Fate of the Flesh

Secularization and Resurrection in the Seventeenth Century

Daniel Juan Gil

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780823290062
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Medieval & Early Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In the seventeenth century the ancient hope for the physical resurrection of the body and its flesh began an unexpected second life as critical theory, challenging the notion of an autonomous self and driving early modern avant-garde poetry. As an emerging empirical scientific world view and a rising Cartesian dualist ontology transformed the ancient hope for the resurrection of the flesh into the fantasy of a soul or mind living on separately from any body, literature complicated the terms of the debate. Such poets as Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, and Jonson picked up the discarded idea of the resurrection of the flesh and bent it from an apocalyptic future into the here and now to imagine the self already infused with the strange, vibrant materiality of the resurrection body. Fate of the Flesh explores what happens when seventeenth-century poets posit a resurrection body within the historical person. These poets see the resurrection body as the precondition for the social person's identities and forms of agency and yet as deeply other to all such identities and agencies, an alien within the self that both enables and undercuts life as a social person. This perspective leads seventeenth-century poets to a compelling awareness of the unsettling materiality within the heart of the self and allows them to re-imagine agency, selfhood, and the natural world in its light. By developing a poetics that seeks a deranging materiality within the self, these poets anticipate twentieth-century "avant-garde" poetics. They frame their poems neither as simple representation nor as beautiful objects but as a form of social praxis that creates new communities of readers and writers assembled around a new experience of self-as-body mediated by poetry.

1 / Secularization, Countersecularization, and the Fate of the Flesh in Donne

John Donne’s writings are driven by an idiosyncratic theory of resurrection that is informed by a distinctive relationship to secularizing pressures. Donne’s search for a “resurrection body” that is already now stirring in the conventionally social self pushes him toward emphasizing the body and its life in all their deranging energy and vibrancy, especially in experiences of sex, passion, sickness, and dying, and he values the body and bodily life precisely for their ability to make him question and rethink the nature of selfhood or personhood and the connection between the self or the person and the material and social world. Recovering this perspective will allow for a new understanding of Donne’s overall intellectual project. Somewhat surprisingly, it will also allow for a new way of understanding Donne’s peculiar appeal to early twentieth-century avant-garde poets including, most famously, T. S. Eliot.

I call Donne’s distinctive way of appropriating and deploying the idea of the resurrection of the flesh “countersecularization,” and to explain it I want to start by contrasting Donne’s ideas with those of his friend Edward Herbert, first Baron of Cherbury (1582–1648), the older brother of the poet George Herbert, who is the subject of the next chapter. Donne was a close friend of Edward and George Herbert’s mother, Magdalene, whom he relied upon for patronage and whose funeral sermon he preached. Through Magdalene Herbert, Donne also became quite friendly with Edward Herbert, whom he visited several times in his life and to whom he wrote several poems, including one of his best and most famous, “Goodfriday 1613. Riding westward,” ostensibly written while on horseback on his way to Lord Herbert’s estate in Wales.

Lord Herbert is a unique character in seventeenth-century England, notable for his international adventures as a soldier and ambassador and for his proneness to violence. He is also noteworthy for his philosophical work in epistemology in which he advocates a rationalizing and comparatist procedure for truth-testing. Herbert wrote poetry (in both English and Latin) but is more famous today for his philosophical treatises about the nature of knowledge and truth including in religious matters. In his treatment of religious claims, Herbert is at the vanguard of secularization. But what “secularization” means in the seventeenth century is not attacking or debunking or seeking to reduce the importance of Christianity. Rather, what it means is a transformation of how people practice and think about Christianity to make it more compatible with an emerging rational and empirical worldview. For Herbert this means reconceiving of the role of reason in ascertaining religious truth and managing religious disagreement. In many ways, he recasts Christianity into a more reasonable and universal form. Indeed, Herbert is sometimes described as the first “deist.” Though it is an exaggeration to equate his views with the rationalized version of Christianity that became the religious ideology of the Enlightenment, it is nevertheless true that Herbert represented an early impulse toward rationalizing Christianity. Examining his work before turning to Donne has the advantage of making clear how different Donne’s relationship to this dominant path of secularization is by contrast.

While serving as an ambassador in Paris in 1624 Lord Herbert wrote and published in Latin his most famous work, De veritate. This text is notable for the philosophical rigor with which it explores issues of epistemology and the question of what can be known with any certainty. In it Edward Herbert rejects an appeal to authorities, whether ancient or recent, and instead proposes the use of comparative reason as the only test of truth. Anticipating Kant, he argues that the space for disagreement is ultimately limited because God has implanted in people basic modes of thought that also give rise (through experience) to basic common ideas that are universally shared. These “common ideas” flow from the basic modes of thought that all humans share. As such, Herbert argues that finding universally shared ideas is the best guarantee of absolute truth, and he writes that truth is “what all men of normal mind believe.”¹ Edward Herbert applies this epistemological approach to all areas of human knowledge, and he develops a methodology in which individuals apply their own individual reason and then check their conclusions against the reasoned conclusions of others; for Herbert, only where there is universal agreement can we be sure that we have arrived at truth. As though to enact its appeal to universal judgment, the original 1624 edition of De veritate was dedicated to “the whole of humanity”; the second and third editions (published in 1633 and 1645) were dedicated to “all readers of sound and fair judgement.”

The most controversial element of De veritate is that Herbert applies his comparatist epistemology to religious questions. Predictably, Herbert rejects the authority of revelation, whether personal or scriptural. Instead, he argues that people should apply their own reason and then compare their conclusions to the reasoned conclusions of others. This epistemological starting point leads Herbert to a “comparative religions” approach in which he compares different religious systems to identify shared principles common not only to all the variants of Christianity available in his own day but also common to historically different religious systems, including that of the ancients. If the comparatist approach aims for truth it begins by first suspending any convictions about any specific religious system in order to then seek commonalities among them all. This comparatist approach is more fully developed in another of Herbert’s works, the posthumously published De religione gentilium, which systematically compares a variety of religious systems, but already in De veritate he writes that “I firmly maintain, however, that it is and always has been possible for all men to reach the truths I have described.… For by no other method could the existence of Divine Universal Providence, the highest attribute of God, be proved by the principles of common reason” (41).

The rise of a comparative-religions perspective associated with Herbert is itself one of the markers of secularization. Charles Taylor argues that under the regime of secularity, religious life is conditioned by “optionality,” the knowledge even on the part of committed religious believers and practitioners that not everyone believes and practices as they do, that there are other religions and even the possibility of no religion. From this perspective, believers oscillate between a mindset of commitment or engagement and a mindset of detachment or even self-criticism founded in the knowledge that the principles of any one religion are “optional” rather than a universally accepted starting point, as they would have been in a presecular context.² For Taylor the new experiences of religious faith defined by “optionality” can be marked by an authenticity and an intensity that might have been out of reach to most or even all believers in a premodern context, in which some particular religion was nonoptional. For other scholars, such as William T. Cavanaugh, the very notion of “religion” as a comparative quasi-universal category brings with it political struggle about what properly counts as “religion.”³ Because it assumes the optionality of any one religious system, Herbert’s interest in developing a rational comparative perspective places him unambiguously at the cutting edge of secularizing pressures in the early modern period.

From his comparatist approach Lord Herbert concludes that there are five religious principles that are (according to Herbert) universally shared not only within the world of Christianity but across all religions and that are therefore true. Herbert’s five religious “common ideas” are: that there is a God, that people should worship God, that God demands moral virtue, that one must ask forgiveness for moral error, and that there is an afterlife in which people are either punished or rewarded for their behavior on earth. Turning to the question of revelation, Herbert concludes that though there may be revelation within particular religious traditions, including Christianity, any possible revelation must be checked against these five common notions and only if it is found compatible with them can it be accepted.⁴ Herbert implies that the warrant for belief is not revelation but reasoned assent, and he proposes to revise Christianity to align it with the rational core of all religions. Thus, one of the notable features of De veritate is Herbert’s elucidation of the rational principles from which the Ten Commandments can be derived, in essence treating these laws as Kantian categorical imperatives.⁵ So reduced, belief in the Commandments, or in any other elements of Christianity, no longer derives from the authority of scripture or revelation at all. Indeed, Herbert’s willingness to sanitize Christianity in light of reason and comparative truth-testing is part of why he is sometimes seen as the father of eighteenth-century deism, in which a completely rationalized theism emerges as an alternative for the historical beliefs and practices of Christianity.

Herbert’s project is certainly not hostile to religion or Christianity but seeks to recast religion into a form compatible with reason and universal truth as he sees it. In Herbert’s work, Christian thought is preserved and becomes the basis for a new, highly rationalized form of religious belief in the form of the five common principles. But inevitably major elements of Christianity are cast aside in the process insofar as they are not confirmed by reasoned comparison with other religions. And for many seventeenth-century Christians, the “losing” elements cast aside by Edward Herbert would no doubt be precisely the most cherished, most centrally valued parts of the religion, which they would be loathe to give up.

What are the implications of Herbert’s project for the central concern of this book, namely, the fate of the ancient Christian commitment to resurrection in the face of secularization? Here it is the fifth of Herbert’s common principles that is decisive, the notion that there is an afterlife of reward and punishment. Herbert posits this to be a reasonable because universally shared principle, but only insofar as it is aligned with radical body/soul dualism, for in writing about the afterlife what Herbert finds commonsensical and universally shared is not that the body will live again but only that a disembodied soul, imagined as the essence of the person, will live again (or just continue to live) separately from the body. Thus in De veritate he writes that any doctrines “which express doubts about the eternal state of the soul, cannot be considered either Common Notions or truths” because “that the soul could be immortal if God willed it is clearly a Common Notion in that among the most distant peoples, holding every type of superstition.” For Herbert, nature itself points toward an eventual separation of soul from body:

Since nature unceasingly labors to deliver the soul from its physical burden, so Nature itself instills with its secret conviction that virtue constitutes the most effective means by which our mind may be gradually separated and released from the body and enter into its lawful realm. And though many arguments could be cited to the same purpose, I know no more convincing proof than the fact that it is only virtue that has the power to draw our soul from the delights which engulf it, and even restore it to its native regions, so that freed from the foul embrace of vice, and finally from the fear of death itself, it can apply itself to its proper function and attain inward everlasting joy.

(36–37)

Herbert suggests that virtuous action (that is, action not governed by physical appetites) allows a preexperience of a disembodied afterlife in which the soul has been freed from its body. Herbert proposes that this understanding is, in fact, universally shared among all religions and therefore calls it a “common idea” and one of the five universal principles. In addressing the afterlife, therefore, Herbert posits a vision of resurrection founded on a strong body/soul dualism that imagines that the soul is the essence of the person and is capable of independent postmortem existence separate from its body.⁶

What Edward Herbert’s project shows is that under the pressure of a rising dominant form of secularization, an implicit dualism becomes a kind of common sense and the basis for a “reasonable” form of Christianity including in questions about the ultimate fate of the self. Entering into a self-reinforcing circle, body/soul dualism with an emphasis on the soul as the primary scene of selfhood energizes an emerging secular modernity and is, in turn, “blessed” by this emerging secular modernity as embodying a reasonable and rational version of Christianity.

But if resurrection is retained in Herbert’s writing by being transformed into a reasonable body/soul dualism that prioritizes the soul, what of the body and the monist-materialist theory of the person that Herbert sets aside? If Herbert’s writings are unconcerned with the fate of the body in the face of rationalizing dualism, then it is precisely here that Donne departs Herbert’s company. Donne was a friend of Edward Herbert and was throughout his lifetime a collector of intellectual provocations, and he was certainly aware of Herbert’s search for shared and reasonable principles to base his religious life upon. Indeed, half of Donne’s mind is traveling the same path as Edward Herbert, namely, the path of rationalizing Christianity, including by reconceptualizing it as a religion of body/soul dualism. But the other half of Donne’s mind travels in a very different direction, by seizing upon and celebrating precisely those elements of Christianity, including the idea of material resurrection, that are least reasonable, rational, commonsensical, or universally shared. For Donne, the body and its fate become the basis for a critique of the reasonable and rational discourse of Christianity that represents the cutting edge of secularization. In doing so, Donne simultaneously critiques the autonomous and rational self that the dominant path of secularization represented by Herbert endorses.

I call this particular “use” of the least reasonable and least rational elements of Christianity, including the commitment to the resurrection of the body and its flesh, “countersecularization.” What I mean by that term is that Donne is not engaging in anything like a fundamentalist return to some kind of archaic orthodoxy in religious matters. Rather, Donne seizes on the notion of the resurrection of the body as that idea is itself transformed by secularizing pressures as a basis for rethinking and reimagining some of the key elements of an emerging secularized vision of religion and of selfhood. Donne uses a heightened emphasis on the body in its strangeness and vulnerability to undermine any stable, role-based identity but also any notion of the person as an autonomous reasoning subject capable of arriving at truth, the sort of reasoning subject that Herbert of Cherbury assumes. Thus, I see Donne’s interest in the “resurrection body” as a crit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface: Christianity as Critical Theory
• Epigraph
• Introduction: Secularization and the Resurrection of the Flesh
• 1. Secularization, Countersecularization, and the Fate of the Flesh in Donne
• 2. Wanting to Be Another Person: Resurrection and Avant-Garde Poetics in George Herbert
• 3. Luminous Stuff: The Resurrection of the Flesh in Vaughan’s Religious Verse
• 4. The Feeling of Being a Body: Resurrection and Habitus in Vaughan’s Medical Writings
• 5. Resurrection, Dualism, and Legal Personhood: Bodily Presence in Ben Jonson
• Epilogue: Resurrection and Zombies
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author