Thematic Instability in Le lai du cor

 

 

 

from the 1634 edition of Malory’s Morte d’Arthur

     Numbers in brackets refer to endnotes; those in parentheses to line numbers in C. T. Erickson’s The Anglo-Norman Text of Le Lai du Cor (1973).

 

 

     The level of gravitas of Robert Biket’s Anglo-Norman “Lai du cor” (ca. 1200) is difficult to specify.  On the one hand, the story is an amusing anecdote: some have even called it a fabliau rather than a lai [1] and, indeed, the author himself assures listeners he knows many good jokes (590).  The laughter of the characters and the harmonious conclusion emphasize the author’s playful tone in his evocation of tensions around the relations of married men and women.

     Stories on that theme, however, may be comic or tragic or simply realistic.  A more serious tone is suggested by the holiday that provides the occasion for Arthur’s party.  The setting on Ascension Thursday brings to mind Christ’s unique moral perfection, and the specific ethical issue of fidelity to one’s lover is foregrounded by the interloper’s disturbing gift.  Just as in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight a festive and courtly occasion becomes a test of virtue and, here as in Gawain, the genteel sophistication of the nobles is not entirely congruous with either Christian morality or the implied authorial intentions. 

     Such doubling characterizes the whole poem, leaving it poised between amusing anecdote and cautionary moral, between courtly sophistication and Christian humility. Though the occasion is a religious holiday, the celebration is far from wholly pious.   The king’s festivities in his court in Carlion are unmistakably regal in scale, an example of “grant curteisie” (20) indeed, with tens of thousands of guests among whom every knight is matched with a lady (as in formal dinner parties in more recent times), “checun out sa paraille” (16).  It's a party until the mysterious visitor arrives.

     Once the ritual of the chastity text [2] has foregrounded the theme of sexual morality, humanity in general is chastened for falling short until Garadue (Caradoc, sometimes Sir Craddock) steps forward toward the end.  Until that point the poem has implied an orthodox Christian theme echoing, for instance, the passages in Romans saying “all men have sinned” (3:23) and “there is none righteous, no, not one" (3:10).  The fact that the exemplar Arthur is included emphasizes the universality of people’s guilt.  Yet this reading is confounded by the appearance of the one wholly faithful couple. 

     Garadue’s preeminence, incidentally, does serve a subsidiary function in reinforcing the tale’s verisimilitude.  Biket says that the story’s hero was also the first to tell it (he assures the reader that he has the permission of a certain abbot).  Further, he notes for pilgrims and other travelers that a visitor may see the fabled horn itself while visiting Cirencester Castle.

     Fundamentally, though, the theme is muddied by the appearance of one apparently flawless marriage.  Since Garadue is not Christ, he must be infected with original sin and the creation’s fallen nature.  Why then spotlight him as perfect, an exception to an otherwise all-inclusive rule meant to chasten all who hear the story?

     The aesthetic text excels at representing certain experiences resistant to linear rationality: the experience of pleasure or emotions, the mysterious, and the ambivalent or self-contradictory.  In this poem the dialectic of love, at once absolute and flawed, is illuminated by several subtle image systems.  The enchanted horn is said to have been made by a malicious fairy (229-230) and Garadue’s wife is said to be herself like a fairy (512), thus conflating the most and least virtuous figures of the poem.  The attendants at the banquet are so shaken with the appearance of the emissary of the king of Moraine that they spill the wine they are serving anticipating the guests’ spills and cut themselves rather than cutting the bread which foreshadows the king’s lunge at his wife with a knife and her own later identification of a good husband with good grape wine and wheat bread.  Thus men are twice associated with bread and wine, in one instance with waste or violence and in the other with pleasure and enjoyment.  Sexuality by implication is likewise powerful with the potential to bring great rewards and also sometimes to bring conflicts.

     Biket has, then, artfully expressed an ambivalence, not from perversity or carelessness, but only to represent reality.  The fact is that both propositions are true: that, if infidelity is broadly enough conceived, all women have “strayed,” many of them inadvertently or innocuously, while it remains a fact that marital loyalty is required by religious mandate as well as by jealous husbands.  In the gap between the real and the ideal the play or art arises, with lyrics and serenades, and courts of love and pledges of love-service, all performative acts for negotiating male-female relations, albeit with only the men’s accounts recorded [3]. 

     This lai then both exposes and downplays the potentially disruptive force of sexual jealousy while avoiding rejecting the traditional goal of absolute devotion to one’s husband.  When one after another of the nobles finds his wife has been to some degree unfaithful, and the general reaction is good-humored laughter rather than a passion for revenge, we have clearly entered a social realm among worldly adults who recognize the universality of sexual temptation.  Without altogether abandoning the ideal of fidelity, the author has made its literal accomplishment marginal, an unusual special case while many technically imperfect relationships flourish while tolerating trivial or symbolic incidents of “love” like the queen’s.

     If one wished to sound au courant, at least with the trends of a generation or two ago, one might say that Biket presents the listeners with a scene “always already erased,” but post-modernism is not required to make sense of his story.  As in Blake’s Ascension Day poems in Songs of Innocence and in Songs of Experience, the holiday highlights the possibility of purity alongside the fallenness of the world. In Blake the charity of the “grey headed beadles” is dubious while the glory of the children, called “lambs” and “angels” remains. 

     In the conclusion to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, while the king is laughing over Gawain’s venial falseness and declaring that every knight shall in solidarity wear a similar garter, for Gawain himself it remains “þe bende of þis blame I bere in my nek” which signifies “couardise and couetyse.”  Though the only known sinner, he seems the most morally scrupulous of the court, while the majority of his fellow knights have settled on a laxer definition of fidelity.  Similarly, in Biket’s lai the court accepts a tolerant standard while the stricter one seems meaningful only to Caradoc and his wife.  The precise extent to which transgressions should be overlooked is left unsaid.  Ladies and gentlemen will be presumed to know the rules

     That the poem embodies two contradictory value systems is scarcely an impediment to its success as a narrative.  The listener or reader may experience both the satisfaction of righteous orthodoxy and the titillation of hints of sensuality.  Perhaps the taste around the year 1200 C. E. had something in common with the audiences for those gangster movies of the ‘thirties that open with a solemn statement about the regrettable rise of urban crime followed by an hour and a half of violent action.  The combination is no more inconsistent than human beings are inconsistent, and to depict the contradiction in art is simply to be psychologically if not rationally accurate. 

    

 

. 

 

1.  See C. T. Erickson, The Anglo-Norman Text of Le Lai du Cor, 11-16. 

2.  For the theme in general, see parallels in Stith Thompson H 411.4.  In the Livre de Carados, first continuation of Perceval, Caradoc’s wife Guignier sacrifices herself by letting a venomous serpent bite her breast.  See also the close parallel in the ballad “The Boy and the Mantle.”

3.  See Jeff Rider, “Courtly Marriage in Robert Biket’s "Lai du Cor," Romania Vol. 106, No. 422 (2) (1985) who maintains the poem is “not anti-feminist” and the horn “not a chastity-testing device.”  His claim is unconvincing as, though he claims the horn tests men as well as women, it is only the men’s “jealousy,” that is, their suspicion of their women and not their own sexual exclusiveness that is mentioned.

4.  Bk. III, stanza 22.

 

An Image for Art in Conrad’s Preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus

 

 

     Toward the end of Conrad’s brief but much-discussed preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus, he characterizes the artist in an image surely meant to sum up the ideas presented in the preceding paragraphs.  What ought to be the rhetorical capping of his argument instead confuses the issues he means to clarify. 

 

Sometimes, stretched at ease in the shade of a roadside tree, we watch the motions of a labourer in a distant field, and after a time, begin to wonder languidly as to what the fellow may be at. We watch the movements of his body, the waving of his arms, we see him bend down, stand up, hesitate, begin again. It may add to the charm of an idle hour to be told the purpose of his exertions. If we know he is trying to lift a stone, to dig a ditch, to uproot a stump, we look with a more real interest at his efforts; we are disposed to condone the jar of his agitation upon the restfulness of the landscape; and even, if in a brotherly frame of mind, we may bring ourselves to forgive his failure. We understood his object, and, after all, the fellow has tried, and perhaps he had not the strength—and perhaps he had not the knowledge. We forgive, go on our way—and forget.

 

     Surely the primary element that links this scene to the consumption of art is the viewer’s engagement.  Anything put within a frame and hung on a wall will receive attention of a sort altogether different from that accorded most sensory data.  A story on paper demands attention of a different order than that we accord impressions incidentally observed in lived experience.  Apart from the narrowed attention required for the contemplation of art, Conrad’s viewer studying a distant man approaches the status of art in the act’s lack of any functional end.  This thought experiment is, however, a very imperfect analogue for art which must be judged on beauty alone, a quality unlikely in an arbitrarily chosen sight.  The figure of the worker also deviates from art in that it lacks intentionality.  Whereas every detail of a work of art is the result of the maker’s choices, the events of lived experience arise from a confluence of countless and mostly random causes.       

     The enigmatic figure Conrad asks his reader to imagine has a good deal in common with Camus’ image of the absurd in The Myth of Sisyphus.

 

 

Dans certaines heures de lucidité, l'aspect mécanique de leurs gestes, leur pantomime privée de sens rend stupide tout ce qui les entoure. Un homme parle au télé phone derrière une cloison vitrée ; on ne l'entend pas, mais on voit sa mimique sans portée : on se demande pourquoi il vit.

 

At certain moments of lucidity, the mechanical aspect of their gestures, their pantomime without meaning makes everything about them stupid.  A man speaks on the telephone on the other side of a glass panel.  One can’t hear him, but one can see his meaningless mime-show.  One wonders why he is alive.  [my translation]

 

     For Camus and Sartre this vision of existential humanity triggers self-recognition and “nausea,” while for Conrad the consequence is entirely different.  His viewer is seeking only to beguile “an idle hour,” and his interest would be piqued if he were “to be told” apparently by some outside informant, what the man is doing.  Oddly, knowing the practical end of the labor he is witnessing satisfies Conrad’s viewer.  Feeling that he understands the worker’s “failure,” he is free to “forget” and wander on.

     “So,” Conrad says, “it is with the workman of art.”  Yet the sight alone is insufficient for him, he must have the informant as well, whose word somehow satisfies and ultimately dissolves his interest, allowing him to proceed then unchanged, apparently as though the encounter had never occurred.    For one who wishes to be entertained, perhaps the casual tone and easy departure are appropriate, though the most casual art can be memorable, but what can be the analogy with learning the nature of the worker’s project?  And why must the artist/worker always fail?  And does he really mean to say that the experience of art leaves one altogether unchanged?  The design if the extended metaphor seems peculiarly inappropriate in view of Conrad’s symphonic mastery of imagery in his fiction.

     Conrad’s central point sheds little light on these questions.  Though often named as a manifesto of literary impressionism [1], its value assumed due to the prestige of the fictions of its author, the preface has also been censured by recent critics, even called an incoherent “hodgepodge” [2].  For most readers, though, the point is quite clear.  Conrad’s summary takes only a single sentence: “My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see.”  Yet this principle scarcely specifies a specific approach; the same could surely be said of all literary texts.  This grand-sounding ambition is really nothing more than a restatement of the need to direct the reader’s consciousness on a particular scene, rather like a frame or a spotlight.  We are all constantly seeing, hearing, and feeling.  Art requires, though, that one’s focus be narrower and more conscious than usual.  In this broad way, the image of the worker is similar, though other attributes – the lack of intentionality, the observer’s wish for an explanation, and the final “failure” and “forgetting” are irrelevant or misleading.

     The end of art for Conrad is truth.  “Art,” he defines as “a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every aspect.”  With sufficient attention, he says, any scene will do.  “There is not a place of splendour or a dark corner of the earth that does not deserve, if only a passing glance of wonder and pity.”  The reason for this radical equality is that, due to the interpenetration of one thing with another, the whole is in theory deducible from any part.  Whatever the object under view, a deep enough consideration will reveal “the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts, to the solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear, which binds men to each other, which binds together all humanity—the dead to the living and the living to the unborn.”  The uniquely human character of art is the basis for the listing of emotional reactions rather than sensory “impressions.”  Yet, as the last phrase suggests, time vanishes in the face of Truth, though this sublime vision is available only to “the deserving and the fortunate,” among whose number his readers are likely to count themselves, for what reader would identify as one “of the bewildered, the simple and the voiceless”? 

     Encouraged then by membership in Conrad’s elect, the reader may anticipate a range of exhilarating emotions (“all you demand”) as reward, and may experience as well “that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask.”  We seem to have come very little distance from Augustine’s acceptance of literary usages when employed for the proper end, that is to say, as an aid toward the salvation that accompanies enlightenment. 

     One could hardly call this spiritual business impressionism.  When Blake sought to convey his own visionary excitement, he wrote “When the Sun rises do you not see a round Disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea O no no I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God” [3].  Here the bright circle is surely the viewer’s likely impression, while the second is the contrivance of art.  Though the language has changed with God’s eclipse in the later nineteenth century, Conrad is promising his readers nothing less than a finger on the pulse of the cosmos. 

     Apart from Conrad’s own obscurities and those added by careless readers, the picture of art of the Preface is defective.  Conrad’s posture is encouraged by his self-dramatization.  He is capable of assuming the posture of a Byronic hero, venturing on dangerous seas of the mind.  For him art is born from distress, from those contemplative moments when “the artist descends within himself, and [creates] in that lonely region of stress and strife” [4].  While it is undeniable that some artists have wrought wonders while working in personal agony, the fact has only incidental relevance to their creations.  For Conrad, though, the poet must be a dramatic figure who dares to “snatch in a moment of courage, from the remorseless rush of time” a “rescued fragment” of reality.  Surely great works and satisfying visions, attractive to others, may arise either with or without such psychic tumult?  Conrad slights the Apollonian, the classical, the craftsman-like side of art in order to emphasize personal drama and himself as an aesthetic adventurer.

     He has little to say about the central role of beauty.  Perhaps the most succinct definition of art is “objects whose purpose is their beauty,” and beauty is pleasure in a thing for its own sake without functional end.   Still, he is not unaware of the importance of style.  “It is only through complete, unswerving devotion to the perfect blending of form and substance . . . only through an unremitting never-discouraged care for the shape and ring of sentences”

     The most critical failing of Conrad’s image of the laborer is the lack of intersubjectivity.  The distant figure is not performing and has no awareness of the onlooker.  In that way it fails to correspond to Conrad’s own description of “all art” as an “appeal of one temperament to all the other innumerable temperaments whose subtle and resistless power endows passing events with their true meaning.”  Surely Conrad is on secure ground when he notes that “such an appeal to be effective must be an impression conveyed through the senses,” but, apart from being based on sensory data, it must also be intentionally constructed and not, like a sunset, a sea shell, or the great novelist’s worker glimpsed in a distant field, simply a bit of lived experience.  Not everything that is beautiful is art, though all art aspires to beauty.

  

 

 1.  See, for instance, Eloise Knapp Hay, “Joseph Conrad and Impressionism,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 34, No. 2 (Winter, 1975) and Todd K. Bender, “Conrad and Literary Impressionism,” Conradiana, Vol. 10, No. 3, Papers from the 1977 Miami Conference (1978).  The phrase is regularly used in reference books such as Vassiliki Kolocotroni’s Edinburgh Dictionary of Modernism and Ian Ousby’s The Wordsworth Companion to Literature in English.  Some literary historians have grouped Conrad with Ford Madox Ford, Henry James, and Stephen Crane as a school of impressionism, though Ford was the only explicit advocate of the term.  Ford did not hesitate to name Conrad (after his death) as a committed impressionist.

2.  For David Goldknopf’s devastating critique, see The Life of the Novel, 81-83.  See also Ian Watt, “Conrad's Preface to "The Nigger of the 'Narcissus'," NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 7, No. 2 (Winter, 1974).

3.  In “A Vision of the Last Judgment” Blake was modeling his comments on those of John Dennis’s “The Grounds of Criticism” (1704): “[T]he Sun mention’d in ordinary Conversation, gives the Idea of a round flat shining Body, of about two foot diameter. But the Sun occurring to us in Meditation, gives the Idea of a vast and glorious Body, and the top of all the visible Creation, and the brightest material Image of the Divinity.” (The Critical Works of John Dennis, ed. Edward Niles Hooker [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1939-43], I, 338-39).

4.  Surely his phrase here consciously echoes “Sturm und Drang.”

Holy Nudity

 

I exclude from consideration the lengthy and fascinating history of the use of nudity to intensify protests such as by the Doukhobors and Extinction Rebellion or artworks such as Spencer Tunick’s photographs or Yayoi Kusama’s “Grand Orgy to Awaken the Dead” (performed in the MoMA sculpture garden).  In a more difficult judgement, I also exclude religious manifestations that strike me as cult-like and exploitative, though these almost always involve nudity and sexuality and may be difficult to distinguish from other unconventional spiritual practices.

 

Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!

The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand and asshole holy!

                                            Allen Ginsberg, footnote to Howl

 

 

 

     Who could fail to be charmed by the story of Thomas Butts’ coming to call on William Blake only to discover the poet and his wife naked, reading Paradise Lost aloud?  When the visitor hesitated, the poet called out, “Come in!  It’s only Adam and Eve, you know.” [1]  What makes the anecdote amusing, of course, and what excited “the scandal of wondering neighbors” of the little garden at 13 Hercules Buildings is the conventional assumption that nudity is incongruous with holiness.  

     In an earlier age Blake and his wife might have been accused of heresy as well as indecency since they were identifying with the primal couple before the fall and thus denying original sin.  Once born into self-consciousness Adam and Eve’s very first reaction once they have eaten the fruit is to feel ashamed of their bodies.  “And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.”  Later God is thoughtful enough to make them garments of skins, presumably more practical for longtime wear.  [2]

     The author of this portion of Genesis was inverting the values of the symbols employed by their ancient Near Eastern neighbors.  The snake and the fruit, which had been regularly associated in Sumerian, Babylonian, Akkadian, Hittite, and Canaanite myth with fertility and the good things of this earth became evil in the story of Adam and Eve, allowing a religious view that, in contrast to religious practices descending from the Neolithic, is fundamentally hostile to the body.  The affirmation implied by Hesiod’s advice to farmers “to sow naked, plow naked, and reap naked” [3] and in this way encourage the fertility of the earth appears only in vestiges in the Hebrew Bible such as, for instance, the snake-topped pole associated with healing and in lyrical love passages, particularly in the Song of Songs.  [4]

       Clearly the primary significance of the story of the Fall is to teach that the body is inherently disgraceful and must be well-covered.  Yet the contrary notion lurks still in the background even here: in paradise one wears no clothes.  The bodily form is in the image of God and must therefore be glorious.  The tension of this contradiction stretches to the present day in such phenomena as the wigs that conceal the hair of ultra-Orthodox Jewish wives and sexual abuse by the Catholic clergy . 

       In general the Abrahamic religions have adopted the negative view represented in the Eden myth in which nudity or dress which reveals the body is considered to be shameful.   Equated with disgrace by prophets and sages, nakedness is associated with oppression and want, the humiliation of military defeat, and ritual uncleanness [5], but surely the primarily motive for body taboos was the concern for sexual purity of women.  The concern for tzniut (basheydnkeyt in Yiddish), for haya or satr in Islam, and modesty in Christianity [6] has resulted in a wide variety of specific dressing codes, all of which traditions place the greatest stress on the sexual purity or faithfulness of women and the discouragement of lust with its inevitable social dangers.

     The condemnation of immodest clothes and promiscuous behavior is complicated in the Hebrew scripture by the fact that the prophets were sometimes condemning acts that were not simply immoral but blasphemous as well since they sometimes referred to the Near Eastern fertility cults which included practices like temple prostitution.   Most prominently in the Canaanite cult of Qetesh which was then adopted in the Egyptian New Kingdom worshippers had sexual contact in the temple with a woman who might be either a dedicated servitor of the deity or a pious layperson fulfilling a once-in-a-lifetime obligation. [7]

     In the early Christian church candidates for baptism presented themselves naked.  The symbolism is clear in St. Cyril’s instructions.  “As soon, then, as ye entered, ye put off your tunic; and this was an image of putting off the old man with his deeds.  Having stripped yourselves, ye were naked; in this also imitating Christ, who was stripped naked on the Cross, and by His nakedness put off from Himself the principalities and powers, and openly triumphed over them on the tree.” [8]

     Blake was far from the first to attempt to recover a prelapsarian innocence through nudity.  In Christianity’s childhood, when orthodoxy was first debated and distinguished from heresy, among the cults most particularly condemned were those associated with the Carpocratian gnostics. [9]  In Augustine and other Christian polemicists one reads of otherwise unknown groups with the most extraordinary beliefs and practices.  A variety of Gnostic groups directly upended Jewish and Christian symbolic values and revered the serpent of Eden as the one who brought knowledge to humanity.  Among them were antinomians like the Nicolaitans who appeared early enough to be attacked in Revelations [10] and, according to Clement of Alexandria, “abandoned themselves to pleasures like goats in a life of shameless self-indulgence.”  If one is to believe Epiphanius, Borborite scripture described Christ’s having sex and used semen and menstrual blood in their eucharist.  Followers of Carpocrates in the second century formed communal groups in which private property was abolished and goods, including women, were held in common.  

    Augustine says of the Adamites as those who practiced nudity were termed, “Naked they gather together, men and women alike; naked they listen to readings; naked they pray; naked they celebrate the sacraments; and that is why they reckon their own church as paradise.”  [11]  A millennium later Europe experienced an efflorescence of neo-Adamite groups which began in the Middle Ages and then briefly flourished on the left wing of the Reformation.   During the fifteenth century a group of Adamites split from the Taborite movement in Bohemia and established a communist nudist colony on an island in the Nežárka.  In 1535 a group of Anabaptists in Amsterdam went naked through the streets prophesying.  They were all executed. 

     In 1641 a pamphlet [12] described an Adamite meeting in the supposed words of a participant who offers to explain their worship to a stranger.  “I will tell you what the brother-hood is, & give you good reason for it.”  Together they proceed to Marylebone Park “where were gathered at least one hundred men and women…[who] instantly stripped themselves to the bare skin, both men and women’ to listen to the Adamite’s sermon.”  The text is Genesis 2:25 “And they were both naked,” and the preacher concludes with the words, “We therefore, my dearely affected, that are voyd of these superstitious coverings, not onely Cloathes, but also Churches, for we prophesie in the open fields as our Father Adam did in the garden of Eden, must needs be in the state of innocence, as he was, for we have not so much as fig-leaves upon us: let us therefore reioyce exceedingly, and expresse our ioy in the lively act of Generation, and propagation of the godly, that may bee borne naked as we are at this present.”

     The same year another anonymous pamphlet noted, among the distressing variety of dissenters “there is sprung up a new sect of Adamists, who take their denomination from our first father Adam, and these with men and women promiscuously mingled have their private meetings, where they will not hear the word preached nor have sacrament administered to them but naked, not so much as fig-leaf breeches upon them, thinking thereby to imitate our first parents in their innocency.” [13]

     A number of seventeenth century Quakers in particular embraced nakedness, including Elizabeth and James Milner who are reported (by their enemies) to have called themselves Adam and Eve.  We know from both Defoe and Pepys of Solomon Eccles’ going about during the 1665 plague without clothing and with a brazier of burning coals on his head.  Poor Eccles was whipped and imprisoned for his brand of piety.  A disapproving contemporary relates how “A Maid-servant at Putney at her Masters house, when he and many friends were at Dinner with him, came into his Parlour amongst them stark-naked, and another day stark-naked from her Masters house through Wandsor and to Lambeth, or neer it, where some Water-men, by force, stop'd her, and carried her back. It was said, she intended to have entred London, over the Bridge, and so to have gone through London streets unto Westminster.”  The author goes on to describe other similar observations, including “a Man-quaker [who] went stark naked through all the Market, and on a Lords day in the same posture entred into the greatest Assembly in that Town, walking unto the further end of the lower cross through many people and then returned.”  [14]   In  America  female Quakers Lydia Wardel and Deborah Wilson followed their British cousins – both were whipped for their action.   Perhaps the last Quaker Adamite was Alexander Jaffray whose diary records his nude stroll through the streets of Aberdeen in 1677.  [15]

     Appearing in recent times, the epigone of this long tradition are the leaders of the modern “naturist” movement in the United States: Ilsley Boone, Henry S. Huntington, and Elton Raymond Shaw, all active Protestants, two of them clergymen.  They were influenced by the health food and exercise regimens of the late nineteenth century and advocated a lifestyle including vegetarianism, sunshine, calisthenics, and abstention from alcohol, tobacco, and coffee, similar to the Germanic nudism that persists strongly to this day under the formidable name of Freikörperkultur. [16]

     Surely all the religious enthusiasts of previous centuries would, like these “naturists,” utterly deny any erotic component to their sight of naked bodies, yet might it not be that the prodigious dynamo of human sexual energy simply kicked their psyches to a higher level from which they were better able to engage the cosmos or the divine?  After all, even prior to the Song of Songs sexual desire has served as the likeliest metaphor for spiritual ecstasy.  This tradition has flourished, recorded in countless texts including the parable of the ten virgins, the poetry of Mechthild and St. John of the Cross, as well as in non-Christian religious poetry including Krishnaite love poetry such as Meera Bai and much Sufi song, Rumi, Hafiz, and many others.

     The most recent widespread association of nudity and holiness is surely the cluster of cultural phenomena associated with the hip youth movement in the sixties.  Allen Ginsberg had begun taking off his clothes at social gatherings a decade earlier, and thousands followed his example in communes, concert venues, parks, “encounter groups,” and meditative sessions.  Even if the effect of such scenes is dimmed by the increased tolerance for revealing clothing and the prevalence of nudity in contemporary films, attempts to recover an Edenic joy through shedding clothes will surely continue, rooted as it is in the prodigious human sexual drive and the resulting customs, restrictions, and taboos.   

     Among non-Christians are a wide variety of naked worshippers even in the present day.  The Digambara or “sky-clad” Jain monks wear nothing at all and sweep the ground before them with a peacock feather broom to avoid treading on small creatures.  The Hindu Shaivite Naga sadhus wear no clothes, though they may wrap themselves at times in a single saffron cloth.  Generally meditating in mountain retreats, they use cannabis (and sometimes martial arts) in their spiritual practice.  Certain Muslim Sufi dervishes such as the Malmatis, likewise eschew clothing in their encampments.  There are also extraordinary individuals such as the eleventh century Sufi poet Baba Taher, called Oryan “the naked” and the remarkable Sarmad Kashani, a 17th century Jewish mystic, originally Jewish, who, while he lived in India, refused to conform to Judaism, Islam, or Hinduism, and was executed for heresy.  

     One might interrogate one’s feelings, standing naked in bedroom or bath or, like Blake, in a breezy garden and inquire the mixture in the mind of purity, integrity, and natural wholeness with shame, self-consciousness, and vulnerability.  If the positive sense of self predominates (as surely it should), one might perhaps begin to imagine the exhilaration of those from earlier centuries for whom the simple experience of shedding clothes reinforced the essential rightness of the body to the extent that they felt themselves absolved of original sin and return thereby to Paradise. 

 

 

 

1.  The story appears in Chapter 12 of Alexander Gilchrist’s Life of Blake.

2.  Genesis 3:7 and 3:21.

3.  Works and Days 390. 

4.  Numbers 21:6-9.  Cf. the rod of Asclepius (often in the U. S. confused with the caduceus).  This snake pole, however, was destroyed by the reformer Hezekiah (2 Kings 18:4).  For love poetry see the Song of Songs passim and, for instance, Proverbs 5:18-19 “Let your fountain be blessed, and rejoice in the wife of your youth, a lovely deer, a graceful doe. Let her breasts fill you at all times with delight; be intoxicated always in her love.”

5.  See, for example, Isaiah 47:1-3, Deuteronomy 28:47-48, and Lamentations 1:8.   For poverty, see Revelation 3:17-18.  On war, see Isaiah 20:2-4.  For the temple taboo, Exodus 20:26.

6.  Key scriptural passages include for Jews Micah 6:8, Proverbs 11:2,and Leviticus 18:6; for Muslims Quran 33:59 and 24:31, and for Christians 1 Timothy 2:9. -

7.  This practice is paralleled in modern times by such phenomena as free love in Noyes’ Oneida Colony in 19th century New York and the custom of Muslims having sex with a stranger as the culminating act of a pilgrimage to Gunung Kemukus in Java.  Many Hebrew-speaking Israelites seem to have participated in the Canaanite rites until the “Deuteronomic reforms” of King Josiah in the seventh century B. C. E.  the prohibition of temple prostitution is recorded in Deuteronomy 23:18, yet the remonstrances of Ezekiel and others they frequently reverted to the practice.  See Ezekiel 23:36-48, II Kings 23:37, 24:9, and 24:19.  In his rage Ezekiel approaches obscenity in 23:20.

8.  St Cyril, Mystagogic Catecheses.

9.  The following accounts are drawn from Augustine (De haeresibus 31), Clement of Alexandria (Stromata II, 20 and III.4), Epiphanius (Panarion, lii), Irenaeus (Ἔλεγχος καὶ ἀνατροπὴ τῆς ψευδωνύμου γνώσεως [called Against Heresies], I.25), and Theodoret (Haereticarum fabularum compendium, I, 6).

10.  2:6, 15. 

11. The Adamites sermon containing their manner of preaching, expounding, and prophesying, as it was delivered in Marie-bone Park.

12.  The Brownists Conventicle: Or an assemble of Brownists, Separatists, and Non-Conformists.

13.  For these and other accounts see Jacques Tual 1997. “Friends on the Fringe: A Further Assessment of Nude Prophesying in Early Quakerism” in Kiyoshi Tsuchiya (ed.), Dissent and Marginality: Studies in Literature and Religion.  I have also made use of Kenneth L. Carroll, “Early Quakers and Going Naked as a Sign,” Quaker History Vol. 67, No. 2.

14. Richard Blome, in his The Fanatick History (1660), p. 112.

15.  James Bowden, The History of the Society of Friends in America, 273.   

16.  One may sunbathe naked in urban German parks and clothesless hikers may enjoy naked trekking (“nacktwandern”) on parkland trails.

Kleist’s Zoroaster

Gebet des Zoroaster (Heinrich von Kleist, 1810)

Prayer of Zoroaster

(From an Indian manuscript, discovered by a traveler in the ruins of Palmyra)

O God, my father in heaven! You have given to humanity a free, marvelous, and abundant life. Powers of endless sorts, divine and animal, play together in his breast, enough to make him king over the earth. Nevertheless, overcome by unseen spirits, he lies for some astonishing and incomprehensible reason in chains and fetters. Misled by error, he abandons the highest and sets off toward wretchedness and nihilism, stricken with blindness. Yet, he likes himself in his condition; and, if the people of earlier times had never been and the holy songs that tell of it had vanished, we would have no idea of what peaks, o lord!, one may look about. Now and then you allow the scales to fall from the eyes of one of your sons that he whom you have chosen may glimpse the foolishness and error of his kind. You prepare him with the quiver of speech so that he, fearless and loving, may go among them with arrows, some sharp, some gentle, with which to wake them from the fabulous somnolence in which they lie. I, too, o lord, in your wisdom you have chosen, though unworthy for this work, and I can only follow orders. Penetrate me head to foot with the feeling of misery to which this age has sunken and with insight into all wretchedness, half-measures, deceit, and hypocrisy that are the consequences. Steel me with the ready strength to draw the bow of judgement and to choose the arrow with prudence and discernment, such that I encounter each individual appropriately: to cast down the fame of the transitory and incurable, to frighten the vicious and warn the erring, to tease the fools with the mere sound far over their heads. And teach me to weave a wreath with which I might crown in my own way those who please you. More than anything, o lord, may love awaken for you without which nothing, even the slightest, can succeed; so that your empire is glorified and expanded through all of space and time.



Zoroaster in German Romanticism


     Heinrich von Kleist’s “Gebet des Zoroaster” (“Zoroaster’s Prayer”) was published as the lead article in the first issue of his extraordinary short-lived daily periodical the Berliner Abendblätter. Almost a manifesto, it suggests the passion and ambition he brought to the first newspaper of Berlin. More broadly, it provides a succinct statement of Kleist’s Romantic sensibility. Zoroaster himself, the Persian prophet, has virtually nothing to do with Kleist’s cri de coeur and serves primarily as the poet’s mouthpiece, yet the choice of persona is nonetheless significant.
     The rise in trade and the assertion of imperial domination by European powers stimulated the vogue for chinoiserie in decorative arts and design. European writers in the eighteenth century, like more recent science fiction writers, used the perspective of the Other to provide new and critical perspectives on their own societies. [4] Among the many examples are Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (1721), Johnson’s Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia (1759), Voltaire’s Zadig subtitled Histoire Orientale (1747), and Beckford’s Vathek, first published as An Arabian Tale (1786).
     Apart from profit, fashion and social criticism, Asia also drew the attention of philosophers, including many who were dissatisfied with the Enlightenment faith in reason. In Germany and France such writers as Hamann and Herder have in recent years been considered to constitute a Counter-Enlightenment movement, to use Isaiah Berlin’s term. Only at the end of the eighteenth century were Europeans able to begin reading translations of major non-Christian works of spirituality, some by Christian missionaries interested in effectively combating the idolatry of the heathens, but others by Europeans who found profound wisdom in the East. [5]
     Interest in Zoroaster himself was surprisingly widespread. Jean-Philippe Rameau wrote an opera Zoroastre (1749). Guillaume Alexandre de Méhégan published a similarly titled novel in 1751 (claiming to be a translation from the "Chaldaean") in which Zoroaster was a wise ruler. Johann Friedrich Kleuker translated Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron’s 1771 French version of the Avesta into German in 1776 as Zend-Avesta, Zoroasters Lebendiges Wort. Voltaire not only made his Zadig a Zoroastrian, he also wrote the article “Zoroastre” (based in part on Thomas Hyde’s life of Zoroaster) in the Dictionnaire Philosophique (1764) in which he declares Zoroaster “the first of men after Confucius.” [6] Yet Voltaire also reacted against the supernatural and mythic stories of the prophet concluding “One cannot read two pages of the abominable rubbish attributed to this Zoroaster without pitying human nature.” [7]
     Writers who valorized emotion and imagination joined Voltaire in his criticism of the sociopolitical order, but some found his rational Deism spiritually wanting. Many sought wisdom in the unconscious, the child, the uneducated, the “primitive,” and the exotic. Such privileging did not begin with Rousseau nor did it end with nineteenth century realism. Yeats’ use of elements of Theosophical lore, Isherwood’s of Vedanta, and Ginsberg’s of Buddhism are likewise examples of Western literary appropriation of Asian cultural materials, with varying mixtures of the traditional and the novel. Blake revered the “ancient Poets” without specifying any in particular because their position in the childhood of humanity was enough to lend them authority. With the same Romantic bias some Americans think that the practices of native people must exemplify a mysterious greater wisdom.
     The praying persona has only the name of Zoroaster, which served Kleist as an empty tablet on which to write what he wished, but his use of the “Oriental” name entailed a weighty load of association. Like Blake in England, he seeks to restore a sense of the divine lost in the Enlightenment. His own crisis of faith is associated by most critics with his reading of Kant which led him to conclude that “dass hienieden keine Wahrheit zu finden ist” (“truth is not to be found here below”). [2]
     Zoroaster’s name allowed Kleist, not to convey information about the ancient prophet or his followers, but to express himself. By claiming to produce a translation of a non-Christian document, he might address the divine as he chose without danger of rebuke from the pious. He could fiercely denounce his own society with less worry about the censors.
     “Zoroaster’s Prayer” is driven by a passion which clearly is that of its author, though generalized and conventionalized. Inspired by what can only be called faith, it opens with an address to God the Father, and proceeds to enthusiastic praise of humans as kings of the earth, given marvelous powers. Though Zoroastrianism is a radically dualistic vision like the later Manichaeism, the origin of suffering and wickedness is here unspecified except as the result of error to which people have become habituated, even perversely attached. Correction can come according to the prayer, not through reasoning, but through a sort of grace that grants rhetorical skills to prophets who are chosen by God, the “quiver of speech,” “bow of judgement,” and well-chosen convincing “arrows” of argument. The speaker concludes by extolling love “without which nothing, even the slightest, can succeed; so that your [God’s] empire is glorified and expanded through all of space and time.” [3] The speaker s recommends the specifically non-rational values of faith and love, though he is rather foggy about the basis and the character of that belief, there is no doubt about his dissatisfaction with the spirit of the age.
     German Romantics sought in a variety of ways to register dissatisfaction with rationalism as a sufficient means of investigating the world. The Schlegel brothers did important philological work on Asian texts and linguistic study while seeking the novelty of a non-European perspective as well as founding the house organ of German Romanticism the Athenaeum in 1798. Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder and Ludwig Tieck praised medieval and Renaissance art over that of their own day primarily for its perceived greater emotion. Herder and Schelling expounded a Naturphilosophie based in the subjective, while to Scheleiermacher religion was “essentially an intuition or a feeling.” [8] Like Novalis whose “blue flower” represented a novel and similarly vague sort of mysticism, Kleist spoke for a revolution in sensibility in which Asian spirituality played an oppositional role recognizable to those who recall the popularity over a period of years of books like Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet (1923), Black Elk Speaks (1932), the Richard Wilhelm/Cary Baynes I Ching (1950), and the Coleman Barks version of Rumi (We Are Three 1987 and a great many more publications since). Zoroaster might repeat his prayer today with little loss of relevance. He would surely find readers sufficiently Romantic still in the twenty-first century to feel its resonance. After all, others both before and since Heinrich von Kleist have declared with him that “all you need is love.”




1. Berliner Abendblätter, 1stes Blatt., den 1sten October 1810. The journal not only took an unusually independent political stance under censorship, it published Achim von Arnim , Clemens Brentano , Wilhelm Grimm , and Friedrich Schleiermacher among others as well as informed articles on scientific developments. It lasted only six months; eight months after the journal’s demise, Kleist killed himself.

2. Letter to Wilhelmine March 22, 1801. A substantial discussion of the philosophic influences is available in D. F. S. Scott, “Heinrich von Kleist's Kant Crisis,” The Modern Language Review, vol. 42, No. 4 (Oct., 1947), pp. 474-484. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3716801?seq=11#metadata_info_tab_contents

3. One might have thought that God’s empire already extended through all space and time.

4. See Jürgen Osterhammel (trans. Robert Savage), Unfabling the East: The Enlightenment's Encounter with Asia.

5. To give only two examples Abraham Hyacynthe Anquetil du Perron, who translated the Avesta in 1771 after long study with Parsi scholars and divines and Charles Wilkins, translator of the Bhagavad Gita (1785). Blake did a painting of Wilkins and the pandits on the occasion of the Gita’s publication; it is unfortunately lost.

6. “Zoroastre était le premier des hommes après Confucius.”

7. “On ne peut lire deux pages de l’abominable fatras attribué à ce Zoroastre sans avoir pitié de la nature humaine.”

8. In his Addresses on Religion 1799. The German title is significant: Über die Religion: Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern (On Religion: Lectures to the Sophisticated among its Despisers).