Magical Epistemologies

Forms of Knowledge in Early Modern English Drama

Anannya Dasgupta

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000417531
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Drama
• Index: Literature

This book began with a simple question: when readers such as us encounter the term magic or figures of magicians in early modern texts, dramatic or otherwise, how do we read them? In the twenty-first century we have recourse to an array of genres and vocabulary from magical realism to fantasy fiction that does not, however, work to read a historical figure like John Dee or a fictional one he inspired in Shakespeare's Prospero. Between longings to transcend human limitation and the actual work of producing, translating, and organizing knowledge, figures such as Dee invite us to re-examine our ways of reading magic only as metaphor. If not metaphor then what else? As we parse the term magic, it reveals a rich context of use that connects various aspects of social, cultural, religious, economic, legal and medical lives of the early moderns. Magic makes its presence felt not only as a forms of knowledge but in methods of knowing in the Renaissance. The arc of dramatists and texts that this book draws between Doctor Faustus, The Tempest, The Alchemist and Comus: A Masque at Ludlow Castle offers a sustained examination of the epistemologies of magic in the context of early modern knowledge formation.

This book is co-published with Aakar Books, New Delhi. Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the print versions of this book in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

CHAPTER 1
Cunning for a Soul: Religion and Magic in Doctor Faustus

The demonization and persecution of witches overshadow any discussion of magic in early modern Europe. The perception of evil in the form of the devil looms large over an art that was understood, in its most commonplace association, to be a result of a pact with the devil. Tied to the activities of the devil, magic was formulated by the changing notions of Christian theodicy in medieval and early modern Europe.¹ Although Catholicism considered magic to be the art taught by the devil in defiance of God, the vilification of magic was renewed as a part of the Protestant self-definition. The reformers seized upon the Catholic Church’s somewhat ambiguous approach to magic in order to condemn the Catholic Church as magical. The severity of the witch hunts in early modern Europe testifies the extent to which magic was a troubled and troubling category of knowledge in discourse and practice.

Religion, both Catholic and Protestant, was instrumental in defining magic in the early modern period. Keith Thomas and Richard Kieckhefer have documented the ecclesiastical involvement in developing a range of the charms designed to attract God’s blessing on secular activities and in exorcisms and reversing of enchantments.² However, the same medieval Church also authorized the writing and publication of the most influential demonology—The Malleus Malificarum in 1486 by Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger—meant to aid the identification and conviction of witches. The medieval Church’s contradictory involvement and denunciation of magic suggests that the real problem with magic was not about whether or not it was a credible system of thought, but about who controlled it and authorized its exercise. Accordingly, the Church distinguished between its own “white” magic as enabled by prayer and the “black” magic of the lay people as witchcraft enabled by the devil.³ This tendency to construct magic as a challenge to religion resulted in a discourse of opposition, contrariety, and contradiction that the reformers emphasized in their much more severe distancing from all magic. The demonized alterity of magic, to which Emily Bartels has drawn our attention, was made the repository for all kinds of non-conformity, transgression, and rebellion; it was achieved by wielding the stake over the body and eternal damnation over the soul.⁴

Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus written and performed between 1591 and 1593 dramatizes the religious and academic polemics generated around the question of magic and its relation to religion. In this chapter, I argue that the representation of magic in Doctor Faustus challenges the oppositional discourse within which reformation Christianity had cast magic. Faustus has inspired a long scholarly tradition of reading the play precisely as dramatizing opposition between the “humanist aspiration” and “orthodox framework” of religion where critics have taken sharply polarized positions about the ultimate moral to be drawn from Marlowe’s play.⁵ But Jonathan Dollimore suggests that contrariness is a part of Faustus’ deeply divided world and Faustus is “constituted by the very limiting structures that he transgresses” (110).⁶ In his thesis of “subversion through transgression”, an identifiably Protestant transgression, borne out of despair and without the hope of liberation, reveals the limiting structures of Faustus’ universe (107, 118). Emily Bartels pushes the subversiveness of Faustus’ transgression even further by suggesting that Protestant ideology “imposes a transgressive identity on [the] subject from without” (126). Faustus thinks he is in charge of his transgression but it is actually Mephistopheles and Lucifer–Protestantism dressed as devils, who manipulate him.

Dollimore’s and Bartels’ Faustus is heavily scripted from within and without and the critique that Marlowe offers in this tragic narrative is the impossibility of the individual to imagine a subjectivity outside these limiting inscriptions. The limiting inscriptions were scripted in part by the reformers, including Luther and Melancthon, who contributed to the Faust legend that grew around the life of a historical George Faustus by making it a story about transgression and punishment by damnation. So far as Faustus is considered a metonym for Renaissance magic, this scripting of Faustus implies a scripting of magic by religion. My contention is that although Marlowe’s Faustus is shaped by the limiting structures and narratives of magic as contrary to religion, he finds that in practice magic exceeds the oppositional relationship with religion. His use of magic in the course of the play and the enactment of his damnation highlight not just the limiting structures but the process of constructing of those limitations. Marlowe’s Faustus implodes the limits that circumscribe him by taking his subjection to the limiting structures quite literally. What John Cox says of the devils in the play applies to the entire play, “Marlowe recreates a simulacrum of familiar oppositional thinking in order to deconstruct it” (113).⁷ The insistence of the demonological and theological writing that magic is necessarily opposed to religion is like the ghost inscription that appears and disappears from Faustus’ arm.

The Devil’s Art

“The history of the Devil”, complains Nathan Johnstone, “has tended to be the history of the demonization of witches” (173).⁸ He argues that Protestant demonization points not to an automatic oppositional discourse but one that is carefully constructed (177). While Johnstone’s project is to recover the devil from his alienation onto marginal transgressors and place him in the heart and hearth of the ordinary Protestant’s spiritual struggle, the corollary to his argument is quite relevant to the history of magic. The history of magic has tended to be the history of the devil. The following brief sketch of three key moments of theodical thought highlight the evolving conception of evil that impacted the demonology of transgressive magic as it was locked down in a relationship of confrontation and opposition to religion. In the words of the authors of the Malleus Malificarum: “S. Augustine says that the abomination of witchcraft arose from the foul connection of mankind with the devil” (29).

Following from Plato and the NeoPlatonists, and influenced by the theory of generation from opposites, St. Augustine dwelt both on the contrary and correlative aspects of good and evil.⁹ In The City of God (c.417) he describes evil as an essential antithesis that sets off the goodness of God:

For God who would never have created any, I do not say angel, but even man, whose future wickedness he foreknew, unless He had equally known to what uses in behalf of good he could turn him, thus embellishing the course of the ages, as it were an exquisite poem set off with antithesis. (Book XI.18.361)¹⁰

The idea of evil as necessary antithesis that is subsumed in the goodness of God leaves open the possibility of tainting God with evil which in early Patristic theodicy is countered by the idea of evil as privation. St. Thomas Aquinas stressed on the idea of evil as a condition of privation. Following Aristotle’s lead, Aquinas deduced that all good necessarily demanded its privation; therefore, the devil and all evil following from him are defective in goodness. In On Evil (c.1263) Aquinas gives goodness the order of precedence over evil:

It remains then that good is the accidental cause of any evil. But evil which is a defective good, may also be a cause of evil; nevertheless it always comes back to this that the first cause of evil is not evil, but good. (21)¹¹

The a priori existence of goodness makes it possible to apprehend evil as the absence of goodness. In one of his iterations of hell, Mephistopheles describes the post-apocalyptic hell as the absence of heaven: “…when all the world dissolves,/and every creatures shall be purified,/All places shall be hell that is not heaven” (2.1.127-29). It is important that Aquinas, the most influential Catholic theologian, places the experience of goodness before the experience of evil because the Reformation theologians invert this order.

In the hands of the Reformation theologians, evil as privation became absolute; they made the individual responsible for the incidence of evil in the world by emphasizing the element of willful opposition to God. Aquinas’ formulation where the positive logically made the existence of the negative possible, was inverted by the Reformation Protestants, especially Calvin. In The Institutes of Christian Religion (1536) Calvin’s definition of original sin “as a hereditary corruption and depravity of our nature” made depravity and evil the first and inescapable experience of the human condition (292).¹² He goes on to add that, “our nature is not only utterly devoid of goodness, but so prolific in all kinds of evil that it can never be idle” for all of man from “intellect to will” and “soul to flesh” is “nothing else than concupiscence” (293). In Calvin’s formulation, evil is both a hereditary condition and a willful persuasion of the human nature that is inherently prone to breeding further evil. Original sin as the first experience of existence needed rectification through the necessary sacrifice of Christ which did not, however, guarantee the availability of salvation to all, as Marlowe’s Faustus will plainly come to realize.

The demonologies, given over the study of the devil and his minions—the witches and sorcerers—grew directly out of theodical thought. The devil is the enemy of mankind because he apes God and presents privation and antithesis. He is the tempter who manipulates the weakness of the hereditary condition of humanity’s sinfulness by tempting people to damnation. The demonologies describe the falling into magic as the abandoning of oneself to the devil. Pope Innocent VIII’s Bull of 1484, that delegated Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger to the work of compiling the Malleus Maleficarum, articulates the Catholic Church’s indignation over losing its laity to the devils in terms strongly resonant with the trajectory of Marlowe’s Faustus:

…many persons of both sexes, unmindful of their own salvation and straying from the Catholic faith have abandoned themselves to devils… they blasphemously renounce their Faith that is theirs by the sacrament of Baptism and at the instigation of the Enemy of Mankind they do not shrink from committing the foulest abominations and filthiest excesses to the deadly peril of their own souls, whereby they outrage Divine Majesty and are a cause of scandal and danger to very many (xliii)¹³

For the Church, magic was mainly demonic because it challenged God’s world and work but not without God’s permission. Right at the outset The Malleus seeks to establish the three essentials of demonic magic—the witch, the sorcerer, and the permission of God (1). Through the text the interlocutor brings up the logical problem of this proposition by returning to the ideas of Augustine and Aquinas: “Why is it erroneous to say that God wishes evil to be and to be done…” (68).¹⁴ The long-winded response draws on the Augustinian proposition that antithesis of the devil is meant to bring out the goodness of God: “it is not God’s purpose to prevent evil, lest the universe should lack the cause of much good” (69). The authors of Malleus are unequivocal in denouncing the devil’s magic, but it emphasizes the Augustinian paradigm of locating evil within a structure of goodness where the devil enacts opposition for the service of good.

Demonologists were instrumental in translating the relationship between God and the devil through the language of magic. In their zeal to mark the distinction between God and the devil in terms of religion and magic, the demonologists worked themselves into the logical trap of making the belief in witches necessary for the belief on God. As King James I, an orthodox demonologist did in his Daemonologie (1597), written to refute Reginald Scot’s skepticism about the real power of witches. In the following dialogue from King James’s Daemonologie Epistemon explains to Philomathes that there is no better way to know God but through “contrarie opposites”.

Phi: Since yee are enterted now to speake of the appearing of spirites: I would be glad to hear your opinion on the matter. For manie denies that anie such spirites can appear in these days as I have said.

Epi: Doubtleslie who denyeth the power of the Devill, woulde likewise denie the power of God, if they could for shame. For since the devil is the very contrarie opposite to God, there is no better way to know God, then by the contraries; as by the ones’s power (though a creature) to admire the power of the great Creator: by the falsehood of the one to consider the trueth of the other, and by the injustice of the one the justice of the other…and so foorth in all the rest of the essence of God, and qualities of the Devill. (38)¹⁵ (Italics for emphasis)

In this exchange Philomathes’s question alludes to Reginald Scot’s skepticism about the validity of witchcraft accusations that King James refuted in his preface. Epistemons’s response presents the devil as the “contrarie opposite” of God. This formulation is representative of the doubly emphasized relationship of opposition that defined not just the devil in relation to religion but also magic as a contrariety.

Stuart Clark demonstrates the centrality of “contrariety” in the linguistics and semantics of early modernity and consequently its crucial role in understanding the language of demonology. He suggests that contentio or antithesis as the verbal and syntactic patterning of sentences reflects the divided and oppositional cosmology of God and the devil.¹⁶ Reformation religions especially articulated th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Cunning for a Soul: Religion and Magic in Doctor Faustus
• 2. Magical Theatricality in Shakespeare’s The Tempest
• 3. Fraudulent Magic in Jonson’s The Alchemist
• 4. The Virtue of Magic in Milton’s A Masque at Ludlow Castle
• Bibliography
• Index