The Manichaean Connection
Over the past months there has been a number of references on dotCom to a “Manichaean” mindset. Now The New Yorker has belatedly entered the lists.
Adam Kirsch has a review of Ann Wroe’s new book, Being Shelley, which he entitles: “Avenging Angel: Inside Shelley’s Manichaean Mind.”
Here’s some of what he writes:
Quite simply, Shelley believed that anyone who disagreed with him was
depraved at heart. As a result, his political vision was essentially
Manichaean: “The Manichaean philosophy respecting the origin and
government of the world, if not true, is at least an hypothesis
conformable to the experience of actual facts,” he wrote. Mankind was
made miserable by the willful selfishness of tyrants and priests. And
the millennium, in Shelley’s limitless, idealizing vision, was not just
a matter of universal suffrage. In “Prometheus Unbound,” he imagines it
as a time when the mountains of the moon turn into “living fountains,”
“ugly human shapes and visages” grow “mild and lovely,” and it becomes
“the pain of bliss / To move, to breathe, to be.”
And Kirsch concludes:
Shelley, who frequently quoted the Platonic injunction “Know
thyself,” never knew himself well enough to acknowledge the intolerance
and self-righteousness that went hand in hand with his sublime egotism.
Instead, exiled in Italy with few friends or readers, he indulged in
the voluptuous self-pity that animates so many of his poems. In his own
eyes, he was always misunderstood by the world, like the lonely
creature he wrote about in “The Sensitive Plant”: “But none ever
trembled and panted with bliss / In the garden, the field, or the
wilderness, / Like a doe in the noon-tide with love’s sweet want, / As
the companionless Sensitive Plant.”
The most important limitation of Wroe’s method is that it leaves her
with as little critical perspective on Shelley as Shelley had himself.
Being Shelley means feeling as Shelley felt, and Wroe tremblingly
recapitulates the poet’s sense of being too fragile for this world:
“Rain punished Shelley, too. He stood in it, his heart naked to its
freezing, battering drops.” By the time he drowns, Wroe’s Shelley has
become literally angelic, ready to return to his heavenly home: “White
wings unfolded vastly from his shoulders, as if through this battering
frenzy he could rise to the upper sky.” But, if there is one lesson to
be drawn from Shelley’s life and work, it is that you can’t trust a man
who believes he is an angel.
There is something of the gnostic in Shelley’s vision also: Divine spirit trapped in the gross and iniquitous material world, enslaved by the suffocating templates of literary and behavioral norms.
It seems perhaps important to clarify a distinction between Manicheanism and a belief in the powerful and persistent presence of evil in the world. The former posits Good and Evil as co-equal forces, and, by implication also renders both terms relative to the individual. One can deny such equality, affirm the ultimacy of Good, and also affirm the powerful and persistent presence of evil in the world. Among the things that I think Catholics by and large do better than Protestants is appreciating the reality of true evil.
Poor Mani. Now he’s being blamed for artistic petulance.
“Manichaean” seems to have become the go-to word when “dualism” or “dualistic” would probably work just as well or even better.
As most people who post here know, Augustine was attracted for some time to the equilibrium between Good and Evil, Light and Dark in Manicheanism, but, among other weaknesses in the religion, he came to realize that the dualism supposedly inherent in individuals (the body as evil, the soul as good) had provided him with the means for rationalizing and excusing his immoral behavior.
I hope Fr. Imbelli won’t mind if I go a bit off topic (well, a lot, if truth be told), but the latest TIME magazine has a lengthy article about a book we’ll likely be hearing more about in the coming weeks. Compiled by Mother Teresa’s postulator for her cause for canonization, the book contains letters written by Mother Teresa to her spiritual directors about her inner spiritual life, including revelations about the prolonged feelings of abandonment and estrangement from God she felt for much of the last 50 years of her life. Mother Teresa wanted the letters destroyed, but powers that be in the Church decided differently. The book, “Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light,” will be released by Doubleday on 9/4/07.
Here’s the link to the IMO very interesting TIME article:
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1655415,00.html?xid=feed-yahoo-full-world
Dear William,
Many thanks for “going off topic.” I can see why the article intrigued you (as it did me). You’ve probably already seen that I thought it merited a separate post.
Shelley was a very intelligent poet, perhaps the most intelligent English poet since Milton.
His crowning work, “Adonais,” is the most potent reactualization of the spirit and thought of Plotinus in the modern world.
Its philosophy is neither gnostic nor manichean, but Plotinian, a quite different thing; and Plotinus has figured in history — for Augustine and Gregory of Nyssa — as a forecourt of Christianity.
Adam Kirsch has basic problems with poetic discourse, as shown in this wooden comment: “In “Adonais,” he seems to suggest that the right-wing reviewers who panned Keats’s “Endymion” actually did not have souls. While the dead poet’s “pure spirit” will become “a portion of the Eternal,” he writes, their “cold embers” will “choke the sordid hearth of shame.” ” He has the same literalistic response to the flamboyant utopian conclusion of “Prometheus Unbound.”
This is of a piece with the reductive biologism, psychologism, and political correctness that are so often used by journalists and literary critics to trash hallowed reputations today. His piece could have been penned by the dismissive critics of Shelley’s own day; and it is a testimony to the enduring fiber of Shelley’s greatest utterances that despite deluges of such snide commentary they remain secure in the firmament of literature today.
Note that in judging the poet to be tainted by a monstrous egotism Kirsch finds the closest comparison for this to be with Jesus… What he really dislikes about Shelley is his prophetic freedom, something equalled only by Blake in English culture. And Shelley gave his prophetic message a classical, highly reflected garb that Blake failed to attain, thanks to his profound mastery of literary and philosophical classics in French, German, Spanish, Italian, Latin and Greek — a European literacy that the English-speaking world has never fully appreciated. What sought to voice itself through Shelley uncannily mastered the instruments that it needed, wearing out its vehicle or driving him to death at the age of 29. And the resultant prophecy is not demonic, gnostic, or manichean, but deeply humanistic — a message about freedom, justice, love, compassion, and the transcendental reach of the divine.
Joseph,
“freedom, justice, love, compassion”
and abandonment of wife and children!
Prophetic of that “humanism” which the 20th century has democratically extended.
I am in Rome today, and think of Shelley, who was steeped in this city and left some of his soul behind here. Shelley, note, was not a libertine like Byron, whose behavior shocked him, but reflected seriously on love and sexual ethics (translating the Symposium and writing an essay On Love). As far as I know, he had sexual intercourse with only two women, both of whom happened to be his wife. The complaint about marriage in Epipsychidion reflects a bleak patch in his own marriage at the time (with one changed friend, perhaps a jealous foe, The longest and the weariest journey go). His “free love” may have been no more than a contingent need from warmer female sympathy to offset alienation from Mary. He can hardly have sustained sexual relations with Clair Clairmont (Byron’s mistress), Emilia Viviani (imprisoned in a convent) or Jane Williams (whose marriage he admired), and if he was a philanderer he would hardly have been remembered with such devotion by Mary later. Perhaps his views on love, like his views on religion and politics, should be seen as a purge of hypocrisy rather than as the weirdly destructive attitudes some (not all) Victorians found in them. The tragedy of his first marriage should not be exploited from moralistic purposes, and it is untrue that he abandoned his children. He did all in his power to keep them, but was no trusted by the English courts. The death of I think two children by Mary left him and her griefstricken and was one of the strains in their marriage. All in all, I would see Shelley as a superior moral being, though that is not the essential point about his prophetic and poetic greatness.