The Faith of Emily Bronte's Immortality CreedAuthor(s): Lawrence J. StarzykSource: Victorian Poetry, Vol. 11, No. 4 (Winter, 1973), pp. 295-305Published by: West Virginia University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40001666 .Accessed: 20/12/2010 12:58

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The Faith of Emily Bronte's

Immortality Creed

LAWRENCE J. STARZYK

Abstract. Emily Bronte responds in "No Coward Soul Is Mine" to the question- How demonstrate the immortality of the soul without the traditional basis of religious faith in a world characterized by flux? The narrator of Bronte's poem immediately recognizes that external reality gives the lie to the notion of the soul's immortality, for if existence is subject to endless change and dissolution the soul is perhaps similarly burdened. But to insist that the immortality of the soul is assured on the grounds that a merciful God would not allow the suffering characteristic of this life to continue unabated in the next life is to argue for the soul's immortality on the basis of an illusion. Emily Bronte is therefore convinced that the only acceptable grounds of faith in the notion of immortality must be related to the soul's recognition of the inner presence of the divinity. The thrust of the poem, however, is directed less at the nature of this internal evidence than it is at the nature of the divinity and the life after death. The narrator of Bronte's poem soon recognizes that the distressing implication of the cladogenetic character of existence must not ultimately result in despair of immortality, but that it can be transformed into proof of the soul's continuance. For as Bronte reads the impermanence of existence, it evidences the ineluctable tendency of differentiated existence towards union with the One. Death consequently finalizes the process of flux and individuation by resolving particularized existence in the undivided existence of the divine, of the One.

HER BIRTHDAY note of 1845, Emily Bronte confessed to being "quite contented for myself . . . seldom or ever troubled with nothing to

[do] and merely desiring that every body could be as comfortable as myself and as undesponding and then we should have a very tolerable world of it."1

!Fannie E. Ratchford, Gondal's Queen (Austin, 1955), pp. 192-193. All subsequent references to the works of Emily Bronte will be to the following editions: Five Essays Written in French, trans. Lorine White Nagel, ed. Fannie E. Ratchford (Austin, 1948),

295

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This statement, unusual because it is one of the few personal pieces still extant, has justly been overshadowed by the more famous profession of contentment of that same year, "No coward soul is mine." Both the poem and the birthday note share this in common: they unqualifiedly testify to Emily Bronte's serene acceptance of her situation. The similarity, however, ends there. For while the birthday note explains this contentment in terms of domestic fulfilment, the poem does so in terms of spiritual insight. On the one hand, purely natural or physical means produce the satisfaction which, on the other hand, depends upon purely supernatural or metaphysical considerations. But just as the means are different, so too are the ends. The birthday note describes a woman content with fulfilling her duties and desirous that the world share the same satisfaction produced by industrious labor. As Emily put into practice this sentiment so typically Victorian in its implication of the benefits to be derived from work, she "invited confidence in her moral power."2 Even Swinburne, discerning these sentiments in her literary productions, admitted that it was this "practical compassion which . . . proved her a perfect woman."3

But Swinburne also noted another current in Bronte's writings, that "imaginative passion . . . which made her a tragic poet" (p. 763). The sentiments of Emily Bronte's "No coward soul is mine" depend upon this tragic current. For despite its reassurance of an existence beyond this storm-troubled sphere, the poem undermines rather than affirms the hope that this world can become the tolerable place described in the birthday note. Matthew Arnold was perhaps the first to be struck by the heresy implicit in the immortality poem, and it is indeed curious that a man convinced of religion's materialization in the fact should be so disturbed by Bronte's repudiation of dogmas and doctrines.4 In his poem, "Haworth Churchyard," he writes of Emily by way of comparison with Charlotte :

She, whose genius, though not Puissant like thine, was yet Sweet and graceful ;-and she (How shall I sing her?) whose soul Knew no fellow for might,

hereafter cited as Essays; The Complete Poems of Emily Jane Bronte, ed. C. W. Hatfield (New York, 1941), hereafter cited as Poems; and Wuthering Heights, vol. 11 of The Shakespeare Head Bronte (Boston and New York, 1931), hereafter cited as WH.

2The Shakespeare Head Life and Letters, ed. T. J. Wise and J. A. Symington (Oxford, 1932), II, 273.

^Athenaeum, no. 2903 (June 16, 1883), 763. 4"Our religion has materialised itself in the fact-the supposed fact," Arnold writes

in his "Introduction to Poetry"; "it has attached its emotion to the fact" (Essays, Letters and Reviews by Matthew Arnold, ed. Fraser Nieman [Cambridge, 1960] , p. 239). In Literature and Dogma Arnold complains that religion "has been made to stand on its apex instead of its base. Righteousness is supported on ecclesiastical dogma, instead of ecclesiastical dogma being supported on righteousness" (Works [London, 1903-1904], VII, 293).

LA WRENCE J. STARZYK / 297

Passion, vehemence, grief, Daring, since Byron died, That world-famed son of fire-she, who sank Baffled, unknown, self-consumed; Whose too bold dying song Stirr'd, like a clarion-blast, my soul. (11. 90-100)

Arnold here sums up what is at once so disconcerting yet fascinating about Bronte's poetry in general and the immortality poem in particular: the strange ambivalence of the woman at peace in the domestic serenity of her father's house, yet intellectually rebelling in the private world she fashioned for herself. Incompatible as these facets of her personality appear to be, Emily seemed to have had little difficulty in moving between these two worlds; the solace and enjoyment afforded by the one compensated for the momentary dissatisfactions of the other, and vice versa. This easy discourse between these two realms of existence appears never to have been shattered, even when Emily repudiated the traditional religious creeds which gave solace to man in the storm-troubled sphere of every day existence. We can dismiss this seeming indifference, as so many friends and critics have done, by admitting that she was indeed a law unto herself.5 But this does not answer the more immediate problem I would like to deal with here, namely Emily Bronte's ability to argue the immortality of the soul in a world of flux without the aid of faith.

The first stanza of the poem appears to be orthodox enough. Fear amid the impermanence of the world is allayed by hope in an eternal world beyond:

No coward soul is mine, No trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphere;

I see Heaven's glories shine, And faith shines equal, arming me from fear.

The poetry as a whole gives ample evidence of Heaven's ability and willingness to dispel man's timidity. Kind, merciful, and just (Poems, pp. 89, 102), God assures happiness to those who persevere. At least this is the comforting illusion traditional religion asks us to accept as the solution to the problem of evil in the^ world. Even "A God of hate could hardly bear / To watch through all eternity / His own creation's dread despair!" (Poems, p. 138). It is unreasonable to assume, in other words, that the long agony of human existence will be punished with eternal tears. The frightening thing about this conclusion, however, is that it is not only unwarranted, but ineffectual in dispelling fear. There is no evidence supporting our belief in a

5Ellen Nussey, a family friend, for example, remarks of Emily that "She was in the strictest sense a law unto herself, and a heroine in keeping to her law" (Shakespeare Head Life and Letters, II, 273). See also John Lock and Canon W. T. Dixon, A Man of Sorrow (London, 1965), pp. 371-372.

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merciful God. Empirically, it is just as easy to prove the existence of a God of hate as it is to prove the existence of a God of love. For as surely as heaven shines arming man from fear, hell shines disarming him of joy:

So stood I, in Heaven's glorious sun And in the glare of Hell My spirit drank a mingled tone Of seraph's song and demon's moan. {Poems, p. 196)

But the important question here is not the nature of God or man's position in the cosmos relative to heaven or hell. These considerations confound rather than illuminate man's perplexity. The significant point is the narrator's sudden and unexplained discovery of personal contentment in the storm-troubled sphere generated in large measure by these questions as well as by the cladogenetic character of nature itself. Subject to the destructive forces of space and time {Poems, p. 200), the physical world answers man's request for permanence, certainty, and love with doubt, suspicion, and hate. "So hopeless is the world without, / The world within I doubly prize" {Poems, p. 205). It is therefore within the very soul of man, rather than in the physical world, that man must discover the permanent grounds of existence in general. Were it not for the realization of God's presence within, the narrator would remain a coward soul. It is this divine indwelling which calms the soul:

O God within my breast, Almighty, ever-present Deity!

Life -that in me has rest, As I -undying Life-have power in Thee!

The only verifiable intimation afforded man regarding the divine being is its vitality or life. Since God is eternal life, and since the narrator possesses this energy in his being, he is therefore assured of "undying Life," of immortality.

But to read the poem thus far simply as proof of man's immortality on the basis of divine indwelling is, I think, to miss the significance of Bronte's poem and her work in general. For the second stanza implies more than perpetuity; it specifies the exact nature of that eternal being beyond the troubled sphere. Not only does God dwell in man, but man dwells in God. The very identity of the one is dependent upon the other. Particularized existence finds its analogue in this ever-present deity, and all life, as we shall see, struggles relentlessly to realize itself in this principle of undifferentiated existence.

Now the cowardice experienced by the narrator before his "conversion" can be properly understood not so much in terms of flux or religious doubt, but rather in terms of identity. Failing to discover some analogue of the self in the fragmented world, the soul ultimately finds it in God himself. But until that moment, the soul is beset by fear, doubt, and despair {Poems, p. 223).

LA WRENCE J. STARZYK / 299

"Had I but seen his glorious eye," Bronte writes of this Spirit, ''Once light the clouds that 'wilder me, / 1 ne'er had raised this coward cry / To cease to think and cease to be" (Poems, p. 221). It is interesting to compare this stanza from Bronte's "The Philosopher" with the first stanza of "No coward soul is mine." In both poems, the only effective solvent of the soul's timidity is light or vision, and specifically the insight into the nature of God as indwelling spirit. But in the latter poem, the desire expressed in the former, "To cease to think and cease to be," is far from being the cry of the coward soul. It is

ultimately what existence, properly understood, is all about. Thought and being here both imply determinate, differentiated existence, and union with God demands the repudiation of multiplicity and individuation. For Bronte, God is that being in whom the individual species of creation become intelligible through the denial of particularity.

With respect to thought, first of all, Bronte repudiates in the third stanza of her immortality poem the very issue of human thought in matters of religion. It is here, of course, that Arnold heard the distressing clarion-call of Bronte's poem:

Vain are the thousand creeds That move men's hearts-unutterably vain;

Worthless as withered weeds, Or idlest froth amid the boundless main,

To waken doubt in one Holding so fast by Thine infinity;

This statement appears to contradict an earlier assertion in stanza one that "Faith" was responsible for arming the soul from fear. Medieval theologians were agreed that faith and the creeds of the church were inseparable, the former being defined by the latter. St. Thomas, for example, considered theology to be faith seeking understanding.6 But for Bronte the dogmatizing and philosophizing involved therein served only to obscure man's under- standing of the object of his beliefs or worship. Any attempt at comprehend- ing the divine in terms of human thought was tantamount to heresy. Not only did it make what was indivisible heterogeneous, it also prevented natural virtue. The creeds of traditional Christianity were, therefore, nothing more than "Relentless laws that disallow / True virtue and true joy below" (Poems, p. 122). But even if these creeds could insure happiness in the next life to those accepting them, there was no assurance that such bliss would be absolute and unadulterated. "It is true," Bronte admits, "that there is a heaven for the saint, but the saint leaves enough misery here below to sadden him even before the throne of God" (Essays, p. 18).

6Citing St. Augustine as his authority (De Trinitate, XIV, I, [PL 42, 1037]), Aquinas says of theology, that "to this science alone belongs that whereby saving faith is begotten, nourished, protected and strengthened'* (Summa I, q. 1, a. 2).

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On what grounds, then, can anyone reasonably hope for peace and endurance in the after-life when the creeds traditionally regarded as the bases for this truth are effete and ineffectual in producing certainty? Ostensibly, Bronte considers God's infinite nature as "the steadfast rock of immortality." But of itself, infinity as an attribute of the divine is as empirically undemonstrable as the other tenets of traditional Christianity regarding the nature of God. In the fifth stanza of the poem, for example, the narrator speaks of God's "wide-embracing love" and, in the final stanza, of his Breath and Being. Now being, philosophically at least, implies essence or deter- minateness, and that which is determinate cannot be unterminated or immortal, at least of itself. Breath or wind in Bronte's poetry is also associated with mortality and limitation {Poems, pp. 85, 234-235). And in her discussion of the divine attribute of love, Bronte implies that this force responsible for change can only argue, causally, the existence of a being also subject to change. Love is effusive, and as such it "changes, sustains, dissolves, creates and rears." How can such a force, therefore, insure existence beyond change? Empirically, of course, it is just as easy to conclude from an examination of the physical world that the creator is eternal yet mutable.7 Every attribute associated with the divinity in the poem, in other words, fails to support apodictically the claim of human immortality. The poem as a whole thus contradicts itself regarding the very point it apparently is attempting to establish. The first part of the poem (sts. 1-4) suggests that faith as a mode of understanding is inadequate in proving or disproving immortality, while the second part (sts. 5-7) seems to indicate that it is on faith alone that the narrator maintains this fact.

With the exception of stanza three, of course, the poem appears to be orthodox in thought and language. It is an unqualified, if not blind, confession of a very important religious doctrine on purely religious grounds. And if there appears to be a violation of logic in the argument underlying this profession, it is inconsequential. Belief alone is important and can be achieved by disregarding the contradictory sentiments of stanza three. But to dismiss the poem and its contradiction in this fashion is not only an admission of the cowardice of one's own soul; it is also an admission that the poem, so patently heterodox, is perfectly orthodox in its implications. The God of Bronte's poem, as will become evident, is not the Christian God of love and

7The very concept of eternity contains within itself its own contradiction. Eternity, as Plotinus defines it, is "a life that persists in its identity always present to itself in its totality" (Enneades, III, 7). Eternity is thus at once an eternal moment or simple point of duration in which all points of time meet. It is simultaneously the totality of time and the absence of time.

LAWRENCE J. STARZYK / 301

justice by any means, and the immortality discussed only remotely resembles the afterlife of the Christian heaven.

Now it is important, I think, to understand Emily Bronte's modest

cosmology if her notion of God and immortality are to be properly understood. "All creation is equally insane," she maintains. "Nature is an

inexplicable puzzle, life exists on a principle of destruction; every creature must be the relentless instrument of death to the others, or himself cease to live" (Essays, p. 17). I say that Bronte's cosmology is modest, in the sense that it is not systematic or elaborately detailed. Despite this limitation, however, it is comprehensive in that all life, without exception, exists in order to die, the substratum of the tangible world being an unending state of disintegration. Biologically, of course, there is nothing disturbing about this fact, save the egotistical consideration that you and I are not exempt. What is distressing is that this principle, in a sense, applies to the life hereafter as well. "The Dweller in the land of Death," Bronte insists, "Is changed and careless too" (Poems, p. 205).

But what is the nature of this change, and how does this characteristic of the physical world provide the only empirically verifiable basis of our belief in the soul's immortality? Bronte's model of creation, it should be noted, is not the Demiurge of Plato's Timaeus, who copied the world from an

unchanging pattern, or the God of the Hebraic tradition, who created the universe out of nothing by fiat, but rather the Absolute of Plotinus, who generated the world by a process of endless self-emanation. The "wide- embracing love" Bronte speaks of in stanza five explains not only the

superabundance and heterogeneity produced by the One, but also the

homogeneity of this divine overflow. The insanity of nature in destroying itself thus proclaims its fundamental unity. Instead of change, dissolution, creation, and rearing (1. 20) being conceived as a meaningless Heraclitean flux, it is regarded as the orderly manifestation of the One. What was hitherto considered as Being is now understood as a Becoming. Creation itself is thus both process and continuant. The distrust of mutability once annulled, destruction (the ceasing to think and to be) becomes the only meaningful concept. And the confusion of divine Life with human life (st. 2) becomes more than a pantheistic tenet; it represents, in essence, the psychic identity all creation is struggling to realize. "To be" for Bronte is thus synonymous with "to be One."

So much of Bronte's writing demonstrates this tendency to cancel differences by reducing everything to a single class. Catherine Earnshaw's identification of her being with Heathcliff s in Wuthering Heights illustrates this as Augusta's desire for union with Julius indicates it in the Gondal cycle. The passionate desire for union exhibited by these individual existences testifies to the ineluctable tendency of all differentiated being to be drawn

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into the vortex of the One. It is appropriate that Bronte's "last" poem should disclose nature's resolute return to the absolute. If the poem means anything, it is less a belief in endurance beyond this world than a justification for going forth in this life. The soul of the narrator is no longer diffident because the cladogenetic and heterogeneous world of the here and now is no longer meaningless flux. It is the faith inspired of understanding which disarms the soul made cowardly by ignorance.

The concluding stanzas of the poem add little to the philosophy of becoming which informs the previous stanzas. What is confirmed or reinforced, however, is the unorthodox position that a deep sense of religion is compatible with the absence of theologizing:

Though earth and man were gone, And suns and universes ceased to be,

And Thou were left alone, Every existence would exist in Thee.

The traditional conception of heaven as uninterrupted enjoyment of the Beatific Vision obviously has no place in this description of the afterlife, for it relies upon a disjunction Bronte refuses to recognize, the difference between the Absolute and the individualized, differentiated beings participating in that vision. To interpret the One or the Existent in this sense is to give it a numerical designation never intended. Mathematically, of course, the one is at once the transcendence of separability and, in a sense, the negation of plurality. Individual existence is preserved after creation's destruction of itself, not as an actuality distinct from its source, but in or as the source itself. In short, individualized, differentiated existence is an anomaly, and it is with this in mind that Bronte's repudiation of Christianity's heaven must be considered. "No promised Heaven, these wild Desires / Could all or half fulfil," Bronte writes of man's hopes for the next life. But neither can Hell satisfy these desires {Poems, p. 220). The only satisfaction is to be found in total annihilation. The prayer of the "coward" soul is a plea for the comforts of traditional religion's heaven. The soul armed from fear, on the other hand, anticipates a fate far different: "0 for the time when I shall sleep / Without identity" {Poems, p. 220).

I mentioned earlier that Bronte's poem is less a hope for the future than a justification for endurance in the present. It is easy to understand why the here and now is of primary importance to the soul desiring existence "without identity." And in terms of Bronte's conception of creation as insane and motivated by the law of destruction, it is also easy to understand why

8Charlotte erroneously stated in a note appended to the poem that "The following are the last lines my sister Emily ever wrote" {Poems, p. 244). Actually, Emily wrote two poems after the composition of "No coward soul is mine." Both deal with death and man's hypocrisy in "mocking heaven with senseless prayers" {Poems, p. 252).

LAWRENCE J. STARZYK / 303

she, along with her most memorable characters, engage in rebellion against systems, creeds, and formalized existence in general. When Catherine Earnshaw notes in her diary that "H. and I are going to rebel" (WH, p. 21), she not only summarizes her life of defiance against all established norms, but ultimately gives expression to Bronte's own displeasure at mankind's attempt to preserve, in direct violation of creation's law, differentiated existence by instituting creeds, traditions, and laws.

The zeal on the part of the Heathcliffs and Augustas to aid creation's suicidal impulse may appear perplexing in the light of the closing statement of the poem:

There is not room for Death, Nor atom that his might could render void;

Thou -Thou art Being and Breath, And what Thou art may never be destroyed.

But this denial of death on the grounds that the Absolute and all coexistent with it are impregnable against the forces of destruction is hardly intended to minimize its significance. For Death, while incapable of destroying the source of individualized, differentiated existence, is nevertheless implacable in its relentless annihilation of the particular. The individual particles of creation are never rendered void, but this does not mean that they are not destroyed, or more precisely transformed. The most triumphant moment of existence comes when the I is no longer I but spirit or one. There are several illustrations of this in Bronte's writings. For example, Bronte's description of King Harold on the eve of the Battle of Hastings, illustrating how the king in the presence of impending disaster "summed up all the energy, power, and hope of the nation" and was "transformed" in that instant (Essays, p. 11). Less concrete and more to the point is Bronte's famous description of the soul's dissolution from sense,9 and the revealing fragment in which she confesses to being happiest "When I am not and none beside- . . . . / But only spirit wandering wide" (Poems, p. 63). The soul is not rendered void, but transformed into that which it is not; sloughing off all that is individual, it attains existence "without identity." In this respect, death as annihilation or dissolution is irrelevant and incomprehensible; as the perennial act of sublimation in which the Absolute aggregates to itself the total energy or life of creation, it is, in fact, the only reality.

9 But first a hush of peace, a soundless calm descends; The struggle of distress and fierce impotence ends;

Then dawns the Invisible, the Unseen its truth reveals; My outward sense is gone, my inward essence feels - Its wings are almost free, its home its harbour found; Measuring the gulf it stoops and dares the final bound!

(Poems, p. 239)

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Now, Bronte assigns two attributes to God in the closing lines of the poem, Being and Breath. Absolute Being, as we have seen, is synonymous with existence without identity. By progressive eliminations of what is multiple and differentiated, creation ascends to the point where there remains nothing but the assimilative act, the absorption of the elan vital into the one. Being, in this respect, is, statically, the attribute of the Absolute by which all that is particular is intelligible and eternal. Breath, on the other hand, is, dynamically, that attribute of unity from which multiplicity proceeds and to which differentiation moves. It is, in short, both evolution and involution: the progressive manifestation of the Absolute's self-emanation as well as the relentless sublimation of creation. As the source of creation, the Absolute under the aspect of Breath is "now a spirit pouring / Thy presence into all-/ The essence of the Tempest's roaring / And of the Tempest's fall." Immanent is yet transcendent from creation, it is the fountain of life free from life's mortality: "A universal influence / From Thine own influence free; / A principle of life, intense, / Lost to mortality" {Poems, p. 165).

But the source of creation is also the end of creation. In language characteristic of so much of her poetry, Bronte introduces the metaphor of breath to explain individual creation's sublimation in the Absolute:

It's over now-and I am free, And the ocean wind is caressing me, The wild wind from that wavy main I never thought to see again. {Poems, p. 41)

But just as physical death brings freedom from the fetters of this world, the understanding of creation as self-emanation and continual return emphasized in the poem affords man still living the power to persevere. The hope of man in this life and in the next remains the same: "Through life and death, a chainless soul / With courage to endure" {Poems, p. 163). The cowardice experienced by the human soul results less from the feeling of sin, divine disinheritance, or the like, than from ignorance of creation's operations and purpose. To the coward, the universe appears "avast machine constructed to bring forth evil." To the soul purged of fear and blessed with an understanding of the purpose motivating creation's insane destruction of itself, "this globe is the embryo of a new heaven and a new earth whose meagerest beauty infinitely surpasses mortal imagination" {Essays, p. 18).

I have mentioned earlier and wish to emphasize again that Bronte's poem, "No coward soul is mine," is not so much an argument for endurance in the next life as it is a justification for going forth in this life. In this respect, it is similar to another poem presumably about immortality, Wordsworth's Intimations Ode. For it is the knowledge of man's and creation's mortality which makes things significant and meaningful, not the comforting illusion afforded by faith in immortality. That, too, of course, is

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important. But the very concept of immortality, like the alleviation of cowardice it seemingly produces, is itself the result of the peculiar optics afforded by Bronte in her poem. Like all positivist credos, any philosophy which rests on the earth must vanish with the earth; it can never definitely eliminate death. The real genius of Bronte's poem resides in the fact that it not only transcends positivist systems in its elimination of death, but it does so by viewing creation's pervasive multiplicity as a blessing, not a bane. Death, if it exists, is merely a point of dissociation in the metamorphosis of existence from multiplicity to unity. Far from drifting into endless proliferation and individuation, creation is resolutely converging upon its source, the Being and Breath which can "never be destroyed."

The contradiction apparent in Bronte's immortality poem represents a profound insight into the nature of the universe and man's attempt at finding permanence therein. The hope for a "tolerable world" set forth in the birthday note of 1845, inconsistent as it seems with the poem's assurance of "undying Life" in a world beyond, serves to clarify the ambivalent character of eternity as described in "No coward soul is mine." Permanence, realizable only in the world beyond, is nevertheless clearly intimated in the world of flux here below. It is only by identifying simultaneously with the realm which embraces all duration as well as with that which excludes all that man understands his unusual position in the universe. In short, it is simply the acceptance of life as it is, this succession of moments by which man finally accedes to a state where there is no longer succession. Then the moment of mortality coincides with the moment of immortality, and with this

conjunction comes the courage to endure through life and death a chainless soul.