Romanticism and Religion from William Cowper to Wallace Stevens

Gavin Hopps, Jane Stabler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780754655701
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317061380
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The relationship between literature and religion is one of the most groundbreaking and challenging areas of Romantic studies. Covering the entire field of Romanticism from its eighteenth-century origins in the writing of William Cowper and its proleptic stirrings in Paradise Lost to late-twentieth-century manifestations in the work of Wallace Stevens, the essays in this timely volume explore subjects such as Romantic attitudes towards creativity and its relation to suffering and religious apprehension; the allure of the 'veiled' and the figure of the monk in Gothic and Romantic writing; Miltonic light and inspiration in the work of Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats; the relationship between Southey's and Coleridge's anti-Catholicism and definitions of religious faith in the Romantic period; the stammering of Romantic attempts to figure the ineffable; the emergence of a feminised Christianity and a gendered sublime; the development of Calvinism and its role in contemporary religious controversies. Its primary focus is the canonical Romantic poets, with a particular emphasis on Byron, whose work is most in need of critical re-evaluation given its engagement with the Christian and Islamic worlds and its critique of totalising religious and secular readings. The collection is an original and much-needed intervention in Romantic studies, bringing together the contextual awareness of recent historicist scholarship with the newly awakened interest in matters of form and an appreciation of the challenges of postmodern theory.

1 Approaching the Unapproached Light Milton and the Romantic Visionary

Jonathon Shears

DOI: 10.4324/9781315606989-1

After creating the heaven and the earth, though whilst the latter was still ‘without form, and void’, God’s first creative act, according to Genesis, and the most sublime passage in the Bible, according to Longinus, is the performative utterance ‘Let there be light’ (Genesis, 1:3).¹ If, as Aquinas argues, God may be known analogically, as a cause may be known from its effects,² light would seem to hold a privileged place in any attempt to know and approach God, since, after the heaven and the formless earth, it is the first of these divine effects, and also because it permits the apprehension of most of the others.³ Yet, as the Bible also tells us, light may paradoxically impede our knowledge of God, even as it simultaneously permits it; as Paul writes, ‘the King of kings, and Lord of lords’ dwells ‘in the light which no man can approach unto’ (1 Timothy, 6:15–16). This paradoxical conception of light, as concealing the God that it also reveals, is central to Milton’s presentation of the Divine in Paradise Lost – which, alluding to both John and Paul, maintains that ‘God is light / And never but in unapproached light / Dwelt from Eternitie’ (III, 3–4)⁴ – and may, I wish to suggest in this chapter, help us to understand the Romantic visionary.

More precisely, I want to argue that, like Milton, the Romantics of Harold Bloom’s ‘Visionary Company’ wrestle with a God cast in light who resists approach – a light which may confusingly be within and without, offspring and origin, the dwelling place of but also coextensive with the Divine – and that Romantic poetry inherits a language of unapproachable light from the seventeenth century.⁵ To begin with, then, it will be helpful to look at some representative examples of metaphysical poetry – and Milton can be included as a metaphysical here – which employ light effects as part of a displaced Christian rhetoric when attempting to figure the ineffable.

Speaking of Milton’s heaven in Paradise Lost, J.B. Broadbent argues that ‘all objective discussions of God are absurd’ as ‘their contact with reality is restricted to moments at which the listener may share a glimpse of the poet’s God’.⁶ If we are to take Milton’s God as a revelation of the poet’s experience of that God, our aesthetic experience as readers is both a ‘glimpse’ of the Divine, but also more particularly of the poet’s relationship with, and struggle to provide an image for, the Divine: ‘Donne’s holy sonnets, Herbert’s descriptions of his struggles with God, Hopkins’s “terrible sonnets”, are not images of God but of the relationship between the poet and his God’.⁷ Milton’s Michael describes the problem which Adam and the reader face in trying to approach Milton’s God:

Much thou hast yet to see, but I perceive

Thy mortal sight to fail; objects divine

Must needs impair and weary human sense. (XII, 8–10)

Significantly, the idea that the ‘mortal sight’ of Adam fails corresponds with a loss, or conclusion, of vision. Adam and the reader are subsequently forbidden to approach Milton’s God directly. This is an inversion of the motif of ‘inner sight’, traditionally held to arise as symbolic compensation for Milton’s physical blindness, in which we view the poet as a modern-day Tiresias. Nicola Trott argues, ‘He had been compensated not just with poetry, but with insight into the otherwise “invisible” ways of God’,⁸ yet in Adam’s case ‘mortal sight’ will, quite simply, ‘fail’.

This is not the only instance in the text at which sight fails in the presence of Milton’s God and the ‘approach’ is foiled. In Book III, the Seraphim shield their eyes in the presence of God’s ‘Fountain of Light […] Amidst the glorious brightness’,

Dark with excessive bright thy skirts appear,

Yet dazzle heaven, that brightest seraphim

Approach not, but with both wings veil their eyes. (III, 380–82) [my italics]

Not even the ‘brightest’ seraphim may look upon Milton’s God directly, suggesting a hierarchy of luminance in which man, including the reader and poet, features at a lower level. Broadbent comments that Milton transfers ‘our attention to the angels, and through their dazzlement makes God not an abstract celestial light but a power active in his own creation’.⁹ I think creative process, and possibly the Trinity, is also indicated by ‘Fountain’; but whether or not the God in Paradise Lost is abstract and static or creative, he always seems inapproachable and transcendent to the poet, or in this case the Seraphim. What Broadbent does not acknowledge is that the Seraphim ‘Approach not’ and the unclouded God is both ‘inaccessible’ and invisible.

Milton’s Christian standpoint would appear to be characteristically Neoplatonic: ‘we’ are in darkness as opposed to God’s blinding light. Moreover, Milton is not alone in using inapproachable light to figure his God. In Canto II of Purgatory, Dante uses an equivalent vehicle, albeit to figure ‘the bird of God’:

Poi, come più e più verso noi venne

I’ uccel divino, più chiaro appariva;

per che l’occhio da presso nol sostenne […]. (ll. 37–9)¹⁰

While Dante employs similar images to Milton, he also makes an interesting comparison as his representation of the Divine is less mathematical or abstract than Milton’s. Northtrop Frye summarises the aesthetic problem of approaching Milton’s God: ‘It is an old quibble that God cannot move because to move is to alter and to alter would be to lessen his perfection’, and he provides the necessary qualification: ‘As long as this means abstract perfection, the argument is unanswerable: a negatively perfect God is not a Creator.’¹¹ For Dante, whose God represents love and is more overtly dynamic, this is not always the case. If God is love then he must also be movement and perpetual generation. As Broadbent argues, ‘The Paradiso is consummated by a vision of the Trinity which, though Platonically geometrical in outline, is infused with more than ideographical potency by Dante’s own passion’.¹² He stresses the importance of the poet at the moment of divine vision, which will become even more significant when considering the Romantics, in this case with respect to the energy of poetic description. But also important on a literal level is the fact that Dante’s culminating vision of ‘eternal light’ is not denied to the poet through a failure of sight as in the case of Milton’s Seraphim or Adam’s loss of vision,

O isplendor di Dio, per cu’io vidi

l’alto triunfo del regno verace,

dammi virtù a dir com’ io il vidi!

Lume è là su che visibile face

lo creatore (Paradiso, XXX, 97–101).¹³

Interestingly, it is actually not Dante’s God but his Satan who is motionless, cast as he is in ice in the final circle of the Inferno

Of course, Milton’s is by no means the only seventeenth-century position on this matter. Marvell, too, uses images of light. In ‘On a Drop of Dew’, the dewdrop, an image of the evanescent human soul, progresses back to its origin, the sky or God of light, figured in the final lines as ‘th’ almighty sun’ (l. 40). Marvell’s interest in the image lies in the ability of the soul to fall or be a means to grace and then approach heaven: ‘How loose and easy hence to go, / How girt and ready to ascend’ (ll. 33–4).¹⁴ Crashaw’s baroque stylings witness the soul of the poet actually sent out of his corporeal body to approach Christ or heaven: ‘Goe, Soul, out of thy Self, and seek for More’.¹⁵ In ‘A Hymn to Sainte Teresa’, Crashaw’s interlocking of sexual and religious ecstasy envisions the ‘burning faces’ of bright souls turned upwards to the roof of heaven from where ‘Beates’ the ‘soveraign ray’ of Christ (ll. 85; 84). Vaughan also emphasises man’s union with the Godhead. E.C. Pettet describes the landscape of Vaughan’s Silex Scintillans (1650) as one ‘where all the Creation […] are perpetually striving towards God’ [my italics].¹⁶ This is the case even when Vaughan depicts himself as falling short: ‘I cannot reach it; and my striving eye / Dazzles at it, as at eternity’ (‘Childhood’, ll. 1–2). Vaughan chooses light images that particularly allow for man’s approach to God, for example the poetic paradox of the ‘Bright shadows of true rest’ in ‘Son-days’ (l. 1), or the sun shining at midnight in ‘The Night’. For Vaughan, the ‘deep, but dazzling darkness’ (l. 50)¹⁷ is a part of God’s light, and is not opposed to it.

D.C. Allen describes the Christian idea of ‘the dark God in the divine night’, which Vaughan appears to employ, as distinct from the Christ-figure who enters darkness (that is, becomes flesh in the Incarnation) to regain the light of God:

The Christians […] saw Jehovah as a bright God, the Father of Lights, and in his human manifestations, the Lux Mundi; but they also knew him as a god in darkness, assuming his cloak of clouds.¹⁸

Allen suggests that Milton also uses this tradition, in denying the approach of the Seraphim, but prior to this in the speech of Mammon in Book Two, ‘How oft amidst / thick clouds and dark doth Heav’ns all-ruling Sire / Choose to reside, his Glory unobscur’d, / And with the Majesty of darkness round’ (ll. 263–6). This ‘cloak of clouds’ ought to make God approachable, and at first this seems to be the case: ‘Glory’ is ‘unobscured’. Yet the speech comes from a fallen angel all too aware of his inability ever to approach God again.¹⁹ In Paradise Lost, clouds may shield divine light, but appear to make it no more approachable. Mammon highlights only the distance between Heaven and Hell; in his delusion ‘As he our Darkness, cannot we his Light / Imitate when we please?’ (Paradise Lost, II, 269–70).

The problem of the inapproachability of God seems, then, to be particularly potent for Milton among seventeenth-century poets. Of course, Milton is able to circumvent the theological issue of God’s resistant light for his own narrative purposes, and C.A. Patrides has argued that Milton often ‘differentiated between the father and the son’, specifically for ‘dramatic purposes’.²⁰ Milton’s transcendent God is actually easily approached at times, especially whilst conversing with Christ.²¹ The inapproachable transcendent God, to which I refer, is invoked at the famous opening to Book III:

Hail, holy Light, offspring of heaven first-born

Or of the eternal coeternal beam

May I express thee unblamed? Since God is light,

And never but in unapproachèd light

Dwelt from eternity – dwelt then in thee

Bright effluence of bright essence increate. (ll. 1–5)

Here Milton’s relationship with God is openly addressed, but is suggestive of those several construals I observed in my introduction, involving the possible joining or separation of God and light. ‘Offspring’ and ‘first-born’ suggest a father–son relationship, with possibly a nod towards the Trinity. Patrides makes the point that the Trinity is included in De Doctina Christiana, ‘The father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are proclaimed to be “one” in love, communion, spirit, and glory […] and each is specifically said to share in the divine substance’,²² which is one reading here. However, ‘coeternal’ is suggestive of a joint origin of God and light, and Patrides comments that, as far as the relationship between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is presented in De Doctrina Christiana, Milton ‘rejects’ their ‘equality in terms of the divine essence’.²³ ‘Effluence’ and ‘increate’ could also be read as contradictory, since effluence suggests an emanation of continuing creativity, while ‘increate’ points to an uncreated metaphysic. As far as the relationship between the poet and this light is concerned, the suggestion that God, or rather God as light, ‘dwells’, implies a location removed from the poet and a sense of separation. ‘May I express thee unblamed?’ may be written with an ironic awareness of the poet’s heterodox belief that light is co-eternal with the Christian God, and therefore un created by God, but it also acknowledges Milton’s very real difficulty in approaching the divine.

As Milton wrestles with the poet’s relationship with a God cast in light who resists approac...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction Grace Under Pressure
• 1 Approaching the Unapproached Light Milton and the Romantic Visionary
• 2 Cowper Prospects Self, Nature, Society
• 3 ‘Je sais bien, mais quand même …' Wordsworth's Faithful Scepticism
• 4 Catholic Contagion Southey, Coleridge and English Romantic Anxieties
• 5 ‘Sacrifice and Offering Thou Didst Not Desire' Byron and Atonement1
• 6 ‘I was Bred a Moderate Presbyterian' Byron, Thomas Chalmers and the Scottish Religious Heritage
• 7 Byron's Confessional Pilgrimage
• 8 Words and the Word The Diction of Don Juan
• 9 ‘Why Should I Speak?' Scepticism and the Voice of Poetry in Byron's Cain
• 10 Byron's Monk-y Business Ghostly Closure and Comic Continuity
• 11 ‘A Fine Excess' Hopkins, Keats and the Gratuity of Grace
• 12 ‘Until Death Tramples It to Fragments' Percy Bysshe Shelley after Postmodern Theology
• 13 Sacred Art and Profane Poets
• 14 ‘The Death of Satan' Stevens's ‘Esthétique du Mal’, Evil and the Romantic Imagination
• Bibliography
• Index