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Infinity, Faith, and Time
Christian Humanism and Renaissance Literature
Infinity, Faith, and Time is an exploration of Renaissance literature

and the importance of a powerful tradition of Christian-Platonist
rational spirituality derived from St Augustine and Nicholas of
Cusa. John Spencer Hill argues that this tradition had a formative
role in the thought of Renaissance writers by enabling them to
assimilate into their worldview two central discoveries of the
Renaissance - that the universe is possibly infinite and that human
existence is bound and regulated by the passage of time.
In Part i Hill examines the effect of the idea of spatial infinity
on seventeenth-century literature, arguing that the metaphysical
cosmology of Nicholas of Cusa provided Renaissance writers, such
as Pascal, Traherne, and Milton, with a way to construe the vast-
ness of space as the symbol of human spiritual potential. Focusing
on time in Part 2, Hill reveals that, faced with the inexorability of
time, Christian humanists turned to St Augustine to develop a
philosophy that interpreted temporal passage as the necessary
condition of experience without making it the essence or ultimate
measure of human purpose. Hill's analysis centres on Shakespeare,
whose experiments with the shapes of time comprise a gallery of
heuristic time-centred fictions that attempt to explain the conse-
quences of human existence in time.
Infinity, Faith, and Time reveals that the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries were a period during which individuals were
able, with more success than in later times, to make room for
new ideas without rejecting old beliefs.
JOHN SPENCER HILL is professor of English, University of Ottawa.

McGill-Queen's Studies in the History of Religion
Volumes in the McGill-Queen's Studies in the History of Religion have
been supported by the Jackman Foundation of Toronto.
SERIES ONE
G.A. Rawlyk, Editor
1 Small Differences
Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants, 1815-1922
An International Perspective
Donald Harman Akenson
2 Two Worlds
The Protestant Culture of Nineteenth-Century Ontario
William Westfall
3 An Evangelical Mind
Nathanael Burwash and the Methodist Tradition in Canada, 1839-1918
Marguerite Van Die
4 The Devotes
Women and Church in Seventeenth-Century France
Elizabeth Rapley
5 The Evangelical Century

College and Creed in English Canada from the Great Revival to the Great Depression
Michael Gauvreau
6 The German Peasants' War and Anabaptist Community of Goods

James M. Stayer
7 A World Mission
Canadian Protestantism and the Quest for a New International Order, 1918-1939
Robert Wright
8 Serving the Present Age

Revivalism, Progressivism, and the Methodist Tradition in Canada
Phyllis D. Airhart
9 A Sensitive Independence
Canadian Methodist Women Missionaries in Canada and the Orient, 1881-1925
Rosemary R. Gagan
10 God's Peoples
Covenant and Land in South Africa, Israel, and Ulster
Donald Harman Akenson
11 Creed and Culture

The Place of English-Speaking Catholics in Canadian Society, 1750-1930
Terrence Murphy and Gerald Stortz, editors
12 Piety and Nationalism

Lay Voluntary Associations and the Creation of an Irish-Catholic Community in
Toronto, 1850-1895
Brian P. Clarke
13 Amazing Grace
Studies in Evangelicalism in Australia, Britain, Canada, and the United States
George Rawlyk and Mark A. Noll, editors
14 Children of Peace
W. John Mclntyre
15 A Solitary Pillar
Montreal's Anglican Church and the Quiet Revolution
Joan Marshall
16 Padres in No Man's Land

Canadian Chaplains and the Great War
Duff Crerar
17 Christian Ethics and Political Economy in North America

A Critical Analysis of U.S. and Canadian Approaches
P. Travis Kroeker
18 Pilgrims in Lotus Land

Conservative Protestantism in British Columbia, 1917-1981
Robert K. Burkinshaw
19 Through Sunshine and Shadow

The Woman's Christian Temperance Union, Evangelicalism, and Reform in Ontario,
1874-1930
Sharon Cook
20 Church, College, and Clergy

A History of Theological Education at Knox College, Toronto, 1844-1994
Brian J. Fraser
21 The Lord's Dominion

The History of Canadian Methodism
Neil Semple
22 A Full-Orbed Christianity
The Protestant Churches and Social Welfare in Canada, 1900-1940
Nancy Christie and Michael Gauvreau
23 Evangelism and Apostasy

The Evolution and Impact of Evangelicals in Modern Mexico
Kurt Bowen
24 The Chignecto Covenanters

A Regional History of Reformed Presbyterianism in New Brunswick and Nova
Scotia, 1827 to 1905
Eldon Hay
25 Methodists and Women's Education in Ontario, 1836-1925

Johanna M. Selles
26 Puritanism and Historical Controversy

William Lamont
SERIES TWO In memory of George Rawlyk
Donald Harman Akenson, Editor
Marguerite Bourgeoys and Montreal, 1640-1665

Patricia Simpson
Aspects of the Canadian Evangelical Experience

Edited by G.A. Rawlyk

Christian Humanism and Renaissance Literature
John Spencer Hill
The Contribution of Presbyterianism to the Maritime Provinces of Canada

Charles H.H. Scobie and G.A. Rawlyk, editors
Christian Humanism and
Renaissance Literature
JOHN SPENCER HILL
McGill-Queen's University Press

Montreal & Kingston • London • Buffalo
© McGill-Queen's University Press 1997
ISBN 0-7735-1661-1
Legal deposit fourth quarter 1997

Bibliotheque nationale du Quebec
Printed in the United States of America

on acid-free paper
This book has been published with the help of a grant

from the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of
Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences
and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Funding
has also been received from the Faculty of Arts,
University of Ottawa.
McGill-Queen's University Press acknowledges the

support received for its publishing program from the
Canada Council's Block Grants program.
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
Hill, John Spencer, 1943-

Infinity, faith and time : Christian humanism and
Renaissance literature
(McGill-Queen's studies in the history of religion)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7735-1661-1
i. European literature - Renaissance, 1450-1600 -
History and criticism. 2. Humanism in literature.
3. Infinite in literature. 4. Time in literature, i. Title.
ii. Series.
PN721.H54 1997 8o9.8'94'o903 097-900674-0
Typeset in Palatino 10/12

by Caractera inc., Quebec City
in patris matrisque memoriam
Harry Simon Hill (1908-1961)

Marion Isobel Hill (1910-1991)
This page intentionally left blank
Contents
Preface xi
PART ONE THE E X P A N D I N G UNIVERSE
1 Fides Quaerens Intellectum 3

2 The Aristotelian Cosmos 13
3 Nicholas of Cusa and the New Astronomy 17
4 Rational Spirituality and Empirical Rationalism 28
5 Chorismos and Methexis: Pascal, Traherne, Milton 40
PART TWO TIME
6 Chronos and Kairos 69

7 Inner Time: Augustine and Bergson 78
8 Time, Literature, and Literary Criticism 88
9 Time in Shakespeare 104
10 Heilsgeschischte: Typology and the Helix of History 127
Appendix One: Notes Toward a Protestant Poetic 137

Appendix Two: Translations from Pascal's Pensees 154
x Contents
Notes 157
Bibliography 185
Index 195
Preface
The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the
pastness of the past, but of its presence. The historical sense
compels a man to write not merely with his own generation
in his bones, but with the feeling that the whole of the
literature of Europe from Homer ... has a simultaneous
existence and composes a simultaneous order. T.S. Eliot
This book explores two topics - space and time - that illustrate, in
distinct but related ways, the importance for Renaissance literature
of a powerful and pervasive tradition of Christian Platonist rational
spirituality. Rejecting the heterodoxy of Hermetic (and Gnostic) Neo-
platonism and the protopositivism of Baconian and Hobbesian ratio-
nalism, major Renaissance writers drew on and adapted to their own
needs the solidly orthodox fides qu&rens intellectum tradition that ran
back, through Augustine and Boethius, to roots in the Christian Pla-
tonism of Clement of Alexandria. The influence of this tradition and
its importance for Renaissance humanism have been overshadowed,
on the one hand, by a scholarly infatuation with Florentine Neopla-
tonism and its offshoots and, on the other, by a post-Enlightenment
prejudice that faith and reason are incompatible and that, in conse-
quence, Renaissance "rationalism" must necessarily be a material
anticipation of post-Renaissance scepticism and secularism. The pur-
pose of Infinity, Faith, and Time is to illustrate that, while the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries opened much that was new in the way
man interpreted his world, they were also centuries when he was
able, with more success than in succeeding times, to make room for
new ideas without rejecting old beliefs.
Part i, "The Expanding Universe," focuses on astronomy and
is concerned with the impact of the idea of spatial infinity on
seventeenth-century literature. Following an analysis of Clement of
Alexandria's rational spirituality - an analysis more lengthy than
would have been necessary if his thought were better known and
xii Preface
represented than it is in literary critical history - and a brief discus-

sion of the "closed" Aristotelian-Ptolemaic universe, the argument
considers the metaphysical cosmology of Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa,
an important fifteenth-century Platonist whose anticipation of
Copernican ideas (together with the theological context in which
Cusanus framed them) provided Renaissance writers with a method
for construing the vastness of space as the symbol both of divine
omnipotence and of human spiritual potential. Far from being "the
last great philosopher of the dying middle ages" (Koyre), Nicholas
of Cusa was the fountainhead of a vital (and orthodox) religious
humanism that deeply influenced Christian thinkers for two hun-
dred years.
The next section of the argument (chap. 4) explores the beginnings
of the tension, particularly after Galileo's invention of the telescope,
between the'nascent scientific rationalism of Bacon, Hobbes, and
Newton, and a Cusaean rational spirituality; and various early
responses - Donne, Herbert, Burton - to the new astronomy are
briefly examined. In the final chapter of part i (chap. 5), the impli-
cations of an infinite universe are explored in detail in the work of
Pascal, Traherne, and Milton, three writers whose differences have
tended to mask the central theme that unites them: namely, a para-
doxical conviction that an interminate universe, while drawing
attention to the vast distance that separates man from God (choris-
mos), nevertheless opens up for man, as imago Dei, the opportunity
to participate (methexis) in the infinite divine through the exercise of
rationally assisted faith. The chapter concludes with a rereading of
the cosmology of Paradise Lost that explores the symbolic implica-
tions for Milton's human theme of the epic's physical cosmos.
The subject of part 2 is Time. As much as the discovery of the
vastness of interstellar space, the Renaissance discovery of time
(facilitated by the invention of sophisticated, accurate, and readily
available timepieces) opened a new world to the inquiring spirits of
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. While secular poets were
content to revive a version of the old Horatian carpe diem, Christian
humanists turned to Augustine to fashion a philosophy that inter-
preted temporal passage as the necessary condition of experience,
without making it the essence or ultimate measure of human purpose.
Following a brief analysis of the difference between the Greek view
of time as quantitative chronos and the Hebrew view of it as qualita-
tive kairos (chap. 6), the argument explores (chap. 7) the implications
of the two major Western philosophies that treat time as a psycho-
logical phenomenon (those of Augustine and Bergson). The follow-
ing chapter contrasts the future-oriented concept of time in late
xiii Preface
medieval and Renaissance literature - a view dependent upon

Augustine - with the past-obsessed vision, traceable in large part to
Bergson, that is so prevalent in twentieth-century literature (Proust,
Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner) and that has been tacitly carried over by
modern literary criticism, through a kind of cultural osmosis, into
the analysis of literary texts, including those of the Renaissance.
Chapter 9 is devoted to Shakespeare, the most complex and pro-
lific Renaissance explorer of time, and argues that his experiments
with the shapes of time in plays as diverse as Troilus and Cressida,
Macbeth, and The Winter's Tale comprise a gallery of heuristic time-
centred fictions that seek to understand, in a very Augustinian way,
the possibilities and consequences of human existence in time. The
last chapter deals with the question of typology and post figuration
in Renaissance literature - an idea rooted in Pauline typology and
Irenaeus' doctrine of "recapitulation" - and explores ways in which
some of the major Christian writers of the later Middle Ages and
Renaissance, from Malory to Milton, construe human history and
individual experience in time as a Heilsgeschischte that conflates clas-
sical (circular) and biblical (linear) models of time.
The book also contains an appendix, "Notes Toward a Protestant
Poetic," that deals briefly - against the backdrop of England's effort
to define itself as a Protestant nation - with the attempt of English
poets to elaborate a specifically Protestant poetic. The emphasis falls
on the doctrine of solifidianism and suggests ways in which that
most important of Reformed doctrines determined the way in which
the major religious poets, whether Anglican or Puritan, conceived
their art. Protestant emphasis on salvation history and the Pauline
stages of salvation set out in Romans (8:29-30) - foreknowledge,
predestination, calling, justification, glorification - constitute both a
central theme and a shaping pattern in the religious poetry of the
period. Using Milton's De Doctrina Christiana as a prose gloss, the
argument explores the use made of the five stages of Pauline soteri-
ology in works by Marlowe, Shakespeare, Milton, Donne, Herbert,
and Traherne.
Scholarly books, though written alone in quiet rooms and often late
at night, are seldom - if ever - the products of a single brain. In the
preparation of the present work, I owe a debt of gratitude to those
writers who have trod the ground before me, often inspiring, some-
times irritating, but always instructing me. I wish, too, to record my
special thanks to four colleagues at the University of Ottawa who set
aside their own work in order to read the manuscript in various
xiv Preface
drafts and to make valuable suggestions: Camille La Bossiere, David

Jeffrey, Irene Makaryk, and David Shore. To my wife and three chil-
dren, who have given up much over many years, I am profoundly
grateful for gifts of unflagging patience, constant love, and support.
My only regret is that my parents, to whose memories the work is
dedicated, did not live to hold the book and turn its pages.
PART ONE
The Expanding Universe
Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too

superstitious. For as I passed by, and beheld your devotions,
I found an altar with this inscription, TO THE UNKNOWN GOD.
Whom therefore ye ignorantly worship, him declare I
unto you. Acts 17: 22-3
The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The
madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason
... He is in the clean and well-lit prison of one idea: he is
sharpened to one painful point. G.K. Chesterton1
i Fides Qu&rens Intellectum
The relationship between faith and reason is the fundamental prob-

lem of Christian theology. Indeed, in a revealed religion, the question
arises as to whether theological discourse is, rationally speaking,
even possible. Since faith is a revelation of grace (gratia gratis) in the
individual soul - a private apocatypsis that echoes and confirms the
public revelation recorded in Scripture - then what is the function
and what are the legitimate aspirations of reason? In what way, if at
all, can the logical and philosophic categories of rational inquiry
serve as instruments of knowledge about God when the end of that
knowledge is, through grace, already its own datum and when the
search for truth commences from the possession of it? In the context
of revealed faith, the discursive power of reason might seem to be,
at best, tautological and, at worst, subversive.
The late second and early third centuries mark a time when Chris-
tian theology, advancing beyond defensive apologetics, was being
born as a formal, disciplined response to the threat of a Gnostic
theosophy that sought to substitut ;) for faith. In ) for faith. In
the writings of the Fathers of this formative period there is, not sur-
prisingly, evidence of a radical divergence in opinion over the role
and value of natural reason and the acceptable limits of the relations
between reason and revelation. Although the debate was occasioned
by Gnosticism, whose origins are at least as much Oriental as Hel-
lenic, it took shape in patristic thought as a disagreement over the
achievements of Greek philosophy and the relevance, or lack of it, of
4 The Expanding Universe
Greek wisdom for those baptized into the Christian covenant of

grace.
At one extreme is Tertullian, who dismisses pagan learning with
contempt. Whereas, he says, the very simplest Christian labourer
knows and manifests God, even Plato himself among the Greeks
ended at last, for all his vaunted perspicuity, by confessing that the
Creator was not easy to discover and, when found, not easy to make
known to others. "So then where," Tertullian demands, "is there any
likeness between the Christian and the philosopher? between the
disciple of Greece and of heaven? between the man whose object is
fame, and whose object is life?" (Apologeticum 46; see ANF 3:51). For
Tertullian, heresies and pagan philosophy are cognate, the former
indeed "instigated" (subornantur) by the latter. The same subjects are
central to both, the same arguments employed by both. Philosophy
is the seedbed of heresy. Appealing to the authority of the Apostle
Paul, "who had been at Athens, and had in his interviews (with its
philosophers) become acquainted with that human wisdom which
pretends to know the truth, whilst it only corrupts it," Tertullian
banished all pagan thought and any prospect of cooperation between
Christians and the old philosophers:
What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What concord is there

between the Academy and the Church? what between heretics and Chris-
tians ... Away with all attempts to produce a mottled Christianity of Stoic,
Platonic, and dialectic composition! We want no curious disputation after
possessing Christ Jesus, no inquisition after enjoying the gospel! With our
faith, we desire no further belief. (De Prxscriptione Hxreticorum 7; see ANF
3:246)'
Credo quia impossible, far from being the last refuge of an embarrassed
credulity, is the ironic gibe of unbending faith.
But Tertullian's view was not destined to triumph. In the writings
of Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen we meet the
beginnings of a spirituality anxious to accommodate reason and
more than willing to make room for those parts of Greek philosophy
that, like Plato's intuitional metaphysic and the puritan ethics of Sto-
icism, could be quarried to bolster the anti-Gnostic ideal of an ascetic
life inspired and directed by a truly rational faith. The distance
between these writers and Tertullian is summed up in one pregnant
phrase in Clement's Stromateis (6.14): "Now to know is more than to
bi, PG 9 Pg 9:332). In the
end it was this view that, through the influence of Augustine, was
to dominate academic Christianity, leaving the germ of Tertullian's
5 Fides Quserens Intellectum
uncompromising fideism to be developed by mystics and embraced

unsystematically in the hearts of simple believers.
Later and more sophisticated than Justin Martyr, yet earlier and
less doctrinally contentious than Origen, Clement of Alexandria pro-
vides a useful introduction to the rational spirituality of this group
of early Fathers. For Clement, in the first place, since reason and
revelation are complementary, it follows that philosophy, which seeks
to make men virtuous, is not the product of vice but the work of God.
Like Justin Martyr (and Philo Judaeus) before him, he considered
philosophy "a divine gift" (Stromateis 1.2; see ANF 2:303), a prepara-
tion for the gospel, "given to the Greeks as a covenant peculiar to
them - being, as it is, a stepping-stone to the philosophy which is
according to Christ" (6.8; ANF 2:495). As the Law was given to the
Jews, so Greek philosophy - whose principle doctrines were taken,
Clement believed, from the Hebrews - was, in its own way, proleptic
of Christian truth: "Now the Greek philosophy, as it were, purges the
soul, and prepares it beforehand for the reception of faith, on which
the Truth builds up the edifice of knowledge" (7.3; ANF 2:528). Yet
Clement, too, though he marvelled at Plato as an instinctive Trinitar-
ian (5.14) and praised him (like Numenius the Pythagorean) as a
"Moses speaking in Attic Greek" (1.23; ANF 2:334-5) could be sharply
critical of classical tradition, "the whole of which, like nuts, is not
eatable" (1.1; ANF 2:3oo).2 His admiration for Greek humanism was
both profound and profoundly qualified: "He loved Plato and
Homer, but he did not read them on his knees" (Chadwick 37).
The essence of Clement's theology may be stated in a sentence:
"For the gates of the Word are gates of reason, opened by the key of
faith" (Protrepticus i).3 First principles being indemonstrable, knowl-
edge of the causa causarum, or first cause of the universe, is accessible
to faith alone; but faith, while superior to reason and indeed its cri-
terion, must be advanced and sustained by rational demonstration.
"Knowledge, accordingly, is characterized by faith; and faith, by a
kind of divine mutual and reciprocal correspondence, becomes char-
acterized by knowledge" (Stromateis 2.4; see ANF 2:35o).4 What, then,
does such a rational faith (or fideist reason) in fact know? This is a
complex question that we may begin to answer by specifying what
it does not know. It does not in any absolute sense know God,
although, by the grace of faith, it knows of him. In contrast to the
pagan deities whose likenesses are figured in stone and paint, the
true God cannot be imaged, except negatively, even in the immaterial
conceptions of the mind. In a passage that anticipates the via negativa
of Pseudo-Dionysius as well as Nicholas of Cusa's docta ignorantia,
Clement likens the knowledge of God to a dialectical regression,
analogous to the contemplation of a geometrical point, that advances

understanding negatively:
We shall understand the mode ... of contemplation by ... advancing by

analysis to the first notion, beginning with the properties underlying it;
abstracting from the body its physical properties, taking away the dimension
of depth, then that of breadth, then that of length. For the point which
remains is a unit, so to speak, having position; from which if we abstract
position, there is the conception of unity.
If, then, abstracting all that belongs to bodies and things called incorpo-
real, we cast ourselves into the greatness of Christ, and thence advance into
immensity by holiness, we may reach somehow to the conception of the
Almighty, knowing not what He is, but what He is not (
(strromateis 5.11; NNF 2:461)
But if the transcendent First Cause exists beyond "space, and time,
and name, and conception," what positive knowledge about Him is
possible? The answer, for Clement, is found in Christ - the divine
Logos, the Word of God: "God, then, being not a subject for demon-
stration, cannot be the object of science. But the Son is wisdom, and
knowledge, and truth, and all else that has affinity thereto. He is also
susceptible of demonstration and of description. And all the powers
of the Spirit, becoming collectively one thing, terminate in the same
point - that is, in the Son" (Stromateis 4.25; see ANF 2:438).5
Clement's Christology, which antedates the homoousion formula of
Nicaea by more than a century, has sometimes been suspected of
proto-Monarchianism, but there is no reason to read it in this way.
While "the Son is, so to ) of the Father," OF THE HE fATHER,"ATHE E R,""
He is also clearly a separate and distinct ousia, and not merely the
modal extension of the Father as Divine Reason. If Clement's Trinitar-
ianism is vaguer than we might wish, it is no doubt because, living
before Sabellius and Noerus were born, he knew no reason to be more
precise. But what he does say is clear enough. The Father is known
only in and through the Logos operating in us, by the agency of the
Holy Spirit, as knowledge: "For the Word of the Father of the uni-
verse is no ), but the wisdom BUT THE WIS
and most manifest kindness of God," and "they who seek Him after
the true search, praising the Lord, shall be filled with the gift that
comes from God, that is, knowledge." Being "always everywhere and
contained nowhere,"6 Christ is the eternal and universal Tutor, the
Psedagogus of men (Clement wrote an engaging treatise on the
theme); and it was He who, among other things, "gave philosophy to
the Greeks by means of the inferior angels" (Stromateis 7.2, 5.1, 7.2;
see ANF 2:525, 445-7, 524)7
7 Fides Quxrens Intellectum
What then of man? As Christ is divine Reason, so man, created in

His image, is for Clement the image of Reason - an imago Dei by
virtue, that is to say, of being an imago Verbi: "For the image of God
is His Word, the genuine Son of Mind, the Divine Word, the arche-
typal light of light; and the image of the Word is the true man, the
mind which is in man, who is therefore said to have been made 'in
the image and likeness of God' [Gen. 1:26], assimilated to the Divine
Word in the affections of the soul, and therefore rational." (Protrepti-
cus 10; see ANF 2:i99).8 There can be no knowledge, no assimilation
to the divine, however, without faith. Scripture itself declares that
faith is the precondition of knowledge: "unless ye believe, neither
will ye understand" (Isa. 7:9 Lxx).9 Faith is not earned, but given; it
is prelogical, an unwilled but not unwilling assent to prevenient
prompting, and Clement defines it as "a preconception of the mind,"
"a grace which conducts from what is indemonstrable to what is
universal and simple," "an internal good [which,] without searching
for God, confesses His existence, and glorifies Him as existent," "a
comprehensive knowledge of the essentials" (
) (Stromateis 5.1, 2.4, 7.10; see ANF 2:446-7, 350, 538-9). At the
same time, however, faith "must not be inert and alone, but "accom-
panied with investigation"; it is not a static possession but a dynamic
process implying the cooperation of intuition and analysis in a lived
hermeneutic spiralling up, through advancing gnosis, from ideata
towards Idea. Reason, on the other hand, "is a concurrent and co-
operating cause of true apprehension ... which acts in conjunction
with [faith], being of itself incapable of operating by itself." Philoso-
phy is the "systematic Wisdom" that flows from the search for truth,
resulting in the "sure and irrefragable apprehension of things divine
and human": "This wisdom - rectitude of soul and of reason, and
purity of life - is the object of the desire of philosophy, which is
kindly and lovingly disposed towards wisdom, and does everything
to attain it." In sum, then, faith is the capacity of spiritual recogni-
tion, while "knowledge ... is the perfection of faith" (
) effected through the exercise of reason. Together, they con-
stitute the possibility of a spiritual Erlebnis that, over time and with
dedication, conforms the rational believer to the image of Reason
and transforms him "from a good and faithful servant into a friend"
of God (Stromateis 1.20, 6.7, 6.18, 7.11; see ANF 2:323, 492-3, 519,
54o).10 This is the true Gnostic.
The life of the Gnostic is an ascent from faith through knowledge
and virtue to a proleptic participation in the joys of heaven. Knowl-
edge is not born with men but acquired, and its acquisition demands
application, training and progress, until, from practice, it passes into
habit. Ever intent on intellectual objects, the true Gnostic traces his
path through human affairs by reference to archetypes above, as a

navigator steers his ship by the stars. Far from avoiding the chal-
lenge of heretical Gnosticism, Clement attacked it on its own ground,
opposing to its specious gnosis (an occult revelation reserved for an
aristocracy of initiates) the universal knowledge of the one Saviour
revealed individually to each and held in common by all: "He is the
true Only-begotten, the express image of the glory of the universal
King and Almighty Father, who impresses on the [true] Gnostic the
seal of the perfect contemplation, according to His own image; so
that there is now a third divine image), ),
made as far as possible like the Second Cause, the Essential Life,
through which we live the true life" (Stromateis 7.3; see ANF 2:527, PG
9.421)."
Attachment to intellectual objects naturally becomes an influence
that draws the true Gnostic away from objects of sense and the mate-
rial world, so that "as those, who are at sea held by an anchor, pull
at the anchor, but do not drag it to them, but drag themselves to the
anchor; so those who, according to the gnostic life, draw God
towards them, imperceptibly bring themselves to God." The true
science of knowledge, which the Gnostic alone possesses, is the sure
n God's l s: "For that he is made in God's likeness:"For
the image of God is the divine and royal Word, the impassible12 man;
and the image of the image is the human mind." True Gnostics are
oi (j)iX6oo(()Oi lot) 0eot), the philosophers of God. And for Clement,
"he who is in [such] a state of knowledge, being assimilated as far
as possible tlready is already
spiritual, and so elect" (Stromateis 4.23, 5.14, 6.14, 4.26; see ANF 2:437,
466, 505, 44o).13
But knowledge in Clement's sense is not mere passive intellection.
Assimilation implies an active virtue:
Christian conduct is the operation of the rational soul in accordance with a

correct judgment and aspiration after the truth, which attains its destined
end through the body, the soul's consort and ally ...14 The true Gnostic is
one who is [fashioned] after the image and likeness of God, who imitates
God as far as possible, deficient in none of the things which contribute to
the likeness as far as compatible, practising self-restraint and endurance,
living righteously, reigning over the passions, bestowing of what he has as
far as possible, and doing good both by word and deed." (Pxdagogus 13; see
ANF 2:235)
Knowledge prompts ppractice, and practice in turn produduces

habit or disposition. The Gnostic is a spiritual wrestler, a "true
9 Fides Quxrens Intellectum
athlete" who, "in the great stadium, the fair world, is crowned for
the true victory over all the passions. For He who prescribes the
contest is the Almighty God, and He who awards the prize is the
only-begotten Son of God. Angels and gods are spectators; and the
contest ... is ... against the spiritual powers of inordinate passions
that work through the flesh. He who obtains the mastery in these
struggles ... wins immortality." Adorned with virtue that is the joint
result of nature, training, and reason, the purified soul is the earthly
image of divine wisdom and power, the true imago Dei. His life is a
living prayer and, like the divine Paedagogus whose image he bears,
his life is devoted to instruction, for "he who is made like the Saviour
is also devoted to saving." In rectitude of life, then, as in depth of
knowledge and love, the true Gnostic, "to speak compendiously
makes up for the absence of the apostles" (Stromateis 2.19, 7.3, 6.9,
7.12; see ANF 2:369, 528, 498, 545).
In the third and fourth centuries the Hellenistic sympathies of the
early Fathers were reconfirmed by Eusebius of Caesaerea and the
Cappadocian Gregory of Nyssa. Although critical of Plato's doc-
trines, Eusebius, as is evident in the fifteen books of his Prseparatio
Evangelica, shared the view of Justin Martyr, Clement, and Origen
that Plato and Moses were fundamentally in agreement and that
Greek philosophy was a preparation for Christianity. Gregory of
Nyssa, "the first real founder of systematic mystical theology"
(Copleston 2(i):5o), drew on both Plato and Plotinus in elaborating
a doctrine of the soul's ascent through various stages of rational
assent to ecstatic participation in the divine darkness. Although
actual growth is the work of the Logos, the human soul, a divine
etKobv (image, likeness) implanted at baptism, advances toward truth
by a rational and willing cooperation with effecting grace, so that
faith and reason in Gregory of Nyssa's system are synergic to the
point where reason, no longer needed, is willingly abandoned.15
While the philosophic mysticism of Gregory of Nyssa was an
important source for writers like Pseudo-Dionysius and Bonaven-
ture, undoubtedly the greatest influence on the subsequent Christian
Platonist tradition of rational spirituality was St Augustine. No one
did more than he to establish the union of reason and faith and to
reconcile Plato with Paul. Platonism, indeed, was instrumental in his
own conversion to Christianity. It is perfectly clear, as Father
Copleston has said, that the famous scene of illumination in the
garden (Confessions 8.8-12) is the record of a moral conversion that
was preceded by an intellectual conversion occasioned by the read-
ing of certain "Platonic" treatises (Plotinus and some Porphyry), as
the result of which he was able to free himself from Manichaean
io The Expanding Universe
gnosticism and "to see the reasonableness of Christianity" (Copies-

ton 2(i):58). From the Platonists whom he then began to read he
learned that evil was not a primal cosmic power but merely an
aspect, indeed a privative rather than positive aspect, of a universe
far greater, far more wonderful and mysterious than anything con-
ceived by Manes. "I perceived therefore, and it was made plain unto
me, that all things are good which [God has] made" (Con/. 7.12;
Augustine1 1:377). Plotinus, in short, caused him to reconsider his
ontology and epistemology.
Sensation, according to Augustine, is the lowest level of knowl-
edge and above it are ratio and intellectus. The latter leads to wisdom
(sapientia), the highest human knowing; wisdom is contemplative
and concerned with the apprehension of eternal realities. Ratio, on
the other hand, results in conceptual knowledge (scientia) and knows
intelligible truths contingently, that is, only in and through its per-
ception of the sensible world.16 (In Augustine's Platonic psychology,
all knowing is spiritual knowing: even sense-knowledge is an activ-
ity of the soul effected through the instrument of the body.17) But,
while the contents of human knowledge are derived from sense and
the concepts formed by reflection on sensory experience, it is only
through direct divine illumination that the human mind is able to
relate the truths of sense and reason to universal, necessary, and
certain truth. As the sun's light makes physical things visible to the
eye, so divine illumination reveals eternal truth to the mind. A crea-
ture can no more illuminate its own mind than the world can become
its own sun: the light comes from above. And what does this divine
light reveal? Primarily this: that the self-reflexive human mind,
God's image, is a seeking thing that does not know itself except to
know that it must seek its identity in God. Sapientia is the progressive
quest for that identity.
Quod intelligimus igitur, debemus rationi: quod credimus, auctoritati
("What then we understand, we owe to reason; what we believe, to
authority [De Utilitate Credendi 1.11.25; PL 42-83; PNF1 3:359]). Faith
precedes reason and is the preparation for it, but faith, in turn,
requires reason for the illuminated soul to advance in understand-
ing. "Unless believing is different from understanding," Augustine
says in De Libero Arbitrio (2.2.6), "and unless we first believe the great
and divine thing that we desire to understand, the prophet has said
in vain, 'Unless you believe, you shall not understand' [Isa. 7:9 LXX]
... For what is believed without being known cannot be said to have
been found, and no one can become fit for finding God unless he
believes first what he shall know afterwards" (Augustine3 39).l8
Reason and faith are integrated and mutually sustaining: to believe is
ii Fides Quaerens Intellectum
to think with assent.^ The fullest exposition of the theme is in an

elegantly witty letter that is not often cited. Written about 410, it is
addressed to Consentius who, in previous correspondence, had
declared it his private principle that "truth is to be grasped by faith
more than by reason." He has written again, this time to ask ques-
tions about the Trinity, and Augustine replies:
See, then, according to [your own] words whether you should not in this
matter, which is the very heart of our faith, follow only the authority of the
saints, and not ask me to make it intelligible to you by reason. For, when I
begin to induct you, so to speak, into the understanding of such a great
mystery - and if God does not aid us interiorly, I shall not be able to do so
- I shall not do anything else in my discussion but give you such reason as
I can. Consequently, if you are not unreasonable in asking of me or of any
other teacher, to make you understand what you believe, you should change
your statement of principle, not to lessen the value of faith, but so that you
may see by the light of reason what you now hold by faith.
God forbid that He should hate in us that faculty by which He made us
superior to all other living beings. Therefore, we must refuse so to believe
as not to receive or seek a reason for our belief, since we could not believe
at all if we did not have rational souls. So, then, in some points that bear on
the doctrine of salvation, which we are not yet able to grasp by reason - but
we shall be able to sometime - let faith precede reason, and let the heart be
cleansed by faith so as to receive and bear the great light of reason; this
indeed is reasonable. Therefore the Prophet said with reason: "If you will not
believe, you will not understand" [Isa. 7:9 LXX]; whereby he undoubtedly
made a distinction between these two things and advised us to believe first
so as to be able to understand whatever we believe. It is, then, a reasonable
requirement that faith precede reason, for, if this requirement is not reason-
able, then it is contrary to reason, which God forbid. But, if it is reasonable
that faith precede a certain great reason which cannot yet be grasped, there
is no doubt that, however slight the reason which proves this, it does pre-
cede faith. (Letter 120 1.2-3; Augustine2 2:3oi-2)20
One hopes that Consentius was himself something of an ironist.

Credo ut intelligam (I believe in order that I may understand) was
the central feature of medieval Augustmianism and was developed
in a variety of ways and with a variety of emphases by later thinkers:
Boethius, Erigena, Anselm, the Victorines, and Bonaventure, to name
the most prominent.21 It was also central to the thought of Nicholas
of Cusa in the fifteenth century and became, largely through him, the
grounding tenet of that Renaissance Christian humanism that over
the next two centuries, against the rising tide of scientific rationalism,
sought to articulate a copulative theology able to accommodate the

sermo scientiae of empirical discovery (especially in the new astron-
omy) to the sermo sapientiae of historical and personal revelation.
But this is to anticipate. It is appropriate here to close with Saint
Anselm, to whom we owe the formula credo ut intelligam. Writing
"from the point of view of one trying to raise his mind to contem-
plate God and seeking to understand what he believes (qwerentis
intelligere quod credit)," Anselm opens the Proslogion - whose subtitle
is Fides quxrens intellectum - with a prayer for illuminated under-
standing:
Teach me to seek You, and reveal Yourself to me as I seek, because I can

neither seek You if You do not teach me how, nor find You unless You reveal
Yourself ... I do not try, Lord, to attain Your lofty heights, because my under-
standing is in no way equal to it. But I do desire to understand Your truth
a little, that truth that my heart believes and loves. For I do not seek to
understand so that I may believe; but I believe so that I may understand (sed
credo ut intelligam). For I believe this also, that "unless I believe, I shall not
understand." (Anselm 103-4, ii5)22
"Well then, Lord/' he continues, "You who give understanding to

faith, grant me that I may understand" - and there follows the
famous ontological argument that is the fruit of his believing search
for rational understanding: te esse aliquid quo nihil mains cogitari possit
("You are something than which nothing greater can be thought"
[Anselm 116-17]).
2 The Aristotelian Cosmos
Like the towns that were built, the cosmos devised by medieval cos-
mologists was a walled enclosure. From the static central Earth nine
concentric spheres expanded outward: first, the seven "planets,"
then a stellatum of fixed stars and, last, the primum mobile whose
turning imparted motion to the inner spheres. Around the outer
edge, compassing and protective, ran "that mightie shining christall
wall, / Wherewith [God] hath encompassed this All" (Spenser, Fowre
Hymnes 4.41-2), which bounded the created universe and separated
it from heaven, which, in the old maps (figure i), was marked as the
habitaculum Dei et omnium electorum (dwelling-place of God and all
the elect).
The origins of this familiar picture may be traced back to
Ptolemy's Almagest ( or "Mathe- or "Mahhe-
matical System") and beyond that to the Hellenistic geometrician
Apollonius, the astronomer Hipparchus, and back finally to the the-
oretical foundations laid by Aristotle in Books 3-4 of the Physics and
in De Caelo. According to the latter, the cosmos is characterised by
five qualities. First, it is circular: "the shape of the heaven is of neces-
sity spherical," both because the circle is the primary geometrical
form and because circularity accounts for the empirical phenomena
(286b.io-n). Second, it is eternal: "the heaven as a whole neither
came into being nor admits of destruction ... but is one and eternal,
with no end or beginning of its total duration, containing and
embracing in itself the infinity of time" (283^27-9). Third, it is
immutable: being spherical in shape, it follows that its motion is
h
Fig. i The Aristotelian-Ptolemaic cosmos. From Peter Apian, Cosmographia (1539)
regular and "returns upon itself without a break" (2883.14-27) and,

being eternal, "it is exempt from decay and generation" (277^28).
Fourth, it is finite in size: "it is clear that an infinite body is an
impossibility" (2733.22) - that is to say, nothing with a shape can be
infinite without ceasing to have a shape. By definition, therefore,
infinity is amorphous; an "infinite" spherical universe is thus a con-
tradiction in terms, for the cosmos, "which moves in a circle, must
necessarily be finite in every respect" (271^26). Finally, it is unique:
"neither are there now, nor have there ever been, nor can there ever
be formed more heavens than one, but this heaven of ours is one and
unique and complete" (2793.9-11).
There are three noteworthy facts about this cosmology: (i) how
late, relatively speaking, it came to northern Europe, (2) how short a
15 The Aristotelian Cosmos
time its formal dominance lasted, and (3) how long it survived in the
public mind after its theoretical (and even physical) supports had
been swept away.
For the first thousand years of Christianity the received cosmology
was that of Genesis. While De Caelo and the Almagest remained the
textbooks of Byzantium and the Arab world, Greek science suffered
total eclipse in the West, where pagan astronomical speculation was
supplanted by the auctoritas of patristic literalism.1 It was not until
the eighth century that Greek scientific thought began hesitantly, in
works like Bede's De Natura Rerum, to raise its head over the para-
pets of theological doctrine; and it was not until the twelfth century,
when the works of Aristotle made their way from Arab Spain to
Christian France, that the major texts, after a hiatus of eight centu-
ries, again became available in the West. In the following century,
through the efforts of Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas (both
of whom wrote commentaries on De Caelo), Aristotle's authority in
cosmology became firmly entrenched as an integral part of the Scho-
lastic effort to coordinate the data of faith with the categories of
reason and to achieve a deeper understanding of revelation through
logic, analogy, and definition.
But Aristotle's reign in Scholastic cosmology was short-lived.
Indeed, as Pierre Duhem has shown, "all the essential principles" of
his theoretical physics were overthrown in the following century, and
it was only "a strange delusion" on the part of later sixteenth-century
astronomers to pretend that "Peripatetic physics, that dark den of
error, [had] just succumbed to their blows, and that they had built
upon its ruins, as if by magic, the bright domain of truth" (Duhem 3).
In fact, the death-blow had been delivered three centuries earlier,
when, in March 1277, a scant three years after the death of Thomas
Aquinas, Etienne Tempier, Bishop of Paris, formally condemned more
than two hundred Aristotelian propositions as contrary to Catholic
doctrine. Aristotelian physics, for example, rejected an infinite cosmos
not only as a matter of practical reality; it denied even the possibility
of infinity. But a creation that is finite implies, ipso facto, a Creator
limited by that same necessity - thus contradicting the doctrine of
divine omnipotence. As with infinity, so it was too with the possibility
of terrestrial movement, and atoms, and void space, and a plurality
of worlds. Aristotle rejected them all, even in the abstract, and so
imposed limitations on God's omnipotence. But Tempier's anathema
of 1277 - an event Duhem calls "the birth certificate of modern phys-
ics" (Duhem 4) - broke the hold of medieval Aristotelianism and
made necessary both a new physics and a new cosmology. The result,
as Duhem has demonstrated with immense erudition, was that as
fourteenth-century Scholasticism worked to replace the condemned

teachings of Aristotle (and Aquinas) it anticipated many of the essen-
tial conclusions of Copernican astronomy. Thus Scholastic theology,
although the fact has not been widely acknowledged by modern his-
torians of science, was the mainspring of medieval science.
In spite of the Bishop of Paris and the labours of late Scholasticism,
however, the Aristotelian universe endured unimpaired in the pop-
ular mind until the beginning of the seventeenth century. Before the
invention of the telescope, the ordered finitude of the old astronomy
seemed to most the only hypothesis capable at once of honouring
God and saving the observable phenomena. But in reality its strength
lay, not in the scientific conviction it compelled - astronomy before
Kepler and Galileo was in any case a theoretical rather than an
empirical discipline - but in its appeal to far deeper human needs:
the desire for security, harmony, and rational order. It was these psy-
chological factors that kept Aristotelian cosmology alive for two cen-
turies after its theoretical supports had crumbled and disappeared.2
To the modern mind, perhaps the most striking feature of the Aris-
totelian universe is that it was, considered spatially a closed system
within narrowly defined spatial limits - a hortus condusus of sorts.
Although finite, it was still vast: the distance from earth to Saturn
was estimated by Maimonides at some 125 million miles - "a journey
of nearly eight thousand seven hundred solar years, [assuming an
average day's travel of] forty legal miles of two thousand ordinary
cubits" (Maimonides 277). But, taken all in all, it was a manageable
universe in spite of its size, a universe easily picturable by imagina-
tion. It was not alien and it inspired no agoraphobia in those who
contemplated it. To gaze into the night sky, as the lovers do in
Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice (5.1.58-61) -
Look how the floor of heaven

Is thick inlaid with patens of bright gold.
There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st
But in his motion like an angel sings -
was to gaze into the cope of a grand cathedral, not to feel dwarfed
to insignificance by numberless galaxies spinning through unimag-
inable reaches of space. Yet even as Lorenzo was wooing Jessica with
comforting words, the old cosmology was collapsing. One by one
Aristotle's doctrines of sphericity, immutability, eternity, finitude,
and singularity were haled, in ways that even the most conservative
contemporary minds could not ignore, into the dock of the new
astronomy and condemned.
3 Nicholas of Cusa and
the New Astronomy
(Unless you believe, you will not understand.) Isaiah 7:9 (LXX)
In the dawning of that artistic and scientific awakening that swept

Europe from the mid-fourteenth to mid-seventeenth century, it was
Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa (1401-64) who reintroduced into Western
epistemology a sharp Platonic distinction between sensible and intel-
ligible reality and who rearticulated, in a new idiom for the new age,
the credo ut intelligam theology of Clement of Alexandria, Augustine,
and Anselm. Cusanus became the fountainhead of a revitalized Pla-
tonist metaphysic and of a visionary humanism that for the next two
centuries, despite the restless stirrings of an empirical rationalism
nearing its term, inspired the period's most representative minds.
Cusanus's Christian Platonism is both orthodox and mainstream.
This point needs to be stated clearly, for the modern scholarly fasci-
nation with Florentine and Hermetic Neoplatonism has tended to
skew the picture of Renaissance Platonism, implying that it was fed
largely from roots running back to Plotinus, Proclus, and the mythi-
cal Hermes Trismegistus. Quite the reverse is true. In England in
particular, occultists like John Dee, Robert Fludd, Thomas Vaughan,
and the quincunxial Thomas Browne of The Garden of Cyrus were
seen in their own time as fringe eccentrics. By far the majority of
English Platonists - from Sidney and Spenser to Milton and Marvell,
from Richard Hooker to the Cambridge Platonists - although they
might echo ideas from Ficino or Bruno or the Corpus Hermeticum,
were Augustinian spiritual rationalists seeking, with the help of rea-
son, to illuminate the transforming motions of grace.
i8 The Expanding Universe
Knowledge, Cusanus knew, is a complex matter. We know things

in many ways: by sensory experience, by remembered experience, by
rational experience, and by intuitive experience or faith. In De Coniec-
turis (2.14) Cusanus distinguishes four faculties of knowledge (sen-
sibility, imagination, reason, and intellect) and ranks them in an
ascending scale according to their power of rising beyond the merely
empirical. As a metaphysician, his interest centred naturally on the
higher powers of ratio and intellectus. Reason, the lower of the two,
he defines as the faculty of discursive abstraction or ratiocination
that draws conclusions from the data provided by sense and mem-
ory; its limitation is that "[it] remains altogether unable to transcend
temporal things in order to embrace spiritual things" (Cusa4 138).
Intellect, on the other hand, soars higher and is the power of appre-
hending truths outside the realms of time and space: "In this fashion
mind grasps ... intuitively and directly absolute entity itself beyond
all participation and variety" (Cusa2 65). Cusanus's epistemology in
general, and his privileging in particular of the intelligible over the
sensible, recalls Plato's analogy of the divided line (Republic 6.^o<^d-
5lie); and his Augustinian division of intelligible reality into the
higher and lower realms of ratiocination and intuition is repeated
throughout the Renaissance, as for instance by Milton's Raphael
(Paradise Lost 5.486-90):
whence the Soul

Reason receives, and reason is her being,
Discursive, or Intuitive; discourse
Is oftest [man's], the latter most is ours,
Differing but in degree, of kind the same.
The fact that Cusanus (or Milton) makes intuition - the realm acces-
sible through faith - the highest form of cognition does not, however,
make him a fideist. (Even a rationalist like Spinoza ranked intuition
above reason: Ethics 2: P4OS2; 5: P25.) It allows him, rather, to elabo-
rate an epistemology which distinguishes the products of rational
inquiry from the data of faith and yet accommodates the legitimate
claims of each.
There is for Cusanus as an Augustinian no antagonism between
faith and reason. On the contrary, all four levels of cognition are
cooperative and mutually sustaining under the general supervision
of the intuitive power of intellect, by which the highest truths are
revealed. Thus, as "the purpose of that which is manifest and extrinsic
[i.e., the sensible] is that which is hidden and intrinsic" (Cusa1 111),
19 Nicholas of Cusa and the New Astronomy
so also the role of ratio, which differs from intellectus in degree but
not in kind, is to corroborate as far as its capacity extends and to
flesh out, as it were, at the conceptual level the truths of faith
revealed to the visionary intellect. And this leads for Cusanus, as it
had earlier for Augustine and Anselm, to a conviction that all wise
knowing is the result of faith's search for understanding. In De Docta
Ignomntia (3.11) Cusanus puts the argument succinctly, citing as illus-
tration the didactic method employed in the Fourth Gospel:
Understanding is the unfolding of faith. Therefore, understanding is guided

by faith, and faith is increased by understanding. Hence, where there is no
sound faith, there is no true understanding ... The Apostle John states that
faith in the incarnation of the Word of God leads us unto the truth in order
that we may be made sons of God. At the outset John plainly discloses this
[faith]; then in accordance with it he expounds the many works of Christ, in
order that the intellect may be illumined in faith; finally, he draws the con-
clusion when he says, "These things were written in order that you would
believe that Jesus is the Son of God." (Cusa4 149)
Faith is not merely an opportunity; it is a responsibility. Even the

fool knows the truth in his heart, and it is man's duty both to himself
and to God to employ the intellectual powers given to him in order
to search out a personal relationship, through Christ, with his Maker.
This relationship is not fixed but fluid: it grows (or declines) as the
individual uses intellect, reason, and will to actualize the spiritual
potential toward which he is at first prompted, and in which he is
subsequently sustained, by the intuitions of faith in his intellectus.
But it is also axiomatic with Cusanus that human knowledge, how-
ever profound, is conjecture. His God is the deus absconditus, the
hidden God of Matthew 11:25, revealed to babes but hidden from the
wise, known by the heart but not by cerebration. He is, quite literally,
inconceivable. Non est proportio creature ad creatorem: there is no com-
parative relation between the creation and its creator, between the
conditioned and the unconditioned. And the knowledge of our
unknowing is, for Cusanus, both the necessary condition of wisdom
and its highest achievement. It is docta ignorantia, learned ignorance:
"The more [a man] knows that he is unknowing, the more learned
he will be" (Cusa4 51). Superficially, this resembles the Socratic
dictum that the wise man knows that he knows nothing; but the
Cusaean doctrine of learned ignorance is a particularly Christian via
negativa - a negative method that, like the method of Pseudo-
Dionysius, whom he greatly admired, descends only in order to rise.1
ao The Expanding Universe
The paradox of docta ignorantia, its proud humility, is apparent in the

analogy of the polygon inscribed in a circle that appears near the
beginning of De Docta Ignorantia (1.3):
Whatever is not truth cannot measure truth precisely ... Hence, the intellect,
which is not truth, never comprehends truth so precisely that truth cannot
be comprehended infinitely more precisely. For the intellect is to truth as a
polygon is to a circle. The more angles the inscribed polygon has the more
similar it is to the circle. However, even if the number of its angles is
increased ad infinitum, the polygon never becomes equal [to the circle] unless
it is resolved into an identity with the circle. Hence, regarding truth, it is
evident that we do not know anything other than the following: viz., that
we know truth not to be precisely comprehensible as it is. (Cusa4 52)
Negatively, this passage draws attention to human limitations. Posi-

tively, it makes the point that docta ignorantia is not merely a knowing
ignorance; it is in very real ways also an ignorant knowing. Therefore,
although the quiddity of things remains forever unattainable in its
purity, "the more deeply we are instructed in this ignorance, the
closer we approach to truth" (Cusa4 53).
The positive aspect of the doctrine is nowhere presented more
clearly than in Cusanus's treatment of man as imago Dei (Gen 1:26).
The theme is developed at length in the dialogue Idiota de Mente
where a layman, a carver of wooden spoons, becomes the magister of
learned ignorance to an orator and a philosopher. "Now the mind,"
he tells them, "is a kind of divine seed ... placed by God (from whom
it holds its power) in a suitable earthly vessel or body where it can
be fruitful and unfold conceptually the totality of things" (chap 5;
Cusa2 55). This seed or incarnated potential is, furthermore, "the
image of the eternal mind [and] strives to hunt out its own measure
in that eternal mind as a likeness in its true original" (chap. 11; Cusa2
79). The likeness, as the spoonmaker-artist is quick to point out, is
but an analogue of its original: "The difference between God's mind
and ours is the difference between making and seeing. By conceiving
the divine mind creates; by conceiving notions or constructing intel-
lectual visions our mind assimilates [from assimilare, to make like or
similar to]. God's mind is the power of giving being, ours is the
power of assimilating" (chap. 7; Cusa2 63). But this power of assim-
ilation, of growing toward the divine Mind in proportion as we come
to know it in ourselves and ourselves in it, is a very real power
indeed. Like God, man is a creator, a microtheos as well as a micro-
cosm, as Cusanus asserts (anticipating Pico's oration De Hominis Dig-
nitate by half a century) in De Coniecturis: "Man therefore is God, but
not absolutely, since he is man. Hence he is a human God. Man is

also the world, but he is not everything by contraction, since he is a
man. Man is therefore a microcosm or, in truth, a human world.
Thus, the region of humanity itself encloses God and the universal
region in its human power. Thus man is able to be a human god, and
as god, he is able to be a human angel, a human beast, a human lion
or bear, or anything else. Indeed, everything exists within the poten-
tiality of humanity according to its mode" (Cusa1 19).
Although a part of created nature, man holds a unique position, for
he inhabits a human world of his own making. He is a second god,
an analgon of the Creator in that he is the maker, though not of course
ex nihilo, of his own microcosmic universe. And it is in his arts and
crafts, Cusanus says in book i of De Ludo Globi, where this inventive
ability is displayed in concrete form, that man most clearly shows
himself to be a microtheos; and he adds the important corollary that
the power of unfolding or realizing mental conceptions in the palpa-
ble form of pots or poems implies the possibility of man's under-
standing (with due allowance for difference in the likeness) the
divine act of creation: "You have therefore from this likeness of
human art a way of conjecturing somehow concerning the nature of
the divine creative art, although there is as much difference between
the creativity of God and man's fabrications, as there is between cre-
ator and creature" (Cusa1 77). Sir Philip Sidney's argument over a
century later in An Apologie for Poetrie, that the poet is a second cre-
ator who surpasses nature and creates a golden world in place of her
brazen world, would have seemed neither novel nor strange to
Nicholas of Cusa.
But if the human mind is capable, by self-scrutiny and assimila-
tion, of coming to understand something of the divine Mind, then
what, in fact, can legitimately be inferred on the basis of analogy
about God's nature and creative activity? What is Cusanus's ontol-
ogy? Briefly, he argues (i) that God is an "enfolded" (complicatio) and
self-contained unity, the Absolute Maximum, and (2) that the uni-
verse is the "unfolding" (explicatio) into plurality of that unity in the
form of a contracted maximum, as number is the unfolding of one-
ness. "God is the enfolding of all things in that all things are in Him;
and He is the unfolding of all things in that He is in all things" (De
Docta 2.3; Cusa4 94). Creation, then, is the unfolding into time and
space (which are themselves the "unfoldings" of eternity and infin-
ity) of the forms or ideas that, ontologically prior to their creation,
were enfolded in God qua God. This does not mean, however, that
Cusanus is, like Spinoza or Hegel, a pantheist - for, as Jasper Hop-
kins points out, "the world is unfolded from God without being God
in His unfolded state, so to speak ... [It is] truly an image of God,
even though it is not a true image of God" (Cusa4 21). Although
immanent in phenomenal reality, Cusanus's Deity is quite clearly
also transcendent, his unitary Being neither coterminous with nor in
any way limited by his activity of creation.
From what has been said about the human mind as the imago Dei
and man as a metonymic creator, it will have been anticipated that,
for Cusanus, man is more than a mere spatiotemporal "unfolding"
like, say, trees or quadrupeds. This is indeed the case. The human
mind is "the most simple image of the divine mind amid all the
images of the divine enfolding," the spoonmaker explains in Idiota de
Mente. "Mind is thus the first image of the divine enfolding which
comprises in its simplicity and power every image of enfolding. As
God is the enfolding of enfoldings, so the mind, God's image, is the
image of the enfolding of enfoldings" (chap. 4; Cusa2 51). In other
words, man's mind is a kind of mirror of the capacities of the divine
Mind, which is its exemplar: as "in God's mind conception is the
production of things, [so] in our mind conception is the knowledge
of things" (chap. 3; Cusa2 49). The process of achieving knowledge is
assimilation or the making of our minds into a likeness of the divine
Mind. Cognition for Cusanus is not passive or merely reproductive.
It is the active pursuit of self-understanding, which proceeds as
unfolded mens (mind) struggles to recognize and to actualize in itself
the reflected reality of enfolded Mens, or God. In short, cognition is
the dialectic of ratio and intellectus, a kind of circular hermeneutic
advancing toward an ideal but never fully realized coincidence of
faith's search for understanding and understanding's assimilation of
the data of faith.
After a long excursus (whose purpose will become clear later), we
come at last to Cusanus's cosmology, and while his physics may be
incidental, it is by no means extraneous to his metaphysics. Not sur-
prisingly, he rejects in De Docta Ignorantia virtually every tenet of the
closed (and claustrophobic) Aristotelian system. The universe is not
for Cusanus a hierarchical structure of enclosed spheres extending
out from a fixed central core; neither is it finite, immutable, nor even
necessarily unique. In the first place, since the universe is, by defini-
tion, everything other than God taken as one (unus + vertere, "turned
into one"), it cannot be conceived as bounded or limited by any
greater thing outside it, and therefore it is unbounded. At the same
time, however, since it is the contraction of the Absolute Maximum
(God), who alone is infinite, it cannot be infinite either; and therefore,
it must be described as "unbounded (interminatum) and thus priva-
tively infinite" (Cusa4 90). What does this mean? One reader glosses
the phrase as "finite but physically unbounded"; another suggests

that the Cusaean universe is "a concrete infinite" (Cusa417; Harries 8).
Neither explanation advances understanding very far, and both risk
converting apparent into absolute contradiction in the effort to make
a difficult phrase rationally intelligible. It is my sense that the termi-
nology is intentionally vague - that ambiguity is, in a way, the
essence of Cusanus's point. His word interminatum, for instance, is
cognate with Greek cmeipov, a term that in classical cosmology can
mean "infinite" or "undetermined" or simply "immense." The con-
clusion Cusanus himself draws, moreover, is intentionally paradoxi-
cal: the universe is "unbounded and thus privatively infinite. And in
this respect it is neither finite nor infinite." Or, again, "And although
the world is not infinite, it cannot be conceived as finite, because it
lacks boundaries within which it is enclosed" (De Docta 2.1,11; Cusa4
90, 114). There are two reasons for this imprecision. First, there being
no comparative relation between the infinite and that which is finite
(finiti et infiniti nulla proportio: 2.2; Cusa4 92), the precise nature of the
"privative infinity" of the universe is and must remain a mystery.
There are some questions that, while they can be asked, cannot be
answered. Second, the physical dimensions of the cosmos are, in any
case, largely an irrelevancy for Cusanus: his concern is not with spa-
tial but with spiritual infinity, which has no measurable dimensions.
The fact that the universe cannot, as Aristotle supposed, be
enclosed within a material circumference leads to the conclusion that
Earth cannot be its centre and that, indeed, it can have no fixed phys-
ical centre. Cusanus expresses this conclusion in another paradox: "if
we consider the various movements of the spheres, [we will see that]
it is not possible for the world-machine to have, as a fixed and
immovable center, either our perceptible earth or air or fire or any
other thing. For, with regard to motion, we do not come to an unqual-
ifiedly minimum - i.e., to a fixed center. For the minimum must coin-
cide with the maximum; therefore the centre of the world coincides
with the circumference" (De Docta 2.11; Cusa4114). The details of this
demonstration need not detain us. The point to notice is that here
again, as so often in Cusanus, the fundamental nature of cognition is
presented as a coincidentia oppositorum in which the unconditioned is
adumbrated to the conditioned through the continuous dialectic of
ratio and intellectus. Cusanus uses paradox to disclose meaning with-
out enclosing or fencing it in; it becomes in his hands a tool for reveal-
ing something of those truths unknowable by positivist reason alone.
(This suggests why historians of science, while conceding Cusanus's
importance, so often have difficulty with him. They feel compelled to
"solve" his paradoxes, instead of simply accepting them.)
One such truth, according to Cusanus, is that the physical uni-

verse, which is the unfolding of enfolded Deity, has a spiritual centre
as well as a spiritual circumference: "He who is the center of the
world, viz., the Blessed God, is also the center of the earth, of all
spheres, and of all things in the world. Likewise, He is the infinite
circumference of all things" (De Docta 2.11; Cusa4 115). It was clear
to Cusanus on the basis of this metaphysic not only that the earth
was not the centre nor the "fixed" stars the outer limit of the uni-
verse but that both the earth and the stars were in motion. Aristotle
and those other material empiricists among the ancients who
thought the earth a fixed centre and who saw the heavens as a
merely physical configuration missed this truth because they lacked
learned ignorance and because they lacked a proper "perspective,"
in a number of senses:
It has already become evident to us that the earth is indeed moved, even
though we do not perceive this to be the case. For we apprehend motion
only through a certain comparison with something fixed. For example, if
someone did not know that a body of water was flowing and did not see
the shore while he was on a ship in the middle of the water, how would he
recognize that the ship was being moved? And because of the fact that it
would always seem to each person (whether he were on the earth, the sun,
or another star) that he was at the "immovable" center, so to speak, and that
all other things were moved: assuredly, it would always be the case that if
he were on the sun, he would fix a set of poles in relation to himself; if on
the earth, another set; on the moon, another; on Mars, another; and so on.
Hence, the world-machine will have its center everywhere and its circum-
ference nowhere, so to speak; for God, who is everywhere and nowhere, is
its circumference and center. (De Docta 2.12; Cusa4 116-17)
The trope of God as an infinite sphere whose centre is everywhere

and circumference nowhere is not original with Cusanus. He could
have found it as a description of God in the pseudo-Hermetic Liber
XXIV philosophorum (cited by the twelfth-century theologian Alain de
Lille), or he might have known that it was a figure applied to the
soul in the mystical writings of Meister Eckhart. But it was Cusanus
who first applied it to the universe and who, by so doing, "helped
to prepare the way for the new astronomy" (Harries 5; see also
below, p. I58n6).
For Nicholas of Cusa the essential fact about the physical universe
was that it was the contracted "unfolding" of God. Its ultimate ref-
erence and meaning, therefore, were spiritual. From this primary
intuition all other knowledge about the universe in Cusanus's
system was derived, as reason, sustained and directed by faith,

worked to conceptualize and extend the original insight furnished
by the visionary intellectus. The method permitted him to anticipate
many features of the new astronomy. He "discovered," for example,
that the earth was in motion and not the centre (fixed or otherwise)
of the universe. He declared that the material cosmos could not be
finite and was content that it must be infinite in some sense, for
space is the unfolding of infinity as time is the unfolding of eternity,
or plurality the unfolding of oneness. He granted the probability of
other worlds and of extraterrestrial life but wisely demurred from
idle speculation: "since that entire region is unknown to us, those
inhabitants remain altogether unknown" (De Docta 2.12; Cusa4 120).
In De Ludo Globi he even anticipated Copernican heliocentrism by
making the sun (rather than earth) the centre of his game of spheres,
played by bowling a spheroid "ball" into a series of nine concentric
circles drawn on the ground - for, he remarks, "no honest game is
entirely lacking in the capacity to instruct" (Cusa1 55).
Taken all in all, Cusanus's cosmology is a remarkable prolepsis of
the discoveries made by science over the next two centuries. Indeed,
to turn from the speculative energy of De Docta Ignorantia and De
Ludo Globi to De Revolutionibus Orbium Ccelestium (1543) of Coperni-
cus, published nearly a century after Nicholas of Cusa's death, is to
experience a distinct anticlimax. Copernicus was a conservative and
his postulation of a heliocentric universe in place of a geocentric one
- a deduction from mathematics, not observation - is presented with
what now seems a strangely apologetic timidity. He makes no effort
to challenge Aristotelian physics in a systematic way and, in fact,
continues to accept most of its essential features. The universe of De
Revolutionibus, like that of De Caelo, is spherical, eternal, unique, and
finite - a circumscribed, hierarchical structure of concentric spheres
bounded by a stellatum of fixed stars. The Polish astronomer's single
innovation was to substitute the sun for the earth as the centre of the
system.
How, then, are we to assess the importance of Nicholas of Cusa,
and what is the nature of his influence on later thought? These ques-
tions, which are of obvious importance for the history of science, are
no less important for the interpretation of Renaissance literature. The
two subjects are connected, because literary critics who have studied
the impact of the new science on literature have relied heavily on the
work of historians of science and, along with the substance, have
carried over into their own work many of the empirical assumptions
and secular values of their scientific colleagues. The approach may
be illustrated by the stark positivism of Alexandre Koyre, the dean
2.6 The Expanding Universe
of twentieth-century historians of science, in an influential work enti-

tled From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe. The Renaissance for
Koyre is characterized by a secularization of consciousness and the
triumph of the vita activa over the vita contemplativa. From these pre-
mises he concludes that the central feature of the period may be
traced in the "fundamental process as the result of which man lost
his place in the world" when the closed Aristotelian cosmos yielded
place to "an indefinite and even infinite universe which is bound
together by the identity of its fundamental components and laws,
and in which all these components are placed on the same level of
being." He adds: "This, in turn, implies the discarding by scientific
thought of all considerations based upon value-concepts, such as
perfection, harmony, meaning and aim, and finally the utter devalo-
rization of being, the divorce of the world of value and the world of
facts" (Koyre 4).
A metaphysical thinker like Nicholas of Cusa, of course, cannot
survive the levelling rationalism of such a worldview, nor can he be
understood as looking forward in any real or significant way to
advances after his time. Not surprisingly, Cusanus is for Koyre "the
last great philosopher of the dying middle ages," someone to be
praised vaguely for "boldness and depth" but whose ideas lead
nowhere and whose "metaphysical intuition is [often] marred by
scientific conceptions that were not in advance of but rather behind
his time" (Koyre 18-19). Such a judgment, one suspects, would have
startled Copernicus or Galileo or Pascal - perhaps even Newton. For
what we see in Koyre is a failure of the historical imagination, a
modern unwillingness, perhaps an inability, to contemplate the past
without imposing upon it the methodological preconceptions of a
later age. Such an approach falsifies by oversimplifying and distorts
by overemphasizing selected phenomena and attitudes; and it is too
often sustained by an inverted logic that derives its premises from
foreknown conclusions. Yet it is not so much "wrong" - for there was
after all a scientific revolution centred on astronomy - as it is ideo-
logically partial and lacking in "perspective."
Koyre's view is that Nicholas of Cusa was an isolated eccentric
who stumbled, as it were per accidens, on ideas bearing an uncanny
resemblance to subsequent scientific truths but that, in the final anal-
ysis, he belonged to an old and dying world whose metaphysical
spirituality had run its course and had, finally, exhausted itself in
him. The view presented in the pages that follow is very different. It
sees in Cusanus a seminal mind whose influence, directly or indi-
rectly, revived in the Christian humanism of the next two centuries
an Augustinian conception of faith as a search for understanding, and
whose cosmology, which construed infinity as inner potential rather

than an outer void, provided a welcome alternative to the bleak
anthropocentric rationalism that was threatening, by the middle of
the seventeenth century, to destroy human dignity in the act of assert-
ing its autonomy. And nowhere, I shall argue, is the essence of
Cusaean rational spirituality more clearly or powerfully expressed
than in the work of the religious writers of Stuart England.
4 Rational Spirituality and
Empirical Rationalism
To the modern reader, the most remarkable feature of Cusanus's cos-

mology is probably its optimism.1 The thought of boundless space
inspired in him no terror, no sense of insignificance or of humanity
shipwrecked in infinity. On the contrary, his writing breathes libera-
tion and a newly expanded vision. He rejoices in man's potential as
a microtheos, a second god. The crumbling walls of the Aristotelian
cosmos are the fall of a materialist prison, and the prospect opens
out, not onto an alien void, but onto a realm of endless spirit of
which the "privatively infinite" physical universe is but the symbol.
True infinity lies in inner, not outer space: sum quid in Deo sum (I am
because I am in God). Man's unlimited capacity for assimilative
growth mirrors metonymically the eternal generative fiat of the infi-
nite i AM. And Cusanus's God, no remote and shadowy Prime
Mover at the periphery of creation, is truly omnipresent. He is every-
where and nowhere, infinitely present at the centre as at the circum-
ference; and man, his image, can participate in that infinity if he
chooses. "Nothing is in vain," Thomas Traherne would say, "much
less Infinity. Evry man is alone the Centre and Circumference of it...
It is the Eternal and Incomprehensible Essence of the Deitie ... It is
the Bosom of God, the Soul and Securitie of every Creature" (Centu-
ries 5.3). Perhaps Traherne was recalling his Cusanus.
It is not surprising that the sixteenth century, an age of Utopias,
should have found another in infinity. Unlike Cusanus, however,
sixteenth-century infinitists were rhapsodic literalists for whom the
material heavens were, in the end, largely their own reward. Their
29 Rational Spirituality and Empirical Rationalism
enthusiasm led them in two directions. On the one hand, Thomas

Digges, the English Copernican credited as the first astronomer to
make the claim of spatial infinity, rejoiced in his freedom from Aris-
totelian physics and praised the infinite universe as the work of an
infinite Creator. Neither Luther nor Calvin had discouraged astron-
omy if its discoveries served to glorify God, and Digges doubtless
considered himself on solid theological ground.2 His readers appar-
ently concurred, for the Per/it Description of the Cxlestiall Orbes went
through seven editions between 1576 and 1605. But the price of
cosmic infinity in Digges is the diminution of man's stature in the
universe. This 'Title darcke starre wherein we live [becomes] but as
a poynct in respect of the immensity of that immoueable heaven ...
[which is a] fixed Orbe garnished with lightes innumerable and
reaching vp in Sphaericall altitude without ende" (quoted in Johnson
167).
Digges provides a map (figure 2) to make the point visually: it
shows a heliocentric system in which the earth, "this globe of mor-
talitye," circles the sun, and around the outside, where rudimentary
stars run off the page, the orb of fixed stars "infinitely vp extendeth
hit selfe in altitvde sphericallye." The heavens are a realm of endless
light declaring God's glory, and Digges is lyrical in their praise: the
starry orb is "the pallace of fcelicitye garnished with perpetvall shin-
inge gloriovs lightes innvmerable farr excellinge ovr sonne both in
qvantitye and qvalitye[;] the very covrt of ccelestiall angelles[,]
devoyd of greefe and replenished with perfite endlesse ioye[;] the
habitacle for the elect." Heaven is neither remote nor abstract. No
wall of crystal bars man from it; he has only to look up to see it
arching over him. But he is somehow smaller for the ability. While
Cusanus gave man a spiritual stature more than adequate to com-
pensate for an interminate universe, Digges reduces the earth to a
mere a cog in the celestial machinery and contracts human dignity
accordingly. He expands the dimensions of the physical environment
without allowing for any compensating increase in spiritual insight
or capacity.
Giordano Bruno presents another picture entirely. No less enthusi-
astic for spatial infinity than Digges, whose book he most probably
knew,3 Bruno brought to astronomy a romantic intensity and propa-
gandist zeal that has possibly never been matched and certainly
never exceeded. In rhapsodies like De I'Infinito (1584) and De
Immense et Innumerabilibus (1591) he expounded a radical pantheism
that posited an infinite number of inhabited worlds, each inspirited
by its own "soul," moved through the infinite space of the heavens.
An implacable foe of Aristotle and admirer of Lucretius, Bruno
1& A perfitJefcnptionoftheCaJelHallOrbes,
vending te tb: mtsl duncitnt dslhiiu eftbe
Pythagoreans. &C.
Fig. 2 From Thomas Digges, A Perfit Description (1576)
linked classical atomism with Hermetic animism in an occult system

of which "Copernicanism was [only] a symbol" (Yates 168). (The
Inquisition, when it finally caught up with Bruno, burned him on the
Campo dei Fiori in February i6oo.)4 For Bruno, infinity was essen-
tially a metaphor for mind, for the boundless capacity of human
reason. He conflated the creation of an infinite universe with its dis-
covery, assuming the powers employed to be identical rather than
analogous. Thus, while Digges reduced man by expanding the uni-
verse around him, Bruno took the opposite course of inflating him
to fill it. Like many pantheists, he was a promethean humanist
driven by the pressure of an immanentist logic to deify the power of

his own mind. Although among the first, he is by no means the last
rationalist in whom the transcendent has been metamorphosed into
the transcendental.
The optimism we meet in Digges and Bruno at the end of the
sixteenth century did not carry over far into the next century. The
world, many Jacobeans were convinced, "groweih olde, and ... lyes
bed-rid, drawing on, looking for the good houre (to some,) and fetch-
ing a thicke, sicke, and short breath" (Harris 136). The causes of this
malaise are fugitive and complex and the new Copernican astron-
omy, as much perhaps symptom as cause, was only one factor -
although an important one, as Donne's famous paroxysm in the First
Anniversary (lines 206-14) plainly attests:
And new Philosophy cals all in doubt,

The Element of fire is quite put out;
The Sunne is lost, and th'earth, and no mans wit
Can well direct him, where to looke for it.
And freely men confesse, that this world's spent,
When in the Planets, and the Firmament
They seeke so many new; they see that this
Is crumbled out againe to his Atomis.
'Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone.
Early Copernicanism had been a largely theoretical affair, its discov-

eries seeming possible rather than certain or even probable. But as
empirical data accumulated, the facts became harder to ignore. In
1572 Tycho Brahe had found a nova in Cassiopeia - a disturbing
event, for it undermined the Aristotelian doctrine of immutability;
but the discovery was not soon followed by others. In 1606, however,
the German astronomer Kepler located two further novae and, three
years later, made untenable the important tenet of sphericity of the
old cosmology, by showing celestial orbits to be elliptical rather than
circular. But the crucial year was 1610 - the year before Donne's First
Anniversary - for in March of that year Galileo published at Venice
his Sidereus Nuncius, a treatise announcing the invention of the tele-
scope and describing a series of sightings that confirmed the Coper-
nican hypothesis while demolishing Aristotelian physics and the
cosmology it supported.
Using a 2ox "spyglass," Galileo observed that the Moon, far from
being "smooth, even, and perfectly spherical, as the great crowd of
philosophers have believed about this and the other heavenly bodies
... [is,] on the contrary, uneven, rough, and crowded with depressions
and bulges." When he turned his instrument further out, the results
were even more amazing, for it was apparent that the stars of
the Ptolemaic stellatum were neither fixed nor numbered. He saw
four "wandering stars" (moons) orbiting Jupiter and, in the constel-
lation of Orion, "more than five hundred new stars around the old
ones ... that were observed long ago." The Milky Way, he wrote, "is
nothing else than a congeries of innumerable stars distributed in
clusters. To whatever region of it you direct your spyglass, an
immense number of stars immediately offer themselves to view"
(Galileo 40, 59, 62). With his own eyes he had seen that the spheres
were not spherical nor the fixed stars fixed, that our earth was not
the centre of the system, and that the universe was much, much
vaster than anything imagined by classical astronomy. He had wit-
nessed the death of the old cosmology, and he knew it: "with the aid
of the spyglass," he said bluntly, "all the disputes that for so many
generations have vexed philosophers are destroyed by visible cer-
tainty" (Galileo 62).
Donne's response to these discoveries in the First Anniversary was
an early and emotional one, the constriction of a visceral reflex. A
more mature and reflective assessment was offered by George Her-
bert in the 16203. Unfortunately, however, literary critics have tended
either to ignore Herbert when the topic is astronomy or have
invoked him only to complain about his reactionary attitude to the
new science. "The newly expanded heavens," Marjorie Nicolson, for
one, has lamented, "did not stir his imagination to take wing and fly
up into the ether" (Nicolson 100). No, it did not - but it does not
follow that Herbert was therefore an inflexible fideist who rejected
scientific discovery out of hand. The test case is Vanitie (I), a poem
where the astronomer is "dismissed," Nicolson says, along with
others of the same breed who seek to pry into Nature's mysteries:
The fleet Astronomer can bore,

And thred the spheres with his quick-piercing minde:
He views their stations, walks from doore to doore,
Surveys, as if he had design'd
To make a purchase there: he sees their dances,
And knoweth long before
Both their full-ey'd aspects, and secret glances.
(i-7)
It is an error to treat these lines as the rejection of astronomy by

a mind too narrow to face new cosmic realities; they are, rather,
the indictment of a dangerous intellectual method. Herbert does not
disparage astronomy per se; he objects to the Brunonian delusion of

self-sufficiency that astronomy too often inspires in its practitioners.
The title Vanitie (I) is not without its stinging tail. The crucial word
in the stanza is "fleet," which in Herbert's time meant "superficial,
shallow" as well as "swift, nimble." It is not astronomy he censures
but the speculative pride it engenders. The imagery of the stanza -
for those inclined to suppose Herbert a fideist in full retreat - is, it
should be noticed, far from timid or evasive: the astronomer is a
prurient nouveau riche surveying the winking stars, those original
ladies of the night, "as if" to make a purchase. The image is an
arraignment of that sort of complacent curiosity that leads to moral
corruption in the broadest sense. A Christian humanist in the credo
ut intelligam tradition of Augustine and Cusanus, Herbert deplores a
rationalism that divorces reason from faith, whose union it is that
alone makes possible a true - and truly natural - philosophy. Like
the "callow principles" of the "subtil Chymick" in the third stanza,
the knowledge of the fleet astronomer is a false perspective, a mis-
taking of part for whole, which implies both impertinence and the
prostitution, as it were, of real potential. The truth of the matter is,
not that Herbert dismisses science in Vanitie (I), but that his modern
commentators have too often been inclined to dismiss the faith that
makes sense of his attitude to science:
What hath not man sought out and found,

But his deare God? who yet his glorious law
Embosomes in us, mellowing the ground
With showres and frosts, with love & aw,
So that we need not say, Where's this command?
Poore man, thou searchest round
To finde out death, but missest life at hand.
(22-8)
If Vanitie (I) shows the new astronomy in a negative light, then The
Search, which explores immanence and transcendence in terms of the
Cusaean paradox of the infinite sphere, may be said to redress the
balance. The poem opens with the speaker lamenting his inability to
find God in the universe and sensing that his efforts at searching for
Him are mocked by the rest of nature:
Whither, O, whither art thou fled,

My Lord, my Love?
My searches are my daily bread;
Yet never prove.
My knees pierce th' earth, mine eies the skie;

And yet the sphere
And centre both to me denie
That thou art there.
Yet can I mark how herbs below

Grow green and gay,
As if to meet thee they did know,
While I decay.
Yet can I mark how starres above

Simper and shine,
As having keyes unto thy love,
While poore I pine.
(1-16)
He finds himself abandoned, not in the infinite reaches of Copernican

space, but in the closed cosmos of the old astronomy. The "sphere /
And centre" of lines 6-7 are, as the word "centre" implies, the stella-
tum and fixed earth of the geocentric system. Liberation comes when,
through faith, he learns what the flowers and the stars already
"knew," that the Lord is everywhere and nowhere, that in his
"strange distance" He is simultaneously the centre and circumference
of thought and being, the Mediator of paradox in whom "East and
West touch, the poles do kisse, / And parallels meet" (43-4).
Since then my grief must be as large,

As is thy space,
Thy distance from me; see my charge,
Lord, see my case.
O take these barres, these lengths away;

Turn, and restore me:
Be not Almightie, let me say,
Against, but for me.
(45-52)
The "barres" and fixed measurements ("lengths") of the old cosmol-

ogy are seen for the narrow prison they are. What the speaker prays
for is to be lifted by grace above time and decay and to participate
by assimilation in the transcendent "space" of God's love. The search
in the poem's title, then, leads from a languishing imprisonment in
the closed world of the old cosmology to a spiritual freedom whose
capacity is symbolized (if only by implication) in the expanded

vision of the new astronomy. But since for Herbert, as for Cusanus
earlier, the meaning and purpose of the universe are ultimately spir-
itual, its physical size, whether infinite or not, is unimportant. His
poetry largely ignores the new astronomy (except to censure the
rationalism of its method) not out of fear but because, in the final
analysis, it had nothing of significance to teach him.
Another figure in the early seventeenth century whose attitude to
the new astronomy has been misunderstood is Robert Burton. It is
widely held that in the Anatomy of Melancholy, a book that went
through six revised and successively augmented editions between
1621 and 1651, Burton begins as a defender of the old astronomy but
ends as "a zealous advocate of the system of infinite worlds" (Barlow
302). Such an assertion goes well beyond the evidence. While it is
true that Burton's attitude to the new astronomy (at which he scoffed
in the first edition of the Anatomy5) softened in later editions, it is by
no means the case that he had become, by the time of his death
(1640), an advocate of the new astronomy. Far from it. In "A Digres-
sion of the Air," a late addition in which he surveys astronomy from
Copernicus to Galileo, he is plainly more amused than persuaded by
the contradictory variety of modern views. Some hold the universe
to be infinite, others finite; some that man shares it with other life-
forms, others that life on earth is unique; some that Earth is the
centre of the system, others that it is the sun. They plug one gap, he
says wryly, only to create others "as a tinker stops one hole and
makes two" and, meanwhile, "the world is tossed in a blanket
amongst them, [and] they hoist the world up and down like a ball"
(Burton 2:57).
Burton of course was a clergyman, not a scientist; and it is an error
to suppose that he was, as it were a century too soon, one of those
protopositivist gentleman-divines of Hanoverian England in whom
a natural religion of reason had usurped the traditional place of
revealed authority and faith. Burton had an inquiring mind, but it
was a mind inspired by that eccentric and peculiarly Renaissance
form of curiosity: a disinterested love of erudition for its own sake.
An insatiable library-cormorant (avidus librorum helluo are his own
words), he had "a great desire ... to have some smattering in all, to
be aliquis in omnibus, nullus in singulis" (Burton 1:17). But the obliga-
tions of his sacred vocation kept the pursuits of his scientific avoca-
tion in a proper perspective and allowed him to contemplate with
detached equanimity the hypotheses of infinity and void space and
a plurality of worlds. What if, he asks, "those infinite stars" be so
many suns with "their subordinate planets"? "Why should not an
infinite cause (as God is) produce infinite effects?" Let us, moreover,
for the sake of argument suppose extraterrestrial beings to exist: are
they then rational? do they have souls? are they masters of their
worlds? For why should man think the cosmos constructed only for
him? (2:55). Such queries occasion neither angst nor euphoria. They
are a scholar's questions, and Burton is perfectly content with provi-
sional answers: "when God sees His time, He will reveal these mys-
teries, and show that to some few at last, which He hath concealed
so long" (2:60). In the meantime, happily, Robert Burton is free to
indulge his "roving humour" in harmless speculation and to be a
"ranging spaniel that barks at every bird he sees" (1:17).
But not all speculation is harmless, and George Herbert was per-
fectly justified, as history would show, in warning in Vanitie (I) about
the threat posed by a Pelagian rationalism to the Christian humanist
tradition of faith and reason cooperating in a unified quest for
understanding. The early signs were there, in Herbert's own lifetime,
in the works of Francis Bacon.6 But the revolt from revelation upon
which militant scientific empiricism was to depend was still, it must
be added, an attitude rejected almost unanimously by Bacon's own
century: the deification of reason is a phenomenon that belongs,
especially in England, to the Enlightenment of the next century.
While the Renaissance was an age of ferment, it was also a transi-
tional period that opened much but settled little and that was able
to question inherited values without discarding them. Copernicus
was not a revolutionary, although a revolution bears his name.
Kepler was an astrologer and romantic dreamer quite as much as an
astronomer or "scientist" in any sense of the word we might now
accept;7 and the same may be said of the pre-Newtonian English
virtuosi of the new Royal Society. The growth of scientific rational-
ism was slow and subtle, an evolutionary process that led only grad-
ually to the recognition of a rift between science and religion.
From 1660 to 1700, the professed intention of English science was
to accommodate reason to faith, to employ rational inquiry not to
supplant but to supplement revealed truth. Virtuosi like Robert
Boyle and John Ray were pious men who claimed, and mostly
believed, that an empirical rationalism applied to the study of nature
would lead to a fuller knowledge of God.8 "The tribute of praise that
we owe our Maker," said Joseph Glanvill in 1676, "is not a formal
slight confession that His works are wonderful and glorious, but
such an acknowledgment as proceeds from deep observation and
acquaintance with them" (quoted in Westfall 47). The motto of these
English virtuosi might have come from De Docta Ignorantia: "under-
standing is guided by faith, and faith is increased by understanding,
[and] where there is no sound faith, there is no true understanding"

(Cusa4 149). In France, on the other hand, the split was more deci-
sive, as may be illustrated by Fontenelle's famous encomium on
astronomy in Entretiens sur la pluralite des mondes: "Quand le ciel
n'etait que cette voute bleue ou les etoiles etaient clouees, 1'univers
me paraissait petit et etroit; je m'y sentais comme oppresse. Presente-
ment qu'on a donne infiniment plus d'etendue et de profondeur a
cette voute ... il me semble que je respire avec plus de liberte, et que
je suis dans un plus grand air, et assurement 1'univers a toute une
autre magnificence" (Fontenelle 1O5).9 It was reason, not faith, that
had battered down the walls of the Aristotelian universe and given
men breathing space, and the infinite universe that was reason's dis-
covery had already become, for Fontenelle in 1686, the symbol of
man's unlimited capacity. Alone and unaided, rational man was the
captain of his soul and master of his fate.10
But to juxtapose passages from Glanvill and Fontenelle is to make
the former seem more conservative than he was. Superficially, Glan-
vill's attitude appears consistent with that of the tradition of rational
spirituality we have traced from Clement of Alexandria, through
Augustine and Nicholas of Cusa, to Herbert and Burton. But in fact
a profound change had taken place. In large part as a reaction
against the sectarian fanaticism of the Civil Wars, English ration-
alism after 1660 took on a decidedly antimetaphysical flavour.
When earlier figures had made reason the ally of religion and con-
strued knowledge as the rationally assisted unfolding of faith, it was
with the clear understanding that reason's role was corroborative
and secondary, her task to assist (with a proper humility) faith's
search for understanding. In Restoration England those roles began
to be reversed. Here, for instance, is Glanvill's statement in A Sea-
sonable Recommendation and Defence of Reason in the Affairs of Religion
(1670):
The denial of reason in religion has been the principal engine that heretics
and enthusiasts have used against the faith and that which lays us open to
infinite follies and impostures ... Men have been taught to put out their eyes
that they might see and to hoodwink themselves that they might avoid
precipices ... Thus has religion by the disparagement of reason been made
a medley of fantastic trash, spiritualized into a heap of vapours, and formed
into a castle of clouds, and exposed to every wind of humor and imagination,
(quoted in Westfall 179-80)
The argument was heard often in the years 1670-1700 and is

rehearsed with something like definitive force in a chapter ("Of Faith
and Reason, and their Distinct Provinces") in the last book of Locke's
Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690):
If the provinces of faith and reason are not kept distinct ... there will, in
matters of religion, be no room for reason at all ... For, to this crying up of
faith in opposition to reason, we may, I think, in good measure ascribe those
absurdities that fill all the religions which possess and divide mankind ...
So that in effect religion, which should most distinguish us from beasts and
ought most peculiarly to elevate us as rational creatures above brutes, is that
wherein men often appear most irrational and more senseless than beasts
themselves. Credo, quia impossibile est: I believe, because it is impossible, might,
in a good man, pass for a sally of zeal, but would prove a very ill rule for
men to choose their opinions or religion by. (bk. 4, chap. 18, sec. 11)
But a decision to rescue reason from faith by establishing a rational

theology is a decision to abandon faith entirely. If reason is to be the
measure of faith, then faith must finally be an act of reason. The
counterpart of a faith based on reason is that reason must be its
ultimate justification; and the central aporia of a rational theology is
that, since it is able to accommodate "spiritual" truths only at the
level of an empirical psychology, it has no way to account for the
data of a universal, historical, and transcendent faith. Revealed
truths and supernatural events, past and present, cannot stand with-
out the imprimatur of the supreme legislative Reason. No less than
individual spiritual experiences, therefore, the historical mysteries of
religion must be carried into the light of common day, probed and
verified - and, where they remain stubbornly mysterious, be dis-
missed as the "sacred whimsies" of men dreaming with their eyes
open. All supernaturalism is ex hypothesi irrational - all, that is, Glan-
vill and Locke would argue, except the idea of God, which is granted
by definition. But given the major premise, the existence of a super-
natural Creator is an illicit inference. Any "proof" of God's existence,
in the form of such an induction as the argument from design, is a
self-fulfilling prophecy: God is found in design only because it is
God who is sought in design. (Such arguments are flawed, as Hume
would show, because they are reducible to prejudice rooted in
custom and prior experience.) In other words, a rational theology is
a contradiction in terms: its premises preclude the possibility of its
conclusion, for the postulation of reason's sovereignty entails ab
initio the rejection of any truth claim (like that of a divine Creator)
beyond the grasp of empirical experience.
It is not surprising that the rational "faith" grounded on these
notions came to consist in a prudential morality buttressed by the
(logically inadmissible) hypothesis of a transcendent Creator. A

rational religion is necessarily a reasonable religion, reducible to a
common sense, deontological ethics based on enlightened self-
interest and supplied with authority by a formalist metaphysic. We
have reached this point in Newton, whose method banishes any
hope of cooperation between science and religion: "anything which
is not deduced from phenomena ought to be called hypothesis, and
hypotheses of this kind, whether metaphysical or physical, have no
place in experimental philosophy. In this philosophy, propositions
are deduced from phenomena, and afterwards made general by
induction" (Newton 7). Accordingly, the Divine Architect of the Prin-
cipia Mathematica is a general induction from a series of particulars:
not a living God, but a mathematical abstraction, an inference from
a summing up of parts, and finally, therefore, an hypothesis. He is
all circumference and no centre; and the universe, the machine of his
making, is, as Leibniz complained, "so imperfect... that he is obliged
to clean it now and then by an extraordinary concourse, and even to
mend it, as a clock-maker mends his work" (Alexander 11-12). New-
ton, in fact, has succeeded in restoring and yet at the same time
reducing the foresight and efficiency of the discredited Primum
Mobile of Aristotelian cosmology, that remote creator-figure on the
periphery of the universe. But there is this difference: Newton has
pushed him much further out.
5 Chorismos and Methexis:
Pascal, Traherne, Milton
In his discussion of Nicholas of Cusa in The Individual and the Cosmos

in Renaissance Philosophy, Ernst Cassirer makes a distinction that can
usefully be applied to later writers and that illustrates something of
the variety possible within the tradition of Christian Platonist spiri-
tuality. In the reconciliation of chorismos (separation) and methexis
(participation), Cassirer argues, Cusanus forged a unified vision that,
without contradiction, united a negative theology and a positive
theory of experience. On the one hand, Cusanus's principle of nulla
proportio (above, chap. 3) insists upon the radical separation (choris-
mos) of finite creature and infinite Creator, and this ontology logically
entails the epistemological implication that a knowledge of God is
impossible, since there can be "no progression from empirical or
rational 'truths' to the absolute truth." On the other hand, however,
With the same decisiveness and acuteness that he applied to the idea of
"separation," Cusanus [next] works out the idea of "participation." Far from
excluding each other, separation and participation, chorismos and methexis,
can only be thought of through and in relation to each other. In the definition
of empirical knowledge, both elements are necessarily posited and connected
with each other. For no empirical knowledge is possible that is not related
to an ideal being and to an ideal being-thus ... Thus, everything conditioned
and finite aims at the unconditioned, without ever being able to attain it ...
By denying any overlapping of the two realms and by teaching us to see the
One in the other, and the other in the One, the separation itself guarantees
the possibility of true participation of the sensible in the ideal. (21-4)
41 Chorismos and Methexis
In other words, Cusanus's episternology rests on the paradox that

knowing is a coincidentia oppositorum, a reconciliation of opposites in
which something of the unknowable divine is adumbrated in mate-
rial reality, which, in itself, is incomprehensible unless understood as
the temporal and spatial unfolding of the unknowable divine.
Human knowledge is therefore an approximation forced upon us by
separation (chorismos) from the Absolute, yet possible at all only
because we are able, being contracted images of that Absolute, to
participate in it by methexis ("proleptic sharing": from [leGe^co [future
of |0£Te%G)], "I shall have a share of").
Cusanus's copulative theology, I shall argue in this chapter can, if
due allowance is made for differences in individual temperament
and emphasis, be a useful tool in interpreting seventeenth-century
Christian humanist texts. To test the hypothesis I have chosen three
writers who deal extensively with cosmology and who, at a first
glance, would seem to have little in the way of a shared or common
vision. Pascal has seemed to many the distillation of a midcentury
pessimism recoiling in horror from the opening out of the universe
by the new astronomy. Traherne, on the other hand, was an optimist
who found the idea of infinity so attractive that he made it his central
theme. Milton, in contrast to Pascal and Traherne, seems an Elizabe-
than anachronism, massively indifferent to the claims of the new
physics. But their differences are less real than apparent and verge
toward caricature precisely in proportion as they are insisted upon
as definitive. Pascal's theme is la misere et grandeur de I'homme: if he
is most memorable in expressing the misery of life in a vast and
darkened universe, his lament is inspired by his sense of the sacri-
ficed ability to find there a concomitant glory. Traherne, while hymn-
ing a spiritual potential so great that it needs infinity as its metaphor,
is none the less deeply aware of human limitation and sin. And Mil-
ton, the most subtly paradoxical of the three, fashions in Paradise Lost
a composite cosmos, drawing both on Ptolemy and Galileo, to serve
as backdrop for his epic of irreparable sin and impossible grace.
PASCAL
To think of Pascal's Pensees is, for the modern reader, generally to

think of mankind shipwrecked in the infinite void, abandoned in a
corner of the cosmos, not knowing how he came there or whither he
is bound:
En voyant 1'aveuglement et la misere de I'homme, en regardant tout 1'uni-

vers muet, et I'homme sans lumiere, abandonne a lui-meme et comme egare
dans ce recoin de 1'univers, sans savoir qui 1'y a mis, ce qu'il y est venu faire,
ce qu'il deviendra en mourant, incapable de toute connaissance, j'entre en
effroi, comme un homme qu'on aurait porte endormi dans une ile deserte et
effroyable, et qui s'eveillerait sans connaitre ou il est et sans moyen d'en
sortir. (no. 196; for translations, see appendix 2)
For Borges, for example, this is the essence of Pascal:
In that dispirited century, the absolute space which had inspired the hexam-
eters of Lucretius, the absolute space which had meant liberation to Bruno,
became a labyrinth and an abyss for Pascal. He abhorred the universe and
would have liked to adore God; but God, for him, was less real than the
abhorred universe. He deplored the fact that the firmament did not speak,
and he compared our life with that of castaways on a desert island. He felt
the incessant weight of the physical world, he experienced vertigo, fright
and solitude, and he put his feelings into these words: "Nature is an infinite
sphere, whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere."
(Borges 192)
But Borges takes a part for the whole, and the fact that he thinks of
Lucretius and Bruno but not Cusanus is instructive, for it shows him
content with Pascal as atomist and protopositivist. He surveys the
past, rediscovering the present in it, and marvels at Pascal's modernity.
But Pascal is not a modern, nor was he a scientific materialist. He
was of course a scientist - an experimental physicist whose work
included study of the vacuum, a topic on which he wrote two
books.1 He understood very well the physical - and metaphysical -
implications of his researches, and when, shortly after 1654, ne
started drafting entries for a vindication of the Christian faith, he
made his case, at least in part, through a vivid presentation of the
rational consequences of rationalism. Perhaps the force of his lan-
guage owes something to his having passed through a valley of
rationalist terrors before his conversion. In any case, the Pensees is a
richly imaginative work and one of the rhetorical strategies it
employs - which Borges might perhaps have recognized as such - is
that of Piranesi-like impressions of humanity condemned to the
silence of an empty universe: for that, since reason can build no
bridge between the physical and metaphysical, is the only cosmos
discoverable by unaided reason. In the seventeenth century, astron-
omy offered an irresistible metaphor for reason's potential. If only,
Pascal argues, the infinitist would pause to consider the implications
of his rationalism, if only he would trace its implications to their
logical conclusion, he would know the terror of being swallowed by
an infinite vacuum of which he knows nothing and which knows

nothing of him: "le silence eternel de ces espaces infinis m'effraie"
(no. 199). A self-examining rationalism, honestly pursued to its log-
ical terminus ad quern, can end only in the recognition of reason's
radical triviality in an endless and endlessly alien void.
But man is not abandoned to reason. There are truths of the heart
as well as of the head, and the Deity inaccessible to reason reveals
Himself to faith in the stirrings of the heart. "C'est le cceur qui sent
Dieu, et non la raison. Voila ce que c'est que la Foi: Dieu sensible au
cceur, non a la raison" (no. 422). Reason must win assent, but faith
commands it: "cette foi ... fait dire non scio, mais credo" (no. 7). To
say, as Borges does, that Pascal longed to adore God but found the
idea of a loving Creator overpowered by and "less real" than a bleak
and alien creation is to ignore the evidence of the text. The disjunction
of faith and reason - both of them aspects of human experience very
real to Pascal - is the central antinomy of the Pensees and is at times
formulated in antitheses that border on brutality: "Juge de toutes
choses, imbecile vers de terre, depositaire du vrai, cloaque d'incerti-
tude et d'erreur, gloire et rebut de 1'univers" (no. 129). The denigra-
tion of rational capacity in such passages has led some to suppose, in
contrast to Borges, that Pascal, whose opponents were libertins, was a
fideist who disparaged reason and rejected its value entirely.
Neither position is tenable. Like the docta ignorantia of Nicholas of
Cusa, Pascal's paradoxes point to a dialectic in which faith and
reason both play a part. On the one hand, he knew and accepted that
human dignity depends on reason: "L'homme n'est qu'un roseau, le
plus faible de la Nature; mais c'est un roseau pensant ... Toute notre
dignite consiste done en la pensee" (no. 198). If the adjectival dignity
of thought in this passage seems less significant than the substantive
fact of being a reed, reason fares better in another pensee where it is
granted the power to assert man's place in an encircling space that
would otherwise swallow him like a speck - for reason comprehends
(that is, includes as well as understands; encompasses by virtue of
giving meaning to) the idea of space itself: "Ce n'est point de 1'espace
que je dois chercher ma dignite, mais c'est du reglement de la pen-
see. Je n'aurai point d'avantage en possedant des terres. Par 1'espace
1'univers me comprend et m'engloutit comme un point; par la pensee
je le comprends" (no. in). This is an important pensee. It is not,
Pascal says, in spatial infinity as the image of reason's potential that
we find the essence of human dignity, for that analogy leads to the
delusion of a self-sufficient rationalism that in the end mocks the
idea of dignity by rendering both human achievement and human
existence nugatory. Possessing whole worlds profits man nothing.
Human dignity depends, rather, on the right ordering of reason ("le

reglement de la pensee"). That this ordering is recta ratio is clear from
other passages and that it is the complement of faith is plain from
no. 183: "La foi dit bien ce que les sens ne disent pas, mais non pas
le contraire de ce qu'ils voient: elle est au-dessus, et non pas centre."
Faith testifies to truths beyond sense and reason, yet does not con-
tradict the evidence of contingent knowing.
Thus, in Pascal, as in Cusanus or Augustine, knowing is (in the
terminology of chapters i and 3) a dialectic of ratio (sermo scientiae)
and intellectus (sermo sapientiae), in which the lower power supports
and confirms the higher in a search for understanding that advances
from a knowing ignorance to an ignorant knowing. If Pascal differs
from Cusanus and Augustine by stressing chorismos over methexis, by
concentrating on the threat to faith of Pelagian rationalism rather
than on the more positive aspects of the dialectic, it is a decision
largely dictated by circumstance and his opponents. But in the end
his position is that of traditional Christian humanism. Employing
reason to confound the rationalist argument for incredulity, he
affirms that reason, rightly ordered, is the ally of faith and the nec-
essary basis of human dignity.
To complete the picture, I must briefly consider the origins of Pas-
cal's view of infinity. In the Pensees, A.O. Lovejoy finds "the curious
combination of a refusal to accept the Copernican hypothesis with
an unequivocal assertion of the Brunonian." However, since Pascal
turns on its head the optimistic Brunonian metaphor of infinity as
the image of reason's potential, Lovejoy concludes that his "use of
the assumption of infinity is ... arbitrary, not to say malicious; he
employs it when it fits his mood and in so far as it serves his purpose
of chastening man's pride" (Lovejoy 126, 129). But Pascal's use of
infinity is far from arbitrary or capricious, his mentor was by no
means Giordano Bruno, and his approach is "malicious" only to the
extent that it offends a rationalist prejudice by rejecting the compla-
cency of reason's pretensions to sufficiency.
There are in the Pensees two substantial entries on spatial infinity
(given here only in part), and they must be taken together:
INFINI-RIEN
... L'unite jointe a 1'infini ne 1'augmente de rien, non plus qu'un pied a une
mesure infinie; le fini s'aneantit en presence de 1'infini, et devient un pur
neant. Ainsi notre esprit devant Dieu; ainsi notre justice devant la justice
divine. II n'y a pas si grande disproportion entre notre justice et celle de
Dieu, qu'entre 1'unite et 1'infini...
- Nous connaissons qu'il y a un infini, et ignorons sa nature: comme nous

savons qu'il est faux que les nombres soient finis; done il est vrai qu'il y a
un infini en nombre; mais nous ne savons ce qu'il est. II est faux qu'il soit
pair, il est faux qu'il soit impair; car, en ajoutant 1'unite, il ne change point
de nature; cependant c'est un nombre, et tout nombre est pair ou impair. II
est vrai que cela s'entend de tout nombre fini.
- Ainsi on peut bien connaitre qu'il y a un Dieu, sans savoir ce qu'il est...
Nous connaissons done 1'existence et la nature du fini, parce que nous
sommes finis et etendus comme lui. Nous connaissons 1'existence de 1'infini
et ignorons sa nature, parce que il a etendue comme nous, mais non pas de
bornes comme nous. Mais nous ne connaissons ni 1'existence ni la nature de
Dieu, parce qu'il n'a ni etendue, ni bornes.
- Mais par la Foi nous connaissons son existence; par la gloire nous
connaitrons sa nature... (no. 418)
DISPROPORTION DE I/HOMME
Que 1'homme contemple done la Nature entiere... L'imagination se lassera

plutot de concevoir que la Nature de fournir. Tout ce monde visible n'est
qu'un trait imperceptible dans 1'ample sein de la Nature. Nulle idee n'en
approche; nous avons beau enfler nos conceptions au-dela des espaces ima-
ginables, nous n'enfantons que des atomes, au prix de la realite des choses.
C'est une sphere infinie, dont le centre est partout, la circonference nulle
part. Enfin c'est le plus grand caractere sensible de la toute-puissance de
Dieu, que notre imagination se perde dans cette pensee... [Moreover, the
infinitely small is as incomprehensible and inaccessible as the infinitely
large. Thus:] Qui se considerera de la sorte s'effraiera de soi-meme; et se
considerant soutenu, dans la masse que la Nature lui a donnee, entre ces
deux abimes de l'infini et du neant, il tremblera dans la vue de ces mer-
veilles, et je crois que, sa curiosite se changeant en admiration, il sera plus
dispose a les contempler en silence qu'a les rechercher avec presomption.
Car enfin qu'est-ce que 1'homme dans la Nature? Un neant a 1'egard de
1'infini, un tout a 1'egard du neant, un milieu entre rien et tout. Infiniment
eloigne de comprendre les extremes, la fin des choses et leur principe sont
pour lui invinciblement caches dans un secret impenetrable.
Connaissons done notre portee. Nous sommes quelque chose, et ne
sommes pas tout; ce que nous avons d'etre nous derobe la connaissance des
premiers principes, qui naissent du neant, et le peu que nous avons d'etre
nous cache la vue de l'infini. (no. 197)
Pascal is clearly no Brunonian. He denies that spatial infinity is a fit

symbol of reason's capacity and he rejects the pantheistic immanent-
ism that, in Bruno, muddles the Creator with his creation. Pascal is
careful to distinguish the divine unfolding into space and time from
the transcendent and enfolded Final Cause of that unfolding. The
universe is not God; it is "the greatest sensible manifestation" of
divine omnipotence - that is, a spatial accommodation (as incompre-
hensible to reason as it is to the image-making faculty of imagina-
tion) of an even more incomprehensible truth beyond it. The only
points of contact between Pascal and Bruno are (i) that both accept
the hypothesis of spatial infinity and (2) that both draw upon the
paradox of the infinite sphere. But similar themes lead to different
conclusions, and whether or not Pascal had Cusanus in mind, the
passages quoted above place him firmly in the Cusaean tradition.
Cusanus grounds his metaphysics (on which his physics depends)
on the radical separation of finite and infinite: finiti et infiniti nulla
proportio. Pascal insists on the absolute "disproportion" of creature
and Creator - a disproportion that precludes rational understanding
of the infinite space that renders the Creator intelligible. Spatial infin-
ity is beyond conception as well as perception: neither reason nor
imagination can grasp it, for any conception necessarily limits what
is, by definition, illimitable. The fact that it is inconceivable, however,
does not invalidate it. The science of mathematics accepts the notion
of infinity even though it is beyond and apparently contrary to rea-
son. It is a concept accepted without being understood: a baffling yet
necessary idea, something known about without in any real way
being known. Similarly, the infinite universe and the Deity it adum-
brates are mysteries mediated by faith ("la pensee de derriere la
tete") to reason, which cannot legitimately reject them. (Faith, once
experienced, commands an assent that reason cannot rationally with-
hold; and Pascal would add that all men do experience at some point
in their lives the intimations of faith.) Our knowledge of the infinite
is thus an ignorant knowing expressible only as paradox: God is
wholly immanent and wholly transcendent, and the infinite universe
that reveals him is a sphere whose centre is everywhere and circum-
ference nowhere.
Pascal's ontology is consistent with his epistemology: as knowing
is a coincidentia oppositorum of the intuitive data of faith and the con-
ceptual data of reason and sense, so man himself, made of body and
spirit, is a living paradox. As imago Dei, man is a middle thing
between All and Nothing who must see that, while he is something,
he is not everything: "un neant a 1'egard de 1'infini, un tout a 1'egard
du neant, un milieu entre rien et tout." Here we meet again the
central paradox of Pascal, on which all understanding depends: the
simultaneous misere et grandeur de I'homme.
TRAHERNE
Like Pascal, Traherne saw man as an ontological amphibium, "a

seeming Intervall between Time and Eternity and the Inhabitant of
both, the Golden Link or Tie of the World, yea the Hymenaeus Mar-
rying the Creator and his Creatures together" (Centuries 4.74). They
share as well a Christian humanist belief that cognition involves faith
and reason, that understanding is the unfolding of faith. But while
Pascal invoked the concept of infinity to attack reason's pretense and
sought to restore a proper perspective by shock therapy, Traherne, an
optimist by nature, found in the idea of spatial infinity a symbol of
the breathtaking possibilities open to man's spirit. Grace was his
theme, not fallible nature.
Pascal emphasizes the disproportion of man; Traherne the trans-
forming proportionality that makes him capable, within bounds, of
participating in infinity. Their divergent views are rooted in cultural
and personal differences. Pascal, at heart an ironist, was led by his
experimental work on the vacuum to accept the notion of void space,
and he traced out in the Pensees the stark implications of the idea in
the context of a post-Cartesian rationalism that had already, in
France, granted methodological autonomy to inductive rationalism.
Traherne, a parish priest of "cheerful and sprightly Temper" seques-
tered in an obscure rural benefice,2 lived in England where the phys-
ical sciences, in spite of Bacon and Hobbes, remained frankly
teleological and at least overtly friendly to religion. The dominant
note of English science in Traherne's time was wonder. "It more sets
off the wisdom of God in the fabric of the universe," said Robert
Boyle, "that He can make so vast a machine perform all those many
things, which He designed it should, by the mere contrivance of
brute matter managed by certain laws of local motion" (Westfall yo).3
In such a climate Traherne sensed little threat from natural philoso-
phy and felt free to assign final instead of material causes to empir-
ical phenomena.
On the matter of spatial infinity Traherne chose not to commit
himself. "The Dimensions of the World are unsearchable," he con-
cluded. "And whether it be infinit or no, we cannot tell" (Centuries
2.21). Physical size in any case was of no real interest to him, a matter
neither of concern nor curiosity. The infinity he sought was not
explored with telescopes. The external universe was meaningful
primarily as a metaphor for "the Everlasting Expansion of what we
feel and behold within us" (5.3). He placed infinity first in the list of
God's attributes and described it as "the field wherin our Thoughts
expaciate without Limit or Restraint, the Ground and Foundation of

all our Satisfactions, the Operative Energie and Power of the Deitie,
the Measure of our Delights, and the Grandure of our Souls ... It
surroundeth us continualy on evry side, it filles us, and inspires us.
It is so Mysterious, that it is wholy within us, and even then it wholy
seems, and is without us" (5.2). True infinity is an inner space par-
tially imaged (for no metaphor runs on all fours) by external space;
it exists as the awareness of a boundless potential within and around
us to know God by loving him. While confirmed by sensory and
intellectual experience, its existence is made known by faith, which
deepens as understanding advances toward the Creator whose
unfolding into space and time is manifest in the beauty of heaven
and earth. To know God in the visible creation is to achieve what
Traherne calls "Felicitie" (3.52-68), a state of spiritual joy resulting
from an interactive at-one-ness (methexis) with God that is a foretaste
of heaven:
Prompted to seek my Bliss abov the Skies,

How often did I lift mine Eys
Beyond the Spheres!
Dame Nature told me there was endless Space
Within my Soul; I spy'd its very face:
Sure it not for nought appears.
What is there which a Man may see
Beyond the Spheres?
FELICITY.
There in the Mind of God, that Sphere of Lov,

(In nature, hight, extent, abov
All other Spheres,)
A Man may see Himself, the World, the Bride
Of God His Church, which as they there are ey'd
Strangely exalted each appears:
His Mind is higher than the Space
Above the Spheres,
Surmounts all Place.
(Felicity 1-18)
Man's capacity is infinite because God is infinite; his capacity for

felicity, for participation in the divine, is infinite because God is infi-
nite love: "my Soul is an Infinit Sphere in a Centre. By this you may
know that you are infinitly Beloved: GOD hath made your Spirit a
Centre in Eternitie Comprehending all" (Centuries 2.80). The paradox
of the infinite sphere is a recurring topos in Traherne, used to express

the soul's essential nature as imago Dei. The human spirit
being Simple like the Deitie

In its own Centre is a Sphere
Not shut up here, but evry Where.
(My Spirit 15-18)
God is wholly immanent yet wholly transcendent, and man, his

contracted analgon, is the "Intervall" linking him to the rest of cre-
ation. The human mind, Cusanus said, is "the most simple image of
the divine mind amid all the images of the divine enfolding" (Cusa2
51). Traherne concurs: the soul is "a Centre in Eternitie Comprehend-
ing all" and is "Simple like the Deitie." Soul, or mind, is no mere
forma formata, or passive mirroring of an idea in the divine mind;4
rather, as forma formans, it replicates in a simplified way the enfolded
power of divine mind: "By conceiving the divine mind creates; by
conceiving notions or constructing intellectual visions our mind
assimilates. God's mind is the power of giving being, ours is the
power of assimilating" (Cusa2 63). Since the human mind is a con-
traction of God, the proper object of its activity is assimilation to its
own absolute: knowledge "takes place by likeness" (Cusa2 51). But
God cannot be known as he is, and so human knowledge must
remain approximate, limited to knowing about him. In this life we
see through a glass darkly. Human cognition, indeed, requires the
world: sensible reality awakens the mind's latent powers and per-
mits knowledge to occur. But the world, although the condition and
proximate cause of cognition, is not its essence or ultimate cause: we
know we have eyes by the act of seeing, but, having seen, we are
forced back upon the antecedent (the power of sight) that rendered
the experience itself possible. Nihil est in intellectu quod non fuerit in
sensu, said Leibniz - adding, excipe: nisi ipse intellectus (New Essays
2.1.8; see Leibniz no).5 Knowing, moreover, is correlative to being.
The human mind becomes an analogue of divine mind - and knows
itself to be so - in the act of conceptualizing and spiritualizing the
data of empirical experience: it becomes what it knows, as certain
insects assume the colour of the leaves they eat. To feed on the phys-
ical universe as the expression or explicatio (unfolding) of God is to
participate in divine reality and become a part of it; and since God
is infinite, the potential for methexis is also infinite:
I felt no Dross nor Matter in my Soul,

No Brims nor Borders, such as in a Bowl
5O The Expanding Universe
We see, My Essence was Capacitie.

(My Spirit 6-8)
It is against the background of his Augustinianism that Traherne's

optimism and conviction of the infinite human capacity must be
seen. His response to the new astronomy in no way echoes Fon-
tenelle's joy in the freedom afforded scientific reason by astronomy's
opening out of the universe. When Marjorie Nicolson declares that
"The capacity of the human imagination to grow with the universe,
the capacity of the human soul to be filled yet still to aspire for more
beyond - such was Traherne's gospel" (Nicolson 201), her reading is
conditioned by the substitution of secular for religious humanism.
She accounts for Traherne's faith by marginalising it as metaphor.
But Traherne was no precursor of William Blake, nor was his Gospel
other than the traditional one in the New Testament. Astronomy and
the vast space it reveals offered a symbol of reality, not an alternative
to it. The discoveries of science were analogical confirmations of
deeper truths; their value was spiritual and intrinsic: "He that
Knows the Secrets of Nature with Albertus Magnus, or the Motions
of the Heavens with Galilao [sic] ... is nothing if he Knows them
meerly for Talk or Idle Speculation, or for Transeunt and External
Use. But He that Knows them for Valu, and Knows them His own:
shall Profit infinitly" (Centuries 3.41).
Traherne's emphasis on childhood innocence and the glories of
external nature has tempted some readers to suppose him a Renais-
sance Wordsworth. It is an unfortunate comparison. Traherne's doc-
trine is an orthodox Christian Platonism, but the same cannot be
said - although this is not the place to argue the point - for the
solipsistic pantheism of Wordsworth.6 The similarity between them
rests on formal rather than substantive affinities: both are autobio-
graphical writers who treat private experience as paradigmatic of
general experience. But there the similarity ends. Wordsworth's
model is the Rousseau of Emile and Reveries du promeneur solitaire;
Traherne's is the Augustine of the Confessions and De Trinitate. When
Traherne invites his reader to "Contemplat therfore the Works of
GOD, for they serv you not only in manifesting Him, but in making
you to know yourself and your Blessedness" (Centuries 2.26), he
presents Nature sacramentally and offers an invitation to discover
the self in God (sum quid in Deo sum). Anthropology is not for Trah-
erne, as it is finally for Wordsworth, the key to theology; nor are the
beauties of nature more than symbols of the transcendent Creator
whose immanence and omnipresence they render intelligible. The
5i Chorismos and Methexis
universe is merely "the visible Porch or Gate of Eternitie" (2.1), a

"Beautifull Frontispiece" (1.20) that directs to the sanctum within.
Traherne develops the paradox of chorismos and methexis in a per-
sonal way, reconciling the opposites in a unified vision. The structure
of the Centuries, as Richard Jordan has shown, is a double loop: the
first loop is a meditation on the world; the second, drawing on auto-
biographical experience, a meditation on the soul. In each rondo, the
pattern is tripartite: a period of innocence is followed, after a fall, by
a period in which grace struggles against nature, then, grace prevail-
ing, by a period of renewed bliss and innocence. Adam, Christ, and
the New Jerusalem provide a graded typological framework in each
section for the progression through the "Estates" of Innocence,
Misery-Grace, and Glory. The two loops of the overall architectonic,
the first focused on the world and the second on the soul, simulta-
neously encompass universal and personal salvation history and
treat them as parallel phenomena. This is a sophisticated structure
that, by itself, confutes readings of Traherne as a vague and inoffen-
sive Anglican "mystic" who, in the words of one critic, "by-passes
ratiocination ... simply by believing implicitly in the efficacy of the
imagination as an instrument of Knowledge" (quoted in Jordan 7).
Traherne does not sacrifice reason to imagination; he subordinates it
to faith and does so in a manner that leaves its dignity unimpaired.
A glance at the argument in the second loop of the Centuries will
illustrate his respect for reason in its proper sphere and, at the same
time, clarify his view of infinity.
His point of departure is a paradox: the knowledge of space is a
knowledge of limits. No matter how vast it is, space implies confine-
ment; all that is at stake is the size of the cage. But outward space is
not man's natural element, nor is the awareness of boundaries the
primary knowledge he has; it is a secondary form, acquired when
sensory experience displaces an original conviction of freedom:
Infinit is the first Thing which is naturaly Known. Bounds and Limits are
Discerned only in a Secondary maner. Suppose a Man were Born Deaf and
Blind. By the very feeling of His Soul He apprehends infinit about Him,
infinit Space, infinit Darkness. He thinks not of Wall and Limits till He feels
them and is stopt by them. That things are finit therfore we learn by our
Sences, but Infinity we know and feel by our Souls: and feel it so Naturaly,
as if it were the very Essence and Being of the Soul. (2.81)
As our bodily senses are framed for the physical world they meet
and interpret, so also (as we know from childhood) we are born
knowing that reality has a spiritual dimension and that this spiritual
dimension constitutes, indeed, the essence of our being. Every child
is an inhabitant of Eden (fallen, of course, but still paradisal) and
knows instinctively that the universe mirrors the Creator's power
and love. "Adam in Paradice," Traherne fondly recalls, "had not
more sweet and Curious Apprehensions of the World, then I when I
was a child":
I was Entertained like an Angel with the Works of GOD in their Splendor and
Glory; I saw all in the Peace of Eden; Heaven and Earth did sing my Creators
Praises, and could not make more Melody to Adam, then to me. All Time
was Eternity, and a Perpetual Sabbath ... The Corn was Orient and Immortal
Wheat, which never should be reaped, nor was ever sown. I thought it had
stood from Everlasting to Everlasting ... And yong Men [were] Glittering
and Sparkling Angels and Maids strange Seraphick Pieces of Life and
Beauty! Boys and Girles Tumbling in the Street, and Playing, were moving
Jewels. I knew not that they were Born or should Die. But all things abided
Eternaly as they were in their Proper Places. Eternity was Manifest in the
Light of the Day, and som thing infinit Behind evry thing appeared: which
talked with my Expectation and moved my Desire. (2.2-3)
The world was a place of joy and wonder, not because it deceptively
appeared better than it was, but because in childhood it is seen as it
truly is and in its full reality. Childhood knowing is a coincidentia
oppositorum in which "som thing infinit" is revealed in and through
finite reality. Childhood perception is not a fiction to be smiled at by
patronising adults; it is the paradigm of all true knowing: "Verily I
say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children,
ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven" (Matt. 18:3).
But the innate methexis of childhood is shortlived. The light of
intuitive first knowledge is eclipsed by the customs and manners of
men and, alas, by "the Evil Influence of a Bad Education." Narrow
and selfish passions erode the original vision, so that "at last all the
Celestial Great and Stable Treasures to which I was born [were]
wholy forgotten, as if they had never been" (3.7). There is a "fall"
into the exacerbated chorismos of materialism: "I began among my
Play fellows to prize a Drum, a fine Coat, a Peny, a Gilded Book ...
As for the Heavens and the Sun they disappeared, and were no more
unto me than the bare Walls. So that the Strange Riches of Mans
Invention quite overcame the Riches of Nature" (3.10). While Trah-
erne does not linger over his "Apostasie," neither does he ignore it.
There was a time when he "lived among Shadows, like a Prodigal
Son feeding upon Husks with Swine" (3.14). But even in this
depraved state grace was not absent; a spiritual anamnesis pricked

his conscience "to long after an unknown Happiness, to griev that
the World was so Empty, and to be dissatisfied with my present State
becaus it was vain and forlorn" (3.15). Instrumental in his recovery
was the discovery of the Bible (3.27-35), for its account of divine love
in human history gave substance and direction to the vestiges of
original apperception and led him to see, among other things, that
science is incomplete as a merely empirical discipline:
Natural Philosophy teaches us the Causes and Effects of all Bodies simply
and in them selvs. But if you extend it a little further, to that indeed which
its Name imports, signifying the Lov of Nature, it leads us into a Diligent
inquisition into all Natures, their Qualities, Affections, Relations, Causes and
Ends, so far forth as by Nature and Reason they may be Known. And this
Noble Science, as such is most Sublime and Perfect... [when it is understood
to be] Nobly Subservient to the Highest Ends: for it Openeth the Riches of
Gods Kingdom, and the Nature of His Territories Works and Creatures in a
Wonderfull Maner, Clearing and preparing the Ey of the Enjoyer. (3.44).
The sermo scientiae leads (or should lead) to the sermo sapientiae. Sci-
ence, as scientia, must seek to integrate all experience, not limit itself
to empirical evidence. And reason cannot rationally or with any pre-
tense to integrity cut itself off from some areas of experience and
then claim its findings are a complete description of reality. Cogni-
tion must take all the data into account. Fed by sense from below
and faith from above, its task is the uniquely human one of unifying
into a coherent whole the manifold of sensible and intelligible expe-
rience. For Traherne, as for Christian Platonists from Clement of
Alexandria onward, sense, reason, and spirit are complementary and
mutually sustaining powers of the human mind.
After four years at Brasenose College, Oxford, where he took a BA
in 1656, Traherne entered upon a course of private study to search
out the meaning of true happiness, choosing "to liv upon 10 pounds
a yeer, and to go in Lether Clothes, and feed upon Bread and Water,
so that I might hav all my time clearly to my self" (3.46). This "Study
of Felicitie," based on "an Implicit Faith in Gods Goodness," allowed
him to skirt without crossing the sandy deserts of rationalism and
materialism and return, at length, to a renewed participation in the
infinite divine that he had known in childhood. Through meditation
on the Psalms and on such topics as free will and the person of
Christ, he recovered gradually his childhood certainty that "som
thing infinit" is revealed in every sight and sound if the perceiving
mind is a true mirror reflecting the Creator's love. The essence of
Traherne's Affirmative Way is that love holds "an Eternal Correspon-

dence with [God] in the Highest Heavens. It is here in its Infancy,
there in its Manhood and perfect Stature" (4.70; cf. i Cor. 13:12-13).
The world is shot through with divinity, like shining from shook foil.
To "know" in the fullest sense is to love: not what is seen, but how it
is seen is the measure of human wisdom and happiness.
As God is love, so man images that love in being as in knowing:
his "Essence [is] Capacitie." He is a microtheos whose potential is
fulfilled to the degree that he wills to actualize it. The relationship
between the infinite God and finite man, Theos and microtheos, is a
paradox resolved by methexis and analogy:
Infinit Lov cannot be Expressed in finit Room: but must hav infinit Places
wherin to utter and shew it self. It must therfore fill all Eternity and the
Omnipresence of God with loys and Treasures for my Fruition. And yet it
must be Exprest in a finit Room: by making me able in a Centre to Enjoy
them. It must be infinitly exprest in the smallest Moment by making me able
in evry Moment to see them all. It is both ways infinit, for my Soul is an
Infinit Sphere in a Centre. By this you may know that you are infinitly
Beloved: GOD hath made your Spirit a Centre in Eternity Comprehending all.
(2.80)
Man is an embodied soul (a centre) whose conceptual capacity (cir-

cumference) is infinite and whose responsibility it is to seek out, by
assimilation to the divine, a personal relationship with the enfolded
transcendence whose image he bears. Although Traherne empha-
sizes "la grandeur" rather than "la misere de rhomme," he shares,
no less than Pascal, a Cusaean vision that reconciles antinomies in a
copulative theology in which chorismos and methexis interpenetrate
and where the fullness of reality is expressible only in such para-
doxes as that of the infinite sphere. And having set out from child-
hood at the beginning, it is to childhood that he returns at the end
of the Centuries. The only change is that his "Study of Felicitie" has
taught reason to corroborate, to the limit of its ability, the intuitions
of faith, so that a knowing ignorance is at length transformed into
an ignorant knowing:
The Everlasting Expansion of what we feel and behold [is] within us ...
Nothing is in vain, much less Infinity. Evry Man is alone the Centre and
Circumference of it. It is all his own, and so Glorious, that it is the Eternal
and Incomprehensible Essence of the Deitie ... It is the Bosom of God, the
Soul and Securitie of every Creature. (5.3)
MILTON
Like Pascal and Traherne, Milton was a Christian Platonist who sub-
ordinated reason to faith and yet assigned the former a role that was
real and significant. He occupies, however, a middle position
between their extremes of pessimism and optimism. Pascal, alarmed
by a rationalism that was draining the creation of Deity and expand-
ing man to fill the vacuum, called attention to man's insignificance
in a universe that was, being infinite, both physically and metaphys-
ically beyond his grasp. Traherne, less threatened by and less
informed about the progress of science, was content to use the
expanding universe to symbolize spiritual capacity and the propor-
tionality that makes man the image of an infinite Creator. Milton
stands between them. On the one hand, he shares Pascal's suspicion
of reason's willingness to serve in a merely supporting role; on the
other hand, like Traherne, but with more caution, he develops a
theory of experience that finds in physics a positive symbol of meta-
physical truth. The differences among them are more matters of
emphasis than of substance. Although Pascal was a Catholic, Trah-
erne an Anglican, and Milton a Puritan, all were Christians seeking
in various ways to accommodate the new physics to the authority of
historical revelation and the imperatives of their own spiritual
experience.
Man is, for Milton, a reconciliation of opposite qualities. On the
one hand, he is a fallen creature, guilty of dust and sin, deserving
death. On the other hand, he is the image of God, restored and refur-
bished by grace. This antinomy, perceived by reason and resolved by
faith, is the standard paradox of Renaissance humanism, and we
have met it in many shapes. What is remarkable about Milton's treat-
ment is his insistence on equilibrium, his insistence that human
nature can be understood only as a balancing of opposites. Most con-
temporaries either tended, like Pascal, to deflate human pride by
exposing reason's pretensions or, like Traherne, to glorify man's
capacity by stressing the rationality of faith. Milton does neither. His
vision is a true concordia discors: a dynamic process where contradic-
tories coalesce yet the components retain their integrity.
Such a balance of opposites occurs in Sonnet xxiii ("Methought I
saw my late espoused Saint"), where death is mourned even as life
is celebrated. The poem invokes a myth of restoration (Admetos and
Alcestis) and a myth of loss (Orpheus and Eurydice), insisting on the
simultaneous reality of both.7 Like a photographic image coming
into focus, the sonnet describes the vision of a beloved wife restored
from a place beyond the touch of time to her "glad husband" - until
morning's light plunges him back into the darkness of quotidian
reality: "But O, as to embrace me she inclin'd, / I wak'd, she fled,
and day brought back my night." The poem is not a clever exercise,
a well-wrought urn turned for the delight of aesthetic cognoscenti.
The contradictory truths it records (she is dead yet lives, he is blind
but sees) were real enough in Milton's experience: the losses truly
terrible, the promises truly consoling. With powerful economy the
poem extends the contraries of private experience into a wider and
deeper mystery: the synchronous misere et grandeur of the human
condition itself.8
If Sonnet xxiii is perhaps the smallest, then Paradise Lost is certainly
the largest tapestry on which Milton wove into verse the story of
human life as a harmony of opposites. The paradox is established in
the opening lines as the central theme of the work:
Of Man's First Disobedience, and the Fruit

Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste
Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat,
Sing Heav'nly Muse.
Ruin and recovery, defeat and victory, damnation and redemption -

variants of chorismos and methexis - are concurrent states. And Mil-
ton's purpose is to show his readers how it is that they, like Adam
and Eve, came to be in this condition. By convincing them of the
responsibility they bear both for what they are and what (through
grace) they may become, he proposes to "justify," that is, make
acceptable to reason, something of the mystery of God's ways to
men: a mystery acceptable as mystery to faith but requiring, perhaps,
some elaboration in order to win reason's assent. The mystery of
God's ways will not be explained - for a mystery explained is a
mystery no more - but explored in such a way that reason can be
comfortable with it. In other words, Milton's object in Paradise Lost
is to mythologize, in order to make rationally intelligible, the contra-
dictory synchronicity of good and evil, power and impotence, joy
and sorrow, and all those other contrasting elements that make man
a living paradox. Not only is no attempt made to "solve" the antino-
mies, the effort is directed precisely to presenting them as paradox,
in a manner at once picturable by imagination and credible to reason.
In the prelapsarian state, Adam and Eve are instructed by Raphael
in the duality of their nature as creatures of clay and spirit. They
learn that they are not static creations but beings capable, by their
own effort, of assimilation to the Creator by their own creative capac-
ity for spiritual growth:
O Adam, one Almighty is, from whom

All things proceed, and up to him return,
If not deprav'd from good, created all
Such to perfection, one first matter all,
Indu'd with various forms, various degrees
Of substance, and in things that live, of life;
But more refin'd, more spiritous, and pure,
As nearer to him plac't or nearer tending
Each in thir several active Spheres assign'd,
Till body up to spirit work, in bounds
Proportion'd to each kind.
(5.469-79)
Adam and Eve are not angels, but they may become so. Human
nature in the unfallen world is a mutable perfection, intended for
improvement but capable of perversion. Milton's Paradise as a
whole is an active, vital place where an extravagant Nature, "Wild
above Rule or Art," pours forth her bounty with a luxuriating hand.
Adam and Eve, the gardeners charged with taming this exuberance
and maintaining order, are part of the garden and are expected to
prune whatever in themselves grows amiss or tends toward "wild."
One such danger is an inclination to speculative rationalism:
Knowledge is as food, and needs no less

Her Temperance over Appetite, to know
In measure what the mind may well contain,
Oppresses else with Surfeit, and soon turns
Wisdom to Folly, as Nourishment to Wind.
(8.126-30)
Reason is not disparaged but seen for what it is: a potentially des-
potic power whose role in the dialectic of intellectus and ratio is, and
must remain, secondary and supportive.
The Fall in Paradise Lost is the victory of apparent over actual self-
interest. Adam and Eve deceive themselves into seeing immediate
goals as ultimate ends. Hoodwinked by "fair appearing good," they
subvert duty with desire and are, as a consequence, surprised by sin
into forfeiting their birthright (that is, their potential to become
angels). The injunction against eating from the tree of knowledge
was for their benefit; it is not a "good" capriciously withheld (as

Satan argues) and, in fact, the only knowledge its taste brings is the
dreadful certainty of what has been lost - not new light but, too late,
a sobering darkness: "thir Eyes how op'n'd, and thir minds / How
dark'n'd" (9.1053-4). Unfallen reason had been the knowledge of
good alone; fallen knowing is the contingent consciousness of good
lost by evil gained. In preferring a lesser to a greater good - an act
implying the abdication, not the exercise, of reason - Adam and Eve
gain no good; they merely thwart their potential for free spiritual
development. This fact places the Fall in its proper tragic perspective
as the irreversible moment when mankind, by the fond impertinence
of taking passion and reason as sufficient ends, sacrificed known to
illusory good and so lost the capacity to earn heaven by their own
unaided merit. There is no felix culpa in Paradise Lost. Original sin
does not make possible a good greater than was previously available;
on the contrary, it is truly a fall that distances man from heaven and
blasts his natural opportunity to realise his potential without pain,
sorrow, violence, and death.
In a postlapsarian world where original sin has subverted the aims
of original grace, Adam and Eve must seek anew, in darker circum-
stances, to understand their place. Prevenient grace makes their
repentance possible (11.3-5), and Christ's sacrifice will, in time, make
that contrition efficacious; but heaven henceforward is beyond their
capacity, no longer theirs to win. Neither remorse nor faith, more-
over, though salvatory, purifies them in the eye of divine justice.
Milton endorsed Luther's view that justification does not erase sin;
the justified sinner is one to whom Christ's righteousness is imputed
(but not imparted) and whom God therefore treats as if innocent,
though in fact the guilt and sin remain, meriting death and damna-
tion. Original sin and the countervailing power of unmerited divine
love throw the paradox of the human situation into stark relief: more
decisively than when unfallen in Eden, postlapsarian man is an
immortal mortal irreparably lost and yet indubitably saved.
The paradox of la misere et grandeur de I'homme is the keynote of
theme and method in the closing books of Paradise Lost. God sends
the Archangel Michael on a mission to Eden that reconciles justice
with mercy:
denounce
To them and to thir Progeny from thence
Perpetual banishment. Yet lest they faint
At the sad Sentence rigorously urg'd,
For I behold them soft'nd and with tears
Bewailing thir excess, all terror hide.

If patiently thy bidding they obey,
Dismiss them not disconsolate; reveal
To Adam what shall come in future days,
As I shall thee enlighten, intermix
My Cov'nant in the woman's seed renew'd;
So send them forth, though sorrowing, yet in peace.
(11.106-17)
When Michael descends with the armed cohorts of heaven, Adam

and Eve do not resist their expulsion from Paradise. They do not
protest because their reason accepts their punishment as the neces-
sary consequence of their actions and because they have learned
that, through faith and obedient love, they may yet achieve a "para-
dise within" (12.587), happier than Eden because immaterial and
more like heaven. (To those who object that Paradise, which began
as a garden, ends as a state of mind, it may be answered that Eden
was ever the symbol of a spiritual state and that its inhabitants are
rightly expelled, as they themselves accept, when the reality of their
condition no longer corresponds to the perfection that the garden
was created to render intelligible.) Accepting the pains and restric-
tions of their new condition, and knowing too that Providence is
their guide, they are content to leave their happy rural seat. In
another of those scenes of quiet power that end so many of Milton's
poems, the final vignette in Paradise Lost is a masterful balancing of
opposites - a concordia discors that summarizes in a visual image the
themes of separation and participation, chorismos and methexis, that
had begun twelve books earlier in the epic's opening invocation.
Taking the human pair by the hand, Michael leads them through
ranks of cherubim, who part silently as they pass, to the gates that
open out on the unknown world that is to be their home and place
of punishment:
Some natural tears they dropp'd, but wip'd them soon;

The world was all before them, where to choose
Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide;
They hand in hand with wand'ring steps and slow,
Through Eden took thir solitary way.
(12.645-9)
Faith and reason in Paradise Lost are not antagonistic but comple-
mentary powers. But Milton, like Pascal, had cause to fear the
growth of a Baconian rationalism that sought to distinguish the
rights of reason from those of faith as a first step in the assertion of

reason's autonomy. The danger was nowhere more apparent than in
the new astronomy, and Milton tackled the problem head-on in the
cosmology discussion in book 8. While Raphael had preempted
many of Adam's questions about the universe in his narrative of the
Creation in the preceding book, "something yet of doubt remains"
(line 13) and Adam, an instinctive Copernican, wonders aloud
whether the visual phenomena do not imply heliocentrism rather
than the geocentrism supposed by Raphael's account. The Archan-
gel, no antirationalist, graciously replies,
To ask or search I blame thee not, for Heav'n

Is as the Book of God before thee set,
Wherein to read his wond'rous Works -
but he adds,
whether Heav'n move or Earth,

Imports not, if thou reck'n right.
(8.64-8, 70-1)
Raphael's commission is "to answer [Adam's] desire / Of knowl-

edge within bounds" (8.119-20): not to indulge whim or idle curios-
ity, but to supply such detail as is necessary for the informed
operation of free will and a clear recognition of the limits of human
nature. But Raphael warns against the dangers of a speculative ratio-
nalism that admits no limits and reduces divine mystery to the not-
yet-known. Such a method subverts faith and is condemned by the
Archangel who, like Herbert in Vanitie (i), warns Adam not to
"solicit" his thought with hidden matters:
Heav'n is for thee too high

To know what passes there; be lowly wise:
Think only what concerns thee and thy being;
Dream not of other Worlds, what Creatures there
Live, in what state, condition or degree,
Contented that thus far hath been re veal'd
Not of Earth only but of highest Heav'n.
(8.172-8)
What if the sun is the centre of the universe? or the moon and the
other planets inhabited? These things neither require nor invite
man's belief. Raphael does not avoid Adam's questions, as is some-
times said; he addresses himself to the real issue they raise by point-
ing out that such knowledge is unnecessary - not forbidden, but
superfluous. This answer, although unsatisfactory to rationalism, is
perfectly consistent with a Christian Platonist premise that reason's
role is the subordinate one of conceptualizing and corroborating the
intuitive evidence of faith. And when Raphael has finished, Adam
declares himself to be "clear'd of doubt" (8.179).
Adam's submissive response in no way implies that Milton dis-
missed the new astronomy or considered its discoveries unimpor-
tant. On his Italian tour (1638-39) Milton went out of his way to visit
"the famous Galileo grown old" and later spoke out against the sup-
pression of truth that kept the inventor of the telescope "a prisner to
the Inquisition, for thinking in Astronomy otherwise then the Fran-
ciscan and Dominican licencers thought" (Milton2 2:538). In Paradise
Lost, too, Galileo's discoveries figure prominently. Sun spots are
mentioned (3.589-90), as are the phases of Venus and the mapping
of the Milky Way (8.577-90); and a celebrated passage on lunar
topography alludes to Sidereus Nuncius:
the Moon, whose Orb

Through Optic Glass the Tuscan Artist views
At Ev'ning from the top of Fesole,
Or in Valdarno, to descry new Lands,
Rivers or Mountains in her spotty Globe.
(1.287-91; cf. 5.261-3)
There is no contradiction between Milton's attitude to Galileo and

Raphael's warning to Adam to be "lowly wise." The Archangel's
commission is to teach what it is appropriate for man in Adam's
particular place to know: "beyond," he warns, "abstain / To ask, nor
let thine own invention hope / Things not reveal'd" (7.120-2).
Always dependent on God's will, revelation is a dynamic con-
tinuum, and like other Christian thinkers, Milton made room for
scientific discovery as progressive divine disclosure. This does not
mean he accepted new ideas uncritically - Kepler's conjectures
about extraterrestrial life are rejected in Paradise Lost - but it does
mean he was prepared to give the new astronomy a fair hearing, and
the fact that he calls Galileo an "artist" implies that he considered
the Italian to be, like himself, a medium chosen to reveal God's ways
to men.
But whatever his respect for Galileo, Milton made the universe of
Paradise Lost in significant ways an essentially Aristotelian one. It is
through the traditional stellatum and down past the "planets seven"
of the old cosmology that Raphael descends to Eden (5.266ff.); and

it is a clearly finite and circular universe that the Son marks out with
"golden Compasses" at the creation:
One foot he centred, and the other turn'd

Round through the vast profundity obscure,
And said, Thus far extend, thus far thy bounds,
This be thy just Circumference, O World.
(7.228-31)
The mixed cosmology of Paradise Lost has seemed awkward and

enigmatic to many readers. Some have argued that Milton was a
defender of the old astronomy, some that he favoured the new, and
some, like Merritt Hughes in his popular edition, that he was indif-
ferent to astronomy and that even the long discussion in book 8 may
be safely dismissed as "a mere interlude" (Milton1 184). Marjorie
Nicolson sensed in the blending of Aristotelian and Copernican
ideas an unresolved tension in the poet's mind between faith and
imagination: "Ethically a poet of content and limitation, Milton the
artist felt aesthetic gratification in the new vastness which as meta-
physician he did not accept" (Nicolson 188). But since none of these
views accounts for the phenomena, we are left with a critical prob-
lem. It is quite clearly presumptuous, on the one hand, to cut the
Gordian knot by deciding Milton's astronomy for him, claiming that
at heart he was either an Aristotelian or a Copernican. And, on the
other hand, if it is impossible to believe, with Hughes, that the poet
who took the cosmos for his setting was indifferent to the most excit-
ing scientific advances of his age, it is equally difficult to believe,
with Nicolson, that the idea of spatial vastness was unacceptable for
metaphysical reasons. The cosmology of Paradise Lost, in spite of all
that has been written about it, requires a reconsideration.
It is obvious, first of all, that Milton was deeply influenced by the
new astronomy. No English poet has written with a more powerfully
"modern" feeling for the immensity of space. To appreciate the
sweep of his vision it is necessary only to set the comfortably paro-
chial universes of Spenser's Mutability Cantos or Shakespeare's The
Merchant of Venice beside Satan's awestruck surmise on surveying the
wasteful deep of Chaos:
the hoary deep, a dark

Illimitable Ocean without bound,
Without dimension, where length, breadth, and heighth,
And time and place are lost-

(2.891-4)
or Adam's grasp of magnitude and perspective in describing the

Earth as
a spot, a grain,
An Atom, with the Firmament compar'd
And all her number'd Stars, that seem to roll
Spaces incomprehensible.
(8.17-20)
Nor were Milton's faith and physics in conflict. Like Nicholas of

Cusa, he rejected spatial infinity but found in the paradox of "priv-
ative infinity" an analogy of spiritual truth. According to De Doctrina
Christiana, God alone is infinite; however, his "omnipresence ... is
[the] consequence of his infinity" (Milton2 6:144) - or, in the words
of the Father in Paradise Lost, "I am who fill / Infinitude" (7.168-9).
In other words, the universe is the expression of God or, in Cusaean
terms, the contracted absolute that unfolds into space and time the
image of an infinite and eternal divine enfolding. Physical space and
all that it contains are the extrinsic form (forma formata) in and
through which God (forma formans) manifests himself.
But why does Milton construct the universe in Paradise Lost out of
elements from incompatible systems? In the first place, it seems cer-
tain that he found neither Aristotle nor the new astronomy of Galileo
and Kepler quite convincing. As Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy illus-
trates (above, chap. 4), there was no consensus on astronomy in the
period itself, even if, considered retrospectively, the new ideas were
inexorably replacing the old. The seventeenth century was an age
that opened much but resolved little; and it is unfair as well as inac-
curate to dismiss Milton, who was cautiously progressive in his atti-
tude to science, as an Elizabethan anachronism because he declined
a firm endorsement of ideas that many still rejected out of hand. But
the issue, surely, is not whether the hybrid cosmology of Paradise Lost
is scientifically defensible but whether it is successful artistically.
Milton does not in fact confuse cosmologies; he combines them in
order to conceptualize the concordia discors of space and infinity. The
cosmology of Paradise Lost imagines an enclosed Aristotelian uni-
verse set within an interminate, privatively infinite Copernican uni-
verse. The world created by the Son with "golden Compasses" in
book 7 is an artistic rendering of the Genesis account - which Milton
follows closely - in terms of Aristotelian theory. Although occasion-

ally modified in detail when the new astronomy gives a better
account of observed phenomena, this inner universe is composed of
the finite series of concentric spheres familiar from classical astronomy.
But this limited cosmos does not make up the whole of the universe,
nor is it created ex nihilo; it is crafted when the Son imposes order
on a small portion of Chaos, "the Womb of nature" (2.911), which
Milton, following Du Bartas and Spenser, identified with the form-
less "void" of Genesis 1:2.
The visible cosmos, then, is a minor excavation in an immense
expanse that, if not actually infinite, is, Milton takes pains to show,
as far beyond thought as it is beyond vision. The area outside our
universe is made up not only of Chaos - itself a "vast immeasurable
Abyss / Outrageous as a Sea, dark, wasteful, wild" (7.211-12) - but
also of the previously excavated "bottomless perdition" (1.47) of
Hell. So much territory has been consumed by divine creation that
old Chaos, in spite of the fact that his realm is an "Illimitable Ocean
without bound, / Without dimension," complains to Satan that he
has been left "little ... to defend" (2.892-3, 1000). And beyond the
immensities of Chaos and Hell lies the still greater expanse of
Heaven, which, Raphael says, contains
Regions to which
All thy Dominion, Adam, is no more
Than what this Garden is to all the Earth,
And all the Sea, from one entire globose
Stretcht into Longitude.
(5-750-4)
The words to describe the magnitude of Heaven fail even the Arch-
angel, and he is left to scramble awkwardly after a suitable litotes.
If the macrocosm in Paradise Lost reconciles Aristotelian and
Copernican cosmologies in a single system, then it must be added
(as Raphael's words imply) that there is also a comparative relation-
ship established between cosmography and geography. Eden, we
recall, is a hortus condusus, a fertile enclosure walled off from the
savage world outside:
Eden, where delicious Paradise,

Now nearer, Crowns with her enclosure green,
As with a rural mound the champaign head
Of a steep wilderness, whose hairy sides
With thicket overgrown, grotesque and wild,
Access deni'd.
(4.132-7)
The geocosm, then, mirrors the universe at large: as the Aristotelian

cosmos is a finite centre of order and harmony carved out of the
boundless desolation of primordial Chaos, so the Garden of Eden is
an oasis of perfection and eternal joy encompassed by the rude chaos
of an encroaching wilderness. Moreover, the antinomies of order and
disorder, perfection and imperfection, harmony and disharmony,
that characterize the oppositions of geocosm and macrocosm also
reflect the balanced antitheses that constitute the paradox of human
nature itself, so that even the physical setting images the epic's
human theme.
Put another way, we might say that man is indeed a microcosm
whose nature is the summing up of the ambiguities inherent in a
cosmos divided between the centripetal energy of divine creativity
and the centrifugal forces of chaotic and demonic confusion and
dissolution. In the prelapsarian world where nature and grace are
syndetic, human nature knows this division of energies only hypo-
thetically; but in the postlapsarian world, once the potential for mito-
sis has been actualized in the deed that brings death into the world
and all our woe, the human condition truly becomes a doubtful siege
of contraries as nature wars with grace, passion with reason, and
reason with faith. And it was a stroke of genius that led Milton,
whose cosmography images spiritual as well as material landscapes,
to conceive the moment of transition from the security of Edenic
innocence to the sad uncertainty of life in the fallen world as an
expulsion from the comfortable enclosure of an Aristotelian universe
into the cold and alien vastness of post-Copernican space. When
Adam first learns that he must leave his "sweet recess" in Eden, he
stands "Heart-strook with chilling gripe of sorrow" (11.264) at the
news. So too it must have been for Milton's contemporaries whose
preconceptions about the world were suddenly confronted by
Thomas Digges's infinitist hypothesis and Galileo's disturbing obser-
vations through a "glaz'd Optic Tube." There could have been no
analogy in seventeenth-century experience more powerful or more
apposite than the new astronomy to drive home the enormity of
man's fall into the knowledge of good and evil and his utter depen-
dence upon the consoling power of grace and saving faith. Far from
ignoring astronomy, Milton made it, in a sense, his central metaphor.
PART TWO
Time
6 Chronos and Kairos
Time is ... the measure of motion in respect of "before" and
"after." Aristotle, Physics 2icjbi
To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose

under the heavens. Ecclesiastes 3:1
From the beginning, two radically different conceptions - one Helle-

nistic, the other Hebraic - have dominated the history of Western
thought on the subject of time. For the Greeks, time was an essen-
tially quantitative phenomenon, opposed to eternity and conceived
as a derivative of physical space. For the Hebrews, on the other
hand, time, whose ontological status was of no speculative interest,
was preeminently qualitative: an historical consciousness of individ-
ual events as parts of a providential continuum. "The characteristic
present of Israel," as Tom Driver has said, "was a 'historical present/
made up of memory, anticipation and responsibility. The character-
istic present of Greece was an 'eternal present/ directed toward per-
ceiving the changeless, recurrent, and eternal in the fleeting,
kaleidoscopic now. Israel was a people to whom time and history
were the fundamental realities and who, for practical reasons, had to
adopt some nonhistorical elements. The Hellenes were essentially a
nonhistorical people who were sometimes driven by extraordinary
crises into a certain amount of historical exploration and interpreta-
tion" (Driver 56).
In Greek thought, the idea of time grew out of metaphysical spec-
ulation on the relationship of flux and passage, of movement and
decay, to the e, the Unlimited. From hhe Unlimited. From
the start, that is to say, the Greek meditation on time was precondi-
tioned by and inseparable from the consideration of eternity, con-
ceived as a boundless "space" from which chronos was drawn and
on which it depended for its continuing existence. According to the
70 Time
Pythagoreans, "the universe is unique, and from the Unlimited it

draws in time, breath, and void which distinguishes the places of
separate things."1 Time, then, is secondary and derivative. It is not
itself an aspect of the Unlimited - imagined as being movement
without beginning, end, or internal division - but is rather one of the
delimiting principles imposed, in the generation of the cosmos, on
the shapeless, numberless, and unformed raw material of the unlim-
ited.2 Time, in short, has a beginning - it comes into being with the
heavens - and it exists in opposition to the infinite and eternal
Unlimited.
These ideas found their way into Plato's Timaeus, a dialogue much
influenced by Pythagorean notions. Before the coming-into-being of
the heaven h 52d), says plato,only threee
th), 6v (the pr (the immutable form of being), (the principle
of becoming), and ( space, which is limitless and procides a a
position for the things that come to be).3 In the beginning, therefore,
there were only the eternal forms and infinite space. Time, he says
bluntly, belongs to the world of becoming:'
("time therefore came into being with the heavens,"
38b). When the Demiurge who ordered the cosmos enacted his cre-
ative fiat, "he resolved to make a moving image of eternity, and
when he set in order the heaven, he made this image eternal but
moving according to number, while eternity itself rests in unity, and
this image we call time" (37d-e).4 Time, then, excluded from the
intelligible realm of pure Being, is relegated to the sensible realm of
Becoming; it is, as the number or measure of change, the condition
of all coming-to-be and passing-away. However, being itself insepa-
rable from the concrete changes that occur in it, time has no real
ontological status: it is nothing in itself but exists merely as an aspect
or attribute of the motion of physical bodies in space.5
Aristotle, although he abandons Plato's metaphysics, develops a
relational theory of time in book 4 of the Physics that explores and
expands the empirical implications of Plato's view. Time, he declares,
"is just this - the number of motion in respect of 'before' and 'after'.
Hence time is not movement, but only movement in so far as it
admits of enumeration ... Time then is a kind of number ... [it] is
what is counted, not that with which we count" (219^-9). Motion
and time are continuous, and time is either the same thing as motion
or an attribute of it: without motion, there is no time. Time, therefore,
is a spatial phenomenon, a mysteriously quasi-independent contin-
uum of duration inseparable, as in Plato, from the concrete, observ-
able changes that take place in the physical world. Toward the end
of his discussion, Aristotle raises the question whether time can exist
without the enumerating activity of the mind (223ai6ff.). The answer,

anticipating Newton, is that time is, in fact, an objective numerical
reality independent of the existence of the counting mind: the sphere
of the fixed stars constitutes a cosmic clock whose uniform rotation
is, within the realm of mutability, the closest imitation of the immu-
tability of the unmoved Prime Mover. In light of the later develop-
ment of a psychological view of time in Plotinus and Augustine, the
question of the role of mind - of time depending on internal motions
of the psyche in addition to the external motion of things - is an
interesting one. In the Physics, however, although Aristotle once
alludes briefly to the matter (21935-6), the subject remains undevel-
oped - a tantalizing suggestion and nothing more. In the final anal-
ysis, time is for Aristotle, as it had been for Plato, merely the
enigmatic pseudo-spatial correlate of physical motility - the numer-
ator or measure of motion in respect of "before" and "after."
Besides its spatial aspect, time in Greek thought is characterized
by the irreversibility of its movement and by its circularity. In the
short term, time is linear, flowing, and, in a nonteleological sense,
progressive, moving inflexibly forward from a "before" through a
"now" to an "after." It is like a continuous stream and, as Heraclitus
observed, You can't step twice into the same river (frag. 91). Since it
moves in only one direction, time is, in Aristotle's words, "by its
nature the cause ... of decay, since it is the number of change, and
change removes what is" (Physics 22ibi-2). In other words, time is
essentially destructive: tempus edax. Untouched itself, it carries every-
thing caught up in its flow inexorably toward dissolution and death.
As the French proverb laments: Le temps ne s'en va pas, mais nous nous
en allons. Since there is no possibility of the temporal participating in
the eternal - time and eternity are antipodean realities in Greek
thought - and since there is no conception of the eternal taking upon
itself the temporal, the Greek vision of time is the bleak and comfort-
less one of an unrelieved descent to nothingness.
So much for the short view. In the long view, Greek thinkers of
virtually every school - Pythagoreans, atomists, and Stoics, Heracli-
tus, Plato, and even Aristotle - accepted in some form or other the
idea of the Great Year6: the doctrine of a periodic conflagration, or
iKn\)p<OGic, every ten to thirty thousand years, marking the cyclical
return of the celestial bodies to their original configuration and fol-
lowed by a recurrence of the events of the previous cycle in all their
details and in the same order.7 Such a vision of an endlessly repeat-
ing world serves only to focus more sharply the futility of any
human endeavour in time. The future is closed and meaningless; and
the present, already determined, loses its decisiveness, its claim to
72 Time
uniqueness and to be a power to effect meaningful change. Only the

past remains, and it is not surprising, therefore, that it was the past
that came to assume for the Greek mind a decisive and determina-
tive character. This view of time explains why their poets, character-
istically ignoring the present and the future, revelled so exclusively
in the stories of old heroes, past deeds, and battles long ago. But
even so, the ancient heroes themselves are bound upon a wheel of
fire: for in every "new" cycle, Clytemnestra will necessarily conspire
to murder Agamemnon and Hercules will inevitably succumb to
Deianeira's poisoned robe. The only redemption possible is to be
removed from the circular course of time and to be translated into
the Unlimites - that of infinite space beyond the reach of f
devouring Time. And since the Unlimited excludes, ex hypoihesi, any
notion of temporality, it follows that even the Greek conception of
blessedness is ultimately spatial.8
In marked contrast to the Greek view of time as quantitative and

circular is the Hebrew conception that time is qualitative, linear, and
teleological. Unlike the predominantly spatial mentality of ancient
Greece, time in the Hebrew understanding constituted an historical
continuum in which and through which God revealed his will and
promises to a chosen people. Time was no a chro- a chro-
nological succession of events, but Kmpo<^ a critical moment. More
properly, indeed, since the providential plan was seen to work itself
out in individual events, we should speak not of Time (an abstrac-
tion) but of times, of concrete mipoi linked in an historical sequence
revealing the acts of God to Israel and calling forth the responses of
individual Israelites. Past and future flowed together into the Kpiaiq
(decision, judgment) of the present moment: "The Lord," Moses
informed Israel, "made not this covenant with our fathers, but with
us, even us, who are all of us here alive this day" (Deut. 5:3).
The first point that needs to be made about the Hebrew view of
time is that the sharp Greek dichotomy between created time and a
timeless, alien eternity is foreign to the vision both of the Old and
New Testaments. In the Bible, the eternity of God is characteristically
described in temporal terms: "Before the mountains were brought
forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from
everlasting to everlasting, thou art God" (Ps. 90:2); "I am Alpha
and Omega, the beginning and the ending, saith the Lord, which
is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty" (Rev. 1:8).
Time and eternity form a continuum. God is the Lord of time as well
as of eternity: he is, and was, and ever shall be. Oscar Cullmann
states categorically that "Primitive Christianity knows nothing of a

timeless God" and argues that subsequent theologies of a timeless
eternity rest on "a great misunderstanding/' in which the biblical
conception of eternity is "dissolved into metaphysics" and "the New
Testament's time-shaped pattern of salvation [is] subjected to the
spatial metaphysical scheme of Hellenism." Biblical eternity, he
concludes,
is time, or, to put it better, what we call "time" is nothing but a part, defined
and delimited by God, of this same unending duration of God's time.
Nowhere does this come so clearly to expression as in the ... fact that the
word used to express eternity, odcbv ("age"), is the same word that is also
applied to a limited division of time; otherwise expressed, between what we
call eternity and what we call time, that is, between everlastingly continuing
time and limited time, the New Testament makes absolutely no difference in
terminology. Eternity is the endless succession of the ages (cdoovec;). (Cull-
mann 62)
Karl Barth, likewise, although he makes a clear distinction

between eternity and time, nonetheless stresses the durational nature
of God's eternity:
The being is eternal in whose duration beginning, succession, and end are
not three but one, not separate as a first, a second and a third occasion, but
one simultaneous occasion as beginning, middle and end. Eternity is the
simultaneity of beginning, middle and end, and to that extent it is pure
duration. Eternity is God in the sense in which in Himself and in all things
God is simultaneous, i.e., beginning and middle as well as end, without
separation, distance or contradiction. Eternity is not, therefore, time ... Time
is distinguished from eternity by the fact that in it beginning, middle and
end are distinct and even opposed as past, present and future. Eternity is
just the duration which is lacking to time, as can be seen clearly at the
middle point of time, in the temporal present and in its relationship to the
past and the future. Eternity has and is the duration which is lacking to time.
It has and is simultaneity. (Barth 2:1, 6o8)9
Two things may be noted here. First, there is in the Bible no specu-
lative or abstract interest in the meaning of time, and no attempt is
made to distinguish it, in any philosophic way, from eternity. While
it is probably the case, given this lack of speculative interest, that no
decisive answer can ever be given to the question of the precise
nature of the. biblical conception of eternity, it remains true that the
vocabulary of eternity in the Old and New Testaments overlaps and
74 Time
is often identical with the vocabulary of time,10 and that later theol-
ogies of a timeless eternity that is categorically opposed to the flux
of time - as in Boethius11 - show the influence of Greek dualistic
metaphysics. Second, like eternity, time in the biblical understanding
is an aspect of the durational providence of God. It is not a thing
opposed to God, as in Hellenistic thought; rather, as Cullmann
observes, it is "the means of which God makes use in order to reveal
his gracious working" (51).
The ancient Greeks lived in a world conditioned primarily by
space, the Hebrews in a world conditioned by time and construed
primarily in temporal terms. Whereas Plato and Aristotle had made
the birth of time dependent on the motion of the heavenly spheres,
the God of Israel delays the creation of the sun and moon until the
fourth day (Gen. 1:14-18), by which time day and night, heaven and
earth have already been brought into existence. Time in Genesis is not
dependent on physical phenomena or motion in space; it is not, as it
was for the Greeks, imageable only as an aspect of motion. Duration
exists from the beginning and, as we have seen, even from before the
beginning as an attribute of God's eternity and providence. It is
worth recalling here that, in contrast to Greek religion with its prolif-
eration of temples and statues, the religion of Israel was, from the
beginning, essentially imageless. Active in time and event, God
cannot be transformed into spatial terms, and "graven images" are
expressly forbidden.12 It is significant, as A.J. Heschel has noted, that
the last act of creation is the blessing, not of a place or a thing, but of
a time: "And God blessed the seventh day, and sanctified it" (Gen.
2:3). Heschel writes, "This is a radical departure from accustomed
religious thinking. The mythical mind would expect that, after
heaven and earth have been established, God would create a holy
place - a holy mountain or a holy spring - whereupon a sanctuary is
to be established. Yet it seems as if to the Bible it is a holiness in time,
the Sabbath, which comes first" (9). It is not, then, temples or physical
places that ar e holy places that are holy (), but events and hi ts
in time when God chooses to exercise his will and purpose. "What
the eye was to the ancient Greek," James Muilenburg has said, "that
the ear was to the man of Israel. The realm of maximum reality was
that of speaking-hearing. The appeal which rings throughout the
Bible from beginning to end is to hear, to listen, to respond to words,
to accept the responsibility of being addressed" (239-40). The com-
monest Hebrew word for time, 'et (which the Septuagint typically
renders renders ), is derived from a root meaning to answmeet
"Thus," Muilenburg says, "time is occurrence; it is that which meets
you in your path through life ... A man's life consists of his days ...
[and] what is significant is what happens, or what man does, in those

periods. There are days which are so filled with content that they
mean more than months of duration-time, and these days are pre-
served and remembered within the nephesh or life-soul of the person
or community which experiences them" (234, 237). To the Hebrew
mind, that is to say time is essentially qualitative, not quantitative: it
is not measured as duration or extent; it is experienced as event.13 In
short, time is kairos - the recognition that, in the providential world
of God's holy-making, there is a season and a proper time for every-
thing under heaven: "A a time to to be born,and a time to
die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; a
time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to
build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and
a time to dance" (Eccles. 3:2-4).
The New Testament vision of time and history grows out of and
depends upon the Old Testament view of time as kairos and provi-
dential mission. While the Greeks, fascinated by the past and its
endless cyclical repetition, denied the future a meaningful dimension
of its own, Hebrews and Christians made the significance of both
past and present, conditioned by promise and expectation, depen-
dent for their meaning largely on the future. Gilles Quispel has
coined the useful phrase "proleptic eschatology" (91) to describe the
teleological Judaeo-Christian vision in which past and present are
drawn, as by a magnet, toward a providentially ordained 6a%ccTov
(end), which imparts both to time and history their ultimate mean-
ing. Such a view also ensures the determinative character of the
present: for past and future, history and prophecy, converge in a
present illuminated by memory and conditioned by anticipation. No
event in sacred history - although each is a unique historical occur-
rence - is isolated; everything that happens is related, backward and
forward, to what has and what will happen. In the tension between
the historical uniqueness of the individual event and its transcendent
meaning as a part of the par- the present acquires its par-
ticular character as Kpicfiq (decision, judgment). Past, present and
future come together in a manifestation of the Eternal enacted in a
moment of time - which, in the New Testament, is called kairos.
The linear progression from Creation to Apocalypse of Old Testa-
ment time is complicated, in the New Testament, by the advent of
Christ. In Christ, time acquires a midpoint, a centre against which all
that has been and shall be is measured. On the one hand, the Incar-
nation, although a once-and-for-all historical event, is the revelation
of a truth that has existed always: Christ is "the Lamb slain from the
foundation of the world" (Rev. 13:8). Thus, the authors of the New
j6 Time
Testament, Paul in particular, came to regard the Old Testament less

as a book of law and history and more as being, from beginning to
end, a preparation and promise of the coming of the Messiah and the
new covenant of grace: Adam is interpreted as a prefigurative typos
of Christ (Rom. 5:19; i Cor. 15:21-2); the old law of ritual and works
is declared to be the "shadow" of the new law of faith sealed by the
blood of Christ's sacrifice (Heb. 10:1); the Jews in the desert are
called TUTioi t||ia)v, ("figures of ourselves," i Cor. 10:6). On the other
hand, however, the historical Jesus is not the end of history, but the
revelation in flesh of the spiritual end toward which all history is
moving. What is significant about this view is that events in time,
including the Incarnation itself, are never self-sufficient, never com-
plete in themselves. Events are always figural, pointing toward a
transcendent reality that is still concealed. "All history," as Eric Auer-
bach has said in an important essay,
remains open and questionable, points to something still concealed, and the
tentativeness of events in the figural interpretation is fundamentally differ-
ent from the tentativeness of events in the modern view of historical devel-
opment. In the modern view, the provisional event is treated as a step in an
unbroken horizontal process; in the figural system the interpretation is
always sought from above; events are considered not in their unbroken rela-
tion to one another, but torn apart, individually, each in relation to some-
thing other that is promised and not yet present. Whereas in the modern
view the event is always self-sufficient and secure, while the interpretation
is fundamentally incomplete, in the figural interpretation the fact is subor-
dinated to an interpretation which is fully secured to begin with: the event
is enacted according to an ideal model which is a prototype situated in the
future and thus far only promised ... For every future model, though incom-
plete as history, is already fulfilled in God and has existed from all eternity
in His providence. The figures in which He cloaked it, and the incarnation
in which He revealed its meaning, are therefore prophecies of something that
has always been, but which will remain veiled for men until the day when
they behold the Saviour revelata facie, with the senses as well as in spirit.
Thus the figures are not only tentative; they are also the tentative form of
something eternal and timeless; they point not only to the concrete future,
but also to something that always has been and always will be; they point
to something which is in need of interpretation, which will indeed be ful-
filled in the concrete future, but which is at all times present, fulfilled in
God's providence, which knows no difference of time. This eternal thing is
already figured in them, and thus they are both tentative fragmentary reality,
and veiled eternal reality. (Auerbach 59-60)
Temporal reality, then, while certainly real, is incomplete. Its reality -

a reality guaranteed by the Incarnation itself, by the fact of the Word-
made-flesh - is only the shadow, the "figure," of an ultimate reality
that will, in the fullness of time, be unveiled. Earthly events are
neither definitive nor self-contained, nor are they links in a horizon-
tal chain of cause and effect; rather, they must be "viewed in imme-
diate vertical connection with the divine order which encompasses
[them], which on some future day will itself be concrete reality; so
that the earthly event is a prophecy or figura of a part of a wholly
divine reality that will be enacted in the future" (72).
In contrast, then, to the view of Greek philosophy, where time is
chronos, a quantitative and pseudo-spatial correlate of physical
motion that, in its action, is cyclical, stripped of a meaningful future,
and essentially destructive (tempus edax), time in the Old and New
Testaments is kairos - an existential reality, qualitative and teleologi-
cal, experienced as occasion or event and always pointing beyond
itself, always gathering up the significance of past and present into
the generative fiat of a providential whole to be fully realized only
when the succession of past, present, and future are subsumed into
the simultaneity of an eternal now.
7 Inner Time:
Augustine and Bergson
Any discussion of time as a psychological reality - a subjective rather

than an objective phenomenon - should properly begin with Ploti-
nus. In Enneads (3.7), where he undertakes to defend and extend
Plato's metaphysical view of time as the "moving image of eternity"
against Aristotle's purely empirical conception of time as the mea-
sure of motion, Plotinus introduces the notion of time as a "power
of the soul"( of the soul" ( 3.7.11). Opposing ty
in the usual Hellenistic fashion/ he begins by asserting categorically
that time is neither movement nor the measure of movement (xomo
"this is not time, but space"), for, he says,
what we call movement is no more than something that occurs in
time: "movement can stop altogether or be interrupted, but time
cannot" (3.7.8). How, then, is time born and what is it? According to
Plotinus, a "restlessness" disturbs the stasis of the One, the eternal
being, giving rise to a series of emanations in which, by a process of
degradation, the lower degrees of reality proceed from the higher
ones. In the first such emanation - that of the World Soul, in which
individual souls are contained - time appears:
("time came into existence simultaneously with this universe,

because soul generated it along with this universe," 3.7.12).2 It is the
activity World Soul that gener and the
resulting universe therefore exists, not in the static perfection eter-
nity, but in the mutable succession of time
It is in this sense that the universe, as Plato
79 Inner Time
had said, is the moving (and therefore imperfect) image of eternity.

But Plotinus departs radically from Plato when he argues that time,
rather than being an attribute of physical motion, is an attribute of
Soul: "But one must not conceive time as outside Soul ... It is not an
[external] accompaniment of Soul nor something that comes after ...
but something which is seen along with it and exists in it and with it"
(3.7.11; italics added).3 Time, then, is a psychological reality; and,
from this correlation of mind and time, what follows logically of
course is that without soul (at least in a rudimentary form) there can
be no time. Effectively, then, Plotinus internalizes the time-motion
analogy of classical Greek philosophy, connecting time with an inner
motion of the soul rather than with external motions in physical
space. In doing so, he prepares the way for Augustine's famous med-
itation on time in book 11 of the Confessions.
What must be said first and foremost about Augustine's discus-
sion of time in the Confessions is that it is an illustration of his con-
viction that fides qu&rit, intellectus invenit - his reiterated assertion
that when faith seeks, understanding finds.4 If you lack understand-
ing, he says in Sermo 118, then believe first in order that you may
understand - for, where faith comes first, understanding follows: si
non poles intelligere, crede ut intelligas; prsecedit fides, sequitur intellectus
(PL 38:672). The discussion of time in the Confessions is, from begin-
ning to end, an extended prayer for enlightenment, the request of
faith for an understanding beyond the capacity of unaided human
reason, for a yvoxnc;5 revealed to the petitioner through a divinely
directed deepening of a preexisting faith: "I would sacrifice unto thee
the service of my thoughts and tongue: now give me what I am to offer
thee. For I am poor and needy, but thou art rich to all those that call
upon thee" (11.2; italics added). He does not seek to extract faith
from rational understanding, but rather calls upon faith to guide and
deepen his understanding: noli quaerere intelligere ut credas, sed crede
ut intelligas (In Joan. Evang. 29.6: PL 35:1630). This point needs to be
stressed, even at the risk of repetition, so that it is clear from the
outset that Augustine's exploration of time is an "inclination of the
soul" - an intentio animi - toward God as being at once the subject
and source of all true knowing. The Confessions are both Augustine's
confession of his human ignorance and inability, and his answered
prayer for the gift of an enlightened faith that truly understands.
The meditation on time proper begins (11.3-8) with a request to
understand the opening verses of the book of Genesis, the mystery
- received and accepted by faith - that God in the beginning created
the heavens and earth ex nihilo. But how, some have asked, did God
employ himself before this act of creation (11.10)? Augustine is blunt:
8o Time
antequam faceret deus cselum et terram, nonfaciebat aliquid ("before God

made heaven and earth, he did not make anything/' 11.12). Before
the creation there was no time; there was only eternity. Time involves
succession, a passing of one thing after another, but God exists in an
ever-fixed eternity where all is at once present (semper stantis xterni-
tatis ... [ubi] totum esse praesens, 11.11). God, who created time, is
beyond time. The glib question, then, as to what occupied him before
the creation is a nonquestion: si autem ante csdum et terram nullum erat
tempus, cur quseeritur, quid tunefaciebas? non enim erat tune, ubi non erat
tempus ("if before heaven and earth there was no time, why is it then
demanded, what thou didst? For there was no THEN, when there was
no time," 11.13). God exists in simultaneity, an undivided reality
where past, present, and future are all-at-once and inseparable;6 crea-
tures (including man), on the other hand, inhabit a realm where
duration is successive, where past, present, and future are discrete,
divisible realities. There is the same difference between God and the
creature as there is between a consciousness to which every note of
a melody is simultaneously present and a consciousness that per-
ceives the notes one by one and adds to the note it hears the memory
of those it has heard and the anticipation of those it has yet to hear
(Gilson 193). Like the Greeks, then, Augustine makes a radical dis-
tinction between time - a creature,7 a created thing whose existence
is disjointed - and the simul stant of eternity; but he does so, unlike
the Greeks, in order to leave room for eschatology: anni tui omnes
simul stant ... [et] isti autem nostri omnes erunt, cum omnes non erunt
("thy years stand all at once ... [and] these years of thine shall all be
ours, when all time shall cease to be," 11.13). F°r Augustine, time is
teleological - not redundantly circular, but directed toward a provi-
dential end that gathers up, rather than excludes, all tran-
sitory duration.
Quid est enim tempus? ("What then is time?") Following Plotinus,
Augustine begins by confessing that time is a baffling mystery: si
nemo ex me quasrat, scio; si quxrenti explicare velim, nescio ("if nobody
asks me, I know; but if I want to explain it to someone who asks, I
find that I do not know," n.i4)8 Time is a riddle. The past does not
exist, because it is no more. The future does not exist, because it is
not yet. And the present, when we think about it, shrinks to an
infinitesimal point, for only the smallest indivisible instant of dura-
tion can properly be called present. A day, for instance, cannot be
present all at once: if it is noon, then twelve hours have passed away,
and twelve are still to come. So, too, a single hour is dissolved into
minutes, and minutes are dissolved into seconds, until finally "the
only time that can be called present is an instant, if we can conceive
8i Inner Time
of such, that cannot be divided even into the most minute fractions,
and a point of time as small as this passes so rapidly from the future
to the past that its duration is without length" (11.15). TRe past, then,
has already ceased to exist, the future has not yet come into being,
and the present is reduced to a point so small that it disappears. Time
truly is an enigma. And yet, Augustine says, despite such imponder-
able mysteries, we are sensible of intervals of time and we do have
experience of the past, the present, and the future. How is this pos-
sible? The answer is that we must speak, not of three separate times,
but of three modes of durational consciousness: a present time of
past things, a present time of present things, and a present time of
future things. "The present time of past things is our memory (memo-
ria); the present time of present things is our sight (contuitus); the
present time of future things is our expectation (expectatio)" (11.20).
Our experience of time, then, is a psychological phenomenon, and
the customary division of time into three ontologically discrete
"times" is an error. Experientially - and we know time only by expe-
rience - there is only one time: the present, in which the past sur-
vives as memory and the future preexists as an anticipation based on
past and present causes. This mental present, which occupies no
space (q.e.d.) but has duration as attentio mentis, incorporates the past
(which is no more) and the future (which is not yet), drawing them
together into a trimodal unity and giving them a continuing exist-
ence in what Augustine calls his "attentive faculty" (attentio mea).9
Thus much for the perception of duration. But how do we measure
time? The ancients, following Aristotle, held that time inheres in the
motion of the heavenly spheres. But this, as Plotinus argued, is a
measurement of space, not a measurement of time. The motion of a
body in space is its physical movement between two points, and
such movement remains the same no matter how long it lasts.
Motion occurs in time but is not itself time. Moreover, if a body
remains motionless, we can still estimate the time of its immobility.
Time and motion are not commensurate. The motion that time mea-
sures is one thing; the time that measures it is quite another: non ergo
tempus corporis motus ("time therefore is not the motion of a body,"
11.24). And yet it is undeniable that we do measure time. We say that
this syllable is shorter than that syllable, that this poem is twice, or
three times, as long as that poem. Now, time is nothing else but a
stretching out in length, nihil esse aliud tempus quam distentionem
(11.26). But what is it precisely that is thus stretched out in order to be
measured? "I know it to be time that I measure; and yet do I neither
measure the time to come, for that it is not yet: nor time present,
because that is not stretched out in any space: nor time past, because
82 Time
that is not still" (11.26). The solution to the problem of time measure-
ment is the same as the solution to the problem of time perception:
in te, anime meus, tempora mea metior ("in thee, my mind, I measure
my times/' 11.27). To measure time is, in fact, to measure impressions
left in the mind by prior or anticipated experience. I compare this
syllable or poem with that syllable or poem and, on this basis,
declare one longer or shorter. Time measurement, that is to say, is a
psychological phenomenon: it occurs only in the mind itself and con-
sists in the present regard of a comparing consciousness that looks
forward (expectatio) as well as backward (memoria).
Having explored the perception and measurement of time, Augus-
tine is now in a position to answer the question with which he began:
"What then is time?" It is, in the first place, the correlative of mental
activity. It has nothing to do with space. The mind expects and marks
attentively and remembers (expectat et adtendit et meminit, 11.28).
Time is the "stretching out" of the mind's attentive faculty - a
present that is continuous and uninterrupted as long as the perceiv-
ing mind remains conscious - to include a past recalled by memory
and a future anticipated by expectation. Time is, in short, a distention
of the soul - a distentio animi. But this is not where Augustine ends,
because the meaning of time per se is not what interests him. Instead
of resting content with his definition of time as distentio animi, his
thoughts are thrown into tumult by the disjunction that exists
between time and eternity.10 "You, Lord, are eternal - but I am
divided between time gone by and time to come, and its course is a
mystery to me" (tu, domine, aeternus es; at ego in tempora dissilui,
quorum ordinem nescio, 11.29). Beyond the psychological problem of
time, there lies a metaphysical problem that has, from the beginning,
determined both the purpose and the direction of his meditation and
that has a direct bearing on his solution of the mystery of time. In
addition to the distentio animi that brings past and future together in
a continuous present, there is also in Augustine's experience an
intentio animi toward eternity. And this is, for him, really the heart of
the matter. It is only the intuition of eternity that allows him to make
sense, in the final analysis, of the psychological experience of time -
for time is the distention of the eternal. Human experience is frag-
mentary and discontinuous. Unlike God, who in the total simul (see
chap. 6, n.n) of eternity perceives all of reality simultaneously, expe-
rience in time is a series of instants rescued from the past and pre-
dicted in the future, out of which the mind forges an analogon of the
whole. We see as in a glass, darkly. And it is with this recognition of
human limitation, but supported by an intuition of the permanent
and eternal glimpsed in and through the temporal and transitory,
83 Inner Time
that Augustine looks forward, "not to what lies ahead of me in this

life and will surely pass away, but to my eternal goal ... [when] I
shall listen to the sound of your praises and gaze at your beauty ever
present, never future, never past" (11.29). Where Plotinus had given
us a spiritual empiricism that sought out the Good as an object of
abstract intellection, Augustine offers a rational metaphysics, rooted
in his yearning for an understanding faith and ending in an enlight-
ening encounter with the living God. In many ways he was, as
Herman Hausheer has said, "the first thinker to take time seriously"
(Hausheer 37). He was, certainly, the first to explore it as an Erlebnis,
a lived experience that takes the whole being into account rather
than merely an intellectual proposition prompted by curiosity.
It is a striking fact that although Henri Bergson, the early modern

"philosopher of time," frequently cites Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus,
Spinoza, Leibniz, and Kant, he never once in all his writings men-
tions Augustine's meditation on time in book 11 of the Confessions.
"The only conceivable reason is that Bergson had simply never heard
of, let alone read, the Confessions" (Kolakowski 17). This is a remark-
able omission, not only because of Augustine's importance, but also
because both writers were struggling, though in different ways, with
the same basic problem: namely, the conception of time as a qualita-
tive, rather than a quantitative, given of experience, whose origin,
operation, and significance are purely psychological. It would have
been most instructive, therefore, to have had Bergson's response to
his famous predecessor's analysis of time as a distentio animi precon-
ditioned and determined by a metaphysical intentio animi towards
eternity. But this, alas, was not to be.
Bergson is a philosopher of sharp dichotomies - body versus mind,
determinism versus freedom, sensory memory versus "pure" mem-
ory, intellect versus intuition, mechanistic evolution versus creative
evolution - and the sharpest of all these distinctions is that between
scientific time, a mathematical abstraction symbolized in physics by
the letter t, and psychological or real time, which Bergson calls duree
reelle or simply duree.11 Scientific time, which is homogeneous, infi-
nitely divisible, and represented by standard units (years, days,
hours, minutes, seconds), is an abstraction in which real time -
erroneously, but usefully for utilitarian purposes - is symbolized
in spatial terms and measured by clocks and chronometers.12 Real
time, in contrast, is "a qualitative multiplicity, with no likeness to
number; an organic evolution which is not yet an increasing quantity;
a pure heterogeneity within which there are no distinct qualities"
84 lime
(Bergson4 226) - that is to say, a diverse and irreversible succession

of psychological states that flow into each other in an indivisible
process. It is, he says, "the form which the succession of our con-
scious states assumes when our ego lets itself live, when it refrains
from separating its present states from its former states" (99). In other
words, duree is experienced time, duration in which nothing is lost,
because each present moment carries within it the entire flow of the
experienced past. It does not exist in the external world but only in
the mind, is unrepeatable and irreversible, and has no parts but
rather constitutes an indivisible dynamic process in which, since no
psychological experience is quantitatively comparable to another (for
example, there is no such thing as a "greater" or "smaller" anger in
terms of size), all distinctions are purely qualitative.13 Leszek Kola-
kowski summarizes the experience of real time in this way: "in the
life of consciousness, there is a perfect continuity, and our self is at
every moment, as it were, in a state of being born, absorbing its past
and creating its future; it has a history, no doubt, it even is its history
stored in memory, but it cannot go through the same state again; such
a miracle would amount to the reversal of time" (Kolakowski 21).
Scientific time, on the other hand, which is at bottom an illusion, is,
says Bergson, no more than "the extensive symbol of true duration
... the shadow of the self projected into homogeneous space" - and,
he adds, since we are customarily absorbed in an everyday struggle
for survival, that human consciousness, "goaded by an insatiable
desire to separate, substitutes the symbol for the reality, or perceives
the reality only through the symbol" (Bergson4 128). And so it is that
in ordinary thought the representation usurps the reality: we project
time into space/4 reduce quality to quantity, substitute explanation
for fact, and sacrifice the intuitive insights of the "profound" self that
lies at the core of personality to the rationalizing and utilitarian intel-
ligence of a "superficial" self that functions as an organ of survival
and of utilitarian progress in technical skill.
In order to appreciate the role of duree in Bergson's epistemology,
one needs to set his view of time in the larger context of his cosmol-
ogy and, though one hesitates to use the word, his metaphysics. By
one of those quirks of coincidence that, in retrospect, seem to assume
a significance unrelated to any solid reality, Bergson was born in the
same year (1859) that Darwin published the Origin of the Species. This
curious fact is worth mentioning because Bergson's most famous
book - Creative Evolution (1907) - was a bold attempt to assimilate
Darwinian theory to a metaphysical dynamic in the light of which
we are led, by intuition/5 to understand that the evolution of living
85 Inner Time
things is a continuous process in which an original drive or cosmic

energy in the universe (un elan original de la vie) produces progres-
sively more complex and sophisticated organisms. Evolution, that is
to say is not, as Darwin held, a mechanical process of the elimination
of the maladjusted according to the law of natural selection,16 but
rather a qualitative and creative process of continuous becoming -
guided by a creative centre of cosmic energy ("God")17 - whose
growth resembles the mysterious methods of artistic creation rather
than the mechanical operation of a machine. The original elan vital is
a "current of consciousness" that penetrates matter, gives rise to
living things, and determines the course of their development; it is
passed on through reproduction, and its operation is revealed to us
in acts of intuition, when we see things (including ourselves) "from
inside," when we participate in pure duree and enter the creative
stream of life driven onward and propelled by the divine force that
permeates the universe and guides the evolutionary process. Thus,
although the human mind and human consciousness are products of
biological evolution, biological evolution itself is the work of cosmic
mind. In the final analysis, evolution is God's "undertaking to create
creators, that He may have, besides Himself, beings worthy of His
love" (from Bergson5, as cited by Goudge 293).
What, then, are the broad implications of Bergson's psychology
and metaphysic of duree, and how does it relate to Augustine's con-
ception of time as a distentio animi conditioned by a prior and deter-
mining intentio animi? It may be said, at the outset, that the
differences are finally more striking than the similarities. In the first
place, Bergson's Dieu, although the centre of creative energy and
qualitative growth in the universe, is by no means the personal God,
omniscient and omnipotent, of Augustine's Confessions. Bergson's
Dieu is a cosmic energy ("un elan original de la vie") working itself
out in time and through evolution, a process to which subsequently
created free and creative beings somehow mysteriously contribute
without losing their identities or existing merely as instruments of
an ulterior revelation. We are closer here to the cosmic Noxx; of Greek
metaphysics (particularly in Plotinus) and to the pantheistic deity of
post-Kantian idealism (Schelling and Hegel) than we are to the
Augustinian God who is and was and shall be, who endures
unchanging and unchanged from everlasting to everlasting. Second,
unlike the radical teleology of Augustinian (and, indeed, of all Chris-
tian) eschatology, the evolutionary process conceived by Bergson,
although it displays an internal purposefulness and retains a basic
direction, has no goal. The elan vital is moving toward no fixed and
86 Time
final, no predetermined, end: it operates only in the present as an

immanent cause within the life force itself. Again, one is reminded
of Hegel or perhaps of Teilhard de Chardin, but not of Augustine.
Third, when we come to the question of duree itself, to the way in
which past, present, and future constitute a psychological reality, we
find ourselves a long way from the Augustinian view of time as the
present "attention" of a soul stretching itself backwards into memory
and forward into expectation. "What duration is there existing out-
side us?" Bergson asks in Time and Free Will; and he returns the blunt
answer: "The present only, or, if we prefer the expression, simultane-
ity" (227). Perception, that is to say, occurs in a concrete present that
makes available to consciousness, at a given moment, a whole
system of objects in spatial relationships to one another. "No doubt,"
he adds, "external things change, but their moments do not succeed
one another ... except for a consciousness which keeps them in
mind." For Bergson, then, the present is certainly real, but it is no
geometrical point separating past and future: it is rather, since "one
is bound to live duration whilst it is passing" (198), the continuous
flow of evolving consciousness gnawing its way from an accumu-
lated past into an undifferentiated future. The past exists as memory
- "consciousness signifies, before everything, memory" (Bergson3
80) - that retains all prior conscious states in the order in which they
occurred. Thus, duree is the coincidence of a currently experienced
present and a remembered past in which nothing is lost, for each
moment, although itself new and unrepeatable, carries with it the
whole of its past.18
And what of the future? The answer is that the future does not
exist in any real way. "All foreseeing," Bergson declares, "is in reality
seeing" (Bergson4 197), that is, a projection (as in the case of astro-
nomical prediction) of the accomplished past into the as yet undif-
ferentiated future. (The sacrifice of the future is the price Bergson is
willing to pay in order to vindicate human freedom and preserve it
against the claims of determinism.)19 Since neither individual con-
sciousness nor the evolutionary process as a whole is governed by
an ultimate xeXot; (end), and since the course of consciousness is held
to be a free and unrestrained - and therefore an unpredictable -
progression, it follows that, in terms of real duration, there can be no
such thing as the future.
We are then, in dealing with Bergson, a long way from the Augus-
tinian vision of time as a distentio animi conditioned by an intentio
animi toward a divinely appointed and eternal end. In order to pre-
serve human freedom, Bergson opts for a radical subjectivism that
reduces individual "souls" to demythologized Leibnizian monads
87 Inner Time
stripped of their preestablished harmony, yet somehow, mysteri-

ously, guided without interference by the imminent teleology of the
cosmic elan vital. How this is possible is something of a mystery.
Bergsonian duree reelle can be apprehended, in the final analysis, only
as a creative intuition, like the numinous unfolding of a fragmentary,
never-to-be-completed poem.
8 Time, Literature, and
Literary Criticism
The essential difference between the Augustinian conception of time

and the Bergsonian conception of time may be expressed as follows:
for Augustine, duration is a necessary condition (one of several) of
human experience; for Bergson, duree is the essence of existence, the
fundamental reality underlying all consciousness. For both writers,
chronos is inconsequential and kairos is everything, but their under-
standing of kairos differs in important ways. For Augustine, time is
a psychological "attention" in which the present is conditioned by,
and significant only in the context of, a past and a future that are
universal as well as personal: memoria and expectatio embrace history
and prophecy as well as individual experience. No man is an island:
each individual, for good or for ill, participates in the providential
design, inaugurated at the Creation, that leads from the City of Man
to its fulfilment and perfection in the City of God; and each individ-
ual life is a microcosm of patterns and events, revealed once and for
all in the life and work of Christ at the mid-point of time but end-
lessly postfigured in the lives of later beings who recapitulate his
human experiences in their own lives (see below, chap. 10).
In Bergson, on the other hand, there is process without plan, a
present and past without a future, and a purely subjective duree in
which individual events are unique, unpredictable, and unrepeatable.
In other words, in Augustine the concept of kairos can be understood
and interpreted only against the background of a providential whole
in which each event in the present is a tentative reality that recapit-
ulates in a fragmentary way the providential past and anticipates a
89 Time and Literature
still-to-be-unveiled providential future; in Bergson, kairos is a purely

relative and subjective phenomenon, where each experience fulfils
and extends only its own past, is complete in itself, and is valued in
isolation as a step in the evolving consciousness of the organism that
experiences it. Time, for Bergson, is a horizontal progression of suc-
cessive psychological states in the progressive but undetermined evo-
lution of individual consciousness; for Augustine, it is a vertical
awareness of an individual identity revealed in the light of an histor-
ical past and an anticipated future which, since it appears as future
only to us sub specie temporalis, is already mysteriously contained in
the present. Augustinian time, then, is centrifugal, drawing the self
out from the centre of its limited being into a deeper and fuller real-
ity; in contrast, Bergsonian duree is centripetal, tending, despite Berg-
son's efforts to tie it to a cosmic elan vital, to limit "true" being to the
solipsistic centre of a relativized and existential consciousness.
The twentieth century, it is often said, is a century obsessed with
time, and Bergson, though preceded by Kant and others, may legit-
imately be singled out as the most influential modern exponent -
indeed, the popularizer - of the subjective reality of time. And time,
conceived as a subjective and relative1 phenomenon of conscious-
ness, constitutes the core of the aesthetic humanism of the modern
spirit. Time is the essence of existence: it is the key to consciousness,
inseparable from the concepts of being and of self, and it opens to
us, in a way that space cannot, the inner world - the "real" world -
of impressions and sensations, of ideas and emotions. True time has
nothing to do with clocks or external succession: it is inner time,
qualitative time, human time. It deals exclusively with memory and
the immediate data of consciousness. One has only to think, for
example, of the "process philosophy" of A.N. Whitehead or of
Heidegger's phenomenology of Dasein (where time is always "my
time" and where authentic existence resides in the stoic angst of a
recognition that in temporality all being is "being-toward-death") or
of Sartre's treatment of time in L'Etre et le neant as an internal struc-
ture of the mind and an activity by which consciousness struggles
both to negate and to transcend itself.
There is a similar fascination with the subjectivity of time in
modern literature and in the literary critical industry that has grown
up around it. In contrast to clock or calendar time, Hans Meyerhoff
has written, "time in literature always refers to elements of time as
given in experience ... Its meaning, therefore, is to be sought only in
the context of this world of experience or within the context of a
human life as the sum total of these experiences. Time so defined is
private, personal, subjective or, as is often said, psychological" (4).
90 Time
One thinks immediately, of course, of Proust, whose recherche du

temps perdu is an attempt to gain, by the recovery of the past, a sense
of continuity and an identity for the narrative self in the present.2 But
time is an omnipresent theme in modern literature, and it is hard to
think of a major writer in English - Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, Faulkner,
Auden, Beckett, to cite the more obvious examples - who does not
in one way or another, often as a central thematic concern, engage
the subject of time as the determining dimension of human con-
sciousness. It is worth exploring one or two instances briefly for the
light they throw on modern preconceptions about the meaning and
importance of time. Such a digression, if it is such, is made relevant
to the present study by the fact that too often literary critics, brought
up on Bergson and Sartre, have given in to a temptation to read back
modern conceptions into Renaissance literature and to impose the
ideals of a modern aesthetic humanism on the work of writers -
particularly Shakespeare - whose ideas about time were formed, not
by Bergson or Proust, but by Augustine and Seneca. As in the first
part of this book, where I argued that modern notions of infinite
space have led to misunderstandings about the thematic use of infin-
ity in Renaissance texts, so too, where time is concerned, a failure of
historical imagination has too often led to a misunderstanding and
misrepresentation of the way in which time, for Renaissance writers,
may properly be described as being a "psychological" reality.
The case for relativism has nowhere been asserted more boldly
than by Walter Pater. "Beauty," he declares in the preface to The
Renaissance, "like all other qualities presented to human experience,
is relative" - and the question one must ask therefore about an aes-
thetic experience is, "What is this song or picture, this engaging per-
sonality in life or in a book, to me? What effect does it really produce
on me?" (xii; the italics are Pater's). In the conclusion to the same
work he traces out the implications of this view. We are all, he
asserts, foreshadowing Heidegger, condemned to live in a world of
transitory impressions under sentence of death but with a sort of
indefinite reprieve.3 We are alone with our minds: "the whole scope
of observation is dwarfed to the narrow chamber of the individual
mind. Experience, reduced to a swarm of impressions, is ringed
around for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through
which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to
that which we can only conjecture to be without. Every one of those
impressions is the impression of the individual in his isolation, each
mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world" (157).
In these circumstances, "success" in life is the aesthetic expansion of
sensation, the getting of "as many pulsations as possible into the
given time" - and this is what art achieves at the highest level: "for
art comes to you, proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest
quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those
moments' sake" (159). Aesthetic experience, then, itself fleeting, is
the solipsist's only salvation, a brief asylum carved out, in a self-
fulfilling interval of conscious duration, between the nothingness
that precedes and the nothingness that follows the hard, gemlike
flash of a life burning briefly in the cosmic darkness. Time is reduced
to a discontinuous series of psychological instants, deemed to be
qualitative in proportion as they maintain or heighten the ecstasy of
the private dream that constitutes reality for each individual con-
sciousness. Je sens, done je suis. Kairos, in consequence, is reduced to
self-referential sensation, a heightened sensuous awareness that is
both of me and for me.4 The present exists as sensation, the past as
memory; but there is no room for the future to exist except as incho-
ate desire, meaningless until realized in the present act and subse-
quently stored as the past in memory. In the final analysis, Pater's
humanism is a neo-Epicurean doctrine of aesthetic indulgence in
which time, mixing memory and desire, serves as a spatialized
forum for the enacting of the pleasurable moment.
The temporalist humanism that we meet in Pater and Bergson we
meet again, in various forms and with various emphases, in the lit-
erature of the first half of this century. Three brief examples will
suffice. In Joyce's Ulysses, where metempsychosis (or "met-him-pike-
hoses," as Molly calls it) is a central leitmotif, we follow the peregri-
nations of Stephen Daedalus and Leopold Bloom around Dublin in
a series of quotidian "adventures" - a walk on the beach (Proteus),
a bath (Lotos-Eaters), a funeral (Hades), lunch in a pub (Lestrygo-
nians), a visit to a brothel (Circe) - which recapitulate Telemachus's
search for his father and Odysseus's travails on his return from the
Trojan War in Homer's Odyssey. The action of the novel takes place
on a single, uneventful but event-filled day: 16 June 1904. There is a
death, an adultery, a birth, a fireworks display at the Minis bazaar,
and, finally, a homecoming: nothing out of the ordinary, nothing
unusual, and yet a repetition in the ordinary events of a perfectly
ordinary day of the whole course of human history. Joyce's stream-
of-consciousness technique, which, ironically, often leaves the char-
acters themselves in the dark about their figural status as reincarna-
tions, privileges the present moment and construes reality as a
discontinuous succession of private kairoi whose broader significance
is revealed only to the patient and attentive reader. Stephen and
Bloom inhabit a present of vivid instants filled with impressions,
thoughts, and encounters, a present that reaches back in an elaborate
92 Time
(one is tempted to say exhaustive) frame of reference to encompass

the historical, literary, and mythic past of the entire human race.5 But
what of the future? If we ask the question, What do Stephen and
Bloom do on 17 June 1904? - or, indeed, on any day subsequent to
the action of the novel - the answer can only be that they repeat,
with appropriate permutations, the thoughts, actions, and responses
of the past-filled present experienced on 16 June 1904. There is, in
other words, no real future; there is only the past revisited, in a
modern version of Hellenic cyclicity, in an endless reiteration of reca-
pitulative incarnations.
When we turn to Virginia Woolf's The Waves, considered by many,
including Woolf herself, to be her masterpiece, we encounter a sim-
ilar phenomenon. Structured on two temporal devices, the lapping
of waves on a shore and the cyclical rising and setting of the sun, the
novel follows the lives of six characters in an anguished search for
the meaning of life - or, more accurately, for the purpose and mean-
ing of their own individual existences in time.6 This series of quests,
sometimes intersecting but conducted for the most part in solipsistic
isolation, is set against the inexorable ticking of the clock: "The clock
ticks. The two hands are convoys marching through a desert ...
Look, the loop of the figure is beginning to fill with time; it holds the
world in it. I begin to draw a figure and the world is looped in it,
and I myself am outside the loop ... The world is entire, and I am
outside of it, crying, 'Oh save me, from being blown for ever outside
the loop of time!'" (15).
The six characters - Bernard, Susan, Rhoda, Neville, Jinny, and
Louis - have no surnames, a fact that underscores the radically self-
contained nature of their perceptions. They come together and they
separate, their meetings like the random colliding of Democritus's
atoms; they speak in distanced, curiously formalized soliloquies,
each intent on forging his or her own identity in the discrete duree of
a private solitude. "We have come together," says Bernard of one
such encounter, "(from the North, from the South, from Susan's
farm, from Louis's house of business) to make one thing, not endur-
ing - for what endures? - but seen by many eyes simultaneously"
(104). They are constantly aware, in Bernard's phrase, of "time taper-
ing to a point," of life as a series of drops forming and falling, a
succession of instants leading nowhere:7 "The drop falls; another
stage has been reached. Stage upon stage. And why should there be
an end of stages? and where do they lead? To what conclusion?"
(155). To death. "Our separate drops," says Louis, "are dissolved; we
are extinct, lost in the abysses of time, in the darkness" (188); Rhoda
commits suicide; even the sensualist Jinny knows that any triumph
over time and death is an illusion, no more than a temporary stay of

execution: "The iron gates have rolled back.8 Time's fangs have
ceased their devouring. We have triumphed over the abysses of
space, with rouge, with powder, with flimsy pocket-handkerchiefs"
(190). And Bernard, too, the storyteller who has searched in vain for
a saving fiction to ease his loneliness,9 comes ultimately to see that
"Life is a dream surely. Our flame, the will-o'-the-wisp that dances
in a few eyes, is soon to be blown out and all will fade" (229). Like
waves drawn inexorably to a rocky shore, the six selves acting out
their various strategies for "being-in-the-world" are driven on to
fragmentation, dissolution, and death. There is no wholeness, no
identity - not even, finally, a saving fiction. There is, as Jinny, the
only one brave enough to say so, admits, "no past, no future; merely
the moment in its ring of light, and our bodies; and the inevitable
climax, the ecstasy" (2ii).10 There is only the passing instant and the
certainty of death: nothing else is real.
At the beginning of the second section of Faulkner's The Sound and
the Fury, Mr Compson gives his son Quentin a pocket-watch, an heir-
loom passed down through the generations, with the words
I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it's rather excruciating-ly
apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experi-
ence which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his
father's. I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might
forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying
to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even
fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory
is an illusion of philosophers and fools. (48)
In an attempt to slay time and gain access to a world without clocks,

Quentin breaks the crystal and twists the hands off the watch. But
the battle cannot be won: "The watch ticked on. I turned the face up,
the blank dial with little wheels clicking and clicking behind it, not
knowing any better" (51).
In fact, Quentin's world is a world dominated from beginning to
fateful end by the ticking and tolling of time: "I began to wonder
what time it was"; "Bell in two minutes"; "The hour began to strike";
"The quarter hour sounded"; "The half hour went. Then the chimes
ceased and died away"; "While I was eating I heard a clock strike the
hour"; "There was a clock high up in the sun"; "The place was full of
ticking, like crickets in September grass" - all of this (and more) in
only the first five pages. Torn between quixotic innocence and inces-
tuous desire, Quentin is a morbid hidalgo whipped by the passing
94 Time
instants and the oppressive, omnipresent past - "theres a curse on us

its not our fault is it our fault" (100) - toward the dark precipice of
self-destruction. Preparing with slow haste for death, he hears the
handless watch ticking in his pocket and takes it out: "A quarter hour
yet. And then I'll not be. The peacefulest words. Peacefulest words.
Non fui. Sum. Fui. Non sum" (no). An enigmatic formulation: I was
not, I am, I was, I am not. Past and present, intertwined, elide in a
beingless present: non sum. All is, everything was - but nothing will be,
except the "peacefullest" dissolution of the past and present (sum, fui)
into the bracketing oblivion of eternal nonbeing (non fui, non sum).
The future is a black void, determining nothing, leading nowhere.
"Faulkner's vision of the world," Jean-Paul Sartre has observed in
a famous essay, "can be compared to that of a man sitting in an open
car and looking backwards. At every moment, formless shadows,
flickerings, faint tremblings and patches of light rise up on either
side of him, and only afterwards, when he has a little perspective,
do they become trees and men and cars" (Faulkner 267). The past is
a prison, windowless and claustrophobic, where memory incarcer-
ates the soul in impenetrable walls; the present is a succession of
meaningless instants, eddying endlessly, the absurdity of their
motion measured by the incessant ticking of clocks. For Benjy, as for
Quentin, past and present are the two antagonistic faces of time, and
the unresolvable disparity between what is and what was is the rack
on which the terrors of his inarticulate soul are drawn out in moans
and bellows. The calculating and prudential Jason, no less oppressed
by the past than his brothers, no less detesting the present than they,
seeks salvation in a laying-up of ill-gotten gains intended to atone
for past indignities, past insults and affronts. But Jason's war with
the Compson past ends in defeat when his niece runs off with the
money he has skimmed from her. The future he imagined for him-
self, in fact, was always a chimera. It never promised freedom; it
offered only the prospect of revenge upon an insufferable genealogy,
a vindictive fulfilment of paranoia and hate. Of all the characters in
the novel, only Dilsey - preparing for her place among "de arisen
dead whut got de blood en de ricklickshun of de Lamb" - possesses
the expectatio of a true future: "I've seed de first and de last," she
says, recalling Revelation (22:11-13)," "never you mind me" (185).
Only Dilsey, whose life is a patient unfolding in time sub specie
aeternitatis, has the power to triumph over past and present and to
transcend, by keeping it in a proper future perspective, the ticking
clock, that "mausoleum of all hope and desire" that the Compsons
have used generation after generation "to gain the reducto absur-
dum of all human experience":
On the wall above a cupboard, invisible save at night, by lamp light and
even then evincing an enigmatic profundity because it had but one hand, a
cabinet clock ticked, then with a preliminary sound as if it had cleared its
throat, struck five times.
"Eight oclock," Dilsey said. (171)
Dilsey treats time with the ironic contempt it deserves. She is not
a Compson and has never shared their values: their morbid preoc-
cupation with the past from which they draw a dying strength, their
Heraclitean sense of the present as a purposeless succession of eva-
nescent, unrepeatable instants. As Luster, Dilsey's son, says of the
family they serve, "Dese funny folks. Glad I aint none of em" (172).
Time-bound and backward-looking, the story of the Compsons is a
tale full of sound and fury, told initially by an idiot, signifying extinc-
tion: the tragedy of the old South.
The attitude to time we have encountered in Pater, Joyce, Woolf, and

Faulkner is, with some variations, the view we meet in the majority
of literary critics. Georges Poulet calls it "human time" and traces its
origin to Protestant individualism and the sole fide theology of the
Reformers: "Something of the Cartesian Cogito already appears in the
Calvinist Credo: I believe, therefore I am" (12). It is Poulet's conten-
tion that the secularization, beginning in the seventeenth century, of
Scholastic occasionalist metaphysics12 led to a divinized anthropo-
morphism that construed time as a succession of instants stripped
both of a past and a future. "The seventeenth century," he argues,
is the epoch in which the individual discovers his isolation ... [and in which]
the human consciousness finds itself reduced to existence without duration
... Instead of continually conferring upon man an existence which is a dura-
tion, [the idea of continued creation] now confers upon him an existence
which is confined to the instant ... Duration is a chaplet of instants. The
creative activity alone permits passage from one bead to another. An intimate
awareness of an ever actual existence, an acute sense of the discontinuity of
duration, and a total dependence upon a creation continually reiterated -
these are indeed the essential traits of human time in the seventeenth
century." (13-15)
Poulet is persuasive, but his argument - at least as it applies to the

seventeenth century - is, it seems to me, more an arguing backward
from Bergson and the moderns than it is an historically grounded
analysis of the Renaissance conception of time.
96 Time
The same may also be said of Richard Glasser and Ricardo Qui-
nones, for both of whom the Renaissance attitude to time is largely
determined by the appearance, for the first time, of reliable clocks.13
According to Glasser, the Renaissance came to understand time in a
radically anthropocentric manner: "man became aware that time and
life were in his own hands, that they were empty and shapeless in
themselves, and that he had to fill and inform them according to his
personal sense of liberty and responsibility" (150). Time was a sub-
jective reality and its value depended on what one made of the
opportunity, on how one chose to employ the duration afforded for
self-discovery. The great enemy of human kind, the obstacle to self-
realization, was the time symbolized by clocks; and the Renaissance,
says Glasser, "with its new awareness of temporal organism,
resented the regulation of life by the clock as an arbitrary and odious
fragmentation of organic forms ... Clocks and calendars were not the
affair of free persons. The ideal was to enjoy time as an experience"
(152). There was, he argues, a profound anxiety in the period occa-
sioned by an awareness of transitoriness and passage - the inelucta-
ble advance of time's winged chariot - and, in French literature, this
anxiety led to two ways of dealing with temporal flux: "one sought
either to live through it as an experience [for example, Rabelais,
Montaigne] or to defeat its effects by gaining fame in posterity [for
example, Petrarch, Ronsard]" (170).
For Ricardo Quinones, whose work is based on the sociology of
nascent Renaissance capitalism (cf. Alfred von Martin and Jacques
Le Goff), time is preeminently the enemy of man. "For the men of
the Renaissance," he asserts, "time is ... the great antagonist against
which they plan and plot and war, and over which they hope to
triumph ... Victory over time is the measure of their heroism" (3). In
the "new society" these men were forging under the aegis of the
clock - a society in which "time, motion, and money were intrinsic"
(7) - time was the "destructive force" against which the "poet-
humanists and the bourgeois elements of society formed a united
front against the temporal nonchalance of the older scholastic and
feudal institutions" (25). Led by Petrarch and Ronsard, by Spenser
and Shakespeare and Milton, the men of the Renaissance unfurled
their banners and, drawing upon "the arsenal of human possibility,"
marched with resolute conviction against the ramparts of devouring
Time. To the flux of time they opposed the continuity of progeny,
fame, and fidelity in love - all areas that endorse the possibility of
triumph over the ravening tooth of time. "In the Renaissance," says
Quinones, "when time comes to be a precious, individual commod-
ity through the effective use of which man can elevate his life and
preserve his identity, then energies and possibilities are aroused that
force the abandonment of the older, contained universe and simple
acquiescence" (16). The central glory of the Renaissance discovery of
time for Quinones is its optimistic militancy, its sublime supposition
that the war against time is winnable.
In spite of differences that are often profound, Poulet, Glasser, and
Quinones share certain fundamental convictions about time that are
decidedly "modern" and that recall attitudes and assumptions
encountered in Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner. In the first place, time is
a "psychological" reality in the sense that it is private and subjective
- an individual property unrelated, except by the arbitrary conve-
nience of chronometric passage, to anything beyond the self. Time is
a distentio animi in which a larger intentio animi plays no part. It
follows that, since there is no teleology, consciousness is reduced to
a self-involved pattern of solipsistic kairoi that evolve into personal-
ity in an incremental progression begun at birth and ended only by
death. In the second place, such an anthropocentric and relativized
view of time inevitably privileges the present over the past and the
future. Then and when are swallowed by an omnivorous now. The
past retains importance only as those accumulated "spots of time,"
whether personal or historical, that contextualize the present
moment and provide it with a meaningful frame of reference. The
future tends to disappear entirely14 or, where it is retained, to be
conditioned not by expectatio but by desire, often in the form of
hypostasized self-projection - as in the cases of the secular "immor-
tality" achieved through begetting progeny or the exegi monumentum
aere pernnius*5 tradition of artistic perpetuation beyond the grave. At
the same time, however, there is a sense in which these critics are
perfectly correct: it is undeniably the case that there does in fact
emerge, during the Renaissance, a new and protomodern view that
construes duration anthropocentrically and subjectively, that privi-
leges the present as the decisive moment, that replaces eternity with
a concept of sempiternal secular duration achieved, for example,
through poetic fame and physical procreation, and that seeks to
defeat the fleeting hours by filling them and turning them to
account, not in extension but in depth. It is clear that this new atti-
tude owes much to the humanist rediscovery of the Latin classics
and, in particular, to the prominence of certain recurring themes: the
"devouring time" motif/6 the carpe diem tradition/7 and the distinc-
tion between existence and time in the moral essays of Seneca/8 As
Poulet, Glasser, Quinones and others have pointed out, one finds
such ideas in many Renaissance writers: in Rabelais/9 in Mon-
taigne,20 in Petrarch and Ronsard/1 in the sonnets and history plays
98 Time
of Shakespeare, in the carpe diem lyrics of Herrick, Suckling, and

Lovelace. But this secular humanist view of time - so compelling and
congenial to modern readers because it anticipates their own preju-
dices on the subject - is not, I would argue, normative for the Renais-
sance nor does it always imply such an absolute anticipation of
modern ideas as these critics propose.22 Against the secular humanist
view one needs to set, as I shall do in the remainder of this chapter,
the Christian humanist conception of time inherited from Augustine
and developed in various ways by many sixteenth and seventeenth
century poets. In the interest of economy, and because I am more
familiar with them, I shall restrict the discussion to English writers
and, in particular, to Shakespeare and Milton.
For those writing in an Augustinian tradition, there are two features

of time that differ radically from the modern view. In the first place,
time is not a discrete series of unrelated moments, a discontinuous
"chaplet of instants" in Poulefs phrase. On the contrary, it is a uni-
fied whole - perceived as succession (that is, past, present, future) -
that mirrors, analogically and metonymically, the tota simul stant of
eternity. As space is an unfolding of an indivisible infinity, so time is
an unfolding of an undivided eternity: "Time," says Nicholas of
Cusa, "is a creature of eternity (creatura aeternitatis) for it is not eter-
nity, which is entirely simultaneous (tota simul est), but the image of
eternity since it exists in succession" (Cusa1 103). Time, that is to say,
is the imago 3eternitatis that the rational soul unfolds or elaborates
from its own unity of being in order to achieve a notional under-
standing of the larger reality in which it participates as imago Dei.23
It follows, of course, that since time is a human creation, the rational
soul is not subject to time but anterior to it.24 All of this is just
another way of saying what Augustine had already said: time is a
unified distentio animi perceived as succession and conditioned by an
intentio animi towards eternity.
The second difference from modern views that we meet in Renais-
sance writers is that Augustinian time, although the present is
always determinative as the moment of Kpioi<; (decision), tends to
privilege the future. "Creatures of an inferiour nature," Donne
remarks in a sermon, "are possest with the present; Man is a future
Creature. In a holy and usefull sense, wee may say, God is a future
God" (Donne3 8:75). Events in time are neither definitive nor self-
contained: the past is a tentative completion, the present a fragmen-
tary completing of the still-future reality of a divine order that
encompasses all that has been and will be, and that, in the fullness
of time, will gather past, present, and future into the eternal "now"
of the concrete providential reality toward which all time and history
are moving. Donne, like Sir Thomas Browne and other contempo-
raries, delighted in the paradoxes of a recapitulative time that con-
flates past and present in a prolepsis of the future: "I was built up
scarce 50. years ago, in my Mothers womb, and I was cast down,
almost 6000. years agoe, in Adams loynes; I was borne in the last Age
of the world, and dyed in the first" (Donne3 8:78); "thus was I dead
before I was alive, though my grave be England, my dying place was
Paradise, and Eve miscarried of mee before she conceiv'd of Cain"
(Browne 132). The point of such temporal dislocations, of which I
shall have more to say in chapter 10, is that past and present com-
prise events that are merely provisional: they are the figural forms of
a future reality that is, paradoxically, at all times present because
God's providence knows no succession, no before and after, no differ-
ences of time.
In Renaissance literature time is generally Janus-faced, bearing a
double aspect. On the one hand, it is the enemy of life, a destroyer
closely related to Death: the edax rerum of Ovid, the "bloody tyrant"
of Shakespeare's sonnets. On the other hand, however, as Saxl and
Panofsky have pointed out, time is also a revealer: veritas filia tempo-
ris, "truth is the daughter of time."25 In other words, while "cormo-
rant" time is the inevitable and negative condition of human
mortality, it is also the necessary and positive condition of human
growth and fulfilment, of truth and knowledge. Shakespeare's
mature tragedies are tragic precisely because devouring time is
allowed to overwhelm, through the protagonists' own willful acts,
the opportunity for knowledge and self-knowledge that revealing
time - had they grasped Occasio by the forelock - would have
afforded: Hamlet, Othello, Lear, and Macbeth are all, in their various
ways, the self-deluded "fools of time." In late romances like The Tem-
pest and The Winter's Tale, on the other hand, the tension between
destructive time and "mature time," as Lear calls it (4.6.275), is hap-
pily resolved in the fable of "a pleasant History, [revealing] that
although by the means of sinister fortune Truth may be concealed,
yet by Time, in spite of fortune, it is most manifestly revealed."26 This
double aspect of time, which at once "nursest all, and murth'rest all
that are" (929), is clearly set out in The Rape of Lucrece:
Time's glory is to calm contending kings,

To unmask falsehood, and bring truth to light,
To stamp the seal of time in aged things,
To wake the morn, and sentinel the night,
ioo Time
To wrong the wronger till he render right,

To ruinate proud buildings with thy hours,
And smear with dust their glitt'ring golden tow'rs. (939-45)
No doubt for a modern reader the most familiar and arresting

images of time in Renaissance literature are those in the tempus edax
tradition - the "devouring," "sluttish," "injurious," and "thievish"
time of Shakespeare's sonnets (nos. 19, 55, 63, 77), the "hasting day"
of Herrick's Daffodils, the "subtle thief" of Milton's youth, "Time's
winged chariot hurrying near" in Marvell's To His Coy Mistress - but
a more characteristic and central, though less flamboyant, use of time
is as a moral dimension in which human free will is exercised. The
fact that life is short, that man is everywhere surrounded by evi-
dence of mutability and decay, prompts moral reflection more often
than it encourages a railing against "swift-footed" time or a self-
indulgent retreat into carpe diem epicureanism. Man is "a creature
of eternity with eternal obligations" (Cullen 30), and the pervasive
concern of English Renaissance literature is to show how, in the face
of his mortality, man is to make the most of the time at his disposal
to put himself in tune with the providential order of the universe.
The issue, that is to say, is fulfilment in time, rather than escape from
time. The knightly heroes of Spenser's Faerie Queene, for example,
grow and mature into moral exemplars as they exercise their free
will and fulfil in action the potential of the various virtues they rep-
resent. Their quests are never easy ones - there are deceptions and
errors of judgment along the way - but in the end, like Red Crosse
Knight in the opening book, they eventually grow into borrowed
armour once too large for them, slay the dragons of evil and deceit,
and eventually emerge triumphant, sanctified by their efforts of
having engaged in right action within time. For them, time is kairos
and forward-looking: the present engagement, the present instant,
serves the larger and higher purpose of a future unfolding; it is a
stage, never isolated, never feared or savoured for itself alone, on the
arduous path to moral maturity. The destructiveness of time, the
transitoriness of a "mortall life" that passes "in the passing of a day"
(FQ 2.12.75), is for them a necessary but only a partial and, in a way,
even an accidental attribute of the ongoing process of self-fulfilment
sub specie aeternitaris. Moreover, as Rawdon Wilson has argued, the
apprehension of time as kairos, "in which the moral dimension of
human action unfolds against the judgment of a Providential vision,
is both the central concept of Spenser's time-sense and the governing
concern that links, in a significant unity of thought, the diverse parts
of Spenser's work. Despite their apparent dissimilarities, The Faerie
ioi Time and Literature
Queene and The Shepheardes Calendar27 express a common under-

standing of human existence. The characters of both works exist, and
must act, within moments of present time that are inextricably rooted
in the past while irreversibly emerging into the future" (63). In other
words, Spenser's view of time is an Augustinian vision in which the
distentio animi of duration is governed by the intentio animi of eternity
and in which the "attention" of the present moment is contextualized
by memoria and lighted to its heavenly goal by expectatio.
In a similar way, the temptation sequences in Milton - of Adam
and Eve in Paradise Lost, Christ in Paradise Regained, and Samson in
Samson Agonistes - are exercises in the right use of time. In the
prelapsarian Eden, Adam and Eve, "perfet, not immutable" (5.524),
have the opportunity to mature in wisdom and to grow, by exercis-
ing their free will, toward a "time ... when men / With Angels may
participate" (5.493-4). This birthright they forfeit by a disobedient
use of time that blasts the sempiternal joys of Paradise, bringing
death into the world and all our woe, until that time when one
greater Man, perfect in obedience, restores the lost Eden by entering
time and bridging the abyss opened by the Fall between past and
future, between time and eternity, between hope and promise. In
Milton's Eden, there is no chronos; time is pure kairos: right choosing
is all. The same is true of Samson Agonistes and Paradise Regained. In
the opening scene of the former work, Samson, blind and impris-
oned, laments the gulf between past and present, between "what
once I was, and what am now" (22), and feelingly endures the ten-
sion between prophecy and the harsh reality of a present that cuts
him off, he assumes, from the expectatio of a promised future:
Promise was that I

Should Israel from Philistian yoke deliver:
Ask for this great Deliverer now, and find him
Eyeless in Gaza at the Mill with slaves.
(38-41)
Presumptuous choice and arrogance have led him here: "I thought it
lawful from my former act" (230); "like a petty God / I walk'd about
admir'd of all" (529-30). In the series of temptations presented to
him by Manoa, Dalila, Harapha, and the Philistian Officer, Samson
learns in bondage what he had failed to understand when he was
free: he must perform real acts in God's time, not pseudo-acts in his
own.28 Having learned the humble lessons of the proper use of time,
he experiences at last the "rousing motions" (1382) of God's call and
goes off with the Officer to fulfil, in one final act, the promise of his
1O2 Time
nativity: in Dagon's temple, fact and prophecy finally come together

in the destruction of the pagan temple; human time and divine time
- at odds through most of the drama - finally coincide.
In Paradise Regained, which deals with the timing of Christ's mes-
sianic mission, time is the central issue. Led by God into the wilder-
ness to consider "how best the mighty work he might begin / Of
Savior to mankind" (1.186-7), Jesus is, like Job before him, exposed
by divine consent to Satan's testing, in order "to show him worthy
of his birth divine / And high prediction" (1.141-2). Satan's tempta-
tions, however, all crafted to trick an alter ego for whom time is a
subjective reality to be used as one pleases rather than an Augustin-
ian opposite like Jesus, for whom time is the forum for the unfolding
of the Father's eternal will, are foredoomed by their very nature to
failure. "All things," the patient Messiah (alluding to Ecclesiastes 3:1)
tells his baffled tempter at one point,
are best fulfill'd in their due time,

And time there is for all things, Truth hath said.
If of my reign Prophetic Writ hath told
That it shall never end, so when begin
The Father in his purpose hath decreed,
He in whose hand all times and seasons roll.
(3.182-7)
One and all, Satan's temptations - which take the form of attempts
to lure the Son into a premature, and hence presumptuous, assump-
tion of his messianic office - are enticements to privilege private
chronos over divine kairos, to seize the instant and so sacrifice the
timing of a providential plan that the Son, in Milton's Arian Chris-
tology, anticipates by faith but does not know by absolute foreknowl-
edge. And to each new offer from Satan, the future Messiah,
undeceived, content to stand and wait until his Father calls upon
him to act, responds with a variant of his words in rejecting the offer
of worldly kingdoms: "My time I told thee ... is not yet come"
(3.396-7). Perplexed and troubled at his bad success, the tempter, as
a last resort intended to force the issue, sets his victim on the pinna-
cle of the temple with the words, "Now show thy Progeny; if not to
stand, / Cast thyself down: safely if Son of God" (4.554-5). "To stand
upright," he adds sardonically, sensing victory, "will ask thee skill."
"To whom thus Jesus. Also it is written, / Tempt not the Lord thy
God; he said and stood" (4.560-1) By standing where it is humanly
impossible to stand, the Son asserts - because the Father chooses this
moment to assert it through him - the inception of his messianic
vocation; and it is Satan, "smitten with amazement/' who tumbles

headlong from the tower. Now fully the incarnation in whom time
and the eternal meet, the Son descends from the pinnacle to begin
the task of working salvation for mankind: human and divine time
coincide.
The general point that both Milton and "our sage and serious Poet
Spenser/' as Milton calls him in Areopagitica, are making in these
various works is that "human time" - pace Poulet - is, properly
conceived, the image of eternity: the reflection, that is to say, in tem-
poral succession of divine simultaneity; a moral duration of past,
present, and future acts that must mirror, if potential is to be realized
and maturity achieved, the providential design of the universe. Time
is subjective, of course, but not in the sense that it is an isolated or
merely a private reality. Its meaning is confined neither to this world
nor to the experiencing individual consciousness. It is, rather, the
universal condition of human growth, maturation, and fulfilment in
which all participate, each in his own way, each with the opportunity
to discover the real self by transcending the mere self, to lose and
rediscover self in a higher and divine reality. Milton makes this same
point with poignancy in a well-known sonnet, where the alarm occa-
sioned in the octave by the "full career" of devouring chronos gives
way, in the sestet, to the consolation of divinely directed kairos:
How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth,

Stol'n on his wing my three and twentieth year!
My hasting days fly on with full career,
But my late spring no bud or blossom show'th.
Perhaps my semblance might deceive the truth,
That I to manhood am arriv'd so near,
And inward ripeness doth much less appear,
That some more timely-happy spirits endu'th.
Yet be it less or more, or soon or slow,
It shall be still in strictest measure ev'n
To that same lot, however mean or high,
Toward which Time leads me, and the will of Heav'n;
All is, if I have grace to use it so,
As ever in my great task-Master's eye.
9 Time in Shakespeare
Most true it is that I have look'd on truth
Askaunce and strangely.
Sonnet no
Milton, it has been said, inhabited a universe of space, Shakespeare

a world of time. This observation is amply borne out, as least as far
as it concerns Shakespeare, in the sonnets, nearly half of which deal
in one way or another with the subject of time. And for the majority
of his modern critics Shakespeare's rhapsodic "war against this
bloody tyrant Time" (no. 16) in the sonnets may be said both to
summarize his attitude to temporal passage in a definitive way and
at the same time to guarantee his position in the avant-garde of those
secular Renaissance humanists seeking to oppose time's devastation
with the heroic resources of human intellect and ingenuity.
Relativised and secularized, time in the sonnets is the antagonist
against whom, says Ricardo Quinones in The Renaissance Discovery of
Time, the poet plans and plots and which he hopes to defeat by
discovering expedients - fame, progeny, constancy in love - to blunt
its ravening tooth and triumph over its despotism. "Fame," writes
Quinones, "is at war with time ... One responded to time because
one hoped to shore up an extremely vulnerable and exposed condi-
tion of being with heroic achievements" (497).1 This view implies, at
least for Quinones, a renunciation of Augustinian time as the mirror
of eternity and seeks, as the consolation of faith is rejected, to locate
a new and secular heroism in man's rhetorical opposition to the
tyranny of time. Discussing sonnet 2 ("When forty winters shall
besiege thy brow"), for example, Quinones asserts that "The cul-
mination of the secularizing process of the Renaissance is seen
when the parable of the talents [Matt. 25:14-30], without any religious
connotations whatsoever, is used as an argument to further reproduc-

tion" (Quinones2 53; italics added). This is a curious statement that
argues, in effect, that a recognizable allusion is not allusive at all.
The truth, however, is that sonnet 2 is a product of its time and
that Shakespeare, however creatively he extends his theme, none the
less reflects the views and values of his period. His understanding
of time is not our modern understanding of it. He had not read
Bergson, Faulkner, and Woolf; and we distort his vision if we read
him as if he had. He grew up with the Bible and Augustine, as well
as with Petrarch and Seneca, and he respected and drew upon them
all. That his sonnets reflect the attitude of his age to time as edax
rerum, the devourer of things, is hardly surprising - he would be an
anachronism if they did not - but to claim that those ideas imply the
rejection of traditional Christian ideas about time is untenable. In
saying this, I am not, it should be understood, arguing obliquely that
Shakespeare was himself a Christian or that his poetry is a platform
for asserting Christian doctrine; I am arguing, rather, that his views
on time (and other matters) were influenced and conditioned by the
Christian, as well as the secular, ideas informing the society in which
he lived and about which he wrote.
There is another point too: like Donne's Songs and Sonnets, Shakes-
peare's sonnets are, with few exceptions, essentially jeux d'esprit, hol-
iday productions characterized by wit, hyperbolic passion, cultivated
obscurity, and not a little of what the poet himself, in sonnet 121,
calls "my sportive blood." We should not look for high seriousness
where high seriousness is not intended. Sonnet 2 is hardly a zealous,
heart-felt plea for procreation in order to thwart devouring time; it
is the witty use of a conventional topos in order to surprise and
delight with a fine excess - and an important part of that surprise
and excess is precisely dependent on the reader's recognition, with
a wry smile, of the artfully artless allusion to the parable of the
talents in Matthew 25: the poet's patron must multiply his talents by
multiplying himself. There are, in fact, a number of biblical allusions
in the sonnets and all of them, far from spurning or mocking their
source, revel in their own guileless ingenuity in adapting sacred
themes to their own ends. Sometimes, indeed, as in the echoes of i
Corinthians 13:4-8 in sonnet 116 ("Let me not to the marriage of true
minds"), these allusions assume a force that draws on something
deeper than mere wit. Consider, for example, sonnet 146:
Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth,

[Thrall to] these rebel pow'rs that thee array,
Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth,
io6 Time
Painting thy outward walls so costly gay?

Why so large cost, having so short a lease,
Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?
Shall worms, inheritors of this excess,
Eat up thy charge? Is this thy body's end?
Then, soul, live thou upon thy servants loss,
And let that pine to aggravate thy store;
Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross;
Within be fed, without be rich no more:
So shalt thou feed on Death, that feeds on men,
And Death once dead, there's no more dying then.
One could make a compelling argument that this sonnet, recalling

the body-soul debates in medieval literature and invoking the
Pauline doctrine that "Death is swallowed up in victory" when the
corruptible body puts on the incorruption of spirit (i Cor. 15:54), is
a "holy sonnet" in the same way that Donne's more famous poem2
on the same subject is. I would prefer, however, not to take this line
too far. It is perilous in dealing with Shakespeare, a poet perfectly
capable of imagining himself into any mood or situation, to argue
backwards from the poetry to the poet; and moreover, this sonnet,
like many others, "seems," as Keats once said, "to be full of fine
things said unintentionally - in the intensity of working out con-
ceits."3 Keats has it, I think, exactly right: in the sonnets, Shakespeare
is intent on working out conceits. The particular conceit in sonnet 146
is, with help from St Paul, a witty inversion - the eater eaten - of the
Ovidian aphorism tempus edax rerum, "time is the devourer of all
things": time and death - the two are intimately connected in this
and other sonnets - become ironic victims of their own activity. In
spite of its cleverness, however, the sonnet is both knowledgable
about and sympathetic to Christian theology, and it forces us, regard-
less of what Shakespeare's personal religious beliefs might have
been, to broaden our view of his attitude to time in the sonnets: faith,
as well as fame and progeny, is a legitimate weapon in the war
against the "bloody tyrant Time."
When we turn from the sonnets to the plays, the subject is enor-
mously complicated by a number of factors: the sheer volume and
variety of the plays, the fact that each treats time in a particular, often
a unique, way, and the further fact that the sense of time varies not
only from play to play but is adapted to the personality of individual
characters - for "time," as Rosalind observes in As You Like It, "trav-
els in divers paces with divers persons" (3.2.307-8). Thus, for Juliet,
it is a succession of instants unendurably stretched out:
icy Time in Shakespeare
I must hear from thee every day in the hour,

For in a minute there are many days.
O, by this count I shall be much in years,
Ere I again behold my Romeo! -
(3-5-43-7)
For Hotspur in ^ Henry IV, it is composed of fleeting instants in a life

of gallant, fiery action:
O gentlemen, the time of life is short!

To spend that shortness basely were too long
If life did ride upon a dial's point,
Still ending at the arrival of an hour.
(5.2.81-4)
For Richard II, languishing in the dungeon of Pomfret Castle and

forced finally to the awareness that "I wasted time, and now doth
time waste me," it is the measure of his tortured minutes - his former
command of event and destiny usurped by another - as time's dis-
ordered "numb'ring clock":
Now, sir, the sound that tells what hour it is

Are clamorous groans, which strike upon my heart,
Which is the bell. So sighs, and tears, and groans
Show minutes, times, and hours; but my time
Runs posting on in Bullingbrook's proud joy,
While I stand fooling here, his Jack of the clock.
(5-5-55-6o)
For Hamlet, it is the lawless history of a time and kingdom "out of

joint" that he, by the cursed spite of fortune, has been appointed, by
accident of birth and much against his inclination, to set right
(1.5.188-9); and for the shipwrecked Pericles, self-exiled and fortune-
plagued at Simonides's court, it is the stoic consolation that
Time's the king of men;

He's both their parent, and he is their grave,
And gives them what he will, not what they crave.
(2-345-7)
In spite of this wide range of views, however, it is still possible to

make some useful generalizations about Shakespeare's attitude to
time in the plays. First, although time is the universal and necessary
io8 Time
condition of human experience - "We are [all] Time's subjects"

(2 Henry IV, 2.1.110) - humanity is not in Shakespeare, as it is, for
example, in Greek drama, the pawn of fate and necessity. Time stays
for no man, of course, and death is an inevitable end; but time's
sway over human life is far from absolute or merely negative.
Shakespearean heroes are guilty of sin, not hubris: their failings orig-
inate in the will, and their destinies are determined by psychological
flaws rather than external forces. Free will and human values, nur-
tured and developed in time, can and often do endow life with
meaning and purpose. Although men are Time's subjects by neces-
sity, only by choice do they become Time's fools. Second, in contrast
to Greek drama, where the past is determinative and the future
either closed or without significance, the future in Shakespeare is
open:4 "It contains the possibility of the new, both as a result of
action which man may take and as a result of growth and the prov-
idential shaping of events which lie outside man's control. The
future is open in Shakespeare in the same way that it is in the Bible
- not totally uncharted and free for any type of action whatsoever,
but full of beneficent promise and tending toward a final culmina-
tion which robs the past of its terror and gives significance to the
choices of the present" (Driver 204). Time in Shakespeare's plays,
then, is essentially a psychological, rather than a chronological,
dimension of reality - a distentio animi in which both memoria and
expectatio play a part and in which human action in the present is
conditioned by an intentio animi toward a future that, if not always
providential, is at least open and free.
Finally, the nature of Time - that enigmatic and omnipresent force
in human life that "nursest all, and murth'rest all that are" (Rape of
Lucrece, 929) - is a central problematic in the entire ceuvre, and indi-
vidual plays serve as the modes of vision through which Shakes-
peare seeks to explore and understand the possibilities and
consequences of human behaviour in time. The plays, that is to say,
constitute a laboratory of heuristic fictions in which the poet exper-
iments with various shapes of time, creating hypothetical models of
experience that reveal in imaginative (rather than merely imaginary)
ways what it means for human beings to live in time, to be self-
conscious creatures inhabiting a world of passage and decay. "The
imaginative structure of Shakespeare's plays," D.S. Kastan has said,
"do not imitate a reality that is confidently known (as is the case in
the Corpus Christi play); rather the different dramatic [genres] reflect
and probe various conceptions of reality ... Each is a provisional and
exploratory version of a reality that is elusive and complex, a rich,
resonant metaphor for what might be true" (33). We may go a step
log Time in Shakespeare
further and say that, considered chronologically, the plays of the

Shakespearean canon also mark an evolution from an interest in time
as primarily a destroyer (tempus edax reruni) in the early plays, as
well as in the sonnets and narrative poems, to time as a revealer
(veritas filia temporis) in the mature tragedies and the last plays. No
categories in Shakespeare are absolute - time appears as both a
destroyer and a revealer throughout - but there is a shift of emphasis
from the early works to the later ones that, if tactfully explored (laxis
effertur habenis),5 implies both a deepening and a sophistication of
Shakespeare's understanding of time. In the remainder of this chap-
ter, I propose to explore some of the implications of this sophistica-
tion with reference, primarily, to three plays: Troilus and Cressida,
Macbeth, and The Winter's Tale.
The sonnets and comedies explore the significance of that most

quintessential of Shakespearean themes: a conviction that constancy
in love is the main defence of the human spirit against the predations
of "injurious" and "devouring" time. In these early works, while
subjection to flux and passage is accepted as the inevitable condition
of existence, of all being-in-the-world -
Tis but an hour ago since it was nine,

And after one hour more, 'twill be eleven,
And so from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe,
And then from hour to hour, we rot and rot -
(As You Like It 2.7.24-7)
idealized and sanctified romantic love, "an ever-fixed mark / That

looks on tempests and is never shaken" (sonnet 116), allows human
kind to transcend the capricious tyranny of time by purifying mortal
existence and transforming it, normally through the covenant of
marriage, into the temporal image of an eternal concord beyond the
reach of passing days and fleeting hours - for then, as Hymen
declares at the end of As You Like It, "there is mirth in heaven, /
When earthly things made even / Atone together" (5.4.108-10).
In the early history plays, on the other hand, time functions prima-
rily as an obstacle to glory, and its ceaseless erosion of human effort
requires continuous heroic action to repair in order to sustain the
fragile dignity of human achievement. The remorseless flow of time
is the dominant principle of reality for those kings and noble peers
caught up in the public time of English history, and the chronicled
duration they reenact, "turning th' accomplishment of many years /
no Time
Into an hour-glass" (Henry V, Prologue, 30-1), is one-directional and

intractable: he who fails to grasp Occasio by the forelock as she passes
cannot "call back yesterday, bid time return" but lives to lament that
"I wasted time, and now doth time waste me" (Richard II, 3.2.69,
5.5.49); he who prospers owes his success to the fact that he "weighs"
the time at his disposal "Even to the utmost grain" (Henry V, 2.4.138).
Time, that is to say, is tempus commodum, time construed as opportu-
nity (see chap. 8, nn. 18-20). Time is what one makes of it - a qualita-
tive rather than a quantitative phenomenon - and history, in the final
analysis, is a human continuum extending from one generation to the
next in which, while individuals are powerless to defeat external pas-
sage, they have the potential nonetheless to endow life with values
and a purpose meaningful both for individuals and for the society
they help to mould. Depending on free human choices rather than
the dictates of an imposed fate, time in the histories is open and free;
but at the same time, the future in these plays, if not, as is sometimes
argued, prescriptively providential,6 is at least guided sub specie
seternitatis by patterns of cosmic justice and truth supplied by the
pervasive cultural assumption of Shakespeare's period that history is
not a random or chaotic development but draws inevitably toward
an eschatological fulfilment. God, and not man, as Henry V knows
(5.2.368), must pronounce the closing Amen on human endeavour.
When we turn to Troilus and Cressida, however, we find ourselves
in a world where time is more complex and where it presents a
darker face than in the earlier plays. "Injurious Time" (4.4.42) in this
play presides over events in a world where sensuality has replaced
the atoning union of wedded love and where bravery has given way
to bluster and bravado. "Lechery, lechery, still wars and lechery,"
grumbles Thersites, "nothing else holds fashion" (5.2.194-5). Other
characters, of course, give a more optimistic colouring to the action
in which they are involved. Agamemnon, for example, the Greek
commander who "has not so much brain as ear-wax" (5.1.52), inter-
prets the siege of Troy as a high-minded trial of Greek honour and
chivalry - "the protractive trials of great Jove / To find persistive
constancy in men" (1.3.20-1); but it becomes clear, as the action pro-
ceeds, that Thersites's biting assessment of the business is in fact
much closer to the truth: "All the argument is a whore and a cuckold,
a good quarrel to draw emulous faction and bleed to death upon"
(2.3.72-5). The abduction of a willing Helen, the pretext for the whole
conflict, has become the occasion for endless patchery, juggling, and
knavery on both sides; and the original abduction is replicated, the
sides this time reversed, in the diplomatic "rape" of Cressida -
protesting love for Troilus but, alas, too willingly the prey of any
in Time in Shakespeare
chance suitor to happen along - who is handed over to the Greeks

in exchange for the Trojan Antenor. Frailty and false seeming, politics
and pandering, deceit and deception are endemic. The action of the
play - a play that is part history, part comedy, part satire, and part
tragedy - takes place largely in a lull in the fighting during which
the two sides indulge their passion for verbal bravura and brawny
self-congratulation. The characters, none of whom can be said to be
admirable, inhabit a world where absolute values of good and evil,
right and wrong, have no place: decisions are based on expediency,
guile, pique, sentiment and arrogance; and while elaborate lip-
service is paid to the grand, universal truths of existence (as by
Ulysses, for instance, in his rhetorical defence of order and degree,
1.3.75-137), no one in fact pays the slightest practical attention to
them. Spleen and sensuality determine all that happens. Even Troi-
lus, who begins as a love-struck idealist inclined to ritualize the car-
nage and lust around him, ultimately comes to embrace the ur-
Nietzschean will-to-power that characterizes the general attitude of
savagery and cynicism in this play -
Then everything include itself in power,

Power into will, will into appetite,
And appetite, an universal wolf
(So doubly seconded with will and power),
Must make perforce an universal prey,
And last eat up himself -
(1.3.119-24)
and the action closes, not with a marriage feast or even the noble
rhetoric of a dignified denouement, but with Troilus's curse on Pan-
darus and the latter's bitter epilogue bequeathing appropriate dis-
eases to future generations of would-be lovers. Truly, as Ulysses had
earlier observed, "chaos, when degree is suffocate, / Follows the
choking" (1.3.125-6).
Hamlet, a play written about the same time, shares with Troilus and
Cressida a vision of thwarted degree and an imagery of unweeded
gardens, but comparison of the two plays does not take us far. The
action of Hamlet centres on a conflict of moral sanctions prompted
by the Ghost's demand for revenge; Troilus and Cressida, on the other
hand, is a play where vanity and frustration, not a concern for right
and wrong, are the motivating factors. In temporal terms, the action
of Hamlet is grounded on the idea of kairos, the appointed time: the
Prince of Denmark was born to set right a "time" that is "out of
joint" (1.5.189-90) and his world is dominated by an anguished,
112 Time
almost scriptural concern for right times and wrong times: "There is
special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to
come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will
come - the readiness is all" (5.2.220-2). Human duration is a tempo-
ral continuum in which right acts are kairoi linking past and future
in pregnant moments of present being that gather up what has been
and reveal something of what should be. Hamlet's problem - like
Christ's in Paradise Regained and Samson's in Samson Agonistes - is to
act in accordance with the will of that elusive "divinity that shapes
our ends" (5.2.10) by distinguishing between presumptive and prov-
identially inspired acts. In Troilus and Cressida there is nothing of this
concern for kairos. Instead, we find ourselves in a world where memo-
ria merely provides a hollow pretext for continuous war and where
expectatio is reduced to the gratification of immediate desires. In spite
of all that has happened and all that we know must still happen
before Troy falls, the past and the future are somehow strangely
irrelevant in Troilus and Cressida; all that matters, all that is truly real
and relevant, is the unconnected present instant. As Ulysses tells an
Achilles piqued that the glory of his past deeds has been forgotten,
"Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back, / Wherein he puts alms
for oblivion":
For Time is like a fashionable host

That slightly shakes his parting guest by th' hand,
And with his arms outstretch'd as he would fly,
Grasps in the comer. The welcome ever smiles,
And farewell goes out sighing. Let not virtue seek
Remuneration for the thing it was;
For beauty, wit,
High birth, vigor of bone, desert in service,
Love, friendship, charity, are subjects all
To envious and calumniating Time.
One touch of nature makes the whole world kin,
That all with one consent praise new-born gawds,
Though they are made and moulded of things past,
And give to dust, that is a little gilt,
More laud than gilt o'erdusted.
The present eye praises the present object.
(3.3.165-80)
In a similar vein, Agamemnon dismisses past and future to indulge

the disingenuous and showy pleasure of the "extant moment":
What's past and what's to come is strew'd with husks

And formless ruin of oblivion;
But in this extant moment, faith and troth,
Strain'd purely from all hollow bias-drawing,
Bids thee, with most divine integrity,
From heart of very heart, great Hector, welcome.
(4.5.166-71)
But the present moment so studiously cultivated by the characters

in this play is, like Cressida's "love" for Troilus, no more than an
insubstantial illusion to beguile the passing hour. Knowing as we do
the final outcome of the story in advance, we know that Troy will
burn and that Priam's lusty sons, together with the hapless Achilles,
will perish with it; we know, too, that the remaining "princes
orgillous" (Prol., 2) of Greece will eventually sail home: Agamemnon
to a bloody, ignominious death at the hands of his wife Clytemnestra
and her lover Aegisthus, Ajax to madness and self-slaughter, Ulysses
to ten years of wandering tribulation and eventual death by the
sword of his own son Telegonus. In the end, "that old common arbi-
trator, Time" (4.5.225) will claim them all and emerge the only victor.
But these events occur in a future that the characters, in spite of
Cassandra's warnings and Ulysses's prophecy (4.5.217-1), choose to
ignore in order to pursue their endless war and ephemeral quests for
love and fame. The play ends indeterminately, as it had begun, in
medias bellum; and "the pessimistic and painful impact" of its conclu-
sion is, as G. Wilson Knight has said, "largely due to the fact that the
hero and heroine are left remorselessly alive" (11). Indeed, for all
those left standing at the end - and they include everyone except
Patroclus and Hector - there is only a precarious present hedged
horribly around, both before and after, by a dark past and a darker
future. The play stops rather than ends, and as the curtain falls, there
is nothing for "anticipating time" (4.5.2) to anticipate but oblivion
and the inevitable scythe that Troilus so justly fears ("Death, I fear
me, / Sounding destruction ... / I fear it much," 3.2.22-6) without
the remotest prospect, as in Hamlet, of ministering flights of angels
to sing the doomed to their final rest. Together with King Lear, which
strains valiantly but, in the end, vainly to salvage some redemptive
significance from time's destructive passage -
Thou'It come no more,

Never, never, never, never, never.
Pray you undo this button. Thank you, sir.
114 Time
Do you see this? Look on her! Look her lips,

Look there, look there! -
(5.3.308-12)
Troilus and Cressida presents us with Shakespeare's bleakest vision of

the fate of men and women trapped in the "sickle hour" of "reckon-
ing" time (sonnets 126, 115) without purpose or meaning, without
direction, without hope or a future.
Macbeth is Shakespeare's great tragedy of the attempt to control
time by manipulating event: "For mine own good, / All causes shall
give way" (3.4.134-5). More than in any other play, we are kept
intensely aware of time and, in particular, of the relationship
between the present and the future, between "present grace and
great prediction" (i-3-55)- There is constant reference to what lies
behind and what lies ahead, anguish over the disparity between
what is and what is promised, an impatient desire to pry into the
seeds of time, to preempt the present and seize the future in the here
and now, a desperate, progressively more bloody resolve to master
time, to "anticipate" its "flighty purpose" (4.1.144-5) and twist it by
every possible means to one's private ends - and then at last, when
all hope is lost, nothing remains but the intolerable prospect of being
reduced to a "show and gaze o' the time" (5.8.24) as the last syllables
of a villainous career dissolve in a succession of empty tomorrows
ended finally, appropriately enough, by one who was "untimely"
ripped from his mother's womb (5.8.15-16).
Nowhere has Shakespeare - or any other writer, for that matter -
conceived in more powerful and moving terms the results of an
attempt to manipulate time, to overleap the "ignorant present" and
know "the future in the instant" (1.5.57-8). By seeking to control the
future instead of simply living it as it comes, by narrowing time to
a reality that is the product of his own imagination and fantastic
obsession with a future promised by "metaphysical aid," Macbeth is
destroyed by the objective reality of the present that he had sought
so tirelessly to annihilate. He who had chosen to "mock the time
with fairest show" (1.7.81) ultimately becomes, through his delusions
about time, the fool of time; and the progress of his moral disinte-
gration, as Harold Toliver has said, "is contained and defined in
terms of the very order it momentarily threatens" (246). Macbeth is
the climax of Shakespeare's vision of destructive time, of time, that
is to say, that is made se//-destructive when desire usurps of the place
of legitimate expectatio. Macbeth's sin is "vaulting ambition" (1.7.27),
and his ambition, in temporal terms, is an uncontrolled obsession
with the future: a perversion of expectatio. The "awful parenthesis,"
in De Quincey's phrase, of Macbeth's unnatural attempt to manipulate

the future is the tragedy of an effort, spurred by ambition and sus-
tained by imagination, to hijack the regular passage of time and
impose one's private will on the established temporal order of the
universe.
For the modern reader, Macbeth is perhaps the most accessible and
human of Shakespeare's tragic heroes. His vices are hyperboles of
ordinary vices and his predicament, caught between "a deeply moral
intellect and an utterly amoral will" (McElroy 219), is the exaggera-
tion of an ethical disjunction that is common enough in capitalist
social democracies, where principle and principal are often conflict-
ing motives. Moreover, unlike such figures as lago and Richard III,
Macbeth becomes evil rather than simply being evil by nature: his
moral judgment is in perfect working order at the beginning, and his
subsequent crimes, skilfully portrayed as the products of will and
temptation, result from acquired rather than innate or inevitable
behaviour. He is as surprised as Banquo, for example, by the pro-
phetic utterances of the witches:
I know I am Thane of Glamis,

But how of Cawdor? The Thane of Cawdor lives
A prosperous gentleman; and to be king
Stands not within the prospect of belief.
(1.3.71-4)
And yet at the same time their "strange intelligence" coincides uncan-
nily with his own "black and deep desires" (1.4.51; italics added) for
the future. What the witches say is neither new nor in itself surprising
to him; what disconcerts him is that they should have the power to
articulate his own secret, but hitherto sedulously repressed, hopes
and dreams of power. "Glamis, and Thane of Cawdor!" he exclaims
in fearful wonder, "The greatest is behind" (1.3.117-18). And then, in
a series of ruminative asides where will and imagination struggle for
supremacy with justice and reason, he adds:
Two truths are told,

As happy prologues to the swelling act
Of the imperial theme ...
This supernatural soliciting
Cannot be ill; cannot be good. If ill,
Why hath it given me earnest of success,
Commencing in a truth? I am Thane of Cawdor.
If good, why do I yield to that suggestion
n6 Time
Whose horrid image doth unfix my hair

And make my seated heart knock at my ribs,
Against the use of nature? Present fears
Are less than horrible imaginings:
My thought, whose murther yet is but fantastical,
Shakes so my single state of man that function
Is smother'd in surmise, and nothing is
But what is not.
(1.3.127-42)
At this point, the inclination to overleap the present and snatch the
future by murdering Duncan is but a "horrid imagining," a figment
of that faculty in which "nothing is / But what is not." Despite his
"black and deep desires/' Macbeth is prepared at this stage to abide
by the rules of an objective reality in which events are allowed to
unfold in due order and succession. He is not yet ready, except in
imagination, to take time into his own hands. "Chance," he thinks,
having named him king may crown him without his stir, and so he
consigns the fulfilment of future events to the ordinary passage of
time: "Come what may, / Time and the hour runs through the rough-
est day" (1.3.146-7). But when he learns, shortly afterwards, that
Duncan has settled the throne on his son Malcolm, imagination
asserts its claim over him once more in a renewed determination to
gain, by any means necessary, the regal future promised by the weird
sisters: "The Prince of Cumberland! that is a step / On which I must
fall down or else o'erleap" (1.4.48-9). Lady Macbeth, of course, is
waiting restlessly in the wings to assist him in this resolve; and when
they meet in 1.7, it is she who overcomes his scruples and bullies
him, only partially against his will, to risk "the life to come" (1.7.7)
and to grasp the promised future in the present instant.
In the opening act, then, a dialectic is established between objec-
tive time and Macbeth's private time. The practical implications of
this dialectic are played out early in act 2 when Macbeth, led by the
air-borne dagger that "marshal'st me the way that I was going" (2.1.42;
italics added), wilfully chooses imagination over reality and commits
the deed that marks the decisive victory in Macbeth's soul of private
over objective time. From the murder of Duncan onward, despite (at
first) the pangs of a troubled conscience, he can do no more than
retreat before the reality of the objective present he has rejected and
plot, as best he can, to preserve the illusionary future he has invented
to take its place. Perceived threats to this private temporal order -
from Banquo, whom the witches had hailed as founder of a compet-
ing line of kings, to Lady Macduff and her innocent "chooks" - are
117 Time m Shakespeare
eliminated in a series of brutal and progressively more mindless

attempts at consolidation, the significant result of which is that the
perpetrator himself is more and more isolated and confined within
the shrinking limits of his own fantasy and degenerating moral con-
dition. And the horror of it all is that Macbeth knows what he is
doing, knows what he has become; his perseverance in evil is an act
of conscious will:
For mine own good

All causes shall give way. I am in blood
Stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o'er.
Strange things I have in head, that will to hand,
Which must be acted ere they may be scann'd.
(3.4.134-9)
More and more, satisfaction of the phantasmic expectatio that under-

lies his ambition becomes a mindless reflex - the firstlings of his
heart become the firstlings of his hand (4.1.147-8) - and Macbeth,
clinging tenaciously to "th' equivocation of the fiend / That lies like
truth" (5.5.42-3), allows "the frame of things [to] disjoint" (3.2.16) by
privileging desire over reason and by opposing the progressively
more desperate whim of a private future to the present governed by
the fundamental time scheme of the universe. He cannot win and in
his heart he knows it. Yet even when he finds himself completely
alone after his wife's death, he clings to "tomorrow" - a debased
future of petty, creeping days and few, but a future nonetheless. The
past is closed to him ("what's done," as Lady Macbeth had more
than once observed, "cannot be undone," 3.2.12, 5.1.68), the present
that he has attempted to subvert is massing insurmountable forces
against him, and there is only the future left and what remains of his
shattered dream for him to retreat into. He who had thought to
master time and bend it to his will becomes, as Birnan Wood and one
"untimely" born of woman make their inexorable way toward Dun-
sinane, the self-willed victim of the "bloody tyrant Time" (sonnet 16)
that shapes, for good or ill, all human destiny.
Macbeth's misuse of time, however, does not extend to taint the
society that survives him. His temporal delusions, like his tragic life,
are a private affair: they die with him. Throughout the play, although
kept in the background while Macbeth struts and frets his hour upon
the stage, there is a second vision of time at work - a temporal
scheme in which human duration is not free-standing but exists as
part of a larger moral order of expectatio that is not merely social but
n8 Time
providential in its origin and scope. Banquo speaks of it after Dun-

can's murder:
In the great hand of God I stand, and thence

Against the undivulg'd pretense I fight
Of treasonous malice.
(2.3.130-2)
Rosse likewise invokes its existence in accounting for the strange

temporal dislocations coincident with Duncan's untimely death:
Thou seest the heavens, as troubl'd with man's act,

Threatens his bloody stage. By th' clock 'tis day,
And yet dark night strangles the travelling lamp.
Is't night's predominance, or the day's shame,
That darkness does the face of earth entomb,
When living light should kiss it?
(2.4.5-10)
It is implicit, too, in Macbeth's tortured conscience: his inner anguish

before and immediately after Duncan's murder and his guilty
response to Banquo's ghost speak eloquently of his belief - though
one he wilfully refuses to act upon - in the existence of a higher
moral and temporal order against which he has rebelled. In short,
Macbeth is an immoral man in a moral universe; and once society
has disposed of him, it is not difficult, with the concurrence of "the
grace of Grace" (5.9.38), to restore a renovated Scotland to the ethical
foundation and proportioned sense of "measure, time, and place"
(5.9.39) - the word time appears four times in the closing twenty lines
of the play - that had existed before the nightmare interlude of Mac-
beth's brief and bloody reign. The new rulers, Malcolm and Macduff,
are, as we know from the "testing" scene in 4.3, good and honour-
able men, and the prospect of their rule allows us to look confidently
to Scotland's future: "The world that endures [after Macbeth's death]
is not a world of exhausted survivors as in Othello or King Lear but
a world of renewed health, newly purged of a malignancy" (Kastan
91). Significantly, the announcement of the inauguration of this new
world is made in temporal terms when Macduff, carrying Macbeth's
head, enters to proclaim Malcolm sovereign: "Hail, King! for so thou
art. Behold where stands / Th' usurper's cursed head: the time is free"
(5.9.20-1; italics added).
By critical consensus, Shakespeare's late romances - Pericles, Cym-
beline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest - are concerned with the
transfiguring power of love. Derek Traversi speaks for many when

he says that "it is of the essence of love, in [these] plays, to produce
a transforming vision of value; from the contemplation of the object
of admiration (the keynote is reverence rather than desire, though
the force of passion is still present in a muted form) springs a radi-
ance, a transfiguring light which rests on surrounding objects and
confers upon them a distinctive quality ... of its own" (257). In the
final plays, love is a theme that allows Shakespeare to celebrate the
restorative power of righteousness, to affirm the existence of a benef-
icent and morally coherent universe, and, recalling earlier comedies
like As You Like It, to shape and, on occasion, even transcend the
processes of time and mutability. Time-the-Destroyer of the sonnets
and the tragedies yields place in the romances to Time the Revealer
and Restorer. This is not to say, of course, that human kind is able in
any way to escape time or death - Shakespearean romance has noth-
ing to do with fairyland escapism - but rather to say that the final
plays are concerned with restoration rather than loss, with rebirth
and new beginnings rather than with endings and the finality of
death. In The Tempest, for example, although Prospero ends by relin-
quishing his god-like powers and forsaking the atemporal fantasy of
his paradisiacal isle for a dukedom in Milan where "every third
thought" will be of mortality and the grave (5.1.312), the dramatic
emphasis falls not on what time has taken away but on the ethical
values it has restored and reinstated - on justice and truth, on self-
discovery and the renewed promise for the future achieved in mar-
riage, on repentance and the "rarer action" of forgiveness, on truth
as the revelatory filia temporis:
O, rejoice
Beyond a common joy, and set it down
With gold on lasting pillars: in one voyage
Did Claribel her husband find at Tunis,
And Ferdinand, her brother, found a wife
Where he himself was lost; Prospero, his dukedom
In a poor isle; and all of us, ourselves,
When no man was his own.
(5.1.206-13)
Like Macbeth, Prospero, whose magic is the refined equivalent of the

ambitious Scot's more brutal methods, seeks to orchestrate the future
by manipulating events; but Prospero succeeds where Macbeth had
failed, and he succeeds precisely because, unlike Macbeth, he under-
stands from the beginning, first, that he can shape the future - or,
12O Time
perhaps better, reshape the past - in a meaningful way only if his

motives coincide with those of the larger providential order that gov-
erns the universe and, second, that he can never, however great his
power over nature, escape the consequences of his own mortality. We
are all, as he observes at the conclusion of the masque scene, which
ends abruptly with a dance of symbolic reapers, players in an
"insubstantial pageant" and "our little life / Is rounded with a sleep"
(4.1.155-7). Prospero's aim is not to escape time but to engineer an
"opportunity" (tempus commodum) in which events, gone awry can
be relived in such a way that old wrongs are, through repentance
and forgiveness, abolished and set finally right:
They being penitent,

The sole drift of my purpose doth extend
Not a frown further.
(5.1.28-30)
Once this purpose is achieved, he releases his spirits, abjures magic,

and willingly embraces the quotidian reality of everyday time: "Now
my charms are all o'erthrown, / And what strength I have's mine
own, / Which is most faint" (Epilogue 1-3). His desire is not, like
Macbeth's, to dominate time and twist it to his will, but to open out
its possibilities by exploring in a renovated present the moral poten-
tial inherent but hitherto unrealized in "the dark backward and
abysm of time" (1.2.50).
Christian themes - repentance, forgiveness, caritas, rebirth, regen-
eration - that are never far below the surface in The Tempest are even
more prominent in The Winter's Tale. The potentially tragic action set
in motion by Leontes' ill-founded jealousy is transformed, through
penance and reawakened "faith" (5.3.95), into a comprehensive
romance action that moves beyond and through suffering to har-
mony and a clarity of spiritual vision that culminates in the dramatic
spectacle of Hermione's "resurrection," a mysterious event that can
only be described as being, in some sense, miraculous. Traversi has
drawn attention to the pervasiveness of the idea of "grace" in the
play, and G. Wilson Knight maintains that The Winter's Tale must
properly be read as "a myth of immortality."7 There are allusions in
the text to the Garden of Eden and original sin (1.2.62-75) an<^ refer-
ences to "pow'rs divine" (3.2.28) that sit in judgment on human
actions; there is an exchange between Autolycus and the Clown that
is a comic reworking of the Lucan parable of the Good Samaritan
(4.3.51-84); and the plot as a whole is centrally concerned with the
concepts of repentance, rebirth, and redemption.
Christianity and the New Testament are necessary background for

an understanding of this play. But the question remains, how pre-
cisely are we to interpret the play's suggestive imagery and myste-
rious events in the context of what is, after all, a secular drama?
There are two extremes to be avoided. On the one hand, it is clear
that The Winter's Tale was not written in order to illustrate points of
Christian doctrine: however much the symbolic action of the play
works toward theodicy, it stops well short of presenting, in the
manner of the medieval mystery cycles, the biblical faith and soteri-
ology of orthodox Christianity. On the other hand, however, it is
historically unwarranted to reject the play's Christian elements or, as
a number of critics have done, to demythologize them into neutral
statements of humanist secularity; and it is difficult to refute Tra-
versi's argument that, whatever Shakespeare's private beliefs might
have been, "it is no more than natural that a writer of his time and
place should be aware of Christian tradition as an influence mould-
ing his thought and that he should seek, in his latest plays, to present
in terms of a highly personal reading of that tradition some of his
final conclusions about life" (Traversi viii). It is perfectly clear that
The Winter's Tale has been influenced in significant ways by Christian
thought and that, without the biblical tradition to draw upon, it
would not be the play it is.
Shakespeare's romances in general, and The Winter's Tale in partic-
ular, have prompted in the past two decades a good deal of theolo-
gizing (owing more to Spinoza and Romantic pantheism than to the
New Testament or traditional Christian thought) and a good deal of
scholarly rumination on the nature of time (owing more to Bergson
and Hellenistic conceptions than to Augustine or the biblical under-
standing of time as kairos). Douglas Peterson, for example, who
argues that "time as duration ... is the conceptual basis of the restor-
ative pattern of the romances" (18), interprets duration as the condi-
tion of experience in which "all temporal things actively participate
in the eternal" and in which man "must discover his role in process
itself ... must discover in transience what is permanent, sifting out
the real from the illusory" (19). He amplifies his position as follows:
"Durative time is cyclical, bringing life out of death as inevitably as
spring emerges out of winter. It is no longer Augustine's Destroyer,8
but the measure of the process which sustains genera and species.
Individual life is utterly dependent upon process, but in the contin-
uum of time in which the living emerge out of and replace the dying,
genera and species subsist eternally" (19).
What is clear from this exegesis is that by "eternity" Peterson
really means sempiternity or a perpetual continuity in which the
122 Time
collectivity of the human race achieves, qua species, a generic bio-

logical immortality. Despite references to "a shaping Providence"
that directs human affairs, Peterson can hardly - given an immanen-
tist logic that locates meaning and value in process itself - retain the
concept of an external Deity. In fact, like Bergson's elan vital (chap. 7,
above), Peterson's "Providence" is not the transcendent God of theo-
logical tradition but a metaphorical deus ex machina imported into
the flux of duration in order to account for a perceived, but other-
wise inexplicable, ethical teleology that determines the consistency
of human values from person to person and from generation to gen-
eration. "Providence," indeed, is merely the moral aspect of "great
creating Nature" - a pantheistic conception in which, as Spinoza was
to point out, God and Nature are synonymous:9 Nature encompasses
and contains God, and God (stripped of traditional attributes like
omnipotence and omniscience) is abbreviated into the ens spiritus of
the phenomenal universe. On the basis of this formalist metaphysic
and a humanist epistemology, Peterson argues that in the romances
Shakespeare
focuses the mirror of his art specifically upon the forces of generation and
decay which sustain the natural order and define the condition of human
existence ... Through the right use of time fathers and their children may
participate in the generative process by which the social and natural orders
are sustained. By enduring tempestuous time patiently they prove their trust
in a purposeful and just universe. By knowing when as well as how to act,
and by acting promptly when occasion presents itself, they defeat Time the
Destroyer. Even those characters who have initially missed occasion, or who
have wasted or abused time - Leontes, Posthumus, Alonso, and Prospero -
have the opportunity to redeem themselves. For time's course is cyclical, and
provides the patient man with recurrent occasions. The patient man seizes
the recurring occasion, redeeming himself and the past and completing the
restorative pattern. (62)
For Peterson, then, romance redemption is se//-redemption, and the

restorative vision of the late plays becomes, in this view, a matter of
exploiting time successfully in pursuit of psychological wholeness
rather than of experiencing it as kairos (that is, a coincidence of
human and divine wills). And the "generative process," hypostasized
as Providence, that validates trust in the existence of "a purposeful
and just universe" is rooted, ultimately, in the natural supernatural-
ism of a radical transformation of human consciousness that relies for
its meaning, not on traditional Christian spirituality, but on an antic-
ipation of Romanticism and the pantheistic philosophies out of which
it grows. What Peterson is attempting, in short, is to retain the mystic

aura of Christianity while reducing its metaphysical content to an
anthropology of "communal man" (i68).10
In a cognate manner, Robert Uphaus concludes, in a 1985 study,
that act 5 of The Winter's Tale is an instance of "romance hierophany"
that elevates the tragic, then pastoral tone of the first four acts "into
a sacred, which is not to say Christian, dimension" (86); R.S. White
in a monograph of the same year undertakes to familiarize wonder
in the play by arguing, with repeated reference to Paradise Lost, that
human time redeems itself sub specie naturae in a postlapsarian Sicilia
where "the entrance of Florizel, Perdita, and their unlikely entou-
rage" herald the beginning of a humanist recovery of hope and
renewal that mirrors the larger regenerative processes of the life
cycle of nature (152-3); and Robert Adams, in a 1989 study, maintains
that "There is emphatically a visionary, though not a theological,
component in the play; it is diffused, not concentrated, and how
much Christianity it contains depends mostly on how much you
bring to it" (120). More recently still, Cynthia Marshall, in a New
Historicist study of eschatology in the last plays, argues that the
romances, written at a time when traditional eschatological themes
were becoming "mere images,"11 consciously borrow apocalyptic
motifs from medieval theology and remythologize them into secular,
theatrical topoi: "Shakespearean romance ... provides alternative
images of judgment (Cymbeline), afterlife (The Winter's Tale), temporal
perspective (Pericles), and paradise (The Tempest)" (m). Hermione's
revival provides a particularly vivid instance of such secularized
theatrical eschatology:
The image offers a kind of imaginative fulfillment but offers nothing to

believe in but the power of theatre. An audience may rejoice for the reunion
in The Winter's Tale without being inclined to accept the image of reunion as
something to hope for or to believe in. Mainly, the audience is aware of
having constructed something upon which to rejoice. The effect of the statue
scene, then, is like that which Greenblatt attributes to King Lear: "to make us
love the theatre." On stage, Shakespeare realized, we can see our desires
fulfilled, safely cordoned from reality. Only in the theatre can "playing dead"
equal "being dead "; only here can we see the dead resurrected." (59-60)
The studies summarized in the preceding paragraphs all have one

thing in common: a desire to preserve the mysteriousness, the numi-
nous quality of transcendence one meets in The Winter's Tale and
other late plays that allows mankind to triumph over destructive
time, while at the same time finding alternatives to Christianity as
124 Time
the source of Shakespeare's romance vision of restoration and

renewal. But Shakespeare was not a proto-Romantic pantheist raised
on Spinoza and Rousseau, nor was he an aesthetic humanist in the
tradition of Schelling and Pater. His world was one still dominated
by a largely unquestioned belief in the metaphysics, as well as the
ethics, of Christianity - and it is within the context of this worldview
that we must seek an understanding of his presentation of redemp-
tive time in the romances. This is not, as I said earlier, to claim that
these plays illustrate or defend Christian doctrine; it is to claim,
rather, that they are heuristic fictions inspired by the Christian tradi-
tion in which the poet explores and experiments with the shapes of
time, creating hypothetical models by which to understand, through
the mirror of art, the values that temporal process seems to involve.
The romances are not "Christian plays" but mimetic analogues of a
dialectic pattern of constructive and consuming time that is, as it
happens, Christian - and, I would argue, specifically Augustinian -
in its origin and development.
The Winter's Tale is a case in point. Through the first three acts, in
spite of Leontes' nostalgic recollection of a time when he had naively
supposed that
there was no more behind

But such a day to-morrow as to-day,
And to be boy eternal,
(1.2.63-5)
there broods over the action of this part of the play an oppressive,
unremitting sense of time as a destructive, unforgiving, impersonal
force: the thief of youth, of sweet innocence - and even of love.
Whipped forward by unmotivated jealousy, Leontes sacrifices two
friends to his rage, then loses a son, a wife, and an infant daughter.
Every passing instant, it seems, strips him of some prospect of peace
and joy, some redemptive possibility to oppose against the headlong
course of all-devouring time - until, alas, too late, he confesses his
folly on hearing the verdict of the oracle at Delphos. He is alive but
alone, doomed (we expect) to a soon and sorry end, possessed still
of power and a hollow authority but bereft of present comfort and
any prospect of a meaningful future. There is no reasonable likeli-
hood at this stage that Perdita will be recovered, and we are given
every reason to believe that Hermione, like the unfortunate Mamil-
lius, is dead: "I say she's dead," declares Paulina, "I'll swear it. If
word nor oath / Prevail not, go and see" (3.2.203-4) - and Leontes
exits, saying, "Prithee bring me / To the dead bodies of my queen

and son. / ... Come, and lead me / To these sorrows" (234-5, 242-3).
This is the stuff of tragedy: Leontes, like Lear or Othello, is the victim
of his own misuse of time. But then unexpectedly, and without pre-
cedent in Shakespeare, "TIME, the Chorus" - "I, that please some, try
all, both joy and terror / Of good and bad, that makes and unfolds
error" (4.1.1-2) - steps onto the boards to announce that sixteen
years have elapsed and that his appointed task is to bridge the "wide
gap" and give his brief scene "such growing / As you had slept
between" (16-17).
In fact, Time's speech, though short, is the hinge on which the
dramatic action turns: it ushers out the tragic reign of Time the
Destroyer (tempus edax rerum) and inaugurates the comic ascendency
of Time the Revealer and Restorer (veritas filia temporis). Having
pleased few and tried all, Time has now come to bring joy out of
terror and to restore a harmony lost through wilfulness and error; his
function is to introduce a dramatic action which effects a reconcilia-
tion between mere passage and the values of a timeless vision that
give that otherwise tyrannical passage purpose and meaning. The
impersonal devouring action of time is overcome and finally tran-
scended - first, by the proleptic pastoral of "great creating Nature"
(44.88),12 then by that more sacred intuition of inexplicable hope that
we, along with Leontes, witness in Hermione's revival - into a qual-
itative understanding of duration that depends upon our awakening
our faith (5.2.95) to the existence of values that, while they cannot
defeat time, can make it irrelevant. Leontes' love for Hermione, deep-
ened and strengthened in penitence, creates a symbolic framework
larger than itself, a universality of context in which time, always
present and passing ("But yet, Paulina, / Hermione was not so much
wrinkled, nothing / So aged as this seems," 5.3.27-9), exists as only
a single and almost insignificant element in a richer and deeper intu-
ition of life. Mutability is a fact of existence, but the value of human
experience, an experience necessarily conditioned but not limited by
physical passage, is infinite and therefore finally incommensurate
with it. What Leontes gains, with Paulina's guidance/3 is the capac-
ity to apprehend the reality of timeless truths in and through the flux
of time, and Hermione's resurrection is the pledge and seal of his act
of faith in these greater truths beyond the mundane realities of flux
and passage:
'Tis time; descend; be stone no more; approach;

Strike all that look upon with marvel. Come;
ia6 Time
I'll fill your grave up. Stir; nay, come away;

Bequeath to death your numbness; for from him
Dear life redeems you. You perceive she stirs.
(5.3.99-103)
For Leontes, as for St Augustine before him, the full reality of time
involves a mysterious, indeed miraculous, distentio animi - a moral
and spiritual opening-out of the soul that transcends and transfig-
ures simple duration and endows it (because conditioned by an
intentio animi toward a higher and eternal order of reality) with
intensity, purpose, and permanent value. The climax of The Winter's
Tale - the revival of Hermione - is what Brian Cosgrove, following
T.S. Eliot, characterizes as "a raid on the inarticulate": "It is Shakes-
peare's beautiful, elaborate and successfully secular way of saying
'all manner of thing shall be well'" - a spectacle in which we too, if
we do as requested and, like Leontes and the others present on the
stage, awake our faith, "experience something we cannot render
totally articulate [but which is] fully received as the imaginative
apprehension of our hearts' desire" (185). The Winter's Tale tests the
limits of criticism because it must be experienced rather than com-
prehended, because, in order to succeed, it must become a miracle in
the full effect of which we, whether as readers or spectators, will-
ingly and actively participate.
io Heilsgeschischte:
Typology and
the Helix of History
It is often asserted categorically that the major distinction between

the classical and Christian views of time and history is that while
they are conceived as circular by the former, they are considered to
be linear by the latter: "The cycles of flux and reflux in the Graeco-
Roman attitude towards history are like the legendary phoenix,
dying periodically in order to revive again, while to Christians his-
tory is like Jacob's ladder, 'ascending by degrees magnificent' toward
the Eternal City" (Patrides 9). While there is much to support this
view, it is at the same time an oversimplification that obscures some
essential features of time-consciousness in the two cultures. Thus,
although Greek and Roman writers normally construe time as circu-
lar on the analogy of the celestial and seasonal cycles,1 the classical
understanding of time is based on the fundamentally linear Aristo-
telian notion that time is the "number of motion in respect of 'before'
and 'after'" (Physics aigbi).
When we turn to the Judaeo-Christian tradition, the situation is
considerably more complex. On the one hand, it is quite true that the
Christian view is essentially linear: history, says the Cambridge Pla-
tonist, Henry More, is "that large voluminous Period of Providence,
which, beginning with the first Fiat lux in Genesis, ends not till the
last Thunder-clap intimated in Revelation" (More, Divine Dialogues
[1688], as cited in Patrides2 82). Augustine, followed, inter alia, by
Paulus Orosius, Bede, and Vincent de Beauvais, had established that
human history was a progression of lived time from the Creation to
the Last Judgment, providentially patterned as either "seven ages"
128 Time
or "four monarchies," whose orderly elaboration testified to the

existence of a horizontal teleology throughout history. On the other
hand, however, there was from Old Testament times a view that time
and history are essentially circular - an attitude one meets, for exam-
ple, in the opening chapter of Ecclesiastes where "the thing that hath
been is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall
be done: and there is no new thing under the sun" (1:9). In a similar
way, the careers of the charismatic shophetim (judges), like Gideon
and Samson, raised up periodically by Yahweh to rule premonarchial
Israel, form part of a cyclical pattern of apostasy and renewal that
underlies both the structure and message of the Book of Judges:
And they forsook the Lord, and served Baal and Ashtaroth. And the anger
of the Lord was hot against Israel, and he delivered them into the hands of
spoilers that spoiled them, and he sold them into the hands of their enemies
round about, so that they could not any longer stand before their enemies
... Nevertheless, the Lord raised up judges, which delivered them out of the
hand of those that spoiled them ... And when the Lord raised them up
judges, then the Lord was with the judge, and delivered them out of the
hand of their enemies all the days of the judge ... And it came to pass, when
the judge was dead, that they returned, and corrupted themselves more than
their fathers, in following other gods to serve them, and to bow down unto
them. (2:13-19)
In the New Testament, typological configurations that construe

Adam as a typos of Christ (Rom. 5:19; i Cor. 15:21-22) or that treat
the old covenant of works as the "shadow" of a new covenant of
faith (Heb. 10:1) imply a modified but still circular vision of history
in which events and characters in the Old Testament past are inter-
preted as material anticipations of events and characters in the New
Testament present. History, in this view, does not, of course, so much
repeat as perfect itself, but there is still a cyclical pattern at the bottom
of a historiography that sees the new dispensation of grace as the
completion and fulfilment of the old dispensation of law. To con-
clude: when we think of the biblical conception of history, we must
think of a providential teleology in which a pattern of symbolic pro-
lepses is superimposed upon an essentially linear temporal progres-
sion that leads from the Creation to the Last Judgment: rather than
a simple horizontal line, biblical history is a helix spiralling upward
through shadowy types to truth.
The parameters of New Testament typology were extended in
early Christian thought, particularly by Irenaeus and, slightly later,
by the allegorizing Alexandrian school of Origen. The excesses of the
129 Typology and the Helix of History
latter are well known and need not detain us, but Irenaeus is useful
because, in the course of refuting the Gnostic heresy, he developed a
doctrine of the "recapitulation" - of human evolu-
tion in the humanity of the incarnate Christ that broadens the con-
ceptual base of figural thinking. Adam, created in the image and
likeness of God, lost that likeness through sin. In Christ, the incar-
nate Word, the original likeness possessed by Adam before the Fall
is recapitulated or summarized;2 and salvation, for Irenaeus, thus
becomes the restoration of the condition prevailing in the prelapsar-
ian Eden when Adam was still the untarnished imago Dei. Through
faith in Christ, Adam and his successors are able to recover this lost
likeness; and salvation history, which Irenaeus regards as a progres-
sive education of the human race from innocence to full spiritual
maturity, culminates in the Incarnation of the second Adam, who
restores to all men the opportunity to achieve the original creation
blighted by the first Adam's transgression.
Now, since Christ recapitulates not just Adam but "sum[s] up in
Himself the whole human race from the beginning to the end" (Ire-
naeus, Against Heresies 5.23.2; see ANF 1:551), it may reasonably be
said to follow that, as those Old Testament figures like Moses and
Noah living before Christ are, in their lives and deeds, prefigurations
of a reality yet to occur, so Christians born and saved in later centu-
ries are postfigurations of this same truth. The premise of figural
thinking is that earthly life, though real, is still - for all its reality -
only the umbra of an authentic and ultimate reality, and this under-
standing applies as much to the lives of those who follow as to the
lives of those who preceded the events that stand, for Christians, at
the midpoint of history. Postfiguration is not, perhaps for obvious
reasons, an idea with much currency in theological discourse, for it
may too easily be used to devalue Scripture and equate common
things with revealed truth; but it is, despite its dangers, a pervasive
theme in the time-conscious religious literature of the later Middle
Ages and Renaissance, and no study of time in the imaginative liter-
ature of these periods would be complete without considering, how-
ever briefly, its purpose and some of its implications.
The first point to be made is that postfiguration is an essential
ingredient of the Christian heroism that depicts saintly knights as
types of Christ. The most important such figure, of course, is Arthur,
one of the line of legendary British kings who, in the words of Geof-
frey of Monmouth, "did succeed [Christ] after the Incarnation" (His-
toria Regum Britanniae 1.1). We meet this form of figuration, used as
both a structural and thematic device, in Malory's prose epic, Le
Morte Darthur. From the opening pages, Arthur is established as a
130 Time
postfiguration of Christ: on Christinas day, a marble block holding

"a fayre swerd naked by the poynt" and bearing the inscription
"WHOSO PULLETH OUTE THIS SWERD OF THIS STONE AND ANVYLD
is RIGHTWYS KYNGE BORNE OF ALL ENGLONo" (7) appears miracu-
lously in the churchyard; and on three symbolic occasions - New
Year's Day (a metaphor of rebirth and new beginnings), Candlemas
(the feast of Christ's presentation in the Temple), and Pentecost (the
passing of earthly authority from Christ to his Apostles) - Arthur
succeeds where all others have failed and pulls the sword "lightly
and fiersly" out of the stone. Once crowned, like the Judges called
by Yahweh to save Israel, he sets about the task of reestablishing
order and faith in a land that has fallen into apostasy and lawless
ways since his father Uther Pendragon's death. The order that he
and his knights seek to establish, however, is doomed by forces both
external and internal, and yet, despite his ultimate failure, a tantaliz-
ing mystery persists about his end and his future role:
som men say in many partys of Inglonde that kynge Arthure ys nat dede,
but had by the wyll of oure Lorde Jesu into another place; and men say that
he shall com agayne, and he shall wynne the Holy Crosse. Yet I wol not say
that hit shall be so, but rather I wolde say: here in thys worlde he chaunged
hys lyff. And many men say that there ys wrytten uppon the tumbe thys:
HIC IACET ARTHURUS, REX QUONDAM REXQUE FUTURUS. (/I/)
The point Malory is making is that Arthur, for all his flaws and
imperfections,3 symbolizes the periodic reappearance in the fallen
world of a reality that can never perish because it is the metonymic
and temporal reenactment of an eternal reality. Typologically, Arthur
looks both backward and forward: he is both a postfiguration of a
past revelation and a prefiguration of a future revelation, both a
recapitulation of the earthly life and work of Christ and an anticipa-
tion of His final ascension, at the Parousia, in power and glory - and
therefore, paradoxically, "a once and future king." Since figural
events are neither definitive nor historically self-sufficient but must
be viewed in "immediate vertical connection" (Auerbach 72) with
the divine order that encompasses them and on which they depend
for their full meaning, a typological interpretation of history is nec-
essarily repetitious and circular in the sense that individual earthly
events either look forward to or look back towards authentic, ulti-
mate events of which they are the temporal figurse. King Arthur was,
for Malory, both a real king enacting real deeds and the tentative
form of something eternal and timeless; and the heroism he symbol-
izes is of the same quality and nature as that of the Old Testament
Judges who, in all their frailty, announced the coming of one whose
kingdom would be as a tree overshadowing all the earth. The reign
of Arthur is, like that of Gideon and the other shophetim of the Book
of Judges, the repetition of a promise, the temporal enactment of a
pattern of revealed truth that is prefigurative in the one instance and,
in the case of Arthur, postfigurative but, in an eschatological sense,
proleptic as well.
Arthur reappears in Spenser's Faerie Queene, again as a typos of
Christ, threading his way through the adventures of lesser knights
and ensuring by his presence a firmly theistic grounding for the
"twelve private morall virtues" drawn from Aristotle that form the
subject of the individual books. But a more interesting - and, it may
be added, more typically Renaissance - use of figuration in the poem
is Spenser's handling of the two-Adam typology (based on the
Pauline doctrine that "as in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all
be made alive," i Cor. 15:22) that provides the central symbolic scaf-
folding for the opening book, "The Legende of the Knight of the Red
Crosse, or of Holiness." While there is certainly a broadly historical
dimension to the allegory of the Protestant St George's travails to
defeat the papist powers of darkness and deceit, there emerges in
Spenser a strong soteriological interest, not present in Malory, that
construes the adventures of Red Crosse Knight as the spiritual stag-
ing-posts of an inner and private quest for rebirth and regeneration.
Holiness, the declared theme, is, of course, more properly a personal
than a public matter, and Spenser's allegory in the opening book
works to dramatize the progressive spiritual growth of the protago-
nist, symbolizing Everyman, as he moves from being a type of Adam
to a type of Christ. He is associated with Adam from the outset - his
quest is to free Una's parents, who live in "Eden" (1.12.26), from a
dragon - and his first encounter is with the foul serpent Error, an
Eve-Satan hybrid who establishes a symbolic connection with events
in the primal garden. Wearing the well-used armour of every Chris-
tian before him who has struggled to slay in himself the old man of
corruption and enter into the adoption of the new man of faith, he
is led through a series of testing adventures that mature his initially
fragile conviction and educate him in the ways of righteousness until
he is strong enough, in the penultimate canto, to accomplish his
original quest by slaying the dragon in an epic three-day fight whose
imagery links the encounter clearly with Christ's Harrowing of Hell
and recovery, on man's behalf, of the lost Eden. Since Spenser is a
Protestant poet, it is not surprising that book i does not end with the
slaying of the dragon, for justification, which is by faith, is followed
by sanctification, which is by works,4 and for this reason Red Crosse
132 Time
Knight, betrothed but not married to Una, is obliged to return to

Gloriana's court in order to serve out "in warlike wize" (1.12.18) the
remaining years of his chivalric pledge. The point to which I would
draw attention, however, is this: Red Crosse Knight summarizes in
his life and quest the whole scope of biblical events from the Fall to
the Incarnation. He is a recapitulation of all human history between
Adam and Christ, a symbol of man's providential destiny - in short,
a temporal microcosm of God's redemptive plan for human history.
The internalization of the two-Adam typology begun by "our sage
and serious Poet Spenser" in the Faerie Queene is carried to comple-
tion in that other great Christian humanist epic of the Renaissance,
Milton's Paradise Lost, a work whose declared purpose is to tell the
story
Of Man's First Disobedience, and the Fruit

Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste
Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat.
(1.1-5)
Disdaining (although his first impulse had been to write an "Arthu-

riad") to indite "with long and tedious havoc" the tales of "fabl'd
knights / In Battles feign'd" (9.30-1), Milton chose instead to con-
front the scriptural record directly and to essay "Things unattempted
yet in Prose or Rhyme" (1.16). The unattempted things he undertakes
to perform in his "advent'rous song" have less to do with what he
says - the story of the Creation and Man's Fall had often been retold
in prose and metrical Hexemera - and more to do with the effect that
he proposes, Deus ducens, his poem shall have: for his intention is
"with no middle flight" (1.14) to present - or, rather, represent - to
the reader the story of who he is and how he came to be thus. The
"Man" mentioned in the epic's opening line is not Adam only, or
even primarily, but Milton's reader - Adam's distant sons and
daughters who are the inheritors of the "mortal sin / Original"
(9.1003-4); nor is the "greater Man" of line 4 merely the historical
Jesus, a distant Saviour, but the living spirit of the Son of Man stir-
ring in the reader's heart as he turns the pages.
Milton writes Paradise Lost as an artist and not as a theologian, and
as an artist he understands that what human beings know, they
accept, but what they truly see and believe, they live and are. In
order, therefore, to make his readers understand and feel that they are
reading the story of their own lives, it is not enough simply to retell
133 TyP°k)§y and the Helix of History
the old familiar story in picturesque detail and with rhetorical embel-
lishment. Rather, Milton must create a poetic analogue of Scripture
itself, a symbolic and metaphoric parallel to revealed truth that is
experienced by the reader as a present reality, erasing the misty centu-
ries of cold detail and forgotten fact that lie between him and his
spiritual origins. (This is not, of course, to suggest that Paradise Lost
is or was intended to be in any way a substitute for Scripture; its
purpose is to supplement and confirm, not to supplant.) If, then,
Milton is to achieve his purpose, if he is to succeed in his bold
attempt to "assert Eternal Providence, / And justify the ways of God
to men" (1.25-6), he must not only answer all the intellectual and
psychological objections that lie in the way of faith in a sceptical age,
but he must also - a more arduous task - draw the distant past and
indeterminate future into the contrived immediacy of a lived truth
and present perception, a self-reflexive intuition known in the heart
as much as in the mind. And this, though it would take another book
to demonstrate it, is precisely what Paradise Lost accomplishes: when
we are moved, in spite of the narrator's objections, to sympathize
with Satan and secretly to applaud his arrogant and scheming bluster
on the burning lake and later in Pandaemonium, we recognize in
ourselves that fatal attraction to evil that makes us Adam's legitimate
heirs; when we nod through God's theology lecture in book 3 but
then find that precisely the same doctrines, repeated in book 12, have
become a source of hope and consolation, we begin to perceive the
redemptive motions of the second Adam stirring in our hearts. For
the education that occurs in Paradise Lost is the growth of the half-
believing reader toward self-understanding and an accepting aware-
ness that the battle for Eden is a present battle, fought anew and as
if for the first time on the private field of every living soul, and that
the victor's prize is, like the struggle itself, a state of mind and soul
- an inner Paradise, happier far, that replicates in existential terms
the "happy rural seat of various view" (4.247) forfeited originally by
Adam. Time in Paradise Lost is the consciousness that the past is not
past but is now: the intuition that the biblical Heilsgeschischte centred
on Adam and Christ is a continuous and living pattern recapitulated
in the inner struggle between good and evil that we experience every
time we make a conscious moral decision. It is we ourselves, Milton's
art makes us understand, who are led between the ranks of shining
seraphim to gates that open out into that brave new world in which
we now, no longer unexpectedly, find ourselves:
Some natural tears they dropp'd, but wip'd them soon;

The World was all before them, where to choose
134 Time
Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide:

They hand in hand with wand'ring steps and slow,
Through Eden took thir solitary way.
(12.645-9)
The point I have been at pains to make in this section on typology

and history is this: as humanity, conceived spatially, is a microcosm
of a larger physical whole - a common Renaissance trope from
Leonardo's famous drawing onward - so humanity, temporally con-
ceived, is the microcosm of a pattern of lapsarian and redemptive
activity revealed in scriptural record, which is relived and experi-
enced anew in the individual spiritual history of every soul. While
we find this attitude to time in an early form in medieval literature
- in certain religious lyrics, for example, and in the pervasive anach-
ronism of speech and dress in the Corpus Christi cycle - it was in
the religious poetry and prose of the Renaissance that the idea was
most fully developed and most fully personalized. Donne gives it
memorable expression in his Hymn to God my God, in my sicknesse:
We thinke that Paradise and Calvarie,

Christs Crosse, and Adams tree, stood in one place;
Looke Lord, and finde both Adams met in me;
As the first Adams sweat surrounds my face,
May the last Adams blood my soule embrace.
(21-5)
In a similar way, Sir Thomas Browne, that lover of paradox and old
folios, observed in Religio Medici that "though my grave be England,
my dying place was Paradise, and Eve miscarried of mee before she
conceiv'd of Cain" (Browne 132). George Herbert, in The Bunch of
Grapes, is, as we might expect, more restrained in his expression:
For as the Jews of old by God's command

Travell'd, and saw no town;
So now each Christian hath his journeys spann'd:
Their storie pennes and sets us down.
(8-10)
In the Nativity Ode, Milton's "gift for the birthday of Christ which
the first light of its dawn brought to me" (Elegy 6.86-7), the full, and
fully personal, significance of the Saviour's birth in a stable long ago
and far away is unobtrusively effected in a simple shift of verb tense:
It was the Winter wild,

While the Heav'n-born child,
All meanly wrapt in the rude manger lies.
(29-31; italics added)
The Incarnation is not simply an event in time, but a living and

timelessly experienced reality in the believer's heart. It is an event
that both transcends time - illustrated by the sweep of imagery from
the "Creator Great" setting his constellations at the beginning of time
(120-32) to the "horrid clang" announcing "the world's last session"
at its end (157-64) - and that permits those who, like the poet, ascend
by faith from the historical record to the spiritual reality that informs
it to participate in a personal way in the biblical events themselves.
The desire expressed in the poem's opening lines to anticipate the
"Star-led Wizards" and reach the stable with his "humble ode"
before they can arrive with their more sumptuous gifts (22-8) is more
than a quaint rhetorical device.
I shall conclude with what is perhaps the most powerful religious
lyric in the language: John Donne's encounter, in the midst of ratio-
nalizing evasions, with his crucified Lord in Goodfriday, 1613. Riding
Westward:
Let mans Soule be a Spheare, and then, in this,

The intelligence that moves, devotion is,
And as the other Spheares, by being growne
Subject to forraigne motions, lose their owne,
And being by others hurried every day,
Scarce in a yeare their naturall forme obey:
Pleasure or businesse, so, our Soules admit
For their first mover, and are whirld by it.
Hence is't, that I am carryed towards the West
This day, when my Soules form bends toward the East.
There I should see a Sunne, by rising set,
And by that setting endlesse day beget;
But that Christ on this Crosse did rise and fall,
Sinne had eternally benighted all.
Yet dare I'almost be glad, I do not see
That spectacle of too much weight for mee.
Who sees Gods face, that is selfe life, must dye;
What a death were it then to see God dye?
It made his owne Lieutenant Nature shrinke,
It made his footstoole crack, and the Sunne winke.
136 Time
Could I behold those hands which span the Poles,

And tune all spheares at once, pierc'd with those holes?
Could I behold that endless height which is
Zenith to us, and to'our Antipodes,
Humbled below us? or that blood which is
The seat of all our Soules, if not of his,
Make durt of dust, or that flesh which was worne
By God, for his apparell, rag'd, and torne?
If on these things I durst not looke, durst I
Upon his miserable mother cast mine eye,
Who was Gods partner here, and furnish'd thus
Halfe of that Sacrifice, which ransom'd us?
Though these things, as I ride, be from mine eye,
They'are present yet unto my memory,
For that looks towards them; and thou look'st towards mee,
0 Saviour, as thou hang'st upon the tree;
1 turne my backe to thee, but to receive
Corrections, till thy mercies bid thee leave.
O thinke mee worth thine anger, punish mee,
Burne off my rusts, and my deformity,
Restore thine Image, so much, by thy grace,
That thou may'st know me, and I'll turne my face.
(italics added)
Time here is pure kairos. As Donne rides, the rising sun at his back
becomes the risen Son; and in that instant, divine and human time
coincide - or better, a specific event on a specific date in the flux of
common time is transformed into an analogy of eternity and partic-
ipates in the very reality that it works to render intelligible. Past,
present, and future are annihilated and fulfilled in an eternal NOW
in which Christ looks down on the poet from the cross on which He
hangs. On this particular Friday in 1613 John Donne, in an ordinary
act of faith (if there is such a thing), encounters the eternal in and
through the temporal and finds himself by losing himself in the mys-
tery of One who comes from beyond time to save the meek and
humble from the wages of sin and from time: "For mine eyes have
seen thy salvation, which thou hast prepared before the face of all
people; a light to lighten the Gentiles and the glory of thy people
Israel" (Luke 2:30-2).
APPENDIX ONE
Notes Toward
a Protestant Poetic
ANGLICANS AND PURITANS
"To be particular/' says Thomas Browne in Religio Medici, "I am of

that reformed new-cast Religion, wherein I dislike nothing but the
name, of the same belief our Saviour taught, the Apostles dissemi-
nated, the Fathers authorised, and the Martyrs confirmed; but by the
sinister ends of Princes, the ambition & avarice of Prelates, and the
fatall corruption of times, so decaied, impaired, and fallen from its
native beauty, that it required the carefull and charitable hand of
these times to restore it to its primitive integrity" (61-2). Protestant-
ism was not an innovation; it was not a new religion but a religion
new-cast from the original mould: a restoration of Primitive Faith,
purged of accretions. "We have reformed from them [viz., Roman
Catholics], not against them" (62). It was a point on which all Prot-
estants agreed. A century earlier, the Bishop of Salisbury had put the
case thus: "we have searched out of the Holy Bible, which we are
sure cannot deceive, one sure form of religion, and have returned
again unto the primitive church of the ancient fathers and apostles,
that is to say, to the first ground and beginning of things, as unto the
very foundations and headsprings of Christ's church" (Jewel 135).
Protestantism, however, is by nature fissionable material; and there
were, as adherents soon found, many points on which they could not
agree, although there were two areas on which there was general
agreement: these were the doctrines of sola Scriptura and sola fide, the
twin pillars of all reformed doctrine.
138 Appendix One
The Bible was the revealed Word of God and therefore the sole
criterion of belief and conduct. "Holy Scripture containeth all things
necessary to salvation; so that whatsoever is not read therein, nor
may be proved thereby, is not to be required of any man ... or be
thought requisite or necessary to salvation" (Thirty-nine Articles,
Article vi). The authority of the Church was inferior to that of Scrip-
ture, and any of its teachings not directly supported by scriptural
authority (e.g., the Roman doctrines of purgatory and transubstanti-
ation) were dismissed as "satanicall inventions." "Papists," said Wil-
liam Perkins in A Reformed Catholic (1597), "teach that beside the
written word there be certain unwritten traditions, which must be
believed as profitable and necessary to salvation ... We hold that the
scriptures are most perfect, containing in them all doctrines needful
to salvation, whether they concern faith and manners, and therefore
we acknowledge no such traditions beside the written word which
shall be necessary to salvation" (Perkins 549-50). But how is Scrip-
ture to be read? Protestant writers insisted on the plain sense of the
text: "The Church of Rome," Perkins says in The Art of Prophesying
(1592), "maketh four senses of the scriptures, the literal, allegorical,
tropological, and anagogical ... but [this method] must be exploded
and rejected. There is only one sense and the same is the literal"
(Perkins 338). This interdiction, however, did not extend to typology,
an exegetical method that, unlike allegory and the others, is sanc-
tioned by Scripture itself:
a type is a different thing from an allegory. The sense, therefore, of that

Scripture [Gal. 4:22-6] is one only, namely, the literal or grammatical. How-
ever, the whole entire sense is not in the words taken strictly, but part in the
type, part in the transaction itself ... When we proceed from the sign to the
thing signified, we bring no new sense, but only bring out into the light what
was before concealed in the sign ... For although this sense be spiritual, yet
it is not a different one, but really literal. (William Whitaker, Disputatio de
Sacra Scriptura [1588], as cited in Lewalski 120-1)
Although the plain sense of Scripture is not itself always clear, as

Milton admits in Of Reformation, "yet ever that which is most neces-
sary to be known is most easie" - and, he adds, in defence of the
inspired penmen, "The very essence of Truth is plainnesse, and
brightnes; the darknes and crookednesse is our own" (Milton2
1:566). But the Spirit, it became clear, could move in remarkably
strange ways and with highly divisive results once uncritical minds
and vibrant imaginations were loosed on thel poetry and prophecy
of the sacred text. "The Bible in English under every weaver's and
139 Toward a Protestant Poetic
chambermaid's arms," the Earl of Newcastle noted laconically in

1660, "hath done us much hurt" (Ogg 143).
Solifidianism, the second pillar of reformed doctrine, held that the
sinner is justified (that is, finds acceptance before God) by faith alone
and not by any works. Based on Luther's translation of Tiicrcei ("by
faith") in Romans 3:28 as allein durch den Glauben ("only by faith"),
the doctrine of sola fide was the uncompromising foundation of Prot-
estant soteriological dogma. In the work of salvation, Calvin said,
"all is of God and nothing from ourselves" (Calvin1 75). A fuller
exposition is given by Thomas Cranmer, Edward VI's Archbishop of
Canterbury:
This proposition, that we be justified by faith only, freely, and without works,
is spoken for to take away clearly all merit of our works, as being insufficient
to deserve our justification at God's hands, and thereby most plainly to
express the weakness of man and goodness of God ... This faith the Holy
Scripture teacheth; this is the strong rock and foundation of the Christian
religion; this doctrine all old and ancient authors of Christ's Church do
approve; this doctrine advanceth and setteth forth the true glory of Christ,
and suppresseth the vainglory of man ... Justification is not the office of
man, but of God; for man cannot justify himself by his own works, neither
in part nor in the whole; for that were the greatest arrogancy and presump-
tion of man that antichrist could erect against God, to affirm that a man
might by his own works take away and purge his own sins, and so justify
himself. (Hughes 50)
If man can earn heaven by his own merit, he has no need of Christ;
if he were able to contribute to his salvation, even in a minor way,
that would still derogate from God's glory and Christ's sacrifice. The
usual proof-text was Galatians 2:21, "I do not frustrate the grace of
God: for if righteousness come by the law, then Christ is dead in
vain."
In its earliest stage the English Reformation was driven by Luthe-
ran doctrine but, within only a decade or so, it was drawing its
sustenance almost exclusively from Switzerland, to some extent from
Zwingli at Zurich but primarily from Calvin in Geneva. The Edwar-
dian episcopate was solidly Calvinist; and it has been plausibly said
that "there was hardly one of the Elizabethan bishops who was not
a Calvinist" (McAdoo 5). Though their styles differed, Richard
Hooker (an Anglican) and William Perkins (a Puritan) spoke with
one voice on most matters, and it is widely accepted that Calvinism
was in the ascendant in England until well into the seventeenth cen-
tury, reaching its peak during the Civil Wars in the 16405. True
140 Appendix One
though this may be, there is always a danger in oversimplification.

Early Anglicans were not, somehow, Puritans in surplices, nor were
Puritans merely dour Anglicans. There were significant differences
in emphasis and attitude that set them apart even in early times, and
there was, as early as Elizabeth's reign, an identifiable spirit of
emerging Anglicanism. It is perhaps more useful, therefore, to say
that theological discussion in England was in flux until at least the
middle of the seventeenth century and that, while normative Angli-
canism appeared after the Restoration, there never has - either then
or since - been any such thing as a normative Puritanism. On the
Continent and in Scotland, strong-willed leaders arrested the natural
centrifugal tendency of Protestantism and imposed uniformity; in
England, this did not happen. The Elizabethan Settlement did not
legislate doctrine in extenso, and it left many matters in the realm of
adiaphora or "things indifferent." Sir Thomas Browne is engaging in
his directness on this point:
There is no Church whose every part so squares unto my conscience ... as

this whereof I hold my belief, the Church of England, to whose faith I am a
sworne subject, and therefore ... subscribe unto her Articles, and endeavour
to observe her Constitutions: whatsoever is beyond, as points indifferent, I
observe according to the rules of my private reason, or the humour and
fashion of my devotion, neither believing this, because Luther affirmed it, nor
disproving [i.e., disapproving] that, because Calvin hath disavouched it. I
condemne not all things in the Councell of Trent, nor approve all in the
Synod of Dort. In briefe, where the Scripture is silent, the Church is my Text;
where that speakes, 'tis but my Comment: where there is a joynt silence of
both, I borrow not the rules of my Religion from Rome or Geneva, but the
dictates of my owne reason. (64)
Beyond the fixed core of Calvinist dogma in the Thirty-nine Articles,

the latitudinarianism of the Church of England both allowed for and
encouraged an eclecticism that drew from many sources. What we
know as Anglicanism, indeed, may be said to have defined itself into
existence during the first century of English Protestantism as a con-
servative reaction to the politicized neo-Calvinism of its own Puritan
faction. An important corollary is this: during this process of self-
definition, since orthodoxy allowed variety, there were many "Angli-
cans" tinged with puritanism and as many "Puritans" (Presbyterians
and Independents) who were close in doctrine, if not in polity to the
official position of the Church of England. (The Sectarians, of course
- non-Calvinist in doctrine and related to Continental Anabaptists -
are another matter entirely.)
Despite the stereotype of Renaissance England as a pious age, the

state of religion left much to be desired. While it is probably an
exaggeration to say that "it is doubtful whether more than a quarter
of the population can be said to have had any religion at all" (Knap-
pen 380), it seems likely that village atheists were as plentiful as
village drunkards and that a large portion of the population looked
on the Church with attitudes ranging from indifference to hostility.
It was a rough-and-ready age, given to childish behaviour and an
almost primitive delight in violence (a London ordinance forbade
wife-beating after nine in the evening on account of the noise). Nor
were such attitudes checked at the church door: "Members of the
congregation jostled for pews, nudged their neighbours, hawked and
spat, knitted, made coarse remarks, told jokes, fell asleep, and even
let off guns." A Cambridgeshire man was disciplined by the author-
ities in 1598 after his "most loathsome farting, striking, and scoffing
speeches" had occasioned "the great offence of the good and the
great rejoicing of the bad" (Thomas 191-2). Half a century later, in
1637, the Murgatroyds, "annoyed because another family walked
into church ahead of them, knocked down and trampled on their
rivals, causing a disturbance the echoes of which were several years
dying away in the ecclesiastical courts" (Wedgwood1 40). The clergy
were little better than their parishioners: many were old, others
incompetent, some illiterate, and many lived dissolute and immoral
lives. Richard Baxter recalled that during his youth in rural Shrop-
shire "within a few miles about us were near a dozen ... ministers
that were near eighty years old apiece, and never preached" - while
"only three or four constant competent preachers lived near us." One
of their neighbour's sons "took Orders, when he had been a while
an attorney's clerk, and a common drunkard, and tippled himself
into so great poverty that he had no other way to live" (Baxter 4).
The situation was better in London and the larger towns, but only
so in parishes where a cultivated minority ensured that appearances
were kept up, order maintained, and competent clergy found.
Conscientious contemporaries not surprisingly felt that the Eliza-
bethan Settlement had settled too little and that a work of reforma-
tion yet remained in order to bring the faith of the Apostles to this
wayward population. In London, Lancelot Andrewes might riddle
his sermons with Greek and Latin, or Donne divert himself with
paradoxes about "a literall God" who is "a figurative, a metaphoricall
God too" (Donne1 199); but in most of the country what was needed
was the plain truth in plain language, supported by modesty of
manner and a moral life as an example to one's flock. If these were
the ideals of Puritans like William Perkins and Richard Baxter, they
142 Appendix One
were also those of an Anglican like George Herbert: "the character

of [the country parson's] Sermon is Holiness; he is not witty, or
learned, or eloquent, but Holy." He does not "crumble" his chosen
text, but rather his method is to give, "first, a plain and evident
declaration of [its] meaning; and secondly, some choyce Observa-
tions drawn out of the whole text, as it lyes entire, and unbroken in
the Scripture it self" - always seeking, "by dipping, and seasoning
all our words and sentences in our hearts, before they come into our
mouths, [to] truly affect, and cordially express all that we say; so that
the auditors may plainly perceive that every word is hart-deep." In
short - in words recalling Chaucer's saintly Parson - Herbert's coun-
try parson "first preacheth to himselfe, and then to others" (Herbert
233, 235, 279). In poetry, as in prose and his own life, holy Mr Herbert
called for the plain truth in plain words:
Riddle who list, for me, and pull for Prime:

I envie no mans nightingale or spring;
Nor let them punish me with losse of rime,
Who plainly say, My God, My King.
(Jordan 112-15)
If Herbert is a puritan Anglican, then Milton may fairly be said to

be a kind of anglican Puritan. Until he was "Church-outed by the
Prelats," Milton had planned a career in the Church of England, "to
whose service ... I was destin'd of a child, and in mine own resolu-
tions, till comming to some maturity of yeers" (Milton2 1:822-3). As
both poet and controversialist, it is apparent, in spite of his political
sympathies, that Milton's taste did not often tend to the plain style
and that his ornate technique is closer to that of Donne than it is to
the unvarnished style of Herbert or Bunyan. But more revealing than
his style is his position on certain doctrinal issues, especially predes-
tination. Following Arminius, Milton - like contemporary Anglicans
- rejected the rigid dogmas of supralapsarianism, reprobation, and
indefectible grace. Strict Calvinists held (i) that the individual soul
is predestined to heaven or hell by eternal decree, (2) that Christ,
therefore, died only for the elect, and (3) that those predestined to
election cannot refuse the grace of saving faith. In contrast, Armin-
ius, a liberal Calvinist, maintained (i) that divine sovereignty is not
incompatible with human free will, (2) that Christ died for all who
choose to accept his sacrifice, and (3) that man, therefore, may accept
or reject the offer of saving faith. Strict Calvinism is deterministic
and asserts a predestination to faith; Arminianism, on the other
hand, asserts human free will and argues that individual human
beings are predestined on condition of faith. As is clear both from
Paradise Lost and De Doctrina Christiana (chap 4), Milton, like contem-
porary Anglicans, was an Arminian. His consistent emphasis on free
will and recta ratio links him, not with the Puritans (who, as predes-
tinarians, denied free will and distrusted reason), but with Anglicans
and the tradition of Christian Platonist rational spirituality examined
in the opening chapter of this book.
"Anglican" and "Puritan," then, are slippery labels. Between the
extremes of a High Church reactionary like William Laud and a stri-
dent purist like William Prynne stretches a vast middle ground
where outlines blur and there is significant overlap. This is not to say
that Anglican and Puritan are meaningless terms. They do, in fact,
point to certain important differences: in general, Anglicans accepted
the Elizabethan Settlement (episcopacy, the Prayer Book, the Thirty-
nine Articles (and so on), tended to emphasize liturgical matters, and
developed an optimistic theology centered on the Incarnation; Puri-
tans, on the other hand, opposed episcopacy, tended to preoccupy
themselves with ethics, and leaned toward a darker theology cen-
tered on the Fall. From this point of view, George Herbert, author of
The British Church and Love (III), is clearly an Anglican, while Milton,
who wrote works with such titles as The Reason of Church-government
Urg'd against Prelaty and Paradise Lost, is equally clearly a Puritan.
But such terms are partial and limiting descriptions of men whose
faith was a dynamic, highly individual search for truth in an unset-
tled time when there were few theological absolutes, and we are well
advised to be wary of the facile convenience of such labels. Sir
Thomas Browne rejected even the broad term Protestant, preferring
to "assume the honorable stile of a Christian" (Browne 61), and Rich-
ard Baxter - a Puritan and spiritual ancestor of the staunchly Angli-
can C.S. Lewis - longed for the day when English faith would be
unified under the banner of what he was the first to call "mere Chris-
tianity": looking back in 1681 over a long religious life that had wit-
nessed the strife of the Jacobean and Caroline periods, the
Protectorate and the Restoration, Baxter concluded, "You could not
(except a Catholick Christian) have trulier called me, than an
Episcopal-Presbyterian-Independent" (Nuttall 84).
SOLA FIDE: POETRY AND SOTERIOLOGY

There is none righteous, no, not one. Romans 3:10
All is of God and nothing from ourselves. Calvin1 75
No biblical text was more cited in Protestant soteriology than

Romans 8:29-30, which sets out the stages of the process of salvation:
144 Appendix One
29 For whom [God] did foreknow, he did also predestinate to be

conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the first-born
among many brethren.
30 Moreover whom he did predestinate, them he also called: and
whom he called, them he also justified: and whom he justified,
them he also glorified.
Salvation doctrine begins with divine foreknowledge. God is omni-

scient and foresees all that will happen; yet he has endowed humans
and angels with free will and sufficient reason ("reason is but choos-
ing," Milton2 2:527) to pick between saving good and damning evil.
God, therefore, with respect to humans cannot be a determinist with-
out being involved in a contradiction. What then of /oreknowledge?
The answer is that prescience is not the condition of occurrence. The
link between an event and God's foreknowledge of it is a necessary
(given divine omniscience) but not a necessitating link. Milton puts
it this way in De Doctrina Christiana (1.3; Milton2 6:164-5):
God decreed the creation of angels and men as beings gifted with reason and
thus with free will. At the same time he foresaw the direction in which they
would tend when they used this absolutely unimpaired freedom. What
then? Shall we say that God's providence or foreknowledge imposes any
necessity upon them? Certainly not ... Nothing has happened because God
has foreseen it, but rather he has foreseen each event because each is the
result of particular causes which, by his decree, work quite freely ... [so that]
the outcome does not rest with God who foresees it, but only with the man
whose action God foresees ... In this way he knew that Adam would, of his
own accord, fall. Thus it was certain that he would fall, but it was not
necessary, because he fell of his own accord and that is irreconcilable with
necessity.
Thus in Paradise Lost (3.112-19) the rebel angels cannot
justly accuse
Thir maker, or thir making, or thir Fate;
As if Predestination over-rul'd
Thir will, dispos'd by absolute Decree
Or high foreknowledge: they themselves decreed
Thir own revolt, not I: if I foreknew,
Foreknowledge had no influence on their fault,
Which had no less prov'd certain unforeknown.
The second stage is predestination. Like contemporary Anglicans,

Milton rejects Calvinist double predestination, that is, the doctrine
that God by eternal decree predestines some souls to heaven and

some to hell. Following Arminius, he makes a distinction between
an absolute general decree ("All who believe shall be saved") and a
contingent particular decree ("X or X whom I foresee as believing,
shall be saved"); and it follows that individuals are predestined on
condition of faith. Milton, indeed, goes one step further, arguing that
predestination is to election only and that neither men nor angels are
ever, even by contingent decree, damned by God:
It is quite clear, then, that God has predestined from eternity all who would
believe and persist in their belief. It follows, therefore, that there is no rep-
robation except for those who do not believe or do not persist, and that this
is rather a matter of consequence than of an express decree by God ... God
has predestined to salvation all who use their free will, on one condition,
which applies to all. None are predestined to destruction except through
their own fault and, in a sense, per accidens. (Milton2 6:190)
The active individual responsibility for the free choice that leads
"as a matter of consequence" to reprobation has important implica-
tions for Milton's poetry. Satan and the angels who fall with him are
self-damned because they choose continuously to reject the continu-
ously available chance to repent, thus damning themselves, as it
were, by default. No fate is imposed on them from outside by divine
anger or, despite Satan's rhetoric, by divine "tyranny"; they freely
choose their own "fate." Knowing that he need not, even after his
expulsion from heaven, remain in hell, Satan nonetheless chooses to
remain:
is there no place
Left for Repentance, none for Pardon left?
None left but by submission; and that word
Disdain forbids me.
(4.79-82)
The language here is of course rhetorically charged and reveals

more about Satan than it does about God. "Submission" (that is,
grovelling) is not what God demands of Satan; it is what Satan, if he
were God, would require of a vanquished foe. What God requires is
genuine sorrow for sin - and this, Satan, of his own free will, refuses
to give. He declines divine pardon out of "disdain," a word evoking
the full range of contemporary meaning: (i) scorn, contempt; (2)
indignation, anger arising from offended dignity; (3) loathing, hatred
(OED). But does this mean then that Satan, mistakenly considering
God an alter ego and misunderstanding the nature of the repentance
146 Appendix One
expected of him, is somehow less guilty, less responsible for his fate?
Not at all. It implies rather that reason and free will are capable of
perversion, that the evildoer who perseveres in his evil eventually
sacrifices reason to passion and freedom to bondage. Satan's con-
tempt for God, who has conquered him in battle, is irrational, and
his wounded pride and petulant dudgeon are the result of his being
the prisoner of his own solipsism. He hates God because he has
become his own god and cannot tolerate a rival. He is beyond repen-
tance because, having used his freedom to choose slavery to his
vision of himself, he is no longer free to choose God. Hope, fear, and
remorse are no more than empty words to him:
So farewell Hope, and with Hope farewell Fear,

Farewell Remorse: all Good to me is lost-
Evil be thou my Good.
(4.108-10)
As Satan damns himself in Paradise Lost, so the tragic heroes of

Renaissance drama bring destruction on themselves by knowingly
choosing evil over good. Like Satan, Marlowe's Faustus and Shakes-
peare's Macbeth come to a point where, having abrogated their free
will, they no longer possess the ability to choose the good; and evil,
in consequence, becomes their "good." Faustus is already at the end,
in a sense, even as the play begins. He uses his free will in the
opening scene to reject good and embrace evil, and the remainder of
his tragical history is not so much a psychomachia (which implies an
active struggle) as a consistent repudiation of free choice. He never
finds the good enticing; his mind is already made up. Conscience -
externalised as a Good Angel and an Old Man - is an irritant in the
path of his ratification of his original decision: he is never even
tempted to accede to its troublesome pricking. By his own choice, his
power of choice atrophies and eventually disappears completely.
Finally, to confirm its loss (and hence his self-damnation), he couples
with the image of Helen - not Helen herself, of course, but a succuba,
one of his own, a devil like himself - and dies, haunted (alas, too
late) by the vision of Christ's redemptive blood streaming in the
firmament, offering what he is no longer capable of choosing.
Macbeth's case is more human and therefore more chilling. As the
play begins he is a man plagued by conscience, a man who "wouldst
not play false, / And yet wouldst wrongly win" (1.5.21-2) the crown
that belongs to another. But vaulting ambition and his wife's desire
are stronger than fear or scruple, and he permits imagination, in the
form of an air-borne dagger, to lead him to the bloody deed. But
it does not end here. Things bad begun, he thinks, make strong
themselves by ill: Banquo, a more distant threat to ambition, is next.

Having once chosen his course, Macbeth could still turn back but
wilfully determines to carry on to the end, and when conscience, in
the guise of Banquo's ghost, menaces his resolve, he silences it with
the "argument" that, having come thus far, he might just as well -
and therefore he will - go on:
For mine own good

All causes shall give way. I am in blood
Stepp'd in so far that, should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o'er.
Strange things I have in head, that will to hand,
Which must be acted ere they may be scann'd.
(3.4.134-9)
Abuse of reason justifies self-will: like Satan and Faustus, Macbeth

does not reform because he will not. But the choice, knowingly made,
is at the cost of the ability for further choosing: Macbeth here uses
his free will for the last time - by employing it to banish free will.
Henceforth, his conscience exiled by regal fiat, the firstlings of his
heart become those of his hand, until finally, having supped full with
horrors, self-knowledge belatedly forces itself upon him as Birnan
Wood marches on Dunsinane. In Macbeth's resolve that all deeds
shall henceforward be "for mine own good," as in Satan's embracing
of evil as his "good," the word good is, of course, ironic. The premise
of free will is that it is only free to choose, and free only so long as
it chooses, the good. Reason is "right" reason (recta ratio], God's gift.
To choose evil is to subvert reason, not to employ it: evil is irrational.
As Hooker says, "to will is to bend our souls to the having or doing
of that which [is] good" - or, again, "the Laws of well-doing are the
dictates of right Reason." How, then, does evil come about? If "evil
as evil cannot be desired," how can it ever be chosen? Quite simply,
evil is self-deception, the choice of an evil as if it were the good: "For
there was never sin committed, wherein a less good was not pre-
ferred before a greater, and that wilfully; which cannot be done with-
out the singular disgrace of Nature, and the utter disturbance of ...
divine order" (Hooker 1:170-3).
The third stage in the process of salvation is calling, that is, the
rousing motions of contrition and the gift of faith - both God's initi-
atives. The first step toward repentance after the Fall in Paradise Lost
is an act of God's that makes repentance itself possible:
Prevenient Grace descending had remov'd

The stony from thir hearts, and made new flesh
148 Appendix One
Regenerate grow instead.

(11-3-5)
Like the stirrings of contrition, faith also comes unsought as the gift
of prevenient grace (from prxvenire, to come before, anticipate). It is
given before there is even an awareness of the need for it and is
offered freely (gratia gratis) to all regardless of merit. The gift of faith
to all
Comes unprevented, unimplor'd, unsought.
Happy for man, so coming; he her aid
Can never seek, once dead in sins and lost;
Atonement for himself or offering meet,
Indebted and undone, hath none to bring.
(3.232-5)
And what precisely is faith? It is believing in the absolute suffi-

ciency, for one's salvation, of Christ's life and sacrifice; it is knowing
and accepting that He is the necessary and only mediator between a
righteous God and sinful man. Christ's mediatory role and the antic-
ipatory nature of faith (the gift of grace) are both finely imagined in
Herbert's sonnet Redemption (from re + emere, to buy back), where the
speaker represents humanity, faring ill under the Law, as seeking a
new covenant with the Lord, only to discover that it has already been
granted by virtue of Christ's sacrifice on the cross:
Having been tenant long to a rich Lord,

Not thriving, I resolved to be bold,
And make a suit unto him, to afford
A new small-rented lease, and cancel th' old.
In heaven at his manour I him sought:
They told me there, that he was lately gone
About some land, which he had dearly bought
Long since on earth, to take possession.
I straight return'd, and knowing his great birth,
Sought him accordingly in great resorts;
In cities, theatres, gardens, parks, and courts:
At length I heard a ragged noise and mirth
Of theeves and murderers: there I him espied,
Who straight, Your suit is granted, said, & died.
The fourth stage in salvation history is justification - the point at

which traditional Protestant and Catholic soteriological dogmas part
company. The Catholic position is that after man has responded to

the initial divine offer of faith, Christ's merit is in some measure
imparted to him, so that he becomes acceptable to God by a combi-
nation of faith and good works. Thus, though in a modest way,
human beings contribute to their salvation. The Protestant position
is that humans, depraved by original sin, are unable to assist in the
work of their own salvation and so must rely on faith alone (sola fide),
that is, on having Christ's righteousness and merit imputed to them.
Milton's God, addressing the Son, gives a succinct summary of Prot-
estant doctrine in terms of the Pauline typology of the two Adams:
Be thou in Adam's room

The Head of all mankind, though Adam's son.
As in him perish all men, so in thee
As from a second root shall be restor'd,
As many as are restor'd, without thee none.
His crime makes guilty all his Sons, thy merit
Imputed shall absolve them who renounce
Thir own both righteous and unrighteous deeds,
And live in thee transplanted, and from thee
Receive new life.
(3.285-94; cf. 12.407-10)
The Greek verb 8iKai6co (justify) and noun SiKoaocruvrj (justifica-

tion) are, as Luther pointed out, used in the Pauline epistles as foren-
sic terms meaning "to regard as righteous" or "to treat as if
righteous." Thus, justification in the New Testament refers to God's
gratuitous decision to treat believers as if they are guiltless, although,
in fact, they remain guilty both of original sin and of their own
subsequent sins. Salvation is unmerited in any way through works;
it is made possible only because God has chosen, for his own rea-
sons, to impute the Son's merit to those who believe in Him and
persevere in their faith. With the Scholastic reader in mind, Calvin
summarises the doctrine in terms of Aristotle's four causes: "the
mercy of God is the efficient cause, Christ with His blood the mate-
rial cause, faith conceived by the Word the formal or instrumental
cause, and the glory of both the divine justice and goodness the final
cause" (Calvin1 75). Man's only contribution is the exercise of free
and rational choice to respond to the divine offer of faith.
What then of works? If justification is by faith alone, are men then
freed from the requirements of the law? - are they free to sin? By no
means. "For true faith," says Bishop John Jewel, "is lively and can in
no wise be idle. Thus therefore teach we the people that God hath
150 Appendix One
called us, not to follow riot and wantonness, but, as Paul saith [Eph.
2:10], 'unto good works to walk in them"' (Jewel 39). Calvin is
blunter: antinomianism, he says, is "the calumny ... that if Christ
frees us from the subjection of the law, He brings us liberty to sin.
Christ, however, does not deliver his followers to unbridled lascivi-
ousness, so that they may prance about without restraint, like horses
let loose in the fields, but conducts them to a lawful manner of life"
(Calvin1133). Good works are enjoined by Scripture and are a matter
of Christian consistency, since a man's moral life must agree with his
faith or involve him in a contradiction. Justification, therefore, is nec-
essarily supplemented by Sanctification (or Holiness), which, says
Hooker, is "our second justification" (1:61); and it was usual for Prot-
estant texts on dogmatics to be divided, like Milton's De Doctrina
Christiana, into two sections: the first on faith, the second on ethics.
Sanctification is the operation of the Holy Spirit in the believer's
heart. As justification is the response to prevenient grace, so Sancti-
fication is the cooperative response to subsequent (or assisting) grace
- that is, the lifelong effort, never perfectly realised, by which the
justified sinner seeks "to be conformed to the image of the Son"
(Rom. 8:29). St Paul elaborates the doctrine using the two-Adam
typology in Ephesians 4:22-4, urging the faithful at Ephesus
That ye put off concerning the former conversation the old man, which is
corrupt according to the deceitful lusts; And be renewed in the spirit of your
mind; And that ye put on the new man, which after God is created in righ-
teousness and true holiness.
Works of Sanctification do not actively contribute to salvation, for

all human works in God's eye are, in Calvin's unsparing phrase, "no
better than dung" (Calvin1118); but as a good tree brings forth good
fruit, so a good man performs good works as the pledge and seal of
his election. Thus, says Hooker (quoting Rom. 6:22), "'Ye are made
free from sin, and made servants unto God'; this is the righteousness
of justification: 'Ye have your fruit in holiness'; this is the righteous-
ness of Sanctification" (1.2.2). The distinction is given artistic point in
the tonal differences between Donne's Holy Sonnets, which stress jus-
tification, and the poems of Herbert's The Temple, which stress the
role of Sanctification. Donne typically dramatises the sinner's need
for justification: his terror and guilt, his fear of rejection, his pleas for
healing grace. He calls on God to batter his heart, to burn him with
a fiery zeal, to teach him repentance while there is still time. He
focuses on the early stages of justification, on the process that leads
up to faith; and a common structural pattern in the Holy Sonnets is
that a conviction of sin (octave) is followed by a petition for grace

(sestet). Sonnet IV, for example, deals with the effects of original sin
- the octave likening the sinner to Adam (literally, "red earth" in
Hebrew) exiled from Eden for stealing an apple, the sestet a prayer
that grace will erase the taint of that original sin:
Oh my blacke Soule! now thou art summoned

By sicknesse, deaths herald, and champion;
Thou art like a pilgrim, which abroad hath done
Treason, and durst not turne to whence hee is fled,
Or like a thiefe, which till deaths doome be read,
Wisheth himselfe delivered from prison;
But damn'd and hal'd to execution,
Wisheth that still he might be imprisoned;
Yet grace, if thou repent, thou canst not lacke;
But who shall give thee that grace to beginne?
Oh make thy selfe with holy mourning blacke,
And red with blushing, as thou art with sinne;
Or wash thee in Christs blood, which hath this might
That being red, it dyes red soules to white.
Here the Adam-Christ typology symbolises a personal psychoma-

chia, and the poem sets out, in a typically Calvinist fashion, the
initial stages of justification: a conviction of sin and a desire to repent
coupled with a sense of personal helplessness; then, in the sestet, a
recognition that grace must come from outside through the imputed
merit of Christ's blood, which "dyes," or bleaches out, Adamic stain
by virtue of the Lord's sacrificial death.
In contrast to the harsh syntax and sometimes hysterical hyperbole
of Donne's Holy Sonnets, there reigns through George Herbert's The
Temple a secure sense of faith received and grace accepted. The very
title of the volume implies that the foundations are in place and that
the work going forward is the construction of the superstructure: in
other words, the work of sanctification. Herbert's struggle is not, like
Donne's, a struggle for faith, but one with faith. His poems, he told
Nicholas Ferrar from his deathbed, were "a picture of the many spir-
itual Conflicts that have past betwixt God and my Soul, before I
could subject mine to the will of Jesus my Master: in whose service
I have now found perfect freedom" (Walton 314). The issue in these
poems is not the poet's desire for justifying grace but, rather, the
nature of his response to a grace that has been granted: a refractory
vanity (The Collar), for instance, or an agonized sense of vocational
unworthiness (The Priesthood), that threaten his ability to submit to
152 Appendix One
the offered grace. And his alternation between affliction and comfort,
revolt and submission, constitutes, as Barbara Lewalski has said,
"the long, slow process of sanctification in the Protestant paradigm
... [that leads, in the final poems, to] the mature Christian's attain-
ment of a plateau of joy, confidence, assurance, and anticipation of
heaven" (287). And nowhere is the tension between a debilitating
sense of unmerited love and the joyful security of mature holiness
more finely resolved than in Love (III), the eucharistic meditation that
closes the volume:
Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,

Guiltie of dust and sinne.
But quick-ey'd Love, observing me grow slack
From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,
If I lack'd any thing.
A guest, I answer'd, worthy to be here:

Love said, You shall be he.
I the unkinde, ungratefull? Ah my deare,
I cannot look on thee.
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
Who made the eyes but I?
Truth Lord, but I have marr'd them: let my shame

Go where it doth deserve.
And know you not, sayes Love, who bore the blame?
My deare, then I will serve.
You must sit down, sayes Love, and taste my meat:
So I did sit and eat.
The final stage of salvation, anticipated by the love-feast in Her-

bert's poem (cf. Rev. 19:7-9), is glorification. Complete glorification is
obtained after death when the justified sinner is received into
heaven; but apart from Puritan apocalyptic literature (much of it
manifestly political), the theme is not much used in poetry or imag-
inative prose. There are exceptions, especially in the work of an ur-
mystic like Henry Vaughan (cf. The Dawning, Ascension-day, "They
are all gone into the world of light!"). More common than complete
glorification, however, is that adumbration of bliss experienced
while still on earth by those well-advanced in holiness. For instance,
Thomas Traherne in Centuries of Meditations:
You will feed with Pleasure upon evry Thing that is His. So that the World
shall be a Grand Jewel of Delight unto you: a very Paradice; and the Gate
of Heaven. It is indeed the Beautifull Frontispiece of Eternitie: the Temple of
God, the Palace of his children. (1.20)
Your Enjoyment of the World is never right, till evry Morning you awake in
Heaven: see your self in your fathers Palace: and look upon the Skies and
the Earth and the Air, as Celestial Joys. (1.28)
Lov God Angels and Men, Triumph in Gods Works, delight in Gods Laws,
Take Pleasure in Gods Ways in all Ages, Correct Sins, bring good out of evil,
subdue your Lusts[,] order your sences, Conquer the Customs and Opinions
of men, and render Good for evil, you are in Heaven evry where. (4.38)
"Incomplete glorification," Milton says in De Doctrina Christiana

(1.25), "means that we are justified and adopted by God the Father
and are filled with a certain awareness both of present grace and
dignity and of future glory, so that we have already begun to be
blessed" (Milton2 6:502). What this means is illustrated near the end
of Paradise Lost. Sadder but wiser after his visionary preview of
human history, Adam confesses that he sees now that "to obey is
best, / And love with fear the only God," and the Archangel Michael
replies,
This having learnt, thou hast attain'd the sum

Of wisdom; hope no higher...
only add
Deeds to thy knowledge answerable, add Faith,
Add Virtue, Patience, Temperance, add Love,
By name to come call'd Charity, the soul
Of all the rest: then wilt thou not be loath
To leave this Paradise, but shalt possess
A paradise within thee, happier far. (12.575-87)
APPENDIX TWO
Translations from
Pascal's Pensees
7 this faith causes one to say not I know, but I believe.

68 When I think of the brief span of my life, swallowed up into the
eternity before and after ... [and that I am] engulfed in that
immensity of spaces of which I know nothing and which know
nothing of me, I am afraid.
111 It is not from space that I must seek human dignity, but in the
ordering of my thought. Possessing whole worlds would profit
me nothing. By space the universe encompasses and swallows
me like a speck; by thought I encompass it.
129 Judge of all things, [yet] a silly earthworm; storehouse of truth,
[yet] a sinkhole of doubt and error; the glory and refuse of the
universe.
183 Faith plainly tells us what the senses do not, but not the contrary
of what they perceive; it is above them, not opposed to them.
196 When I consider the blindness and misery of man, and gaze on
the whole silent universe, and man without light, left to himself
and, as it were, lost in this corner of the cosmos, not knowing
who put him here, what he has come to do, what will happen
when he dies, incapable of knowing anything, I am terrified -
like a man carried in his sleep into some dreadful and deserted
island, and who awakes not knowing where he is and with no
means of escape.
197 DISPROPORTION OF MAN
Let man therefore consider the whole of Nature ... Imagination
will sooner cease to function than Nature to furnish [it with
images]. This whole visible world is but an imperceptible dot in
155 Pascal's Pensees
the ample bosom of Nature. No idea comes near it; in vain do

we inflate our conceptions beyond imaginable space, for we
only conceive atoms at the expense of the reality of things. [The
universe] is an infinite sphere, whose centre is everywhere and
circumference nowhere. In brief, it is the greatest sensible man-
ifestation of God's omnipotence, so that our imagination loses
itself in that thought... Whoever thinks about [man] in this way
will be terrified of himself; and considering that he is sustained,
in the physical body that Nature has given him, between these
two abysses of infinity and nothingness, he will tremble in the
sight of these marvels, and I think that - curiosity changing into
wonder - he will be more inclined to contemplate them in
silence than to inquire into them with presumption.
For, in the final analysis, what is man in Nature? A nothing in
relation to the infinite, a whole in comparison with the nothing,
a middle thing between all and nothing. Infinitely remote from
understanding the extremes, the end of things and their begin-
ning are, for him, unattainably hidden in impenetrable secrecy.
Let us know our limitations. We are something, but we are not
everything; such being as we have conceals from us the knowl-
edge of first principles (born of nothingness), and the little [por-
tion] of being we possess hides infinity from our sight.
198 Man is a mere reed, the weakest [thing] in Nature; but he is a
thinking reed ... All human dignity, then, consists in thought.
199 The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me.
418 INFINITY - NOTHINGNESS
Unity added to infinity does not increase it at all, no more than
a foot [does] an infinite length; the finite is annihilated in the
presence of the infinite, and becomes a pure nothingness. So
[does] our mind before God; so our justice before divine justice.
There is not so great a disproportion between human justice and
that of God as between unity and infinity...
- We know that infinity exists, and we are ignorant of its
nature: just as we know that it is false that number is finite, so
it is true that number is infinite; but we don't know what it [=
numerical infinity] is. It cannot be even, nor can it be odd; for,
by adding "one," its nature does not change - however, it is a
number, and all numbers are even or odd. It is [at least] true that
this applies to all finite numbers.
- So we may perfectly well know that God exists, without
knowing what he is...
Thus, we know the existence and nature of the finite, because
we are finite and extended like it. We know that the infinite
exists and we are ignorant of its nature, because it has extension
156 Appendix Two
like us, but no limits as we do. But we know neither the exist-
ence nor the nature of God, because he has neither extension nor
limits.
- But by Faith we know his existence; in heaven we shall
know his nature.
422 It is the heart that senses God, not reason. This is what Faith is:
God perceived by the heart, not by reason.
The numbering of entries in the Pensees varies widely from edition

to edition. Listed below are important French editions and the two
most accessible English translations, so that readers can track down
the full texts of passages excerpted above. The translations given
here are mine.
Numbering of Entries in the Pensees

Tourneur Brunschvicg Lafuma Everyman Penguin
7 248 30 30 7
68 205 116 116 68
111 348 217 217 11
129 434 246 246 11
183 265 370 370 85
196 693 389 389 198
197 72 390 390 199
198 347 391 391 200
199 206 392 392 201
418 233 343 343 418
422 278 255 255 424
Sources. Tourneur: Blaise Pascal: Pensees. Zacharie Tourneur and Didier Anzieu, eds.
2 vols. Paris, 1960. Brunschvicg: Pascal: CEuvres Completes. L. Brunschvicg, P. Boutroux,
and F. Gazier, eds. 14 vols. Paris, 1904-14. Lafuma: Blaise Pascal: Pensees sur la Religion et
sur quelques autres sujets. Louis Lafuma, ed. 3 vols. Paris, 1952; 2nd ed., 1953. Everyman:
Blaise Pascal: Pensees. Notes on Religion and Other Subjects. John Warrington, trans.
London: Dent, 1960. Penguin: Pascal: Pensees. A.J. Krailsheimer, trans. Harmondsworth,
England: Penguin Books, 1966.
Notes
PART ONE
i Orthodoxy, 19, 22. Chesterton distinguishes the "mad" rationalism that

characterizes "half the chairs of science and seats of learning to-day"
from the healthy "mysticism" of the common man. The scientists in
the former class "all have exactly that combination we have noted ...
of an expansive and exhaustive reason with a contracted common
sense. They are universal only in the sense that they take one thin
explanation and carry it very far. But a pattern can stretch for ever and
still be a small pattern" (22). In contrast, "the ordinary man has
always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic
... He has always left himself free to doubt his gods; but (unlike the
agnostic of to-day) free also to believe in them ... The whole secret of
mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by the help of
what he does not understand. The morbid logician seeks to make
everything lucid, and succeeds in making everything mysterious. The
mystic allows one thing to be mysterious, and everything else becomes
lucid" (28).
CHAPTER ONE
i Similar views are expressed in Tatian's Oratio ad Grxcos (ANF 2:65-82)

and, with more moderation, by Irenaeus in the Adversus Hxreses: e.g.,
the discussion of knowledge and mystery in 2.28 (ANF 1:399-402).
158 Notes to pages 5-7
2 See also Stromateis 6.18: "Now ou Gnostic

always occupies himself with the things of highest importance. But if
at any time he has leisure and time for relaxation from what is of
prime consequence, he applies himself to Hellenic philosophy in pref-
erence to other recreation, feasting on it as a kind of dessert at supper
6). (af21:p93
3 Greek text:
The Greek text is from Clement of Alexandria, ed. Butterworth,
2.6.
4 Greek text:
(PG 8:948).
5 For Clement's anticipation of Cusanus's docta ignorantia, see Stromateis
5.3: "The knowledge of ignorance is, then, the first lesson in walking
according to the Word" (ANF 2:448). No doubt Clement had Plato Apol-
ogy zjb in mind, as well, perhaps, as the discussion of Socrates in
Justin Martyr, Second Apology 10 (ANF 1:191-2).
; (PG 9:8). ((pg 9
The idea anticipates the paradox of the sphere whose circumference
and centre are identical, an image of God and the universe used by
Nicholas of Cusa and usually said to be of Hermetic origin (see pp. 24-
5). Perhaps, however, Cusanus's source was more orthodox.
7 Stromateis 5.14 cites the comic poet Epicharmus to illustrate that the
Greeks had "clearly" anticipated Christian Logos doctrine: "There is in
man reasoning; and there is a divine Reason ... And the Reason of
man derives its origin from the divine Reason" (ANF 2:471).
8 Greek text: 'H
N
(PG 8:212-13).
9 The Septuagint version of Isaiah 7:9 is cited often by Clement (Stro-
mateis 1.1, 2.4, 4.21). It may be noted in passing that the LXX text -
- takes ci)vf|Te as a Hiphil of 'mn (i.e.,
"believe"), while in fact the Hebrew (followed by all versions except
LXX and its derivatives) gives a Niphal of 'mn (i.e., "be established").
Modern commentators generally find intentional wordplay in the
Hebrew phrase.
10 There is a useful statement about the lived relationship between faith
and reason in Stromateis 7.10: to speak gener- to speak gener-
ally, a perfecting of man as man, is consummated by acquaintance
with divine things, in character, life, and word, accordant and con-
formable to itself and to the divine Word. For by it faith is perfected,
inasmuch as it is solely by it that the believer becomes perfect ...
Whence by starting from this faith, and being developed by it, through
the grace of God, the knowledge respecting Him is to be acquired as
far as possible" (ANF 2:538).
11 The passage anticipates Nicholas of Cusa's view of man as a micro-
theos (see pp. 24-5), and Clement delights in expressing the idea with
almost shocking force: e.g., "it is possible for the Gnostic already to
have become God" or, again, "so he who listens to the Lord ... will be
formed perfectly in the likeness of the teacher - made a god going
about in flesh" (Stromateis 4.23, 7.26; see ANF 2:437, 553).
12 The Stoic doctrine of apatheia. Cf. Stromateis 6.9: "[Christ] was entirely
impassibl e inaccessible to any movement of feeling - either
pleasure or pain. While the apostles, having most gnostically mas-
tered, through the Lord's teaching, anger, and fear, and lust, were not
liable even to such of the movements of feeling, as seem good, cour-
age, zeal, joy, desire, through a steady condition of mind, not changing
a whit; but ever continuing unvarying in a state of training after the
resurrection of the Lord." The true Gnostic, Clement adds, "is com-
pelled to become like his Teacher in impassibility ... for it is impos-
sible that he who has been once made perfect by love, and feasts
eternally and insatiably on the boundless joy of contemplation should
delight in small and grovelling things" (ANF 2:496-7).
reing to Cl nt, and faith are, according to clement,
linguistic cognates: "If, then, we are to give the epistemology of
£mc»tf|[rr|, knowledge, its signification is to be derived from OTaoa<^
placing; for our soul, which was formerly borne, now in one way, now
in another, it settles in objects. Similarly faith is to be explained etymo-
loul respec t which is" o our soul respecting that which is "
(Stromateis 4.22; see ANF 2:435).
14 "In a word, [we are] assimilated to God by a participation in moral
excellence" (Psedagogus 12). In contrast to the heretical Gnostics, who,
like the Manichaeans after them, were dualists who despised the body
as evil and an impediment to spiritual insight, Clement holds that
material reality, neither good nor bad in itself, is the necessary vehicle
of spiritual understanding. His asceticism takes the form of a master-
ing of the passions, an ascent accomplished through the body rather
than, as the Gnostics taught, by rejecting it. The true Gnostic, Clement
says, uses the body "as one sent on a distant pilgrimage uses inns and
dwellings by the way, having care of the things of the world ... but
leaving his dwelling-place and property without excessive emotion ...
[and] embracing the mansion that is in heaven" (Stromateis 4.24; see
ANF 2:440).
15 See De Hominis Opificio and De Anima et Resurrectione, both available in
English translation in PNF 5:387ff.
16 E.g., De Trinitate 12.14.22: "Distat tamen ab aeternorum contemplatione

actio qua bene utimur temporalibus rebus, et ilia sapientiae, haec scien-
tiae deputatur" (PL 43:1009). (Yet action, by which we use temporal
things well, differs from contemplation of eternal things; and the latter
is reckoned to wisdom, the former to knowledge [PNF1 3:163].)
17 De Trinitate 11.2.2: "anima tamen commixta corpori per instrumentum
sentit corporeum, et idem instrumentum sensus vocatur" (PL 42:986)
(yet the soul commingled with the body perceives through a corporeal
instrument, and that instrument is called sense [PNF1 3:145]). Cf. De
Musica 6.5.10 (PL 32.1169).
18 Latin text: "Nisi enim aliud esset credere, et aliud intelligere, et primo
credendum esset, quod magnum et divinum intelligere cuperemus,
frustra propheta dixisset, Nisi credideritis, non intelligent ... Nam
neque inventum dici potest, quod incognitum creditur; neque
quisquam inveniendo Deo fit idoneus, nisi antea crediderit quod est
postea cogniturus" (PL 32:1243). See note 9, above, for a comment on
the Septuagint version of Isaiah 7:9, which Augustine cites again in the
letter quoted in note 21, below.
19 "Credere nihil aliud est, quam assensione cogitare" (De Prxdestinatione
Sanctorum 2.5; PL 44:963).
20 Latin text: "Vide ergo secundum haec verba tua, ne potius debeas,
maxime de hac re, in qua praecipue fides nostra consistit, solam sanc-
torum auctoritate sequi, nee ejus intelligentiae a me quaerere rationem.
Neque enim cum coepero te in tanti hujus secreti intelligentiam utcum-
que introducere (quod nisi Deus intus adjuverit, omnino non potero),
aliud disserendo facturus sum, quem rationem ut potero redditurus:
quam si a me, vel a quolibet doctore non irrationabiliter flagitas, ut
quod credis intelligas, corrige definitionem tuam, non ut fidem
respuas, sed ut ea quae fidei firmitate jam tenes, etiam rationis luce
conspicias. [3] Absit namque ut hoc in nobis Deus oderit, in quo nos
reliquis animantibus excellentiores creavit. Absit, inquam, ut ideo cre-
damus, ne rationem accipiamus sive quaeramus; cum etiam credere
non possemus, nisi rationales animas haberemus. Ut ergo in quibus-
dam rebus ad doctrinam salutarem pertinentibus, quas ratione
nondum percipere valemus, sed aliquando valebimus, fides praacedat
rationem, qua cor mundetur, ut magnae rationis capiat et perferat
lucem, hoc utique rationis est. Et ideo rationabiliter dictum est per
prophetam: Nisi credideritis, non intelligetis. Ubi procul dubio discrevit
haec duo, dedique consilium quo prius credamus, ut id quod credimus
intelligere valeamus. Proinde ut fides praecedat rationem, rationabiliter
visum est. Nam si hoc praaceptum rationabile non est, ergo irratio-
nabile est: absit. Si igitur rationabile est ut ad magna quaadam, quae
capi nondum possunt, fides praecedat rationem, procul dubio quantu-
lacumque ratio quae hoc persuadit, etiam ipse antecedit fidem" (PL
33:453)-
A useful gloss is offered by Etienne Gilson: "In its final form the
Augustinian doctrine concerning the relations between reason and
faith comprises three steps: preparation for faith by reason, act of faith,
understanding of the content of faith. First, let us point out with
Augustine that the very possibility of faith depends on reason ... Let
us say, then, that man has a mind (mens); that in order to acquire
knowledge his mind exercises an activity proper to him, namely
reason (ratio); and finally, that the knowledge gained by reason, or the
glimpse of truth thus gained, is understanding (intellectus). In short,
man is the image of God inasmuch as he is a mind which, by exercis-
ing its reason, acquires more and more understanding and grows pro-
gressively richer therein. Reason, then, is naturally present before
understanding, and before faith as well. If we were to belittle or to
hate reason, we should despise God's image within us and the very
source of our preeminence over all other living creatures. This would
be absurd" (Gilson 29).
21 E.g., Boethius' statement in Utrum Pater et Filius, "examine carefully
what has been said, and if possible, reconcile faith and reason" (Boeth-
ius 37). On Erigena, see his De Divisione Naturae and Copleston
2(i):i49-5i. For the Victorines, see Hugh of St Victor, De Sacramentis
Christianas Fidei, and Richard of St Victor, De Trinitate. For Bonaventure,
see especially Itinerarium Mentis in Deum; there is a useful introduction
to Bonaventure's Augustinianism in Copleston 2(1), chaps. 25, 29.
22 Latin text: "Doce me quasrere te, et ostende te quaerenti; quia nee quae-
rere te possum nisi tu doceas, nee invenire nisi te ostendas ... Non
tento, domine, penetrare altitudinem tuam, quia nullatenus compare
illi intellectum meum; sed desidero aliquatenus intelligere veritatem
tuam, quam credit et amat cor meum. Neque enim quaere intelligere
ut credam, sed credo ut intelligam. Nam et hoc credo: quia 'nisi credi-
dero, non intelligam'" (Anselm 114). On the Septuagint reading of
Isaiah 7:9, see above, notes 9, 18, 20.
CHAPTER TWO
i On a literal reading a£ the Mosaic cosmology in Genesis i the earth

was held to be flat and saucer-like, the heavens a fixed vault across
which angels were appointed to carry the planets and stars. The notion
of a round earth was dismissed as preposterous, by, for example, Lac-
tantius: "How is it with those who imagine that there are antipodes
opposite to our footsteps ... Is there anyone so senseless as to believe
that there are men whose footsteps are higher than their heads? or that
the things which with us are in a recumbent position, with them hang
in an inverted direction? that the crops and trees grow downwards?
that the rains, and snow, and hail fall upwards to the earth?" (Divine
Institutes 3.24; see ANF 7:94).
2 In 1593, for example, fifty years after the publication of Copernicus's
De Revolutionibus, Richard Hooker still argued that the immutability
and regularity of the cosmos were the visible guarantees of providen-
tial control. And what, he asked with horror, would happen to man if
Nature were allowed to "intermit her course, and leave altogether
though it were but for a while the observation of her own laws ... if
the frame of that heavenly arch erected over our heads should loosen
and dissolve itself; if celestial spheres should forget their wonted
motion, [or] ... the moon wander from her beaten way?" (Hooker
1:157). An insistence on the stability of "natural law" as the confirma-
tion of Divine Law and the same fear of disturbing the Aristotelian
cosmos appear in Ulysses' "degree speech" in Troilus and Cressida
(1601) 1.3.85-110. However chaotic their society, Elizabethans clung
tenaciously to the conviction of cosmic order.
CHAPTER THREE
i The theme predates Pseudo-Dionysius (see p. 5, above), although it

was no doubt he who inspired Cusanus.
CHAPTER FOUR
i That it was ever possible to think optimistically about an infinite uni-

verse will strike many today as a strangely incomprehensible notion.
But our response to Cusanus highlights a prejudice of our own. A.N.
Whitehead, a professor of applied mathematics and, later in life, an
idealist philosopher, recalled an event that struck him as emblematic
of the inspiration of modern scientific materialism. The passage (White-
head 10-11) is worth citing, if only for the quality of its prose: "The pil-
grim fathers of the scientific imagination as it exists today are the
great tragedians of ancient Athens: Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides.
Their vision of fate, remorseless and indifferent, urging a tragic inci-
dent to its inevitable issue, is the vision possessed by science. Fate in
Greek Tragedy becomes the order of nature in modern thought ... It
was my good fortune to be present at the meeting of the Royal Society
in London when the Astronomer Royal for England announced that
the photographic plates of the famous eclipse, as measured by his
colleagues in Greenwich Observatory, had verified the prediction of
Einstein that rays of light are bent as they pass in the neighbourhood
of the sun. The whole atmosphere of tense interest was exactly that of
the Greek drama: we were the chorus commenting on the decree of
destiny as disclosed in the development of a supreme incident ...
Remorseless inevitableness is what pervades scientific thought. The
laws of physics are the decrees of fate."
2 Calvin, for example, says, "To investigate the motions of the heavenly
bodies, to determine their positions, measure their distances, and ascer-
tain their properties, demands skill, and a more careful examination;
and where these are so employed, as the providence of God is thereby
more fully unfolded, so it is reasonable to suppose that the mind takes
a loftier flight, and obtains brighter views of his glory" (Institutes 1.5.2;
see Calvin2 1:52).
3 Bruno spent two formative years in London (1583-85), at a time when
Digges's Per/it Description of the Ccelestiall Orbes was at the height of its
popularity.
4 The fact that Bruno became a martyr of "science" for nineteenth-
century rationalism should not be allowed to inflate his importance
beyond what is warranted by the history of science. His assertion - in
Delia Causa, Principio ed Una (1584) and elsewhere - that "the universe
is all centre, or that the centre of the universe is everywhere and the
circumference nowhere" has been taken by some commentators (e.g.
Lovejoy) as the normative statement of the paradox; and later writers
who have used the image, like Pascal or Traherne, are then presumed,
in some way, to be "Brunonians." There is no need, however, to link
seventeenth-century writers with the unorthodox Bruno when the
image was available to them in so impeccably orthodox a source as
Nicholas of Cusa's De Docta Ignorantia.
5 On the first page of the rambling preface addressed to the reader by
"Democritus Junior," Burton dismissively lumps the recent theories of
infinite worlds held by "Copernicus, Brunus, and some others" with
the "ridiculous treatise[s]" of the classical atomists Leucippus, Democri-
tus, and Epicurus" (Burton 1:15).
6 A promethean humanist, Bacon fought vigorously against "the corrup-
tion of natural philosophy by superstition and the admixture of theol-
ogy" and declared that sober common sense dictated the rendering to
faith of "that only which is faith's": "For man by the fall fell at the
same time from his state of innocency and from his dominion over
creation. Both of these losses however can even in this life be in some
part repaired, the former by religion and faith, the latter by arts and
sciences" (Novum Organum 1.65, 2.52). The same antinomy was pressed
later in the century, in different ways and perhaps for different reasons,
by Cartesian dualism and Hobbesian empiricism. Writing in 1651,

Hobbes asserted that "we are not to renounce our Senses, and Experi-
ence; nor (that which is the undoubted Word of God) our naturall
Reason. For they are the talents which he hath put into our hands to
negotiate ... and [are] therefore not to be folded up in the Napkin of
an Implicate Faith" (Leviathan 3.32).
7 For example, in a ruminative letter of May 1610, entitled Dissertatio
cum Nuncio Sidero and inspired by Galileo's recent discoveries, Kepler
gave his imagination free reign: "I cannot help wondering about the
meaning of that large circular cavity in what I usually call the left
corner of the mouth [of the face of the Moon]. Is it a work of nature,
or of a trained hand? Suppose there are living beings on the moon ...
It surely stands to reason that the inhabitants express the character of
their dwelling place, which has much bigger mountains and valleys
than our earth has. Consequently, being endowed with very massive
bodies, they also construct gigantic projects. Their day is as long as
15 of our days, and they feel insufferable heat. Perhaps they lack stone
for erecting shelters against the sun. On the other hand, maybe they
have a soil as sticky as clay. Their usual building plan, accordingly, is
as follows. Digging up huge fields, they carry out the earth and heap
it in a circle, perhaps for the purpose of drawing out the moisture
down below. In this way they may hide in the deep shade behind
their excavated mounds and, in keeping with the sun's motion, shift
about inside, clinging to the shadow. They have, as it were, a sort of
underground city. They make their homes in numerous caves hewn
out of that circular embankment. They place their fields and pastures
in the middle, to avoid being forced to go too far away from their
farms in their flight from the sun" (Galileo 95-6).
8 Titles like Robert Boyle's Christian Virtuoso (1690) and John Ray's
Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of the Creation (1691) attest the
intention.
9 Translation: When the sky was but this blue vault stuck with stars, the
universe struck me as small and narrow; I felt stifled in it. But now
that this vault has been given infinitely greater size and depth, I seem
to breathe more freely, to move in a more open air - and certainly the
universe has an altogether different grandeur.
10 The flaw in Fontenelle's vision is its optimism, for, as Pascal saw, a self-
examining rationalism must ultimately come to the recognition of its
own radical triviality in an endlessly alien void: "Quand je considere
la petite duree de ma vie, absorbee dans 1'eternite precedente et sui-
vante ... [et que je suis] abime dans 1'infinie immensite des espaces
que j'ignore et qui m'ignorent, je m'effraie" (Pensees, no 68; for transla-
tion, see appendix 2).
CHAPTER FIVE
1 Experiences nouvelles touchant le Vide (1647) and the posthumously pub-

lished Preface d'un traite du vide.
2 A contemporary (perhaps Susanna Hopton, for whom Traherne wrote
the Centuries) describes him as "a man of cheerful and sprightly Tem-
per, free from any thing of the sourness or formality, by which some
great pretenders of Piety rather disparage and misrepresent true Reli-
gion, than recommend it; and therefore ... very affable, and pleasant
in his Conversation, ready to do all good Offices to his Friends, and
Charitable to the Poor almost beyond his ability" (Traherne xii).
3 Boyle, a founding father of the Royal Society, wrote a series of tracts to
vindicate the harmony between science and religion, and at his death
left a bequest of £50 per annum to endow lectures for the defense of
Christianity against unbelievers. His, moreover, was not a lone voice,
as is plain from such titles as John Ray's The Wisdom of God Manifested
in the Works of the Creation (1691) and Physico-theological Discourses
(1692) or Nehemiah Crew's Cosmologia Sacra (1701). That such works
were the thin edge of a Deist wedge was not apparent to their
authors, who would have been horrified by this later development.
4 In Christian Platonist theology, soul and mind are synonymous terms.
Latin mens (like Greek voix;) denominates intellectual ability, not the
physical brain, and is used of the Divine Nature as well as of human
nature.
5 Leibniz is refuting Locke's argument that the mind is a tabula rasa void
of characters and ideas until experience imprints them there: "Experi-
ence is necessary, I admit, if the soul is to be given such and such
thoughts, and if it is to take heed of the ideas that are within us. But
how could experience and the senses provide the ideas? Does the soul
have windows? Is it similar to writing-tablets, or like wax? Clearly,
those who take this view of the soul are treating it as fundamentally
corporeal. Someone will confront me with this accepted philosophical
maxim, that there is nothing in the soul which does not come from the
senses. But an exception must be made of the soul itself and its states.
Nihil est in intellectu quod non fuerit in sensu, excipe: nisi ipse intellectus.
Now the soul includes being, substance, one, same, cause, perception,
reasoning, and many other notions which the senses cannot provide."
6 This much may be said here. Wordsworth's pantheism, which attenu-
ates God into the ens spiritus of phenomenal Nature, is incompatible
with the Christian doctrine, accepted by Traherne, of divine transcen-
dence. God, in Wordsworth, is reduced to Nature - which, in turn, is
exalted into God: Deus sive Natura. Moreover, Wordsworth's anthropo-
centrism works consistently in his poetry to deify the human observer
i66 Notes to pages 55-70
who "half creates" what he perceives, with the result that God ( )
is finally reducible to the projected gnosis of the poet's own idealized
self-image. Wordsworth places his faith, not in God, but in a radical
transformation of self-consciousness effected through the creative imag-
ination. If he recalls anyone in the Renaissance, it is Giordano Bruno.
(On Wordsworth, see Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism.)
7 See my paper "'Alcestis from the Grave': Image and Structure in
Sonnet XXIII."
8 The reconciliation of opposites is a common theme in Milton, from the
balanced polarities of L'Allegro and // Penseroso to the victory-in-defeat
of Samson Agonistes. In each case, mutually exclusive realities coalesce
into a unified vision of disjunctive concord. At the end of Samson Ago-
nistes, for example, both the Hebrew Chorus and the modern reader
are dismissed from the hero's death "With peace and consolation ...
And calm of mind, all passion spent" (1757-8).
C H A P T E R six
1 From Aristotle's treatise on the Pythagorean philosophy, as quoted in

Guthrie 1:336.
2 "There was not then [i.e., before the generation of the heavens] time,
for there was no order or measure or distinction, only indefinite
motion which was as it were the shapeless and unformed raw material
of time" (Plutarch, Platonic Questions 10070, as cited in Guthrie 1:339).
3 Desmond Lee offers this useful translation of Timaeus $2a-d: "there
exist, first, the unchanging form, uncreated and indestructible, admit-
ting no modification and entering no combination, imperceptible to
sight or the other senses, the object of thought: second, that which
bears the same name as the form and resembles it, but is sensible, has
come into existence, is in constant motion, comes into existence in and
vanishes from a particular place, and is apprehended by opinion with
the aid of sensation: third, space which is eternal and indestructible,
which provides a position for everything that comes to be ... My ver-
dict, in short, may be stated as follows. There were, before the world
came into existence, being, space, and becoming, three distinct reali-
ties" (Timaeus and Critias [Penguin, 1977] 71-2).
4 Greek text:
5 The tendency to spatialize time - and hence virtually to eliminate it -

is especially pronounced in the Eleatics (Parmenides and particularly
Zeno), who expounded a radical metaphysics of timeless Being and
sought, as Zeno's paradoxes show in an extreme form, to eliminate
change and temporality altogether. The Atomists (Democritus, Leucip-

pus, Empedocles) were also, though for different reasons, convinced of
the unreality of time since it is inseparable from the changes occurring
in it: "time," as Lucretius said later, "is nothing by itself" (De rerum
natura 1.459-60), and Sextus Empiricus, reviewing earlier arguments,
concluded that "as far as appearances go, time seems to be something,
but when we come to the arguments about it, it appears unreal" (Pyr-
rhoneioi hypotyposeis 3.10; see Sextus, Selections from the Major Writings,
124-8).
6 The Eleatics, who denied the existence of time and becoming, are the
obvious exception.
7 See, for example, Burnet 156-63, Capek 390-1, Guthrie 1:282, 458.
8 See Cullmann 52.
9 Barth includes two long discussions of time and eternity in the Dogmat-
ics: 2:1, 608-77 (on eternity as a divine attribute) and 3:2, 437-640 (on
Christ, Man, and Time).
10 Such terms include: bayyom hazzeh (this day), bayyom hahu (that day, i.e.,
), or futture),
past (theht (day), (hour, season), (tge risht
(time (time), (age/ages).
11 Consolation of Philosophy 5.6: "Eternity, then, is the whole, simultaneous
and perfect possession of boundless life (interminabilis vitae tota simul et
perfecta possessio), which becomes clearer by comparison with temporal
things. For whatever lives in time proceeds in the present from the
past into the future, and there is nothing established in time which can
embrace the whole space of its life equally, but tomorrow surely it
does not yet grasp, while yesterday it has already lost" (Boethius 423).
It may be added that Boethius's description of eternity as tota simul
became the standard definition of eternity for medieval theologians.
12 On the Hebrew attitude to temples, Muilenburg writes: "In the ark
cloistered in the Holy of Holies of the temple at Jerusalem Yahweh
was doubtless believed to be truly present, but the staves beneath the
ark were a perpetual witness to his mobility (cf. II Sam. 7:4-7), and
finally it disappears from history without even a mention of its loss ...
The sanctuaries are holy places, to be sure, but what makes them holy
is that they are characteristically associated with aetiological stories
which commemorate 'historical' events, moments in which Yahweh
had appeared to the patriarchs, or to Joshua, David, and others. Not
the physical structure of space ... but the historical event in time is
remembered and treasured and passed on from generation to genera-
tion" (231-2).
13 As DeVries points out, for the ancient Hebrews "time was the arena
within which Yahweh acts purposefully; temporal event was the vehi-
cle of his self-disclosure ... It is significant that, as the Hebrews had no
i68 Notes to pages 78-80
word for abstract 'time/ they had no way of speaking about the
abstract 'past/ 'present/ and 'future.' There were no specific terms to
correspond to these nominal ideas. All they had were a variety of
adverbial phrases and substantives referring to a specific aspect of
time ... For nonspecific units of time the Hebrews had several words.
The most common of these is 'et, which may usually be translated 'a
time' or 'a situation.' The word mo'ed (a participial form of the verb
~ty>) properly means an assemblage, hence either the place or time of
meeting" (DeVries 35, 39-40).
CHAPTER SEVEN
1 Ennead 3.7 opens with the blunt statement:
v (Eternity and
time, we say, are two different things, the one belonging to the sphere
of the nature that lasts forever, the other to that of becoming and of
thiserived from the p y derived from the phrase (always
existing), is later defined as the timeless "life, always the same, of real
being around the One" (3.7.6).
2 Later he says: "What is before the movement of soul [viz., World Soul]
is eternity ... This movement of soul was the first to enter time, and
generated time, and possesses it along with its own activity" (3.7.13).
3 Greek text:
4 The Latin phrase is from De Trinitate 15.2.2 (PL 42.1058). For a discus-
sion of the fides quxrens intellectutn tradition, see chapter i, above.
5 I use the word gnosis in the sense given to it by Clement of Alexan-
dria: see above pp. 7-9.
6 See the quotation from Earth, above p. 73.
7 As Augustine elsewhere observes, time is a creature that, like all cre-
ated beings, has a beginning and is therefore not eternal: "tempusque
ipsum creaturam esse, ac per hoc ipsum habere initium, nee coaeter-
num esse creatori" (De Gen. ad Litt. 3.8; PL 34:223).
8 Time, says Plotinus (Enneads 3.7.1), is one of those subjects that "we
think that we have a clear and distinct experience of in our own souls,
as we are always speaking of them and using their names on every
occasion. Of course, when we try to concentrate on them and, so to
speak, get close to them, we find again that our thought runs into diffi-
culties." Although less pithy and memorable than Augustine's formula-
tion, this is one of a number of passages in Enneads 3.7 that suggests
Augustine's familiarity (despite his inability with Greek) with Ploti-

nus's treatise.
9 In order to understand how past and future coincide in the present,
writes Gilson, "we must look upon the soul's present as an attention
which is directed both towards that which is yet to be (through antici-
pation), and towards that which is no more (through memory). This
attention is continuous: it is, so to speak, the point of transition from
something anticipated to something remembered" (Gilson 195). Augus-
tine himself provides the following illustration: "Suppose that I am
going to recite a psalm that I know. Before I begin, my faculty of expec-
tation is engaged by the whole of it. But once I have begun, as much
of the psalm as I have removed from the province of expectation and
relegated to the past now engages my memory, and the scope of the
action which I am performing is divided between the two faculties of
memory and expectation, the one looking back to the part which I
have already recited, the other looking forward to the part which I
have still to recite. But my faculty of attention is present all the while,
and through it passes what was the future in the process of becoming
the past. As the process continues, the province of memory is
extended in proportion as that of expectation is reduced, until the
whole of my expectation is absorbed. This happens when I have fin-
ished my recitation and it has all passed into the province of memory.
What is true of the whole psalm is also true of all its parts and of each
syllable." (11.28: Confessions, trans. R.S. Pine-Coffin [Penguin, 1961],
278).
10 I am not convinced by John L. Morrison's argument in "Augustine's
Two Theories of Time" that Augustine changed his mind about time
between the writing of the Confessions and the writing of the City of
God. In the Confessions, Morrison maintains, "the human soul is neces-
sary for time [and there is] little justification for the five days [of cre-
ation] before man having temporal significance"; in the City of God, on
the other hand, "time is identified with the initial creation, not man's
subsequent arrival" (604). On the contrary, it seems to me evident that
Augustine's theology is consistent on this point: time is a creature (see
above, note 7) given being with the introduction of transitoriness, i.e.,
with the first act of creation. Since the Confessions is concerned with
the human psychology of time as a distention of the soul, it is hardly
surprising that its treatment should be anthropocentric. It may be
added that later theology - especially among the Scholastics - made
much of the meaning of time before man's creation and that they intro-
duced the concept of xvum, a sempiternal duration which was neither
tempus nor 3eternitas: see Kantorowicz, especially 275-84.
11 It is also true, although this is not the place to elaborate the point, that
Bergson's initially uncompromising disjunctions have a tendency to
grow fuzzy around the edges and to become self-contradictory, so that
even admirers are occasionally forced to admit that at certain points it
is "hard to clear [him] of the charge of inconsistency" (Kolakowski 28).
The fact remains, however, that his thought is preeminently a philoso-
phy of radical dichotomies.
12 "There is a real space, without duration, in which phenomena appear
and disappear simultaneously with our states of consciousness. There
is a real duration, the heterogeneous moments of which permeate one
another ... The comparison of these two realities gives rise to a symbol-
ical representation of duration, derived from space. Duration thus
assumes the illusory form of a homogeneous medium, and the connect-
ing link between these two terms, space and duration, is simultaneity,
which might be defined as the intersection of time and space"
(Bergson4 no).
13 "Within myself a process of organization or interpenetration of con-
scious states is going on, which constitutes true duration ... duration
and motion are mental syntheses, and not objects [capable of spatial or
mathematical representation]" (Bergson4 108, 120).
14 See, for example, the following statements in Time and Free Will: "time,
conceived under the form of an unbounded and homogeneous
medium, is nothing but the ghost of space haunting the reflective con-
sciousness" (99); "science cannot deal with time ... except on condition
of first eliminating the essential and qualitative element ... of dura-
tion" (115); "our ordinary conception of duration depends on a grad-
ual incursion of space into the domain of pure consciousness" (126);
"we project time into space ... we give a mechanical explanation of a
fact, and then substitute the explanation for the fact itself" (180-1).
15 Bergson makes a sharp distinction between intuition (the basis of meta-
physical knowing) and intelligence (the basis of scientific knowing).
Intuition enters into what it knows and participates in its being, and its
knowing is therefore immediate and absolute; intelligence, on the
other hand, remains outside what it knows, is abstract and relative,
and requires symbols to express itself. Intuition is "the attention mind
pays to itself" (Bergson2 85): with reference to perception, it is "a sym-
pathy whereby one carries oneself into the interior of an object in
order to coincide with what is unique and therefore inexpressible in
it" (181); with reference to the self, it is an immersion in the indivisible
flow of consciousness, a grasping of pure becoming and real duration.
The realm of intuition is that of the unrepeatable and thus the real -
which lies beyond the reach of empirical analysis and symbolical repre-
sentation. "Intuition," as Kolakowski says, "does what intelligence
never can: it brings us into the world as it is, irrespective of utilitarian

considerations" (25).
16 The Darwinian concepts of accidental mutation and mechanical selec-
tion were, in Bergson's view, inadequate to describe the observed facts
of biological evolution. Such rules failed, for example, to explain how
similar sequences of accidents have been repeated independently in
various branches of evolution, or why living things have evolved in
greater and greater complexity, why life has continued to complicate
itself more and more as it develops. Indeed, he says, "the more we
focus our attention on the continuity of life, the more we see how
organic evolution comes closer to the evolution of consciousness
where the past presses the present to give birth to a new form which
is incommensurable with its antecedent" (French text: plus on fixe son
attention sur cette continuite de la vie, plus on voit 1'evolution orga-
nique se rapprocher de celle d'une conscience, ou le passe presse
centre le present et en fait jaillir une forme nouvelle, incommensurable
avec ses antecedents) (Bergson1 27).
17 Writing in the context of a plurality of worlds - an idea he accepts -
Bergson defines divine activity (in the only passage in Creative Evolu-
tion where he uses the term Dieu) as follows: "je parle d'un centre
d'ou les mondes jailliraient comme les fusees d'un immense bouquet,
- pourvu toutefois que je ne donne pas ce centre pour une chose, mais
pour une continuite de jaillissement. Dieu, ainsi defini, n'a rien de tout
fait; il est vie incessante, action, liberte. La creation, ainsi conc.ue, n'est
pas un mystere, nous 1'experimentons en nous des que nous agissons
librement" (I speak of a centre from which the worlds burst out like
the blooms of an immense bouquet, - provided always that I do not
make this centre into a thing, but keep it a continuous outpouring.
God, so defined, has nothing of the ready-made; he is uninterrupted
life, action, freedom. The creation, so conceived, is not a mystery: we
experience it in ourselves whenever we act freely) (Bergson1 249).
18 Bergson believed that memory is not an aspect of matter and that the
human mind, being independent of the body, can survive the latter's
destruction. Provided that pure memory is not produced by or pre-
served in the physical brain - and Bergson denied that it was - there
is every reason to suppose that the accumulated memory of each indi-
vidual is immortal.
19 "To say that time is real is to say ... that the future does not exist in
any sense. This is by no means a trivial point, according to Bergson,
since for a determinist every event merely unfolds the ready-made real-
ity hidden in existing conditions; the course of events consists, as it
were, in displaying a destiny written in advance for all eternity, as if
time were only a machine to unwind a film reel which has been there
all along, with its entire story. For Bergson, on the contrary, the life of
the universe is a creative process, whereby something new and thus
unpredictable appears at every moment" (Kolakowski 2-3).
CHAPTER EIGHT
1 The related idea that chronometric time is relative rather than absolute
(as Newton had claimed) is, of course, a cornerstone of modern phys-
ics; and it may be added that Einstein's general theory of relativity,
though concerned with the space-time continuum, is properly a
dynamization of space rather than a spatialization of time.
2 The earliest full-scale development of the idea, however, occurs in
Wordsworth's Prelude, where the poet summarizes the numinous (and
optimistic) significance for the present of past kairoi in the following
lines:
There are in our existence spots of time,
Which with distinct pre-eminence retain
A vivifying virtue, whence ...
our minds
Are nourished and invisibly repaired;
A virtue, by which pleasure is enhanced,
That penetrates, enables us to mount,
When high, more high, and lifts us up when fallen.
This efficacious spirit chiefly lurks
Among those passages of life in which
We have had deepest feeling that the mind
Is lord and master, and that outward sense
Is but the obedient servant of her will,
(xi, 258-73; 1805 text)
3 Pater's epigraph to the conclusion is
(Heraclitus somewhere says that everything
passes and nothing remains).
4 It is worth reminding ourselves that the Greek noun oda6r|cn,q, the
root of our word aesthetic, means a felt perception by the senses. Sen-
sual experienc e, a is preeminently senuuous experience.
5 In the Cyclops episode (382-3), for instance, there is a comic genealogy
of the one-eyed Citizen that links him with "Irish heroes and heroines
of antiquity" including Malachi, Goliath, Horace Wheatley, Peg Wof-
fington, the Village Blacksmith, Lady Godiva, Adam and Eve, the
Bride of Lammermoor, Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte, and the
Last of the Mohicans - inter alia. The range of reference in the novel is
wittily captured in the title of Anthony Burgess's book on Joyce: Here
Comes Everybody (London, 1959).
6 It may well be, as Howard Harper has argued, that the search implies
Virginia Woolf's own attempt to discover an authentic narrative voice:
"the book itself can be seen as a process of 'eidetic reduction/ in the
phenomenological sense of the term: the search for essence through
the 'testing' of various predicates, whose subject is consciousness itself.
The narrative explores the various possibilities until their potentiali-
ties, in its own view, seem exhausted. These potentialities are there
from the beginning, of course, in the creative consciousness itself.
What are being tested are the possible modes in which that conscious-
ness may become incarnate. And so the various voices emerge, each to
speak of its own reality. The larger narrative consciousness allows
them to speak, listens to them, and to some extent orchestrates them.
It auditions them, in the hope of discovering the authentic, definitive
reality ... The 'plot' of The Waves, then, is the drama of the intentional-
ity of the narrative consciousness. As one voice succeeds another there
is always the hope - though it constantly diminishes - that the narra-
tive will discover its own authentic voice" (Harper 247-8).
7 Ironically, Bernard's meditation on lost time (153-8) is set against the
backdrop of Rome - the Eternal City.
8 The allusion is to Marvell's To His Coy Mistress (41-6):
Let us roll all our strength, and all
Our sweetness, up into one ball:
And tear our pleasures with rough strife,
Through the iron gates of life.
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.
Oddly, Gillian Beer, editor of the Oxford edition of The Waves, takes
the words to be a reference to "the gates of Dante's Inferno" (257ni9o).
Given Jinny's devotion to her body, however, and her sexual drives -
"men, how many, have broken from the wall and come to me" (184) -
Marvell's poem is clearly the more appropriate reference: "I am," Jinny
unrepentantly declares, "a native of this world, I follow its banners"
(162).
9 "I have made up thousands of stories; I have filled innumerable note-
books with phrases to be used when I have found the true story ... But I
have never yet found that story" (156); "For ever alone, alone, alone ...
Gorged and replete, solid with middle-aged content, I, whom loneliness
destroys, let silence fall, drop by drop" (187); "Of story, of design, I do
not see a trace" (200). Although Virginia Woolf and some of her critics
have maintained that Bernard's final soliloquy is a victory - "Against
you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!" (248) -
it is a purely rhetorical victory, and the waves, as Bernard's voice dies
into silence, have the final word: The waves broke on the shore.
10 Rhoda comes to a similar conclusion, although, in her case, the terror

of discontinuity is too much to bear and she commits suicide: "If I
could believe that I should grow old in pursuit and change, I should
be rid of my fear: nothing persists. One moment does not lead to
another. The door opens and the tiger leaps ... I cannot make one
moment merge in the next. To me they are all violent, all separate ... I
have no end in view. I do not know how to run minute to minute and
hour to hour, solving them by some natural force until they make the
whole and indivisible mass that you call life" (106-7).
11 "He that is unjust, let him be unjust still: and he which is filthy, let
him be filthy still: and he that is righteous, let him be righteous still:
and he that is holy, let him be holy still. And, behold, I come quickly;
and my reward is with me, to give every man according as his work
shall be. I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first
and the last."
12 I.e., the doctrine of continuous creation, which maintains that individ-
ual human existence is constantly being saved from annihilation and
non-being by a continuous act of divine grace that rescues, at each
instant, the discontinuity of a human duration constantly falling. "The
religions of the seventeenth century are all religions of continued grace,
in the precise sense in which the thought of a Descartes and the
thought of a Malebranche are philosophies of continued creation. The
seventeenth century is the epoch in which nothing is interposed
between divine eternity and each human moment ... All the thought
of the [seventeenth century was,] as it were, one long meditation on
the phrase of Saint Augustine [De civitate Dei, 1.12.25]: 'If God should
withdraw his creative power from the things he has created, they
would fall back into their primal state of nothingness'" (Poulet 18-19).
13 The impact on Renaissance life and culture of mechanical timepieces,
which first appeared in the thirteenth century but became common
only in the sixteenth, is a phenomenon that has been much studied:
see, for example, the entries in the bibliography under Cipolla, Cleary
Le Goff, Landes, and Macey. Early clocks, frequently corrected by the
sundial and possessing only an hour hand, were notoriously inaccu-
rate. Parisians had a doggerel rhyme for the clock on the royal palace:
I'horloge du palais, elle va comme il lui plait. By the sixteenth century,
however, timekeeping had become more accurate, minute hands
appeared more frequently, and domestic clocks and even watches
became much less of a rarity. Clockmakers established their own
guilds in Paris in 1544, in Geneva in 1601, in Toulouse in 1608, and in
London, finally, in 1631. "In matters of horology," says Cipolla,
"English backwardness was conspicuous until the last decades of the
sixteenth century ... [and] there is no record of an English watch
175 Notes to page 97
before 1580 ... But in the course of the seventeenth century English
makers made noticeable progress, establishing original lines of thought
and acquiring an undisputed supremacy over their continental col-
leagues ... [so that] by the dawn of the eighteenth century, London
and Geneva were by far the two greatest centres of clock and watch-
making in Europe" (66-70).
14 It is a striking feature of much modern literature that the future - as
we have seen in Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner - plays little or no role.
The future, of course, does not disappear from literature, but it
becomes severed from the past and present (with which "canonical"
fiction is concerned) and develops its own genre: science fiction. If one
asks where the future is to be found in modern literature, my response
would be to point to Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, and their successors.
15 Horace, Odes 3.30: "I have erected [in my poems] a monument more
lasting than bronze."
16 The locus classicus is Ovid, Metamorphoses 15.234-6: "tempus edax
rerum, tuque, invidiosa vetustas / omnia destruitis vitiataque dentibus
aevi / paulatim lenta consumitis omnia morte!" (O Time, thou great
devourer, and thou, envious Age, together you destroy all things; and,
slowly gnawing with your teeth, you finally consume all things in lin-
gering death!)
17 The phrase carpe diem is from Horace, Odes 1.11.7-8: "dum loquimur,
fugerit invidia / aetas: carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero"
(Even while we speak, envious time has sped. Seize the day, putting as
little trust as may be in the morrow). For a more extended treatment
of the theme, see Odes 3.29.25-64.
18 Seneca's moral utilitarianism in De brevitate vitae, an essay that had an
enormous impact on the Renaissance secularization of time and that
offers a marked contrast to the view of time in book 11 of Augustine's
Confessions, merits special consideration. The great problem with life,
says Seneca, is not the fact that time is short, but that we waste so
much of it: "The part of life we really live is small. For all the rest of
existence is not life, but merely time (ceterum quidem omne spatium non
vita sed tempus est," 2:291). There is nothing harder or more important
to learn than how to manage time; and the substance of Seneca's
wisdom on this topic may be summed up in a single sentence: ille qui
nullum non tempus in usus suos confert, qui omnem diem tamquam ulti-
mum ordinal, nee optat crastinum nee timet ("he who bestows all of his
time on his own needs, who plans out every day as if it were his last,
neither longs for nor fears the morrow," 2:309). Now, life, he says, is
divided into three periods: "Of these the present time is short, the
future is doubtful, the past is certain" (2:317). There is, he asserts in
direct contrast to Augustine, nothing more foolish than concerning
oneself with the future: "The greatest hindrance to living is expectancy

(expectatio), which depends upon the morrow and wastes today ... All
things that are still to come lie in uncertainty; live straightaway (proti-
nus vive)l ... Unless you seize the day, it flees. Even though you seize
it, it still will flee; therefore you must vie with time's swiftness in the
speed of using it, and, as from a torrent that rushes by and will not
always flow, you must drink quickly" (2:313-15). In order to make the
most of the fleeting present, we must ignore the future and "surrender
ourselves with all our soul to the past, which is boundless, which is
eternal, which we share with our betters" (2:335). By "the past" he
means the intellectual past of the human race. His argument is - and
it has been leading to this point from the beginning - that only he
who devotes himself to the study of philosophy succeeds in managing
his allotted time successfully: "This is the only way of prolonging mor-
tality - nay, of turning it into immortality ... The philosopher is not
confined by the same bounds that shut others in. He alone is freed
from the limitations of the human race; all ages serve him as if a god"
(2:339). Knowledge, in short, is time well used - as well as being (as
Nietzsche would later emphasize) power.
19 For Rabelais, external time was nothing and experience was every-
thing. Man was responsible for his own duration. Rebelling against the
tyranny of time, he maintained that we should shape our lives by our
personal preferences, moods, and discretion. "Jarnais," he says (Gargan-
tua et Pantagruel 2.41), "je ne m'assubjectis a heures: les heures sont
faictes pour rhomme, et non l'homme pour les heures. Pourtant je fais
des miennes a guise d'estrivieres, je les accourcis ou allonge, quand
bon me semble" (Never do I subject myself to hours: hours are made
for man, not man for hours. However, I treat them as harness makers
do leather, making them shorter or longer, as and when I please).
Glasser writes: "the narrow-minded, the wretched, the monks and the
scribes ... all those who were the slaves of time ... incurred [Rabelais']
disapproval. Against this workaday servitude he set his holiday view
of things, in which the moment was an end in itself ... Rabelais
restored the present to its rightful place" (182; italics added). Glasser's
enthusiasm and approbation - especially as revealed in the word I
have italicized - reveal the modernist bias lurking under the surface
and subtly informing his analysis of Renaissance literature.
20 No one took Seneca's distinction between "life" and mere "existence"
(above, ni8) more seriously than Montaigne: "L'utilite du vivre n'est
pas en 1'espace, elle est en 1'usage: tel a vescu long temps, qui a peu
vescu; attendez vous y pendant que vous y estes. II gist en vostre
volonte, non au nombre des ans, que vous ayez vescu" (Essais 1.20).
Florio translation: "The profit of life consists not in the space, but
rather in the use. Some man hath lived long, that hath had a short life.
Follow it whilest you have time. It consists not in number of yeeres,
but in your will, that you have lived long enough" (1:89-90). Time, for
Montaigne, is time present. His subject is himself, and he seeks whole-
ness and continuity by looking steadily at the flux of his own being:
"Je ne peints pas 1'estre. Je peints le passage; non un passage d'aage
en autre, ou, comme diet le peuple, de sept en sept ans, mais de jour
en jour, de minute en minute. II faut accommoder mon histoire a
1'heure" (Essais 3.2). Florio translation: "I describe not the essence but
the passage; not a passage from age to age, or as the people reckon,
from seaven yeares to seaven, but from day to day, from minute to
minute. My history must be fitted to the present" (3:23). Quinones
comments: "Montaigne transcends time not by prudentially looking to
the future, but by disregarding the future and sinking into the present
... Life possesses a reality in which he can immerse himself - not in
order to lose himself, he reminds us, but to find himself. It is from fill-
ing up his present that man arrives at the sense of completion that he
had previously sought - like time itself - by running anxiously after
the future" (240-1).
21 In Petrarch's Trionfi and the lyrics of Ronsard, the Latin ideal of achiev-
ing a secular immortality through art as a means of triumphing over
time became a fashionable leitmotif that spread across Europe. Poetry
is timeless, and in the poet's words the fleeting and ephemeral world
of human time is wrested from transitoriness and perpetuated into pos-
terity, achieving continued existence both for the poet and his subject.
"Je suis," declared Ronsard, "le trafiqueur des Muses, / Et de leurs
biens, maistres du temps, / ... [qui] T'ose pour jamais promettre / Te
faire vainqueur du temps" (I am the broker of the Muses, masters of
time, and of their benefits, [who] dares to promise forever to make
you the vanquisher of time). The idea is most familiar to English read-
ers from Shakespeare's sonnets: e.g., "So long as men can breathe or
eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee" (sonnet
18); "Not marble, nor the gilded monuments / Of princes, shall out-
live this pow'rful rhyme" (sonnet 55); "Your monument shall be my
gentle verse, / Which eyes not yet created shall o'erread, / And
tongues to be your being shall rehearse / When all the breathers of
this world are dead" (sonnet 81); "And thou in this shalt find thy mon-
ument, / When tyrants' crests and tombs of brass are spent" (sonnet
107).
22 Not all modern critics, of course, impose modern notions of time on
Renaissance literature; and two of them - to both of whom I owe a
debt of influence - deserve to be noticed here. In The Sense of an End-
ing, Frank Kermode argues that fiction involves "a transformation of
mere successiveness" (46):,it creates human time by transforming chro-

nos into kairos, that is, by making something humanly meaningful out
of imagined events and acts rescued from the meaningless flow of
simple chronicity. Both the Renaissance and the modern world are peri-
ods of transition and both are concerned with apocalyptic themes, but
there is a fundamental difference between the fictions of concord and
complementarity (where time is contextualized by eternity) that
Spenser and Shakespeare employ to explore their relation to an uncer-
tain future and the neo-Joachism of Sartre and Beckett, for example,
whose fictions ("myths of crisis") register "the conviction that the end
is immanent rather than imminent": "Our own epoch is the epoch of
nothing positive, only of transition. Since we move from transition to
transition, we may suppose that we exist in no intelligible relation to
the past, and no predictable relation to the future" (101-2). Second,
Paul Ricoeur. In his magisterial work of narratological hermeneutics
entitled Time and Narrative, Ricoeur set out to demonstrate that philo-
sophic "speculation on time is an inconclusive rumination to which
narrative activity alone can respond" (1:6). His basic thesis is that
"time becomes human to the extent that it is articulated through a nar-
rative mode, and narrative attains its full meaning when it becomes a
condition of temporal existence" (1:52). Basing his argument on a
detailed study of Augustine's analysis of time in book 11 of the Confes-
sions (see 1:5-30 and 3:12-22) and of Aristotle's theory of emplotment
in the Poetics, Ricoeur seeks to show that time and emplotment come
together in a three-fold mimesis that constitutes the literariness of a
work of literature. He summarizes his task as follows: "to resolve the
problem of the relation between time and narrative I must establish
the mediating role of emplotment between a stage of practical experi-
ence that precedes it and a stage that succeeds it. In this sense my
argument in this book consists of constructing the mediation between
time and narrative by demonstrating emplotment's mediating role in
the mimetic process. Aristotle, we have seen, ignored the temporal
aspects of emplotment. I propose to disentangle them from the act of
textual configuration and to show the mediating role of the time of
emplotment between the temporal aspects prefigured in the practical
field and the refiguration of our temporal experience by this con-
structed time. We are following therefore the destiny of a prefigured time
that becomes a refigured time through the mediation of a configured time"
(1:53-4). Since Ricoeur does not discuss Renaissance literature per se, I
have relegated him to a footnote, although it will be apparent to the
reader that I share many of his convictions and have been influenced
by many of his ideas. (It may be added that Ricoeur offers an insight-
ful critique of Kermode's The Sense of an Ending, a critique with which

I fully agree: see Time and Narrative 2:22-8.)
23 In the rational spirituality of Nicholas of Cusa - indebted, as the use
of the phrase imago xternitas to describe time implies, to Plato as well
as to Augustine - man is a microtheos, a second creator, whose enfold-
ing and acts of unfolding replicate at the creaturely level the divine
enfolding and creative unfolding of God himself: "God is that unity
which is also being, enfolding everything that can exist. But the ratio-
nal soul is unity, enfolding everything that can be known or distin-
guished. The unity of the rational soul is enfolded in the unity that is
God in such a way that it can be that which it is, that is, the soul
enfolding everything in itself notionally. Therefore everything as it is
and can be known is enfolded in the unity that is God, because in
God unity and entity are the same thing" (Cusa1 105). The rational
soul, therefore, is "the simplicity of all notional enfoldings," and one
of the truths it enfolds is that of time: "The rational soul also enfolds
the enfolding of time, which is called 'now' or the present. Nothing
except 'now' is found in time" - an oddly modern statement, it might
seem, until one remembers that Cusanus is not denying the past and
future but rather insisting that time, as the image of the tota simul of
eternity, must image ontologically its simultaneity. As Augustine had
said, the past is no more and the future is not yet; only the present is,
that is, possesses actual being. (For a fuller discussion of Nicholas of
Cusa's philosophy, see chap. 3, above.)
24 "In order that it may distinguish and know, the soul creates new
instruments through its inventiveness ... The year, the month, the hour
are instruments of the measurement of time created by man. Thus
time, since it is the measure of motion, is an instrument of the measur-
ing soul. Therefore the reason of the soul does not depend upon time,
but the reason of the measure of motion, which is called time, depends
upon the rational soul. Hence the rational soul is not subject to time
but is anterior to time as the sight is anterior to the eye. Although
sight does not see without the eye, nevertheless it does not have from
the eye that it is sight since the eye is its organ. Thus although the
rational soul does not measure motion without time nevertheless it is
not subject to time because of this but rather the opposite since it uses
time as an instrument and an organ for making a distinction of
motions. The distinguishing movement of the soul can never be mea-
sured by time, therefore this movement is not limitable by time. It is
perpetual" (Cusa1 107). It is noteworthy in this passage how Cusanus
adapts the ideas of Scholastic Aristotelianism and Aristotle's definition
of time as the measure of motion (see above, p. 70) to serve his
Platonic and Augustinian thesis that time is the psychological (i.e., spir-
itual) image of eternity.
25 "El tiempo," Don Quixote remarks to Sancho (2.25), "descubridor de
todas las cosas, no se deja ninguna que no la saque a la luz del sol"
(time, which reveals all things, leaves nothing that it does not drag
into the light of day).
26 The "moral" from Robert Greene's Pandosto, The Triumph of Time (the
major source for The Winter's Tale): Shakespeare2 xxvii.
27 For the role of time in The Shepheardes Calendar, see Durr, who argues
that the poem should be read as "another mirror for magistrates" (271)
in which time is "Christian, not natural or heathen, time" (290). The
central concern of the poem is the education of Colin Clout, who
stands, like Everyman at the crossroads, between the good shepherds
(Hobbinol, Thenot, Piers) concerned for their flocks and with their
duty to God rather than with selfish joys and worldly ambitions, and
the bad shepherds (the "worldes childe" Palinode, Cuddie, and Mor-
rel) who seek their own ends and ignore their pastoral charges. The
Shepheardes Calendar is a psychomachia in which Colin, lover and poet,
matures and fulfils his potential by engaging time in the age-old strug-
gle between amor carnis and amor spiritus.
28 Temptation, Milton held, may be either good or evil. "Good tempta-
tions are those which God uses to tempt even righteous men, in order
to prove them. He does this not for his own sake - as if he did not
know what sort of men they would turn out to be - but either to exer-
cise or demonstrate their faith or patience, as in the case of Abraham
and Job, or to lessen their self-confidence and prove them guilty of
weakness, so that they may become wiser, and others may be
instructed" (De Doctrina Christiana 1.8: Milton2 6:338).
CHAPTER NINE
i It may be pointed out, however, that the secular fame here applauded
by Quinones is precisely the illusory reputation that Milton, in Lycidas,
disparages as "That last infirmity of Noble mind" (71). For the Chris-
tian humanist, fame is not a plant that grows on mortal soil: it is a
heavenly dispensation; an eternal, not a temporal blessing. As Christ
points out to his demonic tormentor in Paradise Regained (3.60-70),
This is true glory and renown, when God
Looking on th' Earth, with approbation marks
The just man, and divulges him through Heaven
To all his Angels, who with true applause
Recount his praises; thus he did to Job ...
[Who] famous was in Heaven, on Earth less known;
Where glory is false glory, attributed

To things not glorious, men not worthy of fame.
2 Holy Sonnet 6 (Gardner's numbering): "Death be not proud, though
some have called thee / Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not soe" -
which concludes with the couplet, "One short sleepe past, wee wake
eternally, / And death shall be no more, Death thou shalt die."
3 In a letter to J.H. Reynolds, dated 22 November 1817: see Letters of
John Keats, ed. Gittings, 40.
4 The exception is King Lear where, in a tragic closure that brings com-
pletion but not catharsis, death retains it sting, the grave its victory. In
spite of the fact that there is, as D.S. Kastan observes, pressure through-
out the play "to see time not solely as the dimension of human change
but as the medium of divine purposiveness," the truth that time
finally yields is the despairing recognition that "the universe lacks the
coherence and benignity that [the] characters so insistently seek. The
search for what Edgar calls 'the sweet face of heaven' (in iv 85) never
meets with much success" (Kastan 106).
5 The Latin phrase (meaning "carried on with slackened reins") is from
line 10 of Petrarch's Epistola Barbato Sulmonensi: see Opera (Basle, 1581)
3:76. Its use here is made apposite by the fact that Coleridge cites the
phrase in chapter 14 of Biographia Literaria when he is describing how
the imagination, whether in literature or in literary criticism, is a fac-
ulty most effectively employed when used least obtrusively.
6 Half a century ago, E.M.W. Tillyard argued in an influential book that
Shakespeare's eight plays dealing with English history between the
reigns of Richard II and Richard III reflect the teleology of Tudor histo-
riography and present, in a dramatic form, the working out of God's
will in English history - a providential design culminating in the deliv-
ery of the nation into the safe haven of Tudor prosperity. This view,
refined and modified, is still accepted by many scholars. At the same
time, however, since Tillyard's thesis largely ignores the human motiva-
tion of the characters, other scholars have argued the inadequacy of a
providential interpretation to account for the actions of these plays:
"[Shakespeare's] vision is historical rather than historicist, confined to
the continuum of human time. Though the orthodox schema of Tudor
history does find occasional voice in the mouths of individual charac-
ters, the over-all dramatic articulation of the history plays more persua-
sively argues that we see them as firmly oriented in the world of time
with no supra-historical perspective to redeem the postlapsarian experi-
ence they portray ... Time in the histories is felt as a linear process as
in the [medieval Mystery] Cycles, but the ends of this process are
nowhere in sight. Individual actions may be brought to completion,
but the open-endedness of the history play recognizes the impossibility
i8a Notes to pages 120-3
of isolating the action from its place on the temporal continuum and
makes no suggestion of a providential context for this 'race of time' ...
Shakespeare's histories are unable, or at least unwilling, to recognize
the providential context of the temporal process. The histories are only
concerned with the matter of the fallen world and make no reference
even by formal analogy to the entire history of mankind" (Kastan 47-
5i).
7 According to Wilson Knight, "the narratives of the last plays from Peri-
cles to The Tempest ... reflect the poet's intuition of immortality and con-
quest within apparent death and failure" (13). He adds: "these plays
do not aim at revealing a temporal survival of death: rather at the
thought that death is a delusion. What was thought dead is in reality
alive. In them we watch the fine flowers of a mystic state of soul
bodied into the forms of drama. The parables of Jesus, which, through
the medium of narrative, leave the reader what is pre-eminently a
sense of quality rather than a memory of events, are of the same kind"
(22).
8 An odd understanding, surely, of Augustine's vision of time as a disten-
tio animi governed by an intentio animi toward eternity (see above,
chap. 7).
9 Spinoza's famous phrase is Deus sive Natura ("God or Nature"): see
Ethics, IV Pref. and P4D.
10 The origins of this method may be traced to German historicism and,
in particular, to Feuerbach's The Essence of Christianity (1841): "With the
Christians God is nothing else than the immediate unity of species and
individuality, of the universal and individual being. God is the idea of
the species as an individual - the idea or essence of the species, which
as a species, as universal being, as the totality of all perfections, of all
attributes or realities, freed from all the limits which exist in the con-
sciousness and feeling of the individual, is at the same time again an
individual, personal being. Ipse suum esse est. Essence and existence are
in God identical; which means nothing else than that he is the idea,
the essence of the species, conceived immediately as an existence, an
individual" (Feuerbach 153). Since "God is the mirror of man" (63)
and "religion is the relation of man to his own nature" (197), it is not
surprising that Feuerbach should conclude his argument with the
blunt assertion that "the secret of theology is anthropology" (270).
11 Shakespeare was drawing, Marshall maintains, on "a modern under-
standing of eschatology" evolving in the early seventeenth century:
"Renaissance theologians who attempted to interpret last things lacked
a hermeneutical approach. There was no language to suggest psycho-
logical correlates of heaven, no existential alternative tradition, no his-
toricist perspective on the relevance of apocalypticism to the current
age ... [In this cultural context,] eschatology increasingly concerned

itself with the moment of individual expiration, rather than focusing
on the end of all time. As the shared images of resurrection, judgment,
heaven, and hell were abandoned or metaphorized, new cultural
forms answered the needs traditionally met by these four last things.
Renaissance drama arose within this particular historical and societal
matrix ... [and became] one, and perhaps the most important, of the
cultural forms absorbing energies formerly directed toward communal
eschatology ... The particular eschatological content of Shakespeare's
last plays draws on the historical matrix of an age when the Apoca-
lypse was in the air, while the traditional images of it were being rec-
ognized as mere images. The theatre's adoption of these images might
most simply be described as secularization" (110-14).
12 Surely, as Brian Cosgrove has argued, "there is a very real difference
... between the two kinds of 'restoration' in the play. Cyclical rebirth,
with which Perdita is most clearly associated, is one thing: redemption
from death (and those are, after all, the words used by Paulina to the
'statue' [5.3.102-3]) - that, surely, is quite another. Or, to state this dif-
ferently: the recovery of Perdita is of a lower and less mysterious
order than the resurrection, as we may fairly call it, of Hermione"
(179). It may be added that it is for this reason that the reconciliation
of Perdita and Leontes is merely reported (5.2), whereas the restoration
of Hermione to her husband is acted out in a vivid theatrical spectacle.
13 I cannot think that Paulina's name is accidental. Like the saint whom
her name recalls, she understands that justification is achieved by faith
(sola fide) and that "they that are after the flesh do mind the things of
the flesh; but they that are after the Spirit the things of the Spirit - for
to be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and
peace" (Rom. 8:5-6).
CHAPTER TEN
1 Seneca, for example, declares that "all things are connected in a sort of
circle; they flee and they are pursued. Night is close at the heels of
day, day at the heels of night; summer ends in autumn, winter rushes
after autumn, and winter softens into spring; all nature in this way
passes, only to return" (Moral Epistles, 24:26). See also Ovid, Metamor-
phoses, 15.176-85.
2 "God recapitulated in Himself the ancient formation of man, that He
might kill sin, deprive death of its power, and vivify man"; "And when
he says, 'after the image of the Creator,' he sets forth the recapitulation
of the same man, who was at the beginning made after the likeness of
God"; "He had Himself, therefore, flesh and blood, recapitulating in
Himself not a certain other, but that original handiwork of the Father,
seeking out that thing which had perished" (Irenaeus, Against Heresies
3.18.7; 5.14.2, 12.4: see ANF 1:448, 538, 541).
3 It is the essential nature of figuration to be flawed and incomplete, to
reveal only obliquely and indirectly the reality that it interprets: its
relation to truth is that of analogy, not identity. Arthur's various weak-
nesses (e.g., his winking at his wife's adulterous relationship with Lan-
celot) are cognate with the failings of Old Testament figural types:
Samson, for example, who indulges in open debauchery, or Gideon,
whose quibbling reluctance to answer Yahweh's summons calls into
question the depth of his obedience and faith.
4 For the distinction in Reformed theology between justification and sanc-
tification, see the discussion of poetry and soteriology in appendix i.
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Index
Numbers in italics indicate that a work is quoted.

Abrams, M.H., i66n6 57; Nicholas of Cusa, Bacon, Sir Francis, 36,
Adams, Robert, 123 20, 22, 28, 49; Tra- 47; Novum Organum,
Alain de Lille, 24 herne, 54 i6^r\6
Albertus Magnus, 15, 50 astronomy. See cosmology Barlow, Richard G., 35
Alexander, H.G., 39 Auden, W.H., 90 Earth, Karl, 73, 167119
Andrewes, Lancelot, 141 Auerbach, Eric, 76-7, 130 Baxter, Richard, 141, 143
Anglicanism, 139-43 Augustine, Saint, 4, 9-11, Beckett, Samuel, 90,
Anselm, Saint, Proslogion, 37, 44, 50, 71, 85-6, 88- I78n22
12, l6lH22 9, 90, 98, 105, 121, 126, Bede, 127; De Natura
apatheia, Stoic doctrine 127, I75ni8, I78n22, Rerum, 15
of, I59ni2 I79n23; epistemology, Beer, Gillian, I73n8
Apollonius, 13 10; faith and reason, Bergson, Henri, 83-7, 88-
Aquinas, St Thomas, 15, 10-11, i6o-in2o; sapien- 9, 90, 91, 105, 121, 170-
16 tia and scientia, 10; 2nmi-i5; cosmology,
Aristotle, 13-16, 23, 24, time, 79-83, 88-9. 84-5; Dieu (God; see
29' 39' 63, 74, 78, 81, Works: Confessions, 9, also elan vital), 85,
83, 149, i66ni; De 10, 79-83, 169719; De I7ini7; duree reelle
Caelo, 13-14, 15, 25; Civitate Dei, i69nio, (real time), 83-4, 86-7,
Nicomachean Ethics, 1747112; De Gen. Ad 88-9; elan vital (vital
131; Physics, 13, 69, Litt., i68ny; De Libero force; see also Dieu),
70-1, 127; Poetics, Arbitrio, 10; De Pr&des- 85-6, 89, 122; evolu-
I78n22 tinatione, 10-11, tion, 84-5; intuition
Arminius, Jacobus, 142- iSomy; De Trinitate, versus intelligence,
3' 145 79, i6onni6-i7, 168114, i7O-ini5; nonexistence
assimilation (making sim- I78n22; De Utilitate Cre- of future, 86, 88, 171-
ilar to): Clement of dendi, 10; In Joan. 2nig; scientific time,
Alexandria, 8, I59ni4; Evang., 79; Letter 120, 83-4; spatialization of
Herbert, 34; Milton, 11; Sermo 118, 79 time, 83-4 (see also
196 Index
time, spatialization of). Calvin, John, 29, 139, Cusa, Nicholas of, 5, 11-
Works: Creative Evolu- 140; predestination, 12, 17-27, 28, 37, 40-1,
tion, 84, 171727216-17; 142. Works: Commen- 42, 44, 54, 63; antici-
Introduction to Meta- tary on Romans, 139, pates Copernican the-
physics, 1707115; Matter 143, 149, 150; Institutes, ory, 25; and Pascal, 46;
and Memory, 86; Time i63n2 assimilation, 20, 22, 28;
and Free Will, 83-4, 86, Cassirer, Ernst, 40-1 chorismos (separation)
I7onni2-i4; Two Cervantes, Miguel de, and methexis (participa-
Sources of Morality and Don Quixote, 1807225 tion), 40-1; coincidentia
Religion, 85 Chadwick, Henry, 5 oppositorum (coinci-
Bible: Acts, i, 74; i Corin- Chardin, Teilhard de, 86 dence of opposites),
thians, 54, 76, 105, 106, Chaucer, Geoffey, 142 23, 41; cosmology, 22-
128, 131; Deuteron- Chesterton, G.K., i, I57ni 6; docta ignorantia
omy, 72; Ecclesiastes, chorismos (separation), 40- (learned ignorance), 5,
69, 75, 102, 128; Ephe- 65 19-20, 43, 49, i58n5;
sians, 139, 150; Gala- Cipolla, Mario M., i74ni3 enfolding / unfolding,
tians, 138; Genesis, 15, Clement of Alexandria, 21-2, 24-5, 98, i79n23;
20, 64, 127, i6im; 4-9, 37, 53; apatheia, interminate (or pri-
Hebrews, 76, 128; I59ni2; assimilation, 8, vately infinite) uni-
Isaiah (LXX), 7, 10, 11, I59ni4; Christology, 6; verse, 22-3, 63; man as
17, 158719; Judges, 128, true Gnostic, 7-9; via imago Dei (image of
131, i84n3; Luke, 120, negativa (negative God), 20-1; man as
136; Matthew, 19, 52, knowing), 5-6. Works: microtheos (meto-
104, 105; Psalms, 72; Paedagogus, 8; Protrepti- nymic creator), 20-1,
Revelation, 72, 75, 94, cus, 5, 7; Stromateis, 4- 28, i59nn, I79n23; not
127, 152, 1747111; 9, 158-911112, 4-8, 10 a pantheist, 21-2; para-
Romans, 76, 128, 139, Coleridge, Samuel Tay- dox of infinite sphere,
143, 144, 150, 1837213; 2 lor, i8in5 24-5, I58n6; view of
Samuel, i67ni2 Copernicus, Nicolas, 26, time, 98, i79-8onri23-
Blake, William, 50 35, 36; De Revolutioni- 24. Works: De Conjec-
Boethius: Consolation of bus, 25, 162112 turis, 18, 20-1; De
Philosophy, 74, 1677211; Copleston, Frederick, 9, Docta Ignorantia, 19-25,
Utrum Pater et Filius, 10, i6in2i 36-7, i63n4; De Ludo
1617121 Cosgrove, Brian, 126, Globi, 21, 25, 98, 179-
Bonaventure, Saint, 9; i83ni2 80777223-4; Idiota de
Itinerarium Mentis in cosmology: Aristotelian / Mente, 20, 22, 49
Deum, i6in2i Ptolemaic, 13-16, 34,
Borges, Jorge Luis, 42, 43 61-2; Bergson, 84-7; damnation (and free
Boyle, Robert, 36, 47, Bruno, 29-31; Burton, will): Faustus, 146;
i64n8, i65n3 35-6; Cusanus, 22-5; Macbeth, 146-7; Satan
Browne, Sir Thomas, Digges, 29-30; Fon- in Paradise Lost, 145-6
Garden of Cyrus, 17; tenelle, 37; Galileo, 31- Darwin, Charles, 84, 85,
Religio Medici, 99, 134, 2, 61; Herbert, 32-5; i7ini6
137, 140, 143 Milton, 60-5; Pascal, da Vinci, Leonardo, 134
Bruno, Giordano, 29-31, 44-6, 154-6; patristic, Dee, John, 17
42, 44, 45-6, 163^13-4, i6ini; Traherne, 47 Democritus, 167^
i66n6 Cranmer, Thomas (Arch- DeQuincey, Thomas, 114-
Bunyan, John 142 bishop of Canterbury), 15
Burton, Robert, 37, 63; 139 DeVries, Simon, i67~8ni3
Anatomy of Melancholy, Cullen, Patrick, 100 Digges, Thomas, 30, 31,
35-6, 163775 Cullman, Oscar, 72-3, 74 65, i63n2; A Perfit
197 Index
Description of the Caeles- Florio, John, 176-71120 Hermes Trismegistus, 17

tiall Orbes, 29, 30 Fludd, Robert, 17 Herrick, Robert, 98, 100
Donne, John, 105, 142, Fontenelle, Bernard de, Heschel, A.J., 74
150-1; Devotions, 141; 50; Entretiens sur la plu- Hill, John Spencer, i66n7
Fz'rsf Anniversary, 31, 32; ralite des mondes, 37, Hipparchus, 13
Goodfriday 1613, 135-6; 164719 Hobbes, Thomas, 47; Levi-
Holy Sonnets, 106, 150- foreknowledge, 144 athan, i6qn6
i, i8in2; Hymn to God free will, 145-7, H9- $ee Homer, 91
... in my sicknesse, 134; also damnation Hooker, Richard, 139;
Sermons, 98, 99 Laws of Ecclesiastical
Driver, Tom, 69, 108 Galileo, 16, 26, 35, 50, 61, Polity, 147, 150, 162712
Du Bartas, Sylvester, 64 63, 65; Sidereus Nun- Hopkins, Jasper, 21-2,
Duhem, Pierre, 15-16 cius, 31-2, 61 23
Durr, R.A., 1801127 Geoffrey of Monmouth, Hopton, Susanna, 165112
129 Horace, Odes, 97,
Eckhart, Johannes (Meis- Gilson, Etienne, i6in2O, I75nni5, 17
ter), 24 i6gng Hughes, Merritt, 62
Einstein, Albert, 172m Glanvill, Joseph, 36, 37, 38 Hugh of St Victor, De
Eliot, T.S., xi, 90, 126 Glasser, Richard, 96, 97, Sacramentis Christianas
Empedocles, 16^5 I76ni9 Fidei, 11, i6in2i
Erigena, John Scotus, De glorification, 152-3 Hume, David, 38
Divisione Naturse, 11, Goudge, T.A., 85
i6in2i Greene, Robert, Pandosto, infinite sphere (paradox
Eusebius of Caesaerea, 99, 1801126 of God as), 24-5, 26,
Preeparatio Evangelica, 9 Gregory of Nyssa, De 33-4, 42, 45, 46, 48-9,
Hominis Opificio, 9, 54, 155, I58n6, 163^
faith, 148; fides quserens I59ni5; De Anima et Irenaeus, Adversus Haere-
intellectum (faith in Resurrectione, 9, I59ni5 ses, 128-9, ^T*11/ I#3~
search of understand- Grew, Nehemiah, 165^ 4«2
ing), 3-12; ratio (rea-
son) and intellectus Harper, Howard, I73n6 Jewel, John (Bishop of
(intuition/faith) in Harries, Karsten, 23, 24 Salisbury), 137, 149-50
Augustine, 10-11, Harris, Victor, 31 Johnson, Francis R., 29
i6in2o, in Milton, 56, Hausheer, Herman, 83 Jordan, Richard, 51
in Nicholas of Cusa, Hegel, G.W.F., 21, 85, 86 Joyce, James, 90, 95, 97,
18-19, 22, 23, in Pascal, Heidegger, Martin, 89, 90 I75ni4; Ulysses, 91-2,
43-4, 46, in Traherne, Heraclitus, 71, 172^ I72n5
51-4; rational theology, Herbert, George, 32-5, justification (sola fide, by
38-9; and reason, 3, 5, 37, 142-3; plain style, faith alone), 131, 137,
7, 15; reason separated 142-3; sanctification, 139, 148-52, i83ni3
from faith, 36-9 150, 151-2. Works: The Justin Martyr, 4, 5;
Faulkner, William, 90, 97, British Church, 143; The Second Apology, I58n5
105, I75ni4; The Sound Bunch of Grapes, 134;
and the Fury, 93-5 The Collar, 151; Jordan Kant, Immanuel, 83, 89
Ferrar, Nicholas, 151 (I), 142; Love (III), 143, Kantorowicz, Ernst H.,
Feuerbach, Ludwig, The 152; The Priesthood, i69nio
Essence of Christianity, 151; A Priest to the Tem- Kastan, D.S., 108, 118,
i82nio ple, or, The Country Par- i8in4, i8i-2n6
figura, 76-7, 99; postfigu- son, 742; Redemption, Keats, John, 106
ration, 129-31. See also 148; The Search, 33-5; Kepler, Johann, 16, 31,
Auerbach Vanitie (I), 32-3, 36, 60 36, 61, 63, i64n7
198 Index
Kermode, Frank, 177- 58; on Galileo, 61; Origen, 4, 5, 128

91122 good temptation, Orosius, Paulus, 127
Knappen, M.M., 141 i8on28; infinity, 63-4; Ovid, Metamorphoses, 99,
Knight, G. Wilson, 113, mutable perfection, 57- 1757216, i83ni
120, i82n7 8; reconciliation of
Kolakowski, Leszek, 83, opposites, 55-9, 65, Panofsky, Erwin, 99
84, i7onn, i7O-ini5, i66n8. Works: L''Allegro I Parmenides, i66n5
I7i-2ni9 II Penseroso, i66n8; Pascal, Blaise, 26, 41-6,
Koyre, Alexandre, 25-6 Areopagitica, 103, 144; 47, 54, 55, 163114; faith
De Doctrina Christiana and reason, 43-4; infin-
Lactantius, Divine Insti- (The Christian Doc- ity, 44-6; Pensees, 41-6,
tutes, i6i-2ni trine), 63, 143, 144, 154-6, 164^10
Laud, William, 143 145, 153, i8on28; Elegy Pater, Walter, 90-1, 95,
Le Goff, Jacques, 96 6, 134; Lycidas, iSoni; 124, I72n3
Leibniz, G.W., 39, 49, 83, Nativity Ode, 134-5; Of Patrides, C.A.., 127
86-7, i65n5 Reformation, 138; Para- Perkins, William, 138,
Leucippus, i67n5 dise Lost, 18, 56-65, 139, 141
Lewalski, Barbara, 138, 101, 123, 132-4, 143, Peterson, Douglas, 121-3
152 144-6, 147-8, 149, 153; Petrarcha, Francesco, 96,
Lewis, C.S., 143 Paradise Regained, 101, 97, 105, I77n2i,
Locke, John, 165^; Essay 102-3, 112, iSoni; i8m5
Concerning Human Reason of Church-Gov- Philo Judaeus, 5
Understanding, 38 ernment Urged Against Pico della Mirandola,
Lovejoy, A.O., 44, i63n2 Prelaty, 142, 143; Giovanni, De Hominis
Lovelace, Richard, 98 Samson Agonistes, 101- Dignitate, 20
Lucretius, 29, 42, 167115 2, 112, i66n8; Sonnet 7 Pine-Coffin, R.S., i6gng
Luther, Martin, 29, 139, ("How soon hath Plato, 4, 5, 9, 74, 78, 79,
149 Time"), 100, 103; 83, I79n23; Apology,
Sonnet 23 ("Methought i58n5; Republic, 18;
McAdoo, H.R., 139 I saw my late Timaeus, 70, i66nnj-4
McElroy, Bernard, 115 espoused Saint"), 55-6, Plotinus, 9-10, 17, 71, 80,
Maimonides, Moses, i66n7 81, 83, 85; Enneads, 78-
Guide for the Perplexed, Montaigne, Michel de, 9, i68nni~3, 8; time as
16 Essais, 176-77720 a psychological reality,
Malory, Sir Thomas, Le More, Henry, 127 78-9
Morte Darthur, 129-31, Morrison, John L., i69nio Plutarch, i66n2
i84n3 Muilenberg, James, 74-5, Porphyry, 9
Marlowe, Christopher, i67ni2 postfiguration. Seefigura
Doctor Faustus, 146, 147 Poulet, Georges, 95, 97,
Marshall, Cynthia, 123, Newton, Sir Isaac, 26, 71, 98, 103, I74ni2
i82-3mi I72ni; Principia Mathe- predestination, 142, 144-
Marvell, Andrew, To His matica, 39 5. See also Calvin,
Coy Mistress, wo, I73n8 Nicolson, Marjorie, 32, damnation
methexis (participation), 50, 62 Proclus, 17
40-65 Nietzsche, Friedrich, Proust, Marcel, 90
Meyerhoff, Hans, 89 i76ni8 Prynne, William, 143
Milton, John, 41, 55-65, Numenius the Pseudo-Dionysius, 9, 19;
96, 98, 101-3, 104, 144- Pythagorean, 5 via negativa (negative
6; cosmology, 60-5; Nuttall, Geoffrey, 143 theology), 5. See also
faith and reason, 56-7, Clement of Alexandria
59-61; no felix culpa, Ogg, David, 138-9 (under via negativa),
199 Index
Cusa (under docta 62; Othello, 99, 118; Per- time: in Aristotle, 70-1;
ignorantia) icles, 107, 118, 123, in Augustine, 79-83,
Ptolemy, Almagest, 13, 15 i82n7; Rape of Lucrece, 88-9, i68-9nri4-io; in
puritanism, 139-43 99-100, 108; Richard II, Bergson, 83-7, 88-9,
107, no; Romeo and I70-2nnn-i9; biblical
Quinones, Ricardo, 96-7, Juliet, 106-7; Sonnets, view of (qualitative,
104-5, 1771120, i8om 99, 100, 104-6, 109, linear, and teleologi-
Quispel, Gilles, 7 114, 117, 1777121; Tem- cal), 69, 73-7; carpe
pest, 99, 118, 119-20, diem (seize the day),
Rabelais, Francois, 97; 123, i82n7; Troilus and 98, 100, I75ni7; chro-
Gargantua et Pan- Cressida, 109, 110-14; nos, 69-77, 88, 101,
tagruel, 1767119 Winter's Tale, 99, 109, 102, 103, I77~8n24 (see
Ray, John, 36, i64n8, 118, 120-6, 1801126 also kairos, below); cir-
i65n3 Sidney, Sir Philip, Apolo- cular vs linear concep-
reason. See faith giefor Poetrie, 21 tion of, 127-8, i83ni;
recapitulation, 99, 129, solafidianism (sola fide). clocks, 96, I74~5ni3; in
132-4, i83-4n2. See See justification Donne, 98, 134, 135-6;
also Irenaeus, typology sola Scriptura (by Scrip- in Faulkner, 93-5;
Richard of St Victor, De ture alone), 137-9 future, as expectatio, 81-
Trinitate, 11, i6in2i Spenser, Edmund, 64, 96, 3, 98-103, 114-18;
Ricoeur, Paul, 178-9^2 103, 1781122; Faerie future denied or made
Ronsard, Pierre de, 96, Queene, 100-1, 131; insignificant, 86, 88,
97, I77n2i Fowre Hymnes, 13; 91, 92-5, 97, 112-14,
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Mutability Cantos, 62; I7i-2ni9, I75ni4, 175-
50, 124 Shepheardes Calendar, 6m8; in Glasser, 96;
101, 1801127 Great Year, 71; Greek
sanctification, 131, 149-52 Spinoza, Benedict, 21, 83, view of (quantitative
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 89, 90, 124; Ethics, 18, 121, and circular), 69-72,
94, I78n22 122, 165716, 182719 77; human time, 89,
Saxl, Fritz, 99 Suckling, Sir John, 98 95, 103, i77-8n22; in
Schelling, F.W.J., 85, 124 Joyce, 91-2, I72n5;
Seneca, 90, 105, 176020; Tatian, Oratio ad Graecos, kairos, 69-77, 88-9, 91,
De brevitate vitae, 97, i57m 97, 100-3, 111-12, 121,
i75-6m#; Moral Epis- Tempier, Etienne (Bishop 122, 134-6, i77-8n24
tles, iSjni of Paris), 15 (see also chronos,
Sextus Empiricus, i67n5 Tertullian, Apologeticum, above); in Kermode,
Shakespeare, William, 90, 4; De prsescriptione 177-81122; in Malory,
96, 98, 104-26, 146-7, hsereticorum, 4 130- i; in Milton, 101-
i8o-3nni-i3; plays as theology. See Anglican- 3, 132-4, 135; in Mon-
heuristic, time-centred ism, damnation, faith, taigne, 176-71120; in
fictions, 108, 124. figura, foreknowledge, Nicholas of Cusa, 98,
Works: As You Like It, free will, glorification, 179-80111123-24; oppor-
106, 109, 119; Cym- justification, predesti- tunity (occasio I tempus
beline, 118, 123; Hamlet, nation, puritanism, commodum), 99, no,
99, 107, iu-12, 113; i recapitulation, sanctifi- 120, 122, i73-4nn8-io,
Henry IV, 107; 2 Henry cation, sola Scriptura, 175-71^117-20; in Ovid,
IV, 108; Henry V, 109- typology I75nm6-i7; in Pater,
10; King Lear, 99, 113- Thirty-nine Articles, 138, 90-1, I72n3; in Plato,
14, 118, 123; Macbeth, 140, 143 70; in Plotinus, 78-9,
99, 109, 114-18, 146-7; Thomas, Keith, 141 i68nni-3, 8; in Poulet,
Merchant of Venice, 16, Tillyard, E.M.W., i8in6 95; psychological view
2oo Index
of, 71, 78-87; in Quino- Toliver, Harold, 114 Vincent de Beauvais, 127
nes, 96-7, 104-5, Traherne, Thomas, 41, 47- von Martin, Alfred, 96
iSoni; in Rabelais, 54, 55, 163114; and
I76ni9; in Ricoeur, Augustine, 50; and Walton, Sir Isaac, 151
I78~9n22; in Ronsard, Wordsworth, 50, 165- Wedgwood, C.V., 141
I77n2i; in Seneca, 175- 6n6; "capacitie," 49-50, Westfall, Richard S., 36,
6ni8; in Shakespeare, 54; Centuries, 28, 47- 37/47
99-100, 104-26, 180- 54, 152-3; "felicitie," Whitaker, William, 138
3nni-i3; spatialization 48, 53-4; "inner" infin- White, R.S., 123
of, 70-2, 78, 81, 83-4, ity, 47-8, 51-4 Whitehead, A.N., 89, 162-
91, i66-7n5, I7onni2, Traversi, Derek, 119, 120, 3ni
14, I72ni; in Spenser, 121 Wilson, Rawdon, 100-1
100-1, 131-2, i8on27; typology, 76-7, 128, 138; Woolf, Virginia, 90, 95,
tempus edax rerum two Adams, 129-34, 97, 105, I75ni4; The
(time, the devourer of 149, 151. See also figura, Waves, 92-3, 173-47177.6-
things), 99-100, 105, recapitulation 10
106, 109, 124-5, Wordsworth, William, 50,
I75ni6; veritas filia tem- Uphaus, Robert, 123 i65~6n6, 172112
poris (truth is the
daughter of time, i.e., Vaughan, Henry, 152 Yates, Frances, 30
Time the Revealer), 99, Vaughan, Thomas, 17
109, 126; in Woolf, 92- via negativa. See Pseudo- Zeno, i66n5
3, i73-4nn6-io Dionysius Zwingli, Ulrich, 139

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Infinity, Faith, and Time

Christian Humanism and Renaissance Literature

Infinity, Faith, and Time is an exploration of Renaissance literature

JOHN SPENCER HILL is professor of English, University of Ottawa.

5 The Evangelical Century

6 The German Peasants' War and Anabaptist Community of Goods

8 Serving the Present Age

11 Creed and Culture

12 Piety and Nationalism

16 Padres in No Man's Land

17 Christian Ethics and Political Economy in North America

18 Pilgrims in Lotus Land

19 Through Sunshine and Shadow

20 Church, College, and Clergy

21 The Lord's Dominion

23 Evangelism and Apostasy

24 The Chignecto Covenanters

25 Methodists and Women's Education in Ontario, 1836-1925

26 Puritanism and Historical Controversy

Marguerite Bourgeoys and Montreal, 1640-1665

Aspects of the Canadian Evangelical Experience

Infinity, Faith, and Time

The Contribution of Presbyterianism to the Maritime Provinces of Canada

McGill-Queen's University Press

Legal deposit fourth quarter 1997

Printed in the United States of America

This book has been published with the help of a grant

McGill-Queen's University Press acknowledges the

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

Hill, John Spencer, 1943-

Typeset in Palatino 10/12

Harry Simon Hill (1908-1961)

PART ONE THE E X P A N D I N G UNIVERSE

1 Fides Quaerens Intellectum 3

PART TWO TIME

6 Chronos and Kairos 69

Appendix One: Notes Toward a Protestant Poetic 137

represented than it is in literary critical history - and a brief discus-

medieval and Renaissance literature - a view dependent upon

drafts and to make valuable suggestions: Camille La Bossiere, David

The Expanding Universe

Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too

The relationship between faith and reason is the fundamental prob-

Greek wisdom for those baptized into the Christian covenant of

What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What concord is there

uncompromising fideism to be developed by mystics and embraced

analogous to the contemplation of a geometrical point, that advances

We shall understand the mode ... of contemplation by ... advancing by

What then of man? As Christ is divine Reason, so man, created in

path through human affairs by reference to archetypes above, as a

Christian conduct is the operation of the rational soul in accordance with a

Knowledge prompts ppractice, and practice in turn produduces

gnosticism and "to see the reasonableness of Christianity" (Copies-

to think with assent.^ The fullest exposition of the theme is in an

One hopes that Consentius was himself something of an ironist.

sought to articulate a copulative theology able to accommodate the

Teach me to seek You, and reveal Yourself to me as I seek, because I can

"Well then, Lord/' he continues, "You who give understanding to

Fig. i The Aristotelian-Ptolemaic cosmos. From Peter Apian, Cosmographia (1539)

regular and "returns upon itself without a break" (2883.14-27) and,

fourteenth-century Scholasticism worked to replace the condemned

Look how the floor of heaven

In the dawning of that artistic and scientific awakening that swept