English Renaissance Literature and Contemporary Theory: Sublime Objects of Theology

English Renaissance Literature and Contemporary Theory

This page intentionally left blank

English Renaissance Literature and Contemporary Theory: Sublime Objects of Theology

Paul Cefalu

ENGLISH RENAISSANCE LITERATURE AND CONTEMPORARY THEORY: SUBLIME OBJECTS OF THEOLOGY Copyright © Paul Cefalu, 2007. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS. Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN13: 975-7-4039-7669-7 ISBN10: 1-4039-7669-4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data English Renaissance literature and contemporary theory: sublime objects of theology / Paul Cefalu p.cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 1-4039-7669-4 (alk. paper) 1. English literature—Early modern, 1500–1700—History and criticism. 2. Christian poetry, English—Early modern, 1500–1700— History and criticism. 3. Theology in literature. 4. Ontology in literature. 5. Poets, English—Early modern, 1500–1700—Philosophy. 6. Donne, John, 1572–1631—Religion. 7. Crashaw, Richard, 1613–1649—Religion. 8. Milton, John, 1608–1674—Religion 9. Traheme, Thomas, d. 1674—Religion. 10. Philosophy, Modern. I. Title PR438.R45C45 2007 821’3—dc22 2007060510 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Scribe Inc. First edition: July 2007 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

For Anna

This page intentionally left blank

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction

1

Chapter 1 States of Exception and Pauline Love in John Donne’s Sermons and Poetry

33

Chapter 2 Baroque Monads and Allegorical Immanence: A Reassessment of Richard Crashaw’s Imagery

69

Chapter 3 Tarrying with Chaos: John Milton’s Paradise Lost and the Ethics of Psychoanalysis

101

Chapter 4 Infinite Love and the Limits of Neo-Scholasticism in the Poetry and Prose of Thomas Traherne 141 Selected Bibliography

201

Index

207

This page intentionally left blank

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Sections of Chapter 3 were previously published as “Thomistic Metaphysics and Ethics in the Poetry and Prose of Thomas Traherne,” Literature and Theology 2002 16 (3): 248–69. I thank Oxford University Press for permission to reprint such material here. I also thank the Provost and Board of Trustees at Lafayette College for providing a sabbatical from teaching during the academic year 2006–2007, which allowed me to make final changes on the manuscript. For their helpful suggestions on earlier drafts of sections of this work, I would like to thank Julia Reinhard Lupton, Catherine Martin, and Marshall Grossman. For continuing support of my research, I also thank the chair of Lafayette’s English Department, Suzanne Westfall, as well as English Department colleagues, including Lee Upton, Lynn Van Dyke, and James Woolley. Thanks especially to Farideh Koohi-Kamali for supporting this project from its inception and to the entire Palgrave team, particularly Julia Cohen, Elizabeth Sabo, and Rosemi Mederos at Scribe, for their expert assistance in shepherding the book to publication. I extend a very warm thank you to David Schragg, my friend, neighbor, and frequent interlocutor on cultural studies and contemporary theory. This book is dedicated to Anna Siomopoulos, without whose support and partnership it would not have been possible.

This page intentionally left blank

   Introduction

If then, the problem of traditional (premodern) art was how to fill in the sublime Void of the Thing (pure Place) with an adequately beautiful object—how to succeed in elevating an ordinary object to the dignity of a Thing—the problem of modern art is, in a way, the opposite (and much more desperate) one: one can no longer count on the Void of the (Sacred) Place being there, offering itself to be occupied by human artefacts, so the task is to sustain the Place as such, to make sure that this Place itself will “take place”—in other words, the problem is no longer that of horror vacui, of filling in the Void, but rather, that of creating the Void in the first place.1 —Slavoj Z˘i ˘zek The aim of this investigation—in the urgency of the state of exception “in which we live”—was to bring to light the fiction that governs this arcanum imperii [secret of power] par excellence of our time. What the “ark” of power contains at its center is the state of exception—but this is essentially an empty space, in which a human action with no relation to law stands before a norm with no relation to life.2 —Giorgio Agamben Philosophy and psychoanalysis elaborate the same question. What is the thinkable relationship between truth and the void? The crux of the problem is the localization of the void. Philosophy and

2

E N G L I S H R E N A I S S A N C E L I T E R AT U R E / PAU L C E FA L U psychoanalysis agree that truth is separation; that the real is irreducible or, as Lacan says, unsymbolizable; that truth is different to knowledge, and that truth thus only occurs under condition of the void.3 —Alain Badiou

T

he epigraphs above, taken from the work of three of the most influential contemporary philosophers and cultural critics, share a preoccupation with the void or empty place as a foundational given of any ontology. Throughout each theorist’s work the constitutive void appears under different names and conceptual frameworks. ˘ iz˘ek, it is often used interchangeably with the Lacanian real as For Z well as the elusive objet a; for Agamben it is intrinsic to the sovereign exception or homo sacer; for Badiou it derives from the principles of naive and axiomatic set theory, in which the null or empty set founds any set theoretic multiple. It is the project of this book to determine to what extent this contemporary preoccupation with ontological voids, empty sets, and anomic spaces can help illuminate the religious aspects of the work of some key seventeenth-century religious writers, including John Donne, Richard Crashaw, John Milton, and Thomas Traherne. My fundamental claim is that when selected early modern devotional poets set out to represent subject-God relations, they often encounter some elusive aspect of God that, in Slovenian-Lacanian terms, seems “Other” to himself. This Other, while sometimes pre˘ iz˘ek’s sented directly as a void or empty place, is more often, in Z terms, “filled in” and depicted instead as some form of divine excess, whether it be an unsatisfiable desire (Donne), an infinitude (Traherne), chaos (Milton), or a Baroque object or image (Crashaw). While Donne and to a lesser extent Traherne, tend to disavow those numinous aspects of God that might subsist beneath such excesses, Crashaw and especially Milton, attempt to represent the intimate relationship between any creature’s and God’s intrinsic alterity. To the extent that Crashaw and Milton at times imply that a structural homology prevails between a subject’s and God’s own uncanny strangeness, their work exhibits what I will be describing, following Alenka Zupanc˘ic˘ and Lacan, as a “heroism of the lack”—one of the fundamental normative precepts of an “ethics of psychoanalysis.” As I describe in the following pages, such a radical gesture resembles, but is ultimately distinguishable from, Patristic and early modern

Introduction

3

unorthodox doctrines, including versions of dualism, mysticism, and negative theology. In Slovenian-Lacanian terms, God’s “Other” refers neither to some timeless, ontologically distinct counterforce or deity (Manichaeanism), nor simply to the privation of those anthropomorphized predicates that God might otherwise instantiate (negative or apophatic theology and mysticism). The theological radicalism outlined in this book more often evolves from an acknowledgement of God’s self-alienation that, importantly, God ultimately seems to share with any rank-and-file subject. We will see that such a radical poetics renders certain seventeenth-century dev˘ iz˘ek’s otional lyrics genuinely “sublime” in nature, according to Z reconstructed usage of the term.4 The meeting point of the contemporary notion of God’s excess and early modern heterodoxy is often anti-trinitarianism, for example, Socinianism and Arianism, which both deny the divinity of Christ. One of my arguments is that early modern poets fend off an acknowledgment of God’s unsatisfiable desire by having Christ name that desire, typically by establishing some form of paternal or divine law. Such a metapsychological process perverts one of Pauline theology’s basic tenets, according to which Christ displaces law with a gospel ethic of mercy and love. In the hands of some seventeenthcentury poets, then, anti-trinitarianism is indeed heretical but not for the reasons conventionally adduced by Reformed apologists of the Trinity. If the conventional defense of anti-trinitarianism is that God is fundamentally a unitary being, and so cannot incarnate himself as a multiple of three, the meta-heresy that I will be tracking is one that often posits anti-trinitarianism precisely because God cannot achieve self-sameness. In Slovenian-Lacanian terms, God’s Otherness is pretrinitarian and only through Christ’s all-too-human symbolic mediations can any subject avoid a direct encounter with this discomfiting aspect of God. As we will see in Chapter 3, for example, Milton’s Arianism, premised as it is on Christ’s ontic distinctness from God, allows Christ to perform the unique role of placating God’s indwelling antagonism or “chaotic” nature. While each chapter will pair the work of a contemporary theorist with a particular poet’s work alongside its relevant historical context— Agamben and Donne, Deleuze and Crashaw, Zupanc˘ic˘ and Milton, ˘ iz˘ek’s work will figure prominently in every Badiou and Traherne—Z ˘ iz˘ek’s thoroughgoing appropriation of Lacan in chapter. Given Z nearly all of his writings, Lacanian metapsychology, particularly as it

4

E N G L I S H R E N A I S S A N C E L I T E R AT U R E / PAU L C E FA L U

is found in Lacan’s later seminars (some of which have only recently been translated into English), will also come into play in each chapter. Since the turn to Lacan might seem historically belated, it will be ˘ iz˘ek ’s worth reviewing in some detail what is distinctive about Z Lacanianism—as well as the conceptual overlap among the work of ˘ iz˘ek, Agamben, Santner, and Badiou—before elaborating the ways Z contemporary theory can illuminate early modern theological and literary contexts. I should make clear at the outset that, while this book offers a series of close readings of selected seventeenth-century devotional lyrics and does turn to early modern religious history where relevant, the book is primarily concerned to introduce, or at least make palatable, contemporary theory to early modernists who are interested in seventeenth-century Protestant devotional literature. The following pages are therefore devoted more to detailed explications of contemporary, often Lacanian, views of the divine pathos, or a “suffering” God, and Pauline theology generally, than to explicating the various seventeenth-century denominational creeds and worldviews to which Donne, Crashaw, Milton, and Traherne seem to have at least nominally adhered.5 As such, some readers should be forewarned that, since I am as interested in using seventeenth-century devotional poetry to help unravel contemporary theory as I am in using such theory to interpret selected poems, there is a greater ratio of theory to literature in what follows than is typical of most recent book-length studies of seventeenth-century devotional literature. This methodological assumption need not be as startling as it might at first seem. Even if we accept, as I believe we should, that literary critics should not impose a priori theories onto literary texts—that, as Richard Strier has remarked, one should be skeptical of “general schemas that mandate what a text (or a valuable text) from a particular period must or must not do or mean”6—we might still rely on the open-endedness of literary texts in order to illuminate basic presuppositions of theoretical schemas, even “totalizing” ones such as psychoanalysis.

Theoretical Background: Z˘ iz˘ek, Agamben, Santner, and Badiou ˘ iz˘ek ’s work is concerned with the late work of Lacan, Much of Z which tends to focus more on the registers of the real and imaginary

Introduction

5

than the play of the signifier in the symbolic. As is perhaps well known, the imaginary describes the early developmental stage in which a body image or “perceptual gestalt” is formed through a process of mirroring, and the symbolic describes a complex signifying network, governed by its own internal rules, through which desire can be articulated, albeit never satisfied. Lacan’s definition of the real changes throughout his writings, but he generally describes the real as an unsymbolizable force or drive—that part of the subject that is partitioned or left over when the subject’s ego or imaginary identity is formed during the mirror stage. ˘ iz˘ek’s earliest, most systematic elaboration of the Lacanian real Z can be found in The Sublime Object of Ideology, where he notes that while the real in some sense developmentally precedes cultural inscription, the “Real is at the same time the product, remainder, leftover, scrap of this process of symbolization, the remnant, the excess that escapes symbolization and is as such produced by symbolization itself.”7 It may seem difficult to reconcile this notion of the real as it is more commonly understood in terms of lack, absence ˘ iz˘ek ’s counterintuitive point is that the real needs to be or void, but Z understood precisely as the positivity of such a lack, absence, or void: The Real is the fullness of the inert presence, positivity; nothing is lacking in the Real—that is, the lack is produced only by the symbolization: it is a signifier which introduces a void, an absence in the Real. But at the same time, the Real is in itself a hole, a gap, an opening in the middle of the symbolic order—it is the lack around which the symbolic order is structured. . . . The Real itself, in its positivity, is nothing but an embodiment of a certain void, lack, radical negativity.8

˘ iz˘ek claims here about the real can be illustrated Much of what Z from a more developmental perspective, especially in relation to Lacan’s notion of the gaze. In developmental terms, the gaze is first apprehended when the child realizes that the mother looks beyond the child for something that the child cannot provide. To meet up with the gaze, to have a face to face encounter, would be radically annihilating for the subject, entailing as it would an encounter with das Ding (the Thing)—the monstrous Other whose unencompassable desires represent something that is not only Other to the child, but also Other to the Other itself. Once situated in the symbolic realm of desire, one becomes attracted to partial objects of the drive (another’s look or voice, for example) precisely because such objects

6

E N G L I S H R E N A I S S A N C E L I T E R AT U R E / PAU L C E FA L U

benignly stand in for and conceal the more alienating gaze or voice of the Other. It should be remembered that the formative experience of mirroring assumes a triadic rather than dualistic structure: The subject comes into being not simply when it identifies with its reflection, but when another party, usually the mother, ratifies this identification by allowing the subject to see a resemblance between its reflection and the image of the mother. Importantly, and against dualistic theories of the gaze that one finds in film theory of the 1980’s, the gaze is threatening precisely because it exceeds the boundaries of both subject and object. Akin to the impersonal, elusive nature of Foucauldian power, the gaze operates through subjects rather than is appropriated by them. Mladen Dolar illustrates this well by pointing out that an authentic, albeit impossible, encounter with the gaze would occur when, looking at one’s reflection in the mirror, one were to observe the reflection unaccountably wink or grimace. The wink suggests the gaze because it is something alien not only to the subject but also to the image of the Other with which the sub˘ iz˘ek often uses the Lacanian neologism “extimate” ject identifies. Z to describe this aspect of the real that emerges in the symbolic but that somehow eludes the subjectivity of both subject and Other. We will see that such an unassumable strangeness extends beyond imaginary relations to the entire symbolic network and its related early modern religious ideologies. One should not conflate this metapsychological void or lack with any unreconstructed notion of “nothingness” or “vacuum”— the latter of which happens to be a well-known preoccupation of seventeenth-century cosmology and philosophy.9 The void or real, ˘ iz˘ek and Alenka Zupanc˘ic˘’s usage, is paradoxically especially in Z equated with an unnameable or unsymbolizable excess, which ˘ iz˘ek often describes as a “hard kernel.” Here again, a developmenZ tal explanation can be helpful. The transfer to the symbolic occurs when the subject undergoes an imaginary process of ceding objects to the mother, for example, the breast. The subject that emerges in the symbolic can thus be likened to a hollowed space, in which it experiences the loss of material objects that it never in fact had. What fills this voided space is not simply desire, but more technically the objet a, an object cause of desire that, in keeping with Lacan’s fundamentally end-directed notion of desire, is intimately connected with the telos, or function, of the subject. The object cause of desire

Introduction

7

is that “object” that particular desires and intentional objects futilely attempt to satisfy, hence Lacan’s notion that the originary void acquires a kind of positivity or even virtual materiality in the form of the objet a, which seems to exist over and beyond any symbolic matrix. In Z˘iz˘ek ’s hands, the Lacanian real is quite a supple concept put to particularly provocative use in his later work on theology, where Z˘iz˘ek will claim again and again not only that God, like any other subject, is a creature of lack, but also that Revelation proper ought to acknowledge this affinity between God and his creatures: “It is the very radical separation of man from God that unites us with God, since, in the figure of Christ, God is thoroughly separated from himself—thus the point is not to overcome the gap that separates us from God, but to take note of how this gap is internal to God himself.”10 We will see later, in relation to Alenka Zupanc˘i c˘ work, that an acknowledgment of this shared “void of desire” is a foundational premise of an “ethics of psychoanalysis,” according to which the ideal ethical agent, like Antigone or Paul Claudel’s Synge de Coufontaine, refuses to give up on her or his desire—refuses, that is, to deny the internal Otherness of oneself, one’s neighbor, and even God.

Agamben’s State of Exception ˘ iz˘ek to Agamben and the second epigraph above, If we move from Z we find that although Agamben’s work is steeped in the history of political theology as represented in the work of Carl Schmitt and Walter Benjamin, Agamben’s political theology analogizes, in some ˘ iz˘ek’s interpretation of Christianity’s perverse important respects, Z core. Recall Agamben’s notion cited in the second epigraph above that the state of exception “is essentially an empty space, in which a human action with no relation to law stands before a norm with no relation to life.” An integral feature of law is not only its dependency on a void or empty space that is other to or alien to law as such, but its reliance on a juridical void that seems to have a life of its own: It is as if the suspension of law freed a force or a mystical element, a sort of legal mana . . . that both the ruling power and its adversaries, the constituted power as well as the constituent power, seeks to appropriate. Force of law that is separate from the law, floating

8

E N G L I S H R E N A I S S A N C E L I T E R AT U R E / PAU L C E FA L U imperium, being-in-force without application, and, more generally, the idea of a sort of “degree zero” of the law—all these are fictions through which law attempts to encompass its own absence and to appropriate the state of exception, or at least to assure itself a relation to it.11

Agamben’s force of law without determinate content is not automatically exercised by the sovereign when constituted law and norms are suspended. The sovereign himself has to compete to appropriate this anomic space, hence Agamben’s comparison of the zone of exception to a floating signifier. To anticipate one of my arguments set forth in Chapter 1: In Donne’s hands, early modern divine right theory, which normally draws tight analogies between the absolutism of the secular magistrate and God, primarily ascribes this zone of exception to God rather than the monarch, even though such an anomic space is not unfailingly appropriable by God alone. Agamben’s theory of sovereign exceptionalism is described in more directly theological terms in Eric Santner’s groundbreaking The Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig. Drawing on the work of Freud, Franz Rosenzweig, and Walter Benjamin, Santner suggests that the ideal of love is one in which we unplug from “symbolic investitures.” By symbolic investitures Santner means “those social acts, often involving a ritualized transferal of a title and a mandate, whereby an individual is endowed with a new social status and role within a shared symbolic universe.”12 The most obvious example of a symbolic investiture is the interpellation of subjects by the sovereign, although Santner understands interpellation as subjectivization by the “sovereign exception.” To the extent that the sovereign exception is paradoxically within and outside of any juridical framework, symbolic investitures legitimate themselves by producing a “validity without meaning,” or an “interpellation without identification.” It is precisely this suturing of biopolitical life to the sovereign exception that produces subjects who languish in a state of suspension or death-in-life that Santner describes as “undeadening”: “We are, in a crucial sense, placed in the space of relationality not by way of intentional acts, but rather by a kind of unconscious transmission that is neither simply enlivening nor simply deadening, but rather, if I might put it that way, undeadening: it produces in us an internal alienness that has a particular sort of vitality and yet belongs to no form of life.”13 The project of

Introduction

9

Revelation, or of religious practice generally, is to negate these procedures of undeadening, to “deanimate the undead,” in order to unplug from the sovereign exception and open up to our own and our neighbor’s alienness. The parousia, or messianic moment, occurs, then, not apocalyptically during the end time, but immanently, in the midst of life, wherein one can embrace one’s own and the Other’s destitution, a form of negative subjectivity that survives the subtraction of predicative being. Biopolitical deanimation “means exposure not simply to the thoughts, values, hopes, and memories of the Other, but also to the Other’s touch of madness, to the way in which the Other is disoriented in the world, destitute, divested of an identity that firmly locates him or her in a delimited whole of some sort.”14 For Santner, any form of political theology needs to be negated for such a deanimation of biopolitical life to take effect. Judaism, at least in the hands of Harold Bloom and Rosenzweig, exemplarily suspends, in the name of monotheism, the very suspension of law by the secular magistrate: “Jewish monotheism in some fashion removes itself—‘unplugs’—from the enigmatic seductions of sovereign power and authority. . . . If indeed the Jewish God is a kind of Master, he is one that, paradoxically, suspends the sovereign relation.”15 In his most recent work, On Creaturely Life, Santner redescribes his notion of undeadness as a mode of “creatureliness.” Building on Julia Lupton’s fascinating essay on the creatureliness of Shakespeare’s Caliban, Santner argues that individuals are rendered creaturely when they are “ex-cited” by sovereign jouissance or surplus enjoyment: “[C]reaturely life is the life that is, so to speak, called into being, ex-cited, by exposure to the peculiar ‘creativity’ associated with this threshold of law and nonlaw; it is the life that has been delivered over to the space of the sovereign’s ‘ecstasy-belonging,’ or what we might call ‘sovereign jouissance.’”16 Political states of emergency (which correspond to theological miracles) create enigmatic signifiers that excite the subject, rendering him creaturely or even shamefully outside of himself.17 Santner’s notions of “undeadness” and “creatureliness” can be further illuminated by turning briefly to Nietzsche’s account of the Protestant ascetic ideal. Nietzsche notes, Everywhere the bad conscience, that “abominable beast,” as Luther called it . . . everywhere the scourge, the hair shirt, the starving body,

10

E N G L I S H R E N A I S S A N C E L I T E R AT U R E / PAU L C E FA L U contrition; everywhere the sinner breaking himself on the cruel wheel of a restless morbidly lascivious conscience; everywhere dumb torment, extreme fear, the agony of the tortured heart, convulsions of an unknown happiness . . . awake, everlastingly awake, sleepless, glowing, charred. . . . Thus was the man, “the sinner,” initiated into this mystery. This ancient mighty sorcerer in his struggle with displeasure, the ascetic priest—he had obviously won, his kingdom had come.18

In The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two, Zupanc˘ ic˘ describes the Nietzschean ascetic ideal as one in which the subject’s mortifying excitement is akin to Lacanian jouissance, an excess of pure passion, partially brought on by a superegoic command to enjoy. For Lacan, jouissance, situated beyond the pleasure principle, is an ecstatic release that is normally contained with the subject’s entry to the symbolic and is akin to what Bruce Fink describes as “pleasure in pain, or satisfaction in dissatisfaction.”19 Such excessive and fundamentally unsatisfiable enjoyment (not to be confused with uncomplicated pleasure) renders the “sublime” but “charred” body paradoxically alive and dead: “Discomfort is soothed (or silenced) by crises and states of emergency in which a subject feels alive. But this ‘alive’ is nothing other than ‘undeadness,’ the petrifying grip of surplus excitation and agitation.”20 The ascetic’s surplus enjoyment places the subject in a cycle of guilt and agitation, as if “the prohibition of enjoyment and the surplus of enjoyment” mutually support one another.21 Santner’s and Zupanc˘ic˘ ’s work, however provocative, is limited in that it spends a disproportionate amount of time explaining the perils of being rendered creaturely by the jouissance of sovereign exceptionalism, while only hinting at what a redemptive interruption of creatureliness would entail. A redemptive scenario can be sought, Santner does note, through Pauline neighbor-love, the ideal messianic context in which one plugs into the neighbor via a shared sense of lack (as if biopolitical deanimation marks a reentry into the Lacanian real). One of the projects of the following chapters is to extend Santner’s account of the salutary suspensions of the very sovereign state of exception. We will see that, in the seventeenthcentury poetry assessed below, creatureliness is mitigated or negated precisely at those moments when God seems most creaturely or alien to himself.

Introduction

11

Badiou, Empty Sets, and Multiple Infinities When we turn finally to Alain Badiou’s theory of the void, as represented in the third epigraph above, we are admittedly in a different ontological realm from Z˘ iz˘ek ’s metapsychology and Agamben’s and Santner’s political theology. Badiou’s ontology is irreconcilable with even the most radical theology: Not only is his ontological datum the multiple rather than any One or unitive being, but he joins the ranks of both philosophic post-Nietzscheans and mathematical postCantorians in hailing the death of God. I hope to show, though, that selected aspects of Badiou’s ontology can offer early modernists a radically new way of theorizing not only ethical conduct but also the semantic range of the term “subject” as it relates to early modern ideologies. Drawing on the axioms of set theory, Badiou remarks, “Let us posit our axioms. There is no God. Which also means: the One is not. The multiple ‘without-one’—every multiple being in its turn nothing other than a multiple of multiples—is the law of being. The only stopping point is the void. The infinite, as Pascal had already realized, is the banal reality of every situation, not the predicate of a transcendence.”22 According to the most basic notion of naive set theory, a set is simply a collection of elements considered to be a whole. One of the nine foundational axioms of set theory posits the existence of the null or empty set in every situation or founded set of elements. The empty set or void has the paradoxical function of neither belonging to nor being presented in any given set of multiples, but at the same time it is included in every set as a subset. What makes the void or empty set especially interesting is that its very inclusion in every set lends a kind of ontological inconsistency to any situation: “Containing nothing, with no belonging or ‘roots’ of its own (nothing underneath it, nothing supporting it), the void is thus a kind of ontological vagrant. The void is ‘the without-place-ofevery place.’. . . It is precisely as nothing, as void, that ‘inconsistency roams through the whole situation.’”23 Much of this can be explained in less mathematical, more sociopolitical terms. For Badiou, any watershed historical occurrence (Christ’s birth, a socialist revolution, etc.) is described as an evental site, one that reveals or retroactively posits the originary void of a particular situation or set of multiples. The void of a given political situation is that element that seems to be included in the situation

12

E N G L I S H R E N A I S S A N C E L I T E R AT U R E / PAU L C E FA L U

but is not counted, named, or identified as a particular element. So, as one commentator notes, those situations structured as anti-Semitic “cannot meaningfully see individual Jews but can see only an indistinct gap in the normal social fabric, the living lack of all ‘positive’ Aryan characteristics.”24 Similarly, the proletariat, which Marx describes as the central void of early bourgeois societies, has no distinguishing features from the perspective within the bourgeois multiple other than its own being. What makes such voided elements dangerous to a structured multiple or situation is another basic axiom of set theory, namely that the number of parts or subsets of a set always exceeds its individual elements. For Badiou, this fundamental instability of any set allows for the void of the situation to acquire a kind of positivity and undermine the set from within: “Since it cannot be ordered in any obvious way, the excess of parts over elements is properly anarchic and immediately dangerous. It risks, so to speak, the introduction of an elementary disorder. Moreover, in the midst of this disorder there is nothing to ensure that the foundational void of the situation—that is, that unstructurable ‘something’ that haunts the situation, from beyond its unpresentable horizon, as an indication of the very ‘substance of its being’—might not somehow erupt into the situation itself, precisely as something uncountable, anarchic, threatening.”25 As we will see in the final chapter on Traherne’s poetry, Badiou’s theory of multiple infinites can help assess Traherne’s notion of the vexed relationship that inheres among God, infinity, and God’s creatures.

Immanence and the Lacanian Non-All In addition to the foundational premises underlying the work of the theorists described above, one of the organizing distinctions that frames each chapter below is the complementary Slovenian-Lacanian distinction between the masculine all, with exception, and the feminine non-all, without exception—a distinction that will be useful in assessing not only the divine pathos but also the basic Pauline lawlove dialectic as it is represented in seventeenth-century devotional poetry. For Lacan, all men are situated under the phallic function, the signifier of castration, which allows one to posit the universal set of man. However, the universal set requires an exception, which Lacan (building on Freud’s account of the murder of the father by

Introduction

13

the primal horde) posits as the ideal father, one who seems to have escaped castration and therefore enjoys unlimited access to jouissance.26 Suzanne Barnard incisively notes, While man is whole within the symbolic, the exception [i.e. the primal father] that delimits him precludes him from fully identifying with castration. . . . As a result, the fantasy of a subject not subjected to Law—the fantasy of no limit—determines masculine structure in an essential way. The point here is that the masculine subject is effectively “caught” in the phallic function, ironically because he does not fully identify with it but maintains a kind of distance toward it through believing in an exception to symbolic law.27

Freud’s primal father, the secular sovereign, and the Judeo-Christian God are homologous in that they all serve as exceptions to the very laws that they seem to instantiate, driving the subject toward an ideal that seems to transcend law entirely and the circuit of desire and symbolic castration. The important point is that, for the psychoanalytic tradition (and political theology inflected by psychoanalysis), the exception is an illusion and mere placeholder, hence ˘ iz˘ek ’s claim that a subversion of ideology would entail fully identiZ fying with the law as a means of exposing it as an empty signifier. Women, on the other hand, seem to escape the logic of exception because they do not belong to any universal set of women situated under a constitutive exception and the phallic function. This goes a way toward explaining Lacan’s rather notorious comment that “[t]here’s no such thing as Woman, Woman with a capital W indicating the universal. There’s no such thing as woman because in her essence . . . she is not all.”28 Lacan’s argument is not that “not-all” of women are under the phallic function or the masculine logic of exception; his argument is rather that there exists no unified category of women, that each woman is an exception unto herself, not a member of a closed set organized around an exception toward which she might strive. Importantly, the non-all is therefore typically associated with immanence rather than transcendence: “The great paradox of Lacan’s approach . . . is that it proceeds not by way of transcendence—positing a space beyond the closure of the sovereign and the creature, one that would not be touched by symbolic castration and the ‘double life’ that it produces—but through a more radical gesture of ‘immanentization.’”29

14

E N G L I S H R E N A I S S A N C E L I T E R AT U R E / PAU L C E FA L U

The distinction between the all with exception and non-all without exception has proved quite malleable for contemporary theorists, most of whom have retained the set theoretic logic of the distinction while jettisoning the gendered, especially antifeminist implications of the original Lacanian formulas of sexuation. The basic Pauline lawlove dialectic, for example, aligns for Z˘ iz˘ek with the logic of exception and the non-all, respectively: “The co-dependency of law and sin (its transgression) thus obeys the Lacanian ‘masculine’ logic of exception: ‘sin’ is the very exception that sustains the Law. This means that love is not simply beyond the Law, but articulates itself as the stance of total immersion in the Law: ‘not all of the subject is within the figure of legal subjection’ equals ‘there is nothing in the subject which escapes its ‘legal subjection.’”30 Building on the basic Pauline notion that the desire, but ultimate inability, to obey divine and moral law serves to further convict the religious suppliant of ˘ iz˘ek’s point is not that love simply supplements or even displasin, Z ces the law, but that authentic love can only emerge after full immersion in the law makes the subject give up the illusion that there is some loving “something” in itself that can be expressible through mere loving acts: “Law loses its alienated character of an external force brutally imposing itself on the subject the moment the subject renounces its attachment to the pathological agalma deep within itself, the notion that there is deep within it some precious treasure that can only be loved, and cannot be submitted to the rule of law.”31 It is precisely under such a scenario that the paradoxical logic of the non-all fully displaces the all or universal with exception. Authentic Pauline agape enables the subject to dispense with the superegoic injunction to enjoy and orient itself toward an “exceptional” goal that can never be reached (complete remission of sin, in this case) and to accept rather that neighborliness, for example, stems from traversing the fantasy of being a particular “something” entirely: “Love is not an exception to the All of knowledge, but precisely that ‘nothing’ which makes incomplete even the complete series/field of knowledge. In other words, without love, I would be nothing, is not simply that with love, I am ‘something’— in love, I am also nothing, but, as it were, a Nothing humbly aware of itself, a Nothing paradoxically made rich through the very awareness of its lack.”32 In a recent essay, Kenneth Reinhard argued that a radical political theology of the neighbor—one built on the paradoxes of the

Introduction

15

non-all—ought to displace a more conventional political theology of the sovereign—one founded on the logic of exception. States of political exception (as already noted in relation to Agamben’s work) require that the sovereign establish, but periodically transgress law. A political theology of the neighbor, by contrast, would be one in which boundaries and limits separating particular sets and its members are dissolved, symbolic castration under the name of the father (including God and the sovereign) is transcended, and neighbors relate to one another’s infinitude and openness as subjects of love: “If the politics of sovereignty is defined by the exception, the neighbor constitutes the exception to the exception, the interruption of sovereignty. The politics of the Not-All can be thought of as the decision to say no to the superegoic insistence on All, on jouissance as an obligation.”33 ˘ iz˘ek often does, is Another way of describing this difference, as Z as one between the jouissance of the Other and a jouissance of desire, or phallic jouissance. The former, pre-symbolic jouissance, often associated with the pre-oedipal mother, indicates the Other’s overwhelming proximity and enjoyment, while the latter signifies the jouissance that, once the former is sublated, is situated under symbolic castration and linked to conditions of desire. The important point about the jouissance of the Other is that a direct, rather than anamorphic, confrontation with it is traumatizing, but from the perspective of an ethics of psychoanalysis, ultimately authentic and illuminating. An encounter with the jouissance of the Other allows for a traversal of fantasy (and a negation of the logic of exceptionalism) not simply because such “surplus enjoyment” exceeds or overflows the Other itself in some significant respect, but because this acknowledgement renders the Other an uncanny double of the very subject of the Other, thereby narrowing the distance between the two. In order to preempt the charge of anachronism, or perhaps the less egregious charge of presentism, I would emphasize that there is a remarkably close affinity between the work of the theorists mentioned above and early modern historical, literary, and political contexts assessed throughout this study. Agamben, for example, draws heavily on the work of Kantorowicz’s account of the King’s “two bodies,” as well as classical Greek and early Christian notions of sacrifice and natural law in his study of homo sacer; and he has recently offered a revisionist account of Pauline theology that overlaps in some respects with the Slovenian-Lacanian notion of the law-agape

16

E N G L I S H R E N A I S S A N C E L I T E R AT U R E / PAU L C E FA L U

˘ iz˘ek makes a number of references to Milton’s Paradise dialectic. Z Lost and spends considerable time interpreting Reformation theology in some of his later monographs on theology. He also writes extensively on Schelling and German mysticism, which has its roots, as I noted above, in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century continental theology. Both Badiou and Deleuze draw much of their atomistic conceptual apparatus from Epicureanism and Stoicism, as well as from early seventeenth-century philosophers, most notably Spinoza and Leibniz. Each chapter will take on the burden, then, of not simply applying a contemporary theory or ontology to the work of an early modern poet, but of meaningfully triangulating early modern intellectual history, seventeenth-century devotional poetry, and contemporary philosophy and psychoanalytic theory.

Seventeenth-Century Devotional Poetry and Contemporary Theory One of the central arguments of this book is that Donne, Crashaw, Milton, and Traherne struggle to plumb the nature of God that inevitably exceeds the theodical qualities—omnipotence, perfect act, omniscience, foreknowledge, etc.—that are attributed to God by the denominational biases to which these writers nominally adhere. Stated in the terms laid out above, these writers struggle to desublimate their relationship to God, to transcend the logic of exception, and to imagine the jouissance of God as it might exist in a pre-symbolic state. In relation to the paradoxes of the non-all, this often involves a leveling of dogmatic distinctions between Christ as God-man and Christ as any individual neighbor; and again it involves radical inquiries into the nature of God’s bipolarity and selfdifferentiation. Each writer is therefore forced to confront the foundational void of God, that aspect of God that seems Other than God himself, a confrontation that is resolved in any number of ways, depending on the predilections of the particular writer. In some cases the subject’s or poetic persona’s fundamental fantasy of unity is bolstered by various forms of neurosis, including hysteria and masochism. In other cases, however, the fundamental fantasy is dismantled, and the subject’s and God’s void is acknowledged. In all cases, the radical gesture occurs not when, as has been more customarily argued, a writer of a particular denomination seems to articulate

Introduction

17

the views of a creedal bias (Donne’s reversion to Catholicism, Milton’s Arminianism, Crashaw’s Counter-Reformation sensibility, etc.), but when the writer realizes that only a minimal distance obtains among their own, their neighbor’s, and, in the most radical cases, their fantasies of God as a unitive being. In the first chapter, I assess Donne’s political theology, as well as his handling of idolatry in his much neglected “The Cross,” as well as in “Good Friday” and the sermons. In the first section of the chapter, I turn to Donne’s political theology. Against Debora Shuger’s notion that Donne’s political theology is conventionally absolutist in orientation, I argue, employing Santner’s reconstruction of Agamben’s theory of sovereign exceptionalism, that Donne levels distinctions between sovereign and subject: Donne is more concerned to elaborate the implications of a metaphorical sovereign within, according to which any Reformed communicant ought to worship the internalized “new man” as much as any secular magistrate.34 Such an establishment of an interiorized commonwealth seems to conduce to self-worship and idolatry. I argue, however, that it ostensibly serves God’s purpose because it sets the stage for an overthrow of the worshipful new man by the residual old man, a process which creates an internalized state of emergency that, in turn, requires God’s intervention to prevent further backsliding. The dialectical turn in such a process is that it actually limits God’s arbitrary power to declare a state of exception and impose, in Agamben’s terms, force over eternal or natural law. Since God’s suspension of mercy in this case is called into play by the convert’s backsliding, the subject remains in some degree of control over God’s exceptionalism. This is paradoxically comforting to the subject because it helps to contain or keep at bay those unaccountable aspects of God’s power that might seem to exceed God himself. Only in some of the poetry, I argue, does Donne’s speaker transcend the logic of exception and, in “Batter my Heart” for example, we see a loving God-subject relationship built on the paradoxes of the non-all. In the second section of the chapter, I offer a Slovenian-Lacanian interpretation of Donne’s handling of idolatry in “The Cross” and “Good Friday.” Drawing on the semiotic registers established by C. S. Peirce—iconic, indexical, symbolic—I argue that Donne’s “The Cross” assesses the consequences of allowing for an iconic proliferation of both the material and aerial cross. Donne not only projects crosses onto the external world, he also represents himself as

18

E N G L I S H R E N A I S S A N C E L I T E R AT U R E / PAU L C E FA L U

a material cross, turning himself into an objectified idol that radically subverts Protestant iconophobia. In Lacanian terms, Donne is unable to move from a dialectic of being to having the cross, or more generally, from imaginary captation to symbolic desire. In a perverse oedipal triangulation, Christ figures in the poem as the Other of God, the paternal function that names God’s desire and should force Donne’s speaker to sublimate his desire to satisfy God’s desire through symbolic outlets. Since Protestant iconophobia limits the ways in which such desires might be symbolically represented, Donne remains at the level of the imaginary, in which he simply objectifies himself as a means of satisfying God. We will see that this failure to move from being to having in “The Cross,” which essentially hystericizes Donne’s subject, is a departure from what one finds in “Good Friday,” where Christ’s failure to establish paternal law forecloses entry into the symbolic and produces acts of masochism that stand in for the absent paternal function. In Chapter 2, I draw on the work not only of Z˘ iz˘ek but also of Gilles Deleuze and Walter Benjamin, in order to reevaluate Richard Crashaw’s relationship to the Baroque. In The Fold: Leibniz and The Baroque, Deleuze suggests that Baroque images are akin to Leibniz’s windowless monads, each of which reveals an infinity of possible worlds through an endless regress of pleats and folds.35 Along with Benjamin, Deleuze concludes that Baroque images are allegorical rather than symbolic in nature, primarily because they represent horizontal relations to one another, rather than vertical relations with a transcendent God. In the first section of the chapter, I argue that Crashaw’s imagery can, to a certain extent, be understood as Baroque monads containing a series of meaningful folds, which is consistent with the most canonical notion of Baroque kinetic movement as described by Heinrich Wolfflin.36 The Deleuze-Benjamin framework can only take us so far because it does not capture the well-known excessiveness of Crashaw’s imagery. In the second section of the chapter, I turn to Lacan’s notion of the gaze, underscoring the ways in which poststructuralist film theory often erroneously equates the gaze with a contestation for mastery between subject and object. As I noted above, Lacan offers a triadic rather than dualistic notion of the gaze. Since the gaze is simply “imagined” to exist for another, it is impossible to appropriate by either subject or object. Crashaw’s images tend ˘ iz˘ek because toward the pornographic in the sense described by Z

Introduction

19

they show “too much,” allowing for a radical desublimation of the gaze in the very aestheticized objects that more typically would conceal it. This helps to explain the startling moment in Crashaw’s Christological poems, which attach such a traumatizing gaze to Christ himself, suggesting that there exists in Christ sublime aspects that are not necessarily attached to God in their sublimity. Like Donne, Crashaw seems preoccupied with such excesses, but unlike Donne does not resort to neurotic fantasies (hysteria, masochism, etc.) as a means of disavowal. The next chapter assesses in detail the vexed God-chaos relation˘ iz˘ek’s assessship in Milton’s Paradise Lost. Here I work back from Z ment of Schelling’s theology of chaos to Jacob Boehme’s similar concerns in his seventeenth-century mystical writings, many of which influenced Schelling, and I argue Milton.37 The Boehme-Schelling˘ iz˘ek framework suggests that Milton’s God is eternally alienated Z from chaos, analogous to the ways in which any creaturely subject is alienated from the real once he or she undergoes a process of subjectivization. Drawing on Kant’s notion of diabolical evil as Lacanized by Zupanc˘ic˘, I argue that Satan attempts to fend off an encounter with this primordial and chaotic ungrund of God by committing himself to a maxim of diabolical evil, thereby making himself an automaton to evil.38 This serves Satan’s purpose because it allows him to construct God, in turn, as an automaton to goodness, in the process making God seem somehow more complete, unified, and objectively good than what is implied throughout the text. God, however, has his own designs, one of which, I argue, is to somehow reapproach chaos, or das Ding, by bringing it into clearer view in the symbolic, a goal that he realizes through Eve’s temptation and Fall. Once Eve falls, she comes to embody God’s double aspect, his actuality and ground—that is, substrate—as if she ultimately comes to represent what is in God more than himself. To the extent that this allows God to more fully sublimate chaos by projecting it away from him and onto creaturely defection, he ultimately shares a characterological homology with Satan in that they both cower from the recognition that such a chaotic void fundamentally constitutes divine ontology. By the end of the poem, the only character who does emerge as a redeemed heroine (at least from the perspective of the ethics of psychoanalysis) is Eve, who unlike Adam, relates to God in terms of drive rather than desire. Rather than continue to question God’s desires in the postlapsarian symbolic (which

20

E N G L I S H R E N A I S S A N C E L I T E R AT U R E / PAU L C E FA L U

is Adam’s hysterical strategy), Eve accepts that God’s desires are unsatisfiable and that the best she can do is take comfort in the eventual realization of the protevangelium. The final chapter is the most metaphysical and scholastic in orientation. Against a long tradition of arguing that Thomas Traherne’s theology is mystical or neo-Platonic in orientation, I argue that it is at least partly scholastic-rationalist, more specifically, Thomistic in nature. The Thomistic framework helps to explain Traherne’s preoccupation, in both the poetry and prose, of the ways in which any subject can at least attempt to become like God by approaching a state of perfect actuality—that is, by moving from essence to existence, or in more analytical terms, by adding non-predicative act to predicative being or essence. Traherne, though, like all of the writers described in this book, is preoccupied with that elusive, excessive quality of God, something that he associates again and again with infinity. Drawing on Badiouian set theory, I argue that Traherne ultimately posits the existence of multiple infinities—God’s infinitude, the infinite nature of love, the infinite nature of the cosmos—and in the process implies that God is one infinity among many possible others. This is never directly stated, of course, since Traherne’s manifest desire is simply to argue that all of infinity is included in God’s capacious nature. I suggest, though, that this raises too many aporetic questions, since Traherne does not posit a Spinozist, immanentist God whose modes and properties define the natural world. Traherne’s Thomism ultimately limits the ways in which God penetrates the creaturely realm. As such, Traherne ends up positing an analogical relationship between God’s infinite qualities and the infinite nature of the creaturely world. Like Donne’s poetry, Traherne’s poetry only displaces such analogical exceptionalism, although, in the Centuries, his Johannine account of God’s love exemplifies a “non-all” relationship between the subject and God. I should note that the challenge of integrating Lacanian psychoanalysis and early modern religious literature in relation to Crashaw, Donne, and Traherne has recently been undertaken by Gary Kuchar in his illuminating study, Divine Subjection: The Rhetoric of Divine Subjection in Early Modern England.39 Although Kuchar’s study overlaps in significant respects with the argument of the following pages (especially regarding our shared belief that seventeenth-century devotional literature registers an uncanny encounter between devout subjects and the Other’s desire, or in Kuchar’s terms, “an otherness

Introduction

21

more itself than itself”40), I would point out that the argument of the following pages tends to radicalize Kuchar’s claims in focusing less on a divine “Other whose desire precedes and exceeds one’s own,” and more on the extent to which the Other’s desire is enigmatic to itself.41 So, for example, while Kuchar offers a convincing account of the way in which Crashaw’s poetry both reveals and ultimately contains the traumatic, specifically, maternal associations with the divine, I am more interested in tracking those moments in seventeenthcentury devotional poetry when such unlikely gender associations and excess moments reveal what Lacan would describe as “traversing the fundamental fantasy.” Again, such authentic, psychoanalytically “ethical” moments occur when encounters with the immanently divine “non-all” escape inclusion in the more conventional ideologies of the universal and transcendent masculine exception.42

The Ideological Sublime and Early Modern Theology What does such a shared, seventeenth-century concern with God’s void and excess ultimately suggest more generally about interpreting early modern religious and political ideologies? One of the wagers of ˘ iz˘ek, as well as the work of Laclau and this book is that the work of Z Mouffe, can offer a much more incisive theory of early modern ideology than the Althusserian-Marxist notion of interpellation some˘ iz˘ek remarks times employed by early modern cultural theorists. Z that an ideology is a “symbolic field which contains such a filler holding the place of some structural impossibility while simultaneously ˘ iz˘ek, any totality or claim to disavowing this impossibility.”43 For Z universality will necessarily contain within itself a paradoxical element that, in its singularity, “embodies the universality of the genus in the form of its opposite.”44 Such paradoxical or symptomal elements include, for example, the proletariat or rabble in relation to the Hegelian constitutional state, the former of which posits itself against the state as universally representing the state’s interests. The state simply maintains its universality as a means of preempting the full emergence of such a “singular universal.” Hence, the state requires such symptomal elements, which are nothing but “absence embodied,” ˘ iz˘ek, in order to legitimate itself. Unable to transcend according to Z

22

E N G L I S H R E N A I S S A N C E L I T E R AT U R E / PAU L C E FA L U

such symptoms and stumbling blocks, the state can never “become itself, achieve its self-identity.”45 The ideological logic of exception should be distinguished from the ˘ iz˘ek, Althusser Althusserian notion of interpellation. According to Z fails to explain the precise mechanism by which routinized, Pascalian modes of habituation are eventually internalized—that is, how ideologies produce effective, subjective beliefs in the state’s senseless ˘ iz˘ek, ideologies always produce some uncontaininjunctions. For Z able excess or surplus: We can learn from Pascal that this “internalization,” by structural necessity, never fully succeeds, that there is always a residue, a leftover, a stain of traumatic irrationality and senselessness sticking to it, and that this leftover, far from hindering the full submission of the subject to the ideological command, is the very condition of it: it is precisely this non-integrated surplus of senseless traumatism which confers on the Law its unconditional authority: in other words, which—in so far as it escapes ideological sense—sustains what we might call the ideological jouis-sense, enjoyment-in-sense (enjoyment) proper to ideology.46

˘ iz˘ek’s counterintuitive, dialectical move It is crucial to understand Z here. The excess produced by an ideology is not a potentially subversive element, but the positive condition of the ideology as such. Ideologies always contain an internally irrational element because this in turn produces subjects who continually question the elusive mechanisms by which such ideological machines operate. In a Kafkaesque way, an effective ideology produces an “interpellation without identification/subjectivation: It does not offer us a Cause with which to identify—the Kafkaesque subject is the subject desperately seeking a trait with which to identify, he does not understand the meaning and the call of the Other.”47 Why does the Other require that the subject continue to question the true nature of its desires? Precisely because this allows for the sustaining illusion that the Other does have some hidden center or foundation that would legitimate its power, that there is no voided element of any ideology, no unsymbolizable “Other of the Other.” A radically subversive act would therefore negate the entire phantasmic structure and expose precisely the Other’s foundational void or lack: “Ideology is not a dream-like illusion that we build to escape insupportable reality; in its basic dimension it is a fantasy-construction

Introduction

23

which serves as a support for our ‘reality’ itself: an ‘illusion’ which structures our effective, real social relations and thereby masks some insupportable, real, impossible kernel (conceptualized by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe as ‘antagonism’: a traumatic social division which cannot be symbolized). The function of ideology is not to offer us a point of escape from traumatic, real kernel.”48 Z˘ iz˘ek’s reference to the work of Laclau and Mouffe bears some scrutiny, ˘ iz˘ek returns again and again to their notion of the “quilting since Z point,” a reconstruction of Lacan’s concept point de capitoin. In Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, Laclau and Mouffe argue that preideological elements of any social system are akin to floating signifiers that are structured into unified fields of meaning through the quilting operation of master-signifiers.49 For example, in a given ideological space, one might find floating elements such as “class struggle,” “feminism,” or “ecologism,” none of which has any meaningful priority over any other until it is quilted by the master-signifier, “Communism.” Once such floating elements become unified and totalized under such a nodal point like Communism, their particular meanings become fixed and made more precise: “If we ‘quilt’ the floating signifiers through ‘Communism,’ for example, ‘class struggle’ confers a precise and fixed signification to all other elements: to democracy (so-called ‘real democracy’ as opposed to ‘bourgeois formal democracy’ as a legal form of explanation); to feminism (the exploitation of women as resulting from the class-conditioned division of labour); to ecologism (the destruction of natural resources as a logical consequence of profit-oriented capitalist production.”50 The quilting point retroactively lends ideological meaning to those preideological elements that previously form just a chain of equivalences. So, for example, “class struggle” might acquire a very different meaning if it is quilted by the master-signifier “Capitalism” rather than “Communism.” The process of quilting pre-ideological elements shares more with an anti-descriptivist rather than descriptivist theory of language. An anti-descriptivist term produces meaning in a particular object or element rather than simply expresses a pre-designated meaning of that object or element. For example, while a descriptivist would argue that the word “table” refers to a cluster of given features that one might predicate of our notion of “table” (it has four legs, it is of a certain shape, etc.), an anti-descriptivist would argue that the term “table” lends meaning to an object through a foundational act of

24

E N G L I S H R E N A I S S A N C E L I T E R AT U R E / PAU L C E FA L U

naming or “primal baptism.” Under such conditions, the designated term retains its meaning even if the particular features of the object named change over time. Master-signifiers seem to designate something essential in the object that might exceed the object’s conventionally understood qualities: This guaranteeing the identity of an object in all counterfactual situations—through a change of all its descriptive features—is the retroactive effect of naming itself: it is the name itself, the signifier, which supports the identity of the object. That “surplus” in the object which stays the same in all possible worlds is “something in it more than itself,” that is to say the Lacanian objet petit a: we search in vain for it in positive reality because it has not positive consistency— because it is just an objectification of a void, of a discontinuity opened in reality by the emergence of the signifier.51

Objectification of a void, something in an object more than itself: we are back to our opening assessment of the void or empty place as an ontological datum. How can this post-Althusserian preoccupation with rigid designators and ideological surpluses help us to theorize early modern Protestant ideology, particularly the nature of God as represented in seventeenth-century devotional poetry? One might proceed by assuming that the English Reformed God does not possess any ontologically unchanging, predicable features, but rather acquires such features retroactively by the quilting operations particular to the master-signifiers of a given early modern religious worldview. To take an obvious, if reductive, example: The God of Richard Hooker and neo-Thomistic rationalists is accorded certain distinct aspects according to the master-signifier “rationalism,” whereas the God of mainline Puritans and English Calvinists is accorded certain features according to the master-signifier “voluntarism.” Of course, neither of these fundamentally antagonistic conceptions of God claims exhaustively to describe God’s nature. Any early modern religious “habit of thought,” in Debora Shuger’s term, will necessarily secrete validity over meaning, will leave open the possibility that there is indeed some aspect of God that exceeds, say, Conformist or Puritan categories.52 But an anti-descriptivist account of early modern theology would force one to acknowledge that a coherent, positive sense of God that eludes a particular quilting operation is an illusion. A gainful,

Introduction

25

hermeneutical investigation of early modern conceptions of God would take into account (1) the particularized, anthropomorphized God that is described by a rigid designator; (2) a lingering sense that there is indeed an enigmatic surplus to God that marks a vanishing point, some aspect of God that exceeds the master-signifier; and (3) the possibility that, when one attempts to determine the nature of this excess, one will only circularly uncover the rigid designator, as such (the empty name alone), as God’s distinguishing feature, beyond which one can only discern some fundamental split or antagonism that seems intrinsic to God. In terms of religious ideologies and the Lacanian point de capitoin, if one carried out a hermeneutic procedure in order to discover the essence of God, one would, after subtracting all of the seventeenth-century denominationally biased predications of God, uncover not just the barely scrutable God of negative theology (which assumes a stable, although numinous, core of God—God as logos, for example), but a God who cannot achieve self-consistency. Granted, this may seem just too impious and perverse to some early modernists. Few historical periods rival the Pauline Renaissance in exhaustively polemicizing about God’s nature and his often unaccountable ways: Calvinist predestinarianism, Arminian notion of universal atonement, countless radically sectarian notions of God— all are well known creedal beliefs among early modernists. Indeed, ˘ iz˘ek God never seems more alive than during the Reformation. But Z and company would no doubt respond that this endless religious debating illustrates that God’s center, or “perverse core,” is really nothing other than, in Laclau and Mouffe’s terms, the “Real of an antagonism”: There is no selfsame God, so the argument would go—only circular debates about God and the sociopolitical investments particular denominations have in asserting their all-toohuman religious biases.53 One reason that the early modern period is particularly amenable to an application of contemporary theory is that the dominant ideology of the period, one that overarches the political, religious, and social realms, is compared to later historical epistemes, a relatively transparent ideology of the exception.54 Consider, for example, the fundamental royal prerogative so dear to King James I and seventeenthcentury English royal absolutists generally. While on the one hand, early modern common law decrees that the King is accountable to parliamentary procedures, subject to the very laws that he might

26

E N G L I S H R E N A I S S A N C E L I T E R AT U R E / PAU L C E FA L U

have voluntarily established, he might also, through an invocation of the royal prerogative, suspend law during emergency times. Early modern absolute monarchs are thus simultaneously within and without the law, their seemingly arbitrary mandates paradigmatic expressions of sovereign exceptionalism. This is an historical phenomenon that becomes particularly interesting when one considers that James I, for example, often described himself as lex loquens, the very embodiment of law, which when suspended, implies that James would achieve a temporary self-effacement during “emergency” times.55 Similarly, the scholastic and early modern (especially Calvinist and Arminian) distinction between God’s potentia ordinata and potentia absoluta rests on an ideology of divine exceptionalism: God may decide to mitigate his power by respecting his ordained mandates, but he may also suspend his pre-established decrees at will.56 Even the well-known medieval-Renaissance fiction of the “king’s two bodies” rests to some extent on an ideology of the exception: By invoking the transcendent and inviolable “body mystical” (when excusing a young monarch’s “nonage,” for example), absolute monarchs could momentarily suspend established laws that would govern their “body natural.”57 The first gesture toward unmasking early modern political and religious ideologies would be not just to point out moments when a particular writer or theorist undermines ordained or suspensory power (which would merely bring to the fore the unchallengeable, elusive, nature of sovereign power), but rather to expose the fact that dominant, universal ideologies are otherwise empty mastersignifiers filled in by the hegemony of singular beliefs and ideologies. So, for example, one would need to make a case that Jacobean absolutism is fundamentally the hegemony of a group of singular ideologies like episcopalianism, or that Caroline absolutism is the hegemony of singular evangelical biases like Laudianism. And, in relation to early modern religious ideologies proper, one might undertake an ideology critique by proving that a master-signifier like “predestinarianism” is just the hegemony of more local singularities like Puritan vocationalism. The crucial second step in such an ideological unmasking would be to determine the nature of sovereignty or divinity that remains once the singular-universal is negated. What seems to happen, at least in the devotional poetry assessed in the following pages, is that once one subtracts the institutionalized singular-universals from a

Introduction

27

master-signifier like God, one is left with a series of anthropomorphized qualities that might still be predicated of God—most of which derive from scripture itself (for example, the Johannine notion that “God is love”). At this point, I argue that selected seventeenthcentury writers imagine that God seems to undergo a process of subjectivization akin to some of the experiences of any common religious subject. Much of what follows has been inspired by Julia Lupton’s groundbreaking Citizen Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology, in which Lupton argues that the divine and sovereign exception create the very conditions under which “creatureliness,” most clearly embodied in Shakespeare’s Caliban, comes to signify Agamben’s notion of “bare life”: “pure vitality denuded of its symbolic significance and political capacity and then sequestered and abandoned within the domain of civilization as its disavowed core.”58 Creatureliness is brought into being when the sovereign’s surplus validity is made manifest as a result of the suspension of established law. In relation to political theology, in particular, Lupton further argues that creatureliness is a residue of the sort of voluntaristic divine activity that is mirrored by the secular magistrate’s exceptionalism: “‘[C]reatureliness’ has served to localize a moment of passionate passivity, of an abjected, thing-like (non)being, a being of subjected becoming, that precipitates out of the divine Logos as its material remnant.”59 In an extension of Lupton’s and Santner’s view of creatureliness, I hope to reveal those moments in seventeenthcentury devotional literature when, as God becomes more enigmatic and creaturely to himself, he therefore becomes less creaturely and more accessible to seventeenth-century poets. The assumption of a seventeenth-century suffering, creaturely God might seem counterintuitive or exceedingly radical, especially when one assumes further, as I do throughout this book, that the divine pathos is pre-incarnational in nature, specific to the eternal relations that inhere within the Triune God. There is a long tradition, however, of theorizing the Divine pathos, extending from Alexandrine theology and the writings of the Church Fathers (especially Origin and Gregory of Nyssa) to Luther, Jacob Boehme, and Cabbalistic mystical texts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In his homilies on Ezekiel, for example, Origen writes of God, “He suffered our sufferings before He suffered the Cross and thought it right to take upon Him our flesh. For if He had not suffered, He

28

E N G L I S H R E N A I S S A N C E L I T E R AT U R E / PAU L C E FA L U

would not have to take part in human life. . . . What is that passion which He suffered for us? Love is passion. . . . The Father himself is not impassible. . . . He suffers something of love, and in those things in which because of the greatness of His nature He cannot subsist; He shares, and because of us He endures human sufferings.”60 Origen emphasizes that the divine pathos preexists the second creation and the Incarnation itself, and that it is based specifically in God’s essence as self-communicative love. Similar theopathic comments can be found in Luther’s Table-Talk, where Luther denies that Christ suffers solely in his manhood and not Godhead: “[S]ince the divine nature has taken to itself the human, and the two are united in Christ, it comes about that these two nature in Christ share, the one with the other, their idiomatic and characteristics. . . . To be born, to suffer, to die, are characteristics of the human nature, of which characteristics the divine nature also becomes sharer in this person.”61 In the Trinity and the Kingdom, Jurgen Moltmann develops a counter-theology to one that more conventionally posits God’s impassibility or apathy as an axiomatic principle. Since God is love, and love must seek “a counterpart who freely responds and independently gives loves for love . . . love of freedom is the most profound reason for ‘God’s self-differentiation’ and for the ‘divine bipolarity,’ for ‘God’s self-surrender.’”62 Moltmann maintains further that one can deduce God’s eternal suffering or self-humiliation from the later fact of Christ’s passion and the mystery of the cross: “What Christ, the incarnate God, did in time, God, the heavenly Father, does and must do in eternity. If Christ is weak and humble on earth, then God is weak and humble in heaven.”63 It is precisely this notion of a theopathic “rift” in God himself, or what Graham Ward has described as a divine “rupture,” that the following pages will develop, especially in relation to Donne’s reconstructed political theology, Crashaw’s immanent Baroque aesthetics, Milton’s ontology of chaos, and Traherne’s syncretistic account of God’s infinite love.64 And we will see that the Slovenian-Lacanian conceptual apparatus provides an illuminating supplement to the more historically inflected trinitarianism of Moltmann and modern theologians, not least because it helps to explain the ways in which selected early modern writers record the fraught psychological experience of imagining a suffering God.65 It is worth underscoring, finally, the ways in which Moltmann’s work and the Slovenian-Lacanian frame of the chapters below depart

Introduction

29

from recent post-liberal theologies. Traditionally, the via negativa, as represented in the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius, Nicholas of Cusa, Meister Eckhart, and the seventeenth-century German mystic Angelus Silesius (Johann Scheffler), asserts that one can only make negative assertions concerning God’s essence. Mystical theology does not, however, deny or renounce God as much as suspends judgment on any positive qualities that might be attributed to him.66 For this reason, the via negativa has often been redescribed, most recently by Derrida, as the via eminentiae, a pure theology that paradoxically hyperessentializes God, affirming, through its very negations, God’s sublime, if ineffable, power. As Derrida notes, “In the most apophatic moment, when one says, ‘God is not,’ ‘God is neither this nor that, neither that nor its contrary’ or ‘being is not,’ etc., even then it is still a matter of saying the entity such as it is, in its truth, even were it meta-metaphysical, metaontological. It is a matter of holding the promise of saying the truth at any price, of testifying, of rendering oneself to the truth, of the name, to the thing itself such as it must be named by the name.”67 One of the goals of Derrida’s late theology is to refute the onto-theology of both the positive and negative ways. The Messianic moment, rather than messianism conventionally understood, is for Derrida a mode of atheism that rejects not God as such, but the notion that God, understood as a specific, revealed deity, has already arrived.68 In a series of recent writings on theology, Jean-Luc Marion has provided a revisionist account of negative theology, a third alternative to the traditional negative and positive ways. Through “denomination” one negates the negative way itself and denies any essential being to God. Building on the metaphysical rather than synoptic Gospel conception of God as love, Marion argues that a God who is beyond being and affirmation is simply one who gives the gift of love to his creatures, thereby rendering God more a performative agent than an ontological being or substance: “To think God, therefore, outside of ontological difference, outside the question of Being . . . risks the unthinkable, indispensable, but impassible. What name, what concept, and what sign nevertheless yet remain feasible? A single one, no doubt, love, or as we would like to say, as Saint John proposes, ‘God is agape.’”69 Marion’s assertion that a God who is identified as agape is beyond onto-theology, is provocative, and will be assessed in later chapters of this study. It is sufficient to say here that although the Slovenian-

30

E N G L I S H R E N A I S S A N C E L I T E R AT U R E / PAU L C E FA L U

Lacanian conception of God bears some similarities to Marion’s theory of agape and a theology of the event, it departs from Marion’s theory as well as from both deconstruction and traditional accounts of the negative way by positing, as a first principle, a God who is not so much a pure performative as one whose ontological inconsistency mirrors that of any religious communicant. Perhaps an apt metaphor for God’s ontological disunity is the Nietzschean one of the “shortest shadow,” recently explicated in detail by Zupanc˘ ic˘ .70 Just as the moment, even at noon time, when one’s shadow is almost, but not quite directly above oneself, and one still seems inherently “two” rather than “one,” so the radical literary treatments of God in selected seventeenth-century poetry render God as unavoidably haunted by various shadows (infinity, love, Christ) that render him sublime and fundamentally opaque to himself.

Early Modern Subjectivity: A Reevaluation Much of what I have thus far argued about the relationship between early modern ideologies and the ethics of psychoanalysis also has important consequences for theorizing early modern subjectivity. In still one of the most influential accounts of the relationship between psychoanalysis and early modern subjecthood, Stephen Greenblatt argues that despite its emphasis on trauma, loss, and unconscious processes over which the subject has no control, psychoanalysis maintains a fantasy of some “inalienable self-possession,” a sense of a subject’s irreducible continuity or “primal, creatural individuation.” This is revealed in the story of Martin Guerre, in which the authentic Martine Guerre ultimately cannot be convincingly impersonated: “The roots of Martin’s identity lie deeper than society; they reach down, as psychoanalysis would assure us, through the frail outward memories of his sisters and friends to the psychic experience of his infancy—the infancy only he can possess and that even the most skillful impostor cannot appropriate—and beneath infancy to his biological continuity.”71 Greenblatt’s larger point is that, for Renaissance culture, the irreducible, if virtual self of psychoanalysis, is a secondary concern, displaced as it is by a more culturally established notion of selfhood in keeping with Hobbesian possessive individualism. Guerre is identifiable not as the subject of psychoanalysis but as a cultural object, “the placeholder in a complex system of possessions,

Introduction

31

kinship bonds, contractual relationships, customary rights, and ethical obligations.”72 Greenblatt’s remarkable conclusion is that, far from serving as a key to explaining this cultural nexus, psychoanalysis is more the consequence of such a nexus, as if psychoanalysis is the end of the Renaissance, or historically belated in relation to Hobbesian notions of selfhood as proprietary rights. During the Renaissance, Greenblatt concludes, “there is no layer deeper, more authentic, than theatrical self-representation.”73 I would suggest that the four poets’ work described in the following pages are indeed interested in stripping away the theatrical masks, the accoutrements of Hobbesian “artificial persons,” in order to uncover the “authentic” nature not only of creaturely subjects but also of God. As I have been suggesting, however, what they often find is not the subject of psychoanalysis, at least as it is defined idiosyncratically by Greenblatt as an “inalienable self-possession” or “biological continuity,” but precisely as the void, real, or empty place that is worth recovering because it emerges as the common denominator linking subjects to neighbors and God. One can describe this commonality or “neighbor-thing” as, in Santner’s terms, a shared “meta-ethical selfhood” or “death-driven singularity,” as long as one appreciates, from the Lacanian perspective, the valorization of such a traversal of the fundamental fantasy.74 If we follow Santner’s logic, and assume that the goal of religious inquiry generally is to get beyond mere predicative being and hook into the uncanny, “mad” aspects of ourselves and others, our shared creatureliness, then conventional notions of subjectivity seem to lose sufficient explanatory power. While one might retain the term “subject” in order to describe a bearer of culturally ascribed possessions and property rights, such a person is always a subject of or to something else, which obviously limits the semantic range of the term. I would suggest that one way of reintroducing the term “subject” to early modern studies is through Badiou’s very distinctive notion of “subjects as events.” Badiou argues that authentic subjects only intermittently emerge from evental sites as described above: “Let us say that a subject, which goes beyond the animal (although the animal remains its sole foundation [support]) needs something to have happened, something that cannot be reduced to its ordinary inscription in ‘what there is.’ Let us call this supplement an event, and let us distinguish multiple-being, where it is not a matter of truth (but only of opinions), from the event, which compels us to decide a new

32

E N G L I S H R E N A I S S A N C E L I T E R AT U R E / PAU L C E FA L U

way of being.”75 A subject proper only emerges, then, through an embrace or, as Badiou puts it, “fidelity” to the evental site. In this sense, Badiou supports the Lacanian notion of not “giving up on one’s desire” and engaging the ethics of psychoanalysis proper: “Desire is constitutive of the subject of the unconscious; it is thus the not-known par excellence, such that ‘do not give up on your desire’ rightly means: ‘do not give up on that part of yourself that you do not know.’ We might add that the ordeal of the not-known is the distant effect of the evental supplement, the puncturing . . . of ‘some-one’ by a fidelity to this vanished supplement.”76 In keeping with Badiou’s theory of subjecthood, we would have to much more discriminately decide, in virtue of their particular responses or fidelities to evental sites, just who meets the stringent criteria for subjecthood, whether referring to historical personages or, as will be the case in the following pages, fictive characters or poetic personae. Thus, the speakers of Donne’s poems most often do not meet the criteria for subjecthood, since they maintain their own and God’s fundamental fantasy of unity. On the other pole would be Milton’s Eve, who, I will be arguing, does remain faithful to the “event” of the Fall, and so is more deserving of the term “subject” than Adam or Satan. As I have argued throughout this introduction, such ethical conduct often involves a painful acknowledgement of subjects’ own and their neighbors’ fundamental inability to satisfy their elusive desires. Perhaps Zupanc˘ ic˘ offers the best summary of the ethics of psychoanalysis: “The ethical subject springs from the coincidence of two lacks: a lack in the subject (the subject’s lack of freedom connected to the moment of the ‘forced choice’) and a lack in the Other (the fact that there is no Other to the Other, no Cause behind the cause).”77 It is precisely this “heroism of the lack” that the remainder of this book attempts to uncover.

Chapter 1

   States of Exception and Pauline Love in John Donne’s Ser mons and Poetry

I

n this opening chapter, I assess John Donne’s views on Protestant iconoclasm as represented in the sermons and the poems “The Cross” and “Good Friday.” The first section reviews Donne’s positions on divine right theory and political theology, particularly the nature of analogical relations that obtain between God and the secular magistrate. Against recent criticism that argues for the absolutist political theology of the sermons, I suggest, drawing on the work of Agamben and Santner, that Donne’s political theology levels hierarchical distinctions between sovereign and subject: Every subject is exhorted to establish an interiorized “sovereign within” as a first step toward imitating Christ’s virtue and elevating God. The establishment of such a metaphorized internal commonwealth opens up the possibility of self-worship, which in turn issues in a metaphoric “state of emergency,” and the intervention of God’s “sovereign” exceptionalism. Since such Godly intervention is ultimately contingent on the subject’s degree of backsliding—backsliding which is always tied to an exercise of creaturely free will—the outcome of this dialectical process is paradoxically to limit, or at least make predictable, God’s otherwise arbitrary power to declare a state of exception in order to punish refractory sin. In the second section of the chapter, I assess Donne’s more direct engagement with idolatry in two of his relatively neglected poems,

34

E n g l i s h R e n a i s s a n c e L i t e r at u r e / Pau l C e f a l u

“The Cross” and “Good Friday.” We will see that, against the grain of Reformed iconophobia, Donne’s speaker believes that he can make satisfaction by representing himself as an embodied cross. The Slovenian-Lacanian explanation of such a move is that it represents Donne’s speaker’s inability to transfer from a state of “being” to a state of “having” the cross: Unable to symbolize adequately his goal of naming and satisfying God’s desire, the speaker remains at the level of imaginary captation, in which he, like the infans who has not yet acceded to the symbolic, desperately offers himself as a material means to fulfill God’s unsatisfiable desire. If the movement, then, of the political theology of the sermons is a regression from the symbolic to the imaginary, the religious poems are more preoccupied with the difficulty of both superseding the imaginary in the absence of clearly established divine and paternal laws, and internalizing the very symbolic investitures that the sermons attempt to negate. But what ultimately brings together the more intensely psychological and devotional concerns of selected poems and the reconstructed political theology of the sermons is a shared tendency momentarily to disclose, but ultimately to cover over, what I will be describing, following Eric Santner, as God’s “surplus validity”—that excessive aspect of God that eludes symbolization according to conventional Reformed or Catholic denominational categories. Only in some of the Holy Sonnets, especially in those sonnets concerned with the agape and law dialectic, do we find Donne’s speakers directly encountering God’s desire, a phenomenon that will allow us to situate Donne’s lyrics in relation to the elusive Lacanian concept of the “non-all without exception.”

Donne’s Political Theology: A Reevaluation In Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance, Debora Shuger argues that Donne’s sermons are typically High Church English Calvinist in orientation because they analogize God and the King in absolutist terms: “Donne consistently and insistently deploys language associated with absolute monarchy in his treatment of the divine, and he stresses precisely that aspect of absolutism most alien to the modern mentality: the configuration of ideal relations in terms of domination and submission.”1 Donne’s absolutist political theology is evidenced, Shuger contends, in his deployment of

S t at e s o f E x c e p t i o n a n d Pau l i n e L ov e

35

concepts, like the arcana imperii, all of which allow kings, like God, to exercise an unchallengeable royal prerogative that can “break the law of nature.”2 Monarchical power legitimately can, like God’s majesty, evoke a range of emotions linked to absolutism: terror, insecurity, fear, and guilt, to name the most salient. The monarch, during such exercises of his inscrutable power, acts much like the Old Testament God of the Davidic Psalms, a God of glory and wrath, rather than the Pauline God of love and mercy. Shuger observes, however, that Donne extenuates God’s and the sovereign’s seemingly unassailable power by denying reprobation and by honoring a covenantal agreement between the subject and God or the King.3 But the covenant is purely notional and unworkable in practice because “Donne sets the standard so high that no one can perform his part of the bargain.”4 So it is that the subject’s ongoing failure to satisfy covenantal obligations ends up fostering paralyzing guilt and an incriminating conscience, all of which is intensely politicized, since, as Shuger remarks, “Sin is not merely wrongdoing or even the violation of a law but a personal affront to a powerful royal Other. As such, it must be negated by an equally personal and political submission.”5 Shuger points out that even in the face of such absolutist rhetoric, Donne denies that God is an immoral or cruel monster. Rather than rely, however, on a conventional law-gospel dialectic, according to which Christ’s loving and merciful qualities would continually displace his wrath, Shuger emphasizes Donne’s sensitivity to the paradoxicality of guilt: Guilt fosters a desire in the sinner to restore a loving relationship to God—as if the sinner is simultaneously attracted to and fearful of God’s awesome power: “The experience of guilt is terrifying because it threatens the loss of love, of relation, while simultaneously intensifying the need for it. The offense committed (or even contemplated) against a loved one—and this is visible even in children and dogs—produces both fear of rejection and a longing for pardon and restoration of bonds. In contrast to modern attempts to extricate theological guilt from the psychological matrix, Donnean spirituality remains suffused with primary, almost primal, affectivities.”6 Such paradoxical spirituality is politicized in King James’s well-known tendency to cast himself—in Basilicon Doron and The Trew Lawe of Free Monarchies—as simultaneously father, husband, and head of the populace, as if James displays a groundswell of affection for his subjects even as he wields absolute dominion over them.7

36

E n g l i s h R e n a i s s a n c e L i t e r at u r e / Pau l C e f a l u

While Shuger offers an important account of Donne’s political theology, I would suggest that Donne’s politico-theological absolutism is not only much more qualified than Shuger’s argument allows but also primarily interested in appropriating the rhetoric of political theology in order to describe the travails of any individual subject’s metaphorical “commonwealth within.” A productive way of reevaluating Donne’s unique, reconstructed views on political theology is to interpret them in the context of recent theories of sovereign exceptionalism. Donne’s treatment of the God-King-Subject relationship is particularly interesting in relation to what Giorgio Agamben, building on foundational work by Carl Schmitt, describes as the “state of exception.”8 The modern state of exception erupts when the sovereign suspends whatever rules of law are currently in force in order to preserve the well-being of the commonwealth. For some modern regimes, states of exception occur so frequently that a situation of permanent emergency or necessity obtains, and sovereignty transmutes into law itself. Paradoxically, when the sovereign suspends the law, he also acts within the parameters of the existing juridical system. The logic here is that the sovereign himself is the bearer of a “minimum of constitution,” as if, during states of exception, the sovereign serves as a “formal being-in-force,” simply articulating and embodying new laws that take on the force of potential norms, while he simultaneously suspends the force of the momentarily displaced, but still formally applicable, prevailing laws: From a technical standpoint, the specific contribution of the state of exception is . . . the separation of “force of law” from the law. It defines a state of law in which, on the one hand, the norm is in force, but is not applied (it has no “force”) and, on the other hand, acts that do not have the value of law acquire its “force.” That is to say, in extreme situations, “force of law” floats as an indeterminate element that can be claimed by both state authority . . . and by a revolutionary organization. The state of exception is an anomic space in which what is at stake is a force of law without a law.9

Agamben’s most important, counterintuitive point is that states of exception do not abrogate existing laws as much as contract them into a zone of potentiality, creating a space of anomie or indeterminate region in which non-juridically legitimated and discrete acts can constitute binding, ad hoc sovereign decisions. The modern state of

S t at e s o f E x c e p t i o n a n d Pau l i n e L ov e

37

exception is akin to the early modern exercise of the Jacobean and Caroline royal prerogative, in which forms of existing law (common law, the law of nations, and natural law) retain their binding force but lose their immediate applicability during times of political and economic crisis. If we turn to Donne’s sermons we find that, although Donne does draw comparisons between divine mysteries and the secular arcana imperii, he establishes a maximal distance between the King and God by investing God with the unilateral power to declare states of exception. In a 1622 sermon on II Corinthians 4:6, Donne suggests that God works by examples and precedents: God is his own Example; whatsoever he hath done for us, he is ready to do again. When he had once written the Law in stone-tables, for the direction of his people, and that Moses in an overvehement zeal and distemper, had broke those Tables, God turn’d to his precedent, remembred [sic] what he had done, and does so again; he writes that Law again in new Tables. When God hath given us the light of the Reformation for a few years of a young King, and that after him, in the time of a pious truly, but credulous Princess, a Cloud of blood over-shadowed us in a heavy persecution, yet God turn’d to his precedent, to the example of his former mercy, and in mercy reestablished that light, which shines yet amongst us. . . . The Lords hand is not shortned [sic], nor weakned [sic] in the ways of justice; and his justice hath a Sicut, a precedent, an Example too.10

It is not the case that the prince declares a state of exception and in doing so, analogizes the unassailable sovereignty of God. Rather, God declares a state of exception in which he suspends his own preceding laws as a means of punishing or correcting the vices of any person, prince, or commonwealth. God’s retention of his own precedents and norms—his potentia ordinata—during such suspensory times corresponds to Agamben’s notion of the secular magistrate’s retention of “forms of law,” law in potentia under conditions of extrajudicial, political necessity. Donne thus turns conventional political theology on its head: Secular sovereignty does not declare the state of exception; the state of exception is made manifest by the very suspension of secular magistracy in its benevolent incarnation. The purely formal suspension of norms by exceptions corresponds to God’s continual displacement of his mercy by wrath. The “precedent” moments to which

38

E n g l i s h R e n a i s s a n c e L i t e r at u r e / Pau l C e f a l u

Donne’s juridically conscientious God returns again and again are none other than those prior moments when God deems it proper to bestow grace and “light” on the devout. Such bestowals so often need to be reversed given the frequency of creaturely backsliding that punitive sanctions are continually required, thereby making the ideally intermittent state of exception appear as a permanent, divine modus operandi. Donne goes further, though, than arguing that the sovereign is the manifestation rather than bearer of the politico-religious exception. At times Donne argues for a leveling of hierarchical distinctions between ruler and subject by remarking that both king and subject are themselves subjected to God’s dominion. So Donne argues in a sermon on Ephesians 5—which focuses on the duties that husbands owe to wives—that a king who lovingly acts on behalf of his subjects reciprocally “subjects” himself to them, just as a husband does for his wife in marriage: “Love, then, when it is limited by a law, is a subjection, but it is a subjection commanded by God. . . . A Prince doth nothing so like a subject as when he puts himselfe to the pain to consider the profit, and the safety of his Subjects.”11 The intimate relationship between king and subject is developed in a March 16 sermon delivered on the anniversary of King James’s coronation. Building on the statement of Proverbs 2—“The King shall be his friend”—Donne remarks, Kings and subjects are Relatives, and cannot be considered in execution of their duties, but together. The greatest Mystery in Earth, or Heaven, which is the Trinity, is conveyed to our understanding, no other way, then so, as they have reference to one another by Relation, as we say in the Schools; for God could not be a father without a Son, nor the Holy Ghost Spiritus sine spirante. As in Divinity, so in Humanity too, Relations constitute one another, King and subject come at once together into consideration. Neither is it so pertinent a consideration, which of these was made for others sake, as that they were both made for God’s sake, and equally bound to advance his glory.12

Very little in this excerpt is reconcilable with an “absolutist” notion of Donne’s political theology. Donne compares not the King to God, but the King-subject relationship to the Trinity. Donne will go so far as to say that love is such a pure and unifying affection, expressible between good king and subject, that it erases or “transmutes” any

S t at e s o f E x c e p t i o n a n d Pau l i n e L ov e

39

otherwise binding differences between the two: “Love is a Possessory Affection, it delivers over him that loves into the possession of that he loves, it is a transmutatory Affection, it changes him that loves, into the very nature of that that he loves, and he is nothing else.”13 Here again, the ideal king-subject relationship should be an expression of the singularity of God, Christ, and the Holy Ghost. The force of “nothing else” establishes a distance between the king-subject dyad and God’s trinitarian aspect. This is not an absolutist political theology as much as a theological politics of shared subjection. Donne’s focus both on the divine exception, manifested in a dialectic between mercy and wrath, and his erasing of distinctions between sovereign and subject can be further illuminated by turning to Eric Santner’s theological revision of Agamben’s theory of political sovereignty. Santner maintains that the ideally spiritual, loving state is one in which we unplug from symbolic investitures. By “symbolic investitures,” Santner means “those social acts, often involving a ritualized transferal of a title and a mandate, whereby an individual is endowed with a new social status and role within a shared symbolic universe.”14 The clearest example of a symbolic investiture is the interpellation of subjects by the sovereign; as noted earlier, however, Santner interprets interpellation more specifically as a mode of subjectivization by the universal sovereign exception. Insofar as the sovereign exception rests paradoxically within and outside of any juridical framework, symbolic investiture legitimates itself by producing a “validity without meaning” or an “interpellation without identification.” As a consequence, this coupling of biopolitical life to the sovereign exception produces subjects who are in a state of suspension, an experience of death-in-life that Santner describes as undeadening: “We are, in a crucial sense, placed in the space of relationality not by way of intentional acts, but rather by a kind of unconscious transmission that is neither simply enlivening nor simply deadening, but rather, if I might put it that way, undeadening: it produces in us an internal alienness that has a particular sort of vitality and yet belongs to no form of life.”15 The ideal goal of Revelation is to negate these procedures of undeadening, to “deanimate the undead,” in order to unplug from sovereign exceptionalism and open oneself up to one’s own intrinsic alienness and the alienness of one another. The parousia (Second Coming) occurs immanently, in the midst of life, wherein one can appreciate one’s own and the other’s destitution, a form of subjectivity that extends beyond mere

40

E n g l i s h R e n a i s s a n c e L i t e r at u r e / Pau l C e f a l u

attributive being. Biopolitical deanimation “means exposure not simply to the thoughts, values, hopes, and memories of the Other, but also to the Other’s touch of madness, to the way in which the other is disoriented in the world, destitute, divested of an identity that firmly locates him or her in a delimited whole of some sort.”16 What makes all of this especially paradoxical is that the subject produced, or more accurately, released from suspension, ends up resembling the sovereign himself or herself in the subject’s realization of its own surplus validity, its own tendency to “secrete” meaning over interpretation regarding its own and its neighbor’s bare life. A structural homology prevails, then, not between the sovereign and God, but between the sovereign and subject, as if the subject is or has been the sovereign all along. Through his unique ability to suspend law and declare exceptions, thereby creating its own excess validity, the sovereign enables, via fantasy, a deanimation of the subject’s jouissance, which in turn releases the subject from the sovereign capture. This complex process occurs, though, only when agape allows one to uncouple from the sovereign relation: “The very locus of our psychic rigidity—what I have referred to as our biopolitical animation or undeadness—at the same time harbors our singular resource for ‘unplugging’ from the sovereign relation. The very dynamic that attaches us to an ideological formation is, in this view, the site where the possibility of genuinely new possibilities can emerge.”17 How can Santner’s conceptual apparatus help further explicate Donne’s political theology? The structural homology between the sovereign exception and the liberated subject of pure devotion is expressed in Donne’s sermons in terms that I would describe (building on the more conventional Reformation and Miltonic notion of a “paradise within”) as a process of cultivating the “sovereign within.” In a 1622 sermon Donne remarks, “It is not onely to the Priests that St. Peter said, God had made them a Royal Priesthood; not onely of Priests that St. John said, God hath made us Kings and Priests. There is not so Regal, so Soveraign, so Monarch-ical a Prerogative, as to have Animum Deo subditum, Corporis sui Rectorem; That man who hath a soul in subjection to God, and in dominion over his own body, that man is a King.”18 Donne undermines absolutist political theology in two ways: First, sovereignty does not mediate relations between the political rank-and-file and God; sovereignty rather replicates relations between all Godly communicants on the one hand and God on the other. Second, while we would be too quick to

S t at e s o f E x c e p t i o n a n d Pau l i n e L ov e

41

describe Donne’s gesture as radically subversive, the force of the passage relies on the rhetoric of political “subjection” in order to suggest that all Kings, spiritual or actual, are equally “subjected” to God’s inimitable majesty. Donne is perhaps more overtly politically subversive when he uses the metaphor of the “king within” to license forms of healthy political skepticism and critique: “That thou must be a Delinquent, or an Accuser, a Traitour or an Infourmer: God hath imprinted in thee characters of a better office, and of more Royall Priesthood; as you have sparks of Royaltie in your soules, Take heed what hear of State-government.”19 How, though, does Donne’s leveling of sovereign-subject distinctions, if at the spiritual level only, link to Santner’s notion that revitalized subjects ideally attain a sense of their own surplus validity that in itself is fundamental to the sovereign exception? The link can be found in Donne’s more complex views regarding the relationship between the imago Dei and idolatry. Consider the implications of the following excerpt: Certainly beloved, if a man were like the King but in countenance, and in proportion, he himself would thinke somewhat better of himselfe, and others would be the lesse apt to put scornes, or injuries upon him, then [sic] if he had a Vulgar, and course aspect. With those, who have the Image of the King’s power, (the Magistrate) the Image of his Wisdome, (the Councell) the Image of his Goodnesse, (the Clergy) it should be so too. Now, in all these respects, man, the meer naturall man, hath the Image of the King of Kings. And therefore respect that Image in thy selfe, and exalt thy naturall faculties. Emulate those men, and be ashamed to be outgone by those men, who had no light but nature.20

The first “King” invoked here is God in his trinitarian aspect. Earlier in the sermon, Donne aligns God with “power,” the Holy Ghost with “goodness,” and Christ with “wisdom.” Inflected politically, these alignments correspond respectively to the secular magistrate, the “council” or juridical system as such, and the Church and clergy. Donne then compares the common but devout individual to the “King of Kings,” which entails more than merely a Christocentric gesture. Donne is suggesting that any devout individual can reflect God in the fullness of the Trinity, which implies that such an individual would ideally reflect a fuller image of God than the sovereign himself, the latter of whom can only instantiate God’s “power.”

42

E n g l i s h R e n a i s s a n c e L i t e r at u r e / Pau l C e f a l u

Yet one cannot help but note that Donne positions such an individual precariously close to a form of personal idolatry, which Donne seems to fend off quickly by warning that such internal faculties as power, goodness, and wisdom are not “instruments” of grace, but merely “susceptible” to grace. Donne more clearly warns against worshipping the image of God within oneself earlier in the sermon when he remarks, “If God wrought by a pattern, and writ by a copie, and proceeded by a precedent, doe thou so too. Never say, There is no Church without error: therefore I will be bound by none; but frame a Church of mine owne, or be a Church to my selfe. What greater injustice, then to propose no Image, no pattern to thy selfe to imitate; and yet propose thy selfe for a pattern, for an Image to be adored?”21 Donne seems to realize that by appropriating the language of absolutist political theology in order to preach an otherwise conventional doctrine of the imago Dei, according to which one ought to “exalt,” as one would any external magistrate, the sovereign within, one treads too closely to idol worship, in which selfadoration would displace the imitatio Christi that should ideally evolve from an awareness of one’s retention of a vestige of the imago Dei even in a postlapsarian context. This sort of tension, though, might be seen as serving a complex purpose in Donne’s sermons, which a return to Santner and Agamben can help illuminate. Donne declares that idolatry constitutes not merely an undermining of divine law and a sinful relapse into vice, but treason against the King himself: “Idolatry hath been destroyed amongst us, destroyed so, as that it hath been declared to be idolatry towards God, and declared to be complicated and wrapped up inseparably in Treason towards the King and the State.”22 If we combine this notion with what I earlier described as Donne’s rhetoric of the sovereign within, we have to imagine that idolatry constitutes a form of treason against oneself: one sets up within oneself both the figures of king and subject and then subverts one’s sovereignty when one adores rather than imitates the internalized “king of kings.” Once such idolatry is expressed, the commonwealth within undergoes such a degree of turmoil that a state of emergency is inevitable. This emergency situation will in turn call into play God’s sovereignty in its wrathful, rather than merciful, aspect—namely, God’s sovereign exceptionalism. One way of viewing Donne’s preoccupation with idolatry in the sermons is to understand it as a kind of necessary remainder of God’s benevolence—necessary because sovereignty

S t at e s o f E x c e p t i o n a n d Pau l i n e L ov e

43

requires an excess of validity that is exemplified when the subject attempts to overthrow his interiorized commonwealth. Consider, for example, Donne’s disquisition on the sentiment of Deuteronomy 12:30 that God has “destroyed” idolaters. The burden of the sermon is to show that although biblical history (Exodus, Kings, and Judges) does recur to those moments when God intervenes on Israel’s behalf to vanquish idolaters like the Assyrians, Philistines, and Canaanites, God does not ever completely destroy idolatry: Really great, admirably strange things did God in the behalf of his children, for the destruction of his and their Idolatrous enemies. But yet were they ever destroy’d? Totally destroy’d they were not; The Lord left some Nations (says the Text there) without hastily driving them out; neither did he deliver them into the hands of Joshuah. . . . Now why did God do this? We would not ask this question, if God had not told us . . . that the Enemy might be their Schoolmaster, and War their Catechism, that they might never think that they stood in no more need of God.23

Idolatry serves as a required leftover of God’s mercy. To vanquish idolatry completely would limit God’s power to declare a state of emergency during those times when any individual erects an idol of the mind, or in terms of political theology, an idolatrous sovereign within. How, though, does all this serve the subject who languishes under the state of exception? In unreconstructed early modern, theological terms, it simply helps the subject to avoid backsliding and creaturely presumptuousness. But in Santner’s terms, it has a pacifying, if deadening, effect because it allows the subject to sustain the fantasy that whatever surplus validity it might recognize in itself is ultimately coupled with that divine excess revealed by God when he declares a state of emergency. Another way of saying this is that idolatry is appeasing because it calls into being the exception at the same time that it legitimates it and contracts its overflow of signification. It is more comforting to assume that we are responsible for forcing God to chastise us for bringing a state of emergency into being, thereby requiring some form of divine intervention. In purely secular relations, the sovereign’s power generates such an excess of meaning because the sovereign seems lawless and always potentially arbitrary. Part of the elusive power of the secular sovereign’s power lies in the fact that law is suspended ideally for the health of the state, even

44

E n g l i s h R e n a i s s a n c e L i t e r at u r e / Pau l C e f a l u

though no particular individual within the state typically seems responsible for actualizing such prerogatives. In Donne’s hands, though, God’s state of exception always can be traced to every individual’s potential and actual idolatry, every individual’s ability to upset lawful relations not between king and subject in an external polity, but between “king” and “subject” within a metaphorically private commonwealth. There exists no true state of emergency because, although God suspends his mercy in order to check backsliding, the cause, meaningfulness, and even limits of his actions can be directly traced to individual sin. There is not so much a surplus of validity over meaning as there is a surplus of meaning over validity: The ideal backslider will realize that not only is God’s punishment for the best but also that such punishment should foster love rather than fear, in particular, love of God’s tendency to show concern for us whether or not we are deserving. Donne’s complex dialectic in the sermons is thus to establish an interior commonwealth in order to set up the possibility of idolatry, which in turn both galvanizes and then limits the otherwise arbitrary nature of the Godly state of exception. Idolatry serves as something of a placeholder in such dialectic—a means to the greater end of attempting to come to terms with God’s validity over meaning. In the poetry to which we now turn, idolatry serves similarly to plumb and keep at bay God’s often ineffable desires, yet it serves, in Lacanian terms, more to keep the subject at the level of imaginary captation rather than, as is the case in the sermons, to reconstruct the nature of symbolic relations that traverse the subject, the secular magistrate, and God. While both the sermons and poetry attempt to understand, even force, a staging of God’s power as law, the sermons reveal the subject’s attempt to regress from the symbolic to the imaginary, while the poetry records the failure of the subject to accede to the symbolic. What follows is a brief introduction to early modern Protestant views on image worship, with a particular emphasis on the various semiotic meanings of the Reformed crucifix, especially in relation to Donne’s “The Cross” and “Good Friday.”

Idolatry and the Reformed Image The history of the reformation of the image has been written many times and routinely focuses on the Reformed complaint that, for

S t at e s o f E x c e p t i o n a n d Pau l i n e L ov e

45

example, effigies and paintings of saints depict “feigned images” that might falsely suggest divine intercession. By the Reformation period, the second commandment a times seemed to disallow not just unlawful worship of certain types of images, but any images that attempt to give either form or embodiment to religious personages. Margaret Aston remarks, “Where once the catechist’s concern had been to explain the uses of imagery, indicating how worship might turn to idolatry, the question that came to the forefront after the Reformation was, rather, are there any permissible uses of imagery? It was no longer, as it had been at the end of the fifteenth century, a matter of confusing possible abuses of art forms of assumed value, but increasingly a matter of deciding which, if any, form of visual representation was not too dangerous to use.”24 As Aston points out, the implacable sixteenth- and seventeenth-century attack on image-making extends to mental images that the idolater has either internalized or can conjure at will. As one homily notes, “Idolatry standeth chiefly in the mind.”25 There are numbers of ways that Reformed theology attempted to save representations of Christ without committing idolatry in doing so. The Lutheran position that emerged during the middle of the sixteenth century has been described as one that sanctioned the “negativity of the image.” Late medieval depictions of the cross faced the challenge of representing what is not representable, of depicting, as Joseph Leo Koerner notes, “God in concealment, glory in abjection, victory in death.”26 Luther’s distinctive contribution was to contrast this “theology of glory,” in which one attempts to locate divine truths beneath appearances, under the aspect of seemingly “invisible things,” to a “theology of the cross.” The former naturally leads to a hermeneutic theology, in which divine mysteries can be rendered decipherable with some exegetical acumen. By contrast, theologians of the cross acknowledge that God should remain hidden in the suffering Christ and that the crucifixion, for example, “arrests speculation, mocks curiosity and chastens claims to righteousness. It locates transcendence where it is least self-evident; for again, based only on reason and experience, no one would place their hopes on a poor carpenter’s son, who, many centuries ago, died a criminal death.”27 Because the deus absconditus cannot be satisfactorily depicted in pictorial art, a theologia crucis testifies to the believer’s hermeneutical weakness.

46

E n g l i s h R e n a i s s a n c e L i t e r at u r e / Pau l C e f a l u

The consequence is that religious images are deemed valuable not due to their power to transport the viewer, but in their power to remind the viewer of the importance of practical, everyday worship and church rituals: word, sacrament, and faith. Any crucifix’s value lies predominantly in its didactic role in this-worldly worship, rather than in its transcendent power to illuminate God. Although the Lutheran tradition thus seems more tolerant of religious images than the English Calvinist, both hold that images are valuable solely for their symbolic function: For Lutherans that function brings the beholder back to the work rather than away from it; for English Calvinists, images approximate the narrative of Christ’s passion and thus turn the believer back to scripture. Both denominations hold that the image functions to underscore substantial differences rather than similarities among the believer, God, Christ, and the image.

The Semiotics of Crossing Early modern theologians typically distinguish three kinds of crosses: the material, the aerial, and the spiritual. While many Catholics agree that worship of a material cross is idolatrous, they hold that aerial crosses might be permissibly worshipped because they refer not to matter or substance, but simply to the form of the cross. If Catholics hold that aerial crosses are valuable for their signifying function, particularly regarding baptismal rites, the Reformers respond that for that very reason, aerial crosses are more pernicious than material ones. In the Idolatrie of the Cross, the anonymous author writes, “Yet it is totally and actually existing in the minde, that which is past in the memory, that which is to come in the intention, all of it together in the affection, that may be applied to the crosse aereall.”28 For a Protestant culture so preoccupied with inward warfaring and purity of intention, the aerial cross is especially troubling because it can be so easily internalized and solicited at will by its user. And its customary use was to stave off evil rather than evoke the Passion: “For whether we imprint him as a seale in the forward, or whether we draw in the emptie ayre the signe thereof, we hope and beleeve it is able to put the Devill to flight.”29 In semiotic terms, the aerial cross serves at once as an indexical and iconic sign. According to C. S. Peirce, the indexical sign does not resemble its conceptual object, but serves as a sign of its object

S t at e s o f E x c e p t i o n a n d Pau l i n e L ov e

47

“by virtue of its being connected with it as a matter of fact, and by also forcibly intruding upon the mind, quite regardless of its being interpreted as a sign.”30 While the aerial cross is iconic insofar as it duplicates the form or resemblance of the material cross, itself a signifier for the passion, aerial crosses can also carry a causal efficacy and hence are indexical in nature. Indexical signs tend to represent effects or symptoms; for example, smoke might serve as an index of fire. What the quote above suggests is that the aerial cross functions as a kind of symptom of the internalization of idolatry in that it measures the extent to which idolatry can infect the memory, the will, and intentionality. Worse, an indexical sign might function not simply as a symptom or effect, but also as a cause unto itself since it might carry the illocutionary force that we associate with more conventional speech acts. An aerial cross might therefore signify a performative cause, a bringing into action of a particular event or state of affairs like baptism; or the aerial cross might, according to the iconophobic interpretation above, serve simply to ward off evil. Most early modern theologians who reject both the worship of material crosses and the signing of aerial crosses understand the proper use of the concept “cross” in a purely spiritual or metaphoric sense. A symbolic cross approximates what semioticians describe as a sign proper, since the relationship between signifier and signified is arbitrary in nature. To invoke a spiritual cross is to bring into play a range of emotions connected to the Passion, thereby attesting to one’s faith. In his Treatise on the Cross, John Martial remarks, “It is not the bare sign of the crosse that worketh these great benefits to man, but faith in the merits of Christ his passion.”31 Martial then proceeds with a typological interpretation of the cross’s signifying power, in which the cross, signaling Christ’s saving intercession, is prefigured by Old Testament narratives: “This arke of Noe prefigured the crosse of Christ. For as by the arke, Noe and his famile were preserved from temporal drowning, so by the crosse of Christ all faithful men are preserved from spiritual drowning in sin.”32 Used symbolically, then, the cross is interpreted as a sign of virtually any action, type, or biblical narrative that represents the full complement of Christ’s virtues: “This rod, saieth Origen, with which Aegypt was subdued and Pharoa conquered, is the cross of Christ by which the world is overcome and the prince of the air conquered.”33 In relation to Peirce’s semiotic triad, we can see that as the cross’s signification extends first from the iconic to the indexical and then from

48

E n g l i s h R e n a i s s a n c e L i t e r at u r e / Pau l C e f a l u

the indexical to the symbolic, the range of meanings it carries widens considerably.

Donne’s “The Cross” In “The Cross,” Donne plays on the different semiotic registers of crossing, dismissing the sort of conventional, Reformed iconophobic arguments summarized above: Since Christ embraced the Cross itself, dare I His image, th’ image of his Cross deny? ...................... Who from the picture would avert his eye How would he fly his pains, who there did die? (1–8)34

But the iconic cross almost imperceptibly transforms into the symbolic one once Donne begins to trade on the rich semiotic range the cross can express: the loss of this Cross, were to me another cross; Better were worse, for, no affliction, No cross is so extreme, as to have none (11–14)

The lower-case “cross” referenced here connotes a personal tribulation that follows the withdrawal of the ability to acknowledge, if not worship, the material cross, as well as the degradation of goodness that would occur should respect for the proto-Cross be unavailing. But the poem becomes more complex when Donne elaborates the iconic signification of material and aerial crosses: The mast and yard make one, where seas do toss. Look down, thou spiest out crosses in small things; Look up, thou seest birds raised on crossed wings; All the globe’s frame, and sphere’s, is nothing else But the meridians crossing parallels (20–25)

Donne effects here a signifying substitution such that the conventional iconic sign of the cross no longer refers simply to the crucifixion or

S t at e s o f E x c e p t i o n a n d Pau l i n e L ov e

49

the proto-Cross as an objective ground or fixed signified. The image of the cross now represents virtually any external or natural sign that duplicates the form or shape of the iconic sign of the cross. Conventional relationships between common signifiers and signifieds (a bird’s wings represent flight, a mast metonymically figures for a ship or for a ship’s movement) are rendered meaningless or at least displaced. This signifying substitution reflects not as much the arbitrariness of the signified as the arbitrariness of the signifier itself: The sign of the cross functions as a master signifier that disrupts ordinary meaning. Through a kind of signifying gestalt, the bird’s wings now resemble flight, now the cross, depending on one’s perceptual orientation. Another way of saying this is that the iconic nature of the cross is projected onto nature and the external world, a startling proliferation of an iconic sign. Donne sets himself the task of fixing meaning to the various incarnations of the cross without overtly resorting to any clear denominational biases, such as his recalcitrant Catholicism. As such, his poeticization of crossing defies categorization as either a theology of glory or a theology of the cross. But what gives the poem its most important and distinctive Donnean aspect occurs when Donne’s speaker effects a further semiotic displacement of crossing by representing his very body as an iconic sign of the cross: Who can deny me power, and liberty To stretch mine arms, and mine own cross to be? Swim, and at every stroke, thou art thy cross .......................... For when that Cross ungrudged, unto you sticks, Then are you to yourself, a crucifix (15–32)

One might argue that Donne attempts to use his body as a mastersignifier to attach the cross to another master-signifier that seems to escape pre-formed ideological constructions altogether. But the semiological interpretation, while it complements the historical, still does not capture Donne’s idiosyncratic tendency to identify the cross with his own material body. And as we will see momentarily, such a gesture is far removed from Donne’s more typical preoccupation in the poetry with corporeal dispersion. At this point, I will suggest that the Slovenian-Lacanian framework has much to offer by way of supplementing both a historical and semiological interpretation of

50

E n g l i s h R e n a i s s a n c e L i t e r at u r e / Pau l C e f a l u

the poem. What follows is a brief review of some key Lacanian terms and concepts, and then a return to Donne’s “The Cross.”

From Being to Having the Cross As it is perhaps well known, Lacan argues that the mirror stage provides the subject with an imaginary gestalt, an ego-ideal, which has a fundamentally alienating character. Prior to the mirror stage, the subject is in a state of “prematurity,” little more than a bundle of conflicting drives. Through a process of specular identification, the mirror stage provides an imago that lends wholeness or coordination to such a body in parts. Importantly, such a process cordons off the subject from presymbolic drives and impulses, as if ego-formation paradoxically provides a stable subjectivity at the expense of circumscribing the individual from himself or herself. Lacan describes this process of ego-formation as one of meconnaisance, in which the ego has no sense of the subject’s desires—those desires that have been lost in the very process of providing what might appear to be the construction of “wholeness.” What gets left out in this traumatic process, what gets “remaindered,” to use a term often employed by ˘ iz˘ek, constitutes the Lacanian real, itself partially accessed through Z the symbolic register in the form of symptoms and parapraxes. The ego that is formed through a process of mirroring or imaginary identification is always founded on the subject’s perception of the desire of the Other. Prior to specular identification, during the stage of prematurity, the subject’s drives are directed to external objects that the subject does not readily distinguish from itself. Imaginary captation occurs when the subject apprehends itself for the first time as Other, as a coherent self that the subject itself seems to lack. At this stage, the subject has acquired only a narcissistic ego. What thrusts the child into an oedipal crisis is its eventual questioning of the desire of the Other, usually the desire of the mother. As the standard account goes, the child first perceives that the mother desires the phallus, itself a master-signifier for the unfulfillable desire of the Other, after which the child imagines, given its perceptual gestalt, that it can itself serve to satisfy the mother by becoming the phallus for her. Once such a fantasy is frustrated, the child moves from the illusion of “being the phallus” to one of “having the phallus,” itself also a fantasy, since castration anxiety always threatens

S t at e s o f E x c e p t i o n a n d Pau l i n e L ov e

51

such illusory wholeness. Phallic anxiety is ultimately the endpoint in a series of sacrifices through which the child, attempting to fathom and satisfy the desire of the Other, gradually relinquishes what the narcissistic ego imagines are its own objects. In the context of Donne’s “The Cross,” the Lacanian framework suggests that Donne’s speaker is unable to move from a state of being to one of having the cross. The speaker’s desire to satisfy God would, from a Lacanian perspective, involve his initial attempt to unravel the nature of God’s desire. In the context of the poem, God wants a display of faith, manifested minimally in an appreciation of the significance of the Passion. In a certain sense, what God wants from the speaker has already been achieved by Christ. For the medieval-Catholic tradition, this sort of awareness might prompt one to imitate Christ’s practices and exhibit Christian virtue (although this would not entail a consideration of oneself as an embodied cross): Such a relationship to the cross would, in metapsychological terms, always be displaced by a relationship to the cross in terms of having or desiring it. One can never be the cross (Christ has already achieved this), so one enters into the realm of identification with Christ as the bearer of the cross, a process of identification that is then symbolized by proper worship of what the cross signifies. To stay at the level of the imaginary register is to understand one’s own desire as object for the Other. This is an entirely dualistic relationship with God, wherein Donne’s speaker identifies not so much with Christ as bearer of the cross and mediator of the speaker’s desire to satisfy God, but with the cross itself as the immediate means through which the speaker might make satisfaction. Why, though, doesn’t Donne’s speaker imagine himself as Christ or Christ’s body rather than as a material cross as such? In order to answer this question we should consider the fundamentally “neurotic” aspect of the speaker’s self-objectification. For Freud and Lacan, neuroses, principally obsessiveness and hysteria, allow the subject to disavow the perception of lack that the paternal law inevitably discloses. The obsessive responds to this reluctant splitting by imagining that, for example, the mother’s breast has not been lost and that it is indeed still part of him. The hysteric responds by desperately attempting to serve as the object of the Other’s desire, the object that the Other seems to be missing. In relation to Donne’s “The Cross,” we need to determine exactly how the paternal signifier or law functions. If, as I have been

52

E n g l i s h R e n a i s s a n c e L i t e r at u r e / Pau l C e f a l u

suggesting, the desire of the Other in the theological context is God, and Christ rather than Donne’s speaker has been able to satisfy that desire, then Christ (rather than God) would need to serve the paternal function: Donne’s plight is utterly contingent on whether Christ sufficiently names the Other’s (God’s) desire, or whether, by remission, Donne faces the consequences of the foreclosure of the symbolic law, namely perversion. The emergence of law is, in fact, determinative in “The Cross,” since the speaker’s tendency to worship the cross is represented in the opening stanzas as defiance of any decree or doctrine that would prevent him from being the cross: From me, no pulpit, nor misgrounded law, Nor scandal taken, shall this Cross withdraw, It shall not, for it cannot; for, the loss Of this Cross, were to me another cross (9–12)

The establishment of law should effect a separation of the Othersubject dyad and a recognition of the desire of the Other, thereby effecting a transition from being the object of the Other’s desire to sublimating and projecting such desire onto alternative objects that stand in for the lost object. This, of course, does not occur in the poem, and so the establishment of law has the effect of hystericizing the speaker. The hysteric remains at the level of object, since to desire as subject would force an acknowledgement that, given the mimetic nature of desire, the Other too desires as a subject. Since, according to the Lacanian framework, desire as such entails a recognition of lack, the hysteric can never completely satisfy the Other’s desire. The hysterical subject denies the entire transition to the symbolic realm of the play of desire, assuming that the Other’s attachment rests solely on demand. In Donne’s poem, this disavowal is suggested in Donne’s version of Lacan’s notion of the forced choice: To be or not to be the phallus. In “The Cross,” the insistent question, to be or not to be the cross, displaces any question of embracing the cross purely in its symbolic function, itself a preemption of some recognition of God’s unsatisfiable desire: Who can deny me power, and liberty To stretch mine arms, and mine own cross to be? (17–18)

S t at e s o f E x c e p t i o n a n d Pau l i n e L ov e

53

If we can term the speaker of “The Cross” a neurotic, particularly hysterical subject, we might note the much different “perverse” or masochistic nature of the speaker of Donne’s poem “Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward.” Unlike “The Cross,” “Good Friday” deals more explicitly with God’s desire, and it significantly omits any mention of divine or positive law that might represent the symbolic register. The speaker remarks that he is thankful that he did not have to witness the crucifixion, that “spectacle of too much weight” (16), since Who sees God’s face, that is self life, must die; What a death were it then to see God die? ....................... Could I behold that endless height which is Zenith to us . . . and to’our antipodes, Humbled below us? (17–25)

As he frets over the very resemblance of God to Christ and himself, the speaker reminds himself that God cannot have a soul: that blood which is The seat of all our souls, if not of his, Made dirt of dust, or that flesh which was worn, By God (26–29)

The speaker fears a complete absorption of himself into God and Christ. The emotions registered in the first two-thirds of the poem are sadness regarding the Incarnation and fear of acknowledging the full implications thereof. How can we explain, though, the abrupt shift from the first two-thirds to last third of the poem, in which this frail, self-divided, mortified God transforms into a wrathful, Old Testament avenging God?: I turn my back to thee, but to receive Corrections, till thy mercies bid thee leave. O think me worth thine anger, punish me, Burn off my rusts, and my deformity. Restore thine image, so much, by thy grace, That thou mayst know me, and I’ll turn my face (37–42)

54

E n g l i s h R e n a i s s a n c e L i t e r at u r e / Pau l C e f a l u

What crucially distinguishes this poem from “The Cross” is that, rather than defy law or disavow the symbolic register, the speaker’s perverse concern is to somehow summon law into existence. Unlike neurosis, perversion occurs when there is a foreclosure of the paternal signifier or law. The subject cannot move from being to having, cannot become a desiring subject, until the establishment of law or prohibition makes clear that the subject cannot be the object of the Other’s desire. Without the establishment of law, perversion, either in the form of fetishism, or more familiarly, masochism or sadism might result. In the latter two cases, the subject stages the very law that is required if the subject is to move successfully from the imaginary to the symbolic. As Lacan writes of masochism, “the masochist tries to bring something into being . . . by which the Other’s desire makes the law.”35 Donne’s desire to “receive corrections” is a bid to offset the disturbing absorption of himself into God’s all-too-human characteristics, a desire to coax God into delivering some form of deserved punishment. The same triangulation is at work here as is in “The Cross.” The consuming Other from which the speaker must separate in order to fully realize himself as a desiring subject is God, depicted in the middle section of the poem as nearly indistinguishable from the speaker himself. The paternal function is served by Christ, the “saviour” invoked in the last section who will administer the requisite sanctions that will allow for separation. The final lines of the poem realize one other central feature of masochism. Because he calls into being the punitive desires of the Other, the masochistic remains in control; he pulls the strings, or “leads the dance,” by convincing the Other to demand some sacrifice of him. Agency at the end of the poem is indeed ascribed to the speaker, who will respond to Christ’s mercy of restoring his image by “turning his face.” Christ does the looking, but the perceptual accuracy of the looking is contingent on the speaker’s agreeing to respond as object to Christ’s recognizing gaze—as if the speaker orchestrates his own objectification by rendering himself the object of Christ’s gaze. This is itself made ambiguous by the invocation of “thine image,” which inevitably brings God as Other back into the speaker’s sight line, suggesting that the speaker has also entreated God to look upon him. The speaker has called into existence not only his own desire to be recognized but also God’s desire to recognize him, an apt example of the Hegelian-Lacanian notion that all desire is the desire of the Other. This provides consolation because,

S t at e s o f E x c e p t i o n a n d Pau l i n e L ov e

55

by forcing Christ to implement law, Christ in effect has named God’s desire, enabling the speaker to enter into the symbolic realm where he can find some pleasure in continuing to serve God’s desire through symbolic outlets (sanctioned forms of worship, for example) and can avoid a direct confrontation with the numinous, unsymbolizable nature of divine desire. How to reconcile, finally, this Lacanian interpretation of these two poems with Donne’s much reconstructed political theology described earlier? The problem worked out in the poetry is the very process of subjectivization, particularly the troublesome move from the imaginary to symbolic and a coming to terms with the desire of God as Other. Donne presents at least two ways of dealing with the transfer from the imaginary to symbolic. Law and the subject’s separation from God are not properly effected (and the subject is hystericized), or law is somehow absent, preventing separation, itself partly resolved through a masochistic staging of law. In the sermons, we have more of a move back from the symbolic to the imaginary: Purely political and symbolic investitures are displaced or re-sacralized and the subject is thrown back to a private relationship with God. What the sermons share with the poetry is a tendency to avoid a direct encounter with God’s “surplus validity,” which would ideally render his jouissance understandable or, in Eric Santner’s ideal scenario, shareable. Only in the Holy Sonnets, to which we now turn, does Donne poeticize a much more intimate relationship between speaker and God; such a relationship, built on agape or divine love, potentially serves, as we will see, as the very expression of law rather than simple displacement or sublation of law.

Agape and Law in the H OLY S ONNETS Any assessment of Donne’s agapeism should establish his view of God’s ontological nature. Donne articulates a negative theology in his 1626 sermon on the question, raised by Matthew 5:8, of seeing God. Following Augustine, Donne maintains not only that God does not have a body and ought not to be anthropomorphized, but that, in keeping with Nicene doxology, the “whole Trinity is equall in itself, and equally invisible to us.”36 Donne develops this notion of the deus absconditus later in the sermon:

56

E n g l i s h R e n a i s s a n c e L i t e r at u r e / Pau l C e f a l u If we bring the very Nature and Essence of God into question, we can give no judgment upon it (non sententia), we can make no probable discourse of it (non ratio), we can frame no likely opinion, or conjecture in it (non opinio), we cannot prepare our selves with any thing which we can bring studiously, or which can fall casually into out fancy, or imagination (non phantasia). And in the whole matter, and all the evidence, he joynes in this verdict with S. Hierome, Tunc cernitur, cum invisibilis creditur; God is best seen by us, when we confesse that he cannot be seen of us. . . . Here, in this life, neither the eyes, nor the minde of the most subtile, and most sanctified man can see the Essence of God.37

Once Donne establishes that God’s essence is unknowable, he maintains that those who are “pure in heart” may indeed “see” God, since “only God can see the heart of man, and only the heart of man can see God.”38 This chiasmic formula might seem like a rhetorical flourish, but it bespeaks Donne’s fundamentally Johannine conception of God’s agapeistic nature, according to which God’s nature defies predication and can only be apprehended in and through the enactings of love. This very performance of love, we will see momentarily, is extrapolated from neighborliness effected by the operations of the Holy Ghost: “God speakes mens’ language, that is, the Holy Ghost in the Scriptures descends to the capacity and understanding of man, and so presents God in the faculties of the minde of man, and in the lineaments of the body of man. But yet, say they, there is never braine, nor liver, nor spleene, nor any other inward part ascribed to God, but onely the heart. God is all heart, and that whole heart, that inexhaustible fountaine of love, is directed wholly upon man.”39 Donne’s wager is to theorize God without resorting to onto-theology, that is, without relying on some attributive account of God’s essence or being. It might be helpful to pause here in order to assess the overlap between Donne’s project and the most recent contemporary theorizing on the via negativa and onto-theology generally. In God Without Being, Jean-Luc Marion remarks, “To think God, therefore, outside of ontotheological difference, outside the question of Being, as well, risks the unthinkable, indispensable, but impassable. What name, what concept, and what sign nevertheless yet remain feasible? A single one, no doubt, love, or as we would like to say, as Saint John proposes—‘God [is] agape’ (1 John 4:8).”40 Love serves to refer to a God beyond predicative essence because, as Marion maintains, love peculiarly “gives

S t at e s o f E x c e p t i o n a n d Pau l i n e L ov e

57

itself,” and as such is not required to be received or confirmed by a recipient. In its unconditional nature, love is unlike any substantial attribute of God; to theorize God as love avoids an idolatrous scaffolding of God’s essential properties: “If God . . . is not because he does nor have to be, but loves, then, by definition, no condition can continue to restrict his initiative, amplitude, and ecstasy. Love loves without condition, simply because it loves; he thus loves without limit or restriction.”41 Marion does not develop a trinitarian doxology from his agapeism, but Jurgen Moltmann has elaborated the interdependence of agape and the Triune God. Drawing on Cabbalistic accounts of God’s pathos, Moltmann’s theopathic understanding of God assumes that God’s passion points to a self-differentiation or “rift” in God. God’s self-humiliation is rooted solely in “suffering love”: Love seeks a counterpart who freely responds and independently gives love for love. Love humiliates itself for the sake of the freedom of its counterpart. The freedom towards God of the human being whom God desires and loves is as unbounded as God’s capacity for passion and for patience. Love of freedom is the most profound reason for “God’s self-differentiation” and for the “rift” which runs though the divine life and activity until redemption. . . . The sole omnipotence which God possesses is the almighty power of love suffering love. It is this that he reveals in Christ.42

Moltmann works back from Christ’s passion and agape effected through the Holy Ghost to some notion of God’s nature as suffering love. Stated in more technical terms, the immanent Trinity is deduced from the economic Trinity; God’s agapeistic nature, extending beyond onto-theology, is extrapolated from God’s power ad extra in the temporal kingdom: What Christ, the incarnate God, did in time, God, the heavenly Father, does and must do in eternity. If Christ is weak and humble on earth, then God is weak and humble in heaven. For “the mystery of the cross” is a mystery which lies at the centre of God’s eternal being. This is the fundamental idea of the whole Anglican theology of God’s suffering: the cross on Golgotha has revealed the eternal heart of the Trinity. That is why we must trace the thread back from the historical, earthly cross, to the eternal nature.43

58

E n g l i s h R e n a i s s a n c e L i t e r at u r e / Pau l C e f a l u

Moltmann’s agapeism radically assumes the necessity of God’s selfhumiliation: “Love has to give, for it is only in the act of giving that it truly possesses, and finds bliss. That is why God has to give himself; and he cannot possess himself apart from this act of serving. God has to give himself completely; and it is only in this way that he is God.”44 On such an account, the Johannine or “suffering” God desires or finds pleasure in communicating himself, and so voluntarily expresses himself. In Moltmann’s terms, “‘God is love’ means: God is self-communication, and also the desire for self-communication.”45 ˘ iz˘ek’s similar but still more radical theopathy holds that monoZ theism is actually a theology of the “two” insofar as it registers the constitutive gap in the Absolute itself: “Christianity, precisely because of the Trinity, is the only true monotheism: the lesson of the Trinity is that God fully coincides with the gap between God and man—that God is this gap—this is Christ, not the God of beyond separated from man by a gap, but the gap as such, the gap that simultaneously separates God from God and man from man.”46 In this context, Christian love is the means by which such a gap is not so much covered over as revealed; it serves, in Slovenian-Lacanian terms, as the “enigmatic thing,” the very means by which a break in symbolic investitures can be apprehended and true neighborliness can prevail. Building on some of the radical implications of Pauline ˘ iz˘ek argues further that theology, particularly in Corinthians 5, Z agapeistic uncoupling, having very little to do with perceiving one’s neighbor in his or her “unique humanity,” is paradoxically, radically antihumanistic: “In this ‘uncoupling,’ the neighbour is thus reduced to a singular member of the community of believers (of the ‘Holy Ghost’)—to use the Althusserian-Lacanian opposition, it is not the symbolic subject who is reduced to the ‘real’ individual, it is the individual (in all the wealth of his ‘personality’) who is reduced to the singular point of his spirituality; as such, ‘uncoupling’ does actually involve a ‘symbolic death’—one has to ‘die for the law’ (Saint Paul).”47 ˘ iz˘ek’s claims, it In order to understand the full implications of Z is important to take into consideration the Lacanian notion of sexuation, particularly the crucial distinction between the masculine “all with exception” and feminine “non-all without exception.” When Lacan notoriously claimed that “Woman does not exist,” he meant that, unlike the category “man,” which is understandable under the phallic function and symbolic castration, the category “woman,”

S t at e s o f E x c e p t i o n a n d Pau l i n e L ov e

59

under which one might situate any individual woman, does not exist. As Kenneth Reinhard has recently argued, To write oneself as “man” is to enter into a social contract where access to unmediated jouissance, the “impossible” traumatic enjoyment associated with the overwhelming presence of the mother’s body, is sacrificed for the sake of the symbolic substitutions and displacements of culture and the remnant of jouissance that it promises. The crucial function of the phallus . . . is precisely that all men are subjected to it, which implies that a set is posited called “all men,” a set that is characterized by its totality and the homogeneity of it members, as castrated subjects. An individual man is always more or less an example of the closed set of Man; each man participates synecdochially in an idea of Man, which he equally represents and falls short of.48

Crucial to understanding the logic of the masculine “all” is to realize that the phallic function posits a constitutive exception suggested in the logical construction, “There exists at least one man who is not subject to the phallic function.” Lacan extrapolates the masculine exception from Freud’s myth of the primal horde as represented in Totem and Taboo, where Freud argues that at least one male, the primal father, theoretically existed who indeed experienced unlimited jouissance, or “surplus-enjoyment.” As a placeholder or ideal, the primal father is an ideal that any individual man strives toward, serving as the universal exception that founds the very set “man.” While women, too, are situated under the phallic function, the formula for female sexuation is a double negative: “[N]ot-all speaking beings are subject to the phallus,” which implies that “women are radically singular, not examples of a class or members of a closed set, but each one an exception. They are exceptions, however, not to a ‘rule’, but to an open set, an infinite series of particular women, into which each woman enters ‘one by one.’”49 What are the Christian implications of the non-all without universal exception, especially regarding agape? In the Pauline sense, the dialectic of law and its transgression, on the one hand, and love, on the other hand, corresponds respec˘ iz˘ek notes, the tively to the masculine and feminine distinction: As Z first dialectic is “clearly ‘masculine’/phallic, it involves the tension between the All (the universal Law) and its constitutive exception, while love is ‘feminine,’ it involves the paradoxes of the non-All.”50 ˘ iz˘ek’s elaboration of the Pauline law of exception is as follows: Z

60

E n g l i s h R e n a i s s a n c e L i t e r at u r e / Pau l C e f a l u The superego dialectic of Law and transgression does not lie only in the fact that Law itself invites its own transgression, that it generates the desire for its own violation; our obedience to the Law itself is not “natural”, spontaneous, but always-already mediated by the (repression of the) desire to transgress the law. When we obey the Law, we do so as part of a desperate strategy to fight against our own desire to transgress it, so the more rigorously we obey the Law, the more we bear witness to the fact that, deep within ourselves, we feel the pressure of the desire to indulge in sin.51

Sin, on such an account, serves as law’s constitutive exception: “The co-dependency of law and sin (its transgression) thus obeys the Lacanian ‘masculine’ logic of exception: ‘sin’ is the very exception that sustains the law . . . ‘Sin’ . . . is that on account of which the Law has to appear to the subject as a foreign power crushing the subject.”52 Sin sustains the law as law’s exception by keeping open the possibility that there is some desirable beyond of the law, some aspect of oneself, “some deep precious treasure” within the subject “that can only be loved, and cannot be submitted to the rule of Law.”53 ˘ iz˘ek’s remarkable conclusion is that true Pauline love fulfills the Z law not by supplementing it, but by fully realizing it, by giving up the illusion that there is some beyond to the law or some Other of the Other. It follows, then, that genuine Pauline love is expressed precisely when the subject assumes the following posture: “In love, I am also nothing, but, as it were, a Nothing humbly aware of itself, a Nothing paradoxically made rich through the very awareness of its lack. Only a lacking, vulnerable being is capable of love: the ultimate mystery of love, therefore, is that incompleteness is, in a way, higher than completion.”54 Before assessing the feminine non-all in relation to Donne’s “Holy Sonnet 14: Batter my heart,” we can elaborate the more straightforward superegoic masculine dialectic of law and its transgression in relation to Donne’s “Holy Sonnet 16” in the 1635 manuscript, “Father part of his double interest.” In “Father, part of his double interest,” Donne brings together, on the one hand, the Pauline account of the ways in which letter and law “kill” (Romans 5:19), as well as the manner in which love “abridges” or sums the law (Galatians 5:19) and, on the other hand, the synoptic view that the love commandments serve as Jesus’ “last” commands (as found in Mark 12:28, for example). Donne further legalizes the relationship between law and love by referencing the language of testamentary

S t at e s o f E x c e p t i o n a n d Pau l i n e L ov e

61

wills. Having suggested that the Old and New Testaments correspond to “two wills,” and having argued that the laws of the first will cannot be met, he offers the following resolution: Thy all-healing grace and Spirit Revive again what law and letter kill. Thy law’s abridgement, and thy last command Is all but love, oh let that last will stand! (11–14)

Rather than worry the inherently paradoxical notion of the command to love, a vexing question that Kierkegaard will eventually devote a chapter of Works of Love to explicating, Donne asserts that love serves as Christ’s last will and testament.55 For Christ to include in his last “will” a commandment to love reflects that lovingness is as legalistic a concept as Old Testament morality. To imagine love as the principle part of Jesus’ last will suggests not simply, as the pun on will implies, that love was and is Jesus’ “will,” but that love is something that retains the stature of a bequest, very close in nature to the dead letter of the law. Most important, insofar as love serves simply as Law’s abridgement—that is, serves to make Law more compendious—the last sentiment of the poem is decidedly ambiguous. When Donne exclaims, “Oh, let that last will stand,” he ostensibly means the will of love, but given that love sums the law, thereby serving law’s ends, the last will might also refer to the will of law itself. Love does not so much fulfill the law as momentarily stand in for and suspend it, which comports with Giorgio Agamben’s notion that the new will is a sublation of the actuality of law, all the while ˘ iz˘ek argues concerning Agamben’s retaining law’s potentiality. Z interpretation of the law and love dialectic: “Pauline love is not the cancellation of destructive negation of the Law, but its accomplishment in the sense of ‘sublation,’ where the law is retained through its very suspension, as a subordinate (potential) moment of a higher actual unity.”56 The danger of such an interpretation as Agamben’s, ˘ iz˘ek points out, is that it tends to overlook what the authentic as Z Pauline state of emergency should effect, namely, a suspension of “the obscene libidinal investment in the Law, the investment on account of which the Law generates/solicits its own transgression.”57As we will see momentarily, “Father, part of his double interest” departs from the radicalism of, for example, “Batter my heart” precisely because such a dialectic is not sublated: To the extent that

62

E n g l i s h R e n a i s s a n c e L i t e r at u r e / Pau l C e f a l u

love serves as a command, it tends to retain a place for something that might exist beyond that command—some unattainable excess that love ultimately conceals, an excess that is both generated and sublimated precisely by the command to love in the poem. What, precisely, is the nature of such an excess? The excess is established outright in the poem and is the mystery of the “knotty” Trinity: Father, part of his double interest Unto thy kingdom, thy Son gives to me, His jointure in the knotty Trinity He keeps, and gives me his death’s conquest. (1–4)

Christ’s involvement in the Trinity, his “jointure,” is withheld from the speaker; what Christ gives instead is “death’s conquest,” and death is conquered in the poem (both the death of sin and literal, mortal death) through Christ’s ultimate bequest of love, or more specifically the command to love. Obedience in the form of love, however, is not the means to understanding the trinitarian mystery; it is rather a means of sublimating the desire to understand such a mystery, especially according to the Lacanian notion of sublimation: elevation of an ordinary object (Christ as the embodiment of love, or love itself) to the dignity of the ineluctable Thing itself. In terms of the Lacanian logic of exception, the exception here is the Trinity, which is part within, part without the circle of love inscribed for the speaker: What generates love is not simply Christ’s command or the subject’s spontaneous overflow of love, but rather a desire to unfold the mystery of the Trinity, the desire of which is inevitably ignited at the beginning of the poem. This, finally, is the phantasmic core of the poem, the object cause of desire toward which, presumably, all loving relationships tend. Stated differently, all loving subjects are caught in the logic of exception insofar as there exists at least one loving subject, Christ, who seems to retain something over and above lovingness as a foundational principle, a mysterious attribute that each particular subject, through the imitatio Christi, can at least potentially possess. One of the reasons that love is issued problematically as a command in the poem is that the possibility of transgression sustains the illusion that there is some beyond not simply of law (already displaced by love) but of love itself.

S t at e s o f E x c e p t i o n a n d Pau l i n e L ov e

63

One way of understanding Donne’s position on agape in the Holy Sonnets is to posit that for Donne, love of God for man is represented under the ideal category, “non-all without exception,” while, as is the case in “Father, part of his double interest,” love of man for God is represented under the category, “all with exception.” “Batter my heart,” “Holy Sonnet 14” in the 1635 manuscript, is distinctive not least because it centers more on the speaker’s concern to receive love from rather than give love to God: “Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain” (9). In this, “Batter my heart’s” account of love is unlike that found in “Sonnet 15” of the 1635 manuscript, which centers on the speaker’s love of God: “Wilt thou love God, as he thee?” (1). The nature and effects of God’s love in “Batter my heart” are, of course, figured in terms of paradox and contradiction: Take me to you, imprison me, for I Except you enthral me, never shall be free, Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me (12–14)

Enthrallment and ravishment render the speaker “free” and “chaste” and ultimately a “new” creature. It should first be noted that God’s love seems contingent and agentless—motivated neither by desire nor drive. Agape, at least in the speaker’s mind, would seem to be an emanation or overflow of God’s uncontainable love. Consider ˘ iz˘ek’s comment on the violence of Christian love: “Christian love Z is a violent passion to introduce a Difference, a gap in the order of being to privilege and elevate some object at the expense of others. Love is violence not (only) in the vulgar sense of the Balkan proverb ‘If he doesn’t beat me, he doesn’t love me!’—violence is already the love choice as such, which tears its object out of its context, elevating it to the Thing.”58 Violence as the love choice as such: This goes a way toward capturing God’s elusive, apophatic nature in “Batter my heart,” a God who is not anthropomorphized, still the deity of the via negativa, but one who, to extent that he has predicates and attributes at all, is the very embodiment of loving violence. This is not a desiring God as much as a God who demands, one who, through his vital energies—knocking, breaking, blowing, imprisoning, and ravishing—fashions a new, regenerated creature. And what exactly is this new creaturely life that God has created? If God is the vehicle of violent motion, the result is the embodiment of overdetermination and paradox as such: a creature whose very creatureliness

64

E n g l i s h R e n a i s s a n c e L i t e r at u r e / Pau l C e f a l u

has been called into question. As legions of Donne’s commentators have noted, part of the difficulty of interpreting “Batter my heart” lies in its tendency to pile metaphor upon metaphor. The speaker, of course, is variously compared to a pot or similar artifact, glassware, a usurped town, Satan’s spouse, and then to the object of divine rape. But it is precisely this overdetermination that allows Donne to represent the result of God’s love, this new creature, as an uncanny, unknowable Thing, beyond simple predicative being. This is a subject who, in its redemptive newness, is momentarily in touch with the violent madness of God and its own irreducible agalma, or selfalienation.59 In Slovenian-Lacanian terms, “Batter my heart” figures less the ˘ iz˘ek notes, jouissance of drives than the jouissance of the Other: As Z “this difference is often described as the threshold of symbolic castration: while desire of the Other (genitivus subjectivus and objectivus) can thrive only insofar as the Other remains an undecipherable abyss, the Other’s jouissance indicates its suffocating overproximity.”60 As noted earlier, the latter, the Other’s jouissance, refers to the pre-symbolic enjoyment of the Other, which is overwhelming and traumatizing especially because it is inexplicable and unsatisfiable to the object of such enjoyment. Only through symbolic castration can ˘ iz˘ek notes, “into the localized such overproximity be sublated, as Z phallic jouissance that, precisely, is jouissance under the condition of desire, that is, as it appears after symbolic castration.”61 What the speaker of “Holy Sonnet 14” attempts is a radical desublimation, a heroic tendency to directly call forth God’s jouissance and refigure that jouissance within the very terms of creaturely, physical love. Put differently: To de-sublimate the God-subject relationship, to render God overproximate rather than mysteriously apart, is to also render God immanent rather than transcendent, to integrate him fully into the symbolic without remainder or exception. When the speaker receives God’s love, he receives it, however traumatically, in its entirety: He encounters God not on the border of the real and symbolic, not because an aspect of the transcendent God has penetrated the creaturely realm; he rather encounters the jouissance of the Other (the Other’s “real”) unexceptionally within the symbolic, which is precisely what an uncanny encounter with the non-all entails. Consider Suzanne Barnard’s description of the Lacanian non-all:

S t at e s o f E x c e p t i o n a n d Pau l i n e L ov e

65

The feminine structure (and hence, Other jouissance) is produced in relation to a “set” that does not exist on the basis of an external, constitutive exception. . . . However, this does not mean, in turn, that the non-whole of feminine structure is simply outside of or indifferent to the order of masculine structure. Rather, she is in the phallic function altogether or, in Lacan”s words, “She is not not at all there. She is there in full.” . . . By being in the symbolic “without exception” then, the feminine subject has a relation to the Other that produces another “unlimited” form of jouissance.62

˘ iz˘ek’s most important, pithy formulations captures exactly One of Z Barnard’s point and its implications for understanding the nature of love in “Batter my heart”: “The Real is not external to the Symbolic: the Real is the Symbolic itself in the modality of non-all, lacking an external Limit/Exception.”63 One might argue that, in “Batter my heart,” Donne’s God embodies such “feminine” jouissance (and produces it in the speaker of the poem) precisely because the most seemingly elusive aspects of God’s power—his ability to make and remake creaturely life—are understandable only in the familiar terms of physical, temporal love, as if the poem conflates facile early Christian and scholastic distinctions between agape and eros. The poem’s paradoxical message is, then, that agape is only truly agape when it is indistinguishable from eros, or in Lacanian terms, agape only emerges when it is rendered outside the matrix of symbolic desire but still firmly within the realm of the symbolic in the form of the non-all without exception.64 As in “Father, part of his double interest,” so in “Batter my heart,” the operations of the Trinity are central, but the latter sonnet, unlike the former, displaces the trinitarian logic of the exception. As we have seen, since Christ’s trinitarian office remains knotty in “Father, part of his double interest,” that sonnet maintains some mysterious beyond of Christ (and by extension, God), some aspect of the divine that seems to transcend Christ’s saving actions in the temporal (symbolic) realm; in “Batter my heart,” however, the specific offices of each person of the Trinity are not so much parsed and clearly delineated as simultaneously ascribed to all three persons at once. While Donne scholars have typically linked the activities of “knocking” and “breaking” with God, “breathing” and “blowing” with the Holy Ghost, and “mending” and “burning” with Christ, Arthur Clements has convincingly argued that each seemingly discrete operation can equally be attributed to the actions of each

66

E n g l i s h R e n a i s s a n c e L i t e r at u r e / Pau l C e f a l u

person of the Trinity.65 So, for example, while “breaking” might be associated with the Father’s agency, it also reflects the Son’s actions (as in Song of Solomon 5:2, in which Christ as “bridegroom” “knocketh” at the communicant’s door). Furthermore, given that the Holy Ghost ultimately serves as the vehicle through which Christ as bridegroom infuses love, one only reductively excludes the Holy Ghost from the knocking activities of the first and second Persons. And while breath is typically associated with the Spirit’s infusion of grace, Genesis, of course, narrates that God “breathes” into man’s nostrils the breath of life. Christ, too, often acts by breathing, as in John 20:22, where we find that, after his resurrection, Christ “breathes” on his disciples. Furthermore, although Donne familiarly puns on Son-sun, implying that Christ will “shine” on the regenerated speaker of the poem, Corinthians 2, 4:6 notes that the God who has commanded the “light to shine out of darkness” has also “shined in our hearts.” Finally, the third person of the Trinity, who descends in “tongues like as of fire,” also may be linked to the shining operations of both the First and Second persons.66 As Clements concludes, “Profound paradox and the consequent greater complexity of the poem are characteristic of Donne, who in this sonnet is asking three person’d God to break (not just the Father alone), to blow (not just the Holy Ghost alone), to burn (not just the Son alone) and make him anew. It is as if all the triple strength of the Three persons acting as one, with true trinitarian force, is required to raise Donne from his deeply sinful life.”67 What should be added to Clements’ able reconstruction of the trinitarian paradoxes in the poem is an acknowledgement that the ultimate saving action on the speaker’s behalf will specifically involve enthrallment and ravishment—activities that are not only unspecific to any singular person of the Trinity, but that, in their very creatureliness, help to narrow considerably the gap between human and divine action. Indeed, “enthrall” and “ravish” are distinctive precisely because they are the two least scriptural and sacred key terms in the poem: “Enthrall” appears only once in scripture and is used in Psalm 45:11, in which the Psalter, addressing the daughter of Tyre, remarks that “the King is enthralled by your beauty, honor him, for he is your lord,” a sentiment that seems far removed from the regenerative enthrallment for which Donne’s speaker beseeches God. And while “ravish” is employed in Deuteronomy, Jeremiah, Lamentations, and elsewhere, it is typically referenced in the context of

S t at e s o f E x c e p t i o n a n d Pau l i n e L ov e

67

biblical history or an illustrative parable that figures a secular ravishment of a woman. Again, the larger point is that a God who regenerates his suppliant by the secularly connotative activities of enthrallment and ravishment is a God whose trinitarian mysteries have been unapologetically demystified, rendered fully understandable, however violent and traumatizing, in the immanent, rather than transcendent sphere of agapeistic love. Gary Kuchar has argued that Donne’s speaker only tentatively yearns to submit himself entirely to God, only reluctantly assumes “his own negativity in the face of God’s plenitude.”68 Yet it is not clear that the subject registers such an asymmetry or dichotomy between his own impending “nothingness” and God’s “plenitude.” When the speaker declares, “Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain” (9), the coordinated syntax and conjunction in the line suggests that, once liberated from Satan, the speaker would ultimately draw no fundamental distinction between his symbolic death (nothingness) and his chaste enthrallment (plenitude) by God. ˘ iz˘ek’s terms, can the Only as a loving and loved “nothing,” in Z speaker become a loving and loved “something.”If, then, “Father, part of my double interest“ reinstates the logic of exception by maintaining such trinitarian knots, “Batter my heart” displaces such an exception by refusing to maintain a divine excess or inscrutable beyond that generates God’s desire for the subject or the subject’s desire for God.

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 2

   Baroque Monads and Allegor ical Immanence: A Reassessment of Richard Crashaw ’s Imagery

R

ichard Crashaw’s poetry, often described as Baroque in nature, provides the most comprehensive illustration of the ways in which a jouissance of the body, or the feminine non-all without exception, operates through or within the fundamental jouissance of the drives, or masculine logic of exception. In Crashaw’s work, the feminine non-all does not, however, make itself felt where we would expect it, namely in the poetry that recounts the lives and tribulations of female mystics and heretics like Saint Teresa and Mary Magdalene. On the contrary, these poems operate firmly within the masculine realm of exception. It is in Crashaw’s Christology, in his unrelenting concern to represent Christ’s material body, that one detects something approaching the non-all without exception. In order to make such an argument, I will be claiming further that one needs to read Crashaw’s theology as fundamentally immanentist rather than transcendent in nature, an orientation that itself is motivated by Crashaw’s embrace of some fundamental Baroque tenets. As such, while the Slovenian-Lacanian organizing antinomy between a jouissance of the drives versus one of the body will guide much of the chapter, I supplement the framework with an exposition of some of the most influential philosophical, theological, and historical accounts of the Baroque that one finds in the writings of not only Lacan but also Gilles Deleuze, Walter Benjamin, and Heinrich

70

E n g l i s h R e n a i s s a n c e L i t e r at u r e / Pau l C e f a l u

Wolfflin. Since Crashaw’s poetry is nothing if not intensely visual and evocative, I begin with a reassessment of Lacan’s theory of the gaze, which, as I suggested in the introduction to this book, has still not been productively appropriated by early modern literary critics.

God’s Extimacy: Crashaw and Desire Since Lacan’s theory of the gaze has often been reductively associated, especially in film theory, with a contestation for mastery regarding who bears the power of the gaze, it will be worth reviewing his account of the gaze as it is presented in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. In these lectures on the relationship among the gaze, look, and screen, Lacan argues that the gaze has a triadic rather than dualistic structure. While Sartre argues that subjects and objects of the look (le regard) compete for mastery, Lacan argues that the gaze is located on a point located outside both subject and object.1 Lacan’s revision of classical, especially Albertian perspective theory, posits the subject who is looking, the object that is looked at, and then the gaze (described both as a point of light and the symbolic other) that apprehends both subject and object and that uncannily seems to look both at the object and subject who erroneously believes that he or she bears the gaze.2 In fact, Lacan claimed that the eye and the function of seeing should not be conflated with the gaze—that seeing or beholding an object or picture functions to pacify the subject from the gaze’s disturbing effects. In order to understand Lacan’s point, it should be remembered that the gaze is identified with the objet a, the object cause of desire around which the scopic drive circulates but that it never directly encounters.3 In developmental terms, the gaze is first apprehended when the child realizes that the mother, or Other more generally, is looking beyond the child for something that the child cannot provide. To meet up with the gaze, to have a face to face encounter, would be radically annihilating for the subject, since this would entail an encounter with das Ding, the unsatisfiable desire that represents something that is not only other to the child, but also Other to the Other itself. As objet a, though, the gaze is akin to a final cause or telos of the subject, something which the subject simultaneously wants to return to and to keep at bay. In the symbolic realm of desire, one is attracted to partial objects of the drive, another’s look or voice, precisely

Baroque Monads and Allegor ical Immanence

71

because such partial objects conceal the more elusive gaze or voice of the Other. This helps to explain why, for Lacan, the gaze is intimated not in another’s direct stare, but in a much more oblique or awry manner, not only through the well-known anamorphic image but also via the “blankness of the eye of the blind man,” or the lowered eyelids of statues of Buddha. To apprehend the sight line of the Other serves to “lay down the gaze” because one can momentarily recognize oneself in the Other, especially during the formative mirror stage. But to apprehend in the Other a look that is askance calls up the gaze that the direct look would otherwise overlay, as if the subject recognizes something that is not only other in the Other, but also other in itself when it projects the Other onto itself. In Mladen Dolar’s example, it is as if one’s reflection in the mirror suddenly winked or smiled independently of the subject’s actual gestures in the mirror.4 What is radically destabilizing about these encounters is the sense of a return of what has been remaindered when one identifies with one’s comforting but alienating imago in the imaginary register. We are again in the realm of the Lacanian “extimate,” some scrap of the real that emerges in the symbolic but that exceeds the subjectivity of both the subject and the Other itself.

Crashaw’s “The Weeper” Bearing in mind this triadic structure of the gaze, we can begin to assess the infamous imagery of Crashaw’s “Saint Mary Magdalene or The Weeper,” as found in his 1652 collection Carmen deo Nostro. In the most notorious and idiosyncratic of such images, Magdalene’s eyes and tears are described as follows: He’s follow’d by two faithful fountains; Two walking baths; two weeping motions; Portable, and compendious oceans (19, 4–6)

This image represents only one among many variations on the theme of weeping. Earlier the tears are described as flowing upward toward heaven’s breast:

72

E n g l i s h R e n a i s s a n c e L i t e r at u r e / Pau l C e f a l u Upwards thou dost weep. Heav’n’s bosom drinks the gentle stream. Where th’ milky rivers creep, Thine floats above; and is the cream (4, 1–4)5

Magdalene’s tears are variously compared to “proudest pearls” (7, 6), “balsam” (10, 6), heaven’s “wine” that has been bottled in “crystal viles” (12, 3–6), “faithful flowers” (14, 6), and “fair Floods” (17, 1). Toward the end of the poem, the tears are anthropomorphized as two “bright brothers” (28, 1), the “fugitive sons of those fair Eyes” (28, 2), and their “fruitful mothers” (28, 3) who travel to “meet / a worthy object, our lord’s Feet” (31, 5–6). What is fascinating about these images, aside from their excessive qualities, is that, in a poem about Magdalene’s eyes—“I mean / Thy fair eyes, sweet Magdalene” (1, 5–6)—such images seem to displace the manner in which these eyes actually look or see. This might not seem remarkable, given that the poem is, after all, concerned to reflect Magdalene’s tears, rather than her eyes, in keeping with the Renaissance emblematic tradition on which Crashaw draws. But the poem’s relentless focus on the unnatural weeping rather than Magdalene’s eyes or look seems to de-anthropomorphize her. Crashaw’s critics have typically argued that what is offensive about the poem is the excessiveness of the imagery and the Baroque sentimentality of the poem generally. But from a Lacanian perspective, what is off-putting about the imagery is that precisely by not representing Magdalene’s look, focusing our attention instead on what emanates from her eyes (tears that have become unrecognizable as such), the gaze that her look would otherwise serve to pacify seems to be laid bare. The “metaphysical” shudder of the poem lies partly in the experience of being confronted with the otherwise invisible gaze that is bodied forth in Magdalene’s shocking visage: Her eyes are described as entrenched “wells” created by Christ’s emblematic dart; Medusa-like tears are transformed into so many elongated fountains that seem to have an uncanny life of their own. Magdalene’s tears become for the viewer of this spectacle the mirror image that refracts rather than reflects our look, the specular double that grimaces and contorts itself. For this reason, “The Weeper” and Crashaw’s poetry generally do not fit neatly into any stylistic or denominational category such as Tridentine Catholicism or even an unreconstructed concept of the

Baroque Monads and Allegor ical Immanence

73

Baroque. Crashaw’s departure from seventeenth-century Ignatian and Salesian meditative practices (both of which engage the Baroque style) underscores the innovative quality of his imagery. While there are significant differences between the Ignatian and Salesian method, both meditative traditions require that the exercitant “compose the place,” a process of imagining detailed, dramatic religious scenes in which the meditator would place himself or herself among the figures of, for example, the gospel parables. As an English Jesuit remarks, one must see “the places where the things we meditate on were wrought, by imagining ourselves to be really present at those places; which we must endeavor to present so lively, as though we saw them indeed, with our corporal eyes.”6 In order to contemplate the nativity, for example, one ought to place oneself in an imagined picture that features “a childe wrapped in swaddling clothes, layed in a manger,” all the while “applying the senses” to, rather than simply cognizing, the good news of such an event.7 When dealing with less concrete, “invisible mysteries” of scripture, one is granted license to compose one’s own scene based entirely on a constructed context and setting. In all cases, composing the place involves, as Roland Barthes points out, an “imperialism of the icon”: Each dramatic scene is typically full of evocative images, scenes, allegories, and religious objects, all of which appeal primarily to the senses, which are considered the surest pathways to the divine. Unlike the speculative mysticism of negative theology, which promotes a purgation of attachments to earthly objects, counter-Reformation method finds divinity within objects that are situated, along with the exercitant himself, in detailed tableaux. Barthes remarks, “It is not against the proliferation of images that the Exercises are finally struggling, but, far more dramatically, against their inexistence, as though, originally emptied of fantasies, the exercitant . . . needed assistance in providing himself with them.”8 As is well known, Crashaw’s critics have tended to place his poetry in some version of this meditative tradition, a trend that Barbara Lewalski’s magisterial account of Protestant poetics did not attempt to revise (given Lewalski’s sense that Crashaw’s religious allegiances did not belong denominationally with the Protestant leanings of Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, and Edward Taylor). So, Louis Martz observes that Crashaw’s nativity hymn, “Sung as by the Shepherds,” composes a place where Crashaw’s speaker makes himself present at the manger scene in the poem through the repetition of “we saw”

74

E n g l i s h R e n a i s s a n c e L i t e r at u r e / Pau l C e f a l u

and “I saw” and lines such as, “See, see how soon his new bloom’d cheek / T’wixt his mother’s breast has gone to bed.”9 Other critics have acknowledged Crashaw’s debt to the meditative tradition, but have pointed out that the construction of mental places and an application of the senses do not involve the visualization of elaborate or exact detail. Marc Bertanasco argues that Crashaw’s imagery is “sensuous perhaps but also curiously unreal,” and that while Crashaw’s imagery at times lacks the sensuous immediacy of other counterReformation poets, his poetry indeed has “spiritual immediacy.”10 If the meditative tradition sets out to make divine mysteries familiar and accessible, Crashaw’s poetry inevitably renders familiar images and places strange. This is apparent from the invocatory lines of “The Weeper,” in which Crashaw begins by composing a place— “Hail sister springs! / Parents of silver-footed rills! / Ever bubbling things! / Thawing crystal! snowy hills” (1, 1–4)—only to correct the reader’s settling judgment by pointing out what he really means to be describing: “I mean / Magdalene’s eyes” (1, 5–6). When the place is less naturalistic and more imaginative, the cognitive shift is no less demanding. As soon as we begin to visualize the “new bright guest” taking up “among the stars a room,” which heaven makes “a feast” (12, 1–3), we realize that crystal vials are serving up none other than Magdalene’s tears (reminiscent of the speaker’s stony heart proffered to God in George Herbert’s “Love Unknown”). And, as has already been noted, the strangest place composed in the poem is the one that depicts Christ straying among the Galilean mountains, followed by those “two walking baths,” “portable, and compendious oceans” (19, 5–6). The visual and cognitive disturbance produced in each case is not simply grounded in bizarre imagery as such; it is more the result of framing a picture, the elements of which are visually straightforward except for the one displacing image that seems to throw the composition off-kilter. ˘ iz˘ek The effect produced here is analogous to the effect Slavoj Z describes regarding the way in which modern pornography situates the gaze. If Lacan’s theory of the gaze posits a fundamental antinomy of the gaze and view, or look (the subject looking cannot see the object-gaze looking back at the subject), pornography is perverse for the very reason that it “reveals all,” shows too much and so relocates the gaze from the object to the subject or spectator: “Instead of being on the side of the viewed object, the gaze falls into ourselves, the spectators, which is why the image we see on the

Baroque Monads and Allegor ical Immanence

75

screen contains no spot, no sublime mysterious point from which it gazes at us.”11 The result is a radical de-sublimation, in which the object loses its capacity to conceal the imagined sublimity with which we invest it, the very sublimity that made us desire the object in the first place. Instead of a direct encounter with the object, we experience a missed or failed encounter. To look too closely at an object, to see it too clearly, is, paradoxically to pass over what initially attracts us to it: “If we proceed too hastily to the point, if we show the ‘thing in itself,’ we necessarily lose what we are after.”12 What results is not titillation but a feeling of disgust, a sense that we have witnessed something too vulgar or obscene. The “too much” that is revealed in Crashaw’s “The Weeper” is Magdalene’s sentimentality or more generally, her desire to represent her contrition to Christ’s witness (and Crashaw’s desire to represent it to the reader). What gives Magdalene her special status for the Renaissance emblematic tradition is indeed her unquenchable desire to devote herself to Christ after her conversion. But we are drawn to that desire (read here as the ineffable desire of the Other) in proportion to the extent that it defies ready symbolization and so cannot be directly and fully shown. Instead of allowing the reader to be drawn in by that desire, precisely by maintaining a distance therefrom (we desire to circle around the desire of the Other), “The Weeper” gives us the devotional equivalent of the pornographic “money shot,” in which Magdalene’s status as elusive thing is rendered obscene, even ridiculous. Crashaw’s poetry departs significantly from the process of meditative symbolization: while he does compose a place, he situates in that place an image that doesn’t quite belong, a kind of blot or stain, something akin to the anamorphic image, to use Lacan’s nomenclature. However, rather than empower that image with the gaze, maintaining its fascination for and hold over the viewer, the image shows too much, and so the gaze is displaced onto the spectator, who now responds to the image, drained of its mystery, in terms of disgust, rather than awe. We can perhaps better appreciate the relevance of the Lacanian context to Crashaw’s imagery if we evaluate it in relation to more conventional notions of the early modern Baroque image. Heinrich Wolfflin, one of the leading interpreters of the Baroque style, underlined the “painterly style” of the Baroque, in which borders among objects themselves (and between background and objects) are not clearly delineated, creating an “illusion of movement” and a sense

76

E n g l i s h R e n a i s s a n c e L i t e r at u r e / Pau l C e f a l u

that each image has “unlimited potentialities”: “The eye quickly tires of anything in a painting that can be fully grasped at first glance. But if some parts of the composition remain hidden and one object overlaps another, the beholder is stimulated to imagine what he cannot see. The objects that are partly hidden seem as if they might at any moment emerge; the picture becomes alive, and the hidden parts then actually do seem to reveal themselves.”13 Baroque art rests not simply on what we might describe as a hermeneutics of movement, but, in ontological terms, a sense of “becoming” rather than the more characteristic Renaissance sense of the “static calm of being.”14 In terms of representations of the human body, this is exemplarily reflected in the proto-Baroque images of Michelangelo, in which bodies seem unstructured, incomplete, and unharmonious—their individual parts accorded a vital energy that makes them seem selfanimating: “This emotion of wild, ecstatic delight cannot be expressed uniformly by the whole body: emotion breaks out with violence in certain organs, while the rest of the body remains subject only to gravity. . . . The two elements, mind and body, have, as it were, parted company. It is as if these men no longer have full power over their own bodies, no longer permeate them with their own will.”15 As we have begun to see, Crashaw’s images do indeed seem to have a life of their own, as if they have been separated out from their bearers (in this case no longer attached to Magdalene herself). To render Magdalene as a wholly desiring creature, to subjectivize her, would serve to domesticate her desire, in turn, placating the subject or viewer of such images. In Lacanian terms, Crashaw’s Baroque images serve as anamorphic images rendered too real, as if the desubjectivized gaze is bodied forth in partial objects. Again, the effect is to melt not only the subject-object distinction between Magdalene and her Other, or God, but also the subject-object distinction between the reader or viewer and Magdalene. We can see this process further at work in Crashaw’s depiction of Teresa d’Avila.

Feminine Not-All: Crashaw with the Mystics A Lacanian assessment of Crashaw’s representation of mysticism ought to begin with Lacan’s suggestive identification of mysticism with feminine jouissance. Lacan distinguishes two sorts of mystics: those like Angelus Silesius, who “situated themselves on the side of the

Baroque Monads and Allegor ical Immanence

77

phallic function,” and those like Hadewijch d’Anvers and Saint Teresa, who partook of a distinctly “feminine jouissance.” About Silesius, Lacan remarks, “Confusing his contemplative eye with the eye with which God looks at him, must, if kept up, partake of perverse jouissance.”16 Regarding Saint Teresa (and, by extension, Hadewijch), Lacan remarks, “You need but go to Rome and see the statue by Bernini to immediately understand that she’s coming. There’s no doubt about it. What is she getting off on? It is clear that the essential testimony of the mystics consists in saying that they experience it, but know nothing about it.”17 I would observe that, contrary to what might seem to be the case, Crashaw’s Teresan poems reflect a compromised or Silesian mysticism, in which the mystical experience still operates within the realm of the masculine economy of the phallic exception rather than the feminine non-all, the latter of which, for Lacan, entails an authentic mysticism. When we encounter the Teresa of Crashaw’s three Teresan poems, we notice that any bodily image of Teresa is conspicuously missing. Teresa’s rapturous union with Christ and heaven render her an idealized abstraction in “A Hymn to the Name and Honor of the Admirable Saint Teresa”: There So soon as thou shalt first appear, The Moon of maiden stars, thy white Mistress, attended by such bright Souls as thy shining self, shall come. (121–25)

To the extent that any concrete imagery is added to this depiction of Teresa’s “bright soul,” that imagery is limited to symbolic body parts: her “gentle Heart” that is wounded by Love’s dart (105–6) and her “lips” that are taught by “heaven with his hand” (130). Crashaw’s imagistic range is here restricted to elaborations of the emblematic dart, which is dipped “thrice in that rich flame” (81) and inscribes Christ’s radiant name “upon the roof of heaven” (82–83); and in the “Flaming Heart,” the anthropomorphized seraphim with his rosy fingers, radiant hair, glowing cheek, who blushes upon witnessing Teresa armed with the dart (132–33). Crashaw has transformed the afflicted, grieving, and always divided Teresa of her autobiography into something akin to an idealized lady reminiscent of the courtly love tradition. This seems to be

78

E n g l i s h R e n a i s s a n c e L i t e r at u r e / Pau l C e f a l u

the transformative strategy of the “Flaming Heart” as well, where Teresa’s attractiveness inheres more in her ability to inspire awe and shame than in her earnest desire to find union with God. The argument of the “Flaming Heart” is that the emblematic tradition misconstrues the relationship between the dart-bearing seraphim and Teresa: Teresa should be wielding the dart, and the seraphim should be filled with the shame usually ascribed to Teresa: Do then as equal right requires, since His the blushes be, and hers the fires . . . Give Him the veil, give her the dart (136–41)

The seraphim is then cast in the role of a “rivall’d lover,” presumably competing with the “nests of new Seraphims” below who desire requital from Teresa and who “live and die amidst her darts” (142–49). Crashaw then manipulates, but stays within the parameters of the rhetoric of courtly love by noting that Teresa’s “weapon” is precisely the wound that she receives from the very dart that Crashaw now puts in her possession: Leave her that; and thou shall leave her Not one loose shaft, but love’s whole quiver. For in love’s field was never found A nobler weapon then a Wound (167–70)

If the courtly lady “wounds” her petitioning lovers by her harshness or frank unresponsiveness, Teresa, now immortal and martyred, will “wound” and “conquer” by allowing “mystic Deaths” to wait on her heart; wise souls will be “the love-slain witnesses of this life of thee” (181–82). The speaker then begs that his own desires be compromised and wounded by Teresa: O sweet incendiary! show here thy art, Upon this carcass of a hard, cold, heart, Let all thy scatter’d shafts of light . . . Combin’d against this Breast at once break in And take away from me my self and sin, This gracious Robbery shall thy bounty be (183–89)

Baroque Monads and Allegor ical Immanence

79

In a well known series of commentaries, Lacan suggests that the idealized lady of courtly love serves simultaneously as a screen on which to project narcissistic fantasies and as a figure so alien and radically Other that she stands in for the traumatic Ding itself. How to reconcile this dual function? On the one hand, the courtly lady serves as an ideal ego for the subject (ideal to the extent that she appears autonomous and self-possessed, what every subject futilely attempts to achieve during the transition from the imaginary to the symbolic). Identification with the imaginary imago is always alienating, since it circumscribes and hence partitions the individual in exchange for an alienating image of the subject. But if the courtly lady serves as an ideal ego, she also threatens the integrity of that ideal ego insofar as the lady stands in for the Thing, an encounter with which would entail the negation of the symbolic and thence of the subject as such. Since any imagined reunion with the Thing threatens to absorb the subject into the Other, narcissism is tied to aggressivity and the death drive. It should also be noted that the traditional relationship with the courtly lady entails an expression of masochism on the part of the courtier. Masochism is one form of perversion that, for Lacan, serves to reenact the process of splitting from the Other that is a necessary condition for the subject to transition to the symbolic. It enables a game of “as if,” in which the subject coaxes the other into establishing law, thereby effecting the process of imaginary splitting. As Bruce Fink remarks, “Like the fetishist, the masochist is in need of separation, and his solution is to orchestrate a scenario whereby it is his partner, acting as Other, who lays down the law, the law that requires him to give up a certain jouissance.”18 In terms of the subject’s relationship to the courtly woman, playing the role of masochist (allowing the woman to punish or refuse to requite one’s overtures) paradoxically serves as a means by which the subject reasserts power even while seeming to yield to the Other’s dictates. The final lines of Crashaw’s “Flaming Heart” seem fairly typical of devotional poetry in their emphasis on the speaker’s desire to be violently remade by Christ, or in this case Christ’s proxy, Saint Teresa. One notes the image of plundering at the end, in which the speaker imagines that Teresa will “break” into his breast in a form of gracious “Robbery”—the “spoils” of which will be his best fortune (189–90), and the entire act of pillage conduces to an erasure of his former self: “[L]eave nothing of my self in me” (204). The poem ultimately departs significantly both from the courtly tradition on whose

80

E n g l i s h R e n a i s s a n c e L i t e r at u r e / Pau l C e f a l u

rhetoric it relies (the speaker does achieve a kind of union with the lady) as well as any straightforward Lacanian notion of masochism (splitting never occurs, autonomy is given up rather than reaffirmed). It is as if the poem offers an account of consummated sacred “courtly” love that secular courtly love poems would never imagine. But it would be wrong to argue that the poem tends toward reconcilement and fulfillment as such. The images at the end of the poem all give a sense that Teresa’s desire, manifested as a flaming, wounded and wounding heart, is so diffuse as to be uncontainable. The shafts of light projecting from her heart are “scattered,” “playing” among the leaves of her “large Books of day” (183–85). When the speaker makes a direct appeal to Teresa, addressing her as the “undaunted daughter of desires!” (191), he provides a litany of means by which she will convert him—for example, “By thy large draughts of intellectual day, / And by thy thirsts of love more large than they” (195–96), again giving a sense that Teresa’s desires overflow their source, a sentiment more directly expressed in the line just following: “By all the brim-fill’d bowls of fierce desire” (197). Not only, however, do Teresa’s desires defy the speaker’s ability to formulate them, but Christ’s presence itself seems to exceed Teresa’s ability to contain it: By all the heav’ns thou hast in him . . . By all of Him we have in Thee (200–2)

Given the sense that in the preceding lines some excess seems to elude formulation by the speaker, we should perhaps not read “all” as complete, but rather in the sense of the sum total of whatever amount of “heavens” Teresa has in Christ, and, in turn, the sum total of whatever measure of Christ the speaker has in Teresa, the implication being that the source of these various quantities or entities has not been exhausted. The most important point is that Crashaw’s representations of femininity remain within the masculine logic of exception, not least because they posit both woman as exception, but also because they posit woman as standing in for some inaccessible, transcendent divinity. In modified Lacanian terms, Crashaw’s Teresan poems conventionally affirm not so much that there is a sexual relationship, however elusive it is, but that there can indeed be a divine relationship, however elusive that would be. Consider that the putative subject of

Baroque Monads and Allegor ical Immanence

81

Crashaw’s “Hymn” is not Teresa as such, but the divine agape to which Teresa enjoys exceptional and unlimited access. The poem begins: Love, thou art Absolute sole lord Of Life and Death. To prove the word, We’ll now appeal to none of all Those thy old Soldiers, Great and tall, Ripe Men of Martyrdom, that could reach down With strong arms, their triumphant crown; Such as could with lusty breath Speak loud into the face of death Their Great Lord’s glorious name, to none Of those whose spacious Bosoms spread a throne For Love at large to fill: spare blood and sweat; And see him take a private seat, Making his mansion in the mild And milky soul of a soft child (1–14).

Teresa is distinguishable from all particular men because, despite men’s strivings in the Lord’s name, and despite all the spent blood and sweat, men always miss Love, or they cannot effect the easy union with love that is achieved by Teresa. But one should not interpret such a distinction as founded on conventional gender differentiation. Teresa herself is described in the subtitle of the poem as one who showed “masculine courage of performance, more than a woman.” In order to interpret this as a paradigmatic case of the mas˘ iz˘ek’s important comment: culine logic of exception, consider Z The usual way of misreading Lacan’s formulas of sexuation is to reduce the difference of the masculine and the feminine side to the two formulas that define the masculine position, as if masculine is the universal phallic function and feminine the exception, the excess, the surplus that eludes the grasp of the phallic function. Such a reading completely misses Lacan’s point, which is that this very position of the Woman as exception ‘say, in the guise of the Lady in courtly love’ is a masculine fantasy par excellence. As the exemplary case of the exception constitutive of the phallic function, one usually mentions the fantasmatic, obscene figure of the primordial father-jouisseur who was not encumbered by any prohibition and was as such able fully to enjoy all women. Does, however, the figure of the lady in courtly love not fully fit these

82

E n g l i s h R e n a i s s a n c e L i t e r at u r e / Pau l C e f a l u determinations of the primordial father? . . . In this precise sense, Woman is one of the names-of-the-father.19

˘ iz˘ek, one might interpret Saint Teresa’s role in the poem Following Z as precisely das Ding that allows for a clear conception of an other of the Other; that is, Teresa’s exceptional presence secures the place of, even as it doubles as, the Divine itself, as the Other (God and Christ) of the Other (Saint Teresa herself). Her martyrdom, of course, consistently explained in terms of her sacrifice for something divine and beyond, is described in the “Hymn” as a “Farewell” to “all the world” (57), and her death is described as only a seeming loss of her soul’s chastity, for it has been given over to heaven’s inaccessible designs: Blest pow’rs forbid, Thy tender life Should bleed upon a barbarous knife; Or some base hand have power to race Thy Breast’s chaste cabinet, and uncase A soul kept there so sweet, o no; Wise heav’n will never have it so. Thou art love’s victim; and must die A death more mystical and high (147–54)

In a conventionally Platonic-Christian move, Crashaw suggests that Saint Teresa’s terrestrial martyrdom allows for the release of her soul, or the union of her soul with Christ “under the roof of Heav’n” (83). We can further approach Crashaw’s masculinized representation of feminine sexuality and Teresan martyrdom by comparing it to the genuine feminine jouissance of the experiences described by the historical Teresa d’Avila. In her autobiography, Teresa d’Avila remarks that her raptures do not typically involve an abandoning of the body entirely. So in the Vida, Teresa describes the rapturous experience of having her “body being lifted up from the earth” as her hair “stands upright,” which induces a fear of God—one who “we see bears so great a love for a worm so vile, and who seems not be satisfied with attracting the soul to Himself in so real a way, but who will have the body also, though it be mortal and of earth so foul, such as it is through our sins, which are so great.”20 Part of the goal of such “suspensions,” illuminations, and “spiritual favours” is that “in this . . . our Lord would have the body itself be detached also; and thus a certain singular estrangement from the things of the earth is

Baroque Monads and Allegor ical Immanence

83

wrought, which makes life much more distressing.”21 The body, immobilized during rapture, is still integral to the experience in such a way that, as Teresa notes later in the Vida, “we are not angels, for we have a body; to seek to make ourselves angels while we are on the earth . . . Is an act of folly.”22 As a rule, the body, Teresa continues, provides the soul with “something to lean upon” when the soul recollects itself; it is also what we materially share with Christ, whose embrace allows us to survive those times when spiritual consolations are unavailing. Against Teresa d’Avila’s autobiographical comments, it is a leaving off of the body that Crashaw’s Teresan poems underscore again and again, which suggests that the mystical experience is not complete unto itself, not available thoroughly in the realm of the symbolic without exception, but rather points to a beyond, an Other of the Other, thereby reinstating what the Lacanian tradition would call the “fundamental fantasy.”

Crashaw’s Baroque Monads As counterintuitive as it may seem, Crashaw’s feminine martyrs and mystics exemplify phallic exceptionalism rather than the much rarer instance of the feminine non-all without exception. This is why I would argue that, despite the excessiveness of the imagery in such poems, such depictions of martyrs and mystics are not instances of an authentic Baroque representation (or at least Lacanian Baroque representation). I will be arguing in the following section that the logic of the immanent non-all without exception can indeed be found in Crashaw’s devotional lyrics, but only in the Christological poems, those that represent Christ as thoroughly situated within the immanent, creaturely realm that itself represents an otherwise impossible immanent-transcendence. As a means to contextualize such poems, it will be helpful to review some of the most influential philosophical, psychoanalytic, and historical theories of the Baroque that can be found in the work of Gilles Deleuze, Walter Benjamin, and Lacan, respectively. In his monograph The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, Deleuze proposes that Leibniz’s well-known notion of the “monad” provides an exemplary figure for the Baroque image. In the Monadology, Leibniz argues that the world is composed of simple and incorporeal monads with a number of distinguishing features—the most important of

84

E n g l i s h R e n a i s s a n c e L i t e r at u r e / Pau l C e f a l u

which, for our purposes, are that monads are closed and unextended (“windowless” in Leibniz’s terminology). Each monad represents the whole universe, thereby including, most obviously, every other monad; and each monad changes or develops according to its preestablished telos or entelechy. Although each monad reflects the entire universe, it only does so in possible or potential terms. One needs to imagine that each particular monad is capable of reflecting everything possible, whether in the past, present, or future, even though its particular entelechy restricts the range of its attributes and reflective power. As Leibniz states, “Although each created monad represents the whole universe, it represents most clearly the body to which it is most particularly attached and whose entelechy it is.”23 What interests Deleuze about Leibniz’s monads and what enables him to link such monads to the Baroque is the way in which monads can be likened to an infinite series of pleats and folds, an endless set of recesses that depicts an “autonomy of the interior”: “The Baroque invents the infinite work or process. The problem is not how to finish a fold, but how to continue it, to have it go through the ceiling, how to bring it to infinity.”24 One is reminded here of Wolfflin’s notion of the amorphous Baroque image that potentially reveals more than what is apprehended from any particular perspective. Importantly, Deleuze links each Baroque or monadic fold to immanence rather than transcendence. In a certain sense, Deleuze retrofits Spinoza’s immanentism (according to which the world is expressive simply of modes and attributes of univocal being) to the Baroque sensibility. Deleuze remarks, Everyone knows the name that Leibniz ascribes to the soul or to the subject as a metaphysical point: the monad. He borrows this name from the Neoplatonists who used it to designate a state of One, a unity that envelops a multiplicity, this multiplicity developing the One in the manner of a “series.” The One specifically has a power of envelopment and development, while the multiple is inseparable from the folds that it makes when it is enveloped, and of unfoldings when it is developed. But its envelopments and developments, its implications and explications, are nonetheless particular movements that must be understood in a universal Unity that “complicates” them all, and that complicates all the Ones. Giordano Bruno will bring the systems of monads to the level of this universal complication: the Soul of the world that complicates everything. Hence neo-Platonic emanations

Baroque Monads and Allegor ical Immanence

85

give way to a large zone of immanence, even if the rights of a Transcendent God or an even higher Unity are formally respected.25

The expressiveness of each Baroque pleat or fold, each detail of every monad, is not merely a direct emanation from univocity, but is in itself the starting point of a new narrative, history, or expressivity that is contained within yet another fold. The Baroque image, then, might be compared to a divine emanation, but to the extent that each particular dilation in turn bifurcates into a series of diverging paths, and the sum of all possible paths (or in Leibnizian terms, compossible paths) represents the One, it is more proper to speak of a horizontal than vertical movement. Paths refer to themselves in addition to the One from which they are sourced, rather than to a unilateral upward movement toward the Divine. In order to fully understand Deleuze’s point, though, one should bear in mind that his ontology is preeminently one of “becoming” rather than “being.” Borrowing from the pre-Socratic and the Stoics a somewhat idiosyncratic notion of predicates as “events” rather than attributes proper, Deleuze denies the Cartesian notion of unified subjects or essences to which one can ascribe various qualities through the use of the copula: “Predicates are never attributes except in the case of infinite form or first quiddities; and even then there they are more like conditions of possibility for the notion of God, nonrelations that would condition any possible relation. Now in all other cases the predicate is only a relation or an event.”26 Under a “Baroque grammar” (in which predicates are relations and events), predicates themselves serve as verbs that are irreducible to the copula: “[T]he event is deemed worthy of being raised to the state of a concept: the Stoics accomplished this by making the event neither an attribute nor a quality, but the incorporeal predication of a subject of the proposition (not ‘the tree is green,’ but ‘the tree greens’). They conclude that the proposition stated a ‘manner of being’ of the thing, an ‘aspect’ that exceeded the Aristotelian alternative, essence-accident: for the verb ‘to be’ they substituted ‘to follow,’ and they put manner in the place of essence.”27 The implications of this seemingly minor grammatical shift in emphasis are ontologically profound. For Deleuze (and by his estimation, the pre-Socratics, Stoics, Leibniz, and Baroque artists generally), entities such as individuals are not substances or essences that express various qualities or attributes. Individuals are just a series of

86

E n g l i s h R e n a i s s a n c e L i t e r at u r e / Pau l C e f a l u

compossible events, with nothing emerging as an unpredicable essence or substance that would be more than the sum of its parts. Deleuze essentially accords ontological primacy to unpredictable, changing events rather than unchanging substances—the former of which come together in various combinations to produce “subjects.” This logic applies to the world as subject itself: “The world itself is an event and, as an incorporal, virtual predicate, the world must be included in every subject as a basis from which each one extracts the manners that correspond to its point of view (aspects). The world is predication itself, manners being the particular predicates, and the subject, what goes from one predicate to another as if from one aspect of the world to another.”28 If we link these comments to the earlier one in which Deleuze half-heartedly suggests that predicates only serve as attributes when referring to God (and even then are more like “conditions of possibility” for the notion of God), we can begin to understand Deleuze’s celebration of immanence rather transcendence. A world comprised of predicate events rather than substances is one in which there are no indivisible substances that stand apart from the evental realm of predication. Deleuze’s philosophy is manifestly anti-Platonic since an ontology of becoming is one in which unchanging forms have no metaphysical supremacy.29 Deleuze would argue, rather, that the first philosophical principle is the univocity of being, but such a “being” needs to be understood as one that undergoes a constant state of change, consisting of the sum total of possible events or predicates. Before turning to Crashaw in relation to some of these Deleuzian principles, it will be worthwhile to review Walter Benjamin’s notion of the Baroque, especially since Deleuze cites with approval Benjamin’s Trauerspiel study. Deleuze notes, “Walter Benjamin made a decisive step forward in our understanding of the Baroque when he showed that allegory was not a failed symbol, or an abstract personification, but a power of figuration entirely different from that of the symbol: the latter combines the eternal and the momentary, nearly at the center of the world, but allegory uncovers nature and history according to the order of time. It produces a history from nature and transforms history into nature in a world that no longer has a center.”30 Deleuze does not elaborate his understanding of Benjamin’s alignment of allegory and the Baroque, but we can momentarily turn to the Trauerspiel study to provide an elaboration. For Benjamin, the symbol achieves a too-easy bringing together of the spiritual or

Baroque Monads and Allegor ical Immanence

87

beautiful and the mundane, a reconciliation that occurs when temporality itself seems to be suspended. As Benjamin’s friend and correspondent Gersham Scholem suggests, the symbol yields to an “instantaneous totality.” In Benjamin’s words, Whereas in the symbol destruction is idealized and the transfigured face of nature is fleetingly revealed in the light of redemption, in allegory the observer is confronted with the facies hippocratica of history as a petrified, primordial landscape. Everything about history that, from the very beginning, has been untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful, is expressed in a face—or rather in a death’s head. . . . This is the heart of the allegorical way of seeing, of the baroque, secular explanation of history as the Passion of the world; its importance resides solely in the stations of its decline.31

Allegorists attempt not to bridge nature to the divine, but somehow to find redemption among the ruins of history and its mortified allegorical objects. Since objects have lost any direct correspondence to the universal, their signifying function is rendered entirely openended: “Any person, any object, any relationship can mean absolutely anything else. With this possibility a destructive, but just verdict is passed on the profane world. . . . But it will be unmistakably apparent, especially to anyone who is familiar with allegorical textual exegesis, that all of the things which are used to signify derive, from the very fact of their pointing to something else, a power which makes them appear no longer commensurable with profane things, which raises them to a higher plane, and which can, indeed, sanctify them.”32 Importantly, for Benjamin the salvific moment is an intrinsic part of the dialectical process of mortifying allegorical objects; it is not achieved through a transcendent or mystical operation in which the object is transfigured suddenly into a beautiful symbol of the divine through which the allegorist can ascend to God. The salvific moment is much closer to an immanent one: After one immerses oneself in the degraded ruins of allegorical objects, one effects a dialectical reversal in which one does not so much leave off earthly and mundane objects in order to achieve redemption, but rather discovers redemption among the dead objects of creaturely history: “[U]ltimately in the death-signs of the baroque, the direction of allegorical reflection is reversed: on the second part of its wide arc it returns, to redeem. . . . Allegories fill out an deny the void in which they are represented, just as, ultimately the intention does

88

E n g l i s h R e n a i s s a n c e L i t e r at u r e / Pau l C e f a l u

not faithfully rest in the contemplation of bones, but faithlessly leaps forward to the idea of resurrection.”33 If we were to put this in Deleuzian terms, we should say that Benjamin’s allegorical objects and images of the Baroque need to be subjected to multiple perspectival unfoldings until they reveal not a hidden, symbolic interior or essence, but something like a divergent path, or in Leibnizian terms, an alternative realm of compossible signification in which what seemed to represent decay and decomposition represented all along something redemptive with its own regress of meaningful unfoldings. At this point, though, Benjamin’s theory of allegory is closer to negative theology than Deleuze’s, the latter of whom, as we have seen, denies transcendence altogether. Benjamin, for example, is fascinated by the productive allegorization of Christ’s humanity typified in the secularizing tendencies of Sigmund von Birken to represent not Christ’s Godhead or “mystical status,” but the “now” of “contemporary actuality,” whereby Christ as symbol transmutes into Christ as allegory, subject to an openended hermeneutics: “The eternal is separated from the events of the story of salvation, and what is left is a living image open to all kinds of revision by the interpretive artist. This corresponds profoundly to the endlessly preparatory, circumlocutious, self-indulgently hesitant manner of the baroque process of giving form. This is designed, however, not only in order to heighten the tensions between immanence and transcendence, but also in order to secure for the latter the greatest conceivable rigour, exclusiveness and inexorability.”34 One way of putting such a dialectical reversal is to say that the redemptive moment achieved through allegoresis is one in which goodness is simply the negation of evil (a provocative inversion of the Augustinian belief that evil is the negation of goodness); in Benjamin’s terms, the redemptive moment “denies the void” opened up by the ruins of history and “leaps faithlessly” to the idea of resurrection.

Crashaw with Deleuze and Benjamin Crashaw’s most Deleuzian and Benjaminian moments are those in which his images appear like Baroque monads, each containing an infinite world, one that, importantly, serves immanently allegorical rather than transcendently symbolic functions. Nowhere is this more

Baroque Monads and Allegor ical Immanence

89

evident than in Crashaw’s Christological poems. The invocatory hymn to Christ’s name in Carmen deo Nostro, “To the Name Above every Name the Name of Jesus: A Hymn,” addresses the speaker’s soul, which, winged and ready for flight—”And be all Wing” (16)— seeks a new “World” (24) in which to reside—that destination, of course, being none other than the world that has contracted into Christ’s birth. The soul seeks not an upward movement, but rather requests “Great Nature for the Key of her huge Chest / of Heav’ns” (29–30) that will allow it to discover Christ, along with the “Lute and Harp / and every sweet-lipp’t Thing” (46–47). While much of Crashaw’s desire to mix nature and art in celebration of Christ is conventional, the poem takes pains to establish the very earthly kingdom of Christ: Bring All your Lutes and Harps of Heav’n and Earth; Whate’er cooperates to The common mirth . . .O may you fix Forever here, and mix Yourselves into the long And everlasting series of a deathless Song (74–85)

Crashaw refuses to derogate the earthly in favor of the heavenly: Pow’rs of my Soul, be Proud! And speak aloud To All the dear-bought Nations This Redeeming Name, And in the wealth of one Rich Word proclaim New Similes to Nature. May it be no wrong Blest Heav’ns, to you, and your Superior song, That we, dark Sons of Dust and Sorrow, A while Dare borrow The Name of your Delights and our Desires, And fit it so far inferior Lyres Our Murmurs have their Music too, Ye mighty Orbs, as well as you (92–104)

Christ’s birth is the occasion on which the Earth itself can transform into heaven:

90

E n g l i s h R e n a i s s a n c e L i t e r at u r e / Pau l C e f a l u Lo how the laboring Earth That hopes to be All Heaven by Thee, Leaps at thy Birth (131–34)

Crashaw’s messianism is evident in the subsequent nativity lyric, “In the Holy Nativity of our Lord God,” in which Christ’s arrival suspends creaturely time and life, representing a nunc stans, or “nowtime,” in which dualisms between the earthly and heavenly kingdom are collapsed: Welcome, all Wonders in one sight! Eternity shut in a span. Summer in Winter. Day in Night. Heaven in earth, and God in Man. Great little one! whose all-embracing birth Lifts earth to heaven, stoops heav’n to earth (78–83)

Consistent with Deleuze’s notion of Baroque unfolding, the earlier poem, “To the Name,” positions Christ himself as a Baroque object. Crashaw calls upon Christ’s heralded name to “Unfold thy fair Conceptions; And display / The Birth of our Bright Joys” (166–67), and to “Unlock thy Cabinet of Day” (127). Christ is described as a world unto himself, the hidden recesses of which will endlessly open out to redeem the temporal realm: O thou compacted Body of Blessings: spirit of Souls extracted! O dissipate thy spicy Pow’rs (Cloud of condensed sweets) and break upon us In balmy show’rs (165–69)

The process of unfolding is specifically linked to Christ’s “name,” which itself will unfurl endless blessings on Crashaw’s world: Sweet name, in Thy each Syllable A Thousand Blest Arabias dwell (183–84)

Baroque Monads and Allegor ical Immanence

91

Such blessings are untold in concept and number, since possible worlds are also contracted in the very name of Christ: How many unknown Worlds there are Of Comforts, which Thou hast in keeping! (189–90)

And consistent with an allegorical rather than symbolic notion of Christ’s monadic name, only an allegorist-poet can unravel such Christological meanings: Happy he who has the art To awake them, And to take them Home, and lodge them in his Heart (193–96)

This is no unreconstructed theology of grace; the allegorist-poet must rely on “art” to ferret out the hidden depths of Christ’s compossible worlds. If Carmen deo Nostro were to continue in such a vein, we might simply argue that Crashaw’s poetry is manifestly Baroque in the terms provided by Deleuze and Benjamin. Crashaw’s poetry does seem to depict unfolding images and concepts, and Crashaw struggles to displace any opposition between immanence and transcendence. What happens, though, as so many readers of Carmen deo Nostro have remarked, is that Crashaw’s Christological imagery becomes more and more bizarre, ugly even, especially when he anthropomorphizes emblematic images. By the third lyric in the series, “In the Glorious Epiphany of our Lord God,” Crashaw remarks of Christ, O little all! in thy embrace The world lies warm, and likes his place. Nor does his full Globe fail to be Kist on Both his cheeks by Thee (37–39)

This image is followed by a less concrete, but no more seemingly out of place image, in which Crashaw describes the triumph of Christ’s birth over Egyptian idolatry and darkness:

92

E n g l i s h R e n a i s s a n c e L i t e r at u r e / Pau l C e f a l u Farewell, the white Egypt! a long farewell to thee Bright Idol; black Idolatry. The dire face of inferior Darkness, kist And courted in the pompous mask of a more specious mist (48–54)

Crashaw presents two kisses: one sinful, one redemptive; the latter image is consistent with the ongoing sense that Christ himself is a world that will surround our world. Yet the excess of these images lingers after their exegesis, as if the kisses are animated with lives of their own. Indeed one might argue that such moments are extensions of Deleuzian ontology, according to which all predicates, actions, and attributes are events. In a Deleuzian world where substances are displaced by predicate-events, Christ is simply one event matched with another, the act of kissing. In more Slovenian-Lacanian terms, Crashaw’s Christological poems refuse to take leave of Christ’s material body, particularly its excessiveness or that which seems to be in Christ more than himself. The lyric of Steps to the Temple, “On the wounds of our Crucified Lord,” is concerned, as its title suggests, with Christ’s wounds—wounds that subject him to the overwhelming presence of his traumatized body. The poem opens with Crashaw’s questioning whether Christ’s wounds are mouths or eyes, concluding that “Be they Mouths, or be they eyne, / Each bleeding part some one supplies” (3–4). After a brief elaboration of each image, the third stanza moves quickly to a description of Christ’s feet, which the fourth stanza then remarkably conflates with the mouth and lips: O thou that on this foot hast laid Many a kiss, and many a Tear, Now thou shalt have all repaid, Whatsoe’er thy charges were. This foot hath got a Mouth and lips, To pay the sweet sum of thy kisses: To pay thy Tears, an Eye that weeps Instead of Tears such Gems as this is (9–16)

Through a metonymic sliding of one body part into another, Christ’s feet, once kissed, miraculously and suckingly kiss back as if

Baroque Monads and Allegor ical Immanence

93

the foot itself is nothing other than Christ’s mouth and lips after all. The image then refers back to Christ’s eyes, which, now the principal “bleeding part” (4), are the locus of Christ’s discharging of sin: The debt is paid in Ruby-Tears, Which thou in Pearls did’st lend (19–20)

What is notable about all of this is not only the animation and conflation of Christ’s body parts, but also the lack of transcendence, of any transformation of Christ into the God-man. Christ’s body is split into so many signifiers, all of which are rendered fully within the symbolic. I would suggest that this is a close approximation of what Lacan struggled to explain when he made reference throughout his later work to a jouissance of the body rather than a jouissance of the drives, and when he provocatively explained that his entire ouvre was an exercise in Baroque aesthetics. In one of his most cryptic essays entitled “On the Baroque,” Lacan claims, I am going to raise a question—of what importance can it be in Christian doctrine that Christ have a soul? That doctrine speaks only of the incarnation of God in a body, and assumes that the passion suffered in that person constituted another person’s jouissance. But there is nothing lacking here, especially not a soul. Christ, even when resurrected from the dead, is valued for his body, and his body is the means by which communion in his presence is incorporation—oral drive—with which Christ’s wife, the Church as it is called, contents itself very well, having nothing to expect from copulation. In everything that followed from the effects of Christianity, particularly in art—and it’s in this respect that I coincide with the ‘baroquism’ with which I accept to be clothed—everything is exhibition of the body evoking jouissance.35

As is his wont, Lacan eschews a precise explication of what he means by a Baroque jouissance of the body, an omission that is certainly not clarified by his other comment that “the Baroque is the regulating of the soul by corporal radioscopy.”36 What is clear is that a jouissance of the body does not signify any transcendent beyond or a being that would serve as a constitutive exception—any unitary being that exists outside the symbolic and toward which some immaterial soul seeks a lost plenitude. Furthermore, a Christianized jouissance of the body is

94

E n g l i s h R e n a i s s a n c e L i t e r at u r e / Pau l C e f a l u

incompatible with emanationism, in which so many expressions of the divine one are manifested in the degradations of the material signifier. Rather, a jouissance of the body, read here as access to the presymbolic real, is located, paradoxically, entirely within the body: The body’s presymbolic excesses overflow the symbolic, as if the body’s “signiferness” lies precisely in the fact that it is split within itself, not split from any transcendent beyond that would ground being. Lacan does make clear, however, that (1) the jouissance of the body, the feminine “non-all,” is of a piece with the Christian notion of Godhead: “[W]hy not interpret one face of the Other, the God face, as based on feminine jouissance”37; and (2) this jouissance of the body itself opens out to the infinite: “When I say that woman is notwhole and that is why I cannot say Woman, it is precisely because I raise the question . . . of a jouissance that, with respect to everything that . . . is in the realm of the infinite.”38 What does Lacan mean when he refers to the infinitude of a jouissance of the body? Paul Verhaeghe, Lacan’s “Kojeve,” offers the most suggestive, if speculative, recounting of Lacan’s conception of the infinitude of the non-all: The real of the organism functions as the cause, in the sense that it contains a primordial loss that precedes the loss in the chain of signifiers. Which loss? The loss of eternal life, which paradoxically enough is lost at the moment of birth, that is, birth as a sexed being, because of meiosis. In order to explain this ultimate incomprehensibility of the ultimate as such, Lacan constructs the myth of the “lamella,” which is nothing but object a in its pure form: the life instinct, the primordial form of the libido. As an idea, it goes back to a biological fact: nonsexual reproduction implies, in principle, the possibility of eternal life (as is the case of single-celled organisms, which can be brought about through cloning), and sexual reproduction implies, in principle, the death of the individual. Each organism wants to undo this loss, and each tries to return to the previous state of being.39

Crashaw’s concern with the return to eternal life is nowhere more evident than in his “Our Lord in his Circumcision to his Father,” in which Christ as speaker observes that To thee these first fruits of my growing death (For what else is my life)? lo I bequeath . . . Now’s but the Nonage of my pains, my fears Are yet but in their hopes, not come to years.

Baroque Monads and Allegor ical Immanence

95

The day of my dark woes is yet but morn. My tears but tender and my death new-born (1–13)

Now, such commonplace notions of Christ’s paradoxical life-indeath can certainly be explained in relation to conventional Pauline theology; and it is true, of course, that Crashaw’s poem reinstates a God of beyond or deus absconditus as the addressee of the poem. Yet the poem, especially when read alongside Crashaw’s lyrics on Christ’s wounds, refuses to mark the beyond in any transcendent manner. Like the earlier lyric on Christ‘s wounds, it grounds redemption purely in Christ’s sacrificial body, as if Christ’s death, literally the dispersal of Christ’s body, allows for a return to eternal life not simply because it leads to transcendence, but because it allows, via the Holy Ghost and regeneration, for the simple “reproduction” of Christ himself. Indeed, in the circumcision poem, the lost objet a of the poem, the circumcised cut or Christian “lamella,” is the very means, the material cause, of Christ’s return to eternal life, and by implication, the return to eternal life of the Christian community. Crashaw’s Baroque notion in these poems is that Christ’s dispersed body parts are the direct causes and vehicles of a kind of immanenttranscendence or, to return to Eric Santner’s terminology, a return to eternity in the very “midst of life.” It is a mistake, however, to assume that access to the feminine non-all without exception occurs outside of the symbolic, beyond, that is, the realm of desire and the phallic economy. In this respect, I would suggest that the one lyric that truly approaches the interdependence of the masculine and feminine economies is Crashaw’s most notorious epigram, one based on Luke 11, “Blessed be the Paps which Thou hast sucked.” Here the phallic economy, represented as the fundamental question of the nature of the Other’s desire, serves as the conceptual starting point that is then displaced by an approach to the feminine non-all. The poem reads, Suppose he had been Tabled at thy Teats, Thy hunger feels not what he eats: He’ll have his Teat ere long (a bloody one) The Mother then must suck the Son (1–4)

What is featured here is the “hunger” of the mother, hunger that is not satisfied by the son’s feeding from the mother’s breast. When

96

E n g l i s h R e n a i s s a n c e L i t e r at u r e / Pau l C e f a l u

the tables are turned, the child is positioned as the object of the mother’s hunger, which itself is satisfied by the son’s breast. In Lacanian terms, this is almost a textbook example of the failure of the subject to move from being to having the object of the Other’s desire. At the level of the imaginary, prior to the onset of castration and the entry to the symbolic, the subject desperately attempts to satisfy the desire of the Other by objectifying himself as the perceived object of such desire. Now, Lacan emphasizes that the child attempts to become the phallus for the mother, but the phallus is just one partial object among others of the drive (breast, gaze, and voice) that, during the transitive stage of the imaginary, the child believes are his as much as the Other’s. The process of splitting from the Other occurs when the child begins ceding these objects (in the child’s imaginary, actually part of himself) in order to satisfy his perception of the Other’s desire. Richard Boothby remarks, “The infant does not detach the breast from its own body, as if amputating one part in order to preserve the whole, but rather comes to experience itself as a body for the first time with the separation of ceding the breast.”40 As the child gradually relinquishes these objects, it becomes a subject in the objects’ place; that is, the subject is nothing more than the void that the process of ceding has left behind. This voiding of objects in order to become a subject then places the subject in the symbolic realm of desire where it will vainly attempt to re-acquire a mythic lost wholeness: “Far from it being the case that there exists an infantile subject who voluntarily or deliberately yields the breast, it is only in the moment of ceding the object that the subject can be said to come into being at all.”41 What happens in Crashaw’s poem is that the process of ceding does not take place; the son remains under the illusion that he can literally becomes the object of the Other’s desire. As such, it is reductive to claim, as some psychoanalytic interpretations have, that Christ’s breast should figure as an object in a scene of fellatio, the son’s breast representing something phallic. The mother does not “suck” on any partial objects of the son; she sucks on the breast that the son has become: “The mother then must suck the son.” The poem centers on not simply Christ’s desire, but also on the mother’s demand and Christ’s satisfaction of that demand. In this sense, Graham Hammill’s Lacanian reading actually grants the poem an undue complexity: “Both [mother and reader] are repositioned as

Baroque Monads and Allegor ical Immanence

97

objects of Christ’s desire—‘thy Teats’ insufficiently feeding the hunger of Christ—and as desiring subjects, subjected by Christ’s demand— ‘Yea, rather, blessed are they that hear the word of God, and keep it.’”42 Not only is the poem more concerned to represent the mother’s rather than the son’s inclinations, but the very notion of “desire” is something of a misnomer here, since the scenario does not extend into the realm of the symbolic. The mother’s “desire” remains at the level of demand, a kind of insatiable “hunger,” the goal of which is satisfaction as such, satisfaction that the Son attempts to provide by embodying the object of her demand. The epigram brings out more clearly what is hinted at in the Teresan poems: the fundamental asymmetry between any two lovers. “There is no sexual relationship” for Lacan because each lover looks for something in the Other that the Other does not possess. What Crashaw’s sacred poems suggest is an analogous notion about which we might say, “There is no spiritual relationship,” even when the spiritual lovers are figures like Magdalene, Teresa, and even Christ himself. If we return momentarily to Crashaw’s Teresan poems, we can begin to explain what Crashaw achieves by insisting on transforming Teresa from an ordinary martyr (“some base hand have power to race Thy breast’s chase cabinet”) to an etherealized, idealized abstraction, and thence to a figure with whom the speaker imagines a kind of blessed, triadic union in which, once burned up by Teresa’s flaming heart, he can merge with some aspect of Teresa that has merged with Christ. This is the moment, I have already suggested, at which courtly love makes its own ideal a reality, when, to use the Jesuit phrase, “recollected,” rather than unrequited love, is truly achieved. From a Lacanian perspective, it marks the moment when the object of love (Teresa) becomes the subject of love, extending her love to others, in spite of the fact that the nature of her love, her desire, her martyrdom is at some fundamental level unknowable to herself. This sense of Teresa’s opaqueness to herself is obvious to any reader of her autobiography, in which she remarks again and again that she does not know why she has been chosen, what she represents to God, or what exactly transpires during her illuminations. It is directly observed in Crashaw’s “A Hymn to the Name and Honor of the Admirable Saint Teresa” when he notes that Teresa often complains of a

98

E n g l i s h R e n a i s s a n c e L i t e r at u r e / Pau l C e f a l u sweet and subtle Pain . . . Of a Death, in which who dies Loves his death, and dies again. And would forever so be slain. And lives, and dies; and knows not why To live (98–104)

Despite this lack of self-knowledge, Teresa responds to the “call of the speaker’s love” in the “Flaming Heart,” a testament to what ˘ iz˘ek has described as the Lacanian moment of genuine love. The Z loving deadlock occurs as follows: The other sees something in me and wants something from me, but I cannot give him what I do not possess, or as Lacan puts it, there is no relationship between what the loved one possesses and what the loving one lacks. The only way for the loving one to escape this deadlock is to stretch out his hand toward the loving one and to return love. . . . It is only by way of this reversal that a genuine love emerges: I am truly in love not when I am simply fascinated by the agalma in the other, but when I experience the other, the object of love, as frail and lost, as lacking “it,” and my love none the less survives the loss.43

This helps to explain the theme of Crashaw’s crucifixion poems as well, about which we might say that neither the speaker nor Christ fully understands how to give the Other what the Other needs, yet their love nevertheless survives the asymmetry (hence the speaker’s inability to understand what he carries within himself that draws Christ to him); stated differently, the speaker does not seem to have what Christ desires, as is evidenced in “Charitas Nimia or The Dear Bargain”: Alas, sweet lord, what wer’t to thee If there were no such worms as we? Heav’n ne’ertheless still heav’n would be, Should Mankind dwell In the deep hell. What have his woes to do with thee? . . . Why should a piece of peevish clay plead shares In the Eternity of thy old cares? Why shouldst thou bow thy awful Breast to see What mine own madnesses have done with me? (7–14, 31–34)

Baroque Monads and Allegor ical Immanence

99

The speaker realizes that there must be something about him, some quality or aspect that itself seems alien to him, yet he also realizes that God loves him nonetheless. The reciprocal position—that there exists in Christ something other to him that attracts us to him—is nowhere made as clear in Crashaw’s ouevre. But there is a sense in the crucifixion poems that Christ, in turn, does not fully understand what we need from him. Consider these lines from “On the Bleeding Wounds of our Crucified Lord”: But o thy side! thy deep digg’d side That hath a double Nilus going, Nor ever was Pharian tide Half so fruitful, half so flowing. What need thy fair head bear a part In Tears? as if thine eyes had none? What need they help to drown thine heart, That strives in Torrents of its own? (13–20)

Much has been written about the Baroque excess of these and similar lines. Might we finally suggest that the excess stems from the speaker’s attempt to see us from Christ’s point of view? At a loss to understand what we need from him, or how he might satisfy us, Christ, or his very body, produces an overabundance that would ensure that he has satisfactorily represented for us what we desire of him. By displaying such an excess, Christ ensures that there is nothing other in himself toward which we ought to be drawn. This is affirmed, finally, by the end of the poem, in which the speaker notes that only now, when faced with such excrescences, does Christ seem to be fully present: Ne’er wast thou in a sense so sadly true, The well of living Waters, Lord, till now (41–42)

This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 3

   Tarrying with Chaos: John M i lton’s P A R A D I S E L O S T and the E T H I C S O F P S Y C H O A N A LY S I S

[The Fall] results from the choice to disobey in order to retain the erotic rapture of Eve, yet the paradox lies in the fact that “because Adam disobeys he loses what he disobeyed in order to keep.” Here we have . . . the structure of castration: when Adam chooses to fall in order to retain jouissance, what he loses thereby is precisely jouissance.1 ˘ iz˘ek, The Plague of Fantasies —Slavoj Z [Satan] elevates evil (rebellion against God) into the consistent ethical attitude of a strong character. The only thing to add is that purely one-dimensional evil (a simply egotistical mean person) is not true evil at all: true evil involves precisely the blurring of distinctions between Good and Evil—that is, the elevation of evil into a consistent principle.2 ˘ iz˘ek, The Plague of Fantasies —Slavoj Z

One would have expected that Slavoj Z˘iz˘ek would at some point

turn his gaze on Milton’s Paradise Lost. The above epigraphs, taken ˘ iz˘ek’s The Plague of Fantasies, are concerned with some of the from Z cruxes of Paradise Lost: whether Adam did indeed have sexual relations with that helpmeet, Eve, in Eden, and whether Satan’s diabolical

102 E n g l i s h R e n a i s s a n c e L i t e r at u r e / Pau l C e f a l u

evil is distinct from radical evil in that Satan establishes an all-purpose maxim to pursue evil against the moral law as such. Unfortunately, ˘ iz˘ek does not develop these potentially rich notions in relation to Z ˘ iz˘ek’s later Paradise Lost—notions that might have resurfaced in Z systematic assessments of Christianity: On Belief, The Fragile Absolute, and The Puppet and the Dwarf.3 The following pages offer ˘ iz˘ek might have offered had he a reading of Paradise Lost that Z returned to Paradise Lost in the context of his recent inquiries into ˘ iz˘ek returns again and God’s fragile absolutism. In his later work, Z again to the notion that the Christian God is Other to himself (a subject alienated from the real like any creaturely subject), but breaks through the boundaries of his imaginary “ego” by incarnat˘ iz˘ek first develops the idea in his assessment ing himself as Christ. Z ˘ iz˘ek’s reading, the relationship of F. W. J. Schelling, for whom, on Z between God and his primordial ground—specifically the way in which God posits his being and thereby remainders part of himself in the process of actualization—is a relationship describable in terms of the Lacanian registers of the real, imaginary, and symbolic.4 In the first section of my argument, I link this account of Schelling to Milton via one of Schelling’s principal influences, Jacob Boehme, a seventeenth-century German mystic who seems to have had some ˘ iz˘ek framework will influence on Milton. The Boehme-Schelling-Z help us to come to terms with the notoriously vexed relationship of Milton’s God to chaos, his primordial ground, a relationship that has too frequently been described by Milton’s critics in terms of substance dualism. I then turn to Alenka Zupanc˘ic˘ ’s Ethics of the Real, in which ˘ iz˘ek’s protégés, provides a virtuosic Lacanian Zupanc˘ic˘, one of Z interpretation of Kantian maxim-making.5 Zupanc˘ic˘ does not offer a direct interpretation of Paradise Lost, but what links her work to Milton’s is her elaboration of Kant’s account of diabolical evil, an account that will help to explain what I will be describing as Satan’s impossible form of non-pathological evil in Milton’s text. By committing himself to a maxim according to which he will act against God’s law as such, Satan establishes himself as an automaton to evil, draining his own evil actions of unpredictable evil desires. In doing so, he establishes God as absolute in God’s own commitment to a countervailing maxim of goodness. This serves Satan’s ends not because it undermines God’s power but because it allows Satan to avoid directly acknowledging that God is not self-transparent and

Ta r ry i n g w i t h C h ao s

103

that there might be an Other to God—his chaotic real—that potentially eludes God himself. Since Satan cowers from this traumatizing knowledge, his conduct does not meet the criteria of what Zupanc˘ic˘ describes as “heroism of the lack.” We will see that unlike Satan, Eve does not shrink from this knowledge, does not “give up on her desire,” and so, along with her avatars like Antigone and Paul Claudel’s Synge de Coufontaine, does meet Zupanc˘ic˘’s and Lacan’s criteria for truly ethical action that might be headed under the category “ethics of the real.”

God’s Chaotic Real We can begin with God’s account of his own beginning, with what Gordon Teskey has recently described as the only “truly metaphysical” statement in Paradise Lost.6 Having just instructed the Son to begin circumscribing chaos in order to create the world, God adds this qualifier regarding his relationship to chaos: Boundless the Deep, because I am who fill Infinitude, nor vacuous the space. Though I uncircumscrib’d myself retire, And put not forth my goodness, which is free To act or not, Necessity and Chance Approach not mee, and what I will is Fate (7.169–73)7

God declares that he can simultaneously remain uncircumscribed and retire from the chaos that he himself fills. For God to fill that from which he retires yet still in some sense occupies makes sense only if one assumes that the “retired” God is dependent upon, yet not equivalent to, the substance of which he is a part. God seems to have subjectivized himself by positing an aspect of his being that is irreducible to its underlying ground. Teskey offers the following explanation: “In the beginning, God is totality and fills, to infinity, all space. Space is therefore not empty (vacuous) but filled with the substance of God, his essential being. God withdraws from totality to the place of his presence in Heaven . . . leaving a residue, which was normally (but is no longer) God’s substance. The residue is instead the substance of chaos, which is ruled by necessity.”8 To argue, as Teskey does, that God’s substance becomes different from

104 E n g l i s h R e n a i s s a n c e L i t e r at u r e / Pau l C e f a l u

chaos’s substance once God retires to heaven suggests that the God-chaos relationship is one of substance dualism: God relates to chaos the way that, for example, minds relate to bodies, at least according to the basic presuppositions of Cartesian dualism. Yet, there is nothing in God’s comment that warrants the conclusion that the “residue” of chaos was formerly but no longer part of God’s substance. It is more appropriate to say that God is something more than or other than the chaos of which he, God, is an essential part. Furthermore, given that God remains uncircumscribed, still a part of chaos even after he relocates to heaven, it seems misleading to describe chaos as a “residue.” After all, God simply “retires,” which hardly implies any alchemical procedure by which monistic matter fissures into two discrete substances. If we were to put more rigorous philosophical language to the God-chaos relationship, we should say that God “supervenes” on chaos, meaning that God’s actuality depends on a particular base or substrate, even though what God is (in terms of logos, will, goodness, etc.) exists over and beyond that substrate. Rather than exemplify substance dualism, God’s relationship to chaos exemplifies what is more aptly termed property dualism. Following a basic understanding of the difference between a substance and property (which has its locus classicus in Aristotle’s Categories), a substance is what we can generally say “of” an item, while a property is something specific that is “in” an item, like a predicable quality. So, we can say of both God and chaos that they are first matter—their shared fundamental substance—but what we might predicate of God in terms of his goodness, benevolence, etc. are properties that chaos need not have or display. But in order to approach further God’s metaphysical relationship to chaos, we ought to supplement these analytical distinctions with a more metaphysical account of the causes and consequences of God’s retiring from prima materia. To observe that even the heavenly God shares substance and properties with chaos says nothing about the way in which God relates to those properties. In what manner does God give expression to, displace, or disavow the qualities of chaos? To what extent can we say that God does not even fully understand such qualities and that he is not an omniscient God? What would it mean, in terms derived from the conceptual and rhetorical features of Milton’s poem, to argue that there is some divine excess that Satan, Adam, and, to a lesser extent, Eve desire not to overcome, but

Ta r ry i n g w i t h C h ao s

105

rather to cover over? We can begin to answer these questions if we briefly consider God’s ontology in relation to the German mystical tradition and thence to Lacanian metapsychology.

Milton with Boehme and Schelling In a 1914 monograph, Margaret Bailey provided a detailed summary of the reception of the work of Jakob Boehme (1575–1625), otherwise known as “Teutonicus” in seventeenth-century England.9 Although she was not able to find empirical evidence supporting her theory that Milton had known and read Boehme’s many writings that had been translated into English, Bailey speculated that Milton might have been introduced to Boehme’s radical mysticism by way of a 1645 Academia Londoniens that had arisen in England during the Interregnum years.10 Many members of this rather secret “invisible college,” especially Theodor Haak, Samuel Hartlib, John Drury, and Robert Boyle, were acquaintances of or personal friends with Milton. Since most members of the Hartlib group knew the work of Paracelsus, Boehme, and other Continental mystics, Bailey conjectured that Milton was influenced by, if not Boehme’s writings directly, then at least English Behmism as it had come to be termed in the middle decades of the seventeenth century. “Is it possible,” Bailey asks, “that Milton heard no mention of Boehme, not among his German friends who shared Boehme’s progressive ideas, nor among his religious friends whose doctrines were supported by Boehme’s teachings, nor among his political friends in whose army Boehme was read?”11 The remainder of Bailey’s study assesses correspondences between Boehme’s many writings and Milton’s trinitarianism, as well as Boehme’s account of Satan’s defection and the war in heaven.12 What Bailey does not explore in as much detail are the similarities between Boehme’s and Milton’s theories of creation. Without attempting to prove that Boehme’s metaphysics directly influenced Milton, I would like, in the following section, to return to Boehme in order to point out some of the striking correspondences between his and Milton’s understanding of the God-chaos relationship.13 In two of his principal treatises, The Aurora (1656) and Mysterium Magnum (1654), Boehme argues that the Divine exists as the ungrund (groundless) prior to its revelation and unfolding. In order

106 E n g l i s h R e n a i s s a n c e L i t e r at u r e / Pau l C e f a l u

for God to reveal himself to himself, he needs to separate from the ungrund, which involves a complex process of both contraction and expansion. By means of an initial impressing movement, the divine being concentrates itself into a particular form or essence. Boehme describes this involutional process as one governed by a divine fire or will that paradoxically gives off only darkness. If left to itself, this contracting will becomes too self-absorbed and so cannot manifest itself. The subsequent process of unfolding occurs when God formulates an idea of himself as fully actualized, after which a self-giving or outgoing will, a fire of light, is united with the self-centered or ingoing will, a fire of darkness. The two wills are interdependent because the ingoing will circumscribes a necessary ground in the groundless, while the outgoing will allows for God to evolve out of that ground.14 Although Boehme never directly ascribes an evil will to God, he emphasizes that the contracting will is fundamentally connected to a degree of wrath that needs to be continually offset by God’s self-giving motion: “No created spirit can exist without the fire-world. Even the love of God could not exist, if not the wrath of God, or the world of fire, were existing in Him.”15 Boehme describes the act of creation that follows from God’s process of self-positing as follows: “The mysterium magnum is the chaos wherefrom originates good and evil, light and darkness, life, and death. It is the foundation or womb wherefrom are issuing souls and angels and all other kinds of beings, and wherein they are contained as in one common cause.”16 God’s wrath in the second creation—the creation of the outward world following from God’s self-creation—is again an intrinsic, potentially dangerous and uncontrollable emanation of God’s substance: “The eternal Triune God created all things by and through the eternal Word, out of His own self, namely, out of his two aspect or qualities; out of eternal nature, the fury or wrath, and out of His love, by means of which the wrath or ‘nature’ was pacified.”17 This is Boehme’s notion of God’s essence prior to or without the warring wills, which themselves subdivide into the “seven spirits” of God. While the intricacies of these subdivisions are beyond our range here, Boehme’s point is that without the warring wills and spirits that comprise God’s being once he posits himself, God is nothing but a groundless “dark deep”: “Now if these seven spirits in any one place wrestle not triumphantly, then in that place there is no mobility, but a deep darkness.”18

Ta r ry i n g w i t h C h ao s

107

What is particularly interesting about Boehme’s notion of the ungrund in relation to Milton’s chaos is that in both conceptions, God’s first matter exists, or more accurately survives, due to an ongoing internal striving or antagonism among elements. Boehme changes the precise nature of these antagonistic elements throughout his writings, but he emphasizes that God’s substrate is fundamentally combative in nature: The hard and brittle involuted will is kindled by the divine fire or outgoing will before first matter can take shape and externalize itself. Recall that Milton’s chaos, although it is comprised of different raw materials than Boehme’s, is also in a state of perpetual strife: For hot, cold, moist, and dry four Champions fierce Strive here for Maistry, and to Battle bring Thir embryon Atoms; they around the flag Of each his Faction, in thir several Clans, Light-arm’d or heavy, sharp, smooth, swift or slow, Swarm populous. (2.898–903)

Of course, Boehme’s God himself is directly created out of the chaotic swirl, whereas an analogous moment of God’s self-positing is not detailed in Paradise Lost. In both cases, though, there is a sense that the created world has as its very ground not just an unformed void or dead matter, but a kind of internal antagonism, if not an inherently evil quality.19 But if Behmism is to help explain the ontological aspects of Milton’s God, we should expect to find in Paradise Lost references not merely to a tension between God and chaos, but something akin to an internal striving within God himself—a sense in which God’s ground always threatens to limit his actualization. Most obviously, throughout Paradise Lost, both chaos and an aspect of the actualized God seem intrinsically linked to wrathfulness. Chaos’s fury is suggested notably in Book VII: Outrageous as a sea, dark, wasteful, wild, Up from the bottom turn’d by furious winds And surging waves, as Mountains to assault Heavn’s highth, and with the Centre mix the Pole (7.211–15)

108 E n g l i s h R e n a i s s a n c e L i t e r at u r e / Pau l C e f a l u

What is distinctive about these wrathful and furious aspects of chaos is that such qualities are fearsome precisely because they seem unpredictable and uncontrollable. Consider those moments in the text when God’s anger is especially unnerving in proportion to the degree to which it might spiral out of control. Raphael comments to Adam on the aftermath of the war in heaven: Squar’d in full Legion (such command we had) To see that none thence issu’d forth a spy, Or enemy, while God was in his work, Lest hee incenst at such eruption bold, Destruction with Creation might have mixt (8.231–35)

On the one hand, this seems perfectly consistent with a theistical understanding of God’s omnipotence. On the other hand, it suggests that God would become so incensed under such circumstances as to negate what he creates in the very process of creation, something approaching a contradiction that the otherwise logical God of Book III suggests runs contrary to his potentia ordinata. Indeed throughout the text, the implication is that God needs constant placating lest his hostile side overwhelm his benevolent side and chaotically wreak “havoc” on his own creation. The Son recognizes that his very existence serves to appease the fiery will of his father: Father, to see thy face wherein no cloud Of anger shall remain, but peace assur’d, And reconcilement; wrath shall be no more Thenceforth, but in thy presence Joy entire (3.263–65)

For God to find inner “reconcilement” would involve the quelling of a constitutional antagonism within himself, a tension that only the Son’s presence can slacken: Hee to appease thy wrath, and end the strife Of Mercy and Justice in thy face discern’d ............ ........... O unexampl’d love, Love nowhere to be found less than Divine (3.407–11)

Ta r ry i n g w i t h C h ao s

109

Suffice it to say that much of these qualities one can locate in chaos: an endless, discordant mixture of unlike elements, the quintessence of which is “secretive,” analogous to the “secret” aspects of God into which Raphael advises Adam not to inquire. To the extent that Milton’s God is as much a God of glory as he is a God of love, and the Son’s glory is always displaced by his love, the Son is in some sense a more actualized version of his father: “Far more than Great or High,” God acknowledges to the Son, because in thee Love hath abounded more than Glory abounds (3.311–12)

Consider further Milton’s description of God’s decision to end the war in heaven: Them with Fire and hostile Arms Fearless assault, and to the brow of Heav’n Pursuing drive them out from God and bliss, Into thir place of punishment, the Gulf Of Tartarus, which ready opens wide His fiery Chaos to receive thir all. So spake the Sovran voice, and Clouds began To darken all the Hill, and smoke to roll In dusky wreaths, reluctant flames, the sign Of wrath awak’t (6.53–58)

There is, of course, nothing unusual about God’s expression of indignation at such an unfathomable insult as the attempt to overthrow heaven itself. But when Milton describes the “signs” of God’s “wrath awaked,” he remarks that the very “flames” associated with this wrathfulness are curiously “reluctant,” as if some part of God attempts vainly to keep God’s own anger at bay. We might pause here, as a way of linking Boehme and Milton to Lacan, to describe Schelling’s very similar account of God’s ontol˘ iz˘ek aligns with Lacanian metapsychology. Here is ogy, which Z Schelling’s description of the contending wills that are constituent features of God’s metaphysical base: “There were from the very beginning two different though not distinguishable aspects of the will that willed nothing. First, it was pure will in itself; but as such, it was also the will that willed nothing. Now only this second aspect

110 E n g l i s h R e n a i s s a n c e L i t e r at u r e / Pau l C e f a l u

has become a positively negating will.”20 This might seem akin to Boehme’s conflicting but ultimately sublating divine wills, but far afield from Milton’s pre-modern sensibilities. Schelling will go on, though, to describe this internal divine stirring in surprisingly Miltonic terms: “Darkness and concealment are the dominant characteristics of the primordial time. All life first becomes and develops in the night; for this reason, the ancients called night the fertile mother of things and indeed, together with chaos, the oldest of beings. The deeper we return into the past, the more we find unmoving rest, indistinction, and indifferent coexistence of the very forces that, though gentle at the beginning, flare up later into ever more turbulent struggle.”21 Schelling’s primordial time, read here as the Divine ground itself, is, like Boehme’s and Milton’s first matter, boundless, dark, internally chaotic, and something that is co-eternal with God, the very substance of God out of which he creates himself (in Boehme’s and Schelling’s version) and out of which he creates the world, in Milton’s less radical version. The important point is that in all three cases—Boehme’s, Milton’s, and Schelling’s—there seems to be some untoward Godly aspect that is remaindered but substantially continuous with God ˘ iz˘ek after God reveals himself and creates the outward world. As Z remarks apropos of Schelling, “The only true Substance is God in his actual Existence, and Grund is ultimately a name for God’s selfdeferral, for that elusive X which lacks any proper ontological consistency, yet on account of which God is never fully himself, cannot ˘ iz˘ek will go on to link this elusive ever attain full self-identity.”22 Z X—Schelling’s “Night coupled with Chaos”—with the “ontological ˘ iz˘ek means that beauty, creation primacy of ugliness,” by which Z itself, does not simply negate this ugliness, but negates “existence as such” (since the ground of existence is something conceptualized as ugly): “[A]n ugly object is ‘in itself’ out of place, on account of the distorted balance between its ‘representation’ (the symbolic features we perceive) and ‘existence’—being ugly, out of place, is the excess of existence over representation.”23 It is a short leap from this notion that existence always exceeds or leaks through representation, ugliness raising its head above beauty, to the Lacanian distinction between the real and the symbolic. If we situate the Schellingian ground of the absolute on the side of the real, the self-revealed divine on the side of the imaginary, and the revealed divine on the side of the symbolic, we can imagine that the ground will always

Ta r ry i n g w i t h C h ao s

111

threaten to undermine the symbolic representation of which it is a fundamental part. God will always carry within himself some blot or stain that, although it can only be apprehended awry or anamorphically, will make us realize that there is some excessive quality at the center of the Divine itself. Another way of saying all this is that Milton’s God is unable to achieve a full integration of his ontological and epistemological aspects: He is a God who knows everything except the precise nature of the being or place from which he knows what he knows. A conspicuous feature of Milton’s God as he is represented in Paradise Lost (if not De Doctrina Christiana) is that, beyond stating in Book VII that “I am who fills / Infinitude” (7.169), he does not articulate a moment of divine self-naming in keeping with the tautologous performatives of Exodus 3:14: “I am who I am” or “I am that I am,” for example.24 When he asserts that he is what fills infinitude, he paradoxically limits himself, since infinitude is chaos’s chief quality, which itself is constitutionally antagonistic (as are Boehme’s contending wills and Schelling’s vortex of drives).25 The nearest we approach an essential aspect of God that is other than chaos occurs when God declares through Christ that he is the Word, out of which he creates the world: And thou my Word, begotten Son, by thee This I perform, speak thou, and be it done (7.163–64)

But God’s essence as Word or Logos does not extend beyond his symbolic authority. Milton’s God knows what he knows, says what he says, and does what he does, but there is no clear sense in which he is what he is.26 One cannot simply dismiss this ontological-epistemological divide by invoking God’s voluntarism as against, say, his rationalism. Milton’s God is unlike an Ockhamist or Scotist God in that there is indeed a material, monistic substance that at some level supports God’s epistemological qualities, even though God seems eternally removed from that support. In terms of the normative or ethical implications of this separation, Milton’s God is the very instantiation of the sort of distinction between facts and values that runs up against basic Christian pieties—a distinction that David Hume, for example, believed was brought into being with a subversion, not justification, of religious orthodoxy. While a voluntarist would say that

112 E n g l i s h R e n a i s s a n c e L i t e r at u r e / Pau l C e f a l u

x is good because God wills it as such (value is located in God’s unassailable will), and a rationalist would say that God wills x because it is good (value is located in the fabric of the created orders), we can say that in Paradise Lost, x is good simply because it hints at or approaches y—y being that ontological quality that God attempts to bring into being precisely by promoting x. Milton’s actualized God is the “subject of the enunciated,” the subject of his own actions in the symbolic. His essence, “the subject of enunciation,” is the goal or object toward which his enunciations aim.27 To return to Milton in relation to Boehme: Miltonists might object that while some of the language of Behmism is approximated in Paradise Lost, Milton provides no corresponding account of the unfolding of God from a primordial abyss, no labor of the negative that one finds in German mysticism. True, Milton’s God, at least in the terms outlined in De Doctrina, is co-eternal with prima materia: “That matter, I say should have existed of itself from all eternity, is inconceivable. If on the contrary it did not exist from all eternity, it is difficult to understand from whence it derives its origin. There remains, therefore, but one solution of the difficulty . . . namely, that all things are of God.”28 Yet there is nothing inconsistent in saying that God is both eternal and eternally self-alienated. As a working hypothesis, I propose not only that Milton’s God is impelled toward a state of mythically lost wholeness, but also that we can reconstruct this eternal drama through an assessment of the specular relationships that prevail between God and his principal creations or effects, Satan, Adam, and Eve. We can begin to understand some of these relationships by turning, with due caution, to Milton’s Satan for guidance, bringing Kant’s notion of radical evil and Zupanc˘ic˘’s Lacanian interpretation of Kantianism into the diabolical mix.

Milton with Kant and Zupanc˘ic˘ In Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, Kant describes moral evil as the subordination of an incentive to moral duty to an incentive to sensuousness or self-love.29 The distinctive Kantian notion here is that of a “maxim,” which is ordinarily described by Kant as a binding policy or self-imposed rule to which the moral agent willingly subjects herself or himself.30 Since Kant believes that we face an ongoing contest between an original predisposition to good and a

Ta r ry i n g w i t h C h ao s

113

“natural propensity to evil,” his argument for the existence of moral evil is not far from the Christian notion of backsliding, according to which a settled disposition toward the good can always be undermined by the sensuous appetite.31 Radical evil, unlike venial evil, is so intrinsic as to influence and corrupt those good maxims that the agent might otherwise have established in order to guide rightful conduct.32 Kant further distinguishes radical from diabolical evil. Unlike the former, the latter entails the rejection of the moral law as an end unto itself. Diabolical evil cannot admit of regeneration because no contest can prevail between a predisposition toward the good and inclinations toward vice. Since Kant claims that we are not by nature devilish, he assumes that no human being is capable of acting according to the principle of diabolical evil—that even the most corrupt will retain an inclination, however submerged, to the moral law: “A reason exempt from the moral law, a malignant reason, as it were, (a thoroughly evil will), comprises too much, for thereby opposition to the law would itself be set up as an incentive (since in the absence of all incentives a will cannot be determined) and the subject would be made a devilish being.”33 Kant’s distinction between radical and diabolical evil evolves from his particular notion of freedom. By rejecting the possibility of diabolical evil, Kant denies that the will is free to exercise reason in the name of unreason; however, he preserves a place for the will to freely set maxims in accordance with a categorical imperative. Kant complicates this by further suggesting that the will succumbs to pathological inclinations that themselves mark the subject as unfree: To act according to self-interest is to be “carried along by the stream of natural necessity.”34 Where does Kant ultimately locate the subject’s freedom? As Alenka Zupanc˘ic˘ remarks, “[F]reedom belongs to the subject only in its noumenal aspect.”35 How, though, can one reconcile the radical freedom of the empirical subject to choose radical evil and the notion that only the nonexperiential, noumenal subject enjoys freedom? The only way to understand the logic here is to assume that one understands one’s freedom to choose retroactively, that is, by discovering that one’s seemingly predetermined self-interested actions have been licensed by the voluntary implementation of a corresponding maxim. In psychoanalytic terms, the setting of a maxim seems to occur unconsciously and can only be apprehended in its effects. Since the best one can do is infer one’s noumenal freedom to settle on a predisposing maxim, one

114 E n g l i s h R e n a i s s a n c e L i t e r at u r e / Pau l C e f a l u

would not be able to isolate the precise moment at which an incentive, say, to evildoing, was first incorporated into a binding policy. However, the experience of guilt suggests to us that at some fundamental level we are responsible for bringing such an evil maxim into being. This is consistent with Kant’s notion that a truly ethical act— or its perversion as radical evil—is an act ex nihilo, an act of free willing that not only commits the subject to causal necessity but also erases any trace of its own foundational agency. This logic is at work in the fetishist’s complaint, who, as Zupanc˘ic˘ remarks, would never say, “‘On this very day I decided that high-heeled shoes would be the ultimate objects, the drives of my desire.’ Instead, he would say, ‘I can’t help myself’, it’s not my fault, it’s beyond my control.’”36 In order to understand the distinctive overlap between the Kantian notion of setting maxims and the “ethics of psychoanalysis,” we should bear in mind that Kant distinguishes not merely the noumenal realm of freedom from the phenomenal realm of necessity, but both from a third realm of transcendental apperception. If the phenomenal realm governs the behavior of the cogito, or thinking subject, and the noumenal the realm of the “thing that thinks,” the third realm is the seat of the “transcendental I.” Kant does not conflate the subject’s disposition toward a maxim and the choice of that maxim; the disposition is located in the noumenal realm and the act or choice to render a particular disposition into a maxim. What Kant describes as an “act of spontaneity of the subject” is situated in the realm of transcendental apperception.37 As Zupanc˘ic˘ describes the difference: “Kant underlines the difference between what we might call ‘the thing-in-itself-in-us’ (the Gesinnung or disposition of the subject) and the transcendental I which is nothing but the empty place from which the subject ‘chooses’ her Gesinnung. This empty place is not noumenal; rather it is an embodiment of the blind spot that sustains the difference between phenomena and noumena. Because of this ‘blind spot’ the acting subject cannot be transparent to herself, and does not have a direct access to a ‘thing-in-itself-in-her,’ to her Gesinnung.”38 To summarize Zupanc˘ic˘’s integration of Kantianism and Lacanianism: In order to discover one’s freedom, one needs to “depsychologize” oneself, undertake a process whereby one realizes that all of one’s seemingly free actions are caused by uncontrollable pathological desires. This brings one to a position of radical subordination to the causality of the Other, a point at which one no longer

Ta r ry i n g w i t h C h ao s

115

phenomenalizes oneself in terms of “I act” or “I think.” At this point, the subject accepts her radical alterity with herself, the extent to which she is a “stranger in her own house,” after which she recognizes that the path has become open for freedom. Radical freedom occurs at the moment that the subject apprehends some surplus or some leftover, an apprehension caused by the realization that the Other itself is self-divided. Freedom inheres in the notion that the disposition or Gesinnung is an object of choice, but one chosen from an empty or transcendental place: “The ethical subject springs from the coincidence of two lacks: a lack in the subject (the subject’s lack of freedom connected to the moment of the ‘forced choice’) and a lack in the Other (the fact that there is no Other to the Other, no Cause behind the cause).”

The Diabolical Imperative Early in Book I of Paradise Lost, Satan advises Beelzebub: Fall’n Cherub, to be weak is miserable Doing or Suffering: but of this be sure, To do aught good never will be our task, But ever to do ill our sole delight, As being the contrary to his high will Whom we resist. If then his Providence Out of our evil seek to bring forth good, Our labour must be to pervert that end, And out of good still to find means of evil (1.157–66)

Satan’s remark serves as a general policy or maxim, in which he binds himself to act unexceptionally against God’s will. As if realizing the pitfalls of such a position in relation to felix culpa, Satan assures Beelzebub that whatever good God may conjure, Satan in turn will pervert into evil. Satan’s pledge to act contrary to God’s will satisfies the basic criterion of Kant’s category of diabolical evil. But to interpret Satan’s remark as an instance of diabolical evil assumes that to act against the moral law is to make oneself into the very form of the law, to commit oneself to a form of automatism that denies acting on pathological interests.

116 E n g l i s h R e n a i s s a n c e L i t e r at u r e / Pau l C e f a l u

This implies that once he commits himself to his maxim, Satan’s ongoing pursuit of evil is not sourced in pathological desires; even more counterintuitively, it implies that Satan would pursue evil even against his own interests, simply for the sake of consistency. This is indeed the case, much of which is brought out in Satan’s poignant monologue in Book IV, where he contemplates asking God’s forgiveness: Is there no place Left for Repentance, none for Pardon left? None left but by submission; and that Word Disdain forbids me, and my dread of shame Among the Spirits beneath, whom I seduc’d With other promises and other vaunts Than to submit, boasting I could subdue Th’ Omnipotent (4.79–81)

Satan might seem to be attributing his inability to repent to a propositional statement, the content of which is a pathological desire, in this case shame. But the syntax of the line suggests that shame is something of an afterthought: Disdain of submission is offered as an explanation, to which shame is appended as a caveat. Satan acknowledges that he cannot repent, since repentance would mean submission, and submission is exactly what his maxim rejects. Satan’s policy functions here as the embedded premise in a practical syllogism of action. Rather than bring that maxim into the open, he invokes shame, as if to say, “Besides, my fear of shame forbids repentance.” Satan makes excuses for his inability to subvert his own policy, even though his adherence to it promotes a further regress in hell. In fact, Satan never does avow to the fallen host that he could defeat God with impunity. This is Moloch’s abortive position presented during the infernal debate, and framed in Satan’s language it is rendered particularly ridiculous for being oxymoronic. Recall that in order to resolve the infernal debate, Beelzebub affirms God’s omnipotence—“For he, be sure / in highth or depth, still first and last will Reign / Sole king” (2.323–25)—and directs the fallen host to a much “easier enterprise” (2.345), the corruption of Adam and Eve, the consequence of which ideally would make them God’s foe and prompt God to, “with relenting hand / Abolish his own works” (2.369–70). The gain here would be an insidious kind of revenge,

Ta r ry i n g w i t h C h ao s

117

one that would not defeat God’s power as much as momentarily thwart it: This would surpass Common revenge, and interrupt his joy In our Confusion, and our Joy upraise In his disturbance (2.372–73)

That Satan’s maxim, rather than discrete pathological motives, renders him unable to repent is underscored when, realizing that submission must be rejected out of hand, he accepts that neither hope of repenting nor fear of reprisal for further transgressions will guide his conduct: So farewell Hope, and with Hope farewell Fear, Farewell Remorse: all Good to me is lost; Evil be thou my Good; by thee at least Divided Empire with Heav’n’s King I hold By thee, and more than half perhaps will reign (4.109–12)

To rid himself of hope of repentance is to rid himself of the fear of a further fall and the ensuing pain that will “double smart” (4.102). This double smart will inevitably occur because, as Satan realizes, if he repented, How soon would highth recall high thoughts, how soon unsay What feign’d submission swore (4.94–96)

Instead of identifying with these or an any particular desires, Satan embraces evil as such, treating evil voluntaristically as his own “good” that will rival God’s. Here again, what he has achieved is simply an affirmation of his imperative to act contrary to God’s will, even at the cost of compounding the “torments” under which he “inwardly groans” (4.86–89). In Lacanian terms, Satan’s maxim protects him not from God’s devouring power, but from acknowledging the very limitations of God’s power, the extent to which God might contain within himself a constitutional loss, what a Lacanian would describe as a traumatizing hole in his being. Recall Zupanc˘ic˘’s postulate of de-psychologizing,

118 E n g l i s h R e n a i s s a n c e L i t e r at u r e / Pau l C e f a l u

in which the subject only discovers freedom by acknowledging the extent to which passions and desires reveal the subject’s heteronomy, its parasitism on the desire of the Other. Yet this is the moment at which the subject apprehends some unsymbolizable leftover, some “scrap of the real” that might be manifested in an unaccountable desire in the Other of which the Other is not entirely aware. By setting a maxim that challenges the divine, thereby making himself into a self-identical subject, Satan (especially when he is alone, away from his cohort) posits that God acts according to a contrary maxim—to pursue good at all costs—and hence is also self-transparent and nonpathological. This is further brought out when Satan exclaims in his monologue in Book IV that because God’s “free Love [was] dealt equally to all” (4.68), he had no just cause to defect. Satan’s remark here runs directly counter to his very justification for the war in heaven, which he believes was provoked by God’s arbitrary bestowal of more love upon the exalted Son than upon the other angels. Satan willfully sets up God here as a fair and consistently love-bestowing patriarch so as to set himself up as God’s fair and consistent rival. These lines are particularly interesting in that Satan represents God as more lovingly objective than does either Milton’s narrator or God himself. The one comment of God that seems to approach in tone and content what Satan suggests here is spoken to the Son in Book II, when God defends his creative ways: Of man, and by implication “all th’ Ethereal Powers” (3.100), God says, he had of me All he could have; I made him just and right, Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall (3.98–100)

What exactly does God mean when he says that man and the angels had of him “all they could have”? Along with God’s statements on death and the nature of the one easy prohibition, this ranks as one of God’s most maddeningly opaque comments in the text. Not only does God leave mysteriously open the nature of those divine qualities that have been bestowed on his creatures, but the force of “could” raises a question as to the kinds of qualities his creatures cannot have, which in turn raises the question of why they cannot have them. Of course, such attributes might include God’s theistic properties (omnipotence, perfect actuality, etc.), which would naturally be

Ta r ry i n g w i t h C h ao s

119

withheld from his subordinates. But nothing in God’s comment here or elsewhere in the text warrants Satan’s or our conclusion that (1) God has bestowed “free love” to all his creatures; (2) these are qualities that God’s creatures “could” have received; or (3) God envisages himself as an unexceptionally loving patriarch, a self-image that is mirrored in his creatures. Returning to Zupanc˘ic˘’s terminology: Rather than accept that God’s decrees might come from that aspect of God that exceeds God (in Kantian terms, a position that is “transcendent” to God; in Lacanian terms, God’s real), Satan finds comfort in postulating that God’s mandates stem from if not a phenomenalized imperative, then at least a noumenal policy that, although it might have been established somewhere offstage, on the edges of God’s symbolic, is still linked to God as a purposive-rational “thinking thing.” If Satan were to pursue an ethics of the real, he would need to momentarily acknowledge the extent to which he depends on the Other (God) precisely in order to achieve a meta- or second-order realization that he actually does not depend on God, that God might not even be fully guiding himself: “The ethics of desire presents itself literally as a ‘heroism of the lack,’ as the attitude through which, in the name of the lack of the True object we reject all other objects and satisfy ourselves with none.”39 As a means to further underscore the extent to which we can reconstruct the ends and drives of God by extrapolating from the effects of his creations, we can now turn to Eve in relation to a fuller account of Zupanc˘ic˘’s notion of an ethics of the real. We will see that, unlike Satan, Eve is truly a heroine of the lack because her refusal to give up on her desires forces a direct encounter, within herself, of that aspect of the chaotic aspect of God from which Satan safely retires.

Milton’s Good Eve, or Why Eve is more like God than God Himself In Book IV, Eve shamefacedly recounts to Adam her tryst at the lake: As I bent down to look, just opposite, a Shape within the wat’ry gleam appear’d Bending to look on me, I started back,

120 E n g l i s h R e n a i s s a n c e L i t e r at u r e / Pau l C e f a l u It started back, but pleas’d I soon returned, Pleas’d it return’d as soon with answering looks Of sympathy and love; there I had fixt Mine eyes till now, and pin’d with vain desire, Had not a voice thus warn’d me, What thou seest, What there thou seest fair creature is thyself, With thee it came and goes: but follow me, And I will bring thee where no shadow stays Thy coming (4.460–71)

Eve, of course, finds her own image spellbinding, especially when compared to Adam’s. She starts back toward her reflection, but is finally moved by Adam’s advisement that as his “other half,” she is his by divine appointment. Miltonists have tended to argue that Eve’s experience serves as a kind of abortive scene of primary narcissism. A brief review of Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage will help us reevaluate the so described narcissistic elements of the scene. As is perhaps well known, the mirror image provides not the ego as such, but more specifically the ideal ego, described by Lacan as an ideal due to the fundamental discrepancy between the subject’s pre-symbolic, lived experiences, on the one hand, and the image of wholeness and coordination that is presented by the specular image, on the other hand: “The mirror stage is a dream whose internal pressure pushes precipitously from insufficiency to anticipation—and, for the subject caught up in the lure of spatial identification, turns out fantasies that proceed from a fragmented image of the body to what I will call an ‘orthopedic’ form of its totality—and to the finally donned armor of an alienating identity that will mark this entire mental development with its rigid structure.”40 The unitary and bounded ideal ego is at a remove from the subject’s experience of herself as uncoordinated, or in Freudian terms, “polymorphously perverse.” This explains why, for Lacan, primary narcissism or the mirror stage marks a period of aggressivity in which the subject initially strives to master, but eventually simply identifies with the mirror image that seems more complete and unified than the subject’s direct apprehension of herself.41 In order to appreciate, however, Lacan’s revision of Freud’s theory of narcissism, we should momentarily return to Freud’s important essay “On Narcissism,” particularly his distinction between the ideal ego and the real or actual ego and his related distinction

Ta r ry i n g w i t h C h ao s

121

between idealization and sublimation. Explaining the process by which ego-cathexis or primary narcissism transforms into objectcathexis, Freud remarks, Repression, as we have said, proceeds from the ego; we might say with greater precision: from the self-respect of the ego. The very impressions, experiences, impulses and desires that one man indulges or at least consciously elaborates in his mind will be rejected with the utmost indignation by another, or stifled once ever before they enter consciousness. . . . We may say that the one man has set up an ideal in himself by which he measures his actual ego, while the other is without this formation of an ideal.42

The path leading from primary narcissism to object choice is guided by the “ideal ego,” itself shaped by an internalization of the ideals of others, which allows for either a sublimation or repression of the gratifications of the infantile libido.43 Freud cautions against assuming that the formation and elevation of an ideal ego (which he uses interchangeably with the ego-ideal) necessarily lead to sublimation of the “lost narcissism” of one’s childhood.44 It is more often the case that idealization of an object will lead merely to repression of the libidinal instincts of self-love. True sublimation, in which the instinct directs itself toward an “aim other than, and remote from, sexual gratification,” is a “special process which may be prompted by the ideal but the execution of which is entirely independent of any such incitement.”45 Lacan’s treatment of Freud’s theory of narcissism is an example of Lacan’s thoroughgoing revision of, rather than simple return to Freud. Where Freud distinguishes an ideal ego or ego-ideal from the actual or foundational ego, Lacan distinguishes the ideal ego from the ego-ideal, the former operating in the imaginary, the latter in the symbolic: “It is speech, the symbolic relation, which determines the greater or lesser degree of perfection, of completeness, of approximation, of the imaginary. This representation allows us to draw the distinction between the Idealich and the Ichideal, between the ideal ego and the ego-ideal. The ego-ideal governs the interplay of relations on which all relations with others depend.”46 Returning to Eve’s encounter at the lake, we can see that Adam’s interruption of Eve’s embrace of her reflection serves to thwart primary narcissism and her formative identification with her image as an ideal ego. As so many commentators have noticed, Adam all but coerces Eve,

122 E n g l i s h R e n a i s s a n c e L i t e r at u r e / Pau l C e f a l u

instead, to identify with his notion that what should constitute her ego is a sense of herself as his subordinate.47 In this precise sense, the only strong ego that Eve has developed is an ego-ideal, an internalization of Adam’s perspective on her. Much more is at stake in this scene, though, than the simple displacement of Eve’s ideal ego by Adam’s ego-ideal. Consider what might have happened had Adam not impeded the natural development of Eve’s imaginary identity. One cannot turn to an unreconstructed Lacanian notion of the “two egos” (which Lacan also refers to as the “two narcissisms”) in order to answer this question, since Eve, upon “birth,” is not at all like the infans who, prior to the development of an ideal ego, experiences herself as an uncoordinated “body in parts.” Eve’s first experience of herself is one of “repose” and simple curiosity. She is, at least with respect to her own body (if not in relation to God or Adam), unified and “coordinated” upon conception. When Adam prevents Eve from internalizing her reflective imago, then, he does not prevent her from an identification with a more autonomous image of herself that would always be in tension with a drive to return to a state of prematurity. He prevents her from approaching something like a pure double. This is not to say, of course, that had Adam not interrupted her, Eve would have achieved “full presence” or “subjective autonomy,” as some critics have suggested.48 Linda Gregerson is no doubt correct to point out that, until she communicates with Adam, Eve is not only “unable to read the world before her and thus to have ‘experiences’ of any sort, she is also palpably possessed of no self.”49 This is entirely consistent with Lacan’s notion that the ego-ideal is temporally later but logically and constitutionally prior to the ideal ego. But Gregerson seems to overlook the fact that the abortive aspect of the scene is crucial precisely because it prevents Eve from realizing that something like subjective autonomy cannot exist outside of a symbolic framework. Adam’s interruption is important not because it forces Eve to give up autonomy, but because it allows for the sustaining illusion that autonomy might have been achievable. Returning to Freud’s original distinction between repression and sublimation, Eve “idealizes” Adam as her ego-ideal, yet idealization allows only for a repression of her ideal ego, rather than the more complex process of sublimation, in which the narcissistic object choice would take on different forms in the symbolic. What has been repressed will erupt as a symptom in the symbolic, a symptom that

Ta r ry i n g w i t h C h ao s

123

will manifest itself as a drive to return to a state of autonomy, however illusory, that Eve’s ego-ideal had prematurely displaced. This drive for autonomy constitutes Eve’s real, or more technically, her objet a, that object cause of desire that impossibly attempts to bridge the gap between the real and symbolic, which will futilely attach to ordinary objects of desire. As Lacan defines the objet a, “The objet a is something from which the subject, in order to constitute itself, has separated itself off as organ. This serves as the symbol of the lack. ”50 Eve’s “narcissism” at the lake illustrates nicely the Lacanian dictum, ˘ iz˘ek’s writings, that the real does not preunderlined throughout Z exist but is rather brought into being by the symbolic. Adam does not so much interrupt as create for Eve a false pre-symbolic unity; he opens up a space or category for narcissistic desire as such. This still leaves unaddressed, though, how we might put content to Eve’s truncated ideal ego, her sense of herself that is neither part of her real or her internalization of Adam’s perspective on her. Eve has been thrown from the real to the symbolic, without having an intermediate chance to develop an imaginary ego. Given that Eve has no clearly demarcated ideal ego, the only way to describe this place is to say that it is a kind of void, something indeterminate that exists only potentially, or as a negative possibility. What structure or item in the text shares such qualities of indeterminacy? Chaos, of course, which perhaps helps to explain why so many commentators have sensed that something about Eve’s actions in the Edenic symbolic resemble chaos in structure and effect. For example, there is the oft-noted implicit comparison between Milton’s description of the wanton and unruly Eden and Eve’s feminine wiles. The “four main Streams” running diverse, “wand’ring many a famous Realm”(4.233–34), might recall for some readers the contending four elements of chaos; and the “mazy error” (4.239–40) of the running nectar does give a sense of activity that seems to be outside God’s immediate, occasionalistic control. As so many readers have noticed, this latter description anticipates the account of Eve’s golden tresses: dishevell’d, but in wanton ringlets wav’d, As the Vine curls her tendrils (4.305–07)

We can further tie these descriptions to Adam’s confession to Raphael that he is helplessly attracted to Eve’s excesses: her “too much of

124 E n g l i s h R e n a i s s a n c e L i t e r at u r e / Pau l C e f a l u

Ornament” (8.538), her falling off from God’s image, and the extent to which “Authority and Reason on her wait” (8.554), which degrades all “higher knowledge in her presence” (8.551). Now these descriptions do not suggest any point-for-point correspondence with Milton’s description of night and chaos, but, on the continuum of prima materia, Eve approaches matter in its primary, unformed state more than Adam or any of the other creatures about them. The difficult question is whether Eve carries the same conception of herself as Adam has of her. The evidence seems to be that while she acquiesces to much of Adam’s instruction, there is part of her that resists what we have been describing as her weak, ideal ego. This is evident in her important refusal to immediately heed Adam’s call during her episode at the lake, in which she returns to her image even after having been called away from it and having gotten a glimpse of Adam: yet methought less faire, Less winning soft, less amiable milde, Than that smooth wat’ry image; back I turn’d, Thou following cri’d’st aloud, Return fair Eve, Whom fli’st thou? (4.478–82)

It is also evident when, after Adam preaches his technical lesson in faculty psychology in order to assuage Eve after her dreamtemptation, Eve silently cries: But silently a gentle tear let fall From either eye, and wip’d them with her hair (5.130–31)

Milton’s narrator immediately assures us of Eve’s fear of having offended, yet the reader cannot help but conclude that Adam has not fully put to rest Eve’s curiosity regarding the meaning and allure of her dream. In a recent study of Milton’s chaos, John Rumrich reminds us that Milton’s “first matter,” and particularly night, are gendered feminine in Paradise Lost: “If God cannot live with eternal Night, except in the shadowy allegorical guise of the unruling anarch, he also cannot live without her. In certain respects, chaos is to God as Eve is to Adam. If God has no separate, female other external to him, he nevertheless acquiesces in his own feminine otherness.”51 Rumrich’s

Ta r ry i n g w i t h C h ao s

125

notion that chaos is to God as Eve is to Adam is compelling, but I would refine his analogy by emphasizing that the aspect of Eve that serves Adam’s sovereignty, her chaotic, “negative capability” (what I have been describing as Eve’s ideal ego), is itself in tension with her reliance on Adam, as well as her unsymbolized drive toward attaining self-sufficiency, her objet a. We will see that Eve’s objet a is closely linked to her desire to have absolute knowledge, to be, as Satan astutely realizes, like God. This is the “non-all” aspect of Eve that a conventional Lacanian interpretation might tie to an ineffable feminine jouissance, but which I would emphasize has very little to do with sexuation. In this respect, at least, Eve and God bear an important, if asymmetrical, resemblance: Eve’s real (manifested as a desire for autonomy, self-sufficiency, etc.) corresponds to God’s imaginary, while Eve’s imaginary (chaos) corresponds to God’s real. To Rumrich’s notion that chaos is to God as Eve is to Adam, I would add that chaos is to God as God is to Eve, if only in the sense that both God and Eve are unavoidably drawn to something that seems to be, or more precisely, seems to have been, intrinsic to themselves yet is now impossibly out of reach. In order, however, to more fully situate Eve’s conduct in relation to God’s metaphysical designs, we need to make one more detour into the work of Alenka Zupanc˘ic˘.

Eve’s Forced Choice Zupanc˘ic˘’s commentary on the conduct of Synge de Coufontaine, the heroine of Paul Claudel’s tragedy The Hostage, will help us understand Eve’s ethical actions and her “heroism of the lack.” The plot of the story is as follows: Synge, the remaining scion of an impoverished noble family, and her cousin Georges, a royalist émigré to England during Napoleonic rule, vow to marry one another in order to consolidate their family’s title and land. At one point in the story, Georges arrives at Synge’s manor harboring the Pope who is in flight of Napoleon. The following day, Synge is visited by Tousaine Turleure, a revolutionary and member of the nouveu riche, who also happens to be the person who earlier had ordered the execution of Synge’s parents in front of their children. Turleure notifies Synge that he has received word that she is protecting Georges and the Pope, but that he will allow their escape on the condition that Synge agree to marry him and turn over to him the title of her land and

126 E n g l i s h R e n a i s s a n c e L i t e r at u r e / Pau l C e f a l u

privileges. After painful deliberation with her priest, Badilon, Synge accepts Turleure’s offer. A year later, upon the eve of the restoration of monarchy, Turleure and George, the latter of whom is now the chief negotiator for the returning king, have a shoot-out in Synge’s presence. Georges is fatally wounded, while Synge unexpectedly steps in front of Georges bullet to save her loathed husband Turleure. Upon Synge’s deathbed, Turleure pleads with her to provide some sign of the unaccountable reason behind her gesture, asking if she did it on behalf of her family name, if not for her husband. Synge’s dying gesture, however, is a contorted shaking of her head, signifying “no” to his queries.52 The tragedy of Synge represents for Zupanc˘ic˘ (and Lacan) the ethical terror that is brought into play by Synge’s “forced choice” and her refusal to give up on her tacit maxim, “sadder than to lose one’s life is to lose one’s reason for living.”53 Synge’s most valued reason for living is her honor and dignity. Paradoxically, the only way that she can retain her honor, her objet a or object cause of desire, is to cede that honor by agreeing to marry Turleure. Initially, what really motivates Synge’s sacrifice is her concern not for the sake of her land, privilege, or cousin, but her concern for the Pope, or more generally, for God and a religious cause. There is some suggestion, brought out in her dialogue with Badilon, that Synge does not merely sacrifice herself, but succumbs to a temptation, as one commentator remarks, to “take upon herself the task of restoring and saving the figure of authority, so that a particular group, society, or family can regain its force and cohesion.”54 Zupanc˘ic˘ concludes that Synge’s martyrdom seems to serve to “fill in the lack of the Other”: “The temptation to which she succumbs is that of making herself in the absence of any Divine guarantee, the support of such a guarantee.”55 However, Synge’s culminating “no” signals that she has died not simply in order to support or procure God’s divine law, but more subversively in order to make herself into the form of that very law. Synge refuses to give up her objet a, in this case honor, that impels her actions in the symbolic realm but which is itself never the object of a particular desire. Synge’s dying “no” reflects that she refuses to abandon herself entirely to God: “The end of the play thus leave us with an unsettling image, an image in which the Divine law and its sole support occupy the same level; the (Divine) law finds itself face to face with this convulsing flesh that refuses to disappear from the picture.”56

Ta r ry i n g w i t h C h ao s

127

What would it mean to argue that, like Synge, Eve traverses her fundamental fantasy, sacrifices her very reason of being, her object cause of desire? In order to answer this question, we need to isolate Eve’s object cause of desire, which, as I have already suggested, is manifested as a desire to actualize that part of herself that has been remaindered by her imaginary, a desire to be more fully like God. During the Temptation scene, Eve finally comes face to face with her objet a, as if it has been transformed into an ordinary object of desire, the fruit offered to her by Satan. When Eve eats the fruit, she makes a fundamental sacrifice: She sacrifices that object cause of desire that is necessary for her to survive as a desiring creature in the Edenic symbolic. To turn her objet a into an ordinary object is, paradoxically, to give it up, just as Synge gives up her heroism in order to martyr herself for a religious cause. For what, though, does Eve sacrifice her object cause of desire? What Eve has brought forward is not simply the nature of evil and its consequences (shame, deceptiveness, envy, and so on). Eve enters into an entirely new ethical register because she has become simultaneously like God and his Other. It is as if she has exposed, will suspend within herself, and will now reflect inwardly and outwardly both God’s epistemological actuality—his knowledge of good and evil—and God’s ontological ground—his chaotic properties (although those properties will henceforth manifest themselves as evil in Eve). In terms of Eve’s epistemological divinity, God himself acknowledges that Eve and Adam have become like him by having acquired knowledge of good and evil. In terms of Eve’s ontological divinity, there is indeed a sense in which Eve and Adam have acquired or discovered within themselves precisely that little bit of chaos that we have been describing as God’s unactualized real: Nor only Tears Rain’d at thir Eyes but high Winds worse within Began to rise, high Passions, Anger, Hate, Mistrust, Suspicion, Discord, and shook sore Thir inward State of Mind, clam region once And full of Peace, now toss’t and turbulent (9.1121–26)

The residual goodness that remains in Eve, this “paradise within” that will be cultivated after the Fall with the help of God’s grace, will

128 E n g l i s h R e n a i s s a n c e L i t e r at u r e / Pau l C e f a l u

be unavoidably mingled with what Regina Schwartz memorably describes as this postlapsarian “chaos within.”

God’s Superegoic Law Consider as a working hypothesis that Eve’s temptation has instrumental effects because it reveals to God what is in God other than himself. What Eve would therefore reflect (or what the Temptation would allegorize) is something akin to God’s reunion with das Ding, that monstrous Other that needs to be remaindered in order for one to become subjectivized and enter into the symbolic. In the Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Lacan defines das Ding as follows: “[D]as Ding is that which I call the beyond-of-the-signified. It is as a function of this beyond-of-the-signified and of an emotional relationship to it that the subject keeps its distance and is constituted in a relationship characterized by primary affect, prior to any repression.”57 Elsewhere Lacan describes das Ding as the “abyss or void,”58 a “lost object,”59 or more intersubjectively (and in a Levinasian manner), the “Other” that interpellates the “You” that in some sense always makes us apologetic or accountable.60 In all cases, the search for such an Other is governed by the pleasure principle, which, due to its primary role as a homeostatic mechanism, keeps the subject at an intrigued but safe distance from das Ding.61 In order to reconstruct some sense of the process, by which Milton’s God primordially reveals himself to himself, we might imagine that God needs to separate from chaos the way that any individual needs to separate from das Ding. If what I have been suggesting holds—namely that Eve, after the Temptation scene, becomes the embodiment of the two aspects of God, his ground, and his actuality—then the only way to keep those two aspects separate would be to impose some paternal law that would effect such a separation. We can imagine, then, that God relates to his ground in an analogous way that the child relates to the Other. Just as the paternal law allows for the child to separate from the Other, so God’s law would allow for God to separate from himself. Since this process of God’s meeting but then having to separate from this Other is reflected in Eve, God can achieve this allegorical separation by imposing paternal law on Eve. To the extent that this paternal law will ideally function as an internalized set of commands, the disobedience of which will

Ta r ry i n g w i t h C h ao s

129

inevitably cause the experience of guilt, paternal law will serve as superegoic law. And superegoic law is precisely what will be delivered to Adam and Eve after the Fall. One might object that divine law existed in Eden well before the Fall, manifested most obviously in the “one easy prohibition.” But a distinction needs to be drawn between this form of an abstract interdiction that is externally imposed and lacks significant content and justification and the kind of superegoic law that is internalized and governs one’s conscience. If we imagine that both cases of law relate not only to Adam and Eve but also to God himself (figuring essentially in the retroactive rebirthing of God in Eve), we can begin to understand the necessity of the displacement of abstract law by superegoic law. In purely Lacanian terms, law becomes less threatening when it is anthropomorphized and embodied through the agency of the partial objects’ gaze and voice. Law without significant content or embodiment represents, as Zupanc˘ic˘ remarks, a “certain inconsistency or incompleteness of the Other (the moral law).”62 Once law becomes legible, it serves to fill a hole in the Other: “The trembling of someone who finds him-herself before both the gaze and the voice of the Law must not mislead us; this trembling is already a relief compared to the original feeling of respect. Fear is already a relief from the anxiety of respect.”63 The introjection of the superego is pacifying because it prevents the subject from ever fully satisfying the moral law, and hence exposing the fact that there is no “Other of the Other.” The superego has the dual effect of absolutizing the Other and keeping lack on the side of the subject: “The absolute Other (in the form of the superego) is there in order to guarantee that there will always be a lack on the other side (the side of the subject); that this lack will never run out and that ‘it’ (the act) will never succeed. . . . The only real guarantee that can prevent the act from even taking place is the advent of the figure of the absolute Other.”64 In terms of the Protestant scheme of salvation, superegoic law takes the form of the subject’s realization that law will only further convict the subject of unremitting sin. Superegoic guilt over a fundamental inability to satisfy the law and commit a truly ethical act is paradoxically comforting because it helps to sustain the illusion that God is self-identical and absolute. If what is reflected in Eve is God’s own relationship between his ground and his actuality, law has as its fundamental goal a keeping

130 E n g l i s h R e n a i s s a n c e L i t e r at u r e / Pau l C e f a l u

of these two aspects separate. One might argue that law in its bald, abstract sense (“Do not eat of this tree”) points to a fundamental ambiguity with respect to the two aspects of God. Does such a prohibition come directly from the actualized or “good” God, or is it somehow a product of God’s Other, essentially a symptom of his chaotic base? It might sound implausible to connect the prohibition to a symptom of God’s impossible ontology, but Satan seems to get at something insightful about the prohibition that warrants our relating it to a symptomal torsion of God’s ground rather than to his actuality. Satan notes that it comes from a jealous God, a God who refuses to share his power with his creatures. This is a God who is afraid of losing some of his sovereignty, much as the Anarch Chaos is afraid of losing some of his control over prima materia, his unbounded territory. And it should also be pointed out that one of the few times that Milton’s narrator employs the term “empire” to describe God’s created world, a term that is conspicuously used in the text to describe Chaos’s domain, occurs just after God has completed creating mankind and dispensed the prohibition: Thence to behold this new created World Th’ addition of his Empire, how it show’d In prospect from his Throne (7.554–56)

We cannot resolve these ambiguities; the important point is that it is precisely this justificatory and genealogical ambiguity regarding the prohibition that evokes Adam and Eve’s “respect” rather than “fear.” What better way, then, for God to pacify himself, not simply pacify Adam and Eve, by anthropomorphizing his law in a set of decrees, delivered to Adam and Eve by Christ and Michael, the latter two who seem more unambiguously good than God himself? It is as if God is able, in Zupanc˘ic˘’s terms, to absolutize himself by setting up an anthropomorphized law, the standards of which Adam and Eve will struggle but continually fail to meet. By doing so, God relocates lack away from himself and onto Adam and Eve, who assume that their inability to obey God’s prohibition keeps them from assuming the self-transparency of which God convinces himself by the very means of embodying his law in the goodness of Christ. Imagine that each time Adam and Eve sin, God somewhere offstage recreates himself, an ongoing process that provides him with the illusion that

Ta r ry i n g w i t h C h ao s

131

he is as pure and self-comprehending as the Son is and Adam and Eve strive to be. How else can we interpret one of God’s most curious sleights in the text? Just prior to sending Michael down to give Adam his grand tour into the future, God collects himself, Prospero-like, and advises the Son: But longer in that Paradise to dwell, The Law I gave to Nature him forbids: Those pure immortal Elements that know No gross, no unharmonious mixture foul Eject him tainted now, and purge him off As a distemper, gross to air as gross (11.48–53)

Why would God suddenly describe Eden as a haven of pure, immortal elements that knows “no gross” when Eden all along has been described as discordant, prone to error and excess, and hence in need of labor and cultivation? Surely the narrator has not failed us by misrepresenting Eden and God’s ways. Adam and Eve’s sin allows God to retroactively posit Eden as spotless or sinless, as if their fall has had the effect of improving the habitation from which they will be expelled. Recall that Milton’s monistic and materialistic God is himself substantially continuous with Eden. It follows that the very substance that is improved in quality in proportion to Adam and Eve’s demotion of quality is God’s substance itself. To Rumrich’s and Regina Schwartz’s notion that each “fall” allows God to create something anew, we might add that each fall allows God to create himself anew, providing God with the opportunity to project chaos away from himself and onto his subjects.65 One of the virtues of using the Lacanian framework to understand God’s relationship to chaos and Eve is that it helps to resolve the question of the gendering of chaos in the text. To Rumrich’s explanation that chaos is gendered feminine, Catherine Martin has made the following objection: “Not only is the realm of Chaos more hermaphroditic than feminine (having both an anarch and anarchess, a Chaos and a Night, that is, both a mothering womb or Venus function and a war-like-tomb or Mars aspect), but in these respects it resembles all the poem’s physical features, including that of light itself.”66 Martin elsewhere claims that chaos is essentially “indeterminate”

132 E n g l i s h R e n a i s s a n c e L i t e r at u r e / Pau l C e f a l u

in keeping with modern theories of quantum physics, Gödel’s indeterminacy principles, and Derridean poststructuralism.67 If we consider that chaos serves as the Lacanian Thing, we can say with Martin that chaos is indeed indeterminate. While particular objects might stand in for the Thing, the Thing is essentially a void or absence: “At the level of the Vorstellungen [representation],” Lacan remarks, “the Thing is not nothing, but literally is not. It is characterized by its absence, its strangeness.”68 Attempts to represent the Thing are fueled by sublimation, which, as Lacan stresses, is nothing other than the raising of an ordinary object to the “dignity of the Thing.”69 Sublimation is exemplified in the treatment of the Lady of courtly love, who holds power because beneath her beautiful exterior, lies a traumatizing emptiness or abyss: “The idealized woman, the Lady, who is in the position of the Other and of the object, finds herself suddenly and brutally positing, in a place knowingly constructed out of the most refined of signifiers, the emptiness of a thing in all its crudity.”70 The woman is inaccessible because she is a representation of something that cannot be represented, a signifier that is “less a representative representative than a non-representative representative.”71 In this sense, das Ding is essentially the uncanny aspect of the Other, that which is in the Other that represents the “beyond-of-the-signified.”72 What we seem to have in Paradise Lost, then, are two general sorts of chaos: an indeterminate chaos, prima materia, and its representation or sublimated form in Eve, who has chaotic properties, those of which are gendered, but which are merely stand-ins or “representative non-representatives” for chaos as such. Eve is an ordinary chaotic “object” elevated to the dignity of the chaotic Ding proper. So much might not be too difficult to accept. But I have been arguing further that this sort of sublimation of Eve serves God’s otherwise unrepresented dilemma of closing up his foundational gap with the Thing proper. Obviously this is not to say that God sublimates his pursuit of the Thing through a direct elevation of Eve. Adam, of course, not God, literally turns Eve into das Ding for which he is duly chastised by Raphael in Book V. I have been suggesting only that we can attempt to reconstruct the ways in which, in accordance with God’s secret designs and foreknowledge, the actions of God’s creatures ultimately help him to narrow his ontological and epistemological chasm.

Ta r ry i n g w i t h C h ao s

133

In what sense can the anthropomorphization or objectification of Eve into a stand-in for chaos serve God? It allows God to maintain an approximation of the presence of the Thing into the symbolic by further embodying it in Eve, where it is brought in contact, given the high value ascribed to the knowledge of good and evil, with one of the defining principles of the “imaginary,” actualized, God, also embodied in Eve after she eats the fruit. If the first act of this drama is to stage this allegorical reunion within Eve between “Goddess” and chaotic Thing, the next act is, as I have noted above, to stage a tension or split between these two aspects. At this point, though, an important ethical transformation occurs as well: Good and evil come into being precisely because the elemental split between God and his ground, a split that is itself irrepresentable, has at least taken sublimated form in the symbolic. In order to understand this transformation from a representation of a non-representative “reunion” with das Ding to the introduction of normativeness into the world, we should recall Lacan’s comments on good and evil: You will not be surprised if I tell you that at the level of the Vorstellungen, the Thing is not nothing, but literally is not. It is characterized by its absence, its strangeness. Everything about it that is articulated as good or bad divides the subject in connection with it. . . . There is not a good and a bad object; there is good and bad, and then there is The Thing. The good and the bad already belong to the order of the Vorstellung; they exist there as clues to that which orients the position of the subject, in accordance with the pleasure principle.73

In relation to Milton’s chaos, these lines suggest not simply that, as das Ding, chaos is beyond good and evil; they suggest that good and evil are “orienting” points that allow the subject (read here as God) to further approach das Ding. Chaos is neither good nor evil, whether before or after the Fall; the Fall simply allows, through evil conduct, a further phenomenalization of chaos, a bringing of chaos into view in the post-Edenic symbolic where it can attach itself to particular objects and figures. For example, as Schwartz notes, Adam, after the Fall, will experience an internalized chaos: O Conscience, into what Abyss of fears And horrors has thou driv’n me; put of which I find no way, from deep to deeper plung’d! (10.842–44)

134 E n g l i s h R e n a i s s a n c e L i t e r at u r e / Pau l C e f a l u

In the passage quoted above, both Adam and Eve after the Fall will experience an internal discord reminiscent of chaos. In Paradise Lost, evil is not simply the negation of the good, as an Augustinian would say; evil allows for the positivity of chaos, which can then be negated by the good. To modify Lacan, “There is chaos, and then there is good and evil.” Much of this is made possible by denying the consubstantiality of God and Christ, and so Milton’s Arianism fits nicely with the Lacanian framework.74 As I remarked earlier, one way of thinking of the God-Son relationship is that the Son’s unqualified lovingness serves as an ordering principle of God’s fundamentally discordant nature. One ought not to pass too quickly over the narrator’s comparison of the Son and God: In him all his Father shone Substantially express’d, and in his face Divine compassion visibly appear’d, Love without end, and without measure Grace (3.139–42)

While these lines declare that all of Christ is a reflection of God, they do not declare that all of God is reflected in Christ. Christ images God’s ideal version of himself: Just as part of chaos is remaindered of God when God retires to Heaven, so part of God is still further separated out when he incarnates himself into the Son. Christ will come to stand in for the law that will allow Milton’s God of mercy to remain emergent.

After the Fall: Eve and Pure Drive We have not yet weighed the extent to which Adam and Eve traverse their fantasies and hence emerge, in Zupanc˘ic˘’s terms, as heroes of the lack, the very shared lack from which Satan and alas God withdraw. The answer to this question requires us to consider that part of our fundamental fantasy has more to do with our perception of what others desire in us than our desires as such. For Lacan, “there is no sexual relationship” because we are always looking for something in the other that the other cannot provide, in particular some return to ˘ iz˘ek remarks, an illusory past wholeness. As Z

Ta r ry i n g w i t h C h ao s

135

[The loving deadlock occurs because] the other sees something in me and wants something from me, but I cannot give him what I do not possess. . . . The only way for the loving one to escape this deadlock is to stretch out his hand toward the loving one and to return love. . . . It is only by way of this reversal that a genuine love emerges: I am truly in love not when I am simply fascinated by the agalma in the other, but when I experience the other, the object of love, as frail and lost, as lacking “it,” and my love none the less survives the loss.75

The deadlock all along has been that Adam and Eve absolutize each other by attempting to locate the divinity in one another. This is obvious in Eve’s tendency to worship God through Adam—“she for God in him” (4.299)—as well as in her direct worship of Adam with “pious awe” (5.135). And it is obvious in Adam’s remarks to Raphael prior to the Fall that Eve is “so absolute she seems / And in herself complete, so well to know / Her own” (8.547–48), as well as in his comment that Eve’s greatness of mind impels him to “create an awe” (8.558). This is the very concupiscence for which, after the Fall, Adam will be chastised by the Son: Was shee thy God, that her thou didst obey Before his voice, or was shee thee made thy guide, Superior (10.145–47)

Once, however, God absolutizes himself by projecting a constitutional loss onto Adam and Eve, the pair will realize their distance from God yet continue to love each other nonetheless. So it is that postlapsarian Eve describes herself as “vile” but one who hopes to regain Adam’s love, consoling Adam and herself that in their very fallenness the two can still be one: While yet we live, scarce one short hour perhaps, Between us two let there be peace, both joining, As join’d in injuries (10.923–24)

Adam, to his credit, reckons that they ought to strive: In offices of Love, how we might light’n Each other’s burden in our share of woe (10.959–60)

136 E n g l i s h R e n a i s s a n c e L i t e r at u r e / Pau l C e f a l u

Although the divine resemblance that each had searched for in the other has been displaced (they have lost confidence in each other’s agalma, Lacan would say), they will find solace in the fact that their love will survive their all-too-human resemblance to one another. But there is still a more profound way in which if not Adam, but Eve, has traversed her fantasy with respect to her relationship with God. Consider first the divergent ways in which Adam and Eve respond to their sense of the consequences of the Fall. After the Fall, Adam props up God as a predictably fair and merciful patriarch: Remember with what mild And gracious temper he both heard and judg’d Without wrath or reviling (10.1045–47)

Proper worship will, Adam avows, incline God toward “pity” (10. 1059) and a tendency to instruct the pair on how to survive whatever perils await them. Adam takes special comfort in the notion that the Fall has indeed been fortunate, since it will allow greater goodness to displace the short-term evil that his and Eve’s blight has introduced into the world: O goodness infinite goodness, immense! That all this good of evil shall produce, And evil turn to good; More wonderful than that which by creation first brought forth Light out of darkness (12.469–73)

Although Adam overstates the virtues of felix culpa, he has glimpsed the nature of God’s design: by means of the Fall and creaturely repentance, God will enhance his glory, and man will stand to receive that much more goodness through God’s grace, which in turn will facilitate the displacement of God’s wrath by love: To God more glory, more good will to Men From God, and over wrath grace shall abound (12.467–68)

We should not pass over these lines too quickly. There is a fine but crucial ambiguity here as to whether the wrath of God has simply been brought into being by the Fall, or whether the long-term consequence of the Fall will allow his wrath to be finally overcome. The

Ta r ry i n g w i t h C h ao s

137

former way of interpreting the lines do not make sense in context, since Adam emphasizes throughout his speech that the Fall will bring forth a measure of goodness that exceeds the goodness that emerged with the very creation of the world. The implication is rather that the Fall will help displace an indwelling antagonism of God that is not as much produced as it is manifested by original sin. Eve’s responses to the Fall and felix culpa are crucially unlike Adam’s. As is evident to most readers, Eve’s remorsefulness seems remarkably qualified. Milton chooses not to embellish the Genesis version of Eve’s terse reply to the Son’s query as to why she disobeyed God: “The Serpent me beguil’d and I did eat” (9.162). On those few occasions after Book X in which Eve does seem penitent, her sentiments are informed by her premonition of the protevangelium. At Adam’s description of her as the “Mother of all mankind” (11.159), Eve responds, Infinite in pardon was my Judge, That I who first brought Death on all, am grac’t The source of life; next favorable thou, Who highly thus to entitle me voutsaf’st, Far other name deserving (11.167–71)

Toward the end of Book XII, upon Adam’s return from his tour with Michael, Eve elaborates the point: Thou to mee Art all thing under Heav’n, all places thou, Who for my wilful crime art banisht hence. This further consolation yet secure I carry hence; though all by mee is lost, Such favour I unworthy am voutsaf’d, By mee the Promis’d Seed shall all restore (12.616–23)

Unlike Adam, Eve claims that the long term consequences of the Fall will lead merely to “restoration,” not an increase in God’s glory or any further goodness that God might bestow upon the pair. If Adam sees the Fall as a gain for God and God’s well-disposed creatures, Eve sees it as a restoration of what “all” has been lost, something circular rather than governed by a linear telos.

138 E n g l i s h R e n a i s s a n c e L i t e r at u r e / Pau l C e f a l u

If we were to describe these divergent responses in Lacanian terms, we might say that after the Fall, Adam relates to God in terms of desire, while Eve relates to God in terms of drive. To the extent that we perceive the Other’s desires, we are attuned to the ways in which those desires function in the symbolic realm, the ways in which desire remains unsatisfiable because it always aims at some future goal or object that is necessarily missed.76 Our perception of another’s drive, however, is more closely linked to our half-awareness of the ways in which the Other’s real exerts what Lacan describes as a constant pressure, a circulation around the objet a, which produces jouissance or a painful satisfaction. Renata Salecl remarks, “On the one hand, the loving subject is attracted to the other because the other is also a desiring subject, which means that both the loved subject is perturbed by the question: what does the other desire? . . . On the other hand, what makes the other the object of love is actually the very jouissance that is linked to the way the other satisfied his or her drive: the loving subject is perturbed by and attracted to the jouissance of the other.”77 Desire is always at some level a way of fending off or sublimating drive, especially when drive takes the form of the death drive, which finds a painful satisfaction in impossibly attempting to negate the entire symbolic network that supports the subject’s fantasies. If we turn back to the text, we can see that Adam responds to the Fall by incessantly questioning God’s desires, goals, and long term plans for him and Eve. He asks, for example, whether God would allow his divine image to be “debas’td / Under inhuman pains” (11.510–11), and what will become of Man should Christ reascend to heaven. He also plies Michael with a range of questions regarding what God now expects of him and Eve. In Lacanian terms, Adam has been hystericized by the Fall. Concerned above all with what the Other desires of him, the hysterical subject continually establishes the Other as a desiring subject so as to raise himself up as an important means by which the Other can find satisfaction: “The hysteric’s questions and appeals to the Other to tell her who she is, what value she has and what object she is, are all attempts to overcome the constitutive split that marks the subject as a speaking being. The hysteric searches for the signifier that would give her unity, wholeness.”78 What is felix culpa, especially in the exaggerated terms outlined by Adam, if not the master signifier that provides Adam with an illusory wholeness (a sense that he can satisfy God’s unsatisfiable desire) even

Ta r ry i n g w i t h C h ao s

139

after the Fall? Adam’s hystericization serves an analogous function that Satan’s diabolical imperative serves, even though the two postures (really neurotic fantasies) are at opposite poles. If Satan is able to plug up God’s real by obsessively automatizing himself and God, Adam avoids such a monstrous encounter by firmly situating God in the symbolic register of elusive desire, wherein God’s real will be endlessly deferred. Eve’s response to the Fall is especially divergent from Adam’s in that she does not as much question what God desires as accept that she will satisfy God through the unavoidable process of childbearing. When Eve remarks on more than one occasion that she will eventually serve as the mother of mankind, she seems keenly attuned to the very inevitability of this role. Recall that just after the Fall, Eve fabricates some notion that she and Adam might be able to make satisfaction if they abstain from sex and hence do not reproduce. Recognizing, however, that abstention would be impossible, Eve further suggests that they should court death directly: Childless thou art, Childless remain: So Death Shall be deceiv’d his glut, and with us two Be forc’d to satisfy his Rav’nous Maw But if thou judge it hard and difficult . . . to abstain From Love’s due Rites. . . . Let us seek Death (10.989–1001)

Eve, of course, will continue to love Adam, flaws and all, but what she says about childbearing and the protevangelium suggests that she has entered into a register beyond symbolic identification. Gone are her desires to find divinity within herself, as is her initial narcissistic fantasy. She cares very little about whatever new laws or rules God might impose on her and Adam, and she seems to have accepted not simply that she has lost Edenic wholeness, but that, as Raphael coldly reminds her, the Eden for which she longs was never entirely hers in the first place. To the extent, then, that Eve relates to the protevangelium as something that will simply happen to her and that will provide satisfaction of a painful, compromised sort, her drives seem to have displaced her desires. Salecl’s remarks seem apposite to Eve’s attitude in Book XII: “The logic of desire is: ‘It is prohibited to do this, but I will nonetheless do it.’ Drive, in contrast, does not care about prohibition: it is not concerned about overcoming the law. Drive’s logic

140 E n g l i s h R e n a i s s a n c e L i t e r at u r e / Pau l C e f a l u

is ‘I do not want to do this, but I am nonetheless doing it.’”79 Eve has traversed her fantasy if only by finding herself in a place where endless questioning has been replaced by a kind of postlapsarian inertia. In this partial or qualified traversing of her fantasy, Eve does not quite approach the status of, for example, Sophocles’s Antigone, whose decision to refuse Creon’s dictates and abide by her dead brother represents, for Lacan, a symbolic death, situating Antigone “beyond the limits of the human.”80 Eve has not fallen beyond the realm of signification as much as traded the Edenic symbolic for its symbolically enriched post-Edenic version. Indeed, to the extent that the postlapsarian symbolic will be one in which master-signifiers like “death” will finally be quilted to particularized meanings, Eve has fallen into, rather than away from, signification. Yet we should not underestimate the extent to which, relative to Adam and Satan, Eve has made quite an achievement: the ability to avoid relating to God by means of the alternative neurotic paths of Satanic obsessiveness or Adamic hystericization. So it is that after the Fall, Adam and Eve have achieved something approaching “genuine love.” The important point is that Adam and Eve never actually experienced the wholeness that they now assume they have lost because the very image in which they were created, God’s image, is itself a phantasmic ideal (as if God unavoidably created all of his creatures just as “crooked” as Adam complains God created Eve). By pursuing a mythical lost wholeness, Adam, if not Eve, sustains God’s fundamental fantasy of self-transparency to the extent that the Fall measures the pair’s distance from God as the absolute point of goodness. But in the very process, Eve, if not Adam, unmasks that fantasy because her plight is a mimetic phenomenalization of God’s own cosmogonic experience of being alienated from his own ground to which he can never return. Perhaps the true secret of the text (the revelation of which would be much more radical than anything Blake or Empson has to say of Milton’s diabolism) is that Adam and Eve’s love not only survives their own shared lack, but also love God despite God’s inability to fully know himself.

Chapter 4

   Infinite Love and the Limits of Neo-Schol asticism in the Poetry and Prose of Thomas Traher ne

W

hile it is generally recognized that Thomas Traherne’s philosophical and theological outlook is informed by a range of classical and early Christian worldviews, most commentators have focused on the Neo-Platonic and mystical elements in his work, usually citing as evidence for Traherne’s Platonism the many excerpts in his Commonplace Book from Ficino, Henry More, and Hermes Trismegistus. For example, in a recent collection of essays focusing on the influence of Platonism in English Renaissance literature, Sara Hutton argues that “the rapturously rhapsodic character of Traherne’s writing, his visionary account of the mundane and his repeated use of dominant images, particularly of light and sight, invite a mystical interpretation.”1 Traherne’s Platonism and mysticism, however, have proved difficult to reconcile with his Aristotelianism and scholasticism, particularly his preoccupation with such metaphysical concepts such as potency, act, form, matter, substance, and habit, all of which figure centrally in Christian Ethicks, the Centuries, and his most famous poems. Faced with integrating Traherne’s scholasticism with his Platonism, critics have often hedged by describing him as an eclectic in whose work Platonism predominates. But this compromise overlooks the fact that all of the mystical and Platonic elements of Traherne’s prose and poetry are consistent with neo-scholasticism, but few of the neo-scholastic elements are consistent with Platonism.

142 E n g l i s h R e n a i s s a n c e L i t e r at u r e / Pau l C e f a l u

Traherne’s Thomistic conception of God as pure Act, for example, is not assimilable to Plato’s conception of the demiurge or Plotinus’s notion of the Unitive One, both of which are first principles whose ontological statuses are beyond categories of potency and act altogether. On the other hand, Traherne’s use of Platonic metaphors of sight and soul, or his account of memory and reminiscence, are indeed assimilable to neo-scholasticism, which incorporates some Platonic fundamentals into an essentially Aristotelian metaphysics. Furthermore, no Platonizing account of Tarherne’s work can make sense of his much neglected Christian Ethicks, which explicates a straightforward Aristotelian theory of ethical habituation as well as a Thomistic account of the perfective nature of the theological virtues. With respect to questions of human psychology, cognition, moral philosophy, and the nature of God, Traherne is more often a neoscholastic who makes use of Platonic imagery and concepts than a Platonist who sometimes invokes scholastic terminology. An explication of the Thomistic character of Traherne’s metaphysics provides occasion to elaborate the scholastic notion of habitus, a central term and concept in scholastic ethics and metaphysics that Traherne invokes throughout Christian Ethicks. Traherne and his scholastic forebears describe habits as dispositions and virtues that assist in the development of substances from states of unrealized potency to act. From this metaphysical datum, much in Traherne’s work can be made comprehensible regarding the development of ethical character, a restoration of lost innocence, and the attainment of a likeness to God and “Felicity.” But while Traherne’s neo-scholasticism provides a context in which to understand his theology of ascent better than Platonism, his theology of descent, or his fall into worldly corruption, is more properly explained in the context of late seventeenth-century doctrines of associationism and empiricism. While Thomism helps us to contextualize the stepwise process by which Traherne believes one can acquire perfective virtue, the associationism of John Locke, David Hartley, and others helps us to understand Traherne’s account of his youthful corruption by habit and custom. Traherne’s thoroughgoing empiricism thus involves a twofold theory of custom, according to which undesirable creaturely habits are replaced with virtuous habits, in turn allowing a transformation of self into pure Act (an identification of essence and existence that, at least in selected poems, seems to be a fundamental attribute of God). In his integration of

Infinite Love and the Limits of Neo-Schol asticism 143

two historical empiricisms—Thomism and associationism—Traherne offers a medieval cure to a late seventeenth-century disease. Traherne’s poetry and prose, however, is not consistently neoscholastic, as his preoccupation with the metaphysical and ontological implications of the basic Johannine notion of God as love strains against neo-scholastic principles such as the essence-existence distinction that runs throughout the Centuries. In the second section of the chapter, I attempt to explicate some of the seeming deadlocks that arise when Traherne supplements his Thomistic notion of God with the basic predication of God as love. Although Traherne partly resolves the tension by expounding a Nicene trinitarian notion that God’s love is eternally communicated to the begotten Christ, Traherne, like the poets assessed in the previous chapters, is unable to avoid representing God as ontologically inconsistent or self-differentiated. Whatever ontological inconsistencies are uncovered in the Centuries, however, are ultimately covered over in Christian Ethicks, where Traherne trades a preoccupation with God’s existence for a preoccupation with God’s essence and the full complement of creaturely virtues that are attributed to the heavily anthropomorphized God that is a constituent feature of Traherne’s ethics. We will see that Traherne’s conception of God’s virtuous plenitude qualifies as yet another example of the “logic of exception” running throughout seventeenth-century devotional writings. In sum, if Traherne’s poetry sets up God as pure Act, a transcendent being absolutely beyond the creaturely realm, the Centuries exposes the ways in which God is inherently ontologically divided, and Christian Ethicks offers a compromise by situating God as both within and without the creaturely realm as the constitutive exception grounding ethical behavior.

Traherne’s Childhood Theme In the Third Century, Traherne writes that “the first Light which shined in my Infancy in its Primitive and Innocent Clarity was totally eclipsed . . . by the Customs and maners of Men. . . . And that our misery proceedeth ten thousand times more from the outward Bondage of Opinion and Custom, then [sic] from any inward corruption or Depravation of Nature: And that it is not our Parents Loyns, so much as our Parents lives, that Enthrals and Blinds us.”2

144 E n g l i s h R e n a i s s a n c e L i t e r at u r e / Pau l C e f a l u

Traherne’s commentators have offered varying interpretations of his childhood theme, including K. W. Salter’s symbolist reading, according to which childhood is an “image of the happiness which is the consequence of mystical illumination,” and John Trimpey’s Platonist interpretation, according to which Traherne’s childhood signifies a “former life as a knowing-soul existing prior to incarnation.”3 But the most extensive account of the childhood theme, which warrants some extended discussion, appears in A. L. Clements’s The Mystical Poetry of Thomas Traherne. For Clements, the state of precorrupted Adamic innocence to which Traherne longs to return is a condition under which the infant is identified as an “ego-less” self, one that exists prior to “ideational knowledge,” “time,” and “conceptual thinking”: “The child, exactly like the unfallen Adam, apparently was without actual sin. Sin arises with conceptualizing, speaking, breaking the silence in which the still Word is uttered by God.”4 Clements supplements his allegorical reading with a psychoanalytic one: “Not only, then, is there no sense of ‘my body’ but there is even no sense of ‘I.’ Having no past from which abstractly to construct an ego, mental picture of self, and no anxieties about or designs for the future, the infant can simply and wholly be his essential self.”5 In addition to the circularity in many of Clements’s formulations— for instance, in the assertion that Traherne needs to return to a selfless, egoless state, which Clements redescribes as his “essential self”—Clements assumes that Traherne’s view all “conceptual thinking” is corrupt and that there is no place in Traherne’s worldview for persons who are at once conscious, linguistically capable, and unfallen. Clements is guided here by his belief that Traherne’s writings are interpretable as allegories of the Fall—that the infant is “exactly like” the unfallen Adam. Thus Clements draws a sharp division between the purity of the pre-oedipal, pre-cognitive developmental stage (what Freud would describe as polymorphous perversity) and the unredeemable symbolic, in which the infant recognizes himself as an “I” separate from his peers. At the same time, however, Clements recognizes Traherne’s refusal to admit an orthodox, Augustinian doctrine of total depravity and original sin, which motivates his description of Traherne’s theology as “Anglican” (since Traherne believed that “a tendency or inclination to evil exists in man”).6 This forces Clements to admit Traherne’s Pelagian focus on free will, as well as Traherne’s belief that the infant is a tabula rasa (“An Empty Book is like an Infants

Infinite Love and the Limits of Neo-Schol asticism 145

Soul, in which any Thing may be Written”) who has assimilated the corrupt habits and customs of the adult environment. Clements thus on the one hand believes the speaker can only regain purity by returning to a pre-cognitive, pre-symbolic state (with the implication that self-awareness and the entrance into adulthood is corrupting as such), yet on the other hand recognizes that the “wrong though weaker potential or tendency [to evil] is realized in the child,” who was “more inclined to transcendent Good and therefore also to moral good.”7 It is not clear how Clements can consistently hold both views, but I believe, in any case, that Traherne’s account of his entrance into the world of custom should be understood much more literally than Clements allows since, at least in the first three Centuries, Traherne’s remedies for reversing undesirable customs and habits entail a process of undergoing corrective encounters and experience within, not beyond, the creaturely world. Clements’s account cannot make sense of Traherne’s empiricism, for Clements believes that Traherne’s return to Felicity requires a complete abandonment of the world, rather than working through creaturely existence in order to reverse passively acquired customs. Traherne believes that not all creaturely customs and associations are corrupt, but that he was unfortunately captive as a child to the wrong habits and association of ideas. Traherne’s speaker has simply and literally been improperly educated and in the Third Century, adopts the voice of a worldly pedagogue, not a visionary mystic: “By this let Nurses, and those parents that desire Holy Children learn to make them possessors of Heaven and Earth betimes; to remove silly objects from before them, to magnify nothing but what is great indeed, and to talk of God to them, and of His works and ways before they can either speak or go. For nothing is so easy as to teach the truth because the nature of the thing confirms the doctrine” (C. 3. 11. 166). Children need to be educated to the right habits and customs, which requires, at the least, an introduction to natural and immutable goodness and the knowledge that, for example, the “sun is glorious,” “A man is a beautiful creature,” and “The world was made for you” (C. 3. 11. 166). On the other hand, the most impermissible knowledge a parent or nurse can communicate to the child might include knowledge that, for example, “this bauble is a jewel and this gew-gaw a fine Thing,” which is “deadly barbarous and uncouth to a little child; and makes him suspect all you

146 E n g l i s h R e n a i s s a n c e L i t e r at u r e / Pau l C e f a l u

say, because the nature of the thing contradicts your words” (C. 3. 11. 166). While Traherne’s emphasis on systematically educating the child to acquire the right associations is commonsensical and not necessarily historically specific, it does seem to anticipate John Locke’s and David Hartley’s associationist account of education.8 Locke writes in Some Thoughts Concerning Education of the importance of training children to acquire virtuous habits: “All the Plays and Diversions of Children should be directed toward good and useful Habits, or else they will introduce ill ones. Whatever they do leaves some impression on that tender age, from thence they receive a Tendency to Good or Evil.”9 Locke, like Traherne, emphasizes the fundamental role of proper “nursing” in shaping virtuous associations and habits: “Place him in Hands, where you may, as much as possible secure his Innocence, cherish and nurse up the Good, and gently correct, and weed out any bad inclination, and settle him in good Habits.”10 Likewise, Hartley sets out to discover the foundational principles underwriting the original associations of unlikely ideas: “It is of the utmost Consequence to Morality and Religion, that the Affections and Passions should be analyzed into their compounding Parts, by reversing the Steps of Associations which concur to form them. For thus we may learn how to cherish and improve good ones, check out and root out such as are mischievous and immoral.”11 Since Traherne has already assimilated the wrong customs and associations of ideas due to his improvident education, he realizes that he must undergo a self-directed process of re-education. While Traherne’s diagnosis of the corrupting accounts of habits on children converges with late-seventeenth century empiricism, the method he presents for reversing ill-acquired customs is more specifically rooted in scholastic metaphysics than in scientific associationism. This process is expressed in some of his most abstract and metaphysical language and imagery, much of which has been described in terms of a poetics of mystical illumination or neoPlatonic emanationism.12 I would like to interpret, against this traditional view, Traherne’s language of ascent in the context of Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics, beginning with an assessment of scholastic terminology in one of his most complex poems, “My Spirit.” The poem begins,

Infinite Love and the Limits of Neo-Schol asticism 147 My Naked Simple Life was I. That Act so Strongly Shind Upon the Earth, the Sea, the Skie. It was the Substance of My Mind. The Sence it self was I.13

The speaker’s “simple life” is described as his “I,” an “Act,” a “Substance” of his mind, and then finally as “Sence” itself. This series of terms is then equated with the “simplicity of Deity,” the nature of which is clarified in the second stanza: Whatever it doth do, It doth not by another Engine work, But by it self; which in the Act doth Lurk. Its Essence is Transformed into a true And perfect Act (II. 5–9)

The key terms introduced in the first two stanzas are all classical and scholastic in derivation, as is the fundamental transformation the speaker has undergone from essence to perfect act. Traherne’s Platonizing critics have refused, however, to accept and elaborate the scholastic affiliation. In his commentary on “My Spirit,” Clements writes that the speaker’s essential being is “an Act which consists in the full realization of its eternal and infinite potentialities, an eternal and infinite Act. In Traherne’s day, the word Act had the now obsolete sense of both Reality and Active Principle (OED). Like the God of Aristotle and the Scholastics, my Spirit is pure Actuality, ThoughtThinking-Thought.”14 Clements, however, in relentless pursuit of the mystical and Neo-Platonic elements in Traherne’s work, then associates “thought” with both Eckhart’s “idea” and “the Platonic idea,”15 even though Traherne’s association of God with pure-Act makes any such Neo-Platonic or mystical attribution questionable. In the Enneads, for example, Plotinus clearly states that the selfidentical One is entirely beyond categories such as existence and essence: “It is because nothing is in the One that everything comes from it. Thus, in order that being be, it is necessary that the One itself be, not being, that which begets being.”16 And Eckhart, like Plotinus, believes that God’s nature is ineffable and beyond metaphysical categories such as existence and being: “There is in God

148 E n g l i s h R e n a i s s a n c e L i t e r at u r e / Pau l C e f a l u

neither to be nor being; for, indeed, if a cause is truly a cause, nothing of the effect should be formally in its cause.”17

Traherne and Aquinas As a preface to a reading of Traherne’s poetry that remains faithful to the poetry’s own scholastic nomenclature, I would like to review in detail basic Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysical terminology, beginning with a discussion of the nature of “substance.” While the term has been subject to a range of interpretations, the Aristotelianscholastic tradition generally describes a substance as that which exists apart from whatever qualities and concomitants one can predicate of an individual or a species. A substance for Aristotle is “that which is not asserted of a subject but of which everything else is asserted.”18 As one commentator writes, “reflection on a statement like ‘Socrates is pale,’ shows that it is not paleness, nor any of the qualities combined with it in Socrates . . . that is said to be pale, but something which has these qualities, the individual thing which is the substratum of them and in which they are united.”19 The conception of substance as an individual’s essential nature is made clearer in terms of the fundamental relationship between form and matter. While some debate has focused on whether, for Aristotle, a substance is identical with form, or whether a substance is equivalent to matter that has already been determined by form, Aquinas (with whose views we are ultimately concerned) clearly holds that a substance is equivalent to a form-matter composite.20 Distinct from indeterminate or formless matter, on the one hand, and transcendent universals, on the other hand, a substance is defined as matter that has been informed with a particular essence or “whatness” (quidditas).21 Substances are not equivalent to matter as such, since the form is that by which (quo est) the matter is made into the substance that it is (quod est). The basic form-matter relationship is illustrated in Aristotle’s famous hypothesis that if an eye were an animal (a substance), its form or soul would be its capacity for vision. Likewise, the substantial form of Man, by which individual men are made into the substances they are, is the soul, which includes all of the functions integral to being an intelligent creature. For Aristotle and Aquinas, all matter undergoes a process of change or becoming, progressing from an unrealized state of potentiality to

Infinite Love and the Limits of Neo-Schol asticism 149

actuality. Actuality is logically prior to potentiality, serving as the final cause of a substance’s pre-ordained fulfillment or telos. As Aristotle says, “animals do not see in order that they may have the faculty of sight, but have this in order that they might see.”22 Furthermore, all individual substances, having been created by the act of a substantial form imposed upon the potency of matter, are themselves in potency to higher determinations and fulfillments of individual- and species-specific destinies. The secondary forms that further individuate a substance are described as accidental forms, those that may change over time without altering the complexion of the substantial form. When one says of a particular man that he is thin, for example, thinness is an accidental form conferred on the substantial form, the rational soul, of man. The potency-act transformation is central to an understanding of most of the intellective and ethical operations of man, although it cannot express the nature and operations of God, who possesses no unrealized potentiality and hence is equivalent to pure act. Before we return to Traherne’s “My Spirit,” I would like to offer a brief review of Aquinas’s conception of God as a self-subsistent being, since to my knowledge, Traherne’s preoccupation with the notion has never been discussed in its proper philosophical context. The explication will be provisional, given the technicalities and fundamental ambiguities in Aquinas’s account. Commentators have had notorious difficulty agreeing upon Aquinas’s metaphysical conception of God. This is evident in Anthony Kenny’s conclusion, which was reached after working through the argument in detail, which “even the most sympathetic treatment of these doctrines [the real distinction between essence and existence and the notion of God as pure Act] cannot wholly succeed in acquitting them of the charge of sophistry and illusion.”23 If these doctrines are sophistical, then it seems all the more important that we isolate their ambiguities, given Traherne’s fascination with a potentially unworkable conception of a self-subsistent deity. According to Aquinas, when a form confers essence on matter, when it provides matter with the substantial form of man, for example, it does not simultaneously confer existence, since existence is an act in its own right that is received by previously determined matter. This is more intuitive than it might seem since one can always conceptualize the essence of a thing, including all of the particular qualities and accretions predicated thereof, even though such a thing

150 E n g l i s h R e n a i s s a n c e L i t e r at u r e / Pau l C e f a l u

may not actually exist in the world.24 Existence is its own act that realizes a particular essence. In terms of potency and actuality, two operations contribute to producing particular substances: “[F]irst there is composition of matter and form, and secondly there is the composition of the substance itself and its existence.”25 Aquinas also holds that existence (esse) precedes essence (ens), an existential datum that follows from the Aristotelian belief that actuality logically precedes potentiality: Since existence or the act of being is to substance as form is to matter, and since form logically precedes matter as matter’s final cause, it follows that existence has primacy over essence. As Gilson says, “[T]he act of existing lies at the very . . . root of the real. It is therefore the principle of the principles of reality. First absolutely, it even precedes the Good, for a being is only good in so far as it is a being, and it is a being only in virtue of the ipsum esse which permits us to say of it: this is ‘being.’”26 Things become more complicated, however, when one tries to conceptualize God in terms of essence and existence. Whenever we posit existence in thinking about objects and creatures in the world, we are forced to attach existence to specific substances such as an “existing man.” Since an object as such is determined both by its substantial form and the fact that it exists in the world, we cannot posit existence absolutely or as an act of being that is not attached to a specific object. Aquinas’s suggestion is that only God can be posited as pure act, as a being whose essence is not concomitant with existence but rather equivalent thereto. God’s essence is simply esse, to be. Aquinas’s proof runs as follows: All created causes, however, have a common effect which is esse, in spite of having distinct characteristic effects. Heat makes things to be hot, a builder makes there to be a house. They have it in common, then, that they cause being; they differ in that fire causes heat whereas the builder causes a house. There must, therefore, be a supreme cause in virtue of which they all cause things to be, and of this cause esse will be the characteristic effect. This characteristic effect, however, of an agent proceeds from it as a likeness of its nature; it follows, therefore, that esse itself is the substance or nature of God.27

Aquinas argues that just as heat, for example, causes many different things to be hot, and so its essence is the act of heating, so God causes many different things to be, and so his essence is the act of being.

Infinite Love and the Limits of Neo-Schol asticism 151

This sounds straightforward enough, although the identification of God’s being with esse seems to limit his power to the function of providing the common denominator of existence to different essences. Surely a particular substance, such as a man, composed of a particular essence in addition to the act of “to be,” is a richer and fuller being than someone or something whose being is constituted solely by “to be.” As Kenny notes, Aquinas attempts to circumvent this implication by suggesting that “to be” is not just something in which every being participates; rather, in Aristotle’s words, “for living things, to be is to live,” (‘vita viventibus est esse’), which includes all of the activities that constitute “life,” including eating, sleeping, walking, and so on. As such, to limit God’s essence to the commonality of “to be” is actually to predicate of God an unimaginably full and rich store of necessary qualities. As Kenny writes, “the esse of anything is not something underlying, or constituting, or specifying its characteristics and modifications; it is rather the totality of all the episodes and states of its history. It seems to be in this sense that Aquinas can speak of esse as ‘the actualization of all acts, and the perfection of all perfections.’”28 Having established working definitions of central Thomistic terms and concepts, we can return to Traherne’s poetry, picking up “My Spirit” at its first two stanzas and further refining our account of scholastic metaphysics as the context requires. Traherne immediately identifies his “Life” with his “I” and “Act”: My Naked Simple Life was I. That Act so Strongly Shind.

Traherne’s remark that his “life” is equivalent to act implies that he has passed beyond a state of potentiality or becoming to a state wherein, to paraphrase line seven, his “essence is capacity that feels all things.” He then describes his perfectly actualized existence as “being Simple like the Deitie (1.15),” a state of being in which whatever it doth do, It doth not by another Engine work, But by itself; which in the Act doth lurk. Its Essence is Transformed into a true And perfect Act.

152 E n g l i s h R e n a i s s a n c e L i t e r at u r e / Pau l C e f a l u

The scholastic influence is unmistakable in the description of the “I” as life itself, equated with perfect act, and the emphasis on achieving unpredicated act from a prior condition of essence. Traherne may seem to depart from a Thomistic fundamental that all potentiality is actualized by an external influence or cause, but his point (“not by another Engine work”) is not that he has reached pure act by selfactualization, but rather that having achieved perfect existence, his being is entirely self-moving, which is consistent with the nature of deity according to Aquinas. It is worth noting that all of these Thomistic doctrines are expressed by one of Traherne’s contemporaries, Richard Culverwell, who, after relating his respect for Thomistic metaphysics in the Discourse of the Light of Nature, writes that God’s knowledge “is always in act; because his Essence is a pure act. Human understandings have much of their knowledge stor’d up in Habits; but there are no Habits in a Deity: for Knowledge is dormant in aHabit, but his understanding never slumbers nor sleeps. There’s no potentiality in him, but he’s always in ultima perfectione, he is semper in actu intelligendi.”29 Traherne’s account of intellection in stanza two is also laden with metaphysical terms and concepts: An Object if it were before My Ey, was by Dame Natures Law, Within my Soul. Her Store Was all at once within me; all her Treasures Were my Immediat and Internal Pleasures, Substantial Joys, which did inform my Mind. With all she wrought, My soul was fraught, And evry Object in my Heart a Thought Begot, or was; I could not tell, Whether the Things did there Themselves appear, Which in my Spirit truly seemd to dwell; Or whether my conforming Mind Were not even all that therein shind. (3.3–17)

Like his notions of being and existence, Traherne’s account of cognition is fundamentally Thomistic in its empiricism. Aquinas distinguishes two processes by which an individual is able to derive

Infinite Love and the Limits of Neo-Schol asticism 153

knowledge from sense impressions, sensory and intellectual cognition. While sensory cognition is responsible for understanding the particular nature of an external object such as a singular man or animal, intellectual cognition is responsible for understanding the essence or universal nature, such as man or animal generally. The intellect itself is further divided into two powers, an active and passive intellect. The active or agent intellect abstracts from sense data the intelligible “species” or form of a particular object, while the passive or possible intellect receives the concepts abstracted from the agent intellect. The important idea is that the intellect is not able to directly cognize any sense data without the mediating influence of the agent intellect, which converts a physical datum into abstract and intelligible form. Cognition for Aquinas requires a certain amount of intellectual labor, as it were, since the cognizer can have no unmediated, direct access to the essences of perceived reality.30 In the lines quoted above, Traherne seems to depart from the Thomistic account of cognition, since he announces his ability to assimilate knowledge from sense data immediately and “all at once,” as if a simple process of turning attention to external objects sufficiently provides him with direct access to nature’s “store.” But the scholastic resonance in the line “substantial joys did inform my mind” implies that the knowledge he acquires is in the form of the substances that he has perceived, which implies further that a certain amount of cognitive effort is involved in abstracting forms from sense data. That this is the direction in which the account takes is reflected in the crucial verb “wrought,” which appears in the phrase, “with all she wrought, my soul was fraught.” What begins as an account of unmediated cognition—the speaker is able simply to transfer the entire store of nature into his own mind, as if his soul literally has been bulked up with nature’s objects—develops into a representational account of cognition, according to which the speaker acquires nature’s substantial forms following the intellectual work of abstraction. I have begun an analysis of Traherne’s work with “My Spirit” because I think that it reveals a pattern that one finds in some of the other poems. While Traherne often claims to have attained perfection and re-ascension following a simple and abrupt meditative turn toward God or nature, he usually belies this claim by emphasizing the arduous process and discipline integral to his attainment of “felicity.” His scholastic and empirical preoccupation with the process by

154 E n g l i s h R e n a i s s a n c e L i t e r at u r e / Pau l C e f a l u

which potency realizes actuality displaces whatever purely mystical and contemplative elements are introduced in a given work. The fact that this displacement is recognizable in a poem like “My Spirit,” which sets out to narrate an already achieved transition from potency to act, implies not only that Traherne rightly views the process as gradual and programmatic, but also that he understands that the process is not fully concluded during earthly existence. A close analysis of one of Traherne’s longer poems, “The Anticipation,” reveals further aspects of the way in which AristotelianThomistic principles inform some of Traherne’s theological views. In the first stanza, Traherne poses the question that the remainder of the poem will address: My contemplation dazzles in the end Of all I comprehend .............. Can He become the end, To whom all creatures tend? (ll. 1–5)

What follows is a clever account of the interaction between man and God in terms of a means-end relationship. God seems to be the end of all things, yet he is also the efficient cause or fountain from which all things issue: The end in Him from everlasting is The fountain of all bliss .............. That so the end should be the very spring, Of every glorious thing; And that which seemeth last, The fountain and the cause; attain’d so fast, That it was first .............. . . . it shows the end complete before, and is A perfect token of His perfect bliss (ll. 28–45)

The end, God himself, precedes the means that seem to be required by the end for the end’s fulfillment. And since God is a “perfect essence” and “all act,” God is also the means to his own end:

Infinite Love and the Limits of Neo-Schol asticism 155 The end complete, the means must needs be so. . . . God is Himself the means, Whereby He doth exist (ll. 46–51)

This position is supplemented with a claim that more directly addresses the interaction between man and God in terms of means and ends: He is the means of them, they not of Him ....................... He is the means both of Himself and all, Whom we the fountain, means, and end do call (ll. 109–16)

Traherne’s recent editor, Alan Bradford, comments that in his assertion that God “is the means of them [His creatures], they not of Him,” Traherne “reverses the premise of earlier poems in the sequence,” in which “the creatures are the means by which the Deity enjoys His works.”31 Bradford has in mind the argument set forth in earlier poems such as “The Demonstration,” in which the speaker claims that God’s creatures serve as means to God’s pleasure: In them He sees, and feels, and smells, and lives, In them affected is to whom He gives: In them ten thousand ways, He all his works again enjoys All things from Him to Him proceed By them (ll. 71–6)

I believe, contrary to Bradford, that the argument of “The Anticipation” is entirely consistent with and does not reverse the premises of the earlier poems. This can be seen if we distinguish, as I think Traherne does, between two significations of the term “means” and its relation to ends, both uses of which depart from a conventional understanding of means as things by which an end is fulfilled or realized. When Traherne remarks in “The Anticipation” that God is the means to his (God’s) own end, his use of “means” refers to efficient causality only. When Traherne more familiarly suggests in “The Anticipation,” “The Demonstration,” and “The Recovery” that creatures are means to God’s end, his use of “means” refers to those things by which God receives pleasure, with the important caveat

156 E n g l i s h R e n a i s s a n c e L i t e r at u r e / Pau l C e f a l u

that such things do not contribute to God’s fulfillment the way in which the prosecution of human means to human ends issues in the full realization of such ends. Thus, when the speaker of “The Anticipation” notes that “He is the means of them, they not of Him” (l. 109), he is observing only that God is the primary cause or creator of those creatures whose tendencies, when directed towards God, provide God with infinite pleasure. That this is the more restrictive sense in which the term “means” is used is suggested in the line, “The holy cherubim, / Souls, angels from Him came” (ll. 110–11) and in the last stanza, in which the speaker notes that God is the being In whom as in the fountain all things are, In whom all things appear As in the means, and end From whom they all proceed, to whom they tend (ll. 118–21)

The “means” in these lines refers simply to the source from which “things appear”; Traherne does not hold that God fails to benefit from his creatures’ goodness and desires for him. But this leaves unresolved how Traherne can consistently argue that God’s creatures are the means to God’s happiness (even if he is the efficient cause of those means) and that God is an already perfect end, an end complete unto itself. That God benefits from the love directed towards him by his creatures is represented clearly in “The Anticipation”: His essence is all act: he did, that he All act might always be. His nature burns like fire; His goodness infinitely doth desire, To be by all possess’d (ll. 91–95)

The sentiment is concisely expressed in “The Recovery”: “For God enjoy’s is all His end” (l. 11). We can begin to resolve the problem if we turn momentarily to Aquinas’s views on such matters. Much of what Traherne suggests in “The Anticipation” is described in Aquinas’s Summa Contra Gentiles, in the section subtitled “The End of Man.” After he has established that all things are directed to one good, namely God, as their final end, Aquinas notes that “the supreme good . . . is the

Infinite Love and the Limits of Neo-Schol asticism 157

cause of goodness in all things good. Therefore He is the cause of every end being an end, since whatever is an end is such in so far as it is good.”32 Like Traherne, Aquinas suggests that God is not simply the end toward which all things tend, but also the efficient cause of all things, “the last end and the first agent” (ch. xxvii, 29). Aquinas is wary, however, of asserting that God acquires anything by the act of creating agents who desire to understand God as their final end: “God, who is the first agent of all things, does not act as though He gained something by His action, but as bestowing something thereby; since He is not in potentiality so that He can acquire something, but solely in perfect actuality, whereby He is able to bestow. Things therefore are not ordered to God as to an end to which something will be added: they are ordered to Him to obtain God Himself from Him according to their measure, since He is their end” (ch. xvii, 29). Since Traherne’s God, like Aquinas’s, enjoys perfect actuality and hence does not progress from states of potentiality to actuality, Traherne’s God figures as the subject and object of desire in a manner quite unlike the objects that he has created: He’s not like us; possession doth not cloy, Nor sense of want destroy. Both are always together (“The Anticipation,” ll. 82–3)

Since God experiences “eternal wants and treasures,” he does not achieve higher states of actuality after having his desires realized. Any means, therefore, to the end of God’s pleasure, any act by which a creature turns toward God, should be understood as an act that redounds to the creature’s fulfillment rather than God’s, since by such a turn the creature will have achieved a step toward the fulfillment of its ultimate goal. If God’s desires and pleasures were not infinite, if the “want” of God were to “o’ercloy,” then only selected creatures would be able to achieve, following creaturely existence, perfect actuality and a divine similitude. That God’s infinite pleasure does benefit all of his creatures is expressed in stanza 12 of “The Anticipation”: From all to all eternity He is That act: an act of bliss:

158 E n g l i s h R e n a i s s a n c e L i t e r at u r e / Pau l C e f a l u Wherein all bliss to all, That will receive the same, or on Him call (ll. 100–103)

We will see momentarily that only in the Centuries does Traherne develop an account of God’s desires that takes into consideration the extent to which God needs creaturely love as much as his creatures require his love. The speaker closes “The Anticipation” by noting that both God and his creatures would benefit if the latter were able to grasp more fully the nature of God’s excellence: Whose souls are spacious bowers Of fall like His. Who ought to have a sense Of all our wants, of all His excellence, that while we all, we Him might comprehend (ll. 123–6)

The implication is that if we had a fuller sense of God’s excellence, which is constitutive of “our wants” or desires, we would achieve a firmer understanding (“comprehension”) of God’s nature and hence a further fulfillment of our own nature. The play on “comprehend” implies further that such knowledge would allow us to act in God or include ourselves more fully in his essence. When Traherne explicitly describes our end in the last line as the desire to understand or comprehend God, he ends the poem on a Thomistic note. Aquinas emphasizes throughout The Summa Contra Gentiles that man’s ultimate end is an intellectual rather than desiderative one, a state of perfect comprehension of God’s nature (although a state that is not attainable during temporal life): “It is evident that the end of any intellectual substance, even the lowest, is to understand God” (ch. xxv, 44). And like Traherne, Aquinas claims that the more one understands God, the more one tends to a likeness with God: “Everything tends to a divine likeness as its own end. Therefore a thing’s last end is that whereby it is most of all like God.” According to Aquinas’s more technical vocabulary, the individual who would attain to the ideal end, the perfect knowledge of and likeness to God, would achieve a state of perfect actuality rather than potentiality or habitual goodness: “In this particular likeness it is more like God in understanding actually than in understanding habitually or potentially, because God is always actually understanding” (ch. xxv, 45).

Infinite Love and the Limits of Neo-Schol asticism 159

We have seen thus far that Traherne shares both Aquinas’s belief that individual agents naturally pursue knowledge of God as their ultimate end and that God’s essence is equivalent to perfect actuality. What Traherne fails to detail in “The Anticipation,” but begins to elaborate in “My Spirit,” is the precise manner by which the individual gradually accumulates knowledge of God and is able to achieve a relative likeness to God during creaturely existence. While even a brief analysis of his poetry suggests that Traherne does not believe that the attainment of felicity and union with God issues from a simple and abrupt meditative or mystical turn toward God or nature, an analysis of the prose suggests that Traherne believes that the attainment of felicity is achieved by a process of moral training and self-discipline. As I describe below, Traherne’s scholastic and empirical preoccupation with the processes by which potency realizes actuality further displaces whatever purely mystical and contemplative elements are introduced in a given work. How exactly are these parallel transformations (from potency to act, ignorance to knowledge, essence to existence) effected according to Traherne and his scholastic forebears? To what extent does Traherne believe that the approach of perfect actuality presupposes systematic, moral training in the world, rather than, as Plotinus argues, an abandonment of evil matter altogether, achievable by the acquisition of what he and Plato describe as merely “purificatory” virtue?33 Traherne’s pragmatic discussion of the ways in which all potencies can be actualized is partly the subject of Christian Ethicks, where Traherne invokes Aristotelian and Thomistic views on ethical habituation repeatedly, employing the term habit, as one might expect, much the way Aquinas uses it in the Summa Theologica. Traherne writes regarding Aristotelian-Thomistic moral philosophy: “All Objects are in God Eternal: which we by perfecting our faculties are made to Enjoy. Which then are turned into Act when they are Desolat and Idle. . . . Whereby I perceived the Meaning of the Definition wherein Aristotle Describeth Felicity. When he saith Felicity is the perfect Exercise of Perfect Virtu in a Perfect Life. For Life is perfect when it is perfectly Extended to all Objects, and perfectly sees them and perfectly loves them: which is done by a perfect Exercise of Virtu about them.”34 This passage is a summary statement of the account of Felicity that Traherne provides in Christian Ethicks, where he more qualifiedly praises Aristotle: “Aristotle never heard of our Ascension into Heaven, nor of sitting down in the

160 E n g l i s h R e n a i s s a n c e L i t e r at u r e / Pau l C e f a l u

Throne of God, yet by a lucky Hit (if I may so say) fell in point blank upon the Nature of Blessedness. For a perfect fruition by perfect virtue, is all that can be thought of.”35 We also learn that Traherne believes that virtuous habits provide the means to happiness, the summun bonum: “Vertue (in General) is that habit of soul by force of which we attain our Happiness. Or if you please, it is a right and well order’d habit of mind, which Facilitates the Soul in all its operations.”36 Traherne also contends that “infused” habits are not precisely called virtues because they are acquired without industry: “Tis true indeed that vertuous Habits are sometimes infused in a Miraculous Manner, but then they are rather called Graces than Vertues.”37 One final detour into Aquinas’s moral theory will provide a proper context for a discussion of Traherne’s account of virtue and habit. According to Aquinas, habits are dispositions or qualities that assist in fulfilling the ordered end of a substance such as man. Since habits are intimately connected with the substantial nature of a thing, they are the most essential qualities and accidents of a thing, more essential than, for example, quantity or color. Because customary dispositions are always evaluated as good or bad according to whether they advance or hinder the development of a substance toward its natural end, the most indispensable habits are the cardinal and theological virtues, the latter, as Traherne rightly remarks, infused like graces rather than acquired like cardinal virtues. Habits, excluding infused graces, however, may still be innate or acquired. Knowledge of first principles, for example, is defined as a habit, just as the acquired virtues of prudence or temperance are defined as habits, since both dispose the substance toward further actuality. Most habits, however, are acquired following repetitive conduct, which includes moral acts and acts of intellection or cognition.38 As Gilson notes, “[S]ometimes . . . many analogous and repeated acts are required in order to generate a habit in a power of the soul. Probable opinion, for example, does not prevail the first time, but it becomes habitual belief only when the agent intellect has impressed it upon the possible intellect by a great number of acts. And the possible intellect in its turn must go on repeating them for the benefit of the lower faculties, as, for example, when it wishes to fix such a belief in the memory.”39 Given Traherne’s scholasticism in the areas of metaphysics, cognition, and ethics, and given the fact that habits are essential me-dia in any potency-act transformation, we should expect Traherne’s

Infinite Love and the Limits of Neo-Schol asticism 161

preoccupation with virtuous habit to be as evident as his preoccupation with vicious habit. This is literally evident to any reader of Christian Ethicks, being the only meta-ethical text in which Traherne directly reflects on the nature of terms such as habit and virtue, although it may not seem as evident to the reader of Traherne’s poetry and Centuries. But if we turn to the Centuries, we see that Traherne does indeed emphasize that the acquisition of virtuous habit, through education and contemplation of nature, is a necessary step toward the actualization of happiness. After having diligently studied the Bible, Traherne realizes that “there are thousands in the World, of whom I being a Poor Child was Ignorant, that in Temples, Universities and Secret Closets enjoy felicity. Whom I saw not in Shops, or Scholes or Trades . . . Who Enjoy Communion with God, and hav fellowship with the Angels evry Day.” Traherne’s knowledge of the Bible is then supplemented with a University education, in which he “saw that Logick, Ethicks, Physics, Metaphysics, Geometry, Astronomy, Poesy . . . all kind of Arts, Trades, and Mechanisms that Adorned the World pertained to Felicity. . . . There I saw into the nature of the Sea, the Heavens. . . . All which appeared like the King’s Daughter . . . and those Things which my nurses and parents should have talked of there were taught unto me” (C. 3. 36. 187). Traherne is most Aristotelian when he describes the importance of practicing rather than purely contemplating virtue: “Philosophers are not only those that contemplate happiness, but practise virtue. He is a philosopher that subdues his vices, lives by reason, orders his desires, rules his passions, and submits not to his senses, nor is guided by the customs of this world” (C. 4. 8. 244). Much of what Traherne says regarding the practice of virtue is firmly within the AristotelianThomistic tradition: The self is conceived as a tabula rasa that acquires virtue and knowledge following a systematic education in traditional disciplines and continual moral conduct in the world. This also involves habituating oneself to the import of ethical maxims, such as “It is a Good Thing to be Happy alone” and “Things Prized are Enjoyed,” of which Traherne exhorts his readers, “[Y]ou must be sure to inure yourself frequently to these principles and to impress them deeply” (C. 4. 17. 251). The practical-ethical regimen of the Centuries is the counterpart to the metaphysical and intellective regimen of the poetry: In both cases, virtuous and intellectual habits transform the speaker from potency to act, moving him closer to God.

162 E n g l i s h R e n a i s s a n c e L i t e r at u r e / Pau l C e f a l u

Love and Traherne’s Multiple Infinities One of the difficulties of further extending the Thomistic framework in order to illuminate Traherne’s metaphysics is that, throughout the Centuries, Traherne also preoccupies himself with a view of love and its related concept, infinity, in terms that are not easily classifiable as neo-scholastic. I would suggest that the Slovenian-Lacanian distinction between the masculine logic of exception and the feminine nonall can help situate, if not entirely resolve, such a bifurcation in Traherne’s work. In broader terms, neo-Thomism, or neo-scholasticism of the rationalist variety, generally operates within the logic of the “all with exception,” while negative theology and Johannine agapeism tend to operate within the realm of the “non-all without exception.” In addition to the neo-scholastic logic of exception in the Centuries (in which God as perfect act figures as the universal exception), one finds not only a conception of God as an infinitely desiring creature but also a sense that God seems to be subjectivized by the very operation of love that, seemingly more than God himself, serves as an ontological first principle. The question, then, is how to reconcile Traherne’s assertion of the mysterious overflowing of love that seems to subjectivize both God and creatures with those passages in Christian Ethicks that anthropomorphize God, attributing, for example, infinite desires to him. I would suggest that one way Traherne mitigates some of the radical implications of ontologizing love as a first principle is by imagining that God himself is the subject of infinite desires, merely one of which is love. In doing so, Traherne achieves, in Lacanian terms, a filling of the very void of love that is ontologized in selected passages of the Centuries—as if Traherne ultimately realizes that it is better to theorize God as a subject of desires, however unsatisfiable those desires are, than to imagine God as mysteriously subjected to the ineluctable workings of love.

Traherne’s Desiring God In the First Century, Traherne describes God as not only infinite in nature but also invisible and lacking material extension. He then makes the commonsensical argument that to imagine God as a visible or materially infinite being would preclude lesser beings from extending themselves into space: “For being infinite it would exclude all

Infinite Love and the Limits of Neo-Schol asticism 163

Being beside out of place. If His Eternity, that cannot by a body be represented. Neither is any sense able to judge of infinity or eternity. For if He should represent Himself by an infinite wall; sight being too short might apprehend itself defective, and be assured that it could not apprehend the ends of that wall”(C. 2. 20. 91). Traherne will go on to distinguish his view of God’s infinite nature from the Cartesians, who deny that God’s infinitude can be extended spiritually. It might seem to follow, then, that infinity is reserved for God, yet Traherne ascribes infinity to a number of concepts and items that serve as exemplars of God’s infinitude. The most important of these exemplars is the faculty of creaturely understanding: “The true exemplar of God’s infinity is that of your understanding, which is a lively pattern and idea of it. It excludeth nothing, and containeth all things, being a power that permitteth all objects to be, and is able to enjoy them. Here is a profitable endlessness of infinite value, because without it infinite joys and blessings would be lost” (C. 2. 20. 98). Not only is each of God’s creatures endowed with an infinite understanding so that he or she might appreciate God’s boundlessness, but, as we will see more clearly in a moment, the “infinite joys and blessings” that would be lost should God’s creatures lack infinite intellects or souls, are indicative of God’s joys and blessings as much as any individual’s. The Christian-hedonic circuit is such that God’s limitless pleasures require that his creatures enjoy infinite understanding in order to satisfy those pleasures. Traherne’s rhetoric of God’s infinite exemplars becomes increasingly pronounced in such claims that each individual’s soul contains “innumerable infinities”: “In the Soul of Man there are innumerable infinities. One soul in the immensity of its intelligence, is greater and more excellent than the whole world” (C. 2. 70. 128). This concept of infinity is extended to an assessment of the infinite relationship among souls: “One would think therefore that one soul should be lost in another: and that two souls should be exactly adequate. Yet indeed my soul can examine and search all the chambers and endless operations of another: being prepared to see innumerable millions” (C. 2. 129). Traherne’s position is gradually enhanced to such an extent that infinities are compounded of infinities: The “soul is a miraculous abyss of infinite abysses, an undrainable ocean, an unexhausted fountain of endless oceans, when it will exert itself to fill and fathom them” (C. 2. 138).

164 E n g l i s h R e n a i s s a n c e L i t e r at u r e / Pau l C e f a l u

Put in set theoretic terms, Traherne’s God figures as the infinite set of all infinite sets. As we have seen, God is not the only concept or multiplicity to which Traherne attributes infinitude. Various exemplars, including not only the faculty of understanding but also predicable concepts such as love, are all considered infinite in nature and belong to the larger infinite divine set or, in Badiouian terms, “situation.” It would be a mistake to suppose that each of these worldly or creaturely infinities is simply a mode or extension of God: Trah-erne’s metaphysics is decidedly not Spinozist or immanentist. It would also be incorrect to argue that Traherne imagines, along with the neo-Platonists, that each of these infinities is an emanation of the One. Nor, finally, is Traherne’s theory of infinity entirely consistent with his Thomism, for it cannot be easily reconciled with Thomistic metaphysics. Traherne’s theistic understanding of God as perfect act (which he usually equates with infinity) separates God from his creatures and the created world. But once infinity is attributed to these created beings, it becomes difficult not to see this as an unavoidable limitation of God’s hierarchical power. To figure God as the infinite set of all infinite sets places God himself in such a set. Infinity seems to be a reified placeholder that situates God as one discrete element among others, as if infinity secretes its own excess beyond those elements, including God, which one might conceptualize as foundationally infinite in nature. Traherne treads dangerously close to ontologizing something other than or in excess of God as a first principle. Traherne’s concept of infinity seems to rely on, but ultimately marks an important departure from, the Thomistic notion of analogical reasoning. Thomas himself diverged from the negative theology of Pseudo-Dionysius in not only allowing for positive attributions of God (God as wisdom, goodness, or love, for example), but also in asserting that what is predicated of God is only analogically related to similar creaturely endowments. All of God’s attributes differ without defect more in degree than kind from their creaturely analogues. As one commentator suggests, “If we make the statement that God is wisdom, this affirmative statement is true in regard to the perfection as such; but if we experience wisdom, it would be false. God is wise, but He is wisdom in a sense transcending our exp-erience; he does not possess wisdom as an inhering quality or form. In other words, we affirm of God the essence of wisdom or goodness or life in a ‘supereminent’ way, and we deny of God the imperfections attendant on human wisdom.”40 It would be difficult to situate

Infinite Love and the Limits of Neo-Schol asticism 165

Traherne’s conception of multiple infinites in relation to Thomistic analogical reasoning. Infinity, for Aquinas, cannot be ascribed to God’s creatures because they are finite and less perfect than God. Aquinas does admit the possibility that substances other than God can be “relatively infinite” but not absolutely infinite (since matter remains in potentiality to many accidental forms). But this does not explain the infinitude that Traherne attaches to concepts and faculties like the human understanding.41 Pre-modern science is pre-Cantorian in assuming that there are no degrees of infinity. To the extent, then, that God’s creatures share infinity with God, the Thomistic framework cannot provide an adequate explanatory framework. Traherne further compounds the problem of multiple infinities by attributing seemingly inscrutable desires to God: The Lord God of Israel, the Living and True God, was from all Eternity, and from all Eternity wanted like a God. 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. This is very strange that God should want. For in Him is the fulness of all Blessedness: He overfloweth eternally. His wants are as glorious as infinite: perfective needs that are in His nature, and ever Blessed, because always satisfied. He is from eternity full of want, or else He would not be full of Treasure. Infinite want is the very ground and cause of infinite treasure. It is incredible, yet very plain. Want is the fountain of all His fulness. Want in God is treasure in us. For had there been no need He would not have created the World, nor made us, nor manifested His wisdom, nor exercised His power, nor beautified Eternity, nor prepared the Joys of Heaven. But he wanted Angels and Men, Images, Companions: And these He had from all Eternity. (C. 1. 41–42. 29)

After paradoxically anthropomorphizing God as an endlessly desiring creature who already has all that he wants—“He wanted Joys, He wanted Spectators, He wanted Treasures. He wanted, yet He wanted not, for He had Them” (C. I, 42, 29)—Traherne cannot avoid noting the oxymoronic nature of an all-sufficient God whose wants are endless. Most readers of this fascinating but ultimately specious passage will not find Traherne’s explanations as “plain” as he supposes. The first explanation is that God’s infinite wants are necessary because he would

166 E n g l i s h R e n a i s s a n c e L i t e r at u r e / Pau l C e f a l u

otherwise not be full of infinite treasures. Traherne might have pursued a simple, if ultimately unsatisfactory, reductio: Since God’s infinite treasures, described by Traherne compendiously as God’s benevolence, are simply a given of God’s nature, God must in turn have immeasurable wants—the question of exactly how God’s wants would be satisfied left open. Traherne argues rather that God needs infinite treasures not because they signify his benevolence as such, but because they produce in his creatures analogously infinite desires to satisfy such wants. The infinitude of God’s desires is matched by the infinitude of God’s creatures’ desires to make satisfaction. This redounds to the creatures’ benefit, since when Traherne adds that “infinite Wants satisfied produce infinite Joys,” he maintains that to satisfy God’s desires produces creaturely contentment. Later on he makes God’s dependence on creaturely desire more explicit: Are not praises the very end for which the world was created? . . . God is a Spirit and cannot feed on carcases: but He can be delighted with thanksgivings, and is infinitely pleased with the emanations of our joy, because Himself is admired and His works are esteemed. . . . Because therefore God is love, and His measure infinite, He infinitely desires to be admired and beloved, and so our praises enter into the very secret of His Eternal Bosom, and mingle with Him who dwelleth in that light which is inaccessible. (C. 3. 82–83. 225)

The embedded premise that Traherne does not consider is that God’s desires are immeasurable such that he requires our unbounded love—as if his only way to approach his own infinitude is through a projection of that infinitude onto his creatures. Returning to the earlier discussion of the excess of infinity over its principle bearer, God, we can see that the particular aspect of infinity that seems to elude God himself, or somehow forces his hand to create, is precisely the unsatisfiable nature of his desire. Seeming to realize such an unsettling implication, Traherne makes the following rather feeble attempt to explain away desire’s excess: Infinite Wants satisfied produce infinite Joys; and in the possession of those joys are infinite joys themselves. The Desire Satisfied is a Tree of Life. Desire imports something absent: and a need of what is absent. God was never without this Tree of Life. He did desire infinitely, yet He was never without the fruits of this Tree, which are the joys it produced. I must lead you out of this, into another World, to learn your

Infinite Love and the Limits of Neo-Schol asticism 167 wants. For till you find them you will never be happy: Wants themselves being Sacred Occasions and Means of Felicity. (C. I. 43. 29–30)

As some commentators have noticed, Traherne’s comment on desire’s “importing” or creating absence is interpretable in a HegelianLacanian context: God’s desire imports absence, yet such desires are eternally satisfied for God by the fruits of the Tree of Life.42 The circularity of this argument makes sense when one assumes that God is a kind of desiring machine, whereby each desire for an object is immediately satisfied by the offering of such an object by the Tree of Life. Of course, since God was never without the Tree of Life, his desires have never gone unsatisfied. Yet it is not clear how one can integrate this idea with the notion that God’s creatures themselves satisfy God’s desires, hence the need to create life in keeping with whatever archetypes are represented by the Tree of Life. Rather than resolve this ambiguity, though, Traherne seems to give up the argument entirely by assuring that the reader will be led “out of this into another World.” Traherne’s position on God’s desires is not easily assimilable to negative or mystical theology. Consider, for example, Pseudo-Dionysius’s explanation of God’s “yearning”: “The divine longing is Good seeking good for the sake of the Good. That yearning which creates all the goodness of the world preexisted superabundantly within the Good and did not allow it to remain without issue. It stirred him to use the abundance of his powers in the production of the world.”43 Divine longing for Dionysius is typically neo-Platonic in that God’s emanations are natural overflows of his “superabundant” goodness. There is no mention here, however, as there is in Traherne’s work, of either God’s perfective “needs” or the creaturely “emanations” that add to God’s pleasure. Unlike Dionysius, who is concerned with God’s unilateral emanations in creating the world, Traherne is concerned with the mutuality by which desire forms a circuit between God and man. How, though, does this foray into Traherne’s notion of a “suffering” God link to his neo-scholasticism? One way of explaining God’s dilemma as represented in the Centuries is that without the created world, he is an infinitely desiring subject whose principal desire is to be desired, but who is not the particular object of any divine or creaturely want. He is indeed pure act, but act or existence without a substantial essence, as if his existence is in excess of his essence. What gives him

168 E n g l i s h R e n a i s s a n c e L i t e r at u r e / Pau l C e f a l u

substance is the objectification of himself that he can achieve once he creates the outward world and serves as a desired object, one that can receive the responsive “emanations” of his loving creatures. What remains to be seen, however, is the extent to which, elsewhere in the Centuries, Traherne abandons the Thomistic framework entirely and gives much fuller expression to some of the radical implications of ontologizing love and infinity. We will see that the Johannine principle that “God is love” strains against the Thomistic identification of God’s essence with his existence or any unproblematic notion that God’s essence is “to be” or “to exist.” The addition of infinite love to such a framework makes God’s essence contingent on the eternal performance of love enacted between God and his creatures.

God Is Love In the Second Century, Traherne refines his notion of God’s desire by introducing the Johannine notion that God is the exemplification of metaphysical love: “God by loving begot His son. For God is Love, and by loving He begot his Love. He is of Himself, and by loving He is what He is, infinite love. God is not a mixed and compounded being, so that His Love is one thing and Himself another: but the most pure and simple of all Beings, all Act and pure Love in the abstract. Being Love therefore itself, by loving He begot His Love” (C. II. 39.109). Traherne here fills out the neo-scholastic notion of God as pure act by defining God’s essence as love itself. If we accept that God does desire, we must assume that the nature of his desire is simply the act of love, or lovingness as such. This in turn explains Traherne’s embrace of Nicene trinitarianism: God’s self-communicative love eternally begets Christ, the second person of the Trinity, whose love is then mediated to the Christian community by the Holy Ghost. Things are not so straightforward, however, because further into the Second Century, the precise nature of the relationship between God and love becomes murkier. If God is initially presented tautologically as love itself (in keeping with the Divine Names theology of Pseudo-Dionysius), Traherne further implies that through the act of love, God can fully attain to love, or that God’s perfect actuality as love is causally linked to the process or performance of love—

Infinite Love and the Limits of Neo-Schol asticism 169

namely love’s outworking not only in creating the second person of the Trinity but also ad extra, that is, through the creation of fallible creature. Traherne remarks, “How wonderful is it that God by being Love should prepare a Redeemer to die or us? But how much more wonderful, that by this means Himself should be, and be God by being Love” (C. II. 45. 112); and “[t]hat love is the end of itself, and that God loveth than he might be Love, is as evident to him that considers spiritual thing, as the Sun” (C. II. 46. 113); and finally that “God by love wholly ministereth to others, and yet wholly ministereth to Himself” (C. II. 55. 119). God’s self-communicative love is not a mere expression of his divinity; God achieves the status of love through the act of begetting and loving. That God is inevitably anthropomorphized by such a process is reflected in his gain of infinite “pleasure,” whereby he is exalted as an object of love even in the process of serving as the subject of love. By the Fourth Century, love is identified less directly with God as such, or even something that God attains to through creation, and more as the result of mutual affection between deity and creature: “But now there is an infinite union between Him and us, He being infinitely delightful to us, and we to Him. For He infinitely delights to see creatures act upon such illustrious and eternal principles, in a manner so divine, heroic, and most truly blessed; and we delight in seeing Him giving us the power” (C. IV. 49. 274). Interdependence of God and subject is achieved through the effect of mutual loving; yet such mutuality is refined to the point that love seems to become a subjectless attribute or concept, something that ultimately seems “subjected” to itself, and that achieves the subjectivization of God and man in its effects: These two properties are in it—that is can attempt all and suffer all. And the more it suffers the more it is delighted, and the more it attempteth the more it is enriched. For it seems that all love is so mysterious that there is something in it which needs expression and can never be understood by any manifestation, (of itself, in itself) but only by mighty doings and sufferings. This moved God the Father to create the world, and God the Son to die for it. Nor is this all. There are many other ways whereby it manifests itself as well as these, there being still something infinite in it behind.(C. IV. 62. 284)

One might argue that, on the one hand, since Traherne has already established that God is Love, he has conflated any distinction among

170 E n g l i s h R e n a i s s a n c e L i t e r at u r e / Pau l C e f a l u

God, love, and the subject designated as “it” in the above passage. On the other hand, given that Traherne clearly states that love “moved the father to create the world,” one cannot safely assume any trivial or tautologous identity of God and love. Another way of saying this is that by the Fourth Century, love becomes so mystified and enlarged, even infinitized, that it transforms into a reified attribute or concept carrying its own causal efficacy. Indeed, Traherne comes dangerously close to articulating a dualistic relationship between love, on the one hand, and God and his creatures, on the other hand, an implication that he himself seems to realize when he boldly claims that love is in many respects the “God of God”: “Were not Love the darling of God, this would be a rash and a bold sally. But since it is His Image, and the Love of God, I may almost say the God of God, because His beloved, all this happeneth unto Love” (C. IV. 67. 288). Perhaps the clearest way of explaining the idiosyncratic nature of Traherne’s conception of love is to point out the difficulty of reconciling his neo-scholasticism with his Johannine metaphysics. Recall Traherne’s basic conception of God as pure act whose essence is equivalent to his existence. One of the limitations, we recall, of considering God in such a respect is that one has trouble imagining any being as a pure existent, as something that has existential force, but no predicative being. As Anthony Kenny notes, “If the esse which denotes God’s essence is like the esse which is predicable of everything, except that it does not permit the addition of further predicates, then it is a predicate which is totally unimaginable.”44 Consider that there are two fundamental ways of imagining an integration of the essence-existence identity and Johannine love. On the one hand, one might posit that love is an essential predicate added to God’s nature that is not itself an existential predicate, but more like a substantial addition to his being. In this scenario, God’s essence would be love, as well as “to be,” a contradiction in terms if love is considered an attribute other than an existential quantifier. On the other hand, by simple substitution, one can argue that if (1) God’s essence is love, and (2) God’s essence is his existence, then (3) Love’s essence is to exist, or “to be.” In this scenario, the problem of a pure existent is compounded because one would need to understand the nature of two pure existents and their relationship to one another. More important, love would seem to be added to God as a

Infinite Love and the Limits of Neo-Schol asticism 171

pure existent unto itself, which would entail that love makes God’s existence overflow his essence. The problem comes down to the following: Once one attaches attributes or performatives like love to God, God’s essence-existence identity inevitably breaks down, since love needs to be considered either as a substantial predicate added to God (making God’s essence more than his existence as such) or an existential quantifier, in which love would simply be defined as “to be,” itself translatable as “Love’s essence is that it exists.” The latter is a clearly unworkable notion, given love’s redemptive work in the temporal world. How, for example, can a pure existent like love effect any soteriological change among creatures or bring them closer to God by actualizing their potentiality? The other difficulty is that, while existence is added to creatures externally by God, God’s existence is self-caused, hence the equivalence between his essence and existence. Importantly, if a being’s essence is not equivalent to its existence, then its existence must be externally caused. One of the basic metaphysical presuppositions here is that “essence is distinct from existence as cause is distinct from effect.”45 If love were part of God’s essence, his essence would immediately be distinguished from his existence, and his ontology would be placed in the realm of the creaturely. Traherne’s love, however, is more often equated with Christ than God as such, and we can see how Traherne’s trinitarianism works partially to overcome the problem of integrating his neo-scholasticism with his agapeism. As eternally begotten by God, a different substance but the same person (in keeping with Nicene doxology), God can, in some respect, give love to himself, add love to his existence, through the very process of giving it to another person with whom he shares, minimally, the same substance. Indeed, one can say of Christ unproblematically that his essence is pure love and pure act, if one considers that his person is pure act, but his substance is pure love. God can somehow remake himself in Christ as pure love without thereby giving up his existential quantification. This resolves the problem in the abstract, but it omits consideration of God’s desires or wants, particularly those that he expects from his creatures other than Christ. Recall that Traherne’s God’s principle desire is to have his creatures love him and his infinite treasures unqualifiedly, the overriding reason for his having created them in the first place. This renders, in turn, God’s love somehow contingent on the loving response of his creatures. How, though, does this square with the gains achieved by

172 E n g l i s h R e n a i s s a n c e L i t e r at u r e / Pau l C e f a l u

God through the first creation, that is, the begetting of Christ in order to maintain his status as pure act? How does it explain why the closed circuit of love between God and the begotten Christ does not satisfy God’s wants? Lacanian theory can provide at least one explanation. Consider that God’s created beings figure in such a scenario as God’s objets a, whose inability to love God without exception and to fully satisfy God allows God to avoid a direct confrontation with his own ontological inconsistency. Consider further that any individual’s inability to love God without exception is best mediated through Christ, the “creaturely” exemplar of the ideal or perfect love that is always missed by God’s lesser creatures. If a conventional Lacanian interpretation of ˘ iz˘ek, for example, posits that Christ the Trinity, one offered by Z serves as man’s objet a, impeding a direct encounter with God as traumatizing Thing, Traherne’s Centuries extends and provides the accompanying obverse of such logic: To the extent that man remains as God’s objet a, man allows God to avoid a direct encounter with Himself. God needs his creatures’ imperfect love because Christ’s perfect love would expose God’s inability to be himself, that is, to be simultaneously a loving being and a being whose essence is pure existence. Individuals, in turn, need Christ’s perfect love in order to screen the creaturely awareness of God’s ontological inconsistency. The Lacanian interpretation is more malleable than it might seem and overlaps, in some respects, with the fundamental principles of Badiouian set theory. In Traherne’s Centuries, love serves the function that the void or empty set serves in Badiou’s ontology. In elementary set theory, the void is included in every situation or structured set, yet it is not presented or counted; it therefore exists as an empty name, without any ontic substantiality. Through the means of an event, the void is disclosed or presented, after which authentic subjects are born, who in turn must remain faithful to the evental site that allows for the voided element to become represented.46 One might argue that love, derived from integrating the notion that God’s essence is his existence with the notion that God is love, serves as that voided part of God, that which remains of God when one subtracts his various divine names and attributes. Love as basic existent, that is, love as equivalent to God’s “to be,” corresponds to Badiou’s notion of the void or empty set as an ontological first principle. As a basic existent, love is only given content or represented through the incarnation of Christ. It is not so much the foundational

Infinite Love and the Limits of Neo-Schol asticism 173

element that is discovered via apophasis or cataphasis, but that which erupts through the very events of creation (both the first creation, or eternal begetting of Christ, and the second creation of the world) and which retroactively lends God a reified ontological unity. That love occupies the status of such ineluctable void space is suggested in Traherne’s attempt to ontologically pin it down: “It is hid in a centre and nowhere at all, if we respect its body. . . . Its own age is too little to contain it, its greatness is spiritual, like the Deity’s. It filleth the world, and exceeds what it filleth. It is present with all objects, and tastes all excellencies, and meeteth the infiniteness of God in everything” (C. 4. 66. 287–88). Love’s roaming excess stems from its eternal, infinite nature: “It representeth every person in the light of Eternity, and loveth him with the love of all worlds” (C. IV. 69. 290). And eternity, as Traherne continues, is itself defined most clearly as something elusive, absent: “Eternity is a mysterious absence of times and ages, an endless length of ages always present, and for ever perfect” (C. V. 7. 324). If love invisibly structures every situation, it acquires positivity through God’s creative agency; it serves, in Badiouian terms, as a kind of ontological vagrant like set theory’s null or empty set. Only retroactively, only after it is symbolized in the creaturely realm through the mediation of Christ, does it become a positive attribute of God, or metaphysically continuous with God. In a pre-symbolic sense, love points not only to the foundational void of God but also to God’s real, namely his inability to achieve ontological unity without love’s subjectivizing and alienating operations on his own behalf. In this sense, Traherne has departed from unreconstructed Thomistic doctrine (God does not instantiate perfect love to which his creatures can only approximate) as well as any hint of Gnostic dualism (love is not an eternal deity, ontologically separate from God). Love is indeed some positive aspect of God, although it is not an attribute or predicate of an otherwise selfsame deity. As in the last chapter, in which we saw that Milton represents the constitutive self-division of God (whereby God is continually subjectivized through the circumscription of chaos), so here we can see that Traherne represents an analogous process whereby God is eternally subjectivized by the ongoing event and very performance of infinite love. Traherne’s God is beyond ontology not because the logic of subtraction renders his being “nothing,” but because Christ allows God’s “essence” to serve as both bare existent and the performative that is agape.

174 E n g l i s h R e n a i s s a n c e L i t e r at u r e / Pau l C e f a l u

Traherne’s Metaethics In the Centuries, Traherne might have pursued the ontological notion of a desiring and suffering God to its ethical implications. To get a sense of what this might have entailed, we can turn briefly to Eric Santner’s understanding of Franz Rosenzweig, which was outlined in Chapter 1 on Donne’s poetry. Rosenzweig’s ideal scenario of neighbor-love, for example, is one in which the subject loves not the predicative being of the Other (the Other’s relational surrender to “symbolic investitures”), but the Other’s meta-ethical self, that ineffable part or enigmatic core of the Other that is left over after symbolic investitures are negated or superseded: “The paradox of revelatory love—as opposed to what we can refer to as relational surrender—is, thus, that it in some sense reveals nothing. It is a love in whose light no new predicate, no new content becomes manifest beyond the ‘nothing’—in Schelling’s terms, the nonbeing—of the demonic, tautological self-sameness testifying to our freedom.”47 Another way of describing this relationship to the Other’s metaethical self is as a relationship with the void of the Other’s character, a loving union with the neighbor-thing rather neighbor qua neighbor. As we have seen in previous chapters, for Santner and Rosenzweig this marks neither a moment of pure immanence or transcendence, but rather a transcendence of attributive being in order to “undeaden” the neighbor of everyday life. Now one might argue that Traherne’s transcendent metaphysics renders such an approach to neighbor-love misguided or impossible. But Traherne’s is not a philosophy of transcendent dualism, since the subject participates in God not only through the neighbor but also, as we will see momentarily, the natural world governed by natural laws. What ultimately prevents Traherne from pursuing the radical implications that his metaphysics implies is that, paradoxically, he not only argues that subjects should transcend their merely predicative being but also, at least in the Centuries, anthropomorphizes God as a predicative being through and through, whose relationship to his creatures is purely instrumentalized (he creates them in order to satisfy his infinite desires). Traherne’s subjects cannot transcend their creatureliness because at times God seems more creaturely than his own creations. What Traherne cannot work out in the Centuries, though, he seems to work out in Christian Ethicks, although only at

Infinite Love and the Limits of Neo-Schol asticism 175

the cost of eschewing much of the theology of the Centuries. In Christian Ethicks, he abandons any notion of God as an infinitely desiring subject, instead constructing a still-anthropomorphized but more proto-Kantian God who acts not according to “pathological” desires but simply for the sake of the good. The means-end rationality of the Centuries is displaced by a true kingdom of ends in which every creature should, like God, pursue virtue simply as an end unto itself. Traherne’s most fully developed account of such a kingdom of ends appears in Christian Ethicks, in a section in which he differentiates “moral” and “divine” goodness. While moral goodness is defined simply as “a willing Conformity to the Interests and Affections of his fellow Creatures,” divine goodness, predicated of God, is “an Active and Eternal Principle, stirring up it self [sic] without Obligation or reward, to do the best and most Excellent Things in an Eternal Manner.”48 Above all, what separates divine goodness from ethical goodness is its non-instrumentality, a conceptual and rhetorical departure from the preoccupation with God’s infinite desires as represented in the Centuries: “It doth Infinite Good, to all its Recipients Meerly for the sake of the Excellency of that Act of Doing Good.”49 Here, one might argue, we have an example of the ideally ethical act: autonomously self-motivating, aimed at the pursuit of the good for its own sake, rather than self-interested ends. Of course, Traherne’s theistic ethic assumes that individual creatures can only approach divine goodness by an imitation of and participation in God’s ethical will: “All its Creatures are Delightful to it self, only as they imitate, and receives its Goodness.”50 These “creatures” that receive and imitate divine goodness include the entire animal and vegetable world—any natural object whose goal is to promote a harmony of interests, even at the seeming expense of selfpreservation. The rays of divine goodness fall “not all upon every single man, but work for him in other places, begetting Herbs, and Fruits, and Flowers, and Minerals, and Springs, and Trees, and Jewels, sigh all that is rich and delectable in the World for his fruition.”51 Each of these “treasures” loves mankind by loving itself, that is, by fulfilling its nature, thus illustrating the commandment to model outward love on self-love: “All which he hath made ours by commanding them to Love us as themselves; fit to be enjoyed, and beloved by us, but filling them with his Goodness, and making them in his Image. For every one of them is to Love all his Creatures as he does, and to delight in the Beauty and Felicity of all.”52

176 E n g l i s h R e n a i s s a n c e L i t e r at u r e / Pau l C e f a l u

Traherne is not just exalting mankind as the center upon which all of nature converges. Nature’s creatures or “treasures” do not serve simply by supplying our wants and necessities. They serve by providing the very example of selfless conduct that the recipients of such conduct need to internalize and emulate: “To be made Partakers of the Divine Nature, without having the Goodness of Almighty GOD is impossible. Nor can we enjoy his Goodness, or bear the similitude of his Glory, unless we are good in like manner. We enjoy the Goodness of GOD, and may be said to have it, either when we have its Similitude in our selves, or the Pleasure of it in others.”53 In one sense, Traherne has simply clarified the relationship between self-love and outward love: Virtue inheres in patterning our neighbor-love on self-love, since when we love ourselves we love God as well. But Christian Ethicks is remarkable for its avoidance of any mention of the “excessive” qualities of God, including his desires, infinitude, and love. Traherne has pried apart the metaphysics and ontology of the Centuries and poems, on the one hand, and the ethics of Christian Ethicks, on the other hand. There is no clear linkage between the way God or any creature is (infinitely desiring subjects that they are) and the way God or any creature does and ought to act. In Santner’s terms, Traherne has effected a move beyond predicative being, yet, in the process, has constructed an ethical system in which not merely God’s creatures, but God himself seems to pursue goodness automatically, simply for its own sake. If what motivates God is too clear in the Centuries, what motivates God in Christian Ethicks is the mutually subjectivizing act of love. The desiring excesses of the former text seem to be displaced by the automatizing excesses of the latter. Returning, finally, to the neo-scholastic frame of the poetry and Centuries: If the God of the poetry exemplifies the basic Thomistic notion that God’s essence is beyond potentiality, as simply pure act or existence as such, and the Centuries shows an impossible excess of existence over essence, the God of Christian Ethicks shows an excess of essence over existence. One noteworthy feature of the latter conception of God is its constant attribution of all sorts of conventional cardinal and theological virtues to God, without a corresponding emphasis on God as pure existent. These virtues are continuous with not only the creaturely world but also the entire fabric of the created orders. When God promotes the good, he promotes his own essence serving as a virtuous exemplar for his creatures in the process, (as if

Infinite Love and the Limits of Neo-Schol asticism 177

the ethos outlined in Christian Ethicks is simply the imago Dei). What had earlier distinguished God from his creatures, namely his perfect actuality (complicated, as we have seen, by the addition of love to his essence and his infinite, unsatisfiable desire), seems to have been displaced by his perfect essence, the full range of virtuous aspects emanated by his being, however insubstantial and invisible, to the creaturely world. Since God “acts” for himself and for his creatures, he acts predictably according to the exemplars of virtue as such. To the extent that one might claim, as Aquinas does, that God’s essence is “to act,” one can only claim of Traherne’s ethical God that his essence is to act tautologously according to his essence. In Christian Ethicks, therefore, Traherne momentarily returns to the Thomistic way but exaggerates God’s essence at the expense of his existence (unlike in the poetry, where he exaggerates God’s existence or pure actuality at the expense of his essence). Consider the following claim in Christian Ethicks regarding God’s need to dispense eternal love: “Removing his Love we remove all the Properties and Effects of his Essence, and are utterly unable to conceive any idea of his Godhead. For his Power, tho it be Almighty, yet it be Dead and idle, is fruitless and Deformed. Idle Power is not the Essence of the Deity, but a meer Privation and Vacuity.”54 Such properties and effects that extend from God’s love include all of the virtues of God, since “to love is the Work of vertue” such as his wisdom and goodness.55 Not only is God’s essence as pure Act or “to be” omitted from such a reconstructed ontology, but outside of God’s essence as love, the nature of God would be inconceivable. In achieving this displacement, Traherne partly relies on the Thomistic notion of “analogy of proportion,” or via affirmativa: God does indeed resemble his creatures due to shared qualities (love, beauty, wisdom, goodness, etc.), except that God instantiates such qualities perfectly or “supereminently,” rather than imperfectly like his creatures, and thereby serves as an absolute standard. Stated in terms of the contemporary theoretical nomenclature to which we have been referring in this book, the analogical way reinstates the logic of exception in which God founds the creaturely realm and serves as its constituent exception, an ideal plenum of virtues toward which all creatures tend. Again, we should note that this is not simply the same as positing God as pure Act, the modus operandi of the Dobbell poems, since in the latter case, God is posited not so much as an exception founded on resemblance, but as a transcendent founded

178 E n g l i s h R e n a i s s a n c e L i t e r at u r e / Pau l C e f a l u

on absolute difference. Traherne’s ethics ultimately provides a safe compromise between the too-transcendent and inaccessible God of the poetry and the too-creaturely God of the Centuries. Since Traherne conceptualizes God’s essence (rather than existence) as pure love, thereby reinstating the logic of exception, it makes sense that Christian Ethicks would furthermore allow a Pauline dialectic of law and love to displace the Johannine metaphysics of love that is emphasized in the Centuries. After noting that “the Apostle . . . telleth us that Love is the fulfilling of the Law, and that it is the bond of Perfectness,”56 Traherne emphasizes the intimate relationship between law and the Decalogue commandments: If we Love God, we shall keep his Commandements with a Tenderness and Desire so extreme, that no Joy will be so great as the Observation of his Laws. . . . We shall reverence his Sanctuary, and keep his Sabbaths, desiring Rest from other Avocations, that we may contemplate his Glory in all his Works. For his sake we shall observe the Laws of the second Table, and Love our Neighbor as our self57 (141–43). Christian Ethicks recalls the dialectic of law and love of Donne’s Holy Sonnets assessed earlier in Chapter 1. Love does not displace the law as much as sums all of the other laws. To the extent that creatures still will not be able to obey love’s legalistic dictates, love, as supreme law, legitimates the cycle of transgressive desire and superegoic guilt. Pauline love, at least as stated in Romans 13, suspends but does not displace law entirely. Consider Giorgio Agamben’s account of Pauline love in relation not only to the Schmittian state of exception but also in relation to a fundamentally Aristotelian distinction between potency and act. “Messianic power” has its effects on the sphere of law and works “not simply by negating or annihilating them, but by de-activating them, rendering them inoperative, no-longer-at-work. . . . It gives potentiality back to them in the form of inoperativity and ineffectiveness. The messianic is not the destruction but the deactivation of the law, rendering the law inexcusable. . . . Only to the extent that the Messiah renders the nomos inoperative, that he makes the nomos no-longer-at-work and thus restores it to the state of potentiality, only in this way may he represent its telos as both end and fulfillment.”58 The messianic moment, as represented in Romans, thus does not annul the law, but conserves or contracts it, rendering it unobservable but still potentially in power. Agamben bases his argument largely on Romans 3:9, but he then extends his assessment to what

Infinite Love and the Limits of Neo-Schol asticism 179

he describes as two more instances of the Pauline state of exception: the first, when, in Romans 7:15 ,Paul contracts Moses’s detailed commandments into the simple statement, “Do not desire” (thereby rendering law as “a trial in the Kafkaesque sense of the terms, a perpetual self-accusation without a precept”), and then finally in relation to Romans 13:8, about which Agamben concludes, “On the side of faith, the counterpart to this contraction of Mosaic law is the messianic recapitulation of the commandments; Paul refers to it in Romans 13:8–9: ‘For the one who loves another had fulfilled the law.’ . . . Once he divides the law into a law of works and a law of faith, a law of sin and a law of God . . . and thus renders it inoperative and unobservable—Paul can then fulfill and recapitulate the law in the figure of love.”59 The Pauline logic of exception in Romans paradoxically reaffirms or sublates the law through law’s very negation by love. That Traherne views love as contracting and sublating rather than dispensing with law by love is made clear in his recapitulation, after invoking Romans 13 in Christian Ethicks, of detailed commandments that can more easily be regarded once love is embraced. Triangulating Traherne’s account of love, his Thomistic concern with the essence and existence relationship, and Agamben’s account of the Pauline state of exception in relation to the potency and act distinction, we can conclude that the God of Christian Ethicks, the very instantiation of love’s virtues and the law of love as such, manifests not perfect actuality through love, but, as has already been suggested, an endless manifestation of himself as pure potentiality. Each creaturely act of love does not so much move the creature closer to God’s esse, but continually suspends and legitimates God’s law. Suffice it to say that the metaphysics of love presented in the Centuries has been thoroughly displaced by the Pauline dialectic ˘ iz˘ek therefore takes of law and love in Christian Ethicks. While Z Agamben to task for his inability to imagine a true subversion of the law and sin dialectic, remarking whether “Pauline love can be reduced to this founding suspension of the Law,” and asking, “What if Romans has to be read together with Corinthians?”60 we might add, apropos of Traherne’s changing conceptions of love, whether Romans needs to be read together with the Johannine metaphysics of love.

This page intentionally left blank

Notes

Introduction ˘ iz˘ek, The Fragile Absolute, or Why is the Christian Legacy Worth 1. Slavoj Z Fighting For?(London: Verso, 2000), 26–27. 2. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 86. 3. Alain Badiou, Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return of Philosophy, trans. Oliver Feltham and Justin Clemens (London: Continuum, 2004), 86. ˘ iz˘ek draws on Lacan’s theory of sublimation, according to which an 4. Z object elevated to the dignity of das Ding is rendered sublime: “What the objects, in their given positivity, are masking is not some other, more substantial order of objects, but simply the void, the emptiness, of what they are filling out. We must remember that there is nothing intrinsically sublime in a sublime object—according to Lacan, a sublime object is an ordinary, everyday object, which, quite by chance, finds itself occupying the place of what he calls das Ding, the impossible-real object of desire.” ˘ iz˘ek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 194. The Z ˘ iz˘ek’s use of the concept of the submost comprehensive comparison of Z lime with the Kantian sublime aesthetic can be found in George Hartley, The Abyss of Representation: Marxism and the Postmodern Sublime (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), esp. chs. 1 and 2. 5. R. V. Young, Doctrine and Devotion in Seventeenth-Century Poetry: Studies in Donne, Herbert, Crashaw, and Vaughan (London: D. S. Brewer, 2000). This is the most comprehensive reassessment of seventeenthcentury Protestant poetics. For an earlier re-evaluation of the Protestant consensus, see Achsah Guibbory, Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton: Literature, Religion, and Cultural Conflict in SeventeenthCentury England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 6. Richard Strier, Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radicalism, and Renaissance Texts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 4. For a good summary and reassessment of Strier’s important work, especially in relation to Donne’s poetry, see Ronald Corthell, Ideology and Desire in Renaissance Poetry: The Subject of Donne (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997), 28–29.

182

N ot e s

˘ iz˘ek, Sublime Object, 169. 7. Z 8. Ibid., 170. 9. On early modern accounts of the nature of void space, see Edward Grant, Much Ado About Nothing: Theories of Space and Vacuum from the Middle Ages to the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). ˘ iz˘ek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christian10. Slavoj Z ity (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2003), 78. 11. Agamben, State of Exception, 51. 12. Eric L. Santner, The Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 47. 13. Ibid., 37. 14. Ibid., 82. 15. Ibid., 27. 16. Eric L. Santner, On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 15. 17. Ibid., 22–23. 18. Cited in Alenka Zupanc˘ic˘ , The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two (Cambridge: Massachusets Institute of Technology Press, 2003), 47–48. 19. Bruce Fink, A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 8. For more on Lacan’s notion of jouissance, see Jacques Lacan, On Jouissance, in On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge, Book XX, Encore 1972–1973, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), passim chapter 1. See also Richard Boothby, Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan (New York: Routledge Press, 2001), 159–60. 20. Zupanc˘ ic˘ , The Shortest Shadow, 49. 21. Ibid., 50. 22. Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil, trans. Peter Hallward (London: Verso, 2002), 25. 23. Peter Hallward, Badiou: A Subject to Truth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 102. 24. Ibid., 118. 25. Ibid., 95. It is precisely on the ontological status of void space that Badiou departs from Lacan, who has influenced Badiou’s metaphysics to a certain extent. For Badiou, the void is an ontological first principle, the very ground of being. Lacan, on Badiou’s interpretation, would not accept any association between void space and being qua being: “For Lacan . . . the void is not on the side of being. This, I think, is a crucial point of conflict. Let us say that philosophy localizes the void as condition of truth on the side of being qua being, while psychoanalysis localizes the void in the Subject, for the Subject is what disappears in the

N ot e s

183

gap between two signifiers . . . . For Lacan, if the void is on the side of being, this means that thought is also on the side of being, because thought is precisely the exercise of separation.” Badiou, Infinite Thought, 87. For more on Badiou’s critique of Lacan, especially regarding theories of subjectivity, see Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2005), 431–35. 26. The most developed Lacanian account of Freud’s myth of the primal ˘ iz˘ek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent horde can be found in Slavoj Z Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 2000), passim chapter 6. 27. See Suzanne Barnard, “Tongues of Angels: Feminine Structure and Other Jouissance,” in Reading Seminar XX: Lacan’s Major Work on Love, Knowledge, and Feminine Sexuality (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002). Cited in Santner, On Creaturely Life, 198. 28. See Kenneth Reinhard, “Toward a Political Theology of the Neighbor,” ˘ iz˘ek, in The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology, eds. Slavoj Z Eric L. Santner, and Kenneth Reinhard (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 57. 29. Santner, On Creaturely Life, 198. ˘ iz˘ek, The Puppet and the Dwarf, 116–17. 30. Z 31. Ibid., 117. 32. Ibid., 115. 33. Reinhard, “Toward a Political Theology of the Neighbor,” 61. 34. See Debora Kuller Shuger, Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance: Religion, Politics, and the Dominant Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), passim chapter 5. 35. Gilles Deleuze: The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, 35. 36. On Baroque images, Wolfflin notes, “The eye quickly tires of anything in a painting that can be fully grasped at first glance. But if some parts of the composition remain hidden and one object overlaps another, the beholder is stimulated to imagine what he cannot see; the objects that are partly hidden seem as if they might at any moment emerge; the picture becomes alive, and the hidden parts then actually do seem to reveal themselves.” Heinrich Wolfflin, Renaissance and Baroque, trans. Kathrin Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1964), 33. ˘ iz˘ek, The Abyss of Freedom (Ann Arbor: University of 37. See Slavoj Z Michigan Press, 1997). 38. Alenka Zupanc˘ ic˘ , Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan (London: Verso, 2000), passim chapter 6. 39. See Gary Kuchar, Divine Subjection: The Rhetoric of Sacramental Devotion in Early Modern England (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2005). 40. Ibid., 25. 41. Ibid., 29.

184

N ot e s

42. On Crashaw and the feminine divine, see Kuchar, Divine Subjection, passim chapter 2. ˘ iz˘ek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 90. 43. Z 44. Ibid., 90. 45. Ibid., 90. 46. Ibid., 44. 47. Ibid., 44. 48. Ibid., 45. 49. See Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1992), 93–146. For Laclau’s more recent reflections on the relationship between master signifiers and hegemony, see Ernesto Laclau, Emancipation(s) (London: Verso, 1996), passim chapter 3; and Ernesto Laclau, “Identity and Hegemony: The Role of Universality in the Constitution of Political Logics,” in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, eds. Judith Butler, ˘ iz˘ek (London: Verso, 2000), 182–212. Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Z ˘ 50. Ziz˘ek, Sublime Object, 88. 51. Ibid., 95. 52. As Shuger notes, “Ideology thus signifies what I will call ‘habits of thought,’ a culture’s interpretive categories and their internal relations, which underlie specific beliefs, ideas, and values. And Renaissance habits of thought were by and large religious,” Shuger, Habits of Thought, 9. 53. On antagonism, see Laclau and Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, ˘ iz˘ek’s return to Laclau’s work in Slavoj Z ˘ iz˘ek, The 127–29. See also Z ˘ Ticklish Subject, 172–84, where Ziz˘ek remarks, “The horizon of Laclau’s central notion of hegemony is the constitutive gap between the Particular and the Universal: the Universal is never full; it is a priori empty, devoid of positive content; different particular contents strive to fill this gap, but every particular remains a temporary and contingent stand-in that is forever split between its particular content and the universality it represents (184). 54. Carl Schmitt directly links the advent of the sovereign exception to sixteenth-century politics, especially the writings of Jean Bodin. See Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), passim chapter 5. 55. In an important essay on Schmitt’s decisionism and early modern politics, Victoria Kahn argues that Schmitt’s account of political exceptionalism overlooks instances in which the sovereign might actually “fake” states of emergency. Since this seems to have been the case under Jacobean and Caroline politics—Charles’ false claim, for example, that pirates were threatening the British coastline—Kahn concludes that Schmitt’s theory inadequately explains seventeenth-century examples of the sovereign

N ot e s

185

˘ iz˘ek’s critique of ideologies, I would argue exception. In the spirit of Z instead that to “fake” an exception only reinforces the numinous aspect of the sovereign’s power, thereby enhancing the “surplus animation” that it inspires in subjects. See Victoria Kahn, “Hamlet or Hecuba: Carl Schmitt’s Decision,” in Representations 83:1 (2003), 67–96, esp. 70. 56. For an excellent survey of the distinction between absolute and ordained power, see William J. Courtenay, Capacity and Volition: A History of the Distinction of Absolute and Ordained Power (Bergamo: Pierluigi Lubrina, 1990). 57. See Santner, Psychotheology of Everyday Life, 19. 58. Julia Reinhard Lupton, Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 162. 59. Ibid, 161. For an excellent summary of Lupton’s work, see Santner, On Creaturely Life, 27–30. 60. Cited in J. K. Mozley, The Impassibility of God: A Survey of Christian Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1926), 61. 61. Ibid., 122. 62. Jurgen Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom: The Doctrine of God (San Francisco: Harper Collins Press, 1991), 30. 63. Ibid., 32. 64. See Graham Ward, “Suffering and Incarnation,” in Suffering Religion, eds. Robert Gibbs and Elliot R. Wolfson (London: Routledge Press, 2002), 171. On divine pathos in early modern Cabbalistic writings, see in the same volume, Elliot R. Wolfson, “Divine Suffering and the Hermeneutics of Reading: Philosophical Reflections on Lurianic Mythology,” 101–62. 65. On divine pathos, see also A. J. Heschel, The Prophets (New York: Harper and Row, 1962). 66. The best recent assessment of negative theology in relation to philosophy can be found in Hent de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), esp. 119–57, which provides a comprehensive gloss on Angelus Silesius’s Cherubimic Wanderer. 67. Jacques Derrida, On the Name, ed. Thomas Dutot, trans. David Wood, John P. Leavey, and Ian McLeod (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 68. 68. For more on Derrida and negative theology, see John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon, eds., God, The Gift, and Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999); Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo, eds., Religion (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998); Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Willis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); John Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997); and Graham Ward, “Deconstructive Theology,”

186

N ot e s

in the Cambridge Companion to Postmodern Theology, ed. Kevin J. Vanhoozer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 76–91. For an earlier poststructuralist study of religion, see Mark C. Taylor, Erring: A Postmodern A/theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 69. Jean-Luc Marion, God Without Being, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 46–47. 70. See Zupanc˘ ic˘ , Shortest Shadow, esp. Part II. 71. Stephen Greenblatt, “Psychoanalysis and Renaissance Culture,” in Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992), 135. 72. Ibid., 136. 73. Ibid., 143. 74. See Santner, Psychotheology of Everyday Life, 72–73. 75. Badiou, Ethics, 41. 76. Ibid., 47. 77. Zupanc˘ ic˘ , Ethics of the Real, 39–40.

Chapter 1 1. Debora Kuller Shuger, Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance: Religion, Politics, and the Dominant Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 164. 2. Ibid., 167. 3. Ibid., 177. 4. Ibid., 178. 5. Ibid., 184. 6. Ibid., 191. 7. Ibid. 8. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). See also Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). 9. Agamben, State of Exception, 39. 10. Evelyn Potter and George Simpson, eds., The Sermons of John Donne (Berkeley: University of California Press), vol. 4, 97–98. All subsequent citations will be taken from this edition. 11. Ibid., vol. 5, 117. 12. Ibid., 126. 13. Ibid., 185. 14. Eric L. Santner, The Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 47. 15. Ibid., 37. 16. Ibid., 82.

N ot e s

187

17. Ibid., 81. 18. Potter and Simpson, Sermons of John Donne, vol. 4, 113. 19. Ibid., vol. 7, 408. 20. Ibid., vol. 9, 85. 21. Ibid., 75. 22. Ibid., vol. 4, 136. 23. Ibid., 135. 24. Margaret Aston, England’s Iconoclasts (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), 446. 25. Ibid., 459. 26. Joseph Leo Koerner, The Reformation of the Image (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 206. 27. Ibid., 209. 28. The Idolatrie of the Cross (London, 1622), 18. 29. Ibid., 15. 30. See Kaja Silverman, The Subject of Semiotics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 19. 31. John Martial, Treatise of the Cross (London, 1546), 20. 32. Ibid., 36. 33. Ibid., 28. 34. All cited poems taken from A. J. Smith, ed., John Donne: The Complete English Poems (London: Penguin Books). Lines cited from Donne’s Holy Sonnets are taken from the 1635 edition of the Holy Sonnets. 35. Cited in Bruce Fink, A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 187. 36. Potter and Simpson, Sermons of John Donne, vol. 7, 343. 37. Ibid., 343–45. 38. Ibid., 343–47. 39. Ibid., 135. 40. Jean-Luc Marion, God without Being, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 47. 41. Ibid. 42. Jurgen Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom: The Doctrine of God (San Francisco: Harper Collins Publishers, 1991), 30–31. 43. Ibid., 31. 44. Ibid., 33. 45. Ibid., 58. ˘ iz˘ek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity 46. Slavoj Z (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2003), 24. ˘ iz˘ek, The Fragile Absolute, or Why is the Christian Legacy Worth 47. Slavoj Z Fighting For? (London: Verso, 2000), 127. 48. Kenneth Reinhard, “Toward a Political Theology of the Neighbor,” in The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 51–52. 49. Ibid., 58.

188

N ot e s

˘ iz˘ek, Puppet and the Dwarf, 116. 50. Z ˘ 51. Ziz˘ek, Fragile Absolute, 142. ˘ iz˘ek, Puppet and the Dwarf, 117. 52. Z 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid., 115. 55. See Soren Kierkegaard, Works of Love, eds. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), esp. 17–43. ˘ iz˘ek, Puppet and the Dwarf, 112. 56. Z 57. Ibid., 113. 58. Ibid., 33. 59. In an extended, compelling reading of the poem, Gary Kuchar also notes that the speaker is confronted with “its own constitutive nothingness,” and attendant anxiety at the prospect of encountering “the proximity of the Other’s desire.” My interpretation departs from Kuchar’s in that Kuchar goes on to argue that Donne’s speaker remains half-hearted about his desire for a complete union with God. See Gary Kuchar, Divine Subjection: The Rhetoric of Sacramental Devotion in Early Modern England (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2005), 230. 60. Ibid., 61. 61. Ibid. 62. Suzanne Barnard, “Tongues of Angels: Feminine Structure and Other Jouissance,” in Reading Seminar XX: Lacan’s Major Work, Love, Knowledge, and Feminine Sexuality, eds. Suzanne Barnard and Bruce Fink (New York: State University of New York Press, 2002), 178; cited ˘ iz˘ek, Puppet and the Dwarf, 69. in Z ˘ 63. Ziz˘ek, Puppet and the Dwarf, 69. 64. For a Lacanian interpretation of the poem that emphasizes Donne’s reluctance to submit to the jouissance of God, see Ronald Corthell, Ideology and Desire in Renaissance Poetry: The Subject of Donne (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997), where Corthell remarks, “The unbounded, shattering nature of jouissance represents a loss of identity (in psychoanalytic terms, a return to the pre-oedipal infantile position of object of the desire of the mother) as well as a recovery of being. . . . Such a resistance to being overwhelmed is perhaps behind Donne’s inconsistent representation of the self in the middle section of the sonnet” (158). 65. For some foundational interpretations of the role of the Trinity in “Batter my heart,” see George Herman, “Donne’s Holy Sonnets, XIV,” Explicator 12 (December 1953), Item 18; and George Knox, “Donne’s Holy Sonnets, XIV,” Explicator 15 (October 1956), Item 2. For Clements’s revisionist account, see Arthur L. Clements, “Donne’s Holy Sonnet XIV,” Modern Language Notes 76, no. 6 (June 1961), 484–89. 66. Clements, “Donne’s Holy Sonnet, XIV,” 485–86.

N ot e s

189

67. Ibid., 487. 68. Kuchar, Divine Subjection, 228.

Chapter 2 1. On Lacan’s interpretation of Sartre’s account of the “look,” see Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), 84–85. On the relationship between the look and gaze, see also Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World (New York: Routledge, 1996), passim ch. 5. 2. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 95–96, 106–9. 3. Ibid., 104. 4. See Mladen Dolar, “At First Sight,” in Gaze and Voice as Love Objects, eds. ˘ iz˘ek (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, Renata Salecl and Slavoj Z 1996), 139. 5. All cites from Crashaw’s poetry are taken from Richard Crashaw, The Verse in English of Richard Crashaw (New York: Grove Press, 1949). Line numbers will be cited parenthetically in the text. 6. Richard Gibbons, The Practical Methode of Meditation (London, 1614). Cited in Louis L. Martz, The Poetry of Meditation: A Study in English Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1965), 27. 7. Martz, Poetry of Meditation, 28. 8. Roland Barthes, Sade, Fourier, Loyola, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976), 69. 9. Ibid., 165. 10. Marc F. Bertonasco, Crashaw and the Baroque (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1971), 89. ˘ iz˘ek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through 11. Slavoj Z Popular Culture (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1993), 110. 12. Ibid. 13. Heinrich Wolfflin, Renaissance and Baroque, trans. Kathrin Simon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1966), 33. 14. Ibid., 62. 15. Ibid., 81. 16. Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality and the Limits of Love and Knowledge, Book XX, Encore, 1972–1973, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 76. 17. Ibid. 18. Bruce Fink, A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 187.

190

N ot e s

˘ iz˘ek, “Woman is One of the ‘Names-of-the-Father,’ or How 19. Slavoj Z Not to Misread Lacan’s Formulas of Sexuation,” Lacanian Ink 10 (1995). http://www.lacan.com/zizwoman.htm. 20. Teresa d’ Avila, The Life of St. Teresa of Avila: Including the Relations of Her Spiritual State, trans. David Lewis (Maryland: The Newman Press, 1962), 138–39. 21. Ibid., 139. 22. Ibid., 162. 23. Cited in Anthony Saville, Leibniz and the Monadology (London: Routledge Press, 2000), 235. 24. Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 35. 25. Ibid., 23–24. 26. Ibid., 52. 27. Ibid., 53. 28. Ibid. 29. Against the conventional understanding of Deleuzian metaphysics, Alain Badiou has recently argued that Deleuze’s philosophy does ultimately rest on a Platonizing notion of the univocity of being. See Alain Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, trans. Louise Burchill (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). 30. Ibid., 125. 31. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: New Left Books, 1977), 166. 32. Ibid., 175. 33. Cited in Susan A. Handelman, Fragments of Redemption: Jewish Thought and Literary Theory in Benjamin, Scholem, and Levinas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 131. 34. Benjamin, Origin of German Tragic Drama, 183. 35. Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the ecole Freudienne, eds. Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose, trans. Jacqueline Rose (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), 113. 36. Ibid., 117. 37. Ibid., 77. 38. Ibid., 103. 39. Paul Verhaeghe, “Lacan’s Answer to the Classical Mind/Body Deadlock: Retracing Freud’s Beyond,” in Reading Seminar XX: Lacan’s Major Work on Love, Knowledge, and Feminine Sexuality, eds. Suzanne Barnard and Bruce Fink (New York: State University of New York Press, 2002), 132. 40. Richard Boothby, Freud as Philosophy: Metapsychology after Lacan (London: Routledge, 2001), 246. 41. Ibid, 247.

N ot e s

191

42. Graham Hammill, “Steps to the Temple,” in South Atlantic Quarterly 88:4 (1989): 947. For an alternative Lacanian interpretation of Crashaw’s epigrams, see Gary Kuchar, Divine Subjection: The Rhetoric of Sacramental Devotion in Early Modern England (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2005), 114–18. ˘ iz˘ek, The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Women and 43. Slavoz Z Causality (London: Verso, 1994), 104.

Chapter 3 ˘ iz˘ek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997), 15. 1. Slavoj Z 2. Ibid., 234. ˘ iz˘ek, The Fragile Absolute, or Why is the Christian Legacy 3. See Slavoj Z Worth Fighting For (London: Verso, 2000), 92–107; On Belief (London: Routledge, 2001), esp. 79–105; and The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2003), esp. passim ch. 3. ˘ iz˘ek, The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and 4. Slavoj Z Related Matters (London: Verso, 1996), passim ch. 1. 5. Alenka Zupanc˘ic˘, Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan (London: Verso, 2000). 6. John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Gordon Teskey (New York: W. W. and Norton, 2005), 163, 168–73. 7. All quotes from Paradise Lost are taken from John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York: Macmillan, 1957). 8. Milton, Paradise Lost, 163, 163–73. 9. Margaret Bailey, Milton and Jakob Boehme (New York: Oxford Uni-versity Press, 1914). 10. Ibid., 64–65. 11. Ibid., 135. 12. Ibid., 137–69. 13. Other Miltonists have tended to acknowledge but circle around Boehme’s possible influence on Milton. George M. Conklin argued, for example, that Milton’s position on the creation, “despite the similarities of Plato, Lucretius, Philo, Eriugena, Servetus, Gerson, Ibn Ezra, Fludd, Bohme, and others is uniquely his and was independently derived from his exegetical conclusions alone.” George M. Conklin, Biblical Criticism and Heresy in Milton (New York: 1949), cited in J. H. Adamson, “The Creation,” in Bright Essence: Studies in Milton’s Theology, by W. B. Hunter, C. A. Patrides, and J. H. Adamson (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1971), 92. See also Adamson, “Creation,” 101.

192

N ot e s

14. This summary is largely based on the account given in David Walsh, The Mysticism of Innerworldly Fulfillment: A Study of Jacob Boehme (Gainsville: University Presses of Florida, 1983), 60–62. 15. Jacob Boehme, Personal Christianity: The Doctrines of Jacob Boehme, intro. Franz Hartmann (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1958), 108. 16. Ibid., 109. 17. Ibid., 106. 18. Jacob Boehme, The Aurora, trans. John Sparrow, eds., C. J. B. and D. H. S. (London: John M. Watkins, 1960), 701. 19. Still one of the most thorough accounts of Milton’s chaos can be found in Walter Clyde Curry, Milton’s Ontology, Cosmology, and Physics (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1957). Yet, given some of these close resemblances between Boehme’s and Milton’s accounts of first matter, Curry perhaps too quickly concludes that, although Milton’s conception of chaos was influenced by Du Bartas and Hermes Trismegistus, “Milton is unusually original in his conception of chaos” (87). 20. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, Ages of the World, trans. Judith Norman, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 169. 21. Ibid., 179. ˘ iz˘ek, The Abyss of Freedom (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan 22. Slavoj Z Press, 1997), 6. 23. Ibid., 21. 24. Frank Allen Patterson, ed., The Works of John Milton, 14.40–1. In this particular sense, Paradise Lost departs from De Doctrina Christiana, which does offer a gloss on the Hebrew “Ehi,” “I am what I am,” or “will be.” The distance between De Doctrina and Paradise Lost regarding divine self-naming is passed over in Maurice Kelley’s survey of parallels between the two texts, which focuses on eternity, immutability, incorruptibility, omnipotence, etc., but not on the tautologies of Exodus 3:14. Kelly does draw a correspondence between the two texts regarding God’s “unity,” but the parallel seems forced: Kelly suggests that in Paradise Lost, God’s remark, “I am alone / From all eternitie, / For none I know / Second to mee or like, equal much less” (8.405–7), seems to echo De Doctrina’s, “And through all numbers absolute, though One” (8.421). Note, though, that God’s comments in Paradise Lost do not suggest that he is “one” or unified; he states only that he is alone, hierarchically speaking, in power and rank. See Maurice Kelley, This Great Argument: A Study of Milton’s De Doctrina Christian as a Gloss upon Paradise Lost (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1962), 74–75. 25. It is precisely this constitutional antagonism rather than any ever-receding, otherwise absolute center that is the distinguishing feature of the ˘ iz˘ek remarks, “Difference points towards the conLacanian real. As Z stant and constitutive deferral of impossible self-identity, whereas in

N ot e s

193

Lacan, what the movement of symbolic deferral-substitution forever ˘ iz˘ek, fails to attain is not Identity but the Real of an antagonism.” Z Indivisible Remainder, 100. 26. Lacan understandably approaches the divine tautology with skepticism. In his commentary on Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, Lacan observes that Moses the Midianite “claims to have heard the decisive word emerge from the burning bush, the word that cannot be eluded, as Freud eludes it: ‘I am,’ not as the whole Christian gnosis has attempted to interpret it, ‘he who is,’—thereby exposing us to difficulties relative to the concept of being that are far from over, and which have perhaps contributed to compromising exegesis—but ‘I am what I am.’ Or, in other words, a God who introduces himself as an essentially hidden God.” The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), 173. 27. This is to say that God always “will have been” in relation to his performatives throughout the text. For a good discussion of Lacan’s use of the future perfect and related linguistic distinction between the subject of the statement and the subject of enunciation, see Samuel Weber, Return to Freud: Jacques Lacan’s Dislocation of Psychoanalysis, trans. Michael Levine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 110–19. 28. Frank Allen Patterson, ed., The Works of John Milton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1953), vol. 15, 21. 29. Immanuel Kant, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans. Theodore M. Greene (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1960), 27–28. 30. See Gordon Michalson Jr., Fallen Freedom: Kant on Radical Evil and Moral Regeneration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 30. 31. Kant, Religion Within the Limits, 28. 32. Ibid., 37. For an excellent discussion of Kantian maxim-making in relation to radical evil, see Richard J. Bernstein, Radical Evil: A Philosophical Interrogation (Cambridge: Polity, 2002), passim ch. 1. 33. Kant, Religion Within the Limits, 30. For a Lacanian assessment of ˘ iz˘ek, Kant’s distinction between radical and diabolical evil, see Slavoj Z Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 95–100. 34. Zupanc˘ic˘, Ethics of the Real, 26. 35. Ibid., 32. 36. Ibid., 35. 37. Ibid., 36. 38. Ibid., 37. 39. Ibid., 240. 40. Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function,” in Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), 6. For a further account of the “anarchic” quality of the pre-symbolic

194

N ot e s

body, see Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 166. 41. On primary narcissism and aggression, see Lacan, “Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis,” in Ecrits, passim ch. 2. 42. Sigmund Freud, “On Narcissism: An Introduction,” in General Psychological Theory: Papers on Metapsychology, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Collier Books, 1963), 74. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid. On Freud’s use of the terms ideal ego and ego-ideal, see also Sigmund Freud, The Complete Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New York: W .W. Norton, 1966), 428–29, 528–30. 45. Freud, “On Narcissism,” 75. 46. Jacques Lacan, “Ego-Ideal and Ideal Ego,” in The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book I, Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953–1954, ed. Jacques AlainMiller, trans. John Forrester (London: W. W. Norton, 1988), 141. The two egos referenced here describe Lacan’s notion of “two narcissisms,” famously illustrated in his “schema of two mirrors,” itself an enhancement of his earlier use of the example of the inverted bouquet to illustrate imaginary captation. Lacan imagines a scenario in which the subject stands with her back to a concave mirror, immediately in front of which is a box with inverted vase on top of which is a bouquet. Just in front of the box and bouquet is another mirror, this time a plane, rather than concave mirror. When the subject looks beyond the inverted box and bouquet into the plane mirror, she sees a virtual image in which the box has been turned right side up. The image is virtual because the real image appears in the concave mirror behind the subject, which simply reflects into the plane mirror the virtual image. By looking into the plane mirror, the subject essentially sees a reflection of a reflection originally produced in the concave mirror. For Lacan, the inverted box and the bouquet stand for the subject’s actual or experiential body. The correction of the image by the concave mirror represents primary narcissism and the ideal ego of the imaginary. The reflection in the plane mirror, which stands for the Other, represents secondary narcissism and the ego-ideal of the symbolic. Lacan’s presentation of the inverted bouquet can be found in The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953–1954, 77–78. His refinement of the bouquet experiment in order to illustrate the “two narcissisms” can be found in the same volume, 123–26. If we were to describe Adam’s interruption of Eve at the lake in terms of Lacan’s schema of the two mirrors, we should say that Adam prevents the primary, concave mirror to produced a unified, improved imaginary ego, as if the plane mirror does not reflect or

N ot e s

195

slightly refract a more primary reflection as much as stand in for that reflection entirely. 47. See, for example, Christine Froula, “When Eve Reads Milton: Undoing the Canonical Economy,” in Canons, ed. Robert von Hallberg (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). For a more recent Lacanian interpretation of the scene, one that responds directly to Froula’s essay, see Linda Gregerson, The Reformation of the Subject: Spenser, Milton, and the English Protestant Epic (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 148–63. 48. Gregerson, Reformation of the Subject, 154. 49. Ibid. 50. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 103. For a reasonably comprehensive survey of Lacan’s changing use of the concept objet a, see Richard Boothby, Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan (New York: Routledge, 2001), passim chap˘ iz˘ek, of course, employs the concept throughout his own work, ter 5. Z ˘ iz˘ek, Looking Awry: An the clearest elaboration of which is Slavoj Z Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1992), 3–8. 51. John Rumrich, Milton Unbound: Controversy and Reinterpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 144. 52. Zupanc˘ic˘, Ethics of the Real, 211–12. 53. Lacan assesses Claudel’s Coufontaine trilogy in Seminar VII, Le Transfert. ˘ iz˘ek, In addition to Zupanc˘ic˘’s reinterpretation of The Hostage, see Z Indivisible Remainder, 115–18. 54. Ibid., 228. 55. Ibid., 228. 56. Ibid., 234. 57. Lacan, Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 54. See also Lacan’s “The Freudian Thing,” in Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2002), 107–37. 58. Ibid., 55. 59. Ibid., 58. 60. Ibid., 56. 61. Ibid., 58–59. 62. Zupanc˘ic˘, Ethics of the Real, 147. 63. Ibid., 147. 64. Ibid., 148. 65. See Rumrich, Milton Unbound, 144–146; and Regina Schwartz, Remembering and Repeating: On Milton’s Theology and Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 35. 66. Catherine Gimelli Martin, “Forum,” PMLA 111, no. 3 (1996): 49.

196

N ot e s

67. Catherine Gimelli Martin, “Fire, Ice, and Epic Entropy: The Physics and Metaphysics of Milton’s Reformed Chaos,” Milton Studies 35 (1997): 73–113. 68. Lacan, Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 63. 69. Ibid., 112. ˘ iz˘ek, The 70. Ibid., 163. On sublimation and courtly love, see also Slavoj Z Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality (London: Verso, 1994), passim chapter 4. 71. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, 217–18, See also Lacan, Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 57–58. For an assessment of the distinction between representative and representation, see Boothby, Freud as Philosopher, 216–17; and Joan Copjec, Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2002), 34–40. 72. Lacan, Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 54. 73. Ibid., 63. 74. For a foundational account of Milton’s Arianism or Anti-Trinitarianism, see Kelley, This Great Argument, especially, 11–14, 118–22. For reconsiderations of Milton’s Arianism, see Hunter, Patrides, and Adamson, Bright Essence, passim. ch. 2. ˘ iz˘ek, The Metastases of Enjoyment, 103–4. 75. Slavoj Z ˘ iz˘ek’s most sustained assessment of the distinction between desire 76. For Z ˘ iz˘ek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Center of Political and drive see Z Onology (London: Verso, 1999), 290–306. 77. Renata Salecl, (Per)versions of Love and Hate (London: Verso, 1998), 52. 78. Ibid., 25. 79. Ibid., 49–50. 80. Lacan, Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 263. For more on literary characters like Oedipus, Synge, Lear, and Antigone who undergo comparable “limit˘ iz˘ek, The Ticklish Subject, 160–61. experiences,” see Z

Chapter 4 1. Sarah Hutton, “Platonism in some Metaphysical Poets: Marvell, Vaughan and Traherne,” in Platonism and the English Imagination, eds. Anna Baldwin and Sarah Hutton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 167. 2. H.M. Margoliouth, ed., Thomas Traherne: Centuries, Poems, and Thanksgivings (Oxford: Clarendon, 1958), 114–15. Hereinafter all cites will be provided within the text.

N ot e s

197

3. See John E. Trimpey, “An Analysis of Traherne’s ‘Thought’s I,’” Studies in Philology 18 (1977), 94–95. 4. A.L. Clements, The Mystical Poetry of Thomas Traherne (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), 65. 5. Ibid., 72. 6. Ibid., 87. 7. Ibid., 87–88. 8. Traherne’s account of his childhood corruption does have a Stoic atmosphere. In the Tusculan Disputations Cicero writes that “the seeds of virtue are inborn in our dispositions and . . . as things are, however, as soon as we come into the light of day . . . we at once find ourselves in a world of iniquity amid a medley of wrong beliefs, so that it seems as if we drank in deception with our nurse’s milk; but when we leave the nursery to be with parents and later on have been handed over to the care of masters, then we become infected with deceptions so varied that truth gives place to unreality and the voice of nature itself to fixed prepossessions.” See Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, trans. J.E. King (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1943), 226. 9. John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education: The Educational Writings of John Locke, ed. J. L. Axtell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 239. 10. Ibid., 235. 11. David Hartley, Observations on Man, ed. T. L. Huguelet (Gainesville, FL: Scholars Facsimiles and Reprints, 1966), 81. 12. This is what we find in Clements’ book on Traherne and the mystical tradition. It should be noted, however, that K.W. Salter, one of Traherne’s best critics, does talk in some detail about the Thomistic influence on Traherne, although Salter makes no substantial mention of Traherne’s particular assimilation of Thomistic ethics. See K. W. Salter, Thomas Traherne: Mystic and Poet (London: Edward Arnold, 1964), 33–37. 13. Gladys I. Wade, ed., The Poetical Works of Thomas Traherne (New York: Cooper Square, 1965), 28. 14. Clements, Mystical Poetry of Thomas Traherne, 126. 15. Ibid. 16. Cited in Etienne Gilson, Being and Some Philosophers (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1952), 24. 17. Ibid., 39. 18. Cited in Sir David Ross, Aristotle (London: Methuen, 1964), 165. 19. Ibid., 166. 20. For an argument that Aristotle associated substance with form separate from matter, see Edwin Hartman, Substance, Body and Soul: Aristotelian Investigations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977). For a rebuttal of Hartman’s argument see Thedore Scaltsas, Substances and

198

N ot e s

Universal in Aristotle’s Metaphysics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 246–49. 21. Aquinas defines substance in De Entia et Essentia as follows: “Relinquitur ergo quod nomen essentiae in substantiis compositis signigicat id quod ex materia et forma componitur.” Cited in Etienne Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas (New York: Octagon Books, 1983), 445. 22. Cited in Ross, Aristotle, 177. 23. Anthony Kenny, Aquinas (New York: Hill and Wang, 1980), 60. 24. Aquinas draws this distinction in De Ente et Essentia. See also Anthony Kenny’s discussion in Aquinas, 53. 25. The paraphrase of Aquinas’s description of the manner in which existence is conferred on the form-matter composite is taken from this very useful monograph on Thomistic metaphysics, Benignus Gerrity, The Relations Between the Theory of Matter and Form and the Theory of Knowledge in the Philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America, 1936), 35. Aquinas’s description appears in the Summa Contra Gentiles, II, c. 54: “In substantiis autem compositis ex materia et forma est duplex compositio actus et potentiae; prima quidem ipsius substantiae, quae componitur ex materia et forma; secunda vero, ex ipsa substantia iam composita et esse.” In Gilson’s terms, “in concrete substances which are the object of sensible experience, two metaphysical compositions must be ranged according to profundity: the first, that of matter and form, constitutes the very substantiality of the substance; the second that of the substance with its act of existing, constitutes the substance as ‘being’ because it makes it an existing thing.” See Gilson, Christian Philosophy, 34. 26. Gilson, Christian Philosophy, 34. 27. Cited in Kenny, Aquinas, 57. The proof appears in Aquinas, De Potentia, 7, 2c. 28. Kenny, Aquinas, 59. 29. Nathaniel Culverwell, An Elegant and Learned Discourse of the Light Nature, eds. Robert A. Greene and Hugh MacCallum (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971). 30. For Aquinas’s account of cognition see Summa Theologica I, 75–89. I have based this brief summary on accounts of medieval theories of cognition presented in Robert Pasnau, Theories of Cognition in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 1–27; and John J. Jenkins, Knowledge and Faith in Thomas Aquinas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), ch. 4. 31. Thomas Traherne, Selected Poems and Prose, ed. Alan Bradford (New York: Penguin, 1991), 336.

N ot e s

199

32. Saint Thomas Aquinas, The Summa Contra Gentiles, in The Basic Writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas, ed. Anton C. Pegis (New York: Random House, 1945), ch. xvii, p. 27. Subsequent references will be cited in text. 33. For Plotinus, unlike Traherne, the virtues serve to purge one’s associations with degraded matter. In the first Ennead, Book VI, Plotinus writes that “according to the ancient (Platonic or Empedoclean) maxim, ‘courage, temperance, all the virtues, nay, even prudence are but purifications’. . . . And indeed, what would real temperance consist of, if it be not to avoid attaching oneself to the pleasures of the body, and to flee from them as impure, and as only proper for an impure being? What else is courage, unless no longer to fear death, which is mere separation of the soul from the body?” Plotinus: Complete Works, vol. 1, ed. Kenneth Sylvan Guthrie (London: George Bell and Sons), 49. 34. Thomas Traherne, Christian Ethicks, eds. Carol L. Marks and George Robert Guffey (New York: Cornell University Press, 1968), 150. 35. Ibid., 19. 36. Ibid., 22. 37. Ibid., 25. 38. Aquinas’s exposition on the nature of habit appears in The Summa Theologica I–II, Questions 49–89. The most extensive Renaissance commentary on the scholastic theory of habitus is Francisco Suarez, Metaphysical Disputation XLIV, which can be found in Francisco Suarez, Disputaciones Metafisicas, Vol. VI, eds. Sergio Rabade Romeo, Salvador Caballero Sanchez, et al, (Madrid: Editorial Gredos, 1964), 345–520. 39. Gilson, Christian Philosophy, 258. 40. See Frederick Copeleston, A History of Philosophy, vol. 2, Medieval Philosophy, Part II: Albert the Great to Duns Scotus (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1962), 71. 41. Aquinas writes, “Things other than God can be relatively infinite, but not absolutely infinite. For with regard to the infinite as applied to matter, it is manifest that everything actually existing possesses a form; and thus its matter is determined by form. But because matter, considered as existing under some substantial form, remains in potentiality to many accidental forms, what is absolutely finite can be relatively infinite.” Summa Theologica, I, Q. 7, Art. 2 in Basic Writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas, vol. I, ed. Anton C. Pegis. 42. The most extensive Lacanian assessment of Traherne and desire can be found in A. Leigh De Neef, Traherne in Dialogue: Heidegger, Lacan, and Derrida (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1988), esp. 115–38. See also Gary Kuchar, Divine Subjection: The Rhetoric of Sacramental Devotion in Early Modern England (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2005), passim ch. 4.

200

N ot e s

43. Pseudo-Dionysius, The Divine Names, in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid (New York: Paulist, 1987), 79–80. 44. Kenny, Aquinas, 59. 45. Ibid., 56. 46. On Badiou’s theory of the void, see Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Felt ham (London: Continuum, 2005), 52–59. For excellent introductions to Badiou’s set-theoretic nomenclature, see Peter Hallward, Badiou: A Subject to Truth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), esp. chs. 4 and 5; Alain Badiou, Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return to Philosophy, trans. and eds. Oliver Feltham and Justin Clemens (London: Continuum, 2004), 1–33; and Jason Barker, Alain Badiou: A Critical Introduction (London: Pluto, 2002), ch. 2. For an exemplary application of Badiou’s ontology to political theology, see Regina Schwartz, “Revelation and Revolution,” in Theology and the Political: ˘ iz˘ek The New Debate, eds. Creston Davis, John Milbank, and Slavoj Z (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 102–24. 47. Eric L. Santner, On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 90. 48. Traherne, Christian Ethicks, 79. 49. Ibid., 80. 50. Ibid. 51. Ibid., 83. 52. Ibid. 53. Ibid., 82. 54. Ibid., 51 55. Ibid., 51–52. 56. Ibid., 136. 57. Ibid., 141–43. 58. Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 97–98. 59. Ibid., 108–109. ˘ iz˘ek, Puppet and the Dwarf, 112. 60. Z

   Selected Bibliography

Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. ———. State of Exception. Translated by Kevin Attel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. ———. The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans. Translated by Patricia Dailey. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005. Aquinas, Thomas. The Summa Contra Gentiles: The Basic Writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas. Edited by Anton C. Pegis. New York: Random House, 1945. Aston, Margaret. England’s Iconoclasts. Oxford: Clarendon, 1988. Badiou, Alain. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. Translated by Peter Hallward. London: Verso, 2002. ———. Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return of Philosophy. Translated by Oliver Feltham and Justin Clemens. London: Continuum, 2004. Bailey, Margaret. Milton and Jakob Boehme. New York: Oxford University Press, 1914. Barnard, Suzanne. “Tongues of Angels: Feminine Structure and Other Jouissance,”171–85. In Reading Seminar XX: Lacan’s Major Work on Love, Knowledge, and Feminine Sexuality. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002. Benjamin, Walter. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Translated by John Osborne. London: New Left Books, 1977. Bernstein, Richard J. Radical Evil: A Philosophical Interrogation. Cambridge: Polity, 2002. Boehme, Jacob. The Aurora. Edited by C. J. B. and D. H. S. Translated by John Sparrow. London: John M. Watkins, 1960.

202

Selected Bibliography

———. Personal Christianity: The Doctrines of Jacob Boehme. Introduction by Franz Hartmann. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1958. Boothby, Richard. Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology after Lacan. London: Routledge, 2001. Bradford, Alan, ed. Traherne, Thomas: Selected Poems and Prose. New York: Penguin, 1991. Caputo, John D. The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. Caputo, John D. and Michael J. Scanlon, eds. God, The Gift, and Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. Clements, A. L. The Mystical Poetry of Thomas Traherne. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969. Copjec, Joan. Imagine There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2002. Corthell, Ronald. Ideology and Desire in Renaissance Poetry: The Subject of Donne. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997. Crashaw, Richard. The Verse in English of Richard Crashaw. New York: Grove, 1949. Culverwell, Nathaniel. An Elegant and Learned Discourse of the Light Nature. Edited by Robert A. Greene and Hugh MacCallum. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1971. Curry, Walter Clyde. Milton’s Ontology, Cosmology, and Physics. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1957. Deleuze, Gilles. The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Translated by Tom Conley. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Derrida, Jacques. On the Name. Edited by Thomas Dutot. Translated by David Wood, John P. Leavey, and Ian McLeod. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995. Derrida, Jacques and Gianni Vattimo, eds. Religion. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. de Vries, Hent. Philosophy and the Turn to Religion. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Dolar, Mladen. “At First Sight.” In Gaze and Voice as Love Objects. Edited by Renata Salecl and Slavoj Zizek. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996. Donne, John. Sermons. Edited by Evelyn Potter and George Simpson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953–1962. Fink, Bruce. A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Freud, Sigmund. The Complete Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. Translated and edited by James Strachey. New York: W. W. Norton, 1966. ———. General Psychological Theory: Papers on Metapsychology. Edited by Philip Rieff. New York: Collier Books, 1963.

Selected Bibliography

203

Froula, Christine. “When Eve Reads Milton: Undoing the Canonical Economy.” In Canons. Edited by Robert von Hallberg. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Gerrity, Benignus. The Relations Between the Theory of Matter and Form and the Theory of Knowledge in the Philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America, 1936. Gilson, Etienne. Being and Some Philosophers. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1952. ———. The Christian Philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas. New York: Octagon Books, 1983. Greenblatt, Stephen. “Psychoanalysis and Renaissance Culture.” In Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture, by Stephen Greenblatt, 131–45. New York: Routledge, 1992. Gregerson, Linda. The Reformation of the Subject: Spenser, Milton, and the English Protestant Epic. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Hallward, Peter. Badiou: A Subject to Truth. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Handelman, Susan A. Fragments of Redemption: Jewish Thought and Literary Theory in Benjamin, Scholem, and Levinas. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. Hartley, David. Observations on Man. Edited by T. L. Huguelet. Gainesville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1966. Hartman, Edwin. Substance, Body and Soul: Aristotelian Investigations. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977. Heschel, A. J. The Prophets. New York: Harper and Row, 1962. Hughes, Merrit, ed. John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose. New York: Macmillan, 1957. Hutton, Sarah. “Platonism in some Metaphysical Poets: Marvell, Vaughan and Traherne.” In Platonism and the English Imagination. Edited by Anna Baldwin and Sarah Hutton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Jenkins, John J. Knowledge and Faith in Thomas Aquinas. Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 1997. Kahn, Victoria. “Hamlet or Hecuba: Carl Schmitt’s Decision.” Representations 83:1 (2003): 67–96. Kant, Immanuel. Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone. Translated by Theodore M. Greene. La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1960. Kelley, Maurice. This Great Argument: A Study of Milton’s De Doctrina Christian as a Gloss upon Paradise Lost. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1962. Kenny, Anthony. Aquinas. New York: Hill and Wang, 1980. Kierkegaard, Soren. Works of Love. Translated and edited by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995.

204

Selected Bibliography

Koerner, Joseph Leo. The Reformation of the Image. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits: A Selection. Translated by Bruce Fink. New York: W. W. Norton, 2002. ———. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. Translated by Dennis Porter. New York: W. W. Norton, 1992. ———. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. New York: W. W. Norton, 1981. ———. On Feminine Sexuality and the Limits of Love and Knowledge, Book XX, Encore 1972–1973. Translated by Bruce Fink. New York: W. W. Norton, 1998. ———. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book I, Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953–1954. Edited by Jacques Alain-Miller. Translated by John Forrester. London: W. W. Norton, 1988. ———. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954–1955. Edited by Jacques Alain-Miller. Translated by Sylvana Tomaselli. New York: W. W. Norton, 1991. Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso, 1992. Locke, John. Some Thoughts Concerning Education: The Educational Writings of John Locke. Edited by J. L. Axtell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968. Lupton, Julia Reinhard. Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Margoliouth, H. M., ed. Thomas Traherne: Centuries, Poems, and Thanksgivings. Oxford: Clarendon, 1958. Marion, Jean-Luc. God Without Being. Translated by Thomas A. Carlson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Martial, John. A Treatise of the Cross. London: n.p., 1564. Martin, Catherine Gimelli. “Fire, Ice, and Epic Entropy: The Physics and Metaphysics of Milton’s Reformed Chaos.” Milton Studies 35 (1997): 73–113. ———. “Forum.” PMLA 111:3 (1996): 49. Martz, Louis L. The Poetry of Meditation: A Study in English Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1965. Michalson, Gordon Jr. Fallen Freedom: Kant on Radical Evil and Moral Regeneration. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Edited by Gordon Teskey. New York: W. W. Norton, 2005. Moltmann, Jurgen. The Trinity and the Kingdom: The Doctrine of God. San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1991.

Selected Bibliography

205

Mozley, J. K. The Impassibility of God: A Survey of Christian Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1926. Pasnau, Robert. Theories of Cognition in the Later Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Patterson, Frank Allen, ed. The Works of John Milton. New York: Columbia University Press, 1953. Pseudo-Dionysius. The Divine Names. In Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works. Translated by Colm Luibheid. New York: Paulist, 1987. Reinhard, Kenneth. “Toward a Political Theology of the Neighbor.” In The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology. Edited by Slavoj Zizek, Eric L. Santner, and Kenneth Reinhard. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Ross, Sir David. Aristotle. London: Methuen, 1964. Rumrich, John. Milton Unbound: Controversy and Reinterpretation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Salecl, Renata. (Per)versions of Love and Hate. London: Verso, 1998. Salter, K. W. Thomas Traherne: Mystic and Poet. London: Edward Arnold, 1964. Santner, Eric L. On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. ———. The Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Scaltsas, Theodore. Substances and Universal in Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994. Schwartz, Regina. Remembering and Repeating: On Milton’s Theology and Poetics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Shuger, Debora Kuller. Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance: Religion, Politics, and the Dominant Culture. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. Silverman, Kaja. The Subject of Semiotics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983. ———. The Threshold of the Visible World. New York: Routledge, 1996. Smith, A. J., ed. John Donne: The Complete English Poems. London: Penguin. Strier, Richard. Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radicalism, and Renaissance Texts. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Traherne, Thomas. Christian Ethicks. Edited by Carol L. Marks and George Robert Guffey. New York: Cornell University Press, 1968. Verhaeghe, Paul. “Lacan’s Answer to the Classical Mind/Body Deadlock: Retracing Freud’s Beyond.” In Reading Seminar XX: Lacan’s Major Work on Love, Knowledge, and Feminine Sexuality. Edited by Suzanne Barnard and Bruce Fink. New York: State University of New York Press, 2002. von Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph. Ages of the World. Translated by Judith Norman. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997.

206

Selected Bibliography

Wade, Gladys I., ed. The Poetical Works of Thomas Traherne. New York: Cooper Square, 1965. Walsh, David. The Mysticism of Innerworldly Fulfillment: A Study of Jacob Boehme. Gainsville: University Presses of Florida, 1983. Ward, Graham. “Suffering and Incarnation.” In Suffering Religion. Edited by Robert Gibbs and Elliot R. Wolfson. London: Routledge, 2002. Weber, Samuel. Return to Freud: Jacques Lacan’s Dislocation of Psychoanalysis. Translated by Michael Levine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. ˘ iz˘ek, Slavoj. The Abyss of Freedom. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Z Press, 1997. ———. The Fragile Absolute, or Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? London, Verso, 2000. ———. The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters. London: Verso, 1996. ———. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1993. ———. The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Women and Causality. London: Verso, 1994. ———. The Plague of Fantasies. London: Verso, 1997. ———. The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2003. ———. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 1989. ———. Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993. ———. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Center of Political Onology. London: Verso, 2000. Zupanc˘ic˘, Alenka. Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan. London: Verso, 2000. ———. The Shortest Shadow: Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Two. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2003.

INDEX

Adam attraction to Eve, 123–24 chaos and, 104, 124–25, 133–34 corruption of, 116 desire and, 138–39 divinity of, 127, 135 ego-ideal and, 121–22 fall of, 131, 135–36, 137 fundamental fantasy, 134, 140 God and, 112 heroes of the lack, 134 hystericization of, 20, 138–39, 140 sexual relations of, 101 as subject, 32 superegoic law and, 129, 130 unfallen, 144 wrath God and, 109 aerial crosses, 46–47 Agamben, Giorgio idolatry and, 42 law and love dialectic, 37, 61, 178–79 sovereign exceptionalism, 1, 2, 7–10, 11, 17, 36 theories of, 3, 4, 15–16 agape, 173 all with exception and, 63 Christ and, 171, 173 dialectic of, 15–16 eros and, 65 God and, 40, 55–57, 63, 81 negative theology and, 29–30, 162

non-all without exception and, 63 unobtainability of, 14 allegory, 18, 86–88, 91, 144 all with exception, 12–15, 14, 21, 24, 58–61, 63, 64–65, 81–82, 162 Althusser, Louis, 21, 22 “The Anticipation” actuality, 157–58 felicity, 159 means-end relationship, 154–56 See also Traherne, Thomas anti-descriptive theory, 23–25 Aquinas, Saint Thomas actuality, 148–49 cognition in, 153 concept of God, 149–51, 177 substance and, 148–50 Summa Contra Gentiles, 156–57, 158, 159 arcana imperii, 35, 37 Aristotle, 147, 148–49, 151, 159 Categories, 104 Aston, Margaret, 45 Augustine, Saint, 55 The Aurora. See Boehme, Jacob Badiou, Alain empty set theory, 2, 11, 13, 172 multiple infinities, 11–12 philosophy and psychoanalysis, 1–2, 3, 4, 16 subjecthood theory, 31–32 void theory, 1–2, 11–12

208

Index

Bailey, Margaret, 105 Barnard, Suzanne, 13, 64–65 Baroque aesthetics of, 18, 69, 75–76, 93–94, 99 bodily images within, 76 Christ and, 90–91 language of, 85–86 monads, 83–85 and “Saint Mary Magdalene or The Weeper,” 72–73 theories of, 83–86 Barthes, Roland, 73 “Batter my heart” desire in, 67 jouissance, 64 law and love dialectic, 61–62 masculine dialectic of law, 60–61, 62, 64–65 non-all without exception, 17, 60, 63 trinitarianism and, 65 violence in, 63–64 See also Donne, John Being and having, 34, 96 Benjamin, Walter, 7, 8, 18, 69, 86–88 Trauerspiel, 86–87 Bertanasco, Marc, 74 biblical passages Old Testament: Exodus 3:14, 111; Deuteronomy 12:30, 43; Psalm 45:11, 66; Song of Solomon 5:2, 66 New Testatment: Matthew 5:8, 55; John 20:22, 66; 2 Corinthians, 4:6, 37, 66; Romans 3:9, 178; Romans 5:19, 60; Romans 7:15, 179; Romans 13:8–9, 179 “Blessed be the Paps which Thou hast sucked.” See Crashaw, Richard Bloom, Harold, 9

Boehme, Jacob, 19, 102, 107, 109, 110 Academia Londoniens, 105 The Aurora, 105–6 Mysterium Magnum, 105–6 Boothby, Richard, 96 Boyle, Robert, 105 Bradford, Alan, 155 Carmen deo Nostro. See Crashaw, Richard Categories. See Aristotle Centuries, 20 childhood theme, 143–44 creatureliness in, 174–75, 175–76 essence-existence distinction, 143, 167–68 God as pure Act and, 167–70 habits and, 161 multiple infinities and, 162–63 See also Traherne, Thomas chaos Adam and, 104, 124–25, 133–34 Eve and, 104, 123–25 God and, 19, 28, 102, 103–5, 107–8, 123–25, 131 non-all without exception and, 131–32 Satan and, 104 “Charitas Nimia or The Dear Bargain.” See Crashaw, Richard Christ allegory and, 88 as Baroque object, 90–91 birth of, 89–90 desires of, 52, 62, 96, 97, 98–99 embodiment of, 16, 134 gaze of, 72, 75 imagery of, 45, 46, 66, 91–92 laws of, 60–61 masochism, 79–80 as Other, 18, 54

Index sublimation, 3, 19, 82, 94–95 trinitarianism and, 62, 65–66 virtue and, 33, 51 wounds of, 92–93 Christian Ethicks creatureliness in, 175 desires, 162 essence-existence distinction, 175–76 God as pure Act, 142–43, 177–78, 179 habits in, 161 language of, 159–60 void of love, 162 See also Traherne, Thomas Citizen Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology. See Lupton, Julia Reinhard Clements, Arthur L., 65–66, 147–48 The Mystical Poetry of Thomas Traherne, 144–45 Commonplace Book. See Traherne, Thomas courtly love, 78–82, 97, 132 Crashaw, Richard agape, 81–82 Baroque aesthetics in, 2, 18, 28 bodily image, 77 courtly love, 78–80 divine pathos and, 4 genuine love and, 98 imagery in, 74, 75, 77, 91 immanence and, 69, 84, 86, 87, 88, 91, 95 jouissance in, 16–17 martyrdom in, 82–83 masochism, 79–80 meditative tradition of, 73–74, 75 monads in, 88–89 non-all without exception in, 69, 83 Other in, 2 phallic exceptionalism in, 83

209

theory of the gaze in, 18–19, 70–71 Works: “Blessed be the Paps which Thou hast sucked,” 95–97 Carmen deo Nostro, 89–91 “Charitas Nimia or The Dear Bargain,” 98–99 “Flaming Heart,” 77, 78–82, 98 “A Hymn to the Name and Honor of the Admirable Saint Teresa,” 77, 82–83, 97–98 “In the Glorious Epiphany of our Lord God,” 91 “In the Holy Nativity of our Lord God,” 90 “On the Bleeding Wounds of our Crucified Lord,” 99 “On the wounds of our Crucified Lord,” 92–93 “Our Lord in his Circumcision to his Father,” 94–95 “Saint Mary Magdalene or The Weeper,” 71–76 “Sung as by the Shepherds,” 73–74 “To the Name Above every Name the Name of Jesus: A Hymn,” 89 creatureliness, 9, 27, 31, 90, 174–76 “The Cross” idolatry in, 17–18, 33, 34, 44 masochism in, 54–55 self-objectification in, 51–53, 54 semiotics of, 48–50, 51 symbolic function of, 52–53 See also Donne, John crosses, 46–48 Culverwell, Richard Discourse of the Light of Nature, 152

210

Index

d’Anvers, Hadewijch, 77 Deleuze, Gilles, 3, 16, 18, 69, 84, 86, 88 The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, 18, 83–86 “The Demonstration.” See Traherne, Thomas Derrida, Jacques, 29 desire, rhetoric of Adam and, 138–39 Christ and, 52, 62, 96, 97, 98–99 Eve and, 103 God and, 34, 51, 52, 53, 67, 128, 139, 157–58, 165–67 language of, 67, 80, 162 of Other, 5–6, 50, 51, 52, 75, 96, 118 void of, 7 diabolical evil, 19, 113, 115–17 Ding, das, 5, 19–20, 70, 79, 82, 128, 132, 133 Discourse of the Light of Nature. See Culverwell, Richard divine pathos, 27–28 Dolar, Mladen, 6 Donne, John agape, 34, 55–56, 63 all with exception in, 60–62 excesses in, 19 idolatry in, 17–18, 33–34, 42–44 jouissance in, 16–17 law and love dialectic, 178 masochism in, 54–55 negative theology in, 55–56 non-all without exception in, 63–67 Other in, 2, 3 political theology in, 17–18, 28, 33, 34–36, 40–41 Protestantism of, 73 semiotics in, 17–18, 48–50, 51–54 sermons of, 38, 40, 44, 55–56

sovereign exceptionalism in, 4, 8, 20, 33, 36–38, 43–44 subjecthood in, 17, 32, 38–39, 41 subversiveness in, 41 and trinitarianism, 38–39, 41 Works: “Batter my heart,” 17, 60, 61 “The Cross,” 17–18, 33, 34, 44, 48–50, 51–53, 54 “Father part of his double interest,” 60–61 “Good Friday,” 17–18, 44 Holy Sonnets, 34, 55, 178 “Wilt thou love God, as he thee?,” 63 Drury, John, 105 Eckhart, Meister, 29 ego formation, 50–51 empty set theory, 2, 11, 13, 172 ethics of psychoanalysis, 2, 7, 15, 19, 30, 32, 114–15, 128 Ethics of the Real. See Zupanc˘ ic˘, Alenka Eve Chaos and, 104, 123–25, 131 corruption of, 116, 137 das Ding, 132 desire of, 103 divinity of, 127–28, 131, 135 drive and, 138, 139–40 ego-ideal, 122 embodiment of, 19–20, 127 excesses of, 123–24 fundamental fantasy of, 127, 134, 136, 140 God and, 112 heroes of the lack, 32, 119, 125, 134 maternity and, 137, 139 objet a, 123, 125, 127 primary narcissism, 119–20, 121–22, 123 sexual relations of, 101

Index sublimation of, 122–23, 132–33 superegoic law and, 129, 130 fantasy fundamental, 81, 83, 127, 134, 136, 140 phallus anxiety and , 50–51 subject’s jouissance, 40 “Father part of his double interest” all with exception, 60–61, 63 law and love dialectic, 60–62 non-all without exception, 63 trinitarianism and, 62, 65, 67 See also Donne, John female jouissance, 82–83 Fink, Bruce, 10, 79 First Century, 162–64 See also Centuries; Traherne, Thomas “Flaming Heart” agape, 81–82 bodily image, 77 courtly love, 78–80 genuine love and, 98 masochism, 79–80 See also Crashaw, Richard The Fold: Leibniz and The Baroque. See Deleuze, Gilles The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. See Lacan, Jacques Fourth Century, 169–70 See also Centuries; Traherne, Thomas ˘ iz˘ek, The Fragile Absolute. See Z Slavoj Freud, Sigmund, 8, 12, 51, 122 “On Narcissism,” 120–21 Totem and Taboo, 59 fulfillment, 6, 70, 84, 137, 149, 179 fundamental fantasy, 83, 127, 134, 140

211

gaze, theory of, 5–6, 18–19, 70–71, 74–75 genuine love, 98 Gilson, Etienne, 150 God actualization of, 104, 105–7, 127, 129–30, 151–52, 157–58 agape and, 29–30, 57–58 all with exception and, 13, 63, 143 analysis of, 24–25 Being and, 56–57, 150–51 chaos and, 102, 103–5, 107–8, 123, 124–25, 131 das Ding, 19–20 desires of, 34, 51, 52, 53, 67, 138, 139, 157–58, 165–67 divine law of, 4, 27–28, 37, 109–10, 126 empty sets and, 11, 13 enthrallment and, 66–67 full integration and, 111–12 fundamental fantasy, 32, 140 heroes of the lack, 134 image functions and, 45, 46 jouissance and, 55, 64 means-end relationship, 154–55, 156–57 multiple infinities and, 12, 20, 164–65 nature of, 28, 31, 55–56, 87, 112, 118–19, 137, 147–48, 149, 175–76 non-all without exception, 17, 63 and objet a, 172 Other and, 2, 7, 16, 54, 55, 102, 127 as pure Act, 142–43, 150–51, 167–71, 172–73, 177–78, 179 self-alienation of, 3, 112 semiotics and, 24, 111–12

212

Index

God—continued sovereign exceptionalism and, 26, 29, 33, 34–46, 37–38, 40–41, 102–3, 116, 130–31, 135 superegoic law, 129–34 trinitarianism and, 3, 38–39, 41, 42, 64–66, 67, 171–72 wrath of, 63–64, 82, 108–9, 136–37 God Without Being. See Marion, Jean-Luc “Good Friday” God’s desire, 53 idolatry, 17, 18, 34, 44 masochism, 54–55 political theology, 33 symbolic register, 53–54, 55 See also Donne, John Greenblatt, Stephen, 30–31 Gregerson, Linda, 122 Haak, Theodor, 105 Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance. See Shuger, Debora Hammill, Graham, 96–97 Hartley, David, 142, 146 Hartlib, Samuel, 105 Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. See Laclau, Ernesto; Mouffe, Chantal Herbert, George, 73 “Love Unknown,” 74 heroism of lack, 2, 32, 119, 125, 134 Holy Ghost, 38, 39, 41, 56, 57, 58, 65–66, 95, 168 Holy Sonnets. See Donne, John The Hostage (Claudel), 125–26 Hume, David, 111 Hutton, Sara, 141

“Hymn to the Name and Honor of the Admirable Saint Teresa.” See Crashaw, Richard identification and mirroring, 6, 50, 71, 120 Idolatrie of the Cross (anonymous), 46 idolatry, 17–18, 33–34, 42–43, 45–46 imagery, 44–46 imaginary order, 4–5, 34, 50, 55, 71, 79, 96–97, 102, 110 immanence, 13, 84–85, 86, 95, 164 “In the Holy Nativity of our Lord God.” See Crashaw, Richard James I, King of England, 25–26, 35 Jesus. See Christ jouissance of the body (feminine), 69, 76–77, 82–83, 93–94 of desire, 15 of the drives (masculine), 64, 69 fantasy and, 40 and father, 13, 81 of God, 16–17, 55, 64 of Other, 15, 64, 138 of phallic, 15 sovereign, 9, 10 of subject, 59 See also desire, rhetoric of Kant, Immanuel, 19, 102–3, 112–13, 114, 115 Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, 112–13 Kenny, Anthony, 170 Kierkegaard, Soren Works of Love, 61 Koerner, Joseph Leo, 45 Kuchar, Gary, 67

Index The Rhetoric of Divine Subjection in Early Modern England, 20–21 Lacan, Jacques agalma, 136 agape and, 65 all with exception and, 24, 58, 59, 81–82 Baroque aesthetics and, 83, 93–94 being to having, 18, 34, 50, 96 courtly love and, 79, 81–82, 132 das Ding and, 70, 128, 132 desire, notion of, 6–7, 32, 54 ego-ideal and, 120, 122 enigmatic thing, 58 ethics of the real, 103 extimate, 6, 71 forced choice, notion of, 52 The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, 70 fundamental fantasy and, 21, 31, 83, 134 gaze, theory of, 5, 18, 70–71, 74, 75 genuine love and, 98 good and evil, 132, 133 heroism of the lack and, 2 hystericization and, 51, 52 imaginary order, 4–5, 44, 96 infinitude and, 94 jouissance and, 10, 93–94 masochism and, 54, 79, 80 meditative symbolization, 75 metapsychology and, 3–4 mirror stage and, 50–51, 120 mystics and, 76–77 narcissism and, 120, 122 non-all without exception and, 12–14, 34, 58, 60, 65, 81–82, 94 and objet a, 2, 7, 24, 70–71, 123, 126

213

point de capitoin and, 23, 25 Real and, 2, 4, 5, 7, 10, 119 sexuation and, 14, 58, 80, 81–82, 97, 134 sublimation and, 62, 132 superegoic law and, 129 symbolic death and, 140 void and real, 7 Laclau, Ernesto, 35 Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 23 Leibniz, G. W., 85 Monadology, 83–84 Lewalski, Barbara, 73 Locke, John Some Thoughts Concerning Education, 142, 146 “Love Unknown.” See Herbert, George Lupton, Julia Reinhard, 9 Citizen Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology, 27 Luther, Martin Table-Talk, 28 Magdalene, Mary, 69, 71–72, 74, 75, 76, 97 Marion, Jean-Luc, 29–30 God Without Being, 56–58 Martial, John Treatise on the Cross, 47 Martin, Catherine, 131–32 martyrdom, 82–83, 97–98, 126 Martz, Louis, 73–74 Marx, Karl, 12 masochism, 54–55, 79–80 master-signifiers, 23–24, 26–27, 49, 50, 138, 140 material crosses, 46, 47, 51 meditative symbolization, 73–74, 75 Milton, John Arianism and, 3, 134 Arminianism of, 4, 16–17 assessments of Christianity, 102

214

Index

Behmism and, 105 ontological study of, 2, 19, 28 See also Adam; Eve; God; Paradise Lost; Satan mirror stage, 6, 50, 71, 120 Moltmann, Jurgen, 57 Trinity and the Kingdom, 28–29 Monadology. See Leibniz, G. W. monads, 83–85, 88–89 Mouffe, Chantal, 25 Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, 23 “My Spirit,” 149 actualized existence of God, 151–52 childhood theme, 146–46 cognition in, 152–54 felicity, 159 See also Traheme, Thomas Mysterium Magnum. See Boehme, Jacob The Mystical Poetry of Thomas Traherne. See Clements, Arthur L. narcissism, 119–20, 121–22, 123 negative theology, 3, 25, 29, 63, 73, 88, 162, 164, 167 neo-scholasticism, 142–46, 152, 159 Nicholas of Cusa, 29 Nietzsche, Friedrich Protestant ascetic ideal, 9–10 non-all without exception, 12–15, 13–15, 16, 17, 20, 21, 34, 58–60, 63–67, 69, 77, 83, 94, 95–99, 125, 162 objet a, 2, 6–7, 70, 95, 123, 125, 126, 127, 172 ˘ iz˘ek, Slavoj On Belief. See Z On Creaturely Life. See Santner, Eric

“On Narcissism.” See Freud, Sigmund “On the Bleeding Wounds of our Crucified Lord.” See Crashaw, Richard “On the wounds of our Crucified Lord.” See Crashaw, Richard Other courtly love and, 79 desire of, 5–6, 50, 51, 52, 75, 96, 118 God and, 2, 16, 102 incompleteness of, 115, 129 jouissance and, 15, 64, 138 lack of, 32, 126 of the Other, 60, 82, 83, 115, 129 separation from, 128–29 theory of the gaze, 70–71 void and, 2, 22–23, 174 “Our Lord in his Circumcision to his Father.” See Crashaw, Richard Paradise Lost (Milton) chaos in, 103–5, 107–8, 123–25, 133–34 Christianity and, 102 das Ding and, 128, 132, 133 diabolical evil and, 101–2, 115–17 embodiment in, 128–29 full integration in, 109–11, 111–12 heroism of the lack, 125–26 jouissance in, 125 language of, 112 narcissism and, 119–23 objet a, 125, 127, 138 omnipotence and, 16, 108, 118 semiotics of, 110–12 sublimation, 122–23, 132–33 superegoic law, 129, 130–34 wrath of God, 108–9 See also Adam; Eve; God; Satan parousia, 9, 39

Index Peirce, C. S., 17, 46–47 phallic economy, 95 phallic exceptionalism, 83 phallic function, 12–13, 58, 59, 65, 77, 81 phallic jouissance, 15, 64 phallus, 50, 52, 59, 96 ˘ iz˘ek, The Plague of Fantasies. See Z Slavoj Platonism, 141–42, 147–48 point de capitoin, 23, 25 political theory, 14–15, 17–18, 28, 33, 34–36, 40–41, 41 psychoanalysis, ethics of, 2, 7, 15, 19, 30, 32, 114–15, 128 The Psychotheology of Everyday Life. See Santner, Eric The Puppet and the Dwarf. See ˘ iz˘ek, Slavoj Z ravishment, 66–67 “The Recovery.” See Traherne, Thomas Reinhard, Kenneth, 14–15, 59 Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone. See Kant, Immanuel The Rhetoric of Divine Subjection in Early Modern England. See Kuchar, Gary Rosenzweig, Franz, 8, 9 Rumrich, John, 124–25 “Saint Mary Magdalene or The Weeper.” See Crashaw, Richard Salecl, Renata, 138, 139–40 Salter, K. W., 144 Santner, Eric On Creaturely Life, 9 jouissance, 9, 10 parousia, 9, 39–40 political theology and, 4, 11, 95 The Psychotheology of Everyday Life, 8–10 sovereign exception and, 17, 42

215

subjectivity and, 31 symbolization in, 34 undeadening and, 8–9, 39–40 Sarte, Jean-Paul, 70 Satan chaos and, 104 evil of, 19, 101–3, 115–17 God and, 67, 112, 130 heroes of the lack, 134 as subject, 32, 118 submission of, 116, 117 Scheffler, Johann (Angelus Silesius), 29 Schelling, F. W. J, 19, 102, 109–10 Schmitt, Carl, 7, 36 Scholem, Gersham, 87 Schwartz, Regina, 128, 133 scripture. See biblical passages Second Century. See Traherne, Thomas set theory, 2, 11, 13, 172 sexuation, 14, 51, 58–60, 80, 81–82, 97, 134 The Shortest Shadow. See Zupanc˘ ic˘, Alenka Shuger, Debora, 17, 24 Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance, 34–36 signifier, 12–13, 23, 47, 49, 51, 54, 93, 94, 138 master-signifiers, 23–24, 26–27, 49, 50, 138, 140 and signified, 47, 49, 128, 132 Silesius, Angelus (Johann Scheffler), 29, 76–77 Some Thoughts Concerning Education. See Locke, John sovereign exceptionalism, 1, 2, 7–10, 11, 17, 25–26, 36 spiritual crosses, 46, 47–48 Steps to the Temple. See Crashaw, Richard Strier, Richard, 4 subjectivity, 6, 30–32

216

Index

sublimation, 3, 19, 62, 82, 94–95, 122–23, 132–33 The Sublime Object of Ideology. See ˘ iz˘ek, Slavoj Z substance, 104, 149–50 Summa Contra Gentiles. See Aquinas, Saint Thomas “Sung as by the Shepherds.” See Crashaw, Richard symbolic crosses, 47–48 symbolic investitures, 8–9, 39–40 symbolic realm, 34, 55, 102, 110–11, 138 Table-Talk. See Luther, Martin Taylor, Edward, 73 telos, 6–7, 70, 84, 137, 149, 179 Teresa d’Avila bodily image of, 76, 77, 78–79, 83 das Ding, 82 desires of, 80 divine relationship with Christ, 80–81 female jouissance, 77, 82–83 as martyr, 69, 82–83, 97–98 sexuation of, 97 Teskey, Gordon, 103–4 theory of the gaze, 5–6, 18–19, 70–71, 74–75 theory of the void, 1–2, 5, 6, 11, 12, 24, 87, 88, 96, 107, 123, 172, 173 Third Century. See Traherne, Thomas Totem and Taboo. See Freud, Sigmund “To the Name Above every Name the Name of Jesus: A Hymn.” See Crashaw, Richard Traherne, Thomas actualization in, 148–49 allegories in, 144 associationism in, 142–43

and Biblical knowledge, 161 childhood theme in, 143–48 creatureliness in, 174–76 desires, and rhetoric of, 158, 165–67 God as pure Act, 28, 167–69, 170–71, 172–73 habits in, 160, 161 metaethics of, 174–79 multiple infinities and, 2, 12, 20, 164–65 nature of God and, 16–17 neo-scholasticism and, 141, 142–43, 146, 152, 159 Platonism, 141–42, 147–48 Thomism of, 20, 142–43, 158 trinitarianism of, 171–72 virtue and, 159–60, 161 Works: “The Anticipation,” 154–56, 157–58, 159 Centuries, 20, 143, 145 Christian Ethicks, 142, 159–60, 161, 162, 175–76, 177–78, 179 Commonplace Book, 91, 141 “The Demonstration,” 155–56 First Century, 162–64 Fourth Century, 169–70 “My Spirit,” 146–46, 149, 151–54, 159 “The Recovery,” 155–56 Second Century, 168–69 Third Century, 143–44, 145–46 transcendence, 11, 13, 45, 83, 84–85, 86, 91, 93, 94, 95, 174 Trauerspiel survey, 86–87 See also Benjamin, Walter Treatise on the Cross. See Martial, John Trimpey, John, 144 trinitarianism, 3, 28–29, 38–39, 41, 62, 64–66, 67, 171–72

Index Trinity and the Kingdom. See Moltmann, Jurgen undeadening, 8–9, 39–40 ungrund and God, 105–7 Vaughan, Henry, 73 Verhaeghe, Paul, 94 void, theory of, 1–2, 5, 6–7, 11, 12, 24, 87, 88, 96, 107, 123, 172, 173 von Birken, Sigmund, 88 Ward, Graham, 28 “Wilt thou love God, as he thee?” See Donne, John Wolfflin, Heinrich, 18, 69–70, 84 Works of Love. See Kierkegaard, Soren ˘ iz˘ek, Slavoj Z alienation and, 19 all with exception, 12, 14, 58, 63, 162 On Belief, 102 das ding, 5–6 divine excess and, 2, 43, 67, 104 empty signifier and, 13 extimate, 6–7 The Fragile Absolute, 102 gap in Absolute, 58 gaze theory and, 5–6, 18–19, 74–75 heroes of the lack, 134–35 jouissance, 15, 64–65 and law-agape dialectic, 15–16, 58, 61

217

and metapsychology, 3–7, 11, 109 and mirror stage, 6, 50 non-all without exception, 12–15, 16, 17, 20, 21, 34, 58, 59, 63, 64–65, 69, 77, 83, 94, 95, 125, 162 objet a, 2, 7, 172 phallic function and, 58, 59–60 The Plague of Fantasies, 101–2 The Puppet and the Dwarf, 102 Real, 5, 7 sexuation and, 51, 81–82 sublime, 3, 10, 19, 29, 30 The Sublime Object of Ideology, 5 suspension of love, 179 and symbolic castration, 13, 15, 50, 64, 101 ugliness, primacy of, 110–11 universality, claim of, 21–22 violence of Christian love, 63–64 void and real, 1, 4–6, 7 Zupanc˘ ic˘ , Alenka de-psychologizing and, 114–15, 117–18 disunity and, 30 ethics of psychoanalysis, 7, 32 Ethics of the Real, 102–3 heroism of the lack, 2, 103, 119, 125–28, 134 jouissance, 10 Kantianism and, 19, 102, 112, 113, 114–15 The Shortest Shadow, 10 superegoic law and, 129, 130–31 void and real, 6 void of desire, 7, 125–27