In the storm Lear is obsessed with his double-dealing daughters. Even when he addresses the storm, his thought is that it owes him nothing, unlike his daughters. Yet there are some shifts. For the first time, Lear knows the Fool as a suffering human being:
Lear. [to Fool] How dost my boy? Art cold?Then he becomes aware that this situation is one that happens to many others, those who up to now have been in his background, the homeless wanderers on the roads and in the towns, for whom he has not given a thought before. Now that he is one of them, he can see them as people. He stays outside long enough to extend his new-found compassion to them:
I am cold myself. (III.ii.68-69)
Lear. Poor, naked wretches, whereso'er you are,He is not only aware of these homeless ones, he recognizes the obligation of rulers to send some of what the rich do not need to help their misery. Gloucester comes to a similar realization after his own disaster: "So distribution should undo excess,/And each man have enough" (IV.i.73-74) Through their own experience, both men learn compassion.
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta'en
Too little care of this! Take physic [medicine], pomp [ruler];
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux [excess] to them,
And show the heavens more just. (III.iv.28-36)
This priming of Lear's compassion readies him to take advantage of what comes next. The hovel has an occupant already, who comes out when disturbed by Kent and the Fool. He wears only a dirty blanket, calls himself "poor Tom," and raves about "the foul fiend" whom he sees everywhere. He looks like what today we would call a homeless mentally ill person.
"Tom" is actually Gloucester's first-born son Edgar, hiding from his father. Edgar is the victim of a plot by the father's illegitimate second son Edmund, who has forged a letter in his brother’s handwriting plotting the father’s death; thus the naive Gloucester believes that Edgar sought to kill him. Edgar's desolation and fear now is only half put on, for he has turned from being Gloucester's heir to being a disguised fugitive in a matter of hours.
Explicit reference to Christian images starts with Lear's reaction to seeing Tom--i.e. Edgar in disguise. Lear immediately projects his own desolation onto Tom. "Have his daughters brought him to this?" he asks in apparent seriousness. Lear himself has been on the verge of madness; now "Tom" is showing Lear his own path-to-be. Beholding this wretch Lear exclaims:
Lear. ...Is man no more than this? Consider him well. Thou ow'st the worm no silk, the beast no hide, the sheep no wool, the cat no perfume. Ha! here's three on's are sophisticated! Thou art the thing itself; unaccomodated man is no more but such a poor, bare forked animal as thou art. Off, off, you lendings! come, unbutton here. [Tearing off his clothes.] (III.iv.107-114)Man, who has dominion over all creatures, is himself naked before the elements, unlike the animals. The emphasis is on what man is in essence, stripping all that comes to him by way of his privileged station. Shaheen detects here a reference to Psalm 8:4: "What is man, that thou art mindful of him, and the son of man that thou visitest him?" The Psalmist is emphasizing man's exalted station "a little lower than God" (8:5, in the Geneva Bible of Shakespeare’s time; King James has "lower than the angels") vis a vis the animals over whom he has dominion. Paul quotes the Psalm at Heb. 2:6-7, applying it to Christ, who lowered himself to man's station "a little lower than the angels." Directors of the play sometimes have Edgar stand with outstretched arms during Lear's speech, to emphasize the parallel with Christ. Another Biblical verse I find reminiscent of this speech of Lear's is John 19:5, Pilate's "Behold the man"--"Ecce Homo" in Latin: Jesus alone, his fate in Pilate's hands. Edgar and Christ are indeed comparable here, for both appear to be heading for their deaths, persecuted by their people, dressed in rags, and stripped of their noble birth. This is an image that Lear, too, can readily identify with.
A short time later Gloucester comes in concerned for Lear's well-being. He does not recognize his son Edgar, but what he sees impresses him enough to say the next day:
Gloucester. I’the last night’s storm, I such a fellow saw"Worm" here is, according to Shaheen, a reference to Psalm 22:6, "I am a worm and no man, a shame of men and the contempt of the people." This is the dark Psalm that begins "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?", Christ's words on the cross, and continues with "They pierced my hands and my feet" (22:16) and "They cast lots upon my vesture" (22:18)--lines held to be predictions of the Messiah's fate.
Which made me think a man a worm. (IV.i.34-35)
Sheehan also draws attention to the worm as an image in the book of Job. Job says, "I have said...to the worms, thou art my mother, and my sister" (Job 17:14). Another verse goes: “Behold, he [God] will give no light to the moon, and the stars are not pure in his sight. How much less man, that is a worm? and the son of man, which is a worm?” (Job 25:5-6). (I cite Verse 5 as it appears in the Geneva Bible, the translation that Shakespeare used. Here the word "give" suggests the same line of thought as the "owest" in Lear's earlier speech: Just as God has given the moon no light of its own, he has given man no hide, silk, or perfume. The parallel is lost in King James: "Behold even to the moon, and it shineth not.")
Whatever "son of man" means in Job, in the New Testament (Heb. 2:6), the reference is to Christ. The worm is another image for "unaccommodated man," small and miserable without all the things he has made, yet thereby capable of redemption. Job is one who becomes such a worm. Jesus, too, is such a worm, as we shall see shortly--but in Gnosticism, not orthodox Christianity, in which Jesus has no need of redemption.
Yet Job is one who rises up even above the God who tests him, as Jung argues in Answer to Job (1969b). Jung imagines God's experience of Job, the man he has had Satan deprive of everything--his wealth, his family, and his health--just to satisfy a bet. Job is even noble than God himself, God must be thinking; thus God resolves to be such a "worm" himself.
This image of man as a worm also appears in Gnosticism, most clearly Irenaeus’s summary of Saturninus, who preceded the Ophites. For him the world was created by seven angels, offspring of the most high. (This corresponds to the Hebrew wording in Genesis, which says that the world was created by Elohim, a plural form meaning “the gods,” but which in Genesis takes singular adjectives and pronouns). These angels saw an image on high and tried to create a being like that image. But the being “was unable to stand erect because of the angels’ impotence, and rather writhed on the ground like a worm” (Layton 1978, 167). The higher power, in whose likeness the being was made, takes pity on it and sends it a spark of spiritual power, which makes it rise up.
The Ophites, as summarized by Irenaeus, expand further on this myth:
They [the rulers] came together and they formed a human being who was immense in breadth and length. But since it could only writhe upon the ground, they carried it to their parent. But wisdom (Sophia) was causing this so that she might empty it (Ialdabaoth) of the secretion of light, so that it might not rise up against those that were above it by having power. And when it breathed a spirit of life into the human being—they say—it was inadvertently emptied of power. (Layton 1987, 176)The creation of humanity is the means by which Sophia can take away what little power Ialdabaoth has, which he might use against those higher than he. In giving spirit to humanity, he loses that power. (The being’s size, I think, a reference to the Jewish doctrine of Adam Kadmon, the first human being, envisioned as a spiritual being of great size.) We have already seen what happens next: he pulls the light out in the form of Eve, from whom Sophia can easily remove it. Later she gives the light back to at least some of humanity, for it is in virtue of its possession that Sophia saves Noah (178). Possibly it came back in by way of Eve’s offspring Seth and Norea (178). For our purposes, what is important is that it is precisely humanity’s worm-like condition, its inability to rise on its own, that is the occasion for its receiving the light and rising up. The greatest poverty is the occasion for the greatest gift.
This spiritual attractiveness of the most naked position is what draws Lear to the disguised Edgar. It leads Lear to begin tearing off his clothes, making himself such an "unaccomodated man." Lear is himself willing to live the human essence, humanity stripped of all the protection with which its intelligence has learned to shield itself. (Earlier, with Regan, Lear had denounced precisely this humanity deprived of the superfluous: "Allow not nature more than nature needs/Man's life is cheap as beast's" (II.ii.455-456).) Lear has learned to raise himself up spiritually, just as Jung's Jehovah had exalted himself by becoming Christ on the cross. As though with these parallels in mind, the play adds disaster to disaster, as with Job and Jesus.
The Gospel of Thomas, another text from Nag Hammadi—this one perhaps earlier than the Gnostics, but used by them (De Conick 1996, 144f)--also uses the image of removing one's clothes, at Logion (Saying) 37:
His disciples said, "When will you become revealed to us and when shall we see you?" Jesus said, "When you disrobe without being ashamed and take up your garments and place them under your feet like little children and tread on them, then you will see the son of the living one and shall not be afraid." (Robinson 1988, 130)The disciples will see Christ as he really is when they have separated themselves from the things of this world, including even the body. What is more, they must do this without shame, like “little children,” those who are naked without shame, as Adam and Eve were before they tasted the forbidden fruit, but in a new way (De Conick 1996, 144f). Then one is in the Kingdom of God. The mystic’s imaginal ascent to the divine, after the most rigorous and lengthy ascetic preparation, is one way in which this may be achieved (De Conick, 145). The crucified Christ is another. Lear's gesture of removing his clothes, emulating Edgar, continues the divestment that started when he gave away his lands. It represents the inner process of stripping off the world, that the spirit might manifest. He is approaching the "nothing" which Cordelia first mentioned, the “beginner’s mind” to which the Zen initiate aspires.
The Gospel of Truth takes Lear's image of disrobing further:
Jesus appeared. He was nailed to the cross; he published the edict of the Father on the cross. O such great teaching! He draws himself down to death though life eternal clothes him. Having stripped himself of the perishable rags, he put on imperishability, which no one can possibly take away from him. (Robinson 1988, 42).Jesus became naked without shame, and then put on other clothing, imperishability. Just so, Lear's suffering is the road to his salvation, not only to self-knowledge but to contact with a divinity superior to his ego, a divinity within that makes him part of that divine world even while on earth. In this process Ego itself partly dissolves, in moments of madness. The result, when Ego has returned but with a new connection to Self, is near the end, when Cordelia and he are captured by the sisters' victorious forces. Cordelia despairs, but Lear is joyful: they will be "Gods spies" [sic] in prison, taking upon themselves "the mystery of things" (V.iii.17). I will discuss this scene in more detail later. Lear is not simply excited about being reunited with Cordelia; he has had a transformation for which the play has been gradually preparing us, through the Fool.
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