The Holy and the Daemonic from Sir Thomas Browne to William Blake

by Robert D. Stock

Overview

Focusing particularly on literary texts, but including biographical and intellectual background, this study examines numinous feeling as it is recorded by a number of seventeenth and eighteenth-century writers: Browne, Drydcn, Pascal; Pope and Swift; Hume and Johnson; eight other poets, including Watts, Smart, Cowper, and Blake; and four novelists, including Richardson, Radcliffe, and Monk" Lewis. Professor Stock demonstrates that the Enlightenment was far more complicated than can be grasped by an exclusive focus on its rationalism and skepticism.

Originally published in 1982.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691614601
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	07/14/2014
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #610
Pages:	408
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.20(h) x 0.90(d)

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The Holy and the Daemonic from Sir Thomas Browne to William Blake

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By R. D. Stock

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1982 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06495-6

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CHAPTER 1

The Plurality of Brave New Worlds: the Numen and the Lumen

Canst thou draw out leviathan with a hook? or his tongue with a cord which thou lettest down?

Job

The assertions of Christianity, when freed from their mythological incrustations ... happen unfortunately to be true. Our universe is the universe of Behemoth and Leviathan, not of Helvetius and Godwin.

Aldous Huxley

When in The Tempest Miranda marvels at the diversity of life beyond her island home, she exclaims= "0 brave new world / That has such people in't!" "Tis new to thee," says Prospero, mingling paternal affection with a dulcet irony. Although his rejoinder is less often quoted than Miranda's interjection, one is apt to recall it when encountering yet another inventory of "new world-views" hatched by the Enlightenment, the Restoration, or the Renaissance. In fact the idea of a "brave new world" is nowadays seldom treated with much grandiosity or hopefulness. The title of Louis I. Bredvold's belligerent story study, The Biave New World of the Enlightenment, is flagrantly ironic, as is that of Aldous Huxley's famous Utopian nightmare, which shows the dehumanizing propensities of technological positivism. I tend to view the phrase ironically myself, partly because I am unable to share the whig critics' zeal for a world wrought by the philosophes. But it strikes me as ironic for a less private reason. I had originally thought to argue that in the eighteenth century there was a decisive break between an older supernatural and a newer naturalistic or positivist point of view. The more I studied, however, the more I realized that the incubative phase of the Enlightenment has been pushed back further and further by scholars, some glimpsing it in the Restoration; some in the Renaissance with Montaigne's famous Apologie de Raymond Sebond; some in the Paduan school and its most exorbitant pupil, Giordano Bruno,· some in the fourteenth century when learning began to migrate from monastery to urban university. Some, finally, have spied it in the nominalism of Averroes (1120–1198), whose skepticism influenced the Paduan school. For that matter rationalism and skepticism are readily endenizened in the classical period, with Pyrrho, Sextus Empiricus, Lucretius. So I abandoned a thesis that was neither original nor, as I decided, significantly true, concluding that rational and non-rational expressions are found at any time, though in different shapes and percentages. I realized, too, that one must draw distinctions between the intelligentsia and the populace, for what prevails in one quarter may not prevail in another, nor do attitudes obtaining in intellectual circles inevitably sift down to the vulgar, as it is sometimes alleged. For example, aristocratic libertinism in the Restoration never inveigled the people and was itself counteracted by the revival of official morality in the early eighteenth century.

While I was thus floundering about, however, one stubborn fact remained before me. A rationalistic, anti-religious spirit does dominate the intelligentsia today. This spirit manifests itself in the premises and procedures of hard and soft sciences alike; it has insinuated itself into the humanities; it has given contemporary society its technological tone or drift. Despite crannies of reaction or resistance, its power operates even among the masses, though to be sure I am speaking only of the developed countries. The very difficulty I am about to discuss, the perplexity experienced but not always recognized by modern critics when they seek to interpret traditional literature, shows that a new world has indeed been born. Whether it is a world presided over by officious but benign Prosperos, or just Calibans slouching toward their destiny, is a question beyond my ability or desire to resolve.

My purpose in this chapter is to illustrate and define the beliefs and principles to be traced in this study. At the same time, I shall glance at a few of the misreadings of older works perpetrated by modern critics: for surely some of these commentators are as naive as Miranda, genuinely unaware that the intellectual island they inhabit is still relatively new and, measured against the continent of human history, small. I should like to look at John Donne and Job. The first is often taken as a gloomy herald of the brave new world, while Job promotes those beliefs that it found most odious.

* * *

Most studies of seventeenth-century intellectual history sooner or later mention Donne's famous remark in The First Anniversary (1611):

    And new Philosophy calls all in doubt,
    The Element of fire is quite put out;
    The Sun is lost, and th'earth, and no mans wit
    Can well direct him where to looke for it.
    And freely men confesse that this world's spent,
    When in the Planets, and the Firmament
    They seeke so many new; they see that this
    Is crumbled out againe to his Atomies.
    'Tis all in peeces, all cohaerence gone;
    All just supply, and all Relation:

What, precisely, is Donne saying? We are usually told that Donne, an inhabitant of the traditional, tidy, divinely sanctioned universe, is dismayed by the naturalistic and skeptical implications of the new science. These caused him "distress and confusion," or were "profoundly upsetting" to him,· he is "appalled at the destruction of order"; or he is lamenting that the cosmos now has been deprived of meaning; he is describing the "malaise" ushered in with the ascendance of revolutionary Copernicanism. Is he, then, some Jacobean Yeats, lamenting in his quaint language: "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold"? In truth Donne's poem, though an elegy, does not elegize the desuetude of an established religious view, but rather the death of an individual. Of course it has a wider theme: man's lapse from innocence and his mounting depravity. The earlier part of the poem culminating in this celebrated passage expounds a perfectly orthodox view of the degeneracy of man and his world as a consequence of the Fall and Original Sin. The doubt and apparent disorder caused by the new philosophy is but another symptom of man's intellectual corruption. Most commentators cease quoting the passage where I have left off, but it is a trifle odd to stop at a colon. The poem continues:

    Prince, Subject, Father, Sonne, are things forgot,
    For every man alone thinkes he hath got
    To be a Phoenix, and that then can bee
    None of that kinde, of which he is, but hee.

In other words: "Every man thinks he has come to be a Phoenix (preferring private judgment to authority) and that then comparison ceases, for there is nothing of the same kind with which to compare himself. There is nothing left to reverence." Donne is not expressing belief in the new philosophy; he is not saying that we should be distressed, or fear it, because it may be true. The new philosophy is only the bad fruit of our degeneracy, and if we are disturbed by it, that is because it has contributed to social and ethical anarchy, to rampant individualism, to a denial of the holy. The theme is very like that of Ulysses's signal speech in Troilus and Ciessida, I, iii, with the new philosophy as merely a new eruption of chaos. When in The Second Anniversary Donne returns to the new science, he contemptuously contrasts the trivial knowledge it affords with the intuitive understanding conferred on us in the afterlife:

    Thou look'st through spectacles; small things seem great
    Below; But up unto the watch-towre get,
    And see all things despoyl'd of fallacies:
    Thou shalt not peepe through lattices of eyes,
    Nor heare through Labyrinths of eares, nor learne
    By circuit, or collections to discerne.
    In heaven thou straight know'st all, concerning it,
    And what concernes it not, shalt straight forget.

"It was not of religion he doubted but of science, of human knowledge with its uncertainties, its shifting theories, its concern about the unimportant." Thus states Grierson, Donne's first scholarly editor, many years since.

Grierson was of an older generation, and nimble-witted critics now have discerned in the passage from The First Anniversary a premonition that the new world of science and skepticism is displacing the old, ordered world of faith. Where Grierson sees contempt, they find fear and confusion. But the fear and confusion they find is their own, and to foist it on Donne they must blink the transparent irony of his famous passage. Donne issues a lament, not for the old way passing, but for the old way continuing: that is to say, for man's inveterate drift into egotism and blasphemy. In the olden times we threw up towers of Babel or, like Job's friends, tried to ensnare God in human concepts,· now we toy with a new philosophy. I am not saying, of course, that Donne failed to see the new science as potentially destructive; I am arguing that he saw it as trumpery, just another instance of man's "vain imaginings," and that it did not cause in him or, so far as one can tell from the poem, in anyone else a crisis of faith. For Donnei the brave new world of science and naturalism is not an intellectual threat, though it may be a threat of the sort that Voegelin, Bredvold, and Aldous Huxley see. It is the latest specimen of man's pride of intellect, when he denies his dependency on God and tries to create a world evacuated of the transcendent and the holy. Donne wrestled with God but not, I think, with belief in God.

* * *

To emancipate man from the tyranny of Jehovah, who is but a projection of man's own fears and the hugger-muggery of superstition= this was the prime motive of the rationalists. This is the stimulus behind their attacks on priestcraft, the Bible, belief in Providence or the daemonic and miraculous in life. It is this that actuated Voltaire to scribble on his letters his motto or slogan, Éciase I'Infâme, Crush out the Infamy (i.e., the Christian church). Of all the stories in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, none more offends against these views than the Book of Job. Conventional preachers interpret it to mean that we should submit to God's providence, but this is too jejune a gloss, for the concept of providence is intertwined with that of justice, and it is precisely the apparent injustice of the world that Job questions and that God, presumably, fails to answer. Victorian Idealists such as Josiah Royce assure us that God is in fact one with Job, that Job's sufferings are God's, and that this suffering is required for God's perfection. But this account, though more sophisticated than the conventional preacher's, is hardly less evasive, and in any event it slights the text, which clearly affirms that God is not Job but terrifyingly other than Job. Modern, secular humanists such as John Ciardi cynically repudiate God's reply to Job: "[Job] had asked for justice, and he had been answered with Size." Modern, liberal theologians see the message as simply "obeisance before an arbitrary and heartless Cosmic Power." Archibald MacLeish updates it in J. B. as a humanist manifesto: fob in effect forgives God in the end; except for human love, God himself would not exist. But all of these views, from the conventionally pious to the conventionally humanistic, distort or disdain the text, and finally are no more persuasive — certainly no more consoling — than the sardonic hermeneutics of Thomas Hobbes, who finds in Job that the right by which God rules us is not his love, but his power, that obedience to his power is our highest worship, not love or gratitude, and hence that God has "justified the Affliction by arguments drawn from his Power."

The skeptical modern humanist or intellectual descendant of Voltaire might well accept the rigor of Hobbes's logic but reject his authoritarian conclusions, as if to say, "God may be so, but I at least shall not worship him." The modern religious man, however, will be troubled by Hobbes's logic, and he may also wonder why, if that is the gist of Job, the book has haunted man's mind so long and so relentlessly. Hobbes's error lies in his verb justify, for God is not striving to justify himself in that work, or to furnish us with a theodicy or an intellectually comprehensible scheme. Rather, he exhibits to Job something of his ineffability, mystery, and power. Even before God appeared out of the whirlwind "Job already knew that God was big." This is Ciardi's complaint. But there are different ways of knowing things and different sorts of bigness. Job's friends have a theoretical knowledge of God's ways, and they are by no means fatuous arguers; in Lamb's fine phrase, they are superficially omniscient. But neither they nor Job have an adequate understanding of Yahweh, for they fail to grasp fully his transcendence and majesty. Thus the theme of Job is by its very nature incommunicable in satisfactory conceptual terms. No work better exemplifies MacLeish's own famous aphorism= "A poem should not mean / But be."

As critics and readers, however, we have an itch to analyse, and the commentary by Rudolf Otto is the best to my mind. For Otto, God's reply to Job out of the whirlwind is one of "the most remarkable [passages] in the history of religion." The poet has affirmed, not just God's power and wisdom, but his mystery and awesomeness. But why does the writer so dilate on the ostrich, the wild ass, the behemoth and the leviathan? Some of these are big, to be sure, and so far one agrees with Ciardi. But they are also ungainly, inutile, weird; we can neither ride them with comfort, control them with security, nor eat them with gratification. Indeed, we can have nothing to do with them, for they were not made for us, and to inquire into their existence were vain. They show forth not only God's power but his great fecundity, and teach us that the being and mind of God are beyond mensuration; he is the wholly other. Moreover, Job feels an inward calmness and peace after the theophany; Hobbes's tyrant-god might well have struck him dumb or dead. In addition to God's power and incomprehensibility the passage conveys "an intrinsic value in the incomprehensible — a value inexpressible, positive, and 'fascinating.' "God may show himself to man in diverse forms. To Job he has shown himself in his numinous or daemonic form, and so has convinced Job that he is not only big but ineffable, not only powerful but wondrous, and that we are totally dependent upon him. This is not "justification" in the usual sense, but neither is it brow-beating or bullying; such a view is inadequate to the power of the text; it would be like calling Lear "a study in filial ingratitude."

In theme, the Book of Job resembles Donne's First Anniversary, and both have been distorted in similar ways by those who cannot or will not abide their non-rational implications. For the author of Job, as for Donne, man is important and complicated, but he is finally limited and weak compared with divinity, spinning out theories, like Job's "comforters" and Donne's new philosophers, to drape over his radical incomprehension, his physical and intellectual frailty. Job wishes, in Donne's vein, to be a phoenix in his heart, "preferring private judgment to authority." Yet for many modern interpreters Job is, in its "true" or esoteric significance, skeptical and humanistic, while Donne, prescient of Matthew Arnold or Yeats, is the threnodist of a decaying faith.

* * *

However Job be interpreted, it is surely the locus classicus for the experience of the holy. Rudolf Otto, a theologian, has provided the classic modern study in his Idea of the Holy (1917), but it is a subject that has intrigued psychologists such as Carl Jung, sociologists such as Emile Durkheim, and literary men such as Arthur Machen, John Crowe Ransom, and C. S. Lewis. Because the experience so stubbornly resists discursive treatment, I thought it best to begin with an actual example in Job. I should like now to define three terms central to this book: the numinous, the daemonic, and the holy.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• Contents, pg. vii
• Plates, pg. ix
• Introductory. The Demons and the Scholars, pg. 3
• Chapter I. The Plurality of Brave New Worlds: the Numen and the Lumen, pg. 9
• CHAPTER II. High Doctrines of the Holy: The Supposed Fideism of Sir Thomas Browne, Dryden, and Pascal, pg. 24
• Chapter III. The Witch of Endor and the Gadarene Swine: The Debate over Witchcraft and Miracles in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, pg. 61
• CHAPTER IV. Propping with a Twig: Rationalism and Daemonianism in Pope and Swift, pg. 117
• Chapter V. Terror and Awe in Mid-Century Poetry: Watts, Akenside, Thomson, Young, pg. 161
• CHAPTER VI. Skeptical and Reverent Empiricism: Hume and Johnson, pg. 201
• CHAPTER VII. Spiritual Horror in the Novel: Richardson, Radcliffe, Beckford, Lewis, pg. 259
• CHAPTER VIII. Religious Love and Fear in Late Century Poetry: Smart, Wesley, Cowper, Blake, pg. 314
• EPILOGUE. The Next Stage, pg. 374
• INDEX, pg. 387