Frank Whigham, The Rhetoric of Elizabethan Suitors' Letters

Frank Whigham, The Rhetoric of Elizabethan Suitors’ Letters, PMLA, October 1981, Volume 96, Number 5, pp. 864-882.

The curious history of Renaissance epistolary theory, rooted in the plain informal style of Cicero’s letters and the plain philosophical style of Seneca’s, continues through the elaborate ars dictaminis of the twelfth century (based on the Ciceronian oratorical heritage) on to Petrarch and Erasmus, who returned in their influential practices to the plain patterns of Ciceronian correspondence. Erasmus also, however, left of ornate epistolary theory, Libellus de Conscribendis Epistolis (Robertson, p. 10), which served as a model for English theoretical writings in the period of the Hatton correspondence. The Libellus and its school-text descendants kept alive the medieval mode of elaborate rhetoric in letters long after a plain bourgeois style appeared. Through some of these manuals, such as Fulwell’s The Enimie of Idlenesse (1568), Fleming’s A Panoplie of Epistles (1576), and The Marchants Avizo (1589), have a rhetorical slant, they reveal a growing affiliation with bourgeois readers, who lter disavowed the mode. But Angel Day’s popular The English Secretorie (1586; eight edition by 1626), not only retains the Erasmian rhetorical mode but carries a dedication to the earl of Oxford and addresses those producing letters at court. Its injunctions directly govern the letter of supplication. (865)

And his categories anatomize the facets of court conduct: horatory, suasory, conciliatory, petitory, commendatory, and amatory modes are all necessary. (866)

The prospect of advancement marks another practical significance of Renaissance letter writing, present only implicitly in Day. Epistolary skills that enable one to perform well as a secretary may also bring new employment within reach. That is, one may speak well of a subject and of one’s own expressive skills at the same time. In the rhetorical theory this reflexive attention to style is called “epideictic”—that mode of rhetoric concerned with “the ceremonial oratory of display.” For Aristotle this mode served mainly for ceremonial occasions, when a certain ornateness was appropriate. Here the term denotes a mode of writing that calls attention to the virtuosity of the writer. (866)

The basic task of a letter, overcoming physical separation, distinguishes the letter as a genre from the drama, which properly depends on physical community; from the epic or romance, which always has the physical relation that counts (between reader and text); and from the sonnet, which extends in a sequence because the lover fails in his appeal for union with the lady. (866)

National centralization amplified the sense of separation. London, where life was more intense, had gained a new force. The boredom of country life became obtrusive to may people as the leisure industry arose in London; … The new potency of a national center made the rest of England seem relatively distant and begot a new interest in long-distance communication. /
As these dialectically related conditions reveal, physical separation soon became conceptual, since it provoked a feeling of relational hiatus. Under Tudor absolutism, royal “presence” had become an ultimate reality. Attendance began to seem an end in itself; absence required fulsome excuse. Even illness was nearly a form of disloyalty. (867)

Many old, static devices for registering status were being replaced by a more dynamic system of conspicuous expenditure, itself inherently anxiety-producing. Its means were finite, its expectations infinite, … (867)

Moreover, personality played a more important structural role at that time. Because opportunity was always “in someone’s gift,” it had to be sought in personal terms. There was no rationalized structure governing competition for office or privilege—little in the way of application form, elections, test, or other impersonal conduits. So the suitor who was unable conveniently to apply the nondiscursive pressures of conversation relied either on the letter or on an intercessor, … (869)

Puttenham implies that referring to one’s deserts and merits was in bad taste. In “negotiating” with princess, at least, he says we are not/
‘to recite the good services which they have received at our hands, for that is but a kind of exprobation [extraction of proof?], but in craving their bountie or largesse to remember unto them all their former beneficences, making no mention of our owne merits… (pp. 299-300) … In any case, Matthew says almost nothing about his ability to perform the dean’s duties. (871)

These strategies shed a new light on the relation of flattery to sprezzatura. Flattery should be invisible, we usually say. Giovanni della Casa’s Galateo (1558; trans. 1576) asserts that “empty, pretentious, and extravagant compliments are undisguised flattery, and in fact they are so obvious and easy to recognize that people who use them to gain some advantage for themselves, besides being dishonest as I have already told you, are also odious and tiresome.” Gabriel Harey says that “visible flattery is abject and unworthy of a gentleman; invisible flattery a matter of skill and suited for men of affairs” (Marginalia, p. 56). Analysis of Mathew’s compliments, however, suggests that flattery must be visible if it is to manipulate the patron by imputing a virtue that restricts choice. The effect depends on the patron’s acknowledging the flattery, which must, therefore, be visible, however disguised. When Harvey condemns visible flattery, his motives may be not so much moral as envious and punitive; he was certainly a notorious have-not. (875)

Paul R. Baumgartner, Jonathan Edwards: The Theory Behind His Use of Figurative Language

Paul R. Baumgartner, Jonathan Edwards: The Theory Behind His Use of Figurative Language, PMLA, September 1963, Volume LXXVIII, Number 4, Part 1, pp. 321-325.

But surely this is not the impression which most readers get from Edwards and earlier Puritan writers. Their use of figurative language, far from being reluctant, seems natural and happy. (321)

Jonathan Edwards, as might be expected, provides the theoretical or philosophical justifications for the analogical use of figurative language. … theories: the first concerns the relation between God and the created universe, between Infinite and finite being; the second has to do with the nature of man and his way of receiving truth or communication from God. (322)

Edwards escape simple pantheism. “Things,” although they are properly ideas of God and from God, are not God because their existence , as projected or externalized ideas, is not in God. The ideas in God have or are an infinite existence; whereas these ideas “extant” have a finite or participated existed which is essentially different, … (322)

The “things” of nature, then, are beautiful precisely in so far as they are emanations of the internal excellency of God, and all creatures have this communicated excellency according to their full capacity. Thus flowers, trees, and birds have no beauty of their own, properly speaking, but only a communicated beauty, which is the beauty of God. Edwards makes this perfectly clear in a long passage in the Covenant of Redemption: /
‘So that, when we are delighted with flowery meadows, and gentle breezes of wind, we may consider that we see only the emanations of the sweet benevolence of Jesus Christ. When we behold the fragrant rose and lily, we see His love the purity. So the green trees, and fields, and singing of birds are the emanations of His infinite joy and benignity. … doubtless this is a reason that Christ is compared so often to those things, and called by their names, as the sun of Righteousness, the morning star, the rose of Sharon, and lily of the valley, the apple tree amongst the trees of wood, a bundle of myrrh, a roe, or a young hart. By this we may discover the beauty of many of those metaphors and similes, which to an unphilosophical person do seem so uncouth. (pp. 373-374)’ /
To call Christ, then, the “rose of Sharon” or the “lily of the valley” is more than mere accommodation or concession to the sensuous side of fallen human nature; it is a proper and beautiful way of speaking, since it expresses the true relation and “consent” between creature and Creator, between the finite and the Infinite. (322)

We must remember, however, that Edwards was not using imagery simply for its emotional effectiveness. The very fact of extensive imagery in the Scriptures, the word of God, was proof of its essential relation to truth. Referring to the New Testament, Edwards tells us that “Christ often makes use of representations of spiritual things in the constitution of the world for argument, as thus: the tree is known by its fruit. These things are not merely mentioned as illustrations of his meaning, but as illustrations and evidences of the truth of what he says.” [8]

God communicates His will and understanding, i.e., His knowledge and love of Himself, though the created universe (by means of constant laws) to finite minds which, in the very act of receiving the communication, return it to God. Man is the instrument by which God’s internal Glory extant is returned to Himself, and man’s knowledge and love of God is simply a participation (in finite existence) of God’s knowledge and love of Himself. (323)

In view of all this it is not difficult to justify the famous spider analogy in Edwards’ “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” There is even a certain metaphysical beauty in the fearful pronouncement that the “God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked” (p.164). It must be remembered that Edwards is speaking here to the non-elect, that is, to men totally depraved in their nature. … The beauty here lies in the truth of the relation expressed and not in the spider or in the condition of the sinner. (324)

Since truth is the analogy between finite and Infinite Being, what could be more appropriate than metaphor or analogy in the order of words and human truth for treating the things of relation “according to their nature” and exhibiting them “truly.” (324)

The one and only cause of true knowledge, however, is a supernatural sense or light given immediately by God to the elect. But God, working through men, makes use of means such as Scriptures, sermons, science, and metaphorical language to convey the “matter” of true spiritual knowledge to the understanding of men, since things must be perceived before they can be loved. (324)

Medieval in origin, the doctrine of analogy finds nearly its last foothold in American Puritanism. Its presence there assures us that the Puritan mind was perfectly at home with figurative language, though certain ascetic elements worked to make the Puritan writers interpret the doctrine more narrowly than writers in the Catholic tradition. Avoiding the baroque and the extraordinary, the Puritan drew his figures from simple nature and ordinary human experience. As Cady observes, Edwards abounds in images of weight and pressure, of suspension, of heat and fire, of cold and ice, of slipperiness and sliding, of rulers and the ruled, and of everyday relations among men. There is no strain in the use of these images; the doctrines of analogy makes them right and inevitable. And so it is with earlier Puritans. Such titles as Hooker’ “A True Sight of Sin” or Cotton’s “Wading in Grace” are neither dead metaphors (as the beginning of Hooker’s treatise makes clear) nor consciously figurative; the analogy of being makes them expressive of the “literal” truth. (324-325)

Earl Miner, Patterns in Stoicism in Thought and Prose Styles, 1530-1700

Earl Miner, Patterns in Stoicism in Thought and Prose Styles, 1530-1700, PMLA, October 1970, Volume 85, Number 5, pp. 1023-1034.

It has grown a commonplace in accounts of English literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that Stoicism in various guises reached the height of its influence in the period from about 1580 to 1630 and that it waned thereafter. (1023)

Morris Croll… conscious alternative to the affected and decorated Ciceronianism, which was premeditated rather than organic, … English writers as diverse as Bacon, Donne, or Browne owed their styles to Roman exemplars and to such continental herbingers of the new modes as Justus Lipsius (Joset Lips). /
To George Williamson, the development of modern English prose was a far more complex process. It began with Erasmus’ anti-Ciceronian Ciceronianus in 1528. The first major English figure was John Lyly, however, whose style possessed two such seemingly opposed features as the schematic structure of the Asian stylists or the Ciceronians and the witty point of the curt Senecan style. (1023)

It was this loose style that eventually won out over the vogue for the curt style, and the loose style that provided in its various manifestations the main line of stylistic development in seventeenth-century prose. (1024)

Croll’s major opponent, R. F. Jones, has not so much disproved Croll as argued that, in the seventeenth century at least, stylistic changes are much better explained by the rise of the new science… (1024)

Croll’s thesis has been accepted for the late Renaissance and early seventeenth century, whereas Jones’s thesis has been accepted for developments culminating in the Restoration. … Whatever occasional objections may have been heard, I think that there is no question but that in one version or another the Croll-Williamson-Jones thesis is widely accepted and taught. (1024)

I very much fear that our generalizations, especially those derived from Croll and relating to England, are based too much upon impression and continental example, too little upon real English evidence. (1025)

I have taken my evidence from the Short-Title-Catalogues of Pollard and Redgrave and of Wing. … The pattern of publication of the dramatic writings is set forth in Table A… What deserves stress is that the half century from 1580 to 1630, when Stoicism was allegedly at its height, has the fewest publications of all (with a complete gap between 1585 and 1613), while the period when Stoicism is supposedly to have vanished, the Restoration, ahs in fact many of Seneca’s plays available. /
It may be thought, however, that the popularity of Seneca’s plays is less significant than that of his prose writings. (1026-1027)

…the period before 1580 was more Senecan than that between 1580 and 1630. And although Senecanism is supposed to have waned after about 1630, there are in fact eighteen publications between 1635 and 1700, four and a half times the total before, especially of the moral Seneca, believed most influential to English thought. And in the hypothetically un-Stoic Restoration, there are fourteen publications. (1027)

…in 1610 only two of Seneca’s prose works were available in English publication. The period from Erasmus’ Ciceronianus in 1528 to 1614 had little Stoic comfort. / We may consider, however, that the argument for Stoic popularity can be reclaimed by a hypothesis that Justus Lipsius and, in particular, his De Constantia, went through numerous English editions, bringing continental Stoicism and prose styles to English attention. Table C gives us the pattern for Lipsius. … Here, happily, and at last, we have some evidence of a “Stoic” writer popular in the last fifteen years of the sixteenth century. There were nine publications. On the other hand, his popularity soon waned, and there is a hiatus of almost half a century between 1615 and 1653. (1027)

Once again, we can only conclude that there were more “Stoics” in the latter half of the seventeenth century than in the former. (1028)

The truth is that classicists describe some of the works (particularly the later) of “Tully” as largely Stoic in nature. Among these is the De Officiis, dealing with the Stoic conception of obligations, duties, or “offices”. The significant fact for theorists of prose style is that this one work of Cicero’s. … was more often published in England than the total canons of Seneca’s prose or of Lipsius’. (1028)

The single “Stoic” writer whose English popularity follows the outline of usual accounts of Stoic ebb and flow in thought as well as in prose style is the historian Tacitus, whose total works published in England do not come, however, to half the number of Cicero’s one work, De Officiis. (1028)

The absolute and relative paucity of publications of Tacitus makes the pattern of less use than the pattern set by the more popular Seneca or the greatly more popular Cicero. Still, it is a fact, and perhaps we can best understand it by attention to Livy, who is contentionally opposed to Tacitus by our proponents of an English Senecan prose. There seems to be a view that he and Cicero enjoyed an earlier popularity and then were displaced by Seneca and Tacitus. In fact, the pattern for Livy is that in Table F. … It is obvious that Tacitus (first published in 1585) was printed in England before Livy (first in 1589), and that with the exception of the very anomalous year of 1659 the pattern, on a reduced scale of frequency, is that of Tacitus… (1028-29)

There are, however, two other major Roman Stoics whom we can look to for confirmation either of the pattern so far observed here, or of the conventional notion. The two are of course Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. …. Epictetus… During the supposedly Stoic half century from 1580 to 1630 there were but three printing in about seven years; but in the four decades between 1660 and 1700 there were nine: three times as many. (1029)

Marcus Aurelius … for the most contemplative of the Antonine emperors, there was no separate publication before 1634. … Simply put, there were four publications between 1634 and 1659, that is, after the presumed period of “Renaissance Stoicism” and fewer than in the Restoration. (1029-30)

It may be argued that since Stoicism influenced Christianity, especially in its Pauline emphasis, we should consider certain Christian writers. I shall return to the subject of religious writings, but for the moment it must be said that while the admittance of Christian writers into consideration greatly widens, and hazes over, the scope of Stoic thought, it nearly destroys the idol of Stoic prose styles. One of the most Pauline of the Fathers, and the one said to have been most popular in England after the Reformation, was Augustine, whose style is famously, or notoriously, ornate (although he, too, wrote in different styles). (1030)

As I suggested earlier, it might be thought that we should assign multiple factors to earlier publications in order to compensate for the increasing number of books published, and I gave reasons for rejecting the thought. Let us, however, accept it for the moment. … The period from 1580 to 1630 emerges on this evidence as one decidedly “Ciceronian,” and it is the Restoration that is decidedly Stoic. It should be said of the Restoration as well, however, that a glance at Wing’s Short-Title Catalogues would show that even in that period more of Cicero (though not of De Oratore) was published than of Seneca. It is just that the Restoration appears to have been relatively more Stoic than earlier periods. (1030-1031)

…the record of publications in England is especially damaging to the hypothesis about the replacement of Ciceronian prose styles by Stoic. I suspect Croll’s knowledge of France may have led him to impose a French model and chronology on England. At least a brief check of the holdings in the Bibliotheque Nationale seems to suggest that French patterns of popularity fit Croll’s thesis better than English, although even in France the total canon of Cicero as opposed to that of Seneca raises some doubts, and the nature of the evidence requires extreme caution. (1032)

Next, the thesis of an un-Stoic, or a scientific of Epicurean, Restoration requires revision. It is obvious that the second half of the seventeenth century was the first time in English history that a major Epicurean writer, Lucretius, was available in English publication, but he was less frequently published in the period than Seneca or the Stoic Cicero. In fact, of the four major philosophical Roman Stoic writers—Seneca, Tacitus, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius—only Tacitus was published less frequently in the Restoration than before. (1032)

In particular, some prose styles may be curt, others loose, and yet others periodic without reference to Stoicism. (1033)

It may be remembered (as one manifestation of decorum) that the translators’ preface to the Authorized Version of the Bible is ornately “Ciceronian,” and that the prose used for such books as the Psalms beautifully adapts “Ciceronian” periodicity to English. The fact that the Authorized Version follows earlier English versions so often and that, for example, the Psalms are part of daily divine service and were printed in the Prayer Book makes it plain that “Ciceronian” prose was (and is) widely heard and read in Reformed England. A second, and related, principle is that religious writings were more often read and sermons more often heard than any classical forms during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. (1033)

Finally, I wonder whether the information presented here is really so surprising? If we think of one major Stoic feature among what are admittedly many, it is a familiar fact that although they believed in self-sufficiency, Stoics differed from certain other schools in holding that the individual held obligations (Cicero’s “offices”) to others and, particularly, to public service. We can all agree that restoration literature, notably that of Dryden, or for that matter of Milton, was concerned with such “offices” and that it was public in mode. It is small wonder that in the Restoration booksellers knew that there was an increasing market for Stoic writings (though why not Tacitus?). (1033)

Anne Drury Hall, Epistle, Meditation and Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici

Anne Drury Hall, Epistle, Meditation and Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici, PMLA, March 1979, Volume 94, Number 2, pp. 234-246.

Religio Medici has traditionally been called simply “an essay” or “an autobiographical essay.” … if we examine the Religio in its literary context, we will see that the principles generating its style and specifying the range of its feelings derive from two prose modes closely associated with other, more clearly defined seventeenth-century genres, the anti-Ciceronian epistle and the religious meditation. Thus, a better definition of its genre is “a meditation in the epistolary mode,” … (234)

Religio… is distinctly epistolary in addressing a restricting audience in a tone of conversational immediacy. (234)

The abruptness of this opening, the intimacy of the voice, and the ruminative ease with delicate points of stress that characterize relaxed conversation are stylistic features sanctioned, not in sixteenth-century rhetorics like Thomas Wilson’s, but in anti-Ciceronian treatises on the familiar letter—Justus Lipsius’ Institutio Epistolica and its English heir, John Hoskins’ Directions for Speech and Style. /
The medieval ars dictaminis had treated the letter either as a formal communication with an unknown superior or as a learned essay based on the oration. But in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, letter-writing rhetorics began to give emphasis to a more relaxed, familiar form. This fragmentation of epistolary rhetoric is reflected in Hoskins’ Directions: (234)

The emphasis of both Lipsius and Hoskins on subdued tone, subtlety of expression, and tasteful wit implies a redefinition of decorum, one appropriate to a small and select audience. Ciceronian oratory, on which the ars dictaminis depended, strives to include as much of the commonalty as possible and hence rests primarily on a principle of clarity. (234)

The understated quality of this irony—not high-pitched and sarcastic, but ducking and bowing with an easy grace—is part of an epistolary code. It assumes that the friend is perceptive enough, first, to hear the irony and, second, to understand that its mock submissiveness reveals the crowd’s hostility as unmannerly and ridiculous. /
This double focus, explicitly addressing a friend and yet placating the world, inveigles the sympathies of the reader, who knows he is not part of one audience but does not want to be classed with the other. (235)

In sum, the epistolary essay style is witty, social, and polite. What gives the Religio its wide and yet subtle range, having the effect of flickering lights on a dark background (Coleridge used the metaphor of shot silk), is the combination of this style with one almost antithetical to it—the somber, withdrawn, and sometimes lyric prose of devotional texts. (236)

Although the seventeenth-century meditation took a variety of forms, I am interested here in what might be called the “confessional” meditation, the meditation at its most expressive; a clear example is Donne’s Devotions upon Emergent Occasions. … The epistolary-essay style presumes a speaker who is a member of a civilized society of a particular historical period, who recognizes a public made up of similar individuals, and who defines his identity, his difference, in relation to the others within this public. The speaker in the meditation belongs, not to a specific civilized community, but simply to the category “God’s human creatures,” which comprised all men who have ever lived. (236)

The epistolary essay is historically bound, logically explanatory, and, though private, dressed for some public audience, however small. The devotion is ahistorical, emotionally cumulative, and intensely private, … (236)

Intended not for the members of a particular community but for all human creatures, devotional prose expresses for both speaker and readers a common worship. As a result, the utterances of the meditation readily absorb the incantations of prayer, since the speaker’s purpose is not to explain and argue… (236)

In the Religio, it is the meditation that generates the incantatory lilt in the rhythm, the roll of the cursus, and the ritualized utterances of Hebraic synonymy, all of which frequently move Browne’s style from middle to elevated. (236)

Where the witty style actively invades the unknown in order to carve out from it a public, human space, ordered by thought, the devotional style collapses in passivity as the human creature craves possession by God. In seeking to “meet” the divine, the meditation characteristically rises above the attempts of reason. (236)

The psychological function of the prescribed steps of a formal meditation was to move the soul form the confusion to the calm of faith. (236)

Each “conclusion” that Browne draws has to do with a spiritual truth or mystery that is beyond what the common sense of reasonable men can discover. (237)

From the friendly address to the reader in the colloquial “your” (“your Piae Fraudes”), this passage moves straight-facedly into the wry suggestion… At this point in the paragraph, the sharp ups and downs of conversational emphasis gradually give way to the slower rhythms of rumination. … The tone here has clearly departed from the relaxed, easy conversation… By the seventeenth sentences, Browne has moved into the repetitions, parallel synonymies, and cursus of the meditation, one thought tacked onto another in radically “libertine” fashion, as the voice dissolves into chanting: /

‘For that indeed which I admire is farre before antiquity, that is, Eternity, and that is God himselfe; who though hee be stiled the Antient of dayes, cannot receive the adjunct of antiquity, who was before the world, and shall be after it, yet is not older then it; for in his yeares there is no Climacter; his duration is eternity, and farre more venerable then antiquitie.’/

Logically, the thought ends with “For that indeed which I admire is farre before antiquity, that is, Eternity, and that is God himselfe”; the rest of the paragraph muses on that notion of eternity. (238)

The combination of civil and devotional prose was not in itself a new achievement. The speaker in Donne’s “Good Friday: Riding Westward,” who devoutly pleads at the end of the poem, “O thinke mee worth thine anger, punish me,” is also a civilized man of the city. Joseph Hall used the civil perspective of the Theophrastan character to discuss religious virtues. Browne’s achievement, however, was to combine the two modes in a way that retains the distinctive timbre of each—wit’s happy confidence and the meditation’s deep mournfulness. The secularity of Browne’s civil prose is clearly heard because his diction has the sharp edges of satiric point. In fact, Browne’s diction in the Religio contributes to a satiric voice, which, in the 1640s, was highly original, a voice whose bemused good humor is crucial to his plea for urbane moderation in matters of religion. (239)

On the face of it, the combination of the cheerful, social, civilized intimacy of the happy man and the isolated piety of the mediator is a daring one, especially since Browne’s wit is so delicately sophisticated and his meditation so wistful. One would think that his poise would make his piety seem insincere or that his piety would make his wit seem brash. (241)

But, besides restraining wit’s tendencies toward aloof contempt, Browne had to restrain the meditation’s tendencies towards self-castigation and eager ecstasy. Generally, of course, he controls the potential emotionalism in the mediation by avoiding the second-person address to God. But he does frequently interject a parenthetical aside just before the concluding though of a section—an “I fear” or “I protest” or “no doubt” (242)

It has become almost a topos in Renaissance criticism to disparage Browne’s ease in favor of Donne’s toughness. Browne’s ease in favor of Donne’s toughness. Browne does not, it is argued, pursue the logical consequences of the paradoxes he sets up, nor does he feel their emotional pull with sufficient sensitivity. [Fish in Self-Consuming Artifacts. A typical comparison of Donne and Browne appears in Gilbert Phelps, “The Prose of Donne and Browne,” in The Pelican Guide to English Literature, Vol. III, ed. Boris Ford, Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1956, 116-30] Let us assess this criticism by examining, first, his failure of intellect. (243)

Now, although the religious person will concede that ultimately he accepts a mystery, he may prefer that philosophical inquiry not resort too quickly to mysterious paradoxy as a solution, in order to preserve the value of logical thought. But Browne recognizes that, if we refuse to allow paradoxy until we have reached a level of abstraction that only the trained theologian is comfortable with, then we will have to reject many of the intuitions about religious truth that enable the ordinary man to make sense of his life. And this Browne does not want to do. His purpose is to argue that we do less harm in accepting what is perhaps philosophically fuzzy paradoxy than in demanding strict logical consistency. (243)

We should recognize too that, if we complain about Browne’s lack of philosophical rigor, we are voicing philosophy’s old quarrel with rhetoric’s condescension to the way the ordinary man takes hold of his experience, and rhetoric, as we know, was at the heart of Christian humanism. (243)

To answer the complaint that Browne is not sufficiently sensitive to the pains of the human condition requires a distinction between public common sense and private lyric serenity. Given his subject, we have to grant Browne the occasional expression of serene faith. But it is harder to grant him those moments when the serenity becomes quite sweet. (243)

But if Browne’s critics are directing their complains not only at his aureate loveliness but also at his cheerful common sense, then I think we have to listen more patiently to the argument implied in his mixture of meditation and epistle. There is an ethical purpose in Browne’s use of the epistle’s wry humor to hold off the sometimes histrionic emotionalism of the confessional meditation, for this emotionalism can keep the soul from recognizing the importance of the public space to its complete flourishing. In acknowledging that man is a social creature who takes pleasure in society and who must use his intelligence to make that society work, if only by being polite, the epistle’s composure checks the absorption in the self that can destroy the commonality. (244)

The self-absorption of the meditation’s emotionalism can also blind the soul to a proper understanding of its relationship to God. A demonstration of one’s anxiety and yet a final affirmation of faith constitute an unseemly attempt to bargain with the Almighty. “Insolent zeales the doe decry good workes and rely onely upon faith, take not away merit: for depending upon the efficacy of their faith, they enforce the condition of God, and in a more sophisticall way doe seeme to challenge Heaven” (I.60). The attempt to prove the intensity of one’s faith is pathetic arrogance: “Surely, that which wee boast of, is not any thing, or at the most, but a remove from nothing” (I.60). Although it is tru that the thought of evil and death can overwhelm us with terror, this terror is an emotion that the meditation should acknowledge, not encourage. To concentrate on the pains of the human situation is to question God’s wisdom in having made our nature what it is and to complain about the way he looks after us. To be happy is a way of being properly thankful. Browne’s unruffled good sense makes it possible for the human spirit to accommodate life’s variety. /

Still, Browne’s version of common sense should not be rated higher than it deserves. Although the Religio is one of many Renaissance attempts to reconcile the values of Christianity with those of classical antiquity, Hooker and Milton are far more profound in addressing the difficulties of that reconciliation. Above all, they speak to the question of man’s responsibility for the commonality in terms of something deeper than manners and a sense of proportion. But in the same way that Browne’s calm cheerfulness has its limitations, so also does Donne’s nervous, self-involved toughness. To be sincere and serious is not enough; one must be sincere and serious about the right things in the right way. Perhaps the best way to distinguish among these various expressions of Christian humanism is to use Pater’s metaphor of a city’s architecture. Hooker and Milton are the “grand public structures” under whose shadow and protections stand the “private houses,” one of which belongs to Browne. [Appreciations] Browne’s ethic of civilized Christian retirement is a form of devotion that makes the society among those houses happy and charitable. (244)

Peter Berek, Plain and Ornate Styles and the Structure of Paradise Lost

Peter Berek, “Plain” and “Ornate” Styles and the Structure of Paradise Lost, PMLA, March 1970, Volume 85, Number 2, pp. 237-246.

…what might in isolation seem like a failure of craft can in the context of the poem as a whole appear a powerful imaginative achievement. This essay will argue that the peculiarly stark and “unpoetic” exposition of doctrine in the opening episodes of Book III give the fit audience of Paradise Lost standards for the use of language indispensable for the proper response to the more immediately attractive parts of the poem. Milton’s choice of the contrast between “plain” and “ornate” styles as a way of making perceptible the difference between perfection and imperfection, innocent and sinfulness, can be explained and, in a sense, “justified” by the sensitivity to rhetorical distinctions the poet could expect from a mid-seventeenth-century audience. If we cannot always find the Father a more attractive speaker than Satan, we can at least understand why Milton might have expected his ideal reader to do so. (237)

In Answerable Style, Arnold Stein wrote of the speeches of the Father, “Language and cadence are as unsensuous as if Milton were writing a model for the Royal Society and attempting to speak purely to the understanding.” [Minneapolis, Minn., 1953, p. 128] Following this lead, Irene Samuel pointed out… The near tonelessness of his first speech at once proves itself the right tone… For the omniscient voice of the omnipotent moral law speaks simply what is. Here is no orator using rhetoric to persuade, … (237)

John M. Major… also briefly surveys the history of anti-rhetorical attitudes—a tradition whose chief figures are Plato, Augustine, Bacon, and seventeenth-century theorists of the sermon. [“Milton’s View of Rhetoric,” SP, LXIV (Oct. 1967), 685-711.] (238)

Jackson I. Cope… Cope’s interest in the changing modes of perceiving and describing the reality that arose in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—an interest in which he largely follows the work of Father Walter J. Ong—distracts him from describing the relatively simple structural patterns by which Milton makes his stylistic changes significant for the ordinary reader. Fish presupposes a reader at once so confused—in that he is unwilling or unable to parse out the plain sense of the poet’s syntax—and so sophisticated—in a later willingness to review the poem again and again as though he were preparing for a Ph. D. examination—that I cannot imagine any seventeenth-century man for whom Paradise Lost was not an assigned text responding in a fashion as complicated as Fish proposes. The demands of so public a genre as epic, and the didactic purposes avowed in the poem itself, surely suggest that if Milton if using stylistic variation as a resource for making clear to his readers the crucial distinctions between perfection and imperfection, innocent and corruption, he will do so in a manner that can be perceived and described without the elaborate machinery provided by Cope and Fish. Even if they are correct in their more complicated claims (I think Cope is and Fish is not), … (238)

Adam and Eve are eloquent, to be sure, but their eloquence is “prompt”—that is, the product of no Ciceronian rule book, no orator’s consideration of the available means of persuasion, but instead an “Unmediated” flowing of language… But one can define more precisely the uses of language that are condemned and those that are praised in Paradise Lost. Satan’s characteristic use of language treats words as entities of an independent value and existence, whose correspondence with the universe of things is a matter for speculation. This technique is most obvious in his manipulation of titles. He begins his exhortation to the not-yet-fallen angels in Book V: /

Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, Powers,
If these magnific Titles yet remain
Not merely titular, since by Decree
Another now hath to himself ingross’t
All Power, and us eclipst under the name
Of King anointed. (v.772-777)
Satan is describing the Father’s proclamation of the Son as King anointed over all the angels… implies that the angels retain a right to certain powers and dignities because of their titles even if the Father should choose to take away these powers and dignities from them. Milton discussed the relationship between title and essence in The Christian Doctrine (Book I, Ch. V) and said the fact that the Son is sometimes called God, or that angels are sometimes referred to as gods in the Bible, in no way demonstrates that they are of the same essence and substance as the single true God. That is to say, powers and attributes, not titles, are what determine a being’s essential nature. But Satan ignores the truth… he is trying to suggest to his audience that the elevation of the Son is a verbal misunderstanding, that if He were called by some name other than “King,” His power would be less, and the angels restored to their former state. (239)

(v.794-797)… Language is being used not to reveal doctrinal truth, but to obscure truth by substituting for the logical appeal of good sense the rhetorical appeal of seductive patterns of sound. In commenting on this speech, T. S. Eliot claimed that it was nearly impossible to attend simultaneously to the paraphrasabel argument and the stirring aural effects. [“A Note on the Verse of John Milton,” Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association, XXI (1936), 32-40] Eliot took this as evidence of Milton’s deplorable dissociation of the music of poetry from its meaning, but the blame, rightly allocated, belongs not to Milton but to Satan. (240)

The sense of passion produced by elaborate tropes and vivid description is exactly what is missing from the speeches of the Father. This is not to say that His speeches are barren of rhetorical devices—rhetoric is, after all, a discipline that describes the ways in which language can be used, and has names for figures that enhance clarity as well as for those that produce confusion. Like Satan and Belial, the Father repeats the same terms over and over in His speech, but the effect of the repetition is never to explore the wide range of possible meanings for ambiguous human language, but instead to insist on the sole relevance of a single, doctrinally correct meaning for each word. (240)

Quintiliam is typical of theoreticians of rhetoric in his admission that the arts of language are needed to persuade the corrupt of the dubious, not the elect of the truth. “Give me philosophers as judges, pack senates and assemblies with philosophers, … The fallen angels, themselves corrupt, are addressing others just as corrupt, and for this reason have need of all the resources of rhetorical eloquence. But god is speaking to His Son, … (241)

As J. B. Broadbent and Jackson I. Cope have pointed out, the style of God’s speeches tends to rely principally on schemes, while those of fallen creatures make more use of tropes. However, the Father’s second speech in Book III is rich in tropes—in metaphors—of a particular kind. …some of the most important and most vivid images in the poem. We see Adam “God-like erect” in Book IV, line 289, and Adam fallen, sprawled upon the ground in Book X, line 850. What looks like a simple metaphor of standing alludes to an prepares us for the most important action of the poem. Metaphor, in fact, turns out to be hardly metaphorical at all; man does indeed stumble on and deeper fall; … (241-242)

The tropes of the speakers in Hell are for the most synechdoches and metonymies used as pejorative periphrases to name God or His Son. But in God’s speech, most of the tropes are metaphors that strike us not simply as inventions of the speaker to make his speech rhetorically effective, but instead as part of the most fundamental fabric of the poem. (242)

It may be objected that the absence of emotional appeal in the Father’s speeches, however sound from the standpoint of doctrine and interesting in terms of Milton’s own ideas, is still a strategic error because the only audience for which a poet can write is one subject to all the failings of fallen men. But in the person of the Son, Milton gives his reader not only a doctrinal mediator between divine justice and human sinfulness, but also a character whose style of speech helps bridge the gap… In a sense, the Son can be considered a figure of speech—a metaphor—by which the Father expresses in a fashion comprehensible to imperfect creatures His own perfection. (242)

When Eve begins the long process of redemption in Book X, she offers a similar self-sacrifice in language clearly intended to remind us of the Son’s. … The reader discovers in the style of Eve’s speech a return to a world where there is no discontinuity between action and language; where the way something is said is an accurate and inevitable reflection of its real nature. (243)

In fact, the portrayal of the characters of Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost recapitulates the pattern of stylistic alteration I have been describing in this essay. In their state of innocence, they are capable of using language not to manipulate the facts of the real world but simply to reveal it. When Eve explains to Adam the extent of her devotion to him, she does so by an elaborate simile that gives the impression of invoking, not just selected facts drawn from nature by a human observer, but the entire order of nature itself. … (IV. 639-656) … Eve fixes upon the loveliness of nature. But she singles out the process of nature, the break of day, rising of the sun, fall of showers, and fall of evening. … Language is used as an imitation of the orderliness of nature. Poetry is in keeping with what is known to be the truth about the way in which God’s creation works. (244)

As Eve begins to quarrel with Adam in Book IX, she changes from a speaker who uses words as counters that correspond exactly to the truths of the universe and begins instead to operate as a definer of terms, a questioner of the relationship between words and truth:
If this be our condition, thus to dwell
In narrow circuit strait’n’d’ by a Foe,
Subtle with like defense, wherever met,
How are we happy, still in fear of harm? (IX.322-326) (244)

In her debates with Satan and within her own mind just before the fall, Eve speculates about the meaning of “good” just as the fallen angels in Pandemonium speculated on the word “worse.” (244)

After the fall, Eve uses a metaphor of a particularly corrupt variety:
…but what if God have seen,
And Death ensue? Then I shall be no more,
And Adam wedded to another Eve,
Shall live with her enjoying, I extinct;
A death to think. (IX. 826-830)
Within one sentence Eve can think of death as the dreaded outcome of man’s disturbing of the order of the cosmos and also as a colloquial metaphorical resource to be used to gain an added touch of rhetorical emphasis. (244)

Like Eve, Adam prefaces his own fall with long passages of complex “reasoning” that play with the definitions of terms, passages that postulate a relationship between language and reality quite different from anything found in his earlier speeches. (244)

I have already indicated how the reconciliation of Adam and Eve with each other and with God takes place in language. … Despite the rhetorical skill of their fallen speeches to each other, they make no attempt to deceive God with elaborate language; Adam speaks like a child caught being naughty, and the Son rebukes him in the tones of a loving, disappointed parent. …Adam urges the language of gesture: prostration, tears, and sighs will speak to God far better than deceiving words: … (245-246)

The plainness of the dialogue in heaven, the “comedy” of the battle in Heaven, the absence of poetic display in Books XI and XII can all be seen as deliberate efforts to force the reader of Paradise Lost to qualify his admiration for effects of verbal virtuosity. Perhaps even the plain style of Paradise Regain’d and Jesus’ rejection of the arts and eloquence of Athens are part of the same pattern. (246)

Jackson I. Cope, Seventeenth Century Quaker Style

Jackson I. Cope, Seventeenth-Century Quaker Style, PMLA, September 1956, Volume LXXI, Number 4, Part 1, pp. 725-754.

The early Quakers, who liked to call themselves the First Publishers of Truth, swept from the north of England across the nations roughly between 1650 and 1675. And during this same quarter century what we have dubiously labeled “plain” style manifestly supplanted the highly-ornate, rhetorical tradition of English prose. (725)

The rise of the new “plain” prose has been attributed to the heightened philosophical interest in skepticism, with its pragmatic theories of action; to the intensified interest in empirical science which centered in the Royal Society; and to the rise of a semi-educated bourgeoisie. But these decades in England’s story were characterized most widely by continuous theological debate and exhortation. So it would seem probable, granting the convergence of several streams of cause, that the peak swell on which the new prose tradition rode to dominance can most intelligibly be traced to an ultimately theological tide. The literature of early Quakerism is of unparalleled value in testing and illustrating this hypothesis because—with the incalculable human distance between George Fox and William Penn—this evangelistic group cut across all social and educational distinctions, even dimmed the dualism in the roles of the sexes. (725)

“For the Lord showed me that though the people of the world have mouths full of deceit…my words should be few and savoury, seasoned with grace; and that I might not eat and drink to make myself wanton but for health…” The confidence of George Fox in this passage from the beginning of the Journal is characteristic; the imagery is not. With their inner ear hearing David’s injunction, “O taste and see that the Lord is good” (Ps. 34:8), many a Puritan enthusiast expressed his realization of a better world as a taste of manna. However, for Fox, although the universe of spirit might smell of heavenly flowers, or might glisten with holy light, spiritual food was no staple of his religious imagery. Invited to look carefully at this passage, then, because of its unexpecteness, one sees that Fox, in “seasoning” his “savoury” speech with grace when his actual practice of eating and drinking is in the front of his mind, is evidencing a tendency to break down the boundary between literalness and metaphor, between conceptions and things. … And it is an illustration in little not only of the most embracing literary characteristic of Fox’s Journal, but of the relationship of language to experience in the early Quaker mind. (726)

In the Journal one finds the distinction between metaphoric and literal expression wholly obliterated on occasion, as in Fox’s description of his first sight of the rugged, thistled Scottish glens and downs: “when first I set my horse’s feet a-top of the Scottish ground I felt the Seed of God to sparkle about me like innumerable sparks of fire, though there is abundance of thick, cloddy earth of hypocrisy and falseness that is a-top, and a briary, brambly nature which is to be burnt up with God’s word” (p. 331) (726)

And this habit of sliding literalness and metaphor inot one another informs the total structure of Fox’s Journal as well as such individual passages. Let us listen for a moment to Bunyan describing a crucial event in his spiritual development: “one day, as I was betwixt Elstow and Bedford the temptation was hot upon me, to try if I had Faith, by doing some Miracle; which Miracle, at that time, was this; I must say to the Puddles that were in the Horse-pads, Be dry; and to the dry places, Be you the puddles…” The passage is typical of Clavinistic spiritual biographies in its immediacy of detail. … Bunyan thus dresses to the life a hundred times. Fox, on the other hand, records much history, but he depicts less… (727)

The physical scene is not England, but the image of his spiritual struggle: “I fasted much, and walked abroad in solitary places many days, and often took my Bible and went and sat in hollow trees and lonesome places till night came on; and frequently in the night walked mournfully about by myself” (p. 9) (728)

Again, it is not that the night is lacking in reality, it is that reality for long stretches of the narrative seems to consist only in Fox, and in the sweep of day and darkness; and that the day and darkness of the journey seem so irresistibly to mirror the spiritual state of Fox, that they become charged with spiritual content even as they alternate over an interminable history. Perhaps this peculiar merging of realism and spiritual symbolism, with the timeless dimension which creates, are most succinctly conveyed by a single brief passage: “from Major Brousfield’s I came to Richard Robinson’s; and as I was passing along the way I asked a man, which was Richard Robinson’s; he asked me from whence I came and I told him, ‘From the Lord’” (p. 106). And perhaps Fox was not entirely unaware of the peculiar effect, for he had said that in the Lord’s day, “all things are seen, visile and invisible, by the divine light of Christ” (. 29). But it was not only Fox’s effect, it was the essential quality of seventeenth-century Quaker expression manifesting itself in several guises. Before looking at these stylistic habits, however, it will be profitable to examine the idea which was even more important to Quaker theology than the Light Within, the conception of the “Name.” (729)

Isaac Penington saw that “the end of words is to bring men to a knowledge of things beyond what words can utter.’ It was an ideal to which Fox attained at least once, an experience he described apocalyptically: “I saw into that which was without end, and things which cannot be uttered, and of the greatness and infiniteness of the love of God, which cannot be expressed by words” (Journal, p. 21). But a few months after his insight into the inexpressible nature of God, Fox saw the obverse of the coin: the perfect expression of God’s nature in the universe. Again it is related in terms of language: “being renewed up into the image of God by Christ Jesus, … I was come up to the state of Adam which he was in before he fell. The creation was opened to me, and it was showed me how all things had their names given them according to their nature and virtue” (p. 27). /
For the Quakers, the root of this conception of language as a key to the essence of proper reality lay in the Johannine Gospel. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. … All things were made by him. … In him was life; and the life was the light of men. … That was the true light, which lighteth every man that cometh into the world… to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name” (John 1: 1-12). No amount of repetition seemed able to dry the spiritual marrow out of these verses for the early Quakers, who adapt them to every circumstance: (729)

The passage clearly shows the important implications of the Johannine prologue for Quaker thought. The “power of the Lord” is perhaps the most insistent single phrase in Fox’s Journal, but here, in company with the “Light”, it is subsumed under the concept of the “Name”—that name which was in the beginning the Word. As Fox proceeds, he brings his rejection of dependence upon Scripture into the net of subordinations to the “Name” by warning that there is no nourishment for protestants in “the Tongues, which makes their Divines, the beginning of which was Babel.” Rather than master the ancient Scriptures with such care, he pleads, “feed upon the Milk of the Word, that was before tongues; and when you are redeemed form Tongues, and see the ceasing of Tongues, and the beginning of Tongues, Babel, … thou must go before Babel and Babylon was… up into the Word Chirst, whose Name is called the Word of God” (pp. 11-12). (730-731)

It was not only Fox, but early Quakers in general who were fascinated by the “Name,” and by the problem of the relation between language and being. (731)

John Crook, fearing lip-service literalism, explains: “we do not belive that the outward letters & syllables are that Name, that are to be bowed to by the outward knee, … but that Name which saves, … the Power of God that then saves, is that Grace that comes from the fullness of Christ the Saviour. And without this vertue, Christ and Jesus are but empty names. …” In sound alone there is no salvation; and yet the process of salvation involves the naming of the Name. (731)

Fox’s fellow warrior Stephen Crisp saw the change coming even in 1666. In An Epistle to Friends Concerning the Present and Succeeding Times, he chides a new and restless liberty. Quakers do not live so carefully as once they had done, and this is an evil; but the really corrosive decline began in language, not morality: “Actions [are] sometimes blameworthy, the Words and Speech again corrupted, and run into the old Channel of the World, like them again, and the pure Language, learned in the Light, in the time of their Poverty and Simplicity, almost lost and forgotten, and so the work of God which he wrought, in a manner laid waste.” (732)

In an era when Puritan and Anglican preachers, when Christian virtuiosi and secular essayists, were proudly boasting that their imaginative heat had been enough stifled to allow them to write a “plain” prose, the Quakers were yet known as the people of plain speech—Fox, indeed, described the whole spirit of Quakerism as being “plain and low as a meadow.” Yet his exhortation to salvation in the “Name,” with its long alternately periodic and additive, repetitive structure, its Scriptural, somewhat exotic vocabulary, does not strike us as “plain” prose in the immediate way that Dryden, Tillotson, or Bunyan, different as they are, appear to write a “plain” style. Still, the passage from Fox is typical of early Quaker style. That it seemed “plain” to Friends is implied in a defense of Quaker language by Thomas Lawson, one of the most learned of the Early Publishers of Truth, when he writes: “[Quaker language] is the only and heavenly Eloquence and Rhetorick… though Plain, Simple, and [though it] be accounted Rude, Clownish and Babbling by the VVorldly VVise.” “Babbling” is the adjective which an unfriendly critic might apply to Fox’s treatment of the “Name”; indeed, Anglican Joseph Glanvill came close when he disgustedly called enthusiastic talk of “closing with Christ, getting into Christ, rolling upon Christ, relying upon Christ” mere “Gibberish.” /

But remembering the Quaker attention to the “Name,” one is prepared to give this aspect of Quaker style a less pejorative and more adequately descriptive term. A critic once made the pregnant suggestion that “Both the corporate and the individual message of Friends has, perhaps, been characterized less by variety than by religion.” This quality is epitomized in what I should like to call the Quakers’ “incantatory” style. Its central characteristic, so clearly displayed in the quotation from Fox, is an incredible repetition, a combining and recombining of a cluster of words and phrases drawn from Scripture. In itself, this repetition is highly reminiscent of the “witty” Anglican sermons made popular by Bishop Andrewes in the age of the first James, and revived self-consciously in some Establishment pulpits after the Restoration. (732-733)

Andrewes has a carefully controlled divisioning and logically-developed examination of the terms he is treating of; it is the method of the philologist turned rhetorician: he anatomizes his terms until he can relate the nerves giving each life, then proceeds to relate them with a variety of modes of rhetorical balance, assonance and other sound patterning. In Fox’s passage, on the other hand, there is no varying of stance, no moving about the object to exhaust all of its facets of meaning; the idea is logically static throughout all of its repetitions. /

Further, and this is not usual in such passages, as Fox breasts forward on the sound waves of his exhortation, he loses sight of the grammatical structure which usually offers even the most strenuously turgid seventeenth-century author assurance of being comprehended. … Fox…a time-conquering stasis of Christian perfection. What had begun as warning, instruction, or exhortation becomes, through the hypnotic utterance of the divine names, a vision of human beatification for the Children of Light. (734)

The incarnation of the “Name” has undercut the progression implicit in a grammar because it has revealed the heart of a world above time. / It has been common to attribute such passages in Fox’s writings to his social and educational deficiencies, a view fathered by William Penn, who apologizes that though Fox’s expression of ideas “might sound uncouth and unfashionable to nice ears,” and that “abruptly and brokenly as sometimes his sentences would fall from him about divine things, it is well known that they were often as texts to many fairer declarations.” But to rebut this inferences that Fox’s “incantatory” passages merely reflect his social status, we need only turn to other early Quakers who joined the Children of Light from a more sophisticated world. Margaret Fell, eventually to be Fox’s wife, was in 1660 the mistress of Swarthmore Hall, the educated daughter of a gentleman, and the wife of a former Parliament member and Assize Judge. … As with Fox, there is no logical progression, but working the word “faith” into a texture of Scripture phrases, Margaret Fell’s grammatical structure progressively disintegrates into shorter and shorter sentence members linked by tenuous, sound-dictated conjunctions, until her final fragmentary quotation turns St. Paul’s logic (Rom. 12:16-20) into mere ejaculation. (734-735)

But the essential aspect of this mode of Quaker expression is not agrammaticism, nor the typical Quaker vocabulary. John Swinton was a converted Scottish Calvinist lawyer who, say contemporaries, “had received as good an education as any man in Scotland,” … Swinton does not abandon grammar, and he uses simple language interspersed with Biblical phrases which are not commonplace in Quaker tracts. He is a man absorbing the Scripture for himself, with a personal eye; but he is learning it in that logically unprogressive, repetitive concentration upon the “word,” which is the central mode of knowing the high moments of spiritual experience for the Quaker. Untypical as are his phrases and form among Quaker tracts in externals, they reflect as clearly as Fox’s writings the epistemology of verbal incantation. / This “incantatory” style is ubiquitous in early Quakerdom. (735-736)

[Note 32: Circumstances which we shall later examine converged to cool the evangelistic optimism which the First Publishers brought to the founding of Quakerism and, as a corollary, to curb the “incantatory” outbursts of the earlier prose. Yet the old mode helped on sometimes when writers of the second generation were “moved” to intense exhortation, and one find occasional vestiges even in such an unlikely author as the courtly William Penn. A passage in his Advice to Children (Everyman ed., pp. 96-97) is the most interesting, because Penn is there writing with a conscious rhetorical structure. Having explained the Light and Spirit logically, he launches into an “incantatory” passage of exhortation, then drops back into an explanation of Grace, after which he again adapts the “incantatory” style to an exhortation to “love the grace.” It is a late example (publ. posthumously 1726, composition date indeterminate) of the style which shows its adaptation to a larger rhetorical pattern. Penn, apparently unaware of the aim of such passages in early Quaker literature and meetings (as his remarks on Fox’s “broken” style indicate), simply utilizes it as a sort of imagination-stirring purple passage which is common in his religious tradition.] (737)

For the seventeenth-century Quaker, as observant of decorum in styles as were his contemporaries, reserves this mode of perception through repetition for those times at which he is exhorting and encouraging fellow saints towards eternity. But he lived in this world, too, and no one sought a place in it more energetically. So that when Peter Hardcastle addresses the secular authorities for toleration and liberty from court oaths, he writes in series of sorites, without an image of the whole; … Margaret Fell, whose “incantatory” style we have sampled, defends women preaching in short paragraphs of short, limpid sentences without resort to metaphor, … (737-8)

But we are not the first to identify the habit of incantation. It seemed the very essence of Quaker style to the subtle and elegant English-born Franciscan apologist John Vincent Canes, who described it without comprehending it in 1661: / ‘The Quaker… books [are] spiritual enough to one of our vulgar readers, unto whose judgement they be well proportioned; for good words are put together there to promote solid and sincere honesty, … But these words are so strangely jumbled together, that every line has good sens in it, but all together none… I have never seen any thing that for the stile and context of the speech doth more nearly resembled Mahomets Alcoran than a good Quakers book, for in both be handsom words, som dreaming conceits interlarded with undeniable truths, … endless tautologies, and no connexion…’ (738)

And it seems probable that Henry More was on the right track in implying a connection between Boehme’s conception of “natural language” and that of the Quakers. Yet the theory, although it explains the “incantatory” style, would not necessarily imply that style as a corollary. Boehme, with a theory of language practically identical, lived in a different world from that of Fox and the First Publishers. His insistence upon the essential language of nature leads him to explicate Genesis by moving even farther away from the Scripture itself, moving out through psychological allegorization into the systematic re-imaging of even that in terms of Paraclesian alchemy. His constant effort is to conceptualize the literal into system. The Quaker understanding of how one reaches the spiritual truths locked in the magic of words, on the other hand, demands an ever closer attention to the words “syllabatim” until one is drawn physically into the special literalness in which alone words can give up their secrets. So it seems improbable that Boehms’s theory of the relation between language and being played any part in developing the form of Quaker “incantatory” style, although it contributed to the motivating conception of essential “names.” (740)

The form itself was likely based to some degree on sheer imitation. The Johannine writings, the Gospel, the Revelation and the Epistle alike, were the very heart of the Scriptures for the seventeenth-century Quaker. (740)

But if John’s epistle was an important source, imitation alone does not account for the omnipresence of the style in early Quaker writings. To understand not only where it originated, but why it was in such constant prominence, we must turn to the wider Puritan context of “spiritual perception” which will explain how a theory influence by Boehme and a style out of the New Testament came to interact. (741)

This Puritan insistence upon the perception of spiritual truths being analogous to and intimately dependent upon physical perception is the tradition which ultimately forms the framework for the Quaker theory of the function of words and their utilization in passages of “incantatory” repetition. Since a word, properly grasped, reveals the essential quality of a datum sub specie aeternitatis, an idea remains static throughout its repetitions, as we have noticed. It cannot be explained by man, but only understood. The Quaker is constantly exhorted to “wait” … (742)

This was, of course, the rationale of the “silent” worship for which Quakers were so notorious. One did not speak out with the voice of human piety, as did the Puritan preacher, but waited until some Friend became the instrument of the Lord, and felt the Light of Christ Within answer to the Light of the Lord’s Day without. When the answer came, it came as an immediate grasp of spiritual reality; and when it was spoken out to the meeting, it was the voice of God which sounded the deeps of divine significance in the words. In the Presbyterian theory the Word of God could become immediate and “saving” only through the words of man. The Quaker theory pressed to the apotheosis: the Word of God spoke its unveiled mysteries immediately to the ears of the saints. But the very fact of the demand for silence until the Spirit moved one implied clearly enough that even the saints who knew the Lord’s Day to be upon them could sometimes be cold and unreceptive. What better stimulus to the whole understanding of mind and heart, then, while it waits upon its awakening to an immediate, God-spoken conception, than an incantation by which the word, the name, which is that conception, permeates the mind and the senses through the echoing and re-echoing voice of God? (742-743)

The Puritans, with their Augustinian heritage, wrote and wrote again the Confessiones in the seventeenth century, climaxing the tradition with Bunyan’s Grace Abounding. Alert to catch the call to their election, and to discipline all of their psychic powers to renewed efforts in response to this call, they searched every detail of their daily life for reflection of their spiritual standing, and recorded much of it in laboriously conscientious diariest, lest any premonitory sign should pass without giving sufficient warning. The spiritual autobiographies, the collections of preachers’ lives, tell of the unceasing self-analysis… The result was a ubiquitous sense of person dominating, and giving its peculiar character to, Puritan religious writing. … /

But there were men of another mind in the seventeenth century, men like John Everard, who could say, “all that thou callest I, all that selfness, all that propriety that thou hast taken to thyself, whatsoever creates in us Iness and selfness, must be brought to nothing.” [Some Gospel Treasures opened (London, 1653), p. 230.] And it was among these saints that the Quakers moved at ease. For what was the individual in oneself but an accident and a tool, a thing to be used only for its own annihilation in that glorious moment when the Inner Light of Christ broke forth the same in every man, to blend with the blazing truth of the Day of the Lord? (743)

Therefore, when the Quaker records his long travel from Babylon to Bethel he exhibits none of the Calvinist Puritan’s minutely-details psychological percipience, none of his circumstantial narrative framework of names and dates and scenes, none of his careful recording of Scripture verse and chapter for each meditation. … Stephen Crisp… What first strikes one is that Crisp conveys almost nothing personal or even concrete in trying to tell his own history—a history which, as the mention of perils and travels and spiritual struggle suggest, must have been stirring. There is only the vaguest localization in the “North or England.” The personality of the spiritual adventurer is suppressed under the consistent passivity: he was “drawn out” to make his journey, “the Vertue of Life” sprang up within him. And other personalities are made even more thoroughly passive ornaments of the Lord as “tender Plants of my Heavenly Father,” as the “Garden of God.” By insisting upon the spiritual experience, Crisp almost denies existence to the physical experience, reducing it to the one clause, “and my Love and Tenderness of Heart towards them, made all Travel and Labour, the Perils easie,” which acknowledges the activities of the traveler only that they can be simultaneously subordinated to the activities of the spirit working without him. But perhaps most suggestive of all, we cannot judge even roughly how long the experience took, … (744)

In the Quaker records, on the other hand, personal histories are made so vague that they seem almost to lose reality. [For general discussion of Quaker spiritual lives see Wright, Literary Life of Early Friends, pp. 155-198; Howard H. Brinton, “Stages in Spiritual Development as Recorded in Quaker Journals,” in Children of Light, ed. Brinton (New York, 1938), pp. 381-406; Owen Watkins, “Quaker Spiritual Biographies,” JFHS, XLV (1953). Both Wright (p. 158) and Brinton (p. 384) insist upon the “dual characteristic of the writers’ motives, merging with those of the group” (Wright). (745)

Fox’s Journal was earlier characterized as a vast symbol of his spiritual mission, in which the figures of people and the sight of places are lost and merged. And yet, since Fox’s intention was largely to preserve the actual history of Quaker origins, it is tru also that the Journal embraces a considerably greater amount of historical detail than is usual in Quaker accounts. A typical passage, I believe, can reconcile the descriptions: /
‘And as I traveled through markets, fairs, and diverse places, I saw death and darkness in all people, where the power of the Lord God had not shaken them. And as I was passing on in Leicestershire I came to Twycross, where there were excise-men, and I was moved of the Lord to go to them and warn them to take heed of oppressing the poor, and people were much afflicted with it. Now there was in that town a great man, that had long lain sick and was given over by the physicians; and some Friends in the town desired me to go to see him. And I went up to him and was moved to pray by him; spoke to him in his bed, and the power of the Lord entered him that he was loving and tender.’ (p.49) (745-746)

Let us look now at the continuation of the letter Richard Sale wrote to Fox. If the lion’s roaring was metaphoric, what follows is all too literal: “But those that did stand afar off me, I was made to hold up my left hand over the multitude, and to show them their figure. For I was made by thy command to take a leathern girdle, and to bid the sackcloth to my loins, and to take some sweet flower in my left hand, and ashes strowed upon my head, bare footed and bare legged, which did astonish all that were out of the life.” Even the literally reported is—as in Fox’s implied healing of the “great man”—scriptura rediviva. [Sale here demonstrates one of the most notorious Quaker practices by which Scripture was made to live anew in a naïve sense. Going in sackcloth and ashes, carrying candles at midday, walking naked in the streets were common behavior among Quakers who wished to give “sign” warning to the “world’s” people. It embraced both sexes and all classes—even Robert Barclay once felt called upon so to humiliate himself. (746)

Indeed, all man’s spiritual experience can only be a continuous reiteration of what has gone before, and before the temporal point of view. So when Fox says of a “false accuser,” “I called him Judas,… told him again that he was Juda and that it was the word of the Lord and of Christ to him, and Judas’s end should be his … [and] this Judas went away and hanged himself shortly,” it is not that there are certain analogies to be observed between the accuser and the Scriptual betrayer, but that the man’s experience is Judas’ experience, just as the Christ Within makes Fox able to say so bluntly of his own prophecy, “it was the word of the Lord and of Christ to him.” … As Quakerdom passed on into the third quarter of the seventeenth century, this mode of viewing life as scriptura rediviva, like the “incantatory” style, withered and disappeared. (749)

Much commoner in all later-century Quaker writing, is a self-conscious analogizing through Scripture imagery which sounds only a faint echo of the immediacy of the same phrases on the tongues of the early Publishers of Truth. Robert Barclay is typical when he writes in the Apology: “For in our Day, God hath raised up Witnesses for himself, as he did Fisher-men of old; … And Barclay’s theory of the usefulness of Scriptural history corresponds to his diluted imagery: “herein we should, as in a Looking-Glass, see the Conditions and Experiences of the Saints of old; that finding our Experience answer to theirs, we might therein be the more confirmed and comforted and our Hope strengthened of obtaining the same end” (p.84). The eternal epic of mankind, spoken by God and re-enacted by his saints forever, had dwindled to a speculum mentis for fallen man. (749-750)

The cause of this decline in spiritual ardency and expressive vigor lay in the theological and social history of the Society. The evangelizing energy of the First Publishers had put them rapidly in “the vanguard of the enthusiastic movement” which was climbing mercurially to its peak in the Commonwealth England of the forties and fifties. … Having built to a membership of forty thousand within a dozen or so years of their beginnings [Braithwaite, Beginnings of Quakerism, p. 512]… 1659. Sir Henry Vane and other Army partisans in that year of confusion petitioned the Quakers to submit lists of dependable local commissioners, justices, and other officers, and even to themselves participate in government directly (one symptom being the offer of a colonelcy to Fox). Fox, to whom the Quaker meeting naturally turned for decision, wrestled in his soul for ten weeks, then rejected the proposals. The opportunity was past. And the aggressive, surging evangelism rising from the same sense of an immediate inward millennium that fostered the stylistic traits of early Quakerism had laid its own boundaries. (750)

…within a dozen years more than half of those who had seen with the eyes of their own souls the first brilliance of the new Day of the Lord were gone. And the new generation of leaders had been bron into a world immeasurably different form that of the dying First Publishers. It was the Restoration world of Penn, a world of “reasonable” temper whose aim was clarity and polish, whose hobby was natural science, and whose chief fear and detestation was the enthusiasm which had been the badge of prophecy to the early Quakers. From this later viewpoint it was as the Anglican critic Charles Leslie said: “the Ingenious Mr: Penn has of late refin’d some of their gross Notions,… has made them speak Sense and English, of both which George Fox (their first and Great Apostle) was totally Ignorant” (750-751)

Fox was no Calvinist. Optimistic in his conception of man, he assumed the human will to be free to choose or to reject God, and he envisaged the possibility of salvation for every man. And yet, as has been recently demonstrated, there was an undercurrent of Calvinism even in Fox. … This undercurrent obviously contains the germ of an attitude which could temper the evangelical optimism that drove Fox and his followers tirelessly over England, across America, to Turkey, into Rome itself. (751)

And like later Calvinism, Barclay sought assurance of election in tangible works… The anti-evangelical force of this rising Calvinism within the Society, merging with the natural anti-enthusiasm of men like Penn, was the ideational cause for the disappearance of the vivid stylistic traits we have seen in the earlier prose of Quakerism. Bu the new ideas and ideals culminated in a single act which greatly hastened the total change in character which distinguishes Quaker writing of the middle from that at the end of the century. This was the establishment of the Second-Day’s Morning Meeting in 1673. … It was soon apparent that the leaders were determined to stamp out everything which smacked of “enthusiasm”: there are numerous records of their rejections and wholesale alterations of manuscripts. Ellwood’s version of Fox’s Journal—an editorial task assigned by the Morning Meeting—bears faint resemblance to the manuscript version made at Fox’s dictation, and Fox’s whole corpus was minutely smoothed out, theologically and stylistically, for republishing. (753)

The Meeting particularly repressed Jeremiads (in which the “incantatory” style had been so prominent), apocalyptic papers, and anything chaotic in expression (as certainly the “incantatory” style must have seemed to a later generation). The age of plainness had come, and Quaker style henceforth was to be distinguished only by a few pathetic anachronisms of diction. And when the Morning Meeting listened to the ancient voices of the First Publishers of Truth, they heard only an “abrupt and broken” uncouthness where once God had spoken, and strong hearts had quaked in the glory of the sound. (754)