Читать книгу Fate of the Flesh - Daniel Juan Gil - Страница 7

In this book I argue that in the seventeenth century the ancient hope for the physical resurrection of the body and its flesh began an unexpected second life as a kind of spontaneous, autochthonous “critical theory” and as a driver of literary art. My aim in this introduction is to trace how this development arises within the long intellectual history of ideas about resurrection. When we survey this intellectual history we will find that the first stirrings of secularization and the beginnings of empirical science led to a dematerialization of the ancient hope for the resurrection of the body, so that the person started to be reimagined as essentially a disembodied mind or soul capable of living on after the death of “its” body. This represents a massive change in centuries of Christian theology that had articulated a materialist and monist understanding of the person and had therefore seen resurrection as essentially a matter of the body living again. A fully disembodied account of resurrection is built on—and reinforces—one of the foundations of secular modernity, namely, a canonical dualist distinction between a disenchanted, inanimate, material world, including the human body, that is subject to scientific analysis and technological domination and a world of mind, consciousness, spirit, or soul that is ruled out of bounds of science. Resurrection is made more compatible with an emerging secular modernity by being recast as a matter of a disembodied soul living on separately from its body, while the body itself is reframed as secondary, a mere vehicle for the self, marked by a disenchanted and medicalized materiality that is, at death, abandoned to the grave. I will argue that this disembodied notion of resurrection reflects but also reinforces the intellectual infrastructure of an emerging secular modernity.

But the central claim of this book is that the ancient hope for the resurrection of the body and its flesh is not completely forgotten, either. Rather, in the seventeenth century the view of the body as the substrate of resurrection lives on as an increasingly oppositional, outré idea that can trouble the emerging dualist consensus. This idea becomes especially powerful when, under the pressure of a rising secularization process that foregrounds the present time, it is bent from an imagined apocalyptic future into the here and now so that the body as it exists in time is imagined already to be infused with a “resurrection body,” a strange, ineradicable material life that is at odds with the conventional social identity of the historical person. Positing a “resurrection body” within the historical person leads oppositional thinkers in the seventeenth century to develop an awareness of a vital material force within the heart of the self and allows them to reimagine agency, selfhood, and the natural world based on this starting point. By driving people to seek a level of presocialized material life within the socialized identities that define the person in the historical world, the decommissioned notion of the resurrection of the flesh opens a compelling theoretical view of the human person as socialized in the body yet also separated from the social world at the level of the body.¹

I argue that this oppositional idea drives the highly experimental poetry written by a group of poets in the early seventeenth century—John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, and Ben Jonson—and that through their poetry the critical potentials of the idea of the resurrection of the body and its flesh become especially evident. These poets value the notion of the resurrection of the flesh because it provides them with a powerfully oppositional starting point for explorations of self, agency, and language. Under its influence, they turn their poetry into a tool for bringing to light a deranging materiality at the heart of the person. Moreover, they value radical formal experimentation as a way of pushing the language that flows from their pens away from the intentions and calculations of the socially legible persons that they are. Instead, their poetry is characterized by a drive to allow the hypothetical resurrection body itself to become visible and (especially) audible in and through the language games of poetry. Their poetry is also designed to inject this deranging materialism into the lives of their readers, who feel called by the poetry to connect with the bodily life at the core of their own social personhood. Thus, for these poets, the idea of the resurrection of the flesh is valuable for the way it energizes art that is “avant-garde” in the sense that it does not present itself as a representation of the world or as a monumental aesthetic object but as a transpersonal practice that is valued primarily for the effects it creates in readers, including in the communities of readers who assembled themselves around each of these poets. The poetry of Donne and his successors is designed to provoke readers into a new way of life built on a new way of understanding themselves in their bodily life and in their relationship to their historical world, and insofar as this body of poetry joins formal experimentation with a transformative “critical theory” project, it anticipates twentieth-century avant-garde art.²

The “theory work” performed by the avant-garde poetry I examine anticipates some strands of contemporary critical theory that address how social identities (including gender, race, sexuality, status, and citizenship) and power (including subjection to sovereign power) are inscribed on the body, for example in work by Alain Badiou, Judith Butler, Pierre Bourdieu, and Giorgio Agamben, whose notion of “bare life” is obviously in play in the notion of the vibrant, fleshly life that makes social identities possible and at the same time undermines them. The thinking performed in the poetry I examine also anticipates critical theory that explores resistance to membership in the social (in work by Jean-Luc Nancy and Roberto Esposito).³ But the branch of contemporary theory that this seventeenth-century avant-garde poetry anticipates most strongly is the so-called new materialism represented by the work of Bruno Latour, Ian Bogost, Timothy Morton, Graham Harman, and especially Jane Bennett.⁴ Bennett’s influential book Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things attempts to recover the agency and force of material stuff in the world in the service of cultivating ecological humility. She calls the notion of “vibrant matter” an “onto-story” that conjures a worldview in which stuff, including trash, decaying rodents, plastic gloves, electrical transmission grids, and so forth, are imagined not as passive objects waiting for humans to use them (that is, as a “standing reserve,” as Heidegger would call it) but rather as having a kind of agency in their own right with which human agency can cooperate or which it can resist in complex “assemblages” (a term she derives from Deleuze and Guattari).⁵ For Bennett, coming to see material things as endowed with an alien agency and vital materiality has the political effect of chastening the self and its fantasies of mastery and domination of the natural world.

The key argument of my book is that under the pressure of secularization in the seventeenth century, the ancient hope for the resurrection of the body and its flesh starts to function as an “onto-story” like Bennett’s “vibrant materialism.” I argue that this particular onto-story injects some of the qualities of her “vibrant materialism” into the heart of the person him- or herself. Under the pressure of the outré notion of the resurrection of the body and its flesh, in other words, the person comes to be imagined as containing (or simply as being) a material body that pulsates with a strange vibrancy that exceeds the social person’s narrow designs and strategies. Thus, the poets I study use the ancient discourse of resurrection of the flesh to locate a recalcitrant materiality and “thing-power” at the heart of persons themselves, and on the basis of this “onto-story” they think about and describe the self and the world in ways that powerfully challenge the emerging notion of the “buffered self” (to use Charles Taylor’s term) that stands against the external world as pure subject and as full of agential power.⁶ The challenge of their poetry is precisely that, touched and fertilized by the onto-story of the resurrection of the flesh, it has the aesthetic power to induct their seventeenth-century readers and even us today into a stance of critical opposition to the dualist picture of a disenchanted nature, on the one hand, and an autonomous, essentially noncorporeal self that strives for mastery over others and over the natural world, on the other hand. By driving poets to seek a level of unsocialized material life within the socialized identities that define the person in the historical world—and by driving readers of their poetry to do the same—the decommissioned notion of the resurrection of the flesh opens a compelling theoretical view of the human person as socialized in the body yet also separated from sociability and the social world at the level of the body, a view that is worth taking seriously “as theory,” so to speak, even today.

The intellectual history of Christian thought about resurrection is long and complex. As major intellectual historians of Christianity, including Caroline Walker Bynum, Fernando Vidal, and N. T. Wright have shown, thought about resurrection is marked by intricate syntheses and discursive reversals, and it has given rise to some of the central philosophical puzzles about agency and identity that have characterized a range of Western philosophical traditions.⁷ As we shall see, the earliest roots of Christianity are insistently materialist and monist; from this perspective, the body is the person and the person is the body so that if the person is to live again the body must live again. Late classical and medieval thought about resurrection comes to be marked by a tense fusion of monist-materialist beliefs and a Hellenistic dualism in which a soul is at least to some extent separable from the body and capable of surviving the death of the body. But beginning with the Reformation and intensifying with the advent of empirical science in the seventeenth century, a strong dualist tendency begins to predominate over the monist-materialist elements, and resurrection comes to be seen more and more as an already immortal soul living on separately from the body. But resurrection as something that involves the body “all the way down,” as it were, is not simply consigned to the flotsam of an unenlightened premodern past. Instead it persists in various discursive registers in which the body is even endowed with the potential for a new kind of transcendence. I suggest that seventeenth-century poets strategically appropriate precisely this persistent notion of the resurrection of the body and its flesh and use it as a potent lever for critique of an emerging secular order founded on a cardinal dualism. In tracing the intellectual history of ideas about resurrection from classical antiquity to high scholasticism and on to the Reformation and the advent of empirical science, I have two goals. First, I want to show both what a massive transformation of centuries of earlier Christian thought the rise of exclusively dualist and soul-focused resurrection truly was and how this understanding of resurrection is an enabling brick in the intellectual foundation of secular and scientistic modernity. Second, I want to explain how this creates the precondition in which the ancient idea of the resurrection of the body and its flesh could be transformed into a powerful critical lever for oppositional thought and art in the seventeenth century.

Belief that resurrection is centrally about the body living again is built into the foundation of Christianity. For Paul and many of the church fathers, the core of what Christ promises to human beings is that their bodies will be reconstituted and reanimated. Early Christianity disavowed the Greek notion of a detachable soul that lives on after the death of the body. Like the current of Jewish thought from which it sprang, early Christianity assumed the corporeal foundation of identity so that if the person is to live again after death then the body must live again. This antidualist commitment to the body living again after death is what early intellectual opponents of Christianity attacked most vociferously, with Celsus (c. 178, though his words survived only in Origen’s refutation) famously calling the Christian hope of fleshly resurrection “the hope of worms” and Porphyry cataloguing the difficulties of reconstituting bodies given what flesh is vulnerable to (noting, among others, the famous problem of cannibalism).⁸ But if early Christianity had to confront dualism as an enemy without, it also had to confront dualism as an enemy within, in the form of gnostic heresies that all shared a strong effort to move from materialist monism to body-soul dualism. Such gnostic challenges often included tendentious reinterpretations of the Christian message as being essentially about liberating the soul from the body or, indeed, from all matter recoded as evil.⁹

Christian thought only slowly develops in the direction of positing a soul that is capable of leaving the body behind at death. Augustine’s theology synthesizes neo-Platonic notions of an eternal soul and early Christianity’s corporeal materialism,¹⁰ but a sustained version of body/soul dualism does not take hold in Christian intellectual history until medieval scholastic accounts that recast resurrection in hylozoic Aristotelian terms. Aquinas posits a soul that is the form of the body, where “form” is understood as the organizing and shaping principle that makes the body what it is, namely, a human body. In a sense, Aquinas’s soul is merely the shape of the body, the body insofar as it is a shaped thing and whose shape enables certain functions.¹¹ Moreover, Aquinas tends to the view that the soul is distinctive and individual only to the extent that it is associated with a particular body and that a truly disembodied soul would be a universally human soul, a view developed by Averroes and ultimately declared heretical by the Catholic Church at the Fifth Lateran Council. Among other things, Aquinas believes that the body is necessary for any concrete knowledge and that without a body the soul could have only abstract knowledge.

When it comes to resurrection, Aquinas does imagine a substantial soul that persists after the death of the body, but this disembodied postmortem existence is a highly imperfect state marked by a yearning for—even a hunger for—reassembly with the body at the general resurrection of bodies at the end of time. The notion of a postmortem soul-life that is temporary is an important driver of the doctrine of purgatory, an idea that already appears with Augustine but is intensified by the Thomist synthesis and eventually becomes a central tenet of Catholic orthodoxy. But the eventual importance of the teaching on purgatory notwithstanding, the early scholastic movement in the direction of a substantial soul that is separable from the body is initially recognized by the Catholic Church as a dangerous innovation, so much so that in 1215 the Fourth Lateran Council reaffirmed the importance of the body in resurrection, decreeing that persons will rise with their own individual bodies which they now “wear” or “bear” (“omnes cum suis propriis resurgent corporibus quae nunc gestant”).¹² While this statement certainly contains a dualist metaphor (in the notion that bodies are like clothes), it was, in fact, designed to affirm the ancient and foundational Christian view of the body’s centrality in any postmortem life.

Nonetheless, from early Christian concerns with the reassembly of the body (in the face of fire, or cannibalism, or dismemberment), medieval thought moves steadily in the direction of thinking about the conceptually separable soul and its relation to the body. Dante offers the most influential literary version of this nascent dualist account, for while it is true that Dante represents the souls in the afterlife in corporeal terms (that is especially true of the souls in the Inferno), he nevertheless imagines that they are already there even though their earthly bodies are still quietly buried on the real historical earth in which the character “Dante” has lost his way.¹³ Though Dante’s souls still have a yearning for the body, it is nevertheless clear that he has cast his lot with body/soul dualism. This dualism becomes Catholic orthodoxy at the Fifth Lateran Council in 1513, which condemned the Averroeist view that there is only one intellect and Alexander of Aphrodiasias’s view that the soul is mortal (“Damnamus et reprobamus omnes assertentes animam intellectivam mortalem esse”). Instead the council claimed that the soul is personal and immortal.¹⁴

Even as late medieval thought increasingly enshrines a dualist, separable soul, there is nonetheless continuing interest in the importance of the body. Elite and popular religions emphasize a bodily resurrection for different reasons. Elites (including church authorities and theologians) maintained a memory of combating gnostic heresies from the classical era through the Middle Ages, for example in the Albigensian Crusade in the thirteenth century. But at the popular level, there is resistance to a detachable soul because, as Philippe Ariès argues, the lived beliefs and worldviews of people change much more slowly than the trends of intellectuals, and this is especially the case when it comes to death and the possibility of an afterlife. Ariès shows persistent popular pushback throughout the Middle Ages against any theological tendencies that devalue bodily life on earth.¹⁵

Nonetheless, by the early modern period there is a strong tendency toward body-soul dualism within Catholicism. With the Reformation, Protestant thought undergoes a parallel development in the direction of dualism. Martin Luther (1483–1546) was broadly dualist in his thinking, but his abiding concern with the centrality of the body to human life leads to discomfort with any notion of the soul as capable of activity without a body. As Gergely M. Juhász notes, Luther’s discomfort about the soul as capable of acting separately from a body is intensified in the context of his hostility to the notion of purgatory, which leads him to posit “soul sleep,” the theory that though the soul is separable from the body and survives the death of the body it is nevertheless not conscious or active without its body.¹⁶ This has the effect of emphasizing the body’s life as central to the life of the person. Similarly, Philip Melanchthon (1497–1560) emphasizes the importance of the body, which he saw (at a minimum) as an expression of the soul, and his understanding of emotional phenomena from this perspective leads him to advocate something like embodied anthropology.¹⁷ Thus, although in principle Luther and Melanchthon did accept the separability of the soul and the body, they nonetheless emphasized the resurrection of the body as central to the Christian promise of a future life.

But as the Reformation unfolded, Luther’s notion of a soul sleep, and the concomitant emphasis on the importance of the body for any true life, migrated from the mainstream of Reformation thought into the radical and Anabaptist fringe, where it becomes the basis for doubts about any kind of postmortem judgment or punishment until the apocalyptic second coming, a point of view that had an antinomian force in the here and now. Radical antinomianism on the fringes of the Reformation, in turn, led the leaders of the mainstream or magisterial Reformation to attack the soul-sleep concept as dangerous to social order. Thus, motivated by his opposition to Anabaptist radicalism, Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531) attacked soul sleep as a dangerous heresy just as Andreas Karlstadt (1486–1541) doubled down on dualism by teaching that once the soul has left the body, the soul immediately entered either heaven or hell.

Partly because of the continuing pressure of materialism on the radical fringe of the Reformation, the kind of hard dualism championed by Karlstadt and Zwingli gradually becomes orthodoxy in Reformation circles. Jean Calvin (1509–1564) in his 1534 treatise Psychopannychia utterly rejects the notion of soul sleep. Via Calvin, this hard dualism becomes orthodoxy within the mainstream of the Reformation, which comes to imagine a two-step resurrection in which the detachable soul’s immediate entry into heaven (or hell) is followed only at the last day by the reanimation of the body and the recombination of body and soul (though what the body would add to a completely separable soul already enjoying the bliss of heaven is unclear).

Calvin and his theological successors within the intellectual tradition of the magisterial Reformation commit themselves to an increasingly thoroughgoing version of body/soul dualism, and this view becomes the default for early modern English Puritan writers such as William Perkins (1558–1602), who assumed that the soul is wholly detachable from the body and that it goes somewhere immediately upon death to wait to be reunited at the end of time with a body that is reduced to the soul’s mere receptacle. This position is enshrined in the 1553 English Articles of Religion.¹⁸ In England, this strong dualism also appears increasingly in elite university circles, including the Cambridge Platonists such as Benjamin Whichcote (1609–1683), Ralph Cudworth (1617–1688), and Henry More (1614–1687).

One reason that mind/body dualism becomes predominant in abstract theological debates is that dualism is increasingly aligned with the most rationalizing, secularizing tendencies within early modern culture as a whole and, most especially, with the rise of an empiricist scientific worldview. It may seem surprising to say that dualism is on the side of an emerging secular modernity but in fact strong soul/body dualism becomes a way of affirming the power of science to analyze and make sense of a nonsoul material realm, including the human body increasingly imagined as a physical machine (explicitly so with the rise of Cartesian thought), while preserving a separate realm—the realm of the disembodied soul and its dramas—that is not in conflict with scientific inquiry but simply separate from it.¹⁹ Indeed, the logical endpoint of what emerges in the seventeenth century as strong dualism is eighteenth-century deism committed to the clockwork operations of the natural order and the absolute irreducibility of the soul, and this becomes the very ideology of the Age of Reason.

The dominant trend of an emerging rationalized and scientistic worldview endorsing and emphasizing dualist views of the person notwithstanding, there is evidence of some interesting transitional thinking in which early modern scientists (including hermeticists like Athanasius Kircher)²⁰ try to square the resurrection of the physical body with the emerging principles of empirical science, for example by positing physical structures such as a “universal sperm” or a “balsam” capable of regenerating a whole person around itself.²¹ Justin E. H. Smith argues that even so important a member of the natural philosophy community as Leibniz was troubled by the difficulty of making resurrection of the flesh compatible with the new empirical science, and that Leibniz spent considerable energy trying to identify some physical analogue of soul, a quasi-physical element capable of powering the regeneration of the body after death.²² He termed this hypothetical protoembryonic power the “stamen” or the “flower of substance,” which he imagined as a hard kernel that could survive all change, even fire. Smith argues that Leibniz eventually rejected this view in favor of the idea that what gives a body personal identity and continuity is that it is constantly changing the environment into more of itself via nutrition (Stoffwechsel in German). This points forward to a solution in which the essence of the self is posited to be pure information written in DNA, which represents a kind of double dualism: disembodied information for creating a physical mechanism (a body or a brain) that will itself create the disembodied mental life that is the essence of the person.²³

This dualist understanding of humans sponsors a vision of the self as essentially and categorically different from the body and therefore as inhabiting a sphere separate from the material world, so that it is ideally free from being shaped or defined by its environment. This point of view is eventually codified by Descartes in his 1641 Meditationes de prima philosophia, in qua Dei existentia et animæ immortalitas demonstrator, or, in English, Meditations on First Philosophy in Which the Existence of God and the Immortality of the Soul Are Demonstrated. Gary Hatfield tracks the ways Descartes redistributes the three Aristotelian souls into disembodied mind on the one hand and mindless automaton-body on the other.²⁴ George Makari traces how the Aristotelian soul (or souls) became the disembodied mind, eventually casting aside such deviant views as Gassendi’s notion that matter itself is imbued with the power to think.²⁵ And Raymond Martin and John Barresi argue that the ensuing dualist vision of resurrection confirms an emerging individualism by imagining the person as essentially a soul and only accidentally embodied and therefore as highly “buffered” from social life and endowed with a high degree of autonomy and agency separate from social conditioning. Thus, the hard body/soul dualism that first emerges in the magisterial Reformation culminates with a vision of the natural world, including the human body, that is purely mechanistic and that can be studied as a pure mechanism.²⁶ The exact counterpoint is a mind that seems to be utterly different in kind from the body or matter and that is simply ruled outside of scientific inquiry. For Thomas Nagel, this division between natural matter, including the body (as the proper object of scientific inquiry), and mind or consciousness (as outside of science’s purview) is precisely what granted early modern science its power but also laced it with irresolvable antinomies.²⁷

My key argument in this book is that in the seventeenth century, as a consolidated and purified version of dualist resurrection belief is assimilated by an emerging secular modernity, the deep materialist-monist currents of resurrectionist thought do not wither away. Instead, they are concentrated to become an internally coherent and self-consciously oppositional discourse founded on a concentrated and transformed experience of the body. Under the pressure of the insistent here-and-now perspective of secularism, the eventual resurrection of the body is bent from an apocalyptic future into the here-and-now, leading to the notion that a future resurrection is also “immanent” or already unfolding in human bodies as they exist here and now, so that it might be possible to see “matter as pregnant with potential for otherness,” as Bynum puts it of an earlier generation of theorists of material resurrection. In seventeenth-century England, such a counterdiscourse of material and immanent resurrection appears in several registers—in elite theology and sermons (including Donne’s sermons, which I examine in Chapter 1), in protoscientific discourse such as the early modern vitalism explored by Diane Kelsey McColley²⁸ and in Paracelsian hermeticism (which I address in Chapters 3 and 4), in treatises on what we would now (in a dualist framework) term mental life (some of which I discuss in Chapters 2 and 4), and in religious self-help and devotional treatises (some of which I examine in Chapter 4).²⁹ It is not the dominant discourse in any of these registers; it is precisely a dissenting discourse in all of these registers.

But this dissenting discourse of immanent materialist resurrectionism appears most explicitly—comes closest, in other words, to becoming dominant—in the most formally experimental poetry of the seventeenth century, including work by Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, and Jonson. In the context of the emergence of a hard-dualist view of the person associated with a hard-dualist view of resurrection, these poets value the materialist and immanent theory of resurrection for its ability to power art that calls into question a purely mentalistic and highly autonomous selfhood. From this perspective, the life of the body as it exists here and now comes to be valued as the sign or seed of a future, apocalyptic resurrection, an experience in the here and now of the strange “material vibrancy” that will be gloriously present on the hypothetical final day. As such, the theory of immanent materialist resurrection leads to a vision of the self here and now as essentially bound up with a bodily life that cannot be fully mastered.³⁰ For these poets, a commitment to immanent, materialist resurrection drives a poetic project of seeing the material body as the precondition for any social markers of identity (including gender, race, age, health, and status) but at the same time as something that is strange and resistant to any ultimate human meaning being imposed on it.³¹ Under the pressure of this perspective, seventeenth-century poetry becomes an art form that seeks to find and bring to consciousness a deranging materialism inside persons as well as things.

The poets I examine seek an art that will do the work of resurrection not by immortalizing the self and its worldly achievements and identities (as with the poetry of praise, epideictic poetry, the classical ideal) but by allowing the poet and then also the reader to touch the strange material core in the self that subtends all worldly achievements and identities. Looking for the signs and seeds of resurrection within the self and in others (and even in the natural world) leads poets away from what can be named or said in any conventional way within a historical language community. And the challenge of (paradoxically) saying what is resistant to systems of human meaning in history is precisely what accounts for the distinctive formal power of the major poets of the century.

That immanent corporeal resurrectionism drives the most distinctive literary art of the seventeenth century has not been noticed because immanent corporeal resurrectionism has not been identified as a coherent, unified, oppositional discourse that emerges out of early modern secularization as the twin of rationalizing dualism and its privileging of a disembodied soul. The efforts by these poets to find ways to capture the vibrant material force of the human body (and the rest of the natural world) beyond human meaning is part of what drives the verbal and formal experimentation of their best poetry, starting with Donne. I therefore uncover a link between the materialism of the démodé idea of resurrection of the flesh and the insistent formal experimentalism of seventeenth-century poetry. These poets use the language games of poetry to seek the signs and seeds of a material resurrection in the vibrancy of material life as it is experienced here and now. This poetry pushes and twists language in ways designed to distance it from straightforward representation or reference in order to reveal a being or ontology that is at once deeper yet also more elusive than the ontology of objects and persons that are conventionally meaningful within a historical language community. In so doing, this poetry may reveal a truth about language in general, suggesting that even as language brings a world into the human space of meaning it also creates the opportunity to see that there is a remainder, as it were, something ontologically strange in the objects and persons that language names. Thus, making things and persons meaningful by bringing them into language inevitably also creates an awareness of how these things and persons have a primary reality that remains outside of the naming (and taming) power of language. In the poetry I examine, this insight is conveyed through the impulse to use poetry to seek the signs and seeds of a resurrection body that is already straining to break into eternity in its material life in the here and now.

This impulse appears in Donne’s drive to capture and present a body in the extreme states created by desire or loss, and in Herbert’s wish to make audible the emotions of pain and joy and the “groaning” of what he imagines as the other person inside the conventional self, and in Vaughan’s pointing to the self and the natural world as pregnant with a new creation. In their best moments, these poems make audible an alien voice rooted in the body and make visible an alien materiality in the world. Moreover, this poetry is designed to provoke readers into a parallel awareness of themselves and the world as strange matter, for the cultural phenomena of Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, and Jonson all suggest that readers feel that the strangely materialized voice of this poetry gets under their own skins, infects their own voices, and provokes answers and responses in alien voices of their own, including in responsive poetry. Thus, the poetry of Donne and Herbert and their followers is experienced as a call to “conversion” (as Vaughan says explicitly in relation to Herbert), conversion not only or not primarily to Christianity but to a form of life centered on poetry with the strange, extrapersonal voices it unleashes into the world and the materiality it brings to light. This effect is very much bound up with the role of these poems as a kind of “critical theory” that makes possible new conceptions of the self, agency and the world. Rather than seeking to represent the world in a closed, beautiful object, these poems push outward to effect transformation in both the poet and the reader, in how the body is felt and understood within the social self.

This provides a basis for one of the strong claims I make in this book, namely, that seventeenth-century poetry is in a meaningful sense “avant-garde” in a way that is bound up with the transformative “critical theory” project built on seeking the signs and seeds of an immanent resurrection of the body and its flesh. Indeed, I propose “seventeenth-century avant-garde poetry” as a more fitting nomenclature for the still common term “metaphysical poetry.” This label was introduced by Samuel Johnson, who understood it as a term of abuse, but its modern use is indebted primarily to T. S. Eliot’s famous 1921 essay “The Metaphysical Poets,” in which he championed the poetry of Donne and his contemporaries. I address this essay in more detail in the chapter on Donne, but I believe it is telling that Eliot recognizes in these seventeenth-century poems something very similar to the fragmented, formally innovative, and even self-consciously difficult art that Eliot himself engages in.

There have been several prominent efforts to define the notion of avant-garde art as it emerges in the early twentieth century. Among the most important theorists is Renato Poggioli, for whom the essence of avant-garde art is self-conscious opposition or antagonism to social conventions, expressed even at the level of language. For Poggioli, the driver of avant-garde art is a quest for a kind of extreme form of freedom, including in language use. Theodore W. Adorno also argues that formally challenging avant-garde art forms can grant readers an experience of genuine freedom, an experience of a subjectivity that stands in an undominated and undominating relationship with objects (including words as material manifestations). Influencing both Poggioli and Adorno is the earlier work of Russian formalists such as Roman Jakobson and Victor Shklovsky, who argue that avant-garde poetry has the social utility of renovating the referential power of language, which is always threatening to descend into cliché. From this perspective, when poets push language beyond the limits of conventional usage in acts of “defamiliarization” they reinvigorate language, thus preserving the possibility of genuine communication.³²

But what I see as definitive of seventeenth-century poetry is not a quest for freedom (as Poggioli and Adorno understand avant-garde art) or a desire to renovate language to maintain its power to communicate (as the Russian formalists understand it) but the impulse to use language in such a way as to allow the self and its voice to appear strange to itself, to use language in such a way as to allow an “other” self that is fundamentally associated with the body and its energies to appear in the poetry. And at the same time, by using poetry to allow this other self to appear, this poetry also interpolates readers to relate to this other strange self in the poet and also in themselves. Rather than offering itself as a closed representational art object, the poetry I examine offers itself as a form of social praxis founded on a transformative relationship to the material thing that is the self and the way that thing appears in language.

Precisely for these reasons, I argue, Peter Bürger’s account of the avant-garde is a powerful model for understanding the art of Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, and Jonson. For Bürger, early twentieth-century avant-garde art is the culmination and also the critique of a historical development in which art is defined as an autonomous domain and is characterized by closed, beautiful, and representational works of art that stand apart from social life and therefore have no implications for social praxis or how people live. Bürger argues that the avant-garde artists both recognize this development and actively turn against it, using violent techniques to wrench art out of its autonomous apartness and return it to social life. Bürger argues that avant-garde art is driven by the impulse to break down the wall between art and everyday life and to see art as an alternative kind of social praxis, an opportunity to engage in new forms of social experience and connection. Thus, for Bürger, avant-gardism challenges the sacred apartness of art, forcing art back into the world by creating visceral, sometimes deranging experiences in readers and creating communities around such experiences even (or especially) when they are hostile to traditional canons of beauty and to the traditional artistic function of representation.³³ Bürger writes:

The avant-garde not only negates the category of individual production but also that of individual reception.… Given the avant-gardist intention to do away with art as a sphere that is separate from the praxis of life, it is logical to eliminate the antithesis between producer and recipient.… Producers and recipients no longer exist. All that remains is the individual who uses poetry as an instrument for living one’s life as best one can.

(53)

Thus, for Bürger, avant-garde art is essentially a cultural happening, an experience that breaks down the divide between art and social life insofar as art becomes “an instrument for living one’s life.”

I address the issue of whether or to what extent there is a category of autonomous art in the seventeenth century in later chapters, especially in the chapter on Herbert, in which I consider Bürger’s arguments at length. But the notion that the essence of avant-garde art is to spring past the borders of classical and representational art that can be decoded and contemplated and “to reintegrate art into the praxis of life” (22) is quite applicable to the poetry I consider in this book. I see this poetry as driven by the desire to create a “happening” in the culture that is built on novel experiences of self by the artist and that also provokes answering experiences of self in the auditors or readers. In the grip of the decommissioned idea of the resurrection of the flesh, seventeenth-century poetry is pitted against the conventional social identity and the conventional forms of the self in the poet and the reader alike and against the forms of social bonding and affiliation based on social status and calculated interests. In place of these, seventeenth-century poetry from Donne to Jonson creates shared experiences around the impulse to alienate the self from itself, to grasp the body as suffused with an alien life, to allow a different voice to appear, and the impulse to have that voice elicit alien voices from others is at the heart of the early modern avant-garde project. Something like a recognition of this lies at the heart of Eliot’s claim that “Donne looked into a good deal more than the heart. One must look into the cerebral cortex, the nervous system, and the digestive tracts.”³⁴ The “critical theory” power of the decommissioned idea of the resurrection of the flesh is at the heart of poetry that actively seeks to establish itself as “an instrument for living” by reopening the question of how the conventionally social self (with its recognizable social identities) inheres in, captures, and is also unsettled by the life of the flesh beneath. This theoretical project and the effects it generates by means of challenging linguistic and poetic experiments is what is at the heart of my claim that the poetry of Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, and Jonson should be understood as “avant-garde.”

I want to end this introduction by situating the development I have described here within a theoretically informed understanding of secularization as a broad process. Recent years have seen an explosion of interdisciplinary work on secularity and modernity.³⁵ By and large this work has moved in the direction of complicating what Charles Taylor calls a “subtraction” model, which describes the rise of a secular, modern world as the result of a simple reduction of religion in both personal and public life. In its place, theorists have developed understandings of secularization as a process of transformation in which there are continuities between religious structures of thought and key institutions and assumptions of secularity. Thus, Taylor and others, including Marcel Gauchet, argue that the intellectual construction of a “disenchanted” natural world, purged of occult forces, that can, therefore, be grasped in terms of abstract laws of nature is indebted to a systematic Protestant program of iconoclasm and suspicion about any claims to the sacred being immanent in creation.³⁶

More generally, as prominent historians of science like Stephen Gaukroger and prominent intellectual historians of Christianity like Hans Küng have argued, all the major early modern scientists (including Pascal, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Leibniz, Newton, and Boyle) were profoundly indebted to a theistic framework for some of their major methodological and substantive breakthroughs.³⁷ In politics, the Reformation’s reactivation of Augustine’s distinction between the City of God and the City of Man paved the way to a religion/politics divide and to rational, bureaucratic approaches to managing society, something evident, for example, in Calvin’s own concern to create social welfare agencies in Geneva.³⁸ Moreover, seeing humans made in the image of God laid the groundwork for the discovery (or invention) of individual rights that even sovereign political orders cannot infringe upon. And perhaps most obviously, the Protestant emphasis on faith, individual scripture reading, and the priesthood of all believers was a powerful incitement to new, deeper experiences of “interiority,” individualism, individual freedom, and the emphasis on individual conscience in moral life.

But if secularization is marked by important continuities with its supposed religious other, it is obviously also marked by profound discontinuities, as emphasized by theorists (from Max Weber to Talal Asad) who highlight the disorienting effects of disenchantment and rationalization and the new forms of political and cultural control it brings. In fact, secularization is a dialectical process in which contradictions and tensions within religious systems of meaning give rise to new, distinctively secular formations. As such, secular formations sometimes echo or repeat (in a transformed form) the religious structures of meaning from which they sprang. But what I want to highlight is that, as with any dialectical process, the back and forth between thesis and antithesis is not always smooth but sometimes produces glitches or hang-ups, and these glitches or hang-ups can sometimes be valuable for the thinking they make possible.³⁹

It is just such a dialectic between religion and an emerging secularism giving rise to counterdialectical glitches that I see playing out in the history of ideas about resurrection. In articulating my project this way, I am echoing the pattern that emerges in Jane Bennett’s book, Unthinking Faith and Enlightenment. Bennett posits an era of “Robust Faith” that brings with it a view of nature as saturated with God’s purposes and meaning. But she argues that the polyvalence and ambiguity of the natural world gradually leads to self-critique of this perspective, so that where once people had been happily absorbed in a meaning-saturated natural world they eventually come to experience a theoretical detachment and distance from it, a stance that she identifies as the basis for Enlightenment rationalism and ultimately the impulse toward technological mastery of the natural world. Thus, for Bennett, the rationalistic Enlightenment is rooted in the way the “Robust Faith” perspective turns critical of itself in a properly dialectical fashion.⁴⁰ Bennett’s discussion suggests a view of secularization as a dialectic in which “robust faith” and “Enlightenment” enter into a mutually transformative encounter between different ways of structuring thought, so that the persistence of an originally faith-based view (what she terms “natural holism”) within a regime of modern “Enlightenment” (marked by the impulse toward technological domination) is the inevitable result of a dialectical development in which the original terms of the dialectic (“robust faith” and its spontaneous autocritique) are preserved in a sublated form (as “natural holism” and the will to technological mastery).

But in Bennett’s account, the dialectic between robust faith and Enlightenment also creates a kind of glitch that generates what she sees as a radically critical discourse. For her, the dialectic between a faith-based view of the natural world and the Enlightenment view of nature as subject to human power gives rise to the particular, radically oppositional discourse she terms “fractious holism” (to differentiate it from the unproblematic holism she associates with a successfully secularized faith). Fractious holism represents an awareness of nature not as mystically holistic (or “enchanted”) or as inert matter available for human use but as something essentially recalcitrant and resistant to human purposes. Bennett values this “fractious holism” precisely because it produces a vision of nature as essentially resistant to people and their concerns and as fracturing or interrupting human purposes, a view that anticipates the notion of “vibrant materialism” she subsequently developed.

Similarly, in looking at the fate of ideas about resurrection, we can see a double process in which some strains of resurrectionist thinking—namely, the most dualist strains—are preserved and elevated (or “sublated,” to use the Hegelian term) into core institutions and discourses of secular modernity, leaving behind an increasingly outré materialist resurrection in intensified form. Moreover, this outré idea is not only left behind but also transformed by being bent back into secular time to become critical theory, a powerful tool for critique and an aid for imagining other paths for modernity than the dominant, dualist form of secularization. As such, I do not see the commitment of the poets I examine to the resurrection of the body as a recalcitrant religious fundamentalism or fideism that simply refuses an emergent secular modernity. Indeed, Olivier Roy powerfully demonstrates that fideistic fundamentalism is utterly bound up with and even an expression of a relatively recent form of neoliberal globalization, and, as such, it was unavailable in the early modern world.⁴¹

I therefore term this oppositional discourse not “antisecularization” (or “fundamentalism”) but “countersecularization,” since it does not reject a rising secularization so much as it accompanies it and seeks to transform it from within.⁴² Indeed, the ultimate claim of the book is that by looking at the fate of ideas about resurrection in their dualist and immanent materialist forms we can see that early modern culture oscillates between a dominant secularization impulse (built, in part, around dualist discourses of the soul and of the soul’s persistence after the death of the body) and an internal critique spawned by the dialectical process itself, a form of countersecularization built on an immanent materialist notion of resurrection that is identified as outré within mainstream seventeenth-century thought and for that very reason invested with the power to call into question some of the key institutions of an emerging secular modernity, including the forms of subjectivity, identity, and agency it assumes and privileges. “Countersecularization” seeks to capture the way these poets do not pit some putative fundamentalism against an emerging secular modernity but rather take up dialectical transformations within resurrection discourse itself as a lever for critiquing key elements of an emerging secular modernity.

But do these poets believe in an immanent materialist resurrection, or do they merely deploy this idea tactically in order to generate formally and thematically interesting poems? And do we, as readers, have to believe it in order to engage in the thought this poetry makes possible? In some ways, the question of belief is a red herring. The discourse of immanent materialist resurrection that the poets I examine deploy can and should be valued for the thinking it makes possible. I see the discourse of materialist-immanent resurrection in seventeenth-century poetry as similar to Simon During’s account of William Thomas Beckford’s transgressive, aesthetic atheist Catholicism as “a true untruth around which a practice of life can form.”⁴³ This notion of a “true untruth” is like Bennet’s claim that vibrant materialism is an “onto-story.” Both are in some obvious way connected to the special status of imaginative literature, including, in Piero Boitani’s account, Shakespeare’s plays, when he suggests that only the suspension of disbelief demanded by a play allows us to “believe in resurrection of the dead, the mystery and miracle preached by Christianity.”⁴⁴ Indeed, the kind of relationship to religious beliefs that literature makes possible for Boitani characterizes Wittgenstein’s understanding of religious claims in general, as he argues that religious claims cannot be untrue in the way that scientific claims can be untrue.⁴⁵

And it is precisely as a “true fiction” that resurrection persists even in our apparently terminally disenchanted world today. Indeed, the fantasies of self that we live by today can almost be said to be structured by the dualist vision of a purely mentalistic afterlife. Today, the way people think about the nature of the self is often marked by the assumption that the body is contingent and that the essence of the self lies in a disembodied mind. Moreover, in view of the genetics and cybernetics revolutions, this disembodied understanding of the self often morphs into imagining that the essence of the self is information that could, in principle, be coded or uploaded onto other biological or nonbiological systems and in that way achieve a kind of cybernetic immortality.⁴⁶ Bernard E. Harcourt connects the “digital self” with the political theology of the “king’s two bodies.” He writes that the “liberal democratic citizen” creates the “now permanent digital self, which we are etching into the virtual cloud with every click and tap, and our mortal analog selves seem by contrast to be fading like the color on a polaroid instant photo.”⁴⁷

But instead of being rooted in the political theology of “the king’s two bodies,” are such ideas not more likely rooted in the persistence of a transformed but still recognizable, fully dualist notion of the Resurrection? That is suggested by Sheila Briggs, who argues that in contemporary modernity, unacknowledged dualist resurrectionist assumptions create a situation in which the discursive body has so devoured the fleshly body that the sensuality of the body is endlessly invoked only to be embalmed in a digital world.⁴⁸ These phenomena are symptoms of the victory of the most dualist version of resurrection thought as a historical driver of secular modernity and, moreover, as continuing to drive the core ways many people have of understanding themselves as persons and agents in the world and in time.

But if dualist resurrection continues secretly to structure our contemporary culture, what of the counterdiscourse of immanent materialist resurrection that I uncover in this book? Has it disappeared altogether? My methodological approach of framing the immanent materialist variant of resurrection belief as critical theory makes it possible to see how bodily resurrection is still with us today even in the redoubts of the culture seemingly most thoroughly stripped of religion. For on reflection it does seem that the undead or postdead body is everywhere in our culture today, especially in the realms of art and entertainment in the form of characters coming back to life and zombie bodies with a strange, ineradicable life, from the films of George Romero to Game of Thrones. Seeing all of this as the ghostly afterglow of centuries of “official” theological engagement with the bizarre and even deranging idea of resurrection forces us to reevaluate what we thought we knew about secular modernity and the place (or nonplace) of religious ideas—including the idea of resurrection—within it. Given our secular worldview, how are we to understand this continuing fascination with the body as able to survive death? I think it is to be understood as a culture-wide protest to the increasingly hard dualism that sees the essence of the person as information that can exist separate from any bodily life, as it does in the virtual world.

The presence of a complex of ideas and thoughts related to the theology of resurrection in the world of art and entertainment today reflects material resurrection’s curious contemporary status as theory. It is not an explicit object of belief (at least for many people), but it is an idea that engages our interest, an idea that we use to think about the world we inhabit, the kinds of selves we are, what future we can expect. In the age of ecological disaster and denationalized bodies of refugees traversing the globe, the resurrection of the flesh provides pop culture with an especially engaging way of imaginatively grasping and thinking through the world. Zombie culture emphasizes the centrality of the body, the importance of bodily life together, and the way the body subtends all identity even while showing the strangeness and ultimate unmasterability of the body. Here the body again reminds us of the contingency of all sense of self and of all human institutions. And when we find ourselves engaged in this kind of thinking, we are fundamentally engaged in a project of early modern countersecularization.

Strange and even embarrassing as the belief in the resurrection of the flesh may seem to modern, scientifically minded readers, it represents a complex set of tools for thinking about the body, the material world, the social life of the person, and the limits of language. It is precisely because of its leverage as a theoretical complex that it forms the basis for the countersecularization I chart in this book and flowers again in contemporary zombie culture. Immanent corporeal resurrectionism leads to a quest not for identity. Instead it leads to a quest to see through all identities and meanings to something deeply strange inside the self, other persons, and even the whole material world. In that sense it cuts against the basic, most fundamental assumption of modernity—the bifurcation of the world into, on the one hand, a disenchanted realm of mechanical matter that is subject to the knowledge procedures of empirical science and, on the other hand, a magical realm of totemic consciousness.

The five chapters that follow are each organized around a major figure. Each chapter reconstructs a particular set of intellectual commitments with respect to the issue of resurrection and then traces how those commitments energize and play out in the poet’s distinctive art; the Epilogue examines the afterlife of the oppositional discourse of immanent materialist resurrection in contemporary zombie culture.

In Chapter 1 I argue that when we look at Donne from the vantage of the history of secularization, we must understand him as playing a double game, advancing the dominant path of secularization by endorsing body/soul dualism (including in his thoughts about resurrection) while simultaneously resisting this dualism by emphasizing the centrality of the body to any experience of personhood. To bring this project into focus I start with the important early deist work by Donne’s friend Edward Herbert (brother of the poet who is the focus of the next chapter). Edward Herbert is often seen as the father of deism, and in his magnum opus De veritate he articulates a reasonable, rationalized version of Christianity founded on dualist assumptions. As I have suggested, the dominant path of secularization is built on foregrounding dualist tendencies within Christianity, thereby creating a division between a natural world (including the human body), which is divested of supernatural or transcendental elements and can therefore be studied by means of the new empirical sciences, and a highly buffered, highly autonomous inner life that becomes the scene of a privatized experience of God. But whereas Edward Herbert fits perfectly within this rationalizing movement toward dualism, Donne illustrates the tension between this form of secularization and a countersecularization built on embracing the “rump” elements of Christianity, including its materialism. Thus, on the one hand, in his sermons and prose writings Donne embraces the dominant path of secularization, acknowledging the explanatory (if also disillusioning) power of science and foregrounding a strong, highly buffered religious subjectivity. This secularizing trend pushes toward a reasonable and moderated form of Christianity in which dualism, including in thinking about resurrection, comes to seem increasingly like “common sense.” On the other hand, however, in all the genres he works in, Donne undermines this form of secularization by returning again and again to the body as irreducible to the self but also as alien to any conventionally socialized sense of agency or identity.

I examine Donne’s sermons for evidence of the interplay of secularizing and countersecularizing tendencies. For example, in the sermon over King James’s dead body and in his famous sermon “Death’s Duel,” Donne uses the decaying body as an object of contemplation to feel the self and its conventional social coordinates and identities scrambled and to touch a strangely vibrant material core within the self. Similarly, in the Devotions upon Emergent Occasions Donne presents his own sick, feverish body as something akin to a Baroque crucifix, and as he contemplates himself in light of his body he engages in a theoretical project of deranging the self and its conventional coordinates within the social and historical world. I argue that this particular use of the body is also what energizes Donne’s formally experimental erotic verse. Donne’s erotic poems suggest an understanding of sexuality in which interruption, deferral, and blockage are valued as a way of intensifying and increasing the experience of being a body with a life of its own separate from the conscious and reasoning life of the soul. I argue that in his poetry Donne uses techniques of formal estranging to investigate forms of subjectivity, embodiment, and social relationship resolutely conditioned by a hypothetical future in which the body will live again. The formal experimentalism generated by Donne’s commitment to resurrection is precisely what T. S. Eliot recognized as modernism avant la lettre, and I argue that Donne’s writings should, in fact, be termed not “metaphysical” but “avant-garde.”

In Chapter 2 I argue that George Herbert adopts and expands Donne’s project of treating the body in the light of an eventual resurrection as a way of deranging any conventional sense of self or identity. For Herbert this project is essentially bound up with his avant-garde project of using language in ways that push against the limits of communication within a historical language community. Herbert is interested in the hypothesis that beneath the ambitions, emotions, and personal history of his socially conditioned self there is another self that inheres in the body and that is in some sense “truer” than his social self. Herbert thus uses his poetry to seek a self (and a voice) different from the highly acculturated social person “George Herbert.” For Herbert, formally experimental poetry is a way of articulating the voice of this other self. I track the trope of the “body speaking” (for example in snapped sinews, broken bones, and onomatopoetic “groans”), and I argue that Herbert tries to drive his poetry to the point where his “own” voice is drowned out by a voice associated with the body. By seeking to hear his body, Herbert is seeking the seed of a future resurrection body. As against aiming to “represent” himself Herbert sees poetry as a way of touching the self that cannot be represented because it is alien to the social categories of personhood. Moreover, for Herbert’s readers, the sound of his poetry has typically had an emotional impact well in excess of the religious and ethical content of his poems, often effecting spectacular “conversions” to a life of Christianity but also to a life of poetry, as evidenced by his many imitators. By moving from a vision of poetry as representation or as a beautiful object to a vision of poetry as a form of social praxis, a way of creating new selves and communities, I see Herbert as anticipating the avant-garde art of the early twentieth century as theorized by Peter Bürger. I conclude the chapter by looking at what Herbert’s poetic theory of identity implies about an understanding of the emotions, which are a key focus of many of Herbert’s poems. I argue that Herbert’s poems implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) cut through the debate between a mechanistic humoral understanding of emotions and an emerging cognitivist judgment-based understanding of the emotions. Instead his poems posit the importance of “mood” as a presubjective way of being in the world through which the historical world and the persons in it are disclosed. I see this interest in “mood” as anticipating key elements of twentieth-century phenomenological psychology. Thus Herbert’s search for the “resurrection body” within himself leads him to anticipate two of the most important intellectual developments of the twentieth century: avant-gardism and phenomenology (including twenty-first-century affect theory).

In Chapter 3 I turn to one of the most important of the many poets who explicitly claimed to be “converted” by Herbert (both religiously and poetically), Henry Vaughan. Vaughan explicitly asserts an understanding of resurrection as essentially and fundamentally about the body, and he understands resurrection to be “immanent” in the sense that signs of resurrection are breaking into the here and now. This theory leads Vaughan to use his poetry to search within himself for the material reality of a resurrection body that displaces him from his conventional sociological coordinates. Vaughan’s goal in his poetry, in other words, is to uncover “Traces, and sounds of a strange kind,” as he puts it in “Vanity of Spirit.” Bypassing any soul/body distinction, Vaughan’s searching analysis of himself splits his bodily life into two: on the one hand, a socialized and historicized life and, on the other hand, a life that, in its material strangeness, is alien to his time and place and therefore the substrate of resurrection. At the same time, Vaughan is also interested in investigating the material stuff of the natural world separate from the meanings that human language imposes upon it. By mystical attention to material stuff, including feathers, rocks, rainbows, and trees, Vaughan believes he can discover a perspective that transcends historical time. In that sense, Vaughan anticipates the Romantic poets, and my argument shows how that poetic perspective is rooted in a distinctively early modern transformation of the Christian idea of resurrection. I argue that in its approach to the sublime otherness of nature, Vaughan’s poetry is designed to detach readers from the mindset of being inside a language community, a mindset defined by the assumption that everything has (human) meaning, and I contrast this poetic project to the accounts of poetry offered by Roman Jakobson and Susan Stewart. By becoming aware of the way a language imposes historically contingent meanings on the world of things (including human bodies), Vaughan’s poetry is designed to produce a mindset oriented toward seeing the seeds or signs of an immanent physical resurrection in the stuff of the self and in the stuff of the world.

In Chapter 4 I articulate more explicitly than in the previous chapter the way resurrection beliefs in Vaughan’s poetry function as “critical theory” about selfhood, identity, and the social world. To do so I look at some of Vaughan’s devotional and religious “self-help” literature and at Vaughan’s translation and expansion of a hermetic medical treatise. (Vaughan worked as a physician for much of his life and thus had an interest in medical literature.) Vaughan’s immanent corporeal resurrectionist commitment to finding the “seeds” of resurrection in the socialized body is transposed in his devotional and medical writings into positing an essential core of bodily life—the radical balsam—that seeks eternal life but that is sickened when it is penetrated and rewired by the social and historical world. The goal of Vaughan’s devotional writings and medicine alike is to rewire the self so that it reduces its investment in the historical and social world by having its life directed by the essential core, a move that I see as analogous to his poetic search for the seeds and signs of resurrection within himself that I examined in Chapter 3. In that sense I argue that when resurrection thought is translated into medical and therapeutic terms, it becomes the site for a kind of organic theory work that attains insights into the self’s habituated relationship to the social world in a way that anticipates Bourdieu’s theory of habitus.

I also examine how Vaughan’s commitment to a corporeal and immanent understanding of resurrection leads him to a way of thinking about emotional life that departs sharply from the predominant humoralism of his day. In place of positing that emotions are the effects of mechanical humors sloshing around the body, Vaughan sees emotional life as giving information about the way and the degree to which the self inhabits the historical world. Thus, he adds to his translation of a hermetic medical treatise the story of a man who died in the act of sex, and he posits that it was not the sex that killed him but the “excess of joy” that accompanied the sex. The notion that joy can kill is strange to us, but in the context of Vaughan’s notion that the emotions are a bridge between an essentially bodily core life and an external social world that imposes its values and claims upon the body, joy can seem like an excessive and therefore enervating investment of the core bodily self into the social world that leaves the core bodily life dissipated and spent. Leo Bersani has taught us to see sexuality as a beneficent crisis of selfhood, and killing joy would seem to qualify as such a crisis.⁴⁹ But Vaughan’s vision also seems to depart from Bersani’s account insofar as Vaughan sees killing joy not as a beneficent death of the person but as a kind of explosive screwing of the self into the world. The field of sexuality that Vaughan opens up with his discussion of sex and joy is thus marked by the notion of the body as socialized yet also as potentially unhinged from that social connectedness, a vision that ultimately derives from his interest in corporeal resurrection.

Finally, in Chapter 5, I argue that Ben Jonson’s popular play Volpone charts a massive cultural shift in which, within a rising capitalist order, a fully disembodied understanding of resurrection is transformed into a legal personhood that allows the individual’s will to survive past the limit of death. In other words, Volpone is a kind of elegiac death knell for the specific form of countersecularization that I chart in the rest of the book, in which a materialist understanding of resurrection is celebrated for its critical power. Volpone glances at such ideas only to mark their ultimate impotence to stem the tide of a now legally institutionalized disembodied personhood. However, I argue for a bifurcation within Jonson’s own corpus of work between Volpone and his poetry, and most especially his poetry of praise and memorialization, which participates in the same project of Donne, Herbert, and Vaughan, but in a new way. Jonson is quite committed to a dualist notion of resurrection in which a disembodied soul ascends directly to heaven, leaving behind its body until the final resurrection at the end of time. But in his poetry Jonson imagines that the separation of soul and body creates a gap in the ontological fabric of the world, and he wants his poetry to fill this gap. His poetry evokes the symbolic achievements of the person who has died, but he wants to combine this informational evocation of who the person was in the world with a kind of ersatz body in the form of the poem itself. Jonson emphasizes the weightiness of his poetic text as a memorial, especially in its intertextual density, its indebtedness to classical texts, its formal and grammatical complexity, and its metrical shapedness. For Jonson the formal patterning in poetry is a way of transcending the fleetingness of everyday speech and thus allowing his poems to “do the work of resurrection” in the gap between death and the final resurrection. For Jonson, poetry supplements dualist resurrection by creating a material presence that exists not fully on the timescale of eternity (Jonson still looks forward to eventual literal resurrection) but at least on a much longer timescale than the fleeting lives of human persons. By continuing to think about agency, personhood, and identity in relation to a body, whether biological or textual, Jonson’s most formally weighty poetry reveals a countersecularization impulse even in the midst of a fairly consistent dualist model. I compare Jonson’s fantasy about poetry’s ability to make people present as textual bodies to our modern fantasies about the special incantatory power of “code,” whether genetic code or computer-based code, as a kind of language that does not represent but enacts presence in the world.

But in the balance of the chapter I look at the different future for residual resurrection beliefs that is suggested by Volpone, a play in which several characters vie with one other to be named heirs in Volpone’s last will and testament. I argue that in this play Jonson reveals his culture’s increasing fascination with the idea that the essence of the person exists in a network of legal institutions and legally entitled wealth (or “substance”) that enables the person as agent to survive the death of the person as body. And if this fantasy is to some extent ridiculed in the play, its prominent role within an emerging capitalist order is nonetheless shown. In Volpone I see the conversion of the complex, contested notion of resurrection into the completely disembodied fantasy of the legal person who exists as a nexus of legal documents and legal institutional frameworks and that comes, in secular modernity, to displace the old body-based countersecularization discourses I have been studying.

Finally, in the epilogue I examine the current pop culture fascination with the undead body visible in the explosion of TV shows and films about zombies. I begin by considering Emmanuel Carrère’s The Kingdom, in which the well-known French writer tells the story of his brief but intense conversion to Christianity, in the grip of which he was involved in developing the French TV series Les revenants, which was the model for A&E’s The Returned. I argue that Carrère’s account of the power of the Christian theology of resurrection as an inspiration for Les revenants reveals the truth of the “undead” genres more generally, namely, as a culture-wide return of the repressed, a protest against the increasingly disembodied, virtualized way we live today. Implicitly, the undead character (including the zombie) attacks the modern fantasy that the self is, in its essence, disembodied and therefore reducible to information, data, and code, a fantasy in which people yearn for a cybernetic resurrection that will take the form of entering into the disembodied life of the digital world. In the midst of this disembodied virtualized world, zombie pop culture, like the poetry I have studied in this book, is a reminder of the body’s abiding vulnerabilities, limitations, and also potentials for transcendence.