Keats’ Letter on Soul making

Rieff: “If  reason is a world changing  force, than it might be summarized in Weberian as well as popular usage, as situation-changing; if charisma is an older and equally revolutionary force, then it might be summarized as what Keats called, soul-making. The younger force is thought to work, somehow, from the outside in, the older, from the inside out, the younger force is impersonally transferable, the older force is nothing if not transference of personal authority. My interest is in quoting the great question: what the transference of a personal authority can mean to us, here, and now. I write unashamedly from the standpoint of my cultural situation. In that situation, all personal authority appears more and more questionable – and with it charisma, too, appears only in questionable forms. I have some extraordinarily tentative notions of the type that is succeeding, the charismatic in our culture; I have tried to sketch the main features of that type in the course of this volume. I have already introduced my premonition of that type, and his main carriers in an earlier book The Triumph of the Therapeutic.

As  Keats wrote in his letter of April 15, 1819, it was while reading two very different books that he discovered the condition of soul-making.

Keats  had the sharpening experiences of reading, intermixed, William Robertson’s America and Voltaire’s Age of Louis Quatorze. “It is like walking arm – in – arm between Pizarro and the great little monarch,-” wrote Keats. Then he jotted down his great conceit on soul-making, and on our world, like his, as the ‘vale of soul-making’.  In the veil, “reason“ plays a small part. Souls are not made by force of “reason.“ How, then, our souls made? Keats’s beautifully intuited alternative to the revolutionary force of “reason“ is worth quoting in full, I think, if for no other reason than that soul – making is not a condition easily summarized.  .  .

This book I may offer as a life- act, a rattling of dry bones, in what is probably a losing war against the radical contemporaneity of our culture; that contemporaneity is the mark of a true barbarian culture. For barbarism is not some primitive technology and naïve cosmology, but a sophisticated cutting off of the inhibiting authority of the past. Keats belongs to the authority of the past. He writes of primitive of America and sophisticated France:

Keats: “In how lamentable a case do we see the great body of the people in both instances: in the first, where men might seem to inherit quiet of mind from unsophisticated senses; from uncontaminated action of civilization; and especially from their being as it were estranged from a mutual help society and its mutual injuries– and thereby more immediately under the protection of Providence – even there they had mortal pains to bear as bad; or even worse than bailiffs, debts and poverties of civilized life – the whole appears to resolve into this- that man is originally “poor forked creature“ subject to the mischances as the beast of the forest,  destined to hardships and disquietude of some kind or the other. If he improves by degrees his bodily accommodations and comforts – at each stage, at each ascent, there are waiting for him a fresh set of annoyances – he is mortal, and there is still a heaven with its stars above his head. The most interesting question that can come before us is, how far by the persevering endeavors of a seldom appearing Socrates, mankind may be made happy – I can imagine such happiness carried to an extreme – but what must it end in? – Death – and who could in such a case bear with death – the whole troubles of life, which are now frittered away in a series of years, would then be accumulated for the last days of being who, instead of hailing it approach, would leave this world as Eve left Paradise. But in truth, I do not believe in this sort of perfectability – the nature of the world will not admit of it – the inhabitants of the world will correspond to itself. Let the fish Philosphize the ice away from the rivers in winter time, and they shall be at continual play in the tepid delight of Summer.Look at the poles and at the Sands of Africa, whirlpools, and volcano volcanoes. Let men exterminate them, and I will say that they may arrive at earthly happiness. The point of which man may arrive is as far as the parallel state in inanimate nature and no further. 

For instance, suppose a rose to have sensation, it blooms on a beautiful morning, it enjoys itself – but there comes a cold wind, a hot sun – it cannot escape it, it cannot destroy its annoyances. They are as native to the world as itself: no more can man be happy in spite,the worldly elements will pray upon his nature. 

The common cognomen of the world among the misguided and superstitious is “a vale of tears“ from which we are to be redeemed by a certain arbitrary interposition of God and taken to heaven. What a little circumscribed straightening notion! 

Call the world if you please “the veil of soul making“ then you will find out the use of the world ( I am speaking now in the highest terms for human nature, admitting it to be immortal, which I will take here for granted for the purpose of showing a thought which is struck me concerning it)  I say “soul making“ soul as distinguished from intelligence.

There may be intelligences or sparks of the divinity in millions, but they are not souls till they acquire identities, till each one is personally itself. Intelligence are atoms of perception – they know, they see, and they are pure, in short, they are God. How then our souls made? How then are these sparks, which are God,  to have identity given them – so as ever to possess a  bliss peculiar to each one’s individual existence? How, but by the medium of a world like this? This point I sincerely wish to consider because I think it a grander system of salvation than the Christian religion – or rather it is a system of Spirit – creation. This is affected by three grand materials, acting the one upon the other for a series of years. These three materials are the intelligence – the human heart ( as distinguished from intelligence of mind) and the world of elemental space suited for the proper action of mind and heart on each other for the purpose of forming the soul or intelligence destined to possess the sense of identity. I can scarcely express what I dimly perceive – and yet I think I perceive it - that you may judge them more clearly I will put it in the most homely form possible:

I will call the world of school Institute for the purpose of teaching little children to read – I will call the human heart. The horn book used in that school – and I will call the child able to read, the soul made from that school and it’s horn book. Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul? A place where the heart must feel and suffer in 1000 diverse ways! Not merely as the heart a horn book, it is the mind’s Bible, it is the minds experience, it is the tea from which the mind or intelligence sucks its identity. As various as the lives of men are so various become their souls, and thus does God make individual beings, souls, identical souls of the sparks of his own essence. 

This appears to me a faint sketch of a system of salvation, which does not affront our reason and humanity. I am convinced that many difficulties which  Christian‘s labor under would vanish before it. There is one in which, even now strikes me – the salvation of children. In them the spark of intelligence returns to God without any identity -it having had no time to learn of, and be altered by the heart - or the seat of the human passion. 

It is pretty generally suspected that the Christian scheme has been copied from the agent Persian and Greek Philosophers. Why may they not have made this simple thing even more simple for common apprehension by introducing mediators in persons in the same manner, as in the heathen mythology abstractions are personified. Seriously, I think it is probably that this system of soul making may have been the parent of all the more palpable and personal schemes of redemption among the Zoroastrians,the Christians and the Hindus. For one part of the human species must’ve carved Jupiter; so another part must have the palpable and named  mediator and Savior their Christ, their Oromones, and their Vishnu.

 If what I have said should not be plain enough, as I fear it may not be, I will put you in the place where I began in the series of thoughts – I mean, I began by seeing how man was formed by circumstances – and what are circumstances? But the touchstones of his heart and what are touchstones? But proving of his heart? And what are proving of his heart, but for the fires or alterers of his nature? And what is his altered nature, but his soul? And what was his soul before it came into the world and had these proving and altering and perfectioning and intelligence without identity and how is this intelligent identity to be made through the medium of the heart and how is the heart to become this medium, but in the world of circumstances?”

Letters of John Keats

4/21 /1819