The turn to religion in Early Modern English studies

Criticism, Wntr, 2004 by Ken Jackson, Arthur F. Marotti

In one sense, Shuger and others pointed out that if we were going to address the alterity of the Renaissance, we would have to fully address religion. But Renaissance religion resists our alterity criticism and thereby reveals the aporetic, philosophical problems hardwired into New Historicism and its organizing respect for alterity, its desire to "speak with the dead." Somewhat paradoxically, the resistance Renaissance religion poses to alterity criticism has spurred, rather than slowed, our historicizing of religion, pushing us, tempting us, it seems, to realize the aporias of our own methodology.

Consequently, the methodology that sought to respect the difference of a distant past actually reveals our proximity to the early modern world, narrowing the gap between the secular and the sacred. Here it might be helpful to return again briefly to Levinas. If Derrida in part derives his understanding of alterity from Levinas, we need to keep in mind that Levinas derives his understanding of alterity from Descartes's very Catholic, Christian notion of the infinite. Descartes, Levinas writes in Totality and Infinity, discovered "a relation with a total alterity irreducible to interiority, which nevertheless does not do violence to interiority--a receptivity without passivity, a relation between freedoms." (57) Descartes's idea of the infinite, in other words, provides a model for Levinas's absolutely "other" outside the thought of the subject. Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley point out that Levinas's idea of "the ethical relation to the other has a formal reseinblance to the relation, in Descartes's Third Meditation, between the res cogitans and infinity of God. What interests Levinas in this moment of Descartes's argument is that the human subject has an idea of infinity, and this idea, by definition, is a thought that contains more than can be thought." (58) The more secular advocates of Levinas, who fear his work will be tainted with "religiosity," stress that this is merely a "formal relation" and that Levinas "transforms" Descartes's understanding of the infinite as God--that is, "substitutes" the other for God. But Derrida, at least, still has troubling and intriguing questions about the nature of this "transformation" and "substitution" that we should attend to more carefully. Derrida reminds us that our desire for the other may not be that distinguishable from the early modern world's desire for the "other." In other words, the turn to religion--in critical theory and in the hyper-historicizing of early modern literary studies--suggests that we may still be more "religious" than we wish to be--even in our most secular of critical methodologies.

Julia Reinhard Lupton has been particularly astute in addressing the "religion" of our critical methodology. For example, she has become increasingly persuasive in cautioning against the tendency to extract religion from our critical discussion, pointing particularly to our "multicultural humanist" habit of viewing the "Christian" or "Jewish" world as "'cultures." This late-twentieth-century tendency arose in part, Lupton points out, to avoid the universalizing impulses of Christian humanism and its most immediate descendant, secular liberalism. For example, criticism steeped in secular liberalism often reads Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice as a piece of irony, its anti-Semitism only a superficial facade that actually demonstrates the flaws of the Christians in the play. This kind of criticism, in other words, has the seemingly unassailable agenda of obliterating differences between Christian and Jew. Lupton reminds us, however, that obliterating differences in this way reinvigorates a certain Pauline universalism (Galatians 3:16) and reveals the "religious" roots of our critical methodology.