Thomas Paine

Against the background of the immensely popular and influential rhetorical and grammatical treatises of the new rhetoric, Thomas Paine’s reaction to Burke’s Reflections in The Rights of Man (1791) and his complex formulation of a scientific theology in The Age of Reason (1794) represent two fundamental aspects of the radical rhetoric of clarity. Many years earlier, in Common Sense (1776), Paine’s powerful textual intervention in the American Revolution, he had already established his levelling politicisation of what were essentially the principles of the Royal Society, associating reason with ‘simple facts, plain arguments, common sense’,²⁶ and associating obfuscation with monarchical superstition and mystery: ‘the fate of Charles the First hath only made Kings more subtle - not more just’.²⁷ Paine’s adoption of an explicitly or metarhetorically plain style in his writings demonstrates the political value of instrumental reflexivity: to say that one valued plainness and clarity was, for metarhetorical purposes, more important than actually writing in a plain and unemotional style, and became a commonplace in radical reactions to Burke. Thus F. P. Lock remarks of the The Rights of Man that ‘[t]hese protests against rhetoric, together with the use of a self-consciously “plain style,” constitute a recognizable, indeed venerable, rhetorical strategy…. Paine excoriates Burke for writing in a style more suited to Romantic fictions, than to serious political discourse’.²⁸

Paine’s 1790s figuration of the relation between nature and God is based largely in a transvaluation of the theological imagery of light and darkness, especially in the context of epistemological investigations of the nature of language. This radical use of the figures of clarity, which is grounded in the belief that collective associations with words can be changed through discourse, thus serves as a powerful rhetorical instrument for the reversal or inversion of institutionally and culturally embedded political and theological ideologies. ‘For both Burke and Paine’, writes James Epstein, ‘there was an inseparable link between linguistic and political order. For Paine, the unmediated transparency of rationalist language was a necessary precondition for democratic politics… words were merely to reflect transparent meaning…. For Burke… the fall of language and the fall of monarchy went hand in hand’.²⁹ But this shared interest in language was also the condition for the interchangeability of key words, which could be differently valued and transvalued by political opponents. Paine’s clarity, like Burke’s obscurity, is a rhetoric designed to persuade, however much Paine may have based the representation of his own language on an ultimately insupportable metarhetorical doctrine of the naturalness of clarity. Ultimately, this meant that Paine too succumbed to the radical decline into the interchangeability of clarity and obscurity. The fact that he ‘repeats precisely what he repudiates Burke for shows how Paine works within the same paradigms as his adversary’.³⁰

From the very beginning of The Rights of Man, ‘[t]he most widely read reply to Burke’,³¹ Paine mocks Burke’s attempt to halt the spread of revolutionary sentiment by portraying him with a battery of negative charges of obscurity, exploiting the connotations of obscurity relating to dishonesty, misinformed and misinforming passion, and the perpetuation of tyranny and oppression through mystery. ‘Mr. Burke’s book,’ writes Paine, in a typical example of radical inversion, ‘has the appearance of being written as instruction to the French Nation; but if I may permit myself the use of an extravagant metaphor, suited to the extravagance of the case, It is darkness attempting to illuminate light’.³² Burke’s highly figurative language affords Paine the ironic freedom to indulge in the looseness of metaphor and ornament otherwise inimical to clear communication, and it is through parody that obscurity is often smuggled into Paine’s rhetoric. Burke is represented as taking ‘poetical liberties’ which distort truth, and his ‘wild, unsystematical, display of paradoxical rhapsodies’³³ is consequently associated with the inhibition of education and the dissemination of accurate information. Accordingly, ‘Burke’ becomes a figure for obscurity, proceeding with ‘astrological mysterious importance’, and for all of the evils of the institutions which Paine sought to reform, or demolish. ³⁴

Mystery, for Paine as for other radicals, is a form of obscurity associated with both an exclusive appropriation of power, and with misleading superstition, as opposed to proper scientific insight. Thus he writes that the promoters of repressive establishments ‘took care to represent Government as a thing made up of mysteries, which only themselves understood’, and the ‘obscurity in which the origin of all the present old governments is buried, implies the iniquity and disgrace with which they began’.³⁵ In the French Nation, naturally, ‘[t]here is no place for mystery’, and the National Assembly, in contrast to Burke, is an ‘illuminated and illuminating body of men’.³⁶ The ‘luminous’ revolutions of America and France, rather than the church or established educating or educated authorities, therefore represent an ‘enlarging orb of reason’.³⁷ This illumination of the tyrannical darkness takes the form of a new type of common and plain education: ‘[a] nation under a well-regulated Government should permit none to remain uninstructed. It is monarchical and aristocratical Government only that requires ignorance for its support’.³⁸ It is this use of language, this new accumulation and radical, egalitarian dissemination of knowledge, which Paine claims is effecting practical reform, and it is fittingly figured in the following well-known passage as a flame: ‘[f]rom a small spark, kindled in America, a flame has arisen not to be extinguished. Without consuming, like the Ultima Ratio Regum, it winds its progress from Nation to Nation and conquers by a silent operation. Man finds himself changed’.³⁹ Burke, the king, established governments, all those institutions and individuals which formerly clothed themselves in the imagery of light - the glory of saints, the glory of kings, the enlightenment of the few by a hierarchical and restricted education - all are deliberately transvalued through the figuration of an obscure Burke and the illuminating Revolution.⁴⁰

Even more fundamental than this shift of received associations, however, is Paine’s representation of the Bible and the Christian God not in the positive imagery of the obscurity of transcendent elevation and sublimity, but in the negative imagery of the obscurity of ignorance and falsity. Mounted in a scientifically motivated contemplation of the nature of language, Paine’s attack inverts figurative associations deeply engrained in dominant English and French Christian cultures, like the Miltonic figures referred to by Burke in his discussion of obscurity in the Enquiry. In the beginning of his carefully orchestrated argument, Paine claims that ‘the word of God cannot exist in any written or human language’ because God is unchangeable, while

[t]he continually progressive change to which the meaning of words is subject, the want of an universal language which renders translations necessary, the error to which translations are again subject, the mistakes of copyists and printers, together with the possibility of wilful alteration, are of themselves evidences, that human language, whether in speech or in print, cannot be the vehicle of the word of God.⁴¹

It is in the world, in creation, by contrast, that we find ‘an universal language… an ever existing original’ capable of communicating the nature of God. ⁴² It is Christianity, and the stories of the Bible, which perpetuate falsity: Christianity is therefore

as near to atheism as twilight is to darkness. It introduces between man and his maker an opaque body which it calls a redeemer; as the moon introduces her opaque self between the earth and the sun, and it produces by this means a religious or an irreligious eclipse of light. It has put the whole orb of reason into shade.⁴³

Breathtakingly, Paine goes on: ‘[t]he effect of this obscurity has been that of turning every thing upside down’.⁴⁴ It is the ultimate inversion and example of radical figurative interchangeability: Christianity is a dark star. As though he needed to do anything more to make his transvaluation of the figures of clarity and obscurity complete, Paine also mocks the tradition of sublimity, from Longinus to Burke, by pointing out the strangeness of the attribution to God of the imperative of the fiat lux, ‘Let there be light’. The ‘sublime’ of Burke’s Enquiry, and, by extension, the whole Christian unscientific theological tradition, becomes ‘a windmill just visible in a fog, which imagination might distort into a flying mountain, an arch angel, or a flock of wild geese’.⁴⁵

Paine’s assertions concerning the mutability of language and its consequent inability to communicate unchangeable truth apply equally to scientific and to religious discourse. But Paine seems largely unaware of this problem for his scheme of general illumination and scientific theology. Thus he reports that it is from those thoughts which ‘bolt into the mind of their own accord’ that he has, in the figure of the economics of the imagination, ‘acquired almost all the knowledge that I have’, and that ‘the learning that any person gains from school education… serves only, like a small capital, to put him in the way of beginning learning for himself afterwards’⁴⁶. Such claims mitigate his dilemma by demonstrating a reliance on intuition, and are to an extent consistent with the belief that reason is a ‘gift of God to man’,⁴⁷ but they also invoke an ancient tradition of inspiration related to that discussed by Timothy Clark:

[i]n both the Platonic and the biblical traditions inspiration described the supposed possession of an individual voice by some transcendent authority…. That is to say, a crucial part of the process of composition is understood as a desired or even calculated suspension of reasoning or deliberation, a temporary mania or insanity. This suspension is valorised as a mode of access to “deeper” or spontaneously productive areas of the psyche. The irrationality that is inspiration, though analogous to a kind of insanity, is understood to be sui generis, a peculiar, unique and probably rare state of being.⁴⁸

Spontaneity is in this case allied to irrationality, to the absence or pre-emption of rational deliberation, and always involves the potential interchangeability of clarity and obscurity in the tradition of inspiration. Significantly, Clark adds: ‘[u]nlike the closely related notion of the furor poeticus or “poetic madness”, inspiration is a rhetorical concept. To be inspired is, necessarily, to inspire others’.⁴⁹ As Clark correctly implies here, claims to inspiration by those engaged in politics and rhetoric, rather than speculations on sublime internal psychological involutions, always involve implications concerning the potential for influence and the interpersonal communication, like a virus, of whatever spirit has inspired or possessed the speaker.

In the kind of inspiration invoked by Paine, this ‘spirit’ is indeterminate because its communications are problematically pre-reflective, however ‘natural’ Paine claims they are. Patricia Howell Michaelson is right to draw a contrast between Paine’s appeal to nature rather than culture in her claim that while ‘Burke relied on inherited wisdom exactly because each individual’s stock of reason is small, Paine is confident that each generation has fully enough reason to address its own needs’.⁵⁰ But both relied on exploiting pre-reflective inspiration as the guarantee of the continuity of signification. For Burke, this meant the continuation of tradition as the ground of political prophecy, while for Paine it meant the conflation of natural and human universality. But there is something mistaken about Michaelson’s claim that Paine rejected the ‘more mystical Inner Light of Quaker belief’,⁵¹ for his invocation of the inspiration of nature is itself a version of the Inner Light, only based on an imminent or natural rather than a transcendent or supernatural Godhead. It is a mistake to take the reflexive assertions of metarhetoric at face value, because metarhetoric is programmatically two-faced. Often using devices it theoretically rejects, Paine’s appeal to pre-rational naturalism vitiates his claims concerning education and the nature of scientific knowledge, and it leads him into unguarded moments of Panglossian excess: in one passage he claims that God ‘organized the structure of the universe in the most advantageous manner for the benefit of man’.⁵²