Calvin and the Resignification of the

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1559 institutes Michelle Chaplin
Sanchez
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 Calvin and the Resignification of the World

Calvin’s 1559 Institutes is one of the most important works of theology

that emerged at a pivotal time in Europe’s history. As a movement,
Calvinism has often been linked to the emerging features of modernity,
especially to capitalism, rationalism, disenchantment, and the forma-
tion of the modern sovereign state. In this book, Michelle Chaplin
Sanchez argues that a closer reading of the 1559 Institutes recalls some
of the tensions that marked Calvinism’s emergence among refugees, and
ultimately opens new ways to understand the more complex ethical and
political legacy of Calvinism. In conversation with theorists of practice
and signification, she advocates for reading the Institutes as a peda-
gogical text that places the reader in the world as the domain in which
to actively pursue the “knowledge of God and ourselves” through
participatory uses of divine revelation. Through this lens, she recon-
ceives Calvin’s understanding of sovereignty and how it works
in relation to the embodied reader. Sanchez also critically examines
Calvin’s teaching on providence and the incarnation, in conversation
with theorists of political theology and modernity who emphasize the
importance of those very doctrines.

Michelle Chaplin Sanchez is Associate Professor of Theology at

Harvard Divinity School, where she teaches courses on the Protestant
Reformations, intersections between Protestant theology and modern
philosophy, theories of sovereignty and modernity, and other themes in
Christian theology including providence and the existence of God. She
has won several teaching awards, and has also published scholarly
articles in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Journal
of Religion, Scottish Journal of Theology, and Political Theology.
 Calvin and the Resignification
of the World
Creation, Incarnation, and the Problem
of Political Theology in the 1559 Institutes

MICHELLE CHAPLIN SANCHEZ

Harvard Divinity School
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names: Sanchez, Michelle Chaplin, author.
title: Calvin and the resignification of the world : creation, incarnation, and the problem of
political theology in the 1559 “Institutes” / Michelle Sanchez.
description: Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, ny : Cambridge University
Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references.
identifiers: lccn 2018034216 | isbn 9781108473040 (hardback : alk. paper)
subjects: lcsh: Calvin, Jean, 1509-1564–Political and social views. |
Calvin, Jean, 1509-1564. Institutio Christianae religionis.
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 Contents

List of Figures page vii

Acknowledgments viii

Introduction 1

part i itinerant pedagogy

1 Writing Reform: The Genre of the 1559 Institutio

Christianae Religionis 43
The Genre of the 1559 Institutio 48
The Enchiridion 54
The Itinerarium 62
The Politics of the Itinerary 70
Conclusion 78

part ii providence

2 The Practice of Writing Providence 83

Approaching Providence as an Activity 86
Earlier Greek Writings: Cleanthes and Plato 91
Later Latin Writings: Stoicism and Boethius 97
Conclusion 107
3 Providence and World Affirmation 111
Providence in the Wake of Loss 117
Calvin’s Providence: The Personal and the Political 125
The Movement of the Divine Will 131
Hiddenness 138
Conclusion 146

v
vi Contents

4 Providence and Governmentality 147

Agamben’s Methodology 151
Order 156
Glory 159
Back to Calvin 161
Conclusion: Reform, Resistance, and Its Gestures 169

part iii incarnation

5 Calvin’s “Secularization” of Augustinian Signification 179

The Paradox of Learning 186
Calvin’s First Difference from Augustine: The Duplex
Cognitio 197
Calvin’s Second Difference from Augustine:
Creation before Church 201
Conclusion 208
6 Faith Resignifying Understanding: Atonement and Election 210
Anselm’s Proslogion 212
Book Two: The Legal Fiction of the Faith of Christ 218
Book Three: Prayer, Election, and the Evidence of Desire 227
Conclusion 237
7 Calvin against Political Theology 240
Excursis 240
Misrecognition 244
Signifying “Ourselves”: The Apparatus of the Visible
Church 247
Calvin’s Two Bodies and the Question of Political
Theology 258
Conclusion 270
Conclusion 274

Bibliography 288
Index 311
 Figures

1 Tabula Peutingeriana (first–fourth century CE). Fascimile by

Conradi Millieri (1887–8) [Map] At: http://upload.wikimedia
.org/wikipedia/commons/5/50/TabulaPeutingeriana.jpg
(accessed May 9, 2014) page 64

vii
 Acknowledgments

If this is the space for thanking everyone who made vital contributions to
this book in ways that are difficult to cite in the footnotes, then it is a task
that is both impossible and necessary. A project like this may be watered
and fertilized by the scholarly exercises of reading, note-taking, testing
ideas, writing, and rewriting. But its soil is life: human relationships;
political anxieties; ethical dilemmas; decades of Sundays in churches that
have caused me both pain and joy; conversations mundane and accidental
that somehow set off a spark in my mind or made me realize I’d
been wrong.
Over the course of cultivating this manuscript from dissertation to
book draft and finally to publication, I have lost three people who were
important to me, and those losses are inscribed in the pages that follow.
First, in 2012, I said goodbye to Professor Ronald F. Thiemann, my
first doctoral advisor and the person who first cultivated my eagerness to
explore the impossibly complicated living impact of Christian doctrinal
writing. I remember sitting in his office one day and running out of words
to describe what it meant to see the world through the lens of ideas like
providence – to read doctrine with a kind of “translucence” that sees the
world only more clearly. He told me he didn’t know, but that was what he
wanted to do, too – to figure out how to say it and write it. When he died
of pancreatic cancer, I had only my dissertation prospectus in hand. But
I also had the echo of his voice against which to test these readings as they
grew: “Never forget to be dialectical.”
In 2014, soon after I’d defended my dissertation, I said goodbye to my
own father. Norm Chaplin was a building contractor who had an Evan-
gelical conversion in 1980, before I was born, and after that he rarely

viii
 Acknowledgments ix

missed a Sunday in church. My dad was unfailingly kind and unflinch-

ingly true to himself. He had no time for things airy and intellectual, but
he knew when something didn’t sit right. Providence was one of those
things that didn’t sit right. He believed that God was all the things
Christians ordinarily believe God to be, but he also bristled at the sugges-
tion that God causes suffering simply for “divine good pleasure.” People
were too important to my dad, and being faithful to God meant being true
to the way Jesus loved people. He taught me that you could be both pious
and honest about the things you don’t know, and in fact that the two
must go together. When I began to ask hard questions about things in
college, as one does, my dad felt like the only one who had faith that
I would be “just fine” – and he was right, because his faith was always in
something bigger than what any one of us can grasp at any one point.
And I believe him now about things being “just fine,” because watching
him suffer and die from dementia taught me that even when things are so
far from just fine – so ghastly far – it’s possible to love God and the world
so much that you’ll still be fundamentally at peace with who you are and
able to say “let it be” to what has come your way.
Just as I finished the first draft of this book, in late April 2017, my dear
friend Lorraine Stanfield was diagnosed with metastatic cancer that took
her life less than five months later. She was fifty-six, a physician and a
professor known for living and teaching compassionate care; a pastor’s
wife who stood at some skeptical distance from the faith of the church,
but never from its love; a mother who mothered like she sang – like each
moment of music was enough to make up for the exhaustion of a full life.
On the surface, she didn’t have much in common with my dad, but over
time I saw the telltale marks: the unfailing kindness, the presence, the
unquestioned conviction that people are always more important than
ideas and things, the ability to savor life even in pain, to love your own
skin because it’s what’s real and what’s sacred.
I’ve long subscribed to the definition of theology that Marilynne
Robinson’s character, Lila, puts best in her inner reflection that, “when
the Reverend talked about angels . . . the notion helped her to think about
certain things.” I’ve found Calvin’s theology to be worth reading and
writing on because it helps me think about certain things. At the same
time, these lives have helped me think about Calvin’s theology, setting up
the relationship that Calvin himself narrates when he cites Augustine at
the close of his final preface: “I count myself one of the number of those
who write as they learn and learn as they write.”
x Acknowledgments

There are, of course, many others who are indelibly woven into this
product of writing and learning and writing. I am grateful to Amy
Hollywood, first for taking me under her wing and guiding my disserta-
tion to completion, but also for so much more: for years of honest, warm,
and good-humored mentorship that always felt fundamentally like care,
as well as for always supplying brilliant questions to provoke better
thinking. Mark Jordan, perhaps more than anyone else, has taught me
through example what it means to read theology for life – in and beyond
its traditional disciplinary bounds – and I am deeply grateful to have his
voice among those that guide my thinking in and outside of academic
settings. And if this book displays any precision of analysis in its reading
of Calvin, that would be thanks to David Lamberth’s sharp early reading
and always-informative conversations. His unwavering interest in this
project has given me the courage to continue cultivating it at critical times.
Additionally, as with so many things in life, I am deeply indebted to an
array of people who remain nameless and faceless to me, but whose
support has enabled my thinking and saved me from many errors and
oversights. My gratitude goes out to the two blind readers serving Cam-
bridge University Press whose reports were profoundly helpful; but also
to those who peer-reviewed a number of now-published articles related to
this project. Thank you all for your generous service to the field. Should
you read this book in its final form, I hope you will find your feedback
faithfully reflected.
I must also thank Harvard Divinity School (HDS), both for supporting
the initial draft of this book with a sabbatical leave and for creating the
setting in which I have been able to learn so much with and from others.
As any professor will know, teaching and writing are never far removed,
and my teaching fellows and students over my first three years at HDS
have shaped my thinking in profound ways. I give special thanks to
Chandra Plowden, Michael Motia, L. Patrick Burrows, AnnMarie Mici-
kas Bridges, and Michael Putnam. Finally, as I was proceeding on my
final revisions, it was my colleague Matthew Potts and student Jeremy
Williams who gave me greatest occasion to think more critically about
how the doctrine of election either mobilizes or upsets the urge to sover-
eignly differentiate bodies according to normative rubrics such as friend
and enemy or citizen and criminal.
There is another pedagogical space of great importance to me, one
without which this book would not have been possible, and that is the
community at Fourth Presbyterian Church in South Boston. While no
words feel sufficient to describing what it has meant to live life alongside
 Acknowledgments xi

such a variety of humanity in that wild and sacred space, I will just say
that being at Fourth has taught me what it looks like to relate scriptural
words to real bodies and real bodies to scriptural words in ordinary time.
As such, it’s persuaded me that when a church invites anyone who walks
through the door to take up, challenge, and bear the doctrines being
preached, this can in fact upset the violence that hegemony has otherwise
exerted over those bodies. I am grateful to routinely bear witness to the
steady and generous heart of Reverend Burns Stanfield in particular, who
week after week allows his own voice and body to serve as the vessel for
that divine love that looks first to the outsider, the refugee, the oppressed –
the one in a hundred who have wandered away. His love is never pity but
the fullest affection for the vast profundity of creation.
Finally, there remain my two loved ones whose contributions to this
work are the most ineffable and most important: my mother and my
husband. My mom, Jennifer Chaplin, was my first theological interlocu-
tor. She couldn’t talk about theology at church at the depth she desired
because she was a woman, so she talked to me instead. My husband, Tim
Sanchez, came to the church as an adult, as an outsider, and embraced it,
having the audacity to respond to the words being spoken even when his
own belonging wasn’t quickly recognized by others. Over the years, both
of them have graced me with endless conversations that shape my think-
ing about everything – about pain, politics, and what it means to live a
truly responsible life. They make me believe that the experience of good-
ness here on earth is real and worth praying for. I am grateful to my mom
for all of this, but also for the more mundane gift of proofreading this
work as dissertation, as first draft, and yet again as final draft. I am
grateful to Tim for his care for me as a human being. He is the most
stable sign through which I daily perceive divine grace. He was also the
first person to occasion my awareness of all the more subtle things this
book is about: how admitting what we don’t know is not a failure, but the
condition for the possibility of love.
This book is dedicated to them, and to anyone who hears the words of
the gospel from the margins and has the audacity to think that those
words refer to them.
 Introduction

Jean Calvin lived life as a refugee. The thinking and writing that produced
his most important body of work – the 1559 Institutio Christianae
Religionis – all occurred at a distance from the institutional bodies of
church and state that had cradled and cultivated his own mind and body
during his formative years.1
In the sixteenth-century, refugees in Europe were unwanted and openly
derided – perhaps more overtly than now, when some nations at least
present the veneer of hospitality to the displaced.2 Nicholas Terpstra
argues that understanding the early modern European Christian logic of
expulsion and migration requires appreciating the ubiquity of the “body”
metaphor as a social imaginary or civic religion – or as something akin to
what later theorists, such as Carl Schmitt to Ernst Kantorowicz and their
interlocutors, would call a “political theology.”3 In The King’s Two
Bodies, Kantorowicz traces how medieval European political theory
was shaped by a series of metaphorical exchanges with Christology,
sacramental theology, and ecclesiology. These theological debates pro-
vided a deep archive of strategies for theorizing the relationship of the
body of Christ as God-Man to the body of Christ as church. Such
strategies were deployed and recast by jurists and artists who imagined

1
My estimation of the 1559 Institutio as Calvin’s most important work follows Calvin’s
own estimation as well as the longstanding and widespread impact of the work relative to
Calvin’s other writing – evident, not least, in the fact that the book has recently earned its
own biography from Calvin scholar and biographer Bruce Gordon.
2
Bruce Gordon, Calvin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009): 198–200.
3
Nicholas Terpstra, Religious Refugees in the Early Modern World (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2015).

1
2 Calvin and the Resignification of the World

the relationships between the natural body of the king and the kingly
office, between individual humans and humanity, and later between the
citizen and the democratic body politic.4
Terpstra argues that by the fifteenth century, the metaphor of the
Corpus Christianum had been thoroughly internalized at the level of
European civic life and that we cannot understand early modern patterns
of expulsion and migration without it. The imaginary of the city or nation
as Corpus Christianum performed several duties. It integrated the lives
and activities of lay people with religious and political elites; demarcated
the boundary between Christian subjects and their Jewish and Muslim
others; and clarified the logic of who should be integrated and who should
be expunged. If society was imagined as a body, then a discourse emerges
over how to maintain its relative health. To be an exile was to know
oneself as that which was deemed “refuse” from the perspective of the
institutional center.5
By the end of the seventeenth century, following the devastation of the
wars of religion, Europe had become a continent replete with exceptional
people. In Reformed regions especially, nearly everyone was someone
else’s refugee. From this vantage, the theological idea of an “exceptional
people,” chosen by God to wander and establish a promised land, could
both borrow from and recast the inherited metaphor of the body politic.6
The sovereign was no longer identified with the office of the king and
sacramental host, whose very substance offered a site of participation
capable of adjudicating who was a healthy member and who should be
expelled. If there was to be a locus of sovereign power organizing a body
politic, that power now had to be identified with the exception itself: with
a people who knew themselves as exceptions chosen to govern a body
comprised of exceptions. These constraints gave birth to new ways of
both imagining and managing collective identity: newly shared religious
and cultural practices, ethnic identities, local histories. All of these ways
of imagining a corporate entity could strategically resist but also reap-
propriate the function that had been served by a sacramentally consti-
tuted Corpus Christianum: to facilitate the determination of which kinds
of individual bodies are governable and which are not.

4
Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985).
5
Terpstra, 21. The argument spans chapter 1.
6
Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities
(London: Verso, 1991). Wallerstein argues that the modern formation of “peoplehood”
argues that state preceded nation. 81–85.
 Introduction 3

Whether in its overtly sacramental form or its later identarian and

purposive forms, this particular and pervasive logic of sovereign power
imagines a power that decides whether bodies are identified with the
collective body – whether they contribute to presumed criteria of health
or not.7 However, unlike the sovereignty of the Corpus Christianum, a
sovereignty grounded in the existence of the exception is marked by a
kind of puzzle. When sovereignty is imagined as an exceptional people
deciding over themselves, this logic perpetuates and organizes – privileges
and marginalizes – a multiplicity of exceptional bodies: races, ethnicities,
cultures, personality types, genders, pathologies. Yet, in another sense,
there is no longer a theoretical “outside.” If the site of the collective body
is identified with management techniques capable of governing a panoply
of exceptions, then what was a sacramental Corpus Christianum
becomes, simply, Corpus. If the refugee qua exception could once be
expelled and sent outside the body, now the refugee qua exception will
be reintegrated into the state in a way that preserves the complex identity
of the exceptional nation: as slave, migrant, patient, prisoner. How is it
possible to get outside the logic of sovereignty when sovereignty operates
precisely by producing exceptions and integrating them into the logic of
the exceptional nation?
One strategy involves beginning with those bodies and histories that
most cut against the grain of the domain in which sovereignty operates.8
J. Kameron Carter reads Giorgio Agamben’s homo sacer as one of the few
moments in the debate over political theology in which the social body of

7
See, for example, Etienne Balibar’s discussion of fictive ethnicity as constitutive of national
identity in Balibar and Wallerstein, 96f. Agamben’s homo sacer project can also be read as
an account of how modern sovereignty works not only by deciding the exception, but by
creating and managing the exception. Magnus Fiskesjö and J. Kameron Carter have
criticized Agamben’s relative lack of attention to the embodied production of peoples as
exceptions in the form of slaves, barbarians, and non-White races. See Magnus Fiskesjö,
“Critical reflections on Agamben’s homo sacer” in Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2/1
(2012): 161–180; J. Kamerom Carter, “The Inglorious” in Political Theology 14/1 (2013):
77–87.
8
I take this to be a common concern of poststructuralists – particularly the work of
Foucault, but also Derrida, Agamben, and Butler, whose work involves efforts to think
of the body as a site of resistance or at least unmanageability. I’ll return to that
conversation shortly. Another approach to critiquing the fascist structure of a
secularized incarnational theology might be to heighten divine transcendence and oppose
it to every historical-political structure. This is more or less the approach taken by Löwith,
but is also resonant with Walter Benjamin’s notion of divine violence.
4 Calvin and the Resignification of the World

the sovereign is approached from the perspective of the exclusions it

produces.9 Agamben pulls the notion of homo sacer from ancient Roman
law as a figure expelled from the city, stripped of legal protections, and
thus reduced to “bare life.”10 Agamben proceeds to argue that “produc-
tion of bare life is the originary act of sovereignty.”11 The modern nation-
state makes citizens by first producing the life of the homo sacer and then
incorporating bare life into dual apparatuses of medical and economic
management. In this way, the bodies of citizens are made to participate in
the “glory” of sovereignty – or by doxological testaments to success that
actually fuels the providential machine. To be a citizen of bureaucratic–
economic sovereignty, and to share in its glory, is essentially to participate
in the incarnation of the state; to be subject to – and subjectivated by – the
bipolar apparatus of modern management that Foucault called
“biopower.”12
Yet, Carter argues that Agamben misses an opportunity in this account
when he fails to theorize sovereignty from the perspective of the “inglori-
ous” homo sacer – the body of those who remain unincorporated or
marginally incorporated into the sovereign body:
Homo sacerization . . . now means something quite materially and somatically
specific that is lost to view in Agamben’s text, but that nevertheless haunts the
text. To undergo non-Europeanization, which perhaps is the specific form of
homo sacerization in the modern/colonial world, is precisely to be denied govern-
ance. That is to say, it is to be denied the position of master within the order of
sovereignty. It is to be marginalized or denied the place of the center around which
all difference is to be organized and then governed . . . Agamben’s suggestive

9
Importantly, Carter locates the development of this particular critique of sovereignty
much earlier in black studies, beginning at least with W. E. B. DuBois, but notes its
near-total absence among white theorists and critics of sovereignty.
10
Across his work, and particularly the multivolume homo sacer project, Agamben
distinguishes “bare life” from zoe and bios, or the form of natural/animal life and the
form of political life, respectively.
11
Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereignty and Bare Life (Redwood City, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1998), 98.
12
Notably, Agamben charts the emergence of this particular logic of sovereignty much
earlier than Foucault, tracing it to early Christian debates over Christology and the
trinity. I discuss this in much greater detail in Chapter 4, which is devoted to
Agamben’s account of glory and glorification as a lens for reading Calvin’s doctrine of
providence. There, I treat Agamben’s relation to Foucault’s biopower as well as the way
he reads governmentality and glory in relation to theological debates over providence
and incarnation, as well as practices of liturgical acclamation. For an important
discussion of biopower, see Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality 1: The Will to
Knowledge (New York: Vintage, 1978), 142f.
 Introduction 5

claims about glory call for more careful reflections on the glorious and especially
the inglorious aspects of corporealization.13

In another place, Carter links the corporeality of the inglorious to the

metaphor of the abject: a substance which is neither separate from nor
central to the body, such as tears, saliva, feces, and urine.14 “In the field of
the political, the abject is neither friend (subject) nor enemy (object),” but
“exists in the zone between life (full citizenship) and death (the enemy as
one who must be killed).” As in the early modern logic of expulsion, the
abject is tied to that which must be marginalized or pushed away to
render the body pure. If the early modern Corpus Christianum was itself
constituted through the institutionalized management of narratives
and practices materialized at the level of the body, then the abject of that
body would be the refugees who were not executed, but whose position
with respect to the health of the collective body was expunged as a
peripheral impurity. If such figures might reveal something of the under-
side of sovereign glory – or the extent to which that sovereignty is
itself constructed and ritually perpetuated through the expulsion of the
inglorious – then is it possible to harness a critique of modern sovereignty
by beginning with the perspective of an early modern refugee?
Calvin lived life as a refugee during a time of tectonic shift. He lived as
an exception at a time when the imaginary of the European state as
Corpus Christianum was most naturalized, yet just before the exception
would be reintegrated into the central logic of the nation-state. From the
age of twenty-five, Calvin’s life and activity took place in liminal cities like
Geneva and Strasbourg: at the margins of both the Roman Catholic and
French monarchical domains.15 A number of Calvin scholars have begun
to explore what occupying this fraught position might have meant for
Calvin as a writer. After all, he did bring the relative privileges of an elite
French education. Although Calvin was not high born, he was the

13
Carter, “Inglorious,” 81–82; 85.
14
For more on abjection, see Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1982); and in the context of theorizing the hybridity
and marginalization of ethnic identity in the United States, see Rey Chow, The Protestant
Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003).
15
During the decades in which the papacy was located in Avignon, every single Pope was
French, and for many, French identity came to be inscribed with Catholic piety.
Christopher Elwood discusses the full extent to which the French monarchy came to
represent a privileged locus of the corpus Christi, and enjoyed legitimacy according to the
same sacramental logic through which the church claimed to hold the monopoly on the
sacred. See Elwood, The Body Broken (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
6 Calvin and the Resignification of the World

beneficiary of patronage that led him through some of the most important
French universities: Montaigu, Lyon, Bourges, Paris. These privileges did
not prevent his exile, but they granted him both a network of other elite
exiles and the skills to leave a record of what it meant to write in exile –
from the vantage of one rejected by the governing bodies that had formed
him. There are some obvious ways that this vantage impacts his writing.
For example, it is replete with metaphors of pilgrimage and journey and
figures of labyrinths and abysses. In letters and commentaries, there are
passages where he depicts himself as the weeping prophet Jeremiah or as
the wandering Apostle Paul. He also set to work retheorizing power
around the community of the excluded – renaming them as elected.
This underscores the obvious irony attached to the mere suggestion
that Calvin be read as an abject figure. Calvin is famous for forwarding a
strong version of divine sovereignty. While Herman Selderhuis has sug-
gested that readers of Calvin “who do not connect ‘predestination’ and
‘providence’ with the concept of being ‘on the road’ will never understand
any of these ideas,” these are also the very theological categories that are
most tied to the logic of modern state sovereignty that understands itself
as both exceptional and central.16 Yet it is also true that for Calvin,
theorizing these ideas could not have been easy. After all, he had to
harness the relative audacity to read scripture and then reframe himself
as chosen for exile, as a pilgrim whose dangerous journey was not just
guided, but willed by hidden providence, a providence that exceeded the
body of the Corpus Christianum. This places the theorist before a
crossroads.17 The will of one who is excluded might either seek revenge
by harnessing a logic of sovereignty around the justification and superior-
ity of the excluded – a move that Nietzsche would call ressentiment. Or
the will of the excluded might devise the understandably more difficult
task of challenging that logic itself – a move that, for Nietzsche, involved
the gesture of affirmation.
The image of Calvinism most prevalent in critical and sociological
literature opted for the former path. Max Weber, Michael Walzer,
Charles Taylor, and Philip Gorski are only some of the most widely read
theorists who narrate an affinity between Calvinist theologies and

16
Herman Selderhuis, John Calvin: A Pilgrim’s Life (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic,
2009), 38.
17
Though my emphases and interlocutors are different, this way of reading Calvin’s
political thinking – with and against the texture of his writing – is partly informed by
Roland Boer’s Political Grace: The Revolutionary Theology of John Calvin (Louisville,
KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009).
 Introduction 7

practices emergent in the seventeenth century to key postures of modern

sovereignty.18 Many are familiar, by now, with the claim that later
Calvinists linked signs of election to reason-driven worldly activity rather
than ritual practice, thus promoting a vision of market sovereignty to
offset and elude that of the Corpus Christianum. Or that Calvinists
reconstructed their own sovereign body through practices of discipline
that could be easily transferred to the logic of the modern state as well as
the rationalizing subject. And then, of course, there is the logic of
exceptionalism itself, evident in early America from the city on the hill
to Manifest Destiny, but visible also in Calvinist-influenced polities
including Prussia, the Netherlands, England, South Africa, and even
France. Each of these polities integrated or persecuted Calvinism to
varying degrees, but in so doing adopted an understanding of their own
nation as exceptional that came to underwrite internal discipline along-
side external efforts at hegemony.
Yet, the case of Geneva – one of the early cities to welcome refugees,
for obvious reasons – presents a little more ambiguity. Geneva seems to
have reconstituted itself as a body by drawing on the theological

18
While I do not engage Charles Taylor or Michael Walzer explicitly, this book’s argument
is in implicit conversation with their urge to link Calvinist reform movements
unequivocally with discipline and disenchantment. In A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2007), Taylor argues that the Calvinist wing of the sixteenth
century reform movements served as a particular “engine of disenchantment” (77).
Concerning Calvin in particular, Taylor forwards a reading of divine sovereignty as a
zero-sum game in which immanent life is evacuated of transcendence: “Calvin’s radical
simplification could perhaps be put this way: We are depraved; and thus in the work of
our salvation God does everything. Man ‘cannot, without sacrilege, claim for himself
even a crumb of righteousness, for just so much is plucked and taken away from the glory
of God’s righteousness’” (78). This quotation is from Inst. 3.13.3, and for Calvin it sets
the stage for a particular kind of relationship between creation and God in which God’s
righteousness is directly related to all of creation, rather than segmented into parts. This,
I will argue, is crucial to ascertaining Calvin’s critique of political theology, or of any urge
to locate the divine in a single assemblage of person, race, culture, nation, or state. I share
certain of Taylor’s sympathies in his critique of “modernity.” I will argue, however, that
close readings of theologies such as Calvin’s, with attention to their pedagogical quality,
furnishes tools for critiquing and recasting modernity’s self-understanding rather than
merely diagnosing it. For a range of the class disenchantment arguments similar to
Taylor’s, see Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of
Radical Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965); Max Weber, The
Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Baehr and Wells (New York:
Penguin, 2002). Philip Gorski’s The Disciplinary Revolution: Calvinism and the Rise of
the State in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003) picks up
on these themes, but focuses on sociological evidence to do so. I will engage Gorski’s
argument at several later points.
8 Calvin and the Resignification of the World

imaginary of creatio ex nihilo, rather than the body of Christ strictly

speaking. For a people living “on the road,” like Calvin himself,
scripture could facilitate the direct address of divine authority without
recourse to royal, noble, or ecclesial mediation. It could act as a map or
guide capable of tying present to past and individual people to each other.
But scripture alone cannot materialize a body. The Divine Word does not
just exist in isolation; it creates.19 Scripture likewise needs a body to
address and shape in order to do its work. As early as 1540, Genevans
adopted the motto Post Tenebras Lux (“After darkness, light”), which
alludes both to the primordial act of creation as narrated in Genesis –
“Let there be light” – and to Calvin’s characteristic claim that divine
providence should be understood as ongoing acts of creation. “To make
God a momentary Creator, who once for all finished his work, would be
cold and barren, and we must differ from profane men especially in that
we see the presence of divine power shining as much in the continuing
state of the universe as in its inception.”20 Providence is the perpetual act
of bringing light out of darkness.
Pamela A. Mason’s translation of a 1728 sermon demonstrates the
extent to which providential language remained inscribed in Genevan
identity two centuries later:
A People made anew, a People created: Our allies & we, we are this People which
God has formed, this People which he has pulled, so to speak, out of nothingness,
in an amazing manner. Who would have said, a few years before the Reformation,
that such a great revolution would occur all over Europe, who would have said
that a small number of Persons, pious, striving toward truth & enlightened, [but]
powerless, without authority, without credit, would produce such a great change,
one would have regarded that prospect as a vision pure and simple, as the least
probable thing in the world. Nevertheless, that is what happened. God said once
more, Let There Be Light, & there was Light. He revived the dry bones of Ezekiel’s
vision. He created an entirely new World; a World, consequently, which is obliged
to celebrate him, as the Author of its subsistence.21

19
The account I’m developing of the relationship between Word and creation comports
with the dynamic Randall Zachman advances in Image and Word in the Theology of
John Calvin (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009), opposing the idea
that Calvin promotes Word over and against material referents. Zachman writes, for
example, that “We must always hear the Word in order to be able to see the living images
of God; but concomitantly we must always open our eyes to see the living images of God
even as we hear the Word of God” (2).
20
Institutes 1.16.1.
21
This is Mason’s translation of a selection from Jean-Alphonse Turrettin, Sermons ur
lejubile de la Reformation établie il y a deux-cens Ans, dans les Eglises de la trés illustre &
trés puissante République de Berne. 7. Janvier 1728. Emphases in original. Mason, 29.
 Introduction 9

The sermon suggests the formation of a new mode of existence, but not
out of existing forms – not out of a move to make the exception into the
rule. The claim, here, is not that the Corpus Christianum has been recon-
stituted around the figure of “Our allies & we.” It is that creation offers
an entirely new world to house a “people.” This is the crossroads that
depart from the suggestion of a new, shared fictive identity. Will the new
world be built around the fictive, imagined body of the exception? Or will
the new world offer a setting in which such fictions work to refuse the
logic of corporate embodiment? There are at least the seeds here for
thinking about different logics of sovereignty and gaining a richer per-
spective on a present forged out of competing and tangled logics of how
the world is organized, what it means, and who decides.
This book pauses at the crossroads and sits with the text that Calvin
produced, rewrote, rewrote again, and deemed his most important:
the 1559 Institutio Christainae Religionis. It was produced before the
“Calvinism” of scholars’ construction; before the worst of the wars of
religion; before the emerging European nation-state; at the very inception
of scientific advancements, colonizations, and enslavements that were
mostly unbeknownst to Calvin. For all of its style and polemic, its tethers
to ancient teachers and present foes, the Institutio remains a text produced
by a refugee who was exiled for calling the Mass – the ritual of the Corpus
Christi Mysticum undergirding central imagery of late medieval sover-
eignty – idolatrous. When Calvin fled his homeland in 1534, it was after
reformers had plastered Paris with placards declaring the Mass an abom-
ination.22 It’s significant that this attack was received as not merely heret-
ical, but seditious – as an assault not just on the church, but on the state.23
Because what was at stake was not an argument over sacramental theology
in the abstract, but the more fundamental living question of where and how
the power of God materializes on earth. The Placards questioned the social
metaphysics that tied the Corpus Christi Mysticum to the Corpus Chris-
tianum. And by refusing the Mass, Calvin counted himself with those
deemed inglorious from the vantage of the French Corpus Christianum.
If Calvin was so deeply opposed to the logic of idolatry that he was willing
to risk expulsion, then it might not be unreasonable to expect that his
writing opposes the project of political theology more generally.

***

22
Gordon, Calvin, 40f.
23
For an account of this logic in its historical context, see Elwood 48–52.
10 Calvin and the Resignification of the World

Political theology remains bound up with the modern operation of

sovereignty to the extent that sovereignty continues to trade in Christian
theological metaphors. We continue to ask how political sovereignty
forms a “people” (creation); how it preserves and governs itself in time
and place (providence); how it saves the people from threat, often by
claiming the legitimate use of sacrificial violence (atonement); and
how it might ultimately progress toward some fuller realization of its
dominion (judgment and glory). These are at once general questions
of the location and operation of power and discourses that resonate
with two distinct theological doctrines: that of creation and providence;
and that of the incarnation. From the incarnation, we get the claim that
divine power reveals and redeems by means of embodiment – through
bodies that look and act in a particular way, or bodies who represent
sovereignty by organizing themselves properly within time and space.
From creation and providence, we get a larger discourse on how divine
power makes and governs ordinary time: an imaginary of how God
draws, marks, tends, differentiates, and manages. Not surprisingly, both
doctrines – providence and incarnation – play key roles in Calvin’s
Institutio.
These doctrines also play key roles in contemporary conversations that
continue to circulate around Carl Schmitt’s 1922 Political Theology. For
Schmitt, “political theology” is a critique of the suggestion that liberalism,
or a state governed by the rule of law, offers a legitimate alternative to
authoritarianism. There are always exceptional cases that reveal the limits
of the law, which means that liberal democracy remains structurally
dependent on a law giver – a person or mechanism that “decides on the
exception.”24 Here, Schmitt discerns a permanent theological structure to
the logic of sovereignty:
All significant concepts of modern theory of the state are secularized theological
concepts not only because of their historical development—in which they were
transferred from theology to the theory of state, whereby, for example, the
Omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgivers—but also because of their
systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological
consideration of these concepts.25

For Schmitt, the permanence of political theology does not mean that all
political arrangements are tacit theocracies beckoning to and bowing

24
Carl Schmitt, Political Theology (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 5.
25
Schmitt, 36.
 Introduction 11

before a metaphysical deity. But it does mean that any logic of political
sovereignty relies, openly or quietly, on something or someone occupying
the position of sovereign who must act as God has long been understood
to act: to govern through a will that decides. It also means that the liberal
state remains constituted – like Hobbes’ Leviathan – by contracted par-
ticipation in the abstract “body politic” whose legal and abstract struc-
ture decides and manages the boundaries of that body, mediating between
its friends and enemies.
This is, however, only one way of framing the permanence of political
theology, and it is significant that many of the disagreements among those
who either defend or oppose political theology hinge on certain assump-
tions about the content and task of theology itself. After all, not all
theologies emphasize God as decider. French post-Marxist Claude
Lefort defends the permanence of political theology by arguing that
religion and politics share an archive of symbols, and he suggests that a
democratic structure can make “disincorporated” use of those symbols
for political ends. In other words, democratic politics will take up and
make use of theological symbols while refusing to reify them as sites of
transcendent participation, thereby preserving the body of the individual
as that from and to which sovereignty is accountable. Lefort’s student,
Marcel Gauchet, makes a different argument: that democratic politics do
in fact reconstitute a certain kind of corporate body, but not as a site of
submission and aesthetic participation. Rather, democracy constructs a
new kind of collective body constructed and constrained by rational
discourse.
Both Lefort and Gauchet view religion as fundamentally transcendent
and, unlike Schmitt, want to defend the possibility that modern politics
can be purely immanent. So, in both their accounts, theology effectively
makes religious symbols available for strategic and deracinated political
use – one through which they can be safely detached from the kind of
irrational mythos of cosmic participation that funds fascism. For Lefort,
democracy resists fascism by refusing to incorporate symbols into bodily
formations. For him, symbols generate meaning through repetition and
break. As different kinds of bodies take up and reinhabit symbols, sover-
eign authority cannot be imaginatively (or literally) identified with one
material location or body. Gauchet argues that rationalization performs
the work of remaking the political apart from the religious. Yet because
symbols are used discursively rather than ritually, the body politic will be
accountable to rational rather than aesthetic norms. Both, however, see
theology as safe and useful to the extent that it is made immanent,
12 Calvin and the Resignification of the World

neutralized by being separated from the violent, orgiastic tendencies of

transcendent participation.26
Karl Löwith, a postwar German émigré who studied under Martin
Heidegger, approaches the question of theology and politics with more
suspicion, understandably wary of Schmitt’s brand of political theology

26
See Claude Lefort, “The Permanence of the Theologico-Political?” in Democracy and
Political Theory, trans. David Macey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988):
213–55; Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of
Religion (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). For a helpful discussion of
the two in the French post-Marxist context, see Warren Breckman, The Adventures of the
Symbolic: Post-Marxism and Radical Democracy (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2013). Marcel Gauchet would also go on to influence Charles Taylor’s A Secular
Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), who would ultimately want to
defend an openness to transcendence of the kind that Gauchet only gently hinted at in
modern uses of art. Gauchet’s account differs from Lefort’s in several crucial ways. First,
where Lefort insists on the emptiness and iconoclasm of democratic power, Gauchet sees
the reincorporation of that power precisely in the institutions that facilitate the practices
founded upon differentiation and otherness. It is in the continuity of this visible collective
“body” that the body is constantly undone and reformed through the exercise of
litigation and process. A second difference, however, has to do with the ongoing role of
the symbolic, and particularly the place Gauchet gives to writing and literature in relation
to modern power. Where Lefort sees the sphere of the fictive as distinct from but
constantly figuring and un-figuring the arrangement of democratic power, Gauchet
grants to the aesthetic in general a much more oblique, yet provocative place as the one
site where the function of “religion” may yet remain. We yet become dispossessed, even
momentarily, by “the vertigo of the musical abyss, the poignant heights of poetry, the
frantic passion of novelistic intrigue, a dreamlike absorption into the image” as well as
“the open-ended attempt to evoke the other deep inside the familiar . . . the unfathomable
‘hidden world’ uncovered in the midst of a landscape seen a hundred times before, the
impressionists’ magic revelation of the deeply hidden truth of an inhabited landscape”
(Gauchet, Disenchantment, 198–204). The traces of religion thus remain, but are
subsumed under the constitutive intellectual awareness of differentiation – that our
subjectivity stands opposed to the unity of which we momentarily experience ourselves
as a part. This, of course, supposes that religion – or that participation – entails collapse
between sign and signified.
Alternatively, at least three features, largely absent in Gauchet, rise to the fore in
Lefort’s account of modern political power. First, the assertion of the importance of the
aesthetic in and for conceiving the political; second, the sense in which disincorporated
power is never fully reincorporated, but is temporarily reincorporated in different
collective arrangements (an incorporation Lefort hopes can be disrupted by the
symbolic as much as it is constituted by it); and finally, a view of the symbolic as not
only aesthetic but also repetitive in quality, and thus as becoming meaningful within a
sphere of iterative practices that relate symbols to arrangements of bodies, thus
performing the kind of impermanent incorporation of power that he envisions. As I’ll
show in Chapter 6, Calvin’s own view tracks closer to that of Lefort in insisting upon
the disincorporation of power and the relative distance between sign and signified.
Lefort, however, relied on the work of Ernst Kantorowicz to formulate his view of
theologico-political symbolism.
 Introduction 13

yet proactively worried about whether theological symbols can be made

immanent without tacitly transferring the force of transcendent power to
sites of immanence. Aware of the fact that a number of Enlightenment
thinkers claimed rationality by purporting to reject a theological past
beholden to transcendent authority, Löwith worried that this self-
stylization only weaponized the transcendent referent of theological dis-
course by incorporating it into a particular brand of (European) human
achievement. If Schmitt argued that modern politics continues to rely on
the authority of a sovereign who decides, Löwith agrees. Only, Löwith
reads this claim as a particular play of the modern urge to immanentize
divinity and relocate divine power in the site of one particular historically
located civilization. Löwith’s 1949 Meaning in History critiques the
permanence of political theology by arguing that modern claims to his-
torical progress are founded on a double movement. Such claims found
progress on the rejection of a transcendent authority who guarantees the
metaphysical shape of time and space. In the same gesture, they also
purport to bring about the kind of progress through a particular socio-
political civilizational arrangement that reinhabits the very structure of a
transcendent “guiding hand” that had been naturalized and thereby
disavowed.
For Löwith, the doctrines of incarnation and providence are absolutely
central to the argument that Western European modernity secularizes,
rather than overcomes, its Christian underpinnings. If early articulations
of Christendom sought to anchor society in the sacramental presence of
the corpus Christi, modern rationalism wants to anchor society in the
immanent presence of the rational man. Löwith reads this as a Prome-
thean move: It brings theology to earth, naturalizes it, and in so doing,
surreptitiously divinizes the privileged site of reason’s emergence as the
guarantor of both political order and historical progress, inevitably over
and against colonized and enslaved others. The difference between Löw-
ith and later thinkers like Lefort and Gauchet is that theology is not made
dangerous by referring to transcendence. It is made dangerous by refusing
transcendence and trying instead to confine theological expectation to a
strictly immanent conception of historical time and space.
Hans Blumenberg would famously challenge Löwith by advancing an
alternate account of modern power as constituted by a decisive break
from political theology. That break is rooted in what Blumenberg reads as
modernity’s adoption of a different linguistic practice – one in which
theological language loses the metaphysical “seriousness” it once pos-
sessed. Modernity’s great achievement is not that it stole fire from heaven,
14 Calvin and the Resignification of the World

but that it rejected the dream of heavenly fire in order to become genu-
inely curious about earth.27 Blumenberg argues that modernity improves
upon premodern Christianity by rejecting the presupposition that the
world is governed by any transcendent authority or de facto ontology.
Citing Nietzsche, he writes, “[Humanity’s] right should consist in imput-
ing the least possible binding force to reality, so as to make room for his
own works. ‘Not in knowing but in creating lies our health! . . . If the
universe has no concern for us, then we want the right to scorn it.’”28
Modern progress does not require a transcendent guarantor because the
conditions for progress emerged precisely out of the evident failure of
transcendent models to mobilize scientific discovery and technological
advancement.29 In an echo of Lefort’s position, a politics and progress
reframed as authentically human endeavors will privilege no body apart
from the ordinary body that asserts itself in and over the immanent world
on its own terms. Theological ideas may still prove useful in a mitigated
way, but only if rendered unserious and made artifactual. As a subset of
art, theology can supply metaphors to construct human projects that are
always fallible and accountable to human needs.
Victoria Kahn ties Blumenberg’s defense of modernity back to the
question of political theology by arguing that it lifts up an often-forgotten

27
Against the suggestion that modernity retains a Christian temporal structure, Blumenberg
argues that historical breaks occur when inherited questions are “reoccupied” by
different modes of practical and conceptual activity. Blumenberg’s concept of
“reoccupation” borrows from the geologic concept of “pseudomorphosis,” which
occurs when a new crystalline substance fills the hollow left by another crystal, and
adapts to this hollow by taking on an alien and potentially misleading crystal form.
Applying this to the study of historical periods in effect flips the script on Löwith’s
accusation: Structural similarities between Christian expectation and immanent
progress do not betray an underlying foundation, but rather are mere adaptive vestiges
of a past that has ceased due to its own collapse. For Blumenberg’s critique of Löwith, see
The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), 27f. For his
account of reoccupation, see 49, 60–75, 77–79, 353–354. See also Benjamin Lazier,
“Overcoming Gnosticism: Hans Jonas, Hans Blumenberg, and the Legitimacy of the
Natural World” in Journal of the History of Ideas 64/4 (2003): 619–637, 625.
28
Blumenberg, 141–142. This passage is part of a longer engagement with Nietzsche in
which Blumenberg wants to tie Nietzsche’s praise for artistic creation to technological
mastery. For more on this exchange, and on the way Blumenberg both borrows from and
critiques Nietzsche’s critique of beholdenness to “reality,” see Nathan Widder. “On
Abuses in the Uses of History: Blumenberg on Nietzsche; Nietzsche on Genealogy” in
History of Political Thought 21/2 (2000): 308–326.
29
Blumenberg, 229–241. See also Zeynep Talay, “A Dialogue with Nietzsche: Blumenberg
and Löwith on History and Progress” in History of European Ideas 37/3 (2011):
376–381, 379.
 Introduction 15

“third term” employed by early modern political thinkers to recast the

relationship between politics and religion: namely, the use of language as
“poiesis,” or creative making. According to Kahn, “The modern project is
fundamentally poetic in the sense elaborated by Hobbes and Vico that we
can know only what we have made or constructed ourselves: verum et
factum convertuntur (truth and fact – in the sense of that which is done or
made – are interchangeable).”30 This use of language enabled novel
renderings of human agency itself as both defined by and accountable to
that which humans have created. Unlike poiesis, Kahn understands the-
ology as a use of language to represent metaphysical realities or to refer to
a given ontological order. And that’s why she worries that any argument
defending the persistence of political theology will end up replicating a
logic of sovereignty modeled on a corporate body. Poiesis, however, does
not work by referring to metaphysical realities. It works by producing
things, by making legal and artistic fictions. These are effectively worded
technologies that are not bodies and do not refer to bodies, but enable
new and different forms of mobilizing, managing, reading, and relating
bodies.
The ability to create art underwrites the distinct “sovereignty of the
artist” – a mode of sovereignty that Kahn traces to Ernst Kantorowicz
and his reading of Dante.31 At the conclusion of The King’s Two Bodies,
Kantorowicz locates a moment in the Divine Comedy when humanity
becomes distinguished from – though not necessarily opposed to –
Christianity. That moment occurs precisely when Dante, as poet, becomes
invested with a dignity that was once reserved for the sovereign office of
the king. According to Kahn, this alternate rendering of sovereignty is
distinct because it does not refer to dignity of “the individual” as a
metaphysical category, but refers instead to an office that can only be
assumed and defined by an individual as individual. It is a “notion of
representation, whereby the individual comes to stand for the mystical
body of mankind.”32 This shift is effected precisely through the produc-
tion and use of literature. By reframing sovereignty around the site of
human artistic production, Kantorowicz gives an account of fictive,
representational bodies (like the church, the nation, or the state) that

30
Kahn, Victoria. The Future of Illusion: Political Theology and Early Modern Texts
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 6.
31
This is also a reading offered in direct opposition to Schmitt, shifting the relationship of
theology and politics from one of a “methodological and existential postulate” to one of a
“metaphorology.” See Kahn, 66.
32
Kahn, 76.
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praying, praying, and, being still on the threshold of their underworld,
thought of her sympathetically as a soul haunting the same territory;
a soul cut out of immaterial substance; not a woman, a soul.
But Mr. Fletcher had to go. He had to pass her, and being himself
neat as a new pin, could not help being a little distressed by the poor
lady’s disorder; her hair down; her parcel on the floor. She did not at
once let him pass. But, as he stood gazing about him, at the white
marbles, grey window panes, and accumulated treasures (for he was
extremely proud of the Abbey), her largeness, robustness, and
power as she sat there shifting her knees from time to time (it was so
rough the approach to her God—so tough her desires) impressed
him, as they had impressed Mrs. Dalloway (she could not get the
thought of her out of her mind that afternoon), the Rev. Edward
Whittaker, and Elizabeth too.
And Elizabeth waited in Victoria Street for an omnibus. It was so nice
to be out of doors. She thought perhaps she need not go home just
yet. It was so nice to be out in the air. So she would get on to an
omnibus. And already, even as she stood there, in her very well cut
clothes, it was beginning.... People were beginning to compare her
to poplar trees, early dawn, hyacinths, fawns, running water, and
garden lilies; and it made her life a burden to her, for she so much
preferred being left alone to do what she liked in the country, but
they would compare her to lilies, and she had to go to parties, and
London was so dreary compared with being alone in the country with
her father and the dogs.
Buses swooped, settled, were off—garish caravans, glistening with
red and yellow varnish. But which should she get on to? She had no
preferences. Of course, she would not push her way. She inclined to
be passive. It was expression she needed, but her eyes were fine,
Chinese, oriental, and, as her mother said, with such nice shoulders
and holding herself so straight, she was always charming to look at;
and lately, in the evening especially, when she was interested, for
she never seemed excited, she looked almost beautiful, very stately,
very serene. What could she be thinking? Every man fell in love with
her, and she was really awfully bored. For it was beginning. Her
mother could see that—the compliments were beginning. That she
did not care more about it—for instance for her clothes—sometimes
worried Clarissa, but perhaps it was as well with all those puppies
and guinea pigs about having distemper, and it gave her a charm.
And now there was this odd friendship with Miss Kilman. Well,
thought Clarissa about three o’clock in the morning, reading Baron
Marbot for she could not sleep, it proves she has a heart.
Suddenly Elizabeth stepped forward and most competently boarded
the omnibus, in front of everybody. She took a seat on top. The
impetuous creature—a pirate—started forward, sprang away; she
had to hold the rail to steady herself, for a pirate it was, reckless,
unscrupulous, bearing down ruthlessly, circumventing dangerously,
boldly snatching a passenger, or ignoring a passenger, squeezing
eel-like and arrogant in between, and then rushing insolently all sails
spread up Whitehall. And did Elizabeth give one thought to poor
Miss Kilman who loved her without jealousy, to whom she had been
a fawn in the open, a moon in a glade? She was delighted to be free.
The fresh air was so delicious. It had been so stuffy in the Army and
Navy Stores. And now it was like riding, to be rushing up Whitehall;
and to each movement of the omnibus the beautiful body in the
fawn-coloured coat responded freely like a rider, like the figurehead
of a ship, for the breeze slightly disarrayed her; the heat gave her
cheeks the pallor of white painted wood; and her fine eyes, having
no eyes to meet, gazed ahead, blank, bright, with the staring
incredible innocence of sculpture.
It was always talking about her own sufferings that made Miss
Kilman so difficult. And was she right? If it was being on committees
and giving up hours and hours every day (she hardly ever saw him in
London) that helped the poor, her father did that, goodness knows,—
if that was what Miss Kilman meant about being a Christian; but it
was so difficult to say. Oh, she would like to go a little further.
Another penny was it to the Strand? Here was another penny then.
She would go up the Strand.
She liked people who were ill. And every profession is open to the
women of your generation, said Miss Kilman. So she might be a
doctor. She might be a farmer. Animals are often ill. She might own a
thousand acres and have people under her. She would go and see
them in their cottages. This was Somerset House. One might be a
very good farmer—and that, strangely enough though Miss Kilman
had her share in it, was almost entirely due to Somerset House. It
looked so splendid, so serious, that great grey building. And she
liked the feeling of people working. She liked those churches, like
shapes of grey paper, breasting the stream of the Strand. It was
quite different here from Westminster, she thought, getting off at
Chancery Lane. It was so serious; it was so busy. In short, she would
like to have a profession. She would become a doctor, a farmer,
possibly go into Parliament, if she found it necessary, all because of
the Strand.
The feet of those people busy about their activities, hands putting
stone to stone, minds eternally occupied not with trivial chatterings
(comparing women to poplars—which was rather exciting, of course,
but very silly), but with thoughts of ships, of business, of law, of
administration, and with it all so stately (she was in the Temple), gay
(there was the river), pious (there was the Church), made her quite
determined, whatever her mother might say, to become either a
farmer or a doctor. But she was, of course, rather lazy.
And it was much better to say nothing about it. It seemed so silly. It
was the sort of thing that did sometimes happen, when one was
alone—buildings without architects’ names, crowds of people coming
back from the city having more power than single clergymen in
Kensington, than any of the books Miss Kilman had lent her, to
stimulate what lay slumbrous, clumsy, and shy on the mind’s sandy
floor to break surface, as a child suddenly stretches its arms; it was
just that, perhaps, a sigh, a stretch of the arms, an impulse, a
revelation, which has its effects for ever, and then down again it went
to the sandy floor. She must go home. She must dress for dinner.
But what was the time?—where was a clock?
She looked up Fleet Street. She walked just a little way towards St.
Paul’s, shyly, like some one penetrating on tiptoe, exploring a
strange house by night with a candle, on edge lest the owner should
suddenly fling wide his bedroom door and ask her business, nor did
she dare wander off into queer alleys, tempting bye-streets, any
more than in a strange house open doors which might be bedroom
doors, or sitting-room doors, or lead straight to the larder. For no
Dalloways came down the Strand daily; she was a pioneer, a stray,
venturing, trusting.
In many ways, her mother felt, she was extremely immature, like a
child still, attached to dolls, to old slippers; a perfect baby; and that
was charming. But then, of course, there was in the Dalloway family
the tradition of public service. Abbesses, principals, head mistresses,
dignitaries, in the republic of women—without being brilliant, any of
them, they were that. She penetrated a little further in the direction of
St. Paul’s. She liked the geniality, sisterhood, motherhood,
brotherhood of this uproar. It seemed to her good. The noise was
tremendous; and suddenly there were trumpets (the unemployed)
blaring, rattling about in the uproar; military music; as if people were
marching; yet had they been dying—had some woman breathed her
last and whoever was watching, opening the window of the room
where she had just brought off that act of supreme dignity, looked
down on Fleet Street, that uproar, that military music would have
come triumphing up to him, consolatory, indifferent.
It was not conscious. There was no recognition in it of one fortune, or
fate, and for that very reason even to those dazed with watching for
the last shivers of consciousness on the faces of the dying,
consoling. Forgetfulness in people might wound, their ingratitude
corrode, but this voice, pouring endlessly, year in year out, would
take whatever it might be; this vow; this van; this life; this procession,
would wrap them all about and carry them on, as in the rough stream
of a glacier the ice holds a splinter of bone, a blue petal, some oak
trees, and rolls them on.
But it was later than she thought. Her mother would not like her to be
wandering off alone like this. She turned back down the Strand.
A puff of wind (in spite of the heat, there was quite a wind) blew a
thin black veil over the sun and over the Strand. The faces faded; the
omnibuses suddenly lost their glow. For although the clouds were of
mountainous white so that one could fancy hacking hard chips off
with a hatchet, with broad golden slopes, lawns of celestial pleasure
gardens, on their flanks, and had all the appearance of settled
habitations assembled for the conference of gods above the world,
there was a perpetual movement among them. Signs were
interchanged, when, as if to fulfil some scheme arranged already,
now a summit dwindled, now a whole block of pyramidal size which
had kept its station inalterably advanced into the midst or gravely led
the procession to fresh anchorage. Fixed though they seemed at
their posts, at rest in perfect unanimity, nothing could be fresher,
freer, more sensitive superficially than the snow-white or gold-kindled
surface; to change, to go, to dismantle the solemn assemblage was
immediately possible; and in spite of the grave fixity, the
accumulated robustness and solidity, now they struck light to the
earth, now darkness.
Calmly and competently, Elizabeth Dalloway mounted the
Westminster omnibus.
Going and coming, beckoning, signalling, so the light and shadow
which now made the wall grey, now the bananas bright yellow, now
made the Strand grey, now made the omnibuses bright yellow,
seemed to Septimus Warren Smith lying on the sofa in the sitting-
room; watching the watery gold glow and fade with the astonishing
sensibility of some live creature on the roses, on the wall-paper.
Outside the trees dragged their leaves like nets through the depths
of the air; the sound of water was in the room and through the waves
came the voices of birds singing. Every power poured its treasures
on his head, and his hand lay there on the back of the sofa, as he
had seen his hand lie when he was bathing, floating, on the top of
the waves, while far away on shore he heard dogs barking and
barking far away. Fear no more, says the heart in the body; fear no
more.
He was not afraid. At every moment Nature signified by some
laughing hint like that gold spot which went round the wall—there,
there, there—her determination to show, by brandishing her plumes,
shaking her tresses, flinging her mantle this way and that, beautifully,
always beautifully, and standing close up to breathe through her
hollowed hands Shakespeare’s words, her meaning.
Rezia, sitting at the table twisting a hat in her hands, watched him;
saw him smiling. He was happy then. But she could not bear to see
him smiling. It was not marriage; it was not being one’s husband to
look strange like that, always to be starting, laughing, sitting hour
after hour silent, or clutching her and telling her to write. The table
drawer was full of those writings; about war; about Shakespeare;
about great discoveries; how there is no death. Lately he had
become excited suddenly for no reason (and both Dr. Holmes and
Sir William Bradshaw said excitement was the worst thing for him),
and waved his hands and cried out that he knew the truth! He knew
everything! That man, his friend who was killed, Evans, had come,
he said. He was singing behind the screen. She wrote it down just as
he spoke it. Some things were very beautiful; others sheer
nonsense. And he was always stopping in the middle, changing his
mind; wanting to add something; hearing something new; listening
with his hand up.
But she heard nothing.
And once they found the girl who did the room reading one of these
papers in fits of laughter. It was a dreadful pity. For that made
Septimus cry out about human cruelty—how they tear each other to
pieces. The fallen, he said, they tear to pieces. “Holmes is on us,” he
would say, and he would invent stories about Holmes; Holmes eating
porridge; Holmes reading Shakespeare—making himself roar with
laughter or rage, for Dr. Holmes seemed to stand for something
horrible to him. “Human nature,” he called him. Then there were the
visions. He was drowned, he used to say, and lying on a cliff with the
gulls screaming over him. He would look over the edge of the sofa
down into the sea. Or he was hearing music. Really it was only a
barrel organ or some man crying in the street. But “Lovely!” he used
to cry, and the tears would run down his cheeks, which was to her
the most dreadful thing of all, to see a man like Septimus, who had
fought, who was brave, crying. And he would lie listening until
suddenly he would cry that he was falling down, down into the
flames! Actually she would look for flames, it was so vivid. But there
was nothing. They were alone in the room. It was a dream, she
would tell him and so quiet him at last, but sometimes she was
frightened too. She sighed as she sat sewing.
Her sigh was tender and enchanting, like the wind outside a wood in
the evening. Now she put down her scissors; now she turned to take
something from the table. A little stir, a little crinkling, a little tapping
built up something on the table there, where she sat sewing.
Through his eyelashes he could see her blurred outline; her little
black body; her face and hands; her turning movements at the table,
as she took up a reel, or looked (she was apt to lose things) for her
silk. She was making a hat for Mrs. Filmer’s married daughter,
whose name was—he had forgotten her name.
“What is the name of Mrs. Filmer’s married daughter?” he asked.
“Mrs. Peters,” said Rezia. She was afraid it was too small, she said,
holding it before her. Mrs. Peters was a big woman; but she did not
like her. It was only because Mrs. Filmer had been so good to them.
“She gave me grapes this morning,” she said—that Rezia wanted to
do something to show that they were grateful. She had come into the
room the other evening and found Mrs. Peters, who thought they
were out, playing the gramophone.
“Was it true?” he asked. She was playing the gramophone? Yes; she
had told him about it at the time; she had found Mrs. Peters playing
the gramophone.
He began, very cautiously, to open his eyes, to see whether a
gramophone was really there. But real things—real things were too
exciting. He must be cautious. He would not go mad. First he looked
at the fashion papers on the lower shelf, then, gradually at the
gramophone with the green trumpet. Nothing could be more exact.
And so, gathering courage, he looked at the sideboard; the plate of
bananas; the engraving of Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort; at
the mantelpiece, with the jar of roses. None of these things moved.
All were still; all were real.
“She is a woman with a spiteful tongue,” said Rezia.
“What does Mr. Peters do?” Septimus asked.
“Ah,” said Rezia, trying to remember. She thought Mrs. Filmer had
said that he travelled for some company. “Just now he is in Hull,” she
said.
“Just now!” She said that with her Italian accent. She said that
herself. He shaded his eyes so that he might see only a little of her
face at a time, first the chin, then the nose, then the forehead, in
case it were deformed, or had some terrible mark on it. But no, there
she was, perfectly natural, sewing, with the pursed lips that women
have, the set, the melancholy expression, when sewing. But there
was nothing terrible about it, he assured himself, looking a second
time, a third time at her face, her hands, for what was frightening or
disgusting in her as she sat there in broad daylight, sewing? Mrs.
Peters had a spiteful tongue. Mr. Peters was in Hull. Why then rage
and prophesy? Why fly scourged and outcast? Why be made to
tremble and sob by the clouds? Why seek truths and deliver
messages when Rezia sat sticking pins into the front of her dress,
and Mr. Peters was in Hull? Miracles, revelations, agonies,
loneliness, falling through the sea, down, down into the flames, all
were burnt out, for he had a sense, as he watched Rezia trimming
the straw hat for Mrs. Peters, of a coverlet of flowers.
“It’s too small for Mrs. Peters,” said Septimus.
For the first time for days he was speaking as he used to do! Of
course it was—absurdly small, she said. But Mrs. Peters had chosen
it.
He took it out of her hands. He said it was an organ grinder’s
monkey’s hat.
How it rejoiced her that! Not for weeks had they laughed like this
together, poking fun privately like married people. What she meant
was that if Mrs. Filmer had come in, or Mrs. Peters or anybody they
would not have understood what she and Septimus were laughing
at.
“There,” she said, pinning a rose to one side of the hat. Never had
she felt so happy! Never in her life!
But that was still more ridiculous, Septimus said. Now the poor
woman looked like a pig at a fair. (Nobody ever made her laugh as
Septimus did.)
What had she got in her work-box? She had ribbons and beads,
tassels, artificial flowers. She tumbled them out on the table. He
began putting odd colours together—for though he had no fingers,
could not even do up a parcel, he had a wonderful eye, and often he
was right, sometimes absurd, of course, but sometimes wonderfully
right.
“She shall have a beautiful hat!” he murmured, taking up this and
that, Rezia kneeling by his side, looking over his shoulder. Now it
was finished—that is to say the design; she must stitch it together.
But she must be very, very careful, he said, to keep it just as he had
made it.
So she sewed. When she sewed, he thought, she made a sound like
a kettle on the hob; bubbling, murmuring, always busy, her strong
little pointed fingers pinching and poking; her needle flashing
straight. The sun might go in and out, on the tassels, on the wall-
paper, but he would wait, he thought, stretching out his feet, looking
at his ringed sock at the end of the sofa; he would wait in this warm
place, this pocket of still air, which one comes on at the edge of a
wood sometimes in the evening, when, because of a fall in the
ground, or some arrangement of the trees (one must be scientific
above all, scientific), warmth lingers, and the air buffets the cheek
like the wing of a bird.
“There it is,” said Rezia, twirling Mrs. Peters’ hat on the tips of her
fingers. “That’ll do for the moment. Later ...” her sentence bubbled
away drip, drip, drip, like a contented tap left running.
It was wonderful. Never had he done anything which made him feel
so proud. It was so real, it was so substantial, Mrs. Peters’ hat.
“Just look at it,” he said.
Yes, it would always make her happy to see that hat. He had
become himself then, he had laughed then. They had been alone
together. Always she would like that hat.
He told her to try it on.
“But I must look so queer!” she cried, running over to the glass and
looking first this side then that. Then she snatched it off again, for
there was a tap at the door. Could it be Sir William Bradshaw? Had
he sent already?
No! it was only the small girl with the evening paper.
What always happened, then happened—what happened every
night of their lives. The small girl sucked her thumb at the door;
Rezia went down on her knees; Rezia cooed and kissed; Rezia got a
bag of sweets out of the table drawer. For so it always happened.
First one thing, then another. So she built it up, first one thing and
then another. Dancing, skipping, round and round the room they
went. He took the paper. Surrey was all out, he read. There was a
heat wave. Rezia repeated: Surrey was all out. There was a heat
wave, making it part of the game she was playing with Mrs. Filmer’s
grandchild, both of them laughing, chattering at the same time, at
their game. He was very tired. He was very happy. He would sleep.
He shut his eyes. But directly he saw nothing the sounds of the
game became fainter and stranger and sounded like the cries of
people seeking and not finding, and passing further and further
away. They had lost him!
He started up in terror. What did he see? The plate of bananas on
the sideboard. Nobody was there (Rezia had taken the child to its
mother. It was bedtime). That was it: to be alone forever. That was
the doom pronounced in Milan when he came into the room and saw
them cutting out buckram shapes with their scissors; to be alone
forever.
He was alone with the sideboard and the bananas. He was alone,
exposed on this bleak eminence, stretched out—but not on a hill-top;
not on a crag; on Mrs. Filmer’s sitting-room sofa. As for the visions,
the faces, the voices of the dead, where were they? There was a
screen in front of him, with black bulrushes and blue swallows.
Where he had once seen mountains, where he had seen faces,
where he had seen beauty, there was a screen.
“Evans!” he cried. There was no answer. A mouse had squeaked, or
a curtain rustled. Those were the voices of the dead. The screen, the
coal-scuttle, the sideboard remained to him. Let him then face the
screen, the coal-scuttle and the sideboard ... but Rezia burst into the
room chattering.
Some letter had come. Everybody’s plans were changed. Mrs.
Filmer would not be able to go to Brighton after all. There was no
time to let Mrs. Williams know, and really Rezia thought it very, very
annoying, when she caught sight of the hat and thought ... perhaps
... she ... might just make a little.... Her voice died out in contented
melody.
“Ah, damn!” she cried (it was a joke of theirs, her swearing), the
needle had broken. Hat, child, Brighton, needle. She built it up; first
one thing, then another, she built it up, sewing.
She wanted him to say whether by moving the rose she had
improved the hat. She sat on the end of the sofa.
They were perfectly happy now, she said, suddenly, putting the hat
down. For she could say anything to him now. She could say
whatever came into her head. That was almost the first thing she
had felt about him, that night in the café when he had come in with
his English friends. He had come in, rather shyly, looking round him,
and his hat had fallen when he hung it up. That she could remember.
She knew he was English, though not one of the large Englishmen
her sister admired, for he was always thin; but he had a beautiful
fresh colour; and with his big nose, his bright eyes, his way of sitting
a little hunched made her think, she had often told him, of a young
hawk, that first evening she saw him, when they were playing
dominoes, and he had come in—of a young hawk; but with her he
was always very gentle. She had never seen him wild or drunk, only
suffering sometimes through this terrible war, but even so, when she
came in, he would put it all away. Anything, anything in the whole
world, any little bother with her work, anything that struck her to say
she would tell him, and he understood at once. Her own family even
were not the same. Being older than she was and being so clever—
how serious he was, wanting her to read Shakespeare before she
could even read a child’s story in English!—being so much more
experienced, he could help her. And she too could help him.
But this hat now. And then (it was getting late) Sir William Bradshaw.
She held her hands to her head, waiting for him to say did he like the
hat or not, and as she sat there, waiting, looking down, he could feel
her mind, like a bird, falling from branch to branch, and always
alighting, quite rightly; he could follow her mind, as she sat there in
one of those loose lax poses that came to her naturally and, if he
should say anything, at once she smiled, like a bird alighting with all
its claws firm upon the bough.
But he remembered Bradshaw said, “The people we are most fond
of are not good for us when we are ill.” Bradshaw said, he must be
taught to rest. Bradshaw said they must be separated.
“Must,” “must,” why “must”? What power had Bradshaw over him?
“What right has Bradshaw to say ‘must’ to me?” he demanded.
“It is because you talked of killing yourself,” said Rezia. (Mercifully,
she could now say anything to Septimus.)
So he was in their power! Holmes and Bradshaw were on him! The
brute with the red nostrils was snuffing into every secret place!
“Must” it could say! Where were his papers? the things he had
written?
She brought him his papers, the things he had written, things she
had written for him. She tumbled them out on to the sofa. They
looked at them together. Diagrams, designs, little men and women
brandishing sticks for arms, with wings—were they?—on their backs;
circles traced round shillings and sixpences—the suns and stars;
zigzagging precipices with mountaineers ascending roped together,
exactly like knives and forks; sea pieces with little faces laughing out
of what might perhaps be waves: the map of the world. Burn them!
he cried. Now for his writings; how the dead sing behind
rhododendron bushes; odes to Time; conversations with
Shakespeare; Evans, Evans, Evans—his messages from the dead;
do not cut down trees; tell the Prime Minister. Universal love: the
meaning of the world. Burn them! he cried.
But Rezia laid her hands on them. Some were very beautiful, she
thought. She would tie them up (for she had no envelope) with a
piece of silk.
Even if they took him, she said, she would go with him. They could
not separate them against their wills, she said.
Shuffling the edges straight, she did up the papers, and tied the
parcel almost without looking, sitting beside him, he thought, as if all
her petals were about her. She was a flowering tree; and through her
branches looked out the face of a lawgiver, who had reached a
sanctuary where she feared no one; not Holmes; not Bradshaw; a
miracle, a triumph, the last and greatest. Staggering he saw her
mount the appalling staircase, laden with Holmes and Bradshaw,
men who never weighed less than eleven stone six, who sent their
wives to Court, men who made ten thousand a year and talked of
proportion; who different in their verdicts (for Holmes said one thing,
Bradshaw another), yet judges they were; who mixed the vision and
the sideboard; saw nothing clear, yet ruled, yet inflicted. “Must” they
said. Over them she triumphed.
“There!” she said. The papers were tied up. No one should get at
them. She would put them away.
And, she said, nothing should separate them. She sat down beside
him and called him by the name of that hawk or crow which being
malicious and a great destroyer of crops was precisely like him. No
one could separate them, she said.
Then she got up to go into the bedroom to pack their things, but
hearing voices downstairs and thinking that Dr. Holmes had perhaps
called, ran down to prevent him coming up.
Septimus could hear her talking to Holmes on the staircase.
“My dear lady, I have come as a friend,” Holmes was saying.
“No. I will not allow you to see my husband,” she said.
He could see her, like a little hen, with her wings spread barring his
passage. But Holmes persevered.
“My dear lady, allow me....” Holmes said, putting her aside (Holmes
was a powerfully built man).
Holmes was coming upstairs. Holmes would burst open the door.
Holmes would say “In a funk, eh?” Holmes would get him. But no;
not Holmes; not Bradshaw. Getting up rather unsteadily, hopping
indeed from foot to foot, he considered Mrs. Filmer’s nice clean
bread knife with “Bread” carved on the handle. Ah, but one mustn’t
spoil that. The gas fire? But it was too late now. Holmes was coming.
Razors he might have got, but Rezia, who always did that sort of
thing, had packed them. There remained only the window, the large
Bloomsbury-lodging house window, the tiresome, the troublesome,
and rather melodramatic business of opening the window and
throwing himself out. It was their idea of tragedy, not his or Rezia’s
(for she was with him). Holmes and Bradshaw like that sort of thing.
(He sat on the sill.) But he would wait till the very last moment. He
did not want to die. Life was good. The sun hot. Only human beings
—what did they want? Coming down the staircase opposite an old
man stopped and stared at him. Holmes was at the door. “I’ll give it
you!” he cried, and flung himself vigorously, violently down on to Mrs.
Filmer’s area railings.
“The coward!” cried Dr. Holmes, bursting the door open. Rezia ran to
the window, she saw; she understood. Dr. Holmes and Mrs. Filmer
collided with each other. Mrs. Filmer flapped her apron and made her
hide her eyes in the bedroom. There was a great deal of running up
and down stairs. Dr. Holmes came in—white as a sheet, shaking all
over, with a glass in his hand. She must be brave and drink
something, he said (What was it? Something sweet), for her
husband was horribly mangled, would not recover consciousness,
she must not see him, must be spared as much as possible, would
have the inquest to go through, poor young woman. Who could have
foretold it? A sudden impulse, no one was in the least to blame (he
told Mrs. Filmer). And why the devil he did it, Dr. Holmes could not
conceive.
It seemed to her as she drank the sweet stuff that she was opening
long windows, stepping out into some garden. But where? The clock
was striking—one, two, three: how sensible the sound was;
compared with all this thumping and whispering; like Septimus
himself. She was falling asleep. But the clock went on striking, four,
five, six and Mrs. Filmer waving her apron (they wouldn’t bring the
body in here, would they?) seemed part of that garden; or a flag. She
had once seen a flag slowly rippling out from a mast when she
stayed with her aunt at Venice. Men killed in battle were thus
saluted, and Septimus had been through the War. Of her memories,
most were happy.
She put on her hat, and ran through cornfields—where could it have
been?—on to some hill, somewhere near the sea, for there were
ships, gulls, butterflies; they sat on a cliff. In London too, there they
sat, and, half dreaming, came to her through the bedroom door, rain
falling, whisperings, stirrings among dry corn, the caress of the sea,
as it seemed to her, hollowing them in its arched shell and
murmuring to her laid on shore, strewn she felt, like flying flowers
over some tomb.
“He is dead,” she said, smiling at the poor old woman who guarded
her with her honest light-blue eyes fixed on the door. (They wouldn’t
bring him in here, would they?) But Mrs. Filmer pooh-poohed. Oh no,
oh no! They were carrying him away now. Ought she not to be told?
Married people ought to be together, Mrs. Filmer thought. But they
must do as the doctor said.
“Let her sleep,” said Dr. Holmes, feeling her pulse. She saw the large
outline of his body standing dark against the window. So that was Dr.
Holmes.
One of the triumphs of civilisation, Peter Walsh thought. It is one of
the triumphs of civilisation, as the light high bell of the ambulance
sounded. Swiftly, cleanly the ambulance sped to the hospital, having
picked up instantly, humanely, some poor devil; some one hit on the
head, struck down by disease, knocked over perhaps a minute or so
ago at one of these crossings, as might happen to oneself. That was
civilisation. It struck him coming back from the East—the efficiency,
the organisation, the communal spirit of London. Every cart or
carriage of its own accord drew aside to let the ambulance pass.
Perhaps it was morbid; or was it not touching rather, the respect
which they showed this ambulance with its victim inside—busy men
hurrying home yet instantly bethinking them as it passed of some
wife; or presumably how easily it might have been them there,
stretched on a shelf with a doctor and a nurse.... Ah, but thinking
became morbid, sentimental, directly one began conjuring up
doctors, dead bodies; a little glow of pleasure, a sort of lust too over
the visual impression warned one not to go on with that sort of thing
any more—fatal to art, fatal to friendship. True. And yet, thought
Peter Walsh, as the ambulance turned the corner though the light
high bell could be heard down the next street and still farther as it
crossed the Tottenham Court Road, chiming constantly, it is the
privilege of loneliness; in privacy one may do as one chooses. One
might weep if no one saw. It had been his undoing—this
susceptibility—in Anglo-Indian society; not weeping at the right time,
or laughing either. I have that in me, he thought standing by the
pillar-box, which could now dissolve in tears. Why, Heaven knows.
Beauty of some sort probably, and the weight of the day, which
beginning with that visit to Clarissa had exhausted him with its heat,
its intensity, and the drip, drip, of one impression after another down
into that cellar where they stood, deep, dark, and no one would ever
know. Partly for that reason, its secrecy, complete and inviolable, he
had found life like an unknown garden, full of turns and corners,
surprising, yes; really it took one’s breath away, these moments;
there coming to him by the pillar-box opposite the British Museum
one of them, a moment, in which things came together; this
ambulance; and life and death. It was as if he were sucked up to
some very high roof by that rush of emotion and the rest of him, like
a white shell-sprinkled beach, left bare. It had been his undoing in
Anglo-Indian society—this susceptibility.
Clarissa once, going on top of an omnibus with him somewhere,
Clarissa superficially at least, so easily moved, now in despair, now
in the best of spirits, all aquiver in those days and such good
company, spotting queer little scenes, names, people from the top of
a bus, for they used to explore London and bring back bags full of
treasures from the Caledonian market—Clarissa had a theory in
those days—they had heaps of theories, always theories, as young
people have. It was to explain the feeling they had of dissatisfaction;
not knowing people; not being known. For how could they know each
other? You met every day; then not for six months, or years. It was
unsatisfactory, they agreed, how little one knew people. But she
said, sitting on the bus going up Shaftesbury Avenue, she felt herself
everywhere; not “here, here, here”; and she tapped the back of the
seat; but everywhere. She waved her hand, going up Shaftesbury
Avenue. She was all that. So that to know her, or any one, one must
seek out the people who completed them; even the places. Odd
affinities she had with people she had never spoken to, some
woman in the street, some man behind a counter—even trees, or
barns. It ended in a transcendental theory which, with her horror of
death, allowed her to believe, or say that she believed (for all her
scepticism), that since our apparitions, the part of us which appears,
are so momentary compared with the other, the unseen part of us,
which spreads wide, the unseen might survive, be recovered
somehow attached to this person or that, or even haunting certain
places after death ... perhaps—perhaps.
Looking back over that long friendship of almost thirty years her
theory worked to this extent. Brief, broken, often painful as their
actual meetings had been what with his absences and interruptions
(this morning, for instance, in came Elizabeth, like a long-legged colt,
handsome, dumb, just as he was beginning to talk to Clarissa) the
effect of them on his life was immeasurable. There was a mystery
about it. You were given a sharp, acute, uncomfortable grain—the
actual meeting; horribly painful as often as not; yet in absence, in the
most unlikely places, it would flower out, open, shed its scent, let you
touch, taste, look about you, get the whole feel of it and
understanding, after years of lying lost. Thus she had come to him;
on board ship; in the Himalayas; suggested by the oddest things (so
Sally Seton, generous, enthusiastic goose! thought of him when she
saw blue hydrangeas). She had influenced him more than any
person he had ever known. And always in this way coming before
him without his wishing it, cool, lady-like, critical; or ravishing,
romantic, recalling some field or English harvest. He saw her most
often in the country, not in London. One scene after another at
Bourton....
He had reached his hotel. He crossed the hall, with its mounds of
reddish chairs and sofas, its spike-leaved, withered-looking plants.
He got his key off the hook. The young lady handed him some
letters. He went upstairs—he saw her most often at Bourton, in the
late summer, when he stayed there for a week, or fortnight even, as
people did in those days. First on top of some hill there she would
stand, hands clapped to her hair, her cloak blowing out, pointing,
crying to them—she saw the Severn beneath. Or in a wood, making
the kettle boil—very ineffective with her fingers; the smoke
curtseying, blowing in their faces; her little pink face showing
through; begging water from an old woman in a cottage, who came
to the door to watch them go. They walked always; the others drove.
She was bored driving, disliked all animals, except that dog. They
tramped miles along roads. She would break off to get her bearings,
pilot him back across country; and all the time they argued,
discussed poetry, discussed people, discussed politics (she was a
Radical then); never noticing a thing except when she stopped, cried
out at a view or a tree, and made him look with her; and so on again,
through stubble fields, she walking ahead, with a flower for her aunt,
never tired of walking for all her delicacy; to drop down on Bourton in
the dusk. Then, after dinner, old Breitkopf would open the piano and
sing without any voice, and they would lie sunk in arm-chairs, trying
not to laugh, but always breaking down and laughing, laughing—
laughing at nothing. Breitkopf was supposed not to see. And then in
the morning, flirting up and down like a wagtail in front of the
house....
Oh it was a letter from her! This blue envelope; that was her hand.
And he would have to read it. Here was another of those meetings,
bound to be painful! To read her letter needed the devil of an effort.
“How heavenly it was to see him. She must tell him that.” That was
all.
But it upset him. It annoyed him. He wished she hadn’t written it.
Coming on top of his thoughts, it was like a nudge in the ribs. Why
couldn’t she let him be? After all, she had married Dalloway, and
lived with him in perfect happiness all these years.
These hotels are not consoling places. Far from it. Any number of
people had hung up their hats on those pegs. Even the flies, if you
thought of it, had settled on other people’s noses. As for the
cleanliness which hit him in the face, it wasn’t cleanliness, so much
as bareness, frigidity; a thing that had to be. Some arid matron made
her rounds at dawn sniffing, peering, causing blue-nosed maids to
scour, for all the world as if the next visitor were a joint of meat to be
served on a perfectly clean platter. For sleep, one bed; for sitting in,
one arm-chair; for cleaning one’s teeth and shaving one’s chin, one
tumbler, one looking-glass. Books, letters, dressing-gown, slipped
about on the impersonality of the horsehair like incongruous
impertinences. And it was Clarissa’s letter that made him see all this.
“Heavenly to see you. She must say so!” He folded the paper;
pushed it away; nothing would induce him to read it again!
To get that letter to him by six o’clock she must have sat down and
written it directly he left her; stamped it; sent somebody to the post. It
was, as people say, very like her. She was upset by his visit. She
had felt a great deal; had for a moment, when she kissed his hand,
regretted, envied him even, remembered possibly (for he saw her
look it) something he had said—how they would change the world if
she married him perhaps; whereas, it was this; it was middle age; it
was mediocrity; then forced herself with her indomitable vitality to put
all that aside, there being in her a thread of life which for toughness,
endurance, power to overcome obstacles, and carry her triumphantly
through he had never known the like of. Yes; but there would come a
reaction directly he left the room. She would be frightfully sorry for
him; she would think what in the world she could do to give him
pleasure (short always of the one thing) and he could see her with
the tears running down her cheeks going to her writing-table and
dashing off that one line which he was to find greeting him....
“Heavenly to see you!” And she meant it.
Peter Walsh had now unlaced his boots.
But it would not have been a success, their marriage. The other
thing, after all, came so much more naturally.
It was odd; it was true; lots of people felt it. Peter Walsh, who had
done just respectably, filled the usual posts adequately, was liked,
but thought a little cranky, gave himself airs—it was odd that he
should have had, especially now that his hair was grey, a contented
look; a look of having reserves. It was this that made him attractive
to women who liked the sense that he was not altogether manly.
There was something unusual about him, or something behind him.
It might be that he was bookish—never came to see you without
taking up the book on the table (he was now reading, with his
bootlaces trailing on the floor); or that he was a gentleman, which
showed itself in the way he knocked the ashes out of his pipe, and in
his manners of course to women. For it was very charming and quite
ridiculous how easily some girl without a grain of sense could twist
him round her finger. But at her own risk. That is to say, though he
might be ever so easy, and indeed with his gaiety and good-breeding
fascinating to be with, it was only up to a point. She said something
—no, no; he saw through that. He wouldn’t stand that—no, no. Then
he could shout and rock and hold his sides together over some joke
with men. He was the best judge of cooking in India. He was a man.
But not the sort of man one had to respect—which was a mercy; not
like Major Simmons, for instance; not in the least like that, Daisy
thought, when, in spite of her two small children, she used to
compare them.
He pulled off his boots. He emptied his pockets. Out came with his
pocket-knife a snapshot of Daisy on the verandah; Daisy all in white,
with a fox-terrier on her knee; very charming, very dark; the best he
had ever seen of her. It did come, after all so naturally; so much
more naturally than Clarissa. No fuss. No bother. No finicking and
fidgeting. All plain sailing. And the dark, adorably pretty girl on the
verandah exclaimed (he could hear her). Of course, of course she
would give him everything! she cried (she had no sense of
discretion) everything he wanted! she cried, running to meet him,
whoever might be looking. And she was only twenty-four. And she
had two children. Well, well!
Well indeed he had got himself into a mess at his age. And it came
over him when he woke in the night pretty forcibly. Suppose they did