Providential Order Research Articles

Hope and Critical Theory

In the first part of the paper I consider the relative neglect of hope in the tradition of critical theory. I attribute this neglect to a low estimation of the cognitive, aesthetic, and moral value of hope, and to the strong—but, argue, contingent—association that holds between hope and religion. I then distinguish three strategies for thinking about the justification of social hope; one which appeals to a notion of unfulfilled or frustrated natural human capacities, another which invokes a providential order, and a third which questions the very appropriateness of justification, turning instead to a notion of ungroundable hope. Different senses of ungroundable hope are distinguished and by way of conclusion I briefly consider their relevance for the project of critique today.

Dating the Devil: Daniel Defoe's Roxana and The Political History of the Devil

In 1724 Daniel Defoe published his last novel, Roxana, and began writing works on occult, including Political History of Devil (1726), A System of Magic (1726), and An Essay on History and Reality of Apparitions (1727). Maximillian E. Novak has suggested that meager financial success of Roxana may have led Defoe to abandon (Daniel Defoe 624) and then turn his attention to answering contemporary attacks on orthodox Christianity and Bible (Defoe 94). shift from novels to treatises appears rather decisive, but critics have suggested possible links between Defoe's novels and his work on occult. In view of Richard Titlebaum, Defoe's work on demonology casts fascinating light on Defoe's fiction (6); however, he makes no mention of Roxana. In Realism, Myth, and History in Defoe's Fiction, Novak proposes that Defoe began toying with a notion in Roxana he would later develop fully in Political History--namely, means by which human beings transform themselves into devils. Even more than Defoe's previous novels, Roxana focuses on internal state of its protagonist and traces her moral decline (105, 100). David Blewett similarly claims that the attention paid to interior drama of moral deterioration distinguishes Roxana from Defoe's earlier novels, and he examines subtle means by which preys on Roxana's mind, a theme developed by Defoe in Political History (130, 139). Novak and Blewett point to a central feature of Political History--the view that hell is more an internal reality than a physical place of fire and brimstone. These readings help us interpret one of most notable junctures in Defoe's writing career; however, they suggest more than they substantiate. This essay argues that rhetorical and formal, as well as thematic, concerns link Roxana and Political History. By examining Roxana in light of Defoe's writings on occult, and vice versa, we can understand motives and methods of each text more clearly. Political History does not merely develop themes introduced in Roxana; continuation of these themes from novel to treatise indicates an inability on Defoe's part to put to rest, via medium of prose fiction, attacks by deists and freethinkers on orthodox Christian views of providential order and reality of hell, of which were foundational to Defoe's religious outlook. differences between two texts reveal serious challenges their author faced in writing about Devil in a time when a dual complication was occurring: belief in Devil was dwindling at very moment when, in Defoe's view, polite society and learning had all but allowed Devil to cease using magical methods suitable to credulous eras and to rely on normal-seeming customs and institutions of society, religion, politics, and learning to do his work for him. This situation required a risky strategy. By avoiding superstition and belief in magic that appeared in contemporary treatises on occult, and by seeking to expose normal-seeming characteristics of society as work of Devil, Defoe in his own way risked eradicating Devil. existence of Devil created controversy because believers in Defoe's lifetime considered it a crux of religious thought at same time as skeptics questioned rationality of such beliefs. While Defoe had, as Novak points out, moved far from notions of a horned and cloven-footed devil (Daniel Defoe 659), Devil was an undeniable reality for Defoe and an indispensable element in his system of belief. Writing in Political History, Defoe explains: The Truth is, God and Devil, however opposite in their nature, and remote from one another in their place of abiding, seem to stand pretty much upon a level in our faith: For as to our believing reality of their existence, he that denies one generally denies both; and he that believes one necessarily believes both (20). …

'UN SOIN QUE JE ME DOIS': SELF-REGARDING VIRTUES IN ROUSSEAU'S DIALOGUES'

The article sets itself three interconnected tasks: first, to provide a fresh interpretation of the ethical and political status and meaning of Rousseau’s Dialogues, both independently and in the light of Rousseau’s other writings; second, to offer a revisionary commentary on Jean Starobinski’s reading of the same text, which it holds to be fundamentally misconceived; third, to show how the quest for a private good in the context of Stoic and Epicurean horizons defines that work’s moral possibilities. The Dialogues convey no aesthetic retreat from Rousseau’s earlier philosophy, as Starobinski argues, but rather its vindication as an ongoing task for moral liberty. Through his principal alter ego, ‘Jean-Jacques’, Rousseau practises a rationally disciplined spiritual hygienics for personal autonomy, one advanced by the cultivation of marked dispositions through the virtues appropriate to his condition. Wisdom, justice, simplicity, temperance and prudence are exercised in the pursuit of the ‘vie simple et laborieuse’ by which ‘Jean-Jacques’ services the purity of intention that wills according to a Providential order.

The "Herbert Butterfield Problem" and its Resolution

Herbert Butterfield (1900-1979)' published The Interpretation of History in 1931, a year after became a Lecturer in University of Cambridge.2 became Professor of Modern History in university in 1944, same year in which published The Englishman and His History.3 This discussion addresses what J.G.A. Pocock referred to as das Herbert Butterfieldproblem-that is, problem of ascertaining precise relationship between arguments presented in these volumes.4The Interpretation of History of 1931 (hereafter, The Interpretation) was a sustained critique of motivation, methods and fallacious conclusions of Whig practice of staging historiographical narratives anachronistically so as to produce a ratification of present, or justification of a position currently espoused by author.5 The term Whig, as Butterfield used it in 1931, referred to nineteenth-century school of historiography that praised progress, protestantism, and liberty and that generally attributed triumph of such principles to beliefs and activities of generations of politicians.6The Interpretation argued that judgments concerning both progressive and reactionary individuals and movements in historiography were anachronistic, in that they were based on general propositions held by historian in present. To correct this error Butterfield argued that historiography should not be based upon general propositions. Basing historiographical narratives on general propositions purporting to be of universal and unchanging validity was seen as inevitably placing them on an anachronistic basis. In The Interpretation Butterfield required historian to represent past but to avoid doing so on basis of a view or of past human experience and action. Historiographical narration should be free of interpretative standpoint and equally open to possible subsequent interpretation. For Butterfield the historian carries us away from world of general ideas. It is not for him to give a philosophical explanation of what happens in time and space; any that writes ought to be as capable of varied philosophical interpretation as life itself seems to be ... historian's explanation ... is not a piece of general reasoning, and if at point we need further elucidation all that can do is to take us into greater detail.7 It seems appropriate to refer to this as Butterfield's postulate. Butterfield subsequently used term technical history to denote this methodological concept.8As might be expected, such a neutrality postulate was replete with problems, however valid Butterfield's strictures towards historiographical anachronism. How is historian to abridge for purposes of narration and explanation without interpreting? Butterfield argued that we are right to demand of historian that he shall not change and purport of historical story in mere act of abridging it. No theory should intrude. As detailed complexity is abridged, there should be no loss of the purport and tenor of whole.9 Abridgment was to be accomplished without interpretative perspective, even though sympathy and imagination are indispensable.10 Such was Butterfield's prescribed antidote. Yet exercise recommended requires more than a specific statement of concrete, individual, and particular. It also requires a general idea of meaning of the whole that historian is called upon not to distort. Indeed, Butterfield drew attention to basis of his historical thinking when asserted that while historical research does not provide proof of existence of a providential order, it nevertheless provides evidence of how profound and mysterious are its workings.In The Interpretation no attempt was made to reconcile advocacy of a non-interpretative neutrality dealing exclusively with individual, concrete and particular, and Butterfield's actual belief in a providential order to which historical process is subject. …

Heritage and forgery: Annio da Viterbo and the quest for the authentic

This paper examines the role of forgery in constructs of heritage from the Renaissance to modernity. It focuses on the work of the 15th-century Dominican Annius of Viterbo, and explores the impact of these constructs on the symbolism of topography in Rome and elsewhere. It argues that during the Renaissance forgery was not always conceived as a dishonest act but sometimes as a necessary process to disclose a higher providential order. This order, that centred on faith in divine grace, constituted a religious and cultural tradition that was all-pervasive and open to renewal. Rather than undermining this tradition forgery was paradoxically put to the service of its disclosure. Denied such an assumed tradition the modern view of forgery is understood in essentially instrumental terms, as pure fabrication and re-invention. The paper argues that Annius's approach to forgery provides an intriguing example of how historiographical enquiry was seen as virtually coterminous with creative and imaginative thought. It suggests that the changing relation between concepts of forgery and heritage in history is symptomatic of a more general transformation from a mytho-historic world-view to historiographical objectivity.

Heritage and forgery: Annio da Viterbo and the quest for the authentic

This paper examines the role of forgery in constructs of heritage from the Renaissance to modernity. It focuses on the work of the 15th-century Dominican Annius of Viterbo, and explores the impact of these constructs on the symbolism of topography in Rome and elsewhere. It argues that during the Renaissance forgery was not always conceived as a dishonest act but sometimes as a necessary process to disclose a higher providential order. This order, that centred on faith in divine grace, constituted a religious and cultural tradition that was all-pervasive and open to renewal. Rather than undermining this tradition forgery was paradoxically put to the service of its disclosure. Denied such an assumed tradition the modern view of forgery is understood in essentially instrumental terms, as pure fabrication and re-invention. The paper argues that Annius's approach to forgery provides an intriguing example of how historiographical enquiry was seen as virtually coterminous with creative and imaginative thought. It suggests that the changing relation between concepts of forgery and heritage in history is symptomatic of a more general transformation from a mytho-historic world-view to historiographical objectivity.

Gospel and Scripture: Rethinking Canonical Unity

It is widely believed that the Christian Bible is merely an anthology of the religious literature of ancient Israel and the early church, and that to speak of its ‘unity’ or ‘coherence’ is no longer possible. But biblical unity is still an issue where one seeks to understand the texts in their relation to God, and there are two main ways in which this issue is typically presented: biblical unity may be grounded in the process of divine inspiration which is believed to have generated these writings, or it may be grounded in a theory of providential ordering. The problem with both approaches is that they fail to reflect on the relation between scripture and the gospel, the proclamation of what God has done in and through Jesus and his Spirit which, for Christians, lies at the centre of the testimony of both Old and New Testaments. In his letter to the Galatians, Paul struggles to articulate an evangelical hermeneutic for scriptural interpretation, over against opponents who hold no less ‘high’ a doctrine of scripture than he does. This evangelical hermeneutic is not simply imposed on the texts from the outside, but identifies fundamental elements in the dynamics of these texts, notably the promise/law polarity. In broad outline, Paul’s argument can serve as a model for our own attempts to rethink scriptural unity.

A Sermon by the "Queen of Whores"

Daniel Roxana seems to resist interpretation, though it has been scrutinized for its likeness to a trade manual, a spiritual autobiography, and a 'woman's novel. Leopold Damrosch, for instance, remarks with some exasperation on his attempt to define Roxands inner logic: We cannot know exactly what Defoe thought he was doing in this enigmatic novel, but we do know that it was his last. As one critic puts it, 'Defoe stopped when he reached the end. '2 One prominent debate concerns the novel's religious allusions, as when Roxana reflects: So possible is it for us to roll ourselves up in Wickedness, until we grow invulnerable by Conscience. 3 At issue is the influence that Puritanism exerted on the text. Polarized opinions on this subject emerge in two seminal studies of Defoe. In the monograph Economics and the FYction of Daniel Defoe (1962), Maximillian Novak presents Defoe as guided by the religious precepts of Puritanism; Novak, thus, is not loath to pronounce Roxana guilty of two economic sins: avarice and luxury.4 Contrary to Novak, Ian Watt claims in The Rise of the Novel (1957) that Defoe substitutes the literary schema of formal realism for Puritanism's providential order, making his writings ethically neutral. 5 Roxands unsatisfactory plot denouement, Watt says, shows that Defoe prefers and certainly achieves the inconsequential and the incomplete.6 Recent studies tend to view Roxana as informed by Puritanism, particularly in its sober tone, even while they suggest that the novel is a departure from strict religious discourse toward aesthetic expression. As Malinda Snow comments in Arguments to the Self in Roxand' (1994), Defoe's

Sterne among the Philosophes : Body and Soul in A Sentimental Journey

Sterne among the Philosophes: Body and Soul in A Sentimental Journey Martin C. Battestin To borrow Dr Johnson's epithet, Laurence Sterne, no less than his masterpiece, was decidedly an "odd" case.1 On the one hand, Tristram Shandy (1759-67) is a funny book—the most inventively impudent work of bawdy wit in the language. Yet it is the first novel in English seriously to explore the disturbing implications of the new empiricist philosophies of Locke and Hartley and Hume—a narrative that, both in the absurdities of its formlessness and in the solipsism and impotence of its characters, seems profoundly modern.2 Leo Spitzer once remarked that the middle decades of the eighteenth century comprised "the great caesura" in the history of Western thought3—the moment when a harmonious tradition of classical and Christian thought that began with Pythagoras came to an end and the Modern age began: the age that has discarded belief in spiritual realities and providential order in favour 1 James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. George Birkbeck Hill and L.F. Powell, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), 2:449. 2 For the argument that Tristram Shandy, formally and thematically, is the first "modem" work in English literature, see Martin C. Battestin, The Providence of Wit: Aspects ofForm in Augustan Literature and the Arts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), pp. 241-69. 3 Leo Spitzer, Classical and Christian Ideas ofWorld Harmony: Prolegomena to an Interpretation of the Word "Stimmung, " ed. Anna Granville Hatcher (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1963), p. 76. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 7, Number 1, October 1994 18 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION of materialism, subjectivism, and (with respect to the polity) egalitarianism . Sterne would have appreciated the aptness of Spitzer's metaphor: the evidence of his novels, Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey (1768), suggests that, more than any other of his literary contemporaries, he had pondered the meaning and the consequences of the new philosophy , and that, more than most others, he was aware of the "caesuras" in the lines of our life, the constant interruption of our felicities. "Pray, my dear, quoth my mother, have you notforgot to wind up the clock?"4 A "hétéroclite ... creature in all his declensions," as Tristram says of Yorick (p. 27), Sterne in his own life acted out the contradiction of indecent foolery and troubled contemplation of our mortality that characterizes his greatest work. He was Tristram, shandying it away with cap and bells astride his hobby horse; and he was Yorick, the thoughtful priest whose memorial in that novel is solid blackness filling the page to the very margins. Yorick, of course, takes his name from the king's dead jester in Hamlet, whose grinning skull, tossed up by the gravediggers , moves Shakespeare's hero to meditate on our mortality. Thoughts of mortality would have occupied Sterne ever since that morning when, as a student at Jesus College, Cambridge, he woke to find the bedclothes soaked with blood from his hemorrhaging lungs. In Tristram Shandy the winding down of clocks and the threat of closure are evils to be avoided at all costs. But in 1767, as he began A Sentimental Journey—his last work and one he hoped would be, indeed, his "Work ofRedemption"5— Sterne resurrected Yorick, whom he had buried in Tristram Shandy, and sent him to France on a journey his author had taken more than once in the vain hope of recovering his health. There Yorick would try to puzzle out the question of who—or what—he is: is he a man whose sympathetic feelings prove he has a soul worth saving, as Sterne's favourite Latitudinarian divines, Tillotson and Clarke, had argued in refuting Hobbes? Or was he merely a sophisticated piece of machinery controlled by his appetites and reducible at last to dust, as the philosophes so eloquently reasoned, who befriended Sterne in the salons of Paris and whose cleverness he admired? For Sterne, as he wrote this work in the last few months of his life, it was a question of no small moment. 4 Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman: The Text, ed. Melvyn New and Joan New...

History and Martyrological Tragedy: The Jewish Experience in Sholem Asch and Andre Schwarz-Bart

In Isaiah 43:11-12, God, after instructing His servant, Israel, that beside Me there is no saviour, imposes the awesome obligation: Therefore ye are my witnesses . . . that am God. A rabbinic midrash or exegesis offers this meaning: When you are my am God, and when you are not my am, as it were, not God.(1) The biblical text and response embody the potentially tragic crisis for both individual and community who may be called upon to the [of God]--Kiddush haShem--by suffering martyrdom, the act of witnessing whose imperative is declared in Lev. 22:32: Neither shall ye profane my Holy Name, but will be hallowed among the children of Israel: am the Lord which hallow you. While the act of Kiddush haShem affirms God's spiritual sovereignty, there also seems little doubt that a major consequence of martyrdom bears directly upon the necessity of witnessing God's salvational history grounded in and shaped by the Covenant, exile, testing, suffering, faith, sin and punishment, expiation and messianic hopes of redemption. God's divine primacy, as the biblical narratives (Exodus, above all) and their commentaries attest, is manifested in His power as a Lord of history. Thus, when the crisis of whether or not to the Name appears in times of persecution and ideological strife, the very meaning of history itself is placed in theological jeopardy. When you are not my witnesses, the midrash insists, I am, as it were, not God. To remove God from history is, then, a desecration of the Name--Hillul haShem--perhaps the most shattering violation of all. For while the failure to witness cannot affect the ontological nature of God or thwart His providential design, it can, for those seeking order and purpose in the apparent chaos of history, either destroy it or render it so problematic that what remains is a form of existential despair. And yet the grand irony is that there is also an inherent tragic knowledge in the reality that countless individuals have witnessed with their lives to the honor of God and the integrity of His revealing historical plan. The putative martyr is nevertheless faced with a tragic dilemma: if the individual fails to witness, God and divine history are betrayed; but to pass the test of sacrifice and to sanctify God's presence in the historical moment means death. As Max Weber has termed it, martyrdom is the of absolute ends.(2) Moreover, it is an ethic fraught with a genuine tragic content which has been thematically exploited by both secular and religious writers, most markedly from the seventeenth century to the present.(3) This ethic energizes the very form of martyrological drama and other genres whose appearance and popularity in Judeo-Christian culture characterize the response of the artist to those historical and ideological clashes which rarely admit of a reconciliation or solution except through death. Most significantly, martyrological tragedy in particular becomes a theological commentary on both the tragic and redemptive nature of history itself. Conceived as either an irony-laden providential order or a random process upon which meaning must be subjectively conferred, history inevitably creates those situations which demand the need for a total commitment to some abiding or absolute truth. Martyrdom is thus a fated condition of the historical process. The testimony incarnated in the martyr's death is the tragic ground of this process. From this perspective, individual artistic statements about the nature of God, martyrdom, and history independent of any formal dogma, may be fairly--if loosely--called literary theologoumena or, in generic terms, the trauerspiel (mourning-tragedy), whose influence on the development of a non-Aristotelian esthetic of tragedy Walter Benjamin seminally analyzed in 1928. A central tenet of Benjamin's study is that the royal martyr-tyrant tragedies of seventeenth-century German baroque drama embody the shift from the classical mythos of heroic sacrifice to the realm of history. …

Story and history: narrative authority and social identity in the eighteenth-century French and English novel

Private lives and public stories personal ordering and providential order negotiating reality individualism and authority the seduction of the self from private narration to public narrative textualizing the self the necessary other - the dialogical structure of the self self-ish narration and the authorial self the emergence of literary authority exemplification and the authoring of utopia ironizing history the great scroll of history self emplotment and the implication of the reader.

'So Elegant a Web': Providential Order and the Rule of Secular Law in Early Nineteenth-Century Upper Canada

'So Elegant a Web': Providential Order and the Rule of Secular Law in Early Nineteenth-Century Upper Canada

“A Checker-Work of Providence”: The Shaping of Robinson Crusoe

“ A C H E C K E R - W O R K O F P R O V I D E N C E ” : T H E S H A P I N G O F R O B I N S O N C R U S O E LISA MARGARET ZEITZ fJL 'h eranks of those whom Sir Leslie Stephen once described as “not too proud to take a rather low order of amusement” 1 have multiplied in recent years. Marked neither by a particularly humble stance nor by a predilection for second-rate entertainment, Defoe’s admirers have discovered in Robinson Crusoe everything from “ the elementary processes of political economy” 2 to “oral fixation and the accompanying intense anxiety.” 3 From the plethora of publications, however, two major camps have emerged: one, led by Ian Watt and Maximillian Novak, emphasizes economic themes and natural law,4 and the other, headed by J. Paul Hunter and G. A. Starr, focuses on the theological background, especially Defoe’s debt to spiritual autobiography and the “ Providence” tradition.5 Critics and scholars seem to appeal, then, to either the secular or the religious character of the period, or, as we have seen most recently, acknowledge both. Melvyn New, for example, argues that the meaning of Defoe’s fiction lies in the author’s “moving more or less gracefully between economic opportunism and the providential order, recon­ ciling as best he can these ultimately antithetical world views” ;6 John J. Richetti has found the use of “the secular-religious antithesis . .. the most prominent guide to the uses of fiction for its readers during the early eighteenth century.” 7 What all these approaches have in common is, of course, a respect for the enduring interest of Defoe’s work. Still, at times it seems that we are asked to thank the critics for that interest, rather than the author himself; Robinson Crusoe appears to be successful in spite of Defoe, rather than because of him. The pronouncement of Arthur W. Second in 1924 that Robinson Crusoe “imitates life in its very shapelessness” 8 has long been an accepted critical assumption, and one which discourages a close examination of the structure of the novel. There has also been a tendency to lump all of Defoe’s narratives together in terms of both theme and literary technique (or lack thereof). This tendency, as E. M. W. Tillyard has pointed out, has resulted in a failure to see that “as a work of art Robinson Crusoe is in a different and a higher category. It is constructed with a closeness that the other novels English Studies in Canada, ix, 3, September 1983 (rightly enough in view of their nature) do not attempt.” 9 It is the relation­ ship between that closeness of construction and the providential order which inspires it, and which it, in turn, conveys, that is the subject of my discussion. While I will allow the Oxford editor’s contention that it is “easy to believe Defoe wrote too hastily to control his materials completely,” 10 I shall follow the course of the more difficult belief that there is sustained design in Robinson Crusoe. Although I have pitched my tent in the “ Providence” camp, my examina­ tion of Crusoe differs from that tradition of criticism in one fundamental respect: rather than identifying Biblical allusions, theological issues raised, and the presence of elements of “ Providence” literature and spiritual auto­ biography, I shall attempt, instead, to show how Defoe, through the special use he made of some of the above features, constructed a fiction which was itself a first model of the providential world it imitated. I am only too aware that readers sometimes find in works of the past values which they them­ selves cherish in the present. Modem readers value carefully structured and unified works of art, even after Finnegans Wake (perhaps because of it), and may be guilty of “ filling in the symbolism.” I have tried to avoid this trap by initially calling attention to the critical significance of Defoe’s insis­ tence that we notice repetitions and parallels in his work. Part of his in­ sistence derives from the conventions of spiritual...

“The Grease of God”: The Form of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction

Recent criticism of the eighteenth-century English novel points to a providential world view as the “proper conceptual context” for these fictions, but it would be an error to see the fictions of Defoe, Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett as uniformly or unhesitatingly committed to the providential order. These authors constructed fictions, characters, and structures in response to the historical actuality of the age, in transition from the Christian to the secular world view. It is this transition and its effect on the providential world view that provide the conceptual context for the fiction of this period. Critics, having recognized the novel as the fictional form of a secular age, must also recognize the significance of the romance as that fictional form best depicting the providential order. In eighteenth-century English fiction the romance is gingerly displaced from the theoretical center of narrative by elements of form now identified with the novel.

The Providential Order of the World. "The Gifford Lectures," 1896-97. Alexander Balmain Bruce

<i>The Providential Order of the World. "The Gifford Lectures," 1896-97</i>. Alexander Balmain Bruce