The Mosaic Constitution: Political Theology and Imagination from Machiavelli to Milton 9780226315430

Citation preview

the mosaic constitution

the mosaic constitution

Political Theology and Imagination from Machiavelli to Milton

graham hammill

the university of chicago press chicago and london

graham hammill is professor of English at the University at Buffalo, SUNY. He is the author of Sexuality and Form and coeditor of Political Theology and Early Modernity, both published by the University of Chicago Press. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2012 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2012. Printed in the United States of America 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12

1 2 3 4 5

isbn-13: 978-0-226-31542-3 (cloth) isbn-10: 0-226-31542-8 (cloth) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hammill, Graham L. The Mosaic constitution : political theology and imagination from Machiavelli to Milton / Graham Hammill. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn-13: 978-0-226-31542-3 (hardcover : alkaline paper) isbn-10: 0-226-31542-8 (hardcover : alkaline paper) 1. Religion and politics. 2. Political science—History. 3. English literature—Early modern, 1500–1700— History and criticism. I. Title. BL65.P7H357 2012 320.01—dc23 2011037292 This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z 39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

FOR R ICH AR D

contents

Acknowledgments Abbreviations 1.

ix xi

Introduction

1

Part One: Moses and Political Theology 2.

Machiavelli and Hebrew Scripture

31

3.

Spinoza and the Theological Imaginary

67

Part Two: The Mosaic Constitution in England: Sovereignty, Government, Literature,1590–1630 4.

Marlowe and the Counter-Reformation

103

5.

Drayton and the Plague

138

Part Three: Political Making, Literary Making, 1651–1671 6.

Marvell’s Mosaic Moment

173

7.

Harrington’s Poetics of Government

208

8.

Paradise Regained and the Limits of Toleration

243

Notes Index

321

285

vii

ack now ledgments

T

his book began as an essay. I wanted to understand why a group of disparate writers from Machiavelli to Freud were so interested in Moses as a founder of state. In considering this question, I have been helped by a number of friends and colleagues who let me see that there was a book in this question and that it was a book worth writing. I am profoundly grateful for their encouragement, questions, and support. The project took shape in part through ongoing conversations with Julia Reinhard Lupton; her own work on political theology has been an inspiration. Kathy Biddick offered valuable comments at the beginning of the project and has been a generous reader throughout. Victoria Kahn gave astute criticism of several chapters and helped me see the broader stakes of the project as a whole. I am especially indebted to Ewa Ziarek for our weekly writing sessions, which made fi nishing this book fun. A number of colleagues at the University of Notre Dame and the University at Buffalo, SUNY, have offered ideas and advice. I thank Rachel Ablow, James Bono, Carrie Bramen, Gerald Bruns, Tim Dean, Maud Ellmann, Stephen Fallon, Stephen Fredman, Sandra Gustafson, James Holstun, Jesse Lander, Ruth Mack, Carla Mazzio, Susannah Monta, Hindy Najman, Steven Miller, Maura Nolan, Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, John Sitter, and David Thomas. I taught material from this book in several graduate and undergraduate courses at Notre Dame and SUNY-Buffalo, and I thank the students in those courses for their exemplary patience, insightful questions, and willingness to participate in the shaping of arguments in progress. I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge several superb research assistants: Sarah Dawson, Joel Dodson, Kaplan Harris, Amanda Michaels, and Maryam Zomorodian. Both Notre Dame and SUNY-Buffalo provided much needed release time from teaching, which allowed me to research and write this book. ix

x

acknowledgments

The College of Arts and Letters at SUNY-Buffalo also helped subsidize the images in this book. I am grateful to both institutions. I have benefited immensely from presenting my work at a number of institutions, including Cornell University; Louisiana State University (Baton Rouge); Melbourne Law School; NYU; Temple University; UCLA; University at Albany, SUNY; University of California, Berkeley; University of California, Irvine; University of Maryland, College Park; and Williams College. I am grateful to my hosts and audiences for questions and insights that have shaped my thinking in ways I never anticipated. For good-natured questions, conversation, and help of all sorts, I thank Richard Barney, C. D. Blanton, Harry Berger, Matthew Biberman, Michael Dillon, Lowell Gallagher, Stephen Guy-Bray, Rebeca Helfer, Heather Hirschfeld, Constance Jordan, András Kiséry, Jacques Lezra, David Loewenstein, Philip Lorenz, Cynthia Marshall, Suzanne Marchand, David Lee Miller, Nicole Miller, Ian Munro, Ineke Murakami, Anne Orford, Kenneth Reinhard, Jennifer Rust, Regina Schwartz, Victoria Silver, Rei Terada, and William West. I am deeply indebted to two readers for the University of Chicago Press—Christopher Pye and Marshall Grossman—for providing invaluable criticism and encouragement. I very much wish that Marshall and Cynthia were around to see this book in print. At the Press, Alan Thomas has been a tremendous editor. His interest in this project during its early stages helped me see that there was indeed a book here, and his gentle probing at just the right moment helped me bring this project to a conclusion. Randy Petilos has made the process of turning a manuscript into a book a pleasure. Jo Ann Kiser is a meticulous copy editor. My husband, Richard Ridenour, has lived with this project for almost as long as I have. His presence has enriched life in every way imaginable. *

*

*

The second half of chapter 4 fi rst appeared in The Return of Theory in Early Modern English Studies: Tarrying with the Subjunctive, edited by Paul Cerfalu and Bryan Reynolds (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); introduction, selection and editorial matter © Paul Cefalu and Bryan Reynolds, individual chapters © contributors 2011, reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan. An earlier version of half of chapter 5 first appeared in Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 10, no. 2 (Fall 2010), reprinted by arrangement with the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies.

abbr ev iations

CPW

Complete Prose Works of John Milton, gen. ed. Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953–82).

D

Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses, in Tutte le Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, ed. Guido Mazzoni and Mario Casella (Florence: G. Barbèra Editore, 1929). Occasionally, I cite from the English translation of The Discourses, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). References to the English are given after the Italian. At times, I silently alter the English translation.

L

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. J. C. A. Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).

P

Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, in Tutte le Opere di Niccolò Machiavelli, ed. Guido Mazzoni and Mario Casella (Florence: G. Barbèra Editore, 1929). Occasionally, I cite from the English translation of The Prince, trans. Luigi Ricci (New York: Signet, 1999). References to the English are given after the Italian. At times, I silently alter the English translation.

ST

St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 3 vols. (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1947).

TTP

Baruch Spinoza, Theologico-Political Treatise, in Spinoza: Complete Works, ed. Michael L. Morgan, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2002). Occasionally, I cite the Latin edition in Spinoza Opera. ed. Carl Gebhardt, 4 vols. (Heidelberg: Carl Winters, 1925), vol. 2. References to the Latin are given after references to the English.

WFB

The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding et al., 15 vols. (Boston: Taggard & Thompson, 1861–64). xi

xii

abbreviations

Quotes from the Bible are cited as follows: DB

The Holie Bible faithful translated into English, out of the authentical Latin (Douay: Printed by Lawrence Kellam, at the sign of the Holy Lamb, 1609–10).

G

The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition, intro. Lloyd E. Berry (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981).

JPS

The JPS Hebrew-English Tanakh, gen. ed. David E. Sulomn Stein (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1999).

KJV

The Bible: The Authorized King James Version, intro. and annot. Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Unless otherwise noted, references to Tacitus and Lucan are from the Loeb Classical Library, published by Harvard University Press.

ch apter one

Introduction

T

his book analyzes the uses and implications of a scriptural figure that becomes central in early modern political thinking and writing about government and the state: Moses’s constitution of Israel as a people bound by the rule of law. Until the sixteenth century, the preferred scriptural model for representing political authority among Christian writers in the West tended to be Solomon, the philosopher-king noted for his wisdom who, perhaps most significantly for medieval writers, inherited his kingdom from his father.1 But by the middle of the seventeenth century, Moses had become a perennial figure for exploring the politics of the early modern state. In The Prince, Machiavelli uses Moses to measure Savonarola’s successes and failures, in the process showing how a new prince needs the fiction of religion to maintain obedience through the manipulation of belief. Almost a hundred and fi fty years later, in Leviathan, Hobbes acknowledges that any theory of the modern state has to account for revelation as well as reason. He then goes on to interpret the Mosaic covenant in such a way that locates the authority to determine the truth of revelation in the state instead of in the Catholic Church or the priesthood of all believers. Writing in the wake of Machiavelli and Hobbes, in Oceana and The Art of Lawgiving James Harrington presents the Mosaic constitution as a scene of communication in order to legitimate popular sovereignty, and in the Theologico-Political Treatise Spinoza refashions the Mosaic constitution through the twinned paradigms of natural philosophy and humanist philology in order to authorize the liberty of the citizenry against the prince’s tendencies toward mystification, which Spinoza calls the “mystery of despotism” (TTP 389). When read from the perspective of a purely secular politics, these uses of Hebrew scripture might seem old-fashioned, leftovers from an age in 1

2

chapter one

need of theological or religious legitimation. Or, at best, they might seem like rhetorical ploys to persuade those who would otherwise be recalcitrant to an emerging sense of the political to join secular public life.2 However, it will be my argument that the Mosaic constitution had an integral role to play in the emergence of early modern concepts of the state. Like the story of Oedipus or Antigone, the Mosaic constitution was one of the founding fictions of early modern political life.3 Beginning with Machiavelli’s analysis of the new prince and continuing up through seventeenthcentury theories of voluntary submission and the social contract, the Mosaic constitution served as a laboratory for cultural experimentation that preceded, precipitated, and responded to political invention. Through the revision and expansion of Moses’s constitution of Israel as a people unified by law and collected under the rule of a single sovereign, early modern literary and political writers attempted to grasp and probe key problems, dynamics, and relationships that defi ned the early modern state, including toleration and the confl ictual character of politics; the fraught relations among revelation, political authority, and literary authorship; and the role of fiction in defi ning and delimiting obedience, liberty, and the right to resist coercive authority.4 I intend the phrase “the Mosaic constitution” to be taken in two related ways. In the fi rst case, the phrase denotes the use of Mosaic narrative to theorize political community. Without a doubt, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers across a range of religious and political commitments recognized in Mosaic law a model for good government.5 Even as Luther argued against Jacob Strauss, Wolfgang Stein, and the radical Reformers that Mosaic law was no more or less righteous than other legal systems, he acknowledged that there were certain laws instituted by Moses that the Saxon princes would be wise to adopt. Religiously speaking, Christians are no more obligated to Mosaic law than they are to Roman law, Luther argued. But he also proposed that the comparative study of Mosaic and Saxon law could lead to the development of better and more just secular government, especially concerning taxation and the treatment of the poor.6 Luther was not alone in thinking of Mosaic law as a good model for secular government. He was joined by writers such as Milton, Jean Bodin, Hugo Grotius, and John Selden, among many others, all of whom turned to the Mosaic constitution to elaborate on the emerging early modern state. In the second case, “the Mosaic constitution” extends beyond the use of Hebrew scripture to provide an exemplary model of political community and includes the use of Moses to flag a conceptual problem. Here, the Mo-

introduction

3

saic constitution refers to the troublesome intersection of religious belief and the secular state. Early modern writers turned to Mosaic law for more than comparative legal studies. As we shall see in the pages that follow, they turned to Hebrew scripture to posit and explore the complex relations between politics and belief that inform the early modern state. Put most broadly, this book’s central thesis is that the Mosaic constitution figures a productive intersection—or what the philosopher Charles Taylor calls a point of cross-pressure7—between religious belief and paradigms of human creation that is unique to an early modern sense of political theology. Political theology is more than just a synthesis of religion and the state. From the perspective of the Mosaic constitution, it concerns an ongoing entanglement and antagonism between two discrete discourses and styles of thinking—politics and theology—that should by all rights have little to do with one another. This second understanding is particularly relevant for the literary writers who explored the Mosaic constitution in its various dimensions. Because Hebrew scripture is so attentive to political confl ict and its own status as a written text, Mosaic narrative gave early modern writers a vocabulary, a model, and an imaginative ground for exploring, critiquing, anatomizing, and reformulating divine authority as a product of political and literary imagination. The sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers whom I consider here developed relations between religious belief and human creation in a variety of ways. They consulted Hebrew scripture to expound upon and debate the multiple roles of sovereignty, obligation, and imagination in the constitution of political community.

POLITICAL THEOLOGY, METAPHOR, IMAGINATION The primary reason that Moses became such a significant figure in early modern Europe is that Mosaic narrative foregrounds the problem of constituting power. Jewish writers, Christian writers who were neither particularly philo-Semitic nor anti-Semitic, and even writers who were purportedly atheists all turned their attention to Moses in order to understand, develop, and authorize the human capacity for political making. In addition to being a lawgiver, Moses was also a writer, and part of the attraction of the Mosaic constitution is that it let a host of early modern writers raise questions about constituting power in relation to political and religious representation.8 Although none of these writers directly questioned Hebrew scripture as a sacred text, all of them were engaged in questioning what the sacred nature of Hebrew scripture might entail. For Spinoza and Milton, scripture is sacred because it is a common text, a text that has the

4

chapter one

capacity to posit and preserve community through polemical debate over interpretive differences, whereas for Hobbes scripture is sacred because it is a public text, a text that constitutes a public sphere through and in relation to a sovereign and authoritative interpreter. Hobbes’s position is antithetical to Spinoza’s and Milton’s in that, where they argue for and legitimate community through dissension, he validates the personal authority of the sovereign. But all three share the assumption that constituting power involves the formation of political community through the faculty of imagination. The phrase “constituting power” was invented by the eighteenthcentury French writer Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès in order to acknowledge and legitimate the role of the third estate in the French Revolution. Sieyès distinguished between constituting power, the power to make a new political order, and constituted power, the power that preserves the already established order. He then argued that the real locus of constituting power is the sovereign nation, which precedes any legal bonds and, therefore, has the absolute authority to remake the existing political order.9 But the concept of constituting power precedes Sieyès’s elaboration of it. In the late sixteenth century, English Jesuits explored alternative models of constituting power as a way to curb what they perceived to be the illegitimate expansion of monarchical authority under Elizabeth. As early as the 1572 Treatise of Treasons, English Catholics argued that Elizabeth received her legitimacy from the people, who had the right to “deliver” her from her own tyrannical rule should she not do so herself.10 Even though recusant writers wanted a better monarch and not a new form of government, they also began to experiment with the idea that monarchy is based on election (as sanctified by the Church) and not heredity per se. Writing on the eve of the Restoration, the English writer George Lawson developed a version of constituting power in his discussion of monarchy and sovereignty by arguing that majesty is both real and personal. “Reall,” he writes, “is in the community, and is greater than Personall, which is the power of a Common-wealth already constituted.”11 The implication of Lawson’s argument is that the community is not just obligated to follow laws issued by parliament or monarch but also has the right to suspend and remake the constituted order in response to tyranny, when personal majesty gets too personal, as it were. In The Second Treatise of Government, John Locke sharpened Lawson’s argument by proposing that while “there can be but one supreme power, which is the legislative,” nevertheless since legislative power is “fiduciary,” “there remains still in the people a supreme power to remove or alter the legislative, when they fi nd the legislative act contrary

introduction

5

to the trust reposed in them.”12 As Andreas Kalyvas puts it, these writers oppose a paradigm in which sovereignty is taken to be “the ultimate coercive power” with one in which sovereignty is understood “as the power to found, to posit, to constitute, that is, as constituent power.”13 The contemporary Italian political theorist Antonio Negri argues, persuasively to my mind, that constituting power becomes a significant conceptual problem once Machiavelli argues for the project of establishing a new state.14 Negri’s purpose in making this claim is to locate a line of radical political thinkers from Machiavelli to Lenin who work to elaborate a purely secular vision of political making—shorn of its links to discourses of transcendence. However, the problem with constituting power is that it endlessly falls into theological modes of thinking and representation. This is because constituting power constitutes more than collective life. To succeed as an act of political making, constituting power must also constitute the overarching conceptions of justice, the conditions of social recognition and nonrecognition, that transcend political community and through which political community is achieved. I do not mean to suggest that political communities are determined by God or Platonic ideals but rather that political making assumes supplemental discourses—myths and founding fictions—that play the role of the transcendent for particular political communities.15 The twentieth-century German jurist Carl Schmitt exploits this need for a supplemental discourse in his account of political theology. Schmitt introduces the concept of political theology as a response to Sieyès’s definition of constituting power, arguing that the capacity for political making cannot lie in the “organic unity” of the people because the people cannot actualize their own will without some representative figure, some transcendental figure who rules over the group and expresses its collective will.16 Schmitt’s general point strikes me as correct. There can be no group without some representative that is not itself included within the group. Nevertheless, he also identifies in very specific terms the figure that transcends and represents the unity of the people. Reviving late sixteenthcentury proto-absolutist political theory against Sieyès’s legitimation of the French Revolution, Schmitt locates political making in the personal authority, or what he calls the decisionist character, of the sovereign, who is analogous to God. “All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts,” he asserts, “not only because of their historical development . . . but also because of their systematic nature.”17 Just as theology needs a God who can intervene in and suspend the natural order, so too does the state need a sovereign who can stand above

6

chapter one

the law, suspend it, and decide exceptional emergency situations—that is, decide where there is an extreme emergency as well as what must be done to eliminate it.”18 We need not follow Schmitt’s arguments for the personal authority of the sovereign to understand the links between constituting power and political theology that he discusses. Even a political philosopher like Hannah Arendt, who is deeply opposed to Schmitt’s revival of absolutism, sees something significant in his argument. Responding to Schmitt, Arendt proposes that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century political writers took up ready-to-hand theological concepts in an attempt to theorize new arrangements of authority and power. As she notes in On Revolution, the separation of politics from religion that for her characterizes modern politics placed a special burden on religion to authorize political making. The numerous difficulties and perplexities, theoretical and practical, that have beset the public, political realm ever since the rise of the secular, the very fact that secularization was accompanied by the rise of absolutism and the downfall of absolutism followed by revolutions whose chief perplexity was where to fi nd an absolute from which to derive authority for law and power, could well be taken to demonstrate that politics and the state needed the sanction of religion even more urgently than religion and the churches had ever needed the support of princes.19

Arendt makes this assertion as part of a broader argument to show how the American Revolution escaped the burden of European political theology. For her, the link between constituting power and political theology is fundamentally historical and, therefore, can be left in the past. But one implication of Arendt’s claim is that the relation between religion and political making is itself fundamentally inventive and creative. From one perspective, we might say that the state needed religion and, indeed, reinvented it for its own purposes. But as we shall see, religion was not just an instrument in the service of the early modern state. From another perspective, we can say that political and literary writers adopted theological concepts to do more than just to buttress juridical authority. They used theological concepts and religious discourses to respond to “perplexities,” to approximate understandings of political phenomenon that would otherwise remain unvoiced, if not invisible. It may well be that political thinking about constituting power in early modern Europe has its roots in the theological distinction that William of

introduction

7

Ockham and his followers drew in the fourteenth century between God’s potentia absoluta and his potentia ordinata, that is, between God’s absolute power to do whatever he wills and the restricted order to which he has committed himself. The political problem of constituting power may already be a theological problem. Ockham defends God’s omnipotence by emphasizing his radical ability to create outside the bounds of any already established order and then argues that God confi nes himself to an ordained system so that his will can become knowable to human reason.20 Like the nominalists’ God, the Machiavellian founder expresses a seemingly absolute power in the act of creating a new legal order. Romulus established the common good when he murdered his brother Remus and instituted the Roman senate, and Numa reinforced the common good when he feigned revelation in order to compel Roman citizens to obey the rule of law. In both instances, the constitution of the common good is predicated upon an act that could only be deemed bad by the system of rules that has been constituted. Moreover, in his account of the history of the Roman republic, Machiavelli argues that civic virtue can be reestablished only by acts of extreme violence, like Junius Brutus murdering his sons, that hearken back to the founding act. In the Discourses, the theologico-political question becomes, how does the myth of founding commit the ruler to a legal order while at the same time preserving the creative capacity of the political? Hebrew scripture differs from nominalist and Roman models in that scripture links constituting power more explicitly to creaturely life. Indeed, the book of Exodus can be read as a key text on political invention as biopolitics. From its very beginning, Exodus pits Israel’s creaturely fecundity against the tyranny of Egyptian rule. “The Israelites were fertile and prolific; they multiplied and increased very greatly, so that the land was fi lled with them [paru vayeesh’r’tzu vayeer’bu vaya’atz’mu]” (JPS Exod. 1:7). Both thematically in its use of “multiply” and “increase” and rhetorically in its piling on of verbs—multiplied, increased, fi lled—this passage harkens back to Genesis, recalling both the injunction to increase and multiply and God’s promise that humans will have dominion over the creeping and swarming reptilian things. This connection is not lost on medieval rabbis, who compared the Israelite’s fecundity with the supposed capacity of reptiles to give birth to seventy offspring at once.21 By the beginning of Exodus, however, the relation between creaturely life and dominion has become a critical problem. In Genesis humanity is to have dominion over “all the living things that creep on earth [ha’rehmes ha’romeys al-ha’aretz]” (Gen. 1:28), but by Exodus Israel has become that

8

chapter one

creeping thing, an extremely fertile group of resident aliens in Egypt ruled over by a foreign power that enslaves the Hebrews and claims the right of dominion over them. Initially, Pharaoh submits the Israelites to forced labor in hopes of curtailing their creaturely expansion, and when this fails, he issues the order to have the midwives murder all the fi rstborn sons of Israel. When both efforts fail, Pharaoh issues a more extreme command, ordering “all his people,” Israelites and Egyptians both, to drown their newly born sons (Exod. 1:22). Exodus represents the Mosaic constitution as both a doubling of and a distancing from Pharaonic rule. As the founder of a new political order, Moses faces the problem of translating a creeping multitude, affiliated by tribal bonds and kinship structures, into people bound by law and obligated through a covenant to a supreme God. At the same time, that translation is never complete. Israel is constantly murmuring, resistant to the imposition of authority, and attached to its own collective capacities for creation and fabrication, be it the forging of the golden calf before the reception of the law or the construction of the Ark of the Covenant before the wandering in the wilderness. Eric Santner has argued that because Moses inaugurates a politics and a theology of creation, what I am calling the Mosaic constitution becomes a touchstone for twentieth-century thinkers like Freud and Franz Rosenzweig who want to assess the biopolitical dimensions of the modern state. If the lesson of the Mosaic constitution is that life is “the ‘stuff’ of sovereignty,” then the challenge for these thinkers is to refashion Jewish monotheism so that it distances itself “from the enigmatic seductions of sovereign power and authority.”22 The early modern emphasis on Hebrew scripture as a received text adds an extra twist. In binding the secular state to interpretations of Hebrew scripture, sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury writers also bind a political theology of creation to literary creation and imagination. While the Mosaic constitution raises the problem of a constituting power that exists outside the bounds of normative law, Hebrew scripture locates that power more specifically in the persuasive capacities of metaphor and narrative to shape life through belief. Jonathan Sheehan has recently detailed the transformation of the Bible from a book authorizing religious truths to a “complex of literature, teaching, scholarship, and history” that turned it into the key text in what gets called the cultural heritage of the West.23 With remarkable erudition, Sheehan shows how in the movement from the Lutheran Bible to the eighteenth century, the Bible became the basis for a notion of culture that could counter the forces of Enlightenment skepticism. Writers like Machiavelli, Marlowe, Harrington, Marvell, Milton, and Spinoza were acutely aware that the

introduction

9

Bible is a human artifact and that its various stories get used as political fictions in the service of mystification, ideological misdirection, and the self-interest of de facto authority. In this interpretive tradition, both scripture and its uses become objects of skeptical reading and political critique. At the same time, these writers also attempted to use the persuasive capacities of scripture to shape collective, creaturely life. The insight that scripture is a human artifact changes the truth-claims that one might make about a supposedly divinely authored text but it also increases the burden for political exegesis—for analyzing, explaining, and reimagining the political uses of the divine text. In early modern English literary studies, political theology has most often been associated with sacred kingship and Christian incarnation, due in no small measure to the massive influence of Ernst Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies in English literary studies. Subtitled A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology, Kantorowicz’s work tracks the legal theory that the dignity of the sovereign is located in the mystical office of the monarch, which is embodied by but also transcends the king’s real, physical, and historical presence. Beginning in the twelfth century and moving up through the seventeenth century, Kantorowicz shows how English common lawyers defi ned the office of the king through the theological figures of the body of Christ and the body of the Church in such a way that split that office between absolutism and constitutionalism.24 In Political Theologies in Shakespeare’s England, Debora Kuller Shuger shows how the regulation of private morality through public authority assumes a sacred element located in the monarch’s sacerdotal function.25 And in Alterations of State, Richard C. McCoy argues that the monarch retains a sacramental presence throughout the various transformations of English statehood from Henry VIII to the Glorious Revolution.26 Both Shuger and McCoy focus on sacred kingship as a corrective to recent works on republicanism and constitutionalism that exclude religion; as Shuger puts it, sacred kingship shows that “religious ideals . . . unfold at the dead center of early modern thinking on government and its properties.”27 Julia Reinhard Lupton offers a more nuanced view by arguing for a literature of citizenship that emerges dialectically through the need to reconstruct political community after the death of the tyrant. Instead of focusing on sacred kingship, Lupton locates political theology in the exception, the moment of crisis that threatens to dissolve prior forms of community and promises the invention of new ones. Emphasizing the constitutional promise installed within the drama of sacred kingship, Lupton elaborates a political theology associated with the emergence of early modern liberalism

10

chapter one

on the desecrated grounds of divine kingship. In her Pauline account of early modern political theology, Christian and Jewish models of incarnation persist on the Shakespearean stage in the hybrid figure of the citizensaint, but these models of incarnation also contains the seeds of their own undoing. The citizen-saint embodies the promise of citizenship through the potential associated with the saint or martyr who sacrifices herself on the altar of the tyrant.28 The Mosaic constitution develops through a more explicitly republican tradition that includes figures like Marvell, Milton, Harrington, and Spinoza, and its emphasis is less on sacred kingship or personal authority than it is on textual authority as the constituent agent of communal life. From the perspective of the Mosaic constitution, political theology is best understood as metaphorical theology. This is the phrase that Hans Blumenberg uses in his critique of Schmitt, whose monograph Political Theology has been both defi nitive and a source of irritation for subsequent generations of political thinkers.29 Blumenberg means to call attention to the ways in which Schmitt takes metaphors from theology and literalizes them in the service of his own political agenda. So, for instance, when Schmitt argues for an analogous relation between the God of Christian theology and the sovereign of the modern state, he does so to grant a set of real emergency powers to the sovereign, who can then suspend the law in order to protect it. 30 Blumenberg’s point is to show that Schmitt justifies a political argument through a metaphor that he treats as if it were real. Schmitt needs the metaphor of the person, which he takes from theology and justifies with his concept of political theology. At the same time, Schmitt’s crisis-driven rhetoric also literalizes that metaphor in the very real person who oversees the executive branch of government in such a way that the literalization of a theological metaphor justifies the expansion of executive authority. Blumenberg sees his insight about metaphor as a point of critique. He is deeply, and rightly, critical of any theory of secularization that sees the modern age as an empty form drained of its religious substance, as an era whose central concepts take shape through the transfer and emptying of theological substance. Such an understanding inevitably constructs an illegitimate modernity against its more authentically religious past. It loads the dice against modernity in favor of an ideal and imaginary understanding of religion. I see Blumenberg’s insight about metaphor not only as a point of critique but also as a site of possibility for developing a different and more comprehensive account of political theology. In literalizing the metaphor of the person, Schmitt inadvertently calls attention to the persistence of theocratic authority in secular poli-

introduction

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tics, while in giving priority to metaphor Blumenberg uncovers the condition for elaborating new concepts of political personhood and community through the resources of fiction and imagination. The very fact that theological argumentation happens in and through a metaphoric language means that it can be accommodated to an unpredictable range of ends. The metaphorical nature of scripture and of theological concepts is what makes political theology an ongoing source of invention and imagination. One of the main goals of this book is to recover that sense of invention and imagination among a group of writers for whom the fashioning of secular government was a most urgent problem.

THE MOSAIC CONSTITUTION Let me illustrate what I mean by the constitutive role of imagination by briefly discussing two mid-seventeenth-century Dutch paintings: Ferdinand Bol’s Moses with the Tablets of the Law, which was commissioned for the Schepenzaal or Magistrates’ Court of Amsterdam’s newly constructed Town Hall, and Rembrandt’s painting of the same title, which the older artist created as a response to Bol, who was also his student.31 Both of these paintings are concerned with the use of public religion to secure obedience to the secular state. Bol’s Moses (fig. 1.1) was commissioned by the anti-Orangist, pro-statist Staatsgezinde party, which oversaw the building of Amsterdam’s Town Hall and insisted that the building stood as an expression of a secular and resolutely antimonarchical state. 32 To that end, Bol casts the Mosaic constitution through a republican understanding of obedience, representing the constitution of the Hebrew state through the people’s desire to submit to the law, which, it appears from the reverential and ecstatic facial expressions on the figures at the base of Mount Sinai, Moses cannot bring down quickly enough. In his poem on Bol’s painting, the Dutch poet and playwright Joost van den Vondel gets at this dynamic quite precisely. As Moses brings down the law, Vondel writes, the people “dat hem eerbeidigh, en wolkomt met verlandgen [greeted him with reverence and welcomed him with longing].”33 Vondel’s poem suggests that the state is based not just on the law but more importantly on a longing for the law. But Bol adds an extra dimension. The strong division between the top and bottom halves of Bol’s painting suggests that voluntary submission endows not just the law but the lawgiver with a transcendental quality that in turn sanctifies the act of obedience to the secular state. Bol’s painting suggests that longing for the law generates a mystical quality that becomes the imaginary source of sovereign authority.

Fig. 1.1. Ferdinand Bol, Moses Descends from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments (1662). Photograph: © Royal Palace Foundation, Amsterdam.

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Rembrandt’s Moses (fig. 1.2) draws out the play of imagination at work in Bol’s painting. Instead of sanctifying obedience, Rembrandt theatricalizes the giving of the law. His painting combines the act of obedience with the aesthetic act of viewing the painting. As viewers of Bol’s painting, we see the Mosaic constitution being staged before us, but as viewers of Rembrandt’s painting, we are more explicitly brought into the space of the Mosaic constitution as if we were actors in the scene itself. The difference between the two paintings is subtle but significant. Bol’s painting portrays a narrative scene in order to reinforce a lesson about virtuous republican citizenship; Rembrandt stages a narrative moment in order to highlight the mediated aspects of public space and its constitution. As Harry Berger comments in his discussion of Rembrandt’s handling of spectatorship, “the image is not something for observers to see, know, and genuflect before but something for them to make and unmake, something perpetually incomplete that extends its desire for completion into theirs.”34 On one level, Rembrandt highlights the political identification at work in Bol’s painting as an aesthetic act. His theatricalization of spectatorship foregrounds the mimetic aspects of communal life, in that identification with the Hebrews is the minimal condition we must accept in order to be members of the community that the painting creates. On another level, Rembrandt emphasizes the historical specificity of the Hebrew past as a point of identification that the painting’s viewers are required to navigate. Rather than portraying a longing for the law, as Bol’s painting does, Rembrandt’s Moses situates its viewers at a point of metacritical ambiguity. Do we see ourselves as Hebrews longing for the law? Or do we see ourselves seeing ourselves as Hebrews longing for the law? That is, do we unproblematically identify with the historical example? Or do we reflect on our distance from it when we are asked to identify with it? Rembrandt’s theatricalization of public space leads to a more general reflection on the Mosaic constitution as a historically distant moment—or better, as a contemporary representation of a historically distant moment—through which political subjects are interpellated into the scene of the modern state. In short, Bol’s painting puts the Mosaic constitution to political use. In response, Rembrandt’s painting represents the Mosaic constitution as a cultural text that is being put to political use. Whereas Bol’s Moses allegorizes and mystifies state power, Rembrandt’s Moses refashions the Mosaic constitution by highlighting the processes of identification, transmission, and cultural inheritance through which the state is constituted and obedience is enforced. Rembrandt’s staging of the Mosaic constitution might profitably be supplemented with Spinoza’s discussion of prophecy in the

Fig. 1.2. Rembrandt van Rijn, Moses Destroying the Tablets of the Law (1659). Gemaeldegalerie, Staatliche Museen, Berlin. Photograph: bpk, Berlin / Joerg P. Anders / Art Resource, New York.

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Theologico-Political Treatise. Spinoza argues that what makes prophets special is neither their ability to reason philosophically nor some capacity to experience the divine in unmediated fashion but rather their aptitude for imagination. As individuals, the prophets imagine the divine in powerful ways, and collectively prophecy shapes communal identification and behavior through the hold that it has on the modern political imaginary as a set of gripping, imaginative writings. Rembrandt’s Moses intimates a similar insight about both the imaginative force of prophecy and its social and political functions. While the angels and light that surround Bol’s Moses endow him with a divine aura, the painterly and artifactual aspects of Rembrandt’s Moses—the visible brushstrokes in the background, the heightened attention to Moses’s hands—along with the decidedly uncertain look on Moses’s face suggest a more human scene of political and aesthetic making. Rembrandt’s emphasis on imagination does not make him less interested than Bol in public religion. By having Moses cover the fi rst tablet, which contains the laws regulating individual piety, with the second, which contains the laws regulating public morality, Rembrandt stages this scene of prophetic imagination to affirm the state’s right to compel public worship while separating that right from private belief. 35 But his emphasis on imagination does suggest that he is more engaged than Bol in understanding and foregrounding the role that imagination plays in constitution of community. Despite their differences, these two paintings both respond to what this book argues is a central aporia in the theorization of the early modern state: the law assumes a public that is potentially obedient, but the law cannot compel obedience without some sort of excessive or extralegal force. One solution is to make the prince a representative of divine authority, as do early modern political thinkers writing in the tradition of Reason of State. Reason of State combines arguments for strong government with an interest in Tacitus’s account of the arcana imperii, or mystery of state, out of the contention that the prince cannot be bound by moral or legal norms if he is to govern effectively. 36 As Giovanni Botero explains in the opening pages of his 1589 treatise On the Reason of State, reason of state is the knowledge by which a prince maintains “a stable rule over a people [un dominio fermo sopra popoli]”; nevertheless, the actions required to maintain a stable rule “cannot be considered by ordinary and common reason [che non si possono ridurre a ragione ordinaria e comume].”37 And as Bol’s painting suggests, this solution is not limited to Reason of State or absolutist political thought but cuts across a range of political traditions, including republicanism. Another solution, the kind developed by

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Rembrandt as well as by writers such as Harrington, Spinoza, and Milton, is explicitly to associate extralegal force with images, metaphors, and narratives taken from scripture. One function of these devices is to compel obedience. But since they work as images, metaphors, and narratives, they also ground an effort to reconceive the public through a politics of representation, poetic strategies of communication, and rhetorical models of demonstration and persuasion. As we shall see in subsequent chapters, both Harrington and Spinoza explore the rhetorical and poetic conditions that make Hebrew scripture persuasive in an effort to reformulate the legal state through models of communication while they also mobilize the persuasive force of scripture to induce obedience. The Mosaic constitution is part of what Victoria Kahn has felicitously called a linguistic turn in early modern political thought in which topics such as obedience, authority, community, and constitution are increasingly cast as questions concerning representation, communication, rhetoric, and fiction. 38 Although this linguistic turn laid the ground for the eighteenth-century invention of the “thin modern subject of formal equality,” it produced a different political subject, one who was both “a richly imagined ‘aesthetic’ subject of passion and interest, and an artifact of the creative powers of language.”39 As I shall argue in the pages that follow, the Mosaic constitution shows that this linguistic turn brought about a set of changes in relations between belief and disbelief. At the same time that a renewed focus on the constitutive role of fiction and representation gave early modern writers tools for reconstructing and reflecting on political community, it also assumed the political subject to be a subject of belief. A claim like “obedience is procured through fiction” or “authority is based on representation” is demystifying only for someone who thinks, fi rst of all, that obedience and authority are natural, unmediated phenomena and, second, that fiction and representation are somehow ineffective or powerless. The fi rst claim is hard to sustain outside of arguing that in the Middle Ages people were politically naive, which is of course patently false, and the second claim contradicts the very reason that the Mosaic constitution interested early modern political writers. The Mosaic constitution had such powerful appeal because it was a narrative that both relied on belief and gave a flexible set of terms for analyzing relations between and among obedience, authority, community, and constitution as problems concerning representation, communication, rhetoric, and fiction. It is impossible to quantify belief, but one reason that the Mosaic constitution became so important in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is that the early modern linguistic turn in political thought placed a higher

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demand on belief by placing belief and imagination at the center of the problem of constituting the state. Although the Mosaic constitution has a long and expansive history that ranges at least from ancient Egypt to interwar Europe, a historical account of its emergence in early modern Europe would have to start with Thomas Aquinas and his attempt in the Middle Ages to theorize good secular government. In the Summa Theologica, Aquinas reads the Mosaic constitution through the lens of Aristotle’s Politics, arguing that Moses instituted a mixed constitution, a form of government that was part monarchy, in that he and his successors ruled over all the people; part aristocracy, since he chose seventy-two elders and gave them governing responsibilities; and part democracy, since the rulers were chosen from among all of the people.40 Since it was ordained by divine law, the Mosaic constitution affirms mixed constitution as the best available. Equally, if not more important are Aquinas’s claims about the status of Mosaic law, because these claims allow him to except the Hebrew state from typological or moral interpretation and argue for a secular understanding of Mosaic government. Moses instituted moral precepts, which derive their binding force from their goodness; ceremonial precepts, which derive their binding force from their holiness; and judicial precepts, which are purely political and “derive their binding force not from reason alone, but in virtue of their institution” (ST I–II.q.104.a.1). Differentiated from both typological figuration and natural law, judicial precepts exist in secular time and are limited only by the vicissitudes of history and the changing relations between a ruler and the people ruled: The judicial precepts established by men retain their binding force for ever, so long as the state of government remains the same. But if the state or nation pass to another form of government, the laws must needs be changed. For democracy, which is government by the people, demands different laws from those of oligarchy, which is government by the rich, as the Philosopher shows (Polit.iv.1). Consequently when the state of the people changed, the judicial precepts had to be changed also. (q.104.a.3.reply.2)

Part of Aquinas’s point is to argue that Mosaic government, although ideal, is no longer binding by divine authority. But in spelling out specifically the ways in which judicial precepts are binding as acts of government, Aquinas also uses Hebrew scripture to develop an understanding of government as a set of relations that exist solely in historical time. As Alan Harding has

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shown, Aquinas’s discussion of judicial precepts provides a flexible instrument by which subsequent generations of medieval thinkers could understand and theorize the volatile politics of the thirteenth-century Italian city-states as well as the French and English kingdoms in more explicitly secular terms.41 Aquinas’s discussion of the Mosaic government helped to lay the foundation for a secular understanding of politics. A counternarrative of Mosaic government was developed in fi fteenthcentury debates over papal authority and Church government. In his treatise On the Power of the Church, Jean Gerson mobilized Aquinas’s version of the Mosaic constitution to argue for limited papal authority and conciliar Church government. Moses spoke with God on friendly terms, as a “counselor to a patron [amicus ad amicum],” Gerson explains, “obediently hearing the advice of his fellow kinsmen as he directed the entire synagogue [obedienter audivit consilium gentilis hominis in regimine totius Synagogae].”42 Writing for the Council of Constance, at which Church cardinals were experimenting with new forms of Church government, Gerson used Moses to argue for the legitimacy of conciliar rule that would limit papal authority.43 Apologists for the primacy of papal authority responded by asserting a more absolutist vision of Mosaic authority. The fi rst papal bull that explicitly condemned the conciliar Church government, titled Moyses vir Dei or Moses the Man of God and promulgated by Eugenius IV in 1439, takes Moses’s punishment of Korah as a precedent for the pope’s right to quash challenges to his authority. Subsequent apologists for papal authority such as Lilius Filelfo and Lilius Tifernas reinforce this image of Mosaic authority by arguing that Moses was not only king, lawgiver, and priest but also the primary authority in each office that he held. And fi nally, at the end of the fi fteenth century, Pope Sixtus IV commissioned Botticelli to decorate the Sistine Chapel with scenes from the life of Moses that reinforced the link between Mosaic authority and apostolic succession.44 At the beginning of the sixteenth century, Machiavelli synthesized Aquinas’s effort to develop a secular version of government with a theological account of Mosaic authority developed by fi fteenth-century apologists for the papacy by introducing the category of imagination. In his discussion of Moses in The Prince, Machiavelli makes two main moves. First, he argues that religion is a useful fiction that the new prince can use to legitimate his authority. Because obedience is predicated upon fidelity, the new prince must fi nd a way to procure and sustain belief from among the populace he is attempting to govern. Moses is exemplary, Machiavelli suggests, because he was able to sustain his rule by persuading the Israelites that he

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spoke with God. Second, Machiavelli interpolates and modifies theological accounts of authority, decision making, and prudential action in his advice to new princes, emphasizing in particular the authority to punish those who represent a challenge to the order that the prince attempts to govern. Anyone who imposes a new order will inevitably make enemies out of those who “did well by the older order [degli ordini vecchi fanno bene]” (P 13 / 49). In such situations, Machiavelli reasons, the new prince must become an armed prophet like Moses and arrange things so that “when [the people] no longer believe, they can be made to believe by force [quando e’ non credono più, so possa fare loro credere per forza]” (13 / 49). Machiavelli’s discussion of Moses in terms of force and fiction scandalized a number of his sixteenth-century readers. Catholic and CounterReformation writers like Reginald Pole, Ambrogio Caterino Politi, Jerónimo Osório, and Pedro Ribadeneyra variously argued that Machiavelli made Moses into a secular prince and discounted his divine mission. His discussion galvanized others. Following Machiavelli, writers like the bishop of Winchester Stephen Gardiner found Moses to be an extremely useful ground for political reasoning.45 But even writers who critiqued Machiavelli’s account of Mosaic revelation as a political fiction could not fi nd sufficient grounds to prove otherwise. Once Machiavelli makes belief in a political fiction central to his theory of the new state, it becomes impossible to argue against him on the basis that this political fiction is really real. Indeed, as Kahn has shown, early modern arguments against Machiavelli often demonized him as the Machiavel on one level while repeating his arguments in terms of rhetoric, interest, and representations of political authority on another.46 Modifying and fundamentally transforming Aquinas, who used the Mosaic constitution to develop what he thought of as good secular government, Machiavelli’s use of Moses suggested to his subsequent readers that the early modern state is bound to a monotheistic tradition of authority and obedience. Even as Machiavelli calls out religion as a political fiction, he also locates the fiction of religion at the center of the new state as a key means by which the state might secure obedience. Looking back over the two centuries of religious wars that plagued sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, in 1757 David Hume called out monotheism as a structure of violence that inevitably leads to persecution and intolerance. “While one sole object of devotion is acknowledged, the worship of other deities is regarded as absurd and impious. Nay, this unity of object seems naturally to require the unity of faith and ceremonies, and furnishes designing men with a pretence for representing their adversaries as profane, and the objects of divine as well as human vengeance.”47

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Although Hume refers to the general category of “designing men,” his argument could well have applied to Machiavelli’s new prince. Following the example of Moses, the new prince introduces monotheism into the early modern state as both a fiction and a structure of violence. What Machiavelli presents as an opportunity, Hume critiques as a scandal. A number of contemporary scholars follow in Hume’s footsteps. Regina Schwartz and Jonathan Kirsch have argued that the roots of contemporary political and religious violence can be found in biblical monotheism.48 And the preeminent Egyptologist Jan Assmann argues that ancient monotheism introduces a distinction between true and false religions, what he calls the Mosaic distinction, that invariably re-fashions political enemies into religious enemies.49 Assmann initially developed his concept of the Mosaic distinction in his 1997 monograph Moses the Egyptian, a work that sought to uncover the cultural memory of Egypt in early modern and modern Europe as a site of resistance to violent monotheism. If the Mosaic distinction distinguished false religions from the religion of the one true God, Egyptian cosmotheism and its recuperation in Hermetic, Deist, and Romantic movements valued a kind of cultural plurality achieved through the translatability of the gods. In subsequent scholarship, Assmann has turned his attention more fully to the Mosaic distinction, showing it to have both positive and negative dimensions. On the positive side, the Mosaic distinction is a structure of symbolic violence that separates politics from religion in the figure of the Exodus. In breaking with Egypt, the Israelites also broke with Egyptian theocracy, a model of government in which religion was instituted in the state and Pharaoh was the primary mediator between the human and the gods.50 On the negative side, the Mosaic distinction is a structure of real violence that reunites religion and politics against the figure of the idolater, the heretic, and the religious enemy. Moses associates divinity with a highly mobile sense of justice that exceeds and turns against any particular institution, transforming political theology into a discourse that was “critical of government” and “critical of religion.”51 But divine justice is also manifest in the punishment and destruction of a highly mobile sense of the unrighteous whose heretical beliefs and practices prevent the establishment of God’s kingdom on earth. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers grappled with the positive and negative aspects of the Mosaic constitution: its potential for renewal; its insistence and, indeed, its dependence on religious enmity; and the interplay between the two. For these writers, authority, obedience, and toleration become increasingly pressing problems both intellectually and politically given the emergence of the confessional state, the question of

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minority religions, and in England the crises in citizenship and political obligation brought about by the Civil Wars, the establishment of the Commonwealth, the Protectorate, and fi nally the Restoration. As a founding fiction, the Mosaic constitution served as a tool for responding to political exigencies not just on the level of policy but more urgently on the level of passion, imagination, and fantasy. Part 1 of this book shows how political writers recognized and tried to mitigate the literal violence of the Mosaic constitution, its emphasis on enmity, by turning to and exploring symbolic structures of differentiation and revision. As a scene of literal violence, the Mosaic constitution served as the vanishing point around which government gets invented. And since it was a scene of literal violence, one of the privileged means for inventing government was to deliteralize that scene or to remediate it, submitting it to metaphorical elaboration as a way to explore and counteract its violent effects. As I argue in chapter 2, Machiavelli is acutely aware of both sides of the Mosaic constitution, its potential for renewal and its construction of the religious enemy as a figure against which political community is fashioned. Throughout The Prince he continually pits one side against the other as he explores the promise of the political while refusing to ignore the insight that politics is founded on violence. In chapter 3, I argue that in The Theologico-Political Treatise Spinoza shifts Machiavelli’s account of the Mosaic constitution onto the terrain of biblical hermeneutics in order to explore the more positive and creative aspects of political theology. Treating scripture as an artifact allows Spinoza to critique the instrumentalization of religion by both sovereign authorities and dissenting minorities while simultaneously developing a democratic notion of political theology based on human imagination and toleration. Some readers may fi nd it surprising that I would associate political theology with a Machiavellian tradition of political thought. The dominant scholarship on Machiavelli in the Anglo-American academy sees Machiavelli as a main figure in the emergence of civic humanism. Eminent scholars from Hans Baron to J. G. A. Pocock and Quentin Skinner have shown that Machiavelli invents a secular version of politics in which, as Pocock puts it, “a self-sufficiently virtuous republic could exist in secular time which was a consequence of its own fi nitude.”52 Moreover, Jonathan Israel has argued that Spinoza developed a “line of thought” that enabled the entire “philosophical matrix” of the Radical Enlightenment, the intellectual movement in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries that threw off the shackles of ecclesiastical authority and forged the modern concepts of toleration, universal democracy, and racial and sexual

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equality.53 At the same time, as Leo Strauss argued years ago, Machiavelli develops one of the most sophisticated accounts of religion and belief in the early modern state. Machiavelli fully understands the contradictory claims that scripture makes on political agents. On the one hand, scripture serves as the basis for moral action, insisting on ethical treatment of the neighbor, the stranger, and the disenfranchised, while on the other hand it serves the state’s need to instrumentalize belief in the service of patriotism, creating political and often self-interest oppositions between friend and enemy, the faithful and the idolatrous, the true believers and the heretics. But, in Strauss’s account, Machiavelli shies away from developing the implications of his own thought.54 As one of Machiavelli’s most perceptive readers, Spinoza only sharpens the contradiction. Demonstrating the necessity of revelation even as he distances himself from it, Spinoza discloses an unavoidable intertwining of politics and religion that can never be settled. “The orthodox premise [that the world is governed by an omnipotent God whose will is unfathomable] cannot be refuted by experience or by recourse to the principle of contradiction,” Strauss writes. Spinoza develops an alternative philosophical system that gives a different account of God and religious experience, but in Strauss’s reading he “cannot legitimately deny the possibility of revelation.”55 In following a trajectory that runs from Machiavelli to Spinoza, part 1 of this book aims to show that these two critical trends are not necessarily antithetical: Machiavelli’s account of secular politics and the early modern state implied an increasingly sophisticated understanding of political theology and its relation to imagination, political agency, and the organization of communal norms. Machiavelli gestures toward that understanding at key moments throughout The Prince. Spinoza develops the implications of Machiavelli’s account in The Theologico-Political Treatise, showing how political theology is central to the concept of universal citizenship and the project of formulating the democratic state. Part 2 focuses on Mosaic discourse as it was introduced into English literature in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. These are significant years for anyone who wants to think about the intersections of political making and literary invention. By the last quarter of the sixteenth century, major figures in English literary culture were arguing for a privileged relation between English letters and the public sphere. From debates over the introduction of Greek and Latin meter into English to Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesy and George Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie, Elizabethan intellectuals emphasized poetry’s capacity for making in order to forge a new sense of English public life. Poetry differs from other

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modes of knowing in that it has the capacity to constitute and preserve a virtuous reading public. Sidney is perhaps most eloquent and direct. Noting that the poet has a vatic function as well as the function of maker (the word poet “cometh of this word poiein, which is, to make”), Sidney goes on to describe poetry in idealistic terms as the maker of “another nature,” one that is richer and better that the natural world, “golden” and not “brazen”: poetry is “not wholly imaginative,” Sidney writes, “but so far substantially it worketh, not only to make a Cyrus, which had been but a particular excellency as nature might have done, but to bestow a Cyrus upon the world to make many Cyruses, if they will learn aright why and how that maker made him.”56 Over the past twenty years, scholars have tended to identify this movement in English letters as an attempt to form a collective national identity that is increasingly distanced from the monarchy, a collective identity that can achieve what Claire McEachern has called “political self-determination.”57 Indeed, reading sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English literature in terms of a broader effort to elaborate antimonarchical forms of political self-determination has become a productive and dominant paradigm in early modern literary studies. As critics like McEachern and Richard Helgerson have argued, late sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury English poets explicitly constructed a sense of Englishness based less on the monarchy than on legal, cultural, familial, and congregational forms of affiliation that looked forward to the constitution of the political nation. In some senses, the English literary writers who took up Mosaic discourse were participating in this broader cultural movement. They were certainly concerned with the constitutive role of poetic invention. However, instead of positing a public space based on national identity, they imaged a more fractured and fragile sense of community based on temporary political affiliations, divided between friend and enemy, and threatened by the tyrannical inclinations of sovereign power—both real and imaginary. Instead of national identity per se, these writers were concerned with the ways in which the theological imaginary overdetermined public space and undermined self-government. Chapter 4 explores Marlowe’s transformation of Mosaic discourse in the context of religious division and the increasingly politicized question of prerogative that troubled late Tudor politics. The Mosaic constitution gave Marlowe the means to explore the twinned figures of the sovereign and the enemy, including their fictive and poetic dimensions, in the transnational context of religious division and the internal context of coercive authority. Chapter 5 takes up Michael Drayton’s plague poem, Moses in a Map of his Miracles, which he

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fi rst published in 1604 as part of his effort to court the favor of England’s new monarch, James I, and then republished in 1630 as part of The Muses Elizium, an innovative volume of poetry that set the standard for Caroline pastoral throughout the 1630s and up through the Civil Wars. A number of Drayton’s contemporaries tended to see the plague as a punishment from God, a political and religious judgment against the English nation, but as I argue in chapter 5, both Moses and The Muses Elizium posit the public as an infected space in order to derive a dialectical relation between governmental administration and divine violence, itself an extreme figure for sovereignty and enmity. Less concerned with national identity, Marlowe and Drayton explore the subjective dimensions of constituting power, especially in terms of erotic passions. Political theology and sexuality might seem to be worlds apart, but Marlowe and Drayton take the erotically driven subject as an object of analytic interest and a subject of sovereign power. What they fi nd in sexuality is a subtle and sophisticated discourse of imagination. Erotic discourse offered Marlowe an alternative resource for exploring the constitutive aspects of bad, imprudent decision making as a counterpart to the sovereign’s need for good discernment and judgment, and it offered Drayton a vocabulary of generativeness and fecundity that he appropriated as his own in his attempt to derive a model of government based on the administration of the passions.58 Part 3 examines works that use the Mosaic constitution to explore relations between and among government, constituting power, and imagination in the aftermath of the English Revolution. After the execution of Charles I in 1649, political writers from a variety of perspectives became increasingly interested in the shaping force of fiction as a means of compelling obedience. In Leviathan, Hobbes developed a measured account of metaphor and literary language as both a cause of the Civil Wars and a potential resolution. And in Oceana, Harrington explored and exploited the role of narrative in molding obedient citizens. Although Harrington makes his case explicitly against Hobbes, what both share is an interest in combining government and imagination in such a way that will prevent the devastation of the Civil Wars from returning. English writers turned to the Mosaic constitution to explore the role of constituting power and its relation to explicitly religious fictions in this new understanding of government. Chapter 6 examines Marvell’s engagement with the Mosaic constitution in his poem Upon Appleton House both as a local response to his employer Thomas Fairfax’s failure to constitute a new government after the execution of Charles I and as a broader effort to consider issues

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of authority and obedience from the perspective of the political subject. Marvell takes up the Mosaic constitution to explore political agency and community, and the relation of both to erotic imagination. He uses marriage to posit a mode of governance based on the regulation of imagination, and he then explores the fantasies of erotic submission that attend this self-regulation. Government, Marvell suggests, cannot be separated from the erotic fantasies that it often unwittingly generates. Chapter 7 turns to Harrington’s Oceana. For Harrington, the Mosaic constitution forms a primal scene of the early modern state, the scriptural ground upon which the modern state has to be constructed. Strenuously arguing against any form of government that would lead to theocracy, Harrington emphasizes the Mosaic constitution as a scene of communication in order to develop a sense of agency, authority, and obedience based on a poetic understanding of government. Harrington cautiously supplements his discussion of political subjectivity with a brief account of female chastity, suggesting that chaste decision making is central to his own understanding of popular sovereignty. Chapter 8 analyzes Paradise Regained as Milton’s revision of the Mosaic constitution. In his revolutionary prose tract, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, Milton uses the Mosaic constitution to elaborate his understanding of the social contract as a scene of voluntary submission and mutual obligation. Twenty-one years later in Paradise Regained, Milton returns to these themes, deriving from a reading of Hebrew scripture a model of government based on obedience and risk management. Milton defi nes government through the management of fundamentally unregulated and quite possibly uncontrollable desires, associated with Oedipus, as he searches for a new model of political rule based on the unending task of managing unmanageable passions. As a figure that binds politics and religion through imagination, the Mosaic constitution persists well beyond its early modern manifestations and continues into the modern world as well. Perhaps the best-known example is Freud, who was preoccupied with Moses for the majority of his intellectual life and whose thinking about sexuality, language, and symbolic authority serve as a key resource for much of the argumentation that follows. In Moses and Monotheism, Freud makes the remarkable claim that “the distortion of a text is not unlike a murder,” and then he continues by applying that insight to Hebrew scripture: “The poetically elaborated accounts attributed to the Jahvist and to his later competitor, the Elohist, are like gravestones, under which the truth about those early matters, about the nature of the Mosaic religion and the violent removal of the great man—truths withdrawn from the knowledge of later

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generations—should, so to speak, be laid to rest.”59 The notorious truth encrypted in scripture is, of course, Freud’s thesis that Moses was originally an Egyptian who gave the Israelites monotheism but that, unable to sustain the rigor of Mosaic religion, the Israelites murdered him in the desert and took up with a second Moses, Moses the Midianite who gave them the Ten Commandments and a new god, Yahweh, “an uncanny, bloodthirsty demon who walks by night and shuns the light of day.”60 As unexpected as this account of Moses’s story is, it gets at fundamental ambivalences that continue to operate in the liberal state. Reading Moses and Monotheism both with and against Rousseau, Bonnie Honig argues that Freud posits the foreignness of Moses to underscore the alien nature of the law. Instead of providing an autochthonous account of political rule based on ethnic or national will, Rousseau’s version of popular sovereignty, Freud portrays “a religion in search of a people”—a system of rules and norms that is both willingly accepted and violently imposed, that can legitimate the worst forms of sovereignty but “can also be a source of civic activism, unrest, and protest.”61 For Freud, the Mosaic constitution haunts the liberal state. Following his early modern predecessors who refashioned Hebrew scripture into an imaginative fiction as they formulated new theories of the state, Freud treats Mosaic discourse as an imaginary symptom that the state seems unable to shake off.62 Indeed, Freud’s writings on Moses seem to be determined by the tragic history of the modern European state in the opening years of the twentieth century. In the fi nal days of the Austro-Hungarian empire, right before the outbreak of World War I, Freud writes “The Moses of Michelangelo” (1914), in which he argues that Michelangelo presents a new Moses, one who holds “his passions in check” instead of breaking the tablets of the law.63 Following the terrible devastation of World War I, five years later in the 1919 edition of Interpretation of Dreams, Freud includes a brief discussion of one of Bismarck’s dreams in which the nineteenthcentury minister-president of Prussia imagines himself to be Moses, leading Prussian troops through Bohemia.64 In no way associated with the rule of law and control of the passions, in Bismarck’s dream Moses becomes a figure linked with conquest, German expansion, and the manipulation of parliamentary rule. And Freud writes the fi rst draft of Moses and Monotheism in 1934 in the days before the Anschluss, when a paramilitary group of Nazis raided the Ballhausplatz and murdered the Austrian chancellor, Engelbert Dollfuss.65 As Freud comes to discover, Mosaic discourse opens a realm of imaginary ideals and violent fantasies that accompany the emergence, rise, and decline of the modern state.

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If Freud’s insights about Hebrew scripture and violence seem close to the vision of political theology that early modern political and literary writers developed as they unfolded the implications of the Mosaic constitution, this is because his thinking is enabled by the link between Hebrew scripture and the modern state forged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. All of these writers, and Freud, share the insight that political community assumes a surplus discourse through which community itself takes shape and within which its own fantasies of communal association and violent exclusion are formed and interact. Whether or not Hebrew scripture plays a similar role nowadays may be an open question, though I am inclined to think that it does. Nevertheless, for better and for worse the questions that early modern writers asked when reading Hebrew scripture are still ours. Can true religion bind a people under the rule of law? What are the costs of that binding, the unavoidable acts of cruelty and exclusion through which political community is constituted and preserved? And how does the imagination pass between and distribute these two extremes? The writers to whom we will now turn understood quite well that to ask these questions is neither to endorse mystification nor to preclude manipulation or social coercion, but to engage critically with the creative dimensions of political life.

ch apter two

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t might seem strange that a chapter on early modern political theology would focus on Machiavelli. Doubtless, if we understand political theology to be the transfer or transposition of sacred authority from the church to the state, as Kantorowicz understands it in his groundbreaking essay “Mysteries of State,” then Machiavelli is an unlikely starting point.1 Throughout The Prince and The Discourses, doesn’t Machiavelli systematically demystify sacred authority? Isn’t his understanding of politics entirely and insistently grounded in this world? As scholars from J. G. A. Pocock to Miguel Vatter have argued, Machiavelli initiates a secular vision of politics, one in which a republican understanding of politics as “particular,” “fi nite,” and “mortal” is able to overcome what Pocock calls the “Christian time-scheme,” “the view that man’s ends transcend time and the city, and even the presence of God himself in history, might vanish altogether.”2 Or, as Vatter puts it, for Machiavelli “political freedom” —and not religious authority—is what gains “transcendence,” and this means that freedom is actualized by breaking with pregiven political forms. 3 However, if we understand political theology to be a problem that persists within the secular world, a seemingly unavoidable level of commerce between religious belief and civil modes of communal life that distresses and stains the idea of a purely secular political community, then starting with Machiavelli makes a great deal of sense. Not only does Machiavelli initiate a secular vision of politics; he also probes the politico-theological predicaments that this vision of politics produces in an attempt to sort them out. One locus of Machiavelli’s inquiry is Hebrew scripture. In The Prince, Machiavelli binds the state to divine authority, and to the fissures and ruptures that accompany it, through the figure of Moses.4 Machiavelli’s 31

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central premise in The Prince is that in founding a state the new prince liberates subjects and citizens from older forms of dominion into newer arrangements of force, governance, and control. He uses Moses to explore the charismatic authority that the new prince has to claim in order to bring this passage about. Moses exemplifies recourse to divine authority that enables the new prince to found a new state. As Machiavelli underscores, divine authority is not to be found in otherworldly sources but is manifest in the prince’s capacity to regulate the belief of his subjects through what, following Walter Benjamin, I’ll call divine violence, the spectacular and lethal violence that accompanies the founding of a new political order.5 Like Benjamin, Machiavelli is concerned with forms of authority that can mediate and, in so doing, both enable and delimit the possibilities that political making brings with it. In The Prince, the transformation of Israel from a kinship group to a people bound by law becomes a synecdoche for the various relations that Machiavelli explores between the creation of the state and its effects on the people who are subject to that order. Highlighting the violent acts by which Moses makes Israel a political community as events that occur in secular time, Machiavelli emphasizes the ways in which the prince is called on to instrumentalize religious belief in order to legitimate and bolster his authority. Divine violence is only rhetorically divine, an attempt to smooth over the central confl ict between the new prince and the people over whom he governs—the central conflict, that is, by which Machiavelli defi nes the early modern state. But demystifying divine violence doesn’t make the problem of violence go away. It only strengthens the sense of confl ict that underpins Machiavelli’s analysis of charismatic authority. In mounting a critique of Christian politics, Machiavelli forges a new link between ancient Jewish texts and the Christian West, a link developed and strengthened by a host of subsequent interpreters from Marlowe to Spinoza, Milton, and beyond. More of a canny and skeptical humanist reader than a pious exegete, in his brief discussion of Moses Machiavelli treats Hebrew scripture as political history, like Livy’s History of Rome, that contains insights about law, sovereignty, and the formation and corruption of a state. Machiavelli is brutally clear that revelation is a political strategy aimed at producing an obedient public through the ruses of belief. But he also counsels claiming the rhetoric of revelation inasmuch as it is politically expedient to do so. More broadly, Machiavelli’s discussion of Moses serves as a jumping-off point for his analysis of prudence and imagination. How, Machiavelli asks us to consider, does Hebrew scripture offer a model by which to explain and exploit the particular forms of power

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taken by the modern state? And how does the reading of scripture disclose fundamental tools for forming and conceptualizing the modern political subject?

MACHIAVELLI AND THE JEWISH QUESTION In the nineteenth century, the Jewish question centered on the problem of emancipation. Can the Jews be emancipated into the secular state? And can the secular state be emancipated from religion? But for Machiavelli, writing in the sixteenth century, the Jewish question centered on the problem of translation, specifically the translation of religious belief into his theory of the new state. Toward the beginning of chapter 21 of The Prince, Machiavelli details the political machinations of Ferdinand of Aragon, his conquest of Granada, his pacification of the Castilian barons, his use of taxes and Church money to build a powerful army, and then Machiavelli briefly pauses to consider Ferdinand’s use of religion to consolidate his authority over the whole of the Iberian peninsula. Machiavelli writes, “Oltre a questo, per potere intraprendere maggiori imprese, servendosi sempre della religione, si volse a una pietosa crudeltà, cacciando e spogliando, el suo regno, de’ Marrani: nè può essere questo esemplo più miserabile nè più raro” (P 43). The gist of the sentence is that, “in order to undertake great enterprises, always under the pretense of religion, Ferdinand has recourse to a pious cruelty, chasing out and stripping his kingdom of the Marrani; a more miserable or rare example cannot be found” (translation mine). Machiavelli is quite clear in both The Prince and The Discourses that cruelty is an essential component in the making of community. We need only to think of his discussions of Manlius Torquatus’s severity in the Discourses or of Hannibal’s “inhuman cruelty [inumana crudeltà]” in The Prince (33 / 91). In both instances, cruelty is a necessary means by which a leader creates unity out of a multiplicity. The phrase “pious cruelty” additionally suggests that Ferdinand’s actions are based on a bad or improper translation. As religious experience, piety would seem to have little to do with cruelty, especially the sense of piety promulgated by Saint Francis and Saint Domenic predicated on “poverty [povertà]” and the “life of Christ [vita di Cristo]” (D 195 / 211). But once piety is translated into a more explicitly political domain, once piety becomes an instrument of the new prince, it also becomes an improper version of itself, like a faux ami. Ferdinand’s pious cruelty is piety that is feigned, carried out under the pretense of religion, and at the same time it is also real, in the sense that it results in what Machiavelli calls “effective truth [verità effettuale della

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cosa],” political realities produced through the actions of the new prince (P 30 / 84). The phrase “pious cruelty” suggests that the new prince operates within a general economy of translation in which some of the most innovative terms for expressing cruelty also seem to be among the most unexpected and strange—at least initially—for conceptualizing it. How we understand Machiavelli’s use of the phrase “pious cruelty” goes hand in hand with how we translate the word “Marrani.” With very few exceptions, modern English editions of The Prince translate Marrani as the Moors. The 1872 edition of The Prince and The History of Florence, which was part of the Bohn Standard Library series, translates the sentence in question as follows: “In order that [Ferdinand] might undertake enterprises still more brilliant, he dexterously assumed the mask of religion, and, by a cruel piety, drove the Moors out of his dominions. The means he took for this enterprise were, without a doubt, barbarous; yet the exploit was extraordinary and almost unexplained.”6 W. K. Marriott’s 1908 edition of The Prince translates the sentence in much the same way: “Always using religion as a plea, so as to undertake greater schemes, [Ferdinand] devoted himself with a pious cruelty to driving out and clearing away his kingdom of the Moors; nor could there be a more admirable example, nor one more rare.”7 And N. H. Thompson’s translation of The Prince for Harvard Classics in 1910 renders the sentence “To enable him to engage in still greater undertakings, always covering himself with the cloak of religion, he had recourse to what may be called pious cruelty, in driving out and clearing his kingdom of Moors; than which exploit none could be made more wonderful or uncommon.”8 This tradition of translating Marrani as the Moors continues to the present.9 The Penguin Classics translation by George Bull, the Signet Classic translation by Luigi Ricci, and the Cambridge translation by Quentin Skinner and Russell Price all render Marrani as the Moors.10 Though surprising, these translations are not entirely without reason. Since “Marranos” was generally a derogatory term, it was in some instances used in reference to Christianized Muslims. It is at least plausible that Machiavelli would have been thinking of the Moors when he wrote “Marrani” since, as Skinner and Price remind us in a footnote, the Moors were expelled from Spain in 1501–2. If we follow the history of these translations, however, we can see that what is at stake is an attempt to downplay the role of religion in Machiavelli’s understanding of the early modern state. The English tradition of translating Marrani as the Moors started with Ellis Farneworth’s 1762 edition of The Works of Nicholas Machiavel, which was expanded and corrected in 1775 with the

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translation intact. Farneworth keeps the term “Marrani” in the Italian. “In the next place, after he had cruelly plundered the Marrani, he drove them out of his dominions, upon religion motives, as he pretended.” But he glosses Marrani as Moriscos, Muslim converts to Christianity. “The Moriscoes, or descendants of the Moors—The Inquisition was set up at this time, under a pretence of discovering who were true Christians, and who concealed Mahometans.”11 In the history of English translations of The Prince, the movement from Marrani to Moriscos to Moors suggests a trajectory in which “the Moors” becomes a secular term that reveals the political truth about the Moriscos and Marrani. If Machiavelli had in fact written that Ferdinand drove the Moors out of the Iberian Peninsula with pious cruelty, he would have been suggesting that Spanish imperialism is a secularized version of the Crusades. The implication would be that Ferdinand feigned religious sentiment in the reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula while his real purpose was to establish himself as the king of a newly formed Spain. In this reading, Ferdinand models himself on the Crusades to gain the reputation for piety, but his cruelty toward the Moors is political through and through. Before Farneworth, English editions of The Prince translated Marrani as the Jews. Edward Dacres’s 1640 edition of The Prince translates Machiavelli’s sentence as follows: “To the end [Ferdinand] might be able, hereamong to undertake greater matters, serving himselfe alwaies under the colour of religion; hee gave himselfe to a kind of religious cruelty, chasing and dispoyling those Jewes out of the kingdome; nor can this example bee more admirable and rare.”12 And in 1675 Henry Neville translates the sentence: “To adapt him for greater Enterprizes, (always making Religion his pretence) by a kind of devout cruelty, [Ferdinand] destroyed and exterminated the Jews called Marrani, than which nothing could be more strange or deplorable.”13 In some ways, these translations make more sense than translating Marrani as the Moors. Marrani is the Italian word for the Spanish Jews who converted to Christianity but were suspected of secretly maintaining Jewish beliefs and ritual practices. Following these seventeenth-century translations, we could say that when Machiavelli writes that Ferdinand drove out the Jews with a pious cruelty, he suggests that a certain religious feeling or sentiment attends the modern political space of land appropriation. Unlike the Moors, the Jews hadn’t conquered the Iberian Peninsula and didn’t rule Spain with a foreign army. Pious cruelty toward the Jews suggests that Ferdinand was in part motivated by a subterranean (or not so subterranean) sense of anti-Semitism, which he used to gather the various kingdoms under one ostensibly Christian rule.

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But in another way, these translations are also inadequate. Translating Marrani as the Jews flattens out the complex sense of selfhood that developed among Spanish Conversos as a result of conversion and the purity of blood laws that followed. Like the Moriscos, the Marranos presented a scandal to confessional identity. As converts to Christianity, they were no longer Jews and were not understood to be Jews either by contemporary rabbis or by Christian theologians. But because Marranos had “Jewish blood,” they also could not have been seen as authentically Spanish Christians. As Benzion Netanyahu has shown, the Marranos were neither Jews nor Christians and were not understood to be either by Christian theologians, Jewish rabbis, or themselves. Developing Netanyahu’s groundbreaking scholarship, Yirmiyahu Yovel argues that the Marranos embodied a form of life in which “duality as such . . . becomes the actual substance of life, its very essence.”14 This is why, Yovel continues, commentators described Marranos as “chimeras” and “heretics to all religions.” Despite the hostile intent of these charges, in Yovel’s account they are also accurate. The forced conversion of the Jews and then refusal to allow converted Jews the status of Christians produced a self split “between affirming a mixture of religions and repudiating them all.”15 Unlike either “the Moors” or “the Jews,” the term “Marrani” suggests that the authority of the new prince comes in no small measure from the fabrication and targeting of a vulnerable, internal enemy. Caught between confessional identities, the Marrani are particularly susceptible to being the targets of a political fiction created and sustained by pious cruelty. Conquest is the central, defi ning aspect of the new state. For Machiavelli, the conquest of land is the constituting action of the new prince.16 Since the new prince inherits neither land nor a legitimate title, he can become a prince only on the basis of conquest. The new prince acquires dominions with “armies of his own or others” or that “fall to him by fortune or virtù” (P 5 / 33). Writing against the backdrop of the European invasion of the Italian peninsula, Machiavelli understands that the political situation of the new prince and the new state must be understood through the implications and effects of land appropriation. This is one reason that in late sixteenth-century England colonial bureaucrats like Richard Beacon and Edmund Spenser found Machiavelli’s writings to be so useful in conceptualizing English rule in Ireland. In the View of the Present State of Ireland, Spenser uses Machiavelli’s analysis of Roman colonialism to call for Elizabeth to grant absolute authority to colonial governors and ruling councils, and in Solon his follie, Richard Beacon experiments with central themes from the Discourses—the significance of discord between social

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classes in the production of civic virtue, the corruption that results from an imbalance in authority between the people and the nobility, and the need for a reformer to use force and fraud in restoring civic virtue and good government—to reformulate English policy in ruling over Ireland.17 Machiavelli’s political thinking translates so well into a more explicitly colonial situation because he understands and conceptualizes the new state and its attending forms of authority through the act of land grabbing. Machiavelli himself pays a great deal of attention to the general structure of governance that results from conquest. He introduces both the new prince and the enemy, the “nuovo principe” and the “inimici” (6 / 35), together for the fi rst time in a passage in chapter 3 of The Prince that is generally concerned with the political field as it is produced by conquest or annexation. Machiavelli notes that men are willing to change rulers out of a desire to fare better (a claim I will return to at the end of this chapter) only to fi nd this desire frustrated once they fi nd a new ruler: “This is the result of another natural and ordinary cause, which is the necessary harm infl icted on those over whom the new prince [nuovo principe] acquires rule, both by his soldiers and by an infi nite number of other injuries caused by his occupation. Thus you fi nd enemies [inimici] in all those whom you have injured by occupying that principality.” As he goes on to explain, the new prince needs the friendship of the people whom he intends to conquer, but once he has conquered them, he cannot fully maintain their friendship. Once the job of the new prince is to maintain his rule, and not to establish it, the people whose liberty he promised fi nd themselves deluded in their hopes and expectations. Machiavelli repeats this argument in chapter 6 by pointing out that those who had vested interests in the older political order will of necessity be enemies of the new. Even if the reformer or founder of a new state isn’t literally a conqueror, the act of reforming or founding works by the same general logic. It displaces an older order in favor of a new one and, in so doing, produces the relation between ruler and enemy (those still committed to the older order) as a key political problem. This problem is the most serious one a new prince faces, Machiavelli suggests, since even the supporters of the new order tend to be tepid at best, partly due to “fear of their adversaries, who have the laws [of the older order] on their side,” and partly due to “the incredulity of mankind, who do not truly believe in anything new until they have had actual experience of it” (P 13 / 50). One of Machiavelli’s main contributions was to take confl ict as a primary point of reference for political thinking, but he was equally attentive to the politics of representation. Any account of political theology in

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Machiavelli must account for the latter as well as the former. The broader topic of chapter 21, where Machiavelli discusses Ferdinand of Aragon, is how a prince must craft reputation strategically for political ends. The theatricalization of virtue, Machiavelli argues, but not virtue as an end in itself, is a key means by which the prince maintains his authority. By the same token, in raising Ferdinand’s pious cruelty toward the Marrani Machiavelli also suggests that a separate discourse of religious difference subsists alongside the new state and that one way for the new prince to make himself look virtuous is to revive and active this discourse. The problem represented by the Marrani isn’t simply the conquest or reconquest of territory but also the theological principles deduced from scripture used to manage the coexistence of diverse ethnic groups within a single dominion. In his discussion of this passage, Leo Strauss underscores pious cruelty as a uniquely modern phenomenon. The problem for Strauss isn’t cruelty but piety. Strauss begins by opposing Ferdinand’s piety to Hannibal’s “inhuman cruelty” in order to elucidate the difference between ancient and modern strategies for producing political community. Hannibal’s cruelty, not to say inhuman cruelty, was justified by the fact that he was the captain of an army which consisted of men of many races. Could it be that the government of an ethnically heterogeneous mixed body, of a society embracing members of many nations, not to say all nations, requires a degree of severity which would not be needed for the good government of a homogeneous society? Certainly only a being “born of man” can be expected to have those feelings of humanity which lead to revulsion against tyranny. According to Machiavelli, even in a homogeneous society like the early Roman republic, cruelty or extreme severity of leading citizens is most useful or desirable. It makes a man thought to be a lover of nothing except the fatherland or the common good, or to be thoroughly just, and to be completely indifferent to his or others’ private good. The Biblical expression for love of the common good is love of the neighbor whom one is commanded to love as oneself. According to the Biblical teaching, love of the neighbor is inseparable from love of God whom one is commanded to love with all his heart, with all his soul, and with all his might. From Machiavelli’s point of view, the Biblical teaching regarding man’s destiny appeared to lead to a more than Manlian severity, to pious cruelty, as a duty.18

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In calling attention to the scriptural basis of pious cruelty, Strauss suggests two things at once. First, as with all versions of cruelty in The Prince, pious cruelty is in the interest of the prince. Cruelty is an efficient and unavoidable means by which the prince might produce loyalty among political subjects. If religion authorizes or legitimates cruelty, it is in the interest of the prince to use it for his own ends. Second, though, pious cruelty should not be understood as simply the instrumentalization of religion but rather as a symptom of that process. Pious cruelty becomes more than a strategy. In Strauss’s account, it becomes a duty. No doubt Machiavelli thinks that Ferdinand uses religion for his own purposes, to consolidate his authority over the newly formed state. In itself, the instrumentalization of religion in the service of the state is nothing new. In both The Prince and the Discourses, Machiavelli makes it clear that all states need civil religions to produce obedience, loyalty, and patriotism. Strauss’s second point runs deeper. Ferdinand’s pious cruelty discloses a strange link between scripture and the modern state that produces a new kind of cruelty, a new form of violence, one that outstrips the understanding of politics as feigning or tactic and poses the more central problem of political theology. Why, Strauss asks us to consider, does a sense of religious duty persist in the political landscape of the early modern and modern state? Why does the religious enemy, who is not necessarily a political enemy, endure in the modern state to contaminate any liberal sense of the common good? As we saw in this book’s introduction, for Carl Schmitt, the twentieth century’s premier theorist of political theology and one of Strauss’s ongoing interlocutors, political theology legitimates the personal authority of the sovereign. Deriving his understanding of political theology from a reading of Hobbes, Schmitt argues that the state is predicated on the political distinction between friend and foe, which can be settled in the last instances only by the sovereign, who, famously, “decides the exception.”19 For Schmitt, “the concept of the state presupposes the concept of the political” as the need to decide between friend and foe.20 In response, Strauss argues that Schmitt’s thesis affirms violence as state-sanctioned morality without grasping either the causes or effects of that violence.21 Machiavelli is singularly significant for Strauss because he approaches these questions through political anthropology, the governance of life. Even as Machiavelli focuses on the personal authority of the prince, he also discloses the dynamic processes by which that authority gets invented and sustained. Machiavelli, we might say, explores the vitality of the political—its ur-

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gency as a life force that animates and dominates community. As Strauss will argue in his reading of Machiavelli, once the preservation of the state defi nes the common good, those invested in the common good must be on the constant look out for “potential enemies.” “Oppression, or injustice,” Strauss writes, “is coeval with political society.”22 For Machiavelli, the example of Ferdinand’s pious cruelty toward the Marrani discloses the intersection of that logic with scriptural narrative and theological modes of thought. The Marrani are paradoxically included within the domain of governance through their despoliation, not because the Marrani are conquerors but because the vitality of the new prince relies on the creation and targeting of a religious enemy. Pious cruelty toward the Marrani suggests that the authority of the new prince is based on his ability to exclude some section of the people from the state or, better, to govern over some section of people through their violent exclusion.23

THE TWO FACES OF MOSES In one sense, Machiavelli highlights a problem that bears no necessary relation to the particular case of the Jews. The phrase “pious cruelty” points to a general form of theologico-political violence at the margins of the conceptualization and theorization of the early modern state. Since Marranos were converts accused of being Jews, or possibly Muslims, contrary to their public confessions of faith, Machiavelli’s example suggests that the authority of the new prince relies not simply on enmity but more precisely on the fabrication of an internal enemy through a ready-made set of metaphors and discursive strategies at the disposal of the new prince. Once the state supposes the political subject to be a subject of belief, the authority of the new prince is grounded on the identification and punishment of subjects suspected of not believing correctly, strongly enough, or at all. In another sense, however, the problem that Machiavelli highlights has everything to do with the Jews, since Machiavelli develops the problem of enmity through a reading of Hebrew scripture. Machiavelli raises the problem of the enemy in the context of a broader discussion of fiction and force. His example of each is Moses. Initially, Machiavelli presents Moses as a founder of state who understands and capitalizes on the ability of religion to secure obedience to a political leader. The greatest founders, the ones who founded new orders based on their own virtù and not on happenstances brought about by fortune, are Moses, Cyrus, Romulus, and Theseus. Machiavelli then qualifies this claim:

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Although one should not speak of Moses [di Moisè non si debba ragionare], he having merely carried out what was ordered by God, still he deserves admiration, if only for the grace which made him worthy to speak with God. But considering Cyrus and the others who have acquired or founded kingdoms [regni], they will all be found worthy of admiration [mirabili]; and if their particular actions and methods are examined they will not appear all that different from those of Moses, although he had so great a Master. And in examining their life and deeds it will be seen that they owed nothing to fortune but the occasion which gave them matter to be shaped into what form they thought fit; and without that opportunity their powers would have been wasted, and without their powers the occasion would have come in vain. (P 13 / 49)

On the one hand, Machiavelli presents Moses as an exception to political calculation. Because he received revelation, he is different from Cyrus, Romulus, Theseus, and others who founded new orders based on their own virtù. Moses is exceptional because his revelation is real. But Machiavelli also adds that Moses’s exceptional status is due to our not reasoning too much about it. Instead, we must simply admire the grace that made him worthy of speaking with God. In making this claim, Machiavelli does more than defer to divine intervention. He stages and performs deference to divine intervention in order to underscore the way in which claims to revelation secure political authority through belief in them. On the other hand, then, Machiavelli presents Moses as an exemplary instance of political calculation. It ends up that Moses is not that different from Cyrus and other pagan rulers who founded their governance based on their own powers, “if their particular actions and methods are examined.” And this in turn underscores the fictional nature of Moses’s claims. All founders and reformers, Moses included, use the fiction of revelation to further their political ends. As Victoria Kahn puts it, “Machiavelli conflates the language of divine providence with that of princely virtù, and so negates the distinction between Moses and Cyrus even as he insists on it.”24 Machiavelli demonstrates the political force of the fiction of revelation at the very moment that he wryly denies its status as fiction. This discussion of political fiction leads Machiavelli to develop a second account of force, the need for a form of violence as brute force that goes beyond the persuasive force of fiction. Because the status of revelation is undecidable, Machiavelli argues that words are never enough. Reformers

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and founders cannot just persuade the people to follow them but must also be able to compel obedience by force. In the fi rst case [when founders rely on words alone] they invariably come to bad success and accomplish nothing; but when they can depend on their own strength and are able to use force, they rarely fail. Thus it comes about that all armed prophets have conquered and unarmed ones fail. For beside what has been already said, the nature of a people [populi] varies, and it is easy to persuade them of a thing, but difficult to keep them in that persuasion. And so it is necessary to order things so that when they no longer believe, they can be made to believe by force. Moses, Cyrus, Theseus, and Romulus would not have been able to keep their constitutions [loro constituzioni] observed for so long had they been disarmed. (P 13–14 / 50)

Machiavelli is relatively tactful here about what Moses actually does, but in the Discourses he is more explicit: “Whoever reads the Bible judiciously will see that since he wished his laws and his orders to go forward, Moses was forced to kill infi nite men [ammazzare infi niti uomini] who, moved by nothing other than envy, were opposed to his plans” (D 3.30.241–42 / 280). When discussing Moses as an armed prophet, Machiavelli is referring to Exodus 32:26–28. After coming down from Mount Sinai and seeing the Hebrews worshiping the golden calf, Moses breaks the tablet of the law and charges the Levites, who did not worship the idol, to slay the members of the other tribes. “Each of you put sword on thigh, go back and forth from gate to gate throughout the camp, and slay brother, neighbor, and kin,” Moses commands. The Levites follow Moses’s order, and, the passage from Exodus concludes, “some three thousand of the people fell that day” (JPS Exod. 32:27–28). Moses’s massacre of the people is the scene of violence as brute force that The Prince assumes without explicitly staging. In Machiavelli’s account, belief harbors both a promise and a problem. Because his authority rests on belief, the reformer or lawgiver can use fiction to sustain obedience. The claim to revelation can found a new political order. But that claim is also potentially the new order’s undoing, since those who profited from the old order but do not profit from the new one can easily discredit the lawgiver’s claims as mere words, so many false promises. For Machiavelli, Hebrew scripture offers one answer. Reformers and founders of new orders must have recourse to extralegal violence— must be able to cast a section of the population as not just enemies but heretics and massacre them in order to reinstate and reinforce belief.

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Machiavelli’s reference to Exodus 32:27–28 recalls a long tradition of Christian theology on the respective roles of church and state in the authority to persecute heretics. Michael Walzer has argued that verses 27–28 of Exodus 32 have a significant place in Christian political theology. As the only example in scripture of Moses punishing his people on the basis of his own authority, they became a touchstone for deciding questions of secular authority and the appropriate use of violence enacted against the unrighteous populace.25 Augustine interprets these verses to justify using secular power against religious heretics. Writing in support of the Roman emperor Falvius Honorius when he issues fi nes against the Donatists, Augustine argues that just as Moses massacred a portion of the people as a corrective against idolatry, so too should the emperor be able to punish heretics, so long as he, like Moses, is motivated by concern for his people’s soul.26 By contrast, Aquinas uses these verses to distinguish between Christian care for the soul and worldly violence. Aquinas subtracts Moses as much as possible from the massacre. Even if Moses gave the order to the Levites to kill the Israelites, Aquinas argues, when the Levites committed this act, they were acting “at the Lord’s command” and by His authority (ST I–II.q.64.a.3.rO1). And this move allows Aquinas to shift the focus of the question from the state to the church. Can clergy kill sinners? Aquinas’s answer is no. Using typological reasoning, he argues that while the Levites were administering the Old Law, “which appointed corporal penalties,” Christian clergy are “concerned with better things than corporal slayings, namely with things pertaining to spiritual welfare” (q.64. a.4.rO1–2). While Aquinas recognizes the possibility that the prince might need to use violence to further the ends of justice, he bars the prince from claiming this violence is divine. Violence, Aquinas argues, is not an appropriate means for achieving spiritual salvation. It may be necessary for the common good, but for Christianity violence is not an acceptable means for carrying out a sacred end. Machiavelli makes a double move in relation to this tradition. Operating within the tradition, he uses Moses to argue for the necessity of divine violence within the secular order. Like Augustine, Machiavelli posits the sovereign as the legitimate secular agent of divine violence. At the same time, Machiavelli rejects Augustine’s central premise that the emperor can carry out acts of divine violence only insofar as the terms are defi ned by the Church. Machiavelli refuses the authority of the Church to defi ne these terms and instead subsumes the ends of divine violence within the domain of the state. What counts is no longer belief in Christ but belief in the charismatic authority of the prince. Operating upon this tradition,

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Machiavelli alters the status of scripture itself. Once he suggests that Moses instrumentalizes religion, Machiavelli also implies that Hebrew scripture should be read fi rst of all as a history and not as sacred script. Hebrew scripture lays claim to revelation, but its value as history is that it demonstrates the force of that claim as it works itself out in the political history of the founding, rise, and fall of Israel. Exegesis reinforces that claim. Augustine, Aquinas, and other theologians who take Moses’s action as a ground for moral inquiry share the assumption that through scripture God reveals the right path. Machiavelli makes a different assumption. Because others take it to be a sacred text, scripture is a symptomatic text, one that discloses the inner workings of a community bound to monotheistic notions of political authority. Machiavelli exploits the symptomatic nature of scripture most fully at the end of The Prince, when he uses the shaping force of Mosaic narrative to authorize a new vision of political community.27 For Machiavelli, this is the other face of Moses. In addition to legitimating the new prince’s need for divine violence, Mosaic narrative also underscores a drive toward freedom through which the people as such are defi ned. Despite Machiavelli’s profound emphasis on cruelty as the signal attribute that binds a people to its sovereign, The Prince ends with a view of political life in which the people’s desire for liberation from tyranny conjures or hails a new leader into being. After detailing the misfortunes that have befallen Italian citystates during and after 1494, Machiavelli concludes The Prince by arguing that the Italians are ready for an exodus: And if, as I said, it was necessary in order that the power of Moses should be displayed, that the people of Israel should be slaves in Egypt, and to give scope for the greatness and courage of Cyrus that the Persians should be oppressed by Medes, and to illustrate the pre-eminence of Theseus that the Athenians should be dispersed, so at the present time, in order that the might of an Italian genius might be recognized, it was necessary that Italy should be reduced to her present condition, and that she should be more enslaved than the Hebrews, more oppressed than the Persians, and more scattered than the Athenians; without a head, without order, beaten, despoiled, lacerated, and overrun, and that she should suffer every kind of ruin. (49–50 / 124)

The reference to Moses is Machiavelli’s solicitation to Lorenzo di Medici. As with Moses, opportunity has presented itself to Lorenzo, Machiavelli argues, who has only to seize the moment in order to be a second Moses.

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“The sea has been opened,” he writes, “a cloud has shown you the road, the rock has given forth water, manna has rained, and everything has contributed to your greatness. The rest must be done by you” (50 / 125). Even if the solicitation rings hollow, the ending of The Prince shows Machiavelli’s investment in the persuasive force of Hebrew scripture. Alongside its ability to offer lessons for the new prince, who needs to manipulate and overrule his subjects, Hebrew scripture has the persuasive force of narrative to shape political desires and mold political communities.

NOMOS AND VIOLENCE Machiavelli uses Hebrew scripture to legitimate violence in the forming of a new state, and at the same time he also explores scripture’s capacity to shape political desires and potentially distance the brute force of political violence through narrative and its persuasive effect on readers. This is a use of Hebrew scripture that Machiavelli could have gleaned from scripture itself, which, like The Prince though for different reasons, teaches that good laws require force and also explores the various modes of mediation that might countenance or abate this force. The Pentateuch both exemplifies the political need for divine violence to counteract the people’s murmuring—their dissatisfaction with the current situation and desire for better leadership—and uses narrative techniques to reduce the direct impact of that violence by translating violence into a symbolic realm. While Moses’s massacre in Exodus 32 suggests the need for divine violence, Deuteronomy searches for a second solution, one that contains the extralegal violence of the massacre within a normative rule of law. In an influential reading of Deuteronomy, Robert Polzin makes a strong distinction between Moses and the book’s narrator, the scribe who writes down Moses’s speeches and describes his actions. Polzin proposes that the narrator pits his own critical understanding of tradition against Moses’s authoritarian dogmatism in order to render the covenant more flexible and to temper God’s retributive justice with love and mercy.28 Showing that this relation between authoritative speaker and scribal revision is what defi nes an ancient “author function,” Hindy Najman argues that the primary target of this complex relation is the reader, who is brought into relation with the law through ongoing acts of reading and interpretation. Focusing on Second Temple exegetical literature, Najman shows how Mosaic authority translates into questions having to do with the fashioning of interpretive communities.29 Building off of Polzin’s and Najman’s arguments, I shall argue that Deuteronomy explores the need for divine violence from the

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vantage point of narrative in order to highlight linguistic techniques by which divine violence might be preserved—but at a distance. Exodus casts Moses’s massacre as part of the broader opposition between the golden calf and the giving of the law. When read from the perspective of the prohibition on images, the golden calf epitomizes the propensity of the mind to create inadequate representations of the divine, the problem, as Calvin explains it, that “men . . . could not otherwise possess God, unless by subjecting Him to their own imaginations.”30 But when read from the perspective of political making, the golden calf represents the capacity of collective life to generate its own forms of political authority. The golden calf represents the desire for an exodus, a desire to leave slavery behind for a new political order. As the medieval rabbi Moshe ben Nachman or Nachmanides argues, the people made the golden calf because they wanted a new leader, a new Moses, since Moses himself seemed to be lost. Although the golden calf expressed a collective desire for leadership that might be admirable in itself, the problem is that the people created a leader who gave no sense of direction. The people “thought that the calf would be their guide, but in fact they appeared as if they had no counsel, not knowing the way wherein they must walk, and the deeds they must do, for some of them intended it for the good, according to their way of thinking, and others intended it for real evil, and thus each one went his own way.”31 Nachmanides casts the golden calf as an emblem of political making even as he critiques that act. As a form of political making that is distinctly immanent, the golden calf seems inevitably to collapse back into undirected collective life, each member of the collective fi nally going “his own way.” For Nachmanides, this decline into collective confusion stands in opposition to the sense of unity and order promised by the giving of the law and especially by the divine sovereignty that the law assumes. The fi rst commandment, “I the Lord am your God” (JPS Exod. 20:2), installs one divine sovereign as the condition of Israel’s collective life. Nachmanides gives a parable that uncovers the implications of this commandment: “A king invaded a country, and his attendants said to him, ‘Issue decrees to us.’ He however, refused, saying: ‘No! When you have accepted my sovereignty, I will issue decrees to you, for if you do not accept my sovereignty, how will you carry out my decrees?’ Similarly, God said, ‘I am the eternal thy god, thou shalt have no other gods. I am he whose sovereignty you have accepted in Egypt.’ And when they said to Him, ‘Yes,’ [He continued]: ‘Now, just as you have accepted My sovereignty, so you must also accept my decrees.’”32 In Nachmanides’s account, the covenant is akin to

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Israel being conquered by a foreign prince. Once entered into, its terms are non-negotiable. Since the law is produced through an agreement with a conquering ruler, the law has a power over collective life regardless of whatever law happens to be given. As punishment for the making of the golden calf, Moses’s massacre reinstates this divine authority over the life of the people. The point of the massacre is to rein in the generative capacity of the people by placing them under the sign of death. After the massacre, God commands the people to remove their jewelry and other fi nery, which they are no longer allowed to wear “from Mount Horeb on” (JPS Exod. 33:6). According to Nachmanides, graven (charuth) on the tablets of the law was freedom (cheiruth) from the angel of death. While the law “girded” the Hebrews with “weapons of armor to save them from all mishaps and the angel of death,” in taking off that armor, the Hebrews accepted death “as a form of punishment for the incident of the calf.”33 Following Nachmanides we might say that through sedition, the Israelites enter a zone of obedience in which the vulnerability to physical death symbolizes and substantiates God’s absolute force. Or, following Elaine Scarry, we might say that Moses’s order bans the celebration of a creaturely capacity for making in order to substantiate the dominion of a noncreated ruler over the created order. As Scarry argues, Hebrew scripture is intensely concerned with the ways in which “the graphic image of the human body substitutes for the object of belief that has no content and thus cannot be represented.”34 The body, and especially the body in pain, makes real and transcendent a God who would otherwise be only a fiction and created artifact. Moses’s massacre of the people suggests that it is not just the individual body in pain but the corporate body under the threat of destruction that substantiates and grounds belief in God as the absolute and unrepresentable sovereign. Deuteronomy reimagines this mode of violence found in Exodus. On the one hand, Deuteronomy asks us to entertain the possibility that relations between the generative power of collective life and the divine authority over collective life might be reconceived through greater attention to nomos, a space of social practice or a “normative universe,” as the legal theorist Robert Cover puts it, “held together by the force of interpretive commitments—some small and private, others immense and public.”35 In its very title, Deuteronomy or deutero-nomos suggest repetition as the central operation by which the book will accomplish this binding. The repetition, retelling, and reinterpretation of the giving of the law itself become an interpretive commitment that shapes and reshapes the people through social practice. On the other hand, Deuteronomy asks us to keep in mind

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the force of Moses’s massacre (while divorcing that act from the agency of the lawgiver) as a kind of extralegal violence that shapes this normative universe. Here, nomos refers to the founding act that orders sociopolitical space. This is the understanding of nomos that Schmitt emphasizes when he argues that nomos is primarily “a constitutive act of spatial ordering,” one that determines and makes sense of any subsequent “political, social, and religious order.”36 Schmitt notes that nomos comes from the Greek word nemein, which means to take or appropriate, to divide or distribute, and to pasture. In its fullest sense, nomos means appropriation, distribution, and production.37 While Cover emphasizes production within the interpretive economy or oikonomos of the law, Schmitt focuses on what he calls the nomos of the earth, the appropriation and distribution of geopolitical space through the active assertion of boundaries. We can see a central relation emerging between these two understandings of nomos as shaping norms and as appropriation if we focus on Deuteronomy’s Hebrew title. In Hebrew, Deuteronomy goes by two different names. The fi rst, Devarim, means “words” and comes from the book’s opening line: “These are the words that Moses spoke to all of Israel on the banks of the Jordan [Ayleh had’varim asher Moshe el-kol-Yisrael b’Ayvehr haYahr Dayn]” (Deut. 1:1). Devarim calls attention to the book as a performative act, a speech extended over thirty chapters in which Moses summarizes and expounds on his prior teaching and links that teaching to the conquest of Canaan. The words of Moses are torot or nomoi (the Greek Septuagint translates torah as nomos) that explain how the people will become righteous enough to conquer the promised land and keep it in their possession. This is the version of nomos that Schmitt emphasizes, as Moses’s words create a spatial order that goes hand in hand with the shaping of Israel as a holy people. Moses’s words, his devarim, have a constituting force that establishes geopolitical space and links it to biopolitical regulation. The other name for Deuteronomy, Mishnei Torah, means repetition or copy of the Torah and comes from chapter 17, where Moses exhorts future kings of Israel to read and submit to the law. “When he is seated on his royal throne, he shall have a copy of this Teaching [mishnei ha’torah ha’zot] written for him on a scroll by the levitical priests. Let it remain with him and let him read it all his life, so that he may learn to revere the Lord his God, to observe faithfully every word of this Teaching as well as these laws” (Deut. 17:18–19). Rather than standing outside or above the law, in these verses (which will become quite significant in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century political exegesis) the monarch is brought under the domain of nomos, a normative world regulated through the kind of legal

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and critical interpretation that Cover describes. The name Mishnei Torah qualifies monarchical authority and the king’s right to claim what will be called, many centuries later, arbitrary rule by submitting the sovereign to law that must be repeatedly read, interpreted, and observed. Moses synthesizes these two versions of nomos through the act of forgetting. Throughout Deuteronomy, Moses repeatedly insists on memory as a practice that will span the distance between past and present, bring the present-day people into contact with the original scene of law giving, and bind the people to the law. Nevertheless, in retelling the story of Exodus, Moses also actively forgets the massacre in Exodus 32. Even though he discusses the worship of the golden calf, in retelling the story he leaves out his decision to command the massacre and emphasizes instead his role as intermediary: I threw myself down before the Lord—eating no bread and drinking no water for forty days and forty nights, as before—because of the great wrong you had committed, doing what displeased the Lord and vexing Him. For I was in dread of the Lord’s fierce anger against you, which moved Him to wipe you out. And that time, too, the Lord gave heed to me.—Moreover, the Lord was angry enough at Aaron to have destroyed him; so I interceded for Aaron at that time.—As for that sinful thing you had made, the calf, I took it and put it into the fi re; I broke it to bits and ground it thoroughly until it was fi ne as dust, and I threw its dust into the brook that comes down from the mountain. And again you provoked the Lord at Taberah, and at Massah, and at Kibroth-hattaavah. (Deut. 9:18–22)

We might read this omission as a form of exculpation, a sign of Moses’s regret over his actions, or we might read it as a sign of changing oral and written traditions, oral or scribal revision as exegetical innovation. In either case, these verses from Deuteronomy reinterpret the massacre in Exodus 32 in an attempt to bind both Moses and God more fi rmly to the normative order of the law, fi rst and foremost the law not to commit murder. Like the images of the kings of Israel in Deuteronomy 17, here both Moses and God are made to submit to the law by the law’s own legitimating narrative. Moses’s retelling acknowledges that the law admits exceptions, but his omission of the massacre implies that neither he nor God claimed the exception in this instance. At the same time, Moses preserves the force of his command to the Levites through an act of symbolic translatio, one that elevates the prob-

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lem of Moses’s decision from the human to the divine. At the end of Deuteronomy, Moses prophesies the disobedience of the people and then teaches the people a song in which they are redeemed through the slaughter of the unfaithful. As both witness and judge, the Song calls out the people for turning to false gods and issues a sentence against them for having done so: He will say: Where are their gods, The rock in whom they sought refuge, Who ate the fat of the offerings And drank their libation wine? Let them rise up to your help, And let them be a shield unto you! See, then, that I, I am He; There is no god beside Me. I deal death and give life; I wound and I will heal: None can deliver from My hand. Lo, I raise My hand to heaven And say: As I live forever, When I whet My flashing blade And My hand lays hold on judgment, Vengeance will I wreak on My foes, Will I deal to those who reject Me. I will make My arrows drunk with blood— As My sword devours flesh— Blood of the slain and the captive From the long-haired enemy chiefs. (Deut. 32:37–42)

Exodus asserts Moses’s authority over the power of collective life when he has the Levites massacre the Israelites who worshiped the golden calf. Deuteronomy responds by reasserting the power over life as God’s prerogative that Moses disclaims. In showing Moses forgetting his decision and ceding it in a general way to God, Deuteronomy performs an exegetical revision of Exodus, suggesting that God has the sovereign right over life and death but that Moses does not. While this doesn’t cancel divine violence, it does relocate that violence in messianic time. What was initially a way of asserting the authority of God’s sovereignty through the punishment of the people now becomes a way of redeeming the people through a more

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general and transcendent form of violence—one that inhabits nomos as a metaphor of extralegal force. Specifically, the Song of Moses emphasizes the distinction between human and divine violence through the metaphor of eating that concludes the passage cited above. Deuteronomy is quite clear about the consumption of blood. Even in exceptional circumstances, when the eating of unclean animals is permitted, consuming blood is strictly forbidden. In certain circumstances, you may eat deer and gazelles along with cattle and sheep, Moses explains. “But make sure that you do not partake of the blood [hadam]; for the blood is the life, and you must not consume the life with the flesh [habasar]” (Deut. 12:23). The distinction between flesh and blood is a legal fiction which ensures that the taking of animal life is distinct from the act of intentional murder. When God promises that his sword will devour flesh and his arrows will drink blood, he explicitly blurs the distinction between flesh and blood and, in so doing, claims power over life through a metaphor of extralegal violence. Deuteronomy explores the role of nomos most fully through the death of Moses. In Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers, Moses maintains the covenant through judicial reasoning, by deciding what to do in exceptional circumstances in his role as leader and judge. With the impending death of Moses, however, Deuteronomy imagines a scribal version of political theology in which crisis is mediated through the transmission and remembering of sacred texts. The death of Moses raises a fundamental problem: how to ensure the sustained existence of the people of Israel? How will Israel remain God’s holy people upon the death of its greatest prophet? This is a pressing problem for Moses, who knows from the book’s beginning that he is about to die and who also knows that the people will stray after his death. It is also a pressing problem for Deuteronomy’s anonymous narrator, who, writing the book several centuries later during the Josianic reforms, attempts to eradicate cultic practices from the Temple and return Israel to a Mosaic code of justice. 38 What is revealed to Moses at the end of Deuteronomy is the present-day reality for the book’s anonymous narrator. The people have in fact gone astray after alien gods; they have broken the covenant and forsaken God; many evils and troubles have befallen them. Moses and the narrator both face the aporia between general law and its particular application. Moses attempts to synthesize general law and particular application in the ideal of total obedience. On the banks of the Jordan River, he repeatedly assures the people that if they fully obey the law, they will live securely and happy in the promised land. But the narrator is cagier. Staging this promise in light of its failure actually to come true in histori-

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cal time, the narrator posits this gap as the very problem that ensures the people’s sustained existence. If there is a sense of return, it is not to the ideal of total obedience but to the moment of choice: accept the covenant or die! As Moses explains it, “I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life—if you and your offspring would live—by loving the Lord your God, heeding his commands, and holding fast to Him. For thereby you shall have life and long endure upon the soil that the Lord swore to your ancestors, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to give to them” (30:19–20). Moses emphasizes the effects of making the right choice. Dying before entering the promised land, he dreams of a political community in which the obedience of norms defers and prevents the exception. Throughout Deuteronomy, however, the narrator emphasizes the moment of choice, returning the people to the moment at which they are situated between law and its application and posing that as the defi ning moment that ensures the people’s ongoing collective life. This is not to say that Deuteronomy’s narrator counsels indecision. Rather, it is to say that in highlighting the difference between the law and its application, Deuteronomy’s narrator uses narrative to highlight nomos as a space of practice. The narrator isolates the moment of choice in order to show how the law constitutes the people in a two-part operation. First, the law conjures the people as a mass of potential. The very act of being given the law consecrates the people, brings them into being as “ahm kodesh,” a holy or consecrated people (7:6). It is in this sense that the law is a gift. The very act of giving is also an act of recognition. When Moses gives the law, he urges the people to play out the logic of gift exchange, to fulfi ll the obligation that the gift of the law carries with it. But his urging also shows that on its own the law cannot transform potentiality into actuality. “You are a people consecrated to the Lord your God. . . . Know, therefore, that only the Lord your God is God, the steadfast God who keeps His covenant faithfully to the thousandth generation of those who love Him and keep His commandments, but who instantly requite those who reject Him” (7:6, 9–10). On its own, the law cannot bridge the space between consecration and obedience. At best, the law can elaborate the consequences of disobedience. Second, though, the law can mediate collective life. The law can organize the potential mass it conjures through increasingly complex forms of mediation. One of the fundamental insights of Hebrew scripture is that the people do not exist outside of some form of mediation, be it Abraham’s covenant with God, the census that Moses and Aaron take at the beginning of Numbers, or the tribal structure that Moses elaborates at the beginning of Deuteronomy. What distinguishes

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Deuteronomy is that it self-consciously mediates the people through the transmission of its law and songs of divine violence. In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt argues that for the Greeks politics is a space of appearance in which citizens disclose their uniqueness through speech and action. Like the builder of city walls, the lawmaker secures a place within which political community can exist by way of conversation, in the sharing of words and deeds. 39 This is not the politics of Hebrew scripture or of the Mosaic constitution, which instead of conversation is based on exegesis. In Deuteronomy, civic life is secured by the space between law and its application, the space of interpretation where the people constitute and confront themselves as a community determined by the narratives that defi ne them and, for this reason, demand ongoing reinterpretation.

FROM CRUELTY TO IMPETUOUS ACTION For both Christian theologians and Hebrew scripture itself, Moses’s decision to massacre a portion of the Israelites raises a host of problems concerning divine violence and its relation to normative political community. Christian theologians turn to Exodus 32 to ask who has the legitimate authority to enact violence against heretics in exceptional circumstances, while Hebrew scripture manages extralegal violence through symbolic strategies and narrative revision. Although there are significant differences within and between these two responses, both take Moses’s decision as a critical moment in the Mosaic constitution that has significant implications for conceptualizing authority and the capacity of authorities to identify and punish religious enemies. Machiavelli does not, of course, engage directly in scriptural exegesis. Nor is he at all interested in elaborating dogma. But he is deeply engaged with the problems raised by Moses’s decision, problems concerning the legitimacy of violence when used for the good of the state. A writer who is deeply concerned with counsel and practical reason, Machiavelli uses the example of Moses to develop a flexible and open-ended response to the various problems that arise in the constitution of a new political order. Specifically, in The Prince Moses’s massacre of the Israelites serves as a point of departure for a broader analysis of prudence and cruelty. Throughout, Machiavelli counsels the prudent use of cruelty when other means of persuasion fail. Machiavelli opens chapter 6 by exhorting the “prudent man [uomo prudente]” (P 12 / 48) to imitate great men like Moses, Cyrus, Romulus, and Theseus. In part, Machiavelli counsels the use of religious rhetoric to induce and nourish belief in the charismatic authority of the new prince, but also he relies on Moses

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to introduce a sustained analysis of the political force needed to reinforce that authority when rhetoric alone is not enough. Rather than addressing Exodus 32 directly, Machiavelli develops the political implications of Moses’s decision in the chapters immediately following his discussion of Moses as the founder of a new state. He begins by giving a series of examples, each of which highlights the need for and political efficacy of cruelty to ensure the people’s obedience. Cesare Borgia appointed Remirro de Orco, “a cruel and able man [uomo crudele ed espedito]” (P 16 / 55), to govern Romagna after he conquered it, and once the people began to resent Remirro’s harshness, Cesare had him cut in half and placed in the public square. “The ferocity of this spectacle,” Machiavelli comments, “made the people both satisfied [satisfatti] and amazed [stupidi]” (16 / 55) and gave Cesare the means to secure his rule. Agathocles the Sicilian became king of Syracuse after murdering the senators and wealthiest men of the city. He convened a meeting of the senate and the people as if to discuss some great matter of state and, during the meeting, had the city leaders murdered by his soldiers. “After their death he occupied and held rule over the city without any civil strife [sanza alcuna controversia civile]” (18 / 59). And Oliverotto gained possession of Fermo by murdering his uncle and the other leaders of the city. Oliverotto had his soldiers slaughter these men after persuading them to retire to a private place to discuss delicate matters. “After the massacre [omicidio] Oliverotto mounted Liverotto his horse, rode through the town and besieged the chief magistrate; so that through fear they were obliged to obey him and form a government [uno governo] of which he made himself prince” (19 / 61). In each of these scenes, Machiavelli asks his readers to weigh the practical uses of cruelty for securing the ends of state, giving a series of examples that culminate in the fi rst articulation of his general thesis on the uses of cruelty: “Well used [bene usate] may be called those (if it is permissible to use the word well of evil) which are perpetrated once for the need of securing one’s self [assicurarsi], and which afterwards are not persisted in, but are exchanged for measures as useful [in più utilità] to the subjects [sudditi] as possible. Cruelties badly used [male usate] are those which, although at fi rst few, increase rather than diminish with time” (20 / 62). Part of Machiavelli’s purpose is to emphasize the usefulness of cruelty in establishing and maintaining power. As Virginia Cox has demonstrated, one of Machiavelli’s main innovations in The Prince is that he rejects the rhetoric of praise when representing political actors and instead employs a deliberative rhetoric whose ends are neither “justice [nor] decency” but “power and security.” While the central concern of a rhetoric

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of praise is decorum, deliberative rhetoric focuses on the utility or utilitas of particular actions or policies and their advantage for the state. In principalities, deliberative rhetoric was usually reserved for private council. “Machiavelli’s radicalism,” Cox writes, “lies in his flouting the rules of decorum, in lifting the language of deliberation out of its ‘proper,’ circumscribed sphere within the councils of state, and placing it on display in a work intended for general circulation and dressed in the formal trappings of a treatise on government.”40 From the perspective of use, cruelty is neither just nor decent, but it is prudent. Or as Machiavelli puts it in his discussion of Moses, “It is necessary to order things so that when [the people] no longer believe, they can be made to believe by force.” Machiavelli’s emphasis on use raises a second problem concerning the ends of prudential reasoning. Initially, Machiavelli introduces prudence as political calculation. He associates it with the civic virtues of the ancient Romans, for whom prudential reasoning led to deliberate action based on a skeptical reading of motive combined with a canny understanding of political allegiances as they played out in the Mediterranean world. But as The Prince continues, Machiavelli increasingly measures prudence in the intertwined terms of self-interest and the interest of the state. Machiavelli understands very well that in principalities the interest of the state is most clearly embodied by the interest of the prince and that these two interests do not always coincide. In his fi rst thesis on cruelty, for instance, Machiavelli counsels its use for “securing one’s self,” but he tempers that advice by referring the prince to measure his cruelty by what is “useful to [his] subjects.” The implication is that the interest of the state never completely coincides with the interest of the prince. In The Prince, Machiavelli almost always casts prudential decision making in terms of the selfinterest of the prince. And he also tends to follow up with a qualification that transforms the self-interest of the prince into the interest of the state. In chapter 15, Machiavelli casts prudence in terms of self-interest in order to introduce a division between moral virtues and political action: “How we live is so far removed from how we ought to live, that he who abandons what is done for what ought to be done, will rather learn to bring about his own ruin than his preservation [la perservazione sua]” (30 / 84). He then concludes the chapter by equating the interest of the prince with the interest of the state. The prince “should be prudent enough to avoid the scandal of those vices which would lose him the state,” Machiavelli writes. Nevertheless, the prince “must not mind incurring the scandal [infamia] of those vices without which it would be difficult to save the state [salvare lo stato], for if one considers well, it will be found that some things which

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seem virtues would, if followed, lead to one’s ruin [sarebbe la ruine sua], and some others which appear vices result in one’s greater security and wellbeing [ne riesce la securità e il bene essere suo]” (31 / 85). Lurking behind Machiavelli’s advice not to worry too much about incurring scandal is a more troublesome set of questions that he leaves unanswered. How can a citizen ensure that the salvation of the state coincides with the wellbeing of the prince? To what extent, and how, can someone control the ends of prudential reasoning? These are the questions at issue in Machiavelli’s engagement with Savonarola, the Dominican friar who had a strong impact on Florentine politics after the Medici were exiled and one of Machiavelli’s main points of reference in his considerations of prudence and interest. Although the intellectual roots for Machiavelli’s reference to Moses in chapter 6 of The Prince run deep, Savonarola is his most immediate source. As a friar and a foreigner, Savonarola was excluded from direct participation in Florentine government. Even so, between 1494 and 1498, he strongly influenced policy from the pulpit. Throughout his sermons, Savonarola often cast the Florentines as the Hebrews and himself as Moses, urging his listeners to embrace freedom through the rigors of moral law.41 This identification culminated in 1498, soon after his excommunication and only a few months before his execution, when between February 11 and March 11 of that year Savonarola gave a series of Lenten sermons on Exodus. Identifying Pharaoh as the pope and Egypt as his Church, Savonarola takes the role of a Moses who will liberate the Florentines from oppression. Explicitly addressing his enemies in the same way that Moses addresses Pharaoh in Exodus, Savonarola charges that “you who want to be tyrants, curses on you and your house! Because it will be ruined and destroyed! [tu che vuoi fare tiranno, guai a te e alla casa tua; perchè elle sarà ruinata e guasta].” “The friar has God with him [il frate ha Dio con seco],” he promises, offering solace to his potentially frightened followers and the plagues of Egypt to those who stand against him.42 In Machiavelli’s assessment, the problem with Savonarola is that he relies on rhetoric because he lacks other means to achieve his project of reform. A rhetorical analysis of Savonarola’s sermons underscores the value of religion to garner support for a project of political reform, but the problem with rhetoric is that it cannot resolve the emerging forms of enmity that accompany the founding of a new order. Savonarola seems aware of this problem. In his sermon of March 2, 1498, on Exodus 1:12, he casts the Christian life as a military life, “una milizia e uno esercito,” so that to be a Christian is to participate in a grand battle between good and evil

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in which those on the side of God fight with “faith, prayer, and patience [fede, orazioni e pazienza]” and those on the other side fight with “with anger, with hatred, and with envy [con ira, con odio e con invidia].”43 Even so, these armies remain metaphorical and imaginary, not a real militia like the Levites whom Moses could use to enforce his authority when his words failed. Machiavelli attended this sermon and wrote a brief analysis of it in a letter to his friend Riccardo Bechi. Savonarola’s reasons are persuasive “for those who do not examine them [a chi non le discorre efficacissime],” Machiavelli writes, but he also indicates that Savonarola discourages examination through fear and the use of religious imagery.44 Identifying his followers as a company “that serves God [che militava sotto Iddio]” and his enemies as those who serve “under the devil [sotto el diavolo],” Savonarola goes on to cast his enemies as Egyptians so that he can play the role of Moses, “who murdered them by showing their vices [che gli ammazzava scoprendo e’ vizii loro].”45 Machiavelli urges Bechi to attend to the effects that Savonarola’s sermons have on his auditors and interpret accordingly. Even as Machiavelli emphasizes the rhetorical dimensions of Savonarola’s sermons to draw out the political uses of religion, however, he remains interested in the theological understanding of prudence that Savonarola develops. This is because Savonarola helps to explain how prudence coerces action, forcing a choice that extends beyond practical considerations and includes deciding between broader worldviews. The ends of prudence, Savonarola argues, are in no way neutral but are determined by a decision between humanist and theological ends. While humanist prudence relies on civic virtues that fi nd perfection in human community, theological prudence fi nds perfection in “the honor of God [lo honore di Dio].”46 Savonarola concedes that both humanist and Christian prudence lead toward the perfection of the community of which the actor is a part, but Christian prudence fi nds perfection specifically in the actor’s submission to an abstract ideal, God’s honor, which must be revealed through a figure who is him or herself authorized by that ideal. It is for this reason that Savonarola can take Exodus 1:12 to be a statement about prudence. The verse describes the Israelites’ response to Pharaoh’s persecution: “The more they were oppressed, the more they increased and spread out.” Not only did Israelites multiply “in number,” Savonarola argues; they also increased “in virtue.”47 In extreme situations, persecution contributes to moral development by forcing a decision between humanist and Christian prudence. Persecution puts the idea of the perfection of human community into crisis and leads Christians to experience that crisis as trials and

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tribulations, “la tentazione” and “la tribulazione,” that bring them closer to God: “For the man of grace, the more tribulations he has, the closer he comes to God, his cause; and therefore he becomes stronger in virtue and more perfect in divinity [L’uomo che è in grazia, quanto ha più tribulazione, tanto più si accosta e ricorre a Dio, causa sua; e pèro tanto fa più forte la sua virtù e diventa più perfetto].”48 Savonarola’s goal is to persuade the Florentines that they are in exactly the same situation. Exodus 1:12 is really an allegory for the Church, he argues, which is made up of its members but is currently under a tyrannical reign that oppresses those members and persecutes them. As was the case with Israel resisting Pharaoh, so too will it be with the Florentines resisting the pope. They will increase in virtue the extent to which they make the right decision and fight against their oppression under Savonarola’s leadership. Savonarola’s claims about the ends of prudence are based on Aquinas’s defi nition of prudence as “recta ratio agibilium,” right reason in action (ST II–II.q.47.a.4), which he quotes at the beginning of his sermon. For Aquinas, prudence is the right reason or rule of all things that act on their own. On one level, prudence is simply practical reason, the capacity to make local decisions and to act on those decisions without consulting a universal principle. Prudence isn’t divorced from considerations of good and bad but assumes both as practical ends. There is, Aquinas argues, an immanent impulse toward the good and an avoidance of the bad, and this system of impulses governs the prudential reasoning of all natural things. As he explains in the part of the Summa Theologica that makes up his Treatise on Law, natural law is based on the fi rst precept that “good is to be done and evil is to be avoided,” so that “whatever the practical reason naturally apprehends as man’s good (or evil) belongs to the precepts of the natural law as something to be done or avoided” (I–II.q.94.a.2). Practical reason judges things to be good that are useful, things bad that are harmful, and then acts accordingly.49 On another level, however, Aquinas argues that prudence can’t be divorced from universal principles. Rather, prudence is a form of reasoning that links practical considerations to theological ends as determined by Christian orthodoxy. Even though the experience of prudence is the act of striving toward practical goods and the avoidance of practical harms that emerge contingently through local decision making, for Aquinas that act of local decision making must also be conceived within Christian principles of good and evil. To this end, prudence—as natural law in action—is supplemented and driven by divine law. Since human happiness is to be found

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in salvation, in the City of God which is not immediately apparent without Christian revelation, Aquinas argues that “it was necessary . . . that man should be directed to his end by a law given by God” (I–II.q.91.a.4). Moreover, divine law is not immediately apparent but must instead be mediated and interpreted by some theological authority. If prudence is right reasoning, then what makes it right is that its ends are explicitly theological, that as an act of practical reasoning—of local decision making—it leads things to perfection by applying “universal principles to the particular conclusions of practical matters” (II–II.q.47.a.6). As a theological virtue, prudence inhabits a strange space between practical reason and theological dogma. Prudence can’t appoint the ends of moral virtues, Aquinas argues. It can only ensure the integrity of the means toward those ends. Although Aquinas doesn’t put the point this way, his writings on prudence and law suggest that prudence is the means by which a free, thinking, and deciding subject is interpolated into a system of Christian values. In his analysis of Savonarola, Machiavelli strongly suggests that this system of values is predicated on fiction and imagination. But that only makes it more interesting for political analysis, not less so. How, Machiavelli asks, can we grasp the coercive aspects of a theological understanding of prudence while sustaining the critique of religion as political fiction and useful instrument? Machiavelli grapples with this question near the end of The Prince when he associates prudence with a providential understanding of events. In chapter 25, Machiavelli takes up the thesis that worldly events are governed by Fortune and by God so that “men by their prudence cannot change them” (48 / 120). At stake in this thesis is the relation of deliberative action to a theology that posits a God who predetermines human history. More than contingency or circumstance, Fortune here figures the concept of a divine agent, like God, who stands outside of temporal events and directs them.50 Initially, Machiavelli refutes this thesis that God or Fortune controls events by associating prudence with free will. Admitting that Fortune rules “half our actions,” he asserts that “she allows the other half or thereabouts to be governed by us.” At this point, it may seem that prudence wins out against providence, at least to some degree, but as he continues Machiavelli immediately reverses his argument to propose that prudential reasoning develops into a form of habituation that renders individuals incapable of shaping fortune. Practical responses like circumspection, patience, or impetuosity have a way of turning into character traits and then losing their value as forms of prudential reasoning. Individuals achieve the same ends through different means, he argues,

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because different means work at different times. The difficulty lies in recognizing and responding to pure contingency: “If it happens that time and circumstances [le cose] are favorable to one who acts with caution and prudence he will be successful, but if time and circumstance [le cose] change he will be ruined, because he does not change his mode of procedure. No man is found so prudent as to be able to adapt himself to this, either because he cannot deviate from that to which his nature disposes him [la natura lo inclina], or else because having always prospered by walking in one path, he cannot persuade himself that it is well to leave it” (49 / 121–22). Even if prudence is based on self-interest and not providence, Machiavelli argues, as a form of reasoning it conserves and protects the self by projecting patterns onto circumstance and responding to these patterns rather than to the occasion itself. Machiavelli isn’t just proposing a kind of flexibility that, as Eugene Garver argues, would reinstate prudence as the basis of political action.51 He is underscoring the difficulties in developing an understanding of prudence liberated from theological concerns. Even if providence is a projection of the mind, nevertheless—and especially as a projection of the mind—it still exerts a force on our apprehension of contingent events. As Miguel Vatter puts it, providence and prudence, although seemingly opposed, imply versions of one another. “Prudence presupposes one of the central traits of providence, namely, the idea that there exists an order in the world that is fi xed independently of human action and that plays a determinant role in human affairs. Depending on how strong the conception of providence is, then the possibility of acting against chance by trying to master it may even be antithetical to prudent, moderate or virtuous behavior because it entails going against the divine order.”52 In the culminating pages of The Prince, Machiavelli identifies a central antinomy around which prudence takes shape. On the one hand, prudence emphasizes contingency over necessity and therefore argues for free will. The capacity of the self to decide and act in the face of contingency means that the freedom of the self is proven by prudence as a form of practical reason. On the other hand, prudence assumes that necessity overrules contingency insofar as prudential reasoning relies on deducing a predictive order to events. Although this predictive order is deduced prudentially, it reinstates a weak version of providence. It then becomes the job of prudence to conserve the self in relation to that order. Prudential action based on self-interest becomes a form of political theology—neither theology per se nor the basis for a politics shorn of theological concerns

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but a hybrid and confl ictual intersection of politics and theology manifest through agency and deliberative reason. Machiavelli doesn’t reject this understanding of prudence so much as he intensifies it, supplementing and supplanting his complex understanding of providence as the fictional end of prudence with a new fiction that potentially drives the providence-prudence nexus to its breaking point. In the fi nal paragraphs of chapter 25, Machiavelli focuses specifically on impetuousness as a unique characteristic that can open prudence to contingency by exposing the self to risk. Initially, Machiavelli makes this point through a discussion of Julius II, whose impetuous nature “achieved what no other pontiff with the utmost human prudence [con tutta la umana prudenzia] would have succeeded in doing” (49 / 122). He then concludes with one of the most well-known passages in The Prince, the one in which he presents fortune as a woman who must be beaten to be mastered: I certainly think it is better to be impetuous than cautious, for fortune is a woman, and it is necessary, if you wish to master her, to conquer her by force; and it can be seen that she lets herself be overcome by the bold rather than by those who proceed coldly. And therefore, like a woman, she is always a friend to the young, because they are less cautious, fiercer, and master her with greater audacity. (123) [Io iudico bene questo: che sia meglio essere impetuoso che respettivo; perchè la fortuna è donna, ed è necessario, volendola tenere sotto, batterla e utarla. E si vede che la si lascia più vincere da questi, che da quelli che freddamente procedano; e però sempre, come donna, è amica de’ giovani, perchè sono meno respettivi, più feroci e con più audacia la comandano.] (49)

This passage demonstrates the complexities of Machiavelli’s thought as well as the difficulties that he faces. In counseling bold, fierce, impetuous, and audacious action, Machiavelli aims to break the grip that Fortune has on our understanding of events. If at the beginning of chapter 25, Fortune merges with God to portray the rule of providence over worldly actions and events, at the end the young are able to free the world from this divine order by turning their aggression against providence itself. In a certain sense, this aggression or impetuous action breaks with an older understanding in favor of a new vision of the world and of action within it. If prudence implies a world ruled by a divine order, then in this brief narrative Machiavelli gestures toward a sphere of action that is separated

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from the control that a divine order might impose on secular politics and suggests a new understanding of political action based on the interplay of force and risk that occurs within that sphere. This is why Vatter argues that in this passage Machiavelli reclaims virtù as “a match for fortuna, but on the basis that is it completely anti-prudential.”53 More than just an act of prudence or the outcome of deliberative reasoning, the beating of Fortune become an emblem for action within a secular order that targets, attacks, and vanquishes theological modes of thinking, reasoning, and apprehending the world. Given the relation this passage has to the Mosaic constitution, however, what Vatter characterizes as antiprudential action might better be thought of in terms of its shaping fictions. Machiavelli’s brief narrative at the end of chapter 25 harkens back to his discussion of the Mosaic constitution in chapter 6 of The Prince. For Machiavelli, Moses succeeds as a lawgiver and founder of a new state not because he is graced by God but because he has the political intelligence to feign being graced by God in order to secure the obedience of his people. This does not necessarily mean that Machiavelli rejects religion but it does mean that he changes the terms of religious belief, so that the central issue is neither salvation nor ethical behavior but the consolidation of political authority and the preservation of the state through the resources of imagination.54 The beating of Fortune is a second fiction of political making, one that supplements the Mosaic constitution by more explicitly asking us to view the assertion of a secular order as a structure of violence.55 In the account of force and fiction that he develops in his discussion of the Mosaic constitution, Machiavelli is fairly tactful about the relation he assumes between scripture and political violence. In his brief narrative of the beating of Fortune, he is much more explicit. The beating of Fortune shows that the assertion of a new order produces political enemies and that the most viable way to deal with these enemies is through violent action. The young can overcome a providential order on the condition that this order remains in the figure of the vanquished: fortune beaten, mastered, and preserved as a beaten and mastered woman. In The Prince, these complementary fictions form the basis of early modern political theology. Political theology here has less to do with the transfer or transposition of theological categories—the lawgiver or the heretic—into an early modern theory of the state. Instead, political theology in The Prince involves the repetition of violence that attends the Mosaic constitution. This repetition involves a critique of humanist prudence in which a theological understanding of prudence is reshaped into an argument for impetuous, violent action in the service of the state.

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EXODUS INTO CITIZENSHIP More than simply underscore the violent and exceptional aspects of the Mosaic constitution, Machiavelli also emphasizes the capacity of Mosaic narrative to inspire liberty and the fight against tyrannical rule. The founding of a new order is made up of two desires—not just one. To be sure, the new state is founded on princes’ acquisitive desires. For princes, “the desire to acquire possessions is a very natural and ordinary thing [È cosa veramente molta naturale e ordinaria desiderare di acquistare]” (P 9 / 41). But this desire can be actualized only if the prince takes account of a second desire, the people’s desire for more liberty. “Men change masters willingly, believing they will better themselves; and this belief makes them take arms against their rulers [li uomini mutano volentieri signore, credendo migliorare; e questa credenza gli fa pigliare l’arme contro a quello]” (6 / 35). Moreover, as Machiavelli argues, this second desire can never fully be instrumentalized by the fi rst. In trusting the promises of a potential liberator, the people “are deceived, as experience later proves that they have gone from bad to worse.” The people’s desire to better themselves remains unsatisfied because the desire for liberty is never fully in sync with the prince’s need to maintain the territories that he has acquired. Although the prince’s desire for acquisition initially combines with the people’s desire for liberty, the promise of the new prince never fully coincides with the people’s desire to better themselves. Instead, the relation between the two stands as the central confl ict that grounds Machiavelli’s understanding of the modern state. As we have seen, the prince attempts to close the open-ended nature of collective life by violently removing those who oppose his rule, but the violence of this action only exacerbates the people’s desire to better themselves and re-opens the generative capacity of collective life, a desire for exodus from the current political order into something that looks more like liberty. Alongside his discussion of cruelty and impetuous action, Machiavelli also assesses what happens to the collective desire to fare better. This is not just an individual desire but one that lives in and is fostered by nomos, what Machiavelli calls “language [lingua], custom [costumi], and laws [ordini]” (P 6 / 36). In the opening chapters of The Prince, Machiavelli approaches nomos from the perspective of the new prince. If a prince is going to maintain rule over a newly acquired territory, Machiavelli argues, he must see himself not just as a ruler of a people but also as a ruler over nomos. It is easy to hold a newly annexed state when the new prince speaks the same language and practices the same customs, but when this is not

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the case, Machiavelli advises, either the prince must overcome local customs through military presence by taking up quarters in the newly acquired state or preferably he must plant colonies that permit local custom to continue so long as economic benefit goes to the conquering prince. But especially in the case of annexed republics, the new prince is obligated to destroy the city, since the inhabitants of that city “can always fi nd a place for rebellion in the name of liberty and of its ancient usages [el nome della libertà e gli ordini antichi suoi], which are forgotten neither by lapse of time nor be benefits received; and whatever one does or provides, so long as the inhabitants are not separated or dispersed, they forget neither that name nor those usages [non sdimenticano quel nome nè quegli ordini], but appeal to them at once in every emergency” (12 / 46–47). The problem created by annexation and conquest is similar to the problem that Machiavelli underscores in his handling of the Mosaic constitution. However, here Machiavelli underscores the cycle of confl ict and violence that cruelty generates. The creation of a new political order creates potential enemies out of those who are attached to the older customs of the conquered order; the only way to root out the problem is through increasingly total forms of violence and destruction; increasingly total forms of destruction foment the people’s desire to fare better and “not to be commanded or oppressed [non essere comandato nè oppresso]” (20 / 64). Machiavelli deepens this sense of conflict in chapters 9 and 11 of The Prince when he discusses the trajectory from civic to ecclesiastical principalities. There, a more complex relation begins to emerge between liberty and absolute authority. While the movement from chapter 9 to chapter 11 suggests an inevitable drift from civic to ecclesiastical principalities, Machiavelli’s terms suggest a countermovement that argues for a more confl ictual model of political life. The central term of chapter 11 is “suddito,” or subject. Earlier, in chapter 4, Machiavelli associates the term with hereditary rule, arguing that in this form of government rulers are obeyed out of love. Taking the example of France, Machiavelli writes that the French nobles are “recognized by their subjects, and loved by them [riconosciuti da’ loro sudditi e amati da quelli]” (10 / 44). Machiavelli casts this love as natural. “These barons have states and their own subjects, who recognize them as their lords and have a natural affection for them [questi tali baroni hanno stati e sudditi proprii, li quali li riconoscono per signori e hanno in loro naturale affezione]” (10 / 43). But it is also clear from his analysis that this love is a political passion produced by the long-term acceptance of hereditary government. Natural affection is the naturalization of obedience. Machiavelli returns to the term “suddito” in chapter 11 to

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argue that religion is what produces political subjects or sudditi as utterly passive. No matter how incompetent or weak he may be, in these states the prince can rest assured of his authority since his subjects have lost the desire to fare better. In ecclesiastical principalities, there is no need for government whatsoever. “These princes alone have states without defending them, have subjects [sudditi] without governing them, and their states, not being defended, are not taken from them; their subjects [sudditi] not being governed do not resent it, and neither think nor are capable of alienating themselves from them” (23 / 69). What Machiavelli calls ancient religious customs, “ordini antiquati nella religione” (23), so fully determine obedience that there is no conflict between the prince and his people. By contrast, the central term of chapter 9 is “cittadino,” or citizen. There, Machiavelli argues that the private citizen or “privato cittadino” who becomes a ruler by favor of his fellow “cittadini” should build his power on the people, and not on the nobility (20 / 63). As fi rst citizen, the prince has an interest in preserving his fellow citizens’ commitment to his individual rule. If the prince rules alongside magistrates, then in “times of adversity [tempi avversi]” (22 / 65) the magistrates will take over the rule of the city. “The prince will have no time to seize absolute authority because the citizens and subjects, accustomed to obeying the magistrates, will not take orders from him in emergencies [el principe non è a tempo, ne’ periculi, a pigliare la autorità assoluta; perchè li cittadini e sudditi, che sogliono avere e’ comandamenti da’ magistrati, non sono, in quelli frangenti, per obedire a’ suoi]” (22 / 66). Moreover, Machiavelli continues, in “difficult times [tempi dubii],” it will be difficult for the prince who lets the magistrates rule to fi nd those he can trust. Part of the problem is that, if the prince does not usually rule, he will have difficulty producing the conditions that will let him rule when emergencies occur. The other part of the problem is that, while in “quiet times [tempi quieti],” everyone happily obeys the prince, in “times of adversity, when the state has need of its citizens, there are few to be found [tempi avversi, quando lo stato ha bisogno de’ citandini, allora se ne travo pochi].” To overcome this difficulty, Machiavelli writes, the prince who wishes to preserve his authority must come up with “a mode by which his citizens, always and in every type of time, need the state and him, and then they will always be faithful to him [uno modo per il quale li sua cittadini, sempre e in ogni qualità di tempo, abbino bisogno dello stato e di lui; e sempre poi li saranno fedeli].” This sentence serves a double duty. Initially, it posits a sense of the state that transcends both the prince and the citizens. Federico Chabod argues that when Machiavelli writes that there are times when the state

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has need of its citizens, he begins to pose the state as a general form of government, one that exists apart from the personal authority and desires of the prince.56 In times of adversity, there is a collective need for government that the prince cannot manage alone. But with the word faith, or “fede,” this fi nal sentence of chapter 9 also looks forward to Machiavelli’s discussion of ecclesiastical principalities in chapter 11. In ensuring faith in himself, the prince pushes toward an ecclesiastical principality, translating cittadini into sudditi, collective subjects of an increasingly absolute vision of authority. As civic principalities press toward theocracy, citizenship emerges constitutively split between cittadino and suddito, compelled toward the latter inasmuch as the prince reproduces the citizen through structures of belief while driven toward the former inasmuch as the citizenry maintains a desire to fare better. What is the citizen’s response to this split? As the prince uses religion to translate citizens into collective subjects of belief, it is incumbent upon the citizenry to engage in a countermovement in the name of liberty. In The Prince, the Mosaic constitution encompasses these two confl icting movements. On the one hand, Moses exemplifies the shaping of collective life by the state through structures of belief, while on the other hand Mosaic narrative is itself motivated by a desire for exodus that cruelty provokes and cannot entirely resolve. One consequence, as Machiavelli understood quite well, is that the crises that attend the making and preserving of the new state are inevitably played out on the terrain of religion. Because scripture is a collection of metaphors and fictions, it is a ready-made tool for early modern princes to shape and mold their subjects through belief. And for this reason, it is also a critical arena for contesting that use. As we shall see in the following chapter, Spinoza takes up the challenge of the Mosaic constitution. Raised by Marrano parents and, as a young adult, excommunicated from the Amsterdam Jewish community for reasons that remain unclear, Spinoza would have been deeply sensitive to Machiavelli’s assessment of Hebrew scripture. Expanding upon Machiavelli’s assessment, Spinoza contests the mystification of political authority by developing an account of political theology based on liberty, democracy, and toleration.

chapter three

Spinoza and the Theological Imaginary

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achiavelli’s discussion of the Mosaic constitution assumes a view of politics as conflict. While Machiavelli uses Moses to explore the relations between cruelty and belief upon which the early modern state is founded, as we saw in the previous chapter he also claims the exodus from political bondage to argue for a break with theocratic or ecclesiastical forms of government. Spinoza develops this conflict into an account of political theology based on the vitality of the common. In the Ethics, he begins his assessment of bondage and freedom with a Machiavellian defi nition of virtue as power. “By virtue and power I mean the same thing; that is, virtue, insofar as it is related to man, is man’s very essence, or nature, insofar as he has power to bring about that which can be understood solely through the laws of his own nature.”1 On the basis of this defi nition of political life, Spinoza goes on to argue for freedom as a positive, common good. Freedom is not liberty from constraints but is actualized through communal life. Like Machiavelli, Spinoza defi nes the human as essentially political and perceives the task of attaining liberty to take place in a sphere of confl icting desires and interests. Moreover, like Machiavelli but in a way that deepens his analysis, Spinoza explores the exodus from theocratic authority as a theologico-political problem. Writing on the heels of the Thirty Years’ War and deeply troubled by the influence of Calvinist orthodoxy in Dutch politics, Spinoza investigates the potential of religion for shaping those desires and interests in the direction of democracy. For Spinoza, this means reassessing the role that the Mosaic constitution plays both as a model for statehood and in the formation of the theological imaginary that the early modern state assumes. Instead of serving as a model that justifies the extralegal actions of the prince,

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however, for Spinoza the Mosaic constitution inaugurates the promise of a democratic state. With the phrase “theological imaginary,” I mean to emphasize the dynamic understanding of religious imagination that Spinoza develops. Spinoza insists that religious imagination is a function of the human mind. Religion is not a gift from on high. It is a product of human invention. This insight does not just lead him to level a wholesale critique of religion; it prompts him to explore the potential of religion for reimagining political community. What Spinoza fi nds so compelling about religious imagination is that its insights seem to come from a source that is external to the self. Prayer, prophetic revelation, and scriptural interpretation all produce transcendence as a primary effect. For this reason, the theological imaginary is an extraordinarily powerful tool for coercive authority, which often claims a transcendental role for itself. As Spinoza will point out, rulers who legitimate their authority by reference to divinity rely upon the creative force of human imagination, which they downplay and attempt to control. But in his hands, the theological imaginary also becomes an instrument for elaborating a democratic vision of society and of justice. Spinoza’s purpose is not to do away with transcendental authority but to develop an explanation of theologico-political authority that enables the flourishing of imagination and philosophical understanding. Spinoza was not the only seventeenth-century thinker to develop a democratic or protodemocratic account of political theology on the basis on Machiavelli’s political writings. Simone Luzzatto’s Discourse on the Hebrew State (1638) is the fi rst published political treatise by a Jewish writer that formulates the Mosaic constitution through a Machiavellian account of Hebrew scripture. A prominent Venetian rabbi, Luzzatto wrote his Discourse in response to an upsurge in Venetian anti-Semitism that was triggered by the participation of several Jews in a bribery scandal involving the Venetian judiciary. Published in Italian, Luzzatto’s Discourse was part of a successful campaign carried out by the Jewish community in Venice to prevent their expulsion from the city.2 In the fi rst ten chapters of the treatise, Luzzatto discusses the Jews’ function in the economic life of Venice, underscoring in particular the central role that the Jews have played in securing Venice’s eminent position in the world of international trade. And in the concluding eight chapters, he discusses the political importance of Mosaic law for early modern statehood. As Luzzatto explains it, Moses is distinguished from other ancient founders of state in the scope and applicability of the laws that he instituted. Solon, Lycurgus, and Romulus gave laws to their particular cities, but only Moses gave laws by which

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“all of humanity in general, together in unanimous friendship, discover themselves to be citizens of a single, all-encompassing republic [tutto il genere humano con unanime amistá insieme corrispondesse, dovendosi qualunque huomo Cittadino d’una sola Republica reputare].”3 On one level, Luzzatto associates Mosaic law with republican ideals in order to distance the Jewish community from the handful of Jews involved in the bribery scandals, but on another level he makes a compelling case for understanding the Mosaic constitution as an act that founds and sustains virtuous citizenship not just for Jews but, as he puts it, for “the harmonizing of all humanity [la conciliatione di tutti gli huomini]” (DHS 47r). Luzzatto is most indebted to Machiavelli—and makes his most innovative contributions to the tradition of Machiavellian political thought— in his discussion of what he calls “true religion,” which Luzzatto defi nes in terms of prudence and strength and which he opposes to superstition. Comparing the world to a great market, Luzzatto writes that “God gives coins” to help humans as they navigate the world of “fortune”: the coins with “the greatest value are prudence and strength [la Prudenza, e la fortezza], which have the imprint of God on them, he being the essence of knowledge and power. . . . True religion [la vera Religione] is that which implores God to give these coins in abundance and does not simply presume to gain anything without them” (67v). In the Discourses, Machiavelli levels a devastating critique of the Church for its inability to produce a vivere civile, against which he holds out the religion of the ancient Romans, which glorifies virtù and promotes a “love of liberty [amore alla libertà]” through “the exaltation and defense of the fatherland [patria]” (D 2.2.141 / 132). Luzzatto replaces ancient Roman religion with the religion of the ancient Hebrews, discovering in the Mosaic constitution a model of true religion that teaches prudence and strength as the basis of collective life. He uses the phrase “true religion” in a chapter devoted to answering Tacitus’s libels against the Jews in the Historiae. His ostensible purpose is to show how a political thinker like Tacitus should have understood the political aspects of Mosaic law. But, as Abraham Melamed has shown, Luzzatto’s broader purpose is to use Tacitus’s claims to develop a political account of Hebrew scripture.4 True religion, Luzzatto argues, involves the prudent use of religion to produce virtuous citizenship. He counters Tacitus’s claims that the Sabbath and the observance of the sabbatical year prove the laziness of the Jews by arguing that such holidays are based on “political prudence [Politica prudenza]” (DHS 71r). Like Roman law, Mosaic law provides for holidays from public service so that the people can be

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more productive. But unlike Roman law, Luzzatto continues, the celebration of the Sabbath involves studying the law and not the “immodesty” and “obscenity” of the Roman holidays (71r). Moreover, through the act of forgiving debt, the Sabbatical year produces the kind of “communal harmony” recommended by writers like Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero (72v). Finally, implicitly following Machiavelli’s arguments in The Prince for the importance of establishing a citizen militia, Luzzatto adds that the Hebrew state was based on a citizen army, which is “the most desirable” model for protecting the state and produces the best “discipline” (72v).For Luzzatto, it is not the religion of the ancient Romans nor, implicitly, contemporary Christianity but the religion of the ancient Hebrews that produces a virtuous citizenry defi ned by prudence, strength, and toleration. Although the Discourse on the Hebrew State has received little attention in current scholarship, the treatise circulated fairly widely in the seventeenth century. Luzzatto’s account of government and toleration influenced Mannaseh ben Israel, who relied heavily on the Discourse in his Humble Address to the Lord Protector, which petitioned Cromwell to admit the Jews into England; James Harrington, whose Oceana I will discuss in chapter 7 of this book; and Baruch Spinoza, whose Theologico-Political Treatise is the subject of this chapter.5 Luzzatto and Spinoza share a deep interest in exploring a vision of true religion based on the Mosaic constitution that can become the basis of toleration and universal citizenship. In Luzzatto’s case, this means pitting the Mosaic constitution against Reason of State. While he was strongly influenced by writers like Giovanni Botero and Trajano Boccalini, especially in their accounts of religion as an instrument to be used in the interest of the state, Luzzatto shied away from Reason of State arguments that located power in the personal authority of the monarch.6 Even a writer like Boccalini, who championed Venetian republicanism against Spanish imperialism, remained fascinated if also disturbed by the arcana imperii.7 Luzzatto was more straightforward in associating the arcana imperii with corruption. As Abraham Melamed has argued, Luzzatto counters Tacitus’s charge that the Jews are prone to lascivious behavior by developing a Machiavellian interpretation of 2 Samuel 16:20–22, the verses in which Absalom, on the advice of Achitophel, has sex with his father King David’s concubines.8 Luzzatto claims to show that Absalom was acting out of the “interest of state [interresse di Stato]” (62r) and not sexual desire since his actions show that he has the courage and fortitude necessary to claim the throne. But his broader purpose is to contrast the political corruption of the monarchy with the sense of integrity produced by Mosaic law. Before turning to 2 Samuel 16, Luzzatto

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refers to Moses’s punishment of Phineas for having sex with the Mideanite woman in Numbers 25 and to the Israelites’ punishment of the tribe of Benjamin for the rape of the concubine in Judges 19 when, as we read in that chapter, “there was no king in Israel” (JPS 19:1). If, as Luzzatto claims, the Hebrews instituted better and more “proper laws” for the regulation of “carnality” than any other ancient nation (DHS 59v-60r), then his brief account of those laws under Mosaic and Davidic rule strongly suggests that monarchy corrupts the ideals of the Mosaic constitution. In the Theologico-Political Treatise, Spinoza takes up the Mosaic constitution to argue against what he calls the “supreme mystery of despotism [Monarchici summum sit arcanum]” (TTP 389 / 7). As with Luzzatto, for Spinoza the key political opposition is not between superstition and reason but between superstition and true religion. However, this latter is more than a simple opposition since Spinoza deduces true religion through the very mechanisms of superstition. The problem is that humans live in secular time and, because of that, have passions and belief as their primary resources for navigating change, crisis, and calamities. In the opening sentences of the preface to the Theologico-Political Treatise, Spinoza writes that “if men were able to exercise complete control over all their circumstances, or if continuous good fortune were always their lot, they would never be prey to superstition.” However, he continues, “their immoderate greed for fortune’s fickle favours often makes them the wretched victims of alternating hopes and fears, the result is that, for the most part, their credulity knows no bounds” (388 / 5). Furthermore, this greed for fortune’s favors leads men to treat circumstances as if they were omens “signifying the anger of the gods or of a supreme deity.” In Spinoza’s account, to live in secular time is to be bound by signs, fictions, and fabrications that ultimately constrain political action. This fact of passional life can lead to a negative or destructive use of imagination, “superstition [superstitioni]” as opposed to “religion [religioni]” (388–89 / 5–6). The supreme mystery of despotism involves nothing less than the translation of this proclivity toward fiction making into the domain of sovereignty so that political leaders can “keep men in a state of deception . . . with the specious title of religion [specioso Religionis]” so “they will fight for their servitude as if for salvation, and count it no shame, but the highest honour, to spend their blood and their lives for the glorification of one man” (389–90 / 7). Spinoza links the mystery of state to the imagination of the ruled not just to expose authority as fiction but also to show that the staying power of political authority depends in no small measure upon the capacity of fiction to determine human action.

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However, the fact of passional life can also lead to a positive and creative use of imagination. Spinoza’s response to the mystery of despotism is not to reject religion but to reconstruct what he calls “true religion [religionem veram]” (389 / 6) or “universal religion [Religio catholica]” (392 / 10) on the basis of a more positive vision of imagination. As I shall argue in the pages that follow, Spinoza’s emphasis on imagination leads him to redefi ne political theology so that it no longer supports the supposed divinity of the monarch but now integrates divine and human law through the capacity of individuals to imagine the common. I begin with Spinoza’s account of the Mosaic constitution in the opening chapters of the Theologico-Political Treatise, showing how Spinoza emphasizes the performative aspects of the law in order to isolate the relations between imagination and fiction that determine obedience and authority in the early modern state. At the end of Spinoza and Politics, Etienne Balibar suggests that Spinoza’s philosophy should be understood as “a philosophy of communication—or, even better, of modes of communication—in which the theory of knowledge and the theory of sociability are closely intertwined.”9 This is nowhere more so the case than in Spinoza’s account of the Mosaic constitution. Investigating the Mosaic constitution through political and linguistic analysis, Spinoza draws out the theological imaginary that accompanies the formation of the early modern state. I continue by examining Spinoza’s contributions to scriptural exegesis in the middle chapters of the Theologico-Political Treatise, where, I argue, Spinoza explores the theological imaginary from the perspective of material transmission. If the Mosaic constitution is the scene of state building, then the composition and canonization of the Bible is the process by which this scene is secured, confi rmed, and transformed. By recasting the theological imaginary through a material vision of creation, Spinoza attempts to fi nd in “corrupt imagination” what Antonio Negri calls “the unique horizon of a human society and a positive, historical determination of being.”10 Finally, I conclude with a reading of Spinoza’s use of the Mosaic constitution to account for the role of the common in social contract theory. Social contract theory implies a concept of natural right as the freedom of choice that, Spinoza argues, is fundamentally antagonistic to the security that the social contract is supposed to provide. Spinoza considers this antagonism in terms of the Mosaic constitution in order to associate the theological imaginary with the promise of democracy as the actualization of natural right. Following Machiavelli, Spinoza fully acknowledges that the early modern state relies on a theological imaginary to coerce belief, but

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for Spinoza this insight leads to a more central set of questions. Who owns that imaginary? How? And in whose service is it being used?

PROPHETIC IMAGINATION Spinoza draws no distinction between revelation and imagination. Revelation is nothing more and nothing less than a set of images of divine law created by the mind of a prophet. “Since the human mind contains the nature of God within itself in concept, and partakes thereof,” he writes, “we are justified in asserting that the nature of the mind, insofar as it is thus conceived, is the primary cause of divine revelation” (TTP 395). Prophecy is not based on philosophical reasoning or what today we might call scientific rationality but on “a more lively imaginative faculty [vividiore imaginatione]” (21 / 399). These assertions might suggest that we can dismiss prophecy as make-believe, but Spinoza’s purpose in emphasizing imagination is to analyze prophecy as a discrete mode of knowledge. In contrast to philosophical reasoning, prophecy works in concert with an intense devotion to the law: “The prophets were endowed with an extraordinary virtue exceeding the normal, and . . . they devoted themselves to piety with especial constancy” (403). And this in turn gives prophets unique access to the social imaginary that governs political life, the collective sense of righteousness, fairness, and obligation that bears on social interactions and activities. The prophets may not know God through the mathematical certainty of philosophy, but they do know God through the moral certainty of the pious. As Nancy Levene has persuasively argued, Spinoza refuses a strict hierarchy between mathematical and moral certainty because it is only through moral certainty that a society can achieve knowledge of God as “justice and charity.”11 Rather than being make-believe, for Spinoza prophecy becomes central to a society’s ability to achieve collective well-being. Milton gives a good illustration of the moral certainty that results from prophetic imagination in The Reason of Church Government (1642) when he explains why he took up the antiroyalist cause against the hierarchical organization of the Church of England during the initial phases of the English Civil Wars. Milton represents prophetic imagination autobiographically, through subjective experience, as he explains that he was compelled to intervene in debates about church reform by what he initially calls “divine inspiration” and then a few pages later refers to as “urgent reason” (CPW 1:802, 1:820). As these two synonymous phrases suggest,

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Milton’s revelation involves a form of communication with God that does not go beyond the capacity of the human mind. Divine inspiration is neither supernatural nor superhuman but is a mode of knowledge that—unlike “that knowledge that rests in the contemplation of natural causes and dimensions,” as Milton puts it (1:801)—carries with it a moral obligation to demonstrate devotion and piety through action. Milton’s revelation that he must engage in the polemical debates concerning church government is based on his imagining the possible futures that might result given his inaction at the present moment. “Should the church be brought under heavy oppression, and God have given me the ability the while to reason against that man that should be the author of so foul a deed; or should she, by blessing from above on the industry and courage of faithful men, change this her distracted estate into better days without the least furtherance or contribution of those few talents which God at that present hath lent me,” Milton reasons—in either case, if he should not act, he can only “foresee . . . stories I should hear within myself all my life after, of discourage and reproach” (1:804). If church reform fails or succeeds and Milton does not help its cause, he can only expect to hear the chiding voice of conscience, upbraiding him for furthering the demise of the church through inaction or reproaching him for rejoicing in the Reformation when he did nothing to contribute to its successes. Milton is as clear as Spinoza that prophecy is rooted in imagination, and he is equally clear that the certainty produced by prophetic imagination is based on devotion and not a sure knowledge of the results that might follow from engaging in the virtuous actions urged by revelation. When Milton writes The Reason of Church Government, what the future holds for church reform is neither obvious nor determined. Regardless, prophetic imagination urges moral certainty through what Milton calls “the enforcement of conscience” (1:806). Conscience is not a word that Spinoza is going to use in the TheologicoPolitical Treatise, but the work of conscience, the act of binding an individual to a system of norms in such a way that compels, constrains, and enables action, is a key problem that Spinoza analyzes.12 Reformation writers from Calvin to Milton posit conscience as a bond between the human and the divine whereby, as Calvin puts it in the Institutes, “men have a sense of divine judgment, as a witness joined to them.”13 Or as Milton portrays it in The Reason of Church Government, conscience is a “Secretary” by which “God . . . injoyns” humans toward particular actions (1:822). In both cases, conscience binds human agents to divine law not through compulsion but through moral choice. Calvin uses a juridical metaphor

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and Milton uses a metaphor concerning reading and writing because both want to emphasize conscience as an injunction that demands but does not predetermine a particular response. Spinoza avoids the word conscience because he wants to underscore the act of binding individuals to a system of norms in its collective and constitutive aspects. He is less interested in the bonds of conscience as a phenomenon concerning casuistry or individual psychology than he is in considering these bonds in terms of a social and political question. How, Spinoza asks, does an imaginary grasp of divine law further the communal and political goal of liberty? Spinoza’s assessment of revelation as imagination is not simply a critique of religion as illusion or mystification. It is a fi rst step in his broader account of political theology as the interdependence of political and theological modes of knowledge and representation that together promise the creation and reinvention of collective life. For Spinoza, at the heart of political theology is the moral certainty that prophetic imagination affords a community. At the same time, because he links prophecy to imagination, Spinoza can examine the various roles that language, culture, and fiction play in the constitution and transformation of political community over time.14 Of course, Spinoza is acutely aware of the fact that tyrants often instrumentalize religion in order to extend personal authority over the minds of their subjects. But this is a particular instance that confi rms a general principle. As he argues in the opening paragraphs of chapter 17, all government—both good and bad—exerts control over the minds of its subjects to some degree or another. What Spinoza sees in prophetic imagination is the possibility for elaborating a better system of government. As Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd explain in their discussion of the Theologico-Political Treatise, “the fictions which bind together communities are not always deliberately fabricated falsehoods propagated by those who stand to gain by them. Rather, social fictions may be distorted or imaginative but genuine attempts to grasp the complex relations within and between collective bodies.”15 Prophecy, Spinoza suggests, and especially prophecy in Hebrew scripture, is an imaginative effort of the latter sort. Prophecy accepts the constitution of political community through a theological imaginary and reinforces that constitution by transforming, renovating, and at times revolutionizing that imaginary. On the one hand, prophets aim to bind the multitude to the law out of a commonsense devotion to the imaginary figure of God who, as a lawgiver and a judge, rewards good behavior and punishes the bad. On the other hand, prophetic imagination has a performative element that works on the social imaginary for

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both good and for ill. It makes and remakes the social and political order— including what counts as good and bad behavior—through its imaginative relation to divine law. The age of prophecy may have come to an end, but the function of prophecy as well as its promise persists in the early modern state. The role of the prophet has been taken over by rulers and political leaders, who, Susan James argues, are for Spinoza analogues of the ancient prophets and who, like the prophets, “do best to accommodate the passions of their subjects, while simultaneously doing all they can to encourage an appreciation of the benefits of obeying the law.”16 Like Hobbes before him, Spinoza fully understands that prophecy mandates a structure of authority within which revelation can be communicated. Since prophets interpret their revelations to others who have not had similar experiences, the truth of prophetic revelation relies on “the prophet’s authority and the confidence he enjoys” (TTP 573). Hobbes applies this insight to the canonization of scripture, arguing that the central question is not whether the various books of scripture are the word of God (which, he writes, no one disputes) but “by what authority they are made law” (L 33.21.259). As Hobbes argues throughout book 3 of Leviathan, the right to interpret revelation is transferred from the ancient prophet to the modern sovereign, who has the authority to decide what counts as revelation and which revelations will be taken as public law. Spinoza, too, acknowledges an analogy between prophetic and sovereign authority. Like prophets, he argues, “sovereign powers are the interpreters of their own sovereign right [summae potestates sui imperii juris interpretes sunt], since the laws that they enact are upheld only by their own sovereign authority, and are supported only by their own testimony” (TTP 573 / 251). Unlike Hobbes, however, Spinoza explores in greater detail the communication of prophetic revelation as a performative act. While the interpretation of prophetic revelation creates a hierarchical relation between a prophet and his or her audience that is ripe for political exploitation, that relation is neither permanent nor inflexible. Nor it is immune to transformation over time. Spinoza turns to the Mosaic constitution to explore the linguistic aspects of prophetic imagination. Rabbinic interpreters indicate the performative aspects of divine law by proposing that God spoke the Ten Commandments, or Ten Words, twice. As Rashi explains it in his commentary on the Torah, God fi rst speaks the Ten Commandments all at once, “in one utterance, something that is impossible for humans to do,” and then repeats them one by one for human comprehension.17 The fi rst utterance of the Ten Commandments registers both the transcendence of divine law

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and gets at the linguistic force of the command, the power of the utterance to hail a group into being regardless of the meaning that is being conveyed. Much more than law, whose function is to preserve and administer the already established social order through the articulation and regulation of norms, the command erupts onto the scene and organizes community around the break that it creates. Spinoza is careful to explain that although he was “at one time inclined to this view” (396), he now rejects it. Instead, he shifts the general insight about linguistic force and the transcendence of divine law onto the terrain of human speech, arguing that the articulation of the law itself produces a break between knowledge and belief as the condition for the community that is thereby founded. Focusing on what in Hebrew scripture is the fi rst of the Ten Commandments, the commandment that identifies God as the God of the Hebrews, Spinoza writes, It seems quite alien to reason to assert that a created thing, dependent on God in the same way as other created things, should be able to express or display, factually or verbally, through its own individuality, God’s essence or existence, declaring in the fi rst person, “I am the Lord your God, etc.” Granted, when someone utters the words “I understand,” we all realise that it is the speaker’s mind, not his mouth, that understands. But it is because the mouth is identified with the person of the speaker, and also because the hearer knows what it is to understand, that he readily grasps the speaker’s meaning through comparison with himself. Now in the case of people who previously knew nothing of God but his name, and desired to speak with him so as to be assured of his existence, I fail to see how their need was met through a created thing (which is no more related to God than are other created things, and does not pertain to God’s nature) which declared, “I am the Lord.” What if God had manipulated Moses—but why Moses? the lips of some beast—so as to pronounce the words “I am the Lord”? Would the people thereby have understood God’s existence? (397)

Spinoza’s initial point is that the fi rst commandment is a failure when considered from the perspective of knowledge because it does not teach anything philosophical about the essence or existence of God. When Moses says, “I am the Lord your God,” he posits the existence of God without offering anything that could plausibly serve as defi nitive proof. This failure has nothing to do with the nature of Moses’s revelation but is instead a result of his speaking in commandments. Even if God were moving Mo-

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ses’s lips, forcing him to speak, we would still not have any philosophical understanding of what God is or how he exists. But as Spinoza’s analysis continues, he turns what is initially a negative, the lack of philosophical knowledge, into the positive condition for the constitution of the Hebrews as a political community. Emphasizing the constitutive force of Mosaic law, Spinoza suggests that the act of speaking the law produces political community in terms of belief and devotion. “The Law revealed to Moses . . . [did not] ever require us to believe that God is incorporeal or that he has no form or figure.” That is, the law never required knowledge of God’s particular attributes. Rather, the law requires only that “the Jews must believe” and “they must worship.” How Moses speaks is a perennial problem for political interpretations of Hebrew scripture. In Exodus, stammering Moses needs eloquent Aaron to persuade Pharaoh to let his people go. This relation between Moses and Aaron sets up a host of questions concerning prophecy, priesthood, the authority to interpret revelation, and the relation of all of these to the liberty of the people. And, as we saw in chapter 2, how Moses speaks becomes specifically an early modern problem when in The Prince Machiavelli suggests that Moses fabricated his revelation on Mount Sinai, foregrounding the use of religious belief in the founding of a new state. For Spinoza, the problem of Moses’s speech indicates the need for understanding the state as a field and mode of communication. It is from this perspective that Spinoza can assess the division between knowledge and belief upon which political life seems to be predicated, and it is also from this perspective that he can repair that division through a political understanding of Moses’s speech. Spinoza’s main focus is the status of the Hebrews as a chosen nation, their election or calling (vocare). Spinoza is quite clear that Israel’s election has nothing to do with a providential notion of history. “The Hebrew nation was chosen [electa] by God before all others not by reason of its understanding nor of its spiritual qualities but by reason of its social organization and the good fortune by which it achieved supremacy [quâ imperium adepta est] and retained it for so many years” (TTP 418 / 47). To say that the Hebrews were chosen by God is simply another way of saying that the institutions of the Hebrew state led it to flourish for a long time. “Their election and vocation consisted only in the material successes and prosperity of their state.” At the same time, election involves more than the social and political organization of the Hebrew state. It is, rather, a result of Moses’s promise that Israel would earn God’s love if it obeyed his laws and would incur wrath if it didn’t. The fact that the Hebrew state achieved and retained supremacy over time secured the performative force

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of Moses’s assertions and maintained his revelation as theological truth. Moses’s promise of election encodes the historical continuation of the Hebrew state and gives that continuation a theological imaginary, which, in turn, reinforces the people’s drive toward virtue and collective strength. Considered from the vantage point of Reformation theology, election or calling prompts questions about the inner working of individual conscience. Accounting for election in terms of Moses’s speech allows Spinoza to explore more fully the performative role of the theological imaginary in shaping a just and righteous society. On the one hand, Spinoza presents election as an act of accommodation that reinforces the imaginative aspects of society at their basest level. In promising election, Moses accommodates divine law to the people’s superstition. Although he wanted to teach the Hebrews an ethical way of life, Spinoza writes, Moses was constrained by their level of understanding, “addicted to Egyptian superstition, uncultured and sunk in degrading slavery” (413). Therefore, he teaches divine law not as a “philosopher” but as a “lawgiver, compelling the people to live good lives by command of law [imperio legis].” And, as Spinoza explains, Moses’s accommodation turns what should have been “true freedom” into another form of “bondage”: For Moses commanded [the Israelites] to love God and keep his Law, to regard their past blessings—such as the escape from Egyptian bondage—as bestowed by God; and he further made terrifying threats if they should transgress these commandments, while promising many blessings if they observe them. So he taught them in the same way as parents teach their children who have not reached the age of reason. It is therefore certain that they had no understanding of the excellence of virtue and true blessedness.

In translating divine law into human law, Moses creates the problem of theological authority, portraying God as the figure who rules over history, bestowing miracles upon those whom he favors and punishment upon those who displease him. On the other hand, election also encourages a loving relation between the Hebrews and this imaginary authority which through superstition can be transformed into a devotion to collective life. In binding the Hebrews to the worship of God, Moses also gives them a mode of obedience that is motivated not by “fear” but “devotion” (439). On its own, devotion can of course become a form of superstition, but election transforms devotion into a mode of action in which individual actors do good for the sake of

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furthering the good. Moses “bound [the Hebrews] by consideration of benefits received, while promising many more benefits from God in the future.” In the Ethics, Spinoza derives a true understanding of God through a discussion of natural causes, and he argues that this true understanding of God goes hand in hand with the actualization of human freedom and the acquisition of true virtue. But, as he points out in the TheologicoPolitical Treatise, the collective good—that is, the “ability to live in security and good health”—cannot be attained through knowledge of natural causes. Instead, it requires a collective strategy for navigating “fortune” or “the operation of external causes of which we are ignorant” (418). This strategy involves a true understanding of God and also goes hand in hand with the actualization of human freedom and the acquisition of virtue. However, both are achieved through and as social and political life. If election forecloses one way of knowing “the excellence of virtue and true blessedness,” through knowledge of natural causes, it open another way of knowing virtue and true blessedness, through collective devotion and loving-kindness. Early on in The Theologico-Political Treatise, Spinoza argues that Moses’s understanding of God was political through and through. Moses imagines God as a creator and a sovereign—a sovereign whose sovereignty was legitimated by his role as creator. He teaches that God “had reduced our visible world from chaos to order (Gen. ch.1 v.2) and had given Nature its seeds. He therefore possesses supreme right and power over things, and (Deut. ch.10 v.14, 15) in virtue of this supreme right and power he had chosen the Hebrew nation for himself alone” (411). As with other prophets, to whom “God is revealed . . . only in accordance with the nature of their imagination” (412), so too with Moses: he intuits God through his own political imagination. But later, Spinoza also claims that Moses is the fi rst figure in Hebrew history to grasp God in his “absolute essence” (TTP 511). The patriarchs knew God only as El Shaddai, which, Spinoza explains, means that they knew God only by his attributes or the gifts that he gives. In Hebrew, El Shaddai means “the one who suffices” and indicates that “to each man [God] gives that which suffices for him.” But Moses knew God as Jehovah or Adonai, which “expresses the three tenses of the verb ‘to be’” and indicates that Moses’s “belief about God was this, that he is a Being who has always existed, exists, and will always exist.” The implication is that in constituting the Hebrew state, Moses effectively created an expression of his revelation through which God’s absolute essence could be known. Theologically, God is an absolute who has no need of a human order. But politically, God needs a created order in order to exist as sover-

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eign. From the perspective of Moses’s revelation, the Mosaic constitution is more than an act of accommodation. It discloses the mutual implication of politics and theology in the formation of a set of social relations in which an imaginary absolute enables recognition and interaction between and among members of a particular group. What Moses understood when he grasped God in his absolute essence is the fundamental lesson of political theology: monotheism needs the modern state as much as the modern state needs monotheism. Not only does the state need monotheism to shape the collective imagination of the multitude in an effort to metamorphose them into a free people, but also monotheism needs the state as a vehicle for the knowledge of God, that is, the “true happiness and blessedness” that “consists solely in the enjoyment of good” as a collective good and not the enjoyment of that good “to the exclusion of others” (415–16).18

THE COMMON In the middle chapters of the Theologico-Political Treatise, Spinoza shows that scripture is a human artifact, a materialization of imaginative work produced over a long period of time through a complex history of writing, editing, and canonization. To develop a sufficient understanding of scripture, he argues, interpreters need knowledge of ancient languages, an awareness of the intentions and biases of the authors of particular books, and some recognition of the processes of canonization by which the various books that make up scripture were collected together into the work that is now known as the Bible. Spinoza asserts these claims in part to continue his critique of divine revelation as anything other than a product of human imagination.19 Influenced by the medieval Spanish rabbi Ibn Ezra as well as by seventeenth-century contemporaries including Hobbes, the French lawyer and theologian Isaac La Peyrère, and plausibly the English Quaker Samuel Fisher, Spinoza concludes that while Moses wrote books that were partially interpolated into scripture in corrupt form—“The Wars of God,” “The Book of the Covenant,” “The Book of the Laws of God,” and the Song that concludes Deuteronomy—the majority of the Pentateuch and the history books were composed by Ezra at the founding of the second temple.20 While Mosaic law is the creation of Moses’s theologico-political imagination, Hebrew scripture is a product of Ezra’s devotion to the Mosaic constitution. Ezra’s purpose, Spinoza writes, was to revive and reinforce the Mosaic constitution, both its institutions and its emphasis on election: “to set forth the words and commandments of Moses and to demonstrate their truth by the course of history” (TTP 478).

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Spinoza’s account of reception and transmission allows him to repeat his explanation of the Mosaic performative with greater attention to scripture’s political promise as well as to the role of language and communication in the establishment of the early modern state. How, Spinoza asks, can the state allow for dissent while upholding a commitment to the distinction between justice and injustice? He develops an answer to this question by exploring the ways in which scripture constitutes the common through both its meaning and its transmission. Spinoza is quite clear about the message of true religion: “to love God above all, and one’s neighbor as oneself” (508). The meaning of scripture is the meaning of commonality. Equally important for Spinoza is the act of transmitting this message. Scripture is significant as a common text, a text that establishes the common in the act of transmitting divine law or “true religion” (507) to as broad an audience as possible, which points to the performative aspects of divine law that Spinoza specifies alongside his discussion of the processes by which scripture came into existence. Moses’s promise of election performatively constituted the Hebrew state under the auspices of a theological imaginary that reinforced and to some degree secured the successes of that state. In Spinoza’s analysis, scripture plays a similar role for the seventeenth-century state. It constitutes the early modern state under the auspices of a theological imaginary that, properly understood, diminishes religious violence and secures that state as a domain of religious toleration. This is not to say that scripture continues the promise of election. For Spinoza, scripture continues the work of the Mosaic performative in its constitutive aspects; it establishes the common as a political field. Both Hobbes and La Peyrère preserve providential history to one degree or another in their interpretations of the early modern state. In Leviathan, Hobbes presents providential history as an excess that the secular state has to keep at bay. While Moses inaugurated the literal kingdom of God that will return at the end of days, the secular state takes its place in the meantime, differentiated from but also bookended by God’s reign. In Men before Adam, La Peyrère argues for the synthesis of providential and secular history. In his account, human history did not begin with Adam but with pre-Adamites who lived in a state of nature. Beginning with Adam, God established a providential history that redeemed the Jews, but it is only with the second coming of the Jewish Messiah, who will rule the world alongside the king of France, that all of humanity will be redeemed. By contrast, Spinoza makes no effort to preserve providential history.

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Rather, in his account the performative mediation of divine law discloses the minimal amount of transcendence needed to secure the common as a political reality. Spinoza is very clear that the common is not the product of consensus, which, he argues, often involves coercive authority and amounts to individuals imposing their views upon others. Beginning with scripture allows Spinoza to develop the common through an analysis of conflict, divergent interests, and multiple investments in political life. As Spinoza repeatedly insists, scriptural interpretation is fundamentally a field of hermeneutic and political disagreement that puts both theological and political authority into crisis: “As the sovereign right to free opinion belongs to every man even in matters of religion, and it is inconceivable that any man can surrender this right, there also belongs to every man the sovereign right and supreme authority to judge freely with regard to religion, and consequently to explain it and interpret it for himself” (470–71). That is, scripture assumes a field of dissensus, of multiple and confl icting interpretations. To emphasize this point, Spinoza cites the Dutch proverb “Geen ketter sonder letter [no heretic without a text]” (514). For Spinoza, this field of dissensus means that when scripture teaches love of God and one’s neighbor, it must do so through a notion of the common that can account for—indeed, that is rooted in—conflict as its own internal condition. Moreover, Spinoza differentiates his notion of the common from the forms of compulsion associated with the exercise of political authority. As he writes, “Nobody can be constrained to a state of blessedness by force or law” (470). While civil laws need juridical and executive authority to secure public right, true religion demands a view of the common that is neither public nor private but collective, in the sense of assembled or gathered together. Dissensus is both real and implacable, which explains why Spinoza begins his discussion of scripture as a common text by arguing against two opposing limit cases in which disagreement has become absolute. The fi rst is enthusiasm. Spinoza opens his analysis of scripture by critiquing enthusiasm for being a form of sacrilege, in that it “[fosters] the bitterest hatred, under the false guise of zeal in God’s cause” (456), and a form of superstition, in that it “teaches men to despise reason and Nature” (457). The second limit case is rationalism, which Spinoza critiques through a discussion of Maimonides, who, as scholars have argued, is a placeholder for seventeenth-century Christian exegetes whom Spinoza is reluctant to name.21 Despite their obvious differences, Spinoza links the two as essen-

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tially anticommunal approaches to scriptural interpretation. Both modes of interpretation are essentially elitist. Enthusiasm is predicated upon claims to individual revelation that is antithetical to the very purpose of scriptural language. Certainly, the prophets and apostles are motivated by divine revelation. Nevertheless they “preached not only to the faithful, but especially to unbelievers and the impious. So their audiences must have been capable of understanding the meaning of the prophets and the apostles; otherwise the latter would have appeared to be preaching to children and babies, not to men endowed with reason” (467–68). When enthusiastic interpreters of scripture claim that a “supernatural light” (467) of revelation is necessary for the true meaning of the text to be revealed, they vitiate scripture’s pedagogical and rhetorical aims with the assumption that scripture’s true meaning is available only to a privileged few. Rationalists claim to interpret scripture according to reason, but they interpret scripture in terms of the truths that they bring to the text. Assuming that every statement in scripture is a truth-claim, either literally or metaphorically, rationalists begin with assertions about God, nature, and the like, and then distort scripture “until it teaches the same” (468). As with enthusiasm, this mode of interpretation is deeply anticommunal. It leads to what Spinoza calls “a novel form of ecclesiastical authority,” in that “if this view were correct, it would follow that the common people, for the most part knowing nothing of logical reasoning or without leisure for it, would have to rely solely on the authority and testimony of philosophers for their understanding of Scripture” (469). Spinoza’s argument is not that enthusiasm and rationalism are teleological and therefore bad modes of reasoning. More pointedly, he shows that the teleological reasoning of both enthusiasm and rationalism assumes and legitimates a structure of authority that is explicitly opposed to the common.22 Certainly, Spinoza’s argument for the common nature of scripture involves a strong defense of toleration, “the sovereign right and supreme authority to judge freely with regard to religion” that belongs to each individual. But his understanding of toleration does not at all neutralize the category of the wicked (malus). Rather, the difference between tolerable dissensus and wickedness is determined by a practical decision based on the present state of political and religious community. Spinoza’s emphasis on practical reasoning emerges in the distinction that he draws between Moses’s and Christ’s dispensations of divine law. For Spinoza, Moses teaches divine law—that is, love God and one’s neighbor as oneself—through the state as an ideal of justice in which threats to the community are identified immanently through the community and without the motives of

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personal interest. Moses “condemned revenge and hatred against one’s neighbor, yet demanded an eye for an eye” (461). Mosaic justice teaches love of one’s neighbor through the control of the passions—neither hate nor seek revenge—while obligating citizens to identify wrongdoing and demand reparations “to prevent the wicked from rejoicing in their wickedness [ut ne malis expediat esse malos]” (461 / 104). Meanwhile, Christ represents a more pragmatic approach in which the protocols of ideal justice are suspended for prudential reasons. Promulgating divine law in Roman-occupied Palestine, Christ teaches that “if a man strike you on the right cheek, turn to him the left also.” Christ teaches true religion “to men suffering under oppression, living in a corrupt commonwealth where justice was utterly disregarded, a commonwealth whose ruin he saw to be imminent.” Love of one’s neighbor is here taken to such an extreme that it seems to contravene the justice of Mosaic law. In describing the relation between Moses and Christ, however, Spinoza treats Mosaic law as an imaginary ideal that Christ’s teaching modifies into practical action in order to account for present political circumstances. Judged by the protocols of justice, Christ’s precept “would have violated the law of Moses.” But judged by taking into account the circumstances of his audience at the time of his teaching, Christ offers a communal strategy for responding to suffering and oppression in the absence of a commonwealth that would protect the common. Almost stoical in spirit, his counsel to turn the other cheek when facing an enemy is a practical response to the vicissitudes of political fortune and is intent on “improving men’s minds rather than their external actions.” The figure lurking in the background of this argument is Machiavelli. As we saw in chapter 2, Machiavelli uses Moses to show how the field of politics is also a field of belief that the modern prince can manipulate to his advantage by naming and defeating political enemies as if they were religious enemies. Machiavelli explains that to succeed the founder of a new order has to procure the faith of his or her political subjects, and then he goes on to suggest that turning supporters of the old order into religious enemies is one way to accomplish this goal. Spinoza answers Machiavelli by dividing his analysis in half. He accepts Machiavelli’s insight that the field of politics is also a field of belief, but he then replaces the Machiavellian issue of political authority with the problem of justice. Can the common be achieved through prophetic imagination of divine law in such a way that breaks the insidious bond between political community and the theologico-political enemy? Spinoza’s description of Moses as sincere lawgiver and promulgator of justice rebuts the latent cynicism of Machia-

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velli’s portrait. In Spinoza’s description, Moses honestly protects the common through a genuine regime of justice. At the same time, Spinoza’s insights deepen Machiavelli’s by translating his analysis of authority into a structural point about the operations of genuine justice. Because it is fundamentally based on the act of distinguishing between the lawful and the wicked, genuine justice triggers a demand for retribution among its most virtuous citizens: “Everyone who wants to be accounted as just has the duty to go before a judge and demand justice for wrongdoing, not out of revenge, but with the purpose of upholding justice and the laws of his country.” The problem is not Moses’s abuse of power but the system of power that justice simply is. It is not authority but justice itself that turns the identification and punishment of the wicked into a duty. And once justice turns into a duty, it threatens to become injustice, the wrongful or overzealous identification of the wicked without concern for love of one’s neighbor but simply for the purposes of upholding the ideals of justice. Even ideal justice—or better, especially ideal justice—cannot escape this dilemma. Christ continues Moses’s efforts not by diminishing the category of the wicked but by changing his response, indicating that true religion has enemies that it must sometimes, but not always, accept on practical grounds to ensure the survival of the common. “It clearly follows on simply Scriptural grounds that this teaching of Christ . . . concerning the toleration of injury and total submission to the wicked applies only in situations where justice is disregarded and at times of oppression, but not in a good commonwealth.” Disregard of justice may seem like a negative statement, but a closer look at how justice works would suggest a more complex scenario. Christ maintains Mosaic law as an ideal but modifies its requirements to meet the present challenges of fortune. Leo Strauss sees in this passage a pattern of accommodation that explains Spinoza’s own situation. Like Christ teaching true religion in Roman-occupied Palestine, Spinoza writes the Theologico-Political Treatise under the threat of persecution in a Christian country, and under those circumstances he produces an esoteric treatise that withholds its true aim behind what it presents as its common meaning. That true aim, Strauss argues, is to teach philosophy to “potential philosophers . . . who, at least in the early stages of their training, are deeply imbued with the vulgar prejudices.”23 Spinoza plays to the prejudices of the masses in his use of religious language while simultaneously leveling a critique of scripture to introduce an absolute break between philosophy and revelation. In advancing his thesis, however, Strauss remains blind to Spinoza’s commitment to the common as a source of po-

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litical vitality. Rather than signaling the conditions that necessitate esoteric writing, this passage hinges on the need to protect the common and the importance of prudence and justice in doing so. To explain how the common is constituted, Spinoza describes what it means to call scripture a sacred text. From one point of view, Spinoza explicitly desanctifies scripture. His thesis that scripture is a product of human imagination is a direct challenge to those “who look upon the Bible, in its present form, as a message for mankind sent down by God from heaven” (503). From another point of view, however, Spinoza resanctifies scripture by changing the terms by which we understand the sacred in the fi rst place. What makes a thing sacred, Spinoza argues, is never its cause but only ever the particular effect that it brings about. “A thing is called sacred and divine when its purpose is to foster piety and religion, and it is sacred only for as long as men use it in a religious way. If men cease to be pious, the thing will likewise cease to be sacred; if it is devoted to impious uses, then that which before was sacred will become unclean and profane” (505). More than making an argument about use, Spinoza defi nes the sacred through scripture’s performative effects. Scripture is the word of God neither because God actually wrote scripture nor because God supernaturally revealed scripture to Moses, Ezra, or to anyone else. Both of these options would be impossible given Spinoza’s account of divinity and revelation. Rather, scripture is sacred because it works in such a way as to make its readers devout. “Scripture . . . is sacred, and its words divine, only as long as it moves men to devotion towards God; but if it is utterly disregarded by them, as it was once by the Jews, it is nothing more than paper and ink, and their neglect renders it completely profane, leaving it exposed to corruption” (505). Given this argument, we can say that for Spinoza true religion is scripture’s effective truth, akin to what Machiavelli in The Prince calls the “verità effettuale della cosa,” the effective truth of the thing (P 30). True religion is the truth that scripture produces among its interpreters in the form of devotion. Moreover, devotion is what preserves the common as scripture’s central aim. So long as scripture’s interpreters are devout, Spinoza argues, they will epitomize the common in the act of devotion. In Spinoza’s account, the common is a formal effect of scriptural accommodation that is then taken up as a mode of social behavior. Scripture accommodates doctrine to as many people as possible by reducing divine law to the lowest common denominator of understanding: “The prophets preached not to scholars but to all Jews without exception, and the Apostles were wont to teach their Gospel in churches which were places of pub-

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lic assembly. . . . It follows that Scriptural doctrine contains not abstruse speculations or philosophical reasoning, but very simple matters able to be understood by the most sluggish mind” (TTP 510). The very act of scriptural accommodation is a neighborly gesture that constitutes community through common understanding. This gesture may or may not register as an intellectual insight, but it does get expressed as political form. While devotion involves both sovereignty and sociality—the love of God and one’s neighbor—Spinoza argues that sociality is the only means available to prove God’s sovereignty in a world of belief. Belief is not a matter of confession, Spinoza argues, since “all men are not equally in agreement in all matters and are influenced by their beliefs in different ways, so that what moves one man to devotion will move another to ridicule and contempt” (517). Rather, belief is a matter of formal action, so much so that, Spinoza writes, its content is always only ever imputed: “If his works are good, he is a believer, however much he may differ in religious dogma from other believers; whereas if his works are evil, he is an unbeliever, however much he may agree with them verbally. For obedience being posited, faith is necessarily posited” (516). What secures true religion as scripture’s effective truth is simply the formal act of obedience to a divine law that is only ever offered through and as imagination. Spinoza’s analysis of scripture broadens the domain of the Mosaic constitution so that it establishes more than just the Hebrew state. Scripture also establishes the common, but on the condition that the common is bound to a structure of enunciation and its effects. Scripture clearly does not speak, and given the editorial thesis that scripture was compiled by Ezra, who was working from corrupt and incomplete documents, it would be easy to argue that the writing of scripture precedes the scene of faceto-face communication so that the Mosaic performative is an imaginary moment created retrospectively to reinforce the devotion of scripture’s readers. Nevertheless, devotion to an increasingly formal sense of law also implies that the law takes the form of a spoken commandment. As Balibar points out, the Theologico-Political Treatise acknowledges at increasing levels of complexity that the law “that stipulates obedience as such necessarily has the form of an enunciation.” This is literally the case with Moses and metaphorically the case with scripture which produces devotion as a performative effect. It is also the case “under its most abstract and irreducible form, when the law is inscribed in hearts and has no other content than the moral precepts of universal reason.”24 This aspect of the law enables arguments for the divine right of the sovereign, who personifies a structural principle by occupying the place of enunciation. But when

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Spinoza explores this principle in an argument about scripture, he exposes it as the product of human imagination. Imagination, Spinoza suggests, posits an external authority through which it receives its own images as obligation. On the one hand, obedience to even the most formal law assumes a theological imaginary, the word of God, through which obedience is secured. Yet on the other hand, the word of God need not be personified by the sovereign but can be formalized through obedience in common. Spinoza’s analysis responds to Hobbes’s account of politico-theological authority. For Spinoza, scripture can only be determined as the word or d’var of God—the d’var of God meaning “word, speech, command, or thing” (506)—by its effects. If scripture produces devotion as the love of God and love of one’s neighbor in some approximate form or another, then it is the word of God. But if scripture ceases to produce devotion, then it is no longer the word of God. Hobbes develops a similar interpretation of scripture in chapter 36 of Leviathan. Like Spinoza after him, Hobbes aims to critique those who take scripture to be the revealed word of God, in the sense that the Bible was sent down from heaven as a message for humanity and that we currently possess it in an uncorrupted form. Instead of referring scripture to its performative effects, however, Hobbes links the word of God to doctrine and, via doctrine, to the sovereign authority of secular rulers to determine theological issues concerning scriptural interpretation and church law. Hobbes argues that in Hebrew the word of God has two distinct meanings. The fi rst is that God actually spoke, and the second, more colloquial meaning in ancient Hebrew is that something was done or instituted “concerning God, and his government; that is to say, the doctrine of religion” (L 36.2.278). Given that all of scripture is mediation by prophets and scribes whose revelations can never be fully verified, Hobbes deduces that it is impossible to tell with any certainty whether or not scripture might count as God’s word in the sense that it reflects what God actually said. But, he continues, all of scripture is God’s word in the sense that it “is taken for the doctrine of Christian religion” (36.3.278–79). In referring scripture to Christian doctrine, Hobbes aims to maintain a sense of political authority for the secular sovereign even as he critiques the thesis that God authored the Bible. In his account, scripture raises and reinforces the need for a sovereign who decides what counts as the word of God, in the sense of church doctrine, and what does not. Whereas Hobbes levels a critique of divine authorship to shore up the authority of the secular sovereign in determining Christian doctrine, Spinoza emphasizes the effective truth of scripture to prioritize the role of norms in establishing the common. As Spinoza explains it, doctrine or

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dogma relies on a coercive authority that destroys the common, but norms constitute a mode of sociality that upholds the common while also preserving dissent as individual belief. In making this argument, Spinoza does more than oppose dogma and norms; he proposes a founding norm or precept, what he calls a “mandate [mandatum]” that stands as the minimal authoritative assertion through which the common can be constituted and preserved. This founding norm, “a true norm [veram normam] for defi ning faith” (TTP 515 / 174), is nothing less than the divine commandment to love one’s neighbor as oneself. It is, Spinoza writes, “the one and only guiding principle for the entire common faith of mankind [totius fidei catholicae norma], and through this mandate alone should be determined all the tenets of faith that every man is in duty bound to accept [per id solum omnia fidei dogmata, quae scilicet unusquisque amplecti tenetur, determinanda sunt]” (515 / 174–75). This founding norm does not render political subjects docile in relation to a prescriptive order of normative thoughts and behaviors. But it does indicate that the common relies on a minimal element of transcendence, a minimal element of divine law that can and must be derived only from human imagination. Imagination embodies the possibility of justice because it is utterly free. Or, as Spinoza insists, free opinion belongs to each individual in matters of religion. And at the same time, the right to free opinion obligates individuals to imagine divine law as justice and charity. The mandate to love one’s neighbor as oneself cannot constrain or even compel imagination, but it does install an obligation toward justice that one can take up or not. “A catholic faith should . . . contain only those dogmas which obedience to God absolutely demands, and without which such obedience is absolutely impossible. As for other dogmas, every man should embrace those that he, being the best judge of himself, feels will do most to strengthen him in the love of justice” (517).

THE MOSAIC COVENANT AND NATURAL RIGHT Up to this point, I have shown how Spinoza uses the Mosaic constitution to develop a democratic understanding of political theology. In the opening chapters of the Theologico-Political Treatise, he stages the Mosaic constitution as a performative act in order to emphasize the separation of knowledge and belief upon which obedience is predicated. Cast as an act of communication, law giving depends upon belief in the lawgiver and the credibility of his or her sources of inspiration, but it does not at all depend upon philosophical or scientific knowledge of those sources. As is so often

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the case in the act of law giving, in the Mosaic constitution inspiration and prophetic imagination are key elements in the fashioning of political community through the principles of law and order. Moses is unique, however, in that he binds the Hebrews to an absolute God and not to himself as an absolutist prince. In Spinoza’s account of the Mosaic constitution, God as a point of philosophical nonknowledge becomes the central site around which political obedience take shape as true religion, that is, as an early manifestation of the commandment to love God and one’s neighbor. As the Theologico-Political Treatise continues, Spinoza develops his claims about prophetic imagination and the Mosaic constitution through a detailed consideration of scripture and scriptural interpretation. Spinoza treats scripture as a performative text whose sacred nature is determined by its effects and not by its causes, because it produces devotion and not because it was or was not authored by God. In the middle chapters of the Theologico-Political Treatise, Spinoza uses this analysis of scripture to suggest a model of political community based on a concept of the common that can accommodate confl ict, dissensus, and disagreement without giving up on the obligations of justice and the concurrent need to distinguish between right and wrong, the just and the unjust. In the fi nal section of this chapter, I show how Spinoza extends his previous analyses by shifting the Mosaic constitution onto the more difficult terrain of individual rights. His purpose is to associate rights with the theological imaginary in a way that resists reinforcing a more authoritarian, absolutist image of the theologico-political sovereign. Spinoza fi rst presents the Mosaic constitution in his analysis of the Mosaic performative. He then returns to the Mosaic constitution in his analysis of Hebrew scripture. He stages the Mosaic constitution for a third time in the concluding chapters of Theologico-Political Treatise to explore relations between the social contract and natural right. In his analysis, the social contract represents a midway point between the “mystery of despotism” and a vision of political community that preserves individual rights. The subject who consents to be governed is a subject who is by defi nition free. Because the social contract is predicated upon voluntary submission, it assumes a political subject endowed with the freedom of choice. At the same time, Spinoza argues, the theory of voluntary submission tends to co-opt the freedom of choice so that it serves to expand coercive authority. Although choosing to obligate oneself seems to be an expression of subjective freedom, that choice de facto enlarges governmental control. “While it is he who makes the decision,” Spinoza argues, “he is nevertheless acting under the control of the sovereign power” (TTP 536–37). Can the Mosaic

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constitution actualize individual rights without instrumentalizing rights in the service of coercive authority? Spinoza’s answer tends to be both yes and no: yes, in the sense that the Mosaic constitution posits a democratic horizon, a promised community in which individual rights are preserved through a collective commitment to a common cause; and no, in the sense that the promised community remains a potential that is only visible negatively in political history, as a promise that remains unrealized. Spinoza’s relation to natural-right theory and the social contract at the end of the Theologico-Political Treatise has been a continuing problem for his readers. Not only does his understanding of natural right undermine the stability that the social contract is intended to provide, and not only does his understanding of both natural right and the social contract seem to be at odds with the classical tradition that he invokes, but also in his subsequent Political Treatise Spinoza abandons the social contract and the question of the origins of society altogether. Douglas Den Uyl reconciles the Theologico-Political Treatise with the Political Treatise by downplaying the problem of political theology, arguing that Spinoza’s considerations of political theology are specific to his analysis of the Hebrew state.25 By contrast, Balibar and Levene argue that the Theologico-Political Treatise highlights a set of problems and aporias concerning political theology and democracy that are central to Spinoza’s conceptualization of politics and collective life.26 Following Balibar and Levene, I shall argue that Spinoza’s fi nal consideration of the Mosaic constitution extends his earlier analysis of political theology as a problem concerning communication and imagination. In the Theologico-Political Treatise’s concluding chapters, Spinoza suggests that democratic theocracy is the imaginative horizon of any political community based on law and order. At the beginning of chapter 16, Spinoza explains that individual right is coextensive with power to act. That is, individuals have the right to do what they are physically and mentally capable of doing. Spinoza explains: By the right and established order of Nature I mean simply the rules governing the nature of every individual thing, according to which we conceive it as naturally determined to exist and to act in a defi nite way. For example, fish are determined by nature to swim, and the big ones to eat the smaller ones. Thus it is by sovereign natural right that fish inhabit water, and the big ones eat the smaller ones. For it is certain that Nature, taken in the absolute sense, has the sovereign right to do all that she can do; that is, Nature’s right is co-extensive with her power. For Nature’s power is the very power of God, who has sov-

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ereign right over all things. But since the universal power of Nature as a whole is nothing but the power of individual things taken together, it follows that each individual thing has the sovereign right to do all that it can do; i.e. the right of the individual is co-extensive with its determinate power. (526–27)

Initially, Spinoza seems to be following Hobbes, who posits a natural right of self-preservation, “the liberty each man hath, to use his own power, as he will himself, for the preservation of his nature . . . to the aptest means thereunto” (L 14.1.86). But when Spinoza follows his defi nition with the example of fish, their natural habitat, and their life cycle, it becomes clear that he means something more biological than Hobbes. Hobbes has a fairly generic sense of natural right based largely on a combination of vainglory, calculation, and acquisitiveness, whereas for Spinoza natural right becomes more like a biological fact. Natural right is the right to act to the fullest extent possible according to the norms of conduct derived from the fact of one’s own embodiment, be it swimming or predatory behavior.27 While natural right is normative and can, therefore, found general claims, it is also singular, based on the particulars of physical existence. For Hobbes natural right quickly turns into an argument about natural law so that the liberty associated with self-preservation is almost automatically constrained by a sense of obligation; the natural right of self-preservation then quickly becomes the natural law that forbids suicide and self-harm. Spinoza most powerfully differentiates his understanding of natural right from Hobbes’s when he justifies his argument on theological grounds— that is, when he argues that nature’s right is coextensive with her power and that nature’s power is the same thing as God’s power. When Spinoza casts his argument about natural right in these terms, he effectively installs a break between rights and law by refusing a juridical concept of divine authority. Earlier in the Theologico-Political Treatise Spinoza argues that since God has absolute sovereignty, there is no distinction between what is and what God decrees. God does not operate as a lawgiver whose decrees can be resisted but as a creator whose created order expresses his sovereignty in all of its permutations, transformations, and confl ictual relations. The overriding thesis of this argument is that God’s sovereignty is not juridical but natural. God’s power is not distinct and separate from the natural or created world but is, in Spinoza’s account, actualized in and as that world. By importing this argument into his account of rights, Spinoza locates his theory of natural right within an understanding of power based on norms of behavior instead of on juridical sovereignty. As Edwin Curley

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argues, Spinoza posits natural right as a theological argument to make the “disturbing normative . . . claim” that we have the right to do what we have the power to do because “no transcendent law forbids us” to do it. 28 Moreover, Spinoza continues, the natural right to do what one is physically and mentally capable of doing cannot fully be relinquished by entering into the social contract. Although one might promise in good faith to obligate oneself to a specific course of action, there is no guarantee whatsoever that this promise will hold, “for everyone has the natural right to act deceitfully and is not bound to keep his engagements except through hope of greater good or fear of greater evil” (TTP 529–30). Spinoza’s claim goes far beyond the issue of whether or not we should keep our word. It goes to the heart of political theology. Like Spinoza, Hobbes understands very well that individuals keep their promises only when compelled to do so by force. In Leviathan this force becomes the source of theologicopolitical sovereignty. Initially, coercive force takes the form of a fear of God “as a revenger for . . . perfidy” (L 14.31.94), but fi nally it rests in the authority of the sovereign who—as “that great leviathan, or . . . Mortal God” (17.13.114) —has the power and strength to compel obedience for the peace and security of all. Spinoza concedes that Hobbes develops one plausible version of theologico-political sovereignty, but he adds a caveat: given that individual right is coextensive with determinate power, Hobbes’s version of the social contract is really part of a political strategy that obscures the more basic struggle between ruler and ruled by which the state is organized. As Spinoza writes in the opening paragraph of chapter 17, “Men have never transferred their rights and surrendered their power to another so completely that they were not feared by those very persons who received their rights and power, and that government has not been in greater danger from its citizens, though deprived of their right, than from its external enemies” (TTP 536). Or, as he puts it several pages later when discussing the arcana imperii, “the position has never been attained where the state was not in greater danger from its citizens than from the external enemy, and where the rulers were not in greater fear of the former than the latter” (538). For this reason, the Greeks and Romans “tried to persuade men that they were descended from the immortal gods, thinking that if only their subjects and all men should regard them not as their equals but should believe them to be gods, they would willingly suffer their rule and would readily submit.” Admittedly, the Hobbesian sovereign does not have to persuade others that he descended from the gods, but that is because Hobbes has already endowed him with a sense of divinity in the authority that he holds over his subjects.

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The central problem that Spinoza faces is how to constitute a society that empowers the realization of natural right to the greatest extent possible without returning society to a pure state of nature. Spinoza is clear about what the social contract that leads to this democratic vision of society would look like. “Without any infringement of natural right, a community [societas] can be formed and a contract be always preserved in its entirety in absolutely good faith on these terms, that everyone transfers all the power that he possesses to the community [societatem], which will therefore alone retain the sovereign natural right over everything [quae adeo summum naturae jus in omnia], that is, the supreme rule [summum imperium] which everyone will have to obey” (530 / 193). And he is also clear that this democratic vision of society is “the most natural form of state” (531). But for Spinoza this vision of political community is most fully realized not through the social contract per se but through a prior contract with God. As Spinoza develops it in the fi nal chapters of the Theologico-Political Treatise, the Mosaic covenant serves as a counternarrative to the Hobbesian social contract in which the theological imaginary safeguards natural rights against what Spinoza calls the seemingly “unlimited power” of “those in command” (537). In his fi nal description of the Mosaic constitution, Spinoza highlights two covenants. In the fi rst, the Hebrews make an agreement directly with God, transferring power to him “in the same way as we have previously conceived it to be made in the case of an ordinary community [communi societate] when men decided to surrender their natural right” (539 / 205). And in the second, the Hebrews abrogate the fi rst contract and transfer authority to Moses, promising “not, as before, to obey all that God should speak to them, but what God should speak to Moses” (540). While Moses institutes a form of government that is good enough to ensure political stability for quite a long time, in Spinoza’s account it is the initial covenant with God that gives expression to democracy, or a democratic theocracy, which preserves natural right as a common value. “Since the Hebrews did not transfer their right to any other man, but, as in a democracy, they surrendered all their right on equal terms, crying with one voice, ‘Whatever God shall speak, we shall do’ (no one else being named as mediator), it follows that this covenant left them all completely equal, and they all had an equal right to consult God, to receive and interpret his laws; in short, they all shared equally in the government of the state” (540).29 What does it means to say that natural right is realized as democratic community in a covenant with God? In the fi rst place, it means that absolute democracy is an imaginative fiction, what Spinoza in his initial de-

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scription of the scene calls “theory” and what he calls several pages later a scene that is “notional rather than practical” (559). The covenant with God relies on a double perspective on the divine. Theologically speaking, God is in no way an authority figure who imposes his will like a lawgiver. From this perspective, it is obvious that “in reality the Hebrews retained their sovereign right completely” (540) because they enter into agreement with a figment of their collective imagination. Politically speaking, however, this agreement underscores the constructive potential of imagination in generating democratic community. In practice, democracy is never pure, but the covenant with God gives imaginative content to the theoretical possibility of a purely democratic political community that is also the realization of divine law, the manifestation of just society. Spinoza’s emphasis on the “notional” aspect of this scene adds a further complication. This image of justice is generated through the Mosaic constitution. It is not an ahistorical Platonic form but is a transcendental ideal created by human means. Although the covenant with God comes fi rst in narrative time, Spinoza suggests that it is an effect of—or, perhaps better, an intensification of—the Mosaic performative. When Spinoza initially represents the Mosaic performative, he locates the break that it creates between knowledge and belief as the positive condition for political community. The success of the Hebrew state comes from Moses’s ability to induce devotion among his followers not for himself but for a God who purportedly loves them, a God whom his devotees can neither see nor know. The Hebrews’ fi rst covenant with God gives imaginative form to the devotion that Moses induces, so that in this initial covenant “civil and religious law—which we have shown to consist only in obedience to God—were one and the same thing; the tenets of religion were not just teaching but laws and commands; piety was looked upon as justice, impiety as crime and injustice” (540). Spinoza remains dissatisfied with this particular vision of political society, so he emphasizes its formal aspects. The initial covenant with God is itself a pure performative. Its effectiveness derives neither from God’s authority, which is only a political fiction, nor from Moses’s authority, which from one point of view has yet to be established, but from the statement of obedience itself—“Whatever God shall speak, we shall do”—which is in turn rendered felicitous through the act of obedience that the statement promises. In a certain sense, at the end of the Theologico-Political Treatise Spinoza repeats the argument he made earlier about scriptural authority as a more explicit argument about democracy. There, Spinoza argued that scripture conveyed divine law— love God and one’s neighbor—in the effects of devotion that it produced

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among its readers. Here, he suggests that the covenant with God produces the same effects. The God with whom one can enter into an agreement may be an imaginative fiction, but in practice the act of entering into an agreement with a common fiction gives form to divine law. Spinoza presents this vision of the Mosaic constitution against the backdrop of his broader assessment of the social contract, in which he argues that human and divine law are deeply intertwined but are not finally the same thing. As with the Mosaic constitution, Spinoza divides the social contract into two discrete components. He begins with the civil contract, arguing that political society comes about when individuals surrender their natural rights by transferring power to a “supreme power” who now has the ability to rule “as long as he has this power of carrying into execution whatever he wills” (530). And the philosopher continues by arguing for a theological contract that supplements and conditions the fi rst. It is only after humans’ covenant with God that divine law has any sway: “Divine law began from the time when men by express covenant promised to obey God in all things, thereby surrendering, as it were, their natural freedom and transferring their right to God in the manner we were describing in speaking of the civil state” (534). By distinguishing between these two contracts, Spinoza is able to prioritize the civil contract without turning the sovereign into a divine representative of God’s will. As Spinoza explains it, the civil sovereign retains the natural right to interpret God’s law based on “his greater advantage,” but for political subjects this natural right is always mediated by the more pressing obligation to obey “the sovereign power’s decrees” (535). On the one hand, Spinoza argues, “it is exceedingly rare for governments to issue quite unreasonable commands,” even when it comes to religion, since “in their own interest and to retain their rule, it especially behooves them to look to the public good” (530). On the other hand, political subjects have an obligation to obey the civil sovereign unless “we have a sure and indubitable revelation [from God]” (535). At the same time, Spinoza is also able to locate justice in the theological imaginary created by the social contract but never quite equal to the personal authority of the civil sovereign. Dividing the civil from the theological contract while joining them as the two sides of law, he suggests that law introduces the possibility of justice but that imagination gives justice its particular content. The abstract theory of the social contract leads to obedience as a pragmatic solution to the problem of religious division and, indeed, to dissensus more generally. The Mosaic constitution supplements this pragmatic solution with an image of justice that prevents it from becoming quietism or mere cynicism and also ac-

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counts for exceptional moments when disobedience becomes necessary to further the constitution of democratic society. Perhaps most significant about this argument is that Spinoza links revelation to natural right. If reason does not dominate in the state of nature, then neither does religion. Just as a political description of the origins of community cannot count on the dictates of reason before the institution of government, a theological description of the origins of divine law cannot count on the force of religious obligation before the institution of religion. As Spinoza puts it, “No one knows by nature that he has any duty to obey God” (533–34). As prophetic imagination, revelation is an expression of power. Even after individuals contract with God, they can break that contract if it serves their own purposes. “I assert that in a state of nature everyone is bound to live by the revealed law from the same motive as he is bound to live according to the dictates of sound reason, namely, that to do so is to his greater advantage and necessary for his salvation. He may refuse to do so, but at his own peril” (534). The civil sovereign can certainly capitalize on prophetic imagination, as Machiavelli argues throughout his political writings and as Spinoza details throughout the Theologico-Political Treatise. Spinoza adds that as an expression of power, revelation can never fully be taken over by the civil sovereign as a sure means of consolidating political authority. Rather, both revelation and rights are best understood as sites of contestation over how best to actualize the common. In the history of the Hebrew state itself, Spinoza goes on to argue, the common emerges negatively, in the contest between civil and priestly authority. But the Mosaic constitution offers another version of political theology, one that preserves the possibility of the common as the foundation of a more just society.

POLITICAL THEOLOGY 1 AND POLITICAL THEOLOGY 2 By way of concluding the fi rst part of this book, I’d like briefly to summarize the argument that I have made so far. When Machiavelli takes the new prince as his object of analysis, he develops a secular understanding of political making. Accordingly, historians of political thought have tended to see Machiavelli as the architect of a system of secular politics that decisively breaks with transcendental modes of thought. But Machiavelli’s emphasis on belief and imagination complicates this view. At the same time that Machiavelli develops a secular understanding of political making, he also points toward the central roles that Christian exegesis and religious narrative have to play in legitimating and determining political action. Be-

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cause politics is a field of belief, princes are obligated to use and manipulate the particular beliefs of those whom they govern to establish authority and maintain obedience, while these beliefs also shape the very concepts of liberty and freedom that resist coercive authority. In the subsequent reception of Machiavelli’s works by writers like Spinoza, Luzzatto, and others whom we will meet in the pages ahead, secular politics is increasingly determined by scriptural narratives and interpretive traditions, for better and for worse: for worse because scripture is often used to sanction authoritarian rule; and for better because scripture becomes a privileged site to contest authoritarian rule in the name of a true religion that gives birth to democracy. Spinoza develops the latter claim with extraordinary philosophical rigor and political acumen. Treating politics as a field of communication and imagination, he shows how human law always implies divine law as its other scene and then, through an increasingly sophisticated exploration of scripture, he associates divine law with consideration for one’s neighbors and the expansion of individual rights. To be sure, this is a tactical claim made in support of religious toleration, but it is a historical and philosophical claim as well. Scripture generates democracy as an absolute horizon of justice that it bequeaths to the early modern state. Throughout the twentieth century, theorists, historians, and political philosophers tended to associate political theology with seventeenthcentury absolutism and the structures of persecution that intensified with the emergence of the confessional state. Machiavelli and Spinoza present a different picture, one in which early modern political theology is fundamentally divided against itself. Absolutism represents one side of political theology, but the other side tends toward liberty as a collective virtue, a common good. Machiavelli enables—and Spinoza develops—a critical assessment of absolutism based on its attempt to manipulate and control the theological imaginary upon which political community depends. In positing belief and imagination as central components of political community, both discover leverage with which to reveal and analyze some of the key mechanisms and techniques upon which coercive authority relies. But both also realize that critique is not enough. The theological imaginary has to be reshaped and reformulated against the backdrop of absolutism as part of the project of transforming and creating new models of government. 30 Early modern political theology involves more than just an argument in support of the personal authority of the sovereign who rules over the state like God rules over creation. It also involves reinventing the state, investigating new modes of governmental regulation, and exploring the novel forms of life that emerge in the process.

ch apter four

Marlowe and the Counter-Reformation

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argued in the preceding section of this book that Mosaic narrative played a central if also paradoxical role in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century political theories of the state. Taking Mosaic narrative as a case study for anatomizing the persuasive force of religious belief, early modern writers strengthened the bond between religion and the state at the very moment that they also recognized religion to be an imaginative fiction, a textual construct, or a political ruse. This paradox is one of the defi ning features of political theology in early modern Europe. It is what made political theology constitutive and not simply retrograde, as political and literary writers attempted to understand and shape communal bonds through the reinvention and elaboration of religious fictions. This part of the book will explore the introduction of the Mosaic constitution into English Renaissance literature in works by Christopher Marlowe and Michael Drayton. More than just a perennial point of reference for writers who lived in a culture that was deeply religious and scripturally literate, the Mosaic constitution figured an antinomy between imagination and the demystification of political authority that came to defi ne literature in relation to an increasingly troubled and divided scene of politics. Marlowe plays a key role in this history partly because of his particularly Machiavellian uses of Mosaic narrative and partly because of his deep interest in political realism and imagination. Throughout his works, Marlowe maintains a Machiavellian sense of political motive, but at the same time he also celebrates the transformative capacities of imagination. Whereas Machiavelli draws a sharp distinction between the “verità effettuale della cosa” and the “imaginazione di essa” (P 30), Marlowe holds the two in a productive tension: while effective truth cuts through and deflates imagination, nevertheless imagination also takes over and pro103

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duces effective truths. Whether or not Marlowe read Machiavelli remains an open question, though I am inclined to think that he did. Regardless, the patterns and antinomies associated with the Mosaic constitution emerge most profoundly if we consider Marlowe’s writings in the context of Counter-Reformation political thought that he would have encountered in the controversial literature which he knew quite well, in his experience as an intelligencer spying on English Catholics in Rheims and in the networks of intelligencers in which he circulated throughout his adult life. No orthodox reader of religious or political controversy, Marlowe derives a sense of political making from Counter-Reformation political writings, which he in turn associates with the force of imagination. In part, Marlowe explores political making through the theatricalization of sovereignty. A canny playwright who understands both the representational force of sovereignty and the transformative powers of the theater, Marlowe stages violent and aggressive sovereignty in order to imagine the possibilities of turning that violence against the early modern state and its emerging versions of community. And in part, Marlowe explores political making through the experience of erotic pleasure. In Marlowe’s account, the problems of sovereignty raised by Counter-Reformation political thought are best expressed and explored in the domain of sexual discourse, where imagination drives and thwarts the supposed sovereignty of the deciding subject. As I shall argue, for Marlowe what links the theatricalization of sovereignty to the experience of erotic pleasure is the fi gure of the enemy. Counter-Reformation political writings are highly attentive to the politicoreligious enemy, be it English Catholics who are unjustly persecuted or French Huguenots who are rightly punished. The unsettling brilliance of Marlowe’s theater is that he stages authority from the perspective of the enemy, turning persecution and punishment into aesthetic sensation. Erotic discourse gives Marlowe the means to anatomize that sensation as a form of self-betrayal that allows the passion-driven subject to create new bonds and affiliations. I begin my three-stage argument with a reading of the notorious Baines note, which fi ngers Marlowe as an atheist and most directly associates him with the tradition of political thought that has been the focus of this book so far. The Baines note is an indictment of Marlowe given by a fellow intelligencer, Richard Baines, as part of what appears to be an attempt on the part of some governmental officials to cover up the still-obscure motives of Marlowe’s murder on May 30, 1593. Despite the dubious circumstances surrounding its production, I read the note in the context of Counter-Reformation political thought in order to argue that it gives a

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plausible and potentially sophisticated account of Marlowe’s intellectual sources; his rhetorical strategies; and his political, religious, and literary commitments. Scholars often discount the Baines note because it lacks credibility, but I argue that it gives a particular vantage point from which to explore the historical and intellectual circumstances of dissimulation as this works in Marlowe’s writings more broadly. It is only by accounting for the role of dissimulation in Marlowe’s writings that we can grasp his understanding of political making. The Baines note may set up Marlowe as an enemy of the state, but this is also a position that Marlowe takes up to rethink political authority and its relation to constituting power. I then show how the sources, strategies, and commitments that we see in the Baines note surface in Marlowe’s plays, The Jew of Malta in particular, where Marlowe extends a Machiavellian account of sovereignty and life through the twin resources of Hebrew scripture and Catholic political thought. Throughout his plays, Marlowe is quite attentive to the bonds that link sovereignty and life; in The Jew of Malta, he reframes Mosaic discourse from the perspective of the religious enemy to imagine and give voice to the forms of collective life coerced into visibility by unbound sovereignty. Finally, I conclude with a reading of Hero and Leander which argues that Marlowe stages his account of sovereignty, life, and enmity in erotic discourse as the most sophisticated literary means available for positing imagination as the motor of political making over and against already constituted moral and legal norms. In Hero and Leander, Marlowe extends his earlier uses of the Mosaic constitution through the story of Hero’s seduction, which, I argue, offers a counternarrative to the sovereign who legitimates his or her authority through the punishment of the political or religious enemy.

THE BAINES NOTE At the end of his life, a series of reports began to crop up that place Marlowe within a tradition of political thought associated with Machiavelli, one that sees religion as an instrument of the state. An anonymous report, probably written in March 1593, that indicts the Elizabethan intelligencer Richard Chomley with treason also claims that “Marlowe is able to shewe more sounde reasons for Atheism than any devine in England is able to geve to prove devinitie.”1 Two months later, on May 26, 1593, Richard Baines repeats these charges. According to Baines, Marlowe was of the opinion that, among other things, “Moyses was but a Jugler”; “That

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Moyses made the Jewes to travell xl yeares in the wildernes (which jorney might have bin done in lesse then one yeare) ere they came to the promised land to thintent that those who were privy to most of his subtilties might perish and so an everlasting superstition remain in the hartes of the people”; “That the fi rst beginning of Religioun was only to keep men in awe”; and “That Christ was a bastard and his mother dishonest.”2 A month later, after Marlowe’s murder, a revised copy of Baines’s note was sent to Elizabeth. That same month, the playwright Thomas Kyd also charged Marlowe with atheism, claiming that it was Marlowe’s custom “to jest at the devine scriptures gybe at praiers, & stryve in argument to frustrate & confute what hath byn spoken or wrytt by prophets & such holie men.”3 Critics have been reluctant to take these charges at face value, partly because Kyd and Baines are both unreliable sources. Kyd identifies Marlowe as an atheist while being tortured; accurate or not, he most likely produced his account in order to protect himself against those same charges. And Baines was an intelligencer whose loyalties were almost always in question. As Roy Kendall has shown, the charges that Baines levels against Marlowe bear a striking resemblance to the portrait that he presented of himself in the early 1580s when he confessed to having engaged in subversive activities at the English College at Rheims. Baines lived as a priest at the Catholic seminary for four years and was discovered to be an intelligencer—most likely working for Elizabeth’s principal secretary, Sir Francis Walsingham—when he tried to poison the college’s water supply. When caught, he confessed that he delivered seditious and heretical lectures to younger seminarians in an attempt to persuade them to atheism, the same charge he levels against Marlowe some ten years later. Baines produced his initial confession under torture, and it was used by William Allen, president of the English seminary in Rheims and later a cardinal in the Catholic Church, as propaganda against Elizabeth and the Privy Council.4 Whatever Baines’s motives, like Kyd’s they were not pure. In charging Marlowe with atheism, Baines seems deliberately to be identifying him as one of the intellectuals who “make Moyses a wise and provident man, well seene in the Egiptian learning, but denie hee had anie divine assistance in the greatest of his miracles” that Thomas Nashe has Christ complain about in Christs Teares.5 Or, more ominously, with the references to Moses and the New Testament, Baines places Marlowe in the “schoole of Atheisme” about which Robert Persons writes, “where in both Moyses, and our Savior; the olde, and new testamente are jested at.”6 But the unreliability of those giving testimony is only one reason that critics have been wary of taking these charges at their word. Following

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Lucien Febvre, critics have tended to assume that intellectual atheism was simply not possible in the late sixteenth century.7 Aside from notable exceptions like Kendall, David Riggs, Nicholas Davidson, and John Parker, readers of Marlowe have tended to assume that while atheism is a position one could charge to others, it was not a position one would understand oneself to be holding.8 The Protestant Nashe or the Catholic Persons might impute atheism as a way to discredit others in advance of any argument they might make against orthodox versions of Protestantism or Catholicism, but atheism is not a profession like Protestantism or Catholicism through which one might understand one’s own principles and metaphysical commitments. Following this understanding, we could say that Baines ascribes a position to Marlowe that he never could have held in order to portray Marlowe as the most execrable version imaginable of the public enemy, turning Marlowe into a stock character like the Machiavel who introduces The Jew of Malta by arguing that “Religion [is] but a childish Toy” and that “Might fi rst made Kings” and those who climb to “Peters Chayre.”9 The Baines note might be part of a setup, or it might be an act of revenge, but it could not be an accurate account of Marlowe’s beliefs—or lack of them—because a lack of belief was not possible in the confessional world of Elizabethan England. So the argument goes. The problem with this line of thinking is that it skirts the more central issues of sovereignty and imagination. Early modern writers often used scriptural models of authority to express new experiences of political power. This is especially the case in early modern uses of Moses. As we saw in chapter 2, Machiavelli shows scripture to offer a ready-made archive of images, metaphors, and narratives that a ruler can and sometimes must use to secure the obedience of the people; scripture is a tool that rulers can use in the service of an indirect coercion that establishes order by operating on the collective imagination. At the same time, Mosaic narrative also solicits critical vantage points from which one might analyze the workings of political power through its narratives of legitimation, challenging the parameters and restrictions that scripture seems to impose. More than a means of ideological critique, Mosaic narrative also becomes a tool for reinterpreting and reimagining political power. This is the possibility that the Baines note opens up. Despite the dubious nature of its attribution, the Baines note holds open the possibility that Marlowe used Mosaic discourse to gain a more nuanced and material understanding of political power as it intersects with literary invention. This use of scripture for ideological critique extends well beyond the intention of those using it. Even writers who developed pious interpreta-

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tions of scripture to critique Machiavelli’s understanding of politics and religion tended to strengthen the very position they were arguing against. After Machiavelli, Counter-Reformation writers defending the truth of scripture could fi nd no easy way to distinguish between good-faith and bad-faith uses of religion. Let me take one example from Pedro de Ribadeneyra’s Religion and the Virtues of the Christian Prince against Machiavelli, which was published in Madrid in 1595 and subsequently translated into Latin, Italian, French, and English. A companion to the Spanish ambassador to England during the coronation of Elizabeth and a longtime friend of Persons, Ribadeneyra maintained a strong interest in Elizabeth’s claims to sovereignty and the effects of those claims on the Catholic Church in England.10 In the above-mentioned book, Ribadeneyra argues against Machiavellian duplicity by insisting that sovereignty relies on a principle of representation based on resemblance and imitation: “Since the sovereign king and prince is as the soul of his realm, and as a resemblance of God on earth, he ought with the very greatest care consider the distinct obligations that are his, to represent [para representar dignamente] (as far as our frailty allows) God in his government; also in order to give life to the whole Commonwealth, and to shine with such illustrious and beautiful virtues that he obscures those of his subjects, as the sun with its surpassing brightness obscures that of the stars.”11 The sovereign imitates God and stands in as his representative in establishing and preserving the common good, so Ribadeneyra argues. But what this principle obscures is political technique. When Ribadeneyra discusses Moses, he doesn’t negate Machiavelli’s argument; rather, he unwittingly shows that the principle of representation is persuasive only so long as his readers remain blind to that technique: When the people of Israel were fighting against Amalech, so long as Moses was in the mountain and holding his hands raised to God, Israel was winning, but when he lowered them, it was conquered, in order that it might be understood that victory was of God, and that he granted it more for the prayer of Moses than for the fortitude and valor of the soldiers who were doing the fighting. So declared Moses himself when that war was won and victory gained, for he erected an altar to the Lord and called Him, Jehova my Exaltation.12

When Ribadeneyra argues that the Hebrews became excellent warriors because they believed that Moses was divinely inspired, he repeats Machiavelli’s argument about belief and force in a noncynical way but also in a

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way that is open to critical revision. It would be easy to answer Ribadeneyra’s account of Moses with Marlowe’s claim that “it was an easy matter for Moses being brought vp in all the artes of the Egiptians to abuse the Jewes being a rude & grosse people.”13 Ribadeneyra’s pious interpretation of Moses’s role in representing God’s will is just as easily explained as a story about the manipulation of a superstitious people. This is not to suggest that Marlowe’s account negates Ribadeneyra’s but rather that it complements it. As quickly as Moses becomes a figure for the divine authority of the monarch, he also becomes a vehicle for political making that turns against the monarch’s claims to divinity and locates power in the capacity of the arts to shape and mold belief. This turn is what defi nes sixteenthcentury atheism. For Marlowe, atheism is not a statement about the nonexistence of God; rather, it is an attempt to account for the political uses of religious belief by showing how the transcendental points of reference through which state authority seeks legitimacy are indeed so many images, metaphors, and narratives put to political use by the state. It is something of a historical irony that in Elizabethan England the Jesuits developed some of the strongest arguments for constitutionalism. Recusant writers developed increasingly articulate theories of constitutional government as they attacked the persecution of English Catholics and worked to delegitimize Elizabeth’s claims to the throne. Associating Elizabeth’s reign with proto-absolutist political thought and theories of Reason of State that were being developed on the continent by writers such as Jean Bodin, Giovanni Botero, and Pierre de Belloy, recusant writers began to look for models of limited sovereignty that could answer the claims of absolutist monarchy. A Conference About the Next Succession to the Crown (1595), written by William Allen, Sir Francis Englefield, and others, turns to Hebrew scripture. The Conference, which largely follows Williams Rainolds’s De iusta reipublicae Chistianae (1590), argues against the absolutist defi nitions of sovereignty that De Belloy offers in his Apologie Catholique (1585) and De l’authorité du roi (1588). De Belloy proposes that “princes were lawlesse and subject to no accompt, reason, or correction, whatsoeuer they did.”14 In response, the Conference turns to Deuteronomy 17, where Moses foresees that the Israelites will ask for a king once in the land of Israel and proceeds to set constitutional limits on monarchical authority: And after he shal sitte in the throne of his kingdome, he shal copie to him selfe the Deuteronomie of this Law in a volume, taking the copie of the priestes of the Levitical tribe, and he shal have it with him, and

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shal reade it al the dayes of his life, that he may learne to feare the Lord his God, and keepe his wordes and ceremonies, that are commanded in the law. And that his hart be not lifted up into pride ouer his brethren, nor decline to the right side or the left side, that he may reigne a long time, and his sonnes ouer Israel. (DB 17:19–20)

The marginal note in the Douay Bible draws the obvious Catholic lesson: “Temporal good princes take the law, and word of God, at the Priests handes.” But the Conference goes several steps further. Rather than simply asserting the Church’s role as counselor to the state, the Conference uses Deuteronomy 17 as a lens through which to read the institution of kingship in 1 Samuel (1 King in the Douay Bible), underscoring the election, consent, and determination of the people who are being governed in establishing who will govern. If God wanted to legitimate succession by propinquity of blood, Samuel never would have been allowed to sanctify David as Saul’s legitimate successor. “But David, being placed in the crowne by election, free consent, & admission of the people of Israel, as the Scripture playnly testifieth (though by motion and direction of God himselfe), we must confesse . . . but that he had given unto him therwithal, al kingly privileges, preheminences, and regalities, even in the highest degree.”15 Nor would God have allowed Nathan the prophet to persuade David to pass the crown to Solomon, the younger son, instead of Adonias, the eldest. “So that hereby also we are taught, that these & like determinations of the people, magistrates, & common wealthes, about admitting or refusing of princes to reigne or not to reigne over them, when their designements are to good ends, and for just respects and causes, are allowed also by God, and oftentymes, are his owne special dirstes and dispositions, though they seme to come from man.”16 Although the arguments being made here are largely tactical, in recusant writing the people begin to emerge as a source of political legitimacy. As early as the Treatise of Treasons (1572), English Catholics responded to Elizabeth’s rule by implying that government is based neither on the inheritance of authority nor on the dignity of the crown but rather on an agreement between sovereign and subject that Elizabeth and her counselors have broken. The anonymous Treatise argues that the people were willing to obey Elizabeth when she took the throne: “Your Q. was than with as great honour, quietnes, & uniformitie of mind, by all sortes brought unto her Croune, settled, & established in her Roiall seate, & with as great assurednes, as euer came any of her Progenitors to the same.”17 Nevertheless, she was seduced into a “stinking Tree of Treasons” by Cecil

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and Nicholas Bacon, who persuaded her to establish Protestant rule and persecute Catholics. The Treatise is careful to cede volition to Elizabeth, who “stood free and indifferent, to make her own choice, without prejudice to herself, to be serued by al her subjects equally, and was by no feare of any detriment to herself tyed to any: nor forced to use one more then an other, but as their habilities deserued, and as her pleasure was to chuse.”18 But as a “yong Ladie . . . that was unexpert in matters of State, of a deepe wit, and timorous nature, and thereby easily made suspicious,” Elizabeth was “wrought and seduced” by Bacon and Cecil against the nobility, her people, and her own self-interest.19 By revealing this seduction as the real treason to which Elizabeth is blinded, the Treatise of Treasons aims to force a second choice upon the people of England in which the “indifferent reader” will “helpe and assist your Q. to deliver her selfe of this long thraldome and abusion” by overthrowing her counselors’ tyrannical reign.20 In the Treatise of Treasons the people’s right to overthrow a tyrannical ruler serves as the just limit to otherwise unbound sovereign power. The Conference broadens this right by asserting election as the source of sovereignty. After surveying “the divers manners of government in divers tymes” throughout Hebrew scripture, from Abraham to Judah Maccabee, Allen and his coauthors conclude that “ther can be no doubt, but that the common wealth hath power to chuse their owne fassion of government, as also to change the same uppon resonable causes, as we see they have done in al tymes and countryes.”21 Nevertheless, because the end goal of this argument is the restoration of an older Catholic order and not the institution of a new regime, the authors of the Treatise and Conference are quite reluctant to develop the people’s role as a force of political making. As Catholic propagandists, these authors are more concerned with the restoration of an ideal vision of an older order that split sovereignty between Church and state. The Conference tactically separates the people’s power of choice from the regulatory oversight of the priesthood in order to avoid giving the impression that the Jesuits are fomenting sedition and rebellion. But by the end of the Conference it is quite clear that the kind of constituting power for which the treatise argues is fundamentally theocratic, brought under the legitimate and legitimating control of priests, since “the highest and chiefest end of every common wealth, is Cultus Dei, the service of God, and religion.”22 Counter-Reformation writers represented Elizabeth as Exhibit A of an absolutist prince, arguing that her claim to be the head of the Church of England is evidence of her absolutist ambitions—in response to which these writers began to suggest a more constitutional model of authority

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in which political sovereignty is rooted in and legitimated by the people. Marlowe would have been aware of these arguments both from reading them in print, from his work as an intelligencer at Allen’s seminary in Rheims in the early 1580s, and later through his association with double agents like Chomley, Baines, and Robert Poley who haunted the various sites where this literature was being produced. These arguments form the basis of Marlowe’s political thinking. This is not to suggest that Marlowe was a constitutionalist. He recasts emergent constitutionalism into a bond between ruler and ruled in order to explore the aesthetic, political, and erotic effects of that bond on and from the perspective of the ruled. In a certain sense, Baines’s note gets Marlowe exactly right. Marlowe has an affinity for Catholicism: “If there be any god or good Religion, then it is in the papistes because the service of god is performed with more ceremonies, as Elevation of the mass, organs, singing men, Shaven Crownes, &cta.”23 But he prefers Catholicism not on the theological grounds that it is true but on the Machiavellian grounds that it is more effective at producing truth. If “the first beginning of Religion was only to keep men in awe,” then Catholicism is more effective in achieving its aim. By contrast, “all protestantes are Hypocriticall asses.” Rather than supporting one version of sovereignty over another, state over religious or religious over state, Marlowe approaches sovereignty from the position that all sovereignty is deceptive—or better, grounded in imagination. Far from rejecting sovereignty, Marlowe toys with its imaginative potential. Monarchy appropriates and attempts to confi ne the making upon which the state relies, but this making can be reclaimed in and as imagination. “If he were put to write a new religion,” Baines reports Marlowe to have said, “he would undertake both a more Excellent and Admirable methode and that all the new testament is fi lthily written.” Did Marlowe actually say this? And did he believe it? Given the world of intelligencing in which Marlowe trafficked, authenticity and sincerity of belief are impossible standards by which to judge any piece of evidence. This was the recognized condition of intelligencing. Responding to William Burghley’s justification of the persecution of Catholics in England, Allen proposes that the one thing Protestants and Catholics can agree on is that intelligencers are not to be trusted. Allen calls intelligencers “False brethren,” double agents who falsify brotherly love on both sides of the divide, “traiterously” slandering English Catholics while abusing the honor of the Privy Council by producing false evidence.24 And in A True Report (1583) he argues that they are the real enemies of both Catholic recusants and the Protestant state, the most dangerous sowers of fiction and forgery

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Fig. 4.1. William Allen, A True Report of the Late Apprehension and Imprisonment of John Nichols (1583). Photograph: © The British Library Board (4903 aa 27 pgAii).

who, like Judas, betray both Church and state for money. To reinforce Allen’s argument, the True Report opens with a decorative letter that portrays an intelligencer sneaking behind the letter “G” of the book’s opening phrase, “Good Christian reader” (fig. 4.1). The relation here between decorative letter and image suggests the intelligencer as a counterfeiter who dissimulates by sneaking around or behind language, using the naïveté and bad reading practices of good Christians as his cover. The lesson of the image is also the lesson of Allen’s opening sentence— “Good Christian reader, the children, and specially the Priests of Gods Church, have ben manifoldly assailed by their adversaries in our countrey these later yeres”—the image of the intelligencer seeming to substantiate Allen’s argument that it is these “conscienceles men” who are the most dangerous assailants because so difficult to discern.25 But the True Report is a valuable document less because of Allen’s argument than because it gives an accurate emblem of Marlowe’s rhetorical position. Marlowe conceptualizes the state as a kind of literary double agent, writing neither in support of the Elizabethan state nor in support of Catholic political critique, but mobilizing Catholic critique to reconceptualize the state and its relation to political making. Marlowe assumes a fundamental division between

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Catholic and Protestant claims. Rather than taking sides, he stages that division in order to play one side against the other, sneaking in and around moral language and religious images and metaphors, writing both more and less than “good Christian readers” would care to know.

THE SOVEREIGN BOND The Counter-Reformation writers whom I have discussed above all assume that sovereignty is based in obedience. Even as writers like Allen and Persons argue for the legitimacy of treason and highlight confl icts between Elizabeth and her subjects, they also take for granted the premise that Christians will commit treason against England out of fidelity to Rome. Treason against Elizabeth is ultimately a sign of loyalty to the Church that Elizabeth and her counselors have betrayed. Marlowe, by contrast, defi nes sovereignty primarily through disobedience, and this creates a double effect: fi rst, by taking disobedience as his central dynamic, Marlowe is able to locate sovereignty neither in the people nor in the ruler but in a structure of violence that binds the ruler to the people through the desecration of political enemies; and second, in theatricalizing that structure of violence, Marlowe is able to place his audiences in the position of those enemies, so that they experience this sovereign bond through the aesthetic sensation of being desecrated, defeated, and overcome. This fi rst move registers new forms of legitimation that emerge in the sixteenth century when rulers claim divine authority against the backdrop of crises produced by religious division. Like English Counter-Reformation writers, Marlowe endeavors to expose the structures of violence upon which these new forms of legitimation depend. Unlike Counter-Reformation writers, however, Marlowe refuses to replace a fundamentally illegitimate form of governance with one that would be more legitimate. Rather, in a second move, he theatricalizes this structure of violence to provoke and explore the experiences of power that it produces. Neither an idealistic nor a utopian thinker, Marlowe accepts the sovereign bond as the effective truth of the new state. In approaching this truth through its theatricalization, he asks how this bond affects and creates new forms of political association that demand new modes of political representation. The fi rst two acts of Tamburlaine situate political antagonism in a fairly traditional way for the late sixteenth century, by plotting that antagonism in the erupting civil war between Mycetes, an ineffective monarch, and his aristocracy, led to revolt by his brother Cosroe. The confl ict between Mycetes and Cosroe is cast through the theatricalization of mon-

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archy. Like Shakespeare’s Richard II, Mycetes denaturalizes the dignity of the monarch by calling attention to the theatrical mediation of authority, and this denaturalization in turn opens the door to Cosroe’s rebellion. In the play’s opening scene, Mycetes issues a royal command only to follow up with metacommentary that undermines his authority: “send my thousand horse incontinent, / To apprehend that paltrie Scythian. / How like you this, my honorable Lords? / Is it not a kingly resolution?” Cosroe responds, “It cannot choose, because it comes from you” (T1 1.1.60–64), indicating his commitment to an antitheatrical notion of authority that Mycetes has violated. It would be easy to imagine a Shakespearean drama unfolding in which Cosroe’s installation on the throne of Persia would lead to his having to legitimate himself by the same theatrical means that he disparages in his brother. “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.”26 But Marlowe displaces this feudal vision of sovereignty and its location in the person of the sovereign with a more contemporary vision in which the sovereign’s supposedly divine authority is secured and legitimated through the extreme degradation of public enemies whom Tamburlaine repeatedly and flamboyantly humiliates. Tamburlaine asserts his divine authority, his favor with “the majestie of heaven” (4.2.1475), as he uses Bajazeth as a footstool to climb onto the royal throne. The issue is not the theatrical or natural basis of authority but the theatricalization of cruelty. Bajazeth’s wife, Zabina, who is forced to witness this scene, sees Tamburlaine’s cruelty as a sign of his illegitimacy: “Unworthy king, that by thy crueltie, / Unlawfully usurpest the Persean seat” (4.2.1500–1501). Contrary to her claim, however, Tamburlaine’s entirely successful actions show cruelty to be a means of legitimation that cuts through and displaces the crises provoked by the theatricalization of monarchy by establishing a potentially more pernicious bond between the ruler and the governed. Indeed, much of the pleasure of watching Tamburlaine is to be drawn into the circles of violence that Marlowe stages, to be aesthetically overcome as a spectator by Tamburlaine’s military, rhetorical, and theatrical force. In Tamburlaine, Marlowe is fairly vague about this bond’s historical specificity, but in The Massacre at Paris he is more precise. There he locates the sovereign bond in the late sixteenth-century religious wars produced by confessional division. Alone on stage, the Guise delivers a soliloquy in which he reveals his decision to massacre Navarre and the “rablement of his hereticks” (MP 151) as part of his broader plan to claim the throne of France: More than just a political problem to be resolved, in Marlowe’s account the confessional division between Catholics and Protestants establishes an almost elemental level of enmity that the Guise can

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manipulate as he schemes to seize the throne. As the play continues, the Guise incorporates this elemental level of enmity within the sovereign bond through the violence of the massacre, but even here in his soliloquy the Guise indicates the structure of violence by which Marlowe defi nes the sovereign bond with a brief theatrical gesture. Speaking of Navarre, the Guise says, “Him will we—“ and then, according to the stage directions, completes his thought by pointing to his sword (153). With this gesture, Marlowe indicates the impending massacre, and at the same time he also invites members of his largely Protestant, English audience to identify with the Guise’s victims. Dramaturgically more sophisticated than the scene between Tamburlaine and Bajazeth, the Guise’s soliloquy draws Marlowe’s audience into the sovereign bond and asks them to experience a metaphorical version of the violence that the Guise will bring about. As if to underscore this theatricalization of violence, the Guise concludes by asking for “a look, that when I bend the browes, / Pale death may walke in furrowes of my face” so that when others see him “they may become / As men that stand and gase against the Sunne” (158–59, 163–64). To experience the physical presence of the Guise is already to be brought into the regime of violence through which his authority is established and maintained.27 In both Tamburlaine and The Massacre at Paris, Marlowe relies on Roman models of imperial authority to represent this sovereign bond. Immediately after announcing his intention to massacre the Huguenots, the Guise compares himself to Caesar, and after he uses Bajazeth as a footstool, Tamburlaine compares his divine force to “a fiery exhalation” that “Fighting for passage, makes the Welkin cracke / And casts a flash of lightning to the earth” (T1 4.2.1487, 1489–90). This image comes from the fi rst book of Lucan’s Pharsalia, which Marlowe translated in English, in which Lucan compares Caesar’s striving to the ability of natural phenomenon to produce fear: So thunder which the wind teares from the cloudes, With cracke of riven ayre and hideous sound Filling the world, leapes out and throwes forth fi re, Affrights poore fearefull men, and blasts their eyes With overthwarting flames . . . (Ph 1.152–56)

Like lightning, Caesar both physically and emotionally destroys whatever stands in the way of his “proud desires” (1.150). In what is more than just a powerful conceit, here Marlowe uses Lucan to defi ne the imperial

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dynamic of Tamburlaine’s theatrical effect, the dynamic by which the sovereign proves his authority through his almost supernatural ability to control the natural world. In The Jew of Malta, Marlowe turns more explicitly to the Mosaic constitution, viewing the movement from slavery to freedom through a cynical lens in order to disclose the complicity of the Exodus narrative with the sovereign bond. We might expect continuity as Marlowe moves from a Roman to a Mosaic vision of authority since in The Jew of Malta Marlowe engaged in similar questions surrounding sovereignty, violence, and disobedience. But the Mosaic model does make a difference in that it offers Marlowe a more flexible set of terms by which to characterize the collective life ruled by seemingly absolute authority. The Mosaic constitution gives Marlowe a vocabulary for representing the forms of association that audience identification with the Huguenots or Bajazeth only begins to suggest, partly because the story of Exodus is concerned with communities—the Hebrews in Egypt—that are not integrated into the state in any easy or obvious way, and partly because the contemporary situation of the Jews in late sixteenth-century Europe made them a productive figure for imagining the plight of resident aliens in the formation of the early modern state. In act 1, Barabas curses the Governor of Malta with “the plagues of Egypt,” playing Moses to Ferneze’s Pharaoh when Ferneze confiscates his goods (JM 1.395). Afterwards, when Barabas sends his daughter Abigail to the nunnery to fi nd his hidden treasures, he asks for God to lead her as he did during the Exodus. In Barabas’s account, the Exodus becomes a story more about restitution than about the movement from slavery to freedom through the giving of the law. “Oh thou that with a fiery piller led’st / The sonnes of Israel through the dismall shades, / Light Abrahams off-spring; and direct the hand / Of Abigall this night” (2.651–54). And, in a passage whose references are fairly condensed, Barabas refers to the Exodus as the paradigm for Davidic kingship, suggesting that both are narratives of dispossession that are ground to political authority. Castigating Lodowick for wanting to marry Abigail, Barabas snarls: This off-spring of Cain, this Jebusite That never tasted of the Passeover, Nor e’re shall see the land of Canaan, Nor our Messias that is yet to come, This gentle Magot Lodowicke I meane, Must be deluded. (2.1066–1071)

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By associating the Jebusites with the Passover, Marlowe links the exodus from Egypt with Israel’s conquest of Canaan and establishment of a religious monarchy. The Jebusites are the citizens of Jerusalem whom David slaughters when he begins to establish his reign (2 Sam. 5:6–10, 1 Chron. 11:4–9) and against whom Solomon levies a special tax because they are resident aliens (1 Kings 9:20–22). And by linking the massacre and economic dispossession of the Jebusites with the Exodus, Marlowe suggests that instead of escaping Pharaoh’s rule in Egypt, the Hebrews reestablish a version of it in Israel. Exegetically, Marlowe uses these references to supplant a narrative of redemption with one that draws an integral relation between the state and its dispossession of a minority population. Botero suggests a similar understanding in his Reason of State when he uses Pharaoh as a positive example of how a ruler should control potentially seditious religious minorities like the Huguenots or the Jews by enforcing a kind of economic enslavement. “It is important to weary such people (as Pharaoh did to the Jews) and give them sordid tasks (as the Jews did to the Gibeonites and the Romans to the Calabrians),” Botero writes, grounding sovereignty in the control a ruler must assume over heretics and potentially seditious resident aliens.28 Like Botero, in The Jew of Malta Marlowe locates the sovereign bond in the relation between authority grounded in state religion and resident aliens over whom those authorities rule. But Marlowe also discloses the political terms of this bond more fully than Botero. Early on in The Jew of Malta, at the beginning of the play, the Governor levies a special tax on the Jews and then uses the punishments set up for enforcing payment to confiscate all of Barabas’s goods. One of the key terms that emerge is “arbitrament.” According to Barabas, the Governor of Malta claims the right of “arbitrament” (JM 1.313) when he issues new “taxes and afflictions” against the Jews (1.297). Moreover, Barabas claims this right for himself at the end of the play when he becomes the new governor. “Thou seest thy life, and Malta’s happinesse, / Are at my Arbitrament,” Barabas tells the old governor, “and Barabas / At his discretion may dispose of both” (5.2153–55). Arbitrament means the right to decide or arbitrate; what prevents decision making from becoming arbitrary is the authority of the person who decides. But Marlowe also adds, this seemingly groundless ground of authority is legitimated by what the Governor calls “accursed” life (1.296). Ferneze justifies taxing the Jews at a higher rate than Malta’s Christian citizens by casting the Jews as unwelcome irritants whose presence has been painfully endured: “For through our sufferance of your hate-

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full liues, / Who stand accursed in the sight of heaven, / These taxes and afflictions are befal’ne” (1.295–97). The accused lives of the Jews both legitimate and support the Governor’s determination to single out the Jews for what amounts to extralegal taxation. Insofar as they are accursed, set apart from the norms of Christian community, the Jews become a prop for sovereign authority. Given this extreme situation, is community even possible outside the bond between arbitrament and cursed life? And if so, what forms might it take? One answer to this question is that the sovereign bond produces affi liations or alliances that subsist alongside the state, what Julia Reinhard Lupton in her reading of the play calls “kinds of prepolitical fellowship” that continually dissolve into uncivil society.29 What makes these forms of fellowship prepolitical is their relation to the state, the polis, which in Lupton’s account is the place of politics properly speaking. While The Jew of Malta stages various alliances through kinship, economy, and religious identity, none of these is fully accorded legitimate and authorized participation in Malta’s governance. Instead, they register unrealized potential. Lupton focuses on the relation between Barabas the Jew and Ithamore the Muslim, Barabas’s slave, whom he adopts as his son after his daughter Abigail converts to Christianity, measuring Marlowe’s extraordinarily cynical account of fellowship against Shakespeare’s more generous and comic uses of Paul to formulate community and concluding that positive political community is a possibility that Marlowe registers but never fully realizes. The relation between Barabas and Ithamore, Lupton argues, “suggests the possibility of affiliations across confessional groups within the realm of civil society, and in opposition to the dominant civic and religious order.”30 We might also include Catholics among the confessional groups that Marlowe affiliates, since the Governor places the Jews in situation similar to Elizabethan Catholics, who, after 1587, could have up to twothirds of their lands seized for refusing to pay fi nes for attending Mass or refusing to attend Protestant services. 31 While The Jew of Malta uses antiCatholic stereotypes to violent and presumably comic effect, reveling in the poisoning of nuns and the murder of priests, the similarities between English Catholics and Maltese Jews suggests another layer of affiliation against the hypocrisy of a political authority that justifies its actions in the name of religion. Rather than reading fellowship in Malta as a background against which Shakespearean community emerges, however, we might see Marlowe exploring more fully than Shakespeare the constitutive aspects of betrayal.

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Tamburlaine and The Massacre at Paris focus on disobedience as the central act that defi nes the sovereign bond. In The Jew of Malta, Marlowe extends his focus on disobedience to ask how acts of betrayal forge new groups and networks of association even as they destroy others. Barabas sets up and murders nuns and priests; poisons Ithamore, Bella Mira, and Pilia-Borza; and he continually shifts his allegiance from the Turks to the Maltese and back again. Abigail enters the nunnery under false pretenses to recover her father’s hidden money. Ithamore assists in the murder of the priests and nuns but then double-crosses Barabas and, with Bella Mira and Pilia-Borza, blackmails him. More than just individual acts of selfinterest, these repeated scenes of betrayal point toward a model of community in which violence is both constitutive and normative. Moreover, if betrayal is the explicit norm by which this community operates, this is because the state itself is already a community in which violence is the central mode of operation. When governments rule by political expediency as opposed to fair laws, then, Barabas argues, “in extremitie / We ought to make barre of no policie” (1.507–8). Playing off of Allen’s account of intelligencing, I propose that another name for the kind of community that Marlowe stages is false brotherhood, especially since Barabas, Abigail, Ithamore, Bella Mira, and Pilia-Borza all end up engaging in the kinds of actions that Allen associates with intelligencing. All become more or less “conscienceles” agents who continually reshuffle their lines of allegiance and reconstitute communal bonds through acts of betrayal. Barabas, Abigail, and Ithamore are all momentarily bound in their actions against the Christians. But soon thereafter, in response to her father’s killing the man whom she loved, Abigail converts to Catholicism and joins the nuns whose nunnery she had previous robbed, and Ithamore betrays Barabas by joining Bella Mira and Pilia-Borza. And throughout the play, Barabas continually joins and unjoins communities through seemingly endless acts of betrayal, playing The Jew and The Machiavel as he makes and breaks bonds with Abigail, Ithamore, the priests, his fellow Jews, the Turks, and even his original enemies the Maltese. Following Thomas Cartelli, Ruth Lunney argues that these scenes are dramaturgically significant in the history of English drama in that they break with moral drama and defi ne everyday experience through a fundamental distinction between what is and what ought to be, viewing the everyday through norms that are practical but not moral. 32 Politically, these scenes are significant in that they locate betrayal at the heart of community. If, as David Riggs and Roy Kendall have argued, The Jew of Malta is Marlowe’s play about intelligencing, then Marlowe’s emphasis on betrayal suggests

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that he is searching for means to formulate a community that accepts the necessity of violence without falling prey to the blind hypocrisy of Christian Malta.33 Betrayal, that is, becomes Marlowe’s response to what I have been describing as the sovereign bond. Like Tamburlaine and the Guise, Barabas is a counterfigure to more familiar accounts of the sovereign whose function is to stand as a representative figure for the people. Barabas is a representative figure for the multitude, the loose affiliation of Jews, Muslim, Catholics, Machiavels, and intelligencers collected under his name. The function of political representation is a central question in The Jew of Malta. Scholars from Stephen Greenblatt to John Parker have argued that Barabas stands for a vision of an Elizabethan society driven by economic interest masked by religious piety. “The Jew is not the exception to but rather the true representative of his society,” Greenblatt writes; this role was supposed to be played by Christ, Parker adds, and then he goes on to propose that Barabas is an “antichristian” substitute who provides “farcical uplift” in Christ’s absence.34 Parker reads Barabas in light of his biblical namesake, Barabbas, the prisoner who is freed instead of Jesus during the Passover ritual in which the Romans purportedly permitted the Jews to name one criminal who would then be released; Parker argues that Marlowe effectively resacralizes the secular world of economy and exchange by offering Barabas as an ironic and artistic force for good against Maltese hypocrisy. But to choose Barabas is also to choose the reconstitution of political community. As Hyam Maccoby has shown, Barabbas was a political prisoner, a leader of the rebellion against the Roman rule. When John calls Barabbas a bandit, he uses the Greek word “lestes,” which was often used to describe members of the Judean resistance (John 18:40), and when Matthew calls Barabbas a “notable prisoner” (G Matt. 27:16), he uses the word “episemos,” which like “notable” connotes distinction more than infamy. 35 The choice of Barabbas is a choice for political making, which is perhaps the reason that, according to the Baines note, Marlowe is reported to have said that “Crist deserved better to Dy then Barrabas and that the Jewes made a good Choise, though Barrabas were both a thief and a murderer.”36 Marlowe makes the “Jewish choice” to explore the possibility of representing a multitude. In sixteenth-century political thought, the term “multitude” designates a collective that stands as a threat to its opposite, the well-ordered people. But the term is also relatively empty of particular content. When in his introductory letter to his 1584 edition of Machiavelli’s political writings John Wolfe distinguishes the “commune ben regolato” (“the well-regulated community”) from the “multitudine con-

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fusa & licentiosa” (“confused and licentious multitude”), it is clear from Wolfe’s discussion that what makes the multitude confused and licentious is simply that it is the opposite of the well-regulated community.37 In The Jew of Malta, Marlowe collects this empty category through various acts of betrayal, making betrayal the positive if also paradoxical term by which multitudes are created. Ferneze justifies his appropriation of Barabas’s goods by claiming that this will “saue the ruine of a multitude” (1.330). Ferneze’s cynical claim is that through private suffering Barabas can Christ-like save his people. “Better one want for a common good, / Then many perish for a private man” (1.331–32). In this version of Christian politics, authority demands a sacrifice to bring out the common good. Against this claim, Marlowe suggests that Barabas’s forced sacrifice turns him into a ruin—one that emblemizes the multitude as it has been damaged by unbound sovereignty. To save the ruin of a multitude means more than just to sacrifice for the good of all. In this scene, it means to represent the multitude through and as its own ruin. Marlowe gets at this understanding of the multitude through a reference to Exodus. After taking away Barabas’s goods, Ferneze reintroduces him into the Maltese state, allowing him to live without giving him the means to do so. Barabas points out his contradictory situation. “What, or how can I multiply?” (1.336), to which Ferneze responds, “Be patient and thy riches will increase” (1.355). Increase and multiply. Exodus begins with an initial opposition between multitudinous Israel and Pharaoh’s imperial authority. After Joseph dies, “the children of Israel broght forthe frute and encreased in abundance, & were multiplied, and were exceading mightie, so that the land was ful of them” (G Exod. 1:7). Worried that he might be overthrown by an ever-expanding group of resident aliens, Pharaoh’s response is to enslave the Jews, but the more he afflicts them, “the more they multiplied and grewe” (1:12). In The Jew of Malta, Marlowe emphasizes both the rule over the multitude by increasingly tyrannical authority and the horizontal expansion of the multitude through the impatient increase of goods through betrayal, theft, and dispossession as a response to that authority. Marlowe does not tell us how to judge this multitude. Rather, his concern is to represent a vision of the collective that in late sixteenth-century political discourse is fundamentally unrepresentable.

PLEASURE AND PREROGATIVE Marlowe returns to the scene of judgment and decision making in Hero and Leander to work out more fully the intersection of enmity and politi-

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cal making that he begins to suggest in The Jew of Malta. Decision making is a creative act. As writers from Nietzsche to Schmitt and beyond have taught, the sovereign decision conjures new worlds and creates new communities. But this does not mean that the decision is unbound or undetermined. In The Jew of Malta, the sovereign decision to tax the Jews is determined by the division between Christians and Muslims. One of the Maltese knights justifies taking Barabas’s goods as “simple policie” (1.392). Akin to polity, policy here means something like the achievement of expedient solutions through executive order. Malta had to raise taxes on the Jews in order to pay the Turks ten years of unpaid tribute money or face war with the Turkish empire. In calling the Governor’s solution “simple policy,” the Knight indicates that, although not desirable, this was the best response to a bad situation. No hard feelings. Barabas responds by calling policy a Maltese “profession,” a religious confession that is not so simple as the Knight claims: “policie? that’s their profession, / And not simplicity, as they suggest” (1.393–94). Policy here means something closer to prudence or political cunning, an act motivated by self-interest but covered over by the righteousness that Christian Malta feels in punishing the Jews. Where the Knight claims simple policy, Barabas sees something more like a theological understanding of prudence that has been covertly transported into the secular domain. As we saw in chapter 2, Machiavelli develops his claims for cruelty by interpolating Savonarola’s arguments for prudence as a theological virtue into The Prince and reshaping those arguments so that they become the basis of his own account of virtù. Marlowe makes a similar move, suggesting that in the context of a religiously divided Mediterranean world (or, by analogy, a religiously divided Europe) the sovereign decision is driven by and foments religious enmity—even when it seems otherwise. In The Jew of Malta, Marlowe asks whether it is possible to claim the creative aspects of the decision from the vantage point of the religious enemy or, more broadly, from the vantage point of the enemy of the state. He continues this question in Hero and Leander, exploring prerogative through the erotic experience of enmity. In a brilliant discussion of Richard II and scholastic theories of sovereignty developed at the Jesuit English colleges in Spain, Jacques Lezra shows how both Shakespeare and the Jesuits understood that in early modern Europe religious division precedes the sovereign decision as the differential that both animates and subverts its seeming unity. Rather than resolving division through decision, sovereignty is defi ned by division’s “motility,” its rhizomatic movement across the terrain of early modern Europe from inter- and intra-state confl icts

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to the fomenting of division by English colleges on the continent. 38 Marlowe shares this insight about division and its motility, an insight which he develops through Hero’s erotic subjectivity. In a certain sense, Hero’s erotic initiation suggests an allegory of religious confl ict. Hero and Leander fall in love while praying in Venus’s “church,” and Hero is fi rst undone when Leander introduces religious doubt, calling her a “holy Idiot” because she does not understand the “rites” in which Venus “most delites” (HL 135, 303, 299–300). References to religious confl ict continue up to the very end of the poem, when Marlowe compares Leander’s pleasure in looking upon Hero’s naked body to Dis Pater, the Roman god of the underworld, “on heapes of gold fi xing his looke,” suggesting a faint reference to that other ruler of a Roman inferno, the pope (810). Hero and Leander is in no way overdetermined by this reading. Rather than turn the poem into an allegory along the lines of book 1 or book 5 of The Faerie Queene, Marlowe uses the metaphors and conceits that attend the unfolding love story as shorthand for political thought, exploring sovereignty and division through the affective dimensions of prerogative in the metaphorical plot of Hero’s erotic initiation. Marlowe moves between and among three different expressions of division: religious division, suggested by Hero and Leander’s faint allegory; Hero’s own self-division, which subverts the initial sense of sovereignty that the poem attributes to her; and sexual difference, which in Marlowe’s account places betrayal at the core of social relations. Hero enters the festival of Adonis as a figure of the sovereign bond. Marlowe describes Hero’s beauty by associating it with the kind of extralegal will exemplified by the well-known dictum from the Justinian Code, “What pleases the prince has the force of law.”39 Writing within this tradition, Bodin notes that the tag occurs at the end of all French edicts and laws, to show that all law depends “upon nothing but [the sovereign’s] meere and franke good will.”40 Marlowe uses this sense of sovereign good will to characterize Hero, comparing “the sentence of her scornefull eies” to an overwhelming enemy force that puts soldiers in “fear of death” (123, 121). Hero’s beauty has the capacity to inspire a fear of death that immobilizes and disarms, preventing any response except for obedience, so that by the end of the passage enemy soldiers are transformed into docile subjects. Her beauty accords her the status of a sovereign whose juridical authority works in much the same way as does Tamburlaine’s, for example, whose look can inspire Agydas to commit suicide, or the Guise’s, whose presence provokes a fear of death. At the same time, Marlowe also suggests that the pleasure that Hero’s onlookers take in considering themselves to be the

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object of her “scornefull eies” overrides the pleasure that motivates her decision. It is, after all, because of their “faithfull love” and not hers that her beauty has a chastening effect, inspiring a fear of Hero’s capacity to decide which transforms soldiers and princes into obedient subjects doomed to experience the bond of love through imaginary death: some, “seeing great princes were denied, / Pyn’d as they went, and thinking on her died” (128–30). That is, Marlowe suggests that Hero’s decision is largely a fantasy, driven by the pleasure that her onlookers take in imagining themselves to be the object of her “scornefull eies.” By underscoring an affective, passion-driven complicity between subject and sovereign, Marlowe discloses the role of imagination in a way that legal and juridical reason cannot. Whereas Bodin argues that legal relations are supported by a sovereign will, Marlowe prioritizes the aesthetic bond between subject and sovereign—a bond rooted in the effects of beauty on the act of judgment—in order to indicate that the force of the sovereign decision is in no small measure derived from the paradoxical pleasure that the political subject takes in imagining the effects that might result from that decision. But the aestheticization of the sovereign bond is only a fi rst step. In a second step, Marlowe replaces this version of the sovereign bond with an image of sovereignty divided against itself not politically but sexually, in terms of an erotic pleasure in bad decision making. When Marlowe returns to Hero’s capacity to decide in the bedroom scene at the end of the poem, he replaces the absolutist version of prerogative that he develops at the beginning of the poem with one in which Hero’s decision is driven by a passion for pleasure that delivers her sense of personhood to unknown pleasures brought about by Leander’s betrayal and manipulation of her as well as her own self-betrayals. The primary reason that Marlowe’s emphasis on prerogative in Hero and Leander has not been particularly obvious concerns textual editing. All editions of the poem agree on the narrative sequence up to the very end, when Hero and Leander “obtaine” a “truce” through “gentle parlie” (762). Afterward, in the earliest edition of the poem, published by Edward Blount in 1597 / 98, Hero decides to have sex with Leander before Leander attempts to persuade her. In his 1910 edition of Marlowe’s Works, Tucker Brooke reverses that order, having Leander speak before Hero makes her choice, so that, instead of choosing to have sex with Leander, Hero is forced into it. Since Tucker Brooke’s edition, almost all editors of Hero and Leander have rearranged the fi nal sex scene between the two lovers, making a simple scene of coercion out of what in Blount is a much more complex scene of decision making and consent.

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The textual problem has to do with two lines in Blount’s edition (which I have italicized below) that make up only half of a conceit: Love is not ful of pittie (as men say) But deaffe and cruell, where he meanes to pray. Euen as a bird, which in our hands we wring, Foorth plungeth, and oft flutters with her wing. And now she wisht this night were never done, And sigh’d to think upon th’approching sunne. (781–86)

In his 1821 edition of Hero and Leander, Samuel Weller Singer calls these lines an “awkward excrescence” and moves them so that they come twenty lines earlier, at the beginning of the sex scene instead of at the end, serving now as a conceit for Hero’s imagination:41 Even as a bird, which in our hands we wring, Foorthe plungeth, and oft flutters with her wing, She trembling strove, this strife of hers (like that Which made the world) another world begat, Of unknown joy.

Tucker Brooke accepts Singer’s emendation (as have all editors after Singer) and, in an act of editorial bravado, goes on to speculate that the lines were misplaced in Blount’s edition because Blount got the pages of Marlowe’s manuscript mixed up.42 Based on this theory, Tucker Brooke moves ten lines from the end of the sex scene to the beginning.43 With the exception of Richard Sylvester’s anthology of English Sixteenth-Century Verse, every modern edition of Hero and Leander that I know follows Tucker Brooke’s reordering—including L. C. Martin’s 1933 Complete Poems, Stephen Orgel’s 1971 Complete Poems and Translations, Fredson Bowers’ 1973 Complete Works, Roma Gill’s volume in the 1987 Complete Works, and the widely circulating Norton Anthology of English Literature, which follows both Martin and Bowers.44 This, even though the very few editors who actually address the problem agree that the conjectures upon which Tucker Brooke’s decision rests are not particularly compelling. Gill’s judgment can stand in as a statement of editorial consensus: “Whatever the reasons for the error, there is no doubt about the need for correction, and the appropriateness of Tucker Brooke’s action.”45 The obvious problem here is that the only reason to accept the “ap-

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propriateness” of Tucker Brooke’s action is to assume that Marlowe really wanted to write a rape scene.46 Gill’s affirmation is a product of critical interpretations of the poem, themselves based on Tucker Brooke’s emendation, which argue that Marlowe’s poem variously authorizes, critiques, or subverts predatory male desire by showing its deleterious effects on women.47 Focusing on Blount shifts the question from male desire to rash and imprudent decision making. In Blount, Hero decides to have sex with Leander, driven by imagination to commit herself to a decision which turns out to be against her own self-interest: She trembling strove, this strife of hers (like that Which made the world) another world begat, Of unkowne joy. Treason was in her thought, And cunningly to yeeld her selfe she sought. Seeming not woon, yet woon she was at length, In such warres women use but halfe their strength. Leander now like Theban Hercules, Entred the orchard of Th’esperides, Whose fruit none rightly can describe, but hee That puls or shakes it from the golden tree: Wherein Leander on her quivering brest, Breathlesse spoke some thing, and sigh’d out the rest; Which so prevail’d, as he with small ado, Inclos’d her in his armes and kist her to. And everie kisse to her was as a charme, And to Leander as a fresh alarme. So that the truce was broken, and she alas, (Poore sillie maiden) at his mercy was. Love is not ful of pittie (as men say) But deaffe and cruell, where he meanes to pray. Even as a bird, which in our hands we wring, Foorth plungeth, and oft flutters with her wing. And now she wisht this night were neuer done, And sigh’d to thinke upon th’approching sunne. (HL 763–86)

What makes Blount’s version of this passage so fascinating is that Hero’s demise is more a matter of her own decision than it is of Leander’s will. Although he does try to persuade her to have sex with him, he also only

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does so after she has already decided to yield herself. This does not mean that Hero can escape the relation between sovereignty and enmity that Marlowe develops throughout his works, but it does duplicate the complex sense of betrayal and manipulation that gives shape to the relation between Hero and Leander within Hero’s own sense of personhood. At the very moment that Hero asserts her capacity to decide whether or not to have sex with Leander, she also becomes her own worst enemy, internalizing the enmity bound up with prerogative as “treason . . . in her thought.” Hero’s decision is informed by the complex role of imagination that early modern political writers foreground in discussions of prudence. As we saw in chapter 2, Machiavelli foregrounds the role of imagination in his ongoing engagement with the theological understanding of prudence developed by Aquinas and Savonarola. Subsequent readers of Machiavelli developed his account of prudence and imagination. Because prudence is a form of reasoning based on experience and not pure rationality, early modern political writers posited, it often demands the capacity to imagine situations which have not been experienced even as it is also susceptible to being overruled by the imagination of those experiences. That is, while imagination enables prudence, it also misdirects prudential reasoning toward false conclusions. For this reason, political writers encourage reading as a way to limit imagination. Realizing that “Proper Prudence . . . can hardly be tied to precepts,” in his Sixe Bookes of Politickes Lipsius goes on to cite sententiae gleaned from a wide array of literary and historical works in order to offer, if not precepts, then statements that might strike and reign in the imagination by tying it to wisdom derived from previous, practical experiences.48 In focusing on Hero’s bad decision, Marlowe raises ethical and political considerations that go beyond the strictly prudential. What are the conditions and scenarios in which one might act contrary to one’s own self-interest? And what combination of imagination and passion might drive one to betray oneself? At the same time, by casting Hero’s decision in terms of treason and war, Marlowe introduces political considerations as well. Under what conditions might a sovereign break her oaths and truces? Under what conditions might a sovereign be charged with treason? And what are the political models that might explain this paradoxical situation? We can fi nd an answer to the last two questions in the Admonition to the Nobility and People of England and Ireland (1588), plausibly written by Allen. The Admonition casts Elizabeth as a tyrant by portraying her rule as a series of imprudent decisions driven by passion and imagination and then goes on to argue that Elizabeth’s exercise of unlimited preroga-

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tive legitimates and, in fact, demands Spanish intervention. Most significant for my own purposes is that the Admonition justifies these claims by focusing on a scene of sexual pleasure. After insinuating that Elizabeth “abused her bodie” with a long list of “divers” persons, Allen explains why Elizabeth refused to marry: “Her affection is so passinge unnatural, that she hath bene heard to wishe, that the day after her death she might stand in sum high place betwene heaven and earthe, to behold the scramblinge that she conceyved wold be for the croune; sportinge herself in the conceyte and foresight of our future miseries, by her onlie unhappines procured: not unlike to Nero, who intending for his recreation to set Rome on fier, devised an eminent pillar wheron he might stand to behold it.”49 Elizabeth’s decision to follow pleasure rather than to marry is supported by a prior, political fantasy of England’s demise. Elizabeth is a tyrant like Nero, Allen proposes, because she courts a fantasy version of England’s downfall, an image of future destruction which she takes so much enjoyment in imaging that it explains and drives her present decision to sleep with divers persons. Because this is a decision against an heir and, therefore, against the good of England, Allen reasons, Elizabeth’s exercise of prerogative legitimates popular uprising and demands Spanish intervention. Ribadeneyra offers a broadly theoretical justification of Allen’s argument in his Religion and the Virtues of the Christian Prince. Like Allen and other Jesuit controversialists, Ribadeneyra sees Elizabeth’s claims to be supreme governor of church and state as evidence of her absolutism. Instead of leveling a sustained attack on Elizabeth, however, Ribadeneyra attacks Bodin and his theory of indivisible sovereignty. Bodin defi nes sovereignty as the right to command others absolutely, and for that reason, he argues, it cannot be shared. “A sovereign is hee which commaundeth all others, and can himselfe by none be commanded.” Shared sovereignty cannot be legally mandated but can be achieved only through the sovereign’s pleasure. “If then there be two princes equall in power, one of them hath not the power to commaund the other, neither can he suffer the commaund of the other his companion, if it stand not with his owne pleasure, otherwise they should not be equals.” Bodin expresses his skepticism over the possibility of this kind of friendship by citing Lucan: “No sincere love is to be found in partners of the soveraigne state, / And fellowship in power great, is alwaies mixt with mortall hate.”50 Fellowship, always a possibility, runs afoul according to Bodin when pleasures other than those associated with friendship start to dominate. In response, Ribadeneyra argues that “reason of state”—the phrase he uses to refer to the sovereign decision—is divided in itself and necessitates

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a choice that cannot be grounded in political thinking. While “all princes ought to hold it ever before their eyes, if they want to succeed in governing and conserving their states,” nevertheless “reason of state [razón de Estados] is not one alone, but two”: one, false and unreal, the other, sound and true; one, deceitful and diabolical, the other, certain and divine; one, that has Religion from the State, the other that has the State from Religion; the one, taught by the politicians and founded on vain prudence and on human and mean methods, the other taught by God, which is supported on God Himself and on the means that He with his paternal providence reveals to the princes, and He gives them powers to use them well, as the Lord of all the States.”51

In effect, Ribadeneyra turns Bodin’s understanding of sovereignty upside down. Instead of locating the indivisibility of sovereignty in the purity of the sovereign’s unbound will, Ribadeneyra subsumes the sovereign within an opposition between true and false paradigms of political decision making in which the decision to accept Bodin’s version of sovereign power and political thought is already a bad decision, a decision against religion as the justifiable limit on royal prerogative. For those who have religion from the state, like Machiavelli and Bodin, the difference between these two positions is a matter of rhetoric, since religion is always a form of political control, even when—or especially when—it does not announce itself as such. A prince who instrumentalizes religion may claim to accept limits on prerogative, but this claim is nothing more than empty rhetoric. This is not to suggest that Ribadeneyra discounts rhetorical uses of religion. The prince can dissimulate, Ribadeneyra writes, even though lying is against Christian ideals, so long as he is “careful not to allow himself to be carried away with the pestiferous doctrine of Machiavelli.”52 But for Ribadeneyra, even rhetorical claims to accept the legitimate capacity of religion to limit prerogative demonstrate the fundamental truth that sovereignty is always and already divided, nowhere more so than when it pretends not to be. The cunning of Ribadeneyra’s division is that it produces limited sovereignty as a necessary situation, the unavoidable if also unexpected outcome of absolutism regardless of which political theory the sovereign chooses. To choose what for Ribadeneyra is the right reason of state means accepting the role of the Church is placing limits on royal prerogative, while to choose unlimited prerogative means confronting the limits of one’s capacity to decide through enmity with other ruling monarchs who accept the legitimacy of the Church.

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While Marlowe only minimally represents Hero’s decision in the context of religious division, nevertheless the structure of her decision is informed by Catholic critiques of Elizabeth’s unlimited prerogative. At the end of the poem when Hero decides to have sex with Leander, Marlowe returns to the issue of prerogative that he raised at the poem’s beginning, but now he presents Hero’s decision as one that is driven by enmity and experienced as subjective division. In his concerns about the poem’s ending, Singer is most likely right that the couplet about the bird “which in our hand we wring” implies a conceit whose second half is missing. Whether this means that the lines are out of place or that the manuscript is incomplete, in either case the couplet recalls the turtledove that Hero was sacrificing when Leander fi rst saw her, indicating that the ending of the poem unfolds the implications of that initial religious act. That is, Hero’s decision to commit “treason” is an effect of the religious difference fi rst introduced by Leander when he calls Hero’s sacrifice a “sinne” and “sacrilege” (HL 306, 307). For Ribadeneyra, prerogative implies its own limitations and, therefore, necessitates shared sovereignty between church and state. Rather than fully exploring religious confl ict as he does in The Massacre at Paris, here Marlowe expresses the limitations of prerogative through a crisis between morality and imagination, between chastity as a moral norm and erotic imagination as a disruptive force that break with those norms. Following “unknowne joy” leads Hero in the direction of political making, at least metaphorically speaking, since her decision begets “another world” that remains imaginary because foreclosed by the norms of chastity that she has up to this moment embraced. At the same time, Hero is also subject to another, darker version of the future. Hero’s striving after “unknown joy” doubles and is doubled by an unknown but probable future that Marlowe portrays as an ominous, cruel and deadly judgment. “Love is not ful of pittie (as men say) / But deaffe and cruell, where he meanes to pray.” Wittingly or not, Hero’s decision commits her to a possible future that she imagines and a probable judgment that she cannot or will not see. Ending the poem where he does, without a satisfactory conclusion, Marlowe only heightens this division and asks us to consider the possibility of a synthesis between literary and political imagination that suspends the act of judgment.

THE MARLOVIAN SUBLIME Counter-Reformation political thought can deepen our sense of Hero’s dilemma by offering paradigms that help us to see why Marlowe would fo-

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cus on her capacity to decide, but it doesn’t fully explain Marlowe’s understanding of sovereignty. For that, we need to turn in a more focused way to aesthetics. From Plato to Spenser (and, indeed, beyond) writers have often associated beauty with the common good. When an end in itself, beauty is merely representation and is therefore fleeting and corrupting, so the argument goes, but when associated with virtue, beauty leads to moral goodness. Francis Bacon expresses this understanding quite well in his essay “Of Beauty.” “Beauty is as summer fruits,” he writes, “which are easy to corrupt, and cannot last; and for the most part it makes a dissolute youth.” But, he continues, if beauty “light well, it maketh virtues shine, and vices blush” (WFB 12:226–27). What distinguishes corrupting beauty from the beauty that makes virtue shine is beauty’s relation to holiness or divinity, “the soveraine light,” as Spenser puts it at the end of his Hymne of Heavenly Beautie, “From whose pure beams al perfect beauty springs.”53 Rather than reflecting sovereign power, for Marlowe beauty only offers an illusory retreat from it. Dr. Faustus turns to an imaginary Helen of Troy in order to defend against the conundrum of sovereign power in which he fi nds himself. Either he accepts God’s “tribunall seate,” in which case Mephostophilis will “arrest” his soul for disobeying his “soveraigne Lord,” or he accepts Mephostophilis’s injunction to “Revolt,” in which case he exiles himself from the kingdom of heaven (DF 1350, 1304–6). Helen’s beauty covers the scandal of Dr. Faustus’s position by allowing him momentarily to imagine himself entering another world. Marlowe suggests a similar dynamic when Tamburlaine reflects on beauty, much to his surprise, after commanding the murder of the Damascan virgins and displaying their corpses on the city walls. Like Dr. Faustus, Tamburlaine’s reflection on beauty offers him some distance from sovereign power, here his own efforts to ground his authority in massacre and slaughter. Instead of aligning sovereignty with beauty, Marlowe thinks sovereignty through self-ravishment, or what I would like to call the Marlovian sublime, the experience of self-desecration in which characters attempt to protect themselves against the effects of absolute power by imagining what Cynthia Marshall has called self shattering, a desire for the undoing or betrayal of the self.54 In Marlowe, suicide is an extreme and literalizing form of this phenomenon, when, for instance, Bajazeth, Zabina, and Agydas kill themselves to prevent further punishment by Tamburlaine, or when Olympia sets up her own death to prevent her forced marriage to Theridamas. But Marlowe is as interested in the role of imagination as he is in the body. “O it strikes, it strikes,” Dr. Faustus exclaims when the hour of judgment arrives, “now body, turne to ayre / Or Lucifer wil beare

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thee quicke to hel” (DF 1470–71). Dr. Faustus’s fantasy of corporeal disintegration oddly defends against imminent death and punishment by staging a more severe death and punishment in imagination. That is, Dr. Faustus claims punishment before judgment in order to preempt and therefore oddly prevent judgment and, perhaps more significant, the presence of the sovereign who judges. Fully aware that Lightborne has come to kill him, Edward responds by imagining his death as a form of religious ecstasy: I see my tragedie written in thy browes, Yet stay a while, forbeare thy bloodie hande, And let me see the stroke before it comes, That even then when I shall lose my life, My minde may be more stedfast on my God. (Ed2, 2522–26)

In this his fi nal speech, Edward moves from recognition of imminent catastrophe, “I see my tragedie,” to a fantasy doubling of that catastrophe that imitates the punishment he faces as a way to preempt it: “let me see the stroke before it comes.” In The Jew of Malta Barabas considers indulging in this kind of ravishment. “Thinke me so mad as I will hang my selfe,” he briefly soliloquizes, “That I may vanish ore the earth in ayre, / And leaue no memory that e’re I was” (JM 1.498–500). But he suspends this fantasy in pronouncing that he will “rouse” and “awake” himself in order to claim the very authority by which his wealth was taken away in the fi rst place (1.504). As the fi rst translator of book 1 of The Pharsalia into English, Marlowe may well have derived his interest in the sublime from Lucan’s poem, which, as David Norbrook describes it, “displays a manic delight in its own iconoclastic creativity” and which, Norbrook shows, was a touchstone in seventeenth-century republican political and literary culture.55 But this does not mean, as Patrick Cheney has recently argued, that Marlowe espoused republicanism either as a positive political program or even as a political ideal at all.56 When Marlowe focuses on the experience of the sublime, the complex relation between sovereignty and imagination that makes up this experience shows that it gives form to the central aporia between sovereignty and political making that defi nes early modern political theology. As political thinkers from Hannah Arendt to Antonio Negri have argued, if the central insight of early modern political thought is that “power becomes an immanent dimension of history,” to quote Negri, then the central problem is coming up with a model of sovereignty

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equal to that insight.57 For Arendt, the theory of the sacred monarch was a partial answer, one that acknowledged the state as a made apparatus while obscuring that very insight. If the monarch has the right—like God—to make and remake the state outside the bounds of law, then this is as much a denial of constituting power as it is an acknowledgment of it. “Theoretically speaking,” Arendt writes, “it is as though absolutism were attempting to solve this problem of authority without having recourse to the revolutionary means of a new foundation; it solved the problem, in other words, within the given frame of reference in which the legitimacy of rule in general, and the authority of secular law and power in particular, had always been justified by relating them to an absolute source which itself was not of this world.”58 The fact that the sovereign is authorized through a transcendental framework distresses that framework (in the sense of distressed furniture) and, in the process, looks forward to a new order in which the immanent force of political making can be actualized as such. Negri reframes the problem as a general principle. Once a political order is made, its constituting power is “conceptually reconstructed not as the system’s cause but as its result. The foundation is inverted, and sovereignty as [supreme power] is reconstructed as the foundation itself.”59 For Marlowe, the experience of the sublime acknowledges this aporia and struggles to express it by reclaiming the role of making as imagination. Instead of legitimating imagination on the grounds that it is analogous to sovereignty— as, for example, Sidney does in the Defence—in the preemptive, temporal dimension of self shattering Marlowe suggests an antagonist relation between the two. For Marlowe, ravishment becomes a compromise position in which imagination reclaims the force of making against sovereignty by staging the very effects of sovereign power in and as imagination. In aesthetic terms, the movement from the festival of Adonis at the beginning of Hero and Leander to the bedroom scene at the end of the poem is a movement from beauty to the sublime. In the scene at the festival of Adonis, imagination solidifies the bond between subject and sovereign as Hero’s lovers submit in anticipation of her judgment. Hero’s beauty implies but also displaces a more ominous picture of sovereignty, one in which Hero stands as conquering general to her lovers, who “Await the sentence of her scornefull eies.” At the end of the poem when Hero chooses ravishment, Marlowe opposes sovereignty and imagination while acknowledging that the two cannot be separated. Hero asserts her paradoxical status as sovereign subject by giving herself over to the “treason” in her “thought,” claiming prerogative through the internalization of enmity and by choos-

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ing an imaginary future. In the process, Marlowe tries to portray what it feels like to experience this opposition between sovereignty and imagination. This opposition culminates in Hero’s blush, when she stands naked and ashamed, between her decision to follow “unknowne joy” and the social judgment which that decision risks. Thus neere the bed she blushing stood upright, And from her countenance behold ye might, A kind of twilight breake, which through the heare, As from an orient cloud, glympse here and there. And round about the chamber this false morne, Brought foorth the day before the day was borne. (HL 801–6)

In part, Hero’s blush looks forward to the kind of moral judgment that awaits her. At the same time, as a “false morne” her blush paradoxically suspends that moment, bringing the day “before the day was borne” as a way of holding onto another world of imagination. Like Bajazeth or Zabina at the end of Tamburlaine, Hero’s blush shows her to be abandoned to her fate while imaginatively suspending that fate, paradoxically “preserving life,” as Bajazeth puts it, “by hasting cruell death” (T1 4.4.1735). Bajazeth is describing a phenomenon whereby, in order to survive, his empty stomach draws humors from the rest of his body, which enfeebles his body and draws death nearer. The relation between life and death that concerns Marlowe at the end of Hero and Leander is more aestheticized and artificial. The life being preserved is the life of imagination, which metaphorically feeds on Hero’s doom. At least, this is one way to explain why Marlowe ends Hero and Leander with such a highly artificial gesture. Confusing Hero’s “false morne” with the real morning, Apollo sounds his harps, which causes Night to pass away: Which watchfull Hesperus no sooner heard, But he the day bright-bearing Car prepar’d. And ran before, as Harbenger of light, And with his flaring beames mockt oughly night, Till she o’recome with anguish, shame, and rage, Dang’d downe to hell her loathsome carriage. (HL 813–18)

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The point is not just that Hero cannot control time. More precisely, Hero’s investment in imagination jump starts and brings about the moment that her shame attempts to suspend. It is as if through the resources of imagination and artifice Marlowe tries to break the sovereign’s hold on time in order to imagine the possibility of a more open, if also undecided and rather anxious image of the future. What might this future look like? Can the acceleration of the sovereign bond release us from its hold? Does willful self shattering, consenting to betrayal and self-betrayal, form a new vision of community? These are the questions that Marlowe leaves us with. Desunt nonnulla.

ENMITY We have become accustomed to thinking of the monarch’s body as the central figure of political theology, largely due to the influence of Kantorowicz’s groundbreaking study The King’s Two Bodies.60 As the historical process by which the “prince stepped into the shoes of Pope and Bishop,” political theology involves the mystification and sanctification of the king’s body.61 Moreover, if we follow Schmitt, then the other significant figure that emerges is the enemy. Schmitt recognized the significance of the enemy in a fairly limited way, from the perspective of the sovereign. In Political Theology, he defi nes the sovereign as “he who decides on the exception”—decides that there is an exception to the rule of law and also decides how to resolve the exception outside of the rule of law.62 Schmitt’s comments on the enemy suggest that among the most important decisions that the sovereign makes is the decision between friend and foe. For Schmitt, the state and the state alone decides who is the enemy with reference neither to “a previously determined general norm nor [to] the judgment of a disinterested and therefore neutral third party” but to the political interests of the state.63 While Schmitt considers the enemy solely from the perspective of the sovereign, Marlowe reverses that relation in order to explore the constituting force of enmity. In the preceding pages, I have argued that for Marlowe it is enmity, and not loyalty, that binds sovereign to political subject, and it is also enmity that defi nes collective life rendered visible by unbound sovereignty whose political acts are at one and the same time destructive and creative, collective life caught between the disfiguration and reconfiguration of communal bonds. In The Jew of Malta, Marlowe inverts a vision of political theology centered on the monarch’s body and produces instead a political theology of the multitude based on heterology and dissensus. Marlowe complements this inversion in Hero

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and Leander by focusing on bad decision making that desecrates sovereignty as it opens onto unknown worlds of imaginary possibilities. Marlowe offers a powerful answer to Kantorowicz and Schmitt because he engaged with political theology not out of a commitment to religion or to the public good but to explore the constituting force of imagination and enmity through the affective body. This is perhaps most evident in Hero and Leander. Hero’s decision to follow her fantasy places a troubling aesthetic pleasure in confl ict and treason at the core of political sovereignty. One consequence is that fantasy, desire, and imagination take precedence over virtue and moral goodness. It is difficult not to read The Rape of Lucrece as a corrective to Hero and Leander. Shakespeare follows a long tradition of humanist and classical political thought when he locates the origin of republican Rome in Lucrece’s decision to commit suicide rather than endure the stain of an impropriety which she did not choose. Lucrece’s decision initiates a republican order of self-regulation that Hero fi nds herself unable to follow. It would be a mistake, however, to infer from Shakespeare’s response that Marlowe was somehow in favor of absolutism. Instead of suggesting the boundlessness of the absolute authority of the state, Marlowe repeatedly stages the sense of enmity that underwrites and delimits these claims, opening the possibility for rethinking political sovereignty through a version of the sublime at the aesthetic underside of the state, grounded in the boundlessness of imagination and what Machiavelli calls the capacity to be “al tutto cattivi,” altogether bad (D 1.27.94).

chapter five

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he constitutional implications of Mosaic discourse made James I anxious, so he turned his attention to David. As we saw in the previous chapter, English Jesuits made use of Deuteronomy 17—the passage in which Moses predicts the monarchy and then subordinates future kings of Israel to the law—to argue that monarchy is legitimated by a combination of priestly sanctification and popular election. One could make a similar argument about David, whose election plausibly reinforces the king’s subordination to the law. David becomes king neither through inheritance nor conquest but as a popular replacement for Saul, who broke with divine command. Anticipating this interpretation in The Trew Law of Free Monarchies (1598), James argues that David in no way establishes a precedent for popular election. Once God gave the Israelites a monarch, the people were bound to that form of government even if Saul was a tyrannical and oppressive king. For James, David is an exception, God’s gift to the people, and not an example that future ages can point to in order to argue for popular sovereignty. James takes up Samuel’s warning to the people that once they have committed themselves from monarchy, they cannot change their minds without offending God. Since the people never could have obtained a monarchy “without the permission and ordinance of God, so may yee no more, fro hee be once set over you, shake him off without the same warrant.” The lesson that he draws: “In time arme your selves with patience and humilitie, since he that hath the only power to make him, hath the onely power to unmake him.”1 James’s favorite writers seemed to understand his anxieties and tacitly navigated them. John Donne reinforces James’s interpretation of kingship in his sermon given on the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot, November 5, 1622, drawing on Deuteronomy 17 to argue that God always intended 138

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a king for Israel and as a precedent for all subsequent states, monarchy being “a more masculin Organe, and Instrument of this Soul of Soveraigntie, then the other forms are.”2 If the people were precipitous in asking for a human king, nevertheless they anticipated God’s intentions. In no way does Hebrew scripture legitimate the overthrow of monarchy, Donne argues, and especially not by “a forein Prelate” (i.e., the pope) who would “annihilate the Supremacy” and “ruine the very forme of a kingdome.”3 As Francis Bacon understood quite well, James preferred Solomon as a model for juridical kingship. In both The Advancement of Learning and the preface to the New Organon Bacon compares James to the wise king who legitimately inherited the throne. When James turns to Moses, as he reluctantly does in the opening paragraphs of his 1616 speech to the Star Chamber, he emphasizes Moses’s judicial authority over that of his judges. On the advice of Jethro, Moses created judges to judge in his stead once the burden of issuing judicial decisions became too cumbersome. But, James goes on to say, “Judges were deputed for easier questions, and the greater and more profound were left to Moses.” Afterwards, he argues “all Kings . . . , especially Christian Kings” have governed by this precedent.4 It comes as something of a surprise, then, that Drayton would have written his long narrative poem Moses in a Map of his Miracles as part of his early campaign to attract James’s favor and become England’s new poet laureate. Published in 1604, the poem responds to the initial promise that Drayton saw in James’s reign for judicial and governmental reform. He relates the story of Moses from birth to death as a model for James’s rule. At best, the choice of Moses was a miscalculation. At worst, the poem is a failure on at least two counts. Drayton failed to achieve professional success at James’s court (obviously, not entirely due to his Moses poem) and spent the years between 1606 and 1625 as an outsider criticizing the court for its foreign policies and corrupt politics.5 Moreover, the poem has failed to fi nd any readership whatsoever. Drayton’s Moses has been relegated to the dustbin of literary history. So far as I know, it has received no critical attention at all. As a piece of political poetry, however, Drayton’s Moses is far from uninteresting. Drayton has little to say about topics such as the arcana imperii or monarchical authority and is instead attracted to questions concerning the ability of government to shape and regulate the passions. In both Basilicon Doron (1599) and The Trew Law, James argues for the monarch’s supreme juridical authority. In Moses, Drayton modifies James’s arguments to account more fully for the biopolitical dimensions of government, the various ways in which government establishes its authority by

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encouraging the physical, moral, and political health of its people. Richard Helgerson and Claire McEachern have shown that Drayton’s major work Poly-Olbion is politically more sophisticated than its long, drawn-out descriptions of landscape might at fi rst suggest. Helgerson argues that chorography substitutes for celebrations of monarchy, as Drayton expresses “more openly” than his contemporaries “new social and political values that were the unintended product of chorographic description.”6 McEachern specifies these values. In her account, Poly-Olbion is less an attack on the monarchy than it is an attempt to reconcile the Stuart monarchy with English common law in a new vision of the nation.7 Moses shares the political sophistication of his later poetry, but in this early work Drayton is less concerned with the land than he is with the capacity of both government and poetry to shape, manage, and regulate the collective life of the people. How, Drayton asks, can government establish its rule by cultivating the life of its people? And how can crisis be managed through the promotion and advancement of collective life? Mosaic narrative is especially well suited to explore the politics of governing a population. Like Marlowe, Drayton understood quite well that one of the distinguishing features of the Mosaic constitution is its foregrounding of the life of a people as the primary object of governmental control. Exodus begins with Pharaoh addressing the problem of an expanding population of alien residents through slavery and then genocide, the murder of the male children of Israel, and continues by emphasizing the ongoing antagonism between Moses as divine lawgiver and the Israelites as a murmuring and resistant population. Drayton’s Moses develops the relations between authority and collective life found in Exodus in its representations of government. Mosaic narrative allows Drayton to imagine a version of government based on a ruler’s coercive care for the people. But his primary interest lies in the state of emergency, the moment of collective crisis that presents the possibility for new and creative solutions, including, in extreme situations, the reformation of government itself. Drayton explores the constitutive aspects of the state of emergency in his extended account of the ten plagues, which takes up an entire book of his three-book poem. As part of the biblical narrative of Israel’s passage from slavery to freedom, the ten plagues exemplify the difficult fusion of creation and destruction that for Drayton makes up and defi nes the state of emergency. Writing in the more immediate setting of plague-infested London, Drayton understands what early moderns call plague time to be a very real state of emergency, one that challenges political, theological, and scientific understandings of the ordered world. In Moses, Drayton takes

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advantage of this state of emergency to argue for the reform of government and to explore the role of poetry in helping to bring about that reform. As we shall see, Drayton was not unique in understanding the plague as a state of emergency that afforded the opportunity of reimagining government. A number of his contemporaries also viewed the plague as a crisis that precipitated and demanded the refashioning of political community. “In the early modern formation of English national consciousness,” Ernest Gilman argues in his study of English Renaissance plague writing, “the vulnerability of the kingdom as a single victim . . . serves as a means of conceiving the state as such, and of symbolizing the forces that threaten it.”8 This was especially the case in 1603, when an outbreak of the plague coincided with the arrival of James, the new monarch, into London. As Jonathan Gil Harris describes it, the 1603 plague had an enormous “impact . . . on the metaphorical as well as the literal language of London.”9 Drayton was sensitive to this impact. More than conceiving the state and symbolizing the forces that threatened it, in his response to the 1603 plague Drayton also reflected on the processes and implications of symbolization itself. How, the poet asks, does divine poetry participate in theologico-political violence? And how does it serve as a poetic strategy for managing that violence? For Drayton, plague legislation serves as the implicit model for governmental administration, while the plague itself manifests a theologico-political crisis best handled by poetry. As I shall argue, Drayton fi rst suggests this argument in Moses in a Map of his Miracles, and he returns to it in order to expand it when he republishes Moses, virtually unchanged though retitled Moses his Birth and Miracles, in a 1630 folio that includes The Muses Elizium and two other divine poems, Noahs Floud and David and Goliath. At the beginning of James’s reign, Drayton could be fairly optimistic about the promise of government. Five years into the reign of Charles I, at the beginning of the Personal Rule, he had become increasingly concerned about the crises of government and the capacity of poetry to represent them.

POLITICAL THEOLOGY AND THE PLAGUE Early in 1579, Elizabeth issued plague Orders, thought meet by her Majestie, and her priuie Councell, to be executed throughout the counties of this realme, which included emergency provisions mandating policies by which justices of the peace were to respond to an epidemic. The most controversial of these enjoined local officials to seal infected households for six weeks with all household members inside, both the sick and the

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healthy. The Orders gained statutory support in 1604 and were reissued by royal proclamation under James and Charles I and by the Long Parliament with little to no change until 1666, when the Orders were substantially altered.10 Household quarantine was reinforced by the Plague Act of 1604, which gave watchmen legal authority to use violence to keep household members shut up, to hang anyone with plague sores who was found outside communing with others, and to whip anyone else who escaped household quarantine.11 Magistrates took responsibility for ensuring the life of the commonwealth by regulating civic space and by separating the healthy from both the sick and the possibly sick. This legislation had an enormous impact on the English cultural and political imaginary. In giving the state the authority to manage disease through a policy of containment and isolation, English quarantine law unintentionally initiated a debate that far exceeded the question of how to manage a communicable disease and shaped seventeenth-century English understandings of sovereignty, national community, and the role of violence in enacting communal reform. Supporters of household quarantine tended to argue that the policy was in the best interest of the broader community. Severe as the plague Orders were, and they were much more severe than continental legislation, supporters represented these harsh measure as acts of charity. The Plague Act of 1604 justifies punishment by arguing that it will achieve “the charitable relief and ordering of persons infected with the Plague.”12 But it is also clear from the act’s wording that charity takes on a new meaning. Although the parallel phrases “charitable relief” and “ordering of persons” suggests that ordering is a kind of charity, one effect of the act is that ordering takes precedence over charitable relief so that charity no longer simply indicates care for the sick. It also indicates protection against the sick. Nicholas Bownd gets at the shift in concepts of care and community in one of his plague sermons, published in 1604. “At this time,” he urges, “the Magistrates in the places infected, should take good order that the sicke be well looked unto, and provided for, and that there bee care taken that they not come abroad, and that the whole may be kept from the sicke.”13 Bownd’s sentence begins by highlighting the responsibility that government officials have toward the sick: “the sicke [should] be well looked unto, and provided for.” But it ends by offering a vision of community defi ned against the sick: “that there bee care taken that they not come abroad, and that the whole might be kept from the sicke.” Charitable action here means more than taking care of the sick; it also means protecting the community against an infected and implicitly rejected part.

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For plague protesters, however, quarantine law perpetrated a policy of unneighborly behavior that ultimately led to questions concerning the state’s theological legitimacy. Plague discourse became a way of thinking about political making, as household quarantine prompted some early modern English writers to reimagine the plague in a way that qualified and displaced sovereign authority in the name of political and moral reform. Instead of positing the preservation of community through the segregation and rejection of one of its parts, writers like Thomas Dekker, Henoch Clapham, and George Wither began to imagine the possibility of a charitable community understood through that rejected part. In The Wonderfull Yeare (1603), Dekker details the “unmatchable torment” it is “for a man to be board up every night in a vast silent Charnell-house.”14 Dekker aims to provoke sympathetic identification with the rejected part in order to reproduce community through the obligation of charitable action. If some poore man, suddeinly starting out of a sweet and golden slumber, should behold his hous flaming about his eares, all his family destroied in their sleepes by the mercilesse fi re; himselfe in the verie midst of it, wofully and like a madde man calling for helpe: would not the misery of such a distressed soule, appeare the greater, if the rich Usurer dwelling next doore to him, should not stirre, (though he felt part of the danger) but suffer him to perish, when the thrusting out of an arme might have saved him! O how many thousandes of wretched people have acted in this poore mans part? how often hath the amazed husband waking, found the comfort of his bedde lying breathlesse by his side! his children at the same instant gasping for life! and his servants mortally wounded at the hart by sickenes! the distracted creature, beats at deaths doores, exclaimes at windows, his cries are sharp inough to pierce heaven, but no earth is opened to receive them.15

In this passage, Dekker poses a fundamental question: which is worse, the danger of infection or the social isolation and lack of neighborly care produced by household quarantine? He uses sympathetic identification to provide an answer. Dekker conjures a readerly community feeling sympathy with the quarantined plague victim, and in so doing, he also suggests that sympathy can counteract the “felt . . . danger” of infection and justify breaking plague Orders, insofar as the very act of identifying with plague victims encourages an imaginative transgression of quarantine law.16 The Protestant minister and ex-Brownist Henoch Clapham radicalizes Dekker’s position, arguing in 1603 and 1604 that the plague is a judg-

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ment against humanity issued by the Angel of Death as a blow or strike. Clapham defi nes the plague through its Classical and Hebrew roots. The word derives from the Greek plege and Latin plaga, Clapham writes, meaning “a blow or stripe infl icted on mankind,” and it also derives from the Hebrew devar, meaning “to speake, whether it be a speech of life or death.”17 The plague is a blow or strike through which God speaks, an act of violence that is also a moment of revelation. To think that the plague is infectious, based on “aeryiall corruption,” is tantamount to rejecting that judgment.18 For Clapham, the plague is a divine judgment that tests the political order. It is only “Atheists, mere Naturians, and other ignorant persons,” he argues, who “hold [the plague] to be a natural disease, proceeding from natural causes only.”19 The atheist’s response to the plague is quarantine, which only divides the community and justifies God’s judgment against it, whereas for Clapham the more properly Christian response is neighborliness, which binds the community together, softens the Angel of Death’s stroke, and abates God’s judgment. “We have sinned together, and the hand of God hath come upon us togither; let us therefore humble our selves togither before the Lord in fasting and prayer.”20 Clapham initially developed an argument for the necessity of accepting discord within a Christian community in his 1600 treatise Antidon: or a Sovereign Remedie Against Schisme and Heresie. A summary of nine sermons delivered at Southwark, Antidon argues that only a heretic would imagine a community so pure as to reject anyone tainted with impurity. The problem with such a position, he argues, is that because no one can ever meet the standards of purity, upholding it results in schism and religious division: “because all are not of one mind, therefore every one begins a Church (spicke and span new) of a sundry fashion.”21 The antidon or antidote to this kind of Puritanism is a model of community based on toleration that accepts a certain amount of doctrinal difference “for love of Church and Common-wealthes peace.”22 As Clapham explains it, “Such varietie of maladies sometimes fall mans bodie, whereof some may be purged and some limmes cut off without the lives destruction; but some of such nature and in such parts, as they cannot be removed, but with deprivation of life. And for this cause (namely preservation of life, and avoiding some great evil ensuing) we often-times permit that we like not.”23 Clapham uses medicine metaphorically, but the metaphor suggests an acceptance of disease for the greater good of the community that becomes the basis for his later challenge to household quarantine. Clapham was arrested by Richard Bancroft in November 1603 for breaking plague Orders. When questioned by Lancelot Andrews, he modi-

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fied his initial position against a natural understanding of the plague, distinguishing between a natural and a supernatural plague. For a natural plague, “naturall political orders are urged,” while for a supernatural plague, Clapham recommends “Fasting and Prayer.”24 But when pressed on the policy of separating the healthy from the sick, Clapham refuses to equivocate. It is “a piety, a worke of faith, charitie, glorious as Martyrdome, to stand by it, doing service one to another, even to the death and buriall.”25 When legal and ecclesiastical authorities exempt themselves from infection, Clapham is both compelled and authorized to break the law. As Clapham explains in his Doctor Andros His Prosopopeia Answered (1605), “I have bene demaunded, what authoritee I had to visit any out of my particular charge. I answer, as good as a warrant, as he that helpeth his neighbors ox or sheepe out of the ditche upon the Sabbath day; specially, when the owne shepheard is lacking, and either will not, or dare not.”26 Like Dekker, Clapham indicts the social isolation produced by quarantine law as antithetical to the ideals of charitable community. More than that, he also argues that the violence of God’s judgment during plague time tests the soul of the Christian community, demanding a charitable response that the Orders actively prevent. Prompted by his experiences in the plague of 1625, in Britain’s Remembrancer (1628) George Wither translates Clapham’s call for charity into an argument for democracy. Like Clapham, Wither portrays the plague as an act of divine judgment, writing that “those dull Naturalists, who think this Foe, / Doth by meere nat’rall causes, come or goe, / Are much deceav’d,” and then like Clapham, Wither charges these naturalists with atheism.27 Although Wither defends himself against what he calls “Claphamnisme,” he goes on to justify breaking plague Orders in terms that elevate Clapham’s stance to the level of democratic decision making. And, whereas we our Orders did transgresse, It was necessitie, not wilfulnesse, That urged it; because our common woe, Did farre beyond the powre of Order goe. . . . Yea, our fi rst Orders had we still observ’d, The healthie Housholds would not halfe have serv’d To keepe the Sicke. And who should then have heeded Our private cares? Or got us what we needed? As long as from each other we refrain’d We greater sorrowes ev’ry day sustain’d: Yea, whilst for none, but for our selves we car’d,

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Our brethren perisht, and the worse we far’d. This made us from our Policies appeale, And meete in Love, each others wounds to heale. This, made us from our civill Orders fl ie, To make more practice of our Charitie. And hereunto, perhaps, compell’d were we, By meere necessitie, to let us see Experiments, of that unmatched good, Which floweth from a Christian Neighbourhod.28

Wither’s specific point is to justify breaking the laws of the commonwealth out of sympathy for the sick. The “common woe” trumps the laws of the commonwealth by providing a reference point by which to justify breaking or suspending that law. His broader point is to use this action to derive an ideal model of community. Once concern for the community reduces self-interest, he implies, a new form of community begins to emerge. Reversing an absolutist model so that prerogative is located in the people and not necessarily the monarch, Wither then refers extralegal decision making to a vision of community based on experiments of charity. Rather than learning the lesson of charity that the plague should be teaching, Wither goes on to argue, the English nation itself has become like Pharaoh, growing bolder as the plagues grow worse: “When he most plagued us, we most presumed; / And sinned most, when we were most consumed.”29 Wither’s purpose is to break this presumption by presenting Britain at a crossroad. Charging the members of the 1625 Parliament with vanity and selfinterest for refusing to provide Charles I with funds for the war against Spain, Wither predicts that general disease in the body politic will only lead to a deeper schism between Charles and the Parliament, and between and among the clergy, so that some flatterer, “under colour of fierce devotion,” will “for preferment strive, / By lifting up the King’s prerogative / Above it selfe.”30 The reason Wither expounds the horrors of the plague is to prevent this possible future, hoping like Clapham to jolt his readers out of their complacency, “to stirre up their affections, and beat into their understandings, the knowledge and feeling of those things which I deliver.”31 For Clapham and Wither, the plague is the theologico-political equivalent of the miracle, a wonder or marvel that either shows or portends the juridical authority that God has over the created world. As scholars from Carl Schmitt to Francis Oakley have argued, the miracle was an important figure in early modern jurisprudence. Miracles underscore God’s absolute will even within a natural order and, by analogy, legitimate a juris-

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tic theory of absolutist sovereignty. 32 Debates about miracles were very often debates about institutional legitimacy and interpretive authority, as Alexandra Walsham and Loraine Daston have argued in the contexts of religious history and the history of science respectively. 33 Interpreting an event as miraculous reinforced the authority of the institution doing the interpreting. This was evident when Catholic and Protestant churches offered competing narratives of miraculous events. But it was also an insight shared by political philosophers who recognized the rhetorical and institutional force of miracles even as they questioned the evidence of the miraculous itself. For Hobbes, the reinforcement of juridical authority is precisely what the miraculous is supposed to do. Given that people are often mistaken in proclaiming an event a miracle, for Hobbes the central issue concerning miracles is evidentiary. “The question is no more, whether what we see done, be a miracle,” he writes. Rather, the question is, who decides and upon what grounds. And for Hobbes, the answer is the monarch or sovereign. “In [this] question,” he explains, “we are not every one, to make our own private reason, or conscience, but the public reason, that is, the reason of God’s supreme lieutenant, judge; and indeed we have made him judge already, if we have given him a sovereign power, to do all that is necessary for our peace and defence” (L 37.13.296). The authenticity of miracles has less to do with their immediate credibility than with sovereign authority, inasmuch as the decision on what counts as a miracle gives broader evidence of the sovereign’s authority to embody and regulate public reason. For Clapham and Wither, the plague splits this authority into two. In plague rhetoric, the monarch is no longer a proxy for divine authority. Rather, divine authority potentially turns against the monarch and his or her ordering of the state. Dekker, Clapham, and Wither’s calls for charity and neighborliness might better be understood as what Kenneth Reinhard calls a political theology of the neighbor. 34 Household quarantine isolates certain sick neighbors and preserves the community through their containment and exclusion. In response, Dekker, Clapham, and Wither emphasize a responsibility toward the neighbor that goes far beyond care for the sick. It implies the decoupling of political and theological authority without divorcing the two entirely. The miracle of the plague is that it leads to new visions of community.

1604: GOVERNING LIFE Drayton is less interested in neighborliness than he is in the broader strategies of governmental management that plague legislation implies. How,

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he asks, does the government’s response to the plague broach larger issues concerning the government of a population? And what is the role of poetry in the representation and regulation of public space? Drayton considers the implications of plague legislation in his long poem Moses in a Map of his Miracles. He is careful to link his poem to a contemporary epidemic. In the poem’s second book, which he announces as his most inspired, Drayton details the plagues that God visited upon the Egyptians, explaining that he used the plague that afflicted London in 1603 as the model for his extended description of the ten plagues that afflicted the Egyptians in Exodus, “the unpeopling” of London serving as “a booke / Whereby to modell Egypts miseries.”35 But his response to the plague is broader and more encompassing. Rather than protesting plague legislation, Drayton recommends Mosaic government as a form of rule based on a collective sense of well-being achieved through political manipulation and moral coercion. Most explicitly, Drayton uses Mosaic narrative to argue for the expansion of governmental administration. But he also explores the plague as an instance of divine violence. Whereas Clapham and Wither turn the theologico-political violence of the plague against the state, Drayton exploits divine poetry as a strategy of representation through which divine violence can be acknowledged, managed, and potentially controlled. The opening narrative of book 1 dramatizes the subjective dilemma that results from a schism between civil and natural law. Following the fi rst chapter of Exodus, Drayton underscores this schism as an opposition between what he calls “the lawes of cruelty” and the laws of “kinde” (Moses 1.156). Enjoined to increase and multiply, Israel is a population whose unstoppable growth—“Like Frim to seed they fructifie the more” (1.62)—Pharaoh tries and fails to limit, fi rst through slavery and then by calling for the execution of all of Israel’s fi rstborn males. Drayton details the implementation of these commands, for instance describing the three months of “scrutinie” in which “searchers” examine private households looking for hidden children (1.121, 122). But his primary focus is on the crisis in obligation that the schism produces. Even if the Israelites wanted to be obedient subjects, in contravening natural law—the injunction to increase and multiply—Pharaoh made obedience impossible. At fi rst, Moses’s parents obey the civil law by disobeying the law of nature. The two agree to a chaste marriage, “when fruition [among the Israelites] plentifulli’st gain’d” (1.55), in order to avoid facing pregnancy and the execution of a possible son. Soon thereafter, however, Moses’s father has a vision that demands procreation, and following the laws of kind, the two indeed become “glad-sad parents” (1.107) forced to endure the tyrannical cruelty of

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Pharaoh’s command. After Moses’s birth, his mother trusts that the law of kind will “reprove / The fraile Edicts that mortall Princes make” (1.147– 48). But eventually she decides to obey Pharaoh’s law and “consent unto so deere a murder” by killing the baby Moses by exposure (1.200). She follows the law of cruelty based on her husband’s advice that “[i]t is not fit Mortality should know / What [God’s] eternall providence decreed,” trusting but not knowing how the law of kind will win out against the law of cruelty (1.185–86). Drayton corrects this schism in the poem’s third and fi nal book when he emphasizes Moses’s care for the Israelites’ physical and moral needs. As opposed to Pharaoh, Moses stands as the good sovereign who is able to induce obedience, quell rebellion, and teach virtue by satisfying biological needs such as hunger and thirst. Following Exodus 15:23–26, Drayton describes the bitter waters at Marah as an object lesson in nurture and obedience. In order to assuage the people’s thirst, God instructs Moses to cast “medc’nall branches” into the waters, making them potable (3.82). Not only does this action “shew his power in every little thing,” but also it teaches a sovereign how to produce an obedient population: Which might have learn’d them in this helplesse case, With tribulations willingly to meete, When men with patience troubles doe embrace, How oftentimes it makes affliction sweete. (3.93–96)

Drayton teaches the same lesson a few pages later when he describes Moses striking the rock in Horeb to produce water for the murmuring Israelites. In Exodus, Moses names the place Massah and Meribah to signify the Israelites’ faithlessness, “because of the contention of the children of Israel, and because they had tempted the Lord, saying, Is the Lord among us or no?” (G Exod. 17:7). By contrast, Drayton concludes the scene by emphasizing obedience and the inculcation of moral virtue. When he strikes the rock, Moses uses the same staff that he previously used to conjure the plagues, showing how an “instrument / Of justice” can also be an instrument of “clemencie” (Moses 3.155–56). This action infuses the act of caring for the people with a moral lesson that reinforces governmental authority. “Untill this very howre,” Drayton writes, “their thirstie soules / Never touch’d water of so sweet a taste” (3.167–68). In mending the schism between the laws of cruelty and kind, Drayton’s Moses exemplifies an art of government that takes as its primary task

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the management of populations. In chapter 2, I argued that Machiavelli turned to Moses in The Prince to explore cruelty as a theologico-political problem that attends the formation of the early modern state. Machiavelli uses Moses to legitimate the prince’s exercise of cruelty to further his own ends and to show how, as a legitimating fiction, scripture overdetermines the prince’s actions. For Machiavelli, the prince’s cruelty is exemplified in the figure of the armed prophet who can use violence against his enemies and legitimate that use of violence through the instrumentalization of religion. Less interested than Machiavelli in cruelty as a means to reinforce the prince’s authority, Drayton sees cruelty as a means by which to advance the life of the people, not by promoting individuals’ lives but by promoting the law of kind. Like Machiavelli, Drayton considers Moses’s massacre of the Israelites after they worship the golden calf. However, unlike Machiavelli, Drayton emphasizes this scene as one motivated by an overall sense of care for the general population. When Drayton describes the Levites’ massacre of the Israelites that Moses commands, he expands a short verse from Exodus in which Moses “toke the calf, which they had made, & burnt it in the fi re, and ground it unto powder, and strowed it upon the water, & made the children of Israel drinke of it” (G Exod. 32:20). Drayton develops this passage by drawing out the moral purpose behind the forced consumption of the golden calf: Downe this proud lump ambitiously he flung Into base dust dissolving it with fi re, That since they for variety did long, They should thereby even surfet their desire. And sent the minerall through their hatefull throats, Whence late those horrid blasphemies did fl ie On bestiall figures when they fell to doate In prostitution to idolatrie. Now when this potion that they lately tooke, This Chymick medicine (their deserved fare) Upon their beards, and on their bosome strooke, He doth their slaughter prepare. (Moses 3.317–28)

In Machiavelli’s account, the massacre of the Israelites reinforces Moses’s authority as a new prince and becomes the counterpart to Moses’s reliance on revelation. Drayton leans on the verse from Exodus to make the point that even the cruelest punishment imaginable should include a

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moral lesson that furthers the life of the people in a general sense, even as it involves the death of a large number of individuals who make up that people. By casting this punishment as “Chymick medicine,” Drayton suggests that Moses’s massacre is unexpectedly a cure. Drayton dramatizes this lesson for James, who he hoped would inaugurate a sense of moral governance that he found to be lacking in Elizabeth’s reign. Drayton explicitly models Moses on Guillaume de Sallust du Bartas’s Divine Weeks, in the poem’s invocation calling on the “faithfull Muse” (1.29) who inspired both Du Bartas and Joshua Sylvester, Du Bartas’s English translator, to inspire his own divine poem. James’s admiration for Du Bartas was quite well known. In Basilicon Doron James recommends the poet “to bee read by any Prince, or other good Christian,” and in The Trew Law of Free Monarchies he uses Du Bartas to deny the people’s right to rebel even against a tyrant. 36 James published his own translations of selections of Du Bartas’s poetry in his Essayes of a Prentise as well as in His Majesties Poetical Exercises. And when Du Bartas was at James’s court on a diplomatic mission for Henry of Navarre, James tried to persuade him to remain in Scotland. 37 To be sure, Drayton follows Du Bartas in hopes (which were foiled) of gaining preferment at court. But his purpose runs deeper. Using the figure of Moses, Drayton refi nes James’s absolutist claims for the divine rights of kings. Following Bodin, in The Trew Law James claims that the king is “above the Law” and has the “power over the life and death” of each of his subjects. While a king should only execute a subject with reference to “the health of the common-wealth,” nevertheless the power to do so “flowes alwaies from him selfe” and not from the law. 38 Although at fi rst James give a fairly weak qualification of the most extreme version of sovereign prerogative, a few pages later James justifies it by exploiting the metaphor of health: “As the judgement comming from the head may not onely imploy the members, every one in their owne office as long as they are able for it; but likewise in case any of them be affected with any infi rmitie must care and provide for their remedy, in-case it be curable, and if otherwise, gar cut them off for feare of infecting of the rest: even so is it betwixt the Prince, and his people.”39 Following James, in Moses Drayton repeatedly shows how the health of a commonwealth is neither a qualification of prerogative nor a metaphorical justification but is instead one of the most efficient arenas in which prerogative might be executed. Throughout the poem, Drayton explicitly uses Moses to urge local political reform. In book 3, for instance, he shows Moses creating a “perfect Common-weale” (Moses 3.244) by instituting judicial reforms suggested by Jethro that answer the corruption of England’s judicial sys-

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tem under Elizabeth as Drayton describes it in The Owle (1604). More pointedly, however, Drayton recommends securing the moral and physical well-being of the people as the most appropriate means by which James would be able to establish his rule. Drayton begins Moses with an invocation that opposes divine poetry and Machiavellian cynicism, the “vile Atheists vituperious sting” (1.12). While Machiavelli posits Moses as a founder of state who instrumentalizes religion in the interest of establishing his own political authority, divine poetry celebrates both scripture (“that sacred and canonicke writ” [1.22]) and nature (“the worlds great Register” [1.25]) as the foundational sources of divine revelation and poetic inspiration. However, this opposition quickly dissolves as Drayton unfolds divine poetry’s political aims. If the problem with Machiavellian cynicism is that it instrumentalizes revelation in order to secure obedience, divine poetry offers a solution that accomplishes the same end through an ostensibly more authentic relation with the created order. But what exactly is this authentic relation? Drayton doesn’t deny the use of force to produce and ensure political obedience. But he does develop a complex assessment of the representation of that force and its management through poetic description. Authenticity here relies on a calculated use of poetic representation. Before describing the ten plagues, Drayton pauses to reflect on his role as divine poet: What heavenly rapture doth enrich my braine, And through my blood extravagently flowes, That doth transport me to that endlesse maine, Whereas th’Almighty his high glories showes? That holy heat into my Spirit infuse, Wherewith thou wont’st thy Prophet to inspire, And lend that power to our delightfull Muse, As dwelt in sounds of that sweet Hebruak Lyre, A taske unusuall I must now assay, Striving through perill to support this masse, No former foot did ever tract a way, Where I propose unto my selfe to passe. (2.53–64, italics in original)

In this passage, Drayton claims the Machiavellian necessity of coercive authority in his role as divinely inspired author. In writing about the plagues in particular—an unusual and perilous task that, Drayton is keen to point out, no poet has taken up before him—he is infused with

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the “endlesse maine” or source of might through which God expresses his unique almighty nature. Drayton emphasizes the phenomenological experience of inspiration, but the broader point remains. His poetic authority depends on his becoming an instrument of divine violence. This is a role that Drayton accepts, but he follows up with a cautionary note. After his description of the second plague, Drayton again reflects on his role as divine poet, acknowledging that this role requires a certain degree of regulation and self-control. Stepping back “to quench this sacred heat” (2.158), Drayton considers the perils of describing the plagues. Without describing the violence of the plague in sufficient detail, he will be unable to produce the awe and obedience that he aims to achieve. “Too concise injuriously we wrong / Things that such state and fearfulnesse impart” (2.161–62). But if he describes the plagues at too great a length, description starts to look like artifice. If his descriptions are “led by zeale irregularly long,” they potentially “Infringe the curious liberties of Art” (2.163–64). While the divine poet cannot help but be an instrument of God’s violence, nevertheless as Drayton portrays it poetic invention involves the management of that violence to effective ends. These two aspects of divine poetry—the need to express divine violence and the demand to manage it—come together in Drayton’s description of the eighth plague, the plague of locusts or, as he would have it, “the plague of Grashoppers” (2.448). Drayton compares the work of the plague to divine poetry, but he does so to highlight the need for administration and self-regulation. Initially, the poet likens the grasshopper to a pastoral poet, an “idle creature” (2.453) who sings “In wanton Sommer” (2.454) and praises the “painefull labouring” (2.455) of the toiling ants. As the passage continues, however, the grasshopper-poet “eats the labourer and the heaped store” (2.456) and then goes on to destroy other elements of the natural world, “So doe the Heavens of every thing dispose” (2.464). The grasshopper is no less a poet for becoming an instrument of divine will; rather, as an instrument of God’s will, the grasshopper claims the violent effects of God’s will in and as divine poetry itself. Drayton extends his consideration of divine poetry in the lines that follow. The eighth plague culminates with the poet’s description of the grasshoppers eating the barks off trees, which he compares to lewd women who have been stripped for punishment: The trees all barcklesse nakedly are left Like people stript of things that they did weare, By the enforcement of disastrous theft,

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Standing as frighted with erected haire. Thus doth the Lord her nakednesse discover, Thereby to prove her stoutnesse to reclaime, That when nor feare, nor punishment could move her, She might at length be tempred with shame. Disrob’d of all her ornaments she stands, Wherein rich Nature whilome did her dight, That the sad verges of the neighbouring lands Seeme with much sorrow wondering at the sight. But Egypt is so impudent and vile, No blush is seene that pittie might compell, That from all eyes to cover her awhile, The Lord in darkenesse leaveth her to dwell. (2.465–80)

The misogyny of this complex and disturbing passage is apparent. Nevertheless, I want to focus on it briefly to point out that the passage combines two interrelated positions, one that stresses the violent aspects of divine poetry and another that calls for administration and regulation. Considered as a continuation of Drayton’s description of the grasshopperpoet, this passage presents divine poetry as an instrument of moral reform through and not despite violence. Although the figure of the shamed woman would have been familiar to Drayton’s readers through the Hebrew prophets, the misogyny implied by the image of Egypt stripped for sexual impropriety underscores that violence. On one level, then, Drayton represents the work of the grasshopper-poet as a violence that creates order through destruction, by damaging and ruining a prior, natural order. But if the image of infected Egypt portrays the problem of divine violence, it offers a possible solution as well. Considered in the context of contemporary plague legislation and literature, we can see that this passage concludes with an allegorical image of household quarantine. As Drayton explains it, the primary effect of exposing Egypt is to except the country from the community of nations. This effect is akin to the form that charity takes in official explanations of household quarantine, which argue for the isolation and segregation of the sick from the healthy in the name of the common good. While Egypt doesn’t feel ashamed about her nakedness, Drayton writes, “neighboring lands” wonder at the sight “with much sorrowe.” Egypt becomes a kind of infected country that other nations metaphorically quarantine and “in darknesse leaveth her to dwell.” On this second

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level, the solution to the theologico-political violence of the plague is cruelty carried out in the name of the common good. Drayton’s Moses is part of a shift in political writing that moves from the exploration of sovereignty through counsel and praise toward a description of government as the regulation of populations and things. In Security, Territory, Population, Foucault locates the intellectual origins of this shift in early seventeenth-century anti-Machiavellian literature, political literature associated with the Reason of State. In The Prince, Foucault argues, “there is no fundamental, essential, natural, and juridical connection between the Prince and his principality: externality, the Prince’s transcendence, is the principle.”40 According to Foucault, Reason of State transformed this relation into one that is more integral and internal, based on economy, “the proper way of managing individuals, goods, and wealth, like the management of a family by a father who knows how to direct his wife, his children, and his servants.”41 Representing Mosaic government against Machiavellian cynicism, Drayton offers a vision of government as management in response to James’s sense of sovereign authority; however, whereas Foucault argues that the movement from sovereignty to governmentality leaves the problem of sovereignty behind, Drayton’s poem suggests that theologico-political sovereignty is one of the main things that require governing. Drayton associates this work of management with poetry. In Drayton’s account divine poetry is analogous to the work of government inasmuch as both have a share in the work of manipulation and moral coercion. But divine poetry also differs from government in that it explicitly operates on the theological imaginary, representing the scenes of divine violence to particular ends and for particular effects. Drayton charges divine poetry with a project that goes beyond the governance of a population through coercive care. It is tasked with the double project of representing and managing divine violence—of representing divine violence as a force that justly targets deserving enemies and of managing both justice and violence through its representation in and as poetry.

1630: IMAGINING CATASTROPHE Drayton extends his understanding of poetry as management in his 1630 volume The Muses Elizium, Lately Discovered by a New Way Over Parnassus, deriving a strategy of government and self-governance from poetry’s ability to shape and steer the passions. Both in its emphasis on the good shepherd and in its celebrations of royal authority, pastoral becomes

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for Drayton a privileged genre for conceptualizing government as a technique of management. However, in The Muses Elizium Drayton is much less optimistic than he was in Moses about the promise of government to administer and resolve states of emergency. Throughout The Muses Elizium, he registers emergency situations with increasingly volatile images and metaphors that provoke and encourage his readers to imagine disaster and impending catastrophe. Throughout the poem, which is divided into ten nymphals, Drayton defi nes good government through the familiar figure of pastoral care. In the “Sixt Nimphall,” for instance, a group of nymphs judge which of three characters is the best suited to govern, Silvius, a forester, “the Prince of sports” (ME 6.47); Halcius, a fisher, who steers his boat “like a Prince . . . in state” (6.121); or Melanthus, a shepherd, whose music induces obedience among his flock. Like Silvius and Halcius before him, Melanthus explains his vocation in explicitly political terms: When the Evening doth approach I to my Bagpipe take, And to my Grazing flocks such Musick then I make, That they forbeare to feed; then me a King you see, I playing goe before, my Subjects followe me . . . (6.211–14)

At the end of the debate, the nymphs decide on Melanthus, whom they prefer “ten tymes more” than the other two (6.240). In choosing the shepherd, the nymphs follow the scriptural tradition of the good ruler as a good shepherd, exemplified in the divine poems in the second half of Muses Elizium by Noah, whose care for the animals on the ark demonstrates divine government; Moses, himself a good shepherd whose prudence and care—“To feede and folde full warily he knew” (Moses 1.689)—look forward to his care for the Israelites; and David, whose ability in David and Goliath to manage both himself and his sheep signifies his capabilities as a good king. In Drayton’s poem, after Samuel anoints David he returns to his flocks, displaying a level of self-governance that both looks forward to and proves his ability to govern the people: And though his Sheephhooke might his Scepter be, This holy Youth so humble is, that he Will back toth’ fields his fathers flock to keepe, And make his subjects, (for a while) his Sheepe.42

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However, Drayton is equally if not more interested in extreme cases, moments of crisis that reveal the limits of pastoral care. In The Muses Elizium, these moments often materialize in figures of natural life that appear to threaten political stability. Throughout the poem, Drayton develops a complex dynamic in which pastoral themes such as the good shepherd are increasingly dislodged by a sense of crises expressed in the landscape itself. The “Sixt Nimphall” begins with a description that produces such an effect. After describing flowers that wake up in the morning to see which has the most beautiful petals, Drayton then considers how their various pleasant odors collect in what he calls “the subtle Ayre” (ME 6.17). This seemingly innocuous detail indicates a more serious political problem, since what makes the air subtle is not the delicacy of its fragrance but, more sinisterly, its wrongful assumption of the various odors from the flowers, who by all rights own their smells themselves: And to it selfe the subtle Ayre, Such soverainty assumes, That it receiv’d too large a share From natures rich perfumes. (6.17–20)

Instead of expressing a natural order that can then be reflected in and by Elizium’s political order, the pastoral landscape expresses a crisis in political representation, the wrongful assumption of sovereignty, that looks forward to a larger crisis in the political order. Immediately after describing the subtle air, Drayton turns his attention to the debate among Silvius, Halcius, and Melanthus, emphasizing the seriousness of the debate and its potential for “civill strife” (6.38). The three ask the question, “Who should the worthiest be,” which Drayton underscores: “violently they pursue, / Nor stickled would they be” (6.34–36). In the “Sixt Nimphall,” this debate about good government fi nds its limit in an essentially ungovernable natural order that questions the legitimacy of government with increasing intensity. Most remarkable about the “Sixt Nimphall” is that the problem of assumed sovereignty is never resolved, neither on the level of plot nor on the level of image. After the nymphs choose Melanthus as the one best suited to govern, they change their minds and, out of “discretion,” “Crowne” all three (6.245, 255). Although their aim is to produce peace, in effect the nymphs reinstate the problem of who is the worthiest with which the nymphal begins. Discretion may be a virtue, a prudent response

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to the potential for civil strife, but Drayton’s conclusion suggests that discretion offers no fi rm resolution. Civil strife is not, fi nally, “stickled” or mediated by pastoral care so much as it is represented and kept in reserve, conspicuously avoided, when the image of discrete unity among the pastoral characters—collectively stand-ins for the members of the Caroline court—takes center stage. It is not difficult to identify the topical reference Drayton here has in mind. The problem of assumed sovereignty almost immediately evokes the constitutional crises that emerged in the mid-1620s with the Five Knights Case and culminated in 1628 with the Petition of Right. After Charles acceded to the throne, Parliament refused to raise taxes in order to fund his wars against France and Spain, so the king issued a forced loan that required individuals to lend money to the crown with no real hope of repayment. The situation came to a head in 1627 when five members of Parliament, all of whom were knights, were imprisoned for refusing to pay the loan and took their case to common-law court. Although the courts decided in favor of the crown, the case raised broader legal questions concerning sovereignty, royal prerogative, and the rule of law. Attorney General Robert Heath argued that the fi nancial situation of the country constituted an emergency situation, and in emergency situations the king has the right to issue edicts outside the bounds of common law. “There is a great difference between [legal obligation] and that absoluta potestas that a sovereign hath, by which a king commands,” Heath argued to the court. Although Heath immediately qualified this absolute power by saying that it does not mean that the king can do “what he pleaseth,” he continued by arguing that prerogative speaks to the very essence of the monarchy: “The king is the head of the same fountain of justice, which your lordship administers to all subjects; all justice is derived from him, and what he doth, he doth not as a private person, but as the head of the common wealth, as justiciarius regni, yea, the very essence of justice under God is in him.”43 Even though his argument was successful, it only confi rmed the fear among members of Parliament and others that Charles was expanding the authority of the crown by abrogating the rights of his subjects. Responding to the court’s decision, in 1628 the House of Commons, led by Edward Coke, issued the Petition of Right, which limited the king’s prerogative by asserting, among other things, that the king needed Parliament’s support to levy taxes and to impose military law. While Coke did not deny the king’s prerogative and, in fact, had argued strongly for it as a legal and political concept under James, he proposed that common law has “admeasured” it.44

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The constitutional crises of the 1620s represented a watershed moment for Drayton both politically and professionally. By 1606, only two years after the publication of Moses, Drayton had decided that James failed his vision of good government. Representing James as Olcon in his Poems lyrick and pastorall, Drayton charges that . . . he forsakes the Heard-groome and his Flocks, Nor of his Bag-pipes takes at all no keepe, But to the sterne Wolfe and deceitfull Fox, Leaves the poore Shepheard and his harmlesse Sheepe, And all those Rimes that he of OLCON sung, The Swayne disgrac’d, participate his wrong.45

Measuring James by the figure of the ruler as good shepherd, he fi nds the king lacking and himself complicit for not seeing James’s failures in his earlier poems. Drayton spent the next twenty years opposing the Stuart court, but in the mid-1620s he was also a strong supporter of Charles’s wars. He signaled his support in 1627 with the publication of The Battle of Agincourt, which celebrated England’s fi fteenth-century victory over the French in an effort to garner support for the contemporary war effort. Drayton’s support was rewarded with recognition by the Caroline court. David Norbrook argues that The Battle of Agincourt was rushed into print so that it would be issued before Buckingham’s invasion of France.46 Moreover, the poem was introduced by a dedicatory poem by Ben Jonson that signaled Drayton’s favor at the court. “It hath been question’d, MICHAEL,” writes Jonson, “if I bee / A Friend at all; or, if at all, to thee.”47 Dismissing the question, Jonson assures Drayton of their friendship, confi rming his inclusion in a circle of court poets from which he had previously been excluded. As Thomas Cogswell explains it, with Charles’s accession to the throne and Parliament’s unwillingness to fund the crown’s wars against France and Spain, Drayton shifted the explicit focus of his critique from the monarchy to the English people, whom he worried were increasingly ungovernable.48 As the image of assumed sovereignty from the “Sixt Nimphall” indicates, Drayton viewed the Five Knights Case and the Petition of Right as wrongful attempts on the part of the House of Commons to appropriate the authority that rightly belongs to the king. If Drayton was not a friend of Parliament in these matters, he was also not an unreflective supporter of the court. A formal reading of The Muses Elizium shows that Drayton understood the constitutional crises of the 1620s to represent a more seri-

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ous dilemma that put his own understanding of good government on trial. Can government sufficiently manage risk? In the opening “Description of Elizium,” Drayton asks this question in an allegory that both acknowledges a crisis of sovereignty and questions the capacity of the court to navigate emergency situations. In the absence of Phoebus, the poem’s figure for Charles, the various flowers in Elizium begin to argue about which one smells sweetest. Unable to decide between them, the Pansy and Violet turn to a Dianthus which “is loath, / To judge it” and replies instead that “for smell / That it excels them both” (ME, “Description” 30–32). A debate ensues in which flowers “throw” their sweet smells at one another from their “odoriferous beds” (36, 35). Representing the House of Commons as a set of contentious flowers, Drayton reveals members of Parliament to be motivated by self-interest in their attempt to usurp judicial authority. “The sweets,” he writes, “for soveraignty contend” (45). Part of Drayton’s purpose is to suggest that the presence of royal authority can be felt even in the monarch’s physical absence. Influenced by celebrations of court culture found in Jonson’s masques and in pastoral dramas such as Fletcher’s The Faithful Shepherdess, Drayton offers the imagined royal reader a celebration of his authority as it is manifest in the pleasure that he takes in experiencing the natural world.49 But this response also means that the aestheticization of that crisis, and not its political resolution, becomes that conflict’s increasingly untenable solution. It is not political strife per se but the general sense of fecundity and sensual delight produced by the contentious flowers that lures Phoebus from his ostensibly more serious concerns to enjoy Elizium’s beauty. As is the case with the debates concerning government in the “Sixt Nimphall,” Phoebus’s pleasure does not actually resolve the crisis of judicial authority through any action, decision, or declaration. Rather, at the close of “The Description,” Drayton leaves us with a pressing question. Can poetry succeed where sovereignty fails? Here happy soules, (their blessed bowers, Free from the rude resort Of beastly people) spend the houres In harmeless mirth and sport, Then on to the Elizian plaines Apollo doth invite you Where he provides with pastorall straines, In Nimphalls to delight you. (105–12)

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The “harmless mirth and sport” of pastoral poetry frees Phoebus and, by implication, the Caroline court from the “resort,” the crowd or multitude of “beastly people,” but this freedom simultaneously perpetuates the crisis represented by the “beastly people” by leaving it undecided. It would, of course, be possible to read this moment metacritically, as a critique of the pastoral enterprise.50 However, by formalizing the crisis of judicial authority while simultaneously insisting on its seriousness, Drayton also suggests that “pastorall straines” have a role to play beyond critique. While poetry cannot decide exceptions, it can represent them and, in so doing, potentially shape and manage them. Can poetry reform the “beastly people”? Drayton explores the civic potential of pastoral poetry most fully when he takes up and develops contemporary discourses of health and disease. In the “Fift Nimphall,” the nymphs Claia and Lelipa visit the hermit Clarinax, an expert in herbal medicine, and the three begin to discuss the use of plants as rewards for virtuous behavior. In Clarinax’s account, the ancients used garlands and wreaths made of plants as recompense for virtuous actions already accomplished, so that the laurel wreath was given to “The Conquerer and the Poet” (5.56); the palm, to the prudent champion who “When Fate had done the worst it could / . . . bore his Fortunes bravely” (5.59–60); the oaken wreath, to a hero who “from death / Some man of worth redeemed” (5.63–64); and so forth. But Claia counters that these rewards were also incentives to encourage virtuous action. The function of the wreaths and garlands was to shape self-interested passions into civic virtue: The Boughes and Sprayes, of which you tell, By you are rightly named, But we with those of pretious smell And colours, are enflamed; The noble Ancients to excite Men to doe things worth crowning, Not unperformed left a Rite, To heighten their renowning. (5.85–92)

The garlands, she argues, induced virtuous behavior through the pleasure of recognition or “renowning” upon receiving the garland and the material pleasure of experiencing the object itself, the garland’s “pretious smell.” Or, as Bacon explains in his essay “Of the True Greatness of Kingdoms

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and Estates,” in ancient times as opposed to present-day practices “crowns and garlands personal . . . were things able to inflame all men’s courages” (WFB 12:187). Claia (and Bacon) do not disagree with Clarinax so much as they extend the implications of his claims. Once plants are transformed into signs and aesthetic objects, they do more than signify an interior state. They can also serve as tools of government by which to shape and direct that state, exciting “Men to doe things worth crowning.” In other words, wreaths and garlands become instances of what Albert O. Hirschman has called “the principle of the countervailing passion” in which “one set of comparatively innocuous passions” is used “to countervail another more dangerous and destructive set.”51 Early modern literary and political writers became increasingly persuaded that humans were in reality driven by passions and self-interest rather than by reason, so government was tasked with using one set of passions to control or countervail others. Hirschman cites chapter 7 of The Dignity and Advancement of Learning where Bacon makes the Machiavellian argument that ethics is overly attached to ideals and, therefore, has not been able to account for the practical realities of human will and desire. As a corrective, Bacon proposes taking a leaf from “poets and writers of history” who are especially attentive to the manipulation of the passions. They understand how, I say, to set affection against affection, and to use the aid of one to master another; like hunters and fowlers who use to hunt beast with beast, and catch bird with bird . . . upon which foundation is erected that excellent and general use in civil government of reward and punishment, whereon commonwealths lean; seeing those predominant affections of fear and hope suppress and bridle all the rest. For as in the government of states it is sometimes necessary to bridle one faction with another, so it is in the internal government of the mind. (WFB 9:220–21)

Bacon draws an analogy between governmental technique and techniques of self-governance, arguing that government must use “fear and hope” to “bridle” the population over which it rules just as the mind uses these same affections to master its own passional life. Following Bacon, Hirschman focuses primarily on the ends of government, showing how seventeenthand eighteenth-century political writers used the principle of the countervailing passion to inculcate a sense of the common good by pitting one passion against another. A key moment in Bacon’s extended meditation on what he calls “the Regiment or Culture of the Mind” (9:194), his discus-

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sion of countervailing passions looks forward to a Machiavellian account of “true religion” in which the ability of religious institutions to “[lay] hold of the reality itself, by imprinting [virtue] upon men’s souls” becomes a model for culture (9:227). As an exemplary instance of “true religion,” in Bacon’s analysis culture becomes a kind of regimentation that induces ethical behavior through and not despite potentially destructive passions. Drayton follows this line of thinking to some degree. Much of the discussion in The Muses Elizium revolves around distinctions between Elizium and its neighboring country Felicia. As opposed to Elizian pleasure and virtue, Felicia is a world of debauchery and bacchanalia. But the opposition is one of degree and not one of kind. That is, it is an opposition that is not absolute but one that has to be asserted, managed, and cultivated. In the “Fourth Nimphall,” the Elizian Cloris reports to Mertilla that she went to Felicia in search of pleasure only to fi nd “monstrousnesse” and “Bacchus Feasts” (ME 4.57, 40). While Mertilla acknowledges that the Felicians are driven by their “affections,” she implies the same of the Elizians when she urges that Cloris “Let not thy noble thoughts descend / So low as their affections” (4.65–66). Neither “counsell” nor “the Gods corrections” can cure a mind that has descended so low, she goes on to point out (4.67). Instead, she recommends that the two of them “in a brave and lofty strayn / . . . exercise our passion, / With wishes of each others good” (4.75–77). For an Elizian, reshaping the passions in the service of a communal good becomes the cure for contamination by Felician monstrosity. But Drayton’s poem also suggests that the principle of the countervailing passion has another side. It also posits some passions and some peoples as beyond repair. Claia assumes Bacon’s view of the human and of government in her assessment of garlands, but at the end of the “Fift Nimphall” she qualifies her argument as she and Clarinax discuss a refugee from Felicia whom Clarinax is attempting to “cure” (5.251). For this refugee, the principle of the countervailing passion is bound to fail. Claia explains: Nay then thou shalt have inough to doe, We pity thy enduring, For they are there infected soe, That they are past thy curing. (5.253–56)

In raising the figure of the incurable refugee, Drayton reasserts and refashions Bacon’s analogy from the perspective of the ungovernable. Once indi-

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vidual self-government and the government of the collective become analogous forms of the regulation, a second analogy begins to emerge between ungovernable passions that are interior to the self and seemingly ungoverned figures that are exterior to the state: the ungovernable becomes a contaminant that exists outside of the self but whose potential presence demands policing the interior of the self as well. A little more than two decades later, in The Second Defense of the English People, Milton will make a similar argument in support of Cromwell. Cromwell is able to defeat enemies on the external battlefield because he has already defeated the enemy on the internal battlefield: “Commander fi rst over himself, victor over himself, he had learned to achieve over himself the most effective triumph, and so, on the very fi rst day that he took service against an external foe, he entered camp a veteran and past-master in all that concerned the soldier’s life” (CPW 4:668). For Milton, Cromwell’s successes on both battlefields make him an exemplary figure through which the English can achieve a unified and virtuous national identity. Because Drayton casts this model in terms of national boundaries and not exemplary virtues per se, he is better able than Milton to emphasize the splits in collective life that government appears to generate. As interested as Drayton is in using poetry to manage the passions, he also explores the aesthetic and imaginative dimensions of infection and contamination. Perhaps most interesting about The Muses Elizium is that Drayton concludes by emphasizing the imaginative potential of the refugee rather than the curative aspects of government. The figure of the refugee returns in the poem’s fi nal nymphal as a satyr, a “monster” never before seen “on the Elizian ground” (ME 10.14, 16). After some discussion of the satyr’s itinerary— how, the Elizians wonder, could a satyr “over high Parnassus hit?” (10.30)— they discover that he has escaped from Felicia, once “Earth’s Paradice” (10.66) but now destroyed by deforestation. Richard Hardin and Thomas Cogswell see the satyr as a self-portrait, Drayton’s self-representation as a poet on the verge of recognition by the Stuart court. In describing the satyr’s pathway, Drayton quotes his own extended title—The Muses Elizium, Lately Discovered by a New Way Over Parnassus—making it clear that the satyr’s acceptance by the Elizians mirrors the acceptance of his own pastoral innovations by Charles’s court. More broadly, the satyr’s description of his trajectory from Felicia to Elizium maps Drayton’s own career path from his early days as a Spenserian poet in the 1590s to his rejection by James and his late recognition by the Caroline court.52 In Felicia, the satyr explains, he lived with “wild Silvanus” (10.57), the satyr who

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led the salvage nation that worshiped Una in book 1 of Spenser’s Faerie Queene. Drayton continues the reference to Spenser, implicitly portraying the satyr as a Spenserian poet: “By Cynthia’s light, and on the pleasant Lawne, / The wanton Fayry we were wont to chace” (10.73–74). This world was destroyed when Felicia was “defac’d” (10.85), and the satyr, seeing that the Felicians have been forsaken, now presents himself for acceptance by the Elizians. In terms of professional advancement, the satyr represents Drayton’s recent recognition by the court while, in terms of literary history, representing Drayton’s innovations within his poetic lineage. The complexities of this moment extend beyond authorial selfrepresentation and begin to dissolve the very distinctions between virtue and vice, Elizium and Felicia, that the poem has so far maintained. The satyr is one in a line of figures throughout the poem who have crossed the border between Felicia and Elizium, carrying with them the threat of infection. Not only is there the incurable “mad man” (5.251) in the fi fth nymphal, but also Venus and Cupid who, in the seventh nymphal, sneak into Elizium from Felicia and urge the Elizian nymphs to commit “Treason, Treason” (7.43). The nymphs issue an edict exiling Venus and Cupid from Elizium, threatening the imprisonment of Cupid and the cloistering of Venus should the two be found again on Elizian soil. At the end of the tenth nymphal, however, the satyr explodes these various strategies of containment by taking up and exploiting the contaminating aspects of plague rhetoric. After explaining the Felician’s loss of “liberty” (10.58), he goes on to imagine the divine judgment that will be visited upon the country’s future generations, the “plagues their next posterity shall see”: The little Infant on the mothers Lap For want of fi re shall be so sore distrest, That whilst it drawes the lanke and empty Pap, The tender lips shall freese unto the breast; The quaking Cattle which their Warmstall want, And with bleake winters Northerne winde opprest, Their Browse and Stover waxing thin and scant, The hungry Crowes shall with their Caryon feast. Men wanting Timber wherewith they should build, And not a Forrest in Felicia found, Shall be enforc’d upon the open Field, To dig them Caves for houses in the ground: The Land thus rob’d, of all her rich Attyre,

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Naked and bare her selfe to heaven doth show, Begging from thence that Jove would dart his fi re Upon those wretches that disrob’d her so . . . (10.92–108)

These lines detail the divine violence that, the satyr prophesies, will be visited upon the Felicians because of their collective corruption, but this prophecy speaks to Elizium as well. While the satyr’s itinerary argues that Felicia can be left behind, the historical motives supporting his prophecy suggest that Elizium itself is in danger of experiencing a similar fate. The problem with Felicia is not just the corruption of James’s rule but also the unwillingness of the people to support Charles’s wars. Drayton underscores the tenuous position of the Caroline court at the end of The Muses Elizium when Coribus, one of the Elizians, repeats the satyr’s prophecy in specific terms: Here live in blisse, till thou shalt see those slaves, Who thus set vertue and desert at nought: Some sacrific’d upon their Grandsires graves, And some like beasts in markets sold and bought. Of fooles and madmen leave thou then the care, That have no understanding of their state: For whom high heaven doth so just plagues prepare, That they to pitty shall convert their hate. And to Elizium be thou welcome then, Untill those base Felicians thou shalt heare, By that vile nation captived again, That many a glorious ages their captives were. 10.137–48)

Coribus’s and the satyr’s satisfaction in imagining the punishment of Felicia relies on a strong distinction between its future and the future of Elizium. But the topical reference paints a different picture. The vile nation that Coribus does not quite name is France, whom the English defeated at the Battle of Agincourt and whom Coribus imagines to be a clear and present threat to English sovereignty. The passage relies on a hypothetical distinction between Felicia and Elizium, but since Charles signed a peace treaty with France in 1629 and with Spain in 1630, that distinction is collapsing, as Caroline policy looks increasingly like the Jacobean pacifism. The die, Coribus implies, has already been cast.

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IMMUNITY Between the 1604 edition of Moses in a Map of his Miracles and its republication in the 1630 edition of The Muses Elizium, Drayton strikes a delicate balance between governmentality and political theology. In Moses, he develops a broad argument for governmental administration from plague legislation and applies that argument to the plague as an instance of divine violence. His purpose is to show how divine poetry, working in tandem with protocols of governmental administration, can manage theologicopolitical violence. At the end of The Muses Elizium, however, Drayton exploits the volatility of the plague as a metaphor of divine violence in order to provoke a sense of impending doom. The plague does more than bring justice to the “base Felicians.” It also threatens the security of Elizium and, by implication, England as well. Instead of managing violence, in The Muses Elizium Drayton exploits its imaginative potential. What links Moses to The Muses Elizium is Drayton’s sense of political ontology, the sense which he shares with Machiavelli and Bacon that collective life is made up of an assemblage of passions, self-interest, and imagination. Moses differs from most early seventeenth-century plague poetry in that Drayton refuses to celebrate neighborliness as the inevitable or more natural response to communal suffering. For Drayton, the assemblage of passions and self-interests that comprise collective life must be harnessed through imagination by some form of governmental authority. The Muses Elizium addresses the problems that attend this process more explicitly. Comparing the work of government fi rst to poetry and then to medicine, Drayton discloses an opposition between governmentality and the ungovernable that threatens to infect individual and communal life. In terms of poetry, this opposition persists because government can never completely harness the passions, and in terms of medical discourse as Drayton develops it, this opposition persists because some illnesses are beyond curing. In The Muses Elizium, Drayton combines these two—ungovernable passions and the possibility of infection—to imagine and represent a future catastrophe, a moment of divine violence, that might unsettle and reform the political order. In a recent discussion of self-interest and its impact on modern politics, Roberto Esposito argues that governments based on theories of self-interest work according to a logic of immunization. In his account, immunity names “the negative protection of life,” a governmental strategy in which life is sheltered “in the same powers that interdict its development.”53 Focusing on a tradition of English liberalism that begins with Hobbes and

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Locke, Esposito notes that seventeenth-century political thinkers increasingly take self-preservation to be the defi ning feature of individual life only to conclude that the right of self-preservation seems inevitably to lead to deadly confl ict as individuals use increasingly destructive means to ensure their protection. In Leviathan, Hobbes initially proposes the right of self-preservation as a way to secure oneself against threats posed by others, but as he develops the concept it quickly becomes clear that individual self-preservation prevents security on the level of community. Hobbes begins chapter 14 by announcing the “Right of Nature” as “the liberty each man hath, to use his own power, as he will himself, for the preservation of his own nature; that is to say, of his own life” (L 14.1.86). But he quickly follows up with the observation that “as long as this natural right . . . endureth, there can be no security to any man” (14.4.87). Locke extends Hobbes’s argument in The Second Treatise of Government by locating the right of self-preservation in the ownership of property. Owning property allows an individual to extend the right of self-preservation by “[making] use of those things that were necessary for his being,” but it also leads to the right to kill anyone who poses the threat of theft, that is, anyone who “has not in the least hurt him, nor declared any designs upon his life, any farther than the use of force, so to get him in his power, as to take away his money, or what he pleases, from him.”54 What interests Esposito about Hobbes and Locke is that instead of rejecting self-preservation as a foundational right, both develop theories of government that preserve a limited version of the right of self-preservation while attempting to neutralize its necessarily aggressive tendencies. As Esposito explains it, Hobbes’s concept of sovereignty preserves an element of self-interest while immunizing the population against its more vicious manifestations, while Locke does the same in his concept of private property that produces public personhood by immunizing the public against the logic of appropriation upon which private property initially rests. Each posits a model of government that encourages the expansion of life while at the same time immunizing life against its drive toward what Hobbes and Locke both call a state of war.55 Although Esposito’s use of the word immunity might suggest that he relies on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century concepts derived from the biological sciences, his account of this immunity-based paradigm is already suggested by a shift in the meaning and value of the term “immunity” in seventeenth-century England. This shift indicates a more dramatic change in the understanding of communal norms. Immunity indicates relief from the law, but in the seventeenth century it also came to signify a

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process in which communal norms are constituted in relation to an exception which is seen as increasingly threatening, dangerous, and malicious. “Immunity” is an Anglo-Norman legal term, deriving from Latin, which indicates a privilege granting exemption from certain duties or obligation. In early modern England, it is often associated with asylum, sanctuary, or benefit of clergy, which is how Robert Persons used the term when he describes the “immunity of the Clergie” in his polemic against Edward Coke defending Jesuit priests against prosecution by the English state.56 Immunity is granted to an individual or class of individuals as an exemption from the norms by which a community is defi ned. But beginning in the late sixteenth century, immunity is increasingly used to indicate an act of segregation in which an individual or community is defi ned through the expulsion of a threat on the inside. In this newer sense, an individual or community is itself immunized against a threatening influence, which is separated off from the community in order to prevent further contamination. In his Treatise of the Passions and Faculties of the Soule of Man, Edward Reynolds uses immunity in this sense to describe self-governance and the overall governance of Christian community. He begins by describing the need to immunize oneself from certain corrupting passions and then goes on to argue for a model of Christian redemption in which community comes together through the rejection of the spiritual and physical enemies of Christ, “giving us Immunity from all spirituall dangers.”57 On both an individual and a communal level, an interior contagion is actively rejected and kept on the outside in order to maintain the security of the inside. One way to characterize Drayton’s understanding of government in his 1604 Moses in a Map of his Miracles and the expansion of that understanding in his 1630 volume The Muses Elizium would be to associate it with this shift in norms of government and self-governance indicated by the changing meaning of the word “immunity.” Drayton implies the second sense of immunity as the reject of an interior contagion in a fairly limited way in his early account of punishment as “Chymick medicine,” while he implies it more broadly in the division in The Muses Elizium between Felicia and Elizium, as he consistently represents Felician bacchanalia as a contaminating force that is both exterior to Elizium and already present within its border. More than just the antithesis of Elizium, Felicia is the debased vision of pleasure that Elizium implies and that it must immunize itself against. In The Muses Elizium, Drayton explores aestheticized versions of governmental technique in which both the individual and the community are established and preserved in parallel fashion through the

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rejection of some infectious or potentially infected part of themselves. But, as I have argued, Drayton is not just interested in norms of government. He also engages with the states of emergency, associated with the plague, in which he can explore theologico-political sovereignty as a product of poetry, metaphor, and imagination. In Drayton’s account, theologicopolitical sovereignty contaminates the system. It overrides government as administration and regulation by forcing a crisis that cannot be managed. Drayton’s exploration can be difficult to see since he also claims the imaginative force of theologico-political sovereignty in his poetic and rhetorical uses of the plague. It is worth attending to, however, because it shows that theologico-political sovereignty can persist in the imaginative life of the subject and, therefore, the political life of the community even, as we shall see, in models of government that attempt to move beyond it.

chapter six

Marvell’s Mosaic Moment

T

he revolutionary period in England witnessed a renewed interest in the Mosaic constitution as writers across a spectrum of political positions turned to Hebrew scripture to explore new models of government that could replace the defeated monarchy. In The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649), for instance, Milton used the Mosaic constitution to argue for Parliament’s legitimate right to execute Charles I. The Mosaic constitution shows that government is based on a contract between rulers and the people, and when rulers break that contract, the people have the right to call for new forms of government. It “[confi rms] us that the right of choosing, yea of changing thir own Government is by the grant of God himself in the People,” Milton writes (CPW 3:207). But even before he made that argument, Milton had already turned to Mosaic law to argue for sexual liberties. In The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643), he argues that Mosaic divorce law affirms a natural law—“a Law not onely writt’n by Moses, but character’d in us by nature” (CPW 2:237)—that impels individuals toward community and conversation, and that guarantees the right of divorce when conversation between married partners fails.1 Marvell combines both the political and the sexual aspects of the Mosaic constitution in his long narrative poem Upon Appleton House. Admittedly, Marvell is less concerned with law and contracts than he is with forms of life that emerge in exceptional situations. A poet indebted to Marlowe and to seventeenth-century Spenserians like Drayton, in his poetry written during and immediately after the English Revolution Marvell combines Drayton’s attempt to synthesize pastoral poetry and questions of governmentality with Marlowe’s political interest in erotic imagination. How, Marvell asks, in the state of emergency can life itself become a site of political making as well as a site of erotic pleasure? 173

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Marvell composed Upon Appleton House during the emergency situation that England faced at the very end of the revolutionary period. Basing their argument on internal evidence and topical references, Derek Hirst and Steven Zwicker have asserted that Upon Appleton House must have been composed in the summer of 1651, a summer that was defi ned by political crisis. Between June 1650, when the second Charles Stuart threatened to invade England from Scotland and renew the Civil Wars, until September 1651, when Cromwell decisively defeated the royalist forces at the battle of Worcester, “the life of the Rump Parliament, and of the English republic as a whole, was dominated by the problem of survival.”2 Facing the double threat of a royalist invasion and the revival of millenarian radicalism among revolutionary citizen-soldiers who refused to disband after the establishment of the Commonwealth, England was thrown into a state of emergency with no apparent force strong enough or capable enough to resolve it. Building on the work of scholars such as John Wallace, Annabel Patterson, and Michael Wilding, Hirst and Zwicker argue that Upon Appleton House reflects the uncertainty of this moment, especially in its address to Marvell’s employer, Thomas Fairfax. 3 Fairfax was an innovative military leader as lord general of the New Model Army, but the defeat of Charles I threw him into a moral crisis. As was much commented on at the time, Fairfax neither supported nor prevented the king’s execution. After the execution, when Parliament was preparing to send forces into Scotland to stop Charles Stuart’s planned invasion, Fairfax decided to resign his post, unable to support or deny the fundamental change in government that war against the prince implied.4 Upon Appleton House is almost always read along with Marvell’s garden poems as a poem about withdrawal and retreat from public life into private gardens, a reflection on the capacity of private imagination to compensate for the hardships of public life. But Hirst and Zwicker help us to see that Marvell’s poem is more centrally a meditation on decision making, the state of emergency, and the reconstruction of government—one of the most innovative considerations of government and the sovereign decision in seventeenth-century English literature. In the account that Marvell gives in Upon Appleton House, Fairfax’s decision to resign his post suspends the juridical means by which the state of emergency that England faced might get resolved. Perhaps Fairfax should have been like the Schmittian sovereign who decides the exception. And certainly Marvell understood that in resigning his post, Fairfax effectively ceded that position to Cromwell, who was much more confident in the use of theo-

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logico-political violence, a violence that Marvell explores in his Cromwell poems. But in Upon Appleton House, he treats Fairfax like the baroque prince of the Trauerspiel whom Walter Benjamin discusses in his Origin of German Tragic Drama, revealing “that he is almost incapable of making a decision” in the political sense that Schmitt means it.5 In this chapter, I argue that Marvell takes up Mosaic discourse to explore the vicissitudes of communal and creaturely life in the absence of strong sovereignty. As Marvell portrays it in Upon Appleton House, Fairfax’s resignation reverses expected relations between the state of emergency and the political decision. Instead of deciding the emergency in the sense of bringing it to a conclusion, Fairfax’s decision to retreat from public life exacerbates and prolongs it. Fairfax refuses the role of the sovereign and effectively suspends the political decision. Through Mosaic discourse Marvell shows how this suspension turns the state of emergency into a state of becoming in which new visions of life begin to emerge that demand a new understanding of political making, new forms of government and agency, and a new poetics of political and erotic representation.

FAIRFAX’S DECISION Following a tradition of country house poems, Marvell represents the estate at Nunappleton as a reflection of his employer’s public virtues so that, at least initially, Fairfax’s general management of the gardens replicates his skills as a military leader. In the process, the natural world of the garden comes to signify the political world of Fairfax’s England. Bees become soldiers, flowers become standard-bearers and musketeers, and Fairfax’s oversight of the garden becomes akin to—or better, an expression of—his weeding of ambition and tilling of conscience. As with earlier seventeenth-century country house poems by Amelia Lanyer, Ben Jonson, Thomas Carew, and Robert Herrick, in Upon Appleton House Fairfax’s relation to his estate discloses and affirms internal virtues that are also visible in his actions in public life. But as the poem progresses, Marvell adds a baroque twist. Rather than reflect and affirm public virtues, in Marvell’s refashioning of it the country house poem exposes a vital order that the genre also seems unable to explain or account for. In the poem’s opening stanzas, Marvell writes that “[n]o creature loves an empty space.”6 The impulse of created nature is toward artificial structures and forms of life that offer shelter and protection. Writing from the vantage point of forms of sheltering that no longer work, Marvell invests creaturely life with a

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sense of the emergent, a sense that the new will emerge from within the very density of creaturely life that has been laid bare.7 This baroque twist is the central poetic device that makes Upon Appleton House such a notoriously difficult poem. On the one hand, Marvell explores exhausted symbolic forms that persist beyond their social or political function, outdated forms that no longer organize and give meaning to life. In his analysis of Upon Appleton House and emergent capitalism, Marxist critic Christopher Kendrick is especially attentive to the economic dimensions of this phenomenon. As Kendrick argues, Marvell distresses a genre of poetry that celebrates feudal economy in order to emphasize the ways in which “all refeudalization strategies are discredited in advance.”8 We can see Marvell engaging in a version of this strategy when he explores the need to develop a new understanding of government from the perspective of older models that are no longer viable. On the other hand, Marvell probes the life that emerges when these symbolic forms no longer take hold. The poet explores the possibility that the natural order lives beyond the forms that once organized its vitality. While the natural order is invested with historical significance and political value, in Upon Appleton House value and significance are unhinged from the symbolic forms that would stabilize and give clear meaning to the natural order. In the process, the natural order seems to take on a life of its own, signifying a political emergency that cannot or will not come to a resolution. In Marvell’s account, this dehiscence between political form and creaturely life is brought about by Fairfax’s decision to retire from public life.9 Ostensibly, Marvell treats Fairfax’s retirement as proof of his virtue, a sign that Fairfax has no ambitions to take over the government. But as the poem develops he more pointedly treats Fairfax’s decision as the cause of a much broader crisis. In deciding to retreat from public life, Fairfax forgoes the opportunity to forge a new political order and instead increases the distance between creaturely life and the communal forms that might organize it. Marvell suggests the stakes of locating this dehiscence in Fairfax’s decision early on in Upon Appleton House when he compares Fairfax to a series of Roman founders of state. In deciding to retire from public life, Fairfax empties the figure of the founder and leaves it hanging. In the poem’s opening stanzas, Marvell compares Appleton House to Romulus’s “beelike cell” (UAH 40), noting how future generations will fi nd it remarkable that such a great man lived in such a small well-ordered house, where “all things are composed . . . / Like Nature, orderly and near”

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In which we the dimensions fi nd Of that more sober age and mind, When larger-sizèd men did stoop To enter at a narrow loop; . . . (25–30)

Given the likeness between the two houses—Romulus’s and Fairfax’s— one might deduce that Fairfax is a founder of state like Romulus, but Fairfax’s decision to resign his post as lord general of the New Model Army subtracts him from the list of founders to which he is being compared. As readers have long noted, the reference to stooping in the lines cited above has its source in book 8 of the Aeneid, where Aeneas sees Evander venerating Hercules, realizes that Evander is Greek, and gains his allegiance in the battle against Turnus for control of the tribes of Latinium. As Aeneas enters Evander’s house, he stoops, just as Hercules stooped when he entered the same doorway. In the Aeneid, Virgil links Aeneas to Hercules in order to establish parallels among three moments of founding: Hercules killing the monster Cacus and saving Latinium from destruction, the story that Evander tells Aeneas; Aeneas killing Turnus and establishing Rome as the dominant political power on the Italian peninsula, the culminating plot of the Aeneid; and Caesar Augustus defeating Marc Antony and Cleopatra and founding the Roman empire, the future that Virgil’s poem proleptically assumes. In this brief comparison, Hercules, Aeneas, and Caesar Augustus all measure Fairfax’s failure to do what they did. While Appleton House, like Romulus’s cell, is small in comparison to its owner, nevertheless Fairfax differs from Romulus, Aeneas, and company in that he did not found a new state. Marvell diagnoses Fairfax’s failure in an absurd image that draws a sharp distinction between constituting power, or the force of political making, and the order that is constituted or made. In Marvell’s account, Appleton House is pressured by the greatness of its owner and “grows spherical” when it is “by [Fairfax’s] magnitude distressed” (52, 54). As a made thing, the house cannot contain the force of making that Fairfax represents. Marvell’s ostensible purpose is to praise Fairfax’s humility and refusal to claim “unwonted Greatness,” and for this reason he blames the house for “officiously” swelling when Fairfax enters it (58, 55). But since the house is also an expression of Fairfax’s humility, Marvell simultaneously suggests that Fairfax’s potential as a founder of state cannot or should not be contained or measured by the moral order upon which he relies to

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determine his actions. Under normal circumstances, humility may be a virtue, but in emergency situations more dramatic action is required. Like Cromwell, who in The Horatian Ode cannot be enclosed and “through his laurels blast” with “Caesar’s head” (HO 23–24), Fairfax has the capacity to break through older political forms, but unlike Cromwell, he is ultimately contained by outdated or inappropriate expressions of virtue—his Presbyterian leanings and inability to carry through on the political events that he helped to set in motion. Given Marvell’s emphasis on founders of state, the contrast between Romulus and Fairfax takes on a particularly Machiavellian resonance. In the Discourses, Machiavelli refuses to measure the act of founding Rome by the particular set of rules and norms that make up the Roman state, arguing that we cannot judge Romulus for killing his brother Remus, even though subsequent Roman law would determine this killing to be murder, since Romulus’s act founded civil life, “un vivere civile”: “That what he did was for the common good [bene comune] and not for his own ambition,” Machiavelli writes, “is demonstrated by his having at once ordered a Senate with which he took counsel and by whose opinion he decided” (D 1.9.72–73 / 29). From this example, Machiavelli draws the conclusion that the act of founding a republic often involves extraordinary action, and that action cannot be judged by the moral order that is founded. “The deed accuses,” but “the effect excuses.” This is the lesson that Fairfax does not grasp. While Romulus’s “bee-cell” serves as a point of comparison for Appleton House, the subtext of the comparison suggested by Marvell’s source texts highlights the critical difference between Romulus and Fairfax, who, in refusing to accept the necessity of violence in the founding of a new order, prolongs and sustains the moment of crisis. I do not want to suggest that Marvell is simply critiquing Fairfax for retreating from politics into the domestic sphere, although he is clearly doing that. More than issuing a critique, the poem’s opening stanzas highlight the problem of the founder as a background figure in order to reimagine political making from within the domestic sphere. In the Discourses, Machiavelli emphasizes the founding of a civil way of life through its separation from the domus, the world of property and the household that Machiavelli associates with ambition, acquisition, and nepotism. When Romulus kills Remus and establishes the Senate, he elevates civic government over family ties. In Machiavelli’s account, this division becomes the basis for the Roman republic when Junius Brutus kills his sons, and it is repeatedly and violently reasserted, for instance, with the assassination of

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Maelius, the grain dealer who attempted to use his monopoly on the grain market to overthrow the republic, or with Manlius Torquatus’s execution of his own son for disobeying the Senate. In Machiavelli’s account, Romulus lays the groundwork for the Roman republic by establishing a fundamental affinity between killing in the domestic sphere and what Machiavelli calls “the common good,” and Junius Brutus subsequently institutes the republic by repeating Romulus’s act, executing his sons for the sake of the rule of law. This repetition leads Machiavelli to assert that freedom in the republic can be brought about only by turning domestic violence into a public duty. “There is no remedy [for corruption] more powerful, more valid, more secure, and more necessary, than to kill [ammazzare] the sons of Brutus” (1.16.84 / 45).10 Marvell inverts Machiavelli’s model of republican violence so that civil life emerges from within the domestic sphere and not through the aggressive and impossible separation of the household from the state. In Upon Appleton House, Fairfax’s failure to become a Machiavellian founder or reformer certainly reorients Fairfax’s relation to the domus, so that he is increasingly not in any simple way its master. But Marvell does not give up on the problem of the founder. Rather, he invests the domus—the inhabitants and land that comprise it— with the force of political making. Government emerges not through the separation of civic space from household concerns but through the crossfertilization between household models and civic life. In order to develop this account of government, Marvell supplants a Roman model of constitution power with a Mosaic one. In the middle section of Upon Appleton House, Marvell restages the problems of political making associated with the Machiavellian founder or reformer in terms of the Mosaic constitution. His most immediate point of reference is a verse translation of Exodus 15 that Fairfax wrote, titled “Moses Songe” and included in The Imployment of my Solitude, a manuscript collection of verse transitions and original poems written by Fairfax and collected during his retreat from public office. “Moses Songe” is a faithful translation of the song that the Israelites sing after crossing the Red Sea. Like a number of revolutionary verses, the poem details Pharaoh’s offenses against the Israelites, celebrates God for drowning his “Horse & Men . . . / Whilst Israel marches on dry grownd,” and looks forward to the founding of a new state in Canaan—all in an effort to fi nd a scriptural model for figuring the defeat of Charles I and expressing the hope for a righteous political future that will follow.11 Marvell takes up Fairfax’s poem as his poem’s speaker passes from

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Nunappleton’s well-manicured gardens to the estate’s “abyss” (UAH 369), its wilder meadows and surrounding forests. The poem’s speaker sees the “tawny mowers” (388) and imagines them to be “like Israelites” (389), passing through a green and not a red sea, as “the grassy deeps divide / And crowd a lane on either side” (391–92). Instead of moving toward statehood, however, Marvell ironizes the Mosaic constitution by rendering it ineffective. One of the mowers’ attendants, whom Marvell calls “bloody Thestylis” (401), responds by pointing to a dead bird lying in the grass and proclaiming, “He called us Israelites; / But now, to make his saying true, / Rails rain for quails, for manna, dew” (406–8). In Thestylis’s response, the dead bird undercuts the force of the founder by measuring the distance between the political aspirations of the Mosaic constitution and the everyday life of the mowers whom the speaker calls Israelites. This undercutting of the force of the founder is reinforced by the speaker’s reference to Numbers 13, the passage in which the Hebrew spies return from Canaan and caution the Israelites that the land’s inhabitants are too strong to be conquered. “And now to the abyss I pass,” Marvell’s speaker announces, “Where men like grasshoppers appear, / But grasshoppers are giants there” (369, 371–72). The Hebrew spies from Numbers report, “The land, through which we have gone to search it, is a land that eateth up the inhabitants thereof; and all the people that we saw in it are men of a great stature. . . . [W]e were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight” (KJV Num. 13:32–33). This “evil report” is what causes the Israelites to have to wander in the dessert for forty years. The speaker’s ineffectiveness produces a similar effect. As the poem continues, Marvell’s speaker withdraws from the act of founding promised by “Moses Songe” and instead revels in the transformations and metamorphoses of the natural world, in the sense of becoming associated with creaturely life. More broadly, this section of Upon Appleton House reverses the direction of Fairfax’s poem. Whereas “Moses Songe” culminates in a political vision of the promised land, Upon Appleton House moves from an ironized vision of the Mosaic constitution backward to a Hebrew vision of Egypt. Moving from Israel to Egypt, and from creation and political constitution to creaturely life, this section of the poem concludes with Marvell’s imagining Fairfax to be surveying his estate and, in the process, misrecognizing a winding river that he and his family called the Little Nile for a serpent. Marvell comments: No serpent new nor crocodile Remains behind our little Nile;

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Unless itself you will mistake, Among these meadows the only snake. (UAH 629–32)

The association of the river with the Nile and its movement with reptiles recalls the opening sonnet in Donne’s Divine Poems, which begins by noting how “the sun’s hot masculine flame / Begets strange creatures on Nile’s dirty slime,”12 or perhaps Spenser’s Faerie Queene, where the “fertile Nile . . . creatures new doth frame,” an apparently endless horizon of creaturely life teeming in potentia: “Ten thousand kindes of creatures partly male / And partly female of his fruitful seed.”13 Marvell gestures toward this seeming infi niteness in his description of the river’s movement. “See in what wanton harmless folds / It ev’rywhere the meadow holds” (UAH 633–34). The paradox of the fold is that it wantonly blurs clear distinctions between inside and outside, container and contained, so that, as the couplet suggests, it is not clear whether the meadow holds the river or the river holds the meadow. Instead, in this abyss everything folds into every other thing and everywhere folds into everywhere else, the whole devolving into a creaturely commonality. Marvell suggests this devolution with a brief reference to Narcissus: And its yet muddy back doth lick, Till as a crystal mirror slick; Where all things gaze themselves, and doubt If they be in it or without. And for his shade where therein shines, Narcissus-like, the sun too pines. (635–40)

The clear surface of the river reflects back to objects their own images, but in Marvell’s account reflection is only the fi rst step in a more complicated and material version of narcissism in which distinctions between creaturely things begin to collapse. As “all things” doubt whether “they be in it or without,” Marvell freezes Narcissus at the very moment at which he falls into the river, unable to tell the difference between himself and the water, a moment of radical uncertainty in which creaturely life declines into further creaturely life, a horizontal infi nity of life in which categorical distinctions between the human and the natural world or between the animal and organic nature do not hold. Reading this moment through the lens of Julia Kristeva’s writings on

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narcissism and abjection, Lynn Enterline argues that Marvell’s speaker undergoes a subjective crisis of self-differentiation.14 But if we read this moment in terms of the biblical paradigms established by Marvell’s reference to Fairfax’s “Moses Songe,” we can also say that this subjective crisis is determined by the political problem of the founder of state. Marvell’s retreat into creaturely life reverses the terms of the Mosaic constitution so that speaker moves from Israel to Egypt, from freedom to bondage, from political creation to creaturely life. In reversing the direction of Fairfax’s poem, Marvell suggests that Mosaic authority is what Fairfax’s decision to retire from public life has suspended. In not leading the English to the promised land, Marvell suggests, Fairfax has released a vital, creaturely order now in search of a political form. In a certain sense, Marvell’s emphasis on creaturely life compares with Gerrard Winstanley’s, who in The True Leveller’s Standard locates political legitimacy in the commonality of creaturely life, an ecological sense of existence that predates economy and political rule. Winstanley develops this notion of creaturely life by pitting the creation story in Genesis 1, where God makes man and woman at the same time, against the creation story in Genesis 2, where God creates Adam and then Eve from Adam. Initially “Every single Man, Male and Female, is a perfect Creature of himself” and is given the right along with every other creature to enjoy the earth as “a common Treasury of relief for all, both Beasts and Men.”15 For Winstanley, it was only with the coming of A-dam, or the spirit of covetousness, that this ideal of creaturely life was suspended or, in Winstanley’s terms, dammed up. Like Robert Filmer, Winstanley sees A-dam inaugurating patriarchal authority as a prototype for political rule. Winstanley quickly associates the spirit of A-dam with “casting off the Lord and chusing Saul, one like themselves, to be their King.”16 Unlike in Filmer’s, in Winstanley’s account patriarchal authority is fundamentally illegitimate because it displaces a prior sense of common creatureliness. Winstanley and his fellow Diggers (or True Levellers) aim to recover this prior sense of the common, to make “the Earth . . . a Common Treasury again,” by farming the commons and waste grounds at St. George’s Hill.17 “Then,” Winstanley writes, “this enmity in all Lands will cease, for none shall dare to seek a Dominion over others, neither shall any dare to kill another, nor desire more of the Earth than another; for he that will rule over, imprison, oppresse, and kill his fellow Creatures, under what pretence soever, is a destroyer of the Creation.”18 In Upon Appleton House, however, Marvell maintains a more agonistic relation between political rule and creaturely life. Initially at least,

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Marvell seems much more interested in identifying the noncoincidence between political rule and creaturely life than he is in fi nding a political form that can satisfactorily mediate the creaturely order. For this reason, Marvell refers to the Diggers in the context of a passage from William Davenant’s poem Gondibert, where Davenant portrays creaturely life before human dominion: Then strait an universal Herd appears; First gazing on each other in the shade; Wondering with levell’d Eies, and lifted Ears, Then play, whilst yet their Tyrant is unmade.19

Although the tyrant Adam is “yet . . . unmade,” the herd’s wondering eyes and lifted ears anticipates his coming, even as the cattle also attempt to suspend that moment through play. The attempt is unsuccessful since in the next stanza Adam arrives and, in Hobbesian fashion, the cattle become “Horned Subjects” as they trade “sport” for “fears.”20 Marvell refers to the Diggers in the context of this passage in order to suggest a complex relation between dominion and creaturely life: For to this naked equal flat, Which Levellers take pattern at, The villagers in common chase Their cattle, which it closer rase; And what below the scythe increased Is pinched yet nearer by the beast. Such, in the painted world, appeared Dav’nant with th’universal herd. (UAH 449–56)

There are at least three senses of the common in this stanza, each of which jostles against the other two. There is, fi rst of all, the sense of common creatureliness that the Diggers aim to achieve, the “naked equal flat” that the “Levellers take pattern at.” But this sense of the common is invalidated once it is doubled by the cattle who consume the village greens beyond an acceptable level. This second sense of common creatureliness—cattle consuming the green—is less a model to be imitated than it is a counterexample of the common that disproves Winstanley’s vision of creaturely cohabitation. This second sense of common counters the fi rst sense with a model of creaturely behavior based on interest and overconsumption. Mar-

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vell offers a third sense of the common that emerges from the efforts to constrain creaturely consumption. The villagers “in common” chase the cattle, who are themselves consuming the commons, the village greens. This third understanding of the common does not necessarily trump the other two, since, after all, the villagers fail to constrain creaturely consumption. The cattle have already consumed the village greens. Rather than coming down on the side of either the Levellers or Davenant and Hobbes and offering a political model through which the common might be achieved, Marvell develops these various versions to raise the larger problem of government: how to navigate the antagonisms between older political forms and emergent creaturely life. What, Marvell asks us to consider, is the basis for the common? Or, given the multiple senses of the common that Marvell implies—the common as creaturely sharing, the common as creaturely self-interest, and the common as the attempt to contain the creaturely—what forms of commonality emerge in this crisis situation and how do they interrelate? And, the most pressing question of all, how might community be reconstituted in the crises of authority and legitimation brought about by the English Revolution?

MACHIAVELLI AND THE MARRIAGE PLOT In the late 1640s and early 1650s, these questions crystallized in the Engagement Controversy, when the Rump Parliament demanded an oath of allegiance initially from anyone holding a public office but eventually from all male persons in England eighteen years and older. Among Presbyterians and other participants in the Civil Wars for whom Parliament’s decision to execute Charles I represented an abuse of its authority, Engagement led to profound moral crises concerning the duties and responsibilities that subjects owed to an unjust and illegal regime. But among supporters of Engagement, Parliament’s demand that all male subjects take an oath of allegiance afforded the opportunity to develop new theories concerning the legitimacy of government and the agency of citizens in authorizing political rule. Like many of his fellow citizens, Marvell was profoundly affected by the Engagement Controversy and the debates it generated concerning government, citizenship, and the obligations owed to the ruling authority. As John Wallace argued years ago, the Engagement Controversy marked a turning point in Marvell’s intellectual and political life, deeply shaping his political thinking from the late 1640s through the Protectorate and well into the Restoration.21 In Upon Appleton House, Marvell casts these issues of legitimacy and obedience in terms that are erotic as well

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as political, exploring coerced and consensual obedience in the marriage plot that frames the poem. The complex story of Isabel Thwaites’s forced marriage to William Fairfax in 1518 begins the poem’s marriage plot and Thomas Fairfax’s agreement to his daughter Mary Fairfax’s marriage ends the poem.22 In both cases, consent is coerced by a sense of necessity, the necessary continuity of the Fairfacian family which, in Marvell’s account, becomes analogous to the necessary obedience that citizens owe to the new Parliamentary government. More than simply writing in support of Engagement, by staging Engagement debates on the terrain of sexual discourse Marvell discloses an erotic dimension to emerging theories of government that escapes the grasp of most mid-seventeenth-century political theory. On the one hand, the Fairfacian marriage plot compensates for the problem of the founder that Marvell associates with Fairfax. Consent to the necessity of marriage allows Marvell to posit a vision of community based on voluntary submission, while the equation between marriage and necessity also offers Marvell a vantage point from which he can expose assertions of necessity as rhetorically motivated. On the other hand, the marriage plot equates political making with sexual agency, so that the founder of state returns as a sexualized figure of the sovereign, who authorizes and remakes the marriage plot in a decision that is both erotic and political at the same time. The Engagement Controversy is a significant moment in this history of political theology in that it supplants the figure of the divine lawgiver with a Machiavellian understanding of providence. The key figure is Marchamont Nedham. Most Engagers argued that government was legitimated by de facto political power, and some proponents of loyalty to Parliament on these grounds made reference to Machiavelli, most notable Anthony Ascham, whose Discourse (1648) set the terms for subsequent supporters of Engagement.23 But Nedham is unique among Parliament’s supporters in that he uses a Machiavellian rhetoric of providence to argue for the loyalty that English citizens owe to the new government.24 Like Machiavelli, Nedham proposes political history as an ongoing series of renovation and corruption; citing authorities such as Tacitus, Cicero, and Solomon, in The Case of the Commonwealth of England (1650) Nedham argues that dissolution and reconstitution are unavoidable events in the history of government. However, rather than locating renovation within the actions of a founder or reformer, Nedham attributes political making to providential necessity. “The corruption of the old form hath proved the generation of another which is already settled in a way visible and most substantial before all the world; so that ‘tis not to be doubted but, in de-

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spite of opposition, it will have a season of continuance as others have had according to the proportion of time allotted by Divine Providence.”25 Nedham’s attribution might seem to avoid the instrumentalization of religion that accompanies Machiavelli’s discussion of founders and reformers. If providence legitimates de facto power, then there is no need for a Moses or a Numa to feign revelation in order to produce political legitimacy. As it develops, however, Nedham’s argument actually tightens the bond between politics and religious discourses. If providence legitimates political change, then, as Nedham argues, oaths of allegiance made to government and “solemnized with the invocation of God as a witness” (CC 41) are immediately disqualified and rendered null and void once that government ceases to exist: “We plainly see God is not pleased to permit their continuance, since all men will confess that, at least, by a permissive act of Providence, another form of government is erected quite contrary to the old” (46). To think otherwise, Nedham writes, is to be “the madman’s saint” or “the fool’s martyr” (29). Nedham only briefly refers to Machiavelli’s discussion of Moses as an armed prophet in part 1 of The Case of the Commonwealth, broadening the Machiavellian problem of the founder into a more general issue concerning force and governmental authority. Conceptually, he concentrates on Machiavelli’s argument about the need for arms in establishing a new political order. Reading Machiavelli’s argument in the context of Grotius’s writing on the establishment of legitimate authority at the end of civil wars, Nedham proposes that the act of founding a legal order never happens without force and that, in the case of civil war, the winning force has the valid right to rule “as if it had the ratifying consent of the whole body of the people” (40). Rhetorically, however, Nedham rehearses and expands Machiavelli’s insight that the founding of a legal order is ideally accompanied by a prophetic supplement through which obedience is secured, translating Machiavelli’s political assessment about the role of revelation into a discourse of providence that will, he hopes, enable members of his English audience to pledge allegiance to the new government. Consent can legitimately be assumed by a new government if it has superior force, Nedham explicitly argues. But just as strongly, he also implies that consent must be procured through the manipulation of religious belief. Like Nedham, Marvell searches for a persuasive set of terms that might justify loyalty to the new government and, like Nedham, Marvell seeks these terms by turning to a Machiavellian understanding of providence.26 Marvell equates the necessary continuity of the Fairfax family with the providential continuity of the English nation, and this equation lets him

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explore the familial crises as if they were crises concerning loyalty to the state. Unlike Nedham, who obscures the role of the divine lawgiver as he takes up and expands Machiavellian rhetoric, Marvell recasts the lawgiver in explicitly sexual terms in order to probe the complex interactions among agency, history, and erotic imagination at work in political making. Marvell introduces the problem of Engagement with William Fairfax, Thomas Fairfax’s early sixteenth-century ancestor, who is caught between his legal right to marry Isabel Thwaites and his moral obligation to respect religion. Between Thwaites’s engagement to Fairfax and their marriage, she became a novice at Nunappleton Priory, illegitimately persuaded in Marvell’s account by the Prioress’s rhetorical manipulations. After Thwaites becomes a novice, the courts granted Fairfax “the lawful form” (UAH 234) to marry Thwaites, but this only raises a casuistical dilemma: What should he do? He would respect Religion, but not right neglect: For fi rst Religion taught him right, And dazzled not but cleared his sight. Sometimes resolved his sword he draws, But reverenceth then the laws: For Justice still that Courage led; First from a judge, then soldier bred. (225–32)

Caught between the religion that taught him right and the rights against the Priory granted to him by the legal system, Fairfax is faced with a moral dilemma: “What should he do?” Most significant about this dilemma is its mode of expression. Marvell reports the terms of Fairfax’s decision without giving the problem subjective depth. That is, rather than elaborating Fairfax’s dilemma through the processes of reckoning and weighing of options that makes up casuistical reasoning, Marvell reports the dilemma from the perspective of an external observer. This mode of expression is significant because it allows Marvell to resolve Fairfax’s dilemma not through casuistry but through the rhetorical assertion of providence— indeed, through a sense of providence asserted as a rhetorical question: Is this not he whose offspring fierce Shall fight through all the universe; And with successive valor try France, Poland, either Germany;

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Till one, as long since prophesied, His horse through conquered Britain ride? Yet, against fate, his spouse they kept; And the great race would intercept. (241–48)

The question posed in this stanza—“Is this not he?”—resolves the earlier question “What should he do?” with a rhetorical sleight of hand; by referring to the unfolding of future events, the valorous deeds of successive generations, Marvell can resolve Fairfax’s dilemma by naming events that are the result of the very decision that is ostensibly in question. Like Britomart’s love for Artegall, in book 3 of The Faerie Queene, which is motivated by what for her is the future of their union but what for Spenser’s readers is England’s past, here Fairfax’s decision to marry Thwaites is justified and legitimated by a future that Marvell treats as if it were before the moment of decision making already determined.27 When Marvell looks forward to Thomas Fairfax as a conqueror, riding “his horse through conquered Britain,” he gestures toward the role of conquest theory in Nedham’s and other Engagers’ use of Grotius to legitimate the new government. More cagily, when Marvell introduces providence into his poem through a rhetorical question, he locates its force in persuasion rather than divine destiny. Marvell resolves Fairfax’s engagement to Thwaites in the same way that Nedham resolves the problem of political Engagement. Like Nedham, Marvell uses a Machiavellian rhetoric of providence to legitimate a break with an older order—monarchical government in England in Nedham’s case, and the nuns’ control of Thwaites and her estate in Marvell’s—and to justify the establishment of a new order through de facto force. Marvell indicates the coercive aspects of this rhetorical use of providence in his account of Thwaites’s decision, which is conspicuously effaced from the marriage plot not once but twice. In the fi rst instance, Marvell voids Thwaites’s decision to enter the nunnery, her consent to a life of chastity. Marvell spends almost a hundred lines quoting the Prioress of Nunappleton as she attempts to persuade Thwaites to join the order. In the process, he puts his readers in Thwaites’s position, asking us to weigh and measure the Prioress’s appeals as if we were hearing them through her ears. At the end of the Prioress’s speech, however, Marvell abruptly shifts the scene to Fairfax’s decision, as the narrator offers advice on how he should react to Thwaites’s response: “Now Fairfax seek her promised faith: / Religion that dispensèd hath” (197–98). Missing is Thwaites’s deci-

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sion. In this shifting of the scene from the Prioress’s appeals to Fairfax’s response, Thwaites becomes something like an agentless auditor, as her capacity for decision making is canceled by Fairfax’s dilemma. In the second instance of effacement, Marvell gestures toward but then quickly withdraws from the scene of the forced marriage. The only real jewel in the nunnery, Marvell explains, is “truly bright and holy Thwaites / That weeping at the alter waits” (263–64). Although we get only a glimpse of her tears, Thwaites’s weeping at the altar suggests a more sympathetic perspective on her decision to enter the nunnery than the surrounding lines would suggest. Rather than developing this perspective, however, Marvell immediately rearranges the scene, bequeathing Thwaites’s tears to the nuns (who bemoan the loss of their wrongly gotten child) and then vanishing the entire nunnery altogether in the mode of Spenserian romance: Thenceforth (as when th’enchantment ends, The castle vanishes or rends) The wasting cloister with the rest Was in one instance dispossessed. (269–72)

As with the House of Busyrane at the end of book 3 of The Faerie Queene, the scene of sexual coercion simply disappears, here with the entry of the “glad youth,” the groom who “away her bears” (265). Especially when read alongside Marvell’s rhetorical account of providence, the double effacement of Thwaites from the story of her marriage suggests a counterplot, legible in its conspicuous absence, that centers on the role of female chastity in the configuration of political agency. If Fairfax stands for the promise of a new order legitimated by a Machiavellian rhetoric of providence, female chastity stands for the promises and costs of that rhetoric for political agency as Thwaites is caught in a dialectic between coercion and consent. For Fairfax’s decision to be authoritative and, moreover, for the Fairfax family to have legitimacy, Thwaites must become the subject of coerced consent and give up a prior sense of agency and freedom. Fairfax’s dilemma displaces Thwaites’s decision to embrace a life of chastity and the liberty that, as the Prioress explains, attends it: “These walls restrain the world without, / But hedge our liberty about” (99–100). And the forced marriage then nullifies that decision as Thwaites is dispossessed of her capacity for decision making. At the same time, the story of the forced marriage also suggests a counterplot in which chastity holds a certain capacity for decision making that Marvell holds in poten-

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tia. Thwaites’s capacity for decision making may be entirely ruined in her forced marriage to Fairfax, but in representing Thwaites’s autonomy negatively, Marvell invests the figure of the chaste woman with the potential for enacting a more sovereign decision that cannot entirely be coerced by rhetorical or even brute force. Marvell gives this potential a more positive spin at the end of the poem when he takes up the prospective marriage of Mary Fairfax, Thomas Fairfax’s daughter and Thwaites’s great-great-great granddaughter. Like Thwaites, Mary is caught between chastity and marriage. Although Marvell counsels chastity as the more authentic and purer site of virtue, nevertheless he looks forward to her marriage as the installation of a new form of political agency. In praising Mary’s chastity, Marvell brings together the role of the founder that her father failed to achieve with the autonomy that was denied to Thwaites. “She . . . already is the law / Of all her sex” (655–56). More than just an exemplary figure, chastity endows Mary with the force of a republican lawgiver, one who gives the law of chastity to others while also embodying that law to herself (auto-nomos). Like Cromwell in The First Anniversary, Mary is at one and the same time a subject of the law, a king who rules over the law, and as both, is also “something more” (FA 389). This is why, in Marvell’s account, Mary almost magically confers order on the natural world. Like a divine lawgiver, “her flames, in heaven tried,” Mary bestows order on a receptive natural world: No new-born comet such a train Draws through the sky, nor star new-slain. For straight those giddy rockets fail, Which from the putrid earth exhale, But by her flames, in heaven tried, Nature is wholly vitrified. . . . She straightness on the woods bestows, To her the meadow sweetness owes; Nothing could make the river be So crystal-pure but only she. (UAH 683–88, 691–94)

Especially with the claim that her flames vitrify the natural world, turn it into glass, Marvell obliquely casts Mary as a Mosaic founder. These lines refer to St. John’s vision in Revelation of the vitrification of the oceans at the end of days: “I saw as it were a sea of glass mingled with fi re; and

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them that had gotten the victory over the beast, and over his image, and over his mark, and over the number of his name, stand on the sea of glass, having the harps of God” (KJV Rev. 15:2). St. John follows up this verse by describing the song that the victorious sing as the song of Moses, the song from Exodus 15 that the Israelites sang after crossing the Red Sea, and the same song that Thomas Fairfax translated and that Marvell took up and reversed in the middle section of his poem. For St. John, the song sung at the end of days on the sea of glass is the typological fulfi llment of the Mosaic promise. In referring to this passage, Marvell casts Mary through a similar operation of political typology, suggesting that through her capacity to embody “the law / Of all her sex” she can overcome the limitations that beset both her father and her great-great-great grandmother and, in the process, offer a model of governmental organization that resolves the crises of the English Revolution. But it is only in her decision to marry that the potential represented in chastity is actualized. As Fairfax’s only heir, Mary’s decision to wed ensures the continuity of the Fairfacian line even if it means the end of the Fairfacian name. By emphasizing Mary’s decision as the determining factor, however, Marvell suggests that the form of government that Mary fi nally bestows is one based on voluntary submission to the demands of necessity. Marvell represents this decision as a cut. Mary, . . . with grace more divine Supplies beyond her sex the line; And, like a sprig of mistletoe, On the Fairfacian oak does grow; Whence, for some universal good, The priest shall cut the sacred bud; While her glad parents most rejoice, And make their destiny their choice. (737–44)

The topical connotations of this cut associate Mary’s decision to wed and the loss of virginity that this decision entails with the violence of the English Revolution. John Rogers argues that this cut recalls the execution of Charles I and that the surprising violence of this image suggests a sense of destruction that extends beyond the “universal good” that Marvell announces. Especially since the oak was a symbol for the Stuarts, the cutting off of the bud looks forward to the potential “tearing up of the sacred oak of England, root and branch.”28 But the cut serves a double function. If this

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is a cut that destroys political authority, unleashing an almost Hobbesian state of nature, it is also a cut that repairs the violence that has been unleashed. What contains the potentially endless destruction of the revolution is voluntary submission, as Mary willingly gives up her chastity and her “glad parents . . . / Make their destiny their choice,” consent to the coercive force of their own rhetorically posited destiny. In a scene reminiscent of Nedham’s arguments for Engagement, Marvell casts historical rupture within a broader conception of historical necessity in order to portray coerced consent as the founding act from which new models of community, governmental authority, and political agency begin to emerge. More than actualize the implied counterplot of Isabel Thwaites, Mary’s decision makes voluntary submission the new condition for participation in the Fairfax line. As a chaste young girl, Mary embodies the figure of the lawmaker, but she only becomes a lawmaker for a brief moment when she decides to wed, that is, when she submits to the demands of the Fairfacian family in such a way that remakes the family through the relation between coercion and consent by which Nunappleton previously passed into the family’s possession. Like Rogers, I fi nd in Marvell’s treatment of Mary a “set of images for the curious, distant ideals of liberal agency and liberal organization,” but unlike Rogers, I think that Marvell is more attentive to the role of erotic imagination that attends liberal agency and governmental organization.29 In representing liberal agency through a decision concerning chastity, Marvell includes the problem of sexual knowledge in his account of governmental organization. Virginity might be a state of innocence, but chastity is a state of experience. As Milton’s Comus makes clear, chastity can be a virtue only to the extent to which it involves controlling, regulating, and sublimating one’s own sexual passions. Moreover, since this control amounts to not acting on those passions, it is nearly impossible to tell whether or not Mary’s sexual passions are her own or are the product of Marvell’s erotic imagination. Marvell certainly attributes sexual knowledge to Mary when he describes her ability to navigate the advances of young men whose “tears,” “sighs,” “praise,” and “feigned complying innocence” are all covert attempts to take her virginity (715– 18). It is in “knowing where this ambush lay” that Mary is able to escape what Marvell calls “the roughest way” (719–20). But Marvell’s attribution rebounds back on himself as speaker and begs the question of who knows what. Does Mary have sexual knowledge? Or does Marvell impute sexual knowledge to Mary in order to cast her as a paragon of virtue? There is no decisive answer to these questions, but given the hyperbolic nature of Marvell’s descriptions, the latter is at the very least a strong possibil-

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ity. Moreover, as Victoria Silver has cannily observed, Marvell’s poetry is populated with knowing little girls who “are made politic (that is to say, preternaturally knowing and formal and terrible) precisely because the speaker’s desire renders them precocious.” Rather than an attribute, she argues, “their intelligence is a sublimation.”30 Locating voluntary submission in the messy epistemological space of erotic imagination lets Marvell make a Machiavellian point about force and fiction. Since Mary’s chastity is as much and perhaps more a product of Marvell’s imagination as it is her own virtuous action, following Machiavelli Marvell is able to suggest that the assertion of a new political order requires a maker or founder whose presence is mythic and fictional as much as it is anything else. And especially an order legitimated by voluntary submission implies submission to a maker whose presence is located as much in the fantasy of those who submit as it is in the rulers or governors who govern the new order. Hobbes is sensitive to the same problem. In his Leviathan, published a little more than a year before Marvell wrote Upon Appleton House, Hobbes develops his theory of the state in which individuals consent to be governed and, through that consent, cause “the generation” of the sovereign or “great leviathan“ who rules over them (L 17.13.114). For Hobbes, the sovereign is authorized and made real through voluntary submission, but Marvell offers a different account. As we shall see, voluntary submission or coerced consent, and in Marvell’s account they amount to the same thing, cannot be understood without some attention to erotic fantasies of power generated by the agreement to surrender willingly to the vicissitudes of political history. There is, Marvell suggests, sexual complicity with authoritarian rule that supplements the political fiction of free choice.

LIBERTINE PLEASURES Marvell supplements the plot of voluntary submission with an account of imagination that more fully explores the mediating role of erotic fantasy in the formation of communal bonds. We get a brief glimpse into Marvell’s sense of imagination toward the beginning of Upon Appleton House when the Prioress attempts to persuade Isabel Thwaites to join the nunnery. Initially, the Prioress praises Thwaites as the site of ecstatic revelation in which “something more than human speaks” (UAH 144); she then continues by transforming this “something more” into the scene of nuns in bed together “All night embracing arm in arm, / Like crystal pure with cotton warm” (191–92). Arguing against a line of criticism that sees the lesbian

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nuns as simply perverse, Judith Haber points out that the Prioress’s rhetorical appeals disclose a set of problems around withdrawal and the desire for solitude that plague Fairfax and Marvell as well. 31 More than that, the Prioress’s appeals imply that Thwaites’s decision to enter the nunnery is motivated by a set of shared fantasies. Marvell is careful to avoid showing how the Prioress’s rhetorical solicitations affected Thwaites’s decision; nevertheless, by making this fantasy scene the vehicle of rhetorical persuasion, Marvell suggests that Thwaites was persuaded to join the nunnery by a fantasy scene of lesbian eroticism in which “pleasure” and “piety” converge and culminate (171). Rather than the product of the individual mind, imagination is here shaped by and shapes communal bonds. 32 Marvell develops the social aspects of imagination most fully in his handling of Marc-Antoine Girard de Saint-Amant’s lyric poem “La Solitude,” fi rst published in 1619 and widely circulating thereafter. Various details that Marvell encounters as he wanders about Nunappleton estate fi nd their point of origin in “La Solitude,” including a pair of linked oaks (489–96), a nightingale singing on a thorny bush (513–20), and several others that I discuss at length below. 33 However, the poem’s influence on Upon Appleton House extends beyond a series of verbal echoes and includes Marvell’s treatment of solitude and male friendship. Saint-Amant dedicates “La Solitude” to Charles II, Monsieur de Bernières, president of the parliament of Normandy. As Saint-Amant wanders through the Norman countryside, he falls in love with what he sees because he imagines that Bernières has also fallen in love with the same scenes. Saint-Amant explains this dynamic at the end of “La Solitude,” when he writes, “Je l’ayme pour l’amour de toy / Connoissant que ton humeur l’ayme” (“La Solitude” 195–96), roughly translated as “I love [the country side] for my love of you / Knowing that your fancy loves it.” In Saint-Amant’s account, solitude is not quite the same thing as being alone; rather, in being alone Saint-Amant experiences a sense of sameness through his sympathetic identification with Bernières’s fancy—or, more precisely, with what he imagines to be Bernières’s fancy. Marvell interpolates this structure of readership, recognition, and sympathetic identification into Upon Appleton House in the poem’s middle section. When Marvell enters the poem, explicitly calling attention to himself as its speaker—“And now to the abyss I pass / Of that unfathomable grass” (369–70)—he repeats SaintAmant’s version of solitude, wandering Nunappleton estate as if he were alone but in fact encountering the landscape in what he imagines to be the same way that Fairfax would, were he looking at the same scenes. Nigel Smith notes in his defi nitive edition of Marvell’s poems that Upon Apple-

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ton House only obliquely and generally refers to events from Fairfax’s life, avoiding rigorous topicality and journalistic attention to detail. 34 Marvell is less interested in the events themselves than he is in how they shape and form Fairfax’s experience of his own estate. Following the model of reading developed by Saint-Amant, Marvell forges a bond between himself and Fairfax based on recognition and the sympathetic identification of imagination to explore male friendship as a mode of sociality that supplements voluntary submission to de facto authority. Fairfax composed a verse translation of Saint-Amant’s poem and included it in his manuscript collection, The Imployment of My Solitude. Although we have no means for dating his poem, Edward Bliss Reed, the editor of Fairfax’s manuscript, conjectures that Marvell fi rst encountered Saint-Amant through Fairfax. 35 I extend Reed’s conjecture by proposing that Marvell interpolated Saint-Amant’s poem into Upon Appleton House to indicate, explore, and manipulate the fantasies that disturb and nourish communal life. Marvell would have been attracted to Saint-Amant’s understanding of male friendship as he often evinced a deep and erotic attachment to the complexities of imitation. Paul Hammond has argued that Marvell often casts epistemological questions about “how we recognize similarity and difference” in terms of homoerotic desire. 36 Imitating Fairfax’s translation of a poem that focuses on sympathetic identification between men certainly emphasizes the links between imitation and male friendship; at the same time, it begs the question of homoerotic desire and its role in the constitution of social bonds. But Marvell’s engagement with Saint-Amant extends beyond imitation and translation into the scenes of erotic attachment, scenes that Marvell elaborates by deducing and staging himself in relation to a set of intentions motivating Fairfax’s verse translations. As Harold Love reminds us, the English country house was an intense site of reading, writing, and manuscript circulation. 37 This was certainly the case at Nunappleton estate. Upon his retreat from public life, Fairfax amassed an impressive collection of printed book and manuscripts; wrote several memorials and numerous letters; translated a variety of works, including chapters of Hermes Trismegistus and some military writings by Vegetius; wrote a history of the Church before the Reformation; and worked on his 656-page Imployment of My Solitude. 38 Treating Nunappleton estate as a site of textual production as well as a geographic site and a space of family relations, Marvell aggressively fashions homoerotic bonds played out on the scenes of Fairfax’s fantasy. Looking at Marvell’s culminating treatment of “La Solitude” in Upon Appleton House gives a sense of the pleasure that Marvell derives from

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inserting himself into what he takes to be Fairfax’s fantasy. In a passage I discussed in section 1 of this chapter, Marvell imagines Fairfax surveying his estate and, in the process, mistaking a winding river, the Little Nile, for a serpent: No serpent new nor crocodile Remains behind our little Nile; Unless itself you will mistake, Among these meadows the only snake. (629–32)

Fairfax’s misrecognition alludes to a simile in “La Solitude” in which Saint-Amant compares the “glissans” (“La Solitude” 35) or gliding of a stream with the movement of a serpent in the grass. Initially the stream moves in torrents, but eventually the waters calm as they wind through a forest scene: “Puis glissans sous les arbrisseaux / Ainsi que des serpens sur l’herbe” (356), or, as Fairfax translates it, “Then glidinge under th’arbored banks / As windinge Serpents in the grass” (Imployment 554). More generally, though, what Fairfax sees and does not see at the same time is Marvell, and especially Marvell’s experience of pleasure. Immediately following Fairfax’s “mistake,” Marvell describes the pleasure that he feels as he fishes while luxuriating on the river’s edge: “Abandoning my lazy side,” he writes, “Stretched as a bank unto the tide” (UAH 643–44). He claims this pleasure in Fairfax’s blind spot, showing that Fairfax does not see in order to enact what Fairfax does not see. And to emphasize the interaction between misrecognition and pleasure, Marvell concludes this scene by concealing his enjoyment for fear that Mary Fairfax will catch him: But now away my hooks, my quills, And angles, idle utensils. The young Maria walks tonight: Hide trifl ing youth thy pleasures slight. ‘Twere shame that such judicious eyes Should with such toys a man surprise . . . (649–54)

Representing his pleasure as that of a “trifl ing youth,” Marvell stages his enjoyment between an act of recognition that is fundamentally a misperception and a potential act of recognition that has been prevented and foreclosed.

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Although the quill that Marvell hides is a fishing instrument used like a cork to indicate that a fish has taken the bait, nevertheless the pleasure that Marvell envisages involves writing as much as it involves relaxation. This complex scene of misperception and prevented recognition repeats and unfolds in baroque fashion the opening scene of “La Solitude.” SaintAmant’s poem begins with the speaker praising solitude and surveying the landscape, until he stumbles across nymphs and naiads bathing in a stream unaware of his presence. Saint-Amant emphasizes the voyeuristic pleasure that he takes in watching: Que j’ayme ce Marests paisible! Il est tout bordé d’aliziers, D’aulnes, des aules, et d’oziers, A qui le fer n’est point nuisible! Les Nymphes y cherchans le frais, S’y viennent fournir de quenoüilles, De pipeaux, de joncs, et de glais, Où l’on voit sauter les grenoüilles, Qui de frayeur s’y vont cacher Si tost qu’on veut s’en approcher. (“La Solitude” 41–50)

Fairfax translates the passage as follows: The quiet Marshe I loue to see That bounded is wth willowes round With Sallow, Elme, & Popler tree Wch Iron yett hath giuen no wound The Nimphes that Come to take fresh Ayre Here Rockes & Spindles them prouide Mongst Sedge & Bulrush we may heare The leping Froges Se wher they hide Themselues for feare when they espye A Man or Beast approaching nye . . . (Imployment 555)

When Marvell represents himself fishing by the side of the Little Nile, he repeats this moment from “La Solitude,” cagily presenting himself as if he were one of the nymphs whom Saint-Amant spies. Or, since Marvell effectively puts Fairfax in the role of the spectator, it would be more accurate to

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say that Marvell presents himself as if he were one of the nymphs whom Fairfax imagines spying as he translates Saint-Amant’s poem. Following Wendy Wall, we might call this moment an instance of literary crossdressing, a moment in which a male author authorizes himself by identifying with female speakers and characters. 39 Wall is mainly concerned with sixteenth-century writers who authorize themselves in print, but Marvell goes in a different direction, authorizing himself as a manuscript poet by tapping into his patron’s supposed fantasy. More than simply the pleasure of stretching out—“to suspend my sliding foot / On th’osiers underminèd root” (UAH 645–46)—this pleasure involves dressing up and performing a role scripted in the relation between “La Solitude” and Fairfax’s translation: “Oh what a pleasure ‘tis to hedge / My temples here with heavy sedge” (641–42). Especially given the reference to “osiers,” which echoes line 43 of Saint-Amant’s verse, and the reference to “sedge,” which echoes line 47 of Fairfax’s translation, the pleasure that Marvell experiences is to be found in waiting to be seen, in imagining himself to be one of the creatures whom Fairfax, acting out the role of the speaker from Saint-Amant’s poem, voyeuristically enjoys watching. Instead of taking pleasure in spying upon nymphs who do not know that they are being seen, Marvell’s pleasure involves soliciting the homoerotic look of Fairfax, who does not directly recognize, at least at fi rst, the scene that is being staged before his reading eyes. Marvell’s use of Saint-Amant needs to be placed alongside his attempts to elicit the reading practices and spectatorship associated with the masque.40 At the same time that Marvell takes “La Solitude” as a model for his own relation to Fairfax, he also turns the landscape into a theater of conscience in order to provoke Fairfax’s moral reflection upon his own past actions. Immediately before Marvell enters the poem, he praises Fairfax “For he did, with his utmost skill, / Ambition weed, but conscience till” (UAH 353–54). As the poem continues, however, this metaphorical link between Fairfax’s moral self-examination and the land becomes more complex and less congratulatory as Marvell asks Fairfax to recognize his own moral dilemma in the scenes he sees staged before him. Marvell represents the land and the labor performed on it as a series of allegorical tableaux that obliquely reflect key moments of Fairfax’s career, asking Fairfax to reflect upon his decisions and actions in relation to the decisions and actions he sees acted out before him. The Caroline masque often navigated the double function of reinforcing royal or aristocratic authority while also calling for a critique of governmental policy. One only need think of Inigo Jones and James Shirley’s Triumph of Peace, which celebrated Charles’s

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authority as sovereign while developing a diplomatic but unequivocal critique of the expansion of prerogative. Marvell underscores the demand for moral reflection by simulating the masque’s model of spectatorship. He introduces the mowers, whom he calls Israelites, through the language of the court masque. “No scene that turns with engines strange / Does oft’ner than these meadows change” (385–86). And several stanzas later, he repeats the language of the masque when he contextualizes the passage on the Levellers. “The scene again withdrawing brings /A new and empty face of things” (441–42). In both these instances, Marvell references significant moments from Fairfax’s public life—his role in defeating Charles I and in routing the Leveller rebellion—and, staging these moments as if Fairfax were watching them in a masque, asks his employer to reflect upon his prior actions. Marvell’s use of the masque to provoke Fairfax’s moral reflection is not opposed to his use of “La Solitude” to derive a model of homoerotic pleasure based on the sympathetic identification of fancy. Rather, the moral reflection that he aims to provoke is part of that economy of pleasure. Marvell’s primary purpose in eliciting Fairfax’s moral reflection is to enjoy the specter of Fairfax judging. If on one level Marvell encourages a moral reading so that Fairfax can see something about himself that he may not want to face, on another level Marvell encourages moral reflection in order to enjoy what he imagines to be Fairfax’s sense of guilt. Fairfax’s guilt becomes for Marvell an object of erotic pleasure. It is for this reason that Marvell’s expression of pleasure and his use of the masque both culminate in his longing to be punished. Bind me ye woodbinds in your twines, Curl me about ye gadding vines, And oh so close your circles lace, That I may never leave this place: But, lest your fetters prove too weak, Ere I your silken bondage break, Do you, O brambles, chain me too, And courteous briars nail me through. (609–16)

Marvell’s longing to be punished specifically targets Fairfax as his masque’s primary viewer: “see how Chance’s better wit / Could with a masque my studies hit!” (585–86). The pleasure that he takes in imagining being bound, laced, chained, and nailed is a theatrical pleasure performed

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as a response to Fairfax’s conscience. It is not difficult to hear in the lines above a reference to Christ’s passion. Especially in the binding and nailing, Marvell takes the role of Christ in relation to Fairfax’s guilt. However, his purpose is not to expiate Fairfax’s guilty conscience but to repair the social order that has been thrown into crisis by Fairfax’s inaction. Rather than playing the scourge of conscience, cruelly chiding Fairfax for his ambivalence and backsliding in the revolutionary cause, Marvell adopts the role of the sufferer, attempting through the pleasure he takes in being bound, laced, chained, and nailed to register the crisis of political making that Fairfax’s backsliding has brought about and, in so doing, to reclaim the possibility of founding a new order through pleasures and vicissitudes of creaturely life. Following Freud, we might call Marvell’s relationship with Fairfax masochistic, since it becomes the “meeting-place” between “guilt and sexual love.”41 But how we take that meeting place is entirely in question. For Freud, masochistic enjoyment reinforces guilt, specifically the guilt that emerges from a sexual love for the father. Whereas an everyday sense of culpability might be satisfied by a form of punishment that meets the crime, Freud argues that the pleasure that the masochist takes in being punished is a substitute for the original pleasure that the masochist takes in the crime. Rather than repairing transgressions against the law by submitting to an appropriate form of punishment, the masochist equates punishment with transgression, creating a sly end-run around the demands of the law. In this way, masochism sets up a recursive loop in which the enjoyment that the masochist takes in being punished produces and sustains a sense of guilt that comes from transgression instead of satisfying and releasing it. Deleuze critiques Freud on this score, arguing that the guilt associated with masochism does not belong to the masochist per se but to a paternal image that the masochist is trying to manage. Through a philosophical and political analysis of the literary writings of Sacher-Masoch, the nineteenth-century Eastern European author after whom masochism is named, Deleuze proposes that masochistic enjoyment is a distancing mechanism that recognizes and attempts to reformulate the cruelty upon which the patriarchal order is founded. The masochist purges himself of any likeness he has to the father and “thus liberates himself in preparation for a rebirth in which the father will have no part.”42 In Deleuze’s account, this liberation is preparatory rather than actual. What makes masochism philosophically, politically, and, in the case of Marvell, poetically interesting is that it isolates a sense of potentiality among the ruins of an order that is being or has been displaced.

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In both The Horatian Ode and The First Anniversary of the Government, Marvell monumentalizes Cromwell as the founder of a new republic by focusing on groups who, in opposing Cromwell’s authority, are desecrated by his overwhelming force. David Norbrook emphasizes Marvell’s aesthetic experimentation, arguing that Marvell turns to Lucan’s Pharsalia in order to develop a republican sublime that captures the uniqueness of Cromwell’s rule.43 In the Cromwell poems, the aesthetic force of the sublime is materialized in spectacles of political violence so that, in The Horatian Ode, Marvell images Cromwell’s compelling nature (“’Tis madness to resist or blame / The force of angry heaven’s flame” [25–26]) through the “ashamed” Irish (73) whom Cromwell had recently slaughtered, and in The First Anniversary Marvell elevates Cromwell by praising his persecution of the Fifth Monarchists. In both poems, Marvell imagines political making through a Machiavellian sense of cruelty in which the new takes shape through the desecration of potential enemies and the theatricalization of political violence. In Upon Appleton House by contrast, Marvell develops a different model of political making. Instead of monumentalizing the founder by celebrating Machiavellian acts of cruelty, Marvell shatters the figure of the founder in order to lay hold of the potentiality that is released. Taking Fairfax’s guilt as a site of sympathetic identification along the lines that his complex use of Saint-Amant would suggest, Marvell then theatricalizes sympathy, his desire to be punished not to do away with Fairfax’s guilt but to reformulate political making through the density of creaturely life. I argued above that Marvell focuses on Fairfax’s verse translation of Exodus 15 to reverse the direction of the Mosaic constitution. Instead of containing and shaping creaturely life through the imposition of law and authority, Marvell releases creaturely life from Mosaic authority and asks how a new sense of community might be fashioned. He suggests an answer through the relation he attempts to forge with Fairfax, not a sense of community that reformulates and reasserts the state by demanding new forms of authority but a sense of community organized around the promise of creaturely bonds. Marvell takes up the Mosaic constitution in his exploration of Fairfax’s conscience, the sense of guilt over the role that he played in the English Revolution. This guilt can be felt in Fairfax’s mapping of Hebrew history. In The Imployment of My Solitude, Fairfax includes verse translations of select moments from Hebrew scripture that highlight the dilemmas of conscience that seem to make up political history. Intentionally or not, these poems show a writer deeply disturbed by the prospect of a dead

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monarch. In The Imployment of My Solitude, Hebrew history begins with “Moses Songe” and the promise of liberation from tyranny, but Fairfax quickly shifts the focus to scenes of mourning. In “Davids Lamentation,” a translation of David’s soliloquy lamenting the deaths of Saul and Jonathan, which he himself brought about (2 Samuel 1), Fairfax emphasizes both the scandal of a people defeating their monarch and the difficulty of fi nding an appropriate political or psychological response to such a situation. Ther th’ Mighty fell, Saule lost his sheild In this shamfull feild On him regardless they did treade As if noe oyle had touch’d his head. . . . (Imployment 419)

In “Hezekiahs Songe,” the least literal and most inventive of his translations, Fairfax probes the mental state of a king who has been condemned to death. In Isaiah, Hezekiah’s lament begins with him recalling his sickness: “I said in the cutting off of my days, I shall go to the gates of the grave” (Isa. 38:10). Fairfax develops the figure of “cutting” to include the cutting of flowers: In Cuttinge off my days I said Must I goe downe to deaths cold shade Youth’s flowre noe sooner Budd but Blast Be Cropt and to obliuion be cast. (Imployment 422)

The purpose of this image is to link Hezekiah’s lament to the death of Charles I. Associating the cutting off of days with the budding flowers that populate Cavalier poetry and its carpe diem sensibilities, Fairfax implicitly frames the Hebrew monarch within context of the culture of the Caroline court. Especially since Hezekiah repented his sins and, therefore, recovered from his sickness, Fairfax’s association projects what he sees as a better, but also impossible, alternative to the English Commonwealth— an alternative future in which Charles I would have repented his wrongdoing and saved the institution of the monarchy. Fairfax deepens his sense of crisis by turning the lament into something that resembles a Shakespearean soliloquy. The “Songe” continues with Hezekiah reflecting on the ontological implications of his illness. “O whatt a little space is this,”

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he groans, “Twixt Being & not Beinge is” (424). Sounding more like Shakespeare’s Richard II than the Hebrew monarch who ultimately fi nds redemption, Fairfax’s Hezekiah looks forward to an irreparable loss that Isaiah’s repenting monarch averts but that England’s monarch did not. Marvell provokes this sense of guilt in an especially powerful image of Charles’s execution. In The Horatian Ode, Marvell portrays Charles’s execution as the sympathetic backdrop against which Cromwell emerges as a new founder of state. In Upon Appleton House, by contrast, Marvell represents the destruction of the monarchy through the promise of a punishment that strongly links the present to the past and, through this link, appears to prohibit the emergence of a new order. Wandering in the woods, the poet comes across an oak—an emblem of monarchy in general and the Stuarts in particular—that has been felled by a woodpecker’s “feeble stroke” (552). Marvell complicates the reference to the regicide by explaining that the woodpecker is able to fell the oak only because it has been internally corrupted by a “traitor-worm” (554) who hollowed out the oak by eating up its insides. This jarring image gives shape to the worries that haunted Fairfax at Charles’s execution. During Charles’s trial, Fairfax was described as “much distracted,” and afterward he was “melancholy mad.”44 The execution of Charles I does more than punish a bad king. It destroys the institution of the monarchy. Given this implication, the scene of retribution that follows is quite striking: And yet that worm triumphs not long, But serves to feed the hewel’s young. While the oak seems to fall content, Viewing the treason’s punishment. (557–60)

These lines confi rm that Fairfax is right to be worried about the future that his actions have unleashed, and they further argue that Fairfax’s casuistical dilemma is a form of punishment that Charles enjoys watching from beyond the grave. Instead of consoling Fairfax, Marvell provokes and exacerbates his dilemma. It is worth noting here that Saint-Amant portrays a similar scene in “La Solitude.” Midway through the poem, he comes across an accursed tree, a “bois maudit” (“La Solitude” 85), upon which a youth hanged himself for love of a nymph “Qui d’un seul regard de pitié, / Ne daigna voir son amitié” (89–90), who had no pity for the youth, even though she saw his love for her. Judged by heaven for her inaction, the nymph is forced to look upon the tree forever, “Tousjours son

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crime devant soy” (100), her crime ever in her sight. Fairfax translates “La Solitude” up to the point where Saint-Amant describes the youth’s suicide but, perhaps innocently, he omits the scene of retribution. By supplying the missing scene, Marvell recasts Fairfax’s omission as intentional, suggesting that Fairfax stopped short because the nymph’s inaction was too much like his own for him to face. Imagining this scene from the perspective of Fairfax’s crime, Marvell recasts it by underscoring not the suffering of Fairfax per se but, more precisely, the contentment that Charles I must feel in watching that suffering from beyond the grave. Cromwell may be able to keep at bay “The spirits of the shady night” (HO 118)—the ghosts that figure the memory of the execution of Charles I. But Fairfax cannot. Instead, Marvell imagines Fairfax haunted by ghosts of the past whose enjoyment in his suffering sustains his indecision by preventing any easy or clear resolution. Most remarkable about this moment, however, is that Marvell claims the oak’s enjoyment as his own. This is not to suggest that Marvell reasserts monarchy in the face of its demise, as if he were reacting conservatively to the changes brought about by the execution of Charles I by reasserting a system of government or organization of the state that has been displaced. Nor does it mean that Marvell takes a cruel pleasure in provoking and figuring Fairfax’s punishment. Rather, Marvell derives a sense of possibility from the scandal of Charles’s execution and then sublates that sense of possibility into the unique social bond that he creates with Fairfax. Following his encoded description of Charles’s execution, he turns his attention to the leaves scattered by the felled oak and associates them with the signs and symbols that enable prophetic interpretation. Out of these scattered sibyl’s leaves Strange prophecies my fancy weaves: And in one history consumes, Like the Mexique paintings, all the plumes, What Rome, Greece, Palestine ere said I in this light mosaic read. Thrice happy he who, not mistook, Hath read in Nature’s mystic book. (UAH 577–84)

As the leaves from the felled oak metamorphose into sibylline leaves, Marvell implies that the state of emergency brought about by Charles’s execution has infused the field of meaning, and historical meaning in

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particular, with a sense of the newly emergent. Identifying with the oak leaves, Marvell becomes more than an “inverted tree” (568). He plays the role of the emergent that was released by the execution of Charles I. These leaves demand prophetic interpretation that Marvell cannot complete but can only name as incomplete: “strange prophecies.” Rather than interpret these signs, Marvell dresses up in them, imagining the leaves becoming an “antic cope” that he puts on “Like some great prelate of the grove” (591–92). Marvell explains this image with the pun on “mosaic.” As a multiplicity within the creaturely world, these leaves scattered by the felled oak form a pattern discernible to those who know how to read the Book of Nature, and as a particularly creaturely multiplicity, these leaves also represent the underside of the Mosaic constitution, the creaturely order that Fairfax’s decision to retire has released. In the Hermetic tradition that so fascinated Fairfax, the Book of Nature is the more authentic scripture alongside which Moses’s writings must be read if their truth is to be discerned. But in Marvell’s hands, the Book of Nature becomes a new locus of political making that compensates for the failures of the founder of state. Instead of a making imposed upon the creaturely order, this is a sense of making that emerges through the made.

SOLITUDE AND SOCIETY Like a number of his contemporaries who were also grappling with the crises in government brought about by the English Revolution, Marvell develops a vision of community based on voluntary submission to de facto power. But he is also acutely aware of the erotic dimensions of community, which leads him to supplement his account of voluntary submission with a vision of community constituted by poetic address and more attentive to affective bonds, sympathetic imagination, and erotic fantasies. Reinhart Koselleck explains this division between political authority and sociality that I have been discussing as a story about Hobbes and Locke—a story, that is, about the emergence of the liberal state. In Leviathan, Hobbes nullifies the force of moral and religious censure by making a strong division between the state of nature and the authority of the state. The state of nature is the space of private interests that inevitably come into confl ict, and the state itself can resolve these confl icts only by asserting a public interest that effectively displaces private interest. As Koselleck puts it, for Hobbes “the public interest, about which the sovereign alone has the right to decide, no longer lies in the jurisdiction of conscience. Conscience, which becomes alienated from the state, turns into private morality.”45

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Locke revises Hobbes’s account by turning the state of nature into the site of social norms that the state can never fully totalize. While Locke agrees with Hobbes that “men uniting into politic societies” have given up to the state their right to use force against their fellow citizens, nevertheless he also adds that “they retain still the power of thinking well or ill,” and this power becomes the basis of a collective moral judgment by which civil society measures the actions of the state.46 Moreover, since judgment is produced more or less immanently through social interaction, it has a normative force that reclaims public interest against the state. “It is no longer the sovereign who decides,” Koselleck writes; with Locke “it is the citizens who constitute the moral laws by their judgment, just as merchants determine a trade value.” 47 For Koselleck, this division between politics and society initiates a crisis that defi nes modernity. Society tries to compensate for the state but in effect “skips the political aporia,” the necessity of political decision making, turning politics into a heteronymous arena of reason and action that stands in the way of social progress.48 Koselleck’s reading of Hobbes and Locke helps to place Marvell’s poem within a broad set of efforts to redefi ne government after the English Revolution. But this does not make Marvell into a protoliberal. In the account that Locke gives in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, the collective aspect of social norms are founded by the coercive pleasure of recognition. Social norms, he argues, are buttressed by a desire for “commendation” and good reputation that becomes the motor for obedience to immanently produced rules, customs, and habits of behavior and acting.49 Marvell’s poem suggests that pleasure also complicates this vision of society in ways that go beyond Locke’s explanation and Koselleck’s as well. Social norms occupy a muddled, middle ground between Hobbes’s sense of absolute self-interest in the state of nature and Locke’s sense of the public interest that emerges through civil society, a middle ground in which pleasure is neither public nor private because it is social. For Locke, moral censure is fundamentally what he calls a “law of fashion.” It is driven by the whimsical and capricious nature of social recognition itself. In this model of social recognition, solitude becomes a limit-case, one that Locke fi nds utterly unthinkable: He must be of a strange and unusual constitution, who can content himself to live in constant disgrace and disrepute with his own particular society. Solitude many men have sought, and have been reconciled to; but nobody, that has the least thought or sense of a man about him, can live in society under the constant dislike and ill opinion of

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his familiars, and those he converses with. This is a burden too heavy for human sufferance: and he must be made up of irreconcilable contradictions, who can take pleasure in company, and yet is insensible of contempt and disgrace from his companions. 50

Solitude is one thing, Locke suggests, but solitude within social relations is quite another. What individual could live within a set of social norms from which he or she was also fundamentally excluded? Who could take pleasure from social intercourse among companions who also hold one in contempt? What contentment could there be in such human sufferance? Marvell develops the reverse of Locke’s line of thinking. Upon Appleton House takes as its starting point the “strange and unusual constitution” of one who can be content to live in shame and ignominy, and from this starting point, Marvell rethinks citizenship and sociality, given the crises in political form brought about by the English Revolution. Measuring Fairfax’s political choices against the need to constitute community, Marvell suggests that the scene of political making is a prescripted fiction assumed by any notion of citizenship based on voluntary submission. But also, this fiction is a fantasy scenario that demands continual revision and reworking. Instead of critiquing and judging, the terms that Koselleck offers in his history of political theory, we might see Marvell the poet engaged in this work of revision and reworking, reimagining the state and inventing new modes of sociality and forms of life in the process.

chapter seven

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y May 1659, approximately eight years after Marvell composed Upon Appleton House and Hobbes published Leviathan, the Protectorate was dissolved and the Council of Officers had gained effective control of the government. The army officers set out to restore the Commonwealth by delegating power and authority to the select few still faithful to the revolutionary cause. The officers’ worry was that if the people were entrusted with political power, they would reinstate the monarchy. But from James Harrington’s perspective, the Council was setting up an oligarchy, missing the opportunity to establish true liberty based on the model of popular sovereignty that he had elaborated three years earlier in Oceana (1656), his major work of political theory. If the people cannot be trusted to choose the right form of government, which was the officers’ position, then for Harrington this is because the people do not yet have the form of government that would guide them in making the appropriate choice. As he writes in A Discourse Upon this Saying (1659), “A people broken loose from their ancient and accustomed form, and yet unreduced unto any other, is of a wild, a giddy spirit; and . . . like some bird or beast which, having been bred in a lease or chain and gotten loose, can neither prey for itself, nor hath anybody to feed it, till (as commonly comes to pass) it be taken up by the remainder of the broken chain or lease, and tied so much the shorter.”1 The operative word here is “unreduced.” Not only does popular prerogative give choice to the people. It also reduces the people to government in such a way that they have no desire to break loose from its bonds. To illustrate this point, Harrington relates a brief scene from a mumming that he saw at a Shrovetide pageant in Rome. The setting of this scene was a kitchen in which the food was prepared by “cats and kitlings, set in such frames,

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so tied and so ordered, that the poor creatures could make no motion to get loose, but the same caused one to turn the spit, another to baste the meat, a third to skim the pot and a fourth to make green sauce” (DUS 744). This apparatus represents Harrington’s ideal of government. “If the frame of your commonwealth be not such as causeth everyone to perform his certain function as necessarily as this did the cat to make green sauce,” he concludes, “it is not right.” I begin with this scene because it highlights three key aspects of Harrington’s political thought that will be the focus of this chapter. The fi rst concerns government as a form of coercion. For Harrington, popular prerogative is preferable not simply because it cedes sovereignty to the people but because, in doing so, it more efficiently secures the Hobbesian ends of state: security and peace. Since J. G. A. Pocock’s groundbreaking work, Harrington has come to be seen as a central figure in the transmission of a language of republicanism to the eighteenth century.2 But as Paul Anthony Rahe, Jonathan Scott, and Gary Remer have shown, whatever Harrington meant by republicanism, he doesn’t follow expected republican models. Although Harrington speaks the language of classical republicanism, he endorses neither the kind of active participation nor the deliberative rhetoric associated with it. 3 A forceful and articulate supporter of popular sovereignty, Harrington replaces a classical sense of politics with a version of citizenship that functions as a form of discipline. Rather than in relation to republicanism, Harrington is better understood in the context of Foucault’s concept of governmentality; as we saw in chapter 5, this is the two-step process in which government fi rst posits a passion-driven subject in need of governance and then elaborates increasingly immanent forms of government to regulate that subject. Read in light of governmentality, Harrington’s central questions would be: How can government produce popular sovereignty through norms? And how can those norms promote the regulation of the passions and self-interest? Harrington answers these questions by turning to fiction. This is the second key aspect of his work, highlighted by the scene with the kittens. It is worth noting in this scene that Harrington’s argument is convincing— if it is—insofar as we recognize the workings of good government in the baroque spectacle that he describes. Far from the scene’s being ancillary, Harrington’s description of the cats is one of his primary means of persuasion. Harrington’s investment in the literary runs throughout his political writings, as James Holstun, Nigel Smith, and David Norbrook have variously demonstrated.4 At the same time that he was publishing his most

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important political treatises, he translated two of Virgil’s Eclogues, which he followed with a brief essay that draws explicit connections between his literary and political interests. The second half of Oceana is a fictional description of an ideal state, and as I shall argue, Harrington’s political thinking is deeply influenced by contemporary writings on the interrelations of poetry and virtue.5 Like Drayton, Harrington sees literature as a fundamental tool of government. His primary influence is Hobbes. Arguably the most significant political thinker after Hobbes to come out of the Civil Wars, Harrington assumes Hobbes’s account in the opening chapters of Leviathan of passion, interest, and imagination as the root of human behavior. However, whereas Hobbes is fundamentally cautious about the capacity of literature to produce political reality, Harrington embraces its generative force. Although he presents the fi rst part of Oceana as straightforward argumentation against Hobbes’s Leviathan and its second part as a fictional account of the ideal commonwealth, throughout both parts Harrington sees the literary—and poetics in particular—as a powerful resource for transforming subjects driven by passions and self-interest into what he calls “a civil society of men . . . instituted and preserved upon the foundation of common right or interest” (O 161). The third aspect of Harrington’s political thought demonstrated by the scene with the kittens is his ongoing effort to reformulate relations between religion and the state.6 Like Spinoza, Harrington uses the resources of language and communication to develop a version of political theology that authorizes popular sovereignty. Throughout his writings, Harrington moves away from a model of political theology based on the mystery of state in which the figure of the lawgiver or the founder of state uses religion to ensure obedience, aiming to replace it with an understanding of political theology in which belief and obedience are shaped through explicitly poetic devices. We can get a sense of this movement in the scene with the cats in Harrington’s unease over using an example that originates in Catholic Rome. On the one hand, he argues, the “popish commonwealths” exemplify precisely the authoritarian oligarchy that the army officers are tending toward (DUS 743). On the other hand, the cat scene demonstrates the prudence and gravity of the Italians, who trace their knowledge of government back to ancient Rome, even though this knowledge is refracted through a “strangeness of habit” that comes from consistently bad government (744). Pitting Roman prudence and gravity against papal authority and its seventeenth-century English analogues, oligarchy and the rule of the saints, Harrington associates his own version of popular prerogative

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with two scriptural models, David’s consultation of the people at the beginning of his reign over the decision to go to war (1 Chron. 13:2–3) and Moses’s constitution of Israel as a representative government (Deut. 1:13). The implication is that the scene with the kittens turns against its Catholic context and harkens back to scriptural models of government that can be found in Hebrew scripture. The following pages begin with a discussion of political, scriptural, and literary discourses as they intersect in Hobbes’s innovative concept of the artificial person of the state, which he develops to counter the version of popular sovereignty implied by his theory of the social contract. The problem with the social contract is that it consolidates power and authority in a single figure rather than dispersing both throughout the populace. Paradoxically, Harrington argues, the social contract cannot actualize true liberty because it is not coercive enough. In Oceana, I argue, Harrington aims to dislodge Hobbes’s understanding of the political person with his own concept of government and popular sovereignty based on the shaping of political agency through the manipulation of imagination. Eric Nelson has recently shown the degree to which Harrington’s understanding of popular sovereignty and toleration emerge from his understanding of Hebrew theocracy. Harrington relied heavily on contemporary scholarship on the Hebrew republic by Grotius, Peter Cunaeus, and Selden to develop his own understanding of civil government.7 He brought to this scholarship a deeply literary sense of Hebrew scripture. More than exemplify the ideals of government, scripture serves also as a locus of imaginative identification through the interpretation of which the people can be fashioned and their actions molded. In his account of the Hebrew republic, Harrington creates a poetics of government, an art of government that needs no artificer, a self-sustaining version of government that needs no sovereign person to oversee it because mimesis combined with discipline steers the people toward a notion of common right. Harrington is a complex political thinker in part because in developing what I am calling a poetics of government, he puts a special emphasis on figural language. To understand Harrington’s argument, we have to attend to what Davide Panagia has called “images of political thought” that address constitution, composition, and participation “from both an aesthetic and a political point of view.”8 As mimesis becomes the specific form that governmental coercion takes, figural language registers the promises, problems, and shortcomings of government and political theology based on common right and interest.

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HOBBES’S CONCEPT OF THE PERSON Hobbes serves as both a countermodel and a resource for Harrington’s arguments about government. Central to Hobbes’s theory of the state is his concept of the judicial person as a function of representation. Accomplishing more than the representation of himself or herself to others, the judicial person represents, delimits, and constrains political community. Chapter 16 of Leviathan opens with a defi nition that makes the capacity for representation the person’s chief characteristic: “A person, is he, whose words or actions are considered, either as his own, or as representing the words or actions of another man, or of any other thing to whom they are attributed, whether truly or by fiction” (L 16.1.106). Immediately turning to Greek and Latin etymology, Hobbes highlights the theatrical and forensic dimensions of representation. After noting that the Greek prosopon means “face” and the Latin persona signifies “the disguise, or outward appearance of a man,” Hobbes goes on to propose that “a person, is the same that an actor is, both on the stage and in common conversation; and to personate, is to act, or represent himself, or another; and he that acteth another, is said to bear his person, or act in his name; (in which sense Cicero useth it where he says, Unus sustineo tres personas; mei, adversarii, et judicis, I bear three persons; my own, my adversary’s, and the judge’s)” (16.3.106–7). Given this understanding, for Hobbes a natural person is one whose words are considered “his own,” while an artificial person is one considered to be representing someone else (16.2.106). It is in this latter sense that the state is an “artificial man” (Intro.1.7). The state is an artificial person that represents the actions of others. In Hobbes’s account, the state does not exist before there is an artificial person to represent and give unity to a multitude of individuals driven by self-interest. “For it is the unity of the representer, not the unity of the represented, that maketh the person one. And it is the representer that beareth the person, and but one person: and unity, cannot otherwise be understood in multitude” (16.13.109). As Hobbes argues in his discussion of names and language in chapter 4 of Leviathan, a unified set is formed only with the imposition of some outside representer. Otherwise that set—be it individuals or other singularities—can only ever be a multiplicity, “there being nothing in the world universal but names; for the things named are every one of them individual and singular” (4.6.22). Political representation works analogously. There is no unity before the artificial person of the state imposes it because the multitude is made up of multiply interested

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selves with “particular judgments, and particular appetites” that preclude durable unity (17.4.112). It may be the case that collectives form through common interest, for instance “by their unanimous endeavor against a foreign enemy,” Hobbes writes, “yet afterwards, when either they have no common enemy, or he that by one part is held for an enemy, is by another part held for a friend, they must needs by the difference of their interests dissolve, and fall again into a war amongst themselves” (17.5.112). The sovereign is first and foremost a fiction that confers unity on an otherwise disparate set of singularities driven by passions and interests. Hobbes’s argument seems simple enough, but it relies on a fundamental contradiction. Since the artificial person of the state is formed by the consent to be governed, Hobbes also assumes a base-level sense of political unity and agency that precedes the particular unity brought about by the artificial person of the state. In De Cive, Hobbes reluctantly concedes that the act of consent implies democracy as a potential unity, even if the form of government chosen isn’t itself democratic. The intention to found a government, he writes, “[was] almost in the very act of meeting a Democraty; for in that they willingly met, they are suppos’d oblig’d to the very observation of what shall be determin’d by the major part.”9 While Hobbes intends his revision of the social contract in Leviathan to disable this originary democracy, nevertheless there is a residue of it in his handling of consent. In describing the social contract, Hobbes writes: This is more than consent, or concord; it is a real unity of them all, in one and the same person, made by covenant of every man with every man, in such a manner, as if every man should say to every man, I authorize and give up my right of governing myself, to this man, or this assembly of men, on this condition, that thou give up thy right to him, and authorize all his actions in like manner. This done, the multitude so united in one person, is called a commonwealth, in Latin civitas. This is the generation of that great leviathan, or rather (to speak more reverently) of that Mortal God, to which we owe under the Immortal God, our peace and defence. For by this authority, given him by every particular man in the commonwealth, he hath the use of so much power and strength conferred on him, that by the terror thereof, he is enabled to conform the wills of them all, to peace at home, and mutual aid against their enemies abroad. And in him consisteth the essence of the commonwealth; which (to defi ne it) is one person, of whose acts a great multitude, by mutual covenants one with another, have made

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themselves every one the author, to the end he may use the strength and means of them all, as he shall think expedient, for their peace and common defence. (17.13.114)

A close look at this passage shows that there are actually two scenes in play. The fi rst sentence suggests a scenario in which the sovereign is already present. Every man gives up his right of self-governance to this man, or this assembly, the embodiment of the sovereign who is already there. Voluntary submission assumes an authority to which one is submitting. But the second and third sentences suggest an opposing scenario, one in which the sovereign is generated by the act of agreement. In these sentences, Hobbes implies a two-step process by which the sovereign is authorized to govern. Initially, the agreement of the multitude produces the artificial person of the state (and not democracy, as was the case in De Cive) represented by the name “commonwealth.” In this step, the state stands as an empty placeholder, conferring formal unity on the multitude. In the second step, the sovereign takes the place of the state, providing “essence” to what would otherwise be an empty formalism. As Hobbes explains it in his introduction to Leviathan, while the commonwealth is an “artificial man” generated by the consent of the multitude, the sovereign is the “artificial soul” that gives “life and motion to the whole body” (Intro.1.7).10 Although highly attenuated and overly complex, this second scenario suggests that unity initially comes from consent but is then taken over by the representer, who effectively appropriates the “power and strength” of the multitude under the guise of representation.11 For Hobbes, then, the artificial person of the state confers unity on the multitude and transforms a group defi ned by their various interests into a people, and at the same time that artificial person is generated by the unity of that multitude in such a way that, as Christopher Pye argues, the “subject becomes awed spectator to his own creation.”12 Instead of resolving this contradiction, Hobbes shifts it onto the terrain of religious history so that scripture becomes a key site in the elaboration of authoritative personhood and the rebellious multitude. In making this move, he engages a twofold strategy. First, Hobbes derives a narrative account of authority and obedience from scripture as the history of religion. Since for Hobbes the history of Christian politics is rooted in the Mosaic covenant and its transformations over time—its abrogation by the ancient Israelites and its promised reinstatement by Christ at the end of time—the history of religion gives him the narrative means to explore the contradictions inherent in the social contract, and especially to explore the ways in which

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the force of religious belief either mutes or fortifies the force of the multitude in particular instances. Second, though, the history of religion also offers Hobbes a tactical ground for shaping and molding that belief into a justification for obedience. When Hobbes unfolds the history of authority and obedience, he is no mere philosophical observer. Both Hobbes and his seventeenth-century readers have exegetical relations with the history of religion and would see any attempt at shaping this history as a potentially polemical act, so that even the most abstract theological positions would have serious consequences for a collective (and highly contested) understanding of the present moment. On the one hand, then, the history of religion gives Hobbes a practical and concrete instance of the social contract, which affords him the opportunity to explore the possibility of dissent in greater detail than natural reason will allow. On the other hand, since the history of religion is for Hobbes and his seventeenth-century readers a discourse that shapes those forces in the present day, Hobbes hopes to abate the possibility of dissent even as he uncovers its historical causes. Hobbes introduces religion as an historical phenomenon by asserting that the “true God may be personated,” and he then goes on to list the ways in which he has been personated over time: fi rst, by Moses; who governed the Israelites (that were not his, but God’s people,) not in his own name, with hoc dicit Moses; but in God’s name, with hoc dicit Dominus. Secondly, by the Son of man, his own Son, our blessed Saviour Jesus Christ, that came to reduce the Jews, and induce all nations into the kingdom of his father; not as of himself, but as sent from his father. And thirdly, by the Holy Ghost, or Comforter, speaking, and working in the Apostles: which Holy Ghost, was a Comforter that came not of himself; but was sent, and proceeded from them both on the day of Pentecost. (16.12.108–9)

In Hobbes’s analysis, God is personated or expressed by human representers in history, each of whom represents one of his particular modes of authority: ruler, redeemer, and comforter. Later, in part 3 of Leviathan, this account of personation will form the basis of Hobbes’s understanding of the trinity. Moses represents God the Father when he established his kingdom. As God’s “sole viceroy or lieutenant” (35.7.273), Moses rules by God’s authority, personating his authority and, in so doing, revealing God as father, monarch, and sovereign. Jesus personates God the Son as redeemer, promising to reinstate God’s kingdom at the end of time for all of the faithful. And fi nally, the Apostles personate God as Holy Spirit, continuing

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Jesus’s teachings by ministering to the faithful “in the office of preaching and teaching” (42.3.328). “For person being a relative to a representer, it is a consequent to plurality of representers, that there be a plurality of persons, though of one and the same substance” (41.9.327).13 For Bishop Bramhall, the scandal of Hobbes’s account is that it leads to the conclusion that God is a historical fiction. Not only does Hobbes suggest that “there was a time when there was no Trinity,” Bramhall argues, but also he implies that “God Almighty hath as many persons, as there have been sovereign princes in the world since Adam.”14 Although Hobbes concedes that he misspoke in Leviathan when he emphasized the person rather than the ministry of Moses, a mistake he corrects in the Latin edition, on the issue of personhood Hobbes refuses to give ground.15 Persons represent structures of authority and not ahistorical essences. The problem centers on the Greek word hypostasis, which the Church Fathers used to refer both to person and to substance.16 In Greek, Hobbes argues, hypostasis means base or foundation and it is always used in relation to appearances. Hobbes draws out this relation between foundation and appearance in the appendix to the Latin edition of Leviathan, by arguing that imposing the name “white” onto some object assumes some underlying substance, “whiteness,” that serves as the basis for the perception of white. At the same time, the relation between appearance and hypostasis, like the relation between cause and effect, is one of approximation, a relation that is fundamentally relative. “Opponitur ergo hypostasis phantasmati, ut causa effectui, nempe relative” (App. 529). For Hobbes, this doesn’t necessarily mean that whiteness does not exist, although it could mean that. Rather, his main point is that since whiteness or any other substance is an abstraction of some material quality, our understanding of it is always imprecise. For this reason, the identification of hypostasis always involves a certain distortion or twisting. “Ad distinctionem phantasmatis, cujus causam in concreto esse intelligunt, ab omnibus aliis phantasmatibus ejusdem rei, detorsione aliqua nominum ita rem signant” (App. 531). This relation between appearance and hypostasis explains Hobbes’s concept of person. The person is the outward appearance or representation of the authority that enables personhood in the fi rst place. In representing oneself, the natural person discloses the authority to own one’s words and deeds. And in representing the words or actions of someone else, the artificial person makes visible the authority by which he or she is able to represents the words and deeds of others. While Hobbes consistently admits that the trinity is a mystery beyond his understanding, nevertheless he also attempts to distinguish between

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mystery and obfuscation based on mistranslation. In using hypostasis to refer to person, Hobbes argues, the Church Fathers introduced the heretical possibility that “the three persons in the Trinity are three Divine substances, that is, three Gods.”17 Moreover, he argues, because the Latin Fathers didn’t distinguish between substance and essence, they turned a structure of authority into an ontology. The more that the Church Fathers and, afterward, the Scholastics attempted to resolve these issues, the more problems they encountered because they relied on categories that were fundamentally flawed. The result is that the Scholastics invented a concept of the person—and not just divine persons but everyday persons as well—based on essences. After defi ning man as a rational animal, the Scholastics called this the essence of man, failing to distinguish between the defi nition of man, “defi nitionem hominis,” and what man is in himself, “hominem ipsum”: a head, chest, limbs, and other members (“caput, bustum, crura, et reliqua membra”) (App. 533). Out of recognition that man does not always act in a rational manner, the Scholastics then invent the concept of a rational soul—“non animal rationale, sed animam rationalem”—separate from the human body while at the same time the most essential part of the person. Not only is this defi nition of the person an affront to Hobbes on materialist grounds. He argues in Leviathan that the phrase “substance incorporeal” is incoherent, “words, which when they are joined together, destroy one another” (L 34.2.261). But also the notion of a rational soul directing human action stands against everything Hobbes writes concerning agency and obedience. There might be some animals like ants and bees whose “common good differeth not from the private” and therefore need no coercive power to “live sociably one with another” (17.8.113, 6.113). But man is not one of them. Even as Hobbes suggests that God is a historical fiction, Bishop Bramhall’s worry, he also insists on the necessity of religion in theorizing the state. Hobbes’s account of the trinity is a continuation of Machiavelli’s discussion of Moses. As we’ve seen in chapter 2, in The Prince Machiavelli casts revelation through the lens of political reason, showing how Moses manipulated religious belief for the benefit of the state, and in so doing recommends Moses’s actions for all founders of state. As a synthesis of Romulus and Numa, Moses founds a state and develops a religion that ensures obedience to it. Like Machiavelli’s Moses, Hobbes’s Moses ensures obedience and authorizes his right to rule by synthesizing religion and the state. Conceding that “Moses had no authority to govern the Israelites, as a successor to the right of Abraham,” Hobbes presents Moses as a kind of new prince whose authority depends on two sources: fi rst, the

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covenant, and second, the Israelites’ belief in Moses’s “sanctity” and “the reality of his conferences with God” (40.6.314). Moreover, also like Machiavelli’s account, Hobbes’s portrayal of Moses signals the recognition of the multitude as a crucial political agent. With Hobbes, the Mosaic covenant becomes a historical version of the social contract. In Exodus 20:18, the people fear the lightning and thunder coming from Mount Sinai and so, instead of receiving the law themselves, ask Moses to receive the law for them: “Speak thou with us, and we will hear, but let not God speak with us lest we die.” Although Hobbes doesn’t draw out the point, this covenant obligates the Israelites to Moses because it also authorizes Moses to personate God. “Here was their promise of obedience; and by this it was that they obliged themselves to obey whatsoever he should deliver unto them for the commandment of God” (40.6.314). For Hobbes, this promise introduces a new structure of authority into history. Whereas Abraham rules by dominion as the patriarchal head of his family, and therefore his subjects need not believe in the reality of his revelation to accept his rightful rule, Moses rules by institution and needs the belief of the Israelites to legitimate his authority. Basing his right to rule on his right to receive and interpret revelation, Moses institutes a circular relation between religious belief and political obedience. The Israelites’ acceptance of Moses’s authority and more generally the structure of political authority that he institutes is correlative to their acceptance of his role as religious leader. Moreover, in making this argument, Hobbes hopes to produce something like a Moses-effect in his readers. Banking on his readers’ sympathies for interpretation sola scriptura, Hobbes fi rmly solders political authority to religious belief under the sign of the literal, so that under the Mosaic covenant the kingdom of God is “real” and not “metaphorical” (35.11.274), and in which holy simply means “public” and sacred means “to be used only [for] public service” (35.14.275, 17.276). The central problem that concerns Hobbes is textuality. He reformulates the trinity out of recognition that scripture cannot be contained by the state. In chapter 16 of Leviathan, Hobbes introduces the trinity by suggesting a point of contrast between the true God and idols. Both can be personated, but since the idol is a “mere figment of the brain,” it cannot be an author and can be personated with authority only after the introduction of “civil government” (16.11.108). The idol, or the god it represents, gets its authority entirely from the state. By contrast, God does not need the state to be personated with authority because he has already been authored by scripture. Although God didn’t author scripture by taking pen in hand, nevertheless in the world of Christian politics scripture poten-

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tially authorizes action against the state in the name of a higher justice, so that personation of God can circumvent the state as a site of counterauthority. This is the worry behind Hobbes’s assertion that “though God Almighty can speak to a man by dreams, visions, voice, and inspiration; yet he obliges no man to believe he hath so done to him that pretends it; who (being a man) may err, and (which is more) lie” (32.6.249). For Hobbes, the problem of revelation is fundamentally the problem of authority. Who has the right to demand belief? “For it is believed on all hands, that the fi rst and original author of [scriptures] is God,” Hobbes writes. “The question truly stated is, by what authority are they made law” (33.21.259). Historically speaking, this is the problem that emerges with Saul. Saul represents the key moment in Hobbes’s unfolding of the trinity, not because Saul personates God—in fact, he is a bad substitute for God—but because Saul’s reign registers the failure of both the Mosaic covenant and the absolute synthesis of politics and religion that his reign institutes. When the people asked Samuel for a king like the other nations have, not only did they depose the high priests who ruled after Moses but also, Hobbes reasons, “they deposed that peculiar government of God” (40.11.318). Ideally, Hobbes argues, this deposition should have produced a transfer of authority so that “there was no authority left to the priests, but such as the king was pleased to allow them” (40.11.318). In practice, however, political authority and religious belief are rent apart because of the persistence of Mosaic teaching, now not in the form of civil law but in the form of a text-bound religion. Although the people elected a new king, they refused to give up Mosaic religion, keeping “in store a pretext, either of justice, or religion to discharge themselves of their obedience, whensoever they had hope to prevail” (40.13.320). Hobbes attributes this refusal to a misunderstanding on the part of the people. The Mosaic covenant survives as a discourse that haunts the legitimate rule of kings, enabling and seeming to legitimate transgression, because the people would not “allow their king to change the religion which they thought was recommended to them by Moses” (40.13.320). The emphasis goes to “they thought.” Maintained past its political function, religious belief is sustained by mystifying writings that once ensured obedience but now ground sedition.

HARRINGTON’S CONCEPT OF GOVERNMENT In Oceana, Harrington counters Hobbes’s version of personhood by opposing two models of government. The fi rst, ancient prudence, was “discovered unto mankind by God himself in the fabric of the commonwealth

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of Israel” and afterward deduced through natural reason by “the Greeks and Romans” (O 161). According to ancient prudence, government is “an art whereby a civil society of men is instituted and preserved upon the foundation of common right or interest” and “is the empire of laws and not men.” The second form of government, what Harrington calls “modern prudence,” is an “art whereby some man, or some few men, subject a city or a nation, and rule it according unto his or their private interest.” Because the laws are made to serve the interest of the few who rule, Harrington calls this “the empire of men and not of laws.” Harrington associates modern prudence with Hobbes, who “goes about to destroy” ancient prudence, and in response he sets out to develop a new theory of government based on the recuperation of ancient prudence as popular sovereignty. For Harrington, prudence involves more than practical decision making. The recuperation of ancient prudence amounts to the shaping of practical decision making through law and the collective imaginary. As we have seen, Hobbes argues for the artificial person of the state as the necessary outcome of the social contract in order to disable the generative force of the people. In response, Harrington argues that government must transform self-interested individuals into a people through the laws and systems of value that secure common right. Instead of constructing a person who rules over the law, Harrington develops a model of government that produces the people bound by the law. Entrusting the legal order to “good men” leads to corruption, since men will inevitably “work their own wills” (205), but a government that subordinates all citizens to the rule of law will produce virtuous citizens.18 Harrington accomplishes this transformation through two axes of government. The fi rst is an axis of what Harrington calls authority, based on self-governance. Opposing Hobbes’s theory of the social contract, Harrington proposes that the self-regulation of the passions will lead to common right or interest. While Harrington defi nes this operation as “internal and founded upon the goods of the mind” (169), he is not quite proposing Neostoicism. Individual self-regulation is not entirely a function of individual will but is shaped and controlled by the second axis of government, an axis of what Harrington calls fortune but which might better be understood as an axis of property. Harrington argues that political crisis emerges out of the relation between the particular form that sovereignty takes within a given state and that state’s distribution of property. Recalling Machiavelli’s fortuna and the need to recognize and respond to contingency, Harrington develops a nascent theory of political economy based on the management of crisis. A state in which the distribution of

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property is in accordance with the structure of sovereignty will produce internal stability, whereas a state in which the distribution of property and the structure of sovereignty are unbalanced, to use Harrington’s term, will be plagued by turmoil. So, for example, a state with an absolute monarch who owns all of the land will tend to avoid crisis, while a state with an absolute monarch who puts the majority of the land in the hands of the aristocracy sets up the conditions for its own downfall. Harrington calls this latter situation the Gothic or feudal order, and, in his assessment, this particular unbalance is what led to the English Civil Wars. In the case of popular sovereignty, the challenge is to regulate the distribution of property in such a way that encourages and induces individual self-regulation. To this end, Harrington argues for two key laws: an agrarian law that caps the amount of property an individual can hold and a law of rotation that secures the fair distribution of office holding among the citizens of a state. Taken together, these two laws secure obedience, ensuring equal participation in government and preventing an interest in sedition by foreclosing possessive individualism. Harrington develops these two axes of government in his Essay upon Two of Virgil’s Eclogues, where he casts Virgil as a symptom of broader shifts in Roman structures of sovereignty and property. After the defeat of Marc Anthony, Harrington explains, Augustus Caesar divided Mantua and distributed it among his soldiers. “Virgil being an inhabitant of Mantua, and coming by this means to lose his patrimony, repaired unto Rome, and there by the favour of the great ones, obtained such particular respect, that he alone continu’d his ancient possession,” until the centurion Arius “took it so ill to be removed, that if Virgil had not escaped by plunging himself into the river Mincius, the Centurion had kill’d him.”19 Following a long tradition of classical scholarship, Harrington argues that Virgil represents himself in Eclogue One under the persona of Tityrus in his attempts to save his property, while under the persona of Melibeus he represents “the miserable condition of those of Mantua” (A4r).20 And he represents himself in Eclogue Nine under the persona of Menalcas, attempting to mollify Arius. What is innovative about this account is the intersection of biography and political structure. Harrington’s fi rst move is to deduce feudalism, or what he calls the Gothic balance, from the expropriation of Mantua. Augustus Caesar originated the feudal system when he granted lands to his soldiers, and Constantine completed it when he made these lands hereditary. Moreover, as Harrington argues, the origin of feudalism contains the seeds of its own destruction. By granting land to soldiers on the condition that they serve the emperor, the Roman empire failed to con-

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stitute an absolute monarchy but instead instituted a compromise “which oppressed both Prince and People” (A8r). Harrington’s second move is to interpret Virgil’s actions as an effect of this system. Rather than reading Virgil’s self-interested actions through an ethical lens, as Harrington’s contemporaries did, to raise broader questions about the relation between moral principals and the need to accommodate to power he proposes that Virgil’s failed accommodation to power is a direct result of the broader political system within which he operates. Virgil becomes both a testimony to the ability of political system to shape self-interest and a negative example of the virtuous citizen that good laws can create. As my discussion of the Essay indicates, in addition to the axes of property and authority Harrington also suggests a third axis of government, one that he doesn’t explicitly reflect upon, but one that he uses to supplement and develop the other two. I will call this third axis of government an axis of poetics, by which I don’t just mean to indicate poetry but also the intertwining of emplotment and mimesis that, as Paul Ricoeur argues, comprises the “narrative character of history.”21 Harrington gestures toward the capacity of poetry to correct the problem of self-interest in a brief didactic poem, “On the Political Ballance,” that concludes his Essay: Nature is that preserv’d which God began: The soul of Empire and the soul of man (Though each of Heav’n be the diviner seed) Bodies by various temper, shape, and seed. Where elements are strong, or where they faint, ‘Tis life or death, be thou wretch or Saint: Who other steps through blind ambition trod Invaded not the throne of Man but * God. * As when the Ballance was Popular. I Sam 8.7. When Monarchical. Jer. 27.9, 10, 11. (A8v)

In this poem, Harrington proposes an ideal state of nature in which creation is preserved in the potential for both good government, the “soul of Empire,” and good self-governance, “the soul of man.” This natural state may not actually exist, but in representing it, Harrington offers a moment of recognition in which his readers are called on to see this potential in themselves. That is, the poem is more performative than it is descriptive; its lesson is also the effect that the poem aims to bring about. If the capacity for good government and good self-government is mediated through the passions, shaped and fed by “bodies” of “various tempers,” then the

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aim of this didactic poem is to shape the passions in an appropriate direction by offering an image with which the passion-driven subject can identify: an image of the self in which the “soul of man” is in accordance with the “soul of Empire” as God originally intended. In order to flesh out this image, which remains notably abstract in the poem itself, Harrington concludes by referencing Israel, suggesting that Israel preserved common interest through political balance until ambition overtook good government, fi rst in 1 Samuel, when the Israelites asked for a human king to replace the divine one, and again in Jeremiah, when God promises Judah’s subjugation to the king of Babylon as punishment for the people’s wrongdoing and the leaders’ efforts to reverse Deuteronomic reforms. Harrington offers Israel as a political model that “preserv’d what God began” until that order was lost through “blind ambition,” a model for his readers to emulate and a cautionary tale for his readers to avoid. This poem is Harrington’s response to Hobbes’s account of self-interest in his version of the state of nature, what Victoria Kahn calls in her powerful reading of Leviathan Hobbes’s “drama of mimetic desire.”22 For Hobbes, the fundamental inability of individuals to overcome self-interest is proven by mimetic desire, in which the desire to have what belongs to other people leads to the imputation of that desire to others, the intuition that other people want your belongings based on the self-knowledge that you want their belongings. As Hobbes puts it, “If one plant, sow, build, or possess a convenient seat, others may probably be expected to come prepared with forces united, to dispossess, and deprive him, not only of the fruit of his labour, but also of his life, or liberty” (L 13.3.83). From this “diffidence,” Hobbes continues, “there is no way for any man to secure himself, so reasonably, as anticipation” (13.4.83), to master others before they master you, based on the insight that you want to master them. Responding on the level of poetics as well as on the level of political argumentation, Harrington hopes to fashion a political subject through the combination of poetry and political Israel that disproves Hobbes’s claims for the state of nature. Harrington’s brief poem interrupts the movement of mimetic desire that Hobbes describes by offering his readers a kind of Aristotelian anagnorisis in which, as Ricoeur puts it, “the pleasure of recognition . . . is the fruit of the pleasure the spectator takes in the composition as necessary or probable.”23 His response to Hobbes works or doesn’t work largely on poetic grounds, the degree to which his readers fi nd pleasure in the point of recognition that he offers. While Harrington relies on agrarian law and broad political participation to theorize the ways in which good laws can make good men, he also

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recognizes the need for some supplemental force that directs the people toward good government. Broadly speaking, this is the function of fiction in Oceana. Harrington claims that his end in writing an account of the constitution of Oceana is to “supply what was wanting in the promulgated epitome unto a more full and perfect narrative of the whole” (O 210). Here Harrington claims Oceana as an ideal world that abstracts from politics in order to improve it. But he signals a stronger claim in the opening pages of Oceana when he cites Bacon’s essay “Of the True Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates.” Only, where Bacon writes “England,” Harrington replaces it with “Oceana.” Not only does the substitution of Oceana for England allow Harrington to withdraw from the political world of England in order to remake it, but also this substitution implies that fiction is an appropriate domain for political thought. The argument is implicitly against Bacon. In the 1623 Dignity and Advancement of Learning, Bacon associates political reason with prudence, arguing that politics must follow history and experience. In Leviathan, Hobbes critiques Bacon’s position, arguing that prudence is based primarily on fiction, the past being nothing but memory, which is a faculty of imagination and the future being “but a fiction of the mind” (L 3.7.18). Although we call it prudence, when an event “answereth our expectation,” Hobbes writes, “it is but presumption.” Harrington’s substitution of Oceana for England in his citation of Bacon’s essay suggests that he accepts Hobbes’s critique as fact and that he goes on to elaborate his understanding of government on the basis of that fact. If government relies on the revival of ancient prudence, this is because prudential reasoning is shaped by fiction and directed by imagination.

LIBERTY, NARRATIVE, AND PROTESTANT INTEREST Harrington gives his most explicit, if also limited defi nition of liberty at the beginning of “The Model of the Commonwealth of Oceana,” when he discusses the initial division of the people into citizens and servants: “If [the people] attain unto liberty, that is to live of themselves, they are freemen or citizens” (O 212). Otherwise, they are servants. Following Aristotle, Harrington defi nes liberty as the ability to live of oneself—that is, the ability to own property and to develop the kind of virtuous character that the ownership of property enables. This division is so obvious, Harrington writes, that it needs no proof “in regard of the nature of servitude, which is inconsistent with freedom or participation of government in a commonwealth.” However, he develops a more complex account of liberty

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early in the fi rst and second parts of “The Preliminaries” of Oceana in response to two distinct problems: the problem of absolutism implied by Hobbes’s concept of the juridical person and the partisanship produced by the rule of the saints. In response to Hobbes, Harrington portrays liberty as a political desire that only gets stronger under authoritarian rule. As he tells the story of modern prudence and its rise to dominance, Harrington gestures toward a counterplot intended to elicit a readerly desire for liberty that opposes the placement of authority in the hands of the few. In response to the partisanship of the saints, Harrington grounds political liberty in a broad notion of liberty of conscience based on toleration and, perhaps paradoxically, associated with empire. If liberty is for Harrington a political passion, liberty of conscience is the normative principle that constrains and delimits it. Harrington fashions his understanding of liberty through his handling of historical narrative. The Gothic balance can be explained only in narrative, Harrington argues, because it has no rational basis. Unlike ancient prudence, the Gothic balance is incomprehensible according to the protocols of natural reason: “As there is no appearance in the bulk or constitution of modern prudence that she should ever have been able to come up and grapple with the ancient, so something of necessity must have interposed, whereby this came to be enervated and that to receive strength and encouragement” (188). Narrative gives Harrington the means by which to analyze this conundrum. At the same time, narrative allows him to emplot the loss of ancient prudence as a counterforce that impinges upon modern prudence, making itself felt at moments when confl icting interests turn into emergency situations that call for immediate action. The fi rst significant moment in Harrington’s history of modern prudence produces this counterforce as subjective desire. Repeating the line of argument he also develops in the Essay upon Two of Virgil’s Eclogues, Harrington proposes that modern prudence began with the Roman emperors; however, in Oceana he adds that the institution of modern prudence was grounded on the loss of ancient prudence, as “the ship of the Roman commonwealth was forced to disburthen herself of that precious freight, which never since could emerge or raise the head” except in Venetian republicanism, a constant reference point for the survival of ancient prudence in modern times (188). Harrington then translates this loss into the particularly subjective grounds for overcoming the Gothic balance. Even as Rome disburdened herself of “the inestimable treasure of liberty” (188), nevertheless the loss of this treasure gave the West “a relish of liberty,” so

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that “what despair soever could never be brought to stand still while the yoke was putting on their necks, but by being fed with some hopes of reserving unto themselves some part of their freedom” (189–90). Eventually, Harrington will pose this desire against Hobbes, but not before showing how common interest can be molded through the interpretation of the past. For Harrington, the second and third significant moments that shape this “relish for liberty” are the Magna Carta and the statutes of population issued by Henry VII. Like the Levellers, Harrington sees the Norman conquest as an early version of absolutism. The “ambition” of Turbo (William the Conqueror) and his successors was to be “absolute princes” (195). This ambition caused a reaction among the Norman baronage, who began to assert the “ancient rights and liberties” of the Anglo-Saxon thanes “as if they had been always natives” (196). However, Harrington is much less interested in the liberties of the baronage than he is in the liberty of the people, a possibility that emerges paradoxically through its suppression. For the barons . . . having vindicated their ancient authority, restored the parliament with all the right and privileges of the same, saving that from thenceforth the kings had found out a way whereby to help themselves against the mighty; creatures of their own, and such as had no other support by their favor. By which means this government, being indeed the masterpiece of modern prudence, hath been cried up to the skies as the only invention whereby at once to maintain the sovereignty of a prince and the liberty of the people; whereas indeed it hath been no other than a wrestling match, wherein the nobility, as they have been stronger, had thrown the king, or the king, if he have been stronger, had thrown the nobility; or the king, where he hath had a nobility and could bring them to his party, hath thrown the people, as in France or Spain; or the people, where they have had no nobility, or could get them to be of their party, have thrown the king, as in Holland and of latter times in Oceana. (196)

Harrington’s immediate claim is that the Magna Carta is most appropriately understood as the crystallization of confl icting interests and not, as others argue, “the only invention” that maintains both “the sovereignty of a prince and the liberty of a people.” In comparison with the liberty actualized through ancient prudence, the version of liberty attained through the Magna Carta is nothing but a ruse of modern prudence, a compromise that props up modern prudence and suppresses real liberty. Harrington’s larger

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claim is that the Magna Carta sets the conditions for the emergence of real liberty, when Panurgus (Henry VII) used legislation to reduce the power of the nobility. Closely following Bacon’s History of the Reign of King Henry VII, Harrington argues that Henry VII enabled the yeoman classes to own property and serve as foot soldiers in the king’s army, which in turn destroyed the nobility: “Living not in a servile or indigent fashion, [the yeomanry or middle people] were much unlinked from dependence upon their lords and, living in a free and plentiful manner, became a more excellent infantry, but such an one upon which the lords had so little power, that from henceforth they may be computed to have been disarmed” (197). Measuring Harrington as a historian, Pocock argues that in this passage Harrington lacks an understanding of the institution of the House of Commons, which would have given him “a doctrine which his own argument badly needed,” to get beyond the analysis of history as “class confl ict.”24 That is, if Harrington had understood the medieval parliament and the place of the Commons within it, as did later historians, he would have been able to trace the rise of the popular sovereignty through political institutions rather than confl icting interests. But history as class confl ict serves Harrington’s narrative purposes well enough in that it allows him to solicit a reader whose own interests can be shaped through the emplotment of confl ict. The movement from ancient Rome to the English Civil Wars through key moments in English history demonstrates Harrington’s attentiveness to narrative, and especially to the ability of narrative to use confl ict to conjure and shape readerly desire. In the sweeping narrative that Harrington develops, the lost liberty of the Roman republic leaves its imprint on the West as a “relish” or desire, invigorated while also suppressed by the Magna Carta and released with Henry VII’s legislation against the nobility. While Henry VII was clearly acting in the interests of the monarchy, through “his secret jealousy lest the dissension of the nobility, as it brought him in, might throw him out” (197), he also unwittingly empowered a class whose interest in liberty reaches back to the Roman republic. Harrington’s main aim in developing this narrative is to elicit and solidify a sympathetic bond between his seventeenth-century English readers and the general category of the people through whom ancient prudence is revivified. In the fourth and fi nal significant moment of his narrative, Harrington assumes this sympathetic bond in order to represent popular sovereignty as historically inevitable. Presenting England after the execution of Charles I at a crossroad, Harrington asks, “What is there in nature that can arise out of these ashes but a popular government, or a new monarchy to be erected

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by the victorious army?” (198). Harrington opposes what he takes to be Hobbes’s answer—a new monarchy—by assuming that his readers have already identified with the relish of liberty that he has been provoking. Since the desire for liberty underwrites the history of the Gothic balance, the only viable choice at the present moment is the one that Harrington has already presented: the establishment of a commonwealth based on popular prerogative. The alternative is to “extirpate out of dominion all other roots of power” (199)—that is, wipe out the desire for liberty that underwrites English history, an impossible project that will only repeat the crises of the past. Hobbes represents the most pressing theoretical challenge to the establishment of popular sovereignty, but for Harrington the most pressing political challenge is the rule of the saints, not because the rule of the saints leads to theocracy but because it results in sectarianism. In “The Second Part of the Preliminaries,” Harrington urges the inclusion of the royalists in the new government on the grounds that their exclusion will result in partisanship instead of popular government, thereby fi xing opposition to the commonwealth. In a savvy analysis of the way in which partisanship introduces a schism between rhetoric and aims, Harrington argues that the exclusion of royalists from government will result in a confusion of terms that fundamentally obscures the possibility of liberty: “Men that have equal possessions and the same security of their estates and of their liberties that you have, have the same cause with you to defend; but if you will be trampling, they fight for liberty, though for monarchy, and you for tyranny, though under the name of a commonwealth” (203). The commonwealth implies equality of property and liberty at its most basic level, but in denying the royalists an equal share of participation in government, the saints effectively (if also unwittingly) set up a fight between two versions of modern prudence: one in which the royalists fight for the reestablishment of the monarchy and another in which the saints fight for oligarchy. Both sides claim liberty as their cause, but neither would bring about true liberty as Harrington understands it. Central to the problem of sectarianism for Harrington is the opposition, a false one in his estimation, between national religion and liberty of conscience. Among the various political parties some are “for a national religion and others for liberty of conscience, with such animosity on both sides as if these two did not consist” (204). What binds the two or makes them “consist,” and what the saints deny, is Protestant interest, a concept based on the Duke of Rohan’s Interest of Princes and developed by Protestant divines in the 1640s and 1650s to argue for a national interest

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in toleration.25 Speaking to Parliament in a sermon on February 25, 1646, Thomas Goodwin argues that just as the state has a political interest in self-preservation, so too does the state have a religious interest, “an interest most divine, most generall, and most fundamentall,” to “maintaine and preserve the saints.” Taking as his central text Psalm 105—“He suffered no man to do them wrong: yea he reproved Kings for their sakes: / Saying, Touch not mine anointed and do my prophets no harm” (KJV 14– 15)—Goodwin proposes that the Protestant state has a vested interest in tolerating godly sects. And since neither the state nor the clergy can adequately discern the godly from the ungodly—since “the new creature is found in circumcision and in uncircumcision,” as Goodwin puts it—the Protestant state has a fundamental interest in preserving all of Christian sects.26 A year later in Theologia Eklektike: Discourse of the Liberty of Prophesying (1647), Jeremy Taylor reasserts and broadens Goodwin’s argument. Tolerance is in the interest of the state, he argues, because it prevents the disruptive force of false religion by diffusing and disabling it: “Toleration of differing opinions . . . secures peace, because there is not so much as the pretence of Religion left to such persons to contend for it, being already indulged to them.”27 And in 1656, in a sermon delivered to Parliament, John Owen turns to Israel as a scriptural model for Protestant interest. God instituted Israel, he argues, so that “the generall interest of all the Sons and Daughters of Sion be preserved.” Any particular expression of faith is acceptable so long as it preserves the general interest. The problem with the rule of the self-proclaimed saints is that their particular interest threatens the common interest: “Because they are not [the head], they conclude they are not of the body, nor will care for the body, but rather endeavour its ruine. Because their peculiar interest doeth not raigne, the common interest shall be despised.”28 Although Harrington never mentions the phrase “Protestant interest,” he assumes these arguments in his synthesis of national religion and liberty of conscience. Initially, Harrington implies a version of Protestant interest through anthropomorphism, by treating government as if it were an individual: “But as a government pretending unto liberty, and suppressing the liberty of conscience, which (because religion not according to a man’s conscience can as to him be none at all) is the main, must be a contradiction; so a man that, pleading for liberty of private conscience, refuseth liberty unto the national conscience, must be absurd. A commonwealth is nothing else but the national conscience. And if the conviction of an individual’s private conscience produces his private religion, the conviction of the national conscience must produce a national religion” (O 185).

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If a “commonwealth is nothing else but the national conscience,” and if private conscience produces private religion, then it follows that national conscience “must produce a national religion”—so long as national conscience works in the same way that the mind does. Harrington returns to this argument some pages later. Now, the state is no longer modeled on the individual but produces the person as an effect of law. In place of the rule of saints, Harrington proposes the “saintship of a people “ (204), the translation of saintship into civil virtue produced and sustained by rule of law, modeled on Hebrew scripture “wherein, as hath been shown, is contained that original whereof all the rest of the commonwealths seem to be copies” (205). Harrington describes this process in a passage that is as bold as it is complex: The saintship of a people as to government consisteth in the election of magistrates fearing God and hating covetousness, and not in their confi ning themselves or being confi ned unto men of this or that party or profession. It consisteth in making the most prudent and religious choice they can, but not in trusting unto men but, next God, in their orders. “Give us good men and they will make us good laws” is the maxim of a demagogue, and (through the alternation which is commonly perceivably in men, when they have power to work their own wills) exceedingly fallible. But “give us good orders, and they will make us good men” is the maxim of a legislator and the most infallible in the politics. (204–5)

This passage navigates two visions for the saintship of a people which are at least potentially in confl ict. In the opening of this passage, the saintship of a people is grounded in liberty of conscience, the capacity to make the right choice and, indeed, the very making of that choice. Liberty of conscience resides in the people “making the most prudent and religious choice they can.” But by the end of this passage, that understanding is determined by another one in which the saintship of a people resides in the capacity of law to “make” the people into “good men.” In this second understanding, the saintship of a people has less to do with the people themselves and more to do with the force of law, which would determine the people’s initial capacity to make prudent and religious choices by making them good before they make their religious choices. In Harrington’s account of government, the rule of law produces virtuous persons who will always make religious choices that are in the best interest of the state. Harrington makes this argument on the heels of his critique of mil-

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lenarianism, arguing that the millenarian politics of the saints reinforces party rule, divides the people into the godly and the ungodly, and excludes the latter from participation in government by setting the task of the former the establishment of Christ’s reign on earth. The problem with millenarianism is that it prevents the saintship of the people by introducing the friend-enemy distinction into the state. However, by the end of Oceana Harrington retools millenarianism so that a general sense of Protestant interest determines relations between and among states. After the government has been entirely reformed, Harrington asks his readers to consider the responsibility that the commonwealth has to the people living within states still under the Gothic balance: “If thy brother cry unto thee in affl iction, wilt thou not hear him?” (322–23). This question is all the more pertinent because the commonwealth “is not made for herself only, but given as a magistrate of God unto mankind, for the vindication of common right and the law of nature” (323). Following Machiavelli’s discussion in book 2, chapter 4, of the Discourses on the modes on expansion available to republics, Harrington develops a model in which Oceana might legitimately conquer states still under the Gothic balance and spread liberty to their people by reformulating government under benevolent colonial rule. And, following Machiavelli’s claim that “the end of the republic is to enervate and weaken all other bodies in order to increase its own size” (D 2.4.142 / 138), Harrington links the obligation to vindicate common right with the state’s interest in expansion. As Lord Archon explains, “If France, Italy and Spain were not all sick, all corrupted together” by the Gothic balance, “there would be none of them so, for the sick would not be able to withstand the sound, nor the sound to preserve her health without curing of the sick” (O 332). The fi rst nation to recover ancient prudence— Lord Archon speculates that it will be France—“shall assuredly govern the world.” And if this comes to pass, Oceana will become a province of France, just as she was a province under ancient Rome. Harrington justifies this argument by positing the concept of the people under the rule of law as a theologico-political ideal whose ungodly enemy is the Gothic balance. Once liberty of conscience is added to the civil liberties that ancient prudence ensures, popular sovereignty becomes “that empire whence justice shall run down like a river, and judgment like a mighty stream” (333). As the combination of empire with scriptural reference indicates, Harrington projects the division within the state that he attempted to disable onto the international landscape, arguing that in its imperial form, popular sovereignty will bring about “the kingdom of Christ.” “For as the kingdom of God the Father was a commonwealth, so

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shall be the kingdom of the Son; the people shall be willing in the day of his power” (332). The implication of the fi nal quote could hardly be any clearer. Citing the line from Psalm 110 immediately following God’s promise that Zion will rule in the midst of its enemies, who will become subject to Israel’s control, Harrington implies that the people’s support against the Gothic empire will be proof of Oceana’s righteousness in pursuing expansion and of the general righteousness of ancient prudence reinstated. In defi ning liberty, then, Harrington asks two questions. The fi rst is, how to cast liberty as the motor of history during a time when liberty was absent? He resolves this question by equating liberty with desire, so that liberty is no longer a virtue but is an overriding political passion. Harrington provokes and shapes this passion in his narrative history of the Gothic balance in England in order to provide a contrary vision to Hobbes’s depiction of the self-interested individual, countering Hobbes by using sympathetic identification rather than sustained argumentation. So long as his readers see themselves in his portrayal of the emergence of the people through the confl icting interests of the Gothic balance, Harrington reasons, he can persuade those readers of the inevitability of government by popular sovereignty. The second question Harrington asks is, how might government produce liberty as its normative effect? Reimagining Protestant interest as a general form of government, Harrington proposes that the rule of law guarantees liberty of conscience as a civic virtue. Protestant interest makes up the theological imaginary that Harrington’s understanding of liberty assumes, as it both posits and coerces agency in the making of a political collective. It posits agency through the expansion of liberty of conscience. In Harrington’s account, good government both relies on and produces individuals who are endowed with the freedom of choice. And it coerces agency by delimiting political and religious choice. The condition of free choice is increasingly revealed as a political and religious opposition to the authoritarianism that Harrington associates with the Gothic balance.

THE COMMONWEALTH OF ISRAEL Harrington attends to the paradoxes of government through what he calls the “commonwealth of Israel,” a phrase that he claims to have invented, although it is likely he got it from Simone Luzzatto, the Venetian rabbi whom I discussed in chapter 3 and whose Discourse on the Hebrew State was one of the fi rst sustained attempts to interpret the Mosaic constitu-

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tion through Machiavellian republicanism. Like Luzzatto, Harrington takes the Mosaic constitution to be an exemplary instance of good government or what he calls “ancient prudence.” But Harrington is more interested than Luzzatto in the Mosaic constitution as an imaginative point of identification. Harrington takes Hebrew scripture to be one of the primary sites of political identification and asks how he might use this identification to develop persuasive accounts of popular sovereignty and the rule of law. Harrington’s use of Israel was innovative, but it was not unique. By the 1650s, Israel had become a central figure among English republicans by which to portray a vision of government grounded in popular sovereignty.29 So, for example, in an editorial that appeared in an April 1652 edition of Mercurius Politicus, Marchamont Nedham turns to the Mosaic constitution in order to argue that “the fi rst and most eminent evidence of the institution of Popular Government in Scripture doth notoriously demonstrate that its origin is in or from the People.”30 The problem, as Nedham only briefly indicates, is that this is an origin that has to be shaped and molded. Recalling book 6 of The Prince, where Moses uses religion to coerce obedience, Nedham writes that Moses “imposed [the institutions of government] upon that people.”31 The verb “imposed” suggests, without Nedham’s developing the point, that popular sovereignty needs some external force to restrain its emergence. Like Nedham, Harrington aims for a system of government in which power is both immanent, originating from the people, and imposed by some outside authority that will regulate the people. Instead of relying on the authority of the lawgiver, however, he relies on mimetic identification as an instrument of coercive force that displaces and supplants Mosaic authority. The fi rst part of “The Model of the Commonwealth of Oceana” deals with the “fitting and distributing” of “the people,” whom Harrington considers the “materials of a commonwealth” (O 212). This process involves both recognizing and regulating the distribution of power among the people. Part of Harrington’s purpose is entirely practical. Following Machiavelli, he argues that the virtuous state depends on a citizen army, which affirms the political force of the people and serves as a check on tyranny while at the same time channeling the political force of the people into the state’s well-being. Harrington supplements this practical argument by offering Israel as a point of imaginary identification. Upon instituting a citizen army in Oceana, the fictional character Hermes de Caduceo points to the citizens of Oceana and proclaims: “Behold the army of Israel become a commonwealth and the commonwealth of Israel remaining an

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army” (O 228). After which, the people respond with shouts of affirmation, having just been named “King People” (229). Harrington turns to the commonwealth of Israel for more than just a model of a state that has a citizen army. In staging Hermes de Caduceo’s declaration and its ratification by the people, he also emphasizes the people’s desire to imitate Israel and the founders’ ability to manipulate that desire. For Hobbes, mimetic identification reinforces competition and selfaggrandizement. If mimetic identification does not lead to the aggressive misery of the state of nature, then it leads to vainglory, “when a man compoundeth the image of his own person, with the image of the actions of another man; as when a man imagines himself a Hercules or an Alexander” (L 2.4.12). Harrington attacks this thesis early on in Oceana. Whereas Hobbes blames the civil war on the reading and emulation of Greek and Latin histories (“he might as well in this sense have said Hebrew,” Harrington adds [O 178]), Harrington sees the imitation of classical and biblical virtues presented in ancient texts as a sign of the strength of ancient forms of government. Hobbes’s emphasis on imitation evades the more obvious insight, that these virtues must have been produced by excellent governments: “great virtue” implies “the best education,” which implies “the best laws,” which implies “the excellency of [ancient] policy” (178). The drive to imitate these virtues indicates awareness, however dim, of the superiority of ancient prudence. The commonwealth of Israel allows Harrington to develop a two-part response to Hobbes. His fi rst move is to use Israel to draw out a central problem in the law. For Hobbes, the Mosaic covenant establishes a pure theologico-political state in which God rules as sovereign until the Israelites reject God for Saul. Harrington reinterprets the election of Saul and uses this reinterpretation to revise Hobbes’s assessment of the Mosaic constitution. Through exegesis of 1 Samuel 8:8, Harrington deduces that the rejection of God and his laws was always a legitimate possibility. Reading the giving of the law in Exodus through the lens of 1 Samuel, Harrington concludes that “the power . . . which the people had to depose even God himself as he was civil magistrate, leaveth little doubt, but that they had power to have rejected any of those laws confi rmed by them throughout the Scripture” (O 175). Although Harrington disapproves of the choice of a human monarch, he also argues that this choice discloses a fundamental political truth: the law can never be a commandment that obliges obedience in its utterance, but can only be thought of as a proposal in need of ratification. This holds for Moses, who, Harrington argues in The Art of Lawgiving, never commanded but only ever proposed law, and it also holds

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for God, whose proposals became law only when they were ratified and confi rmed by the people. On the one hand, the noncoincidence between the law and obedience gives logical precedence to popular sovereignty. “If all and every one of the laws of Israel, being proposed by God, were no otherwise enacted than by covenant with the people,” Harrington writes, “then that only which was resolved by the people of Israel was their law; and so the result of that commonwealth was in the people” (175). That is, the only law to which the people are obligated is a law to which they have obligated themselves. On the other hand, this noncoincidence constantly raises the possibility of an emergency situation in which the people legitimately choose not to obey. Since the law cannot produce or compel obedience, something else has to be added to it to mend the gap between the conjuring of the people through the proposing of law and their decision to obey. Harrington’s second move is to make the fi gure of Israel—that is, Israel as a figure—into the solution to the very problem that it also foregrounds. Although both Harrington and Hobbes use the Mosaic covenant to propose models of voluntary submission, for Hobbes the people submit out of fear to the authority of a sovereign who will protect them, whereas with words like “resolve,” “confi rm,” and “ratify” Harrington seems to suggest that the people submit after due consideration of the law. However, for Harrington it is not due consideration but a desire for recognition that bridges the gap between the people and their decision to obey. While Harrington uses the figure of Israel to disclose the noncoincidence of the people and the law, he also uses mimetic identification with the commonwealth of Israel to shape and mold the decision to obey. This is the reason that Harrington concludes the scene with Hermes de Caduceo sanctifying the people as Israel by briefly gesturing toward Leviathan, calling sovereignty a “formidable creature” (229) and then reimagining the institution of popular sovereignty through images of constraint and discipline that culminate in the following advice: “Receive the sovereign power; you have received her; hold her fast, embrace her forever in your shining arms. The virtue of the loadstone is not impaired or limited, but receiveth strength and nourishment, by being bound in iron” (230). The proximity between romantic embrace and the virtue of self-discipline suggests that when De Caduceo offers the commonwealth of Israel as a figure by which members of the citizen militia of Oceana can recognize themselves, Harrington hopes to produce a scene of recognition in which the pleasure of recognizing oneself as Israel becomes the distinctly political pleasure of good citizenship, as the desire to be like Israel coerces the fundamental right

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to choose that Harrington takes to be the basis of popular prerogative. In other words, the figure of Israel demonstrates for Harrington that mimesis can take on a kind of executive force, as mimetic identification becomes an act of self-discipline that coerces and shapes the fundamental choice to obey or not upon which popular prerogative relies. In this way, mimesis compensates for an excess of sovereignty embodied in the authority of the lawgiver. As a form of gentle coercion, mimetic identification seems to do away with the need for some authority that imposes government on the people. Mimetic identification with Israel takes the place of the sovereign, not just in the sense of displacing the figure of the Hobbesian sovereign but also in the sense of carrying out his extralegal function. But it would be more accurate to say that mimesis takes over the extralegal function of the sovereign in attempting to displace it. Harrington gestures toward the displacement of the lawgiver at a fairly rarefied level in his initial representation of the commonwealth of Israel. The fi rst time that he presents the constitution of Israel, in the opening pages of Oceana, Israel comes into being as a commonwealth that has no origin outside of itself. Israel fi rst appears ratifying the commandment to be a commonwealth, while the enunciator of this commandment is erased from view—almost as if he had been a sacrificial victim of popular sovereignty. “The people of Israel,” Harrington writes,” are commanded to take wise men of understanding and known among the tribes, to be made rulers over them” (173). As the sentence’s passive construction indicates, the commonwealth of Israel comes into being immanently, through the ratification of its own being, on the condition that it forgo the figure of the lawmaker. Moses appears only at the end of Harrington’s several-page description, flanked by the Sanhedrim on the one side and his scribes on the other, fully contextualized by the legislative body that he instituted. 32 It is as if to be a member of Israel, or to identify with Israel, is to participate in a form of government in which the coercive authority of the sovereign is always and already expunged from practical political life. We can see a similar dynamic at the end of Oceana when Harrington describes the fate of the Lord Archon, his figure for Cromwell. After establishing the commonwealth of Oceana, the Lord Archon abdicates and, as Harrington puts it, “the lawmaker happened to be the fi rst object and reflection of the law made” (342). While the Lord Archon’s abdication exemplifies the normative self-discipline that Harrington argues for and attempts to produce throughout Oceana, his abdication is also Harrington’s way of representing the lawmaker as an excess to the rule of law. When the Lord Archon is reflected into the law, becoming the law’s fi rst object, the

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capacity for political making outside the bounds of law must also be suspended. As Holstun puts it in his astute reading of Oceana’s fi nal section, the “Lord Archon’s abdication . . . is not the result of [Oceana’s] constraining discipline but a precondition for [its] existence. The Lord Archon’s continuing presence after those orders are in place would create a superfluous sovereignty or, even worse, a divided one.”33 Like Moses, the Lord Archon becomes an erased origin whose imposition of government on the people must be reconfigured from within the form of government that he imposed. Initially, Harrington uses the Lord Archon to flatter and constrain Cromwell, when out of gratitude toward the Lord Archon for abdicating, the senate and people of Oceana confer upon him the double title of Patria Patriae, father of the country, and Protector for life. With the death of the Lord Archon in the fi nal pages of Oceana, Harrington further attempts to contain the force of political making by focusing it in a lawmaker who can be monumentalized and mourned. The Lord Archon’s effigy commemorates the legislative act that constituted the commonwealth of Oceana. He was the “Greatest of Captains,” the “Best of Princes,” the “Happiest of Legislators,” the “Most Sincere of Christians,” “Who, setting the Kingdoms of the Earth at Liberty, / Took the Kingdom of the Heavens by Violence” (359). At the same time, the superlative terms that Harrington uses to describe him suggest that he wants to ban others from repeating the Lord Archon’s acts. In a commonwealth where virtuous citizenship is based on mimesis, Harrington suggests, there are certain acts integral to the foundation of that commonwealth that, for the sake of good government, cannot or should not be imitated.

SILLY GIRLS Harrington addresses Hobbes’s account of sovereignty and the social contract most explicitly and directly in “The First Part of the Preliminaries” of Oceana. In Leviathan Hobbes argues for the necessity of the social contract and “a visible power to keep [men] in awe” (L 17.1.111) because there is no natural drive toward the common good. “Certain living creatures, as bees, and ants, live sociably one with another,” but humans lack this social drive and can achieve lasting community only if there is a “common power, to keep them in awe, and direct their actions to the common benefit” (17.6.113, 12.114). Initially, Harrington takes issue with Hobbes’s assessment, citing Hooker and then Grotius, both of whom argue that all “natural agents” have a law that “bindeth them each to serve the others’ good,” as Hooker puts it.34 If there is a drive toward the common good, and

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if that drive can be shown to emerge out of self-interest, then Harrington can obviate the need for the social contract and the Hobbesian sovereign. But as Harrington continues, he realizes that argument by authority is not persuasive enough. What he needs is a demonstration, one that can persuade his readers through the shaping of private interest. Even if popular government is “nearest unto right reason,” nevertheless, Harrington admits, “a man doth not look upon reason as it is right or wrong in itself, but as it makes for him or against him” (O 172). Harrington’s demonstration combines the resources of mimesis with a creative conception of political theology based on what he calls “common right” or “interest of the whole” (171). The way to establish common right through private interest, Harrington argues, is “known even unto girls”: For example, two of them have a cake yet undivided, which was given between them. That each of them therefore may have that which is due, “Divide,” says one unto the other, “and I will choose; or let me divide, and you shall choose.” If this be but once agreed upon, it is enough; for the divident dividing unequally loses, in regard that the other takes the better half; wherefore she divides equally, and so both have right. O the depth of the wisdom of God! and yet by the very mouths of babes and sucklings hath he set forth his strength. That which great philosophers are disputing upon in vain is brought unto light by two silly girls: even the whole mystery of a commonwealth, which lies only in dividing and choosing. (172)

On one level, this scene is simply a demonstration purportedly taken from everyday life. Common right or interest is proven through the mundane actions of two “silly” or creaturely girls who, acting out of self-interest, also act in the interest of one another. But one of the more innovative aspects of this scene is Harrington’s layering of mimetic identification. Harrington’s initial point is that the recognition of mutual desire can transform self-interest into common right, as each girl sees her own desire in the desire of the other and modifies her actions accordingly, so that both girls can share the cake equally. Unlike mimetic identification in Hobbes, which leads to the state of war, in Harrington’s account mimetic desire is fundamentally altruistic, entirely proportionate to self-interest, as each girl gives up at least some of what she wants so that both girls get what they want in common. 35 What confi rms this altruism, however, isn’t just the fiction of the two girls but the reader’s desire to identify with them. Harrington relies on his readers’ sympathetic identification in this drama

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of mimetic desire, on his readers’ assumption that they would act exactly as the two girls act were they placed in the same situation. The pleasure of this identification is fundamentally a pleasure of self-promotion: in seeing my own actions in those of the two girls, I am able to persuade myself that I and my fellow humans are not Hobbesian subjects of brutish selfinterest but are instead subjects of a self-interest that leads to the common good. On one level, the two girls exemplify common right as each identifies with the desire of the other and modifies her behavior accordingly, and on another level, Harrington relies on his readers’ imaginary identification with this scene so that it appears commonplace and not particularly exceptional. Moreover, in calling the girls’ act of dividing and choosing the “mystery of a commonwealth,” Harrington argues for a version of political theology based on mimetic identification. On the one hand, the phrase indicates a movement away from the arcana imperii or mystery of state, the “belief,” as Kantorowicz describes it, “that government is a mysterium administered by the king-highpriest and his indisputable officers.”36 As the commonwealth replaces the monarch whose prerogative remained above the law, the mysterious nature of prerogative becomes irrelevant, nothing more than a ruse or mystification sustained beyond its time by vain philosophical debate—“that which great philosophers are disputing upon in vain.” On the other hand, the phrase also suggests that the commonwealth is itself a mysterium as political theology is now represented in the administration of desire through normative behavior. Instead of residing with the fisc or property of the crown, as Kantorowicz argues was the case in medieval political theology, according to Harrington the dignity and perpetuity of government reside in the administration of acquisitive self-interest, the administration of the desire that the two girls share for the cake placed between them. In short, the “mystery of a commonwealth” suggests an economic version of political theology in which a selfinterested desire for equitable government is produced and shaped by a set of formal and poetic devices. The mystery of state no longer centers on the personal authority of the sovereign but, with Harrington, is now focused in the decision-making processes of the people insofar as these processes are directed through imagination. As with his use of the commonwealth of Israel, here too Harrington posits mimetic identification as an instrument of discipline that suspends the coercive authority of the lawgiver or king. In the case of the commonwealth of Israel, I argued, the problem of coercive authority returns in a literary register as the force of mimesis, which takes on a magical ability

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to compel identification. The scene with the two girls has its own underside that highlights the promise and the problem of government. One of the quirky aspects of the scene with the two girls is that it provokes a heightened sense of literary interest. 37 That is, this scene has a literary density that diverts attention away from its more obviously political or disciplinary function and engages us on the level of its unusual particulars. If a cake was given between the two girls, where did it come from? Who made it? Why a cake? Why girls, and not boys? Minors and not adults? Harrington’s purpose is to give a singular and decisive demonstration of the general lesson that self-interest can transcend itself and become the interest of the whole. But the singularity of this example crosscuts that general lesson and seems to thwart it, to attract interest in the scene precisely as narrative fiction. In part, the literary aspect of this scene enables the incredible promise of Harrington’s vision of government, installing toleration and the expansion of rights at the heart of popular sovereignty. For someone like Robert Filmer, for whom the father’s rights over his children and the husband’s rights over his wife exemplify the ideal relation between sovereign and subject, the use of two girls to depict popular sovereignty would be unthinkable. 38 It would also be unthinkable for Locke, for whom children do not yet have the capacity to exercise freedom. Because children are born within a structure of dominion, Locke argues, they lack the capacity to rationalize political equity. 39 Although Harrington is not arguing for women’s or children’s rights, his example critiques current understanding of the common and argues for its expansion. Since the two girls cannot be citizens, on the grounds that they are minors and on the grounds that they are not men, they engage in an act of reasoning that founds the concept of popular sovereignty from which they are also excluded. And to identify with the two girls as the basis of common right is to include these excluded figures, if not through political argumentation, then through poetic imagination. By defi ning popular sovereignty through its exception, Harrington probably, most likely, or even absolutely unwittingly strengthens and expands the demand for liberty which is at the core of the concept of common right. But the literary nature of the scene also points to the problems of Harrington’s understanding of government. Playing off the relation between the particular and the general in the scene with the two girls, one of Harrington’s detractors, Matthew Wren, writes in his Considerations On Mr. Harrington’s Oceana (1657) that “we are promised a solution so facile, that it is obvious to such as have the Green sicknesse.”40 Harrington

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wants to show the transformation of particular self-interest into general common interest, but Wren insists that this transformation is inevitably incomplete. Wren takes up the scene’s invitation to employ literary imagination and develops a counternarrative that upsets the terms of Harrington’s fiction. Green sickness is a humoral ailment that inflicts young virgin women of marriageable age. Its primary symptom is the reluctance of young women to marry. As such, it is a social disease—or better, a disease of detachment from the transformation into the social world—a disease in which pathological private interest overrules the projected social good.41 Harrington responds by calling attention to the aggressive nature of Wren’s interpretation. “Why, in comes a gallant with a fi le of musketeers. What, says he, are you dividing and choosing here? Go to, I will have no dividing, give me all. Down go the pots, and up go their heels. What is this? why, a king! what more? by divine right! As he took the cake from the girls!” (PPG 419). But since he shares Hobbes’s understanding of politics and imagination, Harrington can register the problem he aims to foreclose only as a dark possibility. Although Harrington aims to suspend Hobbes’s account of the theologico-political sovereign with a new founding fiction, one that can take the place of the social contract, this fiction is successful only as a fiction and, for this reason, can never fully overcome the threat of the sovereign’s return. Harrington’s critique and transformation of Hobbes recall Carl Schmitt’s account of modern political form. In Constitutional Theory, Schmitt proposes two principles that defi ne modern political form: identity and representation. Political unity can exist through the self-identity of the people, and it can also exist through the representational capacity of the ruler. Following Hobbes, Schmitt gives priority to the second: “That the government of established community is something other than the power of a pirate cannot be understood from the perspective of the ideas of justice, social usefulness, or other normative elements, for all these normative concepts can apply even to thieves. The difference lies in the fact that every genuine government represents the political unity of a people, not the people in its natural presence.”42 The role of the sovereign is to constitute the public in the act of representing it, to establish the difference between public and private, legitimate and illegitimate, in the act of representing its political unity. Harrington reverses Hobbes’s—and, by extension, Schmitt’s—terms, using mimesis to argue against and transform authoritarian models of representation into a more democratic political form. For Harrington, it is not the sovereign’s capacity to represent that establishes the public; rather, it is the capacity of mimesis to regulate

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self-interest that constitutes the people as a politic unit within the rule of common right. We might extrapolate competing fictions of political theology from these two principles of political form. For Hobbes the social contract justifies and legitimates the theologico-political sovereign, the sovereign who rules the state analogously to the sovereign who created the world. In Leviathan Hobbes claims that the social contract obligates us to the “Mortal God,” the sovereign to whom “we owe under the Immortal God, our peace and defence” (L 17.114). Harrington responds by developing a model of political theology organized through mimetic identification. Mimesis works as an instrument of discipline that also manages the collective theological imaginary. Working within a Machiavellian tradition that sees religion as an instrument of the state, Harrington explores the explicitly poetic means by which a civil religion grounded in popular sovereignty might replace the Hobbesian theologico-political sovereign with a new version of political theology based on popular sovereignty. But there is no guarantee that this replacement will work. As we shall see in the next chapter, this is the problem that Milton takes up in Paradise Regained.

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t the end of The Rehearsal Transpros’d (1672), Andrew Marvell charges that the Anglican clergyman Samuel Parker does “despight” to the three persons of the trinity and especially to the Son, whom Parker likens to a “Jewish Zealot.”1 Parker portrays Jesus thus in his Discourse of Ecclesiastical Polity (1669) to legitimate persecution in extraordinary situations, when, for instance, Jesus expelled the money lenders from the temple in an act of righteous passion “without the Forms and Solemnities of Legal Process.”2 Parker’s broader point is to argue for the necessity of “just Indignation” against nonconformists for threatening the authority of the state. 3 He justifies the need for persecution on the grounds that nonconformity to the Anglican Church represents an unacceptable challenge to both ecclesiastical and political authority. Liberty of conscience, which Parker understands to be the right to claim exception to the doctrines and liturgical practices of the national church, inevitably leads down the slippery slope to sedition. “If this Right be claimed without Restraint or Limitation,” Parker argues, it follows that “Subjects may, whenever they please, cross with the Authority of their Governours, upon any pretence that can wear the Name, or make a shew of Religion.”4 This is precisely the kind of hypocrisy that a zealous Jesus prosecutes, legitimately and with righteous indignation. Marvell critiques this view of Jesus in the name of toleration. He writes The Rehearsal Transpros’d in defense of Charles II’s Declaration of Indulgence, which used royal prerogative to suspend legal penalties against nonconformists and Catholics. Marvell’s purpose is to demonstrate the extent to which the Anglican hegemony will twist Christianity in the interest of individual ambition and “the secular grandure of the Church.”5 To this end, he develops a wickedly satirical account of Parker, 243

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who becomes a symptom of the larger problem of state-sponsored persecution. In part, Marvell argues that Parker exemplifies a form of ambition legitimated by “Blood, Execution, and Massacre.”6 But also, he suggests that Parker’s just indignation acts out fantasies of revenge. Parker wants to whip nonconformists “as oft as he wants the prospect of a more pleasing Nudity” in response to the beatings and sexual violations that, Marvell insinuates, Parker received as a schoolboy.7 In the concluding paragraphs of The Rehearsal, Marvell implies that both kinds of violence result in bad theology, which in turn legitimates bad politics. Parker turns the Son into an extension of his own violent fantasies, representing the Son as “a notorious Rogue and Cut-throat” to foreclose the possibility of tolerating nonconformists.8 I begin with this well-known and highly public exchange to distinguish Milton’s response to the question of toleration. Milton may not have been thinking of Parker’s claims and he may not have consulted with his friend Marvell as he was writing Paradise Regained (1671), but the interrelated issues of theology, dissent, civil authority, and toleration are very much on his mind.9 Milton’s positions on nonconformity and toleration lead him to develop his own notorious figure of the Son. While the Jesus of Paradise Regained is no zealot and explicitly rejects the model of the Maccabees, he is no pacifist either.10 Rather, Milton uses Jesus to critique the synthesis of ecclesiastical and civil authority that writers like Parker were promoting. Like Marvell, in both A Treatise of Civil Power (1659) and Of True Religion, Heresy, Schism, and Toleration (1673) Milton argues for a broad understanding of toleration for all Protestant confessions, but unlike Marvell, he bases his arguments on his own particular understanding of the division between church and state. As Nicholas von Maltzahn has argued, Marvell had a more modern understanding of toleration than Milton, despite Milton often being taken as an early champion of the virtues espoused by a long-standing liberal tradition.11 Whereas Marvell argues that toleration is in the interest of the state, Milton argues that toleration is in the interest of religion. It furthers Christ’s government. “Christ hath a government of his own, sufficient of it self to all his ends and purposes in governing his church; but much different from that of the civil magistrate,” Milton writes in Of Civil Power (CPW 7:255). Civil government uses “outward force” to secure obedience, but Christ’s government is able to subdue “worldly force” through “faith and charitie,” which, Milton argues, involves ongoing interpretation of scripture alongside a tolerant attitude toward others who come up with different interpretations (7:255). While civil government and Christ’s government might coexist, Milton

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gives clear priority to the second. For Marvell, the central question is whether or not the state should tolerate nonconformists, but for Milton, the central question is whether or not religion should tolerate the state. Milton’s answer to this question tends to be no. Because he imagines toleration in terms of competing forms of government, he often seems much less tolerant than Marvell, at least by post-Enlightenment standards. Milton is most often interested in limit cases of intolerance, even, or especially, when he is also arguing for the flourishing of nonconformity. In response to the question of whether or not Catholicism should be tolerated, Milton answers with a resounding no. This is because for Milton the Catholic Church figures ecclesiastical polity in its most egregious form: the instrumentalization of religion by politics. Catholicism, Milton argues, is not primarily a religion but is a political form that uses religion to further political authority. It is “a Roman principality . . . , endeavoring to keep up her old universal dominion under a new name” (7:254). Or, as he puts it later in Of True Religion, “Popery . . . claims a twofold Power, Ecclesiastical and Political, both usurpt, and the one supporting the other” (8:429). In the case of the Protestant state, Milton gives a more qualified response. A Protestant state that attempts to force conscience and, thereby, restrict Christian liberty cannot be tolerated, whereas a Protestant state that tolerates sects and schisms, allowing Christian liberty to flourish, is no immediate threat to Christ’s government and can be tolerated. However, Milton’s argument also implies that at some point in time Christ’s government will replace the state, since its purpose is to subdue worldly power. David Loewenstein, Sharon Achinstein, David Norbrook, and John Coffey have all argued that in Paradise Regained Milton presented only a seemingly pacifist Jesus because he was concerned with the issue of timing. Milton didn’t give up his revolutionary politics in the aftermath of the Restoration, but, like a number of his contemporaries, he became deeply attentive to the means and opportunities for expressing them. He was a close enough reader of Machiavelli to understand that successful reform depends upon calibrating strategy to occasions as they present themselves.12 An argument that takes shape in the 1640s as The Reason of Church Government would have to be couched in radically different terms in the Restoration, not just because Milton’s thinking develops between his early antiprelatical treatises and his later poetry but also because exigent political circumstances change the terms by which he can express his thinking. Milton may tolerate the state for the moment, but, as Achinstein puts it, toleration of confl icting views is “a temporary condition,” one that enables Milton’s critique of “both secularism and toler-

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ance in their many guises.”13 Neither the state nor toleration is a goal in itself that could plausibly replace Christ’s government and the subduing of worldly force. This temporary condition might also be thought of as the condition of the secular order. Like Spinoza, Milton understands existence in this world to be polemical and defi ned by interpretive differences and, again as with Spinoza, it is from within these differences that Milton redefi nes our understanding of the secular order. In Paradise Regained, I argue, Milton places us in the “temporary condition” of conflicting views and asks us to imagine Christ’s government through a devastating critique of divine kingship. And this leads Milton to explore political theology from the perspective of dissension, conflict, and the freedom of interpretation. Locating the action of the poem between God’s pronouncement that Jesus is his Son and Jesus’s execution of that office in the scene on top of the temple, Milton explores the imaginative resources of scriptural interpretation in formulating what Christ’s government might look like. In Of Civil Power, Milton argues that the freedom and necessity of scriptural interpretation founds Christ’s government in secular time. Since “no man or body of men in these times can be the infallible judges or determiners in matters of religion to any other men’s consciences but their own,” anyone who “shall pretend that the scripture judges to his conscience for other men, he makes himself not only greater than the church, but also than the scripture” (7:865). In Paradise Regained Jesus fashions a form of government that protects and nourishes this freedom by using scripture to mount a critique of the various manifestations of ecclesiastical polity offered by Satan. At stake is more than scriptural interpretation, however; also at stake is political form. Through a critique of ecclesiastical polity, Milton elaborates a form of government and of self-governance based on religious imagination that takes the place of divine sovereignty and the structures of violence upon which that sovereign relies. Although Paradise Regained takes up the Mosaic constitution at a certain level of abstraction, Milton’s poem makes a fitting ending to this book. Focusing the poem on Jesus’s temptation in the wilderness allows Milton to explore key themes and issues at stake in the Mosaic constitution that we have seen throughout—including the role of divine violence in political making and the relation between political making and the constituted order—while he simultaneously treats scripture as a remarkably fluid and expansive text, a source of literary invention. Milton’s two main points of reference are Machiavelli and Hobbes. As I shall argue, Milton encourages us to read God’s announcement that Jesus is his Son through a

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Machiavellian understanding of the new prince. However, Milton locates political making in obedience rather than in the pronouncement or command. In Of Civil Power, he claims that “Christ is the only lawgiver of his church” (7:866). Expanding this claim through a Machiavellian paradigm of the lawgiver, Milton asks us to imagine the Son’s obedience as a form of constituting power. At the same time, Milton uses the Son to raise a Hobbesian problem concerning obedience and sovereignty: what is the role of obedience when the protection of the sovereign is absent? Reimagining obedience through a Machiavellian understanding of the founder, Milton develops a surprisingly worldly understanding of Christ’s government. In this way, Milton joins contemporaries like Harrington and Spinoza in laying the foundations for a modern understanding of political power and its relation to religious imagination, or what I have been calling the theological imaginary.

THE SCENE OF ENUNCIATION The Gospel accounts of the temptation in the wilderness combine two moments from Hebrew scripture. The fi rst comes from Psalm 2, where the psalmist imagines himself being named the Son of God insofar as he has been anointed the King of Israel: I will declare the decree: the Lord hath said unto me, Thou art my Son; this day have I begotten thee. Ask of me, and I shall give thee the heathen [goyim: the nations] for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession. Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron; thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel. (KJV Psalm 2:7–9)

All three of the gospel accounts cite this decree (Matt. 3:17, Mark 1:11, Luke 3:22), indicating that Jesus is the anointed one who legitimately inherits the Kingdom of Israel and, in this role, will break the enemies of God. Jesus is, in short, a new David.14 The second moment from Hebrew scripture referenced in gospel accounts of the temptation in the wilderness comes from Exodus.15 The forty days that Jesus spends in the desert (Matt. 4:2, Mark 1:13, Luke 4:2) alludes to the forty years that the Israelites wandered in the desert, implying that God’s pronouncement, “Thou art my beloved Son,” reiterates and restages the fi rst commandment, “I am the Lord thy God,” that the Israelites received on Mount Sinai (Exod. 20:2).

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If the pronouncement “I am the Lord thy God” established the fi rst covenant, its reiteration as “Thou art my Son” looks forward to a second covenant that transforms the fi rst. Especially since Jesus is the recipient and target of this new declaration, the repetition of the scene on Mount Sinai suggests that whatever authority is being conferred on the Son, that authority allows Jesus to obey the law in such a way that brings about a new dispensation. Jesus’s obedience has a performative dimension that turns obedience into a form of political making—a new ordering of authority, belief, and obligation. The gospel writers synthesized the two moments so that Jesus becomes both a new David and a new Moses. Imagining the dual figures of monarch and lawgiver through a structure of obedience—the Son’s capacity to resist Satan’s temptations—these writers suggest the combination of monarchy and lawgiving in such a way that at least potentially reestablishes Israel in a new set of relations to divine authority and the law. Milton, by contrast, wedges these two moments apart, turning the scene of law giving conjured by the typological repetition of Exodus against the claims in Psalm 2 of inherited kingship. What authorizes Jesus’s role as the Son of God, Milton suggests, is his relation to the Mosaic constitution. Like Harrington, Milton understands the act of law giving to be a scene of communication in which one party proposes and the other confi rms or rejects the proposed law. Unlike Harrington, Milton uses the scene of communication to expand the social contract into an act of continued negotiation and not, as Harrington does, to argue against the social contract itself. Considering the covenant from the perspective of a hidden God, in the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce Milton explains that the law reveals God’s will through the figure of the lawgiver: “Herein he appears to us as it were in human shape” and “binds himself like a just lawgiver to his own prescriptions.” The play here between fact and figure, between what Milton calls “reveled will” and the “hidden wayes of [God’s] providence,” opens up the law as a site of interpretation (CPW 2:292). God binds like a lawgiver, but because his intentions appear in a simile—God appears “as it were in human shape” and “like a just lawgiver”—the law that he gives is open to ongoing interpretation and renegotiation. In Paradise Regained, Milton considers this negotiation from the perspective of Jesus. As the recipient of a new law, Jesus must negotiate with a hidden God. At the same time, as that law’s primary referent, he must do so by interpreting and shaping his own identity as God’s Son. Milton rejects the idea that the office of the Son was an inherited position throughout his writings. In his verse translation of Psalm 2 (dated

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1653), Milton pushes the psalm’s language of inheritance toward a legal model of exchange. In the King James Version, God says to the psalmist, “Ask of me, and I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance.” Milton revises this line to read, “Ask of me, and the grant is made.”16 By substituting “grant” for “inheritance,” Milton downplays the blood relations implied in the language of birthright and instead emphasizes the agency of the two parties involved. The psalmist must ask for the grant to be made before God agrees to give it to him. In book 3 of Paradise Lost, the Son is given dominion over the created world only after he freely agrees to stand as a substitute for Adam and Eve’s transgression. The Son is elevated to the throne of heaven “By Merit more than Birthright,” as Milton’s God puts it, earning his authority because of his trust in God and not because of his blood relation to the Father (PL 3.309). And in De Doctrina Christiana, Milton argues that throughout scripture the Son is called the only begotten “in a metaphorical sense,” as an effect of the Father’s command or decree (CPW 6:210).17 In his account of the relation between Father and Son, Milton is careful to preserve the free will of the Father in electing the Son and the free will of the Son in fulfilling his election. Pushing the agency of the Father and the Son to an extreme, Milton reasons that if the Son were the Son in a sense other than metaphorical, the implication would be that he deserves his office apart from any action on his part and that the Father was constrained to cede this office to him because of the custom of birthright. In Paradise Regained, Milton revises the notion of inherited kingship found in scripture by focusing the poem’s dramatic action on the aporia opened up by the initial enunciation (“This is my Son”) and its uptake by Jesus. As Barbara Lewalski argued years ago in her groundbreaking study of the poem, the central question of Paradise Regained is how to interpret the Son’s office.18 The answer to this question takes shape indirectly, through the interactions between Satan’s sometimes intentional and sometimes inadvertent misunderstandings of that office and Jesus’s rejection and redefi nition of Satan’s terms. In his initial representation of the scene of enunciation, Milton deliberately withholds God’s pronouncement, reporting it as indirect speech only: . . . on him baptiz’d Heaven open’d, and in likeness of a Dove The Spirit descended, while the Father’s voice From Heav’n pronounc’d him his beloved Son. (PR 1.29–32)

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It is Satan who directly reports what he heard God say: “out of Heav’n the Sovran voice I heard,” he tells the other devils, “‘This is my Son belov’d, in him am pleas’d’” (1.84–85). Despite the force of the pronouncement, which is never in question, its meaning and significance become increasingly mysterious. “Who this is we must learn,” Satan says (1.91). By the end of the poem, it is clear that Satan hasn’t learned much. Given Jesus’s impulse to transform Satan’s literal terms into metaphors that indicate a different understanding of his office, Satan cannot tell if the Son’s portended kingdom will be “Real or Allegoric” (4.390); nor, given Jesus’s adamant rejection of any supernatural, divine, or transcendental terms, can Satan tell “what more” Jesus is “than man, / Worth naming Son of God by voice from Heav’n” (4.538–39). But presumably Jesus has learned something about his office since by the end of the temptations, he is reaffirmed “Son of God” and “Victor” (4.636–37). At the end of the poem, Jesus seems to have successfully become what at the beginning of the poem he was announced to be. However, Milton isn’t at all clear what it is that the Son has learned, and one of the activities that Milton asks his readers to take up is to discern how through the various temptations the office of the Son is being formed. Although Paradise Regained asks explicitly theological questions about the office of the Son, Milton also assumes a Machiavellian understanding of the scene of enunciation. Initially, this understanding takes form through Reason of State. Beginning in the late sixteenth century, CounterReformation political writers like Giovanni Botero, Trajano Boccalini, and Thomas Campanella transformed the Machiavellian prince into an absolutist monarch.19 As part of this transformation, these writers fi rst implicitly acknowledged and then came to underscore the various technical and representational means by which an absolutist monarch might manipulate belief in order to secure obedience. In his Considérations politiques sur les coups d’Etat (1639), written only a few years before Milton composed The Reason of Church Government, the political theorist Gabriel Naudé reads Machiavelli through the lens of French skepticism, especially through the works of Pierre Charron and Michel de Montaigne, in order to recommend that the monarch develop a theatrical sense of what Peter Donaldson has called “political magic.”20 According to Naudé, the arcana imperii or mysteries of state mean that the monarch should intervene in the everyday affairs of his or her subjects like a god, in such a way that seems magically to reinforce political authority. As he describes it, the monarch must look down, as if on “some high tower, upon the world, which is represented as if some theater, poorly ordered and full of confusion, where some act in

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comedies and others in tragedies, and where he can intervene tanquam Deus aliquis ex machina, as often as he pleases.”21 The absolutist monarch treats the whole world as a stage in order to play the role of deus ex machina—the god who intervenes in order to repair the plot and, in the same stroke or coup as Naudé calls it, affirm his majesty and glory. This is how Satan understands the scene of enunciation. He interprets the naming of the Son through the lens of political theater to underscore a libertine interpretation of the Son’s authority. As he explains to his followers, the fallen angels, Before him a great Prophet, to proclaim His coming, is sent Harbinger, who all Invites, and in the Consecrated stream Pretends to wash off sin, and fit them so Purified to receive him pure, or rather To do him honour as their King; all come, And he himself among them was baptiz’d, Not thence to be more pure, but to receive The testimony of Heaven, that who he is Thenceforth the Nations may not doubt; . . . (1.70–79)

Satan calls attention to baptism as an instrumentalized ritual. Following accounts like Naudé’s of the arcana imperii as the assertion of power cloaked by the more palatable cover of religion, Satan proposes that baptism is a religious ritual whose central function is political. Baptism only “pretends to wash off sin” when really its purpose is to give the Son’s followers the impression that his kingship is divinely ordained. By interpreting the office of the Son as political theater, Satan hopes to demystify the Son’s authority and, thereby, discredit it. Why does the Son need the ritual pretence of purification rites? Is God nothing more than a Machiavellian prince? As he does in book 5 of Paradise Lost, here Satan imputes political motive to the elevation of the Son in order to cast the Father as a manipulative and tyrannical ruler. Milton underscores Satan’s sense of political theater by describing the effect of God’s pronouncement in terms of sensation. When Satan hears God pronounce Jesus his Son, he is “with the voice divine / Nigh Thunderstruck” (1.35–36), and he then “survey’d” Jesus “With wonder” (1.37–38). Satan inhabits a Machiavellian world in which political authorities instrumentalize religion in the service of their own dominion. For Satan, God

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and the Son are not exempt from this insight. They are, rather, Exhibits A and B in support of its truth. Satan assumes that Jesus will be a founder like the Moses whom Machiavelli describes in chapter 6 of The Prince, but Satan interprets Jesus’s actions not from the perspective of one of Jesus’s followers but from the perspective of one of the vanquished, those who “profit by the old order” and, as Machiavelli describes it, “take every opportunity” for attacking the founder “with the enthusiasm of partisans [partigianamente]” (P 13 / 49–50). It might seem that Milton would renounce a Machiavellian understanding of authority, given that he associates it with a Satanic perspective. Instead, he deepens this understanding to be able to account for an understanding of authority based on freedom and obedience. Paradise Regained is part of a tradition of Machiavellian political thought (that would include Harrington and Spinoza) explicitly opposed to Reason of State and seeing in Hebrew scripture a model for contemporary government contrary to seventeenth-century absolutism. This is most evident in Jesus’s rejection of classical learning, a controversial moment for some Miltonists because it seems to suggest that Milton is rejecting the literary tradition out of which his poetry develops. But for Milton the central issue is the mode of government that Satan associates with classical learning. Satan offers Jesus the ability to be “famous” “By wisdom” (4.221–22). He then adds the caveat that classical learning will allow Jesus to be a better ruler over the Greeks and Romans: All knowledge is not couch’t in Moses’ Law, The Pentateuch or what the Prophets wrote; The Gentiles also know, and write, and teach To admiration, led by Nature’s light; And with the Gentiles much thou must converse, Ruling them by persuasion as thou mean’st, Without thir learning how wilt thou with them, Or they with thee hold conversation meet? How wilt thou reason with them, how refute Thir Idolisms, Traditions, Paradoxes? (4.225–34)

The assumption lurking behind Satan’s offer is that Jesus intends to rule “by persuasion.” On an initial read, persuasion seems like an innocent enough mode of interaction. It implies nothing more than conversation and debate. But a second glance at Satan’s offer reveals a darker purpose.

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Conversation and debate assume the interaction of equals, whereas “ruling by persuasion” implies manipulation and deceit. At stake in Satan’s offer is more than a means of communication. More pointedly, if also quite subtly, Satan suggests that Jesus should learn the Greek and Roman traditions in order to turn those traditions against the very people who developed them. Autochthonic culture becomes a means by which the Son can subject the Greek and Romans to his reign. This is why, after he rejects the inherent worth of classical learning, Jesus goes on to distinguish the models of government implied by classical oratory from the one found in Hebrew scripture: Their Orators thou then extoll’st, as those The top of Eloquence, Statists indeed, And lovers of their Country, as may seem; But herein to our Prophets far beneath, As men divinely taught, and better teaching The solid rules of Civil Government In thir majestic unaffected style Than all the Oratory of Greece and Rome. In them is plainest taught, and easiest learnt, What makes a Nation happy, and keeps it so, What ruins Kingdoms, and lays Cities flat; These only, with our Law, best form a King. (4.353–64)

Milton’s opposition between “Statists” and “the solid rules of Civil Government” found in Hebrew scripture is similar to the opposition that Harrington draws, as we saw in chapter 7, between “the empire of laws” and the “empire of men.”22 The problem with the statists is that they rule by oratory, which introduces the possibility of self-interest. Like governance through the empire of men, governance through oratory or persuasion is based on the rule of the few, who subject the city or the nation to their own interests. Jesus indicates this problem with his brief qualification, “lovers of their Country, as may seem” (emphasis mine). These statists may seem to love their country, and may indeed love their country, Jesus argues, but the introduction of seeming indicates that this is a distinction that is inevitably blurred by governance based on persuasion, oratory, and eloquence. By contrast, the value of “Civil Government” as taught by Hebrew scripture is that it places law above individual interest. As with Harrington’s empire of laws, the “solid rules of Civil Government” found

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in Hebrew scripture assumes as its point of reference the common interest of the entire nation—“What makes a nation happy,” as Milton puts it. As Jesus suggests in this passage’s fi nal line, it is “Law” that can “best form a King” and not a king who can best form law. Or, as Harrington puts it in Oceana, “‘Give us good men and they will make good laws’ is the maxim of a demagogue . . . and exceedingly fallible. But ‘give us good orders, and they will make us good men’ is the maxim of a legislator and the most infallible in the politics.”23 In Milton’s hands, however, scripture is more than an exemplary text that shows the best rules for civil government. It is also the means that Jesus uses to reimagine and refashion the state. Jesus’s claim in the fi nal line of this passage is an oblique reference to Deuteronomy 17, where Moses warns the Israelites that eventually their descendants will reject God’s rule and establish a monarchy, and he then goes on to subordinate monarchical authority to the rule of law: And it shall be, when [the king] sitteth upon the throne of his kingdom, that he shall write him a copy of this law in a book out of that which is before the priests the Levites: And it shall be with him, and he shall read therein all the days of his life: that he may learn to fear the Lord his God, to keep all the words of this law and these statutes, to do them: That his heart be not lifted up above his brethren, and that he turn not aside from the commandment, to the right hand, or to the left: to the end that he may prolong his days in his kingdom, he, and his children, in the midst of Israel. (KJV Deut. 17:18–20)

As we saw in chapter 4, this passage was central to English Jesuits in the late sixteenth century, who were arguing to limit the monarch’s authority in matters of Church doctrine and, as we saw in chapter 7, it was also central for English republicans aiming to subordinate executive authority to the rule of law. Like Harrington after him, in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates Milton uses this passage to argue against divine kingship—“that Law of Moses was to the King expresly, Deut. 17. not to think so highly of himself above his Brethren”—and in favor of popular sovereignty. The very warning that the people will reject God’s government for a human king indicates that “the right of choosing, yea of changing their own Government, is by the grant of God himself in the People” (CPW 3:205, 207). In Paradise Regained, Jesus develops the claims of Deuteronomy 17

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through the metaphorical revision of the figure of the king. At the end of book 2, Jesus explains that he is not exactly rejecting kingship, and he then goes on to elaborate a version of kingship that has very little to do with the governance of the state. . . . to guide Nations in the way of truth By saving Doctrine, and from error lead To know, and knowing worship God aright, Is yet more Kingly; this attracts the Soul, Governs the inner man, the nobler part; That other o’er the body only reigns, And oft by force, which to a generous mind So reigning can be no sincere delight. (PR 2.473–80)

Rather than reigning over others “by force”—“no sincere delight”—Jesus associates kingship with obedience, worshiping God, and with selfmanagement, governing “the inner man.” In Milton’s metaphorical revision, the claims of Deuteronomy 17 get internalized, so that, instead of the king simply being subordinate to the law through study and education, more profoundly the act of governing the inner man institutes the rule of law and saves law or “Doctrine” from corruption by self-interest. This is not a prescriptive model of obedience either. By making the argument through metaphor, Milton can argue for the necessity of a governmental order based on obedience and self-management without actually specifying a set of rules or laws to be obeyed. This is because for Milton, metaphor does not lead toward clarity but toward what Catherine Gimelli Martin call a “vitalistic obscurity” through which God’s purpose continues to be revealed and negotiated.24 Milton indicates the emptying-out effect of this mode of argumentation with the phrase “saving Doctrine,” a particularly undefi ned phrase that does not at all indicate any particular doctrines that are being saved. Rather, the mode of governance that Jesus elaborates saves “doctrine” itself as an order instantiated through the action of obedience. Milton’s argumentation through metaphor draws him uncomfortably close to libertines like Naudé who see religion as a fiction to be manipulated by the state. In both cases, scripture is not fi xed and unbending but is open to reinterpretation and poetic transformation. This is the reason that Milton takes a strong stance against the instrumentalization of religion urged by Reason of State, to distinguish himself from an understanding of politics and representation that his poem might otherwise imply.

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Milton levels his most forceful critique of this line of thinking in his account of glory at the beginning of book 3. When Satan suggests that Jesus claim his office through glory and stylize himself after Alexander the Great, Scipio, Pompey, and Caesar, Jesus responds in no uncertain terms. This kind of glory leads “Conquerors” to think themselves gods, “Great Benefactors of mankind, Deliverers, / Worshipped with Temple, Priest, and Sacrifice” (3.78, 82–83). In The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, Milton associates this kind of glory with pride: “No Christian prince, not drunk with high mind, and prouder than those Pagan Caesars that deifi’d themselves, would arrogate so unreasonably above human condition, or derogate so basely from a whole Nation of men his Brethren, as if for him only subsisting, and to serve his glory; valuing them in comparison of his own brute will and pleasure, no more than so many beasts, or vermin under his Feet, not to be reasoned with, but trod upon” (CPW 3:204). In this work written during the English Revolution, Milton justifies the execution of Charles I while placing a great deal of faith in the capacity of the English people to establish government based on virtue and rule of law. By the Restoration, Milton felt that trust had been misplaced, so in Paradise Regained he expands his earlier account to argue that subjects who accept divine kingship are complicit in their own devaluation. In addition to pride, governance through the mystery of state is fostered by the praises of a “miscellaneous rabble” who in their unthinkingness “extol / Things vulgar” and “admire they know not what” (PR 3.50–53). In Milton’s developing assessment, the glorification of the sovereign is sustained by a bond between the pride of those who govern and the willful ignorance of those who are subject to them. Most interesting about this moment, however, is that Satan completely agrees. In the passage that follows Jesus’s indictment of the arcana imperii, Satan takes up Jesus’s critique and applies it to God. “Think not so slight of glory,” Satan responds; after all, glory is how “thy great Father” governs (3.109, 110). God is, in fact, a glutton for glory. He requires glory from the angels, from “all men good or bad,” and even from Satan and his followers: “From us his foes pronounc’t glory he exacts” (3.114, 120). Satan’s response indicates the limitations of a solely political critique of the mystery of state. From a political perspective, the mystery of state mystifies authority, but without a concurrent theological critique, the political critique risks becoming cynicism. This is precisely Satan’s situation. One the one hand, he cunningly uses God’s government to legitimate a self-serving model of divine kingship at odds with God’s rule. On the other hand, he genuinely believes that God is a divine monarch. In a

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backhanded way, Satan’s political calculation affirms an absolutist theology as his sincere belief. In Satan’s account, a monarch can legitimately if also deceitfully stylize him or herself as a god because this is how God is stylizing himself. Milton stages this dynamic repeatedly in Paradise Lost, where Satan imitates what he imagines and believes to be God’s mode of governance, which only underscores his own “proud imaginations” in his distance from God’s government (PL 2.10). In Paradise Regained, this dynamic takes the form of temptation, when Satan offers Jesus a sincere vision of his understanding of divine authority and asks him to imitate that vision in his own rule on earth. For Milton, the problem with the instrumentalization of religion is not that it assumes religion to be a fiction but that it literalizes the fiction of religion by projecting an image of the divine that further fi xes God’s motives and, at the same time, reinforces an absolutist image of sovereignty. Milton responds not by denying that religion is a fiction but instead by reconfiguring religious imagination. Religious imagination becomes a mode of exchange between the human and the divine in which representations of the divine are approximations that can just as easily be pitted against divine monarchy as mobilized in support of it. Jesus answers Satan’s account of divine glory by emphasizing the central place of freedom in religious imagination: . . . since his word all things produc’d, Though chiefly not for glory as prime end, But to show forth his goodness, and impart His good communicable to every soul Freely; of whom what could he less expect Than glory and benediction, that is thanks, The slightest, easiest, readiest recompense From them who could return him nothing else, And not returning that would likeliest render Contempt instead, dishonor, obloquy? (PR 3.122–31)

How we understand this passage depends entirely on what we take the word “freely” to modify. Read from one point of view, this passage proposes that as the creator of the universe God deserves glorification in a way that created beings don’t. In this case, “freely” modifies “impart.” God freely creates and imparts his goodness, and, for this reason, he can legitimately expect “glory and benediction.” By contrast, Jesus contin-

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ues, human “Conquerors” who “ruin wheresoe’er they rove” deserve only contempt (3.79–80). “Why should man seek glory?” he asks, “who of his own / Hath nothing” (3.134–35). In this account, the absolute nature of God as free creator mitigates against Satan’s version of political theology. Read from another point of view, this passage also proposes that religious language cannot be contained. In this case, “freely” modifies “communicable.” God’s goodness is freely “communicable to every soul.” Communicable includes not just vertical communication, revelation from God to particular individuals, but horizontal communication between and among individuals as well. In this second account, the freedom at stake is not just God’s freedom to impart his goodness but also the freedom of his creatures to communicate that goodness both to God and to one another unconstrained by God’s absolute nature. These two readings form the central tenet of religious imagination, which is entirely free to imagine the divine in any way whatsoever but, in imagining the divine, is also accountable to the absolute nature of God, which exceeds imagination. This freedom is the condition for Satan’s version of political theology. That God doesn’t constrain representations of himself means that Satan can translate one of God’s attributes into an instrument of political domination. It is also the condition for the Son’s response. The Son freely ratifies the glory of God, which means that God’s glory exists as an interaction between creator and creature and is not an aspect of the creator imposed upon the creature. The freedom to represent God can and, for Milton, must be turned against all forms of what Milton calls coercive power. And fi nally, for this reason, this freedom explains the need for intolerance in the confrontation between religion and the state. The vision of political theology that Satan espouses threatens the freedom of religious imagination that the Son claims, and so Milton only admits it so that it can be defeated. Satan makes two intertwined mistakes. First, he takes the attribute of glory as a reality and not as a marker, to use the felicitous terms that Victoria Silver develops in her account of Satanic representation in Paradise Lost. And second, Satan uses this bad understanding of representation to authorize an analogy between God and the political sovereign. For Silver, the problem with taking a marker for reality, or the figural for the actual, is that it short-circuits the negative dialectic around which religious imagination productively turns. (Silver’s two points of reference are Luther and Adorno.) Since religious imagination can only imagine the divine without ever capturing its essence, its most appropriate medium is a language that marks the difference between the human and the divine in its characterizations of the divine.25 In response to Satan’s mistake, Je-

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sus turns glory into a marker of this difference, turning Satan’s analogy between God and the political sovereign against itself. First, he claims that the sovereign is an inadequate representation of God. Any good there is in glory “may by means far different be attain’d / By deeds of peace, by wisdom eminent, / By patience, temperance” (3.89–91). Second, he turns glory into an acknowledgment of God’s absolute nature, so that those who “advance [God’s] glory, not thir own / Them he himself to glory will advance” (3.143–44). Glory becomes a marker of the difference between the human and the divine, which is manifest not in the mysterious nature of divine authority but instead in the twinned acts of free interpretation and patient obedience. One implication of this argument is that it is the Son’s intolerance that makes Paradise Regained significant as political poem. Through Jesus’s critique of absolutist political theology, Milton claims Machiavelli’s more radical insight that religion is a shaping fiction against Satan’s more limited characterization of that insight, that religion can be instrumentalized in the service of the state. In his account of glory, Milton inverts the Machiavellian scene of the lawgiver, approaching it not from the perspective of a monarch or new prince who establishes authority through spectacularly violent means but from the perspective of obedience. As we have seen throughout this book, Machiavelli’s argument about force and the need to instrumentalize religion assumes a gap between command and obedience that he and his subsequent readers repeatedly exploit. In his brief analysis of Moses, Machiavelli shows how the new prince can best secure obedience through the rhetorical manipulation of belief backed up by visible military force. This is because law on its own cannot compel obedience, and new systems of law in particular sow the seeds of dissension more readily than they bring about consensus and produce a loyal following. For Spinoza, this gap means that government assumes a theological imaginary that must be shaped and crafted, while for Harrington it points to the need for any command to be ratified and founds his arguments for popular sovereignty. Writing after the Restoration, Milton is much less optimistic than Harrington, though he remains committed to the general insight. In a certain sense, Satan is absolutely correct in his assessment of the Son’s political role. As the Son of God, Jesus is like a new prince who inaugurates a new order by displacing an older view of the state. Except, Milton shifts the emphasis so that now the obedient subject and not the lawgiver is the primary agent. He considers the founding act not through the assertion of virtù but through what the angels call the Son’s “fi lial Virtue,” his capacity to resist temptation (1.177). In Paradise

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Regained, Milton admits Satan’s perspective and then deepens our understanding of his central premises. In combining a theological account of the office of the Son with a Machiavellian understanding of politics, Milton asks us to entertain the following question: Can the Son embody a Machiavellian understanding of political making through a form of obedience that effectively usurps the function of divine kingship while displacing its manifestation as political sovereignty?

JESUS’S CALLING Milton approaches the scene of enunciation from a second perspective, that of calling. What for Satan is the announcement of a political office is, for Jesus, a call to his vocation. Upon hearing the pronouncement that he is the Son of God, Jesus wanders into the desert, “the Spirit leading, / And his deep thoughts” (PR 1.189–90), and considers “How best the mighty work he might begin” (1.186). Milton underscores this “mighty work” as a vocation by having Jesus review his prior speculations about possible career choices. Initially, Jesus considered achieving the “public good” by studying law (1.204) but then aspired to free Israel from Roman rule through “heroic acts” (1.216). Rejecting the role of military liberator, he decides to become a preacher and “make persuasion do the work of fear” (1.223) until his mother reveals that actually his father is God. This leads him to consult scripture, where he learns of the future that seems to have been mapped out for him: . . . my way must lie Through many a hard assay even to the death, Ere I the promis’d Kingdom can attain, Or work Redemption for mankind, whose sins’ Full weight must be transferr’d upon my head. (1.263–67)

Deducing his role as redeemer from reading the rituals of atonement surrounding the sin offering as described in Leviticus 9, Jesus determines that to fulfi ll his role as the Son of God he must become an object of sacrifice. Like the sin offering, Jesus takes on the job of bearing the people’s guilt. As he discerns it from scripture, his office is to be based on an act of substitution: the sins of humanity are to be “transferr’d” to him so that, like the sin offering, he can take humanity’s place at the moment of judgment and redeem humanity from its deserved punishment.26

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However, this is not the act of substitution that Milton has in mind in his understanding of Jesus’s vocation. Instead, Paradise Regained performs a second-level substitution in which the sacrificial economy that Jesus deduces is exchanged for a mode of obedience based on governance and self-administration.27 Can Jesus take up his office in such a way that obviates the need for divine violence? The problem with sacrifice is that it implies a model of political theology in which divine sovereignty is expressed through the sovereign’s right to infl ict pain, suffering, and death upon select political subjects. For Milton, the emblematic moment of that version of political theology is the Passion. His resistance to that moment is well known. His early poem “The Passion,” a self-proclaimed failure, is remarkable for its speaker’s inability to look at the scene the poem tries but fi nally cannot represent. In Paradise Lost, Michael’s brief description of the Passion entirely avoids the sense of suffering one might expect in representations of the crucifi xion and emphasizes the Son’s obedience and love instead. In Paradise Regained, Milton’s concerns are more explicitly political. He shifts the focus of attention away from a model of sovereignty in which the Son suffers at the hands of the Father and toward a model of obedience that defers and displaces this prior scene.28 This shift involves a movement from the polis to the household. In the Politics, Aristotle specifies the oikos as the place of management (the master manages the slave, the father manages the sons, the husband manages the wife), which he distinguishes from the polis as the space where equals meet to determine their collective future.29 By raising Jesus’s vocation in terms of a set of confl icting familial desires, Milton recommends that we consider obedience in terms of economy in its root sense of oiko-nomos, or household management. Bacon makes a similar recommendation in The Dignity and Advancement of Learning when he proposes that to understand political duty and its relation to self-interest, philosophers would do well to consider treatises “touching the respective duties of vocations and professions” (WFB 9:210), treatises on craftsmanship that cast duty through practical and not theoretical reason. Milton takes up Bacon’s advice, exploring Jesus’s vocation as a practical response to divine violence. Jesus shapes his vocation against the backdrop of the path laid out for him by scripture, following what he takes to be his Father’s will while at the same time transforming that will in such a way that disables the sacrificial economy associated with it. Instead of the Father managing the career of his Son, the unfolding of Jesus’s calling through the story of the temptation in the wilderness suggests that the Son transforms the will of the Father by managing his own ambitions and desires.

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Milton extends the household to include Jesus’s mother. Mary triangulates relations between Father and Son in her worries over the Pidyon Ha’Ben, the Jewish ritual of the redemption of the fi rstborn son. As Moses explains it in Exodus, the fi rstborn son must be redeemed by a substituting sacrifice because all fi rstborn males, both human and animal, belong to God: “Thou shalt set apart unto the Lord all that openeth the matrix, and every fi rstling that cometh of a beast which thou hast; the males shall be the Lord’s” (KJV Exod. 13:12). However, Jesus’s ritual redemption is interrupted by Simeon and Anna’s prophecy: “Behold, this child is set for the fall and rising again of many in Israel; and for a sign which shall be spoken against; (Yea, a sword shall pierce through thy own soul also,) that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed” (Luke 2:34–35). This prophecy stains Mary’s understanding of her son’s vocation. After telling Jesus about Gabriel’s revelation and the gifts of the Magi, she concludes by recalling Simeon and Anna, who “warn’d / By Vision” and spoke “Like things of thee to all that present stood” (PR 1.255–56, 258). Most significant about her revelation is her strategy of containment. Rather than disclosing Simeon and Anna’s warning, she folds it into the general “like things” that Gabriel and the Magi prophesy. Gabriel and the Magi look forward to a bright future for Jesus that Mary emphasizes, acknowledging while withholding from Jesus the warning that Simeon and Anna issued. Milton indicates Mary’s strategy of withholding when, in her only soliloquy in the poem, she explains her worries once the Father publicly announces Jesus’s office: “I look’t for some great change; to Honor? no, / But trouble, as old Simeon plain foretold” (2.86–87). Mary’s worry is that the Pidyon Ha’Ben has been short-circuited, that the ritual of redemption has not loosened God’s dominion over his Son. Jesus is “acknowledg’d, as I hear,” she says, and “in public shown / Son own’d from Heaven by his Father’s voice” (2.83–85). With the word “own’d” Mary indicates her concern that God the Father will claim the rights of the pater familias that the sacrificial rituals of the Pidyon Ha’Ben are meant to suspend. Mary’s worries color how we take her vocational advice to Jesus. Once she notices that Jesus is beginning to consider his vocation, she reveals his true paternity: High are thy thoughts O Son, but nourish them and let them soar To what height sacred virtue and true worth Can raise them, though above example high; By matchless Deeds express thy matchless Sire.

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For know, thou art no Son of mortal man; Though men esteem thee low of Parentage, Thy Father is th’Eternal King, who rules All Heaven and Earth, Angels and Sons of men; A messenger from God foretold thy birth Conceiv’d in me a Virgin, he foretold Thou shouldst be great and sit on David’s Throne, And of thy Kingdom there should be no end. (1.229–41)

There are two points that I would like to make about this advice. The fi rst concerns rhetoric. While it is possible to read this advice as utterly sincere, Milton’s subsequent revelation about Mary’s worries suggests that she is equivocating. Mary offers a literal interpretation of the annunciation as a defense against her darker fears over what she suspects might be the Father’s real plans for her son. She is not simply counseling her son to aspire to kingship. Rather, she counsels kingship against her worries that her son will become a sacrificial object. Literalization here becomes a defensive strategy. My second point is that, given this defensive strategy, Mary’s advice takes on an aggressive edge. Maternal desire potentially pits the Father against the Son out of fear that the Father will demand the Son’s death. “By matchless Deeds express thy matchless Sire,” Mary urges. “Express” might mean to make manifest, so that the monarchy of the Son reveals the imperial might of the Father. But the repetition of “matchless” and the language of ascent that accompanies it also suggest that “express” might mean to imitate and overcome. The matchless deeds that express the matchless Father might also overcome the Father, outdo him by establishing a new reign. Haunting Mary’s advice is a darker message. Be like the Father and, perhaps, be superior, as Eve puts it in Paradise Lost, “for inferior who is free?” (PL 9.825). Maternal desire doesn’t get worked out directly in the poem. Instead, it gets worked out indirectly, through the temptations in the wilderness. Theologically speaking, as Stanley Fish has persuasively argued, Jesus’s temptations all center on the doctrine of things indifferent. Satan repeatedly offers Jesus objects (riches, knowledge, empires) or courses of action (feeding the poor, defeating the Romans) that would ground his office as the Son of God. To successfully resist Satan’s temptations, Jesus must not only reject these things as essential to his office but also show how these things are not necessarily bad in and of themselves. As Fish explains it, “On the one hand one must be wary lest one embrace something (an ob-

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ject, an action, a person) as good in and of itself and therefore as necessary, for that would make it one’s God. . . . On the other hand, one must be wary of declaring something (an object, an action, or a person) intrinsically evil, for that would be to shift the responsibility for evil from the intention or disposition of the agent to something external and independent of him.”30 The doctrine of things indifferent assumes a morally free agent, but in Fish’s account, Milton’s Jesus responds to the various objects that Satan offers in such a way that demonstrates the burden of choice that comes from this moral freedom. “The Son never rejects anything because it is evil in and of itself but because, in the circumstances as Satan has arranged them, it is presented as crucial, uniquely compelling, and, in a word, necessary.”31 I would like to add to Fish’s account that the temptations are also overdetermined by the domestic scene within which Jesus’s calling has been defi ned. Throughout the temptations, Satan repeatedly offers Jesus versions of his calling that Mary urged as well. Although Satan rejects Belial’s suggestion that Jesus might be tempted by “[setting] women in his eye” (PR 2.153), opting instead for what he considers to be the “manlier objects . . . / Of worth, of honor, glory, and popular praise” (2.225–27), nevertheless in offering these manlier objects, Satan’s temptations recalls the maternal desire in relation to which Jesus repeatedly positions himself. Jesus neither accepts the literal terms of Satan’s offers nor rejects these offers in favor of the path seemingly laid out for him by scripture that Mary fears. Rather, he repeatedly translates the literal terms of Satan’s offer into metaphors for a mode of obedience that stays true to his Father’s will by reshaping it. In a certain sense, Jesus reverses the direction of Mary’s strategy while remaining attuned to her unspoken worries. Instead of accepting her strategy of literalization, he rejects it in favor of creating metaphors, but those metaphors accomplish an end similar to Mary’s literalization. They transform what otherwise might be thought of as the work of death into the work of life. 32 At the end of book 2, Satan offers Jesus riches as the means to achieve authority. Jesus rejects the offer as an “impotent” means to “gain dominion or to keep it gain’d” (2.433–34). He compares himself to a series of Roman and Hebrew leaders who variously accepted political authority temporarily but also refused the riches that accompany power. But he then goes on to clarify that he is not exactly rejecting dominion. “What if with like aversion I reject / Riches and Realms?” he asks (2.457–58) and then adds the careful qualification that he is not rejecting the office of the king “for that a Crown / Golden in show, is but a wreath of thorns” (2.458–59). Jesus accepts that a plot of suffering, “a wreath of thorns,” may have been

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laid out for him by his Father, but at the same time he refuses to equate that plot with his calling. 33 Rather, he redefi nes the office of a king so that it metaphorically signifies self-governance. “[H]e who reigns within himself, and rules / Passions, Desires, and Fears, is more a King,” Jesus announces (2.466–67). With this metaphor, Jesus defers the sacrificial plot laid out for him by his Father. It may be that a wreath of thorns is in his future (and all of Milton’s readers would immediately understand that it is). Nevertheless, this possible future does not determine Jesus’s action. Rather, he translates the vocational plot laid out for him by his mother into a set of metaphors that allows him to redefi ne obedience outside a sacrificial economy. If a wreath of thorns is in his future, Jesus responds by reshaping that future into a statement about monarchy and obedience and not a statement about a vocation of suffering. In responding to Satan, Jesus transforms his mother’s literalization, mobilizing a metaphorical version of her desire both with and against his own hunger to do his “Father’s will” (2.259). This double gesture—the reshaping of paternal will through the reshaping of maternal desire—culminates in book 4, when Jesus responds to Satan’s offer of the imperial seat of Rome. Jesus rejects the notion that political freedom can occur without moral self-regulation. “What wise and valiant man would seek to free / These thus degenerate, by themselves enslav’d, / Or could of inward slaves make outward free?” (4.143–45). He then rearticulates the imperial ambitions implied by his mother’s version of his calling in highly equivocal terms: Know therefore that when my season comes to sit On David’s Throne, it shall be like a tree Spreading and overshadowing all the Earth, Or as a stone that shall to pieces dash All Monarchies besides throughout the world, And of my Kingdom there shall be no end: Means there shall be to this, but what the means, Is not for thee to know, nor me to tell. (4.146–53)

Initially, Jesus seems to be claiming as his own an even more powerful version of the Roman empire that will come about at the end of days. Collating messianic passages from the book of Daniel, Jesus appears to affirm the very ambition that Mary urged and that Satan has aimed to provoke. But the last two lines of Jesus’s response make the means by which this

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empire will arise so mysterious that the nature of his claim becomes mysterious as well. Since the means by which Jesus will attain this kingdom seem to be other than political, the kind of kingdom he intends is seriously in question. Is he being literal, or is he being metaphorical? The undecidability of this question reinforces and is reinforced by the missing means. On the one hand, Jesus’s equivocation frustrates Satan’s attempts to defi ne the office of the Son. On the other hand, these equivocations allow Jesus to shape his office through the management and transformation of parental desires. Not only is Jesus metaphorizing his mother’s version of his calling. By obscuring the means by which he will accomplish the ends set out for him by scripture, Jesus also modifies his father’s versions of his life, mobilizing metaphor against the sacrifice that he suspects his father demands. In privileging Jesus’s vocational choice as the central moment through which redemption will be achieved, Paradise Regained returns its readers to a Pauline understanding of messiah, what in Ephesians gets called “the dispensation [oikonomia] of the fullness of time” (Eph. 1:10). Translated in the King James Version of the Bible as dispensation, edification, household, fellowship, conversation, and steward, oikonomia and its various forms populate Paul’s letters to indicate at least two aspects of economy. 34 One concerns the relations between the Father and the Son: “Unto me, who am less than the least of all saints, is this grace given, that I should preach unto the Gentiles the unsearchable richness of Christ; And to make all men see what is the fellowship [oikonomia] of the mystery, which from the beginning of the world hath been hid in God, who created all things by Jesus Christ” (Eph. 3:8–9). Here, Paul uses economy in an Aristotelian sense to signify household administration or governance. God the Father governs the Son as the head of house would any other source of richness, dispensing that richness through the revelation of Christ. While the relationship between Father and Son is a mystery, one that has been hidden until Jesus’s birth, nevertheless a certain economic relation has persisted within the godhead since the beginning of time. A second aspect of Pauline economy concerns participation in this mystery through the management of faith: “Let a man so account of us, as of the ministers of Christ, and stewards [oikonomous] of the mystery of God. Moreover it is required in stewards [oikonomi] that a man be found faithful” (1 Cor. 4:1–2). The stewards or managers of the mystery of God experience the economy of that mystery through self-administration, ensuring that they govern themselves in such a way that participates in God’s household management by further dispensing the riches of that

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economy through example and ministry. The “economy of the mystery” is not, therefore, limited to the godhead but is open to all of the faithful insofar as they become members of the “house [oikos] of God” (1 Tim. 3:15). Casting the problem of messianic economy through vocation and calling, Milton works a Pauline understanding of divine economy into his narrative account of Jesus’s life, and this in turn allows him to shift the focus from the Father’s management of the Son to the Son’s management of the parental desires. This shift extends beyond the question of Jesus’s calling and looks forward to the larger problem of political economy. In Aristotle’s account, politics and economy, polis and oikos, are two separate and distinct spheres of human life. The phrase “political economy” assumes that these two spheres are merged. It is not surprising that Milton’s narrative of Jesus’s calling would point in the direction of political economy since, as Max Weber has argued, especially Calvinist notions of calling were central in figuring early modern political economy. In Weber’s account of Calvinist theology, calling fuses the sphere of politics to the sphere of economy through epistemological crisis. Considered as a discourse of political authority, Calvinist theology proposed an absolutist sovereign whose will was both inscrutable and beyond dispute. Because for Calvin predestination and election were so firmly bound together, there was nothing one could do to change God’s decrees. At the same time, because God so transcended human understanding, the nature of God’s will placed the subject at an epistemological crisis. Am I one of the elect? Or am I one of the reprobate? As Weber puts it, “The elect differ externally in this life in no way from the damned; and even all the subjective experiences of the chosen are . . . possible for the damned with the single exception of the fi naliter expectant, trusting faith.”35 This fundamentally political model of Christian community was accompanied by an economic model in which the subject managed this crisis through increased self-governance and self-administration. Labor, work in the world, becomes a way of carrying out God’s will and making one’s relation to that will visible. “The community of the elect with their God could only take place and be perceptible to them in that God worked (operatur) through them and that they were conscious of it.”36 Calvin imports a Lutheran understanding of works into his general theological system. Works don’t resolve the problem of salvation. Even works that serve the glory of God do not contribute to election. Nevertheless, Weber notes that work does respond to the epistemological crisis opened up by the absolute nature of the divine, as profit from labor becomes “indispensable as signs of election.”37 Weber offers a limited account of political

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economy in which economic models of labor and management compensate for a crisis in political form. This compensation doesn’t resolve that crisis. Rather, it translates it into an affiliated system of action. Milton, who was an Arminian, rejected Calvinist notions of predestination in favor of a theology based on free will, but, as John Guillory has shown, the problem of freedom only focuses the epistemological crises associated with a Calvinist understanding of calling within Milton’s concept of special vocation.38 As Milton explains it in De Doctrina Christiana, “Special vocation means that God, whenever he chooses, invites certain selected individuals, either from the so-called elect or from the reprobate, more clearly and more insistently than is normal” (CPW 6:455). Calling, minus the concept of predestination, actually puts more pressure on the individual to discern the call and, in the process, to freely make the right choice. Milton’s earlier poetry stages this moment of choice autobiographically. In Ad Patrem, the young Milton highlights the sociological implications of a son choosing a career against his father’s wishes. “Nec tu vatis opus divinum despice carmen [Scorn not the poet’s song, a work divine]” Milton writes (AP 17), rejecting his father’s right to determine his son’s career, marking what must have been felt as a radical shift in a seventeenth-century father’s role in household management. In Sonnet XIX, responding to his blindness, Milton asks whether God exacts “daylabor, light denied” (XIX 7). He receives two distinct answers. The fi rst answer is, no, “God doth not need / Either man’s work or his own gifts” (9–10). The sonnet releases Milton and his readers from a Calvinist understanding of work in which the profits of labor become signs of election. The inability to express his talents due to his blindness is not a sign of reprobation, Milton insists, because—as he will argue throughout his writings— God is not bound by necessity. He “does not need” Milton’s or anyone’s work to carry out his will. The second answer to the question of whether or not God exacts day labor is a qualified yes. Milton’s worry is that he has been selected for special vocation and that his blindness prevents him from fulfi lling it. In response to this worry, Milton offers an account of labor based on a Pauline sense of economy. God works through the individual, Milton writes, insofar as that individual manages his or her own desires to do God’s will. This is the force of the poem’s last three lines: . . . Thousands at his bidding speed And post o’er Land and Ocean without rest, They also serve who only stand and wait. (XIX 14)

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Milton can dissolve the opposition between action and rest because both acting and resting connote an economy of willing participation in God’s own inscrutable will. Acting is explicitly a form of service, but in Milton’s account waiting is also a form of service insofar as it involves the management of one’s desires to be chosen. Like a Pauline steward, Milton participates in God’s economy through a moment of choice that binds him more forcefully to that economy. In Paradise Regained, Milton shifts these questions of calling, obedience, and economy onto the terrain of the godhead in order to qualify and reimagine the versions of political theology potentially associated with God the Father. Instead of equating a theology of suffering with the work of redemption, Milton distinguishes the two from one another. It may be that Jesus’s life will be one of immense suffering, but when Milton focuses the question of redemption on Jesus’s vocational choice, he is able to separate the work of redemption from a life of suffering. In Milton’s account, the work of redemption takes the place of a Father who demands sacrifice. By representing the godhead in explicitly household terms, Milton foregrounds the competing desires that Jesus is called to manage in shaping his vocation. There is a sense in which the Jesus of Paradise Regained is an autobiographical figure. Milton’s emphasis on metaphor as Jesus’s response to Satan’s assertions of political authority suggests that Jesus becomes a kind of poet, like Milton, who realizes his calling through a poetic elaboration of scripture.39 More pointedly, however, by staging an earlier autobiographical problem of vocation in terms of the godhead, Milton deepens his critique of divine monarchy, as an economic understanding of household management substitutes for a political understanding of divine kingship. Giorgio Agamben’s 2009 book, The Kingdom and the Glory, helps me to make my point. There, Agamben excavates the Pauline economy I have been discussing as the basis for early modern and modern modes of power. In Agamben’s account, the Church Fathers supplanted Paul’s economic understanding of the godhead with an imperial model of divinity, turning God into a divine monarch who legitimates imperial sovereignty in the City of Man. Nevertheless, Pauline economy survived in the theological problem of providence, the problem of how God rules the world. Is God a king or a governor? While the figure of the king looks backward toward an imperial model that was increasingly put into crisis in early modern Europe, theologically with Reformation ecclesiology and new concepts of church discipline and politically with the reemergence of classical republicanism, the figure of the governor looks forward toward a Foucauldian

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concept of governmentality: “Once King and Governor are separated in God in a troublesome opposition, then the governance of the world is possible in reality: it will happen on the one side through the impotence of the sovereign and on the other side through the endless and chaotic series of the particular (violent) acts of providence.”40 This opposition between King and Governor structures Paradise Regained. On the one hand, the debate between Satan and Jesus increasingly empties the concept of God as king. Milton’s critique of divine monarchy aims to ensure that no king will legitimately be able to claim God as a political model. As I argued above, Milton elaborates the metaphor of God’s kingship to emphasize the figural means by which the absolute nature of divinity is only partially revealed. This metaphorical elaboration allows Milton to disallow any effort to literalize that figure in the political institution of monarchy. On the other hand, Milton’s emphasis on vocation looks forward to a model of governance, as the Son’s fashioning of his own office exemplifies a general economy defi ned by a “zone of undecidability,” as Agamben describes it, “between general and particular, between calculation and unwilled action.”41 In managing the parental desires through which his calling is expressed, Jesus transforms what he takes to be his Father’s demand through the reshaping of the representational strategies that he receives from his mother. This model of governance as self-governance and the governance of others supplants divine authority and offers a second model of the political theology based on economy and risk management. One key figure in Milton’s considerations of Jesus’s calling is Hobbes. Christopher Warren has recently shown how Hobbes became an unexpected resource for Milton in his thinking about toleration and dissent during the Restoration. Warren reads Samson Agonistes in the context of nonconformists’ reception of Hobbes, dissenters’ use of Hobbes’s theories of self-preservation to sanction resistance to civil authority, in order to propose that “Milton’s precise reception of Hobbes . . . deserves considerable scrutiny for a more thorough understanding of the development of liberal Whiggism.”42 In this reading, Warren argues that Hobbes provides “the vocabulary for a poetics of the state of nature” that Milton develops to justify Samson’s violence against the Philistine state and, by implication, to defend the rights of dissenters in the face of civil persecution.43 Because he was not protected by Philistine political authorities, because he was increasingly forced to submit bodily to Philistia and increasingly rendered physically vulnerable to Philistine power, Samson was justified by the terms that Hobbes develops in Leviathan to attack the Philistine state. In Paradise Regained as well, Milton takes up a Hobbesian “vocabulary”

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to develop a “poetics of the state of nature.” He portrays the wilderness in which Jesus roams as an analogue of the state of nature produced by God withdrawing his protection and “expos[ing]” Jesus to Satan’s “subtlety” (PR 1.142, 144). More than just a scriptural figure from Exodus that, as N. H. Keeble has shown,44 became a particularly potent metaphor in midseventeenth-century England for expressing adversity in the face of political crisis, in Milton’s hands the wilderness raises a fundamental Hobbesian problem: the quality of liberty in the state of nature. In permitting the temptation in the wilderness, God does exactly what for Hobbes the sovereign is not supposed to do. He withdraws his protection. For Hobbes, this would mean that the subject has the right to break whatever contracts he or she may have with the sovereign, based on the subject’s fundamental right of self-preservation: “If a monarch, or sovereign assembly, grant a liberty to all, or any of his subjects, which grant standing, he is disabled to provide for their safety, the grant is void. . . . The obligation of subjects to the sovereign, is understood to last as long, and no longer, than the power lasteth, by which he is able to protect them. For the right men have by nature to protect themselves, when none else can protect them, can by no covenant be relinquished” (L 21.20.146–21.147). For Milton, by contrast, the withdrawal of direct intervention by the sovereign allows him to elaborate a level of obedience that is based on the actions of the subject. Like Samson, Jesus is left to his own devices, asked to respond to external threats without the sovereign’s sheltering protection. Unlike Samson, Jesus draws on the resources of household economy to elaborate and nuance Hobbes’s limited understanding of self-preservation. Subsequent readers of Hobbes such as John Locke, the Baron de Montesquieu, and David Hume will strongly associate Hobbesian self-preservation with commerce and money making.45 However, Milton reads self-preservation in the state of nature backward through Paul and Aristotle to recover a sense of virtue associated with management. More than just a basic natural right, Milton suggests, self-preservation is an impulse derived from the subject’s capacity to manage his or her own desire in managing the desires of others. This is not a view of the state of nature that Hobbes will sanction, but it is a view of obedience that he will exploit. In book 3 of Leviathan, Hobbes argues that the particular nature of the Son’s office effectively disables millenarianism and demands toleration. Although Hobbes concedes that the Son will establish the kingdom of God at the end of days, he carefully distinguishes between God as a ruler, which is the office he attributes to the Father, and God as a redeemer, which is the office he attributes to the Son. Jesus promises regeneration, “which is not properly

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a kingdom, and thereby a warrant to deny obedience to the magistrates that then were . . . but only an earnest of the kingdom of God that was to come” (L 41.4.324). That is, in personating the Son, whose authority is always “subordinate” or “viceregent” to the Father (41.7.325), Jesus manifests a structure of obedience that claims no right whatsoever to challenge current law. The Son offers a model of obedience that prepares Christians for the reestablishment of the kingdom of God on earth while explicitly not claiming that kingdom here and now. Only two virtues are necessary for salvation, “faith in Christ, and obedience to laws” (43.3.391, Hobbes’s emphasis), from which it follows that the Christian subject has neither the right nor the responsibility to interfere in civil law on religious grounds. Nor, Hobbes argues, do Christian churches have this right since, in following the office of the Son, the role of churches is to minister to the faithful and not to issue political commands. Like Milton, Hobbes is intensely concerned to avoid a vision of politics in which the authority of the sovereign is substantiated through his right to infl ict pain and suffering on his subjects. Hobbes is as eager as Milton to replace a political theology of the Passion with a model of obedience that secures toleration.46 We can see this if we contrast Hobbes’s depiction of the end of days with his assessment of the obedience that Christian subjects owe infidel monarchs. The kingdom of God at the end of days is the clearest expression in Leviathan of a vision of authority in which the absolute rule of the sovereign is grounded in the treatment of his enemies, who are consigned not just to one death but to two, the second being a weirdly interim state of “everlasting death” (38.14.305) in which the enemies of God keep on dying as a sign of his righteous power. Hobbes’s interpretation of the Son’s obedience defers this vision. “What infidel king is so unreasonable,” Hobbes asks, “as knowing he has a subject, that waiteth for the second coming on Christ . . . and in the meantime thinketh himself bound to obey the laws of that infidel king, (which all Christians are obliged in conscience to do,) to put to death, or to persecute such a subject?” (43.23.401). Hobbes’s question is meant to be rhetorical, as if the only possible answer were, no king, infidel or Christian, would be so unreasonable. But a whole tradition of political thought would beg to differ. As we saw in chapter 2, Machiavelli’s central argument is that the new prince has a vested interest in targeting and persecuting segments of the population. And as we saw in chapter 4, Marlowe derives his understanding of sovereignty from the willingness and necessity of rulers to persecute their subjects. In Hobbes’s discussion, by contrast, obedience has an almost magical quality to constrain the will of the sovereign. Mil-

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ton takes Hobbes’s account of obedience as his starting point. However, whereas Hobbes imagines a mode of obedience that might constrain the sovereign’s will, Milton uses a Christian model of obedience to supplant the state. By casting the office of the Son in terms of vocation, something closer to officium than to a divine office, Milton suggests a political economy that Hobbes implies but is reluctant to develop. In Paradise Regained, I have argued, Milton’s revision of gospel accounts of the temptation in the wilderness inverts a Machiavellian scene of the founding or reforming of the state and restages it from the vantage point of the subject and not the sovereign. This inversion lets Milton explore metaphor and imagination as resources by which the political subject might lay claim to the force of political making within the domain of the state of nature. Whereas Hobbes represents the state of nature as a condition of embattlement, “continual fear, and danger of violent death” (13.9.84), Milton suggests that the state of nature might better be understood through metaphors of household economy where the expression and management of competing desires yields a general political strategy of obedience that promises to replace a model of government based on the reign of the theologico-political sovereign. While from one perspective, Christ’s government will fully subdue worldly power only at the end of days, from another perspective Milton develops the terms by which a model of governmentality is already becoming a new form of worldly power. That is, Milton doesn’t just accept the worldly order as it is. In Paradise Regained, he uses the Son’s strategies of government and self-governance to reimagine it.

OBEDIENCE ON TRIAL Milton ends Paradise Regained by putting on trial the mode of obedience that he has been developing throughout the poem. In his fi nal temptation, Satan brings Jesus to the very top of the temple in Jerusalem and offers him the following option: “There stand, if thou wilt stand” (PR 4.551). Stand where it is physically impossible to do so. Or “Cast thyself down; safely if Son of God” (4.555). Fall in such a way that displays your divinity. This temptation represents Satan’s most rigorous questioning of the Son’s authority in the poem. If Jesus stands, then he does so in such a way that usurps the authority of his Father. “I to thy Father’s house / Have brought thee,” Satan proclaims, “and highest plac’t, highest is best” (4.552–53). Especially with the phrase “highest is best,” Satan implies that Jesus becomes the Son in such a way that overrules the Father. The temptation

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implies a vision pun on sub-stance, the dicey theological problem of hypostasis that I discussed in chapter 7. The substance or essence of the Son, Satan implies, is the power of the Temple. Placing the Son on top of the temple, Satan concedes that Father and Son share the same substance, but he also deduces from this shared substance that both Father and Son express that substance in the same way. Each embodies the same structure of personhood and authority, which suggests that the Son’s reign supplants and displaces the reign of his Father.47 If, however, Jesus falls, he will do so in such a way that shows his lack of agency. As Satan points out, the Father has promised to protect his Son from physical harm. If he falls and the Father rescues him, then he is so strongly under the protection of the Father that he has no free will. He would be, to paraphrase the well-known line from book 3 of Paradise Lost, insufficient to have stood but not free to fall. Moreover, since Satan bases the idea that the Father will protect the Son from all physical harm on Psalm 91:11–12, this temptation represents Satan’s questioning of scriptural authority as well. “Cast thyself down,” he charges, For it is written, He will give command Concerning thee to his Angels, in thir hands They shall up lift thee, lest at any time Thou chance to dash thy foot against a stone. (4.556–59)

If Jesus falls, and God does not protect him, then either Jesus is not the Son of God, contrary to God’s announcement at the beginning of the poem, or God is not bound by the authority of scripture. In either case, God is not bound by his word to do what he promises. If, however, Jesus falls and God does protect him, then God is so bound by his word that his own agency (as well as the Son’s) is utterly constrained by a vision of history in which good always wins out against evil at the end of the day. In any of the possible resolutions that Satan can imagine, God intervenes ex machina, like Naudé’s absolutist monarch, bringing the plot to a successful conclusion in such a way that affirms either the Father’s or the Son’s magical agency. Jesus answers this conundrum by citing Deuteronomy 6:16 and standing: “Also it is written / Tempt not the Lord thy God; he said and stood” (4.560–61). Upon hearing Jesus’s response, Satan falls, “smitten with amazement” (4.562). For Milton, this is the moment at which Jesus fully embodies his office as the Son of God, the moment, that is, that Jesus takes on the role articulated for him at the poem’s beginning: “This is my Son

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belov’d, in him am pleas’d.” Paradise Regained begins by associating the office of the Son with a typological repetition of Moses’s giving of the law; it ends with the Son discovering his office by citing a scriptural passage in which God demands obedience. The movement here is not from law to grace but from the command as one mode by which authority is articulated to obedience as another mode by which it is expressed. Only, the end of the poem also suggests that there has been a slight rotation or torque in the relation between obedience and command. When Jesus responds to Satan with a quote from Deuteronomy, he completes the “covenant” that God announces at the beginning of the poem by reflecting the Father’s terms back to him in such a way that fundamentally alters their significance. When Jesus says, “Tempt not the Lord thy God,” he initially means to say that Satan should not tempt God the Father to show his power. But once Satan falls, it retrospectively becomes clear that the phrase “the Lord thy God” also refers to Jesus. In deferring to the absolute and transcendental power of God to defeat Satan, Jesus reveals the immanent authority of God to overcome Satan within the bounds of human agency.48 The Son does not need the protection of the Father, Milton suggests, any more than the Son usurps the authority of the Father. Rather, the Son’s authority comes from his capacity to discern and resist the temptation to see himself as a god by maintaining a sense of the divine which is both absolutely apart from and absolutely interior to the human at the same time. This is the theological proposition at work in Jesus’s identification with his role through scriptural citation. Put differently, the divine inheres in the “zone of undecidability” that Agamben describes in his explanation of economic theology and is asserted through an action which is both calculated and unwilled. In claiming his office as Son through scriptural citation about the Father, and in claiming that office in a way that he didn’t quite intend, Jesus reveals this zone as the arena in which temptation happens and then demonstrates the proper action of obedience by which Satan can and will be defeated. In Paradise Regained, this zone of undecidability is most often represented as the province of figural language. This means that Milton is making a more radical claim than simply saying that the Son does not need the intervention of the Father. Considered from the perspective of representation, Jesus’s act of scriptural citation suggests that he changes the very terms of divine authority. To explain what I mean, let me draw a quick contrast between Milton and Hobbes. For Hobbes, political authority should be based on natural reason, which eschews metaphor as a device that encourages misunderstanding. At the same time, Hobbes fully recog-

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nizes scripture to be a domain of metaphor with which he must contend. So on the one hand, in chapter 30 of Leviathan Hobbes argues that the Ten Commandments are accurate precepts by which to understand the authority of the sovereign because they are based on natural reason. God’s laws confi rm natural reason. On the other hand, in book 3 of Leviathan Hobbes parses scripture along the lines of the literal and the metaphorical as a way of determining what is acceptable in scripture while limiting and demonizing the metaphorical as a source of confusion and civil discord. When scripture gives an accurate model of authority, it is literal, but when it gives a confused model of authority, it is metaphorical. Milton utterly rejects this distinction. He accepts Hobbes’s general insight that scripture is the domain of metaphor, but from this insight he extrapolates the further thesis that authority is based on metaphor. When the Son develops a poetic strategy for navigating and managing what Hobbes thinks of as a “real” and “not a metaphorical kingdom” of God (L 35.11.274), Milton suggests that the real kingdom of God is already the domain of metaphor. For Milton, metaphor becomes the source of freedom, as Jesus’s use of figural language expresses the liberty he has in defi ning his office. To this extent, Satan is right when he complains in frustration that he can’t tell whether the Son portends a “Kingdom / Real or Allegoric” (PR 4.389–90). For Milton, this is a false choice. This kingdom is mysterious because it is both real and allegorical. When Milton makes the capacity of scripture to resignify the solution to Satan’s temptations, he locates scriptural authority in its iterability— the capacity to create meaning through repetition—and not in any simple way its status as the revealed word of God. Stanley Fish, Victoria Kahn, and Catherine Gimelli Martin have argued that Paradise Regained reorients its readers’ relations to scriptural authority. In his reading of the tower scene, Fish argues that scripture becomes one more in a long list of things indifferent, things that have no inherent goodness or badness but only become such in relation to their use. The Son is careful not to reject scripture even as he rejects its use by Satan to put forward a certain understanding of his office, which shifts the focus from scripture as a thing in itself—what Fish calls “[making] an idol of Scriptures”—toward scripture as a field of competing interpretations and revisions.49 Kahn extends Fish’s argument by proposing that as a field of competing interpretations and revisions, scripture privileges poetry as “the proper mode for ordinary human beings, among them John Milton, to understand their own ambiguous location in secular life, including their relation to sacred texts,”

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because “the secular realm is” or should be “defi ned . . . by the absence of dogmatism.”50 Catherine Martin makes a similar point in her discussion of Milton’s relation to Restoration poetics. Paradise Regained “exemplifies the common neoclassical belief that Hebrew narrative was more truly observant of the natural unities of space and time, the natural attributes of human beings, and the simple revealed Word of God than either Greek epic or philosophy,” she writes, and this in turn led Milton to develop a proto-anthropological rendering of scriptural narrative that attempts to grasp “nature, human customs, history, and religion” in the most concrete terms possible.51 In Kahn’s account, dogmatism might come in the form of Satan’s literal interpretations, or it might come in the form of an unjust God who makes unreasonable demands. Milton mobilizes a Jobian sense of irony against both, she proposes, using the interpretive possibilities opened by scripture to reject Satan’s reading of scripture as well as the Father’s theological vision of politics. However, Milton’s secular treatment of scripture does not free him from the sacred so much as it leads him to reconceive political theology. For Milton, we might say, scripture is authoritative because it is a symptomatic text. Scripture is not a repository of unbending truth. Rather, it binds the present to past images of God in such a way that prevents and blocks a correct understanding of divinity. But also, because it presents past images of God, it is also an essential text for developing a correct understanding of the divine. In Milton’s account, Jesus operates on scripture to achieve that correct understanding. In his fi nal temptation, he effectively frees the world from a political vision of God as absolute sovereign, the vision that Satan has been urging, while he also recreates an image of the divine posited through obedience. He unbinds the world from one understanding of political theology and rebinds it to another. Milton stages this moment to assess the Son’s actions and probe the problems that the Son creates alongside the ones that he resolves. He does so by comparing the Son’s defeat of Satan to two moments from Roman and Greek literature. In the fi rst, a reference to Lucan’s Pharsalia, Milton compares Jesus’s defeat of Satan to Hercules’s defeat of Antaeus. Upon seeing the Son stand, . . . Satan smitten with amazement fell As when Earth’s son Antaeus (to compare Small things with greatest) in Irassa strove With Jove’s Alcides, and oft foil’d still rose,

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Receiving from his mother Earth new strength, Fresh from his fall, and fiercer grapple join’d, Throttl’d at length in th’Air, expir’d and fell; . . . (4.562–68)

Initially, this simile seems to reinforce the idea that in claiming the office of the Son, Jesus defeats his enemies and paves the way for God’s kingdom on earth. Both sons of gods, Jesus and Hercules are able to deliver decisive blows against their enemies by separating them from their respective sources of strength. The giant Antaeus receives strength from his mother the Earth. In order to defeat him, Hercules has to separate him from the earth, holding him aloft as he kills him. Satan received strength from humanity’s disobedience. In order to defeat him, Jesus must redeem humanity of its disobedience, fulfi lling his role as savior by drawing a line between Satan and human disobedience through his own capacity to obey God’s law. But the Pharsalia suggests that a more complex set of issues concerning interpretation, identification, and action is also at stake. Lucan tells the story of Hercules and Antaeus in book 4 of the Pharsalia to underscore Curio’s wrongheaded identification with the Roman hero. Curio, the onetime champion of liberty whom Dante puts in the ninth circle of hell along with other sowers of discord because he persuaded Caesar to cross the Rubicon, is leading his troops through Libya in the service of Caesar when he is told the story of how Hercules liberated the Libyans from Antaeus, a mythological giant who terrorized the locals.52 Taking this story as prophetic, Curio deduces that he will be successful in the conquest of North Africa and so marches his troops into battle. His armies are then slaughtered by the African king Juba, and Curio is left unburied, carrion for the birds. Given Milton’s source, the simple identification of Jesus with Hercules gives way to a more complex scenario that helps to explain Satan’s fall. Like Curio’s, Satan’s defeat involves his wrongheaded identification with a certain model of Herculean heroism, both as his own and as the kind of heroism he thinks that the Son will need to claim to defeat him. Milton gestures toward this identification when he describes Satan bringing “Joyless triumphals of his hop’t success” back to the expectant devils in hell (4.579). The hoped-for return of a Roman hero is emptied out as Satan’s return to hell is celebrated in a disappointed triumphal that indicates his hopes but leaves them unfulfi lled. In the context of the Restoration, the implied link between Satan and Curio could certainly be read as an indictment of Parliament, which was pushing Charles II toward

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increased persecution of nonconformists. Like Curio, Parliament could be seen as relinquishing its role as the voice of the people while sowing the seeds of tyranny. In this reading, the defeat of Satan might connote the hoped-for defeat of governmental intolerance. At the same time, the link between Satan and Curio could be read as an indictment of dissenters who, as misreaders of sacred texts, used stories about God’s Son to legitimate civil revolt. As Laura Knoppers argues in her reading of Paradise Regained, Milton rejected the tactics of the Fifth Monarchists, who argued for the legitimacy of violence to achieve millenarian ends.53 Read from this perspective, the defeat of Satan might also connote the defeat of political tactics that provoked governmental intolerance. What makes this epic simile such a flexible instrument is that it asks us to consider opposition in terms of the difference between the literal and the figurative. In Greek, Antaeus or Anti has opposition as its root meaning, suggesting that Hercules is able to defeat Antaeus by becoming less literal, by separating the figuration of enmity from its immediate, physical embodiment. Lucan indicates the dangers of literal interpretation through his handling of the image of standing. As the story of Curio unfolds, Lucan consistently emphasizes physical standing as metaphorical defeat. Hercules is able to defeat Antaeus by forcing him to stand. Once Hercules sees that Antaeus gets renewed strength through contact with his mother, he announces, “You must stand upright [Standum est tibi]” and then kills him in a bear hug (Pharsalia 4.646). Lucan returns to the figure of standing several times throughout the remainder of book 4, to characterize the lack of loyalty of Curio’s soldiers, each of whom “backs the side on which he stands [Qua stetit, inde favet]” (4.708); to explain the strange movement of Curio’s horses, who neither stand still nor move forward (“non stare tumultu” [4.753]) when called into battle; and fi nally to describe the slaughter of Curio’s army, who were forced to fight in such a small space that they died standing up. Non tam laeta tulit victor spectacula Maurus Quam fortuna dabat; fluvios non ille cruoris Membrorumque videt lapsum et ferientia terram Corpora: conpressum turba stetit omne cadaver. [The victorious Moors did not enjoy to the full the spectacle that Fortune granted them: they could not see the rivers of blood, the collapsing limbs, and the bodies striking the ground; for each dead man was left standing by the dense array.] (4.784–87, translation slightly altered)

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Since the root of cadaver is “to fall,” in this fi nal graphic image Lucan indicates a physical act of standing that is also metaphorically a kind of falling, manifest in the slaughtered bodies of the Roman soldiers. Lucan’s broader aim is to show the corrosive effects of civil war and Caesarism on republican values. Civil war, he suggests, foments ambition, degrades loyalty, and leads to pointless slaughter—all points with which Milton would plausibly agree. For Milton, the epic simile becomes a cautionary tale about taking the comparison between Jesus and Hercules too literally. Whatever Jesus does to defeat Satan (whom both Milton and the King James Version of the Bible consistently call “the adversary”), it cannot be taken in the literal sense in which Curio reads the Hercules story but should instead be taken as a formal act in which figuration replaces the literalization of enmity. When the Son cites scripture and stands, Milton offers a countermodel to Curio’s version of standing. The Son does not claim his office by falling into his dead body. Instead, Milton has the Son stand in such a way that suspends Lucan’s pun on cadaver. In positing the temptation on top of the temple as the moment in which the Son fulfi lls his office, Milton supplants the more traditional moment in which the Son redeems humanity, the moment when the crucified Christ cites Psalm 22:1: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” For a poet like George Herbert, this moment indicates the humanity of Christ in his distance from the Father and marks the Son as authentically human through his intense suffering: But, O my God, my God! why leav’st thou me, The sonne, in whom thou dost delight to be? My God, my God——— Never was grief like mine.54

As Herbert goes on to suggest in poem after poem, this is a degree of suffering that individual humans can approximate only through imitation. “Shall I be scourged, flouted, boxed, sold?” the speaker asks. “‘Tis but to tell the tale is told. / My God, my God, why dost thou part from me?” (“The Thanksgiving,” 7–9). And, as Herbert repeatedly asserts throughout The Temple, imitation defi nes the human at an unbearable but unavoidable distance from the more authentic suffering of the crucified Christ. By contrast, Milton develops a strategy of fi guration that refuses to authenticate suffering as a central theological virtue. When Jesus cites Deuteronomy 6, he recalls a passage in which God chastises the Israelites through Moses and threatens punishment if they disobey. Moses warns the Israelites nei-

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ther to follow strange gods nor to demand miracles, as they did at Massah, “lest the anger of the Lord thy God by kindled against thee, and destroy thee from off the face of the earth. Ye shall not tempt the Lord your God” (KJV Deut. 6:15–16).55 Like the Israelites’, Satan’s demand to witness the power of God provokes an image of God as a divine sovereign who exerts his authority through the suffering and destruction of those over whom he rules. But in fulfilling the office of the Son at this moment, and not at the moment of the crucifi xion, Jesus effectively suspends that image by embracing substitution as his primary mode of operation. Milton uses substitution to refuse a theology of suffering and to reject a politics of death. But this rejection comes at a cost, one that Milton indicates in the second simile that he uses to describe the Satan’s fall. In this simile, Satan plays Sphinx to Jesus’s Oedipus: And as that Theban monster that propos’d Her riddle, and him who solv’d it not, devour’d; That once found out and solv’d, for grief and spite Cast herself headlong from th’Ismenian steep, So struck with dread and anguish fell the Fiend, And to his crew, that sat consulting, brought Joyless triumphals of his hop’t success, Ruin, and desperation, and dismay, Who durst so proudly tempt the Son of God. (PR 4.572–80)

As Oedipus defeats the Sphinx by solving the riddle of man, so too does Jesus defeat Satan by solving the problem of “man’s disobedience” (1.2). For Oedipus, this resolution leads to the deeper problem of individual destiny. Having saved Thebes from the Sphinx, Oedipus is given Jocasta’s hand in marriage and becomes king of the city only to discover that it was he who killed his father, Laius, and took his mother for his wife. And it is his sons who will wreak havoc on Thebes. Although Milton pictures Oedipus precariously balanced—like the Son atop the temple spire—between his victorious present and his terrible future, it is also clear that Oedipus has already done the deed that sets him on his tragic itinerary. The implication is that Jesus has done a similar deed. He, too, has released a tragic future that he does not yet understand. The deed has to do with Jesus’s handling of scripture. In claiming his office through the citation of scripture, Jesus fundamentally transforms scriptural authority. No longer the literal word of God that Satan takes

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it to be, scripture now gains its authority through imaginative, reiterative, and metaphorical revision. Milton’s two epic conceits allegorize this transformation through the image of maternity. Perhaps most striking about the story of Hercules and Antaeus is that it casts maternity as a dangerous supplement, a resource that must be refused if Antaeus is to be defeated. But the reference to Oedipus indicates that maternity is also to be reclaimed and in a more transgressive fashion than the story of Hercules and Antaeus would suggest. The movement from rejected to reclaimed resource mirrors Jesus’s relation to Mary and her vocational counsel. As we have seen, Mary triangulates the relation between Father and Son, allowing Jesus to imagine his calling outside the trajectory that he suspects his Father demands. On the one hand, Jesus refuses the content of Mary’s desire that he fulfi ll his calling by becoming “King of Israel” (1.254). On the other hand, he claims the general impulse of her desire that he avoid becoming an object of sacrifice. Instead of literalizing monarchy as the endpoint of his calling as Mary tactically does, Jesus renders monarchy increasingly metaphorical but to the same effect as Mary’s literalization. Milton’s use of Oedipus to draw out Jesus’s strategy suggests that the choice of metaphor has a tragic dimension that colors this present victory. This tragic dimension isn’t particularly difficult to discern. In the world of metaphor, there is no direct access to God’s will. The world of metaphor kills paternal demand, like Oedipus kills his father, so that there is no perspective transcending the world that tells you how to act. Human action is caught between the capacity to make and the coercion of the made. And yet the archive of metaphors that Milton inherits demands that he act, and that he act in the right way. This archive of metaphors—call it scripture—coerces the subject into believing that he or she is subject to a divine voice impelling action that subject must consent to carry out. The transformation of scriptural authority through and into its metaphorical dimension weakens the claims of divine monarchy but strengthens the force of religious imagination. As we saw in chapter 3, this is Spinoza’s insight as well. His critique of the arcana imperii in the Theologico-Political Treatise leads him to suggest that the social contract forged by Moses and upon which the possibility of democracy is based is predicated upon the fantasy that “all [have] an equal right to consult God, to receive and interpret his laws” (TTP 540). For both Spinoza and Milton, the theological imaginary that persists in the secular world is a source of both commonality and violence that must be managed with vigilance. That management might take the form of aesthetic distancing, as it does in Marlowe and Drayton, or it might take the form of governance through representation

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and imagination, as it does in Drayton (again), Marvell, and Harrington. In either case, the project of managing the theological imaginary is what makes up early modern political theology. Milton’s focus on the Son adds an extra twist. In emphasizing the metaphorical dimensions of scriptural authority, Milton binds the secular subject to a figure of authority who is precisely that—a figure, dead in reality but effectively alive in imagination. Like Marvell and, before him, Marlowe, Milton considers political theology in terms of subjectivity and not just sovereignty. More intensely than his predecessors, however, he understands quite well that the management of the theological imaginary takes place in the world and in subjective imagination as well. At the very end of Paradise Regained, Milton stages the tragic dimensions of managing divine violence through the song of the angels, who cite Hebrews 1:3 and then give their version of the life of Christ. It is a life marked by “Godlike force” and “terror” (4.602, 627); decisive action (Satan “Thou didst debel, and down from Heav’n cast / With all his Army, now thou hast aveng’d / Supplanted Adam” [4.605–7]); and conquest (“Hail Son of the most High, heir of both worlds, / Queller of Satan, on thy glorious work / Now enter” [4.633–35]). What’s remarkable about this song is that it repeats the language of Satan’s temptations, offering Jesus an image of his office that Milton has spent the previous four books of poetry reshaping, reformulating, and recreating. It is as if Milton considered the angels’ praise to be a continuation of Jesus’s temptation, the temptation to act in such a way and with a kind of certainty that one is doing the work of God. Milton concludes Paradise Regained by indicating the Son’s unhappy choice: Thus they the Son of God our Savior meek Sung Victor, and from Heavenly Feast refresht Brought on his way with joy; hee unobserv’d Home to his Mother’s house private return’d. (4.636–39)

Like Jesus on the temple spire, the semicolon precariously balances two images of the Son, one put forward by the angels in which the Son is a triumphant victor already on his way toward fulfi lling his destiny and another suggested by Jesus’s decision to return home, away from the public sphere to a private house and “unobserv’d.” In this second image, Jesus rejects the figure of Christ the warrior, attempting to maintain a difference between it and his sense of his calling. In making his choice, Jesus

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attempts to extricate himself from the theologico-political drama that the angels play, knowing full well that were he to take this route, he would end up an object of sacrifice. But given the earlier reference to Oedipus, Milton suggests that Jesus’s choice involves a worse tragedy, in that Jesus’s attempt to extricate himself from a theologico-political drama only implicates him further. Leaving behind his father’s demands for his mother’s house reinscribes those demands in a set of metaphors that persist and seem to compel violent action. It is a challenge that Milton himself faces, as Samson Agonistes makes clear. And fi nally it is a question that Milton issues to his readers: What comes after political theology? A new model of governance, more political theology, or both?

NOTES

CH A PTER one 1. Abraham Melamed, The Philosopher-King in Medieval and Renaissance Jewish Thought, ed. Lenn E. Goodman (Albany: SUNY Press, 2003), 141–49. 2. Talal Asad critiques the association of secularism with disenchantment. “The interesting thing about this view is that although religion is regarded as alien to the secular, the latter is also seen to have generated religion. Historians of progress relate that in the premodern past secular life created superstitious and oppressive religions, and in the modern present secularism has produced enlightened and tolerant religion. Thus the insistence on a sharp separation between the religious and the secular goes with the paradoxical claim that the latter continually produces the former” (Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003], 193). Charles Taylor associates secularization with the rise of disciplinary society, which, he argues, has fundamentally changed religious life: “Developments of Western modernity have destabilized and rendered virtually impossible earlier forms of religious life, but . . . new forms have sprung up. Moreover, this process of destabilization and recomposition is not a once-for-all change, but is continuing” (Taylor, A Secular Age [Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 2007], 594). It is evident that the secular and the sacred imply one another from the very fact of their opposition. Throughout this book, it will be my argument that political theology is a product of the secular and arises as a phenomenon at points where the opposition between the secular and the sacred becomes blurred and entangled, sometimes in productive ways. 3. See, for example, Moira Fradinger’s excellent discussion of Antigone in Binding Violence: Literary Visions of Political Origins (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), esp. 87–102. 4. Barbara Johnson emphasizes the potential for political reinvention in Mosaic narrative in Moses and Multiculturalism, foreword by Barbara Rietveld (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). 5. Scholars have only begun to investigate the influence of Jewish sources on early modern Europe political thought. I have in mind groundbreaking texts in seventeenth-

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century studies by Eric Nelson and Jason Rosenblatt and in eighteenth-century studies by Adam Sutcliffe, as well as foundational work by Michael Walzer. Nelson details the range of early modern political writers, primarily English and Dutch, who took Mosaic law as a model for secular government in The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 16–22. Rosenblatt shows the immense importance of Jewish political thought on Hugo Grotius and John Selden, and through them on seventeenth-century English literary and political writers in Renaissance England’s Chief Rabbi: John Selden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). Sutcliffe shows how Jewish political thought influenced English and continental Enlightenment ideals in Judaism and Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Also see Gordon Schochet, Fania Oz-Salzberger, and Meirav Jones, eds., Political Hebraism: Judaic Sources in Early Modern Political Thought (Jerusalem: Shalem Press, 2008). For a useful overview of Jewish political thought, see Michael Walzer et al., eds., The Jewish Political Tradition, 2 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000–2003). 6. Martin Luther, “How Christians Should Regard Moses” (1525), in Luther’s Works, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan, Helmut T. Lehmann, et al., 55 vols. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1955–76), 35:161–74. 7. Taylor, Secular Age, 595. 8. Even Hobbes and Spinoza, who were both instrumental in establishing the terms for historical criticism, understood Moses to be the author of sacred texts, however corrupt or redacted they may have been in their seventeenth-century versions. For the story of how Moses stopped being considered the author of sacred texts, see Suzanne L. Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race, and Scholarship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 178–86. 9. “La constitution n’est pas l’ouvrage du pouvoir constitué, mais du pouvoir constituant,” Sieyès explains. And subsequently, “On doit concevoir les nations sur la terre comme des individus hors du lien social ou, comme l’on dit, dans l’état de nature” (Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, Qu’est-ce que le Teirs état? [Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1970], 180–81, 183). 10. Anon., A Treatise of Treasons against Q. Elizabeth ([Louvain]: Imprinted [by John Fowler], 1572), 134v. 11. George Lawson, Politica Sacra & Civilis (London: John Starkey, 1660), 34. 12. John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, in Two Treatises of Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. and intro. Ian Shapiro (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 13.149.166. 13. Andreas Kalyvas, “Popular Sovereignty, Democracy, and the Constituent Power,” Constellations 12 (June 2005): 225. Martin Loughlin argues that the concept of constituting power was explicitly a concern in mid-seventeenth-century England during the constitutional crises, Civil Wars, Commonwealth, and Protectorate, but that it was resolved during the Restoration when absolute authority was granted to the Crownin-Parliament (Loughlin, “Constituent Power Subverted: From English Constitutional Argument to British Constitutional Practice,” in The Paradox of Constitutionalism: Constituent Power and Constitutional Form, ed. Martin Loughlin and Neil Walker [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007], 27–48).

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14. Antonio Negri, Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State, trans. Maurizia Boscagli (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). 15. Elliott Visconsi writes that “jure divino kingship is predicated upon a mythicohistorical argument in which power descends from God at specific, concrete moments . . . and is enabled by affective bonds of political obligation.” Visconsi goes on to show how after Restoration, English writers revised that argument through the imaginative resources of fiction. See Visconsi, Lines of Equity: The Origins of Law in Later Stuart England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 117–18. 16. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 49. 17. Ibid., 36. 18. Ibid., 7. 19. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1990), 161. 20. See, for example, William Ockham, Predestination, God’s Foreknowledge, and Future Contingents, trans. Marilyn McCord Adams and Norman Kretzmann (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983), 36, 54–55. See Hans Blumenberg’s excellent discussion of Ockham in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), 152–55. Also see Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 124–52. In a recent book, Michael Allen Gillespie argues that nominalism is the origin of a crisis in modernity in which man becomes unmoored from the common good. Medieval scholastics were able to synthesize reason and revelation, the ordered world and creation, through logic and universals. In positing a God of creation who breaks with his own order, the nominalists ruptured the synthesis that the scholastics brought about (Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008], 14, 19–43). Although Gillespie takes Blumenberg to be an ally, Blumenberg’s reoccupation thesis suggests that the two would diverge precisely on the question of the theological origins of philosophical modernity. For Blumenberg, the nominalist distinction between God’s absolute and ordained power rearticulates an earlier crisis that theology tried and failed to resolve. For this reason, theology as a science is bracketed by questions concerning absolute power that it needs to answer but fi nally cannot resolve. Because Gillespie does not ask about the nontheological origins of theology, he rejects Blumenberg’s reoccupation thesis in its strong form, and this, in turn, allows him to argue that secular modernity has a hidden theological origin that it keeps out of view. Gillespie ends up arguing for exactly the secularization thesis that Blumenberg strongly critiques. 21. Midrash Rabbah, ed. H. Freeman and Maurice Simon, 10 vols. (London: Soncino Press, 1939), 3:9. See Aviva Gottlieb Zornberg, Genesis: The Beginning of Desire (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1995), 8. 22. Eric L. Santner, On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Refl ections on Freud and Rosenzweig (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 27. Santner links creaturely life through Agamben to Heidegger and Benjamin in On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 5–30. Also see Julia Reinhard Lupton, Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 161–65. Lupton suggestively associates creatureliness

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with political craftsmanship in Thinking with Shakespeare: Essays on Politics and Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 152–54. 23. Jonathan Sheehan, The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 92. Also see Debora Kuller Shugar, The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice, and Subjectivity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 24. Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (1957; reprint, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985). For an account of Kantorowicz’s concept of fiction in relation to debates about political theology, see Victoria Kahn, “Political Theology and Fiction in The King’s Two Bodies,” Representations 106 (Spring 2009): 77–101. For a discussion of the constitutional elements of Kantorowicz’s version of political theology, see Jennifer Rust, “Political Theologies of the Corpus Mysticum,” in Points of Departure: Political Theology on the Scene of Early Modernity, ed. Graham Hammill and Julia Reinhard Lupton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming). 25. Debora Kuller Shuger, Political Theologies in Shakespeare’s England: The Sacred and the State in “Measure for Measure” (Houndsmill: Palgrave, 2001). 26. Richard C. McCoy, Alterations of State: Sacred Kingship in the English Reformation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). 27. Shuger, Political Theologies, 2. 28. Lupton, Citizen-Saints, esp. 127–57. 29. Blumenberg, Legitimacy, 101. Also see Hans Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology, trans. with afterword by Robert Savage (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), and “Prospect for a Theory of Nonconceptuality” in Shipwreck with Spectator: Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence, trans. Stephen Rendall (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 81–102. I discuss Blumenberg’s argument in greater detail in “Blumenberg and Schmitt on the Rhetoric of Political Theology,” in Points of Departure (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming). 30. Schmitt, Political Theology, 36. 31. There is some controversy surrounding the dating of this painting. In proposing that Rembrandt’s painting responds to Bol’s, I follow Gary Schwartz, Rembrandt: His Life, His Paintings (New York: Penguin, 1991), 325. 32. Katherine Fremantle, The Baroque Town Hall of Amsterdam (Utrecht: Haentjens, Dekker, and Gumbert, 1959), 25–35; Jonathan Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall, 1477–1806 (1995; reprint, Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), 867–68. 33. Joost van den Vondel, De Werken van Vondel, ed. J. F. M. Sterk et al., 10 vols. (Amsterdam: Maatschappij voor Goede en Goedkoope Lectuur, 1927–37), 8:757. Translation mine. 34. Harry Berger, Jr., Fictions of the Pose: Rembrandt against the Italian Renaissance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 56. 35. As Calvin writes, summarizing the standard interpretation of the separation of the law into two tablets in both Jewish and Christian traditions, “the law was divided into two tablets . . . because it fi rst sets forth piety and the worship of God; and, secondly, prescribes the rules of righteous living between man and man” (John Calvin,

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Commentaries on the Four Last Books of Moses, trans. Charles William Bingham, 4 vols. [Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1948], 3:345). Rembrandt was most likely dividing private and public worship in relation to a fundamental rift in the Dutch Reformed Church over Sabbath observance. While the Calvinist wing of the church pressed for stricter enforcement of pious Sabbath observance, the liberal wing argued that the Sabbath did not require strict observance and abstinence from work. The debate exploded in the late 1650s and lasted until the mid-1660s, when the States of Holland and of Utrecht forbade sermons and publication on the issue (Israel, The Dutch Republic, 661–64). 36. Tacitus, Annals 2:36. See Peter S. Donaldson, Machiavelli and the Mystery of State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 111–40. 37. Giovanni Botero, Della Ragion di Stato (Bologna: L. Capelli, 1930), 9. Translations mine. 38. Victoria Kahn’s Wayward Contracts: The Crisis of Political Obligation in England, 1640–1674 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 15–20. Richard Tuck hints at this point in his discussion of the attack on “a [literal] representational theory of perception” by mid-seventeenth-century political philosophers (Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 1572–1651 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993], 289). 39. Ibid., 283. The phrase “passion and interest” comes from Albert O. Hirschman, who uses it to describe the reinvention of political subjectivity from Machiavelli to the eighteenth century. Scholars including Foucault, Horkheimer, and Strauss have all argued that early modern theories of government employ a two-step process involving the invention of the individual to be governed as the site of interests and unruly passions and the elaboration of modes of government adequate to the regulation and disciplining of this passion-driven, self-interested individual. One of Kahn’s main innovations is to insist on creative aspects of this process, both in terms of politics and poetics. See Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (1977; reprint, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997); Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (Houndsmill: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Max Horkheimer, “Egoism and the Freedom Movement: On the Anthropology of the Bourgeois Era,” Telos 54 (Winter 1982–83): 10–60; Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 166–202. For an account of politics and passion in early modern England that complements Kahn, see Christopher Tilmouth, Passion’s Triumph over Reason: A History of the Moral Imagination from Spenser to Rochester (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 40. ST, I–II, q.105.a.1. For a discussion of Aquinas’s use of Aristotle’s Politics in his interpretation of Mosaic law, see Douglas Kries, “Thomas Aquinas and the Politics of Moses,” Review of Politics 52 (Winter 1990): 84–104. 41. Alan Harding, “The Origins of the Concept of the State,” History of Political Thought 15 (Spring 1994): 59–66. 42. Jean Gerson, De Potestate Ecclesiastica, in Oeuvre Complètes, ed. Msgr. Glorieux, trans. Jeay and Garay, 8 vols. (Paris: Desclée, 1968–73), 6:224.

290

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43. Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 2:39–40. For an overview of the conciliar movement and its origins in early medieval Church government, see Brian Tierney, Foundations of the Conciliar Theory: The Contribution of Medieval Canonists from Gratian to the Great Schism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955), 47–84. 44. For a more detailed account of the changing images of Moses in the fi fteenthcentury campaign for the primacy of papal authority, see L. D. Ettlinger, The Sistine Chapel before Michelangelo: Religious Imagery and Papal Primacy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), 85–86, 116–17. 45. Peter Samuel Donaldson briefly discusses some of these fi gures’ responses to Machiavelli’s Moses in his introduction to Gardiner’s Machiavellian Treatise, ed. and trans. Donaldson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 18. 46. Victoria Kahn, Machiavellian Rhetoric: From the Counter-Reformation to Milton (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 60–84. 47. David Hume, The Natural History of Religion (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1957), 9.49. 48. Regina Schwartz, The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Jonathan Kirsch, God against the Gods: The History of the War between Monotheism and Polytheism (New York: Penguin, 2005). 49. Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 23–54. 50. Both Michael Walzer and James Nohrnberg develop this positive side of the Mosaic constitution. See Michael Walzer, Exodus and Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1985); James Nohrnberg, Like Unto Moses: The Constituting of an Irruption (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). 51. Jan Assmann, Of God and the Gods: Egypt, Israel, and the Rise of Monotheism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008), 86; also see Jan Assmann, The Price of Monotheism, trans. Robert Savage (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010). 52. Hans Baron, “Machiavelli: The Republican Citizen and Author of The Prince,” English Historical Review 76 (April 1961): 217–53; J. G. A. Pocock, Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), 85; Quentin Skinner, Machiavelli (New York: Hill & Wang, 1981). See also Gisela Bok, Quentin Skinner, and Maurizio Viroli, eds., Machiavelli and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 53. Jonathan I. Israel, The Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 159. 54. “Machiavelli needed much more urgently than did even Hobbes a detailed discussion revealing the harmony between his political teaching and the teaching of the Bible. Yet unlike Hobbes he failed to give such a discussion. The fact that he failed to do so and at the same time spoke so rarely about revelation cannot be explained by blindness or ignorance but only by a peculiar mixture of boldness and caution: he silently makes superficial readers oblivious of the Biblical teaching” (Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958], 176). 55. Leo Strauss, “Preface to the English Translation,” in Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, trans. E. M. Sinclair (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 28–29.

notes to pages 23–31

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56. Philip Sidney, A Defence of Poetry, ed. J. A. Van Dorsten (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 22–24. Joel Dodson argues that Sidney’s theorization of secular literature in the Defence responds to increasingly urgent problems of religious division and schism (Dodson, “‘Some newer name than Christian’: Confessionalization in Early Modern English Literature, Spenser to Donne” [dissertation, University of Notre Dame, 2011], 23–32). 57. Claire McEachern, The Poetics of English Nationhood, 1590–1612 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 12. See also Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of the English Nation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 28–40. 58. Melissa Sanchez draws out some of the relations between erotic discourse and political thought in Erotic Subjects: The Sexuality of Politics in Early Modern English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 59. Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, trans. Katherine Jones (New York: Vintage, 1967), 52, 77. 60. Ibid., 39. 61. Bonnie Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 27, 31. 62. Kathleen Biddick discusses Freud’s sensitivity to theologico-political issues and his dissatisfaction with Enlightenment accounts of modernity in The Typological Imaginary: Circumcision, Technology, History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 81–90. 63. Sigmund Freud, “The Moses of Michelangelo,” in Character and Culture, ed. Philip Rieff (New York: Collier, 1963), 99. 64. Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (New York: Avon, 1965), 414. A full account of Bismarck’s dream can be found in Otto Bismarck, Bismarck, His Life and Refl ections, trans. A. J. Butler, 2 vols. (London: Smith, Elder, 1898), 2:209–10. 65. As Yosef Yerushalmi has uncovered, by August 9, 1934, Freud had written a manuscript draft of what would become Moses and Monotheism. Engelbert Dollfuss was a fascist Christian whose strongest ally was Mussolini; Dollfuss suppressed both the Austrian Nazi party and the left-wing socialists and, by April of 1934 had established authoritarian rule by securing a one-party system. After his murder, it was clear that the Anschluss was imminent. The only question was, when? (Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Freud’s Moses: Judaism Terminable and Interminable [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991], 16–18). Freud fi rst mentions the project in a letter to Arnold Zweig, September 30, 1934.

CH A PTER two 1. Ernst H. Kantorowicz, “Mysteries of State: An Absolutist Concept and Its Late Medieval Origins,” Harvard Theological Review 48 (January 1955): 65–91. 2. J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), 84. Quentin Skinner develops Pocock’s thesis by arguing that Machiavelli revives the Ro-

292

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man virtues of liberty and prudence. See Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 1:69–189, Machiavelli (New York: Hill & Wang, 1981), 21–77, “Machiavelli’s Discorsi and the Pre-humanist Origins of Republican Ideas,” Machiavelli and Republicanism, ed. Gisela Bock, Quentin Skinner, and Maurizio Viroli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 121–42, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), and Visions of Politics, 3 vols. (Cambridge University Press, 2002), 2:118–212. A number of scholars in the Cambridge School of Political Thought have taken up and reiterated Pocock’s and Skinner’s readings of Machiavelli, most notably Maurizio Viroli, in Machiavelli (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Also see Machiavelli and Republicanism, as well as Paul A. Rahe, ed., Machiavelli’s Liberal Republican Legacy, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006). For a critical account of these interpretations of Machiavelli, see Mark Jurdjevic, “Machiavelli’s Hybrid Republicanism,” English Historical Review 122 (December 2007): 1228–57. 3. Miguel Vatter, Between Form and Event: Machiavelli’s Theory of Political Freedom (Dordecht: Kluwer, 2000), 83. For a sympathetic, although critical, account of Vatter’s study, see Michael Dillon, “Lethal Freedom: Divine Violence and the Machiavellian Moment,” Theory and Event 11 (2008), http://muse.jhu.edu.gate.lib.buffalo.edu/ journals/theory_and_event/v011/11.2.dillon.html. 4. Several critics have discussed Machiavelli’s use of Moses. Steven Marx focuses on Machiavelli’s Moses to propose that Machiavelli was among the fi rst to read Hebrew scripture as a secular text that gave practical political advice. John H. Geerken shows how Machiavelli uses Moses to emphasize the need to combine military modes of thought with prophetic discourse. And in a fascinating essay that compares Machiavelli’s use of Moses with Luther’s critique of works, Margery O’Rourke Boyle argues that Machiavelli employs Moses to critique the political implications of an Orthodox Catholic theology of grace (Marx, “Moses and Machiavellianism,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 65 (Autumn 1997): 551–71; Geerken, “Machiavelli’s Moses and Renaissance Politics,” Journal of the History of Ideas 60 (October 1999): 579–95; O’Rourke Boyle, “Machiavelli and the Politics of Grace,” Modern Language Notes 119 Supplemental (2004): S224–S246. 5. For Benjamin’s discussion of the term, see his “Critique of Violence,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, 4 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 1996–2006), 1:236–52. 6. The History and the Affairs of Italy, from the earliest times to the death of Lorenzo the Magnificent, Together with The Prince and various Historical Tracts (London: Bell &Daley, 1872), 474. 7. Available online at http://www.constitution.org/mac/prince21.htm. 8. The Prince, Utopia, and Ninety-Five Theses: Address to the German Nobility Concerning Christian Liberty, ed. Charles W. Eliot (New York: F. F. Collier & Son), 1910), 76. 9. Exceptions include Harvey Mansfield’s edition, which translates Marrani back into Spanish, as “Marranos,” and Tim Parks’ recent edition, which translates Marrani as “Marrano Jews.” Mansfield includes a note explaining that Machiavelli is referring

notes to pages 34–38

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to both Jews and Muslims forcibly converted to Christianity. See The Prince, trans. and intro. Harvey C. Mansfield, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 88; and The Prince, trans. Tim Parks (New York: Penguin, 2009), 87. 10. The Prince, trans. George Bull, introduced by Anthony Grafton (1961; reprint, New York: Penguin, 1999), 72; The Prince, trans. Luigi Ricci, intro. Christian Gauss (New York: Signet, 1999), 110; The Prince, ed. and trans. Quentin Skinner and Russell Price (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 77. The 1933 Spanish edition of The Prince also translates Marrani as “los Moros” (El Príncipe. trans. Edmundo González Blaco [Madrid: Ediciones Ibéricas, 1933], 383). 11. The Works of Nicholas Machiavel, secretary of state of the republic of Florence, ed. Ellis Farneworth, 2 vols. (London: Printed for Thomas Davies; Thomas Waller; R. and J. Dodsley; James Fletcher; Mess. Balfour and Hamilton; and Mr. James Hoey, junior, 1762), 1:662. Farneworth makes the same claim in the second edition. See The Works of Nicholas Machiavel, secretary of state of the republic of Florence, ed. Ellis Farneworth, 2nd ed., corrected, 4 vols. (London: Printed for T. Davies, J. Dodsley, J. Robson, G. Robinson, T. Becket, T. Cadell, and T. Evans, 1775): 2:383. Farneworth cites Michael Geddes’s History of the Expulsion of the Moriscos Out of Spain, which details the forced conversion of the Moors under Ferdinand, but nowhere equates the Marranos with the Moors (Geddes, Miscellaneous Tracts, 3 vols. [London: Printed for A and J. Churchill at the Black-Swan in Paternoster-Row, 1702], 1:4–205). 12. Nicholas Machiavels Prince (London: R. Bishop, 1640), 180. Dacres’s translation was republished in 1661, 1663, and 1674. 13. The Works of the Famous Nicolas Machiavel (London: Printed for J. S., 1675), 229. Neville’s translation was republished in 1680, 1694, and 1695. 14. Yirmiyahu Yovel, The Other Within: The Marranos, Split Identity and Emerging Modernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 86; Benzion Netanyahu, The Marranos of Spain: From the Late Fourteenth to the Early Sixteenth Century, According to Contemporary Hebrew Sources, 3rd ed., updated and expanded (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999). 15. Yovel, Other Within, 164. 16. Peter Breiner underscores the instabilities and confl icts that result from this constituting act. See his “Machiavelli’s ‘New Prince’ and the Primordial Moment of Acquisition,” Political Theory 36 (February 2008): 66–92. See also Felix Gilbert, “Machiavelli: The Renaissance Art of War,” in Makers of Modern Strategy from Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age, ed. Peter Paret, Gordon A. Craig, and Felix Gilbert (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 11–31; and Mikael Hörnquist, Machiavelli and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 76–112. 17. Andrew Hadfield, Edmund Spenser’s Irish Experience (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), 77–78; Markku Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, 1570–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 76–102. 18. Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 187. Strauss also briefly discusses Machiavelli’s example of the expulsion of the Marranos from Spain in “What Is Political Philosophy?” See An Introduction to Political Philosophy: Ten Essays by Leo Strauss, ed. and intro. Hilail Gildin (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989), 44.

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19. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 5. 20. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. and intro. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 19. 21. Leo Strauss, “Notes on Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political,” trans. J. Harvey Lomax, esp. pp. 97–105, in Schmitt, The Concept of the Political. 22. Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli, 278. 23. Giorgio Agamben develops this logic, though not in terms of Machiavelli, in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 15–29. 24. Victoria Kahn, Machiavellian Rhetoric: From the Counter-Reformation to Milton (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 22. 25. See Michael Walzer, “Exodus 32 and the Theory of Holy War: The History of a Citation,” Harvard Theological Review 61 (January 1968): 1–14. 26. Augustine, Letter 93 in Letters, trans. Sister Wilfred Parsons, SND, 5 vols. (New York: Fathers of the Church, 1953), 2:62. 27. Alison Brown notes that Machiavelli’s view of religion has two sides to it: “One sees [religion] as a form of political control; the other follows Lucretius in describing religion anthropologically as the expression of the deeply rooted beliefs and fears of ordinary people, which Machiavelli, unlike Lucretius, saw as the basis of their respect for law and civilized behavior.” See Brown, “Philosophy and Religion in Machiavelli,” in The Cambridge Companion to Machiavelli, ed. John M. Najemy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 166. Brown makes a similar point in The Return of Lucretius to Renaissance Florence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 78–79. Maurizio Viroli emphasizes this second of Machiavelli’s views on religion, arguing that Machiavelli has more in common with contemporary reformers than scholars have previously acknowledged. Machiavelli “presented religious rebirth and political rebirth as two processes of the same form, which each required the presence of the other.” Viroli downplays Machiavelli’s more skeptical responses to religion by arguing for a coherent republican theology at work in his letters and political writings. See Viroli, Machiavelli’s God, trans. Anthony Shuggar (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 210–11. 28. Robert Polzin, Moses and the Deuteronomist: A Literary Study of Deuteronomic History (New York: Seabury, 1980), 65–69. 29. Hindy Najman, Seconding Sinai: The Development of Mosaic Discourse in Second Temple Judaism (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 31. 30. John Calvin, Commentaries on the Four Last Books of Moses, trans. Charles William Bingham, 4 vols. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1950), 4:330. 31. Ramban, Commentaries on the Torah, trans. Charles B. Chavel, 5 vols. (New York: Shilo, 1973), 2:564. Nachmanides, also known as Ramban, is responding to Rashi, who argues that Israel was seduced by the eiruv rav, or riffraff, who accompanied the Israelites out of Egypt (The Metsudah Chumash / Rashi, trans. Avrohom Davis and Joseph Rabinowitz, 5 vols. [Hoboken, NJ: Ktav, 1991–98], 2:511). 32. Ramban, Commentaries, 2:286. Also see Kenneth Reinhard and Julia Reinhard

notes to pages 47–57

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Lupton, “The Subject of Religion: Lacan and the Ten Commandments,” Diacritics 33 (Summer 2003): 71–97. 33. Ramban, Commentaries, 2:574. 34. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and the Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 198. 35. Robert Cover, “Nomos and Narrative,” in Narrative, Violence, and the Law: The Essays of Robert Cover, ed. Martha Minow, Michael Ryan, and Austin Sarat (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 98–99. 36. Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the “Jus Publicum Europaeum,” trans. and annotat. G. L. Ulmen (New York: Telos, 2006), 70–71. For a useful discussion of Schmitt’s argument, see Susan Buck-Morss, “Sovereign Right and the Global Left,” Cultural Critique 69 (Spring 2008): 145–71. 37. Schmitt, Nomos, 326–27. 38. At least as early as Jerome, some readers have taken the scrolls discovered in 2 Kings 22 to be some version of Deuteronomy. And especially since DeWette’s Dissertatio Critica (1805), this view has dominated biblical scholarship. See Moshe Weinfeld, “Deuteronomy and the Present State of Inquiry,” in A Song of Power and the Power of Song: Essays on the Book of Deuteronomy, ed. Duane L. Christensen (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1993), 21–35. 39. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (1958; reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 192–207. 40. Virginia Cox, “Rhetoric and Ethics in Machiavelli,” in The Cambridge Companion to Machiavelli, 178–79. 41. For a discussion of Savonarola’s influence on the Florentine republic, see Donald Weinstein, Savonarola and Florence: Prophecy and Patriotism in the Renaissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971), 247–88. For a discussion of the ideology and political system Savonarola instituted, see Richard Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980), 462–90; see also Lorenzo Polizziotto, The Elect Nation: The Savonarola Movement in Florence, 1494–1545 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), 8–53. For an overview and discussion of Savonarola’s identification with Moses, see Alison Brown, “Savonarola, Machiavelli, and Moses: A Changing Model,” in The Medici in Florence: The Exercise and Language of Power (Florence: L. S. Olschki; Perth: University of Western Australia Press, 1992), 263–79; Philippe Guérin, “‘La petit clé des secrets’: De la performativité du discours savonarolien,” in Savonarole: Enjeux, Débats, Questions, ed. A. Fontes, J. L. Fournel, and M. Plaisance (Paris: Université de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1997), 21–22. 42. Savonarola, Prediche sopra l’Esodo, ed. Pier Giorgio Ricci, 2 vols. (Rome: Angelo Belardetti, [1956]), 1:202–3. All translations of Savonarola’s sermons are mine. 43. Ibid., 1:149. 44. Machiavelli, Lettere Familiari, 875, in Tutte le Opere di Machiavelli, ed. Guido Mazzoni and Mario Casella (Florence: G. Barbèra Editore, 1929). All translations mine. 45. Ibid., 876. 46. Savonarola, Prediche sopra l’Esodo, 1:149. 47. Ibid., 1:157.

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48. Ibid., 1:153. 49. It is this level of prudence that Martin Rhonhiemer emphasizes in his study of moral autonomy in Aquinas. “The appetibile, the principle of the practical reason (its primum consideratum), is not just any kind of good, but must be a practical good. Practical goods are not such as emerge in the necessary structure of beings as ‘givens,’ or as ‘things’ one strives after or considers in action. Rather, they are the basis of the contingency of action and thereby, of striving.” See Martin Rhonhiemer, Natural Law and Practical Reason: A Thomist View of Moral Autonomy, trans. Gerald Maslbary (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000), 27. 50. Strauss associates fortune with the Roman deity Fortuna (Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli, 213–23). 51. Eugene Garver, Machiavelli and the History of Prudence (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 109–12. 52. Vatter, Between Form and Event, 171. 53. Ibid., 185. 54. As Albert Russell Ascoli argues, The Prince is structured around an opposition between “pragmatic humanism” and “utopian prophecy” in which both terms are fundamentally transformed: “Machiavelli’s gift of prudential counsel is at its most pragmatic and realistic precisely in its prediction that it will be accepted and implemented only if it is indeed also a truly prophetic gift of the Holy Spirit—however unlikely that may appear to be in the terms of The Prince” (Ascoli, “Machiavelli’s Gift of Counsel,” in Machiavelli and the Discourse of Literature, ed. Albert Russell Ascoli and Victoria Kahn [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993], 256, Ascoli’s emphasis). 55. See Hannah Pitkin’s discussion in Fortune Is a Woman: Gender and Politics in the Thought of Niccolò Machiavelli (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 301–6. 56. Federico Chabod, Scritti sul Rinascemento (1967; reprint, Torino: Giulio Einaudi, 1981), 633.

CH A PTER thr ee 1. Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, IV.Def.8, in Spinoza: Complete Works, ed. Michael L. Morgan, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2002). 2. Benjamin Ravid, Economics and Toleration in Seventeenth-Century Venice: The Background and Context of the “Discourse” of Simone Luzzatto (Jerusalem: American Academy for Jewish Research, 1977), 7–18. 3. Simone Luzzatto, Discorso circa il Stato de gl’ Hebrei et in particolar dimoranti nell’ inclita città di Venetia (Bologna: Arnoldo Forni Editore, 1976), 46v. All translations are mine. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically by page number in the text as DHS. 4. See Abraham Melamed’s excellent essay “Simone Luzzatto on Tacitus: Apologetica and Ragione di Stato,” in Studies in Medieval Jewish History and Literature, ed. Isadore Twersky, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979–2001), 2:143–70. 5. Bernard Septimus, “Biblical Religion and Political Rationality in Simone Luzzatto, Maimonides, and Spinoza,” in Jewish Thought in the Seventeenth Century,

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ed. Isadore Twersky and Bernard Septimus (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 399–433; Abraham Melamed, “English Travelers and Venetian Jewish Scholars: The Case of Simone Luzzatto and James Harrington,” in Gli Ebrei e Venezia: Secoli XIV–XVIII; atti del convegno internazionale organizzato dall Instituto di storia della società e della Stato veneziano della . . . Maggiore, 5–10 giugno, 1983, ed. Gaetano Cozzi (Milan: Edizioni Comunità, 1987), 507–52. In the early eighteenth century, John Toland promised to publish a translation of Luzzatto’s Discourse, and Luzzatto was the primary source for Toland’s Reason for Naturalizing the Jews in Great Britain and Ireland. See Ravid, Economics, 8–10, and Adam Sutcliffe, Judaism and Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 227–28. 6. Melamed and Benjamin Ravid see a continuity between Luzzatto and Reason of State (Melamed, “Luzzatto on Tacitus”; Benjamin Ravid, “Biblical Exegesis à la Mercantilism and Raison d’état in Seventeenth-Century Venice: The Discorso of Simone Luzzatto,” in Bringing the Hidden to Light: The Process of Interpretation, Studies in Honor of Stephen A. Geller, ed. Kathryn F. Kravitz et al. [Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2007], 169–86). For a discussion of Reason of State and religion, see Peter S. Donaldson, Machiavelli and Mystery of State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 186–222. 7. Friedrich Meinecke, Machiavellianism: The Doctrine of Raison dÉtat and Its Place in Modern History, trans. Douglas Scott, intro. Werner Stark (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1998), 70–89. 8. Melamed, “Luzzatto on Tacitus,” 159–63. 9. Etienne Balibar, Spinoza and Politics, trans. Peter Snowdon (London: Verso, 1998), 101, Balibar’s emphasis. Communication is a central critical issue in Spinoza studies. Eminent scholars from Harry Wolfson and Leo Strauss to Yirmiyahu Yovel have shown how Spinoza seems to use two languages at the same time. Wolfson notes that Spinoza writes in the language of orthodox Jewish medieval philosophy but also thinks in heterodoxical ways that, for Wolfson, legitimately fall within that tradition. Strauss argues that Spinoza spoke to two audiences, conveying two meanings, because he wrote under the threat of persecution. And Yovel proposes that Spinoza thought in two languages because, although he was born a Jew, he was raised in the intellectual environment of Marranos. Balibar is making a substantially different claim. Spinoza’s philosophy is not just enabled by his complex relation to language, rhetoric, and communication. These are philosophical issues central to Spinoza’s understanding of knowledge, politics, and theology (Harry A. Wolfson, The Philosophy of Spinoza, 2 vols. [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1948]; Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing [1952; reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988], 142–201; Yirmiyahu Yovel, Spinoza and Other Heretics, 2 vols. [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989]). 10. Antonio Negri, The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysic and Politics, trans. Michael Hardt (1991; reprint, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 89. 11. Nancy K. Levene, Spinoza’s Revelation: Religion, Democracy, and Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 164. 12. Spinoza uses the word conscientia in the opening pages of the Theologico-

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Political Treatise to oppose the claim that the prophets were endowed with superhuman capacities, as if their “conscientium” is different from ours (TTP 395 / 16). Conscientia, which could plausibly be translated as conscience, is most often and, I think, correctly translated as “consciousness.” Even though Spinoza does not use the phrase “liberty of conscience,” Seymour Feldman argues in his introduction to Samuel Shirley’s translation of the Theologico-Political Treatise that Spinoza strongly advocates it (The Theologico-Political Treatise, trans. Samuel Shirley, intro. Seymour Feldman [Indianapolis: Hackett, 1998], xli). 13. John Calvin, Institutes of Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960), 1:848. 14. For a discussion of Spinoza’s relation to subsequent concepts of culture, see Victoria Kahn, “Political Theology and Liberal Culture: Strauss, Schmitt, Spinoza, and Arendt,” in Points of Departure: Political Theology on the Scenes of Early Modernity, ed. Graham Hammill and Julia Reinhard Lupton (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, forthcoming). 15. Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd, Collective Imaginings: Spinoza, Past and Present (London: Routledge, 1999), 90. 16. Susan James, “Democracy and the Good Life in Spinoza’s Philosophy,” in Interpreting Spinoza: Critical Essays, ed. Charlie Huenemann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 136. 17. Pentateuch with Rashi’s Commentary, trans. Rev. M. Rosenbaum and A. M. Silberman, 5 vols. (New York: Hebrew Publishing, 1965) 2:102. 18. The two twentieth-century writers who best encapsulate Spinoza’s arguments about political theology are Louis Althusser and Freud. Althusser concludes his seminal essay, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” with a brief account of the ways in which election serves as a model for interpellation—in Althusser’s account, the processes of recognition and conscience by which individuals are transformed into political subjects. Following Spinoza, who “explained this completely two centuries before Marx” (175), Althusser focuses on Mosaic revelation in order to draw out the state’s relation to monotheism. Political membership in the state relies on the assertion of an imaginary absolute to which individuals are subjected. “Moses, interpellated-called by [God’s] Name, having recognized that it ‘really’ was he who was called by God, recognizes that he is a subject, a subject of God, a subject subjected to God, a subject through the Subject and subjected to the Subject. The proof: he obeys him, and makes his people obey God’s Commandments” (Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses [Notes towards an Investigation],” in Lenin and Philosophy, and other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster [New York: New Left Books, 1971], 179, emphasis Althusser’s). Like Althusser, Freud emphasizes the constitutive aspects of political theology, but for Freud these aspects extend beyond reflection into the state and include an ethical relation to thinking and to life. Like Spinoza and Althusser, Freud argues that the constitution of the subject through moral law involves submission to an imaginary authority, “for whose sake the effort [of instinctual renunciation, or Triebverzicht] is made” (150). But, for Freud, Judaism represents a special case. On the one hand, Judaism is like a “fossil” (113). Unlike Christianity, which overcomes the Mosaic constitution and its various obligations in a new dispensation of the universal, Judaism remains attached

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to the imaginary authority of Moses and of Moses’s God. On the other hand, because Judaism transforms the prohibition against images of God into a critique of magical thinking, it also represents a progress in spirituality and ethical obligations beyond the limits of statehood. Freud’s intellectual debts to Spinoza are less direct than Althusser’s, though he did acknowledge an affinity for the philosophy. But we might hear in Freud’s description of Jewish spirituality an echo of what Spinoza considers to be the promise of the Mosaic constitution: the belief in “a single God who embraces the whole world, one as all-loving as he was all peaceful, who, averse to all ceremonial and magic, set humanity as its highest aim a life of truth and justice” (Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, trans. Katherine Jones [New York: Vintage, 1967], 61). For a discussion of Freud’s relation to Spinoza, see Freud’s letters to Siegfried Hessing, reproduced in Siegfried Hessing, “Freud’s Relation with Spinoza,” in Speculum Spinozanum, ed. Siegfried Hessing (London: Routledge, 1977), 224–39; also see Michael Mack, Spinoza and the Spectres of Modernity: The Hidden Enlightenment of Diversity from Spinoza to Freud (London: Continuum, 2010), 195–216. 19. Warren Montag develops this point in Bodies, Masses, and Power: Spinoza and His Contemporaries (London: Verso, 1999), 1–25. 20. On Spinoza’s relation to his contemporaries, see Richard H. Popkin, “Spinoza and Biblical Scholarship,” in The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza, ed. Don Garrett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 383–407. See also Popkin, Spinoza (Oxford: Oneworld, 2004), 65–70. 21. J. Samuel Preuss argues that Spinoza is in fact critiquing the biblical hermeneutics developed by his friend Ludwig Meyer. See J. Samuel Preuss, Spinoza and the Irrelevance of Biblical Authority (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 37–38. 22. Ibid, 159–68. Preuss is right to argue that Spinoza applies a Baconian understanding of inductive reasoning to scriptural interpretation; however, Spinoza does so not just because he thinks Baconian reason is correct but also because he wants to maintain a Baconian understanding of authority, community, and interpretation. 23. Strauss, Persecution, 184. 24. Etienne Balibar, “Jus-Pactum-Lex: On the Constitution of the Subject in the Theologico-Political Treatise,” in The New Spinoza, ed. Warren Montag and Ted Stolze (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 189. Emphasis Balibar’s. 25. Douglas Den Uyl, Power, State, and Freedom: An Interpretation of Spinoza’s Political Philosophy (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1983), 44–52. 26. Balibar, “Jus-Pactus-Lex”; Levene, Spinoza’s Revelation, 189–221. 27. Spinoza appears to be following Lambert Velthuysen’s Tractatus de Poena Divina et Humana (1664). See Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 139–42. 28. Edwin Curley, “Kissinger, Spinoza, and Genghis Kahn,” in The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza, 322. 29. Alexandre Matheron argues that Spinoza derives an originary democracy from De Cive (Matheron, “The Theoretical Function of Democracy in Spinoza and Hobbes,” in Montag and Stolze, The New Spinoza, 207–17). Hobbes subsequently denies the democratic horizon implied by his theory of the social contract while Spinoza draws it out. 30. Although Foucault does not take up political theology, he describes this inter-

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nal division in his analysis of liberalism, which, as he argues, invents against a projected history of absolutism as too much governmental control. See Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, 1978–1979, ed. Arnold I. Davidson, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008), 267–89.

CH A PTER fou r 1. British Library (BL) Harleian MSS 6848, F. 190, R and V. Cited in Constance Brown Kuriyama, Christopher Marlowe: A Renaissance Life (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 215. 2. BL Harleian MS.6848, FF. 185–86; cited in Kuriyama, Marlowe, 221. 3. BL Harleian 6849, F. 218; cited in Kuriyama, Marlowe, 231. 4. Roy Kendall, Christopher Marlowe and Richard Baines: Journeys through the Elizabethan Underground (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2003), 23–94. An earlier version of this argument can be found in Kendall, “Richard Baines and Christopher Marlowe’s Milieu,” English Literary Renaissance (ELR) 24 (Autumn 1994): 507–52. 5. The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. F. B. Wilson, rprt. ed. Ronald McKurrow, 5 vols. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958), 2:116. 6.Robert Persons, An advertisement written to a secretarie of my L. Treasurers (Antwerp: s.n., 1592), 18. The book is also attributed to Richard Verstegan. See Kendall, Marlowe and Baines, 218–21. 7. Lucien Febvre, The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion and Rabelais, trans. Beatrice Gottlieb (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 131–46. 8. Kendall, Marlowe and Baines; David Riggs, The World of Christopher Marlowe (New York: Henry Holt, 2004); also see Riggs, “Marlowe’s Quarrel with God,” in Marlowe, History, Sexuality: New Critical Essays on Christopher Marlowe, ed. Paul Whitfield White (New York: AMS Press, 1998), 15–38; Nicholas Davidson, “Christopher Marlowe and Atheism,” in Christopher Marlowe and English Renaissance Culture, ed. Darryll Grantley and Peter Roberts (Aldershot: Scholars’ Press, 1996), 129–47; and John Parker, The Aesthetics of the Antichrist: From Christian Drama to Christopher Marlowe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007), 183–245. 9. Prologue, 14, 20, 12, in The Works of Christopher Marlowe, ed. C. F. Tucker Brooke (1910; reprint, Oxford: Clarendon, , 1966). With the exception of Hero and Leander, references to Marlowe’s works are from this edition and will be cited parenthetically by act, scene, and line number as DF (Doctor Faustus), Ed2 (Edward the Second), JM (The Jew of Malta), Ph (Lucan’s First Book [Pharsalia], Marlowe’s translation), MP (The Massacre at Paris), and T1 (Tamburlaine the Great). Unless otherwise noted, references to Hero and Leander are from Hero and Leander: A Facsimile of the First Edition, London 1598, intro. Louis Martz (Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1972). Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically by line number in the text as HL. For a history of the early printing of Hero and Leander, see W. W. Greg, “The Copyright of Hero and Leander,” Library, 4th series, 24 (1944): 165–74. 10. In 1588, Ribadeneyra published the fi rst part of The Ecclesiastical History

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of the English Schism in Spain and Antwerp to prepare the Spanish people for the upcoming invasion of England on the grounds of defending and restoring the Catholic Church and, in 1593, he published the second part, in which, according to Persons, Ribadeneyra charges Elizabeth and Burghley with tyranny for enacting statutes that restrict the movement of Catholics, a “desperat devise” for “massacring and murthing al the principall catholiques uppon the sudden when soeuer [Burghley] shal see no other shift” (Robert Persons, Newes from Spayne and Holland [Antwerp: A. Conincx, 1593], 21r). In a manuscript titled “A memorial for the reformation of England,” dated 1596 and published in 1690, Persons recommends The Christian Prince “to be read by all good Princes, for that it will put them in mind of many rare and necessary points, fit to be remembered, embraced, and put in execution” (The Jesuit’s Memorial . . . with an Introduction and Animadversions, by Edward Gee [London: Printed for Richard Chiswel, 1690], 219). See also Persons’s letter to Ribadeneyra on the Seminar at Rheims in Letters and Memorials of Father Robert Persons, S.J., ed. L. Hicks, S.J., Catholic Records Society, vol. 39 (London: Privately printed for the Society by John Whitehead and Sons, 1942), 227–40. 11. Pedro de Ribadeneyra, Tratado de la religion y Virtudes que debe tener El Principe Cristiano para Goberar y Conservar sus Estados Contra lo que Nicolas Maquiavelo y los Politicos de este Teimpo Enseñan (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sopena Argentina, 1942), 2.1.99; Religion and the Virtues of the Christian Prince against Machiavelli, trans. and ed. George Albert Moore (Washington, DC: Country Dollar Press, 1949), 2.1.266. Subsequent references cite the Spanish edition, followed by the English. 12. Ibid., 2.41.185 / 340. 13. BL Harleian MSS 6848, FF. 185–86; cited in Kuriyama, Marlowe, 221. 14. De Belloy cited in A Conference About the Next Succession to the Crown of Ingland (Antwerp: Printed by A. Coninx, 1595), 66. A Conference is wrongly attributed to Robert Doleman. 15. Ibid., 143–44. 16. Ibid., 146–47. 17. A Treatise of Treasons against Q. Elizabeth ([Louvain]: Imprinted [by John Fowler], 1572), 85v. The Treatise is sometimes attributed to John Leslie. 18. Ibid., 87v, 86v. 19. Ibid., 87r–v. 20. Ibid., 134r, 134v–135r. 21. Conference, 12. 22. Ibid., 207. 23. BL Harleian MSS 6848, FF. 185–86; cited in Kuriyama, Marlowe, 221. 24. William Allen, An Apologie and True Declaration of the Institution and Endevours of the Two English Colleges (Rheims: Jean de Foigny), 14r–v. 25. William Allen, A True Report of the Late Apprehension and Imprisonment of John Nichols (Rheims: Printed by John Fogny, 1583), sig. Aii r–v. 26. 2 Henry 4, 3.1.31, in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blackmore Evans et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974). 27. I develop this argument in “Time for Marlowe,” English Literary History (ELH) 75 (Summer 2008): 291–314.

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28. “Sarà anco di momento affaticare cotesta gente, come già Faraone i Giudei; o destinarla ad offici vili, come Giudei i Gabaoniti, e i Romani i Calabresi” (Giovanni Botero, Della Ragione di Stato [Bologna: L. Capelli, 1930], 146). Translation is from The Reason of State, trans. P. J. and D. P. Wale (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1956), 101. 29. Julia Lupton, Citizens-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 60. 30. Ibid., 66. 31. 23.Eliz.c.1.; 29.Eliz.c.6, Statutes of the Realm, 11 vols. (London: Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1963), 4:657–58, 4:771–72. 32. Ruth Lunney, Marlowe and the Popular Tradition: Innovation in the English Drama before 1595 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 116; see Thomas Cartelli, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and the Economy of Theatrical Experience (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 174–80. 33. Riggs, The World of Christopher Marlowe, 250–73; Kendall, Marlowe and Baines, 129–32. 34. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 203; Parker, The Aesthetics of the Antichrist, 208. 35. Hyam Maccoby, Revolution in Judaea: Jesus and the Jewish Resistance (London: Orbach & Chambers, 1973), 207–8. 36. BL Harleian MSS 6848, FF. 185–85; cited in Kuriyama, Marlowe, 221. 37. Il Discorsi de Nicolo Machiavelli, sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio, bound with Il Prencipe di Nicolo Machiavelli (London: Printed by John Wolfe,1584), 2v. 38. Jacques Lezra, Wild Materialism: The Ethic of Terror and the Modern Republic (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 79. 39. The entire statement includes an explanation that justifies this sovereign power: “What pleases the sovereign has the force of law, since by royal law concerning his rule, the people confer on him and lodge in him all their rule and power [Quod principi placuit, legis habet vigorem: utpote cum lege regia, quae de imperio eius lata est, populus ei et in eum omne suum imperium et potestatem conferat.]” It was standard practice among medieval jurists to refer to Justinian when addressing the problem of “princeps legibus solutus,” or the prince unbound or loosened from the law (Paul Vinogradoff, Roman Law in Medieval Europe [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961], 65–68; Thomas Gilby, The Political Thought of Thomas Aquinas [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958], 51–54). 40. Jean Bodin, The Six Bookes of a Common-weal, trans. Richard Knolles (London: [Printed by Adam Islip] impensis G. Bishop, 1606), 1.8.92. 41. Select English Poets, ed. S. W. Singer, no. 8 (London: Chiswick Press, 1821), 39. 42. Tucker Brooke, Works of Christopher Marlowe, 511. 43. Fredson Bowers points out that Tucker Brooke’s conjecture is most likely wrong since ten lines “is too short to suppose that it comprised a full page of manuscript” (Christopher Marlowe: The Complete Works, ed. Fredson Bowers, 2 vols. [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981], 2:427). After Bowers criticizes Tucker Brooke’s

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conjecture, he goes on to speculates that the ten lines in question were written “on a separate slip” as “Marlowe’s second thoughts,” which were then inserted in the wrong place. 44. English Sixteenth-Century Verse: An Anthology, ed. Richard S. Sylvester (New York: Norton, 1984); Marlowe’s Complete Poems, ed. L. C. Martin (London: Methuen, 1933); Complete Poems and Translations, ed. Stephen Orgel (1971; reprint, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986); Bowers, Christopher Marlowe: Complete Works; The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe, ed. Roma Gill et al., 5 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987–1998); The Norton Anthology of English Literature, gen. ed. M. H. Abrams, 2 vols. (New York: Norton, 2000). 45. Gill, Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe, 1:186–87. 46. Judith Haber is one of the few critics who accept Blount. See her “‘True-loves blood’: Narrative and Desire in Hero and Leander” ELR 28 (Autumn 1998): 384. John Leonard also makes a case for Blount, giving a close reading of images, motifs, and metaphors of war in Blount’s version of the poem’s ending. See Leonard, “Marlowe’s Doric Music: Lust and Aggression in Hero and Leander,” ELR 30 (Winter 2000): 67–73. 47. J. B. Steane reads the fi nal scene of Hero and Leander as displaying “a sort of sexual brutality”; Werner Von Koppenfels argues that Leander attacks Hero at the end of the poem, revealing a violent, predatory undercurrent to male desire; David Lee Miller argues that Hero is forced to bear the burden of male heterosexual desire and “to constitute her sexuality by internalizing the discontinuity between her position as subject and as object of desire”; Gregory Bredbeck argues that Marlowe uses the blazon in the poem to fetishize and query the naturalness of male heterosexual desire; and Claude J. Summers, working from Miller’s and Bredbeck’s readings, agrees that Hero and Leander confi rms male virility as a part of an “Elizabethan sex-gender system” and adds that the poem also subverts this system by representing a variety of non-normative desires (Steane, Marlowe: A Critical Study [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964], 331; Von Koppenfels, “Dis-covering the Female Body: Erotic Exploration in Elizabethan Poetry,” Shakespeare Survey 47 [1994]: 129; Miller, “The Death of the Modern: Gender and Desire in Marlowe’s Hero and Leander,” South Atlantic Quarterly 88 [Fall 1989]: 773; Bredbeck, Sodomy and Interpretation: Marlowe to Milton [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991], 113–14; Summers, “Hero and Leander: The Arbitrariness of Desire,” in Constructing Christopher Marlowe, ed. J. A. Downie and J. T. Parnell [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000], 147). Georgia Brown argues that in the poem Marlowe “explores a feminised form of authorship,” acknowledging “an analogy between the aesthetic and the feminine.” Playing Ovidian poetics against epic seriousness, Brown argues that Marlowe responds to cultural imperatives which demanded that literature be moral and didactic by using Hero to celebrate forms of literature and literary production which are trivial, prodigal, and wanton (Brown, “Gender and Voice in Hero and Leander,” in Downie and Parnell, Constructing Christopher Marlowe, 149). Brown substantially develops her reading of Elizabethan Ovidianism in Redefi ning English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 102–77. In his study of the epyllion, Jim Ellis argues that in Hero and Leander Marlowe explores the intersections of rhetoric, sexuality, and male

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citizenship. See Ellis’s Sexuality and Citizenship: Metamorphoses in Elizabethan Erotic Verse (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 94–108. 48. Justus Lipsius, Sixes Bookes of Politickes or Civil Doctrine (London: Ponsby, 1594), 4.1.59. Francis Bacon develops a similar understanding of prudence and imagination. See Todd Butler, Imagination and Politics in Seventeenth-Century England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 17–55. 49. William Allen, An Admonition to the Nobility and People of England and Ireland Concerning the Present Warres made for the execution of his Holines Sentence, by the highe and mightie Kinge Catholike of Spaine (Antwerp: A. Conincx, 1588), B2r, B3v. 50. Bodin, Six Bookes, 2.2.197–98. 51. Ribadeneyra, Tratado de la religion, 11; Religion, 253 (translation slightly altered). For a discussion of Ribadeneyra, see Robert Bireley, The Counter-Reformation Prince: Anti-Machiavellianism or Catholic Statecraft in Early Modern England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 111–35. 52. Ribadeneyra, Tratado de la religion, 282; Religion, 109. 53. “An Hymne of Heavenly Beautie,” 295–96, in Edmund Spenser: The Shorter Poems, ed. Richard A. McCabe (New York: Penguin, 1999). 54. Cynthia Marshall, The Shattering of the Self: Violence, Subjectivity, and Early Modern Texts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 53. Both Michael Goldman and Heather James have explored this phenomenon in suggestive ways. For Marlowe, Goldman argues, pleasure often takes the form of abandonment in which characters forsake the world of social norms in order to experience a kind of ravishment in being overtaken. And as James shows, it is through the licentiousness of this pleasure that Marlowe speaks to and about the state. See Michael Goldman, “Marlowe and the Histrionics of Ravishment,” in Two Renaissance Mythmakers: Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson, ed. Alvin Kernan (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 22–40; Heather James, “The Poet’s Toys: Christopher Marlowe and the Liberties of Erotic Elegy,” Modern Language Quarterly 67 (March 2006): 103–27. 55. David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric, and Politics, 1627–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 33. For a brief discussion of Marlowe and Lucan, see my essay “Time for Marlowe,” ELH 75*** (Summer 2008): 301–3, 306–7. 56. Patrick Cheney, Marlowe’s Republican Authorship: Lucan, Liberty, and the Sublime (Houndsmill: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 68–77. 57. Antonio Negri, Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State, trans. Maurizia Boscagli (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 11. 58. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (London: Penguin, 1990), 160. 59. Negri, Insurgencies, 13. 60. Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology, with preface by William Chester Jordan (1957; reprint, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). 61. Ernst Kantorowicz, “Mysteries of State: An Absolutist Concept and Its Late Medieval Origins,” Harvard Theological Review 48 (January 1955): 67. 62. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), 5.

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63. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. and intro. George Schwab (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996), 27.

CH A PTER fiv e 1. King James VI and I: Political Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 68. 2. John Donne, Sermons, ed. George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson, 10 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953–62), 4:241. 3. Ibid., 4:244. 4. James, Political Writings, 205. 5. For a discussion of Drayton’s relation to James, see Bernard H. Newgate, Michael Drayton and His Circle (Oxford: Blackwell, 1941) 124–35; Richard F. Hardin, Michael Drayton and the Passing of Elizabethan England (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1973), 82–92; Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 128–31. 6. Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood, 145–46. In a recent essay on Poly-Olbion, Sukanya Dasgupta argues that these new values emerge from Drayton’s sensitivity to ecological changes brought about by new trends in the English economy (Dasgupta, “Drayton’s ‘Silent Spring’: Poly-Olbion and the Politics of Landscape,” Cambridge Quarterly 39 [February–March 2010]: 152–71). 7. Claire McEachern, The Poetics of English Nationhood, 1590–1612 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 168–73. 8. Ernest Gilman, Plague Writing in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 42–43. Rebecca Totaro emphasizes the influence of the plague on literary imagination in the English Renaissance, and Jonathan Gil Harris argues that shifting concepts of infection influence representations of political confl ict, showing how shifts from Galenic to Paracelsian paradigms of infection, disease, and cure led sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century English writers to conceptualize political enemies (real and imagined) as pathogens within the body politic and to formulate policy accordingly. Ian Munro underscores relations between early seventeenth-century plague writing and the emergent city as the space of the urban crowd. (Totaro, Suffering in Paradise: The Bubonic Plague in English Literature from More to Milton [Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2005], 38–39; Harris, Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998], 19–47; Munro, The Figure of the Crowd in Early Modern London: The City and Its Double [Houndsmill: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005], 145–99.) 9. Harris, Foreign Bodies, 55. Gilman discusses some of the political debates that the 1603 plague occasioned in Plague Writing, 156–62. 10. Paul Slack, The Impact of the Plague in Tudor and Stuart England (London: Routledge, 1985), 209; see also Paul Slack, “Books of Orders: The Making of English Social Policy, 1577–1631,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, vol. 30 (1980): 1–22. 11. Slack, Impact, 211. 12. 1 James I, c. 31, in Statutes of the Realm, 11 vols. (London: Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1963), 4:1060–61.

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13. Nicholas Bownd, Medicines for the Plague (London: Printed by Adam Slip, 1604), 90. 14. The Plague Pamphlets of Thomas Dekker, ed. F. P. Wilson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1925), 27. 15. Ibid., 28. 16. As Munro notes, “Dekker’s literary practice was deeply involved with the socially transforming power of the plague” (see Figure of the Crowd, 189). 17. Henoch Clapham, An Epistle Discoursing upon the present Pestilence. Reprinted with some additions (London: Printed by T. C[reede], 1603), A4v. 18. Ibid., B1r. 19. Ibid., A3v. 20. Ibid., C3v. 21. Henoch Clapham, Antidon: or a Sovereign Remedie Against Schisme and Heresie (London: Printed by John Wolfe, 1600), 32. 22. Ibid., 35. 23. Ibid., 35–36. 24. Henoch Clapham, Henoch Clapham his demaunds and answeres (Middleburg: Printed by Richard Schilders, 1604), 7. Also see Clapham, Doctor Andros His Prosopopeia answered (Middleburg: Printed by Richard Schilders, 1605), 12–60. 25. Clapham, Henoch Clapham, 25–26. 26. Clapham, Doctor Andros, 37. 27. George Wither, Britain’s Remembrancer, Spenser Society no. 28 (New York: Burt Franklin, 1967), 47v. 28. Ibid., 50v–51r. 29. Ibid., 172r. 30. Ibid., 262v–263r. 31. Ibid., “Premonition,” sig. B3r. 32. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 36; Francis Oakley, “The Absolute and Ordained Power of God and King in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: Science, Politics, and Law,” Journal of the History of Ideas 59 (1998): 669–90. 33. Lorraine Daston, “Marvelous Facts and Miraculous Evidence in Early Modern Europe,” in Wonders, Marvels, and Monsters in Early Modern Culture, ed. Peter G. Platt (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999), 76–104; Alexandra Walsham, “Miracles and the Counter-Reformation Mission to England,” Historical Journal 46 (2003): 779–815. 34. See Kenneth Reinhard, “Towards a Political Theology of the Neighbor,” in Kenneth Reinhard, Eric Santner, and Slavoj Žižek, The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 11–75. 35. Moses in a Map of his Miracles, 2.635, 632–33. All references to this poem are from volume 3 of The Works of Michael Drayton, ed. J. William Hebel, 5 vols. (Oxford: Published for the Shakespeare Head Press by Basil Blackwell, 1961) and will be cited parenthetically in the text by book and line number as Moses. References to The Muses Elizium are also from this volume and will be cited parenthetically in the text as ME by nymphal and line number.

notes to pages 151–160

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36. James, Political Writings, 58, 79. 37. James Doelman details James’s admiration for Du Bartas and the effect it had on English poetry, especially neo-Latin poetry, immediately after 1603. See Doelman, “The Accession of King James I and English Religious Poetry,” Studies in English Literature 34 (Winter 1994): 19–40. 38. James, Political Writings, 75. 39. Ibid., 77. 40. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–78, ed. Arnold Davidson, trans. Graham Burchell (Houndsmill: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 91. 41. Ibid., 94–95. 42. David and Goliath, 191–94, in volume 3 of The Works of Michael Drayton. 43. Cobbett’s Collection of State Trials, 22 vols. (London: Printed by T. C. Hansard, Published by R. Bagshaw, 1809–26), 3:37. 44. Commons Debates, 1628, ed. Robert C. Johnson et al., 6 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977–83), 2:358. For a discussion of the Five Knights Case and the Petition of Right, see Margaret Atwood Judson, The Crisis of the Constitution: An Essay in Constitutional and Political Thought in England, 1603–1645 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988), 240–69. Also see Glenn Burgess, The Politics of the Ancient Constitution: An Introduction to English Political Thought, 1603–1642 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), 190–200. 45. Eighth Eglogue, ll. 97–102. In volume 2 of The Works of Michael Drayton, from the 1619 volume of Poems: by Michael Drayton. 46. David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (London: Routledge, 1984), 222. 47. “The Vision of Be. Jonson, on the Muses of his Friend M. Drayton,” ll. 1–2 in volume 3 of The Works of Michael Drayton. 48. Cogswell develops this argument against Jean Brink and Richard Hardin, both of whom argue that Drayton consistently supported the country against the court (Thomas Cogswell, “The Path to Elizium ‘Lately Discovered’: Drayton and the Early Stuart Court,” Huntington Library Quarterly 54 [1991]: 207–33; Brink, Michael Drayton Revisited [Boston: Twayne, 1990], 136–37; and Hardin, Drayton, 27–29). 49. Stephen Orgel: “Pastoral, that traditionally contemplative mode, becomes an assertion of royal power; and the use of pastoral in masques is a remarkable index to the age’s changing attitudes toward monarchy” (Orgel, The Illusion of Power: Political Theater in the English Renaissance [1975, reprint, Berkeley: University of California Press1991], 49). Also see Erica Veevers, Images of Love and Religion: Queen Henrietta Maria and Court Entertainments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 39–47; and Martin Butler, “Ben Jonson’s Pan’s Anniversary and the Politics of Early Stuart Pastoral,” English Literary Renaissance 22 (Autumn 1992): 369–404. In her discussion of Caroline pastoral, Annabel Patterson emphasizes the genre’s capacity to work as an ideological solvent even among supporters of the court: “Although from a distance Caroline pastoral seems to be merely Caroline propaganda, a closer inspection often reveals that the ideological power of the model [to critique authority] remained intact, producing in writers even assumed to be court apologists

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interesting signs of tension and complexity” (Patterson, Pastoral and Ideology: Virgil to Valéry [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987], 147–48). Kevin Sharpe develops a similar argument in his analysis of Thomas Carew’s love poetry. See his Criticism and Compliment: The Politics of Literature in the England of Charles I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 109–51. In an excellent discussion of Mary Wroth’s use of pastoral in Urania, to which my discussion of Drayton is indebted, Amelia Zurcher Sandy shows how Stuart writers used pastoral to explore questions of character and virtuous action (Zurcher Sandy, “Pastoral, Temperance, and the Unitary Self in Wroth’s Urania,” Studies in English Literature 42 [Winter 2002]: 103–19). 50. Harry Berger, Jr., proposes that pastoral tends to construct “within itself an image of its generic traditions in order to critique them and, in the process, performs a critique of the limits of its own enterprise” (Berger, Situated Utterances: Texts, Bodies, and Cultural Representations [New York: Fordham University Press, 2005], 132). 51. Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (1977; reprint, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 20. 52. Hardin, Drayton, 129; Cogswell, “Path to Elizium,” 207–9. 53. Roberto Esposito, Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy, trans. and intro. Timothy Campbell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 9, 56. 54. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. Ian Shapiro (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 56, 107–8. 55. Esposito, Bíos, 57–69. 56. Robert Persons, An Answer to the fifth part of the Reportes lately set forth by Sir Edward Cooke Knight ([Saint-Moer]: Imprinted with license by F. Bellet, 1606), 111. 57. Edward Reynolds, A Treatise of the Passions and Faculties of the Soule of Man (London: Printed for R. H. by Robert Bastock, 1640), 422.

CH A PTER six 1. For a discussion of natural law in The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, see Jason P. Rosenblatt, Renaissance England’s Chief Rabbi: John Selden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 142–47. Milton’s source is De Iure Belli, where Grotius argues that Mosaic law is absolutely in accord with natural law. For this reason, Grotius continues, mitzvot must be understood as natural right. See Hugo Grotius, The Rights of War and Peace, ed. and intro. Richard Tuck from the edition by Jean Barbeyrac, 3 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005), 1:175, 150. 2. Derek Hirst and Steven Zwicker, “High Summer at Nun Appleton, 1651: Andrew Marvell and Lord Fairfax’s Occasions,” Historical Journal 36, no. 2 (1993): 250. For a history of these years, see Blair Worden, The Rump Parliament, 1648–1653 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974). Based on Marvell’s references to the Dutch statesman Constantine Huygens, Worden dates Upon Appleton House to the second half of 1651 or early 1652 (Worden, Literature and Politics in Cromwellian England: John Milton, Andrew Marvell, Marchamont Nedham [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007], 400). 3. John Wallace, Destiny His Choice: The Loyalism of Andrew Marvell (Cam-

notes to pages 174–182

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bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968); Annabel Patterson, Marvell and the Civic Crown (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978), 95–110; and Michael Wilding, Dragon’s Teeth: Literature in the English Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), 138–72. 4. Hirst and Zwicker, “High Summer,” 250, 255. 5. Walter Benjamin, The Origin of the German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (1985; London: Verso, 1994), 71. 6. Upon Appleton House, 15, in The Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. Nigel Smith (London: Longman, 2003). All references to Marvell’s poetry are from this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text by line number as follows: The First Anniversary of the Government, FA; The Horatian Ode, HO; Upon Appleton House, UAH. 7. For discussions of creaturely life, see Julia Reinhard Lupton, Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 161– 65; and Eric Santner, On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 12–21. 8. Christopher Kendrick, “Agons of the Manor: ‘Upon Appleton House’ and Agrarian Capitalism,” in The Production of English Renaissance Culture, ed. David Lee Miller, Sharon O’Dair, and Harold Weber (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 14. 9. Historians disagree over the cause of Fairfax’s resignation. He was clearly troubled by the Rump Parliament’s decision to execute Charles I. But he did not resign his post until the following year, when Parliament was planning a preemptory strike against Scotland to prevent a Royalist uprising led by Charles’s son, the second Charles Stuart. Was Fairfax motivated to resign by immediate concerns over the legitimacy of invading Scotland? Or was he motivated by his continued dissatisfaction with Parliamentary rule? Andrew Hopper discusses these questions in “Black Tom”: Sir Thomas Fairfax and the English Revolution (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 109–15. 10. See Hannah Pitkin, Fortune Is a Woman: Gender and Politics in the Thought of Machiavelli (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 254–82. At the core of Pitkin’s argument is the claim that Machiavelli’s political thought makes sense in the context of Florentine domesticity. Machiavelli continually rejects that context, but it returns especially in his metaphors of state violence. 11. The Poems of Thomas Third Lord Fairfax, ed. and intro. Edward Bliss Reed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1909), 395. Subsequent references to Fairfax’s poems will be cited parenthetically in the text by manuscript page as Imployment. 12. “To E. of D.” 1–2, in John Donne: The Complete English Poems, ed. A. J. Smith (New York: Penguin, 1996), 305. 13. IV.xi.20.3, I.i.21.7–8, in Spenser: The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton (Harlow: Longman, 2001). 14. Lynn Enterline, The Tears of Narcissus: Melancholia and Masculinity in Early Modern Writing (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 179–81. 15. The True Levellers’ Standard in The Complete Works of Gerrard Winstanley, ed. Thomas N. Corns, Ann Hughes, and David Loewenstein, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 2:4–5. 16. Ibid., 2:5.

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17. Ibid., 2:6 18. Ibid., 2:7. 19. William Davenant, Gondibert, ed. David F. Gladish (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), 2.6.60. 20. Ibid., 2.6.61. 21. Wallace, Destiny His Choice, 66–68. 22. For a detailed discussion of these two events, see Lee Erickson, “Marvell’s ‘Upon Appleton House’ and the Fairfax Family,” English Literary Renaissance 9 (December 1979): 158–68. 23. Anthony Ascham, A Discourse: Wherein is examined what is particularly lawful during Confusions and Revolutions of Government (London: Printed for Humphrey Mosely, 1648), 71. Ascham briefly refers to Machiavelli’s discussion in chapter 17 of The Prince on public obligation and private interest. For a discussion of Ascham, see Wallace, Destiny His Choice, 30–40. 24. For discussions of Nedham’s uses of Machiavelli, see Perez Zarogin, A History of Political Thought in the English Revolution (London: Routledge, 1954), 121–27; Felix Raab, The English Face of Machiavelli, a Changing Interpretation, 1500–1700 (London: Routledge, 1964), 159–64; and Victoria Kahn, Machiavellian Rhetoric: From the Counter Reformation to Milton (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 157–62. 25. Marchamont Nedham, The Case of the Commonwealth of England, Stated by Marchamont Nedham, ed. Philip A. Knachel (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, published for the Folger Shakespeare Library, 1969), 13. Subsequent references cited parenthetically in the text as CC. 26. For a discussion of Nedham and Marvell, see Worden, Literature and Politics, 54–115. 27. Marshall Grossman’s analysis of allegory and irony in Upon Appleton House explains how providence can seem both to recognize and to defeat historical crises at the same time. See Marshall Grossman, The Story of All Things: Writing the Self in English Renaissance Narrative Poetry (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 202–5. 28. John Rogers, The Matter of Revolution: Science, Poetry, and Politics in the Age of Milton (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 78. 29. Ibid., 78. 30. Victoria Silver, “The Obscure Script of Regicide: Ambivalence and Little Girls in Marvell’s Pastorals,” English Literary History (ELH) 68 (2001): 37. Also see Anne Cotterill, “Marvell’s Watery Maze: Digression and Discovery at Nun Appleton,” ELH 69 (Spring 2002): 103–32. 31. Judith Haber, Pastoral and the Poetics of Self-Contradiction: Theocritus to Marvell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 130–31. Also see James Holstun, “‘Will you Rent our Ancient Love Asunder?’ Lesbian Elegy in Donne, Marvell, and Milton,” ELH 54 (Winter 1987): 847–52; and Elana Levy-Navarro, “History Straight and Narrow: Marvell, Mary Fairfax, and the Critique of Sexual and Historical Sequence,” in Postmodern Medievalisms (Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 2004), 181–92. 32. Isabel MacCaffrey argues for the centrality of imagination in Upon Appleton House, but she links imagination to individual perception and representation. By con-

notes to pages 194–206

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trast, I argue that in Upon Appleton House imagination is fundamentally social. See Isabel MacCaffrey, “The Scope of Imagination in Upon Appleton House,” in Tercentenary Essays in Honor of Andrew Marvell, ed. Kenneth Friedenreich (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1977), 224–44. See also Warren Chernaik, The Poet’s Time: Politics and Religion in the Work of Andrew Marvell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 22–42. 33. Nigel Smith notes the importance of “La Solitude” for Upon Appleton House in Andrew Marvell: The Chameleon (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 97. The following images in Upon Appleton House can also be found in “La Solitude”: the nightingale singing on a thorny bush (UAH 513–20) corresponds to “La Solitude,” 21–24; the comparison of the “Little Nile” to the sliding of a serpent (UAH 631–32) corresponds to “La Solitude,” 31–37; the sedge or algae that adorns the poet’s head as he fishes (UAH 641–42) corresponds to “La Solitude,” 45–46; and the willow tree that hangs over the river’s edge (UAH 646–48) corresponds to “La Solitude,” 41–44. “La Solitude” can be found in volume 1 of Marc-Antoine Girard de Saint-Amant, Oeuvres, ed. Jacques Bailbé, 5 vols. (Paris: Librairie Marcel Didier, 1971). All references are cited parenthetically in the text by line number as “La Solitude.” Translations are mine, unless otherwise noted. 34. See Smith’s introduction to Upon Appleton House in The Poems of Andrew Marvell, 212. 35. Introduction to The Poems of Thomas Third Lord Fairfax, 248. 36. Paul Hammond, Figuring Sex between Men from Shakespeare to Rochester (Oxford: Clarendon, 2002), 205. 37. Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), 197–203. 38. Hopper, “Black Tom,” 204. 39. Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 275–78. 40. For a discussion of Marvell’s general use of the masque throughout his poetry, as well as his specific use of the form in Upon Appleton House, see Muriel C. Bradbrook, “Marvell and the Masque,” in Tercentenary Essays in Honor of Andrew Marvell, 204–23. Also see Rosalie Colie, “My Echoing Song”: Andrew Marvell’s Poetry of Criticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), 211–18. 41. Sigmund Freud, “A Child Is Being Beaten,” in Sexuality and the Psychology of Love, ed. and intro. Philip Rieff (New York: Collier, 1963), 117. 42. Gilles Deleuze and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, “Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty” and “Venus in Furs,” trans. Jean McNeil (New York: Zone Books, 1989), 66. 43. David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric, and Politics, 1625–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 265–68. 44. Hopper, “Black Tom,” 102; Worden, Rump Parliament, 224. 45. Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 31. 46. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Roger Woolhouse (New York: Penguin, 1997), 2.28.10.318. 47. Koselleck, Critique, 56. 48. Ibid., 11.

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49. Locke, Essay, 2.28.12.321. We might compare Locke’s account of sociality to Bacon’s essay “Of Friendship” (WFB 12:165–74). 50. Locke, Essay, 2.28.12.321.

CH A PTER sev en 1. James Harrington, A Discourse Upon this Saying, in The Political Works of James Harrington, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 737. All references to Harrington’s works are from this edition, unless otherwise noted. Subsequent references will be cited parenthetically in the text as follows: A Discourse as DUS; The Commonwealth of Oceana as O; and The Prerogative of Popular Government as PPG. 2. In particular, see Pocock’s substantial “Historical Introduction” to The Political Works, 1–152, and J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), 383–422. 3. Paul Anthony Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modern: Classical Republicanism and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 409–29; Jonathan Scott, “‘The Rapture of Motion’: James Harrington’s Republicanism,” in Political Discourse, ed. Nicholas Phillipson and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 139–63; Gary Remer, “James Harrington’s New Deliberative Rhetoric: Reflections of an Anticlassical Republicanism,” History of Political Thought 16 (Winter 1995): 532–57. 4. James Holstun argues that Oceana is driven by a utopian imagination that, like the writing of Harrington’s Puritan contemporaries, links republican modes of discipline with Christian millenarianism through fictional accounts of government. Nigel Smith sees Harrington as a central figure in the linguistic turn in seventeenth-century political thought, arguing that he fashions government on the model of the Sidneyan foreconceit. And David Norbrook argues that Harrington’s translation of Virgil’s’ First and Ninth Eclogues complements his political project by shaping a particularly republican sense of literary culture. (Holstun, A Rational Millennium: Puritan Utopias of Seventeenth-Century England and America [New York: Oxford University Press, 1987], 166–245; Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660 [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994], 163–78; and Norbrook, Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric, and Politics, 1627–1660 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999], 357–78.) 5. Given Harrington’s insistence on popular sovereignty, it is not surprising that Harrington plays a key role in Antonio Negri’s history of radical political thinkers, ranging from Machiavelli to Marx and Lenin, who theorize constituting power. By placing Harrington within this history, Negri uncovers what is most innovative about him as a political thinker. Like Pocock and Quentin Skinner, Negri sees Harrington developing a political subject who fi nds liberty through and not apart from the state. For Harrington, government mediates equality through the virtue of the political subject in a way that “dissolves any bloc to the free expression of productive freedom.” In Negri’s account, Pocock and Skinner do not go far enough. Turning to Machiavelli,

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but also going beyond him, Harrington produces “constituent ontology,” transforming the virtù that Machiavelli associates with the founders of a state into virtuous citizenship, a mode of civic being that actualizes constituting power within the bounds of the constituted order (Negri, Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State, trans. Maurizia Boscagli [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999], 115, 99; Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998], 23–36; Pocock, Machiavellian Moment, 386). All three argue against C. B. Macpherson’s thesis that the Harringtonian subject is an expression of market and class interests (Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962], 160–93). The problem with Negri’s account is that he underestimates the complex function of poetics in Harrington’s political writing. Initially, Negri subtracts poetics from Harrington’s account of constituting power making, treating Harrington’s understanding of government as distinctly unmediated and unconcerned with its deployment of fiction and figural language. Subsequently, however, he admits a version of poetics within Harrington’s political thought, treating imagination and fancy as figures for political making. “Fancy and imagination do not simply mediate between concrete and abstract,” Negri writes. “They are not epistemological functions; on the contrary, they are ontological and constitutive functions. Moving from thought to being, from philosophy to politics, from individual to collective functions, fancy and imagination are nothing but constituting power” (120–21). While it is not clear what justifies this claim, it is clear why Negri makes it. On the one hand, Negri needs to admit some form of mediation. Because fancy and imagination are mental faculties, they can— potentially, at least—bridge the gap between political thought and the world. On the other hand, Negri wants to downplay any critical assessment of this mediating role in order to stress the constitutive function as ontology. By treating medium as political content, Negri reads the making of fiction as itself an allegory for the creative political energy that motivates Harrington’s larger political project, so that Harrington’s investment in the literary is simply a manifestation of his broader investment in political making. 6. Mark Goldie and J. A. I. Champion have shown that Harrington became a central figure in subsequent Whig political theology. See Mark Goldie, “The Civil Religion of James Harrington,” in The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe, ed. Anthony Pagden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 197–222; J. A. I. Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: The Church of England and Its Enemies, 1660–1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 170–222. 7. Eric Nelson, The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 117–22. 8. Davide Panagia, The Poetics of Political Thinking (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 14. 9. Hobbes, De Cive, ed. Howard Warrender (1983; reprint, Oxford: Clarendon, 2003), 109. 10. Quentin Skinner argues that “the name of the person engendered by the transformation of the multitude into one person through their agreement to appoint a representative is not the sovereign but the state. The sovereign is the name of the representative of the multitude united into one person, and is thus the name of the representative

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of the state” (“Hobbes and the Purely Artificial Person of the State,” Journal of Political Philosophy 7 [March 1999]: 20. But also see David Runciman, “What Kind of Person is Hobbes’s State? A Reply to Skinner,” Journal of Political Philosophy 8 [June 2000]: 268–78). For a philosophical discussion of Hobbes’s concept of political representation, see Hannah Pitkin, The Concept of Representation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 14–37. For a discussion of Hobbes on personhood and agency, see David Copp, “Hobbes on Artificial Persons and Collective Actions,” Philosophical Review 89 (October 1980): 579–606. 11. Samuel Pufendorf develops the implications of these two versions of the social contract in Two Books of the Elements of Jurisprudence, ed, and intro. Thomas Behme, trans. William Abbott Oldfather (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2009), 1.Def.12.27.146–48. 12. Christopher Pye, “The Sovereign, the Theater, and the Kingdom of Darknesse: Hobbes and the Spectacle of Power,” Representations 8 (Autumn 1984): 86. 13. For detailed analysis of Hobbes’s theology of the trinity in relation to the Church Fathers, see Alexandre Matheron, “Hobbes, la Trinité et les caprices de la représentation,” in Thomas Hobbes: Philosophie premiere, théorie de la science et politique, ed. Yves Charles Zarka and Jean Bernhardt (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1990), 381–90; Aloysius Martinich, The Two Gods of Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes on Religion and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 203–8; George Wright, “Hobbes and the Economic Trinity,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 7 (June 1999): 397–428; Gianni Paganini, “Hobbes, Valla, and the Trinity,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy (April 2003): 183–218. 14. Hobbes cites Bramhall’s argument in An Answer to Bishop Bramhall, in The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmsebury, ed. Sir William Molesworth, 11 vols. (London: John Bohn, 1839–45) 4:315. 15. After reviewing his discussion of the trinity, Hobbes corrects himself (under the guise of interlocutor B): Pia voluntas, sed erronea est explicatio. Nam Mosem, quoniam is quoque aliquo modo gessit personam Dei, ut faciunt omnes reges Christiani, unam videtur facere personam in Trinitate. Valde hoc negligenter. Si dixisset Deum, in persona propria, creasse mundum; in persona Filii, redemisse genus humanum; in persona Spiritus Sancti, sanctificasse ecclesiam; nihil aliud dixisset, nisi quod in catechismo ab ecclesia edito. [It is a pious wish [to want to explain the doctrine of the Trinity], but the explanation is in error. For Moses, because he bore the person of God in a particular way, as do all Christian kings, seems to make up one of the persons in the Trinity. This is the result of negligence. If he had said that God, in his own person, created the world; in the person of the Son, redeemed mankind; and in the person of the Holy Spirit, sanctified the church; then he would have said nothing other than what the catechism in the church proclaims.] This appears in the appendix to the Latin edition of Leviathan, in The Latin Works of Thomas Hobbes, ed. Sir William Molesworth, 5 vols. (London: John Bohn, 1839–1845), 3:563. Subsequent references are cited parenthetically in the text as App.

notes to pages 216–229

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16. Harry Austern Wolfson, The Philosophy of the Church Fathers: Faith, Trinity, Incarnation, 3rd ed. revised (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970), 305–63. 17. Hobbes, An Answer, 311. 18. As Arihiro Fukado notes, Harrington’s primary point is to eradicate resistance, although not, like Hobbes, to unify the people under the single will of the sovereign (Fukado, Sovereignty and the Sword: Harrington, Hobbes, and Mixed Government in the English Civil Wars [Oxford: Clarendon, 1997], 93). 19. James Harrington, Essay upon Two of Virgil’s Eclogues and Two Books of his Aeneis (If this be not enough) Towards the Translation of the Whole (London: Printed by T. C. for Thomas Brewster, 1658), A4r. Subsequently cited parenthetically in text as E. 20. On mid-seventeenth-century English interpretations of the First Eclogue, see Annabel Patterson, Pastoral and Ideology: Virgil to Valéry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 145–65. See also Norbrook, Writing, 360–62. 21. Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer, 3 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 1:91. 22. Victoria Kahn, Wayward Contracts: The Crisis of Political Obligation, 1640– 1674 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 151. Although Harrington never explicitly addresses the state of nature in his published works, he sent John Aubrey a poem entitled “Upon the State of Nature”: The state of Nature never was so raw That oakes bore accorns; and there was a Law By wch the spider and the silke worm span; Each creature had her birthright; and must Man Be illegitimate!—and have no childs part! If reason has no wit how came in Arte. Cited in John A. Wettergreen, “James Harrington ‘Upon the State of Nature,’” International Journal of Philosophy 4 (1983): 143–44. For a broader discussion of Harrington and the state of nature, see Wettergreen, “James Harrington’s Liberal Republicanism,” Polity 20 (Summer 1988): 665–87. 23. Ricoeur, Time, 1:49. 24. J. G. A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), 138, 136. See also Pocock’s discussion of this moment in the “Historical Introduction” to The Political Works, 43–51. 25. Derek Hirst, “Bodies and Interests: Toleration and the Political Imagination in the Later Seventeenth Century,” Huntington Library Quarterly 70 (September 2007): 401–26. 26. Thomas Goodwin, The Great Interest of States and Kingdomes (London: R. Dawlman, 1656), 53. 27. Jeremy Taylor, Theologica Eklektike: A Discourse of the Liberty of Prophesying (London: R. Royston, 1647), 21. 28. John Owen, God’s Work in Founding Zion and His People’s Duties Thereupon (Oxford: Leon Lichfield, 1656), 9–10, 30.

316

notes to pages 233–244

29. See Nelson’s overview in The Hebrew Republic, 20–22. 30. Mercurius Politicus (April 1652): 1540, Nedham’s emphasis. 31. Ibid., 1538–39. 32. Following Selden, Harrington assumes (inaccurately) that Moses instituted the Sanhedrim. 33. Holstun, Rational Millennium, 227. 34. Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, in The Folger Library Edition of the Words of Richard Hooker, ed. W. Speed Hill et al., 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 1977–81), 1:1.3.5.69. 35. J. A. W. Gunn, Politics and the Public Interest in the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge, 1969), 109–53. 36. Ernst H. Kantorowicz, “Mysteries of State: An Absolutist Concept and Its Late Medieval Origins,” Harvard Theological Review 48 (January 1955): 72. 37. My discussion of literary interest relies on Steven Knapp’s Literary Interest: The Limits of Anti-Formalism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 49–87, and David Thomas’s unpublished essay, “Fish and Knapp on Literary Study.” 38. Robert Filmer, Patriarchia and Other Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 11–12. 39. John Locke, Second Treatise on Government, in “Two Treatises of Government” and “A Letter Concerning Toleration,” ed. and intro. Ian Shapiro (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 6.52.122–61.126. 40. Matthew Wren, Considerations On Mr. Harrington’s Oceana; Restrained to the fi rst part of the Preliminaries (London: Samuel Gellibrand, 1657), 22. 41. See Gail Kern Paster’s discussion of green sickness in Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 89–95. 42. Carl Schmitt, Constitutional Theory, trans. Jeffrey Seitzer (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 245. Schmitt’s emphasis.

CH A PTER eight 1. Andrew Marvell, The Rehearsal Transpros’d, in The Prose Works of Andrew Marvell, ed. Annabel Patterson et al., 2 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 1:202. Parker makes this reference in his Discourse of Ecclesiastical Polity (London: Printed by John Martyn, 1670), vii, and again in his Defence and Continuation of the Ecclesiastical Politie (London: Printed by A. Clark for J. Martyn, 1671), 150–52. Although the Discourse is dated 1670, it fi rst appeared in 1669. 2. Parker, Defence, 150. 3. Samuel Parker, Preface to Bishop Bramhall’s Vindication of Himself and the Episcopal Clergy, from the Presbyterian Charge of Popery (London: Printed by A. C. for James Collins), sig. a4v. 4. Ibid., sig. a8v. 5. Marvell, Rehearsal Transpros’d, 196. 6. Ibid., 134. 7. Ibid., 82, Marvell’s emphasis. 8. Ibid., 202.

notes to pages 244–249

317

9. Laura Knoppers was the fi rst critic to situate Paradise Regained fi rmly in the context of debates concerning toleration, nonconformity, and dissent. Knoppers argues that the poem should be read in the context of Venner’s Uprising. While Milton rejects the mindless millenarianism of the Fifth Monarchists’ revolt, he is also deeply attentive to the crown’s manipulation of that revolt for its own authoritarian ends. According to Knoppers, Paradise Regained develops strategies by which dissidents and nonconformists might respond to the temptation to unwise violence without capitulating to the Restoration state (Laura Lunger Knoppers, Historicizing Milton: Spectacle, Power, and Poetry in Restoration England [Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994], 123–41). Other scholars who have underscored the significance of Restoration politics for Milton’s later poetry include N. H. Keeble, The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later Seventeenth-Century England ([Leicester]: Leicester University Press, 1987); David Lowenstein, Representing Revolution in Milton and His Contemporaries: Religion, Politics, and Polemics in Radical Puritanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); and Sharon Achinstein, Literature and Dissent in Milton’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 10. For proponents of the view that Paradise Regained represents a pacifist Jesus, see Steven Marx, “The Prophet Disarmed: Milton and the Quakers,” Studies in English Literature 32 (Winter 1992): 111–28, and Michael Wilding, Dragon’s Teeth: Literature in the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 251–55. 11. Nicholas von Maltzahn, “Milton, Marvell, and Toleration,” in Milton and Toleration, ed. Sharon Achinstein and Elizabeth Sauer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 86–104. 12. Loewenstein, Representing Revolution, 260–68; Achinstein, Literature and Dissent, 133–38; David Norbrook, “Republican Occasions in Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes,” Milton Studies 41 (2003): 122–48; John Coffey, “Pacifist, Quietist, or Patient Militant? John Milton and the Restoration,” Milton Studies 42 (2003): 149–74. 13. Sharon Achinstein, “Toleration in Milton’s Epics: A Chimera?” in Achinstein and Sauer, Milton and Toleration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 225. 14. Luke strengthens this claim interpolating a genealogy linking Jesus to David into the temptation story, further emphasizing Jesus’s legitimacy as Israel’s new king. 15. Both Barbara Lewalski and Northrop Frye discuss the general relation between Exodus and the temptation in the wilderness. I am arguing that Milton asks us to focus specifically on the pronouncement of the Son as a repetition of the giving of the law. See Barbara Lewalski, Milton’s Brief Epic: The Genre, Meaning, and Art of “Paradise Regained (Providence: Brown University Press, 1966), 195–204; Northrop Frye, “Revolt in the Desert,” in Five Essays on Milton (London: Routledge, 1966), 130–31. 16. Psalms 2, 16, in John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (1957; reprint, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1984). All references to Milton’s poetry are from this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text by line number as AP (Ad Patrem), PL (Paradise Lost), PR (Paradise Regained), and XIX (Sonnet XIX). 17. John Rogers discusses Milton’s engagement with Psalm 2 and Hebrews 1 in light of his fl irtations with Socinianism in “Milton and the Heretical Priesthood of Christ,” in Heresy, Literature, and Politics in Early Modern Culture, ed. David Loewenstein and John Marshall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 210–11.

318

notes to pages 249–264

18. Lewalski, Milton’s Brief Epic, 133–63. 19. See Friedrich Meinecke, Machiavellianism: The Doctrine of Raison d’État and Its Place in Modern History, trans. Douglas Scott, intro. Werner Stark (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1998), 65–116. 20. Peter S. Donaldson, Machiavelli and the Mystery of State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 149. Donaldson discusses the double influence of hermeticism and skepticism on Naudé’s reading of Machiavelli. See also Meinecke, Machiavellianism, 196–204. 21. Gabriel Naudé, Considérations politiques sur les coups dEtat, ed. and intro. Françoise Charles-Daubert (Hildensheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1993), 20. Translations mine. 22. James Harrington, Oceana, in The Political Works of James Harrington, ed. and intro. J. G. A. Pocock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 161. 23. Ibid., 205. 24. As Martin explains it, “The Miltonic metaphor never conducts merely an abstract law, fate, or symbolic effect but the potentially active or immanent agency at work within the ‘Divine Similitude.’ Its indeterminate fi guration therefore resists any more than hypothetical resolution in either time or eternity precisely because its variability signals an oblique resonance within divine grace” (Catherine Gimelli Martin, The Ruins of Allegory: “Paradise Lost” and the Metamorphosis of Epic Convention [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998], 124). 25. Victoria Silver, Imperfect Sense: The Predicament of Milton’s Irony (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 109. Silver discusses Reformation hermeneutics as a kind of negative dialectics on pp. 94–114. 26. Russell M. Hillier discusses some of Milton’s literary sources for casting the question of the Son’s office through Mary’s perspective in Milton’s Messiah: The Son of God in the Works of John Milton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 192–93. 27. Although he does not discuss Paradise Regained, Michael Lieb emphasizes Milton’s tendency to transform “destructive violence into a generative experience.” See Lieb, Milton and the Culture of Violence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 28. 28. John Rogers discusses this dynamic in his excellent reading of Milton’s early poem Upon the Circumcision, where, Rogers argues, Milton casts the circumcision as an emblem of virtuous submission to God’s law and troubling submission to an irrational demand for sacrifice. As Rogers argues, Milton’s ongoing efforts to navigate sacrifice and voluntary submission lead to his Antitrinitarianism (John Rogers, “Milton’s Circumcision,” Milton and the Grounds of Contention, ed. Mark R. Kelley, Michael Lieb, and John T. Shawcross [Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2003], 188–213). 29. Aristotle, Politics, 1259a37–b7, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941). 30. Stanley Fish, How Milton Works (Cambridge: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 2001), 369. An earlier version of this chapter was published as “Things and Actions Indifferent: The Temptation of Plot in Paradise Regained,” Milton Studies 17 (1983): 163–85. 31. Fish, How Milton Works, 363.

notes to pages 264–270

319

32. William Kerrigan makes a similar point about the relation between Jesus and Mary in more explicitly psychological terms. Jesus has to separate from his mother, Kerrigan argues, but this separation is predicated upon her prior assimilation. “She is an internal presence,” he writes, “ contributing from within to his work of salvation, and when Christ descends into himself to set his life before him . . . , the words of his mother appear inside these ‘deep thoughts’ (1.190)” (Kerrigan, The Sacred Complex: On the Psychogenesis of “Paradise Lost” [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983], 107). 33. As Ken Simpson argues, in Paradise Regained Milton rethinks and rejects the apocalyptic of his earlier works (Simpson, “The Apocalypse in Paradise Regained,” in Milton and the Ends of Time, ed. Juliet Cummings [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003], 202–23). A longer version of Simpson’s argument can be found in his Spiritual Architecture and “Paradise Regained”: Milton’s Literary Ecclesiology (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2007). 34. The following verses in the KJV translate oikonomia as dispensation: 1 Cor. 9:17, Col. 1:25, Eph. 1:10. Oikonomia gets translated as edification and its various forms in 1 Tim. 1:4, Eph. 4:16, Rom. 14:19, 1 Cor. 14:3, 2 Cor. 12:19. It gets translated as fellowship in Eph. 3:9, as household in Eph 2:19, and as conversation in Phil. 1:27 and 3:20. I Cor. 4:1 translates oikonomoi as steward. John Reumann argues that oikonomia was used in the everyday language of fi rstcentury Greek to mean covenant as well as administration. “Oikonomia, a patristic term for Heilsgeschichte [salvation history], was thus able to convey much of the covenant idea of biblical thought, plus more besides, including the whole Stoic conception of a divine administration or rule of God in the universe.” See John Reumann, “Oikonomia = ‘Covenant’; Terms for Heilsgeschichte in Early Christian Usage,” Novum Testamentum 3 (1959): 290. 35. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons, intro. Anthony Giddens (London: Routledge, 1992), 110. 36. Ibid., 113. 37. Ibid., 115. 38. John Guillory develops his account of Milton and vocation in “The Father’s House: Samson Agonistes in Its Historical Moment,” in Re-membering Milton: Essays on the Texts and Traditions, ed. Mary Nyquist and Margaret W. Ferguson (New York: Methuen, 1987), 148–76. 39. Stephen M. Fallon and Thomas N. Corns argue that the Son is a figure for Milton (Fallon, Milton’s Peculiar Grace: Self-Representation and Authority [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007], 239–50; Corns, “‘With Unaltered Brow’: Milton and the Son of God,” Milton Studies 41 [2003]: 106–21). Douglas Lanier argues that the Son expresses Milton’s anxieties about going public (Lanier, “‘Unmarkt, unknown’: Paradise Regained and the Return of the Expressed,” Criticism 37 [Spring 1995]: 187–212). 40. Giorgio Agamben, Il Regno e La Gloria: Per una genealogia teologicao dell’economia e del governo (Torino: Bollati Boringhiere editore, 2009), 130. All translations from this monograph are mine. 41. Ibid., 158. 42. Christopher N. Warren, “When Self-Preservation Bids: Approaching Milton,

320

notes to pages 270 –281

Hobbes, and Dissent,” English Literary Renaissance (2007): 141. Warren’s argument is based in part on Derek Hirst, “Samuel Parker, Andrew Marvell, and Political Culture, 1667–1673,” in Writing and Political Engagement in Seventeenth-Century England, ed. Hirst and Richard Strier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 145–64; and Richard Tuck, “Hobbes and Locke on Toleration,” Thomas Hobbes and Political Theory, ed. Mary G. Dietz (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1990), 153–71. 43. Warren, “Self-Preservation,” 142. 44. N. H. Keeble, “Wilderness Exercises: Adversity, Temptation, and Trial in Paradise Regained,” Milton Studies (2002): 86–105. See also Keeble, Literary Culture of Nonconformity, 273–82. 45. See Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (1977; reprint, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 48–66. 46. Richard Tuck, “The Civil Religion of Thomas Hobbes,” in Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain, ed. Nicholas Phillipson and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 120–38. 47. For a discussion of the significance of substance in debates among the early Church Fathers over relations between the Father and the Son, see Harry Austryn Wolfson, The Philosophy of the Early Church Fathers: Faith, Trinity, Incarnation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956; 3rd ed., 1976), 305–63. Satan’s fi nal temptation forces a gnostic crisis in the sense that Hans Blumenberg uses the term. See Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), 125–226. 48. As Gordon Teskey puts it in his reading of this scene, “The presence, here, of the Father in the Son is not a metaphysical identity. That presence is a moment of delirious identity when the Son is at once acknowledging the transcendence of the Father in heaven and affirming the immanence of the Father in the Son” (Teskey, Delirious Milton: The Fate of the Poet in Modernity [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006], 175). 49. Fish, How Milton Works, 385. 50. Victoria Kahn, “Job’s Complaint in Paradise Regained,” English Literary History 76 (Fall 2009): 645–46. 51. Catherine Gimelli Martin, Milton among the Puritans: The Case for Historical Revisionism (Surrey: Ashgate, 2010), 256–57. 52. Dante refers to Curio in The Divine Comedy: Inferno, trans. and commentary John D. Sinclair (New York: Oxford University Press, 1939), 28.94–102. 53. Knoppers, Historicizing Milton, 138–40. 54. “The Sacrifice,” in The Works of George Herbert, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1941), 213–16. All references to Herbert are from this edition and are cited parenthetically by line number in the text. 55. Exodus (17:7) identifies Massah and Meribah as the same place, where the Israelites demanded water from God in the desert. In Hebrew, “massah” means testing.

Index

Achinstein, Sharon, 245–46, 317n9 Admonition to the Nobility and People of Ireland and England, 128–29 Adorno, Theodor, 258 Agamben, Giorgio, 269–70, 275, 294n23 Allen, William, 106, 109, 111–14, 120, 128–29 Althusser, Louis, 298–99n18 Andrews, Lancelot, 144–45 Aquinas. See Thomas Aquinas, Saint arcana imperii, 1, 15, 70–72, 91, 139, 239, 256, 282 Arendt, Hannah, 6, 53, 133–34 Aristotle, 17, 224, 266–67, 271 Asad, Talal, 285n2 Ascham, Anthony, 185 Ascoli, Albert Russell, 296n54 Assmann, Jan, 20 Augustine, Saint, 43–44 authority, 6, 18–19, 20–21, 25, 33–34, 64–65, 71, 77–78, 86, 89–92, 99, 122, 147, 149–52, 155–56, 218–19, 220, 250–52, 264–65, 271; and the enemy, 36–43, 50–51, 115–19, 263, 280–81. See also sovereignty Bacon, Francis, 139, 167, 227, 229n22, 304n48; Dignity and Advancement of Learning, 162–64, 224, 261; Essays, 132, 161–62, 224, 312n49 Bacon, Nicholas, 111 Baines, Richard, 104, 105–6, 112 Baines note. See Marlowe, Christopher Balibar, Etienne, 72, 88, 92, 297n9 Bancroft, Richard, 144

Baron, Hans, 21 Beacon, Richard, 36–37 belief, 3, 16, 32–33, 41–44, 66, 108–9 Benjamin, Walter, 32, 175 Berger, Harry, Jr., 13, 308n50 Biddick, Kathleen, 291n62 biopolitics, 7, 38–40, 119–22, 137, 139–40, 147–53, 155–63, 167–70 Bireley, Robert, 304n51 Bismarck, Otto von, 26 Blumenberg, Hans, 10–11, 287n20, 320n47 Boccalini, Trajano, 70, 250 Bodin, Jean, 109, 124–25, 129, 130 Bol, Ferdinand, 11–15 Botero, Giovanni, 15, 70, 109, 118, 250 Bownd, Nicholas, 142 Bowers, Fredson, 126, 302–3n43 Boyle, Margery O’Rourke, 292n4 Bradbeck, Muriel C., 311n40 Bramhall, John (archbishop of Armagh), 216 Bredbeck, Gregory, 303n47 Breiner, Peter, 293n16 Brink, Jean R., 301n48 Brown, Alison, 294–95n27, 295n41 Brown, Georgia, 303n47 Buck-Morss, Susan, 295n36 Burgess, Glenn, 307n44 Butler, Martin, 307n49 Butler, Todd, 304n48 Calvin, John, 74–75, 267–68, 288–89n35 Carew, Thomas, 175, 308n49 Cartelli, Thomas, 120 Campanella, Thomas, 250

321

322

Index

Catholicism, 4, 109–14, 119, 123–24, 128–29, 243–44, 245 Chabod, Federico, 65–66 Champion, J. A. I., 313n6 Charles I, 24, 141–42, 146, 158–60, 166, 173, 184, 191, 198–99, 202–5, 227, 256 Charles II, 243, 278 Charron, Pierre, 250 chastity, 190–93, 240–41; and sexual experience, 125, 127–29, 134–37, 153–55, 192–93 Cheney, Patrick, 133 Chernaik, Warren, 311n32 Chomley, Richard, 105, 112 Christ, 84–87, 106, 214, 215, 231–32, 243–44, 247–84 1 Chronicles. See under Hebrew scripture Clapham, Henoch, 143–45, 146–47 Coffey, John, 245 Cogswell, Thomas, 159, 164, 307n48 Coke, Edward, 158, 169 Colie, Rosalie, 311n40 common right, 211, 220, 237–40. See also natural right Conference About the Next Succession to the Crown of Ingland, 109–10 conscience, 73–74, 113, 175, 187–88, 198–99, 201–3, 205, 229, 297–98n12 consent, 11–16, 91, 95–98, 125–28, 184–93, 213–14 constituting power. See political making Copp, David, 314n10 Corns, Thomas N., 319n39 Cotterill, Anne, 310n30 Cover, Robert, 47–49 Cox, Virginia, 54–55 creaturely life, 7–9, 119–22, 153–55, 163–66, 175–76, 180–84, 195–99, 201–5, 309n7 Cromwell, Oliver, 70, 164, 174–75, 190, 201, 236, 237 Cunaeus, Peter, 211 Curley, Edwin, 93–94 Dacres, Edward, 35 Daniel. See under Hebrew scripture Dante, 278 Dasgupta, Sukanya, 305n6 Daston, Lorraine, 147 Davenant, William, 183–84 Davidson, Nicholas, 107

de Belloy, Pierre, 109 decision, 10–11, 24, 42–43, 61–62, 91–92, 118–19, 136–37, 158, 160–61, 174–77, 185, 188–93, 283–84; popular decision making, 111, 145–47, 208–9, 234–36, 238–40, 254; and sovereign authority, 5–6, 39–40, 49–51, 122–23, 125, 127–31, 147, 151–52. See also revelation Dekker, Thomas, 143, 147 Deleuze, Gilles, 200 Den Uyl, Douglas, 92 Deuteronomy. See under Hebrew scripture Dillon, Michael, 292n3 Dodson, Joel, 291n56 Doelman, James, 307n37 Donaldson, Peter Samuel, 250, 290n45, 297n6 Donne, John, 138–39, 181 Drayton, Michael, 23–24, 103, 139–41, 147–70, 173, 210, 282–83; Battle of Agincourt, 159; David and Goliath, 156–57; and divine violence, 148, 152–55, 163–66; and governmentality, 149–52, 155–63; Moses in a Map of his Miracles, 139–41, 147–55, 169–70; Muses Elizium, 155–67, 169–70; Owle, 151–52; Poems lyrick and pastorall, 159; Poly-Olbion, 140 du Bartas, Guillaume de Sallust, 151 Egypt, 7–8, 20, 78–79, 117–18, 122, 140, 146, 148, 153–55, 180–81 election, 11–15, 78–80, 233–34, 249, 267 Ellis, Jim, 303–4n47 Elizabeth I, 106, 109–12, 128–31, 141, 152 Engagement Controversy, 184–88 Englefield, Francis, 109 Enterline, Lynn, 181–82 Erickson, Lee, 310n22 Esposito, Roberto, 167–69 Ettlinger, L. D., 290n44 Exodus. See under Hebrew scripture Fairfax, Mary, 185, 190–93 Fairfax, Thomas, 24, 174–82, 185, 194–205, 309n9; “Davids Lamentation,” 202; “Hezekiahs Songe,” 202–3; “Moses Songe,” 179–82, 202; “La Solitude,” 196–98, 182, 202 Fallon, Stephen M., 319n39 Farneworth, Ellis, 34–35, 293n11

Index Febvre, Lucien, 106–7 Feldman, Seymour, 298n12 Ferdinand of Aragon, 33–35, 38–39 Filmer, Robert, 182, 240 Fischer, Samuel, 81 Fish, Stanley, 263–64, 276–77 Five Knights Case, 158 Foucault, Michel, 155, 269, 289n39, 299–300n30 Frandinger, Moira, 285n3 Fremantle, Katherine, 288n32 Freud, Sigmund, 8, 25–27, 200, 298–99n18 Frye, Northrop, 317n15 Fukado, Arihiro, 315n18 Funkenstein, Amos, 287n20 Gardiner, Stephen, 19 Garver, Eugene, 60 Gatens, Moira, 75 Geerken, John H., 292n4 Genesis. See under Hebrew scripture Gerson, Jean, 18 Gilbert, Felix, 293n16 Gilby, Thomas, 302n39 Gill, Roma, 126–27 Gillespie, Michael Allen, 287n20 Gilman, Ernest, 141 Goldie, Mark, 313n6 Goldman, Michael, 304n54 Goodwin, Thomas, 229 government, 99, 110, 140, 147–52, 155–64, 167–70, 173–75, 178–79, 184, 192–93, 209, 211, 219–24, 236–37, 239–40, 244, 253–40, 266–73, 282–83 Greenblatt, Stephen, 121 Grossman, Marshall, 310n62 Grotius, Hugo, 188, 211, 237, 308n1 Guérin, Philippe, 295n41 Guillory, John, 268 Gunn, J. A. W., 316n35 Haber, Judith, 194, 303n46 Hadfield, Andrew, 293n17 Hammond, Paul, 195 Hardin, Richard F., 164, 305n5, 307n48 Harding, Alan, 17–18 Harrington, James, 1, 16, 24, 70, 208–11, 219–42, 247, 248, 282–83; Art of Lawgiving, 234–35; Discourse Upon this Saying, 208–11; Essay upon Two of Virgil’s

323

Eclogues, 221–23, 225; and identification through fiction, 221–24, 234–41; on interest, 223, 228–32, 237–40; and Milton, 253–55, 259; and narrative, 224–28; Oceana, 208, 210, 219–42, 254; Prerogative of Popular Government, 241 Harris, Jonathan Gil, 141, 305n8 Heath, Robert, 158 Hebrew scripture, 3–4, 11, 16, 25–27, 31–33, 38–39, 42–53, 70–71, 107–9, 217–19, 233–36, 252–56, 275–76, 281–82, 295n38; 1 Chronicles, 118, 211; and creaturely life, 7–8; Daniel, 265; Deuteronomy, 45– 46, 47–53, 109–10, 138–39, 211, 254–55, 274–75, 280–81; Exodus, 7–8, 42–43, 45, 46–47, 49–51, 53–54, 56–58, 122, 148–51, 191, 247, 262, 271, 320n55; Genesis, 7, 182; Isaiah, 202; Jeremiah, 222; Judges, 71; 1 Kings, 118; Leviticus, 51, 260; and liberty, 44–45, 98–99; Numbers, 51, 71, 180; Psalms, 232, 247–49, 274, 280; 1 Samuel, 110, 219, 222–23, 234; 2 Samuel, 70, 118, 202; and secularism, 1–2, 8–9; and violence, 43 Helgerson, Richard, 23, 140, 305n5 Henry VII, 226–27 Herbert, George, 280 Herrick, Robert, 175 Hessing, Siegfried, 299n18 Hillier, Russell, 318n28 Hirschman, Albert O., 162–63, 289n39 Hirst, Derek, 174, 320n42 Hobbes, Thomas, 4, 212–19; Answer to Bishop Bramhall, 216; and biopower, 167–68; De Cive, 213–14; and Harrington, 205–6, 210, 211, 220, 223–24, 228, 234–35, 237–39, 241–42; Leviathan, 1, 24, 76, 82, 89, 93–94, 147, 193, 205, 212–19, 271–72, 276; and Marvell, 192–93; and Milton, 270–73, 275–76; on miracles, 147; on personhood, 212–18; and Spinoza, 76, 82, 89, 93–94 Holstun, James, 209, 237, 310n31, 312n4 Honig, Bonnie, 26 Hooker, Richard, 237 Hopper, Andrew, 369n9 Horkheimer, Max, 289n39 Hörnquist, Mikael, 293n16 Hume, David, 19–20, 271 hypostasis, 216–17, 273–73

324

Index

Ibn Ezra, 81 imagination, 3, 11–16, 22, 24–25, 59–62, 68, 71–73, 98–99, 104–5, 107, 112–14, 133–34, 310n32, 312–13n5; erotic imagination, 24–25, 128–29, 131–37, 173, 193–98, 203–5; literary imagination, 22–23, 161, 222–24; prophetic imagination, 73–81, 85, 165–66, 205; religious imagination, 57, 95–98, 246–47, 257–59, 282–83 interest, 67–68, 127–28, 167–68, 183–84, 205, 209–14, 220–23, 228–30, 238–42, 289n39; common interest, 226, 238–39 (see also common right); Protestant interest, 228–32; self-interest, 22, 55, 60, 84–85, 111, 127–28, 161–63, 238, 240 Isaiah. See under Hebrew scripture Israel, 1, 8, 18–19, 20, 32, 50–53, 70–71, 78–80, 91, 95–98, 122, 149–51, 180, 214, 223, 232–37, 247, 254, 320n55 Israel, Jonathan, 21, 288n32 Israel, Mannaseh ben, 70 James, Heather, 304n54 James, Susan, 76 James VI and I, 138–39, 141, 142, 159, 166; Trew Law, 138, 151 Jeremiah. See under Hebrew scripture Johnson, Barbara, 285n4 Jones, Inigo, 198–99 Jonson, Ben, 159, 160, 175 Judges. See under Hebrew scripture Judson, Margaret Atwood, 307n44 Jurdjevic, Mark, 292n2 Kahn, Victoria, 16, 19, 41, 223, 276–77, 298n14, 310n24 Kalyvas, Andreas, 5 Kantorowicz, Ernst H., 9, 31, 136–37, 239 Keeble, N. H., 271, 317n9 Kendall, Roy, 106, 107, 120–21 Kendrick, Christopher, 176 Kerrigan, William, 319n32 1 Kings. See under Hebrew scripture Kirsch, Jonathan, 20 Knapp, Steven, 316n37 Knoppers, Laura, 279, 317n9 Koselleck, Reinhart, 205–6 Kries, Douglas, 289n40 Kristeva, Julia, 181 Kyd, Thomas, 106

Lanier, Douglas, 319n39 Lanyer, Amelia, 175 La Peyrère, Isaac, 81–82 law, 2, 11–16, 79, 124, 234–35, 253–54; and interpretation, 15–16, 47–49, 51–53; and obedience, 15, 51–53, 84–91. See also lawgiver lawgiver, 11–15, 41, 49–53, 62, 80–81, 85, 90, 234–37, 247, 248, 259 Lawson, George, 4 Leonard, John, 303n46 Levene, Nancy, 73, 92 Leviticus. See under Hebrew scripture Levy-Navarro, Elana, 310n31 Lewalski, Barbara, 249, 317n15 Lezra, Jacques, 123–24 liberty of conscience, 83, 225, 228–30, 232, 243 Lieb, Michael, 318n27 Lipsius, Justus, 128 Livy, 32 Lloyd, Genevieve, 75 Locke, John, 167–68, 205–7, 240, 271; Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 206–7; Second Treatise Concerning Government, 4–5, 168 Loewenstein, David, 245, 317n9 Lorenzo di Medici, 44–45 Loughlin, Martin, 286n13 Love, Harold, 195 Lucan, 116–17, 129, 133, 201, 277–80 Lunney, Ruth, 120 Lupton, Julia Reinhard, 9–10, 119, 287– 88n22, 294–95n27, 309n7 Luther, Martin, 2, 258, 267 Luzzatto, Simone, 68–71, 99, 232–33 MacCaffrey, Isabel, 310–11n32 Maccoby, Hyam, 121 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 1, 20–22, 31–45, 53–66, 272; and the Counter-Reformation, 108– 9, 130, 250–51; on cruelty, 33–34, 38–39, 42–43, 53–55, 60–62; Discourses, 7, 33, 36, 42, 69, 178–79, 231; and Drayton, 150–53, 167; and the Engagement Controversy, 185–86; and Harrington, 220; and Hobbes, 217–18; letter to Riccardo Bechi, 57; and Luzzatto, 68–70; and Marlowe, 103–4, 107, 123, 137; and Marvell, 193; and Milton, 246–47, 250–52, 259–60, 272–73; on Moses, 18–19, 40–45,

Index 53–54; Prince, 18–19, 31–32, 33–45, 53–57, 59–66, 87, 233, 252; on prudence, 55–62; on Savonarola, 56–60; on scripture, 43–44; and Spinoza, 67–68, 85–87, 98–99; translations of, 34–36, 292–93n9 Mack, Michael, 299n18 Macpherson, C. B., 313n4 Magna Carta, 226–27 Maltzahn, Nicholas von, 244 Marchand, Suzanne L., 286n8 Marlowe, Christopher, 23–24, 103–7, 112–37, 140, 173, 272, 282–83; as atheist, 105–7, 112–14; Baines note, 104–6, 112–14; on betrayal, 119–22; Dr. Faustus, 132–33; editions of Hero and Leander, 125–28, 302–3n43, 303–4n47; Edward II, 133; Hero and Leander, 105, 123–27; Jew of Malta, 105, 107, 117–23, 133, 136; Massacre at Paris, 115–17, 131; Pharsalia (Marlowe’s translation), 116–17, 133; on sovereignty, 114–17; on the sublime, 131–36; Tamburlaine, 114–17, 124, 132, 135 Marranos, 33–36, 40 Marshall, Cynthia, 132 Martin, Catherine Gemelli, 255, 276–77, 318n24 Martinich, Aloysius, 314n13 Marvell, Andrew, 24–25, 173–207, 208, 282–83; on consent, 186–93; on constituting power, 176–84, 189–93, 201–5; on creaturely life, 175–76, 180–84, 195–99, 201–5; First Anniversary, 190, 201; Horatian Ode, 178, 201, 203; Rehearsal Transpros’d, 243–45; Upon Appleton House, 175–205 Marx, Steven, 292n4, 317n10 Matheron, Alexandre, 299n29, 314n13 McCoy, Richard, 9 McEachern, Claire, 23, 140 Meinecke, Friedrich, 297n7, 318n19 Melamed, Abraham, 69, 70, 285n1, 297n6 metaphor, 10–11, 57, 107, 114, 156, 219, 249–50, 255–59, 263–65, 273, 275–77, 281–84, 318n24 Midrash Rabbah, 7 Miller, David Lee, 303n47 Milton, John, 3–4, 16, 25, 173, 192, 243–84; Ad Patrem, 268; Comus, 192; De Doctrina Christiana, 249, 268; Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, 173, 248; on

325

government, 247, 252–59, 261, 264–65, 269–73; Of Civil Power, 244–45, 247; Paradise Lost, 249, 251, 257, 258, 261, 263, 274; Paradise Regained, 25, 245–84; “The Passion,” 261; Reason of Church Government, 73–75, 245, 250; Samson Agonistes, 270, 284; Second Defense, 164; on the Son, 247–50, 260–61, 264–67, 269, 273–84; Sonnet XIX, 268–69; Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 25, 173, 254, 256; on toleration, 244–46, 259–60; Of True Religion, 244–45; on vocation, 260–61, 268–69 mimesis, 223, 233–36, 238–40, 241–42 miracle, 146–47 monarchy, 9, 64–65, 109–11, 128–30, 138–39, 158–60, 190, 203, 219, 226–28, 234, 249, 254–60, 269–70 Montag, Warren, 299n19 Montaigne, Michel de, 250 Montesquieu, Baron de (Charles-Louis de Secondat), 217 Moses, 1, 3, 8, 11–15, 17–19, 25–26, 31–32, 40–54, 56–58, 68–69, 77–82, 84–87, 91, 95–97, 105–6, 107–9, 138–40, 149–51, 191, 215–18, 233–35, 252, 254 multitude, 121–22, 136 Munro, Ian, 305n8, 305n16 mystery of state. See arcana imperii Nachmanides (Moshe ben Nachman, rabbi), 46–47 Najman, Hindy, 45 Nashe, Thomas, 106, 107 natural right, 72, 91–98, 168. See also common right Naudé, Gabriel, 251–52, 255, 274 Nedham, Marchamont, 185–87, 188, 233 Negri, Antonio, 5, 72, 133–34, 312–23n5 Nelson, Eric, 211, 285–86n5 Netanyahu, Benzion, 36 Neville, Henry, 35 Newgate, Bernard H., 305n5 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 123 Nohrnberg, James, 290n50 Norbrook, David, 133, 159, 201, 209, 245, 312n4, 315n20 norms, 26, 47–49, 51, 63–64, 89–90, 93–94, 119–20, 131, 147–55, 206–7, 209, 232, 241–42, 304n54 Numbers. See under Hebrew scripture

326

Index

Oakley, Francis, 146–47 Ockham. See William of Ockham Oedipus, 2, 281–82 Orgel, Stephen, 307n49 Owen, John, 229

Psalms. See under Hebrew scripture Pufendorf, Samuel, 314n11 Puttenham, George, 22 Pye, Christopher, 214 quarantine, 141–47, 154, 169–70

Paganini, Gianni, 314n13 Panagia, Davide, 211 Parker, John, 107, 121 Parker, Samuel, 243–44 passions, 24, 64, 71–72, 104, 139, 161–64, 167, 169, 193, 209–10, 224–28, 232, 261, 289n39 Paster, Gail Kern, 316n41 pastoral, 155–58, 161–63, 173, 221–22, 307–8n49, 308n50 Patterson, Annabel, 174, 307n49, 315n20 Paul, Saint, 266–68, 271 Peltonen, Markku, 293n17 persecution, 20–22, 33–34, 37–40, 42–43, 57–58, 68, 104, 112–13, 115–16, 118–19, 123, 243–44 personhood, 212–20; and people, 230 Persons, Robert, 106, 107, 114, 169 Petition of Right, 158 Pitkin, Hannah, 296n54, 309n10, 314n10 plague, 117–18, 140–48, 152–52, 165–67, 169–70, 305n8. See also ten plagues Pocock, J. G. A., 21, 31, 209, 227, 312n5 Poley, Robert, 112 political making, 2, 4–9, 11–17, 32, 40–42, 46–53, 63–64, 109–12, 119–20, 177–80, 184, 185–87, 190–93, 201, 246–47, 312– 13n5; constituting power, 4–9, 36–37, 48, 63–65, 105, 111–12, 133–34; and poetry, 22–23, 133–34 political theology, 3, 5–6, 9–11, 27, 31, 38–40, 43, 60, 62, 66, 98–99, 136–37, 141, 146–47, 155, 169–70, 210–11, 241–42, 258–60, 282–84, 285n2, 298–99n18 Polizziotto, Lorenzo, 295n41 Polzin, Robert, 45 Popkin, Richard, 299n20 Preuss, J. Samuel, 299nn21–22 Price, Russell, 34 prophecy, 13–15, 42, 73–81, 98, 152–53, 165–66, 204. See also imagination Protestant interest. See under interest prudence, 53–62, 69–70, 85–87, 123, 128, 157–58, 210–11, 219–20, 224, 225–27, 230, 238

Raab, Felix, 310n24 Rahe, Paul Anthony, 209 Rainolds, William, 109 Ramban. See Nachmanides Rashi (Shlomo Yitzhaki, rabbi), 76 Ravid, Benjamin, 296n2, 297n6 Reason of State, 15, 70, 118, 129–30, 155, 250–52, 255–57 Reed, Edward Bliss, 195 Reinhard, Kenneth, 147, 294–95n32 religion, 1, 6, 15, 19, 23–24, 33–40, 57, 64–65, 71–72, 86–87, 99, 103, 105–6, 108–12, 122–23, 130, 214–19, 244–45, 251, 257–58 Rembrandt van Rijn, 11–16, 288–89n35 Remer, Gary, 209 republicanism, 10, 11, 15, 31, 65–66, 68–71, 133, 137, 201, 209, 231 Reumann, John, 319n34 revelation, 1, 41–42, 73–75, 79–81, 86, 98, 152–53, 165–66, 193 Reynolds, Edward, 169 Rhonhiemer, Martin, 296n49 Ribadeneyra, Pedro de, 108–9, 129–31, 300–301n10 Ricoeur, Paul, 222–23 Riggs, David, 107, 120–21 Rogers, John, 191–92, 317n17, 318n28 Rohan, Duke of (Henri de Rohan), 228–29 Rosenblatt, Jason, 285–86n5, 308n1 Runciman, David, 314n10 Rust, Jennifer, 288n24 Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von, 200 Saint-Amant, Marc-Antoine Girard de, 194–98, 201, 203–4 1 Samuel. See under Hebrew scripture 2 Samuel. See under Hebrew scripture Sanchez, Melissa, 291n58 Sandy, Amelia Zurcher, 308n49 Santner, Eric, 8, 287n22, 309n7 Savonarola, Girolamo, 1, 56–59, 128 Scarry, Elaine, 47 Schmitt, Carl, 5–6, 10–11, 39–40, 48, 123, 136–37, 146–67, 214–42

Index Schwartz, Gary, 288n31 Schwartz, Regina, 20 Scott, Jonathan, 209 Selden, John, 211, 316n32 Septimus, Bernard, 296–97n5 Shakespeare, William, 115, 119, 137, 203 Sharpe, Kevin, 308n49 Sheehan, Jonathan, 8–9 Shirley, James, 198–99 Shuger, Debora Kuller, 9 Sidney, Philip, 22–23, 124 Sieyès, Emmanuel Joseph, 4–5 Silver, Victoria, 193, 258–59 Simpson, Ken, 319n32 Singer, Samuel Weller, 126, 131 Skinner, Quentin, 21, 34, 290n43, 291–92n2, 312n4, 313–14n10 Slack, Paul, 305n10 Smith, Nigel, 194–95, 209, 311n33, 312n4 social contract, 2, 72, 91–92, 94–98, 193, 213–15, 218, 220 sovereignty, 11–16, 39, 50, 71, 88–92, 93–94, 104, 112, 115–17, 124–25, 136–37, 142, 144–47, 156–61, 166, 193, 205, 220, 228, 235–37, 240–42, 246, 261, 272–73. See also authority Spenser, Edmund: Faerie Queene, 124, 164–65, 181, 188–89; Hymne of Heavenly Beautie, 132; View, 36–37 Spinoza, Baruch, 3–4, 16, 21–22, 66, 67–99, 210, 246, 259, 282; Ethics, 80; and Hobbes, 76, 82–83, 89–90, 93; and Machiavelli, 67–68, 85–88, 98–99; on natural right, 91–96, 98; Political Treatise, 92; on prophecy, 13–15, 73–81; on scriptural interpretation, 81–85, 87–88; Theologico-Political Treatise, 1, 71–98 state of emergency, 65–66, 140–42, 156, 158, 165–66, 173–75, 203–5 state of nature, 92–94, 98, 205–7, 222–23, 270–71, 315n22 Strauss, Leo, 22, 38–40, 86–87, 289n39, 293n18, 297n9 Steane, J. B., 303n47 substance. See hypostasis Summer, Claude J., 303n47 Sutcliffe, Adam, 285–86n5, 297n5 Tacitus, 15, 69, 185 Taylor, Charles, 2, 285n2 Taylor, Jeremy, 229

327

Ten Commandments, 11–15, 26, 42, 46–47, 49, 76–79, 95–97, 276; as speech act, 71–78, 96, 247–48, 317n15 ten plagues, 141, 146, 148, 152–53 Teskey, Gordon, 320n48 Thomas, David, 316n37 Thomas Aquinas, Saint, 17–18, 43–44, 58–59, 128 Tierney, Brian, 290n43 Tilmouth, Christopher, 289n39 toleration, 20–22, 68–70, 83–87, 225, 228–30, 240, 243–46, 256–57, 272–73 Totaro, Rebecca, 305n8 Treatise of Treasons, 4, 110–11 Trexler, Richard, 295n41 Tuck, Richard, 289n38, 299n27, 320n42 Tucker Brooke, C. F., 125–27 Vatter, Miguel, 31, 60, 62 Veevers, Erica, 307n49 Vinogradoff, Paul, 302n39 violence, 7–8, 15–16, 19–20, 25–27, 33–34, 53–62, 82, 104, 114–22, 178–79, 199–205, 272–73; divine, 32, 38–43, 47, 50, 148, 152–55, 261–62, 280–84; and governmentality, 153–55, 164– 65, 269, 272–73; and the sublime, 133–37, 201; symbolic, 20–21, 48–53, 281–84 Virgil, 177, 210, 221–22, 225 Viroli, Maurizio, 292n2, 294n27 Visconsi, Elliott, 287n15 vocation, 252–53, 260–70, 283; special vocation, 268–69 voluntary submission. See consent Vondel, Joost van den, 11 Von Koppenfels, Werner, 303n47 Wall, Wendy, 198 Wallace, John, 174, 184 Walsham, Alexandra, 147 Walsingham, Francis, 106 Walzer, Michael, 43, 285–86n5, 290n50 Warren, Christopher N., 270–71 Weber, Max, 267–68 Weinfeld, Moshe, 295n38 Weinstein, Donald, 295n41 Wettergreen, John A., 315n22 Wilding, Michael, 174, 317n10 William of Ockham, 6–7 Winstanley, Gerrard, 182–84

328 Wither, George, 143, 145–47 Wolfe, John, 121–22 Wolfson, Harry Austryn, 297n9, 320n47 Worden, Blair, 308n2 Wren, Matthew, 240–42 Wright, George, 314n13

Index Yerushalmi, Yosef Hayim, 291n65 Yovel, Yirmiyahu, 36, 297n9 Zarogin, Perez, 310n23 Zornberg, Aviva Gottlieb, 287n21 Zwicker, Steven, 174