Moral Identity in Early Modern English Literature

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MORAL IDENTITY IN EARLY MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE

Paul Cefalu’s study explores the relationship between moral character and religious conversion in the poetry and prose of Sidney, Spenser, Donne, Herbert, and Milton, as well as in early modern English Conformist and Puritan sermons, theological tracts, and philosophical treatises. Cefalu argues that early modern Protestant theologians were often unable to incorporate a coherent theory of practical morality into the order of salvation. Cefalu draws on new historicist theories of ideology and subversion, but takes issue with the new historicist tendency to conflate generic and categorical distinctions among texts. He argues that imaginative literature, by virtue of its tendency to place characters in approximately real ethical quandaries, uniquely points out the inability of early modern English Protestant theology to merge religious theory and ethical practice. This study should appeal not only to literary critics and historians, but also to scholars interested in the history of moral theory. paul c e falu is Assistant Professor of English at Lafayette College, Pennsylvania. He is the author of Revisionist Shakespeare: Transitional Ideologies in Texts and Contexts (forthcoming) and has published widely in such journals as ELH, Shakespeare Studies, and Studies in Philology.

M O R A L I D E N T I T Y I N E A R LY MODERN ENGLISH L I T E R AT U R E PA U L C E F A L U Lafayette College

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521838078 © Paul Cefalu 2004 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2004 ISBN-13 ISBN-10

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For Anna

Contents

Acknowledgments

page ix

Introduction: English Protestant moral theory and regeneration

1

1 Shame, guilt, and moral character in early modern English Protestant theology and Sir Philip Sidney’s Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia

17

2 The three orders of nature, grace, and law in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Book II

47

3 Conformist and puritan moral theory: from Richard Hooker’s natural law theory to Richard Sibbes’s ethical occasionalism

77

4 The elect body in pain: Godly fear and sanctification in John Donne’s poetry and prose

115

5 Absent neighbors in George Herbert’s “The Church,” or Why Agape becomes Caritas in English Protestant devotional poetry

134

6 Moral pragmatism in the theology of John Milton and his contemporaries

157

Epilogue: theorizing early modern moral selfhood Notes Index

189 198 222

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Acknowledgments

This study began under the guidance of Richard Strier and Jay Schleusener at the University of Chicago. Over many years, Richard has brought his scholarly example, passion for theological matters, and incisive editorial comments and criticisms to bear on all of my work. Always tough-minded and rigorous, he has been a remarkable critic, mentor, and friend. I thank him for making this work possible. I thank Jay for his support as well, particularly the philosophical acumen with which he assessed early drafts of this study. Over the years, I have also received indispensable advice from Joshua Scodel, whose scholarship has provided a benchmark for research in early modern ethics and literature, and David Bevington, whose generosity and fair-mindedness are examples to all of us in academe. At Lafayette College, Lynn Van Dyke and Susan Blake have, as respective chairs of my department, graciously provided me with a flexible teaching schedule that allowed time for research. I thank Lynn, Susan, James Woolley, and Bryan Washington for their ongoing support of my teaching and research. I extend a special thanks to Lee Upton and Eric Ziolkowski, two individuals who seem to have an effortless ability to integrate kindness and professionalism. Eric’s interest in this study provided me with the impetus I needed to complete the final version of the manuscript. I have also benefited from the diligent work of two research assistants, both students at Lafayette College: Brian Want, an Excel scholar who spent the summer of 1998 poring over twelve volumes of Calvin’s New Testament commentaries (which hopefully has not turned him off to scholarship entirely); and Jeb Madigan, who meticulously proofread an earlier draft of this study. My good friend Owen McLeod also deserves thanks for his good humor and insights on ethical theory. This study could not have been undertaken without the support of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, which provided me with a Newcomb Fellowship in 1997–8. I also thank Lafayette College for a year leave during which I made final revisions on the manuscript; many thanks to the staff ix

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Acknowledgments

of Skillman Library, as well, particularly Kandyce Fisher, for her expertise and patience. It has been a pleasure to work with Ray Ryan, my editor at Cambridge University Press. Ray has provided astute and expeditious advice at every step of preparing this manuscript for publication. I also thank the two readers for Cambridge University Press for their exacting comments on an earlier version of this study. This book is about, among other things, virtuous dispositions of character. It might well be about my father, who I believe exemplifies the classical ideal of the unity of virtue. I thank him for his unwavering encouragement of my work. Anna Siomopoulos, the dedicatee of this book, inspires me on a daily basis with her brilliance and integrity. Aristotle, if only he could have met her, would have acknowledged her as a great-souled woman. A version of chapter 4 appeared as “Godly Fear, Sanctification, and Calvinist Theology in the Sermons and ‘Holy Sonnets’ of John Donne,” Studies in Philology Volume 100. Copyright
C 2003 by the University of North Carolina Press. Used by permission of the publisher. A version of chapter 6 is a revised version of “Moral Pragmatism in the Theology of Milton and His Contemporaries, or Habitus Historicized,” by Paul Cefalu from Milton Studies XXXIX, Albert C. Labriola, Ed.,
C 2000 by University of Pittsburgh Press. I thank the editors of these journals for their permission to reuse this material.

Introduction: English Protestant moral theory and regeneration

In his 1618 sermon, Lancelot Andrewes, the Conformist Bishop of Winchester, admonishes his listeners that the fear of divine punishment can prevent apostasy: “This fear to suffer evil for sin, malum poenae, makes men fear to do the evil of sin, malum culpae; what they fear to suffer for, they fear to do.”1 In 1643, the English Puritan divine, William Ames, outlines for the reader a pragmatic remedy of bridling sin: “If he consider the misery of those, that obey not God, for he is the servant of sinne, to death . . . If he alwayes set before his eyes the threatnings against, and the vengeance which is prepared for the disobedient.”2 Despite their doctrinal allegiances – Andrewes is a late apologist for the Elizabethan Settlement, Ames a covenant theologian – both theologians are devoted Pauline evangelists. To invoke the prospect of damnation and a wrathful, punitive God seems like a reversion to Old Testament moralism, the legalistic tenets of which are supposedly displaced by the comforts of the Gospel. Pauline theology holds, for example, that sinners are justified by Christ’s sacrifice, after which they fulfill moral law out of responsive love rather than servile fear. Presumably Andrewes and Ames are directing their advice to penitents as well as reprobates: Andrewes’s sermon is delivered before King James I; Ames’s advice appears in a rather arid treatise on conscience. But even if they are addressing their views exclusively to unregenerate sinners, both theologians would be expected to follow standard Pauline practice by arguing that sinners should acknowledge an inability to obey moral law. Such an acknowledgment is the initial soteriological step in preparing the heart for a bestowal of unmerited grace. Yet Andrewes’s and Ames’s primary concern is to rouse in reprobates and converts alike a servile fear of disobeying God’s precepts. While neither theologian makes the Pelagian or Arminian argument that righteousness is conditional on the fulfillment of divine law, both suggest that damnation may very well follow from moral transgression. One expects that this threat of punishments would be complemented by a system of enticing rewards. And so it is. Later in the century, Jeremy 1

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Taylor, the “holy living,” latitudinarian theologian, concludes in Unum Necessarium (1655) that “the first cause of an universal impiety is, that at first God had made no promises of heaven. He had not propounded any glorious rewards, to be as an argument to support the superior faculty against the inferior, that is, to make the will choose the best and leave the worst . . .”3 If we combine Andrewes’s and Ames’s malum poenae with Taylor’s calculus of rewards, we have an approximation of Blaise Pascal’s rational-choice model of Godly conduct. If one asks a rational-choice theorist a fundamentally normative, ethical question – “Why should I be good?” – the answer would invariably be, “Because obedience is economically sound.” Nothing in such a response recommends that one uphold moral law out of reverence for God’s unconditional will, or that a love of divine goodness should be pursued for its own sake. Why would Reformed theologians – Andrewes, Ames, Taylor – erect such a system of rewards and punishments, a system that, even under the rubric of Pascal’s Jansenism, hardly establishes fit criteria of piety? Surely Lord Shaftesbury was not the first to realize that such a means-end basis of devotion fails to provide an acceptable motive to virtue: “If the desire of life be only through the violence of that natural aversion to death, if it be through the love of something else than virtuous affection . . . then it is no longer any sign or token of real virtue.”4 Moral Identity argues that such tensions between mercenary and disinterested virtue issue from a more systemic problem of integrating English Reformed soteriology (defined as the theory or doctrine of salvation) and ethical practice. My fundamental claim is that early modern theologians were often unable to incorporate a coherent theory of practical morality into their soteriological accounts of justification and sanctification. Justification describes a forensic change in the status of the sinner following Christ’s redeeming sacrifice. The sinner is “imputed” righteousness by justification, meaning that his sinful legacy has been erased by Christ’s saving intervention. The conceptual features of justification, thorny enough on their own terms, emerge as self-evident axioms when compared to the murkiness of sanctification. In its barest outline, sanctification describes the partial renewal of ethical character through a process of integrating a regenerated “new man” with a residually sinful “old man.” The difficult questions center on the precise relationship among sanctification, virtue, and grace. To what extent does sanctification increase over time? Does such an increase in sanctifying righteousness mark a gradual perfection of already-imparted virtue? If so, is the moral agent responsible for ethical selfmastery, or does each ethical achievement require a quickening infusion of

Introduction

3

grace? And to what extent is grace like a habit or virtuous disposition of character? Many of these questions derive from scholastic metaphysics, and I can assure the reader that any neo-scholastic inquiries into these matters will be restricted to chapter 3, on the subject of Richard Hooker’s distinction between habitual and active righteousness. The bulk of this study instead focuses on the various non-scholastic compromises the theology and literature of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England make when confronted with the aporias of sanctifying righteousness. When faced with offering a user-friendly, pragmatic means of reordering the will and disciplining conduct, theologians and writers often supplement their soteriological views with a prudential “ethics” of shame, servile fear, and mercenary virtue. I put the term “ethics” in quotes to emphasize that these alternatives or accommodations of sanctifying righteousness are not normatively ethical, that is, they do not belong to any strain of ethical theory – natural law ethics, deontology, situation ethics – that might be easily reconcilable with devotion. Early modern theologians time and again accept that an appeal to ethical egoism and rational self-interest is often the most efficient means of binding conduct in both the sacred and secular kingdoms. It should be noted that early modern theologians were not significantly departing from tradition in emphasizing a system of rewards and punishments. Historically, Christian moralists across denominations have unembarrassedly relied on calculating hedonism as a pragmatic moral device. Augustine typically preaches hell in his youthful sermons: “So from the things people are afraid of in this time, they should work out what they really ought to be afraid of. I mean, they’re afraid of prison, and not afraid of gehemma? Afraid of the inquisitor’s torturers, and not afraid of hell’s angels? Afraid of torment in time, and not afraid of the pains of eternal fire?”5 Augustine insists, however, that the threat of sanctions should serve merely as the opening act in the ongoing drama of salvation: “Fear of punishment makes a person do the works of the law, but still in a servile manner.”6 Similarly, Jonathan Edwards justifies the hellfire and brimstone of his imprecatory sermons – for example, the memorable image of God holding sinners “over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider” – by claiming that such evangelical awakenings are necessary prompts to less compromised forms of virtue.7 Early modern references to mercenary virtue stand out because they strain against some of the cherished precepts of the Pauline Renaissance in England: an emphasis on the purity of intention grounding virtuous action, and the displacement of pure agape and disinterested neighbor-regard by

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caritas or self-interested love. The difference between late-sixteenth through mid-seventeenth century sermonizing on virtue and late-seventeenth century high church latitudinarianism illustrates the pull in pre-Restoration Protestantism between religious theory and moral practice. When they preach hell, late-seventeenth-century latitudinarians like John Tillotson and Edward Stillingfleet argue against their English Calvinist predecessors that the center of theology should be practical morality rather than selfscrutiny. This shift to “holy living” theology, underwritten by a greater emphasis on sanctification than justification, affords Restoration theologians the license to preach the virtues of social utility rather than clean consciences. Earlier Protestant theologians, by contrast, attempt the more burdensome task of integrating a morality of external behavior with a theology of justifying righteousness. Given the reality of moral backsliding and the inadmissibility of sanctified moral progress, forms of calculating hedonism serve as practical safeguards throughout the stages of the ordo salutis, rather than simply as lures during the earliest stage of conversion. Much of this book, then, will attempt to reconstruct the Reformed theory of sanctified morality, giving particular attention to soteriological paradoxes and blind alleys in relation to moral praxis. It will be helpful at the outset to establish what sanctification is not by briefly outlining its ethical alter ego – Aristotelian hexis – the classical bogey that so exercised the imagination and polemic of Reformed theologians from Luther to Puritan divines like Richard Sibbes and Richard Baxter. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle draws a distinction between the intellectual and moral virtues, the former acquired by instruction and experience, the latter, like crafts, the result of habituation: “Moral virtue comes about as a result of habit, whence also its name ethike is one that is formed by a slight variation from the word ethos (habit). From this it is also plain that none of the moral virtues arises in us by nature, for nothing that exists by nature can form a habit contrary to its nature.”8 Moral virtues, acquired by repetition, are contrasted with natural endowments such as the senses, which are “possessed” as potentialities before they are used. The moral virtues belong to the categories of potentiality or power, states of mind or disposition called hexeis, variously translated as “states,” dispositions,” or “habits.” Actions which proceed from virtuous habits are not simply actions one does repeatedly and inattentively; they require a certain degree of “virtuosity” and need to be performed with skill and care. We can begin to understand, even from this brief account of Aristotelian hexis, why Reformed theology exclaimed so loudly against classical virtue theory. The young Luther pointed out that morality is a fruit (and sign)

Introduction

5

rather than efficient cause of grace: “For he is not righteous who acts righteously, as Aristotle says, and we are not called righteous when doing righteous deeds, but when we believe and trust in God.”9 The experimental Puritans of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries take up Luther’s anti-Aristotelianism. In his Cases of Conscience, William Perkins “confute[s] the errours of the wisest heathen philosophers” by arguing that virtue is not a “habite of mind, obtained by custom, use, and practice,” but a “gift of the Spirit of God and a part of the regenerate, whereby a man may live well.”10 Later in the century, Richard Sibbes, another leading Puritan divine, explains the tension between piety and classical virtue in more provocative terms: Now the spirit guides us not immediately, but it works a habit in us . . . And when that is wrought, the Spirit guides us to every particular action . . . [we] have need of grace for every particular action. And herein the soul is like to the air . . . So a man is no wiser in particular actions than God will make him on the sudden . . . so all our wisdom, all the direction we have to lead our lives as becomes Christians, it comes from Christ, it comes from grace; not only the disposition, but likewise every particular action . . . It was a proud term the philosophers had, as I said, sometimes they called their moral virtues habits; and if we consider them merely as they are in the person, they are habits, but indeed they are graces . . .11

While some Puritan brethren argue that God sanctifies by renewing man’s corrupted faculties of will and reason, that is, by working through secondary causes and the created orders, Sibbes implies that morally approbative acts are efficiently caused by ongoing deliveries of grace. Sibbes thus makes scant allowance for a gradual development of ethical character even following conversion. To the extent that God does not renew human faculties, Sibbes’s view of sanctification approximates a theory of ethical occasionalism: God seems to provide the unmediated force impelling each morally creditable act.12 We will see that this commonly articulated, occasionalist view of the relationship between grace and virtue – provocative in its own right – offers little in terms of a practical regimen of shaping conduct. These tensions between classical ethics and Reformed theories of grace have not gone unnoticed by modern historians. In his work on Lutheran theories of education, Gerald Strauss recognizes that all sixteenth-century Lutheran educators had trouble forging a motivational link between habitual virtue and divine grace. The term they invoked, “einbilden,” was meant to suggest an internally guiding “imprint” or impression left by grace. Yet, as Strauss notes, divine imprinting failed to explain precisely how practical moral education might be introduced into the economy of salvation: “Torn between their trust in the molding power of education and their admission

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that the alteration of men’s nature was a task beyond human strength, they strove for success in their endeavors while conceding the likelihood of defeat.”13 Gilbert Meilaender, dedicated as he is to reconstructing a coherent Lutheran theory of virtue, ultimately agrees with Strauss: “The tension between these several views of virtue cannot, I think, be removed from the Christian perspective. Its theoretical resolution lies in the narrative Christians tell and retell . . . in which God is graciously at work transforming sinners into saints . . . The theoretical resolution explains but does not remove the tensions of the practical life.”14 Recent work on early modern theology has suggested that Reformed theologians attempted to resolve such tensions by invoking the LutheranCalvinist doctrine of the two kingdoms. As is well known, Luther distinguishes a temporal regiment, the realm of social ethics, from a spiritual regiment, the realm of grace and salvation. Calvin argues similarly that the forum externum should be distinguished from the forum conscientiae.15 The Reformed doctrine of the two kingdoms has recently been appropriated by modern theologians and literary critics to help resolve tensions in Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, as well as Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia and George Herbert’s poetry and prose.16 Yet I will be arguing that, in relation to Reformed soteriology and morality, the two kingdoms doctrine raises more problems than it resolves. To the extent that all theological treatises of sanctification recur to the language and rhetoric of different strains of virtue theory, we would be wrong to argue that early modern theologians maintained a disjuncture between the spiritual and moral regiments. In fact, rather than designate the temporal or social kingdom as the ethical realm proper, the most considered early modern versions of the two kingdoms doctrine align each realm with a distinctive form of morality: social or civic ethics in the secular kingdom, and an ethics of neighbor-regard and forbearance in the Christian kingdom.17 Yet, as a number of early modern theologians themselves argued, even this distinction fails to account for the precise ways in which selected individual virtues, prudence, for example, overarch both realms. Thus Ames will argue against Reformed neo-Aristotelians – Philip Melanchthon and Bartholomaeus Keckermann – that “they say that theology is concerned with the inward affections of men and ethics with outward manners – as if ethics, which they consider the prudence which governs the will and appetite, had nothing to do with inward affections, and theology did not teach outward as well as inward obedience.”18 Ames finds the entire two kingdoms framework reductionistic, particularly the internal-spiritual, external-ethical division. Along with Ames and other early modern

Introduction

7

theologians, I will be arguing that the two kingdoms doctrine figures as something of a red herring in accounts of Protestant ethical theory. The real issue, implicitly raised by Ames’s suggestion that theology teach “outward things,” is the difficulty of finding a place for ethics in the ordo salutis, a challenge facing all theologians and literary authors who set out to theorize the relationship between justification and sanctification. dogmatic theology, literary et hics One of the fundamental methodological arguments of this study is that the tensions between early modern ethical theory and practice make themselves felt most prominently in the literary treatments of ethics – in the sixteenth-century works of Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser, and in the seventeenth-century poetry and prose of John Donne, George Herbert, and John Milton. Since literary texts place characters in approximately real ethical quandaries, they uniquely expose the limitations of the theoretical apparatus found in dogmatic theology – the sermons, treatises, and ethical handbooks published during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In isolating the literary realm as the roiled meeting place of dogmatic theology and ethical practice, I follow those modern ethicists who have turned to literary contexts as a means of supplementing the analytical barrenness of early modern (and modern) ethical theory. Colin McGinn recommends, for example, that “some attempt should be made to come to terms with the embeddedness of the ethical in the fictional . . . We will need to mingle the general and the specific in ways that are not typical of the orthodox ethical treatise. Above all, questions of character assume far greater prominence when ethics is approached in this way, since fictional works are all about the interaction between character and conduct.”19 Moral Identity begins by looking at literary inquiries into the relationship between classical ethics and piety in Sidney’s Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia and Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Book II. The theological background for these texts includes the doctrinal works of the early English Reformers, notably William Tyndale, John Bradford, and John Frith; Theodore Beza’s Confession of Faith; and occasional sermons by leading Elizabethan Puritans, including Henry Smith, Richard Rogers, and Richard Greenham. While these texts, published roughly between 1520–90, all make passing reference to the relationship among justification, sanctification, and morality, the most extensive English Calvinist treatments of sanctifying righteousness emerge between the end of the sixteenth century and early decades of the seventeenth century, including William Perkins’s Golden Chaine (1592),

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Thomas Tuke’s Highway of Heaven (1609), Thomas Taylor’s Progresse of Saints to Holinesse (1630), and John Preston’s Saint’s Qualification (1637). As late sixteenth-century texts, Sidney’s Arcadia (1580–93) and Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Book II (1590) address soteriological and moral issues that are just beginning to be fully theorized in early modern theology. The conduct of most of the principals in Sidney’s Arcadia is governed by a heteronomous ethics of shame that seems to be classical in origin. I argue, though, that a preoccupation with shame runs throughout the theological writings of the period, much of which draws from the early English Reformers’ assumption that personal assurance of election is ratified by public, third-party appraisals of moral conduct. The early English Reformers, who do not emphasize the role of conscience or a “reflex act” in order to discern personal assurance, construct a spectator theory of morality, which in its extreme manifestations renders assurance parasitical on public reputation. Sidney’s Arcadia points out not only the limitations of this theological shame ethic to bind conduct, but the limitations of a number of alternative classical and theological ethical options as well, including Aristotelian behaviorism, an ethical system of guilt and conscience, and a purely Christological ethics of grace. The Arcadia is notable for pointing out the flaws of nearly all of the prevailing and emergent ethical systems theorized in sixteenth-century theology. Spenser continues Sidney’s search for a robust, comprehensive ethical system that can successfully merge theory and conduct. Unlike Sidney, though, Spenser focuses more specifically on the relationship between Aristotelian hexis and sanctifying righteousness, a distinction that is often described by Spenser’s critics in less technical terms as the two orders of nature and grace. As a number of critics have noted, Guyon, the Knight of Temperance, seems to forsake his classical training in virtue, ultimately emerging as a regenerated hero by the time he destroys the Bower of Bliss. I will be arguing, though, that Spenser suggests that both orders of nature and grace are unable to effectively direct practical conduct. He thus invokes a third order of Mosaic law to compensate for the perceived limitations of the Aristotelian and Pauline alternatives. In the third chapter, I shift attention away from sixteenth-century literary depictions of ethical quandaries and toward a consideration of the internal ambiguities found in the ethical theories of the most influential Conformist and Puritan theologians of the latesixteenth through mid-seventeenth centuries: Richard Hooker’s natural law theory; Lancelot Andrewes’s narrative ethics; William Perkins’s theory of

Introduction

9

conscience in relation to personal assurance; and Richard Sibbes’s affective ethic of spiritual love. In their quest to integrate soteriology and morality, each of these theologians is forced to address two governing ethical questions to which I will often return throughout this study: a “normative” and a “behavioral” question. All ethical systems posit a “source of normativity,” an ultimate ground or justificatory reason for moral conduct.20 Kant described the search for normativity as a regress to the unconditioned, a point beyond which one can no longer ask, “Why should one be good?” To this fundamental normative question, different ethical systems yield specialized responses. An apologist for Christian voluntarism would answer the question, “Why should one be good?” with the answer, “Because it is God’s will.” For most voluntarists, the interrogative regress ends there, since the answer to the logically succeeding question – “Why should one obey God’s will?” – often just reaffirms the necessity of Godly obedience. Yet, early modern theologians realize that the circularity of voluntarist normativity often proves unsatisfactory in practice. They are thus willing to entertain alternative or subsidiary sources of normativity. Each of the theologians treated in chapter 3 offers a distinctive response to the second regress of our normative question, “Why should I obey God’s will?” Hooker responds that God’s intentions are consistent with natural laws; natural laws describe human propensities; and so to obey God’s will is to follow one’s natural inclinations. Perkins argues that we should obey God’s will because our (renewed) consciences dictate that we act accordingly. Sibbes suggests that we should obey God’s will because the new covenant demands that we owe God responsive love. Andrewes, as we have begun to see, at times argues that Godly obedience helps to avoid damnation and likely secures salvation. But the normative why question is routinely supplemented with a behavioral or how question. After positing the grounds of morality, theologians are faced with explaining the enabling means by which one can meet the requirements of the distinctive moral system under consideration. And the nature of the answer to the behavioral question – a question about the proper forms of moral education – is dictated by whatever actionguiding source is offered by the answer to the normative question. Hooker and Perkins, for example, are moral internalists: they believe that, respectively, the apprehension of natural laws or the exactions of conscience will naturally condition praiseworthy action. This sounds counter-intuitive to modern ears, but it is consistent with the Socratic notion that if one truly

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understands the nature of the good, one naturally pursues the good. To the extent that Hooker and Perkins offer pragmatic ethical therapies or educational regimens, they assume that cognitive training can dispose the intellect in the right direction. They thus partially avoid the problem of integrating Protestant notions of grace and a behavioral system of reconditioning the will. Sibbes’s love ethic, which derives from Luther’s theory of agape, is also a form of moral internalism. Yet Sibbes is less confident that the reception of God’s effulgent love will motivate conduct after the manner of obligating natural laws or a supervisory conscience. So he supplements his love ethic with the form of occasionalistic ethics described above. Since Andrewes does not postulate an internally binding normative source, he at times resorts to the system of rewards and punishments also described above. In terms of the early modern textual archives in which we find such tensions played out, there is a fundamental difference between the compromises one finds in the sermonizing, on the one hand, and the prose and poetry of Sidney and Spenser, on the other hand. When the dogmatic or more systematic theologians attempt to integrate theology and social practice they seldom view such maneuverings as compromises; that is, the theologians do not assume the critical stance or meta-ethical distance from system-building that one finds in sixteenth-century literary ethics. When we get to chapters 4 through 7, though, the relationship between theory and practice, or ethical system and ethical context, becomes more complicated, since Donne, Herbert, and Milton each inhabits the roles of both theologian and poet. In chapter 4 I argue that Donne subjects the standard early modern distinction between filial and servile fear to one of the most exhaustive analyses of his time. While filial fear ordinarily describes the fear of defecting from election, servile fear describes a slavish fear of punishment and damnation. As theologian, Donne accepts the Calvinist distinction. As reflective poet, however, Donne acknowledges the extent to which his awareness of his decaying, fallible body inspires servile fear in spite of his sense of election. We find in Donne’s poetry and prose neither an endorsement nor critique of Reformed theories of morality, but rather an unresolved play between dogmatic theology and bodily praxis. For Donne, the consolations of theology continually bump up against his fearsome, damnable, body in pain. In his inimitable way, Donne posits his anatomy as a fundamental source of normativity. As George Herbert’s critics have recently noted, Herbert seems to keep religious concerns distinct from ethical concerns, the former appearing in

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11

the intensely personal colloquies of his lyric poems of “The Church,” the latter featured in the pastoral and courtly writings of “The Church-porch” and The Country Parson.21 To ask the speaker of a given lyric of “The Church” to respond to our normative question – “Why should I be good?” – would seem to be pressing a fair question to the wrong party, since the ethical realm proper seems to be the pastoral domain of The Country Parson. Yet I will be arguing that, with respect to their extended treatment of the agape–caritas relationship, Herbert’s religious lyrics constantly belie an awareness of the difficulty of separating theology from ethics. All early modern theorists of divine love argue that a necessary response of God’s outpouring, descending love is neighbor-love; that is, external service or horizontal love, rather than simply ascending love for God, is held to be the immediate issue of God’s agape. To the extent that Herbert undertakes to maintain an intimacy with God in his religious poetry, he tends to efface those third parties (otherwise fit objects of horizontal love) that seem to dart in and out of the speaker’s and reader’s vision in the poems of “The Church.” Herbert’s religious lyrics thus evoke the kind of cognitive dissonance an earlier generation of critics ascribed to his “metaphysical” lyrics not simply due to his celebrated wit or marvelous conceits, but because he attempts the often self-undermining task of poeticizing sanctifying love while maintaining a too-private devotion to God. What I hope to show is that Herbert’s religious lyrics raise and answer the normative question, but they struggle to respond in satisfying ways to the behavioral question. When readers first encounter Adam and Eve in Book IV of Milton’s Paradise Lost, Adam informs Eve that death may be the punishment for disobeying God’s “one easy prohibition.” But when faced with explaining the precise nature of death, Adam all but throws up his hands and concludes that death is “some dreadful thing no doubt.” In Paradise Lost, the subject of chapter 6, Milton’s God himself acts as the consummate moral pragmatist: on the one hand he realizes that a bald assertion of exceptionless law will not sufficiently secure Adam and Eve’s obedience; on the other hand, he is understandably reluctant to construct a system of rewards and punishments as a means to establish the pair’s devotion. So he tantalizingly provides Adam and Eve with just enough information about death in order to prompt the pair to work through their own responses to the normative and behavioral questions. To a certain extent, God’s vagueness creates the very conditions of sin, since Satan will trade on Adam and Eve’s ignorance about death during the temptation scene. But God has a postlapsarian, pragmatic remedy at hand that corresponds to his prelapsarian strategy: to educate Adam and

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Eve in the virtues of “impure” or unformed faith – that is, to allow Adam and Eve to act “as if” they believed in divine precepts as a preliminary step to the acquisition of formed faith and a “paradise within.”

new historicism, theological et hics, and thick description Since G. E. M. Anscombe’s influential call in 1958 for a return to theories of virtue in moral philosophy, modern ethical theory has standardly distinguished an ethics of action from an ethics of being, or a rule-based theory of obligation from a virtue-based theory of character.22 Moral philosophers have recently appropriated Clifford Geertz’s influential notion of “thick description” to describe the “virtue ethics” side of the action-character debate. Thus Charles Taylor writes, “To move from external action descriptions to the language of qualitative distinctions is to move to a language of ‘thick descriptions,’ in the sense of this term that Clifford Geertz has made famous, that is, a language which is a lot richer and more culturally bound, because it articulates the significance and point that the actions or feeling have within a certain culture.”23 As is well known, the Geertzian attention to a culture’s thick description underwrites many early modern, new historicist interpretations of literary texts.24 The recent application of Geertz’s semiotic notion of culture to a context-sensitive theory of virtue thus raises the question of Moral Identity’s methodological relation to new historicism and cultural materialism.25 The best way to approach the relationship between thick description and early modern religious ethics is to return to Geertz’s foundational essays on religious culture: “Religion as a Cultural System” and “Ethos, World View, and the Analysis of Sacred Symbols.”26 In both essays, Geertz argues that the fact-value relationship applies to all religious cultures. To argue, as Geertz does, that values follow from facts, assumes that ethical norms are built on ontological supports, that “ought follows from is.” A culture’s religious sign systems and attitudes toward sacred objects naturally evolve out of its organizing world view. Such world views are based on particularized notions of the nature of the real, including not only theories of human inclinations, but also culturally bounded conceptions of deity and the mundane world: “A people’s ethos is the tone, character, and quality of their life, its oral and aesthetic style and mood . . . Their world view is their picture of the way things in sheer actuality are, their concept of nature, of self, of society.”27 Geertz’s is fundamentally a functionalist view of the relationship between metaphysical ground and cultural semiosis: world

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view, the explanans, dictates the shape and direction of cultural ethos, the explanandum.28 In relation to early modern soteriology and ethics, Geertz’s view of the fact-value relationship operates on two distinct levels. At the level of soteriology, justification is the fact of the ethos of sanctification; that is, justification is the descriptive ground that dictates and supports the exhortative forms of sanctifying righteousness. Carrying no normative import itself, justification describes a once-for-all event – Christ’s sacrifice – that reconfigures the individual’s status in God’s eyes. The forms of moral behavior that follow from the datum of justification include the range of prescriptions that constitute the multilayered ethos of sanctifying righteousness: mortification of the flesh, sacramentalism, commission of works, and reverence for moral law. The links between fact and value, world view and ethos, thus correspond to the links in soteriology between the indicatives of justification and imperatives of sanctification. This is a basic Pauline distinction between what Christ does for the sinner and what the sinner ought to do as a result. While there are numerous statements expressed in the indicative mood throughout Paul’s epistles – “the old man has passed away”; “you are a new creation”; “the Son has set you free”; – Paul also emphasizes that Christian existence is, as Thomas Oden says, “not an accomplished fact, but rather . . . demands human decision for its actualization.”29 Yet this fact-value relationship between justification and sanctification still describes a theoretical, rather than practical ethical distinction. Although sanctification designates moral prescriptions, these prescriptions might not be realized or upheld in practice. In order for the soteriological fact-value relationship to explain ethical practice, it needs to further subdivide as a fact-value distinction within sanctification itself. This subdivision marks a distinction between what Christians really do, on the one hand, and what needs to be done to get them to act the way that they should, on the other hand. Early modern theologians provide their own terminology to describe these ethical lapses and misjudgments: moral backsliding. To the extent that literary texts situate characters in ethically textured contexts, they often point out not simply the reality of moral backsliding, but the failures of the first-order distinction between justification and sanctification to explain precisely how such moral lapses can be prevented. The world view that is illumined, then, by an interpretive assessment of a literary ethos is fundamentally the entire field of ethical theory that can be found in early modern treatises on ethics. In its assumption that the “real” that is made knowable through thick description is moral philosophy itself, Moral Identity departs from (and aims to supplement) the more common new historicist practice of finding ideological critiques of the culture of

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everyday life in literary texts. My assumption is that when we sort through the complex sign systems of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Book II, for example, we are not only acquiring knowledge of the text’s biases in relation to political, social, and institutional ideologies: Spenser’s colonialist enterprise, gender presuppositions, or royalist propaganda. At a more strictly intertextual level, the ethos of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene also provides commentary on prevailing ethical theory. New historicists have offered provocative and politically important interpretations of texts like The Faerie Queene, but they have overlooked the extent to which the archive of intellectual history – which includes manuals on classical ethics, commentaries on natural law morality, and treatises on sanctifying righteousness – itself constitutes an early modern “world view,” the presuppositions of which are questioned by literary thick description. New historicists and cultural materialists might respond that any theory circulating in early modern ethical treatises or dogmatic and systematic theology is itself shaped by cultural presuppositions. As such, we need not draw distinctions between the literary and the non-literary, practice and theory, culture and intellectual history. It is undoubtedly true that this conflation of the theoretical and practical has been productive when applied to those texts that present themselves as theoretical or scientific treatises – Thomas Harriot’s A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1588), for example – but which clearly rely on so many literary and non-literary mythmaking devices that they do not even approach the status of theory.30 Yet, it is not clear how a new historicist, expanded notion of textuality would treat some of the more technical medieval and early modern theological and ethical treatises: Aquinas’s Treatise on the Virtues, Melanchthon’s Philosophiae Epitomes Moralis, Ames’s Technometria or Marrow of Theology, Perkins’s Discourse on Conscience. While these texts clearly can be charged with theory-ladenness, they do not offer the thick description of a colonialist tract, a treatise on poverty, or a humanist defense of women. To a certain extent, the new historicist project is biased by the choice of texts it places under its lens. A fairly large body of theological and ethical treatises seems to have been disqualified from analysis, sequestered to the impoverished realm of intellectual history, where thin description is shadowed by the interpretive riches of more densely metaphorical, literary “treatises.” There are notable exceptions to this turn away from intellectual history by cultural historians. Reid Barbour and Joshua Scodel have provided us with exemplary, culturally rich, accounts of early modern appropriations of the classical legacy.31 My belief that the context-specificity of literary ethics

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can illuminate philosophical discourse has been particularly influenced by Barbour’s most recent work on the Caroline response to the English Church’s turn away from religious fundamentals and toward the historical particulars of “salvation, worship, and moral action,” a turn toward a “casuistry of circumstance.”32 Moral Identity hopes to complement Barbour’s work by offering an account of the literary “stocktaking” of classical and theological theories of moral education. Moral Identity thus aims to integrate the new historicist sensitivity to thick description with an analysis of the rhetoric and ideas found in the history of moral philosophy. By assuming that the thick description of literary texts offers meta-ethical critiques of ethical theory, I aim to improve upon an earlier method of investigating the ethical content of early modern literature. An earlier group of critics – Ernest Sirluck, A. S. P Woodhouse, Harry Berger, among many others – often failed to draw fundamental distinctions between the ethical theory of a treatise and the ethical practice allegorized in literature. As such, they tended to absorb the literary into the theoretical, assuming that Sidney, Spenser, and Milton either side with pagan theories of virtue or Pauline theories of grace, or attempt to accommodate classicism to piety. In contrast, I argue that early modern literary texts are as critical of Protestant ethical theory (across denominations) as they are of its classical, especially Aristotelian alternatives. To argue that the texts treated in the following pages respond to a common problem in Reformed theology is not to say, though, that there is a wide-ranging Calvinist or Arminian consensus on ecclesiology or theological fundamentals. There were, of course ideological, doctrinal and ecclesiological disputes during the period, but regarding the more specialized topic of ethical training as a stage in the order of salvation, there is general agreement that converts could not achieve unassisted, incremental moral progress. The burden of chapter 3 is to show that Conformists, Puritans, and even Arminians hold this position. We begin to see a relaxation of the strictures against moral perfectionism in late-seventeenth-century latitudinarianism and Puritan nonconformity, but only with the ascendancy of Methodism, as well as strains of Germanic pietism, does Protestantism entertain the possibility of infallible moral regeneration or “entire sanctification.” To the extent, then, that the literary texts treated in the following pages might be described as subversive or oppositional, they simply expose the inability of all Protestant theories from the middle of the sixteenth century through the Restoration period to adequately explain the relationship between religious moral theory and practice. In assessing such tensions

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between theory and practice, I will be interested in tracking what Debora Shuger usefully describes as “habits of thought” during the period, although I would modify Shuger’s use of the phrase in relation to Protestant ethics. As Shuger remarks, “Ideology thus signifies what I will call ‘habits of thought,’ a culture’s interpretive categories and their internal relations, which underlie specific beliefs, ideas, and values.”33 One of the virtues of Shuger’s schema is its focus on the ways in which individuals ascribe ideational and propositional content to upswelling emotions: “Indeed, the function of habits of thought seems less to make sense of (naturalize) sociopolitical orderings than to make sense of feeling, to construct meaning out of the raw materials of needs, desires, expectations (both frustrated and fulfilled), fears, and anxieties.”34 Moral Identity is also interested in making sense of the theological role of passions – shame, fear, guilt, and love, in particular – but, unlike Shuger’s work, it focuses principally on the role of emotions in disciplining moral character. And one of the principal assumptions here is that the behavior of saints and sinners alike is often shaped by passions and desires that theoretically are considered suboptimal for their connections to legalism at best, psychological egoism at worst, yet are nevertheless factored into the economy of salvation as practically availing, ethical compromises. One way of expanding Shuger’s important analytic category is to think of a pull during the period – largely unacknowledged in the dogmatic theology, but directly confronted in the imaginative literature – between habits of thought, on the one hand, and practical habits of action, on the other. To return, finally, to Moral Identity’s relationship to a modified version of new historicism, one more friendly to the concerns of theologically focused ethical inquiry. In order to appreciate the literary critiques of ethical theory, I apply some of the rhetoric and strategies of the new historicist repertoire. But I also postulate some basic distinctions between theory and practice, treatise and story, rule-based and character-based ethical theory. Hopefully, this study will show that the very return to generic distinctions and a discriminating theory of textuality allows for a productive integration of new historicism and intellectual history.

chap t e r 1

Shame, guilt, and moral character in early modern English Protestant theology and Sir Philip Sidney’s Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia In the Chrysanthemum and the Sword, Ruth Benedict famously argued that shame cultures typically rely on “external sanctions for good behavior,” while guilt cultures rely on an “internalized conviction of sin” as a means to cultivate ethical discipline.1 Anthropologists and philosophers have followed Benedict in maintaining that the typical moral agent in a shame culture strives to cultivate Homeric and classical Greco-Roman attributes such as pride, honor, and reputation. As a moral emotion, shame is often held to be more social and heteronomous in nature than guilt, more intimately connected to one’s extrinsic character and behavior than one’s interior life and conscience. Unlike the experience of guilt, which derives from a sense of transgressing moral or legal rules and precepts, and can be alleviated through reparation, the experience of shame is often intractable: it follows not simply from a moral lapse, but from a sense of an abiding defect in one’s public character.2 Such a comparison between shame and guilt has often been used to characterize the differences between pagan and Christian cultures. According to the widely held view (overlooking for the moment doctrinal differences in emphasis), the Christian tradition holds that guilt represents both the sinner’s inherited, ontological status (the guilt of original sin) and an occurent emotion that follows acts of disobedience against divine, natural, and scriptural law. In his discussion of the historical origins of religious guilt, Paul Ricouer remarks that “guilt designates the subjective moment in fault as sin is its ontological moment. Sin designates the real situation of man before God, whatever consciousness he may have of it . . . Guilt is the awareness of this real situation.”3 For Ricouer, the experience of guilt depends on selfrecognition. Describing the centrality of guilt in Pauline theology, Ricouer writes that “guilt . . . is the completed internalization of sin. With guilt, ‘conscience’ is born; a responsible agent appears, to face the prophetic call and its demand for holiness.”4 17

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Recently, theologians have begun to question the adequacy of the traditional, Augustinian emphasis on guilt and atonement as an appropriate paradigm with which to assess New Testament theology. Noting the frequent lexical occurrences of shame, honor, praise and their semantic equivalents in Pauline theology (and comparatively fewer references to forgiveness, guilt, and conscience) commentators have suggested that the Mediterranean culture depicted in Pauline theology is, like its Greco-Roman alter-ego, fundamentally an “honour society.”5 Thus Halvor Moxnes argues that the culture of Romans is dyadic or heteronomous, one in which “recognition and approval from others” predominates, and in which the “group is more important than the individual.”6 David deSilva suggests that Paul’s employment of a “court of reputation” functions in Thessalonians as a “program of shaming the deviants back into conformity with the dominant cultural values.”7 And other theologians have noted the centrality of honor, reputation, glory and competitiveness in Corinthians, Peter and various Gospel texts.8 Given the English Protestant preoccupation, especially among seventeenth-century Puritans, with the role of conscience and inwardness in Christian warfaring, one might assume that the English Reformation was indeed more preoccupied with sin and atonement than honor and shame in spiritual matters. However, in this chapter I will be suggesting that sixteenth-century English and Continental Reformers – Heinrich Bullinger, William Tyndale, Richard Greenham, Philip de Mornay and others – emphasize the centrality of shame, rather than guilt, in their doctrinal treatises. I then interpret Sidney’s Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia in the context of the sixteenth-century English preoccupation with the role of Godly reputation in sacred, rather than simply courtly or secular matters. While critics of the Arcadia have tended to focus either on the secular-heroic or the Reformed theological concerns of the text (some critics pointing out the uneasy confluence of these two realms), I will be arguing that the text’s preoccupation with shame derives less from classical models than it does theological presuppositions, particularly the early English Reformers’ focus on the demand to externalize grace. The ethical tensions described in the Arcadia issue from the text’s awareness of the limitations of a theological ethics of shame, rather than from an irresoluble duality between the orders of nature and grace. shame in the arcadia Early in Book I of the Arcadia, after the knight Pyrocles reveals to his cousin Musidorus his own doubts regarding the active pursuit of virtue, Musidorus

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offers the following advice: “A mind well trained and long exercised in virtue, my sweet and worthy cousin, doth not easily change any course it once undertakes but upon well-grounded and well-weighted causes.”9 Musidorus charges Pyrocles specifically with thwarting the progress of his moral education, which demands that virtues continually be tested through practice. Pyrocles is exhorted “to seek the familiarity of excellent men in learning and soldiery,” and “to put all these things in practice by continual wise proceeding and worthy enterprises, as occasion fell for them” (62). The species of moral education that seems to be guiding Pyrocles’s conduct has been described by commentators as Aristotelian in nature.10 Andrew Weiner writes, “Musidorus’s doctrine is based on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, and like him he argues for the excellence of the life governed by reason and devoted to the exercise of virtue. As Aristotle proclaimed, ‘A man fulfills his proper function only by way of practical wisdom and moral excellence or virtue’; virtue makes us aim at the right target and practical wisdom makes us use the right means.”11 Commenting on the princes’ brutish behavior during the hunting episode in Book I, Weiner adds, “The fall of the princes is now complete. From the happiest of men, Aristotle’s habitually virtuous wise men ‘most beloved by God,’ to confused men engaged in an all-out struggle between reason and will.”12 Consistent with Weiner’s account, Blair Worden has recently argued that “the knowledge in which Musidorus and Pyrocles have been schooled seems to embody pure Aristotelian principles.”13 The assumption in the Aristotelian interpretations is that the knights’ otherwise full-bodied ethical training has not prepared them sufficiently to meet the challenges of love that eventually overtake them. On Weiner’s account, such training leads to impious presumption rather than moral excellence. Thus, by the time Pyrocles and Musidorus meet Philoclea and Pamela, the knights have fallen from Aristotelian virtue. To the extent that the princes never do fully repent of their uxuriousness and “accept divine providence,” they “remain criminal in the eyes of both human and divine law.”14 Sidney’s project, according to this sort of interpretation, shares much with Spenser’s project in Book II of The Faerie Queene: to point up the fundamental limitations of classical virtue theory from the perspective of Protestant theology and a Christian ethics of humility. However, if we give attention to the knights’ experience of shame in the context of Aristotle’s views on moral training and the passions, we can see that their conduct never even approaches inclusion in the Aristotelian ethical tradition. In one of the earliest references to Pyrocles’s shame, which occurs while Musidorus offers a lecture on the virtue of the active life, the narrator notes, “he [Pyrocles] no more attentively marked his friend’s

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discourse than the child that hath leave to play marks the last part of his lesson . . . yet . . . pierced with any mislike of so dearly an esteemed friend, and desirous by degrees to bring him to a gentler consideration of him, with a shamefast look . . . answered him . . . (110–11).” The comment here is one of many that represents the knights’ experience of shame as purely responsive to a perceived blight on their reputation. At its best, shame inspires grudging and partial acknowledgment of a moral lapse: “witnessing he rather could not help than did not know his fault” (111). Shame, in this context, is unconnected to remorse or an appreciation of acting virtuously for the sake of virtue. Such a fear of external sanctions as a motive for right conduct represents, for Aristotle, the most puerile motive for action. In a well-known passage in the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle emphatically states that aidos (fear of disgrace) should not be confused with arete (virtuous state of character): Shame should not be described as a virtue; for it is more like a feeling than a state of character. It is defined, at any rate, as a kind of fear of dishonour . . . The feeling is not becoming to every age, but only to youth . . . For the sense of disgrace is not even characteristic of a good man, since it is consequent on bad actions . . . It is a mark of a bad man to be such as to do any disgraceful action. To be so constituted as to feel disgraced if one does such an action, and for this reason to think oneself good, is absurd . . .15

Aristotle’s modern commentators have had some trouble reconciling Aristotle’s belief that shame does not serve as a transition to virtue with a later passage in which he seems to acknowledge the formative role of shame in ethical training: “While [discourses of virtue] seem to have power to encourage and stimulate the generous-minded among our youth, and to make a character which is gently born, and a true lover of what is noble, ready to be possessed by virtue, they are not able to encourage the many to nobility and goodness. For these do not by nature obey the sense of shame, but only fear, and do not abstain from bad acts because of their baseness but through fear of punishment . . .”16 Aristotle implies here that shame is indeed useful as means to instruct impressionable youth in proper conduct. Commentators have not as much reconciled the two views as assumed that Aristotle’s considered opinion is that shame can indeed serve as a transition to virtue, although it is not the optimal means of ethical habituation, and it will only lead to the full complement of virtue when supplemented by practical wisdom. When Arisotle maintains that shame will not make a moral apprentice into a “good man,” he does not mean that shame has no use in virtuous training. He means rather that shame is useful as a means

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of instructing the “how” or “that” rather than “because” of virtuous action. Only with the later cultivation of prudence do intending moral agents act not simply responsively, but for the sake of the noble, the knowledge of which they will have fully internalized. As one commentator writes, “The person who has achieved full excellence, then, must have done so with the help of aidos, and it is difficult to imagine that that person can have left aidos entirely behind.”17 If we return to the Arcadia we can see that the important question is whether Musidorus and Pyrocles learn to distinguish virtuous actions from actions done out of fear of disgrace, and whether their many non-virtuous experiences of shame lead to a true appreciation of the nature of classical (post-Homeric) virtue. To argue, as Weiner does, that the text dramatizes the princes’ fall from habitually wise Aristotelians to Protestant penitents begs the question of whether the knights’ conduct ever satisfies the rigors of Aristotelian hexis in the absence of the countervailing pressures of Christian virtue. It seems obvious enough that the knights’ many experiences of shame simply represent bouts with different complexes of passions that do not conduce to the acquisition of virtue. Pyrocles, who experiences “as much shame as Musidorus had sorrow” when Musidorus first discovers his friend’s crossdressing, only then becomes angry and defensive at Musidorus’s advice: “But in Pyrocles this speech wrung no more but that he who (before he was espied) was afraid, after (being perceived) was ashamed, now (being hardly rubbed upon) left both fear and shame and was moved to anger” (134). When Zelmane-Pyrocles initially meets Philantus, King Basilius’s counselor, she burns with choler at the prospect of a rival for Philoclea, then mildly wounds Philantus, after which she feels “heartily sorry, and even ashamed . . . considering how little he had done” (293). Both Pyrocles and Musidorus suffer excessive, even morbid shame. Musidorus, for example, realizes that he will not be able to bear the shame of having been defeated by Amphialus: “O noble Barsanes, how shamed will thy soul be, that he that slew thee should be resisted by this one man! O incomparable Pyrocles, more grieved wilt thou be with thy friend’s shame than with thine own imprisonment”; he thus overthrows the precepts of courtesy and yields to unregulated cruelty: “the forsaken knight [Musidorus], (having with the extremity of justly-conceived hate and the unpitifulness of his own near-threatening death, blotted out all compliments of courtesy) let fly at him so cruelly . . .” (542–3). Later in the text, the narrator tells of Zelmane’s disgrace upon being transferred by Cecropia’s agents from his prison to Philoclea’s: “As for

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Zelmane, as she went with her hands bound . . . she was the true image of overmastered courage, and of spite that sees no remedy. For her breasts swelled withal, the blood burst out at her nose, and she looked paler than accustomed, with her eyes cast on the ground, with such a grace as if she were fallen out with the heavens . . .” (547). What such scenes reveal is that the Aristotelian rhetoric of Musidorus’s virtue theory – “A mind welltrained and long exercised in virtue [is] witness to itself of its own inward good (110)” – ends up as mercenary and instrumental in practice. A desire to avoid shame and maintain honor and glory is viewed as an end unto itself, not as a proximate means to happiness, contemplation, and basic Aristotelian traits of character such as temperance and practical wisdom. In their avoidance of shame, Musidorus and Pyrocles are not radically different from the base Clinias: “But Clinias, though he wanted heart to prevent shame, yet he wanted to wit to feel shame; not so much repining at it for the abhorring of shame as for the discommodities that to them that are shamed ensue” (436). There is no evidence in the text that even among the “virtuous” characters, the youthful avoidance of shame transitions into the desire to act virtuously for the sake of the noble. But the failure to satisfy the rigors of Aristotelian hexis is merely one of the limitations of shame ethic. Shame is often so heteronomous as to be entirely value-relative. The wicked Cecropia seems to understand this well when she explains to her son, Amphialus, on whose presumed behalf she has imprisoned Philoclea, the full reach of her evil: “Son . . . I will do it willingly, and since all is done for you I will hide nothing from you. And howsoever I might be ashamed to tell it to strangers who would think it wickedness, yet what is done for your sake (how evil soever to others) to you is virtue” (444). Of course, Cecropia is not complexly transvaluing any ethical norms as much as semantically manipulating terms. Her comment does indicate, however, the extent to which the experience of shame can operate independently of a moral system based on conventional distinctions between right and wrong or good and evil. Another limitation, or rather danger, of an ethics of shame, is its selffulfilling character. Gynecia, Queen of Arcadia, in love with PyroclesZelmane, offers a provocative, even poignant, analysis of her inability to prevent her downward spiral in virtue: “No, no, it is Philoclea his heart is set upon . . . But if it be so, the life I have given thee, ungrateful Philoclea, I will sooner with these hands bereave thee of than my birth shall glory she hath bereaved me of my desires. In shame there is no comfort but to be beyond all bounds of shame” (214). Gynecia grasps clearly one aspect of shame that differentiates it from guilt: the inability to counter shame

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experiences with acts or repentance of purification. Gynecia believes that she can mitigate her self-loathing by acting so reprehensibly as to become unrecognizable or invisible to herself and her peers. How, then, does the circuit of reason-desire-passion relate to the contrasting experiences of shame and guilt? While shame usually occurs when an agent’s overall self-image is radically altered, when one’s ideals and beliefs begin to seem misguided or second-rate, guilt is more localized; it attaches to discrete actions, and ordinarily does not signify a profound realignment of the very boundaries of the self. One commentator locates guilt and shame along the axes of primary and secondary deviance, respectively: ‘Primary deviance’ applies to those cases where a person accepts that he has done wrong but does not think of this wrong-doing as affecting his overall standing as a person . . . The secondary deviant, however, now sees himself not just as a man who at some point, for instance, committed a burglary, but rather sees himself as a burglar. What he has done is not alien to himself but on the contrary expresses what he really is. This second view is appropriate to shame, the former to guilt . . .18

In order to see how this distinction between shame and guilt operates in the Arcadia we need first to assess the relationship between evaluative judgments and passions. Most conduct in the Arcadia derives from interlocking complexes of reasons, desires, and passions, rather than from contending faculties that divide the self. As such, most characters are represented, before their “falls,” as individuals who show a measure of internal coherence and unity. Pamela speaks like a philosopher of the passions when she justifies to Philoclea her desire for Musidorus: “You will say, but how know I him to be Musidorus, since the handmaid of wisdom is slow of belief? That consideration did not want in me, for the nature of desire itself is no easier to receive belief than it is hard to ground belief. For as desire is glad to embrace the first show of comfort, so is desire desirous of perfect assurance . . .” (578). The circuit of desire and belief is such that if desires initially contort beliefs, the same desires cannot, in turn, retain their affective pull unless they are eventually legitimated by those beliefs. If, under the sway of love, Pamela at first suspends consideration of Dorus’s character, over time her love for Dorus demands that she uncover the nature of Dorus’s true identity. Reason thus normally does not serve in the Arcadia as the seat of moral judgment that contends with the passions; reason more often presents itself in the form of evaluative beliefs that serve to arouse corresponding passions, most of which are considered wayward by Arcadian standards. Amphialus, for example, does not simply, as an earlier generation of critics

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argued, allegorize the irrational passion of uncontrolled anger; he labors to channel his anger to satisfy his desire for Philoclea, who he believes will be liberated if he loses his battle with the forsaken knight: “who like a tiger from whom a company of wolves did seek to ravish a new gotten prey, so he (remembering they came to take away Philoclea) did labour to make valor, strength, choler and hatred to answer the proportion of his love which was infinite”(469).19 As a consequence of the tight causal link between reason and passion (there are few cases of genuine incontinence among the Arcadians), the recognition of moral errancy is a recognition not simply that one has succumbed to the alien intrusions of passion, but that one’s entire belief-system has been faulty. The evocation of shame, rather than guilt, seems to be a natural outgrowth of such a turning of the whole self toward an action which will ultimately signify a moral lapse. But if the text clearly points out the limitations of an ethics of shame to properly govern conduct, it does not suggest, as Weiner and others have argued, that an alternative ethic of natural laws or “heavenly rules” will effectively discipline behavior.20 According to the dialogue in the Second Eclogues, “heavenly rules” are designated to supersede both passions and reason: P: But so we shall with grief learn to repent. R: Repent indeed, but that shall be your bliss. P: How know we that, since present joys we miss? R: You know it not; of Reason therefore know it. P: No Reason yet had ever skill to show it. R, P: Then let us both to heavenly rules give place, Which Passions kill, and Reason do deface (408).

Weiner writes of these “heavenly rules” in relation to the final trial scene: “Euarchus must make the Arcadians (and the reader) aware that their true contentment can only come from God, not from their ruler. To do this, he must make them aware of the meaning of obedience to ‘heavenly rules.’”21 Yet these “heavenly rules” are rendered in Arcadia as abstractions without significant content. The few invocations of particularized natural laws or heavenly rules serve parodic functions. Basilius, King of Arcadia, feebly exalts the natural laws of mercy over the mundane laws of charity as a means to sway Zelmane: “Alas, let not certain imaginative rules, whose truth stands but upon opinion, keep so wise a mind from gratefulness and mercy, whose never-failing laws nature hath planted in us” (671). Zelmane’s mocking rebuke underscores the ridiculousness of Basilius’s attempt to bend natural laws to a courtship stratagem: “These are but those swelling speeches which give the uttermost name to every trifle” (671). At those moments

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when natural laws do seem to be taken more seriously, their presumed self-evidentiary nature is identified with the time-bound quality of civil or positive laws. As much as we would like to imagine that Euarchus hooks into axiomatic natural laws and rules of equity by special dispensation, his laws turn out to be little more than the established laws of Greece and Arcadia: “In reward of this . . . I will promise and protest unto you that to the uttermost of my skill, both in the general laws of nature, especially of Greece, and particular of Arcadia (wherein I must confess I am not unacquainted) . . .” (797). And if we argue that these positive laws are derived from natural laws, we learn that, given the Arcadia’s extenuatation of every vice and crime by the close of the romance, even these laws fail to carry binding force.22 If religion does not enter into the text principally in the form of a natural law system of ethics, in what forms, if any, does it enter? Because critics have tended to set up a disjuncture between an order of nature and grace, they have overlooked the fact that the order of “nature,” the ethics of shame predominant in the text, is, in many of its incarnations, indistinguishable from the text’s theology; that is, at times the shame ethic derives from the very theological presuppositions that such an ethic threatens to undermine.23 Recall Musidorus’s account, upon returning to the arms of Pyrocles, of his bittersweet survival of his shipwreck: O what a monster of misery am I! Even when most fortunate, most unfortunate, who never had a lightning of comfort but that it was suddenly followed with a thunder of confusion. Twice was my felicity by land . . . made a prey to the inexorable waves . . . And, O, thrice happy I, if I had perished whilst I was altogether unhappy! Then, when a dejected shepherd offensive to the perfection of the world, I could hardly (being oppressed by contempt) make myself worthy to be disdained, disdain to be despised being a degree of grace . . . (604).

In one of the few references in the text to grace, Musidorus suggests that he had been so downcast at this point that he was unable to consider himself worthy of disdain – as if he had sunk so low as to place himself out of any normative framework of evaluation, degenerated to the point that he could not even identify himself as shame’s object. As such, he was unable to “despise” such “disdain,” and in doing so, achieve at least a point of grace. The language here unmistakably recalls the well-known description in Hebrews 12:2 of Christ’s “despising shame” on the cross: Let us run with patience the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising shame, and hath sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.

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For consider him that hath endured such gainsaying of sinners against themselves, that ye wax not weary, fainting in your souls.24

Exegeted widely during the sixteenth century, this passage of Christ’s “despising shame” was used to convince God’s faithful to embrace shame in emulation of Christ’s humility. Thus Calvin: “Although Christ was free to exempt Himself from all trouble and to lead a life of happiness . . . nevertheless He submitted Himself voluntarily to a bitter and disgraceful death . . . He commends the patience of Christ to us for two reasons, first because He endured a bitter death and secondly because He despised the shame.”25 The extent to which this form of a shame ethic might be accommodated to piety is illustrated in Philip Melanchthon’s description of Ulysses’s perseverance: In order to keep his course and to achieve what he wants, he does not let himself be defeated or have done with dangers and ills; even in his own house he endures much that is unbearable; he withstands being torn and needy, being made sport of, being beaten, having bones thrown at him by the suitors for a time . . . That virtue is distinguished in men . . . to withstand and endure injustice, disgrace, abuse and disrepute, and persevere on their determined course, aiming for and following only what is honourable and beneficial.26

Melanchthon’s recasting of Ulysses’s trials is especially palatable to the Protestant humanist who can appreciate Ulysses’s virtue of patience, as well as his willingness to bear indignities, more readily than Ulysses’s cardinal or pagan virtues. Such a belief in the saving role of shame implicitly extends the sentiments of Hebrews 12:2 that the fear of disgrace should lead to humility, even self-abasement, rather than pride. David deSilva notes that early Christians “considered as their most ennobling achievements the very activities and commitments which made them dishonorable in the eyes of unbelievers.”27 Given Musidorus’s and Pyrocles’s otherwise uncompromising avoidance of shame, Musidorus’s recollection of an inability to acquire grace by “despising” humiliation seems out of character, to say the least. And one would be too quick to assume that his sentiments reflect any considered view of the relationship between shame and grace. One might even argue that Musidorus’s comments play on the admittedly ambiguous phrasing of Hebrews 12:2, that his despising of shame describes not his own inability to despise (embrace) his shame in front of others, but to have his shame despised by others, which is consistent with his self-pity, as well as his sense that a removal from the framework of ethical evaluation entirely is

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worse than suffering shame from within that framework. There thus seems to be an ambiguity in the text as to whether grace demands that public calumny be avoided or courted. Another related example of the use of shame in a Christian context occurs during the dialogue in Book III between Pamela and Cecropia, on the subject of God’s providence. After delivering her neo-scholastic, knockdown defense of God’s efficient and final causality, Pamela issues this warning to her captor: Since then there is a God, and an all-knowing God, so as he sees into the darkest of all natural secrets which is the heart of man, and sees therein the deepest dissembled thoughts . . . since he is just to exercise his thoughts before they be thought; since he is just to exercise his might, and mighty to perform his justice, assure thyself, most wicked woman . . . that the time will come when thou shalt know that power by feeling it; when thou shalt see His wisdom in the manifesting thy ugly shamefulness . . . (492).

While one may pass over this speech as a conventional strategy of instilling fear by invoking a punitive Old Testament God, Pamela’s specific focus on Cecropia’s shame is noteworthy.28 Shame in the Arcadia has up to this point been connected to a blight on one’s public reputation, or more generally, a failure to live up to Greek standards of virtue. When shame acquires theological overtones, it is recommended as an affective response that ought to be embraced rather than avoided. If Cecropia were to admit her depravity to herself or God, one expects that she would suffer, at least minimally, guilt over her abuse of Basilius’s daughters. Pamela, however, admonishes that God stands to shame Cecropia, that he will expose her fraudulence, render it visible and publicly available. It is as if the shame ethic that measures heroic conduct is projected onto the God-subject relationship, as if shame governs both horizontal relations among the Arcadians and vertical relations with God. This sort of theological configuration of shame appears elsewhere in the text. Zelmane at one point advises Anaxius, who has designs on Pamela and Philoclea: “If thou harm these incomparable ladies, or myself without daring to fight with me, I protest before these knights, and before heaven, and earth (that will reveal thy shame) that thou art the beggarliest dastardly villain that dishonoureth the earth with his steps . . .” (583). Just to provide a sense of the wealth of sources that Sidney may have used to develop the text’s multiform religious use of shame, we should note that these descriptions of a vengeful, disgracing God are typical of the Psalms, which are held up in Sidney’s Defense of Poesy as ideal, poetic instructors of virtue. Sidney and Mary Sidney translated and paraphrased the Psalms

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after the manner of Theodore Beza’s influential paraphrases. Shame figures prominently in nine of the Sidneian Psalms, which tend to focus on the public disgrace that God will bring to the speaker’s combatants. “Lett them be cloth’d with most confounding shame, / That lift them selves my ruine for to frame” (Psalm 35, 65–66); “Lett them have shame, yea, blush for shame / Who joyntly sought my bale to frame” (Psalm 40, 51–53); “Add feare and shame, to shame and feare: / Confound them quite, and quite deface” (Psalm 83, 49–50); “They rise, but shame shall bring them downe. / And this my joy shall be, / As bad disgrace, or worse, / Shall them attyre than ever clothed me, / Trailing in trayne a synfull shamefull gowne” (Psalm 109, 74–78).29 In all of these passages the Psalter’s plea to have God bring shame on his enemies echoes the Arcadian assumption, rhetorically powerful, if not practically effective, that malefactors can be dissuaded from evil once they are conditioned to fear God’s power to expose their depravity to the Arcadian public. We can begin to discern a pattern in the text, in which ethical systems are presented, scrutinized, and ultimately displaced by kindred, although modified ethical forms. The too-secular, heteronomous ethics of shame takes on a Christian coloring in the text’s emphasis on the importance of despising shame in keeping with Christ’s abasement. Yet Musidorus only glimpses the profundity of such a theologia crucis, and is certainly not ready to discard his credentials, however puerile, in classical virtue theory. If the New Testament ethic fails to appeal to the well-intentioned Musidorus, it certainly will not appeal to Cecropia, sunk too deeply in sin, so the shame ethic transmutes one more time into something approaching the cultic pleadings of the Davidic Psalms. Yet, Pamela’s warning to Cecropia has no practical consequences, since her eventual liberation is secured by the combined efforts of Musidorus and the Arcadian authorities. Suffice it to say that in most of its incarnations, classical and theological, the shame ethic fails to operate effectively to habituate virtue or to prevent evildoing. What is striking to consider is that, given the evident limitations of the shame ethic, there is a notable paucity of references to an accusing conscience or guilt. While the Arcadia’s classicism partly explains the focus on shame rather than guilt, the shame references are so often invested with Christian-ethical motifs that the text’s classicism is not a sufficient condition of explanation. It turns out, in fact, that a focus on shame rather than guilt predominates in the theological, doctrinal writings of the period, which a brief detour into early English Reformed theology will bear out. This summary is provided not to mark direct lines of influence on Sidney’s

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thinking, but simply to provide an account of the contemporary theological context that seems to be informing the mutating function of shame in the Arcadia. sham e in six teenth-century english theology Most of the leading early English Reformers – William Tyndale, John Bradford, and Robert Barnes, for example – stand apart from Calvin and the later experimental predestinarians in their focus on the public, specular aspect of sanctification and external service, rather than justification and the role guilt and conscience play in the order of salvation. In his Answer to Thomas More’s Dialogue, Tyndale stresses the importance of works as testimonials of a prior reception of grace: “Faith justifieth in the heart and before God; and the deeds before the world only, and maketh the others seen; as ye may see by the scripture [Rom. 4].”30 The commission of service is a natural outflowing of the justified heart; works serve primarily to declare the believer’s election to the community, although they serve also to reaffirm to the believer his or her election. As Carl Trueman notes of Tyndale’s biased focus on sanctifying righteousness: “Tyndale’s soteriology is structured towards maintaining the ethical dimension of Christianity. He regards the primary purpose of salvation to be the freeing of man’s will and the putting away of man’s moral guilt. Indeed, the latter concept plays little part in his theology.”31 Tyndale’s emphasis on signifying faith through service can be found in the doctrinal writings of some other early English Reformers. John Frith, Tyndale’s contemporary, writes in Tracy’s Testament (1532), “Before God we are verily justified by that root of faith; for he searcheth the heart, and therfore this just judge doth inwardly justify . . . but men must look for the works, for their sight cannot enter into the heart . . .”32 Similarly, another contemporary of Tyndale, Robert Barnes, describes Abraham’s offering of Isaac as a public testimony of inward justification: “Abraham’s faith was declared [through his offering of Isaac], and had a great testimony afore all the world, that it was a living, and a perfect, and a right shapen faith.”33 The historical conditions underlying the early Reformed bias toward pastoral concerns rather than sin and guilt are wide ranging. Tyndale’s strategy in the Obedience of A Christian Man is to overturn the Catholic charge of Protestant antinomianism by developing a theory of sanctifying righteousness that would, as William Clebsch notes, “outwork” the Catholics.34 Tyndale’s preoccupation with moralism is then reinforced by his eventual translation of the Pentateuch in 1530, out of which he develops his

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semi-legalistic view of double justification: if moral law is the object of fear prior to justification, it makes itself felt after grace as the object of love to which the devout turn for pastoral guidance. Although Frith and Barnes shift their attention to ecclesiology in their later works, both support Tyndale’s moralistic soteriology, if not his legalism. And the early Reformers’ preoccupation with Stephen Greenblatt’s influential notion of self-fashioning perhaps underlies their shared concern with the publicness of faith. As Greenblatt suggests, the “complex dialectic of external manifestation and inward conviction,” drives Tyndale “to an intense need for something external to himself in which he could totally merge his identity.”35 But the more immediate theological reason that the early English Reformers are not fundamentally concerned with internal accounting is that they assume a relative degree of personal assurance of election; as such, they recommend that converts testify righteousness outwardly rather than fret inwardly or privately about their state of election. John Bradford, for example, argues that assurance does not require second-order certification by means of self-reflection: Whom look you on? on yourself, on your worthiness, on your thankfulness, on that which God requireth of you, as faith, hope, love, fear, joy, etc.? Then can you not but waver indeed . . . Have you so soon forgotten that which ever should be in memory? namely that, when you would and should be certain and quiet in conscience, then should your faith burst throughout all things.36

The early English Reformers tend to occupy a position between Beza and Calvin on the subject of assurance. As R. D. Kendall remarks, Calvin, unlike the Bezan reformers, did not draw a distinction between faith and assurance: “If we are elected in him [Christ] we cannot find the certainty of our election in ourselves; and not even in God the Father, if we look at him apart from the Son. Christ, then, is the mirror in which we ought to, and in which, without deception we may contemplate our election.”37 One contemplates or sustains “communion” with Christ not through introspection and the siftings of conscience, but rather through sincerity of prayer and a belief in Christ’s promises as represented in scripture. Distinguishing those reprobates who enjoy temporary faith from those confirmed in election, Calvin observes, “I deny not that they have signs of calling similar to those given to the elect; but I do not at all admit that they have that sure confirmation of election which I desire believers to seek from the word of the gospel.”38 For Calvin there is no fundamental distinction among faith, election and assurance: with the bestowal of faith comes the gift of assurance. As

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such, excessive self-reflection can lead to unnecessary anxiety: “But what proof have you of your election? Whence once this thought has taken possession of any individual, it keeps him perpetually miserable, subjects him to dire torment, or throws him into complete stupor.”39 Indeed, selfscrutiny and curiosity regarding election might even attest to depravity: “If you contemplate yourself, that is sure damnation.”40 On the opposite extreme from Calvin stood Theodore Beza and the Heidelberg Reformers (Ursinus and Zanchius), those who separate faith from assurance and rely on a “reflex act” as a means of discerning the relative certainty of election. Since Beza, for example, believed that no individual can know whether or not Christ died for him or her in particular, the ground of assurance must be sought from within the penitent, rather than by means of the word alone. As Kendall notes, “Beza directs us not to Christ but to ourselves; we do not begin with Him but with the effect, which points us back, as it were, to the decree of election.”41 As we will see in more detail in a later chapter, such a “reflex act” shapes William Perkins’s theology, whose doctrinal writings reveal a distinct preoccupation with the guiding effects of conscience and the use of the practical syllogism as a means to ascertain election. Thus one of Perkins’s syllogisms runs: “every murtherer is cursed, saith the mind; Thou art a murtherer, saith the conscience assisted by memorie; Ergo, Thou art cursed, saith conscience, and giveth her sentence.”42 The early English Reformers occupy a position that may be described as soft on assurance: outward service is necessary primarily to signify one’s faith to the community, although it has, as a subordinate end, a reaffirmation to the penitent of his or her spiritual standing. Another way of saying this is that the early English Reformers construct a spectator view of morality. The moral agent is positioned as the object of another’s moral appraisal, the outcome of which can never be fully certain. Now one of the dangers of emphasizing the specular dimension of sin is that the desire to cultivate Godly reputation could potentially outrun the desire to cleanse oneself of inner corruption. This seems to be Luther’s concern when he makes reference to Augustine’s interpretation of 2 Corinthians (8:21). The Corinthians passage reads: “For we aim at what is good . . . not only in the sight of God, but also in the sight of men.” Augustine exposits the lines in a sermon on clerical discipline: As far as we are concerned, our consciences are all that matters; as far as you are concerned, our reputation among you ought not to be tarnished, but influential for good . . . There are two things, conscience and reputation; conscience for yourself,

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reputation for your neighbor. Those who, being clear in their consciences, neglect their reputations are being cruel; especially if they find themselves in . . . a position about which the aspostle says, when he writes to his disciple, ‘Showing yourself to all around you as an example of good works.’43

Augustine’s sermon exercised Luther’s imagination, who recognized the value of Augustine’s “remarkable” commentary, but also showed a concern that the passage might lead to excessive pride when reputation is at stake. He therefore tries to mitigate the implications of the passage by arguing that “Augustine wants nothing else than that person must beware of the appearance of evil and in a straightforward way demonstrate his innocence, so that he may not be accused of having neglected it.”44 Luther’s apprehension reveals a potentially intractable tension, one we have already seen allegorized in the Arcadia, between on the one hand an ethics of humiliation, according to which the devout ought to despise shame, and on the other hand, an ethics of honor and reputation, which inevitably encourages a manifestation of one’s spiritual favor to the community. Thus Luther worries that Augustine’s commentary is often misinterpreted to mean, “He who does not protect his reputation by every kind of force and device, by rightful or wrongful means, is morally insensitive.”45 Unresolved at the time of the Elizabethan Settlement and the establishment of the Thirty-nine Articles, these tensions resurface in the sermons of the late-sixteenth century Puritan brethren. The twin emphasis on despising and fearing shame is featured, for example, in Richard Greenham’s remarkable treatise, Of a Good Name. On the one hand Greenham exhorts his readers to expose shame publicly: This is the best remedy against sin: rather to be grieved that we feel not our sinnes pardoned with God, then that we are known to be sinners among men, and that we be ready to shame that God may have the glory, acknowledge in shame and confusion and the whole hell of temptations, to be due unto us, and glory and praise, and compassion to obey the Lord. For this is a special mark of the child of God by temptations mightily humbled, is that he be ready to shame himself for his sins . . .46

Yet Greenham’s reference to the difficulty of securing God’s pardon or forgiveness, which would seem to be bound up with the guilt of having offended God or transgressed divine law, is downgraded in relationship to the saving potential of public reputation, which is not specifically tied to self-abasement: “It cannot be without great sin, that a man should cast off all care of his own credit. The very Heathen saw this to be a fault, and they did commonly say, that whosever regardeth not the reports of men, he is dissolute indeed, and hath not the nature of man.”47 While Greenham

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would no doubt recommend the cultivation of humility rather than heroic virtue, his emphasis on actively cultivating community respect strains against the emphasis in Hebrews 12:2 on accepting public humiliation. We should consider the extent to which a relative tightening or slackening of this tension would be regulated by corresponding degrees of personal assurance. In the absence of a sense of assurance, one would look immediately to God (and secondarily to the community) for signs of spiritual status; this form of introspective accounting, practiced by the experimental predestinarians, inevitably leads to an initial soteriological preoccupation with conscience and guilt. On the other extreme, a firm sense of assurance would allow the saint to properly despise shame, which might manifest itself in a settled disposition, for example, to marry oneself to the radical forbearance demanded of the Sermon on the Mount. But if the relative certainty of election lay somewhere between these two extremes, if a faint sense of assurance were constantly reaffirmed by public evaluation (what we find in the writings of the early English Reformers), then election would run the danger of becoming parasitical on a third-person, spectatorial viewpoint. Shame, in such a context, would be difficult to despise, indeed. Thus the task of rendering oneself immune to the full range of community standards, standards which are not always optimally Christian, becomes an elusive ideal. In such a context, a spotted conscience would not dictate public conduct; rather, public appraisals would be projected inwardly, displacing internal guilt, causing one to fear rather than court shame. This seems to be motivating Luther’s worry expressed above, and it seems to point to a design flaw in the proleptic soteriology of the early English Reformers.48 That it is a problem that haunts seventeenth-century moral theology as well is suggested in Donne’s observation in “The Cross”: “Let crosses, so take what hid in Christ thee, And be his image, or not his but he, / But, as oft alchemists do coiners prove, / So may a self-despising, get self-love. / And then as worst surfeits, of best meats be, / So is pride, issued from humility” (35–40).49 Sidney composed a first draft of the Old Arcadia in 1579, substantial parts of which he revised over the next few years. These revisions culminated in the unfinished New Arcadia. In 1593 Mary Sidney published the Folio version of the Arcadia, a composite text of the Old and New Arcadias, which enters into the modern canon as The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia. As Weiner has shown, the widely accepted statement of the Protestant faith in the 1560s and 1570s, during the years that Sidney was composing the first draft of the Old Arcadia, was the Confession of Faith, drawn up by Beza, Bullinger and other Continental Reformers.50 As a formulary of Reformed theology, the Confession does not descend into particulars

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regarding the soteriological role of shame; yet, like the writings of the early English Reformers, it emphasizes the intensely public component of soteriology by focusing on sanctification to a greater degree than justification, and by marginalizing the role of guilt and conscience in the ordo salutis. Thus we find that the chapter on repentance, which precedes the chapter on justification, describes regeneration as a process “whereby the sinner doth straight way acknowledge his natural corruption . . . his iniquities, but being ashamed thereof, confess them, but also with disdain detest them, minding earnestly to amend, and always endeavoring to lead an innocent and virtuous life.”51 What follows is an exhortation to confess sins in as public a context as possible – “Acknowledge your sins one to another”52 – and to display one’s faith in good works: “Let your light to shine before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify your father . . .”53 That one finds an overlap between the Confession and the theology of the early English Reformers makes sense, given that most of the early English Reformers lived in exile on the continent during the years 1520–35, and were directly influenced by Bullinger and Rhineland theology. Sidney may have absorbed the theology of the early English Reformers and its continental counterparts through any number of channels, but perhaps the most direct influence was Philip de Mornay’s Woorke Concerning the Trewnesse of the Christian Religion, which was published in Sidney’s translation in 1587. Like the theologians described above, de Mornay shows a preoccupation with the heteronomous dimension of sin and regeneration: O how many doe we esteeme to be good men, whome we should see to be wicked men if their thoughts lay open, or if we had eyes to see into them: O what a sort of wilde bestes should wee see harbored in a man’s heart as in a forest: And what is then our skill, but ignorance; our wisdome, but vanities; and our holiness, but hipocrisie: Wherein consisteth our vertue, but in concealing our vyces, whenas in truth (as sayth Aristotle) it were both more for our behoof and more approaching to righteousnesse, if we layd them open . . . And surely we ought to be ashamed . . .54

De Mornay’s focus on the natural desire to hide depravity, to cover it over with classical virtue, seems to speak directly to the consuming role of shame in the Arcadia: the desire to build an enviable reputation among men is fueled by the very desire to conceal the lack of virtue and, in many cases, a besmirched reputation with God. Interestingly, Aristotelianism is held up as de Mornay’s remedy, according to which vices ought to be displayed in order to be purged. Yet there seems to be a circularity embedded in such advice: Aristotle’s remedy for removing shameful vice, habituating

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oneself to proper virtue (a process that begins but ought not to end with recognizing and fearing shame), is a remedy that few sixteenth-century Protestant moralists, with the exception of Melanchthon, would endorse. But more to the point, it is a remedy that, as we have already seen, fails to condition the behavior of the principals in Sidney’s Arcadia, where shame does not transition into secular, not to mention theological virtue. Like so many other sixteenth-century accounts of Protestant morality, de Mornay acutely diagnoses the ethical dilemma, but offers little in terms of a pragmatic, acceptably Christian remedy. A glance at one passage from Nicholas Bifield’s The Spiritual Touchstone (1625) will help to underscore the contrast between the sixteenthcentury preoccupation with the spirituality of honor and shame and the seventeenth-century, Puritan preoccupation with guilt and conscience. Describing the steps that the individual might take to ascertain his spiritual standing, Bifield writes: “First, make a Catalogue of thy sinnes, which thou mayes do, either by memory or by book. By memory thus: Go aside, set thy soule before the Lord, as if thou werest presently to be judged of him; call to mind particularly whatsoever thou canst remember by thy selfe: consider thy want, thy omissions, and commissions of evill . . . Thou mayest then see an armie of rebellious evils thou hast been guiltie of . . .”55 Bifield’s concern is with the private meditations of the sinner who carries on a dialogue with himself or herself in order to measure guilt. Since there are no public witnesses to whatever signs are elicited during these meditative practices, and the sinner calls to account his or her discrete actions over a period of time rather than the wholesale defilement of his or her soul (experimental predestinarianism could inadvertently undermine Luther’s toto homo doctrine) the evocation of shame is not integral to the practice described in Bifield’s treatise. While the early English Reformers would perhaps support such private explorations, their concerns lie elsewhere, with the intersubjective relations among converted and unconverted sinners in the community. The juxtaposition of Bifield’s seventeenth-century Puritan focus on guilt, inwardness and conscience, with the sixteenth-century, equally biased focus on shame, externality, and reputation, suggests that a robust, more comprehensive view of sanctifying righteousness might have been achieved with a better integration of the public and private dimensions of salvation. co nscience and guilt in the arcadia So we turn back to the Arcadia, in search of an alternative to the shame ethic as a practical means of governing right conduct. What we find is that Sidney does subject the shame ethic to further analysis by finally exploring shame’s

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relation to the moral axis of guilt and conscience. The most important dialogue to this effect occurs during Pyrocles’s and Philoclea’s discussion on the permissibility of suicide. Philoclea remarks, “And truly, my Pyrocles, I have heard my father and other wise men say that the killing one’s self is but a false colour of true courage, proceeding rather of fear of a further evil, either of torment or shame” (743). Given Pyrocles’s pathological fear of shame, Philoclea is undoubtedly onto something here, but Pyrocles responds by trumpeting his clean conscience: “As for shame, how can I be ashamed of that for which my well meaning conscience will answer for me to God, and your unresistable beauty to the world?” He then directly challenges Philoclea’s providentialism: “If we be lieutenants in this little castle, do you not think we must take warning of him to give our charge when he leaves us unprovided of good means to tarry in it?” (745). Pyrocles seems somewhat illogical here, since he at once argues that his conduct is a matter for God’s scrutiny – his well-meaning conscience will meet God’s requirements for virtue – and that his conduct is an indifferent matter, outside divine jurisdiction. Philoclea responds with a line that sounds typically voluntaristic and Calvinist: “That we should be masters of ourselves we can show at all not title nor claim: since neither we made ourselves nor bought ourselves, we can stand upon no other right but his gift, which he must limit as it pleaseth him” (745). Philoclea continues her brief against Pyrocles with a remark that is crucial to understanding the Arcadia’s considered view of the relationship between shame and guilt: I cannot think your defense even in rules of virtue sufficient. Sufficient and excellent it were the question were of two outward things, wherein a man might by nature’s freedom determine whether he would prefer shame to pain, present smaller torment to greater following, or no. But to this (besides the comparison of the matters’ values), there is added of the one part a direct evil doing which maketh the balance of that side too much unequal; since a virtuous man without any respect . . . is never to do that which he cannot assure himself is allowable before the everlasting rightfulness, but rather is to think honours or shames (which stand in other men’s true or false judgments) pains or not pains (which yet never approach our souls) to be nothing in regard to an unspotted conscience (744).

Philoclea believes that Pyrocles has fundamentally separated ethics from theology, an idea that is promoted most forcefully in the sixteenth century by Melanchthon, with whose work Sidney was familiar.56 In his Oration on Education, Melanchthon notes:

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Philosophy does not provide confirmation of the will of God, nor does it instruct on the fear of God and the trust in Him; that pertains properly to the Gospel. However, apart from these things, precepts for civic life are necessary, which teach how men may live peacefully with each other . . . Philosophers and other writers teaching honourable precepts for life are not to be spurned, but they are to be read diligently.57

Melanchthon’s separation of ethics and theology eventually finds its way into the seventeenth century by route of the Reformed commentaries on Aristotelian ethics, especially the ethical manuals of Adrian Heerbord, Bartholomaeus Keckermann, and Franco Burgersdyck.58 This form of dualism suffers from a number of problems, not the least of which is the soteriological difficulty of explaining the morality of regeneration without any recourse whatsoever to moral philosophy. As we will see in a later chapter, Luther avoids the need to supplement soteriology with classical ethical training by arguing that horizontal love and outward service merged the two kingdoms (although Luther’s love ethic itself remains undertheorized). Since the Aristotelian commentators do not satisfactorily explain the link between the two regiments, they cannot account for instances of moral rectitude or errancy that seem to lie in a jurisdictional gray area between ethics and theology. This is a criticism made, for example, by one of the leading seventeenth-century Puritans, William Ames, who argues in The Marrow of Theology: They hold that the end of theology is the good of grace and the end of ethics is moral or civil good (as if no moral or civil good were in any way spiritual or the good of grace) . . . They say that theology is concerned with the inward affections of men and ethics with outward manners – as if ethics, which they consider the prudence which governs the will and appetite, had nothing to do with inward affections, and theology did not teach outward as well as inward obedience . . . But the Apostle expressly teaches that theology instructs us to live not only piously and righteously but also temperately and justly, or honestly and honorably.59

Ames stresses that morality and theology show significant overlap: both realms designate mutual ends, and both esteem selected virtues that meet the twin demands of ethics and piety. Ames will go on to argue that the theological realm has supremacy over the ethical realm; but this hierarchical ordering presupposes a mingling of the realms, since if the two realms were kept distinct, classical and Christian ethical values would be entirely incommensurate, and theology could not properly adjudicate conduct. Returning to Philoclea’s speech to Pyrocles, we can see that Philoclea initially aligns ethics with “outward things” and theology with conscience, presumably “inward” things. She realizes, however, that the demands of

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ethics and those of theology will at times conflict. When operating solely in the sphere of ethics, one might indeed weigh, as Pyrocles does, the relative values of shame and pain when contemplating suicide. Philoclea notes, though, that, since suicide is not allowable according to the “everlasting rightfulness,” Pyrocles’s weighing of shame and pain ought to give way to the dictates of his “unspotted conscience,” which should command him to obey divine law. Philoclea thus rejects Pyrocles’s implicit separation of ethics and theology by noting that divine and natural laws can always supervene on the demands of secular morality, in this case, Pyrocles’s pursuit of honor. Yet, Philoclea’s argument takes an interesting turn. She concludes that, in any case, Pyrocles has not developed the proper moral virtues: “And for these reasons do I remember I have heard good men bring in, that since it hath not his ground in an assured virtue, it proceeds rather of some other disguised passion” (746). The “assured virtue” is no doubt courage, since Philoclea had opened her petition by noting that suicide proceeds from a “false colour of true courage.” So Philoclea initially argues that whether or not Pyrocles has the courage to pursue suicide should be of no account, bound as he is by conscience to obey divine laws. But she then argues that his conscience’s failure to move him reflects that he does not have the courage to refrain from suicide and endure his just deserts. On the one hand, moral virtue is something distinct from and subordinate to God’s law and conscience; on the other hand, moral virtue enables one to appreciate God’s law and act conscientiously. Far from separating the realms of ethics and theology, Philoclea convinces Pyrocles that the virtue of courage ought to enable him to endure shame and follow the strictures of theology, not morality. But Philoclea has achieved more than simply a dismantling of the two kingdoms doctrine. She implicitly outdoes those theologians like Ames who would argue that theological priorities supervene on secular virtue but who then do not go on to explain precisely how such theological superventions can bind conduct. That is, she seems to realize that an invocation of divine law and a direct appeal to conscience might appeal cognitively to Pyrocles, but that such appeals will not move his stubborn will or condition his behavior. So she hits Pyrocles where it hurts by accusing him of not having the moral virtue of courage anyway. In a deft act of appropriation, she turns Pyrocles’s own ethical system against him by shaming him into changing his mind. Her success helps us to see that shame is, however limited, a stopgap measure that is derived from the very limitations of conscience and guilt to discipline conduct.

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Yet, there does seem to be a shift away from shame and toward guilt by the end of the Arcadia, particularly focused on Gynecia, who is tormented by her illicit love for Pyrocles-Zelmane. Gynecia is not only the one character who remains, throughout the course of her conduct, keenly aware of her moral failings, but who also experiences guilt to the same degree that she does shame. Here is one of her lamentations: O accursed reason, how many eyes thou hast to see thy evils, and how dim, may blind thou art in preventing them! Forlorn creature that I am, I would I might be freely wicked, since wickedness doth prevail; but the footsteps of my overtrodden virtue lie still as bitter accusations unto me. I am divided in myself: how can I stand? I am overthrown in myself: who shall raise me? Vice is but a nurse of new agonies, and the virtue I am divorced from makes the hateful comparison the more manifest. No, no virtue, either, I never had but a shadow of thee, or thou thyself art but a shadow (635).

Gynecia is the one character who does not ground her passions in any rational beliefs. She is internally divided rather than wholly misled. While she doubts whether or not the virtuous character from which she has defected was ever durable in the first place, she is at least aware of the existence of an insubstantial, “shadowy” moral center that has been ravaged by the effects of her desire for Pyrocles. She has violated that core moral self, transgressed the internal sanctions of virtue, and as a result is overcome with guilt and a sense of responsibility for the consequences of her actions. Her guilt accompanies her earliest desire for Pyrocles – “But remembering herself, and seeing Basilius by (her guilty conscience more suspecting than being suspected) . . .” (377) – and it swells to unbearable proportions when she believes she has been an instrument of Basilius’s death: “Gynecia did crucify her own soul, after the guiltiness of her heart was surcharged with the suddenness of her husband’s death; for although that effect came not from her mind, yet her mind being evil and the effect evil, she thought the justice of God had for the beginning of her pains coupled them together” (798). In order to fully understand the text’s view on conscience and guilt, it will be helpful to review the prevailing sixteenth-century understanding of the nature of conscience. Luther’s early view of conscience, one shared by some sixteenth-century English theologians, was neo-scholastic in its assumption that conscience is a faculty that functions to match particular premises in a practical syllogism of action to universal precepts. These universal precepts were graspable by the synteresis, a faculty that automatically perceived the content of natural laws. This was a basic scholastic presupposition,

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introduced in the early thirteenth century by Philip the Chancellor, and subsequently modified by Bonaventure, Aquinas, and Ockham.60 Apart from minor dissension over whether the synteresis is located in the intellect or will, both the theologians of the via antiqua and via moderna suggested that the synteresis had its scriptural basis in Paul’s reference in 2 Romans to a “law written in their hearts.”61 Conscience, in turn, was described as a complementary faculty that governs practical application of such precepts; hence Aquinas’s belief that conscience derives from the Latin phrase, “cum alio scientia,” – “knowledge applied to an individual case.”62 The young Luther inherited this view of conscience from Gabriel Biel, and expounded it in his early lectures on the Psalms, Dicta Super Psalterium (1513–15). It also figures prominently in sixteenth-century English treatises of conscience. John Woolton, in Of The Conscience (1590), writes, “Synteresis . . . is the keeper and conserver of notices, or understandings, which are held with us by nature, examining what is, and what is not expedient.”63 After an elaboration of the relationship between the major and minor premises of a syllogism of action, in which he describes the synteresis as a general proposition, Woolton describes conscience as follows: In the second place of the minde is Intelligence practicall, which consisteth in action. And therin is the Conscience properly placed, for that of the difference of Actions, the putteth down and as it were delivereth the lesse proportion or assumtion in the Sillogisme or Argument, in this wise, Sinteresis or Understanding ministreth this proposition in Hector. Honest thinges are to be done. Then Conscience apprehendeth this assumtion. To defend a mans countrie and to die therefore is honest (sig. c1).

Woolton’s neo-scholastic idea of conscience is remarkable for its tendency not only to attach conscience to discrete acts of the intellect, but also for its focus on the antecedent rather than consequent interventions of conscience: conscience exerts its influence in guiding the will to choose rightly, rather than in making accusations subsequent to a moral failing. Before turning to the more developed view of conscience one finds in Luther’s later writings (which anticipates the early seventeenth-century English Puritan conception of conscience), it will help to consider Gynecia’s early conduct in relation to a practical syllogism of action. Directly after meeting Zelmane, Gynecia confronts her inability to prevent her defection from her presumed habit of virtue: There appeared unto the eyes of her judgment the evils she was like to run into, with ugly infamy waiting upon them: she felt the terrors of her own conscience; she was guilty of a long exercised virtue which made this vice the fuller of deformity . . . no small part of her evils was that she was wise to see her evils (213).

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Gynecia’s conscience is activated upon the simple bringing to consciousness of her desire for Pyrocles. Her experience of moral incontinence separates her from her peers – she has a settled disposition toward virtue, and she is fully aware of her impropriety. Applying a practical syllogism of action to her conduct suggests that she grasps clearly the nature of the unspoken rules she contemplates transgressing – a command not to commit adultery, for example. Her conscience, in turn, dictates that to realize her desires in this particular situation with Zelmane would signify a breach of the general rule. Her failure, then, is not an inability to grasp the normative force of the overarching precept, but a genuine case of weakness of will. Her conscience at this point works antecedently to convince her to reorient her desires. This circumscribed role of conscience is brought out when, upon awaking from her dream about Zelmane, she gathers herself with the help of her conscience: “With that she awakes, crying very loud, ‘Zelmane, Zelmane.’ But remembering herself, and seeing Basilius by (her guilty conscience more suspecting than being suspected) she turned her call and called for Philoclea.” (377) A “suspecting” conscience functions pre-emptively as an avoidance mechanism. Rather than accuse or convict, it serves intersubjectively to veil the guilt that may be witnessed by others. As such, it still operates quite like shame. Following Basilius’s presumed death from poison, however, Gynecia’s guilty conscience completely overmasters her, to such an extent that she fails to realize that her guilt is disproportionate to her offenses: Her painful memory had straight filled her with the true shapes of all the fore-past mischiefs: her reason began to cry out against the filthy rebellion of sinful sense, and to tear itself with anguish for having made so weak a resistance: her conscience a terrible witness of the inward wickedness, still nourishing this debateful fire: her complaint now not having an end to be directed unto, something to disburthen sorrow, but a necessary downfall of inward wretchedness (729).

Conscience here does not serve solely to adjust single acts to universal premises; it serves to convict the sinner of “inward wretchedness.” In its focus on diffusive guilt rather than the guilt of particular acts, the passage recalls Luther’s more mature view of conscience that evolves out of his “whole man” theology. By 1520, Luther began arguing that conscience before man (coram hominibus) should be replaced by a more allencompassing conscience before God (coram Deo). Pangs of conscience were not to result solely from remorse for having committed wrongful acts, but from acknowledging inner corruption and an inability to obey moral and divine law, the initial steps all sinners take before accepting their need for grace.64

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By the end of the Arcadia, Gynecia’s guilt seems explicable in the context of Luther’s reconstructed theory of conscience. In her comments above she accepts that her complaints “no longer have an end to be directed unto,” as if she has accepted inner corruption as a state of character; and she acquires a new perspective on the corruption of her peers: “For whither should I recommend the protection of my dishonoured fall? To the earth? It hath no life . . . To men, who are always cruel in their neighbours’ faults . . . To the heavens? O unspeakable torment of conscience which dare not look unto them!.” (729) Eventually she contemplates her intrinsic unrighteousness, and the need for divine assistance: “‘O Gods,’ would she cry out, ‘why did you not make me to destruction? If you love goodness, why did you not give me a good mind? Or if I cannot have it without your gift, why do you plague me?.” (799) We seem to have here an untroubled development away from an ethics of shame, toward a focus on Gynecia’s early ruminations of conscience, culminating in a theology of grace, a development that seems consistent with Andrew Weiner’s notion that religion enters into the text to underline and correct human presumptuousness. Yet this overlooks the Arcadia’s point of view regarding Gynecia’s moral unraveling. Critics have not stayed long enough with Gynecia’s case to notice just how exaggerated and even inexplicable are her self-recriminations. She tells Dameta and his men: “It is I, faithful Arcadians, that have spoiled the country of their protector. I, none but I, was the minister of his unnatural end. Carry therefore my blood in your hands to testify to your own innocency.” (732) Her refusal to extenuate her crime, to reveal its accidental nature, to incriminate Pyrocles and even Basilius himself, acquires more poignancy during the trial scene, in which she says, “I am the subject that have killed my prince. I am the wife that have murdered my husband. I am a degenerate woman, an undoer of this country . . .” (814). The narrator is moved by her uncharitable selfcondemnations: “by the despairing conceit she took of the judgment of God in her husband’s death and her own fortune, purposely to overthrow herself, and confirm by a wrong confession that abominable shame, which with her wisdom joined to the truth, perhaps she might have refelled.” (816) The scapegoating of Gynecia is obvious enough. She describes herself as not merely the murderer of her husband, but the “undoer” of the country and a shame to her children. Her confession absorbs much of the crimes of the other characters in the text. If she has shamed her children by dishonoring the adultery commandment, her children have shamed their parents by dishonouring the obedience commandment. The death of Basilius is not

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the defining moment at which the country has been “undone.” Pyrocles and Musidorus have been undoing the country since their arrival. And Basilius himself undid the country when he peevishly sequestered his family and then began hotly pursuing Pyrocles. The text seems to be implying that since no character except for Gynecia has realized his or her transgression of “heavenly rules,” rather than simply a breach of social norms, and since she is the only character whose shame bows to guilt, she must somehow repent on behalf of all Arcadians, on behalf of an entire culture that values public reputation over private conscience. The important point is that the text itself seems to suggest that Gynecia’s guilt is unjustified. She has been so mired in her own despair that she no longer judges clearly: “Thus the excellent lady Gynecia, having passed five and thirty years of age . . . having not, in her own knowledge ever spotted her soul with any willful vice but her immoderate love of Zelmane, was brought . . . by the despairing conceit she took of the judgment of God in her husband’s death and her own fortune, purposely to overthrow herself . . .” (816). Gynecia’s morbid guilt has finally metamorphosed into morbid shame. One faulty ethical system has simply replaced the other: the overly heteronomous standards of evaluation established by shame are traded for the too-private standards of evaluation established by guilt. Given the text’s ambivalence regarding Gynecia’s culpability, it becomes difficult to argue that Sidney endorses the view that conscience is more effective in disciplining the will than shame. Now Weiner and Sidney’s theological interpreters might respond that the successful workings of conscience require an administration of grace, yet it is not clear in the text whether Gynecia lacks grace as such, or whether she simply backslides from Christian virtue. But, in any case, to argue that grace, rather than heroic virtue, can sufficiently motivate ethical action, begs the question of the precise causal relationship between grace and morality. What, for example, does the text say about Christian virtue and grace as a means of practically disciplining the will? Here we may finally turn to Pamela, Basilius’s elder daughter, whose behavior seems to illustrate the miraculous workings of Christian patience. Cecropia listens as Pamela prays: Lord, triumph over me, and let my faults by Thy hand be corrected, and make not mine unjust enemy the minister of Thy justice . . . If the pride of my not-enough humble heart be thus to be broken, O Lord, I yield unto Thy will . . . Let calamity be the exercise, but not the overthrow of my virtue; let there power prevail, but prevail not to destruction; let my virtue be their prey; let my pain be the sweetness of their revenge; let them (if so it seem good unto Thee) vex me with more and

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more punishment. But, O Lord, let never their wickedness have such a hand, but that I may carry a pure mind in a pure body,’ (and pausing a awhile) ‘And, O most gracious Lord,’ saith she, ‘whatever become of me preserve the virtuous Musidorus’ (464).

Pamela’s prayer goes on for a while more, until the narrator describes her as “a heavenly creature, with such a fervent grace as if devotion had borrowed her body to make itself a most beautiful representation . . .” (464). Yet for all this grace, devotion, and self-abasement, Pamela’s acknowledgment of her “faults” is shadowed by her petition to God to provide her with the ability to resist her enemies, which refer not metaphorically to her inner vices, but in this case to the pressures of the wicked Cecropia and her son Amphialus. The very pause, toward the end of the quoted section, followed by her prayer on behalf of Musidorus, perhaps reflects her own sense of the limits of her devotion. That Pamela’s vaunted patience operates simply as an instrumental virtue in the text is revealed at a later time when the narrator differentiates Pamela’s and Philoclea’s ability to withstand Cecropia’s flattering persuasions: But in vain was all her vain oratory employed. Pamela’s determination was built upon so brave a rock that no shot of hers could reach unto it: and Philoclea (though humbly seated) was so environed with sweet rivers of clear virtue as could neither be battered nor undermined. Her witty persuasions had wise answers; her eloquence recompense with sweetness; her threatenings repelled with disdain in the one, and patience in the other; her gifts either not accepted, or accepted to obey, but not to bind (55).

Philoclea’s “disdain” and Pamela’s “patience” are two different but equally effective means of thwarting Cecropia: to the extent that these qualities are described as virtues, they serve simply to allow their owners to resist Cecropia’s overtures. Yet the point of resisting Cecropia is, of course, to maintain the sisters’ devotion to Pyrocles and Musidorus, allegiances that, within the narrowly (especially sexist) precincts of Arcadian morality, are themselves considered immoral. There is thus a danger of allegorizing Pamela’s and Philoclea’s virtue, of lifting it out of its instrumental context, holding the sisters’ up as exemplars of thoroughly Christian virtue. The sisters’ virtue represents not the efficacious, irresistible workings of grace, but the ability to trade one form of disobedience for another. The Arcadia’s considered view of the proper, most efficient form of social morality is thus that there is none. Recognizing that Aristotelian virtue theory is too perfectionistic, the text turns to an intersubjective ethics of shame, itself underwritten by sixteenth-century theology, but does so only

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to point out the difficulties of reconciling the twin commands to avoid and embrace public shame. A system of guilt, with its attending focus on the reproofs of conscience, is then offered as an alternative to the shame ethic, yet conscience fundamentally works retrospectively to chastise, and is not presented in the text as rehabilitative or conducive to the acquisition of virtue, whether classical or Christian. Grace then seems to be held up as the essential ingredient that all would-be ethical agents require, yet rather than impart properly directed goodness, grace seems to enable little more than selective, instrumental propriety. One of the Arcadia’s most remarkable observations on ideal virtue is made by Pyrocles, in a bid to describe the seemingly inexplicable quality of Philoclea’s goodness: “Then sought he new means of stopping his breath, but that by Philoclea’s labor above her force he was stayed to hear her, in whom a man might perceive what a small difference in the working there is betwixt a simple voidness of evil and a judicial habit of virtue” (741). This identification of virtue with a voidness of evil is one of the more intriguing ethical notions in the Arcadia. Sidney seems to be playing on the well-known Augustinian definition of evil as an absence of good. In his desire to avoid the pitfalls of Manichaean dualism, Augustine held that evil could have no ontological supports whatsoever, that it exists simply as the privation of goodness.65 Sidney comes close to inverting this formula by suggesting that virtue itself is insubstantial, that goodness is simply the negation of evil rather than the other way around. But the problem here is not simply a metaphysical one of ascribing ontological priority to evil. The problem is a soteriological one of explaining away any precise notion of the relationship among virtue, righteousness and grace. Nearly all early modern theories of Christian grace and virtue assume that regeneration presupposes some substantial change of character or imparted righteousness. To define virtue as the voidness of evil contracts the realm of ethics into the realm of justification, which is normally considered the locus of purely alien righteousness granted by Christ’s remission of sin. Sidney fuses a forensic act to morality – as if justifying righteousness provides an efficient cause of virtuous conduct in the absence of a corresponding material cause of virtue, whether infused or otherwise. Without the mediating influence of imparted righteousness linking grace and virtuous conduct, one has to assume an occasionalist theory of virtue, according to which Christ or God is immediately responsible (as efficient and material cause) for every proper action. As we have already noted, this form of ethical occasionalism offers little in terms of a model for disciplining behavior.

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In the Defense of Poesy, Sidney famously distinguishes the poet, as ideal instructor in virtue, from both the philosopher and historian: The philosopher therefore and the historian are they which would win the goal, the one by precept, the other by example, but both not having both, do both halt . . . Now doth the peerless poet perform both; for whatever the philosopher saith should be done, he giveth a perfect picture of it in some one by whom he presupposeth it was done, so as he coupleth the general notion with the particular example. A perfect picture, I say; for he yieldeth to the powers of the mind an image of that whereof the philosopher bestoweth but a wordish description . . .66

The vates or right poet is the optimal teacher of virtue because he presents a speaking picture of proper conduct, unconstrained by the demands of syllogistic logic or historical facticity. As right poet of the Arcadia, Sidney outdoes not merely the philosophers or the historians, but the very poets whose example he recommends in the Defense. What he seems to have discovered in the Arcadia is that once the poet attempts to show virtue in action, he inevitably is led to a consideration of the foundations of virtue; this includes an appraisal of the sources of normativity – the justificatory explanations as to why individuals act ethically – and it includes an assessment of competing strategies of moral “education,” ranging from classical virtue theory, natural law morality, an ethics of shame (in its classical and scriptural incarnations), and a purely theological ethics of grace and Christian virtue. Through his own poetic craft, the poet discovers the difficulties each of these systems meets in operating effectively as praxis. The poet thus does not simply merge the precepts of philosophy with the examples of history; he places entire ethical systems under scrutiny. Far from merely offering a philosophical or historical supplement, the right poet figures as a meta-ethicist, evaluating ethical theory as much as he measures the conduct of characters in approximately real and contrived contexts.

chap t e r 2

The three orders of nature, grace, and law in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Book II

Recent accounts of the interplay of ethics and theology in The Faerie Queene have no doubt improved upon A. S. P. Woodhouse’s belief that the poem allegorizes a disjuncture between the two orders of nature and grace.1 Revising Woodhouse’s argument that Book I moves on the religious level, while Book II moves on the natural level, Spenserians have argued variously that Book II depicts a syncretic via media of Christian humanism, that Guyon’s embodiment of Christian temperance is restricted to the latter half of his quest toward the Bower of Bliss, and that Guyon allegorizes a sanctified Protestant moral agent, one whose works-righteousness follows rather than precedes justification in the ordo salutis.2 Despite the diversity of such readings, the significant revisions of Woodhouse’s thesis tend either to harmonize classical virtue theory and Protestantism, or to privilege Protestantism over classical ethics by noting the presumptuousness of Aristotelianism from the vantage point of English Calvinism. Yet no discussion of Book II has considered the possibility that Spenser allegorizes the failure of Pauline theology to offer a sound theory of virtuous training that can substitute for Aristotelian behaviorism. In the following chapter, I assess in more detail the significant points of similarity and contrast between Aristotelian moral education and Reformed accounts of moral renewal. As we have begun to see, much of the Reformation animus toward Aristotelian ethics centers on Aristotle’s foundational notion, described throughout the Nicomachean and Eudemian ethics, that the moral virtues and prudence are acquired by habituation and repetitive rightful conduct. A broad group of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Puritan and Conformist theologians assert that, following justification, during the interfused period of sanctification, agents can, with God’s compliance, grow in holiness and renovate their moral characters. But as I argue below, despite such attempts to offer a theory of agent-centered moral renewal that might succeed the forensic and passive order of justification, Protestant theologians resort time and again to a law-centered theory of morality, 47

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one in which servile fear of a punitive God shapes conduct more efficiently than the love of moral law that ideally evolves from sanctified righteousness. As in Sidney’s Arcadia, Book II of The Faerie Queene reveals tensions not simply between classical ethics and Protestantism, but tensions within Protestantism with respect to the relationship between ethical theory and ethical conduct. As a means to focus such tensions, I expand the frame used in the last chapter by first assessing Spenser’s views on the role of pity, fear, and shame in classical ethical habituation. Because Guyon is not trained in any systematic manner in the government of passions, he does not experience pity, fear and shame at the right moments, for the right reasons. Ironically, Guyon’s antagonists, including Cymochles, Pyrochles, and Archimago, at times exhibit exemplary emotions despite the base ends toward which such emotions are directed. Since Guyon has not been properly trained to set virtuous ends and select appropriate means to such ends, he is unable to appreciate what is valuable and extractable in his antagonists’ conduct. Following a discussion of the cultivation of proper emotional states and intentions, I explore the representation in the poem of incontinence, giving particular attention to Aristotle’s account of the role of the practical syllogism in akratic conduct. There has been a surprising neglect, even in the detailed Aristotelian interpretations of Book II published during the early decades of the twentieth century, of Aristotle’s provocative discussion in the Nicomachean Ethics of akratic conduct.3 According to his most basic explanation of incontinence, Aristotle argues that the akrates misinterprets, due to disordered, unhabituated emotional training, the minor, rather than universal premise of a practical syllogism of action. According to Aristotle, ethical agents settle upon final ends and universal precepts following moral training; they neither deliberate about ultimate ends nor set ends in conformity with externally imposed rules or commands. When agents act incontinently they do not lose sight of the ends that they have been habituated to pursue; they fail to discern the proper means to such ends, and they find it difficult to coordinate particular actions and universal goals. As such, they act incontinently because they know what to do but choose what they should avoid. While Spenserians have persisted in viewing the relationship between classical and Christian ethics as hierarchically ordered, I hope to show instead that they are analogically related. If the Aristotelian akrates acts wrongly due to a failure to match particular circumstances to accurately perceived universal premises, the sanctified akrates acts rightly due to convenient misapprehension: Guyon withstands Mammon’s seducements

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not because he understands and resists their evil allure but because at key moments he diverts attention from the full signification of Mammon’s material goods. Just as the Aristotelian akrates conveniently focuses on the non-salient aspects of a particular good – the shape, rather than sweetness of something sweet – so Guyon focuses on the non-salient aspects of Mammon’s riches – their means of acquisition, rather than their material qualities. Guyon chooses rightly in an analogous way that the Aristotelian akrates chooses wrongly. I hope to show that such a distractive strategy of avoiding evil is held up in the text as a too thin and unreliable ethical option. However, grace does descend, on more than one occasion, to assist Guyon’s progress toward the Bower, yet here too I will be arguing that, in relation to practical discipline, sanctifying grace is subject to as many flaws as its Aristotelian counterpart. By the time Guyon and his trusty Palmer enter the Bower of Bliss we see the displacement not only of pagan virtue by a Pauline scheme of salvation, but the further displacement of that Pauline order by the emergence of a third order, an order of moral law. Once embroiled in the Bower, the Palmer and Guyon figure as absolutist dispensers of justice, rather than as embodiments of pagan virtue or Christian grace. Spenser complicates the historical and typological relationship between law and grace, suggesting that if sanctified holiness and filial fear prove ineffective in binding conduct of both the elect and reprobate, a reversion to servile fear and the authoritarian imposition of absolute rules offers the most serviceable alternative. As in Sidney’s Arcadia, ethical systems are held up to intense scrutiny from the perspective of praxis: in Spenser’s weighing of ethical options, an alternative ethic of absolutist legalism emerges as the most practically availing in context. the t wo ord ers revisit ed In assessing the “two orders” schema in The Faerie Queene, it will be helpful to distinguish roughly three critical schools regarding the structural and thematic relationship between grace and nature in Books I and II. The first school, headed by Woodhouse and some early twentieth-century critics, finds sharp discontinuity between Books I and II: Book I focuses almost exclusively on the workings of holiness and Christian grace; Book II concerns itself with secular morality, particularly Aristotelian ethics.4 The second school, represented most recently by Anthea Hume and Daryl Gless, maintains that there is significant continuity between Books I and II: both books focus centrally on Christian grace, especially the intertwined

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relationship between justifying righteousness and moral renewal.5 The third school, represented influentially by Harry Berger, argues that the most significant division between nature and grace occurs within Book II itself: unmerited grace is dispensed in canto viii of Book II, after which Guyon forsakes his training in secular virtue and begins the uneven journey toward Christian glorification.6 It will be helpful to assess each position in some detail. In “Nature and Grace in The Faerie Queene,” Woodhouse distinguished an order of nature, “apprehended in experience and interpreted by reason, upon which is erected the ethical systems of Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero,” from an order of grace, governed “by the revealed will of God, received and interpreted by faith.”7 Applied to The Faerie Queene, this division situates Redcross Knight as microchristus, who undergoes the trials of Christian warfaring throughout Book I. Redcross Knight must cast off the spiritual pride displayed during his encounters with Error and Orogoglio, and accept the operative grace administered by Arthur. Once in the House of Holiness, he learns of the numinous exfoliations of the ordo salutis: by the end of Book II, he is “cleansed by repentance, taught by Faith, healed by Hope, led through the works of Charity to the hill of Contemplation, vouchsafed a vision of the new Jerusalem and his own place as a saint there, and returned to the world, prepared at last for active service.”8 Guyon, on the other hand, as natural man or microcosmus, undergoes a classical regimen of moral training in Book II, out of which he acquires “virtues habitual.”9 The two separate realms are only momentarily synthesized in canto ix of Book II, when Arthur defends Alma’s castle against the assaults of Malegar. As an allegorical embodiment of the irremediable taint of original sin, Malegar can only be defeated by Arthur with the assistance of grace, allegorized as the “baptismal water” into which Arthur eventually sinks Malegar. Although Guyon does achieve temperance and natural virtue “without recourse to grace,” his virtuous insufficiency is “balanced by the necessity of grace for Prince Arthur’s destruction of Malegar.”10 Woodhouse’s argument was subsequently modified by a generation of Spenserians, many of whom spotted earlier arrivals of grace in Book II.11 These revisions culminated in Berger’s contention that the division between the two orders is marked by Guyon’s faint upon emerging from Mammon’s cave, after which the guardian angel descends to offer real and spiritual succor. Attributing Guyon’s faint to unprofitable curiosity and a desire to “feed on his own virtues,” Berger concludes that by the end of canto vii, Guyon learns that moral virtue is not self-sufficient, that far from conducting himself as a moral expert, he shares much with common sinners: “The

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first six cantos of Book II emphasize how Guyon and Everyman differ. The last five will reveal what they have in common – what all men inherit from Adam’s defection.”12 Where Woodhouse narrowly attached grace to Arthur, accepting that Guyon is an Aristotelian phronimos, Berger found grace ubiquitously present in cantos viii–xii; where Woodhouse and others loosely tied grace to sacramental symbolism, Berger more specifically defined grace as an infusion of Christian virtue: “Cantos viii–xi disclose the workings of a different kind of temperance, the Christian virtue, supernaturally infused, accessible to all, but gained and retained by each with difficulty.”13 Recent critics have refined Berger’s argument by so expanding the role grace in the text that Book II has been seen to simply extend the theological frame of Book I. Focusing on the soteriological distinction between justification and sanctification, Anthea Hume builds on Robert Hoopes’s early revision of Woodhouse (and implicitly Berger) by arguing that sanctifying righteousness announces itself at the outset of Guyon’s adventures, when Guyon acknowledges the sacred badge on Redcross Knight’s shield, and avows that Christ is his redeemer: “The sacred badge of my Redeemers death, / Which on your shield is set for ornament” (ii.i.27.6–7). This comment, coupled with the Palmer’s remark – “God guide thee, Guyon” (ii.i.32.8) – and his description of Guyon’s adventures as a Christian “race,” suggest to Hume a distinctly Pauline frame for Book II, in which natural man “has a very imperfect grasp of the process of moral renewal which follows justification by faith.”14 Hume’s larger methodological point is that there can be no merging of the two orders of grace and nature because “logic and theology insist that man cannot simultaneously be and not be a natural man.”15 This brief critical genealogy raises a number of issues already canvassed in relation to Sidney’s Arcadia. Spenser’s early, Aristotelian-biased critics like Woodhouse, Sirluck, and others, assumed that Guyon’s sound achievements in Aristotelian virtue theory were either self-sufficient or, in view of Guyon’s many relapses in virtue, required augmentation by Christian grace. But as in Sidney’s Arcadia, such an argument begs the question of whether, in this case, Guyon’s secular virtue ever approaches inclusion in the Aristotelian framework. After Woodhouse’s influential article, Spenserians began scouring the text for traces of supplemental grace, even though the precise nature of the “natural order” that required supplementation had not yet been subjected to a comprehensive evaluation. This is evident in the fact that none of Spenser’s Aristotelian commentators worked through Aristotle’s view of the role of the practical syllogism in incontinent conduct

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as it relates to the temperance-continence axis running throughout Book II. Due to the combined effects of Rosemond Tuve’s influential assessment of Medieval views of temperance and the ascendancy of Spenser’s Christianizing (as well as post-colonialist) critics, the Aristotelian framework has all but been abandoned.16 For any reader who takes seriously Spenser’s letter to Raleigh, in which he pledges to depict the full range of Aristotelian virtues, such a wholesale abandonment might seem unwarranted.17 The benefit, I hope to show, of returning to the Aristotelian framework is, as counterintuitive as it may seem, to outline the structural similarities between Aristotelian hexis and sanctifying righteousness, especially with respect to the precise nature of the relationship between moral habituation and virtue. In a sense, Aristotelianism is presented in the text as the alter-ego of sanctifying righteousness. To the extent that the two flawed ethical systems are linked analogically, not merely hierarchically, we can understand the failures of Pauline ethics by weighing them against the failures of the Aristotelian alternative. What follows is a review of Aristotelian behaviorism in relation to Guyon’s moral training in the first half of Book II. Following this we can return to the two orders debate from a slightly different vantage point. aristotelian moral educat ion As I noted in the introductory chapter, Aristotle distinguishes between intellectual and moral virtues, the former acquired by instruction and experience, the latter, like crafts, the result of habituation: “Moral virtue comes about as a result of habit, whence also its name ethike is one that is formed by a slight variation from the word ethos (habit). From this it is also plain that none of the moral virtues arises in us by nature; for nothing that exists by nature can form a habit contrary to its nature.”18 Moral virtues, acquired by repetition, are categorized as potentialities called hexeis, usually translated as “states,” “dispositions,” or “habits.” Ideally, actions that proceed from virtuous habits are not simply actions one does repeatedly and inattentively; they require a certain degree of “virtuosity” and need to be performed with skill and care. W. F. R. Hardie writes, “The virtuous action is second nature and not against the grain; but it is not mechanical. The agent must have knowledge and he must choose. There is a nice discrimination in his actions and a fine appropriateness in his feelings.”19 According to Aristotle’s view of ethical habituation, the ethical apprentice is trained not simply to contain inordinate or vicious passions, but rather to attach certain passions to appropriate beliefs directed at a variety of

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circumstances. Since Aristotle believed that emotions are intentional or cognitive states, he argued that the cultivation of appropriate dispositions and virtues entailed a process of not merely containing inordinate or vicious passions, but of learning how to coordinate certain emotions or dispositions and appropriate beliefs. As one commentator suggests: Part of what the parent tries to do is bring the child to see the particular circumstances that here and now make certain emotions appropriate . . . This will involve persuading the child that the situation at hand is to be construed in this way rather than that, that what the child took to be a deliberate assault and cause for anger was really only an accident, that the laughter and smiles which annoy were intended as signs of delight rather than of teasing . . .20

While Aristotle emphasizes that individuals become just and acquire virtue and states of character by doing just actions, and that “practice makes perfect,” he does not mean that the apprentice in virtue should repeat the same action again and again under similar circumstances. The moral apprentice will, through a process of trial and error, learn how to translate virtuous action as a given situation demands. If such a view of moral training and practice is abstract and unscientific, that is because Aristotle believed virtuous conduct cannot be governed by a system of rules or precepts. As one commentator notes, there is no “external husk of all just actions that we can isolate and repeatedly practice.”21 We can begin to see the explanatory potential of the Aristotelian framework in relation to Guyon’s many displays of grief and pity. After Amavia’s death, “good Sir Guyon, could uneath / From tears abstaine, for griefe his hart did grate, / And from so heauie sight his head did wreath, / Accusing fortune, and too cruell fate, / Which plunged had faire Ladie in so wretched state” (ii.i.56.5–9). Spenser clearly wants the reader to view the Amavia and Mordant episode as tragic in nature; he repeatedly describes the tableau as a “pitiful” spectacle, and then prefaces the Ruddymane episode by noting that a “sad Tragedie” has befallen the child and parents. Since Spenser is concerned to outline the nature of temperance, and thus invokes the Aristotelian golden mean as well, he suggests that temperance is taught not just through examples of temperance or intemperance, but through the example of tragedy in particular. In the Rhetoric, Aristotle discusses the relationship between ethics and tragedy, focusing on the manner in which the experience of tragic pity and fear helps to reform the agent’s dispositions and ethical capacities. Pity is defined as “pain at an apparent destructive or painful evil of someone who does not deserve to get it, that one could expect oneself, or someone belonging to oneself, to suffer, and this, when it

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appears near.”22 While pity technically differs from fear in that it includes a judgment that another person has suffered wrongly, tragic pity and fear are conceptually interdependent, since, as one commentator observes, “pity for others cannot arise unless we expect that we ourselves could suffer the same things.”23 As Aristotle claims in the Rhetoric, such interdependency does not hold for non-tragic situations or in failed tragedies, where fear can be aroused without pity. While Aristotle draws a number of such distinctions, in the Poetics and Rhetoric, respectively, of the interdependence of pity and fear in tragedy, and the distinctions between more restrictive variants of such emotions in non-tragic situations, he emphasizes that tragic fear and pity are aroused by evils that are above all shameful. The fear of shame (aidos) elicited by tragic events provides tragedy with a morally educative potential, which can be understood in terms of the golden mean. A fear of disgrace is beneficial insofar as it can “counterbalance a preexisting emotional extreme of shamelessness that constitutes, in part, the praiseworthy mean of aidos, a fear of wrongdoing.”24 And like the actions stemming from virtuous activity, the arousal of shame, pity and fear by tragedy helps the moral apprentice to become habituated to moral excellence. As one commentator writes, “If tragedy helps produce aidos, it helps provide the kind of habituation aidos provides in Aristotle’s ethical works. By leading us to feel fear in response to actions that are shameful as well as destructive or painful, tragedy helps us feel pain and pleasure, love and hate, correctly.”25 Now we should ask to what extent Guyon’s experience of pity is linked to fear, particularly fear of disgrace, and whether or not such arousals contribute to his moral expertise as he advances toward the Bower of Bliss. In his comments to Amavia, noted above, his responsiveness to Pyrochles’s predicament – “the Knight was greatly moued at his plaint” (ii.v.24.1) – and to Furor’s plight – “noble Guyon, mou’d with great remorse” (ii.iv.6.1) – Guyon displays pity, but not fear. I think the mistake is to assume that this is what we should expect from the Knight of Temperance, as if Guyon has been already conditioned to coordinate courage to appropriate contexts. If we assume that Guyon can dispense such a virtue wisely, as the phronimos might, then we have trouble explaining, given the correlative doctrine of the unity of virtue, why the Palmer suggests on later occasions that Guyon has not been properly trained to express a range of emotions and desires such as pity in fitting contexts. I think it is more plausible to argue that Guyon is not fearful because he does not appropriately identify with the conduct of the victims of temperance to whom he offers assistance. For Aristotle, fear is causally related to

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pity because the witness of a tragic spectacle assumes not only that another party has been unfairly treated, but also because the witness imagines that he or she can become similarly imperiled. While we can explain Guyon’s ability to distance himself in such a manner by assuming, as critics have done, that he is too aristocratic, priggish, or perfunctorily chivalric, the important point is that without the experience of fear, particularly the fear of disgrace, Guyon will not benefit, in terms of habituating his character and governing untoward desires, from his encounters with exemplary intemperance. We know that Guyon does not learn to control his expressions of pity, for the Palmer warns him twice, as late as canto xii to restrain from “foolish pity.” If we assess Guyon’s conduct counterfactually, and reconstruct his encounters with tragic victims, we can begin to see why his moral education has not been entirely successful. In Alma’s castle, Guyon apprehends his reflection in the personification of shamefastness, whose face “flashes” with “blushing bloud.” Alma informs Guyon: “She is the fountaine of your modestee; / You shamefast are, but shamefastness it selfe is shee” (ii.ix.43.8–9). Much critical commentary has attempted to situate Spenser’s and the Renaissance understanding of the term “shamefastness” in the context of Aristotle’s belief that shamefastness is a virtuous mean rather than extreme passion. Spenser’s early editors, for example, offered the reasonable view that for Spenser shamefastness is an extreme and undesirable form of modesty.26 That Guyon has retained such a passion of bashfulness, after having witnessed in the characters of Phaeton and Pyrochles such displays of the opposing extreme of immodest pride and excessive fear of disgrace, should strike us as curious, at least from the perspective of classical ethics. Aristotle suggests that one may temper extreme passions and achieve mean states by apprehending or internalizing examples of the opposite extreme: “We must consider the things towards which we ourselves also are easily carried away; for some of us tend to one thing, some to another; and this will be recognizable from the pleasure and the pain we feel. We must drag ourselves away to the contrary extreme; for we shall get into the intermediate state by drawing well away from error as people do in straightening sticks that are bent.”27 How might Guyon have learned to temper his disposition of shamefastness? The Palmer might have pointed out that the motivational force impelling the conduct of Phaeton, Pyrochles or Cymochles should be interpreted as an extreme lack of shamefastness. Guyon might have responded by reflecting on his own character’s relationship to such a passional extreme, thereby acquiring both the fear of having too much or too little shamefastness and the desire to reform his dispositional set. Since Guyon does not

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intuit any essential resemblance between his character and the character of his intemperate or vicious peers, he fails to experience the requisite fear and self-awareness that would be constituent features of a program of moral reform. Rather than explain the relevance to Guyon’s own character of, for example, Pyrochles intemperance, the Palmer glibly advises Guyon to contain his “pitty vayne” for a foe that “deserues to tast his follies fruit” (ii.v.24.6–9). From the Aristotelian perspective, or from the perspective of any context-sensitive theory of moral virtue, the Palmer would have been more effective if he had managed to integrate Guyon’s pity with knowledge and identificatory fear. This raises the question of the Palmer’s role in guiding Guyon. That the Palmer has often been described as the embodiment of Aristotelian prudence or practical wisdom is one of the more egregious misinterpretations of Book II. Sirluck tells us that “The Palmer is Aristotle’s practical wisdom.”28 Upton suggests that the “Palmer, in the allegorical and moral allusion, means prudence . . . Prudence is a kind of intellectual virtue and a proper directness of temperance, a moral virtue.”29 Elizabeth Heale offers a more specifically Aristotelian interpretation when she remarks that the Palmer does not simply allegorize reason in a general manner: “Perhaps most suggestive is Aristotle’s account of ‘practical wisdom,’ the essential companion of moral virtue but not to be identified with it.”30 On either a traditionalist or more modern account of Aristotelian phronesis, the Palmer’s counsel does meet the criteria for prudence. According to what Aristotelians describe as the traditional, “narrow view” of phronesis, Aristotle contends that moral virtue, acquired by behavioral training, sets the ends of one’s conduct, while prudence or practical wisdom assists the agent in deliberating about the means to attain such undeliberated ends. A moral apprentice’s desires are regulated such that the agent comes to naturally pursue and takes pleasure in pursuing noble, final ends (a life according to virtue, happiness, and contemplation) and intermediate ends such as healthfulness. When placed in a particular situation, the agent must weigh the available means to such settled ends, hence the importance of practical wisdom, which sifts through possible courses of action until a choice is selected. On a more recent understanding of Aristotle’s theory of practical wisdom, understood as the “expanded view” of phronesis, habituated virtue sets ends in conference with practical wisdom, which allows the agent to grasp the full significance of a particular end and in some cases to revise the end. While one is training, one is of course learning to think about why one is pursuing what one is pursuing, but one only has practical wisdom properly when one has a full grasp of what constitutes

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moral proficiency and the pleasure involved therein. In either case, full virtue cannot be possessed without practical wisdom and vice versa.31 Since Guyon’s failure to reform properly his emotions of pity and shamefastness suggests that he has neither inherited nor acquired moral excellence, the designation of the Palmer as the embodiment of practical wisdom clearly departs from the Aristotelian notion of the interdependence of desire and choice. But for argument’s sake, even if we assume that Guyon does possess habituated moral virtue, the Palmer establishes the ends Guyon should pursue rather than the means, and as such does not meet the criteria of practical wisdom. For example, when Guyon gestures to assist Pyrochles, the Palmer bids him to abstain and continue his journey. Rather than simply directing Guyon how to achieve his desiderative end of assisting Pyrochles, the Palmer pronounces, without much deliberation, that such an end is not worth pursuing. For Aristotle, moral virtue and practical wisdom are dialectically related such that practical wisdom is fundamentally guided by the prior establishment of ends by well-directed emotional states. Undoubtedly the Palmer’s reason guides Guyon’s desires. But such a relationship is a necessary but not sufficient condition for practical action according to Aristotelian ethics. I will return to the Aristotelian framework below, after an introduction to the Reformed Protestant alternative framework, but we can begin to see that the Palmer has not been training Guyon in the virtues of Aristotelian temperance, even during these early cantos of Book II. sanctifying righteousness versus moral habituation In order to weigh the success and failure of the theological alternative to the text’s Aristotelianism, it will be helpful to return to Anthea Hume’s notion that Guyon allegorizes a member of the sanctified elect. In her discussion of Guyon’s moral renewal, Hume makes frequent reference to a notion of an “increase” in moral virtue and progress towards “self-mastery” during sanctification. She derives such terminology particularly from two latesixteenth century sermons. In The Heavenly Thrift, Henry Smith writes: “Thus a travailer passeth from towne unto towne, untill hee come to his Inne: so a Christian passeth from vertue to vertue, untill he come to Heaven.”32 In a 1596 sermon preached at Penshurst, Thomas White observes that “there should be in us a continuall indeavor to proceede from vertue to vertue, and never to desist, untill we come into the brightnesse of his presence.”33 Hume seems to conclude too readily that such a movement from virtue to virtue reflects an increase in moral growth and self-mastery.

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Indeed, one might read Smith’s metaphor as a comment on the ultimate futility of attempting to achieve salvation by acquiring moral virtue. Just as the traveler realizes that each town is not his appropriate destination, so the sinner realizes that intermittent passages through creaturely virtue will not direct him to heaven. White’s comment seems to more directly recommend the acquisition of virtue, but White does not specifically suggest the procession from virtue to virtue involves an increase in self-mastery. Since the nature of sanctifying righteousness will be an ongoing concern in this and subsequent chapters, we should pause in order to establish late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth century English views on the relationship between justification and sanctification. According to Luther’s Shorter Catechism, “sanctification is the work of God’s free grace, whereby we are renewed in the whole man after the image of God, and are enabled more and more to die unto sin, and to live unto righteousness.”34 Calvin offers a similar definition of regeneration in the Institutes: “Repentance [sanctification] may be not inappropriately defined thus: A real conversion of our life unto God, proceeding from sincere and serious fear of God; and consisting in the mortification of our flesh and the old man, and the quickening of our spirit.”35 For both Luther and Calvin, sanctification differs from and logically succeeds justification, the latter of which is a forensic term, one that describes the individual’s righteous standing before God rather than a change in the very nature and substance of the individual. “We interpret justification” Calvin remarks, “as the acceptance with which God receives us into his favour as if we were righteous; and we say that this justification consists in the forgiveness of sins and the imputation of the righteousness of Christ.”36 On the relationship between justification and sanctification, and the nature of faith generally, Calvin concludes, “The whole may be thus summed up: Christ given to us by the kindness of God is apprehended and possessed by faith, by means of which we obtain in particular a twofold benefit: first, being reconciled by the righteousness of Christ [justification], God becomes instead of a judge, and indulgent Father; and, secondly, being sanctified by his Spirit, we aspire to integrity and purity of life.”37 English Calvinists offered detailed elaborations of the nature of sanctification as a stage in the ordo salutis. While many of the most influential treatises were published shortly after Spenser had been writing, such treatises are expansions of and hence consistent with the magisterial Reformed views on sanctification. In the Saint’s Qualification, a Treatise of Humiliation and Sanctification, John Preston focuses considerable attention on the transformation of the “old man” into a “new Creature”: The sanctified

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individual, whose heart has been molded by the “infusion” of a new quality of grace, and by the destruction of the old, becomes a “partaker of the divine nature.” Preston’s elaboration of the properties of such a new nature should be quoted at length: [Like in all the faculties of nature, so in sanctified nature] you have first a sense of seeing given you before you see; In the things that are not naturall, there the actions go before the thing, before the faculty or habite; as, when a man learnes any thing, that is not naturall, as to play on a Lute, or any other Art, he doth many actions, and then he hath got the habit; and when he hath got it, he doth it easily, for what is naturall is planted in a man; so is this, it is planted in the heart, as the Senses are, it is infused into the Soule, and then we exercise the operations of it; so that it is another nature . . .38

Preston notes that such a new, unalterable quality or nature is consistent with Aristotle’s views of nature, since, “as Aristotle observes, throw a stone up a thousand times, it will returne again, because it is the nature of it to returne . . .”39 Yet such a nature is not teachable in the manner that arts might be considered learned skills: “Nature is a thing that cannot be taught, no more can this New Creature, no man can teach you to be New Creatures. Arts may be taught, and things not naturall may be taught, but this no man can teach you . . . In this sense he [God] teacheth thee to be a New Creature, he puts an instinct into thee.”40 Such an account of the complete and unalterable nature of the sanctified agent, one who “exercises” the operations of an entirely imparted, new disposition, seems difficult to reconcile with some of the typical remarks made by English Calvinists on the gradualist and perfectionist nature of sanctification. In The Highway of Heaven, Thomas Tuke writes that sanctified individuals slowly “increase in holiness,” and that sanctification of the soul consists in the “alteration of the mind,” whereby “ignorance is little by little abolished.”41 In a different context, Tuke explains: “Some man may say, Can we perfect holiness, is the Image of God perfectly renewed, can we be perfect in the exercises and expressions of it in the outward man?,” to which he responds, “There is a perfection of degrees, this we must aspire to, and labor for, though we can never attaine it here.”42 In The Progresse of Saints to Full Holinesse, Thomas Taylor remarks that “sanctification is busie both to stocke up sin, and enlarge the stocke of grace, to get more strength against corruption, more power to obey God in all things; it markes the increase of grace, and is thankfull for it; it conscionably useth meanes of repairing graces decayed; it renews daily warre against the reigne of sinne . . .”43

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This emphasis on the active participation of the sanctified agent in gradually renewing himself or herself seems to suggest, against Preston’s comments noted above, that while one is initially the passive recipient of an infusion of sanctified grace, one further strengthens one’s holiness and salvation by performing outward duties. But if we return to Preston’s view, and then give careful attention to the language used by the other divines, we may reach a slightly different understanding of the nature of sanctification. Preston suggests that God bestows the sanctified agent with a habit of holiness. Such a quality of holiness is not, like a learned skill, gradually acquired or acquired in parts. He will go on to suggest that the supernatural habit of holiness does not entirely displace, but rather co-exists with corrupt nature. The constant warring or tensions between the old and new nature is such that acts of holiness wear away the residual sinfulness of the old nature, while sinful conduct prevents the new nature from overtaking the individual’s nature in its entirety. Preston describes the relationship between the two natures as follows: Common Nature is like a Bowle betweene two biasses, Corruption is the wrong biasse, carrying us out of the way; and Grace the good biasse carrying us into the way . . . Now it is not only required that there be an infusion of the new quality, but likewise a weakning of this old, both cannot stand together, so farre as you strengthen one, the other is weakened, it is alwayes so where is contrariety, where there is no contrariety two may stand together; but when things bee opposite, the comming in of the one, is the weakning of the other, the comming of heat is the weakning of cold . . .44

The important idea is that in the case of positive outward conduct, there is not any net increase in the amount of grace or degree of holiness of the new nature; rather, the new nature is permitted to actualize itself or realize its capacity to the degree that the old nature is abandoned. At any given moment, the strength of one nature is inversely proportional to the strength of the other nature. Thus one Puritan divine, Jeremiah Lewis, distinguishes between “habitual” and “actual” sanctification, the former describing the renewal of our nature and “holinesse that is infused by God into us,” the latter describing the “exercise and expression of the same [habitual holiness] both in our words and actions.”45 Given such a distinction, we can begin to explain why Thomas Taylor, in the passage cited above, notes that sanctification marks at once an increase in grace and a reparation of decayed graces. “Increase” refers not to a net increase in the quantity of grace following the effective infusion of holiness, but rather a proportional increase within the individual of the ratio of sanctified grace to corrupt nature.

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In order to realize the infused habit of holiness or new nature, the sanctified agent must of course perform a range of approbative actions. A cursory assessment of the nature of such actions might suggest (as Hume’s account does) that sanctified progress, which does involve the performance of works, also entails the acquisition of virtue, broadly defined. But like in their discussion of the nature of sanctified nature, early modern theologians describe the forms of outward conduct that are integral features of the order of salvation. Typically, commentators suggest that the means of attempting to achieve the full measure of one’s holiness include prayer, performance of the sacraments, abstinence from sin, and a vigilant obedience to the commandments: “The publicke meanes to perfect holinesse, are, The Word, The Sacrament, and Prayer.”46 The emphasis on duty to revealed law is a primary feature of sanctification: “True sanctification exerciseth itselfe in the acts of holinesse universally . . . in imploying a man’s self is all necessary knowne duties that God cals for . . . This is recorded in the 2 King. 23.25. of Josiah, It is said that he turned to the Lord his God with all his soul . . . according to all the Commandments . . .”47 Commentators emphasize the unity of the commandments, a theological commonplace analogous to the classical emphasis on the unity of virtue. The sanctified individual either obeys all or none of the commandments. Lewis remarks that “a man must set himselfe to keep every Commandement, and if he doe but take liberty in any, he is guilty of the whole”;48 for example, Moses’s obedience to all of the Commandments reflected “true holinesse, because his Sanctification was exercised in the acts of holinesse, universally, in one as well as another: Whereas an hypocrite, hee alwayes sets upon the breach of some one of God’s Commandments . . .”49 Such a view of law-governed conduct is so commonly articulated that one modern commentator has described the English Calvinist position on sanctification as a “piety of law,” in keeping with Calvin’s insistence that God’s law as outset in the Decalogue contains “a perfect pattern of righteousness,” and the “one everlasting and unchangeable rule to live by.”50 In The Confession of Faith, a treatise on the relationship between justification and good works, Henry Balvanes expands Calvin’s point: “There is no other thing but the law of nature, printed in the hart of man, in the beginning: now made patent by the mouth of god to man, to utter his sin, and make his corrupted nature more patent to himself. And so is the lawe of nature, and the lawe of Moses, joyned together in a knot, which is a doctrine, teaching all men a perfite rule, to know what he should do.”51 We should pause to recapitulate the principal features of sanctification, paying particular attention to what the English Calvinists do not include

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in their sermons and treatises. Sanctification describes a state logically following justification, in which the individual is endowed with a new nature and supernatural graces; external conduct enables the individual to mortify the flesh and thereby realize his or her holiness. Such external conduct includes devotional practices and an unexceptionable adherence to revealed law. When the English Calvinists do make reference to the performance of works, the implication is that the individual is guided in his or her selection of works by the revealed law, specifically the second table of the Decalogue. Nowhere in such accounts do commentators suggest that the sanctified individual is educated to act ethically or acquires moral virtue as part of a systematic, step-wise process of perfecting one’s moral character. In fact, Preston emphasizes, against Hume’s view outlined above, that no form of commendable outward conduct conduces to an increase in moral virtue. The new nature is “not Morall Vertue[s], for that is no changing of Nature, for they may bee got and lost again.”52 If we return to The Faerie Queene, bearing this theological context in mind, we can begin to evaluate Hume’s interpretations of some of the famous cruxes of Book II. Hume, like most theological interpreters of Book II, finds that Guyon’s faint in Book VII marks a turning point in his moral education: And now he has so long remained there, That vitall powres gan wexe both weake and wan, For want of food, and sleepe, which two upbeare, Like mightie pillours, this fraile life of man, Than none without the same enduren can. For now three dayes of men were full outwrought, Since he this hardie enterprize began: For thy great Mammon fairely he besought, Into the world to guide him backe, as he him brought. The God, though loth, yet was constrained t’obay, For lenger time, then that, no livin wight Below the earth, might suffred be to stay: So backe againe, him brought to living light. But all so soone as his enfeebled spright Gan suck this vitall aire into his brest, As overcome with too exceeding might, The life did flit away out of her nest, And all his senses were with deadly fit opprest. (ii.vii.65–66)

For Hume, the narrator’s use of “hardie” in the phrase “hardie enterprize” (ii, vii, 65) is “richly ambiguous,” as it suggests “foolhardiness,” not simply

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bravery.53 Hume concludes that when Guyon acts rashly in Mammon’s cave, he allegorizes one of the sanctified elect who has momentarily lapsed from his election: “The regenerate man who begins to attain successive virtues may find himself in a new danger, that of a self-confident belief in his own strength which can variously be labelled vainglory, pride, self-trust, presumption . . .”54 Hume is undoubtedly correct to point out, as nearly all commentators have, the extent to which Guyon’s pridefulness in entering Mammon’s cave compromises his temperance in the face of Mammon’s persuasions. Yet this does not imply that, as Hume argues further, Guyon has begun, up to this point, to acquire “successive virtues”: “The progress of Guyon during the first six cantos of Book II was in the direction of increasing self-mastery. The Cave of Mammon episode . . . represents a disturbance in this moral progress, arising from the fault common among virtuous men of too great a liking for their own virtues.”55 To a certain extent, Hume’s conclusion threatens to undermine the entire Calvinistic edifice that she has erected in order to account for Guyon’s virtue in the first place. Since sanctified righteousness does not admit of an increase in self-perfection, the only proper context for Guyon’s supposed increase in moral aptitude during the first six books is the classical model, yet we have seen that even from the classical perspective Guyon has not increased in virtuous self-mastery. Daryl Gless complements Hume’s Calvinist interpretation by shifting attention away from Guyon’s moral progress and toward his moral backsliding. Attuned to the fundamental differences between Redcross Knight and Guyon in relation to assurance, Gless responds that Hume’s “passing the baton analogy” sets up a relationship between the two knights that is “too neat,” since Guyon’s failures to maintain temperance “register something darker than normal passion,” and widen a distance between Guyon’s lapses and Redcross Knight’s gift of holiness.56 Rather than conclude that Guyon begins where Redcross Knight leaves off, Gless suggests that Guyon relates to Redcross Knight “in the sense that he too undertakes good works that grace alone makes possible. His works of temperance represent a specific focus within the pursuit of that comprehensive virtue which Protestant moral theology named holiness.”57 The relationship between Redcross Knight and Guyon is thus synechdochal, not linear or developmental. Both Knights, in analogous ways, illustrate the difficulty of suppressing the remnants of the “old man” retained by all justified sinners. In explaining Guyon’s faint, Gless notes that Guyon has fallen away from sanctified grace, but the arrival of the guardian angel symbolizes the “persistent (though now outwardly invisible) presence of that deeper inalienable grace which justifies.”58

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By emphasizing the synechdochal rather than linear ordering of the knights, Gless is careful to avoid describing the positive conduct of the regenerate in a manner that warps the terms of Aristotelian ethics to fit Calvinist theology. For example, one will not find in Gless’s account any examination of Guyon’s development from “virtue to virtue.” Unfortunately, given Gless’s primary focus on Book I, his provocative discussion of Guyon’s conduct is limited to examples of Guyon’s intemperance and backsliding. As such, he does not consider how Calvinist theology would explain Guyon’s moral successes in Mammon’s cave prior to his famous faint. If the Reformed view of sanctification provides an explanation of Guyon’s ongoing moral recidivism by invoking the re-emergence of the “old man,” in what manner can such a position help to explain Guyon’s temperate or continent action in terms of the success of the “new man”? If sanctifying righteousness describes the moral outworking of justified grace, then it ought to explain instances of moral probity that happen without the rescue of quickening grace, which is signified variously by Redcross Knight’s shield, Arthur, or the nameless guardian angel. On precisely this issue of the practical effects of sanctifying righteousness, the text begins to bend under the pressures of reconciling Pauline theory and ethical practice. What follows is a brief return to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, which will allow us to establish a context for weighing Aristotle’s exposition of incontinence in relation to sanctified righteousness, both theories of which can then be applied to Guyon’s conduct in Mammon’s cave. from aristotelian to ref ormed incontinence Spenser’s early critics often held that Book II more frequently illustrates Aristotelian incontinence than intemperance. Padelford asserts that “the episodes completely cover every phase of incontinence and continence as discussed by Aristotle . . .”59 Sirluck writes that “Spenser . . . accepted Aristotle’s account of continence and incontinence, and in treating these moral states, he preserved Aristotle’s distinction between them and virtue and vice.”60 It is striking that while so many critics have made such assertions, none of Spenser’s critics has offered a summary of Aristotle’s notoriously complex and often contradictory view of incontinence. The basic problem that Aristotle set for himself was to explain how agents can both know what is right but choose wrongly. Socrates had argued that incontinent action is not possible, since no agent willingly acts against settled knowledge. Aristotle believed that practical actions derive from the application of a practical syllogism containing a major or universal and a minor

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or particular premise. The major premise denotes a general connection between human agents and a class of actions or objects, and the minor denotes knowledge of a particular state of affairs at a given moment. The incontinent individual retains knowledge of the universal premise, but either does not exercise or does not possess adequate knowledge of the particular premise. Aristotle’s views on incontinence are difficult to interpret, however, since he provides an example of the syllogism that issues in akratic conduct, but not the syllogism that prescribes continent conduct. According to the akratic’s syllogism, the major premise is “All sweet things are pleasant,” and the minor premise is “This particular thing is sweet,” leading to the conclusion that “this particular thing should be tasted.” I cite Aristotle at length, since the passage in question continues to trouble Aristotle’s modern commentators: When . . . the universal opinion is present in us forbidding us to taste, and there is also the opinion that ‘everything sweet is pleasant,’ and that ‘this is sweet’ (now this is the opinion that is active), and when appetite happens to be present in us, the one opinion bids us avoid the object, but appetite leads us towards it (for it can move each of our bodily parts); so that it turns out that a man behaves incontinently under the influence (in a sense) of a rule and an opinion, and of one not contrary in itself, but only incidentally – for the appetite is contrary, not the opinion – to the right rule61

If we assume that the major premise of the proper, continent syllogism is a normative statement such as “All tasting of sweets is forbidden,” and the particular premise is the same as in the akratic person’s syllogism – “this particular thing is sweet” – the conclusion would be, “Avoid this particular thing.” But this seems to contradict Aristotle’s earlier assertion that the akrates misunderstands or suppresses the particular rather than universal premise, since in Aristotle’s example the incontinent person apprehends the same particular premise but a different major premise than does the continent person. The inconsistency, however, is only apparent, because while both the incontinent and the continent individual have knowledge of the item’s sweetness, the akratic individual, “drunk with desire,” does not acknowledge the item’s sweetness and therefore does not apply the proper major premise to the particular case. As one commentator writes, the akrates “will realize the applications and bearing of the major [premise] in some directions but not in the particular case before him: or he will know that the piece of cake is sweet but will not fully see the implications

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of its sweetness: i.e. his knowledge of the minor will be a mere piece of information in his mind, not in vital connexion with his main thinking.”62 While this explanation does not entirely explain the ambiguities, it explains how the akrates can have active knowledge of a premise such as, “Avoid sweets,” but select a sweet anyway, given that the agent does not fully realize that the desired item is a case of such a universal. The akrates’ problem, therefore, is a failure to fuse perception with knowledge. Aristotle does not provide examples of the precise manner in which an akratic individual fails to merge the particular and major premise, but we can imagine cases in which a well-trained ethical agent, who has a firm grasp of a range of universal ethical principles, is tempted to eat a particular item that happens to be sweet. Rather than focus on the sweetness of the item, however, he or she focuses on the color, texture, or, given Aristotle’s other famous syllogistic example – “Moist food is unhealthy. This food is moist and therefore to be avoided” – the “dryness” of the food. In each case, an ungoverned appetite for the object suppresses the agent’s ability to see what is unhealthy in the object. The important point for our purposes is that the akratic individual, like the continent individual, has been extensively trained in ethical matters, and has internalized a range of ethical principles, set in accordance with precepts and maxims, that serve as major premises in practical syllogisms of action. Incontinent action, which follows specifically from a failure of sense perception, will of course have ethical consequences, but such action does not issue from a specifically ethical or normative lapse. As Sarah Broadie writes, “By highlighting the particular premiss, Aristotle is saying that incontinence can be avoided or cured only by disciplining our appetitive nature, not by training our moral sensibilities, or by exposing us to plenty of experience . . .”63 To the extent that the continent and incontinent person alike will have settled upon determined ends that serve as universal premises of actions, no untrained ethical agent will act incontinently, strictly speaking. Such individuals act, as Aristotle suggests, like brutes: “This is the reason why the lower animals are not incontinent, viz. because they have no universal judgement but only imagination and memory of particulars.”64 Given the foregoing analysis, it is not clear how, even according to a loose application of Aristotelian principles, any of the conduct of Guyon’s antagonists, including the conduct of Acrasia herself, can plausibly be interpreted as akratic. As I have already suggested, the actions of Pyrochles, Atin and Archimago, for instance, aim to achieve settled ends that are entirely sinful and vicious in nature. According to the spirit and letter

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of Aristotle’s theory of practical conduct, such characters are governed by untoward desires in keeping with non-virtuous universal premises. They do not merely suffer from an inability to see the full implications of minor premises. But it is more interesting to consider whether Guyon’s conduct should be described under the Aristotelian sphere of continent and incontinent action. If the necessary condition of an action’s falling under the sphere of continence or incontinence is the establishment and grasp of virtuous ends, then we ought to determine the nature of Guyon’s settled ends. In one of his most self-revealing comments, Guyon describes his ends to Mammon. Responding to Mammon’s claim that material wealth is the “end, / To which all men do ayme” (ii.vii.32.7–8), Guyon says, “Another blis before mine eyes I place, / Another happinesse, another end. / To them, that list, these base regardes I lend: / But I in armes, and in atchieuements braue, / Do rather choose my flitting houres to spend, / And to be Lord of those, that riches haue, / Then them to haue my selfe, and be their seruile sclaue” (ii.vii.33.3–9). Given the opportunity to represent himself and the nature of his virtue in the broadest way possible, Guyon avows that his ultimate end, the end that above all provides happiness, is military prowess and brave achievement! Such a selective and potentially exclusive end, which seems to translate into a desire to achieve honor, an Aristotelian external good, rather than the virtue of courage, is at best compatible with Aristotelian ethics. It is not, however, a sufficient condition for moral excellence according to Aristotelianism. One of Aristotle’s fundamental principles, outlined in Book I of the Nicomachean Ethics, is that the summum bonum for man is happiness, defined as “an activity of the soul in accordance with perfect virtue.”65 “Perfect” or complete virtue consists in virtuous practical activity, including the exercise of such virtues as theoretical wisdom and contemplation, practical wisdom, justice, courage, and magnanimity.66 The composite of these human goods allows one to reason excellently and thereby act in accordance with the proper functioning of one’s rational soul. While it is true that Guyon does not make comments that conflict with such a view, Guyon fails to realize, or at least fails to articulate, that brave action is choiceworthy because it is either a means to the end of happiness (a life according to perfect virtue) or a means to such an ultimate end and a local end unto itself. If one objects that such a reading holds Guyon too strictly to the letter of Aristotelian ethics, I would argue that if there is one foundational notion that Guyon as an Aristotelian ethical agent should understand it is the nature of the summum bonum, accessible, as Aristotle says, through the apprehension of

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various starting points, some of which are grapsed “by induction, some by perception, some by a certain habituation, others too in other ways.”67 In terms of Guyon’s relationship to Protestant ethics, the narrow end of happiness derived from brave achievement is of course not a sufficient condition for meeting the end of holiness, which is usually described as a life in Christ from a practical perspective, and knowledge of God from an epistemological point of view. One way to think of Guyon’s relationship to incontinence and Aristotelian and Christian ends is to reintroduce our earlier discussion of the two natures of the sanctified agent. According to our modified version of Anthea Hume’s view that Books I and II correspond respectively to justification and sanctification as stages in salvation, we should imagine that Guyon, like any sanctified agent, bears an old nature, described time and again in the Augustinian-Protestant tradition as a nature stubbornly habituated to sin, and a new nature, which is the habit of holiness that has been imparted to the regenerated agent. We can finally consider the manner in which such an account of sanctified morality is inversely related to Aristotle’s account of virtuous character. When the Aristotelian agent acts incontinently, such an agent’s habituated virtue and governance of appetite is “asleep” or “drunk,” pressed back into the realm of potentiality rather than actuality. When the sanctified individual acts virtuously, such an agent’s habitually sinful old nature lies dormant or is suppressed by the newly incorporated holy nature. It is as if the sanctified agent’s habitual evil rather than habitual goodness is pressed back into the realm of potentiality rather than actuality, as if the sanctified agent acts “incontinently” with respect to sin rather than virtue. One way to describe Guyon’s conduct in Mammon’s cave is to suggest that, as represented in his arrogance, his choice of an external good as an ultimate end, and his neglect to acknowledge directly a theological end, Guyon does not possess habituated virtue and hence a grasp of the correct ends. As such, he does not, in spite of his ability to resist Mammon’s offerings, act continently from an Aristotelian perspective. From a Christian perspective, however, he does successfully repress the inherently base desires that any fallen creature experiences, and so is momentarily able to suppress his old nature while actualizing his new nature. But how is Guyon able to achieve such moderation without a habituated character or grasp of specifically Christian ends? I believe that the best way to explain his conduct is that Guyon chooses the good in an analogous way that the akratic individual chooses the bad. Guyon, as a fallen individual, specifically the individual whose conduct remains under the sway of the old man, naturally finds pleasure in acquiring riches and material wealth. Such a natural inclination enters into the creature’s practical reasoning as a major

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premise, articulable, for example, as a standing desire to “acquire riches.” The individual who does not pursue riches is able to avoid acting according to the major premise even though he retains an active understanding of and belief in that same premise. He both desires and knows the nature of the wrong selection, but chooses the right selection anyway (recall that the Aristotelian akrates both desires and knows the nature of the right selection, but chooses the wrong selection anyway). In the former case, the sanctified individual’s competing desires for the good (not habituated desires, but those desires issuing from an internalization of divine commands, precepts and natural law) allow him to suppress clear and active knowledge of the minor or particular premise, in this case, “this particular object is an example of a material good,” and therefore avoid the otherwise inevitable conclusion, “this material good should be pursued.” But how does Guyon suppress knowledge of the particular premise in an analogous way that the akrates suppresses such knowledge? The akrates suppresses the important knowledge of the minor premise by conveniently seeing the object in a few selected, non-salient aspects. Something sweet, for instance, something to be avoided, might appear to be permissibly desirable if one sees the item not as sweet, but as an item that is of a certain beneficial constitution, weight, and so on. Guyon, I would suggest, avoids indulging himself in Mammon’s cave not because he is temperate or continent (from either a classical or Christian perspective) and believes that riches, in their full signification, are not worth pursuing. Guyon avoids riches because at key moments he conveniently does not see them as such. An example of such conduct occurs when Guyon refuses to accept Mammon’s surplus (“surplusage”) goods. Mammon says, “Take what thou please of all this surplusage; / If thee list not, leaue haue thou to refuse . . .” (ii.vii.18.7–8), to which Guyon responds, “Me list not . . . receaue / Thing offred, till I know it well be got, / Ne wote I, but thou didst these goods bereaue / From rightfull owner by vnrighteous lot, / Or that bloud guiltnesse or guile them blot” (ii.vii.19.1–5). Guyon’s preoccupation with the means by which Mammon might have acquired the goods – “from wrong and robbery?” – is certainly a commendable concern, but it preempts any additional arguments he might have made according to which an excess of material wealth is to be avoided because it leads to intemperance and gluttony. While Guyon clearly apprehends such a major premise, he does not apply the premise to this particular case. He focuses not on the excesses of the riches as such, and the extent to which his desire for the goods might constitute intemperance, but rather single-mindedly on the notion that he would be trespassing on someone else’s property should he accept the pilfered goods.

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Guyon confidently refuses the riches not because he successfully matches a major premise, “Avoid an excess of riches,” to a minor premise, “These items constitute such an excess.” He is able to abstain because he focuses on one specific aspect of the riches – the illicit means of acquisition – and so is able to apply a version of the Decalogue commandment – “do not covet one’s neighbor’s goods” – to the particular case. Given Guyon’s position at this moment, we cannot be sure that he would have rejected the riches had Mammon assured him that the material goods had been permissibly acquired. Another way of saying this is that Guyon’s otherregarding concern allows him to avoid the fundamental question of whether or not he, as the knight of temperance, should find such riches alluring in the first place. We have no basis on which to assume that Guyon rejects the goods because he has attained a measure of regeneration and moral expertise such that he has successfully suppressed a major premise – “Riches provide pleasure and are to be pursued” – that might govern the conduct of the “old creature.” He simply applies a rule, the application of which is itself uncertain, to a selectively perceived particular case. Guyon himself seems to recognize that such an argument against accepting an excess of material goods is not compelling. He later refuses Mammon’s goods on the grounds that he has no use for the surplus items: “Suffise it then, thou Money God (qouth hee) / That all thine idle offers I refuse. / All that I need I haue; what needeth mee / To couet more, then I haue cause to vse?” (ii.vii.39.1–4). While Guyon had earlier refused the goods because he suspected they had been acquired illicitly, he now argues that he has no use of the goods in any case, a statement that shows a belated, still inchoate awareness of the extent to which his desire for Mammon’s goods would constitute an intemperate desire in such a context. I believe that we give Guyon too much credit when we assume that his argument is informed by Christian views on moderation and humility. Rather than elaborate what he believes defines the limits of the goods that any individual deserves, Guyon abruptly asks to be led out of the cave. Here again Guyon seems able to suppress his settled desires for Mammon’s goods by advancing glib and insubstantial arguments. If Mammon had been more clever he might have responded to Guyon by arguing counterfactually: “What if these goods were fairly acquired? What if you could put them to good use? Would you accept my daughter Philotime if you weren’t committed to another lady? Forced to respond to such pointed questions, Guyon might have fainted much sooner than he actually does. What all this shows is that if the text depicts Aristotelianism as too perfectionistic, the theological alternative, a theology of grace expressed

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through sanctifying righteousness, provides a much too thin ethical alternative. Now Spenser’s Christianizing critics might respond that Reformed soteriology assumes moral fallibility even after the bestowal of grace. This explains the saving intervention of the guardian angel and later Arthur, following Guyon’s faint. But the fact of an ongoing need for quickening grace does not serve to explain away all unassisted moral conduct among the regenerate; if it did, we would end up with an impractical, occasionalist notion of ethical conduct alluded to earlier. Sanctification theoretically promotes a renovation of moral character, yet it has trouble imagining that ethical agents develop their imparted characters according to any additive or developmental regimen of ethical conditioning. To the extent that every moral confrontation is a novel challenge, and the moral agent cannot draw on an experiential store of moral expertise and wisdom, every action reestablishes the regenerate as a moral apprentice whose ethical resources are not his or her own. If Spenser were truly concerned with allegorizing this occasionalist strain of sanctifying morality, we would expect to witness in the cantos following canto viii recurring examples of grace’s assistance to sanctified righteousness. Instead of encountering recurring arrivals of grace, though, we find that grace is constantly displaced by alternative forms of ethical assistance. The guardian angel comforts the Palmer by noting that he will continue to watch over Guyon: “The charge, which God doth vnto me arret, / Of his deare safetie, I to thee commend; / Yet will I not forgoe, ne yet forget / The care thereof my selfe vnto the end, / But euermore him succour . . .” (ii.viii.8.1–5). When faced with his very next danger, however, Guyon is not saved by grace, but by Arthur, who, despite the best efforts of Spenser’s Christianizing critics to link Arthur to Christian grace, brings to the battle “great magnanimity” (ii.viii.23.9), “reason” (ii.viii.26.6), and the “law of armes” (ii.viii.31.7). It becomes difficult to view Arthur as saving grace when he himself, dealt a near-fatal blow by Cymochles, burns with the anger and fear of shame appropriate to his combatant – “Three times more furious, and more puissaunt, / Vnmindfull of his wound, of his fate ignoraunt” (ii.viii.34.8–9); or when he spares Cymochles not out of Christian forgiveness but in order to display magnanimity and pride: “But full of Princely bounty and great mind, / The Conquerour nought cared him to slay, / But casting wrongs and all reuenge behind, / More glory thought to giue life, then decay . . .” (ii.viii.51.1–4). There are three references to grace in canto viii which Spenser’s Christianizing critics have seized on as examples of Arthur’s embodiment of Christian grace. Arthur is introduced as the “flowre of grace and nobilesse, / That

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hath to Paynim knights wrought great distresse . . .” (ii.viii.18.4–5); the narrator explains Cymochles refusal to renounce his “miscreance” as a refusal of grace: “Wroth was the Prince, and sory yet withall, / That he so wilfully refused grace; / Yet sith his fate so cruelly did fall . . .” (ii.viii.52.5–7); and Guyon says to Arthur, upon awaking from his protracted faint: “What may suffise, to be for meede repayd / Of so great graces, as ye haue me shewd . . .” (ii.viii.55.7–8). The extent to which these references imply a specifically Christian grace is questioned by their syntactical and narrative contexts. The juxtaposition of Arthur’s “grace” with “nobilesse” suggests courtly refinement as much as it does Christian grace; Arthur’s “grace” or willingness to spare Cymochles is connected, as noted above, to his desire to display his own “glory.” Most important, Arthur’s response to Guyon’s appreciation of Arthur’s “great graces” toward him underscores the extent to which Arthur is governed by the reciprocating law of knighthood and courtesy, rather than divine instruction: “What need/ Good turnes be counted, as a seruile bond, / To bind their doers, to receiue their meede? / Are not all knights by oath bound, to withstond / Oppressours powre by armes and puissant hond? / Suffise, that I haue done my dew in place” (ii.viii.56.1–6). The fact is that after the departure of the guardian angel in canto viii, grace never does really descend again in Book II. Something else emerges in its stead, not a resurgence of classical ethics in modified form, but rather a punitive Christian ethic of fear and wrath that approximates Old Testament legalism in its structure and effects. If Reformed ethical theory standardly argues that grace supersedes law, the ethical pragmatism of Book II dictates that law must displace grace. What Spenser’s critics have not seriously considered is that there are three, not two interacting orders in the Book: nature, grace, and law, each of which displaces in effectiveness its predecessor form. If Aristotelianism is too perfectionistic, sanctifying righteousness is unworkable, not to mention unreliable, in practice. So an ethics of fear and law, manifested principally in the Palmer’s conduct in Book XII, is wheeled in as the most serviceable emergency device that can destroy the Bower. moral l aw in the bower of bliss Buffeted in the whirlpool of decay, prevailed upon by “deformed monsters thousand fold,” the Palmer and Guyon rely on the Palmer’s staff to quell the waters: “Tho lifting vp his vertuous staffe on hye, / He smote the sea, which calmed was with speed” (ii.xii.26.6–7). This is the first of many miraculous uses to which the Palmer’s staff is put in canto xii. “But soone as they approcht with deadly threat, / The Palmer ouer them his staffe

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vpheld, / His mighty staffe, that could all charmes defeat . . .” (ii.xii.40.1–3). These applications of the staff recall not only Leviathan (Job 41:1) – in the staff’s power over the “spring-headed Hydraes, and sea-shouldering Whales” (ii, xii, 23) – but also, as Spenser’s early commentators frequently point out, Moses’s staff as described in various sections of Exodus. Kitchin notes of the Palmer’s staff that “it is the proper accompaniment of all workers of wonders or magicians, from Moses’s rod downwards.”68 Upton describes the wand more generally as reason, “the wise man’s magic wand.”69 Reformed theology more specifically connected Moses’s rod to divine law. Gervase Babington, in his Comfortable Notes Upon the Booke of Exodus (1604), comments that the use of Moses’s rod to part the waters signifies “the might of him that commandeth” and “how in wrath the Lord bindeth Sinners till they runne and rush into their due destruction . . .”70 In Hexapla in Exodum (1608), Andrew Willet claims that the transformation of Moses’s rod to serpents in Exodus 4:3 signifies a “difference of the Law, the ministerie whereof is fearfull and full of terror, and the Gospel which bringeth comfort . . . as also in particular it sheweth that the rod of Moses’s government should be as terrible as a serpent to the Egyptians, but as a rod and scepter of upright and lawfull government to the people.”71 Willet identifies two forms of law with Moses’s rod: the negative law that convicts the unregenerate, and the positive law that helps to erect Christian polities.72 Another possible Biblical echo of the function of the Palmer’s staff is Isaiah 10:5, which tells of God’s use of Assyria as his instrument of anger to reform the Israelites: “Ah, Assyria, the rod of my anger, the staff of my fury! Against a godless nation I send him, and against the people of my wrath I command him . . .”73 Calvin argues that God’s actions serve to “terrifie the wicked” and that “we should not thinke the wicked are carried away with the raines in their necke, whither their appetite shall leade them; but are flawed and held short, so as they can doe nothing at all without the will of God.”74 Calvin expressly distinguishes this form of God’s intervention from those dealings of God in which “he governes his elect by the spirit of sanctification, which is peculiar to his chosen onely.”75 Yet the most interesting use of the Palmer’s staff in relation to a New Testament source occurs farther into the Bower, when the Palmer charms the devouring wild beasts. Here is the stanza in full: But soone as they approcht with deadly threat, The Palmer over them his staffe vpheld, His mighty staffe, that could all charmes defeat: Eftsoones their stubborne courages were queld, And high aduanced crests downe meekely feld,

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Moral Identity in Early Modern English Literature In stead of fraying, they them selues did feare, And trembled, as them passing they beheld: Such wondrous powre did in that staffe appeare, All monsters to subdew to him, that did it beare. (ii.xii.40)

Perhaps because of the syntactical enjambment at lines six and seven, Spenser’s concordance-minded critics have overlooked the unmistakable echo of Philippians 2:12 in the phrase, “fear, / And trembled.” This is a phrase that is widely exegeted during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Paul addresses the converted Philippians in the following manner: “So then, my beloved, as ye have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but no much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling: for in God which worketh in you, both to will and to work, for his good pleasure.”76 Calvin insists that, by employing the phrase “fear and trembling, Paul exhorts the Philippians “to testify and approve their obedience by being submissive and humble . . . For whence comes pride, but from the assurance which blind confidence produces . . . in contrast to this vice is the fear to which he exhorts.”77 Calvin warns of the “perversion” of this passage by the Papists, for whom fear and trembling work to shake assurance of faith. Rather, Calvin insists, far from “disturbing tranquility of conscience,” fear and trembling actually confirm election, for “distrust of ourselves leads us to lean more boldly upon the mercy of God.”78 In relation to Spenser’s allusion to this biblical source, Calvin’s exposition raises a puzzle. For Calvin, the “fear” component of the doublet “fear and trembling” signifies filial, rather than servile fear, the fear of prescinding from regeneration. Filial fear serves the regenerate by checking self-confidence and preventing backsliding. Yet Spenser invokes the phrase to describe the response of the wild animals, immobilized by the power of the Palmer’s staff, which, among its many significations, figures as reason and law. If the phrase were articulated by one of the Bower’s malefactors, we might interpret it as biblical parody, after the manner of Phaedria’s perversion of the Sermon on the Mount or the various other sermon parodies running throughout Book II.79 Yet the phrase is invoked by the objective narrator in order to underscore the withering fear of hopelessly unregenerate beasts. Spenser seems to be yoking a New Testament sense of “fear and trembling” (a dual response that is integral to the experience of grace), to an Old Testament sense of the servile fear experienced by the depraved upon confronting an absolutist God – a God who imposes unexceptionable laws rather than dispenses remediable grace. The fact of such an appropriation is not remarkable, since, as Carol Kaske has demonstrated, Spenser’s biblical poetics constantly shuffles and recontextualizes scriptural proof-texts.80 Yet

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the particular form and content of this appropriation reveals just how far the militant ethic of the Bower has strayed from both the Aristotelianism and the Paulinism of the first eleven cantos. For Guyon’s education in the Bower is not a step-wise progress in pagan or Christian virtue, but rather an “education” in the virtue of obedience to the Palmer’s unassailable commands and speech-acts. Moved to pity by the forgeries of the “dolefull Mayd” (ii.xii.28.2), Guyon is reprimanded by the Palmer for his “foolish pitty,” after which “the knight was ruled” (ii.xii.29.2). Later, as the wanton maidens seduce Guyon, “secret signes of kindled lust appeare” (ii.xii.68.6), until the Palmer intercedes: “He much rebukt those wandring eyes of his, / And counseld well, him forward thence did draw” (ii.xii.69.2–3). The content of such “counseling” is not elaborated, the implication being that the simple act of the Palmer’s “rebuke” steers Guyon back on course. Compare these scenes of ruling and rebuking to earlier examples of the Palmer’s tutelage in which he imparts gnomic wisdom: the Palmer corrects Guyon’s ignorance about the nature of the fountain in canto ii by explaining that “secret vertues are infusd / In euery fountaine” (ii.ii.5.6–7); he advises Guyon that Furor cannot be mastered by sword (ii.iv.10); and he assures Guyon, after the Knight is struck with grief and fear over Phedon’s harrowing story, that all “hurts may soone through temperance be easd” (ii.iv.33.12). Now one might say that once in the perilous Bower, the Palmer has no time to patiently discourse on the workings of temperance, and in any case he would seem to be going over lessons already administered to his recalcitrant pupil. Yet the Palmer’s instructions in the Bower seem oddly means-end in nature, oriented to their immediate effects rather than to the construction or maintenance of Guyon’s temperance. Indeed, the Palmer affects Guyon in the Bower more by the brute force of example rather than by a nuanced pedagogy. Prior to destroying the Bower, Guyon twice imitates the violence that the Palmer displays when he, for example, “smotes” the sea with his staff (ii.xii.26.6–7). Moved to righteous anger by the idolatrous proffers of Genius, Guyon “ouerthrew his bowle disdainfully; / And broke his staffe, with which he charmed semblants sly” (ii.xii.49.11–12). Guyon responds similarly when the “comely dame” tempts him with a cup of gold: “Who taking out of her tender hond, / The cup to ground did violently cast, / That all in peeces it was broken fond” (ii.xii.57.2–4). It is misleading, I think, to interpret these outbursts as late examples of either Guyon’s secular intemperance or, from the perspective of Pauline theology, the persistence of the fulsome “old man.” To interpret Guyon’s destruction of the Bower according to a scheme of temperance, continence, or any complement of secular or Christian virtue is a category mistake. Indeed some early seventeenth-century theologians place anger

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outside the frame of temperance-intemperance altogether: “The Apostle presseth Temperance,” Cornelius Burgess observes, “as a speciall virtue distinguished from others . . . It cannot bee taken for that particular ability of moderating the passions of griefe and anger, for this belongs to Patience, which also is distinguished from Temperance . . .”81 By the end of Book II, Guyon comes to embody the Palmer’s status as supernal law, and his behavior is warranted by any number of scriptural precedents in which God’s wrath descends on the unregenerate. “The Bower of Bliss must be destroyed,” writes Stephen Greenblatt, “not because its gratifications are unreal but because they threaten ‘civility’ – civilization – which for Spenser is achieved only through renunciation and the constant exercise of power.”82 Greenblatt’s remarkable explanation of Guyon’s regenerative violence builds on Freud’s observation in Civilization and its Discontents: “It is impossible, to overlook the extent to which civilization is built up upon a renunciation of instinct, how much it presupposes precisely the nonsatisfaction (by suppression, repression, or some other means?) of powerful instincts . . .”83 Yet Freud’s less cynical, tripartite theory of the psyche, which is first presented in the Ego and the Id, seems to provide a more explanatory model of the destruction of the Bower than his account of repression in Civilization and its Discontents. In the Ego and the Id Freud suggested that the superego is erected as the judicial faculty, responsible for internalizing moral law and facilitating the suppression of instinctual drives. While it is true that Guyon finds the Bower’s finery and sensuousness alluring, he is not especially under the sway of concupiscence in the Bower relative to earlier encounters with fleshly temptation. His temperance in the face of Mammon’s seducements is an exception, of course, but we have already suggested one way of interpreting his seeming moral expertise in the cave. Guyon destroys the Bower not because his pent up, illicit desires or primary processes finally express themselves in sublimated violence, as Greenblatt suggests. Rather, Guyon destroys the Bower because he has internalized the moral law that licenses such an uninhibited expression of will. According to the Freudian developmental scale, at least, Guyon has indeed come far along – expressive violence issues from full identification with his “fathers” – the Palmer, God – rather than from any uncontainable symptom that has resulted from partial repression. By the time Guyon destroys the Bower of Bliss, he has acquired the status not of microchristus, as Patrick Cullen, following Woodhouse suggests, but more properly of microdeus.84

chap t e r 3

Conformist and puritan moral theory: from Richard Hooker’s natural law theory to Richard Sibbes’s ethical occasionalism As Elizabethan poets, Sidney and Spenser witnessed the emergence of the most sustained theological inquiries into the nature of justifying grace and its relationship to regeneration and moral conduct. In the following chapter, I attempt to reconstruct the dogmatic and systematic moral theology of some of the most influential Conformist and Puritan English theologians of the late sixteenth through mid-seventeenth centuries: Richard Hooker, Lancelot Andrewes, William Perkins, and Richard Sibbes. Since I will be arguing that, despite their different doctrinal allegiances, these theologians share the belief that regeneration does not imply incremental moral progress, it will be helpful to review some of the recent revisionist and postrevisionist accounts of the ecclesiological and doctrinal disputes between early modern English Conformists and Puritans. Revisionist work on the history of English Protestantism has begun to question whether a radical Puritan oligarchy posed an ideological threat to a single-minded Anglican pursuit of a via media between Rome and Geneva. Some well-documented Puritan preoccupations – the double decrees of predestination, vehement anti-popery, a concern with sermon-centered rather than word-centered piety – have now been described as much closer in spirit to the concerns of the established English church than historians had earlier imagined.1 Nicholas Tyacke argues, for example, that the abiding religious and political skirmishes of the seventeenth century were fought between English Calvinists and Arminians, rather than Conformists and forward English Calvinists.2 By the end of the sixteenth century, Tyacke remarks, Calvinism was the “defacto religion of the Church of England under Queen Elizabeth and King James,” and remained so until the 1630s.3 What sunders the English Church, according to Tyacke’s analysis, is the rise of Arminian heresies, including such anti-Calvinist bogeys like irresistible grace, limited atonement, and supralapsarian predestination. In Anglicans and Puritans?, a post-revisionist assessment of such a Calvinist consensus, Peter Lake establishes some basic distinctions between 77

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episcopalianism and presbyterianism, most prominently the Conformist desire, expressed by John Whitgift in the early 1570s, to maintain a separation between the public observances of the established church and the private devotional practices of the so-called invisible church.4 Against the Conformists, William Cartwright and fellow presbyterian dissenters responded that individual piety should not be sloughed off to a realm of private devotion, but should rather be an institutionalized responsibility of the Church of England. This division of spheres eventually collapses in the hands of Hooker, who held that church observances and ritual practices ought to influence not just protocols of public worship, but also the cultivation of private virtue. For Hooker, the “scenic apparatus” of the Church – the ensemble of prayer, sacramental, and liturgical ceremonies – adequately could serve as a “school of virtue” through which the established church might edify members more readily than nonconformist sermonizing or experimental predestinarianism.5 Lake’s post-revisionism is important not simply because it establishes some ecclesiological distinctions between Conformists and Puritans that precede the emergence of Arminian or Laudian threats to Calvinist fundamentals. Lake’s work, particularly on Hooker, reminds us that political wrangling over, for example, the legitimacy of the royal supremacy or the role of clericalism was often closely tied to behavioral questions regarding the nature of ethical character and training.6 This chapter evaluates the soteriology of late sixteenth through midseventeenth-century Conformists and Puritans not simply in the interests of extending Lake’s analysis, but to argue that, on the subject of moral progress among the regenerate, English Protestants approach neither a consensus nor dissensus, at least not according to the terms in which such position-taking has been described by historians of early modern theology. There is indeed broad English Protestant agreement regarding regeneration, but this is an agreement defined negatively: a belief that divinely unassisted moral progress cannot be achieved during sanctification. This should be seen more as a default position than well-thought out doctrinal or methodological platform, a position that, as we have begun to see, usually surfaces in anti-Aristotelian or more generally anti-pagan theological rhetoric. There are at least two interdependent reasons why no methodological treatment of regeneration or sanctifying righteousness in relation to practical ethics emerges in English Protestant writings prior to the emergence of post-Restoration latitudinarianism. The establishing formularies and articles of English Protestantism that touch off the fateful ecclesiological

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debates do not make sanctification a central concern; and polemical and ideological interests usually serve as limiting factors in just how much consideration is given to the subject. The Thirty-nine Articles, for example, fail to include a separate treatment of regeneration. Article XII, entitled “Of Good Works,” simply claims that good works are the fruits of faith that follow after justification. The Synod of Dort (1619) approaches a treatment of sanctification in its commentaries on the perseverance of the saints, but, as would be expected given the Synod’s polemical context, the sections on perseverance are concerned above all to refute the Arminian belief in resistible grace. Where we might expect to get a full discussion of sanctification is in Arminian doctrine itself. Arminius, however, who did not write a public disputation on sanctification, has precious little to say on the subject. In a private disputation, Arminius does address perfectionism and sanctification, but he restricts his query to sanctification following death: “We permit this question to be made the subject of discussion: Does the death of the body bring the perfection and completion of sanctification – and how is this effect produced.”7 The closest Arminius comes to addressing temporal moral training appears in a noncommittal hedge in his Declaration of Sentiments: “While I never asserted, that a believer could perfectly keep the precepts of Christ in this life, I never denied it, but always left it as a matter which has still to be decided.”8 An explication of Arminian doctrine is beyond the range of this study, but suffice it to say that debates between Calvinists and anti-Calvinists were focused more on either rarefied doctrinal matters – the precise nature of the decrees of predestination, for example – or more politically charged issues relating to church reform. Hooker’s discussion of the church as a school of virtue illustrates the extent to which polemical maneuvering determines the amount of attention given to regeneration. His concern to enhance the role of the sacraments and liturgical practices is influenced by his Erastianism and desire to counter the presbyterian exaltation of the invisible church. Hooker does write a treatise on justification in relation to sanctification entitled A Learned Discourse of Justification (1586), but only in response to charges that he offers a Pelagian position on the causal relationship between works and grace. In only cursorily addressing the practical-moral implications of salvation theory, Hooker’s work is typical of the dogmatic theology produced between the Admonition Controversy and the middle decades of the seventeenth century. While some neo-Aristotelian treatises of ethics do emerge in the seventeenth century, Reformed theologians generally pay more attention to

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describing when regeneration happens – before, during, or after the administration of grace – and what causes it to happen – meritorious works, free grace, etc., – than to defining the nature of the relationship between regeneration and the development of moral character. We find, then, in the leading sermons and treatises of this period, at least converging opinion against the notion of incremental moral progress and training. In this chapter, I will be particularly interested in describing the divergent ways that Conformists and Puritans attempt to construct a moral theology that remains consistent with this widespread position against moral perfectionism. Thus, while we might say that there is something approaching tacit agreement on what sanctification disallows, there is a wide divergence on just what type of compensatory moral system should be incorporated into the order of salvation. Hooker, for example, offers a two-fold theory of ethics in which natural law theology is supplemented by a neo-scholastic theory of regenerating grace. I hope to show, however, that while Hooker assumes an Aristotelian-Thomistic framework for his doctrines of natural law and soteriology, he does not fully develop a theory of Thomistic ethics as a complement to his Thomistic metaphysics. Other leading theologians offer analogously dogmatic theories of normativity in order to supplement the ethical restrictions placed on sanctifying righteousness. Lancelot Andrewes at times augments his narrative ethics with servile fear, while Perkins and Sibbes introduce the covenant of grace into English Reformed theology as a way of theorizing the reciprocal relations between converts and God, although each bolsters his covenantilism with a distinctive theory of normativity and behavioral ethic. Perkins assumes that an exacting conscience sufficiently legislates conduct, while Sibbes, denying that sanctification marks a renewal of human faculties, endorses a Christological love ethic that shares much with mid-seventeenthcentury antinomianism. In relation to this study as a whole, this chapter serves as a pivot of sorts, marking off the late Elizabethan from the seventeenth-century literary treatments of moral theology and character that we find in the writings of Donne, Herbert, and Milton. While Sidney’s and Spenser’s ethical views were influenced by some of the emergent theories of salvation, their conceptual starting point is the classical-humanist project of relating pagan ethics to moral theology. The later literary texts treated in this study more often leave off pagan ethics entirely in an attempt to fill in the gaps in salvation theory that they inherit from the Conformist and Puritan writings assessed in this chapter. As might be expected, what distinguishes all of the literary treatments of moral theology from the more arid theological treatises

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is the attempt by preachers, educators, polemicists and church officials to advance dogmatic, sometimes systematic theology. Once we establish the various strains of moralism in the theological treatises, we can return to the meta-ethical, literary assessments of the limits of Reformed theories of virtue, in particular, Godly fear in Donne’s Holy Sonnets and Devotions; agapeism in Herbert’s “The Church”; and moral pragmatism in Milton’s Paradise Lost. richard hooker (1554–1600): nat ural l aw and the t wo kingd oms Until a few decades ago, most Hooker scholars agreed that Hooker pioneered an Anglican via media between post-Tridentine Catholicism and Reformed orthodoxy. Although scholars disagreed about the particular form of Hooker’s via media – whether he was a Thomistic rationalist or Erasmian humanist, for example – most held that Hooker’s ecclesiological defense of the Royal Supremacy, first presented in Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity in 1593, deviated significantly from the theology of Luther and Calvin. However, recent monographs have situated Hooker’s Laws squarely in the tradition of the magisterial reformation, contending that Hooker’s soteriology, ecclesiology and political theory build on Luther’s and Calvin’s “two regiments” doctrine. Thus W. Torrance Kirby finds that not only is Hooker’s distinction between passively received, justifying grace, and active, sanctifying virtue consistent with Luther’s “two kinds of righteousness” and Calvin’s distinction between forum conscientiae and forum externum, but Hooker’s theories of royal headship, church discipline, and church-state relations all have their basis in Reformed theology.9 “Contrary to received opinion,” Kirby argues, “there is a sense in which Hooker was a closer follower of Calvin than the so-called Calvinist Disciplinarians of England . . .”10 Kirby and other revisionists such as Nigel Atkinson have argued convincingly that an earlier generation of Hooker scholars erroneously assumed that the Thomistic rationalism and legalism of Book I of the Laws are inconsistent with the political voluntarism of Book VIII.11 In this final book of the Laws, Hooker offers his defense of the Royal Supremacy against the Disciplinarian-Puritan opposition. The revisionists have thus concluded that because all of the planks of Hooker’s ecclesiology are structured around his Reformed soteriology, the Laws are internally consistent rather than contradictory. Yet, Hooker’s critics have not reconstructed all of the Laws’ planks, since we still do not have a comprehensive account of Hooker’s

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moral philosophy in relation to his doctrines of salvation and ecclesiology. This absence is evident in Kirby’s omission of a discussion of Hooker’s natural law theory in relation to his theories of grace and church discipline. While a discussion of Hooker’s ecclesiology is beyond the scope of this study, I will attempt in the following section to reconstruct the relationship among Hooker’s soteriology, moral psychology, and natural law ethics. While Hooker’s soteriology does largely follow the positions of the magisterial reformers, his views on sanctification, in particular, as well as his natural law doctrine, are fundamentally neo-Thomistic. One of the goals of this section, then, is to evaluate whether the views of earlier Hooker scholars – Hillerdal and Munz – can be merged with the revisionist views.12 To anticipate my argument: Hooker makes a distinction, not found in Luther’s or Calvin’s theology, between two forms of sanctifying righteousness. Habitual sanctifying righteousness functions as the efficient cause of justification, from which actual sanctifying righteousness follows. Habitual sanctification, marked by an infusion of the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity, establishes ultimate ends, while natural laws, which primarily enlighten and recondition the intellect, establish proximate ends. Hooker thus promotes not a two-fold division between religion and morality (which an application of the magisterial “two regiments” doctrine might imply), but a two-tiered system of morality. The training of the will is a constituent feature of sanctification, and the training of the intellect assists the moral agent in apprehending the axiomatic rightness of natural laws, those which dictate worldly, rather than ultimate ends. What we will find, however, is that in respect of neither proximate nor final ends, does Hooker develop a systematic program of ethical training. Positive laws, which rely on temporal sanctions for enforcement, displace the need for a full understanding of the content and normative force of natural laws; and sanctifying righteousness occurs following an infusion of the theological virtues, rather than through a process of moral effort or practice. hooker’s moral psychology In Book I of the Laws, Hooker argues that sinful acts do not stem from an intention to pursue evil knowingly, but rather from the intellect’s misapprehension of the nature of the good: Evil, as evil, cannot be desired; if that be desired which is evil, the cause is the goodness is or seemeth to be joined with it. Goodness doth not move by being,

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but by being apparent; and therefore many things are neglected which are most precious, only because the value of them lieth hid. Sensible Goodness is most apparent, near, and present, which causeth the Appetite to be therewith strongly provoked. Now pursuit and refusal in the Will do follow, the one the affirmation, the other the negation of goodness, which the understanding apprehendeth, grounding itself upon sense, unless some higher Reason do chance to teach the contrary.13

Although the will is a distinct, autonomous faculty, free to pursue its desiderative ends, the pursuit of such desires ordinarily follows the dictates of reason or the intellect. If the will veers from the good, reason has not clearly weighed the possible courses of action (the value of the right courses “lieth hid,”), and the will thus embraces evil, which technically is an erroneous good perceived by the intellect. But if Hooker suggests that the will naturally follows reason’s example, and thus seldom pursues evil knowingly, he immediately refines his argument by admitting that the will can indeed act clean contrary to reason: Reason . . . may rightly discern the thing which is good, and yet the Will of man not incline itself thereunto as oft as the prejudice of sensible experience doth oversway . . . There was never sin committed wherein a less good was not preferred before a greater, and that wilfully . . . There is not that good which concerneth us, but it hath evidence enough for itself, if Reason were diligent to search it out. Through the neglect thereof, abused we are with the shew of that which is not; sometimes the subtilty of Satan inveigling us, as it did Eve; sometimes the hastiness of our Wills preventing the more considerate advice of sound Reason, as in the Apostles . . . Still therefore that wherewith we stand blameable, and can no way excuse it, is, in doing evil we prefer a less good before a greater, the greatness whereof is by reason investigable and may be known. The search of knowledge is a thing painful; and the painfulness of knowledge is that which maketh the Will hardly inclinable thereunto.14

While this passage, especially in the opening lines, seems to argue for the radical freedom of the will to influence the moral agent to act against evaluative judgments, by the last third of the passage Hooker reiterates his claim that even in these cases reason has not sufficiently understood the nature of the good. The implication is that when sensible experience “over-sways” reason, it presents to the intellect a lesser good over a greater; reason ought to respond by “diligently” seeking the greater good out, since the greater good, the knowledge of which will properly move the will, is always “investigable” and knowable, even though original sin has rendered burdensome such a cognitive sorting of alternatives. Thus Hooker returns to his earlier, more confident assertion that reason is sufficient to constrain the

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will, and that moral training should proceed not by regulating the appetites but by uncovering knowledge of good and evil, from which proper conduct might ensue: All particular things which are subject unto action, the Will doth so far forth incline unto, as Reason judgeth them the better for us, and consequently the more available to our bliss. If Reason err, we fall into evil, and are so far forth deprived of the general perfection we seek. Seeing, therefore, that for the framing of men’s actions the knowledge of good from evil is necessary, it only resteth, that we search how this may be had.15

Hooker’s considered position on moral psychology is underwritten by a long tradition in classical and medieval ethics that argues that moral improprieties are caused by mistaken evaluations rather than convulsive passions. Most of the arguments in this direction deny the possibility of incontinent acts. The principal philosophers and theologians who occupy some form of this cognitivist position include Socrates (in the early Platonic dialogues), Aristotle (whose views on incontinence were touched on last chapter), and medieval philosophers grouped under the via antiqua, notably Aquinas, in his early writings. Since Hooker’s view most closely resembles Aquinas’s views on the relationship between will and intellect, it will be useful to very briefly summarize the theological tradition leading up to and including the Thomistic position on incontinence. In the early Platonic dialogues Socrates argues that moral agents do not act on non-rational beliefs or desires. Since Socrates, unlike Plato, does not divide the soul into rational, sensitive or appetitive parts, he argues that all desires are rational and directed to the final good. Conduct that may look irrational is conduct that still has been guided by a rational choice, although such a choice is an erroneous one. As Socrates says in the Protagoras, “no man voluntarily pursues evil, or that which he thinks to be evil. To prefer evil to good is not in human nature; and when a man is compelled to choose one of two evils, no one will choose the greater when he may have the less.”16 Augustine, who has generally been credited with offering the earliest sustained account of the will as a distinct faculty, separate from the rational and appetitive parts of the soul, rejected cognitive moralities like the Socratic one. For Augustine, the perverse will can motivate conduct in a direction contrary to settled beliefs; voluntas and wisdom are always potentially at odds, to such an extent that, as Augustine writes in De Libero Arbitrio, “the first man could have sinned even if he had been created wise.”17 As Albrecht Dihl writes, “The direction of the will . . . is thought and spoken

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of as being independent of the cognition of the better and the worse. This indeed supersedes the famous Socratic problem, according to which ‘no one does wrong on purpose.’”18 In his early writings – De Veritate and the Summa Contra Gentiles – Aquinas accepts the Augustinian distinction between reason and will, but maintains a classicized position regarding the superiority of the intellect: “That the will is higher than the intellect in the sense of moving it is again clearly false. For primarily and directly the intellect moves the will . . . hence, it is evident that the intellect is, without qualification, higher than the will.”19 Reason, in Aquinas’s analysis, conditions the will by presenting objects the pursuit of which directs the moral agent to beatitude, the final theological end. Since the will is entirely passive in respect of reason, and it necessarily inclines toward whatever good reason dictates, the will can never be the seat of moral blame or praise: “Where there is no failure in apprehending and comparing, there can be no willing of evil even when there is a question of means.”20 Aquinas’s more developed views on incontinence follow Aristotle in assuming that the akratic individual fails to join particular premises with general propositions in practical syllogisms of action.21 In the passages cited above, Hooker leans momentarily toward the Augustinian view of akrasia, but he seems confident that the firm acquisition of the knowledge of good and evil can redirect the will in difficult ethical cases. This fusion of normativity and bindingness – enlightened sinners actually do act on the reasons set forth by perspicuous natural laws – has been overlooked by Hooker’s commentators. Thus Hillerdal concludes, “In the contest between the sense and the will the latter often fails to win, since reason does not make the good convincingly clear. This does not mean that man is without blame. If reason actually ‘were diligent to search,’ man surely would know what to do and not to do. Instead, we sin by choosing that which is less good before that which is the real good.”22 But Hillerdal neglects to consider the inbuilt behavioral component of Hooker’s rationalism: that an accurate perception of goodness itself should “move” the individual to action. While Hooker can of course imagine cases where a moral lapse is connected to a failure of will rather than reason (cases in which the will resists acting in line with informed knowledge), he holds that the surest means of reforming the will is to assist the intellect in acquiring firmer knowledge of self-motivating rules and laws. This raises the question, however, of exactly how the intellect can be trained to reacquaint itself with the nature of the good. Hooker begins to address this topic in his natural law theory, to which we now turn.

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In elaborating his theory of natural law, Hooker distinguishes between general and specific axioms, all of which are apprehensible through the light of reason: In every kind of knowledge some such grounds there are, as that being proposed, the mind doth presently embrace them as free from all possibility of error, clear and manifest without proof. In which kind, axioms or principles more general, are such as this, That the greater good is to be chosen before the less . . . Axioms less general, yet so manifest that they need no farther proof, are such as these, God to be worshipped; Parents to be honoured; Others to be used by us, as we ourselves would be by them.’23

While commentators have generally agreed on the main lines of Hooker’s natural law theory, they have tended to overlook Hooker’s belief that natural laws are derivable from natural human inclinations.24 Natural laws serve our “vital preservation.”25 Rather than merely provide “general moral knowledge,” as Hillerdal suggests, they describe common or shared human tendencies26 : We see the whole world and each part thereof so compacted, that as long as each thing performeth only that work which is natural unto it, it thereby preserveth both other things, and also itself . . . Is it possible, that Man being not only the noblest creature in the world, but even a very world in himself, his transgressing the Law of his Nature should draw no manner of harm after it? . . . Good doth follow unto all things by observing the course of their nature, and on the contrary side evil by not observing it . . .”27

To the extent that Hooker’s natural law system is one in which moral norms are based on natural human inclinations, Hooker, like Aquinas and classical natural law theorists, derives ought from is, or norms from facts.28 Aquinas held, for example, that the first principle of practical reason is “do good and avoid evil.” From this primary datum a number of secondary or subordinate principles ought to be easily inferred, for example, “Children ought to honor their parents.” Such principles are self-evident and indemonstrable, although their normative content is not innately available but understandable following experience. As Aquinas writes in the Prima Secundae: “Since . . . good has the nature of an end, and evil, the nature of the contrary, hence it is that all those things to which man has a natural inclination are naturally apprehended by reason as being good, and consequently as objects of pursuit, and their contraries as evil, and objects of avoidance. Therefore, the order of the precepts of the natural law is

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according to the order of natural inclinations.”29 The natural inclinations include, for example, the tendency toward self-preservation and preservation of the species, the desire to live in society and to know God, the desire to avoid ignorance, a tendency “not to offend others with whom [one] must live,” as well as comparable self- and other-regarding inclinations.30 For Aquinas and most classical natural law theorists, including Hooker, natural inclinations are essential and unrevisable. External law, functioning as an “exemplar of divine wisdom,” itself directs all natural laws or human inclinations. As one commentator writes, classical natural law theory holds “that both the content and the inherent practicality of natural law derive from eternal law. Eternal law specifies an ideal for each being, its good that is built into its essence as ends. Since the good of each is defined in relation to this perfectionist/teleological scheme, a harmony of goods and, given the relation between natural and eternal law, a coincidence between duty and the interest are metaphysically guaranteed.”31 The important idea is that although eternal law directs such a harmony of interests, an agent’s perception of natural inclinations should be sufficiently motivating without an accompanying perception of an obligating law. Classical natural law theory is thus a form of ethical naturalism: moral behavior ideally is governed by an empirical awareness of noninferential first principles of human behavior that, in many cases, are sufficiently motivating. Thus, for Hooker, natural laws, which dictate the “greatest moral duties we owe towards God and Man,” stand as principles “universally agreed upon,” although accretions of untoward customs have submerged accurate knowledge of such laws: “Lewd and wicked custom, beginning perhaps at the first amongst few, afterwards spreading into greater multitudes, and so continuing from time to time, may be of force even in plain things, to smother the light of natural understanding, because men will not bend their wits to examine whether things wherewith they have been accustomed be good or evil.”32 Hooker’s rationalism is evident in his suggestion that custom has corrupted our understanding rather than our wills or affections, a departure from the Augustinian and Reformed view of the corrosive effects of custom and habitual sin. How, then, does one undo the effects of custom and reacquaint oneself with the normative content of natural laws? Hooker, like most early modern Reformers, holds that natural laws are either too difficult to discern by reason alone, or have been obscured by the Fall. Hooker strays from the magisterial reformers, though, in arguing that even after the fall general axioms remain clear and distinct, although particular axioms, especially the application of general axioms to particular cases, have become submerged:

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“The first principles of the Law of Nature are easy; hard it were to find men ignorant of them. But concerning the duty which Nature’s Law doth require at the hands of men in a number of things particular, so far hath the natural understanding even of sundry whole nations been darkened, that they have not discerned, no, not gross iniquity to be sin.”33 Hooker makes a fundamental departure at this point from Thomistic natural law theory, a departure that has been overlooked by Hooker’s early and more recent commentators. Aquinas, unlike Hooker, augments his natural law theory with a two-fold system of behavioral training: moral virtues provide the necessary dispositions for acting according to the reasons set forth in natural laws; and intellectual virtues, particularly prudence, provide the agent with the ability to apply general ordinances to specific cases. Thus Aquinas writes in the Prima Secundae: Man is suitably directed to his due end by a virtue which perfects the soul in the appetite part, the object of which is the good and the end. But to that which is suitably ordained to the due end man needs to be rightly disposed by a habit in his reason, because counsel and choice, which are about means ordained to the end, are acts of the reason. Consequently an intellectual virtue is needed in the reason, to perfect the reason and make it suitably affected towards means ordained to the end; and this virtue is prudence.34

Aquinas’s prudentia, which corresponds to Aristotle’s phronesis, equips the agent with moral discernment, the ability to see the intrinsic fitness between general precepts and particular circumstances. Joseph Boyle remarks that, “In order to make proper moral judgments . . . one needs not only to understand natural dispositions or the synteresis; one also should be able to “evaluate the particularities of the concrete possibilities for action which one faces.”35 Hooker, however, does not provide a corresponding account of the acquisition of intellectual virtues like prudence that would assist in matching natural laws to particular cases. If Hooker’s cognitivism helps to justify the omission of any account of a behavioral conditioning of the will, it does not also dispense with the need to possess some intellectual disposition or virtue that would bring rules of behavior down to the level of ordinary practice. At the point in Book I of the Laws where we most expect an exposition of some theory of virtue in keeping with classical natural law theory, Hooker rather introduces his views on the establishment of human polities; constructed laws, mostly derivable from first principles, seem to displace the training in virtue that would otherwise invest moral agents with morally discriminating abilities. Thus, section ix of Book I ends with Hooker’s affirmation that “wicked custom” has submerged the

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clarity of natural laws, and Book x begins with his presentation of the social compact by which politic societies have come into existence. Much of the remainder of Book I is dedicated to Hooker’s inquiry as to “how nature findeth out such laws of government as serve to direct even nature depraved to a right end.”36 And, in keeping with most later contractualist theories of government, Hooker mostly restricts his exposition to the individual duties contracted members owe to one another, rather than the ensemble of virtues that any individual ought to acquire as a constitutive member of the “politic society.” Yet, Hooker seems to want to integrate, if not a system of characterbased virtue theory, then simply the language and rhetoric of virtue theory with his rule-centered system of positive law. He not only points out that prescriptions and duties are only efficacious if rewards or punishments follow; he describes these rewards or punishments as virtues and vices: Unto laws that men do make for the benefit of men, it hath seemed always needful to add rewards, which may more allure unto good than any hardness deterreth from it; and punishments, which may more deter from evil than any sweetness thereto allureth. Wherein as the generality is natural, virtue rewardable, and vice punishable; so the particular determination of the reward or punishment belongeth unto them by whom laws are made. Theft is naturally punishable, but the kind of punishment is positive; and such lawful as men shall think with discretion convenient by Law to appoint.37

Vice is equated not with a hardened, vicious disposition, but with a discrete act of theft. A precise elaboration of the nature of virtue in relation to this positive law schema is significantly omitted. As Book I shifts from a focus on natural law to positive law, the construction of virtuous character becomes less and less a priority. In respect of the temporal kingdom particularly, “virtue” is largely emptied of its normative signification, seemingly descriptive of an absence of criminality and little more. Proper conduct issues not from virtuous dispositions of character, but from the bare fact of obedience: “Laws do not only teach what is good, but they enjoin it, they have in them a certain constraining force.”38 Hooker seems to compensate for this gradual submergence of moral psychology and virtue theory in his discussion of “mixed” laws, the normative force of which are dictated by those natural laws on which the content of corresponding human laws is based. The undeniable fact that the “common sort are led by the sway of their sensual desires” is “cause sufficient, why duties belonging unto each kind of virtue, albeit the Law of Reason teach them, should notwithstanding be prescribed even by human Law.”39 Nothing in such a comment implies that when common malefactors uphold

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mixed laws they have either acquired a complement of virtue, or are in the process of educating themselves as to the Aristotelian or Thomistic “why” of virtuous conduct that eventually rounds out the simple “how” of acting properly according to community standards. While Hooker’s moral agents are required to act virtuously, they are not explicitly exhorted to be virtuous. Hooker remarks at one point in Book I that because the embrace of natural laws assists in the fulfillment of each individual’s natural inclinations, natural laws should be understood as immanently binding: “Now the due observation of this Law which Reason teacheth us cannot but be effectual unto their great good that observe the same. For we see the whole world and each part thereof so compacted, that as long as each thing performeth only that work which is natural unto it, it thereby preserveth both other things, and also itself.”40 To the extent that the pursuit of the good is the fulfillment of any individual’s nature, natural laws would seem to be self-motivating: “Good doth follow unto all things by observing the course of their nature . . .”41 Sanctions, therefore, would seem to be immanent to natural laws, rather than artificially (albeit consensually) established by external lawgivers. Yet, Hooker accepts that, realistically, men disobey the laws of their own natures as willingly as they do external legislation. In fact, positive laws are derived from and warranted by this very form of “natural” disobedience: “Laws politic, ordained for external order and regiment amongst men, are never framed as they should be, unless presuming the will of man to be inwardly obstinate, rebellious, and averse from all obedience unto the sacred Laws of his Nature . . .”42 In his recognition that natural dispositions are not readily obeyed, and that natural laws fail, all things considered, to internally motivate, the “judicious” Hooker does anticipate Locke, for both assume the delinquency of natural dispositions in the settled state, although Locke more cynically holds that even in the state of nature human dispositions are fundamentally self-regarding. What seems to happen, then, is that as natural laws transform into human laws, Hooker’s concern with moral psychology and virtue theory – always a constituent feature of scholastic natural law theory – is subordinated to an obediential system of positive laws, a system that theoretically is consistent with, but does not have as a priority, the fulfillment of human nature according to natural law teleology. This shift seems logically and practically necessary: by failing to complement his natural law theory with a system of ethical habituation in keeping with Thomistic natural law ethics, Hooker leaves himself open to the sort of criticism that David Hume makes

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of an early eighteenth-century ethical treatise, Samuel Clark’s A Discourse Concerning the Unchangeable Obligations of Natural Religion (1706): “It is one thing to know virtue, and another to conform the will to it. In order, therefore, to prove that the measures of right and wrong are eternal laws, obligatory on every rational mind, it is not sufficient to show the relations upon which they are founded: we must also point out the connection betwixt the relations and the will . . .”43 For Hooker, the price of providing obligatoriness in the form of positive sanctions is the abandonment of a behavioral ethical system that would condition the faculties responsible for governing practical reasonableness. Such a behavioral regimen would lead to the cultivation, minimally, of intellectual virtues like prudence which, in Aquinas’s ethical system at least, assist moral agents in uniting general laws and specific cases. By neglecting to theorize a system of moral habituation and edification in relation to worldly ends, Hooker offers a truncated neo-Thomistic virtue theory. While Hooker does not go so far as to develop a theory of natural rights – as do most eighteenthcentury natural law theorists and contractualists – his practical-ethical system resembles negative libertarianism in that positive laws primarily dictate interpersonal duties rather than the acquisition of perfectionistic virtue. It will be helpful to evaluate Hooker’s natural law theory in the context of Debora Shuger’s useful and important distinction between early modern rational and participatory modes of consciousness: Rational consciousness sees reason as the primary connection between self and reality. The function of reason is to distinguish, and rational consciousness therefore individuates and maintains clear boundaries between entities. It is thus sensitive to the gap between subject and object, as well as to that between words and things . . . Participatory consciousness, on the other hand, assumes the primacy of desire in the act of knowing. It therefore does not oppose psyche and world, since the desires of the mind assure the reality of the desired object.44

Shuger finds the presence of both habits of thought in Hooker’s writings: rationalizing consciousness predominates in his “treatment of signs, language, and history,” while participatory consciousness operates in his spiritual and sacramental psychology.45 What I have been suggesting, however, is that Hooker’s rationalizing world view breaks down within his natural law system itself, irrespective of the dissolution of rationalizing modes of thought that Shuger locates primarily in his doctrine of salvation. While rational discernment is required to understand the content of axiomatic natural laws, as well as the ways in which changing historical

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circumstances structure positive law, rationalizing modes of consciousness seem to carry less practical, hermeneutical weight once positive laws have been established. In the Christian commonwealth, where natural laws are redescribed as mixed laws, the need to undergo processes of rational sifting and moral discernment is obviated by the more objective demand of unexceptionable obedience, itself conditioned by legal sanctions. In addition, a question arises as to whether the accurate perception of natural laws as such ever really requires the kind of rationalizing consciousness described by Shuger, as well as Egil Grislis.46 To the extent that natural laws are per se nota propositions, they are indemonstrable first principles much like self-evident mathematical rules or proofs; hence Aquinas’s example, “every whole is greater than its parts.”47 Certainly the apprehension of such self-evident principles assumes reasonableness, but this form of non-discursive intuition would not seem to require the effortful, cognitive practices of distinguishing and individuating that Shuger locates in the rationalizing episteme. On the other hand, context-sensitive rationality and moral discernment are, of course, required to derive circumstantially appropriate positive laws from preceptive laws of reason. Yet, as Hooker makes abundantly clear, this form of rational discrimination is not widely available, and is exercised principally by those selected lawmakers and lawgivers responsible for erecting and maintaining civil society. Due to the historical accretions of “wicked custom,” natural laws lose their analytical clarity. Those who can still perceive natural laws are responsible for ferreting out positive laws from the store of directive laws; positive laws, in turn, bind more through an appeal to civic punishments than through an appeal to reasonableness as such – as if right reason is supplanted by prudential reason in the settled state. By the end of Book I of the Laws, one begins to suspect that the very reasonableness of Hooker’s natural law system exists more on a notional than practical level. What Grislis describes as the “problem of subjectivity” in the Laws, the requirement that each individual obtain truth “discursively” according to a rational hermeneutic, does not seem to apply to the practical implementation of Hooker’s natural law system.48 Yet this explication of Hooker’s natural law systems does not explain Hooker’s views on ultimate or theological ends. That is, for Hooker, an accurate perception of natural laws does not facilitate the reach of beatitude – a clear vision of God, for example – but only proximate, moral ends to be pursued in secular society. Theological ends, in turn, are achieved by an infusion of the theological virtues, themselves a product of sanctifying

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righteousness. So, in order to understand Hooker’s two-fold system of morality, we need to turn finally to his doctrine of salvation. hooker and sanctifying virtue Hooker occupies a position on salvation that borrows much from Aquinas but remains in the spirit of the moderate English Calvinist views on sanctification summarized in the preceding chapter. His most extensive discussion of the relationship between justification and sanctification appears in his Learned Discourse of Justification (1586). Soon after his appointment as Master of the Temple in 1585, Hooker delivered a series of sermons in which he suggested that those apostates under the influence of popish superstitions might still enjoy God’s mercy. Walter Travers, a disciplinarian-Puritan lecturer at the Temple, took Hooker to task for implying that Catholics could receive justifying grace.49 Sections of one of Hooker’s sermons were published in 1612 as Hooker’s Learned Discourse, from which the following comments on justification and sanctification are taken: There be two kinds of Christian righteousness: the one without us, which we have by imputation; the other in us, which consisteth of Faith, Hope, and Charity . . . God giveth us both the one justice and the other; the one by accepting us for righteous in Christ; the other by working Christian righteousness in us. The proper and most immediate efficient cause in us of this latter is the Spirit of Adoption we have received into our hearts. That whereof it consisteth . . . are those infused virtues proper and peculiar unto saints . . . the effects whereof are such actions as the Apostle doth call the fruits of works, the operations of the Spirit; the difference of the which operation from the root whereof they spring maketh it needful to put two kinds likewise of sanctifying righteousness, habitual and actual. Habitual, that holiness, wherewith our souls are inwardly endued, the same instant when first we begin to be the temples of the Holy Ghost; actual, that holiness which afterwards beautifieth all the parts and actions of our life . . .50

Hooker’s remarks here have long been held to be the cornerstone of his via media doctrine of justification. For some theologians he offers an adequate account of the extrinsic nature of sanctifying righteousness, but fails to offer a coherent account of the efficient cause of justification: “The formal cause of justification is the ‘pivotal point’ between Hooker and the Council of Trent, as it was between Hooker and the Puritans. Hooker rejects the Roman doctrine of intrinsic justification, but he does not state what he considers to be the formal cause of justification . . .”51 Lee Gibbs defends Hooker’s doctrine by underscoring a crucial passage in the Discourse in which Hooker

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does indeed mark the formal cause of justification as inherent, sanctifying righteousness: If here it be demanded, which of these we do first receive; I answer, that the Spirit, the virtue of the Spirit, the habitual justice, which is ingrafted, the external justice of Jesus Christ, which is imputed, these we receive all at one and the same time . . . yet sith no man is justified except he believe, and no man believeth except he has Faith, and no man except he hath received the Spirit of Adoption, hath Faith, forasmuch as they do necessarily infer justification, and justification doth of necessity presuppose them; we must needs hold that imputed righteousness, in dignity being the chiefest, is notwithstanding in order to the last of all these, but actual righteousness, which is the righteousness of good works, succeedeth all, followeth after all, both in order and time.52

Hooker’s challenge, a challenge met by all Protestant theologians, is to account for the intimate relationship between justification and sanctification without arguing that one efficiently causes the other. If one argues that sanctification causes justification, one supports Pelagian doctrine, according to which meritorious works effect grace. If one argues that justification causes sanctification, one still is faced with adequately theorizing the internal change of character that occurs during regeneration.53 Hooker therefore distinguishes not simply justification from sanctification, or imputed grace from imparted righteousness; he further subdivides sanctification into habitual and actual sanctification. Habitual sanctification, effected by the gratuitous infusion of the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity, serves as the formal or internal cause of justifying righteousness. Actual sanctification, which is marked by the performance of good works, follows from justification. Due to his distinct ordering of the three stages in tempore – habitual sanctification, justifying righteousness, and actual sanctification – Hooker rejects the Roman Catholic supposition that justification directly causes intrinsic righteousness, as he does any notion that works righteousness leads to justifying righteousness. Yet he does not go so far as to endorse the Reformed belief in the purely extrinsic righteousness caused by Christ’s sacrifice, since he assumes that justification itself is caused by habitual sanctification or a prior infusion of the theological virtues.54 Although Hooker notes in the Learned Discourse that sanctifying righteousness marks an infusion of a habit of theological virtues, he points out in the Laws that the process of receiving and realizing such virtues is ongoing: “the habit of Faith, which afterwards doth come with years, is but a farther building up of the same edifice, the first foundation whereof was laid by the Sacrament of Baptism.”55 The infusion of virtue establishes a union with

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God, which involves a gradual building-up of the justified sinner: “Baptism implieth a covenant or league between God and man, wherein as God doth bestow presently remission of sin and the Holy Ghost, binding also himself to ass in process of time what grace soever shall be farther necessary for the attainment of everlasting life.”56 Grace is renewed not solely by means of the sacraments, however, but also through worship and prayer. Hooker writes that the Book of Psalms magnifieth the holy meditations and actions of divine men . . . working in them whose hearts God inspireth with the due consideration thereof, an habit or disposition of mind whereby they are made fit vessels, both for receipt and for delivery of whatsoever spiritual perfection. What is there necessary for man to know, which the Psalms are not able to teach? They are to beginners an easy and familiar introduction, a mighty augmentation of all virtue and knowledge in such as are entered before, a strong confirmation to the most perfect amongst others.57

In claiming that an embrace of the Psalms contributes to the believer’s “spiritual perfection,” Hooker emphasizes that this form of moral training leads to an appreciation of the final end, beatitude or union with God, rather than secular or temporal ends, the achievement of which, as we have already noted, follows from obedience to general and particular natural laws. In pursuit of final ends, the believer needs to undergo, as Peter Lake points out, a step-wise process of moral training and education. In most cases, however, as exemplified in the above passage, this involves a process of preparing the heart for the “receipt” and “delivery” of spiritual perfection, rather than an acquisition of virtue through creaturely efforts.58 There are passages in the Laws in which Hooker claims that an accurate perception of and turning toward the agent’s final end requires not only a passive bestowal of supernatural virtue through an administration of the sacraments, but also a co-operative effort on the part of the justified sinner to train his or her affections through prayer and church worship. Thus, when Hooker describes participation in festival days, he writes, “The constant habit of well doing is not gotten without the custom of doing well, neither can virtue be made perfect but by the manifold works of virtue often practiced.”59 Yet Hooker’s comments here should not be taken out of their polemical context. Worried that papists too often keep Easter and festival days purely in order to display virtues that are seemingly non-existent during the rest of the year, Hooker reminds his readers that “Christ requireth . . . the perpetuity of virtuous duties; not perpetuity of exercise or action, but disposition perpetual, and practice as oft as times and opportunities require.”60 Although feasts and holiday church services are intermittent,

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such “iterative” participation helps to maintain a disposition toward virtue that remains active even after the passing of the festival: “So that although by their necessary short continuance they abridge the present exercise of piety in some kind, yet because by repetition they enlarge, strengthen and confirm the habits of all virtue, it remaineth, that we honour, observe, and keep them as ordinances . . .”61 Hooker chooses his words quite carefully here, so as to avoid any confusion of his rhetoric of habituation to virtue with a classicized regimen of moral perfectionism. He notes only that repetition and practice “confirms” virtue, not that it leads to the acquisition or development of virtue. Although he does not enumerate individual virtues, the implication, given the immediate concerns with church worship, prayer, and ceremony, is that such practices lead to the participant’s theological, ultimate end, rather than proximate ends, and so help strengthen already infused, theological virtues, rather than moral virtues oriented toward civic morality. Hooker’s two-tiered moral system is thus notable for its appropriation of the rhetoric of moral habituation in relation to spiritual matters, without directly postulating that moral agents acquire, through their own efforts, virtues as dispositions of character. Hooker constantly returns to the importance of moral conditioning, but seldom makes reference to a renovation of character through the acquisition of cardinal virtues. He can consistently maintain this viewpoint because the realm of secular morality, the realm of proximate ends, is fundamentally governed by natural laws, which are binding in the form of positive laws. Since Hooker suggests that moral recidivism, with respect to proximate ends, is caused by intellectual rather than moral errors, he does not emphasize a system of secular, behavioral training, through which the acquisition of virtuous dispositions bridles wayward affections. Insofar as the passions need to be redirected, they need to be reoriented toward the moral agent’s supernatural end. As such, the maintenance of the passions is largely a process of preparing the will, through church worship, to receive the supernatural virtues. There is an inherent change of character during sanctification, but moral renewal is fundamentally the result of divine acceptation and a step-wise process of strengthening imparted holiness. If we try to integrate finally Hooker’s natural law theory with his doctrine of salvation, we find that the problem is not, as Hillerdal claims, that Hooker smuggles too much rationality into the realm of supernature: “The chief problem . . . is the question of how grace . . . can change the mental capacities, particularly reason, so that he who has received grace will understand what he could not grasp formerly.”62 Rather, the problem is

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that Hooker actually diminishes the role of reasonableness in the order of nature itself, or allows prudential rationality to displace right reason and moral discernment, the latter of which would require some form of moral education in a postlapsarian context. This problem would seem to affect both the unregenerate and the regenerate: nothing in Hooker’s account of sacramental piety, justification, or sanctification assumes that spiritually regenerated individuals have acquired an intellectual grasp of those first principles that shape conduct in the civic realm. Unlike Aquinas’s moral apprentices, who first undergo a process of moral conditioning in order to temper their behavior in the temporal realm, after which they receive a supplemental bestowal of theological virtues in order to facilitate their pursuit of beatitude, Hooker’s sanctified individuals would seem to be putting the theological cart before the moralistic horse: their reconditioned wills allow them to begin to glimpse divine beatitude, yet we cannot be sure that their intellects have been fundamentally renovated such that they fully understand the nature of proximate ends that are set forth by natural laws. Hooker’s separation of the secular and spiritual regiments thus raises the question of how any individual can integrate a true apprehension of the nature of temporal goods with salvation. l ancelot andrewes (1555–1626): narrat ive et hics and god ly fear While Hooker and his contemporary and fellow Conformist, Lancelot Andrewes, hold similar soteriological views – both allowing for an element of co-operation as a feature of sanctifying righteousness – they offer fundamentally contrasting views on moral “training.” Rather than argue for the existence of self-evident natural laws, the perception of which should go a way toward conditioning behavior, Andrewes elaborates a communitarian ethic in which the Gospel witness provides narrative examples of right conduct that ideally are internalized by the ethical apprentice. In constructing an ethics centered on narrative and storytelling, Andrewes’s contextualist ethics departs significantly from Hooker’s universalism. Andrewes states his most developed view of narrative ethics in his sermon on Hebrews 12:2. The scriptural passage under discussion is one that we have already encountered, focused on Christ’s despising of the cross: “Looking unto Jesus the Author and Finisher of our Faith; Who for the joy that was set before Him, endured the cross, and despised the shame; and is set at the right-hand of the throne of God.”63 Andrewes describes the passion as a “theory or sight” laid before us to instruct in virtue: “Of our

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blessed Saviour’s life or death, there is no part but is ‘a theory’ of itself, well worthy our looking on; for from each part thereof there goeth virtue to do us good.”64 In the particular example, Andrewes postulates a distinction between the object or sight apprehended, and the act of apprehending the object or sight: “The principal parts thereof are two: 1. The sight itself, that is, the thing to be seen; 2. and the sight of it, that is, the act of seeing it or looking on it.”65 The former corresponds to the “spectacle propounded,” “Jesus the Author,” the latter to the “act or duty” of “looking on.” The second point, the act of “looking on” is subdivided into the act of looking upon the passion and the effect such an apprehension has on the viewer: “In the one is the theory or sight we shall see, thus looking. In the other the praxis of this theory, what this sight is to work in us; and that is a motion, a swift motion, running. So to look on it that we run, and so to run that we faint not.”66 Andrewes thus differentiates the theoretical and practical function of the exegeted passage. If theory designates the entire experience of witnessing, praxis describes the process by which the theory works on the apprehender (“what this sight is to work in us”). Andrewes’s taxonomic distinction between theory and praxis does not correspond neatly to any conventional distinction according to which theory provides a system of rules or beliefs, the working out of which is then illustrated or tested in practice. Rather, theoria carries the Greek, pre-transliterated meaning of a “viewing” or “beholding,” as in the use of “seeing” in Luke 23:48: “And all the multitudes who assembled to see the sight, when they saw what had taken place, returned home beating their breasts.”67 Yet even this distinction does not capture Andrewes’s meaning, since theory, for Andrewes, describes not simply the act of beholding but more specifically a proper interpretation or exegesis, that is, gleaning the significance of a religious utterance for practical conduct. Praxis, importantly, does not refer to any systematic process of moral habituation, of volitionally putting into practice the knowledge provided by theory. Praxis rather refers to the ways in which theory, once properly understood, itself acts on the witnesser, the “motions” that theory works in the penitent’s heart. Given Andrewes’s specialized understanding of the theory-practice dialectic, we would be wrong to assume that he reverts to the imitatio tradition of medieval Catholicism. At this point in his exegesis, Andrewes follows the young Luther in privileging Christ as sacramentum rather than exemplum. Rather than argue that conformitas Christi is achieved through similitudo, an active imitation, the young Luther, in contrast to his late medieval forbears, argued that Christ’s death and resurrection should be

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understood as signs and tokens of Christ’s actions on our behalf. Luther writes of Romans 10: “the apostle speaks here of the death and resurrection of Christ inasmuch as they are sacramentum and not inasmuch as they are exemplum.”68 Andrewes does not make direct reference to the distinction between Christ as sacramentum et exemplum, but his belief that praxis is an action that works on the witnesser suggests that once we fully “see” the significance of Christ’s example in Hebrews 12, we experience the praxis of the theologia crucis. Praxis ultimately describes an infused skill or motion of which the apprehender is made suddenly aware. If we return to Andrewes’s expositions of Hebrews 12, we find that Andrewes further distinguishes two “theories” which are “worth the seeing” in the example. The first, the “theory medicinal,” serves for “comfort to the conscience, stung and wounded with the remorse of sin.”69 Andrewes rejects the application of the medicinal theory in this particular case because it serves to “quiet the mind,” whereas the Passion ought to “move” the mind and “make it stir.”70 Thus Andrewes remarks that “there is then another ‘theory’ besides,” and “that is exemplary for imitation”: There He died, saith St. Peter, to leave unto us . . . relinquens nobis exemplum, ‘a pattern,’ an example to follow, and this is it, to this He calleth us; to have a directory use of it, to make it our pattern, to view it as our idea. And sure, as the Church under the Law needed not, so neither doth the Church under the Gospel need any other precept than this one, Inspice et fac, see and do according to the theory shewed thee in the mount . . .’71

To the extent that Christ provides a pattern for saving conduct, Andrewes finally does emphasize Christ as exemplum rather than sacramentum. The example is able “to teach all virtue new again,” of which Andrewes enumerates five particular virtues: faith, patience, humility, perseverance, and love. Each virtue is displayed in a particular aspect of the Passion; for example, patience in “enduring the cross,” and humility in “despising the shame.” Andrewes realizes, however, that he has complicated the precise causal link between theory and praxis: “Having had the theory, what is the praxis of this theory? what the conclusion of our contemplation? . . . That thus looking we run, or that thus looking we tire not. This is the practice of our theory.”72 Andrewes never precisely details the manner in which praxis is finally effected, but he suggests that an understanding of the theory of the cross enables one to emulate “St. Peter’s practice of the Passion, ‘to cease from sin.’ This abstractive force we shall find and feel; it will draw from us the delights of sin.”73 Theory thus informs practice simply because the knowledge of

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the Passion and its significance turns our will: “And He loving us so, if our hearts be not iron, yea if they be iron, they cannot choose but feel the magnetical force of his loadstone . . . Which, as it were the needle, our faith being but touched, will stir straight.”74 Andrewes’s considered view of the relationship between theory and practice approximates Luther’s eventual integration of Christ as sacrament and example, although Luther still held that the former should be emphasized over the latter. Luther warns, “Those people make a huge mistake who first try to block out their sins by good works and penitential practice, for they try to begin with Christ as exemplum when they ought to begin with Him as sacramentum.”75 For Andrewes, the narrative example provides deep knowledge of the signification of the Passion, the contemplation of which softens the heart, from which faith follows. To the extent, then, that Christ as sacrament and example is integrated, the former seems to provide the spark or motive force that enables the latter: once we fully theorize or see the significance of Christ’s Passion, praxis is effected in us, from which we can then begin the more literal “practice” of imitating Christ’s virtues. To a certain extent Andrewes resembles Hooker in arguing that the clear apprehension of moral truths, in this case narratively grounded truths, will draw the individual to Christ. Moral renewal, manifested in an affective bond with Christ, follows from propositional knowledge, itself culled from Biblical narrative. Andrewes concludes generically that faith is “made perfect by ‘works,’” at which point he acknowledges that the faithful grow in virtue according to a gradual process of moral renewal: “Every virtue is a stadium, and every act a step toward the end of our race. Beginning at humility, the virtue of the first setting out . . . and so proceeding from virtue to virtue, till we come to patience and perseverance, that keep the goal end.”76 Andrewes seems to be confident that he has offered a systematic account of the meaning and use of Christological exempla, the main lines of which, with the exception of his emphasis on the “perfective” nature of works, do not stray too far from the magisterial reformers belief in free grace and a bestowal of the attending supernatural virtues. At times, however, Andrewes seems to accord co-operative agency to the sinner during the theory phase of interpreting exempla: “We must, in a sort, work force to our nature, and per actum elicitum, as they term it in schools, inhibit our eyes, and even wean them from other more pleasing spectacles that better like them, or we shall do no good here, never make a true ‘theory’ of it.”77 The phrase “elicited acts” is used widely in scholastic ethics, usually referring to the power of the will to move itself to action. In Reformation theology “elicitation”

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ordinarily describes the gratuitous elicitation of grace and virtue by God. Andrewes’s emphasis on the responsible agency of the sinner to “work” force into his nature, “inhibit” his eyes, etc., suggests a pre-Reformation belief in, if not the unilateral moral agency of the sinner, at least a co-operation between the sinner and the biblical witness, which directly “works” on the sinner’s conscience. So Andrewes seems to introduce moral agency into his narrative Christology as a means of preparing the heart accurately to see theory, from which praxis, both as sacrament and example, may follow. Andrewes follows Hooker in isolating the cognitive side of moralism: although Hooker locates the ground of morality in universal, self-evident precepts, and Andrewes locates them in narrative examples, Andrewes’s theory loosely corresponds to Hooker’s natural laws, the accurate perception of which goes a way toward shaping moral conduct. But just as Hooker fails to develop a theory of postlapsarian moral education that might provide a grasp of natural laws, so Andrewes neglects to provide an account of the processes by which one “works force” in one’s nature in order properly to “see” and internalize narrative theory. As if realizing that an acknowledgment of the need for “special grace” will not in itself condition conduct, he gestures toward moral co-operation, yet leaves undertheorized the behavioral and moralistic aspects of such co-operative efforts.78 He does not consider the permissibility of a modified account of classical ethical training because he shares the Reformed disdain for “heathenish” virtue: “We will leave the heathen to their habits and habitualities, but with us Christians this is sure: whatsoever in us, or by us is wrought, that is, pleasing to God, it is wrought by the virtue of Christ’s resurrection . . . And whatsoever good is revived or brought again anew from us, it is all from the virtue of Christ’s rising again.”79 If the early English Reformers at times resort to an ethics of shame to guide conduct, and Hooker substitutes positive laws for teleological laws of reason, Andrewes (like Spenser), at times supplements his soteriology with an ethics of Godly fear that draws much from Old Testament legalism. Servile fear serves to deter evil conduct: This fear to suffer evil for sin, malum poenae, makes men fear to do the evil of sin, malum culpae; what they fear to suffer for, they fear to do. Keeps them from doing evil at all, makes them avoid it; or keeps them from doing evil still, makes them forsake it. It prevailed not only with Job in the Old, but with the Ninevites.80

Andrewes does, at times, attempt to incorporate fear into a regimen of moral training: fear has as its end the very mitigation of fear: “Where there happens a strange effect, that not to fear the next way is to fear. The kind

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work of fear is to make us ‘cease from sin.’ Ceasing from sin brings with it a good life; a good life, that ever carries with it a good conscience; and a good conscience casts out fear.”81 The endpoint of the fear of punishment is a purified conscience, which brings in its wake both humility and confidence. This first stage of fear, described by Andrewes as the “introduction,” prepares the heart to receive indwelling faith, which in turn is preserved by fear.82 Yet Andrewes is keenly aware that his ethics of fear can be seen as an unreconstructed reversion to legalism: “nor regard them not that say it [Godly fear] pertains not to the New Testament, fancying to themselves nothing must be done but out of pure love. For even there it abideth.”83 Andrewes justifies his claim by referencing Paul’s comments on fear in Corinthians – “knowing then this fearful judgment, we persuade men,” – although the balance of his exegesis is devoted to a discussion of fear as referenced in Proverbs, Isaiah, Ecclesiastes, Hebrews, Acts, and Deuteronomy. The important point is that Andrewes does not bend Old Testament notions of a fearsome God to a gospel ethic of love; rather, he appropriates gospel references of fear to Old Testament legalism. In one sermon, Andrewes remarks that Godly fear is justified less because it has Mosaic warrant than because it makes sound philosophical and rational sense: As it is good philosophy, unumquodque propter operationem suam, so this is sure, it is sound divinity, unusquisque recipiet secundum operationem suam. At our coming back from the dead . . . we shall be disposed of according to them [good works]; receive we shall, every man ‘according to his works.’ And when it comes to going, they that have done good works shall go into everlasting life; and they, not that have done evil, but they that have not done good, shall go – you know whither.84

In this frank apology for a retributive ethic, the threat of going “whither” (presumably the torments of hell need no lurid elaboration to sway Andrewes’s auditors) is a necessary, if not sufficient condition, to ensure the performance of works. Moral retributivism is described by Andrewes not as a mere waystation to higher forms of faith, but as a fundamental source of normativity itself: “the root of immortality, the same is the root of virtue – but one and the same root both.”85 And if an acknowledgment of this ground of normativity effectively motivates heathens to refrain from vice, Andrewes remarks elsewhere, it should appeal to Christians as well: vice is so pernicious that it shuts us “out of Heaven whither we would come,” incurs the “greatest loss and poena damni,” and presses us “down to hell

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which we fainest would fly, the greatest torment and poena sensus;” for these reasons, “even the heathen believed the joys and pains of another world.”86 Just how far Andrewes has strayed from the magisterial reformers’ position on fear in relation to love can be glimpsed from a few passages in Luther’s commentary on Galatians: [Christ] sitteth in Heaven at the right hand of his Father, not as a judge, but made unto us of God, wisdom, righteousness, holiness and redemption . . . Here no sin is perceived, no terror or remorse of conscience is felt; for in this heavenly righteousness sin can have no place: for there is no law, and where no law is, there can be no transgression [Rom, 4:15]. Seeing then that sin hath here no place, there can be no anguish of conscience, no fear, no heaviness.87

Luther would agree with Andrewes that fear serves a purpose at the early stages of repentance; as Luther notes, “true repentance beginneth at the fear and judgment of God.”88 But for Luther fear is not tied, even in its initial stages, directly to moral consequentialism; fear is a saving response to one’s awareness of the difficulty of obeying moral law, and fear does not prevail after the conferral of faith as a means to secure godliness. Not only does Andrewes depart from the Reformed distinction between filial and servile fear; his employment of Godly fear itself strays from the letter and spirit of the role that fear serves in Wisdom literature. Many of the Wisdom texts that Andrewes mines for references to Godly fear tie fear to moral renovation. For instance, Proverbs announces that “fear is the beginning of wisdom,” but individual proverbs, Proverb 2, for example, go on to instruct youth to acquire a cluster of intellectual and behavioral virtues, including wisdom, justice, righteousness, and equity, all of which help build ethical character; ethical character, in turn, is oriented to establishing parental obedience, the marriage covenant, and other forms of communal life (30–38). Qoheleth, in Ecclesiastes, enjoins the fear and reverence of God in numerous places, but fear in Ecclesiastes serves not despotically to threaten or punish, but to highlight the epistemological chasm separating man from God, and to remind the devout that they labor in vain to understand God’s providentialism. Instead of exhorting obedience to maxims and rules, Qoheleth encourages the development of virtuous character as a means of coping with the vanities and limitations of creaturely existence.89 The moral lessons of Ecclesiastes begin with fear but end with an approximation of what Charles Taylor terms, in a much different context, the “affirmation of everyday life,” a pragmatic ethic of holy living that inevitably results from voluntaristic theology.90 Andrewes lifts the richly textured Wisdom treatment of fear out of its characterological context:

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simply put, the fear reflex legislates conduct by scaring the regenerate and unregenerate into obedience. So, when faced with the question of the relationship of ethical theory to practice, or the relationship between normativity and bindingness, Andrewes introduces malum poenae as a means of supplementing his narrative Christology. This sort of accommodation (more like a compromise) complicates Shuger’s account of Andrewes’s participatory consciousness. As I have already noted, Shuger argues that Andrewes replaces a philosophy of natural laws and secondary causation with a “participatory consciousness,” in which boundaries between typical binary theological pairs are dissolved: “The strict dichotomization of word and thing, text and history, subject and object, nature and supernature, knower and known seems relatively absent; instead everything seems capable of fusing or merging with everything else.”91 Shuger remarks further that Andrewes’s participatory consciousness informs his spiritual psychology and soteriology. Unlike the experimental Puritans, Andrewes, as well as Hooker, rejects covenantalism and assurance, thus arguing that the experience of fear, desolation, and “forsakenness” is fundamental to the soteriological experience. As such the “intellectual contents” of faith are replaced with affective inwardness and theological emotionalism: participatory consciousness assumes that the desire to unite with God in the face of doubt and despair is itself a sign of faith: “To the extent that faith is not propositional belief but theocentric emotionality – an overriding need for God that may subsist with conscious disbelief in His existence or His love – it incorporates desolation as it incorporates joy.”92 Shuger thus concludes that in Andrewes’s sermons an emphasis on spiritual psychology and affective inwardness leads to a neglect of ethical concerns: “In Hooker and Andrewes . . . the conviction that spiritual suffering forms the problem of faith entails a marginalization of ethical concern. The virtues most commended in the sermons are those most relevant to the problem of inward pain and disbelief: patience, endurance, humility . . . Otherwise, the sermons contain very little moral content.”93 I have been suggesting, however, that rather than marginalize ethical concern, Andrewes’s bid to incorporate ethics into his soteriology at times results in an ethic of fearing rather than loving God. At the point that his narrative ethics meets his soteriology, his participatory framework collapses, since Godly fear reintroduces the epistemological and ontological gulf between the individual and God that his Christology attempts to narrow. Andrewes’s participatory soteriology sits uneasily with his absolutist legalism. The fundamental difference, then, between Hooker and

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Andrewes is that Hooker’s universalist ethics is degraded into civic legalism, while Andrewes’s dismissal of the bindingness of natural laws forces him to impose ethics on soteriology. Both theologians are thus intensely interested in moralism, yet neither is able to unproblematically integrate moral theory and practice. What separates both Hooker and Andrewes from seventeenth-century Puritan ethics, to which we now turn, is the Puritan refusal to make such a legalistic accommodation of ethical theory. puritan covenantalism: conscience and love Puritans seem to avoid the compromises Andrewes makes by promoting the covenant of grace as a means of contracting the devout to God. While the covenant of works, God’s contract with Adam, demands outward service as a condition of grace, the new covenant with Abraham upholds service through faith, usually defined epistemologically as a firm belief in Christ’s sacrifices. Under the new covenant, God exercises his potentia ordinata to renew the sinner’s faculties of will and intellect. Unlike their antinomian critics, covenanters such as William Perkins and William Ames assume that assurance of having met the terms of God’s contract is detectable through a reflex act of the sinner’s renewed faculties. Antinomians rather argue that covenantal assurance occurs during the moment of justification, marked by Christ’s embodiment of converted sinners.94 william perkins (1558–1602): from covenant to co nscience William Perkins, the leading English Puritan writer of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, outlines the covenant of grace in his systematic treatise, A Golden Chaine (1603): The covenant of grace is that whereby God freely promising Christ and of his benefits, exacts again of man that he would by faith receive Christ and repent of his sins . . . The covenant albeit it be one in substance, yet it is distinguished into the old and new testament. The old testament, or covenant, is that which in types and shadows prefigured Christ to come and to be exhibited. The new testament declareth Christ already come in the flesh and is apparently showed in the gospel . . . The end and use of the gospel is first to manifest that righteousness in Christ whereby the whole law is fully satisfied and salvation attained.95

The covenant with Abraham is contingent on faith in Christ’s satisfaction, rather than external performance as a means to acquire grace. It is not

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the case that God offers grace in return for faith or works; rather God offers assurance of prevenient grace to those who dedicate themselves to his word. The goal of meeting the requirement of the covenant is thus fundamentally epistemological rather than ontological: by fulfilling their obligation, converts stand to gain knowledge and certainty of election, rather than a fundamental change in ethical character. The natural means by which believers acquire assurance is, as has been noted briefly in an earlier chapter, a reflex act, by which the renewed faculties, especially the conscience, syllogistically reason out the status of one’s assurance. Thus Perkins notes in A Discourse of Conscience (1596): “This certentie is by little and little conceived in a forme of reasoning or practicall syllogisme framed in the mind by the holy ghost in this manner: Every one that beleeves, is the child of God. But I doe beleeve, Therefore I am the child of God.”96 Perkins’s emphasis on the drawn-out process of the reflex act is crucial to understanding the extent to which Puritan theology attempted to incorporate moralism and regeneration into the structure of the new covenant. One of Perry Miller’s greatest contributions to our understanding of covenant theology is his emphasis on the complex ways in which it attempts to integrate Platonic notions of self-evident rules of conduct (as theorized in Puritan Ramism) with an Aristotelian belief that theological and ethical notions are perceived through the sensory apparatus, the created faculties and natural orders. As converts prove their devotion through worship, expressions of belief, and sacramentalism, God gradually renews the very human faculties – will, intellect, conscience – through which converts mediate the realms of nature and supernature.97 Thus Perkins describes sanctifying righteousness as a process “by which a Christian in his minde, in his will, and in his affections is freede from the bondage and tyranny of sinne and Sathan, and is by little and little inabled through the Spirit of Christ to desire and approve that which is good, and to walke in it. And it hath two parts, The first is mortification, when the power of sinne is continually weakened, consumed, and diminished. The second is Vivification, by which inherent righteousnes is really put into them, and afterward is continually increased.”98 While we have seen versions of this view of sanctification before, Perkins stresses that while his Catholic antagonists hold that certainty of assurance cannot be achieved due to the fundamentally uneven nature of moral conduct, the inborn faculty of conscience is responsible for differentiating excusable moral failings from sinful conduct that stems from a corrupt will: “Morall certenty is that which proceedes from sanctification and good workes, as signes and tokens of true faith. This wee both allowe, yet with some difference. For they esteeme all

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certenty that comes by workes to be uncerten and often to deceive: but wee doe otherwise if the workes be done in uprightnesse of heart.”99 Conscience for Perkins is the primary faculty through which covenanters discern certainty of personal assurance. As such, it functions mostly to salve the soul, to excuse rather than accuse: “It is the will of God to which he hath bound us in conscience, to beleeve the remission of our own sinnes: and therefore rather not to doe it is presumptuous disobedience.”100 Yet given his focus on the moral intentions rather than successes or failures of particular acts, Perkins expands the role of conscience to include judgment passed on those actions that are knowingly or intentionally sinful: And though it be the office of conscience after it is once renewed principally to excuse, yet doth it also in part accuse . . . Neither must it seeme strange that one and the same conscience should both accuse and excuse; because it doth it not in one and the same respect. It excuseth, in that is assureth a man that his person standes righteous before God, and that the hath an indeavour in the generall course of his life to please God: it accuseth him for his particular slippes, and for the wants that be in his good actions . . .101

Unlike the earlier sixteenth-century English Calvinists, Perkins installs conscience as the last arbiter (among created faculties) of the moral value of sanctified actions. Conscience figures centrally in nearly all of Perkins’s practical writings. In his Treatise Unto a Declaration, an interlocutor asks, “Show me one rule how I might . . . behave myself among men,” to which his advisor responds: Ask your own conscience what you may or ought to do. Would you men did so with you? Then do you it. Would you not be so dealt with? Then do it not . . . Do you no such thing then unto your neighbours, but as loath as you would be to buy false ware and too dear for undoing yourself, so loath be you to sell false ware or too dear for undoing your neighbor . . .102

Conscience evaluates whether a particular action will conform to scriptural law, in this case the golden rule of Matthew 7:12, which outlines the precepts governing neighbor-regard. To a certain extent, this office of conscience resembles the earlier neo-scholastic function of conscience, which as we have seen, serves to bridge universal laws, perceived by the synteresis, with moral singulars. Yet the neo-scholastic conscience operates principally to evaluate the general-specific fitness between moral law and past conduct, whereas Perkins’s conscience provides not only reasons for action, but also the behavioral impetus to act on the decisions that conscience has reached. Conscience should ideally serve not only as an intellectual faculty, but something akin to a virtuous disposition of character in its ability to provide

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the proper justification of and desire impelling morally appraisable conduct. If we are about to lie or swear in ordinary conversation, conscience will check our behavior: “Despise not civil honesty: good conscience and good manners go together. Therefore remember to make conscience of lying and customable swearing in common talk”;103 when we struggle to keep the sabbath, conscience helps us to see through our commitments: “every man is bound in conscience before God to surcease from the duties of his calling on the sabbath day . . .”;104 and if we are deciding whether to quit our particular vocations, conscience will help arbitrate our decision: “no man is to lay down the calling wherein he is placed, till he can say by some warrant in his conscience that it is the good will and pleasure of God that he shall then resign and cease to do the duties thereof any longer.”105 Conscience thus provides the motivational force to action, seemingly replacing the need for moral habituation or similar training in virtue. But this still leaves unaddressed the normative question – “Why ought one to obey the dictates of one’s conscience?” – as well as the correlative question – “How can conscience control desires that act contrary to its dictates?” One answer is that we should bear in mind, Perkins advises, that “Every man’s ill conscience is to him like the fire of hell; and doubtless the torment of conscience is a part of the very real torment of hell.”106 But Perkins wants to avoid erecting a transparent system of rewards and punishments. He reminds his readers that they do not routinely experience their consciences as “fires of hell,” since when they deviate from the right or the good, God’s equity and mercy screens out what we actually experience from what our consciences present to our intellects: “If every man had but justice he should feel presently after every sin the very torment of hell, namely the sting and torment of a guilty accusing conscience. But see the mercy and moderation of God: he inflicts it not presently, but only gives the sinner a prick, or a little pang (as it were) when he hath sinned . . .”107 Under the aspect of divine equity, the sinner is spared from a disabling confrontation with his noumenal conscience, the substructural hell within that expresses itself in nudges or pricks rather than as a tormenting reality. Yet, Perkins accepts that these barely perceptible or insignificant pricks will often not carry overriding ethical weight to convince us to follow our consciences. So he positions God as a second-order “conscience,” a synoptic judge of the quality of the individual’s responsiveness to his or her first-order conscience: “Be ye equal and moderate one towards another, for God is ready in his great and general judgment to judge all men . . . God is present with every man and at every action to testify and judge of it, and

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either to approve it and reward it, if it be upright, equal and merciful: or to correct and punish it, if it be extreme and void of equity.”108 To the extent that conscience, which otherwise seems to be invested with authoritative power, is itself directly subject to God’s witness, one wonders what independent authority Perkins finally grants to any individual conscience. That is, God’s continuous presence as judge seems to render the role of conscience potentially redundant: it is not clear whether the prompts of an individual’s conscience move the intellect and will, or the palpable awareness of God’s conviction reforms the individual’s conscience. The internal conscience is necessary, it seems, precisely as a means to circumvent the need for sanctions and benefits as primary motivators of goodness. Presumably, to follow one’s conscience is to act for conscience’s sake: the source of normativity ideally stops there. God maintains the role of second-order conscience simply as a moral failsafe, reminding the sinner only during hard cases of the “fire of hell” that brims just beneath the surface of one’s private conscience: “Consider therefore when the judge of all judges, the lord of heaven and earth, stands by and seeth and marks all thy actions, whether they be towards thy brother as his is towards thee. This ought to make the greatest man on earth fear how he deals cruelly or hardly with his brother.”109 Perkins builds up conscience precisely as a means of downgrading the importance of an instrumentalized system of rewards and punishments. Yet, he retains a sense of the regulative force of fear or damnation as an emergency device. Perkins’s theory of conscience is consistent with what historians of Puritanism have described as the “as-if ” nature of covenant theology. Ames and Perkins, as Janice Knight notes, not only preached the omnipotence of God in relation to the divine contract, but also implied that “on the practical level man was responsible.”110 Knight concludes that Ames, and implicitly Perkins, exhort “auditors ‘as if ’ faith were a condition of the covenant, contingent on human action. Practically speaking, the doctrine of the covenant became an exhortation to the saints to work out his or her salvation with fear and trembling . . .”111 Similar logic applies to the use and experience of conscience: for a saint to act with moral probity suggests that he or she has followed the trusty guidance of conscience, the final arbiter of moral evaluation; yet every saint is also a sinner, so in reality the saint acts “as if ” he or she obeys conscience, the underlying source of normativity being the fear of divine penalty. In addition to Knight, John Coolidge is one of the few modern historians who underlines this sort of tension between disinterested and mercenary virtue in the covenant theology of Perkins and his contemporaries: “While the sense in which the Covenant of Grace is

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absolute allows the preacher to reassure the soul under his tutelage, the sense in which it is conditional allows him still to use the good old anxieties for all they are worth.”112 These “good old anxieties” raised in Perkins’s theological writings distinguish his soteriology from that of another leading mid-seventeenth century Puritan divine, Richard Sibbes, whose Christological love ethic seems unexpectedly antinomian when judged in relation to Perkins’s soteriological mingling of conscientousness, legalism, and fear. richard sibbes (1577–1635): an et hics of love The most recent and influential revision of Perry Miller’s classic narrative of Puritan orthodoxy can be found in Janice Knight’s Orthodoxies in Massachusetts. In place of what she describes as Miller’s overly monological survey of the covenant theology of the English divines and their New England counterparts, Knight distinguishes the seventeenth-century “Intellectual Fathers” from the “Spiritual Brethren.”113 The Intellectual Fathers include those New England Puritans – principally Thomas Hooker, Thomas Shepherd, and Peter Bulkeley – who support the federal or covenant theology of Perkins and Ames. The New England Spiritual Brethren – John Cotton, William Davenport, and others – follow the Cambridge theologians, particularly John Preston and Richard Sibbes, in viewing the covenant in terms of an affective, rather than purely fiduciary bond. In the remaining pages of this chapter, I would like to extend Knight’s account of these Puritan orthodoxies by focusing on the love theology of Richard Sibbes, another leading mid-century English Puritan, in relation to our ongoing moralistic concerns: the construction of virtuous character, ethical conditioning, and regenerative grace. Sibbes’s presentation of the covenant of grace approximates in its main lines that of Perkins: Christ is the foundation of the covenant of grace, by his humiliation and by his exaltation, whereof the resurrection was the first degree. Now, in this as in other covenants, there is the party promising, making the covenant, and the parties that answer in the covenant. God promises life everlasting, forgiveness of sin, through the death of Christ, the mediator. We answer by faith, that we rely upon God’s mercy in Christ; this is the answer of conscience.114

Sibbes, like Perkins, describes regeneration as the principle stage under which the covenant is carried out, the judgments of conscience working to discern personal assurance. Yet where Perkins is preoccupied with faculty psychology, the mediatorial role of the renewed intellect and will working

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in tandem to reunite the sinner to God, Sibbes emphasizes the immediacy of the “seal” (Ephesians 1:13) that joins the justified sinner with Christ, the imprinting of Christ’s image on the convert. To perceive the nature of this imprint is to understand assurance: once the sinner recognizes his own ills, as well as the good that is in Christ, he is “moved by the Holy Ghost” to embrace reconciliation in the Lord Jesus: “then a superadded work is vouchsafed unto us; for the Spirit daily perfecteth his own work.”115 Once the work of regeneration begins, however, the disciple’s righteous motions, which facilitate his or her embrace of the good, are continually bolstered by Christ’s motive force: Every good thought is from grace . . . There is nothing good in us. He requires obedience that he may work it when he requires it . . . When he commands us to believe and obey, he gives us grace to believe and obey. It is ourselves that answer, but not from ourselves, but from grace. Yet notwithstanding, let us make this use of it, let us search ourselves, though it be not from ourselves, that we answer God’s promise by faith and his command by obedience . . .116

Sibbes allows no co-operative agency on man’s part during sanctification since God does not renew created faculties; Christ rather inhabits the sanctified individual, and is held responsible for every perception of grace and proper action. The force of “notwithstanding” points to the difficulty of reconciling Sibbes’s doctrine of salvation with the English Calvinist belief in the gradual actualization of holiness during sanctification. For Sibbes, all moral conduct is sourced in Christ: “Every renewed work in us comes from Christ.”117 Sibbesian occasionalism is nowhere more evident than in his criticism of classical virtue theory in relation to ethical habituation: Now the spirit guides us not immediately, but it works a habit in us, as we call it, it works somewhat in us to that which is good. And when that is wrought, the Spirit guides us to every particular action . . . [we] have need of grace for every particular action. And herein the soul is like to the air . . . So a man is no wiser in particular actions than God will make him on the sudden . . . so all our wisdom, all the direction we have to lead our lives as becomes Christians, it comes from Christ, it comes from grace; not only the disposition, but likewise every particular action . . . It was a proud term the philosophers had, as I said, sometimes they called their moral virtues habits; and if we consider them merely as they are in the person, they are habits, but indeed they are graces . . . grace is a fitter word than habit, because then we consider them as they come from God freely.118

Most Puritans would agree with Sibbes that virtues should not be described as classically defined states of character or hexeis. And most would agree that well-intentioned conduct is assisted by regenerating grace, ad extra. Sibbes takes an extreme position by baldly emphasizing that every particular action is directly tied to discrete infusions of grace. Since Sibbes does not

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elaborate, as Perkins does, a standard taxonomy of causes in which God covenants himself to work through creaturely agency, Sibbes implies that grace relates to virtue as an immediately motivating cause. Yet how does one explain moral reversals and backsliding in the context of Sibbesian occasionalism? How and to what end does Christ withdraw his grace? Sibbes believes that God’s effulgent love is the most immediate manifestation of grace and virtue. The contract between individual and God is recast as a union of love between Christ and the justified sinner: “Our love is but a reflection of his; and therefore if we have love to anything that is good, we have it from him first . . . There is no such thing as spiritual love growing in our natures and hearts.”119 When Christ’s love is availing, the immediate effect is vertical love for God – “It draws us upwards, and makes us heavenly minded.”120 When Christ withdraws his love, the immediate effect is despair, although the ideal, saving effect of theological despair should be a desire for reunion that eventually issues in righteousness: He absents himself for our good, to make us more humble and watchful for the time to come; more pitiful to others; more to prize our former condition; to justify the ways of God more strictly; to walk with him; to regain that sweet communion which by our negligence and security we lost. When we are thus prepared by his absence, there ensues a more satisfying discovery of himself than ever before.121

While Perkins and Ames describe sanctified moral success as a suppression of the residual old man by the newly created faculties, Sibbes describes moral success as an ability to withstand Christ’s periodical withdrawal of love. Thus, while Perkins conceptualizes the seat of moral conduct as a refashioned character, a substantial positive change or renewed presence (the “new man”), Sibbes understands moral conduct as directed by Christ’s now present, now absent love. Christ’s love thus works not only through the force of its barely apprehensible, numinous seal, but also by the desire that is excited by its very absence. In her recent study of love, among other passions, Martha Nussbaum suggests that the “object relations” school of psychoanalysis offers the best account of love in relation to developmental ethics.122 Sibbes’s love ethic so uncannily approaches the view of love offered by object relations theory that we might pause to reflect on the similarities. Leading object relations theorists – Winnicot, Fairbairn, and Bowles – suggest that children learn how to relate to the external world through initial attachments to transitional objects, principally a nurturing, parental figure. The child’s entrance into the world of intersubjective relations requires a transitional object that responds to its needs for nurturance and love. To the extent, however, that

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transitional objects are not always available to respond immediately to the child’s needs, the child gradually acclimates to the despair experienced upon the withdrawal or non-responsiveness of its transitional object. The ideal, “good enough” parent, to use Winnicott’s well-known phrase, will strike an optimal balance between responsiveness and non-responsiveness, allowing the child to develop autonomy during those periods when the relational object is out of reach. Sibbes’s love ethic too requires that Christ, as relational object, provides comfort when present and initial despair is absent. The converted sinner – newly born into Christ’s loving embrace – ideally will learn to draw on the memory and lingerings of Christ’s love when such love is not immediately availing; this, in turn, inspires hope and strengthens character: When we are in such a seeming forlorn estate, let us have recourse to former experience. What is the reason that God vouchsafes his children for the most part in the beginning of their conversion, in their first love, experience of his love to ravishment? It is, that afterwards they may have recourse to that love of God then felt, to support themselves, and withal to stir up endeavors, and hope; that finding it not so well with them now as formerly it hath been, by comparing state with state, desires may be stirred up to be as they were, or rather better . . .123

Of course, divine love functions recursively, rather than transitionally in Sibbes’s soteriology, so one should not press too far the developmental analogy with object relations theory. But what the object relations context does help us to see is the extent to which Sibbes’s love ethic, for all its pietistic rhetoric and affective spiritualism, fundamentally assumes an element of penitential self-interest or instrumentality. Converts who experience Christ’s momentary withdrawal of love are impelled toward moralism by a desire to offset a feeling of bereftness; they desire to regain the fullness and satisfaction that they have merely tasted upon first receiving Christ’s love (just as the child’s frustrated desires ultimately enhance coping skills). To the extent that they obey moral law during these periods in which love is reduced, Sibbesian converts are not necessarily acting out of a simple respect or love for the moral law, which ought to be a fundamental result of grace. They rather act out of a persistent longing for spiritual comfort, which lies somewhere in a hazy area between a self-interested motive for action and a purely selfless or saintly devotionalism. Yet, relative to the more categorical compromises we have seen in earlier ethical systems – most of which introduce shame or servile fear as last resorts – Sibbes’s moral system emerges as one of the least compromised we have thus far encountered.

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There is another minor, speculative complaint one might make of Sibbes’s love ethic. Sibbes believes that Christ’s guiding love can provide the spiritual strength to muddle through temporal combats and ills. Talk with a man that is in any heat of affections, you talk with one that is not at home, you talk with one absent. The soul is more where it loves than where it swells. Surely where love is in any strength it draws up the soul, so that a man oftimes, in his calling and ordinary employments, doth not heed them, but passeth though the world as a man at random. He regards not the things of the world; for Christ is gotten into his heart, and draws all the affections to himself. Where the affection of love is strong, it cares not what it suffers for the party loved. Nay it glories in it. As it is said of the disciples, when they were whipped and scourged for preaching the gospel, it was a matter of glory to them.124

One reads this passage and wonders about the negative, practical repercussions of Sibbes’s love ethic. Sibbes often implies that the disciple and God (or Christ) are bound in such a closed circuit of love that the love ethic unavoidably marginalizes pastoral concerns and mundane ethical matters. To a certain extent Sibbes follows Luther, rather than Augustine, in emphasizing God’s free and unmerited bestowal of love (agape), rather than Augustinian caritas, or self-interested ascending love for God. Yet, as we will see in a later chapter, Lutheran agape is as closely tied to outward service and neighbor-love as it is answerable love for God and obedience to the first commandment. Sibbes’s Christological love ethic seems to displace the centrality of horizontal love, including outward service, to the experience of regeneration. The passage above comes close to devaluing the importance of created orders and divinely sanctioned vocations – individuals who overflow with love pass through these orders “randomly” – even as it exalts the glorious evangelizing that issues from a loving union with Christ. Sibbes’s compartmentalization of love leaves little space for those ordinary covenanters who have prepared their hearts to receive Christ’s love but whose workaday lives are still tied to particular callings.

chap t e r 4

The elect body in pain: Godly fear and sanctification in John Donne’s poetry and prose

In an influential interpretation of John Donne’s religious poetry, John Stachniewski argues that doctrinal Calvinism underwrites the expressions of passivity, fear, and resentment in Donne’s Holy Sonnets. After tracing the influence of the Calvinist emphasis on total depravity, double predestination, and prevenient grace in Donne’s religious lyrics, Stachniewski concludes that “the sonnets reveal that Donne experienced tormented doubt of his salvation in a way not dissimilar to [the] Calvinist despairers.”1 In response to such a one-sidedly Calvinist reading of the sonnets – a reading that Stachniewski shares with John Carey and, with certain qualifications, Barbara Lewalski – Richard Strier has provocatively argued that Donne’s Holy Sonnets are not consistently Calvinist in theology, and that throughout the Holy Sonnets, Donne alternates between on the one hand an “Erasmian belief in repentance as a means to salvation,” and on the other hand a mainstream Reformation belief in “passively received, justified righteousness.”2 In advancing his argument, Strier suggests that Stachniewski and others have mistakenly linked the Holy Sonnets and Calvinism because Donne’s evident preoccupation with religious fear, broadly defined, is a preoccupation that runs throughout Reformation theology and Puritan sermons. Strier rightly questions such an affiliation by pointing out that Calvinist theology, particularly the doctrine of justification by faith, was not meant to inspire fear but rather “the sweetness of psychological comfort” and the experience of assurance. As Strier remarks, “contra Carey, the temptation to despair and the desire for assurance were good, not bad signs – ‘comfortable’ ones, the preachers would have said.”3 Acknowledging that the experience of theological fear is prominent in Donne’s poetry, Strier concludes that during his middle period, Donne did not see his religious experience in a distinctly Calvinist way, and that Donne’s unabating expressions of doubt should be interpreted as doubt about the means to rather than status of salvation: “In the ‘Holy Sonnets,’ Donne clearly did not see his experience in a truly Bunyanesque way. It should be stated that there is a difference 115

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between being in doubt about your own salvation and being in doubt about the very means or method of salvation. I will try to demonstrate that the latter sort of doubt is present in many of the ‘Holy Sonnets.’”4 I argue in the following chapter that because Donne’s critics have not elaborated the Pauline distinction between the stages of justification and sanctification in the ordo salutis, they have not situated Donne’s Holy Sonnets in their proper theological context. The speaker in some of the more puzzling of the Holy Sonnets (Sonnets 1, 6, and 19 in the 1635 edition) is not in doubt about the means to or status of his justification. The speaker is in doubt about his ability to maintain his sanctification that has followed from justification, and he often exploits the ambiguous nature of the differences between the two interfused stages of the order of salvation. The speaker is concerned not with the proper means to attain the new man, but rather with the extent to which he has successfully abandoned the old man and grown in sanctified holiness. Since the circumstances leading to the “death” of the old man are routinely described by early modern theologians in terms similar to the death of the body as such, the speaker of the Holy Sonnets is able provocatively to blur distinctions between his impending physical death and the metaphorical death of his corrupt nature. As we have begun to see in preceding chapters, Reformed theology held that filial fear enters into the saint’s life most prominently and influentially during the stage of regeneration, prompting the justified sinner to mortify the flesh as a means to avoid excessive confidence in his election. Since the speaker of the sonnets represents himself as well advanced in the order of salvation, but is unsure of the status of the relationship between his old and new natures, he exhibits primarily the filial fear of falling away from his election rather than a servile fear of unrepentant death and damnation. Yet, to simply draw out Donne’s preoccupation with filial rather than servile fear overlooks the innovations Donne introduces into basic Reformed ideas on the relation between fear and virtue. None of the other writers and theologians discussed in this study is as preoccupied as Donne with the travails of the body, including bodily disease, physical degeneration, and vexed body-soul relations. I will be arguing that the Reformed tension between salvation theory and morality emerges in Donne’s writings at the point at which theological dogma meets the reality of Donne’s diseased, fear-inducing body. The soteriological duality of the Holy Sonnets stems from this uniquely Donnean conflict between theological theory and bodily praxis: on the one hand Donne seems assured of his election, his filial fear serving as a fruit or sign of his regeneration. On the other hand, Donne is so intensely attuned to the degradations of his body, constantly

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reminded of the possibility of painful death and damnation, that he returns again and again to the realm of servile fear. Thus, while many of the theologians described in the previous chapter supplement their soteriological theory with chastening invocations of servile fear, Donne’s diseased body itself renders such prudential supplements unnecessary. d onne’s f ilial f ear Donne’s contemporaries follow Calvin in arguing that filial fear is intimately connected to sanctification. In A Sermon of the Nature and Necessitie of Godly Feare (1616), William Case familiarly distinguishes between “servile” and “filial” fear: “the servile feare doth feare God because hee is just and powerfull, the filiall feare because hee is good and mercifull. The servile fear doth bridle sin, the filial feare doth provoke unto righteousnesse.”5 Case then explains the relationship among filial fear, election, and sanctification, observing that while the saints should experience both servile and filial fear as components of regeneration, filial fear should predominate: “Inasmuch as a Christian man is an Hypostasis, consisting of two natures, which the Scripture notes out by the Flesh and the Spirit, the Old Man and the New, and such like, therfore are both of these feares required, the one to restraine the power of sinne, the other to set forward the powers of righteousness. Yet not both in the same degree of respect,” since servile fear is simply a “‘preparative’ to filial fear.”6 This stress on the importance of Godly fear to regeneration frequently appears in seventeenth-century treatises specifically devoted to explaining the nature of the saint’s ascent toward glorification, a state of perfection that can only be fully secured in the afterlife. In The Right Use of Promises, or A Treatise of Sanctification, Jeremiah Lewis defines sanctification as a “growing towards perfecting holinesse,” noting that “wee have the meanes how wee may doe this, The feare of God; Perfecting holinesse in the feare of God.”7 In The Saint’s Qualification, John Preston closes his discussion of regeneration by exhorting his listeners to “learne to depend on Christ with much feare, to take heed of putting off the worke, when he cals, take heed of denying him . . . you might be bold to put off your Repentance, but take heed of that, when it is God that workes in you, when God must doe it, and hee doth when hee lists, when it is the Spirit that doth it, and it breathes when and where it lists; this may make you feare and tremble.”8 Later in the century, John Browne, following Calvin, cites 2 Philippians as a reminder that justified sinners should not proceed to grow in sanctified holiness with “too much self-confidence,” since “God may, in justice and

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mercy, suffer corruption to break loose upon such . . . and tread them underfoot, to learne them afterward to carry more soberly; and to work out their salvation with fear and trembling.”9 Before turning to Donne’s sermons and the Holy Sonnets in the above context, it will be helpful briefly to distinguish the English Protestant and Catholic views of fear in relation to justification and regeneration, particularly since Donne’s commentators have often argued that Donne’s poetry belies his Catholic inheritance. The Catholic position on justification, ratified at the Council of Trent, and promulgated forcefully by sixteenth-century Jesuit controversialists like Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, holds that justification describes not simply a declarative act of imputation, but rather a bestowal of inherent righteousness. The Tridentine position diverges fundamentally from the Protestant view in its assumption that, since co-operative grace enables converts to grow in holiness, justification and regeneration do not describe fundamentally distinct moments or stages in the order of salvation. Furthermore, Tridentine Catholics contend that grace can be lost through mortal sin, after which meritorious works de congruo (works that God might or might not credit) can help sinners regain their spiritual elevation. Importantly, the Catholic belief that grace might be forsaken should not be conflated with Protestant backsliding, the latter of which does not signify any quantity of grace lost, but rather a temporary deflation of personal assurance.10 With respect to the role of emotions like Godly fear or love in these contrasting schemas of conversion, Catholics more often view fear as a means to acquire grace than as a Godly passion that inevitably results from justification. In his refutation of Bellarmine’s treatise of justification, John Piscator, Protestant polemicist and contemporary of Donne, takes Bellarmine to task for arguing that fear, along with love, might contribute to justification as much as faith itself. Attempting to merge Aprocryphal commentaries on fear and wisdom with Gospel statements on justification, Bellarmine claims, for example, that fear itself justifies according to a pronouncement in Ecclesiastes: “He that is without feare, cannot be justified.”11 Faith partly justifies, Bellarmine concludes, “because it is the beginning of justice and salvation: but the feare of the Lord is the beginning of wisdome, Prov. 1, and by wisdome is understood perfect justification.”12 Piscator responds with a neo-scholastic rebuttal, arguing that the motions of fear, wisdom, and hope are simply human qualities and so cannot justifiy. In Piscator’s view, Bellarmine erroneously views justification as a gradual process, in which faith serves as the beginning of justification, the development of which requires meritorious expressions of not only fear, but also hope, and love. For Piscator, however, justification is a momentous

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act, while sanctification proper describes the process of realizing holiness; rather than meriting grace; sanctified fear figures as a byproduct of complete justification.13 Much has been written about Donne’s preoccupation with Catholicism despite his apostasy and his having taken Anglican orders in 1613. While Donne’s critics are no doubt right to point out some of the marks of Catholicism in Donne’s poetry, Donne is typically Protestant on the more technical issue of the interrelations of justification and sanctification, although like all the writers discussed in this book, his view of the relationship between the stages of salvation and moral behavior is less easily classifiable, especially when he theorizes the moralistic applications of Godly fear. First, Donne rejects the Catholic belief in synergistic or cooperative grace: “We should banish all self-subsistence, all attributing of any power, to any faculty of our own; either by preoperation . . . or by such a cooperation, as should put God and man in Commission together . . .”14 Second, although he does not provide any systematic account of the distinction between justification and sanctification, Donne, unlike the Catholics, describes sanctification as a stage unto itself in which converts display their faith and thereby attempt to bolster personal assurance: “Christ gives us life abundantius illis, better meanes of eternall life then to Gentile or Jew, and abundantantius ipsis; better, that is, nearer assurance, in our growth of grace, and encrease of Sanctification every day . . .”15 Most important, for our purposes, is Donne’s assumption that Godly fear functions not as a cause of faith, as Bellarmine suggests, but rather as a deterrant from sinful regression and a means to maintain assurance: There is an ill security in the godly, when for the time, in their prosperity, they grow ill husbands of Gods graces, and negligent of his mercies . . . And there is a security of the faithfull, a constant perswasion, grounded upon those marks, which God, in his Word, hath set upon that state, That neither height, nor depth, nor any creature shall separate us from God: But yet this security is never discharged of that feare, which he that said that, had in himself, I keep under my body, lest when I have preached to others, I my self should be a cast-away; And which he perswades others, how safe soever they were, Work out your salvation with feare and trembling . . . So there is no feare of God, though it have some servility . . . but it is good . . . Conceive no such feare as excludes spirituall joy, conceive no such assurance, as excludes an humble and reverentiall feare.16

Donne’s comments here recapitulate Calvin’s discussion of the role of fear in the assurance of faith: “Godly feare” for Donne is “but a Reverence, it is not a Jealousie, a suspition of God.”17 I will be arguing in the following section that Donne assumes in the Holy Sonnets this fundamentally Calvinist, rather than Catholic view of the significance of filial fear as a precondition

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for the regeneration of the justified sinner. More counterintuitively, perhaps, I will be suggesting that in those sonnets in which the speaker superficially seems to be revealing a servile fear of reprobation, he actually is representing himself as an assured, justified sinner – he has already been called and elected – who is struggling with the problems specific to regeneration. As we have seen, such problems include the manner in which he might disabuse himself of the old man, mortify his flesh, and grow in holiness. But because the sonnets do not advance dogmatic theology in the manner of the sermons, the speaker of the sonnets is able intriguingly to conflate experiential distinctions between, for example, the death of the “old man” and his impending physical death, as well as conceptual distinctions between justifying and regenerating grace. And we will see that by the time Donne writes the Devotions, his formal Calvinist distinction between filial and servile fear begins to unravel as well: although still steering clear of the Catholic view of fear as an efficient cause of justification, Donne, when faced with the prospect of death, incisively questions whether filial fear ever truly displaces or can be severed from even the elect’s seemingly unavoidable fear of damnation. the h o ly s o n n e t s and the order of salvation In Protestant Poetics, Barbara Lewalski proposes that the Holy Sonnets reflect the Protestant paradigm of salvation in programmatic, Pauline terms. For Lewalski the Holy Sonnets should be interpreted as meditative exercises through which the speaker comes to terms with the interdependent though discrete stages of salvation, ordered as follows: election, calling, justification, adoption, sanctification, and glorification. Election refers to the predestinate status of every individual. Effectual calling “involves God’s awakening in him at whatever time God has appointed and by whatever means . . . such a sense of his desperate sinfulness . . .”18 Justification refers to an imputation of righteousness. Adoption refers to the penitent’s awareness that he or she is a child of God. Sanctification “involves the actual but gradual repairing of the defaced image of God in the soul,” and glorification refers to the perfect restoration of the image of God in man.19 Lewalski then interprets the sequence of the 1635 sonnets according to the salvational sequence outlined above. She argues that the first sonnet, “Thou hast made me,” “presents graphically the condition of anguish, terror, helplessness and despair accompanying the conviction of sin and guilt which is the first effect of God’s calling – the mollifying of hard and sinful hearts with which the Protestant spiritual drama begins.”20 Her reading of the poem evolves from her belief that the final couplet – “Thy

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Grace may wing me to prevent his art / And thou like Adamant draw mine iron heart” (13–14) – represents the speaker’s awareness of his “effectual calling.” Apart, however, from an emblem that depicts a heart drawn to a stone, Lewalski has very little evidence to support her notion that the couplet marks the speaker’s struggle with the earliest stage of effectual calling according to the Pauline scheme of salvation. The lines, in fact, bear a striking similarity to the following description of the justified sinner in Preston’s treatise on conversion: “As soon as a man hath taken Christ, and is justified, there is a strong impression made upon his soule, by which he is caused to cleave unto him, and to long after him, as the Iron doth after the Load-stone, that cannot be at rest untill it hath attained it.”21 Although Preston specifically invokes a loadstone rather than the more generic “adamant,” he and Donne both suggest that the subject’s heart is effectually drawn to God as iron gravitates to an attracting agent. Preston explicitly describes the justified saint’s desire to continue the process of regeneration with God’s assistance; he does not describe the initial stage of the sinner’s struggle to accept and undertake an effectual calling. The implication is that Donne’s speaker, like Preston’s saint, is well on his way to regeneration and glorification according to the Pauline morphology of conversion. But how can we reconcile the notion that the speaker in “Thou hast made me” has already been turned to God, and is struggling to renew himself, with the speaker’s evident despair that death is imminent and that he needs to acquire God’s grace in order to die contritely? I would suggest that Donne’s critics have not appreciated the extent to which many of Donne’s meditations on death can be read as descriptions of both the speaker’s impending physical death as well as metaphorical accounts of the death of the speaker’s corrupt nature. In a 1624 sermon on the multiple significations of the term “resurrection,” Donne remarks that commentators have often glossed resurrection too literally, and that a principal figurative meaning of the term describes the “death of sin” and then “resurrection from sin, by grace”: “Sin is a death, and that needs a resurrection; and a resurrection is as great a work, as the very Creation it selfe. It is death in semine the roote, it produces, it brings forth death . . . And in this spirituall death, and resurrection . . . Grace is the soule of the soule, and so the departing of grace, is the death, and the returning of grace is the resurrection of this sinfull soule.”22 Donne’s English Calvinist contemporaries typically employ the terms “death” and “resurrection” to describe the process of regeneration. In A Sermon of Sanctification (1608), Richard Crakanthorpe emphasizes the nuanced manner in which conversion is described in scripture: “For which

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cause the Scripture calles our conversion unto God sometimes a resurrection from death, sometimes a new creation in Christ, but most usually a new birth, a quickening, or regeneration; to teach us, that as in our naturall birth and first creation, we are no agents at all to give life, will or motion to our selves, but all proceeds from him who breatheth life into a livelesse body . . .”23 While Crakanthorpe suggests here that regeneration marks a “resurrection from death,” elsewhere he describes such a death as a death of sin: “God’s grace in our conversion is not only an excitant, but a . . . grace, whereby we are not wakened, but revived and quickened, as the Apostle saith, from the death of sinne.”24 Similarly, Preston remarks: “No man is ingrafted into Christ, but sin is crucified in him, he is dead thereto, that is, he is a dead man in regard of the life of sin, and is alive to God; as Christ rose from the dead, so is he raised to newnesse of life . . . We are ingrafted into the similitude of his death and resurrection.”25 If we read in a similar way Donne’s meditations on death as both metaphorical references to conversion as well as descriptions of his impending literal death, we can make sense of some of the more difficult phrases and meanings of “Thou hast made me.” While the speaker’s petition to have God “repair” him might be understood as the speaker’s generic request for grace, the invocation of “repair” more plausibly (and less presumptuously) suggests a desire to be temporally reborn. That the speaker “runs” to death, and that death meets him “as fast,” implies further that the speaker actively pursues, however fearful he is, the abandonment of his corrupt body. Lines 9–10 reinforce the point: “when towards thee / By thy leave I can look, I rise again.” Given that the speaker believes that God’s compliance might enable him to “rise again,” and given that such an act of rising would occur while the speaker is still alive, prior to his having been further tempted by “our old subtle foe,” how can we say that the speaker is describing his imminent and unrepentant physical death? If “rise” suggests resurrection, the most plausible referent, then the speaker has been experiencing an ongoing process of rising or resurrecting and then falling or “dying.” Such a repetitive process of death and rebirth makes good sense if it refers to the incomplete process of temporal renewal that occurs following justification, a process during which the subject always possesses some remnant of the old body, “dead to sin,” and the new nature that is able to rise in proportion as the sinful nature is repressed. That Donne’s references to death should be interpreted both literally and metaphorically is further suggested in sonnet 6, “This is my play’s last scene.” Given, as Lewalski, notes, the sonnet’s familiar employment of biblical metaphors of life as a pilgrimage and an athletic race – “This

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is my play’s last scene, here heavens appoint / My pilgrimage’s last mile; and my race / Idly, yet quickly run” (lines 1–3) – the sonnet seems to offer a straightforward account of the speaker’s awareness of his approaching death and his fear of God’s judgment.26 The problem, however, is that the sense of the couplet and the invocation of fear in the last line of the octave are not easily reconcilable with such an unproblematical account of the speaker’s anxiety about his place in the afterlife. The couplet reads, “Impute me righteous, thus purged of evil, / For thus I leave the world, the flesh, and devil” (lines 13–14). The tendency of critics to either fault Donne for being unclear or to manipulate the lines to serve critical biases is noteworthy. Lewalski, for example, finds it puzzling that the speaker believes he will find salvation only if he is justified immediately before he dies: “The speaker hopes, with somewhat strained wit, that this justification might take place for him at the moment of death, for at that time (as not earlier) his soul will leave the body and his body will leave the world . . . [and] he can be said to leave ‘the world, the flesh, and devill.’”27 Where Lewalski locates “strained wit,” Strier finds a tension between Reformation doctrine and an anti-Reformation, materialist theology. As Strier comments on the couplet: “The Reformation vocabulary does not correspond to the vision presented . . . The whole point of the doctrine of imputation was to oppose the idea that one had to be ‘purged of evill’ to be saved. The sinner was saved not through being made righteous but through having Christ’s righteousness counted as his (‘imputed to’ him) through the gift of faith in this ‘alien righteousness.’”28 Finding support in a formal Anglican declaration – “if we say we have no sin, the truth is not in us”– Strier suggests that in this sonnet and others, “Donne’s [Romanish] imagination hungered for actual purity, for imparted or attained not imputed righteousness.”29 If we give careful attention to the language and syntax of the couplet, and then read the lines in the context of early-seventeenth century views on regeneration, I believe we will find that Donne is neither straining his wit nor espousing anti-Reformation doctrine. When Donne writes, “Impute me righteous, thus purged of evil” (l. 13), he seems to be playing on the notion of the inseparable but distinct nature of the relationship between justifying grace and regeneration. An imputation of righteousness in its stark formulation suggests merely that the sinner’s forensic status before God has been changed by Christ’s propitiations. As we have seen, sanctification theoretically begins at the moment of justification, but involves a realization of holiness over time, and hence can also be described as a state consequent

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upon justification. As Thomas Tuke writes in The High-Way to Heaven, or The Doctrine of Election (1609): “First . . . justification is out of a man; sanctification is within him. Secondly justification absolveth a sinner, and makes him stand righteous at the barre of God’s judgment; sanctification cannot do this. Thirdly justification brings peace of conscience, so doth not sanctification, but followeth that peace . . .”30 Donne’s reiteration of “thus” in the couplet implies that consequent upon his justification he will become purged of evil, and then following such a purgation, he will be able to leave the “world, the flesh, and devil.” He does not suggest that the act of imputation as such purges him of evil. Although the interval after which the sinner has been justified and purged of evil is not marked, the comma and pause following “righteous” leaves open exactly when such a purgative process begins and ends. The speaker’s belief that as a consequence of justification he will be “purged of evil” is not specifically anti-Reformation in conception. Preston, for example, who emphasizes throughout his treatise that no regenerate individual is permanently purged of sin, gives no pause to describing the regenerate subject as “free” of sin: “If Christ have accepted me for his, if he be mine, and will justifie me, and free me from my sins, then I will serve him in all things.”31 As Preston observes, to the extent that the disciple has acquired a new nature, he or she becomes purged and rendered “free” of evil. Since the process of cleansing and purgation is ongoing during creaturely life, this does not entail that the saint will not lapse and intermittently allow the residual old nature man to reinstate sinful conduct. Thus Donne will draw a subtle comparison in a sermon on Corinthians between purging the flesh of corruption during sanctification, and purging the “corruptibleness,” the potential for corruption, only during glorification: “Our corrupt flesh must be purged by Sanctification here, for the future kingdome, our naturall Corruptiblenesse must be purged by glorification there.”32 Given that the sonnet closes with a compacted reference to the interlinked nature of justification and sanctification, we should be wary of assuming that the speaker one-sidedly describes a deathbed petition to have God savingly impute him righteousness. The lines just as plausibly refer to the death of one nature and an infusion of a new nature. While the final line’s reference to the speaker’s abandonment of the “world, the flesh, and the devil” might be interpreted as a description of the prospect of his physical death, the lines might also be understood as metaphorical references to conversion. Preston, for example, directly invokes the “world, the flesh, and the devil” to describe the attachments of the old nature that the new nature subdues: “When the Spirit hath wrought this worke

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[regeneration], there is such a contrary inclination, such a propensnesse to God . . . that it over ballanceth all the Temptations that the world, the flesh, and the Devill can lay against it.”33 If the couplet of “This is my play’s last scene” implies that the speaker’s death signifies both his physical death and the death of sin, then we should consider whether the lines that precede the couplet should be interpreted literally and metaphorically. Here again, while some of the language no doubt suggests a literal death – “then, as my soul, to heaven her first seat, takes flight” (line 9) – some of the language suggestively refers to the death of the speaker’s stubbornly vicious nature, particularly the expressions of fear in the octave: “And gluttonous death, will instantly unjoint / My body, and soul, and I shall sleep a space, / But my ‘ever-waking part shall see that face, / Whose fear already shakes my every joint” (lines 5–8). In interpreting these lines, Donne’s critics again express puzzlement. Strier observes, for example, that A. L. French “rightly finds it difficult to see ‘how we get from the face that is terrifying’ to the soul simply ‘taking flight’ to heaven, and he rightly finds the content of the vision ‘rather queer’ – the idea of sins as somehow dissociated from the person who committed them, and as being ‘bred’ in a physical place external to the person in whom they perversely lodge.”34 But given the efficiently causal relationship outlined above between fear and regeneration, as well as the tendency among English Calvinists to describe regeneration in terms of a figurative death and resurrection, there is nothing especially odd about the shift from an invocation of “shaking fear” to a resurrection of the speaker’s soul or new nature. The focus on the terms “joint” and “unjoining” also can be seen as a description of the intricate process of regeneration. As Preston writes, “in the corruption of nature, there are the same naturall operations, but all is disordered and turned upside downe; thus was the confusion of man after the fall, But the New Creature doth worke the contrary, it sets up the house againe, and restirs us unto our first estate in Adam. When a man is made a New Creature, his soule is put in joynt againe . . .”35 Through the experience of fear, Donne’s speaker’s corrupt body becomes further disjointed, until the successful mortification of the corrupt nature and introduction of the renewed nature finally “unjoins” the two natures, each of which corresponds in the sonnet, as they do in seventeenth-century sermons on regeneration, to the body and soul respectively. Donne does not suggest that the new nature, or soul, is “put in joynt,” but the implication is that the soul once free of its “pressing sins,” can be rejoined and “purged of evil.” One of the recurring themes in seventeenth-century treatises on sanctification, a theme that is pervasive in sonnet 19, “Oh, to vex me,” as I discuss

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below, is the inherently two-fold and contradictory status of the nature of the regenerate subject. In The Mystery of Mankind (1619), William Loe writes that while “the godliest live in this world, they cannot attain to a full expulsion of the evill, and introduction of the good; but these two remaine like to opposite parties in a pittched field combating, and skirmishing the one with the other, that the most holy cannot do what they would.”36 Preston reiterates the point in The Saint’s Qualification: “Two things thou shalt finde in thy selfe, if thy nature be changed, if thou have another nature in thee, though there be something in thee, that doth like the objects of thine own lusts, yet there is something in thee that abhors them, though there be an inclination that carries thee towards them, yet there is a contrary inclination that resists them, so there is something still that contradicts and opposeth them.”37 “Oh, to vex me” makes clear Donne’s preoccupation with the contradictory nature of the regenerate subject, as well as the relationship between sanctification and fear. It also introduces another preoccupation we have been assessing, the nature of “habit” in relation to virtue. Donne’s views on habitual virtue are influenced by his preoccupation with Augustinian views on the relationship between habit and sin. The speaker complains: “Oh, to vex me, contraries meet in one: / Inconstancy unnaturally hath begot / A constant habit that when I would not / I change vows, and in devotion. / As humorous is my contrition / As my profane love, and as soon forgot” (lines 1–6). While much of this seems familiar and straightforward – the speaker is attempting to explain why he cannot settle on any single course, whether good or evil – the play on a “constant habit” of inconstancy extends Donne’s intense preoccupation with the nature of habit that runs throughout the sermons. Never at a loss to find adequately evocative metaphors to describe the egregiousness of habitual sin, Donne admonishes: “We consider this plurality, this multiplicity of habituall sinnes, to bee got over our heads, as waters, especially in this, that they have stupefied us . . .”38 Donne remarks in another sermon: “When the multiplicity and indifferencie to lesser sins, and the habituall custome of some particular sin, meet in the aggravating of the burden: for then, they are heavyer then the sand of the Sea . . .”39 Donne is at his most Calvinistic when he elaborates the nature of vicious habit. His concern with the nature of sinful habit has its locus classicus in Augustine’s Confessions, where Augustine describes the force of habit as a refractory addiction: “For the rule of sin is the force of habit, by which the mind is swept along and held fast even against its will, yet deservedly, because it fell into the habit of its own accord.”40 He describes his infected will as a “disease of the mind, which does not wholly rise

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to the heights where it is lifted by the truth, because it is weighed down by habit.”41 At the beginning of the seventeenth century, Perkins follows Augustine in remarking that sin, “after it is received into the nature of man . . . continues and abides in the powers and faculties thereof, and so carries the name of an habit.”42 Similarly, William Ames remarks that customary sins, “old through daily multiplication, beget an evil habit.”43 How remarkably different these Augustinian meditations on sinful habit are from some Conformist accounts of moral habituation. Joseph Hall, for example, accommodates classical virtue theory to piety in The Remedy of Profaneness: “The Philosopher could say, and find that virtuous actions are delightful to well disposed minds, insomuch as it is defined for the surest argument of a good habit fully acquired, that we find contentment and delectation in good performances.”44 Donne implies in “Oh, to vex me” that the regenerate individual cannot benefit from the simple acquisition of virtuous habits, since the residual vicious habits of the old nature remain in constant tension with any new habits that the penitent might acquire. If the sanctified individual were to undertake a growth in holiness primarily by acquiring devout habits, as Hall suggests, he or she would simply be acquiring a third, supervening habit, the habit of inconstancy. Donne’s thoughts here are wonderfully clever, since early modern theologians often argue, as I have described elsewhere, that a sinful habit should be construed as a sin unto itself, superadded to the discrete sins of which it the sinful habit is a part.45 Thus Jeremy Taylor, the mid-seventeenth century, latitudinarian divine, describes habit as a sin unto itself, “a proper guiltiness of its own,” added to the individual sins that make up a composite sinful habit: “For every man is bound to repent instantly of every known sin; he sins anew if he does not, though he add no more of the same actions to his heap. But it is much worse if he sins on; not only because he sins oftener, but because if he contracts a custom or habit of sin, he superadds a state of evil to himself, distinct from the guilt of all those single actions which made the habit.”46 When Donne cautions that the regenerate subject might unproductively acquire a habit of inconstancy, he seems to be parodying the classically inspired, Anglican belief in the efficacy of countervailing, virtuous habits, and anticipating a more benign version of this latitudinarian belief that an ingrained habit is more than the sum of its parts. I would suggest that in “Oh, to vex me” Godly or filial fear serves the role that virtuous habits play for Donne’s less mainstream, Calvinist contemporaries. The speaker finds resolution in the thought that even though his habitually inconstant “devout fits” “come and go away / Like a fantastic ague” (ll. 12–13), “those days are my best days, when I shake with

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fear” (l. 14). Godly fear stands apart from habit to the extent that it does not, according to Donne, become an ingrained disposition or attribute of the regenerate subject. In an illuminating comment on the nature of Godly fear, Donne addresses the case of the disciple who seeks ease and rest in any endeavor, however virtuous: God does not onely not tell him, who shall have riches, but he does not tell him, who shall have his soule. He leaves him no assurance, no ease, no rest, Here. This rest is not then in these things; not in their use; for they are got with labor, and held with feare; and these, labour and feare, admit no rest; not in their nature; for they are fluid, and transitory, and moveable, and these are not attributes of rest.47

Unlike habits, whether virtuous or vicious, which risk becoming second nature and hence taken for granted, the nature of fear is “transitory” and “moveable”; it defies rest. This notion of the fluidity of Godly fear is extended in “Oh, to vex me” to suggest that fear is an integral feature of regeneration because it is universally incapable of being mastered or becoming second nature. In a 1624 sermon Donne warns that “there is a fear, which grows out of a second nature, Custome, and so is half-naturall, to those men that have it. The custome of the place we live in, or of the times we live in, or of the company we live in . . . The fear of the Lord is not a Topicall, not a Chronicall, not a Personall, but a Catholique, a Canonicall, a Circular, an Universall fear . . .”48 When the speaker concludes “Oh, to vex me” by remarking that “those are my best days, when I shake with fear,” he is suggesting, given the open-endedness of the demonstrative “those,” that the onset of fear is something that he cannot predict, something that is indeed “inconstant,” but valuable precisely because it is not a settled habit or disposition. Defined thus, fear is truly a “virtue,” as Donne suggests in a 1619 sermon: “Can any man make so ill use of so great virtues, as the feare of God and the hate of sinne?”49 Like in sonnets 1 and 6, in “Oh, to vex me” Godly fear provides the regenerate subject with direction and consolation, not despair at the prospect of reprobation. Donne’s identification of fear with virtue may seem more like a rhetorical flourish than innovation. Yet his identification of fear as a virtue departs from most of the influential early modern treatises on the passions that describe fear as a passion rather than disposition. Thus William Case: As our appetite doth immediately & positively respect and seeke after good; so doth it necessarily by consequent avoid that which is evill . . . And according unto the divers circumstances of its object of good and evill, so its the appetite varied into the divers formes and fashions of the minde . . . Feare then is a passion or affection of the sensible appetite, shunning and avoyding evills, future and to come.50

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The passions referenced in William Case’s treatise – fear, hope, zeal, and love – all have their province in the sensible appetite. While Case does not theorize the relationship between appetites and virtue, another moralist, John Case, distinguishes passions from virtues in his Speculum Quaestionum Moralium (1588), in which he claims that, since powers and affects are given by nature, and virtues are acquired by industry, passions are not properly considered virtues.51 Case follows Melanchthon, who distinguishes affects and virtue by describing affects as “motions whereby the sense or will follows or flees something presented to it.”52 Virtues, in keeping with Aristotle’s definition, are rather “elective habits issuing in a mean,”53 while affects are more aptly described as preconditions or blocks to virtue. This is a standard Reformed understanding of the relationship between virtue and passion, usually deployed to counter Stoic apathy. Thus Thomas Wright notes that “Passions, are not,” “wholy to be extinguished (as the Stoicks seemed to affirme) but somethinge to be moved, & stirred up for the service of vertue, as learnedly Plutarch teacheth: for mercie and compassion will move us often to pitty, as it did Job . . .”54 Donne reconfigures this virtue-passion distinction in his Verse Letters, Epicedes, and Obsequies, where he idiosyncratically identifies virtues with humoral states. In his “Letter to the Lady Carey,” he distinguishes virtuous souls from individually virtuous actions: “When through tasteless flat humility, / In dough-baked men, some harmlessness we see, / ’Tis but his phlegm that’s virtuous, and not he. / So is the blood sometimes; who ever ran / To danger unimportuned, he was then / No better than a sanguine virtuous man” (19–24). By linking virtuous conduct to humoral disturbances, Donne seems to empty morally praiseworthy actions of their intentionality and agency, as if “virtuous” acts are conditioned by those very passions that virtue is theoretically supposed to bridle. Donne’s views are not merely playful, occasional meditations framed by the conventions of epideictic poetry. He promotes a similar theory of humoral virtue in the more austere “Obsequies to the Lord Harrington,” in which he struggles to isolate Harrington’s chief virtues: “Where can I affirm, or where arrest my thoughts on his deeds? which shall I call best? / For fluid virtue cannot be looked on, / Nor can endure a contemplation; / As bodies change, and as I do not wear / Those spirits, humours, blood I did last year . . . So in this sea of virtues, can no one / Be insisted on; virtues, as rivers, pass, / Yet still remains that virtuous man there was . . .” (41–52). Donne’s suspicion of dispositional behavior is of a piece with his philosophical skepticism. Much of his criticism of conventional virtue theory

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echoes the critique of moral habituation that one finds in the works of leading Renaissance Epicureans and Skeptics. Thus Lorenzo Valla writes in his trenchant critique of character-based virtue theory in Repastinatio Dialectice: “virtues, which consist of affect, come upon us rapidly and are released rapidly, just as vices.”55 Valla believes that moral personhood is, as Nancy Struever observes, a philosopher’s fiction, since virtuous conduct can never lead to virtuous habits. Struever notes: “Valla dislikes both reification and pride, and he sees a kind of self-gratulatory reification in the treatises which present continuous stories of habitual virtue as true accounts of the disjunctive, instantaneous nature of moral identity.”56 In his famous treatise on the Aristotelian mean, De Voluptate, Valla extends his antiessentialism, arguing that moral evaluation should always be based on an assessment of “single acts and single things. In the same hour I shall be repeatedly temperate and intemperate; I should almost say that I can act rightly or wrongly thousands of times in the same hour . . .”57 Pierre Charron, a leading seventeenth-century French skeptic, supports Valla’s skepticism: “the greatest part of our actions, are nothing else but eruptions and impulsions enforced by occasions, and that have reference to others. Irresolution on the one part, and afterwards inconstancy and instability, are the most common and apparent vices in the nature of man. Doubtlesse our actions doe many times so contradict one the other in so strange a maner, that it seemes impossible they should all come forth of one and the same shop.”58 Like Valla’s and Charron’s, Donne’s skepticism is nourished by his fascination with the metaphysics and phenomenology of change. This helps to explain the sense of abandon, for example, that he encourages Sir Henry Goodyear to warmly embrace: “We can beginnings, but not habits choke. / Go; whither? Hence; you get, if you forget; / New faults, till they prescribe in us, are smoke” (25–28). Yet, unlike Valla and Charron, Donne does, as we have seen, recommend Godly fear as a form of virtue precisely because it escapes habituation and mastery. This is consistent with his critique of a dispositional theory of virtue, since Godly fear should serve as a diffuse emotional state, rather than as a spur to commendable actions. But this still leaves unexplained the duality or gestalt shift operating in the Holy Sonnets, in which a virtuous fear of backsliding seems to be superimposed on a servile fear of damnation. I believe that this soteriological dualism is explained by Donne’s preoccupation with bodily degeneration and disease. In many of his writings, Donne warns that no amount of theological consolation can render one

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numb from the perils of the body. The difficulty of overcoming servile fear results not from a tendency to question one’s election in the abstract, but rather from the very impossibility of escaping the fear that issues from an acknowledgment of bodily pathology. Once you are reminded of bodily decay, you begin to fear death; once you fear death, you begin to think about damnation; and once you fix on damnation, you relinquish filial fear. The inescapable reality of the body is a great soteriological equalizer; it subjects reprobates and penitents alike to the same kinds of pains and tribulations. This causal relationship between bodily pain and servile fear is nowhere more evident than in Donne’s most sustained meditation on fear, the “Sixth Meditation” of the Devotions: The Lord is my helpe, and my salvation, whome shall I feare? Great enemies? not great enemies; for no enemies are great to them that feare thee; Feare not the people of this land, for they are Bread to you; They shall not only not eat us, not eat our bread, but they shall bee our Bread; Why should we feare them? But for all this Metaphoricall Bread, victory over enemies, that thought to devoure us, may we not feare, that we may lack bread literally? And feare famine, though we feare not enemies? . . . Wherfore should I feare in the dayes of evill, saies thy servant David? Though his own sins had made them evill, he feared them not. No? not if this evill determin in death?59

Donne shifts from a theoretical to practical register, from metaphorical implication to literal possibility: Can we really find comfort in “metaphorical bread” when confronted with the possibility of starvation? Should David truly disregard his sins, even if these sins hasten him to his death? Donne cannot allow filial fear to circumscribe a hypothetical orbit around regeneration and personal assurance. Fearing has too many propositional branches – the fear of starvation, the fear of violent death, the fear of an inability to pray and worship. All of these branches wind their way back to the bodily root from which such anxieties grow: As the ill affections of the spleene, complicate, and mingle themselves with every infirmitie of the body, so doth feare insinuate itself in every action, or passion of the mind; and as wind in the body will counterfet any disease, and seem the Stone, & seem the Gout, so feare will counterfet any disease of the Mind; it shall seeme love, a love of having, and it is but a fear, a jealous, and suspitious feare of loosing . . .60

This passage depicts nicely Donne’s ambivalence about Godly fear. On the one hand, he values fear as a virtue precisely for its non-dispositional quality.

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Fear, like ideal virtue, ought not to attach to merely occurrent actions. It works most effectively as an encompassing, although numinous, state of “virtue.” Yet precisely because of its unmasterable quality, fear can function as a “counterfeit” emotion. When we express love for what we possess, are we not at the same time revealing our fear of what we might lose? If we say that we love God, are we not equivalently identifying our fear of God’s abandonment? More worrisome still, is every response of filial fear at the same time a response of servile fear?: “I know not, what fear is, nor I know not what it is that I fear now: I fear not the hastening of my death, and yet I do fear the increase of the disease; I should belye Nature, if I should deny that I feared this, & if I should say that I feared death, I should belye God . . .”61 Donne’s challenge is to acknowledge the fear and pain associated with his fallible nature while maintaining confidence in God’s assurance. Filial fear and servile fear are thus incorporated into the same phenomenological experience: the fear of belying God’s promise is fortified by the very possibility of the slavish fear that might burst forth from bodily anxieties. Another way of saying this is that filial and servile fear are so interdependent that the former is constantly shored up by the latter’s possibility. On the one hand, Donne admits that his unavoidable experience of his diseased body conditions his descent into a sanctionable fear of death. On the other hand, his fear of disobeying God’s promise provides a salutary check on such slavish fear. Donne thus presses servile fear back to a state of potentiality rather than actuality. By restricting fear to the time-bound realm of disease, he prevents its overflow into the eschatological realm of death and damnation. For Donne, then, the source of normativity, the endpoint of the ethical regress for the unconditioned, is the body in pain. In a sense, our more systematic theologians make this claim before Donne, although their use of a more generalized rhetoric of reprobation displaces attention from the immediacy of the damnable body. “If you don’t obey God, you will face dire consequences, dreadful things, no doubt,” Andrewes, Ames, and Perkins suggest, in anticipation of God’s teasingly ambiguous phrasing to Adam in Milton’s Paradise Lost. Yet Donne seems to know quite well what those dreadful things are: bodily pain and degeneration, which begin in this life and may not end in the afterlife. If there is a “reflex act” in Donne’s soteriology that approximates Puritan reflectiveness, it lies in an awareness of the dangers of concluding one’s damnation from the body’s inevitable decay. Donne’s body thus functions in his soteriology the way that conscience, syllogistic reasoning, and fear-inducing sermonizing function in

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the dogmatic and systematic theology described in the previous chapter. John Carey has incisively noted that Donne’s sermons in particular show Donne’s “need to anchor abstract truths in the human anatomy.”62 I would add that Donne anchors not only the metaphysical truths of speculative divinity in the human anatomy, but the ethical norms of practical theology as well.

chap t e r 5

Absent neighbors in George Herbert’s “The Church,” or why Agape becomes Caritas in English Protestant devotional poetry Ever since Herbert’s poetry was reclaimed for the Protestant tradition some decades ago, Herbert’s critics have tended to emphasize Herbert’s belief that agape, rather than caritas, describes the proper affective bond that should inhere between God and the disciple. For the Lutheran tradition, agape signifies spontaneous, descending love from God to man, without assuming a reciprocal upward movement by the justified sinner. Caritas, on the other hand, as described principally by Augustine, signifies an affective bond between man and God that is initiated by the communicant’s acquisitive love and desire for self-fulfillment. For Augustine, acquisitive love directs its path away from material goods and upwards to God, its summum bonum. Rosemond Tuve offered the foundational discussion of the agape-caritas relationship in Herbert’s poetry, pointing out that “The Church” depicts sacred love as principally a one-way path from God to the individual: “Herbert seems to write much more of God’s love for man than of what man’s love to God should be . . .”1 For Tuve, Herbert’s views on agapic love presuppose his Christology: “Herbert celebrates in poem after poem God’s love for man, Agape, and the single complete revelation of it in Christ’s Incarnation and Passion.”2 In spite of some quibbling, Arnold Stein and Richard Strier tend to agree with Tuve that the agape rather than caritas motif prevails in the devotional lyrics of “The Church.”3 Tuve tended to overlook the extent to which most of Herbert’s sacred lyrics figure man’s vertical love for God as the immediate response to a prior bestowal of agapic love. While Tuve does note that man’s responsive love to God is best conceptualized as an imitatio Christi, rather than “reciprocity in the usual sense,” she largely admits to glossing over the issue of human love: “Though I dare not take up here the staggering problem of whether and how man can love God in the way of Agape, Herbert’s conception of how man having Christ in his heart loves Him ‘freely’ and loves all creature as His creature, is his way into it . . .”4 Oddly, Tuve’s glance at the imitatio Christi motif reinstates the very medieval tradition from which, she argues, 134

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Herbert departs in emphasizing Lutheran agape. Luther, as we have seen, held the imitatio Christi in cautious regard, and does not assume that the answerable human love that follows agape is governed by Christological emulation. If Tuve had pursued in detail Reformation views on the nature of the immediate results of agape, a line of inquiry also neglected in Anders Nygren’s classic account of Lutheran agape, she might have found that pure or “strong agape,” unmerited, descending love of God for man, ought to have its immediate effects in the recipient’s love for neighbor, which, in turn, expresses love for God.5 Faith, of course, should express itself as an affective turn toward God, but Reformed theology suggests that it most efficaciously expresses itself vertically through horizontal love, that is, through the route of outward service. Luther’s well-known mantra to this effect is “faith active in love.” The difficulty in applying this understanding of agapic love to Herbert’s poetry is that, despite the best efforts of recent criticism to bring out the social, public dimensions of Herbert’s devotional lyrics, outward service and neighbor-regard are topics that are only obliquely referenced in the intimate colloquies of “The Church,” although they figure prominently in the pastoral concerns of “The Church-porch” and A Priest to the Temple. So, as critics have rightly noted, the sacred love poems of “The Church” certainly seem to be exploring the nature of agapic love; yet, given that service is so central to Lutheran agapeism, but that flesh and blood objects of service are so scarce in “The Church,” Herbert’s views on sacred love are bound to pose a “staggering problem.” Part of what happens in the poetry, I will be arguing, is that divine love once received is rechanelled back to its source, which at times seems to render agape’s overflow as caritas, despite the rejection of caritas that is typically announced through Herbert’s pleadings at the outset of a given poem. Herbert’s preoccupation with agape and caritas foregrounds some of the larger problems specific to any ethics of love. A theological love ethic meets the difficulty of reconciling love of God, love of neighbor, and love of self. What is the precise ordering of the three commands? Should they be taken serially to mean that love of God (objective genitive), itself conditioned by a prior act of grace, enables love of neighbor and self?6 What is the causal nexus between self-love and neighbor love? In order to carry out the directive to “love thy neighbor as thy self,” should neighbor-love be modeled on self-love, or should self-love be patterned after neighbor-love. How does Jesus’s mandate to “love one another as I have loved you” ( John 15:12) further complicate the three dispensations of love? One contemporary theologian has described no less than eight ways of understanding Jesus’s command in

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relation to the ordinate love commandments.7 And from these fundamental difficulties ramify larger problems in reconciling an ethics of love with other systems of morality, including law-centered and virtue-based ethics.8 By first outlining the Reformation view of agape, and then turning to Herbert’s use of the agape motif, we will be able to address, if not resolve, some of these difficulties specific to an ethics of love. We will see that although Donne and Herbert are temperamentally distinct – Herbert’s preoccupation with divine and human love generally suppressing his more anxious, Donnean moments – both respond to the same challenge of working morality into an acceptable scheme of salvation. Unlike Donne, however, who integrates morality and salvation by fixing the source of normativity in his body itself, Herbert maintains a distinction between the spheres of morality and grace, a distinction that, I will be arguing, sets his theology apart from the mainstream English Protestant belief in the interfused nature of justification and sanctification. faith ex pressed in love In his Lectures on Romans (1515–16), Luther describes God’s descending love as follows: “This sublime power [God’s love] which is in us is not from ourselves, but must be sought from God. Thus it follows that it is poured into us, not born in us or originated in us. And this takes place through the Holy Spirit; it is not acquired by moral effort and practice, as our moral virtues are.”9 Luther’s conceptualization of unmerited, spontaneously infused love was famously hailed by Anders Nygren as a Copernican revolution in the history of theological ethics. Not only does Luther reject all versions of ascending, egocentric love in his assumption that God’s love is unmotivated and groundless, but he argues that the very basis of agape is the recipient’s sinfulness, rather than holiness; hence Luther’s belief that the justified sinner is simul iutus et peccator. Nygren remarks: “There is no other justification than the justification of the sinner, no other fellowship with God than that on the basis of one’s own sin.”10 But Luther’s evaluation of the effects of agape is more complex than his discussion of divine love as such. In his influential but abbreviated account of the connection between Lutheran agape and social ethics, Nygren stressed that Luther conceives of neighbor-love as simply a natural extension of agapic love. He thus underlined Luther’s remarkable comment that the object of divine love is “like a vessel or tube through which the stream of divine blessings must flow without intermission to other people.”11 Luther radically departs from the Augustinian belief that one attains to God

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through a self-motivated turn towards “god in the neighbor.” Augustinian caritas often implied that the initiate in faith should instrumentalize his neighbor in order to reach beatitude. If Augustine likened the neighbor to a channel through which one connects to God, Luther likened the recipient of divine love to a channel through which God connects to the neighbor. As Nygren concludes, “All that a Christian possesses he has received from God, from the Divine love; and all that he possesses he passes on in love to his neighbor. He has nothing of his own to give.”12 Because Nygren’s principal focus was on God’s outpouring love, he tended to imply that Luther subordinated social ethics to agape. For Luther, however, no discussion of divine love is adequate if it omits an account of the intimate connection between agape and external service. Indeed, one is hard-pressed to find in Luther’s writings a discussion of agape that does not also underscore the importance of an orientation toward the mundane world. Luther’s expression, “faith active in love,” a phrase that he borrows from Galatians 5:6, directly complements his soteriological mantra, simul iustus et peccator: faith is to love of neighbor as justification is to sanctification, or as imputed righteousness is to works-righteousness: “Faith is truly active through love . . . that is, it finds expression in works of the freest service, cheerfully and lovingly done, with which a man willingly serves another without hope of reward . . .”13 There is a danger of assuming that Lutheran neighbor-love is simply one effect among others of a prior infusion of spontaneous agape. While sanctified human love obviously cannot exist without agape, Luther at times implies that agape itself cannot exist in the absence of neighborliness. Necessarily active, faith cannot help but manifest itself externally: “For faith does not rest but serves the neighbor through love . . .”14 Luther thus understands agape as God’s means to a public end. As George Forel notes, “The Christian as a child of God is used by God to mediate the divine love to other men.”15 Luther extends his discussion of agape and neighbor-love to include an account of Paul’s proclamation in Galatians: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Luther vehemently rejects Augustinian interpretations of this passage, according to which amor sui provides the fundamental datum of love. Luther explains, rather, that neighbor-love should be patterned after self-love: This pattern . . . is felt within; it is alive, and it teaches most effectively . . . For who is not vitally aware of how he loves himself, how he seeks, plans, and tries everything that is beneficial, honorable, and necessary for himself? But this whole

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awareness is a living indication, an inward reminder, and a proofe immediately at hand of what you owe your neighbor. You owe him exactly what you owe yourself, and you owe it from the same disposition of the heart.16

Convinced of the impossibility of abandoning self-love entirely, Luther recommends an appropriation of amor sui as a model for love in its proper forms. The inherently evil nature of amor sui can be mitigated by putting self-love to use as a means to service rather than as its own end. Luther, along with Paul, believes the command to love one’s neighbor as oneself fulfills the Law in its entirety, that is, sums in one precept all of the other commandments. In his various accounts of the interrelationship among the love commandments – Lectures on Romans (1515), Lectures on Galatians (1519), and Freedom of a Christian (1520) – Luther does, of course, describe the meanings of the first commandment to love God; love of God, though, is not ordinarily incorporated into detailed explanations of God’s descending love for man. When Luther does discuss agape in relation to the believer’s unmediated response to God, he emphasizes fear rather than love of God. The clearest statement to this effect appears in the 1519 sermon, Two Kinds of Righteousness. The first form of righteousness is described as justifying righteousness, through which “Christ’s righteousness becomes our righteousness and all that he has becomes ours; rather, he himself becomes ours.”17 The second kind of righteousness (which corresponds to the stage of sanctification, although Luther seldom uses the term) is described as “proper righteousness,” or the “fruit and consequence” of justifying righteousness: “This is that manner of life spent profitably in good works, in the first place, in slaying the flesh and crucifying the desires with respect to the self . . . In the second place, this righteousness consists in love to one’s neighbor, and in the third place, in meekness and fear toward God.”18 Luther’s registration of “meekness and fear” certainly covers love of God, fear implicitly defined here as reverence. But this does not mean that the convert’s reverence is an immediate response to agapic love; unlike some of the experimental predestinarians, for whom Godly fear and reverence is transformed to love of God following justification, Luther maintains that an affective distance still prevails between the justified sinner and God. Luther’s refusal to build up man’s unmediated love for God makes sense, given his refusal to allow for any substantial change in the regenerate’s character following free grace. Luther’s second kind of righteousness completes “the first for it ever strives to do away with the old Adam and to destroy the body of sin. Therefore it hates itself and loves its neighbor . . . Thus in each sphere it does

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God’s will, living soberly with self, justly with neighbor, devoutly toward God.”19 Early seventeenth-century English treatises on theological love generally follow Luther in emphasizing the tightly woven bond between God’s love and neighbor-love. In A Treatise of Love (1632), John Rogers recounts the intermingled relationship among God’s love, works righteousness and neighborliness: “Love is a sanctified affection of the heart, whereby whosoever is indued withall, endeavoureth to doe all the good he can to all; but especially, to them that be nearest unto him.”20 Love, in particular, is held up as the preeminently other-regarding virtue, a “benefeciall vertue,” as compared to virtues that “benefit our selves”: “Love layes out all it hath for others good: as the Sunne that shines forth his light to others, having it for that end and not for it selfe.”21 Rogers analogizes faith and love to the bung of a barrell and tap: the former takes in beer or wine, the latter “lets it forth, to the benefit of them that neede.”22 Like Luther, Rogers emphasizes that love of neighbor, rather than love of God, is the immediate result of agapic love. Divine love, Rogers relates, certainly does not “inform” or give being to faith – a Pelagian and medieval Catholic supposition – it rather evinces faith: “It [love] declares and makes Faith manifest where it is, and proves the soundnesse and truth of it . . .”23 Rogers so marginalizes love for God that he is compelled to add a disclaimer at the end of the first chapter of his treatise. Responding to those readers who might object that, “whereas the Apostle hath brought all our duties to these two, Faith in Christ, and Love to our Neighbour; that this is defective, for as much as the Love of God, which the chiefe of all, is left out,”24 Rogers answers that love for God is not neglected, “but necessarily included in the love of our neighbour, from whence that doth proceed.”25 Love of neighbor manifests a prior bestowal of agape and makes possible a subsequent expression of God’s love through its own motive force. Before turning to Herbert’s treatment of the agape motif in relation to the above contexts, it will be helpful to compare the relationship between agape and neighbor-love to the very different caritas motif that one finds, for example, in Peter Du Moulin’s The Love of God: A Treatise Containing Five Degrees, Marks, Aids of God’s Love (1628). Du Moulin contends that the chain of love uniting man and God is wrought by man’s ascending love, itself directed by man’s ultimate goal of deification: “true love is that which transformeth the lover . . . By loving God, wee become like to him.”26 Du Moulin then outlines five “degrees” or reasons for loving God, the lowest referring to love of God simply for the “good which he doth us,” the highest referring to the love of God “in the life to come.”27 Neighbor-love

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is included as a passing moment during the third stage, when one should “love God above all things, that wee should love nothing in the world but for his sake.”28 To the extent that neighbors figure as instrumental steps on the convert’s route to glorification and deification, neighbor-love is never an end unto itself: “A man loveth his friends as hee ought, when he loveth them because they love God, and because hee seeth the Image of God shining in them.”29 Moral agents seek God in their neighbors; they do not, as the agapic process mandates, express their love for God by treating their neighbors as both ends unto themselves and means of love for God. herbert’s “love (iii)”: z acchaeus as guest Much of the criticism of Herbert’s poem “Love (III)” has focused on the discursive conventions of courtesy that govern the parley between guest and host. The poem begins, Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back, Guilty of dust and sin. But quick-eyed Love, observing me grow slack From my first entrance in, Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning, If I lacked anything. (1–6)

Stanley Fish argues that the speaker is catechistically browbeaten by God to participate in the heavenly banquet referenced in the final line, which has its source in Luke 12:37: – “You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat.”30 Strier argues that the poem represents “the steps by which selfdenial becomes self-assertion,” although the speaker’s caviling eventually gives way to an acceptance of the Lord’s unreciprocated gift of agape, which is value-creating rather than merited.31 More recently, Michael Schoenfeldt has returned to the courtesy framework of the poem, emphasizing that the speaker’s polite refusals and demurrals are charged with a degree of presumptuousness that is not fully absorbed by irresistible grace.32 Oddly enough, while so many commentators have focused on the courtesy framework guiding the poem’s guest-host interchange (and have noted the relevance of the heavenly banquet in Luke 12:37 to the hospitality motif ), Herbert’s critics have overlooked the one biblical passage that directly employs the term “guest” in relation to modes of courtesy and hospitality. That passage is Luke 19:7, which recounts the conversion of Zacchaeus, chief publican of Jerusalem. Upon learning that Jesus will be

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passing through Jericho, Zacchaeus hurriedly climbs atop a sycamore tree in order to witness Jesus’ passing. The narrative proceeds: And when he came to the place Jesus looked up, and saw him, and said unto him, Zacchaeus, make haste, and come down; for today I must abide at your house. And he made haste, and came down, and received him joyfully. And when they saw it, they all murmured, saying, He is gone in to be a guest with a man that is a sinner. And Zacchaeus stood, and said unto the Lord, Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor; and if I have wrongfully exacted aught of any man, I restore it fourfold.33

Luke 19:7 represented for Calvin a “wonderful and sudden conversion,” which Calvin describes as a prelude to faith, the seeds of which were already present in Zacchaeus: “Although faith was not yet formed in Zacchaeus, this was a certain preparation for it.”34 Calvin is especially moved by Jesus’s peremptory demand that Zacchaeus invite Jesus to his house as guest – an action that recalls the tone and attitude of “Love” in Herbert’s poem. Of the line, “Zacchaeus, make haste, and come down,” Calvin exclaims: “A memorable example of grace! The Lord forestalls Zacchaeus, does not wait for an invitation, but asks straight out to be his guest. We know how much the very name of publican was then disliked, even detested . . . It was therefore a remarkable kindness that the Son of God should take the initiative and come to him whom men commonly shunned.”35 Alert to misinterpretations of the passage – that Zacchaeus’s efforts to see Christ and relinquish half his worth enable his conversion – Calvin emphasizes that Zacchaeus’s charitableness stems from those “secret movings of the Spirit” which had been stirring his conduct even before he is accepted by Christ. Zacchaeus’s pledge of half his wealth therefore signifies a prior turning of his will: “Zacchaeus’s conversion is described from its fruits and outward signs: since it is probable that he had grown rich to the hurt of many, he is ready to repay fourfold any whom he has defrauded. Moreover, he would devote a half of his possessions to the poor.”36 Herbert’s commentators have perhaps overlooked the Zacchaeus episode because Herbert’s poem inverts the guest–host relationship: the speaker of the poem serves as Christ’s guest rather than Christ’s host. Yet this positioning in the poem of speaker as guest is ambiguated by the speaker’s initial response to “Love’s” question of whether the speaker “lacks anything,” to which the speaker replies, “A guest, I answered, worthy to be here . . .” (7). The speaker does not suggest that he, as guest, is unworthy, but that he is unworthy because he does not have a guest. Understandably, the slight difference is ignored by Herbert’s commentators, since Christ’s

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immediate advice to the speaker – “You shall be he” (8) – contributes to the development of the speaker’s intimacy with Christ, as well as reinforces Christ’s authoritative beneficence: “The only guest I am concerned with is you,” Christ seems to be saying, as if the speaker acquires his status as guest not through the acceptance of a gracious offer, but through the force of a speech-act that cannot be refused. Yet, given that the only use of the singular form of “guest” in either the Old or New Testaments is in Luke 19:17, early modern interpreters of “Love (III)” most likely would have drawn a connection between this line and the Zacchaeus exposition. Against such a backdrop, the speaker in the poem allegorizes an unconverted Zacchaeus, a figure whose “guilt of dust and sin” perhaps stems from his failure to realize that to accept Christ as guest is an act that simultaneously renders oneself worthy to be Christ’s guest. The speaker does not comprehend the interchangeability of roles in respect of the sinner’s relationship with Christ. Playing host to Christ enables you to play guest to Christ. More important, playing host to Christ enables you to play guest to Christ only if your playing host to Christ brings along with it at least some gesture of remunerative, outward service. This, of course, is not fully represented in “Love (III)” because devotional intimacy displaces a narrativization of outward service. Yet, the failure of some gesture toward outward service seems to be the absent cause or missing link that explains the speaker’s recalcitrance and Christ’s saving intervention. The conventional way of explaining the speaker’s demurrals – that he is “guilty of dust and sin,” that he is “slack,” “unkind,” and “ungrateful” – is to argue that he has not appreciated Christ’s justifying sacrifice (hence the eucharistic imagery referenced in the second half of the poem). But another way of explaining the speaker’s demurrals is that he has been justified but has not fully understood what it means to be sanctified. In this sense, his self-deprecations suggest an awareness of his failure to manifest faith in service, or his failure to realize to whom proper service ought to be directed. The speaker concludes in his final riposte to Love: “My dear, then I will serve” (16), omitting any specification of the precise object or direction of his service. To serve in the immediate context means to serve Love/Christ by obeying the command to taste Christ’s meat; yet to serve also recalls Zacchaeus’s literal serving of Christ as guest, as well as the service he avows to extend to his disenfranchised brethren, the former mode of service expressed through the latter. Service, then, at the close of the poem, is so open-ended that the reader cannot be sure that the speaker has understood the proper nature of service, or that Love’s command to eat represents Love’s satisfaction with

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the speaker’s spiritual and intellectual enlightenment. Strier rightly notes a movement in the poem from guilt to shame: guilt is referenced in line 2; while shame is referenced in lines 13–14: “Let my shame / Go where it doth deserve.”37 As we saw earlier in relation to Sidney’s Arcadia, guilt and shame differ fundamentally in that the former tends to describe an internal, private stirring, while the latter describes an experience that assumes a public context. The speaker’s shame at not properly serving implies that he glimpses, but does not fully record, both his awareness of the demands of agape and his failure to emulate or analogize the conduct of a Zacchaeus. Even the tone of “Love (III’s)” final command to eat is richly ambiguous. Fish offers a provocative paraphrase of the condescending pitch of Love’s final command: “You still haven’t got it right and never will, but come in and sit down anyway” (136). Yet what the speaker has failed to “get right” is not clearly articulated in Fish’s analysis. Fish implies that the speaker fails to realize that “the exercise of preparing to become worthy does not end in becoming worthy, but in the realization . . . that you never can be.”38 However, the speaker’s failure is not merely a cognitive or attitudinal one; it is not a failure to admit humility or passivity as a principle ingredient in the ongoing process of preparing one’s heart. The speaker’s failure is a moral-practical failure, a neglect of realizing the importance of directing his prepared heart outwardly, through which he can best express his love to God. A similar approach to the difficulties of depicting the fullness of agape can be found in Herbert’s “Love Unknown.” The poem is presented in the form of a colloquy between the speaker and an undisclosed “friend.” The speaker complains: Dear Friend, sit down, the tale is long and sad: And in my faintings I presume your love Will more comply, than help. A Lord I had, And have, of whom some grounds which may improve, I hold for two lives, and both lives in me.39 (1–5)

The friend will go on to advise the speaker on how properly to sacrifice himself to God. Given the educative lesson narrativized in the poem – that the only acceptable sacrifice is a contrite, supple heart, which will help the speaker to remain “new, tender, quick,” (70) – the poem seems to describe a moment in the order of salvation just following justification and prior to sanctification and the commission of service. According to such an interpretation, the speaker has received grace but still fails to understand how

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to respond to God’s gift; he must learn that he still requires God’s enabling power to express faith in proper service. Thus Cristina Malcolmson argues that the process of suppling the speaker’s heart will enable him “to simply increase and deepen the very readiness of the tenant to do his Lord’s bidding.”40 Unlike most critics, Malcomson recognizes that the poem is focused on sanctification; yet she does not specify what would constitute proper service, that is, what the Lord’s bidding entails for the speaker. Of the three principal Biblical motifs and types referenced in the poem – the broken heart of Psalm 51, the furnace image drawn from Isaiah 48:2, and the watering rock typologized in 1 Corinthians 10:4 – Psalm 51 most clearly illuminates the function of Gospel sacrifice. The relevant lines of Psalm 51 read as follows: “For thou desirest no sacrifice, else would I give it thee: but thou delightest not in burnt-offerings. The sacrifice of God is a troubled spirit: a broken and contrite heart” (388). Similarly, Herbert’s speaker in “Love Unknown” complains: “So I went / to fetch a sacrifice out of my fold, / Thinking with that, which I did thus present, / To warm his love, which I did fear grew cold. / But as my heart did tend it, the man / Who was to take it from me, slipped his hand, And threw my heart into the scalding pan” (29–35). In his commentary on Psalm 51:17, The Sacrifice of a Contrite Heart (1630), John Evans describes sacrifice as a preeminently moral service: “Because, if not Morall, not acceptable; a Ceremonial service of Sacrifices and Burnt-offerings, as being mere emptie shadowes; would not please God.”41 Offerings as defined by the Law, Evans continues, are expiatory and dedicatory, ceremonial acts that do not signify permissible service.42 Evans fails to specify the forms of such sacrificial moral action, but in The Christian’s Sacrifice (1622), Thomas Stoughton provides a detailed elaboration of the manifestation of responsible, sacrificial conduct. After defining sacrificium as a “holy work,” and beneficium as “any good worke,”43 Stoughton enumerates the various ways of actively mortifying one’s body according to the Gospel. Particular emphasis is placed on the metaphorical sacrificing of both the “hands” and “feet,” both forms of which are directly linked to the performance of works: “A special point of hands sacrificed, is in distributing and giving to the poore. In which respect a vertuous woman is commended for stretching out her hands to the poore . . . The feete also must be sacrificed . . . by being nimble for performance of any good; particularly to do any worke of kindnesse or mercie.”44 Worried that he has strained his metaphor of sacrificing bodies by particularizing too much, Stoughton cites Chrysostom on gospel sacrifice: “For a sacrifice hath no

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uncleannesse, it comprehendeth the first fruits of all others . . . Make your bodies a sacrifice, but present them; as if he had said, Have no thing to do with them, sith ye have bestowed them upon another.”45 What we find, then, in early seventeenth-century commentaries on sacrifice, is not just the familiar distinction between pharisaical expiation and Christological mortification, but a specification of the forms of Gospel sacrifice grounded principally in outward service. Given the fact that both agapic love and Gospel sacrifice ought to issue immediately in works righteousness – more specifically, that they are realized in outward service – one returns to “Love Unknown,” vainly searching for some representation of the speaker’s gesture toward horizontal love. Since the poem depicts no available outlets for neighborliness, no distraught individuals on whose behalf the speaker’s contrite heart can be offered, we tend to interpret the poem as purely devotional, in which the initial colloquy between speaker and friend has as its goal a clarification of the speaker’s asymmetrical relationship with God. Or, if we are determined to bring out the pastoralism of the poem, as Malcolmson aims to do, we describe it as a depiction of the process by which the speaker comes to learn, only by the poem’s close, that a quick and tender heart is the appropriate offering to God, the question of the specific forms by which such contrition can be manifested left unclear or to be filled out at a later time. What these interpretations have in common is a tendency to equate the elusive friend invoked at the beginning of the poem with Christ. Louis Martz identifies the friend as the embodiment of “love unknown”: “the friend is indeed his other self: the Christ who at the close reveals the full counsel of his ‘inward speaking.’”46 Although she does not directly link the friend with Christ, Malcolmson likens the friend to a spiritual counselor, whose relationship with the speaker recalls the “non-hierarchical relations of pastoral teaching that Christ forged with his disciples.”47 But while the friend no doubt typologizes Christ, he just as plausibly figures literally as a generic neighbor, since the two figures are treated as the same in discussion of agape and neighbor-love. Luther famously argued, for example, that individuals should “put on” Christ as he has done for us: “we also ought freely to help our neighbor through our body and its works, and each one should become as it were a Christ to the other that we may be Christs to one another and Christ may be the same in all, that is, that we may be truly Christians.”48 Designating the friend as Christ therefore implies, rather than calls into question, the friend’s mundane existence. Once we establish that the friend doubles as neighbor and Christ, we are faced with explaining the friend’s special role in the poem. Given the

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mutually entailing relationship between agape and sacrifice on the one hand, and horizontal love on the other hand, one is perhaps surprised to learn that the only friend/neighbor in the poem functions as an active counselor to the speaker rather than as the recipient of the speaker’s love. Of course, that the friend dispenses advice rather than receives love makes sense, given the speaker’s ignorance regarding his proper response to agapic love. Yet, assuming the Reformation understanding of the irreducibly social dimension of agape, there seems to be an implicit tension between the role that the friend plays in the poem, and the role that the friend ought to play in the poem. The friend stands in as Christ-as-counselor, when he might also have figured as Christ-as-neighbor. The poignancy and irony of the poem lies in the fact that the solution to the speaker’s problem is so close at hand: the unknown love is at least partly the love the speaker needs to express towards the very “friend” whom he never acknowledges as love’s object. The speaker is unable to make the required gestalt shift of seeing the friend simultaneously as subject and object, as dispenser and receiver of love’s gift. Part of the reason, then, that the friend’s “love / Will more comply, than help” (2–3), is that the speaker cannot imagine a dialogical, intersubjective relationship with the friend; this kind of relationship would truly “help” by dint of its making love known, rather than by simply complying with the limited role in which the speaker casts the friend from the outset of the poem. What “Love (III)” and “Love Unknown” reflect is Herbert’s tendency, even when he seems to be equating Christ with third parties, to reinsert boundaries separating his speakers, their “friends,” and God or Christ. Another lyric of “The Church,” “ Unkindness,” elaborates a series of comparisons between the way the speaker treats his friends relative to the way he treats God and Christ. The poem reads as an ironic confession and apology: the speaker outlines the sacrifices he makes on behalf of his friends, and then returns to some version of the refrain, “I would not use a friend, as I use Thee” (5). None of the generous considerations extended to his friends – defending their “honour” (7) or lending them “gold” (12) – is proffered to God. The final line is the most alarming, as the speaker shamefully acknowledges that he dares to treat even his enemies more respectfully than Christ: “Yet use I not my foes, as I use thee” (25). One way of reading this poem is to credit the speaker for his ironic selfawareness, for the implicit apology embedded in his half-understanding of the proper treatment of Christ in relation to his friend. Another way of reading the poem, however, is to note that the very fact of the comparison of friend to Christ belies a more foundational misapprehension that lingers

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even after the poem’s close. The poem’s hortatory message seems to be that Christ should enjoy priority among the speaker’s “friends,” or that, at the very least, Christ should be regarded as much as any ordinary friend. Yet, all of the possible alignments and configurations imagined by the speaker – to privilege Christ over the neighbor, to measure ordinary friendship against the friendship extended to Christ, or to measure love of Christ against ordinary friendship – set up a disjuncture between private and public devotion that is denied by Reformed theories of sanctifying righteousness. Herbert’s lyrics, especially “Love” (III),” seem to reflect, as Strier observes, the value-conferring nature of agape.49 Yet, agape is inseparable from neighbor-regard and outward service, a primary subject of the early modern expositions of the Biblical passages referenced in many of Herbert’s lyrics. Instead of representing outward service as a necessary component of agape, the three poems so far discussed seem to channel agape back to its source: descending love becomes ascending love; agape begins to look like caritas. This is a common occurrence in a number of other sacred love poems in “The Church.” “How shall I praise thee, Lord! how should my rhymes / Gladly engrave thy love in steel” (1–2), queries the tentative speaker of “The Temper” (1). By the end of the poem, an acknowledgement of God’s love is displaced by an expression of the speaker’s capacious love for God: “my love and trust / Make one place ev’ry where” (28). In “Matins,” the speaker asks to receive God’s beneficent love: “Teach me thy love to know; / That this new light, which now I see, / May both the work and workman show” (17–19). By the close of the poem, though, the speaker clarifies exactly why he desires divine love: “Then by a sunbeam I will climb thee,” a sentiment that is so standardly Augustinian the reader no longer has any foothold on the poem’s point of view regarding spiritual love. But perhaps the clearest expression of Herbert’s ambivalence regarding the agape-caritas relationship is found in “Home,” where spiritual love is reduced to two different, but equally availing alternatives: “O show thyself to me, / Or take me up to thee!” (29–30). The speaker of “Home” is perhaps one of the most resigned speakers in “The Church.” He so desires a union with God that he no longer frets over the available and proper routes by which either party might travel to meet the other. In all of these poems the speaker seems to realize the presumptuousness of caritas, embraces agape, but then can only imagine that the result of agape is caritas, as if his relationship with God is bound in a closed circuit of sacred love. In none of these poems does the speaker consider that the strongest, most enabling link between downward and upward love is outward love, a notion that seems to be gestured at but ultimately displaced

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in the fuller depictions of spiritual love in “Love Unknown,” and “Love (III)”. Neighbors are shadowy, haunting figures in “The Church” generally. Their existence, once postulated, is routinely absorbed or cancelled by the speaker’s intense desire to find intimacy with God. It is almost as if the speaker’s love moves vertically because it lacks a horizontal object. Love cannot spill outwardly, so its momentum forces it to ascend, even though an upward ascent ought not to be its immediate or proximate destination. Caritas looks like the unintended consequence of the neighbor’s absence, rather than the directed result of God’s efficient or final causality. When Herbert’s lyrics do directly confront the centrality of neighborregard to the experience of justification, they present a speaker who sounds weary, confused, and almost put-upon at the prospect of having to unravel the tangle of love commands in order to integrate the private and public dimensions of salvation. “ Divinity” is one of Herbert’s most meta-ethical poems. The opening stanzas reveal Herbert as deeply critical of any attempt to subject the mysteries of divinity to rational inspection and objective, scientific analysis. Just as men mistakenly set out to discover the astronomical (Ptolemaic) workings of the heavenly spheres in relation to the surrounding stars, so they inappropriately attempt to understand “Divinity’s transcendent sky: / Which with the edge of wit they cut and carve. / Reason triumphs, and faith lies by” (5–7). Divinity is understandable not through scientific investigation but through a faithful obedience to Christ’s instruction: “He doth bid us take his blood for win. / Bid what he please; yet I am sure, / To take and taste what he doth there design, / Is all that saves and not obscure” (126). Much of this disdain of rationality in relation to salvation seems straightforward, and typically Herbertian. Yet, the middle stanza of the poem makes a direct reference to the pastoral love commandments, and, remarkably, situates those commandments in the realm of indecipherable mystery: “Love God, and love your neighbour. Watch and pray. / Do as ye would be done unto. / O dark instructions; ev’n as dark as day! Who can these Gordian knots undo?” (17–20). What follows is not what we would expect. Rather than systematically untie the Gordian knots for the reader or, in keeping with the speaker’s considered view that divinity naturally clarifies itself, explain that these knots are not knots at all for the faithful, the speaker introduces the eucharistic imagery in the next stanza: “But he doth bid us take his blood for wine.” (21) Since the Eucharist is, as the speaker avows, “all that saves,” it seems to displace the saving importance of understanding and carrying out the love commandments, those which, unlike sacramental piety, remain “obscure” (24). The “darkness” of the love commandments thus seems to be aligned

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with those doctrinal mysteries that are better left alone, as if the difficulty of resolving the commands to love God, neighbor, and self warrants their consignment to the realm of speculative divinity, rather than to the more appropriate realm of practical theology. Shouldn’t it be possible, though, to isolate and depict a unitary stage or moment of the agapic experience? Must any poeticized depiction of divine love necessarily include an account of horizontal love? If the object of inquiry is poetically and narratively to render an approximation of the Reformed conception of agape, an inquiry that Herbert’s critics suggest his poems undertake, then the answer seems to be that sanctifying love is difficult to parse in any logically coherent way. To the extent that one understands the event of justification through its manifestation in sanctification, and that the two interdependent stages correspond respectively to downward and outward love, an omission of any depiction of sanctification calls into question the facticity of the moment of justification. Of course, Herbert’s devotional meditations on sacred love might be interpreted as inventive, syncretistic accounts of the love shared by an individual and God. The burden of my interpretation has been simply to argue that in so doing Herbert’s poems defy neat placement in the context of standard Reformation views on the relationship among soteriology, agape and caritas. herbert and the t wo kingdoms doct rine Yet, there are flesh and blood neighbors and fit objects of charity in Herbert’s corpus: they people the pages of Herbert’s pastoral writings, “ The Churchporch” and A Priest to the Temple. “Join hands with God,” Herbert advises in the “The Church-porch”, “to make a man to live. / Give to all something; to a good poor man, / Till thou change names, and be where he began” (376–78). The parson would do well to remember, Herbert instructs, that “the country parson is full of charity; it is his predominant element.”50 Far from privileging spiritual over temporal love, the Parson, “when he riseth in the morning . . . bethinketh himself what good deeds he can do that day, and presently does them, counting that day lost wherein he hath not exercised his charity.”51 And the parson is equipped with particularizing rules and maxims that will enable him properly to dispense charity. Rather than uncritically heed the precept not to “respect persons,” the parson, “in all his charity, he distinguisheth, giving them most who live best and take most pains and are most charged . . .”52 What we seem to find, then, is, as critics have noted, a disjuncture between the private, devotional meditations of “The Church,” and the

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public, socially responsible concerns of the pastoral writings. Shuger provides the most detailed elaboration of this personal-public division: “In ‘The Church-porch’ the self is autonomous, ethical, and social; in ‘The Church,’ dependant, passive, and private.”53 In order to contextualize this division, Shuger appropriates the Lutheran two regiments distinction, which she finds clearly expressed in a commentary by William Perkins that Perkins had borrowed from Luther via Tyndale: Every person is a double person and under two regiments. In the first regiment I am a person of mine own self, under Christ and his doctrine, and may neither hate nor be angry . . . but must after the example of Christ humble myself, forsake and deny myself, and hate myself and cast myself away . . . and . . . In the temporal regiment, thou art a person in respect of another. Thou art husband, father, mother, daughter, wife, lord, subject and there thou must do according to thine office. If thou be a father, thou must do the office of a father and rule, or else thou damnedest thyself.54

From this passage Shuger extrapolates her influential notion of dual personhood: the social self, which figures prominently in “The Churchporch,” is modeled as a persona or performative self, concerned above all with fulfilling prescribed, vocational roles. This fundamentally ethical self is distinguished from the spiritual or “pneumatic” self that figures prominently in “The Church.” The pneumatic self “struggles to cast itself away,” and “strives toward submission and love.”55 Most important, the pneumatic self, for Shuger, is not fundamentally concerned with morality: “In Andrewes’s sermons, as in Herbert’s lyrics, one notes a lack of interest in moral action. Andrewes generally divides his text into doctrine and duty, but almost invariably the ‘duty’ turns out not to be a doing but a receiving.”56 Such a passive duty of reception, “replaces ethical activity, the latter becoming almost suspect, a form of self-assertion.”57 Shuger is undoubtedly correct to note the disjuncture between the private and public personae of Herbert’s “The Church” and the “Church-porch.” And she convincingly argues that the pneumatic self, as represented in “The Church,” marginalizes ethical activity. Yet, in making such a distinction, Herbert does not seem to be simply reflecting a standard account of the non-moral pneumatic self that one finds in the writings of Luther, Tyndale, and Perkins, since none of these writers separates the private self from morality. If we look back at the Perkins quote above, we note that the conduct of the private (not public) self is directed by the following precept: “let every man go over me . . . and do me wrong. And yet I am to love them.” This is a clear statement of the intensely moralistic nature of the

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theological regiment: the private self is exhorted to love friends and its enemies, Christians and pagans, regardless of just deserts. The difference between the public, vocational self and the private, theological self is not that one is concerned with morality and the other is not; the difference is that the morality of the social self is governed by vocational roles and civic laws, while the morality of the theological, “pneumatic” self is governed by the love commandments, which dictate that one ought not to respect persons.58 But before returning to Hebert’s love theology in this context, we should establish a clearer sense of Luther’s considered views on the two regiments. Luther’s most extensive discussion of the two regiments doctrine appears in Secular Authority (1523), one of his many polemical attacks on the secular power of the Roman church. Luther faced the problem of reconciling two seemingly contradictory scriptural passages – Romans 13:1 – “Let every soul be subject to power and authority . . .” – and Matthew 5:38 – “A man shall not resist evil, but if any one strikes thee upon the right cheek, turn to him the other also.”59 The command to obey secular magistracy seems to be at odds with the unexceptionable passivity demanded of the Sermon on the Mount. In an attempt to reconcile the necessary violence of civic discipline and the Sermon’s love commandments, Luther distinguishes between a spiritual and temporal regiment: “We must divide all the children of Adam into two classes; the first belong to the kingdom of God, the second to the kingdom of the world. Those belonging to the kingdom of God are all true believers in Christ and are subject to Christ . . . These two kingdoms must be sharply distinguished, and both be permitted to remain; the one to produce piety, the other to bring about external peace and prevent evil deeds; neither is sufficient in the world without the other.”60 Admitting that no individual is “by nature Christian or pious,” Luther eventually refocused his argument away from a division between two classes of people – Christian and non-Christian – and began to emphasize the dual roles that any individual inhabits as a member of two kingdoms. Luther did not suggest, however, that the two regiments ought to be understood as distinct spheres. His purpose in establishing the division was to explain how God’s faithful, strict adherents of the commands of Matthew 5, could also allow themselves to be governed by natural orders and stations. Not unexpectedly, an orientation toward the neighbor provides the linchpin that unites the two regiments. A pious Christian will take up the secular sword, if necessary, not to defend himself, but to defend those potential co-religionists who have not achieved spiritual progress and who are in need of assistance:

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Since, however, a true Christian lives and labors on earth not for himself but for his neighbor, therefore the whole spirit of his life impels him to do even that which he need not do, but which is profitable and necessary for his neighbor; because the sword is a very great benefit and necessary to the whole world, to preserve peace, to punish sin and to prevent evil, he submits most willingly to the rule of the sword, pays tax, honors those in authority, serves, helps, and does all he can to further the government, that it may be sustained and held in honor and fear.61

Although Luther modifies his two kingdoms doctrines throughout his writings, he does not suggest that the spiritual realm is a non-moral realm of personal devotion. Rather, he suggests that the special requirements of spirituality or politics will force the morality of one sphere to yield to the morality of the other. Thus, the love ethics of the spiritual regiment will often be forced to accommodate political exigencies, and temporal powers will often be curtailed so as not to encroach upon spiritual priorities.62 In fact, the spiritual realm, not the temporal realm, has historically been considered the proper domain of morality, the precepts and commandments of which are too often ignored due to political necessity. The fear expressed by modern commentators is that the two doctrines schema warrants radical dualism, allowing a secular will to power dominate Christian morality. One commentator writes that the two doctrines idea “limited the application of Christian morality to the private life of man.”63 Karl Barth worried, for example, that the two kingdoms doctrine licensed German nihilism in the early decades of the 1940s: “The German pagan can use the Lutheran doctrine of the authority of the state as a Christian justification of National Socialism, and by the same doctrine the Christian in Germany can feel himself summoned to recognize National Socialism.”64 An accurate view of Luther’s two kingdoms doctrine should thus acknowledge the interdependence of the two kingdoms linked by a ministry of love. As Helmut Thielicke claims, “For Luther the law of love is the determinative principle of all the orders. In this respect Luther can even appeal to Matthew 7:12, thus avoiding the view that over and above what we do in the order there is a ‘particular’ and radical commandment, the ‘true’ command to love, which applies to personal life. No, love is exercised also in the orders.”65 Luther’s notion of a twofold system of morality distributed between two kingdoms is shared by William Perkins and William Ames. In A Treatise of the Vocations or Callings of Men (1603), Perkins establishes a well-known distinction between general and particular callings: “The general calling is the calling of Christianity which is common to all that live in the church of God. The particular is that special calling which belongs to some particular

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men: as the calling of a magistrate, the calling of a minister, the calling of a master, of a father, of a child, of a servant, of a subject, or any other calling that is common to all.”66 The link between the general and particular calling, a distinction which corresponds roughly to Luther’s theological and temporal regiments, is, as one finds in Luther’s account, social responsibility: The general calling of Christianity without the practice of some particular calling is nothing else but the form of godliness without the power thereof: and therefore both callings must be joined as body and soul are joined in a living man. And that we may the better join both our callings together, we must consider the main end of our lives, and that is to serve God in the serving of men in the works of our callings. God as he made man, so can he preserve man without the help of man: but his pleasure is that men should be his instruments for the good of one another . . .67

For Perkins, as for Luther, external service binds the two regiments. Far from serving as a private sphere of devotion, the Christian or general calling demands public expression, just as the particular calling requires godliness as its ultimate end. As we have already seen, Perkins’s student, William Ames, polemicizes against those theologians and ethicists like Barthololmaeus Keckermann who attempt to separate religion and morality. Here are Ames’s comments in full: They say that theology is concerned with the inward affections of men and ethics with outward manners – as if ethics, which they consider the prudence which governs the will and appetite, had nothing to do with inward affections, and theology did not teach outward as well as inward obedience. They also hold that ethics terminate within the bounds of this life and that theology extends into the future. They say that the subject of ethics is a good, honest, honorable man and the subject of theology is a godly and religious man. But the Apostle expressly teaches that theology instructs us to live not only piously and righteously but also temperately and justly, or honestly and honorably . . .68

Ames goes on to connect this erroneous separation of ethics and theology to an Aristotelian source, extolling Ramist dialectics over Aristotelian hexis; he then proceeds to redescribe habitual virtue as effective grace, a common Puritan maneuver that, we have also seen, raises practical problems as it resolves theoretical ones.69 The important point is that Ames’s contention that the neo-Aristotelian ethicists are responsible for reductively separating ethics from theology makes Herbert’s poetry difficult to reconcile with Reformed theories of the interdependence of the two regiments. This does not mean, of course, that Herbert is neo-Aristotelian in keeping ethics distinct from theology. It suggests only that Herbert’s separation of ethics and

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theology is thus largely his own contrivance, unjustified by any conventional early modern, ethical or theological position on the matter. To ask the question of why Herbert cordons off his neighbors in the pastoral writings, refusing to incorporate them into the otherwise flexible body of “The Church” runs the risk of engaging too many fallacies laid to rest by the history of poetic theory. It is worth noting, though, that part of the problem stems from the nature of the demands put on any poeticized account of the relationship among the three love commandments. As is the case with most early modern ethical theories, an ethics of love suffers from an inability to clarify the relationship between theory and practice. “Love and do what you will,” advises Augustine. Yet how does this starkly formulated, universal precept, inform conduct in particular circumstances? How does one reconcile, for example, in the absence of casuistical cases of conscience, those scriptural passages that argue for equal regard and those that argue for special consideration? In his pastoral writings, Herbert recognizes what most modern “situation ethicists” recognize: that the proper dispensation of love requires acute sensitivity to the particulars of any case at hand. Rather than provide exceptionless rules, the Love commandments offer little more than the form of proper conduct. Prudence is thus required to resolve hard cases, and to adequately match contingencies to precepts. Herbert’s sensitivity to what Reid Barbour aptly describes in another context as a “casuistry of circumstance” is evident throughout “A Priest to the Temple.”70 The parson should catechize, which promotes universal precepts and rules of conduct, yet he “greatly esteems also of cases of conscience, wherein he is much versed.”71 Cases of conscience provide “a slighter form of catechising fitter for country people.”72 This allows the parson to “Canvass all the particulars of human actions, at least all those which he observeth are most incident to his parish.”73 When the parson preaches, he serves as the consummate Pauline rhetor, functioning as all things to all people. Adapting his tone and content to the demands of his local audience, the parson practices a “particularizing of his speech now to the younger sort, then to the elder, now to the poor, and now to the rich.”74 And the parson dispenses charity not indiscriminately, but rather respects persons: “In all his charity, he distinguisheth, giving them most who live best and take most pains and are most charged; so is his charity in effect a sermon.”75 If we return to Herbert’s religious lyrics, bearing in mind that, for Herbert, a context-sensitive ethics of love is a necessary feature of regeneration, we can begin to explain the absence of any adequate depiction of sanctification in the devotional poetry. To the extent that justification

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describes Christ’s saving actions on the sinner’s behalf, justification is fundamentally abstractive by nature, representable in poetic form without reference to particularizing circumstances. This is not to say that the moment of justification is not depicted as vexatious in “The Church.” It is rather to say that Herbert’s perturbations over questions of faith and grace are readily understandable and shareable (or ought to be) by any Protestant communicant. Sanctifying righteousness, however, cannot be adequately represented without descending into particulars, without enumerating, if not flesh and blood moral subjects and objects, at least approximately real circumstances under which moral conduct takes place. This particularizing requirement is precisely what “The Church” eschews in its focus on the complexities of grace; when the poems do reckon with the interdependent nature of grace and works, the universalist focus in a given lyric so overshadows the expression of sanctification that, as we have seen, neighbors are typically effaced, apprehensible only as ghostly traces of their scriptural counterparts that can be found in the biblical proof-texts providing the content of individual poems. Another way to approach this problem of reconciling justification and sanctification is to return to “Divinity” and Herbert’s own distinction between faith and reason. To the extent that practical, “holy living” divinity requires one to unravel the “gordian knot” of the triple love commandment, it requires a degree or moral discernment that assumes, if not the possession of a specifically neo-scholastic, intellectual virtue like prudence, then at least the supplement of grace by what Shuger would call rationalizing consciousness. If there exists in Reformed theology one virtue or disposition the expression of which requires a dissolution of a two regiment distinction, it is the virtue of love, comprehensively defined as love of God, neighbor, and self. In order adequately to represent Reformed theories of love, rigid distinctions between justification and sanctification, the temporal and the spiritual regiment, reason and faith, need to be dissolved. In “The Church” Herbert seems to want to maintain the very distinctions that his own rhetoric of Reformed theories of love strives to dismantle. Again, this of course should not be construed as an inconsistency as such; it simply raises a question as to “The Church’s” placement amid the mainstream of Reformed theology and Protestant poetics. “What can the poor hope from us, when we be / Uncharitable ev’n to Charity” (55–56). So writes Richard Crashaw in the final lines of “A Treatise to Charity,” a poem included in his 1646 collection of devotional lyrics, “Steps to the Temple.”76 Far from sidestepping an exploration of an ethics of charity in relation to devotion, Crashaw decrees that all poetry

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ought to represent virtue’s fulfillment in social responsibility: “This shall from hence-forth be the masculine theme / Pulpits and pens shall weat in; / to redeem / Virtue to action, that life-feeding flame that keeps Religion warm: not swell a name / of Faith . . .” (48–51). Whether Crashaw is directly responding to Herbert’s devotionalism, his message is clear: service to God is not adequate service without due consideration of proper forms of charity, religion’s handmaid: “God’s services no longer shall put on / A sluttishness, for pure religion.” The unlikely title of Crashaw’s intensely lyrical poem, “A Treatise of Charity,” seems to raise the very question of the proper media through which the relationship between ethics and theology can be represented. The obvious lyricism of Crashaw’s poem, falsifying the analyticity of its title, suggests that questions of social ethics in relation to “pure” devotion are fit objects of poetic reflection, not just proper subjects for neo-scholastic treatises. It might seem doctrinally inconsistent to weigh Herbert’s lyrics against Crashaw’s counter-reformation sensibilities, but we can turn now to Milton’s Paradise Lost for an example of a Protestant text that fulfills, in its pragmatic and latitudinarian way, Crashaw’s demand to poeticize righteousness in relation to grace.

chap t e r 6

Moral pragmatism in the theology of John Milton and his contemporaries

We have seen that Donne and Herbert inherit the English Calvinist challenge of not only clearly distinguishing justification from sanctification, but also of incorporating a theory of practical morality into the order of salvation. This chapter investigates the mid to late seventeenth-century doctrinal and textual positions on the relationship between grace and morality, positions that mark a fundamental departure from the Conformist and Puritan theories of morality we have been evaluating throughout this study. In the interests of consolidating the English church after the divisive civil war years, moderate churchmen or “latitudinarians” – Jeremy Taylor, John Tillotson, Edward Stillingfleet, Isaac Barrow, and others – reject all manner of polemicizing about unprovable fundamentals of revealed religion. The latitude-men were particularly critical, as we shall see below, of excessive self-scrutiny as a means of discerning personal assurance. Affective individualism is described in their sermons as an overscrupulous devotional exercise that leads to frustration and religious despair rather than dutiful expressions of practical piety. Most latitudinarian sermons focus instead on a reformation of manners and the reasonable and practical means by which congregants might be disciplined into participating in a comprehensive, tolerant English church. For its interest in practical rather than dogmatic theology, latitudinarianism is aptly described as a “holy living” theology. Regarding moral education, in particular, latitudinarians are more willing than their English Calvinist predecessors to introduce a system of moral conditioning into the scheme of salvation, although they offer a particular theory of habituation that I will be terming “moral pragmatism.” In the second section of the chapter I argue that John Milton shares with holy living theologians the pragmatic assumption that new converts ought to be allowed to go through the motions of faith as a short term strategy in the pursuit of salvation. This process of ethical habituation converges with at least one modern ethical theory, William James’s “will-to-believe” pragmatism, which maintains that moral agents are permitted to act “as-if ” 157

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they believed in God and fundamentals of theodicy.1 In Paradise Lost, Adam and Eve do develop morally in Eden, but this development is governed by a two-step process of rational choice followed by mostly unreflective conduct; that is to say, Adam and Eve rationally commit themselves to a measure of automatic piety that will ultimately lead to pure or formed faith and the discovery of a “paradise within.” Against recent Milton criticism, I will be arguing that, given such a seemingly self-contradictory process of rational habituation, Milton’s Irenaean or rational “soul-making” theodicy is entirely compatible with the regulation of behavior according to protocols of habit and custom. In his desire to introduce moral habituation into the order of salvation, Milton eases away from the Calvinist hostility toward developmental virtue as described in the previous chapters. This is not say, though, that Paradise Lost revitalizes the Aristotelian ethic of habituation that, as we have seen, makes such an embattled appearance in Sidney’s Arcadia and Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. Rather than describe a process through which moral apprentices gradually acquire discrete moral virtues and practical wisdom, late seventeenth-century moral pragmatism assumes instead that early converts make a series of rational choices, based on a sense of temporal and heavenly rewards, to stake unquestioning or automatic belief and faith in God. Consistent not only with latitudinarianism but also with Pascalian rationalism, Milton’s moral theology thus assumes that over time, after acting largely unreflectively, agents will naturally acquire a higher form of faith that does not entail any ontological change in character, but that does eventually displace rational self-interest as a motive for devotion. Milton is thus able to circumvent many of the soteriological problems facing earlier theologians and writers because he effectively works a measure of self-interest and moral progress into an acceptable Calvinist scheme of salvation. the seventeenth-century will-to-believe argument Milton’s critics have often argued that Richard Baxter and Milton shared a Puritan commitment to justifying the ways of an authoritarian God to recalcitrant sinners. Stanley Fish enlists Baxter’s Saint’s Everlasting Rest (1650) in support of his thesis that Milton’s God is an entrapping and chastising presence in Paradise Lost, in keeping with Milton’s presumptive theodicy.2 C. A. Patrides argues that Milton shared a number of Baxter’s orthodox views, for instance, the forensic and retributive nature of the contract between God and the Son regarding “full satisfaction” by the Son’s sacrifice.3 Because discussions of the Milton-Baxter affiliation have

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centered on doctrinal and party-line similarities, less attention has been given to Milton’s and Baxter’s converging ethical views, perhaps because such little notice has been given to Baxter’s practical works in general.4 Below is a brief introduction to the ethical theories of Baxter and those of his mid- to late-seventeenth century contemporaries, much of which, I argue, parallel what I will be describing as Milton’s moral pragmatism. In his practical writings, Baxter describes a systematic ethical program in which the role of habit and custom is given extended treatment. Baxter views habits as fundamental in setting conduct on a rightful path, conduct which need not be consciously directed or evaluated once firmly rooted habits have programmed the individual to act ethically: The intending of God’s glory or our spiritual good, cannot be distinctly and sensibly re-acted in every particular pleasure we take . . . but a sincere, habitual intention well laid at first in the heart, will serve to the right use of many particular means. As a man purposeth at his first setting out to what place he meaneth to go, and afterwards goeth on, though at every step he think not sensibly of his end; so he that devoteth himself to God . . . will carry on small particulars to that end, by a secret, unobserved action of the soul, performed at the same time with other actions, which only are observed . . . As the accustomed hand of a musician can play a lesson on his lute, while he thinks of something else: so can a resolved Christian faithfully do such accustomed things as . . . labouring in his calling, to the good ends which he (first actually, and still habitually) resolved on, without a distinct remembrance and observable intention of that end.5

Baxter believes that habit is a controlling faculty which, after having been developed properly, can be more responsible for the agent’s actions than divine inspiration, reasoned motivation or passional response. The confirmed believer is so proficient in his habits of faith that Baxter compares him to an expert laborer whose unthinking proficiency in a craft allows him the freedom to contemplate worthy objects and ideas while he works: “A weaver, a tailor, and some other tradesmen, and day-labourers, may do their work well, and yet have their thoughts free for better things, a great part of the day: these must contrive an ordinary way of employment for their thoughts, when their work doth not require them . . .”6 Baxter also finds value in permitting individuals who are gradually assimilating the tenets of faith to accept religious doctrine without the proper knowledge thereof, to undergo a time in which they simply go through the motions of believing fine points of doctrine until proper understanding can unfold the mysteries one has accepted and practiced unknowingly: “Though your religion must not be taken on trust, there are many controverted, smaller opinions that you must take upon trust, until you are capable

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of discerning them in proper evidence.”7 The whole point in Baxter’s practical and functional ethics is to promote ease and fluidity in moral conduct: “By the faithful practice of these directions, obedience may become, as it were, your nature; a familiar, easy, and delightful thing: and may be like a cheerful servant or child, that waiteth for your commands, and is glad to be employed by you.”8 One suspects that his Puritan predecessors would have contended that Baxter comes dangerously close in these exhortations to permitting moral mechanism, wherein moral agents can programmatically act ethically without full awareness of the implications of their conduct. Baxter’s moral pragmatism derives in part from his frequent criticisms of affective inwardness, which, as we have seen, for the experimental predestinarians involved a process of meticulous self-watchfulness. Throughout his writings, Baxter warns against excessive inward scrutiny: “A Christian indeed is more in getting and using his graces, than in inquiring whether he have them; he is very desirous to be assured that he is sincere, but he is more desirous to be so: and he knoweth that even assurance is got more by the exercise and increase of grace than by the bare inquiry we have it already . . .”9 Baxter suggests that a preoccupation with the state of one’s soul can even be considered sinful: “small excesses of fleshpleasing” are lesser sins than “excessive scrupulousness,” wherein a “man should daily perplex his mind about scruples, about every bit he eats, whether it be not too pleasing or too much; and about every word he speaks, and every step he goes, as many poor, tempted, melancholy persons do; thereby disabling themselves, not only to love, and praise and thankfulness, but even all considerable service.”10 Baxter’s moral philosophy is of a piece: the effectiveness of the self-conscious inward turn is downgraded and replaced with an exhortation to act responsively and efficiently; the surest means to preclude the disabling lethargy following from self-scrutiny is to allow habits efficiently and even mechanically to guide the regenerate to moral progress. Despite Baxter’s formal alliance with late seventeenth-century nonconformity, versions of his views on ethical habituation are expressed by a range of late seventeenth-century theologians nominally headed under the banner of high church Anglicanism and latitudinarianism.11 Baxter’s writings do not fall neatly into any denominational category such as Puritan nonconformity, which during the later decades of the seventeenth century found adherents such as John Howe, John Owen, William Bates, Robert Barclay, and John Bunyan. Nonconformists promote the erection of a primitive church of Presbyters and a “reconstruction of individualism” as an alternative to episcopalian uniformity and anti-enthusiasm.12 While Baxter

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sympathizes with Puritan nonconformists and mainstream Puritans of the early seventeenth century, including Perkins, Sibbes, and Preston, whom he calls “our old, solid divine” in The Saint’s Everlasting Rest (1650), he also shows in his autobiography an appreciation for the writings of moderate Conformists, including Joseph Hall and Ussher.13 He also expresses throughout his autobiography respect for latitudinarians such as Wilkins, Tillotson, Stillingfleet, and Nest, most of whose sermons he attended and appreciated in the 1660s: “Ordinarily I went to some parish church, where I heard a learned minister that had not obtruded himself upon the people, but was chosen by them, and preached well (as Dr. Wilkins, Dr. Tillotson, Mr. Nest, etc.), and I joined also in the common prayers of the church.”14 Isabel Rivers remarks, “The respect in which Baxter was held by moderate Anglicans is evidenced by the fact that in 1660, when a moderate church policy for a short time seemed possible, Charles II made him one of his chaplains . . . And his respect for the latitudinarians, especially Wilkins (‘a lover of mankind, and of honesty, peace and Impartiality and Justice’), Tillotson, Whichcote, and Stillingfleet, emerges at several points in his autobiography.”15 Baxter and his latitudinarian contemporaries believed that orthodox Calvinism underestimated the role of ethical training and holy living in the acquisition of faith. Latitudinarians argue that scripture contains only a few self-evident principles or saving truths, and that in place of an undue concern with mystery and sacrifice, ministers and lay persons should preoccupy themselves with matters of pastoral discipline.16 Given Baxter’s sympathy with latitudinarianism, it is not surprising that Tillotson, Baxter’s and Milton’s contemporary, reiterates the indispensability of custom in guiding proper conduct: “custom bears a huge sway in all humane actions. Men love those things and do them with ease to which they have become long inured and accustomed.” Tillotson, like Baxter, realizes that steadiness of purpose can operate beneath the level of discursive awareness and rational proof, as long as it follows from an initiating commitment to believe and act properly: Not that we are obliged always actually to think upon [salvation]; but to have it frequently in our minds, and habitually to intend and design it, so as to make it the scope of all our endeavors and actions, and that everything we do be either directly in order to it, or some way or other subservient to this design . . . like the term and end of a man’s journey, towards which the traveler is continually tending, and hath it always habitually in his intention, tho’ he doth not always think of it every step that he takes, and tho’ he be not always directly advancing and moving

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towards it, yet he never knowingly goes out of the way . . . if our mind be once fixed and resolved, that will determine and govern all our motions, and inspire us with diligence, and zeal, and perseverance in the prosecution of our end.17

For Tillotson, as for Baxter, the “habitual intention” once implemented requires negligible additional management, as if both theologians argue a kind of internalized or personalized deism, according to which the self is modeled as a clock or similar mechanism, which once set properly by a foundationally rational act, remains perfectly operative and self-governing. Indeed, in a Eucharist sermon preached at Westminster Abbey, Robert South, although usually occupying a position more conservative than his latitudinarian contemporaries on doctrinal points, draws an analogy between individual ethical maintenance and mechanistic functionalism: Common experience shows that the wisest of men are not always fit and disposed to act wisely . . . They have a . . . standing ability of wisdom and eloquence within them, which gives them an habitual sufficiency for such performances . . . [but] the most active powers and faculties of the mind require something besides themselves to raise them to the full height of their natural activity: something to excite, and quicken, and draw them forth into immediate action . . . [Like] the having of wheels and springs, though never so curiously wrought, and artificially set, but the winding of them up, that must give motion to the watch . . . we must add actual preparation to habitual.18

The causal relationship South underlines between “actual” and “habitual” preparation conforms to the procedure Baxter and Tillotson describe of setting habitual conduct to work by a prior momentous rational decision or series of rational decisions. In none of the examples mentioned above do we find a rationalist theology proper, since determining habitual conduct follows from the intermittence of rational choice. Moral pragmatism does not involve an ongoing disposition to act with practical wisdom, according to classical ethics, nor is such pragmatism an integral feature of mid-century notions of ethical rationalism, which, for moderate Anglicans like Chillingworth and John Hale, held that the light of reason itself helped the individual to make deductions and reach conclusions about theological fundamentals.19 Late seventeenth-century moral pragmatism shares much with Blaise Pascal’s influential account of habit, as related in his notes on the wager concerning the existence of God. After arguing that the decision to believe in God is justified because of the potential gains in the afterlife if, in fact, God does exist, Pascal imagines a question posed by his skeptical interlocutor: “yes, but my hands are tied and I cannot speak a word. I am

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being forced to wager and I am not free, they will not let me go. And I am made in such a way that I cannot believe. So what do you want me to do?”20 After responding that his interlocutor’s inability to believe stems from his servitude to the passions, Pascal recommends that rather than futilely multiplying arguments and proofs, his interlocutor should carry on like those who act “as if they believed, having masses said, etc. This will make you believe quite naturally, and according to your animal reactions.”21 Pascal believes that purer versions of belief and faith will eventually follow if his skeptic agrees to act obediently, in spite of the skeptic’s uncertainty regarding God’s existence. When Pascal resorts to the nascent principles of decision theory and probabilistic reasoning, he aims neither to prove the existence of God nor even to convince his readers to make a willful decision to believe in God. He simply argues that obedience is worthwhile given the utilities presented by the wager. As Ian Hacking writes, Pascal realizes that “one cannot decide to believe in God. One can decide to act so that one will very probably come to believe in God.”22 For Pascal, the existence of God cannot be deduced by an exercise of pure reason or elaborate metaphysical proofs. Such misleading proofs are the product of dogmatism, particularly rational deism, which assumes that the rational faculty can probe the rational principles of nature and divine law. Pyrrhonist skepticism, however, at the other extreme from dogmatism, is atheistical in negating the existence of God in the absence of contrary proofs. In place of dogmatism and unmethodological skepticism, Pascal believes in the efficacy of discrete rational choices, choices that are selfundermining because they are based on probability calculations that yield governance to habitual conduct: “In the end, we have to resort to custom once the mind has seen where the truth lies, to immerse and ingrain ourselves in this belief, which constantly eludes us.”23 Pascal realizes that the “last proceeding of reason is to recognize the fact that an infinity of things are beyond it.”24 As Jean Mesnard writes, “On the path to the affirmation of God, reason can help us take the first steps and, from the moment that it exerts itself correctly, all of its resources can be usefully employed without reservation and distrust,” but “the affirmation of God demands the submission of reason,” or as Pascal says, “Nothing conforms so much to reason as this disavowal of reason.”25 English latitudinarian sermonists of the 1660s through 1680s frequently made pragmatic and probabilistic arguments similar to Pascal’s. Consider Tillotson’s claim: “If there be no God the case of the Religious man and the Atheist will be alike, because they will both be extinguished by death and insensible of any further happiness or misery. But . . . if there is a

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God . . . where shall the wicked and ungodly appear? What can they expect but to be rejected by him whom they have renounced, and to feel the terrible effects of that Power and Justice which they have despised? So that tho’ the arguments on both sides were equal, yet the danger is not so. On the one side there is none at all, but ’tis infinite on the other.”26 As Henry Van Leeuwen says of this passage, Tillotson, “using a wager argument similar to that of Pascal . . . argues that if Christianity is false the believer will lose only some of the baser pleasures of life, whereas if it is true that there is a God and future rewards the atheist will lose his soul for eternity.”27 Jeremy Taylor uses a Pascalian argument in order to explain the problems of obeying God, rather than the more foundational problem of believing in God’s existence. In a passage already cited, Taylor observes in Unum Necessarium (1655): “the first cause of an universal impiety is, that at first God had made no promises of heaven. He had not propounded any glorious rewards, to be as an argument to support the superior faculty against the inferior, that is, to make the will choose the best and leave the worst, and to be as a reward for suffering contradiction.”28 Before we turn to a discussion of Milton’s ethical views and Paradise Lost in the context of the above themes, it will be helpful to further define the role of reason in what I have been describing as seventeenth-century moral pragmatism by drawing a distinction between reasonableness and rational choice. As John Rawls notes, moral philosophers frequently argue that a person who acts reasonably considers the effects which his or her actions will have on the well-being of larger communities of reasonable agents. An agent who acts rationally, on the other hand, is concerned primarily with personal utility, and acts in accordance with probability calculations and economic preferences. The outcome of a rational choice may have desirable ethical consequences, but such consequences are incidental to the initial rational commitment. As one commentator writes, “knowing that people are rational we do not know the ends that they will pursue, only that they will pursue them intelligently. Knowing that people are reasonable, where others are concerned, we know that they are willing to govern their conduct by a principle which they and others can reason in common.”29 The moral pragmatist relates rational choices to reasonableness as means to ends. By rationally committing oneself to habitual conduct, a decision which itself is a means to future personal gains, he or she will eventually acquire a reasonable end of true belief and ethical certainty. Adam and Eve exhibit the kind of habitual but not automatic or mechanical ethic recommended by late seventeenth-century moral doctrine, but they have been denied the originary moment of choosing a life of mostly unreflective non-choosing.

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How Milton has them resolve their ethical quandary will be the subject of the rest of this chapter. milton’s moral pragmat ism Drawing on the foundational work on the Fall by N. P. Williams and John Hicks, Dennis Danielson has usefully distinguished two early Christian accounts of man’s ethical stature, the Augustinian or “maximal” view and the Irenaean or “minimal” view. According to the Augustinian position, Adam and Eve are ethically perfect upon creation; moral progress is a postlapsarian phenomenon.30 According to the Irenaean position, Adam and Eve are ethically imperfect upon creation; only gradually, through a process of trial and error, do they realize their pre-ordained likeness to God. According to this “soul-making” theodicy, the “one who has attained to goodness by meeting and eventually mastering temptation, and thus by rightly making responsible choices in concrete situations, is good in a richer and more valuable sense than would be one created ab initio in a state . . . of virtue.”31 Danielson argues that Areopagitica’s vindication of trial by contraries is consistent with Irenaean rather than Augustinian theodicy. According to Danielson, when Milton claims that “God sure esteems the growth and compleating of one vertuous person, more than the restraint of ten vitious,” Milton is suggesting that “Adam must not be a puppet.”32 Danielson’s belief that Areopagitica reflects Milton’s soul-making theodicy is shared by critics who implicitly associate the Irenaean approach to moral development with Milton’s critique of custom and habit in the prose writings. John Rumrich, the most outspoken critic of the “invented” Milton, argues that for Milton, “truth was a goal to be worked toward, rather than an accomplished set of beliefs. How should we reconcile the vision of Milton as a preaching narrator with the voice that, in the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, allegorized custom or tradition as the puffed-up countenance of monstrous error? Milton’s conviction that submission to external interpretive authority undermines true virtue was fundamental to his disenchantment with the ‘ordinary’ Christians of his time . . . Sources often cited as background for Milton’s pedagogical method and message, however, recommend automatic, habitual, unreasoning response to trial and temptation.”33 One of the limitations of Rumrich’s and Danielson’s account of Milton’s soul-making ethic is that neither critic allows Milton a pro-habit ethical system that is personally installed, rationally motivated and largely self-governing. Although Rumrich argues for an iconoclastic Milton and

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Danielson for a theocentrist Milton, both critics tend to draw an overly simplified opposition between freedom to choose and habit, when habit may very well be the most desirable object of the original free choice. In the passage quoted above, Rumrich makes unwarranted inferences from Milton’s abhorrence of institutional practices to Milton’s conception of “pedagogy” (which may or may not include institutionalization), to Milton’s recommendation for alleviating “trial and temptation.” Surely practices of ethical habituation can be essentials to moral conduct even if such conduct is neither monitored by Presbyterianism nor dispensed by the “authoritative interpretation of revelation.” Areopagitica’s Irenaenism remains mostly on the level of diagnosis and exhortation, and as such cannot explain the precise nature of Adam and Eve’s practical-moral education in a mimetic epic like Paradise Lost. By its polemical nature, Areopagitica does not describe how ethical agents act on a daily basis, how discrete acts of trial by contraries can be organized into a larger ethical framework, and how classical and Christian virtues can be acquired and retained. Irenaenism is a teleological ethical system that posits the final cause of creaturely existence but does not offer practical, everyday advice on how an individual’s behavior can be regulated. In addition to a few remarks regarding trial by contraries, Irenaeus’s ethical commentary in Against Heresies is limited to general observations like the following: “[God planned that] man, passing through all things, and acquiring the knowledge of moral discipline, then attaining to the resurrection from the dead, and learning by experience what is the source of his deliverance, may always live in a state of gratitude to the Lord . . . Now it was necessary that man should in the first instance be created; and having been created, should receive growth; and having received growth should be strengthened; and having been strengthened should abound . . .”34 Irenaeus fails to discuss precisely how man is able to acquire moral discipline. If we turn briefly to Milton’s views on custom in the prose writings we will not find evidence that Milton disdained ethical habituation in the way that he did certain traditional beliefs and superstitions. In The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, custom is denounced because it “puffs up unhealthily a certain big face of pretended learning, mistaken among credulous men for the wholesome habit of soundness and good constitution, but is indeed no other than that swoln visit of counterfeit knowledge and literature, which not only in private mars our education, but also in public is the common climber into every chair . . .”35 Nowhere in such a comment does Milton offer anything more than a critique of custom from the vantage point of epistemology. Such a vilification of traditional or “counterfeit”

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modes of thinking does not suggest that unreflective practical conduct is equally unhealthy. In fact, Milton draws a distinction in the passage between custom and habit when he suggests that custom is often mistaken for the “wholesome habit of soundness and good constitution.” Unfortunately Milton does not elaborate his appreciation of habit, but he clearly believes that habit and custom are not identical in any non-reductive way. In Of Reformation, Milton refers approvingly to Cyprian’s 74th Epistle on the subject of custom: “neither ought Custome to hinder that Truth should not prevaile, for Custome without Truth is but agednesse of error” (YP. i. 561). In the prefatory comments to The Reason of Church-government, Milton justifies his project by invoking Plato’s belief that a “well-tempered discourse . . . would so incite, and in a manner charm, the multitude into the love of that which is really good, as to embrace it ever after, not of custom and awe, which most men do, but of choice and purpose, with true and constant delight” (YP. i. 747). In these references and those of the Divorce tracts, customs originate from sources external to the individual. The administration of customary thinking is never a private affair from its inception. Like Foucauldian power, custom traverses and insinuates itself into persons, hence the coupling of personification and action verbs used to track its movements. Often custom is objectified, the focus of our “awe,” but it more often travels and finds its terminus by “visiting” and “climbing” its way into our belief systems. Custom so conceived bears little resemblance to the process of habituation described by moral pragmatism, which is implemented purposefully by an individual’s rational decisions. One passage that links Milton’s ideas on faith (and implicitly habit) with the tradition of late seventeenth-century moral pragmatism appears in Book I, chapter 20 of De Doctrina, in Milton’s discussion of implicit faith: “Implicit faith, which sees not the objects of hope, but yields belief with a blind assent, cannot possibly be genuine faith, except in the case of novices or first converts, whose faith must necessarily be for a time implicit, inasmuch as they believe even before they have entered upon a course of instruction” (YP. vi. 338). That Milton finds implicit faith neither uncommon nor unacceptable (if not ideal) is represented in the list of exemplary implicit believers he compiles from biblical history: “such was that of the Samaritans. John xi. 31. and of the disciples, who believed in Christ long before they were accurately acquainted with the many articles of faith. Those also belong to this class, who are slow of understanding and inapt to learn, but who nevertheless believe according to the measure of their knowledge, and striving to live by faith, are acceptable to God” (YP. vi. 338).

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Milton’s account of implicit faith would parallel moral pragmatism exactly if Milton also had written that the act of yielding is itself a rational choice to admit reason’s impotence in the absence of further instruction. But this further criterion has to be embedded in Milton’s account, given the hymns to reasonableness which are found elsewhere in De Doctrina. As Richard Strier has pointed out in a rigorous discussion of Milton’s ethical rationalism, De Doctrina recommends the employment of deliberative reason under all conditions. Strier has compiled a series of comments from De Doctrina showing Milton’s commitment to ethical rationalism. Milton remarks, for example, that if trinitarian arguments are to be convincing they must be based on reasonable, and not “absurd notions which are utterly alien to all human ways of thinking” (YP. vi. 222). Milton argues further that predestination is false because it is “repulsive and unreasonable” (YP. vi. 164), and that “everyone is provided with sufficient innate reason . . . to be able to resist evil desires by his own efforts (YP. vi. 186).”36 Milton’s “conception of freedom,” Strier remarks, “is entirely a conception of deliberation and choice.”37 How can we reconcile the ubiquitous call in De Doctrina to act deliberatively with the same text’s own admission that first converts can act justifiably following a non-rational, blind assent to believe? Is such a novice pardoned, during her formative stages of religious education, from prudential conduct? The only way to make sense of the logic of De Doctrina is to assume that Milton has in mind a pragmatic argument: the novice, not fully instructed in matters relevant to the acquisition of pure faith, can still act reasonably by making a rational decision to trust uncertain doctrine. I argue below that, in Paradise Lost, Adam and Eve, despite their keen acquisition of scientific knowledge and self-knowledge, remain novices in matters of faith and ethical conduct. adam and eve’s fall f rom reasonableness to rational choice In her essay “Innocence and Experience in Milton’s Eden,” Barbara Lewalski draws an analogy between Adam and Eve’s cultivation of the garden and their development of a virtuous “paradise within.” After noting that Edenic growth tends toward wildness and so requires constant maintenance, Lewalski writes: The poem’s garden imagery identifies Adam and Eve not only as gardeners but also as part of the Garden: they too are “planted” by God, expected to grow and

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perfect themselves through cultivation, and to bear appropriate fruits . . . Adam and Eve . . . have natures capable of a prodigious growth of good things, but which require constant pruning to remove excessive or unsightly growth, constant direction of overreaching tendencies, constant propping of possible weaknesses, and also, one supposes, further cultivation through art.38

Throughout the essay Lewalski tends to collapse distinctions between the natural and biological progress that Adam and Eve are to learn and initiate – the growth of human society or the knowledge of astronomy, for example – and Adam and Eve’s moral development. Except for one command by God to Adam – “govern well thy appetite, lest sin / Surprise thee” (PL. vii. 546–7)39 – Lewalski does not provide compelling evidence that suggests that the analogy between external and internal “labor” is concerned specifically with moral progress rather than biological, historical or scientific progress. Nor does Lewalski explain in detail the relationship that she seems to draw between virtue and progress in general. During key moments, rather than show Adam and Eve’s linear development in virtue, Lewalski makes reference to Milton’s ideas on morality that appear outside the text. Thus she quotes Areopagitica on the importance of “tempering virtue,” which warrants her claim that the labor analogy suggests that in Eden the only security from Satan is “watchfulness and constant growth in virtue and wisdom.”40 The passages Lewalski does reference in order to draw out the garden analogy do not clearly refer to the construction of virtuous character. She cites, for instance, as evidence of the cultivation of a “paradise within,” the following passage from Book V: “They led the vine / To wed her Elm; she spous’d about him twines / Her marriageable arms, and with her brings / Her dow’r th’ adopted Clusters, to adorn / His barren leaves” (v. 215–19). Lewalski writes of this passage that “Eve has been identified as a ‘vine’ with tendrils clustering about Adam, and she is to solace his loneliness, bring him progeny, cleave to him.”41 Lewalski offers a beautiful gloss on these lines, but neither the passage nor her interpretation has anything obvious to say about moral education. In another instance, after discussing Adam and Eve’s sexual relations, their need to deepen their knowledge of astronomy, and Raphael’s remark that all things “body up to spirit work, in bounds / Proportion’d to each kind (v. 478–9),” Lewalski writes, “By means of such departures from the expected, primal man’s nature is shown to be complex and constantly developing, not simple and stable. Each new situation in Milton’s Eden is an opportunity to grow in wisdom, virtue, and perfection.”42 Virtue is used so generally that it is emptied of meaning. One wants from Lewalski a fuller account of the relationship between virtue, on

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the one hand, and science, sexual consummation, perfection, and wisdom, on the other hand. Lewalski’s most curious conflation of knowledge and ethics occurs when she invokes Socratic ethics in order to describe Adam’s realization that he should seek to acquire practical, rather than cosmological knowledge: “Now he announces himself a committed humanist, and like Socrates proposes to ‘descend’: from speculation about the heavens (whether angelic warfare, or creation, or planets) and seek the ‘prime wisdom,’ namely, ‘That which before us lies in daily life’ – in Socratic terms, self-knowledge, ethics (viii. 193–4).”43 Adam’s decision to focus on matters of “daily life” rather than cosmological issues does not necessarily reflect his acquisition of self-knowledge and a Socratic ethic. Adam makes a case in these passages for what Charles Taylor describes as the seventeenth-century “affirmation of ordinary life,” in which, as we have had occasion to note in an earlier chapter, a commitment to acquiring useful knowledge replaces unprofitable curiosity regarding God’s voluntaristic nature (a belief that Taylor himself says is uncongenial to Socratic ethics).44 Such an affirmation of ordinary life does not assume “self-knowledge” necessarily; indeed, it in many ways served to relieve the burden of intensely experienced affective individualism. But more important, a commitment to learning useful knowledge is not a sufficient condition for Socratic virtue, which denies incontinence and requires objective knowledge of good and evil. If Adam and Eve possessed such objective or scientific knowledge of good and evil in Eden, then what point would the tree of knowledge and the Fall possibly serve? There is, I think, an alternative way of explaining the role of Edenic labor, one that avoids making generalizations about Adam and Eve’s moral progress, but does not deny the importance of their education in science and cosmology. In Book IV, after relating to Eve God’s prohibitions concerning the tree of knowledge, Adam tells her that, “God hath pronounc’t it death to taste that Tree, / The only sign of our obedience left . . . Then let us not think hard / One easy prohibition . . . But let us ever praise him . . . following our delightful task to prune these growing plants, and tend these Flow’rs . . .” (iv. 427–38). Have Adam and Eve made a rational decision not to “think hard one easy prohibition?” What, as Jeremy Taylor asks, are the gains and losses of such obedience? There are no future gains in the sense that Adam and Eve stand to acquire something more than what they already have been given (they have not yet been told that they can ascend the scale of nature should they remain obedient, an important condition that I discuss below). Of course, what they would retain is “all this happiness”

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(iv. 417) and “Dominion giv’n / over all other Creatures” (iv. 430–1), but Adam performs no weighting procedures that suggests he understands the possibility of losing such goods should they disobey. He argues that since they already have such goods, obeying one easy prohibition cannot be so difficult. The distinction is a fine but I think essential one. Adam does not make a rational calculation to obey based on an evaluation of his interests. He makes a decision to obey based on his sense of the proper gratitude and duty owed toward God. His experience of happiness makes obedience easier; it does not motivate his obedience in the same way that one’s abstention from alcohol, for instance, might be motivated by a desire to remain healthy or to retain a job. What does seem more closely connected to Adam’s interested obedience is his fear of death, but his comments on death are so convoluted as to make any attribution of rationality to obedience unwarranted. He tells Eve of the Tree of Knowledge: “planted by the Tree of Life, / So near grows Death to Life, whate’er death is, / Some dreadful thing no doubt; for well thou know’st / God hath pronounc’t it death to taste that Tree . . .” (iv. 424–7). Adam does not say that death is dreadful and God has said as much; he says that death is dreadful because God has said as much. This ranks among the most transparently voluntaristic comments in the entire poem. It is reminiscent of Ockham’s well-known revision of Aquinas’s naturalistic ethic. While Aquinas had argued that God demands x because x is good, Ockham argued that x is good simply because God demands x. God might have substituted anything for “death” in his prohibition, and Adam would have simply re-inserted the substitution in his template of a remark: “x is some dreadful thing no doubt.” If, for argument’s sake, we say that the pair does make a considered decision to obey the prohibition, should we say that they act in accordance with the tenets of theological pragmatism? To the extent that they make rational decisions to act mostly unreflectively, they still will have met only two of the three criteria for pragmatism. What follows a rational decision to act non-rationally is the further assumption, included in Baxter’s, Pascal’s and Milton’s views on the subject, that over time agents will come to understand clearly matters previously taken on blind faith. This is precisely what is omitted from Adam and Eve’s decision scenario, since God does not suggest that they will eventually acquire a deeper understanding specifically of the Tree of Knowledge and the prohibition. Since the promise of firmer knowledge is not factored into any original decision to act habitually, Adam and Eve’s conduct does not meet the criteria of moral pragmatism; without such a promise, obedience is diluted of rationality.

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From the assumption that Adam and Eve’s conduct up to this point meets only the second criterion of moral pragmatism – moderate reflectiveness in the face of limited knowledge (excluding any rational decision to obey) – we can see that the first call to labor in Book IV partly serves a benign means of distraction. Adam says to Eve, “Then let us not think hard / One easy prohibition . . . But let us ever praise him . . . following our delightful task / To prune these growing plants, and tend these Flow’rs . . .” (iv. 427–38). Here and elsewhere Adam’s abrupt turn from epistemological questioning to the immediacy of physical labor allows him to fix attention on a manageable and non-speculative pursuit. Lewalski fails to remark on the arbitrariness of Adam’s first invocation of gardening, which is introduced as a non sequitur from his immediately preceding narrative on God’s prohibitions. Edenic labor often provides a distraction that allows Adam and Eve to avoid inquiring about unanswerable questions. Rather than recall to mind a scheduled responsibility, Adam seems to happen upon the prospect of ritualized labor. Adam and Eve’s conduct throughout Books IV and V oscillates from distraction to moderate reflectiveness. If Adam first suggests to Eve that labor will redirect their attention away from God’s dispensations, Eve then suggests to Adam that his decrees alone can bind her unthoughtful obedience: My Author and Disposer, what thou bidd’st Unargu’d I obey; so God ordains, God is thy Law, thou mine: to know no more Is woman’s happiest knowledge and her praise. With thee conversing I forget all time, All seasons and thir change, all please alike. (iv. 635–40).

Eve expresses here almost a parody of the doctrine of learned ignorance. Rather than reasonably deriving her conclusion to bind herself unarguingly to Adam, she allows a simple awareness of chained commandments to govern her conduct: “I will act as Adam acts because Adam acts as God commands.” Should we say that such a resignation furthers Eve’s moral progress? Following Eve’s narration of her dream in Book V, Adam attempts to calm her by offering a brief lesson in faculty psychology and the role of fancy in self-deception, and he assures her that images of evil in one’s mind “may come and go” (v. 118). But then rather than give Eve time to respond, and allow a dialogue to follow, Adam quickly reminds her of the work at hand: “And let us to our fresh imployments rise” (v. 125). The conjunction “and”

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is curious, since the natural word to mark the syntactical turn in Adam’s speech should be “instead,” or “rather.” Adam’s full comment is, “Be not disheart’nd then, nor cloud those looks / That wont to be more cheerful and serene / Than when the fair Morning first smiles on the World, / And let us to our fresh employments rise . . .” (v. 122–5). The use of “and” rather than a more appropriate transition allows Adam to seamlessly finesse the call to labor in the groves, which are alluringly suffused with “the choicest bosom’d smells” (v. 127). Adam might as well have waved an apple, or any enticement that might have helped to press back into Eve’s unconsciousness the images of her dream. Here again, the call to labor serves as an efficient means of distractive pleasure. Lewalski hurries over the passage when she remarks, “In the moral climate of Milton’s Eden, Eve’s virtual experience of evil no doubt creates new tensions within her but by making her so much more aware of evil’s true nature, it could greatly enhance her ability and her determination to shun the actual experience.”45 But of course the episode does not enhance Eve’s ability to shun the actual experience. Rather, Milton’s decision not to allow Eve the time to respond to Adam, to ruminate on his advice, to think for herself in a reasoned dialogue, all converge to make her that much more susceptible to the actual temptation. Adam and Eve’s ethic of unreflection is represented not only in their timely moves toward labor, but also in the tableau which models their unity in devotion. The narrator notes that on one occasion before praying, Adam and Eve “both stood, both turned” (iv. 720), and upon completion of their devotions, they lay their troublesome disguises “straight side by side” (iv, 741). Adam and Eve’s perfectly synchronized conduct is reiterated in Book V, when they perform their Orisons without meditation or rehearsal: “Unmeditated, such prompt eloquence / Flow’d from thir lips . . .” (v. 149–50). “Unmeditated” is a suggestive word choice in this description. To say that one meditates or not when praying would seem to refer to a practice occurring (or not occurring) during the actual event of praying. The narrator, however, suggests that meditation, if it had occurred at all in this context, would have begun prior to the praying, as if meditation has a causal rather than constitutive relationship to the conduct. There seems to be nothing in particular that is immediately responsible for motivating such conduct, as if Adam and Eve’s devotions just break into sound. There is certainly something endearing about the spontaneity of Adam and Eve’s behavior. Because they pray “in various style” (v. 146), they should not be described as automata. But there is also something unsettling about the limits Milton puts on their ability to self-consciously coordinate their own actions.

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Adam and Eve at this point seem to have met much of the criteria for morally pragmatic behavior. Their conduct is mostly unreflective, although not entirely mechanical, in keeping with the recommendations of Baxter and his contemporaries; it is predictable, disciplined and sufficiently routine, but not slavishly practiced. The problem, though, which I have already noted, is that their behavior has never been fixed by a self-consciously rational act or set of acts, and so there exists the threat that such conduct may not be sufficiently binding or able to withstand perverse turns of the will. Of course, part of the reason that such formative prior moments are not represented is that, given the nature of the myth bequeathed to Milton, Adam and Eve have no extended past lives. This is no small problem when it comes to representing the long and arduous processes by which pre-modern ethical agents learn how to act ethically. And it helps to explain, as I discuss later, why Raphael painstakingly narrates the event in the war in heaven as a means of preventing the pair’s apostasy. Lewalski, in her essay mentioned above, argues that in Book VIII, during his expostulation with God immediately following his creation, Adam begins a process of growth that is governed above all by his use of a “discourse of reason”: “By discourse of reason he [Adam] works out the fact that he is not self-generated, and that he ought to discover and adore his creator, so he asks the creatures (not yet knowing they are mute) who he is, and who his maker is.”46 The lines actually read, “Fair Creatures, tell, / Tell, if ye saw, how came I this, how here? / Not of myself; by some great Maker then . . .” (viii. 276–8). Adam’s immediate answer to his own question gives the impression that, despite the reflexive pronoun, somehow Adam’s own voice and the creatures’ response have been fused into one intuitively clear response, as if the answer is so obvious that the question never had to be asked in the first place. To say, as Lewalski does, that Adam undergoes such an illumination by “discourse of reason” misleadingly implies that much more ratiocination is at play than what the lines suggest. Adam, of course, does later show his gifts for ratiocination when he makes his plea to God for a mate, but his reasoning is focused neither on God’s prohibitions nor on his decision to commit himself to such prohibitions. During their otherwise benign rituals, Adam and Eve reveal not simply that they have deferred a rational inquiry as to God’s unrevealed ways; rather, they reveal that they have deferred an otherwise self-imposed rational choice not to explore God’s ways. Adam thrusts himself into habitual labor just as Eve accepts unquestioningly Adam’s decisions on the pair’s behalf. The problem is not in the not asking but in the thrusting without having first made a considered decision not to ask. The limitations in acting

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unreflectively without having rationally committed oneself to unreflection surfaces when Adam confesses to Raphael that his “constant thoughts” are not necessarily unswerving: “Yet that we never shall forget to love / Our maker, and obey him whose command / Single, is yet so just, my constant thoughts / Assur’d me, and still assure: though what thou tell’st / Hath past in heaven, some doubt within me move” (v. 550–4). Since Adam’s “constant thoughts” do not have assured staying power in the absence of a prior commitment to thinking constantly, his knowledge of another’s fall from heaven partially undermines his own faith. I think that we can begin to see more clearly the problems facing critics who defend either an Irenaean view that Adam and Eve need to develop into morally responsible adults or the Augustinian view that they are morally perfect adults while in Eden. While the Irenaean school cannot make sense of Adam and Eve’s intuitive knowledge of devotional practices and the spontaneity of their obedience, the Augustinian school cannot convincingly argue that, in the absence of clear deliberation about means and ends, Adam and Eve are perfectly ethical agents upon creation (at least not according to any acceptable criteria for moral excellence figuring in the history of moral doctrine). As I have been suggesting, moral pragmatism helps resolve a number of these difficulties, and helps integrate rather than dichotomize what Richard Strier has set up as, on the one hand, the ethical rationalism of De Doctrina and, on the other hand, Adam and Eve’s spontaneous prelapsarian obedience and generosity.47 Whether we describe spontaneous obedience as virtuous or not, it can only be considered sufficiently virtuous if it meets De Doctrina’s criteria for virtue, that is, if it is combined with effective and binding practices of rational deliberation. The pragmatic ethic is the only normative ethic that allows for the integration of a minimum of reason with a maximum of instinctive obedience. And, as I suggest below, the processes by which Adam and Eve come to add such rationality to their spontaneity help to explain the events that lead up to the Fall. The first step Adam and Eve take toward properly acquiring the pragmatic ethic occurs during the separation scene. What critics have tended to overlook is that Adam and Eve exercise two very different versions of reason throughout the scene. I have already mentioned the analytical distinction between reasonableness and rational choice, the former describing an ongoing disposition and willingness to act ethically, the latter an occurrent, mostly instrumental practice of private choosing based on probability calculations (the latter is more properly described as pragmatically ethical rather than ethical as such). During the separation scene, Eve insists on exercising rational choice, while Adam insists on exercising reasonableness. Eve

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tells Adam: “Let us divide our labours, thou where choice / Leads thee . . . while I . . . find what to redress till Noon: / For while so near each other thus all day / Our task we choose, what wonder if so near / Looks intervene and smiles, or object new / Casual discourse draw on, which intermits / Our day’s work brought to little . . .” (ix. 214–24). Given the probability that co-operative work brings too great a chance of interruption, Eve motions compellingly that the potential gains in fellowship will be offset by the potential losses in efficiency. Adam then defines co-operation and fellowship as man’s distinguishing marks of reasonableness: “for smiles / from Reason flow, / To brute deni’d . . . For not to irksome toil, but to delight / He made us, and delight to reason join’d” (ix. 239–43). Eve displays in this exchange moral pragmatism writ small by making a rational case for committing herself to non-reasonable conduct, conduct that does not immediately involve discourse, curiosity, or mutuality. Regarding Adam and Eve’s moral development, the separation incident is one of the most formative and educational experiences in the poem; it instructs the pair (although Adam does not immediately realize this) in the importance of assessing a situation, weighing alternatives, and acting deliberately in pursuit of a long term goal. No model of behavior like this one has been represented up to this point, and it anticipates the type of rational choice scenario Eve will encounter during the Temptation scene. Only when it is evaluated out of the immediate context of the poem and the context of the history of moral philosophy does Eve deserve the blame that Adam and legions of interpreters have heaped upon her. Upon encountering Satan during the Temptation scene, then, Eve has already assimilated the structural features of moral pragmatism. Whether she will decide to act obediently or not will be determined by a cost-benefit analysis. Before looking at the Temptation scene I would like to remark on a passage on the Fall already quoted above, from Jeremy Taylor’s Unum Necessarium (1655). Taylor writes that “the first cause of an universal impiety is, that at first God had made no promises of heaven, He had not propounded any glorious rewards, to be as an argument to support the superior faculty against the inferior, that is, to make the will choose the best and leave the worst, and to be as a reward for suffering contradiction.”48 Taylor believes that when faced with a decision to obey God, any rational person must resort to basic principles of decision theory and moral consequentialism. Since, as Taylor insists, God offered Adam no “recompense” for abstention, it is “no wonder that when Adam had no promises made to enable him to contest his natural concupiscence, he should strive to make his condition better by the devil’s promises.”49

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Taylor’s interpretation of Adam’s rationally justifiable behavior – Adam’s calculated decision to indulge – applies equally to Eve’s conduct during the Temptation scene. Eve seems ready to stake blind obedience in God but fails to register the gains that would accrue were she to remain obedient and the losses that would ensue were she to commit herself to the serpent. The gains of disobedience are clearly proffered: a “happier life” (ix. 697) and “knowledge of good and evil” (ix. 697), and the chance to become “A Goddess among Gods, ador’d and serv’d / By Angels numberless, thy daily Train” (ix. 547–8). Significantly, such considerations appeal, as the narrator says, to Eve’s “reason” (ix. 738), again suggesting that Eve at this point thinks pragmatically and calculatingly. On the other side, the potential losses if Eve forsakes God amount to death, but it is not clear that Eve has any settled notions of what death might entail. All God has told her (through Adam) is that she should neither eat nor touch the fruit, “lest ye die” (ix. 663), only a direful prospect if Eve is able to contemplate the seriousness of death in the first place. As I have already noted, that neither she nor Adam feels any real dread of death at this point is made clear when Adam remarks that although he has no clear notion of death, it is “some dreadful thing no doubt” (iv. 426). Satan exploits Eve’s ignorance when he says, “whatever thing Death be” (ix. 695). Eve, of course, ruminates on death during her famous contemplations at Book ix, 758–73, but only after her lapse does she make any attempt to define death: “And Death ensue? then I shall be no more” (ix. 827). Given such utilities for and against God, at this point the serpent’s gambit looks highly attractive. It is more difficult to determine what Eve believes she would gain if she remains obedient, or in the absence of any future compensations, whether or not she weighs the value of what she already has against Satan’s offers. Raphael has already suggested to the pair what might be interpreted as a future gain should they remain committed to God. Raphael tells Adam that, should he and Eve remain obedient, their “bodies may at last turn all to spirit, / Improv’d by tract of time, and wing’d ascend / Ethereal, as wee . . .” (v. 497–9), to which Adam responds, “Well hast thou taught the way that might direct / Our knowledge, and the scale of Nature set / From centre to circumference, whereon / In contemplation of created things / By steps we may ascend to God” (v. 508–12). Why doesn’t Eve remind herself of the promised ascent? What are the values Adam and Eve place on such a promise? Importantly, Milton never suggests that the ascent is considered by the pair to be a gain or achievement that might be desirable in itself. The extent to which Adam puts a value

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on Raphael’s promise needs to be weighed against the substance of Adam’s question posed just following his words cited above: “can we want obedience then / To him . . . Who form’d us from the dust, and plac’d us here / Full to the utmost measure of what bliss / Human desires can seek or apprehend?” (v. 514–18). If we assume that Adam believes the ascent is valuable because it will enhance his and Eve’s happiness, then we cannot make sense of his comment that he and Eve already possess the “utmost measure of bliss” while in Eden. It is difficult to interpret the future ascent as an event that might motivate Adam and Eve’s obedience, since they fail to see how their level of Edenic happiness can be matched by an alternative or future state of affairs. If Adam were a bit more outspoken he might respond to Raphael by asking, “If I fail to remain obedient and so lose the chance to ascend to God, will I still be able to remain with Eve in Eden?” But this still leaves unresolved why Eve fails to consider during the Temptation scene the possibility of having to forsake Edenic life if she disobeys God. Why doesn’t she recall Raphael’s narrative of the war in heaven? We need, I think, to assess the impression that, from a rational choice perspective, the events of the war in heaven have on Adam and Eve’s obedience. Adam’s comments just before and just after he has learned the details of the war in heaven provide the clearest test case of Areopagitica’s claim that virtue is learned from knowledge of vice. The claim is momentarily called into question when Adam, upon merely learning that disobedience is possible, begins to question his own constancy: “what thou tell’st / Hath past in Heav’n, some doubt within me move” (v. 553–4). If the claim is to be validated, Satan’s example should dissuade Adam and Eve from apostasy. That Raphael’s narrative does not achieve its desired effect is of course proven by the Fall itself. The important question is whether or not anything specific about the analogy fails, or whether the analogy is successfully communicated, but the pair lapses because supervening influences offset the otherwise effective power of the analogy to justify their obedience. I think that the former is the case, that something internal to the strategy behind the analogy fails, and that such a failure is implicit in Adam’s response to the events of the war in heaven. Adam tells Raphael: Great things, and full of wonder in our ears, Far differing from this World, thou hast reveal’d Divine interpreter, by favor sent Down from the Empyrean to forewarn Us timely of what might else have been our loss,

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Unknown, which human knowledge could not reach: For which to th’ infinitely Good we owe Immortal thanks, and his admonishment Receive with solemn purpose to observe Immutably his sovran will, the end Of what we are. (vii. 70–80)

Adam’s emphasis on the distance separating the war in heaven and Edenic life – “far differing from this world” – has the effect of straining the relevance of Satan’s disobedience to his and Eve’s potential disobedience, widening the applicability of Satan’s act of “too high aspiring” (vi. 899) to his and Eve’s much less dramatic act of obeying or disobeying their one easy prohibition. Adam then thanks Raphael specifically for forewarning him and Eve “timely of what might else have bin our loss” (vii. 74). If we assume that the object of “forewarn” (vii. 73) is roughly equivalent to “the possibility of falling as Satan fell,” and that “our loss” refers to Adam and Eve’s potential loss, the line can be paraphrased as, “to forewarn us of the possibility of falling as Satan fell, which would have been our loss (would have happened to us too) had you not mentioned the events.” Here, as in his earlier determination not to “think hard / One easie prohibition” (iv. 432–3), Adam undergoes very little deliberation and weighing of alternatives. The use of the contrary-to-fact conditional suggests that Adam’s reaffirmed obedience is achieved simply upon his hearing the details of Satan’s fall, as if Raphael’s narration serves as an extended speech act carrying sufficient weight to secure Adam’s obedience. Adam does not say anything like, “Now that I have learned of the events of the war in heaven, I understand the penalties of disobedience and rewards of obedience; therefore I desire and plan to act accordingly.” What he says is more like, “Now, Raphael, that you have narrated the events of the war in heaven, you have made unlikely the possibility of my (our) apostasy.” That negligible decisionmaking precedes Adam’s response is reflected in his final claim to obey immutably God’s “will” (vii. 79), which he suggests is equivalent to what he and Eve “are” (vii. 80). Whatever small measure of ratiocination Adam has applied is undercut by his act of yielding rational autonomy to God’s causality. Adam begins his response by emphasizing the distance between heavenly and earthly matters; he then simply acknowledges that his awareness of Satan’s Fall has changed his future course. He completes his response by affirming that his and Eve’s wills are absorbed by God’s will. It is no wonder that Raphael’s calculated exposition does not achieve its intended effect.

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If we return to Eve and the Temptation scene, assuming that Raphael’s narration is at least as influential on Eve’s conduct as it is on Adam’s, we can better understand why she fails to imagine any lesser punishment after she has convinced herself that death will not follow from her indulgence. Eve’s inability to reflect rationally on the possibility of losing Eden reinforces what I have been suggesting about the largely unreflective nature of her experiences up to this point. That she does not introduce into her mental accounting the possibility of expulsion during this crucial moment suggests both that she has not experienced her lifestyle in any dynamic way, and that she has only begun to assess her own behavior in any rational manner. If, during the separation scene, Eve discovers the efficiencies of rational choice accounting, during the Temptation scene she puts into practice what she has learned. If, as I have been arguing, Eve’s rational choosing is a positively formative step insofar as it is a constituent feature of the pragmatic ethic (the other feature is habituation), then it follows that the Fall is logically necessary if Eve (and Adam) are to develop their moral identities. Only after the Fall will they learn the benefits and costs of obeying or disobeying God. It is as if the events leading up to the Fall are instrumental in introducing the pair to the importance of rational choice, so that after the Fall they will be able to apply their rational choices on God’s behalf, but not simply at his behest. The paradox is that disobedience and the Fall are necessary as a means of instructing the pair as to the structure of rational choice that will eventually serve to help them atone for the Fall and act obediently. The Fall is not as much fortunate as it is instrumentally necessary. Michael’s biblical exegesis of Books 11 and 12, to which we now turn, does not morally regenerate Adam and Eve as much as provide them with useful knowledge on which to make a decision to bind themselves to God. Since they already know how to act ethically, Michael’s purpose is largely to teach them why they should act ethically. the “education” of ad am and eve: a pragmat ic interpretation of books xi and xii In an attempt to save Books XI and XII from C. S. Lewis’s comment that the final books of the poem amount to an “untransmuted lump of futurity,” critics have offered detailed accounts of Michael’s moral education of Adam.50 While most recent criticism has assumed that Michael achieves what he sets out to do, that he not only instructs Adam as to the future of mankind, but successfully helps Adam acquire virtue and pure faith, I would like to argue below a much different way of understanding Adam’s

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“education.” Michael’s examples are valuable to Adam not because they teach him patience and virtue but because they provide him with knowledge of the past and the future, as well as instrumental information regarding the consequences of believing or not believing in God. This knowledge of consequences will then convince Adam to stake belief in God, after which point he will attempt to resume the manner of living that he and Eve enjoyed while in Eden, according to routine and habit, from which pure or “formed” faith will eventually follow. Michael first introduces his educative narrative in Book XI by assuring Adam that he will “learn / True patience, and to temper joy with fear / And pious sorrow, equally inur’d / By moderation either state to bear, / Prosperous or adverse: so shalt thou lead / Safest thy life, and best prepar’d endure / Thy mortal passage when it comes” (xi. 360–6). The ethical strategy seems to be the classical (pre-Hellenistic) one of governing the passions by acquiring temperance through a process of “inuring” or habituation. Such a moral regimen should help Adam cope with the chilling notion that, as the Cain and Abel episode suggests, he must eventually “return to native dust” (xi. 463). Adam, however, misinterprets the education in temperance as Stoic in nature, responding to Michael’s admonition to “observe / The rule of not too much” (xi. 530–1) with a promise to accept life’s “cumbrous charge” (xi. 549). Michael corrects him by assuring him it is acceptable to “live well” rather than resignedly, offering in place of Stoic withdrawal what seems like the Aristotelian acceptance of external goods. Learning how to cope with death, however, pales in difficulty with learning how to cope with the prospect of eternal torment. Contemplating the endless woe that is to be his lot following his introduction of sin, Adam resumes despair; during the episode of the flood, however, he is informed of Christ’s ransom, and he gains comfort in the thought that sainthood for the regenerate will replace eternal suffering on judgment day. One of the shifts from Book XI to Book XII is that in the former book Michael helps Adam deal with the effects of sin which will directly affect his earthly future, but in the latter book Adam is confronted with the consequences of sin which will directly affect the larger political community. The virtue in question that will offset the seductiveness of sin is in both places temperance, but virtue in Book XII is identified with reason in Michael’s exposition of the Tower of Babylon episode: “inordinate desires / And upstart Passions catch the Government / From reason, and to servitude reduce / Man till then free . . . sometimes Nations will decline so low / From virtue, which is reason . . .” (xii. 87–98). As the focus shifts away from Adam’s strategies for dealing with death to the worldly sins of ambition and

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tyranny, Michael suggests that the moral strategy Adam has been taught of inuring himself to pain is of a different order from the manner of governing passions in everyday political situations. Michael offers in his account of Nimrod only a diagnostic account of the subversion of reason by tyranny without offering any humanistic therapy for the overthrow of virtue defined as reason. Rather than instruct Adam on how tyranny such as Nimrod’s can be avoided, Michael instead directly invokes Abraham’s leadership into Canaan, emphasizing one of Abraham’s famous displays of blind faith: “He straight obeys, / Not knowing to what Land, yet firm believes: / I see him, but thou canst not, with what Faith / He leaves his gods” (xii. 126–7). Much has gone on between Michael’s advice to Adam regarding temperance and the invocation of Abraham, but by this point Michael has presented Adam with just two general models of behavior, each of which should be evaluated for its relative moral salience. In the first case Michael presents Adam with a grim situation and a resolution Adam cannot rationally refuse: acquire temperance in order to cope with anxieties about death. Importantly, the strategy is not properly Aristotelian, since a temperate Adam will not as much be fulfilling any telos or final cause as he will be acquiring a means-end strategy for alleviating the fear of death. This is a good example of a rational choice model of conduct. In the second case, Michael presents Adam with a series of equally grim situations about the world in which the overthrow of reason by the passions can only be redressed given the kind of blind faith in God exemplified by Abraham. What is the relationship between the two models of conduct? Does one displace the other? Will Adam’s rational self-management lead to tyranny like Nimrod’s, which then would require a full abdication of reason to a submission of faith and hope? Has Milton folded into the narrative a basic opposition between reason versus faith, pagan versus Christian morality? There are, I think, two satisfactory answers to these questions, both converging with the principles of moral pragmatism. The first is that Adam’s exercise of rational choice in acquiring temperance is related to Abraham’s faith as a short-term goal is related to a long-term goal, or as a second-order goal is to a first-order goal. Adam, like Abraham, should commit himself to God in a non-rational way, carrying out all of God’s decrees, but he should also apply a dialectic of reason and habit in matters of daily, practical conduct. Moral pragmatism is restricted to Adam’s everyday conduct but can be trumped by God’s intervention. The goal of acquiring temperance in order to provide comfort from the fear of death, for example, will yield to divine mandate, such as leading one’s people into Canaan, or (alas) binding

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one’s only son at God’s behest. In this sense, Michael has separated morality from theology, since Adam’s moral pragmatism has very little to do with his faith in God. The second way of explaining the narrative instruction up to this point requires thinking in more detail about Abraham’s significance in biblical history. Popularized modern conceptions of Abraham as the exemplar of irrational submission to God owe much to Kierkegaard’s interpretation of the binding of Isaac. For Kierkegaard, Abraham, the “knight of faith,” is permitted to act unethically – ignoring the Kantian imperative to treat all individuals as ends and not means – when acting in obedience to a Divine call. If one focuses solely on the binding of Isaac, however, one neglects the fact that Abraham is tested ten times according to the Genesis tradition, and that his motives involve more than just an expression of his love of God. When Abraham pledges obedience to God in all cases except for the binding of Isaac, he assumes future gains for himself and his followers, including the prospect of fathering kingly descendants (Genesis 15) and the settling of Canaan. As a means to inspire obedience, early modern commentators on Genesis customarily point out the long-term benefits of Abraham’s commitments. In Prototypes out of the Booke of Genesis (1640), William Whately writes, “thus you see, how worth the while it is to serve, feare, and obey God, what abundant blessings he grants, what honour and fame even after death . . . Hee will give you the inheritance of life eternall, as sure as he did to Abraham . . .”51 Commentators also realize that, given his preoccupation with the beneficial consequences of faith, Abraham’s otherregarding conduct could easily transform into self-centeredness, as when he decides to prostitute Sarah to Pharaoh for fear of death (Genesis 12). Calvin admits that “although they are rash judges, who entirely condemn this deed of Abram, yet the special fault is not to be denied, namely that he, trembling at the approach of death, did not commit the issue of the danger to God, instead of sinfully betraying the modesty of his wife.”52 It is worth remarking, as a supplement to these contemporary accounts, that modern commentators note that throughout Genesis Abraham acts as a skilled bargainer, as when he negotiates the salvation of sinners during the Sodom and Gomorrah episode.53 Karl-Josef Kuschel writes, “If we look closely at Abraham’s way we discover that his faith is quite a complex one. There is no trace of blind readiness to follow, of an irrational act of the will, of the obedience of an automaton. Abraham’s faith is . . . made up of quite different ingredients: there is a touch of doubt and a touch of cunning, a touch of anxiety and a touch of risk-taking with his God; a touch of wordless obedience and a touch of canny haggling.”54 John Donne, who would have

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agreed with much of Kuschel’s comment, wrote in a 1627 sermon that, although Abraham’s conduct is ultimately defensible, “Abraham was bold, when he could conceive such an imagination, that God would destroy the righteous with the wicked, or that the Judge of all the earth should not doe right . . .”55 Given the complex motives behind his pledges to God, we are justified in describing Abraham as a moral pragmatist in much of his conduct excluding the binding of Isaac (since Isaac’s death would mark the demise of Abraham’s lineage and contradict God’s promise that Abraham’s descendants would rule future nations). Michael, of course, makes no mention of the Isaac episode, but focuses only on Abraham’s deliverance out of Egypt, noting that “he [Abraham] straight obeys, / Not knowing to what Land, yet firm believes . . .” (xii. 126–27). Given, however, that the sum total of Abraham’s conduct accords more with a consequentialist and pragmatic ethic than it does blind faith, and given the instructions that Michael has earlier given to Adam regarding temperance as a means to cope with the inevitability of death, it is more likely that Abraham’s “faith” reinforces rather than undermines Adam’s moral pragmatism (or would have been understood as such by early modern readers). Interpreted in either of the two ways I have presented – that Abraham represents an example of faith which has priority over Adam’s means-end ethic, or that Abraham represents an extension of that means-end ethic – up to this point the only practical model of behavior Adam has internalized is one of moral consequentialism. I think that it can be further argued that the structure of Adam’s moral education is mostly completed with the invocation of Abraham and the quest toward Canaan. What follows Michael’s account of Abraham’s faith is a series of references to the protoevangelium and a doctrinal lesson on the relationship between Law and Gospel. Michael’s account of the displacement of Old Testament legalism by justification by faith is routinely Pauline, although his final admonition to embrace Christ “by faith not void of works” is sufficiently ambiguous regarding the temporal and causal relationship between faith and works. The important point is that the lessons in Christology which follow the invocation of Abraham do not continue Adam’s lesson in morality as much as begin his lesson in theology. Critics of Paradise Lost have often claimed that Adam acquires not only classical and Christian virtue, but also what Calvin describes as “formed” faith by the end of Michael’s paraphrase. After detailing what he describes as the progressive moral education of Adam, Lawrence Sasek concludes that “the last two books present a drama in which Adam is molded into an example of Christian fortitude. They dramatize the final stage in Adam’s

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development, which has proceeded from innocence, through sin, through reconciliation with God, to a full knowledge and acceptance of the justice of God’s judgments . . .”56 Sasek fails to reconcile Adam’s so-called moral regeneration and appreciation of human sinfulness with Adam’s felix culpa epiphany in Book XII. Sasek evades the tension by arguing that Adam is not at all articulating felix culpa as “any reasoned theological view of the consequences of sin,” but rather as an “emotional reaction to the final triumph of good.” Sasek believes that Adam cannot really be justifying his sin because Adam’s final words regarding his education are “Henceforth I learn, that to obey is best” and “suffering for Truth’s sake / Is fortitude to highest victorie / And to the faithful Death the Gate of Life” (xii. 561–71). Sasek argues too readily that Adam’s final sentiments on obedience are irreconcilable with Adam’s having a reasonable understanding of the fortunate fall. If pressed hard enough, Adam could assert that he is ready to obey God without exception, even though at this point he is only committed to the idea that the beneficial consequences will offset the pernicious effects of sin. Given what I have suggested above regarding the instrumentalization of Adam’s belief, Adam’s articulation of the fortunate fall represents that he is not knowledgeably contrite, but that he has acquired simply an awareness of the expediency of obeying God. Adam further reveals his confusion when he wavers from unsupported optimism in his premonition of felix culpa to a gratuitous worry that the Son’s resurrection will abandon the faithful: “who then shall guide / His people, who defend? will they not deal / Worse with his followers than with him they dealt?” (xii. 482–4). Louis Martz, puzzling over Adam’s despair, writes, “the strange thing is that there is nothing at all in Milton’s account of the redemption to evoke this sort of pessimistic query. On the contrary, the question of how many shall believe is left entirely and deliberately open, while the tone of optimism and victory dominates.”57 Strange indeed, but only if one assumes that Adam has been progressively absorbing fine points of doctrine, which his shift between optimism and pessimism suggests is unlikely. Readers like Sasek seem hastily optimistic when they dismiss Adam’s confusions as emotional outbursts and accept that Adam fully understands what he thinks and says about doctrinal matters, or that he even believes what he says. Throughout the first half of Book XII, Adam repeatedly misses fundamental points of Michael’s lesson, asking questions the answers to which he might have intuitively figured out for himself. For instance, Adam fails to understand why so many laws and rites will be established by God for His own people: “So many laws argue so many sins / Among them; how can God with such reside?” (xii. 283–4).

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After Michael elaborates the relationship between Mosaic law and gospel, Adam wonders when and where he will be able to see the heroic fight between God and the serpent: “say where and when / Thir fight, what stroke shall bruise the Victor’s heel” (xii. 384–5). Finally, after having blundered and been corrected twice, Adam makes the biggest mistake of all, wondering whether he should repent of sin or rejoice that “much more good thereof shall spring” (xii. 476). Should we describe these outbursts as late stages in Adam’s moral education? Adam is like a small child, eagerly listening to a homiletic bedtime story written for young adults. The most the child can do at this stage is either to project his imaginative re-creations on the characters and plots, or to distill a ponderous moral exemplum into its most provocative aspects. I think that Martz’s comment on Adam’s exultation at the ending of the Flood at Book xi. 874–8, is appropriate to Adam’s final comments on his own education: Adam’s closural statement sounds like nothing more than a “cry placed in Adam’s mouth.”58 The only claim Adam makes that we can be sure he understands is his reference to the item which has preoccupied him all along, the status of death, about which he has learned that “to the faithful Death the Gate of life” (xii. 572). That Adam has not yet acquired faith or virtue is clearly expressed in Michael’s final admonition to “add / Deeds to thy knowledge answerable, add Faith, / Add Virtue, Patience, Temperance, add Love . . .” (xii. 581–3). Michael’s insistence that Adam must “add faith” to knowledge is overlooked in Barbara Lewalski’s illuminating essay on the structural patterns of Books XI and XII. Lewalski describes the distinction Milton draws in De Doctrina between “implicit” and “saving faith.” Implicit faith, as I have noted above, “sees not the objects of hope, but yields belief with a blind assent” (YP. vi. 338). Saving faith is defined as “a full persuasion operated in us through the gift of God, whereby we believe, on the sole authority of the promise itself, that whatsoever things he has promised in Christ are ours, and especially the grace of eternal life” (YP. vi. 338). Lewalski, in terms similar to Sasek’s, argues that Michael’s prophecy “is to lead Adam from the ‘blindness’ of implicit faith to the true vision of ‘saving faith’.”59 Lewalski adds that when Adam acknowledges Christ as his redeemer, he “demonstrates that his faith is now fully matured.”60 But a review of Adam’s conduct suggests that Milton holds a theory of saving faith whose criteria Adam does not fully meet by the close of Michael’s prophecy. In the terms outlined in De Doctrina, Adam can move from blind assent to a “full persuasion” if he acquires knowledge of Christ’s promises, the most important being knowledge of future salvation, “eternal life.” Nothing in this definition assumes that at such a stage Adam will have

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acquired virtue, that he will have become regenerated, or even that he will have acquired the kind of pure faith that distinguishes Reformation from scholastic criteria for faith. While Reformation theories of faith require that the agent add emotional commitment to intellectual assent, scholastic theories of faith require that the agent merely assents to believe in God. Milton’s claim that proper belief is “full persuasion” suggests a neoscholastic account of saving faith, since one can be fully persuaded by certain doctrine without also being emotionally committed or non-intellectually attached to such doctrine. Since Milton does not hold a stronger version of faith than the intellectualist version presented in De Doctrina, and since Michael tells Adam that he must eventually “add faith” to his “answerable knowledge,” Milton is suggesting that Adam has not acquired “full persuasion” of God’s promise regarding his salvation. If Adam is to carry on in any ethically effective way after Michael’s exhortation, his conduct will be governed by a measure of belief resting between “blind assent” and “full persuasion.” Eve will of course learn all of the knowledge that Adam has learned, but her statement of her position prior to having heard Adam’s exposition suggests that whatever Adam tells her at this point will have little bearing on her settled convictions. Her commitment to acting according to God’s decrees derives more from an awareness of the longterm consequences of doing so rather than from a non-instrumental grasp of fundamentals. She describes her final uplift as a “consolation yet secure / I carry hence . . . by mee the Promised Seed shall all restore” (xii. 620–3). Her commitment is to a shadowy premonition of the protoevangelium; her pledge of devotion is not even to God but rather to Adam, who to her is “all things under Heav’n” (xii. 618). The effects of Adam and Eve’s education never extend further than what Milton describes in De Doctrina as the “secondary species of repentance,” according to which “a man abstains from sin through fear of punishment and obeys the call of God merely for the sake of his own salvation . . . This kind of repentance is common to the regenerate and to the unregenerate” (YP. vi. 325). About ten years after Milton had written Paradise Lost, Robert South remarked in a sermon that “in the actions of duty . . . there is not a sufficient motive to engage the will of man in a constant practice of them . . . this complacency of mind upon a man’s doing his duty, on the one side, and that remorse attending his neglect of it . . . on the other, are so far from excluding a respect to a future recompence, . . . that they are principally founded in it”61 (emphasis mine). Richard Hooker had anticipated much of Milton’s and South’s interpretation of moral consequentialism in the Laws, where he argued that only after sanctification do persons abandon an

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ethic of instrumentality: “Whereas we now love the thing that is good, but good especially in respect of benefit unto us; we shall then love the thing that is good, only or principally for the goodness of beauty in itself.”62 If Adam and Eve leave Paradise convinced of little more than the “future recompences” that will accrue from a commitment to God, we can assume that their moral “progress” is somewhat circular, and that after their expulsion, they will resume the life they had led while in Eden, the difference being that they will have gained enough knowledge of future happenings to more firmly commit themselves to whatever knowledge they have learned of God. This circularity is suggested in the resemblances between Eve’s consolation by the protoevangelium in Book XII and her and Adam’s similar consolations near the beginning of Book XI, just prior to Michael’s intervention. After Adam asserts that his memory of God’s promise that Eve’s “Seed shall bruise our Foe” (xi. 155), Eve recognizes that she is graced with “the source of life” (xi. 169). It is not inconceivable that Adam will repeat to Eve a version of his prelapsarian sentiment, “let us not think hard” (iv. 432) the way that lies ahead, and that Eve will interrupt their conversation with a version of her comment in Book XI, “But the Field / to labour calls us now with sweat impos’d” (xi. 171–2). This would mark the resumption of what I described earlier as an ethic of distraction, whereby Adam and Eve both before and (predictably) after the fall govern their daily lives routinely, without thinking much about God’s dispensations, and with the goal of “inuring” themselves to distress and the acquisition of temperance. Whether they will eventually acquire a “paradise within” is an open question, not an established fact.

Epilogue: theorizing early modern moral selfhood

We have seen that, regarding the ongoing drama of salvation, early modern literary texts do not directly endorse or critique dogmatic theology as much as test the workings of salvational doctrine in practice. Of course, texts ultimately take positions: Sidney suggests that no prevailing classical humanist or theological view of practical morality is more effective than any other; Spenser implies that reversions to legalism can be effective complements to grace; Donne concludes that filial fear has its unavoidable source in the body; and Milton takes a pragmatic, even Pascalian position on rationalchoice optimizing. It would be misleading, however, to say that any of these positions or resolutions is unilaterally tied to any particular early modern theological doctrine. While we might say that each of these positions is doctrinally syncretistic, a better way to explain the ethical work performed by early modern literature is to say that it offers ad hoc, context-sensitive guidelines for moral behavior rather than universalizable rules of conduct. What motivates all of the ethical guidelines presented in these texts is a desire to locate plausible sources of normativity when direct appeals to godliness for its own sake fail to direct conduct. We have seen that most of these ethical guidelines emerge as a mix of prudentialism and moralism, a mix that often accords a higher weighting to self-interest than it does to expressions of a good will. These texts do share, then, an assumption about individual behavior that is as familiar to us as it was to Augustine: that saints and sinners alike are most often concerned to maximize personal happiness, whether defined as human flourishing according to the classical tradition or beatitude according to Christian theology. But what is most interesting about early modern Protestant ethics is not the ways in which it anticipates competing ethical traditions, but rather the insights it provides about the lived experience of early modern moral selfhood. Although this is an experience we can at best approximate, I would 189

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like to make some provisional remarks in these remaining pages about the developmental nature of early modern, moral subjectivity. In an influential comparison of modern, psychoanalytic and early modern, theatricalized constructions of subjectivity, Stephen Greenblatt points out that the Freudian view of the self assumes a substratum of instincts that are ordered according to the exigencies of culture: “For psychoanalysis the self is at its most visible, most expressive, perhaps most interesting at moments in which the moral will has ceded place to the desires that constitute the deepest stratum of psychic experience.”1 Greenblatt suggests that early modern subjects, unlike modern subjects, are constituted all the way down by theatricalized roles without which they would fail to function as competitively viable members of society. One model for this performative and appropriative self is Hobbism, which understands selfhood in terms of proprietary rights: ownership of a name, goods and property, and vocation: There is no layer deeper, more authentic, than theatrical self-representation. This conception of the self does not deny the importance of the body – all consciousness for Hobbes derives from the body’s responses to external pressure – but it does not anchor personal identity in an inalienable biological continuity. The crucial consideration is ownership: what distinguishes a ‘natural’ person from an ‘artificial’ person is that the former is considered to own his words and actions.2

In describing this performative model of subjectivity, Greenblatt acknowledges that fundamental passions and desires undergird the self, but he implies that any regress to constitutive desires as a means to understand or formulate subjectivity is of little value, if at all achievable. Alternatively, Michael Schoenfeldt has recently argued that the experience of early modern selfhood is directly linked to proper governance of the material body: “Psychoanalysis and early modern psychology are linked in that both require fastidious attention to the inner promptings of various appetites and urges. But where psychoanalysis tends to locate identity in terms of which objects are desired among the various possibilities . . . the Renaissance locates identity in the more or less successful regulation of a series of desires shared by all.”3 Where Greenblatt thinks of selfhood as overlaying an affective, although irrecoverable base – the self is purely a sociological construct, established by alienable social personae – Schoenfeldt thinks of the self as fundamentally a biological datum, constituted by humoral embodiments that require constant tending. While both accounts of subjectivity are suggestive of the ways in which early modern individuals are socialized, the reduction of early modern selfhood to performative roles or humoral constituents tends to underestimate the shaping influence of

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Protestant theology on personal identity. Greenblatt’s and Schoenfeldt’s selves are nurtured more by Renaissance and early modern than Reformation sensibilities. True, Schoenfeldt acknowledges that a Galenic regimen of caring for the self is often at odds with a theology of passive righteousness, but his study is not focused on specific tensions between sanctification and moral habituation. One way around this tension between classicized or early modern and Christian subjectivity is to posit the existence of a duplex persona along the lines of Debora Shuger’s distinction between public and private selfhood. To a certain extent, Shuger’s notion of the public, vocational self approximates Greenblatt’s paradigmatic self-fashioner, while the pneumenal self is consumed by more nuanced theological requirements: essaying one’s state of election, engaging in prayerful relations with God, or meditating on Christ’s propitiations. We have seen, however, that such duality between public and private, or social/moral and theological selves, fundamentally cuts along moralistic rather than ontological lines. To the extent that early modern selves are divided from within, they are called upon to promote two potentially conflicting ethical codes, the Gospel message of forbearance and the more aggressive civil norms established and legislated by the temporal orders. Despite the differences among these accounts of early modern selfhood, they share the belief that ineliminable desires and passions provide at least the starting point from which to theorize early modern subjectivity. I have also assumed the importance of theorizing the emotions, but what I have been suggesting about the nature and role of theological passions departs somewhat from these prevailing theories of early modern subjectivity. First, theological emotions are not reducible to objectless passions or raw feelings; they are causally linked to presiding beliefs and cognitive states. The Galenic treatment of the emotions is partial because it tends to overlook the epistemic content of passional states. Second, the theological subject is called upon to sort through conflicting, at times mutually incompatible objects of any particular emotion. This is evident in the distinction between filial and servile fear, in which fear is judged as normatively satisfactory depending on the propositional object toward which it is directed. Godly fear, we have seen, can take at least two intentional objects: a puerile fear of divine punishment or a mature, saving fear of losing God’s favor. When evaluating the experience of conversion, it therefore seems important to consider the causal relationship between theological passions and evaluative beliefs. Given the ongoing debates among English Calvinists, Arminians, and Antinomians over personal assurance, we should not

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assume that bouts with Godly fear were fused with corresponding beliefs as to whether such fear is filial or servile in disposition. More likely, fear would strike not simply unannounced, but also without any intrinsic, evaluative verdicts: a phenomenological lag would seem to obtain between the transports of fear (or love), on the one hand, and an understanding of the reasons or causes of these emotions, on the other hand. There is nothing theologically or even culturally specific about this experience: we commonly ask ourselves whether what we think we fear or love is what we actually fear or love. But this sort of questioning would seem particularly to overwhelm early modern subjects. Theologically ordered emotions tend to be divinely motivated (if not actually infused, as crypto-Catholics often said), which means that any individual’s epistemic grasp of their own emotions is tenuous at best. Since backsliding renders the possibility that filial fear might at any time regress to servile fear, or neighbor-love resurface as self-love, early modern converts not only teem with conflicting theological emotions, but also are required to undertake ceaseless second- and third-order evaluations of a given emotion experienced at a moment in time. Some degree of moral expertise would have gone a way toward easing these burdens. As we have seen, though, Protestant theories of salvation are generally intolerant of moral training and moral progress along the lines of classical ideals of ethical habituation. Of course, congregants were exhorted, as Schoenfeldt describes, to govern their passions and humors according to rules of Christian temperance. But when faced with resolving intersubjective moral quandaries, when weighing, for example, the competing demands of self-love, neighbor-love and Godly love, converts continually act as moral novices, novices whose behavior more often expresses psychological egoism than it does moral sainthood. To the extent, then, that we can understand early modern subjectivity through the lens of modern psychology, we should perhaps look to the disciplines of cognitive-developmental psychology and object relations theory rather than Freudianism. While the God-subject relationship is at times eroticized during the medieval and early modern periods, we would be straining the limits of Freudianism to claim that soteriology is sexualized or explainable in terms of an oedipal paradigm. The moral implications of the sequential ordering of the stages of salvation can be better evaluated in the context of some non-Freudian, developmental theories of moral behavior. Lawrence Kohlberg, for example, divides moral development into six stages, the earliest stage distinguished by a premoral or preconventional fear of punishment and chastisement for moral improprieties, the most advanced stage marked by disinterested obedience to intrinsically valid

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social norms.4 The earliest stage thus holds that moral actions are governed by a hedonistic calculus, while the final stage holds that moral actions are directed by general principles that transcend particular interests. Such principles include, for example, the Golden Rule or categorical imperative, each of which demands an appreciation of the dignity of individuals qua human beings. Although one finds conflicting data in the literature on moral stage theory, empirical evidence reveals that early adolescence marks the beginning of a transition from preconventional to postconventional morality. Cognitive-developmental theory suggests that early modern converts were stuck at a borderline between pre- and postconventional behavior. Regeneration or sanctification marks a new birth, usually described as the birth of the new man, from which approbative conduct ideally follows. But the designation “new man” is one of the scandalous misnomers employed in the rhetoric of conversion: it takes only a glancing familiarity with early modern treatises on conversion to realize that the new man is quite like a dependent child in relation to moral conduct: “Our strength to hold Christ,” Thomas Shepard observes in his journal, “is like the child’s holding of the father, soon weak and falls.”5 To the extent that cognitivedevelopmental theory holds explanatory power regarding conversion, it suggests that the expectable behavior of these “new men” is often hedonistic and consequentialist, an attribution borne out by the theological and literary writings assessed throughout this study. There is nothing fundamentally unsettling about this realization; what is notable is the extent to which salvation theory officially disapproves of psychological egoism but fails to account for the practical manner in which converts might advance in moral insight and at least approach a realistic level of disinterested benevolence. Object relations theory, which overlaps somewhat with cognitivedevelopmental theory, can further illuminate this problematic of early modern moral development. As I remarked in chapter 3, object relation theorists assume that during early developmental stages, individuals employ transitional objects and transitional representations as a means of coping with the inevitable withdrawal of attention from primary caregivers. During the earliest stages of infancy, caregiver and child are bound together as an undifferentiated unity. Eventually the ideal or at least “good enough” parent will intermittently withdraw from the child, allowing the child to attach itself to compensatory, transitional objects over which it believes it can exercise creative agency. Transitional objects thus occupy a space of creative play between subjective imagining and external reality. As the child develops, and as it learns to cope with the disappointing reality of

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parental withdrawal, it also begins to accept the objective reality of transitional objects. By gradually relinquishing control over such objects, the child ideally achieves a more realistic appreciation of the boundaries that separate the internal and external realms. Psychoanalysts have recently begun to consider the role that transitional religious objects play in the developmental scheme of salvation. W. W. Meissner has described expressions of faith, prayer and the use of religious icons as transitional phenomena, and Anna Rizzuto has explored the role of individual “God-representations” or imagos as transitional objects that typically help to offset the experience of parental deprivation.6 In relation to early modern soteriology and moral development, object relations theory allows us to make some provisional observations. As we have seen, the rhetoric of conversion describes converts as new creatures nurtured by God (or Christ) as an imagined caregiver. In theory, the Puritan belief in irresistible grace and assurance should have offered some comfort to those fortunate few who were especially confident of their election. For saints such as these, the constant fear of offending God might be salved by the belief that God would mercifully quicken their spirits. According to the Puritan strains of occasionalism, for example, in Richard Sibbes’s sermonizing, God reliably returns again and again to provide succor. Of course, we have seen that, developmentally speaking, this idealized God-subject relationship does not permit converts the freedom to develop moral autonomy or expertise; hence the need for punitive sanctions. In terms of object relations theory, an overly reliable God, one who never truly withdraws from the convert’s imagination, would seem to obviate the need for the individual to develop a surrogate relationship with transitional objects. But backsliding was undoubtedly such a harrowing phenomenon that the lived experience of devolving into sin would not easily have been countered by the rhetoric of personal assurance. Worse, as Peter Lake suggests, the entire experience of assurance was so abused by carnal gospellers that it transformed into routinized habit for many, thus losing much of its spiritual force and meaning.7 Suffice it to say that the so-called elect could never be entirely sure of the validity of even their own responses to personal assurance. “Sits any man here in an assurance”, Donne asks, “that he shall be the same tomorrow, that he is now?”8 In psychoanalytic terms, the need for transitional objects would seem as necessary for God’s embattled warfarers as it is for a parent’s anxious child. Yet at this developmental stage an appreciation of the fundamental difference between God as an imago and the parent as individual caretaker seems crucial to any application of object relations

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to Protestant salvation theory. Given the overriding Protestant suspicion of faith in externals, the convert’s most suitable transitional object would appropriately be a constructed imago to stand in for God, rather than any material object at hand. I would suggest that the most available transitional representation would be the “new man,” which, given its status as imparted righteousness, or God (Christ) within the individual, would serve as the most appropriate stand-in for God’s felt absence. As infants relate to objects associated with the qualities of primary caregivers, so new converts relate to that part of themselves that seems to be an extension of God, and that helps them to mediate relations with God. Now the aim of object-relating in nontheological experience is precisely to overcome complete dependency on both parents and transitional objects. The entrance into adulthood in nontheological terms requires an awareness of the fundamental boundaries between self and the external realm, a process that is facilitated by a recognition that objects have an existence independent of the subject’s desire and creative agency. This is where the developmental stages described by object relations theory instructively diverge from the stages of religious conversion. Religious converts achieve spiritual progress in proportion to their ability to fully identify with and embrace their regenerated selves. Ideally, they need to overcome or dissolve rather than establish subject-object dualism: becoming a unified theological subject means fully taking on God (Christ) or the new man, not establishing boundaries between self and God (“Christ becomes our garment,” Luther remarks in his Galatians commentary9 ). But to the extent that early modern salvation theory assumes that the persistence of the malingering old man prevents converts from fully identifying with their new righteousness, converts presumably would not be able to relate to the new man as something other than a bounded, internalized object. The more technical way of saying this is that imparted righteousness never fully displaces a sense of alien righteousness. Like cognitive-developmental theory, object relations theory provides a valuable heuristic against which to evaluate the developmental constraints built into the morphology of early modern Protestant conversion. Furthermore, since the religious space of transition is so fraught with anxiety (unlike the nontheological transitional space, where infants and adults ideally experience comfort), the salvific transitional space presumably would not become the site of what object relations theorists describe as transitional creativity and play. Play emerges in that conceptual space that exists between the fantasy of complete subjective control and an acceptance of reality as an unmediated given. As D. W. Winnicott remarks, “This

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intermediate area of experience, unchallenged in respect of not belonging to inner or external (shared) reality, constitutes the greater part of the infant’s experience, and throughout life is retained in the intense experiencing that belongs to the arts and to religion and to imaginative living.”10 Transitional experiencing thus encourages one to express one’s ideas and thoughts freely, unconstrained by, as one commentator writes, “logic and validity in the real world nor the threat that [one’s] musings will lead us into a totally subjective, solipsistic world.”11 Winnicott’s ideas on creativity and play are among his most underdeveloped, but we can at least point to what this phenomenon of transitional play might suggest about early modern Protestant moral development. The poles of a fantasy of subjective empowerment and acceptance of external reality take the following moral correlates: the invention of right and wrong at will, on the one hand, and obediential rule-following, an uncritical acceptance of established norms, on the other. Moral improvisation and “play,” facilitated by a nurturing transitional environment, presumably would allow for some creative integration of or conflation of these stark normative alternatives. What we have seen, however, is that few dogmatic and systematic theologians were able to mingle inventively the extremes of self-interest and benevolence, and that only in the literature of the period, where we would expect depictions of ethical improvisation and play, do we find some practical-ethical compromises. Object relations theory offers at least one methodology that can begin to explain why the official culture at large displays a very underdeveloped sense of the ways in which self-interest and morality might have been creatively integrated. Further historical inquiries into the nature of early modern Protestant ethics might assess whether early modern literary ethics provides a transitional bridge to eighteenth-century ethical theories. Historically speaking, the earliest systematic integrations of self-interest and morality appear after the chronological endpoint of the works discussed in this book. Most of these late-seventeenth- through eighteenth-century theocentric moral theories postulate self-love as an essential human quality, but then go on to assimilate self-love to some version of a greatest happiness principle. Thus, in arguing against the self-interest theories of Hobbes and Mandeville, the earliest religious utilitarians, John Brown, John Gay, and William Paley, all stipulate that the end of moral action is a desire to aggregate overall pleasure, God’s pleasure included, in some cases.12 Each philosopher then provides a systematic elaboration, beyond our range here, of the ways in which the pursuit of self-interest can be harmonized with this basic utility criterion of religious morality.

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Early modern literary ethics experiments with the ways in which selfinterest can be harmonized with benevolence, but it stops short of offering a basic criterion, method, or principle of virtue analogous to the utility formula advanced by eighteenth-century Christian apologists. To the extent that early modern literary texts promote something that approaches an overriding principle of morality, they suggest that a degree of moral expertise and autonomy exercised independently of God’s assistance serves as the very precondition for godliness. Despite obvious differences, then, what some early modern literary texts share with eighteenth-century religious moral theory is the belief that self-interest can be a permissible moral posture as long as it serves as a means to more pietistic ends. The important larger point is that, unlike early modern dogmatic theology, which exaggerates self-interest to the point of disallowing moral autonomy entirely, but at the same time exploits self-interest by making frequent recourse to religious sanctions, early modern literary ethics, like religious utilitarianism, takes on the more difficult challenge of assimilating self-interest to a pietistic, thisworldly scheme of salvation. Future work on the transitional nature of early modern literary ethics might explore the full extent to which the literature described in this study looks forward to the theocentric responses to the selfinterest theories of a Hobbes or Mandeville. This might serve as a corrective to the frequently made assumption that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature anticipates the modes of unreconstructed self-interest that we associate with the tradition of bourgeois liberalism.

Notes

INTRODUCTION: ENGLISH PROTESTANT MORAL THEORY AND REGENERATION 1. Lancelot Andrewes, Sermons of the Sending of the Holy Ghost, in The Works of Lancelot Andrewes, 11 vols. (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1854), 3.334. 2. William Ames, Conscience with the Power and Cases Thereof (London, 1643), Bk. 3, 48. 3. Jeremy Taylor, Unum Necessarium, in The Whole Works of the Right Reverend Jeremy Taylor 15 vols., ed. Reginald Heber (London: Longman, 1848–65), 7.152. 4. Anthony, Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manner, Opinions, Times, ed. John M. Robertson (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964), 273. 5. Saint Augustine, Sermon 161, trans. Edmund Hill, in The Works of Saint Augustine, 26 vols., ed. John E. Roselle (New Rochelle: New City Press, 1990), Part iii, 5.138. 6. Saint Augustine, Sermon 178, Part iii, 5.292. 7. Jonathan Edwards, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” in The Works of Jonathan Edwards, 22 vols., general ed. Perry Miller, vol. 22 ed. Harry S. Stout and Nathan O. Hatch, with Kyle P. Farley (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 22. 411. On Edwards’s rationale for preaching hellfire, see Clyde A. Holbrook, The Ethics of Jonathan Edwards: Morality and Aesthetics (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1973), 26. 8. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1103a16–20, trans. W. D. Ross, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941). 9. Cited in George W. Forell, Faith Active in Love: An Investigation of the Principles Underlying Luther’s Social Ethics (Minnesota: Augsburg Publishing House, 1954), 78. 10. William Perkins, The Whole Treatise of Cases of Conscience, ed. Thomas Merrill (Nieuwkoop, De Graaf, 1966), 112. 11. The Complete Works of Richard Sibbes, 7 vols., ed. Alexander B. Grosart (London: James, Nisbet, 1862), 3.284. 12. Stanley Hauerwas finds a similar distrust of an ethics of character in the works of Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann. See Character and the Christian Life: A Study in Theological Ethics (San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 1975), chap. 4. 198

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13. Gerald Strauss, Luther’s House of Learning: Indoctrination of the Young in the German Reformation (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 300. Cited in Gilbert C. Meilaender, The Theory and Practice of Virtue (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 124. 14. Meilaender, The Theory and Practice of Virtue, 125. 15. For Calvin’s version of the two kingdoms doctrine, see Francois Wendel, Calvin: The Origins and Development of his Religious Thought, trans. Philip Mairet (London, 1963). 16. On Hooker’s use of the two kingdoms doctrine, see W. Torrance Kirby, Richard Hooker’s Doctrine of the Royal Supremacy (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1990); and Nigel Atkinson, Richard Hooker and the Authority of Scripture, Tradition and Reason (Cumbria: Paternoster Press, 1997). On Sidney’s Old Arcadia and the two kingdoms doctrine, see Ake Bergvall, “Reason in Luther, Calvin, and Sidney,” Sixteenth-Century Journal 33 (1992), 115–27. For a discussion of George Herbert’s poetry and prose in relation to the two kingdoms doctrine, see Debora Kuller Shuger, Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance: Religion, Politics, and the Dominant Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 91–119. 17. For a thorough assessment of the two kingdoms doctrine see Helmut Thielicke, Theological Ethics: Volume 1: Foundations, ed. William H. Lazareth (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdman’s Publishing Company, 1966), 359–82. See also Heinrich Bornkmann, Luther’s Doctrine of the Two Kingdoms in the Context of his Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1966). 18. William Ames, The Marrow of Theology, ed. John Dykstra Eusden (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1968), 226. 19. Colin McGinn, Ethics, Evil, and Fiction (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 174. 20. Much of my account of normativity in relation to the history of ethics is taken from Christine M. Korsgaard’s The Sources of Normativity, ed. Onora O’Neil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 21. In addition to Shuger, Habits of Thought, chap. 3, see also Cristina Malcolmson, Heart-Work: George Herbert and the Protestant Ethic (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). 22. See G. E. M. Anscombe, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” Philosophy 35 (1958), reprinted in Anscombe, Collected Philosophical Papers, 3 vols. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981), 3.26–42. 23. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self, The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 80. 24. For recent assessments of Geertz’s theory of culture, see the essays collected in The Fate of Culture: Geertz and Beyond, ed. Sherry B. Ortner (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 25. For a recent assessment of ethical thick description in relation to religious narrative, see Moshe Gold, “Ethical Practice in Critical Discourse: Conversion and Disruptions in Legal, Religious Narrative,” Representations 64 (1998), 21–40. 26. Both essays are included in Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973).

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Notes to pages 12–18

27. Ibid., 127. 28. On Geertz’s functionalist understanding of religious culture, see Nancy K. Frankenberry and Hans H. Penner, “Geertz’s Longlasting Moods, Motivations, and Metaphysical Conceptions,” in Language, Truth, and Religious Belief: Studies in Twentieth-Century Theory and Method in Religion, eds. Nancy K. Frankenberry and Hans H. Penner (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1999), 218–45. 29. See Thomas C. Oden, Radical Obedience (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1964), 94. 30. For Greenblatt’s new historicist analysis of Harriot’s tract in relation to Machiavellianism and Shakespeare’s Henry IV, part one, see Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 21–65. 31. See Reid Barbour, English Epicures and Stoics: Ancient Legacies in Early Stuart Culture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998); and Joshua Scodel, Excess and the Mean in Early Modern English Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). 32. See Reid Barbour, Literature and Religious Culture in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 11. 33. Shuger, Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance, 9. 34. Ibid., 254.

1 SHAME, GUILT, AND MORAL CHARACTER IN EARLY MODERN ENGLISH PROTESTANT THEOLOGY AND S I R P H I L I P S I D N E Y ’S COUNTESS OF PEMBR OKE’S ARCADIA 1. Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1946), 222. 2. For a classic account of some of these differences between shame and guilt in archaic Greece, see E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951), chap. 2. 3. Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), 101. 4. Ibid., 143. 5. See Bruce J. Malina, The New Testament World: Insights From Cultural Anthropology (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1981) and Malina, Christian Origins and Cultural Anthropology: Practical Models for Biblical Interpretation (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1986); Honor and Shame in the World of the Bible, ed. Victor H. Matthews and Don C. Benjamin (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1996); Robert Jewett, Saint Paul Returns to the Movies: Triumph Over Shame (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s, 1999); Robert Jewett, Honor, Shame and the Rhetoric of 1 Peter (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1998); Edward P. Wimberly, Moving from Shame to Self-Worth: Preaching and Pastoral Care (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1999). 6. Quoted in Matthews and Benjamin, Honor and Shame in the World of the Bible, 16.

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7. David Arthur deSilva, Despising Shame: Honor Discourse and Community Maintenance in the Epistle to the Hebrews (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1995), 50. 8. See Arthur J. Dewey, “A Matter of Honor: A Social-Historical Analysis of 2 Corinthians 10,” Harvard Theological Review 78 (1985), 209–17; Barth Campbell, Honor, Shame, and the Rhetoric of 1 Peter (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1998); and David Arthur deSilva, “‘Worthy of His Kingdom’: Honor Discourse and Social Engineering in 1 Thessalonians,” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 64 (1996), 49–79. 9. Sir Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, ed. Maurice Evans (London: Penguin Books, 1987), 110. Further citations will be noted parenthetically in the text. 10. That Sidney was influenced by Aristotle’s ethics is evident in a letter to his brother in which he describes Aristotle’s ethical writings as “the begyning, and foundacion of all his workes, the good ende which everie man doth & ought to bend his greatest actions.” See The Complete Works of Sir Philip Sidney, 3 vols., ed. Albert Feuillerat (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1923), 3. 124. 11. Andrew D. Weiner, Sir Philip Sidney and the Poetics of Protestantism: A Study of Contexts (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1978), 62. 12. Ibid., 76. 13. Blair Worden, The Sound of Virtue: Philip Sidney’s Arcadia and Elizabethan Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 302. 14. Weiner, Sidney and the Poetics of Protestantism, 85–7. 15. Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics, 1128b1–28, trans. W. D. Ross, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941). 16. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1179b7–13. 17. Douglas L. Cairns, Aidos: The Psychology of Honour and Shame in Ancient Greek Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 427. 18. Gabrielle Taylor, Pride, Shame, and Guilt: Emotions of Self-Assessment (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1985), 90. 19. For an assessment of Sidney’s use of allegory in the Arcadia see Kenneth Myrick, Sir Philip Sidney as a Literary Craftsman (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), chap. 7. 20. See Alan Sinfield, Literature in Protestant England: 1560–1660 (Totowa: Barnes & Noble Books, 1983), 38–9. 21. Weiner, Sidney and the Poetics of Protestantism, 177. 22. For an incisive account of the crisis of paternal authority and ethical compromises of the trial scene in the Old Arcadia, see Richard C. McCoy, Sir Philip Sidney: Rebellion in Arcadia (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1973), 136. ◦ 23. For a recent discussion of two regiments in Sidney’s work see Ake Bergvall, “Reason in Luther, Calvin, and Sidney,” Sixteenth-Century Journal 23 (1992), 115–27. 24. John Calvin, Commentary on The Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Hebrews, trans. William B. Johnston, in Calvin’s New Testament Commentaries, eds.

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25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

Notes to pages 26–32

David W. Torrance and Thomas F. Torrance, 12 vols. (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdman’s Publishing Company, 1963), 12.187. Ibid., 188. Philip Melanchthon, Orations on Philosophy and Education, ed. Sachiko Kusukawa and tr. Christine F. Salazar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 46. David Arthur deSilva, Despising Shame, 295. Sinfield notes that Pamela’s speech borrows from Cicero’s Of the Nature of the Gods. See Literature in Protestant England: 1560–1660 (Totowa: Barnes & Noble Books, 1983), 28. All passages taken from The Psalms of Sir Philip Sidney and the Countess of Pembroke, ed. J. C. A. Rathmell (New York: New York University Press, 1963). For an excellent account of the influence of the Psalms on Sidney’s views on right poetry, see Anne Lake Prescott, “King David as a ‘Right Poet’: Sidney and the Psalmist,” English Literary Renaissance 19 (1989), 131–51. William Tyndale, An Answer to Sir Thomas More’s Dialogue, ed. H. Walter (Cambridge, 1850), 202; quoted in Carl R. Trueman, Luther’s Legacy: Salvation and English Reformers, 1525–1556 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 103. Trueman, Luther’s Legacy, 119. The Works of the English Reformers: William Tyndale and John Frith 3, ed. T. Russell (London, 1831), 253; quoted in Trueman, Luther’s Legacy, 142. Robert Barnes, A supplicacion unto the most gracyous prynce H. the viii (London, 1534), xli. a., quoted in Trueman, Luther’s Legacy, 195. For an account of Tyndale’s theological development away from Luther’s ideas of justification toward legalism, see William A. Clebsch, England’s Earliest Protestants, 1520–1535 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), 137–204. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980), 111. John Bradford, The Writings of John Bradford, M.A., 2 vols., ed. Aubrey Townsend (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1848–53), 2. 114–15; quoted in Trueman, Luther’s Legacy, 270. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, (Library of Christian Classics, 1961,) iii. xxiv, 5; quoted in R. D. Kendall, Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 25. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Grand Rapids: W. B. Eerdman’s Publishing Company, 1995), 247. Ibid., 243. Kendall, Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649, 26. Ibid., 33. Ibid., 57. Saint Augustine, Sermon 355, trans. Edmund Hill, in The Works of Saint Augustine, 26 vols., ed. John E. Rotelle (Hyde Park: New City Press, 1995), Part iii, 10.165.

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44. Martin Luther, First Lectures on the Psalms, in Luther’s Works, 55 vols., ed. Jaroslav Pelikan (Saint Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1955–86), 10. 303; see also Luther’s Lectures on Romans, in Works, 25. 465. 45. Martin Luther, First Lectures on the Psalms, in Works, 303. 46. Richard Greenham, The Works (New York: Da Capo Press, 1973), 27. 47. Ibid., 32. 48. This preoccupation with assurance justifies Greenblatt’s conclusion that sixteenth-century theology unavoidably warranted “mingled egotism and selfloathing.” Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 111. 49. John Donne: The Complete English Poems, ed. A. J. Smith (London: Penguin Books, 1986), 327. 50. Weiner, Sidney and the Poetics of Protestantism, 8. 51. Theodore Beza, et al., A Generall Confession of Christian Churches (London, 1578), 74. 52. Ibid., 75. 53. Ibid., 76. 54. Philip de Mornay, A Woorke Concerning the Trewnesse of the Christian Religion (London, 1587), 301. 55. Nicholas Bifield, The Spiritual Touch-Stone: or, The Signes of the Wicked Man (London, 1625), 234–5. 56. Sidney prompted Richard Robinson to translate two of Melanchthon’s treatises on church discipline into English. When outlining a program of humanist education for his brother, Sidney recommended Melanchthon’s Chronicon, a treatise on history and ethics. On Melanchthon’s influence on Sidney and ◦ Tudor English theology and culture, see Ake Bergvall, “Melanchthon and Tudor England,” in Cultural Exchange between European Nations during the Renaissance: Proceedings of the Symposium arranged in Uppsala by the Forum for Renaissance Studies of the English Department of Uppsala University, 5–7 June 1993 (Uppsala, 1994), 85–95. 57. Philip Melanchthon, Orations on Philosophy and Education, 81–2. 58. See Bartholomaeus Keckermann, Systematis Ethic Praecognita Generalia, in Opera Omnia, 2 vols. (Geneva, 1614), 2.251–2. Adrian Heerebord, Collegium Ethicum (London, 1642); and Franco Burgersdyck, Idea Philosophia Morales Tum Moralis, Tum Naturalis (London, 1654). 59. William Ames, The Marrow of Theology, ed. John D. Eusden (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1968), 226. 60. For a comprehensive assessment of the early modern notion of synteresis, see Robert A. Greene, “Synderesis, the Spark of Conscience, in the English Renaissance,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 52 (1991), 195–219. 61. Much of this summary is based on accounts of conscience in Timothy Potts, Conscience in Medieval Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Douglas C. Langston, Conscience and Other Virtues: From Bonaventure to MacIntyre (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), 7–71; and Michael G. Baylor, Action and Person: Conscience in Late Scholasticism and the Young Luther (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1977).

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Notes to pages 40–51

62. 63. 64. 65.

Baylor, Action and Person, 29–30. John Woolton, Of the Conscience (London, 1590) sig, c1. See Baylor, Action and Person, 209–72. See, for example, Augustine, Confessions, trans. and intro. R. S. Pine-Coffin (London: Penguin Books, 1961), 135–42. 66. Sir Philip Sidney, The Defense of Poesy, ed. and intro. Albert S. Cook (Boston: Ginn & Company, 1890), 30. 2 THE THREE ORDERS OF NATURE, GRACE, AND LAW I N E D M U N D S P E N S E R ’S THE FAERIE QUEENE B O O K I I 1. See A. S. P. Woodhouse, “Nature and Grace in The Faerie Queene,” ELH 16 (1949), 194–228. Reprinted in Essential Articles for the Study of Edmund Spenser, ed. A. C. Hamilton (Hamden: Archon Books 1972), 58–83. 2. See, for example, Alan Sinfield, Literature in Protestant England, 1560–1660 (London: Croom Helm, 1983); Harry Berger, Jr., The Allegorical Temper: Vision and Reality in Book II of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957); Anthea Hume, Edmund Spenser: Protestant Poet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); and Lauren Silberman, “The Faerie Queene, Book II, and the Limitations of Temperance,” Modern Language Studies 17 (1987), 9–22. 3. See, for example, Ernest Sirluck, “The Faerie Queene, Book II, and the Nicomachean Ethics,” Modern Philology xlix (1951), 73–100; and W. F. DeMoss, “Spenser’s ‘Twelve Moral Virtues’ According to Aristotle,” Modern Philology xvi (1918), 77–102. 4. For early refinements of Woodhouse’s argument, see Robert Hoopes, “‘God Guide Thee, Guyon’: Nature and Grace Reconciled in The Faerie Queene, Book II,” Review of English Studies 5 (1954), 14–24, reprinted in Hamilton, Essential Articles: Edmund Spenser, 84–95; Lewis H. Miller, Jr. “A Secular Reading of The Faerie Queene, Book II,” ELH 33 (1966), 154–69, reprinted in Hamilton, Essential Articles: Edmund Spenser, 299–312. 5. See Anthea Hume, Edmund Spenser: Protestant Poet; and Darryl J. Gless, Interpretation and Theology in Spenser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 177–92. 6. Harry Berger, The Allegorical Temper, 3–64. 7. Woodhouse, “Nature and Grace in the Faerie Queene,” 59. 8. Ibid., 65. 9. Ibid., 66–7. 10. Ibid., 82. 11. See, for example, Hoopes, “‘God Guide Thee Guyon’: Nature and Grace Reconciled in The Faerie Queene, Book II,” 91–2. 12. Berger, The Allegorical Temper, 29. 13. Ibid., 62. 14. Hume, Edmund Spenser: Protestant Poet, 64. All citations from Book II of The Faerie Queene will be taken from Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene,

Notes to pages 51–8

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

205

ed. Thomas P. Roche, Jr. (Penguin Books, 1987). All quotations will be placed parenthically in text by book, canto, stanza, and page numbers. Hume, Edmund Spenser: Protestant Poet, 66. See Rosemond Tuve, Allegorical Imagery: Some Medieval Books and Their Posterity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), chap. 2. See “A Letter of the Author” in Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. Thomas P. Roche, Jr. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1103a16–20, trans. W. D. Ross, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941). W. F. R. Hardie, Aristotle’s Ethical Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 105. Nancy Sherman, The Fabric of Character: Aristotle’s Theory of Virtue (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 171. Ibid., 178. Cited in Elizabeth S. Belfiore, Tragic Pleasures: Aristotle on Plot and Emotion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 188. Ibid., 189. Ibid., 236. Ibid., 237. See The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition, 11 vols., eds. Edwin Greenlaw, et al., (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1932–49), 2. 294. See also F. M. Padelford, “The Virtue of Temperance in The Faerie Queene,” Studies in Philology 18 (1921), 334–46. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1109b1–7. Sirluck, “The Faerie Queene, Book II, and the Nicomachean Ethics,” 79. Quoted in The Works of Edmund Spenser, 2.188. Elizabeth Heale, The Faerie Queene: A Reader’s Guide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 52. For a good summary of the competing accounts of Aristotle’s theory of the relationship among means, ends, and practical wisdom, see Denis J. M. Bradley, Aquinas on the Twofold Human Good: Reason and Human Happiness in Aquinas’s Moral Science (Washington, DC: The Catholic University Press, 1997), 199– 225. Henry Smith, “The Heavenly Thrift,” in The Sermons of Maistre Henrie Smith, Gathered into One Volume (London, 1593), 677; quoted in Hume, Edmund Spenser: Protestant Poet, 67. Thomas White, A Godlie Sermon preached the xxi. day of June, 1586. at Pensehurst in Kent (1593), sigs. c3-c3; quoted in Hume, Edmund Spenser: Protestant Poet, 67. Cited in R. B. Larter, “The Doctrine of Sanctification,” Evangelical Quarterly xxvii (1955), 146. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Grand Rapids: Eerdman’s Publishing Company), 1989, iii. iii. 5, 513. Calvin, Institutes, iii. xi. 2, 37–8. Calvin, Institutes, iii. xi. 1, 37.

206 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

Notes to pages 59–73

John Preston, The Saint’s Qualification (London, 1637), 364. Ibid., 365. Ibid., 366. Thomas Tuke, The High-Way to Heaven, or The Doctrine of Election (London, 1609), 165. Ibid., 195. Thomas Taylor, The Progress of Saints to Full Holinesse (London, 1630), 207. Preston, The Saint’s Qualification, 354. Jeremiah Lewis, The Right Use of Promises, or A Treatise of Sanctification (London, 1632), 126. Ibid., 233. Ibid., 149. Ibid., 58. Ibid., 151. Quoted in Donald K. McKim, “William Perkins and the Christian Life: The Place of the Moral Law and Sanctification in Perkins’ Theology,” Evangelical Quarterly 59 (1987), 126. Henry Balvanes, The Confession of Faith (London, 1548), 57–8. Preston, The Saint’s Qualification, 365. Hume, Edmund Spenser: Protestant Poet, 115. Ibid., 116. Ibid., 120. Gless, Interpretation and Theology in Spenser, 178. Ibid., 180. Ibid., 189. F. M. Padelford, “The Virtue of Temperance in The Faerie Queene,” Studies in Philology 18 (1921), 334. Sirluck, “The Faerie Queene, Book II and the Nicomachean Ethics,” 83. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1147a32–1147b2. H. H. Joachim, Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, A Commentary, ed. D. A. Rees (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1951), 224. Quoted in James Jerome Walsh, Aristotle’s Conception of Moral Weakness (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), 107. Sarah Broadie, Ethics With Aristotle (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 303–4. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1147b2–4. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1102a5–6. Richard Kraut, Aristotle on the Human Good (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 5. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1098a27–b12. The Works of Edmund Spenser, 2.364. Ibid., 370. Gervase Babington, Comfortable Notes Upon the Bookes of Exodus and Leviticus (London, 1604), 298. Andrew Willet, Hexapla in Exodum: A Sixfolde Commentarie Upon the Second Booke of Moses Called Exodus (London, 1608), 44.

Notes to pages 73–9

207

72. Ibid., 44. 73. Cited in Jean Calvin, A Commentarie Upon the Prophet of Isaiah (London, 1609), 115. 74. Ibid., 116. 75. Ibid., 116. 76. John Calvin, Commentary on The Epistles of Saint Paul the Apostle to the Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, and Colossians, trans. T. H. L. Parker, in Calvin’s New Testament Commentaries, eds. David W. Torrance and Thomas F. Torrance, 12 vols. (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdman’s Publishing Company, 1996), 11.253. 77. Ibid., 253. 78. Ibid., 256. 79. For a discussion of sermon parody in The Faerie Queene, see Richard Mallete, Spenser and the Discourses of Reformation England (Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 50–83. See also Ann E. Imbrie, “‘Playing Legerdemaine with the Scripture’: Parodic Sermons in The Faerie Queene,” ELR 17 (1987), 142–55. 80. See Carol Kaske, Spenser and Biblical Poetics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), chap. 2, in which Kaske describes Spenser’s taxonomical use of distinctions bono et malo. 81. Cornelius Burgess, A Chaine of Graces (London, 1622), 96. 82. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980), 173. 83. Ibid., 173. 84. Patrick Cullen, Infernal Triad: The Flesh, the World, and the Devil in Spenser and Milton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), 68–96. For a recent critique of Cullen’s identification of Guyon as microchristus, see Harold. L. Weatherby, Mirrors of Celestial Grace: Patristic Theology in Spenser’s Allegory (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 132–7. 3 CONFORMIST AND PURITAN MORAL THEORY: F R O M R I C H A R D HO O K E R ’S NA T U R A L L A W T H E O R Y T O R I C H A R D S I B B E S ’S E T H I C A L O C C A S I O N A L I S M 1. See Peter Lake, Anglicans and Puritans? Presbyterians and English Conformist thought from Whitgift to Hooker (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988), 5. Lake cites Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1967). 2. See Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism, 1590– 1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 1–7. 3. Ibid., 7. 4. Lake, Anglicans and Puritans?, 28–42. 5. Ibid., 164–82. 6. Ibid., 182–230. 7. The Works of James Arminius, 3 vols., vols 1 and 2 trans. James Nichols; vol. 3 trans. W. R. Bagnall (Buffalo: Derby, Orton and Mulligan, 1853), 2.121.

208

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29.

Notes to pages 79–87

Quoted in Carl Bangs, Arminius: A Study in the Dutch Reformation (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1971), 346. Arminius, Works, 1.256. W. J. Torrance Kirby, Richard Hooker’s Doctrine of the Royal Supremacy (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1990). Ibid., 26. See Nigel Atkinson, Richard Hooker and the Authority of Scripture, Tradition and Reason: Reformed Theologian of the Church of England (Paternoster Press, 1997). See also Kirby, Richard Hooker’s Doctrine of the Royal Supremacy, 5–29. Peter Munz, The Place of Hooker in the History of Thought (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, Ltd, 1952); and Gunnar Hillerdal, Reason and Revelation in Richard Hooker (Lund: CWK Gleerup, 1962). Richard Hooker, Of The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, in The Works of That Learned and Judicious Divine, Mr. Richard Hooker, 3 vols., ed. Rev. John Keble (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1820), Book 1, Chapter 7, Volume I, p. 222. Hooker, Laws, 1.7, in Works, I.223. Hooker, Laws, 1.8, in Works, I.224. Plato, Protagoras, 358, in The Dialogues of Plato, trans. B. Jowett (New York: Random House, 1937). Augustine, On Free Choice of the Will, trans. Thomas Williams (Cambridge: Hackett, 1993), 120. Dihle, The Theory of Will in Classical Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 129. Thomas Aquinas, De spiritualibus creatures, 10.ob4 and ad4, quoted in James F. Keenan, S. J., Goodness and Rightness in Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1998), 28. Ibid., 30. For a thorough exposition of Aquinas’s developed view of incontinence, see Bonnie Kent, Virtues of the Will: The Transformation of Ethics in the Late Thirteenth Century (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1995). Hillerdal, Reason and Revelation in Richard Hooker, 48. Hooker, Laws, 1.8, in Works, i. 228–9. See Munz, The Place of Hooker in the History of Thought, 51–5; and Hillerdal, Reason and Revelation in Richard Hooker, 82. Hooker, Laws, 1.8, in Works, i. 229. Hillerdal, Reason and Revelation in Richard Hooker, 82. Hooker, Laws, 1.9, in Works, i. 237–8. It should be noted that John Finnis has argued that Aquinas believed that first principles are derived from pre-moral goods; as such, Aquinas did not commit the naturalistic fallacy of deriving normative statements from factual ones. See John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 33–6. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Ia IIae, q. 94, a. 3, in Basic Writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas, 2 vols., ed. Anton C. Pegis (New York: Random House,

Notes to pages 87–94

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46.

47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

209

1945). All quotations from Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae will be taken from vol. 2 of this edition. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Ia IIae, q. 94, a. 3. Stephen Darwall, The British Moralists and the Internal ‘Ought’: 1640–1740 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 28. Hooker, Laws, 1.8, in Works, i. 235. Hooker, Laws, 1.12, in Works, i. 267. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Ia IIae, q. 57, a. 5. Joseph Boyle, “Natural Law and the Ethics of Traditions,” in Natural Law Theory: Contemporary Essays, ed. Robert P. George (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 13–14. Hooker, Laws, 1.10, in Works, i. 241. Hooker, Laws, 1.10, in Works, i. 246. Hooker, Laws, 1.10, in Works, i. 246–7. Hooker, Laws, 1.10, in Works, i. 251. Hooker, Laws, 1.8, in Works, i. 237. Hooker, Laws, 1.9, in Works, i. 237. Hooker, Laws, 1.10, in Works, i. 241. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1740), iii.i.i., in British Moralists, 1650–1800, ed. D. D. Raphael (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), para. 500, quoted in Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights, 41. Debora Shuger, Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance: Religion, Politics, and the Dominant Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 45. Ibid., 44. Egil Grislis, “The Hermeneutical Problem in Richard Hooker,” in Studies in Richard Hooker: Essays Preliminary to an Edition of His Works, ed. W. Speed Hill (Cleveland: The Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1972), 159–206. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Ia, IIae, q. 94, a. 3. For a discussion of the analyticity of per se nota principles, see Denis J. M. Bradley, Aquinas on the Twofold Human Good: Reason and Human Happiness in Aquinas’s Moral Science (Washington, DC: Catholic University Press), 302–6. Grislis, The Hermeneutical Problem in Richard Hooker, 179. For the most recent reconstruction of the Hooker-Travers debate, see Philip B. Secor, Richard Hooker: Prophet of Anglicanism (Toronto: The Anglican Book Centre, 1999), chap. 10. Hooker, A Learned Discourse of Justification, in Works, iii. 448–9. Cited in Lee Gibbs, “Richard Hooker’s Via Media Doctrine of Justification,” Harvard Theological Review 74 (1981), 218. Hooker, A Learned Discourse of Justification, in Works, iii. 449. For a survey of these early modern tensions between justification and sanctification, see Alister E. McGrath, Justitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), especially 285–317.

210

Notes to pages 94–102

54. For an assessment of Hooker’s Learned Discourse see Lee Gibbs, “Richard Hooker’s Via Media Doctrine of Justification,” Harvard Theological Review 74 (1981), 212–20. 55. Hooker, Laws, 5.64, in Works, ii. 289. 56. Hooker, Laws, 5.64, in Works, ii. 291. 57. Hooker, Laws, 5.37, in Works, ii. 141. 58. Lake, Anglicans and Puritans?, 166. 59. Hooker, Laws, 5.71, in Works, ii. 369. 60. Hooker, Laws, 5.71, in Works, ii. 368. 61. Hooker, Laws, 5.71, in Works, ii. 370. 62. Hillerdal, Reason and Revelation in Richard Hooker, 137. 63. Quoted in Lancelot Andrewes, A Sermon Preached Before the King’s Majesty, at Greenwich (1605), in The Works of Lancelot Andrewes, 11 vols. (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1854), 2.158. 64. Andrewes, A Sermon Preached Before the King’s Majesty, at Greenwich (1605), in Works, 2.158. 65. Ibid., 160. 66. Ibid., 161. 67. Quoted in The New Oxford Annotated Bible, Revised Standard Version, eds. Herbert G. May and Bruce M. Metzger (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962). 68. Quoted in Dietmar Lage, Martin Luther’s Christology and Ethics (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990), 94. 69. Andrewes, A Sermon Preached Before the King’s Majesty, at Greenwich (1605), in Works, 2.179. 70. Ibid., 179. 71. Ibid., 179. 72. Ibid., 180. 73. Ibid., 181. 74. Ibid., 182. 75. Cited in Lage, Martin Luther’s Christology and Ethics, 95. 76. Andrewes, A Sermon Preached Before the King’s Majesty, at Greenwich (1605), in Works, 2.182. 77. Ibid., 178. 78. Andrewes describes the operations of “special grace” in A Preparation to Prayer, in Works, 5.301–10. 79. Andrewes, A Sermon Prepared to be Preached on Easter-Day (1624), in Works, 3.100–1. 80. Andrewes, A Sermon Preached Before the King’s Majesty at Greenwich (1609), in Works, 3.334. 81. Ibid., 3. 336. 82. Ibid., 3. 336. 83. Ibid., 3. 335–6. 84. Andrewes, A Sermon Prepared to be Preached on Easter-Day (1624), in Works, 3. 94. 85. Ibid., 3. 94.

Notes to pages 103–8

211

86. Andrewes, A Sermon Preached Before Queen Elizabeth at Whitehall (1602), in Works, 1.372–3. For Andrewes’s most extensive commentary on the political expedience of Godly fear, see his sixth sermon on the gunpowder treason, A Sermon Preached Before The King’s Majesty at Whitehall (1614), in Works, 4.300–6. 87. Martin Luther, A Commentary on St. Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians, in Martin Luther: Selections From His Writings, ed. John Dillenberger (New York: Anchor Books, 1961), 105. 88. Ibid., 109. 89. Much of this account of ethical character in relation to Wisdom literature is taken from William P. Brown, Character in Crisis: A Fresh Approach to the Wisdom Literature of the Old Testament (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdman’s Publishing Company, 1996). 90. See Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), chap. 13. 91. Shuger, Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance, 61. 92. Ibid., 81. 93. Ibid., 86. 94. For foundational accounts of Puritan covenant theology, see Perry Miller, The New England Mind: the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954), chap. 13; and Miller’s Errand Into the Wilderness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), chap. 1. For more recent accounts of covenant theology, see William K. B. Stoever, “A Faire and Easie Way to Heaven,”: Covenant Theology and Antinominianism in Early Massachusetts (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1978); and Janice Knight, Orthodoxies in Massachusetts: Rereading American Puritanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 95. William Perkins, A Golden Chain, or the Description of Theology, in The Work of William Perkins, intro. and ed. Ian Breward (Abingdon: Sutton Courtenay Press, 1970), 213. 96. William Perkins, A Discourse of Conscience (London, 1596), 139. 97. Miller spends considerable time describing the uneasy Puritan assimilation of Aristotelian faculty psychology to Platonic innatism in The New England Mind, 278. 98. William Perkins, The Foundation of Christian Religion (London, 1618), 111–12. 99. Perkins, A Discourse of Conscience, 108. 100. Ibid., 35–6. 101. Ibid., 149. 102. Perkins, A Treatise Tending Unto a Declaration Whether a Man Be in The Estate of Damnation or in The Estate of Grace, in Breward, 384–5. 103. Perkins, A Grain of Mustard Seed, in Breward, 409. 104. Perkins, A Treatise of the Vocations or Callings of Men, in Breward, 471. 105. Ibid., 472. 106. Perkins, Epieikeia, or A Treatise of Christian Equity and Moderation, in Breward, 504. 107. Ibid., 504.

212

Notes to pages 109–18

108. Ibid., 508. 109. Ibid., 508. 110. Janice Knight, Orthodoxies in Massachusetts: Rereading American Puritanism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 93. 111. Ibid., 93. 112. Ibid., 175. 113. Ibid., chap. 2. 114. The Complete Works of Richard Sibbes, 7 vols., ed. Alexander B. Grosart (London: James Nisbet, 1862), 7. 482. 115. Sibbes, Works, 4.134. 116. Sibbes, Works, 7.483. 117. Sibbes, Works, 4.129. 118. Sibbes, Works, 4.284. 119. Sibbes, Works, 2.75. 120. Sibbes, Works, 2.77. 121. Sibbes, Works, 2.77. 122. Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 185–96. 123. Sibbes, Works, 2.117. 124. Sibbes, Works, 2.126. 4 THE ELECT BODY IN PAIN: GODLY FEAR AND S A N C T I F IC A T I O N I N JO H N D O N N E ’S POETRY AND PROSE 1. John Stachniewski, “The Despair of the ‘Holy Sonnets,’” ELH 48, 1981, 699. For an alternative, Augustinian interpretation of the Holy Sonnets, see Patrick Grant, “Augustinian Spirituality and the Holy Sonnets of John Donne,” ELH 38, 1971, 542–61. 2. Richard Strier, “John Donne Awry and Squint: The ‘Holy Sonnets,’ 1608– 1610,” Modern Philology, 1989, 357–84. 3. Ibid., 364. 4. Ibid., 364. 5. William Case, A Sermon of the Nature and Necessitie of Godly Feare (London, 1616), 7. 6. Ibid., 8. 7. Jeremiah Lewis, The Right Use of Promises, or A Treatise of Sanctification (London, 1632), 7– 8. 8. John Preston, The Saint’s Qualification (London: 1637), 414. 9. John Brown, Christ, the Way, and the Truth, and the Life (Rotterdam, 1677), 93. 10. For an overview of early modern Catholic positions regarding justification in relation to sanctification see Alister E. McGrath, Justitia Dei: A History of the Christian Doctrine of Justification (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), chap. 7.

Notes to pages 118–27

213

11. Quoted in John Piscator, A Learned and Profitable Treatise of Man’s Justification (London, 1599), 73–4. 12. Ibid., 76. 13. Ibid., 76–9. 14. The Sermons of John Donne, 10 vols., ed. George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), 8.369. 15. The Sermons of John Donne, 9. 150. 16. The Sermons of John Donne, 3. 279. 17. The Sermons of John Donne, 8. 125. 18. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 18. 19. Ibid., 18. 20. Ibid., 266. 21. Preston, The Saint’s Qualification, 295. 22. The Sermons of John Donne, 6. 64, 72–4. 23. Richard Crakanthorpe, A Sermon of Sanctification (London, 1608), 9. 24. Ibid., 11. 25. Preston, The Saint’s Qualification, 299. 26. Lewalski, Protestant Poetics, 268. 27. Ibid., 268. 28. Strier, “John Donne Awry and Squint,” 373–4. 29. Ibid., 374. 30. Thomas Tuke, The High-Way to Heaven, or The Doctrine of Election (London, 1609), 182. 31. Preston, The Saint’s Qualification, 286. 32. The Sermons of John Donne, 3. 117. 33. Preston, The Saint’s Qualification, 290. 34. Strier, “John Donne Awry and Squint,” 373. 35. Preston, The Saint’s Qualification, 333. 36. William Loe, The Mystery of Mankind (London, 1619), 26. 37. Preston, The Saint’s Qualification, 377. 38. The Sermons of John Donne, 2. 115. 39. Ibid., 128. 40. Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. and intro. R. S. Pine-Coffin (Penguin Books, 1961), 165. 41. Ibid., 172. 42. William Perkins, The Whole Treatise of the Cases of Conscience (London, 1635), 7. 43. William Ames, The Marrow of Theology (1642), trans. John D. Eusden (Boston: Pilgrim Press, 1968), 123. 44. Joseph Hall, The Remedy of Profanesse, in The Works of Joseph Hall, 12 vols. (Oxford: D. A. Talboys, 1837), 6.351. 45. Paul Cefalu, “‘Damn´ed Custom . . . Habits Devil’: Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Antidualism, and the Early Modern Philosophy of Mind,” ELH 67 (2000), 399–431.

214

Notes to pages 127–34

46. Jeremy Taylor, Unum Necessarium (1655), in The Whole Works of the Right Reverend Jeremy Taylor, 15 vols, ed. Reginald Heber (London: Longman, 1861), 7.152. 47. The Sermons of John Donne, 5. 208–9. 48. The Sermons of John Donne, 6. 107. 49. The Sermons of John Donne, 2. 332. 50. William Case, A Sermon of the Nature and Necessitie of Godly Feare (London, 1616), B3. 51. “Potentia et affectus naturae partum sequuntur: at virtue (ut antea probarum est industria) acquiritur: ergo nec potentia nec affectus apellari potest.” John Case, Speculum quaestionum moralium, in universam Aristotelis (London, 1588). 52. “Affectus, qui sic proprie dicitur, est motus, quo sensus aut voluntas prosequitur aut fugit rem oblatam.” Philipp Melanchthon, Philosophiae Moralis Epitomes (1538), in Opera quae supersunt omnia, 28 vols., eds. Karl Bretschneider and Heinrich Bindseil (Halis Saxonum, 1834–60; reprinted, New York: Johnson Reprint Corp., 1963), 16.51, trans. William C. Stull. 53. Philipp Melanchthon, Summary of Ethics (1532); quoted in Ralph Breen, A Melanchthon Reader (New York: Peter Lang, 1988), 207. 54. Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Minde in Generall (1604), ed. Thomas O. Sloan (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971), 17. 55. “Virtus, que affectu constat, celeriter admittitur celeriterque amittitur . . . Quod si absurdissimum dictu est, fateamur ex uno act summum vitium et ex uno act summam posse esse virtutem: ergo non opus esse habitu.” Lorenzo Valla, Repastinatio Dialectice et Philosophie, ed. G. Zippel (Padova: Antenore, 1982), 1.77–8. 56. Nancy Struever, Theory and Practice: Ethical Inquiry in the Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 120. 57. Lorenzo Valla, De Voluptate, trans. A. Kent Hieatt and Maristella Lorch (New York: Abaris Books, 1977), 239–41. 58. Pierre Charron, Of Wisdome (New York: Da Capo Press, 1971), 136. 59. John Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, ed. Anthony Raspa (Montreal: Mcgill-Queen’s University Press, 1973), 31. 60. Ibid., 29. 61. Ibid., 30. 62. John Carey, John Donne: Life, Mind and Art (London: Faber and Faber, 1981), 121. 5 A B S E N T N E I G H B O R S I N G E O R G E H E R B E R T ’S “ T H E C H U R C H , ” O R W H Y AGAPE B E C O M E S CARITAS IN ENGLISH PROTESTANT DEVOTIONAL POETRY 1. Rosemond Tuve, “George Herbert and Caritas,” in Essays by Rosemond Tuve: Spenser, Herbert, Milton, ed. Thomas P. Roche, Jr. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 174.

Notes to pages 134–40

215

2. Ibid., 174. 3. See Arnold Stein, George Herbert’s Lyrics (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1968), 104, 135; and Richard Strier, Love Known: Theology and Experience in George Herbert’s Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), xvi–xix. 4. Tuve, “George Herbert and Caritas,” 194. 5. Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros (London: S.P.C.K., 1953), 681–737. 6. Most of these questions are treated at length in Timothy Jackson’s excellent study, Love Disconsoled: Meditations on Christian Charity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 1–15. 7. Ibid., 13–14. 8. These larger questions of the relationship among agape, law, and character are examined in detail in Gene Outka, Agape: An Ethical Analysis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972). See also The Love Commandments: Essays in Christian Ethics and Moral Philosophy, eds. Edmund N. Santurri and William Werpehowski (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1992). 9. Martin Luther, Lectures on Romans (1515–16), in Luther’s Works, 55 vols., ed. Jaroslav Pelikan (Saint Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1955–86), 25. 294. 10. Nygren, Agape and Eros, 697. 11. Ibid., 734. 12. Ibid., 734. 13. Martin Luther, The Freedom of a Christian (1520), in Martin Luther: Selections From His Writings, ed. John Dillenberger (New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1961), 74. 14. Martin Luther, Samtliche Werke, 67 vols., (Erlangen, 1826–57), 52. 158; quoted in George W. Forell, Faith Active in Love: An Investigation of the Principles Underlying Luther’s Social Ethics (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1954), 90. 15. Forell, Faith Active in Love, 100. 16. Luther, Works, 27:351. 17. Dillenberger, Martin Luther: Selections From His Writings, 87. 18. Ibid., 88–9. 19. Ibid., 89. 20. John Rogers, A Treatise of Love (London, 1632), 24–5. 21. Ibid., 47. 22. Ibid., 47–8. 23. Ibid., 11. 24. Ibid., 12. 25. Ibid., 13. 26. Peter Du Moulin, The Love of God: A Divine Treatise Containing Five Degrees, Marks, Aids of God’s Love, trans. Richard Goring (London, 1628), 12. 27. Ibid., 26–7. 28. Ibid., 67. 29. Ibid., 71.

216

Notes to pages 140–51

30. Stanley Fish, The Living Temple: George Herbert and Catechizing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 134–6. 31. Strier, Love Known, 79–83. 32. Michael C. Schoenfeldt, Prayer and Power: George Herbert and Renaissance Courtship (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991), 213–14. 33. John Calvin, A Harmony of the Gospels: Matthew, Mark, and Luke, trans. T. H. L. Parker, in Calvin’s New Testament Commentaries, 12 vols., eds. David W. Torrance and Thomas F. Torrance (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1972), 2. 281. 34. Ibid., 2. 281. 35. Ibid., 2. 282. 36. Ibid., 2. 283. 37. Strier, Love Known, 73. 38. Fish, The Living Temple, 136. 39. All quotations taken from George Herbert: The Complete English Poems, ed. John Tobin (New York: Penguin Books, 1991). 40. Cristina Malcolmson, Heart-Work: George Herbert and the Protestant Ethic (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 164. 41. John Evans, The Sacrifice of a Contrite Heart in Teares, Meditations, and Prayers (London, 1630), 100. 42. Ibid., 102. 43. The Christian’s Sacrifice (London, 1622), 45. 44. Ibid., 59. 45. Ibid., 61. 46. Louis Martz, The Poetry of Meditation: A Study in English Literature of the Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), 309. 47. Malcomson, Heart-Work: George Herbert and the Protestant Ethic, 167. 48. Dillenberger, Martin Luther: Selections From His Writings, 76. 49. Strier, Love Known, 78–9. 50. George Herbert, A Priest to the Temple, or The Country Parson, His Character, and Rule of Holy Life, in George Herbert, The Complete English Poems, 219. 51. Ibid., 220. 52. Ibid., 220. 53. Debora Kuller Shuger, Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance: Religion, Politics, and the Dominant Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 93. 54. William Perkins, “A Dialoge of the State of a Christian Man,” in The Work of William Perkins, intro. and ed. Ian Breward, (Abingdon: Sutton Courtenay Press, 1970), 382; quoted in Shuger, Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance, 94. 55. Ibid., 95. 56. Ibid., 98. 57. Ibid., 99. 58. For an illuminating account of the mid-seventeenth-century understanding of the biblical exhortation not to respect persons, see Reid Barbour, Literature

Notes to pages 151–8

59. 60. 61. 62.

63.

64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76.

217

and Religious Culture in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), chap. 4. Dillenberger, Martin Luther: Selections From His Writings, 366–7. Ibid., 368, 370. Ibid., 373. For further discussion of Luther’s Two Kingdoms doctrine, see Heinrich Bornkmann, Luther’s Doctrine of the Two Kingdoms in the Context of His Theology, trans. Karl H. Hertz (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1966); Per Frostin, Luther’s Two Kingdoms Doctrine: A Critical Study (Lund: Lund University Press, 1994); and Martin E. Marty, “Luther on Ethics: Man Free and Slave,” in Accents in Luther’s Theology: Essays in Commemoration of the 405th Anniversary of the Reformation, ed. Heino O. Kadai (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1967), 199–229. Arno Deutelmoser, Luther, Staat und Glaube (Jena, 1937), 201; quoted in Helmut Thielicke, Theological Ethics, Volume 1: Foundations, ed. William H. Lazareth (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdman’s Publishing Company, 1966), 370. Karl Barth, Eine Schweizer Stimme, 1938–1945 (Zollikon-Zurich, 1945), 113; quoted in Thielicke, Theological Ethics, 369. Ibid., 377. William Perkins, A Treatise of the Vocations or Callings of Men, in Breward, 451. Ibid., 456–7. William Ames, The Marrow Theology, ed. John D. Eusden (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1997), 226. Ibid., 226–7. See Barbour, Literature and Religious Culture in Seventeenth-Century England, 1–2. George Herbert, The Complete English Poems, 206. Ibid., 206. Ibid., 207. Ibid., 208. Ibid., 220. The Verse in English of Richard Crashaw (New York: Grove Press, 1949), 87–8. 6 MORAL PRAGMATISM IN THE THEOLOGY OF JO H N M I L T O N A N D H I S C O N T E M P O R A R I E S

1. See William James, “The Will to Believe,” in William James: Pragmatism and Other Essays (New York: Washington Square Press, 1963). 2. Stanley Fish, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1967), 12. 3. For an overview of critical discussion linking Baxter and Milton, see John Rumrich, Milton Unbound: Controversy and Reinterpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 28–34.

218

Notes to pages 159–64

4. N. H. Keeble does devote a chapter of Richard Baxter: Puritan Man of Letters to Baxter’s ethics, but his focus is mostly on Baxter’s relationship to casuistry. See N. H. Keeble, Richard Baxter: Puritan Man of Letters (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982). 5. Richard Baxter, Christian Ethics, in The Practical Works of The Reverend Richard Baxter, 23 vols., ed. William Orme (London: James Duncan, 1830), 3, 101–2. 6. Baxter, Christian Ethics, in Works, 2. 203. 7. Baxter, The Character of a Sound, Confirmed Christian, in Works, 8.435. 8. Baxter, Christian Ethics, in Works, 1. 100. 9. Ibid., 102. 10. Baxter, Christian Ethics, in Works, 2. 203. 11. For a discussion of Baxter’s relation to Puritan nonconformity and latitudinarianism, see Isabel Rivers, Reason, Grace, and Sentiment: A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in England, 1660–1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 12. Nigel Keeble, The Literary Culture of Nonconformity (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987), 24. 13. Ibid., 100. 14. The Autobiography of Richard Baxter, ed. J. M. Lloyd Thomas (London, J. M. Dent, 1925), 190. 15. Rivers, Reason, Grace, and Sentiment, 100. 16. For a good account of the complexities of the latitudinarian position, see Gerard Reedy, Robert South (1634–1716): An Introduction to His Life and Sermons (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), chap. 6. 17. John Tillotson, Sermons on Several Subjects and Occasions, 12 vols. (London, 1742–44), 6. 155. 18. Robert South, Sermons Preached Upon Several Occasions, 4 vols. (Philadelphia: Sorin and Ball, 1844), 1. 326. 19. See C. F. Allison, The Rise of Moralism: The Proclamation of the Gospel From Hooker to Baxter (New York: Seabury Press, 1966). 20. Blaise Pascal, Pensees, 45.680, trans. Honor Levi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 155. 21. Ibid., 156. 22. Ian Hacking, The Emergence of Probability (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 66. 23. Pascal, Pens´ees, 148. 24. Pascal, Pens´ees, 4.267, in Ouevres de Blaise Pascal, 14 vols., ed. Leon Brunschvicg (Paris, 1904), 13.196; quoted in Jean Mesnard, Pascal, trans. Claude and Marcia Abraham (Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1969), 35. 25. Ibid., 4.272; quoted in Mesnard, Pascal, 41. 26. Quoted in Henry G. Van Leeuwen, The Problem of Certainty in English Thought (1630–1690) (The Hague, 1963), 46. 27. Ibid., 46. 28. Jeremy Taylor, Unum Necessarium, in The Whole Works of the Right Reverend Jeremy Taylor, 15 vols., ed. Reginald Heber (London: Longman, 1848–65), 7. 276.

Notes to pages 164–80

219

29. See W. B. Sibley, “The Rational Versus the Reasonable,” Philosophical Review 62 (October, 1953), 554–60; quoted in John Rawls’s Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 49. Rawls offers a useful and extended discussion of the distinction between reasonableness and rational choice, 48–54. 30. Two influential Augustinian interpretations of prelapsarian perfection are A. J. A. Waldock’s, Paradise Lost and its Critics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966); and C. S. Lewis’s, A Preface to Paradise Lost (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961). 31. Quoted in Dennis Danielson, Milton’s Good God: A Study in Literary Theodicy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 170. 32. Ibid., 173. 33. Rumrich, Milton Unbound, 33. 34. The citations are taken from Book III, chapter 20 and Book IV, chapter 38 of Against Heresies, in Writings of Irenaeus, trans. Alexander Roberts and W. H. Rambaut (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1880). 35. Complete Prose Works of John Milton, 8 vols., ed. D. M. Wolfe et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–82), 2. 223; cited hereafter in text as YP, with volume and page number. 36. These three passages from De Doctrina are cited in Richard Strier, “Milton’s Fetters, or, Why Milton’s Eden Is Better than His Heaven,” Milton Studies 38 (2000), 171–2. 37. Ibid., 172. 38. Barbara Lewalski, “Innocence and Experience in Milton’s Eden,” in New Essays on Paradise Lost, ed. Thomas Kranidas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 93. 39. All quotations from Paradise Lost are from John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York, 1957) and will be cited in the text by book and line number. 40. Lewalski, “Innocence and Experience in Milton’s Eden,” 96. 41. Ibid., 94. 42. Ibid., 100. 43. Ibid., 113. 44. See Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), particularly 218–19, where Taylor distinguishes classical ethics, including Socratic ethics, from Christian morality. 45. Lewalski, “Innocence and Experience in Milton’s Eden,” 103. 46. Ibid., 100. 47. Strier, “Milton’s Fetters, or, Why Eden Is Better than Heaven,” 187–92. 48. Jeremy Taylor, Unum Necessarium (1655), in Works, 7. 276. 49. Ibid., 277. 50. See, for example, George Williamson, “The Education of Adam,” in Milton: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. Arthur E. Barker (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 284–307; and Gerald J. Schiffhorst, “Patience and the Education of Adam in Paradise Lost,” South Atlantic Review 49 (1984), 55–63.

220

Notes to pages 183–94

51. William Whately, Prototypes or the Primarie Precedent Presidents out of the Booke of Genesis (London, 1640), 135. 52. John Calvin, Commentaries on the First Book of Moses Called Genesis, 2 vols. (Michigan, 1984), 1. 360. For further discussion of Renaissance conceptions of Abraham, see Arnold Williams, The Common Expositor: An Account of the Commentaries on Genesis: 1527–1633 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1948), chap. 8. 53. See Silvano Arieti, Abraham and the Contemporary Mind (New York: Basic Books, 1981), 112. 54. Karl-Josef Kuschel, Abraham: A Symbol of Hope for Jews, Christians and Muslims (London: SCM Press, Ltd., 1995), 26. 55. The Sermons of John Donne, 10 vols., eds. Evelyn M. Simpson and George R. Potter (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), 8. 347. 56. Lawrence A. Sasek, “The Drama of Paradise Lost, Books XI and XII,” in Milton: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. Arthur E. Barker. 57. Louis Martz, The Paradise Within: Studies in Vaughan, Traherne, and Milton (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964), 163–4. 58. Ibid., 154. 59. Barbara Lewalski, “Structure and the Symbolism of Vision in Michael’s Prophecy, Paradise Lost, Books XI and XII,” Philological Quarterly xlii (1963), 30. 60. Ibid., 30. 61. Robert South, Sermons Preached Upon Several Occasions, 3. 143. 62. Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Book I, section xi, in The Works of That Learned and Judicious Divine, Mr. Richard Hooker, 3 vols., ed. Rev. John Keble (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1820), 1. 259. EPILOGUE: THEORIZING EARLY MODERN MORAL SELFHOOD 1. Stephen Greenblatt, “Psychoanalysis in Renaissance Culture,” in Stephen Greenblatt, Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (New York: Routledge, 1990), 136. 2. Ibid., 143. 3. Michael C. Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 18. 4. See Lawrence Kohlberg, Essays on Moral Development, Volume II, The Psychology of Moral Development: The Nature and Validity of Moral Stages (New York: Harper and Row, 1984). 5. God’s Plot: The Paradoxes of Puritan Piety: Being the Autobiography and Journal of Thomas Shepard, ed. Michael McGiffert (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1972), 144. 6. See W. W. Meissner, Psychoanalysis and Religious Experience (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984); and Anna-Maria Rizzuto, The Birth of the Living God: A Psychoanalytic Study (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1979).

Notes to pages 194–6

221

7. Peter Lake, The Boxmaker’s Revenge: ‘Orthodoxy,’ ‘Heterodoxy’ and the Politics of the Parish in Early Stuart London (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 204. 8. The Sermons of John Donne, 10 vols., eds. Goerge R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1957), 9. 192. 9. Martin Luther, Lectures on Galatians (1535), in Luther’s Works, 55 vols., ed. Jaroslav Pelikan (Saint Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1955–86), 26. 353. 10. D. W. Winnicott, “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena,” in Essential Papers on Object Relations, ed. Peter Buckley (New York: New York University Press, 1986), 271. 11. Jay R. Greenberg and Stephen A. Mitchell, Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 196. 12. All of these positions on religious utilitarianism are elaborated in Utilitarians and Religion, ed. James E. Crimmins (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1998).

Index

agape (divine love): 3, 11; and neighbor-love, 147; Richard Sibbes on, 114, 135; see also caritas Allison, C. F., 218 Ames, William, 1, 6–7, 37, 127, 198, 199, 203, 213, 217; on two kingdoms doctrine, 153 Andrewes, Lancelot, 1, 97–105, 198, 210; and divine law, 102; and fear of God, 1, 100–1; and imitatio Christi, 100; and sacramentalism, 98 Anscombe, G. E. M., 12, 199 Aquinas, Saint Thomas, 30, 208, 209; on natural law, 86–7, 88 Arieti, Silvano, 220 Aristotle, 4, 201, 205, 206; on hexis (habituation), 4–5, 47; on incontinence, 48–9, 52–3, 64–6, 198; on moral virtue, 4; Nicomachean Ethics, 4, 19; on pity, 53; on prudence (practical wisdom), 56; Rhetoric, 53; on shame, 19–21, 54–6; and summum bonum, 67–8 Arminius, Jacobus, 79, 207, 208 Atkinson, Nigel, 199, 208 Augustine, Saint, 3, 18, 198, 202, 204, 208, 213; on caritas, 137; on Edenic perfection, 165, 175; on habitual sin, 126; on incontinence, 84; on nature of evil, 45; on personal assurance, 33, 194 Babington, Gervase, 73, 206 Balvanes, Henry, 206 Bangs, Carl, 208 Barbour, Reid, 14, 154, 200, 216, 217 Barnes, Robert, 29 Barth, Karl, 152, 217 Baxter, Richard, 109, 218 Baylor, Michael G., 203, 204 Belfiore, Elizabeth S., 205 Bellarmine, Robert, 118 Benedict, Ruth, 17, 200 Berger, Harry, 50–1, 204 ˚ 199, 201, 203 Bergvall, Ake, Beza, Theodore, 31, 203

Bible: and Abraham, 182–4; 2 Corinthians 8:21, 71–2; Exodus, 14:15, 73; Exodus 4:3, 73; Galatians, 103; Hebrews 12:2, 25–6, 97; Isaiah 10:5, 73; Luke 12:37, 140; Luke 19:7, 140; Philippians 2:12, 74; Psalms, 26–8; Psalm 51, 144 Bifield, Nicholas, 203 Bornkmann, Heinrich, 4, 217 Boyle, Joseph, 88, 89–91, 209 Bradford, John, 30, 202 Bradley, Denis J. M., 205, 209 Breen, Ralph, 214 Broadie, Sarah, 206 Brown, John, 117, 212 Brown, William P., 211 Burgersdyck, Franco, 203 Burgess, Cornelius, 76, 207 Cairns, Douglas L., 201 Calvin, John, 6, 201, 202, 205, 207, 216, 220; on Abraham, 183; on fear of God, 74; on justification, 58; on law, 73; on Luke 19:7 (Zacchaeus), 141; on sanctification, 58 Campbell, Barth, 201 Carey, John, 214 Caritas (love), 4, 135, 147 Cartwright, William, 78 Case, John, 129, 133, 214 Case, William, 117, 140, 212, 214 Cefalu, Paul, 213 Charron, Pierre, 130, 214 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 202 Clarke, Samuel, 88, 91–2 Clebsch, William, 29 Collinson, Patrick, 207 conscience: and habituation, 108; Martin Luther on, 39; William Perkins on, 107–10; and synteresis, 40; in Sidney’s Arcadia (Gynecia), 40; John Woolton on, 40 Coolidge, John, 109 covenant of grace (Puritanism), 105–14

222

Index Crakanthorpe, Richard, 121, 213 Crashaw, Richard, 155 Cullen, Patrick, 76, 207 Danielson, Dennis, 165, 219 Darwall, Stephen, 209 DeMornay, Philip, 34–5, 203 DeMoss, W. F., 204 DeSilva, David Arthur, 18, 201, 202 Deutelmoser, Arno, 217 Dewey, Arthur, J., 201 Dihl, Albrecht, 84, 208 Dillenberger, John, 215, 217 divine law; Lancelot Andrewes on, 102; and sanctification, 61 Dodds, E. R., 200 Donne, John, 4, 115–33, 214; on Abraham, 183; and Augustine, 126; and Catholicism, 118; and death, 121–5; Devotions, 131–2; on fear, 10, 116; Holy Sonnets: 129; ‘Oh, to vex me,’ 125–8; ‘This is my play’s last scene,’ 122; ‘Thou hast made me,’ 120; Letter to the Lady Carey, 129; ‘Obsequies to the Lord Harrington,’; personal assurance, 33, 194 Du Moulin, Peter, 139, 215 Edwards, Jonathan, 3, 198 Evans, John, 144, 216 fear of God: Lancelot Andrewes on, 1, 100–1; John Calvin on, 74–5; John Donne on, 116, 117; and divine punishment, 1; filial versus servile, 10, 117; Martin Luther on, 103; and shame in Sidney’s Arcadia, 19–21 Finnis, John, 208 Fish, Stanley, 140, 143, 158, 215, 216, 217 Forel, George, 137, 198, 215 Frankenberry, Nancy, K., 200 Freud, Sigmund, 76 Frith, John, 29 Frostin, Per, 217 Geertz, Clifford, 12–13, 199 Gibbs, Lee, 93, 209 Gless, Daryl, 49, 63–4, 206 Gold, Moshe, 199 good works: and Catholicism, 118; and early English Reformers, 29–30; and justification, 61; and law, 62; and Luke 19:7 (Zacchaeus), 140; and neighbor-love, 135; and prayer, 95; and sanctification, 61; and two kingdoms doctrine, 149–56; and virtue (Andrewes), 100–1 grace: and death of sin (Donne); and Guyon (The Faerie Queene); and infusion of virtue, 60; and new covenant, 121–2

223

Grant, Patrick, 212 Greenberg, Jay, R., 221 Greenblatt, Stephen, 190–1, 200, 202, 203, 207, 220 Greene, Robert A., 203 Greenham, Richard, 32, 203 Grislis, Egil, 92, 209 guilt, 17–18; and conscience (Arcadia), 35–43; compared to shame, 23–4, 36–45 Hacking, Ian, 163 Hall, Joseph, 127, 213 Hardie, W. F. R., 52, 205 Hauerwas, Stanley, 198 Heale, Elizabeth, 56, 205 Heerebord, Adrian, 203 Herbert, George, 6, 10, 217; The Temple: ‘The Church-porch,’ 149; ‘Divinity,’ 148–9, 155; ‘Love (III)’; ‘Love Unknown,’ 143–6; ‘Unkindness,’ 146–7 Hillerdal, Gunnar, 85, 86, 96, 208, 210 Holbrook, Clyde A., 198 Hooker, Richard, 3, 6, 9, 19, 79, 81–97, 208, 209, 210, 220; Nigel Atkinson on, 81; and incontinence, 84–5; and instrumental virtue, 187; and justification, 94; W. Torrance Kirby on, 81; and moral psychology, 82–5; and natural law, 9, 86–93; and Psalms, 95; and sanctification, 82, 93; and two kingdoms doctrine, 81 Hoopes, Robert, 51, 204 Hume, Anthea, 49, 51, 57–8, 62–3, 204, 205, 206 Hume, David, 209 Imbrie, Ann E., 207 Irenaeus of Lyons, 166 Jackson, Timothy, 215 James, William, 217 Jewett, Robert, 200 Joachim, H. H., 206 justification, 2, 13; Calvin on, 58; and Catholicism, 118; Hooker on, 94; Luther on, 58; See also sanctification Kaske, Carol, 74, 207 Keckermann, Bartholomaeus, 203 Keeble, N. H., 217, 218 Keenan, James F., 208 Kendall, R. D., 30, 202 Kent, Bonnie, 208 Kirby, W. Torrance, 199, 208 Kitchin, G. W., 73 Knight, Janice, 109, 211, 212 Kohlberg, Lawrence, 192, 220 Kraut, Richard, 206

224

Index

Kuschel, Karl-Josef, 183, 220 Lage, Dietmar, 210 Lake, Peter, 77, 95, 140, 207, 220 Langston, Douglas, C., 203 Larter, R. R., 205 latitudinarianism, 4, 157 Lewalski, Barbara, 120, 122, 168–70, 186, 213, 219, 220 Lewis, C. S., 180, 219 Lewis, Jeremiah, 117, 206, 212 Loe, William, 126, 128, 213 love: as agape, 3, 11; as caritas, 4, 135; George Herbert on, 140–9; Martin Luther on, 136–9; neighbor-love, 135; Richard Sibbes on, 114, 118 Luther, Martin, 6, 202, 203, 211, 215, 221; and William Ames, 37; on Augustine, 31–2; on fear of God, 103; and imitatio Christi, 100–1; on love of God, 136–9; on personal assurance, 31–2; on sanctification, 58; on two kingdoms doctrine, 37, 151 Malcolmson, Cristina, 144, 199, 216 Malina, Bruce J., 200 Mallete, Richard, 207 Martin, Marty, E., 217 Martz, Louis, 145, 185, 216, 220 McCoy, Richard, C., 201 McGinn, Colin, 7, 199 McGrath, Alister, E., 209, 212 McKim, Donald K., 206 Meilaender, Gilbert, 6, 199 Meissner, W. W., 194, 220 Melanchthon, Philip, 6, 36–43, 129, 202, 203, 214 Merrill, Thomas, 198 Mesnard, Jean, 163, 218 Miller, Lewis H., Jr., 204 Miller, Perry, 211 Milton, John: on Abraham, 182–4; on custom, 166; De Doctrina Christiana; The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce; moral pragmatism, 11, 165–88; Of Reformation, 167; Paradise Lost, 4, 11; The Reason of Church-government, 168 Mitchell, Stephen A., 221 moral pragmatism, 11; and latitudinarianism, 11; and John Milton, 165–88; and Blaise Pascal, 162–4 Munz, Peter, 208 Myrick, Kenneth, 201 natural law, 9, 24–5; Saint Thomas Aquinas on, 86–7, 88; Richard Hooker on, 86–93; and synteresis, 88, 91–2 neighbor-love, 135; See also good works New Historicism, 12, 13, 16

Nussbaum, Martha, 112, 212 Nygren, Anders, 135, 136, 215 object relations theory, 112, 193–6 Oden, Thomas C., 200 Ortner, Sherry, B., 199 Outka, Gene, 215 Padelford, F. M., 75, 206 Pascal, Blaise, 2, 162–4, 218; and latitudinarianism, 163 Patrides, C. A., 158 Penner, Hans, H., 200 Perkins, William, 198, 211, 213, 216, 217; on conscience, 107–10; on covenant of grace, 105–6; on habitual sin, 127; and reflex act, 31, 106; on two kingdoms doctrine, 150, 152 personal assurance, 8; Calvin on, 30–1; Donne on, 33, 194; early English Reformers on, 30–3 Piscator, John, 118, 213 Plato, 208 Potts, Timothy, 203 Prescott, Anne Lake, 202, 218 Preston, John, 58–9, 60, 62, 97, 117, 121, 122, 124–5, 126, 205, 206, 212, 213 prudential ethics, 3; and Lancelot Andrewes, 100–1; and Richard Hooker, 88, 89–91; and William Perkins, 108; and self-interest, 3 Rawls, John, 219 Reedy, Gerard, 218 Ricouer, Paul, 17 Rivers, Isabel, 161, 218 Rizzuto, Anna, 194, 220 Rogers, John, 139, 215 Ross, W. D., 198 Rumrich, John, 165, 217, 219 sacrifice, 144–5 sanctification (regeneration): 2–3, 13, 62; Calvin on, 58; and Catholicism, 118; and early English Reformers, 29–30; and fear of God, 117; and grace, 49, 74; and Guyon (The Faerie Queene), 49; Hooker on, 82, 93; Luther on, 58; and neighbor-love, 135; John Preston on, 58–9, 60; William Perkins on, 106; and practical ethics, 78–81; Richard Sibbes on, 112; Thomas Taylor on, 59; Thomas Tuke on, 59; See also justification Sasek, Lawrence, 184 Schiffhorst, Gerald J., 219 Schoenfeldt, Michael C., 135, 190, 216, 220 Scodel, Joshua, 14, 200 Secor, Philip, B., 209

Index self-interest, 3; relation to benevolence, 196–7; and rational choice (Paradise Lost), 175–80; compared to reasonableness, 164; see also prudential ethics Shaftesbury, Anthony, 2, 198 shame, 17–18; in Arcadia, 18–29; and early English Reformers, 29–30; compared to guilt, 23–4, 36–45; and religion, 25–7 Shepard, Thomas, 193, 220 Sherman, Nancy, 205 Shuger, Debora, 15–16, 120, 191, 199, 200, 209, 211, 216; on Lancelot Andrewes, 104; on George Herbert, 150–1; on Richard Hooker, 85 Sibbes, Richard, 10, 104, 212; as compared to William Ames and William Perkins, 112; and divine love, 112–14; and divine seal, 111; and habituation to virtue, 111; and sanctification, 112 Sibley, W. B., 219 Sidney, Sir Philip, 6, 201, 204; on conscience, 40; Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, 7, 8, 18, 45; Defense of Poesy, 29–32, 46; on shame, 18–29 Silberman, Lauren, 204 Sinfield, Alan, 201, 202, 204 Sirluck, Ernest, 56–7, 64, 204, 205, 206 Smith, Henry, 57, 205 soteriology, defined, 2 source of normativity, 9–10 South, Robert, 162, 187, 218, 220 Spenser, Edmund: The Faerie Queene, Book II, 7, 8, 14, 47–76, 204, 205; and habituation to virtue (Guyon), 68–70; and incontinence (Guyon), 68–70 Stachniewski, John, 115, 212 Stein, Arnold, 215 Stoever, William K. B. Stoughton, Thomas, 144 Strauss, Gerald, 5, 198 Strier, Richard, 115, 123, 140, 143, 147, 168, 212, 213, 216, 219 Struever, Nancy, 130, 214 Taylor, Charles, 170, 199, 211, 219 Taylor, Gabrielle, 201

225

Taylor, Jeremy, 1, 12, 127, 176, 198, 213, 218, 219; and Blaise Pascal, 164 Taylor, Thomas, 59, 60, 206 Thielicke, Helmut, 152, 199, 217 Tillotson, John, 161, 218 Travers, Walter, 93 Trueman, Carl, R., 29, 202 Tuke, Thomas, 59, 124, 206, 213 Tuve, Rosemond, 134, 205, 214, 215 two kingdoms doctrine, 6–7, 37; and George Herbert, 149–56; Richard Hooker on, 81; Martin Luther on, 37, 151; William Perkins on, 150, 152 Tyacke, Nicholas, 77, 207 Tydale, William, 29 Upton, John, 56, 73 Valla, Lorenzo, 130, 214 Van Leeuwen, Henry, 164, 218 virtue: and fear (Donne), 127–30; and habituation, 111; and latitudinarianism, 158–62; and mercenary conduct, 3, 22; and passion, 128; and sanctions, 1, 88, 89–91, 108; and self-interest, 3; theological virtues (Hooker), 94–5 Waldock, A. J. A., 219 Walsh, James Jerome, 206 Weatherby, Harold, L., 207 Weiner, Andrew, 19, 201, 203 Wendel, Francois, 199 Whately, William, 183, 219 White, Thomas, 57, 205 Whitgift, John, 78 Willet, Andrew, 73, 206 Williams, Arnold, 220 Williamson, George, 219 Wimberly, Edward P., 200 Winnicott, D. W., 195, 221 Woodhouse, A. S. P., 47, 49, 50, 76, 204 Woolton, John, 204 Worden, Blair, 19, 201 Wright, Thomas, 129, 214