Flesh in the Age of Reason (42 page)

Yet there was a solution of sorts, for Christianity itself had furnished a story of its own, the master-narrative of the salvation of the individual soul, the Bible story of the creation, fall and redemption of Adam and his seed, pictorialized throughout medieval and Renaissance art and versified from Dante to Milton. From medieval times, Catholicism ‘humanized’ the Christian truths, emphasizing the idea of the immanence of the divine in the human in the cults of the Virgin, the Christ child and
Corpus Christi
, God made flesh. Saints’ lives proliferated, and transcendental experiences were recorded by mystics such as Dame Julian of Norwich or her admirer, Margery Kempe of King’s Lynn. Kempe’s narrative, the very first autobiography in the English language (not written down by herself but dictated to a priest), recounted the story of her trials, temptations and final redemption in the eyes of the Lord. Meanwhile, the office of confession was designed to elicit truthful accounts of the state of one’s soul, with a view to contrition, penance and the forgiveness of sins.

In parallel movements, Renaissance humanism sanctioned the growth of self-portraiture and autobiography. The latter genre had many sources and models, notably Augustine’s
Confessions
, in which the Bishop of Hippo charted his route from paganism, through heresy, finally to true faith. There were also exemplary humanist reflections upon the self, particularly the writings of Petrarch and Pico Della Mirandola, who set the soul within the divine Chain of
Being, required to fulfil its potential in the order of things as a spiritual being temporarily hitched to a physical body. In more sceptical vein, the essays of Michel de Montaigne in sixteenth-century France raised doubts about the status of the self. His ‘
que sçais-je
?’ – what do I know? – carried the implication that man does not possess true self-knowledge intuitively: humble scepticism is perhaps the basis for Christian piety. Writing or painting oneself could thus be legitimate if it were undertaken in the name of truth, or by way of example, instruction or confession.

While scourging that ultimate scandal, egoism, Christianity thus paradoxically encouraged its highest and most overt manifestation – the notion that God’s very design lay in the salvation of the individual soul: Christ died for
my
sins. But to achieve salvation it was crucial to possess the true faith or grace: to tell God and the world of one’s sins and doubts, failings and faith, could thus become one of the highest Christian duties, a great act of witness.

The Stuart century brought the flourishing of the genre of spiritual autobiography, particularly among Puritans, providing a framework for highly charged individual experiences. Take for instance George Trosse. Born in Exeter in 1631 into a wealthy family of Anglican lawyers, Trosse later looked back at his youth as a Sodom of sin – a ‘very Atheist’, he had followed every ‘cursed, carnal principle’ which had fired his lusts.

Pricked by a ‘roving Fancy, a Desire to get Riches, and to live luxuriously in the World’, as he recorded in his autobiography, Trosse travelled abroad to enjoy the ‘unregenerate World; the Lusts of the Flesh, the Lusts of the Eyes, and the Pride of Life’, being led into ‘great Sins and dangerous Snares’, and indulging in ‘the most abominable Uncleannesses’ short of ‘compleat Acts of Fornication’. Even grave illness did not lead him to think on death and damnation, or on the merciful Providence which had spared him.

Eventually he returned home, a notorious sinner against all the Commandments, enslaved to a licentiousness which had hardened his heart. A crisis ensued. After one particularly gross drinking bout, he awoke hearing ‘some rushing kind of Noise’ and seeing a ‘shadow’
at the foot of his bed. ‘I was seiz’d with great Fear and Trembling,’ Trosse recalled. A voice demanded: ‘Who art thou?’ Convinced it must be God, he contritely replied, ‘I am a very great Sinner, Lord!’, and fell to his knees and prayed. The voice proceeded. ‘Yet more humble; yet more humble.’ He removed his stockings, to pray upon his bare knees. The voice continued. He pulled off his hose and doublet. Warned he was still not low enough, he found a hole in the floor and crept into it, praying while covering himself in dirt.

The voice then commanded him to cut off his hair, and at this point he anticipated it would next tell him to slit his throat. Spiritual illumination now dawned: the voice was not God’s but the Devil’s! Knowing he had ‘greatly offended’, he finally heard a call: ‘Thou Wretch! Thou hast committed the Sin against the Holy-Ghost.’ Falling into despair – the sin against the Holy Ghost was reputed to be unpardonable – he wanted to curse God and die, and his head exploded with a babel of clamouring voices, making a ‘Torment of my Conscience’.

Buffeted by further voices and visions, Trosse fell into a ‘distracted Condition’. His friends, fortunately, knew of a physician of Glastonbury in Somerset who was ‘esteem’d very skilful and successful in such Cases’. There they carried him by main force, strapped to a horse; he resisted with all his might, believing he was being dragged down into the ‘Regions of Hell’. Voices taunted: ‘What, must he go yet farther into hell? O fearful, O dreadful!’ The Devil, Trosse later recalled, had taken complete possession.

He identified the Glastonbury madhouse with hell, seeing its fetters as satanic torments and his fellow patients as ‘executioners’. Eventually, however, though long seeking ‘revenge and rebellion’ against God, he grew more tranquil, largely thanks to the doctor’s wife, ‘a very religious woman’, who would pray with him until his ‘blasphemies’ began to subside. Finally, ‘I bewail’d my Sins’, and he was thought to have recovered enough to return to Exeter.

Alas! Like the proverbial dog to his vomit, he returned to his old ways. This time, however, the fight with the Tempter was in the open. He now applied to godly ministers for guidance in removing
his ‘great Load of Guilt’. Carried once again to Glastonbury, he ‘rag’d against God’, believing that he had sinned once more against the Holy Ghost, but the doctor ‘reduc’d [me] again to a Com-posedness and Calmness of Mind’.

Even then, his regeneration was not complete, for his faith was but ‘Pharisaical’. Backsliding, he was induced to return for a third time to Glastonbury. Finally, and this time permanently, ‘God was pleas’d, after all my repeated Provocations, to restore me to Peace and Serenity, and the regular Use of my Reason’. A man reborn, Trosse went off to study at Oxford. With divine assistance, he was called to the ministry, and he became a pious Nonconformist preacher. He told the world his story in
The Life of the Reverend Mr George Trosse: Written by Himself
– it was published posthumously in 1714 – so that others could know God’s mercy and be able to bring themselves back from the brink.

Among the many contemporary tellings of the self through the Christian narrative of sin and redemption, the most influential were the writings of the tinker John Bunyan, a Baptist. Persecuted in the repressive atmosphere after the Restoration he wrote his classic works in Bedford Gaol: as so often, the imprisonment of the flesh was the emancipation of the spirit.
Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners
(1666) told of a reformed sinner, and, in allegorical mode,
The Pilgrim’s Progress
(1678) narrated the snares besetting the Christian. For Bunyan, the pilgrim’s road to the Celestial City winds through Vanity Fair, where Christian and his companion Faithful are pelted by the mob, set in irons, and hurled into a cage as a public spectacle. Faithful is sentenced to be burnt at the stake, and though Christian escapes and ‘came to a delicate plain, called Ease’, this is more the beginning of his trials than the end: ‘at the farthest side of that plain was a little hill called Lucre’, and beyond lay Doubting Castle.

As autobiography,
Grace Abounding
is remarkable for what it does
not
tell us about Bunyan – we do not even find out the name of his wife. Everything is excluded from this spiritual autobiography but what touches on his inner life, the trials he underwent and their meaning, the spiritual battlefield on which he was assailed. Even at
the tender age of 9 or 10, Bunyan was afflicted by dreams of devils – indeed, he wished himself a devil, so that he might be tormentor rather than victim. The first great crisis occurred after his marriage. One Sunday, he heard a sermon on Sabbath-breaking, and ‘at that time I felt what guilt was, though never before, that I can remember’. By afternoon, he had shaken off his agony, but he could not escape it for long, for

the same day, as I was in the midst of a game at Cat, and having struck it one blow from the Hole, just as I was about to strike it the second time, a Voice did suddenly dart from Heaven into my Soul which said,
Wilt thou leave thy sins and go to Heaven, or have thy sins and go to Hell
? At this I was put to an exceeding Maze. Wherefore, leaving my Cat upon the ground, I looked up to Heaven, and was as if I had, with the Eyes of my understanding, seen the Lord Jesus looking down upon me, as being very hotly displeased with me, as if he did severely threaten me with some grievous Punishment for these and other my ungodly Practices.

Bunyan leapt to the conclusion that he was quite beyond redemption. ‘Wherefore I found within me a great desire to take my fill of sin, still studying what sin was yet to be committed, that I might taste the sweetness of it.’ For two years he was convinced of inescapable damnation. He tried to make sense of all that happened to him, including his dreams. He once found himself alone and cold at the foot of a walled mountain on whose sunny slopes sat the blessed people of Bedford he so envied. After some searching, he discovered ‘a narrow gap, like a little doorway in the Wall’, and at last managed to pass through it. Every new conviction of salvation brought with it new trials and new temptations to blaspheme, as it were to test God’s love.

Spiritual autobiographies in this mould continued to be written through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, above all by those marginalized Protestant Dissenters who had been excluded (by fiat and choice) from Vanity Fair. Experiencing persecution by the powers of darkness and loathing for the vanities of the world, such pilgrims held that intense individual experience with God was
paramount: the term ‘experimental’ was used to signify that such autobiographies were the product of true ‘experience’.

The rich print-based cultural world of the Georgian era also produced, by way of parallel but also critique, many variants upon the genre. Swift and other satirists mercilessly guyed the unlettered self-importance of the peddlers of such soul-food, exposing their humility and self-laceration as an egregious and obnoxious form of self-advertisement (
s’excuser, c’est s’accuser
). Such Puritan hypocrites as Joseph Surface in Sheridan’s
The School for Scandal
litter Georgian plays and novels – they were one of the stock butts for an age rejoicing in its escape from moral rigorism.

A secular, comic and satirical alternative to the Christian salvation story was Henry Fielding’s
A Journey from This World to the Next
(1743), in which the just-deceased narrator takes us with him on a sardonic tour of the underworld. Inspired by the Greek satirist Lucian, in whose
Dialogues of the Dead
the greats of the ancient world gathered in the nether regions to discuss the vanities and follies of humankind, the satiric journey into the nether regions was a common literary device. In Fielding’s variant of the ‘News from Hell’, a boat filled with the spirits of the recently deceased forms the forum for a discussion of the transitory nature of life.

Fielding’s narrator from beyond the grave is deadpan: ‘On the first of
December
1741, I departed this Life, at my Lodgings in
Cheapside
.’ The world he leaves behind, without sorrow or regret, contains little but a host of uncaring relatives squabbling over the will and a sozzled old woman watching the corpse – shades of Hogarth. The narrator is then conveyed by Mercury to a coach in which other spirits are awaiting transportation to Elysium, and from them he hears sordid tales of how they in turn left the wicked world behind. The cumulative effect of this – and of the ensuing encounters with the City of Diseases, the Palace of Death, the Wheel of Fortune, the Court of Minos, and with Elysium itself – is to confirm ‘the Vanity, Folly, and Misery of the lower World, from which every Passenger in the Coach expressed the highest Satisfaction in being delivered’.

In a key episode, the travellers come to a crossroads, and have to
choose between two paths. One is almost impassable, while the other affords the most pleasant of prospects. Yet great crowds are attempting to negotiate the bad highway, and only a few proceeding along the good one. We learn that the obstructed road is the path to greatness, and the clear road leads to goodness.

The much-debated rise of the novel at this time sustained the intensity of the scrutiny into character and motives typical of the Bunyanesque spiritual autobiography, while transvaluing it into secular and psychological terms. Comparable themes were to the fore: the innocent making his or her way in a wicked world, trials of goodness, transformations from ignorance and folly to wisdom, learning the hard way, the innocent abroad – all appear, in the comic register, for instance, in another work of Fielding’s,
Joseph Andrews
.

There had always been romances and picaresque tales, but novels seemed something new (hence the name). Their ‘realism’ gave them a potent appeal, in particular, perhaps, among less sophisticated readers: ‘I have heard a party of ladies discuss the conduct of the characters in a new novel,’ divulged Robert Southey, ‘just as if they were real personages of their acquaintance.’ Enlightened psychological analysts pondered as to what precisely gave these products of the imagination such an air of reality. ‘The frequent Recurrency of an interesting Event, supposed doubtful, or even fictitious,’ reflected David Hartley, paying tribute to the power of the imagination, ‘does, by degrees, make it appear like a real one, as in Reveries, reading Romances, seeing Plays,
&c
.’ In daydreaming about a fiction, brooding upon an episode could make it seem true.