Babel by emss.kings

Babel

B A B E L Volume XVII - 2018

A Journal of Early Modern Studies Vol. XVII - 2018 The Early Modern Studies Program University of Kingâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s College

Studiolo

B SAt u dBi oEl o L Vol. XVII - 2018

Editor-in-Chief

Sam Gleave Riemann

Publisher

Keenan Livingstone

Assistant Editors

Charlotte Scromeda Hannah Sparwasser Soroka Katy Weatherly Zรถe Sherwin

Published 2018 The Early Modern Studies Society University of King’s College K’jipuktuk (Halifax), Nova Scotia

The Early Modern Period was a time of systematic and violent oppression for many people of various and intersecting identities. To quote an earlier edition of Babel, it “wasn’t all that fun for anyone other than straight white dudes.”1 We recognize that some topics in Babel may be uncomfortable for certain readers. As such, we have included content warnings on relevant essays. We encourage you to interact with Babel on your own terms.

Recto: da Messina, Antonello. St. Jerome in His Study. 1475. Oil on wood. London, England: National Gallery. Verso: Recto; Dürer, Albrecht. Saint Jerome in His Study. 1514. Engraving. Dresden, Germany: Kupferstich-Kabinett.

Printed in K’jipuktuk (Halifax), Nova Scotia by etc. Press Ltd.

Kate Jordan and Jake Norris, Land Acknowledgement to Babel: A Journal of Early Modern Studies 18, (2016): 4.

Table of Contents On the Studiolo

Light and Community in Frankenstein

Sam Gleave Riemann Nathan Ferguson

“The still cave of the witch Poesy:” The Sublime and Creative Imagination in Shelley’s “Mont Blanc”

Yes, a Novel Must Have a Moral! — (A frivolous one, at least.) Madame de Staël’s Corinne, or Italy and her “Essay on Fictions”

Duties to Ourselves that Regard Animals: A Kantian Account of Animal Ethics

Challenging Burke’s Constitutional Change in Ireland as an Effective Answer to the French Revolution

Milton’s Use of the Religious Sublime in Paradise Lost

A Case Study of the Obscure Jacob Vrel

Dignity Within Difference: The Moral Weight of the Genital Organs in Montaigne’s Essays

Baptism and Blood: Martin Luther and Menno Simons on the Theology of Rebirth

The Disappearing Self in Zeami’s Atsumori

Afterword

Beatrice Glickman

Edie Chunn

Graham O’Brien

Daniel Whitten Lea Paas-Lang Layla Gibson

Sam Gleave Riemann

Verity Thomson

Emma Graveson

Keenan Livingstone

All of the work and scholarship at King’s and the preparations that go into Babel take place on unceded Mi’kmaq territory. The Peace and Friendship Treaties struck in the Early Modern period between the Mi’kmaq and British Nations are unique in that they grant uninhibited use of land resources to First Nations, rather than outlining a surrender of land. Canada continues to violate the spirit—peace and friendship—and the letter—resource use for the Mi’kmaq Nation—of these treaties. We are all treaty people.

On the Studiolo

he studiolo was an innovation of the Renaissance, an artifact of the quickly-expanding world of the 15th century. Italian for a “little study,” the studiolo was first a drawer, then a closet, then a room filled with marvels and curios from all over the world. The papers in this year’s edition of Babel each bear witness to the small passions that motivate students of the Early Modern. The journal this year has no better throughline than the wide-ranging curiosity that our writers bring to bear on their topic, be it Nō theatre or the theology of baptism. Whether they are championing the art of a lesser-known Netherlandish master, or challenging colonialist dogmas, or bringing a new perspective to a well-known work of literature, these young scholars inherit the curiosity that drove the collectors of the Renaissance into the studiolo. As you read these essays, we invite you to be curious. Go ahead, open up the drawer, see what lies inside. Whether it’s the badly taxidermied corpse of a pufferfish that resides in the King’s archives, or a long-forgotten masterpiece, you will find yourself enriched. We hope that as you rifle through the drawers of our studiolo, you will find marvelous new ideas that will inspire you to ask more questions. Scholarship is always a group effort. As we strive to slake our own curiosity, please join in with curiosities of your own. While we believe that our collection is marvelous, the studiolo is by no means full. There is room enough in our little study for everyone. Speaking of group efforts, many people contributed to the success of this journal. The whole Babel committee would like to thank our many, many peers for their many, many contributions. Even if you did not submit a paper to Babel this year, every paper we read is a testament to the quality of our class discussion, the curiosity of our community, and the camaraderie of our fellow travelers. On that note, we would also like to extend our most heartfelt thanks to the whole of the EMSP faculty, with particular thanks due to Dr. Simon Kow, our programme director of late, for his patience and his puns. We would also be remiss if we did not acknowledge the ongoing financial support of the King’s Students’ Union, without which this journal would never make it to press. Thank you all.

Pia curiositate,

Sam Gleave Riemann Editor-in-Chief, Babel 2017-8

Light and Community in Frankenstein Nathan Patrick

n Frankenstein, Mary Shelley participates in a discourse about teleology in the ethics of social life and scientific discovery. She communicates her perception of the ethical value of her characters’ actions through light imagery, associating both radical discovery and companionship with light. Despite the apparent value of the dazzling light of radical discovery, all actual goodness exists within the soft glow of authentic community, which is the only bulwark against evil and despair. Light, in facilitating perception, does not necessarily represent actual value. However, when Shelley’s characters cease to actively seek the goodness of social communion, they descend into a metaphorical darkness which guarantees misery. Therefore, when Victor’s pursuit of radical discovery leads him into solitude, he finds only despair. Those who alienate themselves from community may be reintegrated by opening themselves to communion, but the product of Victor’s alienated science is fundamentally irreconcilable with, and therefore destructive of, his community. Shelley’s usage of light symbolism exposes the superficiality of human judgement. Not only does Victor’s misperception of radical knowledge as a good in itself temporarily cripple his ability to participate in communal fellowship, the very light that allows the creature to perceive communion as good exposes him as apparently unfit to participate in it. By barring the creature from community, human society damns him to total isolation and misery; this state compels the creature to commit acts of destructive violence. Light helps one find the value in potential ends insofar as sight is the means by which those ends are perceived. Victor’s interest in unlocking the radical secrets of the natural world is born first of his observation of the “dazzling light” of a thunderbolt; an attraction towards “one glimmering ... light” drives his obsession.1 Furthermore, when the creature observes true communion, he does so through light that pours out of the cottage onto his eyes as he lies in his hovel.2 In all instances, light facilitates the evaluation of an end by allowing the character to perceive its potential good. However, the potential good which the character perceives is not necessarily actual; for example, Victor’s pursuit of radical discovery unfolds disastrously. The perceived value of communion is that it allows one to exit the self and participate in a greater, more stable, and more mutual good. The creature’s despair derives primarily over his exclusion from mutuality—he is “dependent on none, related to none.”3 Elizabeth typifies the selfless member of community, who, when at her best, “continually endeavours to contribute to the happiness of others, entirely forgetful of 1. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, ed. D.L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2012), 70; 79. 2. Ibid., 126. 3. Ibid., 142.

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herself.” In an authentic community, no act of self-sacrifice is compelled, but rather, “mutual affection [engages all] to comply with and obey the slightest desire of each other.”5 In communion, one willingly relocates one’s immediate personal interest into the concerns of the collective, and in return earns access to the goodness of companionship. This goodness is community’s consistent defense against and alleviation of despair. Shelley provides an example following the success of Victor’s experimentum crucis, as he wanders the streets of Ingolstadt in a deep and solitary anguish, eventually encountering Henry Clerval. The presence of Victor’s old companion recalls scenes of his former fellowship to his mind, and restores him from “horror and misfortune” to “calm and serene joy.”6 Furthermore, Justine Moritz, recalling her false confession, notes that a lack of compassionate company caused her misery. She had “none to support [her]” and could not bear the alienation of such an “evil hour.”7 The intense mutual love present in communion softens the sting of death as comrades learn to “think [themselves] fortunate, whilst one remains whom the spoiler has not seized.”8 Even consideration of one’s own death becomes painless. The sweetness of Elizabeth’s affection allows Justine to “feel as if [she] could die in peace,” while Victor looks forward to his reunion-in-death with Elizabeth in “ecstasy.”9 In all instances, true communion is the only good necessary to ward off anxiety and misery, and it endows meditation on mortality a character of serenity unavailable to the isolated. In such authentic community, love and joy are actualized not only by and through its composite members, but in the presence and beauty of the external world. Following his encounter with Clerval in Ingolstadt—and the abatement of despair that was its corollary—Victor is reawakened to the beauty of the natural world, which “[contributes] greatly to [his] convalescence.”10 However, nature only has the power to “[fill Victor] with ecstasy” after the presence of authentic community reopens his “cramped and narrowed” senses to selflessness.11 Contrarily, the creature, who is permanently precluded from communion, perceives all such goodness as “a shadow” instead of as “sublime and transcendent visions of ... beauty.”12 In communion, the participant wills a selflessness that allows them to become fully attentive to the sempiternal beauty and goodness of the communal and natural world. However, community is not the only end perceived to be good. As alluded to above, Victor distracts himself from community in his pursuit of radical discovery. His perception of radical knowledge as valuable leads him on a flight into isolation; his “frantic impulse” to complete this “secret toil” in a “solitary ... cell” leaves him “insensible to the charms of nature” and causes him to “forget those friends ... whom 4

4. Ibid., 73. 5. Ibid., 71. 6. Ibid., 85-86. 7. Ibid., 107. 8. Ibid., 72. 9. Ibid., 109; 205. 10. Ibid., 88. 11. Ibid., 94. 12. Ibid., 219.

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[he] had not seen for so long a time.”13 When he recalls this insensibility to goodness, he describes his esteem of ambitious discovery as having “[shut his eyes] to the horror of [his] proceedings.”14 When Victor perceives knowledge to be the ultimate good, he alienates himself from the benefits of companionship by closing his eyes—that is, his means of perception of the good—to the destructivity of his actions. By isolating himself, he eliminates all possibility to perform the selflessness that is the foundation of all goodness. As the artificial creation of his alienated science destroys his former community, he develops a hellish self-hatred that renders him unable to stably feel the empathy necessary for communion; he becomes utterly hopeless and dejected, forever lost to the good of true friendship.15 Victor is “blasted and miserable”, kept alive only by the mad drive to exterminate the product of his ambition.16 Both the practice and the product of ambitious scientific pursuit are irreconcilable with the demands of authentic communion, and provide no protection from despair themselves. The role of sight as the sense by which all things are perceived and evaluated powerfully emphasizes the superficiality that characterizes human judgement in Frankenstein. No character appreciates the salient value of communion more than Victor’s creature: he understands that “[his] vices are the children of a forced solitude that [he] abhors; and [his] virtues will necessarily arise when [he lives] in communion.”17 Significantly, the creature believes that only superficial “human senses are insurmountable barriers to [his] union” with others.18 The future life he once perceived as “gilded by bright rays of hope” is thereby impossible.19 Instead, the superficiality of that light condemns him to abject and irremediable agony, vice, and solitary self-hatred. Once he becomes “content to suffer alone, ... no malignity, no misery, can be found equal to [his].”20 Existing in this utter desolation of goodness, the creature finds himself “the slave, not the master, of an impulse which [he] detested, ... evil thenceforth became [his] good.”21 The creature resigns himself to a life devoid of companionship—that is, a life devoid of the fulfillment and comfort of self-willed subjection to a greater good. He is instead subject to an insatiable thirst to destroy the community from whence his master sprung and from which he is so devastatingly excluded. The creature’s characterization of the human as enslaved to their superficial senses is evidently correct. Shelley consistently demonstrates that the creature’s countenance is simply “too horrible for human eyes to behold.”22 The natural reaction of all to his visage is horror, repulsion, and fear.23 Significantly, it is his physiognomy alone 13. Ibid., 81. 14. Ibid., 173. 15. Ibid., 61. 16. Ibid., 193; 207; 213. 17. Ibid., 158. 18. Ibid., 156. 19. Ibid., 132. 20. Ibid., 219. 21. Ibid., 218. 22. Ibid., 156. 23. Ibid., 84; 148; 154; 217.

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that alienates him from the possibility of participating in authentic community, as it is clear he is not inhuman in any substantial way outside of his superficial appearance. During his conversation with the blind DeLacey, the old man refers to him as a â&#x20AC;&#x153;human creature.â&#x20AC;?24 Thus, the very light which illuminates scenes of communion exposes him as an irreconcilable being, unfit for human community, yet unable to ward off despair and evil temptation without it. This superficiality of human judgement makes it totally inadequate to the self-transcendence demanded by supracommunal ambition; not only does Victor improperly locate value in horrifying and destructive pursuits, he is totally unable to incorporate his radical creation into an authentic communal life. He alienates himself from his capacity to self-sacrifice, and the monstrous creations of modernity are simply beyond the ken of relatively superficial human compassion. However, the human is not condemned to despair, for Shelley presents the reader with an image of a community in which hope, service, and love are unified in a radical and exultant self-willed mutuality.

24. Ibid., 148

NATHAN FERGUSON

Bibliography Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. Edited by D.L. MacDonald and Kathleen Scherf. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2012.

“The still cave of the witch Poesy:” The Sublime and Creative Imagination in Shelley’s “Mont Blanc” Beatrice Glickman

ercy Bysshe Shelley’s “Mont Blanc” is an ode written in 1816 about a Swiss Vale. In this work, Shelley describes the landscape as sublime: the vale and the mountain are overwhelmingly vast, wild, terrifying, and yet delightful. Shelley said that writing “Mont Blanc” was the result of an “undisciplined overflowing of the soul,” his attempt to capture the deep emotions the scene evoked in him.1 Thus, “Mont Blanc” is not merely a description of a place; it is instead a reflection on the human experience of nature. Shelley imagines the vale as an eternal world and gives voices to the different objects present there—voices that both affect and communicate with him. This focus on humanity’s emotional experience of nature is, of course, consistent with the Romantic movement of the time. According to Edmund Burke, a political theorist and a philosopher, nature was considered a powerful, possibly divine being, and the source of the sublime. Yet, I will argue that Shelley suggests that the human imagination is just as powerful as natural objects in evoking the sublime. Indeed, for Shelley, the human imagination is fundamentally necessary for the sublime to take effect and for the universe to express itself. The literary, artistic, philosophical, and musical movement known as Romanticism focused on emotion, on articulating humanity’s relationship with nature, and on the importance of beauty and art for the human soul. It often incorporated themes of the sublime, understood as an overwhelming feeling of terror and delight. In 1757, Edmund Burke wrote A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. In this treatise, Burke aimed to distinguish the ideas of the sublime and the beautiful, claiming that the terms were confused. His goal was to identify what properties in art and literature evoke the passions that lead to these ideas.2 Burke defines the sublime as “whatever is fitted in any sort to excite ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible.”3 By contrast, he states that the beautiful is any quality that incites love in the beholder.4 One of the key fea1. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley, History of a Six Week’s Tour, and Letters from Switzerland (London, 1817), vi, quoted in Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly, “Notes on Poems of 1816, by Mrs. Shelley,: in The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1932), 532. 2. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. James T. Boulton (Notre Same, IL Notre Dame UP, 1986), 1. 3. Ibid., 39. 4. Ibid., 91.

BEATRICE GLICKMAN

tures of a sublime object is that it is powerful, which means not merely strong, but also potentially threatening.5 For instance, we do not normally witness the sublime in strong animals, like horses, but we do when they are part of a “howling wilderness.”6 Though the sublime comes from a source of terror, it is not a negative experience: it evokes a “delightful horror” and it is the most powerful emotion the human mind can feel.7 The strongest passion caused by the sublime is a feeling of astonishment, when the soul is so overwhelmed that its activities cease and the spectator becomes incapable of thinking of anything else or making rational arguments about what they see. This astonishment is usually tied to terror, because when something is dangerous and terrifying, it seems more overwhelming.8 Shelley’s “Mont Blanc” does, for the most part, conform to Burke’s ideas of the sublime. In the first of the poem’s five sections, we immediately see the tension between the beauty and delight of the landscape and the terror it brings, since the speaker sees the universe as “Now dark—now glittering—now reflecting gloom— / Now lending splendour.”9 Before we know what the speaker describes, we see that it vacillates between passions, and has a chaotic, strong effect. We then learn that the subject is a vale, an “awful scene / where Power comes down,” and this power is another aspect of the sublime.10 Indeed, the speaker states that when he looks at the Ravine, he “seem[s] as in a trance sublime and strange,” which suggests that he is in the state of astonishment that Burke describes, completely captivated.11 “Mont Blanc” also aligns with Burke’s definition of the sublime in the way it expresses eternity and infinity in the vast, seemingly boundless Alpine wilderness. The first line of the poem is “The everlasting universe of things,” which situates the reader not in a particular location, but in a narrative of infinite possibility.12 The poem then narrows its focus to the wilderness, while still maintaining that it is infinite: a “vast river / ... ceaselessly bursts and raves,” there is an ocean of “unfathomable deeps,” and a mountain, Mont Blanc, “pierc[es] the infinite sky.”13 Burke states that the ideas of infinity and eternity are among “the most affecting we have, and yet perhaps there is nothing of which we really understand so little,” which may be precisely why they are so enticing.14 The idea of an infinite universe of which we can perceive only a tiny portion, and which has existed eternally and will continue to exist long after we are gone, is terrifyingly incomprehensible, and yet it is also delightful both to witness and to participate in. Shelley’s poem suggests such participation by tying the infinite universe to the human experience, stating that “the works and ways of man, their death and birth” 5. Ibid., 66. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid., 73; 39. 8. Ibid., 57. 9. Percy Shelley, “Mont Blanc” in The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1932), 1.3-4. 10. Ibid., 1.15-61. 11. Ibid., 35. 12. Ibid., 1.1. 13. Ibid., 1.10-1; 1.64; 1.60. 14. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, 61.

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are all a part of nature, captured by the landscape of Mont Blanc. Thus, the speaker of “Mont Blanc” has a sublime experience of the terrifying power of nature, and of the infinite universe, that fits in with Burke’s philosophical ideas of the sublime in art. In the poem, Shelley imagines the natural world, and particularly the mountain, as a powerful being on a “secret throne,” presiding over living things.16 Scholar Angela Leighton argues that the powerful being hidden in the landscape may have been inspired by a Zoroastrian god of storm and pain and she views it as “a careless and death-dealing tyrant ... much less than human” who perpetuates destruction.17 She argues that the mountain, though given a voice, is not anthropomorphized and has no will to create or act, and is therefore “a debased kind of god.”18 Furthermore, she claims that the power is separated from the landscape, since it is hidden high up in the mountain.19 It is true that compared to a benevolent Christian God, Mont Blanc seems harsh; Shelley describes it as “a desert peopled by storms alone” filled with unnatural beings.20 The landscape below it is threatening and awful, in that “the glaciers creep / Like snakes that watch their prey” and it is even called a “city of death,” an unforgiving climate where living things die and seem consumed by nature.21 However, the powerful being in Shelley’s landscape is not necessarily as dark or malicious as Leighton claims. Shelley makes it clear that “the wilderness has a mysterious tongue.”22 Furthermore, he writes that the Mountain has a voice that most people do not understand, “but which the wise, and great, and good / Interpret, or make felt, or deeply feel,” which suggests that even if the Mountain is not rational and does not speak in words, it can communicate deeply with those who listen, and perhaps is not careless.23 In this way, Mont Blanc produces a source of duality in its imagery. Its effects are chaotic, but its “Power dwells apart in tranquility;” it causes the movements of the waters, but it is “still and solemn;” it carries in it the sounds of “life and death,” encapsulating the whole of experience, and not just the darkness.24 If it is a deity of chaos, it is not a tyrant; it merely is the eternal universe that Shelley opens with: powerful, messy, dark, light, terrifying, and beautiful. As much as “Mont Blanc” is about a powerful being in nature, it is also a search for the origin of Shelley’s creative power as a poet. In the poem, the speaker turns inward to “muse on [his] own separate fantasy” and begins a kind of meditation where he enters “the still cave of the witch Poesy” and fleeting images come to him.25 Leighton suggests that he is here searching for the origin of his creativity, and he finds 15

15. Shelley, “Mont Blanc,” 1.92. 16. Ibid., 1.26. 17. Angela Leighton, Shelley and the Sublime: An Interpretation of the Major Poems (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984), 60. 18. Ibid., 61. 19. Ibid., 64. 20. Shelley, “Mont Blanc,” 1.67; 1.62. 21. Ibid., 1.100-01; 1.105 22. Ibid., 1.17. 23. Ibid., 1.81-82. 24. Ibid,, 1.96; 1.127; 1.128. 25. Ibid., 1.36; 1.43.

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it not in the ghostly ideas that appear to him, but in the power of the natural world.26 The way he finds the origin of words, Leighton says, is by letting go of the words themselves. However, this imageless, wordless abstract idea is impossible to keep hold of, and so leads him to despair.27 In this way, the origin of the poet’s power might be similar to the voice of the mountain, in that it cannot be heard in words or spoken to, but can instead be felt deeply. I would argue that if the speaker’s poetic inspiration comes from the powerful deity of the mountain, it too is deeply powerful and can evoke the sublime. In other words, the imagination itself can be a source of an intense emotional experience. Burke states that words are able to evoke the passions even more than natural phenomena in some cases, because there are abstract ideas that cannot be captured in sensory experience. Those ideas thus must be conveyed through words, and can excite the passions more deeply than objects in the world.28 Furthermore, those abstract ideas can be combined with sense perceptions to evoke a greater sense of the sublime.29 The idea that words can evoke the sublime seems implicit in Shelley’s decision to write a poem about Mont Blanc, but it is also present in the content of the poem itself. Mont Blanc is described as a “many-voiced vale” that speaks in “an old and solemn harmony.”30 Arguably, one of the voices is that of Shelley himself, which suggests a power on the part of the imagination to enact a scene through the telling of it. The speaker states that the vale causes a “strange sleep [that] wraps all in its own deep eternity.”31 He believes that if he is not asleep and dreaming, a god-like being must be revealing to him “the veil of life and death.”32 Here, we see that the speaker’s imagination either has the power to access the secrets of the deity of sublime nature and to glimpse into the mysteries of life and death, or, if he is dreaming, his imagination has the power to create this meaning for itself, which is arguably just as effective to him. Either way, Shelley seems to conceive of the imagination as itself sublime, insofar as it connects to the infinite and allows for the peeling back the veil of death, a concept which is both terrifying and beautiful. Furthermore, in his meditative state, the speaker’s “wild thoughts ... float above [the Ravine’s] darkness,” which suggests a kind of conquering of the sublime natural world that had previously overwhelmed him.33 Thus, the speaker’s imaginative thoughts have the power to participate in, invoke, and even conquer the sublime world. Scholar Wry argues that Shelley subverts the traditional Romantic idea that there must be a distance between the observer and the object of sublime inspiration by imagining that he is right in the middle of the scene, having climbed the mountain, which “situates him in a dark and disorienting topography.”34 At times, the speaker is 26. Leighton, Shelly and the Sublime, 66. 27. Ibid., 66. 28. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry, 39. 29. Ibid., 174. 30. Shelley, “Mont Blanc,” 1.13; 1.24. 31. Ibid., 1.27-29. 32. Ibid., 1.54. 33. Ibid., 1.41-42. 34. Joanreiss Wry, “Panoptic Perspectives in Shelley’s Mont Blanc: Collapsed Distance

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overwhelmed by the vastness of the scene and the sheer amount of sounds and sights around him, which causes him to exclaim “Dizzy Ravine!” when looking at the rushing water. Wry argues that because of this collapsed distance, the speaker relates to the harsh reality of nature directly, and can therefore see its deadly and fearsome power more clearly.35 I would argue that in addition to collapsing physical distance, Shelley also collapses the imaginative distance between himself and the sublime, presenting the human mind and the sublime as intertwined forces. In fact, I would argue that they need each other. At the beginning of the poem, the springs of the universe, which are “the source of human thought” bring forth water that produces “a sound but half its own.” 36 Here, we see the interplay between the waters of the universe and the human mind. The universe gives life to human imagination, but it needs the human voice to fully be expressed. Later, when the speaker is in a sublime trance, he states that his mind holds “an unremitting interchange / With the clear universe of things around,” which again suggests that not only does the human imagination receive thoughts and perceptions from the world, but that the world receives something valuable in return.37 Furthermore, the poem ends with the thought that if the human mind were not able to perceive the universe, then nature would be nothing. The speaker proclaims, “and what were thou, and earth, and stars, and sea, / If to the human mind’s imaginings / Silence and solitude were vacancy?”38 The human imagination gives voice to the universe: the earth, stars, and sea, and Mont Blanc, silent and alone, require humanity to perceive them, hear them, and record their voices. Shelley suggests that if human imagination did not think that nature was significant and sublime, then it would not be; it would simply be vacant. Thus, “Mont Blanc” demonstrates the necessity of imagination to commune with and complete the expression of the natural sublime, and ultimately of the infinite universe. Shelley’s poem “Mont Blanc” conforms to Edmund Burke’s philosophy of the sublime, in that the natural landscape of the poem is terrifying, powerful, and beautiful, and produces a sense of overwhelming astonishment for the observer. Yet Shelley also suggests that the human imagination is itself a force of great power, one that can both participate in and invoke the sublime. He perhaps goes still further, suggesting that the human imagination is necessary for the sublime, and even the universe, to be given expression and meaning.

and the Alpine Sublime,” in The Explicator 67, no. 1 (1 September 2008), 30. 35. Ibid., 32. 36. Shelley, “Mont Blanc,” 1.4; 1.5. 37. Ibid., 1.39-40. 38. Ibid., 1.142-45.

BEATRICE GLICKMAN

Bibliography Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Ed. James T. Boulton. Notre Dame, IL: Notre Dame UP, 1986. Leighton, Angela. Shelley and the Sublime: An Interpretation of the Major Poems. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984. Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. “Note on Poems of 1816, by Mrs. Shelley.” In The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, edited by Thomas Hutchinson, 532. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1932. Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. History of a Six Weeks’ Tour, and Letters from Switzerland. London, 1817. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. “Mont Blanc.” In The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, edited by Thomas Hutchinson, 528-31. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1932. Wry, Joanreiss. “Panoptic Perspectives in Shelley’s Mont Blanc: Collapsed Distance and the Alpine Sublime.” The Explicator 67, no. 1 (1 September, 2008): 30-33.

Yes, a Novel Must Have a Moral! — (A frivolous one, at least.) Madame de Staël’s Corinne, or Italy and her “Essay on Fictions” Edie Chunn

s a literary form, the novel fascinates because of its flexibility and adaptability, and the way in which it depicts the lives of characters who are in constantly in action, making choices, and discovering things. In her novel Corinne, or Italy, Germaine de Staël inscribes a landscape of characters that range from the passionate genius to the melancholic venturer—including, crucially, the frivolous, lighthearted disposition of Frenchman Count d’Erfeuil. In Corinne, the Count’s notion of frivolity—the ability not to take oneself or others too seriously—subtly occupies a position of moral wisdom and ordering in the novel. Staël presents the Count’s lightness and noncommittal attitude as a moral strength, making him a moral guide in the novel. To a similar effect, in her “Essay on Fictions” Staël argues that the novel is a literary form capable of moral teaching because it amuses readers in a lighthearted, almost frivolous way. Lightness, for Staël, is a strength, and in making the Count (an ostensibly secondary character) a moral commentator or guide, Staël places a character in the novel who instructs morality through lightness, cheerfulness, and frivolity—the same methods of instruction that the novel itself uses. Staël further establishes the Count as a moral guide through her use of narrative voices and techniques, ending the novel on a note where the narration seems to be taken over by the Count. For Staël, the moral strength of the novel comes from its lightness. In Corinne, or Italy, she exhibits this particular strength in the character of the Count d’Erfeuil, transforming his frivolity and ease into a guide for moral decision making and suggesting that the moral lesson Corinne imparts is, in effect, the very foundations of the novel itself. According to Staël, the novel is an invaluable form of fiction because, through it, an author can subtly impart a moral lesson to her readers. To this effect, Staël considers the novel to be a “philosophical” literary form. In her “Essay on Fictions,” Staël writes that “all novels should be philosophical, as they should have a moral goal.”1 Because it has this moral imperative, the novel is not simply light, unimportant writing; in fact, its lightness allows it to carry the same philosophical or intellectual significance of any other ‘weightier’ text. A further component of what makes the novel unique is the way that it arrives at its moral goal—that is, through a well-written prose narrative and the depiction of actual relationships. Staël believes that “almost all moral truths 1. Germaine de Staël, “Essay on Fictions,” trans. Vivian Folkenflik (Columbia UP, 1987), 70.

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can be made tangible if they are shown in action,” underlining how the novel is useful as it depicts a sequence of events in time.2 Beyond merely presenting a series of events, however, the novel makes the things in it beautiful and interesting, using language to capture the imagination. Staël describes a kind of formula, stating that “the more moral or philosophical the result one is trying to achieve, the more they have to be decked out with things to move us, leading us to the goal without advance warning.”3 The novel’s strength, as Staël understands it, is its lightness, the looseness of its structure, as well as the way a novelist can “deck it out.” The lightness of the novel, or its focus on emotions and intimacies, avoids the more heavy-handed methods of instructing morality that other forms use and leads to a more profound moral realization. Although the word ‘frivolity,’ which connotes less favourable terms such as pettiness, vanity, or emptiness, may seem counterproductive to Staël’s goal, this contemporary (and, for that matter, English!) interpretation of frivolous does not capture Staël’s use of the word. For Staël, frivolity appears more in the context of cheerfulness and a spirit of lightheartedness. The French definition is somehow softer and less harsh than the English: “Qui est léger, sans constance ni sérieux”—that which is light, neither constant nor serious.4 In this sense, Count d’Erfeuil’s attitude of frivolity encompasses his lightheartedness and ready acquiescence to circumstance. While the Count is often vain and speaks of petty things, the main characteristic that Staël repeatedly emphasizes is his insistence upon cheerfulness. As the Count relates to Lord Nelvil, “Are we not on this earth, first to be useful, and then to be happy after that. My dear Nelvil, let’s go no further than that.”5 Here, the Count’s plainly stated perspective echoes what Staël believes the novel is capable of: “If fictions please nothing but the eye, they do nothing but amuse; but if they touch our hearts they can have a great influence on all our moral ideas.”6 In this way, Staël introduces the idea of moral usefulness in conjunction with amusement or happiness, both in Count d’Erfeuil’s perspective and in her conception of the novel. Similarly, the way Staël describes the Count’s conversational mannerisms resonates with her claim about “natural fictions,” or novels. As she writes while introducing the Count: “He played with words and sentences very ingeniously but he talked neither about the things around them nor his personal feelings. His conversation came, as it were, neither from without nor within. It was in between reflection and imagination, and dealt only with social relationships.”7 In this passage, the way the Count’s speech comes “neither from without nor within” and straddles “reflection and imagination” recalls Staël’s statement about the writing of novels, where “everything is both invented and imitated, so that nothing is true but everything looks true to life.”8 In both these passages, there is a sense of being in between the real and the imagined, or fictional, of 2. Ibid., 74. 3. Ibid., 61. 4. Définitions : frivole - Dictionnaire de français Larousse.” Dictionnaire Larousse, 12 avril 2017. www.larousse.fr/dictionnaires/francais/frivole/35342 5. Germaine de Staël, Corinne, or Italy, trans. Slyvia Raphael (Oxford UP, 2008), 13. 6. Staël, “Essay on Fictions,” 60-61. 7. Staël, Corinne, 11. 8. Staël, “Essay on Fiction,” 60; 61.

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vacillating between the two without ever landing. Staël characterizes the Count through his speech in a similar way to how she writes about the novel, suggesting a fundamental connection between the Count’s outlook on life and the moral object of the novel. In these ways, the frivolity displayed in Count d’Erfeuil expands upon Staël’s treatment of the novel. In a moral sense, the Count is one of the novel’s more just and helpful characters, as he is always aware of and able to follow his own instincts regarding the right or wrong course of action. Early on, Staël establishes that Count d’Erfeuil’s frivolity is a viable—and very likely favourable—alternative to Oswald’s sensibility regarding the conduct of one’s life. As the Count brazenly remarks to Oswald, “I may seem frivolous to you, but I wager that in the ordering of my life I shall be more sensible than you.”9 This ostensibly paradoxical claim—that practicality can come from frivolity—sums up the Count’s role in Corinne, as well as recalling the purpose of the novel as Staël describes it. This moment of acknowledging how his actions may appear to others also indicates that Count d’Erfeuil possesses a kind of self-awareness and attunement with the possible outcomes of his own actions that Oswald seems to lack, suggesting a more developed moral sensibility. As it turns out, over the course of the novel Count d’Erfeuil proves to be practical, and, if not “[friendly]” then certainly “[helpful].”10 When Corinne grows ill because of a broken heart while seeking Oswald in England, the Count, who happens to be travelling in England, abandons all of his plans in order to take care of her. As the narrator remarks, “so it was the frivolous man who looked after [Corinne], and the sensitive man who cut out her heart.”11 In this way, the frivolous Count d’Erfeuil demonstrates a kind of moral integrity, as his own sense of right and wrong guides him to aid Corinne, and his frivolity affords him enough flexibility to make sacrifices. The lesson Staël implicitly presents in this sentiment reflects and “[shows] in action” her earlier claim that “it is characters who feel deeply rather than frivolous ones who are capable of folly.”12 In these ways, Count d’Erfeuil’s role in the novel demonstrates the value of living in accordance with frivolity; Staël uses him to illustrate her claim about the value of frivolity or lightness as a moral rule to guide one’s actions. Finally, Staël’s shifts in narrative voice at the end of Corinne, or Italy solidify the Count’s position as a source of moral teaching, as we are left with a narrative voice that sounds remarkably like the Count. The closing lines—where one might expect to discover a final judgment of Oswald or Corinne—explicitly demonstrate a decision not to judge: “But did he forgive himself for his past behaviour? Was he consoled by society’s approval? Was he content with the common lot after what he had lost? I do not know, and, on that matter, I want neither to blame nor to absolve him.”13 These final few sentences, with the switch from an impersonal, seemingly omniscient voice to the first person, the repeated rhetorical questions and the ultimate off-handed acceptance of not knowing, indicate Count d’Erfeuil’s tone and perspective. This culminating re9. Staël, Corinne, 47. 10. Ibid., 346. 11. Ibid. 12. Staël, “Essay on Fictions,” 74; Staël, Corinne, 13. 13. Staël, Corinne, 404.

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mark is, in a sense, the frivolous attitude at its finest. The narrator “[wants] neither to blame nor to absolve [Oswald],” implying that making such a judgment is not something that interests him, and that instead he would like to move on to other things.14 This simple not “wanting” to do something evokes Count d’Erfeuil’s frivolous attitude and voice. After all the build up of the novel’s plot, which Staël imitates in the final list of questions addressing the consequences of Oswald’s actions, we discover that it is not necessary to make a judgment regarding the actions of others, and that our own lives may be better if we can accept and move past tragedy, instead of focusing on “blaming” or “absolving” it. In a different way, if Staël had made the judgment one way or another, she would have taken the moral dilemma out of her reader’s hands, effectively letting them off the hook. The Count’s flippant attitude thereby becomes extremely useful at the end because his voice allows the story to conclude without resolution. The more earnest narrative voice used for much of the rest of the novel accedes to the Count’s tone of unflappable aloofness. This final passage of Corinne, or Italy is, therefore, crucial to understanding the novel as a form that teaches a moral lesson. Staël leaves us with the character who embodies frivolity, a character trait that matches part of what Staël believes makes novels tick. With his frivolity, Count d’Erfeuil embodies the guiding moral principle of the novel as Staël outlines in her “Essay on Fictions.” Staël creates this continuity between character and form with the language she uses to describe both the Count and the novel, as well as in the subtle shifts she makes in narrative voice. While in many ways such lightness and acceptance make life easier, it does suffer from certain shortcomings, most notably a kind of insensitivity, as well as a difficulty with making permanent interpersonal connections. The Count’s frivolity, then, only covers one component of what makes the novel so effective: the novel’s easy lightness that leads to a practicality that makes moral lessons stand out. In a longer essay than this, one could explore the other component of the novel that Staël describes—the imagination, which colours in and makes the uncomplicated lightness of frivolity more beautiful. What we can take away from Corinne, or Italy, and from the novel itself as Staël conceives of it, is the knowledge that imagination must be tempered with frivolity, and also the reverse, in order to live wisely, helpfully, and most importantly, cheerfully. For all of this, however, the Count himself might reject the search for parallels in language and moral claims, desiring instead simply to continue his conversations about other people; to seek to understand and appreciate the decisions they make; and to live his life much in the way that the novelist writes.

14. Ibid.

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Bibliography de Staël, Germaine. Corinne, or Italy. Trans. Sylvia Raphael. Oxford UP, 2008. ———. “Essay on Fictions.” Trans. Vivian Folkenflik. Columbia UP, 1987. “Définitions : frivole - Dictionnaire de français Larousse.” Dictionnaire Larousse, 12 avril 2017. www.larousse.fr/dictionnaires/francais/frivole/35342

Duties to Ourselves that Regard Animals: A Kantian Account of Animal Ethics Graham O’Brien

n its most basic, Immanuel Kant’s ethical philosophy examines the particulars of human behavior under universal moral laws. Most of the time Kant examines how humans ought to interact with one another and how they ought to treat themselves. This essay, however, is interested in the often overlooked importance of how Kant supposes humans ought to treat animals. In this essay I will explain Kant’s system of duties, establish their connection to animals, and determine the moral status of both humans and animals. Throughout these explanations I will argue that human treatment of animals has ramifications on the moral status of humans themselves and informs how they may treat their fellow humans. This is the case in Kant’s schema of moral obligation because duties to oneself “take first rank and are the most important duties of all.”1 Kant makes it clear that if there were no duties to oneself, there could be no duties at all: “for I can recognize that I am under obligation to others only insofar as I at the same time put myself under obligation.”2 In other words, Kant declares them “to be the precondition of all obligation, even obligation to others.”3 Following this logic, it must be the case that the duties we have regarding animals can be traced back to duties we have to ourselves. As simple as this answer seems here, at the outset, it requires a lengthier explanation of Kant’s ethical system, how animals can fit into that system, and the implications of their place in Kant’s ethics as a whole. Bearing in mind our understanding that all duties arise from duties to oneself, every duty must have its source in a duty one has to themselves. Jens Timmerman clarifies this point in the following: “The agent’s self is not just the subject that has to comply with duty. It is also the object, defined as the authority to which the duty is owed. … [U]nder an obligation, I realize that the source of this obligation, qua obligation, is my own self, my own faculty of reason.”4 To explain this claim, it may be helpful to turn to the second formulation of the categorical imperative, “The Formula of Humanity.”5 Kant expresses the formula as the following: “So act that you use humanity, in your own

person as well as in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a 1. Jens Timmermann, “Kantian Duties to the Self, Explained and Defended,” Philosophy

81, no. 317 (2006): 508. 2. Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, ed. Lara Denis, trans Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2017), 173 [6:417]. 3. Timmermann, “Kantian Duties to the Self,” 508-09. 4. Ibid., 512. 5. Christine Korsgaard, introduction to Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, by Emmanuel Kant, trans. Mary J. Gregor, ed. Jens Timmermann (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012), xxiii.

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means.” What this means, as it applies to the current discussion, is that one has a duty 6

to never use themselves, or others, merely as a means to an end. Kant describes this duty in the following: “a human being has a duty to himself to be a useful member of the world, since this also belongs to the worth of humanity in his own person, which he ought not to degrade.”7 With that said, one is only obligated to be a useful member of society because one must not degrade one’s own moral worth, which is a duty we have to ourselves. In this case, and in all others, the duty to oneself is primary, acting as the predicate for duties to others. Kant proposes two kinds of other-directed duties: to others and regarding others. Robert Johnson clarifies this distinction in the following, salient example: If I promise to keep your elderly parents company while you are away, my duty is to you, not them, and I am obliged to keep them, not you, company. The duty is to you, not them, but regarding them, not you.8 Here, I do not directly owe anything to the elderly parents, rather my direct obligation is to their child who has asked me to look after them. Indirectly, I am duty-bound to the elderly parents. Duties regarding others are indirect duties; duties to others are direct duties. I have a duty to someone if and only if they can oblige me to their end and that the obligation is directly owed to them.9 In order to participate in Kant’s ethical system, beings must have “use of a rational will.”10 Johnson writes: We can, then, have duties only to persons on Kant’s view, those whose rational will(s) we intend to use. Note, however, that this does not imply that non-persons have no value. To have value is to be the object of a rational will.11 Kant does not attribute a rational will to non-humans; we will return to this later. The crucial detail for present discussion is that only a being that has a rational will can have direct duties to other beings. We can better understand the rational will by turning to “The Formulation of Universal Law,” which exhorts us to, “act only according to that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law.”12 Kant states that maxims predicate actions: “the will is thought as a capacity to determine itself to action in conformity with the representation of certain laws.”13 The will, then, is the capacity to act according to certain laws, “i.e. according to principles.”14 These principles are, as Korsgaard suggested, maxims. This implies that rational beings (including humans) have the 6. Emmanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary J. Gregor, ed. Jens Timmermann (Cambride UP, 2012), 41 [4:429]. 7. Ibid., 195 [6:446]. 8. Robert N. Johnson, “Duties to and Regarding Others,” in Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals: A Critical Guide, ed. Lara Denis (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010), 192-93. 9. Ibid., 193. 10. Ibid., 194. 11. Ibid., 198. 12. Korsgaard, introduction to Groundwork, xix; Kant, Groundwork, 34 [4:421]. 13. Kant, Groundwork, 39 [4:427]. 14. Ibid., 26 [4:412].

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capacity to choose what maxims they wish to act upon. We are constrained only by our own reason.15 This self-legislating capacity to choose maxims, according to the will, is a simple, but sufficient understanding of how Kant conceives of the relationship between duty and the rational will. Is it possible, then, for alloanimals16 to possess a rational will, according to Kant? As Johnson notes, Kant does not consider non-humans to have a rational will, so my task will be to explain why this is the case.17 Patrick Kain makes his arguments from contemporary biology, explaining that animals are capable of acting from their own chosen internal principles, sensing the world in similar and sometimes better ways than humans, and even learning language.18 Kain, citing Kant, explains that “animals are ‘things,’ not persons, and ‘respect is always directed only to persons, never to things.’”19 As this suggests, Kant asserts that we can only have duties to other humans and that alloanimals are of lower moral status than humans.20 In Kant’s system alloanimals are not ends-in-themselves, as humans are, rather they are “merely as a means to an end.”21 Alloanimals are merely a means because they only have relative value, which Kant calls “price.”22 Kant describes price in the following: an extrinsic value for his usefulness … that is to say, it gives one man a higher value than another, that is, a price as of a commodity in exchange with these animals as things.23 Essentially, it is a hierarchical value based on usefulness and applies explicitly to alloanimals. Price stands in opposition to the absolute and inalienable value that Kant calls “dignity.”24 Dignity is exclusive to humans, and does not exist in alloanimals. Kain writes: Kant claims that what gives a being dignity and marks it out as an ‘end in itself ’ is its innate rational capacity … for autonomy … the capacity to ‘legislate’ the moral law and to act out of respect for the moral law. 25 Alloanimals do not legislate and act upon maxims or utilize a rational will. Therefore, they cannot be ends-in-themselves or autonomous beings. As such, alloanimals occupy a significantly lower moral worth than humans and cannot have a rational will. Another difference between humans and alloanimals, per Kant, is that allo15. Kant, Metaphysics, 173 [6:418]. 16. Non-Human Animals. 17. Johnson, “Duties to and Regarding Others,” 198. 18. Patrick Kain, “Duties Regarding Animals,” in Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals: A Critical Guide, ed. Lara Denis (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010), 214-15. 19. Ibid., 210. 20. Ibid. 21. Emmanuel Kant, Lectures on Ethics, trans. Louis Infield, in Human Life and the Natural World: Readings in the History of Western Philosophy, ed. Owen Goldin and Patricia Kilroe (Peterborough Ontario: Broadview Press, 1997), 152. 22. Kant, Metaphysics, 186 [6:434]. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25. Kain, “Duties Regarding Animals,” 212.

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animals are incapable of consent because they lack a rational will. As the Formula of Humanity explains, we cannot treat any other person as a means to an end. Furthermore, we cannot compel any other person to fulfill our ends in this manner. Yet, with their consent, we can obligate them to our ends. Kant writes: “there is one end that can be presupposed as actual in all rational beings … and all actually do have according to a natural necessity, and that is the purpose of happiness.”26 This passage is essential to understanding how duties to others are possible at all. Happiness, in this case, is an end sought by all rational beings, and acquiring it occasionally requires assistance from other persons.27 In fact, Johnson claims that we, “in having our own happiness as our end, … cannot rationally avoid intending to make use of the rational agency of some person at some … time.”28 Because we cannot avoid making use of someone’s will as a means to happiness, we require their consent. They must be willing to allow us to use them as a means. This is permissible because we do not use them “merely as a means” precisely because they have consented.29 This “merely” carries a lot of weight, as it leaves for someone to become a means only by consenting to make “the happiness of other human beings, whose [permitted] end I thus make my own end as well.”30 This is not to suggest that you make another person’s happiness your duty, which is impermissible under Kant’s system.31 Rather, it shows how duties to others have a place in Kantian ethics. In his lectures, Kant explains that “our duties towards animals are merely indirect duties towards humanity.”32 The claim that duties towards alloanimals are indirect is important because it implies the notion that these duties are regarding alloanimals, not to them. Unlike the example of the elderly parents, you owe duties regarding alloanimals to yourself. Johnson explains that “many duties which are in regard to or concerning others (or the environment, animals, etc.) may strictly speaking be duties to oneself or some other person.”33 Therefore, we cannot have a direct duty to alloanimals. Instead, any duties we have concerning alloanimals are either owed to another person or to ourselves. The former kind is akin to the kind of duty we would have regarding the elderly parents. The latter requires more explanation, for it is here that alloanimals find their place in Kant’s schema. To borrow an example from Kant, say we have a faithful dog who is now too old to serve, and we kill them, rather than caring for them until their natural death.34 If we do this we do not “fail in [our] duty to the dog, for the dog cannot judge [and does not have a rational will], but [our] act is inhuman and damages in [yourself] that humanity which it is [our] duty to show towards mankind.”35 By violating the duty we 26. Kant, Groundwork, 29 [4:415]. 27. Johnson, “Duties to and Regarding Others,” 197-98. 28. Ibid., 198. 29. Kant, Groundwork, 41 [4:429]. 30. Kant, Metaphysics, 151 [6:388]. 31. Ibid., 150 [6:386]. 32. Kant, Lectures, 152. 33. Johnson, “Duties to and Regarding Others,” 195. 34. Kant, Lectures, 152-53. 35. Ibid., 153.

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have regarding the dog, we are violating a duty we owe to ourselves. More specifically, we violate the duties to act morally (moral perfection) and to be benevolent (humanity).36 If we are unnecessarily cruel to alloanimals, we fail in these direct duties to ourselves. This failure affects how we behave with other humans. Kant writes: if he is not to stifle his human feelings, he must practice kindness towards animals, for he who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men. We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.37 When we are cruel to alloanimals we diminish our capacity to act morally, and we fail to act benevolently. This is also the case if our duty regarding an alloanimal is a duty owed to another person, because the predicate of all other-directed duties is duties to ourselves.38 We would also be behaving malevolently if the duty we owe to another involves harming an animal. In “Interacting with Animals: A Kantian Account,” Christine Korsgaard uses 21st-century scientific knowledge to explain that we share a common history with alloanimals. She asserts that we share what it means to be alive with alloanimals and that “to engage in those activities—to feed and reproduce—is essentially what it means to be alive.”39 Humans and alloanimals act in similar ways, but Kant recognizes this already.40 Korsgaard introduces the idea that humans are animals, and that we share conditions of “good” and “bad.”41 This is morally significant, as Korsgaard asks if there is even a justification for our treatment of alloanimals as morally different from us.42 She does not believe there is any such difference, and that we ought to treat alloanimals as moral equals to whom we owe moral duties. How can this be possible if alloanimals are not ends-in-themselves and do not have a rational will, as humans do? Korsgaard would like us to take up the position that we ought to, at least, treat alloanimals as though they are ends-in-themselves.43 Her reasoning for this is that we should be doing everything we can “in order to be related as well as possible to each of them [alloanimals].”44 This way of treating alloanimals is possible within Kant’s system. Korsgaard takes pains to show it by recalling the notion that we ought to treat alloanimals well because we owe it to ourselves. Korsgaard agrees with Kant that treating animals well is a duty owed to the self. She complicates this system by suggesting that animals ought to also be treated as ends-in-themselves. In Kant’s ethical system, it is clearly the case that duties concerning alloani36. Kant, Metaphysics, 196 [6:447]; 204 [6:456]. 37. Kant, Lectures, 153. 38. Timmermann. “Kantian Duties to the Self,” 508-09. 39. Chritine Korsgaard, “Interacting with Animals: A Kantian Account,” in The Oxford Handbook of Animal Ethics, ed. Tom L. Beauchamp and R.G. Frey (New York: Oxford UP, 2013), 91. 40. Kant, Lectures, 152. 41. Korsgaard, “Interacting with Animals,” 91-92. 42. Ibid., 93. 43. Ibid., 98. 44. Ibid.

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mals occupy a very specific place. In his view, alloanimals are things, and as such, are of a very low moral worth. This is not to say that an alloanimal “is no more worthy of our concern than is a turnspit on which we might choose to roast it.”45 Rather, it is to say that their moral value is, practically speaking, a tangential representation of our own. Considering Korsgaard, and this suggestion, I am left thinking that we should treat animals how we humans ought to be treated, as ends-in-themselves.

45. Kain, “Duties Regarding Animals,” 210.

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Bibliography Johnson, Robert N. “Duties to and Regarding Others.” In Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals: A Critical Guide, edited by Lara Denis, 192-209. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010. Kain, Patrick. “Duties Regarding Animals.” In Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals: A Critical Guide, edited by Lara Denis, 210-233. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010. Kant, Immanuel. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Translated by Mary J. Gregor. Edited by Jens Timmermann. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012. ———. “Lectures on Ethics.” Translated by Louis Infield. In Human Life and the Natural World: Readings in the History of Western Philosophy, edited by Owen Goldin and Patricia Kilroe, 152-53. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 1997. ———. The Metaphysics of Morals. Edited by Lara Denis. Translated by Mary J. Gregor. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge UP, 2017. Korsgaard, Christine. “Interacting with Animals: A Kantian Account.” In The Oxford Handbook of Animal Ethics, edited by Tom L. Beauchamp and R. G. Frey, 91118. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013. ———. Introduction to Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, by Emmanuel Kant, translated by Mary J. Gregor, edited by Jens Timmermann. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012. Timmermann, Jens. “Kantian Duties to the Self, Explained and Defended.” Philosophy 81, no. 317 (2006): 505-30.

Challenging Burke’s Constitutional Change in Ireland as an Effective Answer to the French Revolution Daniel Whitten Content Warning: This essay includes discussion of sexualized and colonial violence. I II To-night, a first movement, a pulse, And I am still imperially As if the rain in bogland gathered head Male, leaving you with pain, To slip and flood: a bog-burst, The rending process in the colony, A gash breaking open the ferny bed. The battering ram, the boom burst from within. Your back is a firm line of eastern coast The act sprouted an obstinate fifth column And arms and legs are thrown Whose stance is growing unilateral. Beyond your gradual hills. I caress His heart beneath your heart is a wardrum The heaving province where our past has grown. Mustering force. His parasitical I am the tall kingdom over your shoulder And ignorant little fists already That you would neither cajole nor ignore. Beat at your borders and I know they’re cocked Conquest is a lie. I grow older At me across the water. No treaty Conceding your half-independant shore I foresee will salve completely your tracked Within whose borders now my legacy And stretchmarked body, the big pain Culminates inexorably. That leaves you raw, like opened ground, again - Seamus Heaney, “Act of Union”

hile Edmund Burke’s name is most closely associated with his conservatism in relation to the French Revolution, he was intimately and passionately involved in many other pressing political questions concerning the British realm and empire. None occupied so much of his time and passion as that of his homeland, Ireland. This period of time saw heavy repression of the Irish Catholics under British rule. His consistent drive for the emancipation of the Irish Catholics from the infamous “Penal Laws” defined his image among his contemporaries and his legacy in Irish history. Indeed, Burke gave his contemporaries repeated justification for his denunciation as a “Papist” by his impassioned defence of Catholic emancipation.1 This same passion also earned him the respect of subsequent generations of Irish historians, as “he provided 1. Thomas H.D. Mahoney, Edmund Burke and Ireland (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 1960), 315; see ibid., figure facing 193 for an example of a “Papist” caricature of Burke

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so much of the intellectual arguments behind reform.”2 Given his harsh critiques of the manner and inefficacy of the French Revolution’s reforms, however, we must critically analyze Burke’s approach to Catholic emancipation. Specifically, conscientious students of history and political theory cannot blindly laud this alternative to Jacobinism without critically considering its relation to the subsequent events, namely the 1798 rebellion and 1801 Act of Union. As a measured and constitutional answer to the radicalism of the French Revolution, Burke’s project for Irish reform ultimately fails to act as a viable alternative method for alleviating repression. Irish issues were a constant concern for Burke throughout as career, as evidenced by the fact that both his first and last works on public affairs concerned the situation of Irish Catholics.3 As a theorist focused on principles rather than ideals, Burke advocated for Catholic emancipation not only out of affection for his homeland, but out of a conviction in religious freedom and imperial integrity.4 Burke argued that the Penal Laws in Ireland were manifestly “unjust, impolitic, and inefficacious,” as they did not stem from the foundational principles of jurisprudence: equity and utility.5 Burke stipulated that “a law against the majority of the people is in substance a law against the people itself ” and, as such, the Penal Laws violate the principle of equity—which “grows out of the great rule of equality”—by ignoring the lack of consent by the Catholic majority.6 Further, as “a law which shuts out from all secure and valuable property the bulk of the people, cannot be made for the utility of the party so excluded,” the Penal Laws violated the principle of utility, insofar as law must be utile for the majority of the population, not solely for an ascendant minority.7 Burke used his political and personal positions to consistently advocate for the emancipation of Catholics, notably supporting his son as the agent of the General Committee of the Irish Catholics and giving him consistent advice and support on how to achieve the Committee’s goals.8 Further, as a member of parliament for almost thirty years, he regularly debated the absolute necessity of Catholic emancipation for the sustainability of Anglo-Irish relations and the more general sustainability of the Empire. Specifically, he worked openly and unwaveringly to secure various reliefs from Penal Laws in 1778, 1782 and 1793.9 This dedication and consistency reveals Catholic emancipation to be one of Burke’s fundamental political endeavours. In light of his popular and pointed critique of the excesses of the French 2. Patrick Geoghegan, “Edmund Burke and the Fight Against Injustice,” (lecture, Ireland in Rebellion: 1762-1916, Trinity College, Dublin, October 2, 2015), https:// itunes.apple.com/ie/itunes-u/ireland-in-rebellion-1782-1916/id1046029654. 3. Mahoney, Burke and Ireland, 310. 4. Ibid., 320. 5. Edmund Burke, Tracts Relative to the Laws Against Popery in Ireland,” in Letters Speeches and Tracts on Irish Affairs by Edmund Burke, ed. Matthew Arnold (London: MacMillian and Co., 1881), 21; 27. 6. Ibid., 23; 27. 7. Ibid., 28. 8. Mahoney, Burke and Ireland, 319. 9. Ibid.

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Revolution as the “sad but instructive monuments of rash and ignorant counsel,” it follows that his prescription for Ireland is an example of an alternative measured and constitutional counsel. We must also note Burke’s absolute opposition to emancipation by means of popular force in Ireland. Although he continually and justifiably feared that the policies of Britain and the Protestant Ascendancy would drive the Catholic majority toward violent revolution, he was nevertheless “charmed with … the alienation of the Catholics from the grand evil of our time and their resolution to resist with all their might the attempts of Jacobinism from without and from within,” despite all that had been done “to irritate them into the frenzy of that malignant fever.”11 These lines are deeply telling, both of Burke’s priorities, and of his almost clairvoyant foresight. Burke felt “that it was his special mission to help settle the differences” between Ireland and England, yet, “should he fail … it was with England that he would side because she was the more important, and his debt to her was even greater than to Ireland.”12 His priority remained always the Empire; although he considered Catholic emancipation necessary for securing the peaceful and fruitful existence of Ireland therein, his utmost loyalty was to England and Empire. This was as a last resort for Burke, and he believed all efforts should be made to ameliorate the dissatisfaction of the Irish in order to base the bonds of empire on magnanimity, not on force. As described above, Burke spoke frequently of the need—according to principles of imperial jurisprudence—for Catholic emancipation in Ireland. In line with his general disdain for pure theory and preference instead for principles employed according to specific circumstances,13 he aimed to achieve this goal in a measured fashion that would not destabilize the Irish population or its bond within the Empire. First and foremost, Burke campaigned for the repeal of the Penal Laws. These included a myriad of social, economic, political, and religious restrictions on Catholics, including the right to marry Protestants, the right to inherit land, the right to vote, and the right to worship freely.14 Burke in particular campaigned for parliamentary support for the Catholic Relief Act that failed in 1778 and passed in 1782. Nevertheless, the law in its final form was limited in scope and removed only a few religious restrictions; Burke’s ideas of political emancipation were considered “the proposal of an extremist fringe.”15 Burke was incensed not only by the lack of meaningful relief, but also by the language of the bill. He writes scathingly about the text, that: 10

it is neither more nor less than a renewed act of UNIVERSAL, UNMITIGATED, INDISPENSABLE, EXCEPTIONLESS DISQUALIFICATION. One would imagine that a Bill, inflicting such a multitude of incapacities, had followed on the heels of a 10. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (Toronto: Penuin, 2004), 127. 11. Burke to the Rev. Dr. Hussey, Febuary, 1795, in Letters Speeches and Tracts on Irish Affairs by Edmund Burk, ed. Matthew Arnold, (London: MacMillian and Co., 1881), 395. 12. Mahoney, Burke and Ireland, 311. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid., 325-32; see Burke, “Tracts Relative,” 3-21 for examle of Penal Law proscriptions. 15. Jaqueline Hill, “Religious Toleration and the Relaxation of the Penal Laws: An Imperial Perspective, 1763-1780,” Archivium Hibernicum 44 (1989): 107.

DANIEL WHITTEN conquest made by a very fierce enemy under the impression of recent animosity and resentment. No man on reading that Bill could imagine he was reading an Act of amnesty and indulgence, following a recital of the good behaviour of those who are the object of it.16

This dissatisfaction with the process of Catholic relief is a hallmark of Burke’s experience with the English parliament vis-à-vis Ireland. Publicly, he called for the softening of the anti-Papist rhetoric for the good of the Empire, yet privately he suspected that some in power were intentionally antagonizing the Catholics in order to precipitate a rebellion, by which reason the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland and Britain could deepen their control of Ireland.17 Burke here again showed his remarkable foresight, for only a month after he mused that he “ought to suppose that the arrival of General Hoche is eagerly expected in Ireland,” General Hoche’s French fleet was caught in a storm off of the Irish coast, exposing a secret alliance between France and the rebellious United Irishmen.18 Despite these suspicions and misgivings, Burke continued to advocate a measured, constitutional path to Catholic emancipation. Namely, he called for the repeal of all Penal Laws, the reform of the Irish Parliament to allow Catholic franchise, and, by means of the previous two measures, the removal of the Protestant Ascendancy as the de facto ruling class. For Burke, the Protestant Ascendancy was the true means by which the oppression of Catholics was sustained.19 Thus, what Burke envisions is, “in effect, home rule, a goal most Irishmen were prepared to accept as late as World War I”—that is to say, independence with full franchise on internal matters and subservience to Britain in matters of Empire.20 Despite these retrospectively modest requests for reform, Burke’s principled rationalization of the necessity for emancipation remained on the fringe of political discourse in England and among the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland. The few “Relief Bills” that passed were minor in comparison to the scope of Penal Laws, and, as Jaqueline Hill argues, passed or not based solely on pragmatic economic and political factors—they represent no corresponding increase or decrease in broader toleration.21 Burke’s most effective Irish victory came at the end of his tenure as MP with the passing of the Catholic Relief Act of 1793, which removed a selection of economic and political penalties, including the restrictions on voting.22 Nevertheless, after 1793 it remained illegal for Catholics to teach school, keep arms if not wealthy, buy or keep land, hold political office, or serve as soldiers without attending Protestant church.23 Failing 16. Burke to a Peer of Ireland on the Penal Laws Against Irish Cathilics, previous to the late repeal of a part thereof in the Session of the Irish Parliament, held A.D. 1782, Febuary 21, 1782, in Arnold, Letters Speeches and Tracts, 185. 17. Burke to the Honourable C.J. Fox, in Arnold, Letters Speeches and Tracts, 92-92; Burke to The Rev. Dr. Hussey, December, 1796, in Arnold, Letters Speeches and Tracts, 418. 18. Ibid., 421; Denis Gwynne, “Dr. Hussey and Edmund Burke,” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 17, no. 68 (1928): 542. 19. Bukre, “Tracts Relative,” 63. 20. Mahoney, Burke and Ireland, 323. 21. See Hill, “Religious Toleration.” 22. Mahoney, Burke and Ireland, 337-41. 23. Ibid., 341-42.

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to see anywhere near the full extent of the emancipation for which he had campaigned so long, and witnessing the failed French invasion of 1796 and subsequent repressive backlash against Catholics by the Protestant Ascendancy, Burke died pessimistic about the future of Ireland within the Empire.24 In a letter written in June 1796, a month before his death, he states that “there is nothing like a fixed intention of making a real change of system in Ireland,” decries the militarization of Irish governance, and signs off his letter with the ominous statement, “things must take their course…”25 This dejection seems apt in hindsight, given both the cycles of violence that would unfold in Ireland over the subsequent decades and centuries and the long delay in Catholic emancipation. Before analyzing Burke’s influence and the efficacy of his approach, it is important to consider the political events in Ireland that followed his retirement and death. After the failure of French reinforcement in December 1796, the reactionary martial law imposed in 1797 precipitated the long-anticipated rebellion by Theobald Wolfe Tone and his United Irishmen—both Catholic and Dissenter—in 1798.26 This rebellion, as Burke predicted, failed, and “after a century of peace Ireland was plunged into the bloodiest episode of modern times,” which killed some 30,000 people in the span of a few months.27 King George III encouraged the leveraging of the attempted revolution as justification for uniting Ireland with Great Britain, which eventually happened in 1800 with the Act of Union. This success occurred only after much lobbying, during which sponsors paid more than £1,260,000 in compensation for the forfeiture of boroughs and spent £30,850 on various lavish dinners for supporters of the bill.28 Such ostentatious solicitation of the Protestant Ascendancy foreshadowed the disappointment of some Catholics who had hoped that the shift of power from Dublin to London would precipitate further emancipation, however King George III resolutely opposed any such suggestion in 1801.29 Wholesale emancipation from the Penal Laws, therefore, did not occur until 120 years after the Act of Union, by the Government of Ireland Act (1920), in preparation for the partition of Ireland.30 The Protestant-controlled north arguably carried forward the de facto legalization of Catholic repression with the Civil Authority (Special Powers) Act 1922 (Northern Ireland) until 1973, and arguably further still under various Emergency Powers Acts enacted between 1973 and 1991 under the British occupation of Northern Ireland.31 Thus, unfortunately, the 24. Jonathan Bardon, “Act of Union,” Queen’s University Belfast, 2003, http://www. actofunion.ac.uk/.actofunion.htm. 25. Burke to Dr. Laurence, June 5, 1797, in Arnold, Letters Speeches and Tracts, 438-39. 26. Bardon, “Act of Union.” 27. Mahiney, Burke and Ireland, 322; Bardon, “Act of Union.” 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid.; Douglas Kanter, “The Foxite Whigs, Irish legislative independence and the Act of Union, 1785-1806,” Irish Historical Studies 36, no. 143 (2009): 341. 30. Government of Ireland Act, 1920, 10 & 11 Geo. 5, c. 67 (U.K.), s. 5(2). 31. See Civil Authorities (Special Powers) Act, 1922, 12 & 13 Geo. 5, c. 5 (Northern Ireland); Disturbances in Northern Ireland: Report of the Commission appointed by the Governor of Northern Ireland, 1969, Cmd. 532, ch. 12, para. 144, http://cain. ulst.ac.uk/hmso/cameron2.htm; Northern Ireland (Emergency Provisions) Act, 1973,

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culminating events of the Eighteenth century did not merely delay Burke’s progress, but Ireland would only see the full realization of his principles after over a century of bloodshed. Having outlined Burke’s position and aims, along with the historical context during and after his sustained political efforts, we must now take the time to analyze the two together. This is especially important to do in the case of Burke’s thought, as his most notable work levels the critique that the French Revolution represents the departure of practice from theory, “an ambition without a distinct object.”32 Therefore, we must judge Burke’s own attempts to align principles with circumstances by the same standard. We see sustained efforts over a diplomatic career of three decades, which resulted in modest gains far short of their intentions, and which were almost immediately overshadowed by savage violence and further repression. This is not to either deny the nobility of Burke’s goals and methods, nor to lay any significant share of the burden for these later events at his feet, nor even to say that the 19th century did not see further Catholic relief. It is to say, however, that we must critically consider the departure of Burke’s principles from their circumstances insofar as he does the same for the departure of the French Revolution’s ideals from its practices. Burke reveals his fatal flaw in his absolute insistence that Ireland remain under the authority of the British Crown, and that the Protestant Ascendancy be removed from undue influence only by means of the British government, which would presumably act in the selfless interest of Empire. By rejecting any inclination towards popular force and placing the responsibility for change on the incumbents of power, Burke relied on the rationality and shared principles of those in the British government. This is surprising, as he openly accused the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland of purposefully and unjustly exploiting the Catholic majority for their own wealth and gain, yet did not level those same concerns against the government in London.33 Further, it is apparent in hindsight that the majority of the British establishment was similarly only concerned with the Catholic question insofar as it benefitted or injured their own interests.34 He therefore continually placed unreserved support in the ability of England to proceed rationally as the great head of Empire and to deal with its colonies in a just and equitable manner. It is frustrating to see—given his starkly realist and material analysis of the self-serving nature of Protestant Ascendancy repression—that he continued to rely on the ruling interests to grant rights, rather than the people themselves to demand their own rights. He clearly defined his limits for acceptable use of force by the Catholics in the pursuit of emancipation, praising the role of Catholic Defender organizations in Ireland, which often clashed with Protestant sectarian groups in defence of Catholic neighbourhoods c. 53 (U.K.), Sch II; Northern Ireland (Emergency Provisions) Act, 1978, c. 5 (U.K.), Sch II. 32. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution, 136. 33. Burke to Richard Burke, Esq., in Arnold, Letters Speeches and Tracts, 343-72; James Coniff, “Edmund Burke’s Reflection on the Coming Revolution in Ireland,” Journal of the History of Ideas 47, no. 1 (1986): 44-47; Mahoney, Burke and Ireland, 323. 34. See Claire E. Lyons,“Playing Catholic Against Protestant: British intervention in Catholic Relief in Ireland, 1778,” Eighteenth Century Ireland / Iris an dá chultúr 28 (2013), 116-35; Hill, “Religious Toleration.”

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and interests. However, he considered the use of these organizations to bring about change of their own accord to be tantamount to Jacobinism. He did, however, regularly admit the growing inevitability of such a movement, given British reluctance to counter the repression perpetrated by the Protestant Ascendancy.36 Burke’s project for Catholic emancipation in Ireland, as a moderate alternative to the methods of the French Revolution, ultimately failed in practice to bring about a more peaceful means of relief. Having dismissed the French Revolution as too rash and theoretical, one would hope that Burke’s answer would prove more practically effective. Certainly, as he decried the blind idealism the Jacobins took to establish equality, we expect to find a more practical approach in his own efforts. Nevertheless, though Burke plainly analyzed and called for the removal of the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland as the primary beneficiary, and therefore preserver of Catholic repression, he nonetheless vested this mandate in the seat of Empire, which had instituted the Ascendency centuries earlier. The failure of this moderate, measured, and constitutional course of emancipation to achieve any large-scale gains stoked the Catholic dissatisfaction that lead to the failed French invasion of 1796, and the subsequent bloody cycle of events that culminated in the Act of Union (1801). This is not to lay any portion of the blame for Irish history on Burke, as he consistently acted according to what he believed to be the best interests of the Irish Catholics and the Empire. Nevertheless, the lesson we must draw from this is to question the image of Burke’s conservative progress as the effective answer to Jacobin radicalism, as it too failed to achieve meaningful equality, and it too descended into meaningless bloodshed. This is not to say, either, that there is a definitive solution as to the correct line of theory or practice for alleviating oppression, but only to problematize Burke’s call for constitutionally-based emancipation. Burke’s failure in the 18th century presages the words written about from another fight for freedom centuries later, that “[n]obody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.”37 Burke, while weaving arguments justifying the necessity of Catholic emancipation for the sustainability of the Empire, nevertheless fundamentally relies on the moral sense of the British government to value said means of sustainability. Irish historians are therefore certainly justified in lauding Burke’s decades-long advocacy for Catholic emancipation and general toleration; the fact that he cared deeply and fought passionately for those principles is evident. In that light, however, it is important also not to overstate his practical influence, and certainly not to oversimplify the nuanced, time-consuming, and bloody process of challenging oppression. 35

35. Ibid., 322. 36. Burke to Dr. Hussey, December 1796, in Arnold, Letters Speeches and Tracts, 416-36. 37. Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography (London: Zed Books, 1988), 155.

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Bibliography Bardon, Jonathan. “The Act of Union.” Queen’s University Belfast, last modified 2003. http://www.actofunion.ac.uk/actofunion.htm. Burke, Edmund. Letters Speeches and Tracts on Irish Affairs by Edmund Burke. Edited by Matthew Arnold. London: MacMillan and Co., 1881. ———. Reflections on the Revolution in France. Toronto: Penguin, 2004. ———. “Tracts Relative to the Laws Against Popery in Ireland.” In Letters Speeches and Tracts on Irish Affairs by Edmund Burke, edited by Matthew Arnold, 1-69. London: MacMillan and Co., 1881. Geoghegan, Patrick. “Edmund Burke and the Fight Against Injustice.” Lecture, Ireland In Rebellion: 1782-1916. Dublin: Trinity College, 2015. https://itunes.apple.com/ie/itunes-u/ireland-in-rebellion-1782-1916/id1046029654. Gwynne, Dennis. “Dr. Hussey and Edmund Burke.” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 17, no. 68 (1928): 529-46. Hill, Jaqueline. “Religious Toleration and the Relaxation of the Penal Laws: An Imperial Perspective, 1763-1780.” Archivium Hibernicum 44 (1989): 98-109. Kanter, Douglas. “The Foxite Whigs, Irish legislative independence and the Act of Union, 1785-1806.” Irish Historical Studies 36, no. 143 (2009): 332-48. Lyons, Claire E. “Playing Catholic Against Protestant: British intervention in Catholic Relief in Ireland, 1778.” Eighteenth Century Ireland / Iris an dá chultúr 28 (2013), 116-35. Mahoney, Thomas H.D. Edmund Burke and Ireland. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 1960. Shakur, Assata. Assata: An Autobiography. London: Zed Books, 1988.

Milton’s Use of the Religious Sublime in Paradise Lost Lea Paas-Lang

ohn Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) is an epic retelling of the events of Genesis. Milton exemplifies his belief that his poetry is ultimately, divinely inspired by making his own poem that recounts the fall of Satan, the temptation of Eve, and the fall of man divinely inspirational. He seeks to stir up overwhelming feelings of passion in his reader that are often described as sublime. Milton frequently uses tactile, often sexual connotations and reframes familiar imagery within a religious context that forms a direct connection between the divine subject matter and the human reader. Milton understands that his reader is human, and therefore flawed. Throughout his poem, he establishes a similarity between the experience of his reader and that of Adam and Eve. However, after Adam and Eve are cast from heaven, the reader becomes hyperaware of the origins and implications of her imperfect humanity. Milton makes it easier for his reader to comprehend the nature of divine existence by reflecting human experience in his characters. Ultimately, Paradise Lost is an attempt to restitch the bond between human and divine. Milton inspires feelings of religious sublimity and devotion by using the uniquely human language of intimacy. Before directly examining Paradise Lost, it is crucial to understand Milton’s own beliefs on the source and the purpose of poetry. Milton believes that poetry is the result of God acting through human artifice: an “inspired gift of God.”1 David Morris, in his book One Flesh, explains that “although the poet must master both the craft of verse and a variety of learning, Christian and non-Christian, Milton insisted that the final vivifying source of great writing must be God.”2 As God works through man, poetry serves as a bridge between the heavenly and human realms. The divine nature of poetry, therefore, could be manipulated to inspire feelings of religious devotion in the reader. John Dennis, an 18th-century dramatist and critic, “demanded a poetry which would express and engage ‘the Whole man’ … in reaching the whole man, however, poetry for Dennis must appeal primarily to the emotions.”3 Dennis believes that the level of emotional excitation is the measure for the strength and effectiveness of poetry. He divides this passion into two forms: Ordinary and Enthusiastic. Whereas Ordinary passion is rooted in simple and immediate excitations, Enthusiastic passions, though originating from the Ordinary, only come about with meditation and consideration. Morris explains that these passions arise from “complex and unfamiliar ideas which 1. David B. Morris, The Religious Sublime: Christian Poetry and Critical Tradition in 18th Century England (Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1972), 22. 2. Ibid., 23-24. 3. Ibid., 49.

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are not distinctly understood.” A poet, therefore, inspires the reader’s meditation and consideration to evoke Enthusiastic passion. John Dennis’ poetic theory asserts that God worked through man to inspire Enthusiastic passion and excite religious devotion. 17th-century thinkers such as Edmund Burke or John Dennis give a particular focus to exploring the human experience of the sublime. Art, including poetry, serves as a conduit for sublimity. 19th-century Romantic painters such as J.M.W Turner and Casper David Friedrich used simultaneously terrifying and beautiful landscapes to evoke feelings of sublime. Milton’s epic poetry, in its ability to arouse such Enthusiastic passions in his reader becomes a source of written sublimity. Sublime poetry, Dennis believed, was exemplified by the Bible for its ability to evoke “the greatest possible Enthusiastic passion.”5 Paradise Lost, therefore, exemplifies a marriage between poetry and religiosity, inspiring what is known as the religious sublime: an arousing of the emotions toward heavenly devotion. To evoke the sublime in their reader, Dennis argues that the poet’s best tools are “clear visual images.” He claims that “the sublimity of Milton depended upon the reader’s feeling as if he actually witnessed the scene described.”6 Milton’s Paradise Lost is an example of the inspirational power of poetry being harnessed to trigger feelings of sublimity in the reader using vivid description. Let us turn to Milton’s epic work to explore the effectiveness of his prose to captivate and inspire his reader. Milton sets much of his work in the Garden of Eden. As Milton prefaces the fall of man by retelling the fall of Satan, the reader’s first encounter with Eden is through the eyes of the revenge-hungry fallen angel. Satan describes the abundant garden as having: goodliest trees loaden with fairest fruit, Blossoms and fruits at once of golden hue Appeared, with gay enamelled colours mixed: On which the sun more glad impressed his beams Than in fair evening cloud, or humid bow, When God hath show’red the earth; so lovely seemed That landscape: and of pure now purer air Meets his approach, and to the heart inspires Vernal delight and joy, able to drive All Sadness.7 Milton describes a bright, colourful, lush perfection in Eden. The effect of the garden is “vernal delight,” implying a spring-like feeling of rebirth and regeneration. The strength of this feeling is so powerful that even Satan, who claims “myself am Hell” reconsiders the value of his revenge.8 Milton emphasizes that the beauty of the garden is so great that it can soften even Satan’s hard edges. Milton’s description of the Garden of Eden 4

4. Ibid., 50. 5. Ibid., 63. 6. Ibid., 69. 7. John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. John Leonard (London: Penguin Classics, 2000), 4.147-56. 8. Ibid., 4.75.

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transports his reader to a vision of sheer perfection. The “loaden,” rich, and fertile landscape of Eden prefaces the sexual relationship that exists between Adam and Eve. James Turner, in his book One Flesh, explains that: Even before the creation of Eve, Adam discovers that erotic love includes and surpasses every other response to the world. His first pleasure in landscape, even before he is aware of his lack of a partner, is already a potential love-encounter.9 Satan and Adam’s first encounters with Eden inspire new feelings of desire in the men. He describes: Each tree Loaden with fairest fruit that hung to the eye Tempting, stirred in me a sudden appetite To pluck and eat.10 This desire, manifested in sexual energy, predicates Adam’s desire for a companion, meaning that even when he does not know the image of woman, or the pleasure of sex, Adam has erotic desire within him. Turner argues that this is Milton’s attempt to show that “innocent human Eros” is not attached to a physical sexual encounter.11 Milton builds a sense of trust in his reader by implying the purity of Adam’s desire. By bestowing a sexual desire on Adam, Milton assures the reader that they can align their own sexual appetite with the perfection of the original man. Milton’s normalization of human sexuality continues with the creation of Eve. The solitary Adam, though appreciative of the beauty in which he lives, recognizes his loneliness and appeals to God. He explains that: of fellowship I speak Such as I seek, fit to participate All rational delight, wherein the brute Cannot be human consort; they rejoice Each with their kind, lion with lioness; So fitly them in pairs thou hast combined.12 Adam begs God to create an equal companion with whom he can share his humanity. And so, Eve is born of the rib of Adam. He is instantly in love, claiming that she: infused Sweetness into my heart, unfelt before, And into all things from her air inspired The spirit of love and amorous delight.13 9. James Grantham Turner, One Flesh: Paradisal Marriage and Sexual Relations in the Age of Milton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 239. 10. Milton, Paradise Lost, 8.306-09. 11. Turner, One Flesh, 241. 12. Milton, Paradise Lost, 8.389-94. 13. Ibid., 8.474-77.

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The two then spend their days tending the garden, eating of the fruits, and appreciating the gift of life they have been given. Regardless of their division of labour, Adam and Eve are level in their love for each other. Within the context of their relationship, sex is an equaling force. The typical interpretation of their relationship is centered on the well-quoted line: “He for God only, she for God in him.”14 Eve is considered subject to Adam because he alone has access to the divine, whereas she can only know God through Adam. Diane Kelsey McColley, in her book Milton’s Eve, attempts to work through this gendered divide by attributing individual values to each character. She writes that “[t]his man and this woman have different gifts, so that Eve has particular pleasure in helping and learning from a husband she admires, and Adam has particular pleasure in attending to the peace and liberty of a wife he cherishes.”15 Though I appreciate her attempt to undermine the inherently gendered nature of Genesis, the roles she ascribes still adhere to typical gender divisions: Eve performs the housework, while Adam’s only duty is to ensure the happiness of Eve. I will not attempt to deny the gendered power imbalance that exist in Eden. Instead, I will find equality in their mutual need for companionship that culminates in their sexual copulation. Milton demonstrates this through their reciprocal and undoubtedly shared experience of sex. As the pair complete their evening prayer and settle in their marriage bed, Milton writes: and eased the putting off These troublesome disguises which we wear, Straight side by side were laid, nor turned I ween Adam from his fair spouse, nor Eve the rites Mysterious of connubial love refused: Whatever hypocrites austerely talk Of purity and place and innocence, Defaming as impure what God declares Pure, and commands to some, leaves free to all. Our Maker bids increase, who bids abstain But our destroyer, foe to God and man? Hail wedded love, mysterious law, true source Of human offspring, sole propriety, In Paradise of all things common else.16 In this description of their sexual love, there is no mention of a gendered imbalance. Milton names both Adam and Eve as deserving of connubial love and declares them both the “true source / Of human offspring, sole propriety, / In Paradise of all things common else.”17 Adam and Eve share their duty to God to procreate along with the rest of Paradise. Though Milton does not shy away from gendering their relationship, 14. Ibid., 4.299. 15. Diane Kelsey McColley, Milton’s Eve (Urbana, Illinois: U of Illinois P, 1983), 35. 16. Milton, Paradise Lost, 4.739-52. 17. Ibid., 4.750-52.

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Adam and Eve are united in their sexual relationship that is not only natural to Eden, but encouraged by God. Adam and Eve’s sexual relationship recalls Milton’s defence of Adam’s desire for the fruit. In the aforementioned passage, Milton defends the sanctity of sexual love in marriage. He condemns the “hypocrites” who, by denying the purity of “wedded love,” deny the word of God who “bids increase.” As Adam and Eve exist in sinless purity, their natural desires are still determined by their fealty and responsibility to God’s word. This notion of sex as a fulfilment of God’s bidding is echoed in Adam’s conversation with Raphael. The angel explains that: The thoughts, and heart enlarges, hath his seat In reason and is judicious, in the scale By which to Heavenly love thou mayst ascend, Not sunk in carnal pleasure, for which cause Among the beasts no mate for thee was found.18 Raphael confirms that carnal pleasure belongs to the beasts, and that is why Adam needed a human companion with whom he could share in Heavenly love. Turner also defends the value of a sexual relationship to enhance a spiritual relationship. He writes that “for true spiritual lovers, the flesh may be transformed into a ‘reverend secret of nature’ something integrated with and generated by the mind.”19 He highlights the power of sexual love to blur the line between mind and body. As Adam and Eve embody God’s bidding to “reproduce,” they are bringing themselves closer to the divine realm. The strength of the prelapsarian divine-human bond mirrors the intention of religiously sublime art to bridge the distance between man and God. Milton’s poetic defence of their sublime holy bond reinforces the reader’s belief in the religious value of sexual desire. Milton uses Adam and Eve’s relationship as a framework to create the twisted relationship between Satan and Eve. As the fallen angel lays eyes on Eden and the world of man, he is faced with a moment of reconsideration. He acknowledges their innocence and explain that the couple should “[t]hank him who puts me loath to this revenge / On you who wrong me not for him who wronged.”20 However, he maintains his need for revenge, and drives forward with his plan and takes the form of the serpent. Satan’s temptation of Eve uses sexualized language to mark the beginning of humankind’s fall from divinity. Satan first spots the solitary Eve as she is: stooping to support Each flow’r of slender stalk, who head though gay Carnation, purple, azure, or specked with gold, Hung drooping unsustained; them she upstays.21 Eve’s ability to revive the flowers alludes to her ability to sexually arouse. By injecting words with body-focused eroticism into Satan’s character, Milton demonizes sexuality. 18. Ibid., 8.590-94. 19. Turner, One Flesh, 201. 20. Milton, Paradise Lost, 4.386-87. 21. Ibid., 9.427-30.

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When the two begin to speak, Satan recounts his introduction to Eden. He describes finding the tree of knowledge and the “sharp desire [he] had / Of tasting those fair apples.”22 Milton reminds his reader, yet again, of the temptation that Adam feels at the sight of Eden’s fruits. This time, however, it is injected with the evil associated with Satan. Milton references earlier events again when Satan explains to Eve that “hath God then said that of the fruit / Of all these garden trees ye shall not eat, / Yet lords declared of all in earth or air?”23 Satan argues that because God awarded man with dominion over all of earth’s bounty, Eve has a right to the Tree of Knowledge. This mirrors Milton’s previous argument in favour of connubial sex: if God gave man the capacity for pleasurable reproduction, it should be used. Milton repeats post-fall Edenic scenes within a Satanic context, signaling a turn from purity to evil. The Tempter’s words “replete with guile/ Into her heart too easy entrance won.”24 Eve succumbs to Satan’s temptation and eats the fruit. The effect of her action is immediate: “Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat / Sighing through all her works have signs of woe, / That all was lost.”25 He forces the reader to feel the loss by attaching human emotions to the earth. His mission complete, Satan slithers away. Eve is left “engorged without restraint.”26 Though it is no different than the pleasure of her and Adam’s usual enjoyment of the fruits of Eden, it is now tinged with the pain of the earth invoked by Satan’s temptation. As Eve eats the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, she breaks a balance in the earth, the effects of which the reader is forced to feel. When Eve recounts to Adam her state of fruit-induced rapturous knowing, it is because of his love and trust in her that he joins her in dissent against God. Milton once again references a prelapsarian scene to communicate the tragedy of the original sin. He writes again of the couple’s sexual partnership, this time describing Adam’s “Carnal desire inflaming; he on Eve / Began to cast lascivious eyes, she him / As wantonly repaid; in lust they burn.”27 The scene is filled with vexing words that contrast with the spiritual and divine implications of the prelapsarian counterpart. Turner argues that “Adam and Eve think they are deliberately re-enacting their love on a higher plane, but we can see it only as a travesty.”28 While I agree that their sexual appetite arises from the same spiritual desire as before, I believe that they are only able to feel the full force of their mistake the morning after. As the pair awake from their sleep, Milton explains how Adam and Eve: Soon found their eyes how opened, and their minds How darkened; innocence, that as a veil Had shadowed them from knowing ill, was gone; Just confidence, and native righteousness 22. Ibid., 9.384-85. 23. Ibid., 9.656-58. 24. Ibid., 9.733-34. 25. Ibid., 9.782-84. 26. Ibid., 9.791. 27. Ibid., 9.1013-15. 28. Turner, One Flesh, 303.

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And honour from about them, naked left To guilty Shame: he covered but his robe Uncovered more.29 Suddenly, Adam’s body becomes foreign to him. He observes it with newfound disgust that awakens a shame within him and encourages him to clothe himself. Just as the reader is forced to feel the burden of Eve’s sin, Milton now forces the reader to examine her own “guilty Shame” and “darkened mind.” A hyperawareness of the body implies that it exists apart from the mind. Thus, it is not their sexual act that is shameful, but the awareness of bodily pleasure as separate from mindful spirituality. William Walker explores Milton’s perspective on mind and body dualism in his essay “Milton’s Dualistic Theory of Religious Toleration.” He explains that “fleshy things can change fleshy things, but not spiritual things.”30 Though the physical act of their sex has not changed, it no longer has the spiritual effects that it used to. After Adam and Eve eat the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, they become acutely aware of their bodies as separate from their minds. Their sex becomes irreversibly associated with the pleasures of the body and lacks the spirituality of their prelapsarian relationship. Milton reframes the originally beautiful sexual relationship as a dirty and guilty act. The stark contrast hits the reader with a visceral emotional reaction. Turner explains that “[t]he effect of the ‘treatable smoothnesse’ of poetry, as Milton had defined it in his earlier prose, is to bathe us in ambrosia, to stir the softest part of our nature, and to ‘set our affections in right tune.’”31 Milton’s sensual descriptions of Eden, and luscious descriptions of god-like Edenic sex offer a comfort and ‘ambrosia’ to the reader. When this comfort is suddenly ripped away with humankind’s original sin, the reader is left only with the empty disgust of postlapsarian human existence. The reader, after hundreds of lines of divinely-inspired beauty, is shocked back into the baseness of human life. This moment of change is the most effective trigger of Dennis’ ‘Enthusiastic passion’ that he insists results from good poetry alone. Though Milton jolts his reader back into her own reality, he does so to arouse emotion in them, and subsequently inspire the religious sublime in the individual. As we exist in the same realm as the fallen Adam and Eve, we too have a separated body and mind that prevents us from living with divine freedom. Walker explains that “whereas rules and scripture are outside us, divine illumination, the spirit of God, and the mind of Christ are within us.”32 Paradise Lost excites the fallen human spirit to understand the divine power of God that exists within us. John Milton’s Paradise Lost is, at once, a work of religious devotion, and a source of religious inspiration. In the prelapsarian scenes, Milton uses sensual language and sexual encounters to build a connection between the human reader and the divine Adam and Eve. Satan’s temptation of Eve hints at the changes that occur after they feast on the Tree of Knowledge. Milton refers to earlier scenes that painted sexuality and de29. Milton, Paradise Lost, 9.1053-59. 30. William Walker, “Milton’s Dualistic Theory of Religious Toleration in ‘A Treatise of Civil Power,’ ‘Of Christian Doctrine,’ and ‘Paradise Lost,’” Modern Philology 99, no. 2 (November 2001): 229. 31. Turner, One Flesh, 298. 32. Walker, “Dualistic Theory,” 207.

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sire in a positive, spiritual light. As they are spoken out of the mouth of Satan, however, they take on the foul guilt that manifests in shame. Milton’s reader is transported back to her own reality. Though Adam and Eve’s sin results in humankind’s rational thought, it also is the cause of our separate mind and body. Milton subscribes to the Protestant belief that it is not through the body that we experience divinity, but the arousal of the Holy Spirit within us. Paradise Lost arouses intense physical emotion by relating human experience to divine experience. Through this overwhelming experience of the sublime, Milton encourages his reader’s spirituality and facilitates a burgeoning relationship between the human and the divine.

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Bibliography McColley, Diane Kelsey. Milton’s Eve. Urbana, Illinois: U of Illinois P, 1983. Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Edited by John Leonard. London: Penguin Classics, 2000. Morris, David B. The Religious Sublime: Christian Poetry and Critical Tradition in 18th-Century England. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1972. Turner, James Grantham. One Flesh: Paradisal Marriage and Sexual Relations in the Age of Milton. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987. Walker, William. “Milton’s Dualistic Theory of Religious Toleration in ‘A Treatise of Civil Power,’ ‘Of Christian Doctrine,’ and ‘Paradise Lost.’” Modern Philology 99, no. 2 (November 2001): 201-30.

A Case Study of the Obscure Jacob Vrel Layla Gibson

acob Vrel is well-known today for how little we know about him. An artist from the Dutch Golden Age, he painted vertical genre pictures which range from street scenes to interiors, the latter of which usually focus on a lone woman. In this essay, I discuss three of these interiors, all of which include a nameless old woman doing various domestic actives. In these paintings, Vrel offers a pensive, wistful commentary upon domestic life through his use of cool-toned light, a restrained color palette, and generally ascetic interiors. I open by briefly discussing Vrel’s life and his works as a whole. The art critic Eugène Fromentin then adds some commentary about Dutch Golden Age art in general, with which I compare Vrel. Afterwards, I discuss these three paintings with two of Johannes Vermeer’s, A Maid Asleep and Woman Holding a Balance. I discuss how both Vrel and Vermeer use space and religious imagery (or a lack thereof) to convey contrasting messages. We know little about Vrel, but we do know that Vermeer was Catholic in a country and time saturated with religious strife. Thus, it is interesting to discuss these two extremely different artists who, upon first glance, may be considered similar. We do not know where Vrel was born, where he worked, or under whom he trained. We only know his approximate working dates due to two of his paintings.1 Near the beginning of her 1989 article, “Looking In(to) Jacob Vrel,” Elizabeth Honig discusses what she can of the life of this obscure painter. During her research in the Netherlands, she discovered that there are, in fact, no records of someone with the last name Vrel in “any Dutch-speaking city.”2 Thus, without the context of his personal life (or patrons), it is a challenge to draw hard-and-fast conclusions about the meaning behind his works. That is, we have to let his works speak for themselves. Still, upon inspection of his interiors, we can gauge the emotions with which he confronts us. In the three paintings I discuss throughout this essay, the lack of religious symbolism points in the direction of Protestantism. Of course, so does his assumed location: The Netherlands. We can also place him in the context of the age in which he worked as well as with the painters who worked around his assumed location. Thus, I compare Vrel’s ascetic works with one of Vermeer’s subtly religious ones as well as one of Vermeer’s more suggestive ones. Vermeer is an apt contender in this comparison because of how wildly different he is from Vrel when we inspect both of their works. We see Vermeer, a Catholic in the Dutch Golden Age, depicting heavy religious themes beneath a calm exterior. Vrel, on the opposite side of the spectrum, does not hint at religion as overtly, choosing instead to focus on ascetic interiors. Before I compare the two artists, however, I must first note the basic similar1. Elizabeth Honig, “Looking In(to) Jacob Vrel,” The Yale Journal of Criticism 3, no. 1 (Fall, 1989): 38. 2. Ibid., 39.

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ities of all three of these works, as well as some context of the age in which he works. When Honig first describes the interpersonal relations within Vrel’s street scenes, she looks to the philosopher Henri Lefebvre and compares his analysis of the city to Vrel’s depiction of one. The world depicted [by Vrel] is one of insignificance, without the ‘faces, monuments, symbols,’ which, says Lefebvre, ‘introduce profundity into the repetitions of daily life: presence of the past, individual or collective actions and dramas, possibilities . . . beauty and grandeur.’ No such thing penetrates the monochrome monotony of [Vrel’s painted] world.3 Honig’s commentary extends into Vrel’s depiction of home life, for there is no grandeur or stereotypical beauty within his painted interiors. Indeed, the three paintings I discuss all revolve around an old woman at home alone. Sometimes she looks out of a window, sometimes she prods at the fireplace, and sometimes she rests. We do not know who this woman is, whether it is the same woman in all of these paintings, or whether she is waiting for someone. The way in which Vrel paints bare walls and barren floors urges viewers to focus on whatever activity the woman is doing. She is often quite small compared to the soaring walls; we do not often see her face—never do we see it fully facing us. There are empty chairs in two out of the three works, which symbolize the loneliness the woman experiences at home. The restrained color palette, although characteristic of the Dutch Golden Age, truly ties together the quiet and uneventful solitude in which this old woman remains. In his book The masters of past time, or Criticism on the old Flemish & Dutch, the nineteenth-century art critic Eugène Fromentin discusses the subject of Dutch art and the religious strife that generally went undocumented by even its most voguish artists. “One thing,” he writes, “strikes you when you study the moral basis of Dutch art—the total absence of what we call to-day a subject.”4 In this quotation, he refers to the general placidity of Dutch Golden Age art, especially when compared to Italian or French Baroque art. Indeed, Fromentin juxtaposes Dutch painting with Italian painting, noting the lack of classical roots, Christian legends, and nudes in the former. He continues, “There is not a sign of trouble or anxiety in this sheltered world which we might take for the golden age of Holland, did not history inform us to the contrary.”5 Vrel’s work is an apt example of Fromentin’s critique of Dutch art. The astounding lack of any obvious symbolism or true subject in his works continues to perplex art historians. However, Vrel depicts a sense of longing in his interiors. It is too far-fetched to consider his works as overtly sorrowful or sad, but judging by the general emptiness of rooms he paints and how monotonous the old woman’s actions are, considering his interiors as studies of the lonesome side of domestic life is not implausible. Thus, although Fromentin describes Dutch Golden Age painting as free of “trouble or anxiety,”6 this applies to Vrel’s—and Vermeer’s—oeuvre only upon a surface-level inspection. 3. Ibid., 37. 4. Eugène Fromentin, “IV. The Subject in Dutch Pictures,” in The masters of past time, or Criticism on the old Flemish & Dutch (London: J. M. Dent, 1913), 146. 5. Ibid., 147-48. 6. Ibid., 148.

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Now that I have discussed some of the context as well as some of the commentary regarding Vrel and Dutch painting in general, I can compare some of his interior scenes with those of Johannes Vermeer and comment upon how each artist depicts space and time. In A Maid Asleep,7 Vermeer paints a young woman sitting across from us. Her head rests in her right hand and her left hand is still perched upon the table which separates us from her. Her rusty-red dress and shimmering earrings suggest wealth. To our right stands an open doorway that leads to another room. The ruffled, pattered tablecloth before us indicates that whoever sat across from this sleeping maid must have just left. Above the woman’s head is three-quarters of a painting with Cupid unmasked, which points to the blush upon her fair cheeks. Likely, the person who just departed is the source of this response. Also worthy of note is the fact that the canvas is intimately cropped so that the viewer is directly across from the maid. Vermeer manages to depict a moment of simultaneous rest and action. The maid is asleep, but the ruffled tablecloth and open doorway suggest a recent departure. Even when not compared to Vrel, this image is extremely intimate due to Vermeer’s ability to place his viewers directly across from the sleeping maid. Vrel, on the other hand, shows no sign of romantic intent in his domestic scenes. In Vrel’s Old Woman by a Fireplace,8 painted between the 1650s and 1660s, we do not feel the passage of time like we do in Vermeer’s A Maid Asleep. Indeed, this painting represents the lonesome facet to domesticity that Vrel so delicately handles. In this painting, an old woman sits before a fireplace; Vrel positions her at an angle so that we cannot see her face. In the fireplace, almost twice as tall as she is sitting down, sits a black pot above a dying fire. An empty bowl lies on the ground beside the old woman. She sits adjacent to an empty chair—the same sort upon which she sits—which faces us at a diagonal angle. Two empty glasses sit atop the fireplace mantle and between them is an array of blue and white dishes. The fireplace is the centerpiece of the canvas and on either side of it stand dimly-painted walls. Their colours, a mix of brown, cream, rust, and a hint of light blue, capture the ambience of a seventies-style hotel room—that is, these muted colors form an apt environment for reflection. With regard to space and time, compared to Vermeer’s A Maid Asleep, Vrel’s depiction of an old woman remains in front of the fireplace. There is no indication that she will move soon, or that she has recently sat down. Indeed, there are no doorways or windows which would depict some sort of transience. While this piece initially evokes a sense of tranquility—or a lack of trouble, as Fromentin may say—upon further inspection it in fact evokes a sense of abidance. On top of this, the empty chair indicates a blatant lack of company. The woman’s solitariness is not a rarity in Vrel’s oeuvre. Elizabeth Honig describes how Vrel handles depicting relationships in his street scenes, which translates well to his interiors: Vrel’s contemporaries often made markets the focus of their city views, the most famous perhaps being those by Hendrick Sorgh and Emanuel de Witte. In these images the buyer, seller and commodities are all made specific and visible; exchange as an ongoing process is clarified through compositions and 7. Figure 1. 8. Figure 2.

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Indeed, Vrel does not grant us a sense of fulfilling interaction in his domestic scenes. He instead arouses a sense of longing based upon his handling of light, space, and time. With regard to religious symbolism, too, Vermeer is an ideal candidate to compare with Vrel. The most apt encapsulation of this symbolism is Vermeer’s 1663 Woman Holding a Balance.10 In this renowned painting stands a young woman holding a balance. Before her rests a sturdy, well-carved table that supports a rich blue fabric and opened boxes overflowing with gleaming pearls. The left side of the canvas holds a small painting or mirror, as well as a small window which pours light across the canvas from the top left to the bottom right. At first glance, this painting seems like a quaint moment of a bourgeois woman weighing her jewelry. However, the art critic Herbert Rudolph concludes that “the woman’s activity, weighing pearls, should be read in contrast to the ultimate weighing of souls and proclaim[s] her to be a personification of base worldly concerns or, in a word, ‘Vanitas.’”11 This is the epitome of Vermeer’s work: symbolism buried beneath a placid exterior. Rudolph’s conclusion is not enough for the art historian Nanette Salomon, however. In her 2004 book Shifting Priorities: Gender and Genre in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting, Salomon refutes Rudolph and argues that his conclusion “fails to take into account another essential element of the picture: the woman’s pregnant state.”12 This is to say that, when the woman holds the balance in her hand, she weighs the fate of both herself and her unborn child. Further, her body is situated so that her head is directly beneath the body of Jesus in The Last Judgement, which hangs behind her. Vermeer situates this painting within a painting on the wall to the woman’s right and her peaceful eyes remain focused on the balance in her right hand. “Her precise position,” Salomon writes, “could not have been overlooked in a century and a country such as Vermeer’s, which was torn in strife over the issue of predestination and free will.”13 Vermeer’s painting presents itself as a depiction of a mundane activity: a woman weighing her pearls. However, beneath this deceptive exterior is a metaphor for the weighing of souls. The initial calm of Vermeer’s 1663 work is remindful of Fromentin’s commentary about Dutch Golden Age painting as a whole: free of “trouble or anxiety.”14 What symbols lie beneath the placid exterior, however, are not at all placid. Vrel does not use his finesse to depict such strong symbolism. Indeed, he focuses more on the mood of the painting than a more symbolic meaning. The old woman he depicts is not bourgeois or wealthy, like the maid or the young woman Vermeer paints. The old woman wears common clothing, has no variation of color in her wardrobe, and houses no beautifully-textured tablecloths. Again, Vrel confronts us with an astounding lack of symbolism or context. We cannot deduce anything about this old woman’s life except 9. Honing, “Looking In(to) Jacob Vrel,: 43. 10. Figure 3. 11. Nanette Salomon, Shifting Priorities: Gender and Genre in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting, (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2004), 13. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid., 14-15. 14. Fromentin, “IV. The Subject in Dutch Pictures,: 148.

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the fact that she partakes in domestic activities alone. Additionally, Vrel and Vermeer use light and close-cropping to convey different messages. In the two works by Vermeer I discuss, both subjects take up a decent amount of the canvas’s space. Vermeer crops his paintings in a way that suggests closeness. Although in his A Maid Asleep we, as viewers, are separated from this woman by the dining table, we are still so close to her that it does not feel as though we are far removed from the scene. As well, in his Woman Holding a Balance, Vermeer crops the canvas so that nothing separates us from the young woman. She takes up almost one-third of the canvas, and the way the light settles upon her creates a warm, quiet environment which invites a viewer. Vrel manages to convey a different message. Although their color palettes are both extremely muted (Vrel’s more than Vermeer’s), Vrel conveys not a sense of warmness, but of a lonelier reflection. Vermeer’s sleeping maid likely reflects on the person who just left the dining table; the young woman holding a balance likely reflects upon the weighing of souls. Vrel’s old woman reflects upon her loneliness and perhaps her youth. A poignant example of this woman recalling her youth is Vrel’s Woman at a Window (date unknown).15 The old woman appears again, this time out of Vrel’s characteristic living room and in an unidentifiable one. The background is an off-white wall and a large window, plates decorating the top portion of it. The contrast between the white walls and near-black sky shows a much cooler tone than his usual interiors. The old woman sits upon a black wooden chair and leans so that the chair is only supported by two legs. While leaning forward, the old woman looks out of the window and has one hand gently placed upon it. Outside stands a young girl, whose face is almost at level with the old woman’s. Whether the girl is actually standing outside or in the woman’s mind is hotly contested, but I argue that she is a figment of the old woman’s imagination. Within the context of Vrel’s other domestic scenes, which portray this old woman making food, stoking a fire, or resting, there is no doubt that this woman has reflected upon her life and age—perhaps her loneliness, as well. On the wooden floor lies a crumpled tissue or letter: was she crying, or is she waiting for someone to return? As this temporal ambiguity is characteristic of Vrel’s work, we will never know. One more example of this domestic life tinged with yearning is Vrel’s 1654 Interior with a Woman Seated by a Hearth.16 It fits perfectly within Vrel’s oeuvre due to its vertical positioning, with the light streaming through the windows and establishing itself as the subject. Near the left of the canvas sits a woman facing a fireplace. Her head is in her hand and we cannot see her face—thus, we do not know what emotions she experiences. Between her and the fireplace lies a sleeping dog, and behind her lies a sleeping cat. Further to the right sits a baby crib. In the room there are four chairs and only one is occupied. This image is more crowded than the others I have discussed, but there still lies a depth behind this initial placidity. Is the woman exhausted from taking care of the baby? Is she crying? Is she waiting for someone? On the wall behind her hangs a man’s clothes as well as a hat and a cloak. Vrel does not paint an openly sad or melancholy painting; he paints one that underlines a subdued sort loneliness when home alone, or a sort of pensive longing. For what, we will never know. Still, through 15. Figure 4. 16. Figure 5.

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Vrel’s use of empty chairs and glasses in sets of twos with only one person as the subject, it is clear that he reflects upon a woman’s life when her husband is not at home. We cannot ascertain exactly what she feels, but based upon his muted color palette and how small she is compared to the vertical canvas indicates how stuck she is in a moment. The sense of anticipation and movement we saw in Vermeer’s two works is not applicable to Vrel’s. In Vrel’s domestic works, windows are sometimes open, but there is not a sense of movement or time passing in a teleological sense. We almost feel stuck. We do not often see doors; we generally see a fireplace, some decorations upon its mantelpiece, and an empty chair. Vrel explores the monotony of domestic life and we, as viewers, are just as stuck in the canvases as this old woman is. In spite of this, there is not an inherently positive or negative reaction he gives to us: he depicts what he sees. Due to his astounding lack of both religious symbolism and general context, Vrel manages to convey to us a sense of reflective solitude with only the finesse of his hand. Art historians, of course, use historical context to make inferences about paintings. We cannot do this with Vrel, but what we can do is compare him to others and remark upon simply how we feel when we view his works. When compared to Vermeer, Vrel’s lack of symbolism is extraordinary. Vermeer’s work is placid on the outside, but once we dive deeper, we find out that a simple gesture could mean contemplating the afterlife. Part of the draw to Vrel’s work is this lack of blatant, or even subtle, symbolism. He manages to affect his viewers through his use of light, a restrained color palette, and ascetic interiors. Despite all that we do not know about Jacob Vrel, he succeeds in allowing his viewers to yearn for something they may not even know they miss.

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Bibliography Fromentin, Eugène. “IV. The Subject in Dutch Pictures.” In The masters of past time, or Criticism on the old Flemish & Dutch, 146-156. London: J. M. Dent, 1913. Honig, Elizabeth. “Looking In(to) Jacob Vrel.” The Yale Journal of Criticism 3, no. 1 (Fall, 1989): 37-56. Salomon, Nanette. Shifting Priorities: Gender and Genre in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2004. Vermeer, Johannes. Woman Holding a Balance. 1663. Oil. Washington, D.C., United States of America: National Gallery of Art. ———. A Maid Asleep. 1656-1657. Oil. Manhattan, United States of America: Metropolitan Museum of Art. Vrel, Jacob. Interior with a Woman Seated by a Hearth. 1654. Oil. Madrid, Spain: Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza. ———. Old Woman By A Fireplace. 1650s-1660s. Oil. Saint Petersburg, Russia: Hermitage Museum. ———. Woman at a Window. Date unknown. Oil. Paris, France: Fondation Custodia.

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Figures

Figure 1, Left: Vermeer, Johannes. A Maid Asleep. 1656-1657.

Figure 2, Right: Vrel, Jacob. Old Woman By A Fireplace. 1650s-1660s.

Figure 3, Left: Vermeer, Johannes. Woman Holding a Balance. 1663.

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Figure 4, Left: Vrel, Jacob. Woman at a Window. Date unknown.

Figure 5, Right: Vrel, Jacob. Interior with a Woman Seated by a Hearth. 1654.

Dignity Within Difference: The Moral Weight of the Genital Organs in Montaigne’s Essays Sam Gleave Riemann Content Warning: This essay discusses sexualized violence and transphobia

he subject of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne, famously, is the author himself. He does not shy away from any part of his own experience, including his sexuality. His essay “On some verses of Virgil” is a frank and surprisingly modern discussion of the ethics of sex, gender roles, and the human body. A large part of his argument revolves around the sex organs. At many points in the Essays, Montaigne plays with processes that attach ethical weight to different parts of the body. Looking at a few of those shorter essays helps us to understand how, in “On some lines of Virgil,” he works to remove some of the weight placed on the female sexual anatomy, while also reaffirming the ethical weight of the phallus. Part of what makes the sex organs such an ethically fraught part of the body is that they look different for different people to an extent that no other piece of human anatomy can match. Through the basic human drive to categorize things by their differences, it is traditional to assign two broad groups of values to the people who have penises and to those who have vulvas. Even though modern science and social thought understands a more complex matrix of sex, gender, and identity, for consistency’s sake I will be using Montaigne’s terms for those two groups: male, female; men, women. At this juncture, I would also like to say that Montaigne cannot fathom the breadth of queer sexualities and, in “On some verses of Virgil,” almost exclusively writes about sex as between a man and a woman. Sometimes he will mention love between men, but he is never explicit and those anecdotes are surrounded by examples of heterosexual love. He is stuck in the binary between masculine and feminine, so let us look at some essays about parts of the body that are unambiguously non-binary. I want to begin with only one biographical detail: Montaigne was a diplomat during the French Wars of Religion, a particularly bloody civil war between French Catholics and French Protestants—he mentions the brutality of the war at the beginning of “Of cruelty.” As a diplomat, he was used to mediating between different positions and trying to keep both sets of interests in mind. I read Montaigne and have always read Montaigne as a philosopher of dignity within difference. What he tries to do for settlers and indigenous people in “Of the cannibals,” for animals and humans in “Of cruelty,” and for Catholics and Protestants in his work as a diplomat he is trying to

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do here men and women in “Of some lines of Virgil.” He aims to articulate the dignity in parts, people, and positions that do not seem dignified at first glance. Montaigne is a fine and charismatic author, but rarely ties a bow around his argument to present neatly to the reader. As many great philosophers are wont to do, he expects the reader to do a great deal of interpretative work. His propensity for brevity is most at work in a type within the Essays of very short pieces composed primarily of anecdotes and quotations, often without very much or even any commentary. These short essays often have a single, distinct thesis, even if it is difficult to spot. Many of them are about the same relationship between the ethical self and the body. Let us look at a few of them to refine our reading of “On some verses of Vergil.” “Of thumbs” would be simply a catalogue of ancient anecdotes about that digit, but for the simple aside asserting that some scholars “say that the thumbs are the master fingers.”1 It is time for my confession: I was absolutely bamboozled by this essay until the fourth or fifth time I read it. Mea culpa, I had completely glossed over this one pertinent line. This is indicative of Montaigne’s style, to sandwich his thesis among a number of digressions into antiquity. Those digressions seemed disjointed and incoherent until I read them as examples of virtue tied into a particular body part: the barbarians saw loyalty in the thumb, the Romans and Greeks saw military prowess. There are different ethical qualifiers tied to the thumb in different cultures, yet the basic mechanism linking the ethics and a body part remains the same. More than any other part of the human body, the thumb is a tool and linked with the use of other tools; it is not an insurmountable leap to subsume the moral evaluation of the actions committed with those tools into the tools themselves. Montaigne is gesturing towards this type of thinking in “Of thumbs.” Indeed, one of the examples that he lists describes how the ancients would have “the thumbs of [their] vanquished enemies cut off, to deprive them of the means of fighting.”2 The thumbs are so intimately connected to the actions they are used to commit that they are the site of consequences for those actions. Montaigne writes ethics onto the body in different ways at other points in the Essays. In “Of smells,” Montaigne outlines how someone’s body might involuntarily express their moral character in the form of an odour and also how one’s body might involuntarily take in an odour to the harm or hindrance of the mind. Alexander the Great, Montaigne tells, was said to have “sweat [that] emitted a sweet odor, owing to some rare and extraordinary constitution.”3 Alexander’s virtues were largely military and thus easily reflected in the body. We see at this point how the ethical value of the body is in manifesting the ethical value of the mind. Since he is his own subject, Montaigne turns to his own body in comparison. He describes how his moustache “performs that service,” which is to say, the service of trapping, preserving, and transmitting smells.4 He understands smells both to cause disease and, in the case of the sweet smell of incense that fills Catholic churches during mass, to “arouse and purify our senses to 1. Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1958), 523. 2. Ibid., 523. 3. Ibid., 228. 4. Ibid

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make us more fit for contemplation.” Montaigne says that he is lucky enough to avoid the various plagues that sweep through his country throughout his lifetime. Since his moustache is, almost uniquely, a body part that he could choose to remove or regrow on a whim, the ethical weight of this cultivated tool is to reflect his own drive towards the virtues of religious and philosophical contemplation. It is worth noting that Montaigne does not think of any body itself as being wrong or unethical. The essay, “Of a monstrous child,” is built around an anecdote from Montaigne’s own life about a set of conjoined twins he had encountered and to whom he refers as a single boy. He notes that those whom “we call monsters are not so to God, who sees in the immensity of his work the infinity of forms that he has comprised in it; … nothing is anything but according to nature.”6 The emotional response that we feel to bodies that look or function differently than our own—the response by which the twins’ family hoped to profit—is due not to the basic goodness of our own bodies or the basic badness of the other body, but from the familiarity we feel towards the things to which we have become accustomed. The logic of this understanding of the body includes an assumption that if an ethical value can be written onto the body, it must proceed from the moral character of the person inhabiting that flesh sac. It is also important to note that Montaigne separates the judgment of God, who exists outside of custom and learned bias, from the judgments that mortals make about each other. Just as in “Of smells,” ethical value flows from the internal to the external. I have been using the term ‘ethical weight’ without explanation. I think it bears spending some time on a thorough definition. It seems to me that Montaigne’s reading of ethics in the body in an essay like “Of thumbs” is something stronger than symbolism or association and yet just short of ethical responsibility. It would be mad to claim that the body bears responsibility for actions decided upon by the mind. There is a gravity with which he considers parts of the body that other philosophers would take for granted. This gravity would be comical in other hands, yet the dignity of Montaigne’s prose elevates ethical association to ethical weight. Association would fall into the realm of what Montaigne calls custom. It is incidental and subjective. When he talks about things or parts of the body that have ethical weight, it seems that he is reaching for something more substantial, even if the connection he tries to make does not actually connect or his argument falls through. It is a distinction of tone and resonance, but a distinction nonetheless. Whereas “Of thumbs,” “Of smells” and “Of a monstrous child” are short and discursive, “On some verses of Virgil” is long and, inconveniently, more discursive still. Since he is dealing with a subject as taboo as human sexuality, he uses quotations from other, more authoritative authors to lend a sense of propriety to the questions he is asking, not to mention the answers he comes up with. As is hinted in the title, the bulk of the quotations are from classical poetry, since the ancients were more comfortable being explicit about sexuality and since, at Montaigne’s moment in history, they were held in very high esteem. Poetry is also a romantically- and sexually-charged medium. Several pages into the essay, as he is introducing the passage from the Aeneid that is referenced in the title, Montaigne explains his interpretation of love poetry. He says 5

5. Ibid., 229. 6. Ibid., 539.

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that “[p]oetry reproduces an indefinable mood that is more amorous than love itself. Venus is not so beautiful all naked, alive, and panting, as she is here in Virgil.”7 It is not worth reproducing Virgil’s words here since Montaigne has so marvelously described his intent. What a visceral turn of phrase! The eroticism of Montaigne’s prose perfectly invokes the goddess he is describing. One of the great advantages of pagan polytheism is that it represents complex ideas like love in the extremes of their duality, wrapped in a mortal shell and then lifted into the divine. Montaigne’s description of Venus is in one breath gut-churningly animal and also loftily super-human, just as she can seem to those who are caught under her influence. We can see already that “On some verses of Vergil” will be deeply interested in relationships between the corporeal and the intellectual parts of ourselves. Given the fraught nature of sexual ethics, they will surely rear their much-debated head. Another much-debated head that Montaigne keeps wanting to rear is the glans penis. Indeed, the penis is a part of the body that is particularly prone to projection and ethical association. In an essay that is ostensibly written for a female audience and that is so often read as a proto-feminist text—there is evidence in the text to support both claims—Montaigne devotes an awful lot of page space to a detailed meditation on the phallus, both past and present. He talks about the deification of the phallus and about how, to that end, the inhabitants of one unnamed country would mutilate and mortify the flesh of their penises. These young men would be “considered deficient in vigor and chastity if they were upset by this cruel pain.”8 A story like this, which is set nowhere in particular, is set everywhere; by not naming the nation, the culture, or the people who demand this self-mutilation, Montaigne is universalizing the message of the anecdote. That message is clearly about the “vigor and chastity” that are tied up in the phallus symbol. A penis that can withstand this unenviable pain is a good penis, a strong penis, a vigorous penis that reflects well on its owner. Every self-absorbed person with a penis likes to describe his genitals as vigorous, so that assertion comes as no surprise. However, chastity seems to be at odds with sexual vigor and is a virtue that is usually parsed as feminine. It seems strange that those are the two virtues that are grouped together to lend weight to the penis. We will return to the subject of the penis, inevitably. Before we talk about the virtues that Montaigne sees attached to the vulva, we should talk about the virtues he values in the people who are lucky enough to get one of their very own. In particular, we should talk about his approach to the virtues demanded from women in regards to sexuality, where he sees a lot of hypocrisy and injustice. I have already said that I accept the proto-feminist reading of this essay. Montaigne rightly points out that women are expected to be “healthy, vigorous, plump, well-nourished, and chaste at the same time: that is to say, both hot and cold.”9 He is articulating a classic psychoanalytic problem, the Madonna-whore dichotomy, which has been seized upon by contemporary feminists and is as common in our society as it was in the 16th century. He also understands that these are a series of expectations imposed on women from the outside, by custom and by the men in their lives. We have seen that sometimes Montaigne expects chastity 7. Ibid. 645. 8. Ibid., 653. 9. Ibid., 650.

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of men, but nevertheless the virtue of chastity is particularly gendered female. Regardless of who practices chastity, Montaigne sees that there are greater sins than sexual immoderation. Perhaps I was too hasty in dividing a firm line between the male and female sex organs, since Montaigne does not see so much of a divide. A large part of his argument against seeing chastity as an inviolable virtue stems from the fact that he sees sexual desire as a natural consequence of having any genitals of any sort whatsoever. He usually uses quite euphemistic language when he refers to the female anatomy, usually relying on the poets of Antiquity to speak more plainly. Occasionally, the euphemisms he employs are quite illuminating in their own right. In the most explicit instance, he describes both the penis and the vulva together in very animalistic terms: The gods, says Plato, have furnished us with a disobedient and tyrannical member, which, like a furious animal, undertakes by the violence of its appetite to subject everything to itself. To women likewise they have given a gluttonous and voracious animal which, if denied its food in due season, goes mad, impatient of delay, and, breathing its rage into their bodies, stops up the passages, arrests the breathing, causing a thousand kinds of ills, until it has sucked in the fruit of the common thirst and therewith plentifully irrigated and fertilized the depth of the womb.10 This passage is in agreement with a series of fundamentally baseless assumptions about women’s bodies that had been passed down from the Ancients to Montaigne, as we can see when he cites Plato. These assumptions maintained that the womb was a vicious, parasitic animal, separate from its female host and responsible for her purportedly natural inferiority. It is, in that context, generous of him to extend the same violent agency to the penis, as well. I have one note and one question more about this passage. The note is that the passage must be understood as part of a larger discourse in “Of some lines of Virgil” that wants to de-privilege chastity as the chief of female virtues. Montaigne places this passage alongside arguments for the occasional acceptability of infidelity and against the hypocrisy of those men who would have their own wives never stray, but do not cease from harassing other women for sex. As for my question, I wonder with what or with whom this monster’s thirst is common. I cannot see anywhere that Montaigne gives us a definitive answer, but from his dogged determination to see women as fully human and capable of rational thought, I would hazard to guess that Montaigne is pointing towards a conception of sexual desire held in common between the mind and the body. This reading strays awfully close to my thesis regarding the ethical weight of the body, except in reverse. Montaigne is trying to remove the weight that his peers usually attach to women’s bodies. One particular part of the female body that carries an intense ethical weight is the hymen. I have always been baffled by the idea of physical virginity, but I can think of no clearer example to explain my idea of ethical weight. A tiny flap of skin in a deeply intimate part of someone’s body is reflective, in some eyes, of that person’s virtue— so reflective, in fact, that the two are conflated. Montaigne rails against this idea and rightly so. He recognizes that women “can lose their chastity without un-chastity, and, 10. Ibid., 654.

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what is more, without their knowledge. … Some have lost their maidenhead for having looked for it; some have lost it for sport.”11 It is notable that he is still stuck in a form of language in which the hymen, or a certain state of being of the hymen, is synonymous with chastity. That is not the point he is making at all, although that is his language. Since the hymen can be torn or stretched by actions other than sexual intercourse, he is disconnecting this piece of anatomy from the action with which it is usually connected; willful action is where moral judgment can properly be applied, whether or not this is a sex act, as is the case here, that deserves any moral judgment at all. Indeed, Montaigne does not believe that female sexuality itself deserves moral judgment. He seems to approach it as a morally neutral field in which both good and bad things might happen. A woman’s genitals, correspondingly, do not carry any ethical weight. As promised, we now must return to the question of the phallus, which Montaigne does imbue with certain virtues. Montaigne aggressively depoliticizes the female anatomy, but in terms of the penis, he seems to always want to uphold a rather neurotic status quo. In particular, he is really quite caught up in anxieties about the size of his penis—or so I can only assume. He is definitely anxious about penis size in general and worries that women will be disappointed if their partner’s member does not measure up. This comes up more than once in “On some lines of Virgil.” He decries the “mischief … done by those enormous pictures that boys spread about the passages and staircases of palaces. From these, women acquire a cruel contempt for our natural capacity.”12 The fear here is clearly that whatever virtue women might come to expect in his penis, his will always fall short of the mark. Although this anecdote comes from a part of the essay where Montaigne argues that nudity reduces lust—women desire huge penises most of all, he argues, and the sooner they are disavowed of the ideas those juvenile graffiti create about the men around them, the sooner they can moderate their desire—at other points he seems to see an almost magically intoxicating power in the male anatomy. He says of women that “the contact and company of any male whatever awakens their heat, which would remain quieter in solitude.”13 No touch, no word, just a peek of penis and she is overcome, according to Monsieur de Montaigne. In another anecdote later in the essay, he describes how Queen Joanna of Naples has her young husband murdered over his small penis. The language Montaigne uses suggests that she was right to do this and that he was justly punished for having “deceived” his wife.14 This looks a lot more like his treatment of thumbs than it does like his treatment of any piece of female anatomy. He says of his penis that “no other [part of the body] makes me more properly a man than this one.”15 This is the bit of himself where not just virtue, but where identity lives. Very basic ideas of his value as a human are wrapped up in the function and appearance of this one organ, much in the same way as martial virtues are wrapped up in the thumb. I want to return to the idea of dignity as it works in Montaigne’s prose. His writing is often frank, but never pornographic; often funny, but never absurd; often 11. Ibid., 660. 12. Ibid., 654. 13. Ibid., 651. 14. Ibid., 675. 15. Ibid., 677.

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colloquial, but never condescending. He desperately wants to preserve the dignity of his subject, whoever that is, as well as respect the dignity of his reader. That shows as much in his beautiful, carefully-constructed prose as in his arguments. His prose stylings allow him to convey the basic dignity of all people regardless of gender of genitalia even if his argument reduces the moral standing of a human being to one body part.

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Bibliography de Montaigne, Michel. The Complete Essays of Montaigne. Translated by Donald M. Frame. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1958.

Baptism and Blood: Martin Luther and Menno Simons on the Theology of Rebirth Verity Thomson Content Warning: This essay includes discussion of religious persecution and violence.

artin Luther is largely credited with founding the Protestant Reformation by nailing his 95 theses to the church door on October 31, 1517. An anxious and despairing Augustinian monk, he “failed to find peace” in practices “provided for by the old monastic teachers.”1 The Catholic position was one which emphasized the authority of the church which “had the power to bring down the grace of God through the channels of the sacraments.”2 Although a highly educated doctor of the church, Luther was not satisfied with this mediated grace and so began diligently reading the Christian Scriptures. He concluded that spiritual life must be the product of a deeply personal faith and rejected the idea that humans can do anything to produce that faith: “[God] imputes divine righteousness to sinful man without man’s participation in any sense.”3 Luther developed the doctrine of sola fide, not because he did not know about grace before he read the Scriptures, but to make clear that no external action was needed for salvation. In defiance of the Catholic church’s complex dogmas, which Luther had spent much time studying and teaching as a professor at the University of Wittenberg, Luther asserted the primacy of Scripture as the only and absolute authority for questions of faith—the principle of sola scriptura. These two principles, sola fide and sola scriptura, became the hallmarks of Luther’s theology and works. However, Luther was not the only one to challenge the Catholic church. Many other Reformers presented themselves shortly after, and in tandem with, Luther. They took up his doctrines of sola fide and sola scriptura, but, in using them, arrived at different interpretations of Scripture and so created their own sects. Some gained the support of the secular authorities and created new state-churches, This essay makes use of the following acronyms: CW – The Complete Works of Menno Simons LW – Luther’s Works WA – D. Martin Luthers Werke 1. Harry Loewen, Luther and the Radicals: Another Look at Some Aspects of the Struggle Between Luther and the Radical Reformers (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfried Laurier UP, 1974), 13. 2. Ibid., 14. 3. Ibid.

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such as Calvin and Zwingli, while others existed on the fringes of society. The Anabaptists fell in the latter category and where distinguished by their practice of believer’s baptism.4 As will be explained, both Luther and the Anabaptists oppose the Catholic church by saying that personal faith is necessary for a valid baptism, in contrast with the Catholic practice of infant baptism. However, the nature of the faith present in baptism is radically different in the two ideologies. This paper examines Luther’s views of baptism in relation to Menno Simon’s (as the focal point of Anabaptism) to shed light on the nature of the two Reformer’s movements. Baptism is the issue on which the two most fundamentally disagree and also on which they most thoroughly influence the other—it is their very opposition which allows for the distillation of each position. “There is no greater name among Anabaptists of the sixteenth century than that of Menno Simons,” says Anabaptist scholar William R. Estep says in The Anabaptist Story.5 Menno Simons (referred to as “Menno” in this paper, following scholarly convention) was born thirteen years after Luther in the Netherlands. He began his career as a Catholic priest, but eventually openly joined the Protestant movement and became a leader of one of the Anabaptist groups who would come to bear his name. Menno was educated at a monastery near his home town, and by the time of his ordination he was able to read and write Latin, was literate in Greek and was familiar with many ancient Latin writings.6 The first years of his priesthood were spent as a typical parish priest and as he explains in Reply to Gellius Faber, “I had not touched [the Scriptures] during my life, for I feared, if I should read them they would mislead me. Behold! Such a stupid preacher was I, for nearly two years.”7 His conversion to Protestantism and later Anabaptism was slow and, like Luther, came through a careful reading of Scripture. Doubts regarding transubstantiation lead him to turn to Scripture for the first time two years after his ordination and he “discovered that we were deceived.”8 Shortly thereafter, Menno read Luther’s works which “did prove to be a source of help” and “enlightenment.”9 He began to preach what he learned from Scripture and gained a reputation as an evangelical preacher.10 In 1531 Menno was greatly disconcerted by the execution of a “God-fearing, pious hero named Sicke Snijder” in the neighbouring village for his adult baptism, so he returned to the Scriptures and “pondered them earnestly, but could find no report of infant baptism.”11 Later that year he decided that only baptism after a confession of 4. William R. Estep, The Anabaptist Story: An Introduction to Sixteenth-Century Anabaptism, 3rd ed. (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1996), 14-15. 5. Ibid., 160. 6. Harold Bender, “A Brief Biography of Menno Simons,” in The Complete Works of Menno Simons, trans. Leonard Verduin, ed. John Christian Wenger (Scottdale, Pennsylvania: Herald Press, 1974), 4. 7. CW , 668 8. Ibid. 9. Estep, The Anabaptist Story, 162; Ralph Moellering, “Attitudes Toward the Use of Force and Violence in Thomas Muentzer, Menno Simons, and Martin Luthe,” Concordia Theological Monthly 31, no. 7 (July 1960): 414. 10. Estep, The Anabaptist Story, 162. 11. CW , 668.

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faith was biblical, yet he would not openly oppose the Catholic church for another five years.12 In 1535, 300 Anabaptists, including Menno’s own brother, were slaughtered by the authorities for their support of the Münsterites—a group of so called Anabaptists who believed Münster was the new Jerusalem.13 This event weighed heavily on Menno both because he was inspired by their sacrifice for their faith and because he believed he could have partially prevented the carnage had he been openly preaching and leading people towards the truth.14 So, in April 1535, still a Catholic priest, he began openly preaching believer’s baptism, the evils of the church and as he says, “the power of the Scriptures to remove all sin and ungodliness … and to testify to the true worship, also baptism and the Lord’s Supper according to the teaching of Christ.”15 This went on for nine months before he voluntarily resigned his place as preacher in January of 1536 and joined the Anabaptists living nearby.16 Scholars have hotly debated the extent to which the Anabaptists were indebted to Luther for their beliefs. Harry Loewen begins his critical work on the topic, Luther and the Radicals, by comparing Luther and the Anabaptists to King Lear and his daughters. Anabaptist groups were born from Luther’s thought, which encouraged each person to read and interpret the Christian Scriptures, yet many grew to hate him and were, in turn, condemned by him.17 Heinold Fast, in his article, “The Dependence of the First Anabaptists on Luther, Erasmus and Zwingli,” concludes that the “Anabaptists were children of the Reformation movement initiated by Luther” and he outlines seven points which the Anabaptists have in common with Luther.18 These are the seriousness of Christian faith, that repentance is a gift from God and not a human action, an emphasis on the Holy Spirit, liberty of conscience, that both baptism and communion are primarily about faith, that the church is a small circle of earnestly desiring Christians, and the primacy of Scripture over tradition.19 Given the list of commonalities it may be surprising to find them in direct opposition on many issues of doctrine, which resulted in condemnation against, and violence between, the two sects. Understanding the difference in Luther and Menno’s principles for scriptural interpretation is critical to explaining their different doctrines. Werner O. Packull unpacks the question of scriptural interpretation in his paper, “Some Reflections on Menno Simons’ and Martin Luther’s Hermeneutics.” He says that: Luther and his followers received more than they bargained for when artisans and peasants, with the aid of radical clerics, drew their own conclusions on what was the Word of God and what the word of men. Frightened by the consequences, the role of interpreting Scrip12. Moellering “Attitudes Toward the Use of Force,” 414. 13. Bender, “A Brief Biography of Menno Simons,” 11-12. 14. Estep, The Anabaptist Story, 164. Bender, “A Brief Biography of Menno Simons,” 12-13. 15. Ibid., 13. 16. Ibid., 14. 17. Loewen, Luther and the Radicals, 9. 18. Heinold Fast, “The Dependence of the First Anabaptists on Luther, Erasmus, and Zwingli,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 30, no. 2 (1956): 108. 19. Ibid., 105-08.

VERITY THOMSON tures became once more the prerogative of authorized exegete.20

Different hermetical principles emerged as more people began reading Scripture, and as Scripture became more accessible. Packull explains that Luther’s hermeneutical principle is Christocentric and asks “what promotes or proclaims Christ,” while Menno Simons, among other Anabaptists, understands the church to be a hermeneutical community in which all members are involved in the active discernment of Scriptures through the lens of faith and obedience to Christ.21 Packull also explains the commonalities in Luther and Simons’ hermeneutics, noting that they agree on the differentiation of the Word of God and Word of Man (e.g., Scripture over doctrine), a Christocentric approach to Scripture, they both have personal devotional interpretations of the psalms, they both seek the “plain” meaning of Scripture, that Scripture is “best understood through the heart rather than intellect,” and that the interpreter of Scripture needs an obedient and regenerate heart to understand Scripture.22 Again, there are significant commonalities between the two reformers, a consequence of their common heritage and shared core beliefs of sola scriptura and sola fide. However, Menno goes beyond Luther’s interpretation and looks to the community of Christians to interpret Scripture together. Despite their different political status (enemy of the state versus leader of the state-church), lifestyles, and beliefs, the two reformers are deeply connected. Although Luther and Menno oppose one another doctrinally, it is this very opposition which develops their different theological standpoints. This is most clearly illustrated in the issue of baptism which was the focus of much of their theological debate. The Anabaptists get their name because of their insistence on a second baptism, after a confession of faith: a believer’s baptism. Luther directly addresses the Anabaptists’s doctrine in his 1532 treatise “Concerning Rebaptism” in which he systematically refutes what he knows of the Anabaptist doctrine of baptism. In tracing the development of Luther and Menno’s thought on baptism we find that without the presence of the other viewpoint to challenge them, Luther nor Menno would have arrived at their positions on baptism. Luther’s position on baptism is not consistent throughout his ministry. With the spreading of Anabaptism, Luther is forced to argue convincingly for the practice of infant baptism which in turn, distills his position. In The Theology of Martin Luther, Paul Althaus explains the development of Luther’s thought concerning baptism. He traces Luther’s numerous, sometimes subtle, changes to his doctrine which often come in response to the Anabaptists and concludes that Luther’s “rejection of the demand that only adults be baptized therefore protects and strengthens his acceptance of infant baptism.”23 Pelikan explains the legitimacy of the Anabaptist’s position, saying that “it was reasonable … to conclude that Luther’s position, consistently carried out, would undercut the traditional doctrine and tract of the church regarding infant baptism.” 24 20. Werner O. Packull, “Some Reflections on Menno Simons’ and Martin Luther’s Hermeneutics,” Consensus 22, no. 2 (1996): 34. 21. Ibid., 34-40. 22. Ibid. 23. Paul Althaus, The Theology of Martin Luther, trans. Robert C. Schultz (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1968), 370. 24. Jaroslav Pelikan, Spirit Versus Structure: Luther and the Institutions of the Church

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However, Luther’s position on baptism, at first a carry-over with little thought, will become an important theological pillar of his ministry and a crucial insight to his overall theology because of the urgency to respond the Anabaptists. Like the Anabaptists, Luther always maintains that faith is needed for baptism.25 However, how that faith is present changes over time for Luther. Initially he argued that it was the faith of the sponsors which was the basis for baptism.26 In 1522 however, he changed this notion to “preserve the insight that we are saved not through someone else’s faith but through our own” and he begins to teach that infants have faith.27 Already Luther is being pushed by the Anabaptist position to be consistent with his own teaching. Three years later, in 1525, his Sermon on Matthew 8:1 again takes up the topic of infant baptism, clarifying that not only do infants have faith, but that they are “more fitted for faith than older and more rational people who always trip over their reason.”28 This is meant to refute the Anabaptist’s claim that we cannot baptize infants because they lack reason. However, as Althaus notes: Luther uses the concept ‘reason’ in a different sense than the opponents intended it. Those who object to infant baptism intended to say that faith is a personal act. Luther … immediately interprets it in terms of its content as the summary of our sinful, rebellious, and unbelieving thoughts.29 Luther says “we are baptized; not because we are certain of our faith but because it is the command and will of God.”30 Luther interprets Jesus’ command “let the little children come unto me” as a command to bring children to the Lord for baptism. The character of a child’s faith and how they come to acquire it of less concern for Luther who says, “Lord you have brought them here and commanded that they be baptized. You will certainly take responsibility for them.”31 Thus, for Luther the essential reason to baptize infants is that in baptism we are obeying God’s word and commandment by bringing them to him. Luther’s 1532 “Concerning Rebaptism” is an answer to the questions of two Catholic priests about how to counter Anabaptist teachings. Again, there is a subtle shift as he “goes a step further” to argue that baptism should be received in faith but is valid in itself as an act of God and as a sign of the covenant with His people.32 Jaroslav Pelikan divides Luther’s arguments for infant baptism in “Concerning Rebaptism” into the following headings: the Faith of Infants, the Natural Order, Continuity, and (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 77. 25. Althaus, The Theology of Martin Luther, 364. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid., 364-65. 28. WA, 17ii:83f, quoted in Paul Althaus, The Theology of Martin Luther, trans. Robert C. Schultz (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1968), 366. 29. Althaus, The Theology of Martin Luther, 366. 30. LW , 40:252. 31. WA, 17ii:85f, quoted in Althaus, The Theology of Martin Luther, 367. 32. Althaus, The Theology of Martin Luther, 368.

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Covenant. The argument of baptism as covenant is “the very strongest and surest ground” and the one which requires the most attention.34 As the Anabaptists push him to require a declaration of faith for baptism, Luther seeks to push to conversation towards the “objective, so that one did not look at the vagaries of his own faith but at the ordinances of God.”35 Luther’s argument is that in baptism we “affirm that God has made a covenant with all the world to be a God of the heathen in all the world, as the gospel says.”36 In this doctrine Luther is seeking to oppose the “personal occasion for an individualistic choice” of believer’s baptism, by emphasizing the dependence on “that which is outside ourselves … the promise and truth of God, which cannot deceive.”37 Thus, in “Concerning Rebaptism,” Luther further distills his position on infant baptism again to refute the Anabaptist idea of personal faith being the basis for baptism by postulating baptism as a sign of the covenant between God and mankind, valid because of God’s immutability whether or not there is human faith present. Luther and Menno’s very different positions in relation to secular authority are also instrumental in forming their positions. As a magisterial reformer, Luther is writing in the context of a state-church which he is actively creating through his writings. Althaus notes that “although Luther does not explicitly say so, his decision is based on the unspoken presupposition that the situation within the church is different than it is on the mission territory.”38 If a state-church, where all members of the society are growing up attending the same church, were to have adult baptism the question would inevitably become how much faith is enough to be baptized.39 Luther explains that in this situation your faith becomes an idol “for he trusts in and builds on something of his own, namely, on a gift which he has from God, and not on God’s Word alone.”40 For Luther, if a state-church were to implement adult baptism on confession of faith it would turn a “simple confession of faith” into trusting your own faith, which is to say one of your own works, for salvation. The Anabaptists were facing a very different situation. Instead of a commitment to faith being the only reasonable act from a law-abiding citizen, the commitment to faith would lead to your persecution and possible death. As Harding explains in “Menno Simons and the Role of Baptism in the Christian Life,” “to become an Anabaptist often did involve a tremendous conviction, and it demanded an act of commitment which might well signalize one’s entire attitude toward discipleship.”41 For the 33

33. Pelikan, Spirit Versus Structure, 77-97. 34. Althaus, The Theology of Martin Luther, 93. 35. Pelikan, Spirit Versus Structure, 93.. 36. LW , 40:252. 37. Egil Grislis, “Martin Luther and Menno Simons on Infant Baptism,” Journal of Mennonite Studies 12 (January 1994): 20. LW , 27:387, quoted in Jaroslav Pelikan, Spirit Versus Structure: Luther and the Institutions of the Church (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 93. 38. Althaus, The Theology of Martin Luther, 373. 39. Ibid. 40. LW , 40:252. 41. Vincent Harding, “Menno Simons and the Role of Baptism in the Christian Life,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 33, no. 4 (1959): 327.

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Anabaptists, baptism was a necessary sign of initiation into the organization. In publicly declaring that they believed and agreed with the Anabaptists an adult was choosing to be part of a movement that may cost them their life. Kamprath notes that “adult baptism played an important role as a sign of obedience and a testing of faith.”42 It was therefore very important that this confession of faith was coming from someone old enough to understand and accept the consequences of their belief. Thus, for both Luther and Menno, their position in relation to secular authority affected their beliefs. As a reformer endorsed by magistrates and in the process of creating a statechurch, Luther feared that adult baptism on confession of faith would lead to faith becoming an idol as people asked themselves, how much faith do I need to be baptized, whereas Menno was on the fringes of society and persecuted by secular authorities; he and his followers relied on a second baptism to determine membership to their group. Baptism played a critical and different role in the lives and theologies of Martin Luther and Menno Simons, and it was their doctrinal opposition to one another which distilled their individual positions. Without the other thinker to challenge their own viewpoints, Luther nor Menno would have arrived at their final theological position on baptism. The change in Luther’s position changed over time in response to the Anabaptist threat.

42. Donna Kamprath, “The Nature of Baptism: Examining the Instructional Writings of Menno Simons and Martin Luther,” Consensus 10, no. 3 (1984): 6

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Bibliography Althaus, Paul. The Theology of Martin Luther. Translated by Robert C. Schultz. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1968. Bender, Harold. “A Brief Biography of Menno Simmons.” In The Complete Works of Menno Simons, translated by Leonard Verduin, edited by John Christian Wenger, 3-29. Scottdale, Pennsylvania: Herald Press, 1974. Davis, Kenneth Ronald. Anabaptism and Asceticism: A Study in Intellectual Origins. Scottdale, Pennsylvania: Herald Press, 1974. Estep, William R. The Anabaptist Story: An Introduction to Sixteenth-Century Anabaptism. 3rd ed. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1996. Fast, Heinold. “The Dependence of the First Anabaptists on Luther, Erasmus, and Zwingli.” Mennonite Quarterly Review 30, no. 2 (1956): 104-19. George, Timothy. Theology of the Reformers. Nashville: Broadman Press, 1988. Grislis, Egil. “Martin Luther and Menno Simons on Infant Baptism.” Journal of Mennonite Studies 12 (January 1994): 7-25. Harding, Vincent. “Menno Simons and the Role of Baptism in the Christian Life.” Mennonite Quarterly Review 33, no. 4 (1959): 323-34. Kamprath, Donna. “The Nature of Baptism: Examining the Instructional Writings of Menno Simons and Martin Luther.” Consensus 10, no. 3 (1984): 3-14. Klassen, William. “Anabaptist Hermeneutics: The Letter and the Spirit.” In Essays in Biblical Interpretation: Anabaptist-Mennonite Perspectives, edited by Willard M. Swartley, 77-90. Elkhart, Indiana: Institute of Mennonite Studies, 1984. Loewen, Harry. Luther and the Radicals: Another Look at Some Aspects of the Struggle Between Luther and the Radical Reformers. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfried Laurier UP, 1974. Luther, Martin. D. Martin Luthers Werke. 120 vols. Weimar, 1883-2009. _____. Luther’s Works. 55 vols. Edited by Helmut T. Lehman. St. Louis: Concordia, 1956. Moellering, Ralph. “Attitudes Toward the Use of Force and Violence in Thomas Muentzer, Menno Simons, and Martin Luther.” Concordia Theological Monthly 31, no. 7 (July 1960): 405-27. Ozment, Steven. The Age of Reform 1250-1550: An Intellectual and Religious History of Late Medieval and Reformation Europe. New Haven: Yale UP, 1980.

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Pelikan, Jaroslav. Spirit Versus Structure: Luther and the Institutions of the Church. New York: Harper & Row, 1968. Packull, Werner O. “Some Reflections on Menno Simons’ and Martin Luther’s Hermeneutics.” Consensus 22, no. 2 (1996): 33-48. Simons, Menno. The Complete Works of Menno Simons. Translated by Leonard Verduin. Edited by John Christian Wenger. Scottdale, Pennsylvania: Herald Press, 1974.

The Disappearing Self in Zeami’s Atsumori Emma Graveson

he extant plays and theoretical treatises of Zeami (1363-1443) were integral to the development of Nō theatre.1 His treatise Fūshikaden, or Style and the Flower, was written in 1400-1402 to preserve the teachings of his late father and to record his own observations on the proper training for and approach to Nō.2 Central to his concept of a proper Nō performance is the aesthetic principle of yūgen, a transcendental quality, loosely related to grace. The exact origin of yūgen in a performance is as difficult to pin down as the definition of the word itself, but seems to require a combination of natural gift, technical practice, and dissolution of the self in performance. Zeami refers to this technical development of the actor as role playing and considers it the foundation of a Nō performance, while yūgen is what brings the technique to perfection.3 This essay will seek to define yūgen, and understand its relationship to Role Playing and to performance, then look specifically at how yūgen features at the textual level in Zeami’s play Atsumori. Yūgen is a compound word which literally translated means “cloudy impenetrability” and we must understand this impenetrable, mysterious, profound quality of the word in order to properly conceptualize Zeami’s aesthetics.4 While yūgen is an elusive concept, it is Zeami’s “central idea and his entire work revolves around and develops from it.”5 Originally a Chinese term, yūgen was used in Buddhism and Taoism to mean “to be so mysteriously faint and profound as to be beyond human perception and understanding.”6 The term was first used in Japan in a Buddhist text and is first found as an aesthetic term in a treatise on poetry written in 945 CE.7 The sense of profundity captured by the term at this time can also be de1. Karen Brazell, ““Zeami Motokiyo,” in The Norton Anthology of Drama, ed. J. Ellen Gainor, et al. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2014), 523. 2. Ibid.; J. Thomas Rimer, “The Background of Zeami’s Treatises,” in On the Art of the Nō Drama: The Major Treatises of Zeami, ed. Yamazaki Masakazu and trans. J. Thomas Rimer (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1984), xvii. 3. Toyoichirō Nogami, Zeami and His Theories of Noh, trans. by Ryōzō Matsumoto (Tōkyō Hinoki Shoten, 1955), 61. 4. Daisetz T. Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture (New York: New York Pantheon Books, 1959), quoted in Andrew T. Tsubaki, “Zeami and the Transition of the Concept of Yūgen: A Note on Japanese Aesthetics,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 30, no. 1 (Autumn 1971): 56. 5. Tsubaki, “Transition of the Concept of Yūgen,” 55. 6. Asaji Nose, Yugen-ron (Tōkyō: Kawade Shobo, 1944), quoted in Tsubaki, “Transition of the Concept of Yūgen,” 58. 7. Tsubaki, “Transition of the Concept of Yūgen,” 58.

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scribed as a “sense of sentimental loneliness which evokes pensiveness.” Near the end of the Kamakura period (1184-1335), it “acquired another characteristic: the implication of brightness in spite of the general permeation of lonesomeness.”9 By the time of Zeami, the quality of loneliness had further receded, and brightness continued to gain prevalence, so that Zeami uses it almost synonymously with elegance and gracefulness.10 Zeami mostly uses yūgen to mean gracefulness, but the term continues to maintain its sense of depth and profundity through the quality of mysteriousness. Possible definitions for his usage of the word include “Grace,” “half revealed grace tinged with sadness,” and “the graceful beauty which is implied by the nuance of a subtle yet profound expression.”11 In his plays, Zeami does not seek to immediately show what is beautiful. Rather, he veils precisely what he wants the audience to see, so that it cannot be grasped merely by the intellect, but moves the audience to something beyond the outward display they witness, something which only the soul can grasp.12 In a performance of Nō, yūgen “is hidden behind the clouds, but not entirely out of sight, for we feel its presence, its secret message being transmitted through the darkness however impenetrable to our intellect.”13 In sum, yūgen is the partially obscured quality of grace which moves the audience to a feeling of profound loneliness and beauty, in a place beyond where the intellect can grasp. Despite our best attempts at creating a working definition, we should not seek to create too constrictive a term, as yūgen is ultimately a multifaceted concept and can emphasize different connotations in differing contexts.14 How does the actor achieve this elusive and undefinable quality of yūgen? To answer this, we must take a brief look at the technical training of the actor, to determine how he approaches a role, and how this relates to yūgen in performance. In Fūshikaden, Zeami says the goal of Role Playing is to imitate the character being played until the actor reaches the point at which he is imitating so well he ceases to imitate and simply is the character.15 He continues: 8

In the art of Role Playing, there is a level at which imitation is no longer sought. When every technique of Role Playing is mastered and the actor has truly become the subject of his impersonation, then the reason for the desire to imitate can no longer exist.16 8. Nogami, Zeami and His Theories of Noh, 51. 9. Ibid., 52. 10. Ibid., 52-53. 11. Rimer, “The Background of Zeami’s Treatises,” xxiii; Mae J. Smethurst, The Artistry of Aeschylus and Zeami: A Comparative Study of Greek Tragedy and No (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2014), 19; Tsubaki, “Transition of the Concept of Yūgen,” 59. 12. Smethurst, The Artistry of Aeschylus and Zeami, 19. 13. Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture, quoted in Tsubaki, “Transition of the Concept of Yūgen,” 56. 14. Tsubaki, “Transition of the Concept of Yūgen,” 57. 15. Zeami Motokiyo, Teachings on Style and the Flower (Fūshikaden), in On the Art of the Nō Drama: The Major Treatises of Zeami, ed. Yamazaki Masakazu and trans. J. Thomas Rimer (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1984), 55. 16. Ibid.

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Zeami provides the example of an actor imitating an old man: an accomplished actor will be able to adjust his psyche to be like that of a real old man; he becomes the old man himself, at which point he ceases to imitate.17 This dissolution of the self allows the actor to bring himself to a universal emotional core to reveal the play’s meaning and emotional depth.18 In terms of technical practice, a good performance which allows for the authentic creation of character stems from a harmonious fusion of text and movement. In Chapter 3 of Fūshikaden, “Questions and Answers,” Zeami asks what the relation is between movement and text in a Nō performance. He answers that they are different, but a truly great performer makes them one, allowing them to grow out of one another.19 Once an actor has understood how to properly fuse movement and text in performance, his performance will certainly contain the quality of yūgen.20 But yūgen is not just a matter of practice. Rehearsal is necessary to perfect technical aspects and technical aspects alone.21 Yūgen comes from elsewhere, but Zeami does not explicitly state the location of this other place, suggesting that it has roots in both inherent ability and, confoundingly, practice. Zeami first poses the question “[i] f one thinks over the matter carefully, is the level of [yūgen] really a question of inborn capabilities? ... There is much to ponder in these matters.”22 It should also be noted that yūgen is not a phenomenon separate from the performance, so cannot be a natural quality that the actor contains outside of a performative context.23 It appears that yūgen is not merely a matter of inborn charisma, although his suggestion that it could be points to the fact that some people may attain it more naturally than others; this is probably the extent to which it is inborn. The quality of yūgen can also be achieved through practice, which seems contrary to Zeami’s previous statement that rehearsal is merely for the technical aspects of Role Playing, but practice in this instance does not mean the same thing as practice of Role Playing. If “an actor merely decides to attempt to create a sense of [yūgen] directly, the performance will be crude and cannot realize its object... Rather, if the actor can imitate perfectly a [role] then the [yūgen] will be created of itself.”24 Role Playing and yūgen are two distinct yet related and equally necessary entities of performance and, when the technical aspect of Role Playing has been sufficiently practiced, the quality of yūgen will follow. It is thus a matter of practice, but not directly so. The actor must seek to perfect both technique and quality in their own way, for Zeami warns that “[a] n actor who seeks to master only one of these two facets of the art can never become a truly great player.”25 The attainment of yūgen should be practiced in conjunction with 17. Ibid. 18. Peter Lamarque, “Expression and the Mask: The Dissolution of Personality in Noh,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 47, no. 2 (Spring 1989): 165. 19. Zeami, Fūshikaden, 27. 20. Ibid., 28. 21. Ibid., 26. 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid., 47. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid., 38.

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Role Playing, so that in performance, yūgen may bloom forth from rehearsed technique. Zeami believes the actor must be attentive to his characterization, rehearsing technical skill so that a transcendental quality may flow forth from it. He also believes, however, that it is the responsibility of the playwright to write a script that will allow for these conditions to arise. For example, a playwright should refrain from writing a character full of rage, as rage is incompatible with a performance embracing yūgen. He holds that “[s]uch plays represent truly improper Nō, and these works can be said to misrepresent the art.”26 The script must always allow the actor to hold Role Playing and yūgen in harmony. Zeami has an exemplary understanding of this harmony in his play Atsumori. He writes it in such a way that the qualities of yūgen are almost inherent in the text itself, and can be easily elevated into a performative context by the actor. A brief summary of the play may be helpful. In the first part, the Buddhist priest Renshō travels to Ichinotani, to pray for the soul of Atsumori, an aristocratic youth whom he killed there in battle. At his destination, Renshō encounters grass cutters playing beautiful flute music. The grass cutters return home, but one stays behind to pray. He asks the priest to pray for him, as well, and Renshō agrees. When Rensho inquires as to his identity, the grass cutter reveals that he is of the family of Atsumori, then disappears. After this scene, there is a comic Kyōgen interlude in which the death of Atsumori is recounted by a local and Renshō reveals his identity as Atsumori’s murderer. In the second part of the play, the grass cutter appears again, revealing himself to be the ghost of Atsumori. Together they provide a poetic recount of the murder and through this action find reconciliation, with the hope “that in the end they will be reborn together / on a single lotus petal.”27 This is an interesting storyline for a Nō play because the subject matter is a historical battle, featuring two warriors in the primary shite and secondary waki roles, which Zeami warns should not be performed too often. He says these roles are usually boring or require wildness, yet must not become a dance role or demon-like.28 In Atsumori, Zeami sidesteps these potential problems by writing it as a shura mono, or ‘ghost-of-warrior’ play, shifting the focus from a plot about the battle itself to the need for forgiveness. By featuring a ghost in the shite role and emphasizing spiritual concerns, he is able to depict the transcendental, mysterious quality of yūgen in a discussion of life and death at the most basic textual level.29 The spiritual elements and ghost shite further establish a general atmosphere of cloudy imperceptibility by blurring the past and present. The theme of forgiveness “destabilizes the unchangeable quality of the past,” essentially reinventing historical events that the audience was already familiar with.30 The play does not re-enact or remember the past to contextualize present events, since a linear temporal storyline is not the aim of the play. Rather, Zeami invokes the past to intensify the present, “[t]he striking suggestion [of which] seems to be that per26. Ibid., 44-45. 27. Zeami Motokiyo, Atsumori, trans. Karen Brazell, in The Norton Anthology of Drama, ed. J. Ellen Gainor, et al. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2014), 537-38. 28. Zeami, Fūshikaden, 15. 29. Brazell, “Zeami Motokiyo,” 524. 30. Yuka Amano, “‘Flower’ as Performing Body in Nō Theatre,” Asian Theatre Journal 28, no. 2 (Fall 2011): 544.

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sonal identity is encapsulated in some vivid and momentary fragment of a life.”31 The non-linear conception of time helps carry the audience towards the feeling of yūgen in the performance. The emphasis on forgiveness and blurring of time further allows a development of yūgen from the textual level, as it dissolves the distinction between opposing parties. There is no mediated agreement between the two opposing forces, nor is one victorious over the other; rather, Zeami resolves the tensions by dissolving the barrier between the opposing characters so that they become a unity.32 This is a textual iteration of the performative connection between Role Playing and yūgen. The actor dissolves the individual psyche to fully imitate the universal emotional core of the character, and thus grant the performance with intangible depth. As the actor and character cease to be opposing parties and come to exist in a perfect union, so to Atsumori and Renshō seek reconciliation and the potential to be reborn in unity. Nō theatre is recognized for its aesthetic depth and potential, as embodied in the multivalent definition of yūgen. Grace, loneliness, and transcendence are qualities of yūgen that the actor attains through both inborn ability and practice in conjunction with Role Playing. In performance, yūgen is an obscure quality that moves the audience to beyond the rational. Zeami writes his play Atsumori to allow a performance which captures these qualities. Through a ghostly shite, focus on reconciliation, and non-linear time, Zeami provides the textual basis for a wistful view of life and death, and a blossoming forth of yūgen for the audience.

31. Lamarque, “Expression and the Mask,” 166. 32. Amano, “‘Flower’ as Performing Body,” 540.

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Bibliography Amano, Yuka. “‘Flower’ as Performing Body in Nō Theatre.” Asian Theatre Journal 28, no. 2 (Fall 2011): 529-548. Daisetz, T. Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture. New York: New York Pantheon Books, 1959. Brazell, Karen. “Zeami Motokiyo.” In The Norton Anthology of Drama, edited by J. Ellen Gainor, et al., 523-528. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2014. Lamarque, Peter. “Expression and the Mask: The Dissolution of Personality in Noh.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 47, no. 2 (Spring 1989): 157-168. Motokiyo, Zeami. Atsumori. Translated by Karen Brazell. In The Norton Anthology of Drama, edited by J. Ellen Gainor, et al., 528-538. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2014. ———. Teachings on Style and the Flower (Fūshikaden). In On the Art of the Nō Drama: The Major Treatises of Zeami, edited by Yamazaki Masakazu and translated by J. Thomas Rimer, 3-63. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1984. Nogami, Toyoichirō, Zeami and His Theories of Noh. Translated by Ryōzō Matsumoto. Tōkyō: Hinoki Shoten, 1955. Nose, Asaji, Yūgen-ron. Tōkyō: Kawade Shobo, 1944. Rimer, Thomas J. “The Background of Zeami’s Treatises.” In On the Art of the Nō Drama: The Major Treatises of Zeami, edited by Yamazaki Masakazu and translated by J. Thomas Rimer, xvii-xxviii. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1984. Smethurst, Mae J., The Artistry of Aeschylus and Zeami: A Comparative Study of Greek Tragedy and No. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2014. Tsubaki, Andrew T. “Zeami and the Transition of the Concept of Yūgen: A Note on Japanese Aesthetics.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 30, no. 1 (Autumn 1971): 55-67.

Afterword

s you may have noticed, the ten papers that compose the bulk of Babel are presented in inverse chronological order. Covering a period of roughly 400 years, Babel starts with a discussion of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, published in 1818, and concludes with an examination of 15th-century theatre. We chose this order for a variety of reasons. Firstly, inspired by our guiding concept of the Studiolo, we wanted the readers of Babel to experience the feeling of looking through a set of drawers—ones full of oddities, keepsakes, and lost relics—where the oldest contents are uncovered as you pull things out. As you read Babel, we hope you felt this sense of discovery and nostalgia as you dug through our drawers and uncovered a snow globe depicting a frozen wasteland, a slightly eaten apple, some Dutch china, and a ghostly grass cutter’s flute: items that may seem new, but are still oddly familiar. Secondly, we wished to mirror our study of the Early Modern Period in the structure of Babel. As we engage with the past academically, we are all sorting through drawers of various makes and models, indicative of the cultures that created and filled them. We could be looking for a scrap of quotation, a complex theological system, or a painter’s lost artworks. Often times this search is challenging, often times it is exhausting; but when you do find what you are looking for—and sometimes, something you did not even know you were looking for—it is an incredible experience. An experience I suspect each of the authors in Babel had as they searched through different, but not unconnected, drawers. There’s a lot of junk in these drawers: racism, sexism, homophobia, colonial violence, and religious intolerance are only a few of the oppressive forces prevalent throughout the Early Modern Period. However, as we hope you’ve found while reading Babel, there are reasons to engage with this period and examine the contents of each drawer. Each paper in Babel represents the work of an author who chose a drawer to dig through, think about, question, and present their analysis of its contents to you, our reader. Collectively, these works form our Studiolo: A space, both physical and theoretical, for you to think about a variety of topics and the connections between them. Thirdly, we hoped that this format would help you explore and question the content in Babel and the themes that run through it. The sexuality and sublimity of poetry, the uses and limits of theatricality, and the ways in which our treatment of others define us are some of the threads I have found woven into Babel. They may emerge overtly in an essay on Kant, fade into the subtext of the following paper, and reappear, in a different form, during a discussion on genitals. By moving backward through the Early Modern Period, we hoped you would encounter these, and many other, themes and question where, when, and how such thoughts emerged. If Babel was not able to answer your questions, we hope it motivated you to look for the answers yourself. Now is an appropriate time to mention the cover of this year’s Babel. As you open our journal, the cropped image of Antonello da Messina’s St. Jerome in His Study on the front cover is replaced on the first inside page with the painting’s broader surroundings. With this cover, we hoped to convey—right from the get-go—that Babel is an opportunity to open up and reflect on the Early Modern Period. While St. Jerome may appear focused on the text in front of him, he is not isolated from the shelves full

of books and jars, the animals on the steps, and the landscape in the background. He, like all of us, is a part of a larger, living world. We hope that the essays in Babel have offered you a new perspective on the Early Modern world, and perhaps even our contemporary one. While Sam began the journal by expressing our profound gratitude to those who contributed so much to make Babel happen, I do not believe it is possible to give them too much thanks. As such, I would like to personally acknowledge their contributions again here. To the editors: Charlotte Scromeda, Hannah Sparwasser Soroka, Katy Weatherly, and Zoë Sherwin, and our Editor-in-Chief: Sam Gleave Riemann, thank you so much for all your hard work. I could not imagine a group of more dedicated, resourceful, and engaging people to work with. To our authors: Nathan Ferguson, Beatrice Glickman, Edie Chunn, Graham O’Brien, Daniel Whitten, Lea Paas-Lang, Layla Gibson, Verity Thomson, and Emma Graveson, you are simply incredible. I speak for the entire editing team when I say it is our honour and pleasure to publish your work in Babel. Thank you for entrusting us with your creations. Babel would not be possible without the unfaltering support shown by the King’s Student Union and the faculty members of the Early Modern Studies Department. To all our professors and mentors, at King’s and beyond, thank you for your patience, thoughtfulness, advice, and encouragement. Additionally, our gratitude goes to Etc. Press for printing this year’s copies of Babel. Lastly, I would like to extend a sincere thank you to you, our reader. I hope that you’ve enjoyed, and perhaps learned something from, this edition of Babel, the work of many dedicated hands and minds.

Keenan Livingstone Co-President of the Early Modern Studies Society, 2017-8