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Unknowing Fanaticism: Reformation Literatures of Self-Annihilation PDF

241 Pages·2019·4.312 MB·English
by  LernerRoss
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Unknowing Fanat i cism Unknowing Fanat i cism Reformation Lit er a tures of Self- Annihilation Ross Lerner fordham university press New York 2019 Fordham University Press gratefully acknowledges financial assistance and support provided for the publication of this book by the Louis and Hermione Brown Humanities Support Fund, Occidental College. Copyright © 2019 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means— electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other— except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the per sis tence or accuracy of URLs for external or third- party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or w ill remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Visit us online at www . fordhampress . com. Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data available online at https:// catalog . loc . gov. Printed in the United States of Amer i ca 21 20 19 5 4 3 2 1 First edition contents Introduction. Receiving Divine Action: Fanat i cism and Form in the Reformation 1 1. Allegorical Fanat i cism: Spenser’s Organs 31 2. Lyric Fanat i cism: Donne’s Annihilation 59 3. Readerly Fanat i cism: Hobbes’s Outworks 83 4. Tragic Fanat i cism: Milton’s Motions 114 Acknowl edgments 145 Notes 149 Bibliography 207 Index 227 Introduction Receiving Divine Action: Fanat i cism and Form in the Reformation Still, I’ve stood, a soldier listening for the word, Attack, a prophet praying any ember be spoken Through me in this desert full of fugitives. Now, I have a voice. Entered, I am lit. — jericho brown, “The Burning Bush” If acts of religious fanat i cism suggest a certain immediacy, supposedly having a direct origin in God’s w ill, they nonetheless circulate mediately, often as story or song. I begin with one such story, paraphrased from verse. Imagine a holy warrior who undertakes a spectacular act of religious vio lence, what turns out to be a suicide mission in an apocalyptic confron- tation. Whether he knew in advance that the battle would cost him his life is unclear. Yet in order to underwrite his mission for holiness and lay the groundwork for a new sacred nation, this soldier of God tries and fails to destroy his enemy, dying twice in his attempt. Miraculously, he is res- urrected a fter each death. Killed but made new by divine force, he de- stroys his e nemy in the end. Returning from his mission, this resurrected and triumphant warrior meets another fighter for truth and his teacher, both of whom are begin- ning a related mission. The teacher of the second warrior recounts how the suicide attacker’s sacrificial vio lence has made him famous throughout the cosmos. You have achieved something absolutely glorious, the instructor says. The warrior retorts: I did not do anything. The achievement and the glory are not mine— both are God’s alone. God made me into an empty 1 2 Introduction: Receiving Divine Action organ of his might and acted through me, and that is the only reason our enemy was destroyed. Annihilated, I became an instrument for God’s di- vine vio lence. This might sound like a parable taught at what in mainstream Western media are often called terrorist training camps, far afield from the canon of Eu ro pean Re nais sance lit er a ture. In fact, this story is my simplified de- scription of an episode from Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596), one that unfolds across the eleventh canto of the poem’s first book and the beginning of its second book. Redcrosse, the knight of holiness, is the one who dies twice and is miraculously reborn in an apocalyptic battle with a dragon, living on as Saint George, patron saint of England. It is the Palmer, guide to Guyon, the knight of temperance, who has to deal with Redcrosse’s claim to divine possession. The Palmer strug gles to know what to do with Redcrosse’s correction, which suggests that even the knight of holiness could not achieve victory as a willing agent. Readers strug gle with this moment, too, and typically sidestep its refusal to resolve which ver- sion of history the poem authorizes: the Palmer’s narrative of heroic achievement and willful action or Redcrosse’s chronicle of self- annihilation and divine instrumentality. How do we know w hether Redcrosse became what he calls “the organ of [God’s] might” (2.1.33)?1 How can Redcrosse narrate his transformation to us if he claims to have been a passive vessel at the moment the dragon was defeated? How can Spenser compose his allegorical poem in such a way that makes Redcrosse’s self- annihilating vio- lence into a didactic lesson about holiness and the sacred foundations of the En glish nation? This book w ill attend to the poetic and po liti cal prob lems that fanat i- cism inspires, with a par tic u lar emphasis on how moments such as this one—in which poems meditate on the vexed relationship between divine vio lence and human agency— participate in or resist Reformation polem- ics about religious fanat i cism. In order to frame this book’s larger ques- tion about the relationship between fanat i cism and form, Chapter 1 will offer an extended analy sis of the disagreement about Redcrosse’s status as an organ in The Faerie Queene and the tremors it sends through the poem’s larger allegorical design. Though Spenser’s poem is uniquely inclined to pres ent scenes in which characters find themselves unable to interpret a prob lem that the poem itself created, this scene is not exceptional. Depic- tions of religious vio lence and uncertain witness such as this one prolifer- ate in Re nais sance poetry, but we have only developed confused ideas about the difficulty such scenes pose to verse- making and reading, not to men- tion to politics and ethics. Fanat i cism and Form in the Reformation 3 This is in part because dominant perceptions of religious fanat i cism today tend to be as polemical and reductive as they were in the early mod- ern period. We live in a world in which Reformation condemnations of fanat i cism, usually meant to justify state vio lence, live on in systemic strat- egies of racialized neo co lo nial brutality that rely on terms such as “terrorist” and “fundamentalist” to vindicate war, indefinite detention, torture, mur- der, dispossession, and economic immiseration—in short, to make many lives, especially in the so-called Greater Middle East, “ungrievable.”2 Scholarship has not been innocent in this regard. Con temporary scholars within and beyond literary studies tend to share with early modern phi- los o phers and theologians a reductive sense of fanat i cism as the incarna- tion of religion devoid of reason, the antitype of modernity.3 Influenced by a long history of polemics against fanat i cism, t hese scholars typically seek to disenchant or to condemn the fanatics’ claims that they do God’s will or that God works through them, whether in fictional or nonfictional accounts of fanatical vio lence. Yet doing so misreads the complex ways in which early modern religious forms interacted with and shaped the emer- gence of modernity. Rejecting the simplified binary of fanatical religion and rational politics, this book demonstrates that fanat i cism was integral to how modern politics and poetics developed. Poets such as Edmund Spenser, John Donne, and John Milton recognized in fanatics’ claims to divine agency an epistemological and repre sen ta tional crisis—an inca- pacity to know and depict the true origins of sacred vio lence. Yet this cri- sis was a productive one. It led t hese writers to experiment with poetic techniques that would allow them to address fanat i cism’s tendency to un- settle the bound aries between h uman w ill and divine agency and between individual and collective bodies. Because “fanat i cism” is a mobile term that has been produced through a history of polemic, it is difficult to use it with precision, both in the Ref- ormation and t oday. Much of this Introduction attempts to offer a his- torically textured description of fanat i cism as the concept took shape in the Reformation, but an initial definition may be useful. Throughout the Reformation, “fanat i cism” evoked the idea of individuals who, through a pro cess of mystical self- annihilation, became vessels filled with God’s vio- lent action, negating “the distinction,” to recall Ralph Cudworth’s phrase, “betwixt God and the creature.”4 (From Luther’s early fascination with negative theology to George Herbert’s poetic meditations on what Stanley Fish calls “letting go” of self, t here are theologies and lit er a tures of self- annihilation that have no direct relationship to vio lence in the world; these are not the focus of this book.)5 Several figures will emerge over the course

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