Thomas Traherne,Thomas Hobbes,and the Rhetoric of Realism

Abstract

Thomas Traherne has often been seen as a mystic detached from the turbulence of his period. Recent scholarship has attempted to place him more firmly in context. This article contributes to this trend in arguing that Traherne's late works, especially Commentaries of Heaven, were shaped by the pressure of responding to Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan. Though Traherne makes only one direct reference to Hobbes, his idiosyncrasies in thought, argument, and mode of expression are all fundamentally influenced by the need to counter Hobbes's account of ethics, metaphysics, and language. Traherne is particularly concerned to assert and display an ardent realism against Hobbes's nominalism. In doing so, he creates a complicated play of rhetorical figures, especially abusio or catachresis, as embodying theological commitments. This both places Traherne more clearly against the background of the intellectual history of the period in which he lived, and demonstrates his particularity as a writer.     

Secular apocalyptic and Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure (1895) makes ironically secular use of the imagery of the New Jerusalem and of unregenerate Babylon in the Book of Revelation. His purchase on the text is mediated both by Bunyan's Pilgrim’s Progress, a childhood favourite, and hymns such as ‘Jerusalem the Golden’ translated from Bernard of Cluny's De Contemptu Mundi. Avoiding the traditions of anti-Catholic interpretation, and of explicitly political readings which identify Babylon and the mysterious ‘number of the beast’ with particular historical adversaries and tyrants, Hardy uses the biblical text sardonically to demonstrate the inadequacy of escapist dreams and institutional religion and to explore problems of poverty and ambition complicated by sexuality and its cynical exploitation.     

Thomas Mann und Luther

At the center of Sophocles’ Antigone is a struggle to reconcile personal beliefs with the needs or dictates of society. At no time is such a struggle more relevant than in periods of war, so it is not surprising that new adaptations of Antigone cluster around periods of armed conflict, whether between nations or within a single nation itself. In Luis Rafael Sánchez’s The Passion of Antígona Pérez (1968)—the subject of this essay—the nation or territory in question is one not typically featured in Western anthologies of drama: Puerto Rico, in the troubled possession of the United States.     

Thomas Laycock and a trophic nervous system

A short introduction is given to Thomas Laycock (1812-1876), and attention drawn to the development of neurological understanding in the nineteenth century. The main text describes a postulated part of the nervous system, the trophic, which was thought to govern nutritive functions of the body. Thomas Laycock appears as a lone figure in British medicine in giving serious consideration to a trophic nervous system. His discussions are based on clinical observations but his theories are speculative. He devised an instrument (an aesthesiometer) which he hoped would identify abnormalities of the trophic nervous system. The demise of a trophic nervous system is described with quotations from Charcot and Gowers and the use of the word trophic in current practice is mentioned.     

Thomas Fitzherbert's reason of state

Thomas Fitzherbert's two-part Treatise concerning Policy and Religion (1606, 1610) was a rebuttal of unidentified Machiavellians, statists or politikes and their politics and policies. The work was apparently still well-regarded in the following century. Fitzherbert's objections to ‘statism’ were principally religious, and he himself thought the providentialist case against it unanswerable. But for those who did not share his convictions, he attempted to undermine Machiavellism on its own ground. Like both ‘Machiavellians’ and their opponents, he argued by inference from historical examples, but with a particularly copious knowledge of historians ancient, medieval and modern to draw on. Equally, however, he deployed the principles of speculative (principally Aristotelian) ‘political science,’ as well as theology and jurisprudence, to demonstrate that the kind of knowledge that Machiavellians required to guarantee the success of their ‘reason of state’ policies was simply unobtainable. A particularly striking strategy (perhaps modelled on that of his mentor and friend Robert Persons) was Fitzherbert's attempt to demonstrate, on the Machiavellians’ own premises, that they advocated policies which were very likely to fail, and would be visited with divine punishments sooner as well as later, whereas policies that were compatible with faith and morals were also much more likely to succeed, even judged in purely human and ‘statist’ terms.