Transparency and Dissimulation (eBook)

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Verena Olejniczak Lobsien, Humboldt University Berlin, Germany.

Foreword 6
Table of Contents 8
CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION »GOOD WORKS« AND »FINE THINGS« 10
CHAPTER 2: CIRCULARITIES OR THE POETICS OF RETURN 40
CHAPTER 3: KNOWLEDGE AND HAPPINESS 96
CHAPTER 4: TRANSPARENT SPHERES, OR THE BEAUTY OF CREATION 194
CHAPTER 5: TRANSPARENT DUPLICITIES 246
BIBLIOGRAPHY 294
INDEX 314

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION »GOOD WORKS« AND »FINE THINGS« (p. 1-2)

Neoplatonic Configurations in Seventeenth-Century English Literature and Culture


Enigma and Excess

»The world is, as one calls it, Ænigma Dei.« This is one of the reasons, Nathanael Culverwell claims, why we need the Spiritual Opticks he sets out to provide. His treatise under this title was published posthumously in 1651 with the subtitle »A Glasse Discovering the weaknesse and imperfection of a Christians knowledge in this life«. It was, as Culverwell's friend and editor W.D. points out in his epistle »To the Reader«, »intended onely for a taste« of Culverwell's work on The Light of Nature. It is perhaps not surprising that a mid-seventeenth century Cambridge theologian should be concerned with questions of how God's truth is hidden in the visible world, what it consists in, and why it is not immediately apparent. It is, however, less self-evident why his explication of verse 13. 12 in Paul's First Epistle to the Corinthians – For now we see through a glasse darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part, but then shall I know even as also I am known – should place so little emphasis on the eschatological promise contained in these well-known words and so much on the modes of ignorance they imply. It is precisely the types and kinds of unknowing that Culverwell's exegesis unfolds in some detail: the ways of not seeing, or rather, of not seeing properly. He describes what impedes cognition and hinders insight; he analyses the obstacles inhibiting certain knowledge, be they deficiencies in our epistemological equipment or distortions of our spiritual perspective.

Interest is focussed not in the first place on the state to come, adumbrated in the apocalyptical meanings of a ›faceto- face‹ recognition of the divine, but on the intervening medium responsible for the ›darkness‹ and partiality of our temporal vision as well as on the glimpses ofthe beyond it nonetheless affords. It is less the solution to the ›enigma‹ posed by the visible world that commands our attention, but the riddle itself; the ways in which the Book of Nature has become unreadable and the ways in which it communicates in spite of this, with illegible letters still signifying transcendence. If Culverwell's treatise exhorts us to decipher the »print of a Deity« in creation and to explore the manner in which this is defaced or appears obscure, it can be said in a more general sense to epitomise a problem occupying seventeenthcentury religious as well as scientific mentalities, resonating not last in the products of the artistic imagination: the problem of transparency.

Transparency and its counterpart, the ›hiddenness‹, obscurity or opacity of transcendence which I refer to as dissimulation, are at the heart of my study of seventeenth-century literary texts. My guiding intuition is that for the seventeenth century the question of transparency became more pressing than in preceding centuries, and than it was to become again at the end of the long English Reformation leading up to the more settled eighteenth century. This is of course to speak very loosely, and it should be stated from the outset that I am not primarily interested in questions of periodisation or in the history of ideas in a traditional sense.