Protestant writing of the early modern era vividly evokes both joy and the threat of joylessness. For the individual soul seeking signs of its salvation, joy is a proof or "earnest" of its sanctification by the Holy Spirit. Conversely, joylessness is a sign of the spirit's absence from the life of the individual believer and the corporate church. To illustrate this dynamic of joy and joylessness, I examine selected works of German and English theology before turning to book 1 of Spenser's The Faerie Queene and John Donne's Sermons.
Wordsworth poetically realizes an ecological ethics grounded on the self's non-assimilative encounter with the otherness of nonhuman things. Engaging the etymological force of the word thing, Stoic and Spinozan philosophy, and a poetic tradition of assigning a “face” to natural things, Wordsworth arrives at a lyric apprehension of the “life of things,” a life that human beings share with other thinking and insentient, substantial and circumstantial things. Instead of anthropomorphizing things, Wordsworth “thingicizes” ethics. This aspect of Wordsworth's poems is illuminated when they are read alongside the “ethics of things” developed by Silvia Benso in philosophical dialogue with two major figures of the continental tradition: Heidegger, who conceives of things without ethics, and Levinas, who advances an ethics without things.
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