ESC: English Studies in Canada

S I D N E Y , G R E V I L L E , A N D T H E M E T A P H Y S I C S O F “ N A U G H T I N E S S E ” DENNIS R. DANIELSON University of Ottawa “Das Nichtige ist nicht das Nichts.” 1 JLhe main thing I want to do in this paper is to point out a relatively simple though not adequately recognized current of intellectual history that is important for our understanding of the poetry of Fulke Greville. In broaching the topic of “Naughtinesse” I shall have nothing at all to say about the misbehaviour of small children or dogs, nor, indeed, about the poetry of Sir Philip Sidney. Nevertheless, as a translator Sidney may have been so central to Greville’s non-trivial apprehension of “naughtinesse” that his achievement too deserves to be recognized. In a discussion of naughtiness one ought to begin by talking about nothing. To paraphrase P. L. Heath’s article in the Encyclopedia of Philos­ ophy, nobody really knows a great deal about nothing; but, then, one would expect him to.2 For the rest of us it is different. For when we use any noun at all we feel as if that of which we are grammatically predicating something must itself somehow exist, or be — which in the case of nothing causes us real problems. Of course, if this whole issue concerned only a minor logical or grammatical quirk, then we as students of literature really wouldn’t have nothing to worry about. But we do need to worry about it, because theo­ logically and philosophically it has been and continues to be a very signifi­ cant notion indeed; and ever since Polyphemus proved that he was Nobody’s fool, the flip-flopping of logical Gestalts that occurs when we try, even play­ fully, to speak of nothing has led to ambiguities both rich and dangerous. Within Western Christendom, the most important link in the so-called meonic tradition — from Greek ¡x .r ] ov, “non-being” — is of course St. Augus­ tine; two of his doctrines are crucial for what I am going to say about Gre­ ville. First, and most obviously, is his teaching that evil, ontologically, is no thing, or no substance — that evil in its essence is merely parasitic, a priva­ tion of good, privatio boni? Augustine’s concern in promulgating this doc­ trine, clearly, is to counter the radical dualism of the Manichaeans with its English Studies in C anada, x, 3, September 1984 two primordial principles of good and evil, light and darkness. For Augus­ tine, the primacy of one good God has to entail the primacy of goodness itself. And in making that affirmation he borrows heavily from Neoplaton­ ism,4 which of course assumes an identity of goodness and being. In the Great Chain of Being, as we all know, the farther down the chain a thing is, the less being and hence the less goodness it possesses. For the Neoplatonist, evil thus has its status in a thing’s relative degree of non-being. Yet as Plotinus says, “nothing is to be blamed for being inferior to the First,” for “the Universe is a thing of variety, and how could there be an inferior with­ out a superior or a superior without an inferior?”5 Only that which is wholly lacking in being can in principle be wholly evil. Ergo nothing can itself be evil, and nothing alone. Let us notice here, however, that, for Augustine, what constitutes evil is not something’s “inferiority” in the static Plotinian sense, but rather its actually being diminished. As he says in the Enchiridion, “for a good to be diminished is an evil.”6 In other words, evil is not the mere absence of a goodness that a thing has never possessed nor could ever possess, but rather the lack or the loss of a goodness in some sense original to it. Clearly this version of evil-as-privatio boni is a more dynamic and a more profoundly moral notion than is its Neoplatonic predecessor. Let me emphasize that the perplexity Augustine...