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Edmund Spenser As Protestant Thinker and Poet; a Study of Protestantism and Culture in the Faerie Oueene

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Edmund Spenser As Protestant Thinker and Poet; a Study of Protestantism and Culture in the Faerie Oueene O I EDMUND SPENSER AS PROTESTANT THINKER AND POET; A STUDY OF PROTESTANTISM AND CULTURE IN THE FAERIE OUEENE DISSERTATION Presented to the Graduate Council of the University of North Texas in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY By Hoyoung Kim, B.A., M.A, Denton, Texas August, 1993 O I EDMUND SPENSER AS PROTESTANT THINKER AND POET; A STUDY OF PROTESTANTISM AND CULTURE IN THE FAERIE OUEENE DISSERTATION Presented to the Graduate Council of the University of North Texas in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY By Hoyoung Kim, B.A., M.A, Denton, Texas August, 1993 Kim, Hoyoung, Edmund Spenser as Protestant Thinker and Poet; A Study of Protestantism and Culture in The Faerie Queenei. Doctor of Philosophy (English), August, 1993, 222 pp., Works Cited. The study inquires into the dynamic relationship between Protestantism and culture in The Faerie Oueene. The American Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr makes penetrating analyses of the relationship between man's cultural potentials and the insights of Protestant Christianity which greatly illuminate how Spenser searches for a comprehensive religious, ethical, political, and social vision for the Christian community of Protestant England. But Spenser maintains the tension between culture and Christianity to the end, refusing to offer a merely coherent system of principles based on the doctrine of Christianity. Chapter I introduces Niebuhr's dynamic understanding of the Renaissance and the Reformation and defines Spenser's attitude toward the potentials and limits of culture and of his art. Chapter II examines how Spenser views the complex relation of Christianity to religious and secular culture in the Legende of Holinesse, which envisions not a static but a dynamic relationship between them that includes both enduring tension and a strong need for integration. In the Legend of Temperaunce, the subject of Chapter III, Spenser explores the full interaction between man's ethical potential and the insights of Christianity to find a feasible moral vision that transcends both classical ethics and antinomianism. Chapter IV studies Spenser's search for an ever-higher principle of justice in the Legend of Justice that can meet both the urgent need to restore order in the community and the more fundamental need to realize the spirit of brotherhood, which is ultimately possible only in God's mercy. Chapter V argues that, in the Legend of Courtesie, Spenser not only provides an ideal vision of the Christian community but shows the inevitable limit of Christian culture. In the Mutability cantos, however, Spenser overcomes the pessimism of the Legend of Courtesie and offers a balanced view of history from the Christian eschatological perspective. The Faerie Oueene amply shows that its author is a highly disciplined and creative thinker as well as a poet of inexhaustible imagination. Copyright by Hoyoung Kim 1993 111 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page COPYRIGHT NOTICE iii Chapter I. INTRODUCTION: THE DYNAMICS OF PROTESTANTISM AND CULTURE 1 II. REDCROSSE'S DUAL ALLEGIANCE TO CHRIST AND GLORIANA 32 III. THE DYNAMICS OF CHRISTIAN TEMPERANCE OR ETHICS 84 IV. THE DYNAMICS OF CHRISTIAN JUSTICE 128 V. THE SOURCES AND LIMITS OF CHRISTIAN CULTURE 173 WORKS CITED 208 IV CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION: THE DYNAMICS OF PROTESTANTISM AND CULTURE The aim of this dissertation is to inquire into the complex relationship between Protestantism and culture in The Faerie Oueene. The necessary task of defining the theological background of the poem has been begun already by such competent scholars as Virgil K. Whitaker in The Religious Basis of Spenser's Thought, Andrew Price Woolley in "God of Law, God of Grace," and Debra Brown-Shneider in "Holiness in Spenser's Faerie Oueene, Book I." This dissertation is not primarily concerned with how The Faerie Oueene reflects the theological issues of the English Reformation, for example, the doctrines of justification by faith and predestination. Spenser was not a professional theologian; but, being a creative Protestant thinker and poet, he admirably tackles the pressing moral and social issues of his time with the flexible and imaginative tool of his poetic medium. Indeed, the intense interaction between Spenser's Protestant understanding of man and his understanding of man's cultural potentials embodied in the heroes' virtues best exemplifies Spenser's dynamic mode of thinking that constantly searches for feasible moral and social visions in the context of sin and Grace. The Faerie 2 Oueene is deeply concerned with the religious, ethical, political, and social implications of the English Reformation. Before proceeding to the main concern of this chapter, it will be appropriate to define the terms "Protestantism" and "culture," however tentative their definitions may be for now. Protestantism is examined for its typical views on man, the Gospel, and Christian life in history, which are reflected in such doctrines as original sin, justification by faith, salvation by Grace alone, and the Bible as the principal medium of revelation (Douglass 284-293); Protestantism is also considered for its peculiar attitudes toward Roman Catholic doctrines and practices including papal claims, the mass, and the veneration of the saints. Culture can be broadly defined as "the artificial, secondary environment- which man superimposes on the natural" (Richard Niebuhr 30). More specifically, culture signifies the realm of human achievement; thus such forms of culture as speech, art, education, tradition, philosophy, government, and beliefs are all man-made, exist only for man, and are inevitably stamped with temporality and relativity (Richard Niebuhr 29-30). The relationship between Protestantism and culture is complicated by the fact that even when Protestantism harshly judges the pretensions of culture, it cannot do so without resorting to culture; indeed, 3 Protestantism, being a form of culture, cannot escape God's judgment. The problem this chapter especially deals with is Spenser's apparent religious syncretism usually called Christian humanism. Every reader when first encountering the Letter to Raleigh. Spenser's preface to The Faerie Oueene. is struck by his diverse allusions to Christian, classical, and medieval sources; St. Paul's Eohesians is cited along with references to classical philosophy, history, literature, and mythology—not to mention the medieval Arthur and Merlin.1 The question inevitably arises: does Spenser believe that the claims of Christianity and culture influenced by the classical and medieval secular tradition are essentially reconcilable with no tension? The term "Christian humanism" has been conveniently used especially to cover the diverse syncretic tendencies of the Renaissance, as if such markedly different thinkers as Pico della Mirandola, Thomas More, and John Milton shared the same attitude toward man's cultural aspirations. It is because of my dissatisfaction with the vagueness of the term that this chapter is devoted to defining how Spenser views the complex relationship between the claims of the Gospel and of culture. The chapter first introduces Reinhold Niebuhr's insightful analysis of the development and breakdown of the medieval Thomistic synthesis of Christianity and culture, not so much to provide Spenser's 4 intellectual milieu as to illuminate the kind of synthesis of Protestantism and culture Spenser seeks in his masterpiece. Next, the question of the relationship between the English Reformation and Elizabethan culture offers a concrete testing ground for whether Niebuhr's suggestion can be validly applied to Spenser's case. The third section of the chapter criticizes three types of Christian humanism frequently employed by Spenserians as intellectual frames of reference in studying The Faerie Oueene. These closely related discussions are devoted to clarifying the nature of Protestant-culture dynamics in the poem. Finally, Spenser's persistent concern about the possibilities and limits of his role as poet and of his poetry, being closely related to the larger issue of Protestantism and culture, will be discussed in the concluding section of the chapter. The modern theological movement called "Neo-Orthodoxy" is an unexpectedly fruitful source of insight into Spenser's The Faerie Oueene. Begun as a severe criticism against nineteenth-century liberal theology after the carnage of the First World War, the theological movement strongly questioned liberal theology's confidence in accommodating the Gospel to the demands of Western civilization. Karl Barth, perhaps the most prominent theologian of the neo- orthodox movement, sharply distinguishes the claims of the Gospel from the cultural life of mankind: "Religion is not the sure ground upon which human culture safely rests; it is 5 the place where civilization and its partner, barbarism, are rendered fundamentally questionable" (258). Behind this harsh judgment lies a radical theological redirection toward the crucial insights of the Reformation concerning man and his destiny: man remains a sinner through and through (simul iustus et peccator); history always remains under God's judgment, being never free from its sinful tendencies (Gilkey 257). Niebuhr, an American Protestant theologian sympathetic to the neo-orthodox movement, appreciates the insights of the Reformation. But, unlike Barth, Niebuhr tries to understand not only the errors but also the positive insights of the Renaissance; moreover, he does not hesitate to criticize
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