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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2008
Over the years Browning's poem “Saul,” which he himself chose as one of his finest lyrics, has received much critical attention. It has been analyzed as showing the development of Browning's religious beliefs between 1845 and 1855, as an inductive approach to religious experience, as a typological account of man's growth in history toward Christianity, as an expression of Browning's Evangelical faith in the Incarnation, as an example of his use of the past to comment on the present, and as a dynamic statement of his emotional mysticism. Its rising structure and sequence of ideas have been related to Christopher Smart's “Song to David” and “Ode to Musick on St. Cecilia's Day,” to Wyatt's “Seven Penitential Psalms,” and to various minor eighteenth- and nineteenth-century works on Saul. Without contradicting this earlier criticism, we should like to suggest another possible source of idea, structure, and image. To read “Saul” in the light of the Platonic, Neoplatonic, or Hermetic tradition's concept of four hierarchical levels or stages of mystic vision can add, we believe, a new and intriguing dimension to the interpretation and appreciation of the poem's structure and significance.
1. See Crawford, A. W., “Browning's Saul,” Queen's Quarterly, 34 (1927), 448–54Google Scholar; Charlton, H. B., “Browning as Poet of Religion,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 27 (1942–1943), 290–99Google Scholar; DeVane, William C., A Browning Handbook, 2nd ed. (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1955), pp. 256–57Google Scholar; Shaw, W. David, “The Analogical Argument of Browning's ‘Saul,’” Victorian Poetry, 2 (1964), 277–82Google Scholar; Hellstrom, Ward, “Time and Type in Browning's Saul,” English Literary History, 33 (1966), 370–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Badger, Kingsbury, “‘See the Christ Stand!’: Browning's Religion,” Robert Browning: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Drew, Philip (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966), pp. 90–91, 94, n. 49Google Scholar; Jones, Rufus, “Mysticism in Robert Browning,” Biblical Review, 8 (1923), 242–43Google Scholar; and Mertins, Marshall Lewis, “Music, Madness, and the Master (Browning's Saul),” Review and Expositor, 15 (1918), 57–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
In its first form this study was delivered as the Browning Birthday Lecture in May 1973 at the Armstrong Browning Library, Baylor University. We wish to thank Professor Jack Herring, Director of the Library, for his encouragement and comments.
2. See DeVane, , pp. 255–57Google Scholar, and McPeek, James A. S., “The Shaping of ‘Saul,’” Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 44 (1945), 360–66.Google Scholar
3. For a study of the Renaissance writers, see Yates, Frances A., Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1964)Google Scholar. On Milton, see Fixler, Michael, “The Orphic Technique of ‘L' Allegro’ and ‘II Penseroso,’” English Literary Renaissance, 1 (1971), 165–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
4. “Browning and Neoplatonism,” Victorian Newsletter, No. 28 (Fall, 1965), pp. 9–12Google Scholar. Benziger, James, Images of Eternity: Studies in the Poetry of Religious Vision (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press. 1962), p. 170Google Scholar, calls Browning “naturally a Platonist.” On “Saul,” see pp. 186–89.Google Scholar
5. DeVane, , p. 53.Google Scholar
6. See Porter, Katherine H., Through a Glass Darkly: Spiritualism in the Browning Circle (Lawrence: Univ. of Kansas Press, 1958).Google Scholar
7. See Whitla, William, “Sources for Browning in Byron, Blake, and Poe,” Studies in Browning and His Circle, 2 (Spring, 1974), 9–14Google Scholar. Browning (after the composition of “Saul”) had in his library the first edition (1863) of Alexander Gilchrist's life of Blake.
8. The Consecrated Urn: An Interpretation of Keats in Terms of Growth and Form (London: Longmans, Green, 1959)Google Scholar. For a concise summary of the Hermetic tradition as it influenced English literature, see pp. 77–78; for Keats' “pleasure thermometer,” see pp. 126–32. Blackstone's book is invaluable for its treatment of nineteenth-century English authors in relation to Hermeticism. He makes much of the tradition's quarternions or fourfold divisions.
9. The Browning Collections (London, 1913)Google Scholar—the Sotheby, Wilkinson, and Hodge sale catalogue of the library of R. W. B. (“Pen”) Browning.
10. Taylor, (1758–1835)Google Scholar is a key figure in the dissemination of Neoplatonic and Hermetic thought. He translated and annotated many of the important texts: Apuleius, Archyas, Aristotle, Celsus, the Chaldean Oracles, Demophilus, Iamblichus, Julian, Maximus Tyrius, Ocellus, the Orphic hymns, Pausanias, Plato, Plotinus, Porphyry, Proclus, Pythagoras, Sallust, Synesius, and Taurus. He wrote A Dissertation on the Eleusinian and Bacchic Mysteries (Amsterdam [?], 1790)Google Scholar, A Dissertation on the Philosophy of Aristotle (London: Thomas Taylor, 1812)Google Scholar, and “The History of the Restoration of the Platonic Philosophy by the Later Platonists,” which he included in the second volume of his translation of The Philosophical and Mathematical Commentaries of Proclus … on the First Book of Euclid's Elements, 2 vols. (London, 1788–1789)Google Scholar. For a full bibliography of his publications and essays on his influence, see Raine, Kathleen and Harper, George Mills, eds., Thomas Taylor the Platonist, Selected Writings (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1969)Google Scholar. See also Evans, Frank B., “Thomas Taylor, Platonist of the Romantic Period,” Publications of the Modern Language Association, 55 (1940), 1060–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Bentley, G. E. Jr., “Thomas Taylor's Biography,” Studies in Bibliography, 14 (1961), 234–36Google Scholar. Blackstone treats at length Taylor's influence on Keats. Taylor (like the Renaissance Neoplatonists) argued that nothing in the Neoplatonic-Hermetic tradition really contravenes true Christianity.
11. Liljegren, S. B. in Bulwer-Lytton's Novels and Isis Unveiled (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1957)Google Scholar and Stewart, C. Nelson in Bulwer-Lytton as Occultist (London: Theosophical Publishing House, 1927)Google Scholar argue that much of Mme. Blavatsky's Theosophy is based on Bulwer-Lytton's novels. Bulwer-Lytton and his son Robert were both friends of the Brownings. Zanoni, Bulwer-Lytton's most famous novel of the occult, was published in 1842. In Strange Stories and Other Explorations in Victorian Fiction (Boston: Gambit, 1971), pp. 160–200, 225, and 339–40Google Scholar, Robert Lee Wolff points out that the basic structure of Zanoni is the soul's rise “along the ascending path of enthusiasms successively through music, mysticism, and prophecy to the climax where it is the enthusiasm of love that triumphs and brings death and resurrection with it” (p. 225). On the four levels of vision Wolff cites at length Hermias, Iamblichus, and Taylor. By 1855 Browning had surely read this very popular novel. Browning's Pope refers to “an adept of the … Rosy Cross” in The Ring and the Book, X.1619.Google Scholar
12. See particularly lines I.632, 693, 726–801; II.109–25; 384–85, 618–49; V.635–908. My citations here and hereafter are to the line numberings in the Centenary Edition of The Complete Works of Robert Browning, ed. Kenyon, F. G., 10 vols. (London: Smith, Edler, 1912)Google Scholar. The word “sage” is used eight times in the poem and the word “secret” ten times.
13. See Yates, , pp. 228, 266, 273, and 354.Google Scholar
14. Note the use of the ladder image in ll. 424–34.
15. Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher, 2nd ed. (Glasgow: James Maclehose and Sons, 1912), pp. 148–49.Google Scholar
16. See pp. 58–74. Mertins divides the poem into three main movements: “The Simple Heart,” “The Songful Heart,” and “The Shepherd Heart.”
17. Taylor, A. E., in Plato: The Man and His Work (New York: L. MacVeagh, Dial Press, 1929), pp. 305–06, 313Google Scholar, identifies this second Platonic “exaltation” with both the “authors of purifications and initiations” and the “founder of religion.”
18. ΤΩΝ ΕΙΣ ΤΟΝ ΠΛΑΤΩΝΟΣ ΦΑΙΔΡΟΝ. The most accessible edition is Hermiae Alexandrini in Platonis Phaedrum Scholia, ed. Couvreur, P. (Paris: É. Bouillon, 1901)Google Scholar. To nineteenth-century England, Hermias' thought was best known through the extensive paraphrases and systemization by Thomas Taylor (see note 10). See Taylor's translation of Hermias in his notes to his translation of Proclus, , The Commentaries of Proclus on the Timaeus of Plato, 2 vols. (London: Thomas Taylor, 1820), II, 470–73Google Scholar; the same notes are reprinted in Iamblichus, On the Mysteries of the Egyptians, trans. Taylor, Thomas (Chiswick: Thomas Taylor, 1821), pp. 350–60Google Scholar. Taylor frequently quotes Hermias in the notes to his translation of the Phaedrus in his Works of Plato, 5 vols. (London, 1804), III, 202–371Google Scholar, and he discusses him in his “Observations on the Scholia of Hermeas on the Phaedrus of Plato, published by Fredericus Astius,” Classical Journal, 28 (1823), 79–83, 268–73; 29 (1824), 169–73, 273–79Google Scholar. There is considerable confusion and contradiction as to which of several Neoplatonic philosophers named Hermias (or Hermeias or Hermeas) wrote the scholia on the Phaedrus, but the general consensus is that he was trained in the Athenian School, a pupil of Proclus, but a teacher in the Alexandrian School and the father of Ammonius. See under “Hermeias” in Pauly-Wissowa, , Real-Encyclopädie der Classichen Altertumswissenschaft, Vol. 8 (Stuttgart, 1913).Google Scholar
19. For Ficino and Tyard, see Masters, G. Mallary, Rabelaisian Dialectic and the Platonic-Hermetic Tradition (Albany: State Univ. of New York Press, 1969), p. 70, n. 38Google Scholar. Masters, (pp. 61–62)Google Scholar discusses the four furors in relation to Rabelais. For Agrippa's treatment of the fourfold hierarchy of “frenzy,” see Yates, , pp. 281–82Google Scholar, and Nauert, Charles G. Jr., Agrippa and the Crisis of Renaissance Thought, Illinois Studies in the Social Sciences, No. 55 (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1965), pp. 286–87.Google Scholar
20. See references above to Taylor's, ProclusGoogle Scholar. In square brackets we indicate the sections of Browning's poem in which each stage is expressed.
21. “The love of the Soul for God is only a conceptual expression for that basic unrest which moves the consciousness inwardly and drives it upward from grade to grade, until at last it reaches its goal and finds rest in the highest act, the contemplation of God” (Ficino, , De AmoreGoogle Scholar, quoted in Kristeller, Paul O., The Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino, trans. Conant, Virginia [Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1964], p. 268)Google Scholar. For further comments by Ficino on the ascent of the soul, especially through art and music, see Chaps. 11 and 14.
Tinsley, E. J., “Mysticism—Neoplatonic and Christian,” Hibbert Journal, 53 (1954–1955), 43–50Google Scholar, distinguishes between Neoplatonic mysticism and St. Paul's doctrine of a mystical union with Christ through the Incarnation and Atonement. The thought of “Saul” lies somewhere in between, or, more accurately, includes both. Such blending of pagan and Christian is characteristic of the Neoplatonic-Hermetic tradition.
22. The interpretation of this passage in terms of the Neoplatonic-Hermetic tradition's Amatory stage of vision helps answer Henry Jones' attack on Browning (Chap. 10) for severing feeling and intelligence. Browning does not appeal from the intellect or mind to the heart or emotion but from lower fact to a love that incorporates the heart and head so sadly dissevered in Paracelsus. True knowledge comes in the love of this Amatory level of vision; love is the highest intellect. The enraptured soul rises from mere knowledge to divine wisdom. Thus Browning does not, as Jones asserts, “make the ‘quality of God’ a love that excludes reason, and the ‘quality of man’ an intellect incapable of knowing truth” (p. 319). Instead, by love man can rise to the highest truth. Jones does, however, note that in Browning love alone makes the heart wise (p. 166). For a discussion of Browning's use of the word “truth” as heavenly, undemonstrable truth, see Cundiff, Paul A., Browning's Ring Metaphor and Truth (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1972), esp. pp. 48–55Google Scholar. Cundiff, , missing the distinction between “Knowledge” and “Wisdom” (p. 55, n. 5)Google Scholar, mistakenly cites ll. 245–53 of “Saul” as saying that truth is not attainable in this world.
23. On the relationship between Paracelsus and “Saul,” see Ward, Maisie, Robert Browning and His World: The Private Face [1812–1861] (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967), pp. 59–60Google Scholar. Cancelled lines of Paracelsus hint at the theme of the Incarnation that appears at the end of “Saul.”
24. In the introduction to his translation of Six Books of Proclus … on the Theology of Plato, 2 vols. (London: Thomas Taylor, 1816), I, xxiii–xxviGoogle Scholar, Taylor argues that St. Paul's references to powers, principalities, and dominions should and can be interpreted in their Chaldean, Orphic, or Hermetic sense. He credits Paul with knowledge of the Hermetic tradition.
