{"id":1578,"date":"2021-05-27T11:35:41","date_gmt":"2021-05-27T16:35:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/?p=1578"},"modified":"2021-07-26T19:37:11","modified_gmt":"2021-07-27T00:37:11","slug":"literature-and-political-theology-in-the-eighteenth-century","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/cthorne\/fiction\/literature-and-political-theology-in-the-eighteenth-century\/","title":{"rendered":"Literature and Political Theology in the Eighteenth Century"},"content":{"rendered":"

The following is a review of Spencer Jackson’s We Are Kings: Political Theology and the Making of a Modern Individual <\/em>(Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2020). It will appear in a future issue of\u00a0Eighteenth-Century Studies<\/em>.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

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If you want to be able to appreciate what Spencer Jackson is up to in We Are Kings<\/em>, it will help first to recall what John Milton was up to in Book 3 of Paradise Lost<\/em>. A lot happens in Milton\u2019s third book: We meet God for the first time, and also the Son, who immediately volunteers for a suicide mission, even as Satan is rocketing through outer space, landing on the sun, and asking anyone he can find whether they know the way to Earth. Book 3 also contains Milton\u2019s compressed account of the End of Days\u2014God\u2019s insurrectionary Five Year Plan, which is to unfold in three stages:<\/p>\n

Stage #1: Already here, in humanity\u2019s earliest days, God is losing interest in ruling as a monarch, choosing instead to hand his sovereignty off to Jesus, who is in some respects a lesser being, and who uniquely in his person will end up sharing that power with humanity. So that\u2019s two sharings now: God is going to share power with the one who shares power. In the figure of the Son, God and humanity will in some not fully manifest sense rule together and so un-sovereignly: He \u201cshalt reign both God and man\u201d (3:316-17). What had been God\u2019s power alone will eventually become a condominium of two. (Or is that three? Or is it many?) Power has already started its trajectory out- and downward.<\/p>\n

Stage #2: When the millennium comes, this figure of shared power is going to undertake a world revolution, installing himself as \u201cuniversal king\u201d (3:319) and thereby ridding the planet of its particular kings: its despots, tyrants, and bosses.<\/p>\n

Stage #3: The universal monarchy\u2019s last act will be to abolish itself. The Un-lord will become immanent\u00a0in\u00a0the world, which will henceforth be self-governing: \u201cGod shall be all in all\u201d (3:343).<\/p>\n

Our historicist scruples will never be pedantic enough to suppress the observation, as it flits across the mind, that Milton has in the passage of #2 to #3 anticipated the Bolshevik theory of revolution at its most controversial point: centralization as the counterintuitive path to decentralization, the amassing of power by one determined to give it all away. But we don\u2019t have to establish that point here. For now, it will be enough to grasp that Milton\u2019s prophecy also furnishes Spencer Jackson with the template for his<\/em> argument. You might hear me as saying that Jackson has something new to report about Paradise Lost, <\/em>but that\u2019s not it. He has surprisingly little to say about Milton, in fact, and nothing at all about the epic\u2019s third book. The point is rather that Jackson has silently and perhaps unwittingly modeled his book on Milton\u2019s apocalypse. What if the millennium\u2014the redeemed world, the all-in-all\u2014had almost come to pass in 1812? Such is Jackson\u2019s question to his readers. And what if its gospel had been eighteenth-century British literature, and not just this or that title from its canon, but all of them taken together, one long Book of Revelation to foretell Babylon\u2019s late Hanoverian downcasting? And what if we had overshot the kingdom of ends, had missed our chance to build the reign of saints on earth, because it hadn\u2019t occurred to us to read Augustan satire and the early novel as sacred texts? And what if we now had another crack at it? What if we could have the millennium after all if we only corrected our readings of Alexander Pope and Samuel Richardson? We Are Kings <\/em>is by all appearances an academic book, with eleven pages of endnotes and a University of Virginia logo on its back cover. But it is, in fact, something else altogether\u2014a whirlwind scroll of radical Protestant prophecy masquerading, not all that convincingly, as literary history.<\/p>\n

Jackson\u2019s Miltonic scheme goes like this: John Dryden spent most of his career writing poetry that transformed the late Stuart kings into godlike figures, or better, into incarnations of the Christian God, humans invested with God\u2019s power, redemptive figures who, committed to saving their people, handed down the law but were not bound by it. And yet not even Dryden remained a monarchist of this kind, and so with the discrediting of absolutism, he and other English writers were forced to wonder whether there were other candidates, besides kings, who could play the part of God-man. Who else could save England by standing outside the law while also enforcing it? Dryden accordingly ended his career by offering the job to an exemplary country gentleman. Pope, however, would soon offer it to the poet, which is to say to himself; Richardson to the Protestant woman with no special credentials; and Maria Edgeworth to colonized peasants and the enslaved. Jackson thinks he can show us that eighteenth-century writers did not, in fact, undertake the secularization of English letters. Whatever we usually think of as literary secularism\u2014plots that rely more on causal explanation than on Providence, fewer collections of innovative devotional poetry, no more masterworks with archangels subbing in as guest narrators\u2014this is not <\/em>one of literary histories Big Stories. After the demise of divine-right monarchy, English literature, far from eliminating divinity from its pages, simply went looking for alternative people to sanctify. What we won\u2019t want to miss is the stepwise descent traced by Jackson\u2019s sequence, that decurrence of God\u2019s power from king to Englishwoman to slave, ergo his sense that this more-than-literary history\u2014the story, that is, of \u201cthe democratization of divine authority\u201d (128)\u2014had both a direction and a terminus. Sovereignty rolls downhill.<\/p>\n

Such a book cannot be judged by the usual standards of peer review and the call for papers. As a piece of scholarship, it is the kind of mess that one sometimes calls \u201cunholy.\u201d Jackson describes Maria Edgeworth\u2019s Absentee<\/em> \u201cdomestic\u201d (141) even though its hero is a) noble; b) a man; and c) almost never at home\u2014the novel shows him, in fact, traveling extensively across two countries. He calls that same novel \u201canticolonial\u201d (141) even though its happy ending shows Ireland\u2019s Anglo-Protestant aristocracy resolving to intensify its government of the island it continues to occupy. He works up a visionary flight about a half page of Edgeworth\u2019s prose by misreporting plot details and suppressing all the counterevidence that her novel supplies just two or three pages later. Indeed, he spends the balance of most chapters tsk-ing older scholars for \u201cfailing\u201d to do x and \u201ctoo quickly saying\u201d y, and then, as the timer is about to buzz, staples a few fervent claims to isolated passages from whichever text he is currently scripturalizing. But listing the argumentative failings of We Are Kings<\/em> would, in fact, be a cheerless task. One feels a little silly fact-checking John of Patmos.<\/p>\n

Some of the conceptual issues that the book raises are nonetheless worth sorting through, if only to flag some of the difficulties that literary scholars are likely to face when they undertake to write political theology. The first problem to note is that Jackson\u2019s sequence\u2014from Dryden to Richardson to Edgeworth; from king and squire to Englishwoman to colonized peasant and slave\u2014is wholly contrived. Jackson gives the impression that English writers dispersed God\u2019s sovereignty through the polity in stages: that they had to beta-test it on country gentlemen first before offering it to women and that it had to work for the Pamelas before it could be extended to subalterns in the colonies. And yet, more extensive reading would surely have shown that each of these positions was available throughout<\/em> the period and, indeed, before Dryden had written his first couplet. This is one reason that Jackson, despite his audible channeling of Christopher Hill\u2014as when he takes for his theme \u201ca distinct Anglo-American brand of socialism, one grounded in liberation theology\u201d (179-180)\u2014has almost nothing to say about Milton. For serious attention to Milton would explode Jackson\u2019s timeline, bringing into view a Puritan revolutionary intellectual who presents in one swoop (and outside of Jackson\u2019s chosen period) every single type on his list: the sanctified prophet-poet of Paradise Lost<\/em>; the sanctified Englishwoman of Comus<\/em>, who was, of course, the original of Richardson\u2019s captive heroines; the sanctified, country-dwelling garden keepers of Milton\u2019s Eden, Adam and Eve, who are also sanctified Native Americans, the naked denizens of \u201cthis New World,\u201d \u201cin native honor clad\u201d (2:403, 4:287). The point is not just a literary one, of course. If the sanctified demos did not, after all, stand in line waiting for its number to be called, but rather rushed to convene itself in the 1630s and 1640s, when Scottish Covenanters showed English ones how to organize, then neither, too, did divine-right monarchism simply bow out once Dryden went Jacobite: De Maistre was still writing tracts on royal sovereignty in the generation of the Jacobins, Napoleon, and Maria Edgeworth. The term that begins Jackson\u2019s sequence will still be available, in European letters, once his sequence has ended; and the term that ends his sequence was available before that sequence had even begun. What Jackson presents as the carefully paced rollout of divine authority across the English and Anglo-colonial polity\u2014an apocalypse, yes, but one that proceeds in the orderly phases of a well-executed business plan\u2014is better grasped as the messy contest of rival positions, coexisting in time and vying for supremacy on the same confessional field. It stands out, therefore, that Jackson\u2019s Catholic and evangelical and Anglican writers never fight. Not at all: Each waits his turn to play the role appointed him in a chronology blocked out in advance by a Levelling and General Baptist God. We Are Kings <\/em>offers up political theology with the politics left out.<\/p>\n

The theology doesn\u2019t fare much better. One of the more unusual features of Jackson\u2019s argument is that it discusses divine-right monarchism, sovereignty theory, and antinomianism within the same frame. It might help if I restated each of these as propositions. Jackson considers the ideas, respectively:<\/p>\n