Prospero and Caliban in Gibeon: Spiritual discernment and The Tempest’s covenantal materialism

Sam Kaufman

My paper begins from the premise that The Tempest’s incessant uncertainty about the location of the power of the moon marks its reception of Galileo’s instantly famous 1610 telescopic observations of the mountainous and pitted lunar surface. If the moon was mere matter like the earth, whence and wherefore its influence, if any? The play sees the ensuing materialism as both a political and a theological problem, demanding the reconciliation of providential action with practical politics. While traditional theories of mystical monarchy provided one nominal solution, the lability of spiritual powers in the person of the material “airy spirit” Ariel, who has served both Prospero and Sycorax, represents this solution’s failure. Like much 17^th-century political philosophy, the play represents several attempts to build up a new materialist politics via revived versions of Stoicism and Epicureanism, but these attempts fail. One way to explain these failures is through the traditional theological problem of the discernment of spirits – the distinction between spiritual experiences or events due to God and the devil – which could theoretically serve as an immanent means to discern providence in action. I will argue that Ariel’s lability also confounds simplistic forms of discernment, instead demanding an aestheticized form of discernment that avoids the risks of elitism or sensuality through a modification of covenantal theology that stresses the importance of suffering undertaken by both parties, a suffering which exceeds Stoic and Epicurean theorizations. As a side product, Prospero’s Machiavellianism is potentially resolved through appeals to a covenantal form of politics and a Lutheran understanding of demonism as spiritual trial. But more significantly for this seminar, the play faces providence through a covenantalism that is capacious enough to accommodate its terms over time to the maturations of its parties, in particular their changing understandings of their selves and the universe. My paper will suggest how the biblical story of Gibeon triangulates the miracles of the play, covenantal theology, 17^th-century political thought, and 17^th-century responses to Galileo. What I call “covenantal materialism” is the play’s cautionary refusal to build its ethics, à la Stoicism and Epicureanism, on a reductive materialism whose basis seemed to be currently changing, but to rely instead on the imaginative and voluntaristic capacities of its parties.

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Bio:

My thesis began as a study of poetry’s variable role in framing the competing epistemic claims of early modern disciplines. A few years and a couple of abandoned chapters on Donne and Marlowe later, I’m completing a more reasonably focused dissertation on how Shakespeare (Midsummer vs Tempest) and Webster (The Duchess of Malfi) received Galileo’s lunar observations – secularizing, or not, and in what ways. The lunar observations’ scientific and cultural particularities make strange familiar stories of disenchantment, prompting quite idiosyncratic reimaginings of the relationship between the natural/philosophical, theological, political, and aesthetic. For example, sex is a huge part of the story – big surprise.

Next up, if the grant gods smile, a postdoc studying the interplay between philosophical and theological conceptions of spirits (from holy to material to demonic) in Shakespeare.

This paper is a reframing of a piece of the dissertation.