Disknowledge: Literature, Alchemy, and the End of Humanism in Renaissance England

Abstract

What Katherine Eggert means by disknowledge is “knowing something isn’t true but believing it anyway” (jacket copy). The subtitle of her book, Literature, Alchemy, and the End of Humanism in Renaissance England, gives a good indication of its scope and Eggert’s intention. An important companion to the book is her Shakespeare Quarterly article “Hamlet’s Alchemy: Transubstantiation, Modernity, Belief” (Eggert 2013). She starts from positions taken by Stephen Greenblatt and Sarah Beckwith, who agree that modern skepticism was born when Christians began to question Roman Catholicism on the sacraments. If a sacrament is an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace, it poses the dilemma of trusting one’s own eyes: how can water confer salvation, or a piece of bread Christ’s sacrifice? As the Anglican Book of Common Prayer has it: “Transubstantiation (or the change of the substance of Bread and Wine) in the Supper of the Lord, cannot be proved by Holy Writ: but is repugnant to the plain words of Scripture, and hath given occasion to many superstitions” (Cummings 2011: 681).“What makes skepticism possible—even if it does not make disbelief inevitable—is the believer’s awareness of and propensity to dwell upon the inevitable disjunction between the material sacrament and the immaterial spirit” (Eggert 2013: 46). Here Eggert refers to Aquinas: “The accidents of the consecrated bread and wine—its taste, smell, color, and so forth—cannot inhere in the body and blood of Christ, since Christ’s resurrected body is in heaven” (Disknowledge, 60). Aquinas and those who thought like him, and by extension Eggert herself, may be exaggerating the problem. In Colossians 1:15–17 (KJV) Paul writes that Christ “is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature: For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him: And he is before all things, and by him all things consist.” “By him all things consist” looks like panentheism, the theory or belief that God encompasses and interpenetrates the universe but at the same time is greater than and independent of it. The first few verses of Saint John’s Gospel are also relevant. To the author of the fifth hermetic libellus, as to Henry Vaughan, the Lord manifested himself “ungrudgingly through all the universe.” He “beheld God’s image with his eyes, and laid hold on it with his hands” (Scott 1924–36, 1: 159). Since he creates by emanation, there is no sharp distinction between God and his universe. No place is especially sacred, because every place is sacred. As Vaughan (1983: 42, 193) puts it, God is “in all things, though invisibly”; “each bush / And oak doth know i am.” Vaughan’s devotion to the God who manifested himself ungrudgingly through the universe surely marks a new phase of religious sensibility that denies the disjunction postulated by Eggert.The suggestion on page 2 of her book that “humanistically educated men” like Hamlet were “especially good” at disknowledge (its being possible not to know what one knows) is also questionable. Belief in ghosts came naturally in the early modern period, and Hamlet says, “O my prophetic soul / My uncle?” (1.5.40–41; Shakespeare 1963). That seems to come close to knowing rather than not knowing.Elsewhere, responding to the notion of “information overload,” Eggert writes that “immediately we spot the problem: in order to separate [keepers] from [discards], . . . one must read them. Anyone who attempted [the] winnowing process would . . . give up long before all the books were read” (21). She has too quick a mind, jumping to such a conclusion: a good many books can be dismissed as trash within five minutes.Reservations such as these aside, Eggert puts forward a good deal of material that is both fascinating and relevant to her thesis. The relevance of alchemy stems from its paradoxical reception in the early modern period—both powerful delusion, no doubt often used fraudulently, as Ben Jonson’s Alchemist suggests, but, on the practical side, edging toward nascent science. Then there is the question of transubstantiation, an issue of Roman Catholicism in early modern England: can we speak of a Catholic physics? Eggert sees John Donne, George Herbert, and Vaughan as participating in “the fits of cultural amnesia that necessarily surrounded the issue of Roman Catholicism in early modern England” (10). She writes that “Vaughan’s physical world is not a world of physics, and it is alchemy that signals it so” (10).“Arthur Kinney,” Eggert continues, “dates humanism’s English preeminence only from 1512, when John Colet chartered St. Paul’s School in London on the principles of Christian humanist education, to 1605, when the publication of Francis Bacon’s The Advancement of Learning brought home to England . . . the fact that the ancient writers so revered by humanists were subpar explicators of the natural world” (14). The demotion of classical learning undercut “three of the fundamental articles of humanistic faith” (15):First, the idea that learning is founded on the mastery of rhetoric. . . . Second, the conviction that learning is furthered primarily by free access to written texts . . . and by the ability to synthesize the wisdom of those texts . . . into a Christian knowledge base. And third, the belief that all these skills, both rhetorical and textual, . . . equip the learned man with what he needs to improve himself and better his world. (15)Humanism was undone by a number of changes in intellectual culture: skepticism, with the work of Sextus Empiricus, “joined other forms of skepticism already in circulation” (15) to remove absolute premises such as the centrality and “the possibility for . . . [the] perfectibility of man” (quoted on 15), his educability and his transformation. It did not remove the possibility of perfectibility from Vaughan, who followed Jacob Boehme (1886) in this respect.1 Perfectibility is not likely to have been the “false magic, which [he] did believe,” or among “those mystic lies in which [he] once believed” (“The Importunate Fortune,” ll. 71–72 [Vaughan 1983]). Hiram Haydn “identifies the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries as ‘the Counter-Renaissance,’ a period in which thinkers from Martin Luther to Niccolò Machiavelli to Michel de Montaigne shared ‘an anti-intellectualist, anti-moralistic, anti-synthetic, anti-authoritarian bias’” (17; see Haydn 1950). The span of late humanism was roughly from the 1580s to the 1660s, or from the popularization of skepticism in Montaigne’s Essays to the founding of the Royal Society.In a section titled “Alchemy as Disknowledge” (38), Eggert suggests that alchemical discourse often claims a mode of reality that exists on the level of metaphorical creation, and this reality is independent of its truth or falsehood. So “alchemy suggests a fantastically creative, tremendously learned, metaphorically plausible, and rhetorically elaborate scheme for purposefully choosing the wrong way to go about knowing things.” It is “marked by a movement away from the empirically provable and a movement toward . . . the pleasures of the fictive” (38). It failed to find a place in the medieval university and a number of medieval thinkers, including Pope John XXII in 1317, rejected it because they “considered it simply impossible to transform one type of matter into another by artificial means” (39).Eggert’s second chapter, “How to Forget Transubstantiation,” has little at which to cavil and much to admire. She shows how Paracelsus “contravened Aristotelian orthodoxy by tossing aside the four traditional elements (earth, water, air, and fire) and putting in their place three elemental principles (sulfur, salt, and mercury) . . . signify[ing] not the common household or workshop substances given those names but rather ‘principles of constitution’ of the particular form and features of every body and every object” (65). She argues that “the spiritual forces of Paracelsus’s three elements are, in fact, derived from and equivalent to the powers of the Triune God. Sulfur provides the heat and the organizational principles of God’s fiat; salt the mass and solidity embodied in the incarnate Christ; and mercury the fluid inspiration toward activity prompted by the Holy Spirit” (65). This theory “was immediately seen as having implications for Eucharistic theology. . . . If all matter participates in the divine, then nothing special is happening in the Eucharist” (65–66). “The very word transubstantiation seems to have entered English not in relation to the Eucharist but in relation to alchemical change” (66): Thomas Norton’s fifteenth-century Ordinal of Alchemy tells us that the philosopher’s stone is that “wherebie of metallis is made transmutacion / Not only in colour, but transubstanciation” (quoted on 66). When the implications of Paracelsus’s work for Eucharistic theology became better known, his work, like Galileo’s and Descartes’s after him, was placed on the Roman Catholic Index of Forbidden Books.Neither Herbert J. C. Grierson (1966) nor Helen Gardner (1965) sees alchemical significance in the third stanza of Donne’s “Canonization.” Of “th’Eagle and the Dove” Gardner comments that they are “emblems of strength and gentleness. Joined, they symbolize the perfection of masculine and feminine qualities; cf. Crashaw’s address to St. Teresa, ‘By all the Eagle in thee, all the Dove.’ See Hadrainus Junius, Emblemata, Antwerp, 1565, emblem 39” (204). However, Eggert argues that “the Phoenix ridle . . . is derived from the alchemical progression from coniunctio, the marriage of masculine sulfur and feminine mercury, to exaltatio, the production of the nonsexed alchemical product—gold, the elixir of life, or the philosopher’s stone” (68). She notes that “a number of critics have usefully discussed alchemy and purification in Donne” (274n67). For instance, the sixth chapter of Stanton J. Linden’s Darke Hierogliphicks, “A True Religious Alchemy,” is headed by the third stanza of “The Canonization.” Linden (1996: 175–76) writes:If an alchemical metaphor were applied to the stanza’s structure it might be said to move from the death or putrefactio stage to the exaltatio stage in which the elixir or philosopher’s stone is actually produced. But the one most crucial to the meaning is the intermediate conjunctio. The alchemical interpretation of the stanza rests entirely on the symbolic meaning of the three birds—eagle, dove, and phoenix—and their interaction.Linden’s analysis enables us to see that Eggert has accomplished the task indicated in the subtitle of her book, in her discussion of the importance of alchemy in English literature of the late Renaissance.

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