Theological Movement in English
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ETHICAL SUCCESSION: THEOLOGICAL MOVEMENT IN ENGLISH RENAISSANCE LITERATURE by NATHAN PATRICK GILMOUR (Under the Direction of Fran Teague) ABSTRACT Poetic and dramatic texts always stand in conversation with a larger world of letters, and in the English Renaissance, certain texts answer questions that theological and philosophical texts ask with an attention to sequence and contingency that advance rather than merely comment upon the projects that the discourses share. The Faerie Queene, Shakespeare's Roman plays and The Rape of Lucrece, and Milton's Biblical epics set the stage for theologians to pay genuine attention to the mediated character of all religious tradition, to the opacity and textuality of human will, and to the obscurity of evil in ways that standard theological polemics often neglect. In all of these cases, the poetic and dramatic texts perform the moves that later Christian theology will recognize as narrative theology, setting the stage for what theologians will do when they learn to give priority to the succession of complex moments. Moreover, as Milton's Paradise Regained demonstrates, the theological discipline of Christology has much to learn from the ways that a narrative poem situates Christ, always poised between the inadequate possibilities that the wilderness temptations represent and always performing His way into the role "Son of God." Ultimately, because certain modern theological traditions continue the practices of putting sequence in the foreground and improvising within the bounds of tradition, some theologians have the potential to contribute to literary criticism in ways that return the favor that plays and poems first granted. INDEX WORDS: Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Theology and Literature ETHICAL SUCCESSION: THEOLOGICAL MOVEMENT IN ENGLISH RENAISSANCE LITERATURE by NATHAN PATRICK GILMOUR Bachelor of Arts, Milligan College, 1999 Master of Arts, Emmanuel School of Religion, 2002 Master of Arts, University of Georgia, 2004 A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The University of Georgia in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY ATHENS, GEORGIA 2012 © 2012 Nathan P. Gilmour All Rights Reserved ETHICAL SUCCESSION: THEOLOGICAL MOVEMENT IN ENGLISH RENAISSANCE LITERATURE by NATHAN PATRICK GILMOUR Major Professor: Fran Teague Committee: Jonathan Evans Carolyn Medine Electronic Version Approved: Maureen Grasso Dean of the Graduate School The University of Georgia May 2012 iv DEDICATION To Mary v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Because this project attempts to bring together some conversations that academic theologians and literary critics do not usually share, I should acknowledge those from both sides of my own academic history who have helped me along. Phil Kenneson and Craig Farmer, professors at Milligan College, guided me into the grand questions that this study attempts to complicate, and in seminary at Emmanuel School of Religion (now Emmanuel Christian Seminary), Kip Elolia and Fred Norris introduced me to the theologians, most notably John Milbank and George Lindbeck, whose work help me still to imagine literature as a theological enterprise (and vice versa). And although this dissertation does not do much with the world of critical Biblical studies, certainly Robert Owens and Rodney Werline played indispensable parts in shaping me as a careful reader and as an intellectual who values and challenges the body of scholarship surrounding any important texts. At the University of Georgia, conversations with Carolyn Medine and Jonathan Evans (both interested in theology and literature, and both readers of this dissertation) helped me to think my way into the problems of embodied convictions and action-embedded-in-story that led me to many of the dissertation's investigations. My teachers of literature, because I played the prodigal and ran off to seminary for a while before coming back to the fold of English teachers, span two very different segments of my life. When I was a young man trying to figure out what an intellectual life might look like, Jack Knowles and Pat Magness and Terry Dibble, three influences as wonderfully different as the best pantheons ought to be (I won't say which was Apollo, vi which Athena, and which Dionysius to me), pressed me always to ask the hard questions instead of the obvious ones and to pair careful research with bold assertions of hypotheses. When I returned to the English department, I could not have found better guides through graduate school and into advanced literary criticism than Fran Teague and Coburn Freer (both readers of this dissertation), two professors both patient with my seminarian's questions and encouraging as I attempted to fuse the inquiries of the theologian with those of the literary critic. Certainly my own students owe to these two fine teachers and mentors any ability I have shown to integrate literary study with faithful theological reflection. To try to name all of the friends who have challenged me through my years in the academy would be impossible, so with trepidation I name a few. Jim Clark, Wes Arblaster, Ben Les, and Jason Payton made my college years an intellectual challenge and a joyous experiment in friendship. In seminary Josh Jeffers and Micah Weedman played crucial roles to shape my thought as a theologian. At the University of Georgia, Alex Fitzner and Ellen Letostak were constant companions as we learned the ropes of graduate studies and worked together to become the curmudgeons and teachers we are now. Jessica Walker, Sonya Loftis, and Lisa Ward Bolding have been constant companions through coursework, conferences, our experiments in graduate-student teaching, and the crazed life of married academics, and all of the EMUS at UGA have been a great source for intellectual challenge and all sorts of other amusements. In the opening act of my career at Emmanuel College, I have valued the friendship of all of my colleagues in the English department, especially Chris Hair, and among my other friends on the faculty, Paul Oxley of the School of Christian Ministries has been a particular vii blessing as he helped me to read and engage with David Bentley Hart, another theologian who features in this study. And the last two years have been all sorts of fun because of the friendship and diversion that my fellow Christian Humanists, Michial Farmer and David Grubbs, have provided as we've attempted to be web-intellectuals together. As I have plowed through graduate school and this project, my family's support has never wavered, even when my dissertation defense itself seemed more hypothetical than it ought to have been. My mother Paula has always kept me grounded in the reality that my children and other loved ones should remain my top priorities, and the example of my father Steven, himself a veteran English teacher and my earliest and most constant model in the life of the mind, is always before me. My brother Ryan, even if he still thinks I'm full of beans, has always kept me aware that, if I slack off even for a moment, he's going to overtake me as a writer and as a thinker, and I keep working as hard as I do knowing that he's always working just a bit harder. I kept coming back to this project knowing that my children Micah and Miriam would one day call me Dr. Daddy. And I would be remiss not to close this Acknowledgments section with a small expression of the grand gratitude I owe my wife Mary. For more than ten years now (we married while I was in seminary), she has tolerated my graduate school habit, and her patience and support made this project possible. S.D.G. Nathan P. Gilmour viii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .................................................................................................v CHAPTER 1 Complex Act ......................................................................................................1 Egyptian Gold, City of God, and Other Augustinian Concerns ...................6 Boethius .....................................................................................................12 Aristotle, Dante, and Ockham ....................................................................18 Luther and Erasmus on the Will .................................................................25 Calvin's Interior Moves ..............................................................................33 Plato ...........................................................................................................36 Reading Literature as a Forerunner to Theology .......................................40 2 Spenser and Storied Act ...................................................................................47 Redcrosse and Guyon: Entering and Extending the Good Life .................48 The Dark Horse, Desire, and Redemption .................................................51 Fall and Rescue ..........................................................................................60 Guyon Succumbs to Self-Denial ................................................................62 Mediated Salvation and Excesses of Mediation ........................................64 The Dragon, Acrasia, and the Reign of Eden.............................................71 Classical Virtue in an Already-Saved World ..............................................77 ix Talus, Artegall, and Mercilla: From State to Soul and Back ......................79 3 Shakespeare and Opaque Act .....................................................................87 Dante and the Goodness