Table Of ContentUnknowing Fanat i cism
Unknowing Fanat i cism
Reformation Lit er a tures
of Self- Annihilation
Ross Lerner
fordham university press
New York 2019
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contents
Introduction. Receiving Divine Action:
Fanat i cism and Form in the Reformation 1
1. Allegorical Fanat i cism: Spenser’s Organs 31
2. Lyric Fanat i cism: Donne’s Annihilation 59
3. Readerly Fanat i cism: Hobbes’s Outworks 83
4. Tragic Fanat i cism: Milton’s Motions 114
Acknowl edgments 145
Notes 149
Bibliography 207
Index 227
Introduction
Receiving Divine Action:
Fanat i cism and Form in the Reformation
Still,
I’ve stood, a soldier listening for the word,
Attack, a prophet praying any ember be spoken
Through me in this desert full of fugitives.
Now, I have a voice. Entered, I am lit.
— jericho brown, “The Burning Bush”
If acts of religious fanat i cism suggest a certain immediacy, supposedly
having a direct origin in God’s w ill, they nonetheless circulate mediately,
often as story or song. I begin with one such story, paraphrased from
verse. Imagine a holy warrior who undertakes a spectacular act of religious
vio lence, what turns out to be a suicide mission in an apocalyptic confron-
tation. Whether he knew in advance that the battle would cost him his
life is unclear. Yet in order to underwrite his mission for holiness and lay
the groundwork for a new sacred nation, this soldier of God tries and fails
to destroy his enemy, dying twice in his attempt. Miraculously, he is res-
urrected a fter each death. Killed but made new by divine force, he de-
stroys his e nemy in the end.
Returning from his mission, this resurrected and triumphant warrior
meets another fighter for truth and his teacher, both of whom are begin-
ning a related mission. The teacher of the second warrior recounts how the
suicide attacker’s sacrificial vio lence has made him famous throughout
the cosmos. You have achieved something absolutely glorious, the instructor
says. The warrior retorts: I did not do anything. The achievement and the
glory are not mine— both are God’s alone. God made me into an empty
1
2 Introduction: Receiving Divine Action
organ of his might and acted through me, and that is the only reason our
enemy was destroyed. Annihilated, I became an instrument for God’s di-
vine vio lence.
This might sound like a parable taught at what in mainstream Western
media are often called terrorist training camps, far afield from the canon
of Eu ro pean Re nais sance lit er a ture. In fact, this story is my simplified de-
scription of an episode from Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590,
1596), one that unfolds across the eleventh canto of the poem’s first book
and the beginning of its second book. Redcrosse, the knight of holiness, is
the one who dies twice and is miraculously reborn in an apocalyptic battle
with a dragon, living on as Saint George, patron saint of England. It is the
Palmer, guide to Guyon, the knight of temperance, who has to deal with
Redcrosse’s claim to divine possession. The Palmer strug gles to know what
to do with Redcrosse’s correction, which suggests that even the knight of
holiness could not achieve victory as a willing agent. Readers strug gle with
this moment, too, and typically sidestep its refusal to resolve which ver-
sion of history the poem authorizes: the Palmer’s narrative of heroic
achievement and willful action or Redcrosse’s chronicle of self- annihilation
and divine instrumentality. How do we know w hether Redcrosse became
what he calls “the organ of [God’s] might” (2.1.33)?1 How can Redcrosse
narrate his transformation to us if he claims to have been a passive vessel
at the moment the dragon was defeated? How can Spenser compose his
allegorical poem in such a way that makes Redcrosse’s self- annihilating vio-
lence into a didactic lesson about holiness and the sacred foundations of
the En glish nation?
This book w ill attend to the poetic and po liti cal prob lems that fanat i-
cism inspires, with a par tic u lar emphasis on how moments such as this
one—in which poems meditate on the vexed relationship between divine
vio lence and human agency— participate in or resist Reformation polem-
ics about religious fanat i cism. In order to frame this book’s larger ques-
tion about the relationship between fanat i cism and form, Chapter 1 will
offer an extended analy sis of the disagreement about Redcrosse’s status as
an organ in The Faerie Queene and the tremors it sends through the poem’s
larger allegorical design. Though Spenser’s poem is uniquely inclined to
pres ent scenes in which characters find themselves unable to interpret a
prob lem that the poem itself created, this scene is not exceptional. Depic-
tions of religious vio lence and uncertain witness such as this one prolifer-
ate in Re nais sance poetry, but we have only developed confused ideas about
the difficulty such scenes pose to verse- making and reading, not to men-
tion to politics and ethics.
Fanat i cism and Form in the Reformation 3
This is in part because dominant perceptions of religious fanat i cism
today tend to be as polemical and reductive as they were in the early mod-
ern period. We live in a world in which Reformation condemnations of
fanat i cism, usually meant to justify state vio lence, live on in systemic strat-
egies of racialized neo co lo nial brutality that rely on terms such as “terrorist”
and “fundamentalist” to vindicate war, indefinite detention, torture, mur-
der, dispossession, and economic immiseration—in short, to make many
lives, especially in the so-called Greater Middle East, “ungrievable.”2
Scholarship has not been innocent in this regard. Con temporary scholars
within and beyond literary studies tend to share with early modern phi-
los o phers and theologians a reductive sense of fanat i cism as the incarna-
tion of religion devoid of reason, the antitype of modernity.3 Influenced
by a long history of polemics against fanat i cism, t hese scholars typically
seek to disenchant or to condemn the fanatics’ claims that they do God’s
will or that God works through them, whether in fictional or nonfictional
accounts of fanatical vio lence. Yet doing so misreads the complex ways in
which early modern religious forms interacted with and shaped the emer-
gence of modernity. Rejecting the simplified binary of fanatical religion
and rational politics, this book demonstrates that fanat i cism was integral
to how modern politics and poetics developed. Poets such as Edmund
Spenser, John Donne, and John Milton recognized in fanatics’ claims
to divine agency an epistemological and repre sen ta tional crisis—an inca-
pacity to know and depict the true origins of sacred vio lence. Yet this cri-
sis was a productive one. It led t hese writers to experiment with poetic
techniques that would allow them to address fanat i cism’s tendency to un-
settle the bound aries between h uman w ill and divine agency and between
individual and collective bodies.
Because “fanat i cism” is a mobile term that has been produced through
a history of polemic, it is difficult to use it with precision, both in the Ref-
ormation and t oday. Much of this Introduction attempts to offer a his-
torically textured description of fanat i cism as the concept took shape in
the Reformation, but an initial definition may be useful. Throughout the
Reformation, “fanat i cism” evoked the idea of individuals who, through a
pro cess of mystical self- annihilation, became vessels filled with God’s vio-
lent action, negating “the distinction,” to recall Ralph Cudworth’s phrase,
“betwixt God and the creature.”4 (From Luther’s early fascination with
negative theology to George Herbert’s poetic meditations on what Stanley
Fish calls “letting go” of self, t here are theologies and lit er a tures of self-
annihilation that have no direct relationship to vio lence in the world; these
are not the focus of this book.)5 Several figures will emerge over the course
