“Nothing almost sees miracles / But misery”: Lucretian Philosophy and Ascetic Experience in King Lear

Often hailed by critics as Shakespeare’s darkest drama, King Lear sometimes seems to be an exploration into extreme nihilism. Marxist critic Jan Kott epitomizes this reading when claiming that, “There is nothing, except the cruel earth, where man goes on his journey from the cradle to the grave. The theme of King Lear is an enquiry into the existence or non-existence of Heaven and Hell.”¹ Truly, denials and negations echo throughout the quarto text from Lear’s first dismissal of Cordelia to her new dowry of “nothing” to his final cry of “no, no, no life?” (5.3.281).² Yet to brand each negation as a form of despairing nihilism overlooks the unique situations and connotations of the various forms of “nothing” that appear in the text, and the development of their meaning. As Edward W. Taylor observes, King Lear’s language communicates “something more than a quibbling connection between ‘no’ and ‘know,’ between negation and knowledge.”³

Originally, the character Lear operates only on the level of the “cruel earth” or natural world, believing in a materialistic view of “nothing” and “something” as merely physical states arising from predictable physical causes, as he threatens Cordelia that “nothing will come of nothing,” and that she and her disinheritance come of her ingratitude just as oaks come from acorns (1.1.90). By endorsing this view of classical philosophy, evidenced from the Pre-Socratics through Epicureanism and Stoicism, Lear has excluded the supernatural from his experience. Before he is capable of perceiving miracles of light, Lear must encounter the nihilism of his elder daughters’ “causeless cruelty,” facing the diabolical on his ascetical journey, and, in so doing, approaching a fuller realization of the nature of “nothing.” Only then can he glimpse the celestial and perceive the ability of both good and evil, ingratitude and grace to arise without cause to invade his straightforward world—a world that, he discovers, is neither straightforward nor his. The manifold negations do not deny meaning but rather strip away illusion, causing Lear to “see better” himself, nature, and the supernatural dimensions (1.1.153).

Criticism of the play has typically alternated between two poles of interpretation. To borrow Sean Lawrence’s terms, the atheist and pessimistic interpretation such as that offered by Kott uses Kent’s cry that “All’s cheerless, dark and deadly” as a description of the entire play (5.3.266).⁴ On the other hand, the optimistic Christian interpretation concentrates on the aspect of hope and resurrection that the drama provides—sometimes at the cost of minimizing the very real torment the characters experience, such as when A. C. Bradley famously interprets Lear as “killed by an agony, not of pain but of ecstasy.”⁵

Contrasting and uniting these two poles, the Christian mystical experience of personal ascetical struggle and the via negativa provides a means through which the essential strengths of both the pessimistic secular and optimistic religious interpretations may be harmonized. Blinded to right reason by his naturalistic assumptions, Lear plunges deep into a darkness that exposes his ignorance not only of the diabolical and celestial, but even the natural realm itself. The sheer physical brutality of evil strips Lear of his materialist misconceptions and becomes the occasion for his ultimate cure. In order to understand the subsequent miracles—which, like Creation, proceed ex nihilo—Lear must first descend into the void of nothingness that he had evoked so lightly and experience for himself the negation of all he had assumed.

To learn through a two-fold negation has been a venerable path for saints, sinners, and mystics for centuries: first is the negation involved in the ascetical path by which the stripping of one’s sins and the world’s distractions reveal God more fully. Second is what is known as the via negativa, by which one learns to know God more intellectually by saying what he is not rather than by what he is. Quite often these negations go together. Drawing upon St. John of the Cross’s...