Divine Enthusiasm and Love Melancholy: Tristram Shandy and Eighteenth-Century Narratives of Saint Errantry

Divine Enthusiasm and Love Melancholy: Tristram Shandy and Eighteenth-Century Narratives of Saint Errantry Oliver Lovesey Shaftesbury classifies "divineENTHUSIASM" as a particularly dangerous moral, medical, and cultural disorder in "A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm," warning moreover that "something of this militant Religion, something of this Soul-rescuing Spirit, and Saint-Errantry prevails still."1 Anxieties about enthusiasm were acute in the long eighteenth centurywhen anti-nonconformist sentiment and especially anti-popery helped fashion a sense of national identity,2 a project pardy carried out by narrative means. Anti-nonconformist writing frequently associated nonconformist Christian confessions with sexual 1 Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, "A Letter Concerning Enthusiasm," Complete Works, Selected Letters and Posthumous Writings in English with Parallel German Translation, vol. 1.1, ed. and trans. Gerd Hemmerich and Wolfram Benda (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1981), 372, 330. References are to this edition. 2 Jeremy Gregory, "Gender and the Clerical Profession in England, 1660-1850," Gender and Christian Religion, ed. R.N. Swanson (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 1998), pp. 251-53. Lawrence E. Klein and AnthonyJ. La Vopa contend, however, that writing against enthusiasm migrated from the religious to the political domains only at the end of the eighteenth century. "Introduction," Enthusiasm and Enliglitenmenl in Europe, 1650-1850, special issue ofHuntington Library (Quarterly 60:1-2 (1998-99), 4. EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION, Volume 16, Number 3,April 2004 374 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION irregularityandwith, atits extreme, love-melancholy or "erotomania,"3 a malady thatJacques Ferrand claimed arose pardy from spiritualizing the beloved as an "idol" (p. 252), and enthusiasm itself was widely regarded in the period as a manifestation of melancholy, and increasingly as a condition best treated by physicians rather than divines. Laurence Sterne, in his sermon "On Enthusiasm," for example, laments that "These deluded people ... call for the aid ofa physician who can cure the distempered state ofthe body, rather than one who may sooth the anxieties of the mind."4 While advancing a variety of methods of recovery, including raillery, Shaftesbury advocated the acceptance of the consolation ofsocial affections,5 by which he indicated a range of communal ties between men and between women, as well as between the sexes. However, as we see in the treatment ofdivine enthusiasm and love melancholy in satiric or sentimental anti-nonconformist narratives of saint errantry by Shaftesbury, Rasiel de Selva, and Richard Graves, which serve to illustrate Sterne's much more complex handling of the subject, this antidote for religious enthusiasm anchored in communal relations and including relations between the sexes could itself become a destabilizing force, especially when the object ofdesire is the religious woman. In this situation, the purity ofreligious longing, modified by natural affections, becomes tainted with an overpowering eroticism and especially a morbid obsession with fetishized virginity. Thus, as 3 "Erotomania" was the tide ofEdmund Chilmead's 1640 translation ofFerrand's De la maladie d'amourou melandwlieemtinue. Ferrand's A Treatiseon Lovesidtness, as the text is named in Donald A. Beecher and Massimo Ciavolella's magisterial edition, is a compendium of medical, philosophical, and literary lore, as well as a program oftreatment for a disease that Ferrand claims is bodi common and dangerous. Ferrand, A Treatise on Lovesickness, ed. and trans. Beecherand Ciavolella (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1990). References are to this edition. In my discussion ofFerrand, I am indebted to Beecher and Ciavolella's analysis. 4 Tlte Sermons ofLaurence Sterne, Tlie Florida Edition oflite Works ofLaurence Sterne, ed. Melvyn New (Gainesville: University Press ofFlorida, 1996), 4:366. References to "On Enthusiasm" are to this edition. See also Michael Heyd, "Robert Burton's Sources on Enthusiasm," History ofEuropean Ideas 5 (1984), 17-44, and Heyd, "Medical Discourse in Religious Controversy," Science in Context8:l (Spring 1995), 133-57. 5 Shaftesbury was "one ofdie first" to reappraise enthusiasm as a common and also a useful passion, as Susie I. Tucker points out in the context ofan extended definition and linguistic analysis of the term in Enthusiasm: A Study in Semantic Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), p. 138. Shaftesbury's critique constituted a "rehabilitation" ofthe term, argues Heyd in "Be Sober and Reasonable": The Critique ofEnthusiasm in tlte Seventeenth andEarly Eigliteenth Centuries (Leiden: EJ...