Agnology - a study in human ignorance

A Realist Reading of Shakespeare’s The Tempest

In many ways, the Renaissance needed a New World to justify itself. The prospect of a world untainted by centuries of medieval ecclesiastics and philosophers was enough to make the sages of Europe see the Americas through distinctly rose-colored glasses. Europe, according to one sermon of the time, was about to lose the Kingdom of God and see it given over to a “Nation” across the sea. The natives of this new land presented a complex picture to the European imagination: one both wild and pristine. As Anthony Pagden described it, the colonialists would have said, “these ‘savages’ are not like us as we now are … they are like us as we once were.” William Shakespeare’s The Tempest provides an insight and critique of this novel idea of the noble savage. The Europeans might wish to use the New World as an opportunity to create a new society after the image of the Renaissance, but The Tempest presents several challenges to this idea. According to Shakespeare, the idealized view of the New World fails to take into account both the crude nature of the native peoples and the moral decrepitude of the Europeans themselves.

Sunday mornings I'd leave her and go to mass. Now here was the strangest exercise of all! Leaving the coordinate of the motel at the intersection of the interstates, leaving the motel with standard doors and carpets and pluming, leaving the interstates extending infinitely in all directions, abscissa and ordinate, descending through a moonscape country side to a—town! Where people had been living all these years, and to some forlorn little Catholic church up a side street just in time for the ten-thirty mass, stepping up on the porch as if I had been doing it every Sunday for the past twenty years, and here comes the stove-up bemused priest with his cup (what am I doing here? says the bemused expression) upon whose head hands had been laid and upon this other head other hands and so on, for here off I-51 I touched the thread in the labyrinth, and the priest announced the turkey raffle and Wednesday bingo and preached the Gospel and fed me Christ—

Back to the motel then, exhilarated by—what? by eating Christ or by the secret discovery of the singular thread in this the unlikeliest of places, this geometry of Holiday Inns and interstates? back to lie with Doris all rosy-fleshed and creased of cheek and slack and heavy-limbed with sleep, cracking one eye and opening her arms and smiling.

"My God, what is it you do in church?"

What she didn't understand, she being spiritual and seeing religion as spirit, was that it took religion to save me from the spirit world, from orbiting earth like Lucifer and the angels, that it took nothing less than touching the thread off the misty interstates and eating Christ himself to make me mortal man again and let me inhabit my own flesh and love her in the morning.

The idea of an apocalypse is usually associated with violence, war, and chaos—both natural and otherwise. But not every ending of the world is carried out like some nuclear Ragnorak. Some deaths are violent, but the saddest deaths are often the ones witnessed over the passing of many diseased and impotent years. And it is this sort of death which Walker Percy observed clinically in the apocalyptic middle-to-late years of 20th century America. For Percy, the most obvious sign of this apocalypse was the pervasive, obsessive way in which Americans wanted merely to desire and to find something ultimately fulfilling and worth wanting. Desire was (and is) a precious commodity, something both cheaply bought and rarely durable. The cliché of American life is the idea of the search, the journey to self-hood and self-expression and self-worth and self-immortalization. There must be something more, no? This is enough to qualify an American as “spiritual.”

In his essay, “Notes for a Novel About the End of the World,” Percy introduced his idea of a fictional protagonist who lives in the sterile modern world, ends his workday as a technician “feeling more disembodied than usual.” Passing by an old empty church, a strange figure emerges from the shadows of the ruins—a weary pilgrim, flawed and wayfaring much “like the whisky priest in Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory.” The stranger confronts the technician: “‘You look unwell friend.’ ‘Yes,’ replies the technician, frowning. ‘But I will be all right as soon as I get home and take my drug, which is the best of the consciousness-expanding community-stimulating self-integrating drugs.’”

The problem at the center of Percy’s novel, how man can find a sense of this-worldly pleasure and meaning, is set against the stark images of scientific sterility. More, who believes in beauty even if he cannot discern its origin, knows that he must find a way to re-integrate the soul with the body. He knows beauty is something more than mere matter, but nevertheless material. In other words, a beautiful woman or an opera by Mozart are simultaneously ordinary and extra-ordinary. The entire modern paradigm, in which nature and super-nature must not touch, is undercut by Percy’s idea of the sacraments. As Percy would say, the modernist looks at something like the act of love-making and sees only the hormones, the chemical interplay, the exchange of bodily fluids—even the sensory pleasure which the “participants” experience can be analyzed in scientific terms. But in the Christian view, love-making cannot be merely the exchange of fluids and chemicals. Actions, things, people, even ideas—all these common “things” have a supra-natural dimension, as John Desmond points out. “The Catholic sacramental view of reality verified the absolute spiritual integrity of the particular, of things, allowing them to be what they are, no more and no less.” Paradoxically, this paradigm answers the nominalist and the modernist, who wanted to divorce “things” from ultimate (supernatural or formal) meaning.

The strange modern pursuit of the natural world and its pleasures is for Percy a smokescreen to hide evidence of a panicked retreat from the supernatural. The Cartesian world is always trying to guard the natural against the incursions of the supernatural. It would seem the worst possible nightmare for the modernist would be a world in which natural objects have “superstitious” power. The paradox of the modern is that the natural world becomes degraded in the process of protecting it from the spiritual world. Percy, as a Catholic, saw evidence of the spiritual in very common objects: in bread and wine and sex and wooden crosses and words spoken by man.

The prospect of authority residing in a physical-metaphysical institution like the Church has always driven the modernist mad. But for Percy this is the inevitable end—the denouement at which the entire plot of the Western world is about to arrive. The mere existence of truth or meaning is useless if it cannot be spoken or transmitted by someone with authority. The message “is not enough.” There must be “someone who delivers the news and who speaks with authority.”

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