Lear. ...When I do stare, see how the subject quakes.People's attitudes make adultery wrong; all sex is natural, Lear is saying. In nature, of which humans are a part, sex without marriage and inconstancy of sexual partners are the rule. "Let copulation thrive," he proclaims. The fruits of adultery are no worse than those of marriage--just compare Lear's daughters with Gloucester's bastard son Edmund. (And it makes no difference that Lear's approval of Edmund is premature; the point is that he is no worse than the others.)
I pardon that man’s life. What was thy cause?
Adultery? [Lev. 20:10]
Thou shalt not die--die for adultery? No!
The wren goes to’t and the small gilded fly
Does lecher in my sight. Let copulation thrive,
For Gloucester’s bastard son was kinder to his father
Than were my daughters got ‘tween the lawful sheets.
To’t, luxury, pell mell, for I lack soldiers. (IV.vi.105-115)
Lear has the same lenient attitude toward the "dogs obeyed in office" of his next long speech, which we looked at in the previous section:
Lear. None does offend, none, I say none; I'll able [warrant] 'em.We cannot even say that Lear is filled with the spirit of forgiveness here. He is denying that these people have done anything to be forgiven for!
Take that of me, my friend, who have the power
To seal th'accuser's lips. ... (V.vi.164-166)
We might be tempted to write Lear off as simply overreacting to his earlier overpunitiveness. But Cordelia and the Gospel of Truth are similar. First Cordelia, in response to Lear's expectation that she will be exacting revenge on him:
Lear. If you have poison for me, I will drink it;And the Gospel of Truth:
I know you do not love me, for your sisters have,
as I remember, done me wrong,
You have some cause, they have not.
Cordelia. No cause, no cause. (IV.vii.71-75)
When light had spoken through his [Jesus’s] mouth, as well as his voice which gave birth to life, he gave them thought and understanding and mercy and salvation and the powerful spirit from the infiniteness and sweetness of the Father. Having made punishments and tortures cease--for it was they which were leading astray from his face some who were in need of mercy, in error and in bonds--he both destroyed them with power and confounded them with knowledge. (Robinson 1988, 46)Punishment and torture, as I read this last passage, keep people in the state of fearfulness and terror that the Gospel of Truth earlier described as the state of ignorance of the Father. They are instruments of the demiurge, who, another text, the Tripartite Tractate, tells us, is the one who created a paradise and a hell. But one has to get beyond punishment to reach the state of calm. In that state there is no need for divine punishment, because nothing threatens the Self as it does the ego. From the viewpoint of the whole, everything simply is what it is. It is not even a question of forgiving wrongs, because, as all these texts make clear, there is no wrong to forgive; there is only ignorance and “lust for power,” in the words of the Tractate (Robinson 1988, 84). From this perspective, Lear did not wrong Cordelia; he was ignorant of what he was doing; he only felt a threat to his power. This is not to say that he did not do wrong--but that is from the perspective of the ego, which needs in this world to defend itself from unjust attack. For another example, take Edmund, the play's most calculatingly vicious character; even to himself he is a great villain, as he concedes at the end. But from the perspective of the Self, he is no more villainous than society itself, which discriminates against children whose only crime is their illegitimacy.
Cardenal has a song in which he faults the Catholic God for sending people to hell:
If…He wants to send me to devildom, S’el me vol metre en la diabliaNelli (1976) has found borrowings from the Cathars in this song. At the beginning, he considers this "wicked world" an adequate substitute for the other-worldly Hell. For the Cathars, the souls who are not saved simply return in a new incarnation, there to try again, or they are damned to the souls of animals. This world is thus both purgatory and hell in one. Then at the end, which I have not quoted, Cardenal prays to Lady St. Mary that God put “both father and children”—i.e. everyone--"where St. John is" (“e.ls meta lay on esta sans Johans”). St. John, Nelli points out, was the disciple most revered by the Cathars.
I’ll say to him, “Lord, mercy, Ieu li dirae: “Seinher, merce, let that not be! ”non sia!”
For in the wicked world Qu’el mal segle I was tormented all my days; tormentiei tot mos ans And so preserve me, if You please, E gardas mi, si us plas, from the tormentors.” del tormentans.” ...I say that He fails his own …Qu’eu auziran lo mieu plaideiamen;
If He thinks to destroy them Si los cuja delir or send them to hell... ni enfernar…
He should then be gentle and solicitous Qu’el deu esser dous e multiplicans
To take to Himself the souls of the dead. De retener las armas trespassans. He should dispossess the devils, Los diables degra dezeretar
Then He would have more souls, E t agra mais d’armas and more often, e plus soven
And the dispossession A.l dezeretz would please all people, plagra a tota gen
And He himself could permit Himself it. Et el mazeis pogra so’o perdonar,
For it would be to my pleasing , Car per mon grat that He destroyed them all trastotz los destruiria,
Since we all know Pos tutsabem that He could absolve Himself for it... c’absolver s’en poiria…
(Press 1971, 301) (Goldin 1973, 295)
Cardenal, like the Gospel of Truth and Lear, seems here to be against divine punishment. He speaks of the "devils" who lead us to do wrong; he is blaming them, not humanity, for humanity’s sinfulness. Hence if God wants people to be better, rather than punishing people, he should get rid of the devils. Today this is an archaic way of speaking; our "devils" are our built-in survival mechanisms that at our current social level no longer are socially productive. They include archaic bits of DNA, like the so-called "lizard brain" of self-serving instinct that can override more social instincts. It also includes social structures which no longer are the most just available, such as the system of primogeniture, which at the time at least ensured that estates were not broken up into a myriad of small holdings which could not be run as efficiently as one large estate. In our own day, outmoded social structures would include environmentally destructive practices that in earlier times might have been less harmful.
From a Gnostic perspective, it is not hard to see why a god would not want to remove such kinks in the system, at least not without our participation. If he does the job, then we are not ourselves consciously changing anything; nothing happens to our consciousness, we have been deprived of part of our freedom, and the same god will have to keep stepping in time and time again. For the Gnostic, freedom is the means to consciousness, and consciousness the means to freedom, in the sense of a will that chooses knowingly. As a species, these are the most precious things we have. And if people must suffer, it makes no sense for this suffering to be off in a world which people even doubt exists, and where people are trapped in their mistakes forever. The most effective hell is one here on earth. Even then, it is more like a purgatory. As a species, release from archaic patterns is always a possibility, either for us now or for humanity in the future. And as individuals now, suffering is what brings knowledge—first, of how to change ourselves, so as to bring about less suffering; and second, of how little the things of this world are worth, even our bodies, except as a means toward deeper knowledge of ourselves.
People who think that Cordelia's death is nihilistic, indicating the lack of transcendence, should consider this: If Cordelia were saved, the insensitive social system that led to her death would escape censure. What is most important is the stimulation of our imagination, sensitivity and thoughtfulness. Then perhaps we shall be better able in the future to avoid the massacre of the innocents--holocausts which we have seen enough of this past century. The future, at least, is a transcendent fact for us mortals. In the world of the play, moreover, and for each individual in the audience who partakes of that world, there is another transcendence as well, away from the ups and downs of this world altogether (which we shall examine in the section after next).
Yet I find in neither the Gnostics nor the Cathars (nor Shakespeare, for that matter) any such doctrine as the hope for human moral progress as a species. But the second part of what I have been saying, about the path of individual Gnosis through suffering, I find in the text from Nag Hammadi called the Tripartite Tractate. It explains that the first humans’ disobedience of the demiurge, eating the “double fruit” (Robinson 1988, 88) of good and evil, actually was "a work of providence," allowing them to find "in a short time...the enjoyment of the things which are eternally good, in which is the place of rest" (89). For that, the spirit ordained that
man should experience the great evil, which is death, that is complete ignorance of the Totality, and that he should experience all the evils which come from this and, after the deprivations and cares which are in these, that he should receive of the greatest good, which is life eternal, that is, firm knowledge of the Totalities and the reception of all good things. (Robinson 1988, 89)Humanity’s situation is that of being out of the demiurge's garden, but within matter, where it experiences “the great ignorance,” ignorance of God, as well as numerous evils, deprivations, and cares. On the one hand, it is infected with a “lust for power” (84), but on the other it has a desire for knowledge of the truth. From the one, and from its ignorance and all the general imperfections of matter, it experiences numerous evils, deprivations, and cares. By such experiences, however, it may learn to recognize and freely choose what is truly good, which is not of this world. As with Lear, there is the sequence: ignorance, suffering, knowledge.
Actually, there is a fourth term to this sequence, before ignorance. Lear is ignorant at the beginning of the play, but he thinks he knows what he is doing. Then later he discovers that he really did not know. The first stage is that of supposed knowledge; the second, then, is the knowledge that the supposed knowledge was really ignorance.
Since knowledge, supposed and higher, appears in two of the stages, we might imagine two trees of knowledge, in two different paradises. The first is in the demiurge’s garden, and the tree is one he planted. The second is in the paradise of the Unknown God. The Gospel of Philip, another Gnostic text from Nag Hammadi, spells out this possibility.
This garden is the place where they will say to me, “…eat this or do not eat that, just as you wish.” In the place where I will eat all things is the tree of knowledge. That one killed Adam, but here the tree of knowledge made men alive. The law was the tree. It has power to give the knowledge of good and evil. It neither removed him from evil, nor did it set him in the good, but it created death for those who ate of it. For when he said, “Eat this, do not eat that,” it became the beginning of death. (Robinson 1988, 153)The tree that killed Adam was the law of “Eat this, do not eat that,” imposed by the law-giver, who gave him the death-sentence when he disobeyed and ate from it. Such law claims absolute validity but is only the idea of the law-giver, a distortion of the truth. And since it comes from an external source, it gets its authority, like that of the Mosaic law that followed, by way of fear and punishment. Yet at the same time, eating of its fruit makes the external internal. It awakens the conscience, and in the world of matter gives us the power to identify things as good and evil in our experience. The other tree has the knowledge that saves, a spark of which has been inside the knower all along. Its fruit, we know from the Gospel of Truth and Cardenal, is the Christ. This tree, for the Gospel of Philip, puts the knower in a place beyond evil and death. In such a place, there are no prohibitions, because everything is filled with light; it is the place of rest where Lear has suddenly found himself.
And how do we get from one to the other? First we experience good and evil in terms of preconceived ideas, from the voice of the lawgiver, be it a jealous demiurge, our personal parents, or a culture. Then in life we may, if we fail to follow the lawgiver’s advice, find ourselves experiencing good and evil directly, in anguish and ignorance, such that we do not even know what to name our suffering. This experience, our suffering, leads, if we let it, to our openness to a second knowing--a second "fruit," so to speak--from another world, by which we may transcend suffering and receive peace and wisdom.
In pictorial art, I think, an example of a similar experience as Lear’s is Hieronymous Bosch’s famous painting, The Garden of Earthly Delights. It is too detailed to reproduce meaningfully as a whole; one part must serve, showing naked young people cavorting around a giant fountain (Fig. 41; below, Dixon 2003, 257). Here copulation certainly appears to thrive, judging from the amorous couples with no hint of evil on their faces. Art historian Laurinda Dixon suggests that this garden represents a future Eden, as a result either of the alchemists’ success in finding the cure for all diseases, or of the second coming of Christ (2003, 216-217).
There are numerous signs of the alchemists' art in the painting, of which Dixon (2003) gives examples. One is the man doing a handstand in front of the fountain; such figures also appear in alchemical drawings representing the distillation process, which turns things upside-down, the lower becoming the upper and then vice versa. The image is that of the upside-down man, whom we have already considered in relation to Blake and the Hanged Man card in Tarot (Figs. 21-23, in section 4). In another detail (Fig. 42; Dixon, 252), the legs and trunk of an upside-down, partially submerged figure form the shape of a “Y”; in alchemy that letter signifies the hermaphrodite, a union of opposite substances, as an engraving by Maier indicates (Fig. 43; Dixon, 252; description from de Rola Golden Game 114).
Figure. 44, left.Coitus or coniunctio. From Rosarium philosophorum 16th century, Stadtsbibliothek Vadiana, St. Gallen, Switzerland, Ms. 395a, Fol. 34r. Figure 45, right. Solutio perfecta, from Tresor des tresors, 17th century, ms. 975, Bibliotheque de l'Aarsenal, Paris.
Then there are Bosch’s numerous amorous couples, seeking what in alchemy was called “coitus” or “coniunctio” in a watery context (Fig. 44 above left; Dixon, 234) .The alchemists saw the process happening in their retorts, when two substances dissolved and combined (Fig. 45 above right; Roob 2001, 442-443). Some of Bosch’s couples are what alchemy called “the black man and the white woman” (Fig. 46 below; Roob, 199), another instance of the union of opposites, which the alchemist used to achieve his sought-after result.
In Lear's case, the "union of opposites" is evidenced in the very diatribe we are examining. He now has Cordelia as a living inner figure; her perspective, which he now understands, speaks in this "mad scene" in a confused, dreamlike manner, juxtaposed against Lear's former ego-state, now projected on other authority-figures of his, or more pointedly, Shakespeare's own--time. The result of this inner marriage is a dissolution of Lear's defensive ego-state, the only one he has, which will allow him to experience the inner divine. He is already part-way there; he will later speak, like a Renaissance, mystic, of the "mystery of things". In Bosch, this result is expressed by the image of large pearls--as in the expression "pearl of wisdom" existing with the figures in a proportionately large mussel shell (Fig. 47, below).
Figure 47. Detail of Hironymus Bosch, Garden of Earthly Delights, center panel, Flemish c. 1480.
Besides the small figures, there is the fountain itself, huge in comparison with the people playing around it. Those ignorant of alchemy could appreciate its resemblance to baptismal fonts of the time, for example the one in te cathedral of Bosch's hometown of 's-Hertogenbosch, installed in 1492 (Fig. 48, below left, from Harris 1995, 196). In this setting the fountain is a symbol of rebirth. But according to Dixon the fountain suggests the alchemist's flask or retort, and as such is a vessel facilitating transformation. In the various types of alchemical retorts drawn at the time of still preserved in museums, one type especially resembles Bosch's fountain (Fig. 49; center, photo by Ela Howard, 2003). This type was called the "double pelican," because each side was like the bill of a pelican, a bird thought to revive its dead young with its own blood (Fig. 50; at right, Dixon, 163); it thereby served as a symbol for Christ.In relation to both Catholicism and alchemy, then, the fountain connotes rebirth, the difference is that in alchemy the rebirth suggested was by means of a process and a kind of mariae of opposites, while in Catholicism it was a gift conferred one one through the agency of the Church.
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But Paradise regained, in the context of orthodoxy, was not typically portrayed in such hedonistic terms, as opposed to devout souls singing God’s praises. To me Bosch’s painting suggests the Gnostics’ “place where I will eat all things” of the Gospel of Philip, the original paradise, higher than the demiurge’s, from which the spirit in humanity first came and to which those with Gnosis, such as Lear in this scene, will return.
William Blake, I believe, also reached the depths of Lear, Cardenal, and Bosch. He summarizes his ideas, which he says were based on visionary experiences, in his prose work A vision of the last judgment. I offer a few quotations from his complex thinking. He says:
Men are admitted into Heaven not because they have curbed & govern’d their Passions or have No Passions, but because they have Cultivated their Understandings. The Treasures of Heaven are not Negations of Passion, but Realities of Intellect, from which all the Passions Emanate Uncurbed in their Eternal Glory. The Fool shall not enter into Heaven let him be ever so holy. Holiness is not the price of Enterance into Heaven. Those who are cast out are All those who, having no Passions of their own because No Intellect, Have spent their lives in Curbing & Governing other People’s by the Various arts of Poverty & Cruelty of all kinds. Wo, Wo, Wo to you Hypocrites…(Vision p. 87; Blake 1953, 398)As for Hell:
In Hell all is Self Righteousness; there is no thing there as Forgiveness of Sin; he who does Forgive Sin is Crucified as an Abettor of Criminals, & he who performs Works of Mercy in Any shape whatever is punish’d &, if possible, destroy’d, not thro’ envy or Hatred or Malice, but thro’ Self Righteousness that thinks it does God’s service, which God is Satan. (Vision p. 93; Blake 1953, 399-400).Hell is the world of life under the accusations of the self-righteous, who are simply following Satan’s. Blake contrasts Satan, the Creator God, with Jesus.
Thinking as I do that the Creator of this World is a very Cruel Being, & being a Worshipper of Christ, I cannot help saying: “the son, O how unlike the Father!” First God almighty comes with a Thump on the Head. Then Jesus Christ comes with a balm to heal it. (Vision p. 94; Blake 1953, 400)Given Jesus’s loving nature, what is the Last Judgment, when Jesus sends all to Heaven or Hell?
The Last Judgment [will be] when all those are Cast away who trouble Religion with Questions concerning Good & Evil or the Eating of the Tree of those Knowledges or Reasonings which hinder the Vision of God, turning all into a consuming fire….Its vision is seen by the [Imaginative Eye] of Every one according to the situation he holds. (Vision p. 70; Blake 1953, 386)The Last Judgment is a state of mind, not an event at the end of time; yet it is that, in that in entering that state of mind we enter the eternal. Eating of the tree of Good & Evil, Blake says, is part of Hell. We must understand what that eating consists of: “The Combats of Good & Evil is Eating of the Tree of Knowledge. The Combats of Truth & Error is Eating of the Tree of Life” (Vision p. 86; Blake 1953, 398). As in the Gospel of Philip, there are the two trees. For Blake the God who planted the first tree, and then threw Adam and Eve out of Eden and gave Moses the ten commandments, is the same as the serpent who counseled Eve to eat. This fits in with Jewish tradition, as exemplified by the Book of Job. There Satan is a tempter, but one specifically authorized by God to tempt. It is the same in Genesis. God sets up a test which humanity is bound at first to fail, if only for the sake of its own freedom. But that God is Urizen, and the only way out is to go beyond this Web of Religion.
…
Such is the Last Judgment—a deliverance from Satan’s Accusation. Satan thinks that Sin is displeasing to God; he ought to know that Nothing is displeasing to God but Unbelief and eating of the Tree of Knowledge of Good & Evil. (Vison p. 86; Blake 1953, 398)
If that god is reason, how could the way out be through intellect? Blake contrasts two forms of intellect, good science and bad science, one tied to the material world and one that operates in the world of imagination. Someone might ask him, “When the sun rises, do you not see a round disk somewhat like a Guinea?” (A guinea is a large round coin, like a silver dollar.) Blake answers, “No, I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly Host crying, ‘Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord God Almighty.’” Then comes his final distinction: “I question not my Corporeal or Vegetative eye any more than I would question a Window concerning a Sight. I look thro’ it & not with it” (Vision p. 95) The eye provides a window by which to see beyond the corporeal to the real. It is the same eye by which Gloucester sees after his blinding: “I see feelingly.”
Blake does not illustrate his point in the work from which I have been quoting. Yet other works cover the same ground, notably Milton: a Poem, in which Blake imagines the spirit of Milton returning from the dead, correcting his former errors, and smashing the web of religion. Two dramatic etchings illustrate the theme.
Figure 51. Milton casting off the "robe of the promise." William Blake, Milton: a Poem, 1811..
First (Fig. 51 above; Erdmann 1974, 234), Milton casts off his garment and stands naked. Here it is not the garment of the body that he discards but what Blake calls “the robe of the promise,” “the oath of God,” in other words Urizen’s promise of protection in this world and the next.
Then in the next etching (Fig. 50 above; Hamlyn & Phillips 2000, 256) Milton confronts Urizen himself, whom he knows to be Satan. Urizen is standing in the River Jordan, “pouring on/ To Milton’s brain the icy fliud”—a kind of negative baptism, designed to numb rather than fill with spirit. Yet as a result of Milton’s wrath the tablets of the law are already falling away, and Urizen himself is starting to sink. Then, as Blake imagines him, Milton “took of the red clay of Succoth, moulding it with care/ Between his palms…and on the bones/ Creating new flesh on the Demon cold.” (21:7-14). Milton is recreating Urizon, the beginning of his transformation.
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