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Editorial 2 Unbelief and Misbelief: The Discourse of Atheism in Seventeenth-Century Literature Roger Pooley 3

Clarissa: Saint or Sinner? Richardson and Eighteenth-Century Ideologies of Virtue

Beth Swan 14 Derrida, Saussure and the Survival of Scripture

Nick Howard 28

Reviews 43

Notes on Contributors 58

News and Notes 60

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NUMBER 12 WINTER 1999

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Editorial

It may be too simple to say that Christianity has customarily given ideological support to established structures of social power, since it is just as possible to promote it as illuminating private and public justice, challenging abuses of power and providing leverage to reform.

In her article here Beth Swan presents Samuel Richardson as a Christian novelist who challenged eighteenth century assumptions about law and custom. Clarissa was moreover a Pilgrim’s Progress for its time, with a female protagonist who underwent the ultimate test of female virtue against an adversary of demonic proportions.

All the same, the atheism of the preceding century was, as Roger Pooley demonstrates in the first article of this issue, an undercurrent associated sometimes with Hobbes and Machiavelli, and so with radical questioning of the fundamentals of government. John Bunyan’s Mapp shewing the Order and Causes of Salvation and Damnation, of which the detail is unfortunately too fine for The Glass, gives the individual a graphic view of life-choices which in another perspective are facets of an eternal election. On this plane the body politic, like that of the self (though not the soul), seems to count for less than the final weight of glory.

A third article, by Nick Howard, reminds us that, contra Jacques Derrida, words may refer directly to reality and that the sign points to something outside the text. Logocentrism is not finished, and on one available definition, it has the last word.

Roger Kojecký

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Unbelief and Misbelief: The Discourse of Atheism in Seventeenth-Century Literature

Roger Pooley This paper is an attempt to set out some possible lines of enquiry into the

discourse of atheism in the seventeenth century; and comments and criticisms on the whole project would be most welcome.

As a teacher of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature, I find myself teaching the Bible and Reformation and Counter-Reformation theology each year as an important precursor to the study of Donne, Herbert, Milton and their contemporaries. Looking for a ‘hook’, a means of entry for those whose assumptions were largely agnostic, if not atheist, I began to think about what characterised unbelief in the period, particularly as it is figured in the drama. To a large extent it is true that the ‘other’ of Protestant Christianity is Catholicism (and vice versa), but a special fear and odium attaches to blatant unbelief. Historians (notably Michael Hunter and David Wootton) have begun the search for unbelievers in philosophical works and court records; in what follows I argue that, while self-confessed unbelievers are elusive, there is a discourse of atheism within and around early modern Christianity which is not only much more visible, but revealing of the nature of that Christianity. It also gives us a purchase on some key characters in the drama.

It is comforting to begin with a definition, and here is one from a pamphlet of 1642, anonymous though clearly mainstream Church of England, Religions Lotterie, or the Churches Amazement Wherein is declared how many Sorts of Religions there is crept into the very bowels of this Kingdome, striving to shake the whole foundation and to destroy both Church and Kingdom.

An Atheist is one that believes that there is no God, only ascribes all things to the power of chance and fortune, he looks only upon the natural things of the world, not dreaming of any other Deity.1

Clear enough: the emphasis on ‘natural things’ rather than a transcendent God is a common feature of descriptions of atheism in

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the period. However, it is a description by an opponent. There is no equivalent from a self-confessed atheist in the period, because it was illegal. Most of the time, the discourse of atheism in the seventeenth century consists of voicing it in order to demolish it. Like many heresies and alternative philosophies in the early church period, atheism is most clearly and most often expounded by its opponents and refiners, who might not be the most reliable witnesses, for all sorts of reasons - they might wilfully or inadvertently misunderstand the position, or want an easy target to hit, for example. Indeed A C Kors can argue that atheism is primarily an invention of orthodox theology, as a critical interlocutor; though of course that may be partly a function of the concept itself; without its ‘other’ of theism it would not be comprehensible.2 It has an obvious parallel to the discourse of male homosexuality in the period (not that ‘homosexual’ was an early modern word, though ‘atheist’ was); indeed, for the posthumous accusers of Christopher Marlowe, there was a manifest link between the two. Though Marlowe’s accusers did not mention it, the drama also offers a way of voicing the unorthodox. Sidney defended the poet against the charge of lying in The Defence of Poetry by saying ‘he nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth’. By using the device of a character who can meet an orthodox sticky end, the dramatic poet can have a double alibi.

Separating atheism the concept in the seventeenth century from atheism the accusation is, therefore, on the tricky side of impossible. For legal and rhetorical reasons, atheism is an accusation, rarely, if ever, a confession. It comes under the Blasphemy laws, which are often used against religious, rather than irreligious opponents, as David Lawton’s book has pointed out.3 ‘Atheist’ is what you call your opponents. Atheism, even as a concept, is defined by what it is not; as an insult, it is the theological or moral position opposite to that taken by the speaker, so Catholics and Nonconformists can be, for an Anglican apologist, equally guilty of ‘atheism’ in a way that is baffling to the modern reader. Atheism is not always not believing in God, but believing in the wrong God.

So what defines conceptual atheism in this period may not only be lack of belief, but what we might call ‘misbelief’, to appropriate Thomas Luxon’s term.4 So it shades into what, by the 18th century, we can happily call Deism. Let us consider some options: a God who created the universe, but who does not intervene any more in the workings of nature; a God who may have given moral rules, but will not conduct a Last Judgement; a God who is immortal, but who has not given humanity immortal souls. You may believe in any of these Gods, but be labelled, by quite general agreement in the seventeenth century, an

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atheist. This can shade into ‘behavioural atheism’, or practical atheism, acting as if God does not exist, or will not judge. This is the main reason that atheism is felt to be politically dangerous: anyone who does not believe in the last Judgement may cheerfully disobey God’s deputies on earth, if they can get away with it.

Let us focus on three areas, then. First, the extent to which atheism, however, loosely or strictly defined, is not just about unbelief but misbelief, and why these two overlap. Second, the link between atheism and a view of nature which has no need, or a seriously reduced need, of a Christian God. Thirdly, a politics of atheism, which explains why it was feared as a threat to civil obedience.

Unbelief, misbelief For the first question, on the relation of belief to unbelief, I believe two maps are instructive; these are visual summaries of Reformed belief. The first is from William Perkins’ A Golden Chaine (1616), a summary of Reformed theology which is a classic of English Calvinism. The second is John Bunyan’s Mapp shewing the Order and Causes of Salvation and Damnation, first published c.1664, but only surviving from its reprint in the posthumous folio Works of 1690. Perkins is undoubtedly Bunyan’s source; he in turn had adapted his from Theodore Beza. Both maps are unusual in needing to be read from top to bottom, instead of the usual side to side, endlessly dividing, Ramist theological diagram/table of contents − though with Bunyan you have to read the side by side sections sequentially as well. Both of them are clearly Calvinist in their deployment of the two lines of predestination, damnation and salvation alike resulting in God’s glory. There are some interesting differences. Perkins, more than one would expect, is interested in some alternative pathways within the two main headings. On the left (labelled B) he shows the temptations of the Godly towards unbelief, and their resolution; on the right, we see the line beginning ‘A general Illumination’, describing a temporary, false religion.5 In Bunyan this is described as ‘Legall conviction’, and is subsumed into the single narrative of reprobation. Bunyan’s Mapp also shows the signs of a stand-alone publication, being more detailed, especially with its citation of biblical texts. As Gordon Campbell has pointed out, Bunyan seems happier with these than with the more scholarly abstractions that Perkins deploys.6 At number Thirteen on the road to hell in Bunyan’s Mapp, one notices the arrival of Atheism, the next stage on from impenitency and hardness of heart. (The reference is to Acts 13:41, part of Paul’s sermon in the synagogue at Antioch in Pisidia − ‘Behold, you

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despisers, and wonder, and perish: for I work a work in your days, a work which ye shall in no wise believe, though a man declare it unto you.’) Bunyan sees atheism as a stage in the reprobate’s progress, a consequence of loose living and theological error. We might remember that the original sequel to The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) was not Christiana’s journey, published as the ‘second part’ in 1686, but The Life and Death of Mr Badman (1680).

Looking at these two maps gives one a graphic sense of the extent to which the Calvinist system generates at the very least an expectation of unbelief. But it also shows how heterodoxy, however defined, is functionally similar to atheism in this kind of theology. For Bunyan, for example, the belief in ‘legal righteousness’ which he ascribed to Latitudinarians like Edward Fowler, and memorably satirised in Mr Worldly Wiseman, is as damnable as open atheism.7 It is part of the same process.

This interest in unbelief may not be simply a function of the doctrine of double predestination. It might equally be a consequence of the emphasis on religion as a choice, a decision, itself a direct consequence of the fissuring of Western Christendom. These problems of choice among churches or theologies are compellingly explored in Donne’s satire ‘Kind pity chokes my spleen’. The growing influence of Arminianism amongst former Puritans, especially after the Restoration, as well as mainstream Anglicans brings in another anti-Calvinist emphasis on choice. The variety of non-Christian religions, particularly those discovered as Europeans explored the world, compound the post-Reformation multiple choices, and raise the question if any are true. Bunyan’s pre-conversion thoughts about Islam, recounted in Grace Abounding, are one example; he ascribes to the Tempter the thought:

Everyone doth think his own religion rightest, both Jews, and Moors, and Pagans; and how if all our Faith, and Christ, and Scriptures, should be but a think-so too?8 Thomas Fuller’s character of the atheist in The Profane State (1653)

similarly ‘quarrels at the diversities of religion in the world’ (p. 365). Disputes within Christianity are also blamed. In the dialogue Firmanius and Dubitantius, by Thomas Goode, Master of Balliol (1674), the character Dubitantius goes through the whole gamut, Presbyterian, Independent, Anabaptist, Quaker, Papist and Antiscripturalist, before finally ending up as an Atheist. From being distracted by ‘diversity of opinion’ in religion, he ends up with nothing. Once again, of course, this is the orthodox picture of atheism and its causes; it is, at best,

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ventriloquised testimony. However, if we are trying to characterise the discourse of atheism, rather than trying to identify a true atheist, then changing, or what is perceived as erroneous religious belief is part of the picture. The discourse of atheism then shades into anti-popery, or anti-Protestantism. Nature The Christian doctrine of nature in the period is distributed between two main concepts, creation and providence. In Richard Muller’s helpful definition, providence is ‘the continuing act of divine power, subsequent to the act of creation, by means of which God preserves all things in being, supports their actions, governs them according to his established order, and directs them towards his ordained ends. Since God is eternal, this distinction between creation and providence results primarily from our temporal view of God’s work.’9 This distinction, largely incidental to the Protestant scholastics that Muller draws on, becomes of singular importance by the end of the century, as the doctrine of creation remains largely acknowledged, but the doctrine of providence becomes increasingly problematic. ‘Nature’ is also an important codeword in the discourse of atheism. In King Lear Edmund has to endure being insulted in public in I.i (‘there was good sport at his making, and the whoreson must be acknowledged’); in the following scene, he bursts out to the audience:

Thou, nature, art my goddess. To thy law My services are bound.

He then proceeds to act like an atheist, with an untroubled appetite for power, sex and cruelty. ‘False to thy gods’ Edgar in one of his disguises calls him (V.iii.24). Even then, at the point of death, he says ‘Some good I mean to do, / In spite of my own nature’ (V.iii.218), suggesting that nature, admittedly a slippery and multivalent term in the play as has long been recognised, is not an inescapably determining force.10 It is a common assertion of the anti-atheist literature that the fear of death might convert an atheist. Certainly D’Amville, the atheist of Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy, draws back from his atheism in the face of his own death, and the stoic approach to execution of the orthodox Charlemont. In so doing, he affirms providence over nature:

There was the strength of natural understanding. But nature is a fool: there is a power above her that hath overthrown the pride of all my projects and posterity, for whose surviving blood I had erected a proud

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monument, and stuck ’em dead before me.11

Opposing nature to law, as Edmund does, forms an interesting link and contrast with a much later play, Thomas Otway’s The Atheist (1684), where the atheist figure Daredevil announces himself as:

Of the Religion of the Inner-Temple, the Common-Law Religion; I believe in the Law, trust in the Law, enjoy what I have by the Law: For if such a Religious fellow as you are get Fifty pounds into my Debt, I may go to Church and pray till my heart akes, but the Law must make you pay me at last.12

Daredevil’s atheism is pragmatic rather than doctrinaire, like so many Restoration atheist figures in the drama. In the end he is mocked because he is unable to sustain his atheism in the face of a threatened death.

There are two sides to the Restoration analysis of atheism. On the one hand, it is an umbrella term in which, what is termed ‘speculative atheism’, covers a range of philosophical positions about the relationship of nature to God or some other first cause, in a way which is perceived to undermine the orthodox doctrine of providence. On the other hand, though, there is the ‘practical atheism’ of a Daredevil, acting as if God doesn’t exist, or at least will not judge, which, some argue, results in debauchery and civil disobedience.13 In this latter sense it can be seen as part of a process of moral decline, part of an inevitable sequence. This double sense of atheism mirrors exactly the procedural doubleness of Mr Badman: on the one hand it often reads like a catalogue, a miscellany of wicked actions and their consequences; on the other hand, there is the narrative of Mr Badman’s decline, an atheist’s progress.

The discourse of ‘speculative atheism’ in the later 17th century is largely carried on in a mixture of arguments against the Classical atheists, Epicurus and Lucretius in particular, and responses to more recent developments, the thought of Hobbes and Descartes especially; and right at the end of the century, reflections on the new scientific activity. Robert Boyle, one of the most distinguished members of the Royal Society, founded a series of lectures in his will to confute atheism: the first of these was in 1692, the year after his death. Richard Bentley, the first Boyle Lecturer (better known to literary scholars for his work on Milton), slips into an already well-established model, the ‘physico-theological treatise’. The term is taken from the sub-title of Walter Charleton’s The Darkness of Atheism Dispelled by the Light of Nature (1652); and its most notable exponent is Ralph Cudworth in his True Intellectual

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System of the Universe . . . wherein, All the Reason and Philosophy of Atheism Is Confuted; and Its Impossibility Demonstrated (1678). We can see, then, that the reaction to a perceived growth in atheism has already produced a new genre and a new kind of apologetic in this period, one based more on deductions from the evidence of natural rather than supernatural revelation. In so doing, it established a view of the philosophical foundations of Christianity which survived into the Enlightenment, but which, in Alasdair McIntyre’s view, resulted in the kind of faith which would be ripe for crisis under the impact of Darwinism – a seventeenth-century crisis of faith leading to a nineteenth-century one. ‘The God in whom the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries came to disbelieve had been invented only in the seventeenth century.’14

I like the idea, but it demands one crucial qualification. This line of apologetic can be traced back to the ancient Greeks. Just as the code-words for atheism can be Lucretius or Epicurus, so the arguments against tend not to be, primarily, Biblical. A whole range of publications such as Atheismus Vapulans (William Towers, 1654), A Preservative against Atheism (William Saller, 1664) and The Unreasonableness of Atheism (Charles Wolseley, 1675, and William Talbot, 1694; same title, different books) support Michael Buckley’s thesis about the French anti-atheist material of the 17th and 18th centuries, that Christian arguments are fetched more from the stoa than the Bible, and that Christ himself is given very little say in these refutations.15 The frontispiece to The True Intellectual System, for example, pictures three Greek theists, Aristotle, Pythagoras and Socrates, arguing against three Greek atheists, Strato, Epicurus and Anaximander. Saller’s A Preservative does give some space to the Bible and Jesus after the usual arguments from design, but the emphasis is more often philosophical and moral, with the characteristic Restoration Anglican privileging of ethics over grace. After all, the argument runs, an atheist is hardly likely to be convinced by an appeal to the authority of scripture.

Henry More’s An Antidote Against Atheism (1653) takes up many of the same arguments for the existence of God, for example the universality of worship in mankind, the innateness of conscience and the usefulness and beauty of plants and animals, alongside other defences of Christian theism in general and the operation of Providence in particular. Like them, he doesn’t have recourse to the Bible as an authority: ‘I appeare now in the plaine shape of a meere Naturaliste, that I might vanquish Atheisme’ (p. 84). But then he picks up a novel line of argument for anti-atheist literature which recognises that a defence of theism involves theodicy, a defence of God’s ways as well as his

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existence: If God would blow upon a man, who can help it? and he will do sometimes, because he will change dispensations with men, and because he will trye their Graces. Yea, also because he will overthrow the wicked with his Judgements; and all these things are seen in Job (p. 99).

More surprising is the change of tone and procedure when More turns to miracles. The appeal to miracles in the New Testament is characteristic of some discourses against atheism, but it is unusual in this period to see someone arguing that they still continue. In Mr Badman Bunyan quotes from Samuel Clarke’s A Mirror or Looking Glasse both for Saints and Sinners (4th ed. 1671), amongst others, to argue that the spectacularly supernatural still exists. There are numerous anecdotes of those torn by devils. The age of Satanic miracles, at least, is not past as far as Bunyan is concerned. Nor are they for More, though he is more concerned that there might be a natural explanation, such as fraud or melancholy. He is not content simply to repeat from printed evidence (his main source is the Dutch writer Remigius) but he also argues from his own examinations of those accused of witchcraft in Cambridge and Huntingdon. After one story, he says:

As for my own part, I should have looked upon this whole Narration as a mere idle fancy or sick dream, had it not beene that my beliefe was so much enlarged by that palpable satisfaction I received from what we heard from foure or five Witches which we lately examined before.16

The ‘we’ is More and his fellow Cambridge Platonist and antiatheist Ralph Cudworth. Examples of spectacular providences, such as those in Mr Badman, are not confined to the popular, or the less educated Christian apologists, but are part of a more general anti-atheist discourse. We can see it in the dialogue Firmanius and Dubitantius, published in 1674, by the Master of Bailiol, Thomas Goode, which argues for the harmony between the Book of Nature and the Book of Grace, and assumes ‘the certainty that there are Devils, evil Spirits, Witches, Magicians . . . which none but a foolish Atheist (who will believe no further than his sight leads him) can doubt of.’17 It is the more noteworthy because More and Goode both see enthusiasm and separatism as parallel threats to rational belief. In his preface More argues that the enthusiast’s raving ‘confirms the Atheists that the whole business of religion and the notion of a God is nothing, but a troublesome fit of over-curious Melancholy’; and in his conclusion, ‘For assuredly that saying was nothing so true in Politicks, No Bishop, no King

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as this is in Metaphysicks, No Spirit, no God.’18

Politics and atheism So what, then, of the political consequences of atheism in the period? John Redwood’s summary (yes, that John Redwood) of the post-Restoration position is representative:

Men feared, perhaps genuinely, perhaps for political and social convenience, that atheists from Warsaw to Lands End were in secret league aimed at the overthrow of all government, order and religion. They feared having to deal with men who accepted no rule of life and morality other than expediency . . . contemporary pen portraits stressed the connections between atheist, deist, Socinian and enthusiast, and thought the theoretic atheist a loyal ally and companion of the drunkard, the debauchee, the ranter and the extravagant enthusiast.19

It is true that the seventeenth century is full of heresiographers torn between making precise distinctions between oppositional groups, while concluding that in other respects they are all the same.

However, we might argue that the face of political atheism in the early modern period has a more explicit philosophical rationale to it. Christian orthodoxy, despite the increasing evidence of principled dissent, tended to the position that social order is dependent on people believing that, if they rebel against the established government, they will go to hell. A pamphlet of 1672 strikes one representative tone in this argument:

How spreading and Epidemical the Contagion of Atheism is grown of late, there are few so happy as to be ignorant, that the same not only strikes at the Root of all Religion, but takes away all sense of Good and Evil, all Trust and Obligation amongst Men; and consequently is most destructive to humane Society and Government.20

The political thinkers who, it was felt, most exemplified this tendency were Machiavelli and Hobbes − so much so, that the term ‘politic’, in its special sense of an amoral use of power, is often, in the drama, associated with the atheistic Machiavel. Even the laughably incompetent Sir Politick Would-Be, in Ben Jonson ‘s Vo1pone (1606) gives some atheist advice to Peregrine:

And then, for your religion, profess none; But wonder at the diversity of all; And for your part protest, were there no other But simply the laws o’ the land, you could content you:

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Nic Machiavel and Monsieur Bodin, both, Were of this mind.21 In the same way, Hobbesian ideas and political atheism seem

indissolubly linked in the minds of the Restoration. For example, the Oxford Convocation of 1683, which condemned Leviathan among other works, suggested it was ‘infamous to Christian Religion, and destructive of all Government in Church and state.’22 Machiavelli and Hobbes, so often feared for their apparent atheism, argue in their different ways that the consequences of disorder are so horrible that the very threat of anarchy is sufficient for us to pardon a ruthless ruler (Machiavelli on the Borgias) or for men to hand over their responsibility for social preservation to an absolute ruler (Hobbes). Both are accused of atheism; the reluctance to credit their arguments is, paradoxically, based on the same fear of disorder that drives their key thinking. Machiavelli had commended the Borgias, not for their methods, but because they had brought peace and order to the Romagna. Leviathan (1651) is manifestly driven by the experience of the English Civil War, and the need to re-establish legitimate government in the aftermath of the execution of Charles I, though many of the ideas are in place in the earlier texts The Elements of Law and De Cive.23

It is one thing to try to decide if Machiavelli or Hobbes were atheists; they denied it, and anything we can do from their published works would be an act of decoding. What we can say is that the polemics against their work are exemplary texts of the discourse of atheism. We can do little more than speculate about the existence of a necessarily private, mostly unpublishable rise in atheistic thinking in the seventeenth century. The evidence is largely in the refuting in print, or the figuring of it on stage; though that, strictly, is evidence for a growing anxiety amongst the orthodox, which is significant but different. It may be that the coffee-house atheists, rakehells and Hobbists are the signs of internal doubts within Christendom about nature, providence, and the true basis of government as much as they constitute a new movement of unbelievers in the seventeenth century. 1 In Lawrence A Sasek, ed., Images of English Puritanism, Baton Rouge,

Louisiana State UP, 1989, p. 330. 2 A C Kors, ‘Atheism in France’, in Atheism from the Reformation to the

Enlightenment, ed. Michael Hunter & David Wootton, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1992, p. 21.

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3 David Lawton, Blasphemy, Hemel Hempstead, HarvesterWheatsheaf, 1993, esp. ch. 4.

4 Thomas H Luxon, Literal Figures: Puritan Allegory and the Reformation Crisis in Representation, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1995.

5 Unfortunately the scale and fine detail of the charts make reproduction here impossible. But readers who would like a rough photocopy are invited to send a large s.a.e. to Dr Roger Pooley, English Department, Keele University, Keele, Staffordshire ST5 5BG, who will be happy to supply them − Ed.

6 Gordon Campbell, ‘The Source of Bunyan’s Mapp of Salvation’, JWCI 44 (1981), 38-9 & 240-1.

7 Bunyan, ‘A defence of the Doctrine of Justification, by Faith’, pp. 1-130 in Miscellaneous Works, IV, ed. T L Underwood, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1989, pp. 17-20.

8 Grace Abounding, ed. Roger Sharrock, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1962, p. 31. 9 Richard A Muller, Dictionary of Latin and Greek Theological Terms Drawn

Principally from Protestant Scholastic Theology, Grand Rapids & Carlisle, Baker Books and Paternoster, 1985, p. 251.

10 See, for example, John F Danby, Shakespeare’s Doctrine of Nature, 1949. 11 Cyril Tourneur, The Atheist’s Tragedy (1611), V.ii, in The Plays of CyriI

Tourneur, ed. George Parfitt, Cambridge, 1978, p. 191. 12 The Works of Thomas Otway ed. J C Ghosh, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1968, II,

324. 13 The distinction is made by a pioneering work in this area, Don Cameron

Allen, Doubt’s Boundless Sea, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins Press, 1984. 14 Alastair MacIntyre and Paul Ricoeur, The Religious Significance of Atheism,

New York, Columbia UP, 1969, p. 14. 15 Michael Buckley, SJ, At the Origins of Modern Atheism, New Haven, Yale UP.

1987, p. 40. C.f. Isabel Rivers, Reason, Grace and Sentiment a study of the language of religion and ethics in England 1660-1780, vol. 1, Cambridge UP, 1991, pp. 44-6.

16 Henry More, An Antidote against Atheism (1653), p. 130. 17 Thomas Goode, Firmanius and Dubitantius: OR, Certain Dialogues concerning

Atheism, Infidelity, Popery and other Heresies and Schismes that trouble the peace of the Church and are destructive of Primitive Piety, Oxford, 1674, pp. 2-3.

18 More, p. 164. 19 John Redwood, Reason, Ridicule and Religion, Thames & Hudson, 1976, p. 75. 20 J M, The Atheist Silenced (1672), Introduction. 21 Ben Jonson, Five Plays, ed. G.A.Wilkes, Oxford, Worlds Classics, 1968, p. 299. 22 Quoted in S L Mintz, The Hunting of Leviathan, Cambridge UP, 1962, p. 62. 23 For the vexed question of Hobbes’ atheism, see Richard Tuck, ‘Hobbes’

Christian atheism’, in Hunter and Wootton; and, with a particular focus on the attacks on him, Mintz, The Hunting of Leviathan.

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Clarissa: Saint or Sinner? Richardson and Eighteenth-Century Ideologies of Virtue Beth Swan The eighteenth century, no less than the twentieth, was happy to espouse the ethos of salvation by works. Focusing on the moral ego, the idea of ‘virtue’ supported flattering notions of self; it was a religion of the respectable, which manifested itself in moral pragmatism, and shunned what it perceived to be theological imponderables. There was of course another, less comfortable vision: ‘For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God’,1 a doctrine not of self-validation through promotion of a public moral persona but of vicarious grace, a doctrine which precluded self-elevation because it underlined man’s eternal inadequacies. It is this which Richardson presents in Clarissa (1747-8), a narrative structured around the spiritual progress of its eponymous heroine, perhaps the most famous and certainly the most controversial Christian figure in eighteenth-century fiction. Clarissa enables Richardson to highlight and comment on issues from a Christian perspective, and by implication to challenge fundamental aspects of eighteenth-century culture and behaviour. As Eaves and Kimpel point out, ‘Clarissa is unconventional in taking seriously the doctrines her society [only] professed to believe.’2

Fielding articulates popular eighteenth-century attitudes towards the faith versus works dialectic in Joseph Andrews (1742): ‘when [Whitfield] began to call Nonsense and Enthusiasm to his Aid, and to set up the detestable Doctrine of Faith against good Works, I was his Friend no longer’, arguing that he cannot ‘imagine that the All-wise Being will hereafter say to the Good and Virtuous, Notwithstanding the Purity of thy Life . . . as thou did’st not believe every thing in the true Orthodox manner, thy want of Faith shall condemn thee.’3

There is a cultural tendency, in resolute opposition to socio-historical fact, to assume that our forefathers were morally superior to ourselves and therefore closer to God. However, if one studies the literature and culture of earlier periods, what becomes apparent is not a progressive alienation from Christian doctrine but consistent tension between notional or socialised Christianity and biblical doctrine. What

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does appear to have occurred is a kind of specialisation of religious values: nominal Christianity is less popular in the twentieth century than it was in earlier periods, presumably as a result of the increasing intellectual respectability of atheism. Hence Christian discourse is now more likely to be appropriated by Christians, as opposed to being common currency.

It is worth remembering that in pre-twentieth century and particularly pre-television English society, church-going was often a primarily social activity, an opportunity to gossip, to search for a spouse and, of course, to assert one’s place in the social hierarchy. In medieval times, church proceedings had definite entertainment value, complete with bogus ‘relikes’ such as rags claimed to be part of Mary’s garments, all with much vaunted magical powers of healing.4 Sermons often took the form of dramatic monologues and morality plays were frequently the only form of religious instruction.5

In the eighteenth century prostitutes used church gatherings to find clients. Richard King explains that older prostitutes would go to church with younger women: ‘the old creature . . . simulates piety and utters hypocritical prayers. . . . When the service is over, the old woman on going out stumbles suddenly, falls down or faints’; a young man escorts the supposed mother and daughter home and falls prey to their machinations.6

This paper seeks to reconstruct the eighteenth-century context to the issue of virtue, focusing on Richardson’s Clarissa not as a romantic heroine but as a Christian. Clarissa is an eighteenth-century Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) but with a female protagonist who faces feminine trials of virtue. It is designed to make the reader empathise with Clarissa, to participate vicariously in her trials and to examine his or her own spiritual state. Clarissa’s dilemma is not one which will be familiar to young women today but the truths which lie behind the narrative conventions are timeless. In an age which valued the reputation for virtue and charity above actual virtue and which was sceptical, even hostile, to the doctrine ‘For by grace are ye saved through faith . . .Not of works, lest any man should boast,’7 Clarissa is intended as a stark reminder of Biblical precept.

Eighteenth-century society appears to have been obsessed with morality: its literature contains frequent allusions to the importance of virtue, and conduct books, giving moral instruction for every conceivable area of life, were very popular.8 Supporting these apparently strenuous efforts to safeguard public morality was an impressive body of legislature seemingly designed to promote virtuous behaviour, particularly in sexual matters, penalising behaviour such as

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pre-marital sexual relations, seduction and adultery.9 Yet closer inspection of the law reveals a society obsessed not with virtue per se, but with property.

Bernard Mandeville argued in 1723 that honour, a word used almost synonymously with virtue, is ‘a Chimera . . . an Invention of Moralists and Politicians,’which signifies a certain Principle of Vertue not related to Religion.’10 While Mandeville is not an entirely reliable mouthpiece for eighteenth-century thinking, he does highlight the disparity between twentieth-century assumptions about eighteenth-century morality and those which actually framed eighteenth-century behaviour.

Eighteenth-century legislation was designed to protect patrilineal blood lines, not to promote moral behaviour. What is perhaps surprising is that the reduction of Christian morality to part of the property mechanism was universally acknowledged but by no means universally criticised. Attitudes varied from discomfort, sometimes anger, to dark amusement at the outrageousness of moral issues being viewed, directly or otherwise, in terms of property. Christian writers such as Richardson and later Catherine Macaulay, who argued that virtue required spiritual conviction and rationality, were challenging by implication the basic assumptions of English law and custom.

Nowhere is eighteenth-century moral ideology more clearly expressed than in the concept of female virtue. A woman’s moral stature was determined by her reputation for chastity, a term which ostensibly indicated many moral qualities but which ultimately ensured that brides would be chaste and that heirs would thus be legitimate. Fundamental to this concept was the view of women as masculine property. Unmarried women under twenty-one were the legal property of their fathers. On marriage, the wife’s identity was subsumed into that of the husband. Blackstone, an eighteenth-century legal historian, explained: ‘By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law’;11 in effect, she became his property.12

In view of the huge importance attached to chastity, reputation became a valuable economic asset, without which women could not hope to make a good marriage. Wollstonecraft quotes Rousseau in Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792): ‘reputation is no less indispensable than chastity’ for women because while a man, ‘secure in his own conduct . . . may brave the public opinion . . . a woman, in behaving well, performs but half her duty; as what is thought of her, is as important to her as what she really is.’ Wollstonecraft argued that ‘a constant attention to keep the varnish of the character fresh’ is ‘often inculcated as the sum total of female duty.’ Hence, ‘if the honor of a

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woman, as it is absurdly called, be safe, she may neglect every social duty.’13

Mandeville argued that even elements of genuine virtue may be based on economically determined social precepts, commenting that women grow up to ‘find their worldly Interest entirely depending upon the Reputation of their Chastity’ and arguing, ‘it is upon this Compound of natural and artificial Chastity, that every Woman’s real actual Chastity depends.’14 Mandeville is unduly cynical in claiming that religion plays no part in eighteenth-century constructs of virtue but he reveals a very real problem: the dichotomy between genuine virtue based on spiritual conviction, and ‘social’ virtue, usually discussed in terms of chastity and reputation. In Remarks he distinguishes humorously but pertinently between the two: ‘Virtue bids us subdue, but good Breeding only requires we should hide our Appetites.’ (p. 106)

Richardson explores moral issues throughout his fiction but in Clarissa he mounts his most serious attack on ‘social morality’. Clarissa is an embodiment of Christian values, existing in contradistinction to society’s often hypocritical notions of virtue. Anna Howe recognises that Clarissa’s virtue is not simply sexual, as society perceives it, but a form of spiritual and moral strength, referring to it as ‘majesty’, ‘native dignity’ and ‘heroism’.15 It is part of Clarissa’s personal tragedy that most of the characters around her fail to understand and even to recognise her spiritual values. Her emphasis on individual moral responsibility and human fallibility is both political and profoundly spiritual.

Clarissa is an extraordinarily well disciplined young woman, renowned for her charity and her study of the Bible.16 Believing herself to be well armed against the wiles of the world, she trusts to her own judgement when determining her moral conduct. She is imprisoned in her room by her family because she refuses to marry the wealthy but repulsive Solmes. They threaten to force her to marry him and she flees the house, placing herself under the protection of the only person willing to help her: Lovelace. He tricks her into lodging with a prostitute and endeavours to seduce her; this fails and so he drugs and rapes her. Clarissa escapes but ultimately dies, apparently from shame and grief.17

This catalogue of disasters is familiar in eighteenth-century fiction: the threat of forced marriage, seduction and rape are commonplace narrative conventions. However, Clarissa transcends the very conventions it employs, following its heroine’s progress not towards marital bliss but greater spiritual awareness. I do not accept Erickson’s reading of Clarissa as a progression from ‘the prophet with divine sanction – to the prophet deified’.18 There are many instances in the text

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where characters are awed by Clarissa’s spirituality and thus refer to her as saintly,19 but it is unwise to accept at face value narrative conventions such as religious epithets for virtuous women. Clarissa is referred to in religious terms to emphasise her purity and piety, not because Richardson intended us to see her as in any way divine. On the contrary, the text establishes very clearly that despite her piety, Clarissa is flawed.

Fall Richardson’s own comments in the Postscript suggest that the novel is a traditional drama of sin and repentance, perhaps all the more powerful because its protagonist is in human terms almost impossibly virtuous. Richardson tells the reader that Clarissa ‘is formed on [a] religious plan’, based on the ‘dispensation . . . with which God by Revelation teaches us he has thought fit to exercise mankind; whom, placing here only in a state of probation, he hath so intermingled good and evil as to necessitate them to look forward for a more equal distribution of both.’ (p. 1495)

At the beginning of the novel Clarissa embodies all that eighteenth-century moralists could desire, a seeming endorsement of the notion of salvation by works. Her only flaw appears to have been a degree of naïveté and pride in her own spiritual strength before she ‘fell’, something she learns to repent of as she reassesses the events of the last few months while waiting to die.20 She becomes painfully aware of the change in her situation: she used to give moral teaching to the poor but admits, ‘how should I be able . . . to say to [the cottagers’ daughters] Fly the delusions of men, who had been supposed to have run away with one?’ (p. 1117).

After her escape from her parents’ home to avoid marriage to the loathsome Solmes, Clarissa is caught in the grip of apparent opposing moral absolutes: aversion to marriage to a man she cannot honour and obey versus filial obedience. She admits to Anna, her confidante, ‘I am in a wilderness of doubt and error’ (p. 566) and turns to prayer; she tells Anna subsequently, ‘I know not how I came by such an uncommon elevation of mind, if it were not given me in answer to my earnest prayers’ (p. 1117). Clarissa writes her own spiritual meditations: ‘How art thou now humbled in the dust, thou proud Clarissa Harlowe . . . Who wert wont . . . to plume thyself upon the expected applauses of all that beheld thee . . . It must have been so! My fall had not else been permitted.’ (p. 891)21 Clarissa is a daring example of mankind’s inability to determine their ultimate spiritual condition: even she, whom

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‘everybody almost worshipped’ (p. 578), ‘proposed by every father and mother for a pattern for their daughters’ (p. 975), is revealed as a sinner.

Clarissa clearly sites itself within contemporary debate concerning the nature of female virtue and whether it required rationality or was simply a sentimental quality, an expression of a ‘good heart’. This issue is reflected in twentieth-century literary criticism. Commentators are characteristically reluctant to deal with Christian issues in fiction beyond vague quasi-philosophical references to ‘religion’. Eaves and Kimpel are representative of those who recognise Clarissa’s spirituality but ascribe it to sensibility: ‘the vital element in Clarissa’s religion is her sensibility.’ (p. 279)22 Clarissa is of course a sentimental heroine but we must not confuse this with her Christian values, which are predicated not on sentiment but Biblical doctrine. Frequent allusions to scripture indicate clearly that Richardson intended the reader to be conscious of a Biblical as well as a romantic context.23

Eighteenth-century debate concerning the role of sensibility as opposed to rationality in religious conviction was in turn closely related to the question of whether or not women had souls. Lovelace articulates the views of many eighteenth-century men: ‘We have held that women have no souls: I am . . . willing to believe they have not.’ (p. 704) This apparently religious issue has socio-political implications: if women have souls and are capable of rationality and individual moral responsibility, the argument that feminine virtue is simply expressed in chastity, so useful to the patriarchal inheritance system, becomes increasingly untenable. Richardson repudiates the socio-legal view through Lovelace, who comes to respect Clarissa’s spiritual identity: ‘she seemed . . . to be all soul.’ (p. 949)

In Clarissa Richardson subjects socialised virtue to Christian scrutiny and presents the potentially tragic consequences of morality without conviction. One obvious example is Clarissa’s mother, who equates virtue with wifely submission, even when it involves participating in her family’s cruelty to her daughter. After Clarissa’s death, Mrs Harlowe admits, ‘I have been too passive. . . . The temporary quiet I have been so studious all my life to preserve has cost me everlasting disquiet.’ (p. 1396) Her lack of individual moral judgement and courage leads indirectly to the assault and death of her daughter, forced to leave the comparative safety of her home to avoid imprisonment and forced marriage and to put her trust in the man who will betray her: Lovelace.

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Christian heroine vs. the devil The relationship between Lovelace and Clarissa is a symbolic battle between Richardson’s conception of the ultimate rake and the ultimate Christian; imagery throughout the novel represents Lovelace as ‘a devil, and [Clarissa] a saint’ (p. 995). Their power struggle culminates in the ultimate test of female virtue in eighteenth-century narrative terms: rape. Clarissa has passed all the earlier sexual ‘tests’ Lovelace has designed for her, by resisting seduction, and so he drugs and rapes her. Throughout Clarissa, Lovelace appropriates the idea of spiritual testing and twists it to his own ends by paralleling it with sexual ‘tests’. He comments, ‘have I not known twenty and twenty of the sex, who have seemed to carry their notions of virtue high; yet, when brought to the test, have abated of their severity?’, arguing, ‘how should we be convinced that any of them are proof, till they are tried?’ (p. 886)

Mrs Norton tells Clarissa after the rape, ‘Your moral character is untainted,’ (p. 990) and Anna reassures her that she has ‘a virtue unsullied; a will wholly faultless’ (p. 1020). This issue was debated throughout the century. Antonia argues in The Virgin Unmask’d (1709) that a virtuous woman cannot ‘lose her Honour, unless she be ravish’d; and then ‘tis a Question, whether she loses it or not.’ Lucinda replies, echoing popular views, ‘a Woman that is murder’d, loses her Life as much as she that dies of a Fever.’ Wollstonecraft criticised such attitudes later in the century in Rights of Woman: ‘miserable beyond all names of misery is the condition of a being, who could be degraded without its own consent!’ (p. 166)

Lovelace testifies to the dichotomy between socio-legal concepts of virtue and genuine moral absolutes, admitting ‘incredulity that there could be such virtue (virtue for virtue’s sake) in the sex.’ (p. 1344) He argues that Clarissa’s virtue is exceptional and so claims, ‘how knew we, till the theft was committed, that the miser did actually set so romantic a value upon the treasure?’ (p. 1438). His use of language shows that, like many others, he regards female virtue as a ‘treasure’ kept by a ‘miser’, as property. Yet he also dismisses it as ‘romantic’, viewing it in sentimental terms rather than from a Christian stance.

Lovelace’s cynical attitude towards feminine virtue is not entirely without foundation, for he has seen numerous examples of female hypocrisy under the guise of virtue: he knows ‘some of the haughtiest and most censorious spirits . . . now passing for chaste wives, of whom strange stories might be told.’ (pp. 869-70) He refers to Clarissa’s virtue as ‘a niceness that has no example either in ancient or modern story’ (p. 886). The word ‘niceness’ suggests fastidiousness and manners, rather

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than serious moral concern. Lovelace’s language and assumptions may be appropriate to hypocritical ‘society ladies’ but they are inadequate in reference to Clarissa.

Clarissa’s vigorous defence of her virtue owes much to the traditions of romance, for example, when she threatens to kill herself with scissors, warning ‘my honour is dearer to me than my life!’ (p. 725) Lovelace refers to her behaviour as ‘romancing’ and argues deprecatingly, ‘At this rate of romancing, how many flourishing ruins dost thou, as well as I, know?’ (p. 869) Yet Clarissa is presented very much as a Christian heroine and consequently her motivation is more complex and her moral position more absolute than those of heroines from purely romantic traditions. Her heroic virtue derives largely from the Christian tradition of fortitude in the face of temptation and suffering. Lovelace explains after the rape: ‘I had prepared myself for high passions, raving. . . . But such a majestic composure. . . . No Lucretia-like24 vengeance upon herself in her thought’ (p. 900) confounds him.

It may be helpful to consider briefly an example of a romantic heroine resisting rape, since this tradition provides an implicit standard of reference for much of Clarissa. In Aubin’s The Strange Adventures of the Count de Vinevil (1721), the Count of Longueville tells his wife Ardelisa, ‘remember both your Duty to yourself and me. Permit not a vile Infidel to dishonour you, resist to death.’ Romantic convention determined that heroines should protect their virtue with their lives. However, the Count’s language must have seemed rather excessive even in the 1720s: ‘let me not be so compleatly curs’d, to hear you live, and are debauch’d.’25

Violetta in the same novel feels that she has not lived up to the romantic ideal of chastity: ‘I submitted to the fatal necessity of my Circumstances.’ (p. 91) She forgives her rapist and ‘saw him with a Wife’s Eyes, and thought [herself] oblig’d to do so.’ Through Father Francis, Aubin provides a somewhat ironic view of Catholic precepts, on which English canon law was based. He tells her, ‘as you were single, a Virgin, and made his by the Chance of War, it was no Sin in you to yield to him, and it would have been . . . a Sin not to have been faithful to his Bed, whilst he is living you ought not to marry,’ (p. 92) as if she had married him.

What differentiates Violetta’s case from Ardelisa’s is that when Violetta was raped, she did not already belong to a man: ‘in Ardelisa, who was marry’d to another, it would have been a horrid Crime to suffer another Man for to possess her.’ (p. 92) Ironically, the ‘horrid crime’ refers not to the rape but to the possibility of a woman not dying

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in an attempt to defend her husband’s property rights vested in her. Aubin, like Richardson, uses the narrative convention of trials of virtue in order to question her society’s values. Her standpoint is resolutely moral, providing an implicit indictment on the legal system and its focus on property.

Ruin Both Richardson and Aubin use the conventions of romance tradition to present their heroines as symbols of strength. In eighteenth-century terms, opportunities for women to express moral strength were limited; the greatest proof was deemed to be the defence of chastity. Clarissa’s attitude to the rape provides a moral standard by which to judge other characters’ views. Most of the other characters view the rape principally in its material aspects, seemingly blind to the moral issue and denying the personal assault on Clarissa. They regard it as a slur on family honour, reflecting the legal view that rape was a violation of masculine property rights. Blackstone explains that by law, rape is an injury to the father ‘to his family, and to his honour and happiness’ because it destroyed the daughter’s property value.

Clarissa sees the rape as a personal injury, an attack on her virtue, not on her father’s ‘property’. Her stand is primarily moral but it inevitably has political implications because in the eighteenth-century scheme of things moral issues were also legal and economic. Increasingly, she retreats into her inner moral self, acting ‘so as that [her] own heart shall not reproach’ her but realising, ‘As to the world’s censure, I must be content to suffer that.’26

Clarissa is a Christian response to a serious eighteenth-century problem: what to do with ‘ruined’ women. Women were ‘ruined’ after sexual experience not because of moral principles but because they were no longer marriageable. Since women from the upper classes could not realistically expect to earn a living, the only ‘heroinely’ option after seduction or rape was to die. Ruined maidens, often rape victims, could have a husband bought for them if the family was sympathetic and could afford it, but all too often they were sent to the workhouse or sometimes incarcerated in private madhouses, even thrown into prostitution. Steeves notes usefully, ‘The fears and compunctions of the heroines of fiction were not illusions and not mere pietistic sentiments’ but ‘practical wisdom’, commenting that ‘ruin’ generally meant prostitution.27

It is difficult for twentieth-century readers to appreciate just how daring Richardson’s presentation of Clarissa is: the rape makes her a

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social outcast and yet Richardson emphasises her moral authority; throughout the novel she holds the moral and spiritual high ground. Richardson’s response is problematic in that he does not provide an answer to the dilemma; he simply removes Clarissa from the problem by having her die and promising reward in the afterlife. He thus appears to bow to social convention, which determined that once sullied, women had to be removed from their immediate social environment. Death was an ideal answer to the problem; it alone could blot out the transgression from the moral record of society by removing the ruined woman, the objective correlative of sexual sin.

Clarissa’s death has been variously interpreted. Terry Castle discusses it in relation to what she believes the novel tells us about the activities of reading and interpretation, arguing: ‘Clarissa foregoes discourse – and by extension leaves behind the world of reading.’28 Eagleton politicises it into a conscious refusal of ‘sexual oppression, bourgeois patriarchy and libertine aristocracy.’29 Watt dismisses it as part of ‘a long tradition of funeral literature.’30 Hill emphasises the economic aspects of the rape, arguing: ‘How could she have lived? There was no room in a commercial society for flawed goods.’31

It seems clear, however, that Richardson intended the death to be a religious symbol; hence the white gown representing not only the purity of an unviolated will but reminiscent of the garments of a novice nun.32 Clarissa herself refers to her clothes as ‘wedding garments’, describing them as ‘the happiest suit, that ever bridal maiden wore’ (p. 1339). She insists, ‘death will be welcomer to me than rest to the most wearied traveller.’ (p. 1106)

For Richardson, Clarissa’s death may derive meaning from contemporary devotional literature, much of which concerned dying a ‘Christian’ death.33 Belford begins to reform through watching Clarissa’s death process: he tells Lovelace, ‘Thou tellest me that thou seest reformation is coming swiftly upon me. I hope it is.’ (p. 1123) Clarissa’s death provides an obvious counterpart to the terrifying deaths of Belton, a rake, and Mrs Sinclair, a prostitute who helps Lovelace to rape Clarissa.34 However, twentieth-century readers in particular may be rather less happy about a character almost willing herself to die,35 using her coffin as a writing desk.36 Castle observes, ‘It does not occur to [Richardson] . . . that a female reader – even a moderately pious one – might not necessarily take an unalloyed pleasure in seeing one of her sex made over into a decomposing emblem of martyred Christian womanhood.’ (p. 173)

Clarissa has been accused of self-indulgence and yet this is clearly not what Richardson had in mind. Her death is presented as an

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affirmation of spiritual values: she is an object lesson in Christian hope, quoting ‘O death, where is thy sting?’ and sighing ‘come – blessed Lord – JESUS’ (p. 1362) as she dies. Clarissa has always lived with her eyes fixed firmly on her eternal rather than her temporal home; Richardson himself comments in the Postscript, ‘who that are in earnest in their profession of Christianity but will rather envy than regret the triumphant death of CLARISSA.’ (p. 1498)

Clarissa is very much an eighteenth-century heroine, whose strength is expressed largely in obedience and resignation. She feels sullied by the rape and perhaps partly responsible for it because had she obeyed her parents and not communicated with Lovelace, he would not have been able to trick her into leaving their house. It would be wrong to judge her, as is often the case, from a twentieth-century perspective. She is a response to an eighteenth-century dilemma regarding the nature of virtue and whatever her flaws, she provides a powerful comment on her society’s ethics and laws.

Watt, like many critics, has difficulty with what he terms Clarissa’s ‘frigid virtue’ (p. 295). Eagleton dismisses her ‘unflawed identity’ similarly as ‘a fetish’ (p. 87), a ‘grave parody of official moral ideology’ which, when taken to extremes, reveals ‘its corrupt reality’ (p. 77). He claims that her ‘spiritual individualism is the acceptable face of the very system which kills’ (p. 87) her, but this is clearly not the case. Social constructs of virtue indeed had ‘corrupt’ roots, as Eagleton argues, but Clarissa’s virtue defines itself in opposition to such ideas rather than being a sublime presentation of them. He seems to confuse social morality masquerading as religious piety with Clarissa’s genuine piety.

Eagleton’s argument seems to redefine Richardson’s ideological stance in terms of his own interpretation of the eighteenth-century philosophy of virtue; in so doing, he fails to recognise fundamental aspects of Richardson’s narrative strategy. Richardson’s concept of virtue is not simply class-related: it transcends bourgeois ethics, which often had economic roots and is based more closely on Christian teaching.

Clarissa is not simply a virtuous bourgeois heroine but a profoundly Christian one who, by her spiritual identity, implicitly criticises false piety. Her language reveals that she interprets issues in a Christian context: ‘I would not bind my soul in covenant with such a man for a thousand worlds!’ (p. 914) She lives on a different spiritual plane to Lovelace: ‘My soul is above thee, man!’ (p. 646). In Clarissa, Richardson created a heroine whose life and death would reveal the hypocrisy implicit in his society’s moral values and point the way to individual spiritual and moral responsibility.

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Richardson explains in the Postscript that the narrative is ‘designed to inculcate upon the human mind, under the guise of an amusement, the great lessons of Christianity, in an age like the present’ (p. 1495). The Postscript reflects Richardson’s spiritual concerns but it is also reminiscent of traditional justifications of fiction, in response to criticisms that novels were unworthy, even morally harmful.37 The Doctor in Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752) articulates popular eighteenth-century criticism of novels as ‘senseless Fictions; which at once vitiate the Mind, and pervert the Understanding; and which if they are at any Time read with Safety, owe their Innocence only to their Absurdity.’38

Clarissa is part of a Christian narrative tradition which sought to appropriate fictional discourse for Christians. Rather than simply condemning the novel as pernicious, writers such as Aubin and Richardson endeavoured to give it a moral purpose, using popular narrative motifs as tools to explore moral and spiritual issues, to recuperate romance for the Christian. Aubin argues in the Preface to Count de Vinevil: ‘Since . . . Religious Treatises grow mouldy on the Booksellers Shelves . . . the few that honour Virtue . . . ought to study to reclaim our Giddy Youth . . . [to] try to win them to Vertue, by methods where Delight and Instruction may go together. With this Design I present this Book . . . in which you will find a Story, where Divine Providence manifests itself in every Transaction, where Vertue is try’d with Misfortunes, and rewarded with Blessings: In fine, where Men behave themselves like Christians, and Women are really vertuous, and such as we ought to imitate.’ (pp. 5-6) The rationale behind her fiction is simple but profound: ‘Would Men trust in Providence . . . they need not to fear any thing; but whilst they defy God . . . their Ends [are] such as they deserve, surprizing and infamous.’ (p. 7)

Erickson notes pertinently: ‘Richardson . . . saw himself as part of a literary tradition (which included Chaucer, Spenser, and Milton) in which the author . . . is at times an interpreter of God’s word by means of his fictional creations.’ (p. 28) Indeed at times Clarissa reads like a sermon, an eighteenth-century equivalent to the medieval morality plays, charting Clarissa’s spiritual learning process, a process Richardson hopes will find a parallel in the spiritual consciousness of the interpretive reader. ______________________________ 1 Romans 3:23. All Biblical references are to the King James version. 2 See Samuel Richardson: A Biography, by T C Eaves and B D Kimpel, Oxford,

Clarendon Press, 1971, p. 271; C Hill, Puritanism and Revolution, London, 1958.

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3 H. Fielding, Joseph Andrews (1741), edited by D Brooks-Davies, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1986, p. 72.

4 See the Prologue to Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale. Chaucer exposes worldliness and hypocrisy throughout the Canterbury Tales (1387-1400); see in particular the General Prologue, where he introduces us to the characters who will narrate the Tales, many of whom are representatives of the church.

5 Morality plays, which derived from the medieval mystery plays, which dramatised biblical episodes, were so-called because they dramatised moral arguments, often using characters who embodied qualities such as youth, wisdom, virtue and vice. Their plots were often colourful and sometimes downright risqué; they were extremely popular.

6 R King, The Frauds of London Detected, London, 1770, pp. 13-14. 7 Ephesians 2:8-9. 8 See for example J Gregory, A Father’s Legacy to his Daughters (1774); C

Macaulay, Letters On Education, (1790); S Richardson, Familiar Letters on Important Occasions (1741); E Rowe, Letters Moral and Entertaining, in Prose and Verse (1728); W Wilkes, A Letter of Genteel and Moral Advice to a Young Lady (1740).

9 See L Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800, London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977.

10 B Mandeville, Remarks (1723), in The Fable of the Bees, edited by Phillip Harth, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1970, p. 212.

11 Sir W Blackstone, Commentaries On The Laws of England (1753), sixth edition, 4 vols, Dublin, 1775, I, p. 442.

12 Women were not regarded as chattels but as ‘belonging’ to their husbands in some ill-defined way. T Sheridan defines ‘property’ in A General Dictionary of the English Language (1780) not simply as an object but as a ‘right of possession’. His definition of ‘to possess’ is particularly relevant to eighteenth-century attitudes to women: ‘To have as an owner, to be master of; to enjoy; to have power over’. T Sheridan, A General Dictionary of the English Language (1780), 2 vols, Menston, England, The Scholar Press, 1967.

13 M Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), edited by M Brody, London, Penguin, 1988, pp. 336-7.

14 B Mandeville, A Modest Defence of Public Stews (1724). Quoted in Women in the Eighteenth Century: Constructions of Femininity, ed.V Jones, London, Routledge, 1990, p. 65.

15 S. Richardson, Clarissa, or The History of A Young Lady (1747-8), edited by A Ross, London, Penguin, 1985, p. 749. All references are to this edition unless otherwise stated.

16 Anna Howe explains Clarissa’s daily schedule to Belford on pp. 1470-1. 17 See Clarissa p. 1075. 18 R Erickson, ‘“Written in the Heart”: Clarissa and Scripture’, Eighteenth-

Century Fiction, II, no.1, October 1989, pp. 17-52 (p. 50). 19 See for example Clarissa pp. 429, 555, 578, 722, 726, 1103. 20 See Samuel Richardson: A Biography, by T C Eaves and B D Kimpel, Oxford,

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Clarendon Press, 1971, pp. 268-71. 21 Erickson comments usefully on Clarissa’s spiritual meditations in relation to

Puritan practices in ‘“Written in the Heart”: Clarissa and Scripture’, pp. 39, 44-5.

22 See also J Dussinger, ‘Conscience and the Pattern of Christian Perfection In Clarissa’, PMLA, LXXXI (1966), pp. 236-45.

23 Erickson provides an interesting introduction to Richardson’s use of scripture in ‘“Written in the Heart”: Clarissa and Scripture’.

24 According to Roman legend, in 500 BC Lucretia, wife of Tarquinius Collatinus, was raped by Sextus while she was asleep; she committed suicide. Her name became a byword for wifely virtue.

25 P Aubin, The Strange Adventures of the Count de Vinevil (1721), London, Garland, 1973, pp. 27-8.

26 S Richardson, Clarissa (1747-8), edited by B. A. Wright, 4 vols, London, Dent, 1967, II, p. 378.

27 H R Steeves, Before Jane Austen: The Shaping of The English Novel in The Eighteenth Century, New York, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965, p. 99.

28 T Castle, Clarissa’s Ciphers, London, Cornell University Press, 1982, p. 26. 29 T Eagleton, The Rape of Clarissa: Writing, Sexuality and Class Struggle in Samuel

Richardson, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1982, p. 76. 30 I Watt, The Rise of The Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding, London,

Chatto and Windus, 1963, p. 225. 31 C Hill, Puritanism and Revolution, London, 1958, p. 386. 32 Calls were made throughout the century for Protestant convents, a proposal

Richardson shows some sympathy for in Sir Charles Grandison (1753-4). 33 Clarissa reads Taylor’s popular Holy Living and Dying (pp. 1001-2). M.

Doody discusses Clarissa’s death in relation to contemporary devotional literature in A Natural Passion: A Study of the Novels of Samuel Richardson, London, Oxford University Press, 1974, pp. 151-87.

34 See Clarissa, pp. 1088-90, 1226-31, 1242-3; 1378, 1387-94. 35 Clarissa insists, ‘For what end should I wish to live? . . . I will neither eat nor

drink’ (p. 895). 36 See Clarissa pp. 1304-5, 1316, 1352. 37 See also D J Templeton, ‘In Defence of Dragons: A Case for the Literature of

the Imagination’, The Glass, Summer 1995, pp. 24-31. 38 C Lennox, The Female Quixote (1752), edited by M Dalziel, London, Oxford

University Press, 1970, p. 374.

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Derrida, Saussure and the Survival of Scripture

Nick Howard

‘Everything is to be disentangled, nothing deciphered.’1 (Roland Barthes)

It is difficult to overstate the significance for Christians of post-war thought about the readability of texts. At a conference held by the Modern Language Association in 1976, which pitted M H Abrams against the deconstuctionist J Hillis Miller, Abrams summed up the position of his opponent as an

. . . abysmal vision of the textual world of literature, philosophy, and all the other achievements of mankind in the medium of language.2

How much more abysmal is this vision for Christians. It ruins the psalmist’s claim that the Bible can be a lamp to our feet and a light for our paths, since, in the curt words of Paul de Man, ‘all readings are in error’.3 According to the deconstructionist position, those seeking to understand the revealed will of God by studying the Bible or listening to sermons are acting under rather absurd delusions. The Bible, as far as Hillis Miller is concerned, ‘like all texts, is “unreadable”, if by “readable” one means open to a single, definitive, univocal interpretation.’4 Deconstruction as a theory and poststructuralism5 as an intellectual movement are therefore on a direct collision course with the Christian faith. Roland Barthes, in his essay ‘The Death of the Author’, makes no attempt to conceal their mutual incompatibility:

Literature (it would be better from now on to say writing) by refusing to assign a ‘secret’, an ultimate meaning, to the text (and to the world as text), liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases – reason, science, law.6

Christians in literary academic circles therefore cannot afford to bury their heads in the sand upon the approach of deconstruction. Its fundamental errors must be understood and broadcast, if we are to follow the lead of Paul and ‘demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God’ (2 Corinthians 10:5 NIV). The purpose of this article is to explain why objections to deconstruction frequently miss

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the mark; and to suggest a new target, namely the linguistic theories of Ferdinand de Saussure, on which Jacques Derrida – the principal architect of deconstruction – relies.

The Genesis of Deconstruction Surveys of poststructuralism often take as their starting-point a conference in Baltimore in 1966 entitled ‘The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man’, at which Jacques Derrida contributed a highly influential paper called ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’. The arguments presented in this essay prepared the way for deconstruction, and the dismissal of the ‘Author’.

The particular human science with which Derrida is concerned in the essay is anthropology, and he concentrates upon the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss. He considers Lévi-Strauss’s use of the word bricolage, exploring the implications of this idea, which underpins the anthropologist’s method, in his book The Savage Mind:

If one calls bricolage the necessity of borrowing one’s concepts from the text of a heritage which is more or less coherent or ruined, it must be said that every discourse is bricoleur. The engineer, whom Lévi-Strauss opposes to the bricoleur, should be the one to construct the totality of his language, syntax, and lexicon. In this sense the engineer is a myth. A subject who supposedly would be the absolute origin of his own discourse and supposedly would construct it ‘out of nothing’, ‘out of whole cloth’, would be the creator of the verb, the verb itself. . . . As soon as we cease to believe in such an engineer . . . then the very idea of bricolage is menaced and the difference in which it took on its meaning breaks down.7

Derrida says that the concept of bricolage relies on the activity of non-bricoleurs, whose work provides reliable, trustworthy material for the use of the bricoleur. Yet, to his mind, these non-bricoleurs do not exist, as ‘the engineer is a myth’.

Later in the paper, Derrida explains in greater detail why this should be the case. For the engineer to be origin and master of his own discourse, ‘totalization’ would need to be conceivable. This is the question that Derrida proceeds to tackle:

If totalization no longer has any meaning, it is not because the infiniteness of a field cannot be covered by a finite glance or a finite discourse, but because the nature of the field – that is, language and a finite language – excludes totalization. This field is in effect that of play, that is to say, a field of infinite substitutions only because it is finite, that is to say, because instead of being too large, there is something missing from it: a center which arrests and grounds the play of substitutions.8

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These insights have clear implications for the concept of the

engineer, who cannot operate in ‘a field of infinite substitutions’ where it would indeed be impossible ‘to construct the totality of his language, syntax, and lexicon’. Derrida claims that Lévi-Strauss avoids this impasse by preserving ‘as an instrument something whose truth value he criticizes’.9 He discerns this approach in the opening words of The Elementary Structures of Kinship: ‘Above all, it is beginning to emerge that this distinction between nature and society . . . while of no acceptable historical significance, does contain a logic, fully justifying its use by modern sociology as a methodological tool.’10 Lévi-Strauss is willing to work with a formula he admits has ‘no acceptable historical significance’. He criticizes the truth value of the distinction between nature and culture while preserving it as an instrument. Derrida’s implication is that the nature of language, a field which contains an infinite number of sign-substitutions, ought to lead all its users to take the same attitude as that of Lévi-Strauss. For the absence of the ‘centre’,11 the transcendental signified, takes away the hope of finding true or acceptable methods. If one wants to use language without self-delusion, one must first criticize its truth value before preserving it as an instrument.

The influence of the ideas advanced by Derrida on Roland Barthes, who was at the same conference, become apparent in ‘The Death of the Author’. In the following passage, Barthes explores the consequences resulting from the absence of what he terms the ‘final signified’:

In the multiplicity of writing, everything is to be disentangled, nothing deciphered; the structure can be followed, ‘run’ (like the thread of a stocking) at every point and at every level, but there is nothing beneath: the space of writing is to be ranged over, not pierced; writing ceaselessly posits meaning ceaselessly to evaporate it, carrying out a systematic exemption of meaning.12

According to Barthes, no text can be deciphered, since this would imply that something could be found ‘beneath’ the writing, that it could be ‘closed’, limited. This is similar to Derrida’s rejection of totalization, and insistence that language is a ‘field of infinite substitutions’. To return to the implications for Christians, it should be obvious that if the Bible ‘ceaselessly posits meaning ceaselessly to evaporate it’, the minister in the pulpit and the congregation in the pews are, in the words of Ecclesiastes, chasing the wind.

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Flaws in the Christian Response There are, however, serious problems with the typical Christian riposte to deconstruction. M H Abrams, while not a Christian himself, exemplifies the general argument used in the apologetics of theologians such as Don Carson.13 Abrams concludes ‘The Deconstructive Angel’ with the point:

After all, without that confidence that we can use language to say what we mean and can interpret language so as to determine what was meant, there is no rationale for the dialogue in which we are now engaged.14

Abrams argues that when Hillis Miller follows him to the podium he will disprove his own theory in the very act of proclaiming it, using words, grammar and logic in an attempt to be understood. In a similar vein, the irony is often pointed out in deconstuctionists’ annoyance when a reviewer misunderstands their work. However, this observation does not alter the force of what Miller and his deconstructionist colleagues say. They can be compared to Lévi-Strauss in disputing the truth value of a methodology (i.e. language) they nevertheless continue to use. The analogy could be made with a couple who make their marital vows in a church with a Christian ceremony, yet do not believe that marriage is an institution ordained by God. The truth value is rejected while the methodology or practice is retained.

For this reason, the thrust of Abrams’ opposition to the deconstructive criticism of Miller is misguided. On Abrams’ own terms, it would indeed be contradicting oneself to disclaim the possibility that one’s argument can be interpreted correctly. This is the line he takes when he attempts to pull the rug from beneath Miller’s oncoming feet:

I shall hazard a prediction as to what Miller will do. . . . He will have determinate things to say and will masterfully exploit the resources of language to explain these things clearly and forcibly, addressing himself to us in the confidence that we, to the degree that we have mastered the constitutive norms of this kind of discourse, will approximate what he means. . . .15

Miller would not deny his demonstration of any of these qualities, but while for Abrams they imply a belief in the possibility of a univocal meaning – a grounded and arrested discourse possessing a centre – they mean nothing of the sort to the deconstructionist critic. When Derrida says that Lévi-Strauss remains ‘faithful to this double intention: to preserve as an instrument something whose truth value he criticizes’, it is not suggested that this double intention is a futile waste of time and

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effort. Without a ‘transcendental signified’, there is simply no truth value available. Yet for Miller, as for Lévi-Strauss, the methodology remains attractive and is worthy of use. Many couples marry in a church without believing that God is joining them together, making them one flesh. To extend the analogy, if a Christian were to maintain that an agnostic couple marrying in this way demonstrate by their actions belief in God and his power to make two one, he would be taking a similar stance to that of Abrams. Such a position would demonstrate an inability to perceive that someone denying the truth value of a practice might, all the same, continue to make use of it.

A further example of this flawed response to deconstruction can be found in ‘Taking the “con” out of deconstruction’ by Greg Clarke, in the Christian periodical Kategoria:

The problem is that, while your brain is still connected to its stem, it is impossible to escape the law of non-contradictions. . . . Derrida is well aware of this dilemma: ‘We cannot utter a single deconstructive proposition which has not already slipped into the form, the logic and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest.’ He claims that a kind of learned helplessness is the only honest alternative to philosophical silence; negative criticism is all that philosophy (and linguistics and literature) can provide. However, I can’t take seriously an approach which denies oppositions and then seeks in its enquiries to find impasses which are in fact oppositions. Would not a blind faith in Linus’s ‘Great Pumpkin’ be preferable?16

Clarke may indeed find a blind faith in the Great Pumpkin preferable, just as the Christian might despair at non-believing marriages in a church setting, but he has not grasped Derrida’s point that a methodology can be kept even if its truth value has been jettisoned. For thinkers who deny the possibility of totalization, for whom ‘the presence of an element is always a signifying and substitutive reference inscribed in a system of differences and the movement of a chain’,17 one cannot do anything but make statements which conform to disputed categories. As Derrida says in ‘Letter to a Japanese Friend’:

the difficulty of defining and therefore also of translating the word ‘deconstruction’ stems from the fact that all the predicates, all the defining concepts, all the lexical significations, and even the syntactic articulations, which seem at one moment to lend themselves to this definition or to that translation, are also deconstructed or deconstructible, directly or otherwise, etc. And that goes for the word, the very unity of the word deconstruction as for every word.18

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Yet in spite of all this, Derrida does not counsel Toshiko Izutsu to avoid completely the task of translating the word ‘deconstruction’. What his letter stresses is that such an activity or methodology must be undertaken on the understanding that it possesses no truth value:

As you know, one of the principal things at stake in what is called in my texts ‘deconstruction’ is precisely the delimiting of ontology and above all of the third person present indicative: S is P.19

Derrida and Saussure Derrida explains that ‘the engineer, whom Lévi-Strauss opposes to the bricoleur, should be the one to construct the totality of his language, syntax, and lexicon.’ This he perceives to be mythical, or impossible, because linguistic totalization is an illusory goal. His argument against totalization is based upon his view of language as ‘a field of infinite substitutions only because it is finite, that is to say, because instead of being too large, there is something missing from it: a centre which arrests and grounds the play of substitutions’. As Derrida says in Positions, ‘Nothing, neither among the elements nor within the system, is anywhere either simply present or absent. There are only, everywhere, differences and traces of traces.’20 Later in the same interview he develops this idea:

one has to admit . . . a systematic production of differences, the production of a system of differences – a différance. . . . Nothing – no present and in-different being – thus precedes différance and spacing. There is no subject who is agent, author, and master of différance.21

If language is a ‘systematic production of differences’ then there can indeed be no ‘agent, author, and master of différance’, and therefore no engineers.

The concept of ‘différance’ is therefore very important for Christians seeking to oppose poststructuralism. In his essay ‘Différance’, Derrida quotes a famous passage from Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics:

The conceptual side of value is made up solely of relations and differences with respect to the other terms of language, and the same can be said of its material side. . . . Everything that has been said up to this point boils down to this: in language there are only differences. Even more important: a difference generally implies positive terms between which the difference is set up; but in language there are only differences without positive terms. Whether we take the signified or the signifier,

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language has neither ideas nor sounds that existed before the linguistic system, but only conceptual and phonic differences that have issued from the system.22

Derrida comments:

The first consequence to be drawn from this is that the signified concept is never present in itself, in an adequate presence that would refer only to itself. Every concept is necessarily and essentially inscribed in a chain or a system, within which it refers to another and to other concepts, by the systematic play of differences. Such a play, then – différance – is thus no longer simply a concept, but the possibility of conceptuality, of the conceptual system and process in general.23

Thus, in his account of language, Derrida takes certain Saussurean premises for granted. They form the foundation of his linguistic theory, leading to his conclusion that the engineer, the person in command of textual meaning, is a myth. Without Saussure there would be no Derridean poststructuralism.

Not surprisingly therefore, Derrida’s use of Saussure has attracted critical attention. Raymond Tallis, for example, in his anti-poststructuralist book Not Saussure, claims in his introduction:

. . . the most important ideas in post-Saussurean theory are mistaken — in particular they are based upon a deep misunderstanding of the nature of language, arising out of a misreading of Saussure.24

Tallis later explains this perception in more detail: . . . certain key passages in his Course have acquired axiomatic status and they have been deemed to have implications that it is unlikely Saussure would have himself accepted. . . . The conclusion that the differential and negative nature of the signifier and the signified implies that discourses have no external reference, that they are non-referential, depends upon a . . . mistake: the identification of the signifier and signified with, respectively sign and referent. . . . Saussure himself contrasts the negativity of the signifier and the signified with the positivity that results from their fusion in the realised linguistic sign – the actual verbal token as it appears in discourse.25

Tallis assumes that Saussure was correct in his opinion that the sign possesses ‘positivity’, although its two constituent elements are negative, resulting from differences alone. He argues that Derrida falls into error simply because he has failed to grasp Saussurean linguistics. If he had only understood that the signifier and signified, when

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combined, form a positive entity with clear external reference, there would have been no mention of différance. Roger Scruton pursues a similar tack in Modern Philosophy when he discusses the coinage of the term:

. . . by a play of words Derrida decides that Saussure has proved that meaning is always deferred by the text: no one word bears a meaning until related to the next, which must be related to the next and so on. . . . Texts do not have a single authoritative meaning; there is a ‘free play of meaning’ and anything goes. In short, we are liberated from meaning.26

Again, it is assumed that Derrida has mistakenly perverted the sound linguistics of Saussure.

However, Derrida is well aware of his disagreement with the linguist:

I have attempted to suggest that this différance in language, and in the relation of speech and language, forbids the essential dissociation of speech and language that Saussure, at another level of his discourse, traditionally wanted to delineate. The practice of a language or of a code supposing a play of forms without a determined and invariable substance, and also supposing in the practice of this play a retention and protention of differences, a spacing and a temporization, a play of traces – all this must be a kind of writing before the letter, an archi-writing without a present origin, without archi-. Whence the regular erasure of the archi-, and the transformation of general semiology into grammatology, this latter executing a critical labour on everything within semiology, including the central concept of the sign, that maintained metaphysical presuppositions incompatible with the motif of différance.27

Derrida says that Saussure ‘traditionally’ sought to dissociate speech and language, implying that he refrained from reaching the conclusions to which his work was naturally leading him because of political reasons. If a ‘play of forms’ has no ‘determined and invariable substance’ then ‘the regular erasure of the archi-’ will inevitably follow, and a critical labour must then be executed on the sign itself. In other words, the negativity of the signifier and the signified, each constituted on the basis of différance, necessarily withold any pretence of positivity from the sign. Both Tallis and Scruton ignore this logic, and speak as if Derrida either ignorantly or irreverently revised Saussure’s conception of the nature of the sign. Neither is the case. If ‘in language there are only differences’, then it can but follow that the ‘centre’ is a ‘non-locus in which an infinite number of sign-substitutions’ come into play. The attempt to restore the engineer cannot therefore turn on any perceived

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abuse of Saussurean linguistics. It must tackle the work of Saussure himself.

Faultlines in Saussurean Linguistics The chapter containing Saussure’s famous statement about linguistic differences begins with the intention ‘To prove that language is only a system of pure values’.28 Linguistic ‘value’ is explained as follows:

the idea of value . . . shows that to consider a term as simply the union of a certain sound with a certain concept is grossly misleading. To define it this way would mean assuming that one can start from the terms and construct the system by adding them together, when, on the contrary, it is from the interdependent whole that one must start and through analysis obtain its elements.29

This synchronic view of the linguistic system is intended to correct the idea that language is formed when a certain sound is united to a predetermined concept. In order to justify his conclusions, Saussure makes a general statement about the nature of the mind:

Psychologically our thought – apart from its expression in words – is only a shapeless and indistinct mass.

His single attempt to verify this claim relies on an appeal to unnamed ‘Philosophers and linguists’, who have apparently ‘always agreed in recognizing that without the help of signs we would be unable to make a clear-cut, consistent distinction between two ideas.’30 While this may be true to a degree, it nevertheless begs the question of how signs come into existence in the first place. On the basis of this statement it would still be perfectly possible to argue that ideas predate signs, and later find expression in them for the sake of clarification and communication. Yet Saussure then makes the following audacious generalisation:

There are no pre-existing ideas, and nothing is distinct before the appearance of language.31 It is from this standpoint that Saussure can go on to compare

‘phonic substance’ with thought as ‘equally vague’ or ‘jumbled’.32 His point is that just as the sounds of linguistic signs are unrelated to their referent, and contain no intrinsic raison d’être, so the thought to which such phonic substance is attached has no essential right to exist – it is unintended:

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The linguistic fact can therefore be pictured in its totality – i.e. language – as a series of contigious subdivisions marked off on both the indefinite plane of jumbled ideas and the equally vague plane of sounds. . . . The characteristic role of language with respect to thought is not to create a material phonic means for expressing ideas but to serve as a link between thought and sound, under conditions that of necessity bring about the reciprocal delimitations of units. . . . Neither are thoughts given material form nor are sounds transformed into mental entities; the somewhat mysterious fact is rather that ‘thought-sound’ implies division, and that language works out its units while taking shape between two shapeless masses.33 (Emphasis added.)

This passage further demonstrates Saussure’s tendency to make absolute statements without due caution. Earlier in the Course he explains how ‘The idea of “sister” is not linked by any inner relationship to the succession of sounds s-ö-r which serve as its signifier in French’34. This is not in dispute. But he is now claiming that the idea of ‘sister’ – the thought of the young woman who has grown up alongside one in the same family – is equally vague, or ‘shapeless and confused’35 as the limitless plane of sounds from which s-ö-r come. Saussure is effectively implying that neither the chicken nor the egg came first, but the hen-coop – the structure of language which ‘mysteriously’ gives birth to the completed sign. This proposition became axiomatic for structuralists,36 yet it rests on very weak ground.

Saussure concludes with the formulation: Language is a system of interdependent terms in which the value of each term results solely from the simultaneous presence of the others.37

The key word in this sentence is ‘solely’, which denies any possibility of self-contained meaning in an individual unit of language. Saussure offers three examples in defence of his position. The first involves a comparison between the French word ‘mouton’, and the English ‘sheep’. He points out that mouton can have the added signification of a piece of meat ready to be eaten, as well as the woolly animal on the side of a hill. In English, a different word, ‘mutton’, comes into play, and it would not be appropriate to compliment one’s hostess on the quality of the ‘sheep’ that she has served. What this proves is that the value of linguistic units does indeed depend partially on other elements in the system, but not necessarily wholly. It is a case for the influence of different words upon another: their inter-relation but not their absolute inter-dependence.

His second example is more complex:

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Within the same language, all words used to express related ideas limit each other reciprocally; synonyms like French redouter ‘dread,’ craindre ‘fear,’ and avoir peur ‘be afraid’ have value only through their opposition: if redouter did not exist, all its content would go to its competitors.38

Saussure is here guilty again of arriving at a conclusion that is not justified by the preceding logic. There is certainly an element of limitation imposed upon words by others that might be more apt in a particular situation. But the idea that synonyms ‘have value only through their opposition’ is an entirely different and much more contentious assertion. To put it in the same sentence as a mild truism is by no means to prove it.

In his final example, Saussure argues ‘If words stood for pre-existing concepts, they would all have exact equivalents in meaning from one language to the next’,39 which he rightly implies is obviously not in fact the case. He also points out that there is no exact correspondence in the value of plurals between different languages, or the concept of time. But this argument in support of his hypothesis depends upon the assumption that people throughout the world, whatever their culture, would have exactly the same pre-existent concepts, exactly the same desire to say exactly the same things. Such an a priori belief deserves suspicion at the very least.

These three manifestly insufficient examples are the pillars upon which Saussure’s claim that ‘in languages there are only differences’ rests. Derrida’s uncritical acceptance of this premise informs his own explanation of the way in which language works. When he says, in ‘Différance’, ‘every concept is necessarily and essentially inscribed in a chain or a system, within which it refers to another and to other concepts, by the systematic play of differences’, he is basing this statement on an unjustified commitment to the Saussurean view of the synchronic nature of language. Saussure’s emphasis on negative differentiation has led Derrida astray.

Conclusion: Studying the Bible The reason why the analyses of deconstruction offered by Abrams, Carson, Clarke and others miss the mark is because they fail to appreciate the full force of the linguistic assumptions made by the poststructuralists. It is futile to inform theorists such as Hillis Miller that they will contradict themselves in the very act of defending deconstruction as they are not using language on these terms. In order to revive the principal of authorial intention and with it the hope of fruitful Bible study, apologists first need to explain why language does

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not carry out what Barthes calls ‘a systematic exemption of meaning’. This can be done once language is no longer seen to function solely

through différance. If Saussure’s unwarranted insistence on the negative nature of both the signified and signifier is rejected, then the sign can once again refer to something outside of the text. Derrida describes the engineer as ‘the one to construct the totality of his language, syntax, and lexicon . . . the absolute origin of his own discourse’. Yet these requirements do not have to be so categorical. If one holds that thought is the precursor of language, thereby imbuing one half of the sign – the signified – with positive value, then (to use Derrida’s metaphor in ‘Structure, Sign and Play’) there is at least ‘cloth’ available. It is not endlessly running like Barthes’ stocking. A degree of opacity in the use of language has been acknowledged down the centuries. Roman Jakobson claims that this element of ambiguity is the main reason for linguistic study: it is the ‘eternal crucial problem in the age-old science of language.’40 But if P D Juhl’s epistemological principle were to be heeded the significance of some linguistic uncertainty would not be wrongly exaggerated. He points out that one should beware

a criterion as to what is involved in knowing what we mean . . . being invoked which is unduly rigid and extreme.41 Don Carson makes a similar point when he speaks of the possibility

of knowing truly what one might not know exhaustively.42 Danielle Scarratt spells out this idea very helpfully:

Truth and certainty are independent. Most of our beliefs are like this – we have good reasons for believing them and it is perfectly reasonable to think they are true. The slight possibility that we are wrong should be no cause for concern. There is a big difference between the possibility of being wrong and having no grounds at all on which to think something is true. So even if we cannot secure Descartes’ certainty, we are not forced into scepticism. There is an implication, however, for our attitudes to our beliefs: we should be humble and ready to acknowledge that we could be wrong. Therefore, while no account of language can hope to provide

what Wilhelm von Humboldt describes as an ‘exact elucidation’ of the ‘apparent connection between sound and meaning’,43 nevertheless, the rescue of semantics from Saussure’s synchronic vice allows far greater confidence that words refer directly to reality, and are not simply given over to an endless chain of sign-substitution. The engineer, as long as he is defined in qualified terms, does not belong to the realm of myth.

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Literary criticism should not be a method in search of truth value. It must be acknowledged that many of the principles of deconstruction

can still be applied even if one rejects Saussurean Linguistics and the function of différance. Aporias (apparent double binds or deadlocks between possible meanings) can be found in any text. But if the sign possesses positive content then there is at least the prospect of tracking down the author’s extratextual references. This may require great patience as one ascertains grammatical niceties and historical context; but the prospect remains, not of exhaustive, but of trustworthy knowledge.

There are obvious implications for Christians. Studying the Bible is not a hopeless dive into an oily sea of meaning, but an admittedly testing exercise in the location of authorial intent. The Puritan John Owen believed that God in His wisdom wanted Bible study to be this hard:

Such a systematical proposal of doctrines, truths, or articles of faith, as some require, would not have answered the great ends of the Scripture itself. All that can be supposed of benefit thereby is only that it would lead us more easily into a methodical comprehension of the truths so proposed; but this we may attain, and not be rendered one jot more like unto God thereby. The principal end of the Scriptures is of another nature. It is, to beget in the minds of men faith, fear, obedience, and reverence of God – to make them holy and righteous. . . . Unto this end every truth is disposed of in the Scripture as it ought to be. If any expect that the Scripture should be written with respect unto opinions, notions, and speculations, to render men skillful and cunning in them, able to talk and dispute . . . they are mistaken. It is given to make us humble, holy, wise in spiritual things . . . sometimes an occasional passage in a story, a word or expressions, shall contribute more to excite faith and love in our souls than a volume of learned disputations.44

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1 R Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, in Image-Music-Text ed. S Heath, London, 1977, 142-148 (p. 147). This reference, and several others, lacks the publisher’s name as a result of the style rules under which the essay was originally prepared.

2 M H Abrams, ‘The Deconstructive Angel’, in Modern Criticism and Theory ed. D. Lodge, Harlow: Longman, 1988, 265-276 (p. 274).

3 The full quotation is, ‘There can be no writing without reading, but all readings are in error because they assume their own readability.’ This was used in an Oxford University examination paper, but I have not been able to find out the source.

4 J H Miller, ‘The Critic as Host’ in Modern Criticism, 278-285 (p. 285). 5 Poststructuralism is generally used as a portmanteau term for the various forms

of deconstruction, with their common thread being ‘the claim that the meaning

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of any text remains radically “open” to contradictory readings’ M H Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, Orlando: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1988, p. 203.

6 R Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’ p. 147. 7 J Derrida, ‘Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences’

in Modern Criticism, 108-123 (p. 115). 8 Ibid., p. 118-9. 9 Ibid., p. 114. 10 Ibid. 11 The same spelling will be used throughout this essay for Derrida’s concept. 12 Barthes, ‘The Death of the Author’, p. 147. 13 I am thinking of a recent talk given by Don Carson to Cambridge

undergraduates, and a section of his book The Gagging of God, Leicester: Apollos, 1996, in which he uses the same argument as Abrams.

14 Abrams, ‘The Deconstructive Angel’, p. 275. 15 Abrams, ‘The Deconstructive Angel’, p. 274. 16 G Clarke, ‘Taking the “Con” out of Deconstruction’, Kategoria 1, St Matthias

Press, 1996, 45-62 (p. 59). 17 Derrida, ‘Structure, Sign and Play’, p. 121 18 Derrida, ‘Letter to a Japanese Friend’, in A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds

ed. P Kamuf, Chichester: Columbia University Press, 1991, 270-276 (p. 274). 19 Ibid., p. 275. 20 J Derrida, Positions trans. A. Bass, London, 1981, p. 26. 21 Ibid., p. 28. 22 F de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics trans. W Baskin, London, 1960, p.

120. 23 J Derrida, ‘Differance’, in Speech and Phenomena And Other Essays on Husserl’s

Theory of Signs trans. D B Allison, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973, 129-160 (p. 140).

24 R Tallis, Not Saussure: A Critique of Post-Saussurean Literary Theory, Basingstoke, 1995, p. x.

25 Ibid., pp. 66-7. 26 R Scruton, Modern Philosophy: A Survey, London: Sinclair-Stevenson, 1994, p.

478. 27 J Derrida, ‘Différance’, trans. A. Bass in Between the Blinds ed. Kamuf, 61-79

(pp. 67-68). 28 Saussure, Course, p. 111. 29 Ibid., p. 113. 30 Ibid., pp. 111, 112. 31 Ibid., p. 112. 32 Ibid. 33 Ibid.

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34 Ibid., p. 67 35 Ibid., p. 113 36 Lévi-Strauss himself says, in the ‘Introduction to the work of Marcel Mauss’,

‘Whatever may have been the moment and the circumstances of its appearance on the scale of animal life, language could only have been born in one fell swoop…’ cited by Derrida in ‘Structure, Sign and Play’, p. 121.

37 Saussure, Course, p. 114. 38 Ibid., p. 116. 39 Ibid., p. 116. 40 R Jakobson, ‘Quest for the Essence of language’ in Language in Literature ed.

K Pomorska and S Rudy, Cambridge USA, 1987, p. 413. 41 Juhl, ‘Playing with Texts: Can Deconstruction Account for Literary Practice?’

in Hawthorn J., Ed., Criticism and Critical Theory, London, 1984, pp. 59-71 (p. 61).

42 This point is made in the lecture to Cambridge students mentioned above. 43 Cited in Jakobson, ‘Quest for the Essence of Language’, p. 413. 44 Cited in J I Packer, A Quest for Godliness, Wheaton: Crossway Books, 1990

(published in the UK as Among God’s Giants), pp. 94-95.

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Reviews Dictionary of Biblical Imagery Leland Ryken, James C. Wilhoit, Tremper Longman III (eds.) Inter-Varsity Press, Downers Grove Illinois and Leicester, 1998 xxi + 1058 pp., £29.99. Another large dictionary, in double columns, crammed full of familiar as well as arcane, obscure and recondite information. There is a wealth of material here and a great deal to delight and charm the reader. Despite the criticisms which will follow, I rate this as one of the most interesting and entertaining volumes, one of the most innovative and creative, to be produced in recent years. It is a vital resource for the serious reader of the Bible, for the preacher who intends to help people understand the Bible, for the lecturer and student of literature who encounters curious references to obscure Bible passages. It does not deal with everything, but it is the best yet for the intelligent and open-minded reader. There is an overview of every biblical book, detailing its predominant imagery and patterns, and a massive range of detailed and informative articles: for example, Oak, Oath, Obadiah, Obedience, Odor, Offering, Offspring, Oil, Ointment, Old, Olive, One, Open, Oppression. Some of these are cross-references, but not much is missed overall.

How does one begin to review such a volume? Perhaps it is best to start with what is distinctive about it. It claims that ‘the primary audience for this Dictionary is not scholars but laypeople’ (p. vii). This aim is reflected in several ways. The bibliographical information is strictly limited, with (I would guess) fewer than a third of the articles giving references for further reading. The books and articles so given are without doubt the major works on the subjects, but even so this restricts investigation of the topic for the layperson to the material included by the dictionary in most cases.

If the layperson wants to know about eschatology in a general sense, he or she will not even find this a headword; turning, puzzled, to ‘Millennium’, he or she will find a delightful essay on Old Testament ideas of ‘the golden age’, and an explicit disavowal of offering anything to do with ‘the technical eschatological one-thousand-year phenomenon mentioned in Revelation 20:4’. The cross-references point to articles on, among others, ‘Apocalyptic Visions of the Future’, ‘End Times’ and ‘Kingdom of God’, so the material can be found eventually. On the one hand, there is the avoidance of scholarly jargon, which would nevertheless be perfectly perspicuous to the kind of person who intends to spend much time with a work of this sort; on the other, an avoidance of the ‘lay’ meaning (and whatever else ‘millennium’ might mean, it does seem to have

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something to do with 1,000 years!) attached to words, which appears as semantic fudge. The notion is laudable, no doubt, but the result is rather odd.

Another distinctive is that ‘the claims of individual authorship [are] subsumed under the editorial vision’ (p. vii). This means that the articles are unsigned, and again it seems to be a sop to laypeople, with the idea that controversy is avoided and consensus espoused. Most of the articles follow a broad formula which outlines the use of the image in the Bible and related literature, and proceeds to consideration of details. While this makes for heavy going in reading the work extensively, when the formula is missing the lack is especially felt. The article on ‘Plot Motifs’ gives a wide-ranging outline of all kinds of motifs, but though there are abundant cross-references within the article, it does not give a single example, and mentions the Bible only once. The majority of the article on ‘Monsters’ deals with non-biblical material, not all of which has relevance to the Israelite monsters which are eventually mentioned. This kind of thing is explicable if individual authorship is attributed, but less so if most of the articles ‘have been worked over by several editorial hands’ (p. vii).

There are occasional illustrations in the volume. Many of these are taken from ancient sources, and are genuinely informative in their own right. In the article on ‘Sacrifice’ there is a picture of two Assyrians sacrificing a ram. Its legs are tied, it lies feet up on a table, with its neck extending over the end, stretched for the sacrificial knife, with a bowl underneath to catch the blood. One man has the knife, and holds the beast by its jaw, the other holds the front legs. Somehow, one never quite pictures the OT sacrifices as requiring the physical struggle that is depicted here, and it helps one to understand. By contrast, the article on ‘Lamb’ has a picture of a very lamb-like lamb, which will hardly enlighten anyone.

A reviewer’s heart sinks when the first paragraph of the preface of the book contains a sentence beginning, ‘For those whose Bible’s were pencil-marked with cross-references . . .’ (sic, p. vii). This is a massive book, and the task of proof-reading must have been entirely unenviable. But it contains more typographical and other errors than I have ever seen in an IVP book. Most of these are purely mechanical: transposition of letters, errors of justification. But one or two are more serious: under ‘Judgment’ on p. 471, Uzziah offers a faulty sacrifice and comes under judgement (2 Chron. 26), but apparently also touches the ark when David tries to bring it back from Abinadab’s house (1 Chron. 13:9, recte Uzzah). The first sentence of the article on ‘Monsters’ is meaningless.

In the detail of presentation the book falls between two stools. It is neither the scholar’s tool, nor does it exactly meet the requirements of the layperson. But the intelligent reader will forgive almost anything in a book so rich with

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information and insight, a book which takes imagery and literary technique seriously. More than that, it is a book which treats present preoccupations as well as the more traditional Bible dictionary ones: ‘Humor’ is an article which does its topic justice in tone as well as coverage, and the article on ‘Sex’ has a light touch. Minor irritations aside, and noting the presence among the contributors of several members of LSG, this is a book to be warmly welcomed and enjoyed.

Paul Cavill John – Evangelist and Interpreter Stephen S Smalley, Paternoster Press, revised edition 1998. First published in 1978. 340pp., £8.99. Since publication, twenty years ago, Stephen Smalley’s book has been the standard introduction to John’s Gospel for countless students. So what has happened in the meantime to warrant this revision and the addition of 50-odd extra pages? Well, in the last twenty years or so, changes of a seismic dimension have hit the world of johannine scholarship. As Smalley himself recognises, the relationship between John and the synoptic gospels has been, and is being, radically reassessed. Twenty years ago John was discussed, for the most part, as if it were completely independent of the synoptics. Nowadays John is discussed more seriously as either dependent upon Mark or Luke or both, or else drawing upon a different strand of gospel tradition which has equal claims to historicity.

But first, Smalley’s is a complete reorganisation rather than a complete rewrite of the former volume. He provides an admirable overview of the historical, literary and theological issues entailed in understanding this most fascinating of New Testament documents. He examines both hellenistic and Jewish backgrounds, discusses the authorship and dating questions, engages the vexed questions of the relationship between John and history, why John seems so different and, finally, why this apparently idiosyncratic gospel was written. Things which would situate the book back in the late seventies have gone, though he finds little reason to reappraise his basic approach to the theology of the gospel. He provides brief thumbnail sketches of John’s characteristic approach to revelation, the sacraments, christology, glory, the cross, the Spirit, the church and eschatology. However, if it’s a theological introduction you require, try D Moody Smith’s The Theology of the Gospel of John (Cambridge University Press, 1995).

Sociology has also radically affected the interpretation of biblical texts not least John. This was fed in particular by John Louis Martyn in his 1968

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monograph (second edition 1979), History and Theology in the Fourth Gospel and the Roman Catholic scholar, Raymond E. Brown. The latter’s ground-breaking study, The Community of the Beloved Disciple, was published too late to make it into Smalley’s first edition. Strangely, it makes little impression in the second. Martyn’s thesis was that John 9:22 (‘The Jews had decided that anyone who acknowledged that Jesus was the Christ should be put our of the synagogue’) is the key to situating and understanding John, especially Jesus’ harsh words to the Jews (see especially John 8:44, ‘You belong to your father, the devil’). In Martyn’s view the story of the blind man speaks to a later time following the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple in AD 70. The man born blind represents the late first century Christian who receives sight from Jesus but the Pharisees (read ‘Jews’) actually reject Jesus and his works and by the end of the story are pronounced blind. Martyn allows a measure of historicity in John’s account but sees it as addressing a situation which has become known as the ‘partings of the ways’, when what became rabbinic Judaism and nascent Christianity found that their differences had become irreconcilable. Jewish Christians, like the blind man, were being allegedly forced out of the synagogues in the 80s and 90s CE. This theory has been immensely influential in scholarly circles over the last twenty years. Smalley, in line with an increasing number of scholars, is not impressed. The Martyn-Brown hypothesis receives short shrift. Sociological interpretations are given surprisingly little space in this new edition.

More prominent in Smalley’s treatment is the immense impact of so-called literary approaches which followed the publication of R Alan Culpepper’s study Anatomy of the Fourth Gospel (Fortress Press, 1983). Culpepper and, in this country, Mark Stibbe (John as Storyteller, John’s Gospel, The Gospel of John as Literature) have promoted an enormous flood of studies which would not look out of place in a fairly traditional Eng. Lit. course. Culpepper examines point of view, narrative time, plot, characterisation, implicit commentary and implied reader. Scores of studies have taken his researches further, paying particular tribute to Frank Kermode and Robert Alter. Smalley is fully abreast of the field. Indeed even in his first edition Smalley promoted an appreciation of the drama of John’s creation. But neither is he naïvely approving. Synchronic, text-immanent literary studies must not displace the historical and diachronic. Excessive subjectivity is quite inappropriate in approaching sacred literature. Moreover despite the proliferation of literary studies of the Bible, great care must be taken not to dismiss lightly those genres in Scripture which are clearly historicising in intent. And great care must be taken to apply methodologies which are

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appropriate to John’s time. To treat him as a nineteenth century novelist is a serious category mistake which will lead to anachronism and misinterpretation.

For those wishing to get up to date on johannine scholarship and to enrich their reading of this wonderful gospel, there is no better introduction on the market. At less than £10 it is a snip.

Robert Willoughby

Awaiting the Millenium Richard Kyle, IVP 1998, 255pp, £9.99. Though its title might suggest that this book will be out of date come the year 2000, its subtitle – ‘a history of end-time thinking’ – gives a clearer impression of its subject. The author explores two millennia of thinking about the last days, beginning with early and medieval Christians, then moving on to the Reformation and the spread of millennial ideas from Europe to America. He concludes in the present day with what he calls the ‘secular apocalypse’, in which humanity might be wiped out by nuclear war, environmental catastrophe or alien invasion.

In his introduction the author appears to disavow the premillennial dispensationalism of his Plymouth Brethren upbringing; but he refuses to state his current position: indeed, he writes, ‘I trust I have not pushed my perspective on other people’. Instead, he calls his work ‘an intellectual history’. By this it would seem he is trying to eliminate as far as possible any trace of personal engagement with the issues presented. Thus we are told what people believed about the end, and what sociological factors might have had a bearing on them, but theological reasons are not explored. By dealing with the material in this way, the book really operates as a very readable, chronological catalogue of apocalyptic groups, false messiahs, mad prophets, mass suicides, strange practices and mysterious revelations. It is all quite fascinating in its way, but by largely avoiding discussion of the really interesting question of why these people thought the way they did, and how they ended up drawing their particular conclusions, the book has an air of slightly detached, intellectual superiority.

Equally, since it has to cover an enormous subject in a relatively small volume, it does not have the space to devote to a detailed discussion of any one idea. To make up for this, the text is copiously footnoted. So if any bizarre tale particularly piques your curiosity, you

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will be referred to a secondary source to find out more. The book is largely a survey of secondary texts about the subject, rather than a pointer to the primary literature, the writings of the groups or individuals themselves.

Because of this, the book will be of most value to anyone who is completely new to this area of study. At the start, the author defines the relatively modern categories pre-, post- and amillennialism, and throughout the text he uses these terms to classify the groups under discussion. He does not stray much further into specifically theological territory. By avoiding detailed analysis, he does at least provide an overview of how millennial thinking has both affected – and been affected by – society. Perhaps it is too much to expect a theological approach to the issues raised, but an inevitable consequence of reading this book is for us to reflect on our own eschatology, and consider how our thinking about the end times compares with that of those who came before us. In that respect, a more avowedly Christian approach might have been more helpful than that of an ‘intellectual history’. Fred Whalley The Spirit Soars Walter Nash, Feather Books, 1998, 44 pp., £4, 0 947718 71 0. Walter Nash has, like the proverbial swan, waited until the later part of his life to open out into full-throated song. His Nobus Natus: Sonnets and Songs for a Nativity (A Nondum Print) appeared in 1997 and this was followed last year by The Spirit Soars, which includes Nobus Natus as Part I, with Part II entitled ‘A Death in Judaea’. He had not exactly been mute previously, since his academic publishing history began in 1954 with a translation of a study of Manet and included well over 40 publications, mostly on linguistics, before his two recent books of poetry began to appear. Brahms’ late Trio in B Major (1889), a masterful leap above his earlier version of the same work, springs to mind.

We are hardly in an era when one expects epic poems to be rolling off the presses at the rate of one per month, so it not surprising that the longest poem in The Spirit Soars, ‘A Nocturne for Atlantis’, is a composition of just four pages in length. The price of the book is well worth paying for this one poem alone. But it is not alone in its quality. In Part III of this slim volume, beginning two poems before ‘A Nocturne’ and including almost all the poems following it, Nash has made an arrangement in his book with the best wine saved till the last.

Not being one who has ever liked anything ‘dry’, gastronomically speaking, I suppose I can be forgiven for finding almost all of the poems in the first two parts of The Spirit Soars less appetising than the later poems.

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Mind you, the earlier poems are more than just ‘dry’ in a white-wine sense of the word, though as my metaphor implies they are ironic, even sardonic occasionally, often clever (no, not in a shallow way) and never stuffy. Many readers with a different literary tongue and ‘nose’ than mine may prefer these to the ones that most appealed to me.

The poems in the first two parts of the book accomplish what they set out to do, and do it well. For instance, the one that is supposed to be in the manner of Gerard Manley Hopkins is; furthermore, it is blessedly more accessible and likeable than Hopkins’ tortured verse. The ones in dialect are appropriate to that treatment and work well because of that.

The first two parts of the book are made up of poems inspired by incidents and characters in the New Testament and, thank goodness, are not devotional. Rather they are meditational, in a Chablis sort of style. And this is as well, since heaven only knows we have too many devotional poems in the universe already – or second-rate and third-rate ones anyway. By the way, the strongest, best-wine poem in Parts I and II (‘Stabat Mater’) is the last one in these sections, too.

In this lyric the metaphor about Jesus, ‘a vagabond in his own skin’, comes closer to the essence of Christology than many hefty theological tomes could ever aspire to. Furthermore, it juxtaposes itself disturbingly and paradoxically with the main image of Christians and Christ in the poem, the image of standing, standing still, firm and set back from mere unbelief. This concern to uphold the supremacy of belief, even if it be small and wavering, over unbelief is central to the book. Nash is a believer, but an ever-present scepticism is implicit in the ironic, distant tone in many of the poems.

That most prized of all literary elements in the twentieth century, irony, is mixed into even the most moving, explosive poems – the ones in Part III. An example from ‘A Nocturne for Atlantis’ should do nicely:

Andrew Marvell (who never came to Atlantis – Hull was enough) thought ocean held the icons of the land.

Then, too, there is this sort of observation about the Three Kings in a poem about a small-town religious festival, in ‘Epiphany in the Pueblo’:

they sit in all their bearded majesty and mystery on three gold-painted kitchen chairs.

The irony about these ironic passages is, of course, that they are not really ironic. Hull was enough for Marvell. He didn’t have to go to some

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imagined majestic and mysterious place like Atlantis to find himself in the presence of reverend icons and los Tres Reyes Magos; despite the ironic tone, the actual heft of the poem is that the kitchen chairs do carry with them majesty and mystery. Throughout these poems the commonplace, the quotidian seems to imply this or that desideratum, yet they send us soaring, ‘Higher still and higher’.

The poet, presenting himself as the narrator in ‘Epiphany in the Pueblo’, calls himself a ‘sceptical septuagenarian’, but though this is a truth it is not as true a characterisation of him as that presented in the last 10 lines of the poem:

so still I sit upon my balcony looking west into the night sky where Venus has risen bright and lonely; and I think that one star will do as well as another, if one is trusting like a child, or wise like a diligent seeker who has sought long and patiently and at last found an answer; and I smile a little, hearing the words echoing sharp and wistful in my head – ¡Vivan los Tres Reyes Magos! Vivan!

(I must pause to say that it is seldom enough that in a poem compounded of irony and faith that one gets to laugh aloud. But here that odd reaction happened to me when the delay in the appearance of the carnivalesque Wise Men caused the cynical septuagenarian to remark, ‘Spain where even history/ rarely happens on time’.)

Many poems in Part III use the Canary Islands and oceanic subject matter as the springboard for their meditations. Thus, shared theme and shared purpose (the supremacy of faith) tend to unify this section, although the factor which cries out to be remarked on is these poems’ ability to deliver an emotional and spiritual swell in the reader. For the moment, though, I want to quote some passages that are like chasers between the courses of a meal. These lines clear the palate so that one can never tire of the grander thrust and tidal-wave experiences conveyed over and over again. Here, from ‘Fuerteventura’, is such a passage:

Now tourists come and tour. Developers develop. Bars and trinket-shops and squads of slot-machines invest the sad resorts. [T]he rubble and the rind of money fill the promenades where backward baseball caps,

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beer bellies, tee shirts, bosoms, swimsuits drift towards the consolations of the night . . . . Fun (one of course joins in) is a yearning waste, pretence of pleasure, unevent of joy.

There is also an example of playfulness with words that is unexpected in such grave and serious poems, this time from ‘A Moment by the Acantilado’:

Out in the sound, a fisherman in his blue-gunwaled skiff is tending his flimsy nets, making a wayward killing on a trading floor where current trends never hold still.

The playfulness rises again in the same poem: ‘Doubt blurs my human eye; the agnostic I’. This time the punning turns on the main theme of the book, faith versus doubt in the ‘I’ of the poetry. This is especially interesting in a poem which is prefaced by the ‘epigraph to the final movement of Beethoven’s last quartet’ (‘Muss es sein? – Es muss sein!’). In the stanza just quoted from, the poet acknowledges that when he takes on his composing attitude, the demands of his art inevitably strip away his will to be Christian. This makes untouchable sense in a poem concerned with music, that art which more than all others is far removed from the possibility of interference from religious doctrine, that form of art which, as regards doctrinal content, is a ‘diminishing to a round O’. But then, as is so typical of the movement in the poems in Part III, Nash goes to a higher key and turns his agnosticism (agnosticism being, after all, a belief, indeed, paradoxically, also the only place from which belief can rise) into ‘belief’:

. . . the soul she turns and pauses at heaven’s porch like an entering bride; es muss sein! And I proclaim the soul’s existence, proclaim against my own belief, against the coming dark; cry how the spirit soars up again and again, flying in the face of chaos, reaching for glory in the long climb. Finally, I feel driven to add a lame coda to this review. The poetry in

this book deserves a better publishing treatment than it suffers here. The ‘originals’ of the pages appear to have been produced with an inkjet printer on paper that is insufficiently absorbent. The resulting blur has all the charms of the mimeograph. Worse, from the serious reader’s point of view, is the fact that there appear to be several typographical errors. Of course, it is possible that in modern poetry (and these are very much late twentieth-century poems) there might be formal reasons for these apparent typos; I doubt it though. To postmodernists, perhaps Nash’s poem that speaks most eloquently is the non-sonnet, a 14-liner forced into being a sonnet (the poem is called ‘The Conscript’) but failing to be one because (this is rich in meaning) it

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does not rhyme. However, whether postmodern or not we are unsure as to whether the two full stops at the end are intended to be there. Should they have been one? Or three, perhaps?

and words contrive the formal, stumbling talk of a sonnet that tries to rhyme and cannot explain.. We cannot come to a reasonable conclusion about the two full stops

because there have been ‘literals’ in the rest of the book. One is reminded of the 1609 printing of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Its text has just enough ‘errors’ in it to have confused readers for almost 400 years over whether the two sets of brackets at the end of Sonnet 126 are intended and meaningfully replace the missing final two lines, or are an oversight which the author or printer meant to correct but didn’t. Maybe Nash should be happy (ahem) to be so bracketed with the Swan of Avon. It was not until 1997, the year of Nash’s first book of poems, that a scholarly edition accepted the four brackets at the end of Sonnet 126 and actually printed them, all previous scholars having decided that they ‘knew better’. Maybe a later edition of Nash’s poems will allow the reader to know better. Phillip Whidden

The Gagging of God D.A. Carson, Apollos, 1996, 640 pp., £19.99. Published in 1996, this remains an important book. The theme is expressed in the subtitle: Christianity confronts pluralism. In his preface the author explains his reasons for his interest in the subject. The first is the need to understand one’s own culture; the second is the bearing that pluralism has on questions of hermeneutics; and the third is that the Christian preacher has to understand today’s pluralist culture in order to present the gospel appropriately today.

The introductory section begins by defining pluralism. ‘Empirical pluralism’ simply describes the growing diversity in our culture. ‘Cherished pluralism’ approves such diversity as good. ‘Philosophical or hermeneutical pluralism’, however, sees the notion that any one ideological or religious claim may be intrinsically superior to another as necessarily wrong. This has repercussions in all sorts of areas in our society.

Part 1 looks at the history behind modern pluralism. The author chooses to focus on the revolution in hermeneutics, literary theory, and

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epistemology. Part 2 considers Religious Pluralism; Part 3 suggests a Christian stance in such fields as education, law and morals, and Part 4 looks at how pluralism has found its way within the evangelical camp and then considers how to evangelise in a postmodern generation.

The author sees contemporary pluralism in many of its forms as tied to certain approaches to hermeneutics. This will be of immediate interest to readers of The Glass. He traces the move from Descartes and modernity to the disappearance of objective truth in the areas of theology, handling texts and science. His chapter on ‘Escaping from the Hermeneutical Morass’ is key in providing a critique. While he acknowledges that postmodernity has a number of strengths, he demonstrates the individualist definitions and doubtful steps of logic that do not withstand close inspection. Against the deconstructionists, he shows that practical experience with the way people actually communicate confirms that accurate communication is possible. He indicates some models of approaching texts that glean the best from the new hermeneutic but do not destroy all possibility of objective truth; for example, the ‘fusion of horizons’ of Gadamer and Thiselton.

One of the correlatives of pluralism is secularisation. The author’s description of the North American scene is equally relevant here.

The national discourse is taken up with economics, politics, entertainment figures, sports, disasters, . . . international affairs, and crime – but nothing about God, very little about religion (except to snicker at its most painfully embarrassing hypocrites and failures), not even very much about such concepts as truth, courtesy, civility, honor, duty, moral courage – all of which sound vaguely quaint and old-fashioned in our ears. And when a religious topic, such as conversion, is treated at the academic level, the treatment is likely to be entirely constrained by social science categories committed to philosophical naturalism and utterly averse to ‘mysticism’. The question of God’s existence or reality in conversion is carefully bracketed out. (p. 39)

Carson’s particular concern is with heralding the gospel into such a culture. He suggests that often it is helpful to critique the intellectual, moral and existential bankruptcy of the age. Effective evangelism must start back with God and creation, and then lead on to the turning points in redemptive history and the proclamation of the historic gospel.

He does not actually call for the formulation of a 21st century hermeneutic which will combine the best insights of modernism and postmodernism, within a framework encompassing the Biblical truths of Creation, Fall, Redemption and Eschaton. However, given the link that he has demonstrated between the new hermeneutic and the

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contemporary scene, such a formulation would appear to be a pressing task. It is also one which readers of The Glass are perhaps particularly well qualified to pursue.

This is a wide-ranging book, with references on nearly every page. It is worth reading for its analysis of contemporary culture, its insights into how to present the gospel today, and its implicit challenge to those who are engaged in the hermeneutical task. If this challenge is boldly appropriated, the repercussions could spread through all sorts of areas of our society. Patricia Deacon Stardust and Ashes: Science fiction in Christian Perspective, Stephen May, SPCK London 1998, pb., £12.99. Stephen May has essayed a broad review of Science Fiction (SF). He has attempted and I think succeeded in showing that underlying much SF is a worldview which is profoundly non-Christian, indeed often actively anti-Christian. His arguments are persuasive. He then attempts to redeem the genre for the Christian to use and enjoy. This is an exciting and mostly successful attempt to bring some order into the swirl of ideas which is SF.

Good SF explores the possibilities of human existence, but there is much second-rate and even third-rate or worse writing which has come under the aegis of SF. To define what SF includes is a difficult task. In Stardust and Ashes May attempts to do it by piling example on example. He describes the plethora of worlds and cosmic ideas used as scenery for SF stories, and uses this to outline the sense of awe and wonder that SF generates. This is the stardust of the title. As SF writers began to investigate moral dilemmas rather than mere intellectual ideas then the taste begins to turn to ashes in the mouth as the answers, if there are any, become more and more bleak and inhuman.

As he moves from description to analysis, the book becomes very interesting indeed. Chapters 6 and 7, where he discusses science and religion as seen through the eyes of SF, are conclusive to my mind. According to much SF, traditional religion is blinkered and pettifogging; its only use is to control subject races. Science brings salvation. Evolution, the slow climb from ape-man to star-man, usually involves ‘outgrowing religion’ and especially in discovering the ‘truth’ about Christianity. Christianity’s founder is usually given short shrift.

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Mind and memory are more important than the body. Mind is often equal to ‘soul’. The ultimate advance or freedom is liberation from the body. Man is more important than the individual. So as man evolves men are destroyed, and in the farthest reaches what is left is pure mind. At this level, the evolved ‘man’ and the universe itself are often inseparable.

In a literary genre as varied as SF it is difficult to do more than generalise and one can always find exceptions. However, May makes a good case for these points being generally true of SF as a whole. A clear example of the anti-Christianity of many such stories is Arthur Clarke in ‘Childhood’s End’ making those who guide mankind to the next phase of our spiritual evolution physically indistinguishable from traditional devils: wings, cloven feet, sulphur and all. The very title of the story indicates the point. As we grow up, we set aside childish things including Christianity, which is shown to have been so incorrect about ‘the true situation’.

The problems that SF writers face are theological. They are what May describes as ‘not just that humanity is striving to fill the gaps left by the absence of God (a ‘humanity of the gaps’ rather than ‘a God of the gaps’ as it were) but that the way humanity tries to define itself is in terms which have been traditionally used to define God.’ So the attributes of God are often used to describe either the idealised humanity which will evolve or the universe into which we will evolve.

Defeatism is also a sign of our age. Generally the idea has been that while the individual is unimportant and can fail or even can be destroyed, the race (or some idea of it) continues. Recent stories are more pessimistic and may suggest that there are no answers other than subjective answers and that the ultimate subjective answer (and therefore the ‘good’ answer) is death or a losing of the individual into the mêlée of the race-mind or machine-mind from which it came. The same answer arrived at by a different route.

In his last chapter May outlines a possible redemptive procedure whereby as Christians we may recover the stars that much SF has turned into ashes. The procedure may require the reinterpreting of what was written by the author through the redeemed mind of the Christian reader. Certainly it involves the realisation that the mind of the reader must be redeemed and renewed into an understanding of what the universe really is and our place in it.

SF is too important a literary genre to be lightly dismissed by merely saying that it is anti-Christian. I am not trying to do that, nor is Stephen May. His thesis demonstrates that SF is not in concordance with the Christian worldview. What is? As with every other human construct SF

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needs redemption. May is trying to redeem SF for our use and enjoyment. SF is thought-provoking and explores real issues. It is also enjoyable. We continually need to recover the awe and wonder of the extent and variety of creation, we need to recover the stardust. Providing we take seriously what God Himself has said, then Christianity does allow us to see the stardust in and through SF because God and His creation is there in spite of what any particular SF author might think and write about God or about the universe. Biblical Christianity allows us to weep with and for the writer who can only find ashes in the face of the splendour of a creation that declares God’s divine power and majesty. Only the Bible tells us of the God who tasted the ashes of death for us so that we might inherit the stars.

John Barrs The Gospel According to Mark with an Introduction by Nick Cave Canongate, 1998, 52 pp., pb., £1.

What are you to make of the Bible if, without a background of familiarity, you come upon it unawares? Nick Cave, a jazz musician from Melbourne now living in London, may be illustrative. Childhood participation in a cathedral choir left him averse to the New Testament and to its hero. Anglican ceremonies were ‘the decaf of worship, and Jesus was their Lord.’ A youngster’s burgeoning interest in violent literature was drawn instead to the ‘maniacal, primitive God’ of the Old Testament, ‘that dealt out punishments that had me jaw-dropped in disbelief at the very depths of their vengefulness.’

In his introduction Nick Cave shares the discovery he later made in Mark of a figure very different from the ‘wet, all-loving, etiolated individual that the church proselytised’ [sc. preached]. Evidently the publishers believe similar discoveries are waiting to be made by readers who can be persuaded to open the remaining sixty-five books of the Bible. In the Pocket Canon a dozen of them are separately published, with the seventeenth century text of the King James Version variously introduced by, for example, Steven Rose (Genesis), Louis de Bernières (Job), Doris Lessing (Ecclesiastes), A S Byatt (The Song of Solomon), Fay Weldon (Corinthians), Will Self (Revelation). The KJV has formed our language; the books can be read ‘as literary works in their own right’. So what, apart from a reader’s experience of surprise, makes a literary reading?

Something like multiple focus is one aspect of it. Nick Cave remarks

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that Jesus’ baptism in the Jordan ‘is already flavoured metaphorically by his death.’ In John the Baptist’s day, baptism was pre-charged with symbolic meaning. In relation to Christ, the reference shifts, since the gospel looks back through the death and brings both into the figure. Baptism, like death, may be representative.

An unceasing pursuit of interpretation is another characteristic. With it there is a willingness to concede, in contrast to dogmatic theology, that there may be no single correct interpretation. The text, like truth itself, is richly composite and multi-dimensional. It may span more than one horizon and have currency in numerous languages. Cave, who is also a novelist, registers the verbal impact made by Jesus, ‘the outpourings of his brilliant, jewel-like imagination.’ He responds to his isolation, his frustration with uncomprehending disciples, and he notes concerning the passion that ‘scenes of deep tragedy are treated with such matter-of-factness and raw economy they become almost palpable in their unprotected sorrowfulness.’ How is all this to be understood?

Christ’s brilliance, which set him at odds with Pharisaic adversaries was, according to Cave, the death of him. In a similar sort of way, Mark’s narrative gets its energy from the tension between the brilliance of Jesus and the ‘dull rationality of those around him.’ Pursuing interpretation, Cave finds that although Christ is trying to ‘save’ the world he struggles with, he has at the end only the agony of aloneness, and dies on a cross, his ‘last howl to a God he believes has forsaken him.’ Yet in Christ the victim he finds ‘the root source of my spirituality’; here is a blueprint for aspiration: not the worship of a perfection but the liberated understanding of our human ‘ordinariness and mediocrity’. Christ’s example frees our imagination ‘to rise and fly’. Where to, Cave does not say, and his argument only leads back to the fate of the howling victim. His interpretation harbours an unresolved conflict between the verbal pyrotechnics and the base facts of our mortal life, between imagination and experience.

But although Mark’s is the most unadorned of the gospels, it carries, as Cave observes, a lot of punch. Mark’s effort goes into demonstrating astonishing fundamentals such as that Jesus was the Son of God, the Messiah (Greek Christos), and that after he was killed, ‘death,’ in Peter’s phrase, ‘could not hold him.’ There’s another motif: Jesus volunteered for the mission that had to pass through death. Messiahship was the agonising provision of a ‘ransom for many’. In this reading, which seems to take us further back into Mark, there was a salvation to win, and won it was.

Roger Kojecký Review originally published in The Church of England Newspaper, 13 Nov. 1998.

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Notes on Contributors

John Barrs, formerly lecturer in Botany at Southampton University, completed an M Div at Covenant Seminary St Louis, and has worked at L’Abri in the UK as well as in commercial computing, where his expertise is in Superbase.

Paul Cavill published Maxims in Old English Poetry and Anglo-Saxon Christianity, both in 1999. He teaches at the University of Nottingham, and has been a member of the LSG for 15 years. Patricia Deacon is UCCF Professional Groups Administrator. After reading English at Oxford University Nick Howard worked for a think tank, the Adam Smith Institute. He is now a researcher for the Conservative Party in the House of Commons. Roger Kojecký, author of T S Eliot’s Social Criticism, has contributed an article on Eliot and D H Lawrence to a special Eliot issue of ANQ (Washington DC, Heldfref), and has reviewed recently in the TLS, THES, and Common Knowledge (Dallas, OUP) . He is among the contributors to the Dictionary of Biblical Imagery and the New Dictionary of National Biography. Roger Pooley’s publications include English Prose of the Seventeenth Century, and he is co-editor of The Discerning Reader, Apollos, 1995. He is Lecturer in English at Keele University and a former Chair of the LSG. Beth Swan has interests in literature and law in the long eighteenth century and has published Fictions of Law (Peter Lang), 1997, and several essays. She is working on a book provisionally entitled Polite Pictures, about 16th and 17th century religious and legal writings whose aim is to establish a context for reading early 18th century narrative fiction. Dr Swan teaches at University College, Chester. Dr Fred Whalley is Pastoral Assistant at St Matthew’s Church, Fulham. His book The Elusive Transcendent: the role of religion in the plays of Frank Wedekind is forthcoming.

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Phillip Whidden has had poetry, stories and articles published in both Britain and the USA and teaches writing, literature and literary theory at Newbold College in Berkshire. He has also been published about the medical and scientific evidence on passive smoking. Currently he is in the MPhil/PhD programme at Birkbeck College, working on Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Robert Willoughby teaches New Testament at London Bible College. He combines a commitment to Scripture with a love for all kinds of literature.

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News & Notes

Autumn conference At the 1999 conference at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, papers

were read on the subject of ends, millennial and apocalyptic. Also addressed was the matter of the Christian Literary Study Group’s future, a subject which had been to some degree clarified by the Membership Survey. Change is in process as with other UCCF professional groups, and in line with them we shall go to aomw form of affiliated status.

The keeping of books and records, and a separate bank account. are implied, and we shall be retaining the UCCF doctrinal basis as a prerequisite for committe members, currently Roger Kojecký, Paul Cavill and Robert Willoughby. The CLSG’s direction, rediscovered in the responses to the Membership Survey, can be expressed in terms such as these: • The CLSG is an evangelical, UCCF-related group for postgraduates

and other Christians with serious interests in literature. • The group remains committed to its aim to explore the implications

of the Christian faith in the study and teaching of literature.

Papers may be from non-evangelical viewpoints, but we shall seek a balance between currency and academic standards on the one hand, and Christian commitment on the other. Similarly The Glass will aspire to the standard of a peer-reviewed learned journal while reflecting literary, Christian and evangelical interests.

Keep in touch

Members and any others who are interested, are invited to join the email list and so receive occasional information about events and activities, on- and off-line, relating to Christianity and literature. The list can also be used for ideas and news, even discussion. During the 1999 summer vacation, when the date of the CLSG November conference had to be put back three weeks, e-list members had the advantage of getting word at an early stage of the new date . Email the editor if you would like to join.

You will find LSG information on UCCF’s website (see p. 1), where we shall also be posting advance notice of events.

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Conference 2000 The next LSG conference is planned provisionally for Saturday 4 November, 2000.

Subscriptions An annual subscription to the CLSG (currently £14, concessions £7) brings to your door any copy of The Glass published during the course of the year. Alternatively, a single copy of The Glass may be ordered for £5 inclusive of UK postage.

Become a Contributor Contributions for The Glass should be sent to The Editor, Roger Kojecký, email kojecky@compuserve.com and 10 Dene Road, Northwood, Middlesex HA6 2AA, or via the UCCF office. The optimum length for articles is 5,000 words; reviews 400 - 1,000 words. We do not yet have a CLSG style sheet, but contributors are asked to look up the form in the most recent issue to hand.

Contributions should be submitted in both hard and soft copy, the latter as an email attachment, or on a 3.5” DOS-formatted diskette. Preferred software formats are MS Word for Windows (versions to 97) or Rich Text Format (RTF).