Abstract
Whether Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Epipsychidion—a Platonic poem on love addressed to the patriarchally imprisoned Theresa Viviani or “Emily”—receives praise or blame has generally been determined by two focal passages: a secular sermon on free love and a planetary allegorical thinly veiling his own imbroglio. This essay re-reads Shelley’s 1821 work drawing on two recent arguments: Stuart Curran’s Dantean call to take the poem’s Florentine narrator seriously as a character, not just as an autobiographical cypher, and Colin Jager’s outline of Shelley’s move beyond the assumptions of his professed atheism after 1816. Based on the poem’s structure and imagery, the paper argues that Epipsychidion critiques the false sense of revolutionary ascent and dualistic escape offered to Emily, who is commodified and erased by the narrator’s egocentric, “counterfeit divinization of eros” (Benedict XVI). Turning from this Radical Enlightenment Platonism, the poem momentarily realizes an embodied, hylomorphic romantic union akin to the Christian nuptial mystery of two becoming “one flesh” (Mark 10:8). This ideal, however, collapses back into solipsism when the narrator cannot understand or accept love as a “unity in duality” (Benedict XVI). This paper thus claims Epipsychidion as a post-secular inquiry into the problem of love whose philosophic limits and theological horizons are both surprising and instructive. It also reclaims Shelley as a phenomenological poet who can open up the world to Christian and non-Christian readers, one whose Platonic and Dantean formation lend him an openness to transcendence and one whose countercultural path through life makes him wary of inhumane appropriations of religion.
Highlights
Studies of the relationship between Christianity and England’s most idealistic and intellectual poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, have been definitive
This paper claims Epipsychidion as a post-secular inquiry into the problem of love whose philosophic limits and theological horizons are both surprising and instructive. It reclaims Shelley as a phenomenological poet who can open up the world to Christian and non-Christian readers, one whose Platonic and Dantean formation lend him an openness to transcendence and one whose countercultural path through life makes him wary of inhumane appropriations of religion
Shelley’s antipathy for what he mocked to Benjamin Robert Haydon as “that detestable religion, the Christian,” imbrues Stuart Curran’s classic study Shelley’s Cenci: Scorpions Ringed with Fire
Summary
Studies of the relationship between Christianity and England’s most idealistic and intellectual poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, have been definitive. My argument is that Shelley examines and questions, the Radical Platonism of the lyrical voice, whom I will refer to as the “Florentine.” This is an autobiographically inflected character whose function is not primarily expressive or confessional, but rather emblematic of a philosophic position Such an approach is similar to Alastor (1816) in which the main character is reflective and critical both of Shelley’s own past self and of Wordsworth [42]. This rupture in form underscores a psychic shift in the Florentine friend from what the philosopher Martin Buber terms a relational and mutual I-Thou encounter to a quantifying and instrumentalizing I-It assessment [51] This syntactical breach, which makes Emily available as an object, enables the narrator to launch his rapturous Platonic ascent from her. He does so with a difference, as the gazing Florentine connects each corporal item with a new stage of transcendent inebriation: The Brightness
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