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Renouncing Sex and the Self: Asceticism in Early Modern England

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Renouncing Sex and the Self: Asceticism in Early Modern England RENOUNCING SEX AND THE SELF: ASCETICISM IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND BY PATRICK JOHN MCGRATH DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2015 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Professor Feisal Mohamed, Chair Professor Curtis Perry Associate Professor Catharine Gray Associate Professor Lori Newcomb Professor Robert Markley Abstract At first glance, it might seem that ascetic practices disappeared in England with the introduction of Protestantism. With the monasteries demolished, priests encouraged to marry, and the laity cautioned against superstitious practices of mortification, how can there be a cultural history of asceticism after the English Reformation? Asceticism is one attitude towards the relationship between body and soul. But that relationship conjures, and was read in the early modern period as implicating, other binaries: word and meaning; letter and spirit; form and content; material and immaterial; sign and signified. Since these binaries were in constant recalibration by early modern religion, poetry, aesthetics, and philosophy (to name but a few), asceticism remained not just current, but exigent. The ascetic privileging of soul over body, the ascetic refinement of the soul through bodily austerity, and the ascetic suspicion of carnality were invoked any time words were purged of fleshly connotations (the plain style), an elaborate formal process sought to perfect content (metaphysical poetry), materiality impeded the immaterial (Neoplatonism), and sign stood in uncertain relation to signified (scriptural exegesis). How asceticism negotiates body and soul has relevance to these other relationships, and they to it. Since, for instance, the dynamic tension between form and content, word and meaning, animates literature, the ascetic negotiation of body and soul directly impacts literary aesthetics. By recovering that impact, along with how ascetic attitudes inform other theological and philosophical discourses, I show the need for a cultural history of asceticism after the English Reformation. A central aim of this project is furthermore to expose a degree of incommensurability between pre- and modern eras by recovering an ascetic subjectivity in all its challenging antipathy for modernity. In its anticipation of contemporary ideas about subjectivity, the body, and sexuality, early modern England has at times been made to look like a viable precursor to ii modernity. In the pages of this study, however, self-respect was a Satanic impulse that had to be annihilated; the body was not celebrated, but beaten into subjection; and, feeling circumscribed by sexual desire, ascetics sought relief in pain, solitude, and deformity. More challenging still, this mental and physical deprivation was not just experienced but embraced, for asceticism also transvalues what defines beauty, pleasure, and the self. To study asceticism is, therefore, to reclaim a sense of the discrete historical particularity of early modernity. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………………………1 CHAPTER 1: RECONSIDERING LAUD: PURITANS AND ANGLICAN ASCETICISM……………………………………………………………………………44 CHAPTER 2: ANGLICAN ASCETICISM AT THE CAROLINE COURT…………………………………………………………………………………..87 CHAPTER 3: BEYOND BINARIES: ASCETICISM AND THE POETRY OF DOCTRINAL HETEROGENEITY……………………………………………………137 CHAPTER 4: LYCIDAS AND LAUD………………………………………………....171 CHAPTER 5: A RELIGIOUS HOUSE: MARVELL’S UPON APPLETON HOUSE, LAUDIANISM, AND EXODUS………………………………………………………227 CHAPTER 6: LEAVING IT ALL: THE PILGRIM’S PROGRESS AND PURITAN SELF-DENIAL…………………………………………………………………………259 EPILOGUE……………………………………………………………………………..284 BIBLIOGRAPHY………………………………………………………………………288 iv Introduction Understanding asceticism is integral to understanding early modern culture. Recovering the cultural contest around it has implications for the way we understand early modern literature, politics, aesthetics, and religion: it allows us to see afresh the lines drawn (and blurred) between puritan and Anglican, court and anti-court cultures, and provides a new interpretive lens through which to view much of the period’s expressive literature. Reading asceticism back into early modern culture enables this project to offer new interpretations of the work of John Milton, Andrew Marvell, and John Bunyan, along with many non-canonical authors; it allows for an intervention into the historiography of the early Stuart Church; and (among other things), it facilitates a new conception of what could constitute beauty in early modern culture. At the heart of this dissertation is the novel historical claim that the Laudian Church valued corporal acts of severe asceticism, including virginity, mortification, and monasticism. The valuation was novel in post-Reformation England, and it directly challenged puritanism and the puritan conception of asceticism. Anglican asceticism found affirmation in patristic ascetic writing, anti-Calvinism, a general détente with the Roman Catholic Church, and, as we shall discuss at length, the “beauty of holiness” (Psalms 96:9). Severe forms of ascetic practice were depicted by Anglicans as a way of purifying—and therefore beautifying—the soul from the dross of carnality and sinful flesh. Though the chancels with sunbursts and lavish reredos of Laudian ceremony may seem diametrically opposed to the gaunt figures of emaciated ascetics, this project theorizes their intimate involution. In contrast, for puritans asceticism was largely an interior, spiritual process that did not manifest itself in corporal acts. Moderate fasting was the most severe form of corporal asceticism the godly were able to countenance. Even then, as we shall see in chapter one, some 1 puritans try to conceive of fasting without the body. As a means of pacifying God’s wrath, rigorous corporal acts were, as William Gouge (1575-1653) inveighs, “vile and abominable in Gods sight.”1 Puritan asceticism consisted of spiritual self-denial, not bodily self-deprivation. In the asceticism of the godly there is an avoidance of any corporal emphasis that might risk reifying a spiritual process in the idolatrous externality of the body. Virginity becomes, not a physical state perpetually maintained, but a holiness of soul whose sacrality can persist regardless of anatomical reality. The title of this dissertation alludes, therefore, to the Anglican conception of asceticism as corporal (renouncing sex) and the puritan as spiritual (renouncing the self). In the physicality of sex and the interiority of the self, these two modes of ascetic definition are expressed. While this dissertation is, in some ways, a tale of two asceticisms, the narration of each will not be equal. I will focus on Anglican asceticism simply because it occasions and provokes the greatest cultural, religious, and literary response. For example, Anglican ascetic practice helped to mobilize—and radicalize—puritan objections to the Laudian Church in the years preceding the English Civil Wars. The Laudian view of asceticism—with its emphasis on the single life and the world-denying austerities of mortification and monasticism—cut to the quick of a fundamental institution of Reformed, and especially zealous, Protestantism: the sanctity of marriage. For puritans, marriage was a vocation, and the due benevolence it entailed was to be treated with all the joyous assiduity that its designation as a calling required. To place virginity above marriage, or to agitate for singleness as more appropriate to the holiness of the priesthood, was to detract from matrimony as, in the words of Thomas Becon, “the best kynde of lyfe.”2 In 1 William Gouge, Gods three arrovves plague, famine, svvord, in three treatises (London, 1631), 45. See also Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1999), 142-50, for discussion of godly animus towards propitiatory corporal acts. 2 Thomas Becon, A new postil (London, 1566), fo. 93v. 2 the 1620s and 30s, the Archbishop of Canterbury advocating the “popish” idea of clerical celibacy, the indignity of holy marriage being referred to by Anglicans as a mere “avocation,” and the Church of England’s renewed effort to valorize monasticism (and, coincidentally, regain monastic lands alienated at the dissolution), directly challenged this life’s designation as “best.”3 Though the motivations for the Anglican Church embracing asceticism are various, three main points of origin will be useful to introduce. Anglicans sought precedent for many of their ascetic beliefs in the writings of the Church Fathers, especially Jerome and the Greek Fathers. In so doing, they plundered a corpus of ascetic writings that Protestants had, since the Reformation, often regarded with suspicion if not outright derision. Asceticism helped to effect, then, the intellectual coup the Laudian Church staged by shifting the intellectual energy of the English Church away from Geneva and Zurich to Alexandria and even Syria. In addition to patristicism, the Laudian emphasis on asceticism found corroboration in Arminianism. The belief that one could remain virginal, suppressing lust and carnal desire, exhibited a much more optimistic view of human nature and the will’s efficacy than Calvinists possessed. A more capacious sense of the will accords well with the anti-Calvinism Nicholas Tyacke has found central to Laudianism.4 To put it simply, for Anglicans, asceticism became a demonstration of the will’s power; for puritans,
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