Part IV
9
Subha Mukherji
I.
If you should dip your hand in,
Your wrist would ache immediately,
…
If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold, hard mouth
of the world…1
Elizabeth Bishop, in her secular twentieth-century poem, captures the feel of knowledge in sharply sensory terms, by way of an analogy with the water at the fishhouses. Bishop is, however, channelling a far earlier descriptive tradition: the pre-history of sensuous perception and portrayal of knowing has featured persistently, if slipperily, in religious epistemologies. In early modern England, sceptical mistrust of the senses was a commonplace, as were religious warnings against their limits: as Richard Smith put it, ‘the senses… oft do deceave’.2 Yet, literary perceptions of the divine are arrived at, again and again, through the senses. Sensible tokens were, of course, valued in legal practice, despite a theoretical preference for probabilistic reasoning. The sensory spiritual register of imaginative literature, however, manifests a vexed, often antagonistic, relation to evidence, unmooring the senses from their usual demonstrative domains. Their role in such literature suggests a distinct understanding of the relation between knowledge and belief. Moments that have seemed confused or puzzling in their mixing of evidentiary and religious languages illuminate an interdisciplinary transaction of ideas, if we know how to read their apparent strangeness. Early modern culture was juggling Reformation theology, with its stress on sola fide, alongside a complex sensory inheritance deriving from late medieval liturgical practices, and Aristotelian and Galenic affective physiology. Added to this was a vocabulary of spiritual perception that went back to the early Church fathers (notably Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, and Augustine), and which was systematised in medieval theology. This pre-modern history of sensing the sacred feeds into the early modern in its literary manifestations, where it joins a classical legacy as well as a secular aesthetic imagination to form something too hybrid to have been recognised as a transformed theological percept. In their pioneering book The Spiritual Senses, Paul Gavrilyuk and Sarah Coakley suggest that ‘the spiritual senses tradition was to undergo [an] eclipse’ in early modernity.3 While I address a more diffuse spectrum of sensory-spiritual texture in the writing of the time than the ‘spiritual sense tradition’ technically suggests, the history they chart might look different, and the gaps they spot might look like diversions, if we let in the testimony of literature. To the list of disciplines they invite to extend research on the relation between Western spirituality and the senses – ‘cognitive science, comparative religion, systematic theology, spiritual anthropology and philosophy of religion’4 – I propose that we need to add literary, including theatrical, production.
The first of my main examples will be the climax of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, where Leontes arrives at his assent to an improbable resurrection through touch, and through an imagining of the moment of recognition as an act of magic ‘lawful as eating’.5 That it is not a play directly about religion is germane to my argument, for I suggest that the more elusive narratives of the sensory sacred in early modern literature are to be looked for in explorations of the numinous, rather than solely of the divine or theological in a straight-forward sense. I use the term ‘numinous’ to mean textual moments, processes, or components that go beyond reference, to actually evoke the presence of the invisible and the immanent in the visible, material world. I build on Rudolph Otto’s originary definition of the term as an experience of ‘mysterium tremendum’, to examine equivalent early modern spiritual affects as captured in literature. In Otto’s conception, the numinous was a combination of three main components: wonder inspired by an absolute otherness from the ordinary, overwhelming awe, and speech-defying grace.6 It is the numinous that suffuses the ending of The Winter’s Tale, as it also does beatific moments in several other Shakespearean plays, sometimes where you least expect it, as in my second example: Bottom’s account of his dream in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Mainstream Reformist thought posited a duality between the perceptual clarity of the elect and the fogginess of the reprobate or the base, when it comes to physical sensations. As the hugely influential Cambridge Puritan preacher, William Perkins, explicates in his commentary on the first five chapters of the Epistle to the Galatians, sensible religious signs were only valuable in so far as they were components of a process of logical persuasion and judgement, and that too, only in application to the elect. The language of the spiritual senses – inward sensations corresponding (but superior) to physical ones – was co-opted into this polarity: it was for the elect alone that the Holy Ghost could ‘clear the eies of the mind’.7 Both the dramatic episodes I focus on are among literary works which collapse or even reverse such hierarchies. Often, these inversions are effected by probing the duality inherent in the language of the spiritual senses. Perkins’s phrase, ‘eies of the mind’, is typical of articulations of spiritual sensation, consisting of the coupling of a physical sense with a spiritual, abstract referent (and sometimes, the mixing of disparate physical senses). Remember Augustine’s famous lament that we have lost our palatum cordis – the palate of the heart; or his prayer to the Lord at the opening of Confessions to ‘see the ears of [his] heart [aures cordis] … [and] open them…’.8 Significantly, the ‘heart’, while it is a spiritual reference here, suggesting affect, also has a corporeal reality and application, which further confounds the basic dichotomy of physical and abstract. This language represents an attempt to find a register for a sensory experience that is extraordinary, in keeping with its object. The disorientation caused by the coupling of physical organs and mental functions is part of that estrangement.
II.
I want to start with a text that is directly about the sacred, as a point of departure: George Herbert’s poem, ‘Prayer 1’:
Prayer the Churches banquet, Angels age,
Gods breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth;
Engine against th’ Almightie, sinners towre,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six-daies world transposing in an houre,
A kinde of tune, which all things heare and fear;
Softnesse, and peace, and joy, and love, and blisse,
Exalted Manna, gladnesse of the best,
Heaven in ordinarie, man well drest,
The Milkie way, the bird of Paradise,
Church-bels beyond the starres heard, the souls bloud,
The land of spices; something understood.9
While phrases such as ‘soul’s blood’ or ‘the soul in paraphrase’ resonate faintly with the language of the spiritual senses, the very arrangement or collocatio of the poem creates a striking sensory impact – a rush of ascending aural darts forming a missive probing at once God’s ear and the reader’s. But the content has its own sensory dimension too. The poem is structured around the figure of ‘systrophe’, a piling up of definitions without getting to the core; a chain of asyndetically juxtaposed, vividly sensuous metaphors that translate a given term of reference – in this case, prayer. As Henry Peacham writes in his popular rhetorical manual, The Garden of Eloquence (1577), ‘systrophe’ or ‘conglobatio’ of definitions is ‘when we bring in diffinityons of one thing, yet not of such defynitions as doe declare the pith of the matter, but others of another kynde all heaped together, which doe amplifye most pleasauntly…’.10 The definitions in Herbert’s systrophe are a succession of vividly sensory images and metaphors for prayer, which make way for the adequate register the poem finds at last in the plain, unmetaphorical ‘something understood’. In a sense it enacts what Herbert’s near contemporary Richard Crashaw calls ‘Types [yielding] to Truths’ (Lauda Sion Salvatorem. The Hymn of the Blessed Sacrament’);11 a shift that registers a transition from physically perceptible sensations (as implicit analogies) to an inner sense, almost an intuition; from created things to the creator himself. This journey is Augustinian: the bodily senses are conceived by Augustine as points of entry – fores (doors) and nuntii (messengers) – leading to a path back across our sensory exile and dysfunction to the sensus interiores we have lost.12 Crashaw, while denigrating ‘poor sense’ in ‘Adoro Te: The Hymn of St Thomas’ (1648), addressed to the undisciplined doubter, allows the senses the function of doorkeeper:
Nor touch nor tast must look for more
But each sitt still in his own Dore.13
Like his unnamed friend’s preface to his The Steps to the Temple (1646), Crashaw’s poems, offered in the wake of his nightly prayers, are likened to ‘Stepps for happy Souls to climbe heaven by’. The metaphor of doors goes back to the classical elegy of desire, paraklausithyron or ‘lament by a door’, as well as to the wandering knight of medieval romance, seeking entrance at his lady’s gate. But this language of longing is harnessed by Crashaw to the idea of Christ’s wounds as our doors to heaven, most eloquently expressed in St Bernard’s homilies on the Song of Songs, intimating a world of reference that was accessible to his readership.14
While doors, windows, and porches structure the sequence of Herbert’s Temple, in ‘Prayer 1’ these sensory thresholds are mobilised as stages of a process which leads the devotee to the place where, finally, he can achieve cognitive clarity and dispense with the structural code of repeated, serial analogy through which we struggle to inadequately express the inexpressible; to the end of the soul’s need to paraphrase. Yet the last, unadorned phrase of ‘Prayer 1’ is also, in rhetorical terms, the conclusio – the logical end of the systrophe. Could it have been reached without the energetically spiralling sensible images that try to divine the meaning, and experience, of prayer? Is it not, in some senses, an apprehension that accommodates all the meanings conveyed by the attempted definitions, and then, from that platform, makes an intuitive leap?
The poem not only attempts a definition of prayer, but enacts it too. In doing so, it performs and invites a reading process that is the necessary route to understanding. The soul that is ‘in’ paraphrase is not only the object of paraphrase but a subject in the act of paraphrasing, vivid and present as the spear that is in the act of ‘piercing’ Christ’s side, eliciting Eucharistic grace and opening up a sensory portal not unlike the corporeal doors of Augustine’s human vessel, or – especially – the salvific wounds of St Bernard’s Christ. Likewise, the plummet that is ‘sounding’ heaven and earth, and even the ‘transposing’ that happens ceaselessly and repeatedly in an hour of prayer, are functions of an ongoing activity that finds its material, in the world and on the page, in sensory forms. The aural symmetry of ‘soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage’ reinforces the equivalence between paraphrasis and journey. Herbert’s paraphrase is for, and on behalf of, his fallen readers; but in as much as the poem embodies prayer, paraphrase is also what makes the soul audible to God. It is what bridges the gap between human chatter and the silence of God; and like the elegy of desire, it acts as the medium of longing, of the instinct towards communion.
The affective function of paraphrasis is co-joined by a doctrinal idea: the implication that the poem is mimetic of the reading process that God initiates in the world. Herbert’s ‘The Windows’ throws light on this, for there, God himself is the ultimate image-maker: ‘thou dost anneal in glass thy story’.15 The ultimate artist, God figures forth his story in the glass that is his preacher and poet. This is not only a reclaiming of the value of stained glass windows that depicted the story of the Bible (just as, elsewhere, Herbert reclaims the prayer-book and liturgy denounced by Puritans like Richard Baxter and John Bunyan). It is, at the same time, a pointer to yet another reader-relation: just as Herbert tries to read God (or prayer), explicating the sense through signs, we need to interpret Herbert’s poetry as it records the process towards discovery, and figures the hermeneutic field that fallen man must plough before arriving at the place of holiness. ‘Thy word is all, if we could spell’, Herbert writes in ‘The Flower’.16 To ‘spell’ connotes literacy at two levels: not only writing but also reading. In reformed thought, we are inheritors of a certain illiteracy by virtue of being human. But it is not enough, therefore, to give up. The act of interpretation itself becomes a necessary process, just as signification is a function of the fallen world.
This is where Augustine’s theory of signs finds a straight route into Herbert.17 Augustine said that God indicates his presence through sensible signs, as man needs to travel the path from obscurity to understanding, in proportion to what he has lost through the Fall. The created world is a semiotic of divine metaphors in which the Creator is manifest, but needs to be read right. The implicit analogy makes ‘discovery’ a more actively engaged process than the apparently passive grace of revelation suggested in the ‘Jordan’ poems, or in ‘Love Unknown’, where ‘discovery’ is defined pointedly as uncovering, as opposed to invention: ‘Lord, in thee,/The beauty lies in discovery’.18 It also complicates the seeming redundance of sensory apprehension suggested by the suddenly achieved post-figurative simplicity of ‘something understood’ after the aural climax of ‘church-bells beyond the stars heard’. This ineradicability of the material sign blends easily into Christian theology which is based on a figuring forth – the poetics of the incarnation. So, Herbert’s own figurations are as legitimate as our hermeneutic effort is necessary, if only to realise that the truth both is, and is not, the fruit of these labours. There is pleasure in the reading of sensible signs accretively; but it is also a required discipline. The material, audible, metaphorical, and visualisable content provided by paraphrase, then, is the substance and medium of ‘Prayer 1’. Roger Ascham’s section on paraphrasis in The Scholemaster is tellingly paradoxical: it addresses the potential for this mode of translation or imitation to become a form of ‘chopping and changing the best to worse’, but goes on to admit of the possibility of ‘an other kinde of Paraphrasis, to turne rude and barbarous into proper and eloquent’, and concludes that it is an exercise best left to the absolute masters.19 It is at once a potential mark of expressive excellence and of inadequate groping prior to complete grasp, trying to capture the supreme in terms that are necessarily inferior.20 ‘Something understood’ is, and is not, the sum of all the rest; both an epiphany and an anti-climax.
Even when Herbert abjures the senses in Jordan II – a poem that explicitly rejects secular poetics – the textile energy of his poem takes life from his weaving himself into the sense, just the activity he ostensibly critiques in his earlier, erroneous poetic practice:
As flames do work and winde, when they ascend,
So did I weave my self into the sense.21
When Herbert follows Augustine in Denial to chart his spiritual (and hence poetic) recovery through grace, the healing harmony, correcting and redirecting his sensory dysfunction, is nevertheless heard – and ‘[relished]’ by the ‘[verser]’– in a final rhyme that rings in the corporeal ear:
That so thy favours granting my request,
They and my mind may chime
And mend my rhyme.22
Even in sacred poetry that has a telos, there is a pull against the deprioritisation – or mere instrumentalisation – of the physical senses.
III.
An even less linear trajectory is worked out in drama. Take the recognition scene of The Winter’s Tale.23 Literary recognition scenes in the Renaissance have been seen as going back to their roots in Greek romance, drama, and Aristotle; but they are also mediated by the foundational moments of recognition and uncertainty in the Christian narrative. These moments bring together knowledge – gnosis being the Greek root for the generic term ‘anagnorisis’ – and incredulity about seemingly impossible truths. The originary Christian empiricist, doubting Thomas, was cured of his mistrust of the Resurrection when he was invited to put his finger into Christ’s wound. But Jesus said to him, ‘Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe’ (John 20:29). This ability to believe against the evidence, or in excess of the proof, is a distinct definition of faith in religious discourse. For Aquinas, for instance, faith was defined by absolute assent in the face of inadequate proof.24
The Reformation sharpened these long-standing theological debates on proof and certainty. In his sermon on certainty, Richard Hooker, Anglican priest and theologian, negotiates the central paradox of Protestantism – that justifying faith has to be assured, yet is inevitably mingled with doubt – by distinguishing between ‘certainty of evidence’, based on sensible things, and the superior ‘certainty of adherence’.25 The latter is activated ‘when the hart doth cleaue and sticke vnto that which it doth beleeue… against all reason of believing’.26 In this theological tradition, faith is predicated precisely on a gap between evidence (literally, what is visible) and the belief that it engenders.
This gap offers a productive space for the poetics of improbability. The Winter’s Tale – going live more or less contemporaneously with the printing of Hooker’s sermon – builds up its trial scene towards a piece of supernatural evidence that will resolve all uncertainties: the verdict of Apollo’s oracle.27 But when it vindicates his wife, Leontes declares, ‘There is no truth at all i’th’oracle. The sessions shall proceed’ (3.2.140–41).Suspicion hardens into conviction and overtakes the original purpose of truth-finding. And yet, in the reason-robbed Leontes, it comes paradoxically, perilously close to the rationalist legal impulse that, from 1215 onwards, steadily outmoded the older form of trial by divine proof.28 The presumption of the rationality of suspicion – the new orthodoxy by the Jacobean period – is what Hermione’s trial puts on the dock.
Against Leontes’s perverse dismissal of absolute evidence, Shakespeare counterpoints another pivotal moment of dramatic reversal where belief, instead of disbelief, is induced: but it is equally at odds with probability and proof. Paulina exhorts, before presenting and animating Hermione’s supposed statue after sixteen years: ‘It is requir’d / You do awake your faith’ (5.3.94–95). To be the beneficiary of that unlikely, impending miracle, Leontes needs an absolute leap of faith, having failed in (what natural theologians would call) moral certainty. His apparent irrationality is to be corrected not by rationalist certainty, but by a training in believing against proof, a surrender to the possibility of grace that accommodates uncertainty and inexplicability. The replacement of legal epistemology here tunes into a contemporary understanding of the psychology of belief – anticipating the distinction between persuasion and faith that Thomas Browne was to formulate, later, in discussing Christ’s resurrection:
I desire to exercise my faith in the difficultest point; for to credit ordinary and visible objects is not faith, but persuasion. … ’Tis an easy and necessary belief, to credit what our eye and sense hath examined.29
What the final scene of The Winter’s Tale demands is nothing short of the acceptance of an incredible resurrection, both from Leontes and his court, and from the audience. The disproportion that is the ingredient of faith is the counterpart of what Terence Cave calls the ‘scandal’ of recognition in dramatic plots, where momentous knowledge often turns on inadequate sensory proofs, and ‘a deal of wonder’ breaks out from perfunctory antecedents.30
Yet the play itself uses Hermione’s statue – potentially unlawful also because it is false – as a kind of entechnic evidence to manage belief, at the same time as it challenges and elicits a submission premised on a lack of proof. This paradox evokes the central legend of doubt and belief in the Western tradition. In his gripping exploration of the story of St Thomas, Glenn Most demonstrates that John’s gospel – by far the fullest and the most narratologically sophisticated – makes it clear that though Thomas asked for material proof, there is no basis for thinking that he was given any.31 When he was told by the other disciples that they had ‘seen the Lord’ (20:25), he replied, unforgettably, ‘Unless I see in his hands the print of the nails, and place my finger in the mark of the nails, and place my hand in his side, I will not believe’ (20:25). Implicit in this story is a hierarchy of proofs. While we have seen Browne denigrating the belief that is based on the sight of Christ or his miracles, Thomas not only demanded to see the nail-marks but went on to demand to touch, indeed, to invade Christ’s wounds with his fingers. This second stage Glenn Most calls the stage of ‘hyperbolic doubt’, as distinct from conventional doubt which requires the evidence of the eyes.32 The violent and sceptical passion of Thomas’s stance has so mesmerised the cultural and aesthetic imagination of ages to follow that we have almost forgotten that when Jesus said to Thomas, ‘Put your finger here, and see my hands; and put out your hand, and place it in my side’ (20:27), that offer, and promise, of touch, seems to have been enough to elicit Thomas’s answer, ‘My Lord and my God!’ (20:28).33 It is a narrative that evokes the temptation to crave tactile proof as further confirmation of visual proof, at the same time as it shows that complete submission transcends that temptation. It is a parable at once of scepticism and faith. That touch is inaudible and implicit at this crucial moment – deliberately leaving Christ’s materiality open – is suggestive of the link between the unspoken and the unspeakable.
The optical illusion of the statue offered by The Winter’s Tale as a healing instrument signifies the play’s accommodation of the Biblical narrative to the limits of human faith and trust. But from Leontes’s assent to Paulina’s call for her audience to awake their faith before her act of revival – ‘Proceed; / No foot shall stir’ (5.3.97–98) – there is a gentle transition to his grateful acceptance of the gift of touch as Hermione descends from her pedestal: ‘O, she’s warm’ (109). This passage enacts the promised sequence that is left tantalisingly incomplete in the Gospel story, for this is not the world of the Gospels but a world where God’s word has less power than Paulina’s trick. Warnings preface the gift: ‘Do not shun her / Until you see her die again; for then you kill her double. Nay, present your hand’ (105–7). Unlike Christ with Mary Magdalene and perhaps Thomas, Hermione does touch, and embrace, Leontes.
Despite the demotion of the senses in traditional religion and Aristotelian rhetoric and poetics, the epistemology of the law-court in this period was based on the assumption that first-hand sensory experiences would provide the best proofs. But given how difficult these might be to obtain, substitutes were designated, including material, sensuously apprehensible tokens that had remarkable impact in court, even though, theoretically, they did not count as full proof.34 Theology was not untouched by this strain of pragmatism, but it showed a simultaneous anxiety that often resulted in a dissolution of the physical into the figurative. Lancelot Andrewes’s Sermon on a Seraphim touching the Prophet’s mouth with a coal vividly suggests this duality.35 First, Andrewes cites the Seraphim’s comments on the ‘[effects] of this touching’: ‘Secondly, the certainty; that as sure as this coale hath touched thy lips; so surely are thy sinnes taken away’,36 evoking touch as a surety against doubt, for this ‘outward element [was] appointed by God to confirme his faith’;37 ‘As Christ himself is spirituall and bodily; so he taketh away our sinnes, by means not only spiritual but bodily; as in the Sacrament’. Yet at the same time, Andrewes stresses that the ‘Seraphim did not take the coale in his mouth, but with tongs’. Then again, he ‘applied it not to the Prophets eare, but to his tongue…it is not the hearing of a sermon that can cleanse us from sinne; but we must taste of the bodily element, appointed to represent the invisible grace of God’.38 The sermon swings back and forth between a sense of corporeal contact and a figurative idea of touch, till it settles on an exposition of the symbolism of the Eucharist.
The instinct towards the bodily is never erased, however, and although the late Protestants talk about ‘feeling’ in entirely immaterial terms, the early reformers were tactile in their imagination. Hooker’s ‘perseverance’ is an inheritor of what Tyndale earlier called ‘feeling faith’: the kind of subjective conviction against which the persuasions of ‘all the preachers of the world’ ‘would not prewayle, no more then though they would make me beleue the fire were cold, after that I had put my finger therein’.39 Curiously, the terms in which this supra-evidential feeling is configured evokes the precise sensory voucher that jolted St Thomas out of doubt into faith. The kind of touch that makes Leontes exclaim, ‘O, she’s warm / If this be magic, let it be an art / Lawful as eating’ (109–11), collapses the mechanics of doubt into the workings of faith in the human condition. It is no accident that in Luke’s Gospel, when some of the disciples ‘still disbelieved for joy, and wondered’ at the risen Christ, there were two responses from Christ. First, he said, ‘handle me’ (24:39), an offer (once again) not taken up or commented on by them; next, he sat down in front of them and ate fish (24:42–43) – a banal activity, and an emphatically everyday foodstuff in the context of contemporary Palestine.40 Any residual doubt in their minds about his materiality dissolved at this point. In Luke, the disciples at Emmaus have their eyes opened when ‘he was known of them in the breaking of bread’ (24:35; cp. 30–31). Significantly, post-Resurrection recognition scenes are more explicitly suggestive of the self’s reliance on physical senses than the pre-resurrection Biblical moments which provide inspiration for the spiritual senses tradition.41
IV.
The history of doubt and belief is inextricably bound up with sensory history: no wonder, then, that the theatre provides Shakespeare with the perfect medium for exploring the phenomenology of faith. Biblical tradition and commentaries, as the Gospels and the Andrewes sermon indicate, strain to pull back from their engagement with the senses and take refuge in the figurative; consider Cranmer’s defence of his description of Christ’s manifestation to us in the sacraments ‘as it were face to face’ and our ‘“smelling of him with our noses, and a feeling and groping of him with our hands”’, to make the point that that does not therefore mean that we ‘see or feel him in deed … If it were so indeed, I would not add these words to say, “as it were”’.42 As St Paul said, ‘For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face’ (1 Corinthians 13:12). By contrast, ‘face to face’ art forms43 – such as drama and sculpture – actively embrace the tactile, as part of their understanding both of the limits of human perception, and of the productive fraudulence of artifice. Leontes’s ‘let it be…’ suggests that the identity between magic and eating, the lost and the restored, is at once a felt longing and a fantasy. ‘To understand a metaphor’, as Jan Zwicky puts it, ‘is always to experience loss at the same time as connexion’.44 Analogy with the bodily offers Leontes, and the audience, familiar cognitive parameters to make sense of the unintelligible but retains the mystery, and the cognitive dissonance, of Hermione as a ‘statue’, as it were, resurrected, ‘as it were’. As the disoriented Hermia puts it in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ‘methinks I see these things with parted eye, / When everything seems double’ (4.1.189–90); or in the words of Helena, who has found Demetrius ‘like a jewel, / Mine own, and not mine own’ (191–92).
The sensory dimension of this disjunctive vision is specifically connected by Shakespeare to the way in which the theatre plays havoc with our senses, making us take live flesh for corpse or marble, flat ground for Dover Cliff, or see sounds and hear sights. It is no accident that Helena uses a characteristic Bottom word – ‘methinks’ – here. For it is in Bottom’s account of his dream that we find the most extreme example of how the moving around of a stage-prop – an ass’s head – can not only signal but effect a transfiguration of sensibility that allows the unromantic, literal-minded weaver to acquire an intuitive understanding of the significance of his ‘most rare vision’, and to simultaneously fail and refuse to describe it. In the process, he succeeds in forging a language that perfectly captures the cognitive indeterminacy of such visions:
I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was – there is no man can tell what methought I was – and methought I had – but man is a patched fool if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue not able to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was! … it shall be called ‘Bottom’s Dream’, because it hath no bottom…
(4.1.204-16)
Here is a collapse of both theological and epistemological elitism as the idiot boy of the play goes through the strangest imaginative experience. He comes to terms with, and responds to his dream with all the folly and susceptibility that gives him the cognitive equipment for this vision, and all the incomprehension that indicates his acknowledgement of its nature. This is a comedic version of the ‘faith’ that Paulina calls for, before her act of animation; and indeed of the capacities that Origen called ‘the faculties of the heart’;45 a certain attunement. Imperfect knowledge was itself potentially a criterion of the highest truths, not only in medieval negative theology, but also in Aristotle’s discussion of knowing ‘celestial things’, like ‘a half-glimpse of persons that we love’.46 The inverse relation between the excellence of the subject and its knowability, the ‘ancient dilemma’ Wesley Trimpi identifies, finds its way into early modern epistemology.47 But unlike Aristotle’s knower, Shakespeare’s Bottom would not have been so transfigured, had he not been disfigured first by a physical change – wearing an animal head. In Bottom, such unknowing is dissolved into sense, and translated through his confused apprehension of his dream, and indeed into the contrast between apprehension as a mode of cognition and Theseus’s rationalist ‘comprehension’:
Such tricks hath strong imagination
That if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear?
MSND, V.i.18-22
For Theseus, a bush is a bush and a bear is a bear; but the play shows us that a man can become a donkey. The lovers are both tricked and healed by a potion in their ‘charmèd eye’ (III.ii.376), and the audience are given the gift of transformation through the theatrical manipulation of the senses. As Hippolyta says:
And all their minds transfigured so together,
More witnesseth than fancy’s images.
And grows to something of great constancy…
Howsoever, strange and admirable.
MSND, V.i.24-7 [italics mine]
Here we recall Herbert’s ‘something’ – that hint of approximation, of intuitive grasp – the traces of something understood, and retained, that they carry back with them to Athens, beyond the stripping of the magic and sensory mayhem of the woods and the play.
The sense of the numinous underpinning Theseus’s distinction, but brought to light in Hippolita’s response, is ingrained in the devotional writing of the period. A single eloquent example will suffice here – Donne’s Christmas 1621 sermon, where divine light is described as ‘the hardest to be looked on’: ‘It is apprehensible by sense, and not comprehensible by reason. If wee winke, we cannot chuse but see it, if we stare, wee know it never the better’.48 Bottom winks when he puts on the donkey head and opens himself up to the mystery of what appears to happen to him. While Hippolyta’s speech has the gravity and rhythm of a philosophically sophisticated response, a post-factum reflection on the truth-value of the unverifiable, Bottom’s insouciance is a simultaneous register of threshold experience: the blurry boundary between dreaming and awakening. Like Keats’s Adam (and indeed Milton’s Eve, echoed by Adam), he ‘awoke and found it truth’.49 In Dream, however, the ineffable is specifically linked with the theatrical: when the ass’s head is removed, Bottom awakes not into noetic illumination but into folly: ‘with thine own fool’s eyes peep’ (IV.i.81). The disjointed, anti-discursive syntax of Bottom’s attempted paraphrase – a prose equivalent of Herbert’s asyndetical arrangement of approximation in grasping ‘prayer’ – intimates an attempt to find a grammar for the numinous.
This is a grammar of apprehension, necessarily glimpsed rather than mastered in human experience: for ‘now I know in part’, as Paul said (1 Corinthians 12).50 There are also more obvious echoes of Corinthians. On the one hand, Bottom’s language verbally recalls Paul on the senses, and resonates with the idea of ‘the deep things of God’ revealed to the spirit:
The eye of man hath not seene, and the eare hath not heard, neither have entred into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him. But God hath revealed them unto the spirit, for the spirit searcheth all things, yea the deep things of God… [1 Corinthians 2: 9–10]51
The context of the Biblical speech is the mysterious manifestation of the wisdom of God in the apparently foolish and base: ‘God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; … and base things of the world, and things which are despised hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are’ (1 Corinthians 1: 27–28). On the other hand, the Bottom register introduces resonances of the diction of spiritual senses with a twist, retaining its dislocations, but reconnecting it with physical sensations. Bottom’s conflation and confusion of senses has a ring of Augustine’s unity or confusion of the senses in describing God as a richly polymorphous sense-object:
Neither is God bread nor is God water, nor is God this light, nor is God clothing, nor is God a house. For all these are visible things and are individual … God is everything for you. If you are hungry, he is bread for you; if you are thirsty, he is water for you…52
Bottom’s dream is also a translation of a miraculous translation into sense, even while the inadequacy of sensory language is acknowledged. This evokes a strand in Reformist thinking about intellectual intuition, as exemplified in the Cambridge Platonist John Smith’s statement that ‘when reason once is raised by the mighty force of the Divine Spirit into a converse with God, it is turned into sense’, though the context is that of ‘[shutting] the eye of the sense’.53 This is turn is a development of Origen’s increasingly sympathetic understanding in his later works of the role of the physical senses, and their capacity for transformation in close converse with the divine. Simultaneously, it is a departure from Reformist thought, in that the senses are not just a sign of election but the means of the perceptual transformation that allows the reception of grace. Bottom being Bottom, however, his conclusio and digest will be the ballad, ‘Bottom’s Dream’, to be written by Peter Quince. This, along with the repeated ‘methoughts’, moor this ‘rare vision’ in the hyper-quotidian. Meanwhile the rough-hewn, unfinished texture of his prose captures the immediacy and the ongoing feel of process, and the anti-syntactical drive in the experience of the numinous.
The Winter’s Tale’s climax, like Bottom’s, brings the bodily and the wondrous together, by an ‘art’ that is ‘lawful as eating’ – a phrase that is itself homely, yet ‘strange and admirable’, and recalls the eldritch lawfulness of that other act of eating in the play, which is all Nature: the bear eating Antigonus. The play’s own brand of uncanny, yoking the wrinkles of age with the ‘grace’ of resurrection, transforms an inherited lexicon that conjoins the abstract and the physical. Its medium, meanwhile, shifts the balance of emphasis and translates the abstraction of doctrine into the particulars of affect through embodied mediation. But the sensible also makes it impossible not to notice the joins. The gap between evidence and assent produces a peculiar realism which is inseparable from the doubleness of human perceptual mechanisms. Like Hermia’s shaky double-seeing, or Helena’s uncertain re-possession of Demetrius who loves her because his eyes are still laced with love-juice, Leontes’s ifs and lets – ‘If this be magic’, ‘let it be’ – inhabit the space between desire and actuality, even as Hermione’s wrinkles at once point up the gap and the potential (if costly) bridge between improbability and possibility.
V.
The first variation on the discourse of spiritual senses on the early modern stage, then, is that it breaks down the hierarchy inherent in the pre-modern register between inner and outer senses. The implicit analogy is retained, but adapted to the disorientations of the numinous, within the play and in the audience, and theatrically deployed to tap into the zone of double-seeing and double-being that the post-lapsarian world, at its improbably best moments, is. The further twist is that the senses – both erroneous and corrective – are prized apart from supernatural evidence, and thus demarcated from the spiritual senses which were traditionally understood to be the evidence of things unseen.54 The mediation is effected not through the inner senses, but through art playing on – and with – our physical senses, creating semblances and analogies which both are, and are not. Finally, the sensory grounding allows transformation, both affective and spiritual. If a live Hermione had been sprung, unmediated, on Leontes the moment he seemed to come to his senses, at the end of that frenetic trial scene driven by ‘tremor cordis’, we might have had a lurch into certitude more generic than psychological, the event rather than the process of conversion. Even in the final scene, when Leontes attempts to kiss the ‘statue’, Paulina intervenes and stalls: ‘Good my lord, forbear. / The ruddiness upon her lip is wet; / You’ll mar it if you kiss it; stain your own / With oily painting’ (80–83). A premature kiss would indeed fail to translate the moment from an encounter with artifice to a leap of faith. But the gradual accretion of sensory experiences makes space, in the final scene, for an enactment of process, as flesh and faith conjoin. No cryptic oracle could have brought the gradual epiphany that the compound of deictic art, vision, hearing, music, touch, and (even the idea of) taste make possible.
Touch, in particular, has a special role in mediating between the visionary and the real, the incredible and the believed. Indeed, Dream’s evocation of Corinthians – ‘the spirit searcheth all things, yea the deep things of God’ – has implications for Winter’s Tale’s evocation of Thomas’s reliance on touch, for ‘searcheth’ carries an overtone of OED sense 8, ‘to probe a wound’: we might remember Saturnius’ words, ‘Now to the bottom dost though search my wound’ (Titus Andronicus, 2.3.262). It is as though even if our eyes and ears are not up to the task of the spirit, touch might be. This in turn creates a further allure which is the other side of an aesthetic illusion: for we can see and hear a play but not touch it, and so Hermione being ‘warm’ is a particularly vivid claim because it is testimony to a sensual certainty that an audience cannot share. Touch is thus brought to the heart of the theatrical experience. So, as it turns Aristotle on his head by giving us the improbable possible, the play also turns the traditional hierarchy of senses upside down. It is significant that the theological strands in which this hierarchy was complicated include the spiritual senses tradition in which the contact senses of touch, taste, and smell subsumed and surpassed the abstract senses of sight and hearing; mystical theology where touch was thought to allow the closest access to the subject; and Eucharistic theology which often aligned sapor with sapientia: all ways of articulating affective cognition. This essay, then, is a first step towards re-examining the gap in Gavrilyuk and Coakley’s chronology which traces the parallel Patristic and medieval traditions of inner and spiritual senses to Cusa’s fusion of the two ‘on the cusp of early modernity’, and picks up the thread again in the Enlightenment, when epistemology and spirituality were being separated (notwithstanding residually entwined strands).55 The continuing but particular role of the senses as transformative agents in the wider life of ‘faith’ understood imaginatively in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries comes into focus if we treat literary representations of numinous experience as historical evidence; if we resist the binary of the religious and the secular Renaissance(s), and open up to the affects generated at their interface. Imaginative literature is a playground for such hybrid histories and elusive overlaps, free as it is of doctrinal responsibility, and ready to embrace the tentative, the indeterminate, and the pre-conceptual.
Notes
The research for this essay has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013)/ERC.”
1 Elizabeth Bishop, ‘At the Fishhouses’, in Elizabeth Bishop, Poems, ed. By Saskia Hamilton (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), 62–4 (64). Excerpt at the beginning of the chapter from Poems by Elizabeth Bishop, Published by Chatto & Windus Ltd., Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Limited. © 2011 (UK & Commonwealth Rights, Excluding Canada), and Elizabeth Bishop, ‘At the Fishhouses’, in Elizabeth Bishop, Poems, ed. By Saskia Hamilton (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), 62–4 (64). Copyright © 2011 by The Alice H. Methfessel Trust. Publisher’s Note and compilation copyright © 2011 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. (United States, Canada, and Rest of World).
2 Richard Smith, The Assertion and Defence of the Sacrament of the Aulter (London, 1546), f. 77v.
3 Paul L. Gavrilyuk and Sarah Coakley, ‘Introduction’, in The Spiritual Senses: Perceiving God in Western Christianity, ed. Gavrilyuk and Coakley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 16.
4 Gavrilyuk and Coakley, ‘Introduction’, 19.
5 William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, 2nd edn (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 5.3.111. All references to Shakespeare’s plays are to this edition unless otherwise stated.
6 Rudolph Otto, The Idea of the Holy, trans. John W. Harvey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950, first pub. 1923), esp. 1–30. On the mixture of the daunting and the fascinating, the dreadful and the ravishing, in the numinous, see 31–40.
7 William Perkins, A treatise tending vnto a declaration whether a man be in the estate of damnation or in the estate of grace (London, 1590), 34. See also Cranmer’s explication of how the spiritual signification of the Eucharist was only accessible to the elect who were blessed with the spiritual senses and, unlike the reprobate or the Papist, able to read the thing that was signified by the outward signs: Thomas Cranmer, A Defence of the True and Catholic Doctrine of the Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ (1550), in John E. Cox, ed., The Works of Thomas Cranmer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1846), 41, 207. On the perceptual privilege of election, often discussed in the context of the Reformed understanding of Eucharistic sensing, see Matthew Milner’s magisterial book, The Senses and the English Reformation (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), passim, but especially 255–65.
8 Augustine of Hippo, Enarrationes in Psalmos, XXX. S3. 6; Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, I.5.5.
9 The Works of George Herbert, ed. F.E. Hutchinson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941) (hereafter, ‘Herbert’), 51. All references to Herbert’s poems are to this edition.
10 Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (Menston: Scholars Press, 1971), Tir.
11 George Walton Williams, ed., The Complete Poems of Richard Crashaw (hereafter, ‘Crashaw’), 178–85 (at 181). All references are to this edition.
12 Augustine of Hippo, De Genesi ad Litteram, XII.20.42, and XII.24.51. On the threshold function of the senses in Augustine, see Gerard J. P. O’Daly, Augustine’s Philosophy of Mind (London: Duckworth, 1987), 80 ff. Another key text is Sermo de Providentia Dei, also known as ‘Sermo Dolbeau 29’: see Sermo inédit de saint Augustin sur la providence divine, RÉAug 41, no.2 (1995), 267–289. For the provenance of the idea in Augustine studies, see, e.g., Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III.I: The Doctrine of Creation (New York: T & T Clark International, 2004; first pub. 1958), 10.
13 Crashaw, 173–77 (173). This is, of course, a translation (with differences) of St Thomas Aquinas’s Eucharistic Hymn, ‘Adóro te devóte, latens Déitas’: see Charles Herbermann, ed., ‘Adoro Te Devote’, in Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: Robert Appleton, 1913). But on the controversies around the Thomistic authorship of this hymn, and by extension of this statement on the error of the senses, see Jean-Pierre Torrell, O.P.’s suggestive discussion in St. Thomas Aquinas, Vol. I, rev. ed., trans. Robert Royal (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 2005), 132–36.
14 St Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermon 61, 3–5, Opera Omnia, 2 (Paris: Frederic Leonard, 1666), 102–103 (at 102); and J. Leclercq, C.H. Talbot and H.M. Rochais, eds., Sancti Bernardi Opera, 8 vols. (Rome: Editiones Cistersienses, 1957–77), vol. 2: Sermon 61, 149.
15 Herbert, 67–68.
16 Herbert, 165.
17 On Augustine’s hermeneutics, see Richard Todd, The Opacity of Signs: Acts of Interpretation in George Herbert’s “The Temple” (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1986), esp. chapter 2 (‘Augustinian Theory: Divine Signs as “Visible Words”’), 21–41.
18 Herbert, 129–30.
19 Roger Ascham, The Scholemaster (first pub. 1570), ed. J.E.B. Mayor (London: Bell and Daldy, 1863), Book II, 106–118 (106–107).
20 Herbert cannot have been unaware, either, of the period’s practices and understanding of paraphrasing as a way of translating and opening up the Bible – potentially both a making sense of things known, and an opening of secrets unnoticed. On the connection of Biblical paraphrase in this period with translation as ‘opening’, see Matthew Reynolds, The Poetry of Translation: From Chaucer & Petrarch to Homer & Logue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 73–81.
21 Herbert, 102–103.
22 Herbert, 79–80. Compare ‘The Flower’ (165) which registers the healing of the devotee’s withered soul in a breathlessly awaited, perfect, clinching rhyme.
23 An earlier version of my argument about the poetics of doubt (and by extension, faith) in The Winter’s Tale, among other plays, is in Subha Mukherji, ‘Trying, knowing, believing: the epistemic plot and the poetics of doubt in early modern literature’, in Yota Batsaki, Subha Mukherji, and Jan-Melissa Schramm, ed., Fictions of Knowledge; Fact, Evidence, Doubt (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 84–109.
24 This idea pervades the Summa Theologica. On Aquinas’ epistemology of faith, and its apartness from proof, see Creighton Rosental, Lessons from Aquinas: A Resolution of the Problem of Faith and Reason (Macon: Mercer University Press, 2011).
25 Richard Hooker, ‘Of the Certainty and Perpetuity of Faith’, in The Works of Richard Hooker (London, 1682), 527–32 (at 527–28).
26 Hooker, ‘Of the Certainty and Perpetuity of Faith’, 528. Italics mine.
27 Hooker’s sermon was printed in 1612, though it was composed around 1586/87. The earliest performance of The Winter’s Tale appears to have been in 1611, and its popularity on stage and in court between 1611 and 1613 is recorded.
28 The Lateran Council of 1215 marked the beginning of the secularisation of judicial tests and ordeals (Canon 18), by taking away clerical control over these. Trial by divine proof was henceforth gradually outmoded, and in England, it was replaced by procedures of pre-trial arrest and questioning based on suspicion, and, at the next stage, witness testimony and jury trial where adjudication depended on a rational assessment of the probability of evidence. Lorna Hutson builds on Barbara J. Shapiro’s finding, in A Culture of Fact: England 1550–1720 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press), 8–33, to write on The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) as a dramatic phenomenon deploying common notions of the bases of legal adjudication, transmitted through the new model of jury trial. A caveat is necessary, however, against over-estimating the prevalence of the jury trial and its indicative nature for participatory justice. Felony trials were only a small part of the total legal business of the period, not all civil or criminal action used the jury format, treason trials began using it at the very end of the seventeenth century, the intensification of interest in contract law indicated an increasing emphasis on resolving matters through negotiation rather than jury trial, and members of the jury were often limited to the middling status who were deemed to be ‘epistemologically competent’ (Shapiro, 24). But that the new procedures were seen as rational replacements of the older forms of supernatural or divine proofs is clear.
29 Browne, Religio Medici, Part I, section 9, in Works, 13–14.
30 Cave, Recognitions, passim, but esp. 1–9 (Introduction).
31 Glenn W. Most, Doubting Thomas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), passim.
32 Most, Doubting Thomas, 50–55.
33 What gives credence to Most’s reading is that Jesus, in immediate response to Thomas’s ‘hyperbolic submission’ (52) (which in turn is an immediate response to Christ’s offer of tactile proof) in this Biblical recognition scene, says, ‘Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe’. No reference is made to touching. As Most argues, those who want to see a narrative lacuna here would have to assume verbal omission at the expense not only of textual arrangement but of a crucial textual fact – that John does not say that Thomas ‘said’ or ‘uttered’ the words ‘My Lord and my God’, but that he ‘answered him’ (John 20:27–28), and that verb consistently indicates immediacy of response throughout the Bible (57–58).
34 See Subha Mukherji, Law and Representation in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), esp. chapter 1.
35 Lancelot Andrewes, ‘A Sermon on Isaiah 6:6–7, Preached at St Giles Cripplegate, 1 October 1598’, in Lancelot Andrewes: Selected Sermons and Lectures, ed. Peter McCullough (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 138–45 (138).
36 Andrewes, ‘A Sermon on Isaiah 6: 6–7’, 144.
37 Andrewes, ‘A Sermon on Isaiah 6: 6–7’, 140.
38 Andrewes, ‘A Sermon on Isaiah 6: 6–7’, 143.
39 The Whole Workes of W. Tyndall (London, 1573), 266b.
40 Most, Doubting Thomas, 21.
41 This is noted in passing in Gavrilyuk and Coakley, ‘Introduction’, 11.
42 Thomas Cranmer, An Answer to a Crafty and Sophistical Cavillation devised by Stephen Gardiner (London, 1580; first published 1551), 160. For a fuller discussion of how this dramatic moment relates to sermon literature on touch, see Mukherji, ‘Trying, knowing, believing’ (2011), 84–109. On Cranmer’s ‘as it were’, and how it negotiates a fine line between sensation and figuration, see my discussion in op cit, 101, and Joe Moshenska’s extensive and acute discussion of it in his subsequent book, Feeling Pleasures: The Sense of Touch in Renaissance England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 37–39.
43 Susan Stewart’s term, in Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 146.
44 Jan Zwicky, Wisdom and Metaphor (Kentville, NS: Gaspereau Press, 2008), 56.
45 Origen, De Principiis, 1, II.
46 Aristotle, Parts of Animals, 1.5.644b.
47 Wesley Trimpi, Muses of One Mind: The Literary Analysis of Experience and its Continuity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 87–195.
48 John Donne, Sermon Preached at St Paul’s upon Christmas day, 1621, in The Sermons of John Donne, ed. George Potter and Evelyn Simpson, 10 vols. (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1962), vol. III, no. 17, 348–75 (at 356).
49 John Keats, Letter to Benjamin Bailey, 22 November 1817: Maurice Buxton Forman, The Letters of John Keats (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947), 66–70 (68). His mode of understanding – encapsulated by ‘methinks’ – is also echoed by the most unlikely literary inheritors: Milton’s Eve recounts her terrifying dream to Adam in a narrative that begins and ends with ‘methought’, and repeats it twice in between (Paradise Lost Bk V, 35, 50, 85, 91); Adam, in response, trying to make sense of her report, muses, ‘Some such resemblances methinks I find/Of our last Ev’ning’s talk, in this thy Dream,/But with addition strange’ (114–16). Vivid dreams, strangeness, and tentative grasp characterises all these speakers.
50 A fuller discussion of ‘apprehensive knowledge’ in the period’s literary writing appears as a chapter in my book in progress, Knowing Encounters: Questioning Knowledge in Early Modern Literature.
51 See also 1 Corinthians 1: 27–28.
52 St Augustine, In Iohannis evangelium tractatus (CCL 36), trans. J.W. Rettig, FC 79 (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1988), 49.
53 John Smith, Select Discourses (New York: Garland, 1978), 15–16.
54 As Mark T. Mealey demonstrates, the theologian John Wesley, as late as the eighteenth century, writes about spiritual senses as a type of elenchus – supernatural proof – suggesting at least a continuing strand against the grain of Enlightenment thought; and as Mark J. McInroy indicates, they acted as a buffer-zone in theological aesthetic from Bonaventura onwards, mediating revelation to human apprehension. See Mealey, ‘John Wesley’, in The Spiritual Senses, ed. Gavrilyuk and Coakley, chapter. 14 (241–56), and McInroy, ‘Karl Rahner and Hans Urs von Balthasar’, in Ibid., chapter 15 (257–74).
55 Gavrilyuk and Coakley, ‘Introduction’, 16.