#paper i

[jelyfoshjellyfish]

hey we (yes, WE) ALL like soh and I made a really swag animation ok go watch it now bye

[jackm3rridew]

basic ahh paper and looseleaf art (i love them so much)

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Biblical Retellings

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Anticlericalism and the privatization of belief in Chaucer, Bacon, and Milton

“In the prologue to The Jew of Malta, the character Machevill (Machiavelli) insists that he counts “religion but a childish toy.” Do other works agree? What are the relations between religion and the state? How are religious figures venerated or made fun of? In your essay, discuss at least THREE works, not including The Jew of Malta.”

 Marlowe’s Machevill, as something of a burlesqued caricature of the Italian philosopher Machiavelli, holds religion to be “but a childish toy.” Machiavelli was understood in this way by early moderns because he posited a secular political philosophy, not grounded in normative ethics or religious doctrine. Indeed, the anxiety Machiavelli produced in the Renaissance imagination attests to the extraordinarily nebulous conception of “atheism” in the period: the term might refer, for instance, to a theistic but nontrinitarian Christian, or indeed to a philosopher like Hobbes who insisted on the materiality of God. Moreover the vagueness of the accusation, particularly in polemical writing, can be seen as enabling the very philosophy it purports to refute. Medieval and early modern “opposition” to religion is also often difficult to place, ideologically, because the medieval discourse of anticlericalism and the post-Reformation discourse of anti-Catholicism voice critiques that resemble subsequent atheistic discourses (vide Edward Gibbons’ 18th-century critique of early Christian miracles) but do not go quite as far in their ultimate conclusions. To chart the relationship of religion to state power, the discourse of anticlericalism, and the ambiguous connection of both of these discourses to the rise of unbelief, I will focus on Chaucer’s “General Prologue” and “Retraction” in The Canterbury Tales, Sir Fancis Bacon’s “Of Atheism” and “Of Superstition,” and the radical Protestantism of Milton’s Paradise Lost.

Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales participates in the rising tide of anticlerical polemic, which by the late fourteenth century had reached a tipping point in England. The Church had amassed incredible wealth across Europe, and its conduct called into question its legitimacy as representative of God on earth. Most strikingly, Catholic Christendom was represented for a time by not one but two popes – one in Rome, and one in Avignon, each supported by different secular powers and interests – troubling the notion of an infallible Pauline succession. Into the fifteenth century, the anticlerical Lollard heresy (promoting among other things a lay priesthood, contrition rather than the sacrament of confession, and spiritual rather than church marriages) produced a harsh reaction from the established Church, spearheaded by Arundel, Archbishop of Canterbury. This repressive climate inhibited the free expression of heterodox religious opinion for almost a hundred years, and has engendered the critical commonplace that the poetry of Chaucer’s fifteenth-century followers, chief among them John Lydgate, suffers aesthetically as a result (it is, in other words, boring). The Canterbury Tales arrives just before that cultural shift, and is consequently able to voice critiques of the English clergy without necessarily indicating an antipathy to religion as such.

In the “General Prologue,” the simple, charitable Parson represents a clerical ideal which none of the other ecclesiastical figures come remotely close to. While the Parson ensures the spiritual well-being even of his poorest congregants, the Friar poses as a mendicant “pour frere” while accumulating donations from “fair wyves,” the Summoner exploits his authority as a lackey of the ecclesiastical courts in return for favours, the Prioress pretends to courtly mannerisms and feeds her numerous pet dogs better food than the poor could typically expect to eat, and the Pardoner exploits the gullible with pig bone “relics” and a “bretful” of indulgences “from Rome al hoot.” The “bretful” of “hoot” pardons casts the Church as a secular commercial enterprise, a bakery or a foundry, rather than a spiritual one. Indeed, the Pardoner poses such a noisome presence to the other pilgrims that Harry Bailey, the host, threatens to castrate him, so that his “coilons” may be “shrined in an hogges tord.” The Knight intervenes to preserve the peace and force a reconciliation. I take the Knight’s intervention to signify the power of secular arms to preserve Church institutions that might otherwise face the wrathful retribution of the common people (as the Peasant’s Revolt of 1381 attempted to do). In short, Chaucer lays bare the (admittedly nebulous) state power relations that maintain hated ecclesiastical practices. His nervous “Retraction,” perhaps the last thing he wrote, similarly performs this exertion of power by disavowing any heterodox material in the Tales. Chaucer should be seen as a mainstream, publically successful figure who offers an anticlerical critique – without attempting to challenge the state power that maintains it. His “retraction” also provides him with plausible authorial deniability and suggests the limit point of anti-ecclesiastical sentiment for a figure of his social stature and aspirations in the period before the Reformation.  

Francis Bacon’s essays helped to lay the foundations for the empirical reasoning later known as the scientific method. We can plausibly link this rationalistic mode to the doctrinal imperatives of English Protestantism: Nature is likened to a divine book that must be read, just as a Protestant reader must study scripture (sola scriptura in Lutheranism and other more radical sects; prima scriptura in Anglicanism). Bacon’s views, however “scientific,” are an outgrowth of the Reformation rather than the eruption of something wholly new and secular. Yet these views are not without tension on the matter of unbelief and anticlericalism, a tension best exemplified by the seemingly contradictory opening gambits of “Of Atheism” and “Of Superstition.” The former begins, “I had rather believe all the fables in the Legend, and the Talmud, and the Alcoran, than that this universal frame is without a mind.” In short, Bacon considers the so-called “fables” of Catholicism, Islam, and Judaism to be preferable to the outright denial of a deity of some sort. In “Of Superstition,” Bacon opens with similar language, but expresses a different idea: “It were better to have no opinion of God at all, than such an opinion as is unworthy of him.” Superstition is perceived as a political threat to the state where atheism is not: citing the age of Augustus Caesar, Bacon remarks that “the times inclined to atheism…were civil times.” Moreover, superstition is coded as Catholic; Bacon refers disparagingly to the “Schoolmen” or theologians of the Council of Trent, the ecumenical council largely responsible for the Counter-Reformation. These Schoolmen are, for Bacon, akin to desperate defenders of the geocentric cosmos, who invent elaborate fictions “to save the phenomena.” Here we see science and religion at odds with one another, but religion of a very particular kind – Bacon will use scientific discoveries to critique the “superstitious” Counter-Reformation, but not religion as such.  Ultimately the tensions between “Of Atheism” and “Of Superstition” attest to Bacon’s ambiguous place in the history of secularization. The early-seventeenth century thinker does not seem to know what he fears most: unbelief, or othered belief.

Milton’s iteration of this problem closer to the end of the century in Paradise Lost is similarly complex. William Empson, in Milton’s God, remarks that Milton’s poem presents the Christian story “with the familiar bad smell removed,” and makes the illuminating insight elsewhere in the book that figures like Donne and Milton wrestled with received orthodoxies “like monsters in the deep.” Known from his De Doctrina Christiana to be an antitrinitarian, Milton could plausibly fall under the wide and imprecise umbrella of early modern “atheism.” Anecdotally, at the end of his life he did not attend any church. Yet he came to his heterodox conclusions about the Trinity from his close study of scripture, which meant that Milton could advocate a harsh Old Testament morality (in, for example, Samson Agonistes) at the same time that he deviated from established Anglican doctrine and hoped for a nation of “faithful labourers” freely testing various ideas in Areopagitica. The consequence of Milton’s Puritan ideology in Paradise Lost, then, is an anticlerical discourse – directed at both Catholic and Protestant clerics – and the promise, rooted in his antitrinitarianism, of God’s “abdication.” Milton’s hatred of paid clergymen was deep-rooted, and manifests in many of his political writings. He hoped that Cromwell would disestablish the Church of England, the better to promote a more radically personal, interiorized form of faith. Satan’s journey, in Book III, through what is destined to become The Paradise of Fools is rife with an anti-Catholic anti-clericalism that would not be out of place in Chaucer: the fools bear the familiar signifiers of bulls, pardons, and indulgences. John Leonard has recently argued that the “Primum Mobile” and other pre-Copernican cosmological fixtures mentioned in the same passage should similarly be seen as the discarded trappings of folly rather than a serious endorsement of geocentrism. If Leonard’s argument holds, then Milton’s position here is akin to Bacon’s – the anti-Copernican fools would resemble Bacon’s Schoolmen. Milton also makes a small, easy-to-miss joke at the expense of Protestant “lewd hirelings” in Book IV. Finally, the emphasis in Book III on God’s eventual abdication to the Son, and the eventual Messianic horizontalism implied by “God shall be All in All,” show Milton’s antitrinitarianism at work: the Father may be rather objectionable, but the Son offers the promise of a fairer political arrangement later on. In Milton, belief is maintained, but much of what Empson calls “the familiar bad smell” of organized religion is evacuated.

The progress from Chaucer to Milton shows the development of an increasingly intensified and intellectualized anticlericalism. Where Chaucer critiqued the personal failings of individual men and women in the clergy, Bacon expands the critique to the more intellectual sin of “preserving the phenomena,” or in other words making arguments in bad faith. For Milton, meanwhile, the very idea of hired priests is “lewd.” The three authors also evince the growth of the critique of religion as an organ of the state; Chaucer avoids this, but Bacon claims that atheism is less harmful to states than superstition and Milton hopes for the end of church government – even his God promises a disestablishment at some future time. While not espousing unbelief, the three authors indicate belief’s tendency toward radical interiorization and privatization from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century. This fragmentation surely helped to create favourable political and cultural conditions for atheism, as we would understand it, in the eighteenth.    

[thoughtswehadaboutcomps]

Religion and Literature

Alright - so this week’s response is a lesson in butchery and also a lesson in why choosing a question is so important. I sort of ‘skimmed’ this question without fully reading it and decided to give it a shot, but as I kept writing, I realized that the question and my (half-assed) response was totally shit and I had lost the plot somewhere. HOWEVER, it was helpful to do this in an hour and get the feel for it (that’s why the Milton drops off quickly). Anyways - hoping I get better at this as the week’s go on! I also feel like I spent too much time trying to remember what the fuck happened in Kempe and The Croxton play so sorry if I’m heavy on summary... 

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A swing and a miss

Hey team -

So I tried to answer a question this week, BUT... didn’t really go my way. Was mainly just going to write a section on WH, and got sidetracked and ended up spending like close to 40 mins. on it, so I have really terrible and skeletal sketches of where I’d keep going. On the positive side - I’m getting to be a fucking boss at posting shit in Tumblr.

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Two Responses on Temporality