From Narcissism to Nihilism

Self-Love and Self-Negation in Early Modern Literature

Anthony Archdeacon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780367858568
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000531589
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book explores how the myth of Narcissus, which is at once about self-love and self-destruction, desire and death, beauty and pain, became an ambivalent symbol of humanistic endeavour, and articulated the conflicts of early modern authorship.

In early modern literature, there were expressions of humanistic self-congratulation that sometimes verged on narcissism, and at the same time expressions of self-doubt and anxiety that verged on nihilism. The themes of self-love and self-negation had a long history in western thought, and this book shows how the medieval treatments of the themes developed into something distinctive in the sixteenth century. The two themes, either individually or combined, encompass such topics as poverty, unrequited love, transgressive sexuality, sexual violence, suicidality, self-worth, authorship, religious penitence, martyrdom, courtly ambition and tyranny.

Archdeacon uses over 100 texts from the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries to show how the early modern writer existed in a culture of contrary forces pulling towards either self-affirmation or self-erasure. Writers attempted to negotiate between the polarised extremes of self-love and self-negation, realising that they are fundamental to how we respond to each other, our selves and the world.

1 Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003259664-1

In defining my key terms, I should begin by making clear that I used nihilism and narcissism in the book’s title loosely, as shorthand for the early modern ideas about self-love and self-negation that in the course of this introduction I will try to elucidate. Neither word existed in English in the period covered by the book, and whilst some elements of post-Freudian understanding of narcissism might be found in the early modern period, the nineteenth-century concept of nihilism could have no real correlative in sixteenth-century European thought, when Christianity still gave meaning to life and the world.¹ The Latin word nihilismus did appear in the seventeenth century, but it did not come into common use until German thinkers adopted it in the nineteenth century. I use it here as an umbrella term covering a wide range of ideas including melancholy, suicidality, martyrdom, the personal self-negation associated with Christian devotional practices, and philosophical claims about the nothingness of the material world. Typically, these are expressed as nihilistic attitudes, such as statements that one’s self, or one’s life, is nothing, or that one desires death or non-existence. With regard to using the modern term narcissism as a proxy for the early-modern usage self-love, this is to some extent justified by the common conflation of Narcissus and self-love, or the Latin philautia, by the beginning of the seventeenth century. The commonly used phrase “Narcissus-like” showed that it was gaining currency as a descriptor of certain types of person. Rather than invent the word “Narcissus-like-ness,” I have used narcissism at times as shorthand for the personality disorder which had been identified by a number of writers, as described further in this chapter. My main task in this introduction is to give historical background and context by explaining the medieval ideas about self-love and self-negation inherited by writers of the sixteenth century.

Medieval Views On Philautia and Narcissus

Philautia emerges as a concept in early medieval Christian theology. I will first explain some of the complexities of that theological background, before looking at the equally complicated representations of the Narcissus myth in the Middle Ages, then show how representations of philautia and Narcissus began to overlap in the course of the sixteenth century.

The most obvious religious significance of self-love is in relation to the sin of pride, or superbia, which is the greatest of the seven deadly sins. However, not all Christian attitudes to self-love have been entirely negative. The two medieval Christian figures most influential in the early modern period were fourth-century Augustine of Hippo and thirteenth-century Thomas Aquinas, both of whom had much to say on the topic. Because there is no systematic approach in Augustine’s philosophy, it has been the task of commentators ever since to create coherence where it is not easily found, and this is certainly the case with the notion of self-love, as the title of Oliver O’Donovan’s book, The Problem of Self-love in St Augustine, makes evident.² O’Donovan there explains that Augustine had inherited two strands of thinking about philautia: Greek Christian writers tended to denigrate philautia, but Aristotle had treated self-esteem, or valuing yourself, as a universal trait of people which was morally neutral. Augustine tied a positive view of self-love to loving God first, arguing that one needed to love God in order properly to love others and yourself.³ A key Augustinian text on the matter was On the Morals of the Catholic Church, where there is a chapter on “Dilectio sui et proximi” (love of oneself and neighbours). Augustine quotes “love your neighbour as yourself,” from Matthew’s Gospel (Matthew 22:39), then says that “te autem ipsum salubriter diligis, si plus quam te diligis Deum” (you love yourself healthily when you love God better than yourself).⁴ Self-love is only problematic, then, when your love of yourself is greater than your love of God. Possibly better known in the early modern period, however, would have been the formulation from On the City of God, in the final chapter of Book 14, where he uses the term amor sui rather than te diligis and where the ambivalence of Augustine’s attitude is pronounced:

We see then that the two cities were created by two kinds of love: the earthly city was created by self-love reaching the point of contempt for God, the heavenly city by love of God carried as far as contempt of self.⁵

In this way of looking at the issue, it appears that self-hatred becomes almost a positive when it is a function of loving God.

Thomas Aquinas too was much read and often cited by early modern writers. In particular, his Summa Theologica was, according to Jakob Schmutz, second in importance only to the Bible as a theological work in the period, especially, but not exclusively, to Catholics.⁶ Aquinas had been influenced in particular by the Nicomachean Ethics where Aristotle, discussing friendship, had claimed that good feelings towards friends derive from good feelings towards yourself. ⁷ Aquinas referred to this several times in his works, including the Summa Theologica. There has been some disagreement about exactly what Aquinas thought about self-love because his approach was to debate points making ever finer distinctions rather than simply to state doctrine. One of the instances where he addresses self-love is in considering whether “amor sui” is the source of all sins.⁸ Quoting the same chapter of On the City of God mentioned above, Aquinas decides against this, that inordinate love of oneself (as per Augustine) is the real cause of sin, whilst “well-ordered self-love is right and natural, whereby man desires a fitting good for himself.”⁹ It has also been argued that for Aquinas self-love was the basis of love for others, and even God.¹⁰

The theological cross-currents on the theme of self-love described above would influence medieval interpretations of the Narcissus myth, and yet these were not always focussed on the issue of self-love. Louise Vigne, in her conspectus of occurrences of the myth from antiquity to the nineteenth century, described in detail the earliest re-tellings of the story in French literature from the twelfth century.¹¹ One example she cited is a narrative poem of over 1000 lines whose version of the myth takes significant departures from the original, with a great deal of focus on the suffering of Dané, the Echo figure, and her experience of rejection.¹² Because she is the King’s daughter and he is of lower class, she is particularly dismayed that she should be rejected. Narcissus, meanwhile, seeing his reflection in a well rather than a pool, thinks he sees a nymph there, so that the idea of his adolescent, sexually ambiguous beauty, only hinted at in Ovid’s remark that Narcissus was attractive to boys and girls, is made more explicit. Gerald Seaman, who re-examined Frederick Goldin’s claims that the medieval Narcissus represented certain aspects or challenges of the courtly lover, noted that the preliminary explanation of the moral of the French tale makes it clear that Narcissus is emblematic of either males or females who inexcusably decline the suits offered by sincere lovers.¹³

It is in the fourteenth-century Ovide moralisé that the next significant developments of the myth are seen. These involved commentaries on the meaning of the tales along with translations into French which, as Vigne notes, modified or added to the original tale. Here the meaning is not only about vanity and conceit but also about the transience of physical beauty: Narcissus stares into the well until his beauty fades and then he dies; the story is about believing false reflections and coveting worldly pleasures. A clearly Christian moral interpretation ends with a warning against being led to hell by the false shadows of earthly delights. A Latin commentary from Pierre Bersuire takes a similar line on the issue of personal vanity but adds a dimension which, as Vigne notes, almost suggests a psychological type, of one who looks down on others and holds others in contempt because of his pride.¹⁴

The idea of Echo as a flatterer also appears in the fourteenth-century commentaries as a way to unify the allegorical meanings of the two figures. Vigne finds various other re-tellings with slightly different emphases, including two French ballads, one where Narcissus is happy in having the object of his love so close at hand, and another that dwells on the idea of the “false mirror.”¹⁵ In a French romance also from the fourteenth century, the main focus of the story is Echo’s revenge for being rejected, and Vigne finds a tendency to focus on Echo’s perspective common in the fifteenth century.¹⁶ Late in that century, however, Marsilio Ficino brought the focus back to the fate of Narcissus himself, and onto themes of self-knowledge and of material and spiritual beauty. As Vigne describes, Ficino was actually reviving neo-platonist readings of the myth wherein Narcissus fell in love not with himself so much as with his reflection. In these accounts, notably by Plotinus, the reflection represented (perhaps counterintuitively) the unreality of the material world in contrast to spiritual reality. Two possible neo-platonic readings are outlined by Vigne, one being that the myth is “an image of the first descent of the soul into the body” and the other that “the world is a reflected image which through its beauty may lure man away from what is reflected.”¹⁷

In summary, the Narcissus myth was commonly, but not always, identified with the theme of self-love, and self-love was usually, but not always, presented in negative terms; therefore, the available ideas of narcissism and self-love by the sixteenth century were overlapping but not identical. I will now similarly trace the self-negation theme up the beginning of the sixteenth century.

The Christian Tradition of Self-negation

As with philautia, the theme of self-negation in Western thought can be traced back to Augustine, for example, in City of God Book 5 Chapter 14. After arguing against the “greed for glory” and the love of praise, he asserts that you are not anything except insofar as you glorify God: “by yourselves you are nothing.”¹⁸ Man is nothing in comparison to God, and it is to commit the sin of superbia to think otherwise. He develops this idea later in Book 14 during his discussion of sin and postlapsarian man, whose fall involved a partial loss of being: “to abandon god and exist in oneself, that is to please oneself, is not immediately to lose all being, but it is to come nearer to nothingness.”¹⁹ Augustine then explicitly links this near-nothingness to human pride, which is about pleasing yourself instead of pleasing God:

That is why the proud are given another name in Holy Scripture; they are called ‘self-pleasers’. Now it is good to ‘lift up your heart’ and to exalt your thoughts, yet not in the self-worship of pride, but in the worship of God … thus, in a surprising way, there is something in humility to exalt the mind, and something in exaltation to abase it.²⁰

The paradox of humility described here is at the core of the tensions between self-love and self-negation inherited by early modern Christian thinkers.

The language of self-negation became commonplace from the fifteenth century onwards mainly via the medium of devotional and mystical literature. If the Summa Theologiae was second only to the Bible amongst theological works, the imitatio Christi by Thomas à Kempis had the same status amongst devotional works. Its print history in different languages in the early modern period was extraordinary, with at least 639 e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Note on Texts Cited
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Poetics of Personal Nothingness
• 3 The Narcissus Myth and English Petrarchism
• 4 Negation and Self-negation in Amatory Verse
• 5 The Glorious Nothingness of Authorship
• 6 Social and Political Contexts
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index