Literature, Religion, and Postsecular Studies Lori Branch, Series Editor
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literature, religion, and postsecular studies lori branch, series editor All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. secular scriptures modern theological poetics in the wake of dante william franke The Ohio State University Press • Columbus All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. Copyright © 2016 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Franke, William, author. Secular scriptures : modern theological poetics in the wake of Dante / William Franke. pages cm — (Literature, religion, and postsecular studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8142-1292-9 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Religion and poetry. 2. Religion and literature. 3. Dante Alighieri, 1265–1321—Reli- gion. I. Title. II. Series: Literature, religion, and postsecular studies. PN1077.F68 2015 809.1'9382—dc23 Cover design by Lisa Force Text design by Juliet Williams Type set in Adobe Sabon Printed by Thomson-Shore, Inc. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the Ameri- can National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48-1992. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. In the holy of holies, where religion and poetry are married, stands Dante as high priest and consecrates all modern art to its calling. —F. W. J. Schelling, “Über Dante in philosophischer Beziehung” All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. “In Secular Scriptures, William Franke rejects the received wisdom that sacred and secular are essentially opposed to one another. He does this by asking us to think about where these alleged oppo- sitions in fact converge—in a venerable Western literary tradition. Surveying a broad spectrum of works written ‘in the wake of Dante,’ he argues that ‘self reflexivity,’ subjective human experience and reflection, has become for modern poets the locus of revelation, a form of scripture. Building on his extensive previous explorations of ineffability, ‘on what cannot be said,’ he uncovers the richness— both literary and philosophical—of inventive language that speaks in order to reveal ‘the spiritual mysteries of the letter,’ to gain access to what ultimately lies beyond the reach of words.” —Peter Hawkins, Yale Divinity School “I read Secular Scriptures almost without putting the work down. Readers in fields from fin-de-siècle decadence to ‘post-post- modernism’ in poetry, especially those with interest in religion and literature studies, will be delighted by the way Dante is recast here to preface twentieth- and twenty-first-century developments. Franke’s way of thinking backwards from recent postsecular theory is beguiling and transformative; the movement forward in the final chapter, via Dante’s emerging again at the end as at the beginning, is really rather beautiful.” —Romana Huk, University of Notre Dame “William Franke has written, in a luminous prose, an enthralling book about a pivotal issue in literary studies: the esthetics of vision- ary literature. The questions Franke raises—philosophy of language, the nature of mystical insights, their modes of representation, and the revelations of poetic knowledge—find in Dante, in the Romantic poets of Europe, and in the radical philosophical speculations of the twentieth century a fascinating articulation through which the reader can experience the depths of the high culture of the West.” —Giuseppe Mazzotta, Yale University All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. contents Preface and Acknowledgments • ix Introduction 1 1 Dante and the Secularization of Religion through Literature 9 2 “Enditynges of Worldly Vanitees”: Truth and Poetry in Chaucer as Compared with Dante 43 3 Prophecy Eclipsed: Hamlet as a Tragedy of Knowledge 70 4 Blind Prophecy: Milton’s Figurative Mode in Paradise Lost and in Some Early Poems 103 5 The Logic of Infinity in European Romanticism: Blake or Leopardi? 120 6 The Linguistic Turning of the Symbol: Baudelaire and His French Symbolist Heirs 143 7 “The Missing All”: Emily Dickinson’s Apophatic Poetics 169 8 The Dialectical Logic of William Butler Yeats’s Byzantium Poems 189 9 The Religious Vocation of Secular Literature: Dante and Postmodern Thought 207 Bibliography • 231 Index • 246 All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. preface and acknowledgments Most of these essays have been published previously in some form, although sometimes in drastically abbreviated versions, and in most cases they have been substantially rewritten. They have, moreover, been fine- tuned in order to connect with and pick up on one another, but each nonetheless remains a discrete and self-sufficient reflection in its own right. There has been no attempt to make them uniform in approach or in research methods. They have been selected and integrated on the basis of their bearing on the topic and on the overarching ideas that organize the volume. Each in its own different way bears witness to the evolving, common predicament of theological poetics in the modern age. Never- theless, it is only by appearing together as a book that the full coherence and extended intellectual roots of their distinctive approach to criticism as speculative philosophy and theology becomes visible for the first time. Translations from other languages into English, unless otherwise indi- cated, are my own. I generally give the original text as well in parentheses or in notes. This practice begins from the epigraph to the book, which is taken from Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, Sämmtliche Werke, ed. Karl Friedrich August Schelling, Part I, vol. 5 (Stuttgart/Augsburg: Cotta, 1859), where it reads: ix All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. x • Preface and Acknowledgments Im Allerheiligsten, Wo Religion und Poesie verbündet, steht Dante als Hohepriester und weiht die ganze moderne Kunst für ihre Bestimmung ein. (152) Schelling’s 1803 essay “Über Dante in philosophischer Beziehung” appeared originally in the Kritisches Journal der Philosophie, edited jointly by Hegel and Schelling, and is now available in an edition by Ste- fan Dietsche (Leipzig: Reclam, 1981), 412–17. Special thanks are due to Lori Branch for her encouragement of this project from the beginning and for her contributions to shaping its final realization. I am grateful as well to the publishers for permission to adapt material from the following publications: “Dante and the Secularization of Religion through Literature.” Religion and Literature 45/1 (2013): 1–31. “‘Enditynges of Worldly Vanitees’: Truth and Poetry in Chaucer as Com- pared with Dante.” The Chaucer Review 34, no. 1 (1999): 87–106. This article is used by permission of The Pennsylvania State University Press. Copyright © 1999. “Prophecy Eclipsed: Hamlet as a Tragedy of Knowledge.” In Core Texts in Conversation. Eds. Jane Kelley Rodeheffer, David Sokolowski, and J. Scott Lee. Lanham-New York-Oxford: University Press of America, 2000. 149–54. “Blind Prophecy: Milton’s Figurative Mode in Paradise Lost.” In Through a Glass Darkly: Essays in the Religious Imagination. Ed. John Haw- ley. New York: Fordham University Press, 1996. 87–103. “The Logic of Infinity: European Romanticism and the Question of Gia- como Leopardi.” Comparatio: Revue Internationale de Littérature Comparée 1 (1990): 69–82. “The Linguistic Turning of the Symbol: Baudelaire and His French Sym- bolist Heirs.” In Baudelaire and the Poetics of Modernity. Ed. Patricia Ward. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2000. 28–40. “‘The Missing All’: Emily Dickinson’s Apophatic Poetics.” Christianity and Literature 58/1 (2008): 61–80. “The Dialectical Logic of Yeats’s Byzantium Poems.” Yeats-Eliot Review 15, no. 3 (Summer 1998): 23–32. “The Religious Vocation of Secular Literature: Dante and Postmodern Thought.” In Letteratura italiana e religione: Atti del convengo inter- All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. Preface and Acknowledgments • xi nationale (Italian Studies–University of Toronto 11–13 ottobre 2012). Ed. Salvatore Bancheri and Francesco Guardini (Florence: Franco Cesati, Editore, forthcoming). All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. All Rights Reserved. Copyright © The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Batch 1. introduction I. The Argument The essays in this volume demonstrate ways in which secularization is intrinsic to theological revelation, particularly in Christian tradition, and they highlight the role that literature plays in the realization of such rev- elation in the incarnate form of the word. God’s coming into the world is the “secular” movement par excellence: the divine becoming humanly incarnate defines the revolutionary, world-historical event of the Chris- tian religion. Secularism, however, also (and more typically) means the exclusion of God from the world. Our modern society stands almost com- pletely under the sway of scientific and technological revolutions that can seem to undermine theological explanations in terms of ostensibly other- worldly powers and to supplant them by this-worldly accounts in terms of material or empirical