M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism
M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, W. W. Norton & Co., New York, 1971
M. H. Abrams’s 1971 book Natural Supernaturalism takes its title from the tendency in English and German literature and philosophy of the Romantic period to naturalize Christian modes of thinking. This book centers on Wordsworth because “(as his English contemporaries acknowledged, with whatever qualifications) [he] was the great and exemplary poet of the age” (14). Abrams considers Wordsworth the prime example, and Shelley, Blake, Coleridge, Novalis, Holderlin, Goethe, Schiller, Hegel and Fichte supporting examples, of a kind of thinking, stemming from a Christian tradition, that results in a distinctive relationship to revolution, and in an apparent deletion of God from the classic triangle of God, Mind, and Nature.
Abrams offers a Christian approach to history underlying the Romantic approach to history. Distinctive features of Biblical history are that: 1) it is finite, where events occur only once and in a single temporal span; 2) it has a plot, with a beginning, middle, and end, 3) the plot of Biblical history has a hidden author, 4) change in Biblical history is characterized by abrupt events and turns, and 5) Biblical history is symmetrical, beginning with a paradise and ending with a paradise. The gradual secularization of Western culture has not been the product of the loss of a Christian understanding of history, but of the translation of that understanding in ways which are not obviously Christian. Wordsworth’s narrator in the Prelude and The Recluse, for example, follows a path of growth paralleling the Biblical history of mankind. Before the fall, the narrator is in a state of youthful innocence, united with the natural world. The narrator experiences tremendous growing pains as he is cast out of blissful innocence and develops self-consciousness and a capacity to think analytically. No longer united to nature, the narrator feels isolated and pained. The pains are fortunate and justified, ultimately, because the maturity behind self-consciousness can provide the narrator a means to win back his integrity, reunite with nature, and experience a paradise exceeding the original paradise.
Two features of Biblical history that resonate for Wordsworth, as they have resonated for his poetic and religious predecessors, are the apocalypse and the prodigal return. If the French Revolution and its subsequent failure did not bring about an earthly apocalypse, it brought about a spiritual apocalypse for Wordsworth’s narrator in The Prelude, wherein his very identity is changed from man of action to prophetic poet. The supposition that the world would change as a result of the revolution evolved into the conviction that Wordsworth would change himself. The theme of the Prodigal Son underpinned Wordsworth’s eventual return, a changed man in a changed world, to his home at Grasmere.
In spite of the Romantic deletion of God from the triangle of God, mind and nature, the Romantic relation to Christianity can still be characterized by more commonalities than differences.
“It is a historical commonplace that the course of Western thought since the Renaissance has been one of progressive secularization, but it is easy to mistake the way in which that process took place…The process—outside the exact sciences at any rate—has not been the deletion and replacement of religious ideas, but rather the assimilation and reinterpretation of religious ideas… Much of what distinguishes writers I call ‘Romantic’ derives from the fact that they undertook, whatever their religious creed or lack of creed, to save traditional concepts, schemes, and values which had been based on the relation of the Creator to his creature and creation, but to reformulate them within the prevailing two-term system of subject and object, ego and non-ego, the human mind or consciousness and its transaction with nature. Despite their displacement from a supernatural to a natural frame of reference, however, the ancient problems, terminology, and ways of thinking about human nature and history survived… (13)
“The Prospectus is an instance of the visionary style in which, according to a view until recently current, Wordsworth is held to indulge his penchant for resounding sublimities is hiding logical evasions behind vague phrasing and lax syntax. But let us assume that in a crucial passage so long meditated, so often written, and so emphatically stated, Wordsworth knew what he was saying… (20)
“A. C. Bradley long ago laid down an essential rule for understanding Wordsworth: ‘The road into Wordsworth’s mind must be through his strangeness and his paradoxes, and not round them’ (“Wordsworth”, Oxford Lectures on Poetry, London, reprinted 1950, p. 101)
Not only was Wordsworth the great and exemplary poet of his age, his ambition, at least for The Recluse, was “perhaps the most remarkable, and certainly one of the most grandiose, ever undertaken by a major writer” (19). Wordsworth’s equivalent of hell, a hell within the self, was deeper and darker than the Christian hell, and his conception of heaven was of one capable of producing a more profound joy and satisfaction than the Christian heaven. In justifying human suffering (according to an idea of personal growth), Wordsworth outdoes Milton’s justification of the ways of God to men, because the scope of Wordsworth’s cosmos exceeds that of Milton’s. On Wordsworth’s relation to the canon, he “remarked to Henry Crabb Robinson that ‘when he resolved to be a poet, [he] feared competition only with Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton.’ Of these poets, however, Chaucer and Shakespeare exemplify what Wordsworth called ‘the human and dramatic Imagination’; while it is Spenser, and above all Milton, who exemplify the ‘enthusiastic and meditative Imagination’ against which Wordsworth persistently measured his own enterprise” (22).
“William Blake, who respected Wordsworth enough to read him closely and take his claims seriously, told Henry Crabb Robinson, in whimsical exasperation, that this passage […when we look/Into our Minds, into the Mind of Man—/My haunt, and the main region of my song.] ‘caused him a bowel complain which nearly killed him.’ ‘Does Mr. Wordsworth think his mind can surpass Jehovah?’ To which the answer is, ‘No, he did not,’ any more than he thought himself a greater poet than Milton. What Wordsworth claims is that the mind of man is a terra incognita which surpasses in its terrors and sublimities, hence in the challenge it poses to its poetic explorer, the traditional subject matter of Milton’s Christian epic. Blake took offense at Wordsworth’s literary enterprise because it paralleled his own, but deviated on its crucial issue of naturalism. For in his Milton (1804-1810) Blake too had undertaken, as the epigraph said, ‘To Justify the Ways of God to Men’ by his own imaginative revision of the doctrines of Paradise Lost. (25)
“the more we attend to the claims of some of Wordsworth’s major contemporaries, in Germany as well as in England, the less idiosyncratic do Wordsworth’s pronouncements seem… radically to recast, in terms appropriate to the historical and intellectual circumstances of their own age, the Christian pattern of the fall, the redemption, and the emergence of a new earth which will constitute a restored paradise. … In his Dejection: An Ode Coleridge wrote that the inner condition of total vitality he called ‘Joy’, … wedding Nature to us, gives in dower/A new Earth and Heaven… Blake prefaced the concluding chapter of Jerusalem with the voice of the Bard arousing Albion from his ‘sleep of death’, so that he may unite with his separate female emanation… The poem closes with the dawn of the ‘Eternal Day’ of a universal resurrection in a restored paradise, … At the conclusion of Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound the regeneration of man in a renovated world has for its central symbol the union of Prometheus and Asia,… In a climactic passage of Holderlin’s Hyperion the young poet-hero, inspired, cries out to ‘holy Nature’... A rejuvenated people will make thee young again, too, and thou wilt be as its bride…Ther will be only one beauty, and man and Nature will unite in one all-embracing divinity. … In one of his Fragments Novalis also stated flatly that all ‘the higher philosophy is concerned with the marriage of Nature and Mind’. The philosopher Schelling looks forward to just such a union between intellect and nature, as well as to the poet-seer adequate to sing this great consummation in an epic poem (29-31)
The Bible’s account of history “has assimilated elements from various environing cultures, but in its totality, and in accordance with the way that the earthly events are successively recalled and interpreted in the later books, it embodies a pattern of history which is profoundly distinctive…as against the Greco-Roman views” (34-35).
“The imagery and themes of the Apocalypse so permeated the depths of Milton’s imagination that he derived as many literary images from the Book of Revelation as from the three Synoptic Gospels together. A similar claim can be make for Spenser” (38).
“…the coming of the new heaven and new earth is signalized by the marriage between Christ and the heavenly city, his bride… The longing of mankind for apocalypse is appropriately expressed as an urgent invitation to the wedding… while those who are destined for the new heaven and earth are represented as guests who have been invited to the wedding feast… roots in the ancient Old Testament concept of marriage as a form of covenant, and the consequent representation of the Lord’s particular covenant with Israel by the metaphor of a marriage between the people and the Lord (Proverbs 2:17; Malachi 2:4-14). By easy metaphoric inference, the violation of this marriage covenant by Israel was figured as her sexual infidelity, adultery, or whoredom with idols and strange gods, of which the condign penalty for the bride is to be divorced from God and sent into exile; although with promise of a future reunion between the repentant and purified nation (or by metonymy, the purified land, or the renovated city of Jerusalem)… (42-43)
“Book I of The Faerie Queene. The prototype for the plot and symbolic elements of this work is the Book of Revelation. The Red Cross Knight escapes the wiles of the false bride, Duessa, the Whore of Babylon; is granted a vision of the New Jerusalem, ‘Whore is for thee ordained a blessed end’; assaults and, after a long struggle, slays the ‘old Dragon’, thereby lifting the long siege of the king and queen (Adam and Eve) and reopening access to the land called Eden; and at the end is ceremoniously betrothed to the true bride, Una, radiant with ‘heavenlie beautie’. In one of its dimensions this ‘continued Allegory, or darke conceit’ signifies the historical Advent of Christ, whose coming victory over the dragon and marriage to the bride will herald the restoration of Eden to all elected mankind; in another dimension, however, it signifies the quest, temptation, struggle, triumph, and redemptive marriage to the one true faith which is acted out within the spirit of each believing Christian. (49)
The most detailed development of spiritual eschatology, however, is to be found not in the allegorists, but among the writers whom we know as Christian mystics… often in sensuous imagery suggested by the Song of Songs… death and renovation of the old self by means of a ‘spiritual marriage’ of the soul as sponsa Dei to Christ as Bridegroom, in a unio passionalis which sometimes is set forth in metaphors of physical lovemaking, or even of violent sexual assault (Donne, Batter my heart, three-personed God)… The violence of a wrathful but loving God, the conflict with the forces of evil embodies in one adversary, the destruction of the created world in an immense conflagratio (a detail from 2 Peter 3:10) in order to make it new (Revelation 21:5 Behold I make all things new), and ultimate marriage with the Bridegroom, represented as a rape of the longingly reluctant soul—all these elements, which had long since become commonplaces of Christian devotion. (50-51)
Paul, at Damascus, and Augustine, outside Milan, both “internalized the theater of events from the outer earth and heaven to the spirit…in which there enacts itself, metaphorically, the entire eschatological drama of the destruction of the old creation, the union with Christ, and the emergence of a new creation…here and now, in this life” (47).
“Francis Bacon’s views on progress are especially relevant, because he was held in extraordinary esteem by Wordsworth, and by Coleridge and Shelley as well…Like the early Christian apologists, Bacon saw the cyclical theory as the specific enemy of his mission: “By far the greatest obstacle to the progress of science” is the despair engendered by the supposition… He undertakes, on the contrary, ‘to give hope’; in this task ‘the beginning is from God,’ as is its destined end… Bacon’s scheme is that of the readily possible (or as he suggests in the passage I have quoted, the providentially necessary and inevitable) advance in man’s mastery over nature… The fall, Bacon says, had a double aspect, one moral and the other cognitive, for man ‘fell at the same time from his state of innocency and from his dominion over creation. Both of these losses however can even in this life be in some part repaired: the former by religion and faith, the latter by arts and science.’ Man’s cognitive fall was occasioned by the loss of ‘that pure and uncorrupted natural knowledge whereby Adam gave names to the creatures according to their propriety,’ and this loss represented a divorce and separation of mind from nature, or (in terms of the mental powers involved) of the empirical sense from reason. (59-60)
“Oliver Cromwell himself expressed his persuasion that ‘I am one of those whose heart of God hath drawne out to waite for some extraordinary dispensations, according to those promises that hee hath held forth of thinges to bee accomplished in the later time, and I canott butt thinke that God is beginning of them’ (64)
“The concept and conduct of local rebellion against an oppressive individual or group or nation have doubtless occurred at all times and in all places. But peculiarly Western, and relatively recent, are the doctrine and trial of a total revolution, which is conceived to possess many, or all of these attributes: (1) the revolution will, by an inescapable and cleansing explosion of violence and destruction, reconstitute the existing political, social, and moral order absolutely, … (2) bring about abruptly… the shift from the present era of profound evil, suffering, and disorder to an era of peace, justice, and optimal conditions for general happiness; (3) it will be led by a militant elite… (4) it will by irresistible contagion spread everywhere… (5) its benefits will endure for a very long time, perhaps forever” (62).
“If we nonetheless remain unaware of the full extent to which characteristic concepts and patterns of Romantic philosophy and literature are displaced and reconstituted theology…that is because we still live in what is essentially, although in derivative rather than direct manifestations, a Biblical culture, and readily mistake our heredity ways of organizing experience for the conditions of reality and the universal forms of thought” (65-66).
The Prelude is a fully developed poetic equivalent of…the Bildungsroman (Wordsworth called The Prelude a poem on ‘the growth of my own mind’) and the Kunstlerroman (Wordsworth also spoke of it as ‘a poem on my own poetical education’” (74).
The narrator experiences these growing pains in both in beautiful and fearful settings. Fearful settings, quite interestingly, such as “Mountains and other wild, waste places were the product not of divine benevolence but of human depravity, for they had been wreaked by the wrath of a just God at the original fall of man, in Eden, or alternatively (in some commentators, additionally) they had been effected by the devastating flood with which He punished the all-but-universal corruption of mankind” (99), according to Thomas Burnet’s The Sacred Theory of the Earth, a book whose author was often compared to Milton and who was esteemed by Coleridge.
“John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography is an austerely secular account of his intellectual development…introduction to Wordsworth’s collective Poems of 1815. These were ‘a medicine,’ says Mill, ‘for my state of mind,’… Especially important was the Intimations Ode… ‘I found the he too had had similar experience to mind; that he also had felt that the first freshness of youthful enjoyment of life was not lasting; but that he had sought for compensation, and found it, in the way in which he was now teaching me to find it. The result was that I gradually, but completely, emerged from my habitual depression, and was never again subject to it’. (136)
‘when William James fell into a spiritual crisis, it was ‘the immortal Wordsworth’s Excursion’ which helped rescue him. (138)
“The apologue of the Prodigal Son was a special favorite among Neoplatonic theologians…The basic categories of characteristic post-Kantian philosophy, and of the thinking of many philosophical-minded poets, can be viewed as highly elaborated and sophisticated variations upon the Neoplatonic paradism of a primal unity and goodness, an emanation into multiplicity which is ipso facto a lapse into evil and suffering, and a return to unity and goodness” (166-169).
Abrams provides a useful classification of Romantic-era philosophy as (1) “self-moving and self-sustaining…a dynamic process which is driven by an internal source of motion to its own completion”; (2) “in no way random, nor [permissive of] any essential options”; (3) “primarily a metaphysics of integration, of which the key principle is that of the ‘reconciliation,’ or synthesis, of whatever is divided”; (4) epistemological and cognitive “to an extraordinary degree…even though [it] undertook to account for the totality of the universe”; and (5) linked with literature as “at no other place and time” (172-192).
“After Kant and Schiller it became a standard procedure for the major German philosophers to show that the secular history of mankind is congruent with the Biblical story of the loss and future recovery of paradise; to interpret that story as a mythical representation of man’s departure from the happiness of ignorance and self-unity into multiple divisions and conflicts attendant upon the emergence of self-consciousness, free decision, and the analytic intellect; to equate the fall, so interpreted, with the beginning of speculative philosophy itself” (217).
“Holderlin… Late in 1795 he drafted a Preface to his novel-in-progress Hyperion, which summarized the intention of the work as it then stood… which turns out to have been a necessary departure on the way back to a higher reunion… ‘We all pass through an eccentric path, and there is no other way possible from childhood to consummation’ … But as in Schiller, so in Holderlin, absolute unity between the self and severed nature is an infinite goal…it can be ever more closely approached but never entirely achieved… (237-238)
“While Romantic poets agree in the use of ‘love’ to signify the spectrum of attraction and relationship, they differ markedly in their choice of the specific type of relationship which serves as the paradigm for all other types. In Coleridge, for example, friendship tends to be the paradigmatic form, and he represents sexual love as an especially intense kind of confraternity. Wordsworth’s favored model is maternal love, and the development of relationship in The Prelude is from the babe in his mother’s arms to the all-inclusive ‘love more intellectual’, which is higher than any love that ‘is human merely.’ In Holderlin all human relations, including sexual love, are largely subsumed under the agape, or primitive Christian love feast, as the elemental form. ‘A vision that haunts all Holderlin’s poetry,’ Ronald Peacock has said, is that of ‘the community, a people having common bonds and a common speech, gathered together to celebrate in a poetic festival its gods’… What makes the fusion of all affinities into love especially conspicuous in Shelley (as, among German poets, in Novalis) is that his persistent paradigm is sexual love, with the result that in his poetry all types of human and extrahuman attraction—all forces that hold the physical, mental, moral, and social universe together—are typically represented…erotic attraction and sexual union. (297-298)
“For Karl Marx the course of history has been an inevitable movement from a prehistoric stage of primitive communism through progressive stages, determined by altering modes of production, of the division and conflict of classes. This movement will terminate (after the penultimate stage of capitalism shall have played out its fate in total revolution) in return to communism, but in a mature form which will preserve the productive values achieved during the intervening stages of development” (313).
“In Catholic France the Revolution, conceived mainly in terms of the rationalism of the Enlightenment, had been grounded on a supposedly empirical science of history and of man… Most English radicals, on the other hand, were Protestant Nonconformists, and for them the portent of the Revolution reactivated the millennialism of their left-wing Puritan ancestors in the English civil war” (330-331).
M. H. Abrams’s 1971 book Natural Supernaturalism takes its title from the tendency in English and German literature and philosophy of the Romantic period to naturalize Christian modes of thinking. This book centers on Wordsworth because “(as his English contemporaries acknowledged, with whatever qualifications) [he] was the great and exemplary poet of the age” (14). Abrams considers Wordsworth the prime example, and Shelley, Blake, Coleridge, Novalis, Holderlin, Goethe, Schiller, Hegel and Fichte supporting examples, of a kind of thinking, stemming from a Christian tradition, that results in a distinctive relationship to revolution, and in an apparent deletion of God from the classic triangle of God, Mind, and Nature.
Abrams offers a Christian approach to history underlying the Romantic approach to history. Distinctive features of Biblical history are that: 1) it is finite, where events occur only once and in a single temporal span; 2) it has a plot, with a beginning, middle, and end, 3) the plot of Biblical history has a hidden author, 4) change in Biblical history is characterized by abrupt events and turns, and 5) Biblical history is symmetrical, beginning with a paradise and ending with a paradise. The gradual secularization of Western culture has not been the product of the loss of a Christian understanding of history, but of the translation of that understanding in ways which are not obviously Christian. Wordsworth’s narrator in the Prelude and The Recluse, for example, follows a path of growth paralleling the Biblical history of mankind. Before the fall, the narrator is in a state of youthful innocence, united with the natural world. The narrator experiences tremendous growing pains as he is cast out of blissful innocence and develops self-consciousness and a capacity to think analytically. No longer united to nature, the narrator feels isolated and pained. The pains are fortunate and justified, ultimately, because the maturity behind self-consciousness can provide the narrator a means to win back his integrity, reunite with nature, and experience a paradise exceeding the original paradise.
Two features of Biblical history that resonate for Wordsworth, as they have resonated for his poetic and religious predecessors, are the apocalypse and the prodigal return. If the French Revolution and its subsequent failure did not bring about an earthly apocalypse, it brought about a spiritual apocalypse for Wordsworth’s narrator in The Prelude, wherein his very identity is changed from man of action to prophetic poet. The supposition that the world would change as a result of the revolution evolved into the conviction that Wordsworth would change himself. The theme of the Prodigal Son underpinned Wordsworth’s eventual return, a changed man in a changed world, to his home at Grasmere.
In spite of the Romantic deletion of God from the triangle of God, mind and nature, the Romantic relation to Christianity can still be characterized by more commonalities than differences.
“It is a historical commonplace that the course of Western thought since the Renaissance has been one of progressive secularization, but it is easy to mistake the way in which that process took place…The process—outside the exact sciences at any rate—has not been the deletion and replacement of religious ideas, but rather the assimilation and reinterpretation of religious ideas… Much of what distinguishes writers I call ‘Romantic’ derives from the fact that they undertook, whatever their religious creed or lack of creed, to save traditional concepts, schemes, and values which had been based on the relation of the Creator to his creature and creation, but to reformulate them within the prevailing two-term system of subject and object, ego and non-ego, the human mind or consciousness and its transaction with nature. Despite their displacement from a supernatural to a natural frame of reference, however, the ancient problems, terminology, and ways of thinking about human nature and history survived… (13)
“The Prospectus is an instance of the visionary style in which, according to a view until recently current, Wordsworth is held to indulge his penchant for resounding sublimities is hiding logical evasions behind vague phrasing and lax syntax. But let us assume that in a crucial passage so long meditated, so often written, and so emphatically stated, Wordsworth knew what he was saying… (20)
“A. C. Bradley long ago laid down an essential rule for understanding Wordsworth: ‘The road into Wordsworth’s mind must be through his strangeness and his paradoxes, and not round them’ (“Wordsworth”, Oxford Lectures on Poetry, London, reprinted 1950, p. 101)
Not only was Wordsworth the great and exemplary poet of his age, his ambition, at least for The Recluse, was “perhaps the most remarkable, and certainly one of the most grandiose, ever undertaken by a major writer” (19). Wordsworth’s equivalent of hell, a hell within the self, was deeper and darker than the Christian hell, and his conception of heaven was of one capable of producing a more profound joy and satisfaction than the Christian heaven. In justifying human suffering (according to an idea of personal growth), Wordsworth outdoes Milton’s justification of the ways of God to men, because the scope of Wordsworth’s cosmos exceeds that of Milton’s. On Wordsworth’s relation to the canon, he “remarked to Henry Crabb Robinson that ‘when he resolved to be a poet, [he] feared competition only with Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton.’ Of these poets, however, Chaucer and Shakespeare exemplify what Wordsworth called ‘the human and dramatic Imagination’; while it is Spenser, and above all Milton, who exemplify the ‘enthusiastic and meditative Imagination’ against which Wordsworth persistently measured his own enterprise” (22).
“William Blake, who respected Wordsworth enough to read him closely and take his claims seriously, told Henry Crabb Robinson, in whimsical exasperation, that this passage […when we look/Into our Minds, into the Mind of Man—/My haunt, and the main region of my song.] ‘caused him a bowel complain which nearly killed him.’ ‘Does Mr. Wordsworth think his mind can surpass Jehovah?’ To which the answer is, ‘No, he did not,’ any more than he thought himself a greater poet than Milton. What Wordsworth claims is that the mind of man is a terra incognita which surpasses in its terrors and sublimities, hence in the challenge it poses to its poetic explorer, the traditional subject matter of Milton’s Christian epic. Blake took offense at Wordsworth’s literary enterprise because it paralleled his own, but deviated on its crucial issue of naturalism. For in his Milton (1804-1810) Blake too had undertaken, as the epigraph said, ‘To Justify the Ways of God to Men’ by his own imaginative revision of the doctrines of Paradise Lost. (25)
“the more we attend to the claims of some of Wordsworth’s major contemporaries, in Germany as well as in England, the less idiosyncratic do Wordsworth’s pronouncements seem… radically to recast, in terms appropriate to the historical and intellectual circumstances of their own age, the Christian pattern of the fall, the redemption, and the emergence of a new earth which will constitute a restored paradise. … In his Dejection: An Ode Coleridge wrote that the inner condition of total vitality he called ‘Joy’, … wedding Nature to us, gives in dower/A new Earth and Heaven… Blake prefaced the concluding chapter of Jerusalem with the voice of the Bard arousing Albion from his ‘sleep of death’, so that he may unite with his separate female emanation… The poem closes with the dawn of the ‘Eternal Day’ of a universal resurrection in a restored paradise, … At the conclusion of Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound the regeneration of man in a renovated world has for its central symbol the union of Prometheus and Asia,… In a climactic passage of Holderlin’s Hyperion the young poet-hero, inspired, cries out to ‘holy Nature’... A rejuvenated people will make thee young again, too, and thou wilt be as its bride…Ther will be only one beauty, and man and Nature will unite in one all-embracing divinity. … In one of his Fragments Novalis also stated flatly that all ‘the higher philosophy is concerned with the marriage of Nature and Mind’. The philosopher Schelling looks forward to just such a union between intellect and nature, as well as to the poet-seer adequate to sing this great consummation in an epic poem (29-31)
The Bible’s account of history “has assimilated elements from various environing cultures, but in its totality, and in accordance with the way that the earthly events are successively recalled and interpreted in the later books, it embodies a pattern of history which is profoundly distinctive…as against the Greco-Roman views” (34-35).
“The imagery and themes of the Apocalypse so permeated the depths of Milton’s imagination that he derived as many literary images from the Book of Revelation as from the three Synoptic Gospels together. A similar claim can be make for Spenser” (38).
“…the coming of the new heaven and new earth is signalized by the marriage between Christ and the heavenly city, his bride… The longing of mankind for apocalypse is appropriately expressed as an urgent invitation to the wedding… while those who are destined for the new heaven and earth are represented as guests who have been invited to the wedding feast… roots in the ancient Old Testament concept of marriage as a form of covenant, and the consequent representation of the Lord’s particular covenant with Israel by the metaphor of a marriage between the people and the Lord (Proverbs 2:17; Malachi 2:4-14). By easy metaphoric inference, the violation of this marriage covenant by Israel was figured as her sexual infidelity, adultery, or whoredom with idols and strange gods, of which the condign penalty for the bride is to be divorced from God and sent into exile; although with promise of a future reunion between the repentant and purified nation (or by metonymy, the purified land, or the renovated city of Jerusalem)… (42-43)
“Book I of The Faerie Queene. The prototype for the plot and symbolic elements of this work is the Book of Revelation. The Red Cross Knight escapes the wiles of the false bride, Duessa, the Whore of Babylon; is granted a vision of the New Jerusalem, ‘Whore is for thee ordained a blessed end’; assaults and, after a long struggle, slays the ‘old Dragon’, thereby lifting the long siege of the king and queen (Adam and Eve) and reopening access to the land called Eden; and at the end is ceremoniously betrothed to the true bride, Una, radiant with ‘heavenlie beautie’. In one of its dimensions this ‘continued Allegory, or darke conceit’ signifies the historical Advent of Christ, whose coming victory over the dragon and marriage to the bride will herald the restoration of Eden to all elected mankind; in another dimension, however, it signifies the quest, temptation, struggle, triumph, and redemptive marriage to the one true faith which is acted out within the spirit of each believing Christian. (49)
The most detailed development of spiritual eschatology, however, is to be found not in the allegorists, but among the writers whom we know as Christian mystics… often in sensuous imagery suggested by the Song of Songs… death and renovation of the old self by means of a ‘spiritual marriage’ of the soul as sponsa Dei to Christ as Bridegroom, in a unio passionalis which sometimes is set forth in metaphors of physical lovemaking, or even of violent sexual assault (Donne, Batter my heart, three-personed God)… The violence of a wrathful but loving God, the conflict with the forces of evil embodies in one adversary, the destruction of the created world in an immense conflagratio (a detail from 2 Peter 3:10) in order to make it new (Revelation 21:5 Behold I make all things new), and ultimate marriage with the Bridegroom, represented as a rape of the longingly reluctant soul—all these elements, which had long since become commonplaces of Christian devotion. (50-51)
Paul, at Damascus, and Augustine, outside Milan, both “internalized the theater of events from the outer earth and heaven to the spirit…in which there enacts itself, metaphorically, the entire eschatological drama of the destruction of the old creation, the union with Christ, and the emergence of a new creation…here and now, in this life” (47).
“Francis Bacon’s views on progress are especially relevant, because he was held in extraordinary esteem by Wordsworth, and by Coleridge and Shelley as well…Like the early Christian apologists, Bacon saw the cyclical theory as the specific enemy of his mission: “By far the greatest obstacle to the progress of science” is the despair engendered by the supposition… He undertakes, on the contrary, ‘to give hope’; in this task ‘the beginning is from God,’ as is its destined end… Bacon’s scheme is that of the readily possible (or as he suggests in the passage I have quoted, the providentially necessary and inevitable) advance in man’s mastery over nature… The fall, Bacon says, had a double aspect, one moral and the other cognitive, for man ‘fell at the same time from his state of innocency and from his dominion over creation. Both of these losses however can even in this life be in some part repaired: the former by religion and faith, the latter by arts and science.’ Man’s cognitive fall was occasioned by the loss of ‘that pure and uncorrupted natural knowledge whereby Adam gave names to the creatures according to their propriety,’ and this loss represented a divorce and separation of mind from nature, or (in terms of the mental powers involved) of the empirical sense from reason. (59-60)
“Oliver Cromwell himself expressed his persuasion that ‘I am one of those whose heart of God hath drawne out to waite for some extraordinary dispensations, according to those promises that hee hath held forth of thinges to bee accomplished in the later time, and I canott butt thinke that God is beginning of them’ (64)
“The concept and conduct of local rebellion against an oppressive individual or group or nation have doubtless occurred at all times and in all places. But peculiarly Western, and relatively recent, are the doctrine and trial of a total revolution, which is conceived to possess many, or all of these attributes: (1) the revolution will, by an inescapable and cleansing explosion of violence and destruction, reconstitute the existing political, social, and moral order absolutely, … (2) bring about abruptly… the shift from the present era of profound evil, suffering, and disorder to an era of peace, justice, and optimal conditions for general happiness; (3) it will be led by a militant elite… (4) it will by irresistible contagion spread everywhere… (5) its benefits will endure for a very long time, perhaps forever” (62).
“If we nonetheless remain unaware of the full extent to which characteristic concepts and patterns of Romantic philosophy and literature are displaced and reconstituted theology…that is because we still live in what is essentially, although in derivative rather than direct manifestations, a Biblical culture, and readily mistake our heredity ways of organizing experience for the conditions of reality and the universal forms of thought” (65-66).
The Prelude is a fully developed poetic equivalent of…the Bildungsroman (Wordsworth called The Prelude a poem on ‘the growth of my own mind’) and the Kunstlerroman (Wordsworth also spoke of it as ‘a poem on my own poetical education’” (74).
The narrator experiences these growing pains in both in beautiful and fearful settings. Fearful settings, quite interestingly, such as “Mountains and other wild, waste places were the product not of divine benevolence but of human depravity, for they had been wreaked by the wrath of a just God at the original fall of man, in Eden, or alternatively (in some commentators, additionally) they had been effected by the devastating flood with which He punished the all-but-universal corruption of mankind” (99), according to Thomas Burnet’s The Sacred Theory of the Earth, a book whose author was often compared to Milton and who was esteemed by Coleridge.
“John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography is an austerely secular account of his intellectual development…introduction to Wordsworth’s collective Poems of 1815. These were ‘a medicine,’ says Mill, ‘for my state of mind,’… Especially important was the Intimations Ode… ‘I found the he too had had similar experience to mind; that he also had felt that the first freshness of youthful enjoyment of life was not lasting; but that he had sought for compensation, and found it, in the way in which he was now teaching me to find it. The result was that I gradually, but completely, emerged from my habitual depression, and was never again subject to it’. (136)
‘when William James fell into a spiritual crisis, it was ‘the immortal Wordsworth’s Excursion’ which helped rescue him. (138)
“The apologue of the Prodigal Son was a special favorite among Neoplatonic theologians…The basic categories of characteristic post-Kantian philosophy, and of the thinking of many philosophical-minded poets, can be viewed as highly elaborated and sophisticated variations upon the Neoplatonic paradism of a primal unity and goodness, an emanation into multiplicity which is ipso facto a lapse into evil and suffering, and a return to unity and goodness” (166-169).
Abrams provides a useful classification of Romantic-era philosophy as (1) “self-moving and self-sustaining…a dynamic process which is driven by an internal source of motion to its own completion”; (2) “in no way random, nor [permissive of] any essential options”; (3) “primarily a metaphysics of integration, of which the key principle is that of the ‘reconciliation,’ or synthesis, of whatever is divided”; (4) epistemological and cognitive “to an extraordinary degree…even though [it] undertook to account for the totality of the universe”; and (5) linked with literature as “at no other place and time” (172-192).
“After Kant and Schiller it became a standard procedure for the major German philosophers to show that the secular history of mankind is congruent with the Biblical story of the loss and future recovery of paradise; to interpret that story as a mythical representation of man’s departure from the happiness of ignorance and self-unity into multiple divisions and conflicts attendant upon the emergence of self-consciousness, free decision, and the analytic intellect; to equate the fall, so interpreted, with the beginning of speculative philosophy itself” (217).
“Holderlin… Late in 1795 he drafted a Preface to his novel-in-progress Hyperion, which summarized the intention of the work as it then stood… which turns out to have been a necessary departure on the way back to a higher reunion… ‘We all pass through an eccentric path, and there is no other way possible from childhood to consummation’ … But as in Schiller, so in Holderlin, absolute unity between the self and severed nature is an infinite goal…it can be ever more closely approached but never entirely achieved… (237-238)
“While Romantic poets agree in the use of ‘love’ to signify the spectrum of attraction and relationship, they differ markedly in their choice of the specific type of relationship which serves as the paradigm for all other types. In Coleridge, for example, friendship tends to be the paradigmatic form, and he represents sexual love as an especially intense kind of confraternity. Wordsworth’s favored model is maternal love, and the development of relationship in The Prelude is from the babe in his mother’s arms to the all-inclusive ‘love more intellectual’, which is higher than any love that ‘is human merely.’ In Holderlin all human relations, including sexual love, are largely subsumed under the agape, or primitive Christian love feast, as the elemental form. ‘A vision that haunts all Holderlin’s poetry,’ Ronald Peacock has said, is that of ‘the community, a people having common bonds and a common speech, gathered together to celebrate in a poetic festival its gods’… What makes the fusion of all affinities into love especially conspicuous in Shelley (as, among German poets, in Novalis) is that his persistent paradigm is sexual love, with the result that in his poetry all types of human and extrahuman attraction—all forces that hold the physical, mental, moral, and social universe together—are typically represented…erotic attraction and sexual union. (297-298)
“For Karl Marx the course of history has been an inevitable movement from a prehistoric stage of primitive communism through progressive stages, determined by altering modes of production, of the division and conflict of classes. This movement will terminate (after the penultimate stage of capitalism shall have played out its fate in total revolution) in return to communism, but in a mature form which will preserve the productive values achieved during the intervening stages of development” (313).
“In Catholic France the Revolution, conceived mainly in terms of the rationalism of the Enlightenment, had been grounded on a supposedly empirical science of history and of man… Most English radicals, on the other hand, were Protestant Nonconformists, and for them the portent of the Revolution reactivated the millennialism of their left-wing Puritan ancestors in the English civil war” (330-331).
posted by Raul de Saldanha at
9:08 PM
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