THE GLASS

NUMBER 33 AUTUMN 2020

Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year Valentine Cunningham 4

Saints under an empty sky – Time and Space in Camus’s La Peste Marie Kawthar Daouda 10

Good and Evil in Eliot’s Lett ers to Emily Hale Jewel Spears Brooker 19

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit David Jasper 26

Seeking Light: Ruskin after Jesus Andrew Tate 32

Pilgrim Plays for a New Elizabethan Age Margaret Wiedemann Hunt 39

The dramatic transformation of Samson Agonistes Irene Montori 48

‘So They Say’: An Experiment in Reading Curse, Lament and Persona in Psalm 109 Richard S. Briggs 55

Book reviews 62 Roy Flechner, Saint Patrick Retold: The Legend and History of Ireland’s Patron Saint Colin McAllister, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Apocalyptic Literature Carolyn Muessig, The Stigmata in Medieval and Early Modern Europe Michael L. Peterson, C. S. Lewis and the Christian Worldview Zora Neale Hurston, Moses, Man of the Mountain

Notes on Contributors 74 News and Notes 76 Published by the Christian Literary Studies Group, a Literary Society in association with the Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship. Editorial and subscriptions: The Glass, 10 Dene Road, Northwood, Middlesex HA6 2AA.

CLSG www.clsg.org [email protected] © the contributors 2020 ISSN 0269-770X (Print) ISSN 2515-3307 (Online) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitt ed in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. The views of the contributors do not necessarily refl ect editorial stance. The CLSG holds personal details on computer for the purpose of mailing in accordance with the Data Protection Act 2018. Editorial

This special issue, subtitled ‘A Journal of the Plague Year’, is a miscellany, but writing in a pandemic we have an eye on previous occurrences, real and fi ctitious, in history. Daniel Defoe in his account of the ‘visitation’ upon London in 1665, A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), sees no reason to preclude the occasional miracle. ‘As the Divine Power has formed the whole scheme of nature and maintains nature in its course, so the same Power thinks fi t to let His own actings with men, whether of mercy or judgement, to go on in the ordinary course of natural causes.… He is pleased to act by those natural causes as the ordinary means, excepting and reserving to Himself nevertheless a power to act in a supernatural way when He sees occasion.’ Yet the occasional catastrophe also seems, for the time being, to be inevitable. The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 upset many theories, and in 2020 the world has been grappling, despite confusion, in as rational a way as may be, with a pandemic. The rationality associated with modern medicine is a major motif in Camus’s La Peste (1947), although there is in truth litt le to be done in Algerian Oran but wait for the ‘fl ail’ to fi nish its activity. Jesus warned that disasters would come, and directed people’s att ention beyond them. Dire as they are, we have claims on our att ention that are ultimately of greater moment. ‘When the Son of Man comes, will he fi nd faith on the earth?’ Disasters in the natural world are not all we have to contend with. T.S. Eliot revealed in a lett er to Emily Hale his experience of a personal visitation by a strong apprehension of evil. Perhaps there’s a connection with the epigraph ‘The horror! The horror!’ from Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness which Eliot used in a draft of The Waste Land. Our next issue will follow an autumn conference displaced to video (see News and Notes, p. 76), and will have something to say on heaven and nature, a conjunction familiar from the hymn by Isaac Watt s. The Scriptures present God as manifest in or through the natural creation as its Creator. Psalm 104 declares that he has provided an environment that is benign, although the earth may sometimes tremble. It also brings forward some moral and spiritual implications of mankind’s being capable of relationship with God.

Roger Kojecký

2 THE GLASS

How and whither a Chrysten man ought to flye the horryble plague of the pestilence New College Library, Oxford, BT1.133.15(2) Title page of a sermon by Andreas Osiander translated anonymously from the German by Miles Coverdale (1488-1568/9) and printed in London in 1537. The sermon, from Psalm 91 (‘Surely he will save you from the fowler’s snare and from the deadly pestilence’), concerned an outbreak of plague in Nuremberg in 1533. Osiander, a Lutheran, suggested somewhat like the Jesuit Father Paneloux in La Peste, that the plague was ‘sent and sterred vp out of Gods wrath for our synne and vnthankfulnesse’. Christians should have nothing to fear in dying from a plague which has been brought about by other people’s sinful actions. Rather than fl eeing from the pestilence itself, we should instead fl ee ‘in good earneste (by true repentaunce and amendment) from synne wherewith the worlde hath deserued this horrible plague.’

3 Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year

Valentine Cunningham

he book we know as A Journal of the Plague Year, fourth of Daniel Defoe’s six novels, was published in 1722, a year to be reckoned extraordinarily productive Teven by his regularly astonishing rate of publication. Moll Flanders came out in the January; A Journal of the Plague Year on March 17; Colonel Jack on December 20; each of these big fi ctions butt ressed by the usual rush of kept-up journalism. The actual title of the anonymous Journal, lengthy in the 1720s fashion, made large claims about its historicity, the actuality of its witnessed events, the thereness of its alleged witness- bearer. A Journal of the Plague Year: Being Observations or Memorials of the most Remarkable Occurrences as well Publick as Private, Which happened in LONDON During the last GREAT VISITATION in 1665, Writt en by a CITIZEN who continued all the while in London. Never made publick before.1 Here was no mere fi ction, but the stuff of document, reportage, journalism even (journalist Defoe’s customary claim about his fi ctions), contained in an allegedly contemporary private journal published now belatedly, 65 years after the events described: Never made publick before. Bluffi ng, of course, assisted by the novel’s being signed ‘HF’, taken, to this day, as the initials of Defoe’s uncle Henry Foe. An att empt, perhaps, to make readers think he was the author of this anonymous ‘journal’. And some literary historians, too distracted by Defoe’s historicist claimings, have indeed speculated about Henry Foe as possible supplier of plague-time stories to his young nephew (fi ve years old when the plague arrived), if not the actual writer of the ‘journal’. Which is to rather miss the novel’s utt erly contemporary drive. Always on the qui vive for the selling subject, Defoe was greatly incited by the massive English concern about the possible spread of the plague devastating France in 1720-21. It arrived in Marseille in May 1720 in contaminated seaborne trade goods, quickly spread to other cities, and was not hampered by the strong quarantine measures the French authorities imposed – which occasioned many deaths when troops fi red on protestors against lockdown measures at Toulon. England’s Parliament was panicked into the Quarantine Act, 25 January 1721, which legalised personal and whole-city lockdown, to be enforced if necessary by the military on French lines, and making quarantine resistance a crime. Too large and consuming a set of public issues for Defoe to refrain from bringing all his writing weaponry to bear – journalism, polemical booklet, novel. In Applebee’s Journal, 20 May 1721, Defoe responded scathingly to the Act, arguing that the massacre of 178 citizens of Toulon, shot dead for breaking out of their lock- downed city, proved the wrongness as well as the ineffi ciency of quarantine measures (his fi rst outing of a never ending hostility). He followed this with a 272-page polemic (anonymous but recognised by everybody as his): Due Preparations for the Plague, as 1 Available in several modern editions, the best of which is the Oxford World’s Classics version of the fi rst 1772 text, ed. and annotated Louis Landa, intro David Roberts (1990, revised 2010). It has a good informative critical-historical Introduction, a map of contemporary London, a topographical Index, medical information, and, above all, superior notes (much the best anywhere), essentially the same as in Landa’s classic Oxford English Novels volume (1969). All my quotations from the novel are from this edition, located by page numbers. (A Journal, in the customary way of Defoe’s novels, eschews what would be helpful chapter divisions.) 4 THE GLASS well for Soul as Body. Being some seasonable THOUGHTS upon the Visible Approach of the present dreadful CONTAGION in France; the properest Measures to prevent it, and the great Work of Submitt ing to it (8 February 1722). It was a prequel to the also anonymous A Journal of the Plague Year, published (astonishingly) a mere thirty-seven days after it, a rehearsal not least of the novel’s scepticisms about the eff ectiveness of quarantine, and from time to time deploying the novel’s main method of what the Due Preparation’s Introduction calls ‘personation’, that is the use of fi ctional spokespersons, normally called characterisation.. Personation, trademark trick of this novel, and indeed of the bourgeois realist Novel Defoe essentially founds: bringing home the current political and economic, the moral and spiritual concerns, making them stick, by personifying them. Beginning, in the Journal, with its narrator HF. A symptomatically ordinary citizen, a saddler by trade, he’s the to-be-trusted observer and reporter of what he professes to see and hear, the transmitt er too of a welter of offi cial facts and fi gures, as well as a plethora of rumour and myth, folk-mythology, the word on the street. He walks and walks about London, the City and its abutt ing parishes, an emotionally sickened fl âneur of the plague-smitt en urbs (European fi ction’s fi rst fl âneur). Appalled psycho-geographer; pioneer too of that fi ctional business. He is what modern criticism, pinching the label from Film Studies, knows as the focalizer – the director of the reader’s gaze. Gaze focussed, of course, through HF’s I-narration; a narration that’s very nearly the founding example of what has come to be known as autobiografi ction. The actual founder was of course Defoe’s own Robinson Crusoe, whose marooned hero Robinson, HF keeps reminding us of. HF is actually, not just metaphorically, marooned in the plague-ridden city. Starkly, the plague maroons; its att empted answer, quarantine, is a marooner. And like Crusoe HF is continually having to meet the moral question this personal islandedness (isolation, negative insulation) raises – main question of the Novel Defoe founds – What do I do? What do I do? It’s HF’s daily dilemma, actualized very pointedly in his extended grapple with his brother’s urging him against staying in the smitt en city; the pressing moral issue shading the various actions of the novel’s beset Londoners – the Anglican Clergy who quit their churches; householders fi ddling their way out of irksomely quarantined houses who might well be infectious; the poor who are stuck with nowhere else to go; and so on. What HF stands for, what he keeps telling us his word is good for, is the truth. Characteristically, at one point he reports that the offi cial number of East End dead in a particular year is 68,590. But he’s heard and read that the true fi gure is 100,000 or so. ‘If I may be allowed to give my Opinion, by what I saw with my Eyes, and heard from other People that were Eye-Witnesses, I do verily believe the same, viz. that there died, at least, 100,000 of the Plague only’ (86). Again and again he sounds this note. ‘I am only relating what I know, or have heard, or believe of the particular Cases, and what fell within the Compass of my View’ (172). He knows, and would have us know, that the truth is knowable. Knowability: fundamental to the realism of HF’s narration, as it is to the realist tradition Defoe is founding. It entails the practice of empiricist particularity – this novel’s relishingly visible, touchable, smellable thinginess – outcome of a confi dent epistemology and hermeneutic. Plague-ridden London is a topography of terror, actualised because it is actual – a set of carefully mapped real locations curious readers could easily check

5 THE GLASS out for themselves. The death-rate of the published ‘Bills’ was, we’re typically told, ‘observed in the Parish of St. Brides, adjoining on one Side of Holborn Parish, and in the Parish of St. James Clerkenwell, adjoining on the other Side of Holborn’(4). ‘N.B. – That it was observ’d the Numbers mentioned in Stepney Parish, at that time, were generally all on that side where Stepney Parish joined to Shoreditch, which we now call Spitt le- fi elds, where the Parish of Stepney comes up to the very Wall of Shoreditch Church- Yard’ (98). The bodies of the dead poor of the parish of St. Stephen Coleman-street have to be wheeled away on hand-barrows because the many alleys of their dwellings are too narrow for the dead-carts: ‘which Alleys now remain to Witness it, such as Whites- Alley, Cross-Key-Court, Swan-Alley, Bell-Alley, White-Horse-Alley’ (77). And so on. It’s the urban particularism the Novel would come to live by – Balzac, Dickens, Dostoievsky, Conrad, Joyce, and the rest. Material truths these, such as trader Defoe has HF keenly trading in: his narrative faith pinned, aptly enough, on the truth-telling powers of actual material, cloth, the woven stuff close to ‘hosier’ Defoe’s heart and pocket. A Journal keeps fi nding what the young apprentice of HF’s neighbour came on when he was sent to collect some money owed by a shopkeeper ‘in White-Cross-street or thereabouts’. Much knocking brings the debtor to the door: ‘he had on his Breeches or Drawers, and a yellow Flannel Waistcoat; no Stockings, a pair of Slipt-Schoes, a white Cap on his head, and, as the young man said, “Death in his Face”’ (75). Body, face, legibly mortal: revelation aff orced by the strikingly uncouth mix of dress and undress; no stockings, but a yellow fl annel waistcoat and a white cap. Tell-tale weskit and tell-tale headgear. Headgear that’s in abundance in the story following right after that, of HF’s appalled discovery when checking out his absent brother’s properties in (the very same) Swan’s Alley in Coleman Street parish. Droves of women walking off wearing hats plundered from his brother’s warehouse, or ‘fi tt ing themselves with Hats as unconcerned and quiet, as if they had been at a Hatt ers Shop, buying for their Money’ (75-76). Hat-wearing signifi es moral infection as surely as, all over London clothes are readable as outward signs of the infected bodies under them. HF is, like Crusoe, obviously perturbed by body exposure per se. He keeps remembering the zany Quaker prophet Solomon Eagle who parades London streets stark naked, the horribly Naked Man – as disturbing as the unclad ‘savages’ in Defoe’s fi rst novel. Christian civilisation demands clothes, and Friday was given some trousers as soon as could be. So the realisation that the fl esh beneath white man’s decency togs might be contaminated is truly unsett ling. Horror compounded by the fear that the garb of decency might also be contaminated. The terrifying collusion, which HF can’t stop painfully imagining, of bad bodies and bad clothing: the awfulness of double infection, body and clothes – the people who ‘breathed Death in every Place, and upon every Body who came near them; nay, their very Cloaths retained the Infection, their Hands would infect the Things they touch’d, especially if they were warm and sweaty, and they were generally apt to sweat too’ (164). The deadly contagion of ‘their Breath, their Sweat, their very Cloaths’ of people calamitously failing to read their own bodies’ signs of the disease, the litt le ‘Spots’ that are ‘Tokens’ of the plague’s ‘gangreen’ (gangrene, ancient English name for necrosis of body tissue, death in the fl esh: HF notices it everywhere) – ‘mortifi ed Flesh in small Knobs as broad as a litt le silver Peny, and hard as a piece of Callous or Horn’ (168). Gangrenous spots like litt le silver pennies – hard cash. HF never lacks a touch for the money connexion, the economic story, like his author. And, in the plague year, the touch for the (Biblical) fi lthiness of lucre is brought vividly home by the prevailing 6 THE GLASS fear of coin contamination. HF reports a butcher in White-Chapel meat-market who ‘would not touch the Money’ of his customers ‘but have it put into a Pot full of Vinegar, which he kept for that purpose. The Buyer carry’d always small Money to make up any odd Sum, that they might take no Change’ (68). Perhaps the most striking of HF’s many accidental happenings on plague eff ects is when he breaks his own self-isolation to go and post a lett er to his brother and at the post-house witnesses the extremely careful eff orts to sanitise the contents of an abandoned ‘small Leather Purse’ suspected of contamination. First, gunpowder is used to ‘smoak’ the air and singe the purse, then it’s burned open and its coins extracted with red-hot tongs, after all of which the coins are dunked in a bucket of water. ‘The Money, as I remember, was about thirteen Shillings and some smooth Groats and Brass farthings’ (91). The money, gravamen of this realist, and the generic Realist, novel’s contentions, can be cleaned up, but only with extraordinary eff ort. This is narrative accounting as moralised fi nancial accountancy (ever Robinson Crusoe’s way, and the way of the western bourgeois novel Defoe kickstarts). The cash, whose tactile reality HF has us feeling – those ‘smooth’ groats – isn’t much, but it would, HF thinks, certainly att ract the att ention of ‘several poor People’ were the money’s contaminating touch not deterring. HF thinks a lot about London’s poor, so horribly marooned by the plague. The anonymous poor whose dead bodies litt er the streets, pile up in heaps, fi ll the emergency plague-pits. The working class, and the classes of workers that he busily lists (he likes making lists, like his author): people out of work because of the plague – builders, carpenters and watermen laid off , domestic servants made homeless, weavers and hat-makers (of course) with no customers, and so in great socio-economic detail on. Desperately short of money, the poor can’t even aff ord the ‘Bread of the Poor’ (82-83). These are moving refl ections on the hard struggle for basic sustenance, very movingly epitomised in the case of the waterman HF encounters walking along the Thames ‘Sea-wall’ at Blackwall, immediately after the money-cleansing episode: a poor man scraping a living, nett ing a mere four shillings for a whole week’s labour, ferrying foodstuff s up and down the river to families self-quarantined on ships, so he can just-about feed his locked-in sick wife and surviving children. HF is so moved by the life history he lengthily extracts that he gives him four shillings, and a groat. (Such detailed accounting!) The man is overwhelmed. They weep together (92-95). Fellow-feeling in practice as revealed in this encounter is a main thrust of this novel’s socio-moral advocacy. HF is a great one for nosing out cases where humans sympathise, or fail to sympathise, with each other. A very main instance of both, is his repeated allusion to London’s runaway clergy. He’s full of admiration for the pastors who returned to minister in the churches from which they had been brusquely ousted in 1662 because they couldn’t sign up to the restoration Church of England, churches now abandoned by the monarchist clergy who took their place and incomes and homes, and who have subsequently fl ed to the countryside for fear of the plague. London’s ministerial Dissenters – like the minister of Defoe’s own parents – who are risking plague out of feeling for the poor who have no country homes or rich relations to escape to (and who get kicked out the moment the plague abates and the Conformists reappear). It’s magnifi cent fellow-feeling in HF’s book which is, of course, utt erly constrained not just by these ecclesiastical, church-political, considerations but by the serious theological ones bounding them. The God-question; as ever in Defoe. It runs

7 THE GLASS through this novel, as in all Defoe’s writing, and in the particular shape of the vexed issue of orthodox Christianity’s faith in divine providence, the sovereignty of God. A faith greatly provoked in the novel’s plague time. What price providence, especially a ‘merciful providence’, as the bodies of children pile up and the agonised cries of suff erers and the bereaved get louder? And anyway aren’t the plague, its cause, arrival and distribution, explicable as natural rather than supernatural phenomena? Defoe’s way out, or through – and he is never not up against the heavily predestinarian dogmas of the Calvinism he was brought up in – is personifi ed in HF’s having it both ways. HF is for sure a sturdy this-worldly, earthly materialist, a man for whom reality is a matt er-of-fact matt er – all those streets and bodies, clothes and coins, and so forth. He’s a kind of sociologist, clearly up on the latest sciences, epidemiology, pathology, and the like, well schooled by his medical friend ‘Dr Heath’ and his reading, the books of the medics he names, Brooks (probably Humphrey Brooke), Nathaniel Upton, Nathaniel Hodges, and Peter Borwick (Berwick or Barwick), ‘the most famous Men of the Time’ (29). Hodges, chief medical adviser to London’s Corporation during the plague, heroic minister to the sick, is thought to be the original of HF’s much quoted ‘very good friend’ Dr Heath. (He’s the ‘eminent physician’ whose 1671 Latin Loimologia, sive, Pestis nuperae apud populum Londinensem grassantis (loimologia, words about plague, pointedly using loimos, the Greek Bible’s word for God-generated pestilence) is questioned by HF in the matt er of alleged numbers of a night-time’s dead (163), referring to it as an ‘Account of those Times’, which is the sub-title of its English translation published in 1721 at the time of the English-French panic, and in time for Defoe to read it.) And yet at every stage HF professes to feel the hand of God guiding him and arranging the plague’s progress; he seeks and gets providential direction from a believer’s random, bibliomantic openings of the Bible (as 12-13); he detects ‘the merciful Disposition of Providence’ in the way the infection spreads across town (182), and so on. The idea of two apparently diff erent agencies, providence and nature, collaborating is of course challengingly paradoxical, involving a double-headed narrative, double think – which always smells of analytical trickiness, the duplicity inevitably suggested by the double think. But HF is patently sincere, far from anything like hypocrisy, let alone submission to Ian Watt ’s sneery suggestion about the similar dualism in Robinson Crusoe that Defoe was crudely driven by marketing considerations to please two diff erent readerships, the one realist like him, the other wanting stories of God being in charge. What’s made very plain here is that the twoness is a considered and meaningful oneness. HF encounters it as well as asserting it. That much admired waterman, for example, says it has ‘pleased God’ that he is free of the plague. HF praises his ‘true dependence’ on God. And also notes, without irony, that he has ‘used all possible caution for his safety’. Just so his wife ‘gives thanks as well to Heaven as to me’ for the money. Double causation, double-speak; given repeated assertion, page after page, as the novel progresses. ‘[D]oubtless the Visitation it self is a Stroke from Heaven upon a City, or Country, or Nation where it falls’ (166). ‘But I must be allowed to believe, that no one in this whole Nation ever receiv’d the Sickness or Infection, but who receiv’d it in the ordinary Way of Infection from some Body, or the Cloaths, or touch, or stench of some Body that was infected before’ (167). Natural causes, divinely sanctioned:. Natural causes, divinely sanctioned. A paradoxically defi ned ‘divine Power’: which ‘thinks fi t to let His own Actings with Men, whether of Mercy or Judgement, go on in the ordinary Course of natural Causes, and he is pleased to act 8 THE GLASS by those Natural Causes as the ordinary Means’ (166). Only religious nutt ers, enthusiasts, Turkish-style predestinarians as HF jeeringly calls them (165) (he’s supplied with information about extreme Islamic predestinarianism by the crankily credulous William Kemp’s 1666 Brief Treatise of the Nature, Causes, Signes, Preservations From and Cure of the Pestilence, which Defoe owned) indulge in monolithic explanations, spurning nature in an all-out call on providence alone. As mistaken as single-minded naturalists on the other side of the debate. For HF and Defoe, as indeed for the many Calvinist scientists running the still newish Royal Society in Defoe’s time, double thinking, and so double speaking, are best. Double minded thought that’s highly congenial to Defoe. ‘Second Thoughts are Best’, his pamphlet of 1729 declared (about ways of making London streets, the onetime plague- ridden locales, as it happens, safer from robbers). Twoness is best at all times and on all occasions but especially this plague sponsored one. It is the philosophical (and theological) beauty of Complementarity, as the truthfulness of two actually diff erent physical theories came to be described by atomic theorists in the early twentieth century. Convincing as solution to the Journal’s providence-versus-nature wrestling bout. But, alas, somewhat let down, as saying it again (and again), the rhetorical equivalent of that due conceptual twoness, sustains a relentless repetivity keeping this novel going on and on far beyond even the most tolerant fi ction-consumer’s sell-by date. ‘And now I am talking of the merciful Disposition of Providence in this time of Calamity, I cannot but mention again, tho’ have spoken several time of it already…’ (182). Indeed, and too, too bad, one thinks. ‘And here let me take leave to enter again, tho’ it may seem a Repetition of Circumstances, into a Description of the miserable Condition of the City it self’ (163). It doesn’t just seem, it is, a Repetition, and the request for permission is bogus. HF will feel it again; complementarity’s narrative downside. He doesn’t care what his implied readers might say. No pity for them, by great contrast with HF’s compellingly piteous regard for the affl icted of the plague.

9 Saints under an empty sky – Time and Space in Camus’s La Peste Marie Kawthar Daouda

ublished in ₁₉₄₇, Camus’s La Peste was translated into ten different languages, and is still one of the three best-sellers of French publisher Gallimard. At the end Pof March 2020, one could hardly secure a copy in a bookstore; online shops were soon out of stock too. The Coronavirus pandemic stirred a new interest in the ‘récit’ – or narrative, a genre Camus preferred to ‘novel’ as a subtitle. La Peste’s original success, however, had less to do with a pandemic context than with the political turmoil of the 1940s. If Camus drew inspiration from relatively small plague epidemics in Algeria in 1944 and 1945, he started working on a plague story as early as 1941. In 1942, he wrote to André Malraux that he was busy writing ’un roman sur la peste.… Dit comme cela, c’est bizarre … mais ce sujet me paraît si “naturel”. ’1 At once odd and natural, the plague as a topic resounded deeply among the readership of the time. Simone de Beauvoir read the narrative as an answer to the creeping plague of Nazism. Roland Barthes opposed Beauvoir’s contingent reading that limited La Peste to its political meaning,2 drawing it towards a more poetical signifi cation. Camus replied that it was impossible to uproot La Peste from history but did not dismiss Barthes’s position altogether. The epigraph of the novel, borrowed from Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719), can be read in favour of an analogical reading: ‘Il est aussi raisonnable de repré senter une espè ce d’emprisonnement par une autre que de repré senter n’importe quelle chose qui existe ré ellement par quelque chose qui n’existe pas.’3 La Peste answered the urgent questions of individual responsibility as disclosed by the Second World War, just as it can still be read in a broader perspective as a refl ection on the problem of evil. Through the account of a narrator who only reveals his identity as one of the characters at the end of the narrative, the chronicle describes ‘the unusual events’ that ‘occurred in 194- at Oran’4 and is presented simultaneously as a collective experience undergone by the entire city, and as the crucial moment in the life of a few main characters as they unite to fi ght the plague. The narrative recalls how rats start to die massively in broad daylight, and follows doctor Bernard Rieux as he connects the rat death to cases of feverish disease. Rieux meets Joseph Grand, an elderly civil servant obsessed with rewriting the fi rst and only sentence of his novel; Rambert, a journalist trapped in Oran during lockdown; Paneloux, an erudite Jesuit of Augustinian spirituality who delivers two crucial sermons; and Jean Tarrou, a visitor who fought in the Spanish Civil War and organises teams of volunteers to fi ght the plague. In La Peste, Camus asks the same questions as in Le Mythe de Sisyphe (1942) and L’Homme révolté (1951): can one be a saint without God, and can one live without

1 Albert Camus, André Malraux, Correspondance 1941-1959, Paris, Gallimard, 2016, p. 42. ‘A novel on the plague. … This sounds strange, … but this topic seems so ‘‘natural’’ to me’. 2 Roland Barthes, ‘La Peste’, Club, février 1955; in Œuvres complètes, Paris, Seuil, t. I, 2002, p. 573. See Michel Murat, ‘La Peste comme analogie’, 7 May 2020, available online htt ps://www.fabula.org/ atelier.php?La_peste_comme_analogie (accessed 27/08/20). 3 ‘It is as reasonable to represent one kind of imprisonment by another as it is to represent anything that really exists by that which exists not.’ 4 Albert Camus, The Plague, trans. Stuart Gilbert, New York, The Modern Library, 1948, p. 2. Translations into English refer to this edition. 10 THE GLASS being a murderer? In a Catholic context, sainthood is understood as an exceptional relationship with mankind through charity and a relationship with God through faith and hope, acknowledged by the Church’s authority. Saint Augustine of Hippo fi rst applied the pagan title of hero to the Christian martyrs; since then the custom has prevailed of bestowing it not only on martyrs, but on all confessors whose virtues and good works greatly outdistance those of ordinary good people.’5 These virtues would be theological, granted by God in the case of faith, hope, and love, or cardinal, coming form man’s heart in the case of fortitude, prudence, justice and temperance. The theological virtues of hope and faith are intertwined. The author of Hebrews defi nes faith as ‘the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen’ (Heb 11:1). Heroism itself can either follow the epic tradition, a hero being a semi-divine character invested with a mission of edifi cation, or the tragic paradigm where the hero is marked as hièros or sacer, set aside by a curse or a blessing, for a struggle with fate he must simultaneously defy and accept. La Peste balances the depiction of a collective fate – the city of Oran suddenly brought to a level of collective consciousness by the plague – and the account of decisions and acts of free will that reveal the main characters’ heroism. We will fi rst consider how collective consciousness is built through feelings of exile and estrangement; which will lead to a contrast of Oran’s surge of consciousness with the fate of the main characters on their path towards a form of holiness by embracing the temporality of the plague, fi ghting against it yet knowing their acts are gratuitous and useless.

A city with no consciousness The colonial sett ing, centered on a narrow, mainly male French community in Algeria, bears meaning with regard to the philosophical stakes of the narrative. The actual Oran in the 1940s fades into an insular, out-of-space colony: Comment faire imaginer, par exemple, une ville sans pigeons, sans arbres et sans jardins, où l’on ne rencontre ni batt ements d’ailes ni froissements de feuilles, un lieu neutre pour tout dire? Le changement des saisons ne s’y lit que dans le ciel.6 The city, ‘bâtie en escargot sur son plateau’7, is naturally closed on its own lack of consciousness. The narrator comments: ‘Il est des villes et des pays où les gens ont, de temps en temps, le soupç on d’autre chose.… Oran, au contraire, est apparemment une ville sans soupç ons, c’est-à -dire une ville tout à fait moderne.’8 The city’s modernity lies in its superfi ciality. There is neither depth nor height in this mineral town where people are only busy making time pass. In this enclosed, secluded town, a nameless crowd will be brought into consciousness of space and time by the restrictions imposed by the plague and by the proximity of death. When the epidemic reaches 5 The defi nition comes from the Catholic Encyclopedia (htt ps://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07292c. htm) 6 La Peste, Paris, Gallimard, 1947, p. 13. ‘How to conjure up a picture, for instance, of a town without pigeons, without any trees or gardens, where you never hear the beat of wings or the rustle of leaves – a thoroughly negative place, in short? The seasons are discriminated only in the sky.’ p. 3. 7 La Peste, p. 43; ‘humped snail-wise on its plateau’ p. 29. 8 ‘There still exist towns and countries where people have now and then an inkling of something diff erent.… Oran, however, seems to be a town without intimations; in other words, completely modem.’ p. 4. 11 THE GLASS its peak, the deserted city ‘gé missait alors comme une î le malheureuse’9. Before it is identifi ed by Rieux, the disease is a nameless fever, in many ways akin to the nameless feverish diseases through which, according to Joseph de Maistre, innocent individuals or communities are supposed to expiate a collective sin: On demande quelquefois à quoi servent ces austérités terribles exercées par certains ordres religieux, et qui sont aussi des dévouements: autant vaudrait précisément demander à quoi sert le Christianisme, puisqu’il repose tout entier sur ce même dogme agrandi, de l’innocence payant pour le crime.10 Naming the plague imposes a shift in the narrative, sett ing the fi rst step of an ongoing personifi cation. The plague embodies what Oran had hitherto ignored, the opposite of the senseless vitalism the inhabitants of Oran live for; and forces them to address what Vladimir Jankélévitch defi nes as the unutt erableness of death as an irreversible non-experience. According to Jankélévitch, death is never the object of an experience; it cannot either be the object of discourse since one can only speak ‘around’ death and not ‘of’ death itself11. The plague alters time insofar as it stops the meaningless buzzing of the city; simultaneously, it gives time density as it forces individuals to gain consciousness by facing temporality. The inhabitants experience an emotional conversion: Des maris et des amants qui avaient la plus grande confi ance dans leur compagne, se dé couvraient jaloux. Des hommes qui se croyaient lé gers en amour retrouvaient une constance. Des fi ls, qui avaient vé cu prè s de leur mè re en la regardant à peine, mett aient toute leur inquié tude et leur regret dans un pli de son visage qui hantait leur souvenir. Cett e sé paration brutale, sans bavures, sans avenir pré visible, nous laissait dé contenancé s, incapables de ré agir contre le souvenir de cett e pré sence, encore si proche et dé jà si lointaine, qui occupait maintenant nos journées. 12 (p. 85) By enforcing separation, lockdown makes both time and space perceptible on a higher level. The fi rst set of Tarrou’s notes comments on time and how not to lose it, how to feel it in all its stretch: Passer des journé es dans l’antichambre d’un dentiste, sur une chaise inconfortable; […] é couter des confé rences dans une langue qu’on ne comprend pas, choisir les itiné raires de chemin de fer les plus longs et les moins commodes et voyager debout naturellement; faire la queue aux

9 ‘[was wailing] like a lost island of the damned’, p. 153. 10 Joseph de Maistre, Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg, ou Entretiens sur le gouvernement temporel de la Providence, [1821], Lyon, Pélagaud, 1854, t. 1, p. 148. Italics are Maistre’s. ‘People frequently wonder about the utility of these terrible austerities, which are also devotions, exerted by certain religious orders, one might just as well precisely wonder about the utility of Christianity, because it lies entirely on this enlarged dogma of innocence paying for crime.’ I translate. 11 See Vladimir Jankélévitch, La Mort, Paris, Flammarion, 1977, p. 67 sq. 12 ‘Husbands who had had complete faith in their wives found, to their surprise, that they were jealous; and lovers had the same experience. Men who had pictured themselves as Don Juans became models of fi delity. Sons who had lived beside their mothers hardly giving them a glance fell to picturing with poignant regret each wrinkle in the absent face that memory cast upon the screen. This drastic, clean-cut deprivation and our complete ignorance of what the future held in store had taken us unawares; we were unable to react against the mute appeal of presences, still so near and already so far, which haunted us daylong.’ p. 63. 12 THE GLASS

guichets des spectacles et ne pas prendre sa place, etc., etc.13 (p. 37) Camus taps into the Bergsonian trope of non-linear time, its rational progression being irrelevant to the actual perception one has of it. The journalist Rambert is forced to stay in Oran while the woman he loves awaits his return in France. His experience of separation makes him aware of what Bergson defi nes as the ‘intensive’ quality of time, where subjective perception is longer or shorter to the person who experiences it, making it diff erent from the linear perception of time, indexed on its spatial representation, in which which days, hours, minutes are all of equal length: ‘La vraie durée, celle que la conscience perçoit, devrait … être rangée parmi les grandeurs dites intensives; … ce n’est pas une quantité, et dès qu’on essaie de la mesurer, on lui substitue inconsciemment de l’espace.’14 By stretching time, boredom and frustration make it substantial; and the inhabitants of Oran are forced to discover this substantiality of time because they are thrown into the present. Severed from the ones they love, they are locked in a ‘present’ suddenly made perceptible. Planned as a temporary segment, separation loses its expected end because of the lockdown. This situation introduces a shift from a linear perception of time to an acute perception of each moment as pure longing for the loved one. The gradual loss of memories paired with the hopeless loss of expectation throw Oran into an unbearable present: Sans mé moire et sans espoir, ils s’installaient dans le présent. À la vé rité , tout leur devenait pré sent. Il faut bien le dire, la peste avait enlevé à tous le pouvoir de l’amour et mê me de l’amitié . Car l’amour demande un peu d’avenir, et il n’y avait plus pour nous que des instants.15(p. 200) As months go by, death becomes banality itself: ‘C’est que rien n’est moins spectaculaire qu’un fl éau et, par leur duré e mê me, les grands malheurs sont monotones.’16 (p. 98) Experienced by Rieux, death is the continuous, redundant mumbling that Jankélévitch merges with the ‘indicible’.17 The negative epiphanies of love through its absence, and of death as the irremediable loss of precious time wasted for not being spent with the loved one, coincides with the epiphany of death. The consciousness of inevitable and irremediable separation becomes consciousness itself as it forces individuals to enter a state of revolt: La peste avait tout recouvert. Il n’y avait plus alors de destins individuels, 13 ‘Spending one’s days on an uneasy chair in a dentist’s waiting-room; by remaining on one’s balcony all a Sunday afternoon; … listening to lectures in a language one doesn’t know; … traveling by the longest and least-convenient train routes, and of course standing all the way; … lining up at the box-offi ce of theaters and then not buying a seat; and so forth.’ pp. 24-25. 14 Henri Bergson, Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, Paris, Alcan, 1908, p. 81. ‘The actual duration, the one which is perceived, should be classifi ed among the intensive magnitudes; … it is not a quantity, and as soon as one tries measuring it, it is unconsciously replaced with space.’ 15 ‘Without memories, without hope, they lived for the moment only. Indeed, the here and now had come to mean everything to them. For there is no denying that the plague had gradually killed off in all of us the faculty not of love only but even of friendship. Naturally enough, since love asks something of the future, and nothing was left us but a series of present moments.’ p. 165. 16 ‘The truth is that nothing is less sensational than pestilence, and by reason of their very duration great misfortunes are monotonous.’ p. 162-163. 17 See La Mort, p. 82 sq. 13 THE GLASS

mais une histoire collective qui é tait la peste et il n’y avait plus alors de destins individuels, mais une histoire collective qui é tait la peste et des sentiments partagé s par tous. Le plus grand était la sé paration et l’exil, avec ce que cela comportait de peur et de ré volte.18 (p. 185) As Camus writes in L’Homme révolté, ‘la conscience vient au jour avec la révolte.’19 In his reading of Sisyphus’s myth and of the diff erent accounts justifying his curse, Camus insists on his will to live20. The signs of resistance against the plague, either by a pursuit of pleasure or by trying to escape the city, only make sense as surrounding an inner state of rebellion against fatality as defi ned and limited by the meaninglessness of pain and the inevitability of death. As the plague evolves, the initial yearning for the loved one wavers. The initial outburst of consciousness in the longing for the absent is eroded: Personne n’est capable réellement de penser à personne […] car penser ré ellement à quelqu’un, c’est y penser minute aprè s minute, sans ê tre distrait par rien, ni les soins du ménage, ni la mouche qui vole, ni les repas, ni une démangeaison. Mais il y a toujours des mouches et des dé mangeaisons. C’est pourquoi la vie est diffi cile à vivre.21 (p. 219) The real plague is the growing insensitivity that ends up overshadowing the epiphanic consciousness of each instant’s ‘primultimity’22, to translate Jankélévitch’s neologism expressing the unique untimeliness of the instants reconstructed as meaningful by the memory. To love someone, to be immersed in the desire of that person’s presence, is a constant eff ort of the will akin to a form of religious contemplation. Rieux, Rambert and Tarrou are heroic in their patience and perseverance because their impulse does not waver. Their desperate toil is not meant to stop the plague but to maintain a state of human revolt against fate, which Camus sees as the peak of human consciousness. Within this imprisonment, the main characters discover what Camus presents as Sisyphus’ freedom. By making each moment become a time of crisis – of choice – the characters break free from the illusionary perception of linear time and grasp its immanent value. ‘Agir librement, c’est reprendre possession de soi, c’est se replacer dans la pure durée.’23 Pure duration is experienced by pure repetition, that is to say, a repetition that has no conscience of the previous or future occurrences. Rambert endeavors to escape to meet the woman he loves, and after a series of failures, he declares to Rieux: ‘La

18 ‘The plague had swallowed up everything and everyone. No longer were there individual destinies; only a collective destiny, made of plague and the emotions shared by all. Strongest of these emotions was the sense of exile and of deprivation, with all the cross-currents of revolt and fear set up by these.’ (p. 151). 19 L’Homme révolté, Paris, Gallimard, ‘Folio’, 1951, p. 28. ‘With revolt comes consciousness.’ 20 Le Mythe de Sisyphe, Paris, Gallimard, 1952, ‘Folio’, p. 163-165. 21 ‘Nobody is capable of really thinking about anyone, even in the worst calamity. For really to think about someone means thinking about that person every minute of the day, without lett ing one’s thoughts be diverted by anything – by meals, by a fl y that sett les on one’s cheek, by household duties, or by a sudden itch somewhere. But there are always fl ies and itches. That’s why life is diffi cult to live.’ (p. 217). 22 See La Mort, p. 304 sq. 23 Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, p. 178. ‘To act freely is to take back possession of oneself, it is sett ing oneself back into pure duration’. 14 THE GLASS

peste. […] Vous n’avez pas compris que ça consiste à recommencer.’24 (p. 178) The old man who spits on the cats, the old asthmatic Spaniard playing with chickpeas, or chiefl y Joseph Grand and his never-ending rewriting of his fi rst sentence nurture ridiculous habits that make them repeat an action over and over again. They seem absurd, but the time and space of the plague turn this very absurdity into heroism as described in Le Mythe de Sisyphe and its fi nal sentence, ‘Il faut imaginer Sisyphe heureux’25. When Tarrou and Rieux discuss the inevitable failure of any doctor’s fi ght against death, Rieux declares: ‘Ce n’est pas une raison pour cesser de lutt er.’26 (p. 145) while still acknowledging his life is ‘une interminable dé faite.’27 (p. 145). As he decides to stay Albert Camus and help Rieux instead of going back to his lover, Rambert chooses a collective moral duty rather than individual happiness. It roots him in the space and time he is in. The absurdity of the struggle, by making him a willing Sisyphus, makes him a hero. This perseverance is not a matt er of Christian hope; it does not rely on faith, but wishes to maintain a paradoxically immanent temporality in which the momentous apex of consciousness would become a permanent state of secular sainthood.

Sainthood and tenderness As they try to do something, albeit useless, rather than nothing, the struggle between the characters’ will and the personifi ed evil of a plague that ends up leaving as it came, of its own accord, does not aim towards a vitalist preservation of the self, but towards reaching and maintaining an intensity of being through the fi ght for a lost cause. The Jesuit priest Paneloux and Tarrou, a former fi ghter in the Spanish war, exemplify the philosophical stake behind fi ghting for lost causes. Paneloux fi rst addresses the congregation on the closing day of a prayer week: ‘Mes frères, vous êtes dans le malheur, mes frè res, vous l’avez mé rité .’28 (p. 110) He reminds the audience of ‘the scourge of God’, of the plague that visited Egypt and echoes 2 Kings 24:15-25, the fi rst reading from the mass for times of pestilence. However, Paneloux joins the voluntary medical assistants and, as the priest and Rieux sit on the deathbed of the child Philippe, the infant’s death marks a turning point. If the death of a child remains a scandal to their eyes, the abstract quality of that scandal disappears because they must stare hour after hour at ‘l’agonie d’un innocent.’29 (p. 234) Philippe dies after a horrid howling that seems to bear the suff ering of the entire humanity: Un seul cri continu, que la respiration nuanç ait à peine … emplit soudain la salle d’une protestation monotone, discorde, et si peu humaine qu’elle semblait venir de

24 ‘The plague …. You haven’t understood that it means exactly that — the same thing over and over and over again.’ p. 148. 25 Le Mythe de Sisyphe, p. 168. ‘One must imagine Sisyphus happy.’ 26 ‘It’s no reason for giving up the struggle.’ (p. 118). 27 ‘A never ending defeat’ p. 118. 28 ‘Calamity has come on you, my brethren, and, my brethren, you deserved it.’ (p. 86-87). 29 ‘the death-throes of an innocent child’. (p. 193). 15 THE GLASS

tous les hommes à la fois.… Paneloux regarda cett e bouche enfantine, souillée par la maladie, pleine de ce cri de tous les âges. Et il se laissa glisser à genoux et tout le monde trouva naturel de l’entendre dire d’une voix un peu étou ff é e, mais distincte derriè re la plainte anonyme qui n’arrêtait pas : ‘Mon Dieu, sauvez cet enfant.’30 (p. 236) Paneloux’s prayer echoes Elijah’s resurrection of the son of the widow (1 Kings 1:17-24) and the resurrection of the son of the widow of Nain (Luke 11:17) as well as Bernanos’s Sous le soleil de Satan (1926). The child dies, and as Paneloux and Rieux walk out, when Rieux pledges that he would refuse until death a creation where children are tortured, Paneloux answers: ‘Je viens de comprendre ce que c’est que la grâce.’ (p. 238)31 The acceptance or the refusal of pain is where faith and will collide, embodying the Augustinian notion of collaboration: ‘Nemo credit nisi volens.’32 Rieux does not negate God’s existence, but refuses to att empt any dialogue with divine silence through desperate prayer: ‘Puisque l’ordre du monde est régle ́ par la mort, peut-être vaut-il mieux pour Dieu qu’on ne croie pas en lui et qu’on lutt e de toutes ses forces contre la mort, sans lever les yeux vers ce ciel où il se tait.’33 (p. 145) The child’s death leads Paneloux to see grace as a matt er of radical, unconditional acceptance, a Kierkegaardian ‘qualitative transition’ between the ethical stage, which heroically fi ghts for lost causes, and the religious stage, which commends itself to God’s will. Pain is not justifi ed by retribution in the afterlife but should nonetheless be accepted, because it is part of a totality willed by God. In his second sermon, Paneloux declares he wishes to remain faithful to ‘cet é cartèlement dont la croix est le symbole, face à face avec la souff rance d’un enfant’34 (p. 244), and instead of the accusation of the fi rst sermon, he invites the congregation to the same leap of faith: ‘Mes frè res, l’instant est venu. Il faut tout croire ou tout nier. Et qui donc, parmi vous, oserait tout nier?’35 (p. 244) To believe in God becomes a matt er of trust, ‘trusting God’ in spite of the absurdity of unjustifi able pain. The priest echoes the Pauline doctrine on grace and providence: ‘All things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose’ (Romans 8:28) and the providentialism Bloy displays in Le Désespéré (1886) ‘Rien n’arrive sans Son ordre ou Sa permission’36 and La Femme pauvre (1897) ‘Tout ce qui arrive est adorable’37: as well as Saint Thérèse of Lisieux’s ‘Tout est grâce’, used by Bernanos as the closing sentence of Journal d’un curé de campagne (1936). 30 ‘A long, incessant scream, hardly varying with his respiration, [fi lled] the ward with a fi erce, indignant protest, so litt le childish that it seemed like a collective voice issuing from all the suff erers there. … Paneloux gazed down at the small mouth, fouled with the sordes of the plague and pouring out the angry death-cry that has sounded through the ages of mankind. He sank on his knees, and all present found it natural to hear him say in a voice hoarse but clearly audible across that nameless, never ending wail: ‘My God, spare this child!’ p. 194-196. 31 ‘I’ve just realized what is meant by “grace”’, p. 197. 32 In Johannis, tract. 26, 3. PL 35-1607 quoted by Josef Pieper in ‘On Hope’ [1934] collected in Faith, Hope, Love, San Francisco, Ignatius, 1997, p. 35. 33 ‘Since the order of the world is shaped by death, mightn’t it be bett er for God if we refuse to believe in Him and struggle with all our might against death, without raising our eyes toward the heaven where He sits in silence.’ p. 117-118 34 ‘that quartering of which the Cross is a symbol, face to face with a child’s suff ering.’ I translate. 35 ‘My brothers, a time of testing has come for us all. We must believe everything or deny everything. And who among you, I ask, would dare to deny everything?’ p. 202. 36 Le Désespéré, Paris, A. Soirat, 1886, p. 163. ‘Nothing happens without His command or His permission.’ 37 La Femme pauvre, Paris, Crès 1924, p. 385. ‘All that happens is adorable.’ 16 THE GLASS

Paneloux dies shortly after this sermon, holding on to a crucifi x, without having called the doctor. His death is not ascribed to the plague as it is classifi ed as a ‘dubious case’ in Rieux’s notes, and seems an illustration of his faith, like Abraham who ‘against hope believed in hope’ (Romans 4:18). Paneloux and Tarrou’s deaths are symmetrical. While the priest stares at the face of the Suff ering God, the former revolutionary gazes intently at the peaceful, loving face of Rieux’s mother. In a dialogue between Rieux and Tarrou, the latt er wonders: ‘Peut-on être un saint sans Dieu, c’est le seul problème concret que je connaisse aujourd’hui.’38 (p. 276) In Tarrou’s life, the question of Sisyphian perseverance is experienced through the duty ‘not to be a murderer’ through a constant vigilance. Tarrou provides a conditional defi nition of sainthood as ‘un ensemble d’habitudes’39 (p. 134) that leaves no room for weakness. His life has been directed by his desire not to be a murderer like his father, a Procureur de la République he sees as an institutional assassin. Tarrou is the only character to evoke a wider state of plague than the actual disease. To him, the plague is the fatal evil that men do: ‘Nous ne pou[vons] pas faire un geste en ce monde sans risquer de faire mourir.… J’ai appris cela, que nous étions tous dans la peste, et j’ai perdu la paix.’40 (p. 273) Tarrou’s heroism is bound to be an endless struggle against a contagious disease that keeps spreading itself. While Paneloux in his fi rst sermon evokes ‘l’ange de la peste, beau comme Lucifer et brillant comme le mal lui-même’ 41 (p. 111) Tarrou’s illness is described as a fi ght against the angel: ‘La nuit commenç ait pour lui dans la lutt e et … ce dur combat avec l’ange de la peste devait durer jusqu’à l’aube.’ (p. 306) Paneloux as a saintly wonder- worker raising the dead, Tarrou as a biblical hero, echo forms of scriptural sainthood in their display of fortitude. The former wishes to love through understanding, the latt er to love in spite of or rather beyond understanding. Diff erent as their understanding of charity may be, each of them perseveres in it with an admirable steadfastness. Yet neither of them seems worthy of being imitated. Admirable as he is, Tarrou holds an untenable position because he lacks hope: Il n’y a pas de paix sans espérance, et Tarrou qui refusait aux hommes le droit de condamner quiconque, qui savait pourtant que personne ne peut s’empêcher de condamner et que mê me les victimes se trouvaient ê tre parfois des bourreaux, Tarrou avait vé cu dans le dé chirement et la contradiction, il n’avait jamais connu l’espé rance.42 (p. 313) Camus suggests that there would be something beyond the immanent temporality of Sisyphus’s toil. Instead of the secular ‘espoir’, he chooses ‘espérance’, the French for hope as a theological virtue. Joseph Grand, who seemed absurd because of his constant rewriting, is presented as the potential hero:

38 ‘Can one be a saint without God? – that’s the problem, in fact the only problem I’m up against today.’ p. 230-231. 39 ‘an aggregate of habits’ p. 109. 40 ‘We can’t stir a fi nger in his world without the risk of bringing death to somebody.… I have realized that we all have plague, and I have lost my peace.’ p. 228 41 ‘That angel of the pestilence, comely as Lucifer, shining like Evil’s very self’, p. 88. 42 ‘There can be no peace without hope, and Tarrou, denying as he did the right to condemn anyone whomsoever – though he knew well that no one can help condemning, and it befalls even the victim sometimes to turn executioner – Tarrou had lived a life riddled with contradictions and had never known hope’s solace.’ p. 263 17 THE GLASS

S’il est vrai que les hommes tiennent à se proposer des exemples et des modè les qu’ils appellent héros, et s’il faut absolument qu’il y en ait un dans cett e histoire, le narrateur propose justement ce hé ros insignifi ant et eff acé qui n’avait pour lui qu’un peu de bonté au cœur et un idé al apparemment ridicule. Cela donnera à la vé rité ce qui lui revient, à l’addition de deux et deux son total de quatre, et à l’héroï sme la place secondaire qui doit être la sienne, juste aprè s, et jamais avant, l’exigence gé né reuse du bonheur. 43 (p. 154) ‘Bonheur’, beyond absurd pain, beyond joy and happiness, takes the features of a human face. Everything sets Tarrou as a hero and a secular saint doing good for its own sake, but his death remains entrapped within the problem of evil; while Grand’s miraculous recovery opens a door towards something else. As he lies dying, he asks for his manuscript to be burned, which is done; and once he recovers, he starts writing again; yet between these two series of labour he wrote two lines to his former wife: ‘Ma chère Jeanne, c’est aujourd’hui Noël, et…’44 (p. 284). Trapped as he is in the iteration of the fi rst sentence, Grand still has a way out of plague by cherishing Jeanne and remaining in the memory of the Christmas Day when they got engaged. It is not so much through fi ghting as through yearning for the incarnate presence of a loving heart, that one reaches the highest intensity of being: ‘Ce monde sans amour é tait comme un monde mort et … il vient toujours une heure où on se lasse des prisons, du travail et du courage pour réclamer le visage d’un être et le cœur émerveillé de la tendresse.’45 (p. 282.) Beyond heroism, vulnerability and its corollary, tenderness, become the only way to inhabit a loveless, dead world and to vivify it. In the empty time and the deserted space of the absence created by the plague, Camus sketches something beyond heroism and sainthood, or rather a radically immanent form of sainthood, tenderness as the only answer to the absurdity of the human condition. What makes The Plague relevant is not so much how it can echo the inhumanity of the Second World War or a global pandemic, but the way in which it brings to light tenderness as the only way to transcend, heroic as it is, the curse of Sisyphus and the struggle within absurdity.

43 ‘If it is a fact that people like to have examples given them, men of the type they call heroic, and if it is absolutely necessary that this narrative should include a “hero,” the narrator commends to his readers, with, to his thinking, perfect justice, this insignifi cant and obscure hero who had to his credit only a litt le goodness of heart and a seemingly absurd ideal. This will render to the truth its due, to the addition of two and two its sum of four, and to heroism the secondary place that rightly falls to it, just after, never before, the noble claim of happiness.’ p. 126. 44 ‘My dearest Jeanne, Today is Christmas Day and…’ p. 238. 45 ‘A loveless world is a dead world, and always there comes an hour when one is weary of prisons, of one’s work, and of devotion to duty, and what one craves for is a loved face, the warmth and wonder of a loving heart.’ p. 237.

18 Good and Evil in Eliot’s Letters to Emily Hale Jewel Spears Brooker

. S. Eliot arrived in Boston on his forty-fourth birthday, ₂₆ September ₁₉₃₂, to begin an academic year at Harvard. He had gone to England in 1914 to study at TOxford and now, in response to an invitation to give the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, he was returning to his alma mater as a celebrated poet and critic. In addition to a commitment to give the Norton Lectures (published as The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism), he agreed to teach a course in English literature and to crisscross America from Baltimore to Los Angeles and Chicago to Charlott esville for readings and speeches. In November and December, he gave four Norton lectures, initiating a hectic schedule that found him at year’s end in California where he gave talks at Scripps College, UCLA, and Berkeley. In January 1933, on the way back to Boston, he paused for lectures in St. Louis, Minneapolis, Ann Arbor, and Buff alo. The feverish round continued throughout the spring, highlighted by three remaining Norton Lectures, the Turnbull Lectures at Johns Hopkins, the Page-Barbour Lectures at the University of Virginia, and twice-weekly lectures to students at Harvard. Before leaving England, Eliot told Emily Hale, a Bostonian teacher and actress he had known at least since 1912, that he was eager to return to America and to re- connect with his family, a longing alleviated by visits with siblings and cousins in Boston and other cities.1 In St. Louis, he visited his Aunt Rose (Mrs. Holmes Smith) and the graves of his parents, and lectured at Washington University, where he was feted as the grandson of its founder. At the same time, and in spite of the fact that for over a year he had been writing love lett ers to her, he told Emily Hale that he was reluctant to see her and nudged her to leave Boston for a position at Scripps College in California. In late December 1932 and early January 1933, he spent a few days with her at Scripps, lectured to her students, and att ended church services. The lett ers that he wrote following this brief rendez-vous are among the most revealing in the Emily Hale archive. The essential context is the confl uence of his visit with Hale in California, his encounter with familial ghosts in St. Louis, and his refl ections on the texts he was teaching in ‘English 26’ at Harvard. This convergence forced him to deal with irreconcilable diff erences between Unitarianism (the faith of his family and Miss Hale) and the Anglo-Catholicism he had embraced in 1927. Chief among these, addressed in both his lett ers and his lectures, was a diff erent understanding of the nature of good and evil. Eliot began teaching English 26 a week or so after returning to Boston. The class, in which he was assisted by Professor Theodore Spencer, met twice a week from 7 February to 4 May 1933.2 On 7 March, in lectures on Conrad and James, he discussed 1 In a 1960 retrospective, Eliot says that he fell in love with Emily Hale (1891-1969) two years before leaving for graduate study in Europe. Following his joyless marriage in 1915, he cultivated a reminiscent longing for Miss Hale which unbeknownst to her inspired some of his greatest poems, notably Ash-Wednesday, and played a role in his conversion. He revealed his love to her in 1930, and over the next two decades, sent her over one thousand lett ers. In 1956, Hale placed his lett ers at Princeton University and stipulated that they should remain sealed for fi fty years after her death. At the end of his life Eliot destroyed her lett ers to him. The lett ers from Eliot to Hale were opened to the public on 2 January, 2020. Emily Hale Lett ers from T. S. Eliot; Manuscripts Division, Department of Special Collections, Princeton University Library. 2 At the end of the course, Eliot gave his lecture notes and outlines to Spencer. Spencer in turn 19 THE GLASS the brilliance with which ‘Real Evil’ was evoked in Heart of Darkness and The Turn of the Screw.3 ‘Real Evil is much more than an Act; . . . [it] is to Bad as Saintliness and Heroism to Decent Behaviour’ (Prose 4.773). It is not the participation in native rites by Kurtz or the use of vile language by Miles at school that is disturbing, but rather, the suggestion that both characters are in touch with another world, conveyed to the reader by an intersection of natural and supernatural realms of being. Only writers with an ‘exceptional awareness of spiritual reality’ are able to suggest the mystery of evil; only writers with ‘a perception of life as on several planes at once,’ can credibly summon the spirits (Prose 4.773). Eliot is here recalling a 1924 lecture in which he noted that in reading The Brothers Karamazov, one is aware ‘that there are everywhere two planes of reality, and that the scene before our eyes is only the screen and veil of another action which is taking place behind it’ (Prose 2.553). Returning via Conrad to James, Eliot declares: ‘The last word on James: “The Horror! The Horror”’ (Prose 4.771). Two months later, in his lectures in Virginia, he repeats the point, claiming that in the work of Conrad, James, and Sophocles, ‘we are in a world of Good and Evil’ (Prose 5.42). On 6 March (the night before his class on Conrad and James), Eliot wrote to Hale that he had spent the day thinking about The Aspern Papers, The Turn of the Screw, and Heart of Darkness, adding that the juxtaposition of Heart of Darkness and The Turn of the Screw had brought to mind an old acquaintance, Matt Prichard.4 Eliot had met the English aesthete and Bergson enthusiast in Paris late in 1910 and recalls that he immediately felt a spiritual aversion to him. He was perhaps the only Evil infl uence that I have ever known; … I have known others … who wanted my body.… But I don’t think I have ever known anybody who wanted my Soul like Matt Prichard.… He wanted to dominate, to possess … as no one I have ever known has wanted to possess a young man’s Soul.5 Eliot then describes his own Conradian experience of ‘The Horror’. He was alone in his boarding room when Prichard appeared and in some unspecifi ed way att empted to ensnare his soul. I just was sure that I had gone over the edge: and I had a vision of hell which I must believe few people ever get: I just hung on, but thinking I was completely gone, blown to pieces. It was going back about fi fty thousand years in evolution, and down into the utt ermost abyss. In twenty seconds or so, ‘it was all over’. Eliot says that the vision vanished and he gave them to Harvard, and they are now printed in volume 4, pages 768-73 of The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot: The Critical Edition. 8 vols. Ronald Schuchard (Gen. ed.). Baltimore, Johns Hopkins UP, 2014-2019. Subsequent references are identifi ed in text with volume and page number. 3 Here, as in After Strange Gods (lectures given at the University of Virginia at the end of his Harvard class), Eliot capitalises ‘Good’ and ‘Evil’ to distinguish moral from behavioral issues. 4 Eliot fi rst mentioned Matt hew Prichard (1865-1936) to Hale on 24 March 1931. Prichard, who lived in Paris from 1908-1914, was known for his Bergsonian aesthetics and his drawings of Romanesque details of architecture in southern France. In 1926, Eliot told Herbert Read that he was ‘in many ways deeply indebted’ to Prichard, a fanatical artist/thinker with a personality ‘so intense that his conversation has an almost hypnotic infl uence.’ The Lett ers of T. S. Eliot, ed. Valerie Eliot and John Haff enden, Vol. 3, 1926-1927. London, Faber and Faber, 2012, p.132. 5 Permission to quote from Eliot’s lett ers to Emily Hale was kindly granted by the T. S. Eliot Estate. 20 THE GLASS was certain that he had won. The demon de- fanged, he was able to join Prichard and his brother for a tour of southern France. Eliot recalls that Prichard seemed to have had his own revelation in their stop-over in Limoges, where during the night he heard him ‘moving about in the next room,’ a memory that was to re-surface in ‘Gerontion’ in a scene suggestive of a black mass (‘To be eaten, to be divided, to be drunk / Among whispers: by Mr. Silvero / With caressing hands, at Limoges / Who walked all night in the next room’ (ll. 22-25).6 In his several backward glances at his encounter with Prichard, Eliot unfailingly associates Evil with a desire for spiritual domination that is facilitated by an imbalance of power. Other issues raised in Eliot’s discussion of Emily Hale good and evil in the class on Conrad and James are also taken up in the lett ers to Hale. On 7 February, the fi rst day of his course, he discusses the folly of defi ning good and evil as good and bad behaviour. From comments on Hale’s Unitarian clergywoman ‘(What was her name, Miss Blagoon?),’ he moves to his own Unitarian heritage. After visiting the graves of his beloved parents and grandparents in St. Louis, he laments that although they were exceptionally good, ‘naturally good’, natural goodness isn’t enough. On 27 February, he sounds the chord again: people who by conventional standards are considered ‘naturally good’ are merely people with good manners, people who have been ‘well brought up’, people like ‘most of my relatives’. In Minneapolis, Eliot stayed over Sunday to hear his cousin Frederick preach. In the 7 February lett er, he acknowledges that although Frederick is a good preacher, a good clergyman, and a leading citizen, there is something wrong with his thinking. At the risk of being considered a ‘fanatical narrow bigot’ Eliot tells Hale that he prefers Christianity to Frederick’s Unitarianism. Later, in January 1936, he wonders whether even his grandfather, who did so much good for so many in St. Louis, had not built his house upon sand. Eliot’s criticism of his family, as Hale would have understood, was a screen for criticism of her. On 27 February, he is explicit, explaining that he is distressed that she is a Unitarian. He adds that when he goes into the home of Catholics, he knows that he is in communion with them ‘as I am not with Emily: we accept . . . things which to Emily will seem only degraded superstitions.’7 In a contemporaneous (1930) essay on Baudelaire, Eliot underscores the connection between moral understanding and sexuality. ‘Baudelaire perceived that what distinguished the relations of man and woman from the copulation of beasts is the knowledge of Good and Evil (of moral Good and Evil, not natural right and wrong)’, (Prose 4.162). The climax of Eliot’s critique of the moral underpinnings of Unitarianism (and, as his brother later reminds him, of his own heritage) occurs in a lecture given on

6 Quotations from Eliot’s poetry are from The Poems of T. S. Eliot, ed. Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue, 2 vols., Baltimore, Johns Hopkins UP, 2015. 7 When criticizing Emily Hale, Eliot usually depersonalises his comments by referring to her, as here, in the third person. 21 THE GLASS

3 April to the Unitarian clergy of Boston.8 Two other areas of overlap between Eliot’s lett ers to Hale and his contemporaneous class lectures are of the essence in following his thinking about the nature of evil. The fi rst, evident in his published poetry and prose, is that there are two planes of being – one natural, the other supernatural – and that both are real. The intersection of these planes, Eliot suggests in the 7 March lecture on Conrad and James, can reveal horror or beatitude. This supposedly impersonal idea did not spring full-grown from the pages of Conrad and James. As revealed in the lett er composed mere hours before his class, Eliot reveals that as a student he had experienced his own Conradian moment – a ‘vision of hell’, a face-to-face with Evil in the person of Matt hew Prichard. In the February lett ers to Hale, Eliot applies the notion of two planes – the temporal and the eternal – to his present situation. In an att empt to encourage Hale to form devotional habits, he explains on 14 February that belief in a higher realm requires more than intellectual assent. ‘It is not until you see and feel and touch that something else is more real, that the other fades.’ To achieve this sensuous apprehension of a higher plane, one must commit to a routine of meditation and prayer. It is in the cultivation of habits of devotion that suddenly one realises that the routine is not merely routine, that ‘the eternal has taken the prior place above the transient.’ By practising spiritual discipline, one gradually learns to live ‘on two planes at once’. And then, in what must have been painful for her to read, he adds that this double vision, this perception of two worlds, is what he appreciates most in the people he meets. This awareness of another world can be seen in the landscapes of his best poems – the stony places of The Waste Land, the pristine gardens of Ash-Wednesday, and the cactus lands of The Hollow Men. It is no accident that one hears the dying whisper of Mistah Kurtz in Eliot’s preferred epigraph to The Waste Land and fi nds him lurking in the kingdoms of death in The Hollow Men.9 And of course, the sudden awareness of other worlds, the momentary peek beyond the river, parallels the perception of the timeless moment in Four Quartets. The second area of overlap between Eliot’s lett ers to Hale and his class lectures is the awareness that human relationships involving an imbalance of power are dangerous. The danger is not physical, but psychological and spiritual and, for the stronger party, fraught with what Eliot refers to in his 6 March lett er as the ‘frightful responsibility’ of infl uence. His several discussions of Evil in the lett ers suggest that conscious att empts to manipulate a weaker party are perilous, with implications of beatitude or damnation. But even in situations where there is no conscious att empt to exert unwarranted infl uence, there is still moral liability. On 6 January 1936, Eliot writes that it is terrifying to think ‘that one may be infl uencing others’ merely by being oneself. Unlike direct assaults, which are demonic, these indirect ones occur primarily through the expansion into malignity of everyday relationships. The relationships that are most susceptible to sliding into the danger zone are those in which there is an inherent and structural imbalance of power, such as those related to age and prestige – teacher/student, priest/penitent, adult/child, male/female (or vice versa), and famous

8 For more details regarding the Boston lecture (‘Two Masters’), followed by Henry Eliot’s rebuke, see Jewel Spears Brooker, T. S. Eliot’s Dialectical Imagination, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins UP, 2018, pp. 150-52. (The book was reviewed in The Glass No. 32, Spring 2020, pp. 63-64.) 9 The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts, ed. Valerie Eliot, New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971, p. 125. Eliot to Pound: the quotation from Heart of Darkness ‘is much the most appropriate I can fi nd, and somewhat elucidative.’ 22 THE GLASS person/fan or admirer. Eliot’s class discussion of the danger lurking in relationships focuses on two examples, both of which involve the daemonic. In Heart of Darkness, Kurtz and Marlow are bound by an unexpressed pact; in Turn of the Screw, Peter Quint and Miles seem to be similarly bound. In the fi rst, Kurtz is a larger-than-life fi gure with whom Marlow is obsessed, and when they come face to face, Kurtz stamps himself irrevocably on Marlow’s imagination, and Marlow remains, in Conrad’s words, ‘loyal to Kurtz to the last.’10 In the second, Miles is a young orphan who is left for many months in the company of his uncle’s evil valet, Peter Quint. James, as Eliot tells his class, is a master of Evil by suggestion, and the clear suggestion here is that the valet, now deceased, has transplanted his own vile imagination into the child. An understanding of the relationship of Kurtz /Marlow and Peter Quint/Miles is instantly illuminating in Eliot’s startling description of his encounter with Prichard. As a twenty-two year old student newly arrived in France for study abroad, he found himself alone with a sophisticated forty-fi ve year-old scholar and artist – ‘a great man, in his way’, as Eliot tells Emily Hale, but also an Evil Infl uence who was hellbent on spiritual domination. In the paragraph following that in which Eliot describes his 1910 encounter with Prichard, he refl ects on his situation at Harvard in the spring of 1933. He was worried that his twenty year old all-male students, impressed to have an internationally known poet as a teacher, might take him as a model. He comments on students who linger for long talks about literature and frets that his thirty-year old teaching assistant, Theodore Spencer, is ‘terribly susceptible to my infl uence.’ Observing that the young professor is a slightly homosexual man with a wife and child, the forty-fi ve year old poet adds that infl uence can be unintentionally good or evil, but either way, it is a frightful responsibility. As in his account of the encounter with Prichard, his refl ections on these less dramatic relationships are tinged with eroticism (homosexual, given that all parties are male). Eliot’s anxiety about the frightful responsibility of infl uence is most intense in regard to his secret relationship with Emily Hale. His earliest lett ers (1930-1931) are worshipful and full of endearments. Upon learning that he would be spending a year in Boston, Eliot drew back in hurtful ways, and after his week with her in California and for the remainder of his time in America, he peppered his endearments with comments that called his devotion into question. He urges her to go to church, to develop devotional habits, and on 10 February, to meet ‘adult intelligent men,’ adding parenthetically ‘(that is unselfi sh of me, isn’t it?).’ At the same time, he admits on 27 February that his behaviour is unwholesome. ‘I know both the desire to dominate … to infl uence … and the desire to be dominated, to be infl uenced.’ Eliot’s preoccupation with the moral implications of infl uence is evident in a recurring question, posed soon after his return to Boston. On 13 February, he begins his lett er to Hale with ‘I want to know, How You Are … frankly and uncircumspectly, as if I were a doctor or a priest.’ He concludes with a variant of the same question, asking her to say whether his visit has harmed her in any way. The following evening, he dons his sacerdotal robe again and urges her to examine herself and tell him honestly whether his visit had been benefi cial or injurious – more specifi cally, whether he had done ‘spiritual good or damage.’ Not surprisingly, Emily has trouble fi guring out exactly what he is fi shing for. She must have assured him that his visit had been

10 Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness [1899], Norton Critical, 3rd ed., New York, 1988, p. 70. 23 THE GLASS

‘helpful,’ for on 2 March, he explains that he was not asking whether his visit had been ‘helpful,’ but ‘whether it had done any harm: either in the way of malice … or internally, spiritually.’ Protesting that she had not thrown the slightest light on either point, he retorts that her response to his question was simply ‘Silly.’ In the face of Eliot’s endless equivocation and occasional scolding, Emily Hale becomes ill and stops writing to him or to her family in Massachusett s. On 17 February, he writes that he is worried about her silence, adding that he assumes that Mrs. Perkins (her aunt) would let him know if there had been a disaster. On 8 March, he reiterates his concern and says he fi nds her silence to be unsett ling. Claiming that he is worrying himself ‘into horrors’ because neither he nor Mrs. Perkins has heard from her, Eliot begs her to write; ‘O my dear even when you can’t write to me, do try to get word to her.’ On 12 March, Mrs. Perkins fi nally receives a telegram with the news that Emily has been ill, with terrible nights and a hacking cough. Alarmed by the telegram, Eliot on 14 March tells her that she cannot imagine how relieved he is to know that she seems to be recovering. Apparently, he feared that she might not survive, for on 19 March, when he at last hears from her, he writes, ‘The momentary anxiety of a world without Emily in it was not pleasant.’ Eliot’s anxiety of infl uence extended beyond his relationship with Emily Hale. His lett ers suggest that it was associated with his Christian vocation, that for him, it was a point of intersection between ethics and theology. As Jesus reminded his disciples, anyone who causes the weak or the young to stumble will be judged harshly. ‘It were bett er for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea, than that he should off end one of these litt le ones (Luke 17:1-2).11 Eliot makes the connection between evil infl uence and judgement in a lett er writt en after confession on Holy Saturday 1933. His specifi c concern circles around an awareness of two issues – fi rst, the weight of infl uence, and second, Hale’s suggestion that he should divorce Vivienne. He claims that one of the reasons he cannot divorce is that he has become, for persons he does not even know, ‘a kind of symbol’. Complete strangers send lett ers expressing admiration and gratitude. They have litt le knowledge of the person they have embraced as a symbol and, given the fact that many are admirers of The Waste Land or The Hollow Men, he wonders about the eff ect he has had on them. Some are receptive to his infl uence because of his prestige as a public intellectual and, after his conversion, as a well-known lay person in the Anglican Communion. In the context of Hale’s repeated suggestion that he should divorce Vivienne, he explains that consciousness of the moral liability of infl uence makes it necessary for him to restrict his behaviour. And then, he indulges in obvious hyperbole, suggesting that if he were to divorce, it would be ‘the greatest misfortune to the Anglican Church since Newman went over to Rome.’ Eliot is also concerned about his infl uence over younger friends, including John Hayward and Stephen Spender. He feels a special burden in regard to Spender, for whom he feels a curious att raction. One facet of unintended infl uence, Eliot fears, is that it takes on a life of its own, and one cost of the awareness of moral liability is a peculiar loneliness. Two years later, on 5 July 1935, he uses his consciousness of the perilous nature of infl uence as a reason for wearing a mask, for keeping space between ‘what I stand for’ and ‘what I am’. Eliot’s year in America, as I argued in Eliot’s Dialectical Imagination, was one of several turning points in his life and art. The most consequential months were those immediately following his Christmas reunion with Hale in California. This week of 11 King James (Authorised) Version. 24 THE GLASS

Platonic intimacy casts a bright light on insurmountable diff erences between the idea and the reality, the greatest of which was intellectual and spiritual incompatibility. On 16 May, he told Hale that he had worried a great deal since Christmas that she considered the Church to be ‘monstrously bigoted’. To her suggestion that the church was to blame for his infl exibility on divorce, he responded that the church’s position on marriage is integral to the distinction between man and beast. As he said in his lectures in Virginia, ‘The perception of Good and Evil – whatever choice we make – is the fi rst requisite of spiritual life’ (Prose 5.39). The experience in California, followed immediately by his visit with family in St. Louis, led him to conclude that Unitarians, including Emily Hale and his parents, believed in good and bad, but not in Good and Evil. The overlap between the lett ers to Emily Hale and Eliot’s contemporaneous lectures on the moral imagination reveals that his year in America did not end either his moral ambivalence or her self-destructive acquiescence. Given the incongruity of their understanding of the spiritual life, the slow demise of their romance seems to have been inevitable.

25 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit

David Jasper

n ₇ May ₁₈₂₅, Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote to J. A. Hessey, the publisher of Coleridge’s Aids to Refl ection concerning six ‘disquisitions’ which he Ointended to publish as a ‘small supplementary volume’ to his larger work.1 The last of these was to be entitled ‘On the Right and the Superstitious Use of the Sacred Scriptures.’ These disquisitions, and there were fi nally seven of them, were not published in Coleridge’s lifetime, but in 1840 the poet’s nephew and literary executor, Henry Nelson Coleridge, published them as Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit: Lett ers on the Inspiration of the Scriptures.2 The seeming insignifi cance of this slight work belies its considerable infl uence on the religious thought of the nineteenth century and beyond, and not least in the fi eld of Biblical criticism. Even before he came up to Cambridge, the theologian F. D. Maurice knew of the writings of Coleridge, and together with John Sterling, Maurice was a prominent fi gure in the infl uential Cambridge Apostles, advocating the spiritual importance of Coleridge and Wordsworth. Other leading fi gures of the Apostles included Arthur Hallam and Alfred, Lord Tennyson.3 In Oxford, also, on the cusp of the Oxford Movement, Coleridge’s infl uence was felt. Tracing the roots of the Oxford Movement in his Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864), St. John Henry Newman wrote appreciatively if somewhat ambivalently of Coleridge: a philosophical basis … was laid in England by a very original thinker, who, while he indulged a liberty of speculation, which no Christian can tolerate, and advocated conclusions which were often heathen rather than Christian, yet after all instilled a higher philosophy into inquiring minds, than they had hitherto been accustomed to accept. In this way he made trial of his age, and succeeded in interesting its genius in the cause of Catholic truth.4 It was in the seventh lett er of Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit that Coleridge made his defence of a ‘philosophical Christianity’ in terms of the ‘pentad of operative Christianity’, and to this we shall return. But it was Benjamin Jowett ’s celebrated, and to many contemporaries his notorious, essay, ‘On the Interpretation of Scripture’ published as the last of the Essays and Reviews (1860), that most clearly developed Coleridge’s thought on the critical reading of the Bible in Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit. In his fi rst lett er, Coleridge adopts the critical perspective of reason that dispenses as far as possible with preconceptions and a priori judgements in the reading of scripture. He writes of the Bible: ‘I take up this work with

1 The Collected Lett ers of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Earl Leslie Griggs. Vol. V (1820-1825). Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1971, pp. 1446-8. 2 They were republished in 1849 with an introduction by Joseph Henry Green, and once again in 1853. 3 See further, Peter Allen, The Cambridge Apostles: The Early Years. Cambridge University Press, 1978. 4 John Henry Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua. London, Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, and Green, 1864, p. 185. 26 THE GLASS the purpose to read it for the fi rst time as I should read any other work.’5 It is precisely this point that Jowett makes in his essay. Of the interpreter of the Bible Jowett writes with clear Coleridgean echoes. He has no theory of interpretation; a few rules guarding against common errors are enough for him. His object is to read Scripture like any other book, with a real interest and not merely a conventional one.6 Was, then, people feared, the Bible to lose its sacred status, simply to be dragged down to the level of all other literature? Coleridge begins Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit by recounting how he had been reading Thomas Carlyle’s translation of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister.7 Not insignifi cantly it was Goethe who had placed the Bible in the ranks of weltliteratur alongside Homer and other classical works. As Coleridge reads the words of Goethe his thoughts are thrown ‘inward on my own religious experience’ and in this condition, as one ‘groaning under a deep sense of infi rmity and manifold imperfection,’ he feels the need of religious support.8 Thus he seeks to take up the Bible without prejudice, freed from the ‘contagious blastments of prejudice, and the fog-blight of self-superstition.’9 This leads him to the most celebrated passage in the work, to be found at the opening of the second letter, where he remarks That in the Bible there is more that fi nd me than I have experienced in all other book put together; that the words of the Bible fi nd me at greater depths of my being; and that whatever fi nds me brings with it an irresistible evidence of its having proceeded from the Holy Spirit.10 The point is, as Jowett saw perfectly, that subjecting the Bible to the same critical scrutiny as one would give to all other works of literature, abandoning all prejudice that might be granted to a ‘sacred text’, is precisely to discover the unique quality of the scriptural books, inspired indeed by the Holy Spirit. To read the Bible like any other book is to discover that it is quite unlike any other book. Thus, the Bible is rescued for both faith and the critical spirit from the deadening eff ects of what Coleridge calls ‘bibliolatry,’11 that worship of scripture that is the result of a ‘habit of slothful, undiscriminating, acquiescence.’12 In the fourth letter he examines the diff erence between the two propositions: The Bible contains the religion revealed by God. Whatever is contained in the Bible is religion, and was revealed by God.13

5 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, London, William Pickering, 1840, p. 8. 6 Benjamin Jowett , ‘On the Interpretation of Scripture’, Essays and Reviews. London, John W. Parker and Son, 1860, p. 338. 7 Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1824), Wilhelm Meister’s Travels (1827). 8 Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, p. 3. 9 Ibid., p. 9. 10 Ibid., p. 13. 11 J. H. Green ascribes the coining of the word ‘bibliolatry’, wrongly, to Gott fried Lessing. Coleridge almost certainly discovered it in the writings of John Byrom (d. 1763), who used it at least twice. 12 Ibid., p. 71. 13 Ibid., p. 44. 27 THE GLASS

The fi rst proposition, he readily affi rms, may be true, but the second most decidedly is not, for, regarding the whole body of the Bible without exception, it is prone to encourage extraordinary interpretations that link together passages far removed from one another by age and culture, or else understand as literal that which is intended to be fi gurative. Such interpretations are violations of both faith and reason. For the Bible must be allowed to speak for itself, and not in isolation but as part of a living tradition and experience of faith. Only thus will the Bible take its place at the heart of the ‘moral and intellectual cultivation of the race.’14 Some years before writing the Confessions, Coleridge had writt en on the literary energy of the Bible in The Statesman’s Manual (1816), describing scripture, with reference to Ezekiel’s great vision of the living chariot (1: 15-21), as the living educts of the Imagination; of that reconciling and mediatory power, which, incorporating the Reason in Images of the sense, and organizing (as it were) the fl ux of the Senses by the permanence and self-circling energies of the Reason, gives birth to a system of symbols, harmonious in themselves, and consubstantial with the truth, of which they are the conductors. These are the Wheels which Ezekiel beheld, when the hand of the Lord was upon him, and he saw visions of God as he sate among the captives by the river of Chebar. Whithersoever the Spirit was to go, the wheels went, and thither was their spirit to go: for the spirit of the living creature was in the wheels also. The truths and symbols that represent them move in conjunction and form the living chariot that bears up (for us) the throne of the Divine Humanity.15 This is a remarkable passage in its density and its energetic realisation of the ‘breathing organism’ that is the Bible, indicative of its manifold and yet unifi ed living quality. Coleridge describes what he calls in Theory of Life (posthumously published, 1848) the Bible’s ‘unity in multeity’ by distinguishing in the Confessions between the two words ‘diversly’ and ‘diversely.’ Of the ‘one Spirit, working diversly’ Coleridge writes. I use the adverb diversly from the adjective divers in order to distinguish the Scriptural and Pauline sense of the word – the sense in which I use it here – from the logical usage of the term diversely from diverse, that is, diff erent in kind, heterogeneous. The same Spirit may act and impel diversity, but, being a good Spirit, it cannot act diversely.16 On this point, Coleridge draws a literary comparison between the unity of the many and varied books of the Bible with the unity of the plays of Shakespeare, referring back to his own Lectures on Dramatic Poetry.17 The plays of Shakespeare, he affi rms, must be taken as a whole and not selectively, Titus Andronicus as well as King Lear, the three parts of Henry VI as well as Richard III. Only thus does the ‘genial mind’ come to appreciate in Shakespeare ‘that unity or total impression comprising, and resulting from, the thousandfold several and particular emotions of delight, admiration and gratitude excited by his works.’18 As we must appreciate all of Shakespeare to understand him, so we must read the Bible as a whole and with that critical spirit that grants to the writings of, for 14 Ibid., p. 71. 15 The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Vol. 6, Lay Sermons, ed. R. J. White et al. Princeton University Press, 1972, p. 29. 16 Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, p. 33. 17 Coleridge is presumably referring to his lectures on Shakespeare given in 1818-19. The Collected Works, Vol.5, Part II. 18 Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, p. 26. 28 THE GLASS example, St. Paul the same ‘honest and intelligent’ att ention that we would give to any other author. Quite unacceptable is that bibliolatry that sets the Bible in a pillar, apart from all other writings and imposes upon it literal readings that simply miss the fact that the truth of Scripture lies not in any literal sense but rather in its ‘declared ends and purposes.’19 What is signifi cant here is not only Coleridge’s literary approach to the reading of the Bible, but his anticipation of so much in modern Anglican liberalism. Not only was he crucial for Benjamin Jowett in Essays and Reviews, but he sets the seal upon Charles Gore’s great essay ‘The Holy Spirit and Inspiration’ in Lux Mundi (1890). For it was Coleridge’s rejection of Biblical literalism and infallibility and his ‘nuanced understanding of scripture as inspired but still fallibly human’20 that drew Gore to a similar position in his essay, bringing down upon his head the ire of the more conservative Anglican and Anglo-catholic opinion of his day. In another way, furthermore, Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit anticipates Charles Gore and liberal Anglicanism at the end of the nineteenth century, for it is essentially a work of pneumatology.21 Throughout it is the operation of the Holy Spirit working through the faculty of reason in the reader that is the key to the origins and proper reading of the Bible. The foundation of the whole work is the ‘Pentad of Operative Christianity’ which stands as a preface to it. In this diagram, the Prothesis is Christ, the Word. The thesis and antithesis are the Scriptures and the Church, between which the mesothesis (or Indiff erence) is the Holy Spirit. The synthesis is the preacher, in whom, through the Spirit, the Scriptures and the Church become one. This Pentad, presented without explanation, is in fact the intellectual key to understanding the whole work. It is in the seventh and concluding letter that Coleridge most fully defends a ‘philosophical Christianity,’ setting the tone for Anglican liberal theology after F. D. Maurice and others in the nineteenth century and beyond. Powerful echoes of it may still be heard in the writings of William Temple in the twentieth century. In this letter Coleridge returns to the model of the pentad of operative Christianity. Revealed Religion (and I know of no religion not revealed) is in its highest contemplation the unity, that is, the identity of coinherence, of Subjective and Objective. It is in itself, and irrelatively, at once inward Life and Truth, and outward Fact and Luminary. But as all Power manifests itself in the harmony of correspondent Opposites, each supposing and supporting the other – so has Religion its objective, or historic and ecclesiastical pole, and its subjective, or spiritual and individual pole.22 Unlike the youthful Coleridge who, in 1796 had abandoned history for metaphysics and the ‘facts of Mind’, here we see the mature thinker, the author of On the Constitution of the Church and State (1830) who is now appreciative of the historical nature of Christianity and its tradition. Coleridge’s prose rarely makes for easy reading but invariably it rewards careful att ention. Aids to Refl ection (1829), to which the Confessions were to be att ached was infl uential on nineteenth century liberal Christian thought in England, and, after its publication in 1840, in the United States also. In correspondence with the younger Cambridge Apostles in 1829, John Sterling shocked them by dismissing from their 19 See further, Frederick Burwick, Poetic Madness and the Romantic Imagination, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996, p. 69. 20 Joel Harter, Coleridge’s Philosophy of Faith. Tübingen, Mohr Siebeck, 2011, p. 3. 21 See further, Luke Savin Herrick Wright, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Anglican Church, University of Notre Dame Press, 2010, p. 208. 22 Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, pp. 91-2. 29 THE GLASS att ention the writings of Wordsworth and Shelley, writing instead: ‘I scarcely hold fast by anything but Shakespeare, Milton, and Coleridge and I have nothing serious to say to any one but to read the “Aids to Refl ection in the formation of a Manly Character” – a book the more necessary now to us all because except in England I do not see that there is a chance of any men being produced any where.’23 In his shrewd and infl uential book Movements of Religious Thought in Britain During the Nineteenth Century (1885), the Scott ish theologian John Tulloch writes of fi nding in the Confessions ‘one indication of the rise of a true spirit of criticism in English theology.’ Tulloch continues. The notion of verbal inspiration, or the infallible dictation of Holy Scripture could not possibly continue after the modern spirit of historical inquiry had begun. As soon as men plainly recognised the organic growth of all great facts, literary as well as others, it was inevitable that they should see the Scriptures in a new light, as a product of many phases of thought in course of more or less perfect development.24 But Coleridge has always had his detractors, and indeed, infl uential though he was on the theology of the nineteenth century, his infl uence was somewhat subterranean and he often puzzled as much as he inspired. It is true that Thomas Carlyle described him as ‘a kind of prophetic or magician character’ as he sat, in his later years, on the brow of Highgate Hill. A sublime man; who alone in those dark days, had saved his crown of spiritual manhood; escaping from the black materialisms, and revolutionary deluges, with ‘God, Freedom, Immortality’ still his: a king of men. The practical intellects of the world did not much heed him, or carelessly reckoned him a metaphysical dreamer: but to the rising spirits of the young generation he had this dusky sublime character; and sat there as a kind of Magus, girt in mystery and enigma; his Dodona oakgrove (Mr. Gilman’s house at Highgate) whispering strange things, uncertain whether oracles or jargon.25 And yet there have certainly always been those who have questioned his intellectual commitment and rigour. Ott o Pfl eiderer in his book Development in Theology in Germany since Kant, and Its Progress in England since 1825 (1893) does give him a place beside Lessing, Herder and Schleiermacher, yet fi nds in him an ‘inclination to suppress criticism in religious questions.’ Nearer to our own time, the American critic Paul de Man expressed himself to be perplexed by Coleridge’s ‘ontological bad faith’ and questioned the intellectual honesty of his religious statements which confuse the purely human with a ‘transcendental source.’26 It is certainly possible to argue that Coleridge wanted to have it both ways as regards the Bible in the Confessions. For the Bible, as he boldly asserts in The Statesman’s Manual, is ‘worthily intitled the WORD OF GOD’. And yet, at the same time, reason prompts us to reject the illogical demands of scriptural inerrancy. But this, for him, does not amount to a contradiction as we address the Bible as a living whole, its words 23 John Sterling to J. W. Blakesley, 25 November, 1829. Quoted in Peter Allen, The Cambridge Apostles, pp. 90-1. 24 John Tulloch, Movements of Religious Thought in Britain During the Nineteenth Century [1885]. Leicester University Press, 1871, p. 25. 25 Thomas Carlyle, The Life of John Sterling (1851), in Selected Writings, ed. Alan Shelston, Penguin, 1971, p. 315. 26 Paul de Man, ‘The Rhetoric of Temporality’ in Charles S. Singleton, ed., Interpretation: Theory and Practice, Johns Hopkins press, 1969, p. 194. See also David Jasper, Introduction to Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit. Philadelphia, Fortress Press, 1988, pp. 15-16. 30 THE GLASS

‘the living chariot that bears up (for us) the throne of the Divine Humanity.’ It was from Coleridge that Charles Gore was bold enough to teach that Jesus Christ, as the divine entering kenotically into humanity, thereby necessarily also took upon himself human fallibility. It has been suggested that this idea was suffi ciently shocking to Canon Henry Parry Liddon that it brought about his death in 1890 shortly after the publication of Lux Mundi.27 But in his Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit Coleridge spoke to those who would hear that the authority of the Bible is neither dogmatic nor arbitrary. Rather its truth, which is a gift of the Holy Spirit, is found in the adventure of encountering, with intelligence, its living words through which are heard the Word of God, found in human language and in human history. The literary critic Geoff rey Hartman wrote in an essay entitled ‘The Struggle for the Text:’ To call the Bible a sacred text is to set it apart, to constitute it as such for the reader, but as Auerbach and others have argued there is something in the text that prompts us towards this, not in order to keep the text’s message hidden or enclosed, but on the contrary to make us enter its originative space: the unsaid as well as the said, the unmarked as well as the marked terrain, where the going is complex from both a scholarly and a spiritual point of view.28 Coleridge would have understood and appreciated this, especially that ‘but,’ the precaution against bibliolatry. He concludes the Confessions with a refl ection that ‘our theologians’ too often seem to act out of a sense of fear rather than a faith that prompts, and is prompted by, a spirit of inquiry. And too often instead of inquiring after Truth in the confi dence, that whatever is truth must be fruitful of good to all who are in Him that is true, they seek with vain precautions to guard against the possible inferences which perverse and distempered minds may pretend, whose whole Christianity, – do what we will – is and will remain nothing but a Pretence.29 This is a message as much for our own time as it was for the nineteenth century. It may go some way to explain why critical writing on Coleridge continues today, unabated, acknowledging his genius as a poet, a philosophical and religious thinker, and, not least, a guide to the reading of Sacred Scripture.

27 The suggestion was made by Bernard M. G. Reardon, From Coleridge to Gore: A Century of Religious Thought in Britain, London, Longman, 1971, p. 431. 28 Geoff rey H. Hartman, ‘The Struggle for the Text,’ in Geoff rey H. Hartman and Sanford Budick, eds., Midrash and Literature, Yale University Press, 1986, p. 3. 29 Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit, p. 95. 31 Seeking Light: Ruskin after Jesus

Andrew Tate

ohn Ruskin ₍₁₈₁₉-₁₉₀₀₎, art critic and social prophet, was famous for his combative public rhetoric, whether in defence of maligned ‘modern painters’ such as J. M. JW. Turner, or to damn exploitative industry. He also used his linguistic skills to disparaging eff ect in private correspondence. This sharp tongue is evident, on occasion, in his assessment of the spirituality of his peers. An example of this is a lett er that he wrote to his friend Charles Eliot Norton, a few days after the death of Charles Dickens. Ruskin is careful to note his admiration for the great writer whose passing is ‘very frightful to me’. However, in a typically savage Ruskinian turn, he is scathing about Dickens’ understanding of deep theological matt ers: ‘His Christmas meant mistletoe and pudding – neither resurrection from dead, nor rising of new stars, nor teaching of wise men, nor shepherds’.1 The question of Dickens’ much debated understanding of religion is a matt er for a diff erent article, though I think Ruskin’s assessment is, in this instance, superfi cial and unfair.2 However, his critique of sentimental iterations of the festive season, of his rather Scrooge-like trivialisation of ‘mistletoe and pudding’, points to Ruskin’s ongoing fascination with the incarnation, death and resurrection of Jesus. For him, these concepts were not simply a matt er of antiquated mythology but a living reality, even if those who claimed to represent Jesus in nineteenth century Britain seemed, very often, to be at odds with the teachings of the one they called Lord. His glib assessment of the personal faith of one of his peers also foreshadows the simplistic way in which future generations would think about the religious lives of nineteenth-century men and women more widely. In the decades after his death, Ruskin’s complex religious belief was an embarrassment for many of his readers. For critics who were actively hostile to organised religion of any kind, the fact that he emphasised the signifi cance of worship, devotion and prayer were simply an indication of his reactionary nature. In the last thirty years, a number of scholars have recuperated the signifi cance of Ruskin’s evolving religious commitments. Most notably, C. Stephen Finley’s Nature’s Covenant: Figures of Landscape in Ruskin (1992) and Michael Wheeler’s Ruskin’s God (1999) are ground-breaking in their serious revaluation of their subject’s religion. More recently the work of Francis O’Gorman and Dinah Birch, among others, demonstrates a sensitive reappraisal of Ruskin’s theological worldview.3 In his authoritative contribution to the fi eld, All Great Art is Praise: Art and Religion in John Ruskin (2016), Aidan Nichols makes the contentious but credible case that his subject was not just ‘catholic’, as is widely 1 The Library Edition of The Works of Ruskin, ed. by E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols, George Allen, 1903-1912, 37, p. 7. All subsequent references will be given parenthetically as volume and page number. 2 Signifi cant book-length studies of Dickens and religion include Dennis Walder, Dickens and Religion, George Allen, 1981; Janet L. Larson, Dickens and the Broken Scripture, Athens, University of Georgia Press, 1985; and Gary Colledge, God and Charles Dickens, Ada, Brazos, 2012. 3 See, in particular, Francis O’Gorman, ‘Religion’, in The Cambridge Companion to John Ruskin, Cambridge University Press, 2015, pp. 114-56; Dinah Birch, ‘John Ruskin’, in The Blackwell Companion to the Bible in English Literature, ed. Rebecca Lemon, Emma Mason, Jonathan Roberts, and Christopher Rowland, Blackwell, 2009, pp. 554-65. 32 THE GLASS acknowledged, but ‘progressively “Catholic” with an uppercase C as well.’4 Was Ruskin devout or doubting, a Romantic anti-capitalist or conservative defender of tradition, a prophetic moralist or playful aesthete? The 39 volumes of his collected works – and thousands of unpublished lett ers – reveal an individual who was all of these things. He was relatively self-aware of this propensity for paradox and famously claimed that he was ‘never satisfi ed that I have handled a subject properly till I have contradicted myself at least three times’ (16. 187). He was a complex individual with views that appealed to now unfashionably transcendent notions of truth but who was deeply troubled by the disappointing realities of life in a world that seemed to have abandoned goodness and beauty. For O’Gorman, Ruskin is not simply another ‘Victorian who, in some decisive or permanent way, suff ers a loss of faith‘, but rather ’a man who suff ers because of his faith and he suff ers from a diffi culty in reconciling deeply held but tormented convictions with a world that increasingly did not seem to fi t them.’5 It is certainly true that a combination of factors, including the challenges of new scientifi c discoveries and the apparent ease with which the church seemed to collude with a culture of greed, were painfully disturbing for him. However, I concur with Nichols’ claim that ‘in all the phases of his long and complex career, what Ruskin has to say about art can never be separated from his thinking about religion’.6 He always resisted a false opposition between diff erent elements of life. This is famously embodied in his celebration of ‘clear’ sight in the third volume of Modern Painters (1856): ‘To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion, – all in one’ (5.333). This trinitarian rhetoric is a way of reminding his readers that holiness was integral to their apparently ordinary lives. The sacred did not live elsewhere but was present in the here and now, for those with eyes to see. In the fi rst volume of Modern Painters (1843), Ruskin emphasised that holiness was visible in the work of all of God’s creatures to whom is appointed ‘a separate mission’ (3. 173). This sense of purpose is developed in The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), in which Ruskin’s Christian aesthetics are given a challenging ethical shape. Humanity is gifted stewardship of the world, and he emphasises a strongly future-oriented worldview rather than a nostalgic one: God has lent us the earth for our life; it is a great entail. It belongs as much to those who are to come after us, and whose names are already writt en in the book of creation, as to us (8. 233).i Ruskin’s hope that his audience would take this ‘great entail’ seriously was often frustrated. He had a complicated relationship with the established church and the wider community of believers. His pious upbringing, in an atmosphere of Evangelical devotion, is well known; similarly, scholars, at least since Mary and Ellen Gibbs in The Bible References of John Ruskin (1898), have recognised the shaping infl uence of the Jewish and Christian scriptures on his criticism of art, architecture and society. For the fi rst decade and a half of his long creative life, Ruskin often wrote like an unoffi cial cultural spokesman for Evangelical Protestants and his early work, like that of many of his peers, appeared particularly antagonistic to Roman Catholicism. This changed in 1858, during his fortieth year when his disillusionment with elements of sectarian religion crystalised during a sojourn in Turin: in between studying the

4 Aidan Nichols, All Great Art Is Praise: Art and Religion in John Ruskin, Washington, Dc, Catholic University of America Press, 2016, xii. 5 O’Gorman, p. 114. 6 Nichols, p. xii. 33 THE GLASS paintings of Paolo Veronese, who he had previously thought of as too much of a sensualist, and listening to a bleak sermon in a Waldensisan chapel, by ‘a litt le squeaking idiot’ who believed that ‘all the people in the world out of sight of Monte Viso, would be damned’, Ruskin had a moment of epiphany (29. 89). He recalls being fi lled with a sense of Veronese’s ‘God-given power’, an experience that he juxtaposes with the judgemental narrowness of the Waldensian preacher – a tradition that English Protestants had long idealised: ‘I came out of the chapel, in sum of twenty years of thought, a conclusively un-converted man’ (29. 89). Although he shared this shift in his world view in private correspondence with, for example, his father and Elizabeth Barrett -Browning, Ruskin did not narrate the experience in public discourse for almost twenty years. The description of Veronese and the preacher are from an 1877 issue of Fors Clavigera (1871-84), his series of lett ers addressed to the workmen of Great Britain. He returned to this moment of change in Praeterita (1885-9), the fragmented and elegiac autobiography in which he memorably describes it as the ‘Queen of Sheba crash’, in homage to the Veronese painting that was part of its inspiration (35.497). Signifi cantly, although the memoir indicates that this break with his Puritan roots was a signifi cant turning point, Ruskin emphasises his experience in the gallery was more than a rejection of dogmatic piety. It was a powerful religious experience in its own right and one that he describes in the language of theophany: And as the perfect colour and sound gradually asserted their power on me, they seemed fi nally to fasten me in the old article of Jewish faith, that things done delightfully and rightly were always done by the help and in the Spirit of God (35. 495-96). 7 Ruskin’s ostensible mid-life ‘unconversion’ from Evangelicalism, which is sometimes misunderstood as a repudiation of orthodox Christianity, created the space for him to engage in a vivid critique of contemporary piety in its many forms. Popular misunderstandings of Ruskin’s religious outlook as something that he once held dearly but was forced to abandon sometime in the 1850s are not uncommon. Although what he regarded as ‘the old Evangelical formulæ’, once the bedrock of his religious security, were no longer suffi cient for his evolving worldview, Ruskin continued to root his worldview in the witness of the scriptures and an abiding, if anxious, faith in God (27. 115). Although he became spiritually homeless for a time, he was not without faith. His work, both public and private, explores doubt, ambivalence and anxiety about religion, but this was paired with an abiding commitment to honour the divine that was manifest in all things. Religion, for Ruskin, was increasingly a matt er of practice that upheld truth, beauty, goodness rather than a set of doctrines that might be utt ered by disbelieving mouths. This, in a sense, was his animus against the pride of his home nation by the time he had reached mid-life. In the fi nal volume of Modern Painters (1860), Ruskin, now in his early forties, refl ects on how the hope of Turner, the artist who had inspired what became a seventeen year project, was ruined by the ethical

7 I explore the ‘Queen of Sheba crash’ in more detail in ‘“Archangel Veronese”: Ruskin as Protestant Spectator’, Ruskin’s Artists: Studies in The Victorian Visual Economy, ed. Robert Hewison, Ashgate, 2000, pp. 131-45, and ‘Tell the Story: Re-imagining Conversion Narratives’, Shaping Belief: Culture, Politics and Religion in Nineteenth-Century Writing, ed. Victoria Morgan and Clare Williams, Liverpool University Press, 2008, pp. 3-19. Michael Wheeler off ers an authoritative exploration of the event in Ruskin’s God, Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp. 125-52. 34 THE GLASS bankruptcy of England: ‘No nation ever before declared boldly, by print and word of mouth, that its religion was good for show, but “would not work”’ (7. 445-46). Ruskin’s anger with the infi delity of a supposedly Christian nation fed into Unto this Last (1860-2), his critique of political economy based, in part, on Christ’s parable of the labourers in the vineyard (Matt hew 20). In condemning the politics of greed he off ered his famous conclusion regarding the accumulation of capital: ‘There is no Wealth but Life. Life, including all its powers of love, of joy, and of admiration. That country is the richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human beings’ (17. 105). Signifi cantly, Ruskin’s argument fi nds its surest ground for an ethical critique of exploitative labour practices not in economic theory but in Christ’s teaching. A decade earlier, in ‘The Nature of Gothic’, a chapter in The Stones of Venice (1851-3), Ruskin had writt en a powerfully theological critique of capitalism, arguing that ‘[y]ou must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both’ (10. 190). He emphasised that social justice was not an optional extra for the devout. Ruskin frequently exhorted his readers to re-read the Psalms, the Hebrew book of praises that is vital in Christian worship, and to consider their stern injunctions against oppressing the poor.8 In The Two Paths (1859), for example, he reminds the faithful, especially wealthy believers, of an uncomfortable scriptural reality: You cannot but have noticed how often in those parts of the Bible which are likely to be oftenest opened when people look for guidance, comfort, or help in the aff airs of daily life, – namely, the Psalms and Proverbs, – mention is made of the guilt att aching to the Oppression of the poor.[. . .] You will often hear sermons about neglect or carelessness of the poor. But neglect and carelessness are not at all the points. The Bible hardly ever talks about neglect of the poor. It always talks of oppression of the poor—a very diff erent matt er (16. 397; 399). Ruskin’s departure from Evangelicalism did not come about because he felt that this wing of the church valued scripture too highly or that it followed Christ’s teachings too dogmatically. Indeed, there is plenty of evidence that he found Evangelicals to be less faithful to the precise demands of the Biblical teaching than their ostensible commitment to belief in its inspired and inerrant nature. In Lett er 40 of Fors Clavigera, published in April 1874, he att acked the tendency of Evangelicals to take individual verses from scripture and to ignore their original context: whatever issues of life, divine or human, there may be in it, for you, can only be got by searching it; and not by chopping it up into small bits and swallowing it like pills [. . .] Read your Bibles honestly and utt erly, my scrupulous friends, and stand by the consequences, - if you have what true men call ‘faith’ (28. 72). Wheeler notes that despite Ruskin’s movement away from this dogmatic position, especially regarding inerrancy, ‘his literalism survived the change’.9 A good example of this, also explored by Wheeler, is Ruskin’s reading of the parable of the Prodigal Son in Time and Tide, by Weare and Tyne (1867). Ruskin asks his reader to reconsider the words of Jesus by suggesting that they be thought of in more simple terms than Christian theology routinely seems to require: ‘First, have you ever observed that all Christ‘s main teachings, by direct order, by earnest parable, and by His own permanent emotion, regard the use and misuse of money?’ (17. 458). This 8 See also Andrew Tate, ‘“Sweeter also than honey”: John Ruskin and the Psalms’, Yearbook of English Studies, 39.1 & 39. 2 (2009), 114-25. 9 Wheeler, p. 178. 35 THE GLASS is a distinctively Ruskinian manoeuvre: the focus on material, ordinary activity – something as apparently base as economic exchange – is a reminder of our physical existence. How we behave in the world that as it presently exists, rather than what we claim for our abstract, transcendent beliefs, reveals more about our authentic spirituality than any number of holy words. The practical and direct nature of Jesus is, Ruskin suggests, quite diff erent from how sanctity is often imagined: We might have thought, if we had been asked what a divine teacher was most likely to teach, that he would have left inferior persons to give directions about money [. . .] But not so (17. 458). The parable is likely to have a strong resonance for Ruskin who was aware of the privilege that his father’s self-made wealth had given to his life. Indeed, his att itude to money – ‘there is no wealth but life’ – might be his att empt to honour a story of forgiveness and return. Ruskin, in truth, rebelled against the wider culture of individualism, greed and destructive att itudes to nature more than he did against his authoritarian, but loving, parents. His dissident streak was defi ned by a distaste for a zeitgeist that seemed to privilege personal gain above the common good. Despite shifts in his doctrinal or ecclesiastical affi liations, Ruskin was unchanging in his view that a life of authentic faith was marked by sacrifi ce. A life of surrender to the divine mandate of selfl essness and of true obedience to goodness is costly in a way that few of us can understand. Ruskin knew that he was privileged and conducted himself as one who believed that he was ultimately accountable to God. In his late work The Bible of Amiens (1880-85), originally intended to form part of an ambitious, multi-volume history of Christianity, Ruskin refl ects on what he reads as a culpable misinterpretation of the cross by Evangelicals: ‘If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, (for charity) and take up his cross (of pain) and follow me.’ The idea has been exactly reversed by modern Protestantism, which sees, in the cross, not a furca to which it is to be nailed; but a raft on which it, and all its valuable properties, are to be fl oated into Paradise (Works, 33. 112). The quotation from Matt hew 16:24 would have been familiar to his readers and it was reframed in a bracing way for those who believed that the only important aspect of their spiritual life was their own personal salvation. Wheeler identifi es this passage from The Bible of Amiens as an example of Evangelicals using Biblical interpretation to make an ‘accommodation with Mammon’.10 Ruskin makes the target of his critique still more explicit in a footnote: ‘Quite one of the most curious colours of modern Evangelical thought is its pleasing connection of Gospel truth with the extension of lucrative commerce!’ (Works, 33. 112). This was a view broadly shared by William Gladstone, the great Victorian statesmen, who like Ruskin, was a former Evangelical. Gladstone once observed that although this wing of the church ‘did not ally itself with literature, art, and general cultivation’, it ‘harmonized very well with the money- gett ing pursuits’.11 Ruskin is a tough critic of self-serving individualism and strategies of interpretation that are designed to justify greed, complacency and personal satisfaction. He became increasingly impatient with spiritual vanity in any tradition and, in particular, with those communities that perpetuate the idea of salvation as an abstract theology, 10 Wheeler, p. 255. 11 William Ewart Gladstone, Gleanings From Past Years, 1843-1878, 7 vols., Murray, 1879, VII, 219.

36 THE GLASS somehow separate from works. In Sesame and Lilies (1865), he expressed contempt for sectarians of every species, small and great, Catholic or Protestant, of high church or low, in so far as they think themselves exclusively in the right and others wrong; and, pre-eminently, in every sect, those who hold that men can be saved by thinking rightly instead of doing rightly, by word instead of act, and wish instead of work (18. 74). This is not simply a repudiation of the Protestant emphasis on sola fi des. For Ruskin, salvation was a mystery but one that is most faithfully given witness in embodied ways. The most authentic faith is, he suggests, a practice of incarnational agency found amongst those who act in justice, mercy and peace. Ruskin was not, in economic, theological or philosophical senses, a liberal. His understanding of human identity privileged belonging and community above individual desire. He also retained a strongly hierarchical sense of society, though this was qualifi ed by his belief that the upper classes routinely squandered their privilege. Yet his beliefs also increasingly moved towards an inclusiveness and a universalism that were shaped by his understanding of the gospels and, as he saw it, the divine imperatives that were evident with those with ears to hear everywhere in creation. In 1883, almost forty years after its original publication, Ruskin wrote what he described as a ‘garrulous Epilogue’ to the second volume of Modern Painters (1846) (4. 356). Now in late middle age, and in retrospective mood, Ruskin refl ects on the signifi cance of his mother’s spiritual guidance, especially in his daily Bible readings and regular prayer: ‘all my love of the beauty, or sense of the majesty, of natural things,’ Ruskin observes, ‘was in direct ratio to conditions of devotional feeling; and I never climbed any mountain, alone, without kneeling down, by instinct, on its summit to pray’ (4. 350). The original book off ered his most sustained theology of aesthetics, a set of arguments about beauty, divinity and perception, and represented a religious worldview that was radically at odds with the times. This was not simply the headline news of Darwinian thought or the much debate process of secularisation. The church itself, in its fi ssiparous forms, often seemed to be indiff erent or inimical to transformative beauty. Although Ruskin was, in many ways, a man altered by the depredations of personal disappointments, grief and the reality of a changing world, this belated coda is a reminder that his project always had a theological shape. He had rejected elements of what he now viewed as a self-serving and naïve militant Protestantism but any shift in dogma did not undo his belief that art and all human endeavour only meant anything in relation to the benign and wise Creator who gave it life. This view was not necessarily rare in the 1880s but it was under pressure. Ruskin was rather diff erent from his contemporaries and, perhaps from twenty-fi rst-century believers, in that he was prepared to scrutinise his ideas, both his faith and his uncertainty, in public. It is easier to retain the idea of a privatised, personal faith, one that should not sound too odd or costly, in an era that is dominated by the idea that consumer choice is the defi ning political reality. In one of his Fors Clavigera lett ers published in March 1876, Ruskin addressed himself to the kind of good work to be undertaken by the ‘companions’ of the Guild of St George, the utopian society that he founded, designed to be a practical response to the exploitation of human beings, the land and the brutalisation of creation. Lett er 63 takes its name, ‘Sit Splendor’, from Psalm 90, also known as the prayer of Moses. Verse 17, cited by Ruskin, is a prayer for divine illumination: ‘And let the brightness of 37 THE GLASS the Lord our God be upon us’. The lett er advocates that his companions and readers should dedicate themselves to works of ‘light’. This, he suggests, may be against the tendencies of the day: A work of light is one that seeks light, and that, not for its own sake, but to light all men; so that all workers of good work delight in witnesses; only with true desire that the witnesses’ pleasure may be greater than theirs; and that the Eternal witnesses – the Cloud around us, and Powers above – may have chief pleasure of all (28. 540-1). Ruskin was a fl awed individual and his views will often seem peculiar or utt erly wrong in the early twenty-fi rst century. However, he has a key theological legacy which is a profound challenge to the complacency of the privileged. This includes Christians who enjoy default protection by the law but who choose to avert their gaze from persecution, exploitation and violence, especially when it is enacted against the most vulnerable members of society. He did not compartmentalise his faith: there is no false split between how he approached a landscape painting, a Gothic Cathedral or exploitative labour. As he moved towards an emphasis on society and human activity, Ruskin retained a gospel infl uenced way of reading the world, perhaps especially when it found him at odds with established religion. His worldview insisted on the interrelation of all things, the intimate association between the earth’s creatures and their creator and the legacies of transgression for future generations. This is particularly visible in late works such as The Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century (1884), his prophetic warning against industrial pollution, a work that provoked confusion and contempt for many of his contemporaries. Yet even in a world of threatening cloud, Ruskin remained convinced that humanity might best defi ne itself by seeking light, to paraphrase his words from Fors Clavigera, a light that shines and has not been overcome by the darkness.12

12 John 1:5. 38 Pilgrim Plays for a New Elizabethan Age Margaret Wiedemann Hunt

he Christian poet and the theologically minded priest speak two different languages, and one of the numerous headaches in “religious drama” is trying ‘Tto please both’.1 These words from Pamela Keily’s Memoirs were writt en in rueful refl ection on her work as Director of the New Pilgrim Players, the professional touring company which was the acting arm of the Religious Drama Society (RDS) from 1952-1956. The objectives of the Sheffi eld-based New Pilgrims were to demonstrate high performance standards and to give advice and training to local drama groups, and after their disbandment Keily became an adviser in religious drama to the northern dioceses. The year 1953 saw the completion of two plays specially commissioned for the Pilgrims: A Match for the Devil by the Cumbrian poet Norman Nicholson,2 and the Passion play Christ in the Concrete City by the young priest Philip Turner.3 A Match for the Devil was rejected by its commissioning body and has not often been performed, but continues to feature in histories of the drama and literature of the period as one of the fi nal plays in the mid-twentieth century fl owering of verse drama. Christ in the Concrete City, an ensemble piece whose style looks forward to workshop productions such as Godspell (1971) in the commercial theatre, proved immensely popular with amateur church groups during the following thirty years but is rarely mentioned in academic studies. This essay will examine some ways in which these contrasting commissions refl ect changes in the post-war theatrical and theological landscapes. On 11 February 1953 the executive committ ee of the RDS held a special meeting in the society’s offi ce on Northumberland Avenue. Its purpose was to review Nicholson’s A Match for the Devil, based on the story of the Old Testament prophet Hosea, and those who had commissioned it were worried about its presentation of the theme of prostitution. The meeting was chaired by E Martin Browne, who mentored and directed the fi rst performances of all T. S. Eliot’s plays and had directed the wartime Pilgrim Players which the New Pilgrims hoped to emulate. Pamela Keily was in att endance at the meeting. Nicholson had writt en a play for Browne’s 1945 season of verse-drama at the Mercury Theatre, and as a northern playwright he was an obvious choice for the Sheffi eld commission. He had previously submitt ed a scenario about the prophet Hosea for the approval of the RDS executive and the Pilgrims started rehearsing the fi rst two acts before the arrival of the third, a situation not unknown in the annals of theatre.4 As Keily wrote in her Memoirs: The company were enchanted by this new play with its sensitive and charming verse.... Suddenly, with the eventual completion of Act Three, there came a summons to London for the director. We were all of us thrilled by the rehearsals of this wholly new creation but it seemed to strike the governing body as something that would hurt and shock the audience by its interpretation of the scriptures.5

1 Pamela Keily, Memoirs, privately printed, 1986, p. 59. Hereafter ‘Memoirs’. 2 Norman Nicholson, A Match for the Devil, Faber & Faber, 1955. 3 Philip Turner, Christ in the Concrete City, SPCK, 1956. Hereafter ‘Concrete City’. 4 In its published form the play is in four scenes. 5 Keily, Memoirs, p. 44.

39 THE GLASS

What was it that caused alarm to the RDS executive? In the Old Testament story, Hosea is told to ‘take for yourself a wife of whoredom and have children of whoredom, for the land commits great whoredom by forsaking the Lord’ (New Revised Standard Version, Hosea 1:2). The Biblical command thus has an explicitly symbolic element, and theologically speaking Hosea has been interpreted down the centuries as representing the unconditional acceptance off ered by God to the people of Israel and to individual sinners. Yvonne Sherwood in a feminist critique of Hosea suggests that Biblical commentators from the earliest times, including Augustine, Jerome and Luther, have been concerned to whitewash Hosea’s wife Gomer by denying or modifying the idea that Gomer is a harlot.6 Nicholson stays within this tradition by making Gomer a temple or cultic prostitute. He expands the story, which in the Bible has very few details, into a verse-drama about forgiveness and acceptance within marriage. But he also develops the symbolic element in the Bible story and makes Gomer a life-force, a woman whose sexuality is affi rmed as part of God’s creation and as a way of gett ing nearer to Yahweh himself, and this lies behind the anxiety felt by the RDS executive. A Match for the Devil presents Hosea as a crotchety middle-aged bachelor living next door to an old woman Sarah and her grandson David. David’s mother Gomer is a beautiful young temple prostitute who returns home to look for a husband, jaded by servicing what Sarah calls the ‘ranting, runting riff raff of Samaria’ whose ‘religious duties’ are performed ‘rump over tip on the temple fl oor’ (p. 20). When Sarah and David negotiate a marriage with Hosea he is overwhelmed with love: ‘You swill the fl agstones with a bucketful of light’ (p. 32) and refuses to let Gomer do any work around the house or in the business. But she is bored and leaves her marriage to return to the temple: ‘You make me feel such a scribble of a wife’ (p. 32). In the second act Hosea becomes the angry prophet of the Old Testament, but the ranting of his hell-fi re colleague Amos (‘Bethel is no more than a brothel’ (p. 55)) makes him realise that his own Yahweh is less judgemental. He off ers to forget and forgive the past but Gomer sees through Hosea’s magnanimity to his paternalistic assumptions: So I’m a dirty cup to be rinsed out and set on the shelf again – While you twiddle your magnanimous thumbs; While you preen yourself on your benevolence (p. 74). The fi nal reconciliation comes when Hosea recognises in humility that they need each other on a basis of equality: I spoke of forgiving when I ought to have asked for forgiveness … For wanting you not what you are .. For off ering you the consciousness of guilt in part-exchange for love (p. 74). The two make a new commitment in love, with Gomer now becoming a business partner in Hosea & Co. The Old Testament story becomes an acknowledgment of a woman’s sexuality and her right to satisfying work. The play is rather arch at fi rst, half-concealing Gomer’s profession with knowing jokes about ‘religious duties’. In one of the play’s few darker moments, Gomer describes unwelcome sex and its resulting spiritual barrenness, and we understand her decision

6 Yvonne Sherwood, The Prostitute and the Prophet: Hosea’s Marriage in Literary-Theological Perspective, Sheffi eld Academic Press, 1996, pp. 40-82. Hereafter ‘Prostitute and Prophet’.

40 THE GLASS to return to her husband in the light of this: ‘The rodent pain that leaves a sawdust heart / Trodden on the fl oor in the spilt wine and the vomit’ (p. 24). While Gomer recognises the aridity of loveless sex she also insists that any sex involves exchange: ‘Under the hot nerves, in the cool of the heart, / There is also a quiet giving’ (p. 20). Commentators have detected Charles Williams’s infl uence, and Kathleen Jones links the theme to Nicholson’s radio talk on Williams entitled ‘Yes to the Body’.7 Gomer’s sexuality as a life-force is a pervasive theme of the play which the worldly High Priest Amaziah characterises in pagan terms: What you call harlotry Is a girl giving herself to the sun, Plighting herself to the husband of heaven, Becoming – in the full absolute of allegory – A lover of life (p. 70). In fact, the historicity of temple sex was a subject for debate in 1953, as the New Testament scholar Noel Davey pointed out at the meeting, and some recent studies have moved in the direction of a purely metaphorical reading of the Biblical story.8 In Nicholson’s play, Hosea’s lament for Gomer explicitly confl ates the loss of his wife with Israel’s turning from God: And this land, this wife, Has turned away from her husband, away from Yahweh. She has become an adulteress. She has ogled after heathen lovers, She has become a mate for idols, A match for the devil (p. 57). Ultimately Gomer is defi ned by the need to give. If this modifi es the play as a feminist statement it also brings it more into line with traditional church teaching. Writing in 1968, Murray Roston unhesitatingly accepts that the play is a Christian one: ‘A Match for the Devil … reworks its Old Testament theme into a Christian message and does so with a smoothness and ease that almost makes one forget the original story. Hosea’s denunciation of Israel in terms of his wife’s harlotry and eventual re-acceptance into the household becomes in this play a lesson on the theme of love.’9 What scandalised the RDS executive, however, was the fact that Hosea, symbolising God, off ers unconditional acceptance without explicitly condemning prostitution. Although church performances were not subject to the laws governing censorship on the commercial stage, church drama groups operated a tacit code of self- censorship very much in line with the practice of the Lord Chamberlain’s offi ce. Steve Nicholson notes that the Public Morality Council demanded in 1954 that the licence for the Isherwood adaptation I Am a Camera should be withdrawn on the grounds that Sally Bowles had freely chosen the life of a prostitute.10 A Match for the Devil, therefore, with a comparable theme, was liable in 1953 to fall foul not only of religious sentiment

7 Kathleen Jones, Norman Nicholson: The Whispering Poet, Appleby: The Book Mill, 2013, p. 135. 8 Karin Adams, ‘Metaphor and Dissonance: A Reinterpretation of Hosea 4:13-14’, Journal of Biblical Literature, 127, no. 2 (2008), 291-305. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25610121, accessed 30 Aug. 2020. 9 Murray Roston, Biblical Drama in England: From the Middle Ages to the Present Day, Faber & Faber, 1968, p. 293. 10 Steve Nicholson, The Censorship of British Drama 1900-1968: Volume Three – The Fifties, University of Exeter Press, 2011, p. 43. Hereafter ‘Censorship’. 41 THE GLASS but also of anxieties about public morality. At the meeting Browne asked for a verbatim transcript to be made, conscious perhaps that while the immediate task was to decide whether or not the play could go ahead under the society’s auspices, the implications of the discussion were likely to have wider reverberations.11 Each committ ee member was asked to give an opinion. Browne’s wife, the actor and playwright Henzie Raeburn, thought the paradox of sincere worship of Yahweh through prostitution would be bewildering to an audience. Kay Baxter, an informed commentator on contemporary theatre, was more robust: ‘temple’ would mean ‘church’ in the minds of the audience, and jokes about ‘minor liturgical duties’ were in poor taste. Baxter referred to ‘our rather refi ned sense of fun’ as opposed to that of the audiences whose laughter would be cruder, and Herbert Malden, the General Manager of the Ambassadors Theatre in the West End, concurred: ‘Whatever its merits as a work of art, it is one of these things you can’t risk trusting the public with.’ Browne’s att empt at a historical perspective was hardly more persuasive: ‘You are all looking at it from a modern point of view; prostitution now is for a completely diff erent reason from what it was then.’ The committ ee’s att itudes to the representation of sex are paternalistic, shot through with class assumptions which anticipate the notorious public debate on Lady Chatt erley’s Lover seven years later. Although the play implies a complex att itude in which even loveless sex may have an element of reciprocity, the fact that Gomer is a prostitute facilitates a blanket failure to take her words seriously as a way in to the play’s themes. For several of those present the question was whether you read the play as endorsing Gomer’s point of view, which is automatically assumed to be reprehensible: Miss Robins: In the play the harlot has the last word ... Miss Keily: No, it is Hosea’s forgiveness that wins. Mrs Baxter: No, she comes back on her own terms. Miss Robins: I feel that it is his fault that is pointed out, not hers. The committ ee avoided any discussion of a woman’s right to a profession, although most would have been familiar with the work of a vice-President of the Society, Dorothy L Sayers, who had published widely on a woman’s right and duty to support herself by working. Sherwood’s study of the Biblical Hosea focuses on the multiple readings possible in the light of contemporary hermeneutics, and the fi nal section of her book is a feminist analysis in which she includes a brief discussion of Nicholson’s play: Ultimately it is Gomer, not Hosea, who occupies the high moral ground, and who has to teach her ‘lanky, shanky, comical, cranky, blind-eyed blockhead of a husband’ the true meaning of forgiveness. Radically, she fi nds Hosea’s (and by implication yhwh’s) concept of forgiveness inadequate, and Nicholson begins to move outside the parameters set by the critical tradition in a critique of the ideology of the text.12 In support of her argument that Nicholson is critiquing the Biblical story of Hosea, Sherwood quotes the words: 11 All verbatim quotations are from the executive minutes of 11.2.1953 unless otherwise stated. The minutes of the meeting can be found in the V&A Theatre and Performance collections under RADIUS Archive THM/353. These collections are closed until 2023 but Radius (www.radiusdrama. org.uk) holds a photocopy of the document. 12 Sherwood, Prostitute and Prophet, 77.

42 THE GLASS

But what does [God’s] forgiveness mean? It asks us to be what we don’t want to be - We resent the presumption; We deny the right. How can God begin to forgive us Till we learn to forgive God? (p. 288) The implication of these words is that humans make God in their own image, and that this image needs reassessment in the light of cultural change. Commenting on the passage, Philip Gardner suggests that ‘Nicholson seems to shirk exploring the deeper implications … and he thus leaves the reader feeling intellectually cheated.’13 Nicholson had envisaged that the audience would go on an educative journey with the play and players, as became apparent when Keily read out a lett er from the playwright: If the Society says that it is diffi cult to tell whether the play is religious or not, say that this is exactly what I meant.… For what Hosea has to oppose is not so much the impulsive and picturesque infi delity of his wife, as the cold, deliberate, cruel, heartless spiritual infi delity of the people of Israel, and the people of today. Keily summed up her own position: ‘I feel that if we can’t risk, and be creative, we will never get anywhere.’ Her words were not taken to heart and a unanimous vote (Keily was not a voting member) decreed that the play should be dropped completely. A Match for the Devil was premiered at the Edinburgh Festival later that year by the London Club Theatre Group, and David Boyd notes that although a review by Muriel Spark in The Church of England Newspaper found the play didactic, no reviewer found it off ensive.14 Given that the director was keen to take the risk of going ahead it is hard to understand why Browne did not push for the play’s acceptance. Keily wrote: ‘I still remember the incredible sense of Martin’s sympathy as he saw me off at King’s Cross’.15 In spite of this sympathy and in spite of the fact that Browne had initiated the commission, under his chairmanship the committ ee sidestepped the play’s challenge. Why was the play dropped? The chapter dealing with the years 1950-55 in Michael Billington’s history of British theatre since 1945, State of the Nation, is entitled ‘Safety First’.16 The phrase sums up the caution of the RDS executive committ ee. Although the Church saw itself as a guardian of the nation’s morals, it is the commercial theatre manager who adopts the most overtly paternalistic tone, and the self-censorship issues raised by the RDS executive are comparable with the strain felt in the Lord Chamberlain’s offi ce at this time: ‘As society and theatre shifted round them through the 1950s, they knew, perhaps bett er than anyone, that their situation was becoming truly absurd’.17 Billington points out that although celebrations such as the Festival of Britain in 1951 were designed to herald a new age they also had a covert function of putt ing the lid on the freedoms which had been unchecked during the war. At the same time, Billington shows 1953 as being a pivotal year in which new directions in

13 Philip Gardner, Norman Nicholson, New York: Twayne Publisgers, Inc, 1973, p. 141. 14 David Boyd, Norman Nicholson: A Literary Life, Berforts Information Press, 2015, p. 154. 15 Keily, Memoirs, p. 44. 16 Michael Billington, State of the Nation: British Theatre since 1945, Faber and Faber, 2007, pp. 46-83. 17 Steve Nicholson, Censorship, p. 8.

43 THE GLASS theatre were latent but not yet recognised: Beckett ’s Waiting for Godot was premiered in Paris, and Joan Litt lewood’s Theatre Workshop took out a lease on the Theatre Royal Stratford East. The Elizabethan age had begun to take shape. In the churches there was a comparable failure of nerve masking a movement for change. Clergy who had embraced drama as a means of religious expression in the wake of the high profi le given to plays such as Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral found themselves in the fi fties caught between playwrights such as Nicholson who tackled religious themes in an increasingly challenging way and the demands of congregations wanting to be reassured by traditional Nativities. In his wide-ranging history of Christianity Diarmaid MacCulloch says of the fi fties that ‘Anglican theology and literary creativity had rarely seemed so impressive or cosmopolitan’,18 singling out literary achievement as the defi ning quality of the decade which saw the publication of C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia and Dorothy L. Sayers’s translations of Dante. The New Pilgrims, however, were playing to audiences some members of which rarely read a book, and in 1953, the year of the coronation of Elizabeth II, religious drama was about to move away from the professional theatre. The verse-drama movement, of which A Match for the Devil is one of the last examples, was superseded in the 1950s by a national change of theatrical direction. This is often associated with the gritt iness of Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (1956), but in 1984 Harold Hobson, the Sunday Times’s drama critic who occasionally wrote reviews for the RDS’s journal Christian Drama, ascribed the impulse for change in the fi fties to the fact that the work of four playwrights, Brecht, Beckett , Osborne and Pinter, ‘had so changed the national outlook that concern for the spiritual welfare of an individual seemed a new blasphemy’.19 Plays such as Brecht’s Mother Courage invited us to ‘comprehend the social process, not pity or condemn the individual’.20 The new direction can be seen in a movement away from what Kenneth Tynan called ‘actors’ plays’, in which the voice of a performer such as Gielgud is ‘a thrilling instrument that commands the full tonal range of both viola and cello’.21 As actors’ plays gave way to ‘directors’ plays’, the centrality of the performing ensemble in conveying meaning made the point that the ‘spiritual welfare of an individual’ is bound up with that of a community. For Tynan, verse drama had given ‘access to imagined worlds in which rationing and the rest of authority’s paraphernalia could be forgott en’; but soon it became clear that ‘audiences were ready for plays about the facts of contemporary life’.22 As Pamela Keily returned disappointed to King’s Cross in February 1953 she must have turned her thoughts to the play she was about to premiere with the New Pilgrims the following month in Hinckley Parish Church: Christ in the Concrete City by Philip Turner. In an obituary tribute of 2007 Rex Walford describes Turner’s play as ‘one of the most performed religious plays of the second half of the twentieth century’.23 He is referring to amateur productions, and the fact that the play was taken up enthusiastically by amateur groups, in the US as well as the UK, is the reason for its survival under the radar of theatre histories which deal largely in professional

18 Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity, Allen Lane, 2009, p. 952. 19 Harold Hobson, Theatre in Britain: A Personal View, Oxford, Phaidon 1984, p. 183. 20 Ibid., p. 184. 21 Kenneth Tynan, A View of the English Stage 1944-1965, Methuen, 1950, p. 247. 22 Ibid., p. 270. 23 Rex Walford, “Philip Turner 1925 – 2007”, Radius Performing, VI, 139 (July 2007), 1-4: 1. 44 THE GLASS productions. Turner’s fi rst curacy was in Leeds, where he encountered the West Yorkshire-based Pamela Keily. In technique Christ in the Concrete City is a director’s play, and as the author acknowledges in the Preface, it owes a good deal to The Way of the Cross by Henri Ghéon, a product of French experimental theatre of the thirties, and to Holy Family by R. H. Ward, director of the wartime pacifi st Adelphi Players, both of which were in Keily’s repertoire as a director. Walford acknowledges these infl uences but adds that ‘the sharp cutt ing edge of contemporary satire was Turner’s own’.24 Walford describes Christ in the Concrete City as an angry play, comparing the author in this respect with John Osborne. ‘Christ in the Concrete City combined the telling of the events of the Passion with vivid parallel cameos of modern life, from suburban families seeking to keep up with their neighbours to the subtle interrogation of political prisoners.’25 As in the Ward and Ghéon plays, the actors, neutrally costumed and unnamed, remain onstage all the time and are not assigned to single parts, changing roles as mouthpieces of a viewpoint rather than as living characters. The style owes something to Brecht but more to French experimental theatre, and Irene Morra comments that ‘the post-war decades saw these manifestations of European theatrical modernism emerge belatedly onto a more mainstream platform, primarily through touring productions.’26 The short-lived New Pilgrims were one such professional touring company. The play’s subject is ‘The Calvary in your backyard’ (p. 1), and Jesus is ‘the Geordie carpenter’ (p. 9). It opens in City Square, Leeds, where the statue of the Black Prince, ‘soot and sin stained’ is ‘Self’s effi gy’, and the ‘hurrying, rain-huddled, job-harassed / Unknowing passers-by in the lamplight’ (p. 1) have to chose between self and Christ. M1 The Word became fl esh And dwelt among us. And we beheld his glory …. M2 (harshly) And because we could not bear his glory, you and I murdered God. Which is why we each have a part in this story. M1 Personally, old boy, I believe in looking after ‘number one’. He’s the chap that counts in the end (p. 2). Abrupt changes of register, and between verse and prose, are characteristic of the dialogue. The author’s preface declares the aim of showing by modern equivalents that the Crucifi xion and Resurrection speak intimately to the individual, ‘urging him to action here and now’.27 M1 This play deals with something that happens now. M2 In the lives of each one of us. In the brief light and warmth of human existence, between the darkness of birth and the coldness of death, while the Big Dipper roars down its ultimate slope, M3 The Son of God is crucifi ed. Both by us, and for us (p. 4). In the fl uid space of a church, there is no clear divide between audience and acting area and the actors both perform the narrative and comment on it, identifying themselves 24 Ibid., p. 3. 25 Ibid., 2. 26 Irene Morra, Verse Drama in England, 1900-2015: Art, Modernity and the National Stage, Bloomsbury, 2016, p. 176. 27 Turner, Concrete City, p. v. 45 THE GLASS repeatedly as spectators who share the same reactions as the audience. Keily mentions in her Memoirs that she had noticed the diff erence between professional and amateur actors when the New Pilgrims fi rst approached Ward’s ensemble play Holy Family which uses a similar technique: ‘For [the professional actor], this was a play unlike anything he had met before: for the amateur, it was predominantly a chance to share his convictions.’28 The sharing of convictions was undoubtedly a motivation for the many amateur groups who took Christ in the Concrete City forward in the next decades. The RDS which commissioned it, however, was never an evangelistic organisation, seeking rather to fi nd the creator God in all manifestations of the arts, and for Martin Browne, a driving force in the society from the early thirties, the performance of a play itself had a sacramental dimension.29 The ensemble movement in the theatre with its focus on ‘social process’ was mirrored in the Church of the fi fties by an emerging emphasis on salvation as something that takes place within a community, as exemplifi ed in the Parish and People movement founded in 1949. One of the New Pilgrims’ keenest supporters was Ernie Southcott , the vicar of St Wilfrid’s, Halton, in whose parish Keily lived for a time. He was later Provost of Southwark where he continued his support for religious drama. Adrian Hastings has drawn att ention to Southcott as the initiator of a project at St Wilfrid’s to hold the eucharist in parishioners’ houses, beginning in 1952.30 It remained an isolated phenomenon but as a grass-roots initiative it provides an interesting parallel with Keily’s pioneering work as the director of ensemble theatre while she was living in Southcott ’s parish. At the February meeting of Religious Drama Society, some disquiet was expressed at the author’s handling of scripture. Two clergy present, Robert Duce and P. Bullock Flint, were uneasy about the fi ctionalisation of the Biblical Hosea, and Noel Davey said that ‘if a subject is deliberately taken from the Old Testament then it must be an exposition of what the writer fi nds in the OT and not the imposition on the OT of an author’s own ideas’. In this Davey was at odds with developing contemporary practice. In the 1950s the prototype and justifi cation for a creative approach to Biblical material was Dorothy L. Sayers’s 1941-1942 BBC radio life of Christ, The Man Born to be King. Sayers justifi ed her invention of fi ctional characters, and an in-depth probe into the psychology of Judas, by saying that ‘It is the business of the dramatist not to subordinate the drama to the theology, but to approach the job of truth-telling from his own end, and trust the theology to emerge undistorted from the dramatic presentation of the story.’31 Sayers’s play established some new parameters for Bible-based drama, and her status as a public fi gure enabled her to prevail against opposition from within the BBC, questions in parliament, and popular opinion. Murray Roston’s interpretation of A Match for the Devil as a Christian drama belongs in this tradition of exegesis. The later twentieth century saw the Bible losing any special public status as a source of material, and in 2005 Howard Brenton’s play Paul, premiered at the National Theatre, represented Jesus as surviving the Crucifi xion and engineering the apostle Paul’s conversion by a trick appearance. In 1953 Turner’s Passion play was less subject to criticism based on freedom in the use of Biblical material, involving as it did universal

28 Keily, Memoirs, 40. 29 See Margaret Wiedemann Hunt, ‘From Sword to Sacrament: The Emperor Constantine by Dorothy L. Sayers’, The Glass 30 (2018), 43-50. 30 Adrian Hastings, A History of English Christianity, 1920-1990, SCM Press, 1991, p. 442. 31 Dorothy L Sayers, The Man Born to be King, Victor Gollancz, 1943, p. 20. 46 THE GLASS types rather than vividly realised individuals, and also belonging to a genre which goes back to the Middle Ages. Both these plays of the year 1953, seen by many as the beginning of an era, place the individual within the ‘social process’ identifi ed by Hobson as a key to change during the decade. A Match for the Devil, however, did so by lending itself to a feminist reading at a time when feminism was not dominant on the English stage (Jimmy Porter’s wife and girlfriend are hardly asserting their independence) and this forward- looking aspect of the play was largely ignored by contemporaries. Nicholson features in histories of drama because of his association with Martin Browne’s post-war season of verse plays at the Mercury, and essentially he was a playwright who belonged to the fi rst half of the twentieth century. Christ in the Concrete City, on the other hand, fared bett er in 1953 in terms of its perceived relevance to contemporary social process, with Turner drawing att ention to the spiritual emptiness of suburban life in such lines as ‘The sins of the milkman / And the neighbour who borrows your mower, / And the man who sits next to you on the eight-fi fteen’ (p. 19). Although there are times when he moves precariously between conscious banality and outright cliché, Turner’s aim to speak through universals to the individual is probably what gave the play its longevity in the work of amateur companies, and his revision of the play in 1983 to include more up-to-date references extended its life in the US. Turner remained unknown outside church circles, but the ensemble style of performance which he embraced not only prepared his audiences for commercial shows such as Oh What a Lovely War (1969) and the workshop approach to Shakespeare pioneered in the 1970s by the RSC, but more importantly was enthusiastically welcomed by church groups for whom a fl uid, minimalist approach made the business of mounting drama in a church building much more manageable. Diffi cult though the task of working with poets and priests may have been for Pamela Keily, her commissions were a signifi cant infl uence on the character of religious drama in the second half of the twentieth century.

47 The dramatic transformation of Samson Agonistes

Irene Montori

t the climax of Milton’s closet drama, Samson Agonistes ₍₁₆₇₁₎, Samson decides to follow the Philistine Messenger to the temple of Dagon by pronouncing the words, ‘This day will be remarkable in my life / By some A 1 great act, or of my days the last’ (SA 1388-89). The ‘great act’ that Samson is going to perform is his suicide att ack against the Philistines. Samson’s cataclysmic destruction of the Philistine temple has long off ered diffi culty to Milton scholarship, whether interpreting Samson’s att ack as the result of God’s inward illumination or as the insane revenge of a desperate protagonist. The regenerationist-revisionist controversy about the catastrophic fi nale provides evidence that Samson’s sacrifi ce marks a climactic moment in the drama, a multi-faceted transformation that involves the character, the plot, and the form of the drama. From a political perspective, for instance, Samson’s narrative describes his social redemption from the bonds of slavery. The tragedy begins with the image of its debased hero ‘made captive, blind’ (SA The Argument) at the prison of Gaza, then the narrative moves to Samson’s regained ‘strength, yet greater’ (SA 1644) and ends with his self-delivering performance at the Dagon festival. By endorsing one of the scholarly viewpoints above the other, one might understand Samson’s transformation either positively, as a ‘politically unrepentant, morally uncompromising’ act of liberation, or negatively, as a spiritual, political, and tragic ‘second fall’.2 Moreover, Milton’s tragedy depicts the moral change in Samson through suff ering and temptation. The drama revolves around a series of confrontations between Samson and his encounters at the prison – his father Manoa, his wife, and Harapha. Each visitor brings a temptation before Samson, whose resistance enables him to gain a new understanding of himself and the world. Samson’s ethical awareness is closely connected to his spiritual transformation, since the hero also redefi nes his relationship to God in terms of conventional doctrine. Through trial, Samson challenges his belief that God’s election guarantees moral triumph as well as salvation. Samson, therefore, develops a more active relationship to the divine: once he senses that he is under God’s guidance again, he resolves to act freely, of his ‘own accord’ (SA 1643), and to take full responsibility for his choice and action. Milton’s rewriting of Samson’s fi nal act unfolds an array of transformations – political, ethical, and spiritual – the appraisals of which have been hitherto a matt er of debate. While modern criticism has thoroughly explored the variety of meanings grounded on Samson’s devastation, the same att ention has not been devoted to the literary transformation that characterises Samson’s fi nale. The series of images, symbols, and intertextual references that describe the destruction of the Philistine temple marks a change in the poetic form of Samson Agonistes to a sublime tragedy. Breaking free from the political and theological debate between regenerationists and

1 Quotations from Samson Agonistes are from the second edition of John Milton: The Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey, Harlow, Pearson-Longman, 2007 and abbreviated in the text as SA. 2 Tobias Gregory, ‘The Political Messages of Samson Agonistes’, Studies in English Literature, 50.1 (2010), 175-203: 199; Joseph Anthony Jr. Witt reich, Interpreting Samson Agonistes, Princeton, 1986, p. 80. 48 THE GLASS revisionists, a close reading of Samson’s climactic act using the concept of the sublime as an interpretative rubric might contribute to marking the dramatic transformation of Milton’s work. For the purposes of the present argument, it helps to distinguish a sublime work of art from representations of sublimity in an artwork. Indeed, the latt er is the case of Samson Agonistes, in which the hero’s catastrophe represents an experience of sublimity without the whole drama aspiring to be sublime. On the contrary, Milton’s intention in Paradise Lost is to pursue a high subject matt er in a lofty style since the beginning of the poem, where the author manifestly declares ‘That with no middle fl ight intends to soar / Above the Aonian mount’.3 Moreover, it is important to diff erentiate the specifi c term ‘sublime’,4 whose systematic theorisation in eighteenth-century aesthetics followed Milton’s poetic writings, from a broader concept of sublimity, dating from late antiquity and included a wide range of topoi, images, and patt erns, whose infl uence on late sixteenth and seventeenth century English authors has been recently reconsidered within the history of the sublime.5 Given the elusiveness of the term, for clarity, I will refer to the sublime as literary greatness.6 The sublime, in brief, is for Milton the ability of the artist to generate through a character in fi ction a sublime event, which makes the character an example of heroic virtue and the author a model of artistic fame. In such instances, the sublime becomes a poetics of elevation and a revolutionary practice of virtuous heroism for the character, the reader, and the author alike. The story of the Hebrew hero, who eventually enters the divine through sublimity tragically, represents Milton’s fi ction about the making of his great work. Samson’s catastrophe creates an experience of sublime transport, which dramatises not only the hero’s yearning for heroism and transcendence, but also Milton’s own aspiration to ‘eternal fame’ (SA 1717). In other words, when portraying Samson’s heroic regeneration, Milton is also fashioning his literary virtue. What the tragedy’s ending posits is an experience of eternising transport through the sublime for both the protagonist and the author. In rewriting the Biblical event, Milton adds his peculiar stamp on the scene. While in the Bible the catastrophe is included in the main narration, in Milton’s tragedy the character’s deed is not directly performed. In the latt er, Samson’s action occurs off -stage and dramatic performance is abandoned in favour of an exalted, rhetorical construction of the hero’s sublime act. Samson’s off -stage performance is foregrounded in that his action is fi rst perceived, in the background, as a ‘hideous noise … / Horribly loud’, followed by ‘a general cry’ (SA 1510-11, 1524). The account of Samson’s grand, though terrible, action is then reported through the Messenger, a character that, Philip Hardie writes, ‘in Greek tragedy typically off ers an eyewitness account of events, and who asserts that he speaks the truth, and the whole truth’.7 The same holds for Milton’s 3 John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler, 2nd ed., Harlow, Longman, 2003, 1.14-15. 4 The term sublime appears in Samson Agonistes (line 1669) with the meaning of ‘exalted in feeling, elated’, a sense that, according to Carey, is found only in Milton, but it does not refer to the idea of sublimity as an experience of transport. 5 James I. Porter, The Sublime in Antiquity, CUP, 2016; Philip Hardie, Lucretian Receptions. History, the Sublime, Knowledge, CUP, 2015; Patrick Cheney, English Authorship and the Early Modern Sublime, CUP, 2018. 6 This is Cheney’s ‘working defi nition’ of the early modern concept of the sublime, whose major source is the Longinian principle of artistic excellence, in Cheney, English Authorship, p. 36. 7 Philip Hardie, ‘Fama in Milton’, in Rumours and Renown: Representations of ‘Fama’ in Western Literature, CUP, 2012, pp. 542-69: 554. 49 THE GLASS tragedy, in which the Messenger off ers his eyewitness account of the event, ‘The sight of this so horrid spectacle / Which erst my eyes beheld and yet behold’ (SA 1542-43). The sublime account of Samson’s performance does not result from the Messenger’s unrestrained fancy. The report, on the contrary, emerges from what the Messenger experienced personally. This is a remarkable addition to the Biblical story: the telling of Samson Agonistes would not require the displacement of the hero’s horrible action, given that Milton’s work is a closet drama. It is probable that the poet decides to report the fi nal event through the mediation of the Messenger because he wants to att end to the construction of Samson’s action, rather than its reality. Milton’s choice to remove Samson’s direct performance of the destruction brings out two signifi cant aspects. First, the emphasis on the construction of Samson’s act put its violence in the background. As a consequence, the ethical value of the event is not in the act itself, whose righteousness is arguable. Rather, the signifi cance of Samson’s act lies in its representation and the eff ects that this has on the readers. Secondly, the sublimity of Samson’s gesture is located once again in the representation of the event, instead of the event itself. Hence, the grandeur of Samson’s act resides in the Messenger’s discourse, that is, in the capacity of the author to convey an experience of transcendent transport through the character’s gesture. The sublime representation of Samson’s fi nal act, in other words, provides a model for heroic action as well as for the author’s literary greatness. The author of Samson Agonistes creates a fi ction of transport that activates the transformative potential of a human mind to reach beyond the fi nitude of material existence. Milton’s idea of the sublime, so conceived, is modelled on Longinus’ tradition, for whom sublimity is not an ecstatic experience, descending directly from heaven, rather it is created out of the author’s ability to represent such an experience. For this reason, the off -stage account of Samson’s event encompasses an array of metaphors and symbols, such as the thunderstorm and eruptions, which denote the character’s action as sublime: As with the force of winds and waters pent, When mountains tremble, those two massy pillars With horrible convulsion to and fro He tugged, he shook, till down they came and drew The whole roof after them, with burst of thunder Upon the heads of all who sat beneath. (SA 1647-1652) Despite the diffi culty of locating the source of these images, the similarities between the classical imagery of the sublime and Milton’s Samson are striking. For Longinus, the sublime operates as an intensively transformative moment of consciousness and, because of its sudden impact, he often uses the metaphor of the whirlwind or the thunderbolt to characterise this experience.8 At the beginning of his tract, Peri Hupsous, the philosopher writes ‘a well-timed fl ash of sublimity shatt ers everything like a bolt of lightning’ (OS 1.4).9 Or, when describing Demosthenes’ style as sublime, Longinus claims that ‘his speed, his force, his terrifi c power of rhetoric, burns, as it were, and

8 Stephen Halliwell, Between Ecstasy and Truth: Interpretations of Greek Poetics from Homer to Longinus, OUP, 2011, pp. 327-42. 9 Quotations from Longinus are from W.H. Fyfe and Donald A. Russell’s translation, On the Sublime, from the Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA, 1995, pp. 161-307 and are abbreviated in the text as OS. 50 THE GLASS scatt ers everything before him, and may therefore be compared to a fl ash of lightning or a thunderbolt’ (OS 12.4). Analogously, Samson’s pulling down the pillars has the eff ect of a ‘burst of thunder’ (SA 1651) upon the heads of the Philistines.10 Along with the image of the thunderbolt, Longinus’ instances of sublimity involve elemental natural phenomena. The violence of nature in storms and eruptions, along with the width of the big rivers and oceans, are associated with the vertiginous ability of the sublime spirit to advance beyond the limits of the universe: So it is by some natural instinct that we admire, not the small streams, clear and useful as they are, but the Nile, the Danube, the Rhine, and above all the Ocean. The litt le fi re we kindle for ourselves keeps clear and steady, yet we do not therefore regard it with more amazement than the fi res of Heaven, which are often darkened, or think it more wonderful than the craters of Etna in eruption, hurling up rocks and whole hills from their depths and sometimes shooting forth rivers of that earthborn, spontaneous fi re. (OS 35.4) In this famous passage, Longinus establishes a catalogue of wonders of nature that would later become part of the sublime tradition, drawing on the cosmic imagery in Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura and in ancient natural literature and philosophy.11 Instances of wonderment in the physical world, as a refl ection of the divine in immanence, att racted early modern readers and writers that connected, for instance, the fascination of volcanoes with the sublime.12 This is not to suggest that there is a direct line of infl uence between Longinus’ text and Milton’s tragedy, given the complexity of the reception history of Longinus’ Peri Hupsous. Nevertheless, Samson’s drama refl ects images and patt erns that circulated between the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries in English culture as a product of classical and Christian receptions of the sublime. Samson Agonistes deploys Lucretian and Longinian topoi of sublimity, such as storms, earthquakes and the thunderbolt, to dramatise a fi ction of heroic grandeur. Indeed, Samson’s cataclysmic act is described in terms of a violent natural phenomenon: his pulling down the temple has the same impact as the whirlwinds and the storms (‘the force of winds and waters’), an earthquake or an eruption (‘when mountains tremble […] with horrid convulsion’) and, fi nally, Samson strikes the crowd like a thunderbolt. Milton’s account of the catastrophe, through the Messenger, carefully selects and combines images of heights and depths, along with natural phenomena, in order to convey the sublime and god-like character of Samson’s deed. Furthermore, what Longinus celebrates in chapter 35 of Peri Hupsous is the immanent vitality of nature, urging the human mind to transcend its limits. Longinus does not mention the Nile, the Danube or the depths of Etna because he sees nature as a 10 Of course, the image of the thunderbolt is not a Longinian invention given the deployment of the same image, for example, in Richard of St. Victor, for whom Longinus did not exist. Nevertheless, the thunderbolt often represents an image of sublimity in classical and medieval traditions. Cf. James I. Porter, The Sublime in Antiquity, CUP, 2016, pp. 18ff .; Piero Boitani, The Tragic and the Sublime in Medieval Literature, CUP, 1989, pp. 253ff . 11 The equation between natural phenomena and sublimity, ‘even divinity in earthly phenomena with the sublime’, is not primarily a Longinian inheritance, but it belongs, as Porter demonstrates, to the Presocratics and then it continues through a long tradition of ‘writers as diverse as Lucretius, Seneca, and Manilius’, along with Aristotle, Porter, The Sublime in Antiquity, p. 131 49n and p. 176 274n. 12 In his Mundus Subterraneus (1665), the Jesuit scholar, Athanasius Kircher, includes, for instance, the illustration of a sublime eruption of Etna. 51 THE GLASS refl ection of the divine. Rather, the physical world is immanently transcendent insofar as natural catastrophes are an invitation to the unlimited capacity of the mind, and to its instinctive yearning for grandeur, to surpass physical reality. Hence, Longinus writes that nature ‘called us into life, into the whole universe, there to be spectators of her games and eager competitors; and she therefore from the fi rst breathed unto our hearts an unconquerable passion for whatever is great and more divine than ourselves’ (OS 35.2). The natural imagery of Samson’s catastrophe hints at the hero’s desire to extend his acting beyond the fi nitude of material existence and to restore his shatt ered relation with God. Thus, Samson’s sublime devastation of the temple of Dagon expresses the violent, cataclysmic interstice between the human and the divine. If the sublime has no actual defi nition, one of the best expressions that captures the essence of sublimity is that of an interstitial phenomenon. Patrick Cheney describes the sublime as ‘that special space and place where the transcendent and the immanent meet, creating a principle of ‘immanent transcendence’. Longinus calls this space ‘the interval between earth and heaven’ [OS 9.5]’.13 And Samson’s fi nal act occurs in the interstice between earth and heaven. When rewriting the Biblical scene, Milton describes the temple of the Philistines as an amphitheatre: The building was a spacious theatre, Half round on two main pillars vaulted high, With seats where all the lords and each degree Of sort, might sit in order to behold, The other side was open, where the throng On banks and scaff olds under sky might stand. (SA 1605-1610) The Bible does not mention that the temple where Samson is led has the shape of a theatre. Vanita Neelakanta draws att ention to the representation of Dagon’s house as a theatrum mundi and of Samson as an actor upon the stage of the world.14 A closer look at the description of Dagon’s temple shows that Milton completes the semi-circular space with another side that makes the theatre round. If Dagon’s theatre is imago mundi, then the ‘two massy pillars’ (SA 1633) on which Samson stands represent the limits of the world which the hero will at once destroy and surpass.15 The sublime is precisely the expression of the human thirst to transcend the boundaries of the universe. Another case in point is the description of the architecture in which Samson’s spectacular performance of his sublime act takes place. His devastating act occurs in an amphitheatre ‘on two massy pillars vaulted high’, and these pillars give ‘main support’ to ‘the arched roof’:

13 Cheney, English Authorship, p. 32. 14 Vanita Neekalanta, ‘Theatrum Mundi and Milton’s Theater of the Blind in Samson Agonistes’, Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 11.1 (2011), 30-58. 15 If Dagon’s house is a representation of the world, then Samson’s pillars might parallel Hercules’ pillars that, in classical and medieval literature, represented the limits of the world as well as of human knowledge. Dante, for instance, places the mount of Purgatory beyond the pillars of Hercules and condemns Ulysses for his att empt to surpass them. Many scholars have pointed out the analogy between the stories of Hercules and of Samson: both have incredible physical strength (cf. Milton’s expression “Herculean Samson” in Paradise Lost 9.1060), both slay lions, both are betrayed by their wives. See Murray Roston, Milton’s Herculean Samson, in Changing Perspectives in Literature and the Visual Arts: 1650-1820, Princeton, 1990, pp. 13-39 and Maggie Kilgour, ‘Odd Couplings: Hercules and Oedipus in Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes’, Milton Studies, 56 (2015), 75-113. 52 THE GLASS

At length for intermission sake they led him Between the pillars; he his guide requested (For so from such as nearer stood we heard) As over-tired to let him lean a while With both his arms on those two massy pillars That to the arched roof gave main support. (SA 1629-1634)

Milton places Samson under a kind of triumphal arch. It can be no coincidence that the etymology of the term sublime comprises the idea of a similar architectural space. The Latin word sublimis is a combination of sub, meaning ‘up to’, with limen, which is the ‘lintel’, the top beam of a door, therefore, the word means ‘up to the lintel’.16 In this context, when pulling down the pillars of the temple, Milton’s Samson physically reaches for the lintel of the arch. In a fi gurative sense, the architectural expression ‘up to the lintel’ indicates an upward rising from a position below, that is, an elevation.17 By representing the natural human desire to go beyond the limits or towards the divine, the sublime is, by defi nition, the architectural space in which immanence and transcendence meet. For this reason, another sense given to limen is also ‘threshold’, therefore, sublime also means ‘up to the threshold’. While the Biblical Samson stands in the middle of the temple between the central pillars that support the building, in Milton’s drama the hero is physically on the threshold of the temple – between the two pillars supporting the arch – which metaphorically represents the space where the human and the divine come together. Samson’s tragic act is physically located in the interstitial space of the sublime, at the very limit between the human and the divine worlds. Therefore, Samson’s performance of the sublime not only depicts his vocation to reach beyond his limits but, more importantly, his experience of elevation occurs in the architectural space of the sublime.18 In its literary manifestation, the Longinian model of the sublime is imaged as a monument or an architectural structure that is located in a sudden, intense, and rare moment. Longinus uses the Greek notion of kairos, the proper moment, to describe the temporal immediacy of the sublime that, through its instantaneity and its force, causes a ‘violent emotion’ and amazement in the hearer (OS 12.5). The presence of the kairos as a heightened instance clarifi es why the sublime does not necessarily concern the totality of a literary work; instead, it can be represented in a series of great moments, images, and passages. Analogously, the sublimity of Samson Agonistes does not involve the entire work. In Milton’s closet drama, the sublime is intensely localised in a specifi c, well-timed moment of the tragedy, its conclusive scene, and in a specifi c space, the building of Dagon. But there is another compelling quality in the Longinian kairos: it is the convergence of textual performance, authorial greatness, and the reader’s response all 16 For the etymology of the word ‘sublime’ see Jan Cohn and Thomas H. Miles, ‘The Sublime: In Alchemy, Aesthetics and Psychoanalysis’, Modern Philology, 74.3 (1977), 289-304. 17 Starting in the fourteenth century, the sublime was fi rst used to express the alchemical process of purifi cation; in the fi fteen and sixteenth centuries, the term developed both spiritual connotations to express a religious elevation and secular ideas of fl ight and loftiness, also related to style, cf. Cohn and Miles, ‘The Sublime’, p. 295. 18 For the architectural connotation of the sublime, as verbal monument, in Longinus and in Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ On the Composition of Words, see Porter, The Sublime in Antiquity, pp. 230-34. 53 THE GLASS at once.19 Likewise, the kairotic moment in Milton’s drama combines three factors in an instant of time: the grandeur of Samson’s act, the epiphanic greatness of the author and the eff ect on the reader. Concerning Samson, his heroic act is intensely dramatic and epiphanic. While the acquisition of virtue proceeds from the exercise of patience and reason, the virtue of a genuine hero manifests itself in a moment of strenuous choice. At a crucial moment, Milton’s heroes exercise their virtue as an interruption of grandeur and free choice. This is true for Samson as well as the Lady in Comus, Adam and Eve, and the Jesus of Paradise Regained. Moreover, the kairos operates in a similar vein from an authorial perspective. No author is constantly sublime, since peaks of literary greatness are rare and of the moment.20 Intense and sudden are also the emotions that vehemently arise in the recipient of the sublime experience. The sublime is characterised by the power of language to amaze, to transport, to overwhelm the audience with violent emotions. In the same way, Samson’s devastation produces astonishment and great emotional transport in both the hero’s audience and in his reader. When taken before the Philistines to show his mighty strength, Samson promises to strike their sight ‘with amaze’ (SA 1645). Then, the Messenger reports that Samson’s act caused confusion and amazement among his enemies: Among them he a spirit of frenzy sent, Who hurt their minds, And urged them on with mad desire To call in haste for their destroyer. (SA 1675-78) Because of its thrilling impact and its bursting energy, Samson’s destruction of the temple produces a sense of wonder and astonishment among the Philistine crowd that also aff ects the reader of the drama. Samson’s sublime fi ction, in this light, involves fi rst the mind of the author, through the fi ctional character, then the mind of the reader. The sublimity of Samson’s gesture is conveyed by the author’s ability to imaginatively enter the hero’s mind and to echo the transcendent scope of his action. Analogously, the reader must participate in the character’s emotions and thoughts in his own mind in order to grasp the hero’s experience of sublimity. Therefore, the powers of the mind create a chain which links author to hero, hero to reader, and reader to author. By presenting Samson’s literary transformation through a series of images, symbols, and visions of sublimity, Milton converts the tragic epilogue of the Biblical Samson into a sublime tragedy, bringing eternal life to the hero’s extreme defence of liberty. In this light, the sublime in Milton’s drama is additional evidence for the reconsideration of Samson’s heroism. More signifi cantly, if Samson’s destruction is a promise for his ‘eternal fame’ (1717), sublimity confers immortal reputation and literary virtue not only to the hero of the tragedy, but fi rst and foremost to its author.

19 Porter, The Sublime in Antiquity, p. 142. 20 Longinus distinguishes between the peaks of Demosthenes’ ‘rugged sublimity’, which is rich in intensity and violent emotions, and Cicero’s more diff used grandeur (OS 12.4).

54 ‘So They Say’: An Experiment in Reading Curse, Lament and Persona in Psalm 109

Richard S. Briggs

omething strange happens in the NRSV translation of Psalm ₁₀₉:₆: ‘They say, “Appoint a wicked man against him; let an accuser stand on his right.”’ Very Ssimply: there is nothing corresponding to ‘they say’ in the original Hebrew, or indeed in any of the early versions of the Psalm. Starting from this intriguing decision to reassign the speaking subject, I off er an ‘experiment in criticism’ – something a la C.S. Lewis – by way of thinking about the persona of a Psalm when read as a poetic and literary text. How such Psalm texts work as literature off ers interesting insights into how readers might respond to who says what within them.

The Strange Case of Psalm 109:6–19 After its addition of ‘they say’, the NRSV puts all of 109:6–19 in quotation marks, casting it as the words of the Psalmist’s enemy. The sole ‘explanatory’ footnote in the NRSV is this lapidary off ering: ‘Heb[rew] lacks They say’.1 The suggestion that vv.6–19 might be another voice goes back nearly 100 years, as we shall see, but as far as I can tell, this solution to it is an NRSV innovation, albeit one that is proving infl uential. Among those who have lately followed its lead are CEB, NLT, and also the CEV’s ‘My enemies said’. On occasion translations allow themselves to stretch to putt ing the off ending passage that follows in (unexplained) quotation marks, without anything corresponding to the added ‘they say’, though this is not common.2 The rationale for any such addition as the NRSV off ers may be driven in part by concern over the content of what follows in vv.6–19, which is perceived as rather less than ideal for the sentiments of a Psalmist of God. Here are some choice selections: • may his days be few (v.8) • may his children be orphans (v.9) • may the creditor seize all that he has (v.11) • let the [sins of his father and mother]3 be before the Lord continually (v.15) • let curses come on him / may blessing be far from him (v.17) By transferring such language to the enemies, one makes a move towards gett ing round the problem of affi rming such curses, at least at fi rst glance. It will become apparent that how to handle the transition out of the now-quoted passage, in v.20, complicates such a judgment, though perhaps not irredeemably. Two roads diverge ahead of us at this point. One well-trodden alternative, 1 The present piece canvasses several Bible translations along the way: NRSV (New Revised Standard Version, 1989); CEB (Common English Bible, 2011); NLT (New Living Translation, 1996), CEV (Contemporary English Version, 1995); NJB (New Jerusalem Bible, 1985); NEB (New English Bible, 1970) – dates refer to fi rst complete edition in each case. 2 Robert Alter does it in his generally wonderful Psalms translation (see his The Hebrew Bible. A Translation with Commentary (3 vols, New York, Norton & Co, 2019), 3: p.262. The NJB uniquely puts just vv.6–15 in quotation marks, and the NEB v.6 alone, which is just odd. 3 In a diff erent sort of article one could rehearse possible reasons for the odd plural ‘them’/’their’ in v.15, but I will take ‘them’ as a reference to multiple sins and move on. 55 THE GLASS preferred in the Biblical studies academy, is to plough into debates about the Hebrew, the early versions (especially the Septuagint, which is in part equivocal here), and the nature of ancient cursing language, cross-comparing for example to passages such as Psalm 35:4-8 where comparable – if less extreme – cursing may be found. The goal of this path, call it the yellow brick road, is to arrive at the right (original?) understanding of the text. The other road pulls back to ask questions of a more literary and refl ective nature on the phenomenon of multiple readings of a text that bluntly does not give up all its secrets. In the present context I shall take this road less travelled, hoping it will be of more interest to literary-minded readers. But fi rst …

Explaining the Interpreters’ Quandary: Standard Options for Reading Psalm 109 The remorselessly historical bent of modern historical-critically orientated Biblical studies seeks data about the origin and intention of the text. With Psalm 109 the discussion may be brief: we know nothing. All we have is what the text itself tells us, and on matt ers of provenance this is indeed nothing.4 One piece of auxiliary data worth noting for Christian readers is that v.8b (‘may another seize his position’) is quoted by Peter in Acts 1:20 with reference to Judas being one of the Twelve, and then removed. Peter (or perhaps Luke) uses Ps 109:8 at face value, perhaps simply fi nding its wording apposite to the point at issue in Acts. Most commentators, including Christians, think this is of no relevance to understanding the Psalm, and although there is an interesting discussion to be had about such NT reading of the OT, it is not my focus of interest here. In any case, they say5 the great merit of historical-critical study of scripture is to let att ention to textual and linguistic detail have its day in the face of att empts to mould the text like a wax nose to the predilections of interpreters.6 (The debate, in turn, is how long this day should be, but we press on.) The basic structure of the Psalm is not diffi cult to grasp, and variations on this outline are not overly signifi cant: vv.1–5 cry to God not to be silent in face of ‘my’ enemies vv.6–19 the complaint/cursing that is either off ered or at stake vv.20–29 plea to God to act in vindication of the Psalmist vv.30–31 commitment to praise God The addition of ‘they say’ at the beginning of v.6 att ributes the curse-like thoughts to the enemies. Partly such a reading may be due to the emphasis on what the ‘wicked and deceitful mouths’ are saying against me in vv.2–3 (and perhaps again in v.20, as we shall discuss). A common line of support for the addition lies in the otherwise unexplained switch from the plural enemies (the ‘they’ of vv.3–5), to the singular ‘he/ him’ that is found in vv.6–19. On the NRSV understanding, the ‘he’ in question is the Psalmist himself, being discussed by the wicked and deceitful others who are in view at the beginning. Indeed once one ponders this explanation for the singular/plural switch it becomes clear that it is not necessarily more straightforward to read the whole

4 The Psalm title is ‘of/to David’, but as is well known this is not a pointer to origins. 5 Textbooks lack they say. 6 Both sides of Reformation polemics liked to charge their opponents with treating scripture as a ‘wax nose’. See for example H.C. Porter, ‘The Nose of Wax: Scripture and the Spirit from Erasmus to Milton’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 14 (1964), pp.155-174. 56 THE GLASS text as in the persona of the Psalmist, since there is no explanation for why the Psalmist suddenly starts talking about a ‘he’ at this point. Not that one could not conjecture one, of course – perhaps it is the leader of the adversaries who looms suddenly into view? Or maybe the singular and plural are simply more fl exible in Hebrew curses?7 But the text does not supply a rationale, and fl exibility obviously opens up options rather than closing them down. Perusing the commentaries reveals what one may have anticipated: a range of options are canvassed, and then one is advocated as bett er than the others. It is this phenomenon that I want to address below. But fi rst, let us dwell briefl y with three commendable att empts to tackle Psalm 109 with all that the Biblical studies world can throw at this recalcitrant text.8 Walter Brueggemann avoids ‘they say’, and reads straight through vv.6–19 as the voice of the Psalmist. In his hands the desire to avoid these words as the import of the Psalm itself represents a silencing of genuine protest and lament. The social location of that protest is key: it is located by way of solidarity with the poor, notably in v.22 where the Psalmist says ‘I am poor and needy’. Brueggemann sees vv.6–20 as ‘an actual court case’, expecting divine action only through due human process. Thus the voice of the poor is driven to express ‘social rage’, in distinction from readings from the bett er off , who are complicit in overlooking divinely-mandated social solidarity.9 The key word that alerts the reader to this dimension of the text for Brueggemann is hesed (vv.12, 16, 21, 26) – God’s covenant faithfulness and loyalty, for all God’s people. The Psalm protests against the abandonment of that hesed as the vision for a just society, and calls for justice to God the judge (because God underwrites Israel’s legal process). We silence such a text at our peril. Hossfeld and Zenger off er a thorough analysis that concludes that vv.6–19 are indeed the voice of the Psalmist’s enemies. They rehearse other options, four in total, and are aware of the various strengths of other readings, but conclude that the text is best handled as a juridical text in which vv.6–19 are the substance of the case being brought by the Psalmist before God, but consisting of the accusations and curses brought in turn against the Psalmist by the enemies.10 In the light of such oppression, the Psalmist pleads for God to act. The rationale for their reading rests on the clear diff erences in both syntax and content found in vv.6–19, but also a particular way of reading v.20. This last point is key, if subtle. It turns on reading the more traditional ‘May that be the reward of my accusers from the Lord …’ (NRSV and most English versions) as ‘This is what they do, those who accuse me, calling on the Lord …’. This is defensible, though of course contestable.11 This is not the place to discuss the linguistic 7 They are indeed, says David P. Wright, ‘Ritual Analogy in Psalm 109’, Journal of Biblical Literature 113 (1994), pp.385-404. 8 I have also read Stephen C. Egwim, A Contextual and Cross-Cultural Study of Psalm 109 (Biblical Tools and Studies 12, Leuven, Peeters, 2011), a fascinating 400-page analysis in dialogue with conceptions of shame among the Igbo in southern Nigeria. Egwim covers everything. Which is sometimes a virtue. 9 For all this see Walter Brueggemann, ‘Psalm 109: Steadfast Love as Social Solidarity’, in his The Psalms & the Life of Faith (ed. Patrick D. Miller, Minneapolis, Fortress Press, 1995), pp.268-82. 10 See Frank Lothar Hossfeld and Eric Zenger, Psalms 3 (A Commentary on Psalms 101–150) Minneapolis, Fortress Press, 2011, pp.124–38. 11 They clarify (p.127): pe’ullah can refer both to an action and the result of an action, but then add ‘the word has been translated and interpreted by scholars, depending on their overall understanding of the psalm’. Indeed. In their typically thorough way they even note that the 57 THE GLASS details, in Hebrew, Greek or even in German, that hold the resulting interpretation together, but the conclusion is clear: ‘Psalm 109 – contrary to its misapplication in Christianity … is not a “cursing psalm” but a “justice psalm.”’12 Without the discussion of v.20 that Hossfeld and Zenger undertake, most commentaries are left in a sort of hybrid position. Goldingay’s work may serve as an example: the specifi cs of vv.6–19 are implicitly the words of the enemies, mainly because of the singular/plural issue, but v.20 then turns these very words back on them. Thus: ‘It might have seemed advantageous to avoid making vv.6–19 the prayer of the accused; but he [the Psalmist] is quite willing to make that prayer and wish his own’ [i.e. a wish ‘that the bad things they want for him … will become their deserved payment’].13 The result seems to be a set of prayed curses at one remove, implied by the text of vv.6–19 but not actually spelled out specifi cally. In a fi nal refl ection Goldingay moves in the direction of saying that the Psalm will work as a prayer for the persecuted or the trapped who seek God to act in retribution, and that those who are comfortably off should be slow to criticise, much as per Brueggemann’s reading, though arrived at by a diff erent route. In short: Brueggemann and Goldingay both think the Psalm models a justifi able curse-laden cry of the down-trodden for justice, one at face value but via the courts, one largely by implication from v.20. Hossfeld and Zenger also fasten on justice for the poor, but distanced from the social rage, even condemning its ‘blasphemous misuse’ as a tool for cursing.14 In the tradition of OT scholarship one could at this point vastly multiply listings of who has said what, and derive further nuances a-plenty.15 One would also now proceed to the court-room summing up, whereby one reading is off ered as the right one, or alternatively a new one is pulled out of the hat to trump all that has gone before it. But instead I want to take seriously the idea that all three of these readings are coherent, responsible, and possible. The question then becomes one of handling this diversity of options, which will take us via a consideration of personae to readers and their interpretative judgments.

Personae in the Psalms Psalms study in general has been a litt le fl at-footed with regard to discerning voices in the text. Popular readings frequently imagine that any given Psalm is an unmediated outpouring of spiritual passion, whether of praise or lament. Sometimes, indeed, the impression is given that the writt en text was incidentally captured alongside a spontaneous vocal performance by the ‘author’. Is it this immediacy that lies behind the interpretative caution about a text like Psalm 109? Is it the worry of potentially unmediated appropriation that leaves it as one of the three Psalms excluded from the lectionary for daily prayer?16 Clearly there could be a problem with lett ing the curses LXX of v.20 off ers two variant readings, each of which can be read either way (p.137). 12 Hossfeld and Zenger, Psalms 3, p.138. 13 John Goldingay, Psalms (3 vols; Baker Commentary on the Old Testament Wisdom and Psalms, Grand Rapids, Baker Academic, 2006–8), vol 3: pp.273–89, here p.285. 14 Hossfeld and Zenger, Psalms 3, p.138. 15 Stephen Egwim has done the work for us. See n.8 above, and the useful summary in his ‘Determining the Place of vv. 6–19 in Ps 109’, Ephemerides theologicae lovanienses 80 (2004), pp.112–30. He locates the claim that vv.6–19 are a quotation as originating in 1928 German scholarship. 16 According to the Revised Common Lectionary (RCL), though not, of course, the BCP, which 58 THE GLASS of vv.6–19 be themselves, at face value, if readers will slip into appropriating them directly, and alas, there is evidence that this happens. Dennis Tucker reports in his commentary that v.8 is prayed as a curse against the president by those who fi nd themselves on the opposite side of vitriolic American politics.17 Sadly what might have been simply a prayer about a leader’s time in power takes on a darker tone as it is appropriated on through the succeeding verses. Here is scriptural curse as legitimation for a form of present-day cursing. It is hard to see how one can fully rule this out as one possible response to the text. Meanwhile, on a scholarly level, the predominant critical mode of reading in modern times has been to assimilate a Psalm’s voice to that of its author, but this time understood in a range of critically constructed ways. In the most thorough such analysis, Steven Croft’s work on The Identity of the Individual in the Psalms investigates who is being referred to by the use of ‘I’ as the designation of the speaker in all its occurrences throughout the book, and concludes that there are three diff erent conceptual categories: ‘either the individual suppliant is the king; or he is a private individual; or he is a minister of the cult’. In the last of these categories, the options are ‘a cultic prophet, wisdom teacher, or psalm singer’. Croft assigns each relevant psalm to one or other of these categories.18 But illuminating as such study is, and regardless of how one identifi es the speaking voice historically, this is clearly not the same as asking about the ‘I’ being presented in the psalm, whether or not that is the historical identity of the author. There seems to be an oddity here. Both these approaches, the popular and the scholarly, divert att ention from the Psalm itself to either an original worshipping experience, or more subtly the writt en account of some such experience. But a Psalm is most certainly a text, and as such it represents any such experience in a range of mediated and/or constructive ways. The speaking voice in a Psalm might more properly be described as its ‘persona’. Like the narrator of a story, the persona is the identity of the ‘I’. Psalms scholarship is only slowly arriving at the usefulness of this category, as for example in the introductory work of Jacobson and Jacobson: ‘the author of the psalm stages the poem in such a way that a particular voice is heard or experienced … [and] leads to asking the basic but important question of who the persona is in the psalm, and what that persona means to me.’19 Armed with this category, our questions about how to read Psalm 109 can be reframed in terms of what voices are ‘staged’ by this exploration of lament and curse. The staging will turn out to be fl exible enough to entertain all three of the readings discussed above as possible ‘performances’ of the Psalm’s persona. The Persona of Psalm 109: An Experiment in Criticism? A potential benefi t of this approach is to recognise that there is a certain gap between wheeled faithfully through everything in the Psalter every month. The RCL also excludes Pss 58 and 83. 17 See W. Dennis Tucker and Jamie A. Grant, The NIV Application Commentary: Psalms Vol 2, Grand Rapids, Zondervan, 2018, p.587. 18 Steven J.L. Croft, The Identity of the Individual in the Psalms (Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplements 44, Sheffi eld, JSOT Press, 1987), citations from p.13. It remains true that there is no unanimity on such an approach of course. Croft sees Ps 109 as the prayer of an individual, while others, e.g. Eaton, read it as a prayer of the king. 19 Rolf A. Jacobsen and Karl N Jacobsen, Invitation to the Psalms. A Reader’s Guide for Discovery and Engagement, Grand Rapids, Baker Academic, 2013, pp.95-96. 59 THE GLASS the words of the text and the proposed response. The case is analogous to going to the theatre to see such a scenario performed: here is the Psalmist lamenting that his love is repaid with evil (vv.4–5), and then declaiming the very curses that have been thrown at him. This could be the actor’s enacting of what has been done to him (appropriating the words of the enemies), or it could be a no doubt powerful performance of the very words themselves aimed at the enemies. Notice that on this approach it will make relatively litt le diff erence to the fi nal response. Then, all acted out, the Psalmist turns to God in weakness (v.24), pleads for help (v.26), ends rousingly (vv.30–31), and leaves the stage. What is the member of the audience expected to do? It should be clear that the ‘member of the audience’, who is in turn playing the role of the reader in this thought experiment, is not expected to go out and appropriate all the words they just heard as their own. This is partly because they are only able to access the ‘performance’ of Psalm 109 as part of a wider suite (or ‘canon’) of such performances: Psalm 109 is not a free-standing text in this sense, and so our appropriation will be constrained by other performances that we witness. Admitt edly in several of the more upbeat and life-affi rming instances of ‘watching’ a Psalm stage a performance, the words are very easily and aptly appropriated for oneself (e.g. ‘The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want …’). But that is a matt er of poetic short-hand. The immediacy is actually dependent on a range of judgements, quick and even sub- conscious though they may be in such a case. The question before us in this litt le experiment in criticism has concerned how to balance the details of the text, the incompatible evaluations of the critics, and the question of how to go on as a reader of this text. In some cases, incompatible interpretations on a textual level actually prove to be harmonious on a broader ethical or theological level: ‘We are not compelled to choose between interpretations that are diff erent but morally and theologically compatible’, writes Charles Cosgrove in the introduction to a collection of essays that ponder precisely this question under the rubric of postmodern ‘indeterminacy’.20 The case of Psalm 109 is almost but not quite in this category. None of the interpretations we canvassed thought that interpreters were thereby mandated to go out and curse, although two of the readings suggested that there would be situations where other readers might be so empowered, while the third rejected cursing. When we do have to choose, a range of criteria come into play: pertaining to theological and moral judgements, the depth and relevance of the readings off ered, and the extent to which they aspire to see the text through others’ eyes as well as one’s own.21 These will be in play as we experience Psalm 109. While a few specifi c implications will need adjudication (e.g. how closely we tie the text to issues of social status and/or poverty), it seems to me that most of the details of the three readings we sampled can combine felicitously to stimulate our best readings. Interpretation might prove to be a litt le less competitive, and more collaborative, on such an approach.

20 Charles H. Cosgrove, ‘Introduction’, in Charles H. Cosgrove (ed.), The Meanings We Choose: Hermeneutical Ethics, Indeterminacy and the Confl ict of Interpretations (Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplements 411, London, T&T Clark International, 2004), pp.1–22, here p.8. 21 Here I summarise the criteria off ered by Cosgrove himself in his chapter in the above- mentioned book: ‘Toward a Postmodern Hermeneutica Sacra: Guiding Considerations in Choosing Between Competing Plausible Interpretations of Scripture’, in The Meanings We Choose, pp.39–61.

60 THE GLASS

By way of this specifi c example, and recent refl ections on the ethics of indeterminate interpretation, I think we have arrived at the territory that C.S. Lewis imagined in his An Experiment in Criticism. Lewis wanted to avoid critical analysis being the gate- keeper to ‘good’ books (or in this case Psalms), and suggested instead that a good book was any book that gave rise to good readings. In an admitt edly skeletal account of what good readings were, he wrote in his epilogue: ‘we seek an enlargement of our being. We want to be more than ourselves.… We want to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as with our own.’22 Without wishing to commend the practice of cursing one’s neighbour, or one’s enemy, or even the American president, I suggest that our approaches to Psalm 109 have allowed us to enter into the experience of being wronged, and of wishing retribution upon others, in order to enlarge our understanding of life before God. Those who have never been wronged doubtless fi nd the Psalm opaque. For the rest of us, it turns out that incompatible interpretations of details do not stand in the way of the enlargement of experience vouchsafed by engaging with the persona of Psalm 109. Stepping back from the interpretative coal-face and conducting an experiment in criticism – refl ecting on why we read, to what end, in the midst of our troubled lives and fractured world – lets Psalm 109 take its rightful place as part of the subject matt er of the Christian life.

22 C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism, Cambridge University Press, 1961, p.137.

61 Book Reviews

Roy Flechner, Saint Patrick Retold: The Legend and History of Ireland’s Patron Saint, Princeton, NJ and Oxford, Princeton University Press, 2019, 277+xvii pages, £22.00 / US$27.95, 9780691184647 In this engaging study, the fi rst major scholarly biography of Ireland’s patron saint by a single author since E. A. Thompson’s Who Was Saint Patrick? (1985), Roy Flechner re-evaluates Patrick’s life and work in its late antique context. Flechner, lecturer in early medieval history at University College Dublin, off ers a readable but rigorous introduction to a familiar – and rather misused – missionary. Certainly, it is a more approachable starting-point than the essays in David Dumville et al., Saint Patrick 493–1993 (1993), which remains the touchstone for scholarly discussion nearly thirty years later. However, Flechner’s commendable desire to look through and behind Patrick’s own self-representation in his Confessio and Epistola occasionally leads him to overreach. Flechner’s most original and controversial hypothesis – that Patrick was not taken as a slave to Ireland but rather absconded across the Irish Sea (from his birthplace at Bannavem Taburniae, an otherwise unatt ested location most likely somewhere on the West coast of Great Britain) with his wealth and potentially his own slaves in order to avoid his duties as a curialis – is certainly an interesting suggestion and deserves careful consideration.1 Patrick’s own father was a curialis (essentially a cross between a town councillor and a tax collector) and the position was both hereditary and undesirable, as they were expected to make up any shortfall in taxes collected out of their own pocket. A declining Roman economy in the fourth century led to a well-documented ‘fl ight of the curiales’, as offi ce-holders and their children sought to escape the burdensome post by joining the army, the Church, gaining higher positions, or fl eeing outright. Flechner suggests that Patrick may have concocted the story of his enslavement as a cover for avoiding his curial responsibilities. He suggests this may have been the unnamed but apparently quite serious ‘sin’, which Patrick later confessed to a friend, who betrayed his trust, causing Patrick considerable embarrassment and legal trouble. Like so much about the subject, this hypothesis is diffi cult to disprove. Patrick’s own writings are the only contemporary sources for his existence and, once you admit the possibility that he might not have been completely honest (which, of course, is necessary for historians to do), it is diffi cult to close the door again. However, I have serious diffi culties with the theory: apart from the lack of direct evidence, it does not fi t the internal logic of Patrick’s text. Would Patrick spin a story about being enslaved as a young man, only to confess the untruth of this story to a friend as a sin? Once this ‘sin’ became public knowledge – which it clearly did, given that it served as the chief evidence in actions taken against Patrick later in life – why would he cling to the slavery story in the Confessio? Moreover, if Patrick had set himself up as a young man in Ireland with wealth and slaves, surely this would have been common knowledge (or at least ‘discoverable’) amongst the Irish? It seems unbelievable that a man with so many enemies could have hoped to hide such an enormous lie. It is one thing to suggest that

1 Flechner fi rst proposed this nearly ten years ago in an article: Roy Flechner, ‘Patrick’s Reasons for Leaving Britain’ in Fiona Edmonds and Paul Russell eds., Tome: Studies in Medieval Celtic History and Law in Honour of Thomas Charles-Edwards, Woodbridge, Boydell, 2011, pp. 125–34. 62 THE GLASS the Confessio was rhetorically constructed; it is surely quite another to suggest that it was so riddled with inconsistencies as to be utt erly self-defeating. One of the other slightly contentious aspects of Flechner’s analysis is his suggestion (again, quite tentative) that Patrick may have been operating in the fourth century. This has never been categorically disproven. The dates given in the later Irish annals for Patrick’s life – 432 for his arrival and either 461/2 or 493/3 for his death – have long been recognised as thoroughly unreliable. An earlier date would certainly suit Flechner’s hypothesis that Patrick was a curial absconder, since the conditions that would have made such a course of action desirable were no longer in place after the Roman Empire ceased to hold sway in Britain. David Dumville suggested in 1993 that Patrick must have received the bulk of his ‘religious education’ in the fi fth century, on the basis of the patt ern of Old Latin v. Vulgate citations of scripture. Even if he received that education in his twenties and thirties, it would be diffi cult to place his birth much earlier than the 380s. Flechner waves away this suggestion, on the basis that any scriptural citations in Patrick’s text might easily be att ributed to later scribal correction. However, in doing so he subtly misrepresents Dumville’s argument. Firstly, he writes that Dumville merely suggested that Patrick ‘must have been writing after 404’, when in fact Dumville’s argument would imply that he was writing some decades later (since he clearly received his education before he went to Ireland and therefore quite some time before he wrote the Confessio). Secondly, he does not take into account the specifi c patt ern of Biblical citations: the fact that Patrick takes his readings from Acts entirely from the Vulgate, his other NT readings from a mixture of Vulgate and Old Latin, and his OT readings almost entirely from the Old Latin is good evidence that he received his scriptural education at a point when Jerome’s translation was only just beginning to fi lter into common use in the far West of Europe. Given that Jerome, writing in Palestine, only completed the NT portion of his translation in 383, and that the earliest clear evidence for its use as an alternative to the Old Latin dates to c.400 in North Africa, it is hard to imagine that Patrick could have integrated the Vulgate NT into his Confessio any earlier than this (and probably somewhat later). My qualms about some of the more original aspects of this book should not detract from its essential qualities, and it must be noted that Flechner himself is always suitably equivocal about his most speculative suggestions. In the introduction, Flechner briefl y outlines the basic, uncritical narrative of Patrick’s career (as far as can be gleaned from the Confessio and Epistola) and lays out his approach to the sources. Flechner’s really original contribution here lies in his use of Roman, and to a lesser extent Irish, legal sources, which illuminate issues of slavery and property ownership in the fourth and fi fth centuries. He also shows sensitivity to Patrick’s reading of the Bible, including the way in which he seems to model himself on the Apostle Paul in the Confessio. He does perhaps underplay Patrick’s originality as a reader: the Briton was in fact one of the very fi rst authors in Christian history to read passages like Matt hew 28:19–20 as a direct call to ‘mission’ or evangelical preaching.

63 THE GLASS

After the introduction, Flechner deftly manages to combine both a chronological and a thematic progression; this is necessary when the ‘bare facts’ of Patrick’s life are so fragmentary. Chapter One covers both Patrick’s upbringing and the historical context of fourth/fi fth-century Britain. Chapter two places ‘Patrick’s Ireland’ in its Iron Age context. Chapter Three discusses both Patrick’s (supposed) captivity and the general history of slavery in Late Antiquity. Chapter Four surveys what litt le can be known about paganism in both the Empire and Ireland, before Chapter Five discusses Patrick’s ‘Missionary Life’. Finally, Chapter Six and the Epilogue survey the creation of narratives about Patrick, from the seventh century through to the end of the First World War. These last chapters do not necessarily add much to what has already been writt en, certainly when it comes to Patrick’s seventh-century hagiographers Muirchú and Tirechán, although they do synthesise some often very diffi cult scholarship into a very readable account. Special mention must be made of the outstanding ‘Further Reading’ section. Rather than a bare list of references, Flechner gives a series of miniature bibliographical essays, which thoroughly cover topics such as ‘slavery in the Roman Empire’ or ‘Patrick’s eschatology and apocalyptic worldview’. Flechner is clearly a master of the historiography of his subject; through these notes, I discovered numerous works which had slipped through the cracks of my own reading. I would certainly recommend this as a starting point for anyone looking to make a study of Patrick for the fi rst time: few subjects can have had as many utt erly worthless books writt en about them as Patrick, and Flechner does an excellent job of separating the wheat from the chaff . I certainly do not think Flechner has writt en the fi nal word on Patrick – he is commendably honest about this himself. However, I thoroughly enjoyed reading his treatment. He fi lled in gaps in my own knowledge, answered a number of questions, and posed many more. Moreover, he has succeeded in producing an accessible synthesis of a well-known but badly misunderstood fi gure, without compromising on critical scholarship. It will hopefully act to disabuse some readers of nationalistic or New Age notions of the ‘Celtic’ Iron Age, and indeed of the ‘Celtic Church’.

Samuel Cardwell

Colin McAllister ed., The Cambridge Companion to Apocalyptic Literature, Cambridge University Press, 2020, xvii + 355 pp. £22.99 pbk., 97811084346892 – also available in hardback & as Ebook What is apocalyptic literature? There have long been two strands in the understanding and appropriation of the word ‘apocalypse’ – revelation (literally, unfolding or unveiling, from its Greek etymology), and the end of the world. The last book of the Bible, ‘Apocalypsis Ioannou’ begins with a moment of revelation and ends with a new heaven and a new earth, resurrected by God. It seems particularly relevant in a time of crisis and fear (now, as I write in a pandemic). It also continues to encourage groups of Christians who are experiencing persecution or ridicule – and it has opened such Christians to ridicule. It provides a language for the threat of annihilation for the whole world. It is also the case that ‘Apocalyptic’ comes dangerously close to being simply an intensifi er for describing anything disastrous – a storm, or a new weapon, or a famine – not to mention supplying many of the tropes of disaster movies. ‘It is possible to identify a literary genre “apocalypse” … as an account of a 64 THE GLASS revelation mediated by a heavenly being that discloses a transcendent reality, both spatial and temporal. Apocalypticism, defi ned as the worldview characteristic of apocalypses, can also be found in works that are not formally apocalypses. It is characterized by the belief that human life is largely shaped by supernatural forces, and bounded by the expectation of a fi nal judgement, including the judgement of the dead.’ (John J. Collins, The Oxford Handbook of Apocalyptic Literature, 2015 – and Collins writes in similar vein in Chapter 2 here, on apocalypticism as a world view). This wide- ranging collection of essays, scholarly but accessible, covers the ‘literature’ in the sense of the primary documents, widely conceived – Biblical, early church, medieval and so on – and wider cultural references. Indeed, the editor’s opening chapter, ‘Through a Glass Darkly:Time, the End, and the Essence of Apocalyptica’ begins with a quotation from Blue Oyster Cult’s song ‘(Don’t Fear) the Reaper’. The editor is a musician as well as the convener of a regular symposium on apocalyptic. I haven’t made a count, but the pop culture references seem to outnumber the high culture references, at least when discussing the present day. As so often with the Cambridge Companion series, part of the att raction of this volume is fi nding some of the best scholars in the fi eld in accessible and concise form. Thus, for example, as well as Collins on the apocalyptic imagination, there is a fi ne, concise introduction to the New Testament book of Revelation by Ian Paul, author of the Tyndale Commentary, att ending to matt ers of authorship and imperial imagery, time and space, and the book’s theology. As the chapters develop, so the subject of ‘apocalypticism’ from the Age of Reason to the present day becomes the focus. What is particularly illuminating is the historical inclusiveness, demonstrating the continuity of att ention to Revelation through late antiquity and the Middle Ages. It is an illuminating challenge to my Anglo-Protestant assumption/prejudice that not much happens in terms of att ention to the Bible between the church fathers and the Reformation. So, we learn of the infl uence of the Gnostics (Dylan Burns) and the Donatists (Jesse Hoover), not to mention the Venerable Bede’s commentary on Revelation (recently translated by Faith Wallis). The historically focused chapters sometimes come in a curious order – for example, ‘The Formation of Antichrist in Medieval Western Christian Thought’ (Kevin L. Hughes, who chides modern scholars for their collective amnesia of Revelation 13, the main source of the Antichrist prophecy) follows Christopher Rowland’s ‘Apocalypticism in the Age of Reason’, which sets visionaries like Winstanley and Blake against Mede and Newton. (The visionaries win.) No such chronological oddity in the fi nal three chapters, which focus on the present in a challenging and informative fashion. David Cook’s cool-headed chapter on ‘Salafi -jihadi Apocalypticism’ traces the origins of the IS phenomenon back to its origins in the rivalry between the early Muslims and Constantinople. In this reading IS comes out as an att empted revival of the earliest Muslim forms of government, but with diff erences. It did/does not claim that its leader, Al Baghdadi, is the Mahdi, the messianic fi gure who will conquer Constantinople, seen as the headquarters of Christendom. What confuses this picture of religiously inspired warfare, he argues, is the number of military alliances made between early Muslims and Christians. It’s very helpful in understanding what is and isn’t ‘fundamental’ to the fundamentalists to get that historical understanding. Cook’s perspective as the translator of the key texts of the Syrian Muslim tradition (The Book of Tribulations) is critical here. Daniel G.

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Hummel, on ‘American Evangelicals and the Apocalypse’ sets the current dominance of ‘dispensational premillennialism’ in a revealing historical context. He reminds us that it ousted a postmillennial consensus, which went back to Jonathan Edwards, the optimism of the ‘Batt le Hymn of the Republic’ and was linked to the mainstream denominations. He traces the growing infl uence of dispensationalism in detail, from J.N. Darby and the Schofi eld Bible, through Billy Graham to the ‘Left Behind’ series and into the political present. He is particularly illuminating on the interrelation of popular culture and the theology, notably the Rapture, but also through Japanese fi lm, manga and some of the Studio Ghibli productions. Lorenzo DiTommaso concludes the volume on ‘Apocalypticism and the Contemporary World’, and his analysis is based on a trenchant philosophical analysis of ‘apocalypticism’ as a world view. To summarize: there are two realities, transcendent and mundane; time is linear, and coming to an end; and the end is near. Like Hummel, he att ends to the popular more than high culture nature of apocalyptic literature and fi lm. He also has a cheeky double response to those who complain that such cultural manifestations are crude and trivial: it is that even the canonical texts like Daniel and Revelation (except for 4 Ezra) are themselves ‘existentially shallow’. This evaluative edge is sharper than that of most of the contributors. For DiTommaso, apocalypticism is an adolescent worldview, and its current popularity is linked with a rise in illiberalism. This is in sharp contrast to a movement within Christian theology from the mid-twentieth century recognizing and sometimes celebrating the apocalyptic character of Christianity, not to mention the other monotheistic religions. This is a rich, wide-ranging and sometimes provocative collection which brings together serious scholarship adapted to a wider readership. It’s not the only one – it shares some authors with the Oxford Handbook which is organised in a diff erent way (much more expensive, but available online through some library subscriptions). I found it consistently thought-provoking, informative, and full of leads for further exploration. Theological, historical and literary scholarship is alert to apocalyptic. It is impossible to understand and address contemporary culture without acknowledging its interest. Question is, how central should it be to Christian proclamation and practice?

Roger Pooley

Carolyn Muessig, The Stigmata in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, Oxford University Press, 2020, 320 pp., £75, 9780198795643 (hardback) At the heart of medieval devotional life was the fi gure of the wounded Christ. In art of all kinds, in writt en meditations, in liturgy, Western Christianity in the Middle Ages became passionately concerned with Jesus in his bodily suff ering. This concern often went beyond the representative into the performative, as Christians sought to imitate Christ in all things. One manifestation was the phenomenon of stigmata – the conferral of wounds and pains like Christ’s, whether visible or invisible, as a gift of God. Carolyn Muessig’s new book on the subject takes a broad yet detailed historical approach to this aspect of medieval (and later) devotion, tracing it from its origins in the claim of Paul, in Galatians 6:17, that ‘I bear on my body the marks of Jesus’, through the varied, often controversial forms it took through the medieval period and beyond. 66 THE GLASS

Muessig is clear from the outset that her intention is not, as has often been characteristic of the debate around stigmatisation, to determine whether stigmatics ‘really’ received their wounds, or to off er retrospective diagnoses of physical or mental illness. Instead, she asks what this phenomenon meant to those who experienced, witnessed, and discussed it. In this, the book is refl ective of the laudable concern in recent study of medieval religion to understand it to some extent on its own terms, as a coherent social formation in which people engaged on many levels, not reducible to simple questions of empirical belief. Muessig also helpfully demonstrates that the receiving of the stigmata is by no means confi ned to medieval Christianity. She bookends the argument with examples of modern-day stigmatics, who indicate the ongoing power, and surprising denomational variety, of the claim to bodily identifi cation with Jesus – from the twentieth century Capuchin friar Padre Pio, to the Lebanese Maronite ecstatic Catherine Fahmi, to the Samoan Catholic convert Toaipuapuagā Opapo Soana’i. She refl ects on the meanings of these people’s experiences in their contexts – social, ecclesial, personal – and suggests that the same approach is needed in analysis of the history of the phenomenon. The book as a whole is carefully thorough, beginning with an introduction covering the substantial historiography on stigmatisation from the early modern period to the present. The ensuing chronologically ordered chapters examine the late antique exegesis of relevant scriptural passages, the high and late medieval changes to those understandings and the many contemporary claims and counter-claims of stigmatic experience, and the theological and ecclesial debates surrounding them through into the Reformation and later. The fi rst key shift in this narrative is att ributed, in Chapter One, to the eleventh century reformer Peter Damian, who refocused the patristic emphasis on the metaphorical Pauline stigma as a mark of ministry, to one which connected Christian, often monastic suff ering to the paradigmatic suff ering of Christ. Asceticism was reframed as more than simple purgation, into an active imitation, even replication of Christ’s Passion – a theological discourse which could become startlingly literal. Francis of Assisi is the best-known fi gure to have received stigmata, and the fi rst recorded to have borne the exact dominical wounds on feet, hands, and side. Chapter Two delineates the variety of interpretations placed on this unprecedented miracle, from the wounds as a seal of the embrace between lover and beloved, to the saint as an icon sculpted by Christ for others’ edifi cation. The association of stigmata with an intense degree of love was particularly infl uential, refl ective of contemporary monastic models of prayer as an ascending, intensifying experience of devotion which could, in some cases, lead to bodily transformation into the image of the One contemplated. Muessig observes that accounts of Francis’s stigmatisation along these lines echo the well-established idea that pregnant women could change the appearance of their children in utero through what they looked at during pregnancy: desire and imagination could lead to astonishing physical manifestations. While the most famous, Francis was not in fact representative of the majority of stigmatics. In Chapters Three and Four, Muessig demonstrates that by the late medieval period, ‘holy, virginal women were axiomatic stigmatics’, and discusses many examples of such women: the nun and writer Gertrude of Helfta, whose invisible stigmata acted as a kind of sacerdotal mark within her community; Chiara of Montefalco, who after death was found to have miniature replicas of the instruments of the Passion (the objects used to crucify Christ, frequently an object of late medieval 67 THE GLASS devotion) embedded in her heart; the ecstatic dancer Elizabeth of Spalbeek, who vividly enacted the suff ering of Christ; and various others. Ideas about the porosity and impressibility of the (virginal) female body, making it uniquely receptive to stigmatisation, were combined with theological parallels between Jesus’ wounded body, Mary’s virginal fl esh, and that of the ascetic female saint, to yield a special association of devoted women with bodily imitation of the suff ering Saviour. Muessig helpfully draws out the various kinds of theological, institutional, and political negotiation that were fi ltered through discussions of stigmatisation, whether hagiographical or polemic. Charismatic women such as the reformer Catherine of Siena – held up by the Dominican order as a stigmatic to rival Francis, despite never having claimed explicitly to have received the holy wounds – made waves in secular and ecclesial courts, gaining authority from this mark of ministry and divine favour, but also inspiring suspicion and rejection. Debates around transubstantiation, the immaculate conception of Mary, and the papal schism of 1378-1417 were all infl ected by stigmatics and their experiences. On a more popular level, Muessig indicates the association of stigmatisation with the evolving forms of aff ective devotion, for example the emerging devotion to the Five Wounds of Christ and the tactile engagement with images which often accompanied it. It is clear that from the earliest days of the phenomenon, stigmatics att racted both belief and disbelief. Chapter Five tracks the controversies over late medieval women stigmatics and their supporters, particularly in the context of the Dominican Observant reforms in which performative sanctity was a key tool on both sides. The scriptural concept of ‘testing the spirits’ became crucial in this period, as the authority of stigmatics’ claim to special union with Christ was contested. It is with this background that Chapter Six deals with the religious upheavals of the sixteenth century onwards, examining what stigmata came to mean in the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. Here, there is the sense that more space could have been given to the question of exactly why stigmatics came to be seen as ‘not icons of faith but idols of fraud’. Muessig’s focus draws out a lesser-known area of Reformation thought, noting that while the majority of Protestant voices treated stigmatisation as one of many examples of Catholic credulity and superstition, there were more positive responses: the writings of the sixteenth century ‘Lutheran mystic’ Johann Arndt, for example, reappropriated the language of the Song of Songs, the ‘seal’ of love, to characterise stigmata as one example of the reform of humanity into the image of God. However, it is not entirely clear why the concept of the stigma, the sign, changed so radically in this period, moving away from the performative mode epitomised by visible, physical stigmatization, back to a metaphorical Pauline interpretation of Galatians 6:17 more reminiscent of patristic readings. Such a lacuna is an understandable side eff ect of a book which covers a vast amount of historical ground in a relatively compact volume, and which engages with key elements of multiple theological and social movements. As a whole, this book provides a balanced account of an important context for understanding medieval and later literature: a theological discourse, and lived experience, of relationship to Christ which still reverberates powerfully in many kinds of Christianity. Stigmatisation was, and is, a rhetorical claim, a devotional performance, and a way of making space for experiences of suff ering, pain, and illness. It embeds the receiver in the very fl esh of Christ and engages the tactile and the somatic in worship and theology. Muessig’s history makes the important step of seeking to understand this discourse holistically 68 THE GLASS and sympathetically, resulting in an illuminating study with many points of interest for scholars of all periods.

Alicia Smith

Michael L. Peterson, C.S.Lewis and the Christian Worldview, Oxford University Press, 2020, 240 pp., £19.99, 9780190201111 As a Chinese reader and researcher of C.S.Lewis for the last fi fteen years, I have found Michael Peterson’s new book on Lewis in the light of his world view, that is, his philosophia perennis, surprisingly accessible, given the depth of the matt ers it deals with – ‘the nature of reality, humanity, morality and meaning’, and given too my own background as a non-English speaker with no training in philosophy or in theology. Just as Lewis was gifted in communicating philosophical ideas and arguments in an accessible style, Peterson’s lucid and graceful prose in this book can be seen as refl ecting a Lewisian accessibility. However, to me the outstanding merit of the book is its breakthrough in presenting a hitherto unavailable ‘conceptual framework’ of Lewis’s life and writings in a comprehensive and systematic form to explain and access Lewis’s Christian worldview, which, as the author confi dently assures us, ‘can be sympathetically constructed, reasonably presented, and rigorously evaluated.’ Among the extant books about Lewis’s Christian philosophy, most of them focus on specifi c topics rather than his worldview in its entirety. Therefore when Peterson avows that he intends his work to ‘fi ll the void by off ering systematic philosophical treatment of Lewis’s overall Christian worldview,’ we can congratulate him on having accomplished a considerable feat. In brief, the major contribution of this book – which aff ords a comprehensive, coherent framework for understanding Lewis’s Christian worldview – is constructed with the following building blocks: the fi rst two chapters provide an intellectual framework for the shaping of Lewis’s Christian worldview (Chapter 1) and a chronological tracing of Lewis’s engagement with diff erent worldviews from atheistic materialism, through various forms of idealism and pantheism, to theism and ultimately Christian theism, where he came to a place of rest in the faith of a classical orthodox Christianity (a helpful guide can be found in Appendix A, ‘A Timeline of Lewis’s Journey’). From here the line of development turns to what I would call the four pillars of Lewis’s Christian worldview – his reasoning for Christian theism through his famous triad of arguments – the argument from Joy, from Reason and from Morality (Chapters 3-5); his defence of the mystery and reality of the Incarnation and Trinitarian God (Chapters 6-7); his addressing of the prevalent doubts and challenges raised by this secular world as well as by truth seekers of all time concerning the problems of pain and evil v. an almighty and all-good God, science (scientism) v. religion, pagan beliefs v. Christian faith (Chapters 8-10). Finally, there are his musings on the divine (Chapters 11-12) – prayer and Providence, heaven and hell, the temporal and the eternal, these not without questions unsolved, on the part of Lewis as much as on the part of Peterson the author. When confronted with the divine and the numinous, one cannot help sighing and longing along with Paul, ‘Now we see in a mirror, darkly … now I know in part; but then shall I know fully’ (1 Cor. 13:12). What stands out in this work is the author’s extensive and erudite drawings upon 69 THE GLASS the voluminous writings of C. S. Lewis, and the equally eloquent voices of Lewis’s critics and commentators, with classical and contemporary philosophical viewpoints, whether expressed by friends or foes. Only by wrestling and conversing with these forces, coupled with living through ‘problems of pains’ in day-to-day experience could Lewis’s Christian worldview withstand tests for its depth and strength, hence the book’s power to convince the reader of the intellectual liveliness and existential liveability of the ‘mere’ orthodox Christian faith to which Lewis committ ed his life and career. Apart from this major merit, I have also reaped some bonus points in my fi rst reading. The hitherto unpublished Lewis-Van Osdall correspondence at Appendix B further unveils to me for the fi rst time what a mature and mellow life Lewis lived spiritually toward the end of his days on earth. A feeble widower, a busy Cambridge don before fully succumbing to bed, a sick old man nearly dying in the summer of 1963, Lewis never ceased to be a caring and quick correspondent with his profound love and ubiquitous wit. The last lett er in reply for comfort to Professor Vas Osdall, a father grieving over the loss of his young son, was dated 26 October 1963, less than a month before others turned to grieve over the loss of Lewis himself, ‘one of the most infl uential spokespersons for Christianity in the English-speaking world’ (Time magazine in 1947). ‘[Going] through fi re and through water’ (Psalms 66:12) in his unspeakable ‘grief observed’, Lewis’s gracious and magnanimous heart is a precious asset for the whole of body of Christ. Another bonus point is my entirely unexpected discovery of Peterson’s nearly point by point resonance with the key arguments in my latest published article (‘The Discarded Image and the Debunked Tao: Objective Value in C.S. Lewis’ Medieval Model and His Critique of Modernity’, Religions, 2019, 10 (11),597; htt ps://doi.org/10.3390/ rel10110597). In this article I discovered a connection between The Discarded Image (1964) and The Abolition of Man (1943) through Tao, a term adopted by Lewis for objective value. His usage was implied in the former and explicated in the latt er work, and the article’s ‘critique of modernity’ takes 1950s eugenics, leading to twenty-fi rst century transhumanism, as targets. In Chapter 9 Peterson discusses Lewis’s views on science, scientism and evolution, and he takes The Discarded Image in relation to The Abolition of Man noticing that what Image implies about humanity’s future being stripped of dignity and transcendence by scientism was taken up in Abolition, harking back to the earlier work’s ‘ominous forecast of disastrous practical consequences for human existence apart from the Tao.’ The ‘disastrous consequences’ see their manifestation in 1950s’ eugenics, prenatal conditioning, known to the lamenting Lewis, as much as in the third millenium’s ‘biotechnological nightmare’ including the ‘transhumanism’ that was unknown to Lewis. Having come across these passages by Peterson my earlier feeling of being original (self-pride) for discovering the ‘Tao connection ’between Image and Abolition and being alone (self-pity) for seeing the nightmarishness of ‘transhumanism’ were defl ated and dissolved. Lewis’s Christian worldview seems to have united us – the reader, the author and the host in the author’s crafted structure – as fellow pilgrims upon the path of the Tao. However, if there were a minor regret after I closed the book it would be the silence about Lewis’s views on gender. After all, throughout Lewis’s life his relationships with both men and women were unique, with his Inklings friends, with Mrs. Moore, Joy, Dorothy Sayers, to name just a few among his numerous and well-

70 THE GLASS known relationships. This should be of interest to the readers not only because one’s views on gender (let alone the views of Lewis as an insightful and intelligent Christian intellectual) are important in the composition of one’s worldview, but also because Lewis was curiously reticent about this topic. If Peterson had gleaned enough material from his all but exhaustive reading of Lewis to provide even a sketch of his views on this, many readers would have been satisfi ed. Finally a point on which I demur. I wonder about the effi cacy of the mathematical formulae used in early chapters to demonstrate the probability of the Christian worldview compared to alternatives: do expressions such as P(M /T) > P(M / X) advance our comprehension, or are they there to impress as they baffl e? During the pandemic travel has been restricted, but as a mental traveller the reader can be guided by Peterson around Lewis’s mental landscape. He or she can reconsider for example an atheist materialism or evolutionist scientism which has served this secular world’s pride, and which indeed was invoked as the saviour in a Chinese 2019 sci-fi blockbuster The Wandering Earth. Lewis’s divine perspectives of prayer and Providence, pain and suff ering are perhaps more relevant to our day-to- day life. We saw it recently when Christian ministers risked their lives caring for the dying on their highly contagious deathbeds.

Yuxiao Su

Zora Neale Hurston, Moses, Man of the Mountain, New York, HarperPerennial Modern Classics, 2009, 352pp., Ebook $7.49, 9780062010568 The African American writer Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) is today best known for Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), a bildungsroman which depicts the lyrical and erotic quest of its black protagonist, Janie Crawford. Her later novel, Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939), is mostly familiar, if at all, to specialists in American southern literature, and her subsequent novel, Herod the Great – which occupied the latt er part of her writing career and on which she set great store – was rejected by several publishers and is still unpublished. These Biblical projects do not fi t into the multiculturalist revival of Hurston’s work that began in the 1980s. But to neglect this Biblical side of Hurston’s oeuvre would be a mistake. Hurston has some claim to be the only major novelist in twentieth century American literature to take up the subject of the Mosaic tradition and of the history of early Judaism. Hurston’s novel belongs within a long African American tradition of reverence for the fi gure of Moses that can still be seen in the speeches of Martin Luther King. In this tradition Moses was recognised for being a political leader and he was often esteemed even above Jesus because he off ered redemption in this world and not only in the next (this esteem can be seen in the 1850s slave spiritual ‘Go Down, Moses’). The creation by Moses of a free nation of ex-slaves in Canaan therefore became for Hurston a deeper and more foundational version of Janie’s discovery of self-worth in the all black township of Eatonville in Their Eyes Were Watching God. To emphasise the Africanist identity of Moses, Hurston makes her character the son of Pharaoh’s daughter and an Assyrian prince (although Moses’ parentage remains ambivalent in the novel: he might also be the son of a Jewish couple). Hurston’s Moses is skilled in many of the ‘hoodoo’ practices that Hurston researched in Haiti as a trained anthropologist, for example his ability to change a staff to a snake (this trick shows an

71 THE GLASS affi nity on Moses’ part with Dumballah, the African snake god worshipped in Haiti). Hurston also uses the speech forms of African Americans for the Hebrew characters. So the Hebrew slaves complain that by following Moses they have just exchanged one ‘boss-man’ for another and Joshua is called ‘biggoty and sassy’. These ‘hoodoo’ aspects of the novel might give the impression that Hurston’s is a folksy, magical variation on the Moses story – as indeed it has often been treated by many commentators. But Hurston’s is a more severe and historically sensitive narrative than this. Her novel coincides with a new preoccupation with Moses in the late 1930s and early 1940s on the part of international writers such as Thomas Mann in The Tables of the Law (1944) and Sigmund Freud in Moses and Monotheism (1939). These writers re-examined the origins of the Mosaic religion at a time when that religion came under the unprecedented att ack of the Third Reich. What was it, these writers asked, in the notion of Jewishness that singled it out, made it such a ferocious object of onslaught in interwar Europe? Mann and Freud located the origins of anti-semitism in the revolt of shiftless sons against the over-onerous demands of the patriarchal Mosaic conscience and its abstract God. Hurston’s answer is virtually the inverse of this explanation: for her the Hebrew and the African American peoples are those that are utt erly ordinary, and this unvarnished humanity, which is not incompatible with a powerful life spirit, became the object of exclusion by those with authoritarian or theocratic intentions. Hurston’s contribution to this international revival of creative interest in the Moses story is to identify the African Americans of the South with the Jews in Germany. Both – under the pressure of the biopolitical dynamic of the modern ethnic state in the US and in the Third Reich – had been classed as alien peoples within their home countries. The Pharaoh at the beginning of Hurston’s novel has many points of comparison with a Fascist leader: for example, his ultranationalism and love for gigantic stone monuments. Above all, by issuing an edict that all boy babies born to Hebrew mothers will be killed, he becomes the leader of a proto-eugenicist state on the model of the Third Reich and its Nuremberg laws: ‘The Hebrew womb had fallen under the heel of Pharaoh.’ The fi rst three chapters present a powerfully dramatic description of biopolitical terror and of the agonies of concealed childbirth. The Hebrew women—including Jochebed, the mother of the original Moses child – are forced to give birth in caves and rocks, having to stifl e as much as they can the cries of childbirth so that they will not be detected by the Pharaoh’s ‘secret police’. Moses, who is brought up in the Egyptian court, becomes the most brilliant of Egyptian generals. But then, out of an inherent magnanimity, he turns into a ‘man of thought’ with a ‘new sympathy for the oppressed of all mankind’. What Hurston’s Moses seeks to create in the Hebrews is a civil polity that is based on liberal democracy. He tries to instil in his people an instinct for liberty, which is like manna in that ‘you just got to keep on gathering it fresh every day’. The forty-year ordeal in the wilderness is a trial to create the inner discipline necessary for this polity. One of the texts that Hurston based her novel on was Baruch Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise (1670). Spinoza reads the Book of Exodus as an early att empt to found a liberal community, ruled by binding norms. Moses voices this Spinozan ideal when he says: ‘A great state is a well- blended mesh of something of all of the people and all of none of the people’. But the paradox is – and it is all the keener for Hurston’s readers in the ‘low dishonest decade’ of the 1930s – that in att empting to create this community Moses is forced to adopt dictatorial methods. In one shocking scene that is not in the Book of Exodus Moses

72 THE GLASS murders Aaron (perhaps his brother) because Aaron threatens to undermine the new state through the creation of a priestly class. But this totalitarian Moses suddenly fades away at the end of the novel. Just as the Hebrews are about to enter Canaan Moses renounces the proff ered kingship of the new nation and apparently becomes a desert wanderer (or perhaps he dies on Mount Nebo: the wording is ambivalent). Hurston moves between the liberal, the totalitarian, and the abdicating versions of Moses as though she cannot quite fi nd a structure of mediation between them, an irresolution that has led Brian Britt to call Hurston’s the fi rst ‘postmodern’ Moses. Moses, Man of the Mountain is a signifi cant novel for Christian literary studies because it is situated at the point where the literary and the religious imagination converge. The Mosaic religion has an aesthetic component: it is partly composed of the image, of feelings of the sublime, and of a compelling narrative structure. Hurston’s treatment enters fully into this aesthetic dimension of the Moses story. She expands the account of the Biblical Moses to include such elements as talking lizards (in the fi nal scene on Mount Nebo Moses meets a lizard who discourses of the ancient wisdom of nature) and the contributions of a feminist prophetess (in the person of Miriam). Often it seems that Moses is a votary of an immanentist nature and of the ‘mysteries of sea and sky and air’; his natural philosophy can appear the equivalent in the ancient world of Spinoza’s monistic idea of ‘substance’. Yet Moses also claims that he has given the Hebrews ‘a religion that had height and depth’, a transcendent religion of ‘the Voice’ that comes from the top of Mount Sinai. Some readers (such as Theodore Ziolkowski) fi nd only a theological and stylistic mélange in these shifts between the immanent and transcendent components of Moses’ religion. But there are other possible interpretations of Hurston’s quirky, polymorphous way of telling the Moses story. To assert the powerful force of natural life in the Jewish people or in the African Americans of the South – communities that were close to the harsh physicality of the world – went for Hurston hand in hand with the Mosaic elevation of this life by a transcendent norm, a norm that would not allow these peoples to be reduced to the status of aliens.

Joseph Kuhn

73 Notes on Contributors

Dr Richard Briggs has taught the Old Testament in Durham for over 15 years at Cranmer Hall in St John’s College. He is also an Anglican minister in a small parish just outside Durham city. His recent publications have included Theological Hermeneutics and the Book of Numbers as Christian Scripture (University of Notre Dame Press, 2018) and Jesus for Life: Spiritual Readings in John’s Gospel (Cascade Books, 2019). He is presently writing a theology of the book of Psalms for Cambridge University Press.

Jewel Spears Brooker, Professor Emerita at Eckerd College in Florida, has recently held visiting appointments at Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Oxford (Merton College). She has writt en or edited ten books, the latest of which is T. S. Eliot’s Dialectical Imagination (2018) and is the co-editor of volumes I and VIII of Eliot’s Complete Prose (2014, 2019). Professor Brooker has served as president of South Atlantic Modern Language Association and the T. S. Eliot Society in the USA and served for six years on the National Humanities Council.

Samuel Cardwell is a PhD student in Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto. He is currently working on a dissertation on the history of the idea of evangelisation in early medieval Europe. He has previously published in journals including The Journal of Medieval History and Early Middle English.

Awarded the OBE 2017 for services to scholarship and the understanding of the humanities, Valentine Cunningham is Emeritus Professor of English Language and Literature and Emeritus Fellow and Lecturer in English at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He works widely across literary, historical, and cultural periods and genres, in addition to his studies in literary theory his books cover such diverse topics as Victorian poetry, the Spanish Civil War, and King Lear.

Marie K. Daouda is a Doctor of French and Comparative Literature and a Stipendiary Lecturer in French at Oriel College, University of Oxford. Her research focuses on the reception of Antiquity in modern times, on the artistic representations of good and evil, and on 19th-20th century religious and political crises in France and in the United Kingdom.

David Jasper is Emeritus Professor at the University of Glasgow where he was Professor of Literature and Theology. He was also Changjiang Chair Professor at Renmin University of China, Beijing. He is Canon Theologian of St. Mary’s Cathedral, Glasgow. His most recent book is Heaven in Ordinary: Poetry and Religion in a Secular Age (2018).

Joseph Kuhn is Associate Professor of American Literature at Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan, Poland. His research interests are mainly in twentieth-century American southern literature and he has published in journals such as the Journal of American Studies.

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Irene Montori recently completed her doctoral studies at Sapienza, University of Rome. Her research unites the twin discourses of aesthetic and ethical value in the seventeenth century formation of the literary sublime, with particular emphasis on Milton’s dramatic works.

Dr Roger Pooley was one of the fi rst members of the CLSG. He retired from his teaching post at Keele University but remains an honorary Research Fellow there.

Alicia Smith is working towards a DPhil at the Queen’s College, Oxford, focusing on the prayer practices of anchorites and how they refl ect on historiographical praxis and time.

Yuxiao Su is Professor of English Literature at the College of Foreign Languages and Cultures, Xiamen University, China, where she is Executive Director of the Center for Comparative Literature and Transcultural Studies. She has published a monograph and several articles (Chinese and English) on C.S. Lewis’s literary criticism and medieval studies. She has been a contributor to English Language journals such as The Journal of Inklings Studies, Bunyan Studies and Religions.

Dr Andrew Tate is Reader in Literature, Religion and Aesthetics in the Department of English & Creative Writing at Lancaster University. His books include Contemporary Fiction and Christianity (2008), The New Atheist Novel (co-authored with Arthur Bradley) (2010) and Apocalyptic Fiction (2017). He is also the co-editor, with Jo Carruthers and Mark Knight, of Literature and the Bible: a Reader (2013) and, with Roger Kojecký, Visions and Revisions: The Word and the Text (2013).

Margaret Wiedemann Hunt taught in schools and adult education and has a PhD on the religious plays of Dorothy L. Sayers. She is the honorary archivist of Radius, formerly The Religious Drama Society, and is working on a history of the Society.

75 THE GLASS News and Notes

Autumn conference You are invited to discuss the papers at the CLSG autumn conference virtually at Oxford on Saturday, 7 November 2020, on the theme ‘Heaven and Nature’. Details are published on the CLSG website www.clsg.org and updated in the weeks leading up to the day. Those on the CLSG e-list will have received details. The conference is open to all, but current members will have priority. There is a caveat: if you wish to receive the six discussion papers and participate in the Zoom discussion the procedure is to apply by email on one of two days, 19-20 October. The meeting is limited to 40, and if you are selected and have paid the conference fee you are duly registered.

Be a member We would like your support since we have no source of funds other than members’ fees, subscriptions and donations. Forms to begin or renew membership (£16 p.a. for UK, overseas £19,) are available on clsg.org. A ‘Subscriptions’ section on our website gives information on ways to subscribe. Members receive a printed copy of The Glass and other entitlements described on the same webpage. The present special issue comes at no extra cost. An annual subscription started this autumn lasts to the end of 2021.

Keep in touch Send in news of events and of your publications, appointments and other items likely to interest list members. Even if you are not a CLSG member you are invited to join the email list and receive occasional information about developments relating to Christianity and literature. There is no charge for membership of the e-list. Email [email protected] to be added.

Contribute to The Glass Members don’t need to wait to be asked. For example, send an idea or proposal for an article any time up to 30 April, then write it during the summer months. Send ideas and contributions to the Editor, Dr Roger Kojecký, [email protected]. Articles may be up to 5,000 words, and reviews 1,200 words, but check with the Editor before writing your peice. All contributors should consult the Style Guidance notes in the Journal section of the website clsg.org and should append a short biographical note to their submitt ed text. Submit copy as an email att achment, but a short item can be sent in the body of an email, preferably with HTML formatt ing preserving italics etc. Back numbers of The Glass can be found in some of the UK Copyright Deposit libraries, and the British Library has a near complete fi le, from 1986, at the principal St Pancras site. As of 2018 we have an ISSN for a digital version. Issues since No. 10 (1997) are in the form of Open Access PDFs in the Journal Archive section of the CLSG website. Similarly, past conference topics and leafl ets with details of the speakers and brief bibliographies can be found in the Conference section of the website. While most of the PDFs are read-only, constituent articles are available to current members on request.

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