Ljungquist, Kent

English

eGrove (Univ. of Mississippi)

Studies in English, New Series Volume 4 Article 23 1983 Stock, The Holy and the Daemonic from Sir Thomas Browne to William Blake Kent Ljungquist Worcester Polytechnic Institute Follow this and additional works at: https://egrove.olemiss.edu/studies_eng_new  Part of the American Literature Commons, and the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Ljungquist, Kent (1983) "Stock, The Holy and the Daemonic from Sir Thomas Browne to William Blake," Studies in English, New Series: Vol. 4 , Article 23. Available at: https://egrove.olemiss.edu/studies_eng_new/vol4/iss1/23 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Studies in English at eGrove. It has been accepted for inclusion in Studies in English, New Series by an authorized editor of eGrove. For more information, please contact egrove@olemiss.edu. R. D. STOCK. THE HOLY AND THE DAEMONIC FROM SIR THOMAS BROWNE TO WILLIAM BLAKE. PRINCE­TON: PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1982.395 pp. $27.50.Although a simplistic view would distinguish between demons and angels as malevolent and beneficent agents respectively, the daemon carries a less determinate moral value because of its myste­rious intimacy with supernatural power. Morally ambivalent outside an orthodox Christian context, the daemonic suggests force, uncanni­ness, a paradoxical melding of awe and fear. An occult source of energy, the daemonic can provoke fascination or vehemence; in its ancient setting the daemon served a positive or active, rather than a diabolical function. The classical concept of the daemon has been revived in almost every literary epoch, as such diverse scholarly stud­ies as Robert H. West’s The Invisible World and Charles I. Patterson’s The Daemonic Experience of John Keats abundantly demonstrate. Tracing further the literary progeny of the ancient daemon, R. D. Stock’s study provides a lively, informative, and engaging survey of  the non-rational side of the Enlightenment.Brief in his treatment of the classical daemon, Stock assays a full-scale examination of religious experience in eighteenth-century literature. Besides the primary texts he explicates with care  and skill,  Stock draws heavily from Rudolf Otto’s The Idea of the Holy (1917). Richly describing spiritual horror, Otto distinguishes two manifesta­tions of numinous experience: the daemonic suggests divine energy lapsing into terror; the holy signifies the numen as it acquires moral attributes. The numinous inevitably carries an emotional intensity alternating between anguish and reverence; man, confronting God as the wholly other, undergoes a ravishment or captivation of the soul. Stock’s analysis of religious experience thus  challenges both compla ­cent fideism and uncritical adherence to theological dogma. Within the twin poles of the holy and daemonic, his chosen texts meaning ­fully oscillate.His individual analyses will hardly win unanimous approval. Donne’s “The First Anniversary,” according to Stock, is no distressed lament over the onset of the new philosophy, but an orthodox expres ­sion of man’s degeneracy resulting from original sin. Neither emotion­ally false nor a meretricious portrait of a sick soul, Edward Young’s1Ljungquist: Stock, The Holy and the Daemonic from Sir Thomas Browne to WilliaPublished by eGrove, 1983196 REVIEWSNight Thoughts emerges as an intensely personal, highly rhetorical expression of the aesthetics of terror. Likewise, the “glooms” of James Thomson’s The Seasons carry the agreeable excitement of numinous experience. Turning to fiction, Stock finds equal measures of religious wonder and horrifying dread. With its terrifying storms and assorted misfortunes, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe proffers a daemonic quest for God’s providence. Possessing no such orientation  toward divine  will,  Richardson’s Lovelace becomes impelled by daemonic energies  beyond rational ken. Although such spiritual onslaughts may not comport with modern skepticism about religion, the holy and dae­monic pervade the literature of the Age of Reason. Even as lurid a yarn as Matthew G. Lewis’s The Monk wins kudos from Stock, who suggests that its powerful sense of evil would do justice to any religious  education.Singled out for Stock’s special scorn, the Whig critics see the  Enlightenment as a climax in man’s inevitable passage from supersti­tion and ignorance to reason and logic. Puncturing such a stereotyped  view, Stock offers Johnson and Hume as the century’s most authentic thinkers, the latter exposing in his blistering attacks on prejudice and  fanaticism man’s unquenchable craving for wonder. A rare book for a  university press to have published in light of its avowed religious sentiments, Stock’s study stands as a bracing exception to W. B.  Yeats’s claim that “all’ s Whiggery now.”Kent Ljungquist Worcester Polytechnic Institute2Studies in English, New Series, Vol. 4 [1983], Art. 23https://egrove.olemiss.edu/studies_eng_new/vol4/iss1/23

Stock, The Holy and the Daemonic from Sir Thomas Browne to William Blake

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Stock, The Holy and the Daemonic from Sir Thomas Browne to William Blake

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