Light and Death

Figuration in Spenser, Kepler, Donne, Milton

Judith H. Anderson

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780823272778
• eBook ISBN: 9780823272792
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Medieval & Early Modern Literary Criticism

Light figures being; darkness, death. Bridging mathematical science, semantics, rhetoric, grammar, and major poems, Judith H. Anderson seeks to negotiate writings from multiple disciplines in the shared terms of poiesis and figuration rather than as cultural opposites. Analogy, a type of metaphor, has always been the connector of the known to the unknown, the sensible to the infinite. Anderson's study moves from the figuration of light and death to the history of analogy and its pertinence to light in physics and metaphysics, from Kepler to Donne, Spenser, and Milton. Topics proliferate: creativity, optics, the relation of literature to science, the methodology of thought and argument, and the processes of narrative, discovery, and interpretation.

CHAPTER 1

“The Body of This Death”

Donne’s Sermons, Spenser’s Maleger, Milton’s Sin and Death

In Romans 7:24, Saint Paul, lamenting the conflict between his enlightened mind and his sinful flesh, utters a cry that has echoed down the centuries: “O wretched man that I am! Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” Almost predictably, Paul’s moving outcry attracted the sustained attention of the poets of early modern England, conspicuous among them Spenser, Donne, and Milton—predictably, not only because of Paul’s anguish but also because of its unusual phrasing and figuration. Popular English translations of the Bible, such as Geneva and King James, in accord with the Latin Vulgate and the Greek, carefully specify “this death,” which might suggest that the death at issue is spiritual and that it results from sin, not simply from the physical constitution of humankind.¹ This vital distinction becomes less distinct, however, the moment we consider that physical death itself is implicit in the Adamic sin that human beings inherit and is thus embedded in their fallen nature. Moreover, the sin to which Paul, in the voice of Everyman, refers is specifically that of his fleshly members, and it further indicates the inextricability of spirit and flesh. Not surprisingly, the sins of the flesh that Paul describes also infect, or perhaps simply override, his rational will: “For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do” (7:19, 23).

The biblical origins of the translated terms flesh and body enforce these complications, as does the underlying fact that Paul was fluent both in Hebrew and Greek. The Old Testament Hebrew word bāśār, or “flesh,” refers to the muscular portion of the body and therefore bears a relatively restricted, physical sense. Yet by extension this Hebrew term can (and did) also designate a living person since Semitic thought does not firmly distinguish between the physical and psychic aspects of existence.² In the Old Testament, the term flesh, whether understood in a physical sense or more holistically, is decidedly oriented to an earthly existence. Like Hebrew bāśār, or “flesh,” the Greek word sárx signifies “flesh,” the soft tissue of the body, but, according to Liddell and Scott, in the New Testament sárx also comes to mean “the flesh, as opposed to spirit,” and it, too, can signify human nature generally.³ Paul’s sárx, or “flesh,” in Romans thus suggests a basis for devaluing earthly existence even while paradoxically insisting on its irreducible reality, as in Hebrew: little wonder that Paul cries out for relief since it is his flesh, also identified as his very nature, that ensures the deadly vitality of sin.

In one of Lancelot Andrewes’s sermons on “The Lord’s Prayer,” a sermon first published in the early Jacobean period, this is clearly his understanding of Paul’s outcry. The learned Bishop Andrewes, himself a Bible translator, glosses the entreaty “Deliver us from evil” as a desire not simply to be freed “from those sins unto which our lust hath already drawn us away into sin” but more fully to be freed “from that infirmity of the flesh and necessity of sinning which doth accompany our nature, in regard whereof the Apostle saith, Quis me liberabit de hoc corpore mortis? ‘Who shall deliver me from this body of death?’ ”⁴ Notably, Andrewes has transferred the demonstrative adjective this from “death” to “body,” a shift that results in phrasing less striking than Paul’s. While further emphasizing the word “body,” his shift also lessens the emotional immediacy of the phrasing “this death” and, to my ear, removes its whisper of mystery.

Here I want to introduce a further linguistic refinement. In New Testament usage the Greek word for flesh, sárx, is not the same as for body, Greek sōma. In Paul’s culminating outcry, the word body distinctively carries a more holistic, less elemental force than would flesh. “The [Pauline] body [tou sōmatos] of this death [tou thanatou toutou],” which arises in and from the flesh, attributes to such death as this a substantive wholeness that threatens to become all-encompassing. Paul’s phrase references not merely the body, but a body possessed by this death. This is death itself as and with body. In Paul’s phrase, death, a nonentity and the absence of being, might thus be said virtually or, indeed, poetically to assume substance as the figure of Death. The Greek text of Romans actually encourages this figurative reading. The successive genitives in the Greek tou sōmatos tou thanatou enable three readings of these words: a genitive of ownership affords the meaning “death’s body”; a genitive of description results in “deathly body”; and a genitive of hypostasis suggests that death has itself a body—“the body of Death” and, more exactly, “the body of this Death: tou sōmatos tou thanatou toutou.”⁵ Evident here, in the suggestion that a personified Death has bodily substance, is the “creative poetic . . . force” (dichterisch gestaltenden . . . Kräften) that Erich Auerbach has more generally attributed to the figurative impulse in Paul’s Epistles. In them, the lineaments of what Elaine Scarry more recently describes as a “fictionalized world” and carefully excludes from her account of the Old Testament are already beginning visibly to form.⁶ Scarry’s fictionalized world might further be described as metasomatic or, perhaps more precisely, as meta–merely somatic since it is at once fictive and real. As Auerbach insists, Paul’s (re)configuration of history is, while purposive and creative, also actual, experiential, and, indeed, in Auerbach’s own terms, concretely historical.⁷

Invoking Auerbach, I should clarify my use of the term figure and its cognates in this chapter. The meaning I intend is broadly figural. It includes Auerbach’s conception of figurae, but it is not limited to this necessarily historicized biblical form. My conception is more openly fictive and imaginative than Auerbach’s figurae. It certainly includes figures of speech, which, in Paul Ricoeur’s words, have a “quasi-optic” or “quasi-bodily externalization”—as what we commonly call “images,” for instance—and it extends to personae in narrative and in drama that is distinctively leavened with symbolism, whether as Spenserian epic or as Shakespearean tragedy.⁸ Jean-François Lyotard’s argument that dream-work inheres in substantive figuration is especially provocative in relation to the poetics of Paul’s Epistles. Lyotard considers “an imaged text . . . [to be] a discourse which is very close to the figure.” Its proximity resides in “the figurative power of a word . . . [, in] the rhythmic power of syntax, and at an even deeper level, [in] the matrix of narrative rhythm, what Propp called form. . . .” The figure, as form, “jam[s]” the communicative constraints inscribed in “any language . . . [b]y virtue of the fact that it sets up a closed circuit intercom system of the work with itself.” Lyotard concludes that “language, at least in its poetic usage, is possessed, haunted by the figure.”⁹ For my purpose, the figure in question is the body of this Death, in which the interlinked figuration of dream-work, image, and form proves hauntingly memorable.

The overload of implication in Paul’s outcry “Who shall deliver me from the body of this death?” predictably has had historical consequences, and the specifically figurative aspects of these are my subject. Fictive—in Sidney’s sense, “poetic”—texts speak a language inseparably and significantly bonded to figure and form. Such figures and forms are not only cognitive but also imaginative, affective, mnemonic, and variously sensuous—temporal and rhythmic, spatial and imagistic—as variously recognized by Lyotard and Ricoeur. They are themselves distinctive ways of perceiving significance, and they cannot be replaced with more abstractive interpretations without alteration and loss. A poetic landscape, plot, dialogue, pun, image, or figure can simultaneously or sequentially keep alternative and even opposite possibilities in play without deciding between them whereas a purely logical argument cannot or, at least, cannot without invoking a different register of meaning, such as faith. The issue of poetic meaning—of poiēsis, “making”—will recur as I treat the figurative and historical legacies of Paul’s outcry.

Like Andrewes, John Donne, whose sermons are often in the broad, Sidneian sense poetic, more than once replaces the Bible translators’ “body of this death” with “this body of death,” but Donne also goes beyond Andrewes to extend the implications of replacement and, in effect, to depict the physical body itself as death. The Pauline text is one of many that enforce the ancient correlation of moral with physical ills—conspicuous, for example, not only in Donne but also in the disease-ridden critiques of Shakespeare’s Thersites or in Spenser’s depiction of the Deadly Sins who counsel Lucifera, each of whom is marked by a fitting affliction: ulcers for Envy, venereal disease for Lechery, edematous dropsy for Gluttony, and so on. While Thersites’s foul mouth in Troilus and Cressida is a very touchstone for the entwining of moral and physical disease, his utterances prove not merely symptomatic but also infectious among the Greeks, as instanced when Ulysses describes Achilles as being “so plaguy proud that the death-tokens of it / Cry ‘No recovery.’ ”¹⁰ Nothing, however, quite matches the concentrated physical corruption in Thersites’s railings themselves, which punctuate the play and which, like Lucifera’s councilors, imply a sordid political, as well as a moral, condition. In one particularly expansive display of venom, Thersites invokes as witnesses to perversion “the rotten diseases of the south, guts-griping, ruptures, catarrhs, loads o’ gravel i’th’ back, lethargies, cold palsies, raw eyes, dirt-rotten livers, wheezing lungs, bladders full of imposthume, sciaticas, limekilns i’th’ palm, incurable bone-ache and the rivelled fee-simple of the tetter” (V.i.17–22). No “ounce of civet” to sweeten the imagination here.¹¹

Physical disease weighs heavily on the psyche as well: for example, in Ben Jonson’s poem “To Heaven,” Paul’s memorable outcry becomes a barely suppressed death wish growing out of both sickness and sin: “Yet dare I not complaine, or wish for death / With holy Paul,” Jonson laments, as his poem nears its conclusion.¹² The Pauline text also takes especially powerful form in the figures of Spenser’s Maleger and Milton’s Death, who fully realize its impulse to figuration. In the rest of this chapter, I intend to explore what various receptions of Paul’s text can tell us about sin, body, and death in the early modern period. Having discussed Jonson’s poem elsewhere, I shall subsequently content myself with Donne, Spenser, and Milton, in this unchronological order.¹³ Donne’s engagement with the Pauline text affords a suggestive gloss on the power it assumes in the poetry of Spenser and Milton, and for this reason I start with it.

Donne, himself sick and near death, returns to Paul’s text early in his last sermon, Deaths Duell, preached at White Hall in 1631. Donne employs the Pauline text to climax his argument that “The wombe whiche should be the house of life, becomes death it selfe, if God leave us there.” After remarking Old Testament texts on the extremity of misery in “a mis-carying wombe,” he concludes, “as soon as wee are . . . inanimated, quickned in the womb . . . our parents have reason to say in our behalf, wretched man that he is, who shall deliver him from this body of death? for even the wombe is a body of death, if there bee no deliverer.”¹⁴ While the womb without deliverer figures humankind without Savior, the connection between embodied life and the body of death—indeed the identification of human life with death from the very instant of its bodily inception—is as inescapable in Donne’s argument as in the subtitle of his sermon, namely, A Consolation to the Soule, against the dying Life, and living Death of the Body (10:229).¹⁵

In Deaths Duell, Donne is a dying man; in Izaak Walton’s memorable words, his own death is “his hourly object.”¹⁶ But in sermons that evoke Paul’s text early in Donne’s clerical career, a similar perception of the Pauline inextricability of sin, death, and the body is evident. This engulfing involvement is anatomical and physiological, structural and functional; in a word, it is quite literally visceral.

In a sermon on pureness of heart delivered at Paul’s Cross in 1617, Donne describes a heart that is habitually sinful, and he warns, “when sin hath got a heart in us, it will quickly come to be that whole Body of Death, which Saint Paul complains of, who shall deliver me from the Body of this Death?” (1:192). This time, Donne assigns the demonstrative adjective to “Death,” as Paul does, but he also subordinates Paul’s “Body of this Death” to his own prior phrase “that whole Body of Death,” thus again claiming a demonstrative adjective for “Body” and emphasizing the body itself as death and death as the body (1:192; my emphasis on that). Even minute changes in Donne’s sermons, as in his poems, prove significant.¹⁷ Simultaneously here, Donne also animates sin as both the getter and begetter, at once the possessor and the breeder, of a wicked heart: “when sin hath got a heart in us,” he says (my emphasis). Such getting is at once infectious and prolific, for

when it is a heart, it will get a Braine; . . . A Brain which shall send forth sinews and ligaments, to tye sins together; and pith and marrow to give a succulencie, and nourishment, even to the bones, to the strength and obduration of sin; . . . So also if sin get to be a heart, it will get a liver to carry blood and life through all the body of our sinful actions; . . . And whilst we dispute whether the throne and seat of the soul be in the Heart, or Brain, or Liver, this tyrant sin will praeoccupate all, and become all; so, as that we shall finde nothing in us without sin, not...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Issues of Death, Light, and Analogy
• 1. “The Body of This Death”: Donne’s Sermons, Spenser’s Maleger, Milton’s Sin and Death
• 2. Mutability and Mortality in The Faerie Queene
• 3. Satanic Ethos: Evil, Death, and Individuality in Paradise Lost
• 4. Connecting the Cultural Dots: Classical to Modern Traditions of Analogy
• 5. Proportional Thinking in Kepler’s Science of Light
• 6. Analogy, Proportion, and Death in Donne’s Anniversaries
• 7. Milton’s Twilight Zone: Analogy, Light, and Darkness in Paradise Lost
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index