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20.08.31 Simpson, Permanent Revolution

20.08.31 Simpson, Permanent Revolution


"For those who considered themselves the Calvinist orthodox after 1625, the kinetic logic of Puritan theology, which denied any value to human works, will produce both nation-changing civil wars and what would become the world-changing colonization of America" (97).

This compact, intense, even shocking sentence emblematizes what James Simpson has accomplished in Permanent Revolution, possibly his best (and this reviewer's favorite) book. The question of whether we have freedom to control and even understand our fates lies at the heart of a nearly incalculable set of changes in world history ignited by the Reformation, with implications that affect, I would contend, human culture (globally) for the past 500 years and with particular currency in 2020. The battle over what is freedom, who determines what level of freedom individuals and communities have, and the relative power of that agency to create happiness (in this life or the next) so dominate not just religion but all elements of cultural politics in the U.S and in Europe and wherever Christianity exists. But it's not just that, not just Christianity, for doctrines of work and conceptions of labor--who works why, with what result, and for whom--informs human experience more globally. The Reformation was not the only permanent revolution, and while the book is not a global history of "revolutions," per se, Simpson acutely weaves in references to Marxism, the Maoist cultural revolution, existential philosophy, and all matters of social change (totalitarian, Kafkaesque or both) that inform the paradigm: revolutions never end--never try to end--and they turn on themselves with (often brutal, violent, deadly) rebuke of their original proponents, who are unmasked as impure and thus condemned (like the famous phrase puts it) as enemies of the revolution.

I write this review in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic that is bringing the world in many ways to its knees and particularly at a moment where conflicting voices claim authority over individual freedoms: what, we wonder is the relationship between the state and the individual agency of the governed? What are the rights of religious expression? Beyond institutional religion, what does individual will really mean and actually enable? Simpson's book animates the authors, texts, and events in English Reformation history and provokes questions that our contemporary historical moment is also asking. Pandemic or not, one could apply this applicability to endless moments in history: what does it mean to be free in a world of absolute authority, under rule by God, monarch, state, political party, or ideological doctrine? Simpson contemplates these very notions right from the 1st paragraph of this book in his engagement with Milton and the relative freedom of choice given to (or seized by) Eve in Paradise Lost, and for the next 350 pages it never lets up in exploring how society, government, and religion can choose to create, eliminate, moderate, or render worthless Eve's or anyone's acts of freedom.

The book is divided into seven parts and 18 chapters, forming an ongoing narrative--like an exciting mini-series--but also providing contained engagement with the local topic. For example, depending on a teacher's needs, one could assign the chapter on the lyric that explores how the sonnet tradition (great material on Greville and Donne) struggles with divine (and earthly) absolute rule (same for the other 17 chapters). So this book will be wonderfully useful for undergraduate and graduate instruction. Many of us who occasionally do a survey class will have to one day teach Chaucer or Piers Plowman and then the next day explain why we are teaching Wyatt, Surrey, and Shakespeare--and what went on in between. The head notes to anthologies will sometimes explain revolutionary changes, reformation, and the stripping of the altars, but here we have a far more detailed history of all the revolutions in doctrine that inform the authors of the time, as theologians, pundits, and poets began to repudiate the old ways and then constantly reform, revolutionize, and reconsider past movements. Each literary, religious, and political move of the Reformation is chronicled through close reading of primary texts.

Driving the book is the extraordinary clarity of Simpson's prose and the secure, confident development of his analysis, as he takes us through major figures and those much less well known who composed the religious doctrines, tracks, commentaries , poems, and epics that filtered down in a sort of mass media way to the experience of English Christians throughout the 16th and 17th centuries. The tremendous generosity of the writing guarantees the book's success, as Simpson shares with us his lifelong reading in issues of Reformation literature and theology, as well as the amazing wit and stunning turn of phrase. Countless favorites abound: "[t]o read one's own works as signs is unending and treacherous work" (95); "[t]ruculent obscenity is a frequent feature of Calvinist linguistic usage" (92); "[t]he Catholic Church is old news. She has been dealt with" (51); "[h]ow did biblical literalism arrive at interpretive freedom? How did iconoclasm arrive at the art museum?" (2)--just to select a few of the 100s that I marked with my pen, in a virtuoso performance of humane instruction and humanist scholarship. The intimacy achieved here among author, reader, and primary text is unparalleled and rare. Only long decades of reading, contemplation, teaching, and feeling could have produced it.

Summaries will do injustice to the detailed arguments and marshalled evidence, but here is an overview of the contents:

Part 1, "Religion as Reformation": The introduction and chapters here explore how revolutions never end and tend to turn against the very people who had begun them. The greatest enemies of Protestantism where slacker Protestants who were not living up to the revolutionary claims of the Reformation, as Simpson traces the "'scope creep' that produces intra-Puritan schism" (43) round the rally cry of "reform the reformation" from 1540-1570. So went the French and the Chinese Cultural Revolutions, in a phenomenon that seems almost unconsciously human.

Part 2, "Working Modernity's Despair: Close Reading of Lyric and Epic," reveals the struggles with the angst that comes from belief in predestination, from confronting "the theology of human depravity" (59) and the "energy that exclusivism produces" (59). If in Piers Plowman the question was "how may I save my soul," in Bunyan it's "whether I was elected" (65). Compelling close reading of Wyatt's Paraphrase of the Penitential Psalms, Greville's Caelica, and Spenser's FQ reflect the struggle against dual forces of absolutism--God and Monarch. In the Arminian Milton--"member of the inner core of a failed, anti-monarchial revolutionary junta" (102), who composes in "mighty bondage-breaking sentences" (107)--we see more "prisons of despair, even if relocated and newly refurbished" (99).

Part 3, "Sincerity and Hypocrisy: Returning to Henry, Elizabeth, and the Early Reformation," traces the interwoven dynamic of these opposed terms, born from Henry's worry that Christians, so mired in accusation, abandoned Paul's call to fraternal love. Highlights here include tracing how accusation of hypocrisy begins to take "queasy forms" (128) when hurled not against Catholics (that's too easy) but between anti-Puritans and Puritans, and a reading of Shakespeare's hypocritically "precise" Angelo in Measure for Measure as an exposure of the "Puritan godly" (140). The near inescapability of hypocrisy informs sermons, poetry, and prose works, as history marched toward 1649 and the execution of Charles I. Greville again--the frequent star of this book, Thomas Edward's Gangraena, Milton, and Bunyan (where hypocritical Calvinist Talkative and not the pope is the greatest danger) are featured here, as revolution breaks into competing heterodox and (thus hypocritical) sects in the rough period before the Toleration Act of 1688 and the writings of Locke--all anticipating the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.

Part 4. "Breaking Idols," confronts the destruction of images, a classic move for destroying the old order featured in revolutionary movements, "including contemporary Mesopotamia" (159), as he examines the Biblical, philosophical and practical motivations for the extraordinary and widespread destruction and the "need to purge the mind of potentially idolatrous forms," a job that is by definition "never finished" but which is redeemed or deflected by the saving concept of the "modern, liberal museum of art" (162). Such important historical contextualization makes this part (which will be rough going for those sensitive to the acts of destruction) especially compelling as we learn how "the hammer wielding iconoclast needs above all to move into, and through, the psyche itself, there to lay waste the imagination" (173). After the onslaught on "mental idolatry" (177) we read of Shakespeare's restoration (revival?) of art in theWinter's Tale, and Minton's desire in Samson Agonistes to "destroy its own idolatrous readership" (193), then finally a shopping spree with Bunyan to Vanity Fair.

Part 5, "Theater, Magic, Sacrament," can be interpreted as a symphony really with different movements and different themes, and in part 5 we begin to reimagine some of the same historical changes we have been tracing but through a different perspective-- the role of the magical with the rather strong contention that "Reformation evangelicalsreinvented black magic" (203) rather than merely condemning it as Catholic, an observation militating against the notion that Calvinist concepts of predestination are inherently more rational than Catholic superstition. Further irony lies in the Calvinist creation of drama that is extremely theatrical and supposedly anti-dramatic (John Bale is "using drama to attack drama," 212). By contrast the York play of Christ before Herod brilliantly accomplishes its effect by combating theatricality (Christ won't play the part assigned by his inquisitors), and the Cycle Plays largely work by "repudiating any connection with witchcraft" (216). Further details unfold in tracing the rise of a "persecuting society" targeting drama and witchcraft in opposition to the magically sacramental, leading playwrights (Marlowe's "Helen of Troy Show"!; Shakespeare'sTempest) to find new forms of largely non-sacramental magic.

Part 6, "Managing Scripture," boldly confronts the critical tendencies of Protestant Triumphalism and the unexamined assumption that the Reformation provided free access to interpretation of Scripture—revealed to be merely a cliché answer to questions about "the greatest gain of the Reformation" (259), asked to any passer-by on the street or any academic. "Individual interpretive freedom" (260) may be true of the Reformation's end but not its start, which reveals illiberal tumult over interpretation, where a "punishing interpretive regime" enacts exclusionary doctrines of readers that favor the powerful, privileged and the "elect," "fractur[ing] nations, communities and psyches" (264). Highlights here include Henry's threat of burning wayward interpreters of scripture; Luther's treatment of "bad peasant readers" (272); and Luther's failed notion that "scripture interprets itself" (278). Simpson, combating forcefully Alistair McGrath's "sentimental" (280), notions about individual interpretive freedom as Reformation's fruit, shows rather a period of great tumult dominated by "intra-Protestant interpretive divisions" (277), with Jews and Catholics of course--and in fact the non-elect within the Reform--summarily excluded from reading Scripture aright--and thus being damned. Surrey (furious, doomed to be beheaded) and Bunyan (imprisoned, agonized, depressed, Kafkaesque) "represent literalist Scriptural reading as an experience of anguish," while evangelicals struggle to determine the relationship between reading, literalism, works, election and salvation--a complicated swirl of conflicting, paradoxical forces. Between them Shakespeare (Merchant of Venice) and Milton--provoked by marriage troubles and thus "pulled from literalism by 'experience,'" (313) to "create a new sublime scripture," (314) in PL--both "explored the grounds of an alternative treatment of Scripture as a living document" (299), thus "contributing to a long anti-literalist tradition" (300). The transition from liberties to Liberty (as in the majestic statue of) weaves through this poignant sequence that will compel readers of all political stripes to look around at their parties and ideologies in relation to the rough rude history of freedom (and claims to freedom) that Simpson has recounted.

A thrilling part 7 meditates further on various clashes of "Liberty" vs "liberties" (the number and capitalization are clutch) revealed in the previous 350 pages to have been pretty darn hard-fought series of battles. In a combative fest of politics and religion, we trace here a tale of hostility to "liberties" and "a new placement of 'Liberty' as the overriding, ineluctable, compelling ideal of life worth living, whose demands must be obeyed" (332-3). In the crossfire are Milton as the "anti-absolutist absolutist" (335) whose "resistance to tyranny produces something that looks very much like a recipe for tyranny" (338). One has to like a book that ends so elegantly where it began, with those twin rebels Satan and then Eve, who in "Milton's political universe. . . acts like Milton" (341), who himself was, "of America's party, without knowing it" (343). The book ends with a seven page conclusion meditating on the "thousand natural shocks" from 1517-1688 that have driven this study of the illiberal roots of liberalism, which has sought to subject the "liberal tradition" to a "salutary embarrassment" about its origins (348), with a caution--from a self-described liberal--that "[c]ontemporary Liberalism looks especially unpersuasive when it mimics, as it not infrequently does, the intolerant, exclusivist, identitarian politics characteristic of the non-democratic, anti-meritocratic, virtue parading, evangelical True Church" (349). The error lies in mistakenly treating Liberalism as "a worldview rather than a tool for governing worldviews" (350).

This is one of the best books I have ever read and one from which I have learned so much new about authors that I love and teach and about figures I barely knew in historical context. The book will provoke readers to contemplate the terms of their own faiths (or absence thereof), while revealing how various histories, when more fully understood, animate the world we live in today, as the unending battle for rights to the title of "liberal" rages on in the unfolding histories of literature, government, doctrine, and freedom. What a monument (though a homely and familiar one) of humanist scholarship and cultural criticism. Seventy-five pages of notes and an eleven-page, pretty darned detailed index dutifully close out the magnificent show.​