Verena Olejniczak Lobsien Transparency and Dissimulation
Transformationen der Antike
Herausgegeben von Hartmut Böhme, Horst Bredekamp, Johannes Helmrath, Christoph Markschies, Ernst Osterkamp, Dominik Perler, Ulrich Schmitzer
Wissenschaftlicher Beirat: Frank Fehrenbach, Niklaus Largier, Martin Mulsow, Wolfgang Proß, Ernst A. Schmidt, Jürgen Paul Schwindt
Band 16
De Gruyter
Verena Olejniczak Lobsien
Transparency and Dissimulation Configurations of Neoplatonism in Early Modern English Literature
De Gruyter
Publication of this volume was assisted by a grant from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lobsien, Verena Olejniczak. Transparency and dissimulation : configurations of Neoplatonism in early modern English literature / by Verena Olejniczak Lobsien. p. cm. -- (Transformationen der Antike, ISSN 1864-5208 ; Bd. 16) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-3-11-022884-7 (alk. paper) 1. English literature--Early modern, 1500-1700-History and criticism. 2. Neoplatonism in literature. 3. English literature--Greek influences. 4. Renaissance-England. 5. Plato--Influence. I. Title. PR428.N46L63 2010 820.9'382--dc22 2010009126
ISBN 978-3-11-022884-7 ISSN 1864-5208 Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliographie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de
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Foreword From One, to One, in one to see All Things (Thomas Traherne, »The Vision«)
This is, in some respects, an escapist book. In a world filled with noise, pain, mindless atrocities, and – less spectacular, but equally disturbing in the everyday course of life – with too many things clamouring for attention, it has been a comfort and a privilege to think about the One, the ways of ascending, and the necessity of returning to it, about angelic hierarchies, sacred love, or the possibilities of perfect happiness. Of course, this always meant to ponder equally the obstacles to the kind of spiritual dynamic that Neoplatonic thinking promises as well as demands. It has, however, taught me not only about ways of avoiding the easy answers by means of aesthetic devices, but also about modes of resisting the pressure of banalities – unfortunately without the implication of having achieved lasting mastery of the art of life advocated by some of my authors. Over the last five years, in which this book was written, many people have helped me in my struggles with the various impediments to concentration. I only wish to mention two of them: Cornelia Wilde and Lutz Bergemann, members of our project team »Configurations of Neoplatonism« in the area of cooperative research »Transformations of Antiquity« at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Many relevant and irrelevant (not to mention irreverent) inspirations are due to our discussions, and their voices are certainly among those in the daily concert I should not like to miss. I am grateful also to the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft for financing a sabbatical which made possible the writing of a considerable part of this book.
Bad Nauheim/Berlin, January 2010
Verena Lobsien
Table of Contents Foreword ..................................................................................................................... V 1 INTRODUCTION: »GOOD WORKS« AND »FINE THINGS« Neoplatonic Configurations in Seventeenth-Century English Literature and Culture ................................................................................................................... 1 Enigma and Excess ............................................................................................. 1 Edward Herbert's Wax-Candle ......................................................................... 16 2
CIRCULARITIES OR THE POETICS OF RETURN .................................................. 31
2.1 Squaring the Circle: Neoplatonic Versions of the Self – Ficino to Donne ......................................................................................................... 31 Neoplatonic Circles of the Self: Ficino to Castiglione ................................... 31 Sidney: The Melancholy Lover as Poet ........................................................... 39 Wyatt: Refiguring Repentance ......................................................................... 42 Spenser: Retractation as Transparency ............................................................ 47 Donne: The Translators Translated .................................................................. 55 2.2 Recursivity and Perfection: Marvell's »On a Drop of Dew« .......................... 60 Images of the Soul ............................................................................................. 60 Neoplatonic Perfection ...................................................................................... 61 The Epistrophé of a Drop of Dew .................................................................... 66 Platonists and Perfectionists ............................................................................. 74 Exodus, or Perfect Imperfection ...................................................................... 83 3
KNOWLEDGE AND HAPPINESS ....................................................................... 87
3.1 »Uncertaine knowledge« Or: How to Make Sense of an Intransparent World .............................................. 87 In the Labyrinth of Truth: Thomas Browne .................................................... 87 The Dynamics of Assimilation in Religio Medici .......................................... 92 Paradox in Urne-Buriall ................................................................................. 111 The Garden of Cyrus and Paralepsis ............................................................. 124
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3.2 Transcendent Opacity: Edenic Imaginations of Happiness in Marvell's »Garden« ............................................................................................ 140 The Gardener's Delight, or: All in One ......................................................... 141 3.3 Felicity: Thomas Traherne's Art of Life ......................................................... 156 A Philosopher's Idea of Happiness: Plotinian eudaimonia .......................... 157 Eudaimonia and Enjoyment Transformed into »Felicity« ........................... 167 Happy with Body and Soul ............................................................................. 174 4
TRANSPARENT SPHERES, OR THE BEAUTY OF CREATION ............................. 185 The Natural World as Subject of Neoplatonic Aesthetics ........................... 185
4.1 The Pleasures of the Pensive Eye: Henry Vaughan's Poetry ........................ 188 Vaughan and the Recalcitrance of Nature ..................................................... 188 Seeds of Eternity? ............................................................................................ 193 4.2 Transparent Spheres: A Neoplatonic Aesthetics of Creation ...................... 210 Cherubinic Writing on Both Sides of the Veil .............................................. 213 Shadows in the Water, or: Like a Face Seen in Many Mirrors ................... 227 5
TRANSPARENT DUPLICITIES ............................................................................ 237
5.1 Dissimulating Dogma in Andrew Marvell's Writings ................................... 237 The Resistance of Opposed Minds ................................................................ 237 Andrew Marvell and Dissimulation ............................................................... 238 »An Horatian Ode« and »The First Anniversary«: Dissimulating Religious Authority ................................................................ 244 »On a Drop of Dew«: Dissimulating Neoplatonic Metaphysics or Biblical Piety? ........................ 252 5.2 The Poetics of Glorious Ruin: Aphra Behn ................................................... 255 A New Neoplatonism? .................................................................................... 255 Truth Stranger than Fiction: Aphra Behn's Stories ....................................... 258 Transcendent Love? A Poetic Farewell to Neoplatonism ............................ 273 BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................. 285 INDEX ................................................................................................................ 305
CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION »GOOD WORKS« AND »FINE THINGS« Neoplatonic Configurations in Seventeenth-Century English Literature and Culture Enigma and Excess »The world is, as one calls it, Ænigma Dei.«1 This is one of the reasons, Nathanael Culverwell claims, why we need the Spiritual Opticks he sets out to provide. His treatise under this title was published posthumously in 1651 with the subtitle »A Glasse Discovering the weaknesse and imperfection of a Christians knowledge in this life«. It was, as Culverwell's friend and editor W.D.2 points out in his epistle »To the Reader«, »intended onely for a taste« of Culverwell's work on The Light of 1ature. It is perhaps not surprising that a mid-seventeenth century Cambridge theologian should be concerned with questions of how God's truth is hidden in the visible world, what it consists in, and why it is not immediately apparent. It is, however, less self-evident why his explication of verse 13. 12 in Paul's First Epistle to the Corinthians – For now we see through a glasse darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part, but then shall I know even as also I am known – should place so little emphasis on the eschatological promise contained in these well-known words and so much on the modes of ignorance they imply. It is precisely the types and kinds of unknowing that Culverwell's exegesis unfolds in some detail: the ways of not seeing, or rather, of not seeing properly. He describes what impedes cognition and hinders insight; he analyses the obstacles inhibiting certain knowledge, be they deficiencies in our epistemological equipment or distortions of our spiritual perspective. Interest is focussed not in the first place on the state to come, adumbrated in the apocalyptical meanings of a ›faceto-face‹ recognition of the divine, but on the intervening medium responsible for the ›darkness‹ and partiality of our temporal vision as well as on the glimpses of _____________ 1
2
Culverwell, Spiritual Opticks, 15. This was composed and delivered in 1641, probably in the chapel of Emmanuel College, of which Culverwell was elected Fellow in 1642. It also appears in An Elegant and Learned Discourse of the Light of 1ature (1652). William Dillingham, who was also to publish Culverwell's Elegant and Learned Discourse of the Light of 1ature in 1652, and who was appointed Fellow of Emmanuel together with him. Cf. the modern edition of this treatise: Culverwell, An Elegant and Learned Discourse of the Light of 1ature, eds. Greene/MacCallum (for Dillingham and Culverwell see the editors' »Introduction«, xii-viii).
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the beyond it nonetheless affords. It is less the solution to the ›enigma‹ posed by the visible world that commands our attention, but the riddle itself; the ways in which the Book of Nature has become unreadable and the ways in which it communicates in spite of this, with illegible letters still signifying transcendence. If Culverwell's treatise exhorts us to decipher the »print of a Deity«3 in creation and to explore the manner in which this is defaced or appears obscure, it can be said in a more general sense to epitomise a problem occupying seventeenthcentury religious as well as scientific mentalities, resonating not last in the products of the artistic imagination: the problem of transparency. Transparency and its counterpart, the ›hiddenness‹, obscurity or opacity of transcendence which I refer to as dissimulation, are at the heart of my study of seventeenth-century literary texts. My guiding intuition is that for the seventeenth century the question of transparency became more pressing than in preceding centuries, and than it was to become again at the end of the long English Reformation leading up to the more settled eighteenth century. This is of course to speak very loosely, and it should be stated from the outset that I am not primarily interested in questions of periodisation or in the history of ideas in a traditional sense. What does interest me, however, is how Early Modern men and women tried to make sense of their lives in extremely troubled times and how they did so in writing, both in poetry and prose. Specifically, I am intrigued by the way they employed certain Neoplatonic concepts and figures of thought. Amongst these, transparency, in a systematic sense, is the most comprehensive concept. It is fundamental for a world-view that was built on readings and rereadings of the thought of Plato and his successors, resting on a multi-layered textual basis that had, in an unprecedented way, broadened during the European Renaissance. For Neoplatonists from Plotinus to Coleridge, the manifold, perceptible plurality of things is not all there is. The visible is, on the contrary, evidence of a reality that transcends sensory perception. It is this invisible, unitary and unifying reality, which is not only the ground and fountainhead of all being, but which also powerfully attracts everything there is, motivating it to return to whence it came. The One (hen) is ontologically primordial to all there is.4 It is the dynamising force at work within the many that constitute the world of appearance, relating the seemingly unrelated and causing in them a strong drift towards union. The given, to the Neoplatonist, is not all and it is not sufficient. In itself, it contains the germ of its melioration and, ultimately, its perfection5 – the divine spark or, in the _____________ 3 4
5
Culverwell, Spiritual Opticks, 15. Thus Proclus in his Elements of Theology, prop. 5: »Every manifold is posterior to the One« (Proclus, The Elements of Theology, 5). In his standard work Denken des Einen, Beierwaltes (1985) analyses the Neoplatonic tradition as a whole as ›thinking of the One‹. For Plotinus see the eminent study by Hadot (1993). In the terms employed by the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy of Dionysius Areopagita: teleiosis or henosis. (An English translation of the Dionysian writings is available in: Pseudo-
»Good Works« and »Fine Things«
3
parlance of a seventeenth-century Quaker conflating the Christian with the alchemical and kabbalistic, the »seed and birth« of Christ.6 Material reality, thus, not only points towards the immaterial, it is transparent to it – diaphanous – permitting its hidden glory to ›shine through the veil‹ (in the language of light so dear to Neoplatonic writers). Indeed, matter serves as a medium through which the One communicates itself. This self-communication and mediated selfrevelation of the One in turn effects the conversion and transformation of the things proceeding from it – a transformation which, by way of several stages of self-reflection, recollection and recognition, amounts to an assimilation and finally identification with their origin. Hence it can be said, with a paradox deriving from John Scotus Eriugena, that everything there is, is the appearance of the non-apparent;7 that the world is, indeed, as the Cambridge Platonist Culverwell claims in Eriugena's wake, Ænigma Dei, waiting to be read by us and contemplated with the eye of the mind so that we may be gathered into this dynamic, all-embracing movement towards the One. We need to see through the veil,8 but without disregarding it, for it is, after all, its beauty which directs our gaze towards its proper object in the first place. It is its permeability as well as its resistance that renders it adequate to the dignity as well as the incommensurability of what it conceals.9 Dissimulation is the signifier of the non-availability of transcendence together with its irresistible attraction. _____________ 6
7
8
9
Dionysius. The Complete Works, trans. Luibheid. Cf. also Louth [1981].) See ch. 2.2 below for some of the aporias of perfection and their poetic resolution. George Keith, Immediate Revelation, or Jesus Christ the Eternal Son of God, revealed in man and revealing the knowledge of God, and the things of his Kingdom, immediately […] 1OT CEASED […], 5 and passim. Hutton draws attention to this treatise in her study of Anne Conway (2004), esp. ch. 9. For additional reverberations of the metaphor see also ch. 4.2 below. »For everything that is understood and sensed is nothing else but the apparition of what is not apparent, the manifestation of the hidden, the affirmation of the negated, […]« (633A) in: Eriugena, Periphyseon, III 4, 58 (cf. also Eriugena, Über die Einteilung der 1atur, III 4, 264). See also O'Meara (1988), Beierwaltes (1994), and Gersh's articles on Eriugena, in: Gersh (2005). Hans Urs von Balthasar (1961) builds his voluminous theological aesthetics around this idea. For a Neoplatonic theology of the veil, or the mediated self-communication of God and its anagogic functions, see also Dionysius Areopagita, Celestial Hierarchy, esp. ch. II (140A141D). For this, of course, an adjustment of perspective (as central element of the spiritual optics proposed by Culverwell) is necessary. Although it is true that »in the most contemptible creature, as a creature, there is aliquid Dei« (Spiritual Opticks, 16), the created world is not the end of the Christian neoplatonist's instruction in seeing right: »Some eyes have been dazled too much with the glitterings of the creatures, so as to take the servant for the Master: and have been so much in admiring the glasse, as they forgot the glorious beauty that it represented. What worship and adoration hath the sunne had? even almost as much as the great Creatour of heaven and earth himself: strange that they should see so darkly, as not to discern the face from the vail that covers it. For the sunne is at best but umbra Dei, […]« (17).
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This sketch of a basic pattern of Neoplatonic thought also indicates why it is that transparency comes to assume such unique relevance for Early Modern mentalities. If Early Modernity, in its Renaissance as well as seventeenth century versions, can be said to form the matrix for what we term a ›modern‹ understanding of the world, transparency becomes functional at several levels. While it avoids untenable claims of a simple accessibility of truth and reality, it provides a non-Aristotelian strengthening of metaphysics in a period that witnessed the end of the old (scholastic, speculative) natural philosophy and the rise of empiricist natural science together with ›mechanical‹ (rationalist) thinking – not, in a revisionist sense, in simple opposition to the new scientific endeavour, but, interestingly, in many of its major protagonists, in close conjunction with it. Thus, we see Francis Bacon still pursuing alchemical interests; we observe the Cambridge Platonists, foremost among them Henry More, corresponding with Descartes and following the discoveries of the Royal Society, and we accompany virtuosi like Thomas Browne or John Evelyn in their meanderings between experimentalism and speculation, ›seraphic friendship‹10 and scientific practice. There is not only no clear-cut antagonism between Neoplatonic metaphysics and natural science,11 but also a complex relationship of mutual criticism and advancement and/or revision in the face of the challenges of materialism. Equally far from the clichés of simple opposition, there also holds a productive relationship between post-Reformation theology, church politics, and Neoplatonism. On one hand, the fundamental structure of the spiritual life based on transparency also implies a model of universal unification. In view of the increasing problems of religious diversity and confessional conflict, notions of oneness and harmonious convergence are likely to appeal to disoriented believers as well as representatives of a Christianity in danger of falling apart and losing its identity in sectarian plurality. On the other hand, it is obvious how the sense of divine truth provisionally veiled, with revelation possible, if not imminent, would appeal to apocalyptic and millenarian tempers within Protestant Nonconformism.12 Besides, the linkage of hiddenness and discovery and their mutual reference implied in the figure of transparency also lends itself to theopsychological argumentation of yet another kind: Anti-institutional groups within reformed spirituality such as the Quakers, who opposed hierarchical, priestly mediation of Evangelical truth and favoured individual inspiration, were convinced, as George Keith wrote in a treatise composed during his imprisonment in 1665, that »Immediate Revelation« had »Not Ceased« and that »Jesus Christ the Eternall Son of God, revealed in man and revealing the knowledge of God, _____________ 10 Cf. Harris (2002), and, with a stronger conceptual interest, Wilde (2009). 11 Cf. also, for a large-scale account of the rise of modern science which considers this process in close interaction with religion, Gaukroger (2006). 12 Cf. also Popkin (1992). For a literary response to apocalyptic mentalities see also V. O. Lobsien (2003).
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and the things of his Kingdom, immediately«13 still communicated himself and all the truths necessary for salvation through the inner light possessed by the individual believer.14 Finally, if the truth of faith, like the truth of scientific knowledge and the truth of thought, has become a contested area; if, indeed, these have become areas to be distinguished from each other, and if the hiddenness of these truths is what they have in common, this also holds good for the realm of ethics and questions concerning the self and others. What the good life consists in, what happiness is and how it might be found becomes a subject for the experts and a matter of controversy. And again, despite the growing multitude of options and models, what they have in common seems to be their non-obviousness, their lack of evidence. With an increasingly widespread knowledge of Latin and Greek authors and with a growing availability of texts due to the humanist enterprise, arts of life, too, began to proliferate. Classical antiquity, especially in its later, Hellenistic version, became imitable in the shape of life styles and modes of everyday conduct.15 And as Stoical,16 Skeptical, and, in the course of the seventeenth _____________ 13 The full title of Keith's treatise gives its agenda: Immediate Revelation, or Jesus Christ the Eternal Son of God, revealed in man and revealing the knowledge of God, and the things of his Kingdom, immediately. Or the Holy Ghost, the Holy Spirit of promise, the spirit of Prophecy, poured forth, and inspiring man, and induing him with power from on high, and baptising him thereunto, giving him wisdom, understanding, and knowledge from above, (and giving to some, utterance, and moving them, by his own immediate assistance to speak forth, and declare the wonderful things of God) 1OT CEASED but remaining a standing and perpetual Ordinance in the Church of Christ, and being of indispensible necessity as to the whole body in general, so to every member thereof; every true Believer in particular, asserted and demonstrated. Printed in the Year, 1668. The motto alludes, not surprisingly, to the necessity of seeing with the eyes of the soul: »Prov. 29.18. Where there is no vision, the people Perish.« 14 Although this argument may come dangerously close to the Cambridge Platonists' predilection for the biblical topos of »the candle of the Lord« (and was indeed perceived to move in this competitive closeness by Henry More, who was to lose his friend, the philosopher Anne Conway, towards the end of her life, to Quaker belief), the difference in emphasis is obvious: While Keith stresses the positive certainty and indisputable conviction that comes with immediate inner revelation, the Cambridge Platonists chose to call to mind the imperfections and deficiencies of human knowledge with regard to last things – as exemplified by Culverwell's treatise referred to above. Culverwell, too, refers to Prov. 20.27 in a paraphrase which mixes biblical and Plotinian language: »Now whil'st we are in this house of our earthly tabernacle, whilest the understanding of a man, which the wise man calls The candle of the Lord, while 'tis hid in the dark lantern of the bodie. Till this partition-wal be beaten down, we cannot see God face to face.« (Spiritual Opticks, 2; for the lantern image see Plotinus, Ennead I 4, 8, 1-5. Culverwell also quotes Prov. 20.27 as motto to his Elegant and Learned Discourse of the Light of 1ature and recurs to it as metaphor for the »Light of Reason« again and again, 13 and passim). For More and Conway cf. [Anne Conway] The Conway Letters; also Hutton (2004), and V. O. Lobsien (1999), ch. VII. 15 For a comprehensive account of the classical models see Horn (1998); cf. also Hadot (2002).
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century, increasingly Epicurean models of the good life compete for validity, offering to make sense of life and to explain the place and role of the individual self in its interaction with others, it is again the voice of Neoplatonism that makes itself heard in this often dissonant music. For here, too, the optimistic assertion of transparency shows its strength. While it readily acknowledges that the meaning of life may appear obscure, it still conceives of this as a merely provisional and transitory state, with its glorious truth merely dissembled. Hence it offers itself (as will be seen in the writings of Thomas Traherne) as a radiantly attractive alternative and a guide to the perplexed, capable of reconciling confessional antagonism. It should be added immediately that the Neoplatonist pattern hardly ever presents itself in complete and unadulterated form. If there is anything in the politically turbulent laboratory situation of the seventeenth century that emerges as fairly unambiguous, it seems to be the feeling that the world has become a radically different place from what it was before. »'Tis all in pieces, all cohaerence gone;« as John Donne famously lamented in his First Anniversarie17 and as Andrew Marvell reiterated in the 1650s: »'Tis not, what once it was, the world«.18 It is this sense of change which gives such a note of urgency to many articulations of the human condition in this century. The responses to the felt loss of order, as pressing as it may have been experienced, are, however, anything but univocal, and they rarely result in simple reproductions of former models. Instead we tend to find hybrid stances, syncretistic positions forged from different and often incompatible materials. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England are not a period in which philosophical systems are originated or, like Cartesian thought in France, systematically and consistently developed from first principles. What might be considered a weakness from a modern point of view, however, appears as a kind of strength, at least a source of productivity, from another. The Early Modern period does not only see the rise of the experimental sciences, it is also itself a laboratory. The materials are available thanks to Renaissance humanism. The huge store of wisdom to be found in classical Antiquity provides ample matter and little reason why the ancient answers should not be freely combined in reply to new situations. It is this courage to select meanings from heterogeneous contexts and to test their compatibility, with a kind of ›experiential‹ curiosity, which constitutes the period's achievement and perhaps its most important contribution to the history of culture and thought. Besides, this readiness to engage with ways of thinking other than one's own not only holds in a diachronic sense, with respect to models of classical provenience, but also, as it _____________ 16 The seminal study of the hellenistic basis for the early modern stoical ›art of life‹ is Hadot (1998). Cf. also Long (2002). 17 John Donne, »An Anatomy of the World«, l. 213, in: The Epithalamions, Anniversaries and Epicedes, 28. 18 »Upon Appleton House, To My Lord Fairfax«, LXXXXVI, l. 761, in: The Poems of Andrew Marvell, 241.
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were, synchronically. As Renaissance humanism was a European movement that spread with different degrees of liveliness and regionally in very different rhythms, and as Early Modern Neoplatonism originated and thrived first of all in fifteenth-century Italy, its transfer to England also indicates – contrary to clichés of insularity – a considerable openness to continental cultural imports. Due to the relative lateness of the English Renaissance in comparison with continental European developments, for the seventeenth century, this implied an added religious relevance, as Neoplatonisms unfolded their explanatory and argumentative potential in contexts of intensifying confessional debate or theological conflict. They became part not only of a ›vertical‹ interaction across the centuries, but also of an ongoing ›lateral‹, European exchange – indeed an international transformation – of ideas and particularly religious and scholarly mentalities.19 Thus, just as Early Modern English Neoplatonism was not an eccentric phenomenon, it never appears in isolation. We encounter it in combination with other modes of thinking, in often unlikely configurations. Of course, this also holds for other explanatory approaches and pragmatic attitudes. Far from being handed down unchanged through the centuries, the systematic positions elaborated by Greek and Latin thinkers were not simply ›reborn‹, ›revived‹ or even ›received‹ in the belated English Renaissance, but rather recomposed and changed in the process. Antiquity is transformed – not infrequently out of recognition, as elements from competing systems are selected and reorganised in versions aimed at cultural situations very different form their origins. It is particularly worthwhile recalling this truism with respect to Early Modern Neoplatonism. As this is in itself an intensely transformative mode of thinking, it seems to lend itself to reconfigurations capable of incorporating, if not integrating, even naturalistic elements. From a Neoplatonic, especially a Plotinian, point of view, the progress of the soul is a process of alteration and metamorphosis, a transformation in which, ascending through successive stages of reflexion and growing selfawareness, it assimilates itself to Intelligence (nous) and approximates union with the One. Perhaps it is this transformative dynamic, sometimes systematised in terms of the triad of rest (moné), progress or emanation (proodos), and return (epistrophé) suggested by Proclus, which enables the Neoplatonic impulse to energise and draw into its wake even elements that may at first sight appear unrelated, if not irreconcilable. Incidentally, as the Neoplatonic model is the only one in the Hellenistic spectrum offering a sophisticated theory of the self, of consciousness and subjectivity, this may be assumed to add to its attractiveness and the historic functionality of its structures.20 _____________ 19 Historiography has for some time been aware of the need for a change of perspective implied by this awareness of European cultural interactions. Examples of some of the findings of this ›new‹ historiography will be found in Mulsow (2007), in Jardine (2008), or Claydon (2008). Cf. also Pfister (2006). 20 Cf. Rappe (1996), also Beierwaltes (2001). For Proclus, see also Beierwaltes (1979), and Radke (2006). See also below, ch. 2.
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Early Modern versions of Neoplatonic thinking in the strict and narrow sense demanded by a history of philosophy21 are, however, not at the heart of the present study (although such a refocusing would be worth while, as interest in the Neoplatonic waves and vogues throughout the period seems to have waned somewhat over the last decades). Not to deny their importance, this is also not a book on the Cambridge Platonists either, although their works will be quoted now and again – not least because of their literary qualities.22 By itself, the emergence of a cluster of joint, systematic, Neoplatonic effort23 in a historical context that could hardly be termed congenial is surprising enough. And the Cambridge Platonists' contributions to the New Philosophy as well as to the New Science are still waiting to be fairly and comprehensively assessed.24 But the cultural presence of Neoplatonism in seventeenth-century England took many shapes apart from that of philosophical or theological debate. Among the relevant Neoplatonist formations – in the widest sense – that come to mind immediately are Petrarchism, courtliness, and representations of political power. Subculturally, Neoplatonist thinking continued in its more esoteric, hermeticist kinds, in cabbalistic and other theosophic versions, in the fields of alchemy and astrology. Among these, Petrarchism has been a prominent research topic for some time; its conventions and norms, its relevance for the gendering of many areas of Renaissance culture, its politics, themes and topics, have consumed academic energies to an inordinate extent. Still, none of these are in themselves subjects of my study, although their symbolic forms figure strongly in many of the texts I consider as well as in my readings of them. For here, too, it is not in the first place isolated thematic elements from individual fields but their configurations I am interested in. That is to say, I am concerned with the ways in which modes of thinking, kinds – combined elements, motifs, but above all structures – of a certain type of metaphysics, affect and shape mentalities. The major theme in what follows is, then, the figurative potential of Neoplatonism. I try to explore this not only with _____________ 21 Or by studies in the history of ideas as epitomised, for instance, by Jayne's standard article on »Ficino and the Platonism of the English Renaissance« (1952), which attempts to disentangle the strands of Neoplatonisms contributing to the shaping of sixteenth-century English poetry. Needless to add, the following is neither source criticism nor a study of the Neoplatonic tradition in English literature (as presented in exemplary fashion 1977 by Schabert's book on the Spenserian poets). 22 See the classical studies by Cassirer (1932), Tulloch (1874), and W. R. Inge (1926); also Patrides (1969) and Cragg (1968); more recently the studies and editorial work of Hutton on Anne Conway and her philosophical milieu, for instance, Hutton (1990), also, with comprehensive bibliography, Rogers (1988). 23 M. Erler and others even think of the seventeenth century in England as the ›Golden Age of Platonism‹; cf. Erler (2006), 218. 24 From this point of view, it seems, for instance, significant that Robert Boyle, perceiving in Nathanael Culverwell a combination of a certain type of philosophical spirituality with scientific interest, should have arranged for the first Oxford publication of Spiritual Opticks (in 1668; cf. An Elegant and Learned Discourse, xxi, n. 38).
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respect to literary texts, but also with a view to their possible, culturally relevant effects and to the attitudes they are capable of inculcating. It might be argued that this figurative achievement is really an imaginative one.25 Indeed, if the defining feature of Early Modern imagination is that it goes beyond a merely additive combinatory faculty in that it makes possible a ›seeingas‹, which amounts to a genuine metamorphosis producing new and coherent identities,26 it could even be claimed that it is the cultural imagination that is at the root of these transformative processes. In the seventeenth-century texts I am reading, at any rate, imaginative transformation does result in ›creative‹ rearrangements of symbolic elements that are in turn capable of effecting, at least of assisting and supporting, cultural and historical change. And again, with this critical interest in the potential effects of literary artefacts, a Neoplatonic turn comes naturally. For the processes involved in poetic transformations could be said to resemble the ›poetic‹ productivity of the world of living beings, as perceived and conceptualised by Early Modern Neoplatonism. The concept of »Plastick Nature« as proposed by Ralph Cudworth is, in some respects, an orthodox Neoplatonic attempt, moving along Proclan lines in order to grasp the formative agency and the creative energies making themselves felt in nature.27 At the same time, however, it draws attention to a fundamental plasticity and to the underlying structures of dynamic change in the order of being, and opens a door to the question of aesthetics. Is there a Neoplatonic aesthetic? If so, what are its outlines? There is, besides the somewhat schematic and general parallelism between »Plastick Nature« and the workings of the configurative imagination, a strong doctrinal basis for aesthetics in Neoplatonism, famously outlined by Plotinus in Ennead I 6.28 This is the overwhelming, erotic attraction of Beauty; of a beauty that does not rest on proportion, harmony, or symmetry but is somehow immensely more than these and strongly affects the Soul, as it ›runs along‹ the surface of things, and moves it to ascend beyond the visible to the highest Good. The One communicates itself _____________ 25 The essays collected by Baldwin/Hutton (1994) started from a similar intution, placing special emphasis on the platonic concept of phantasia and its relevance for literary creativity; with contributions ranging from the early Christian period to twentieth-century literature. 26 Cf. V. O. Lobsien/E. Lobsien (2003). 27 Cf. »A Digression concerning the Plastick Life of Nature« in Ralph Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678), Book I, Ch. III, Sect. XXXVII, 146-174, (excerpts reprinted also in The Cambridge Platonists, ed. Patrides, 288-325). Henry More's corresponding term is »Spirit of Nature«; cf. The Immortality of the Soul, passim. For Proclus' concept of Nature (physis) cf. Proclus, Commentary on Plato's Timaeus, 1, 9, 2512, 30 (Diehl). For More and Cudworth see also Jacob (1991). 28 Cf. also Ennead VI 7, 22; for a more extended treatment of the theory of beauty see also Ennead V 8. Recent accounts of Neoplatonist aesthetics also discussing its Platonic foundations can be found in Halfwassen (2005a), and in Büttner (2006); but cf. also Beierwaltes (1980). I have tried to suggest a few basic features of a neoplatonist aesthetics in V. O. Lobsien (2007a).
10
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through beauty. In Plotinus' metaphor, the light of the Good »plays on the surface of intelligible being and illuminates it but is not a part of intelligible being itself«.29 It is therefore the aesthetic experience triggered by charis, the ineffable, diaphanous ›charm‹ or grace of beautiful beings which functions as the metaphysical threshold to be crossed in the direction of the Good. The experience of beauty is a liminal experience in that it enables us to take the step beyond the corporeal, to transcend the finite towards the infinite, the visible towards the invisible. It makes possible, as we contemplate the transparency of the beautiful with the eye of the mind, a move beyond the erotic desire to possess and sensually to enjoy what we perceive. This is not without consequences. Neoplatonists are convinced that the experience of beauty carries a potential for change, even transformation. We may be altered by it, as the anagogical impulse triggered by beauty leads us towards a more than intellectual illumination and purification. As Plotinus saw (and Augustine knew as well), this kind of love makes us beautiful, too.30 From the point of view of later Christian Neoplatonists like Dionysius Areopagita, this mutuality in the response to beauty appears even more irresistible, as they stress not only the contemplator's experience but also insist on the intentionality of divine self-communication as precondition for this experience. Here, it is not just the impersonal One expending itself, as it were, automatically, not unlike the sun giving warmth and the snow chilling,31 but a divine agent, a personal God externalizing himself in his splendour and lavishly, unstintingly giving himself in his creation.32 In a fundamental sense, then, Neoplatonic aesthetics rests on a structure of excess, and it is hardly separable from its ethical dimension. _____________ 29 Thus Tornau in allusion to Ennead VI 7, 22, 25f and similar passages; cf. Tornau's own translation of this text in: Plotinus, Ausgewählte Schriften, as well as Tornau (2007), 96. 30 Because, in a double movement of the soul turning to herself and to the highest Good which has, as it were, glanced off the beloved, she assimilates herself, on her way to union with the One, to what she recognises as traces of this supreme beauty. Cf. Tornau (2007), where he discusses Enn. VI 7, 33, 22-27 and 34, 14-16, in comparison with Augustine's similar position in his Tractates on the First Epistle of John and his criticism of the Plotinian basis for the beautifying effect of love in the soul's epistrophic self-love: »In Plotinus, the soul is capable of undertaking her beautifying efforts because ›she has something of the Good in herself‹. Since her supreme goal is in some way already present to her, her ascent to it is more or less a return to her natural state. There is nothing comparable to this in Augustine.« (103; the reference is to Enn. VI 7, 31, 8f). For a more extended discussion cf. also Tornau (2005). – The pattern of ennobling and meliorating self-transformation incidentally also contains the matrix for the Petrarchan constellation, based as it is on the transcendent beauty of the beloved and her unavailability as well as on the psychological rewards this paradoxically implies for the lover. 31 For an account of the inexhaustible self-expenditure of the One in these terms see for instance Ennead V 1, 6. 32 Dionysius, as Louth (1981) has pointed out, even describes this as God's own ecstasy: »We must dare to add this as being no less true; that the Source of all things Himself, in His wonderful and good love of all things, through the excess of His loving goodness, is carried outside Himself, in His providential care for all that is, so enchanted is He in
»Good Works« and »Fine Things«
11
The depth of this aesthetic-ethical ›doubleness‹ may be gauged by a glance at a biblical episode and the different readings suggested by it. As the gospel according to St. Mark narrates,33 Jesus stays at the house of Simon the leper while on a visit in Bethany, immediately before his betrayal by Judas. During the meal, a woman (by later theology and iconography identified with Mary Magdalen) approaches Jesus, »having an alabaster box of ointment of spikenard very precious; and she brake the box, and poured it on his head.« (14.3) To the indignant protest of some of his companions that the ointment might better have been sold and the money given to the poor, Jesus replies: Let her alone; why trouble ye her? she hath wrought a good work on me. For ye have the poor with you always, and whensoever ye will ye may do them good; but me ye have not always. She hath done what she could: she is come aforehand to anoint my body to the burying. (14.6-8 – my italics)34
Jesus counters the moral indignation voiced by the zealous among his disciples by insisting that »a good work«35 is precisely what the woman has done. In the Greek New Testament, however, his defense of the uninvited visitor against the reproach of indulging in gratuitous waste, perhaps for dubious reasons, has a different ring to it: It is a ›beautiful work‹, kalon ergon, that the woman has done. Not the ethical, but the aesthetic aspect of her profoundly ambivalent act is placed in the foreground. The point, admittedly difficult to render in a translation, is, of course, that one does not rule out the other. The Oxford 1ew Bible tries to capture this doubleness by translating the phrase as »a fine thing«; the 1eue Zürcher Bibel is even less timid in the face of the ›aestheticist‹ challenge by calling the woman's transgression plainly »eine schöne Tat«. If we assume, for a moment, a Neoplatonic perspective on this episode,36 it is precisely the coincidence of both _____________
33 34
35 36
goodness and love and longing. Removed from His position above all and beyond all He descends to be in all according to an ecstatic and transcendent power which is yet inseparable from Himself.« (177; Louth's own translation from Divine 1ames IV.13: 721 AB). Duclow (1972), 265, makes a similar point, following Lossky (1968). Mark 14.3-9, cf. Mat. 26.6-13, Luke 7.36-50, John 12.1-8. Authorized Version. – This passage and the aesthetic-ethic suggestiveness arising from the different translations of the Greek original for a theology of the ›more than strictly necessary‹ were the subject of Franz Kamphaus's memorable farewell sermon as Bishop of Limburg on 14 January 2007. In the Vulgate: bonum opus. Perhaps additionally justified by Plato's use of the formula kala erga in his Meno, referring to the »beautiful works« of Phidias (91d). Later neoplatonists, like Dionysius Areopagita, evidently loved to play on this doubleness of the good and the beautiful; cf. Dionysius' allusion to Genesis 1.31 in The Celestial Hierarchy (2 141C): »And remember too that there is nothing which lacks its own share of beauty, for as scripture rightly says, ›Everything is good.‹« Unlike the English translation of CH, which here appears to defer to the Authorized Version, the Greek of the Septuagint has the word kala, which makes the
12
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aspects that accounts for its theological format. The woman's gratuitous act is beautiful because it both imitates and anticipates, in its structure of conspicuous and amazing, indeed shocking, expense, Christ's own excess in giving his life. This remains unsurpassable, but the surprise and irritation triggered in the spectators of the sumptuous anointing give a measure of the extent to which this image of the ultimate excess is a fitting one. The human imitates the divine, the imperfect mirrors the perfect. It manages, in some ways all too successfully, to signify what is beyond signification. It provides an experience of transcendence by means of a transgressive action – the unbidden approach to a famous rabbi by a woman as well as the breaking of the precious container and the spilling of the precious ointment – in the medium of an almost outrageous sensuality: the consequences of the act can be seen, heard, felt, smelt, tasted. In view of its structure and effect, the woman's kalon ergon provides a radically dissimilar image of what it signifies. This, however, is characteristic of the mimetic relationship that holds between the manifold and the One.37 In the Neoplatonic system, this paradoxical, impossible assimilation of everything to the highest in a process of unceasing, self-reflexive recursivity constitutes epistrophé. It is also what Dionysian negative theology describes as one of the ways in which the divine can be referred to without being named: the apophatic (as opposed to the affirmative, kataphatic) way, relying on ›unlike symbols‹ (anomoia symbola), which indicate the radical ›unknowability‹ – the hiddenness of the Godhead and the absolute difference between signifier and signified.38 In Dionysian theory, however, resting on the assumption that all signs are fundamentally inadequate to the divine, dissimilar signs are superior to similar ones and hence preferred to positive analogies. They are more suitable to the via negativa and its awareness of the un-nameability of God. In dissembling what they mean and by simultaneously displaying their inadequacy, they succeed in communicating the presence of the divine in created things together with its ineffability. Indeed, it is the theology and theurgy articulated in the Corpus Dionysiacum that together imply what is in some ways the most elaborate and complete outline of an aesthetic based on a version of Christian Neoplatonism. This appears on one hand palatable to Early Modern minds and on the other, suggestive of an _____________ Creator behold both the goodness and the beauty of his work in retaining the double meaning ›good‹/›beautiful‹ of the Hebrew term towb (Stock [2008] also points this out, 198 n. 997). 37 Cf. also Halliwell (2002), 314–315: »On the largest scale, Plotinus can speak of the relationship between everything and the One as a case of mimesis: all things aspire to the eternity and goodness embodied in the first principle of the cosmos (5.4.1.33). More commonly, Plotinus posits mimesis between comparable entities or components of reality at distinct levels of his system, or between these levels themselves. […] If, in Plotinus' scheme of things, being or reality ›flows‹ down the cosmos from top to bottom, mimetic affinities are one way of talking about the process by which all being endeavors to revert, upward, to its source. To understand mimesis is, accordingly, to understand a key principle of the dynamics of reality.«. 38 The Celestial Hierarchy, cf. esp. 2 140C-141C.
»Good Works« and »Fine Things«
13
aesthetics of effect,39 as it opens up the possibility of understanding ›progress‹, ›return‹ and ›rest‹ not only as ontological categories but as performative structures of being as well as art. As has recently been shown with respect to Dionysius' Ecclesiastical Hierarchy,40 this work contains above all a theourgike techné, an art of effecting the divine – not in the sense of a magical conjuring up or instrumentalising of God, but in the sense of changing the human soul by making it receptive to God, willing and ready to respond to his communication. The human is to be drawn to God in a process of perfection, not vice versa. This process aims at a fundamental ethical change, a transformation towards the right attitude, spiritual condition or state of mind (hexis) attained through habituation and training. It is a movement of adjustment oriented towards the highest, in which the human becomes progressively more attuned to the divine. It ultimately points towards theosis, or a modelling of the self according to God's image and a participation in His divinity. Hence, it involves not only a purgative effort, an active striving for illumination, and a struggle against inner resistance (agon) not least through a channelling of the imagination.41 This theurgical training is also a thoroughly mediated process in that it relies on signs (symbola and synthemata)42. It addresses itself to human nature,43 in other words, by accommodating itself to _____________ 39 In its basic features it could be said to anticipate, in modern parlance, an aesthetics of reception (also, somewhat reductively, known as ›reader-response theory‹) as formulated for instance in the work of Wolfgang Iser or Hans Robert Jauß. In this respect, my own inquiry into the Neoplatonic aesthetics underlying Early Modern literary texts resembles, to some extent, Rappe's attempt (2000) to take seriously both the textuality of Neoplatonic philosophy and its non-discursive elements, as these appear not only to aid in the demonstration, explication, and systematic organization of what they refer to, but also actually to effect in the recipient the psychological and existential changes aimed at by neoplatonic thinking and ascetic discipline. Rappe's approach has been acclaimed, but aspects of her realisation of it have drawn severe criticism (cf. Helmig/Steel [2004)], 241– 246). While I share her assumption that we need to pay attention to the textual practice (that is to say, the literary qualities) of philosophical texts, my own study focusses not in the first place on the philosophers' but on the poets' texts, in the hope that here the functionality of literary devices – and thus the potentially cognitive and indeed genuinely philosophical effect of poetry – may be made evident. 40 Cf. Stock (2008). 41 While unruly and potentially evil phantasiai have to be controlled by those who want to participate worthily in the liturgy and the holy rites, Dionysius does rely on the positive powers of the imagination in his theory of divine symbols and on human plasticity that alone makes possible the active structuring of hexeis through symbolic practice. 42 Terms to be found also in Iamblichus; cf. the passage from De Mysteriis quoted by Stock (2008), 155. 43 In a conception that appears on the one hand wholly Plotinian and on the other easily lends itself to Christian reinterpretation, Dionysian theology constructs the human being as synamphoteron, as compound of body and soul, in which the body is not simply the soul's material prison or her irritating antagonist, but her partner and helpful organon. For Plotinus' view of the self, which aptly refers to itself with the plural »we« (hêmeis), as synamphoteron, which conceives of the living body in close and friendly »neighbourhood« to the soul, not as its enemy, cf. Enneads I 1, 1–10 and VI 4, 14–15 (with the commentary
14
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its capacities and by working through the senses. Dionysian aesthetic-ethic practice quite literally takes us by the hand: it provides a cheiragôgia leading us by sensual means towards the divine, be these media liturgy, dance, choral song, or the ›symbol‹ – the paradoxical sign that can only approximate its meaning by displaying its incommensurability with what it signifies, indeed by acting as a coloured veil concealing the mystery whose presence it indicates.44 Without needing to go into further detail, we have already touched upon most of the principles of a Neoplatonic aesthetics: an awareness of natural plasticity and a corresponding awareness of the powers of imaginative, poetic ›making‹;45 the assumption that the experience of beauty must be at the metaphysical heart of the theory; an alertness to the pragmatic as well as the metaphysical effects of this experience based on a systematic linkage of the Good and the Beautiful in a kalon ergon, which makes possible transformative, educational and modelling (anagogic) functions, or, in other words, is capable of bringing about change; indeed, a sense that beauty is an important mediator for the experience of transcendence; an understanding of mimesis that implies figures of reflexivity and return; also, a sense of the universal, if not always evident, ›sympathetic‹ relatedness of created things and their various degrees of participation in higher reality; finally, a particular sensitivity to the signifying potential of darkness and obscurity, of dissimulation or, to use a term central to Modernist aesthetics, of ›difficult form‹.46 With a view to its favourite devices and their hoped-for effects, this is _____________ by Christian Tornau in his 2001 edition of Plotinus, Ausgewählte Schriften, 364, 424–425). From this non-dualistic point of view a Christian Neoplatonism becomes capable of integrating not only the material world as created (hence originally good and redeemable), but also the human body as additionally valorised by Christ's incarnation and resurrection. These are obviously fronts on which most of the authors treated below struggle; for two of the most interesting solutions along the lines indicated here see the chapters on Thomas Browne and Andrew Marvell. 44 »We now grasp these things in the best way we can, and as they come to us, wrapped in the sacred veils of that love toward humanity with which scripture and hierarchical traditions cover the truths of the mind with things derived from the realm of the senses. And so it is that the Transcendent is clothed in the terms of being, with shape and form on things which have neither, and numerous symbols are employed to convey the varied attributes of what is an imageless and supra-natural simplicity.« (The Divine 1ames, 1 592 B). Cf. also The Celestial Hierarchy, 1 121B-C, and, for the notion that the world is indeed ›enigma‹ of God, The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, 5 501B: »[…] the divinity extends its most sacred gifts into our domain and, in the words of scripture, it deals with us as though we were ›babes‹. It bestowed on us the hierarchy of the Law. It veiled truth with obscure imagery. It employed the palest copies of originals. It resorted to dense enigmas and to symbolism whose meaning is discerned with the maximum difficulty.« For the special anagogical potential of dissimilar similarities, see also Stock (2008), 197-202. 45 Proclus also refers to the »productive activity« of Nature as poiesis, cf. Proclus, Commentary on Plato's Timaeus, Book I, 10, 5-6. 46 For the theory of defamiliarisation and the central technique of art »to make forms difficult« cf. Victor Shklovsky's seminal essay on »Art as Technique« (1917), in: Lemon/Reis (1965), 12.
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15
emphatically an aesthetics of presence and an aesthetics of identity. Under the conditions of the via negativa,47 paradoxical re-presentation in the sense of an adumbration of the transcendent is possible. Optimistically, what is dissembled (or dissembles itself) in this manner is assumed to be present even if it is not immediately evident. The figure of transparency neatly sums up many of these principal aspects. If creation is more than an aggregate of created things; if a work of art is more than the sum of its parts; if it is indeed the unity of its many different elements that constitutes its aesthetic surplus – the excess, or the more-than-necessary that makes it beautiful –, this unity, imitation of the One in miniature, needs to make itself seen and felt. It has to be accessible to human apprehension, to offer itself to sensual and cognitive experience while remaining non-obvious and thus retaining an index of its ultimate unavailability. This it does by way of the intimate linkage and interaction of ›medium‹ and ›message‹, immanence and transcendence. Both are dependent on each other, and it is their reciprocality that makes possible their signifying relationship. In it, the given becomes a vehicle for what is beyond; more than that, the material becomes transparent, making apparent what is not identical with it, yet constitutive of its identity. In his theology of Creation, John Scotus Eriugena places particular emphasis on this figure of thought: »omnia que sunt lumina sunt«48 – all created things are ›lights‹. They are theophanous, because it is through them that God communicates his presence: everything that is, is illuminated. No creature falls outside the scope of the divine. Again, there are different degrees of mediality, but the point is precisely the extraordinary value placed on this mediality. The created world is not a mere product of the divine, passive and inert object of the creator's superior agency; the material is not just that – matter for, and resistant to, the shaping force, somehow opposed, recalcitrant, and certainly morally inferior to what is ›beyond being‹. This would amount to a dualist view of things,49 irreconcilable with Neoplatonic monism. Hence, for Christian Neoplatonists, theophany appears as a two-way process, relating ›darkness‹ and ›light‹ in modes of mutual participation. Henry Vaughan articulates the same idea in his allusion to the Mystical Theology of Dionysius Areopagita:50 There is in God (some say) A deep but dazling darkness; As men here Say it is late and dusky, because they See not all clear;
_____________ 47 For a philosophical history of the ›negative way‹, beginning with Proclus and Dionysius and extending to Derrida and Levinas, cf. Westerkamp (2006). 48 Eriugena, Expositiones in Ierarchiam Coelestem, I 76-77. For Eriugena's metaphysics cf. also Beierwaltes (1994), also Beierwaltes (2006), and Halfwassen (2005a), 172-173. 49 A step on the way towards gnosticism, one of the major antagonists for Plotinus. 50 »The Night«, ll. 49-54, in: The Works of Henry Vaughan, 523.
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O for that night! where I in him Might live invisible and dim.
From a Dionysian point of view, the night deserves highest praise as »sacred vail«,51 as a transparent, semi-opaque medium – the fundamental condition of spiritual vision, which directs us towards the divine, revealing as it seems to conceal it. For Eriugena, also echoing Dionysius, everything is illuminated in order to light the way towards God: »lumina mihi fiunt, hoc est me illuminant«.52 On this, the dignity of created things rests. By virtue of its very perceptibility, the world of the senses is the basis for divine self-communication, affirmation of what it seems to deny53 and appearance of the non-apparent.54 The world, from this perspective, is »divina metaphora«55 – both divine metaphor and metaphor of the divine. It is indeed, as Culverwell put it, »Ænigma Dei«.
Edward Herbert's Wax-Candle Not all of the authors addressed by the present study manage to climb to these mystical heights, though many of them explicitly attempt it. Henry Vaughan certainly does, often successfully; so does Thomas Traherne in his ecstatic meditations. Andrew Marvell hardly ever seems to try, yet he succeeds in the most improbable – and spectacular – manner. Thomas Browne appears at times to play the game of speculative theology, and he, too, emerges as a far more serious player than his critics have tended to believe; a hybrid Neoplatonist of a very individual cast. The most unlikely ›writer of transparency‹ is surely Aphra Behn. Yet, surprisingly, her prose as well as her poetry shows duplicitous structures that _____________ 51 Ibid., l. 2. 52 Eriugena, Expositiones in Ierarchiam Coelestem, I 117. For Benjamin Whichcote, too, the enlightening power of ›illuminated‹ being works both ways; thus, the human soul is »Lighted by God and Lighting us to God: Res illuminata, illuminans.« (Moral and Religious Aphorisms, no. 916, in: The Cambridge Platonists, ed. Patrides, 334). A version of this notion of reciprocal illumination as a theurgy which, while affecting and perfecting the recipient, turns him into an agent of sacred illumination for others as well, will also be found in Dionysius, cf. e.g. The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy 1 372B: »we […] come to look up to the blessed and ultimately divine ray of Jesus himself. Then, having sacredly beheld whatever can be seen, enlightened by the knowledge of what we have seen, we shall then be able to be consecrated and consecrators of this mysterious understanding. Formed of light, initiates in God's work, we shall be perfected and bring about perfection.« 53 In Eriugena's words: »negati affirmatio« (Periphyseon III, 4; 58; 633A). 54 Ibid. 55 Periphyseon I 12; 62, 13. For a similarly ambivalent construction cf. also Eriugena's reading of Dionysius Areopagita in his Expositiones in Ierarchiam Coelestem, where he describes the forms of the visible world as »invisibilis pulchritudinis imaginationes« (I 511-518) – imaginations of/by invisible beauty. Cf. also Beierwaltes' exposition of Eriugena's »divine metaphor«, (1994), 107f and 123f.
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17
even as they seem to ruin their Neoplatonic foundations still retain the attractive powers of their transcendentalism. Dissimulated glory remains the radiant force even behind Behn's libertine Naturalism. Admittedly, these are more or less canonic authors, and I have, with few exceptions, selected more or less accessible texts. However, my exploration of ›structural‹ (or textualised) Neoplatonism is easily capable of covering noncanonical writers as well. A brief glance at one of the lesser figures in the second half of this introduction may suggest just how ›common‹ and self-evident the aesthetic-ethical syndrome in seventeenth century England was – including the manner in which it functioned as midwife to certain Modern attitudes. The writings of Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, are also capable of exemplifying the various cultural levels on which these structures unfold their figurative potential, in the fields of knowledge, manners, and art – that is to say, in the period's struggles to attain Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. Edward Herbert (1582/3-1648),56 son of Magdalen Herbert and elder brother to the poet George Herbert, friend of Ben Jonson, Thomas Carew and John Donne, courtier and diplomat, husband and lover, philosopher, historian, poet in English and Latin, and author of his Life, one of the first autobiographies in English literary history, »a gentleman adventurer and dilettante philosopher, the last knight-errant and the first deist«:57 Edward Herbert did valiant battle in all these fields, and he wrote about it. Of course I cannot do detailed justice to all of his works, but for the present purpose, a rough outline of his profile in the relevant areas – metaphysics and religion, manners and morality, and the life of the imagination – will suffice in order to indicate their patterning according to the figures of transparency and dissimulation. As regards the highly embattled territory of metaphysics, Edward Herbert has come to be known above all as the author of De veritate – a Latin treatise mapping out a position that holds affinities with that of the Cambridge Platonists in its attempt to find a universal criterion for distinguishing truth from error; a basis for religious truth capable of reconciling the warring factions; an eirenicon on which confessional peace could finally be founded.58 This was quite obviously a work on which Herbert placed particular value; at the same time he apparently felt doubts about whether he should risk its publication. About 1623, he consulted Hugo Grotius on this point and proudly quotes the great scholar in his autobiography as warmly exhorting him to print it, »with more commendations than is _____________ 56 For an estimate of Herbert's philosophical achievement and the still largely uncharted position of his work in the seventeenth-century philosophical landscape cf. also Pailin (1988) and Hutton (1996). 57 Shuttleworth in his introduction to The Life of Edward, First Lord Herbert of Cherbury written by himself, x; hereafter quoted as Life. 58 Hutton (1996), 21–22, reads De veritate above all as an eclectic »blend of Stoic, Neoplatonic, and Aristotelian elements«, at the same time pointing out the overall affinities of Herbert's philosophical stance with that of the Cambridge Platonists.
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fit for me to repeat«.59 Still, and surprisingly, the expert's opinion alone appears not to have satisfied him. He required a kind of encouragement that went beyond the merely human and fallible. The last paragraphs of his Life recount the supernatural certainty finally granted him:60 […] being thus doubtfull in my Chamber one fair day in the Summer, my Casement being opened towards the South, the Sun shining clear and no wind stirring, I took my Book de Veritate in my hand, and kneeling on my knees devoutly said these words, O Thou Eternal God Author of that Light which now shines upon me, and Giver of all inward illuminations, I do beseech Thee of thy infinite Goodness to pardon a greater request than a Sinner ought to make; I am not satisfied enough whether I shall publish This Book De Veritate, if it be for thy Glory, I beeseech thee give me some Signe from Heaven, if not, I shall suppress it. I had no sooner spoken these words, but a Loud though yet Gentle noise came from the Heavens (for it was like nothing on Earth) which did so comfort and cheer me, that I took my Petition as granted, and that I had the Signe I demanded, whereupon also I resolved to print my Book: This (how strange soever it may seem) I protest before the Eternal God is true, neither am I any way superstitiously deceived herein, since I did not only clearly hear the Noise, but in the Serenest Skye that ever I saw being without all cloud did to my thinking see the Place from whence it came.
Only after receiving this divine confirmation of his plan did Herbert, in 1624, proceed to publish his book61 in Paris (the first London edition following in 1633). What is striking about this episode is not last the easiness with which this self-confessed rationalist combines his very precise request with a belief in miracles. Herbert seems, like any good Neoplatonist, to be firmly convinced that the Highest might, at any time, make explicit the ongoing communication with his creatures and that, given the right circumstances and the right attitude on the part of the person uttering the prayer, He will not hesitate to do so. In a more general sense, of course, this episode gives impressive evidence for two of the central »common notions« Herbert proposes in his book, namely – in Sir Basil Willey's translation – »That there is a supreme power« and: »That this sovereign power must be worshipped«.62 _____________ 59 Life, 120. In the 1630s, Gassendi as well as Descartes also read it, disagreeing with it on various (and different) points; Culverwell knew it, too (cf. Pailin [1988], 236–7). 60 Life, 120–121. 61 Under the title De Veritate Prout Distinguitur a Revelatione, a Verisimili, a Possibili, et a Falso. There was a second edition in 1636 and a French translation in 1639. 62 I quote from Ch. 7 of Willey (1934), 118,119. Willey refers to and translates from the 1639 French edition of De la vérité. The other »common notions« are, according to Herbert: »That the good ordering or disposition of the faculties of man constitutes the principal or best part of divine worship, and that this has always been believed«; »That all vices and crimes should be expiated and effaced by repentance«; »That there are rewards and punishments after this life« (ibid., 120f). In his Life, Herbert gives them as follows: »1: That there is one supreme God. 2. That he is to be worshipped. 3. That vertue and Piety
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19
This, as Willey has made clear in his account of the rational theology of this »Spiritual Quixote«,63 is not the only parallel between Edward Herbert's philosophical attitude and that of the Cambridge Platonists (who also, for all their closeness to Cartesian rationalism, retained their belief in witchcraft and the existence of ghosts). What both have in common is the search for an incontrovertible basis of faith, »certain unshakable foundations of truth supported by universal consent«.64 This universal consent would be commanded by two facts: it would be based on one principle, and this would be accessible to all reasonable human beings, due to its being firmly anchored in the human mind. This principle of certainty Herbert refers to as inner »faculty« (vis animae interna); it is »the sole criterion of the truth in these necessary things«,65 all others being indifferent. The inner faculty witnesses to the truth of the few indisputable »common notions« (notitiae communes) every individual is equipped with ›naturally‹,66 and which need to be acknowledged by the believer. Herbert's inner faculty corresponds in many ways to the Cambridge Platonists' concept of Right Reason, the Light of Nature or, in their favourite metaphor, »Candle of the Lord«67; like theirs, his is a concept that only functions under the assumption of individual participation in a higher, universal intellect, whose recognition through reflexion will provide everything necessary for spiritual salvation. Truth will shine through, if only we permit it to. If all revert to this rational principle – which is easily and quickly done, for all that is needed is the readiness to ›know oneself‹ –,68 religious peace and confessional unity become attainable. As this sketch indicates, a basically Neoplatonic pattern emerges, which, however, contains ingredients of another, not immediately compatible way of thinking and above all, acting, namely ethical Naturalism. Herbert's common notions, as Willey has pointed out, also define some of the principal tenets of ›natural religion‹.69 And there are hybrid passages in De veritate which, while they hold fast to the idea of revelation essential to Neoplatonic transparency, also _____________
63 64 65 66 67 68
69
ioyned with Faith in and love of God are the best ways to serue and worship him. 4. That wee ought to Repent vs of our Sinnes and seriously to returne to God and the Right way. 5. That there is reward and Punishment both in this life and after it.« (29–30). Part of the »reward […] in this life« might be the pleasure derived not only from seeing one's ideas in print, but also from being able to look back on things well done – a pleasure Herbert's Life so obviously affords its author that it does perhaps go some way towards explaining the modification of the fifth article. Cf. Willey (1941). De la vérité, quoted in Willey (1934), 115. Ibid. They are given and inscribed in us by God (a deo profectas et in nobis descriptas; quoted in Pailin [1988], 234). Prov. 20.27: »The spirit of man is the candle of the LORD, […]«. Thus Herbert's advice: »Retire into yourself and enter into your own faculties; you will find there God, virtue, and the other universal and eternal truths.« (quoted in Willey [1934], 117). Cf. ibid., 121.
20
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articulate a Naturalism that we glimpse occasionally in Herbert's other writings. Thus, he summarises his understanding of ›revelation‹:70 […] every divine and happy sentiment that we feel within our conscience is a revelation, although properly speaking there are no other revelations than those which the inner sense knows to be above the ordinary providence of things.
If this offers a first approach to Edward Herbert's idiosyncratic configuration of Neoplatonism in his explorations of truth, not only as a self-sufficient contemplative enterprise, but also as the basis for an active life, it is above all Herbert's Life that allows us to glimpse this vita activa and to reconstruct the major lines of what may indeed be called his art of life. Here, too, we encounter hybrid formations; what is most striking, however, is not so much their heterogeneity, but Herbert's attempt at welding them together in a coherent self-portrait. The coherence is to some extent implicit in the act of life-writing itself. Herbert's autobiographic narrative covers only the period of his life up to 1624, focusing on his travels abroad and his activities as ambassador to France, and it is clearly a selective account, justified by the purpose of instructing his posterity, especially his nearest relatives, in a more personal, dynastically more fitting and individually more appealing sense than »those vulgar Rules and Examples«71 available, presumably, in run-of-the-mill conduct books. What he aims at, then, is above all functional consistency: »[…] I have thought fit to relate to my posterity those Passages of my Life, which I conceive may best declare me, and be most useful to them.«72 Those will, he promises, be truthfully delivered; the attitude of truthfulness being itself part of the pose he wishes to strike – a matter of honour: »[…] I profess to write with all Truth and Sincerity, as scorning ever to deceive or speak false to any«.73 There is, however, a slightly Montaignesque touch as well not only to Herbert's occasionally rambling, at times introspective, and always intensely self-focussed account,74 but also to his programme. Like Montaigne, he alludes (somewhat coyly) to his approaching senility and announces the second guideline that will give consistency to his portrait – self-examination and selfreflexion in the laying of a personal »accompt«, which will show his achievements and reflect his character to greatest advantage, including, where necessary, his pious readiness to »reform«:75 _____________ 70 71 72 73 74
Quoted ibid., 122. Life, 1. Ibid. Ibid. Which includes information about his weight and relative height as well as his freedom from body odour and his amazing sweetness of breath (before he started, for medical reasons, to smoke); cf. ibid., 101-2. 75 Ibid., 1.
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[…] it will be fit to recollect my former actions, and examine what hath been done well or ill, to the intent I may both reform that which was amiss, and so make my peace with God, as also comfort my self in those things which through Gods great grace and favour, have been done according to the Rules of Conscience, Vertue and Honor.
Herbert's aristocratic self-fashioning, the recollection and modeling of his life to a shape that shows the contours of a unified mentality (in a correspondingly handsome body), includes his philosophical aspirations and systematic efforts. Not only does he provide a summary of »the most certaine and vnfallible Principles« of religion as formulated in his De veritate with its five »Catholique and vniversall« articles or common notions,76 or insert platonising Latin verses on the meaning of human life77 together with a rumination on the senses and faculties of man and their innate tendencies to go beyond the felicity this world has to offer, ready to »acquiesce finally onely in the Perfect, Eternal and Infinite«.78 But it is actually these philosophical ambitions that frame the extracts from Herbert's life, giving it literary shape and metaphysical format both by providing the material for its crowning experience in the personal communication from God concerning the publication of De veritate – an episode with strong closural force –, and by being significantly anticipated at the very beginning of the protagonist's articulate life. For little Edward clearly shows philosophical talent even in his very first words:79 […] It was soe long before I began to speake That many thought I should bee euer dumbe. The very furthest thing I remember is, That when I vnderstood what was said by others I did yet forbeare to speake lest I should vtter something That were imperfect or impertinent. When I came to talke One of the first Inquiries I made was, How I came into this world; I tould my Nurse keeper and others I found my selfe here indeede but for what Cause or beginning or by what meanes I could not ymagine; But for this as I was laught at by my Nurse and some other women that were then present soe I was wondered at by others who said they neuer heard Childe but my selfe aske that Question; […]
Here is an infant who, with his very first utterance, boldly inquires into first causes, a self-reflexive perfectionist, perhaps even a budding Platonist who, in his _____________ 76 Cf. ibid., 29–31; see also 24, where he refers to the fundamental moral virtues as »Doctrines imprinted in the soule in its first originall and Contayning the Principall and first notices by which man may attaine his happines here or hereafter […]«. 77 Entitled »VITA« (cf. ibid., 12–13, also Shuttleworth's English paraphrase 136–137). Beginning with the mind gliding down from heaven (»Caelo delapsa«) to inhabit the body and ending with the divine power descending to meet the ascending soul moved by holy love, it is largely patterned like the Life itself. 78 Ibid., 13. 79 Ibid., 11.
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amazement at finding himself in this world, seems to retain some awareness of a pre-natal existence in another. But of course this is only one of the two central dimensions in which Herbert charts his life. The contemplative side, litterae, appears to be complemented by the active, and this is quite literally governed by arma, martial valour. These are the amplitudes between which his life swings. However, in keeping with the Renaissance authors who debate the comparative dignity of vita activa and vita contemplativa and the relative merits of arma versus litterae in courtly selffashioning (and who have set the literary examples his own text clearly attempts to imitate), Herbert's Life tries to present these not as competing models but as aspects of a unified attitude that, in its holistic ambition, mirrors the ultimate perfection man ought to strive for. Herbert's self-portrait, in other words, propagates essentially a Renaissance ideal of courtliness; it is in some ways a Book of the Courtier like Castiglione's Cortegiano, albeit in a monological form. In another sense it seems close to the equally widespread books of manners and education, like Guazzo's Civile Conversation, della Casa's Galateo,80 or their numerous anonymous English imitators, with the success of courtly good manners being illustrated again and again in a series of examples, chronologically ordered, with Herbert himself as the major protagonist. His Life gestures towards Castiglione's great paradigm of courtliness above all in its metaphysical aspirations.81 Although here these find a much less sophisticated form than in Castiglione's artistically inconclusive performance or the carefully marshaled intricacies of his dialogue, yet Herbert, too, finds a unifying structure indicating a fundamentally Neoplatonic commitment and helping him strike the ideal balance between soldier and thinker. It is the symbolic, textual ordering of his life, with the philosophical giving light and guidance to the military, which is evidence of the mentality my study sets out to describe.82 This mentality need not always be associated with the high cultural ideal of courtliness, as it in Herbert's case is. But its courtly profile makes it particularly well suited for an illustration of the ambiguities attending the concept of dissimulation. For courtly behaviour is also a kind of rhetoric;83 a highly persuasive technique of representation suggesting what it hides: the presence of an ideal. While concealing the effort which went into its production, dissembling the pains undergone by the aristocratic actor, the courtly performance ideally succeeds in making good manners transparent to moral excellence. Its aim is to communicate, _____________ 80 Both explicitly recommended by Herbert, cf. ibid., 36. 81 For the neoplatonic basis of Castiglione's concept of courtliness see also ch. 7 in V. O. Lobsien/E. Lobsien (2003), 169-202; cf. also chs. 3.1 and 5.2 below. 82 I am using the term mentality in the sense of a general attitude towards life, less systematic and more inclusive than ›ideology‹ or ›intellectuality‹, not as consistent or clear-cut as ›worldview‹, and not necessarily wholly conscious of itself in all its elements, but including evaluative stances, cultural codes and a working knowledge of symbolic orders; cf. also Bryson (1998), 20. 83 Cf. e.g. Lanham (1976), Hinz (1992).
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by means of its central strategy of sprezzatura, the grace and efficacy of the unseen. Structurally, this too relies on a figure of excess – quite literally, as the courtier is required »[…] to wade in everye thyng a litle farther then other menne, so that he maye be knowen among al menne for one that is excellente.«84 The beauty of this performance consists in the power of its suggestiveness, its promise of universal competence. But of course, just as rhetoric cannot guarantee that the aims hidden by its persuasive tropes and convincing figures are always ethically impeccable, the perfect courtier may be an all-too-perfect simulator, hiding incompetence rather than elegantly concealing true valour, and it is here that the reproach of hypocrisy arises. Dissimulation may amount to nothing more than deceit and falseness, and there is no guarding against it. Theories of civility have known and reflected this from the beginning, as the growing popularity of the corresponding handbooks throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is accompanied by a chorus of critical voices.85 England's first propagators of Petrarchist court culture, foremost among them Wyatt and Surrey, vehemently complain about the attendant pains and pressures of Platonic self-presentation, which threaten to make the courtier above all an expert liar, distrustful of beautiful surfaces. Good manners can only promise moral integrity, polished speech can only protest it. But although they give potentially duplicitous evidence of it, they will continue to project an attractive image of the beautiful ideal. Edward Herbert's life and writings move in this profound ambivalence. As he records his diplomatic networking at home and abroad, his experience of politics and protocol, his intelligence work and his gallant exploits, above all his quarrels of honour, his erotic conquests, his brilliant horsemanship and his expertise in the niceties of dueling, the central values he articulates again and again are those of chivalry, courtesy and honesty.86 Yet, much as he glories in his own ingenious conversational ploys and his gift of witty, yet decorous, repartee, he is aware of the radical untrustworthiness and the thin rhetorical ice he is skating on. It is not only physical violence that is never far from his cavalier audacity, but a surprisingly clear consciousness of the potential hollowness of courtly mores. Thus, he _____________ 84 The Book of the Courtier From the Italian of Count Baldassare Castiglione Done into English by Sir Thomas Hoby, Anno 1561, 54. 85 See, for instance, the works discussed by Bryson (1998). Cf. also Uhlig (1973), Plett (1983), Geitner (1992), Shapin (1994), Skinner, (1994), Berger, Jr. (2000), Till (2004), Danneberg (2006). 86 Protested e.g. in passages like the following, where he insists on his unfailing loyalty to his »Oath of Knighthood« while – again not without vanity – admitting to a natural pugnaciousness: »[…] I can truly say That though I haue lived in the Armyes and Courts of the greatest Princes in Christendome yet I neuer had quarrell with man for my owne sake, noe although in my owne Nature I was euer Chollerique and hasty yet I neuer without occasion quarrelled with any body. And as litle did any body attempt to giue mee offence as having as cleare a Reputation for my Courage as whosoeuer of my Time. For my freinds often I haue hazzarded my self but neuer had occasion to drawe my sword for my owne sake, as hating euer the doing of Iniury and contenting my selfe onely to resent them when they were offered mee; […]« (Life, 44–45).
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narrates with considerable relish how (under the pretense of ›maintaining the dignity of the King his master‹) he managed to provoke and persist in annoying the Spanish ambassador, and he concludes this episode with an anecdote that not only sums up the ratio of his own and his antagonist's behaviour but also shows both the ostensible contempt for the Spaniards' exaggerated courtliness in their topical idolatry of ›honour‹ and the secret admiration for the bravado of a reply that uncovers the dissembled emptiness of cavalier points of honour, or »Pundonores«:87 I should scarce haue mentioned this Passage but that the Spaniards stand soe much vpon theire Pundonores, For confirming whereof I haue thought fitt to remember the answer a Spanish Ambassedor made to Philip the Second of Spaine who finding fault with him for neglecting a busines of greate Importance in Italy because hee could not agree with the Frensh Ambassedor about some such Pundonore as this, said to him, Como a dexado vno cosa di importancia por vna Ceremonia; How? have you lost a busines of Importance for a Seremonye. The Ambassedor bouldly replyed to his Master, Como por vna Ceremonia? Vuessa magestad misma no es sino vna Ceremonia. How for a Seremony? Your Majesties selfe are but a Seremony.
The audacity of the reply makes evident what normally remains hidden. The success of the courtly performance rests on the unspoken assent of those engaging in it and on their readiness to believe in the glamorous surface. It rests, in other words, both on the dissimulation of this consensual basis of »Seremony« and on its transparency. The beauty of the symbolic action of royalty and courtliness promises the real presence of an ideal, without being able to guarantee it. Its ethical substance as well as its metaphysical truth will, however, remain in doubt and deeply questionable. If this fundamental insecurity additionally motivates Herbert in his Life to stabilise its structure by repeatedly making us see the thinker through the soldier and the soldier through the thinker as well as to supplement the account of his courtly successes by interweaving it with philosophical and religious considerations,88 it is a formation that returns in his love poetry. In the standard Petrarchist constellation, a beautiful appearance ought to correspond to a beautiful mind. The life of the soul ought to shine through and animate the attractive body. However, although sometimes a ›fair‹ outside is indeed transparent to interior goodness, at other times it is not; or, equally irritating, it is the seeming opposite to ›fair‹, namely opaque ›black‹-ness, which comes to signify the ethical _____________ 87 Life, 99–100. 88 The latter perhaps most impressively in his well-meant, if rather self-satisfied advice to Monsieur de Luines and the French King concerning the best way of implementing a reformation or at least accommodating their »Subjects of the refomed Religion« while avoiding unnecessary bloodshed; cf. Life, 104–106.
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optimum.89 Of course, Petrarchist discourse is easily capable of accommodating both these situations. But it seems interesting that Herbert should himself repeatedly pose the challenge and rework his Neoplatonist presuppositions accordingly; in the medium of poetry as well as in that of courtliness. As a gentleman's pastime, his poetry goes unmentioned in his Life, but the ability to compose verses is so much a part of a courtier's accomplishments that it could be taken for granted or passed over with sprezzatura. Still, it rounds off this outline of a typical and in many ways paradigmatic seventeenth-century mind-set. It is significant also in that, like much of Herbert's writing, his poems are strongly topical. In comparison with the works of his ›metaphysical‹ contemporaries, not least his friend Donne's or his brother George Herbert's, his own verses can lay little claim to concettistic originality. It is, however, his very inclination to the commonplace that demonstrates just how widespread the attitudes he strikes in his texts are. These may not be ›common‹ in the same sense in which he claims this for his religious notitiae communes, but as his texts make use of the highly conventionalised Petrarchist language familiar to poets and readers of his generation, they give evidence of the vitality – and the integrative force – of his Neoplatonic imagination in a current discursive medium. We have some 90 poems left by this author, including a few of doubtful attribution, with the 1665 edition of the Occasional Verses of Lord Herbert of Cherbury comprising 79 texts, 15 of these in Latin. Like his Life, they tend to be in an openly self-aggrandising manner, usually with a self-conscious philosophical, often stoical, touch. In their thematic as well as formal scope, they mirror the variety of Herbert's interests and ambitions, ranging from courtly love to moralistic or metaphysical ruminations. There are carpe-diem poems, blazons, songs, »ditties« and madrigals, numerous poems in praise of various types of female beauty (»Black« or »Brown«, »Sun-burn'd Exotique« or afflicted by »Green-Sickness«), epitaphs in the manner of Jonson, satyres in obvious imitation of Donne as well as poems on the departure and separation of lovers attempting a similar mode; but there are also three poems explicitly on »Platonick Love« and a number of others (like »The Idea« or »The Thought«) using a Platonic vocabulary in a quite unmitigated and affirmative manner and announcing this in their titles. There are, for instance, several poems claiming that lovers are inseparably linked to each other due to the »interchanged forms«90 of their respective thoughts and images in each other's minds, which are in turn proof of their intimate and permanent connectedness; or that argue, like the well-known »Ode upon a
_____________ 89 Compare, e.g., »The Idea, Made of Alnwick in his Expedition to Scotland with the Army, 1639« with »Sonnet of Black Beauty« and »Another Sonnet to Black it self«, in: The Poems English & Latin of Edward Lord Herbert of Cherbury (all quotations in the following according to this edition). 90 »The Thought«, l. 28.
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Question moved, Whether love should continue for ever?«91 that the joy and ravishment of »vertuous love« (l. 98) will indeed endure to all eternity, as lasting and immortal as the lovers' souls. But next to these, we also find poems responding differently to the challenge posed by the death of the body. Thus, while the early »Elegy for the Prince« both laments the royal death and offers consolation by likening the dead prince to a Neoplatonic world soul, »universally diffused« and still animating »the worlds harmonique body« (l. 20f), we also find a conspicuously macabre poem on death as the speaker's sweetest and best love, deceptively titled »To his Mistress for her true Picture«. In this meditatio mortis, he not only ardently desires a release from his »bodies prison« (l. 141) in order to be united with his mistress Death, but also dwells in great detail on the processes of physical decay and corruption, wasting not a word on the expected »Reward above« (l. 141). Instead he addresses the worms themselves in strikingly Neoplatonic terms as: Death-priviledg'd, were you in sunder smit You do not lose your life, but double it: Best framed types of the immortal Soul, Which in your selves, and in each part are whole: Last-living Creatures, heirs of all the earth, For when all men are dead, it is your birth: When you dy, your brave self-kill'd Generall (For nothing else can kill him) doth end all. (119–126)
Few other poems in the collection muse in such detail on the separation of the body into its »elements«92 and their paradoxical post-mortal life. Still, they frequently (again not unlike Donne's poems) appear fascinated by questions concerning the relationship of body and mind, before, but especially after death. However, like »To his Mistress for her true Picture«, they do not pursue a morbid interest in death. They are really concerned with the investigation of life, or rather, the figure of death-in-life implied by the double concept of transparency and dissimulation. How can the invisible real be perceived through the deceptive veil of appearances? How does the reality of death as final point of transition to the other life transform this life? There are no simple answers, and it is interesting to observe that Herbert, too, does not opt for the more schematic Neoplatonic ones. It is perhaps »A Meditation upon his Wax-Candle burning out« that achieves the broadest and most sophisticated fusion of some of Herbert's ideas about last things and therefore offers itself as concluding example of the aggregate character _____________ 91 To which Donne appears to have responded in »The Extasy«; cf. Marotti (1986). See also the forceful and lucid reading of Donne's poem in comparison with Herbert's in Targoff (2008), 53–59. 92 Cf. also l. 6 of »Epitaph for himself«.
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of the Early Modern Neoplatonic imagination. This, too, is seemingly a meditation on death. In ten stanzas and sixty lines altogether, Herbert compares the processes of physical decomposition and the separation of body and soul after death with the self-consumption and burning out of a candle. The first three stanzas, which develop the candle conceit, actually contain most of the arguments for the eternal life of the soul as well as for the modes of dissolution and final disposition of the body's material parts. While thy ambitious flame doth strive for height, Yet burneth down, as clogged with the weight Of earthly parts, to which thou art combin'd, Thou still do'st grow more short of thy desire, And do'st in vain unto that place aspire, To which thy native powers seem inclin'd. Yet when at last thou com'st to be dissolved, And to thy proper principles resolv'd, And all that made thee now is discompos'd, Though thy terrestrial part in ashes lies, Thy more sublime to higher Region flies, The rest b'ing to the middle wayes expos'd. And while thou doest thy self each where disperse, Some parts of thee make up this Universe, Others a kind of dignity obtain, Since thy pure Wax in its own flame consum'd, Volumes of incense sends, in which perfum'd, Thy smoak mounts where thy fire could not attain. (1–18)
In the separation of »terrestrial« from the »more sublime« parts, the former, however, are not simply discarded or left to waste. On the contrary, in this analysis of the human into its »proper principles«, these are carefully accorded »a kind of dignity« in that the particles of smoke that perfume the »incense« of the wax candle not only spread a pleasing odour but arise to even greater heights than the soul's »ambitious flame«. In the following stanzas, too, it seems to be the material parts of the living being, the »Elements« (ll. 20, 28, 29, 44, 47), which receive greater poetic attention in their dispensation than the spiritual ones in their (expectable) ascent. It is only in the two rather perfunctory final stanzas that the speaker returns to the fate of the soul. In the intervening larger part of the poem he appears remarkably concerned about the body, labouring to project a theory capable of accounting for the fate of »our frail and earthly frame« (l. 21) in a carefully non-dualistic manner. The solution he proposes is in effect a model in which both material and immaterial parts revert to their origins, each »to its proper place« (l. 45), ending up where they begun and where they belong. Thus, »those poor Carkasses« left
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behind by their souls also, in their elements, experience a kind of epistrophé, at least a suitable redistribution and allocation to their »stations«: Since being in unequal parts commix'd Each in his Element their place will get, And who thought Elements unhappy yet, As long as they were in their stations fix'd? (27–30)
Striking about this conception is that these elements are anything but lifeless. They also appear equipped with sensibility, animated and generative, even individualised to some degree: Or if they sally'd forth, is there not light And heat in some, and spirit prone to fight? Keep they not, in the Earth and Air, the field? Besides, have they not pow'r to generate When, more then Meteors, they Starrs create, Which while they last scarce to the brightest yield. That so in them we more then once may live, While these materials which here did give Our bodies essence, and are most of use, Quick'ned again by the worlds common soul, Which in it self and in each part is whole, Can various forms in divers kinds produce. (31–42)
Full of their own kind of life, indeed able to create beautiful phenomena such as new astral constellations,93 these materials, previously particles of our bodies, in Herbert's account, first become animated atoms capable of entering new formations, perhaps even of something like a reincarnation, next they are cast as instruments of the world soul and its plastic energy, wholly contained »in it self and in each part«. A corpuscular model, with a few ingredients of natural science thrown in, is thus adumbrated and ›platonically‹ reworked. Herbert continues this re-figuration in a more conventional way in the last two stanzas, which now pursue the idea of the soul as »our part divine« which will, it is hoped, »this dross of Elements refine« (l. 46f). But again it is remarkable how hesitating and tentative a note is sounded by this suggestion of spiritual melioration »unto a better state« (l. 48). Stanzas 8 and 9 are presented in _____________ 93 The »Starrs« in l. 35 are asterisked, referring to a marginal gloss – »In the Constellation of Cassiopeia, 1572« – linking them to the supernova discovered by Tycho Brahe, a spectacular event in the history of astronomy, which in turn grounds Herbert's metaphysical speculation in scientific factuality.
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a conditional mode,94 rendering their assertions possible, hoped-for conclusions rather than unshakeable certainties. This of course goes well with Christian orthodoxy. But though the devout ending, emphasised only by the strength of our souls' »infinite desire | To be of perfect happiness possest« (l. 53f), appears doctrinally unimpeachable, it is poetically much weaker than the comparatively complex and suggestive candle conceit of the beginning, with which it seems to have lost all metaphorical connection: And therefore I, who do not live and move, By outward sense so much as faith and love, Which is not in inferior Creatures found, May unto some immortal state pretend, Since by these wings I thither may ascend, Where faithful loving Souls with joys are crown'd. (55–60)
It is only the rather wooden argument that the ›faithful love‹ of which human souls are capable will render them worthy of ultimately attaining to »some immortal state«, that distinguishes the human from the fascinating liveliness of »inferior Creatures«. In his poetry then, as in his De veritate, Edward Herbert, the courtly metaphysician, seems to approach Naturalist positions, briefly pulling them into the Neoplatonic orbit of his thinking, but soon relinquishing them again. He does not appear to be troubled by the systematic inconsistencies of the resulting configurations. They are attitudes he tries out, as easily abandoned as adopted. For my project, they are interesting as examples for the ways these seemingly heterogeneous stances can be combined, for the configurations that result and for the dynamic function acquired by Neoplatonic figures of thought in their formation and transformation. For Lord Herbert of Cherbury, as for many others in this century obsessed with First Principles and experimenting with them, this life could still be made transparent to the ›other‹ life subsisting within it, if not always visible to eyes not accustomed to looking for it (or no longer willing to, due not last to the new and alternative certainties beginning to offer themselves). To Herbert as to others, a ›good work‹ could still appear as a ›fine thing‹, which would, by gracefully and significantly exceeding the conventional, let the truth shine through and, perhaps, transform its beholder.
_____________ 94 Cf. l. 43 – »If then, at worst, this our condition be,« – and 49 – »Or if as cloid upon this earthly stage«.
CHAPTER 2: CIRCULARITIES OR THE POETICS OF RETURN And this also with application to the soul of man, which hath a double aspect, one right, whereby it beholdeth the body, and objects without; another circular and reciprocal, whereby it beholdeth it self. The circle declaring the motion of the indivisible soul, simple, according to the divinity of its nature, and returning into it self; the right lines respecting the motion pertaining unto sense, and vegetation, and the central decussation, the wondrous connexion of the severall faculties conjointly in one substance. (Thomas Browne, The Garden of Cyrus)
2.1 Squaring the Circle: Neoplatonic Versions of the Self – Ficino to Donne In this chapter, I hope to sketch a few of the ways in which Renaissance and seventeenth-century poets used circularity as a medium for thinking through certain problems in connection with the life of the soul.1 The second part of the chapter (2.2) will combine observations on recursivity with a focus on the notion of perfection in a close reading of a poem by Andrew Marvell. Ideally, both parts will, in different ways, yield insights into some of the structural possibilities as well as the limits of a Neoplatonic poetics of return. They will also begin to indicate how the transformations of concepts fundamental to Neoplatonism emerge from interactions with their Early Modern contexts, more specifically, with some of the more strident voices in contemporary ideological debates.
Neoplatonic Circles of the Self: Ficino to Castiglione The circle possesses a number of obvious attractions. It has, of course, its equally obvious drawbacks, but, to some extent, these appear as flip sides of its advantages. Foremost among these are its endlessness (which may appear as inescapability) and its closedness (which may appear as enclosure and prison). As a poetic structure it is among those which exert the strongest closural force. The Renaissance, it seems, felt drawn above all to the perfections of circularity. But in exploring circular perfection as a way of figuring both microcosm and macro_____________ 1
Parts of ch. 2.1 (relating to Sidney, Wyatt, and Donne) will be published as V. O. Lobsien (2010b).
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cosm, it also discovered dimensions that seemed less suited to the intended praise of the creation and its creator. Thus, some celebrations of the circle may equally seem to deplore, if not condemn it. Still, the circle appears to be something of a master-trope for Early Modern mappings of the self.2 It provides a means of analysing, understanding, and asserting what later came to be called subjectivity. Indeed, circularity becomes a favourite mode of imagining the mind in possession of itself. But the manner in which Sidney, Wyatt, Spenser, Donne, and Marvell employ it in their poetry also enables them to point out the distressing limitations, indeed aporias, of the self-reflecting figurations of consciousness and an autonomous subject richly endowed with imagination, which later periods would regard as the foundations of literary creativity as well as philosophical systembuilding. If the circle functioned as one of the most pregnant metaphors of Renaissance subjectivity, it was Classical philosophy which furnished a language as well as a framework of terms and topics that helped to articulate it.3 Neoplatonic thinking would appear to be particularly suitable for the purpose, and in what follows I shall focus on it. But I do by no means wish to suggest that the Early Modern revival of Platonism was exclusively responsible for the emergence of the formations of selfhood in question. Another obvious candidate – in turn not easily separated from its Platonic ingredients – is Christianity, particularly in its Protestant versions. In addition, an exhaustive account of this aspect of Renaissance mentalities would have to consider the impact of Hellenistic materials and ways of thinking.4 As we have come to see, the Renaissance was not a period of indiscriminate ›rediscovery of the ancients‹, but a time significantly shaped by a highly selective appropriation and characteristic transformation of late Classical and Hellenistic philosophies, such as Stoicism, Skepticism, and – albeit slightly later, in conjunction with the rise of the new sciences – Epicureanism. It seems obvious that concepts of the self based (in the sense relevant to my enquiry) on circularity are also central to the Hellenistic thinkers. Both the notions of ataraxia, common to Epicurus as well as Sextus Empiricus, and stoic apathia, closely linked to the ideal of living in accordance (or harmony) with oneself,5 _____________ 2
3
4 5
For an exploration of some of the numerous other discursive and systematic functions of circularity, especially of the notion of the perfect globe, for Early Modern natural philosophy and cosmology cf. Blumenberg (1969). It seems to be no coincidence that Plato should choose the circle as preeminently suitable for illustrating the fundamental difference between the concept of a thing and its material representations; between its identity as an idea as distinct from others and its varying and unstable realizations; between what something is and how it is (its name, description, bodily form). (Plato, The Collected Dialogues, Letters: VII, 342a–343e, 1589–1591). See also above, ch. 1, »›Good Works‹ and ›Fine Things‹«. Referring to Zeno's definition of the highest good, Hadot (1998), 75, explains the concept of homologoumenos zen as follows: »Stoicism is a philosophy of self-coherence, based upon a remarkable intuition of the essence of life. From the very first moment of its existence, every living being is instinctively attuned to itself; that is, it tends to preseve itself, to love its own existence, and to love all that can preserve this existence. This
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unaffected by passions or exterior disturbances, rely on an idea of autoreferentiality in which the self rests securely in a recursive relationship with itself – a condition as tranquil and self-regarding as it is potentially self-perpetuating. Recent studies have emphasised the importance of Skepticism6 and, above all, Stoicism for individual Renaissance thinkers as well as for Humanist education in general, and of the Hellenistic art of life for the Early Modern mind-set as a whole.7 Still, while keeping in mind the multiplicity of causes and traditions as well as their tendencies to blend into and mutually reinforce each other, it is Neoplatonic figurations of circularity which will be at the heart of the following considerations. Among the reasons for this, as will be seen, are their close alliances both with Christian and Petrarchist genres, the licences these provide and the areas of friction they offer. Also, however, and in a more systematic sense with reference to the Renaissance theory of the faculties of the mind, Neoplatonist renderings of this doctrine tend to infuse its essentially Aristotelian schematizations with a certain dynamic. If the system tends to encapsulate reason, imagination, and memory in their respective ›chambers‹ or cellulae of the brain, Platonist thinkers appear more inclined to view them as interconnected and closely dependent on each other. They are willing to regard imagination and reason in some respects as closer allies than, for instance, imagination and the passions or the senses.8 (On the other hand, the emphasis on the close proximity between imagination and the passions is also why Stoicism seems less congenial, _____________
6 7 8
instinctive accord becomes a moral accord with oneself, as soon as man discovers by means of his reason that the supreme value is not those things which are the objects of this instinct for self-preservation, but the reflective choice of accord with oneself, and the activity of choice itself. This is because voluntary accord with oneself coincides with the tendencies of universal Reason, which not only makes each living being into a being in accord with itself, but makes the entire world as well a being in accord with itself.« Relevant considerations of ›life in agreement with (our) nature‹ and the related concept of oikeiosis also in Long (2006). Cf. Popkin (1979); with emphasis on the relevance of Skepticism for Early Modern literature: V. O. Lobsien (1999). Cf. e.g. Hadot (1998), Chew (1988), Braden (1985), Kraye (1988), Menn (1998), Inwood (2003). Thus, for instance, Ficino even refers to the mind and the phantasy as »gemini oculi«, »twin eyes«, of the soul: »Ita mens et phantasia, qui gemini oculi sunt eiusdem animae atque admodum proximi, simul aperiuntur atque eodem pro modo suo conspiciunt.« (»Thus the mind and the phantasy, the twin eyes of the same soul and next to each other, open together and look in the same direction, but each in its own way.«) (Ficino, Platonic Theology, vol. 3, Book X, Chapter VI, 164–165.) As he explains, the mind needs the images of the phantasy (»phantasiae simulacrae«) as a kind of »prompting« in order to arrive at modes of abstraction and higher understanding, and possibly even afterwards as a kind of retrospective modelling: »Beforehand, it needs the images so it can be excited by their stimulus to give birth to the universal species; if it needs them afterwards, it does so, the Peripatetics think, only as a kind of foundation or companion for the species. And in fact, following the intellect's command, a new image is often fashioned in the phantasy conforming to that universal species, an image in which the mind's universal species is blazingly reflected (just as a model is reflected in its image).« (ibid.).
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hence also less tolerant, towards imaginative activities and their products.) On the whole, to risk a hypothesis, Platonism, particularly in its Neoplatonist interpretations, is probably more sympathetic than other approaches to the transformative powers of the imagination9 – despite Plato's well-known, for the Renaissance indeed topical, reservations towards poetry and poets. Let us, still by way of introduction and reminder, briefly glance at two thinkers who provide paradigmatic versions of the kind of circularity I should like to explore in poems by various 16th- and 17th-century authors. First, this is how Marsilio Ficino in his Platonic Theology explains self-awareness: Furthermore, when the soul contemplates itself, it can gaze at its own act and power and essence […]. This is especially true when it is aware that it understands, and understands that it is aware, and so on back and forth to infinity; and especially if, as some people think, it becomes aware of its own intelligible species and its own act through the said species or act.10
This act of contemplation is quite literally speculation – a mirroring of a higher intelligence in which the human mind participates and from which it ultimately derives. It is a mode of self-reflection, albeit one which is divinely motivated and powered, and which, by turning the mind in on itself, leads it back to its source. In fact, it can be said that this circular process forms part of God's wisdom observing itself, a larger circularity in which the divine realises and expends itself only to return to itself: Thus the divine ray penetrates everything: it exists in stones but does not live; it lives in plants but does not shine; it shines in animals but does not reflect on itself or return to its source. In men it exists, lives, shines, and first reflects on itself through a sort of
_____________ 9
For a discussion of the imagination with reference to the theory of the faculties, including (Neo)Platonist perspectives, as well as to Early Modern literature, cf. V. O. Lobsien/E. Lobsien (2003). 10 »Potest insuper anima, quando seipsam considerat, tunc actum suum vimque et essentiam sine phantasiae simulacro intueri. Maxime vero quando et animadvertit se intellegere, et rursus quod animadvertat intellegit replicaturque similiter absque fine, praesertim si, ut quidam putant, speciem suam intellegibilem suumque actum per ipsammet speciem ipsumve actum animadvertat.« (ibid., 166–7). – The anti-imagist context of this passage does not necessarily contradict the generalization on platonism and the imagination just offered. Ficino is here arguing expressly against Lucretius and his doctrine of simulacra by stressing that the soul is capable of this particular act of self-reflection unaided by those types of images. However, the platonist notion of the imagination is not restricted to the specific image-making capacity which Ficino wishes to rule out at this point, i.e. Lucretian »corporal images« (167). Also, the systematic argument I am trying to put forward concerning the role of circularity in Renaissance concepts of the mind is not affected by Ficino's explicit wish to keep the mind's ›gazing‹ at itself a strictly immaterial, non-visual act, »an angelic and divine mode of knowing, free from images« (»cognitio[] quandam angelica[] et divina[] a simulacris libera[]«, ibid., 168–169).
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observing of itself, and then returns to God, its source, blessed in coming to know its own origin.11
It is this return to »the first, the true, and the good« for which the human soul yearns and which it strives towards in reflecting on its own intellect, progressively growing stronger in its »intention of speculation«.12 We are thus dealing with a doubly circular movement, with two circles intimately linked: the reflexive movement of contemplation, in which the soul, as it were, comes into its own, and the more comprehensive circle in which it – by virtue of this self-apprehension as an aspect of the divine – returns to whence it came. Neoplatonic circularity is, however, ambivalent in yet another sense. The selfreflexive figure described by the contemplative mind is also characteristic of melancholy and the saturnine disposition. In Book One of his De vita, Ficino analyses the centripetal dynamic which both energises and, vortex-like, constrains melancholy interiority to a downward and inward motion: […] for the pursuit of the sciences, especially the difficult ones, the soul must draw in upon itself from external things to internal as from the circumference to the center, and while it speculates, it must stay immovably at the very center (as I might say) of man. Now to collect oneself from the circumference to the center, and to be fixed in the center, is above all the property of the Earth itself, to which black bile is analogous. Therefore black bile continually incites the soul both to collect itself together into one and to dwell on itself and to contemplate itself. And being analogous to the world's center, it forces the investigation to the center of individual subjects, and it carries one to the contemplation of whatever is highest, since, indeed, it is most congruent with Saturn, the highest of the planets. Contemplation itself, in its turn, by a continual recollection and compression, as it were, brings on a nature similar to black bile. (1.4.10–21)13
_____________ 11 Ibid., 161. 12 »So the soul's abstraction from the body, which waxes more vehemently as the intention of speculation waxes, is also totally fulfilled by the fulfillment of that intention. But that intention is fulfilled when other things have been put totally aside and only the first, the true, and the good are loved and contemplated by the incandescent yearning of the mind.« (ibid., 171). 13 »[…] quod ad scientias praesertim difficiles consequendas necesse est animum ab externis ad interna tanquam a circumferentia quadam ad centrum sese recipere, atque dum speculatur in ipso (ut ita dixerim) hominis centro stabilissime permanere. Ad centrum vero a circumferentia se colligere figique in centro maxime terrae ipsius est proprium, cui quidem atra bilis persimilis est. Igitur atra bilis animum, ut se et colligat in unum et sistat in uno contempleturque, assidue provocat. Atque ipsa mundi centro similis ad centrum rerum singularum cogit investigandum, evehitque ad altissima quaeque comprehendenda, quandoquidem cum Saturno maxime congruit altissimo planetarum. Contemplatio quoque ipsa vicissim assidua quadam collectione et quasi compressione naturam atrae bili persimilem contrahit.« (Ficino, Three Books on Life, 112–115. – The standard work on the history of melancholy, with particular emphasis on its Ficinian version, is, of course, Klibansky/Panofsky/Saxl [1964]).
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Here, the same paradoxical doubleness seems to hold: the deepest recollection and penetration is said to approximate a recognition of the highest,14 the greatest concentration of the soul in search of truth amounts to self-transcendence. Ficinian melancholy also is a recursive condition, as it predisposes the scholar towards speculative investigation, yet, at the same time, this contemplation tends to bring on atrabilious bouts. On the whole, Ficino's concept of melancholia generosa places the stress on the enthusiastic and manic sides15 of a disposition known to Christian theologians as acedia or sloth and considered a mortal sin. His attempt to nobilitate melancholy is a principal and fundamental one in that it employs the same figures of thought as his doctrine of the soul. But this symmetry of argument works both ways: by virtue of the foundational circularity common to both, the speculative intellect is also tinged by melancholy. Its talent for transcendence remains coupled with a potential for a spiritually fatal selfinvolvement, for depression and despair. It is not only the religious poetry of the English Renaissance which will display a particular sensitivity towards this Neoplatonic nexus between being oneself and being melancholy. Poets will, however, also respond to, and help to shape, another related, and culturally immensely influential, paradigm. The Neoplatonic impulse to ›come into one's own‹ and thus to (re)ascend to the ideal also informs the paradigm of courtly love as articulated by Baldassare Castiglione.16 In fact, as The Book of the Courtier practises what it preaches, it already provides me with a first example of circularity as subject matter as well as a literary strategy. To begin with, Castiglione's courtier indicates that he, too, is equipped for transcendence in that he manifests »a certain grace« (grazia).17 This is suggested by his readiness to _____________ 14 The right sort of black bile being »congruent« with it: »[…] the soul with an instrument or incitement of this kind - which is congruent in a way with the center of the cosmos, and, as I might say, collects the soul into its own center – always seeks the center of all subjects and penetrates to their innermost core. [animus instrumento sive incitamento eiusmodi quod centro mundi quodammodo congruit, atque (ut ita dixerim) in suum centrum animum colligit, semper rerum omnium et centra petit, et penetralia penetrat.]« (Three Books on Life, 1.6.19–22, 120–121; cf. also 3.22 for the melancholy intellect's affinity with Saturn). 15 For an explicit linkage with the notion of furor divinus, also as precondition for poetic productivity, cf. ibid. 1.5. 16 The Book of the Courtier From the Italian of Count Baldassare Castiglione: Done into English by Sir Thomas Hoby (STC 4778–4781). In subsequent quotations, I shall refer to this edition as Courtier. 17 »The Courtyer therfore, besyde noblenesse of birthe, I wyll have hym to be fortunate in this behalfe, and by nature to have not only a wytte, and a comely shape of persone and countenance, but also a certain grace, and (as they saie) a hewe, that shal make him at the fist sight acceptable and lovyng unto who so beholdeth him. And let this be an ornament to frame and accompanye all his actes, and to assure men in his looke, such a one to bee woorthy the companye and favour of every great man.« (Courtier, 46). – Castiglione's grazia seems to hold some affinity with Plotinus' concept of »grace« (charis), i.e. the ›charm‹ of a person capable of inspiring love in the beholder, which will in turn lead him to the highest good (Enn. VI 7, 22, 1–25; cf. also Hadot [1993], 49–52).
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excel, to go beyond the limits set by the achievements of others.18 But there is an analogy which goes beyond the structural between this ›transcendence in immanence‹ and its neoplatonic archetype. This is easily borne out by a glance19 at Pietro Bembo's performance of a furor divinus in Book IV, the last book of The Courtier. Here, the ultimate exaltation is presented as courtly perfection – in a genuinely metaphysical cast, if finally not without irony. Bembo unfolds a doctrine of love for the »not yonge Courtier«,20 explaining how, since love is really nothing but a desire to be united with heavenly beauty,21 this may be attained by looking at it »with the eyes of the minde«22 and by sublimating the passions aimed at earthly consummation.23 Bembo expounds the joys of this »reasonable love«24 in some detail. By a contemplation of the beloved's beauty purified and cleansed of all sensual ingredients and bodily longing, it will gradually orient the lover's soul towards its true, celestial object. His soul will then awaken to herself and embark on the circle of self-reflection which will lead her to the highest: Therfore the soule […] tourninge her to the beehouldyng of her owne substance, as it were raysed out of a most deepe sleepe, openeth the eyes that all men have, and fewe occupy, and seeth in her self a shining beame of that lyght, which is the true image of
_____________ 18 He will »wade in everye thyng a litle farther then other menne, so that he maye bee knowen among all menne for one that is excellente« (Courtier, 54). 19 For a fuller reading of Castiglione cf. V. O. Lobsien/E. Lobsien (2003), also V. O. Lobsien, (2005). 20 Courtier, 356, and passim. 21 Beauty having its source in God and being, as it were, only exiled in the human body (cf. Courtier, 348–350), it continually strives to overcome »the darkeness of the bodye« (350): »[…] the body, where that beawtye shyneth, is not the fountaine frome whens beauty springeth, but rather bicause beautie is bodilesse and […] an heavenlie shyning beame, she loseth much of her honoure whan she is coopled with that vile subject and full of corruption, bicause the lesse she is partner therof, the more perfect she is, and cleane sundred frome it, is most perfect« (353). 22 Ibid., 359. 23 It is interesting to note the role allocated to the imagination in this process: Like Ficino, Castiglione attributes to it the function of shaping (›fashioning‹), generalizing, in fact transforming the image of the beloved into a »universall concept« of beauty (ibid., 358). In a sense, the imagination produces the object to be contemplated by reason, processing the raw materiality of the sense perception to make it palatable to the speculative gaze of the higher faculty. It acts as a kind of intermediary (»conveiance«), hence as an important catalyzing force in the soul's ascent – provided it is not regarded as an end in itself: »This stayer of love, though it be verye noble, and such as fewe arrive at it, yet is it not in this sort to be called perfect, forsomuch as where the imagination is of force to make conveiance and hath no knowleage, but through those beeginninges that the senses helpe her wythall, she is not cleane pourged from grosse darkenesse: and therefore though she do consider that universall beawtie in sunder and in it self alone, yet doeth she not well and cleerlye descerne it, nor without some doubtfulness, by reason of the agreement that the fansyes have with the bodye« (358). 24 Ibid., 355. Cf. also 353 where ›Bembo‹ recommends »to shonn throughlye all filthinesse of commune love, and so entre into the holye way of love with the guide of reason«.
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the aungelike beawtye partened with her, whereof she also partneth with the bodye a feeble shadowe: therfore wexed blinde about earthlye matters, is made most quicke of sight about heavenlye.25
As Bembo continues to describe this ascent, he gets carried away by his own enthusiasm. From a topic of his speech, »the holye furie of love« is turned into its agent, the speaker becoming a mere medium for what he is trying to present. Bembo falls silent in a moment of ecstatic trance: When Bembo had hitherto spoken with such vehemencye, that a man woulde have thought him (as it were) ravished and beeside himselfe, he stoode still without once mooving, houldynge his eyes towarde heaven as astonied, whan the LADY EMILIA, whiche together with the rest gave most diligent eare to this talke, tooke him by the plaite of hys garment and pluckinge hym a little, said: Take heede (M. Peter) that these thoughtes make not your soule also to forsake the bodye. Madam, answered M. PETER, it shoulde not be the first miracle that love hath wrought in me.26
Both the gentle irony with which the Lady Emilia arouses him from his rapt state and the sprezzatura with which Bembo replies exemplify once again the virtue at the heart of graceful courtliness. The claim to excellence is elegantly distanced and at the same time quite literally asserted. Bembo is both perfectly himself and wholly beside himself, subject and object of the amazing power of love, finding – indeed, advantageously presenting – himself in a situation of absolute heteronomy. It is above all in its courtly and (closely related) Petrarchist versions that we encounter Neoplatonic circularity in sixteenth-century English poetry. These are not, however, the only ones: after a consideration of Sidney's Astrophil and Stella, a brief look at Wyatt's translation of Aretino's rendering of the penitential psalms will help us to discern ways in which biblical and Christian variants of the circle blend with the patterns sketched above. Spenser's Fowre Hymnes, too, modulate between the religious and the philosophical, but they do so in a very different manner. Transparently dissimulating their central project they can be read as a highly sophisticated and surprisingly complex example of the poetic possibilities offered by a neoplatonic aesthetics. While Spenser's hymns and Wyatt's psalms will thus provide a forward-looking perspective on seventeenth-century ›innovations‹, metaphysical conceits of circularity in a lesser-known poem by Donne _____________ 25 Ibid., 359. Thus »the soule rid of vices […] feeleth a certain previe smell of the right aungelike beawtie, and ravished with the shining of that light, beeginneth to be inflamed, and so greedilye foloweth after, that (in a maner) she wexeth dronken and beeside her self, for coveting to coople her self with it, havinge founde (to her wening) the footesteppes of God, in the beehouldinge of whom (as in her happy end) she seeketh to settle her self.« (ibid.). – Cf. also Plotinus, Enn. I 6, 8 and 9. 26 Ibid., 363.
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may, from the point of view suggested here, be regarded as continuation of an older tradition or as part of yet another Platonic Renaissance – Early Modern aesthetics coming full circle, perhaps, with Marvell.
Sidney: The Melancholy Lover as Poet Obviously, Sidney's Astrophil is not a courtier of ripe years. However, he is unfortunate in his love for Stella. Thus he finds himself in a constellation that theoretically offers all the Petrarchist rewards, from heightened self-awareness to an appreciation of virtue, the purification of his longing, and the miraculous experience of transcendent beauty. Still, for Sidney's poetic persona, these do not seem to work. Sonnet No. 5 leaves no doubt that he is excellently versed in the relevant doctrines: It is most true, that eyes are form'd to serve The inward light: and that the heavenly part Ought to be king, from whose rules who do swerve, Rebels to Nature, strive for their owne smart. It is most true, what we call Cupid's dart, An image is, which for our selves we carve; And, fooles, adore in temple of our hart, Till that good God make Church and Churchman starve. True, that true Beautie Vertue is indeed, Whereof this Beautie can be but a shade, Which elements with mortall mixture breed: True, that on earth we are but pilgrims made, And should in soule up to our countrey move: True, and yet true that I must Stella love.27
Yet there seems to be another ›truth‹ to Astrophil's love, or why will the circle not close? Why does his soul, enflamed by the contemplation of Stella's beauty, not feel inclined to return to its heavenly origin (»up to our country move«)? The answer seems to be given, famously, in Sonnets No. 71 and 72, with Astrophil refusing to learn the well-known lesson from »fairest booke of Nature« (71.1), prompted by the »light« (71.7) and »sweetest soveraigntie | Of reason« (71.6–7). Stella's »Vertue« (71.13) and »true goodnesse« (71.4) appear incapable of »bend[ing]« his love »to good« (71.13). Instead, as in the final line of Sonnet 5 (»yet«), an adversative signals disruption of the circular movement and heralds massive opposition: »›But ah,‹ Desire still cries, ›give me some food.‹« (71.14). Similarly, the couplet ending Sonnet 72 seems to despair of the ascent to courtly _____________ 27 The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney. All quotations from »Astrophil and Stella« according to this edition. Sonnets are referred to by number and bracketed together with line references after the respective quotation.
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virtue hitherto charted with such conviction28 and mythological inevitability (the speaker confidently claiming that »Venus is taught with Dian's wings to flie«, 72.6): But thou Desire, because thou wouldst have all, Now banisht art, but yet alas how shall?
Unfulfilled – insistent and unsatisfiable – »Desire« seems to be at the heart of Astrophil's despair, repeatedly channelling his attempts to reap Platonic profit from his love into the same aporia. Structurally (and also psychologically), however, the circle has already closed. Desire, Astrophil's »old companion« (72.1), will still accompany him at the end of the poem. Together, they have entered the self-perpetuating circle of melancholy. That this is just another version, and only seemingly the reverse, of the Neoplatonic flight to the heights is borne out by the ambiguous Sonnet No. 68: Stella, the onely Planet of my light, Light of my life, and life of my desire, Chiefe good, whereto my hope doth only aspire, World of my wealth, and heav'n of my delight. Why doest thou spend the treasures of thy sprite, With voice more fit to wed Amphion's lyre, Seeking to quench in me the noble fire, Fed by thy worth, and kindled by thy sight? And all in vaine, for while thy breath most sweet, With choisest words, thy words with reasons rare, Thy reasons firmly set on Vertue's feet, Labour to kill in me this killing care: O thinke I then, what paradise of joy It is, so faire a Vertue to enjoy.
Here it is precisely Stella's dissuasion from love, her painful if fruitless trying to reason with her lover, which is intensely enjoyable. This is less a gentle reproach to the beloved, a poignant prayer to desist from what is in any case »in vaine«, but a plea to continue in a virtuous rhetoric which causes delight not because of what it says, but, perversely, in spite of that and because of who says it. Astrophil manages to convert distress into joy; what saddens him becomes a source of pleasure. The couplet could also contain a pun, offering an additional and more piquant reason for »joy«. The melancholy listener's »desire« (68.2) is alive to such an extent that in the final lines it threatens to thrust him to words that try to chastise _____________ 28 Cf. 72.9-12: »Service and Honor, wonder with delight, | Feare to offend, will worthie to appeare, | Care shining in mine eyes, faith in my sprite, | These things are left me by my only Deare«.
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his passion out of this circle of self-affirmation. Possibly, the sonnet's last lines, emphasised by the ›embracing‹ rhyme »joy«/»enjoy«, also show us the lover secretly imagining what it would be like to do precisely what both Platonic sublimation and melancholy forbid him to do: namely physically to »enjoy« the embodiment of »so faire a Vertue«.29 If the Sidneyan circle is one that returns the lover to himself and leaves him to the continued exploration of his unhappiness, endlessly feeding his melancholy, while at the same time depriving him of transcendence, does imagination perhaps point a way out of this situation of aporetic self-enclosure? At first glance this might seem to be the case. Although imagination, in accordance with conventional views, is ranged lower than reason and understanding, there are a number of sonnets which appear to rate it highly, if in a self-consciously ingenious and provocative manner. Thus No. 45, where Astrophil wishes that Stella might regard his unfortunate fate as »fable« (45.5) and pity him as deeply as he has observed her pity the »grievous case« (45.6) of fictional lovers in an invented »tale« (45.14). Or No. 58, which describes how Stella's performance, her ravishing actio in reading out Astrophil's complaining verse evokes a response contrary to the intended effect by causing »delight« instead of sympathetic »wo« (58.13) even in the sad poet, thus transforming passions into their opposite and rendering void and useless the words and thoughts cast most skilfully in the finest rhetorical mould. Or perhaps No. 38, where »Stella's image« (38.6), brought before his dreaming mind by »fancie's error« (38.5), wakes the sleeping Astrophil and by its startling lifelikeness so effectively banishes sleep that he is incapable of conjuring it up again. Sleep, and with it the desired image in the mind's eye, refuses to do his bidding. But, while this does report a triumph of »Fancy drawne by imag'd things« (45.9), all it really signifies in Astrophil's sad tale is a failure of the imaginative and affective power of his own poetry. All he is left with is »wailing eloquence« (38.10), sterile rhetoric devoid of the power to move or call forth the intended response in its addressee. And here we enter yet another circle: the melancholy lover's predicament is mirrored by the poet's desperately trying to avoid being a »pick-purse of another's wit« (74.8), but caught in the seemingly unbreakable circle of imitation. Astrophil's artistic dilemma is articulated most famously in Sonnet No. 1 (»Loving in truth, and faine in verse my love to show«), but it recurs again and again, together with its wholly topical pseudo-solution – for »looke in thy heart and write« (1.14) is precisely what the poet-lover tried to do at the beginning and what thousands of other re-enactors of »poore Petrarch's long deceased woes« (15.7) have (as he knows) claimed to have been doing before him. The only original gesture possible in a situation where everything has already been said, and said better, seems to be a radical negation of imitation and a rejection of rhetorical finesse in favour of the spontaneity of ›natural‹ expression when faced _____________ 29 Much as Pyrocles wishing to »enjoy« Philoclea in Sidney's Old Arcadia, 21.
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with Nature's »chiefe worke, Stella's eyes« (7.1).30 But of course this artful disclaimer of artificiality, while functioning as a bravura piece of poetic sprezzatura, only succeeds in self-consciously posing as naturalness. It remains »art […] hiding art«.31 Even as the speaker tries to communicate the intensity of his feeling by emphasizing his inability to utter it, he does not escape poetic convention: In the expressive quaver of lines such as »When trembling voice brings forth that I do Stella love« (6.14), his protestation of speechlessness conforms to the rhetoric figure of aposiopesis, signifying the failure of eloquence in the medium it pretends to reject. Thus, Astrophil's rebellious gestures are just that. Both the aporia of hopeless »desire« pitted against the self-enclosed circle of melancholy love imitating the pattern of Neoplatonic circularity but experiencing itself as incapable of transcendence, and the equally imitative attempts to break out of the self-perpetuating circles of ornate language, though innovative in their variations of the topic, leave Sidney's speaker a despairing prisoner of his own interiority. His rage affirms what it appears to combat. As Astrophil's fury is denied divinity, knowing »Poets' furie« only from hearsay (74.5), all that remains is self-pity – and the repeated articulation of this condition: »Poore Layman I, for sacred rites unfit.« (74.4).
Wyatt: Refiguring Repentance The autoreferentiality figured in the biblical poetry of Sir Thomas Wyatt is of a different kind. Yet here, too, the circle provides a major strategy for the presentation of Early Modern interiority, above all for the self-invention of a Protestant sensibility. Again, it functions both as topic and as structure, as the following cursory examination of Wyatt's »Paraphrase of the Penitential Psalms«32 will show. Wyatt's metrical paraphrase, as is well known, closely follows Pietro Aretino's narrative embedding of the seven penitential psalms, presenting the psalms as spoken or sung by a contrite King David. The biblical pretext for the framing material as well as the transitional texts linking the actual paraphrases of psalms 6, 32, 38, 51, 102, 130, and 143 is provided by 2 Samuel 11 and 12, the two chapters telling the story of how David comes to desire the _____________ 30 Cf. e.g. sonnets 1, 3, 6, 15, 74. 31 Cf. Old Arcadia, 24. 32 First printed 1549 as Certayne psalmes chosen out of the psalter of Dauid commonlye called thee. vii. penytentiall psalmes, drawen into englysshe meter by sir Thomas Wyat Knyght, whereunto is added a prologue of ye auctore before euery psalme, very pleasaunt & profettable to the godly reader. Quotations and line references follow the modernspelling edition by Rebholz (Wyatt, Complete Poems). Cf. also Twombly (1970); in his detailed examination and critical comparison of Wyatt's text with its Italian pretext, Twombly seems to glance at the structural peculiarities I am interested in, remarking that the psychological »dynamics« of Wyatt's penitential psalms is provided by a »lifting oneself by one's own bootstraps« (353).
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beautiful Bathsheba, how he possesses her, and arranges to have her husband Uriah killed in a battle against the Ammonites; of God's displeasure with David, David's recognition of his sin prompted by Nathan, his repentance, punishment, and return to grace. Since the penitential psalms, as a sequence, do not follow an order other than the numerical, the biblical setting provides them with dramatic consistency and the motivational logic of a narrative context familiar, indeed topical in its subject: the spectacular abuse of power for sexual purposes. Also, the pattern substituted by Aretino and closely imitated – if with certain important modifications – by Wyatt provides a satisfying order as it manages to arrange a linear, non-teleological sequence into a circle, structuring it, in fact, according to multiple circularities. The story of David and Bathsheba tells how its protagonist falls from grace and returns to it, having sinned grievously and repented. Superimposed on this, in terms of the internal structure of the texts integrated into this movement, is the cyclical pattern characteristic of the genre of psalms of supplication and lament, which repeat in themselves the archetypal rhythm of (spiritual) death and rebirth, sin and redemption, fall into darkness and rise to light.33 In a sense, this multiple internal circularity resists the overall closure the narrative frame implies, as it carries the suggestion ›to be continued‹. In Aretino, as has been remarked, this leads to a presentation of David as painfully wavering between sin and forgiveness. Wyatt, on the other hand, seems to be trying, particularly in the final paraphrases and their narrative links, to rework the latent seriality into a psychologically more coherent presentation of the process of repentance,34 stressing both its progressive nature and its teleological continuity, leading from the depths of contrition to an experience of grace which is the more exalting the less deserved. As grace, however, is freely given and not to be possessed once and for all, this process must not be presented as moving towards a final solution. This kind of closure, while its promise is to be strengthened against the vacillations of ›Roman Catholic‹ practice, is to remain something devoutly to be striven for, to be upheld only by the utmost and unflagging spiritual exertion. What results is probably one of the first extended renditions of Protestant interiority, struggling to keep a precarious balance between the conflicting structural and theological tensions inscribed in its subject matter. Wyatt tries to do this by inserting yet further circular elements, albeit on other textual levels: circles of self-reflexivity bordering on religious melancholy, circles of (equally dangerous) self-satisfaction, and not least certain metaphoric complexes drawn from the Neoplatonic repertoire. One of the most striking indicators of Wyatt's attempt to insinuate as much ›provisional‹ circularity as possible on all these _____________ 33 For these and other structural and generic patterns cf. Alter's article on »Psalms« in: Alter/Kermode (1987), 244–262. 34 Cf. Rebholz' commentary for a discussion of Wyatt's attempts to shift the theological attitudes in the direction of Reformed Christianity, in Wyatt, Complete Poems, 453ff.
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levels is the frequency with which he employs the rhetorical figura etymologica.35 Microstructurally, the punning repetition of a word in varying grammatical forms and functions very aptly conveys a sense of the sameness-with-variations characteristic of the spiritual rhythms the text as a whole aims at delineating. Self-reflexivity, together with self-recognition and acknowledgement of the great sin he has committed, is of course the precondition for David's repentance. Here, however, it results first of all in the complete interiorization of the spiritual drama of conversion, famously epitomised in the speaker's plea: Make Zion, Lord, according to thy will, Inward Zion, the Zion of the ghost. Of heart's Jerusalem strength the walls still. (503–505)
In addition, and potentially more terrifying, awareness of guilt, deepened by the radical soul-searching David has embarked on after his descent into his »prison or grave«-like dark cave (62), repeatedly verges on »despair« (196). Again and again, David's budding assurance of God's forgiveness threatens to falter, tipping the balance towards a self-accusation so severe that it cannot even dare to hope for a renewal of grace: Like as he whom his own thought affrays, He turns his look. Him seemeth that the shade Of his offence again his force assays By violence despair on him to lade. (420–423)
Consciousness of his crime, dwelt on in the ambivalent »shade« cast by his sorrow (400, cf. 397), which darkens the mind while it carries the promise of refreshment for the wearied »pilgrim« (395), may lead to a lethal acedia. This tristitia mortifera, which will ultimately despair of salvation, appears as a potential consequence of the reflexivity indispensable for conversion. It must of course be avoided at all cost. But the only means Wyatt's protagonist seems to have at his disposal – the utterance of »song«, i.e. of yet another penitential psalm –, implies yet another danger, potentially equally fatal to the spirit already fatigued and tormented by ever-deepening remorse. Having finished his fourth song, the »Miserere mei Domine« of Psalm 51, David begins to take heart. His confidence in »God's goodness« bent on »justifying« even the worst of sinners (cf. 511) increases, and he is struck by the fact that God has chosen him of all people to give voice to such »deep secrets« – »Of mercy, of faith, of frailty, of grace« (509–510). He begins to ponder what he has sung, repeating it to himself and contemplating it: »[…] in his heart he turneth _____________ 35 Cf. e.g. »Paraphrase«, lines 31–32, 297–300, 451–455, 525–528, 664–666 in Wyatt, Complete Poems.
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and poiseth | Each word that erst his lips might forth afford« (518–519). This kind of reflection on himself as the Lord's chosen instrument,36 however, soon takes on a colouring different from that of contrition – namely that of vanity. David delights in his »prophesy« (642) and begins to consider it in the light of a reward for all his »pain and penitence« (647). Fortunately, this self-deception does not last long. Renewed meditation on his »fault« and the »recompense« he has received (648) quickly makes him realise their utter incongruity. He now sees his conceit for what it is: »[…] the sly assault | Of vain allowance of his void desert« (656–657). He immediately responds to the temptation with a second act of conversion37 and, »the heart returned again | And sore contrite« (653–654), finds himself in a disposition wholly adequate to Psalm 130, »De profundis«. In striving to render palpable the repentant soul's effort to gain certainty of renewed grace and to reassure itself of the permanence of salvation, Wyatt's text demonstrates both the heroism of its relentless self-examination, of an interiority continually observing and checking itself, and the dangers of either sinking into despair under the perceived weight of its guilt or of taking illicit pleasure in the heightened self-awareness resulting from this activity. Were he to catch himself in a circle of spiritual pride, the speaker would fall prey to a particularly vicious form of backsliding – a relapse into sin made possible by the very self-reflection that is the precondition for redemption. As, from a perspective of reformed Christianity, justification can never be deserved, the soul can never rest in secure possession of grace. This lack of certainty can only be countered by incessant self-monitoring. The risks attendant on that are only to be controlled by keeping a yet closer watch over one's thoughts and feelings. This multiple circularity more than once threatens to become oppressive, shutting out the hope of transcendence it is meant to convey. Yet at this point David's mental activities are shown to modulate from the closeness of introspection into a compelling sense of being ›in the eye of another‹ – of being the object of benevolent divine attention. In Wyatt's text, these are moments that appear to break the circle by attempting to figure the incalculable. They do so by highly conventional means, yet very effectively against the sinister background of self-inclosure. One of the most pervasive metaphors of Neoplatonic discourse here serves to create the liberating effect: the metaphor of light.38 This metaphor not only signifies how the redeeming »Word«, having vanquished death, now _____________ 36 Cf. »Paraphrase«, 632–639: »When David had perceived in his breast | The sprite of God returned that was exiled, | Because he knew he hath alone expressed | These great things that greater sprite compiled, | As shawm or pipe lets out the sound impressed, | By music's art forged tofore and filed, | I say when David had perceived this | The sprite of comfort in him revived is.« 37 »And all the glory of his forgiven fault | To God alone he doth it whole convert.« (»Paraphrase«, 658–659). 38 In his essay »Licht als Metapher der Wahrheit«, Hans Blumenberg has sketched a history of this metaphor and the uses to which it is put in platonic and other contexts from Parmenides to the present (Blumenberg [1957], 139–171).
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»leapeth lighter from such corruption | Than glint of light that in the air doth lome« (706–7). Even before this final vision granted to David »As in a trance« (697), and at a fairly early point in the text, a ray of light intruding unexpectedly into his cave helps to preempt spiritual stagnation39 and to spur on the progress of repentance: This while a beam that bright sun forth sends – That sun the which was never cloud could hide – Pierceth the cave and on the harp descends, Whose glancing light the chords did overglide And such lustre upon the harp extends As light of lamp upon the gold clean tried; The turn whereof into his eyes did start, Surprised with joy by penance of the heart. (309–318)
The final line manages to convey the requisite double sense of »joy« originating both within and without the speaker: intense spiritual delight appears simultaneously as a consequence of the »sun«40 which suddenly pierces his darkness and as a correlate of his contrition strengthened by his art – the music of his psalms sung and played on his harp. Thus Wyatt's text constitutes a Christian, indeed Protestant, reworking of circularity. However, due to the insertions of Neoplatonic elements, especially metaphors of light, its refigurations of repentance also avoid stifling selfinclosure, or at least help to modify the sense of entrapment inside an increasingly autoreferential interiority. That this should be achieved by an added emphasis on the ›aesthetic‹ aspects of the psalmist's striving for salvation does not seem to be incidental.41 Both Edmund Spenser and John Donne will unfold the aesthetic potential implicit in Wyatt's moment of ravishing religious insight in ways that can be observed to shape the outlines of a Neoplatonist poetics. In doing so, they can also be seen to use the medium of Platonic Christian theology in order to pursue another agenda: that of finding and articulating their own poetic voice, a voice capable both of saying the unsayable and, most obvious in Donne's case, of proclaiming their literary individuality.
_____________ 39 Indeed petrifaction, as he seems to have frozen in his posture of »A marble image of singular reverence | Carved in the rock with eyes and hands on high, | Made as by craft to plain, to sob, to sigh.« (Wyatt, Complete Poems, »Paraphrase«, 306–8). 40 Of course with a paranomastic anticipation in line 310 of the later passage about the Son of God as logos irresistible in his redeeming act: »That sun which never cloud could hide«. 41 For a groundbreaking theology of the Psalter both as reading and ›playing‹, which brilliantly and patiently unfolds not only its theological but, inseparable from it, also its poetic and musical dimensions, see Bader's weighty and witty Psalterspiel (2009).
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Spenser: Retractation as Transparency42 Despite their considerable length of 1182 lines, Spenser's Fowre Hymnes are traditionally listed among his »shorter poems«,43 and their relative brevity in comparison with the Faerie Queene seems, to many of their readers, to indicate their lesser status as well. Today's Spenser criticism has tended to marginalise these texts, presumably because they appear to contain so little that connects them to the author's political stance or his »Irish experience«. In comparison with his notorious Vewe of the Present State of Ireland and the draconic colonist measures advocated there, also dated 1596 and thus assumed to have been composed in shockingly distasteful synchronicity, the Fowre Hymnes must appear esoteric and escapist, if not, from a biographic point of view, hypocritical. However, if these critical perspectives appear incapable of accommodating the text, this does not mean that it is irrelevant. The approach suggested here makes possible not only to perceive and accept the coexistence of contradictory symbolic responses to the world in one and the same authorial personality, it may also help to appreciate the political potential of Renaissance Neoplatonism. For in the shape of courtly selfculture propagated by Castiglione's Cortegiano, Elyot's Boke named the Gouvernour and many other similar writings, Neoplatonism furnishes both an important medium for a specific doctrine of love and a central part of the Humanist educational enterprise. With respect to the latter, it is not only the masculinist model of stoical virtue which provided the model, but also, if not more so, a Neoplatonically-inspired ideal of universal excellency and perfection, with a pronounced emphasis on continued self-transcendence, which invited and indeed demanded imitation. To render emulation worthwhile, however, involves more than the teaching of philosophical doctrine or the formulation of normative truths. In order to trigger a truly formative impulse towards a fashioning of the self in accordance with the courtly precepts of gratia and sprezzatura, the ideal has to appear attractive. To make it both attractive and delightful is the anagogical task of poetry, and it was, of course, Spenser's declared aim. Similar to the courtiers assembled round the Lady Emilia at Urbino, who attempt »to shape in woordes a good courtier« (»formar con parole un perfetto cortegiano«),44 Spenser announces in an oftenquoted formula from the »Letter of the Authors« that prefaces his Faerie Queene that he seeks, by means of his book, »to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline«, adding, with extra stress on the poetic dimension _____________ 42 An earlier version of this section was published in German (V. O. Lobsien [2007b]). 43 In quoting Fowre Hymnes I refer to The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser. Individual poems and lines are referred to by abbreviated title – HL (An Hymne in Honour of Love), HB (An Hymne in Honour of Beautie), HHL (An Hymne of Heavenly Beautie), HHB (An Hymne of Heavenly Beautie) – and line number after the quotation. 44 Castiglione, Courtier, 42; Castiglione, Il libro del Cortegiano, 36.
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of the kind of instruction he has to offer: »So much more profitable and gratious is doctrine by ensample, then by rule.«45 If this programme of resistance against »plain« discursivity holds for Spenser's other works as well, we have to look for ›effective structures‹ in the Fowre Hymnes, structures which appear able to turn the reading process into a formative one, the text into an act capable of »shaping« its reader. And these will, as I hope to indicate, go beyond the strategies of allegorical dissimulation, although, as in the larger epic, those are functional here as well. It is, above all, a small number of specifically Neoplatonic figures of thought, circular throughout, which structure the Fowre Hymnes, arrange their elements into a coherent whole, and make them both a graceful performance of the heavenly beauty they thematise and a stimulus towards an interior realization and imitation of this selfreflexive performance. That these four ›hymns‹ – songs in praise of love, of beauty, of heavenly love, and of heavenly beauty – refer to Neoplatonic themes and motifs in a generic mode indistinguishably both pagan and Christian has never been in dispute. They are, as traditional research has tended to stress, most heavily indebted to Florentine Neoplatonism, above all to the writings and translations of Marsilio Ficino.46 But the fact that they are riddled with Neoplatonic topoi and allusions does not suffice to substantiate their claim to a Neoplatonic aesthetic. For this we have to determine the criteria according to which these topical elements have been selected as well as the relations that hold between them. In a sense, it is the authorial voice itself which raises questions of this kind. For in his dedication to Margaret, Countess of Cumberland, and Anne, Countess of Warwick, Spenser performs a self-consciously ›reformist‹ gesture, depreciating the two first »Hymnes of earthly or naturall love and beauty« as youthful and somewhat frivolous works. Having been unable to revoke them, he claims, he attempted to correct their excess of passion and lack of seriosity in the later »heavenly« ones:
_____________ 45 Spenser formulates this in explicit rejection of the conventional options: »To some I know this Methode will seeme displeasaunt, which had rather haue good discipline deliuered plainly in way of precepts or sermoned at large, as they vse, then thus clowdily enwrapped in Allegorical deuises.« (Spenser, The Faerie Queene, 737). 46 Cf., for an identification of individual sources in Ficino, Louis Le Roy, Benivieni, Pico, Leone Ebreo, Bembo and others, Ellrodt (1975). Bjorvand's commentary in the Yale Edition as well as Allen (1997) place stronger emphasis on Ficino. Bieman (1988) stresses the co-presence of Christian thought, which she finds, above all, in the Fathers, in Augustine and Boethius. The presence of Giordano Bruno appears to be disputed, but others could easily be added. Taking into account the sheer number of possible sources, there is a strong sense of overdetermination in these poems. Spenser seems to pile layer upon layer of Neoplatonic semantics, creating a highly charged, but nonetheless oddly monochromatic texture.
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Having in the greener times of my youth, composed these former two Hymnes in the praise of Love and Beautie, and finding that the same too much pleased those of like age and disposition, which being too vehemently caried with that kind of affection, do rather sucke out poyson to their strong passion, then hony to their honest delight, I was moved by the one of you two most excellent Ladies, to call in the same. But being unable so to doe, by reason that many copies thereof were formerly scattered abroad, I resolved at least to amend, and by way of retractation to reforme them, making in stead of those two Hymnes of earthly or naturall love and beautie, two others of heavenly and celestiall.47
As a matter of fact and contrary to his claim, however, Spenser's text does not offer the two »celestiall« hymnes »in stead of« the earthly ones. Likewise, »retractation«, the key term in this passage, does not mean a simple taking back of the latter or their being superseded. The text plays with the ambivalence of Latin retractare, which can carry both the distancing power of a revokation proper and the milder sense of a mere revision or reconsideration, which does not wholly negate or give up the former version but only partially rejects it, retaining its main tenor in a modified repetition or variation.48 It was Augustine who had provided the most famous paradigm for this ambivalent genre in his Retractationes,49 but in the late sixteenth century, the rueful abnegation of former folly was a well-established literary gesture.50 _____________ 47 Fowre Hymnes in: Spenser, The Yale Edition, 690; italics in the original. 48 Retractatio does not seem to be a term of classical rhetorics, although Quintilian does use the word in an explanation of certain figures of affirmative or contrastive repetition (Institutio Oratoria 9, 3, 36). The Latin word carries juridical meanings, but can also be employed in a technical literary sense; cf. the Oxford Latin Dictionary definitions of retracto: »to handle again. […] 6. To occupy oneself or deal with again; (esp.) b to do (a structure) up again, retouch; to revise (literary work, etc.). c (leg.) to re-open (a case); to reconsider (a judgement or settlement, esp. with implication of questioning it. d to study afresh, re-examine.« 49 Known in sixteenth-century England, see the OED references under »retractation«. Thus for instance Thomas More in The confutacyon of Tyndales answere (1532): »Saynt Austyne […] found no faut in that saieng when he was after bishop at the time of his retractacions«; cf. also the definition in Elyot's Dictionary of 1548: »Retractatio, a retractacion; a reuokyng of ones opinion.« Accordingly, the OED defines »retractation« as: »Withdrawal or recantation of an opinion, statement, etc., with admission of error«. 50 A particularly impressive example is provided by George Gascoigne in A Hundreth sundrie Flowres (1573) und The Posies (1575) (cf. »Prefatory Letters« in Gascoigne, A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres). In his essay »Poison and Honey«, Sawday (1996) presents a reading of the text, in particular of Spenser's »retraction«, as a paradigmatic realization of a poetics of equivocation in accordance with the aesthetic precepts of Castiglione, Sidney, and Puttenham. While Sawday's runs in many ways parallel to my own interpretation of FH as transparent dissimulation, it takes a different direction in trying to situate the poem squarely in the »shifting political circumstances« of September 1596 (79). As a consequence, Sawday analyses FH as a self-denying »text which repudiates itself, denies responsibility, evades any charge of adopting a position« (89). I will be arguing that, on the contrary, if on a different textual level, Spenser's poem is emphatically self-affirmative,
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While posing as a reformed prodigal, then, the speaker of this passage is in fact having his cake and eating it too. The hymns on heavenly love and beauty do not replace the earlier two. While pretending to emend them, they follow them in a sequence simultaneously retaining what the speaker claims to have abandoned and undermining its pretended hierarchy. All four poems enter into a interaction in which it is hardly possible to establish priorities. They respond to each other in a manner that welds them into one continual text whose internal rhythms are those of a special type of circularity. On casual inspection this may not appear obvious, as the text seems so strongly to foreground the principles of its symmetrical ordering. The patterns according to which the four hymns are grouped suggest perfect proportion: hymns to love alternate with hymns to beauty, with the hymn to love preceding that to beauty; first and third hymn correspond in the same manner in which the fourth seems to take up the second; earthly themes are followed by heavenly ones, while agape is proposed as a heightening of eros; contrast and similarity appear in perfect balance. At the same time, Classical antiquity appears to be transcended by Christianity, as the celebration of pagan deities (Cupid and Venus) is mirrored and, it seems, replaced by the praise of Christ and the Wisdom of God (»Sapience«). The relationship is one of 2 : 2, with a middle axis separating the two pairs and indicating a dividing line, if not a turning point. We feel invited to compare and to contrast as well as to relate the four poems before and after the caesura. In addition, the difference between first and second pair and the critical censure directed at the attitude which brought forth the first are given explicit emphasis at the beginning of the second half, in the second stanza of the Hymne of Heavenly Love: Many lewd layes (ah woe is me the more) In praise of that mad fit, which fooles call love, I have in th'heat of youth made heretofore, That in light wits did loose affection move. But all those follies now I do reprove, And turned have the tenor of my string, The heavenly prayses of true love to sing. (HHL 8–14)
However, this self-flagellation occurs after we have read (and, presumably, enjoyed) the first two hymns. Also, the attempt at a retrospective cancelling appears at least half-hearted, if not disingenuous. The differentiation between »love«, disqualified as destructive passion (»that mad fit«), and »true love« serves at this point as a reminder of the former which directs our attention back to it. And it might also alert us to the similarity of address to both corresponding _____________ due to its prevalent structures of epistrophé. Far from evading authorial responsibility, Spenser appears to be asserting it by displaying his virtuosity in ringing endless poetic changes on the self-referential pattern of ›beginning again‹.
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deities: »Love, lift me up upon thy golden wings« (HHL, 1) has nothing specifically Christian about it, but could equally be addressed to Cupid. Indeed, Cupid, too, had earlier been described as »Lord of truth and loialtie«, triumphing with »golden plumes« over »loathly sinfull lust« and ascending to heavenly heights (HL, 176–189). It is difficult to perceive a difference between the poetic idioms employed in each case. As the text now proceeds to praise Christ's freelygiven love, it does not do so in a language markedly contrasting to that of the earlier poems. Even there, we had been asked, again and again, to leave behind the bodily and merely material. Now, the appeal to transcend the given does not cease, it does not even intensify to any marked degree. We do not experience a break but at best a transition. At the same time, the qualitative and categorial differences between the various kinds of transcendence the text had claimed to distinguish and rank respectively higher or lower appear levelled out rather than sharpened. This, however, places the attitude of repentance and conversion in an dubious light. Disputed rather than borne out by the text itself, it appears unreliable, indeed as transparent dissimulation. Despite the protestations that the two last hymns would revise the preceding two, repair what had been erroneous and put right what had been morally wrong, this now appears as a pose – as a mere staging of the process of conversion. While the speaker goes through the histrionics of retractation, he effectively validates what he pretends to reject and revise. At the same time, this raises the question why the rhetoric of a break with the past should be realised in this manner. How can we describe Spenser's aesthetics of refiguration in the Fowre Hymnes and what are its functions? A preliminary answer would have to observe that while the relationship between love, beauty, goodness, and truth may not be one of clear-cut opposition or mutual exclusion, it is obviously a highly dynamic one. Each of the four thematic fields seems to be open to the other. Thus the earthly hymns anticipate motifs that might have been reserved for the heavenly ones, and these in turn resume elements and figures of thought seeming to belong to the former. All use similar metaphoric registers – those of the flight and ascent, of fire and light, of fountain and dew. In addition, all are ruled by the same hyperbolical pathos of ›more‹ and ›beyond‹, to an extent which makes it almost impossible to re-assign isolated passages to their respective contexts. The overall strategy of these four songs appears to be a kind of selfreference and self-surpassing: as soon as an ascending and comparative movement has been completed and we seem to have arrived at the imagined perfection, the text resumes its impulse, moving beyond it towards a goal even higher than the summit it seemed to have gained. This is a text that cannot cease to begin. The resulting structure is one of a complicated retrospective-prospective modification transforming each textual element into a lens through which we perceive the others. Transparency thus becomes a central aspect of our reading experience. As each known element causes us to look beyond it, each new element to look back to the known, the text continually returns our attention to itself, reflecting and simultaneously altering itself in a permanent reinterpretation.
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In this circular process, the poems could be said to habituate us to the wisdom which is the (paradoxically unspeakable) subject of the last hymn – a wisdom that can be experienced indirectly and obliquely, as it is presupposed by the textual movement, but that cannot be explicated or thematised directly, as it eludes the grasp of language. Spenser's text thus demonstrates by its forward-backwards dynamic what it cannot express: it acts out what cannot be articulated or circumscribed by any of the Neoplatonic metaphors available. This is also a unifying movement that incessantly strives to conflate and reconcile the temporally earlier (but ontologically secondary) with the ontologically prior (but later in the sequence) and vice versa. Thus, retractation is realised as a re-tracing, which attempts to practise an implication and integration of the earlier in the later, but more real – of love in goodness, beauty in truth, and all of them in an unspeakable wisdom. The point is not that these are, under Neoplatonic auspices, systematically compatible, but rather that the text puts us through a circular motion that resembles the Neoplatonic concept of epistrophé or conversion. While we attempt to understand the philosophical substance of the text, we are, in other words, made to ›act‹ it as we perform, reflexively, the return of the mind to itself and thus into its own ground and origin.51 Were we to present this process, which depends for its effect not least on reiteration and duration, in anything like adequate detail, it would take as long as reading or reciting the text. Two observations should be made, however, in order to characterise the specific profile of this long instruction in how to »read through love« (HHL, 224). Both concern its poetological dimension: the first, the postponement of what the poem purports to be, the second, the metaphysical and literary implications of this self-deferral. First, and in many ways for the reader most excruciating, is the fact that the poem seems in a highly conspicuous manner to fail to come to the point – and to reflect upon this. For in all its four parts, the speaking voice offers to sing a »sacred hymne« (HL, 41) in praise of the respective personification. Naturally, we expect this to be the poem that follows the announcement. In each poem, however, the speaker also strongly and sometimes tortuously denies his own ability to perform the task he has set himself. He elaborately voices his doubts that he will be able to adequately fulfill his promise (HL, stanzas 3, 7, 8); he protests that he will immediately begin his song properly as soon as (and provided that) the goddess gracefully deigns to inspire him (HB, lines 6, 19–21). At the beginning of the next hymn, the promised song is still not sung, and the speaker again requests »one drop of dew reliefe« (HB, 284, cf. 277) that might empower him to do so, this time from the Holy Spirit: _____________ 51 This is different from claiming that these are ›Neoplatonic hymns‹. Spenser's text does not merely reproduce philosophical truth in another, somehow more palatable medium. Rather, it manages to render this truth efficient by actualizing its structures instead of only rehearsing its contents. (For an admirably precise account of the latter, which in some respects anticipates my own, cf. Schabert [1977]).
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Vouchsafe to shed into my barren spright, Some little drop of thy celestiall dew,52 That may my rymes with sweet infuse embrew, And give me words equall unto my thought, To tell the marveiles by thy mercie wrought. (HHL, 45–49)
Still there appears to be a hiatus between the insurpassable insight pressing towards articulation and the linguistic means at the speaker's disposal. While it is the object of his praise which first woke in him the wish to exercise his poetic talent in its honour, it is the same object which now also appears as the actual subject of the poetic activity in that its »mercie« is needed to realise it. Without participation in the divine, the divine cannot be praised. But full, even sufficient, participation is not to be had. While the poet is alive, this has to remain in the future. It is only available as something to be hoped and wished for with »devouring great desire« (HHL, 268). Only with the final granting of the beatific vision, the speaker reminds himself and the reader, will this overwhelming desire be fulfilled: Thenceforth all worlds desire will in thee dye, And all earthes glorie on which men do gaze, Seeme durt and drosse in thy pure sighted eye, Compar'd to that celestiall beauties blaze, Whose glorious beames all fleshly sense doth daze With admiration of their passing light, Blinding the eyes and lumining the spright. Then shall thy ravisht soule inspired bee With heavenly thoughts, farre above humane skil, And thy bright radiant eyes shall plainely see Th'Idee of his pure glorie present still, Before thy face, that all thy spirits shall fill With sweet enragement of celestiall love, Kindled through sight of those faire things above. (HHL 274–287)
But even this anticipation of the Neoplatonic sight-more-than-seeing53 only serves to postpone the ultimate song. Rhetorically, this is no more and no less than another prolepsis: a promise and partial preemption of things to come. However, not even the last hymn will fulfill this promise, because, as has by now become obvious, it cannot, and structurally must not. It is a defining criterion of the ultimate closure that it is yet to be expected. Spenser's text manages to render _____________ 52 For the concept of a ›dripping away‹ (aporroia) as Neoplatonic metaphor for a selfexpenditure which does not cause its well-spring to dwindle, see Dörrie (1965); cf. also Plotinus, Enn. III 4, 25–27. 53 »Farre above reach of feeble earthly sight« (HHL, 5).
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such closure urgently imminent by transforming metaphysical structure into poetic strategy. Preliminariness here becomes poetic reality. This is a mere anticipation of future glory, but as the final hymn refers back to it, it becomes clear that this is all we ever get. Rapt with the rage of mine own ravisht thought, Through contemplation of those goodly sights, And glorious images in heaven wrought, Whose wondrous beauty breathing sweet delights, Do kindle love in high conceipted sprights: I faine to tell the things that I behold, But feele my wits to faile, and tongue to fold. (HHB 1–7)
This is far from representing the »wondrous beauty« it aspires to. The text does little more than reflect on its lack of evidentia, producing another version of the unspeakability topos. All we see is the speaker's poetic fury turning in on itself, as he appears ravished by his »own ravisht thought«, indeed as much »rapt with« it as ›wrapped in‹ it – caught in his own imaginative mania. Instead of the impossible fulfillment, we are offered a poetic analepsis which takes us back to the repeated anticipation of communication with the divine in »sweet enragement« (HHL, 286). This is adumbrated in the mutual remodelling of later and earlier elements, in the cumulation of proleptic-analeptic movements.54 As the text repeats, in endless loopings, that it will become the medium for the selfcommunication of the One, it literally returns to itself, displaying itself as a process always about to begin, as the impossible origin and end of poetry. This double orientation of the poem's recursivity, which has by now undermined any notion of conventional retractation, is captured in the formula »Beginning then below« (HHB, 22). Frustratingly, it occurs briefly before the contemplative kinetics of the text seem to have transported us near to the expected apex. Once again, it suspends the promised arrival; once again, after the renewed ascent, the speaker exhorts himself to silence – »Cease then my tongue« (HHB, 106) – as he approaches the unimaginable »Sapience«. The expectable failure to render this in terms accessible to human imagination and understanding _____________ 54 This kind of complex circularity differs from the comparatively simple figures of emanation and return to be found in the writings of diverse neoplatonic authorities; cf. for instance Ficino in De amore II, ii (»Quo pacto divina pulchritudo amorem parit«): »Quoniam si deus ad se rapit mundum mundusque rapitur, unus quidam continuus astractus est a deo incipiens, transiens in mundum, in deum denique desinens, qui quasi circulo quodam in idem unde manavit iterum remeat. Circulus itaque unus et idem a deo in mundum, a mundo in deum, tribus nominibus nuncupatur. Prout in deo incipit et allicit, pulchritudo; prout in mundum transiens ipsum rapit, amor; prout in auctorem remeans ipsi suum opus coniungit, voluptas.« (Über die Liebe oder Platons Gastmahl [Commentarium in Convivium Platonis de amore], 38). In affirmation, Ficino quotes Dionysius Areopagita: »Amor circulus est bonus a bono in bonum perpetuo revolutus.« (Dionysius Areopagita, De divinis nominibus, 4, 712D).
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finally returns us to where we began: to the project of rejecting the material and sensual, of transcending the earthly towards the heavenly, of leaving behind the lower and lesser things. Except that it does close on the word »rest«, the last stanza repeats the by now familiar looping in an address to the speaker's »hungry soule«: And looke at last up to that soveraine light, From whose pure beams al perfect beauty springs, That kindleth love in every godly spright, Even the love of God, which loathing brings Of this vile world, and these gay seeming things; With whose sweete pleasures being so possest, Thy straying thoughts henceforth for ever rest. (HHB, 295–301)
The mode of a perfected future only insufficiently masks the glance back and the transparent vanity of a retractation which has shown itself to be a pretense, a rhetorical vehicle of transparent dissimulation. It thus succeeds paradoxically – in making accessible to our reading experience the inaccessibility of what it aims at, and in creating a poetic uniformity which mirrors, at least in »fayned shadowes« (HHB, 273), the unity of the One. The idea of absolute transcendence is translated into a permanent recursivity, a return into the same that is interpreted both as necessary exercise and as (equally necessary) failure of imagination and poetic speech. Ultimately, however, the poet's hyperbolical insistence on the unavailability of transcendent divinity in this series of autoreferential disclaimers leaves us with the question whether such an extreme exercise in spiritual and poetic apophasis can still confidently conceive of itself as being fed by the source it repeatedly confesses being unable to reach. As it clamours to be admired for its permanent self-abasement, Spenser's very perfectionism may prove a hindrance to our effort to »read through love«.
Donne: The Translators Translated As we move into the seventeenth century and towards Metaphysical Poetry in the familiar sense, the demonstration, indeed ostentation of poetic competence continues, intensifying in some respects and varying in others. Still, poets seem to seek the challenge of exercising their skill with the most difficult subjects. Again, it is figures of circularity, together with the strategy of translating the impossible into another mode, which play an important role for avantgarde writers like John Donne. However, unlike his predecessor Spenser, at least in his poem »Upon the translation of the Psalmes by Sir Philip Sidney, and the Countesse of Pembroke
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his Sister«55 Donne abandons the negative, apophatic mode in favour of a highly artful version of its opposite, kataphasis. Yet, as the protestation of linguistic impotence in the face of the highest gives way to affirmative praise that turns into self-praise, it also redounds to the poet himself and his own brilliance. In addition, Donne's laudatory fifty-six lines in iambic pentameter are quite openly metapoetical in that they choose as their subject the practice, exemplified by Wyatt and brought to perfection by the Sidneys, of translating David's psalms into English poetry. In the realization of their project, Donne's verses practise what they praise in those (and other) contemporary attempts to supersede the Sternhold-Hopkins psalter. They themselves strive to form part of the ancient circulation of the inspired word they describe, above all by their central conceit of casting the transmission and tradition of the psalmic praise of God into the mould of a circle. Thus, Donne's verses paradoxically aspire to do no less than what they initially disclaim; indeed, they »doe the Circle square« by finding »new expressions« for the exaltation of God who is himself »cornerlesse and infinite« (cf. 2–4), that is to say possesses the absolute perfection signified by a circle. For by praising the Sidneys' psalms, the speaker really praises their originator, namely God's »blessed Spirit« (8), whose inspiration, through David as the first singer and passing through all the others who intoned and translated the psalms after him, is finally returned to heaven. In this conceit, Donne's text not only squares the circle by achieving an innovation previously considered impossible, but performs it in praising the divine through participating in the circulation of its products. This central, circular figure can be analyzed both as an extended prosopopoeia and as a series of parentheses or multiple embeddings. It constitutes a prosopopoeia in that it is really one voice, that of the Holy Spirit, who, in a pentecostal manner, speaks through all the succeeding speakers, singers, and translators of psalms: […] as thy blessed Spirit fell upon These Psalmes first Author in a cloven tongue; (For 'twas a double power by which he sung The highest matter in the noblest forme;) So thou hast cleft that spirit, to performe That worke again, and shed it, here, upon Two, by their bloods, and by their Spirit one; A Brother and a Sister, made by thee The Organ, where thou art the Harmony. (8–16)
_____________ 55 Quotations follow John Donne, The Divine Poems. For the object of Donne's praise see The Sidney Psalter. Following Stringer's (2008) suggestion, the editors of The Sidney Psalter assume that Donne's poem may have been written about 1625 and indeed intended as a preface to a projected edition of the Sidneyan psalms; they print it as a dedicatory poem to their own edition. For an interpretation of Donne's text which links it with notions of circularity in Thomas Traherne, cf. also Frontain (1996).
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From this ventriloquism result continuity and unity – an all-encompassing univocality. Yet at the same time, this is also a process leading to a harmonious polyphony by means of a complex mediation that does not render the individual voices inaudible. On the contrary, it is the excellence of translators like the Sidneys which decisively adds to, indeed makes up the ever-increasing richness of the resulting music, »tuned« again by the Holy Spirit. Here, the metaphor of the organ is taken a step further: […] The Organist is hee Who hath tun'd God and Man, the Organ we: The songs are these, which heavens high holy Muse Whisper'd to David, David to the Jewes: And Davids Successors, in holy zeale, In formes of joy and art do re-reveale To us so sweetly and sincerely too, […] (29–35)
Donne's conceit construes no less than a paradoxical unity-in-multiplicity, a discordia concors which preserves individual musical identities without dispersing itself in heterogeneity. Mutual citation in this potentially eternal transmission creates unbroken continuity, made palpable poetically by a series of syntactic framings. The six sentences that make up this poem are already conspicuously long, but the remarkable number of parentheses by which they are interlaced renders them even more complex. At least six times, the effect of mutual embedding, of voices articulating another (if intimately related) text within the text is mimetically recreated by a kind of textual looping and thus made part of the reading experience.56 Also, we once again encounter a multiple circularity. Individual laudatory interiorities, poetical selves attuned to God and tuned by God, are integrated to form a huge collective enterprise. This is a »choir« reaching back and forward through the ages as well as down and up, connecting earthly psalm-singing with the angelic choir in a relationship of mutual imitation, listening and antiphonal response which leads it towards perfection – »[…] our third Quire, to which the first [i.e. the heavenly] gives eare, | (For, Angels learne by what the Church does here) | This Quire hath all.« (27–29). Hence it is that we can hope to enter the laudatory circulation between heaven and earth by here and now joining in the psalmody brought to such a superior pitch by the Sidneys. For thus we may anticipate the eternal harmony in which, once we are »translated« ourselves, learning and utterance of the ultimate song of praise become one:
_____________ 56 Cf. ll. 1–4, 6, 10–11, 28, 48, 52–3, if we count only the parentheses marked by brackets.
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And, till we come th'Extemporall song to sing, (Learn'd the first hower, that we see the King, Who hath translated these translators) may These their sweet learned labours, all the way Be as our tuning, that, when hence we part We may fall in with them, and sing our part. (51–56)
In more than one sense, then, Donne's text is a liminal one. Amazingly, it stages multiple transcendences in interlocking circles, between heaven, spheres, and earth, angelic and human as well as temporal and eternal worlds, past inspirations and the praise of God in time and worlds to come. More, it manages to transform Neoplatonic circularity from a discursive framework functioning as vehicle for meanings different from itself into poetic autoreferentiality presented in the extended and involved conceit of choirs, organ and multiple harmonies created by many voices. In addition, it elegantly mediates between private and common prayer, public and individual religious discourse, single and communal voices, traditional and innovative, spontaneous and received poetry.57 As he squares the circle of inventing yet another way of praising God, then, Donne alerts us to his own poetic sophistication while articulating aspects of his confessional politics.58 _____________ 57 This intermingling, as Targoff has shown, forms part of the poetological programme of Donne's divine poetry; cf. Targoff (2001), 85–88. Targoff, however, does not think that Donne ever realised his project: »For Donne, the project of writing devotional verse that reflects a simultaneously indivdidual and collective voice never seems to have materialized.« (92) Nonetheless, as I hope to have shown in my reading of the above poem, it can be understood as a precursor to just that kind of poetry, albeit not in a liturgical context. Cf. Targoff (2001), 87: »When the two central principles that governed the texts of the Book of Common Prayer – the intertwining of the singular I and the collective we, and the absolute preference for formalised over spontaneous voice – are conjoined in the early 1600s with a belief in the liturgical power of eloquent verse, the possibility for a new form of poetry is released into the world.« Within the framework of this »new form of poetry«, it is true, Donne's voice remains intensely individual – and conscious of his poetic singularity. 58 Targoff (2001) has also drawn attention to Donne's criticism of the Puritan preference for informal, spontaneous prayer: »In a 1625 sermon preached at St. Paul's Cross, Donne challenges the familiar Puritan notion that personal prayer can be generated through only original and extempore worship. […] Praying spontaneously, Donne contends, not only severs the worshippers' ties to the church, but jeopardises their chances for salvation: But if I come to pray or to preach without this kind of Idea, if I come to extemporal prayer, and extemporal preaching, I shall come to an extemporal faith, and extemporal religion; and then I must look for an extemporal Heaven, a Heaven to be made for me; for to that Heaven which belongs to the Catholic Church, I shall never come, except I go by the way of the Catholic Church, by former ideas, former examples, former patterns. […] far from representing, as Puritans maintained, the highest expression of the spirit, extempore prayer becomes a form of devotional sloth. For Donne, there ought to be no distinction between the petitions of the self and those of the church […].« (88) The idea of »Extemporall song« in his poem, however, seems to adumbrate, indeed to celebrate, just such a fusion between private and communal prayer, albeit only under the special conditions of life after death.
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But, at the same time, his project is ingeniously realised in the overlapping circles which, while structuring the praise of his eminent predecessors, mirror the poet's own efforts »in sense translative«.59 If Spenser's world in Fowre Hymnes is one without beginning, Marvell's will come to be seen as one without end. If Sidney's sonnets map their speaker's selfreferential melancholy love and the frustrations of Petrarchist ambition, Marvell's poem may appear as an analysis of self-transcendent desire. If Wyatt's psalmist felt surprised with joy, Marvell's text may surprise and perhaps irritate us by the ultimate refusal of an assurance of conversion and the suspension of anticipated joy. As Neoplatonic figurations of transcendence, they mark the scope of a psycho-logical poetics of return.
_____________ 59 George Puttenham uses this term in the course of his explanation of allegory, which occurs »when we do speak in sense translative, and wrested from the own signification, nevertheless applied to another not altogether contrary but having much convenience with it, as before we said of the metaphor«. (The Arte of English Poesie, The Third Book, ch. XVIII, in: Vickers [1999], 247.)
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2.2 Recursivity and Perfection: Marvell's »On a Drop of Dew«60 Images of the Soul »On a Drop of Dew« is not singular among Andrew Marvell's poems in that it presents an image of the soul, but it surely does present the most openly and, at least at a first glance, affirmatively Neoplatonic one. That makes it easy to dismiss the poem as a mere illustration of a given philosophical doctrine, and any reading of it in the context of a study of Neoplatonic configurations as a basically redundant exercise in marshalling positive evidence. But this would not only disregard the very specific cast the text gives to the doctrine, such a dismissal would also overlook the critical interrogation to which the doctrine appears submitted. For, contrary to first impressions, the Neoplatonic pattern sustains an insidious problematising, indeed a kind of alteration, due to its transformative combination with ultimately discordant elements. In itself, this discord may seem surprising as »On a Drop of Dew« is also, and obviously, a poem on the topic of perfection and perfectibility. In fact it offers a structural imitation of its theme by means of an overall circularity – and does not perfection imply harmony and concord? As in the other texts we have been considering in this chapter, Marvell's poem uses the idea of the circle as a medium for thinking about the life of the soul. Possibly even more explicitly than the previous examples, it proposes the figure of cyclical return as the preeminent shape of spiritual perfection. A reading of this poem therefore seems to offer itself as a way of literally rounding off our sketch of an Early Modern, Neoplatonic poetics of return. Despite the fundamentally affirmative gesture it appears to make, however, Marvell's poem will finally be seen to opt for an apophatic mode, but of a kind different from (and perhaps superior to) Spenser's ascent without beginning or end in Fowre Hymnes. Its negative theology and the enigma it poses is successfully counterbalanced by its aesthetics of excess. It will leave the reader puzzled, but not perplexed, oddly satisfied, yet still hungry for an answer the text skillfully withholds. In analysing the ›life‹ of a drop of dew, Marvell's short text retells the complete psycho-logical narrative as envisaged by Neoplatonic thinkers like Plotinus, beginning with the soul's fall into the material world and ending with its return to the One. The poem presents the interlinked processes of descent and renewed ascent as recovery of a lost perfection, and appears to do so in a manner which is itself perfect, not least by contemporary standards. For, in its final lines, it seems to point beyond the philosophical model by adding a theological dimension which the former might be said to lack. Still, it is precisely the _____________ 60 Parts of this argument will be published in a German version in: V. O. Lobsien/C. Olk (2010).
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perspective of perfection which will enable us to see how these two dimensions are placed in a relationship of uneasy competition. Instead of amounting to a mutual reinforcement, their juxtaposition may finally be seen to result in a mutual questioning. As always, Marvell's apparent simplicity leads to unforeseen complications – in this case to an unexpected questioning of the notion of circular perfection. In fact, as innocuous as the contemplation of a mere drop of dew may seem, it also exposes ways of functionalising this topic which carry critical implications for late seventeenth-century denominational politics. Thus, the poem's Neoplatonism will turn out to be more than a mere thematic ingredient, or a convenient reservoir for its central metaphors. I hope to show how it provides the poetic strategy that energises and in the end pushes both philosophical and religious systems beyond their limits. I shall preface my close reading of the text with a brief recapitulation of the basic features of Plotinus' doctrine of the soul on its way to perfection, to be followed by an analysis of the poetic structure of recursivity in Marvell's poem. The section closes with an attempt to understand the text as a rather unusual contribution to the philosophical as well as religious debates which raged around the challenge of spiritual perfection in Marvell's day.
Neoplatonic Perfection It is above all in Ennead V 1, »On the Three Primary Hypostases«,61 that Plotinus explains the fundamental features of the life of the soul (psyché) in its62 relationship to the lower, material world, as well as to the higher realms of being. He begins by asking why it is that the souls have forgotten their origin and entered the world of becoming.63 It is this forgetfulness of origin which leads to the separation and alienation of the soul and to its ›falling‹ away from the One through a kind of presumption or »audacity« (tolma).64 From the first, this is also seen as an instance of self-forgetfulness, born from the soul's desire to belong to itself and to admire the things of the material world while ignoring its own true nature. Thus, the soul not only loses contact with God, but also immediate knowledge of itself and its real dignity. It is these which it has to regain in an act of simultaneous self-reflexion and remembrance of its origin. At the same time, it comes to know itself in its capacity of re-cognition. It is this reflexivity, this _____________ 61 Quoted, if not otherwise indicated, according to the translation by A. H. Armstrong in: Plotinus, vol. 5: Enneads V. 1-9 (with Ennead reference; volume, and page number where relevant). 62 In the my outline of Plotinus' argument I shall follow Armstrong in referring to the soul as »it«. 63 In Armstrong's translation: »What is it, then, which has made the souls forget their father, God, and be ignorant of themselves and him, even though they are parts which come from his higher world and altogether belong to it?« (Enn. V 1, 1; Plotinus, vol. 5, 11). 64 Ibid.
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ability to turn around and investigate itself, which enables the soul to realise its own principle as something akin to, indeed as identical with itself.65 The ascent of the soul from the realm of mere becoming and perishing, from the material and corporeal, which encompasses it like a liquid medium, always moving and capable to overwhelm and drown those who trust themselves to it,66 begins as soon as it turns around and looks towards its »upper neighbour«,67 Intellect (nous). This is also a way of activating its true cognitive power, which is in turn derived from Intellect.68 With this ›conversion‹, the process of perfection commences. Now the soul finds itself in a position which enables it to return more and more to its original state of unity with the One, its true goal: »Since then its existence derives from Intellect soul is intellectual, […] and its perfection [teleiosis] comes from Intellect, like a father who brings to maturity a son whom he begat imperfect in comparison with himself.«69 Intellect is perfect, like everything that is with it;70 _____________ 65 It is in fact this self-investigation which is also the subject of Plotinus' treatise, which thus turns out to be also an exercise in reflexivity: »For that which investigates is the soul, and it should know what it is as an investigating soul, so that it may learn first about itself, whether it has the power to investigate things of this kind, and if it has an eye of the right kind to see them, and if the investigation is suitable for it. For if the objects are alien, what is the point? But if they are akin, the investigation is suitable and discovery is possible.« (ibid.; 13, 15). 66 With a Platonic, possibly also Homeric, metaphor, Plotinus refers to this as »the body's raging sea« (Enn. V 1, 2; Plotinus, vol. 5, 15). 67 Enn. V 1, 3 (Plotinus, vol. 5, 19). 68 For a part of soul remained above (as Plotinus points out in Enn. VI 2, 1) and thereby preserved something of the higher, transcendent wholeness. In Enn. I 1, 8 this complicated relationship is described in an interpretation of passages from Plato's Timaeus and with a suggestive metaphor: »But how do we possess God? He rides mounted on the nature of Intellect and true reality – that is how we possess him; ›we‹ are third in order counting from God, being made, Plato says, ›from the undivided‹, that which is above, ›and from that which is divided in bodies‹; we must consider this part of soul as being divided in bodies […] because it is pictured as being present to bodies since it shines into them and makes living creatures, not of itself and body, but abiding itself and giving images of itself, like a face seen in many mirrors.« (Plotinus, vol. 1: Porphyry on the Life of Plotinus and the Order of His Books. Enneads I. 1–9, 111, 113). 69 Enn. V 1, 3. The passage continues with an even stronger emphasis on the mutual connection of soul with Intellect, with the soul recognising Intellect as something intimately belonging to it: »Soul's establishment in reality, then, comes from Intellect and its thought becomes actual in its seeing of Intellect. For when it looks into Intellect, it has within it and as its own what it thinks in its active actuality.« (Plotinus, vol. 5, 21). 70 »For why should it seek to change when all is well with it? […] But it does not even seek to increase, since it is most perfect. Therefore all things in it are perfect, that it may be altogether perfect, having nothing which is not so, having nothing in itself which does not think; but it thinks not by seeking but by having.« (Enn. V 1, 4; Plotinus, vol. 5, 23). This, then, seems to be the predicate most apt for the Intellect: perfect cognition, which does not consist in seeking, but in having, at rest in its identity with itself; while the One is without predicates altogether.
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hence perfection, for the soul, consists in perfecting its return to Intellect, that is to say, in recovering its native dignity through perfect, ›epistrophic‹ recursivity. Still, at the same time, Intellect is multiple; it brings forth the intelligible realities by thinking them and giving them existence, ›realising‹ them by means of this intellection (»seeing sight«).71 Because of its perfection, it also brings forth Soul.72 It is capable of doing this, because it is itself derived from the One, who is prior to multiplicity and thanks to whose abundant creativity it possesses its own productive power. Thus, Intellect is itself both generated and generating. Again, the figure of a dynamic and transformative circularity emerges, is shaped, stimulated, and held in motion by reflection as a conscious bending back to the origin from which it springs and that animates it. It is this precursive-recursive circularity which structures the relationship between Soul, Intellect, and the One. The successors of Plotinus, above all Proclus, would describe this relationship in the triadic terminology of moné (remaining), próodos (progress, proceeding forth) and epistrophé (return).73 Plotinus himself offers an explanatory mythological allegory, with the One corresponding to Uranos, the Intellect to Kronos, and the soul to Zeus. He thereby stresses not only the aspects of relatedness, derivation, and procreativity within the triad, but also, once more, circularity and reflexivity. For Kronos/Intellect swallows up all the beings and realities and all the beauty of forms he/it has created, and only »in satiety«, in a state of perfect fullness, begets Zeus, that is to say releases and brings forth the soul.74 Within this perfect circularity, self-reflexivity and the turn towards the higher hypostasis become barely distinguishable.75 In Plotinus' thinking, they appear as closely interlinked as the only seemingly opposite motions of descent and ascent, process and return. For both depend on the One giving itself, unforced and of its own accord, and thus setting the whole dynamic in motion. Self-communication _____________ 71 Cf. Enn. V 1, 5; also Enn. I 1, 8. 72 »[…] for Intellect generates soul, since it is perfect Intellect. For since it was perfect it had to generate, and not be without offspring when it was so great a power.« (Enn. V 1, 7; Plotinus, vol. 5, 39). 73 For Proclus, see Beierwaltes (1979); also Radke (2006). 74 Cf. Enn. V 1, 7. 75 At this central point in the argument, there appears to be a formidable crux for the translator with equally crucial systematic implications. Controversy has concentrated on lines V 1, 6, 17-19 (cf. also Tornau's remarks in his edition of Plotinus, Ausgewählte Schriften, 351–2). Plotinus' wording seems to leave open the question if anything comes into being because the One turns towards itself in an autoreflexive act, or if it comes into being as it turns towards the One. (Armstrong disambiguates the passage in favour of the One's self-reflexivity: »[…] the One remains continually turned towards itself.« Plotinus, vol. 5, 31) In any case, however, the point of these lines appears to be the activity of ›turning‹ or ›looking towards‹ – no matter who does the looking –, and its direction towards another which ultimately turns out to be the same, identical with the source of the activity. While the systematic irritation remains, the ambiguity might appear less troubling if considered as a literary device, for then it could be read as not only stating but demonstrating, or ›acting out‹, the simultaneity of both movements.
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of the highest is the defining characteristic of perfection – the more perfect, the more creative it is: »And all things when they come to perfection produce; the One is always perfect and therefore produces everlastingly […]«.76 In this manner, it can also be explained how and why the One brings into being the many: it does so, as it were, naturally, communicating itself spontaneously and effortlessly and neither exhausting nor diminishing itself in the process. Multiplicity thus appears like a »radiation« from the One, »like the bright light of the sun which, so to speak, runs round it, springing from it continually while it remains unchanged«.77 Again, a metaphor of circularity informs the idea of the One exteriorising itself.78 Like light, fire, snow, or perfume, the One communicates itself, without growing less in the process. It generates an image of itself outside itself, in a medium that, despite its otherness, still bears some resemblance to it.79 This cannot be a one-way process, for whatever comes into being in this way will wish to recover the fullness from which it came. It finds itself in an ontologically asymmetrical, but erotically reciprocal relationship, in which »all things aspire to contemplation«.80 Thus both Intellect and soul long to return to the higher from which they derive their being and from which they depend, but which does not depend on them. ›Looking to‹ it, they recognise themselves in this loving aspiration, _____________ 76 Enn. V 1, 6; in his continuation of this line of thought, Plotinus reproduces the recursivity he describes: »What then must we say about the most perfect? Nothing can come from it except that which is next greatest after it. Intellect is next to it in greatness and second to it: for Intellect sees it and needs it alone; but it has no need of Intellect […] Soul is an expression and a kind of activity of Intellect, just as Intellect is of the One. But soul's expression is obscure […] and for this reason it has to look to Intellect; but Intellect in the same way has to look to that god, in order to be Intellect.« (Plotinus, vol. 5, 33). – The idea of a self-communication of the divine as a kind of filiation also forms the basis of the trinitary speculation of Nicolaus of Cusa. Also, in his interpretation of the Epistle of James 1.17, De dato patris luminum, it is one of the central arguments (particularly in chapters 1 and 2) that the best and highest communicates itself to all created beings and makes itself manifest in them so that they appear ›illuminated‹ by it. In the seventeenth century, De dato patris luminum was one of the very few writings by Nicolaus of Cusa available in English translation; for its possible relevance to »On a Drop of Dew« see below. 77 Enn. V 1, 6 (Plotinus, vol. 5, 31). 78 »All things which exist, as long as they remain in being, necessarily produce from their own substances, in dependence on their present power, a surrounding reality directed to what is outside them, a kind of image of the archetypes from which it was produced: fire produces the heat which comes from it; snow does not only keep its cold inside itself.« (ibid.). 79 In this sense, it ›gives what it does not have‹; cf. Enn. VI 7, 17: »But how can these be in Intellect, and be Intellect, when they are not there in what fills it, nor, again, in it itself which is filled? For when it was not yet filled, it did not have them. Now, there is no necessity for anyone to have what he gives, but in this kind of situation one must consider that the giver is greater, and that what is given is less than the giver; for that is how coming to be is among the real beings.« (Plotinus, vol. 7: Enneads VI. 6–9, 141). 80 Enn. III 8, 1; »contemplation« is Armstrong's rendering of theoria (Plotinus, vol. 3: Enneads III. 1–9, 361).
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»seeing« themselves and their respective goal.81 This holds the soul in the orbit of Intellect as its »trace«, at the same time illuminating and illuminated: »[…] it is this which moves round Intellect and is light and trace of Intellect and dependent on it, united to it on one side and so filled with it and enjoying it and sharing in it and thinking, but, on the other side, in touch with the things which came after it […]«.82 In its epistrophic movement,83 soul becomes more and more what it already is. It participates in the infinite, senses its connection with the most perfect, and apprehends, as it reflects on this continuity, the reality of this relatedness which moves it, keeps it in being, and motivates its return. The more it is, in this nonspatial sense, ›beside‹ itself, the more it comes to itself, and vice versa. It is in this that its divinity and perfection consist.84 Of course the idea of perfection is not exclusive to Neoplatonic thinkers. The absolute metaphors of circle and sphere or globe can be found in Presocratic thought,85 long before Plato praises the globe as »the most perfect and the most like itself of all figures«86. Still, Platonists obviously have a particular and characteristic preference for circular figures of thought and metaphors of the spherical.87 And they tend to connect these with perfection in all respects – epistemologically, theologically, psychologically, and, not surprisingly, cosmologically. Early Modern Neoplatonism gives special emphasis to the circular or
_____________ 81 82 83 84
Cf. Enn. V 1, 6–7. (Plotinus, vol. 5, 33, 35). Enn. V 1, 7 (ibid., 39). Plotinus calls it, in an allusion to Phaedrus 245c 5, »ever-moving« (cf. Enn. V 1, 12). »Our soul then also is a divine thing and of a nature different [from the things of sense], like the universal nature of soul; and the human soul is perfect when it has intellect; […]« (Enn. V 1, 10; Plotinus, vol. 5, 47). Plotinus links this perfection with an emancipation, indeed »alienation« from the body (ibid.); however, in the final passage of his treatise, he takes care to present this distancing of the sensual not as something motivated by contempt – for after all, the sensual (aisthesis; our »perceptive power«) belongs to us – but rather as an ascetic letting go in favour of a turning inwards: »[…] we must let perceptible sounds go […] and keep the soul's power of apprehension pure and ready to hear the voices from on high.« (Enn. V 1, 12; Plotinus, vol. 5, 53). 85 And Plotinus is clearly aware of this as he mentions Parmenides and his idea of being as »the mass of a sphere« in Enn. V 1, 8. For circle and sphere as absolute metaphors cf. also Blumenberg (1969). For a history of the idea of perfection in connection with concepts of the spherical see also Hoffmann (2001) and the seminal study by Mahnke (1966). 86 Timaeus 33b. 87 Numerous examples from the writings of Proclus and others will be found in chapter II of Beierwaltes (1979), (such as, for instance, Proclus' image of the soul as circle with intellect at its centre and thinking »dancing round« [perichoreuein] intellect; qu. 210). The centrality of the concept of perichoresis for the most systematic presentation of Neoplatonic natural philosophy in seventeenth-century England, Ralph Cudworth's True Intellectual System of the Universe, will be developed in the forthcoming study by Bergemann (2010).
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spherical as paradigmatic structure of perfection.88 As I suggested above, this may be due to (and, conversely, may have contributed to) the emergence of ways of thinking about the soul which take reflexivity to be its defining characteristic and even consider the soul's return into its own ground as foundational for human consciousness. Neoplatonic patterns of thought seem to hold a particular affinity to this. If, then, the teleological dimension of perfection consists in a wished-for convergence of what is and what ought to be (teleiosis), the circle joining beginning and end and thus, in endless and serene affirmation of itself, persisting in the achievement of this concord, appears to offer an unsurpassably simple way of thinking about perfect selfhood. And if thinking about the highest possible perfection, which consists in the soul's union with its origin by way of a reflexive merging with intellect, seems to require imagination, a poetics of return, on the other hand, appears to prefer Neoplatonic elements and modes of thinking when faced with the challenge of figuring perfection.
The Epistrophé of a Drop of Dew In Marvell's poem »On a Drop of Dew«,89 the Neoplatonic ingredients seem to be, at first, almost too self-evident. Its central conceit presents, in the extended metaphor of a drop of dew fallen from the sky and longing to evaporate again, the Neoplatonic narrative of the soul after its ›fall‹ from its true home into a material world while retaining the memory of its origin and wishing to return to it. Hardly troubled by its appended biblical conclusion, which only perfunctorily appears to relativise its philosophical orthodoxy, the poem remains focussed on the topic of epistrophé imagined as the anticipated return of the soul to the state of perfection lost when it issued from it. Philosophy and poetic strategy, matter and manner appear to be in complete harmony, with Neoplatonic circularity perfectly transforming itself into poetic autoreferentiality and the language of the soul finally converted to its aesthetic substance. The poem flaunts its own simplicity, prosodically – in the variations it plays, particulary in its second half, on the iambic tetrameter so characteristic of Marvell's poetry – as well as metaphorically, with the major emphasis placed on just one conceit. In that, it resembles Donne's praise of the Sidneyan translation of the psalms. But in contrast to the complex brilliance of Donne's choirs, with organ and multiple harmonies created by many voices, the metaphor of the drop of dew appears as simple as can be. And, again unlike the stress on the auditory in _____________ 88 Thus, for instance, they never seem to tire of repeating the hermeticist commonplace of God as »a spiritual circle whose center is everywhere, whose circumference nowhere« (»circulus spiritalis, cuius centrum est ubique circumferentia nusquam«; Ficino, Platonic Theology. Book XVIII, 3, Vol. 6, 100-101). 89 The Poems of Andrew Marvell, 39-42. All quotations according to this edition; line numbers are given in brackets in the text.
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Donne's circular music, it seems to be based on an imagination primarily visual. Both its first words (»See how […]«) and its last (»th'Almighty Sun«) emphasise vision and visibility. But however much this might appear suitable to a subject eminently Neoplatonic, the insight aimed at and the ›evidence‹ offered are finally cognitive and intuitive rather than visual or ekphrastic. Marvell's meditation unfolds its subject by way of a treble circularity. Three circles are presented in sequence, the first two focussing on subsidiary and principal subjects90 of the central metaphor, the drop of dew (1–18) and the human soul (19–36) respectively, and the third introducing yet another metaphor which pretends to supersede, comprehend, or at least somehow comment on the first, that of the manna sent to the Israelites in the desert, congealing and then melting in the sun (37–40). If the first two circles intricately reflect each other and, as they represent each other in different media, appear chiastically linked, the third, shorter and less detailed cycle seems to open the door towards yet another, typological hermeneutic.91 Almost like an afterthought, the correspondence of drop and soul is given a biblical underpinning and laid open to a theological reading. If the world of the dewdrop reflects that of the soul, which in turn also represents that of the drop, both now seem to be suspended and mirrored once more in the medium of biblical analogies, in which God's sending of the manna prefigures Christ's institution of the Eucharist.92 Philosophical and biblical imagery are juxtaposed, and, since the text claims that they do refer to each other,93 we are left with the difficult question of how to describe their relationship and where to look for the analogies. As the text links worlds which are not obviously related, we are left with troubling sets of free-floating connotations not easily reconciled. If we felt tempted, especially in view of the poem's final lines, to think of its simplicity as plainness, this will – with or without religious connotations – turn out as deceptive. Marvell's style, here as elsewhere, brilliantly dissembles the metaphysical aporias his text tackles. Equally remarkable is the way Marvell's poetry connects metaphysical with scientific discourses. The drop of dew does not reveal itself immediately as a metaphor for the human soul. First of all, it appears as a meteorological, biological and physical phenomenon described with great acuteness and intense attention to its appearance. Thus, we are made to appreciate its perfect globular _____________ 90 To adopt Max Black's nomenclature; cf. Black (1962). It seems slightly more apt in this context than I. A. Richards' »tenor« and »vehicle«, although both terminologies suggest a hierarchy between the metaphor's components, and it is precisely this which is subverted by Marvell's text. 91 For typology as a basic feature of early modern habits of textual perception see also Korshin (1982). 92 The text reminds us of this correspondence in an oddly offhand manner in its last line by means of the ancient pun which makes audible the Son in »th'Almighty Sun« (40). 93 »Such did the manna's sacred dew distil;« (37; my emphases). In addition, the Exodus scenery is anticipated three lines earlier: on the night the Israelites leave the Egyptians they are also required to be »girt and ready« (34).
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shape and the effect of its surface tension; we understand that its unquiet movement is due to the uneven cell structure of the rose petal which encloses air in its surface pockets and causes the globe of water to roll to and fro, touching its base only at a point, or barely at all; we learn that the drop of moisture collects and reflects the light due to its spherical form; also, that it mirrors the surrounding world, especially the bright sky above it, although it is itself transparent. We realise that it finally evaporates as it literally seems to expire and breathe its last, when the heat of the sun causes its aggregate state to change and it becomes part again of the general humidity of the air. These processes of condensation, formation and evaporation are looked at closely, as if through a microscope, and analyzed with a precision which seems to imitate that of an empiricist observer. As the phenomenon is rendered with quasi-scientific care, however, it also receives an interpretation in neoplatonic terms, with equal exactitude: See how the orient dew Shed from the bosom of the morn Into the blowing roses, Yet careless of its mansion new; For the clear region where 'twas born Round in itself incloses: And in its little globe's extent, Frames as it can its native element. How it the purple flower does slight, Scarce touching where it lies, But gazing back upon the skies, Shines with a mournful light; Like its own tear, Because so long divided from the sphere. Restless it rolls and unsecure, Trembling lest it grow impure: Till the warm sun pity its pain, And to the skies exhale it back again.
5
10
15
As we watch the drop of dew, circular in itself (a »little globe« [7]), to issue from another »sphere« (14) and to reflect and »frame« (8), indeed »inclose[]« (6), the world of its birth (»its native element« [8]), remembering its origin, saddened by its loss, frightened at the contamination it finds itself threatened with, and longing to return to where it came from, the anthropomorphism – or perhaps rather: psychomorphism – of this description leaves no doubt that the beautiful phenomenon is also meant to adumbrate the soul painfully exiled from its divine origin, although in thought and imagination already on its way »back again« (18). All physical aspects begin to refer per analogiam to metaphysical ones. We are coming to know something about the soul by regarding it as a drop of dew. Paraphrased thus, the poem up to this point seems to do little more than repeat a Neoplatonic commonplace. But as Marvell proceeds to unfold the »pure and
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circling thoughts« (25) which constitute the soul's consciousness of itself, this highly topical way of thinking about the soul in circular terms assumes a new quality: now the metaphorical relationship is inverted. Once we have come to regard the drop of dew as soul, the explication – which is in a sense unnecessary, if we have understood and appreciated the emblematic pictura of emanation and longed-for return – now makes us perceive the soul as a drop of dew: So the soul, that drop, that ray Of the clear fountain of eternal day, Could it within the human flower be seen, Rememb'ring still its former height, Shuns the swart leaves and blossoms green; And, recollecting its own light, Does, in its pure and circling thoughts, express The greater Heaven in a heaven less. In how coy a figure wound, Every way it turns away: So the world excluding round, Yet receiving in the day. Dark beneath, but bright above: Here disdaining, there in love. How loose and easy hence to go: How girt and ready to ascend. Moving but on a point below, It all about does upward bend.
20
25
30
35
A remarkable doubling has taken place, in which the systems of implications brought into interaction by this elaborate conceit have changed places. It is no longer possible to distinguish between vehicle and tenor, subsidiary and principal subject, signifier and signified. If the drop of dew is an ›image‹ of the soul, the soul becomes a descriptive model for the drop of dew. The soul appears ›like‹ a drop of dew – however, so much so, in this reinterpretation, that every drop of dew also comes to resemble a soul. It – the drop-soul or soul-drop – appears animated, as it participates in the overarching circular movement of descent and ascent, inspiration and exhalation. The repetition of the first circle, the exploration of the dewdrop's interiority, literally re-presents and thereby replicates the former in a process of poetical mirroring. In a manner almost, but not quite, tautological, the poem folds back on itself. Now both circles, in the manner in which they are interlinked, carry implications for the concepts of perfection underlying this poem. Thus, the falling of the »orient dew« is clearly a woeful descent.94 It falls like tears (»shed«) from a _____________ 94 Although it appears thanks to its Latin name, ros, ›nominalistically‹ related to the blowing roses, into which it falls. Under the title »Ros« Marvell wrote a Latin poem on the same subject matter as »On a Drop of Dew«. Neither text can be dated with certainty, but the
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region of light, leaving a state of intimacy (»from the bosom of the morn«). This is a kind of birth; and, although the new home may appear stately (»mansion«) and, at least in its colour, displays royal attributes, it is primarily associated with loss and a sense of exile, even alienation. At the same time, the dewdrop is to some extent compensated for its fall by a remembrance of its origin: its roundness and perfect spherical shape quite literally enclose its »native element«. A Neoplatonic paradox emerges: a small, but perfect globe appears capable of mirroring a larger, possibly infinite sphere. While it is rounded and closed on all sides, it is also completely transparent; self-referring in shape, it points to something different, indeed understands itself as a medium for another. Its immanence points towards its transcendence, both as origin and end. If its exemplary sphericality still appears somehow imperfect, this is due to its referential quality: while it represents what it strives to be, even participates in it, it is not yet wholly identical with it. Perfection thus begins to appear as anticipation of a transformation still to be awaited. And it is at this point that the metaphorical transfer becomes possible, indeed unavoidable: To think about the drop of dew in this manner is to think about the human soul emanating, literally dripping away or flowing off from the One,95 to which it still remains connected through its reflexive faculty. Like the drop, the soul is an individual that yet participates in the greater, heavenly perfection; separated and enclosed in its body, its true being is infinite. As a microcosmical image of something greater, the soul-drop possesses a gift for transcendence. This makes its state fluid and changeable, prone to transformation. Its own beauty and the beauty it remembers surpass the glories of the material world, in which it finds itself but whose beauty is a mere reflection and trace of the ideal.96 To perfect this permeability and with it the soul's relatedness to the higher world, however, is an innate possibility the soul has yet to realise. _____________ bilingual realisation of the theme may perhaps also be taken to indicate that this brief and deceptively simple text is anything but trivial. 95 Marvell's drop appears to illustrate in a particularly apt manner the metaphor of aporroia (flowing or running off, as of a liquid) by which Neoplatonic thinkers try to signify the way in which the higher hypostases communicate themselves to the lower without diminishing in the process. (Cf. e.g. the passage in Plotinus, Enn. III 4, 3, 25–27: »[…] we remain with all the rest of our intelligible part above, but by its ultimate fringe we are tied to the world below, giving a kind of outflow from it to what is below, or rather an activity, by which that intelligible part is not itself lessened« [my emphasis, V. O. L.]; also Enn. III 2, 2, 18; Plotinus, vol. 3, 48–49, 150–151. For a history of the term see Dörrie [1965].) 96 For Plotinus, the beautiful is an experience that eludes the conceptual grasp (cf. Enn. I 6). It is a trace of something else, like a bright reflection which glitters and runs along the surface of things, a »kind of grace« (charis) playing upon things or faces (cf. Enn. VI 7, 22). In it, something communicates itself which exceeds the bodily and whose irresistible attractiveness is beheld with a kind of painful surprise and amazement, perceived by virtue of a non-corporeal, »inner sight« (cf. Enn. I 6, 9). Its erotic fascination points beyond the graceful surface on which it plays, for beauty is »in the intelligible world« (Enn. I 6, 9, 44– 45).
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As the poem continues in this anthropo-, or psychomorphosing vein, it also explicates the aesthetic implications of the transformative return desired by the drop of dew. As the dewdrop despises the rose, its perfect sphericality, which only at one point affords contact with the petal, is now interpreted as generalised contempt for the material world and as rejection of erotic temptation. The drop appears chaste, virginal, shy, as it is faced with the opulence of the roses; worried about its purity. Yet it seems not wholly disinclined to flirt a little with the beauty which offers itself so abundantly.97 This self-contained globe of transparent water does not want to mate, indeed it cannot, as the attractions that display themselves are so unlike itself. While its gender remains indeterminate throughout, at times androgynous, still its movements appear erotically charged.98 At the same time, its sadness, too, acquires a circular, self-reflexive, almost tautological structure. As the drop »Shines with a mournful light; | Like its own tear« (11–12), the analogy between it and a tear, initially only suggested by its movement of flowing off from somewhere on high, now grows into more than an equation. It becomes the perfect, translucent sign of its own sorrow and its unappeased nostalgia for the heavenly sphere. It is because the drop seems to be aware of this, because it knows about its loss and persists in reminding itself of it, that its separation from its origin appears also genuinely melancholic. While it grieves, it also affirms itself in the very shape that permits it both to grieve and to signify its grief. The drop also knows that its light is only a secondary, derivatory luminosity, and it realises that its very self-reflexivity represents and re-performs, again and _____________ 97 Cf. also l. 27: »In how coy a figure wound« – said of the soul at this point, retrospectively, this also applies to the drop of dew. 98 Perhaps typical for the psycho-sexual patterns which seem to structure major dimensions of Marvell's poetry, the drop of dew offers yet another image of non-progenitive creativity and indeterminate gender. While it appears female in its »coyness«, the »purple roses«, too, carry suggestions of female seductiveness, which the drop takes pains to resist. The modes of Neoplatonic thought and the corresponding patterns of self-perfection through return here seem to offer a suggestive medium for playing through the possibilities of an option for a non-procreative love, which at the same time promises a heightening and continuation of the self. The fact that this model appears to be also connected with an act of dissolution and dispersal in the ultimate ›exhalation‹ of the soul, however, leaves some uneasiness at the very apex of its perfection – and it may have been this which prompted the addition of the poem's final lines (although it will be seen that they are far from providing the expected closural force). – For a study of the sexual profile underlying Marvell's poetry, which explores the political implications as well as the literary consequences of the poet's liminal sexuality, see also Hirst/Zwicker (1999). The authors argue that it is Marvell's homosexuality in combination with his professional and political dependency which is responsible for his recurring literary fantasies of »transmigration, of refuge and shelter« (633) and his troubling »anxieties of attachment« (640), and which leads in his writings not only to a consistent deconstruction of the frame of patriarchy and heterosexuality but also, in the last resort, to a radical »subversion, of progenitiveness and descent as well as of heterosexual authority« (632). Hirst and Zwicker make no reference to »On a Drop of Dew«.
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again, its exclusion from the reality it yearns for. Thus, despite its globular perfections and to some extent because of them, the drop alias the soul finds itself in a situation of self-perpetuating melancholy sadness as well as unrest and fear of further contamination. Its only hope of salvation consists, paradoxically, in evaporation, i.e. in a loss of its perfect shape (at least its dispersal and further miniaturisation), should the sun »exhale it back again« (18) and thus enable it to return, transformed and in a different aggregate state, to the divine light from which it proceeded. Here, at the end of the first circle, with its primary orientation towards the visible phenomenon, the mutual relativisation of physical and metaphysical worlds occupying the poem is already obvious – to an extent that renders any attempt at a clear distinction between (phenomenal) tenor and (signified) vehicle hopeless. The following lines (19–26) introduce an explicit transfer which, in a second circle, brings into play further nuances which even more strongly point towards the soul. And again, we encounter a near-tautological structure, a repetitive doubling back of the text on itself, which leads us to re-enact, in the process of reading, the very figure of spherical perfection which is the poem's topic. Reading, we are made to perform a Neoplatonic figure of thought, at least an intellectual movement from an imagination of the visual towards the cognitive, from the sensual towards the spiritual, and conversely. In addition, the unlikely homology between elements belonging to different worlds is now made explicit in unmistakeably Neoplatonic terms and with familiar metaphors. Now the soul is referred to as »ray« of the »eternal day«, which in turn is presented as »clear fountain«, in a metaphor that merges light and water to give a sense of the translucent medium of the soul both as a divine spark and as a drop of that everlasting source. The body, which clothes the soul in the »human flower«, is translated into »swart leaves and blossoms green«, which have little in common with its wearer (apart from a trace of ›green‹ vivacity) and threaten to darken its light-like essence. Like the drop of dew, the soul strives to return to its origin, remembering and reflecting this in its thinking. Mind thus becomes an image of the »greater heaven«; self-consciousness appears to be the point in which the divine light »recollect[s]« and thus becomes aware of itself. In a tautology that also parallels that of drop of dew and teardrop (cf. 13), this reflection of the eternal brilliance concentrates itself and moves »in its own light« (24). The soul's »pure and circling thoughts« (25) gain their refinement from their own transcendent dynamic, which does not come to rest in the near-perfection of its products, but brings forth, in a manner approaching the poetic, something that exceeds and truly perfects them, »express[ing] | The greater Heaven in an heaven less« (25–26).99 _____________ 99 It is unsurprising and in fact philosophically apt that Marvell should, by introducing terms like »express« (25) or »figure« (27), choose to show that these processes are, quite literally, poetic ones. For Plotinus, too, points out in Enn. III 8, 3 that the activity of Nature, which strives towards »contemplation«, is, in contrast to practical action, a kind of poiein.
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For the next ten lines (27–36), the poem continues in this openly Neoplatonic vein, finding in the sphericality of the drop of dew the perfect correlate to a conception of the soul as defined by its individual selfhood but at the same time gifted for transcendence and responsive to the attractions of a higher world. »Here disdaining, there in love« (32), the soul balances as it were on tiptoe, »ready to ascend« (34). In keeping with the familiar, Neoplatonic-Christian topology, it is receptive only to the brightness from above and strives with all its might »upward« (36), almost desperately reaching for the higher region. Still, while the text seems to approach a perfection of mutual representation and containment, of specular as well as speculative circularity duplicating itself and reinforcing its elements, it does not end at this point. The kind of readiness to depart indicated by »girt« (34) introduces yet another note, preparing the four enigmatic final lines (37–40): Such did the manna's sacred dew distil; White, and entire, though congealèd and chill. Congealed on earth: but does, dissolving, run Into the glories of th'Almighty Sun.
True, these two final couplets could be said to describe a third circle. The allusion to Exodus 16.11–21, besides, is not in itself dark or unsuitable, insisting as it does on the equivalence between dew and manna in a metaphysically relevant process of ›distillation‹. But the explicitness of the biblical and theological turn does surprise, and it raises the question of its relation to what came before. It calls to mind the experience of the Israelites after their exodus from Egypt, on their way through the wilderness and before their arrival in the promised land. Having left the flesh-pots, the chosen people are freed from slavery, but left homeless. In this situation, the nourishment sent from heaven might look like a renewal of God's promise to his people – a comforting self-communication recalling instances of his former fidelity. Above all, however, the ascent of soul and dew-drop appears comparable to this significant gift in another respect: The manna in the desert also came ›from above‹ and, when exposed to the sun, lost its congealed state, liquified, and evaporated. Thus it also seems to signify an intermediate state, between materiality and immateriality, a kind of inspired matter, ready to reunite with more evanescent elements. In addition, the pun on »Sun« introduces a christological moment,100 with eucharistic aspects. Typologically, the manna anticipates the bread ›from heaven‹, broken at the Last Supper and given in communion. Now, against the background of religious controversy in the wake of the ›long Reformation‹ and amidst the turbulences of seventeenth-century ecclesiastical _____________ 100 For the function of sun metaphors in Christian Neoplatonism in the larger context of a merging of philosophical with theological traditions of discourse see also Beierwaltes (2001b).
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politics, indeed in a period of renewed anti-papistical hystery, this allusion to the sacrament of the Eucharist, however vague, must have touched a sensitive point. But it sits oddly, too, with respect to semantic and topical structures within the poem it pretends to continue and round off. With this emphatically biblical third circle we leave the realm of the timeless, ›philosophical‹ present, and we enter the contingent field of God's history with Israel. A time structure overwhelmingly cyclical up to this point finishes with a reference to a chronology which is austerely linear, partly to be narrated in the imperfect tense, open with respect to its ending. While the Neoplatonic narrative is already closed, having reached a seemingly perfect structural balance with the psychomorphism of the soul-drop, the text opens out again, switching to a different kind of discourse, which in turn contains irritating references to its contemporary present. What does this mean? Is the model of perfection the text has so carefully and with such obvious relish lead us to envisage and think through not sufficient after all? How can we take seriously both this final change of poetic direction and what went before? What does it tell us about the relationship between Marvell's poem and the realms of contem-porary knowledge it evokes?
Platonists and Perfectionists »On a Drop of Dew« not only faithfully reproduces and affirms the basic features of Plotinus' doctrine of the soul, but also appears to take up figures and motifs current with the Cambridge Platonists and those associated with them. Thus, with its central image of the drop of dew as irradiated and radiant, translucent and luminous, enlightened and sending out its own light, Marvell's poem places in the foreground one of the favourite topoi of seventeenth-century Neoplatonists. As Benjamin Whichcote put it succinctly in one of his aphorisms, this is precisely what the soul is – »Lighted by God, and Lighting us to God. Res illuminata, illuminans«, or, in another phrase the members of the Cambridge circle loved to reiterate, the »Candle of the Lord«.101 It is this inner light that motivates the _____________ 101 Benjamin Whichcote, Moral and Religious Aphorisms, no. 916, in: The Cambridge Platonists, ed. Patrides, 334. Cf. Proverbs 20.27: »The spirit of man is the candle of the LORD, […]« (in the Vulgate: »lucerna Domini spiraculum hominis […]«). Whichcote frequently elaborates the biblical commonplace (cf. also The Cambridge Platonists, 50, 57, and 59, where Whichcote paraphrases it as »a natural and indelible Sence of Deity […] in the Mind of Man«); so does John Smith (cf. ibid., 159, 197). Starting with the idea of an innate ›sense of God‹ in the soul of man, it would be easy to point out further parallels between Marvell's text and the variations played upon Plotinian theology by the Cambridge Platonists, such as their insistence on the »conformity« of human nature with the divine and its origin »from above« (Whichcote: »our Conformity to the Divine 1ature, and 1ativity from above«, ibid., 71), or on man's longing for reunion with the divine through an imitation of divine perfection (thus Smith, who refers to »[…] a living Imitation of a Godlike perfection drawn out by a strong fervent love of it. […] This life is nothing else but God's own breath within him […]«, ibid., 143). Again and again they
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drop's evasive movements on the foliage and equips the soul for its resistance to the material world, which threatens to envelop and darken it. In his explanation of the ideal transparency of the soul, Ralph Cudworth appears to parallel Marvell's text yet more closely. In his monumental work The True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678) he characterises human self-awareness as awareness of the ideal and describes the noetic faculty of consciousness by means of just this metaphor of a diaphanous sphere which microcosmically reflects the world of true being within itself: »Mind and Understanding is as it were a Diaphanous and Crystalline Globe, or a kind of 1otional World, which hath some Reflex Image, and correspondent Ray, or Representation in it, to whatsoever is in the True and Real World of Being.«102 Furthermore, Marvell's text effectively stages one of the most original thoughts of Cudworth and More. By turning the soul into a metaphor for the drop of dew, the poem makes palpable the ›ensoulment‹ of nature. As it offers the pervading and energising of creation by a »Plastick Nature«103 emanating from the highest as a poetic experience, it realises a Neoplatonic figure of thought in a literary structure. In retrospect, the drop of dew appears literally ›inspired‹, as the ›breath‹ with which the sun delivers it from its terrestrial bonds can be taken to be a divine exhalation of the »Spirit of Nature«104 animating all. The emergent figure so interlinks psychological and ›naturalistic‹ elements that it becomes as impossible to think of the soul as wholly bodyless as to conceive of nature as completely reducible to its materiality. Soul does not appear except embodied in the drop of dew, while nature (of which the drop forms part), appears animated and pervaded by spirit.105 _____________
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emphasise that it is this attraction of the divine which leads to a dynamic upwards movement of the soul as part of a process of »Deification« or theosis (e.g. Smith, ibid., 152, 165, 166–167), culminating in the famous words with which Plotinus' Enneads end: »flight of the Soul alone to God alone« (qu. ibid., 180). And here too, as in Plotinus, the movement is a reciprocal one in that it responds to the self-communication of divine love (cf. ibid., 180–183, 189). Ralph Cudworth, The True Intellectual System of the Universe, 638. The concept of a »Plastick Nature« which bears some resemblance to the neoplatonic World Soul and which informs and enlivens all beings is systematically unfolded in Cudworth's True Intellectual System (cf. the extract printed in The Cambridge Platonists, ed. Patrides, 288–325, »The Digression concerning the Plastick Life of Nature, or an Artificial, Orderly and Methodical Nature«), but it also figures strongly in the writings of Henry More, who refers to it as »Spirit of Nature«. Cf. for instance Henry More, The Immortality of the Soul (1659), Book III, Ch. XII-XIII (Immortalitas Animæ, 430-438). This is a thought by no means alien to neoplatonism; in fact it is part of its orthodoxy. As Plotinus points out in Enn. VI 4, 15, body and soul are no strangers, and the body is not merely dead matter. There is an affinity, a close »neighbourhood« between them, as the body is both capable of being ensouled and wants to be. It is alive, and there is an »adaptability« to soul in it, hence it may be ›heated‹ or ›illuminated‹ by the soul, it is suited to receive it, indeed prone to do so, and, although it is »in a tumult because of its weakness«, it gains at least »a trace of soul« (Plotinus, vol. 6, 317, 319). And as a whole,
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In outline, this corresponds exactly to the arguments by which the Cambridge Platonists tried to distinguish themselves from competing ways of explaining the world, whether these were put forward by radical Calvinists or by rampant materialists.106 We might even speculate that the final, biblical lines of the poem contain a fairly specific reference to one of the models the Cambridge circle attempted to oppose to the corpuscularean and Epicurean theories which had gained ground within the new natural sciences as well as in the context of Hobbesian political thought. For it was Anne Conway, Henry More's friend and fellow philosopher, who tried to explain the corporeal in terms of a Neoplatonicvitalistic monism as »condensed Spirit«107 and, conversely, conceived of the spiritual as something that could »congeal« to a more solid, corporeal state108 – a notion that also seems to resonate in Marvell's description of the physical quality of the manna as frigidly »congealed« (38 and 39),109 but capable of »dissolving« again any time into non-material »glories«. Precisely this marked care to present the relationship of body and soul in nondualistic terms110 also militates against a schematic Cartesian reading of the _____________
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nature, too, is implicated in this aspiration of all living things »to contemplation« (cf. Enn. III 8, 1-5). It brings forth living things and communicates to them part of its productive power; it is dúnamis poiousa – »a life and a rational principle and a power which makes« (III 8, 3; Plotinus, vol. 3, 367-369). Similarly, Proclus describes nature as self-moving and productive; cf. Proclus, Commentary on Plato's Timaeus. The standard work on the Cambridge Platonists' critical opposition to contemporary trends in philosophy as well as religion is still Cassirer's seminal study (1932). »[…] Spirit and Body are originally of one Nature and Substance, and […] a Body is nothing but a fixed and condensed Spirit, and a Spirit nothing but a subtile and volatile Body« (Anne Conway, The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, 217; cf. 131: »[…] corpus nihil sit; quam spiritus fixus & condensatus, & spiritus nihil quam corpus volatile, vel factum subtile«). Conway's philosophical work was printed only long after her (and Marvell's) death. Still, as far as we know, it emerged as the sum of her thought in continual conversation and correspondence with Henry More, so that it seems justifiable to assume that an idea as pregnant as that of matter as »condensed Spirit« would have gained currency beyond her friendship with More in the context of the controversies in which the Cambridge Platonists participated. (For Anne Conway and Henry More see also V. O. Lobsien [1999], 297-322, and Hutton [2004]). Some of the spiritual parts of the body, Conway writes, are able to change to »a certain Spirituous Liquour, which is congealed with great cold« (Principles, 194, and passim; cf. also 106: »congelatur«). They thus alter their aggregate state in a manner not much different from the biblical manna. As the historical references given in the OED under both condense and congeal make clear, in early modern usage both are close semantic neighbours. While »congealed« possibly carries stronger connotations of physical coldness than »condensed«, it could nonetheless also assume religious meanings, as for instance in the metaphor of the »heart congealed and hardened in sin« in Hooker (cf. OED congeal I.4). With these terms, physical and spiritual meanings seem to fuse easily. In the Latin »Ros«, too, »gelata« occurs twice in subsequent lines. Cf. also the strong emphasis in Whichcote: »[…] nothing of the Natural State is base or vile. Whatsoever hath Foundation in God's Creation, […] it is not base. For, our Saviour himself took Flesh and Blood: and that is the meaner Part of Human Nature.« (»The
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poem. For all we know, in itself this would hardly be far-fetched – neither in view of the great interest with which More and Cudworth regarded the development of Cartesian rationalism, nor with respect to the actual affinities between their way of thinking and that of Descartes. A reading along these lines would have to see the dew-drop/soul as Cartesian ego, reduced to the mental act of cogito and clearly separated from its body, which in turn would have to be considered as a mere res extensa, a mere container and like the roses incapable of providing a real home for the res cogitans. The soul would appear curved back into itself, finding, in a sense producing, selfhood in its reflexivity and turning away from the world by placing it in brackets in an act of radical epoché. At the same time it would seem to be equipped with the idea of God, at least with the idea of something infinite and perfect, recognisable within the medium of its own finiteness. There are several aspects of Marvell's poem, however, which resist this interpretation. Thus, in his text, the soul never, at any point, presents itself as a self, neither does it refer to itself with the first person singular pronoun. Also, its autoreflexivity appears much less pronounced than its reflection on its relatedness to the heavenly realm from whence it came. Further, the major structural point of the text lies in the way in which it stages and performs not so much the analytical separation of the spiritual and the natural but, on the contrary, their interaction and mutual interpenetration. And finally, a Cartesian soul conceived in terms of the poem would feel no strong urge towards, and no real need of, transcendence, as it is already completely rounded and self-contained, as it were, subsuming the divine in its own perfect subjectivity. Still, if Cartesianism marks one of the boundaries of the poem's special brand of Neoplatonism, its overall theological drift, together with the emphatically biblical colouring of its final lines, indicates yet another demarcation line. Even if »th'Almighty Sun« gains no personal contours and only very indirectly, by way of its typological implications, evokes a soteriological dimension, the text shows an affinity, albeit a tenuous one, with the rhetoric of the religious extremism of Marvell's time. It moves in close neighbourhood to the discourses of contemporary radical Protestantism, which in their turn integrated various Neoplatonic motifs into their fundamentalist propaganda. These were put to the service of an individualised spirituality, an inwardness articulated for the most part in accordance with reformed, Calvinist theology, an affective piety (›heart piety‹) often combined with a strong emphasis on the workings of the Spirit, and in many cases the formation of independent religious communities and congregations (›gathered churches‹) for the sake of godly fellowship.111 _____________ Manifestation of Christ and the Deification of Man«, in: The Cambridge Platonists, ed. Patrides, 70). 111 In its multi-faceted portrait of early modern English Protestantism, the contributions in Coffey/Lim (2008) provide the necessary differentiations corresponding to the various denominations. For a definition of »radical Puritan«, which insists on the historical relativity of the term, see Como (2008). On the importance of communal piety and the Puritan emphasis on practical divinity cf. also Spurr (2008) and Hambrick-Stowe (2008).
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In view of the turbulences that accompanied the processes of pluralisation within seventeenth-century Protestantism, and the heterogeneity of English nonconformism, which unfolded and diversified to an even greater extent under Cromwell's protectorate,112 there seems to be little point in trying to make out a unified and coherent theological profile. However, it does appear possible to outline a few of the features shared by most, if not all, nonconformist spiritualities – whether they aligned themselves with Baptists, Quakers, Fifth Monarchists, Seekers, Ranters, Shakers, Diggers, Familists, Behmenists or other revivalist, pentecostal or adventist groups.113 Most conspicuous amongst those also relevant for Marvell's portrait of the soul is the ›perfectionism‹ these otherwise highly different movements have in common, as Nigel Smith has shown in his study of radical Protestant writing in the two decades from 1640 to 1660.114 Their aim is above all the spiritual self-perfection of the individual believer.115 Precondition for the attainment of this goal is election by grace, and it is the task of the believer to ascertain and, if possible, gain assurance of, his or her state of salvation. In this, the ecstatic experience of the inner light, of particular importance in Quaker spirituality, may be seen as a comforting and fortifying mode of divine _____________ 112 For background and reasons for the »proliferation of unorthodox beliefs« from the 1640s onwards see also Worden (2009), esp. 79–81. 113 Some of these were apparently quite small, the number of their members standing in some disproportion to the stir they created in the mid seventeenth century. Morrill's (2008) account of the situation around the crisis of »The Puritan Revolution« argues that their differences are, on the whole, not so much theological, but (usually fierce) disagreements over questions of church government and clericalism. His profile of ecclesiastical politics over the mid-century decades is one of declining homogeneity, furthered by Cromwell's toleration of religious »liberty« and sectarianism: »[…] the period 1640-6 was dominated by Presbyterian assaults on Anglicanism, 1646-53 by Independent assaults on Presbyterianism, and 1653-60 by sectarian assaults on congregationalism and central tenets of Calvinism« (68). Granted that political diversity outweighs theological differences among the various groups of the godly, it is Quaker spirituality which still seems to differ most widely from mainstream Protestantism – and which, on the other hand, seems to move closest towards Neoplatonism. 114 Smith (1989). For similar profiles of early modern continental millenarianism see also Schmidt-Biggemann (2007). The following brief account is indebted above all to Smith's study; but cf. also the more recent contributions to the topic in Coffey/Lim (2008). Thus, Collinson (2008) points out that, from the very first instances of its polemic use, the term ›Puritan‹ provided, for the antagonists of these particularly zealous Protestants, welcome associations with »ancient perfectionist heresies«, 19. For Marvell's own more than ambiguous attitude in disputes about denominational politics see also the chapter on »Dissimulating Dogma« (5.2) below. 115 Again, with a view to the actual diversity of positions within the range of this generalisation, it ought to be stressed that the spectrum comprised those who regarded salvation as a process to be perfected at the end of the world as well as believers inclining more strongly to presentist and antinomian views; cf. Como (2008), 250: »Some antinomians, influenced at times by Familist or other mystical texts, went even further, hinting that God's chosen were in a sense unified with God, and could hence view themselves as perfect, even divine.«.
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communication, a palpable influx of grace into the soul of the believer and an incontrovertible way of unification with the holy spirit.116 Through the mechanisms familiar since Max Weber's analysis of the Protestant ethic, Calvinist doctrines of grace and predestination demand inner-worldly asceticism, introversion, constant self-monitoring and observation of the processes of salvation; in short, a sustained attention to the state of one's soul in its progress towards justification, sanctification, and complete attainment of grace. The language in which this kind of religious perfectionism articulates itself, however, is not only biblical and evangelical. To a surprisingly large extent, elements of Platonic or platonising discourses are also fed into it, such as the ubiquitous metaphors of light and fountain, of illumination and warmth, of an outpouring or flowing in of the spirit.117 Tropes of a liquefaction of sinful rigour and a melting of the hardened heart, figures of speech which cast the reconciliation and desired merging with the divine in intimate, quasi-physical terms, abound in these testimonies of confession and conversion.118 They are inspired by an enthusiasm, which soon becomes a term of abuse in the mouths of their critics.119 Sermons as well as autobiographical and catechetic writings120 repeatedly schematise conversion as a spiritual return: Touched by grace, the soul discovers the error of its ways, changes its course, leaves its aberrations, and, newly enlightened by the insights available all along but stubbornly ignored, finally reunites with its origin. Central to this epistrophic volte-face is the experience of an often rapturous encounter with the divine. It is this dimension of immediate spiritual experience which earned the corresponding doctrine the label of experiential or (in contemporary parlance) »experimental theology«.121 At the same time, it can also be seen _____________ 116 Cf. Smith (1989), 66ff. 117 Unsurprisingly, the discourse of Protestant perfectionism at times becomes indistinguishable from mystical speech, cf. Smith (1989), 15, 17, and passim. For the Neoplatonic origins of Christian mysticism see also McGinn (1991). 118 Cf. Smith (1989), 41, 43, 45, and passim; thus also Smith's resumée: »Versions of the self were created which moved increasingly towards the merging of the individual with the Godhead, the ultimate claim for perfection« (18). 119 Prominent among these, for reasons personal as well as theological, Henry More, whose Enthusiasmus Triumphatus testifies not only to the closeness of platonic mania to the religious enthusiasm the author reviles, but also to his resentment of the Quaker spirituality to which his friend Anne Conway was to convert shortly before her death (for More and Conway see also Ch. VII in V. O. Lobsien (1999), esp. 297–322). 120 For the large generic variety of devotional writing in the service of Puritanism cf. also Keeble (2008). 121 Thus the Puritan William Perkins (cf. Smith [1989], 5; also Ch. 1, »Prophecy, Experience, and the Presentation of the Self«, 23–72). However, Neoplatonic explanations of prophecy also resort to this experiential model: for John Smith, prophetical inspiration is quite literally a feeling of the divine breath experienced in mind as well as body (ibid., 27–31). And John Everard, who was as learned in his writings and translations as he appears to have been vehement in his sermons (he was persecuted for his radical Protestantism), also repeatedly stressed the importance of the immediate inner experience of God. It is this, he
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to foreground the strongly Pauline profile of English Protestantism. Christian and Neoplatonic patterns of thought are effectively conflated as the identity between conversio and epistrophé is epitomised in St Paul's Damascus experience. For Saul's conversion to the Christianity he had hitherto persecuted is not only brought about by the experience of a blinding light (Acts 9. 3), in which the presence of God is both concealed and revealed, and later by the sense of being »filled with the Holy Ghost« (Acts 9. 17) as he recovers his sight, but he also afterwards wistfully remembers it in the very terms of dissolution, liquefaction, and loss of a former self122 which were to become so characteristic of the godly folk's rhetoric of conversion. Repeatedly, too, Renaissance Neoplatonists would refer to the raptus Pauli as prominent example for an experience of the soul's union with the One granted even in this life, elevating it to a paradigm for the desired perfection.123 But seventeenth-century English authors also, and sometimes with explicit reference to their Renaissance precursors, practised this hybridisation of Neoplatonic and nonconformist discourses with the greatest fervour and often with considerable publicity. Around mid-century they imported continental, in part even counterreformational writings into England, translating them and spreading a number of their most evocative elements by making them part of their own sermons and treatises, thus of Protestant spirituality. Remarkably and typically, the mystical, Neoplatonic, or even hermeticist provenience of its central ideas does not seem to make a difference to this kind of religious literature, centrally concerned as it is _____________ claims in a sermon on James 1.17, which provides certainty of salvation as it lets the believer »know and feel experimentally, in some measure and degree, that Iesus Christ is in you« (The Gospel-Treasury Opened [1657], qu. in Hayes [1981a], 121; cf. also Hayes [1981b]. James 1.17 is the very verse which Nicolaus of Cusa explicates in his De dato patris luminum. For yet another Neoplatonic interpretation of this address to the »Father of lights« see ch. 4.1 below). 122 Cf. II Cor 12; but the locus classicus is Phil 1. 23, in the Vulgate: »desiderium habens dissolvi et esse cum Christo«. While the Authorized Version renders »dissolvi« as »depart«, Tyndale translates »I desyre to be lowsed« (The 1ew Testament 1562, 418). See also the references in the OED (dissolve I. 6) for evidence of the Early Modern awareness of the literal connotations of the term. Incidentally, this also makes it likely that Pauline undertones of this kind are to be heard as well in the final lines of »On a Drop of Dew« – »Congealed on earth: but does, dissolving, run | Into the glories of th'Almighty Sun«. 123 Thus Pico explains cherubinic perfection, referring explicitly to Paul's ravishment when he was »caught up to the third heaven« (II Cor 12. 2) as well as to Dionysius Areopagita: »Consulamus Paulum apostolum vas electionis, quid ipse cum tertium sublimatus est caelum, agentes Cherubinorum exercitus viderit. Respondebit utique Dionysio interprete: purgari illos, tum illuminari, postremo perfici […]«. (Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, De hominis dignitate, 12–14). (»Let us consult the Apostle Paul, the vessel of election, because, when he was lifted up to the third heaven, he saw the armies of the cherubim in action. According to Dionysius' interpretation, he will answer that the cherubim are being purged, then are being illuminated, and lastly are being perfected.« Pico della Mirandola, On the Dignity of Man, 8). For the raptus Pauli in Ficino's thinking cf. also Lauster (1998). For the ambivalent, Christian Neoplatonic contours of Augustine's experience of metanoia/conversio cf. also Moog-Grünewald (2003).
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with personal illumination as immediate communication of the Godhead.124 In this manner, certain topics and motifs, gleaned from a wide range of authors and texts including Nicolaus of Cusa, the Theologia Germanica, and Jakob Boehme, were incorporated into English radical religious mentalities. What made them so congenial seems above all to have been their affinity with the already existing rhetoric of spiritual perfection, which considered individual salvation as an experience of deification, at least of assimilation to God.125 The work of the Puritan divine John Everard provides a particularly salient instance of this kind of syncretism. He translated the Theologica Germanica as well as extracts from Johannes Tauler, Dionysius the Areopagite, and the Corpus Hermeticum (Pimander and Asclepius), and he rendered Nicolaus of Cusa's De visione Dei and De dato patris luminum into English.126 At the same time he appears to have been busy as preacher, making abundant use in his sermons of the motifs and concepts he found in the translated texts. As the example of Everard shows with particular clarity, there was a close, albeit in many respects punctual, affinity between Neoplatonism and reformed Christianity. Above all, we find that Everard's work places special emphasis on the idea that is both the precondition for the individual believer's experiential recognition of God and equally informs the Cambridge Platonists' concept of sensually perceptible nature: the idea of theophany. In the context of Everard's radical, perfectionist Puritanism, however, the idea gains a kind of explosiveness which goes beyond that of philosophical eccentricity. Principally, theophany relies on a theorem that dates back to Dionysius Areopagita, but was articulated with great paradoxical acumen in John Scotus Eriugena's Periphyseon in the formula of »the apparition of what is not apparent«127 (non apparentis apparitio). It was taken up and unfolded with considerable closeness to Eriugena's thought _____________ 124 See Smith (1989), 107–143. The problematic implications of such conflations from the point of view of philosophical consistency simply do not seem to have mattered to those who propagated them. In his essay on The Idea of Perfection in the Western World (1946), Foss has criticised perfection as a normative concept of western thought, pointing out the crucial, but also constitutive ambivalence between the stasis of completion and the dynamics and historicity of processes of transcendence, which it implies but which its adherents prefer to ignore. It seems to be not the least of Marvell's achievements in »On a Drop of Dew« to uncover this ambiguity by means of the proto-deconstructivism of his poem; see below. 125 This perfectionism finds additional support in habits of reading the Bible which typically rely on individual, ahistorical or allegorical interpretations: »[…] mystical and occult texts […] encouraged claims of personal perfection upon earth to the extent that individuals could claim to be deified or to be in a state very close to this. […] these illuminist ideas had their origins in a form of scriptural interpretation which elevated the power of the spirit in the individual over the letter of the scriptural text as a witness to divine truth.« (Smith [1989], 107). 126 The latter probably in the 1630s; see Hayes (1981a). 127 »For everything that is understood and sensed is nothing else but the apparition of what is not apparent, the manifestation of the hidden, the affirmation of the negated, […]« (633A) in: Eriugena, Periphyseon, III 4, 58.
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by Nicolaus of Cusa in his De dato patris luminum,128 the very treatise which held such fascination for Everard. In Eriugena's version, this idea of a self-manifestation of the invisible God in the visible world of His creation can be seen to acquire an almost revolutionary potential.129 At any rate, it seems to have been precisely its egalitarian brisance which appealed to Everard, as he so insistently teases it out in his writings. This is retained in Nicolaus of Cusa's interpretation of James 1. 17130 (as it is implicit in his Idiota treatises); and as it makes everybody, even the layman (who is in fact particularly sensitive to it), a potential receiver of divine illumination, Everard appears to have proclaimed it with considerable enthusiasm in his sermons.131 Theologically if not politically, it culminates in Eriugena's interpretation of Dionysius' Celestial Hierarchy in the sentence omnia que sunt lumina sunt132 – »All things therfore are certainly apparitions or lights«, as Nicolaus of Cusa has it in Everard's version.133 For Eriugena as for Nicolaus of Cusa all creatures are »lights« which are transparent to the divine and capable of bringing it to appearance. »But all this actuating illumination« (thus again Nicolaus of Cusa in the words of Everard) »which is a gift, cometh downe from above, from the father of all gifts, which gifts are lights, or Theophanyes (that is, appearances or manifestations of God).«134 Given this background of a suggestive convergence of contemporary discourses over the idea of theophany (despite the contrary theological and ideological consequences drawn from it), we are now in a position to ask again how Marvell's poem places itself against it. How much of a ›Puritan‹ ring is there to the dewdrop's fearful »Trembling lest it grow impure« (16)? If the metaphors of circle and globe, of vision and sight, fountain, stream and light play prominent roles not only in indisputably Neoplatonic texts but also in the writings of just those radically Protestant perfectionists and enthusiasts from which the Cambridge Platonists tried to distinguish themselves almost as resolutely as from materialist thinkers, it becomes increasingly difficult to give a clear-cut reason for aligning Marvell's text with one party rather than the other. How then can we describe the attitude towards the soul which »On a Drop of Dew« proposes and _____________ 128 As Beierwaltes (2006) has recently shown. 129 In the eleventh and thirteenth centuries Eriugena was considered a heretic (cf. also Beierwaltes (2006), 218-219). As the Cambridge Platonists were more concerned about orthodoxy and tried to keep their distance from contemporary radicalism, they do not seem to have regarded the political potential of Eriugena's position with the same interest as Everard. 130 The Epistle to James addresses the pater luminum, and it is also with a quotation of this verse that the Celestial Hierarchy of Dionysius begins. There are frequent echoes of this passage in hermeticist writings; cf. also my reading of Vaughan's »Cock-Crowing« below (4.1). 131 See also Hayes (1987). 132 Eriugena, Expositiones in Ierarchiam Coelestem, I 76-77. 133 Hayes (1981a), 130. 134 Ibid., 124.
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prepares for the reader? How does the text situate itself in this antagonistic (and often confused) context of religious, philosophical and scientific controversy? What kind of perfection is it that this conceit of the soul evokes, and how can we characterise the transformation of Neoplatonism which gives rise to it?
Exodus, or Perfect Imperfection In order to answer these questions we need to return, once again, to a consideration of poetic structure. As we could already observe, »On a Drop of Dew« carefully avoids terminating on the note of perfect circularity actually attained with the soul-drop's epistrophé. From the point of view of its completion, the four final lines would appear superfluous, if not irritating. Conversely, looking back from the closural allusion to Exodus, the detailed unfolding of the homology between soul and drop of dew appears redundant, if not heterodox. The chosen people in the desert are as yet only on their way towards the perfection which the poem's central conceit enacts as imminent, if not already achieved.135 On the other hand, the final biblical accent rather lacks attractivity in comparison with the beauty of metaphysical desire associated with the drop of dew and almost fulfilled. Also, the wilderness episode is barely indicated, sketched laconically and almost perfunctorily. Even worse, as a heavenly sign, the manna ultimately remains almost as opaque as it had appeared to the Israelites: »[…] they said to one another, It is manna: for they wist not what it was.« (Ex 16. 15). Besides, after the subtle anthropomorphising of the drop of dew which precedes it, the event in the desert is presented in a conspicuously impersonal manner. The gift of the manna appears as unmotivated as the re-ascent of the life-saving but highly perishable present. The text makes no mention of love (the central Ficinian ingredient of Neoplatonic recursivity) or at least of »Universal Charity« (Whichcote).136 The sacred dew condenses of its own accord, and its reliquefaction appears as groundless and self-induced as its intransitive ›distillation‹, a spontaneous and arbitary side-effect of divine omnipotence. The manna is ephemerous. True, it is »White, and entire«, and in this respect as self-enclosed as the drop of dew,137 but its immaculate purity is as impermanent as the soul_____________ 135 For Puritan writers' predilections for the imagery of pilgrimage and itinerancy and their particular preference for journeys through the wilderness, see also Keeble (2008), 317f. 136 Cf. Benjamin Whichcote, Moral and Religious Aphorisms no. 679: »Universal Charity is a thing Final in Religion.« (in: The Cambridge Platonists, ed. Patrides, 333). Both Whichcote and Smith occasionally refer to the manna, however usually in an unemphatic manner, presupposing its allegorical understanding as an inner, everyday certainty of the soul's connectedness with God and His truth (see also ibid., 137, 175). 137 Colie, too, stresses the singularity and self-centredness of the drop of dew: »Marvell's drop is exclusive, self-contained, self-reflecting, an emblem for rejection of res creatae. […] Marvell concentrates even more fully on the single, self-concentrated object; he narrows his meditation inward. […] Marvell's meditative way, in this poem, rejects visual copia,
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drop's is endangered. It is merely provender, sustenance on the way, an episode in passing, an iconic, perhaps indexical sign from God. It may be taken as affirmation or renewal of a promise already given. But its precise and ultimate significance cannot be deciphered by those who receive it, because they are still involved with, and part of, the history whose continuation it obliquely, in the medium of typological prefiguration, might be seen to predict.138 If Puritan spirituality tends to practical divinity, to »the perfection of the world of the reader's everyday experience«,139 the poem withholds any direct ethical appeal. Despite its homiletic tone, the scriptural allusion remains without ›application‹. Yet Marvell's text can itself be compared to the manna, which accompanies the Israelite exodus as inscrutable and impermanent, self-negating sign. The poem's structure may be understood as metapoetic sign of insufficiency. As it overlays a seemingly complete allegory with another, different one, this entails that neither can suffice. Neither the perfect poetic presentation of platonic circularity, nor its pious translation into a sign of election is wholly satisfactory. At its close, the poem, in an almost iconoclastic gesture, seems to turn against its own Neoplatonic psychomorphism that permitted the interpretation of natural globularity as the completion of epistrophé as well as a vitalist ensouling of the natural world. But the claim to absolute validity raised by the dogmatic final word must also stand contested, as the episode it commemorates continues to irritate, its tantalising uncertainty and openness in uneasy contrast to the exquisite phenomenological precision, the philosophical determination, and the beautiful suggestiveness of the ideal with which it is prefaced. Conversely, the incompleteness of the history of salvation militates against the philosophical pattern's equally absolute claim to timelessness and calls in doubt its eternal, unceasing, and allencompassing movement towards transcendence and contemplation. The indeterminate openness of history, its contingency, the metaphysical homelessness of those implicated in it, seems to call for the renewal of a promise of salvation. _____________ which so often inspired contemplation and vision, to concentrate on one precise, meaningful object, self-contained but existing in a world of other things.« (Colie [1970], 117). 138 A glance at neighbouring literary texts will only deepen the ambiguity, while it may provide an additional justification for the proposed multiple reading of Marvell's poem, in terms of philosophy and theology as well as confessional politics. Thus, George Herbert's »Bunch of Grapes« also evokes the manna, but offers a much more explicit ›evangelical‹ allegorisation: »Our Scripture-dew drops fast« places the manna in analogy to the spiritual nourishment contained in the revelation of the Word and effectively forbids all eucharistic associations (»The Bunch of Grapes«, l. 16, in: The Works of George Herbert, 128). By adding yet another foil of reference in Num 11 (the sending of the quails, the dissatisfaction and greed of the people and their punishment by »a very great plague«), stanzas XLVII to LIII of Marvell's »Upon Appleton House, To My Lord Fairfax« extend, in the haymaking episode featuring »bloody Thestylis« and the killing of the rail, the range of possible theological and political meanings even further to include the themes not only of civil war but also of inordinate identification with the Israelites as the chosen people in the desert. 139 Keeble (2008), 320.
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Perhaps this is only to be borne against the possibility of a timeless presence and the fulfilment of time in a final redemption as yet unavailable, though darkly prefigured. But as the last circle refuses to close, the pattern of exodus and arrival remains as incomplete as that of retreat and restoration. The figure this poem makes is one of mutual relativisation and questioning. Neoplatonic optimism and Puritan certainty of salvation challenge each other in a metaphorical constellation, which almost tears the text apart. Their relation is not one of complementarity but rather of an ongoing reciprocal reflection. While this cannot be arrested in favour of one side or the other, it exposes their respective deficiencies. And it is this critical reciprocity in the mutual illumination of exile and exodus, of certainty and promise, of assurance and covenant, which does, I would suggest, in the end figure a kind of perfection. This consists in the perfect dynamic of a poetic structure, which, by means of its textual patterning, enables insight into the implications of competing (if overlapping) models of the soul while keeping in mind their limitations. While the text remains critically tilted against Puritan scripturalism and spirituality, it retains, at the same time, a sceptical reserve towards the intellectual security gained by philosophical speculation and promised by the imaginative perfection of a Neoplatonic iconology of the soul. To read »On a Drop of Dew«, then, demands – and opens – a scrutiny of several areas of reference which in turn undergo a modification. While it may appear both as a minor knot in the network of Early Modern Neoplatonic thought and as a carefully modulated voice in the clamorous religious debates of its time, the poem presents a unique and multiple transformation of the seemingly atemporal concept of Plotinian perfection. This it effects, on one hand, by foregrounding in the elaborate reciprocity of the drop/soul metaphor its ›scientific‹ implications in a manner sharply accentuating the naturalistic dimensions of contemporary English Neoplatonism – be they Cudworthian concepts of »Plastick Nature« or ideas mediated by Dionysius, Eriugena, or Nicolaus of Cusa, of nature as theophany. On the other hand, in its final lines, and after having reproduced it so impressively, the poem challenges and once again transforms the Neoplatonic narrative of recursivity and ascent by means of a double historisation. This it does by signalling, through ostentatious biblicity and a sermon-like send-off as if to an extended allegoresis (»Such did the manna's sacred dew distil […]«), a relation to the discourses of contemporary radical Protestantism. Godly self-confidence and assurance of grace, however, find no room to settle, and the perfectionist gesture falters as soon as it is made. As it calls to mind the unfinished, albeit irreversible, history of God with his chosen people in precisely those aspects which are indeterminate and open to interpretation, the episode evoked appears capable of triggering both metapoetically and metahistorically subversive effects. In this way, the text avoids the temptations of systematic a-temporality and appears equally safe from denominational appropriation. It seems charged with Classical as well as contemporary meanings, while it cannot be reduced either to timeless truths or historical and regional
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specificity. Marvell manages to remove his drop of dew in more than one sense from the attractions of dogmatism, be they rooted in philosophical tradition or in political and religious actuality. As this strategy of a double suspension of certainty replaces static representation with complex interaction, as it confronts the perfectionist teleology of arrival with the necessity of re-departure and undermines the prospect of a happy closure with the reminder of another exodus, it should, however, also have become clear that these can be considered figurations of perfection only under the conditions of a Neoplatonic aesthetics.140 If, in the end, movement between several competing conceits comes to take the place of the one, static, unambiguous ›image‹, it is dynamic reference and deferral, continual transition and the altering of positions just articulated which emerge as dominant strategies. The way in which drop of dew, soul, and manna are projected onto one another effectively stages transcendence as a meta-structure of excess. It even makes possible its ›anagogical‹ enactment, indeed its experience within the comparatively safe medium of a poetic experiment. Far from providing metaphoric illustrations of Neoplatonic or Puritan dogma, »On a Drop of Dew« attempts their imaginative transformation. From this perspective, Marvell's text neither return us to the wilderness nor to the cyclical comforts of emanation and conversion. Instead, as it withholds discursive completeness, it offers aesthetic perfection – a paradoxical, non-apocalyptic perfection, which, in its projected permanence of recursive non-arrival, does not show us things coming to an end but persisting in their transitoriness. This, finally, makes the poem more Neoplatonic than its Neoplatonic metaphor and more pious than the piety of the godly.
_____________ 140 For an outline of the major systematic features of Neoplatonic aesthetic theory see above, ch. 1; also V. O. Lobsien (2007a).
CHAPTER 3: KNOWLEDGE AND HAPPINESS Religion begins in Knowledge; Procedes in Practice; and Ends in Happiness. (Whichcote, Moral and Religions Aphorisms, no. 169)
3.1 »Uncertaine knowledge« Or: How to Make Sense of an Intransparent World In the Labyrinth of Truth: Thomas Browne Thomas Browne's best-known writings, Religio Medici, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, Urne-Buriall, and The Garden of Cyrus,1 share an undercurrent of uncertainty, to be more precise, of learned ignorance. Browne does not hesitate to make this explicit; for instance in a typical passage in the second part of Religio Medici, where, after first absolving himself of the cardinal sin of pride, he modestly parades the considerable extent of his own knowledge and experience in contrast to those who know little and boast much, only to expatiate on the futility, instability and vanity of the »blind pursuit« of insights to be acquired »in this life«: »wee doe but learne to day, what our better advanced judgements will unteach us to morrow«. This, he concludes, will at best provide only »uncertaine knowledge«. We had therefore better spare the effort, since after death we shall receive gratis, as »an accessary of our glorification«, what here we strive for »with sweat and vexation« (RM II. 8, 66). A similar attitude pervades the discourse on Urne-Buriall, where, in the midst of assembling factual evidence and of cataloguing material particulars about funeral rites, graves, urns and monuments past and present he is led to state laconically: »The certainty of death is attended with uncertainties, in time, manner, places.« (U-B III, 106). And like Urne-Buriall, even more conspicuously so, The Garden of Cyrus is riddled with _____________ 1
With the exception of Pseudodoxia Epidemica, Browne's works are quoted according to Religio Medici and Other Works, ed. L. C. Martin. Pseudodoxia Epidemica is quoted according to The Works of Sir Thomas Browne, vol. 2, ed. Keynes. References are given in brackets following the quotation, with abbreviated titles referring to Religio Medici as RM, to Hydrotaphia, Urn-Buriall. Or, a Brief Discourse of the Sepulchrall Urnes lately found in 1orfolk as U-B, to The Garden of Cyrus. Or, The Quincunciall, Lozenge, or 1et-work Plantations of the Ancients, Artificially, 1aturally, Mystically considered as GC, and to Pseudodoxia Epidemica as PE. The references follow the pattern (Part or Book. Section or Chapter, page in the respective edition). Biographical information is derived mainly from Robbins (2004).
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unanswered questions and unsolved problems; indeed, instead of offering a conclusive synthesis of the numerous aspects under which the quincunx has been considered, the last chapter manoeuvres us finally right into the midst of the »Labyrinth of Truth« (GC V, 174) it has constructed by culminating in a list of »new Problemes«, which accumulates precarious topics for speculation and »abstrusities of no ready resolution« (V, 172f). This foil of unknowing – or, in the terms of this study: this sense of the world as enigma – underlies everything Browne touches upon. It provides the paradoxical foundation for his eccentric themes, his witty insights, his scientific investigations, his ingenious observations, his bold conjectures, his learned allusions. It affects his more traditional readings in the Book of Nature as well as his ›new‹ (medical, physical, botanical, geometrical etc.) science; his thinking about the self and the relations between the human mind, body and soul; his religion and his theology; his ethics as well as his metaphysics, including his opinions about last things such as death and resurrection or the Day of Judgment; not last his aesthetics. And what if not the conviction of the ubiquity of error and the endless, indeed infectious – although of course highly interesting –, possibilities of mistaking false opinion for secure knowledge could have prompted the encyclopaedic Pseudodoxia Epidemica? Thus, in a fundamental sense, the world for Browne is intransparent. Neither does it wear its meaning on the outside, nor are its truths accessible in ways that would put them beyond doubt. There is no way of knowing for sure whether what we take to be truth is not really its opposite. »In brief, there is nothing infallible but GOD, who cannot possibly Erre.« (PE I. 1, 21).2 In view of this radical fallibility of human reason, what could be more plausible than to resort to Skepticism?3 In the section from Religio Medici quoted above, Browne does seem to opt for the Pyrrhonist way of resigning oneself to uncertainty, of reserving final judgment on the non-obvious, and of renouncing the fruitless attempt to gain insight into the invisible and hidden: I have runne through all sects, yet finde no rest in any, though our first studies & junior endeavors may stile us Peripateticks, Stoicks, or Academicks, yet I perceive the wisest heads prove at last, almost all Scepticks, and stand like Janus in the field of knowledge. (II. 8, 66)
_____________ 2
3
He proceeds to give a Platonising explanation for this: »For things are really true as they correspond unto His conception; and have so much verity as they hold of conformity unto that Intellect, in whose Idea they had their first determinations. And therefore being the Rule, he cannot be Irregular; nor, being Truth it self, conceaveably admit the impossible society of Error.« (PE I. 1, 21). Or at least fideism; for an overview and discussion of the Early Modern renaissance of Skepticism see Popkin (1979); also Burnyeat (1983). For an attempt to gauge more precisely the kind and extent of hybrid Skepticism underlying Browne's RM, see also V. O. Lobsien (2009).
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However, what is offered here as imitation of »the wisest heads«, indeed as a perfectly rational way of keeping an open mind by entertaining and maintaining in a productive suspense irreconcilable points of view and the assumptions they lead to, will turn out as just another, fairly conventional pose – that of »Socrates«, knowing that he knows nothing, or of »Solomon«, instigating the vanity of knowledge in his role of the preacher Ecclesiastes. Although the confessional tone of the speaker may momentarily mislead us into crediting this to the voice of wisdom – assumed, after all, by Thomas Browne at the age of barely thirty4 –, it is only one of the many attitudes tentatively assumed and played through in this text. This becomes clear not only through the highly characteristic topical manner in which this statement is approached and the context in which it is embedded, but above all by the fact that it remains entirely without consequence. For not only does the timid insistence on the »uncertaine knowledge of this life« not prevent Browne from plunging into the next section with a collection of misogynist home-truths about marriage, the relative value of man and woman, and the folly of sex, wholly untouched by any kind of doubt and rather startling in their blatant unoriginality – this discordant blast is followed up by an almost equally outrageous and equally commonplace aggregate of ›Platonic‹ speculations about the music of the spheres (cf. II. 9). Of course, even this sequence of heterogeneous topoi might be attributed to the essayistic macro-structure of the Religio Medici, which, following Montaigne, might in itself be regarded as essentially Skeptical,5 as it keeps contradictory and dissonant elements in an unresolved and possibly unresolvable equilibrium. However, both essayistic and performativist6 readings of Religio Medici, promising as they may appear at first sight, seem to me to choose an all too easy way out. Apart from the fact that they allow this writer more licence than he would grant himself,7 and leaving out of _____________ 4 5
6 7
Youthful by our standards, yet even be seventeenth-century ones hardly the age of a senex. I have suggested the concept of ›structural skepticism‹ to account for this and related effects; cf. my study of Montaigne and other sixteenth- as well as seventeenth-century authors, their Pyrrhonist and Academic pretexts, and the aesthetic implications of Skepticism in V. O. Lobsien (1999). Like other readers, Coleridge, too, noticed the similarity to Montaigne's writing, attributing it to the interest in their own subjectivity common to both authors, which, however, yields profiles of different personalities: »He sometimes reminds the reader of Montaigne but from no other than the general circumstance of an Egotism common to both, which in Montaigne is too often a mere amusing Gossip, a chit chat story of Whims & Peculiarities that lead to nothing, but which in Sir Thomas Brown [sic] is always the result of a feeling Heart conjoined with a mind of active curiosity –
who loving other men as himself, gains the habit & the privilege of talking about himself as familiarly as other men.« (Marginalia I, 762–763). For instance, to name one of the best examples, Straznicky's analysis of the double voice in Browne's »performative autobiography« (1990). Cf. for instance Browne's disclaimer with regard to his imitation of Montaigne (in reply to an allegation by his 1656 editor Thomas Keck), quoted by L. C. Martin in his commentary to RM: »In a peece of myne published long agoe the learned commentator hath paralleld many passages with others of Mountaignes essaies whereas to deale clearly, when I
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account the generic difference to Browne's other texts, which do not lend themselves to the same approach as the notoriously heterogeneous and note-booklike Religio Medici,8 these readings, while tending to present Browne in the light of irresponsible jester or irresolute Skeptic, stress the aesthetic dimension of his writing – important as it is – at the expense of the systematic. Yet he and his contemporaries would certainly have perceived and admired both. To explain this, the collusion of the seemingly incompatible as arranged by Browne, seems to me the challenge of the lectio difficilior I should like to submit.9 Browne is a writer who is precisely not content to live (in his own, muchquoted phrase) »in divided and distinguished worlds« (RM I. 34, 33). Or rather: he will not put up with the distinctions he perceives more sharply than others and which seem to multiply in the course of his analysis. Not only does his professed Skepticism not prevent him from continuing to waste his time in the pursuit of knowledge; not only does his conviction of its fundamental uncertainty serve as a dark background against which his protestations of faith stand out and shine the more brightly, but also, like Plato's Timaeus, he is undeterred by fields of uncertain knowledge or oceans of intellectual insecurity, and manages repeatedly to steer his bark into »the haven of probability«10 – even if he has to invent or posit it rather precariously. What appears to move this writer, the energy and intention which appear to drive and structure his discourse and which realise themselves in diverse and varied, at times experimental, texts, in a prose not only interspersed with poetry but often verging on the poetical, point not so much towards the wish to know for certain, but seem to indicate an insatiable desire to _____________ penned that peece I had neuer read 3 leaues of that Author (& scarce any more euer since.« (Religio Medici and Other Works, ed. Martin, 290). Also, far from glorying in his spontaneous inconsistency, in his epistle »To the Reader« prefacing the authorised edition (1643) Browne appears embarrassed by it, attributing it to the »Rhetoricall« and »meerely Tropicall« character of his argument: »There are many things delivered Rhetorically, many expressions therein meerely Tropicall, and as they best illustrate my intention; and therefore also there are many things to be taken in a soft and flexible sense, and not to be called unto the rigid text of reason.« ›Performativity‹ of this kind is presented as symptom of youthful exuberance; it is to the maturer author not a reason for pride, but for apology. 8 Admittedly so, if Browne's own misgivings about the allegedly pirated first publication of his text are to be taken seriously not only as mirroring his disgust at the unauthorised printing but also as qualms about the argumentative coherence and consistency of the text. For a detailed discussion and analysis of Browne's complaint against the unauthorised publication see Preston (2005). 9 There is no need, in other words, to choose between the positions of Stanley Fish and Frank J. Warnke; the point is rather to see where they converge. Cf. Fish's excoriation of Browne as self-referential stylist, smugly putting his own rhetorical prowess on display, hence »The Bad Physician«, (1974), 353–373, and Warnke's defense of Browne's writing as evidence of an aesthetic of admiration, (1982), 49–56. In view of the present interests of cultural and literary criticism, the middle course admirably steered by Claire Preston, who in her study of Browne (2005) seeks to keep both the aesthetic and the referential dimensions of his discourse in mind, seems to me most promising. 10 Timaeus 48e (The Collected Dialogues of Plato, 1176).
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hold together, to understand and to interpret. To know is not (yet) to understand; learned ignorance, in Browne as in Nicolaus of Cusa, is above all the precondition of wisdom in divinity. Still, if Browne's is a holistic impulse, there is no need to assume that it is born from the residues of a »unified sensibility«.11 Rather, it seems to arise from a particularly clear perception of the ubiquitous processes of dissociation and from an obvious fascination with them. Also, the desire to unify, the effort to ›see in one‹ is not without philosophical colour or systematic substance. It resembles the »Academick« way of thinking Browne officially repudiates. After all, in The Garden of Cyrus, Browne thinks of himself not as caught in an impenetrable maze of error but as tracing »the Labyrinth of Truth«, which affords him new and »delightful« insights at every turning (GC V, 174) and will perhaps one day disclose the secret at its heart open only to the initiated. But it comes closest to the Neoplatonic striving for a unity which does not simply annihilate or leap over differences but transcends them in the excessive, but inclusive gesture of ›Aufhebung‹. The instability of knowledge is to Browne an encouragement, spurring him on in his pursuit of the one principle which moves all and which connects the distinguished worlds which he refuses to see divided. That he finds himself equipped for that by a Renaissance commonplace still beloved by seventeenth-century Neoplatonists (and tenaciously repeated), rather strengthens his case: »[…] thus is man that great and true Amphibium, whose nature is disposed to live not onely like other creatures in divers elements, but in divided and distinguished worlds« (RM I. 34, 33). The amphibious construction of man, which places us ambiguously »betweene a corporall and spirituall essence« (ibid.) and makes us partakers of both, reaching up to angelic format while constantly in danger of degenerating to bestiality, not only alludes to Pico's famous Oration on the dignity (and chamaeleonic potential) of man12 but actually harks back to Plotinus, who also refers to human souls as amphibians (amphibioi),13 capable of transition, transformation, and transcendence. In what follows, then, I shall try to present Thomas Browne as an »irregular Platonist«,14 indeed, an irregular Neoplatonist, with the epithet ›irregular‹ _____________ 11 Cf. Willey with reference to T. S. Eliot (1934), 45. 12 Cf. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, De hominis dignitate, 4–11. 13 Plotinus, Ennead IV 8, 33: »Souls, then, become, one might say, amphibious, compelled to live by turns the life There, and the life here: those which are able to be more in the company of Intellect live the life There more, but those whose normal condition is, by nature or chance, the opposite, live more the life here below.« 14 Cf. Bush (1962), 349. I see no reason not to concur with Bush's high estimate of Browne, especially with his concluding statement about the relative significance of seventeenthcentury English Neoplatonism: »Because […] scientific empiricism and mechanism continued their triumphal advance, Cambridge Platonism has often been dismissed as only an interesting eddy in the stream of modern thought. But whatever their philosophic inadequacies, the Platonists were in the main stream.« (367). This they were, however, not only because they were »the founders of British idealism« (ibid.), but because they kept abreast with the most avantgarde tendencies of though of their own time.
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referring not only to the intermittent emergence of explicitly Neoplatonic stretches of thought, but also to their specific, at times extravagant qualities and the fact that they hardly ever appear without commixture of other elements. In a sense, Browne is a test case, at any rate a limiting case, for my project, as he is perhaps the writer who dares to move furthest into neighbouring and at times remote worlds of thought; indeed, it could be disputed whether it is fair to refer to him as a Neoplatonist at all, as he experiments with being so many things. But it is not my aim to attach a label to him,15 least of all an exclusive one. It is precisely the degree and kind of commixture as well as the functions assumed by the Neoplatonic elements in the process, which appear important in the present context. However, I would insist on calling Browne a Neoplatonic writer. For, as I shall attempt to show in my readings of Religio Medici, Urn-Buriall, and The Garden of Cyrus, his Neoplatonism consists less in explicit proclamations (although these do occur more plentifully than has hitherto been realised) than in the literary implications, the overall strategies and structures of his prose. It constitutes the characteristic mode by which he »unites the incompatible distances« (RM I. 34, 33) in various manners – assimilative, paradoxical, and paraleptic.
The Dynamics of Assimilation in Religio Medici The title page of Religio Medici carried an engraving by William Marshall which strikingly contrasts with the irenic temper and the impression of an equanimous disposition the writer of the treatise sought to convey. It shows a dramatic scene: a man is falling headlong into the sea, perhaps from the pinnacle of the steep and craggy rock which occupies almost all of the left half of the picture; he is arrested in mid-fall by an arm issuing from the clouds. He exclaims »à cælo salus«, but the arm not in the grip of the heavenly hand still follows the downward momentum of his body, dangling in the direction of the depths and pointing towards the waves that rage against the foot of the rock and appear about to engulf him, his shadow already falling on the water. Considered more closely, the engraving is marked by an ambiguity which also characterises the text that follows. Least surprising is the falling man's exclamation. Few would have openly disputed that salvation comes from heaven, and the pictorial realisation of this pious motto would (with its possible allusion to the manner of delivery praised in Ps 18. 16)16 have pleased many. Iconographically, however, the engraving closely resembles _____________ 15 Let alone one which has been applied before, if in a different manner. The case for considering Browne a Platonist has probably been made most strongly by Nathanson (1967); more recently, and with a shift towards ethical considerations, in Nathanson (1982). 16 The engraver, like the psalmist, presents God as intervening from heaven and as rescuing the speaker from mortal dangers imagined as floods of water: »He sent from above, he took me, he drew me out of many waters.«
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contemporary emblems of Icarus tumbling head over heels after having soared too high.17 Also, the presence of the rock seems to suggest that the man bears some responsibility for his fall, having by the foolhardy ascension of its peak caused his own jeopardy. And although he does not wear feathered wings but only a vaguely wing-like, voluminous garment billowing about his legs and shoulders, the image further seems to indicate a connection with a potentially hubristic striving for knowledge and a technical achievement too high for humanity. The would-be flyer is about to fall, the sole of his foot still touching the rock; he is caught in this awkward position and held suspended, his predicament together with the grateful acknowledgement of his relief and its source displayed for all to see and wonder at. The equally ambivalent responses this engraving calls forth hover between pious contentment and admiration, both for the man's boldness and his naive trust. The strongest effects are caused by the vertiginous verticality of the rock, which corresponds to the disposition of the inverted body's limbs in flailing movement, whose outlines yet appear parallel to the oversized heavenly arm. Although Browne's text lacks the violent drama depicted in Marshall's engraving, it does at times evoke similar feelings of a vertiginous suspense in mid-air, with the enquiring spirit (having soared high and brought himself in a position about to topple) being saved from impact only by a hair's breadth. It seems to follow a similarly double impulse of scientific questioning and affirmation of religious truth. It also moves vertically, scaling metaphysical heights, but pursuing reason only to surrender it in the eponymous »oh altitudo« (cf. I. 9, 9).18 It combines a sense of experiment, of venturing into the open, with spiritual con-fidence and a sense of safety. It is the enterprise of a single speaker, who insists on his singularity as well as on his right to error and self-correction. And it raises similar questions, although in a less spectacular manner. True, Browne's speaker never knowingly oversteps the limits of orthodoxy, but he is very much aware of the possibilities of transgression. Also, his protagonist self19 in Religio Medici proudly announces his amphibious nature, but like the figure depicted in the engraving appears unwilling actually to change his element, feeling neither at home in the air nor desirous of entering the waters. Thus, we might finally ask to what extent the pattern implied by the frontispiece scene also structures the text following it: Are we in for a demonstration of faith coming to the rescue where _____________ 17 Cf. the examples printed in Henkel/Schöne (1978), 1616–1617. There may be a sense here, too, of the Neoplatonic tolma, the presumptious over-boldness of the soul which leads to its ›fall‹ (see also above, 2.2). 18 For a qualification of the notion of a surrender of reason see below. 19 In what follows, this is what »Browne« refers to: the ›I‹ of the text as its speaking voice at any given moment, with no assumptions made about its relationship to Dr. Browne of Norwich or Sir Thomas Browne, Knight. Although this voice appears to be fairly close to the implied author, it should not be taken to suggest a great deal of ideological consistency beyond the respective argument, but neither is it meant to indicate a mere persona.
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reason overreaches itself?20 Is this the function of Browne's metaphysics – to intervene »à cælo« when his scientific impulses founder? Without straining the analogy, I should like to suggest that in reading Browne's text we do often find ourselves poised between the worlds, uncomfortably neither here nor there, neither quite ready to follow the reasoning outlined nor to assent emphatically to the metaphysical truths offered. I would argue, however, that this potentially skeptical moment of assent withheld and judgment reserved is repeatedly overridden by a stronger impulse, namely the wish to unify. More than anything, Browne's speaker wants to reconcile what appears contradictory, the more so the stronger the opposed elements seem to pull in different directions. What makes his discourse so entertaining as well as irritating, what engages while it may enervate the reader, is its habit of self-deconstruction. Its rhetoric and its semantics are continually at odds. What it announces is seldom what it does – but knowingly so, for to bridge the gap between world and words, indeed, between different worlds of words inhabited by individuals bound to differ in their views, is its declared aim: I could never divide my selfe from any man upon the difference of an opinion, or be angry with his judgement for not agreeing with mee in that, from which perhaps within a few dayes I should dissent my selfe […] (RM I. 6, 6)
This is precisely what makes Browne's discourse in Religio Medici such a slippery slope: his textual persona announces the intention to present and justify himself as a religious believer, despite the ill opinion associated with his medical profession.21 Yet as he sets out to do just that, to outline his individuality and the _____________ 20 This is Fish's view, who sees Browne repeatedly arranging discursive situations in which reason is failing and religion stepping in: »Browne's commitment to the devaluing of rational thought and the subsequent exaltation of knowledge through faith is evident on every page […]« (Fish [1974], 353). He takes Browne to task for maneouvering the reader into a position where »his reason is exercised (and teased) to the point where its insufficiency becomes self-evident, and ratiocination gives way to faith professing assertion […]« (ibid.), thus rendering the intellectual exertions his argument demands and seemed to value spurious, at any rate second-best. 21 The commonplace which provides the foil against which Browne tries to fashion himself, that a physician can only be an atheist, opens up an interesting double line of speculation with respect to his philosophical self-positioning. On the one hand, Sextus Empiricus, the founding father of Early Modern Skepticism with his Outline of Pyrrhonism, was commonly assumed to have been a physician, and he likes to adopt a ›therapeutic‹ stance in his text. (On Sextus as a doctor as well as on »therapeutic argument« more generally see also Nussbaum [1994], 295). Coleridge glosses RM I. 1 accordingly: »The origin of this scandal, which in nine cases out of ten is the honor of the medical Profession, may perhaps be found in the fact, that Ænesidemus and Sextus Empiricus, Sceptics, were both Physicians — about the close of the second Century.« (Marginalia I, 781). Hence, as Browne distances himself from an all-too-easy Pyrrhonism, he may be seen thereby to try and avoid the standard suspicion of atheism adhering to his profession. On the other hand, however, his text might also be seen to counter the cliché in yet another, bolder, if less
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specifics of his mind-set including his singularity and a few oddities; as he proceeds »to difference my self neerer, & draw into a lesser circle« (I. 5, 5), he also explains that this difference arises not only from his constitutional inability to break with others over points of religious dissent, but that it actually consists in various types of unity, in belonging to wider circles (Christianity, the Reformed Churches, Anglicanism), in being part of larger wholes, in being comprehended and not divided. Repeatedly, we begin with a particularising and individualising gesture only to slide – not always in a straight line – towards types of community and connectedness. As for instance in Section 6, the speaker fashions himself as civilly tolerant, conscious of the instability of his own convictions. He follows this by a heterogeneous series of reasons for not participating in religious disputes22 and alights on the topos that »Every man is not a proper Champion for Truth« (I. 6, 6), briefly dwelling on its allegorical implications.23 That one can be right and still be defeated, however, leads to a further, surprising slippage, which gathers momentum towards a quietist determination to stop worrying about truth altogether: »If therefore there rise any doubts in my way, I doe forget them […]«. We have moved from the consideration of ways of coping with dissent in religious matters via some consequences of ›possessing‹ truth to its opposite, doubts, and – in the final close of the same period – even to »the subtilties of errour«. From a glimpse of a Pyrrhonist refusal to bother about truth at all, we swerve towards a comforting reliance on future reasonable insight, only to be _____________ obvious, manner through the way it is structured: RM is divided asymmetrically into a longer and more clearly autobiographical first part and a shorter, more discursive second one, circling the themes of friendship and charity. This could be taken to imply a modelling upon a famous example, namely that of St. Augustine's Confessiones. These also fall into a personal and unmistakeably autobiographical part with exhortative elements, containing a narrative of the author's life (Books I–X) and a shorter, more impersonal and contemplative second part, which foregrounds more general theological, philosophical, and scriptural meditations (XI–XIII) and focusses on the virtuous life, not least on caritas. Although Browne's text, of course, lacks a spectacular conversion, such a subliminally Augustinian (and by implication, Neoplatonist) structuring of his ›confessional‹ discourse would also go well with the critical (if, in the end, rather apologetic) discussion of his former ›heresies‹. The transformative presence of Augustinian thinking will occupy us again in connection with Traherne (see ch. 3. 3 below). 22 Which might be paraphrased as follows: I have no talent for religious dispute anyway. Also, it is not wise to engage in them, for you might be defeated. In addition, the good cause is bound to suffer if not defended suitably. On the other hand, religious contests can be seen to serve different purposes according to the type of our opponent: if we fight with those »above our selves« (presumably because they are better theologians; or: better disputants?), we shall improve our own knowledge in these matters; if we fight with our inferiors, we do so in order to confirm the opinions we held before. Does this kind of »temperate dispute« (RM I. 5, 6) therefore seem acceptable, if not downright useful (albeit for secondary reasons)? 23 »A man may be in as just possession of Truth as of a City, and yet bee forced to surrender« (RM I. 6, 6).
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brought up rather sharply against the model of a clearcut division of attitudes in philosophy and in divinity: In Philosophy where truth seemes double-faced, there is no man more paradoxicall then my self; but in Divinity I love to keepe the road, and though not in an implicite, yet an humble faith, follow the great wheele of the Church, by which I move, not reserving any proper poles or motion from the epicycle of my own braine; […] (RM I. 6, 7)
This amounts to little less than a renunciation of reason in matters of religion. Also, this stance appears to be immediately abandoned as we are propelled towards a consideration of the heresies the speaker has entertained in the past but, thanks to increased understanding and spiritual growth, abandoned. But these, he hastens to assure us, were really rather »Errors, and single Lapses of my understanding« (I. 7, 8) than heresies proper (which would, he avers, presuppose »a joynt depravity of my will«). As such they, like the opinions that took their place, were quite common; indeed, they were nothing but submerged ideas formerly (or in other cultures) shared by others – by »the Arabians«, by Origen, by Roman Catholics – and which had quasi-metempsychotically24 taken their temporary abode in the mind of Browne's former self. Section 7 lists these, not without expounding their respective plausibility and thus giving evidence of their »communicable nature« (I. 7, 8), to return, in Section 8, in the course of a consideration of the dangers of schism attendant on heresies, to the issue of singularity versus community and separation versus participation, which had set the whole slippage in motion: […] for heads that are disposed unto Schisme and complexionally propense to innovation, are naturally indisposed for a community, nor will ever be confined unto the order or œconomy of one body; […] nor contented with a generall breach or dichotomie with their Church, do subdivide and mince themselves almost into Atomes. (RM I. 8, 9)
This atomisation seems to be the most troubling consequence25 of the individuated reason which lets itself be caught in »the circle of an heresie« (ibid.) instead of moving with »the great wheele of the Church«. But its consideration leads not _____________ 24 »[…] as though there were a Metempsuchosis, and the soule of one man passed into another, opinions doe finde after certaine revolutions, men and mindes like those that first begat them.« (RM I. 6, 7). 25 Browne inveighs again, with (for him, untypical) scatological truculence, against »Atoms in Divinity«, which, regarded in isolation and out of context, amount to nothing but »a bundle of curiosities, not onely in Philosophy but in Divinity, proposed and discussed by men of most supposed abilities, which indeed are not worthy our vacant houres, much lesse our serious studies; Pieces only fit to be placed in Pantagruels Library, or bound up with Tartaretus de modo Cacandi.« (RM I. 21, 22).
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only to yet another sideways gesture in a small looping in which, far from being expelled from religious dispute, »honest reason« asserts its right to play in the space of indeterminacy left by the definitions of »the Schooles«.26 It also lands us in what sounds like yet another disclaimer of reason in favour of faith. This is probably the most famous passage of Religio Medici – and it leaves us suspended in a position where the exclamation »à cælo salus« might spring readily to our lips: As for those wingy mysteries in Divinity, and ayery subtilties in Religion, which have unhindg'd the braines of better heads, they never stretched the Pia Mater of mine; me thinkes there be not impossibilities enough in Religion for an active faith; the deepest mysteries ours containes, have not only been illustrated, but maintained by syllogisme, and the rule of reason: I love to lose my selfe in a mystery to pursue my reason to an oh altitudo. 'Tis my solitary recreation to pose my apprehension with those involved ænigma's and riddles of the Trinity, with Incarnation and Resurrection. I can answer all the objections of Satan, and my rebellious reason, with that odde resolution I learned of Tertullian, Certum est quia impossibile est. I desire to exercise my faith in the difficultest points, for to credit ordinary and visible objects is not faith, but perswasion. (RM I. 9, 9).
The vertiginous tumble is abruptly redefined as an ascent. Or have we simply been jerked back to the heights from which we threatened to lapse towards the lower circles of heresy? Browne's »oh altitudo« alludes to the Vulgate version of Romans 11. 33,27 a verse that praises the magnitude of God's mercy and the inscrutability of his ways. The exclamation, however, marks the culminating point of a theological argument concerned less with human reason and its limits than with election and grace and above all with the inclusiveness of God's plans of salvation for both Jews and Gentiles. And it is here, obliquely and mediated through one of the most highly charged biblical topoi, that the figure on the frontispiece of Religio Medici makes its reappearance – as a highly ambivalent version of Icarus, with a whole train of contradictory associations. For it is only a few verses before the passage alluded to that we encounter another potent phrase, whose history of interpretation, as Carlo Ginzburg has shown,28 contributed massively to the formation of a complex anti-rational, anti-scientific commonplace as well as to the irritating metaphorical topology connected with knowledge allegedly too high or too deep _____________ 26 Not without the insinuation, which runs counter to the ostentatious modesty of »honest reason«, that such intelligence might actually belong to one of the »men of singular parts and humors«, whose seeming eccentricity only masks their superior giftedness (RM I. 8, 9). 27 »O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! how unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out!« (O altitudo divitiarum sapientiae et scientiae Dei, quam incomprehensibilia sunt iudicia eius et investigabiles viae eius!). 28 Ginzburg (1976), 28–41.
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for those in search of it: noli altum sapere, sed time (Rom 11. 20). Contrary to its original intention, and in a misunderstanding of the Vulgate which persisted for centuries, St. Paul's warning against spiritual pride – »Be not highminded, but fear« (because God's generosity may be greater than yours) – was interpreted as prohibition addressed to those tempted by curiositas and the undue desire to know.29 It was only towards the end of the seventeenth century that the protagonists of the New Science began to invert the prohibitive topos, self-confidently transforming it into the encouraging sapere aude and elevating it to a motto of their ambitions and their experimental research.30 Until then, the verse had for a long time been utilised in the interests of various parties, with readings oscillating between the extremes of simple anti-intellectualism (not only on the part of the Church) and Arminian exhortations towards lenience and religious toleration in opposition to extreme predestinarianism, in their debates with the stricter sort of Calvinists at the synod of Dordrecht.31 Interestingly, both sides liked to make their positions more effective medially by employing Icarus-emblems with the corresponding textual elements. It is precisely this ambiguous potential of the biblical topos with its antagonistic implications as part of a still unresolved controversy over the status of scientific as well as metaphysical knowledge which Browne seems to evoke and bring into play in Religio Medici. Both the figure (with or without wings) toppling from the heights and the allusion to the verticality of knowledge and its pursuit in his oh altitudo may convey a sense of (possibly illicit) fascination together with a warning of it, a skeptical reserve towards hidden truths as well as the desire to scale the summits of divine wisdom, the ambitious wish to rise to flights of inspiration or delve into possibly arcane depths of insight. Browne's text, too, wavers and at the same time tries to mediate between the poles of overboldness and restraint, fearlessness and reverence, presumption and a _____________ 29 »[…] St. Paul's condemnation of moral pride became a warning against intellectual curiosity.« (Ginzburg [1976], 28–29). 30 Cf. ibid., 41: sapere aude was the motto chosen by Gassendi; the vignette prefacing Anton van Leeuwenhoek's Epistolae ad Societatem Regiam Anglicam (Leiden 1719) bore the motto Dum audes, Ardua Vinces (ibid. plate 8). 31 Ginzburg demonstrates this in an analysis of the Icarus motif in emblems by Florentius Schoonhovius (ibid., 38–41). To a pictura showing the falling Icarus, Schoonhovius adds the motto Altum sapere periculosum (ibid., plate 6), but frames the portrait of himself with sapere aude (plate 7), adding emblems proclaiming nosce te ipsum and sapiens supra fortunam. Schoonhovius' Emblemata were first published at Gouda in 1618, later at Leiden (1626) and Amsterdam (1635-48). Browne had studied in Leiden in the early 1630s, and in his Pseudodoxia Epidemica he still praises the theology of the rationalist Arminian Hugo Grotius (PE I. 7, 49). Like his contemporaries, Browne would have been aware of the controversies negotiated at the synod of Dordrecht and surrounding it. It seems worthwhile to point out that for instance the debate about double predestination continues to function as a self-evident background to Andrew Marvell's polemic Remarks Upon a Late Disingenuous Discourse […] of 1678 (The Prose Works of Andrew Marvell, vol. 2, 381– 482). Cf. also Colie's study of Arminianism in relation to the Cambridge Platonists (1957).
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conforming obtuseness which risks missing the best. He attempts somehow to encompass both, suspended and balancing between the extremes of skeptical epoché and Neoplatonic enthusiasm, much like the figure in mid-air at the moment of rescue. But we can be a little more precise at this point and against this background. It was Francis Bacon who had given the Oh-altitudo-topos an additional antirational spin, or rather, who used it in an attempt to curtail the use of speculative reason in theology, arguing that theologians must be content with partial knowledge, for theirs can never be a systematic »Art«, aiming at totality, hence »round and uniforme: But in Diuinitie manie things must bee left abrupt and concluded with this: O altitudo Sapientiæ & scientiæ Dei, quam incomprehensibilia sunt Iudicia eius, & non inuestigabiles viæ eius?«32 Unlike Bacon, Browne is not interested in putting divinity in its place; neither is he making an irrationalist or anti-rational point. There may still be a trace of fascination with the comprehensiveness of God's grace, which provides the tenor of the biblical original. But above all Browne's passage seems to aim at making reason and faith indistinguishable by presenting both at their most heroic. Hence, his speaker does not feel compelled to abandon one for the sake of the other, on the contrary: it is »mysteries« and »impossibilities« which provoke both reason and faith to their heighest achievements. He does not claim never to have worried about »ayery subtilties in Religion«, but asserts that he has never felt daunted by the intellectual challenge they pose, since reason and logic actively support them as mysteries. The ecstatic moment he takes so much pleasure in does not consist in a loss of reason, but in a forgetfulness of self. Transcendence does not demand that reason be left behind, but comprehends it in the movement beyond. It is after all reason that leads up to the point of Tertullian's paradoxical certitude, provided we »pursue« it far enough, indeed, to excess. For a moment, Browne's text balances playfully on the peak of a strong, non-dualistic, indeed Neoplatonic concept of reason as intellect (nous), neither reductively opposed to intuition or spiritual insight, nor, on the other hand, to sense-supported apprehension, but reconcilable with both.33 _____________ 32 The Advancement of Learning, ed. Kiernan, 187 (cf. Bacon, The Advancement of Learning and 1ew Atlantis, ed. Johnston, 206). Patrides points out the parallel in his edition of Browne, The Major Works, 69, without commenting on Bacon's rather obvious polemical intention. Bacon is openly concerned with pointing out »The true limits and vse of reason in spirituall things«, warning theologians above all not »to search and mine into that which is not reuealed« if they do not wish to fall into the errors of »scholasticall diuinitie; whereby diuinity hath bin reduced into an Art«, which aims at »a summarie breuitie, a compacted strength, and a compleate perfection; whereof the two first they faile to finde, and the last they ought not to seeke« (The Advancement of Learning, ed. Kiernan, 184, 186). 33 Admittedly, even in this short passage, there is some wavering and a tendency to topple into dualistic models, with »rebellious reason« again opposed to the impossible demands of faith. The falconry image in the following section returns to the more complex idea of a possible reconciliation of both – »[…] and thus I teach my haggard and unreclaimed
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In an assimilative textual movement tending to blur differences while seeming to posit them, Browne's »oh altitudo« thus evokes, and to some extent enacts, a collapse of oppositions. The antagonism of reason and faith is set up in order to be resolved, but not at the expense of either one or the other. What is at issue is not »the devaluing of rational thought«,34 but the erosion of barriers between the rational and the spiritual (which Bacon had tried to reinforce). »A man's Reason« – Browne might have agreed with Benjamin Whichcote – »is no where so much satisfied; as in matters of Faith.«35 In fact, the Cambridge Platonists never tired of stressing the consonance of faith and reason, equating rational with spiritual, with the human intellect as »the first Participation from God«,36 hence capable of leading us to the highest and enabling us to undertake the ascent.37 In Religio Medici this is not, it must be admitted, a systematic resolution as in the teachings of the Neoplatonic theologians. It is mimetic and experiential rather than analytic or argumentative. Still, as the description of the erratic and contingent movement which led up to it has shown, it is much more haphazard than the forgone conclusion of the pseudo-drama Stanley Fish saw staged in Browne's text.38 If Browne makes us experience the impotence of reason, or rather: its _____________
34 35 36 37
38
reason to stoope unto the lure of faith« (RM I. 10, 10) –, albeit with the verticality of the »oh altitudo« inverted, reason not leading up towards but swooping down to the point of ultimate attraction. Fish (1974), 351. No. 943 of Whichcote's »Moral and Religious Aphorisms«, in: The Cambridge Platonists, ed. Patrides, 334. Cf. also aphorisms no. 76, 99, 109, 457, 460, 644, 880, 889. No. 460, ibid., 331. In Whichcote's version of their favourite biblical-Neoplatonic metaphor: »The Spirit of a Man is the Candle of the Lord; Lighted by God, and Lighting us to God. Res illuminata, illuminans.« (no. 916, ibid., 334). For the Neoplatonic theology of Whichcote and his school, rationality is the fundamental, God-given humanum, as he stresses with a note of resentment against the Baconian position: »They have a Reason for it, which the Apostle had not; who reject the Use of Reason in matters of Religion: but we must be Men, before we can be Christians.« (no. 997, ibid., 335). The light of reason is, as Whichcote elaborates in his sermons, the »Principle of God within« us: »All Understandings seek after God, and have a Sense and Feeling of God. If Reason did not apprehend God; Religion could not be learn'd: For there would be nothing in Nature to graft it on.« (»The Use of Reason in Matters of Religion«, ibid., 46, 47). It is therefore inconceivable that faith should somehow be beyond or even contradictory to reason: »What is contrary to the Order of Reason, is contrary to the State of Nature, in Intellectuals.« (ibid., 49). Similar arguments, explicitly supported with numerous references to Plotinus, in John Smith, »The True Way or Method of Attaining to Divine Knowledge«, ibid., 128–144. This is of course also the tenor of Willey's chapter on »Rational Theology« (1934), 123–154. »In short, an ›O altitudo,‹ in the course of which the rational intellect is allowed to play itself out before rushing to embrace what Browne holds to be the ›fundamental point of Religion, the Unity of God (I, 26).‹« (Fish [1974], 358). Fish is annoyed at what he feels to be a disingenuous arrangement of counters in a game masterminded by Browne and tending repeatedly and solely to a display of his artistic brilliance. To my mind, the direction Browne's discourse is going to take at any point is less certain and calculable than that (and in this sense more ›essayistic‹). More importantly, while I totally agree with the
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coincidence with faith, this does not appear as sleight of hand or as part of a strategic juggling of implications. It seems precarious and, more often than not, transitory. In his text, transcendence happens – inconsistently and often surprisingly, after we thought that we had reached a safe, usually topical, plateau. We may feel exasperated at Browne's manner, but should not feel tricked or cheated, because there is no duplicity. It his his declared intention »to compose those fewds and angry dissentions between affection, faith, and reason« in his own soul (RM I. 19, 19). Also, he protests repeatedly, he speaks only for himself. At the same time – and this may be seen as yet another aspect of the assimilative energy which moves the speaker in Religio Medici – it is part of his selffashioning as unmistakeable, even idiosyncratic, personality. Tertullian's resolution may be »odde«, but like numerous other oddities, it belongs to the one and integral self the text is engaged in projecting. And it appears significant that, although this may be a feature conspicuous in a member of the medical profession, it is by no means singular. It does not isolate Browne or separate him from others, but places him at least on the margins of, and at times squarely within, a tradition of Neoplatonic thinking about to reestablish itself in England. In making his very personal case for a rational spirituality, this speaker is a member of another ›invisible college‹, still strongly attached to a holistic and monistic idea of truth and working against the dissociation and reduction not only of sensibility but of rationality,39 which has come to constitute part of modernity. This multi-levelled drive towards unification, integration and assimilation of the diverse and seemingly contradictory is realised on the structural as well as on the thematic levels of Browne's text. A cursory listing of these themes as they surface in Browne's text will have to suffice, although – as with the »oh altitudo« – they form part of a coherent discursive movement, elements in a tightly knit textual fabric from which they can only be separated at the cost of distorting and to some extent unravelling the whole. In the preceding paragraphs I have tried to describe the patterns of only a short stretch. In itself, this movement of quasitextile, lateral linkage, creates a dense and inclusive network of ideas (embroidered in unexpected places), and constitutes an important dimension of Browne's argument in which ›either/or‹ tends to become ›both/and‹. In this dynamic and connective movement, enmeshing and incorporating the contradictory as well as the eccentric, Neoplatonisms are not just purple patches, but rather self-descriptive explications, inset replicas or spellings-out of the principles of patterning. They are, it should be added, nearly all topoi, well-worn commonplaces of hermetic and/or Christian Neoplatonic thinking. But they derive their peculiar _____________ results of Fish's analysis – that conceptual divisions tend to be overruled and placed »in the service of a cosmic reconciliation« (361) and that distinctions are made mainly in order to be transcended (cf. 360) –, I find this not a ground for irritation but evidence of a typically Neoplatonic impulse, which does, it is true, carry both metaphysical implications and the autoreferential, aesthetic ones which so incense Fish. 39 For Browne as a protagonist of non-reductive rationality cf. also Mulder (1969), 54–62, 101, and Patrides' introduction to his Sir Thomas Browne. The Major Works.
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originality from they way they are embedded in the metonymic logic of a text in which juxtaposition comes to signify mutual and universal comprehension. It seems particularly fitting that the next topical formula Browne offers for understanding a divine mystery, as he follows the strain of his deliberations about human reason, should be a Neoplatonic classic: »That allegoricall description of Hermes,« glossed in the margin as »Sphæra, cujus centrum ubique, circumferentia nullibi.« (RM I. 10, 10). As metaphor for the omnipresence of God, the hermetic commonplace of the sphere whose centre is everywhere, whose circumference nowhere,40 appears as adequate continuation of the line of thought begun in the preceding sections, for it transcends not only reason but also imagination.41 It once again stresses Browne's predilection for the circular, and it aptly suggests completeness, absolute perfection, and total comprehensiveness while evoking connotations of ancient wisdom hallowed by tradition, slightly esoteric but not offensively so. – Eternity, predestination, and the trinity are added as further instances of the ineffable, which, as they challenge reason as well as faith, also serve the speaker as devotional »recreations« (RM I. 9, 9; cf. 13, 12). They lead to brief and turbulent flights of speculative fancy which in turn give rise to a further confession of Platonic hermeticism: The severe Schooles shall never laugh me out of the Philosophy of Hermes, that this visible world is but a picture of the invisible, wherein as in a pourtract, things are not truely, but in equivocall shapes; and as they counterfeit some more reall substance in that invisible fabrick. (RM I. 12, 12)
If, however, nature is really a repository of signs for the divine, of figurations, or rather: dissimulations of the invisible, which baffle our cognitive faculties, the wisdom we need is one which helps us to decipher and decrypt these signatures – »to trace and discover those expressions hee hath left in his creatures« (RM I. 13, 13); in brief: to »read« God's works.42 What is required of us is an attitude which _____________ 40 Browne attributes it to Hermes Trismegistus, also in Christian Morals (Part III., Sect. ii, Religio Medici and Other Works, ed. Martin, 229). In his commentary, Martin (ibid., 291) lists the major authorities by whom it has been used: with anticipations in Dionysius Areopagita (whose complete works Browne owned) and later in Alain de Lille, it occurs in the second of the 24 definitions of God contained in the strongly Neoplatonic twelfthcentury Liber viginti quattuor philosophorum (ascribed to Hermes). It resonates in Nicolaus of Cusa (De docta ignorantia I. 12 and II. 11; De ludo globi II. 84 and 69ff), in Ficino (Theologia Platonica XVIII. 3) and many other Renaissance authors. For the Neoplatonic uses of circularity see also ch. 2 above. 41 Although Browne claims that this »easie and Platonick description« pleases him especially because it affords a way of ›humouring his fancy‹ (cf. RM I. 10, 10). 42 The poem inserted in Section 13 not only contains the relevant formula (»thy workes to read«), but seems in the vertical topography of its central passage once again to allude to the Icarus commonplace which provided the material for the frontispiece engraving: »Teach my endeavours so thy workes to read, | That learning them, in thee I may proceed. | Give thou my reason that instructive flight, | Whose weary wings may on thy hands still
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combines contemplation and study in »a devout and learned admiration« and which in a spirit of »judicious enquiry« (ibid.) attends to the truths and wonders inscribed in the Book of Nature. Browne expands the topos of the »two bookes« of God, especially that of the second, authored by »his servant Nature, that universall and publik Manuscript, that lies expans'd unto the eyes of all« in Section 16, persisting in the assimilative gesture we are by now familiar with. Thus, the commonplace acquires a Platonic colouring by an extra emphasis placed on the all-embracing beauty of creation,43 nature being perfected by its maker and admitting no genuine deformity,44 so that the distinction between art and nature finally collapses – Now nature is not at variance with art, nor art with nature; they being both the servants of his providence: Art is the perfection of Nature: […] In briefe, all things are artificiall, for nature is the Art of God. (RM I. 16, 16)
But as the speaker does not fail to point out, this insight into the »finall cause« is also a result of his own intellectual effort and reasonable inquiry, indeed »a sweeter piece of reason, and a diviner point of Philosophy« (RM I. 14, 14), which once again blurs the difference between divinity and philosophy. In fact this anticipates a point which will later be made explicit and which, in a continuation of this vein, presents the rational observation of natural phenomena – in this case itself an example of metamorphosis – as a means to attaining a ›reasonable‹ understanding of the resurrection, hence as a catalyzing medium capable of transforming ›mere‹ philosophy into theology: »Those strange and mysticall transmigrations that I have observed in Silkewormes, turn'd my Philosophy into Divinity.« (RM I. 39, 38). And this is accompanied by yet another collapse of oppositions – that of outer and inner worlds, of self and nature. The unifying drift of Browne's text makes the contemplation of the wonders of nature part of his speaker's »Cosmography of my selfe«, in a gesture strongly reminiscent of Montaigne:
_____________ light. | Teach me to soare aloft, yet ever so, | When neare the Sunne, to stoope againe below. | Thus shall my humble feathers safely hover, | And though neere earth, more then the heavens discover.« (RM I. 13, 13). 43 Anticipated in Section 14: »This is the cause I grope after in the workes of nature, on this hangs the providence of God; to raise so beauteous a structure, as the world and the creatures thereof, was but his Art, but their sundry and divided operations with their predestinated ends, are from the treasury of his wisedome.« (RM I. 14, 14). 44 »I hold there is a generall beauty in the works of God, and therefore no deformity in any kind or species of creature whatsoever: […] there is no deformity but in monstrosity, wherein notwithstanding there is a kind of beauty, Nature so ingeniously contriving the irregular parts, as they become sometimes more remarkable than the principall Fabrick.« (RM I. 16, 16).
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[…] wee carry with us the wonders, we seeke without us: There is all Africa, and her prodigies in us; we are that bold and adventurous piece of nature, which he that studies wisely learnes in a compendium, what others labour at in a divided piece and endlesse volume. (RM I. 15, 15)
There seems to be no opposition which this discourse is incapable of reconciling, no antagonism or psychomachia which it will not assuage or pacify, no contradiction which it will not somehow accommodate, be it between »providence« and »fortune« (Sections 17 and 18), among »affection, faith, and reason« (Section 19),45 or between Christian theology and Hellenistic philosophies conventionally charged with atheism, such as the doctrines of Epicurus or the Stoics (Section 20). The incredible as well as the merely curious, the miraculous and the magic, Jews and Muslims, differences in times, ceremonies, and cultures – all are brought into the fold in the course of the next sections (21–31). We are made to feel that as far as matters of religion are concerned, division, friction or doubt, points of conflict or resistance, »irregularities, contradictions, and antinomies« (RM I. 21, 21) are there to be overcome; mere »niceties« (RM I. 22, 22), which must not be allowed to detract from a concordance greater than all these.46 This text, which appears in many respects excruciatingly centrifugal, is really engaged in a circling,47 recollecting and integrating movement which tries to round up even the last straggler. Not surprisingly, the unifying impulse also colours Browne's thinking about last things – about death, resurrection, body and soul, heaven and hell. Here, too, the dominant perspective is Neoplatonic. Browne lays the foundations for his eschatology by considering the possibility of there being a world-soul, a divine spirit inhabiting and connecting the individual souls to a common source, an allembracing, transcendent identity from which they spring and to which they aspire to return: _____________ 45 Cf. also RM II. 7, 64: »Let mee be nothing if within the compasse of my selfe, I doe not find the battell of Lepanto, passion against reason, reason against faith, faith against the Devill, and my conscience against all.« Here, too, the conflict in the individual soul is claimed to be contained within a greater concord, due, it seems, to a paradoxical balance of powers: »It is no breach of charity to our selves to be at variance with our vices […]; wherein wee doe but imitate our great selves the world, whose divided Antipathies and contrary faces doe yet carry a charitable regard unto the whole, by their particular discords preserving the common harmony, and keeping in fetters those powers, whose rebellions once Masters, might bee the ruine of all.« (RM II. 7, 65). 46 That this is possible – conceivable precisely in the transcendence of all conceptions – is affirmed in yet another version of the »oh altitudo«: »Wee doe too narrowly define the power of God, restraining it to our capacities. I hold that God can doe all things, how he should work contradictions I do not understand, yet dare not therefore deny.« (RM I. 27, 28). 47 The circle is of course not only his characteristic figure of thought, but also one of Browne's favourite metaphors, as Lambert has pointed out (2005), 364-379. For her, however, Browne's circularity is above all evidence of an egocentric subjectivity.
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Now besides these particular and divided Spirits, there may be (for ought I know) an universall and common Spirit to the whole world. It was the opinion of Plato, and it is yet of the Hermeticall Philosophers; if there be a common nature that unites and tyes the scattered and divided individuals into one species, why may there not bee one that unites them all? However, I am sure there is a common Spirit that playes within us, yet makes no part of us, and that is the Spirit of God, the fire and scintillation of that noble and mighty Essence, which is the life and radicall heat of spirits […] (RM I. 32, 31)
World-soul, nous, and Holy Spirit are conflated in this conception of a unifying energy, which upholds the scale of creatures including spirits, angels, and human beings and which determines different degrees as well as makes possible communications and transitions between them. The »amphibious« nature of man, bracketing as it does »a corporall and spirituall essence«, provides only one of the most spectacular examples for the permeability of visible and invisible worlds,48 from the life of minerals to the life of spirits (cf. RM I. 34, 33). However, here as elsewhere, the line of argument is not pursued systematically. Although the idea of a world-soul, or of an underlying sameness connecting all individuals might, in another writer, have served as an aid to explaining the resurrection in accordance with Neoplatonic orthodoxy, Browne lets himself be diverted by considerations of the physical aspects of death, arriving at questions (and answers) similar to those which were to occupy him again in Urne-Buriall. Central to these is the problem of the resurrection of the body as one of the crucial articles of Christian belief, part of the Apostolic Creed and affirmed by the catechism in the Book of Common Prayer. Posing the question, »How shall the dead arise«, to himself, Browne's speaker suggests (not without advertising it as »impossible by any solid or demonstrative reasons«) an answer which resorts to the figure of a recollection of the dispersed (RM I. 48, 45). He proposes a model of reunification resembling the Creation, only in reverse: I beleeve that our estranged and divided ashes shall unite againe, that our separated dust after so many pilgrimages and transformations into the parts of mineralls, Plants, Animals, Elements, shall at the voyce of God returne into their primitive shapes; and joyne againe to make up their primary and predestinate formes. As at the Creation, there was a separation of that confused masse into its species, so at the destruction
_____________ 48 The notion of the interpenetration of the material and the immaterial also opens the following section: »Now for that immateriall world, me thinkes wee need not wander so farre as the first moveable, for even in this materiall fabricke the spirits walke as freely exempt from the affection of time, place, and motion, as beyond the extreamest circumference: doe but extract from the corpulency of bodies, or resolve things beyond their first matter, and you discover the habitation of Angels, which if I call the ubiquitary, and omnipresent essence of God, I hope I shall not offend Divinity; for before the Creation of the world God was really all things.« (RM I. 35, 34).
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thereof there shall bee a separation into its distinct individuals. […] so at the last day, when these corrupted reliques shall be scattered in the wildernesse of formes, and seeme to have forgot their proper habits, God by a powerfull voyce shall command them backe into their proper shapes, and call them out by their single individuals: […] (RM I. 48, 45)
No world-soul inspires this reassembling of particles or guarantees their coherence; instead the restitution of individual oneness is compared to an equally amazing natural phenomenon: »I have often beheld as a miracle, that artificiall resurrection and revivification of Mercury, how being mortified into thousand shapes, it assumes againe its owne, and returns into its numericall selfe.« (RM I. 48, 46). But as it combines ›scientific‹ observation with alchemical anthropomorphism, Browne's Christian version of the final recollection of dispersed materiality in obedience to the voice of God and its mysterious retention of identity manages also to preserve a touch of »that mysticall Philosophy, from whence no true Scholler becomes an Atheist, but from the visible effects of nature, growes up a reall Divine« (I. 48, 46) – that is to say of hermeticist »Art«, at its best imitating that of God. The »sensible Artist« alluded to in the subsequent account of an incinerated plant resuscitated from its ashes appears to be combining the virtues of the experimental scientist with that of the alchemist, providing at the same time palpable evidence for the miraculous and justification for his own art.49 Thus, Browne's gesture draws into one suggestive orbit Christian, Neoplatonic, hermetic and scientific elements. The ensuing hybrid is held together, if precariously, by certain affinities between its contents. Even more than this, however, it is similarities of structure which finally leave us with an impression of subliminal consistency instead of heterogeneity, fragmentation and dispersal. What Religio Medici appears to be working towards by means of these recurring gestures of transcendence is unification as a ›seeing-in-one‹. Whether it is the attempt to explain the resurrection of the body as re-creation, or as a paradoxical restitution of individuality _____________ 49 »A plant or vegetable consumed to ashes, to a contemplative and schoole Philosopher seemes utterly destroyed, and the forme to have taken his leave for ever: But to a sensible Artist the formes are not perished, but withdrawne into their incombustible part, where they lie secure from the action of that devouring element. This is made good by experience, which can from the ashes of a plant revive the plant, and from its cinders recall it into its stalk and leaves againe. What the Art of man can doe in these inferiour pieces, what blasphemy is it to affirme the finger of God cannot doe in these more perfect and sensible structures?« (RM I. 48, 46). It is not clear who the »sensible Artist« is. The reference seems to be to accounts of an experiment mentioned by Browne's friend Dr. Henry Power in a letter to Browne of 10 Feb. 1647 (see the commentary in Religio Medici and Other Works, ed. Martin, 308). There, Power gives an account of this »noble […] piece of chymistry, viz., the re-individualling of an incinerated plant«, which provides »an ocular demonstration of our resurrection« and which is mentioned in »chymicall Tractates« by, among others, Quercetanus and Alsted (cf. also The Works of Sir Thomas Browne, vol. 4, ed. Keynes, 258).
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from its dispersal into antagonistic particles, or its submersion in a collectivity which at one point may appear spiritual, at the next material; or whether it is the Brownesque paraphrase of the creatio ex nihilo (cf. RM I. 35), or an idiosyncratic version of the topos of man as microcosm (cf. RM II. 10 and 11) – the text is concerned above all with resolving differences, reconciling oppositions and reducing them to underlying similitudes. Religio Medici, in all its diversity, is obsessed with oneness. What fascinates its speaker is the absolute unity of God, which absorbs and annihilates all differences; the oneness of pure, undistinguished being, the origin of everything, opposed to nothing.50 And he seems to be equally intrigued by personal identity, the individual oneness acquired by a self distinct from other selves and (as he hopes) regained together with bodily integrity at the resurrection of the dead. Browne's autobiographical enterprise, concerned as it is with the recognisable contours of this physician's mind and his religiosity, strives to embrace both individual and divine unity. It is probably true to observe, as Stanley Fish has done, that in this refusal to entertain antipathies, to be »averse« to anything (RM II. 1, 55), or to be torn apart by interior strife (»the corruption […] within me«, II. 10, 69), Browne »imitates his God«.51 However, the figure of thought employed in this is neither just one of individuation eliminated in favour of a larger, ultimately incomprehensible whole, nor is it automatically linked to a self-destruction of rationality.52 Rather, the relationship constructed by the text is one of different ontological rank, with divine identity prior to all – »for he onely is« (RM I. 35, 34) –, and human selfbeing dependent on it, unable to exist by itself: And to speake more narrowly, there is no such thing as solitude, nor any thing that can be said to be alone, and by it selfe, but God, who is his owne circle, and can subsist by himselfe, all others besides their dissimilary and Heterogeneous parts, which in a manner multiply there [sic] natures, cannot subsist without the concourse of God, and the society of that hand which doth uphold their natures. In briefe, there can be nothing truely alone, and by its self, which is not truely one, and such is onely God: All others transcend an unity, and so by consequence are many. (RM II. 10, 69)
If the task of being fully human consists in being as much as possible ›at one‹ and ›by oneself‹, not manifold and divided against oneself, this is indeed only to be achieved in the manner suggested and practised by Browne's text: by the double movement consisting in an effort to assimilate what is dissimilar or other and in _____________ 50 In the dizzying version offered in RM I. 35, 34–35: »Whatsoever is opposite to something or more exactly, that which is truely contrary unto God: for he onely is, all others have an existence with dependency and are something but by a distinction; and herein is Divinity conformant unto Philosophy, and generation not onely founded on contrarieties, but also creation; God being all things is contrary unto nothing out of which were made all things, and so nothing became something, and Omneity informed 1ullity into an essence.« 51 Fish (1974), 360, cf. 363. 52 Cf. ibid., 362 and passim.
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an imitation of the ideal oneness. This metaphysical movement will have to remain incomplete, as the ideal is cast as unattainable. But it is equally impossible to give up the attempt to approximate it, both because we are dependent on this highest unity for our very existence and because we are similar to it, made in »the Image of God« (RM II. 11, 70). In the abstract, this movement of inclusive conversion perceptibly conforms to a Christian-Neoplatonic pattern: The self is equipped for identification with the highest because it is related to it by way of an affinity with it (mediated by its intellect), but also through an innate talent for transcendence, which points it in the right direction. It is connected to the unity it aspires to metonymically as well as metaphorically, by participation – »There is surely a peece of Divinity in us« (ibid.) – as well as simulation – »I am the Image of God« (ibid.). And it is this sense of being at home not only in this, the present and visible world which provides Browne's speaker with his double vantage point both within and above, indeed beyond it: Men that look upon my outside, perusing onely my condition, and fortunes, do erre in my altitude; for I am above Atlas his shoulders. The earth is a point not onely in respect of the heavens above us, but of that heavenly and celestial part within us: that masse of flesh that circumscribes me, limits not my mind […]: whilst I study to finde how I am a Microcosme or little world, I finde my selfe something more than the great. (RM II. 11, 70)
Unsurprisingly, Browne finds his self »something more« also with respect to significant others as well as to the metaphysical spaces to be occupied after death. His favourite assimilative gesture of gathering the different into one is, in a meditation on friendship (RM II. 5 and 6), extended beyond the traditional conception of the friend as alter ego to the figure of a union of souls on a level with the trinity and Christ's union of human and divine natures.53 And even Heaven and Hell are, in his description, converted from »places« and »necessary Mansions« to be inhabited by »our restored selves« into a dimension of the self's interiority: Briefely therefore, where the soule hath the full measure, and complement of happinesse, where the boundlesse appetite of that spirit remaines compleatly satisfied, that it can neither desire addition nor alteration, that I thinke is truely Heaven: […] where-ever God will thus manifest himselfe, there is Heaven, though within the circle of this sensible world. Thus the soule of man may bee in Heaven any where, even within the limits of his owne proper body […] (RM I. 49, 46–47)
_____________ 53 »Omitting all other, there are three most mysticall unions; Two natures in one person; three persons in one nature; one soule in two bodies. For though indeed they bee really divided, yet are they so united, as they seeme but one, and make rather a duality then two distinct soules.« (RM II. 5, 62).
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In that he imagines both Heaven and Hell not locally or spatially, but as states of the mind not necessarily linked with concrete physical situations, Browne not only performs one more absorption of the many into one. By readjusting his metaphysical optics so as to focus on the self and its ethical stance, on the »peece of Divinity in us«, he also aligns himself once again with contemporary Neoplatonist thinking. Benjamin Whichcote, too, conceived of Heaven as »first a Temper, and then a Place«54 and of both Heaven and Hell as having »their Foundation within Us«.55 For a glimpse of Heaven, then, we need not peer beyond the Empyrean but only look within ourselves – provided our conscience presents us the image of God undistorted. In view of this metaphysical egocentricsm, the speaker's final prayer in Religio Medici (after one more skeptical glance at the uncertainty of human affections) comes to sound less modest than it may appear at first reading: »Blesse mee in this life with but the peace of my conscience, command of my affections, the love of thy selfe and my dearest friends, and I shall be happy enough to pity Cæsar.« (RM II. 15, 75). In Religio Medici, Browne produces his identity in an act of writerly selffashioning. He presents his assimilative self not only by what he says but equally by the manner in which he says it. I have tried to outline not only the concepts and assumptions around which Browne's field of consciousness seems to be centred, but also to indicate the way in which they correspond to his »mindstyle«.56 In conclusion, and with a slightly different focus, I should like to suggest yet another perspective from which this convergence of mind and style can be understood as ›structurally Neoplatonic‹. The mind-style of Religio Medici appears confidently confessional rather than tentative or experimental. It is mimetic to a degree difficult to determine, with Browne at times seeming to ›speak as another‹, yet not so much as to assume a definable persona. The self projected in this way practises a »flexible« speaking in the mode announced by the epistle »To the Reader«,57 eschewing determination and rigid definition as well as the histrionic dissimulation and role-playing repudiated in Plato's Republic.58 Its self-presentation is characterised by rhetorical rather than dramatic mimesis: while it seems prepared to pursue an idea through several of the shapes it may assume, it will yet return to a recognisable profile. Above all, Browne's mind-style appears to be oriented towards the topoi in which his trains of thought _____________ 54 Moral and Religions Aphorisms, no. 464 (The Cambridge Platonists, ed. Patrides, 331); cf. also no. 282. 55 Ibid., No. 100: »Both Heaven and Hell have their Foundation within Us. Heaven primarily lies in a refined Temper; in an internal Reconciliation to the Nature of God, and to the Rule of Righteousness. The Guilt of Conscience, and Enmity to Righteousness, is the inward state of Hell. The Guilt of Conscience is the Fewel of Hell.« (327; cf. also the same statement in Whichcote's sermon on »The Use of Reason in Matters of Religion«, ibid., 46). 56 The term is borrowed from Fowler (1977), 103f. 57 Religio Medici and Other Works, ed. Martin, 2. 58 Cf. Republic III 392d ff.
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repeatedly culminate. More often than not these are versions of the »oh altitudo«, which attempt to open the doors towards metaphysical dimensions and to reach beyond the argumentative explorations which precede it. Browne thus marshalls his Neoplatonic materials by putting their inventio on display, demonstrating the movement of his mind in searching and finding, before he elegantly articulates them. It is the mode of dispositio which, while it may appear erratic and incalculable, ultimately brings forth surprising, assimilative effects. This mode of offering central and recurring topoi may be seen as a display of inventive ingenuity as well as the stock-taking of a personality rich in knowledge, yet honest in the admission of ignorance, open-minded if not curious with regard to unthought-of possibilities and probabilities. The overall impression is one of a careful avoidance of pretentiousness and pedantry, pugnacious dogmatism and intolerance. These features of Browne's mind-style have appeared sympathetic and likeable to many of his readers. It has, however, only recently been shown that they also conform to a social and behavioral ideal typical of Browne's time, namely that of late humanist scholarly civility. To Claire Preston's analysis of Religio Medici as the epitome of this wholly immanent notion, to a great extent determined by seventeenth-century Neo-Stoicism, may perhaps now be added yet another facet: the non-dogmatic politeness with which Browne offers his insights as well as the unifying dynamic that motivates and drives his arrangement of the relevant topoi also speaks of another cultural ideal, one which rather resembles the precursor of the scholar's civility, that of the courtly excellence of the perfect gentleman. This differs from civility above all in that, in the version propagated in Castiglione's Book of the Courtier, it retains – not only in Book IV, which deals with the doctrine of courtly love – a metaphysical basis for the virtue it demands.59 In other words, it seems to be less the performative competence of sprezzatura constitutive of aristocratic courtliness as popularised by the followers of Castiglione in Henrician and Elizabethan times than the essentially Neoplatonic virtue on which this in turn is based: the readiness to surpass, to go beyond, to transcend the visible and given towards a goal as yet unknown. The essence of courtliness consists in this implicit promise of a potential achievement always greater than the standard already realised – in other words, in the ethics as well as aesthetics of excess. In this it provides both an imitation and a social analogue to the Deus semper maior which cautions the theologian's attempts to comprehend God. It gestures towards an ideal known to be inattainable but kept within imaginative reach and adumbrated as infinitely glorious. Browne's text is more than civil in that its rhetoric follows a courtly pattern. Conscious of the uncertainty of knowledge, avid of reconciling the contradictory, and not content with resigning itself to the coexistence of antagonistic elements in _____________ 59 See also ch. 1 above. For a more comprehensive account of the Neoplatonic implications of Renaissance courtliness cf. also ch. 3 (»Die höfische Imagination«) in: V. O. Lobsien/E. Lobsien (2003), 169–260, and, with specific reference to the rhetoric of Browne's Garden of Cyrus, V. O. Lobsien (2010a, forthcoming).
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one mind, it strives for a point from which it would still, once again, be possible to comprehend the whole. It seems no longer possible, however, to simply posit such a meta-level (not last because the realm of religion and metaphysics appears especially threatened by conflict and atomisation). As it cannot be articulated, it has to be suggested. Rhetorically, one way of attempting to communicate what eludes articulation, of alluding to what resists familiarisation, is through a rearrangement of the familiar, that is to say the topical, so as to indicate an orientation beyond it. This is what Browne does. Like one learning a foreign language, he seems to hope that, in his reassemblage of the topoi which comprise the thesaurus of his mind, the unknown will somehow emerge from the known. If we focus on his disposition of Neoplatonic topicality and the assimilative functions assigned to it, the sum might indeed be greater than its parts. In the face of an intransparent world, this discursive transcendence is the kind of transparency Religio Medici has to offer.
Paradox in Urne-Buriall To some extent, Browne's self-fashioning as a religious physician – in itself something of an oxymoron, as he does not hesitate to point out in the very first sentence of Religio Medici (RM I. 1, 3) – is continued in the two shorter texts published together in 1658: HYDRIOTAPHIA, UR1E-BURIALL, or, A discourse of the Sepulchrall Urnes lately found in 1ORFOLK and THE GARDE1 OF CYRUS. Or, The Quincunciall, Lozenge, or 1et-work Plantations of the Ancients, Artificially, 1aturally, Mystically Considered. In the dedicatory letter to Thomas le Gros which prefaces Urne-Buriall he characterises the following enterprise by connecting it explicitly with his profession, and by disconnecting it at the same time from literary traditions with edificatory purposes in which it might by mistake be placed, such as devotional meditations on death:60
_____________ 60 For the seventeenth-century meditatio mortis as part of the tradition of ars moriendi cf. Martz (1954), 139–144. Browne's distancing gesture appears significant in that he must have been familiar with the popular Arte of Divine Meditation (London 1606) by his friend and patient Bishop Joseph Hall (cf. also Martz [1954], 331–348). Browne's text seems to be bent on avoiding the strictly regulated meditative procedure prescribed by Hall in conformity with his pretext, the Rosetum of Joannes Mauburnus (Zwolle 1494) and especially the elaborate »Scala Meditatoria« set forth there (and indeed earlier by Johan Wessel Gansfort; cf. Martz [1954], 62). If there is anything Browne's discourse does not do, it is to ascend step by step from well-defined questions through clearly distinguished acts of the understanding to the evocation of wished-for affections, directing of will in accordance with the spiritual insight and experience envisaged from the first. In this refusal of the gradual ascent, U-B is also strikingly un-mystical, and it is not surprising that the text does not play a major role in Hack-Molitor's otherwise instructive attempt to understand Browne as a mystical writer (1998).
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Beside, to preserve the living, and make the dead to live, to keep men out of their Urnes, and discourse of humane fragments in them, is not impertinent unto our profession; whose study is life and death, who daily behold examples of mortality, and of all men least need artificial memento's, or coffins by our bed side, to minde us of our graves. (U-B, Epistle, 84)
A physician, he does not need images (literary or material) of death as memento mori; both because his primary occupation is with life and because he is daily confronted with ›the real thing‹. The doubleness of the argument, however, seems significant. It both connects Browne personally to the subsequent consideration of the recent discovery of forty or fifty urns containing burnt remains of human bones in field at Old Walsingham in Norfolk, as these are doubtless ancient »examples of mortality«, and as, with a metaphorical twist to the phrase, to »discourse on humane fragments« in these urns is clearly a continuation of his professional activity. And it seems to disconnect him from these, as they are declared superfluous, being »artificial memento's«. The urns thus are, and are not, Browne's business. Similarly, the following discourse will be both self-directed (if less directly so than Religio Medici) in that it will imply a fashioning of his attitude towards these findings, and ›objective‹; personal as well as impersonal. The ambivalence deepens to incipient paradoxicality with respect to the latter aspect. There are several options with regard to the construction and representation of such objects and Browne manages, at the same time, to reject what is easily the most prominent of these while he appears to radicalise it. It is the antiquarian's approach which offers itself to the observer, raising his thoughts unto »old things« and »the ancient of dayes, the Antiquaries truest object» (U-B, Epistle, 83 and 84). But despite his admiration for William Camden and his works, Browne does not intend to »erect a new Britannia«. He conspicuously distances himself from this kind of project, unwilling to »intrude upon the Antiquary«: »We are coldly drawn unto discourses of Antiquities, who have scarce time before us to comprehend new things, or make out learned Novelties.« (U-B, Epistle, 84). And yet, Browne displays considerable antiquarian prowess. He appears to be conscious of contemporary satire61 targeting the late humanist collector and the mindless virtuoso, the gentleman dilettante mimicking the scientist, and he seems intent on avoiding identification with these stereotypes, all ridiculously incapable of systematic explanation and interpretation. Still, he clearly possesses something of the antiquarian's patience, a ›positivist‹ passion for collecting and a keenness for the material object, an eye for the curious detail and, not last, a natural scientist's (or: a Pyrrhonist's) slowness in assigning meanings – if, unsuitably, combined with speculative ingenium. Browne knows antiquarian _____________ 61 For a review of relevant English examples of the »curiosity-spoof« and a list of its generic characteristics in comparison with Browne's own Musæum Clausum cf. Preston (2005), 155–174. For Preston, the antiquarian with whom Browne has most in common is John Aubrey rather than William Camden; cf. ibid., 138–146.
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procedure only too well; indeed, he excels at it, presenting a plethora of data with a kind of hyperbolic, witty sprezzatura, always implying that, in terms of quantity and diversity, this is nothing to what he could do, if he chose. But he is also aware that a mere accumulation of ›facts‹ does not suffice, as these will remain finally insecure, yielding only second-rate certainties: »The certainty of death is attended with uncertainties, in time, manner, places.« (U-B III, 106). And he also possesses systematic ambition, albeit neither of the new, empiricist, nor of the traditional, scholastic type. He will be content neither with an aggregate of unrelated things, however acutely observed, nor with abstract, ultimately self-referential ramifications of speculation. In a situation where knowledge can only be fragmentary, Browne's impulse in Urne-Buriall as in Religio Medici is stubbornly holistic. As such it can only be self-deconstructing, practising what it openly repudiates, but in a manner which continually doubts, indeed subverts, the foundations of its own procedure.62 But what will grow from the ruins of the antiquarian enterprise? Though Browne may be only moderately interested in antiquities for their own sake, he does seem to be concerned with the light the past throws on the present. The past and its remains are to be respected not last because they are evidence of immaterial things worthy to be preserved – for instance »the early civility they brought upon these Countreys« (U-B, Epistle, 85). It is the pressing evils of present times which render the past valuable, and we may hope that it will help us accomplish the allimportant task of ›making up‹ the collective identity capable of coping with these afflictions: 'Tis opportune to look back upon old times, and contemplate our Forefathers. Great examples grow thin, and to be fetched from the passed world. Simplicity flies away, and iniquity comes at long strides upon us. We have enough to do to make up our selves from present and passed times, and the whole stage of things scarce serveth for our instruction. A compleat peece of vertue must be made up from the Centos of all ages, as all the beauties of Greece could make but one handsome Venus. (U-B, Epistle, 84)
But how can such a recuperative, »re-collective«63 enterprise succeed? And how can it succeed if it eschews nearly all the available modes of ›making up‹ a whole from only tenuously related elements? While the first two and a half chapters of Urne-Buriall still seem to be organised along vaguely antiquarian lines, enumerating and comparing ancient funerary customs, methods of burial, regionally different conventions for the disposing of mortal remains by fire, water, earth or air and the rites and _____________ 62 Preston puts it with admirable succinctness: »A work which enacts its own subject, UrneBuriall in arguing the fruitlessness of antiquarian enquiry offers a sparkling, finished array of recovered facts which only adds up to its own demolition.« (Preston [2005], 139). 63 Ibid., 154.
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prohibitions governing these in relation to the respective deities, there is little ›empirical‹ observation and hardly any exact description of the numbers, sizes, shapes or specific appearances of the Walsingham urns. Also, the investigative impetus appears to be oddly restrained, curbed at every point by references to the factual as well as interpretative uncertainties which surround it.64 Again and again we are brought up short, as the unknown and unknowable seems to encroach on all sides on the small areas of knowledge Browne maps out. However, although fragmentation and reduction of the human, at least of its material remains, as well as oblivion and forgetfulness of the past together with the vanities, frustrations and bafflements attending the attempt to recover it may be the subject of UrneBuriall, this text, like Religio Medici, resists the pressures of skepticism. It would be easy to give in to the Pyrrhonist temptation, to weigh the pros and cons for any one position, declare them to be undecidable, and consequently abstain from pronouncing on ›hidden things‹ altogether. If truth dodges our efforts, why continue to pursue it? But Browne does not resign. He never yields completely to the allurements of skepticism, although, trying to confound both immanentists and strict believers in a life after death, he does now and then indulge himself a little. Thus, for instance, he aligns the apologetics of grave-robbers and tomb-raiders – the »most civill Rhetorick« of »the most barbarous Expilators«, (U-B III, 106) – with the pious »sensible Rhetorick of the dead, to exemplarity of good life« (ibid., 109), implying that the admonition to civility and the excuses for the plundering of graves may seem equally convincing. Still, although this balancing movement with its equal counterpoising of the contradictory and its see-sawing between oppositions is certainly one of the salient characteristics of this text,65 it seems wrong to reduce it to this. The arch-Pyrrhonist strategy of inventing arguments in order to place them in state of equilibrium so as to render judgment impossible, is ultimately self-serving, promising tranquillity once the zealous desire for certainty has been given up. But this is not what motivates Browne's discourse. On the _____________ 64 To quote only a few of these indicators of insecure knowledge found on four pages: »Then the time of these Urnes deposited, or precise Antiquity of these Reliques, nothing of more uncertainty. […] A great obscurity herein […] Some uncertainty there is […] we hold no authentick account […] not improbably conjectured […] we have no historicall assertion or deniall […] we discern no assured period […]« (U-B II, 97–100). This undercurrent of doubt begins to eat away even at the (false) assumption on which Browne had hitherto worked – that the urnes were of Roman provenience – and he begins to entertain, equally tentatively, the notion that they were perhaps of Anglo-Saxon origin: »Some men considering the contents of these Vrnes, lasting peeces and toyes included in them, and the custome of burning with many other Nations, might somewhat doubt whether all Vrnes found among us, were properly Romane Reliques, or some not belonging unto our Brittish, Saxon, or Danish Forefathers.« (ibid., 99). 65 For a detailed and brilliant analysis of the final paragraph of U-B III, 111, with its contradictory, ›Pyrrhonist‹ rhythms, taking up and rejecting the conceptions as they come and »present[ing] its ideas as a turning over of often mutually opposed possibilities« with the effect of »atomising our sense of certainty like death itself« cf. Preston (2005), 134–138.
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contrary, it is precisely the unquenchable interest in the invisible which motivates it and keeps it going even after aporias of this kind have been established. And yet, this desire for non-evident truths will not be stilled by the conventional answers and the well-known formulae. In fact, Urne-Buriall is remarkable for its systematic avoidance of the dogmatic; an avoidance that extends even to the negative dogmatism of the Skeptic. Browne distances himself from the antiquarian as well as the scientific. Although he is attracted by the exemplary, what he distils from his examples does not seem to be suited to didactic or edifying streamlining of any kind. He resists facile pieties and an easy theologising which circumvents the puzzles contained in biblical texts dealing with the resurrection. He eschews the hermetic; his text does not fall into the familiar devotional patterns of the meditation on death, and it is not a mystical text either. In a sense, Christian mysticism could have posed the ultimate temptation, affording as it does a well-structured progression, including episodes of desolation, despair and backsliding, towards union with the divine.66 But it is precisely the schematic build-up, the illusion of an inexorable approach towards the encounter with God, and the guarantees of salvation extended to its adepts which seem to repel Browne while they attract him. This is borne out by the climactic passage near the end of the text which at first reading sounds like an emphatic affirmation of the patterns of mystical ascent – and which really functions as their refusal: Pious spirits who passed their dayes in raptures of futurity, made little more of this world, then the world that was before it, while they lay obscure in the Chaos of preordination, and night of their fore-beings. And if any have been so happy as truly to understand Christian annihilation, extasis, exolution, liquefaction, transformation, the kisse of the Spouse, gustation of God, and ingression into the divine shadow, they have already had an handsome anticipation of heaven; the glory of the world is surely over, and the earth in ashes unto them. (U-B V, 124–5)67
Browne does not only distance himself from the »Pious spirits« and those even more rarefied ones capable of understanding the intricately graded progress towards union with the highest, he also mocks the sophistication and esoteric refinement of the terminology needed to describe the scale of ascent. And it is clear from what has preceded this passage that the profits he sees these spiritual heroes as reaping cannot possess a great deal of charm for him. If there is any tenor emerging with some forcefulness from Urne-Buriall it is a generous and tolerant acceptance of the fact that human beings find it difficult to renounce the _____________ 66 Cf. Underhill (1918). 67 Slightly modified, and marked as self-quotation (»as we have elsewhere declared«), the last sentence in this passage also forms the end (Section 30) of Browne's posthumously published Christian Morals (Religio Medici and Other Works, ed. Martin, 247; cf. The Works of Sir Thomas Browne, vol. 1, ed. Keynes, 290).
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»glory of the world«, and that even though they may be aware of the folly of trying to perpetuate this life beyond the grave, only very few will reconcile themselves to consider the earth as being what they themselves will inevitably be in time, namely mere »ashes«. Against this, Browne performs a gesture of defiance, albeit precariously founded: »But man is a Noble Animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave, solemnising Nativities and Deaths with equall lustre, nor omitting Ceremonies of bravery, in the infamy of his nature.« (U-B V, 123). This, in turn, implies resistance to yet another temptation; one congenial on the one hand to Skepticism, on the other to mystical enthusiasm and other kinds of mania – the temptation to melancholy. Again, this would have been an unsurprising response to the extensive contemplation of the vanities associated with death and burial, of mortality and oblivion, fragility and impermanence of physical as well as immaterial remains. It would perhaps not have been as fashionable as half a century ago, but it would, in the wake of Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy,68 have appeared familiar and, by and large, unexceptionable. But although there may be a melancholy undercurrent emerging now and then in Urne-Buriall (for instance with Browne discerning a biblical allusion in an Epicurean classic),69 this is, strangely enough, neither a saddening text nor one that merely stimulates Democritean laughter. Rather than sardonic, the attitude with which the futility of human effort is observed is one of empathy, if not pity, and Browne seems ready to repulse the attack although he recognises its seriousness: »It is the heaviest stone that melancholy can throw at a man, to tell him he is at the end of his nature; or that there is no further state to come, unto which this seemes progressionall, and otherwise made in vaine; […]« (U-B IV, 117). Death considered as absolute finality is the ultimate – and ultimately unbearable – affront to the living. To dwell on this affront, as well as on the decay of the flesh together with the blatant failure of mankind to remember their deceased as they would be (or deserve to be) remembered, could, finally, trigger yet another mechanism: that of a gnostic belief in the resurrection of the soul, with the body left to return to dust. But in Urne-Buriall this is not an option either,70 Browne being worried not so much by the perpetuity of the soul or the spirit, but by the question of the survival of individuality.71 _____________ 68 Whose popularity seems to have endured after its publication in 1621, with enlargements and successive editions, well into the 1650s. 69 »Or who would expect from Lucretius a sentence of Ecclesiastes?« (U-B IV, 112). Browne's marginal note quotes De rerum natura 2. 999–1000, apparently finding there a reference to Eccles. 12. 7: »Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit shall return to God who gave it.« – a correspondence between the biblical author and Hellenistic thinking by now common knowledge in biblical exegesis. (Cf. Lohfink [1980]). 70 Although Bennett has argued that this heterodox position, out of keeping with the Apostles' Creed, is what Browne ends up with (Bennett [1962], 196, 204). She finds Browne repeatedly doubting the resurrection of the body, especially during his meditation on the lack of permanence of all things material in chapter V. 71 Cf. U-B III, 111, or V, 125: »To live indeed is to be again our selves […]«.
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How then are we to respond, if all the familiar modes are ruled out as dysfunctional? Or rather: how can we describe the response Browne's text seems to suggest and indeed helps us to experience in the face of the aporias it constructs with such painstaking acuteness? What keeps going despite the materials that provide its topic and their melancholy implications is the persistent ›counterfactual‹ interest in what they do not say. It is the continued probing for what the Walsingham urns cannot be made to express, as they cannot provide evidence for it. This is not simply ›what they stand for‹ either. For the old theological answers are, in the last resort, no different from the pagan ones in that they are ultimately only doxa (»opinions«) too – mere shadows of the truth: The particulars of future beings must needs be dark unto ancient Theories, which Christian Philosophy yet determines but in a Cloud of opinions. A Dialogue between two Infants in the womb concerning the state of this world, might handsomely illustrate our ignorance of the next, whereof methinks we yet discourse in Platoes denne, and are but Embryon Philosophers. (U-B IV, 116)
In this situation of learned ignorance Browne's text refrains from articulating ›meanings‹ of any kind. Probabilities may be cautiously phrased as »learned conjecture« (U-B III, 111), but they are never presented in an unqualified manner. Instead, Urne-Buriall simultaneously clings to uncertainty and responds to it by textually performing anti-dogmatic gestures – sideways, associative moves rather than logical transfers, or abrupt leaps rather than the expected smooth transition to a palatable conclusion. These oblique textual gestures are exemplified by the resistance to melancholy, the rejection of cheap ›Christian‹ comfort, or the sudden reversal towards the end of chapter III, where the detailed and extensive dwelling on the curiosity of burial rites and the futility of human attempts to counteract oblivion does not prevent a surprisingly irrational revulsion at the various abuses that may be inflicted on our bodies after interment: »To be gnaw'd out of our graves, to have our sculs made drinking-bowls, and our bones turned into Pipes, to delight and sport our Enemies, are Tragicall abominations […]« (U-B III, 109– 110). That these are »escaped in burning Burials« (ibid., 110) does not, of course, constitute an argument in favour of cremation. For this, as demonstrated by the urns, destroys individuality, obliterates physiognomy and renders identification impossible, »leav[ing] us ignorant of most personall discoveries« (ibid.). What we are left with is these gestures of rejection, defiance, negation; of options avoided, refused, or recognised as closed. These options include, it should be stressed, Neoplatonic clichés. In UrneBuriall, the world which troubles and fascinates the speaker is an intransparent world; a world in which materiality, including that of the human body, appears a strong and in its very fragility an almost insurmountable obstacle to transcendence. Mortality, especially in its physical aspects, seems to offer overwhelming arguments not only against Christian hopes of resurrection but also against all aspirations to ascend to higher levels of being by despising,
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disregarding or somehow discarding the body. The perspective provided in this text does not find comfort in the notion that the corporeal is worthless. This might in antiquity have provided consolation for very young or very old martyrs (neither of them having much to lose) – »But the contempt of death from corporall animosity, promoteth not our felicity.« (U-B IV, 117).72 If the point of reference for this text remains solidly and impenetrably material, the vanishing point, however, towards which its parallel gestures of avoidance and resistance tend, is emphatically not. To some extent, it is to be found only in the following text, in The Garden of Cyrus, to which it is so closely linked as to function as its complement in most of its aspects.73 But structural adumbrations of this orientation, discursive alignments towards a point beyond the argument from mortality, are to be found in these textual gestures so characteristic of Urne-Buriall, whose rhetoric seems continually to raise objections to the finiteness of human life which the text insistently dwells on. Thus, they can also be seen as imitating the movement towards transcendence the text finds itself incapable of articulating directly and with anything like the positive certitude surrounding the grave.74 Indeed, they seem to imply the possibility of the very »felicity« this text can envisage only as imminent, never as immanent. These gestures tend to assume the shape of sudden adversatives, either arresting the metonymic undulations of the text or causing their movement to oscillate so widely as to disturb us into an awareness of their self-contradictory rhythms. Thus they magnify the irritating micro-structures of Urne-Buriall, elevating miniature contradictions and inconsistencies to a pervasive paradoxicality. In them, Browne's curiosity and unrest, driven by a comparative impulse, culminate in assertions that reach towards a state of ›different from‹ and ›more than‹ and that do not follow from the propositions preceding them. Thus, at the end of chapter IV, he insists: »But the superiour ingredient and obscured part of our selves, whereto all present felicities afford no resting contentment, will be _____________ 72 Browne's distancing, here and in similar contexts, from what he describes is quite conspicuous. What he presents are not his personal conviction, but rather views to be entertained imaginatively and as it were by proxy, having their origin with »severe contemplators« (U-B III, 111), authors of »learned conjecture« (ibid.), or with anonymous »Christians« (IV, 113); having been expressed by Homer, Dante, Epicurus, Socrates, Cato, by a generalised »We« (passim), whose inclusiveness remains unclear; by »the man of God« (V, 123), or finally by those who »have been so happy as truly to understand Christian annihilation« (V, 124), by »pious spirits« (ibid.) and by »noble beleevers« (V, 125). 73 Huntley (1956); cf. also Huntley (1962), 204–223. 74 Hence, these textual gestures do not provide a »solution« to the problem posed, as Williamson (1964) has suggested. The movement I am trying to outline is also different from the triumphant conclusion to the drama of victorious Christian struggle as envisaged by Nathanson (1967): Nathanson perceives a dramatic progress, mimetic of conflict overcome, from the known (and the uncertainties associated with it) to the unknown, culminating in the assertion of Christian belief in the salvation of the soul against the futility of human efforts to ensure perpetuity of the material remains of life.
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able at last to tell us we are more then our present selves; and evacuate such hopes in the fruition of their own accomplishments.« (U-B IV, 118). True, hopes end when they are fulfilled, but have not these hopes of eternal life just been elevated to the distinguishing mark of the human? And how can the restlessness of the superior part of our soul be part of our natural equipment, if it is not content with the lot all other creatures seem to be content with, namely the finality of death? What can be the foundation for the comparative in »more then our present selves«; what is the ground for the assumption that this hope of »a further state to come« (ibid., 117) might be capable of warding off the melancholy conviction that death ends absolutely? If it is the »obscured part of our selves« which, by its spiritual discontent, communicates to us and at the same time guarantees the presence of the ultimate object of its desire, there is a whole world of theological argument which – perhaps – underlies this proposition, but which is never made explicit. The statement jolts us unto another plane of thinking and leaves us to our own devices. Or, to be more precise: Browne's text challenges our intellectual imagination to make the leap beyond the materials it has laid before us and the assumptions they appear to lead to. By its rhetoric of paradox, it dares us to make the connections it leaves out. We are to comprehend and envisage as unity what it posits as separate and, under the discursive condition it has established, incompatible. Similarly, a proclamation like »Life is a pure flame, and we live by an invisible Sun within us« (U-B V, 123) startles by its abruptness and apodictic quality. Quoted out of context, it will strike us as either incomprehensibly cryptic or topical – a pious sentence and as such the distillation of an attitude the text has, so far, not elaborated. A non sequitur, it amazes by the suddenness with which it seems to switch from the decay of the body and the oblivion of names to the metaphoric proclamation of a vitalist, perhaps Neoplatonist principle of life. In an attempt to make it coherent with the final sentence of the paragraph immediately preceding it, we might be inclined to take the »pure flame« within as a reason for that which makes man »a Noble Animal« and which gives »lustre« to the rituals with which he celebrates births or deaths. But the intellectual effort required in order to establish this kind of consistency is considerable. It would have to change the sentence from an unrelated, quasi-proverbial saying to an argument that holds, perhaps, even a connection to the idea of Christian immortality surpassing in its glory all earthly commemoration. It would also require the assumption that the »invisible Sun within us« is more perdurable, a link to eternity far superior to the mutability that is to be observed not only »below the Moon« but even in the heavenly constellations »above the Sun« (the topic Browne has been considering yet one paragraph before that; U-B V, 122–3). These assumptions and potential linkages, however, are never made explicit in the text. They are not even suggested with great emphasis. It is possible to forge these links by reading backwards and retrospectively adjusting our expectations, but this will have to be the reader's doing – the text seems to point towards such possible relations by implication, but at the same time eschews the responsibility for explicating them.
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We are left with these repeated gestures of punctual defiance and with the task of constructing the position they do not fully articulate. Above all, their abruptness conveys the experience of ›and yet‹. The collection of factual evidence does not lead to the certainty this text aims at. It can never lead to a ›knowledge‹ of resurrection; still the desire for it cannot be given up. Hence, Urne-Buriall seems to ask us to hold the divergent and heterogeneous together, to keep both poles of its central opposition simultaneously in mind – the immanent as well as the transcendent, the finiteness of life together with the assertion of its infinity, the visibility of decay and the assurance of invisible perpetuity, oblivion of persons, acts and names and the conviction of »the soul subsisting« (U-B III, 111) in its individuality, transitoriness of glory and the permanence of life for the famous as well as for the obscure, the private and the anonymous. In its paradoxical structure, the text also reflects the logical impossibility of uniting the incompatible, yet attempts to do just that. The closing paragraph of the text provides a final example for this basic structure: To subsist in lasting Monuments, to live in their productions, to exist in their names, and prædicament of Chymera's, was large satisfaction unto old expectations, and made one part of their Elyziums. But all this is nothing in the Metaphysicks of true belief. To live indeed is to be again our selves, which being not only an hope, but an evidence in noble beleevers; 'Tis all one to lye in St Innocents Church-yard, as in the Sands of Ægypt: Ready to be any thing, in the extasie of being ever, and as content with six foot as the Moles of Adrianus. (U-B V, 125)
Memorial representation is powerless to ensure perpetuity; yet it is to be respected as part of ancient civilization and religious culture. The »Metaphysicks of true belief«, on the other hand, is just as groundless; and, as Browne knows and leaves only slightly indeterminate in the ironical reference to »noble beleevers« (of whom he might and might not be one, relegating himself to a more humble stance), »to be again our selves« can never gain the status of »evidence« – at any rate not under the conditions of factuality established by his discourse. Still, this is precisely what it asserts while it cannot represent it. It can only be demonstrated, that is to say figured rhetorically, by means of paradox. It is only this which renders the impossible possible. Of course, we can afford to be indifferent to our bodies being dissolved in the acidic earth of a Parisian cemetery or preserved for ages in the Egyptian desert – »Ready to be any thing, in the extasie of being ever« – provided we are prepared to imagine both this corporeal transformation and the mystery of perfection it is merely a prelude to. It does, in other words, require the ›ecstatic‹ step beyond the ascertainable and perhaps also the probable. Perhaps it also requires the readiness to join in the equally paradoxical »oh altitudo« of Religio Medici underlined by Tertullian's formula »Certum est quia impossibile est« (RM I 9, 9).
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As a minimum commitment, it requires the readiness to join in the textual game Browne is playing and to enjoy the ludic aesthetic his texts propose. This has been described as an aesthetic of admiratio, congenial to the Baroque preoccupation with serio ludere.75 A predilection for paradox comes naturally to this tradition of Early Modern wit, as Rosalie Colie has comprehensively shown.76 George Puttenham's translation of the Greek term paradox as the »The Wondrer«77 stresses the element of pleasurable shock and surprise and the effect of joyful amazement it is capable of calling forth in presenting something that goes against received opinion (para-doxa) and blatantly contradicts official doctrine. Paradox is the dominant aesthetic strategy in Urne-Buriall. But as such it differs from the ordinary Renaissance paradox in that it is realised only seldom by a compact oxymoron or similar isolatable figure, which might be considered as purple patch in an otherwise ›scientific‹ treatise. Rather, it appears as the overarching configuration of ideas in this text. If the central subject of Urne-Buriall is the complex of death, the failure of memorial representation, and the unanswerable question of eternal life; if the failure of representing what transcends representation is one of the reading experiences it provides, it is, paradoxically, the configuration of paradox which holds the text together. In its eschewal of synthesis and dogma, Browne's text still makes possible the impossible – a ›seeing-in-unity‹ of human glory and misery, mortality and immortality, transience and permanence, folly and grandeur, annihilation and continuity, loss of bodily and nominal self and the regaining of identity »in the extasie of being ever«. This configuration of material impermanence and the idea of a perfection of life succeeds (if and when it succeeds) not by reconciling the opposed but by raising the validity claims of both sides to the highest possible pitch and by thus staging, potentially, a moment of transcendence. It is capable of doing this due to the cognitive resources of paradox. For this figure of thought, defying expectation by defending the indefensible, praising the despicable, asserting to be true what seems non-sensical, does not only run counter to established views. Looked at closely, it may begin to make new, unthought-of sense. By means of surprise or even shock it is capable of stimulating a revision of opinion; it may be productive of truth by raising questions and enabling insights different from those hitherto accepted. Paradox thus becomes itself paradoxical, tending towards its own abolition. It is, however, never _____________ 75 See Warnke (1982). The emphasis here is on the ›serious‹ aspects of play; I have tried to indicate above why exclusively ludist or performativist readings of Browne miss the point. Cf. also Colie (1966), 5. Cicero explains paradox as »admirabilia contraque opinionem communem« (Paradoxa Stoicorum, pr. 4). 76 In her classical study »Paradoxia Epidemica« (1966), which unfolds, in its first chapter, many of the problems, as well as the whole scale of the typical literary and epistemological effects of this figure of thought and to which I am indebted for many of the following observations. For rhetorical definitions of paradox cf. also Neumeyer (2003). 77 George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Willcock/Walker, The Third Booke, of Ornament, Ch. XIX, 226 (qu. also in Colie [1966], 3).
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didactical, as it leaves the formulation of the hitherto unsaid to its recipients. It renders assent possible, but does not enforce it.78 Browne's paradoxes are an invitation to interpretation. They stretch the intellectual imagination in directions which they do not themselves explicate. In fact, and this is another functional correlate of paradox, they conceal rather than reveal the position they might be expected to suggest. Like Browne's conspicuous avoidance of the numerous contemporary discourses on death (and resurrection) available to him, they perform a gesture of negation, at least of reserve. They also eschew the confessional. In this sense, they dissimulate the speaker's point of view, who perhaps is, more likely is not, one of the »noble beleevers«, the »pious spirits«, or the »men of God«79 whom he involves in his paradoxical reasonings. Duplicity and equivocation are built into Browne's text precisely at those points where he seems to speak his mind. His ›true‹ convictions remain enigmatic. However, and again due to the structure of this figure of thought but also to its historical affiliations, we are not left wholly in the dark with respect to the direction in which the text seeks to point us. In her study of paradox, Rosalie Colie has also shown how close the alignment is between a rhetoric adumbrating the inexpressible and Neoplatonic thinking, especially as mediated through Dionysius Areopagita and Nicolaus of Cusa.80 Both as a configuration of concordia discors working at the limits of thought and as a cognitive structure suited to suggesting the simultaneity of the experiential and the metaphysical,81 paradox appears utterly consonant with a negative theology based on Neoplatonic assumptions in this late medieval tradition. Above all, it provides the structure for what is perhaps the central paradox of Neoplatonism, certainly the mainstay of a Neoplatonist aesthetic. As formulated by Dionysius Areopagita and reformulated by Johannes Scotus Eriugena, this is the insight that, since the transcendence of the One is not to be comprehended by thought, not available to the grasp of human speculation and not representable mimetically, pictorially, linguistically or otherwise; as there is no created being that resembles the divine, it has to be made manifest by what does emphatically not resemble it – indicated through
_____________ 78 As this only works in relation to contextual systems of understanding, competing complexes of value and knowledge, which can be topically evoked in order to be opposed, it is interesting to note that in Urne-Buriall both sides are to a great extent established by the text itself – the panorama of human transience as well as its Christian counterpoint. 79 Cf. e.g. yet another paradox along the lines quoted: »The man of God lives longer without a Tomb then any by one, […]« (U-B V, 123), which, like many parallel formulations leaves open whether Browne considers himself one of these godly persons or, with a gesture of humility, only marks them out as an ideal he falls short of achieving, hence embodiments of his spiritual ambition rather than his peers. 80 Colie (1966), 22–33. 81 Ibid., 32.
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dissimilitude, by means of dissimiles formationes. Colie quotes the locus classicus from Dionysius' treatise on the heavenly hierarchy:82 For this […] is more appropriate to the divine essence, since, as the secret and sacerdotal tradition taught, we rightly describe its non-relationship to things created, but we do not know its superessential, and inconceivable, and unutterable indefinability. If, then, the negations respecting things Divine are true, but the affirmations are inharmonious, the revelation as regards things invisible, through dissimilar representations, is more appropriate to the hiddenness of things unutterable.83
As this kind of radical incongruity is capable of making us realise that God's transcendent glory is, in a fundamental sense, not to be measured by the standards of the created world, it becomes itself paradoxical. It becomes, self-inclusively, what it refers to: a dissimilar similitude.84 The consequence of this, both for theological and aesthetic attempts to speak of God or to represent the divine, amounts, again, to a paradox. Far from being useless and dispensable in this impossible enterprise, the visible, created world as the realm of the given is elevated to a privileged position. It is the medium through which God communicates with his creatures. It is the means by which he makes himself known. The world, in Eriugena's famous reformulation of the Dionysian tenet, is »the apparition of what is not apparent«.85 _____________ 82 Dionysius the Areopagite, On the Heavenly Hierarchy, from Works, trans. John Parker (London 1897), qu. Colie (1966), 24–25; cf. also the passage slightly later in the same treatise: »[…] and so Divine things should be honoured by the true negations, and by comparisons with the lowest things, which are diverse from their proper resemblance. There is then nothing absurd if they depict even the Heavenly Beings under incongruous dissimilar similitudes, for causes aforesaid.« (qu. ibid., 25). Colm Luibheid offers the following translation: »So true negations and the unlike comparisons with their last echoes offer due homage to the divine things. For this reason there is nothing ridiculous about representing heavenly beings with similarities which are dissimilar and inconcruous, for the reasons mentioned.« (The Celestial Hierarchy, II, 5 [145A], in: Dionysius Areopagita, The Complete Works, 152–3). Cf. also the German version in Über die himmlische Hierarchie, 35: the translator suggests »nichtanaloge Analogien« in the place of Parker's equally paradoxical »dissimilar similitudes«. 83 In the translation by Luibheid: »[…] as the secret and sacred tradition has instructed, God is in no way like the things that have being and we have no knowledge at all of his incomprehensible and ineffable transcendence and invisibility. Since the way of negation appears to be more suitable to the realm of the divine and since positive affirmations are always unfitting to the hiddenness of the inexpressible, a manifestation through dissimilar shapes is more correctly to be applied to the invisible.« (CH II, 3 [141A], The Complete Works, 150). 84 For a brilliant exposition of a pictorial aesthetic along Neoplatonic, specifically Dionysian, lines cf. also Didi-Huberman (1995), 13 and passim. 85 Cf. Periphyseon (The Division of 1ature), III 4, 633A–633B. This edition renders the complete passage as follows: »Therefore God is everything that truly is because He
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It is this paradoxical gesture of negati affirmatio,86 an affirmation of what is negated, which also seems to energise Browne's Urne-Buriall, enabling his disquisition on modes and cultures of funeral to prepare the ground for a celebration of regeneration. Browne's text is a paradoxical imitation of what resists imitation, an impossible mimesis of the invisible. Death, in its finiteness the most melancholy negative, is simultaneously affirmed and denied; resurrection, as its Christian opposite, is simultaneously questioned and affirmed – from a position this side the grave, which yet refuses to be defined and limited by it. The paradoxes this text falls into strive to point beyond themselves, figuring an ›argument‹ against death by the dynamics of their formation. We may not be willing to share the suggestion mapped out by these textual gestures tinged, both thematically and structurally, by Neoplatonism; besides, we need not give our assent, since paradox, operating at the limits of rational discourse, does not enforce its truth. The point relevant to the resolutely a-mimetic aesthetics of Urne-Buriall is that these gestures are made possible in the first place by the figural repertoire of Neoplatonism. What Browne's text has to offer – if it is accessible to philosophical labelling at all – is indeed a highly »irregular«,87 largely unsystematic Neoplatonism of the kind with which Religio Medici is also imbued. It does hold in store for us an experience both epistemological and affective in that it makes possible the gaining of an insight that might appear banal, although it is easier formulated than acted upon: the insight into the discontinuity between our doxa and the truth they aim at. And perhaps, relatedly, the realisation that in order to bridge the gap between the fact of mortality and the hope for immortality, an act of transcending is needed – a leap beyond received opinion which is resistant to theory, and in which we will not be aided by dogma.
The Garden of Cyrus and Paralepsis »Circles and right lines limit and close all bodies, and the mortall right-lined circle, must conclude and shut up all.« (U-B V, 120). Thomas Browne _____________ Himself makes all things and is made in all things, as St. Dionysius the Areopagite says. / For everything that is understood and sensed is nothing else but the apparition of what is not apparent, the manifestation of the hidden, the affirmation of the negated, the comprehension of the incomprehensible, [the utterance of the unutterable, the access to the inaccessible,] the understanding of the unintelligible, the body of the bodiless, the essence of the superessential, the form of the formless, the measure of the measureless, the number of the unnumbered, the weight of the weightless, the materialization of the spiritual, the visibility of the invisible, the place of that which is in no place, the time of the timeless, the definition of the infinite, the circumscription of the uncircumscribed, and the other things which are both considered and perceived by the intellect alone and cannot be retained within the recesses of the memory and which escape the sharpness of the mind.« 86 Ibid. (»the affirmation of the negated«); cf. also Beierwaltes' foundational study of Eriugena's aesthetic (1994), 115–158. 87 Bush (1962), 349.
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supplements this remark in the final chapter of Urne-Buriall with a gloss explaining that by »the mortall right-lined circle« he means »ș The character of death« – theta, the first letter of the Greek thanatos. The combination of circle and »right lines« seems to allude to that paradox of paradoxes, the squaring of the circle, which will play a certain role in The Garden of Cyrus. But the sentence appears both retrospective and anticipatory not only in that this twin essay88 to Urne-Buriall will explicitly consider the potential circularity of the quincunx in its multiple senses. It also contains in miniature, as it were, a programme of the way these two treatises are related: we now move, from the suggestive combination of linear finality and circular infinity circumscribed by the Greek letter as well as by the paradoxes figured by Urne-Buriall, to the predominantly, but not exclusively, angular figure of the quincunx89 at the heart of The Garden of Cyrus. And this treatise will demonstrate to us the reverse of the deadly, limiting and inclosing function of »right lines« in that they are shown to be, epitomised in the quincunx, the principle of plantation, gardening, growth and verdancy – in short, of life as the ›natural‹ consequence of death. In his dedicatory letter to Nicholas Bacon, Browne makes this explicit, hinting, at the same time, at the complementary linkage between the two texts: That we conjoyn these parts of different Subjects, or that this should succeed the other; Your judgement will admit without impute of incongruity; Since the delightfull World comes after death, and Paradise succeeds the Grave. Since the verdant state of things is the Symbole of the Resurrection, and to flourish in the state of Glory, we must first be sown in corruption. (GC, Epistle, 87)
In this process, we also move, from a consideration of bodies and their mortality to one of »characters« – signs, figures, and signatures. And, not last, we switch modes of figuration: from (paradoxical) representation by dissimilitude to a manner of signification which relies above all on similitude – a kind of figurative similitude, however, which is abstract and symbolic rather than analogical or iconic. The overall change of focus thus follows an oppositional – complementary and to some extent chiastic – pattern, closely linking the grave and the garden, burial and plantation, descent and ascent, death and life, light and darkness, eternity and termination, with both sides of these oppositions anchored in both texts, but tending towards different centres of gravity in each. We are still concerned with last things, but the eschatological tone has shifted from a minor to a major key. The funeral sound of Urne-Buriall gives way, in The Garden of Cyrus, to one of joyful exuberance and expectation. In its turn, this evocation of a _____________ 88 Cf. Huntley (1962), 219, 222. 89 »An arrangement or disposition of five objects so placed that four occupy the corners, and the fifth the centre, of a square or other rectangle; a set of five things arranged in this manner.« (Oxford English Dictionary; the earliest reference is to GC).
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felicity which Urne-Buriall had kept in abeyance is wholly consonant with the Neoplatonic dynamic (if not with the semantics) The Garden of Cyrus shares with its darker counterpart. Like Browne's other texts, The Garden of Cyrus adheres to an aesthetics of admiration, albeit of a specific kind. This is indicated by the only illustration that accompanies it,90 a diagram of a quincuncial network subscribed with a quotation from Quintilian: »Quid Quincunce speciosius, qui, in quam cunque partem spectaveris, rectus est.«91 In the context of this passage, the concern is with ornament generally and more specifically with rhetorical ornatus, whose uses and limits are here exemplified by the order of planting fruit trees. Quintilian's point is, with Cicero and Aristotle, that the »excitement of admiration« should be one of the first aims of eloquence,92 hence that beauty (species) and the aesthetic pleasure derived from decorous order and ornament are a main objective in rhetoric; however, these must always be qualified by functionality.93 It seems important not only that Browne should chose the horticultural reference together with its abstract representation,94 but also that the stress in the original should fall on a beauty both artificial and natural and, not last, that here the formation of five should serve to make a point in rhetoric, an art relying strongly on quinary patterns. Thus, and from the first, Browne's text emphasises non-iconic structures, favouring figures of thought and speech over quasi-pictorial means of ›imaging‹ what it seeks to communicate. This is not to say that The Garden of Cyrus is in a conventional way oratorically structured. It is clearly not an illustration of a classical five-part dispositio, as can be seen from the different readings the sequence of its chapters affords. True, it does have five chapters, like Urne-Buriall, and it is tempting to assume a quincuncial design underlying the whole. But their order and argumentative function, depending on which is assigned the position in the centre, can be variously accounted for. _____________ 90 Claiming to be a non-naturalistic diagram of its subject and perhaps also, autoreferentially, of itself: »He that will illustrate the excellency of this order, may easily fail upon so spruce a Subject, wherein we have not affrighted the common Reader with any other Diagramms, then of it self; and have industriously declined illustrations from rare and unknown plants.« (GC, Epistle, 86–87). 91 Institutio Oratoria, VIII. iii. 9: »Quid illo quincunce speciosius qui, in quamcunque partem spectaveris, rectus est?« – which Patrides renders as: »What is more beautiful than the well-known quincunx which, in whatever direction you view it, presents straight lines?« (Sir Thomas Browne. The Major Works, ed. Patrides, 320). 92 Cf. Inst. Or. VIII. iii. 6. 93 Beauty is not to be separated from usefulness: »Nunquam vera species ab utilitate dividitur.« (Inst. Or. VIII. iii. 11). 94 He would have found both in the gardening works by Benedict Curtius (Hortorum Libri Triginta Autore Benedicto Curtio Symphoriano, 1560) and Gianbattista Porta (Villæ Io. Baptistæ Portæ, 1eapolitani Libri XII, 1592) which provided the principal sources for the first chapter; cf. Finch (1940).
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Thus, Chapter III has been placed at the heart of the text, in accordance with a symmetry suggested by the subtitle of the treatise, which allows us to read I and II as ›artificial‹, IV and V as ›mystical‹, and III alone as ›natural‹ consideration of the quincunx.95 However, this privileging of quincunxes in nature concentrated in Chapter III is out of keeping with the arrangement of the running titles with which The Garden of Cyrus was first published96 and which suggest a much simpler, bipartite design, with »Cyrus-Garden, Or The Quincunx Naturally Considered« as running headline for Chapters I-III and »Cyrus-Garden, Or The Quincunx Mistically Considered« as headline for IV and V. Neither arrangement considers the possibility that Chapter V might function as peroratio to the whole – presumably because this is obviously (and irritantingly) not the case. Browne's final chapter appears to subvert a traditional rhetorical patterning in that it consists not of a concise and emphatic summary but mainly of a series of open questions relating to matters quincuncial. In terms of its structural design, The Garden of Cyrus withholds the neatness which it might lead us to expect. It does not offer the univocal mimesis of a quincunx,97 rhetorical or otherwise. In fact, and in a manner not dissimilar to Urne-Buriall and despite its explicit concern with a schematic pattern capable of acting as a generative (and analytical) principle for nearly everything, this text systematically evades the systematic. Or rather, it evades the possibilites for schematising which offer themselves and it prevents the closure of structures it seemed about to establish. Browne may declare his delight in »how nature Geometrizeth, and observeth order in all things« (GC III, 153), but his own discourse follows a different ratio. Like Religio Medici and Urne-Buriall, but in a different manner, The Garden of Cyrus is a fundamentally disorderly text. It may pursue the astonishing emergence of quincunxes and patterns of decussation in seeds, plants, textures, animal motions, _____________ 95 Cf. Huntley (1962), 207: »The long chapter on nature […] is the center or decussation«; also Preston (2005), 207: »To understand the whole of Cyrus, therefore, we must understand its middle chapter, the astonishing, digressive, decussive, virtuosic display which effulgently enacts the theme of germination«. 96 According to The Major Works, ed. Patrides; in his edition of Religio Medici and Other Works, L. C. Martin suggests yet another structural division by heading Chapter I only with »Cyrus-Garden, Or The Quincunx«, II with »Cyrus-Garden, Or The Quincunx Artificially Considered«. 97 It is of course possible, with some ingenuity, to place Chapter V in the centre of an imagined (lozenge-shaped) quincunx (with I, II, III, and IV at its corners), since this would allow the allocation of corresponding positions to I and IV, with a vertical axis connecting them. This would take account of the fact that IV, with its final emphasis on creation and light, might be seen to hark back to the initial paragraph of I, and it would explain the central placement of the questioning Chapter V by reading it as an indication of uncertainty remaining despite the »delightful truths« (V, 174) it has to offer. The point remains, however, that alternative dispositions can be argued for in an equally plausible manner and that any kind of imitative arrangement will remain questionable. The structure of GC, considered quincuncially, is anamorphic: it depends on the reader's identification of its subject and will assume its shape accordingly.
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colours, in cognitive processes, cultural products and in the arithmetical potential of the number five – but it is remarkable above all for its self-limiting strategies. It is this mixture of exuberance and negation which not only makes it a prototypically Brownean text but perhaps also the most radical example of his pursuit of uncertain knowledge. For, although at first glance it seems to be crammed with evidence affirmative of a ubiquitous quincuncial ordering, its rhetoric again and again foregrounds the uncertainty which pervades and surrounds these fragments. None of its five chapters is without a more or less emphatic gesture reining in its investigative energies, demarcating the limits of knowledge and bringing to mind the zones where conjecture leads to unproved hypotheses, merges into improbability or disappears into ignorance. Having in Chapter I embarked on a report of the descriptions of the plantations of Cyrus, Browne thus amplifies and elucidates a quotation from Xenophon (»omnia perpulchrè in Quincuncem directa«), declaring programmatically: That is the rows and orders so handsomly disposed; or five trees so set together, that a regular angularity, and through prospect, was left on every side, Owing this name not only unto the Quintuple number of Trees, but the figure declaring that number, which being doubled at the angle, makes up the Letter Ȥ, that is the Emphaticall decussation, or fundamentall figure. (GC I, 131)
Having introduced a reference to the first letter of the name of Christ – hence to a potentially all-explaining matrix of creation and redemption – Browne just a short paragraph later, rejects the mimetic suggestions implied by this »Emphaticall decussation« which ›mystically‹, but so conveniently, seemed to emerge from the natural (the plantation of trees) combined with the artificial (the Roman numeral V, doubled and joined at the angle): »Where by the way we shall decline the old Theme, so traced by antiquity of crosses and crucifixion […] Nor shall we take in the mysticall Tau, or the Crosse of our blessed Saviour […]« (GC I, 132). The tone for the remaining paragraphs is set by »doubt«, lack of clarity, contested »probability« and »conjecture« (ibid., 134–5). Chapter II continues this vein of negation by means of what is clearly the dominant rhetorical figure of the whole text: paralepsis or praeteritio, the figure of ostentatious omission. The catalogues of ›artificial‹ quincunxes which make up this chapter are riddled by indicators of this figure, which Puttenham translated as »the passager«.98 Again and again they claim »to omit« the items they enumerate as openings to realms of _____________ 98 With an allusion to Richard III, 3.7.51: »PARALEPSIS; or, the passager. It is also very many times used for a good policy in pleading or persuasion, to make wise as if we set but light of the matter, and that therefore we do pass it over lightly – when indeed we do then intend most effectually and despitefully (if it be invective) to remember it. It is also when we will not seem to know a thing, and yet we know it well enough, and may be likened to the manner of women who, as the common saying is, ›will say nay and take it‹ […]« (»English poetics and rhetoric [1589]«, in: English Renaissance Literary Criticism, ed. Vickers [1999], 271; cf. The Arte of English Poesie, eds. Willcock/Walker, 232).
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further, albeit insecure, knowledge. And despite its emphasis on the observable and demonstrable with regard to examples from nature, Chapter III also repeatedly ›passes by‹ what might also be included99 and inserts a list of open questions, »quæries which might enlarge but must conclude this digression« (GC III, 150). Such »quæries« are continued and extended to an even longer list of mainly botanical questions »deserv[ing] another enquiry« in Chapter IV (162–164) and indeed enlarged to metaphysical dimensions in a consideration of the »mysteries« of quincuncial plantation (158). Chapter V, finally, as a whole is structured along the lines of paralepsis, trying hard not to fall into »inexcusable Pythagorisme« (169) and »omitting« numerical speculations.100 Still, they are at least cursorily mentioned, and the text actually manages to squeeze in a considerable number of hermeticist ideas together with »Hebrew mysteries and Cabalistical accounts« (171). In addition to these extended paralepses and partly overlapping them, the last chapter consists mainly of questions yet to be answered and lists of »new Problemes« (172) waiting to be solved. The functions of this prevalence of paralepsis in combination with such extensive (and inconclusive) questioning are, again, paradoxical in the sense already outlined. To begin with, these strategies do not serve to ›order‹ the text by simulating or imitating the »correspondencies« in the book of nature it claims to present.101 Rather, they introduce a figurative dynamic into it. That is to say, they do not offer a mimesis of anything, but contain the potential to set in motion _____________ 99 Cf. e.g. GC III, 149, 151, 153, 154, 158. 100 This is, in other words, not a signaturist text. It resists readings like Singer's (1987), which attempt to place it squarely within the hieroglyphic tradition. Singer regards The Garden of Cyrus as »the response of a seventeenth-century thinker to the tradition of the ancient wisdom of Egypt« (91–92), with the consequence that Neoplatonism is reduced to analogistic thinking and the hermetic theory of correspondences. Expectably, Browne appears »tied to patterns of analogical thinking that characterized the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance« (99). In contrast to Singer, Preston (1993) argues that Browne's method of »discovering the divine text inscribed in the Creation« (264) at a time when signaturism was clearly on the wane shows not only that he »occupies a position midway between what we can recognise as modern science and very late neo-Platonic thought« (264–5) but also that this is due above all to the literary strategies of indirection he employs in his writing as means of suggesting what cannot otherwise be represented. Thus, Preston effectively keeps open the possibility of the dynamic Neoplatonic reading that I am trying to suggest: Figuration in Browne functions as a strategy of making palpable the apparition of the nonapparent (and not, as it were, as a means of hermetically illustrating the apparition of the apparent). 101 »Studious Observators may discover more analogies in the orderly book of nature, and cannot escape the Elegancy of her hand in other correspondencies.« (GC III, 156). – These »Studious Observators« seem to be closely related to the »Pious spirits« Browne likes to refer to in Urne-Buriall, as both occupy positions with which he does not wholly identify himself. A sense of distance remains in both texts. Note also that Browne appears to be fascinated by the »Elegancy« with which nature's hand has drawn these analogies rather than by the analogies themselves.
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processes of thinking that point beyond the observable, visible patterns the text pretends to be so interested in. They do not close, but open up. Instead of defining, they exceed boundaries already drawn. By again and again deflecting the impulse towards schematic closure, they prevent univocal designs, recognisable shapes from constituting themselves. From this point of view, The Garden of Cyrus turns out to be neither a signaturist (or analogistic) text nor, in a mimetic sense, a quincuncial one.102 As it refuses to fall into shape, above all, to represent conclusively what it refers to; as it avoids the familiar, definitive patterns, most decisively the iconic as exemplified by the cruciform, Browne's text deepens the sense of uncertainty and of the elusiveness of knowledge which generally characterises his discourse. At the same time, the device of paralepsis suggests a figuration of knowledge different from the representational or the iconic. This figure of ostentatious omission, far from being a negation of what it claims to leave out (and of course due to the dialectic of negation), manages to refer to it even more emphatically. What it negates – or pretends to negate – is not so much what it refuses to name but the scope of the discourse in which it occurs. Besides, and especially when it is used in connection with topoi of humility or self-denigration, it is eminently suited to the purposes and strategical aims of sprezzatura, as it suggests that the allegedly limited competence of the speaker is actually far more comprehensive than it is made to appear.103 Thus, while this act of transparent dissimulation may conceal either limited knowledge or actual ignorance, it is also capable of adumbrating the idea of perfect, all-embracing knowledge. In drawing attention to itself as dissimulation, it leaves open the scope of what it hides. At least potentially, however, the extent of this is infinite, at any rate indeterminate. If paralepsis at this point appears closely related to irony,104 it also becomes clear why the term is sometimes used as a synonym for occultatio and apophasis.105 While this figure may simultaneously create a sense of uncertainty and of its opposite, perfect knowledge, it achieves this by denying the explicitly represented and by pointing beyond it towards the hidden. It shows that there is abundance beyond the immediately sayable by figuring what it does not say, or what it pretends to be incapable of saying. It thus claims what it disclaims, implying as it does so that _____________ 102 The text simply does not fall into any of the available contemporary patterns – despite recent attempts to discern hidden structures of the collector's, antiquarian's, or, again, the signaturist's order; cf. e.g. Löffler (2006), also Heyl (2006), and van Hoorn (2006). 103 For a more detailed discussion of this aspect see V. O. Lobsien (2010a, forthcoming). 104 Anaximander considers paralepsis as a form of irony (cf. Czapla [2005]). 105 The Rhetorica ad Herennium defines it as ›saying by not saying‹: »Occultatio est, cum dicimus nos praeterire aut non scire aut nolle dicere id quod nunc maxime dicimus« (IV, 37). John Hoskyns, in Directions for Speech and Style, interestingly treats paralepsis as a kind of dissimulated amplification: »PARALEPSIS, the second counterfeit of amplification is when you say you let pass that which notwithstanding you touch at full […]« (»Sidney's Arcadia and the rhetoric of English prose (c. 1599)«, in: English Renaissance Literary Criticism, ed. Vickers [1999], 413).
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there is more than can be expressed. In so far as it alludes to the absolutely inexpressible, it can be said to be a structurally Neoplatonic figure:106 apophatic speech impossibly referring to what is beyond speech; striving, in the medium of sense, to evoke what is beyond sense together with an awareness of the impossibility of such an evocation. The underside of uncertainty is potentiality – and the imagination directed towards it. To create the paradoxical effect of productive uncertainty, of inexhaustible copia beyond the limits of discourse, is an achievement of Browne's paralepsis. To be precise: it is an effect of the equivocation of paralepsis. It is capable not only of dissimulating but also of displaying the elusiveness, perhaps the ineffability of what it omits. Its power, like that of the lists of unanswered questions, lies in its suggestiveness: what is not said is, possibly, what can not be said. What is paraleptically cancelled in articulation may signal the presence of the non-apparent. This equivocal strategy of virtualising a whole dimension of the text is itself capable of calling forth duplicitous effects. As a means of apophatic figuration it borrows something of the dignity of negative theology. Since, in The Garden of Cyrus, it is not necessarily divine secrets only which are ›leapt over‹ in this manner, however, these are also virtualised and assume the status of potential mysteries. As the non-apparent becomes virtual, a parallelism is established between the visible and the invisible capable of rendering their positions interchangeable. And it is this double structure which ultimately turns this text into a promise of regeneration, the material world into a potential for resurrection. As a paradoxical figuration of unavailable knowledge this is also a means of transfiguring the discourse of natural science, causing it to balance on a point where it retains something of the explanatory and interpretative potential of metaphysics and, indeed, of poetry. This parallelism of the virtual and the represented, together with the infinite figurative suggestiveness of the given, can be seen at work throughout. It is palpable already in the brilliant and involuted opening paragraph of the text: That Vulcan gave arrows unto Apollo and Diana the fourth day after their Nativities, according to Gentile Theology, may passe for no blinde apprehension of the Creation of the Sunne and Moon, in the work of the fourth day; When the diffused light contracted into Orbes, and shooting rayes, of those Luminaries. Plainer Descriptions there are from Pagan pens, of the creatures of the fourth day; While the divine Philosopher unhappily omitteth the noblest part of the third; And Ovid (whom many conceive to have borrowed his description from Moses) coldly deserting the remarkable account of the text, in three words, describeth this work of the third day; the vegetable creation, and first ornamentall Scene of nature; the primitive food of animals, and first story of Physick, in Dietetical conservation. (GC I, 129)
_____________ 106 Figura, in the sense in which Didi-Huberman (1995) defines it: as figuration through dissimilitude. Cf. for a philosophical exploration of the paradoxes of the negative theology of Dionysius Areopagita also Derrida (1989).
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At first reading and considered out of context, this paragraph merely baffles. As an introduction to a fairly recondite theme it is an obvious failure, as it renders even more remote what must already, even by seventeenth-century standards, have appeared eccentric. The subject of the following treatise hardly becomes any clearer. With, it seems, wholly unnecessary indirectness the text proceeds from Greek mythology to the fourth day of creation, from the making of sun, moon, and stars according to the biblical account via regrettable omissions in Plato's Timaeus and Ovid's Metamorphoses and with a looping back to Genesis at long last to the work of the third day, namely the creation of the plants – »the vegetable creation, and first ornamentall Scene of nature«. Did we not know that the vegetable world is indeed to be a major focus of the text, this passage would hardly succeed in pointing us towards the subsequent consideration of gardens and the prevalence of quincuncial principles in vegetation as well as plantation. As an example of paraleptic figuring, however, this is wholly characteristic of what follows. Instead of coming to the point, it ›leaps over‹ and at the same time emphasises what will be the second focus of the text – the topic of illumination, visibility, recognition. It is even autoreferential in that, ›in passing‹, it deplores a Platonic omission. From the first, Browne leaves open what he pretends to cancel or leave unsaid, thus installing, from the very first, the duplicity that structures the text as a whole. As in this paragraph, The Garden of Cyrus proceeds on multiple symbolic layers at once. True, the planets are not its primary subject. But, as it will later unfold, orbs and rays, spheres and quincunxes, circles and ›decussated‹ lines are inseparably connected. The text will remain centrally concerned with light and vision in all its aspects, including potential mythological and theological interpretations like the one offered here, with the »shooting rayes« of sun and moon parallelised and considered somehow equivalent to the »arrows« (with lozengeshaped points?) given by the god of fire to the solar and lunar deity respectively. True, it is not »Pagan« philosophy which is to be the major theme of the following. But, just as ostentatiously as it is omitted here it will be present throughout under Platonic auspices. As part of this duplicitous rhetorical firework, the paradoxical litotes »no blind apprehension« (like paralepsis a figure of understatement) sums up the symbolic vision of what is beyond sight. Thematising the creation of light, together with the divine personifications of art and beauty, before everything else, and inverting the sequence of third and fourth day, the paragraph suggests the doubleness and parallelism of stellar and botanical dimensions, of the worlds of light and growth. In the same manner, it relates different systems of meaning, such as Jewish and Graeco-Roman theologies and philosophical (or poetical) cosmologies, suggesting that they might be mutual referents. Equally, and in the same indirect manner, it postulates a commensurability between nature and culture as well as between creationist metaphysics and medicine (»Physick«).
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The basis for these correspondences remains unspoken. The text does not formulate the grounds for assuming likenesses, how precarious soever, between Greek, Roman, and Mosaic accounts of genesis, and it remains just as uncertain that – as the following paragraphs will propose – the gardens of Cyrus were actually located on the site of (and thus somehow identical with) Paradise. The exact relations between these different elements of knowledge are as invisible as the usually invisible connections between the points of the quincunx. They are poetical decussations. But as such they are capable of suggesting that the universe of The Garden of Cyrus is held together by relations of mutual figuration. From the very first, the visible world as presented in this text is transparent. The parallelism that emerges as the poetic strategy underlying it is obviously eminently suitable to presenting the network of rhombus forms under consideration. It is the mainstay of the ›parallelogrammatic‹ submitted by the text as a whole, which spells out »the severall commodities, mysteries, parallelismes, and resemblances, both in Art and Nature« and aims above all at discerning »the elegancy of this order« (GC I, 133). The most potent of these »parallelismes« of course links the quincunx as the arch-pattern of plantation, in paradise as in the garden of Cyrus, to the garden. It thus connects nature and art, science and poetry, divine creation and human labour. It also relates beginning and end, in an eschatological as well as concretely textual sense. The text begins with considerations of genesis, the Garden of Eden and the awakening of creation to proceed, by way of multiple versions of the principles structuring this first of all gardens, to an evocation of night,107 sleep, and – although neither justified by sense experience nor by ancient authorities108 – dreams of paradise itself, culminating finally in a hint of the end of all things: Though Somnus in Homer be sent to rowse up Agamemnon, I finde no such effects in the drowsy approaches of sleep. To keep our eyes open longer were but to act our Antipodes. The Huntsmen are up in America, and they are already past their first sleep in Persia. But who can be drowsie at that howr which freed us from everlasting sleep? or have slumbring thoughts at that time, when sleep it self must end, and as some conjecture all shall awake again? (GC V, 174–175)
Browne's final paragraph in The Garden of Cyrus short-circuits the inevitability of sleep with its impossibility. Closing, aptly, with a rhetorical question that _____________ 107 By identifying an astronomical resemblance: »But the Quincunx of Heaven runs low, and 'tis time to close the five ports of knowledge; […]« (GC V, 174). 108 Again, garden dreams are passed over paraleptically, with sense perceptions being made to appear simultaneously insufficient and decisive for the truth value of what is apprehended: »Beside Hippocrates hath spoke so little and the Oneirocriticall Masters, have left such frigid Interpretations from plants, that there is little encouragement to dream of Paradise it self. Nor will the sweetest delight of Gardens afford much comfort in sleep; wherein the dulnesse of that sense shakes hands with delectable odours; and though in the Bed of Cleopatra, can hardly with any delight raise up the ghost of a Rose.« (ibid.).
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might open another (millenarian) debate, it proposes yet another parallelism. We cannot stay awake in the middle of the night – yet, in another sense, how could we not? Our geographical (and physiological) situation prescribes what our spiritual situation proscribes. As outlined, the human condition appears to imply contradictory demands. At the same time, the geographical comes to figure the spiritual; the immanent becomes a sign for the imminent. The ultimate parallelism this forces us to consider is that of salvation. It is built around the simultaneity of time and eternity, the life of the body and the life of the soul. From the point of view of the eternal, everything is always present. Hence, the apocalypse, and with it our resurrection, is joyously to be anticipated, as it is about to put an end to the dream which is our life and to the »everlasting sleep« which would be death without hope of salvation. The quincunx finally appears as a figure of desire almost fulfilled. Browne's Neoplatonic parallelogrammatic, his writing with »a double aspect« (GC IV, 168), in which one part remains in the shade, to be affirmed in its potential as it is ›passed over‹, finds its most systematic explication towards the end of Chapter IV. Continuing the »seminall considerations« (GC III, 148) begun and elaborated in Chapter III, here we move from matters of growth and colour to theories of seeing, of cognition, and of the constitution and motions of the human soul. In his account of vision, Browne mainly rehearses Renaissance theories of perspective as evidence for ancient models, but subsumes them under his own favourite idea, that of quincuncial decussation: »For all things are seen Quincuncially«, and this explains the universal preference for this principle of order (GC IV, 167). The centre of refraction, in this account, is made to appear the centre of a multiple decussation, with the »Pyramidal rayes« sent out by the object crossing in the eye and finding »a second base« on the retina, and a further decussation in the »optick or visual nerves in the brain«, with a branching out of the reflected rays towards the »place of vision«, the left eye responding, in addition, crosswise to nerves in the right half of the brain and vice versa (ibid.). There is some conflation of theories here and not a little lack of clarity, but the point is that these multiple decussations provide reasons for the interaction of inner and outer worlds, visible things and objects seen, which are no longer either material or ideal, but somehow both. The same holds for »the law of reflection in moved bodies and sounds« (ibid.) and for the structure of intellectual apprehension mediated by sense perceptions generally. This, too, works according to the dynamic of the double V connected at the angle: »Things entring upon the intellect by a Pyramid from without, and thence into the memory by another from within, the common decussation being in the understanding […]« (GC IV, 168).109 _____________ 109 From this follows an irresistible pathological possibility: »Whether the intellectual and phantastical lines be not thus rightly disposed, but magnified diminished, distorted, and ill placed in the Mathematicks of some brains, whereby they have irregular apprehensions of
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Decussation is thus established quite literally as the figure of transcendence, of the crossing of thresholds between things and their concepts in human perception and cognition. It is therefore not surprising that the »ascending and descending Pyramids« which in hermetical thinking depict the movements of the »geniall spirits of both worlds« should also form the letter X connecting the points of the quincunx. Most importantly, however, the figure provides the model for »the motion of the soul, both of the world and man« (GC IV, 168). Having explicitly derived his theory of cognition from Carolus Bovillus, the early sixteenth-century thinker following in the footsteps of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Nicolaus of Cusa, 110 Browne now refers to Plato himself and the Timaeus. In the version offered here, this provides not only the conjunction of quincunx and circle as the principle of creation, it seems also to contain the ›seminal idea‹ (to borrow a Brownean phrase) of a theory of self-awareness: And this also with application to the soul of man, which hath a double aspect, one right, whereby it beholdeth the body, and objects without; another circular and reciprocal, whereby it beholdeth it self. The circle declaring the motion of the indivisible soul, simple, according to the divinity of its nature, and returning into it self; the right lines respecting the motion pertaining unto sense, and vegetation, and the central decussation, the wondrous connexion of the severall faculties conjointly in one substance. (GC IV, 168)
Browne thus gains a ›Platonic‹ principle of unity capable of explaining the self under a »double aspect« – as a process of perception directed outward and simultaneously towards itself. The reflexive movement by which the subject acquires consciousness of itself is seen to be due to, and constitutive of, its »divinity«. It is also what holds together and perfects the soul with respect to its bodily and object-directed motions. In the last paragraph of this chapter, the quincuncial joining of sense and soul is finally enlarged to Christian format, including the history of salvation and transforming the whole universe into the figure of Christ: »Decussavit eum in universo«, in a phrase Browne ascribes via Justin Martyr to Plato (GC IV, 169).111 _____________ things, perverted notions, conceptions, and incurable hallucinations, were no unpleasant speculation.« (GC IV, 168). 110 Cassirer locates Bovillus historically at the point where Platonism and Aristotelianism begin to drift apart. He sees him as a liminal figure, partly in the wake of Renaissance Neoplatonism, but also strongly obliged to Aristotelian categories and structures of thought; cf. Cassirer (1911), 62–72; also Cassirer (1927, repr. 1969), 93–103, with an appendix containing Bovillus' Liber de sapiente, ed. Klibansky, 299–412. 111 Incorrectly so, as L. C. Martin points out in his commentary (Religio Medici and Other Works, 357–358). The second-century middle Platonist philosopher and Christian apologist Justin Martyr is an intriguing choice of authority at this point, as he is generally considered to be the first Christian Platonist; also the first ecclesiastical author who parallelises the Timaeus and Genesis; with Christ as the Logos in the place of the world soul. He is also regarded as anticipating the Neoplatonic principle of emanation in the
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This theoretical vortex seems to suck in arts and sciences, natural philosophy and Christian theology, hermetical together with optical and mythological knowledge – indifferently, though not quite irrespective of their provenience. As elsewhere in Browne, in The Garden of Cyrus there seems to be a bias in favour of Platonic models of thinking. In addition to the reasons already suggested, this text takes recourse to them because they appear capable of embracing and comprehending a great diversity of heterogeneous modes of knowledge. In the »Labyrinth of Truth« they afford »delightful Truths, confirmable by sense and ocular Observation« (GC V, 174). A Platonic meta-theory like that of the quincunx in all its ramifications aims to go beyond mere »discursive enquiry and rationall conjecture« (ibid.). But while it avoids scholastic pedantry by including sensual and experimental evidence, it never loses itself in empirical or antiquarian detail either. Investigating an undercurrent of astonishing insight in an ocean of uncertainty, it seeks the reconciliation of speculative and ›scientific‹ manners of knowing.112 When (and if) Browne succeeds in this enterprise, he does so aesthetically and because of the poetic qualities of his prose. He is self-confidently aware of this, as he asserts with a trace of defiance: »Flat and flexible truths are beat out by every hammer; But Vulcan and his whole forge sweat to work out Achilles his armour.« (GC V, 174). It seems to be only consistent that Vulcan, whose gift of arrows to Apollo and Diana opened the text should be invoked again near its close. The reference does not only justify the aesthetic, legitimising beauty joined with function. It also serves to remind us of the theme which, persistent like no other, runs through the text, structuring and guiding its argument from first to last: light. Together with its opposite, shade, light is pondered in one of the most _____________ theory of the Son proceeding from the Father. Not last, his doctrine of Logos spermatikos, the idea that ›seeds‹ of Christian truth may be found in the works of the pagan philosophers, seems highly congenial to Browne's interest in the seminal – both in a botanical sense and with reference to theoretical prefiguration. 112 Similarly, Halley (1985) situates Browne at a crucial moment in the advancement of learning; right in the forefront of an ongoing debate within the process we have come to consider, with hindsight, as the self-definition and foundation of natural science – but before the drifting apart of modes of knowing. For Halley, The Garden of Cyrus arises from the conviction that though nature may be a perfect order, human systems of classification and attempts at consistent taxonomy are incapable of reproducing it. Hence the many digressions: they are the peculiar »formal strategy of The Garden of Cyrus, where an ideal form expressed in terms of the Neoplatonic homo universalis is opposed by a bulging, digressive text« (107). Browne's text succeeds not only in a »precise rendering of epistemological problems« (101) not yet solved by science, but also in presenting empiricist and Neoplatonic modes of knowing as equivalent and mutually corresponding. In this respect, Browne's project has, as Halley shows, affinities with Comenius' The Way of Light and, above all, with John Wilkins' Essay Towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language (1668). Indeed, the emphasis on unassimilable facts and »uncontrolled particularization« (118) even turns Browne's text into an example of a »Baconian aesthetics« (abstract, 5).
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poetical passages of The Garden of Cyrus, which at the same time functions as a densely charged summary of the text and a self-description of its strategies. The passage occurs in Chapter IV and it prefaces the ›systematic‹ considerations of sight, cognition, and the self-reflexive powers of the human soul we have just mentioned. It is itself preceded by paragraphs concerned with the necessity of »shades and shadows« for the growth and mutual sheltering of plants and especially for the protection of their seeds (GC IV, 166). Of course, to talk about the botanical and horticultural functions of shade is still to talk about the quincunx, as it is only this principle of plantation which guarantees the optimum of protection against the elements, especially wind and sun. But it is also to realise, as an aspect of decussative design, the interdependence, indeed the interchangeability of light and darkness: to the »generative particle« darkness is at first as essential as light; in the sense of its life-giving principle, it is its ›light‹: Darknesse and light hold interchangeable dominions, and alternately rule the seminal state of things. Light unto Pluto is darknesse unto Jupiter. Legions of seminall Idæa's lye in their second Chaos and Orcus of Hipocrates; till putting on the habit of their forms, they shew themselves upon the stage of the world, and open dominion of Jove. (GC IV, 166–167)
Browne's discourse switches registers at this point, modulating into the mythological; or more precisely, into the mythological language of Hippocrates' meditation on birth and death as aspects of continuous natural alteration in De dieta. With this, we move through brief considerations of cosmology and astronomy to the nuclear passage which concentrates with great density the characteristic elements of the aesthetic metaphysics underlying the text: Light that makes things seen, makes some things invisible, were it not for darknesse and the shadow of the earth, the noblest part of the Creation had remained unseen, and the Stars in heaven as invisible as on the fourth day, when they were created above the Horizon, with the Sun, or there was not an eye to behold them. The greatest mystery of Religion is expressed by adumbration, and in the noblest part of Jewish Types, we finde the Cherubims shadowing the Mercy-seat: Life it self is but the shadow of death, and souls departed but the shadows of the living: All things fall under this name. The Sunne it self is but the dark simulachrum, and light but the shadow of God. (GC IV, 167)
The paradox at the beginning of this paragraph boldly postulates that light darkens as well as illuminates and that the visible and the invisible are but metaphors of each other. At the same time, this is based on a fairly straightforward cosmological description, stating that darkness on earth is the pre-
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condition for our perception of the heavenly bodies.113 This characteristic physical-metaphysical doubleness persists in the following sentences. True, it is only the change of night and day, indeed their simultaneity on the terrestrial globe, which, as it were, makes us and our antipodes experience every night and day anew the fourth day of creation in rendering the planets visible to us. On the other hand, as we, by means of the reference to Hippocrates, have just been pointed towards the possibility of a natural regeneration capable of converting death into new life, this reminds us of the initial paragraph of The Garden of Cyrus with its meditation on the creation and the sequence in which lights and plants were called into being. This multiplication of semantic levels is meant to amaze and to call forth admiration at the wonderful and mysterious way opposites are folded into one – both at the creation of the world and at the point of its salvation: »The greatest mystery of Religion is expressed by adumbration«. In a manner hardly to be surpassed in its paradoxical ingenuity, Browne here explains the incarnation as mutual figuration of light and shade by alluding to the words of the annunciation in Luke 1. 35: »[…] The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee: […]«. As the Holy Ghost overshadows the flesh in the conception of Christ, the flesh becomes the shadow of the spirit. The mere transference of the central English term into Latinate diction (»adumbration«) here achieves the impossible. It increases its scope as absolute metaphor by transforming it into a figure of cosmological, natural, and metaliterary validity in addition to its familiar theological and metaphysical dimensions. Indeed: »All things fall under this name«. For, as the following series of paradoxes makes clear, this ›shadowing‹ is the only way we can evoke the ineffable. We have already come to know this mode of speaking as occultatio or paralepsis. Here, the ultimate occultatio is realised on several levels at once. The incarnation is not only the greatest mystery in that it folds into one the divine and the human, it is also the greatest paralepsis and the greatest paradox in that it combines the utterly incompatible, reconciling the material and the spiritual. As this cannot be expressed, it has to be shown or made palpable by poetic form. If salvation consists in the restoration of potential, this is also what paraleptical ›shadowing‹ is capable of effecting. By passing over the possibilities it leaves unspoken it suggests them. _____________ 113 This implies that the earth is not self-luminous. In the preceding paragraph there seems to be some ambiguity, in connection with the reference to Hevelius, as to whether the moon is indeed a »Luminary« (i.e. self-luminous) or dependent on reflected light (with its far side in »shadow« – in addition to being always invisible from the earth and forcing its inhabitants to lead »a polary life«; GC IV, 167). On the medieval as well as the still controversial Early Modern discussion on this point cf. Grant (1994), especially 390–421 and 459–466. As regards Browne's attitude towards Copernican cosmology, Huntley aligns him with Bacon, who also showed considerable reserve towards heliocentrism (cf. Huntley [1962], 87).
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This suggestive paragraph epitomises Browne's writing. It links The Garden of Cyrus to the »oh altitudo« of Religio Medici as well as to the shadow of death as a paradoxical figure of the resurrection in Urne-Buriall. It puts into literary practice the central Neoplatonic configuration of the non-apparent by apparition. Not last, in the elegant central conceit we see Browne's art of suggestion perfectly realised: the adumbration of perfection in the annunciation is thematised in a manner which itself promises a perfection beyond the spoken. Here as elsewhere, Browne's poetic sprezzatura, in its suggestiveness, imitates the beauty he finds in the natural world and which he again and again designates with the term »elegancy«. Decussation thus becomes the figure of invisible knowledge, a figure of desire linked to the promise of its potential realisation. As Browne, sentence by sentence and persisting in his double concern for the natural world ›occulted‹ and illuminated by the divine, stages transcendence, the world as projected and read in The Garden of Cyrus grows transparent: a figure of Paradise.
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3.2 Transcendent Opacity: Edenic Imaginations of Happiness in Marvell's »Garden« Thomas Browne's The Garden of Cyrus is not only a joyful horticultural fantasy of regeneration predominantly Neoplatonic in its literary and rhetorical modes. It is also the product of an imagination we might call Edenic. In a sense, the gardens of Cyrus are identical with the Garden of Eden, if only because they are planted according to the same principles and situated, presumably, in the same site. They are Paradise, however, also in a textual sense, as Browne's prose causes them to refer to this other garden in a way similar to that in which the omissions in his text point towards transcendence. But, like these paralepses, they do not signify their other, potentially infinite meaning with anything like necessity or univocality. The Garden of Cyrus, in other words, never grows into a fully blown allegory of Paradise. In order to gain this significance and thus realise its significatory potential to the full, it requires what it seeks to stimulate in its reader: an act of transcendence. This invitation to ›go beyond‹ can be felt also in Browne's other writings. Reading Browne, we observe how Neoplatonic figures of thought inject an assimilative dynamics not only into autobiographic explorations of the religious subjectivity, but also into potentially divisive discussions of reason versus faith, as in Religio Medici. Similarly, a Neoplatonic readiness to transcend appears capable of inspiring paradoxical strategies of knowing what cannot be known this side of the grave as well as the search for an equally scientific and metaphysical language for last things (in Urne-Buriall). Configurations of Neoplatonism, however eccentric, help to gesture towards the invisible, linking emergent scientific mentalities with much older modes of thought. At the same time, they prepare a theory of creation that is also emphatically an aesthetics, which regards the world as metaphora divina in the sense postulated by Eriugena – or Aenigma Dei, as some of Browne's contemporaries would have put it. Neoplatonic thinking can thus also be seen as a way of fashioning the counter-intuitive – in an Early Modern context which grows increasingly uncongenial. But, to return to the subject of Paradise, this is perhaps also because horticultural and Edenic imaginations appear additionally and ›naturally‹ linked to a number of Neoplatonic themes. Prominent among them is the subject of happiness, of a delight both very much of this world, but, with equal emphasis, pointing beyond it. The following two parts of this chapter will explore happiness in two different, yet related directions, poetic as well as philosophical. They attempt to do so with two very different authors. First, I shall offer yet another reading of one of the most securely canonised texts of the seventeenth century – Andrew Marvell's poem »The Garden« (3.2). Next, in 3.3, the poem, which to many epitomises the delights of immanence but ironically achieves rather more, is
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placed side by side with the meditations of Thomas Traherne, certainly a lesser figure in terms of literary quality, but in other respects and from the point of view of my study equally relevant. Traherne has left us prose texts and poems which, although they appear firmly anchored in, indeed obsessed with, a happiness that transcends the world, are still very much concerned with questions of how to live in the here and now. As writers, both Marvell and Traherne differ from Browne's celebrated style in that they cultivate plainness, albeit with different effects.114 With both we move from Browne's explicit Anglo-Catholicism once again into the disputed realm of Protestant sensibilities and more ambivalent denominational allegiances. But while Marvell's poem in a sense continues the comprehensive ›scientific‹ questioning that motivates Browne's treatises, and while his text takes off, in terms of its implied aesthetics and its Neoplatonic figurations, where Browne's prose leaves us, Traherne's contemplative rhapsodies are neither overmuch interested in the intricacies of natural philosophy or in detailed observation of particulars, nor, like Marvell's poems, in the refinement of poetic meta-reflexivity. They do, however, take one of the central metaphysical implications of the Edenic imagination to its extreme, offering nothing less than a platonic-poetical art of life based on the experience of happiness.
The Gardener's Delight, or: All in One Of course, Marvell's »Garden« is not a Neoplatonist poem. It is much more than that; and, clearly, to approach this much-discussed poem once again calls for an apology. It has been placed in the traditions of seventeenth-century retirement poetry; it obviously carries Neo-Stoic overtones; it has been explicated as a poetic realisation of the Epicurean garden; it has been seen as the scene of an emerging empiricist vision as well as a trial ground for aspects of an equally avantgarde Cartesian rationalism; there is a clearly discernible hermetic undercurrent as well as an indebtedness to pastoral and emblematic genres hard to overlook.115 Its allusive literary and meta-poetical richness is in itself remarkable and has been studied in depth, most fully and with a wealth of insight rivalling the text itself by Rosalie Colie, who suggested the term »poetry of criticism« in order to highlight this important dimension of a poem so deceptively straightforward at first encounter.116 Not surprisingly, the Garden's Neoplatonist ingredients have been _____________ 114 In ch. 2.2 above we could see the extent to which Marvell's plainness differs from simplicity. 115 Nigel Smith's recent edition of The Poems of Andrew Marvell provides an overview of the critical discussion and lists its major protagonists (152–159). All references to the text in what follows will be to this edition, with line numbers given in brackets directly after the quotation. 116 Colie (1970). It does not come as a surprise to find her repeatedly referring to the writings of Thomas Browne, not only in relation to garden matters.
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commented on as well.117 The following brief reading is not concerned with ›direct‹ correspondences of the kind discussed in these source studies, and it does not claim originality in adding to their number. It does not strive for exhaustiveness either, nor does it intend to establish a new set of key concepts in »Garden« studies. It does, however, aim at providing an analysis of some of the text's poetic strategies, its most striking effects, and its major figures of thought in the light of a Neoplatonic aesthetic. In doing this it will attempt to provide yet another example of the kind of work Neoplatonic structures are capable of doing as part of an ensemble of other elements, motifs, and devices in a text paradigmatic of Early Modern genera mixta.118 Thus, in that it tries to show the aesthetic implicitly governing Marvell's text and to characterise its central poetic figurations, my reading will try to interpret the poem as Neoplatonic – if not always openly Neoplatonist. In doing so, it will also explore the extent to which the happiness described in »The Garden« is, in an eminent and literal sense, aesthetic happiness. Rosalie Colie embarks on her discussion of »The Garden« with an observation of the puzzling »sfumato of its meanings«,119 the peculiar elusiveness that results from the »hiatus«120 or indeterminate space left between the various and heterogenous elements of traditional philosophical and literary discourses the text draws into its orbit. My own coinage ›transcendent opacity‹ tries to capture a similar effect of transparency combined with concealment, darkness with translucency, but will refer it, at least in part, to the aesthetic Neoplatonism underlying the poem, with its paradoxical insistence both on the beautiful materiality of its textual surface, including its semantic and rhetorical organization, and on its referential dynamics that point to a further, integrating meaning figured at the same time as present and as unavailable, radically beyond cognitive reach, not to be overtaken by thought. Similar in several respects to the literary logic of figuration ruling the writings of Thomas Browne, this will ultimately turn out to be a Dionysian (or Erigenist) aesthetic. As a prime instance of the poetry of retirement, the text sets out, in its first stanza, with a mockery – not of human effort as such, but of the expectations of reward connected with civil, military, or poetic achievement – and recommends another kind of ›crowning‹. _____________ 117 E.g. by Klonsky (1950), who short-circuits the text with passages from Plotinus' Enneads, thus reducing it to a metaphysical statement; also, with interesting references to Nicolaus of Cusa, by MacCaffrey (1964). 118 For the classical analysis of »The Garden« predominantly under this aspect cf. Colie (1970), 146–177. A strictly generic approach is also pursued by Kermode (1952). 119 »›The Garden‹ presents a primary puzzle, because though its language is clear as glass, the sfumato of its meanings seems to belie the beautiful precision of vocabulary and syntax. However we read the poem, it seems to hold ›more‹ the next time; it must, then, withhold something of itself from us at each reading.« (Colie [1970], 141). 120 Colie (1970), 142 and passim.
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How vainly men themselves amaze To win the palm, the oak, or bays; And their uncessant labours see Crowned from some single herb or tree, Whose short and narrow vergèd shade Does prudently their toils upbraid; While all flow'rs and all trees do close To weave the garlands of repose. (1–8)
The crowning favoured here differs from the allegorical coronets of »the palm, the oak, or bays« (2) in that it consists not in a suggestion of continued activity (negotium), but of the relaxed and possibly contemplative otium evoked by the festive »garlands of repose« (8). It, too, promises a plural enjoyment, but not one based on the barely veiled indifference to the species of plant awarded (and with it to the specific achievement associated with it). Instead, it speaks of a fullness made up by »all flow'rs and all trees« (7), an all-inclusive copia much superior to the ludicrous »single herb or tree« (4), whose individual blade will afford only a »short and narrow vergèd shade« (5) and which by its very skimpiness implies an adverse and unflattering comment on the »toils« (6) and the »uncessant labours« (3) recompensed by it. This effect of comic irreverence, with a discrete touch of moralising, however, depends not so much on the literalising of the metaphoric palm, oak, or bays, which manages to suppress their mythological significance and to render their pathos slightly pathetic. Rather, it hinges on a structural retroor introversion, a kind of bending back of our attention and its redirection, in the process of reading, from the second half of the stanza to the first, from the first caesura of the text towards its beginning, from holiday back again to strenuousness – but with a difference. The text arranges an ironic duplication of meanings – beginning, perhaps, as early as the diminishing or even derogatory note sounded by the emphasis on the »single«-ness of the honorific »herb or tree« (4), and ending with a renewed and amused understanding of the doubleentendre, or pun,121 implicit in the initial qualification »vainly« (1). Retrospectively, we perceive the vanitas of human effort – albeit not only as its devaluation (as by a Neo-Stoic sermon, or a pious mediatio mortis), but as the installation of a double vision capable of discerning both the aspects of vanity and emptiness and that of (slightly comical, imprudent, but still respectable) gratuity. More: as we experience this exposure, we simultaneously ›see‹ it already overlaid by the recreative garden scenery, so much richer in leafy variety as well as _____________ 121 Colie interprets Marvell's method brilliantly as continued punning, with the effect of making us aware of the shifting multiplicity of meanings (ibid., cf. 147–152); the following paragraphs are indebted to her observations. It is not my intention to improve on her reading, my main ambition being to add a further kind of consistency to her analysis by drawing attention to the tight structural coherence of the text, explicable only, it seems to me, in terms of a Neoplatonic aesthetic.
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refreshing shade. The duplicity, or rather, multiplicity, of vanitas in this very baroque sense of the possibly empty yet poignantly beautiful opulence as depicted also in still life painting will resonate throughout the poem, perhaps most obviously and overwhelmingly so in stanza V, with the fruits of the garden literally obtruding themselves on the speaker. Still, in the later stanza, as in the first, the resulting sense of complex semantic enrichment, doubling and subversion without loss is really a structural effect, produced by the text recoiling on itself.122 »The Garden« thus teaches us, from the first, to move through it, as it were, backwards. We are led continually to revise our first readings, to add to them as well as to question them. This retroflexive looping is its central poetic device, the principle of its textual organization. In this way, the poem not only alerts us to our own meaning-making operations. It also enacts – and instructs us to engage in and imitate – an intellectual activity which, once again, appears closely analogous to that of Neoplatonic epistrophé, or return to the One. This is the third term in the triad moné-próodos-epistrophé as schematised by Proclus123 and reproduced above all in the writings of Dionysius Areopagita, the term signifying the conversion or bending back of the soul, indeed of everything that is, to its transcendent origin. It is in this sense of an epistrophé poetically instigated (and only in this) that this least didactic poem of all may be termed anagogic. »The Garden« causes us to move in circles, sometimes dizzyingly so. Indeed, here, epistrophé seems to be taken to its extreme. With each stanza, we again cover the same thematic ground, gradually realizing what we are doing and learning to enjoy the endless anamorphic possibilities of re-viewing the seemingly univocal. At the same time, we may come to appreciate the surprising way in which this poem gathers the seemingly divergent into one; hence also the sense of joyful amazement throughout. In a way typical of many texts written in accordance with a Neoplatonic agenda,124 Marvell's poem habituates us to the kind of reflexivity indicated by epistrophé by ›leading us through the motions‹. But it does so as if it were teaching us a game that may appear complicated if we read its theoretical instructions, but which in actual play appears delightfully easy. And, as we shall see, it does so to an ultimately meta-poetic end. What is so unusual about it and what causes it to differ so greatly from Spenserian poems and so strongly to resemble writings in a Brownesque vein is that it goes about it so discretely and so pleasurably. »The Garden« really is an _____________ 122 Cf. also ibid., 147: »[…] Marvell tends to mute his [puns], so that they resonate late in their larger meanings, ofter the reader seems to have got (or so he may think) safely past them to the next line, figure, or stage of thought.« Colie is, however, less interested in the structural implications of this resonance than in their meta-literary consequences. 123 On triadic structures of thought at the heart of the metaphysic of Proclus cf. Beierwaltes (1979). – The circularity associated with epistrophé is analysed in some detail above as one of the major strategies of Early Modern explorations of subjectivity; see chapter 2. 124 For instance like Spenser's Fowre Hymnes – which, however, display their Neoplatonism in a comparatively blatant and above all, highly serious manner; see ch. 2.1 above.
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example of the impossible: a metaphysical poem in a comic mode; as such an extreme instance of mixed genres. Repeatedly, we are made to perform a rather demanding epistemological and metaphysical operation, not necessarily quite conscious at first of what we are doing, but certainly sensing that this poem means more than it appears to mean; that it points beyond itself by its very opacity. This is transcendence staged in the satiric rhythms of iambic tetrameter. It is evidence of Marvell's superlative art and evidence of his irony that we hardly notice that we are comically as well as metaphysically engaged: a celare artem that corresponds to the larger dissimulation of transcendence this text is concerned with.125 The question of course remains of what it is that we return to in the course of this unique reading experience. Certainly the retrospective multiplication of meanings may teach us to perceive the many in the one.126 But in what sense can it be said that the epistrophic movement of the text ultimately and in a valid metaphysical sense effects a reduction of the Many to the One? Before we can answer this question a second closer look at the poem is needed. The basic strategy of a textual return to itself not only structures the individual stanzas internally, causing them to rebound upon themselves, but also provides transitions and circular links between them in the same retroactive manner. Thus, stanza II first seems to re-allegorise the carefully literalised garden scenery by introducing »Fair Quiet« (9) and »Innocence thy sister dear« (10), together with their »sacred plants« (13), re-inflating the mere signifier of the laurel leaf to mythological status. But the very next line converts the »sacred plants« into mere »plants« (14), tautologically insisting that these are nothing but what they appear to be ›by nature‹. However, after further humanoid metamorphoses and ambiguous reliteralizations of botanical phenomena in the subsequent stanzas, the last stanza seems to turn them back again into mere decorative signifiers again – »flow'rs and herbs« (66) as floral part of a horticultural work of art representing the zodiac. Difference thus seems to be finally ›stilled‹ in circular cosmic sameness; much as, previously, and with comically inverted teleology, »The gods, that mortal beauty chase, | Still in a tree did end their race« (27|28). Epistrophé thus ranges over and subsumes the other as well as the same. But, of course, even if it appears to end in identity its dynamic only seems to subside in stasis: How well the skilful gard'ner drew Of flow'rs and herbs this dial new; Where from above the milder sun
_____________ 125 Yet another resonance of courtly poetics in an allegedly republican milieu; cf. also Harry Berger's observation on stanza six: »The soul bird […] pursues its happiness with aristocratic sprezzatura.« (Berger, Jr., [1967a], 298). 126 Thus Colie (1970), 152: »These puns teach us – as puns do, of course – to experience the many in the one […] these puns are not designed to be puzzled out to the limit of their relevant implications, but suggest an endless mirror-world of reflection and speculation upon infinitesimal degrees of differentiation.«
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Does through a fragrant zodiac run; And, as it works, th'industrious bee Computes its time as well as we. How could such sweet and wholesome hours Be reckoned but with herbs and flow'rs! (65–72)
The scene evoked in these lines virtually hums with activity: the gardener's artistic creativity, his skill and innovative energy (»this dial new«) recalled admiringly at the outset; followed by a reminder of unceasing cosmic movement, with the sun ›running‹ a double course both through the heavenly constellations and, as vital force regulating the seasonal growth and decay of plants, through the »fragrant zodiac« here in the garden, as it were animating it and promoting its continual change. Next, »th'industrious bee«, emblematic of tireless and productive labour is introduced and its activity offered as metaphor for ours; not so much as exemplifying the inescapable temporality of existence here on earth, but as busily counting up and adding to the store of moments filled with the sweetness of things simply and ›naturally‹ done. Here, even the pun on »time« (thyme) combines the sense of a final result both sensuous and satisfying with implications of impermanence and fleetingness, perhaps vanity. This double sense of delightful self-sufficiency and painful limitation, of time measured by the timeless and of the timeless absurdly subdivided into temporal units (a note struck already with the collocation of »dial« and »sun«), of wholeness and movement, of something at the same time complete and running out, evanescent yet eternal, is stressed also in the poem's last lines. With the allusion to a final ›reckoning‹ they resume, with an eschatological undertone, the comparatively harmless notion of a ›computing‹ of what will ultimately resist calculation. With the inversion »herbs and flow'rs« they chiastically return us to the beginning of the stanza. And with placing the »herbs« at the centre of this chiasmus – arranged in a circle in the perfect representation of the zodiac and encircled by cosmical orbits – the poem comes full circle as it glances back at the first stanza and its »single herb« of futile merit contrasted and supplemented with »all flow'rs and all trees« of the garden. If it is at all possible to enact in language, in the linearity of a literary text, the paradox of stillness-in-movement so dear to the author of the Celestial Hierarchy,127 it is here that it is achieved. The text thus appears to arrive at an identity compatible with dynamic, indeed spherical, movement. It does not terminate and it is not arrested, but circles within itself. The identity and oneness it presents is that of a perfect, self-reflexive aesthetic whole, in more than one sense. Thus, as first and foremost effect of its recursive structures, the poem asserts itself in its quasi-spatial, circular textuality. Its stanzas follow each other loosely, not in a strictly linear manner, neither gradually increasing in complexity, nor forming a tightly linked argumentative _____________ 127 Cf., for instance, 208B and 212A (Dionysius Areopagita, The Complete Works, 163, 165).
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chain; rather, proceeding in a metamorphic sequence, with references tending to be recursive rather than anticipatory. There is nothing coercive about this sequence; its necessity is wholly aesthetic, as it unhurriedly builds up the garden as an absolute metaphor. As it constitutes itself by means of multiple, ›global‹ anaphora, the poem assumes the dimensions of a place in which we move and through which we are guided by the speaker. This sense of a definable, if strangely unlimited, garden-like whereabouts is created above all by the deixis, which situates us, together with the speaking voice, »here« (9), »here below«, in »this delicious solitude« (16), among »this lovely green« (18), »Here at the fountain's sliding foot« (49), leisurely admiring »this dial new« (66). This is a ›place‹ in which it is possible to dwell; only very slightly menacing with its »curious« (37), impertinent, passionate fruit and its possibilities of asexual but highly erotic entanglement ending in a soft »fall« (40) – a Fall that punningly resonates also through the penultimate stanza, with its wistful fantasy of a fruit not eaten, a fatal option not taken, indeed made impossible through solitariness. This place is, and is not, »Paradise« (64); indeed, due to its imaginative doubling in this poetic cabinet of mirrors, it is »Two Paradises […] in one« (63). But space in literature, especially Edenic space, must retain its metaphoric quality; and it is this which is repeatedly exposed, its claims to totality irritated by the references to time and temporality. Fantasised enclosure is both posited as beautiful and intensely desirable, and, at the same time, as porous, open to time, ephemeral, hence »vain«: as impermanent as the victory, success, and fame rewarded by palm, oak, and bays, and as transitory as the gods' passion finding its end in another self-referential transformation (the »laurel« [30] and the »reed« [32] speaking of Petrarchan and pastoral poetry; indeed, finally and auto-erotically, only of themselves).128 But these floral »hours« (71), only to be measured by themselves, are yet to be measured. They may be surpassingly »sweet and wholesome« (71), but they, too, will pass. This text literally ›marks time‹ – making no headway, going nowhere, because it has already arrived where it wants to be. And yet it is precisely in this imagination of the end of all desire that temporal movement seems to reinsert itself. After all, this vision of Paradise is just a remembrance of life before Eve – »Such was that happy garden-state | While man there walked without a mate« (57|58) –, as well as a comically misogynist fantasy of the never-to-be. For Marvell's ironical speaker, as attractive as that theoretic vision may appear, there is no timeless Plotinian ›flight of the alone to the Alone‹.129 As this attempt to describe the precarious spatiality of the text already implies, there is a second sense in which it presents itself as an aesthetic whole, _____________ 128 As made clear in the rejection of »am'rous« convention in the final couplet of the preceding stanza: »Fair trees! Wheres'e'er your barks I wound, | No name shall but your own be found.« (23/24) The plants in the garden do signify – nothing but themselves. 129 Enn. VI 9, 11 (the last words of the Enneads; in Armstrong's translation: »[…] escape in solitude to the solitary«).
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and emphatically so: This garden world is all. It is not only Paradise; it is not only all gardens (especially all symbolic gardens), but aspires to be, at least to represent, the universe. This is not the only respect in which it resembles Thomas Browne's Garden of Cyrus. It offers a sphere capable of accommodating everything – civic strife, professional effort, passionate love, not least material beauty – as it maps out its realm of all-inclusive transformative potentiality. Yet this aspect of plenitude, of ecstatic delight in the sensual world as communicated most strikingly in the hedonistic language of stanza V,130 remains inseparable from the third, and most important, ›holistic‹ dimension of the text. The poem culminates in yet another transformative move, turning the universal garden into a hortus mentis comprehending even more.131 And it is only here that the speaker finds »happiness«. Meanwhile the mind, from pleasures less, Withdraws into its happiness: The mind, that ocean where each kind Does straight its own resemblance find; Yet it creates, transcending these, Far other worlds, and other seas; Annihilating all that's made To a green thought in a green shade. (41–48)
Here, as the speaker turns from hedoné (»pleasures less«) to eudaimonia (»happiness«),132 the garden is converted into an interior space, the space of the mind. This introversion, which might appear as the ultimate withdrawal, at the same time as ultimate diminution of the garden world, immediately assumes a vastness even greater than the symbolic universe hitherto charted. The commonplace notion of the ocean containing replicas of all terranean forms of life confers upon the mind the same ability to mirror all there is. However, this projection of the very large upon the small not only once again stresses the mind's reflexive capacities that make it (at best) an imitator of the world, the source of a mimesis which merely duplicates the given. It also, by foregrounding the oceanlike fertility of the mind and accentuating, by means of the interior rhymes with »kind« and »find«, its inventive ingenuity (which after all depends on the resources of generic ›kinds‹ only for its starting point), prepares for the truly _____________ 130 Cf. also Berger's reading of this (for him, central) stanza (Berger, Jr. [1967a], 288–293). 131 Colie, too, makes much of this observation. For her, however, this is primarily another indicator of the metapoetic engagement of the text: »The recreative power of plants, celebrated in the ethical literature of retirement and of husbandry, now metamorphoses into the creative power of poetry, as gradually the garden takes on more and more aspects of the hortus mentis.« (Colie [1970], 160). 132 These concepts, and the distinction between them, will become important also for Traherne; see below 3.3.
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extraordinary claims made in the following famous, indeed notorious lines. For these assert no less than the human mind's ›poietic‹ creativity – a creativity which goes beyond a mere copying of the things given in nature, boldly and selfconfidently »transcending these«. Its product are not imitations of the same but, explicitly, »Far other worlds«, of the kind of the familiar yet utterly strange garden world, with whose creation the speaker as alter Deus is concerned at the moment. It is, however, not only the explicitness with which this poem presents its startlingly ›modern‹ theory of the imagination133 which makes these lines so remarkable in the present context. As the final couplet of the stanza makes clear, this imaginative creativity only makes sense if combined with its apparent opposite, a gesture of ›annihilation‹ or radical negation, and with the Neoplatonic thought-action of reflexive concentration in preparation for transcendence. Here the mind becomes mindful of itself. This is the supreme home-coming: in a gesture of simultaneous aversion and conversion, the mind steps beyond »all that's made«, at the same time comprehending it and making the material and sensual world perfectly its own by transforming it into »a green thought in a green shade«. As green has by now become the colour of perfection,134 far superior to the red and white of Petrarchan love and evocative of all garden delights, it is now raised to the colour of reflexion and creative contemplation as well. Here the mind comes into its own, having, as it were, incorporated the created world, with a figure again verging on tautology, the echoing »green« suggesting an identity of meaning between thought and its operations only questioned by the traces of materiality remaining in the notion of »shade«. This stanza makes us experience a further tightening of the circular, an intensification of the recursive mode which, as it shows the mind to delight in recognition and reflexion of its own creativity, seems about to take the garden retreat to the extreme, ingesting and contracting the world to a mental point. Taken by itself, it might make us doubt whether, despite its irresistible structural pull towards unification, recursiveness of this egocentric kind deserves the name of epistrophé. However, not only is the thematic undercurrent of Neoplatonic thinking which already seems to surface here strengthened by the following stanza, but there are also indications, even in this ingenious play with Platonic commonplaces,135 that the mind's enjoyment is not exclusively focused on itself _____________ 133 Cf. V.O.Lobsien/E. Lobsien (2003). 134 Cf. also Colie (1970), 164. 135 Such as the presence of the ideas of things in the mirror-like mind enabling perception (according to Colie, »standard platonic epistemology«; ibid., 164); also perhaps in the doubling, in which the mind is seen in the likeness of the ocean – i.e. is turned, in effect, into a secondary agent, these lines reflecting the idea of a universal reflector. Cf. also Smith, who in his introduction to the poem sees »the broad patterns of thought behind M.'s poem« to come close to those of the Cambridge Platonists (The Poems of Andrew Marvell, 154). The point, however, is not so much that these are commonplaces, but the uses the topical is put to in this text.
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and its own powers. Readers of Thomas Browne – and perhaps others as well – will have sensed in these lines, with their ambiguous references to an eclipse of the material and a luminous shade, an opening and transcending of the selfcontained sphere of the mind, preventing it from circling in its own selfsufficiency. There may in fact be felt a whole chain of resonances here, starting with the conspicuous stress on annihilation – used in Browne's Urne-Buriall and in his Christian Morals to emphasise precisely the obliteration of the self »according to Mystical Theology«136 – and confirmed by the climactic »green shade« (48), which transforms the preceding references to the pleasures of a shady garden into an allusion to what Browne had called »adumbration«,137 turning his own predilection for »shades and shadows«138 in quincunxial plantations in particular and in nature in general into a metaphor for the greatest mystery of faith, that of the incarnation, or the materialisation of divinity. In turn, this play on the equally paradoxical and suggestive topos of translucent darkness, of the divine light obscured by its taking on of human flesh, at the same time transfiguring it and making darkness the very medium of the self-communication of God, is a reminder of the author who, in his Mystical Theology, introduced it into Christian Neoplatonism: Dionysius Areopagita. Marvell's poem, however, never takes these resonances into the realm of the discursively explicit. There are no abstractions in the garden. And the ›theology‹ offered in the next stanza, which functions as an indispensable counterpart to the preceding account of poetic self-reflexivity and creative transcendence of the merely mimetic, is itself another example of the imaginative power of this text: Here at the fountain's sliding foot Or at some fruit-tree's mossy root,
_____________ 136 In Christian Morals, Browne quotes a passage from his own Urne-Buriall almost verbatim, with the most conspicuous addition of the phrase which might be taken as a reference to the title of the famous work of Dionysius Areopagita: »And if, as we have elsewhere declared, any have been so happy as personally to understand Christian Annihilation, Extasy, Exolution, Transformation, the Kiss of the Spouse, and Ingression into the Divine Shadow, according to Mystical Theology, they have already had an handsome Anticipation of Heaven; the World is in a manner over, and the Earth in Ashes unto them.« (Religio Medici and Other Works, ed. Martin, 247 – my italics, V.O.L.; cf. also ibid., 124f). That Browne at least knew of Dionysius Areopagita is (if necessary) borne out by an allusion to another of the Areopagite's works, the Celestial Hierarchy, in his Religio Medici: »I beleeve there shall never be an Anarchy in Heaven, but as there are Hierarchies amongst the Angels, so shall there be degrees of priority amongst the Saints.« (RM I. 58, ibid., 53). 137 »Light that makes things seen, makes some things invisible […] The greatest mystery of Religion is expressed by adumbration, and in the noblest part of Jewish Types, we finde the Cherubims shadowing the Mercy-seat: Life it self is but the shadow of death, and souls departed but the shadows of the living: All things fall under this name. The Sunne it self is but the dark simulachrum, and light but the shadow of God.« (GC IV, ibid., 167). – For an interpretation of this passage, see above, 3.1. 138 The Garden of Cyrus, ibid., 166.
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Casting the body's vest aside, My soul into the boughs does glide: There like a bird it sits, and sings, The whets, and combs its silver wings; And, till prepared for longer flight, Waves in its plumes the various light. (49–56)
Again, the image of the soul as a feathered being is thoroughly topical; a Platonic commonplace in Renaissance literature, familiar not last from Spenser's Fowre Hymnes. Still, Marvell's soul-bird is both less physical and less transcendent, at the same time more literally aesthetic – that is to say, concerned with its own beauty – than Spenser's. It is also ostentatiously Neoplatonic.139 Having discarded its body (and with it the last remaining traces of potential interest in the business of human love), the soul appears about to embark on a further ascent. Yet, on the other hand, this is still very much a bird, preening itself. Also, primary interest seems to be focused not so much on its song (as might be expected with an allegory of the poetic soul) as on its splendid plumage and its intense preoccupation with it. It is in fact another reflexive activity in which the soul is shown to be engaged, but a reflexion pointed outward, not inward: As it »Waves in its plumes the various light« the bird appears to return and in returning subtly to alter the brightness bestowed on it.140 This is, in other words, not an image of _____________ 139 In a sense different from that unearthed by source-hunting: Klonsky (1950), not surprisingly, goes beyond the topos of the soul as a feathered being by finding an even more specific parallel in Plotinus's musings on reincarnation: »Those who loved music but were in other ways respectable turn into song-birds; kings who ruled stupidly into eagles, if they had no other vices; astronomers who were always raising themselves to the sky without philosophic reflection turn into birds which fly high.« (Enn. III 4, 2). (The reference given by Klonsky is not only incorrect, but he also abbreviates Plotinus's period to the phrase concerning the lovers of music, thus turning this somewhat sarcastic passage into a serious and unambiguous statement on the after-life of the artistically-minded; cf. Klonsky [1950], 26). 140 The paronomastic effect of the rhyme »flight«/»light« deserves further comment: As ›light‹ appears to be included in ›flight‹, it not only suggests a resemblance or secret kinship between the terms, but turns the the former (retrospectively) into a condition of the latter. This idea – that the »longer« flight is made possible by what is not only the condition of visibility and perception but also the cause of its beauty and attractivity, i.e. light as physical phenomenon but at the same time perhaps as lux mundi – appears to be both brought into play and relativised by the epithet »various«. Simultaneously posited and questioned, it evokes a Neoplatonic figure of thought as articulated, with similar suggestiveness, by Augustine. In the Confessions, Book X, Ch. 34, he both deplores that he is prone to be enticed by the pleasure of the eyes and justifies this delight, as his love of the visible is, after all, a consequence of the light, which renders colours visible in the first place: »pulchras formas et varias, nitidos et amoenos colores amant oculi. […] ipsa enim regina colorum lux, ista perfundens cuncta, quae cernimus, ubiubi per diem fuero, multimodo adlapsu blanditur mihi, aliud agenti et ad eam non advertenti.« (»Mine eyes take delight in fair forms, and vanities of them: in beautiful and pleasant colours. […] For
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self-sufficiency,141 but another opening of the circularity ruling this poem – an image of suspense, of tranquil expectation, of preparation »for longer flight«. It may justly be termed epistrophic, as it marks the moment before the ascent and the perfecting of the given that has to precede it. It is beautiful, verging on the auto-erotic, but not self-contained. It is an image of actively anticipated perfection, but still marked with the index of ›not yet‹; a perfectly relaxed anticipation of joys possibly even greater than those depicted, but never explicitly named, as they are beyond naming. It is, finally, a supreme instance of Marvell's language of veiled excess, of an implicit (and still Dionysian) hyperbole. But where, if anywhere, does this lead us? How can we, in conclusion, describe the figure this poem makes? Marvell's bird of paradise is neither Spenser's »soare faulcon«142 nor Herbert's lark (hoping to fly with the ›imped‹ wing of Christ as falcon);143 it does not appear worried by the longer flight it is about to embark on, but seems restful and unhurried in its preparation for it. Indeed, it »sits, and sings«. Its song is, of course, the poem we read; but then, as we have already seen, the Garden is also the garden of the speaker's consciousness; it is also, as we read, our mind. It is a prelapsarian Garden of Eden, but also a ›real‹ garden with bees, flowers and an ornamental sundial, and it aspires to be an image of the whole created universe. There are altogether too many candidates for an allegorical reading, the meanings offering themselves too diverse. If, following the intuition of plurality, we consider the Garden as an extended conceit of the manifold, it will also resist interpretation, not because it is so strikingly complex but rather because it is oddly hermetic. The text seems to bring into play both allegorical and concettistic modes, but refuses to deliver a discur_____________ this queen of colours, the light, shedding itself in all whatsoever we behold, so oft as I enjoy the daylight, gliding by mine eye in its varied forms, doth most sweetly inveigle me, wholly busy about another matter, and taking no notice of it.«) This corporeal light is, however, only a trace or image of the uncreated, unified and unifying divine light, which is its origin and whose superiority it points toward: »ipsa est lux, una est et unum omnes, qui vident et amant eam.« (»This is the light indeed; it is one, and one are all those who see and love that light.« (St. Augustine's Confessions With an English Translation by William Watts 1631, vol. 2, 168–171). In connection with the rhyme on »flight«, Marvell's »various light«, adding perhaps a further, ›empiricist‹ touch, describes an analogous figure, evoking the beauty and multiplicity of reflected colours as well as the source of their visibility and its potential theological resonances. (Cf. also Didi-Huberman [2001], 139–157). 141 For a different opinion cf. Berger, Jr. (1967a), 299 and passim. 142 An Hymne of Heavenly Beautie, l. 26 and passim. Still, it does seem to have something in common with the equally hawk-like »spirit« bird of Amoretti LXXII, which, about to »spred her bolder winges, | In mind to mount up to the purest sky«, is repeatedly weighed down and caused to return by »earthly things«, in particular by contemplating the beauty of his beloved. Not dissimilar to Marvell's, Spenser's soul »unto heaven forgets her former flight« and her »fraile fancy fed with full delight, | doth bath in blisse and mantleth most at ease«, enjoying earthly »happinesse« at least as a temporary substitute for, and anticipation of, »hevens blisse«. (The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, 736 and 643-644). 143 Cf. »Easter Wings«, in: The Works of George Herbert, 43.
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sive ›meaning‹. If there is one, it remains concealed. In fact, the feeling voiced by many readers that the poem withholds something central receives yet another affirmation. The mode and quality of this withholding, however, may assume a slightly different colouring in the light of the approach suggested above. The Garden's refusal to ›mean‹ – that is, to explicate itself by making a statement that might be articulated in another medium (metaphysical, physical, devotional, moral, satirical etc.), while seeming, on the other hand, to point towards a wealth of possible meanings – is indeed a systematic refusal. For, Neoplatonically speaking, Marvell's text is anagogic, but persists in veiling its reference. It seems to guide us towards a goal kept consistently opaque. It appears translucent, but repeatedly refers us to the apparent. Thus, in terms of a Neoplatonic aesthetic demanding structural anagogy together with reference to the transcendent, it is a limiting case – a test case like the writings of Thomas Browne, if for different reasons. Due to its removal from discursive availability, the transcendence the poem does gesture towards by its transparent tautologies is radicalised almost to vanishing point. Its beyondness appears heightened to a point where it becomes anonymous. However, I would still argue that it remains present – for structural as well as explicitly thematic reasons. Not only is there a strong undercurrent of Neoplatonic motifs and ideas, surfacing most clearly in stanzas six and seven, it is also, and more importantly so, the combination of these materials with circular, epistrophic structures which gives the poem's muted transcendentalism its specific quality. These are enacted, indeed put on display in a manner which leads us back, persistently, to the aesthetic, the sensually perceptible, but also, and simultaneously, to the poetic and imaginative. The poem's recursivity returns us to itself, but not merely as a decorative artefact like the herbal dial created by the »skillful gardener«. Rather, it returns us to beautiful surfaces brimming with potential, unreleased non-discursive insight, with anticipation beyond articulation. It is not only in its final stanza, with its metapoetically suggestive evocations of the gardener and the bee and its pun on »time« (70), claiming identity of the sensual and the abstract, of herbal fragrance and intellectual ›computation‹, implying both immediacy of experience and detached reflexivity, that Marvell's »Garden« marshalls its commonplaces in a manner which loads them with unspoken meaning by arranging them in a specific and describable manner. As it, in its recursive movement repeatedly alerts us to the poetic devices by which its effects are created; as, with the mind withdrawing »into its happiness« (42) and the soul-bird basking in the »various light« (56), it reflects upon its own process and the faculty which gave rise to it, the poem also offers a metaphoric account of the imagination. It is this – imaginative – potentiality to which it returns us. This is also why it seems to simmer with things unsaid. From a Neoplatonic, especially a Dionysian, point of view, this is only natural. For although, in our movement towards henosis, imagination or phantasia is the faculty superior to sense perception and next to dianoia, the highest mode of the human intellect, it is still in need of being elucidated by this highest mode of thought and cognition.
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Conversely, however, it is phantasia which paves the way towards this superior cognitive mode. It is in fact indispensable as preparation for this kind of »longer flight«,144 a necessary foundation, anagogically furthering the ascent and a vital element in this dynamic conception of a mind capable of reaching the divine. Phantasia provides the vehicle and the medium for our ascent to the One. This is why this text puts it on display; together with its products, its aesthetic exuberance as well as its capacity to reflect upon itself. While it guides us through the structures of epistrophé, the poem draws attention to, and emphatically affirms, the conditions of its own beauty, the (asexually) sensual as well as the phantastic. It does not, however, celebrate these for their own sakes. »The Garden« displays, in its performance of recursivity, both the riches of poetic ›matter‹, its beauty – and its poverty. In metaphysical terms, the experience it has to offer is only second-best. That is why it resists the attractions of narcissistic self-containment, circular self-sufficiency, or discursive univocality. But it is, nonetheless, precisely that: intensely enjoyable potential, »happiness« holding the promise of more. Barely transparent to the highest, its reflecting surfaces yet seem to convey an awareness of their penultimate status as something ultimately good and therefore wholly justified. This is then, once again, the attempt to describe a paradoxical effect due to circular structure – but also a source of enduring fascination. Marvell's poem resists both the temptations of complacency in the guise of aesthetic ›autonomy‹ and of self-denigration by explication. It is neither completely opaque nor totally transparent. Its opacity does not prevent but dissimulate potential transcendence. If this is negative theology, it is negative theology in an ironic mode. What will not cease to amaze modern readers in this poem charged with a persistently veiled symbolism is the confidence with which it points to the power of the aesthetic. »The Garden« is the most modern, the most self-confidently auto-referential of the texts considered in this study. Marvell's stubborn refusal to be didactic and unambiguous may of course be read as an attempt to distinguish himself from _____________ 144 It does not seem coincidental that we find another comparison of the soul-as-imagination with a bird readying itself »for longer flight« towards the end of Book IV in Castiglione's Courtier. The speaker is Pietro Bembo, and, in the course of his explanation of the Neoplatonic doctrine of love, he compares those who have already acquired a general concept of beauty (pointing beyond the individual and sensual but not yet pertaining to heavenly beauty) with callow birds capable of fluttering their wings but not yet able to rise high or fly far: »This stayer of love, though it be verye noble, and such as fewe arrive at it, yet is it not in this sort to be called perfect, forsomuch as where the imagination is of force to make conveiance and hath no knowleage, but through those beeginninges that the senses helpe her wythall, she is not cleane pourged from grosse darknesse: and therefore though she do consider that universall beawtie in sunder and in it self alone, yet doeth she not well and cleerlye descerne it, nor without some doubtfulness, by reason of the agreement that the fansyes have with the bodye. Wherefore such as come to thys love, are lyke yonge Birdes almost flushe, whyche for all they flytter a litle their tender wynges, yet dare they not stray farr from the neste, nor commytt theym selves to the wynde and open weather.« (The Book of the Courtier, 358–359).
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contemporary allegorical modes, especially those current in the type of devotional fiction which was to become popular in the 1660s and 1670s, not only of a Puritan cast but also of the kind written by his friend Nathaniel Ingelo.145 However, the subtility of his tongue-in-cheek aestheticism, his self-reflexive affirmation of the created worlds not only of nature but also of poetry, the very knowingness of this text will continue to spur readers of »The Garden« to a further pursuit of its »green thought«.
_____________ 145 Cf. for instance the pop-Neoplatonism of Nathaniel Ingelo's philosophical romance Bentivolio and Urania (1660; a second part with the last two books was published in 1664). Ingelo was also a friend of John Worthington and Henry More, who sent a copy of the book to Anne Conway and enquired after her opinion in a letter of 1661 (cf. letter No. 118 in [Anne Conway] The Conway Letters, 192). In his introduction to Marvell's poem »A Letter to Doctor Ingelo, then with my Lord Whitelocke, Ambassador from the Protector to the Queen of Sweden«, a characteristically ambiguous panegyric on Queen Christina of Sweden, Smith comments on the friendship between Marvell and Ingelo and the »unlikely« Puritanism of both (cf. The Poems of Andrew Marvell, 259–266).
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3.3 Felicity: Thomas Traherne's Art of Life That the philosopher's idea of happiness should differ from the poet's is perhaps less surprising than that they should converge. As we turn from the delights of Marvell's »Garden« to Thomas Traherne's meditations, we also turn to an author with philosophical amibitions of a different kind, one who is also a ›pastoral‹ writer in a different sense. Traherne is priest as well as poet. It is precisely the resulting combination and the mutual transformation of its elements which render his ›mind-set‹ interesting. If Thomas Browne's profession might (mis)lead us to approach his texts with the expectation that they will be preoccupied above all with a doctor's interest in the care of the human body and its physical well-being, at the utmost with the natural science of his day in so far as it relates to his profession, and that his texts will be dominated by didactic and educational functions in accordance with these preoccupations, we may be similarly tempted with respect to Traherne's. But, much as Browne will emerge as a »bad physician«146 to frustrated readers seeking to find more pragmatism than he has to offer, readers of Traherne are likely to encounter, apart from the anticipated concerns with spiritual health or aspects of pastoral care for his parishioners, a number of irritating features as well. These are aesthetic as well as conceptual; similar to Browne, they sometimes hover between the persuasive and the autoreferential. They differ from Marvell's striking poetic self-sufficiency, however, in that they remain intensely concerned with the transcendental anchoring of the delights they display to the reader. While their emphasis also falls on felicity rather than on pleasure, Traherne's texts persist in referring to a reality strictly outside the textual scope and not reducible to its immanence. As their topic, however, – ultimately like Marvell's »Garden« and also similar to Browne's Garden of Cyrus – is happiness as the end of knowledge, I shall begin with an examination of the philosophical groundwork for this, which, in all three authors, is Neoplatonic and, in its systematic profile, Plotinian. From here it will be possible to discern more clearly not only the distinctive characteristics of Traherne's Neoplatonism, but also its functions as part of a textual network of contemporary concerns not immediately reconcilable with it.147
_____________ 146 Cf. Fish (1974), 353-373. 147 Parts of the argument presented below are articulated also in V. O. Lobsien (2009b).
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A Philosopher's Idea of Happiness: Plotinian eudaimonia In order to understand the idea of happiness as proposed by Plotinus, we need to consider the context in which he develops it. He refers to it by the term current in late Antique ethics for the highest good: eudaimonia. This is indispensable to living well; without its achievement no ›art of life‹ would be regarded as successful. If we take Neoplatonism to contain, like the philosophies of late Antiquity in general, such an ›art‹ of life, i.e. to offer a guide towards the good life, together with instructions in care of the self (cura sui),148 we will expect it to teach us how to transform our personality so as to develop desirable qualities and an adequate attitude towards life. Still we might hesitate to translate Plotinian eudaimonia as ›happiness‹ pure and simple. Plotinus accentuates the concept in a specific way which caused A. H. Armstrong in his translation of the Enneads to render it, with a degree of understatement, as »well-being«.149 He explains the reasons for his choice in a footnote: »Happiness, as we normally use the word, means feeling good; but eudaimonia means being in a good state; […]«.150 Armstrong's stress on ›being‹ succeeds in emphasizing what is central to Plotinian Neoplatonism and indeed different from the everyday notion of happiness. For Plotinian eudaimonia is not in the first place an emotional category, but an intellectual, indeed an ontological one. As an art of life, Neoplatonism does not primarily aim at educating or controlling the affections. Rather, it is a doctrine of wisdom, respectively of salvation. Those who opt for it will not do so mainly for the sake of its affective assets, but because it shows a way of life that appears eminently good and right and in which experiences of bliss may or may not play a certain role. In fact, as Armstrong has pointed out, to be happy in the Plotinian sense you need not feel happy. Eudaimonia is not necessarily accompanied by pleasure (hêdonê). It is a truism that Neoplatonic views of life differ from Epicurean ones in many ways. One of the major differences is also that pleasure is conceived as a good which, given the circumstances, may be absent in well-being. There may be no true hêdonê without eudaimonia, but it is possible to experience eudaimonia with reduced or even without hêdonê. Also, we need not be conscious of experiencing this kind of happiness. In exceptional cases we may even feel downright unhappy – we may be in pain or sick, feel sad or oppressed by cares – and still be in a state of eudaimonia. Compared to its ontological dimension, the affective side of wellbeing appears secondary and contingent.
_____________ 148 Cf. Horn (1998); also Hadot (2002) and Nussbaum (1994). (Nussbaum's study focusses on Hellenistic, particularly Skeptic, Stoic, and Epicurean ethics; she does not discuss Neoplatonism as an art of life or as offering »therapeutic argument«). 149 Plotinus. With an English Translation by A. H. Armstrong, vol. I: Enneads I. 1–9. If not otherwise indicated, all quotations from the Enneads will be from this translation. 150 Ibid., n. 1, 170–171.
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It is the Platonism of Plotinus to which he owes this conception of eudaimonia as a state of perfection151 rather than an affective state. More than once he refers to a well-known passage in Plato's Theaetetus (176a-b).152 He does not only allude to it towards the end of his treatise »On Well-Being« (I 4), but quotes from it at the beginning of Ennead I 2, »On Virtue«: Since it is here that evils are, and ›they must necessarily haunt this region,‹ and the soul wants to escape from evils, we must escape from here. What, then, is this escape? ›Being made like to God,‹ Plato says.153
And he evokes the same passage in the famous closing lines of Ennead VI 9 (with the final words usually rendered as »flight of the alone to the Alone«; again in Armstrong's translation): This is the life of gods and of godlike and blessed men, deliverance from the things of this world, a life which takes no delight in the things of this world, escape in solitude to the solitary. (VI 9, 11)
But what is meant by this ›assimilation to God‹ (homoiôsis theô), this ›becoming like God‹ that is the essence of the happy life? For Plotinus, it is an escape ›home‹, »to our dear country« like Odysseus (cf. Enn. I 6, 8), a return of the soul to its origin which is at the same time its highest and ultimate end. For all that is springs from the One, which is also the Good and shows itself in Beauty so irresistibly that everything longs to return to it. This return (epistrophé) is also an ascent of the soul, in which it transforms itself and begins to assimilate itself to that on which it has set its sights. In a densely poetical passage, Plotinus compares this process with the ascent to a sacred place. This demands not only the right orientation but also ritual acts of disrobing and purification: So we must ascend again to the good, which every soul desires. Anyone who has seen it knows what I mean when I say that it is beautiful. It is desired as good, and the desire for it is directed to good, and the attainment of it is for those who go up to the higher world and are converted and strip off what we put on in our descent; (just as for those who go up to the celebrations of sacred rites there are purifications, and strippings off of the clothes they wore before, and going up naked) until, passing in
_____________ 151 Cf. Horn (1998), 108; also Szaif (2002). 152 »SOCRATES: Evils, Theodorus, can never be done away with, for the good must always have its contrary; nor have they any place in the divine world, but they must needs haunt this region of our mortal nature. That is why we should make all speed to take flight from this world to the other, and that means becoming like the divine so far as we can, and that again is to become righteous with the help of wisdom.« (The Collected Dialogues of Plato, 881). Cf. also Symposium 210a–212a and Phaedrus 248a. 153 Transl. John M. Dillon, cf. Dillon (1996), 316.
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the ascent all that is alien to the God, one sees with one's self alone That alone, simple, single and pure, from which all depends and to which all look and are and live and think: for it is cause of life and mind and being. (I 6, 7)
For Plotinus, this assimilation to the highest is a metaphysical ascent, at the same time a realization of the »upper«, pure and uncontaminated part of the soul:154 a coming into its own, through which the soul assimilates itself to that in which it already participates and with which it seeks to unite itself.155 This is also the Good, for it is only the good who are truly happy.156 Plotinus conceives of the unification that gives rise to such eudaimonia as a predominantly intellectual process; indeed, as Werner Beierwaltes has put it, as a »thinking of the One«.157 It is triggered and motivated by an experience, above all by the experience of beauty, in which the One makes itself known with irresistible attractivity. To give in to this attraction will lead beyond the sensual and material to the true end of all desire and wish for knowledge. It is only in this unification with the divine that all striving ceases. Thus, at the end of his treatise »On Well-Being«, Plotinus again affirms Plato's position: Plato was right in maintaining that the man who intends to be wise and in a state of well-being must take his good from There, from above, and look to that good and be made like it and live by it. (I 4,16)
This way is open to all ready to undergo the intellectual effort this ascent involves. It is not, however, an easy way, but an ascetic one of building and shaping the self through arduous self-discipline, introspection and self-education, a way of negation and detachment. In Pierre Hadot's words: the soul must »seek _____________ 154 Cf. Enn. IV 8, 8, 1-3: »And, if one ought to dare to express one's own view more clearly, contradicting the opinion of others, even our soul does not altogether come down, but there is always something of it in the intelligible; […]«. 155 The sight of the One in beauty is an intensely erotic experience. Plotinus continues in I 6: »If anyone sees it, what passion will he feel, what longing in his desire to be united with it, what a shock of delight! The man who has not seen it may desire it as good, but he who has seen it glories in its beauty and is full of wonder and delight, enduring a shock which causes no hurt, loving with true passion and piercing longing; […] If then one sees That which provides for all and remains by itself and gives to all but receives nothing into itself, if he abides in the contemplation of this kind of beauty and rejoices in being make like it, how can he need any other beauty? […] Here the greatest, the ultimate contest is set before our souls; all our toil and trouble is for this, not to be left without a share in the best of visions. The man who attains this is blessed in seeing that ›blessed sight‹ […]« (I 6, 7). »Blessed« here translates makarios, which underlines the quasi-divine, god-given quality of the experience. 156 Cf. Enn. III 2, 4, 45: »Only the good are well off [eudaimones]; that, too, is what gives the gods their well-being.« 157 Beierwaltes (1985).
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to give herself spiritual form, by rejecting everything other than herself«.158 If we choose this way – thus Plotinus in an often-quoted comparison – we shall resemble a sculptor working on a statue, who removes and cuts away everything that is redundant, wrong, or irritating.159 It is to follow the ascetic motto aphele panta (»Take away everything!«, in the final sentence of Enn. V 3, 17). This radical refusal of all that might distract from the realization of the highest potential of the human soul leads to a fundamental transformation, a total change of outlook and response to the world. The self thus »rises back up to that which, within itself, is more itself than itself«.160 This is an alteration so complete that it renders a man immune to all troubles, attacks and blows of fate: »He is not to be pitied in his pain; his light burns within, like the light in a lantern when it is blowing hard outside with a great fury of wind and storm.« (Enn. I 4, 8, 1–5).161 Obviously, such a person is no longer an ordinary human being but an enlightened one, to whom the ethical writers of late Antiquity would refer as ›wise‹. Plotinus's intention is to make clear what this wisdom consists in. To the extent to which his teachings are to be considered as an ethic, what they articulate is indeed, as John Dillon has put it, »[a]n ethic for the late antique sage«. This is not to say that this thinking is only for the few, elitist or esoteric. It does, however, imply that questions of everyday life and action are not its foremost concern, nor do they need to be. For if we look at Plotinian speculative metaphysics as a way, indeed an art, of life, all this will flow self-evidently and naturally from the highest wisdom which consists in unification, henosis, with the One. Everything depends on it. It will also enable us to virtuous action (although not necessarily prompt us to it). But this is secondary: in comparison with the achievement of henosis everything, whether pleasant or troublesome, good or evil, is of lesser importance: »What human circumstance is so great that a man will not think little of it who has climbed higher than all this and depends on nothing below?« (Enn. I 4, 7, 15). Thus, for Plotinus eudaimonia is inseparable from its ontological condition. At the same time, it has a double aspect: It is part of our interiority, something the _____________ 158 Hadot (1993), 21. 159 »How then can you see the sort of beauty a good soul has? Go back into yourself and look; and if you do not yet see yourself beautiful, then, just as someone making a statue which has to be beautiful cuts away here and polishes there and makes one part smooth and clears another till he has given his statue a beautiful face, so you too must cut away excess and straighten the crooked and clear the dark and make it bright, and never stop ›working on your statue‹ till the divine glory of virtue shines out on you, till you see ›self-mastery enthroned upon its holy seat‹.« (Enn. I 6, 9; with references to Plato's Phaedrus). 160 Hadot (1993), 21. 161 A passage which was to find its way into a seventeenth-century bestseller – Nathaniel Ingelo's neoplatonic romance Bentivolio and Urania, cf. e.g. Book II: »The Peace of my Soul shines clear within, and is no more clouded with this Disaster, then a Light which is guarded with a thick Lantern upon the stern of a Ship is in danger of being put out with those blustring winds which make a noise about it.« (Bentivolio and Urania. In Six Books. The Third Edition […], 51f).
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soul strives to »clasp close within itself« (I 4, 6). It is an »inner state« (I 5, 10), a disposition or even an inner »possession of the true good«, but as such it is also a correlative of something independent of this interiority and infinitely superior to it – »better than itself« (I 4, 6). In this manner, well-being or happiness is distinguished from its origin as well as its effects and consequences (such as virtuous action). Incidentally, it also appears separable from its temporal circumstances. If it occurs repeatedly, the unitive experience may, as it were, become habitual and gain a kind of underlying continuity.162 But neither does it grow by duration, nor can it be intensified by means of remembrance or anticipation. For it does not possess extension and it does not occur in time. It is the quality of the experience that matters, not its quantity (cf. Enn. I 5). From this point of view, eudaimonia is not an exterior phenomenon but something that happens within the soul and is, in a sense, effected by it. And yet, it is not ›merely subjective‹. Rather, the soul finds its fulfillment in union with something higher and better than itself,163 and the unitive experience is also a reminder that there is this higher reality beyond discursive thought and beyond consciousness. True, this reality is ultimately compatible with the soul, since in the monistic Plotinian universe everything is dynamically connected to each other through relations of participation. But the One remains distinct from the soul, although identity with it is the soul's ultimate end. As end of the soul's desire it is its ›other‹, hence ›objectively‹ given.164 In this view, happiness is certainly a state of the soul that shapes the individual's attitude towards life. At the same time, it appears grounded in an ontological reality thought of as transcending individual subjectivity. The fact that it touches, indeed taps into, this transcendent reality is precisely what distinguishes it from competing conceptions. In its characteristic subjective-objective duplicity, the Neoplatonic definition of happiness continues well into Early Modern times. Still, as I shall try to show, the idea also undergoes some modification. At some points within the constellation of interior and exterior elements and in some of its Early Modern versions, the stress falls differently. To anticipate the major changes: Perhaps least surprising, the seventeenth century tends to _____________ 162 Cf. also Hadot (1993), 71–72. 163 »But the real drive of desire of our soul is towards that which is better than itself. When that is present within it, it is fulfilled and at rest, and this is the way of living it really wills.« (Enn. I 4, 6). 164 For an account of ›objectivist‹ conceptions of the good life as compared to a ›modern subjectivization of happiness‹ see also Horn (1998), 108–112. From this point of view, the ›egocentrism‹ of the Neoplatonic ethic stressed by Dillon (1996) appears not only as a general characteristic of Hellenistic ways of life. Plotinus is, in this respect, not more egotistical than other philosophers, especially since the experience of eudaimonia may become productive in virtuous action. Rather, the disposition he recommends seems to be almost the exact metaphysical opposite to ethical egocentrism: The Plotinian self is founded in heteronomy; its identity is paradoxically constituted by its connection with an alterity different from it and yet related to it, its own and not its own – not even discursively available.
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emphasise the side of subjective interiority. Thus the quality of feeling, which Plotinus tended to play down, is foregrounded more strongly. We move from the philosopher's happiness of »well-being« to an emotionally charged state of mind. In addition, a second aspect present in Plotinus is elaborated which, though serving to distance his thinking from dualistic approaches (for instance, gnostic ones), finally possesses only instrumental or medial relevance with respect to the ultimate end of all desire: the corporeal, or, more generally, the sensual and material. The last paragraph of Ennead I 4, the short treatise on »well-being«, contains an extract from Plotinus's thinking on this topic, especially in its weighty final sentences. Even the sage, far advanced on his way to the highest goal, for whom eudaimonia is about to become second nature, is by no means a purely spiritual being, although the highest part of his soul may be constantly in touch with the nous. Rather, he too possesses an ›earthly‹ life, a corporeal existence belonging to him as long as he lives – […] which he will care for and bear with as long as he can, like a musician with his lyre, as long as he can use it; if he cannot use it he will change to another or give up using the lyre and abandon the activities directed to it. Then he will have something else to do which does not need the lyre, and will let it lie unregarded beside him while he sings without an instrument. Yet the instrument was not given him at the beginning without good reason. He has used it often up till now. (I 4, 16)
The life of the body, as this passage together with many similar ones makes clear, is not evil in itself. And it is not inimical to the life of the spirit. True, the sage will have to divest himself of it (as all of us will have to discard it when we die). But it is neither contemptible, nor is it a mere disturbance or a burden. Rather, it is an object entrusted to our care and worthy of it.165 As the ruling metaphor points out, it is even a means of aesthetic activity. It is associated with proportion, harmony and pleasing sound; it is seen as an organon capable of producing – or at least helping to produce – beauty. If used suitably and adequately, the »lyre« will give pleasure to the player as well as to those who listen. This music has its purpose and its legitimation, although it may finally provide only a transition to a mode of unaccompanied singing. Contrary to one of the most persistent clichés connected with Neoplatonism, the valuation of the body as well as of sensually perceptible things in general as media referring to the highest perfection thus forms an integral part of Plotinian thought. It will be accentuated even more sharply and in a specific manner, in early modernity, due not last to its synthesis with Christian ideas of the incarnation, nature and the creatures. If every being is part of God's creation, it cannot be _____________ 165 It is not, as Hadot (1993), 31, points out, this care which distracts us from our spiritual goal but undue and exaggerated »concern« for our body.
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radically bad;166 if the Word became flesh, the flesh cannot be absolutely hateful. Of course, a number of important intermediate steps lead from Plotinus to a seventeenth-century theologian like Traherne.167 Since this is not a study in the history of ideas and their ›reception‹, and as I do not intend to discover and list the sources from which various authors derived their Neoplatonism, but rather to show what they did with it and how it transformed their own ideas, at this point in the argument I need mention only one thinker relevant as well as representative for the type of Christian Neoplatonism which helped to shape Early Modern attitudes on happiness: Augustine of Hippo. Augustine's presence in seventeenth-century Protestant theology is undisputed; in the present context, it is above all his concern with the mediality of the ›terrestrial‹ and material world which is of interest. Here, the Neoplatonic colouring of his religious thinking appears most obvious;168 besides, it is in this connection that the question of what happiness or, in his terminology, beatitudo consists in is most explicitly posed and debated. It is above all the short treatise De beata vita which addresses the problem directly. It also provides a terminological solution that appears to structure Augustine's other writings on the topic as well169 and that seems to be echoed – but also modified – by Traherne. Prefaced by a Plotinian allegory elaborating the idea of epistrophé as the soul's journey home analogous to the return of Ulysses170, De beata vita develops its theme in the form of a dialogue strongly conscious of the need to render its conclusions acceptable to reason. The text appears to aim not so much at rhetorical persuasion or at religious conviction by arguments relying on pre-established articles of faith, but above all at creating _____________ 166 Cf. Augustine in De vera religione, XI. 21: »Nulla vita est quae non sit ex deo, […] nec aliqua vita in quantum vita est malum est, sed in quantum vergit ad mortem.« (›There is no life which does not originate in God […] and no life is bad in so far it is life, but only in so far it inclines towards death.‹ My translation – V. O. L.) Since God is the first and highest being (»prima atque summa essentia«), whatever is what it is, is good – »in quantum est quicquid est, bonum est«. (Aurelius Augustinus, De vera religione, 36–37.) 167 Some of these are treated, albeit from a different perspective, in the admirable study by James (1997), especially in Chapter 10, »Knowledge as Emotion«. James shows, among other things, in which respects the Cambridge Platonists may still be seen in the tradition of late Antique Neoplatonism as doctrine of wisdom. 168 For a concise outline of Augustine's Neoplatonism in particular as well as of the functions of Plotinian Neoplatonism for Christian theology in general cf. Rist (1996). Cf. also Kurt Flasch‹s afterword in: Augustinus, De vera religione, 215–230, and Flasch (1980). 169 Cf. for instance, in addition to those discussed below, the following passages in De trinitate: IX (2. 2), IX (8. 13), X (10. 13) and X (11. 17). In the context of trinitarian speculation unfolded there, comparatively greater stress is laid on the criterion of will (voluntas). 170 The reference is to Enn. I 6, 8. In Augustine's unfolding of Plotinus's brief Homeric allusion, men are seafarers, life is an arduous and perilous journey homeward through stormy seas. Philosophy is a safe haven, providing access to the mainland of restful happiness, but guarded by a huge mountaineous cliff of Academic Skepticism or perhaps of vainglory or high office (cf. Augustinus, De beata vita, 1[1–3]).
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rational insight by logical means. The participants of the conversation – ideally all of them, even those with Pyrrhonist or Academic reservations – and its readers are to consent freely. Since all strive to be happy, what does happiness consist in? The answer to this central question is soon given: True beatitude can only spring from what is permanent and cannot be lost, hence to be happy is to have God. That is, for the soul to enjoy him (perfrui) as the highest truth in highest measure: »Hoc est animis deum habere, id est deo perfrui.«171 To have God is also to be wise (sapiens). Conversely, to want God or to lack Him is incompatible with happiness, since to want and not to have in this existential sense brings a person near to nequitia or non-being. The soul perfectly realises its own being and thus comes into its own in realizing the plenitude of God; this is the soul's true measure (modus), as it were, the format of its self: »Modus ergo animi sapientia est […]: sapientia igitur plenitudo.«172 This is also to realise, with the eyes of the mind, our fundamental relatedness to the highest truth. To recognise it devoutly is perfect satisfaction and the mainstay of the happy life.173 In De doctrina Christiana, his outline of a theory of signs and a universal hermeneutics, Augustine again takes up the idea of an ›enjoyment‹ of God. Here, in the first book of his treatise, he opposes the term uti to that of frui, contrasting use and delight. He also proposes a scale of distinctions as well as gradations between the two. Accordingly, things are to be used or to be enjoyed. In the latter case they make us happy, in the former they are instruments in our striving for happiness. To enjoy a thing is to be lovingly attached to it for its own sake,174 whereas to use it is to refer everything to the attainment of what we love, i.e. to consider it a means to an ulterior end. But actually, both uti and frui are kinds of mediality.175 Whether we enjoy or use a thing, we treat it as a medium for the _____________ 171 De beata vita, 4 (34). 172 De beata vita 4 (32). 173 »Illa est igitur plena satietas animorum, hoc est beata vita, pie perfecteque cognoscere, a quo inducaris in veritatem, qua veritate perfruaris, per quid conectaris summo modo.« (De beata vita 4 [35]). As modus, veritas and sapientia are, in Augustine's argument, mutually convertible, happiness is also the realisation of transcendence as the only true measure of the individual soul: To be oneself is to find one's own innate measure as centrally connected to God. Augustine's explicit avoidance of the term abundantia, which has a strong Neoplatonic ring to it, and his introduction of modus, with its – possibly Stoic – suggestion that nothing may be added or taken away, emphasises the notion of self-identity which finds its determination, its fulfillment as well as its limitation in transcendence. 174 Cf. also Augustinus, Die christliche Bildung (De doctrina christiana): »Genießen bedeutet nämlich, aus Liebe irgendeiner Sache um ihrer selbst willen anzuhängen; gebrauchen aber bedeutet, alles, was sich für den Gebrauch anbietet, auf das Erlangen dessen zu beziehen, was du liebst – wenn es sich dabei überhaupt um eine Sache handelt, die geliebt werden soll.« (Book One, IV. 4. 8). If not otherwise indicated, all references in the following are to Book One. 175 Cf. also De trinitate, X (11.17): »proinde omnis qui fruitur utitur; […] non autem omnis qui utitur fruitur […]« (›Thus, whoever enjoys also uses […] but not everyone who uses enjoys […]‹; my translation – V. O. L.).
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attainment of the ultimate happiness that consists in the epistrophic ›return home‹ from our pilgrimage in the world to God.176 Still, there are differences of degree, ranging from the instrumental to the autotelic. Indeed, the only ›thing‹ to be truly enjoyed is the Trinity, as it is the ground of all things.177 At the other extreme, the world is never to be enjoyed, but only to be used so that we may realise and see the invisible through the visible, grasp the eternal and spiritual by means of the corporeal and temporal.178 Between these poles there are degrees of mediation and, correspondingly, transparency. Human beings, too, are not to be enjoyed directly and in the strict sense of the term. As they are created in the image of God, this is what they are to be loved for. If only the permanent and unchangeable source of the highest happiness is to be loved absolutely and for its own sake, men are to be loved relatively and for the sake of their Creator.179 What is above all to be avoided is the abusus consisting in an attachment to the medium for its own sake, without further reference. Love for our neighbour is thus constructed in analogy to self-love: for we are to love ourselves not autoreferentially and narcisstically, but because our being derives from God. It is, in other words, the fact that men refer to God, that they are related to Him and participate in His being, which confers value and renders them worthy of being loved. This is not to say, however, that human beings are to be used in the same way in which the world is to be used. Only God can be said to use human beings, as he has no need of them. Our relationship to each other is one in which we »use one another in love« – which is the same as to enjoy one another »in God».180 Following the same logic, attitudes of radical asceticism with regard to the body are rejected. Augustine takes great care not to propagate enmity towards things corporeal.181 It is absurd to hate our body, equally absurd to wish that we did not have one.182 After all, the body will be resurrected together with the soul. Therefore, we are to rule over it reasonably, to care for it prudently and to keep it in good health. Still, again this is a graded attachment: just as we are to love God more than ourselves, we are to love our neighbour more than our body – for the sake of his soul and its relation to God. We are not to rest in our love to temporal
_____________ 176 177 178 179 180 181 182
De doctrina christiana, IV. 4. 9, cf. also IX. 9. 21 and X. 10. 22. Cf. ibid., V. 5. 10. Cf. ibid., IV. 4. 9. Cf. ibid., XXII. 20. 40–21. 43. Ibid., XXXIII. 37. 79. Cf. ibid., XXIV. 24. 48–XXV. 26. 56. These arguments appear pointed against radical platonists as well as against dualistic conceptions, Gnostic or Manichaean. Augustine seems to strike a note different from Plotinus too in that he lays the stress on non-grudging acceptance of the body and not on modes of overcoming or controlling it, let alone on imagining how to divest oneself of it.
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things, but we are to esteem them temporarily - as we are attached to a vehicle or any other means to an end.183 The model proposed by Augustine is one of graded mediality. All media lead us away from self-sufficiency and false autoreferentiality; they gesture towards an alterity. To view them from this point beyond the material is to render them transparent. The respective medium, be it world, body, or human being, may appear to possess a lesser degree of dignity than what we are to realise through it, but it is never wholly without value. Its function as a stepping-stone towards an ulterior truth is what constitutes its significance. It is an element in the ascent to the highest. Consequently, the dignity of things other than God is referential as well as participatory. Their contribution to human beatitude, therefore, will be indirect and instrumental, with God being the only ›object‹ of absolute enjoyment. Since the wisdom which consists in the rational insight in this multiple mediation and the continued practice of aversion from worldly things and the conversion to heavenly ones may be acquired in this life, beatitude is to some extent accessible even in the here and now, although full enjoyment is reserved for the state of ultimate perfection after death. If we now turn from the systematic conceptions of happiness as exemplified by pagan and Christian thinkers of late Antiquity, with Plotinian eudaimonia and Augustinian frui in mind, to an Early Modern religious writer and poet like Thomas Traherne, both the unmistakeably Neoplatonic profile and the originality of his writing will become strikingly obvious. Traherne is probably the most unmitigated Neoplatonist of the authors considered in this study. Still, the happiness outlined by him will be seen to differ significantly both from Plotinian wellbeing and Augustinian beatitude. Were we to write a history of the emotions, the question might arise whether not only the technical terms but also the ›feeling‹ under consideration had possibly changed over the centuries. This is not a question easily answered. For the moment and for the purposes of the present study it may suffice to assume that the ways of speaking about emotions do actually structure their experience, and that the semantics of this discourse as presented in the texts of Traherne will have to be seen against the Early Modern version of the ancient system of faculties combined with a predominantly neo-Stoical view of the affections and passions.184 Against this background, Traherne's re-modelling of what is from the first not a mere feeling but always also connected to an act of the intellect will perhaps appear even more surprising. _____________ 183 Cf. ibid., XXXV. 39. 85: »[…] in einer eher zeitweiligen Liebe, so wie zu einem Weg, zu Fahrzeugen oder anderen Hilfsmitteln solcher Art […], so daß wir die Dinge, durch die wir getragen werden, um dessentwillen lieben, zu dem wir getragen werden.« This again seems to bear a Neoplatonic resonance, as Plotinus defined the relationship to the body in exactly the same terms: we possess it as an organon, an instrument, not an end in itself. 184 A wealth of material relevant in this context and a systematic analysis of the philosophical traditions, especially within and beyond the Aristotelian framework, will be found in James (1997).
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Eudaimonia and Enjoyment Transformed into »Felicity« Thomas Traherne185 was born c. 1637 as son of a shoemaker in the city of Hereford and died 1674 after a brief period of employment as domestic chaplain in the household of Sir Orlando Bridgeman. He spent the greatest part of his professional life as rector of the small parish of Credenhill in Herefordshire where he also seems to have been in touch with the devotional writer Susanna Hopton and her circle. His studies at Brasenose College, Oxford, in the 1650s would have brought him close to pre-Restoration Puritanism, while his later, London acquaintances (as far as they are known) seem to have been of more moderate, even latitudinarian persuasion. Although the exact degree of his nonconformist sympathies is difficult to determine, numerous passages in his texts give evidence of his strong desire for ecclesiastical union and integration. None of these, except the polemical Roman Forgeries (1673),186 were published during his lifetime. The spectacular history of the rediscovery of his writings, beginning in the early twentieth century with two manuscript volumes purchased from London bookstalls, among them poems and his prose Centuries, proceeding with the rescue of his Commentaries of Heaven from a burning rubbish tip in 1967,187 and still continuing in 1996/7 with the coming to light of further manuscripts, has led to a growing appreciation of Traherne's work as part of the canon of English Restoration literature. Not a few of his modern readers would agree with the seventeenth-century comment on the flyleaf of one of the recently-found manuscripts: »Why is this soe long detaind in a dark manuscript, that if printed would be a Light to the World, & a Universal Blessing?«188 _____________ 185 The following according to the new D1B (see Julia J. Smith [2004]). 186 Christian Ethicks was completed and given to the press, but did not appear in print before his death. Margoliouth assumes that Roman Forgeries, which to him has »a distinct smell of the thesis«, was written with a view to acquiring the degree of B. D.; cf. »Introduction« to Thomas Traherne, Centuries, Poems, and Thanksgivings, vol. 1, xxxviii. For a comparison of Roman Forgeries with Susanna Hopton's devotional writings, which challenges the view of the closeness of these two authors see also Berry (2000). 187 Commentaries of Heaven Where In The Mysteries of Felicitie are opened and All Things Discovered to be Objects of Happiness Evry Being Created and Increated being Alphabeticaly Represented (as it will appear) In the Light of Glory. Pritchard describes this very long text together with the story of the finding of Traherne's manuscripts; he also prints selections from the prose articles in Pritchard (1983). The poems are reprinted in: Traherne, Commentaries of Heaven. The Poems. 188 Quoted by Smith (2004), 208. Blevins' collection of new critical essays on Traherne (2007) came to my attention only after I had concluded work on this chapter. Several of the contributions to this volume study manuscript texts which are only gradually becoming available in print, such as the complete text of the Commentaries of Heaven (cf. the articles by Saenz and Fordham) or the Lambeth MS. 1360 (see the article by Johnston), as well as the fragments and notebooks. On the whole, however, the interests of Blevins' collection touch those of my study only peripherally. D. Inge's valuable introduction (2008) helpfully describes all known Traherne texts, focussing on Traherne the theologian. She also prints extracts from many of the less well known texts, especially the Lambeth MS.
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Not only with respect to the fate of his works and the history of their publication Traherne may appear eccentric. Still, his writings form an important part of the literary field under consideration. This contains religious and devotional writings, but by no means exclusively. It embraces other second generation Metaphysical Poets like Andrew Marvell and Henry Vaughan. But it also includes virtuosi and natural philosophers like Thomas Browne, and of course, at the heart of the second Platonic Renaissance in England,189 the Cambridge Platonists with Anne Conway. By itself, this phenomenon of a revitalisation of Platonism in the mid-century climate of growing hostility towards metaphysical speculation of any, let alone this explicitly ›idealistic‹ kind, comes as a surprise. Its very existence side by side with authoritarian models, rivalling explanations of the world and scientific ideas seemingly more suited to the pressing problems of immanence, may appear astonishing. In an explosive situation of this kind, confessionally far from settled and still politically unstable, in the context of a society in danger of being torn apart by sectarianism and cultural conflict and with toleration about to become a sharply disputed key concept in church politics,190 this is far from self-evident. With his radical conception of happiness and the poetically articulated art of life that goes with it, Traherne does occupy in some ways an extreme position, at times verging on the heterodox. However, in another sense he is also a representative figure within this field of the seemingly uncontemporaneous. As with his fellow Neoplatonists, what may, with the wisdom of hindsight, appear as a _____________ 189 Traherne was a student of Brasenose College, Oxford. It is true that the revival of Neoplatonic studies in Cambridge beginning in the 1630s does not affect Oxford to anything like the same extent, but there are other, indirect possibilities of contact. Traherne, as Carol Marks has shown, made excerpts from the works of the Oxford Arminian Thomas Jackson in one of his commonplace books. In addition, there are affinities between opinions held by Traherne and Henry More as well as Peter Sterry. Important evidence for the fact that Traherne did indeed possess considerable knowledge of Platonism and in particular of (Florentine) Neoplatonism is the so-called Ficino Notebook from the late 1660s, which – among notes from a work entitled »Stoicismus Christianus« – contains excerpts from Ficino's commentaries on Plato, his translation of the Politeia, the beginning of the »Argumentum« of Ficino's translation of Hermes Trismegistus, and a life of Socrates. Further commonplace book entries contain excerpts from More's Divine Dialogues (London 1668) as well as from Theophilus Gale's Court of the Gentiles. In Traherne's Christian Ethicks, there is a critical discussion of More's concept of infinite space; in his commonplace book Traherne is more outspoken and explicitly rejects the idea: »Bare extended Space cannot Think, illuminat or desire.« (See Marks [1966], qu. 530). Marks sums up: »Undoubtedly, then, Traherne was an Oxford Platonist, as familiar as his Cambridge contemporaries with the Platonic inheritance, bequeathed to the Renaissance by Ficino. His response to Platonism, direct and exceedingly personal, was broadly similar to the response of the Cambridge Platonists, but the individual variations are striking.« (524). 190 It appears to have been lack of sympathy with the Declaration of Indulgence of 1672 which caused Sir Orlando Bridgeman, Traherne's patron and at this point Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, to fall in disgrace with Charles II., who subsequently handed the Great Seal from Bridgeman to Shaftesbury; cf. Berry (2000), 229–230.
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species of revisionism, indeed a particular hopeless one in view of the triumphant rise of the natural sciences and the attempts of their protagonists to eradicate speculative system-building and with it philosophical scholasticism, will appear as avantgarde thinking if viewed as element of a situation as yet undecided and with competing philosophies still struggling for predominance. In the following, and against the systematic Plotinian background outlined above, I shall try to describe and characterise Traherne's very specific contribution to this strand within the literary-philosophical avantgarde as well as the guidance towards tranquillity of the soul which he offers his readers in the midst of continuing turbulences, with Civil War experiences hardly forgotten.191 It is in particular his re-modelling of neoplatonic eudaimonia which will afford a first, thematic approach to this writer, with special emphasis on his early prose meditations. A later chapter (4. 2) will pay more detailed attention to the poetic strategies and the implied aesthetic of his Centuries as well as the Poems.192 Thomas Traherne is a monomanic poet of happiness. It is this which constitutes his extremism; in this consist also his one-sidedness as well as a certain monotony. His one and only subject is »Felicity«. Where Thomas Browne tries, often in vain, to curb his tendencies to digress and to resist the temptation to mention just another curious detail; where for Browne the manifold and particular appear the more attractive the more intransparent they seem at first sight, Traherne is ever mindful of his one overriding interest and excited exclusively by its overwhelming significance, by a transparency which, to him, will become apparent as soon as he turns his radiant interest towards anything. Thus, for the sake of repeated enthusiastic appreciation of its ultimate goal, he tends to pass over the concrete, specific and possibly singular in a somewhat cursory manner. The idea, not the specimen, is what matters to him. He pursues his topic in 410 Centuries and in several hundred Select Meditations,193 in numerous poems, in his encyclopaedic (but fragmentary) Commentaries of Heaven and in rhapsodic Thanksgivings. The experimental form of the latter, the innovative philosophical verse and not last the highly unconventional poetic prose of Traherne's meditations characterise a kind of writing that permanently seeks to practice what it preaches – transcendence. Traherne's texts tend towards infinity. To be more precise: by means of varying devices of ecstatic repetition and sheer redundance they seek to _____________ 191 Cf. also D. Inge (2008), 49f. 192 In the following, the Centuries as well as the poems will be quoted from Thomas Traherne, Centuries, Poems, and Thanksgivings. References to this edition will be found in brackets after the respective quotation, the first numeral giving the century, the second the number of the paragraph in question. 193 The collection edited 1997 by Julia Smith under the title of Select Meditations makes available a number of prose meditations very similar to the Centuries, but probably written earlier; the text is fragmentary, several of the meditations being lost. References to this edition are given in brackets after the respective quotation as SM followed by roman numerals referring to the century and the number of the meditation quoted.
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guide their readers beyond their own boundaries towards the One in His abundance, in whom all finite things have their origin and their end. The principle of his poetry is spiritual excess.194 Yet Traherne is also and in an emphatic sense a poet of God's presence in the world. Needless to say, this divinity is not conceived as the impersonal and ultimately nondescript Plotinian One but as personal Christian deity. For Traherne, transcendence too, does not happen in the abstract, but makes itself known through the medium of the creatures. Like Augustine, he is highly aware of the mediality of the created world. God shows his presence by means of and within sensually perceptible things. Traherne's writing is poetry of the copiously manifest. He celebrates the appearance of God in the plenitude of the world and his own exuberant gratitude in its realisation. Unlike the works of his contemporaries like John Bunyan, also different from most of Henry More's versified philosophy, Traherne's texts are conspicuously un-allegoric. He writes in a manner which aims at displaying its meaning openly. As plain style, this is a writing that uncovers itself, as it were, strips itself of ornament, and seeks to forgo all complexity.195 It foregrounds itself in its simplicity and strives for self-explaining evidence: words bordering on and trying to bring about theophany. In this effort, Traherne's language does not require the dimension of metaphor, for, from a Neoplatonic point of view, the world as a whole is an extended metaphor – metaphora divina, in the Erigenist sense familiar by now. It is an allegory of God, in which he gives himself to be understood by us, showing and communicating himself in disguise. Thus, this poetry is also a continued act of reference to what cannot be referred to directly. It reaches out towards something else and strives continually to leave itself behind, to become transparent and as it were permeable for another presence. One of many indications of this is the interactive mode which characterises the Centuries. They begin, and over long _____________ 194 He makes this explicit in his Select Meditations: »Surmount therefore O my Soul thy fathers hous, by way of Eminence Enclude thy family, exceed the Citty wherein thou wast born, fill the Ages, Salute the Angels, Inherit kingdoms, penetrat the Earth, Encompass Heaven, Reign, Triumph, prais, Adore, O Life and Lov, Sing forever. See the churches throughout the world, let the souls and affections of all Ages be wings and streams to Elavat and Carry Thee. feare and be Enlarged. flie a way, Ascend in the Incense of all their Devotions, Mingle with their Praises, be united to them, Enflamed with them, Ravished with their Beauty, Transported with their melodie, Transformed with their Lov. All these are the Materials of Bliss, but no more compared with Bliss it selfe, then Ink and letters with the Strength of Laws.« (SM 1. 92). 195 In this it strongly differs from the ›conceited‹ writing of the Metaphysicals, in particular Donne. If one of the first-generation Metaphysical Poets was the object of Traherne's literary imitatio, it would have been George Herbert. In yet another sense, Traherne is a conspicuously un-›metaphysical‹ poet: apart from the fact that his texts are imbued with biblical diction, he usually refrains from learned allusion, covert citation or other intertextual strategies for which the Metaphysicals have become notorious. (Note, however, one of the few exceptions: the long excerpt from Pico's Oration on the Dignity of Man in Centuries 4. 74-78; see below, ch. 4. 2).
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stretches remain in the second person singular, addressed to another person in a manner at the same time appealing and insistent – a kind of ›heterologue‹, which only gradually modulates into the traditional, first-person meditative speech, directed towards an inclusive self containing the other. In a sense, this is another of the Neoplatonic hallmarks of this writing: Traherne's poetic contemplation attempts to act out the unification which is its subject. But let us, for the time being, return to the levels of theme and argument. Traherne never declares himself a Neoplatonist in so many words. He does, now and then, evoke the authority of Plato, especially in the Select Meditations, but this does not, by the standards of his time, exceed the scholarly norm.196 I have not found in the poems or prose meditations a single explicit quotation from Plotinus. Still, Traherne is probably the most single-minded and radical Neoplatonic writer among the authors considered in this study.197 The implied systematic of his thinking and writing is that of Christian Neoplatonism. However, although it might be said that the profile of Traherne's Christianity, precariously orthodox as it is,198 is shaped by Neoplatonic figures of thought, conversely, these are not wholly explicable by reference to the topics of Christian, specifically Augustinian, theology. It is Traherne's Neoplatonism, of a fundamentally Plotinian cast, which determines his ideas, concepts, themes and the few recurring metaphors (such as, expectably, those of light, of the spring or fountain, of seeing and vision, of the circle or sphere199). It is this which provides his main arguments and produces consistency and internal coherence among his meditations. In particular, if we look at his central idea of felicity, the close proximity to Plotinus becomes obvious. _____________ 196 That Traherne possessed extensive (though by no means exhaustive) knowledge of Plato, both through his own reading and through his study of Ficino's commentaries, is proved by his commonplace books, which Carol Marks has described in several articles. On the whole, Traherne's Platonism has a pronounced Renaissance profile, mediated as it is through his reading in Ficino, Pico, and Hermetic treatises, especially the Pymander; cf. Marks Sicherman (1969), Marks (1966b), and Marks (1964). She summarises her findings and compares Traherne's position to opinions held by contemporary Platonists such as Peter Sterry and Henry More in Marks (1966a). 197 For similar observations, cf. also Hutton (1994). 198 His attitude towards contemporary nonconformism remains somewhat ambivalent. He does sign the Act of Uniformity in 1662, but the enthusiastic tone of his writings, his emphasis on illumined interiority and his absolutist insistence on perfection have a nonconformist ring to them. On the other hand, in his Commentaries of Heaven, he attacks not only Roman Catholicism, but also dissenting Protestant sects, such as Quakers, Baptists and Socinians (cf. Pritchard [1983], 9), and, in the Select Meditations, praises »the union the Beautifull union of my Nationall church!« (SM 1. 85). For a Neoplatonist, of course, unity would principally appear more congenial than dispersal or schism, consensus preferable over dissent. 199 Thus, for instance, Traherne too alludes to the Neoplatonic-Hermetic commonplace, fascinating also to Thomas Browne, of the »Sphere […] whose Centre is everywhere, circumference no where« in his »Thanksgivings for God's Attributes«, Centuries, Poems, and Thanksgivings, vol. 2, 318, lines 224–225.
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Like his late Antique model, Traherne considers his writing as a doctrine of wisdom teaching the art of life. The point is to gain the right insight and attitude towards the world and to communicate it. In an autobiographical passage, Traherne recalls how he naively expected to be introduced to this meta-doctrine of happiness at the university, and he describes his disappointment as this is not the case: »There was never a Tutor that did professely Teach Felicity: tho that be the Mistress of all other Sciences.« (Centuries 3. 37).200 Still, the doctrine of felicity is also a kind of philosophy;201 even an emphatically positive, or kataphatic, one, capable of naming its aim and the conditions which have to be fulfilled in order to reach it: Felicity is a Thing coveted of all. The Whole World is taken with the Beauty of it: and he is no Man, but a Stock or Stone that does not desire it. Nevertheless Great Offence hath been don by the Philosophers and Scandal given, through their Blindness, many of them in making Felicity to consist in Negativs. […] So that whosoever will Profit in the Mystery of Felicity, must see the Objects of His Happiness, and the Maner how they are to be Enjoyed, and discern also the Powers of His Soul by which He is to enjoy them, and perhaps the Rules that shall Guid Him in the Way of Enjoyment. All which you have here GOD, THE WORLD, YOUR SELF. All Things in Time and Eternity being the Objects of your Felicity GOD the Giver, and you the Receiver. (Centuries 2. 100)
The philosophy envisaged by Traherne will above all communicate truth, that is to say the highest truth, which, if understood correctly, will change everything, including the soul ready to be filled by it. The first paragraph of the first Century makes this quite clear:202 An Empty Book is like an Infants Soul, in which any Thing may be Written. It is Capable of all Things, but containeth Nothing. I hav a Mind to fill this with Profitable Wonders. And since Love made you put it into my Hands I will fill it with those Truths you Love, without Knowing them: and with those Things which, if it be
_____________ 200 It is only the orientation towards Felicity which gives direction and coherence to all scientific endeavour. However, neither the student Traherne nor his fellows are aware of this ultimate telos; thus they remain fundamentally estranged from the objects of their learning: »Nor did any of us Study these things but as Aliena, which we ought to hav Studied as our own Enjoyments. We Studied to inform our Knowledg, but Knew not for what End we so Studied. And for lack of aiming at a Certain End, we Erred in the Maner.« (Centuries 3. 37). Mere knowledge does not quench the thirst for happiness: »[…] Happiness was that I thirsted after.« (Centuries 3. 39). 201 A philosophy, incidentally, which resembles that presented by Plotinus in Ennead I 4 even in its stoic features. It is above all in Select Meditations that Traherne stresses that the art of life to be acquired through the recognition of true felicity also provides immunity against harm and calamity (cf. e.g. SM 2. 95–97). 202 I shall return to a discussion of this passage below, see ch. 4. 2.
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Possible, shall shew my Lov; To you, in Communicating most Enriching Truths; to Truth, in Exalting Her Beauties in such a Soul. (Centuries 1. 1)
It is this truth, anonymously desired but as yet unknown,203 which is the source of felicity. Indeed, truth and felicity are identical: Truth and felicity are ever the same, becaus all the things in Heaven and Earth are Infinit Treasures: And are never Enjoyed but when truly Seen: nor ever indeed truly seen, but by a wise man they are truly enjoyd. (Select Meditations 3. 6)
Again and again, »seeing« and »enjoying«, perception and delight, are connected to form one idea. The forging of this link is a characteristic aim of Traherne's art of life. But before we return to it, a few other parallels to Plotinus's doctrine of eudaimonia need to be stressed. For Traherne, too, the attaining of felicity is self-evidently a state of fulfillment and perfection. It is the highest aim of our longing, and it is in itself perfect: »Felicity must be perfect, or not Felicity« (Centuries 3. 57). Nothing else is worth the effort, and everything else is a means to this end.204 This is borne out already by the very strength and absoluteness of our desire for it. We want no less than everything: »I would have all! a compleat Harmonie. a perfect Heaven.« (SM 2. 98) The point is that this limitless desire is already fulfilled. For everything already belongs to us. We are heirs to the world. The world is ours, and it is, conversely, God's infinite desire205 that we should infinitely delight in it. The only condition – and here we perceive another Platonist topos which we already encountered in Plotinus – is that we should realise what is the case: namely, that we are created in the image of God and are therefore committed to growing more and more like him – »[…] we were made in his Image that we might liv in His similitud.« (Centuries 5. 38) Traherne's texts abound in variations of this idea of a transformation of the self in assimilation to God, often additionally stressed by _____________ 203 The notion that »Felicity is a Glorious tho an unknown Thing« recurs in Centuries 3. 56: »I was very much animated by the Desires of Philosophers, which I saw in Heathen Books aspiring after it [i.e. Felicity – V. O. L.]. But the misery is It was unknown. An altar was erected to it like that in Athens with this inscription TO THE UNKNOWN GOD.« The allusion is to Acts 17. 16–34, with a possible further allusion (via the Areopagite) to the Christian Neoplatonist Dionysius Areopagita. 204 Cf. also Centuries 3. 56: »And certainly it was the infinit Wisdom of God, that did implant by Instinct so strong a Desire of felicity in the Soul, that we might be excited to labor after it, tho we know it not, the very force wherwith we covet it supplying the place of Understanding. That there is a Felicity we all know by the Desires after, that there is a most Glorious felicity we know by the Strength and vehemence of those Desires: And that nothing but Felicity is worthy of our Labor, becaus all other things are the Means only which conduce unto it.« 205 For the unusual notion (irreconcilable with Augustinian dogmatics) that God too should feel »Want« in that he wishes us to perceive and enjoy his creation, cf. Centuries 1. 38–53.
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references to Genesis. Again and again we read: »The best of all possible manners to which any thing created can possibly attain is the Similitude of God« (SM 2. 3).206 Repeatedly we are enjoined to »Live Like a God« (SM 3. 15). It almost goes without saying that the movement of transcendence that initiates this assimilation is presented in accordance with Neoplatonic topology. It is an ascent to the highest, taking its beginning from it and leading back to it.207 And as with Plotinus, the ecstatic delight accompanying it will surpass all earthly joy: O King of Kings no other Thing but Thee Can I confer with. O Felicitie! Thou Dost Transport me! Extasies Dispence Scarce halfe a Gram of thy Sweet Influence. (SM 1. 90)
The speaker's ravishment is fed by the awareness that even in the greatest enthusiasm not even a fragment of the potential intensity is experienced which is contained in its source. ›There‹, there is always more; and it is this certainty of inexhaustible fullness on which the speaker's felicity is founded. Yet there are embedded, as it were, in this Neoplatonic matrix, a number of features which distinguish Traherne from his philosophical models. At the same time, these transform the more obvious similarities in a manner giving them a characteristic Early Modern profile. I want to stress only two points in this ensemble of differences: one which refers to the relationship between the medium and the object of felicity as well as to the point of view from which we inquire into it, and a second which refers more directly to a subject already touched upon in the course of this inquiry.208 With regard to both these aspects, the systematic doubleness of outer and inner we observed in Plotinus's concept of eudaimonia reappears in Traherne, but is accentuated differently.
Happy with Body and Soul In Traherne's texts we find a remarkably radicalised version of the Plotinian – and also Augustinian – ideas of the body and the sensually perceptible world. Plotinus regarded the body as an important organon, more than merely useful but an instrument entrusted to our care, as such conducive to life and even to beauty, _____________ 206 Cf. also SM 2. 4–7, 2. 99 and passim; also Centuries 3. 59: »The Image of God implanted in us, guided me to the maner wherin we were to Enjoy. for since we were made in the similitud of God, we were made to Enjoy after his Similitude. Now to Enjoy the Treasures of God in the Similitud of God, is the most perfect Blessedness God could Devise.« 207 Cf. e.g. Centuries 1. 90, or SM 3. 8: »evry thing must arise from His Goodness and End in his Glory«. 208 See ch. 2. 1 above, which discussed Neoplatonic versions of subjectivity mainly with respect to earlier examples.
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while Augustine proposed a model of graded mediality, with the scale extending from use (uti), geared to worldly things, to a concept of frui, or unmitigated enjoyment reserved for the divine. In contrast, for Traherne it is creation in its totality, the whole world including the human body, which becomes a means of felicity and an object of highest delight. »Enjoy the World« is the generous call resounding through the Centuries.209 Traherne's work as a whole consists in the attempt to summon and guide his readers towards this enjoyment; to make it possible by uncovering and displaying the reasons for such joy and to teach us, in and through the process of reading, how to ›see‹ the world. The main reason seems to be quite plain: The world is ours, therefore we are obliged to rejoice in it. »All Things were made to be yours. And you were made to Prize them according to their value: which is your Office and Duty, the End for which you were Created, and the Means wherby you Enjoy.« (Centuries 1. 12) – and, even more explicitly: »By the very Right of your Sences you Enjoy the World.« (Centuries 1. 21). Not only are ends and means of enjoyment fused in the activity of »prizing« the world. Traherne also makes at least two presuppositions which continue Neoplatonic lines of thought (albeit idiosyncratically) and which his texts unfold. In the first place, this is only possible because we always already participate in the divine. In Christian terms, we are made in the image of God, we are his children and therefore his heirs. »Your Enjoyment of the World is never right, till evry Morning you awake in Heaven: see your self in your fathers Palace« (Centuries 1. 28).210 Secondly, this insight needs to be continually rehearsed, indeed to be envisaged – »Perceiv your self to be the Sole Heir of the whole World« (Centuries 1.29). In order to achieve the wished-for effect of a habituation to this ›right‹ perception, it has to be trained by (re)enactment and a sustained imaginative effort. Traherne's favourite fantasy in this connection, frequently associated with memories and ideas of childhood,211 may be called ›adamic‹: He imagines himself _____________ 209 E.g. Centuries 1. 7, 10, 12, 14, 21, 25, 27–29 and passim. In the Select Meditations, too, he reformulates his guidelines to felicity several times, as in 3. 31, which offers a didactic catalogue of the most important points under the title of »Instructions Teaching us how to Liv the Life of Happieness«. 210 For the idea of heaven in writings by Traherne and his contemporaries see also Rupp (2001). 211 For these, he enjoys a certain fame particularly among readers who appreciate the protoromantic side of his writings. He memorably articulates the adamic experience in his poem »Innocence«: »That Prospect was the Gate of Heav'n, that Day | The anchient Light of Eden did convey | Into my Soul: I was an Adam there, | A little Adam in a Sphere | Of Joys!« (Centuries, Poems, and Thanksgivings, vol. 2, 18, lines 49–53). However, Traherne shares this valuation of childhood as a state of quasi-Edenic innocence and universal, allembracing sensibility with his fellow-Neoplatonists, for instance with his contemporary Henry Vaughan. The idea of a return to this state of the soul in its glorious first emergence, even before it has come into touch with the world, is of course a topos of Plato's doctrine of the soul; cf. Phaidon 79c-d and Henry Vaughan's poems »The Retreat« or »Childhood«. The image of the child also plays a central role in Gnostic doctrines of salvation.
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as the first human being, as Man in the Garden of Eden, and he calls upon his readers equally to see themselves at the very centre of creation.212 Then, all things will be his, or hers: »You are the Adam, or the Eve that Enjoy them« (Centuries 2. 12). And here too, the appreciation and valuation (»prizing«) of ›all that was made for me and for me alone‹, is intimately linked with an act not only of contemplation, but also of imagination – an act which aspires to the state of an imitative or secondary creation: What would Heaven and Earth be Worth, were there no Spectator, no Enjoyer? As much therfore as the End is better then the Means, the Thought of the World wherby it is Enjoyed is Better then the World. So is the Idea of it in the Soul of Man, better then the World in the Esteem of GOD: It being the End of the World, without which Heaven and Earth would be in vain. […] The World within you is an offering returned. Which is infinitly more Acceptable to GOD Almighty, since it came from him, that it might return unto Him. Wherin the Mysterie is Great. For GOD hath made you able to Creat Worlds in your own mind, which are more Precious unto Him then those which He Created: […]. (Centuries 2. 90)
This creation of »Worlds« in the human mind calls forth a response in kind, in that God is claimed to ›prize‹ them even more highly than his own creation. Different from Augustine's God in his splendid self-sufficiency, Traherne's wants man, and above all he wants man's felicity in the life he has awarded him. For God does not only want man as »Spectator«, »Enjoyer«, »Comprehensor« (Centuries 1. 100) of his creation; not only does he require that man perceive it as his gift, but to him the value of the world is increased if and when it is reflected in the human imagination. By means of this ›creative‹ restitution it is elevated and heightened213 to be what it truly is. This is also the basis on which Traherne's aesthetic of the creation is founded. It is the imaginative imitation of the created world which nobilitates it and helps to perfect himself,214 because (in best Neoplatonic style) this makes him aware of _____________ (For a detailed account of the tradition and its reverberations in English medieval literature see Birkner [2005]). However, suggestive as Traherne's predilection for the idea of childhood and its redemptive potential may be, this does not make him a Gnostic. It is above all his emphasis on the immanence of God in the physical world which jars sharply with Gnostic dualism. 212 »Place yourself therfore in the midst of the World as if you were alone« (Centuries 2. 7 and passim). This position is, as Book 4 of the Centuries makes clear, the vantage point of man at his creation in Pico's Oration on the Dignity of Man (cf. Centuries 4. 74ff); see below, ch. 4. 2. 213 »[…] an Augmentation infinitly infinit« (Centuries 2. 5). Cf. 1. 74: »This is the Effect of Making Images. And by all their Lov is evry Image infinitly Exalted.« 214 Cf. also Centuries 2. 84: »Being therfore Perfect, and the Mirror of all Perfection, He hath Commanded us to be perfect as he is Perfect […] We are to be Conformed to the Image of His Glory: till we becom the Resemblance of His Great Exemplar. Which we then are, when our Power is Converted into Act, and covered with it we being an Act of
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the unity with God which precedes this act and makes it possible in the first place: »It […] Beautifies and Perfects your Nature. […] for therby you are united to Him« (Centuries 2. 90). We grow similar to what we ›see‹ in this manner.215 Aesthetic and metaphysic converge – »we may see a little Heaven in the Creatures« (Centuries 2. 12).216 This appreciation of the visible217 is a source of ecstatic joy: »This visible World is Wonderfully to be Delighted in and Highly to be Esteemed, becaus it is the Theatre of GODs Righteous Kingdom« (Centuries 2. 97). Thus, immense dignity is conferred upon the world. It is a signifier referring to a transcendental signified, which we would not be able to recognise or read without it. Both sides of this complex sign are constitutive of it; both are valid. To realise this is to turn the here and now into a site for the realization of ›the beyond‹ – by enjoying it: »Eternal Life is an object of our enjoyment here beneath« (SM 3. 60).218 _____________ 215
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KNOWLEDG and Wisdom as He is. When our Souls are Present with all Objects, and Beautified with the Ideas and figures of them all« (14–22). In Traherne's version of this central Platonic tenet: »For as Light varieth upon all objects whither it cometh, and returneth with the Form and figure of them: so is the Soul Transformed into the Being of its Object. Like light from the Sun, it first Effigies is simple Life, the Pure resemblance of its Primitive fountain but on the Object which it meeteth it is quickly changed, and by Understanding becometh All Things.« (Centuries 2. 78, lines 23– 29). For Traherne as for the Cambridge Platonists the soul is »Res illuminata, illuminans« (Benjamin Whichcote, Moral and Religious Aphorisms, no. 916, in The Cambridge Platonists, ed. Patrides, 334). Cf. also Traherne's Meditation on the soul as ›active‹ mirror in Centuries 2. 78: »The Heavens and the Earth serv you, not only in shewing unto you your fathers Glory, as all Things without you are your Riches and Enjoyments. But as within you also, they Magnify, and Beautify and Illuminat your Soul. For as the Sun Beams Illuminat the Air and All Objects, yet are them selvs also Illuminated by them, so fareth it with the Powers of your Soul. The Rays of the Sun carry Light in them as they Pass through the Air, but go on in vain till they meet an Object: and there they are Expresst. They Illuminat a Mirror, and are Illuminated by it.« (1–9). And this, it deserves to be stressed once more, is not just a figure of speech which schematically alludes to the familiar correspondence between micro- and macrocosm and related commonplaces. Rather, Traherne, too, reveals himself to be a follower of the ninthcentury theologian Johannes Scotus Eriugena, who claims, in his translation of the Dionysian treatise on the Divine Hierarchy, that »omnia que sunt lumina sunt« – all things that are, are lights (Eriugena, Expositiones in Ierarchiam Coelestem, Cap. I, 76–77). Cf. also Centuries 3. 6: »[…] we are Born to be a Burning and Shining Light«. Including, emphatically, the human body; cf. also Select Meditations 3. 9: »The Image of God in a Body being the Grand mistery of all Eternity: Gods Picture in a curious Case, besett with stars insteed of Jewels, The Angels freind in whom alone and by whom they enjoy the world, the sphere of all Perfection and the centre in which all visible and Invisible thinges Sweetly Close, The Temple in whom the fulness of the GodHead dwelleth Bodily.« – Cf. also the enthusiastic celebration of the human body in the 548 lines of »Thanksgivings for the Body«. A claim to which Augustine would probably not have subscribed unreservedly. The difference in attitude becomes obvious also in their treatment of the concept of abundance: While Augustine scrupulously avoids the term in De beata vita, Traherne devotes a whole exuberant entry to it in his Commentaries of Heaven.
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While Plotinus's sage strove to liberate himself from undue pleasure in the here and now,219 this is precisely what Traherne appears to propagate. Still, although both thinkers arrive at different results, their reasons are the same. Traherne's rehabilitation of the created world rests on a radical interpretation of the neoplatonic idea of participation. It is the universal relatedness of everything which gives rise to felicity: Oh how Happy! Here is Lov! Here is a Kingdom! Where all are Knit in infinit Unity. all are Happy in each other. all are like Dieties. Evry one the End of all Things evry one supreme, evry one a Treasure and the Joy of all, and evry one most infinitly Delighted in being so. (Centuries 1. 74)
That passages like these should know only one verb – be –, does not seem surprising. The copula becomes so self-evident in the course of its numerous repetitions that it can be left out, the rhetorical figure of ellipsis indicating both the identity of the element and the plenitude signified by it. The being envisaged here does not change, nor can anything be added to it.220 It is the ontological basis for everything, its discovery the source of the greatest possible joy. This insight into the basic unity of all releases, for Traherne, a kind of happiness which, different from its somewhat sterile conception in Plotinus, deserves to be called a great emotion. This emotion's scope is truly holistic, integrating immense delight in the created world with the equally joyful conviction that it is its relationship with the spiritual which renders it delightful. The breathtaking intensity of Felicity, which springs from an overwhelming desire and its equally insurpassable fulfillment, also distinguishes it from the notion of pleasure (hêdonê) that functions as a ruling idea for other late Antique philosophers, especially those of Epicurean persuasion. If the Plotinian sage knows himself to be in union with the One (or at least on the way towards it), Traherne, in addition, feels himself to be at one, with God through the creation. Simultaneously, another difference emerges, one perhaps less of a systematic nature than a change of perspective directed towards the late Antique matrix. As astonishing as this version of Early Modern happiness may appear by itself, its _____________ 219 Seeking »a life which takes no delight in the things of this world«; cf. the final lines of Enn. VI 9. 220 Since nothing is left out – »even Hell it self is a Region of Joys« –, we are called upon to feel ourselves in a living exchange with all things: »So that a Man is never right, till as a Part in the Univers he Correspond with all« (»Abundance« in Commentaries of Heaven, 23). Similarly, unknown things for Traherne can only be »unknown Joys«. In any encounter with the strange and unfamiliar he will immediately anticipate intimate community with it; as in the poem »Shadows in the Water«, where the »Antipodes« supposed to live under the surface of the water are joyfully greeted as »my yet unknown Friends« (line 55). Cf. also lines 61–64 of the same poem: »I my Companions see | In You, another Me. | They seemed Others, but are We; | Our second Selvs those Shadows be.« (Centuries, Poems, and Thanksgivings, vol. 2, 129).
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intensity results also from its difficulty and the obstacles it encounters. After all, the reasons for felicity in seventeenth-century everyday life are not as obvious as Traherne's speaker tirelessly announces in his manic rhapsodies, and he seems to know it. The divine often appears to be hidden and disguised, in the external world as well as within the souls of men.221 If Plotinus's rather unemphatic treatment of eudaimonia was guided above all by considerations of systematic consistency, Traherne's urgency and his passionate engagement seem to be due not last to his wish to render the opaque transparent, to let the truth shine through the unreality and ontological deficiency which darken and distort it. For the evils are not to be denied; of course we are permanently faced with wicked, trite and empty things – »taxes Injuries clothes and Monies, Musick feasts chambering wantonness, Sports and Losses« (SM 3. 10), to quote only one of Traherne's catalogues of bad worldliness.222 It is the invisibility of God which provides the starting point for Traherne. Hence, the concealment of happiness and the observation that their divinity remains hidden from many, if not most men, provide the dark foil against which his enthusiastic attempt to reclaim the world appears the more radiant: It is a misery to bewayl, But a Blessed mans missery a Step to Happienes, to lament the Corruption of a Degenarate and unrighteous world. How much more is it to Thirst and love and bear, and long to reClaime! this is my portion under the sun, and my task with God, wherein I am to Labor under as fellow workman. O Blessed be the Eternal King for my Glorious Employment! (SM 2. 20)
It is one of the most exacting demands of Neoplatonism that it requires us to consider as true, beautiful and good what is screened from our senses. Traherne stresses this demand in a characteristically Early Modern manner by taking the visible world to dissemble its true, delightful essence.223 Its beauty is veiled, and still we are charged with seeing what is on both sides of the veil.224 In fact, this _____________ 221 This realization is also central to the poem which opens Traherne's Poems (»The Author to the Critical Peruser«): The authorial voice deplores that most men perceive neither God's works nor »the Soul, in whose concealed Face, | Which comprehendeth all unbounded Space, | GOD may be seen;« (Centuries, Poems, and Thanksgivings, vol. 2, 3, lines 55–57). 222 At times, the Select Meditations sound very much like a Jeremiad (e.g. in 1. 85, 2. 42; cf. also the introduction by the editor, xxff). 223 »[…] wisdom is now become profound, Happieness concealed, Felicity Buried.« (SM 3. 42). 224 The divine shows itself in the same ambiguity, in which the pillar of fire and cloud guided the Israelites through the Red Sea: »But how much are we bound to bless his Name, that in the world of Things there is an Amiable and Delightfull side, which the Happy man does always apprehend! as the same pillar that Divided between the Israelites and Egyptians was a fire to the one and a cloud to the other.« (SM 2. 82). The ambivalence of the diaphanous medium seems to be essential, as can also be observed in the meditation on the Passion in Centuries 1. 88: »O Thou Sun of Righteousness, Ecclypsed on the Cross, overcast with sorrows, and covered with the shadow of Death, remov the vail of thy flesh
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double view may even be felt to come near to felicity: »And it is my Happiness that I can see it [i.e. Love] on both sides the Vail or Skreen« (Centuries 4. 60). But there can be no doubt that the unconcealed presence of divine glory is to be preferred to its dissimulation: »Felicity is amiable under a Vail, but most Amiable when most Naked« (Centuries 4. 13). In conclusion, a second, distinctive trait of Traherne's refiguration both of Plotinian eudaimonia and Augustinian beatitudo should be mentioned; it will be discussed in greater detail and in closer connection with Traherne's aesthetic in the following chapter. Here the focus is the subject of felicity. The accent, too, is unmistakeably ›modern‹, but still the systematic basis remains resolutely Neoplatonic (albeit with a touch of Renaissance metaphysical heroism). Traherne endows the self with the same abilities as those possessed by the soul in Plotinus. Put schematically, these are the contours of mind or consciousness comprising the mechanics as well as the aporias of the phenomenon that has been described as the structure of subjectivity.225 In Neoplatonic terms: due to its origin in the One the soul is capable of self-reflexion. This introspective, autoreferential turning into itself will cause it to become aware of its relation to the One (the transcendent, ›God‹) – a relation to be intellectually realised and acknowledged, although its end is never to be grasped or encompassed by intellect in its totality and alterity. In its simultaneity of self- and other-directed insight, its »unity between the knowing subject and the object known«,226 this is conscious activity realising the ground of all consciousness; at the same time it is an intellectual recognition-as-identification which guides the soul on its way back to its origin, indeed enacts this return. Similarly, the realization to which Traherne's texts continually seek to exhort us is also a kind of encounter with the divine, at any rate with the divinity within our soul, indeed our similitude to God: Over the Gate of Apollos oracle there was this Inscription. Know thy Selfe. […] For He that Knows the Powers of the Soul, Shall See Himselfe an infinit Creature […], in all Things the Image and Seal of God. For as a Sealing Seal, and a Seal Sealed has the Same Liniaments cuts and Figures, so hath He the Similitude of all the Divine
_____________ that I may see thy Glory. Those cheeks are shades, those Lims and Members clouds, that hide the Glory of thy Mind, thy Knowledg and thy Lov from us. But were they removed those inward Excellencies would remain Invisible. As therfore we see thy Flesh with our fleshly Eys, and handle thy Wounds with our Bodily Sences, let us see thy Understanding with our Understandings, and read thy Lov with our own. Let our Souls have Communion with thy Soul, and let the Ey of our Mind enter into thine.« (Cf. also Centuries 4. 13). 225 See the groundbreaking article by Henrich (1966). Cf. also Halfwassen (2005b) and Halfwassen (2004a). – For an assessment of the ›modernity‹ of the Plotinian conception of subjectivity and the theory of noetic self-identity it implies in comparison with Cartesian figures of thought see also Rappe (1996). 226 Rappe (1996), 253. This self-knowledge or self-realisation is, as Rappe stresses repeatedly, not an act of cognition in the strict sense of the term, as its hallmark is precisely the closing of the representational gap between knower and known, »at the highest summit of intellectual absorption« (ibid., 252).
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Attributes, in the most Sublime and Illustrious manner. Infinity, Life, understanding, Power, with whatso ever else in hope or capacity. nor will there ever be found one Attribute in God, but it will imediatly appear in the Soul of man, if the Soul be Seen in a clear Light. By which man is made to be unto God, what God is: a God, unto God, and all His creatures. (SM 4. 6)
From its commonplace starting point (»Know thy Selfe«),227 the passage moves to a radical statement of the likeness of the human soul to God, metaphorically guaranteed by the comparison of the claimed one-to-one correspondence to the correspondence between a seal and its imprint. It is the awareness of a mutual »indwelling« of God and soul which results from this insight: »A Perfect Indwelling of the Soul in God, and God in the Soul« (Centuries 4.100). It confirms the presence of the divine in the here and now as well as the subject's participation in the transcendent. Both are perfectly suited to each other. And of course this gives rise to infinite joy.228 The reciprocal conditioning of origin and end, and the circulation of the divine embracing and motivating the whole process is mirrored in the repetitiveness and circularity of Traherne's prose: No man can Infinitly Delight in his Being that sees not his Being at least Infinite […] For He Delighteth in God because God hath made him to enjoy Infinite Blessedness, and to Delight in Himselfe Infinitly because he is [a] Creature Meet to enjoy Infinite Blessedness. (SM 2. 25; cf. also 2. 24).
Again, an Early Modern radicalization of the late Antique theme makes itself felt. Traherne's texts not only display their participation in the infinite commu-
_____________ 227 Both in its initial topicality and in the way it proceeds towards an original statement of the Neoplatonic conception of the rational soul's potential to transcend itself so as to find its true identity, Traherne's meditation resembles a passage in Augustine's De vera religione, XXXIX. 72: »Noli foras ire, in te ipsum redi; in interiore homine habitat veritas, et si tuam naturam mutabilem inveneris, transcende et te ipsum. Sed memento cum te transcendis, ratiocinantem animam te transcendere. Illuc ergo tende unde ipsum lumen rationis accenditur.« (De vera religione, 122). (›Do not go out into the marketplace, return into yourself! Truth lives in the inner man. And if you find yourself changeable, transcend yourself too. But remember that, if you transcend yourself, it is your rational soul which transcends yourself. Strive to reach the point from where the ray of light comes which illumines your reason.‹ – My translation, V.O.L.). For Augustine's emphasis on reflective introspection see also his Confessiones, e.g. VII. 10: »Et inde admonitus redire ad memet ipsum, intravi in intima mea […] et vidi qulicumque oculo animae meae supra eundum oculum animae meae, supra mentem meam, lucem incommutabilem […]« (»And being hence admonished to return to myself, I entered even into mine own inwards, […] and with the eyes of my soul (such as it was) I discovered over the same eye of my soul, over my mind, the unchangeable light of the Lord […]«. [St. Augustine's Confessions, vol. 1, 371]). 228 Cf. also the litanies of happiness in SM 3. 72 and 4. 27.
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nicativity of the ultimate good229 (another Neoplatonic commonplace). As hyperbolic thinker of the One230 he even risks to be charged with selfdivinisation.231 Indeed, in his poetic analysis of the self and the structures of its interority he allows his enthusiasm to lead him even further towards – and perhaps beyond – the limits of religious orthodoxy. The poem that enacts this quite explicitly is entitled »My Spirit«. For now it will suffice to point out the extreme position this text maps out as it describes the shape and structure of subjectivity.232 For »my spirit« is not only theophanous, it is not only a medium in which the divine manifests itself, but it is also an active principle in itself, and as such, theomorphic: Whatever it doth do, It doth not by another Engine work, But by it self; which in the Act doth lurk. Its Essence is Transformd into a true And perfect Act. (»My Spirit«, 22–26)
As »perfect Act« this self appears as creative as the ground from which it originates. It is, what it does. At the same time it is capable of assimilating itself to what it perceives. And, like the light, which seems to bring forth the things it makes visible, it may assume »ten thousand Forms«: […] tis all Ey, all Act, all Sight, And what it pleas can be, Not only see,
_____________ 229 »God is Goodness infinitly Communicativ.« (SM 3. 43); cf. SM 4. 8: »Is He not Infinitly communicativ. Is He not the more Good the more He is communicativ.« Inge points out that this »flow« or communication from God and intended to return to him through us is also central to Seeds of Eternity, one of the texts in the Lambeth MS. She quotes from Seeds of Eternity ll. 93–4, 96–7: »He [God] desires to be Delightfull, and to be enjoyed: he is infinitly Good and communicative […] that therfore we might be capable of all Enjoyments, in communion with him, he made us like him self« (D. Inge [2008], 36). 230 Cf., in lieu of many similar passages, SM 4. 29: »God is Happy in Himselfe, and Happy in us. Happy in Eternity, Happy in Time, Happy in Heaven, Happy in Earth, and So Shall we. Happy in the creation, […] Happy in the Glory of his Eternal Kingdom; and so Shall we. who must of necessity be Transformed into his Divine Image, that we may thereby becom one with Him.« 231 In Traherne's affirmation of man's divinity, a Hermetic touch may be detected (cf. also Marks [1966b], 122). However, it should be stressed immediately that Traherne is no Hermeticist, just as his preference for imaginations of childhood does not make him a Gnostic. He never endorsed a dualism of material and spiritual worlds and, though he applauds some of the ideas of Hermes in Christian Ethicks as well as his commonplace books, in central points he retained a critical distance. 232 But see ch. 4. 2 below.
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Or do; for tis mor Voluble then Light: Which can put on ten thousand Forms, Being clothd with what it self adorns. (»My Spirit«, 29–34)
Traherne attributes immense transformative powers to his »I«/»Eye«. In becoming aware of itself, the eye-self gains consciousness of its potential. Consequently, it not only transforms itself but equally the world. In the process of concentration the self becomes as transparent to itself as the world it illuminates. This unitive experience changes the world into an object of infinite joy. In this way, Traherne's texts seek to communicate the happiness they preach. They also elevate felicity to a central motive of metamorphosis – of self as well as world.233 While offering as a textual experience what their authorial speaker claims to have experienced himself,234 they articulate – in a manner entirely dissonant with the beginnings of modern hostility to metaphysics – what seems, in the seventeenth century, to be a contradiction in terms: an ›empiricist‹ metaphysics.235 Traherne's Neoplatonism is a Christianised, Renaissance philosophy, mediated especially in its anthropocentrism by Florentine thinkers such as Pico and Ficino, in its accentuation of human interiority perhaps also by Augustine, and based in its central tenets on a solid systematic basis of Plotinian metaphysics. But his radical, almost anti-idealist emphasis on divine immanence in the physical world as well as on the experiential quality of the individual joyful encounter with divine truth also makes him a liminal thinker of a very special kind. The seemingly backward-looking poet-philosopher really adumbrates a ›holistic‹ model of thinking and feeling, offering points of contact with the New Philosophy without losing touch with a late Antique ethic of universal relatedness.236 The happy man, from Traherne's point of view, may be a kind of _____________ 233 »My Spirit« even considers the ›constructivist‹ possibility that objects may exist entirely and exclusively in consciousness: »And evry Object in my Soul a Thought | Begot, or was; I could not tell, | Whether the Things did there | Themselvs appear, | Which in my Spirit truly seemd to dwell; | Or whether my conforming Mind | Were not alone even all that shind.« (Centuries, Poems, and Thanksgivings, vol. 2, 52, lines 45–51). 234 »This Endless Comprehension of my Immortal Soul when I first saw it, so wholy Ravished and Transported my spirit, that for a fortnight after I could Scarsly Think or speak or write of any other Thing. But Like a man Doteing with Delight and Extasie, Talk of it Night and Day as if all the Joy of Heaven and Earth were Shut up in it. For in very Deed there I saw the Divine Image Relucent and shining, There I saw the foundation of mans Excellency, and that which made Him a Son of God. Nor ever shall I be able to forget its Glory.« (SM 4. 3). 235 Announced programmatically in Centuries 3. 1: »Those Pure and Virgin Apprehensions I had from the Womb, and that Divine Light wherewith I was born […] are unattainable by Book, and therfore I will teach them by Experience.« 236 Cf. Clucas's remarks on the ›platonised atomism‹ of Traherne and More in Clucas (1991); also Marks's observation (1966a, 527): »Here was the juncture of the new philosophy and Cambridge Platonism […]«.
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dissimulator, a prince visiting his realm in disguise.237 Yet he is also, as it were, an unknown Deity, empowered and self-empowering through his enjoyment of everything: »That God should give us soe Divine a Power! To Transfigure all Things, and be Delighted!« (SM 2. 71)
_____________ 237 »How Happy hast Thou made me O God in making me to Lov! A Divine and spirituall Lover is a wonderfull Great and unknown Creature. A strang Being here upon Earth. An Image of the Diety in the wilderness. A Disguised prince walking InCognito among forrein people. unknown, unseen, Incredible.« (SM 2. 64, cf. also 2. 42).
CHAPTER 4: TRANSPARENT SPHERES, OR THE BEAUTY OF CREATION Darknesse and light hold interchangeable dominions, and alternately rule the seminal state of things. […] Light that makes things seen, makes some things invisible, were it not for darknesse and the shadow of the earth, the noblest part of the Creation had remained unseen, and the Stars in heaven as invisible as on the fourth day, when they were created above the Horizon, with the Sun, or there was not an eye to behold them. The greatest mystery of Religion is expressed by adumbration, and in the noblest part of Jewish Types, we finde the Cherubims shadowing the Mercy-seat (Thomas Browne, The Garden of Cyrus)
The Natural World as Subject of Neoplatonic Aesthetics In the readings of Thomas Browne, Andrew Marvell and Thomas Traherne offered in the preceding chapter, two sets of questions were repeatedly touched upon, which can now be asked more explicitly. They are systematically interlinked, and will structure the interpretation of two texts by Henry Vaughan, which constitute the first part of this chapter (4. 1), as well as the discussion of the poetry of Thomas Traherne (4. 2), with which it concludes. It appears that the assumption of the functionality of Neoplatonic ideas in Early Modern theories of knowledge and happiness, of general cognition as well as individual ethics, centrally relies on a sense of the beauty of creation and created things as signifiers of the transcendent. The assumptions on which this sense of the created world rests will be addressed from a slightly different angle in the following readings, and it may be useful to articulate them before embarking on analyses of the poetic texts. Above all, we now need to ask in which sense the term ›aesthetic‹ is appropriate with reference to the Neoplatonic metaphysic of the beautiful implied by seventeenth-century works of art. Can the use of a term be justified that might be taken to carry historically highly specific philosophical connotations1 and that _____________ 1
In other than British or American debates, especially in the context of German philosophical aesthetics, the term tends to be used in a highly charged sense. It refers to a strict philosophical discipline of ›sensual cognition‹ (»Wissenschaft der sinnlichen Erkenntnis«) as postulated and described by Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten in his Theoretische Ästhetik, 3. For a discussion of the consequences of this conceptual shift for a
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may therefore be regarded as inapplicable, indeed anachronistic, in connection to Early Modern literature? Which of its aspects deserve, perhaps even demand, a description as aesthetic, and what are their characteristics? Secondly, since questions of aisthesis carry in their wake questions concerning the status of the sensually perceptible world, these will gain a particular edge in connection with Early Modern versions of Neoplatonism. What are the qualities, functions, and values accorded to the natural world in this context? Are they to be distinguished from more traditional, analogical modes of reading and deciphering the Book of Nature? What are the outlines of the mediality projected onto created things? How can these outlines be traced in the analysis of individual poems? And what (if any) insights does this yield into the transformative functions of seventeenthcentury Neoplatonism(s) in contexts besides the literary? If, as the preceding chapter has tried to show, a certain type of Neoplatonism is capable both of shaping a scientific attitude and of founding an art of life; if, as in the case of Thomas Traherne, it can even lay the foundation for an exuberant happiness, this was mainly due to the perspective it provided on the created world. In the work of Traherne's contemporary Henry Vaughan, felicity appears far less pronounced. But although the felt presence of the divine and of human participation in it, which form the basis for Traherne's enjoyment of the world, are not as strongly and stridently foregrounded in Vaughan's poetry, the presence of the transcendent in the material world is among the elements constituting the horizon of potentiality to which his texts repeatedly and consistently allude. They do so, however, in a manner that is, in an interesting way, much more indirect and mediated than Traherne's. While Traherne (as the second part of this chapter will attempt to show in some detail) also explores the dimensions of subjectivity indispensable to an understanding of aesthetics in the full sense of the term, in Vaughan, the stress falls on the obstacles and impediments to the immediacy envisaged by Traherne. Where his younger contemporary enthusiastically rushes in, avid of the angelic company he is about to encounter, Vaughan seems to hover on the threshold, and even sometimes draws back discouraged, although his desire to cross it is possibly even stronger, because the obstacles he perceives are greater. While every line in Traherne's poetry and prose speaks of desire already fulfilled and only waiting to be fully realised in the overwhelming consequences it has for life in this world, Vaughan's poems dwell on the speaker's unfulfilled longing for the »world of light«.2 While Traherne's irrepressible happiness prompts his repeated exhortation to his readers to »enjoy the world«, Vaughan is _____________
2
philosophical analysis of art see the contributions in Früchtl/Moog-Grünewald (2007). Leaving apart the terminological controversy, it appears worth while, in the present context, to keep an open mind about the applicability of some of the implications of Baumgarten's idea for Early Modern art. Cf. »They are all gone into the world of light!« in: Henry Vaughan: The Complete Poems, ed. Rudrum, 246–7. If not otherwise indicated, I quote according to this edition (The Complete Poems, page reference).
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in many respects a poet of discomfort and impatient expectation. While Traherne everywhere feels God's communicative presence, Vaughan often experiences the world as non-communicative despite its constant noise. To him, the created world appears theologically inarticulate, even mute and frequently dark, while he feels himself to be blind or deaf or at any rate painfully out of tune with the music which he ought to be able to hear. Vaughan's major theme is the difficulty of reaching what does appear undisputably present in the here and now, albeit always at one remove or hidden just beyond his grasp. What he seeks with such urgency hardly ever, or only for brief, evanescent moments, seems to offer itself plainly. It is perceived dimly, direct access being prevented by a medium often figured as mist or veil. The ambivalence at the heart of his poetry, then, is the Neoplatonic duplicity of a transparency which permits glimpses of what is beyond but, while this exerts a powerful attraction, suspends its total availability. One of the best-known expressions of this ambivalence in Vaughan reformulates it in terms of the paradox also central to the mystical theology of Dionysius Areopagita, ascribing to God »A deep, but dazzling darkness«.3 While it promises the wished-for radiancy, the opaque medium still partly conceals it, although, conversely, what appears obscured is still indicated as present. The medium that tantalizingly promises what it withholds, and allows to appear what it at the same time declares to be non-apparent, is the created world. It is for this reason that created things continue to fascinate, even while they rarely yield the hoped-for certainty. It is precisely this evocative ›inbetweenness‹ of nature, its signifying power, which is the focus of Vaughan's attention. Like Browne, he may at times appear to be a skeptic of sorts, but unlike him, Vaughan does not thrive on uncertainty. Both authors, however, accomplish remarkable – if different – balancing acts on a threshold they long to cross. Among other things, the following readings will try to show the specific emphasis this receives in a poet whom T. S. Eliot has called »in some ways the most original and difficult of all the followers of Donne« and whom he characterised as »really the most various of all our metaphysical poets«.4 It is in a strong sense that the epithet »metaphysical« will be seen as apt with reference to Vaughan. Perhaps it will also become clear why his poetry may be felt to be »difficult«, as one of its remarkable features is the resistance it offers to the attempt to understand it in accordance with conventional, ›hieroglyphic‹, or even allegorical ways of reading nature as a reservoir of signs for the divine. This chapter will, then, focus on the mediality in which transcendence communicates itself and on the alterations it works in the recipient of this communication. It is here that the outlines of a Neoplatonic aesthetic may find its _____________ 3 4
In »The Night. John iii 2« (The Complete Poems, 289–290, l. 50). T. S. Eliot, »Mystic and Politician as Poet: Vaughan, Traherne, Marvell, Milton«, in: Listener (2 April 1930), qu. in: T. S. Eliot, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry, »Editor's Introduction«, 21.
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clearest articulation. If one of its central principles is the mimesis of the nonapparent in the appearing, this will show itself most impressively in the work of poets who consider reality as a metaphor of the transcendent and created things as – sometimes enigmatic – signifiers in a universal semantics of the divine. This, however, does not amount to stating that these poets, and in particular Vaughan, are merely the last protagonists of »the old doctrine« of analogy,5 clinging tenaciously and against better insight to a model of the universe based on reliable correspondences between visible and invisible worlds, microcosm and macrocosm. In fact, the opposite is true. It seems that it is precisely the mimetic relationship between the material, sensually perceptible, and the immaterial realm of being which becomes increasingly questionable to a mentality still hoping to find both connected, but neither content with the given nor willing to discount it. In a sense, seventeenth-century occultism, too, is part of an attempt to answer the growing insecurity in analogical readings of nature by intensifying and perfecting man's technical and manipulative grasp of the sympathetic relationships underlying the order of the universe. It is therefore interesting to observe that Henry Vaughan cannot be reduced to the hermeticism which has for some time been at the centre of critical interest, hence not to the current image of »a Welsh country doctor with special interests in the occult«.6 Although he is clearly well versed in the hermetic arts, he is quite unlike his twin brother Thomas, the alchemist and natural philosopher, with regard to the explanatory power he grants them. Henry's response to the secrets of nature and to arcane knowledge is different, at the same time both more cautious and more complex – a response which only makes sense if seen as guided by a particular kind of Neoplatonism.7
4.1 The Pleasures of the Pensive Eye: Henry Vaughan's Poetry Vaughan and the Recalcitrance of Nature A first impression of Henry Vaughan's curious reticence in translating natural phenomena into metaphors, let alone hieroglyphs, may be gained by a glance at »The Water-fall«.8 It belongs to those of his poems which take relatively great care in describing the elements of creation they deal with in precise detail. At the _____________ 5 6 7
8
Thus the 1orton Anthology of English Literature (Abrams [1986], 1367), in the introduction to Vaughan's poetry. Ibid.. Vaughan's predilection for certain Platonic motifs – such as the idea of the preexistence of the soul (cf. Phaidon 79c–d) and its capacity for anamnesis – is obvious in several of his poems, most famously in »The Retreat« (The Complete Poems, 172–3), with the speaker's reference to his »angel-infancy« (l. 2) and the »bright shoots of everlastingness« (l. 20), which constitute his as yet inarticulate memory of eternity. The Complete Poems, 306–7.
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same time and somewhat surprisingly, the text refrains from doing what the waterfall seems to demand, namely to understand it allegorically. Or rather, allegory provides only a first approach as a stimulus for further contemplation: With what deep murmurs through time's silent stealth Doth thy transparent, cool, and watery wealth Here flowing fall, And chide, and call, As if his liquid, loose retìnue stayed Ling'ring, and were of this steep place afraid, The common pass Where, clear as glass, All must descend, Not to an end: But quickened by this deep and rocky grave, Rise to a longer course more bright and brave. (1–12)
The conspicuous alteration in this passage between groups of long and short lines imitates the gathering of the water before it rushes down as well as its recollection in the rock pool underneath the fall. Visual, poetic evidence thus corresponds to the aspects accentuated by the stanza's address to the waterfall: its evocative sound; the seeming hesitation of the water before the brink; the descent which is really only a preliminary to, or a phase in the process of, the waters' return to their origin in the eternal cycle of evaporation and condensation.9 All of the aspects touched upon, lend themselves to allegorical application. Still, their spiritual meaning is only indicated very discretely, the suggestions remaining on the level of their natural signifiers. Thus, the ›depth‹ of the stream's murmuring, enduring and unchanged »through time's silent stealth« may be taken to suggest, together with its »watery wealth«, the communicative, permanent and undiminishing self-expenditure of the divine into the world of living beings. The river's hesitation before the downpour invites us to see it as corresponding to the souls' fear of death, although this is only a passing from one sphere of life to a higher one. In reality, the fall to »this deep and rocky grave« is not a descent at all but an ascent similar to the »Rise« of the water in its return to the fountainhead, hence only a preliminary to the ›quickening‹ and return to life which is the resurrection. However, in the following 28 lines the allegorical mode modulates into something different. True, the Neoplatonic theme of return to the origin is sounded again and again. But the distance from the emblematic dimension of the image grows as an interpretation of its signifying potential is offered that moves into metaphysical areas not covered by the spectacle available to the senses: _____________ 9
Rudrum draws attention, in his commentary, to the importance of this notion of the cyclical movement of water to »the seventeenth-century mind«, cf. Henry Vaughan, The Complete Poems, 638.
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Dear stream! dear bank! where often I Have sat, and pleased my pensive eye, Why, since each drop of thy quick store Runs thither, whence it flowed before, Should poor souls fear a shade or night, Who came (sure) from a sea of light? Or since those drops are all sent back So sure to thee, that none doth lack, Why should frail flesh doubt any more That what God takes, he'll not restore? O useful element and clear! My sacred wash and cleanser here, My first consigner unto those Fountains of life, where the Lamb goes? What sublime truths, and wholesome themes, Lodge in thy mystical, deep streams! Such as dull man can never find Unless that Spirit lead his mind, Which first upon thy face did move, And hatched all with his quickening love. As this loud brook's incessant fall In streaming rings restagnates all Which reach by course the bank, and then Are no more seen, just so pass men. Oh my invisible estate, My glorious liberty, still late! Thou art the channel my soul seeks, Not this with cataracts and creeks. (13–40)
What the »pensive eye« derives from a spectacle that virtually thrusts itself upon allegorical sensibilities, is a theological benefit not only going beyond the perceptible but finally rejecting it together with its seemingly obvious ›message‹. If this is a subscriptio to the waterfall-pictura, it is one that strangely emancipates itself from what gave rise to it. Thus, the language of »light« and »night« the text now embarks on appears only very tenuously linked to the waterfall's transparency in the preceding lines (»clear as glass«, 8). Motifs of restoration and spiritual purification now move into the foreground; the meaning of clearness shifts from an aesthetic to a theological quality with obvious uses as »wash and cleanser« for a soul on its way to the »Fountains of life, where the Lamb goes«. Still, apart from the fact that it involves a switching of metaphorical repertoire, this translation into a familiar devotional mode somehow does not appear satisfactory either. With the emphatic but slightly flat summary that reduces the waterfall's pious potential to the equally commonplace and vague »sublime truths and wholesome themes«, the text seems to change course once again.
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Through a consideration of the hiddenness of the »mystical« meanings held by those »deep streams« and revealed only to those whose minds are opened by God's creative spirit, the poem moves to a consideration of death which sits oddly with the topical certainties offered before. In its unexpected emphasis on finality, it cannot be contained by the previous insistence that the descent is not »an end« (10). The ›passing‹ of men is now compared to the vanishing of the circular ripples caused by the falling water (»streaming rings«) as they reach the bank. Uninterrupted movement and stillness are combined in an image that retains some of the concreteness of the poem's first lines, although it is difficult to imagine how it could have been accommodated in the first stanza. For in its very precision, it unfolds implications which exceed the comforting ideas of circularity and restoration the text strove to bring into play. In the process of ›restagnation‹, the watery rings disappear for good and are »no more seen«.10 The somewhat startling dynamic of this image leads to the similarly disquieting four lines concluding the text: the speaker abruptly begins to praise this transgression of visibility, equalling his »invisible estate«, the awareness of his own mortality, which marks him as also bound for death, with his »glorious liberty«. He thus translates the inevitable into a potential for transcendence only waiting to be realised; a latent promise of liberation whose fulfillment he impatiently longs for (»still late!«). But this final option for a hidden potential, a secret and very personal conviction, almost cancels out the pictorial certainties the poem seemed bent on bringing to our attention in the first place. The exclamation in which this interpretation of the sensually pleasing as well as spiritually pregnant spectacle of the waterfall culminates does not really follow from it. The natural phenomenon becomes an uneasy emblem for a truth not to be reached by its contemplation. In a radical non sequitur, the text breaks with visibility as it leaps to a state of unknowing. Its final gesture is one of determined negation of the concreteness of »cataracts and creeks«. The poem aims at a goal which, retrospectively, the waterfall does not seem to be capable of signifying, or only in a manner too schematic to be credible. Perhaps this ending is readable as a figuration of, even an exercise in, transcendence. But what the text leaves us with is not only the vehemency of the speaker's desire for his »glorious liberty«, but also an irritating sense of the insufficiency of the sensually perceptible and a feeling that it does not lend itself easily to allegorical application. Vaughan has often been characterised as a minor poet – a poet of ravishing first lines and weak endings. While »The Water-fall« at first glance seems to bear out this verdict, this might lead us to overlook its true achievement. The poem's lack of phenomenological consistency is compensated for by its reflexive restlessness. The »pensive eye« finds its pleasure not only in what it sees but in its attempt to perceive it as intimately connected with an invisible truth which some_____________ 10 On the minor crux connected with ›restagnate‹, see Rudrum's note (Henry Vaughan, The Complete Poems, 639).
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how seems to elude allegorical evidence. Far from worthless, the immanent is regarded as affirmation of the transcendent. But what the natural world is seen to affirm is above all the unavailability of the transcendent. That is why pious truisms and the conventional strategies of making analogical sense of the world are not enough. For this poet, they do not suffice; and it is this sense of lingering dissatisfaction which often leads to his overcharging of images or their premature abandonment. At the same time, however, the contours of an aesthetic attitude may become visible that can be described in Neoplatonic terms; an aesthetic based on the metaphysical assumption that all material and living things are created beings which have their foundation in the divine. They are of transcendent origin and strive to return to it. Their beauty, accessible to sensual perception, is at home in a realm which in its turn transcends all perception. That is why it awakens love, an urgent nostalgia for this sphere of its origin; and it is for this reason that it is capable of leading back to this sphere in the process of contemplation. The beautiful partakes in the light of the transcendent, it reflects it in a way which reveals the invisible in the perceptible.11 Thus, the non-apparent paradoxically shows itself in what appears, which in turn can be seen as mimesis of the nonapparent.12 From the Neoplatonic point of view, this is a kind of seeing which goes beyond perceiving – a mode of non-discursive cognition or of intuitive realization in which the soul becomes aware of itself and simultaneously sets out on a way of unification or henosis.13 As it embarks on this process, the soul's reflexivity is dynamically heightened and ultimately leads towards the desired union with the One, to whom it owes this potential for opening and extending its intellectual faculty to embrace even the ground of its own being. _____________ 11 The beautiful, for Plotinus, is an experience which eludes the conceptual grasp; it is an intimation of something greater, in excess of the given and sensually perceptible, like a reflection shimmering on the surface of things, an inexplicable »grace« (charis) (cf. Ennead VI 7, 22). It is recognised with a surprise at the same time painful and pleasurable, ›seen‹ by »another way of seeing«, an »inner sight« (Enn. I 6, 8–9); and it unfolds a tremendous erotic attractivity, which points beyond the charm and splendour of its graceful bodily exterior (cf. Enn. I 6, 3), drawing the soul towards the Good as the source of all beauty (cf. also Enn. V 8). 12 Halliwell (2002), 314–315, explains the relationship of the Neoplatonic hypostases with respect to each other and to the One in Plotinus as metaphysical mimesis: »On the largest scale, Plotinus can speak of the relationship between everything and the One as a case of mimesis: all things aspire to the eternity and goodness embodied in the first principle of the cosmos (5.4.1.33). More commonly, Plotinus posits mimesis between comparable entities or components of reality at distinct levels of his system, or between these levels themselves. […] If, in Plotinus' scheme of things, being or reality ›flows‹ down the cosmos from top to bottom, mimetic affinities are one way of talking about the process by which all being endeavors to revert, upward, to its source. To understand mimesis is, accordingly, to understand a key principle of the dynamics of reality«. 13 For the concept of henosis see the standard work by Beierwaltes (1985). For Plotinus' philosophy of reflection and the thought of his followers cf. also the lucid study by Halfwassen (2004a).
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Seeds of Eternity? A few structural elements characteristic of this matrix for a (difficult) unification should already have become obvious in our first approach to Vaughan's poetry: for instance, the testing of different discursive modes, their rejection as insufficient, or their transgression in directions not yet conventionalised, hence not foreseeable in their outcome; the attempt to discover relations between different realms of being, in particular the soul and the natural world, and an awareness of difficulties and obstacles in this which might appear insurmountable, calling attention to the radical unavailability of their object; a pervasive sense of the hiddenness of essential truths combined with an unwillingness to apply current classifications and explications; the insistence on a precarious, mediated participation of the soul in higher realms of being and the wish to believe in a mutual indwelling of the divine in the natural. It is the difficult balancing act which results from this, Vaughan's double insistence on the inaccessibility of the divine to the senses and its self-presentation through the medium of created things, which qualifies him as a Neoplatonic poet. The following reading will add to this two further, related aspects: the idea of a transformation of the speaking or meditating subject through reflexivity and the poetic performance of this transformation by ambiguous figures of retirement, restoration, and epistrophé. Vaughan's cautious reliance on the circularity implied by the Neoplatonic matrix finds its textual correlative in his preference for recursive structures. Similar in this respect to most of the poets considered in this study, his imagination is primarily one of return. The headings of many of the poems in his most comprehensive collection, Silex Scintillans,14 indicate circular gestures of this type – such as »Regeneration«, »Resurrection and Immortality«, »Religion«, »Man's Fall and Recovery«, »The Retreat«, »The Relapse«, »The Resolve«, »Repentance«, »Retirement (I)«, »Ascension-Day«, »Ascension-Hymn«. But even texts which do not promise anything of the kind in their title often follow a poetic rhetoric which indirectly or directly thematises circularity while performing it structurally.15 This is true also for one of his better-known poems, »Cock_____________ 14 Silex Scintillans, Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations was first printed in 1650 and again, in a version extended by 56 poems, in 1655; both parts are usually referred to as Silex I and Silex II. 15 This holds true e.g. for »Childhood« (The Complete Poems, 288–9), where the wish to recover the innocence and proximity to God, the »Angel-infancy« unfolded in »The Retreat« (ibid., 172–3), also forms the central topic and is articulated in a yearning for the midday brightness which is thought of as »centre« of the divine. »The Tempest« (ibid., 220–1) constructs a complex conceit of return from the idea of the circular re-ascent of the waters, similar to the first stanza of »The Water-fall« (ibid., 306–7) as discussed above. Spherical images of return also dominate »The World (I)« (ibid., 227–8) – eternity is imagined as ring, circulated by the times – and also »They are all gone into the world of light« (ibid., 246–7): the dead are gone on ahead into the world of light to which the speaker also desires to return, but whose sight is obscured by »those mists«. Similar patterns occur, with an apocalyptic twist, in »L'Envoy« (ibid., 311–3). Expectably, »The
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Crowing«,16 which I want to present in a close reading as paradigmatic example of Vaughan's Neoplatonic aesthetic of the creatures.17 Cock-Crowing Father of lights! what sunny seed, What glance of day hast thou confined Into this bird? To all the breed This busy ray thou hast assigned; Their magnetism works all night, And dreams of Paradise and light. Their eyes watch for the morning hue, Their little grain expelling night So shines and sings, as if it knew The path unto the house of light. It seems their candle, howe'r done, Was tinned and lighted at the sun.
10
If such a tincture, such a touch, So firm a longing can impower Shall thy own image think it much To watch for thy appearing hour? If a mere blast so fill the sail, Shall not the breath of God prevail? O thou immortal light and heat! Whose hand so shines through all this frame, That by the beauty of the seat, We plainly see, who made the same. Seeing thy seed abides in me, Dwell thou in it, and I in thee. To sleep without thee, is to die; Yes, 'tis a death partakes of hell: For where thou dost not close the eye It never opens, I can tell. In such a dark, Egyptian border, The shades of death dwell and disorder.
20
30
_____________ Eagle« (ibid., 328–30) meditates the ascent to the One in the metaphor of a flight to the highest; and »The Morning-Watch« (ibid., 176) and »The Day-Spring« (ibid., 370–1) ecstatically praise the daybreak as possibility for spiritual renewal and exhortation to a resumption of the soul's epistrophic movement towards God. 16 Like »The Water-fall«, »Cock-Crowing« belongs to Silex II (ibid., 251–252); line numbers are given in brackets following the quotation. 17 For a detailed reading of this text see also V. O. Lobsien (2007c).
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If joys, and hopes, and earnest throes, And hearts, whose pulse beats still for light Are given to birds; who, but thee, knows A love-sick soul's exalted flight? Can souls be tracked by any eye But his, who gave them wings to fly? Only this veil which thou hast broke, And must be broken yet in me, This veil, I say, is all the cloak And cloud which shadows thee from me. This veil thy full-eyed love denies, And only gleams and fractions spies.
40
O take it off! make no delay, But brush me with thy light, that I May shine unto a perfect day, And warm me at thy glorious Eye! O take it off! or till it flee, Though with no lily, stay with me!
While the poem hardly abounds in naturalistic detail, it possesses a particularity of another kind, pointing towards a specific natural philosophy. Its subject is neither an individual cock-crowing, nor a singular, dateable experience. There is nothing occasional in the deixis of »this bird« (3). Rather, it is the species of cocks (»all the breed«, 3) and their early morning crowing which is the topic of the text. Still, its pastoral or georgic potential does not seem to be of interest; cocks do not play a role as domestic animals, nor do they figure as elements of Welsh country life.18 They do, however, matter as birds, as feathered beings of a particular kind. Some of their traditional meanings, also current in emblems,19 are _____________ 18 Vaughan repeatedly refers to his regionality. Thus he calls himself »Silurist«, in allusion to the Celtic tribe which inhabited Brecknockshire, the region of his origin, in prehistoric times. Also, the title of his second collection of poems, Olor Iscanus (1651, with the preface of 1647 indicating an earlier date of composition), ›Swan of Usk‹, not only points emblematically to the author's status as singer and bard, but also self-consciously refers to the river Usk from which the place of his birth, Newton by Usk, derives its name. Vaughan has been regarded as poet and mystic of nature and as precursor of Wordsworth; but as early as 1927 T. S. Eliot rejects this in his criticism of Edmund Blunden's study of Vaughan as a notion which derives from nineteenth-century poetical ideologies (cf. Eliot, »The Silurist«). 19 Together with others – such as thirst for glory, warlike pride, courage, fierceness and valiancy, the terror it causes even in the lion, or the daily interpretation of its behaviour in the auspices – they will be found in Pliny's 1aturalis Historia X, 46–49 (Pliny, 1atural History. Vol. III, 320–325). Cf. also the two Camerarius emblems »UNDIQUE TUTUS« and »CVRA VIGIL« in Henkel/ Schöne (1978), 853 and 854.
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brought into play – such as the cock's watchfulness, its gaze towards the sky,20 the aligning of its biorhythm with the course of the sun, and its timekeeping function for daily life –, while others (such as the ›martial‹ nature of the cock) do not seem to be relevant. But due to the way the text alludes to them these conventional meanings acquire an unorthodox semantics of their own. This is signalled by the hermetic manner of speech which sets in with the first line and pervades the text as a whole down to its conclusion, and it would seem to be confirmed, at least in the eyes of some of Vaughan's contemporaries, by the fact that the cock was one of the attributes of Hermes Trismegistus.21 In the wake of the modernist rediscovery of the metaphysical poets, literary criticism did not fail to observe Vaughan's conspicuous knowledge of hermeticism and to notice his occasional use of occultist jargon.22 Its most plausible explanation was (and is) Henry's closeness to his twin brother Thomas.23 Between 1650 and 1655, around the time of his brother's greatest poetic productivity, Thomas Vaughan wrote and published a number of alchemical and hermeticist works, with programmatic titles such as Anthroposophia Theomagica: A Discourse of the 1ature of Man and his State after Death; Anima Magica Abscondita: A Discourse of the Universal Spirit of 1ature; or Magia Adamica, Cœlum Terræ, Lumen de Lumine, Aula Lucis or Euphrates, or The Waters of the East, all except Aula Lucis under the pseudonym of Eugenius Philaletes.24 Among these, Anthroposophia Theomagica and Anima Magica Abscondita gained particular notoriety, because they involved the Cambridge Platonist, Henry More, in an exchange of polemics, which More did not, at first, take very seriously, but _____________ 20 Emphasised by Pliny: »caelumque sola volucrum aspicit crebra«, 1aturalis Historia X, 47 (1atural History. Vol. III, 322), and discernable in both Camerarius-picturae. 21 In Renaissance representations of the eponymous sage such as the Inscriptiones sacrosanctae vetustatis (1534) by Petrus Apianus (cf. the illustration in Ebeling [2005], 22). 22 See the detailed study by Holmes (1932). Holmes (and various critics after her) points out the interpenetration of hermetic with other, especially Christian elements: »Various traditions meet in this writer. They are confused, the reader of his poetry cannot perhaps at first disentangle them; […]« (2). While Holmes does try to disentangle them, she finally tends to find the paradigm for their combination in older Christian models such as the Theologia naturalis of Raimundus Sabundus (cf. 44ff) rather than in the numerous hermetic texts she consults. Pettet (1960), too, opts for a Christian hermeticism. Garner (1959) views the whole debate in a critical light (46–91), but finally votes for a (Christian) mystical structure of experience. – Cf. also the useful synopsis of Vaughan criticism in the early 1970s including the source studies of Vaughan's hermeticism in Bourdette (1974); see also Rudrum (1987). One of the most important individual studies on »Cock-Crowing« is Allen (1954), (repr. in Rudrum [1987], 78–90), which contains numerous references to Latin sources (as well as their christianised versions) on the meaning of cocks and cockcrowing. 23 Cf. also the articles by Rudrum (2004) and Speake (2004) in the new Oxford Dictionary of 1ational Biography. 24 In: The Works of Thomas Vaughan (Eugenius Philaletes); Aula Lucis came out under the initials »S.N.«.
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which increased in bitterness and scurrility (especially on Vaughan's side) as it progressed.25 More presumably felt provoked to reply with untypical sharpness not only because of the subject matter of these treatises, which reflects some of his own interests, but even more strongly because of their ›enthusiastic‹ manner, which would have touched a particular nerve.26 Like More, Thomas Vaughan repeatedly refers to Neoplatonic thinkers; he likes to mention Iamblichos, Dionysius the Areopagite or Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, and has a predilection for cabbalistic elements. But where More tries to integrate these into a more or less coherent system, recognisably founded in Neoplatonic philosophy and compatible with Christian orthodoxy, in Vaughan's writings, Neoplatonisms remain mere quotation, reduced to strategically placed insets with the intention to authorise his rather crude cabbalism and anti-Aristotelianism. His tone is that of the bombastic mystery-monger who, above all, wishes to impress and to intimidate. He is so little concerned about the argumentative consistency of his treatises that even his generally sympathetic twentieth-century editor confesses irritation. Greatest among the authorities to whom Thomas Vaughan loves to refer with great pathos is Henricus Cornelius Agrippa of Nettesheim – »that grand Archimagus«.27 Now Agrippa's Occulta Philosophia, like hermetic thinking _____________ 25 For Vaughan's controversy with More cf. the summary in The Works of Thomas Vaughan, Appendix III, 468–473; a rather different view emerges from More's correspondence, cf. [Anne Conway] The Conway Letters, 72–75. Specimens of Vaughan's cantankerous polemic are quoted in Speake's D1B article (2004); but More appears to have been able to respond in kind. 26 Cf. More's own Enthusiasmus triumphatus (1656) and his continued preoccupation with the topic even before Anne Conway's growing interest in the Quakers gave a very personal turn to his conerns; see Sarah Hutton's »Introduction to the Revised Edition« of The Conway Letters, xv–xvi, and Marjorie Nicolson's introduction to the part of the correspondence relating to »Quakerism«, ibid., 378–384. 27 »He indeed is my author, and next to God I owe all that I have unto him.« (Anthroposophia Theomagica, in: The Works of Thomas Vaughan, 50). Compared to Thomas Vaughan, however, Agrippa is a highly systematic thinker. Vaughan moves from one eclectic quotation to the next, announcing his speculations in the dogmatic and authoritarian tones of the prophet, whose knowledge about the arcane extends much further than what he deigns to impart to his readers. He also loves to surround himself with the aura of the rosicrucian initiate, condescending to a somewhat dull neophyte: »And now, Reader, prick up thine ears; come on without prejudice, and I will tell thee that which never hitherto hath been discovered.« (ibid., 36). Still, there are suggestive passages among his theosophic ramblings which find audible echoes in the poems of his brother Henry; e.g. the following, with a sprinkling of Proclus thrown in: »You see now – if you be not men of a most dense head – how man fell, and by consequence you may guess by what means he is to rise. He must be united to the Divine Light, from whence by disobedience he was separated. A flash or tincture of this must come or he can no more discern things spiritually than he can distinguish colours naturally without the light of the sun. This light descends and is united to him by the same means as his soul was at first. […] The soul of man, whiles she is in the body, is like a candle shut up in a dark lanthorn, or a fire that is almost stifled for want of air. Spirits – say the Platonics – when they are ›in their own country‹ are like the inhabitants of green fields who live perpetually amongst
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generally, does rest on basically Neoplatonic assumptions such as the universal sympathy and relatedness of all beings, and an all-pervasive spiritualisation and illumination of the world which emanates from the highest and leads back to him. At the same time, however, this way of thinking manifests itself in a discourse whose aims are the manipulation of things and the self-empowerment of the magus. Its main characteristic is an ›instrumental imagination‹,28 leading to a use of the creatures as means to the end of their alteration (albeit with the purpose of their purification and perfection). Now it is certainly true that ancient Neoplatonism possesses theurgic potential; witness its later history.29 Also, features of this kind of Neoplatonic hermeticism can easily be discerned also in Henry Vaughan's poetry. Indeed, there appear to be strikingly direct verbal echoes from his brother's Anima Magica Abscondita (and other writings) in »Cock-Crowing«: The Soul though in some sense active yet is she not so essentially but a mere instrumental agent; for she is guided in her operations by a spiritual, metaphysical grain, a seed or glance of light, simple and without any mixture, descending from the first Father of Lights. For though His full-eyed love shines on nothing but man, yet everything in the world is in some measure directed for his preservation by a spice or touch of the First Intellect.30
_____________ flowers, in a spicy, odorous air; but here below, ›in the circle of generation,‹ they mourn because of darkness and solitude, like people locked up in a pesthouse. ›Here do they fear, desire and grieve,‹ &c. This is it makes the soul subject to so many passions, to such a Proteus of humours. […] This is occasioned by her vast and infinite capacity, which is satisfied with nothing but God, from Whom at first she descended.« (Anthroposophia Theomagica, in: The Works of Thomas Vaughan, 46–47). 28 For the concept of instrumental imagination and the Neoplatonic foundations of the Occulta philosophia see V. O. Lobsien/E. Lobsien (2003), 371–395. 29 See, e.g., Bergemann (2006), esp. Ch. 3. 30 The Works of Thomas Vaughan, 81; I have italicised elements which recur verbatim in »Cock-Crowing« (in lines 1, 2, 8, 13, 23, 41). Thomas Vaughan frequently uses »tincture« (l. 13 in the poem) as hermetic metaphor for the divine light which enables the soul to gain spiritual insight and also the image of the soul's »candle« (l. 11) lighted by God; cf. e.g. Anthroposophia Theomagica, in: The Works of Thomas Vaughan, 46. The motif is not, however, to be restricted to its hermetic significance. In his study On the Mystical Poetry of Henry Vaughan (1962), 125–130), Durr gives an overview of the versions in which the idea of the divine spark was handed down from its Plotinian beginnings to Vaughan's contemporaries, including the Cambridge Platonists. A further, relativising mediation is suggested by Rudrum, who points out that the phrase »full-eyed love« already occurs in George Herbert's poem »The Glance«. To him, this is an indication of both brothers' familiarity with Herbert's poetry (The Complete Poems, 597). Henry Vaughan does understand his own poetry as imitatio of Herbert's and explicitly refers to him in the preface of Silex I as eminent and insurpassable master of devotional poetry (cf. ibid., 142). Rudrum also draws attention to the high estimate in which Henry Vaughan, too, held Agrippa and to the fact that the affinity between the cock and the sun is also stressed by him. It does not seem necessary, in other words, to assume a direct derivation of Henry's imagery from Thomas at all points. A further caution against this might be added with
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And yet, despite these verbatim resonances and the shared hermetical language, Henry's poetry differs fundamentally from Thomas's dogmatism. The »greater matters«31 proclaimed by his hermetic twin in a tone of unshakeable certainty and secure possession of the truth become, to the author of »Cock-Crowing«, a matter for questioning, probing, wondering, surmising. The transformations of the soul that Henry's poems imagine and seek to present, are never the products of magical feasibility. To him, the universal sympathy of created beings is not a means to an end, but a medium for the actualisation of his own imagination of return. Spiritual metamorphosis is not the result of magical technique but remains something to be desired, devoutly wished and prayed for, still to be expected, though with some confidence. The changes his texts yearn for are not alterations to be effected by supernatural devices but fulfillments of promises still open. Relations between natural phenomena and their meanings are not so much posited as suggested (»as if it knew | The path unto the house of light«, 9–10); or they are declared to be appearances of quasi-material connections, whose real status remains dark (»It seems their candle, howe'r done, | Was tinned and lighted at the sun«, 11–12). But this is not the only difference between the hermetic and the poetic approach. While, on a surface level, the hermetic discourse does shape »CockCrowing« to a considerable extent, its central aesthetic quality is due to the way it selects and reorganises hermetic elements, combining them with others in a manner which modifies their structural dynamic as well as their potential effects. These poetic strategies could be described as modes of transparent concealment or of a mutual dissimulation of different discourses, especially of hermetic and devotional registers of thought and speech. It is also in Henry Vaughan's refiguration of the hermetic and its configuration with the modes of contemporary Christian spirituality that the Neoplatonic substratum of both is actualised and brought to the fore, although not so much in a propositional as in a figural sense. It is impossible to reduce »Cock-Crowing« to just one of the discourses it brings together, projects onto each other, and divests of their wonted function. By translating a primarily acoustic phenomenon into a complex of visual motifs and by reinterpreting the traditional semantics of ›natural history‹ in hermetic terms, the text in turn renders the hermetic transparent to another, devotional language
_____________ reference to »Father of Lights«, the emphatic apostrophe in the first line of »CockCrowing«: Not only is this a biblical quotation (James 1. 17), it is also the phrase with which Dionysius Areopagita begins his Celestial Hierarchy (120 B, The Complete Works, 145). The latter is perhaps even more likely as a source for Henry's poem in view of its immediate context – in the very next paragraph, Dionysius mentions a concealment by ›sacred veils‹ (121 C, The Complete Works, 146); for Vaughan's treatment of the idea of the veil see below. 31 Anima Magica Abscondita, in: The Works of Thomas Vaughan, 81.
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and its corresponding practice, both already well established by the middle of the seventeenth century: the meditation on the creatures.32 The meditation on the creatures follows a typical generic pattern easily discernable in »Cock-Crowing«: to the speaker, the observation of the cock's crowing and the intensity with which it orients itself towards the highest, becomes an occasion for thinking about the ways and channels through which the whole of creation including man is related to God. It is the beauty of created things (»all this frame«, 20; »the beauty of the seat«, 21) and their reference to the creator of the world which affords some certainty, at least hope that he himself may equally be connected to the origin of all things. But it also leads him to consider, with some trepidation, the possibility of being totally cut off from God and isolated in a state of blindness (»To sleep without thee, is to die«). This glance in the abyss of an utter loss of the consciousness of God's presence finally moves the speaker to an act of the will, an active turning of the mind and heart towards God in an urgent prayer for the removal of everything which still separates him from God (»O take it off! make no delay«, 43ff), and which prevents him from feeling the divine presence as intimately and directly as the cock seemed to proclaim it in its early morning call. At first, the contemplative movement from the creatures towards God, from the visible to the invisible, may appear quite traditional. On further consideration, however, it becomes evident that its schematism is not unbroken. There are several elements which weaken the teleology of the patterning. To begin with, the hidden presence of the divine light is not a conviction the meditation triumphantly arrives at, but it is from the very first at the centre of poetic interest. Also, the analogy between the cock's attunement to light in its greeting of the sunrise and the human soul's yearning for God, which is after all the topic of the text's devotional questioning and which ought to emerge as its result, appears to be selfevidently given throughout and is alluded to in the very first line. It is the same occult »seed« (1, 23) which is placed in both creatures; indeed, it is this – potentially comforting – awareness which provides the starting point for the poem rather than an insight gained at the end of the contemplative process it instigates. Thus, hermetic and contemplative teleologies cross each other, with the effect that their respective claims for absolute validity are at least partially suspended. To some extent, both approaches mutually de-automatise each other. Their compatibility, so obviously taken for granted by Henry Vaughan's hermetic twin, begins to appear doubtful. The internal friction this causes in the complex conceit of cock-crowing manages to avoid both the certainties of occult manipulation based on an essentialism of ›influence‹ and those of a pious silencing of troubled questions through a calling to mind of the well-orderedness of creation. _____________ 32 The standard work on form and tradition of the meditation on the creatures and related devotional as well as literary practices is still Martz (1954), esp. 3, 64–67, 129, 150–152, 256–257.
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Similar effects can be traced on a micro-textual level as well: thus, the address to the creator with which the poem begins so emphatically turns out to be a duplication of a kind the text employs again and again. It reenacts, in miniature, the tension between Christian or biblical and hermetic registers we could already observe on a larger scale. For »Father of lights« not only may be seen to refer to Thomas Vaughan's Anima Magica Abscondita, as cited above, but at the same time quotes the Epistle of James (1. 17), where God is praised as creator of the universe, hence as reliable giver of »Every good gift and every perfect gift«, and perhaps also alludes to the beginning of Dionysius' Celestial Hierarchy, which opens with an interpretation of this passage. Thus, the unchangeable creator of the sun and the other heavenly bodies simultaneously appears as origin of the spiritual light which he imparts to the creatures in different degrees and whose principles of distribution and communication are the subject of the poem's insistent questioning.33 In a way, this ambivalent apostrophe becomes a paradigmatic poetic ›seed‹, compatible to the »sunny seed« and »little grain« which are implanted in the creatures, the principle of germination from which the text unfolds through further hermetico-biblical doublings with multiple connotations.34 Even on a small scale, Vaughan's conceits tend to look two (or more) ways. _____________ 33 From a Dionysian point of view, the stress falls even more strongly on the unificatory power of the divine light, which is expressly said to remove all differentiation, while Thomas Vaughan in the above passage seems to be interested in distinguishing between the amount of light received by the creatures. The biblical text in turn emphasises the unchanging nature of the creator, hence his permanence and reliability. All the texts brought into play here carry widely divergent implications. 34 Further duplications of this type will be found in the »Paradise« the birds dream of (6), but which is equally readable as evocation of the Fall as well as to the idiosyncratic paraphrases of Genesis in Thomas Vaughan's Anthroposophia Theomagica (The Works of Thomas Vaughan, 14–22, 38–40); also in the reference to man as made in God's image (»Cock-Crowing«, 15, cf. Gen 1. 27) and to the live-giving divine afflatus (»CockCrowing«, 18, cf. Gen 2. 7); also in the allusion to the darkness which falls over Egypt at Moses's behest (»Cock-Crowing«, 29, cf. Ex 10. 21); furthermore in the complex metaphor of veiling and the veil in the two concluding stanzas, which seem to allude to the Letters to the Corinthians (2 Cor 3. 13–16; 1 Cor 11. 24; 1 Cor 13. 9–10) and to the Letter to the Hebrews (Heb 10. 20) and also to Thomas Vaughan's revelatory poses in his Anthroposophia Theomagica: »We are all born like Moses with a veil over the face. This is it which hinders the prospect of that intellectual shining light which God hath placed in us; and – to tell you a truth that concerns all mankind – the greatest mystery, both in divinity and philosophy, is how to remove it.« (The Works of Thomas Vaughan, 40, cf. 26). Finally, the very last line of the poem appears charged with two kinds of significance in the same manner: The lily, with which the speaker does not dare to compare his soul, on the one hand evokes, in its whiteness, the alchemical albedo, that is to say the white elixir and symbol of purity which is reached in this (lunar) phase of the opus in analogy to the resurrection after the state of nigredo has been passed through. (It is in the nuptial union with the sunlike red lily, in the rubedo, that the opus alchymicum reaches its perfection; cf. Abraham [1998], 117–118, 174–175, 215–217). On the other hand, however, the lily can also be seen to allude to one of Henry Vaughan's favourite passages from the Song of
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But what, if any, is their principle – the basis, hence, of the text's poetic consistency? What is the argumentative logic underlying the question the poem articulates as well as the prayer to which it is guided? How does it sustain the emergent tension between the intelligible and the spiritual? What is it that moves this text and why is its speaker kept in a state of agitation, if the question – »If a mere blast so fill the sail, | Shall not the breath of God prevail?« (17–18) – is, from a hermetic point of view, already answered, and if the plea – »[…] stay with me!« (48) – is, from a Christian perspective, already fulfilled? Both vantage points take for granted what the text struggles for and in its restlessness presents as still withheld. There seems to be a third position, whose outlines gradually emerge as the discourses of secret knowledge and devotional practice mutually keep each other suspended. The origin of the speaker's unappeasable desire will become visible if we focus on the Neoplatonic contours and scope of his stance. It is this which motivates the dynamic texturing of this poem; its idiosyncratic staging of the conflict and reciprocity which ties appearance to concealment, mimesis to difference, in a process which displays its continued drama from first to last and thus provides aesthetic unity. Again it is possible to show this even in an analysis of the duplicitous semantics of the smaller textual ingredients. If we consider, for instance, the ›illumination‹ of the creatures, our attention is drawn to the double sense of direction this implies: »sunny seed« (1) like »glance of day« (2) or »busy ray« (4) all announce that light is »confined« (2) in, or »assigned« (4) to them, but they equally indicate an outward radiation and communication of brightness; »magnetism« (4) implies a strong attraction towards the morning, but also a repulsion of the dark (»expelling night«, 8). The »little grain« of light (8), which drives away the night, is on its way, while it shines, towards its origin (»house of light«, 10;35 »sun«, 12), but conversely it is this origin which enlightens it and from which its own brightness (»candle«, 11) derives its lustre (is »tinned and lighted«, 12). The giver, who »shines and sings« (9), is at the same time figured as receiver, who derives from another source the streams of song and splendour. The subject of desire appears empowered by its object (cf. 13–14); what radiates light appears, at the same time, irradiated. The searching glance is capable of piercing the darkness only because the subject of the »pensive eye« has been looked at before by another gaze which »full-eyed« (41) embraces all and draws the seekers to itself. What we are here enabled to observe is a circle of emanation, whose complicated mutuality lets its origin shine through. But it is precisely this lucidity towards the origin (which is simultaneously the end of desire) which raises the disquieting question why man should be excepted from the strong and unbroken dynamic – »so firm a longing« (24) – which _____________ Solomon (Cant 2. 16), hence simultaneously evokes the traditional allegorical interpretations of Christ's union with his church and the soul who loves him. 35 Again with a possible alchemical double sense, cf. the title of Thomas Vaughan's Aula Lucis, or The House of Light (1651).
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pervades all creation. Why does the image of God (cf. 25) not self-evidently share, let alone occupy a place of honour in this theophanous brightness? Instead, the sense of universal analogy which the meditation on the creatures should have produced appears to be strangely lacking, when it comes to man. As in »The Waterfall«, the expectable allegorical mode does not seem to be an option. Even though the existence of correspondences between the creatures may in principle be beyond doubt, to the human mind, their actualisation appears difficult and their effectivity remains hidden.36 To the text, man's potential imperviousness to the divine glory is so troubling that for six of its eight stanzas, it strives to explain this difference and to articulate an attitude capable at the same time of reflecting and overcoming it. The poem becomes a meditation on the difficulties which »dream[ing] of Paradise and light« (6) and the vigilance directed towards the second coming (»thy appearing hour«, 16) hold for the soul. From this, an awareness of the singularity of man arises, which does not necessarily redound to his glory. As a being equipped with intellect and geared towards reflexion man appears singled out, if not excluded, from the unquestioning community with the other creatures. It is, then, the transparency of creation, manifest in its beauty but contingent with respect to its perceiver, which motivates a shift from seeing to insight and vision: Human perception is shown to be capable (in principle) of responding to the theophany of creation, and transcendent beauty may begin to be realised through the medium of the senses in an act of aisthesis. This intimate mutuality can be seen to be enacted in the chain of assonances and vocal echoes which characterises the fourth and central stanza of the poem, as »heat«, »seat«, »see«, »same«, »Seeing«, »seed«, »me« and »thee« ring the changes on this topic:37 _____________ 36 This holds for other Vaughan poems as well; thus, it is this tension between the manifest and the latent – »That busy commerce kept between | God and his Creatures, though unseen« – which forms a central topic also in »The Stone« (The Complete Poems, 281–2). 37 From the point of view of Early Modern poetics, these are what George Puttenham would call »auricular figures« – albeit auricular figures which aspire towards »sensable« ones, i.e. figures which aim not only at persuasive effect but appeal to an understanding which works through intellect and reason. In The Arte of English Poesie (1589) Puttenham distinguishes these as follows: »And that first sort of figures doth serve the ear only and may be therefore called ›auricular‹. Your second serves the conceit only and not the ear, and may be called ›sensable‹, not sensible nor yet sententious.« (»English poetics and rhetoric (1589)«, in: English Renaissance Literary Criticism, 236.) He elaborates: »Thus then I say that ›auricular‹ figures be those which work alteration in the ear by sound, accent, time, and slipper volubility in utterance, […]. And so long as this quality extendeth but to the outward tuning of the speech, reaching no higher than the ear, and forcing the mind little or nothing, it is that virtue which the Greeks call enargeia, and is the office of the ›auricular‹ figures to perform« (ibid., 237). It is ultimately only sensable figures which are effective in a comprehensive sense including a movement of the will: »The ear having received his due satisfaction by the auricular figures, now must the mind also be served with his natural delight, by figures sensable: such as by alteration of intendments affect the courage, and give a good liking to the conceit« (ibid., 241). Puttenham's distinction is both interesting and relevant for my reading of Vaughan as it reflects a much older debate about
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O thou immortal light and heat! Whose hand so shines through all this frame, That by the beauty of the seat, We plainly see, who made the same. Seeing thy seed abides in me, Dwell thou in it, and I in thee.
(19–24)
It is this mutual ›indwelling‹ of the human and the divine, at the same time plainly visible and concealed from mere sight, which provides both the underlying assumption and the aim of the textual movement, its presupposition as well as its end. Structurally, then, the poem is a petitio principii. From beginning to end it circles the transparency of the adjacent, perhaps superimposed, spheres of the divine and the created. To this it returns again and again; to this it has, literally, recourse, as it attempts to imitate and recreate as aesthetic experience the circular communication which holds between them. The text performs a recursive movement of thought which at the same time describes reflection as the continued and unending attempt to grasp this ongoing process of mediation as foundation of its own being; as grounding of the human condition in a participation in the divine light which is at the same time wholly obvious and totally lacking in selfevidence. It is in this self-reflexive sense that the poem unfolds the metaphors of sight. The ›indwelling‹ which is to be made palpable appears as a kind of _____________ the modes and possibilities of aesthetic cognition. This, in turn, leads to the problem which seems to agitate the seventeenth-century poet as well: the distinction between (Aristotelian) energeia and (Hellenistic) enargeia, or the question of how knowledge of the dynamic essence of things, their reality as well as their function is best to be communicated in descriptive language. While Hellenistic thinking as well as Quintilian rhetorics contributed not a little to eroding the seemingly clear-cut opposition between a mode of speech capable of conveying essential, conceptual meaning in a vivid and seemingly immediate manner and a mode of representation which tended to rely on illustrative detail, phenomenal singularity and individual evidence in order to construct a convincing image of reality capable of persuading its recipients, an awareness of the different potential of these modes appears to have survived into Early Modern times, reemerging, for instance, in Puttenham's categories of »auricular« vs. »sensable figures«. (For a summary of the history of the controversy cf. also Kemmann [1996]. A collection of recent contributions to the debate will be found in Radke-Uhlmann/Schmitt, [forthcoming]). The distinction also provides a model for describing the specific effect of Vaughan's poetry: while Vaughan clearly aims at ways of ›sensably‹ communicating the hidden dynamic energy of created beings, he appears to do so by poetic devices which appeal to the senses (›sensibly‹), for instance, as in the above example, to the sense of hearing. However, in his effort to arrive at the insight dissimulated by these aesthetically pleasing evidences, he remains fixed on this transcendent truth to an extent which tends to render him impatient. Hence his repeated attempts to reach beyond what, from the point of energeia, must appear as mere sensual impediment (if not a superficial illusion), a tantalising promise waiting to be fulfilled.
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prevenient grace, a relationship antecedently given, which demands to be actualised by the soul in a continual turning back upon itself. Vaughan's poetry arises from a reflexivity which realises itself as an open question, and it requires a similar, auto-referential structure of attention in response. This is figured, in the following stanzas, as a human-divine mutuality of seeing and being seen. Stanza Five regards the idea of going to sleep unaware of the presence of God as a state of blindness akin to death (»To sleep without thee, is to die«), while the next stanza tries to mitigate the terrifying thought of having lost sight of God and of being about to move outside the scope of his care. It turns the speaker's anxiety at the possibility of this forgetfulness and his almost childlike terror of being left alone in the dark into a rhetorical question which tries to make sure that he is known even during his spiritual escapades and that his soul is still securely enveloped and contained in God's loving gaze: […] who, but thee, knows A love-sick soul's exalted flight? Can souls be tracked by any eye But his, who gave them wings to fly?
(33–36)
But a worried undertone remains even in the comforting parallel of »birds«38 and »souls« in combination with the familiar Platonic image of the feathered soul on its flight back home to the true goal of its love.39 This corresponds to the sense of apprehension and uneasiness pervading the whole text, a latent feeling of lack and of the soul being somehow not quite secure despite its repeatedly, at times beseechingly, invoked conviction of being part of a coherent whole, illuminated by the light of God. The two concluding stanzas give a reason for this continued yearning in a further variation on the theme of vision. Both the restless expectancy and the sense of a revelation which is imminent but still withheld appear highly characteristic for Vaughan's poetry.40 From a Christian point of view he might be _____________ 38 The immediately preceding lines 31–33 refer, once again, to the cocks, »whose pulse beats still for light«, but which are not renowned as high fliers. The non-specific plural »birds«, however, might be seen to extend the generic reference in a way which avoids unintentional comic effects. 39 Cf. e.g. Plotinus, Enn. VI 7, 22, 8–21, alluding to Plato's Phaedrus (esp. 251 and 254b); cf. also Hadot (1993), Ch. IV »Love«. 40 Cf., for instance, »L'Envoy«, 8–22: »And like old clothes fold up these skies, | This long worn veil: then shine and spread | Thy own bright self over each head, | And through thy creatures pierce and pass | Till all becomes thy cloudless glass, | Transparent as the purest day | And without blemish or decay, | Fixed by thy spirit to a state | For evermore immaculate. | A state fit for the sight of thy | Immediate, pure and unveiled eye, | A state agreeing with thy mind, | A state thy birth, and death designed: | A state for which thy creatures all | Travel and groan, and look and call.« (The Complete Poems, 312). And from a contemplation of darkness – »that pure Virgin-shrine, | That sacred veil drawn o'er thy glorious noon« (1–2) –, »The Night« (The Complete Poems, 289–290) distils in its final
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thought of as the poet of Romans 8, 19–22,41 were it not for his inclination to cast the »earnest expectation of the creature« in Neoplatonic terms.42 If the ground of being in common to all creatures and relating them to each other is participation in the One, figured as the divine light which renders everything visible, it is only suitable that the impediment to universal illumination should be represented as veil. It is this veil which disturbs the ideal reciprocity of seeing and being seen. In »Cock-Crowing« it appears as a transparent boundary that ambivalently both separates and unites the adjoining spheres of creator and created beings: Only this veil which thou hast broke, And must be broken yet in me, This veil, I say, is all the cloak And cloud which shadows thee from me. This veil thy full-eyed love denies, And only gleams and fractions spies.
(37–42)
Strongly foregrounded, the medium of disunion – »veil« (three times), »cloak«, »cloud« – not only presupposes that union is possible, but again and again affords glimpses of it. While it appears estranging, it is imagined as at the same time as removable, indeed as already peirced by the creator's »full-eyed love«, which in spite of the intervention persists in communicating itself by »gleams and fractions«, only partially obscured. The veil both conceals and reveals.43 It darkens, _____________ stanza the Dionysian paradox of God's hidden presence: »There is in God (some say) | A deep, but dazzling darkness; […]« (49–50). For this important topos see also Dionysius' Mystical Theology, chs. I and II (The Complete Works, 135–138). 41 »For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God. […] For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.« 42 This is, of course, not necessarily a contradiction, although in Vaughan's texts (as here) it is often possible to feel the fault lines. While there may be, strictly speaking, systematic incompatibilities between certain types of ancient Neoplatonism and Early Modern Christianity (prominent among them the whole field of Soteriology), on the whole Christian theology had managed to accommodate many of the central Neoplatonic tenets, perhaps most effectively in the »Augustinian synthesis« (Gaukroger [2006], 49 and passim; for the general impact of Augustine's appropriation of Neoplatonism and Hellenistic philosophies on reformation theology cf. also MacCulloch [2003]). It appears, not only from the writings of the Cambridge Platonists or writers like Thomas Traherne, that Neoplatonically inclined Christians were in the everyday practice of their faith none too worried by possible unorthodoxies. (On Traherne's relation to Augustine's idea of happiness see above, ch. 3. 3 on »Felicity«; cf. also Rist [1996]. For a critical, nineteenthcentury estimate of Cambridge Platonism with a view to the integrative efforts of its protagonists see the classical study by Tulloch [21874]). 43 Again, from a biblical point of view, the veil may appear as already pushed aside and torn – for instance in the mystery of the incarnation, which crosses the boundary between creator and creature; in the perfection through the person of Christ of what is only adumbrated under the Old Covenant (cf. 2 Cor. 3. 12–18, which, in an allusion to Ex. 34.
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even seems to negate the offer of love. But as the dividing line runs right through the speaker, his mind becomes itself medium and mediator; an agent not merely of occlusion but also of transmission. As the verb »spies« oscillates towards a transitive use, indicating the veil's capacity to render itself transparent, the medium of division becomes itself the agent not only of shadowing but also of actively disclosing the divine light. Having reached the difficult paradox of dark lucidity, the poem now pursues it from the point of view of the human desire to reach beyond it. As its tone grows more personal and intimate, speaking in its own cause, the text projects the hoped-for plenitude as simultaneously given and removed. Oneness and light are literally ›adumbrated‹44 – doubtlessly present but hiding in an impenetrable shade; not visible themselves but the source of visibility. The last stanza gives an apocalyptic turn to this phantasy of appearance, as it insistently pleads for the removal of the veil (»O take it off!«) and metaphorically elaborates the hoped-for act. The textual figure is again a recursive one: the revelation is imagined as taking place on a morning that is also the breaking of the Day of Judgment (»that I | May shine unto a perfect day«, 45), and thus not only resumes the notion of the beginnings of creation in Paradise alluded to in the first stanza, but also refers to the time of the Second Coming evoked in the creatures' attentive vigilance and expectation of »thy appearing hour« (16). And again the desire for the perfect, revelatory manifestation of God's presence in his creation is thought of as a relation of mutuality and an exchange of brightness in a reciprocal reflection of light. The speaker asks that his soul be touched, even cleansed and polished by God's radiancy (»brush me with thy light«, 43) in order to be able to make visible and radiate again the splendour he has received. However, even at the very end of the poem the union of »I« and God's glorious, sunlike »Eye«, though urgently desired, remains precarious. The imagined fulfillment of the speaker's yearning is no more than that. We are left at the moment of imminence, with the final word pointing back to the speaker and the veil still in place, permeable and porous but almost occlusive and effectively hindering. The repetition of the plea affirms the continued separation: _____________ 33–34, constrasts the transitory glory bestowed on Moses with the final and permanent removal of the veil by Christ); also in Christ's passion, in the sign of »the veil of the temple rent in twain from the top to the bottom« (Mat. 27. 51, cf. Mark 15. 38, Luke 23. 45). In Heb. 10. 20 the metaphor is given a eucharistic turn: »Having therefore, brethren, boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus, By a new and living way, which he hath consecrated for us, through the veil, that is to say, his flesh«. The most famous locus is of course 1 Cor. 13. 9–10 and 12, emphasising both imperviousness and permeability of the medium which now prevents us from knowing in full and being known: »For we know in part, and we prophesy in part. But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away. […] For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part: but then shall I know even as also I am known.« – For a multi-facetted literary history of the veil from the Middle Ages to the present in the romance literatures see Oster (2002). 44 On »adumbration« in Thomas Browne see also above, ch. 3. 1.
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O take it off! or till it flee, Though with no lily, stay with me!
There is no mystical ring to these lines, despite the potentially hermetic semantics of the lily.45 Still, not only does the intervening texture appear to become part of the realm of animated beings, capable of moving of its own accord (»flee«), hence perhaps of being chased away soon. In addition, another model for the relationship between human and divine agencies seems to be brought into play with the very last line, restructuring the pattern of frustrated identification while retaining an awareness of the supplicant's imperfections together with the initial sense of the universal relatedness of all created beings. This is a model of companionship, based on the insight of transparent separation. It promises the familiar proximity of neigbouring spheres. These do not – for the time being – merge. But their juxtaposition offers a comfort which keeps apocalyptic horrors at bay just as it makes possible an aesthetic attitude towards the medium of division and transmission. Henry Vaughan's predilection for themes of retirement, return, and restoration may well be, as Alan Rudrum has suggested, »a spiritual response to a political situation«.46 His royalist sympathies are no secret, and it might be argued that, in his provincial seclusion, Vaughan found some comfort in contemplating the potential of created things to find a redemptive way back to their origin and thus gain their rightful place. Also, and in a very general sense, the spiritual as well as the aesthetic may be said to be, ultimately, of political relevance. However, apart from the fact that it is hard to find implications in the poems of Silex Scintillans which lend themselves to a crypto-political reading, Vaughan is, as I have tried to argue, conspicuously averse to straightforward allegory. Besides, »The Waterfall« and »Cock-Crowing« – as the majority of his other poems47 – are not poems concerned with restoration politics but with metaphysics. It is in the work of authors such as Andrew Marvell and, above all, Aphra Behn that some of the
_____________ 45 Once again, a reticence towards a wholesale embrace of hermeticism makes itself felt. True, in hermetic writings, for instance in Jacob Böhme, the lily is often used as symbol for the goal of the opus; thus in the prologue to De signatura rerum: »Dann eine Lilie blühet vber Berg vnd Thal in allen Enden der Erden | wer da suchet der findet | etc.« (Böhme, Werke, 513. Cf. also Böhme, Im Zeichen der Lilie). But not only does the speaker by means of the negation (»no lily«) divest himself of these significances, the rhetoric of his text as it were deflates their occultist virulence, since its point is above all that the ›arcana‹ are not really secret but surprisingly, even disturbingly manifest. There is no need painfully to search for them as the transparency of creation makes them evident to the ›pensive eye‹. 46 Rudrum (2004). 47 With the exception of his early Poems (1646) and several texts in Olor Iscanus (1651).
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political implications of Neoplatonism may be seen to emerge, albeit in ways that are anything but univocal or unambiguous.48 It is not only with regard to politics that Vaughan tends to avoid the easy answers, but also with respect to the hermetic as well as devotional discourses which appear to offer themselves. In his poetic attempt to come to an understanding of man's place in creation and to interpret his relationship to other created beings both the pious patterns of meditation on the creatures and the unorthodoxies of his brother's hermeticism seem ultimately unsatisfactory. The insight into the spiritual meaning of creation sought by his »pensive eye« appears to consist neither in a simple reference to the creator nor in the instrumentalisation of secret knowledge and the manipulation of the order of things in accordance with the magus' interests. Rather, it lies in the soul's growing awareness of the mediality, not the means of knowing. The speaking soul whose progress is charted in these poems becomes increasingly conscious of its own questioning movement; or rather: if its drive towards transcendence can be termed progressive, it consists in a growth of reflexivity. Thus, in a paradigmatic way, »Cock-Crowing« exposes questions rather than answers, intimations rather than certainties, a sense of risk rather than security, a reliance on the mode of fiction rather than on modes of positive knowledge. What the ›shining‹ and singing of the creature in this poem communicates is, at best, metaphorical knowledge – »as if it knew |The way unto the house of light« (my emphasis). The ultimate aim of the speaker's desire does not become apparent other than by way of transparency – concealed, veiled, perhaps even intentionally dissimulated in order to keep alive the thirst for face-to-face knowledge. The only manifestation possible is an aesthetic showing forth, containing the promise of a revelation which is only available in a mediated manner and through a process of at times painful self-reflection of the perceiving self. What underlies this metaphysical aesthetic of creation and the creatures is a Neoplatonic figure of thought – the assumption of a companionship of human and divine, even of a precarious mutual indwelling of the pensive soul and God. It is this interpretative effort and the difficult imagination of transparent spheres which inspires Vaughan's poetry and finally provides the ground of its aesthetic unity.
_____________ 48 See below, ch. 5.
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4.2 Transparent Spheres: A Neoplatonic Aesthetics of Creation »So shines and sings, as if it knew | The path unto the house of light«: For Henry Vaughan, the mode of ›as if‹ is in many ways characteristic. Like the cock's crowing, which provides both the observation from which his poetic meditation started and its central conceit, the attitude in which he announces his reflections manages to be at the same time confident (although never strident or propagandist) and tentative. It conveys a sense of strong, at times even impatient desire as well as a consciousness of the ›fictional‹ quality attached to its aim: what cannot be known has to be imagined. The awareness of this, however, the reflection on immediacy withheld, adds a note of melancholy to many of Vaughan's poems. Still, if this renders the connection precarious, some comfort lies in the conviction that there are hidden correspondences between the visible and the invisible spheres. Because these spheres are adjacent (albeit not in a way obvious to all beholders), there is some hope in hermetic ways of approach. But, as my reading of »Cock-crowing« attempted to show, this is by no means allsufficient; nor is orthodox devotional practice. The divine appears to be concealed beyond the reach of hermeticist or meditative technique. Yet, and despite these hindrances, to the speaker of the poem, the translucency of the world is so palpable that he cannot cease to strive for it. Nonetheless, for Henry Vaughan the final stress seems to fall on the hiddenness of what constitutes the unity of creation. Hence the apocalyptic strain: we have yet to await the dawning of the »perfect day«. If Vaughan is in many ways a poet of secrecy and opacity, Thomas Traherne could perhaps be called a poet of the apparent. He also is a poet of a quite astonishing certainty of the presence of God in His creation. Above all, as we could see, he is a poet of felicity. And, like Vaughan's precarious comfort of the imagination, Traherne's happy assurance is grounded in a highly distinctive version of Neoplatonism. If, as I would suggest, Vaughan and Traherne are representative of many other, less openly religious writers in seventeenth-century England, Neoplatonic figures of thought, then, can be seen to acquire a specific and important function in the difficult articulation of individual spiritual identities characterising the period. In the complex confessional landscape around mid-century, the outcome of these negotiations was often precarious, the balances struck resulting in mixtures of heterogeneous elements not always easy to reconcile. In a situation which saw an increasing plurality and a hitherto unknown proliferation of denominational possibilities associated with varying degrees of normativity and institutionalised authority and offering different options between conformity and dissent, between assent freely or reluctantly given, with sanctions incurred, risked
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or avoided, the profiles which emerged were seldom as clear-cut as in Traherne's case.49 Still, even here it will be instructive to observe how Neoplatonic configurations come to serve as an instrument for avoiding the easy answers and transforming the available patterns into dynamic personal formations. Vaughan unfolded his greatest productivity as a poet in provincial obscurity around the 1650s; Traherne's writing activities coincide with the first years of the Restoration, concentrating on a period of five years after 166950 and his death in 1674 and intensifying with his employment as chaplain to Sir Orlando Bridgeman in London. Yet he too kept up his west country affiliations. While he was rector of Credenhill, it is possible that he was a member of the religious circle around Susanna Hopton at nearby Gattertop. It is to her that he may have addressed the 410 prose meditations that have come to be known as his Centuries.51 I shall start with a consideration of these (with a few glances at the Thanksgivings) in order to unfold his remarkable philosophy and theology, before I move on to a reading of his Poems. From this Traherne will emerge not primarily as the poet of infinity whom Marjorie Nicolson and Rosalie Colie have taught us to see,52 whose impulse towards transcendence mirrors the breaking of epistemological boundaries associated with the new sciences of his time. That there are analogies between his radical extension of the topos of the circle whose centre is everywhere, whose circumference nowhere, and the Baconian plus ultra; between his (and Henry
_____________ 49 Although even with respect to an author whose stance appears as little ambiguous as Traherne's, recent research has demonstrated the difficulties of determining precisely the ideological positions he occupied, the ethics he practised, and the sincerity with which he engaged in the theological controversies he entered in his polemic works; cf. e.g. Denise Inge's discussion of Traherne's church politics and specific brand of Anglicanism (2008), 49–59. 50 He may have started earlier in the 1660s, as Julia J. Smith suggests (2004). The Select Meditations, identified only in 1964 as Traherne's, may have been composed shortly after he took up residence at Credenhill. 51 Julia Smith (2004) does not explicitly endorse this communis opinio of the older critical literature. For a critical view of Traherne's assumed closeness to Hopton see also Berry (2000). Like Traherne's poems, the text referred to as Centuries (and believed by Grosart to be by Vaughan) was never published in the author's lifetime. Its manuscript turned up, with the title »Centuries of Meditations« in a hand not Traherne's, in a notebook on a London bookstall in the winter of 1896-7 and was ascribed to Traherne by Bertram Dobell, who first published it in 1908 in a modernised edition. – I quote from Margoliouth's twovolume edition of the works: Thomas Traherne. Centuries, Poems, and Thanksgivings, Vol. I: Introduction and Centuries, Vol. II: Poems and Thanksgivings. The Centuries are referred to by number, the first referring to the respective century, the second to the paragraph in question, and line in Margoliouth's edition, with references in brackets behind the quotation. 52 Cf. Nicolson (1960), and Colie (1957/8).
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More's) notion of infinite space53 and that of contemporary physics, need not be disputed. Nonetheless, one of the points I am trying to make is that the aesthetic implicit in his texts does not simply reflect but also contributes in a distinctive (and philosophically grounded) way to the debate about infinity. Transcendence, from a Neoplatonic point of view, does not in the first place equal transgression, but transparency and continual communication. As a theological metaphor, infinite extension is not necessarily bold, and it is not used to justify the manipulation of nature for human ends – on the contrary. Also, Traherne will certainly not be considered as a wistful poet of childhood and nostalgia for a world of arcadian innocence eternally lost. Like Vaughan, he has been cast in the role of a precursor of Wordsworth, at best, a proto-Romantic, if without the undertones of tragedy and despair.54 But Traherne's texts, like Vaughan's, though they may perhaps be said to rest on metaphysical assumptions not so different from Coleridge's,55 move in directions incompatible with nineteenth-century pastoralism. Traherne's Adamic fantasies are far from childish, escapist, or Oedipal, and his infant self has nothing in common with »Lewis Carroll's little girls or J. M. Barrie's little boys«.56 In a medium only slightly different from, and indeed interwoven with his prose, Traherne's verse, which by its exterior shape more openly claims to be poetry than the Centuries (or his more openly dogmatic works), offers compact rephrasings of central aspects of his philosophy and sets some striking accents. This includes the experimental Thankgsgivings, which freely mix verse (free verse with widely differing line lengths as well as rhyme) and passages of rhythmicised, psalmodic prose. However, even in its more discursive forms Traherne's thinking displays poetic features. Conversely, in terms of the ideas they comprise, the poems are, like the prose texts, enormously redundant. Again and again, they seem to revert to the same topics, to cover the same ground. In itself, this, together with the poetic qualities shared by verse and prose, appears significant. As ensemble of various recursive structures, Traherne's texts in their repetitiveness give evidence of what has, in this study, emerged as one of the major recurrent figures of literary Neoplatonism – the return of the soul to its origin, or epistrophé. In addition, Traherne's poetic voice – much more so and with a greater intensity than Vaughan's – is that of a sharer in what he desires. He casts himself as one who already participates in what he ardently wishes for, and it is this happiness and joy which his texts seek to communicate. Since to him, the _____________ 53 Nicolson (1960), 158–9, credits Traherne's interest in infinity wholly to Henry More, calling him »the greatest of the seventeenth-century ›sons of More‹«, and claiming that he expressed in his poetry attitudes and ideas inherited from the Cambridge Platonist. 54 Cf. Conrad (1985), 272–275. 55 For the Neoplatonic foundations of Coleridge's thinking cf. Hedley (2000). Also, E. Lobsien (2007). 56 Conrad (1985), 275.
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non-apparent is present, all that is needed is a way in which the enthusiasm which necessarily accompanies this insight, can be articulated and in its turn shared with others in a manner capable of making them ›see‹, too. If to Vaughan, the adjacent spheres are sometimes opaque to each other and painfully separate, Traherne presents himself as the master of double vision, of imagined reciprocity, throughout: »And it is my Happiness that I can see it [i.e. Lov] on both sides the Vail or Skreen.« (Centuries 4. 60, 3–4).
Cherubinic Writing on Both Sides of the Veil The dedication and the first paragraph of the Centuries introduce the text to the reader in more ways than one. Four lines of verse precede the book as a whole, and they are commented on in a manner instructive both of the kind of mutuality the text aims at and the metaphysics on which it is based: This book unto the friend of my best friend As of the Wisest Love a Mark I send That she may write my Makers prais therin And make her self therby a Cherubin. 1 An Empty Book is like an Infants Soul, in which any Thing may be Written. It is Capable of all Things, but containeth Nothing. I hav a Mind to fill this with Profitable Wonders. And since Love made you put it into my Hands I will fill it with those Truths you Love, without Knowing them: and with those Things which, if it be Possible, shall shew my Lov; To you, in Communicating most Enriching Truths; to Truth, in Exalting Her Beauties in such a Soul. (Centuries 1. 1)
The »friend« to whom the Centuries are addressed is usually assumed to be Susanna Hopton, friend of God like Traherne himself. Their platonic (or, as contemporaries would call it, ›seraphic‹)57 friendship is here figured as »the Wisest Love« of which human beings are capable. Still, a further heightening of this love through being directed towards its source is envisaged as the end of this »book«. The reader is to be transformed into a writer and thereby into an epitome of contemplative love, guardian of Paradise as well as herald of God's glory – »a Cherubin«. For its biblical connotations of divine power, ardent love, religious art, and wisdom,58 its Neoplatonic resonance harking back to the Dionysian _____________ 57 For the vogue of this type of ›holy‹ (»Seraphick«) friendship in the second half of the seventeenth century, triggered not least by a treatise entitled Some Motives to the Love of God, better known as Seraphick Love (1659) and written by »the Incomparable Mr Robert Boyl«, as Traherne called him (D. Inge [2008], 53), cf. Harris (2002) and Wilde (2009). 58 The references are above all to Gen. 3. 24 (»So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to
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hierarchies,59 and for the associations with prelapsarian innocence as well as ›angelic‹ female beauty which had accrued to it by the second half of the seventeenth century,60 this term could hardly have been better chosen for the ultimate aim of the proposed self-modelling. At the same time, its semantic potential makes it highly apt for the recipient of Traherne's doctrine of felicity. For this, too, consists in learning and getting used to a specific, indeed ›cherubic‹,61 manner of seeing which, by looking at created things, arrives at a contemplation of the divine and will in turn effortlessly communicate itself and its awareness of transcendent plenitude to others. The metaphor of the »Empty Book« is continued and elaborated further in the first prose passage. Having drawn attention to the addressee's active spiritual participation in realising the truth it offers, it is now made to highlight the state of mind presupposed by such activity. The »Infants Soul«, to which it is compared, is not, however, strictly a tabula rasa. It may be said to contain nothing yet, but its eminence, as Traherne never tires of emphasising, consists in its infinite capacity (»Capable of all Things«). The soul is sheer potential, unlimited receptivity. It is also blind desire, yearning for »Truths«, to which, paradoxically, it feels attracted without knowing them. This strong and persistent love for an anonymous object is grounded in the unspoken presupposition of a connection between the soul and those »most _____________ keep the way of the tree of life.«), to Ezekiel's visions of the cherubim (Ezek. 1 and 10) as winged, four-faced and »full of eyes round about« (Ezek. 10. 12), manifestating the glory of God, and to the instructions given to Moses for building the tabernacle and the mercyseat (Exod. 25. 18–20). 59 The cherubim come second in the nine triadic orders of the divine hierarchy, ranging behind the seraphim and before the thrones, and they have the special attributes of ›fullness of insight‹ and ›pouring out of knowledge‹ (with an allusion to the Plotinian metaphor of infinity flowing like an inexhaustible fountain and ›boiling over‹ with life; cf. Enn. VI 5, 12, 8f); in Dionysius' etymological explanation in The Celestial Hierarchy: »The name cherubim signifies the power to know and to see God, to receive the greatest gifts of his light, to contemplate the divine splendor in primordial power, to be filled with the gifts that bring wisdom and to share these generously with subordinates as a part of the beneficent outpouring of wisdom.« (205C, The Complete Works, 162). 60 Cf. the references in OED, cherub (cherubim, cherubin) applied to persons, 3. b. In the form »cherubim« the word could also refer to »a divine of surpassing intellect«, cf. 3.a.; with the meaning »a beautiful and innocent child«, »cherub« seems to become current only after 1700, cf. 3.c. Hence, although semantic elements associated with childlikeness might have been welcome to Traherne, they do not seem to have been available as yet and the theological connotations as well as those associated with beauty in a vaguely complimentary fashion appear to be foregrounded. 61 In his Oratio de hominis dignitate (1486), Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, referring (among others) to Dionysius Areopagita, also recommends that we model our lives upon that of the cherub – »ad exemplar vitae cherubicae vita nostra formanda est« –, imitating cherubic fervour and brilliance of insight (»fulget Cherub intelligentiae splendore«). (De hominis dignitate, 12, 10; cf. On the Dignity of Man, 8, 7). Pico, too, explicitly celebrates the contemplative powers of the cherub and ascribes to him mediating functions, being placed in the middle (»medius«) between seraphim and thrones (12).
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Enriching Truths« – a relationship preexistent and pre-conscious, but insistently present, waiting only to be actualised. The soul is always already in love with the truth the speaker has in mind and prepares to communicate, because this truth is congenial to it, innate if still dormant. Traherne's persona will repeatedly claim that to gain access to it is the easiest thing in the world. In offering to explicate to his addressee what is yet implicit, to unfold what is hidden but waiting to be recognised, he also offers a token of his own ›cherubic‹ love. And he extends this simultaneously to the recipient and to the secret subject of his discourse: the Truth whose »Beauties« they are both in love with and whom their joined and mutual contemplation will, by interior »Exalting«, make even more palpable. A surprising number of the topics of Neoplatonic ontology are touched upon and evoked in these first lines: spiritual connectedness and reciprocal participation of individuals in an underlying unity of being; universal communication; mutuality; reflexivity as progression towards increasing self-awareness as awareness of the ground of consciousness; attraction towards a truth at the same time good and beautiful; accessibility of this higher truth and its intimacy in a soul as yet dimly aware of it but ready to embrace it; not least the necessity of striving to conform to it in a process of ›cherubic‹ self-fashioning and contemplative practice. It is this contemplative practice which the Centuries document by performing it. In doing so, they arrange and shape these elements of Neoplatonic thinking to a highly distinctive profile, which may justly be called an aesthetics of creation – and not only with a view to its poetic features. These features are obvious, although not obtrusive. While the Centuries practise what they preach, they urgently invite to emulating it, stressing the anagogic character of their enterprise by means of the metaliterary metaphor of the book, both given and received, both empty and to be filled, indeed already filled in a script only to be deciphered and rewritten by the recipient, who will herself become its author. Thus, they emphasise a transparency necessarily mediated. They foreground a rhetoric of empathy and guidance in an attempt to structure another's mind (and one's own like another's), to facilitate communication between (and within) interiorities as well as between apparent and hidden worlds. Traherne's speaker and his addressee may live in different spheres, but every paragraph of his Centuries is an overstepping of presumed dividing lines, striving to make already present openings visible and to show walls as permeable. Traherne thus speaks a language of transcendence, but with a recognisable accent. Although the titles of his poems are sometimes selfconsciously reminiscent of Herbert's, they are less openly imitative than Vaughan's. And although this may be seen as an attempt to place himself in the same devotional tradition, in the poems, but indisputably in the Centuries as well as in the Thanksgivings, Traherne's voice is very much his own. The tone of his texts is heightened throughout, if, in some of the illustrative details, tinged with homeliness. The Centuries strive for plainness, like the
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poems, repudiating ornate diction.62 Still, they tend to speak less in a preacherly but rather in a prophetic, often ecstatic voice,63 at times verging on harangue or rhapsody. As they try to eschew scholarliness or a sophistication which might appear pedantic, they often substitute paratactic structures for syntactic complexity, enumerating and cataloguing where they might have chosen structures of super- or subordination. On one hand this strengthens the rhythm of a prose already generously emphatic. The normally short paragraphs appear selfcontained, focused and concentrated. Frequent capitalisation as well as the idiosyncrasy of leaving out mute end-›e‹s add stress and a feeling of condensed force. On the other hand, the enumeration of similar elements and the accumulation of strong accents may create a sense of repetitiveness, at best abundance. Combined with the second-person address, which dominates the first two Centuries, the list as a favourite stylistic device contributes to an impression of (sometimes studied) simplicity while making for directness and emotionally charged insistence. As »you« is now and then, especially in the ›autobiographical‹ third Century, exchanged for »I«, the confrontational manner modulates into a more meditative and reflective one. On the whole, hortatory modes just about balance deliberative ones, while the epideictic genre seems reserved for christological meditations as well as for the extensive and exuberant passages of praise for the created world. There is little exposition, theological or otherwise, and narrative is restricted to selective spiritual autobiography. Correspondingly (and perhaps surprisingly), there is no sense of community, or of the collective sociability of a congregation consisting of different individuals. The relationship these texts construct has a private quality. Its model seems to be that of mentor or tutor and pupil. As the speaker addresses himself to just one ›other‹, at times assuming her role as the meditations turn into interior dialogues, we might feel that, for all his desire to communicate, we are in the presence of a solitary, indeed ›lyrical‹ self. He may pose as a caller in the wilderness, but the overall impression is one less of zeal than of enthusiasm blended with concern, personal as well as pastoral. Traherne sounds utterly delighted, indeed intensely thrilled when he unfolds his vision; troubled, perplexed, genuinely pained that others should not see the world with his eyes. This is clearly a man with a mission, but one reticent to adopt a dogmatic stance. His is neither the voice of the marketplace nor of the pulpit. He appears convinced and convincing, but the poetic effects of his prose are due above all to his unremitting efforts to persuade rather than overwhelm, to woo and win his _____________ 62 Cf., for instance, the programmatic preference for »The naked Truth in many faces shewn,« articulated in »The Author to the Critical Peruser«, in Centuries, Poems, and Thanksgivings, vol. 2, 2–3, l. 1. 63 »I will open my Mouth in Parables: I will utter Things that have been Kept Secret from the foundation of the World. Things Strange yet Common; Incredible, yet Known; Most High, yet Plain; infinitly Profitable, but not Esteemed.« (Centuries 1. 3, 1–4). In her standard work on the Metaphysicals, White stresses the prophetic and visionary aspects of Traherne's writing (1962), Chs. 12 and 13.
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reader by making evident the astonishing riches to be gained. He insists, but there are no traces of a pugnacious or disputatious (let alone radically puritan) spirit as he displays his treasures. He is never polemically embattled; he disarms. There is an openness and a sweetness about the spiritual temper his texts communicate, which make even a modern reader respond with wonder rather than irritation. Traherne's devotional writings never threaten but promise. And they promise nothing less than ultimate happiness – »felicity«.64 Traherne's instruction to happiness could be summarised as follows (using his own favourite terms and personalised diction): Felicity results from realising that everything is mine. The world, indeed the whole universe was created for me alone. It belongs to me. In that, it corresponds to my insatiable desire, because I want nothing less than everything. It is not only sufficient for my needs, but it is excellent, perfect in all respects. It is impossible to imagine a better world. To understand this – and it is easily understood – is the source of infinite and inexhaustible joy. It makes me not only »Heir« but »Comprehensor« and »Enjoyer« of the whole world. This in turn heightens my importance to God even more. For as I enjoy and »prize« his creation, equipped as I am with a soul in a perfectly useful body capable of realising all this, I become aware of my self. Not only that, as I try to value the inestimable greatness of the gift I have received, I make it even more valuable by returning it to God enriched by my praise. God needs and expects me to do this, because, paradoxically, although he lacks nothing, he wants to have a »Spectator« and »Contemplator« – someone who appreciates and enjoys his creation and thereby restores and enhances it to him. Thus, with everyone an enjoyer, identical in this respect and conscious of it, all living beings are involved in an immense »Circulation«. All are caught up in a unifying movement back to the One from whom they came. To perceive that there is this ongoing reciprocal dynamic which animates the universe is to recognise my own potential share in it, indeed already to participate in it. This, too, is happiness. There are a number of elements in this outline of Traherne's thought which deserve further comment. I shall at least try to give a rough sketch of how, in this fundamentally Neoplatonic configuration, they are composed and presented so as to build an aesthetics of creation. As already indicated, Traherne's is not an ostentatiously learned discourse. There are very few explicit references to the authorities, apart from biblical ones. It might even be argued that, systematically, the text is founded on a minimal biblical repertoire consisting of the psalmist's praise of creation – paradigmatically in Ps. 104 –, his exhortation to rejoice in God – »Delight thyself also in the LORD; and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart« (Ps. 37. 4) –, frequently repeated in the epistles, as in St. Paul's exhortation to the Thessalonians »Rejoice evermore« (1 Thes. 5. 16), and Christ's commendation of childlike openness of heart (»Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein.« Mark 10. 15). But _____________ 64 See also ch. 3. 3 above.
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although these are clearly Traherne's favourites, they are also topical underpinnings, part of the everyday currency of Christian devotion, which do not suffice to explain the idiosyncratic metaphysical contours his spirituality assumes. There are a number of more specific allusions, some with a vaguely Plotinian ring to them. But, on the whole and although the Neoplatonic patterning is conspicuous, neither the Centuries nor the Thanksgivings or the Poems put their intertextuality on display. It may therefore come as a surprise that, among the few evocations of pretexts in the Centuries there should be a long, at times verbatim, quotation from Giovanni Pico della Mirandola's oration On the Dignity of Man in paragraphs 74 to 78 of the Fourth Century. The Latin text would have been available to Traherne, for instance in the 1601 Basel edition of Pico's Opera Omnia. Traherne gives the beginning of the oration – the well-known account of the creation of man – which comprises about three pages. He quotes a little in Latin, but for the greater part offers it in what seems to be a translation of his own. He omits little and adds less, so that, with very few exceptions, his version moves fairly close to the Latin original. Of these exceptions, only one seems to be significant.65 It is no coincidence that Traherne should insert precisely this passage into his own text. In many ways Pico's treatise is something like a master-text for his own. Not only is the Oration – together with other Neoplatonic and hermetic writings by the fifteenth-century Christian Neoplatonist thinkers in Florence, above all, Marsilio Ficino – one of the core texts for the second Platonic Renaissance in England, Pico also emerges as the structuring force behind many of Traherne's central concerns. Thus, for instance, Pico strongly advocates a ›cherubic‹ self-modelling,66 which would have been highly congenial to Traherne. Above all, in the passage from which Traherne quotes, Pico is really engaged in giving reasons for, and celebrating, man's felicity. His enthusiastic exclamation: »O summam Dei patris liberalitatem, summam et admirandam hominis felicitatem!« could have been Traherne's own, who renders it in the same emphatic manner: »O Infinit Liberality of God the father! O Admirable and supreme felicity of Man!« (Centuries 4. 77, 1-2). Also, Pico's narrative of the creation of man, of his lack of a pre-determined, fixed or circumscribed space in the order of creatures, of the creator placing him in the middle and endowing him with the potential to assume whatever nature he wishes, beast or angel, thus to define himself according to his inclinations, indeed to be, in the famous phrase, »ipsius quasi arbitrarius _____________ 65 In accordance with his tendency to assimilate Pico's diction and concepts to his own, Traherne renders the phrase »Igitur hominem accepit indiscretae opus imaginis« (De hominis dignitate, 4), which stresses the indeterminateness of the human, in a characteristically more optimistic manner, removing any trace of uncertainty: »And therfore he took Man, the Image of all his Work, […]« (Centuries 4. 75, 28). Man, in Traherne, is settled to be the affirmative mirror of creation. 66 Cf. also Centuries 1. 37, 9–10: »we need nothing but open Eys, to be Ravished like the Cherubims.«
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honorariusque plastes et fictor«,67 his own »molder and maker«,68 freely and honorably inventing and shaping himself – all this provides Traherne with a massive emphasis on, and a strong retrospective affirmation of, his own favourite ideas. This appears all the more effective as it comes after he has already unfolded these topics in the preceding Centuries and variously highlighted them. For Traherne, too, as we know by now, man is a quasi-creative »Former and Framer« of himself (Centuries 4. 76, 11), called upon never to stop ›working on his statue‹ like a sculptor, as Plotinus would say,69 to model himself after the cherub. Indeed, as Traherne already stressed in the First Century, man is meant to be the »Contemplator of the Univers«,70 the »Spectator«71 God desires for His creation,72 »Born to Enjoy«73 it. And, as in Pico, man finds himself equipped for his ascent to the highest through self-reflection.74 Traherne places extra emphasis _____________ 67 Pico, De hominis dignitate, 6. 68 Pico, On the Dignity of Man, 5. 69 »How then can you see the sort of beauty a good soul has? Go back into yourself and look; and if you do not yet see yourself beautiful, then, just as someone making a statue which has to be beautiful cuts away here and polishes there and makes one part smooth and clears another till he has given his statue a beautiful face, so you too must cut away excess and straighten the crooked and clear the dark and make it bright, and never stop ›working on your statue‹ till the divine glory of virtue shines out on you, till you see ›self-mastery enthroned upon its holy seat‹.« (Plotinus, Enn. I 6, 9, 6–15, in Plotinus, vol. 1, 259. Both quotations allude to Plato's Phaedrus.) 70 Centuries 4. 75, 15f (Pico: »universi contemplator« [De hominis dignitate, 4]). 71 Cf. also Centuries 4. 79, 6. 72 In his version of Pico: »[…] His Work being Compleated, He desired som one, that might Weigh and reason, lov the Beauty, and admire the Vastness of so Great a Work.« (Centuries 4. 75, 7–10). Cf. one of Traherne's many earlier phrasings: »He Wanted the Communication of His Divine Essence, and Persons to Enjoy it. He Wanted Worlds, He wanted Spectators, He wanted Joys, He wanted Treasures. He wanted, yet he wanted not, for he had them.« (Centuries 1. 41, 13–16). – Traherne's paradoxical phrasing at this point indicates that for him as well as for Pico the ascription of ›want‹ or ›desire‹ to the Creator poses a certain problem, at least from an orthodox (Plotinian) Neoplatonic point of view. For in so far as want implies deficiency, need or lack, it is not compatible with the perfection of the highest. Hence the attempt to figure God's desire as »perfective« and to glorify it hyperbolically by metaphorically transforming it into its opposite, plenitude: »This is very strange that GOD should Want. for in Him is the Fulness of all Blessedness: He overfloweth Eternaly. His Wants are as Glorious as Infinit. Perfectiv needs that are in His Nature, and ever Blessed, becaus always Satisfied. He is from Eternity full of Want: Or els He would not be full of Treasure. […] It is Incridible, yet very Plain: Want is the Fountain of all His Fulness.« (Centuries 1. 42, 1–7). 73 Centuries 1. 7, 3; cf., with Traherne's key concept referring to man's freedom of choice in Pico's narrative, 4. 76, 1–3: »O Adam, we hav given Thee neither a certain seat, nor a Private face, nor a Peculiar office, that whatsoever seat or face or office thou dost desire, thou mayst Enjoy.« 74 Thus Pico in Traherne's words: »And if being content with the lot of no Creatures, he [i.e. Man – V. O. L.] withdraws Himself into the Centre of His own Unitie, he shall be one Spirit with GOD, and Dwell abov all in the Solitary Darkness of his Eternal Father.« (Centuries 4. 77, 12–16).
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on the relevant passage by rephrasing it four paragraphs later: »And what Our Author here observeth, is very considerable, that Man by retiring from all Externals and withdrawing into Him self, in the centre of his own Unity becometh most like unto GOD.« (Centuries 4. 81, 3–6). It is this concentration of the self which makes possible the soul's unificatory movement towards the One. But it is here that Traherne, much as he admires Pico's rhapsodic language and his poetic licence,75 often giving rein to the same kind of ultramundane exuberance himself, shifts the accent slightly but significantly. Although he too delights in the »Changeable Power« of man (Centuries 4. 78, 5f), since it enables him so to »chuse as to becom One Spirit with GOD Almighty« (Centuries 4. 79, 19f), his own version of Neoplatonism constructs this choice so that the stress falls less on the soul isolated within itself and ravished with holy mania in its solitary flight to the ultimate union than on the soul's assimilation to the communicative power of God: By chusing a Man may be turned and Converted into Lov. Which as it is an Universal Sun filling and shining in the Eternity of GOD, so is it infinitly more Glorious then the Sun is, not only shedding abroad more Amiable and Delightfull Beams, Illuminating and Comforting all Objects: yea Glorifying them in the Supreme and Soveraign Maner, but is of all sensibles the most Quick and Tender; being able to feel like the longlegged Spider, at the utmost End of its Divaricated feet: and to be wholy present in every place where any Beam of it self extends. The Sweetness of its Healing Influences is Inexpressible. And of all Beings such a Being would I chuse to be for ever. One that might inherit all in the most Exquisit Maner, and be the Joy of all in the most Perfect Measure. (Centuries 4. 80)
It is not so much the radically transcendent and indeed escapist aspects of Pico's stance and his view of the soul which fascinate Traherne, but the diffusive potential it implies and its presence in creation. Traherne's speaker does not hurl himself beyond the created world but stays in touch with it quite literally, glorying in the sensually experienced extension of his soul (»like the longlegged Spider«) and in its beneficial effects for the creatures he feels intimately related to. His ambition is not to rid himself of the world but to include it within the radius of his soul where »the Dimensions of Innumerable Worlds are shut up in a Centre« (Centuries 4. 81, 16f). His focus is not so much on the solitary, almost solipsistic soul of Pico, but rather seeks to embrace and contain the whole of creation. It is therefore the loving soul which receives his highest commendation. For, by realizing itself as inheritor of the whole world and as called upon to enjoy it, i.e. by being itself, it »communicates it self wholy […] and is Richer in its Communications then all Odors and Spices whatsoever« (Centuries 4. 82, 6–8). It _____________ 75 »Any man may perceiv, that He permitteth his fancy to wander a little Wantonly after the maner of a Poet: but most deep and serious things are secretly hidden under his free and luxuriant Language.« (Centuries 4. 78, 2–5).
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expends itself in a manner at the same time sunlike and godlike, irradiating everything with »its Beams«76 and overflowing to all creatures.77 This capacity to give out of its own ›communicative‹ abundance follows from the soul's plasticity, its aptness to mould and transform itself in conformity with what it perceives and »prizes«.78 At the same time, it is an effect of the soul reflecting God's love: »[…] as a Mirror returneth the very selfsame Beams it receiveth from the Sun, so the Soul returneth those Beams of Lov that shine upon it from God« (Centuries 4. 84, 9–11). But by virtue of this (still quite orthodox) reflexivity the soul acquires a productive power verging on a creativity quite her79 own. Her »Lov […] is not meerly the Reflexion of Gods«, but »a real fountain« or well-spring, from which flow her own live-giving »Waters« (Centuries 4. 85, 6f, 8, 12): »Creatures as it were to which her self givs their Existence. For indeed she could not lov, were not her Beams of Lov, her own. Before she loves they are not, when she lovs they are. And so she givs them their Being. […] now she can Exalt a Creature abov all the Things in Heaven and Earth, in her self« (Centuries 4. 85, 15–22). It is in this communicative achievement, in the soul's loving creativity which is simultaneously »so like Gods« and yet »Distinct from his« (Centuries 4. 85, 34, 35), that Traherne's version of epistrophé is articulated. For it is precisely through this creative illumination of the world which, by enjoying it and teaching others to enjoy – not least in the manner in which Traherne's texts attempt to do this –, that the soul returns the world and with it herself to God. The Second Century brings out this idea even more clearly, in a manner which can be read as a justification of aisthesis and the imagination. Creation perceived becomes creation imagined and thus enhanced: _____________ 76 »The Abundance of its Beams, the Reality of its Beams, the freedom of its Beams, the Excellency and valu of its Beams are all Transcendent. They shine upon all the Things in Heaven and Earth and cover them all with Celestial Waters: Waters of Refreshment, Beams of Comfort.« (Centuries 4. 82, 1–5). 77 This train of ideas is prominent also in the Thanksgivings; cf. e.g. »Thanksgivings for the Blessedness of God's Ways« with the speaker praising God »Because in every thing thou overflowest | Infinitly to all: | Art infinite in Goodness in all thy Ways; | Infinitly Communicative of all thy Goodness; | Granting it wholly to all thine hosts; | In every thing wholly to every person, | In every place, | Every way, | For every End, | By him in thy Likeness wholly to be enjoy'd: | Whom thou constitutest likewise, | And appointest to be heir | Of all that Goodness communicated unto all; | Recollecting the same, | And causing it to rest in him alone. | Yea not to rest, | But with greater joy, | From him to overflow | To all thine Armies.« (lines 65–83, cf. 399–411, Centuries, Poems, and Thanksgivings, vol. 2, 258–259, cf. 267–268). 78 »Objects are so far from Diminishing, that they magnify the faculties of the Soul beholding them. […] And what is without Limit maketh your Conception illimited and Endless.« (Centuries 4. 73, 4–6, 11ff). 79 And it does not seem incidental that here Traherne switches from the neutral to the personal pronoun in order to outline the anima's creative power, which seems to resemble less a technical faculty, to be described ›objectively‹, than a spiritual – and therefore more human and ›subjective‹ – one.
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What would Heaven and Earth be Worth, were there no Spectator, no Enjoyer? As much therfore as the End is better then the Means, the Thought of the World wherby it is Enjoyed is Better then the World. So is the Idea of it in the Soul of Man, better then the World in the Esteem of GOD: It being the End of the World, without which Heaven and Earth would be in vain. […] The World within you is an offering returned. Which is infinitly more Acceptable to GOD Almighty, since it came from him, that it might return unto Him. Wherin the Mysterie is Great. For GOD hath made you able to Creat Worlds in your own mind, which are more Precious unto Him then those which He Created: […]. (Centuries 2. 90, 4–10, 20–24)
Enjoyment is the ›creative‹ ingredient added to sensual perception of the world, transforming it into an idea which, rightly pondered, equals a spiritual exercise. As God upholds everything through the »Perpetual Influx of His Almighty Power« (Centuries 2. 87, 9f), so we, too, ought to join in this work by »the perpetual Influxe of our Life« (ibid., 16), i.e. by an imaginative imitation of His dynamic activity. Our mental image of God's creation is capable of ennobling it as well as perfecting ourselves: »It […] Beautifies and Perfects your Nature. […] for therby you are united to Him.« (Centuries 2. 90, 11–15).80 This is in accordance with the basic Neoplatonic conviction that we become what we see, are assimilated to, and transformed into what we fill our minds with.81 For Traherne, too,82 the aesthetic thus seamlessly merges with the metaphysical. Beauty and highest ontological worth are cognate. _____________ 80 Cf. also Centuries 2. 84: »Being therfore Perfect, and the Mirror of all Perfection, He hath Commanded us to be perfect as He is Perfect […] We are to be Conformed to the Image of His Glory: till we becom the Resemblance of His Great Exemplar. Which we then are, when our Power is Converted into Act, and covered with it we being an Act of KNOWLEDG and Wisdom as He is. When our Souls are Present with all Objects, and Beautified with the Ideas and figures of them all« (14–22). 81 In Traherne's version: »For as Light varieth upon all objects whither it cometh, and returneth with the Form and figure of them: so is the Soul Transformed into the Being of its Object. Like light from the Sun, it first Effigies is simple Life, the Pure resemblance of its Primitive fountain but on the Object which it meeteth it is quickly changed, and by Understanding becometh All Things.« (Centuries 2. 78, 23–29). For Traherne as for the Cambridge Platonists, the soul is »Res illuminata, illuminans« (Benjamin Whichcote, Moral and Religious Aphorisms, no. 916, in: The Cambridge Platonists, ed. Patrides, 334). Cf. Traherne's meditation on the soul as ›active‹ mirror in Centuries 2. 78: »The Heavens and the Earth serv you, not only in shewing unto you your fathers Glory, as all Things without you are your Riches and Enjoyments. But as within you also, they Magnify, and Beautify and Illuminat your Soul. For as the Sun Beams Illuminat the Air and All Objects, yet are them selvs also Illuminated by them, so fareth it with the Powers of your Soul. The Rays of the Sun carry Light in them as they Pass through the Air, but go on in vain till they meet an Object: and there they are Expresst. They Illuminat a Mirror, and are Illuminated by it.« (1–9). 82 As for Plotinus; cf. e.g. Enn. I 6, 2, 23–29: »So beauty rests upon the material thing when it has been brought into unity, and gives itself to parts and wholes alike. […] So then the beautiful body comes into being by sharing in a formative power which comes from the divine forms.«
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It is this high esteem in which the material world, including the human body,83 is held, the great value ascribed to the visible creation, which is perhaps the most striking – and also a genuinely Neoplatonic – feature of Traherne's writing. »This visible World is Wonderfully to be Delighted in and Highly to be Esteemed, becaus it is the Theatre of GODs Righteous Kingdom.« (Centuries 2. 97, 1–3). In Traherne's metaphysics, the world and the creatures in it are not depreciated or despised, neither ontologically devalued nor deprived of meaning and worth for the sake of a reality beyond and ›behind‹ them. Of course, creation is ultimately to be »prized« for theological reasons: it is God's gift to us, and it is the vehicle which returns us to him. It is the signifier which refers to a transcendent signified, which without it we should be incapable of recognizing or understanding. But as such it is not only necessary but of the highest dignity. Indeed, in a sense it is identical with the transcendent truth it conveys. When Traherne claims that »we may see a little Heaven in the Creatures« (Centuries 2. 12, 1f), he is not speaking in terms of schematic microcosmos-macrocosmos correspondences. In his insistence on the divinity of created things he is much closer to the radical Neoplatonism of the ninth-century Christian thinker John Scotus Eriugena. Eriugena, in his translation and commentary of Dionysius' Celestial Hierarchy stated that »omnia que sunt lumina sunt« – everything which is, is a light.84 Like a cantus firmus, this claim seems to underlie all the poetic texts considered in this study. Since nothing can fall outside God, who is all in all, all creatures, by virtue of this omnipresence of the divine life, are illuminated and illuminating. As God, who is himself invisible, realises himself in his creation, this creation is, in Eriugena's most famous paradox, »apparition of what is not
_____________ 83 Cf. for instance its elaborate celebration in the 548 lines of »Thanksgivings for the Body« (Centuries, Poems, and Thanksgivings, vol. 2, 214–229): Here, the body is praised in detail for its beauty and functionality as well as its close connection with the soul. The senses as well as the faculties (l. 128ff) are also credited to it and praised for their amazing potential. Above all, it derives its dignity from the fact that God created the whole world for its sake, in order to be appreciated by »an earthly body« (l. 170f). This raises the question of why God should do such a thing (l. 170f, l. 213f). Would not everything have been less complicated if he had made us pure souls? One answer is given by defining the world – as in Centuries 2. 97, 1–3 – as »the Chamber of thy presence; the ground and theatre of thy righteous Kingdom« (l. 180f), with us as appreciative spectators (and the angels as appreciative and empathetic spectators of our experiences; cf. l. 387ff). Indeed, the body is so glorious and pleasurable in fulfilling this task that even the angels envy us for it and in fact »enjoy« creation in their turn through us, human bodies and senses being the media of enjoyment (387–242). 84 (Johannes Scotus) Eriugena, Expositiones in Ierarchiam Coelestem, Cap. I, 76–77. There seems to have been no translation of Eriugena published in England before Thomas Gale's edition of the Periphyseon: Joannis Scoti Erigenae de divisione naturae, Oxford 1681 (Wing J 747). But Traherne need not have studied Eriugena in order to be familiar with this Dionysian topos. Cf. also Centuries 3. 6, 2f: »[…] we are Born to be a Burning and Shining Light«.
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apparent«.85 It is the glorious evidence of the non-obvious, the »affirmation of the negated«,86 the manifestation of an unutterable God who, in his abundance, »Wanted the Communication of His Divine Essence, and Persons to Enjoy it« (Centuries, 1. 41, 13f). From this point of view, the created world is not only object of my aisthesis, its perception through my senses a source of infinite delight, but also the origin of my subjectivity as awareness of a self intimately related to its creator. For everything is, emphatically, »mine« (cf. Centuries 1. 15, 4 and passim); I am »Heir of the World« (1. 3, 5 and passim), and everything belongs to me: All Things were made to be yours. And you were made to Prize them according to their value: which is your Office and Duty, the End for which you were Created, and the Means wherby you Enjoy. The End for which you were Created is that by Prizing all that God hath don, you may Enjoy your self and Him in Blessedness. (Centuries 1. 12, 5–10)
It is at this point that Traherne's aesthetics of creation and selfhood can be seen to display another highly characteristic feature. For his pleasure in the creatures blends with a recurring, distinctly narcissistic Edenic fantasy. Again and again, he encourages his addressee to imagine herself in the situation of Pico's first human being: »Place yourself therfore in the midst of the World as if you were alone« (Centuries 2. 7, 1f; cf. 2. 2. 1f, 1. 65, 1f, and passim). All things are created for you: »You are the Adam, or the Eve that Enjoy them.« (Centuries 2. 12, 15). As this fantasy of exclusiveness increases the joy in the given, it also enhances the human obligation to return it to its maker by enjoying it. But in addition to highlighting the theological significance of this Edenic perspective as well as the subjective and interior quality of the situation envisaged, the fantasy of being the first and only individual again becomes the source of an intensely aesthetic experience. This is most impressive in Traherne's poems, but also becomes palpable in the Centuries. The point of imagining oneself as the sole contemplator of creation, alone in Paradise, is not only to feel in immediate contact with God's goodness overflowing and diffused through his creation87 but to see everything as if for the first time, to experience it sensually as well as spir_____________ 85 Periphyseon (The Division of 1ature), III 4, 633A. This, too, follows on a paraphrase of a Dionysian thought. 86 Ibid. 87 For this Christian-Neoplatonic commonplace of a God »infinitly and Eternaly Communicativ«, »Diffused and Propagated« through creation, see also Centuries 3. 65. It should be noted that for Traherne, as for Plotinian Neoplatonists generally, this selfexpenditure of the One does imply neither lessening nor exhaustion. Cf. also »The Odour« for an elaboration of this idea of an exuding (like a fragrance), or a ›dripping off‹ (like honey) of goodness and light which does not diminish its source. In Plotinus, this capacity to give productively without suffering a diminution is an important characteristic of spiritual beings; cf. e.g. Enn. I 6, 7, 25–27, or VI 9, 9, 3–6.
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itually with the simplicity, clarity, and innocence of a child, to whom all is new.88 In the Third Century, Traherne associates this experiential quality explicitly with his own childhood; he figures his infancy as just such a state of Adamic happiness.89 This state of beatific purity and unclouded enlightenment with the capacity for ecstatic wonder at the beauty and plenitude of creation is lost, but not irrevocably. It may be regained through the right kind of reflection and recollection.90 What is remarkable about this notion is not only the optimism rarely to be found in the less Platonic religious tempers of Traherne's time91 and implied in the underlying conviction that human beings are born good92 as well as in the meliorating certainty that the ›cherubic‹ bliss of early childhood, the sense of unmediated connectedness to the source of all things – hence of intense joy – may be recuperated. The dream of a restitution of this primordial freshness of perception and appreciation, of the sense of wonder and strangeness recreated in another medium is also at the heart of modern aesthetics. Traherne's insistence on the necessity of renovating our vision shares in the essence (and the enthusiasm) of the formalist impulse to reanimate life, to make the world palpable again.93 If this _____________ 88 As White puts it (1962), 340: »There is something of the freshness of the beginning of the world about Traherne«. 89 Most impressively in Centuries 3. 1–3, but continued, in intermittent narrative, through to 3. 68. These passages have tended to attract critical interest, not last because they lend themselves to being read as elements of their author's spiritual autobiography (thus, e.g., White [1962], 299–311). This usually leads to the ascription of a proto-Wordsworthian »vision into the heart of things« (ibid., 305) – a parallel which not only overlooks that, for the Wordsworth of »Lines Written a few miles above Tintern Abbey«, this unmediated vision is not recoverable as such, but also that, for Traherne, childhood is not a specific age in its own right and with its own laws, but a phase of life in strict and unbroken continuity with adulthood. This is one of the reasons why it is possible, as it were, to take it up again and to repossess the child's pristine point of view. 90 Aided by the right kind of reading; in Traherne's fragmentary story as told in the Third Century this is, somewhat expectably in accordance with the conventional patterns of narratives of spiritual awakening and conversion, linked to his (re)discovery of the Bible. 91 White stresses the anti-Hobbesian affect in Traherne's attitude: »Human nature, at least in its beginnings, he found good, worthy of having the world made for it, and worthy of the delight in its own powers which he had himself known as a child.« (White [1962], 307). Her intuition is corroborated by recent research; cf. Julia Smith's D1B article (2004), which stresses Traherne's affinities with latitudinarian theology and his opposition to Hobbes; also D. Inge (2008), 49–59. 92 In his explanation of sin and evil, Traherne wavers between nature and nurture, finds the notion of original sin obviously uncongenial, and finally opts for (relative) original goodness: »[…] it is not our Parents Loyns, so much as our Parents lives, that Enthrals and Blinds us. Yet is all our Corruption Derived from Adam: inasmuch as all the Evil Examples and inclinations of the World arise from His Sin. But I speak it in the presence of GOD and of our Lord Jesus Christ, in my Pure Primitive Virgin Light, while my Apprehensions were natural, and unmixed, I can not remember, but that I was ten thousand times more prone to Good and Excellent Things, then evil.« (Centuries 3. 8, 13–20). 93 Cf. e.g. Shklovsky (1917).
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is one of the proto-modernist features of his writing, however, it needs to be added immediately that defamiliarisation, for him, is never an end in itself. It is a metaphysical side-effect: one of the circumstances accompanying the process of epistrophé; an indicator of our innate proximity to God and of the desired communion with him. Still, it is also one of the central effects of his writing, whenever it manages to transfigure the everyday, transforming the world from the trite, drab and depressing into a source of extraordinary joy and making the quotidian and commonplace appear transparent and charged with transcendent meaning. It is an effect attendant on Traherne's prose as well as on his poetry, and it is not an incidental but an intended effect. »Evry one provideth Objects, but few prepare Senses wherby, and Light wherin to see them«, the speaker of the Centuries observes, and goes on to claim: »I will in the Light of my Soul shew you the Univers. Perhaps it is Celestial […]« (3. 6, 1–5). Traherne's writings are a school of seeing. They provide a training for the »Ey of the Enjoyer« (Centuries 3. 44, 19) until it becomes just that: »A Power of Admiring Loving and Prizing« capable of experiencing unitive vision (3. 42, 26f). However, the transparency Traherne's texts aspire to is anything but selfevident. Traherne may be a kataphatic theologian,94 strongly affirmative and confident in the presence of God, but his ›positive‹ stance rests on an equally strong awareness of the fact that this presence, though fundamental and accessible, is normally hidden by a material »veil«.95 God dissimulates his presence, but not in order to make felicity harder to achieve. His glories are concealed because of the deficiencies in human nature, which make men hold cheap what is open and may be attained without effort: Those Mysteries which while men are Ignorant of, they would giv all the Gold in the World for, I hav seen when Known to be despised. Not as if the Nature of Happiness were such that it did need a vail: but the Nature of Man is such, that it is Odious and ingratefull. For those things which are most Glorious when most Naked, are by Men when most Nakedly reveald most Despised. So that GOD is fain for His very Names sake, lest His Beauties should be scorned to conceal her Beauties: […] (Centuries 4. 13, 12–19)
Still, for Traherne's speaker, beauty disguised remains second best. Some such concealing may be opportune as enticement and challenge, but the greater delight is in revelation: »Felicity is amiable under a Vail, but most Amiable when most Naked.« (Centuries 4. 13, 22f). His own preference is for transparency, or better: unimpeded vision.96 Accordingly, as his addressee, you cannot claim to have _____________ 94 Confessedly so; cf. Centuries 2. 100, where he inveighs against the Philosophers who, »through their Blindness«, make »Felicity to consist in Negativs« (4–5). 95 Cf. e.g. Centuries 1. 88, 2f, 15, 20. 96 This is also why it is »an important Imagination, and the Way to Happiness« to cast oneself not so much in the role of one who suffers under this intransparency but »To think
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attained the aims of the school of seeing, »till evry Morning you awake in Heaven« (Centuries 1. 28, 1f). At least you should have mastered the art of seeing »on both sides the Vail or Skreen« (4. 60 3f), on which Traherne prides himself. That this capacity for theophany is also – and perhaps primarily – a function of the imagination may be confirmed by a glance at some of his poems. Shadows in the Water, or: Like a Face Seen in Many Mirrors97 For the greater part, Traherne's poems98 traverse much the same thematic ground as the Centuries. Like these, they do so insistently, repetitively, obsessively. Again and again they turn to the same topics, presenting them in slightly varying lights and modes, but in the same language as the prose meditations,99 though often pointed with epigrammatic wit.100 If, beneath the metonymic, ›diffusive‹ movement of the poetic prose of the Centuries, certain paradigmatic themes and motifs have become discernible, in the poems these seem to spread syntagmatically in texts which grow by accretion and association, and which seldom end with a sense of strong closure. As they often take up themes of preceding poems and tend to spill over their final stanzas, textual boundaries are blurred, and structural units (not very pronounced anyway, despite Traherne's preference for stanzaic forms and varying line lengths) are fused.101 An impression of excess, but above all of an abundance of the same ensues. As in the Centuries, a rhetoric of enthusiastic iteration, hence of emphatic similarity prevails. _____________
97 98
99
100 101
the World […] a General Bedlam, or Place of Madmen, and one self a Physician« (Centuries 4. 20, 19–22), or, alternately, as a »Royal Chymist«, who has mastered the »Diviner Art« of »Extracting Good out of evil« and transforming noxious things into wholesome and beautiful ones (cf. 4. 21, 5–9), – at any rate as one who »seeth through all the Mists and Vails of Invention, and possesseth here beneath the true Riches« (4. 29, 11f). Plotinus, Enn. I 1, 8. The poems are quoted according to Centuries, Poems, and Thanksgivings, vol. 2; they are referred to by title and line. (If not otherwise indicated, quotations refer to the version before amendment by Traherne's brother Philip). Indeed, one might argue, as some critics – such as Helen White – have done, that the Centuries are more poetical than the poems (cf. White [1962], 332–335, 340). My own impression is that their poetic qualities lie along different lines; but since my interest is more in the Neoplatonic impetus Traherne's writings have in common, the question of their overall aesthetic value seems more important than a differentiation at this point. Cf., e.g., couplets like the following from »The Odour«: »But He that cannot like an Angel see, | In Heven it self shall dwell in Misery.« (35–36). A highly characteristic indicator of this kind of formal overflowing corresponding to an exuberance of ideas is the beginning of stanza 12 of »The Improvement«: »But Oh! the vigor of mine Infant Sence | Drives me too far: […]« (67f). Indeed: the poem could have ended with stanza 11, but three more stanzas follow, explaining the pre-reflexive state of mind in childhood, which is really a new theme belonging, for instance, to »The Approach« (which deals with childhood as the time when we are »Instructed […] by the Deity« (42).
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The poems do, however, shift the weight in comparison with the Centuries (and Thanksgivings). There is a clear thematic preference for the themes of childhood and the Adamic experience of the self in sole possession of the world; the greater part of the poems either foreground them or return to them at one point or another. As they explore this seminal idea of the self as contemplator of creation, the poems develop what might be called a spherical imagination. The figure which appears to describe both the perfection of Edenic infancy and its centering on man in the middle most aptly is that of the circle or sphere. Thus the speaker puts it in stanza 5 of »Innocence« (49–52): That Prospect was the Gate of Heav'n, that Day The anchient Light of Eden did convey Into my Soul: I was an Adam there, A little Adam in a Sphere
– or again, in »The Preparative«, which seems to start as a pre-natal fantasy and then goes on to explain the primacy of sight as a more than sensual endowment of the infant, a metaphor for the soul with its gift of spiritual vision: I was an Inward Sphere of Light, Or an Interminable Orb of Sight, An Endless and a Living Day, A vital Sun that round about did ray All Life and Sence, A Naked Simple Pure Intelligence. (15–20)
This conflation of the metaphors of sphere, eye,102 and sun, together with a claim to infinity,103 which, blending smallness and vastness, attributes to the child a _____________ 102 A sphere within the sphere, contemplating »The fair ideas of all Things«: »A Meditating Inward Ey | Gazing at Quiet did within me lie,« (»The Preparative«, 25, 27–28; cf. also »The Vision« and »Misapprehension«, 62–65, where the speaker claims the »Compass« of the whole world as his interiority: »Of it I am th'inclusive Sphere, | It doth entire in me appear | As well as I in it: It givs me Room, | Yet lies within my Womb.«). The notion of the spherical self »within«, sheltered and somehow contained, yet not constricted by the individual mind and body, but capable of dispensing its light endlessly and irresistibly expanding through the darkness of matter, is also elaborated in »Nature«: »A Secret self I had enclosd within, | That was not bounded with my Clothes or Skin, | Or terminated with my Sight, the Sphere | Of which was bounded with the Heavens here: | But that did rather, like the Subtile Light, | Securd from rough and raging Storms by Night, | Break through the Lanthorns sides, and freely ray | Dispersing and Dilating evry Way: | Whose Steddy Beams too Subtile for the Wind, | Are such, that we their Bounds can scarcely find.« (19–28). The comparison with the lantern burning calmly despite the storm appears to allude to Enn. I 4, 8, 3–6, where Plotinus says of the serenity of the good man: »He is not to be pitied in his pain; his light burns within, like the light in a lantern when it is blowing hard outside with
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faculty of universal comprehension, also manages to incorporate a suggestion of reciprocity, perhaps even of autonomous radiance. The soul is presented as »sight« not only receiving life and light but also actively ›emanating‹ them. This in turn is conceived of as a truly epistrophic movement – a return to a unity in whom both »Fountain« and »End«104 are »conjoynd«:105 »From One, to One, in one to see All Things« (»The Vision«, 49). The figurative complex of the sphere thus evokes an idea of multiple permeability: the soul receives as well as gives off the divine (with both modes, communication as well as response, so closely linked as to be versions of each other), and it is transparent both for the divine and for the created world. It may become the site of a theophany, but it is equally capable of reflecting and »enjoying« the creatures and, by doing so, restoring to them their true identity. It is truly the centre of a transparent sphere, or of spheres mutually transparent: Pure Empty Powers that did nothing loath, Did like the fairest Glass, Or Spotless polisht Brass, Themselvs soon in their Objects Image cloath. (»The Preparative«, 51–54)
The metaphor, wavering as it does between glass and mirroring surface, retains a sense of an intervening medium capable of transforming itself in accordance with its object,106 albeit an ›interface‹ so refined as to be almost evanescent. One of Traherne's better-known poems, »Shadows in the Water«, dwells at some length on this paradoxical, self-effacing mediality as well as on the potential of reflection taken literally. It is one of few which present the concept of cherubic infancy not so much in generalizing, abstract terms, but in connection with a childhood experience outlined with some accuracy and concrete particularity. The child, gazing at a clear surface of water – whether »Puddle« (15) or »purling Stream« (76) does not seem to matter –, discovers another world in it: a mundus inversus, inverted not politically but optically, quite literally an ›antipodean‹ world (cf. 38) with the »reversed Feet« of its inhabitants touching those of the viewers (41, 48); a world whose perception and meditation will in the end turn out to be a metaphysical augmentation of the world it reflects. The text describes the child's wonder at this world peopled by »yet unknown Friends« (56) and _____________
103 104 105 106
a great fury of wind and storm.« At least for Traherne, this is not quite the same as Stoical impassiveness and self-containment, since it responds to outside illumination and also communicates its own light. Cf. also the final lines of »Silence«: »For so my Spirit was an Endless Sphere, | Like God himself, and Heaven and Earth was there.« (85–86) Cf. »The Vision«, stanzas 5 and 6 (33–48). Ibid., 55. Cf. also the exhortation in »The Odour«: »Talk with thy self; thy self enjoy and see: | At once the Mirror and the Object be.« (53–54).
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inquires into the ontological status of their mirrored representations, exploring the relationship between reflection and reality, true and imagined realities, identity and otherness. As the speaker ponders these questions, he entertains both possibilities so that they become nearly indistinguishable, even though sameness – or rather: the anticipation of a secret kinship – finally seems to prevail: I my Companions see In You, another Me. They seemed Others, but are We; Our second Selvs those Shadows be. (»Shadows in the Water«, 61–64)
In the following lines he veers away from this certainty of an encounter with a self merely mirrored, pursuing the ambiguities and the connotation of difference associated with the term »Shadows«.107 Thus he both seems to suppose that the viewers are identical with those »Others« and to assume, however tentatively, that their unknown worlds may constitute secondary, alternative realities,108 transcendent realms normally hidden from us, from which we are only separated by a thin, but penetrable medium: Are ye the Representatives Of other Peopl's distant Lives? Of all the Play-mates which I knew That here I do the Image view In other Selvs; what can it mean? But that below the purling Stream Som unknown Joys there be Laid up in Store for me; To which I shall, when that thin Skin Is broken, be admitted in. (»Shadows in the Water«, 71–80)
_____________ 107 It seems worth noting that there is nothing narcissistic about this poem. Traherne does not go as far as Plotinus, who warns of the dangerous temptation which lies in following images and shadows: »For if a man runs to the image and wants to seize it as if it was the reality (like a beautiful reflection playing on the water, which some story somewhere, I think, said riddlingly a man wanted to catch and sank down into the stream and disappeared) then this man who clings to beautiful bodies and will not let them go, will, like the man in the story, but in soul, not in body, sink down into the dark depths where intellect has no delight, and stay blind in Hades, consorting with shadows there and here.« (Enn. I 6, 8, 9–16). Traherne seems to remain conscious of the double attraction associated with a phenomenon which suggests sameness as well as difference. 108 Traherne does actually, in other contexts, entertain the idea of infinite worlds, cf. The Kingdom of God, ch. 22, in: D. Inge (2008), 76–77.
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This opens up the possibility of a twofold allegorical reading. On one hand, the world seen in the water and assumed to be »below«, reflecting our own, which in turn perhaps functions as a reflection to yet other worlds »Within the Regions of the Air« (49),109 corresponds – precisely in its haunting similarity and intimate connectedness with ours and despite a separation still to be felt – to the divine realities, whose presence we are convinced of but do not see (and with which the infant feels so closely in touch). On the other hand, this duplication of our world can be seen to signify a »Phantasm« (44), a product of the imagination. The text presents the insights adumbrated by it as a serious game – something emerging from the child's play (cf. 15). But its results are greeted with the joy Traherne usually reserves for encounters with the transcendent. As such they can be seen as dignifying the imaginative activity from which they arise. There is not only an inventive, but a genuinely creative dimension to the perception of those worlds »throu a little watry Chink« (27). Still, the poem's aesthetic attraction does not, at least not in the first place, arise from its allegoric potential but, to a greater extent, from its playful fascination with the empirical phenomenon itself and, again, from the delight in the sensual world it conveys. To Traherne's speaker, at any rate, the »Film […] between« (40) this and the other world is not a reason for complaint or frustration. It is not an obstructive so much as a transparent medium, almost negligible, which causes him to look forward enthusiastically to the union it appears to promise, and to enjoy the pleasures of anticipation which it affords here and now. It furthers this kind of enjoyment in yet another sense, as the adjacency of spheres also facilitates the epistrophic, recursive exchange between them. Sphericality here blends with circularity. A series of poems foregrounds the circular movement of being as it proceeds from God and returns to him in a continuous unbroken simultaneity of descent and ascent. Among these are not only »Circulation«, which indicates its theme in its title, but also »Hosanna«, »The Review«, »Amendment«, »The Demonstration«, »The Anticipation«, and »The Recovery«. Each of these offers a variation of the concept familiar from the Centuries that creation is enriched, ›amended‹, made more pleasing and returned to its source through being prized and enjoyed by humanity: »He made our Souls to make his Creatures Higher« (»Amendment«, 49).110 Thus God's creatures are not only the medium as well as the means, subjects as well as objects, of this circulation, he also in a sense relies on them to play back to him his own identity in so far as it consists in a permanent self-transcendence: _____________ 109 The second possibility is elaborated to the point of infinite regress in »On Leaping over the Moon«, another exploration of the devotional as well as imaginative potential of realities reflected in water. There, too, the discovery of the duplicate world becomes a source of overwhelming happiness. 110 Or, as in »The Demonstration«: »GOD is the Spring whence Things came forth | Souls are the fountains of their Real Worth.« (59–60).
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All things from Him to Him proceed By them; Are His in them: As if indeed His Godhead did it self exceed. To them He all Conveys; Nay even Himself: He is the End To whom in them Himself, and All things tend. (»The Demonstration«, 75–80)
It is in circular »excess« that everything begins and ends. In a form even more compact than the prose meditations and at the same time more obviously mimetic of their topic in their almost tautological repetitions, these poems outline the concept of a transcendence which spends itself out of its own abundance without ever exhausting itself, and which figures the idea of highest perfection in a return to itself; with the (no longer surprising) consequence that transcendence is to be grasped in immanence.111 The poem which comprehends many of these notions as it combines the sense of multiple adjoining spheres with the circulation of enjoyment, and both with an exploration of the essence of selfhood, is »My Spirit«. As it contains something like a sum of Traherne's aesthetic of the creatures as well as a rather avantgarde analysis of the structures of subjectivity as capable of reflexivity and conscious of owing its potential to a transcendent ground, the following reading is offered in lieu of a summary. The poem comprises 119 lines of varying lengths, ranging between five and two stresses and arranged in seven stanzas of 17 lines each. Each stanza comprises seven rhyme words.112 It is a poem of laconic grandeur, only intermittently, in stanza 5, and in the final stanza rising to the pitch of enthusiastic exclamation we have grown to expect from the poet. It is an unabashedly egocentric poem, setting out with an emphatic gesture of reduction and recollection: »My Naked Simple Life was I.« (1). To some extent it belongs to the poems of infancy, striving for the recuperation of pristine, angelic vision. However, in explanation and analysis it repeatedly switches to a simple present _____________ 111 »That while we all, we Him might comprehend.« (»The Anticipation«, 126). 112 It is tempting to indulge in some numerological speculation here: 119 is not only seven times seventeen but also ten times seven plus seven times seven; the number seven also seems to dictate the number of rhymes in each stanza. Of course there may be an allusion to the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit here (rather than to the seven deadly sins), and a sense of perfection may surely have been aimed at. But in terms of their content the stanzas do not correspond to a devotional pattern of this rather simple kind. Also, there is a complicated rhyme scheme with – not surprisingly – a great number of eye-rhymes, and many impure rhymes, which, in most stanzas, divides the first seven lines from the following ten in that it contains three of the seven rhyme words, the remaining four being distributed irregularly over the last ten lines. Stanzas 1, 5, 6, 7 follow the pattern ababaccdeeedffdgg. But stanza 3 follows the pattern ababaccdeeefggfdd, and stanza 2 (abcbaccadddeffegg) as well as stanza 4 (ababaccdeedfggfcc) make an exception in that one of the first group of rhymes recurs in the latter part, and that with no semantic significance I can discern.
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remote from any actual situation in time, biographical or otherwise. The selfhood circled by the text is an abstract and generalised one, divested of all individuality and stripped to its most fundamental structure. It is presented as a personal reminiscence, but aspires to be, at the same time, an image of every human self. This basic self is characterised above all by its being all »Act« (2 and passim), and that of unlimited »Capacitie« (8). As act it is self-actuated, auto-referential and self-maintaining, hence circular in itself: Whatever it doth do, It doth not by another Engine work, But by it self; which in the Act doth lurk. Its Essence is Transformd into a true And perfect Act. (»My Spirit«, 22–26)
But it is also defined by its capacity to comprehend everything, indeed to assimilate itself to its object so as to be co-present with it, almost to become its object: In its own Centre is a Sphere Not shut up here, but evry Where. It Acts not from a Centre to Its Object as remote, But present is, when it doth view, Being with the Being it doth note. (»My Spirit«, 16–21)
This co-presence is really the point of the variations the text rings on the topos of the circle whose centre is everywhere, whose circumference nowhere. Objects, to the self whose capacities trigger this sense of wonder, are not outside, distant, separate, but it is in an elementary sense at one with the world. With respect to this plasticity, the self's close proximity to the things it apprehends most resembles sight, or the light which renders everything visible, yet cannot be perceived apart from what it illuminates: […] tis all Ey, all Act, all Sight, And what it pleas can be, Not only see, Or do; for tis more Voluble then Light: Which can put on then thousand Forms, Being clothd with what it self adorns. (»My Spirit«, 29–34)
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The spirit's sphericality is characterised by the paradoxical convertibility of inside and outside we have already noted. More than on any other theme, the first four stanzas dwell on this mutual adaequatio of the mind and its objects. In fact, the text presents this operation as one that is possibly much more than a merely passive or receptive ›making equal‹. To the speaker, this commensuration appears so dynamic as to verge on an imaginative creation of the things impinging on his »conforming Mind« (50).113 But the poem just touches on this ›constructivist‹ possibility; the interiority »Within my Soul« (39) of what is without remains the main focus of interest and the subjective faculty most marvelled at. Its meditation not only leads to an impossible collocation of spatial minimum with maximum – »That Being Greatest which doth Nothing seem!« (74) –, but also to chiastic linkages of here and there, act and thing, which rhetorically figure transcendent immanence: The Act was Immanent, yet there. The Thing remote, yet felt even here. (»My Spirit«, 67–68)
It is this, the double vision of a mind both intimately related with its object and still aware of its own »Indivisible« selfhood (92), of perfect wholeness and radical reference, of personal definiteness and infinity, which causes the speaker to call his self not only a »Strange Mysterious Sphere« (76), but »An Image of the Deity« (72), nothing less than »The Son and friend of God« (85). The two last stanzas resume most of these insights, dwelling at length on this glorification, indeed deification of the soul aware of its own powers at the centre of multiple spheres, which connect it both to the world and to its creator. Thus stanza 6: A Strange Extended Orb of Joy, Proceeding from within, Which did on evry side convey It self, and being nigh of Kin To God did evry Way Dilate it self even in an Instant, and Like an Indivisible Centre Stand At once Surrounding all Eternitie. Twas not a Sphere Yet did appear One infinit. Twas somwhat evry where. […] Twas not a Sphere, but twas a Power
_____________ 113 »And evry Object in my Soul a Thought | Begot, or was; I could not tell, | Whether the Things did there | Themselvs appear, | Which in my Spirit truly seemd to dwell; | Or whether my conforming Mind | Were not alone even all that shind.« (»My Spirit«, 45–51).
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Invisible, and yet a Bower. (»My Spirit«, 86–102)
Simultaneously denying and asserting the sphericality of the soul, affirming centredness as well as ubiquity, the text strives to convey a sense of the dynamic together with the reassuringly ›rounded‹, and hence stable quality of man's spiritual condition. Thus the sphere surrounding »little Adam« appears also capable of »Surrounding all Eternitie«, spatially as well as temporally dilatable beyond all imaginable boundaries. Still, the text insists, this ubiquitous, potentially allinclusive »Power« is also experienced as a »Bower«, a protective shell, a place of safety and pleasure like a sheltered place in a secret garden. That the reader's imaginative capacities are also stretched to the utmost seems to be a calculated rather than an incidental effect. We are meant to stand amazed at this, exclaiming in wonder and admiration: O Wondrous Self! O Sphere of Light, O Sphere of Joy most fair; O Act, O Power infinit; O Subtile, and unbounded Air! O Living Orb of Sight! Thou which within me art, yet Me! Thou Ey, And Temple of his Whole Infinitie! O what a World art Thou! a World within! All Things appear, All Objects are Alive in thee! Supersubstancial, Rare, Abov them selvs, and nigh of Kin To those pure Things we find In his Great Mind Who made the World! tho now Ecclypsd by Sin. There they are Usefull and Divine, Exalted there they ought to Shine. (»My Spirit«, 103–119)
It might at first glance seem unfortunate for this enthusiastic and hitherto not overtly didactic poem to introduce the notion of sin in its final lines, or to end with an indirect appeal attached to the optimistic circulation of enjoyment which has so far been presented as something of a natural, almost automatic process (cf. 117–119). With the ideal – the creatures »shining« divinely – marked as something intensely desirable, but apparently not yet realised, a note of anxiety appears to creep in at the end. We might also wonder how this harmonises with the exaltation the stanza performs with particular emphasis in its first lines. The repeated exclamatory »O«s actually seem to imitate the perfect circularity they celebrate, offering a visible (as well as potentially audible) mimesis of the »Orb« of sight which includes and brings to life in its orbit of vision all »Objects«. In the way the first ten lines resume and accumulate metaphors of light and sight in praising the self as dynamic agency of all-embracing apperception and comprehension
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capable of self-reflexion they are – down to the expectable play on the homophonic identity of eye/I114 – an exercise in felicity. In their affective as well as intellectual charge they epitomise Traherne's metaphysics of happiness, thrilling with delight in the power he has been endowed with by the maker of the world, whose creativity finds its image in his own world-making capacity. Despite its comparatively subdued tone, however, the ending of the poem does not so much cause its initial élan to subside, but makes its transcendent momentum swing in a slightly different direction. For although these lines assume a hortatory stance, they may also be read as yet another attempt to enact circularity. They not only take up again the metaphors of light radiated and reflected with which this stanza began – a radiance which may, of course, also be »Ecclypsd«, and which is, as we are finally reminded, not so much our own achievement as a gratuitous gift accompanied by an obligation to return it. They also resonate with the rhetoric of augmentation and its swing beyond the creatures, which in joyfully apprehending them – and in recognising them as the more God's the more they are, in my mind, ›mine‹ – transcends and elevates them »Abov them selvs«. The text finally performs an animating and purifying motion which identifies the creatures with what they are: »nigh of Kin« to their ideas in God's »Great Mind«. In addition, these last lines also refer back to the poem's beginning by echoing the notion of light reflected as alluded to in the verb »Shine«. While earlier it was the act of the infant self which »Strongly Shind« (2) on its objects, the shining envisaged in the final lines, which is to render visible the divinity of things, is figured as imminent – ideally in the present or in an immediate future. The ending thus continues the sweeping unificatory movement which underlies the text as a whole,115 which after the exploration of the structures of the self eventually performs another looping to include the objects. But the movement does not stop there, opening out instead to adumbrate yet further gyrations. The resulting effect is indeed one of a nest of mutually transparent spheres, of circles within circles, of poetic thinking turning in on itself and yet extending itself in spirals to infinity. Clearly, for Traherne, heaven is not a place but a state of mind.116 _____________ 114 »Thou Ey« (108), with its possible pun, also manages to juxtapose in its address to the self second and first person pronouns so as to instal (in addition to the identity of within and without, subject and object) an internal dialogicity within the self similar to the antipodean mirroring of self and alter ego in »Shadows in the Water«. It might also be seen as a reminder of the dialogue with an addressee who is absent yet imagined as intimately present as one's own self conducted in the Centuries. 115 As it were, from the alpha of »Act« to the omega of »Objects« or the unspoken One, whose »Great Mind« holds all things. 116 Cf. Centuries 4. 38, also the poem on »All Things« in Commentaries of Heaven: »Heaven surely is a State and not a Place« (l. 25, in: Inge [2008], 79). There are obvious similarities with tenets articulated by the Cambridge Platonists, see for instance Benjamin Whichcote's aphorism: »Heaven is first a Temper, and then a Place.« (no. 464 of Moral and Religious Aphorisms, in: The Cambridge Platonists, ed. Patrides, 331. See also nos. 282 and 100).
CHAPTER 5: TRANSPARENT DUPLICITIES Magnanimity […] includes all that belongs to a Great Soul: A high and mighty Courage, an invincible Patience, an immoveable Grandeur which is above the reach of Injuries, a contempt of all little and feeble Enjoyments, and a certain kind of Majesty that is conversant only with Great things; a high and lofty frame of Spirit, allayed with the sweetness of Courtesie and Respect; a deep and stable Resolution founded on Humility whithout any baseness; an infinite Hope; and a vast Desire; a Divine, profound, uncontrolable sence of ones own Capacity, a generous Confidence, and a great inclination to Heroical deeds; all these conspire to compleat it, with a severe and mighty expectation of Bliss incomprehensible. […] A Magnanimous Soul is alwaies awake. (Thomas Traherne, Christian Ethicks)
5.1 Dissimulating Dogma in Andrew Marvell's Writings1 The Resistance of Opposed Minds To find a way back from the transparent spheres of an aesthetics of creation to everyday cares, contested worldly issues and ideological controversies, or the business of parliamentarian (or, for that matter, royalist) politics in times of Civil War or Restoration, seems all but impossible. Still, in the case of Thomas Traherne's art of life – even leaving apart the ecological implications of a Neoplatonic, relational view of the natural world –, we could catch a glimpse of the unlikely way in which the most trivial things and the mundanities of everyday human existence as well as the ethics of a (moderate) ›Anglican‹ holiness are, if viewed under the auspices of felicity and as part of the experiential metaphysics he advocates, connected to the highest form of eudaimonia, or »flourishing«.2 Also, it seems obvious how Neoplatonic concepts of unity could and did help to shape and articulate Traherne's overwhelming desire for unity in the English Church.3 As we now, once again towards the end of this study, approach two _____________ 1 2 3
An earlier version of portions of this chapter has been published in V. O. Lobsien (2007b). As Martha Nussbaum prefers to translate eudaimonia, with special reference to its Stoic, Skeptic, and Epicurean versions; cf. Nussbaum (1994). For a discussion of Traherne's confessional polemics as well as his approach to the holy life and his virtue ethics see also D. Inge (2008).
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writers whose philosophical as well as ideological stances appear less easily identifiable than Traherne's, it also grows more intriguing to inquire into the functions served by elements, at some point perhaps only traces, of Neoplatonism – figures of thought, patterns of arranging experience, valuations, features of mind-sets or world views, habits of feeling, perspectives on personhood, life-styles or techniques for achieving happiness – in configuration with others not immediately compatible or congenial. What happens to dogmatic claims to validity if they encounter the Neoplatonic logic of excess? What happens to Neoplatonic clichés if they are placed in competition with elements of opposed sensibilities and ways of thinking newly emerging on the seventeenth-century scene, such as a generalised naturalism or outright Epicureanism? What kind of changes does the absolutism of religious or ideological systems suffer if faced with the conviction that the world is an enigma rather than an orderly ensemble of meanings to be shuffled about according as ecclesiastical politics dictates? What if, on the other hand, dogmatic truth, in the services of political flexibility, is dissembled to such an extent that it moves beyond recognition? What (if anything) is it that we discern behind the veil of textual duplicities installed by authors like Andrew Marvell and Aphra Behn? Where dissimulation reigns supreme, as in Marvell's political poems, transparency may become questionable. In Behn's prose and poetry, by contrast, even though her authorial persona may at times appear as »Great Mistress« of duplicity, a great soul, although its glories may be all but obscured by deceit and dissimulation, will still shine through everything. For Behn, the attractions of Neoplatonic magnanimity, ruined as they may be and already partly replaced by new formations of ambiguously gendered authorial sovereignty, will yet, in the end, vanquish all. In both Marvell and Behn, I would claim, these effects are due to the transformative dynamics of Early Modern Neoplatonism, or what remained of it.
Andrew Marvell and Dissimulation Andrew Marvell, whom we have already encountered in various guises in this study, has often been seen as a poet in hiding, a writer who, as Annabel Patterson aptly put it, »insisted on traveling incognito«.4 His ironical detachment can be regarded as a matter of personal choice, a correlative of the character and temperament of a man who valued his privacy: »[…] I am naturally and now more by my Age inclined to keep my thoughts private«, as he wrote in a letter of 1675.5 We could obviously leave it at that, and respect the author's wish to keep himself to himself. Alternatively we could try to find out his views from his writings and from what little we know about his life. Biographical research, however, does not _____________ 4 5
Patterson (1978), 48. Marvell, The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, vol. 2, 166 (letter to Mayor Shires), qu. also in Patterson (1978), 12.
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seem to have thrived too well on a writer whose early, possibly colourful years are likely to remain in the dark and whose later years, with Marvell's long-term function as Member of Parliament for Hull, impress primarily by their biographical monochromy, despite the turbulences in governmental and parliamentary politics between 1660 and 1678. And although we have had his letters to the Hull Corporation and to his nephew for a while,6 and although the matrix of reliable texts available to be searched for clues of his ›true‹ convictions has considerably broadened in recent years, due above all to the editorial work of Nigel Smith, Annabel Patterson and others, 7 it may be questioned whether ›civic‹ Marvell really differs from ›private‹ (and literary) Marvell in terms of his confessional reticence and personal reserve. Thus, while the question of the relationship between Marvell the poet and Marvell the politician still seems to be waiting for a conclusive answer, the overall tenor of a large proportion of Marvell studies remains curiously unchanged.8 The author's elusiveness, if not the complaint about it, is still one of the standard topoi, even amongst those bent on reducing it. Equally persistent, however, appears the temptation to disambiguate Marvell's texts as well as his person;9 at least to shift critical emphasis so as to make us discover a writer in addition to, if not instead of, a poet – a controversialist involved with the politics of his day, committed to a cause, and, ideally, taking an identifiable confessional stance. Attempts in this direction have focussed not only on the later satirical poems as well as the overtly political ones but also on his polemical writing. One of the hopes behind what has been called »the project of historicizing Marvell«,10 newly stimulated by the new editions, seems to be that the emerging engagé Marvell will prove more amenable to our present-day concerns than the graceful, urbane and rather aloof poet presented by T.S. Eliot in his _____________ 6 7 8
Cf. The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, vol. 2. See The Poems of Andrew Marvell and The Prose Works of Andrew Marvell, 2 vols. An exception being Patterson herself, who in her more recent work gives confident voice to her knowledge of what Marvell felt and »cared about most intensely« (Patterson [1999], 23). 9 If not always as grandly unconcerned about artistic structure as Hill (1958), 337–366, who reduces the whole of the Marvellian oeuvre to a representation of the author's inner struggle between idealist as well as escapist tendencies and the social and political problems of his time. Hill diagnoses a »conflict in the poet's own mind between the attractions of evading reality in communion with Nature, and the necessity of coming to terms with the world« (359), which is, however, in the end resolved in favour of »reality«, making Marvell come down squarely on the side of »the cause of Parliament« (339) as a »true Cromwellian« (365), who never loses his »inward assurance« (366) even after the Restoration. Thus, having »come down from the ivory tower into the arena« (361), according to Hill's charting of his progress, Marvell finally manages to adjust to »external conditions and forces« (363). 10 A project under way since the late 1960s according to Chernaik/Dzelzainis (1999), see their »Introduction«, 9, and the bibliographical references given there.
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essay of 1921.11 At least the editors of one of the representative collections, programmatically titled Marvell and Liberty, leave no doubt that they wish to say farewell to the allegedly hypercanonised12 Marvell of the 1960s and '70s, the »bookish, contemplative« ironist dear to former generations of critics,13 and to instigate a reassessment on a broader textual and contextual basis. My own attempt to understand Marvell's texts could be seen as part of a general historicising effort. It does not, however, share the anti-formalist bias of many of its protagonists.14 On the contrary, now that Marvell's prose writings are available in definitive editions, it seems to be more important than ever to investigate how they are related to the aesthetic dynamics of his poems – and here not only to his political poetry. We need to look closely at the way they are connected not solely by theme and motive, but also by structure and literary strategy, especially since the Marvell who emerges from the tracts and pamphlets is just as elusive as the poet.15 If this author did care about anything with genuine passion, _____________ 11 12 13 14
Eliot, »Andrew Marvell (1921)«. Patterson (1999), 23, uses the term »hypercanonization«. Chernaik/Dzelzainis (1999), 3. While the historicising work strikes me as important and necessary, the Eliot-bashing does not. Neither do I share the rather alarming aim of Chernaik/Dzelzainis »to get a definitive fix on Marvell« (ibid., 7). I am not convinced either that the enterprise as a whole has so far succeeded in substantiating the claim formulated in Chernaik/Dzelzainis' volume to present »art and political commitment […] as interrelated« (16), although the articles by Keeble and Donnelly in their collection are exemplary in this respect. Still, much more needs to be done along these lines in the field of literary analysis of Marvell's prose. 15 As D. I. B. Smith already remarked in his older edition of The Rehearsal Transpros'd, »[…] it is very difficult to get a clear idea of what Marvell thought about the fundamental issues of religion, from The Rehearsal Transpros'd. In a work which is supposedly concerned with religious toleration, apart from indicating that he is in favour of the King's policy of indulgence, Marvell does not make it clear whether he favoured comprehension to toleration – an issue which divided most other men who considered the problem.« (Marvell, The Rehearsal Transpros'd, xviii). And Marvell's careful refusal to »consider ›deep‹ questions« (ibid.) is just as marked in his other tracts. Thus, in his introduction to the Remarks Upon a Late Disingenuous Discourse, N. H. Keeble is equally struck by Marvell's reticence to make explicit where he stands on the question of predestination: »The tract is curiously uninterested in the points in dispute.« (The Prose Works of Andrew Marvell, vol. 2, 397). There is virtually only one nearly unambiguous half-sentence in the whole tract which might be taken to give voice to Marvell's conviction about »a Notion so altogether unrevealed as this universal Predetermination yet appears, and so contrary […] to all common understanding and genuine sense of right Reason.« (ibid., 446). Quite emphatically, skeptical self-restraint, an unwillingness to address ›hidden things‹ directly, an anti-dogmatic resistance to »creeds« of any colour – at least to their articulation in propositional terms – are the characteristics of Marvell's controversial writings as well as his poetry. This holds for the theologically intensely topical Remarks, but also for A Short Historical Essay, Touching General Councils, Creeds, and Impositions in Matters of Religion of 1676, which merely offers such indisputable truths as »a good Life is a Clergymans best Syllogism« (ibid., 174), or, with reference to the Bible: »'Tis a very good Book, and if a man read it carefully, will make him much wiser.« (ibid., 173). It is equally hard, if not impossible, to distil a positive statement of Marvell's beliefs, religious or political,
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it was the »manner« or decorum of any discourse,16 including his own – in formalist parlance, the way it is ›made‹ in accordance with the situational conditions and demands. In what follows my interest is therefore decidedly neither biographical nor intentionalist, although it too might be considered »revisionist«17 – with respect both to formal, that is to say textual, figurations and to broader cultural and symbolical patterns, whose continuities await a reassessment as much as political and confessional ones. I want to consider two18 poems by Marvell in the light of what I think is one of the overriding cultural modes of the sixteenth as well as seventeenth century – dissimulation. This has to do with an intuition that, rather than deplore Marvell's elusiveness or try to remove it, it will prove more interesting to explore the ways in which he stages it. What draws my attention, in other words, is the ›substance‹ of Marvell's elusiveness; paradoxically, the modes and positive achievement of his notorious eschewing of positives. How can we define, at least describe, how he evades definition? And what does he effect by it? Not last could this provide one of the much-needed links between Marvell's poetry and his prose. I have suggested above19 how, in his ostensibly non-political poems, Marvell makes use of Neoplatonic strategies of excess so as to refigure and, as it were, withhold by signifying the truths his texts address. Now, we perhaps approach a position from which the all-too successful creation of evaluative enigmas may appear as the vanishing point of Neoplatonism. At any rate, I _____________
16 17
18 19
from his defense of Bishop Herbert Croft against Francis Turner (Mr. Smirke; or, the Divine in Mode) or, for that matter, from the tract which laid the foundation for Marvell's eighteenth-century renown as exemplary patriout and liberal parliamentarian, the compendious (if slightly misleadingly titled) Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government in England (1677). If anywhere, Marvell's political sympathies here seem to emerge in comparatively discernable outlines, although again rarely, if ever in quotable shape and never in a manner unmediated by rhetorical restraints. They are to be gathered from his overall argument, at the utmost to be deduced from the implications of its complex literary and argumentative strategies; they are never to be extracted from it in so many words. As Nicholas von Maltzahn points out in his introduction: »Irony is Marvell's hallmark, in his poetry and prose alike, and the Account often reveals the distance between its professed and real intentions. What might be said was so different from what might be thought.« (ibid., 195). Indeed, the unifying bracket for Marvell's work is provided by a cultural strategy more comprehensive than, but certainly implying, irony: namely dissimulation – see below. See Remarks Upon a Late Disingenuous Discourse in The Prose Works of Andrew Marvell, vol. 2, 417 and passim. Chernaik/Dzelzainis rightly stress the need for a »revisionist emphasis on continuities between what went before 1660 and what came after« (Chernaik/Dzelzainis [1999], 8). The investigation of dissimulation also promises insights which might link ›Renaissance‹ and ›Restoration‹ more closely than the period concepts suggest. With a mere reminder of my more detailed reading of a third (see ch. 2. 2. above). See ch.s 2. 2 and 3. 2; for a reading of »Upon Appleton House« (in which the political becomes indistinguishable from other modes of speaking), which tries to relate the space imagined under the poem's title to the Neoplatonically coloured concept of a »realm above the heavens« (huper ouranios), see also V. O. Lobsien (2010c, forthcoming).
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hope to show how the cultural mode of dissimulation is turned, in Marvell's hands, into an aesthetic strategy, which in turn becomes capable of acquiring certain functions in refiguring political, religious, and philosophical discourses in a situation where these appear to be multiplying in a manner alarming to many contemporaries. Since the theory of Early Modern dissimulation is fairly well known and as I have touched upon it already several times in the course of this study, a few very general claims will have to suffice by way of reminder. First, dissimulation is the mainstay of courtly culture in the Renaissance. As sprezzatura, with strong Neoplatonic connotations imported by Castiglione and Hoby and practised at the Tudor court from Henry VIII to Elizabeth I (and again, if differently, under the Stuarts), the ideal it strove to embody still carried recognisable metaphysical implications, strengthened by doctrines of Petrarchan love.20 Second, with confessional conflict permanently present and with religious persecution always threatening in one form or another, with official politics after the Civil War veering from the Act of Uniformity (1662) to the Declaration of Indulgence and back again to the Test Act,21 the ambiguities implicit in dissimulation become even more strongly foregrounded: For those who wish to survive, be they Roman Catholics or dissenting Protestants, dissimulation of beliefs becomes an indispensable necessity. Third, with the notion of dissimulation tilting towards hypocrisy and equivocation on the one hand, its aesthetic dimension, on the other hand, gains even greater weight. As, from the first, courtliness was seen as an allegorical mode of behaviour,22 now allegorical modes of writing – such as employed most prominently in pastoral, but in other literary ›kinds‹ as well – can be perceived as not only hiding, but indeed communicating opinions or convictions considered inopportune, or even dangerous. Finally, dissimulative modes of writing as well as behaviour have become deeply ingrained over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a consequence of humanist education, for they are part and parcel of rhetoric.23 »Rhetorical man«, as has been remarked, is above all an actor.24 _____________ 20 See V. O. Lobsien (2005). 21 The second Declaration of Indulgence was issued by Charles II in 1672, promising toleration to non-conformists as well as Roman Catholics (at least granting the latter freedom to worship in private), but rescinded by Parliament; the Test Act followed in 1673 with the intention of preventing Roman Catholics from holding government offices, sitting in parliament or serving in the military. 22 George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, see »English poetics and rhetoric (1589)«, in English Renaissance Literary Criticism, ed. Vickers, 291, 247. See also V. O. Lobsien/E. Lobsien (2003), Ch. III. 23 Quintilian considers dissimulatio as an alternative term for irony, sometimes as a subspecies of it; see Instititio Oratoria, vol. 2, 485, vol. 3, 334, 398 (VI, 3, 85; VIII, 6, 59; IX, 2, 44). Modern rhetoric has acknowledged the wider cultural significance of the concept, see Lausberg (1960), 446–447 (§ 902). 24 See Lanham (1976), 4 and passim.
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In what follows, dissimulation will not only be considered as hallmark of a period, but also as a strategy highly characteristic of Marvell's poetry, his overtly political as well as his seemingly non-political poems. His poetry will emerge as highly rhetorical throughout, that is to say, of a high technical standard; but also and by virtue of this, as a medium for undercover experiment with modes of thinking and writing not easily reconciled with each other or with existing patterns of religious, political or poetic meaning. What cannot or must not be confessed openly has to be invented. It may be presented in a poetical fiction, performed ›hypocritically‹ in a conceit, tested in a comparison, an allegory or a speaking persona taken to its limits or subverted in its pretensions by being confronted with its opposite. Seventeenth-century literature is still »an art […] hiding art«.25 As such, it can easily become an art of crypto-confessionality, provisionally exploring figurations which will only later aspire to cultural dominance – or be forgotten. Marvell's aesthetics is above all one which thrives on the juxtaposition of seemingly irreconcilable elements, of balancing forces which pull in opposite directions. Each of the poems I shall glance at in what follows displays this feature, if in different ways – with »An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland« presenting two types of dissimulation for inconclusive comparison, »The First Anniversary of the Government under His Highness the Lord Protector« enacting a structural dissimulation which completely obscures its dogmatic nucleus. »On a Drop of Dew«, already considered in detail above, finally seems to stage a competition between modes of understanding the human soul, which, again, iconoclastically dissimulates the perspective which ought to emerge from their interaction.26 To some extent, the following lines from »The First Anniversary« offer themselves as a self-description of Marvell's political poetics: The crossest spirits here do take their part, Fast'ning the contignation which they thwart; And they, whose nature leads them to divide, Uphold, this one, and that the other side; But the most equal still sustain the height, And they as pillars keep the work upright; While the resistance of opposèd minds, The fabric as with arches stronger binds, (89–96)
_____________ 25 Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia (The Old Arcadia), 24. 26 All quotations of Marvell's poems according to The Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. Smith, with line numbers in brackets immediately following the quotation. I have also gratefully drawn on the wealth of annotation offered by Smith both in the introductions to the poems and in his commentary.
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It is precisely this intricate balance of pressure, of forceful antagonisms working with equal strength in opposite directions, which holds the texts together and makes them so distinctive. Thus, Marvell's art is more than »the art of adjustment […] under three radically different regimes«,27 although it is that too. As his poetry suspends competing claims to validity, it manages, at the same time, to leave latent semantic potentials intact – to be discovered, perhaps, by readers with different commitments.
»An Horatian Ode« and »The First Anniversary«: Dissimulating Religious Authority Marvell wrote »An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland« in 1650, in the year following the execution of Charles I., his encomium on »The First Anniversary of the Government under His Highness the Lord Protector« in 1654/1655. The conflict between Royalists and Republicans during the 1650s was not only a struggle for political superiority but implied also an intense confessional and religious competition. Demarcation lines between different theological affiliations were far from clear-cut; sometimes the more so the louder they were proclaimed. They were further complicated not only by the continued missionary efforts of underground Catholicism in the wake of the continental CounterReformation but also by the home-bred emergence during the first half of the seventeenth century of a number of dissenting fundamentalist groups, their considerable doctrinal differences soon obscured by the blanket term ›nonconformist‹. In various degrees of radicalism, sectarians and religious enthusiasts vied for attention, many of them strongly embued with milleniarist tendencies.28 These, often grouped under the heading of ›Fifth Monarchists‹, posed a political threat as well, especially under the Protectorate, their destabilising influence due to the fact that their political aims were often cast in religious terms and vice versa. To take sides in a situation as diffuse and unstable as this would be risky, at least if you wished to pursue a political (or, for that matter, clerical) career. For a person as sharply aware of theological as well as political complexities as Marvell, it would presumably not only have been difficult but against the grain. Still, politically, Oliver Cromwell was obviously the man of the moment, and the situation after his return from Ireland seems to have called for a response capable of charting and analysing its ambiguous potential. _____________ 27 Patterson (1978), 13–14: »He found it easier to correct or modify other men's statements than formulate his own, to discover the ideal concept or metaphor behind its temporary aberrations, to base his differences from others upon a profound consensus of literary and political assumptions. He adjusted; and the art of adjustment that kept him writing under three radically different regimes allowed him to take what he found, in literature and politics, and literally make the best of it.« 28 For a discussion of radical Puritan perfectionism see ch. 2. 2 above.
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It is possible to read the two Cromwell poems by Marvell as bids for patronage. »The First Anniversary« surely is an overtly propagandist text. But if we regard them as poems in praise of their subject, hence as belonging to the rhetorical genre of epideictic speech,29 they contain a number of puzzling elements. Both are agitated, if in different ways, by what we may, with Annabel Patterson, call the »problem of assessment«.30 They bring into play deliberative strategies31 which irritate as they seem to counteract those apparently intended to praise the republican cause and vituperate the royalist. It is this effect which I propose to analyse under the title of literary dissimulation. In this my aim is not to allocate Marvell to one party rather than another. I am not in search of his covert sympathies, but interested in the language he employs in articulating a noncommittal stance, which carries political as well as religious implications by virtue of its aesthetics. This will emerge as less univocal than prescribed by the genre, but also as ambigous and perhaps ironical in a sense different from the authorial elusiveness recognised by some readers.32 »An Horatian Ode« sets out to praise Cromwell after his victorious Irish campaign not only as a gifted political and military leader but also as a spiritual figurehead. The text extols Cromwell's Machiavellian talents and the virtú which helps him to identify the right moment for action and seize it without hesitation, breaking »like the three-forked lightning« (13) not only through his enemies' resistance, but also through the ranks and factions of »his own side« (15). In that, however, he is not seen to act on his own behalf, but as instrument of a greater, divine agency – the irresistible »force of angry heaven's flame« (26) overthrowing the mighty by his superior stratagems (the »wiser art«, 48, employed in bringing the King to trial) and thus identifying himself as one of Nature's »greater spirits« _____________ 29 Patterson was the first to insist that we read Marvell's Protectorate poems with reference to the rules of rhetoric they strive to follow in accordance with their Ciceronian precepts: as »exercises in praise, remarkably original contributions to the epideictic mode«, indeed as »Experiments in Praise« (Patterson [1978], 51; »Experiments in Praise« is the subtitle to Chapter 2). Cf. also her remarks concerning the status of Cicero's authority and precedent for Marvell's own poetics and literary practice, (ibid., 16–17 and passim). The guiding idea of her study is that Marvell's political poems, in keeping with the practice he follows in his other texts (and as analysed most convincingly by Rosalie Colie), demonstrate »exactly the same qualities of generic self-consciousness and inventiveness, the same redeployments of old topoi in intelligent new configurations« (7) which Colie had discovered in his »garden« lyrics (see Colie [1970]). In fact, it is Marvell's »heroic classicism« (Patterson [1978], 49) which, from the point of view suggested by Patterson's study, motivates his attempts to reconcile the art of »speaking well« with the art of »speaking true« (57) and characterises his poetry as well as his prose writing. 30 Patterson (1978), 65. 31 For a generically oriented rhetorical analysis of »An Horatian Ode« see Patterson (1978), 65–67. 32 It also goes beyond Patterson's analysis, which sees the poem's main modification of demonstrative rhetoric in its tendency to look back rather than engage with prognostics, hence as an offer of »conditional praise« (Patterson [1978], 61).
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(44). In addition, and only in seeming contradiction to his martial and tactical prowess, Cromwell is presented as a protagonist essentially pastoral – Who, from his private gardens, where He lived reservèd and austere, As if his highest plot To plant the bergamot, Could by industrious valour climb To ruin the great work of time, And cast the kingdoms old Into another mould. (29–36)
The presentation of Cromwell's personal lifestyle as withdrawn and devoted solely to privacy and horticultural pleasures, however, barely disguises an ambivalence, which turns the show of modesty and asceticism into the display of an ambition of quite another sort. »As if« is a telling introduction to a clause which not only deletes a subjunctive ›were‹ (thus disguising its mode) but also implies ulterior aims pursued by the gardener's »highest plot« in a design indicated by the associations of the bergamot as the ›pear of kings‹. This gardener's »industrious valour« dissimulates another heroism, which will amount to nothing less than a re-shaping and recreation of the political order. Cromwell's Machiavellian virtues are thus connected with the skill to conceal political interest behind a pious facade. The poem's final conceit affirms a reading of Cromwell's behaviour which assumes a difference between public appearance and private intentions. Here, victorious Cromwell, who has humbly laid his successes at the Parliament's feet, renouncing his power and respectfully awaiting further instructions, is compared to a falcon after a killing, who now perches »on the next green bough« (94), only waiting to be called by the falconer and »sure« to return to him (96). The potential irony of the final line – »The falc'ner has her sure« – carries implications more comprehensive than the political in that the falcon also might be seen to point towards Christ.33 But it is as impossible to be certain of the domesticated predator's next action as of the successful Puritan general's. If Cromwell's plans emerge as opaque and possibly transgressive, King Charles is presented as dissimulator of another kind. During his execution he is _____________ 33 Compare, for instance, the final lines in George Herbert's »Easter Wings« (The Works of George Herbert, 43). Of course, in Marvell's text, the connotation is far from univocal – as is, in the emblematic tradition, the falcon, who can serve to signify meanings which range from rejuvenation and spiritual regeneration, goodwill and chastity to cruelty and, not last, incalculable and unenforcable self-will (cf. for instance the Camerarius emblem of a falcon returning under the motto »SPONTE MEA, NON VI«, with the subscriptio pointing out that all depends on the victorious falcon's readiness to obey the falconer: »Sponte mea redeo, mihi cum victoria parta est, | Nec vis me vocat, ast aucupis obsequium.«, in Henkel/Schöne [1978], 783–4).
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explicitly depicted as »the royal actor born«, as superb performer in his own tragedy. His fatal flight to Carisbrooke Castle had led to his arrest (as the text suggests, in accordance with Cromwell's well-laid plans): That thence the royal actor born The tragic scaffold might adorn, While round the armèd bands Did clap their bloody hands. He nothing common did, or mean, Upon that memorable scene; But with his keener eye The axe's edge did try. Nor called the Gods with vulgar spite To vindicate his helpless right; But bowed his comely head Down, as upon a bed. (53–64)
This scene of grandiose theatricality manages, due to the way it employs vocabulary derived from drama and the stage, to shift the role of agent from the plotter Cromwell to his victim. It is Charles, who is the main protagonist of this moment, truly humble in the way he plays to the last the role he is born for, the scaffold his »tragic« stage, with the »armed bands« his appreciative audience. Indeed, his »keener eye« might be seen to render him superior not only in his bent for perfection even in the case of his own execution, it might, in an anticipation of the falcon conceit, even prove him a hunter nobler, in the last resort, than his antagonist. If Eikon Basilike in 1649 fashioned the king into a religious emblem – its frontispiece showing him with his hand on the martyr's crown –, the passage in Marvell's poem appears to chime in with this stylisation.34 At any rate, the presentation of Charles I harks back to the traditional model of dissimulation as idealised by the Renaissance: the king on the scaffold provides an instance of supreme sprezzatura. »An Horatian Ode« thus works by contrast. It achieves its effects by outlining two modes of dissimulation, similar in structure but opposed in their implications. Cromwell's appears as historically successful, albeit not only with the associations of violence, Machiavellism, and the ambiguous possibility of heralding a return to
_____________ 34 Patterson (1978) also points out the similarity: »[…] the Horatian Ode reflects the appeal of Eikon Basilike […] no reader of Eikon Basilike could have read the Ode without recognizing what role it was the ›Royal Actor‹ played.« (67). I do not agree with her wholesale claim that »Marvell excluded any Christological language« (ibid.); Christological overtones are certainly present in the falcon imagery.
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arbitrary rule or even tyranny;35 while Charles' is shown to be impotent if impressive – a paragon perhaps, but a »helpless« one (62) belonging to the »kingdoms old« (35) superseded and remodelled by the new forces. Both modes, Machiavellian versus courtly, are arranged in a perfect balance. Playing sympathy against fear, admiration against suspicion, the poem finally seems to take both sides – or none. »The First Anniversary«, celebrating the first year of the Protectorate, is structured differently. As a poem of praise, it seems at first sight to be unambiguous. True, here too we encounter examples of dissimulation, in fact quite a few. Cromwell, however, the hero of the piece, is conspicuously excluded from their number. Indeed, it is his exemption from dissimulation which comes to define, and quite literally distinguish him from the numerous others competing with him for religious authority. He alone seems to practise the sincerity and authenticity preached by reformed Christianity. Or doesn't he? My brief reading of this long poem will attempt to show that the genus demonstrativum is, technically speaking, just as ›hypocritical‹ as all other rhetorical genres.36 That is to say, it is just as inescapably rhetorical, relying for its success on the stance of a speaker capable of linguistically enacting what he pretends to be deeply convinced of.37 The poem offers a series of encomiastic topoi, all hyperbolically praising Cromwell's rulership, but not in any obvious manner arranged in a culminating sequence. Cromwell is processed through them almost mechanically, rather like the sun, to which he is compared twice (7ff and 325ff), running »the stages of succeeding suns« (8) and springing endlessly »with new lustre« (11), never to be exhausted. He is also likened at great length to Amphion, the political musician building Thebes by the power of his harmonies (47ff). Next, and with the expectable pun, he is even presented as Christ at the second coming – »the ap_____________ 35 Cf. the conflation of ominous episodes from Roman history – the finding of a man's head during the construction of the temple of Jupiter Carolinum and the finding of a bleeding head by Tarquin the Proud – in lines 67–72 and Smith's remark concerning their ambiguity in his commentary (The Poems of Andrew Marvell, 276). 36 Here, too, my analysis differs from Patterson's. To her, the »First Anniversary« is not readable as a ›committed‹ Puritan poem, because it subverts both the generic norms of encomium and of Christian prophecy (Patterson [1978], 68–93). Patterson sees Marvell as struggling with the problem of Cromwell's »uniqueness« (70) by subverting one by one the analogies offering themselves through an exposure of their fictionality: »The act of hypothesizing is underlined at every turn. Fictions proclaim themselves as fictions, and in the critical awareness which such discoveries promote Marvell distinguishes a ›true‹ political poetry from the automatic responses encouraged by propaganda.« (70). 37 Technically speaking, this is what Aristotle terms hypocrisis, or delivery (Rhetoric, 3. 1., 1403b 27–35); compare also the extensive treatment of actio and pronuntiatio in the Rhetorica ad Herennium (3, 19–27; see [Cicero] Ad C. Herennium de ratione dicendi, 188–205) as well as Cicero's characteristic of orators as »the players that act real life« (»oratores, qui sunt veritatis ipsius actores«) in De oratore (3, 56, 241; see De oratore Book III, 170, 171).
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proaching, not yet angry Son« (106ff) –, with echoes in the final lines of the poem (401–2), where he appears as angel of the covenant, again prefiguring the return of Christ. The apocalyptic tenor continues, significantly, even as the text recalls, and in vivid detail imagines, Cromwell's »sudden fall« (175) – the Lord Protector suffered a coach accident driving six horses in Hyde Park in September 1654. But the story is ingeniously made to modulate from one of potential humiliation to an account of triumphant salvation38 complete with all the paraphernalia of Nature mourning for the seemingly fallen hero, and providing occasions for comparisons with the Great Pan (200ff) and with Elijah being rushed to heaven in a fiery chariot and leaving behind his mantle (215ff). Next and in obvious continuation of the biblical typology, Cromwell is figured as Gideon (249ff), refusing the crown of Israel, and as Noah (283ff), responsible for the cultivation of the land after the flood of the civil wars, but with careful stress being placed on the former's greater sobriety and superior self-control. Cromwell is even approximated to the world soul (»his one soul | Moves the great bulk, and animates the whole«, 379–380) and, with some caution, to Alexander the Great severing the Gordian knot (384ff). But if this series of glorifications achieves the effect it aims at, this is due as much to the foil it is placed against. It appears against a sinister backcloth – of dissimulation. Cromwell's antagonists, be they foreign monarchs or domestic competitors, are shown as duplicitous, »more malignant than Saturn« (16), feigning motives and interests they do not possess (cf. 29), hiding their evil intentions behind false pretences; they resemble mechanical images, presenting false fronts to the world, idols asking to be destroyed by the glorious iconoclast Cromwell (cf. 41–44); some blind to the truth, some misled by error or malice (cf. 118), many »mad with reason, so miscalled, of state« (111), monstrous in that respect almost like the Roman Antichrist (128–130) pursued by »Angelic Cromwell« (126). Domestic threats are painted in even more garish colours, but they too depend on the same kind of duplicity, with the spiritual hubris even more pronounced. While Cromwell always speaks the truth (cf. 167–168), his enemies are the most accomplished liars and deceivers. It is above all the Fifth Monarchists, whose »lying prophecies« (172) the text decries in shrill, xenophobic tones, discrediting Muslims together with Diggers, Quakers, Anabaptists, Jesuits and others: Yet such a Chammish issue still does rage, The shame and plague both of the land and age, Who watched thy halting, and thy fall deride, Rejoicing when thy foot had slipped aside;
_____________ 38 As Patterson (1978) points out, this conforms to the poetological pattern of soteria, congratulating a public figure on preservation from danger or recovery from sickness (cf. 79); its purpose »to define value by exploring its near loss« (80). In his use of soteria, Marvell »controls his praise of Cromwell's life by imagining him dead« (81).
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That their new king might the fifth sceptre shake, And make the world, by his example, quake: Whose frantic army should they want for men Might muster heresies, so one were ten. What thy misfortune, they the Spirit call, And their religion only is to fall. Oh Mahomet! now couldst thou rise again, Thy falling-sickness should have made thee reign, While Feake and Simpson would in many a tome, Have writ the comments of thy sacred foam: For soon thou mightst have passed among their rant Were't but for thine unmovèd tulipant; As thou must needs have owned them of thy band For prophecies fit to be Alcoran'd. Accursèd locusts, whom your king does spit Out of the centre of th'unbottomed pit: Wand'rers, adult'rers, liars, Münzer's rest, Sorc'rers, atheists, Jesuits, possessed; You who the scriptures and the laws deface With the same liberty as points and lace; Oh race most hypocritically strict! Bent to reduce us to the ancient pict; Well may you act the Adam and the Eve; Aye, and the serpent too that did deceive. (293–320)
It is in this envenomed charting of contemporary religious plurality39 that two of the text's major concerns – the issue of truth versus falsehood and a strong interest in ›last things‹ – converge. Not only is it in the course of this invective that the main reproach against Cromwell's enemies is given loud and explicit voice: »Oh race most hypocritically strict!« This fundamental disingenuousness, their secret pursuit of ulterior aims, is what unites them, despite all appearances of variety and multiplicity. Also, an interesting inversion takes place. The apocalyptic discourse previously made to work in praise of the Protector is here turned against radical Puritans, sectarians and dissenters of all kinds who employed milleniarist preaching for their purposes. As Cromwell is cast in the image of Christ at the second coming (subsequently as angel of the apocalypse hunting the Roman beast), the poem does perceive the potential for a »wished conjuncture« (136) to »precipitate the latest day« (140). But it insists in opposition to the Fifth Monarchists that
_____________ 39 For a detailed explanation of specific allusions in the passage both to the leading figures of the Fifth Monarchist movement, Christopher Feake and John Simpson, as well as to doctrines, customs and practices, both rumoured and true, of the various sects mentioned, see the commentary by Smith (The Poems of Andrew Marvell, 295–6).
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[…] a thick cloud about that morning lies, And intercepts the beams of mortal eyes, That 'tis the most which we determine can, If these the times, then this must be the man. (141–144)
The arrival of »that blest day« remains in suspense, »still counterpoisèd« (155). Still, despite the opacity of the day of judgment, the apocalyptic promise surrounding Cromwell remains.40 Its positive connotations are even strengthened because he is said to possess the absolute truthfulness opposed to the milleniarists' pretense and dissimulation. After all, this is what the term apocalypse signifies: ultimate revelation of good and evil. But it is hardly possible to keep the event wholly free from ambiguity, and what is turned critically against one party may also work against the other. And precisely what kind of truth is it that will be uncovered at the last reckoning? What is it that is claimed to be foreshadowed in the person of Cromwell? If the eschatological discourse which structures the poem evokes the idea of a final revelation of what has been hidden, the anniversary of Cromwell's reign can be seen as kind of small-scale apocalypse – a laying of accounts, a preliminary weighing of achievements which makes visible the true dimensions and values of things. But what is it that is laid open? What does Cromwell stand for? The poem as a whole, but in particular its raging against the danger of religious pluralisation as embodied by the milleniarists creates an effect radically paradoxical: the more it praises its subject, the greater its metaphysical hyperbole, the more opaque does its hero become. The process culminates in the counterfeited speech of a foreign monarch, trembling before Cromwell's military superiority and his domestic »arts«, and formulating, from an allegedly external perspective, the questions the poem is incapable of answering: Where did he learn those arts that cost us dear? Where below earth, or where above the sphere? He seems a king by long succession born, And yet the same to be a king does scorn. Abroad a king he seems, and something more, At home a subject on the equal floor. (385–390)
The ventriloquist assumption of a pseudo-confessional tone41 permits the speaker to dissimulate his own view, providing a transition to the unspeakability topos with which the text closes. In fact, the poem, celebrating Cromwell as if he were a _____________ 40 Hence I do not agree with Patterson (1978) that this is a »less destructive millennium« (87), with the apocalyptic aspirations associated with Cromwell's person ironised or even »canceled« as mere fictions (cf. 88, 205). 41 Thus the foreign monarch tries to curb his tongue, as if annoyed at his own inadvertent openness: »It grieves me sore to have so much confessed« (394).
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monarch, yet ostentatiously refusing to call him that, has already suggested a reason for his rejection of the crown: For to be Cromwell was a greater thing, Than ought below, or yet above a king: Therefore thou rather didst thyself depress, Yielding to rule, because it made thee less. (225–228)
Leaving aside the implication also present in these lines of a spiritual vanity and ambition truly ultramundane, glorying in the concealment of felt greatness, the answer given is tautological. In its covert imitation of the divine »I AM THAT I AM« (Ex 3. 14) it is perhaps even diabolical. Even so, these lines really reveal nothing. What Cromwell stands for at this critical point of a first anniversary is only Cromwell. The fierce enemy of hypocritical dissimulators finally appears as the most successful dissimulator of all. The more he is praised for his authenticity and sincerity, the more elusive he becomes. As the whole world around him is tainted with dissimulation, there is literally nothing left for him to be. Not identical with any of the topoi brought forth in his celebration, he emerges as the blind spot of the poem. This too, is the effect of dissimulation: what the text does, structurally, by its serial lining up of laudatory topoi as well as by its strategy of counterpointing them with instances of damnable hypocrisy, is to present its protagonist as one who dissimulates dissimulation. The text in fact simulates this experience of the ultimate dissimulation by pretending to reject it, by relegating it to hypocrisy wherever practised by the political enemy, by assigning to Cromwell its undefined opposite. It thus creates a blank at its centre charged with possibilities unspoken and left to be imagined. Attributed ›truthfulness‹ here appears as the most convincing mask. Cromwell's religious authority is the consequence of its invisibility, his unifying force resulting from dogma effectively dissimulated.
»On a Drop of Dew«: Dissimulating Neoplatonic Metaphysics or Biblical Piety? Finally, a brief reminder of the reading of Marvell's narrative of the soul in his poem »On a Drop of Dew« seems to be in place. At first sight, the contrast between this and the two Cromwell poems could hardly be greater. Still I hope at least to indicate how Marvell's dissimulatory rhetoric can be seen to bracket even these greatly dissimilar texts; how two overtly political poems, whose grand demonstrative gestures seemed to be unsettled by elements of deliberative rhetoric, paradoxically chastising dissimulation by means of dissimulatory strategies, resemble a poem which favours a contemplative mode not even remotely inclined to take sides. In fact, as I indicated above, the subject of »On a Drop of Dew« resonates with dogmatic implications of different kinds. Thus, contrary to its innocuous appearance, the near-perfect balance of conceits we
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approach towards the end of this poem – the drop of dew as soul and the soul as a drop of dew, both somehow analogous to the gift of manna to the chosen people – carries a metaphysical as well as confessional, and hence politically relevant, charge. The enigmatic final lines of this poem, as they refer us to the Exodus story of »the manna's sacred dew« dispensed to the Israelites in the desert (Ex 16. 11–21), effectively irritate the certainties the preceding lines appear to have established: Such did the manna's sacred dew distil; White, and entire, though congealèd and chill. Congealed on earth: but does, dissolving, run Into the glories of th'Almighty Sun. (37–40)
Above all, these lines convey a sense of exile and loss. As the drop of dew alias the human soul derived its identity from its awareness of being where it does not belong, this final evocation of a sense of craving left unsatisfied by being temporarily stilled leads the poem to a paradoxical closure by focussing on a yet unfinished progress towards communal salvation. True, the manna may be regarded as a reminder of God's covenant with his chosen people in their situation of homelessness. But, »congealed and chill« and prone to evaporation (biblically also: to decay), it also emphasises a dimension not wholly consoling, at least not finally so. The ultimate fulfillment of the promise is yet to come. The divine communication appears both inexplicable and evanescent. It is a sign quite literally unreadable to those who receive it, actually signifying its ›chilly‹ opacity: »[…] they said to one another, It is manna: for they wist not what it was.« (Ex 16. 15). The manna conceit is a metaphor without an image, a metaphor of divine intent dissembled in the act of revelation. Could the way Marvell pits this quite literally blank metaphor (»White, and entire«) against the drop of dew in its bed of roses be read as provocation – an iconoclastic gesture not only against the imaginative comforts provided by a doctrine of the soul inclined to consider it as a part of divinely inspired nature, but also against the anti-Calvinist via media propagated, for instance, by the Cambridge Platonists? Or does it, by stressing the insecurities besetting the elect even under the conditions of a strict scripturalism, rather affirm the anti-predestinarian line taken by them and other moderate theologians?42 Does it thereby retrospectively challenge the implicit optimism and the Neoplatonic certainties so strikingly articulated in the duplicated circles of emanation from, and expiration into transcendence?43 _____________ 42 See also, in comparison, Marvell's polemic against Thomas Danson, a proponent of double predestination, in his Remarks Upon a Late Disingenuous Discourse (in: The Prose Works of Andrew Marvell, vol. 2). 43 For Marvell (if not for others of his contemporaries as well), it appears doubtful whether his poetry can indeed be reclaimed as an »art of transcendence«, as Wilcox (1998), 243,
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I do not think that it is possible to answer those questions with any kind of assurance, precisely because the sense of balance the poem creates is so exquisite, the dynamic interaction of its conceits so perfect. We are left with an effect which deserves to be called dissimulatory – or, for that matter, skeptical.44 But this is not a quietist's skepticism. Rather, the final suspense achieved by the text and produced as reading experience functions – by means of its renewal of indeterminacy and its discovery of the lack of security in the realms of Neoplatonic metaphysics as well as reformed theology and biblical exegesis – as a potential matrix for ways of thinking as yet unexplored. True, exile replaces the comforting patterns of return. The manna conceit substitutes impenetrability for enlightenment, divine (and poetic) reticence for ideological positives. But, as globular structures dissolve, this also suggests the need for a new, as yet unexplained and perhaps unimaginable basis for a sense of identity. Whether this could be built from the remnants of Neoplatonic psychology still virulent, and all too attractive in this poem despite challenges by a perfectionism tending to rather different ends, remains open.
_____________ suggests. In spite of their topical references to both philosophical and current theological modes of presenting it, what these texts at the utmost seem to stage and thus to articulate structurally is a questioning of the available ways of proposing transcendence. – With reference to the »Horatian Ode«, Abraham/Wilding (1999) have explored the possibilities of a ›scientific‹ reading. They read the poem as alchemical performance with Cromwell as agent of the transmutation necessary in the process; according to them, alchemy has to be seen as a ›modern‹ science which provides a language capable of justifying the displacement of traditional forms and »ancient rights« (113), a »unifying, non-divisive scientific explanation of the nature of revolutionary change« (115). One of the problems with this approach is that it tends to place the ›scientific‹ discourse outside the dissimulatory play. 44 For the ›structural skepticism‹ at issue here, see also V. O. Lobsien (1999).
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5.2 The Poetics of Glorious Ruin: Aphra Behn A New Neoplatonism?
Aphra Behn marks the end of literary Platonism – and its resurrection as narrative and poetic fiction. In her texts, especially in her prose and poetry, Behn bids an intensely wistful farewell to most of what Platonism and, by implication, Neoplatonism has stood for. She still appears to adhere quite strongly to certain ideals and to pursue them passionately, but, it seems, without otherworldly ambition. Her writings are as a rule non-allegorical45; her world is firmly anchored in immanence, her metaphysics dubious. If her poems and tales do not lack a moral altogether, the ›messages‹ they might be said to inculcate are highly ambivalent. What is left of (Neo-)platonism in these texts, which very often deal with varieties of failure and ruin, is in ruins. At the same time, the first professional woman writer transforms these Platonic ruins into something »new«, a way of writing hitherto unknown and repeatedly described by her in gendered terms. She characterises her poetic cadences as »soft« and »natural«; she confesses a predilection for the pastoral as the genre most suitable for literary neophytes and, by implication, women; her black prince Oroonoko has both the misfortune and the honour to be celebrated and immortalised by »a Female Pen«.46 However, Behn's self-confidence as a writer is only thinly disguised by such coyness. In effect, and behind the feminine smoke-screen, she renews the poetics inspired by Neoplatonism by transforming it thoroughly. For her, it becomes a medium for authorial as well as literary self-empowerment, and in this enterprise of rewriting the old script with new strategies she succeeds gloriously. Paradoxically, while it enables fiction and ›female‹ counterfeit, Neoplatonism, in Behn, also becomes a vehicle for belief in a historically specific, but also in a more general systematic sense. At first glance, ›Aphra Behn, Platonist‹ would appear to be the most wildly inaccurate label one could think of. A prolific dramatist, by now firmly canonised as the most important Restoration playwright next to (and, in popularity, possibly superior to) Dryden, Behn is best known as a writer of erotic verse and shorter fiction, as well as the sensational epistolary _____________ 45 With the exception of two extensive poetic paraphrases respectively translations from the French and from Latin (»A Voyage to the Isle of Love« and »Of Plants«). 46 Oroonoko, or The Royal Slave, in: The Works of Aphra Behn, vol. 3, 88. Cf. also the final sentence: »Thus Dy'd this Great Man; worthy of a better Fate, and a more sublime Wit than mine to write his Praise; yet, I hope, the Reputation of my Pen is considerable enough to make his Glorious Name to survive to all ages; […]« (ibid., 119). All references to Behn's works follow the edition by Todd, The Works of Aphra Behn, giving volume number and page in brackets after the respective quotation.
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novel and roman à clef thematising political intrigue and the aristocratic amours surrounding the Monmouth Rebellion, Love-Letters Between a 1obleman and His Sister. In addition, her own doctrine of desire, sensual love and passionate fulfillment, together with her veneration for notorious libertinists such as Rochester and her double-edged praise of Thomas Creech for his translation of Lucretius47 seem to leave no doubt where her true philosophical allegiance lies: with ways of thinking most emphatically opposed to Platonism, that is to say with contemporary ›naturalism‹ and Epicureanism, with risqué hedonism and with atomistic individualism and materialism as articulated in the political philosophy of Hobbes. But it is precisely these ingredients which form a central part of the mental constellation that makes Behn interesting in the present context. For her freethinking as a member of a coterie of ›wits‹, associated as much with the theatre as with the Inns of Court, goes hand in hand with a pugnacious Toryism. She presents herself as a staunch Royalist, fiercely loyal to the Stuart monarchy. She served Charles II as an agent in the Netherlands and probably also on an overseas mission in Surinam, and she celebrated the coronation of James II in enthusiastic verse. Still, as far as we know, she was never rewarded by the hoped-for patronage and, it seems, even had to go without the financial benefit promised for her intelligence work on the continent.48 Never part of court life, but deeply fascinated by the ideal of courtliness as well as the aura of Stuart absolutism, it is not only Cavalier life-style and values which appear to have appealed to her. Never ostentatiously pious, Behn also harbours strong sympathies for the old faith, for Roman Catholic culture and ritual. In the first place, then, hers would appear to be an ideological Neoplatonism, or rather: Neoplatonism as political ideology, a facet of Restoration politics. This, however, is in turn supported by figures of thought by now familiar and resting on a much older foundation: her texts propagate an invincible belief in hierarchy and the substantiality of rank (»Quality«), the sacredness of kingship, and the beauty and truth of their representations. Thus, on the level of motifs, topics, and opinions, Behn provocatively brings together egalitarian Epicurean elements with the glorification of hierarchical order,49 with the King as »earthly God«50 at its head. _____________ 47 I have suggested a reading of »TO The Unkown DAPHNIS on his Excellent Translation of Lucretius« in connection with other pastoral poems by Behn; see V. O. Lobsien (1999), 214–229. 48 For the most convincing biography of Aphra Behn today, with particular emphasis on her elusiveness, cf. Todd (1996). 49 One of the most spectacular examples for this blending of openly hedonist motifs with a detailed and celebratory account of a display of hierarchical order staged and performed with the purpose of solemnly affirming an act of renunciation of the sensual and material life occurs in Love-Letters between a 1obleman and his Sister, where, in Part Three, Octavio takes his vows to be received into the order of St. Bernard (The Works of Aphra Behn, vol. 2, 379–383). The narrator, who claims to have been present as an eyewitness, enjoys every minute of the magnificent Roman Catholic ceremony, glorying in the sweet-
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This is a mind-set that combines New Philosophy with old beliefs. It cultivates both materialist and idealist attitudes, combining, at any rate juxtaposing and causing to interact, heterogeneous if not incompatible elements. In the present context, it raises several questions. Is Behn's ruined Platonism really reducible to its topical elements? Is it no more than the flattened and crumbling ideological remains of a once various and multifaceted repertoire? How is the negotiation of such diverse elements staged in Behn's texts, and how does she manage the friction between them? How, for instance, does the ideology of carpe diem go together with eternising strategies on the one hand, the valuation of magnanimity and unstinting generosity in love on the other? How do Epicurean and Neoplatonic elements affect each other, and why are the latter not abandoned altogether? How are they transformed in this new, aggregate constellation, and what functions do they serve as ruins? It should be stressed that the complex attitude conveyed by Behn's texts is more than an idiosyncrasy rooted in the author's biography; it is also more than a document of a specific aspect of Restoration culture, with the opposite, Republican variety represented by a literary and political personality such as Andrew Marvell. It may be all this, but its efficacy is ultimately due to the fact that it is an aesthetic phenomenon.51 What may, from a systematic perspective, appear as an instance of muddled thinking, does, through the way it fuses its disparate ingredients, form an aesthetically convincing whole. Only as such did it become effective, and as such does it unfold its lasting attractivity. It realises itself on the level of symbolic order – as a mode of selffashioning and as a kind of speaking and writing, that is to say as literary figuration. From this point of view, Behn will appear to mark the end of one type of Platonist aesthetic. But she will perhaps also be seen to stand at the beginning of _____________ ness of the choristers' angelic voices: »[…] I confess, I thought my self no longer on Earth; and sure there is nothing gives us an Idea of real Heaven, like a Church all adorn'd with rare Pictures, and the other Ornaments of it, with what ever can Charm the Eyes; and Musick, and Voices to Ravish the Ear; both which inspire the Soul with unresistable Devotion; and I can Swear for my own part, in those Moments a thousand times I have wish'd to Die; so absolutely I have forgot the World, and all its Vanities, and fixt my thoughts on Heaven.« (381) But she also, and particularly, revels in the perfect order in which the monks of the fraternity, the choir boys, and the Bishop with his train proceed through the church and perform the ritual. This, too, leaves her in an ecstasy at the same time spiritual and physical: »[…] wholly ravished with what I saw and heard, I fancied myself no longer on Earth, but absolutely ascended up to the Regions of the Sky. All I could see around me, all I heard, was ravishing and heavenly; the Scene of Glory, and the dazling Altar; the noble Paintings, and the numerous Lamps; the Awfulness, the Musick, and the Order, made me conceive myself above the Stars, and I had no part of mortal Thought about me.« (382) No adept of Dionysius Areopagita could have done better. 50 »Great Charles« is referred to as »our earthly God« in »Of Plants« (l. 21, The Works of Aphra Behn, vol. 1, 311). 51 Zook (2004) makes a similar point, describing the stance taken by Behn in her divine-right royalism and her revisionist longing for a courtly, chivalric, Cavalier ideal as »political aesthetics« (48).
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another that has continued well into literary modernity. Perhaps this configuration need not be called by the awkward name of ›a new Neoplatonism‹. It does appear changed almost out of recognition, revealing its former and still virulent constituents only from the perspective of a study such as this, but a great deal of its power rests on their hidden dynamic. In this chapter, Behn's narrative texts, exemplified by her shorter fiction, will be placed in the foreground, with a final excursion into her poetry. I shall only glance in passing at Oroonoko, in many ways her richest narrative and, for good reason, the one most frequently discussed in recent times.52 For the greater part, the consideration of two of her more schematically patterned »Stories of Nuns«53 – The Fair Jilt and The History of the 1un – promises to yield paradigmatic as well as intriguing insights into the way in which these texts at the end of the Early Modern period restructure the twin concepts of transparency and dissimulation.
Truth Stranger than Fiction: Aphra Behn's Stories The Fair Jilt: or, The History of Prince Tarquin and Miranda was first published in 1688 and reissued later the same year in a volume bearing the title Three Histories, also containing Oroonoko and Agnes de Castro. It is the first of her »novels«54 and the first to include her name on the title page. Unlike some of the posthumously published stories with their often sketchy and skeletal character and like Oroonoko and The History of the 1un it has a finished appearance. It is based on a historical event reported in the London Gazette – the botched execution of a »Prince Tarquino« in Antwerp in May 1666, who had been accused of trying to murder his sister-in-law. As Behn only arrived in Antwerp in July 1666 as agent for the crown, she could not have been present at the spectacle. This does not prevent her from casting her narrator as an authorial eye-witness;55 although she is not equipped with the same degree of presence and ambivalent but intimate familiarity with the hero's mind as the narrating persona in Oroonoko, who poses as his friend and »Great Mistress«. The narrating voice's complicity with the _____________ 52 For a more detailed analysis of Oroonoko and some of Behn's poems in a different context cf. V. O. Lobsien (1999), 214–254, also V. O. Lobsien (2006). Cf. also the articles on Oroonoko by Rosenthal (2004) and Lipking (2004). 53 Cf. Oroonoko, where Imoinda is instructed in »pretty Works« and told »Stories of Nuns« by the narrator (The Works of Aphra Behn, vol. 3, 93). See also the editor's »Textual Introduction«, ibid., xiii. 54 The term ›novel‹ as used by Behn and her contemporaries and as it appears frequently on the title pages especially of her posthumous fiction, evokes above all a generic import, namely the French nouvelle, which enjoyed considerable popularity in Restoration England; cf. Kelly (1981). 55 »To a great part of the Main, I my self was an Eye-witness; and what I did not see, I was confirm'd of by Actors in the Intrigue, holy Men, of the Order of St Francis […]« (The Works of Aphra Behn, vol. 3, 9).
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protagonist of The Fair Jilt is limited, ranging from an omniscience ready to empathise with the turbulences of passion suffered by her protagonist Miranda to gleeful irony and moral distance. As in Oroonoko and nearly all of her narratives, Behn asserts a strong claim to telling the truth. This »little History«, she protests in her dedication to Henry Nevil Payne, is no »Fiction« but »Reality, and Matter of Fact, and acted in this our latter Age« (Works, III, 4). She does, however, concede that the legitimising claim to »Truth« is a necessary preface to a story which contains so many entertaining »Accidents diverting and moving« (ibid.) that they will strain the credulity of many readers. The danger, in other words, is that the story be mistaken as romance; and what is claimed under the labels of factuality and historicity is the verisimilitude which will soon be understood to be one of the central characteristics of the novel. Behn's truth claim is in fact a disclaimer.56 At the same time it attempts to dispose the reader favourably towards a narrative which appears to fit none of the existing genres wholly while it retains some of their features. To refuse the label of romance amounts to rejecting certain expectations of the kind formulated in Congreve's often-quoted definition. In the preface to Incognita (1692) he stated that Romances are generally composed of the constant loves and invincible courages of heroes, heroines, kings and queens, mortals of the first rank, and so forth; where lofty language, miraculous contingencies and impossible performances elevate and surprise the reader into a giddy delight, which leaves him flat upon the ground whenever he gives off, and vexes him to think how he has suffered himself to be pleased and transported, concerned and afflicted, […] when he is forced to be very well convinced that 'tis all a lie.57
Like Congreve (and other professional writers), Behn had an interest in ridding herself of the cliché that persisted in casting the poet as liar, hence as morally dubious; and like him, she eschewed miracles and »impossible performances«, magic and monsters in her narratives. She did, however, by presenting accidents »of a more familiar nature« and »intrigues in practice«, also wish to retain a sense of »wonder«58 and the licence to amaze and amuse her readers with the barely credible while being able to designate the whole as truthful. _____________ 56 In that it resembles strongly the disclaimer articulated by Mme de Lafayette in a letter of April 1678, where she insists that La Princesse de Clèves – a text almost certainly known to Behn and in many ways similar to her own prose experiments – is ›not a romance‹ (»Aussi n'est-ce pas un roman«), because that would have carried the associations of mere, extravagant invention (cf. Cave, »Introduction« to Madame de Lafayette, The Princesse de Clèves, viii–ix. 57 In: Salzman (1991), 474, cf. also Congreve, Incognita, 5. 58 Ibid.; »wonder« in Congreve's preface is attributed to romance, while familiarity and intrigue belong to the »novel«.
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Still, the older generic pattern of romance implies a semantics which goes beyond the features enumerated by Congreve. It does in fact contain elements which, taken together, amount to making this a quintessentially Platonic genre. Not only are its protagonists embodiments of the ideal – of univocal meanings, of what they should be, in accordance with the commonplace of Classical aesthetics as reiterated and elaborated by Renaissance poetics. They are good or evil, virtuous or vicious, and they will remain so consistently, even though virtue may be obscured or feigned, wickedness dissembled for a while. It is not the appearance that counts but the truth that lies behind it. Heroes and heroines embody recognisable and clearly distinguishable values and qualities – ideas in the Platonic sense.59 These are considered as given; the characters are transparent to them. But they are also repeatedly shown and confirmed by corresponding actions. Indeed, this appears to be the main reason for the series of adventures to be braved and perils to be gone through: these are necessary for the central ideas to shine through in their generality and to be made manifest again and again. Ideal values, virtues, and qualities are the principles on which the action of romance rests. They are realised in exemplary manner by protagonists who, as they are largely untainted by individuality and quirks of personality, appear exchangeable. Their generalisation and exemplariness guarantees the anagogical value of the narrative. This – the need to assume paradigmatic shape – is also why the protagonists are normally courtly personages, belonging to a world other than that of everyday experience and of higher excellence, splendour and magnificence. Its values are chivalric and aristocratic, prescribing valour, courage, invincible strength for the hero and virtue, chastity, incomparable beauty for the heroine. It is a world at the same time remote from and better than the everyday also in that it provides for satisfying closure, for happy endings and poetic justice. True identities are revealed, lost children are found and reconciled with their parents, separated friends are reunited, matching couples are married, virtue is rewarded and the wicked are punished. Thus, the structures of romance are linear as well as circular, with complications consisting typically in secondary narratives, intercalated stories of subsidiary protagonists embedded in the major strand. The wonder of heroic feats, of the overcoming of intrigue and adverse circumstances, of disastrous as well as _____________ 59 In Platonic epistemology, to know is to discriminate, and the critical, rational faculty is superior to mere perception, as meaning is ontologically prior to appearance. In accordance with these basic principles, the idea of a thing is its function, the way it is structured and constituted in order to fulfill its respective task and which makes it what it is. It follows – as Plato explains in Books 2 and 3 of the Politeia and 2 and 7 of the 1omoi – that in art, including literature, characters are to be presented in a manner making it possible for us to recognise what they are and what determines their behaviour, and to distinguish them from others. They are to re-present their idea; in fact, they are identical with it, and their essence consists in this congruity with it. Art, from this point of view, is mimesis of ideas. (For a short and concise account of Plato's aesthetics see Büttner [2006], cf. also Halliwell [2002], 37–147.)
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fortunate coincidences, is acted out and displayed against a golden background of ›metaphysical‹ certainty guaranteeing that, in the end, everything will be well. Empty contingency is ruled out. Behind the events, we always sense the presence of what-ought-to-be, and the narrative allows us to share in it. Clemens Lugowski has suggested the concept of »mythical analogon« to describe this participation in a world of pure, »timeless being«, which permeates and reveals itself through the elements and structures that make up Early Modern romance.60 The world of romance is a Platonic world of transparent ideality, moving us to admiration and emulation of heroic virtue. In Oroonoko, many of the features of the traditional pattern are conspicuous. The African romance of the noble Prince Oroonoko and his beautiful bride Imoinda, which forms the first part of this »True History«,61 could easily, after their separation and reunion in the New World of Surinam, have taken a turn towards the happy ending both seem to be created for.62 However, it does not; and the manner in which their terrible fate is narrated can be read as a systematic destruction of the Platonic scheme underlying the older genre and its supplanting by a world of Hobbesian contingency, with the self-interest and violence of ›atomised‹ individuals in a state of nature.63 Still, despite the deceit, ambivalence and untrustworthiness on all sides which undermine the second part of the action in particular, Oroonoko remains a story of _____________ 60 Lugowski (1932). Lugowski's central concept seeks to describe the artificiality of a literary work, which constitutes both the structural whole which holds together its individual elements and the community it creates between the world it presents and its recipients – a community analogous to that which held between myth and the audience of Classical tragedy. It is a world interpreted as totality, a kind of »formal myth« (cf. 83) in which this world comes to terms with itself in certain »formal gestures«; an act in which meaning is created. In the destruction of the mythical analogon – Lugowski's graphic terms are »Zerrüttung« und »Zersetzung« – first traces of an awareness of individuality become visible in Early Modern prose texts (cf. 9). Lugowski explores this emergence of subjectivity in literature above all through readings of writings by Jörg Wickram. For the »timeless being« underlying chivalric novels such as Amadis like the ›metaphysical‹ golden background of medieval painting cf. 28, 140, and passim. – The generic prefigurations of the novel are also unfolded by McKeon (1987). McKeon's comprehensive study discusses the »attitudes toward how to tell the truth in narrative« (28), which shape the seventeenthcentury conflict between ›romance‹ and ›true history‹, i.e. the rivalry between (supposedly) fabulous untruth and (proclaimed) empirical facticity. Together with Doody (1997) and others, McKeon's work forms part of an ongoing major revision in the field staked out by Ian Watt's classic The Rise of the 1ovel (1977). (Watt groups Behn with writers of allegory like Bunyan and romance like La Calprenède, denying her claims to novelistic verisimilitude and realism all justification; cf. 36–37). 61 The Works of Aphra Behn, vol. 3, 51. 62 It could perhaps be argued that, to Behn as a Restoration playwright, to construct characters ›platonically‹, in terms of ruling ideas would have come naturally. For an estimate of Behn in this context of a dramatic production relying strongly on character schematization cf. also Hughes (2004). 63 I have described this process and some of its implications for female authorship in V. O. Lobsien (2006).
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heroic courage, honour, fortitude and princely valour. In this respect – and also in that it is the only story of genuinely tragic failure – it differs rather markedly from Behn's other narratives, in which masculine heroic virtue appears comparatively marginalised, which tend towards comedy if not farce, and which rely more strongly on love and the heroism of eros. In this and in the focus on the more private passions they approximate, to a certain extent, the generic patterns of the nouvelle. But it seems significant that these passions nonetheless tend to be staged communally, not primarily in the individualised secrecy of private rooms or boudoirs, but often in the relative openness of the religious convent, with its possibilities of mutual observation and overhearing and its intriguing potential of inofficial communication despite official restraint.64 Corresponding to the weakened emphasis on chivalric prowess in action, there are, in these stories, fewer adventures and episodes in which this prowess is tested and confirmed. Male characters do »go into a Campagn«, as for instance the Venetian wars against the Turks in The History of the 1un,65 but their exploits are seldom shown, and if they are described in some detail, this is not necessary in order to stress their bravery, but because it is relevant to the plot in an ulterior sense.66 Here, military life is not of ›romantic‹ interest.67 _____________ 64 The convent in Behn functions as an enclosed, yet public space, with marked boundaries, which, however, turn out to be permeable by words or messages (for instance grilles or grated windows). Like the room in her father's house, in which the heroine is regularly imprisoned in order to keep her from communicating with her lover, it is also a place from which an (often fatal) elopement is possible. The constant opening and closing of doors, windows, casements, with the surprises and discoveries waiting beyond, is not only a theatrical feature in Behn's narratives. It also bears witness to her interest in transgression and abrupt change, as well as in the ambivalent negotiations between containment and ›liberty‹, especially for women. 65 Cf. The Works of Aphra Behn, vol. 3, 241. 66 The narrative disclaimer that accompanies the brief account of Henault's supposed death and its summarising gesture is both typical and instructive in this respect: »[…] as it is not my business to relate the History of the War, being wholly unacquainted with the Terms of Battels, I shall only say, That these Men were led by Villenoys, and Henault would accompany him in this Sally, and that they acted very Noble, and great Things, worthy of a Memory in the History of that Siege; but this day, particularly, they had an occasion to shew their Valour, which they did very much to their Glory; but, venturing too far, they were ambush'd, in the pursuit of the Party of the Enemies, and being surrounded, Villenoys had the unhappiness to see his gallant Friend fall, fighting and dealing of Wounds around him, even as he descended to the Earth, for he fell from his Horse at the same moment that he kill'd a Turk; […]« (ibid., 243). 67 Indeed, the most detailed description of military service occurs in The Unhappy Mistake (cf. ibid., 431–438), but its focus is not on bravery in the field but on peacetime occupations of soldiers (such as cleaning out ditches). Here the point is precisely not the protagonist's fortitude in combat but his civil accomplishments, such as humility, politeness, conscientiousness in performing menial tasks and above all his awareness of a hierarchical order which he now obeys unquestioningly in order to expiate for his former selfwilledness.
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In Aphra Behn's narratives, the generic pattern of Platonic romance is, as it were, hollowed out. It appears interlaced with and partly superseded by heterogeneous elements, but some of its features are retained, if significantly modified. Which are they, and how can we describe both the modification, indeed transformation they undergo through their interaction with others and the transformative potential they unfold in their turn? How do the respective narrative voices engineer this ›ruining‹ of romance, and what is it that remains? All the stories retain Platonisms (in some cases reduced to the bare device of speaking names). Still, these do not appear in isolation, but as part of an experimental narrative process tending towards a new way of writing. It is this emerging aesthetic which deserves closer attention. At the heart both of The History of the 1un and The Fair Jilt there appears to be the conflict between desire and chastity, between earthly and heavenly eros. Both are stories of love and dissimulation: The History of the 1un explores how the beautiful Isabella, setting out as an exemplary member of an Augustine convent becomes »the Murderess of two Husbands (both belov'd) in one Night«.68 The »just Relation«69 offered in The Fair Jilt tells how the fair but false Miranda nearly brings about the death of two of her lovers (and actually causes the execution of a third), but despite her crimes, manages to live happily ever after. Both stories are set in Catholic Flanders, in a context of religious and urban life. For both, the Roman Catholic milieu is more than mere ideological staffage, designed to add confessional frisson and erotic piquancy to the action (as later in the gothic novel, from Radcliffe to Lewis). True, such effects are staged and exploited as well, in particular in The Fair Jilt, where Miranda attempts to seduce and rape the young and beautiful Franciscan monk, Father Francisco (formerly Prince Henrick), in the sacristy and during a pretended confession. But in the first place the convent appears to be interesting both because, by veiling and thus officially obscuring gender, it may serve as a means of drawing attention to it, and also because of the circumscribed freedom it allows. The convent setting seems to be chosen not so much for the restraint it imposes on the protagonists but for the liberties it provides; hence the space of play it defines. Thus, Miranda in The Fair Jilt is cast as a Beguine; she is a woman of fortune, who has taken only temporary vows and, being free to marry if and when she pleases, uses her sheltered life as a pretext for behaving like a coquette or courtesan. In this way, she is able to enjoy the favours, gifts and devotion of many suitors without having to commit herself to any. By contrast, Isabella, the eponymous nun in The History of the 1un: or, The Fair Vow-Breaker, is, though equally lovely, impeccable in her life-style. She is the perfect example of holiness, pious and devoutly austere in her habits, yet friendly and amiable in her conversation, so much so that »her Life was a
_____________ 68 Ibid., 257. 69 Ibid., 5.
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Proverb, and a President, and when they would express a very Holy Woman indeed, they would say, She was a very ISABELLA.«70 Still, here too the cloistered life is no imprisonment. Rather, the Augustine convent which houses Isabella is depicted with both institutional and religious sympathy. It is presented as a highly liberal and humane institution, with her aunt, the Lady Abbess, a generous and forgiving person of great and irreproachable »Integrity and Justice«.71 It is clearly not the strictness of the religious order, hence no confessionally coded constraint or coercion, but a very different kind of rigour which causes this story to end as shockingly as it does. The monastery, in these stories, provides a space which is dedicated to the service of a higher, heavenly love and speaks of it in all aspects of its institutional semiotics, but which turns into the stage on which the drama of earthly passion is enacted. This arrangement is one of the figurations of ruined Neoplatonism which give Behn's narrative its distinctive profile. Another is connected with the presentation of character. All subsidiary characters possess the univocality and stability belonging to romance. And even the heroines at first appear to be paradigmatic in the manner required by the pattern. Both conform to a feminine ideal of surpassing beauty and excellent wit.72 While Isabella is introduced as being what she appears to be, however, when of her own free will she takes the eternal vows, possessed of a perfect »evenness of Mind«,73 extraordinary constancy and the »perfect peace and tranquillity within«,74 which render her immune to all worldly temptations and vanities,75 Miranda is from the first presented as duplicitous. She is ›artlessly‹ beautiful in a manner that would have enchanted any petrarchan lover: _____________ 70 Ibid., 220. 71 Ibid., 213. 72 This holds true for all Behn heroines. Even where, as in The Unfortunate Bride: or, The Blind Lady a Beauty, or in The Dumb Virgin: or, The Force of Imagination, the protagonists are blind, dumb, or deformed, their handicap is either remedied in the course of the narrative, or, as in The Dumb Virgin, the gifts of beauty and wit are so distributed between two sisters that they complement each other: one has what the other lacks and both are irresistably attractive. It might, however, be noted, that while beauty, in Behn's heroines, seems absolutely requisite in order to trigger the erotic plot, it is also often the cause of painful complications, death and suffering, while it is wit that survives. 73 The Works of Aphra Behn, vol. 3, 216. 74 Ibid., 219. 75 As Isabella is given to the convent as a child, at her father's wish, to be brought up by the nuns after the death of her mother, the focus in The History of the 1un is rather more on the gradual development of the beauties of her mind and body. Also, while her beauty is depicted in terms of quite conventional hyperbole – at thirteen, she is »pretty tall of Stature, with the finest Shape that Fancy can create, with all the Adornment of a perfect brown-hair'd Beauty, Eyes black and lovely, Complexion fair; to a Miracle, all her Features of the rarest proportion, the Mouth red, the Teeth white, and a thousand Graces in her Meen and Air« (ibid., 215) –, comparatively greater attention is paid to the graces of her mind, in particular her constancy, »those continual, and innate Stedfastness, and Calm, she was Mistress of« (ibid., 214–215), and her unshakeable determination to pursue the
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She was tall, and admirably shap'd; she had a bright Hair, and Hazle-Eyes, all full of Love and Sweetness: No Art cou'd make a Face so fair as hers by Nature, which every Feature adorn'd with a Grace that Imagination cannot reach: Every Look, every Motion charm'd, and her black Dress shew'd the Lustre of her Face and Neck. She had an Air, though gay as so much Youth cou'd inspire, yet so modest, so nobly reserv'd, without Formality, or Stiffness, that one who look'd on her wou'd have imagin'd her Soul the Twin-Angel of her Body; and both together, made her appear something Divine.76
But even this first portrait of the fair Miranda – before we learn, in the next paragraph, that she is »extreamly Inconstant« and capable of »deceiving well«77 – makes it clear, by its very stress on the naturalness of her beauty, that her stunning appearance is deceptive. It is, to a superior degree, art hiding art. The blackness of her nun's habit contrasts most advantageously with the whiteness of her skin, suggesting a more than human immaculacy. And the »Air« she gives herself is as much an exterior ornament as her »Grace« – less than skin-deep, something that may be put off as easily as it is assumed, and above all strategically designed so as to lead her admirers to believe that so much beauty cannot but be the signifier of angelic virtue, »her Soul the Twin-Angel of her Body«. The standard Neoplatonic reference of beautiful body to beautiful soul which is evoked in this description is, in other words, an illusion, qualified as a projection as well as a trap. Miranda's divinity is a mere facade: a product both of her calculation and of the erotic imagination of the beholder. The protagonist of The Fair Jilt is from the first and as it were naturally what »The Fair VowBreaker« Isabella is only to become: an expert dissembler. Both heroines are thus presented in a way that seems to suggest that ›romantic‹ patterns are still functional and brings them into play quite emphatically. Simultaneously, however, both texts introduce elements that, at a fairly early stage of the narrative, undermine the impression of ›heavenly‹ beauty and transcendent virtue. The moralising introductions to both stories are part of this subversive strategy. The narrative voice, on the first pages of The History of the 1un, expatiates on the consequences of broken vows, deploring that women, though they are »by Nature more Constant and Just, than Men«,78 are corrupted by men, being taught by their lovers to be as unfaithful as they, and warning young women inclined to the religious life not to overestimate their own powers _____________ religious life despite the love offered her not only by »abundance of young Noble Men« (ibid., 216) sighing at her feet but especially by the handsome and accomplished young gentleman Villenoys, whom she likes but cannot find it in her heart to love. 76 Ibid., 10. 77 Ibid., 11. 78 Ibid., 211.
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of resolution.79 We are thus prepared, indeed we expect, to see Isabella fall a victim to her »fickle faithless deceiving Youth«.80 Still, the text does makes us marvel at the exemplariness of the heroine's integrity, thus increasing the height of her fall and at the same time preparing the astonishing ambivalence of the ending, in which Isabella, despite her lies and heinous crimes – the double murder she has just confessed to –, still appears as »a very ISABELLA«, the lovely and admirable person presented to us at the outset. Even after she has delivered herself into the hands of justice and has been executed she is somehow justified in being »generally Lamented, and Honourably Bury'd«81 – the glorious ruin82 of a Platonic character. As in Oroonoko, the exemplary may be incapable of survival, but they are at least duly mourned. In The Fair Jilt, the introduction promises a different kind of exemplariness. It is framed by a (seemingly unreserved) praise of the »wondrous« power of love, beginning with a sweeping statement: »As Love is the most noble and divine Passion of the Soul, so is it that to which we must justly attribute all the real Satisfactions of Life; and without it, Man is unfinish'd, and unhappy.«83 And having illustrated the miraculous change it is capable of working, »even to a degree of Transmigration«,84 as well as the limits to its power, by an inset satirical portrait of the fop in fashion (whose extravagant foolishness may be intensified by love but who, alone of all mankind, is immune to its metamorphotic force), the ambivalent panegyric ends with another piece of praise, reiterating the initial claim: »But 'tis that refin'd and illustrious Passion of the Soul, whose Aim is Vertue, and [w]hose End is Honour, that has the power of changing Nature, and is capable of performing all those heroick things, of which History is full.«85. Is _____________ 79 With an ›autobiographical‹ digression claiming first-hand knowledge of both worlds and aiming at a heightening of credibility: »I once was design'd an humble Votary in the House of Devotion, but fancying my self not endu'd with an obstinacy of Mind, great enough to secure me from the Efforts and Vanities of the World, I rather chose to deny my self that Content I could not certainly promise my self, than to languish (as I have seen some do) in a certain Affliction; tho' possibly, since, I have sufficiently bewailed that mistaken and inconsiderate Approbation and Preference of the false ungrateful World, (full of nothing but Nonsense, Noise, false Notions, and Contradiction) before the Innocence and Quiet of a Cloyster; […]« (ibid., 212–213) – and ending on a characteristically sardonic note, with a possible allusion to the strategies of self-commodification adopted by several of her heroines: »[…] since I cannot alter Custom, nor shall ever be allow'd to make new Laws, or rectify the old ones, I must leave the Young Nuns inclos'd to their best Endeavours, of making a Virtue of Necessity; and the young Wives, to make the best of a bad Market.« (213). 80 Ibid., 212. 81 Ibid., 258. 82 For the phrase »Glorious ruine« see Love-Letters between a 1obleman and his Sister, in: The Works of Aphra Behn, vol. 2, 44. 83 The Works of Aphra Behn, vol. 3, 7. 84 Ibid.. 85 Ibid., 9.
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›Love‹, then, capable of working radical change even in the most insensitive and egocentric, or isn't it? Assuming that the introduction is not just an instance of slip-shod workmanship, a passage thoughtlessly added on for the sake of the witticisms against foppery it contains, it leaves us with a question rather than clear-cut expectations regarding the fate of the beautiful Miranda. Still, the narrator protest that his story is going to provide an example: How far distant Passions may be from one another, I shall be able to make appear in these following Rules. I'll prove to you the strong Effects of Love in some unguarded and ungovern'd Hearts; where it rages beyond the Inspirations of a God all soft and gentle, and reigns more like a Fury from Hell.86
This indeed seems to map out one of the ways in which the following story may be read. It leads us to expect an exemplary tale, but with some uncertainty concerning its didactic validity as well as its outcome. Is Miranda, the fair jilt, going to be redeemed or destroyed by love, led by excessive passion to erotic heroism or to ruin? The narrative we are rather elaborately called upon to anticipate appears to be of an experimental kind – an exploration, almost an anatomy, of the degrees, kinds, and effects of love. Such multi-facetedness and non-judgmental cataloguing, however, is hardly compatible with the Neoplatonic figure the rhetoric of the introduction at the same time attempts to retain, with love safely ensconced in the position of overruling value. Again, the text seems to try to have its cake and eat it. Both stories tenaciously cling to a rudimentary Platonism, although the narratives themselves contain elements which tend to disprove, or at least question it. In both cases we sense that the traditional patterns of romance are under strain. The doubts beginning to surround their reliability add to the intrigues both texts unfold. Both Isabella and Miranda undergo a change due to their experience of love. In Isabella, it is more pronounced, since her integrity seems to be so unimpeachable. She is proof even to the attentions of the virtuous and beautiful Count of Villenoys, who almost dies of his love for her. But although it is only the promise of a chaste remembrance she has to offer the unhappy suitor, it appears that he has sown the seeds87 of that passion which soon after begins to devastate her hitherto tranquil and self-contained life. When she makes the acquaintance of her friend's brother, the charming and melancholy Bernardo Henault, son to an Earl, he loves her as soon as he sets sight on her and she falls in love with him _____________ 86 Ibid.. 87 »[…] for she own'd she saw him, with wonder at his Beauty, and murch more she admir'd him, when she found the Beauties of his Mind; she confess'd, she had given him hope, by answering his Letters; and that when she found her Heart grow a little more than usually tender, when she thought on him, she believ'd it a Crime, that ought to be check'd by a Virtue, such as she pretended to profess, and hop'd she should ever carry to her Grave; […]« (ibid., 218–219).
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violently and irrecoverably. Although she tries desparately to fight her passion, it is of no avail; she admits to herself and to her friend the plight she is in: »[…] she was now another Woman than what she had hitherto been; she was quite alter'd in every Sentiment, Thought, and Notion«.88 This is, of course, the beginning of the end. Isabella's transformation could not, it would seem, be more radical or more complete. For above all, she loses her Platonic innocence: duplicity sets in, and she begins to »dissemble«89 – to her friend, to herself, to the Lady Abbess. After a long and heart-wringing struggle she agrees to elope with Henault. Everything else seems to follow with a kind of terrible logic,90 leading to the spectacularly unhappy ending. The alteration of the protagonist of The Fair Jilt comes as a smaller surprise, and the text prepares us to witness it with feelings unmitigated by pity and ruled rather by a morally dubious enjoyment, relishing both the crime and the punishment. Miranda changes from a shallow coquette to a passionate and vengeful lover. The attempt to sublimate sexual desire and translate it into divine love does not even remotely occur to her, although this is one of the options offered to her, infuriatingly, by the beautiful Franciscan she is enamoured with and tries to seduce.91 She does not feel that her habit, outward sign of her religious calling,92 _____________ 88 Ibid., 224. 89 Ibid., 225 and passim. 90 Henault is immediately disinherited by his father. The couple try to live the life of small farmers in the country, but Henault's agricultural efforts are attended by ill luck. Isabella's small fortune is soon used up (together with the support she receives from her generous aunt, the Lady Abbess), and Henault finds himself forced to seize the only chance of reconciling himself to his father by going to the wars against the Turks and seeking military distinction. There, he meets Villenoys, and they immediately grow friends, »like two sworn Brothers« (ibid., 242). Unfortunately, however, Henault appears to be killed in the field; his body is never recovered. The news of his death throws Isabella into deepest sorrow. Her grief renders her even more charming to her still numerous adorers. Villenoys then seeks her out again and woos the beautiful widow; after three years she manages to transfer her affection for Henault wholly to him and agrees to marry him (247). However, one night, when Villenoys is out on a hunting expedition, Henault returns and demands to be received as Isabella's husband, having spent the past years in Turkish slavery. In her panic and despair, Isabella smothers him in his sleep. When Villenoys returns, she tells him that a stranger with news from Henault has arrived, but has suddenly and to her horror died in his bed. Villenoys suggest that they do away with the body; they sew it into a sack, planning to throw it into the river from the bridge. As Villenoys heaves the sack onto his shoulder, Isabella fastens it to his collar so that, when he hurls the corpse into the water, he is pulled after it and drowns. When the two corpses are found it is assumed they have both been murdered. Though she has thus rid herself of the only potential witness, Isabella is racked by grief and guilt. When Villenoys's body is laid out in the house and Isabella approaches it, it opens its eyes and fixes them on the murderess. Even worse, a friend and fellow-slave of Henault's comes in search of him, grows suspicious, has the body exhumed and identifies it. Isabella then delivers herself into the hands of justice and is sentenced to death. 91 »But his Habit having not made him forget his Quality and Education, he writ to her with all the profound Respect imaginable; […] He sent her a thousand Blessings, and told her,
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places her under any kind of moral obligation: to her, it is a dress like any other, a kind of disguise, to be put on for certain purposes and (preferably) to be taken off again. Miranda's eros, different from Isabella's, is »mad, malicious Love«;93 a passion fed just as much by the self-love and hurt vanity of the experienced conqueror as by desire for the fair object of her wishes. It is indeed to a considerable extent a product of her own »fond Imaginations«,94 and these appear in turn as a kind of inverted Platonism. For what really turns Miranda's incipient infatuation into an ungovernable passion is mediated by the literary device most typical of conventional romance: the embedded narrative. Her maid Cornelia tells her the story of the unhappy love which had caused the lovely friar (who in his former life was a German nobleman), to give up the world. »The Story of Prince Henrick«95 draws additional attention to itself as an inset by its title which separates it from the rest of the narrative. However, although it clears up the heroic past of one of the protagonists and offers a moving example of his capacity for selfless, »suffering Love«96, here it is strictly functional in yet another sense. It serves not only as a contrasting foil for Miranda's egocentrism, but above all as a trigger for the greed that really motivates her: the greed for »Quality« – for aristocratic rank as well as the material and symbolic assets that go with it. »What!« she exclaims with incredulous delight after having heard the story, »is Father Henrick a Man of Quality?«.97 And, convinced that he is ›really‹ a prince, she immediately begins to fantasise about him: »She frames an Idea of him all gay and splendid, and looks on his present Habit as some Disguise proper for the Stealths of Love; some feign'd put-on Shape, with the more Security to approach a Mistress, and make himself happy; […]«.98 The erotic imagination she gives reign to turns the clerical identity of Father Francisco into a mere disguise, his ideal truth into a fiction, to be, literally, stripped off at her own sweet will: »In the Bed, the silent, gloomy Night, and the soft Embraces of her Arms, he loses all the Friar, and assumes all the Prince; […]«.99 The Platonic paraphernalia are still
_____________
92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99
she shou'd ever be in his Prayers, though not in his Heart, as she desir'd: And abundance of Goodness more he express'd, and Counsel he gave her, which had the same Effect with his Silence; it made her Love but the more, and the more impatient she grew […]« (ibid., 21, cf. also 23) – it is definitely not caritas she is interested in, but (earthly) eros. And described in some detail at the beginning of the tale (cf. ibid., 9–10). Ibid., 19. Ibid.. Ibid., 13–18. Ibid., 16. Ibid., 18. Ibid.. Ibid..
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there, but they appear reduced the products of lustful fantasy – a fantasy, however, left unfulfilled, at least for the time being.100 If, then, both heroines undergo a transformation due to love, this turns out to be in neither case a transformation modelled according to Neoplatonic, let alone Petrarchist, patterns.101 Neither Isabella nor Miranda becomes a better, more spiritual person, capable of discerning divine beauty in the unavailable beauty of the beloved, although their religious calling might have qualified them for this to a higher degree than mere worldly lovers, and although in both cases, the spiritualisation of desire is one of the options explicitly discussed (and rejected as beyond the protagonist's power considering the strength of the passion it would have to transform). There is nothing saintly in these loves. While the trajectory of Neoplatonic transformation would have described a movement to a higher plane, here the dynamic is inverted – it is a movement towards ruin, in Isabella's case ending in death, in Miranda's case leading to near-desaster several times and involving the death of others. Morally, both characters are totally annihilated. Or are they? While those who mourn Isabella's death do not seem to regard her as completely dishonoured, Miranda seems to develop a survivor's qualities: despite her several humiliations and the repeated frustration of her wishes, she appears undaunted. True, we are led to see her increasingly as depraved, but she manages to win and retain her spurious Prince Tarquin (who may be an impostor and a cheat like herself, but at any rate turns out a faithful and devoted lover), and to live to a ripe old age. Her career resembles that of Silvia in Love-Letters between a 1obleman and his Sister, who, after losing her innocence, gradually turns into a manipulative woman and finally a whore; or it might in some respects be compared to the change wrought in the hero of Oroonoko, who, after experiencing repeated betrayal, ›turns native‹ and, from the narrator's point of view, becomes dangerous and self-willed towards the end of the narrative. However, while the alterations both of Silvia and Oroonoko appear psychologically motivated and to _____________ 100 Miranda nearly manages to ruin Francisco, who, after her attempt to rape him has failed, gets the blame and is thrown into prison. It is then that Prince Tarquino enters the scene, who provides a new target for her frustrated desire. Yet another man of (in his case, slightly doubtful) quality, he immediately succumbs to her charms, and this time she succeeds in securing and marrying her prince. Soon, however, their fortune is diminished to an alarming extent and she plots to have her sister Alcidiana killed by her adoring page Van Brune in order to obtain Alcidiana's portion as well. The attempt does not quite succeed, and Van Brune is captured, confesses and is sentenced to death, while she is condemned to stand under the gibbet in the market-place. Nothing daunted by her humiliation, Miranda resumes her extravagant lifestyle with Tarquin, and when they run out of money again, she instigates Tarquin to the murder of Alcidiana. Her consort readily complies, but the attempt again miscarries; he is sentenced to death, but pardoned when the executioner messes up the beheading. Miranda, too, is finally pardoned, their financial situation is redeemed by Tarquin's father, and they retire to a countryhouse, with Miranda allegedly »very penitent for her Life past« (ibid., 48). 101 It is not, to evoke another classical author much favoured by Restoration authors and revered by Behn herself, a radical Ovidian metamorphosis either.
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some extent justified by the catastrophic disappointments they suffer, in Miranda we discern no reason for her change. Indeed, it may be argued whether this is a transformation at all. For, although both Isabella's and Miranda's physical beauty turn out to be false – a deceitful signifier, the suggested virtue mere counterfeit –, the man-eating harpy that Miranda is ultimately revealed to be does not really differ so much from what we as readers were enabled to suspect from the first. Neither (and strangely enough) do the murders Isabella commits detract a great deal from the fundamentally good and admirable person she is taken to be even at the end. These irritating, mixed and thoroughly un-Platonic effects – fascinated interest in malice, grudging admiration for the self-invention, determination and stamina of a female rake, horrified pleasure at the spectacular, but morally reprehensible actions of both heroines and perhaps even involuntary empathy with the unhappy »Murderess of two Husbands (both belov'd)« – are a consequence of the way in which both stories arrange their Platonic residues. As in both tales exemplariness is emptied of substance and paradigmatic stature is replaced by characters which, enigmatically, mean only themselves; as transparency gives way to dissimulation, dissimulation also appears to gain the upper hand as narrative mode. It should be noted in this connection that although the first pages of The History of the 1un offer the commonplace explanation that holds true also for Love-Letters between a 1obleman and his Sister (innocent female corrupted by deceitful male, constant woman taught to dissemble by inconstant man), this is not the pattern followed by the narrative. Isabella does not learn dissimulation through being jilted but begins to dissemble of her own accord as soon as she falls in love.102 Untruth, equivocation, downright lies – all start with her infatuation. The epitome of artlessness before, Isabella now becomes an expert in deceit and the strategic creation of false fronts. It is as if, like Miranda, she had known the art all along, or as if there were a natural and unbreakable link between desire and dissimulation. In The Fair Jilt, the interest in dissimulation appears even more pronounced. It is Miranda's major talent from first to last, advertised on the first page of her story (differing from the title page) by the heading »The Fair Hypocrite; or the Amours of Prince Tarquin and Miranda«. She is »powerful […] in dissembling well«,103 and if her self-presentation is transparent to anything it is to the art of hiding art, a kind of depraved sprezzatura.104 Her gift for stratagem is activated by her passion for the lovely friar (who fortunately turns out to be a man of quality, his ›true‹ status hidden and its attractivity enhanced by his clerical _____________ 102 Cf. The Works of Aphra Behn, vol. 3, 222, 225, 227, 229 and passim. 103 Ibid., 37. 104 Like her obsession with »quality« – the correlate of nobility and rank, preferably also visible in the form of material capital –, which is here reduced to a mere reminder of representative hierarchy, its graded symbolic values and references.
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habit) and inspired by her imagination of concealed passion in him.105 Her duplicity then plumbs to dizzying depths as she rails against his steadfast refusal, culminating in a perfidious charge of hypocritical dissimulation directed at him.106 As genuine truthfulness and innocence appear incapable of mustering an equal barrage of deceitful signs,107 its blankness, in those Miranda manages to blame for her crimes, is read as a sure sign of guilt.108 Sincerity and dissimulation thus begin to change positions until they become virtually indistinguishable, even to the narrator: »And indeed, if ever she shed Tears which she did not dissemble, it was upon this Occasion. But here she almost over-acted: […]«.109 For Miranda, even honesty is a bravura performance, still part of the »Dissimulation of the deceiving Fair«.110 The systematic difference between dissimulation and simulation has vanished; to dissemble feelings is equivalent to feigning them.111 Thus, however, dissimulation comes to be closely allied with imagination. For the protagonists, to dissemble is to invent themselves in a manner which carries only faint resonances of Platonic idealism (and these manipulated to fit strategic purposes); to present a façade no longer transparent to a higher truth, or only misleadingly so. For the teller of the tale, however, dissimulation as a motif and theme of the narrative appears indirectly related to her authorial self-invention as distinct narrative voice. As such, Behn is a knowing presence in her stories. There are moralising passages, but they do not occur consistently; they are usually placed at the beginning,112 and in the tales under consideration there are _____________ 105 The Works of Aphra Behn, vol. 3, 18. 106 »And (said she) since all my nobler Ways have fail'd me; and that, for a little hypocritical Devotion, you resolve to lose the greatest Blessings of Life, and to sacrifice me to your religious Pride and Vanity, I will either force you to abandon that dull Dissimulation; or you shall die, to prove your Sanctity real.« (ibid., 23). 107 Thus, for instance, Miranda orchestrates her perjuries during the trial against the wrongfully accused Francisco: »With that a Shower of Tears burst from her fair dissembling Eyes, and Sobs so naturally acted, and so well manag'd, as left no Doubt upon the good Men, but all she had spoken was Truth.« (ibid., 25). 108 »The innocent betray'd Victim, all this while she was speaking, heard her with an Astonishment that may easily be imagin'd; yet shew'd no extravagant Signs of it, as those wou'd do, who feign it to be thought innocent; but being really so, he bore, with an humble modest, and blushing Countenance, all her Accusations: which silent Shame they mistook for evident Signs of his Guilt.« (ibid., 25–26; cf. also 33). 109 Ibid., 37. 110 Ibid., 34. 111 Cf. for instance the description of Tarquin under sentence of death and still hopelessly enamoured with Miranda: »[…] he cou'd not so much as dissemble a Repentance for having marry'd her.« (ibid., 41). 112 In The History of the 1un, where she cannot very well claim bodily presence at the extended intimate conversations at the grate, the narrator's voice still manages to assume some degree of authority in this respect, while restricting herself to the ›autobiographical‹ digression of the beginning which concerns her own failed aspirations to a religious life. By means of this brief passage she manages at the same time to claim first-hand knowledge of the problems of vow-keeping she sets out to explore and to cast herself as different
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only brief interventions of the narrator in her own person once the story has got under way. These tend to be protestations of truth: the narrator reiterates her claim to have been acquainted with the protagonists, present on the scene, an eyewitness to the events faithfully represented in the narrative. Thus, in The Fair Jilt, she insists that this is not »a feign'd Story […] piec'd together with Romantick Accidents«,113 witnessed by herself for the greater part and memorised in »Journal Observations« at the time;114 and for the rest, confirmed by trustworthy »Actors in the Intrigue«.115 She also takes care to remind us, now and again, of her firsthand knowledge by depicting, in some detail, the differences of habit in the various holy orders,116 by alluding to her expertise concerning the manners and methods of execution in Flanders117 or to the present situation of the participants in the narrated action,118 ending on a note of hearsay: »Since I began this Relation, I heard that Prince Tarquin dy'd about three quarters of a Year ago.«119 By its very uncertainty, its personal, self-rererential tone and its attitude of factual conscientiousness, it adds to the overall authenticity the narrative aims at. As in Oroonoko, its truth claim is thus paradoxically strengthened by narratorial absence at crucial points. Together with the increasing dissimulation of the characters, this absence becomes one of the conditions of literature as truthful invention – falsity produces fictionality as »true relation«.
Transcendent Love? A Poetic Farewell to Neoplatonism None of Behn's stories lacks love interest. In fact, in nearly all of them, love interest dominates the action. The Fair Jilt could also be read as a kind of ›anatomy‹ of the degrees and kinds of love – from passionate love at first sight, in egocentric as well as altruistic versions, to friendship and marital companionship, from fickleness to unconditional fidelity, from sexual desire to chaste and »honourable« selfless love, as exemplified by Father Francisco.120 The experience of love and the analysis of its effects on the heroine are strongly foregrounded in the first part of the story, but they recede as the episodes of the plot are spun out in an almost picaresque manner. By contrast, The History of the 1un focusses with much greater exclusiveness on motivation and the psychological change wrought by love in the main protagonist Isabella, on her own discovery of her _____________ 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120
from the exemplary Isabella in her greater self-awareness and a more realistic estimate of her own strength of character. The Works of Aphra Behn, vol. 3, 9. Ibid., 36. Ibid., 9. Ibid., 9–10. Cf. ibid., 44. Cf. ibid., 42. Ibid., 48. Ibid., 23.
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weakness and her habituation to duplicity. Here, the narrative charts with meticulous attention to nuances of feeling and the swings of mood and resolution, the process in which the heroine acquires self-reflexivity and an awareness of her own ungovernable interiority. She starts out with a sense of unbroken identity, artlessness and exemplary integrity and is manoeuvred into a situation of painful confusion and division against herself. With the realisation that she is in love, she also becomes aware that she has lost her former autonomy. Now, all of a sudden, she experiences herself as ruled by another: »[…] this Tyrant of my soul, who, I thought, had never enter'd into holy Houses, or mix'd his Devotions and Worship with the true Religion; but, oh! no Cells, no Cloysters, no Hermitages, are secur'd from his Efforts.«121 Isabella finds herself engaged in a desperate psychomachia, with complex options militating against each other and lacking a clear criterion of right and wrong; a self-destructive torment, hopeless and potentially endless.122 This interesting predicament is, in The History of the 1un, presented both in long passages of direct speech and in a wide range of varieties of indirect (including free indirect) discourse representing private meditation and unspoken thought. It is, not only with respect to this self-contradictory quality of a monologic condition concerned with another person, also a state of mind lending itself preeminently to the medium of poetry. And, as a figure of consciousness reflectively bent on itself though oriented towards an instance outside the self and cast as superior to itself, it might appear structurally congenial to Neoplatonic thinking. Not surprisingly, then, it is in her love poetry that we find Behn once again leaning on traditional Neoplatonic themes and structures, testing them to breaking point. As in her prose, however, it is not only Petrarchist patterns which are placed under stress, but the interaction is reciprocal. The competing elements of Epicurean – libertinist and Hobbist – ideology are also affected and questioned in the process of negotiation of which they become part. Indeed, one of Behn's major preoccupations throughout the whole of her work, including her plays, is a kind of reckoning of costs – quite literally, as she calculates fortunes, dowries, incomes (she seldom omits to state the monetarian »worth« of a suitor or a bride), as well as debts and mortgages; but also symbolically and with considerable awareness of gender difference in the results of the calculation. What is the price, financially, but also in terms of social prestige, moral status, and emotional gains and losses, of being a ›material girl‹? What are the costs of sexual liberty for women? Neither in Behn's shorter fiction – with The Fair Jilt a case in point – nor in Love-Letters between a 1obleman and his Sister does the imitation of masculine libertinism _____________ 121 Ibid., 224. 122 »She considers well, she cannot bear Despairing Love, and finds it impossible to cure her Despair; she cannot fly from the Thoughts of the Charming Henault, and 'tis impossible to quit 'em; and, at this rate, she found, Life could not long support it self, but would either reduce her to Madness, and so render her an hated Object of Scorn to the Censuring World, or force her Hand to commit a Murder upon her self.« (ibid., 225–226).
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come cheap. Still, to abstain from the pursuit of love – and even in the case of the grasping Miranda, it is not, at first, the greed for lucre but love of something ultimately intangible, namely the passion for Francisco's beauty and »quality« which motivates her – is repeatedly shown to be impossible, in prose, drama, and, with greatest intensity, in a poetry ruled precisely by the seemingly invincible »Tyrant« to which even the paradigmatically chaste Isabella finally succumbs. It is this impasse to which Behn's texts return again and again, and it is not one for which she has easy solutions to offer. The exploration of eros as a major theme of Behn's poems (which, incidentally, also dominates her political poetry to a remarkable extent) is intensified and furnished with the rhetorical means by another literary mode which harks back to the first Platonic Renaissance in England and which goes well with Neoplatonic Petrarchism: pastoral. In Behn's writings, however, this assumes a distinct shape as it interacts with Lucretian naturalism. While pastoral discourse plays no significant role in Behn's dramatic works with their predominantly urban settings, it becomes functional in a number of ways in her prose. Thus, in Oroonoko, Surinam, in the course of the narrative, changes from a locus amoenus, an earthly paradise with many of the appurtenances of golden-age pastoral, to a locus terribilis ruled not by love but by racist violence and the egocentric interests of atomised individuals. In The History of the 1un, pastoralism is equalled to naive escapism, as Isabella and Henault after being disinherited try to realise their fantasy of rural life and fail miserably.123 In the epistolary exchanges of the first volume of Love-Letters, the discourse of pastoral assumes major importance as it provides not only some of the scenery, but most of the language and rhetoric of seduction. By virtue of this duplicity it may also serve as a preliminary to Behn's poetic pastoralism. This, then, is how Philander presses his case with Silvia in one of his early letters to her, describing a scenery that contains virtually all the repertoire elements and commonplaces of naturalist pastoral arranged so as to argue for sexual compliance in the addressee: Say fond Love whither wilt thou lead me? thou hast brought me from the noysey hurry's of the Town, to charming solitude; from Crowded Cabals, where mighty
_____________ 123 Thus Isabella's equally modest and romantic vision of her future life: »[…] if I considered at all, it was, that Grandure and Magnificence were useless Trifles to Lovers, wholly needless and troublesome, I thought of living in some loanly Cottage, far from the noise of crowded busie Cities, to walk with thee in Groves, and silent Shades, where I might hear no Voice but thine; and when we had been tir'd, to sit down by some cool murmuring Rivulet, and be to each a World, my Monarch thou, and I thy sovereign Queen, while Wreaths of Flowers shall crown our happy Heads, some fragrant Bank our Throne, and Heaven our Canopy« (ibid., 237) – and Henault chimes in: »1ow, now, I find, my Isabella loves indeed, when she's content to abandon the World for my sake; Oh! thou hast named the only happy Life that suits my quiet 1ature, to be retir'd, has always been my Joy!« (ibid., 238; for their failure see 239–240).
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things are resolving to loanly Groves, to thy own abodes, where thou dwell'st, gay and pleas'd, amongst the Rural Swains in shady homely Cottages; thou hast brought me to a Grove of flowers, to the brink of Purling Streams, where thou hast laid me down to contemplate on Silvia! […] and every thing inspires thy dictates; the Winds a round me blow soft, and mixing with the wanton Boughs, continually play and Kiss; while those like a coy Maid in Love resist and comply by turns; they like a ravisht vigorous Lover, rush on with a transported violence; rudely imbracing its Spring drest Mistress, ruffling her Native order, while the pretty Birds on the dancing Branches incessantly make Love: upbraiding duller man with his defective want of fire: man the Lord of all! he to be stinted in the most valuable joy of Life! is it not Pity? here's no troublesome Honour, amongst the pretty inhabitants of the Woods and Streams, fondly to give Laws to Nature, but uncontroul'd they play and sing, and Love; […]124
»Love«, still sporting some of the attributes of a mythic Cupid, is here equalled with »Nature«, whose dictates animate the »Grove of flowers« and rule the amorous behaviour of all living things, unrestrained by »troublesome Honour«. Philander may still lie down in the lonely grove to conjure up fantasies of his beloved Silvia, but he is no Petrarchist lover adoring from afar the distant beauty of an unyielding mistress. On the contrary, it is above all impatience and urgency which all this inspires in him, images of impetuous desire immediately fulfilled as in the »Winds […] mixing with the wanton Boughs« and »rudely imbracing« them, or in the »Courtship« of the birds he pretends to observe, who »meeting look, and like, and Love« without delay.125 In this view, »Honour« is no value aligned with grace and pointing towards the spiritual benefits of unrequited love, but at best an illusion, a product of collective hallucination, calculated only to inspire fear and restraint. Philander can find nothing to admire and nothing to gain in the traditional stances of courtly love with their elaborate strategies of erotic postponement. To him, these seem merely self-serving and pernicious, futile exercises invented in order to denigrate the status of »man the Lord of all«. Hence, he rails against what, from a naturalist point of view, can only appear unnatural, a malicious withholding of the pleasure man was made for: […] while scanted man, born alone for the fatigues of Love, with industrious toyl, and all his boasting Arts of Eloquence, his Godlike Image, and his noble form, may labour on a tedious term of years, with pain, expence, and hazard, before he can arrive at happiness, and then too perhaps his Vows are unregarded, and all his Sighs and Tears are vain.126
_____________ 124 The Works of Aphra Behn, vol. 2, 34–35. 125 Ibid., 35. 126 Ibid..
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And, in keeping with his pastoral affectation, he compares his predicament to that of enamoured sheep: Tell me oh you fellow Lovers, yea amorous dear Bruits […] tell me by a gentle bleat ye little butting Rams; do you Sigh thus for your soft white Ewes? do you ly thus conceal'd, to wait the coming shades of Night, till all the curled spyes are folded? no, no, even you are much more blest than Man, who is bound up to rules fetter'd by the nice decencies of Honour.127
But of course, the intentions of Philander's erotic pastoralism are more than transparent. What Behn's text discovers to us is above all the writer's strategic interest. If he claims that there is no restraint in nature and that birds and beasts are neither forced to languish for a gratification eternally denied nor, above all, to dissemble their passions, then each of the elements in his anti-Petrarchan complaint also functions as an argument in his persuasion to love. The text exposes this tactical level of Philander's discourse not last by showing him obsessed by issues of dominance and control as well as by images of desire fulfilled against resistance and in spite of obstructions. It is this which gives his letter its erotic urgency, but it also makes it appear less innocuous than the language of little birds and curly sheep might suggest. Philander's pastoral dissimulation of sexual aggression is linked with his problematic attitude towards »Honour«, and this, too, is an element that recurs in several of Behn's poems.128 »Troublesome« honour is railed at and vituperated as if it were a tyrannical parent or a despotic monarch mainly because it usurps an authority due only to nature – that of law-giver. From an Epicurean, naturalist point of view, this must appear as a kind of sacrilege, as it recognises no metaphysical instance beyond that of nature. The good life is a life lived in accordance with the law of nature. It is this which guarantees happiness; it is also this which demands liberty – especially sexual liberty. While nature is a given, honour is man-made, depending on convention and mere (relative and, according to circumstance, changeable) custom. However, both honour and nature may assume different meanings for men and women; in particular honour. This is one of the major themes explored by Love-Letters. And just as honour, reputation, status and social value are so closely associated for women that their loss amounts to ›ruin‹,
_____________ 127 Ibid., 35–36. 128 Cf. e.g. »The Golden Age. A Paraphrase on a Translation out of French«, where Honour is reviled as »Fond Idol of the slavish Crowd« and as »Miser«, and the golden age is imagined as naturalist paradise: »Then it was glory to pursue delight, | And that was Lawful all, that Pleasure did invite, | Then 'twas the Amorous world injoy'd its Reign; | And Tyrant Honour strove t'usurp in Vain.« (lines 77, 80–83; The Works of Aphra Behn, vol. 1, 32). There too, however, sexual demands as well as modes of compliance are clearly gendered, with critical implications for the Lucretian fantasy.
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for men, honour will also imply political integrity and loyalty129 (while a reputation of promiscuity may even redound to their honour). But apart from the double sexual standard repeatedly exposed and indirectly criticised by Behn in her novel, she also, and from the first, presents Philander as a man who has a quarrel with authority (as well as with the representative hierarchical structures derived from it). This bodes nothing good for his political future. The manner in which he is ready not only to jeopardise Silvia's reputation but also to play down the absoluteness of the allegiance and fidelity he owes to the King, in other words: his duplicitous juggling with »Honour«, gives evidence of his fundamentally dubious loyalty and questionable political reliability. Behn's blending of the rhetoric of naturalism with pastoral thus creates a medium in which nature and honour, as ideological counters signalling Epicurean and Platonic mentalities, begin to interact and point out each other's deficits. If, as clandestine correspondence between lovers, the Love-Letters are themselves readable as libertinist imitation and contrafactum to another Platonic genre in contemporary fashion – that of »seraphicks«130 – the duplicitous rhetoric of love unfolded in them manages to hold in a productive suspense ways of thinking and feeling not only systematically incompatible but also working in very different ways for men and women. From the vantage point of female honour, male nature, as privileged by Lucretian naturalism, may well appear reckless and totalitarian.131 However – and this is the tension Behn repeatedly explores in her poetry –, although female nature may not lend itself as wholeheartedly to libertinism as male, it does not always accommodate itself easily to Platonising pastoral either. While it does not seem any longer possible to posit love as a metaphysical absolute, its total relativisation does not appear to be an option either. A way out of this aporia is its poetical reflection, the close analysis of the predicament that gives rise to it. Behn's poems abound with shepherdesses and nymphs betrayed, abandoned, disappointed or rejected, but it is only on the surface that these poems seem to be predominantly complaints. It is in her analysis of the manner in which these pastoral speakers experience and describe their situation, in the mode in which they turn their attention back upon themselves, their thoughts and feelings as well as their constructions of their antagonists' motivations, that Behn's poetic _____________ 129 These appear emphatically linked for instance in »A Farewel to Celladon, On his Going into Ireland«, which praises its addressee for the exemplary royalist virtues »Cesar« (i.e. Charles II) estimates in him so highly that he sends him to take up public office in pastoral »Hybernia«: »Mix thus your Toiles of Life with Joyes, | And for the publick good, prolong your days: | Instruct the World, the great Example prove, | Of Honour, Friendship, Loyalty, and Love.« (ll. 97–100; ibid., 38). 130 Cf. Harris (2002), also Wilde (2009); a different, but relevant generic paradigm is of course provided by the Lettres Portugaises, cf. Roger L'Estrange's version Five LoveLetters from a 1un to a Cavalier. 131 While male Honour may also thwart the wishes of female Nature – another variant also explored in the Love-Letters in a later episode that ends with Octavio entering a monastery.
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voice really comes into its own. It is here that her »new« way of writing is practised most suggestively; and it is here that we may finally discern configurations of transparency and dissimulation which, as a result of the way they blend naturalist strategies with a Neoplatonist aesthetic, adumbrate ›modern‹ modes of the lyric. »On Desire«, the poem I should like to glance at briefly in conclusion of this study, is subtitled »A Pindarick«.132 It is not Behn's only ode; like the others, it is written in imitation of a classical genre popularised by Abraham Cowley's Pindarique Odes (1659). It does seem, however, that in this poem, the fashionable form lends itself with supreme aptness to the ›informal‹ exploration of a recalcitrant phenomenon, whose strangely amorphous and yet powerful nature the poet attempts to come to terms with in varying metres and rhythms, flexible line lengths and irregular rhymes. The tone is celebratory, yet personal, and the Classicist choice of genre opens highly interesting opportunities for playing with the contrast between the public, stately aura of the form and the conspicuous privacy of the passion. It is inner turmoil, with the appearance of outward calm, which will give rise to the figure of transparent dissimulation at the heart of this poem. The subject of the text is the unruliness of desire, its anarchic and refractory nature as well as its irresistibility. The ode admires, even as it charts its power and its resistance to all attempts to subdue, domesticate or make it subservient to ulterior purposes. It carefully unfolds the paradoxical character of desire, which is born in, and rises from, a person's innermost heart, while it at the same time involves an experience of acute heteronomy, the feeling of being conquered and occupied by an outside force. Desire leads both to a heightening of self-awareness and to a sense of loss of self. It is accompanied by need and increasing want focussed on the desired individual, while simultaneously creating a feeling of enrichment, even superiority to those who lead sedate and quiet lives untrammeled by the violence of passion. The speaker of the poem is a woman; the matrix of the relationships she discusses is heterosexual, but she directs particular attention towards the efforts of her own sex to avoid, hide or leave unacknowledged the pleasant ravages of desire. Again, however, the gendered stance appears contradictory: while the speaking voice frequently alludes to her »weekness« (l. 114) and to her »humble feebles« (l. 23), which render her vulnerable to the »soft« but powerful »Intruder« (l. 11), the pose of feminine passivity only serves as a transparent disguise of the fact that this is a highly confident first-person speaker taking the part of, indeed identifying with, an active, if not aggressive, passion urging gratification through the conversion of another's will to its own aims and wishes. Behn's poem, it should be noted, is a study of eros, but it is emphatically neither a study of innocuous »love« nor of (ostensibly) naive pastoral dalliance. _____________ 132 The Works of Aphra Behn, vol. 1, 281–284; in the following, line numbers are given in brackets after the quotation.
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There are few elements of pastoral here; indeed, like the court, as »proper sphear« of love affairs (l. 52), the »silent Groves«, »Flowry beds«, and »sheltering Woods« (ll. 40–51) are sought out and soon rejected as sceneries in which desire could be safely counted upon to appear. Still, a faint yet unmistakeable echo of pastoral parlance is heard when the object of the speaker's desire is identified as the »dear Shepherd« Lysander (l. 72). What is being anatomised and celebrated in this ambivalent fashion, however, although it does preserve some of its fundamental structures, is no unadulterated Petrarchan feeling. There is nothing civilising in this egotistical and profoundly antisocial impulse and in the energies it tries to master. It does not lead the tormented soul to spiritual purification; its victims cannot hope for self-perfection and they never gain the (however precarious) balance of a quasi-heavenly equilibrium anticipating a higher happiness. Behn's eros retains the power to disturb, perhaps to destroy, certainly to lead to ruin. It may be driven by an urge to transcend the self, but the resulting ›metaphysic‹ of excess is one of severely immanent, if astonishingly heightened, subjectivity. Behn's poem abounds with figures of concealment. Desire is from the first nameless and hidden, present but latent: What Art thou, oh! thou new-found pain? From what infection dost thou spring? Tell me —— oh! tell me, thou inchanting thing, Thy nature, and thy name; Inform me by what subtil Art, What powerful Influence, You got such vast Dominion in a part Of my unheeded, and unguarded, heart, That fame and Honour cannot drive yee thence. (ll. 1–9)
Like a secret agent, desire has managed by its »subtil Art« to insinuate itself into the speaker's heart, to occupy and govern it in a manner at the same time disturbing and strangely enjoyable. It also remains poetically anonymous, dissembling its true state. It is not presented as allegory, for it is wholly itself – but what it is remains highly questionable; hence, fittingly, the dominant interrogatory mode of the poem, which refrains from answering the questions it poses. Desire is variously addressed as »malicious spright« (l. 24) or »peevish Phantôm« (l. 31), but never seems to assume a stable shape. From »unform'd somthing« (l. 39) waiting to be aroused (but not to be conjured up at will or made subservient to »interest«; ll. 26, 54) to god-like »Idol« (l. 80), it appears capable of being everything; a shape-shifter, whose hallmark is disguise. Indeed, together with its absolute contingency, dissimulation is of its paradoxical essence. It is also this feature which renders it not amenable to naturalist readings either. While this kind of desire seems to be a far cry from Petrarchist models, it does not conform to the competing ideological norm either. For although
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»Honour« is vilified almost as vigorously as in the love-letter quoted above, the poem simultaneously eschews all propagation of sincerity or ›natural‹ authenticity. On the contrary, while ›Nature‹ does not appear at all except in pastoral costume, the erotic intensity of the experience is clearly linked with its concealment and with the false fronts which barely mask it. Honour, in the »fair ones« (l. 89) who strive to keep their countenance and their reputation, may be merely a »false disguise« (l. 104), their pretended virtue »but a cheat« (l. 88), but this kind of counterfeit forms an indispensable part of the game of desire. It is a »needful fraud« (l. 110), without which this passion would not be able to gather its »mighty power« (l. 111). Dissimulation is the façade behind which it holds imperial sway, vainly denying the ubiquity it conceals. Desire is thus construed as a duplicitous absolute. It retains features of divinity, and its devotees do receive certain benefits. But while its origins may remain in the dark, its gifts and their consequences are remarkable, at the same time deeply disturbing as well as elevating: Tell me, thou nimble fire, that dost dilate Thy mighty force thrô every part, What God, or Human power did thee create In my, till now, unfacile heart? Art thou some welcome plague sent from above In this dear form, this kind disguise? Or the false offspring of mistaken love, Begot by some soft thought that faintly strove, With the bright peircing Beautys of Lysanders Eyes? Yes, yes, tormenter, I have found thee now; And found to who thou dost thy being owe, 'Tis thou the blushes dost impart, For thee this languishment I wear, 'Tis thou that tremblest in my heart When the dear Shepherd do's appear, I faint, I dye with pleasing pain, My words intruding sighing break When e're I touch the charming swain When e're I gaze, when e're I speak. Thy conscious fire is mingl'd with my love, As in the sanctify'd abodes Misguided worshippers approve The mixing Idol with their Gods. In vain, alas! in vain I strive With errors, which my soul do please and vex, For superstition will survive, Purer Religion to perplex. (ll. 58–84)
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In more than one sense, this is the central passage in Behn's pindaric. Still riddled with Petrarchist oxymora – from »welcome plague« to »pleasing pain« – and other commonplace motifs of Neoplatonic love poetry, such as the »bright peircing Beautys of Lysanders Eyes« or the failure of language caused by an encounter with the beloved, it manages, while it divests itself of the traditional patterns, to redirect their structural energies so as to tease out something new. The structure emerging is, again, duplicitous. While traces of the older discourse are still palpable, for instance in personified desire trembling in the speaker's heart and determining her behaviour against her will, the text at the same time conveys a sense of genuine physical urgency, with the senses taking over and uncontrollable sighs interrupting well-formed utterance. While it avoids naturalist reductions, this is no mere reinstatement of the conventional either. Similar to the rejection of courtly and pastoral sceneries which still retain their empty shells as potential stages for the performances of ideal love, perhaps even for the reinvention of sprezzatura as a new kind of (decidedly anti-puritan) erotic magnanimity, in further gestures of suggestion and negation, a religious context is evoked and shown to be undermined by the rhetoric and liturgy of desire as rival deity demanding adoration and, possibly, sacrifice. The result of this blending, again, is highly ambivalent: the »worshippers« of desire are »Misguided«; what they revere is an »Idol«; they are vexed by »errors«. Still, the »superstition« they have fallen prey to appears strong and lively. It resists instrumentalization as well as suppression and will remain a thorn in the side of »Purer Religion«, with a view to winning more proselytes. What remains is a perplexity,133 losses and gains appearing inextricably mixed. The productive irritation caused by this state is perhaps best summed up in the phrase »conscious fire« (l. 77), experienced by the speaker as »mingl'd« with her love. But this formula actually refers to the greatest benefit of the heresy described. Taking up the idea of the »nimble fire« (l. 58) which spreads its invigorating force through the initiate's body, it implies both physical heat, elemental strength, consuming passion and an enthusiasm bordering on fury. As »conscious« mania, however, this is a madness which knows itself. What the idolatrous worshipper of desire gains is above all self-awareness. Conversely, lack of this kind of reflexivity is the main target of the scorn the speaker pours upon the fair ones bent only on preserving their reputations. Unlike herself, they have not yet learnt to know themselves, and they lack insight into their own (as yet unconscious) dissimulation. This is here revealed as vain attempt to repress what they refuse to recognise. Like the speaker's, their ›feminine‹ chastity is a performance – but as such, because it lacks motivation and it does not realise that it is a performance, it is deficient. There is a conversion in store for them, too, try as _____________ 133 »Perplex« occurs twice in the poem (ll. 84 and 113), both times as a verbal correlative to the dynamic force of desire, rhyming first with »vex« and, finally – four lines from the end – with »sex«.
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they may to »veil« their passions in their »pride« (l. 108). The prognosis is given in the final couplet (ll. 115–116): So Helen while from Theseus arms she fled, To charming Paris yeilds her heart and Bed.
The comparison sits oddly with a poem that has, so far, avoided learned allusion. But, by calling upon a mythical narrative of surpassing beauty and irresistible desire, it manages to convey in a suitably open conclusion once again a sense of the ambivalence of the passion celebrated here: For, among the consequences of Paris's choice and Helen's yielding, is, of course, not only erotic pleasure but also the Trojan War. Desire is cast in Behn's poem as an agent of potentially radical, even catastrophic, transformation. It is also presented as a transformation which the speaking subject has already experienced and which provides her with the vantage point from which she views the world. This is the perspective of glorious ruin. But it also emerges as a figure of transparent dissimulation. Desire, in everyone, is an open secret. It is human, especially female, nature unveiled – and discovered as ›naturally‹ dissembling. While the relationships described in this poem, however, are no longer supported by a belief in the artificial naturalness of pastoral nor by an unbroken trust in the natural artificiality of courtliness, the enforced naturalism of libertine ideology is held in abeyance as well. The open ending leaves space not only for the simulative play of imagination, but also hides, once again, the naked truth of nature by a fable – a literary fiction which can be read in a number of ways. As transparent dissimulation, the figure of desire thus emerges as a figure of authorial self-empowerment. For it is paradoxically the experience of desire, that is, the experience of utter heteronomy, which establishes the speaking subject in a position of superior insight and control. As »Lysander« is identified as its representative, the female speaking voice comes to be an agent of desire. Having recognised her own predicament, she comes to see through all: »From me the needful fraud you cannot hide« (l. 110). Self-awareness and reflection, mainstays of systematic Neoplatonism, here function primarily as the conditions of being able to imagine what others hide. Hence, desire itself becomes the object of desire. It provides Behn's speaker with an extremely heightened sense of self. It appears as the ultimate source of authorial knowledge and poetic power. Eros, no longer contained in metaphysical truth and, irreducible to masculine fictions of sexual liberty, emerges as analogon to a transcendence which no longer has a (philosophical) name. But, as this poem with its open ending suggests, the logic of transparent dissimulation still makes possible transgression and delightful excess. With its fading Neoplatonic contours it remains at the heart of a generous gesture – kalon ergon, risking glorious ruin.
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INDEX Abraham, Lyndy 201, 254 Agrippa of Nettesheim, Henricus Cornelius 197, 198 Alain de Lille [Alanus ab Insulis] 102 Allen, Don Cameron 196 Alter, Robert 43 Anaximander 130 Anne, Countess of Warwick 48 Apianus, Petrus 196 Aretino, Pietro 38, 42, 43 Aristotle 126, 248 Armstrong, A. H. 61, 64, 147, 157, 158 Aubrey, John 112 Augustinus, Aurelius 10, 48, 49, 80, 95, 151, 163–166, 170, 175–177, 181, 183, 206 Bacon, Francis 4, 99, 100, 138 Bacon, Nicholas 125 Baldwin, Anna 9 Balthasar, Hans Urs von 3 Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb 185 Behn, Aphra 16, 17, 208, 237, 238, 255–283 Beierwaltes, Werner 2, 3, 7, 9, 15, 16, 63, 65, 73, 82, 124, 144, 159, 192 Bembo, Pietro 46 Benivieni, Antonio 48 Bennett, Joan 116 Bergemann, Lutz 65, 198 Berger, Harry, Jr. 23, 145, 148, 152 Berry, Boyd M. 167, 168, 211 Bieman, Elizabeth 48 Birkner, Gerd 176 Black, Max 67 Blevins, Jacob 167
Blumenberg, Hans 32, 45, 65 Blunden, Edmund 195 Boethius 48 Böhme, Jacob 81, 208 Bourdette, Jr., Robert E. 196 Bovillus, Carolus 135 Boyle, Robert 8, 213 Braden, Gordon 33 Bridgeman, Orlando 167, 168, 211 Browne, Thomas 4, 14, 16, 31, 87–139, 140–142, 148, 150, 153, 156, 168, 169, 171, 185, 187, 207 Bruno, Giordano 48 Bryson, Anna 22, 23 Bunyan, John 170, 261 Burnyeat, Miles 88 Burton, Robert 116 Bush, Douglas 91, 124 Büttner, Stefan 9, 260 Camden, William 112 Camerarius, Joachim 195, 196, 246 Carew, Thomas 17 Cassirer, Ernst 8, 76, 135 Castiglione, Baldesar 22, 31, 36, 37, 47, 49, 110, 154, 242 Cato 118 Charles I. 246–248 Charles II. 186, 242, 256, 278 Chernaik, Warren 293, 240, 241 Chew, Audrey 33 Christina, Queen of Sweden 155 Cicero 121, 126, 245, 248 Claydon, Tony 7 Clucas, Stephen 183 Coffey, John 77, 78
306 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 2, 89, 94, 212 Colie, Rosalie L. 83, 84, 98, 121–123, 141–145, 148, 149, 211, 245 Collinson, Patrick 78 Comenius, Johann Amos 136 Como, David R. 77, 78 Congreve, William 259, 260 Conrad, Peter 212 Conway, Anne 3, 5, 8, 76, 79, 155, 168, 197 Cowley, Abraham 279 Cragg, Gerald R. 8 Creech, Thomas 256 Croft, Herbert 241 Cromwell, Oliver 78, 244–252, 254 Cudworth, Ralph 9, 65, 75, 77 Culverwell, Nathanael 1–3, 5, 8, 16, 18 Curtius, Benedict 126 Cyrus 128, 133, 140 Danneberg, Lutz 23 Danson, Thomas 253 Dante Alighieri 118 Della Casa, Giovanni 22 Derrida, Jacques 15, 131 Descartes, René 4, 18, 77 Didi-Huberman, Georges 123, 131, 152 Dillingham, William 1 Dillon, John M. 158, 160, 161 Dionysius Areopagita 2, 3, 10, 11, 13, 15, 16, 54, 80–82, 85, 102, 122–124, 131, 144, 146, 150, 173, 187, 197, 199, 201, 206, 214, 223, 257 Dobell, Bertram 211 Donne, John 6, 17, 25, 26, 31, 32, 38, 46, 55–58, 66, 67, 170 Donnelly, M. L. 240 Doody, Margaret Anne 261 Dörrie, Heinrich 53, 70 Dryden, John 255 Duclow, Donald 11 Durr, R. A. 198 Dzelzainis, Martin 239, 240, 241
Index
Ebeling, Florian 196 Ebreo, Leone 48 Edward, First Lord Herbert of Cherbury, see Herbert, Edward Eliot, T. S. 91, 187, 195, 239, 240 Elizabeth I. 242 Ellrodt, Robert 48 Elyot, Thomas 47, 49 Epicurus 32, 104, 118 Erler, Michael 8 Evelyn, John 4 Everard, John 79, 81, 82 Feake, Christopher 250 Ficino, Marsilio 31, 33–37, 48, 54, 66, 102, 168, 171, 183, 218 Finch, Jeremia S. 126 Fish, Stanley 90, 94, 100, 101, 107, 156 Flasch, Kurt 163 Foss, Martin 81 Fowler, Roger 109 Frontain, Raymond-Jean 56 Gale, Theophilus 168 Gale, Thomas 223 Gansfort, Johan Wessel 111 Garner, Ross 196 Gascoigne, George 49 Gassendi, Pierre 18, 98 Gaukroger, Stephen 4, 206 Geitner, Ursula 23 Gersh, Stephen 3 Ginzburg, Carlo 97, 98 Grant, Edward 138 Grotius, Hugo 17, 98 Guazzo, Stefano 22 Hack-Molitor, Gisela 111 Hadot, Pierre 2, 5, 6, 32, 33, 36, 157, 159–162, 205 Halfwassen, Jens 9, 15, 180, 192 Hall, Joseph 111 Halley, Janet E. 136 Halliwell, Stephen 12, 192, 260
307
Index
Hambrick-Stowe, Charles 77 Harris, Francis 4, 213, 278 Hayes, Thomas Wilson 80–82 Hedley, Douglas 212 Helmig, Christoph 13 Henkel, Arthur 93, 195, 246 Henrich, Dieter 180 Henry VIII. 242 Herbert, Edward 16–29, Herbert, George 17, 25, 84, 152, 170, 198, 215, 246 Herbert, Magdalen 16 Hermes Trismegistus 168, 182, 196 Hevelius, Johannes 138 Heyl, Christoph 130 Hill, Christopher 239 Hinz, Manfred 22 Hippocrates 137, 138 Hirst, Derek 71 Hobbes, Thomas 225, 256 Hoby, Thomas 242 Hoffman, Th. S. 65 Holmes, Elizabeth 196 Homer 118 Hoorn, Tanja van 130 Hopton, Susanna 167, 211, 213 Horn, Christoph 5, 157, 158, 161 Hoskyns, John 130 Hughes, Derek 261 Huntley, Frank Livingstone 118, 125, 127, 138 Hutton, Sarah 3, 5, 8, 9, 17, 76, 171, 197 Iamblichos 13, 197 Inge, Denise 167, 169, 182, 211, 213, 225, 230, 236, 237 Inge, W. R. 8 Ingelo, Nathaniel 155, 160 Inwood, Brad 33 Iser, Wolfgang 13 Jackson, Thomas 168 Jacob, Alexander 9 James II. 256
James, Susan 163, 166 Jardine, Lisa 7 Jauß, Hans Robert 13 Jayne, Sears 8 Johannes Scotus Eriugena 3, 15, 16, 81, 82, 85, 122, 124, 140, 177, 223 John, St. (Evangelist) 11 Jonson, Ben 17, 25 Justin Martyr 135 Kamphaus, Franz 11 Keck, Thomas 89 Keeble, N. H. 79, 83, 84, 240 Keith, George 3–5 Kelly, G. 258 Kemmann, Ansgar 204 Kermode, Frank 43, 142 Keynes, Geoffrey 87, 106, 115 Klibansky, Raymond 35, 135 Klonsky, Milton 142, 151 Korshin, Paul J. 67 Kraye, Jill 33 L'Estrange, Roger 278 La Calprenède, Gauthier de Costes de 261 Lafayette, Marie-Madelaine, Madame de 259 Lambert, Ladina Bezzola 104 Lanham, Richard A. 22, 242 Lausberg, Heinrich 242 Lauster, Jörg 80 Le Gros, Thomas 111 Le Roy, Louis 48 Leeuwenhoek, Anton van 98 Levinas, Emmanuel 15 Lewis, Matthew 263 Lim, Paul C. H. 77, 78 Lipking, Joanna 258 Lobsien, Eckhard 9, 22, 34, 37, 110, 149, 198, 212 Lobsien, Verena Olejniczak 4, 5, 9, 22, 31, 33, 34, 37, 47, 60, 76, 79, 86, 88,
308 89, 110, 130, 149, 156, 194, 198, 237, 241, 242, 254, 256, 258, 261 Löffler, Arno 130 Lohfink, Norbert 116 Long, A. A. 6, 32 Louth, Andrew 3, 10 Lucretius 34, 256 Lugowski, Clemens 261 Luke, St. (Evangelist) 11 MacCaffrey, Isabel 142 MacCulloch, Diarmaid 206 Mahnke, Dietrich 65 Maltzahn, Nicholas von 241 Margaret, Countess of Cumberland 48 Margoliouth, H. M. 167, 211 Mark, St. (Evangelist) 11 Marks [Sicherman], Carol 168, 171, 182, 183 Marotti, Arthur 26 Marshall, William 92, 93 Martin, L. C. 87, 89, 90, 102, 106, 109, 116, 127, 135 Martz, Louis L. 111, 200 Marvell, Andrew 6, 14, 16, 31, 32, 39, 59, 60–86, 98, 156, 168, 185, 208, 237–254 Matthew, St. (Evangelist) 11 Mauburnus, Joannes 111 McGinn, Bernard 79 McKeon, Michael 261 Menn, Stephen 33 Monmouth, James Scott, Duke of 256 Montaigne, Michel de 20, 89, 103 Moog-Grünewald, Maria 80, 186 More, Henry 4, 5, 9, 75–77, 79, 155, 168, 170, 171, 183, 196, 197, 212 Morill, John 78 Mulder, John R. 101 Mulsow, Martin 7 Nathanson, Leonard 92, 118 Neumeyer, Martina 121
Index
Nicolaus of Cusa 64, 80–82, 85, 91, 102, 122, 135, 142 Nicolson, Marjorie Hope 197, 211, 212 Nussbaum, Martha 94, 157, 237 O'Meara, John J. 3 Olk, Claudia 60 Origen 96 Oster, Patricia 207 Ovid 132 Pailin, David A. 17–19 Panofsky, Erwin 35 Parmenides 45, 65 Patrides, C. A. 8, 9, 16, 74, 77, 83, 99– 101, 109, 126, 127, 177, 222, 236 Patterson, Annabel 238–240, 244, 245, 247–249, 251 Paul, St. (Apostle) 1, 80, 98, 217 Payne, Henry Nevil 259 Perkins, William 79 Pettet, E. C. 196 Pfister, Manfred 7 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni 48, 80, 91, 135, 170, 171, 176, 183, 197, 214, 218, 219, 220, 224 Plato 2, 11, 32, 34, 62, 65, 90, 105, 109, 117, 132, 135, 158–160, 168, 171, 175, 205, 219, 260 Plett, Heinrich F. 23 Pliny 195, 196 Plotinus 2, 5, 9–11, 13–15, 36, 38, 53, 60–65, 70, 72, 74, 75, 91, 100, 142, 151, 157–163, 165, 166, 171–174, 178–180, 192, 205, 219, 222, 224, 227, 228, 230 Popkin, Richard 4, 33, 88 Porta, Gianbattista 126 Power, Henry 106 Preston, Claire 90, 110, 112–114, 127, 129 Pritchard, Allan 167, 171 Proclus 2, 7, 9, 14, 15, 63, 65, 76, 144, 197
309
Index
Puttenham, George 49, 59, 121, 128, 203, 204, 242 Quintilian 49, 126, 242 Radcliffe, Ann 263 Radke[-Uhlmann], Gyburg 7, 63, 204 Raimundus Sabundus 196 Rappe, Sara 7, 13, 180 Rebholz, Ronald 42, 43 Richards, I. A. 67 Rist, John 163, 206 Robbins, R. H. 87 Rochester see Wilmot, John Rogers, G. A. John 8 Rosenthal, Laura J. 258 Rudrum, Alan 186, 189, 191, 196, 198, 208 Rupp, Susanne 175 Salzman, Paul 259 Sawday, Jonathan 49 Saxl, Fritz 35 Schabert, Ina 8, 52 Schmidt-Biggemann, Wilhelm 78 Schmitt, Arbogast 204 Schöne, Albrecht 93, 195, 246 Schoonhovius, Florentius 98 Sextus Empiricus 32, 94 Shapin, Steven 23 Shklovsky, Victor 14, 225 Shuttleworth, J. M. 17, 21 Sidney [Herbert], Mary, Countess of Pembroke 55 Sidney, Philip 31, 32, 38, 39–42, 49, 55–57, 59, 243 Simpson, John 250 Singer, Thomas C. 129 Skinner, Quentin 23 Smith, D. I. B. 240 Smith, John 74, 75, 79, 83, 100 Smith, Julia J. 167, 169, 211, 225 Smith, Nigel 78, 79, 81, 141, 149, 155, 293, 243, 248, 250
Socrates 118, 168 Speake, Jennifer 196, 197 Spenser, Edmund 32, 38, 46, 47–55, 59, 60, 144, 151, 152 Spurr, John 77 Steel, Carlos 13 Sterry, Peter 168, 171 Stock, Wiebke-Marie 12–14 Straznicky, Marta 89 Stringer, Gary 56 Surrey, Henry Howard, Earl of 23 Szaif, Jan 158 Targoff, Ramie 26, 58 Tauler, Johannes 81 Tertullian 97, 99, 101, 120 Till, Dietmar 23 Todd, Janet 255, 256 Tornau, Christian 10, 14, 63 Traherne, Thomas 6, 16, 56, 95, 141, 148, 175–187, 206, 210–236, 237 Tulloch, John 8, 206 Turner, Francis 241 Twombly, Robert G. 42 Tyndale, William 80 Uhlig, Claus 23 Underhill, Evelyn 115 Vaughan, Henry 15, 16, 82, 168, 175, 185–213, 215 Vaughan, Thomas 188, 196–202 Warnke, Frank J. 90, 121 Watt, Ian 261 Weber, Max 79 Westerkamp, Dirk 15 Whichcote, Benjamin 16, 74, 76, 83, 87, 100, 109, 177, 222, 236 White, Helen C. 216, 225, 227 Wickram, Jörg 261 Wilcox, Helen 253 Wilde, Cornelia 4, 213, 278 Wilding, Michael 254
310 Wilkins, John 136 Willey, Basil 18, 19, 91, 100 Williamson, George 118 Wilmot, John, 2nd Earl of Rochester 256 Worden, Blair 78 Wordsworth, William 195, 212, 225
Index
Worthington, John 155 Wyatt, Thomas 23, 31, 32, 38, 42–46, 56 Zeno 32 Zook, Melinda S. 257 Zwicker, Steven 71
