The Last Pilgrimage to Eternity: Protestant Paths to the Afterlife in Early Modern English Poetry 9783839442548

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Cyril L. Caspar The Last Pilgrimage to Eternity

Lettre

Cyril L. Caspar, born in 1989, wrote his PhD thesis at the English Department of the University of Zurich, Switzerland. His research interests include early modern English literature and the history of the reformation.

Cyril L. Caspar

The Last Pilgrimage to Eternity Protestant Paths to the Afterlife in Early Modern English Poetry

This work was accepted as a PhD thesis by the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences of the University of Zurich in the spring semester 2017 on the recommendation of the Doctoral Committee: Prof. Allen H. Reddick (main supervisor) and Prof. Fritz Gutbrodt.

© 2018 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de Cover layout: Maria Arndt, Bielefeld Cover illustration: Engraving by Francis Barlow in Sir William Denny’s Pelecanicidium: or the Christian Adviser Against Self-Murder . . . and the Pilgrims Passe to the Land of the Living (London: Thomas Hucklescott, 1653), RB 122064, The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-4254-4 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-4254-8

Contents

Figures | vii Acknowledgments | ix Conventions | xi Introduction | 1 Chapter 1: The Poetics of the Last Pilgrimage Approximating eternity in the works of John Donne, Sir Walter Raleigh, and George Herbert | 21

Soteriology, Eschatology, and the Hermeneutics of Figurative Language | 23 Early Modern Pastoral Care: ars moriendi literature and the pilgrimage to eternity | 27 John Donne’s Holy Sonnet No. 6 | 32 Sir Walter Raleigh’s “The Passionate mans Pilgrimage” | 44 The Last Pilgrimage in George Herbert’s Poetry | 54 Chapter 2: “streight way on that last long voiage” Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and the trajectory of the last pilgrimage | 73

Metaphor, Allegory, and Anagogy in Faerieland | 82 Wandering in Faerieland: defining the last pilgrimage ex negativo | 86 The House of Holinesse as a Springboard to Eternity? | 104 Redcrosse’s Vision of His Last Pilgrimage and Its Effects on Earthly Life | 122 The Cantos of Mutabilitie as an Ambiguous Access to Restful Eternity | 127

Chapter 3: “a death like sleep, / A gentle wafting to immortal Life” Pilgrimages to eternity in John Milton’s Areopagitica, Paradise Lost, and Paradise Regain’d | 137

“new enlightn’d steps”: Areopagitica and the collective pilgrimage to Truth Divine | 137 “Wandring this darksome Desart”: Satan’s pilgrimage to God’s light and the Fall of Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost | 149 “to choose / Thir place of rest . . . / with wandring steps and slow”: Pilgrimage negotiations in Paradise Lost to palliate the pangs of death | 163 “yet only stood’st / Unshaken”: Steadfastness as the path to the Kingdoms of Grace and of Glory in the wilderness of Paradise Regain’d | 173 Conclusion: John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress Recurring topoi on the pilgrimage to eternity | 195 Bibliography | 221

Primary Sources | 221 Biblical Sources | 227 Secondary Sources | 228



Figures

Figure 1: Late Medieval Deathbed Scene Engraving No. 3 in The Ars Moriendi (Editio Princeps, circa 1450): a Reproduction of the Copy in the British Museum, ed. W. Harry Rylands and George Bullen | 37 Figure 2: St. James the Greater, dressed as a pilgrim in Sir Walter Raleigh’s Book of Hours. With permission of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford, MS. Add. A. 185, fol. 59v | 48 Figure 3: Albrecht Dürer, Knight, Death, and the Devil (1513), Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/ File:Duerer_-_Ritter,_Tod_und_Teufel_(Der_Reuther).jpg | 72 Figure 4: The Ark of the Covenant from The Geneva Bible (1560), Exodus 25. With permission of the University of Wisconsin Press | 186



Acknowledgments

The present book has itself been a pilgrimage of sorts. This long journey began well before I embarked on my doctoral studies at the University of Zurich and has incurred a great number of debts with many generous cotravelers who I am grateful to acknowledge here. First and foremost, I would like to thank my supervisors Allen H. Reddick and Fritz Gutbrodt for their unwavering support and encouragement, their attentive ear for all kinds of incipient ideas, and their thought-provoking questions that were critical at various stages of this project. Moreover, I owe a great debt of gratitude to Antoinina Bevan Zlatar, who was not only the first to introduce me to all things early modern but who has frequently lent a critical eye to greater portions of my work; her helpful criticism has been instrumental in shaping the present book. Shorter parts of the following were scrutinized by such generous and kind readers as Luca Baschera, Albrecht Classen, Deborah Frick, Christina Ljungberg, Fabian Schambron, and Thomas Willard. Furthermore, I am indebted to Shane Walshe for going through my work with a finetoothed comb to remove any linguistic barbarisms; remaining blunders, however, are entirely my own. This intellectual journey would not have been possible without the financial support of the University of Zurich (UZH). I would therefore like to express my gratitude for the 19-month research grant, which I was awarded by the UZH’s Forschungskredit (FK–14–059) and which provided me with the necessary time and freedom to complete my project. More physical journeys all around the globe were made possible through the substantial support of the PhD Program for English and American Literary Studies at the English Department of UZH: this enabled me not only to conduct in-depth research at the Bodleian Library in Oxford but also to discuss parts of my work at the

x | The Last Pilgrimage to Eternity

11th International Symposium: Death and the Culture of Death in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Time in Tucson, AZ, in May 2014 as well as at the 10th Biennial ANZAMEMS Conference in Brisbane and at the Grounding the Sacred Through the Arts Conference in Sydney in July 2015. I am grateful to all participants for the inspiring discussions that followed the papers given at these conferences. In addition, several very special companions from all walks of life need to be thanked. In my exchange semester at Florida State University in Fall 2010, such inspirational teachers as Elizabeth Spiller (now at UC Davis) and Elaine Treharne (now at Stanford) planted important seeds that grew into my deep fascination for the medieval and early modern period. Back at the English Department of the University of Zurich, Sabin Jeanmaire, Mark Ittensohn, Johannes Riquet, Salma Ghandour, Stella Castelli, and many others taught me to cherish life in academia for its intellectual and social exchange on many unforgettable occasions. Moreover, at Kantonsschule Rychenberg, the selective high school in Winterthur, where I have been teaching English since the beginning of my doctoral project, many trusted colleagues and more than a handful of bright teenage students repeatedly expressed interest in my dissertation and provided a fruitful contrast to life at university. In particular, I would like to thank Michael Beusch, Heidi Bürgi, Sandro Fehr, Stephan Frech, Ruth Stadelmann, Christian Sommer, Markus Wettstein, Martin Wildhaber, and Silvia Živanov for their genuine interest and the many stimulating conversations over lunch, during breaks, or just in passing. Last but not least, friends and family have supported me throughout the past few years. Among many others Sebastian Müller, Jacqueline Ebneter, Martin Hanselmann, Martina Belz, Lucien Palser, Elisabeth Jehli, Rachel and Martin Stoessel, Peter Klemensberger, and Felix Schmid have often had to listen to ideas that may have seemed foreign at best, have expressed their personal thoughts and doubts, and have thus proven true and indispensable companions on a long journey. This journey, however, would not have been possible if it had not been for my wonderful parents, Ruth and Franz Caspar, to whom I owe a very special word of thanks for supporting me with their generosity and love as well as for believing in me and in what I do. Zurich, January 2018

The Last Pilgrimage to Eternity | xi

CONVENTIONS In the following pages, original spellings and abbreviations have been retained but old letter forms have been silently modernized. Unless otherwise noted, biblical quotations derive from The Geneva Bible (1560); early printed books have been accessed through Early English Books Online.

Introduction These be Saint Paules wordes in effecte, whereby we maye perceiue, that the lyfe in this world, is resembled & likened to a pylgrimage, in a straunge countreye, farre from god: & that death delyuering vs from oure bodyes, doth sende vs strayghte home into oure owne countrey, & maketh vs to dwell presently with god for euer, in euerlastinge rest & quietnes. So that to dye is no losse, but profyte and winnynge to all true christen people. Book of Homilies, “The Second Part of the Sermon against the Fear of Death,” probably written by Thomas Cranmer1

These lines from the first Book of Homilies issued under Elizabeth I’s reign encapsulate the core of the present study: life in this world is but a pilgrimage and death—sending “vs strayghte home into oure owne countrey”—marks this spiritual journey’s end and a new beginning. This ultimate and liminal stage will be called the “last pilgrimage” in the following. Deriving from Hebrews 11, “Saint Paules wordes”2 denote an almost universal spiritual pattern that is particularly deeply enmeshed in the fibers of medieval and early

1

Certayne Sermons appoynted by the Quenes Maiestie . . . (London: Paul’s

2

Throughout the centuries, there has been speculation about the authorship of the

Churchyard by Richard Jugge and John Cawood, 1559), Q1v. Epistle to the Hebrews, with some acknowledging the apostle Paul as its author, as Cranmer does here. By contrast, his near contemporary William Tyndale re-

2 | The Last Pilgrimage to Eternity

modern culture: man is an exiled stranger in this world and thus keen to find the way to his heavenly home. Concerned with how Pentateuch luminaries like Abraham, Sarah, Jacob, and Moses epitomize this state of exile, Hebrews 11 exemplifies a spiritual ideal of living by faith alone, of following a path through a metaphorical wilderness, and of being invariably driven by the prospect of the promised land ahead: “All these dyed in faith, and receiued not the promises, but sawe them afarre of, and beleued them, and receiued them thankefully, and confessed that they were strangers and pilgremes on the earth” (v. 13). These promises “afarre of” are only seen “with ye eyes of faith,” as the marginalia in The Geneva Bible (1560) imply, but their faith impels these spiritual travelers to view their journey as a metaphorical pilgrimage toward “a better, that is an heauenly [country]: wherefore God is not ashamed of them to be called their God: for he hathe prepared for them a citie” (v. 16). John Durham Peters rightly notes that “such concepts as exile, diaspora, and nomadism . . . lie at the heart of the western canon; otherness wanders through its center.”3 This state of exile was more often than not characterized as a metaphorical pilgrimage in early Christian theology and particularly so in the medieval and early modern period. As the final stage of such a spiritual journey, the last pilgrimage marks the travelers’ deliverance from their earthly plight and their acceptance into a blissful eternity. Examining this ontological transition and the ways in which this pilgrimage-to-eternity-pattern is embedded in early modern English poetry is the aim of the present book, an endeavor that will ultimately lead to a deeper understanding of death and the afterlife in early modern England. The epigraph from “An exhortation agaynste the feare of death” refers to Hebrews 11 in order to do precisely what its title advertises: to deprive death

fuses to specify the author in his Prologue to Hebrews. Today, there is widespread consensus about Paul’s unlikely authorship of the Epistle, whose actual author, however, has hitherto remained obscure. See Tyndale’s New Testament, 1534, ed. David Daniell (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 345. 3

John Durham Peters, “Exile, Nomadism, and Diaspora: the Stakes of Mobility in the Western Canon,” in Home, Exile, Homeland, ed. Hamid Naficy (New York: Routledge, 1999), 17. My thanks to Martin Mühlheim, who pointed this passage out to me.

Introduction | 3

of its earthly sting. Probably written by Thomas Cranmer himself,4 this sermon presents the divinely prepared city, commonly taken to be the New Jerusalem, as heralding the prospects of “oure owne countrey” toward which the strangers and pilgrims in Hebrews travel as they leave that “straunge countreye, farre from god.” Provided that one has lived by faith in acknowledgment of one’s itinerant state as a temporary spiritual traveler on earth, every believer’s toils in the present world and, particularly, the pangs of death will fall into oblivion in view of the heavenly destination that lies ahead. To this end, Cranmer’s sermon extends the passage from Hebrews to a spiritual means of coping with one’s personal prospect of death and appropriates it to render death less fearful. Nevertheless, the mortal passage is inevitable on one’s route to eternity, but death—viewed through the prism of the last pilgrimage—is shorn of its fearsomeness and becomes a means of deliverance with “no losse, but profyte and winnynge to all true christen people,” as Cranmer writes. This notion of death as a last pilgrimage to eternity throws into sharp relief other, more gruesome and annihilating conceptions of the end of life that have often been seen to predominate the theology and literature of early modern England. To cast a light on more hopeful versions of death, the present study aims at revisiting the popular metaphor of life as a pilgrimage to focus, in an unprecedented way, on the liminality of death in early modern England and on how this passage to “euerlastinge rest & quietnes” is represented poetically as the inevitable apex of man’s spiritual journey to eternity. In its interest in the “last pilgrimage” as an early modern trope negotiating life, death, and eternity, the following investigation revolves around one particular way in which the end of life and the transition to the afterlife were conceived in Renaissance England. However, as the early modern saying,

4

On the authorship of this sermon, see Frank L. Cross and Elizabeth A. Livingstone, eds., The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974; reprint, 1978), 662; John Edmund Cox, “Notes,” in Miscellaneous Writings and Letters of Thomas Cranmer, ed. John Edmund Cox (Cambridge: University Press, 1846), 128, n. 1.

4 | The Last Pilgrimage to Eternity

“Death has a hundred ways to let out life,”5 indicates, the period, beginning roughly with the English Reformation and ending with the close of the seventeenth century, offered a plethora of different correspondences between life, death, and a potential afterlife. In a time that saw momentous theological changes in the wake of the Reformation, conceptions about the afterlife were not left untouched. As the historian Peter Marshall observes, The obsession of the medieval Church with negotiating the counterfeit demands of purgatory had engendered a crude foreshortening of the eternal perspective of Christianity. Many Protestant reformers refocused their own hopes on the end of time, an end which some at least did not believe to be so far away.6

Despite these hopes of an imminent afterlife, the absence of a concretely envisioned, soul-cleansing proto-eschaton like purgatory may well have cast considerable doubts on the whereabouts and effectuality of the life everlasting among both clergy and laity. This skepticism is prominently encapsulated in Hamlet’s assertion that death is “The vndiscouer’d country, from whose borne / No trauiler returnes,” which culminates famously in his nihilistic last words, “the rest is silence.”7 In their uncertainty and silence, these lines testify to a fear of annihilation and to the possibility that there may not be anything at all to follow after death. The chapters to come, however, will seek to untether early modern mortality from the mooring lines of uncertainty, fear, and gruesomeness to show that Hamlet’s (and other’s) deepseated anxieties may not represent as dominant a conception of death as one might think. Instead, the following will show how the metaphor of the last

5

Morris Palmer Tilley, A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: a Collection of the Proverbs Found in English Literature and the Dictionaries of the Period (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1950), D140.

6

Peter Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 227–28.

7

William Shakespeare, The Complete Works: Original-Spelling Edition, eds. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), III, i, 79–80 and V, ii, 342. Subsequent references to Shakespeare are taken from this edition and will henceforth be indicated parenthetically.

Introduction | 5

pilgrimage may well offer a way of envisioning a more hopeful transition to the afterlife. These more blissful versions of an early modern English death have been largely overlooked by most critics and literary historians over the last few decades, which leaves open a lacuna that this study intends to fill. Over the last few decades, it has almost become a critical commonplace that the end of life was considered dark, uncertain, and even annihilating in early modern England; this contention, however, has relegated more blissful poetical conceptions of the afterlife to the periphery. This more pessimistic strand of literary criticism takes its most extreme form in Robert N. Watson’s The Rest Is Silence: Death as Annihilation in the English Renaissance.8 He argues that the English Renaissance witnessed an unprecedented crisis of death that had its roots not only in “the lack of any purgatorial process,” but also in Protestantism’s “particular emphasis on individual interiority” and in the dogmatic assertion of man’s inherent sinfulness, all of which “must have made it virtually impossible to imagine satisfactorily the survival of a full selfhood in heaven.”9 Although Watson implicitly acknowledges a pattern akin to the last pilgrimage to eternity when he refers to “the proper path to the afterlife,” he avers that such metaphors were only a psychological distraction from the possibility that “there might be no destination” at all.10 While historians like Marshall deem Watson’s assessment exaggerated,11 most scholars agree that the Protestant plow, tilling the dogmatic soil of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, left furrows of eschatological 8

Robert N. Watson, The Rest Is Silence: Death as Annihilation in the English Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). For similar views, see Philippe Ariès, Western Attitudes toward Death: from the Middle Ages to the Present, trans. Patricia M. Ranum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 41–45; Phoebe S. Spinrad, The Summons of Death on the Medieval and Renaissance Stage (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1987), 1–26; Thomas Willard, “Images of Mortality in Early English Drama,” in Death and the Culture of Death in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Time: the Material and Spiritual Conditions of the Medieval and Early Modern Culture of Death, ed. Albrecht Classen (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2016), 411–31.

9

Watson, The Rest Is Silence, 1, 6.

10

Watson, The Rest Is Silence, 40.

11

Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead, 215.

6 | The Last Pilgrimage to Eternity

uncertainties that called for other, non-purgatorial understandings of the afterlife to be (re-)discovered. Furthermore, the philosopher of religion John Hick holds that it is probably even because of “the dark, punitive conception of the meaning of death” that “there has always been the very different picture of human life as a pilgrimage, with bodily death as the end of one stage of that pilgrimage and, by the same token, as a passing on to another stage.” 12 Hence, even if death in early modern England was accompanied by a “nihilistic sting,” as Watson contends,13 the metaphorical pilgrimage to eternity can be shown to provide a conceit that allows for these ontological anxieties to be transcended linguistically in a genuine attempt to explore new and almost invariably hopeful meanings of the life to come. After all, the abolishment of purgatory may not only have led to a spiritually disconcerting eschatological void, as Watson claims, but may well have sparked a reappropriation of the traditional pilgrimage metaphor to pave more concrete pathways to post-Reformation afterlives. While the term “the last pilgrimage” is chiefly a modern coinage,14 the idea of a final pilgrimage from this life to the next has its roots in the more comprehensive Christian metaphor that conceives of life in its entirety as a pilgrimage. This traditional and holistic form of a metaphorical pilgrimage through life has received ample critical attention from both literary scholars and historians alike.15 There is unanimous agreement that the trope of the 12

John Hick, Death and Eternal Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), 208.

13

Watson, The Rest Is Silence, 40.

14

The only early modern reference I could find that resembles the phrase derives from Hermann Kirchner’s “An Oration in Praise of Trauell in generall” in Thomas Coryate’s Crudities, in which life is described as “nothing else then a dayly trauell, to that last and heauenly pilgrimage”: see Coryats Crudities hastily gobled vp in five Moneths . . . (London: William Stansby, 1611), C9r.

15

In much of the following, I rely on Dee Dyas, Pilgrimage in Medieval English Literature, 700–1500 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001), 9–65; Marco Nievergelt, Allegorical Quests from Deguileville to Spenser (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2012), particularly 23–26; Barbara K. Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 93–94; Grace Tiffany, Love’s Pilgrimage: the Holy Journey in English Renaissance Literature (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2006), 13–

Introduction | 7

pilgrimage through life is not an invention of the English Renaissance but that it can be traced as far back in the Judeo-Christian tradition as to the Old Testament narratives of a chosen people on their quest for the land of milk and honey (see Gen., Exod., and Deut. but also Lev. 25:23 and Ps. 39:12, 107:3–7, and many other instances).16 As explained above, this quest is reintroduced in the New Testament metaphor of the paradigmatic “strangers and pilgremes” in Hebrews 11:13, roaming the plains of a spiritually foreign country.17 Dee Dyas holds that this Christian appropriation of “the twin concepts of the sojourner-pilgrim and the citizen of a distant, greater homeland” led to an image which combined the promise of future security with a challenge to present behaviour. Faith in God’s promises of blessings to come would inspire willingness to

43. For an earlier, groundbreaking literary treatment of the topic with a particular emphasis on its pictorial tradition, see Samuel C. Chew, The Pilgrimage of Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), particularly 174–75. For one of the many historical commentaries on the pilgrimage trope, see Eamon Duffy, “The Dynamics of Pilgrimage in Late Medieval England,” in Pilgrimage: the English Experience from Becket to Bunyan, ed. Colin Morris and Peter Roberts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 164–77. It bears emphasis, however, that pilgrimage in its literal or metaphorical manifestations is not peculiar to Christianity; see Simon Coleman and John Elsner, Pilgrimage: Past and Present; Sacred Travel and Sacred Space in the World Religions (London: British Museum Press, 1995), 6–33. 16

For example, in Genesis 47:9, ‫( ָמגוּר‬magur), literally “sojourn, sojourning,” is translated as pilgrimage in the 1560 Geneva translation with a marginal reference to Hebrews 11:9.

17

The rendering of “strangers and pilgremes” may seem inaccurate in light of the Greek original ξένοι καὶ παρεπίδηµοι. However, this phrase has its own history of reception in the English language: it goes back to the to the Wycliffite Bible, which was translated on the basis of Jerome’s Vulgate, “peregrini et hospites,” thus becoming “pilgryms, and herboryd men” rather than “strangers and sojourners,” which would be closer to the Greek original. See Philip Edwards, Pilgrimage and Literary Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 5–6.

8 | The Last Pilgrimage to Eternity

make sacrifices in the present. Pilgrims en route to heaven would be enabled to remain impervious to sufferings or abuse.18

The various pilgrims whose last journeys form the central concern of the chapters to come are very differently aware of their itinerant status and of their other-worldly destination; ultimately, the narrative of their spiritual progress is invariably determined by their heavenly goal. Consciously or unconsciously, they thus participate in a trajectory that was most influentially delineated by Augustine in Of the Citie of God. 19 In this monumental work, “THAT most glorious Society and celestiall Citie of Gods faithfull” is seen as “partly seated in the course of these declining times” and “partly in that solid estate of eternity”; in our fallen times, “hee that liueth . . . by faith, is a Pilgrim amongst the wicked” while the state of eternity is still waiting to “be crowned in perfection of peace.”20 This polarity between the fallen human state and man’s eventual redemption is largely negotiated through the image of the pilgrimage through life reaching its apotheosis when the pious traveler concludes his earthly journey. Employed already in various different hues in the Middle Ages, this central Augustinian tenet informs the profuse use of the pilgrimage metaphor in theological writings of the early modern period. Apart from Cranmer’s sermon above, one of the most notable instances can be found in A Clovd of Faithfvl Witnesses, an extensive commentary only on the eleventh chapter of the Letter to Hebrews, written by the celebrated Puritan divine William Perkins: commenting on verse 16, he elucidates that

18

Dyas, Pilgrimage in Medieval English Literature, 24.

19

M. A. Claussen, “‘Peregrinatio’ and ‘Peregrini’ in Augustine’s The City of God,” Traditio 46 (1991): 33–75.

20

Augustine, Of the Citie of God, 413–26 A.D., trans. John Healey (London: G. Eld and M. Flesher, 1620), I, i, 1 (p. 1, B1r). Dyas rightly points out that similar patterns can also be traced in the writings of Origen, Eusebius, Cyprian, Chrysostom, Athanasius, and Jerome. Out of the plethora of Patristic writings, Augustine’s treatment of the idea of the Christian journey seems to me the most comprehensive and influential one. For further details, see Dyas, Pilgrimage in Medieval English Literature, 27–36.

Introduction | 9

the Patriarchs, being our fore-fathers in faith, and patternes whom we must followe, did desire heauen: by their example euery one of vs is taught the same duty, to aime at another and a better Country, then that in which we liue, euen at the kingdome of heauen: and not to thinke that this world is the Country we are borne for.21

It is this optimistic perspective on the last things that lets Arthur Dent describe his late Elizabethan bestseller The Plaine Mans Path-way to Heaven as a work that “hath in it, not the nature of a tragedie, which is begunne with ioy, and ended with sorrow: but of comedie, which is begunne with sorrow, and ended with ioy.”22 Such blissful outlooks on the afterlife are difficult to reconcile with Watson’s earlier assertion that early modern England witnessed a major crisis of death. If there was a crisis at all, the following will show that it was effectively addressed through the metaphor of the last pilgrimage to eternity. As the earthly span of life becomes shorter and the passage through death to eternity a more likely scenario, such a metaphor seems to provide the perfect bridge from the time of spiritual exile to one of divine encounter. The literary development of this powerful and ontologically transcendent metaphor mainly occurred in the Middle Ages when the concept of exiled pilgrims striving for their heavenly home became a commonplace not only in theological texts but also in what is now known as medieval English literature. For example, in his Piers Plowman, William Langland devises twenty (or twenty-two) passūs (“steps”) as instructive elements of a journey that prepares metaphorical travelers for the eschaton and the divine city on a hill, teaching them “What þis mountaigne bymeneþ.”23 Likewise, after all the

21

William Perkins, A Clovd of Faithfvll Witnesses . . . (London: Humfrey Lownes for Leo. Greene, 1607), 302.

22

Arthur Dent, The Plaine Mans Path-way to Heauen . . . (London: Robert Dexter,

23

William Langland, Piers Plowman: a Parallel-Text Edition of the A, B, C and

1601), A4r. Z Versions, c. 1370–90, ed. A. V. C. Schmidt, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications of Western Michigan University, 2011), 1: I, 1, subsequent quotations are from this edition and are indicated parenthetically; Dyas, Pilgrimage in Medieval English Literature, 232, 238–40.

10 | The Last Pilgrimage to Eternity

other pilgrims have told their tale on the way to Canterbury, Chaucer’s Parson is left to tell his, in which he wants To shewe yow the wey, in this viage, Of thilke parfit glorious pilgrymage That highte Jerusalem celestial.

(“The Parson’s Prologue,” ll. 49–51)24

According to the Parson, penitence is the best way for those who have “mysgoon fro the righte wey of Jersusalem celestial” (“The Parson’s Tale,” l. 80), and his lengthy exhortation instructs his listeners/readers to become penitent through contrition, confession, and satisfaction. In both Langland and Chaucer, the journey’s ultimate eschatological goal spurs on spiritual amelioration. Such processes can be seen as devotional and literary commonplaces that are in no way confined to medieval English literature but that are, inter alia, famously articulated in the work of Dante Alighieri and in that of Guillaume de Deguileville, the latter of which will be considered more specifically in Chapter 2.25 To gain a deeper understanding of the medieval and early modern implications of pilgrimage, it is important to differentiate between what Dyas has dubbed “place pilgrimage” and “life pilgrimage,” a distinction that will be employed throughout this study.26 In essence, the concept of the life pilgrimage refers holistically to a mentally and spiritually motivated metaphorical journey that reaches its apex in eternity while the place pilgrimage merely

24

Geoffrey Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson et al., 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1987), subsequent quotations are from this edition and are indicated parenthetically; Dyas, Pilgrimage in Medieval English Literature, 242.

25

Nievergelt, Allegorical Quests, 16. On Dante, see Peter S. Hawkins, Undiscovered Country: Imagining the World to Come (New York: Seabury Books, 2009), particularly 4–6, 12, 68–104.

26

Dyas, Pilgrimage in Medieval English Literature, 3–4. This commonly erected dichotomy also has its limits as will become clear in Chapter 1, in which I show how Sir Walter Raleigh uses traditional place pilgrimage imagery for the final part of what would strictly be a metaphorical journey through life.

Introduction | 11

dramatizes its metaphorical counterpart in geographical terms and culminates at a sacred place on earth. Throughout the later Middle Ages, place pilgrimages to holy shrines and to the relics usually enshrined therein enjoyed increasing popularity and could vary considerably in length and purpose. Disciplinary measures imposed by church authorities on individuals for moral and/or spiritual deviance could be just as much of a reason to go on a pilgrimage as more discretionary journeys for an indulgence, which would grant the shriven penitent mitigation of his temporal punishment and often included a foreshortening of his own or a (deceased) relative’s time in purgatory.27 However, as the practice became more fashionable, it also drew more skepticism. This growing skepticism about place pilgrimages is also reflected in the poetry of the late medieval period. Chaucer’s prologue to “The Pardoner’s Tale,” for example, lampoons some of the vices typical of literal place pilgrims as the Pardoner, a disreputable pilgrim and relic trader, discloses his worldly intentions: For I wol preche and begge in sondry lands; I wol nat do no labour with myne hands, Ne make baskettes and lyve thereby, By cause I wol nat beggen ydelly. ... Nay, I wol drynke licour of the vyne And have a joly wenche in every toun.

(ll. 443–53)

Such volitional inebriation and uninhibited promiscuity are hardly reconcilable to the inherently spiritual nature of place pilgrimages, which, after all, were intended to climax in an earthly encounter with the sacred rather than in one with the flesh under the bedcovers of some casual acquaintance on the road. In Piers Plowman, Langland’s allegorical preacher Reason presses in

27

Diana Webb, Pilgrimage in Medieval England (London: Hambledon and London, 2000), xiv–xv; Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c.1400–c.1580, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 288; Robert N. Swanson, Indulgences in Late Medieval England: Passports to Paradise? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 52–56.

12 | The Last Pilgrimage to Eternity

a similar direction and launches even more explicitly on a diatribe against the efficacy of place-bound pilgrimages to the shrines of holy saints: Amen dico vobis, nescio vos. And ye þat seke Seynt Iames and seyntes of Rome, Sekeþ Seynt Truþe, for he may saue yow alle.

(V, 55–57)

In other words, Truth cannot be reached by venerating saints on earth, but since “þere was wiȝt noon so wys, þe wey þider kouþe” (V, 513, “there was no one so wise that knew the way thither”), Piers concludes that this holy Truth can only be found through “Conscience and Kynde Wit” (V, 539) as well as “þoruȝ Mekenesse” (V, 561). These tensions between geographical physicality and spiritual interiority together with the common Lollard accusation of the negative economy of “vain” pilgrimages kept fueling the controversies over the meritoriousness of place pilgrimages.28 Although place pilgrimages enjoyed increasing popularity, most scholars concur that the metaphor of the pilgrimage through life never wavered in importance, neither before nor after the Reformation.29 As Christian K. Zacher maintains, place pilgrims “inevitably looked upon the journey as a preview of their own wished-for final passage after death into the heavenly city. To die en route or at the pilgrimage shrine usually was thought to ensure immediate joyful translation to beatitude.”30 Even though Neil H. Keeble 28

The Lollard movement repeatedly criticized place pilgrimages as depriving believers of their funds and preventing them from fulfilling “Goddis hestis [commandments] in almesgyuyng to sustene Cristis pore puple”; see Anne Hudson, ed., Selections from English Wycliffite Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 88.

29

Victor Turner, Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture: Anthropological Perspectives (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978), 7; Giles Constable, “Opposition to Pilgrimage in the Middle Ages,” Studia Gratiana 19 (1976): 121–46; Dyas, Pilgrimage in Medieval English Literature, 126–204; Webb, Pilgrimage in Medieval England, 233–61.

30

Christian K. Zacher, Curiosity and Pilgrimage: the Literature of Discovery in Fourteenth-Century England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 50.

Introduction | 13

may not agree,31 the passages above and Dyas’s work on medieval literature and pilgrimage lead to the conclusion that the life pilgrimage as such is not a Protestant appropriation but that it is “the process of journeying through life, rather than travelling to holy places, which constitutes the primary meaning of pilgrimage in the late-medieval thinking and preaching.”32 In short, the metaphor of the pilgrimage through life was already firmly enmeshed in the fibers of medieval spirituality, as, indeed, was the idea of a final pilgrimage after death, as I will show in Chapter 1. After the turn of the century, the medieval commonplace of the life pilgrimage withstood the onslaught of the Reformation and quite possibly even became re-emphasized through the abolition of its place-bound counterpart. As early as 1536, the Royal Injunctions repudiated place pilgrimages, a notion which was to be confirmed in the Injunctions of 1538. The latter clearly dictate avoidance of any other workes deuysed by mens fantasyes besyde scripture. As in wanderynge to pylgremages, offrynge of money, candels, or tapers to fayned reliques or ymages, or

31

The evidence presented here, pace Keeble, clearly indicates that his assertion that Protestantism “appropriated [place pilgrimages] to new purpose” is historically distorted. When quoting from a 1413 trial in which the accused John Oldcastle defended his hostility toward place pilgrimages saying that “euerye manne dwellynge on this earth is a pylgryme eyther towardes blesse or els towardes payne,” Keeble ignores that, by embracing such a view, the defendant did not resort to heterodox thinking in any way but to an orthodox mindset that was very much ingrained at the heart of medieval culture; see Neil H. Keeble, “‘To be a pilgrim’: Constructing the Protestant Life in Early Modern England,” in Pilgrimage: the English Experience from Becket to Bunyan, ed. Colin Morris and Peter Roberts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 242–42; John Bale, A brefe Chronycle concernynge the Examinacyon and death of the blessed martyr of Christ syr Iohan Oldecastell . . . (Antwerp: attr. Hans Luft, 1544), fol. 21v.

32

Dee Dyas, “Chaucer and the Communities of Pilgrimage,” in Chaucer and Religion, ed. Helen Phillips (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2010), 134 (my emphasis).

14 | The Last Pilgrimage to Eternity

kyssing and lickyng the same, saying ouer a number of beades not vnderstanded ne mynded on, or in suche lyke superstition.33

On the continent, the reformer Martin Luther was moving in a similar direction, as a glance into his Table Talks shows: In former times saints made many pilgrimages to Rome, Jerusalem, and Compostela in order to make satisfaction for sins. Now, however, we can go on true pilgrimages in faith, namely, when we diligently read the psalms, prophets, gospel, etc. Rather than walk about holy places we can thus pause at our thoughts, examine our heart, and visit the real promised land and paradise of eternal life.34

Thus, the efficacy of pilgrimages to holy shrines was rendered moot, and the practice was seen as tantamount to other acts of idolatry such as the burning of candles and the worshipping of relics and images. Such outward practices were to be eschewed at all costs because they “divert funds from more practical charitable uses” and were often seen as “an expedient of the Roman Church to sustain (and increase) its material wealth, often through deceit and fraudulent contrivances,” as Keeble explains.35 Put differently, the veneration of saints both near and far was not only declared superstitious and unmeritorious by the reformers but the journeys to their shrines came under attack as well. Above all, pilgrimages to holy sites came to be regarded as a potential impediment to salvation, and the criticism—already voiced about place-bound pilgrimages before the Reformation—could no longer be silenced. On the other hand, the validity of the pilgrimage as a mental image for a journey through life remained largely unchallenged. As indicated by the epigraph above, the authoritative Book of Homilies paradigmatically adopts the metaphor of the pilgrimage through life as a conceit for this-worldly toils and their after-worldly obliteration. More specifically, Keeble observes that “biblical deserts of exile, trial and spiritual enlightenment supplied the most 33

Iniunctions exhibited the [blank] day of [blank] anno. M. D. XXXVIII. (London:

34

Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, edited and translated by Jaroslav J. Pelikan, et

Thomas Berthelet, 1538), fol. 1v. al., 55 vols. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1955–86), 54:238. 35

Keeble, “Constructing the Protestant Life,” 239.

Introduction | 15

frequent metaphor to express the homelessness of saints whose destination was the New Jerusalem.”36 This mindset of exile, homelessness, and eventual deliverance sparked a long list of theological manuals that were intended to exemplify a Protestant’s righteous steps on his godly journey to the New Jerusalem: in such works as Edward Woolay’s A Playne Pathway to Perfect Rest (1571) or Arthur Dent’s The Plaine Mans Path-way to Heaven (1601), the prospect of the life everlasting directly informed moral instruction on how to frame one’s steps in the present world.37 Despite this apparent preoccupation with the here and now, eternity itself never went out of focus. Spanning from the present world to the one to come, the concept of the life pilgrimage thus provided believers not only with an experiential model of mapping their spiritual progress but also with a way of putting life and death into perspective: upon the close of his earthly life, the exiled stranger-pilgrim embarks on the last pilgrimage to his heavenly home.38 In this way, the metaphor of the last pilgrimage as the central concern of the present study represents the ultimate existential scenario on the trajectory of the pilgrimage through life. These remarks on one particular way of conceiving of life, death, and the afterlife as a final transcendental journey invite some more general comments on the existential phenomenon of death that unites cultures of all times. Albrecht Classen is not afraid of stating the obvious when he writes that “the living do not, of course, comprehend death, . . . but they observe dying all around them incessantly and try to make sense of it, or to cope with death through a myriad of cultural performances,” and he rightly insists that “all those answers offered throughout time have only been approximations, attempts, theoretical reflections.”39 Representing or palliating the end of life

36

Neil H. Keeble, The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later SeventeenthCentury England (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1987), 280.

37

Keeble provides a more comprehensive list in his article “Constructing the Protestant Life,” 242.

38

Keeble, “Constructing the Protestant Life,” 245, 250.

39

Albrecht Classen, “Death and the Culture of Death: Universal Cultural-Historial Observations, with an Emphasis on the Middle Ages,” in Death and the Culture of Death in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Time: the Material and Spiritual

16 | The Last Pilgrimage to Eternity

by resorting to a metaphor like the last pilgrimage can thus be seen as yet another human attempt of coming to terms with the inevitably elusive phenomenon of death and dying. In the chapters to come, this merely approximative explicability of death will lead to the assertion that death cannot be adequately grasped linguistically: put simply, the person who has just died has given up the necessary breath required to express the nature of death and those standing by are too passively involved to genuinely deliver an active account of this utterly liminal experience.40 Thus, it is, as the German theologian Jürgen Moltmann advances, one of the peculiar characteristics of death that its earthly nature eludes those immediately affected by it.41 Despite or perhaps because of death’s immediate inaccessibility, there seems to be a very human need to penetrate the parameters of human life to inquire into the realm of what is not to be known. In almost all cases, the inexpressibility of death leads to a fundamental dilemma: death cannot be expressed and yet we somehow need to express it to answer our burning questions of whence we came and where we go.42 The following pages will show that metaphors and related figures will prove particularly apt to address this dilemma on a literary scale. As one theologian expressed it on a broader, anthropological level, man “seems to be always symbolic man, metaphorusing, image-making, and image-using man,” and precisely because of this

Conditions of the Medieval and Early Modern Culture of Death, ed. Albrecht Classen (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2016), 1, 8. 40

Jürgen Moltmann, “Is There Life After Death?,” in The End of the World and the Ends of God: Science and Theology on Eschatology, ed. John Polkinghorne and Michael Welker (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2000), 246.

41

Jürgen Moltmann, Das Kommen Gottes: Christliche Eschatologie (Gütersloh: Chr. Kaiser/Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1995), 115.

42

Near-death experiences may be a notable exception to this, but the thriving research on this phenomenon again testifies to the curiosity that is piqued by the unresolved question of our ultimate post-mortem destination.

Introduction | 17

we use the image of our journeyings toward destinations as pictures of what we are and what we are doing in all action. And these similes can also become symbols when our lives become pilgrimages, move toward personal, national, or human goals.43

When such metaphorical pilgrimages are directed toward a personal or collective destination beyond the end of time, they are informed by an “eschatological faith” that Jerry L. Walls characterizes as “a daring hope, an ‘insane expectation’ that refuses the consolation of stoic resignation in the face of loss and devastation.”44 The early modern poets under scrutiny in the present study will be shown in the following to express their “daring hope” by means of metaphorical and symbolic language in a genuine attempt to access the ineffable. This will be shown in Chapter 1, in which I demonstrate how the pastoral use of the pilgrimage-to-eternity trope is adopted in select poems by John Donne, Sir Walter Raleigh, and George Herbert to palliate the prospects of death. This early modern pastoral use of the last pilgrimage has only been recognized cursorily by a handful of historians.45 To expand our understanding of the metaphor’s spiritual significance, the first chapter will also consider a number of seminal early modern sermons and more general devotional writings by Desiderius Erasmus, John Calvin, Thomas Becon, and others. Furthermore, the liminal nature of the last pilgrimage requires some theoretical reflections on the transcendental use of metaphors in general, and how they, in John Bunyan’s later words, turn “our darkest nights to days.”46 On the basis of Paul Ricœur’s and Hans Weder’s work, I will establish a theoretical framework that appreciates the creative and hermeneutic potential of religious metaphors and that will prove indispensable in the ensuing analysis of the poetry by Donne, Raleigh, and Herbert. Above all, my discussion of these poems will provide a profound insight into how the biblical 43

H. Richard Niebuhr, The Responsible Self: an Essay in Christian Moral Philosophy (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 153–54, 159–60.

44

Jerry L. Walls, “Introduction,” in The Oxford Handbook of Eschatology, ed. Jerry L. Walls (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 6.

45

Ralph A. Houlbrooke, Death, Religion, and the Family in England, 1480–1750 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 65; Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead, 309.

46

John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, 1678/1684, ed. Cynthia Wall (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), 8. Subsequent quotations to Bunyan’s bestseller will be taken from this edition with page numbers indicated parenthetically.

18 | The Last Pilgrimage to Eternity

origins of the last pilgrimage, the medieval practice of place pilgrimages, the Protestant model for spiritual progress, and the palliative implications of early modern pastoral care converge when the metaphor of a last journey opens up to a new bodily self (Donne), a new spiritual head (Raleigh), or—perhaps most peculiarly—a chair (Herbert). The second chapter will expand the metaphorical concepts delineated in Chapter 1 to its allegorical implications in the arcane world of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590/1596). In an Augustinian reading of Book I, I will show how the poet first presents a rich collection of human error and sinfulness that is allegorized in a confusingly high number of wrong ways and turnings that lead away from the plain pathway to eternity. I will then demonstrate how the Redcrosse Knight, the eponymous hero of the Legend of Holinesse, first has to experience these wrong turns himself, how they lead him to the verge of suicide, and how his restorative sojourn in the House of Holinesse heals his destitute spiritual condition and reveals to him his very own last pilgrimage and future identity as St. George. Unlike the poems treated in Chapter 1, The Faerie Queene is not so much concerned with the metaphorical representation of a last pilgrimage to eternity but, as will become clear, with how the prospect of such an ultimate journey sparks in Redcrosse and the Protestant reader the spiritual desire to ameliorate their own this-worldly ways. Only when Redcrosse sees the New Jerusalem does he undergo a transformation from a homo erro to a homo viator of sorts, participating in a Saul-to-Paul narrative that encourages moral probity in accordance with the Spenserian virtues that lead to the “generall end” of the epic. The more the poem progresses, however, the bleaker the prospect becomes as to whether these virtues can be achieved in the end. In a novel reading of the Mutabilitie Cantos, I will put forward that this final, fragmentary part of Spenser’s epic poem gestures toward a rather ambiguous end: while, on the one hand, invoking other-worldly stability and restfulness, the last stanza, on the other hand, points to a final eschatological battle, which suggest that the earthly struggles are not yet over. In my third and final chapter, I will trace the metaphorical steps of pilgrimages to eternity in John Milton’s Areopagitica (1644), Paradise Lost (1674), and Paradise Regain’d (1671). Although the mortalist doctrine that Milton develops in De Doctrina Christiana would exclude an immediate post-mortem translation from earth to heaven, patterns that resonate with the pilgrimage-to-eternity motif can be clearly identified in his epic poetry. For

Introduction | 19

example, Milton portrays his Satan as an archetypal wanderer, whose longwinded journey from hell to earth can be read as an undesirable place pilgrimage that does not lead to heaven but to the Fall of Adam and Eve and thus to the root of human corruption. As a consequence, any direct access to heaven is obstructed as Sin and Death enter God’s creation through the broad highway that they pave. To take the sting out of the prospects of death, God sends the Archangel Michael to reveal to the first man that not everything is lost: death will no longer be something fearsome but will, through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, be turned into “A gentle wafting to immortal Life” (XII, 435). As a result, their way out of Eden is not to be seen as a road to destruction but as a temporary providential pilgrimage to be concluded in eternity. Like Abraham and Sarah, Adam and Eve do not receive God’s promises but are made to see them, with the eyes of faith, “afarre of” (Heb. 11:13) through Michael’s visual and narrative instruction. He teaches them that, on their way, a “paradise within” will provide them with a spiritual resort to cope with the plights of the present. These feature again in the wilderness of Paradise Regain’d in which Satan tempts the Son of God multiple times. I will show that in Jesus’s resistance to the demonic trials Milton exemplifies a prototypical form of spiritual steadfastness on one’s way to salvation. When Jesus does not fall from the pinnacle of the Temple in Jerusalem when tempted to do so by Satan, the Son of God constructs a striking textual image that represents not only a provisional stop on a metaphorical pilgrimage through life but also a spiritual model for resisting the trials of the present. On the following journey through different versions and implications of last pilgrimages in early modern English literature, a few literary byways will have to be neglected. While occasionally taking recourse to prose writings, the present study’s main interest resides in poetic representations of last pilgrimages to eternity. Therefore, the following investigation claims in no way to be a comprehensive approach to such liminal journeys in prose, which will eventually be represented collectively in my short discussion of Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. It needs to be emphasized, moreover, that the metaphor of the last pilgrimage was so influential that it even made frequent entries of sorts into some of the dramatic texts of the period: for example, when Shakespeare’s Richard III announces his own brother’s death, he announces that Clarence should

20 | The Last Pilgrimage to Eternity

Go treade the path that thou shalt nere returne, Simple plaine Clarence I doe loue thee, so, That I will shortly send thy soule to heuen, If heuen will take the present at our hands.

(I, i, 118–21)

These lines testify to the fact that the pilgrimage metaphor was so well established in late Elizabethan England that even Shakespeare skewed it somewhat to fit Richard’s bitter sarcasm that anticipates his cruel fratricide of Clarence. However, these and similar instances of a last pilgrimage on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage bear only little witness to the trope’s spiritual nature, which is this study’s primary concern; therefore, last journeys to eternity in early modern drama, albeit interesting, will need to be covered in a future study with a different approach.47 Lastly, the literary material presented in the following is mainly restricted to print. Although a consideration of hand-written sources would probably lead to an even more vivid picture of early modern spirituality, retrieving these potential gems from the many archives that are spread around the globe will have to be the task of a project with a much wider scope. With poets as diverse as John Donne, Sir Walter Raleigh, George Herbert, Edmund Spenser, and John Milton, the following pages, however, will paint a broad enough picture to claim at least canonical comprehensiveness.

47

To some degree, this has been covered in Edwards, Pilgrimage and Literary Tradition, 195–204.

Chapter 1: The Poetics of the Last Pilgrimage Approximating eternity in the works of John Donne, Sir Walter Raleigh, and George Herbert

Depicting the passage from this life to the next as a last pilgrimage is a recurring trope among writers in early modern England, and yet the many different eschatological implications have hardly been recognized by literary critics.1 While the trope may be best known to us through the first part of John Bunyan’s prose work The Pilgrim’s Progress (1679), in which the Everyman figure Christian and his companion Hopeful eventually cross the River of Death to cast off “their Mortal Garments,” the following chapters will show that Bunyan’s conclusion of a full-fledged pilgrimage allegory is heavily indebted to earlier last pilgrimages to eternity in medieval and early modern English poetry.2 Irrespective of the literary and historical period, a number of fundamental questions are inevitable: What happens on such liminal pilgrimages to eternity? Where do body and soul go? What other metaphorical steps frame the passage to heaven? How does the prospect of such a journey affect medieval and early modern notions of mortality and to what

1

An abridged version of this chapter appeared as “New Perspectives of the Early Modern Afterlife: the Last Pilgrimage in the Poetry of John Donne and Sir Walter Raleigh,” in Death and the Culture of Death in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Time: the Material and Spiritual Conditions of the Medieval and Early Modern Culture of Death, ed. Albrecht Classen (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2016), 433–56.

2

Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, 120–22.

22 | The Last Pilgrimage to Eternity

degree does this prospect influence the spiritual steps taken in the present? And what are the linguistic implications of such a life-transcending metaphor? The following will attempt to find an answer to these and many related questions that are likely to arise when a pilgrim embarks on his last journey to eternity. While some of the medieval origins of such journeys have already been discussed in the Introduction, other potentially influential source texts like Guillaume de Deguileville’s The Pilgrimage of Human Life (1331/1355) will be considered more closely in Chapter 2. In this first chapter, however, I will lay the foundations of an early modern poetics of the last pilgrimage by focusing on three shorter poems by John Donne, Sir Walter Raleigh, and George Herbert that may well be regarded as, if not direct, at least topical precursors to the Bunyanesque journey to eternity. After establishing a theoretical and theological basis for such liminal journeys, I will contend that each of the poems by Donne, Raleigh, and Herbert opens up a meaningful perspective of the afterlife through the metaphorical potential residing in the different last pilgrimages that these poets present. A close analysis of one of Donne’s Holy Sonnets will provide a condensed but rich insight into the ruminations of a person at the point of death. On the “last mile” of the speaker’s earthly pilgrimage, his sins are cast to hell, entitling his soul to leave behind the world, the flesh, and the devil to rejoin a fully purified body in heaven. To have a contrast to Donne’s sonnet, I will turn to “The Passionate mans Pilgrimage,” a poem often attributed to Sir Walter Raleigh, in which a much more confident pilgrim envisions his own execution and his ensuing journey to a heavenly court of justice presided over by Christ, his real and ultimate judge. As a third example, George Herbert’s poem “The Pilgrimage,” ending on the final assertion that death is “but a chair,” offers a pithy but puzzling metaphor that will lead to a much deeper understanding of the poet’s conception of rest and eternity. I will maintain that, even though these three poems vary in tone, scope, and end, their mutual use of the last pilgrimage as a transcendental metaphor reveals markedly different meanings of after-worldly being. Through the trope of the last pilgrimage, Donne’s poem invites the reader into a dying person’s innermost thoughts, subtly alluding to the post-mortem reunion of his body and soul, as I will argue. The poem attributed to Raleigh, on the other hand, uses the trope for a political and personal cause: by opening up an entirely new perspective on heavenly justice, the convict sets the stage to excoriate those earthly authorities that he holds responsible for his untimely

The Poetics of the Last Pilgrimage | 23

death on the scaffold. In the third instance, I contest the common critical opinion that Herbert’s chair at the end of “The Pilgrimage” implies dynamic conveyance and will suggest instead that its implications of Eucharistic restfulness align felicitously with the poetic architecture of “The Church,” the centerpiece of The Temple. Accordingly, despite their individual idiosyncrasies, these poems can be shown to share the common motif of the last pilgrimage to overcome the inexpressibility of death and to approximate the ineffability of that which is to come.

SOTERIOLOGY, ESCHATOLOGY, AND THE HERMENEUTICS OF FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE This chapter and the ones to follow are based on the theoretical premise that the last stretch of a metaphorical pilgrimage through life provides a conceit to overcome the tension between soteriology and eschatology, two dogmatic disciplines theorized in Systematic Theology. To clarify the two in the most simple terms, we can view soteriology as the field or doctrine that adumbrates the this-worldly ways in which God grants salvation to humanity.3 The doctrine of eschatology, on the other hand, is ultimately concerned with the “last things”—that is, the after-worldly consequences of God’s salutary acts (heaven, hell, resurrection, last judgment) in both individual and collective terms.4 Despite the New Testament’s insistence on the Good News and the eventual salvation of mankind (admittedly varying in comprehensiveness), the tension between the redemption through the messianic figure of Jesus Christ and its eschatological fulfillment remains unresolved until the end of time. This dogmatic tension has prevailed for Christians of any epoch, each affording its own responses. For the present inquiry, it can be said that the medieval and early modern notion of a spiritual pilgrimage conceptualizes 3

Rochus Leonhardt, Grundinformation Dogmatik, 3rd ed. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008), 310–33.

4

I borrow the German terminology “individuelle Eschatologie” and “kollektive Eschatologie” from Leonhardt, Grundinformation Dogmatik, 388–90. For similar definitions in English, see Stephen T. Davis, “Eschatology and Resurrection,” in The Oxford Handbook of Eschatology, ed. Jerry L. Walls (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 384–85.

24 | The Last Pilgrimage to Eternity

this tension metaphorically: the pilgrimage through life is a soteriological model that sketches the metaphorical steps in this life, and its end inevitably tends to an eschatological conclusion. It thus follows that the more narrow and less comprehensive metaphor of the last pilgrimage is charged with nothing less than with buttressing the liminal bridge between soteriology and eschatology, between this life and the one to come. These tensions can be addressed on a linguistic level through the use of metaphor. In his treatment of the tropes in the second edition of The Garden of Eloqvence (1593), the early modern rhetorician Henry Peacham first defines metaphor as an “artificial translation of one word, from the proper signification, to another not proper, but yet nigh and like” and then adds a remarkable little section (absent in the first edition) on the “The vse of Metaphors,” which, according to him, is fivefold: First, they giue pleasant light to darke things, thereby remouing vnprofitable and odious obscuritie. Secondly, by the aptnesse of their proportion, and nearenesse of affinitie, they worke in the hearer many effects, they obtaine allowance of his iudgement, they moue his affections, and minister pleasure to his wit. Thirdly, they are forcible to perswade. Fourthly to commend or dispraise. Fiftly, they leaue such a firme impression in the memory, as is not lightly forgotten.5

Even if, strictly speaking, Peacham presents a collection of “the Figures of Rhetorike,” as his title implies, his assertion about the use of metaphors claims equal validity for early modern English poetry. After all, Aristotle, the “father of metaphor,” not only included his famous discussion of metaphor in his Poetics, but the lines between figures used in speeches and in poetry have also become increasingly blurred by the sixteenth century.6 Of 5

Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloqvence . . . , 2nd ed. (London: H. Jackson, 1593), 3, 13. In Thomas Wilson’s earlier manual on rhetoric, metaphor is defined similarly as “an alteration of a woorde from the proper and naturall meanynge, to that whiche is not proper, and yet agreeth thereunto, by some lykenes that appeareth to be in it”; see his The Arte of Rhetorique . . . (London: Richardus Graftonus, 1553), fol. 91v.

6

David Punter, Metaphor (London: Routledge, 2007), 12; Sylvia Adamson, Gavin Alexander, and Katrin Ettenhuber, “Introduction: the Figures in Renaissance Theory and Practice,” in Renaissance Figures of Speech, ed. Sylvia

The Poetics of the Last Pilgrimage | 25

course, Peacham’s five uses are rather general and apply to all sorts of metaphors, but it will become apparent throughout my analysis of the poems by Donne, Raleigh, and Herbert that the metaphor of the last pilgrimage is fairly in line with what is advanced in this late sixteenth-century manual on rhetoric. Not only does the metaphor at hand shed light on the dark (i.e., death), but it figures as a mover and persuader in a commendatory and memorable way. Functioning “as ways of defining the divine,” metaphors were seen, writes Helen Wilcox, as “a sheer necessity for religious understanding” and “the essential feature of poetry.”7 Consequently, it is not surprising that this feature of poetry was once considered by John Donne to be a “counterfait Creation” that “makes things that are not, as though they were” and deemed indispensable, though “impotent,” when it “be put to expresse . . . Eternity.”8 This transcendental potential has been much more elaborately recognized in recent theories of metaphor, on which I will base most of my literary analysis in the following. Drawing from Aristotle’s Poetics, David Punter infers that through the use of metaphor the reader is cast into “the presence of something unusual, something outside language’s normal ambit, and this can serve to deepen the reader’s experience, to bring a suddenly enriched apprehension of the world.”9 How this metaphorical enrichment is exploited can be further elucidated through the lens of Paul Ricœur’s work on metaphor theory. Borrowing the Fregean distinction between the sense (German Sinn), “the immanent design of discourse,” and its reference (German Bedeutung), “the intentional direction towards a world,” Ricœur presents a tension theory according to which a metaphor provides “a previously unnoticed ‘proximity’ of two ideas . . . despite their logical distance.” This new correlation between the sense of a metaphorical statement and its reference Adamson, Gavin Alexander, and Katrin Ettenhuber (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 3–4. 7

Helen Wilcox, “Squaring the Circle: Metaphors of the Divine in the Work of Donne and His Contemporaries,” John Donne Journal 13, no. 1–2 (1994): 64– 65.

8

John Donne, “Sermon No. 2: Preached upon Easter-day,” 1622, in The Sermons of John Donne, ed. George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson, 10 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959; reprint, 1962), 4:87.

9

Punter, Metaphor, 12.

26 | The Last Pilgrimage to Eternity

gives rise to a “semantic innovation,” as Ricœur calls it.10 In this way, his theory of metaphor comes close to what Janet M. Soskice labels an “incremental theory” in which “the combination of parts in a metaphor can produce new and unique agents of meaning.”11 Viewing metaphors as producing semantic innovations becomes utterly relevant when theorizing death through the final stage of a spiritual pilgrimage. While to believers in early modern England, the literal sense of the end of a pilgrimage may just have referred to the medieval place pilgrim reaching his shrine, the metaphorical reference, I argue, achieves an unprecedented semantic proximity between life and death leading, in Ricœur’s words, to “a new vision of reality to which ordinary language . . . stands in opposition.”12 Put differently, the meaning of that which cannot be expressed literally— that is, death itself—is suspended through the use of figurative language. This kind of language, then, is capable not only of putting life and death into a meaningful, metaphorical relationship and of thereby providing figurative consolation but also of entering literary works through poetic innovation and exploration, thereby providing “a wholly different way of seeing the world,” as Soskice adds.13 10

Paul Ricœur, “Metaphor and the Main Problem of Hermeneutics,” New Literary History 6, no. 1 (1974): 100–01; Paul Ricœur, The Rule of Metaphor: the Creation of Meaning in Language, 1975, 1977, trans. Robert Czerny with Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello (London: Routledge, 2004), 4. In other theories of metaphor, these two elements are often referred to as subject and predicate or tenor and vehicle, respectively.

11

Janet Martin Soskice, Metaphor and Religious Language (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 31.

12

Paul Ricœur, “Stellung und Funktion der Metapher in der biblischen Sprache,” in Metapher: Zur Hermeneutik religiöser Sprache, ed. Paul Ricœur and Eberhard Jüngel (München: Chr. Kaiser, 1974), 51 (my translation).

13

Soskice, Metaphor and Religious Language, 75. The use of comforting metaphors in early modern devotional manuals is analyzed in Jenny Mayhew, “Godly Beds of Pain: Pain in English Protestant Manuals (ca. 1500–1650),” in The Sense of Suffering: Constructions of Physical Pain in Early Modern Culture, ed. Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen and Karl A. E. Enenkel (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 312–15.

The Poetics of the Last Pilgrimage | 27

Although the two dogmatic disciplines of soteriology and eschatology are theoretically not congruent with the literal sense and the metaphorical reference, a certain parallel between the two is very well discernible. Both soteriology and Ricœur’s literal sense share an aspect of immanence, while eschatology and his metaphorical reference denote a way of transcending this-worldly life and language. This linguistic relationship of religious metaphors has been further enunciated by Hans Weder, a New Testament theologian whose hermeneutics are closely associated with Ricœur’s. Weder maintains that a religious metaphor has a “hermeneutical potential” insofar as it “can be defined as combining a transcendent subject with an immanent predicate” (e.g., death with passage) while balancing an insurmountable difference between the worldly and the divine, or between this life and the next, for that matter.14 It is precisely within this arena of the here and now and the hereafter that the trope of the last pilgrimage operates to open up new and meaningful perspectives of the life to come, as I will demonstrate below.

EARLY MODERN PASTORAL CARE: ARS MORIENDI LITERATURE AND THE PILGRIMAGE TO ETERNITY While it was not possible for early modern believers to draw from Ricœur or Weder for theories of life-transcending metaphors, they were still acutely aware of the mechanisms of figurative language15 and had other opportunities to grapple with such theological issues in the various devotional manuals that were profusely available. With regard to the trope of the last pilgrimage, the literary tradition of the late medieval ars moriendi is of particular interest as a popular literary genre that survived the Protestant onslaught and saw

14

Hans Weder, “Metaphor and Reality,” in The End of the World and the Ends of God: Science and Theology on Eschatology, ed. John Polkinghorne and Michael Welker (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 2000), 292; Hans Weder, “Metapher und Gleichnis: Bemerkungen zur Reichweite des Bildes in religiöser Sprache,” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 90 (1993): 403.

15

Lewalski, Protestant Poetics, 73–86.

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many variegated revivals far into the late seventeenth century.16 In Craft and Knowledge For to Dye Well (c. 1490), which may be considered the first English contribution to the genre, the anonymous writer already invokes “the wrechednesse of the exyle of thys worlde . . . for techyng and comfortyng of hem that been in poynt off dethe” (1).17 As shown in the Introduction, the phrase “exyle of this worlde” clearly harks back to the Pentateuch and to the seemingly endless wanderings of God’s people in a foreign land as well as to its pilgrimage reappropriation in Hebrews 11. Put simply, the art of dying as advanced in this early ars manual consists of regarding the present world as a spiritual exile and of looking forward to what follows after death. Viewing (fallen) man as exiled from God’s land and in search of his home country is a trope that was so deeply ingrained in medieval and early modern culture that it remained very popular with later ars writers. One of them is the Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus, who in Preparation to Deathe (1534, trans. 1538) declares, We be wayfarynge men in this worlde, not inhabytantes. We be as straungers in innes, or to speke it better, in bouthes or tentes. We lyue not in our countrey. This holle lyfe is nothynge elles but a rennynge to deathe, and that very shorte, but death is the gate of euerlastynge lyfe. (38)

16

In the following, I am indebted to Nancy Lee Beaty, The Craft of Dying: a Study in the Literary Tradition of the “Ars Moriendi” in England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), particularly 1–53, 108–156; David W. Atkinson, “The English ars morendi [sic]: Its Protestant Transformation,” Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme 6, no. 1 (1982); David Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 389–93; Houlbrooke, Death, Religion, and the Family in England, 149–52, 157–75. On the pastoral qualities of the ars moriendi literature, see Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, 314.

17

Selections of English ars literature are conveniently anthologized in David W. Atkinson, ed., The English Ars Moriendi (New York: Lang, 1992); unless otherwise noted, the passages quoted in this section are taken from this collection with page numbers indicated parenthetically. Atkinson’s convention of using italics for expanded abbreviations has been retained.

The Poetics of the Last Pilgrimage | 29

A frequent, often Pauline, commonplace in the New Testament (cf. 1 Cor. 9:24–27, Phil. 3:12–14, 2 Tim. 4:7–8, and Heb. 12:1), the metaphor of life as a race to eternity is obviously closely related to the concept of the last pilgrimage as both imply heavenward movement. Significantly, death here is presented as the inevitable but truly desired transition from the thisworldly race or pilgrimage to heavenly eternity. This clear contrast between the present world and the one to come paves the way for Erasmus to embrace the popular notion of the contemptus mundi: following 2 Corinthians 4:18, he reasons that “this is a greate parte of the Christen philosophie, whiche prepareth vs to dethe, that by the contemplation of the thinges eternall and heuenly, we maye lerne the despisynge of temporall and erthly [sic].”18 Thus, the pilgrimage out of this world to the next is seen as separating man from the despicable things on earth, fraught with corruption and temporality, and uniting him with the bliss to come. Such a fierce contempt of what is left behind will surface again in Donne, Raleigh, and Herbert in this chapter as well as in other pilgrimage narratives in Spenser and Milton in Chapters 2 and 3, respectively. Theologically often fairly close to Erasmian thought, Protestant theologians were just as keen to express their contempt for this-worldly life with regard to what lies ahead and frequently refer to the popular pilgrimage metaphor. In The Institution of Christian Religion (1561), John Calvin exhorts his readers to demonstrate “contempt of this present life, & therby be stirred to the meditation of the life to come.”19 Moreover, a fear of death is 18

Desiderius Erasmus, Preparation to Deathe . . . , trans. probably by Thomas Berthelet (London: Thomas Berthelet, 1538), A5v. On the tradition of the contemptus mundi, see among others David E. Stannard, The Puritan Way of Death: a Study in Religion, Culture, and Social Change (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 21, 23.

19

John Calvin, The Institution of Christian Religion, . . . , trans. Thomas Norton (London: Reinolde Wolfe & Richarde Harison, 1561), bk. 3, chap. 9, sec. 1. Daniel W. Doerksen maintains that the many abridged compendia in both Latin and English “outnumbering the works of any other writer, secular or religious (including the English)” as well as the many editions and reprints of Thomas Norton’s full English translation (the one quoted here) suggest an incredibly wide readership of Calvin’s work or “indeed a ‘bath’ of Calvinism” in early

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deemed unchristian by the Genevan reformer, for “If we consider that by death we are called home out of banishment [per mortem ab exilio], to inhabite our contry, yea a heauenly contrey, shall we obteine no comfort there by?”20 Until death calls the devout Christian home, however, Calvin insists that man is on a burdensome pilgrimage of progress: “so longe as we wander from home in thys worlde, our faith is not fully expressed, not onely bicause many things are yet hidden from vs, but bicause being compassed with many mistes of erroures, we atteine not all things.”21 The Latin original is even more telling here: the phrase “we wander from home in thys worlde” is a translation of “in mundo peregrinamur,” which is even more indicative of the original meaning of peregrinus rendered accurately by Philip Edwards as “a wanderer, a traveller from foreign parts, an alien.”22 Around the time of the first English translation of Calvin’s Institutes, Thomas Becon’s lengthy dialogue The Sicke Mans Salue was also published,23 which marks another cornerstone in the tradition of the ars moriendi in England. Already in his dedicatory epistle, Becon bewails man’s earthly blindness and his willingness to cling to this-worldly matters, but soon he modern England; see John T. McNeill, “Introduction,” in Calvin: Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, 2 vols. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1960; reprint, 2006), 1:xlii–xlv, xlviii–l; Daniel W. Doerksen, Conforming to the Word: Herbert, Donne, and the English Church Before Laud (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1997), 16–17; Daniel W. Doerksen and Christopher Hodgkins, “Introduction,” in Centered on the Word: Literature, Scripture, and the Tudor-Stuart Middle Way, ed. Daniel W. Doerksen and Christopher Hodgkins (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2004), 14. 20

Calvin, Institution of Christian Religion, bk. 3, chap. 9, sec. 5.

21

Calvin, Institution of Christian Religion, bk. 3, chap. 2, sec. 4.

22

John Calvin, Institvtio christianæ religionis . . . (Geneva: Robertus Stephanus, 1559), bk. 3, chap. 2, sec. 4 [last accessed on January 3, 2018: http://www. e-rara.ch/doi/10.3931/e-rara-2664]; Edwards, Pilgrimage and Literary Tradition, 6. I am also indebted to Heinrich Quistorp’s somewhat dated but still fairly authoritative work on Calvin’s eschatology; see his Die letzten Dinge im Zeugnis Calvins: Calvins Eschatologie (Gütersloh: C. Bertelsmann, 1941), 18–20.

23

Houlbrooke assumes that it was already written during the reign of Edward VI; see his Death, Religion, and the Family in England, 157.

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turns to Hebrews 11:13–16 and 13:14 to invoke the popular pilgrimage trope: “The holy scripturs calleth vs strangers and Pilgrims in this worlde, & declareth that we haue here no continuying city, but we seke one to come.”24 This is elaborated upon a little later in the main text, which essentially comprises a dialogue around the deathbed: here, the metaphor of the strangers and pilgrims in exile is used to underscore how wretched the conditions in this life are compared to the glories that await the elect.25 After providing the dying Epaphroditus with scriptural evidence that death is neither terrible nor fearful nor painful, Philemon addresses his counselee’s deep concern that “Death taketh me away from my gorgious and pleasaunte houses, and from all the temporall thinges that I haue” (114).26 Philemon’s response merits a longer quote: In thys worlde we all are but strangers & pelgrimes. We haue here no dwelling citie, but looke for an other that is to come . . . . The houses that you leaue behinde you here, be they neuer so gorgious and pleasaunt, are but earthly, made of clay & weatherbeaten stones, and shall in processe of time decay, and returne vnto dust, & become thinges of naught. But after your departure from this vale of wretchednesse, you shall haue a building of God, an habitation not made with handes, but euerlasting in [. . .] heauen . . . . You shall dwel in a citie that is of pure gold, like vnto cleare glasse, and the foundations of the walles of this citie are garnished wyth all manner of precious stones, the gates are of fine pearle. Yea the stretes of this heauenly citie are pure golde . . . . And as touching your other temporal things, from the which as you say, death taketh you away, you haue no cause to be sory for that, for, as concerning your galant apparell, which, if they be not worne, will sone be motheaten . . . . In the stead of them, you, being once placed in the heauenly citie, shall be clothed of God with white garments, which shall neuer ware old, but alwayes abide glorious & incorruptible. (114)

In an intimately pastoral move, Philemon (or Becon himself)27 adduces scriptural proof as to why giving up all one’s earthly possessions should be strived for rather than avoided. Apart from encouraging the dying with the famous

24

Thomas Becon, The Sycke Mans Salue . . . (London: John Day, 1561), *4r.

25

Becon’s Calvinist thrust has been noted by a few readers; see, for example, Beaty, The Craft of Dying, 108–56; David W. Atkinson, “Introduction,” in The English “Ars Moriendi”, ed. David W. Atkinson (New York: Lang, 1992), xix.

26

For the pericope of the sick Epaphroditus, see Philippians 2:25–30.

27

Beaty, The Craft of Dying, 113.

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pilgrimage metaphor in Hebrews 11, Philemon attempts to dispel Epaphroditus’s fears of relinquishing his temporal things by referring to 2 Corinthians 5:1 and the conceit of the dissolved earthly tabernacle that is replaced with an eternal heavenly dwelling. Moreover, Philemon’s apocalyptic turn to Revelation 21:15 with depictions of the glorious heavenly city suggests an immediate translation to the celestial city, which will appear not only in Raleigh’s poem below but also in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene in Chapter 2. All of these after-worldly references in one way or another rely on the fact that man in this world is seen as but a stranger and pilgrim and that his heavenly destiny, the goal of his “departure from this vale of wretchednesse,” is to be revealed as the richly adorned home for which he has been yearning throughout his pilgrimage through life. Although the anonymous fifteenth-century ars writer, Erasmus, Calvin, and Becon may sometimes share little common theological ground, they all at some point resort to the pilgrimage trope to put the plights of the present life in relation to the glories of the one that is to come. The metaphor of being an exiled stranger and pilgrim never surfaces in isolation but as, what Barbara Lewalski calls, a “key metaphor” with different shadings in its theological and literary development that invariably conveys a strong thrust toward the afterlife.28 Indeed, in all of the passages above, the metaphor of the life pilgrimage that eventually leads to eternity transcends this-worldly matters by unfolding and developing new and meaningful perspectives of the life to come. How this transition from the pilgrimage through life to eternity is achieved in poetic versions of different last pilgrimages will be the primary concern for the remainder of this chapter.

JOHN DONNE’S HOLY SONNET NO. 6 “This is my playes last scene,” usually considered the sixth of John Donne’s Holy Sonnets, unmistakably invokes the pilgrimage trope from the beginning and is deeply concerned with the brevity of life and with what happens on the last journey. The poem begins with the popular metaphor of life as a play

28

Lewalski, Protestant Poetics, 86–87.

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that has reached its final scene,29 but the second line already speaks of the following journey as the speaker’s last pilgrimage: This is my playes last scene, here heavens appoint My pilgrimages last mile; and my race Idly, yet quickly runne, hath this last pace, My spans last inch, my minutes latest point.

(ll. 1–4)30

The impending end of the speaker’s earthly life is intensified through the striking repetition of the word “last” in “last scene,” “last mile,” “last inch,” “last pace,” and “latest point” (which is also “last point” in one manuscript).31 The poet’s repeated insistence on this crucial word, which moves further toward the end of each line the more the sonnet develops, underlines the acute liminality that looms large throughout the poem. Although there may be a clear reference to Hebrews 12:1, “let vs runne with pacience the race that is set before vs,” the speaker’s patience is soon to be exhausted, for his race is not patiently but “quickly runne” (l. 3): no longer is his entire life set before

29

This is, of course, reminiscent of William Shakespeare’s As You Like It and Jacques’s famous “All the world’s a stage” speech, but the metaphor of life as a play is a commonplace that reaches much further back, as is shown in Lynda Gregorian Christian, Theatrum Mundi: the History of an Idea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1969; reprint, New York: Garland, 1987), particularly 1– 109.

30

I quote from John Donne, The Complete English Poems, ed. C. A. Patrides (New York: Everyman’s Library, 1991), 437–38. All subsequent quotations from Donne’s poetry are taken from this edition and referenced with line numbers in parentheses. In most editions after 1633, “This is my playes last scene” is referred to as Holy Sonnet No. 6, a practice that has been retained among critics of the poem despite Helen Gardner’s argument for some loose continuity in the 1633 sequence, in which this poem is placed third. See Helen Gardner, “Introduction and Textual Introduction,” in John Donne: the Divine Poems, ed. Helen Gardner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), xv–xcvi.

31

See “This is my playes last scene,” 1633, in John Donne: the Divine Poems, ed. Helen Gardner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 7, l. 4.

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him but only the final part. The remainder of his life is even further reduced in line 4, where the end of his race is no longer a mile away but an inch! In the second half of the octave, the vexed issue of the union of his body and soul is introduced. The speaker is well aware that, at the point of death, the two are separated: And gluttonous death, will instantly unjoynt My body, and soule, and I shall sleepe a space, But my’ever-waking part shall see that face, Whose feare already shakes my every joynt.

(ll. 5–8)

The “I” in the second half of line 6 must refer to his body that he envisions falling into a post-mortem sleep, for the speaker’s “ever-waking part,” his soul, already participates in a visio Dei.32 A profound feeling of fear permeates this second quatrain, a feeling that can apparently only be addressed by zooming in again on the separation of the speaker’s body and soul in the sestet that follows: Then, as my soule, to’heaven her first seate, takes flight, And earth borne body, in the earth shall dwell, So, fall my sinnes, that all may have their right, To where they’are bred, and would presse me, to hell.

(ll. 9–12)

The speaker here insists that the “earth-borne body” remain entombed in the earth and that all the speaker’s sins fall from there to their place of origin, to hell. The final couplet seemingly abruptly concludes the sonnet and quite possibly the speaker’s pilgrimage: Impute me righteous, thus purg’d of evill, For thus I leave the world, the flesh, the devill.

32

(ll. 13–14)

Most critics read these lines in a similar way; see, for instance, Richard Strier, “John Donne Awry and Squint: The ‘Holy Sonnets,’ 1608–1610,” Modern Philology 86, no. 4 (1989): 373. It has also been suggested that the speaker does not see God’s face but that of the devil; for this view, see Arthur W. Pitts, “Donne’s Holy Sonnets VI,” Explicator 29, no. 5 (1971): 39.

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In the end, purgation of evil and divine imputation are given as the prerequisites for the pilgrim to leave behind all things earthly, carnal, and diabolical. What at first looks like a more or less simple account of a soul’s passage from this world to the next has puzzled critics over the last few decades. Lewalski criticizes that Donne’s wit in this poem is “strained”; A. L. French finds it “rather queer” that the speaker can so easily dissociate himself from his sins and that his soul departs so freely in spite of the prospect of seeing “that face”; Richard Strier remarks that “the whole point of the [Protestant] doctrine of imputation was to oppose the idea that one had to be ‘purg’d of evill’ to be saved,” so the speaker’s ruminations, Strier maintains, are actually contradictory, not to say futile; and Paul M. Oliver reads the striking repetition of “last” in the opening quatrain as a mere expression of “melodramatic urgency as the speaker, with his sham piety, pulls himself together in an attempt to concentrate.”33 In what follows, I will argue that many of the issues that are raised in this poem can actually be explained by two aspects that have so far only been subject to critical consideration en passant. First, I will contend that much of this poem is about taking leave of “the world, the flesh, the devill” and about engaging in a deathbed scene that can be read in close relation to the notion of pilgrimage in the ars moriendi literature. Second, I will maintain that the speaker’s ruminations at the point of death are resolved toward the end of the speaker’s last pilgrimage in a profound change in the “I” of the final couplet: viewed through the lens of one of Donne’s sermons, the first personal pronoun, I will argue, unfolds a semantic innovation of a new heavenly reunion between the speaker’s body and soul, the two most central constituents of the Donnean self.34

33

Lewalski, Protestant Poetics, 268; A. L. French, “The Psychopathology of Donne’s Holy Sonnets,” Critical Review (Melbourne) 13 (1970): 116; Strier, “John Donne Awry and Squint,” 373–74; Paul M. Oliver, Donne’s Religious Writing: a Discourse of Feigned Devotion (London: Longman, 1997), 119.

34

As suggested by Ramie Targoff, “Donne’s writing is fueled by a set of metaphysical questions, and . . . these questions coalesce most persistently around the nature of the soul and its relation to the body”; see her John Donne, Body and Soul (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 5.

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Historians have pointed out that attitudes toward death and dying changed in the wake of the Reformation, or rather, change was mostly imposed by ecclesiastical authorities.35 Importantly, however, there is no clearcut distinction between a good or bad death on a pre-Reformation deathbed and on a Protestant one; only some tendencies can be observed.36 In latemedieval times, the final moment before the dying person exhaled his last breath was often sacramentally critical as final (non-)repentance could lead to eternal heavenly bliss, temporary purgatory, or eternal damnation.37 According to Philip Benedict, there was a “pre-Reformation emphasis on the deathbed struggle that the dying person had to fight against despair and the devil’s temptations.”38 This is nicely illustrated in an ars moriendi manual from around 1450, showing a typical deathbed (Fig. 1). Here, the dying man is not only surrounded by familial and clerical bystanders but also by at least an equal horde of snarling devils. The latter confront the man with his sins (“ecce peccata tua”) and in particular with his life in avarice (“auare vixisti”) and with his allegedly extra-marital affairs (“fornicatus es”).

35

See, for instance, Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead, 6–187.

36

For a more in-depth account of what was considered a “good” and a “bad death,” see Houlbrooke, Death, Religion, and the Family in England, 154, 183–96.

37

Jacques Le Goff argues that the doctrine of purgatory was responsible for dramatizing the final moments of life: “L’essentiel, le choix de l’Enfer ou du Paradis, puisque le Purgatoire était l’antichambre assurée du Paradis, pouvait encore se jouer à la dernière minute. Les derniers instants étaient ceux de la dernière chance”; see his La Naissance du Purgatoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1981), 484.

38

Philip Benedict, Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed: a Social History of Calvinism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 507. As the tradition of the ars moriendi developed, Duffy observes, “this attack was quite precisely analysed, and it was believed to be fivefold. The devil would try to make the dying person sin against faith by slipping into heresy, superstition, or infidelity, to sin against hope by succumbing to despair on account of their great sins, to sin against charity by becoming impatient under their sickness, refusing to accept it from God and abusing those who tended the deathbed, to forfeit salvation by trusting in their own good deeds rather than solely in the merits of Christ, and finally to reject Heaven and the eternal world by clinging to the goods and relationships of the present world”; see his The Stripping of the Altars, 316.

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Figure 1: Late Medieval Deathbed Scene

Engraving No. 3 in The Ars Moriendi (Editio Princeps, circa 1450): a Reproduction of the Copy in the British Museum, edited by W. Harry Rylands and George Bullen.

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Although Benedict seems to imply that the diabolical threats disappeared from the Protestant deathbed, a closer look at death manuals of early modern divines such as Thomas Becon or William Perkins suggests the opposite.39 Perkins, for instance, writes about “The last combate with the deuill,” recounts how the reformer John Knox could “quench the [devil’s] fierie darts,” and advises the dying to commend their spirit to the “Lord Iesus” to ensure that “Christ will come vnto thee with all his Angels and be the guider of thy way.”40 Hence, if threatened by demonic powers, the dying are, according to Perkins, provided with Christ as their defender and guide on their journey to eternity. Despite the blurred lines between the pre- and post-Reformation deathbed, it can be said that the latter underwent a shift in emphasis, namely from the medieval death struggle to a general review of the individual’s entire life in the last moments, including in Calvinist circles, the unresolved question of their election.41 In The Sycke Mans Salue, Becon expounds on “the nature and property of God,” which “is to wound . . . before he healeth, to throwe downe . . . before he lifteth vp, to kyll . . . before he quickeneth, to condemne . . . before he saueth.”42 At which point in life this happens does not seem to concern Becon too much, but the devilish hordes around the deathbed could even be considered a form of God’s final act of wounding, hurling, killing, and condemning sent to prod the sinner toward contrition. Thus, by tolerating diabolic presence around the deathbed, God is in a way pulling the sinner down while at the same time providing an ultimate opportunity for deathbed 39

Becon, The Sycke Mans Salue, 349–50. In Becon, Philemon confirms Epaphroditus’s fears that “The manner of Satan, which is the common aduersary of all men, is, when any man is greuously sicke & like to die, straightways to com vpon him at the beginning very fearcely, & to shew him selfe terrible vnto him, & to cast before his eies such a mist . . . that except he taketh hede, he shall see nothing but the fearce wrath” (349).

40

William Perkins, A Salve for a Sicke Man . . . (Cambridge: John Legate, 1595), 109–11.

41

Benedict, Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed, 507.

42

Becon, The Sycke Mans Salue, 379; Richard Wunderli and Gerald Broce, “The Final Moment before Death in Early Modern England,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 20, no. 2 (1989): 265.

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contrition and hence a “vertical slingshot” reserved for the elect.43 As a result, the comportment of a dying person during the final moments of his life came over time to be considered an indicator of the individual’s afterworldly destiny. Dying with equanimity was generally associated with divine election and thus with successfully leaving the world, the flesh, and the devil, a phrase that surfaces again and again in the ars moriendi before and after its canonization in the Litany of The Book of Common Prayer.44 This crucial aspect of leave-taking is invoked in the final line of Donne’s sonnet as well as in other instances in his poetry that suggest that a deathbed surrounded by a fiendish horde of devils that ought to be defeated is not foreign to Donne. One example is his The Second Anniversarie (1612), in which the speaker addresses his own soul’s passage to the next world and in which he is clearly aware of the diabolical threat at the point of death:

43

This is reminiscent of Heb. 12:6, “For whome the Lord loueth, he chasteneth: and he scourgeth euerie sonne that he receiueth,” and similar instances of antithesis.

44

Leaving the flesh, the world, and the devil is not only mentioned in the Litany of The Book of Common Prayers of 1549, 1559, and 1662, but it is also a recurring phrase among pre- and post-Reformation ars writers. Erasmus, for instance, refers to death as “the laste fyghte with the enemye” invoking the idea of the miles Christianus seeking the “vyctorye of the flesh, of the worlde, and of the dyuell.” Moreover, Becon writes that “In this world therefore, wherein our life is nothing but a knighthod or warfar, must we lawfully, valeantly & mightely fight & striue against our ennemies the deuill, the world & the flesh, and by seruent and diligent prayer vnto God so triumphe ouer them thorow the help of our graund captain Christ, that we may haue a glorious spoill of our ennemies, & garnishe our selues with al kind of victorious & roial robes I meane, all good workes & godly vertues”; see Erasmus, Preparation to Deathe, A2r, A7r; Becon, The Sycke Mans Salue, *6v; Brian Cummings, ed., The Book of Common Prayer: the Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 41, 117, 260. The origin of this triad is hard to determine, but it can be traced through its early Christian form all the way back to Plato’s The Republic; see Patrick Cullen, Infernal Triad: the Flesh, the World, and the Devil in Spenser and Milton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), xxv–xxvi.

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Thinke Satans Sergeants round about thee bee, And thinke that but for Legacies they thrust; Give one thy Pride, to’another give thy Lust: Give them those sinnes which they gave thee before, An trust th’immaculate blood to wash thy score.

(ll. 102–06)

Here, we can almost see what that one medieval ars manual from around 1450 depicts literally (cf. Fig. 1): a number of Satan’s delegates sent to seize the speaker’s soul. Significantly, however, instead of succumbing to the demonic temptations, the soul is advised to surrender all her earthly burdens to “Satans Sergeants” and to be thus purified by Christ’s immaculate blood. Reconsidering now lines 12 and 13 of Donne’s sonnet, “So, fall my sinnes, that all may have their right, / To where they’are bred, & would presse me, to hell,” we encounter a similar or related process: everything tainted by earthly sin is cast to hell, and the sinner is imputed righteous through Christ’s “immaculate blood.” Although the hell-ward haulers remain passively obscure in the sonnet, the passage from The Second Anniversarie reveals “Satans Sergeants” at least as likely candidates for such an undertaking at the point of death. Furthermore, Ramie Targoff observes that “the gesture of dividing himself into three parts rather than two—body, soul, and sin— reflects Donne’s desire to isolate that part of the self that he expects will not fare well at the Last Judgment.”45 Thus, since sin has been taken care of, the two constituents that are left—body and soul—can be identified as righteous and are therefore eligible for a post-mortem reunion, a commonplace in Donne’s thought, as I will show.46 This divine imputation leads to the constitution of a new “I,” a new union of body and soul, to be effected on the speaker’s last pilgrimage. It has been advanced that the first personal pronoun in line 6 of Donne’s sonnet refers

45

Targoff, John Donne, Body and Soul, 125.

46

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines imputation as “the attributing to believers of the righteousness of Christ, and to Christ of human sin, by vicarious substitution” (n. 2a); my analysis relies on the assumption that Donne conceived of the concept similarly since the OED provides a few samples from Donne’s near contemporaries.

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to the body and the soul,47 but, as I have pointed out above, it is more plausible that this “I” can “sleepe a space” as a physical body, which contrasts in the following line with the ethereal soul, the “ever-waking part,” as an active participant in the visio Dei. However, following swiftly after the speaker’s plea for righteousness, the final “I” in the couplet has undergone a significant semantic shift: it is here, I posit, that the union of body and soul is restored in heavenly terms and that this “I” assumes a new after-worldly meaning as the last pilgrimage comes successfully to a close. This can be corroborated by turning to one of Donne’s later sermons. In 1620, Donne preached at Lincoln’s Inn on Job 19:26, “And thogh after my skin wormes destroy this bodie, yet shal I se God in my flesh.” Throughout his entire sermon, Donne talks at length about the doctrine of the resurrection including more worldly matters such as putrefaction that may well challenge said doctrine. Using this verse from Job 19:26, he argues that while all belong to the “Massa damnata” and will see God on the Day of Judgment, not all shall rise to glory. Donne reasons that whereas some will remain in the old flesh, others will rise in a new flesh to see God, just as Job envisioned it for himself. Using the verse that follows, “Whome I my self shal se” or in its Vulgate rendering “quem visurus sum ego ipse” (v. 27, my emphases), Donne concludes that since the flesh will be new and devoid of sin, the new heavenly “I” will include both body and soul again: Ego, I, I the same body, and the same soul, shall be recompact again, and be identically, numerically, individually the same man. The same integrity of body, and soul, and the same integrity in the Organs of my body, and in the faculties of my soul too; I shall be all there, my body, and my soul, and all my body, and all my soul.48

That the soul, which “was put to the slavery to serve that [earthly] body, . . . hath once got loose by death,” and “in sight and fruition of that God . . . was in no danger,” should now “willingly, nay desirously, ambitiously

47 48

Gardner, “Introduction and Textual Introduction,” xlv. John Donne, “Sermon No. 3: Preached at Lincolns Inne,” 1620, in The Sermons of John Donne, ed. George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson, 10 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), 3:109–10. Subsequent references to this sermon are indicated parenthetically.

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seek this . . . body . . . is the most inconsiderable consideration,” Donne admits (109). However, he repeats again and again that, according to the passage from Job (and the way he lays it out, I would say!),49 there is no other possibility for body and soul but that both “receive the crown of glory which shall not fade” (110). It is notable that Donne’s insistence on a post-mortem reunion of body and soul is not limited to his sermon on Job 19:25 but that similar views are also expressed in an earlier sermon on Genesis 32:10, which he preached at White Hall. Here, he speaks of this life as “but a pilgrimage, a peregrination, a travell; . . . in corpore peregrinamur a domino”: the pun on “in corpore” is probably meant to signify both a communal pilgrimage to God (“domino”) as well as a bodily one, for “we shall be received intirely body and soul, into our Countrey, into heaven.”50 This idea of a post-mortem union of body and soul is very dominant in Donne’s thought, as we have seen, but it is also important to bear in mind that such a union would have run contrary to the orthodox doctrine of the Church of England, which declared that “the soul should feel nothing but liberation at the moment of leaving the body,” as Targoff writes.51 For Donne, however, it is beyond doubt that, upon the conclusion of man’s earthly pilgrimage, his body and soul will live together in eternal and untainted integrity. Albeit unorthodox, this Donnean idiosyncrasy sheds quite some new light on his “This is my playes last scene.” As time is running out and as the “last mile” is reduced to the “last inch,” the speaker envisions how his earthly

49

Alison Knight has analyzed Donne’s practices of misquoting Scripture when preaching on this passage; see her article “The ‘Very, Very Words’: (Mis)quoting Scripture in Lancelot Andrewes’s and John Donne’s Sermons on Job 19:23–27,” Studies in Philology 111, no. 3 (2014): 442–69.

50

John Donne, “Sermon No. 7: a Sermon Preached at White-Hall, April 12, 1618,” in The Sermons of John Donne, ed. Evelyn M. Simpson and George R. Potter, 10 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962), 1:279.

51

Targoff, John Donne, Body and Soul, 79–80. Donne, however, was not alone with his anti-dualism of body and soul: for a similar line of thought in Henry Vaughan’s poetry, see Daniel Juan Gil, “The Resurrection of the Body and the Life of the Flesh in Henry Vaughan’s Religious Verse,” English Literary History 82, no. 1 (2015): 59–86.

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self will eventually assume heavenly integrity. His earthly body being subject to putrefaction in sepulcro and his sins cast to hell, the speaker “only” has to turn to God himself, to “that face” that he fears, and to ask for divine imputation. What troubles Strier above, namely that the purgation of evil is redundant if divine imputation has already been granted, can only be understood in the context of Donne’s unorthodox understanding of body and soul. If, following the speaker’s last pilgrimage, both body and soul are to experience an eschatological reunion and are to assume heavenly integrity together, there does not seem to be another way to shear the body of its corruption than a process of spiritual purification of which both imputation and purgation are a part. The result of this imputative and purgative process can be found in the subtle allusion to a new heavenly self, a new “I,” in the final line of the poem: “For thus I leave the world, the flesh, the devill” (l. 14, my emphasis). This new “I” is entitled to take leave of the world. Or put differently, it is on the speaker’s last mile, or last inch presumably, that he envisions and hopes for a process of purgation and imputation. Only through this very process on the metaphorical last pilgrimage, the “I” becomes “recompact again” and can assume a new heavenly meaning in that it subsumes both a purified soul and body, “purg’d” of all things evil. As can be seen in the above, fourteen lines about a last pilgrimage can give rise to a number of contentious issues. Many of these can, however, be resolved when one enquires further into the depths of the last pilgrimage as a trope as well as into devotional literature such as the ars moriendi or Donne’s sermons, the latter of which illuminate the full idiosyncratic potential of the pilgrimage metaphor. This method has revealed the speaker’s last journey to revolve essentially around the in-mortem separation of sin, body, and soul as well as around the post-mortem reunion of the latter two into a new heavenly “I.” With a new set of meaning instilled into that one letter of the first personal pronoun, the ruminating pilgrim can now look forward to a new eschatological reality that will come to full fruition once he is past the last inch of his life’s pilgrimage.

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SIR WALTER RALEIGH’S “THE PASSIONATE MANS PILGRIMAGE” “The Passionate mans Pilgrimage,” a poem that has often been attributed to Sir Walter Raleigh, presents another pilgrimage to heaven; this pilgrim, however, will not embark on his journey from his deathbed but from the scaffold. A request uttered by the “one at the point of death” marks the opening of the poem: Give me my Scallop shell of quiet, My staffe of Faith to walke upon, My scrip of Joy, Immortal diet, My bottle of salvation: My Gowne of Glory, hopes true gage, And thus Ile take my pilgrimage.

(ll. 1–6)52

Equipped with the traditional paraphernalia of the medieval place pilgrim, he “Travels to the land of heauen, / Over the silver mountaines, / Where spring the Nectar fountaines” (ll. 10–12). On his “happie blisfull way” (l. 19), he encounters other pilgrims “That have shooke off their gownes of clay, / And goe appareld fresh like mee” (ll. 20–21). The pilgrims are soon “fild with immortalitie” and their heavenly abode is presented so ostentatiously that one is immediately reminded of the final passages of the Book of Revelation: “the holy paths” are Strewde with Rubies thicke as gravell Seelings of Diamonds, Saphire floores, High walles of Corall and Pearle Bowre.

(ll. 30–34)

The tone, however, soon shifts from ornate to satirical as the practice of earthly and heavenly justice is juxtaposed in the two stanzas that follow: in the “Bribeles [bribe-less] hall” of heaven 52

I quote from Sir Walter Raleigh, “The Passionate mans Pilgrimage, supposed to be written by one at the point of death,” 1604, in The Poems of Sir Walter Ralegh: a Historical Edition, ed. Michael Rudick (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1999), 126–27.

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no corrupted voyces brall, No Conscience molten into gold, Nor forg’d accusers bought and sold, No cause deferd, nor vaine spent Jorney, For there Christ is the Kings Atturney.

(ll. 35–40)

Thus, heaven becomes a place of eternal justice with Christ, as the “Unblotted Lawyer, true proceeder” (l. 48), representing man before the divine judge.53 The last stanza, then, is quite tongue-in-cheek, but it includes a serious concern, namely, that the convict’s soul live in eternity (l. 56): And this is my eternall plea, To him that made Heaven, Earth and Sea, Seeing my flesh must die so soone, And want a head to dine next noone, Just at the stroke when my vaines start and spred Set on my soule an everlasting head.

(ll. 51–56)

As the “flesh must die” (l. 53) and as the convict is forced to lose his head, his soul is provided with an “everlasting head” (l. 56), an uncorrupted version of his body, which will allow him to be “like a palmer fit, / To tread those blest paths which before I writ” (ll. 57–58). To date, there is still no watertight evidence that this poem was written by Raleigh, but much speaks in his favor. First published in 1604, the poem was appended to Daiphantus, or, The Passions of Love, a collection of love poetry by Anthony Scoloker. According to Michael Rudick, hardly any topical (or other) connection can be established between Scoloker’s love poetry 53

This may well be read as an allusion to the medieval and also early modern practice of calling one’s accusers before a quasi-heavenly tribunal often located at Josaphat, see Siegfried Hardung, Die Vorladung vor Gottes Gericht: ein Beitrag zur rechtlichen und religiösen Volkskunde (Bühl: Konkordia, 1934), 11– 42; Adolf Laufs, “Das Jüngste Gericht in der Rechtsgeschichte,” in Festschrift für Jan Schröder zum 70. Geburtstag am 28. Mai 2013, ed. Arndt Kiehnle, Bernd Mertens, and Gottfried Schiemann (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013), 720–21. For this insight, I am indebted to Andreas Thier.

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and the anonymously written poem, least of all an authorial one. This is why he suspects “The Passionate mans Pilgrimage” to be merely an expedient printer’s filler that does not resurface in publication until twenty years later when Raleigh is for the first time identified as its author. If he is indeed the author, the date of composition would most likely fall somewhere between November 17 and December 6, 1603, when he had been convicted, was incarcerated in the Tower, and faced a traitor’s death (for the first time).54 This nebulous history of publication and some contentious contextual issues like his use of traditional pilgrimage imagery have repeatedly led to scholarly debates about the authorship of this poem. On one end of the critical spectrum, Pierre Lefranc and Philip Edwards cast serious doubt on Raleigh’s authorship of the poem due to its disappearance from print until three years after his actual death in 1618, its blatantly Catholic imagery, and various other aspects that they deem uncharacteristic of his poetry. However, their main reason for contesting Raleigh’s authorship is the inclusion of wellknown pilgrim attributes like the scallop shell, the pilgrim’s staff, the scrip, the gown, etc.: why would a Protestant like Raleigh have borrowed such imagery?55 Admittedly, these unmistakable emblems of pilgrims en route to the Catholic shrine to St. James in Santiago de Compostela are rather unlikely to be endorsed by a dedicated English courtier, explorer, and poet like Raleigh, for whom the Protestant faith was not only a matter of personal conviction but arguably also one of political survival. However, neither Lefranc nor Edwards are able to propose plausible alternatives to Raleigh. On the other side of the spectrum are such critics as Stephen Greenblatt and Rosemund Tuve, who consider Raleigh a more than valid candidate for being the author of the poem. Greenblatt estheticizes Raleigh’s choice of imagery, arguing that his “poems fully realize and elaborate roles which are, of necessity, only partially acted out in life.” He conjectures that, since Raleigh fell from Elizabeth I’s favor around the turn of the century, “the role of the

54

Michael Rudick, “Attributions, Arrangement, Chronology,” in The Poems of Sir Walter Ralegh: a Historical Edition, ed. Michael Rudick (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1999), lxix–lxx. For a more comprehensive overview on the debates of authorship, see p. lxx, n. 75.

55

Pierre Lefranc, Sir Walter Ralegh, Écrivain: l’œvre et les idées (Paris: Colin, 1968), 84–85; Philip Edwards, Sir Walter Ralegh (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1953), 93–96.

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pilgrim resolved the conflicting visions within him, the Golden World and the world of death.” He further mentions Raleigh’s earlier use of pilgrimage imagery in “As you came from the holy land / of Walsinghame—,” and some other instances in Raleigh’s prose that undoubtedly confirm his familiarity with medieval pilgrimage culture. Lastly, Greenblatt contends that ostentatious after-worldly imagery need not be indicative of Catholicism, as both Milton and Bunyan make use of it in their writings as well.56 Thus, for Greenblatt, the convicted Raleigh is a very plausible candidate for putting pen to paper late in 1603 in view of his prospective end on the scaffold. Moreover, Tuve adduces evidence of Raleigh’s ownership of a midfifteenth-century book of hours (Fig. 2) that exhibits an “illumination picturing St. James . . . with the scallop-shell, staff, scrip, gown of Ralegh’s poem.”57 The first folio of this manuscript even features Raleigh’s signature, which has been identified by the late Penry Williams as authentic.58 Depictions of St. James the Greater like the one in Raleigh’s hours (fol. 59v) are nothing rare in these precious prayer books that gained increasing popularity during the late medieval period. As the first apostle to suffer martyrdom, St. James usually occupies a place in the suffrages of these prayer books together with other well-known saints who were believed to have shared similar fates. According to Eamon Duffy, it was not uncommon for Protestant families to keep books of hours like Raleigh’s, though their purpose and use is still subject to speculation.59 This may lead to interesting conclusions about the way in which pre-Reformation images may still have prevailed physically and/or mentally in what has often been historicized as a Protestant 56

Stephen Greenblatt, Sir Walter Ralegh: the Renaissance Man and His Roles (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), 123–24.

57

Rosemond Tuve, Elizabethan and Metaphysical Imagery: Renaissance Poetic and Twentieth-Century Critics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947; reprint, 1968), 308, n. 29; also see her article “Spenser and Some Pictorial Conventions, with Particular Reference to Illuminated Manuscripts,” Studies in Philology 37, no. 2 (1940): 151, n. 3.

58

Email correspondence with Bruce Barker-Benfield (July 17, 2014). I am in-

59

Eamon Duffy, Marking the Hours: English People and Their Prayers, 1240–

debted to Dr. Barker-Benfield for granting me access to this select manuscript. 1570 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 174.

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England so obsessed with iconoclastic practices that they were characterized by one influential historian as “iconophobic.”60 Given the scriptural basis for St. James’s decapitation in Acts 12:2 as well as a clear reference to his end in John Fox’s Acts and Monuments, it can be safely assumed that the particularities of the saint’s end were more than well known in early Protestant England.61 It also goes without saying that the connection between the pilgrim’s fate in our poem and St. James’s beheading in Acts 12:2 is very close and not one that would preclude Raleigh’s authorship of “The Passionate mans Pilgrimage” at all.

Figure 2: St. James the Greater, dressed as a pilgrim in Raleigh’s Book of Hours

MS. Add. A. 185, fol. 59v Reprinted with permission of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.

60

In the more recent historiography of the Reformation in England (and Scotland), Patrick Collinson’s notion of Protestant iconophobia has been called into question; see Tara Hamling, Decorating the ‘Godly’ Household: Religious Art in Post-Reformation Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 7–8.

61

John Fox, The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe, ed. Stephen Reed Cattley, 8 vols. (London: R. B. Seeley and W. Burnside, 1841), 1:94.

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In addition, St. James’s attributes may well have been much more prominent in early modern England than those who contest Raleigh’s authorship of the poem may want to concede. A diligent scholar from the early twentieth century counts some 414 dedications to St. James the Greater throughout England, although he admits that it is not always possible to discriminate between St. James the Greater and his namesake St. James the Less(er).62 Moreover, in his A Svrvay of London (1603), the early modern antiquarian John Stow lists just under a dozen references to place names and churches that are associated with a St. James in London.63 Lastly, those who were granted access to Westminster Abbey at the time64 and, in particular, to the Lady Chapel of Henry VII would have been able to see a statue of St. James the Greater with all the traditional emblems far up in the gallery of the sixth bay or a similar one on the grille of Henry VII’s tomb.65 All of this suggests that—on an emblematic level—St. James the Great was not just a vestige of the “old faith,” but that his fate and his emblems prevailed throughout the sixteenth century and were thus much less repulsive and perhaps much more palatable to English Protestantism than scholars who impugn Raleigh’s authorship argue. With regard to Raleigh, one can even take this one step further as he may have been one of those explorers who was even more exposed to St. James’s 62

Francis Bond, Dedications & Patron Saints of English Churches: Ecclesiastical Symbolism – Saints and Their Emblems (London: Humphrey Milford, 1914), 43–45.

63

John Stow, A Svrvay of London, . . . (London: John Windet, 1603), 106, 250– 51, 301, 318, 471, 497.

64

Julia F. Merritt, The Social World of Early Modern Westminster: Abbey, Court and Community, 1525–1640 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 326.

65

John Thomas Micklethwaite, “Notes on the Imagery of Henry the Seventh’s Chapel, Westminster,” Archaeologia 47, no. 2 (1883): 371, 373; Bond, Dedications & Patron Saints of English Churches, 45; Phillip Lindley, “‘The singuler mediacion and praiers of al the holie companie of Heven’: Sculptural Functions and Forms in Henry VII’s Chapel,” in Westminster Abbey: the Lady Chapel of Henry VII, ed. Tim Tatton-Brown and Richard Mortimer (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2003), 281.

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imagery along the way than other Englishmen. What Alison A. Chapman argues in relation to St. James’s influence in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene may also hold true for Raleigh, who, like Spenser, spent a considerable amount of his lifetime in Ireland. According to Chapman, Dublin, in particular, was replete with toponyms related to St. James: St. James’s Well and St. James’s Gate being only two close to Lord Grey’s headquarters, which both Raleigh and Spenser are believed to have frequented in the 1580s and 1590s.66 Raleigh is also assumed to have accompanied Lord Grey to Smerwick and was probably passively involved in the massacre in 1580: on his way there, Raleigh must have passed the town of Dingle, which, Chapman reminds us, is still “dominated today by the church of St. James built by early Spanish Catholic immigrants.”67 Thus, not only might Raleigh have been very familiar with the scallop shell and staff from the suffrages included in his personal book of hours and from depictions of St. James in England, but he also might have become more acquainted with the saint’s attributes during his lengthy sojourns in Ireland some twenty years before “The Passionate Mans Pilgrimage” saw the light of day. In light of all this evidence, it can be concluded that Raleigh is, in all probability, the author of the poem and that its late attribution was based on knowledge or documents now lost. Returning to the text itself, we notice at first that the somewhat contentious traditional pilgrimage attributes, used at the very beginning of the poem, appropriate dogmatic concepts that are not confined to Catholicism at all but that again suggest an ideal of a “good” death. The “Scallop shell,” “staffe,” “bottle,” “Scrip,” and “Gowne” in the first stanza may, on a literal level, recall the pre-Reformation place pilgrimage. However, in Raleigh’s poem, these signifiers are cast in metaphorical genitives of apposition and thus function as quantifiers, as semantic receptacles, so to speak, to accentuate particularities of the Christian faith that are not foreign to Protestantism at all (see my emphases): “Scallop shell of quiet,” “staff of Faith,” “Scrip of

66

Alison A. Chapman, Patrons and Patron Saints in Early Modern English Literature (New York: Routledge, 2013), 39; Mark Nicholls and Penry Williams, Sir Walter Raleigh: in Life and Legend (London: Continuum, 2011), 17.

67

Chapman, Patrons and Patron Saints, 39–40; Nicholls and Williams, Life, 14– 15.

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Joy,” “bottle of salvation,” “Gown of Glory.”68 As integral parts of the Protestant faith, a sense of quietness, steadfastness in faith, the prospect of joy, the probability of salvation, and the expectation of celestial glory accord fully with the ideal of a “good death” exemplified in the contemporary ars moriendi literature.69 In addition, since the speaker of this poem does not face an “ordinary” death struggle on the deathbed but a gruesome spectacle on the scaffold, reminiscence of these key aspects of faith may well open the door to the desired equanimity at the point of death, which would be indicative of the dying’s elect state as explained above. Cast in metaphors, the pleas for quietness, faith, joy, salvation, and glory not only borrow medieval pilgrimage imagery but they also artfully anticipate the fact that this journey will be the pilgrim’s last. The finality of his journey is confirmed in the next stanza, which abounds in metaphorical references to fluids. “Blood” will be his body’s “balmer,” a rare word in this sense for which the Oxford English Dictionary references only this line from Raleigh’s poem (n.1). The line can be read in two ways: either Blood is personified as a “balmer,” a person who embalms, or blood is the fluid in which the victim is embalmed. One way or the other, this line already foreshadows the violent scene on the scaffold. Interestingly, however, the poet does not specify whether the execution will be carried out exclusively by decapitation, as implied by the final stanza, or by hanging, drawing, and quartering. Fittingly, the latter would also include decollation and was the common punishment for treason, to which Raleigh had originally been sentenced by Lord Popham.70 In any event, upon leaving the bloodbath on the scaffold, he (or, rather, his soul) is seen to travel “like a white Palmer” to heaven (ll. 9–10), where he kisses the “Bowle of bliss” and drinks some eternal substance “On

68

On genitives of apposition, see Ethelbert W. Bullinger, Figures of Speech Used in the Bible, 1898 (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1968; reprint, 2003), 995.

69 70

Houlbrooke, Death, Religion, and the Family in England, 154, 183–96. Nicholls and Williams, Life, 213; John H. Baker, “Criminal Courts and Procedure at Common Law, 1550–1800,” in Crime in England, 1550–1800, ed. James S. Cockburn (London: Methuen, 1977), 42. For the social differences in methods of execution, see Esther Cohen, “The Expression of Pain in the Later Middle Ages: Deliverance, Acceptance and Infamy,” in Bodily Extremities: Preoccuptions with the Human Body in Early Modern European Culture, ed. Florike Egmond and Robert Zwijnenberg (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 214, 216.

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every milken hill” (ll. 13–16). Here, abandoning the earthly body in its pool of blood is sharply contrasted with ethereal whiteness: on the one hand, this is suggestive of the purity of the pilgrim’s soul and, on the other hand, “every milken hill” may well be a subtle allusion to the land of milk and honey as the desired destination of the wandering Israelites in the Old Testament (e.g., Exod. 3:8). Significantly, the soul is not just leaving the body but the metaphorical journey goes further: quenching his soul’s thirst by drinking from the “Bowle of bliss,” the pilgrim partakes in a process of after-worldly rejuvenation, a process in which “more peacefull Pilgrims” will be seen to participate in the next stanza. All the instances of metaphor thus far mentioned appear to approximate something inexpressible in human terms. Heavenly quietness, unwavering faith, celestial joy and bliss, eternal salvation and glory (and in all likelihood even the violence on the scaffold) are hard to conceive of literally. However, what can be witnessed in this poem is exactly what has been advanced by Weder following Ricœur, namely that a new set of semantics is generated through a religious metaphor by combining a “transcendent subject” with an “immanent predicate.” For example, a staff of faith, I would argue, becomes much more meaningful to the pilgrim-convict as it bespeaks a supportive, this-worldly device rather than “just” faith alone. In what may well be an existential crisis, faith becomes the quintessential walking aid on the final passage to eternity. Likewise, salvation and bliss can perhaps be better conceived of if they can be imbibed and thus wholly integrated into the new eschatological self. God’s glory is impossible to adumbrate in worldly terms, but a pilgrim cloaked in the “gown of glory” might be a tad closer to understanding what protects him on his journey and what awaits him on the other side. Hence, all the metaphors thus used aim at bridging the ontological divide between man and God, between temporality and eternity, between this world and the one to come. Through the combination of this-worldly terms with after-worldly concerns, the latter are not only rendered more accessible to the “one at the point of death,” but both constitute the broader, metaphorical stage of the last pilgrimage and thereby generate a new set of “heavenly semantics,” so to speak. As his metaphorical pilgrimage leads him to “heavens Bribeles hall,” the pilgrim is presented with what seem to be never-experienced legal conditions: from the pilgrim-convict’s perspective, there is no more corruption (“no cor-

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rupted voyces brall,” l. 36), clear conscience is a matter of course (“No Conscience molten into gold,” l. 37),71 prosecutors are not “bought and sold” (l. 38), nor is he any longer subject to legal inertia by being sent from court to court (“No cause deferd, nor vaine spent Jorney,” l. 39). All of this fits very nicely into the picture of a Raleigh who relentlessly inveighed against the charges put forward by his prosecutors: evidence of this can be found in the many extant letters to his wife Bess and others as well as in court records, in which he is said to protest against being tried “by no law but by the Spanish inquisition.”72 Thus, the heavenly tribunal presided over by the taintless Christ figures as an unprecedented scene of justice on the convict’s and/or Raleigh’s last pilgrimage to eternity. These strong contrasts between the present world, which he holds in deep contempt, and the one to come are negotiated through the extended metaphor of the last pilgrimage, thereby allowing the pilgrim to identify with a new world that lies beyond earthly corruption and, in particular, beyond courtly venality. At the beginning of the poem, a new set of heavenly semantics, a new state of after-worldly being, is announced in the introductory metaphors adumbrating quietness, steadfastness, joy, salvation, and glory. These the pilgrim-convict hopes to enjoy once he is past his just judgment in heaven. Although he has not yet departed, the poem sets the stage for him to do so soon, thus paving the metaphorical path to the new heavenly reality that lies ahead. The pilgrim’s confident mood, moreover, not only allows for the fierce excoriation of the earthly authorities but also for wry gallows humor: “Seeing my flesh must die so soone, / And want a head to dine next noone” (ll. 53–54). His final plea that his decollated self be reconstituted with “an

71

Incidentally, Raleigh had previously appealed to his accusers’ “reputatione of conscience,” but to no avail, see Sir Walter Raleigh, The Letters of Sir Walter Ralegh, eds. Agnes M. C. Latham and Joyce Youings (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1999), 252.

72

Raleigh, The Letters of Sir Walter Ralegh, 247–67. “And I will tell you, Master Atturney, if you condemne me upon bare inferences, and will not bring my accuser to my face: you may try me by no law but by the Spanish inquisition”; see Sir Thomas Overbury, The Arraignment and Conviction of Sr Walter Rawleigh . . . (London: William Wilson, 1648), 18.

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everlasting head” (l. 56) to be placed on his soul, on the one hand, is suggestive of a long-standing tradition in which “salvation and eternal life are inconceivable, even impossible without heads and skulls.”73 On the other hand, the prospect of his newly equipped soul invites the desired equanimity of the two final lines in which he expresses his readiness to leave this world and to pass on to a new reality that has just been created for him through the powerful metaphor of the last pilgrimage.

THE LAST PILGRIMAGE IN GEORGE HERBERT’S POETRY A third poet who must not be neglected in the present discussion of how last pilgrimages serve as a linguistic means of heavenly approximation is George Herbert, author of what became posthumously known as The Temple: Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations (1633). According to Izaak Walton, the poet’s biographer/hagiographer, Herbert passed on his collection some weeks before his death to Edmund Duncon and famously said that these poems are “a picture of the many spiritual Conflicts that have past betwixt God and my Soul.”74 The peg of many of these conflicts hinges on elaborate conceits which are engendered by the poet’s unwavering attempts at understanding his supposedly loving God’s whys and wherefores and by his relentless effort to communicate his affliction heavenward. Herbert’s sonnet “Prayer (I)” is a case in point in that it illustrates many of the paradoxes that arise when attempting to penetrate the divine. Essentially, it comprises nothing more than an elaborate list of metaphors to describe prayer: “the Churches banquet” (l. 1), “The Soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage, / The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth” (l. 3–4) are just a few instances that attempt to characterize prayer metaphorically as

73

Catrien Santing and Barbara Baert, “Introduction,” in Disembodied Heads in Medieval and Early Modern Culture, ed. Catrien Santing, Barbara Baert, and Anita Traninger (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 9.

74

Izaak Walton, The Life of Mr. George Herbert (London: Thomas Newcom, 1670), 109.

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a form of communication transcending earthly realms. In some instances, Herbert’s metaphors even imply some sort of spiritual warfare as in prayer as an “Engine against th’ Almightie” (l. 5).75 This last metaphor and similar instances throughout Herbert’s work authorize Daniel W. Doerksen’s contention that “Herbert’s most frequent opponent is God,” which often leads to a paradoxical opposition of approximation that characterizes the dynamics of Herbert’s œuvre.76 Like Donne and Raleigh before, Herbert exploits all of his poetical repertoire “to define that which is beyond words, paradoxically using words to convey both the possibilities of prayer and the limits of language,” as Wilcox aptly points out.77 The last line of “Prayer (I)” epitomizes this Herbertian sense of linguistic boundaries: even though the poet repeatedly attempts to describe and conceive of prayer metaphorically, he concedes that, ultimately, prayer itself is merely “something understood” (l. 14), with the full meaning of prayer remaining impenetrable even to the divine poet. In the following, it will become clear that it is this linguistic limitation imposed upon Herbert by the ineffability and incomprehensibility of the divine that leads to the acme of his metaphorical creations. This will first be shown exemplarily in a number of oft-read poems by Herbert that will then allow me to delve into a more in-depth discussion of “The Pilgrimage,” which has so far only received scant critical attention. The trope of the pilgrimage through life, inevitably including the final stretch of such a metaphorical journey, is implicit and explicit throughout Herbert’s The Temple. His poem “Coloss. 3. 3.” provides a good example to illustrate this as both ideas—the life pilgrimage and its final stage—occur together: My words & thoughts do both expresse this notion, That Life hath with the sun a double motion. The first Is straight, and our diurnall friend, The other Hid, and doth obliquely bend. One life is wrapt In flesh, and tends to earth.

75

All of George Herbert’s poems are taken from The English Poems of George Herbert, ed. Helen Wilcox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

76

Doerksen, Conforming to the Word, 123–24.

77

Helen Wilcox, “Introduction,” in The English Poems of George Herbert, ed. Helen Wilcox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), xxxv.

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The other winds towards Him, whose happie birth Taught me to live here so, That still one eye Should aim and shoot at that which Is on high: Quitting with daily labour all My pleasure, To gain at harvest an eternall Treasure.

Well-known for its diagonal acrostic, echoing Colossians 2:3, this poem artfully erects a dichotomy of two lives that are likened to the double motion of the sun. While I am less interested in the cosmography of the poem,78 the religious implications promise fruitful insights into the pilgrimage pattern enmeshed in these lines. Herbert distinguishes between the earthly life that is obscure, “obliquely” bent (l. 4), and encumbered by the flesh (l. 5) and the other one that is straight, ultimately winding “towards Him” (l. 6), and letting him with one eye “aim and shoot at that which Is on high” (l. 8). Describing the tortuousness of the pilgrimage through life on earth, these lines, at the same time, assert that there is something better to come. Antitheses as expressed in the preceding verse to Colossians 3:3, “Set your affection on things which are aboue, and not on things, which are on the earth,” and other heavenly aspirations of this kind are a common feature of the Pauline letters (1 Cor. 9:24–27, Phil. 3:12–16,…), by which these lines are without doubt heavily informed. Through his insistence that “One life is wrapt In flesh, and tends to earth” (l. 5) while the other leads to the reaping of “an eternall Treasure” (l. 10), Herbert juxtaposes the crooked earthly ways to the only straight one that is reserved for the devout Christian to tread his pilgrimage to eternity. Other poems in The Temple are concerned with related issues of spiritual aberration and experiment poetically to refocus on the heavenly destination. In “Lent,” the poet-homilist reminds his flock that “Who goeth in the way which Christ hath gone, / Is much more sure to meet with him, then one / That travelleth by-wayes” (ll. 37–39), thereby urging his listeners to avoid any detours on their spiritual journey to Christ. Likewise, in “Faith,” Christ is compared to

78

For a thorough commentary on the cosmography of the poem, see Chauncey Wood, “A Reading of George Herbert’s ‘Coloss. 3.3’,” George Herbert Journal 2, no. 2 (1979): 15–24.

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a rare outlandish root, Which when I could not get, I thought it here [in Faith]: That apprehension cur’d so well my foot, That I can walk to heav’n well neare.

(ll. 9–12)

Faith leads the wayward pilgrim back to Christ (“a rare outlandish root”),79 who heals human feet “allowing them to continue their spiritual pilgrimage beyond their physical limits,” as Watson maintains.80 Similarly, the first stanza of “H. Baptisme (II)” avers that “My faith in me” (l. 5) is “all the passage” (l. 3) that leads to God through “A narrow way and little gate” (l. 2), thus echoing Jesus’s famous words from the Sermon on the Mount, “the gate is streicte, and the way narowe that leadeth vnto life, and few there be that finde it” (Matt. 7:14). This passage, moreover, resonates with “A Wreath,” in which godly life is “Straight as a line, and ever tends to thee [God]” (l. 6). Such approximations to heaven, God, or Christ are again developed in “The Pearl. Matth. 13.45,” employing the rather touching image of a speaker who went through the ways of learning, honor, and pleasure, but who is ready to admit, not my groveling wit, But thy silk twist let down from heav’n to me, Did both conduct and teach me, how by it To climbe to thee.

79

(ll. 37–40)81

I find it plausible that the “rare outlandish root” is a typological reference to the messianic “Root of Jesse” in Isaiah 11:10, as Wilcox suggests in her gloss to this line.

80

Watson, The Rest Is Silence, 274.

81

According to Wilcox’s gloss to this line, the metaphor of the “silk twist” encapsulates a fourfold meaning: (1) “Ariadne’s thread which guided Theseus to safety,” (2) Jacob’s ladder in Gen. 28:12, (3) the “threefold cord” in Eccles. 6:12, (4) God’s word which, according to Calvin, “leads the Christian out of the labyrinth to the safety of salvation.” For (2), also see C. A. Patrides, Premises and Motifs in Renaissance Thought and Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 36.

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And, lastly, the many triads in “Trinitie Sunday” are concluded with the speaker’s eschatological expectation, “That I may runne, rise, rest with thee” (l. 9), which again echoes the pilgrimage-related metaphor of the Pauline race to eternity.82 The speaker in all of these poems finds himself sometimes more, sometimes less astray from the right path, but what unites them is his eventual attempt to renounce his peripatetic wanderings in favor of his intense desire for union with his creator. In a similar but more extensive manner, earthly vicissitudes and their obliteration in eternity are discussed in Herbert’s poem “The Pilgrimage,” which I subject to closer scrutiny in the following. The speaker in this poem is portrayed as a traveler who is looking for “the hill, where lay / My expectation” (ll. 1–2). The first two lines already indicate what will be the driving force almost throughout the entire poem: “the hill” and the speaker’s “expectation” to reach it eventually. However, the poem makes a strong case for the speaker’s hardships: not only is the journey long and wearisome (l. 3), but the first three words, “I Travell’d on” (l. 1), suggest that the traveler began his spiritual pilgrimage long ago, that the reader is let in on it in medias res,83 and that what follows is thus only the continuation of a fraught journey. As Joseph H. Summers notes, a certain sense of weariness can also be identified in the poet’s consistent use of the preterit (with the exception of the last two lines of the poem).84 What follows, then, is a somewhat lengthy catalogue of the mishaps, disappointments, and deceptions that the pilgrim encounters on his allegorical journey: having passed “the cave of Desperation” (l. 4) and “The rock of Pride” (l. 6) without let or hindrance, he comes to a beautiful meadow where he would have liked to stay a little longer, but the impatient pilgrim “was quicken’d by my houre” (l. 10) and left “With much 82

This list may well be continued with lines from “Home” (the prayerful refrain “O show thyself to me, / Or take me up to thee,” ll. 5–6), “Mattens” (“by a sunne-beam I will climbe to thee,” l. 20), and “Affliction (IV)” (“Till I reach heav’n, and much more thee,” l. 30).

83

On the implications of this beginning and a potential parody of the epic genre, see Bart Westerweel, Patterns and Patterning: a Study of Four Poems by George Herbert (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1984), 146–47.

84

Joseph H. Summers, George Herbert: His Religion and Art (London: Chatto and Windus, 1954), 173.

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ado” (l. 12). He moves from place to place and is stripped of all his gold (l. 16), but he is also provided with a guardian angel, “ti’d / Close to my side” (ll. 17–18).85 Finally, he seems to arrive at “the gladsome hill, / Where lay my hope” (ll. 19–20) only to dejectedly find “A lake of brackish waters” (l. 23) on top of it. The pilgrim is desperate, “abashed and struck” (l. 25), and full of “swarming fears” (l. 26), he exclaims, “Alas my King; / Can both the way and end be tears?” (ll. 27–28). He then “perceiv’d / I was deceiv’d:” (ll. 29–30, my emphasis). The colon concludes this penultimate stanza and, at the same time, points to a further prolongation of the pilgrim’s toilsome metaphorical travels. Only in the very last stanza does the speaker wearily arrive at his long-sought destination: My hill was further: so I flung away, Yet heard a crie Just as I went, None goes that way and lives: If that be all, said I, After so foul a journey death is fair, And but a chair.

(ll. 31–36)

The poem’s very end, “death is fair, / And but a chair” (ll. 35–36), has led to critical confusion and discord. F. E. Hutchinson, the pioneering figure in Herbert criticism, interprets the chair as “a symbol of old age” with references to Shakespeare’s II Henry VI and I Henry VI.86 C. A. Patrides and

85

Most critics have recognized the pun on the angel also being a gold coin with a depiction of St. Michael, but Westerweel goes even further: he advances that the tying of a guardian angel to one’s side “is perhaps reminiscent of the pilgrim’s custom of carrying a scallop shell,” and he reminds us that St. Michael “was also often associated with pilgrimages, which is shown iconographically by his sometimes wearing a shell, a common pilgrim’s attribute,” see Westerweel, Patterns and Patterning, 200. I will return to St. Michael as a pilgrim’s guide in my discussion of his role in John Milton’s Paradise Lost.

86

Francis E. Hutchinson, “Commentary,” in The Works of George Herbert, ed. Francis E. Hutchinson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941; reprint, 1972), 512. He quotes the “Chaire-dayes” in II Henry VI (V, ii, 48) and “When saplesse Age,

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Marvin Morillo, probably each unaware of the other, both read the line in light of Herbert’s poem “Mortification,” in which “A chair or litter shows the biere, / Which shall convey him [an old man] to the house of death” (ll. 29–30). Whereas Patrides glosses the chair in “The Pilgrimage” as “literally a sedan-chair, a comfortable mode of transport,” Morillo submits evidence that a sedan-chair, patented in 1634, was a new-fangled vehicle that postdates Herbert’s chair, which would make a litter (as in “a chair or litter”) more likely.87 I am, however, inclined to side with Bart Westerweel, who calls “in question the equivalence of the chairs of the two poems”: the chair in “The Pilgrimage” that is used as a metaphor for death can hardly be identical with the one that merely stands for a vehicle transporting a cadaver “to the house of death” in “Mortification.”88 As an alternative, Westerweel advances that Herbert’s chair may stand for a heavenly chariot: to buttress his claim, he presents entries from the Oxford English Dictionary, ranging from c. 1374 to 1815, in which “chair” is used synonymously with “chariot” invariably in reference to the ascension of Elijah in his chariot of fire (2 Kings 2:11). As in other parts of his thorough study, Westerweel is at pains to establish a certain prevalence of the chair/chariot synonymy in Herbert’s day: instances like Christiana’s prospective “Horses and Chariots” in Bunyan’s second part of The Pilgrim’s Progress may in fact bespeak some late commonness of the pattern in seventeenth century England.89 However, if this is really a reference to Elijah’s chariot, it lacks the “fiery Steeds” that John Milton would later invoke as clear signifiers of the prophet’s vehicle in Paradise Lost (III, 522). Thus, some doubts persist as Westerweel cannot establish any direct connection between the truly wonderful material that he cites and what may actually have directly influenced Herbert’s idea of death as a chair.

and weake vnable limbes / Should bring thy Father to his drooping Chaire” in I Henry VI (IV, v, 4–5); see Shakespeare, Works, 100, 197. 87

C. A. Patrides, “Notes,” in The English Poems of George Herbert, ed. C. A. Patrides (London: Dent, 1974; reprint, 1986), 151; Marvin Morillo, “Herbert’s Chairs: Notes on The Temple,” English Language Notes 11, no. 4 (1974): 274.

88

Westerweel, Patterns and Patterning, 203.

89

Westerweel, Patterns and Patterning, 207; Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, 240.

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In the following, I will therefore put forward a different reading of the death/chair metaphor by keeping much closer to Herbert’s poetry: to my knowledge, no one has argued yet that the chair in the final line of “The Pilgrimage” may well be seen as a post-mortem rehearsal of the Eucharist at God’s heavenly banquet of love. As I will show, Herbert’s ideas of rest, Holy Communion, and heavenly feasts in other poems of The Temple can actually be well reconciled to the laconic, sedentary closure of the traveler’s foul journey in “The Pilgrimage.” Sitting down in a chair is generally associated with rest, an important word with which Herbert plays throughout the The Temple. In her glossary entry on “rest,” Wilcox illustrates the poet’s playfulness with its meaning, ranging from a mere arithmetical rest in “The Forerunners” to the obvious biblical overtones that underline its recuperative, redemptive, and relaxing implications in many other poems such as “The H. Communion,” “Aaron,” “The Answer,” and “The Pulley.”90 This last poem relates God’s creation of man and how the creator bestows upon him strength, beauty, wisdom, honor, and pleasure out of “a glasse of blessings standing by” (ll. 1–8). At the bottom of his beatifying container, God finds “rest,” but decides to withhold it from man lest he adore God’s gifts instead of God himself. The poem closes with the divine voice setting the basis for an earthly life of restlessness that tends toward eternal heavenly rest: Yet let him [man] keep the rest [i.e., all the other blessings], But keep them with repining restlesnesse: Let him be rich and wearie, that at least, If goodnesse leade him not, yet wearinesse May tosse him to my brest.

(ll. 16–20)

Thus, man’s this-worldly restlessness and exhaustion lead him to be eventually ensconced in God’s bosom, where man is finally admitted to the divine rest that was previously withheld from him.91

90 91

Wilcox, “Glossary,” xliii–xliv. I am indebted to a close reading by Barbara Leah Harman in her Costly Monuments: Representations of the Self in George Herbert’s Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), 149–50.

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This rest/restlessness dichotomy pervades a fair number of poems throughout The Temple. “Giddinesse” characterizes man as “farre from power, / From settled peace and rest” (ll. 1–2). Likewise, the priestly meditations in the poem “Aaron” admit to a “Profaneness in my head” that leads “Unto a place where is no rest,” likely to be hell itself (cf. Rev. 14:11), but Christ is eventually identified as the only man in whom “I may rest” (ll. 6, 14, 19). In “Even-song,” furthermore, the speaker envisions a God who gently pulls him back from his toilsome ways, “Saying to man, It doth suffice: / Henceforth repose; your work is done” (ll. 17–20). In his divinely ordained repose, the speaker finds divine love and concludes the poem, “And in this love, more then in bed, I rest” (l. 32). Accordingly, the rich texture of the word “rest” ultimately revolves around nothing less than God’s love, as Wilcox rightly maintains.92 On the basis of this conceptualization of rest and given the frequent occurrence of this word throughout Herbert’s work, it seems rather evident that the speaker in “The Pilgrimage” is also yearning for serenity and restfulness at the end of his foul and wearisome journey rather than for a chariot that propels him heavenward.93 Herbert’s complex concept of restfulness is moreover connected to frequent references to eating a divinely prepared meal and to the Eucharist, “the marrow of Herbert’s sensibility,” as one critic describes it.94 While some of the Eucharistic poems in The Temple may seem rather technically liturgical (e.g., “The Invitation”), others such as “The Banquet” transcend the dogmatic technicalities of bread and wine to aver that the latter “becomes a Wing at last”: For with it alone I flie To the skie:

92

Wilcox, “Glossary,” xliv.

93

This claim is also supported by the near contemporary Ralph Knevet and his lengthy and rather mediocre imitation of Herbert’s “The Pilgrimage” ending in “Here of my God I did request, / To sett up my repose and rest” (ll. 215–16); see The Shorter Poems of Ralph Knevet: a Critical Edition, ed. Amy M. Charles (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1966), 356–63.

94

C. A. Patrides, “‘A Crown of Praise’: the Poetry of Herbert,” in The English Poems of George Herbert, ed. C. A. Patrides (London: Everyman’s Library, 1974; reprint, 1986), 17.

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Where I wipe mine eyes, and see What I seek, for what I sue; Him I view, Who hath done so much for me.

(ll. 42–48)

Here, the sacrament of the Eucharist is clearly situated in its liturgical setting, but, at the same time, its rehearsal provides an intimate means of heavenly approximation and even divine revelation (“Him I view”). Thus, in Herbert’s thought, the Eucharist of the liturgy becomes an enactment of a divine meal whose restful implications may well carry eschatological overtones, as I will show. In “The 23 Psalme,” Herbert envisions another version of a heavenly repast that underscores the close proximity of food and rest and the central role that both play in the spirituality that is inflected in The Temple. In this only psalm translation by Herbert, the speaker is supplied with food by his divine shepherd as he is led “to the tender grasse, / Where I both feed and rest” (ll. 5–6, my emphasis). Herbert’s biblical source for these two lines obviously is Psalm 23:2, but he clearly favored one particular translation current in his day. While explicit reference to feeding is absent in the Geneva translation of 1560, “He maketh me to rest in grene pasture, & leadeth me by the stil waters” and similarly so in the Authorized Version, Herbert’s psalm seems to be unmistakably informed by the Great Bible’s rendering, “He fedeth me in a grene pasture” (my emphasis).95 This 1535 translation by Miles Coverdale, often collated together with the Book of Common Prayer,96 must have been very well known to Herbert and his contemporary divines as it constituted part of the monthly readings of the Psalter during Morning and Evening Prayer. Since both the Geneva Bible and the Authorized Version

95

See Helen Wilcox’s comment on Herbert’s sources for his “The 23 Psalme” (592–93).

96

Brian Cummings, “Note on the Texts,” in The Book of Common Prayer: the Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662, ed. Brian Cummings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), lvi. According to Cummings, the King James Version was not included in the scriptural readings before the 1662 version of the Book of Common Prayer.

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translate verse 2 more literally, Herbert’s reliance on the liturgically conventional Coverdale translation, which more freely renders “fedeth,” can only be intentional.97 The fact that the poet has his speaker explicitly fed already before he does “sit and dine, / Ev’n in my enemies sight” (ll. 17–18 or v. 5, respectively) and the striking syntactical proximity of “feed and rest” (l. 6) speak very much in favor of a deliberate choice. Here, Herbert clearly underlines the significance of divine food and its inherent connection to repose in this and other poems. Sacred food and rest play an important role not only in Herbert’s only psalm translation, but also in his poem “The H. Communion,” which can also be read as a poetical articulation in which the Eucharist and rest coincide meaningfully. Essentially, the sacramental elements—bread and wine—become a remedy against “sinnes force and art” in the second stanza: But by the way of nourishment and strength Thou creep’st into my breast; Making thy way my rest, And thy small quantities my length; Which spread their forces into every part, Meeting sinnes force and art.

(ll. 7–12)

Not only are God’s “small quantities,” the body and blood in the sacrament, identified as an effective treatment against sin, but here their ingestion also opens up the only way that quintessentially dovetails into rest: “Making thy way my rest” (l. 9). Put differently, Herbert’s understanding of rest is predicated on the acceptance of the Eucharistic bread and wine and thus on the sacramental internalization of Christ’s body. This internalization eventually leads to God’s “grace, which with these elements comes” (l. 19) to permeate every faculty of man’s sinful nature. In this way, the Eucharist becomes an essential part on the believer’s spiritual pathway, not only affording rest in the liturgical context but also eternal rest once the end of the journey is reached.

97

The original Hebrew verb used for “He maketh me to lie downe” (KJV) is ‫ָרבַץ‬ (rabats), which is probably best rendered as “to cause to crouch,” thus implying a form of rest without any food.

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Having considered “The Banquet,” “The 23 Psalme,” and “The H. Communion,” we come to understand that the Eucharist and other heavenly banquets, more often than not, imply a close connection of rest that can only be found within the arena of the divine. Little is there, however, that suggests permanence of any such rest on earth, and it is hardly surprising that, in The Temple, an eternal restful banquet with God is only fully realized at the end of one’s pilgrimage through life, as I will now demonstrate. In “The Pilgrimage,” the traveler must be desperately longing for such a restful banquet, for both literal and spiritual nutrition are strikingly absent throughout his restless journey. This “restlesnesse,” as we have seen in “The Pulley,” eventually “May tosse him to my [God’s] brest” (l. 20), but the traveler in “The Pilgrimage” still has a long way to go before settling in God’s bosom. Unlike the psalmist above, who makes rest in green pastures to be nurtured by God, Herbert’s pilgrim regrets that he is pressed by time and therefore has to pass the “phansies medow strow’d / With many a flower” (ll. 7–8). The antithetical “cares cops” obviously calls for neither rest nor food, and he escapes them “With much ado” (l. 12). In neither of the two places does the pilgrim rest, and neither of them affords provisions for his journey: in the first, he “was quicken’d by my houre” (l. 10), while the second has only trepidation on offer. The “gladsome hill” that would potentially supply some nourishment only yields a “lake of brackish waters on the ground” (l. 23). This mixture of salt and fresh water is diametrically opposed to the pilgrim’s desired refreshment and may, according to one early commentator, even “excite the appetite.”98 It seems more than plausible at this point that, “After so foul a journey,” the allegorical bitterness of malnourishment and dehydration is resolved by God offering the pilgrim a chair at his heavenly table, a claim to be further explored. The topoi of rest and bitterness are examined at great length by Westerweel, who has so far advanced the most exhaustive discussion of Herbert’s “The Pilgrimage.” Rooted in antiquity and in the medieval period, the quieta sedes and the post amara dulcia are two motifs that occurred in literary works again and again even beyond Herbert’s day, as Westerweel shows. The first one refers to “the idea of a certain relief awaiting the pilgrim who has chosen the arduous path of virtue,” and its obvious reference in the poem 98

George Ryley cited in Wilcox’s gloss to this line.

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is the metaphor of death being “fair, / And but a chair” (ll. 35–36).99 Regrettably, Westerweel considers this motif only in passing, probably favoring his contention that Herbert’s chair actually implies conveyance rather than rest, which I am challenging. The second—bitterness is followed by sweetness— is echoed in Herbert’s line, “After so foul a journey death is fair” (l. 35, my emphasis): here, Westerweel underscores the pervasiveness of this motif by identifying similar patterns of thought in near contemporary works such as Geoffrey Whitney’s A Choice of Emblemes (1586), Georgette de Montenay’s Emblemes, ou Devises Chrestiennes (1571), and again Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress.100 In the last two lines of Herbert’s poem, the two motifs of the post amara dulcia and the quieta sedes are elegantly combined. Eventually, the pilgrim overcomes the bitterness of life and awaits the sweetness of heavenly rest. This transition, I argue, corresponds well with the idea of a heavenly meal if we take seriously how many other poems in The Temple insist on a close connection between food and rest. The exclusive and thus deliberate use of the present tense in the penultimate line (“death is fair . . .”) furthermore underscores Herbert’s insistence on the durability of his restful and savory metaphor. Such a reading of “The Pilgrimage” uniting food and rest in the final lines is to my knowledge new in Herbert criticism but finds scaffolding in “Love (III),” the last poem of The Temple’s main section entitled “The Church.” Read in relation to “The Pilgrimage,” “Love (III)” describes the pilgrim’s entry to the arrival hall of heaven.101 The poem largely consists of a dialogue 99

Westerweel, Patterns and Patterning, 163.

100 Westerweel illustrates his point with images from Whitney’s and de Montenay’s work, and he again quotes from Bunyan, “In this Land, they heard nothing, saw nothing, felt nothing, smelt nothing, tasted nothing, that was offensive to their Stomach or Mind; only when they tasted of the Water of the River, over which they were to go, they thought that tasted a little Bitterish to the Palat, but it proved sweeter when ’twas down,” see Westerweel, Patterns and Patterning, 165; Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, 238. 101 This poem has attracted much comment in Herbert criticism. Given the poem’s final position after lyrics such as “Death,” “Dooms-day,” “Judgement” and “Heaven,” I find myself in agreement with those critics who read it as the conclusion to a deliberate sequence rather than another rehearsal of the liturgical

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between the arriving pilgrim and Love, who “is personified . . . both as God, who welcomes the sinner . . . , and as the crucified Christ who ‘bore the blame’ (line 15) for human sin.”102 Love’s cordial words of welcome and the pilgrim’s initial reluctance mark the beginning of the poem: Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back, Guiltie of dust and sinne.

(ll. 1–2)

The pilgrim at first grows “slack” (l. 3), hesitant to move further, but then is asked by Love “If I lack’d anything” (l. 6). Apparently, he does not expect to be on the guest list for the divine party, for his only answer is that he lacks a guest “worthy to be here” (l. 7). He is reminded by Love that he, in fact, is this worthy guest, and the dialogue continues to oscillate between the pilgrim’s declarations of unworthiness and Love’s patient ripostes that eventually make the pilgrim recall Christ’s sacrifice. At last, the pilgrim is persuaded to follow Love’s invitation: You must sit down, sayes Love, and taste my meat: So I did sit and eat.

(ll. 17–18)

In “Love (III),” the Eucharist and the idea of a heavenly banquet dovetail wonderfully to underscore both the eschatological foreshadowing of the former and the eternal implications of the latter. The fruitful combination of the Eucharist and the heavenly banquet is expressed in the hidden pun on the implicit word “host,” which many critics have observed stands, on the one hand, for the personified Love preparing a table for his guest and is, on the other hand, suggestive of the round wafer distributed during Communion.103 Eucharist, see Summers, George Herbert: His Religion and Art, 89; John Drury, Music at Midnight: the Life & Poetry of George Herbert (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 141, 149. Even more pertinently, Westerweel argues that “the corollary of the poem [‘The Pilgrimage’], in terms of its theme, is ‘Love (III),’ the final poem of ‘The Church,’ in which the arrival of the human soul at Heaven’s door is described,” see Patterns and Patterning, 141. 102 Wilcox’s gloss on the title. 103 See Wilcox’s introduction to “Love (III).”

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Lewalski and Wilcox, moreover, point to the biblical references that underlie the idea of heavenly banquets: apart from the obvious references to Psalm 23:5, Wilcox adduces Song of Solomon 2:4, “Hee brought me to the banketing house, and his banner ouer mee was loue,” and adds, as does Lewalski, Jesus saying in Luke 12:37, “I say vnto you, That he shall girde himself, and make them to sit downe to meate, and will come foorth and serue them” (KJV).104 Perhaps because the reference is almost blatantly obvious, neither Lewalski nor Wilcox, however, relate “Love (III)” to Jesus’s words addressed to his disciples during the Last Supper in Luke 22:30, “That yee may eate and drinke at my table in my kingdome” (KJV). These words bespeak even more of a close relationship between the heavenly banquets of the Old Testament Psalms and the sacrament of the Eucharist that emerged from the New Testament.105 It seems at least likely, if not indeed very plausible, that Herbert had passages like these in mind when he drafted “Love (III).” Not only is the speaker prompted to sit and eat at the banquet of Love, but he is also invited to “taste my meat” (l. 17), Christ’s body remembered in the sacrament of the Eucharist, which is appropriated here in heavenly terms as the table in Love’s dining hall is set for the arriving pilgrim to satisfy his spiritual yearning and appetite. The conclusion of “The Pilgrimage” strikingly parallels that of “Love (III).” Both poems share a pilgrim on his way to a heavenly destination. While “The Pilgrimage” focuses on the difficulties of the traveler’s journey, “Love (III)” is more concerned with his reluctance to accept a chair at God’s feast. Albeit different in tone and theme, the trajectory of both poems ultimately aims at a heavenly seat. In “The Pilgrimage,” death finds equivalence with a chair, a metaphor that is further elaborated upon at the end of “Love (III).” Weary of his travels and probably overwhelmed by Love’s generosity, the pilgrim accepts the invitation and will eventually “sit and eat” on a heavenly chair. In his prose manual A Priest to the Temple, or, The Countrey Parson, Herbert reflects intensively on the duties of countryside clergy, which prominently include the administering of the sacraments. Probably in

104 For Lewalski, see Protestant Poetics, 304. 105 Similarly so in the synoptic passages in Matt. 26:29 and less explicitly in Mark 14:25, in which Jesus also envisions a joint heavenly meal with his disciples.

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response to King James I’s indifference to physical posture during communion, Herbert writes that “The Feast [i.e., the Sacrament] indeed requires sitting, because it is a Feast; but man’s unpreparednesse asks kneeling.”106 This passage leads to a particularly compelling argument in Anne Williams’s reading of “Love (III)”: Ordinarily one kneels and rises again to continue the earthly pilgrimage. In Herbert’s conclusion, to sit and eat declares the end of that journey and the beginning of a new life that no symbols, no words, no human poetry could ever accommodate.107

The conclusion of “The Pilgrimage” is just the same: here as well, the pilgrim’s journey comes to a close through a gesture of sedentary rest that, in light of “Love (III),” may well be read as a chair at God’s banquet of Love. I concur with Williams’s contention that the symbolical, lexical, and poetical repertoire is exhausted here, but I would add that Herbert’s thorough explorations of these limitations leads him to offer unparalleled semantic innovations that attempt to describe what eludes our epistemic grasp. Hence, the linguistic limitations that are imposed upon the poet through the ineffability of the divine become very productive as they invite the artist to paint with words and thus to create metaphors of unprecedented vividness. It, therefore, comes as a rather unexpected surprise that the terse ending of “The Pilgrimage” has been described by Watson as “graceless” and “hardly a satisfying closure” and that Drury interprets it as the pilgrim’s disillusioned acceptance of the worst—that is, death.108 Far from gracelessness, dissatisfaction, and abject acquiescence, a thorough appreciation of Herbert’s poetry challenges such critical assessments as the chair at the end of the pilgrimage through life becomes a hopeful rather than a despondent reference to the pilgrim’s acceptance to the banquet in “Love (III).” His final journey and its culmina-

106 George Herbert, A Priest to the Temple, or, The Countrey Parson, 1652, in The Works of George Herbert, ed. Francis E. Hutchinson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941; reprint, 1972), 259; Gary Kuchar, George Herbert and the Mystery of the Word: Poetry and Scripture in Seventeenth-Century England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 47. 107 Anne Williams, “Gracious Accommodations: Herbert’s ‘Love III’,” Modern Philology 82, no. 1 (1984): 18. 108 Watson, The Rest Is Silence, 296; Drury, Life, 248.

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tion in a chair at God’s banquet of Love testify to a quintessential metaphorical development in which the trope of the last pilgrimage unlocks a tasty vision of the afterlife. *** The investigation above inquired into three rather different poems that make use of the last pilgrimage as a Christian metaphor to express the passage from this life to the next. Ricœur’s and Weder’s theory of metaphor as well as the literary tradition of the ars moriendi with its offshoots provided a helpful method to show how this trope opens up new perspectives of the afterlife in the three poems discussed. While the metaphorical potential residing in Donne’s poem reveals a semantic innovation in the constitution of a new heavenly “I” in which both the purified body and the soul coalesce, Raleigh’s pilgrim foresees new celestial semantics as he faces a heavenly court of untainted justice. In Herbert’s “The Pilgrimage,” the trope of the last pilgrimage reaches full fruition in the laconically puzzling metaphor of death as a chair: in a close reading of some of Herbert’s other poems, I was able to demonstrate that the metaphor of death as a chair is a likely reference not to a sedan chair, a litter, or a chariot, but to a seat at a heavenly banquet in the eschaton. In sum, Donne, Raleigh, and Herbert could be shown to use the figurative framework of the last pilgrimage to great effect to furnish a route for the dying as they take leave of the world, but in each case, the metaphor unfolds a very different heavenly scenario: a new self, a just trial, a fair seat. While these three perspectives on the afterlife—self, trial, seat—are essentially a remarkable reduction of a new eschatological reality that eventually awaits these pilgrims, the chapters to come on Spenser and Milton will identify ways in which the prospects of a last pilgrimage to eternity not only sweeten the bitter pill of death but also spark spiritual amelioration and godly contemplation in the present.

Figure 3: Albrecht Dürer, Knight, Death, and the Devil (1513)

Chapter 2: “streight way on that last long voiage” Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and the trajectory of the last pilgrimage

Albrecht Dürer’s Knight, Death, and the Devil (1513) may serve as an instructive point of entry to the concept of the last pilgrimage as it is articulated in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590/96).1 A true master of intricate chalcography, Dürer depicts a knight with a stern and determined facial expression who seems to have just escaped an utterly terrifying trial.2 Mounted on a noble steed somewhere deep in a dense wood, the knight has just left behind the devil, whose gaze is still haunting him from the right. The center captures a menacing moment in which decaying Death, sitting on a significantly smaller horse, approaches the knight, who appears to ignore him entirely. Wearing a frightening crown of snakes, Death holds up an hourglass in a typical memento mori gesture to remind the knight of the brevity of his life. The deadly scenario is again echoed in Death’s horse bending

1

The similarities between Dürer’s famous engraving and Spenser’s Redcrosse Knight have already been observed in Andrew D. Weiner, “‘Fierce Warres and Faithful Loues’: Pattern as Structure in Book I of The Faerie Queene,” Huntington Library Quarterly 37, no. 1 (1973): 36.

2

My reading of Dürer’s engraving is mainly based on Heinrich Theissing, Dürers Ritter, Tod und Teufel: Sinnbild und Bildsinn (Berlin: Mann, 1978), 19–22. On the interpretative challenges in this and other engravings by Dürer, see Thomas Schauerte, Dürer: Das ferne Genie (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2012), 15, 188–99.

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forward to the skull on the bottom left corner of the engraving. All of this suggests that what is ultimately at stake in this chaotic scene in the woods is the knight’s earthly life and ultimately his passage to eternity. Meanwhile, the emanating source of light that penetrates the engraving from the left gives grounds for hope that the knight’s destination may be much more promising than his current predicament with Death and the Devil. Far behind this sinister scene, we moreover recognize the reassuring structure of a city that is elevated inaccessibly high above the labyrinthine wood. Is this where the knight’s pilgrimage becomes his last? While this chapter does not primarily aim to offer a novel reading of Dürer’s engraving, it takes it as a point of departure for a thorough analysis of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and of the ways in which this unfinished epic poem is concerned with the concept of the last pilgrimage. I will show that, in Book I, the Redcrosse Knight apprehends his last pilgrimage much more clearly than Dürer’s knight, and yet I will argue that Spenser’s opus magnum as a whole is as eschatologically inconclusive as the early sixteenthcentury engraving. After Redcrosse is thoroughly cleansed from all his sins in the House of Holinesse, he envisions his own last pilgrimage at the end of Canto 10. Led by Mercy to a hermit by the name of Contemplation, the hero of Book I has a vision of the passage to the afterlife that the poet describes as follows: A litle path, that was both steepe and long, Which to a goodly Citty led his vew; Whose wals and towres were builded high and strong Of perle and precious stone, that earthly tong Cannot describe, nor wit of man can tell; Too high a ditty for my simple song: The Citty of the greate king hight it well, Wherein eternall peace and hapinesse doth dwell.

3

(I, x, 55.2–9)3

All references to Edmund Spenser’s epic are taken from The Faerie Queene, 1590/1596, eds. A. C. Hamilton, Hiroshi Yamashita, and Toshiyuki Suzuku, rev. ed. (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2007).

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Later identified as the New Jerusalem, this city will be the knight’s ultimate spiritual destination. Struck by all the future glory and bliss for which this city is known, he grows keen to dismiss his earthly travels/travails to go “straight way on that last long voiage” (I, x, 63.4).4 But he is soon made to understand that there is no shortcut to the New Jerusalem and that he first has to complete his earthly quest, which extends well beyond the parameters of Book I. Dürer’s knight, by comparison, may be pursuing a similar endeavor, but the engraving remains deliberately vague about his final destination: no particularly alert eye is necessary to recognize the city on the hill, but the knight himself still seems too deeply involved with earthly things to behold it himself. In this regard, Book I of The Faerie Queene is very different: as this chapter will argue, Redcrosse’s vision of the heavenly city strikes a note of reassurance that signals a pivotal didactic concern intended to spark in the knight the desire to abandon the earthly paths of errancy and to adhere to the godly path of righteousness. However, despite Redcrosse’s clear vision and vocation as Saint George, the entire poetical project of The Faerie Queene can be shown to end on just as inconclusive a note as Dürer’s engraving since the end of the fragmentary Mutabilitie Cantos offers, I argue, both a perspective of heavenly rest and earthly struggle. Dürer’s knight and Spenser’s Redcrosse have both been variously identified as milites christiani—Christian Knights—confronted with spiritual battles in this world en route to their heavenly goal.5 In his comprehensive study on the medieval roots of Christian warfare in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, Andreas Wang universalizes the concepts of the miles christianus and the militia christiana as states of mind reflecting perpetual spiritual struggles that are, irrespective of time and place, closely connected 4 5

The pun on travel/travail is ubiquitous throughout The Faerie Queene. Andreas Wang, Der ‹miles christianus› im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert und seine mittelalterliche Tradition: ein Beitrag zum Verhältnis von sprachlicher und graphischer Bildlichkeit (Bern: Lang, 1975), 159; Theissing, Dürers Ritter, Tod und Teufel, 33–39; Matthias Mende, “Der Reiter (Ritter, Tod und Teufel),” in Albrecht Dürer: Das druckgraphische Werk, ed. Rainer Schoch, Matthias Mende, and Anna Scherbaum, 3 vols. (Munich: Prestel, 2001), 1:170; Richard Mallette, Spenser and the Discourses of Reformation England (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 34–35.

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to the preservation of Christianity in both individual and collective terms.6 As Marco Nievergelt contends, the foreground of Dürer’s scene “with the suggestion of struggle, combat and movement and [the] static background hinting at repose, safety and deliverance” epitomize the tensions that are experienced in the militia christiana.7 Although Dürer criticism has increasingly cast doubt on the towering city being a direct reference to the Heavenly Jerusalem (as Nievergelt conjectures),8 the rather disorderly scene in the worldly foreground registers a quintessential spiritual contrast in which the background may well stand for other-worldly stability. Personified in the miles christianus, these spiritual tensions between the this-worldly plights and their potential eschatological alleviation led to fairly widespread literary explorations of Christian warfare as a state of late medieval spirituality that found prolific continuation with late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poets including Edmund Spenser.9 Given the ubiquity of this tradition, Spenser’s allusion to the militia christiana from the outset of Book I is hardly surprising. From the very beginning, the Redcrosse Knight is depicted as A Gentle Knight . . . Ycladd in mightie armes and siluer shield, Wherein old dints of deepe woundes did remaine

6

Wang, Der ‹miles christianus›, 9.

7

Nievergelt, Allegorical Quests, 1–2.

8

Theissing, Dürers Ritter, Tod und Teufel, 112.

9

(I, i, 1.1–3)

Literary texts that participate in the tradition of the miles christianus include but are by no means limited to Guillaume de Deguileville’s Pèlerinage de vie humaine (1331/1355), Olivier de La Marche’s Le Chevalier délibéré (1483), Stephen Bateman’s (unacknowledged) “translation” of La Marche entitled The Trauayled Pylgrime (1569), and, perhaps most prominently, Desiderius Erasmus’s Enchiridion Militis Christiani (1504); see Nievergelt, Allegorical Quests, 1, 15–22.

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The dents in his armor at first seem10 to signify some candid experience in (spirito-)chivalric adventures as they are “The cruell markes of many’ a bloody fielde” (I, i, 1.4). The knight’s dented armor is more specifically identified in Spenser’s “Letter to Raleigh” as “the armour of a Christian man specified by Saint Paul v. [vide] Ephes.” (l. 64), which ties Redcrosse explicitly to the tradition of Christian warfare.11 Ephesians 6:11–17, which serves as the primary source text for the construction of the miles christianus, exhorts such metaphorical Christian warriors as Dürer’s knight to “Put on the whole armour of God, that ye may be able to stand against the assauts of the deuil” (v. 11). To wrestle against evil, they are equipped with the “brest plate of righteousness” (v. 14), “the shield of faith” (v. 16), “the helmet of saluation, and the sworde of ye Spirit, which is the word of God” (v. 17). The Letter to Raleigh furthermore explains that the donor of Redcrosse’s armor is the faithful Una (ll. 63–64), who will partly guide him through his spiritual adventures in Faerieland. However, the dents in Redcrosse’s armor cannot be marks of his own fighting, for “armes till that time did he neuer wield” (I, i, 1.5). In other words, the first stanza of Book I presents nothing but a parody of a romance hero who has just put on his spiritually significant armor but who is arguably completely oblivious to its provenance and to the full implications of its traditional Christian symbolism. Throughout the episodes to follow, Redcrosse and his armor will be put through various trials that at times may be rather risible, but they are also spiritually significant, for they reveal, I will argue later, how the knight’s armor proves absolutely futile until he himself comes to identify with its signifiers in the House of Holinesse. As he is increasingly governed by these signifiers, the knight becomes eligible to partake in a vision of his own pilgrimage to heaven. Unlike Dürer’s knight, who does not behold his eschatological destination towering in the background of the engraving, Redcrosse,

10

The word “seem” is of paramount importance in Spenser and alerts readers from the beginning “to be aware of the disparity throughout the poem between what is and what seems to be,” as Hamilton observes in his note to I, i, 1.8.

11

For Spenser’s “A Letter of the Authors expounding his whole intention in the course of this worke: which for that it giueth great light to the Reader, for the better vnderstanding is hereunto annexed,” see pp. 714–18 in the authoritative Hamilton edition, cf. note 3. All references to the “Letter” are henceforth indicated parenthetically with the line numbers used in this edition.

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after his spiritual rejuvenation in the House of Holinesse, has in view what awaits him. I will show that this enables Spenser’s knight not only to cope more successfully with the tensions between this life and the one to come but also to function as a role model for the readers of the epic poem to assume moral probity in their own militia christiana. With regard to this study’s pilgrimage pattern, it is crucial to note that the tradition of militia christiana and the state of being a stranger and pilgrim on earth (as implied by Hebrews 11:13–16) both coalesced well before Spenser’s time. Expected to fight the earthly temptations of the flesh, the miles christianus figures as a model for spiritual wayfaring that can be traced from Augustine to medieval commentaries on Ephesians 6. While the medieval relationship between metaphors of spiritual warfare and of exiled pilgrims lies beyond the scope of the present chapter, it is important to bear in mind that the two were at times nearly synonymous, as Wang shows. After the Reformation, this near synonymy still prevails as a single glance at sermons such as John Calvin’s on Ephesians 6:11–17 shows: For God hath set vs in this world too maynteyne the battell vntill wee bee come too the rest of heauen. The earth then is not only as a pilgrimage too the faythfull, but also as a Camp where wee must alwayes haue enemies too trubble vs nyght and day without ceassing.12

In this sermon on the significance of man’s spiritual armor, Calvin is to a great extent concerned that “wee must hold out too the end, yea euen all our lyfe long” and that “our only trauell may be too come always forewarder and nearer vnto him [God], vntill wee bee gone out of this world.”13 This discourse of spiritual-warfare-cum-earthly-pilgrimage is intricately enmeshed in the texture of Book I of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene,14 and I will argue

12

John Calvin, The Sermons of M. Iohn Caluin, vpon the Epistle of S. Paule too the Ephesians, trans. Arthur Golding (London: Lucas Harison and George Byshop, 1577), fol. 328r (my emphasis).

13

Calvin, The Sermons of M. Iohn Caluin . . . Ephesians, 328r, 330v.

14

In this observation, I have been anticipated by Cullen, whose chapter “Red Crosse and the Pilgrimage of Christian Life” is arguably the most comprehensive exploration of the knight’s life pilgrimage. While Cullen offers an excellent

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that this dynamic relationship between warfare and pilgrimage coalesces around Redcrosse’s vision of his spiritual destination which figures as a powerful and indispensable turning point in the Legend of Holinesse. These prolegomena bring me to my general line of argument. Throughout the following pages, I will maintain that, unlike the poets in Chapter 1, Spenser uses the trope of the last pilgrimage not so much to unravel the particularities of the early modern afterlife but to show how a clear vision of eternity may inform moral behavior in this life. Appreciating the full meaning of The Faerie Queene’s eschatological approximations necessitates long and intensive preparatory work. I will show that the Redcrosse Knight’s endless and aimless roamings in this-worldly Faerieland are constructed as an ex negativo definition of a potential journey to eternity. Ways that do not lead to one’s last pilgrimage are to be avoided by Spenser’s Elizabethan readers who are encouraged to follow the eponymous Knight of Holinesse as their quasi-chivalric Everyman.15 Such an educational reading of Book I is authorized by the didactic impetus coming from the appended Letter to Raleigh, which would have been accessible to all early readers in possession of the 1590 installment of Spenser’s epic. These readers are part of an early modern spiritual culture that is seen by recent historiography as a Protestant nation in the making, torn between Reformed orthodoxy and more traditional forms of piety that loomed large behind newly established Protestantism. A conscious awareness of these doctrinal tensions informs an understanding in which the errant wanderings of the Redcrosse Knight and of others often lead to signifiers of the “old faith.” These function not only as nostalgic remnants of the medieval past but as a way of negotiating the spiritual heterodoxy ingrained in the heart of early modern English piety. Just as

overview of potential precursive pilgrimage narratives, I disagree with his overall argument that Redcrosse is “ultimately defeated by the Flesh (Duessa), the World (Lucifera), and the Devil (Orgoglio)”; see his Infernal Triad, 3–67, particularly pp. 3–4. As I will show in the following, these episodes do not suggest that Redcrosse is defeated on his pilgrimage, but they serve to identify his tortuous byways as a means of envisioning his own last pilgrimage in Canto 10. 15

John N. King, “Spenser’s Religion,” in The Cambridge Companion to Spenser, ed. Andrew Hadfield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 209.

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the miles christianus can be read as a Grenzgänger, a crosser of borders between the medieval and the early modern period,16 specific elements of Book I such as the House of Holinesse, the echoes of the contempus mundi tradition, and, most importantly, Redcrosse’s vision of his last pilgrimage to the New Jerusalem, fulfill a similar function. They all have medieval roots but have been slightly reshaped to fit the Protestant cause. While they challenge the rigidity of modern concepts of periodization (medieval and early modern period, pre- and post-Reformation times, etc.), these highly hybrid elements can be shown to be instrumental in transcending this-worldly terms in view of the afterlife. Despite this transcendental potential, the dawn of the eschaton in The Faerie Queene is still rather oblique. Only a vision of the afterlife is provided: Redcrosse does not witness his own arrival in the New Jerusalem, and nor do Spenser’s contemporary readers. While this may underscore the ineffability of the afterlife “that earthly tong / Cannot describe, nor wit of man can tell” (I, x, 55.5–6), withholding the pilgrim’s eventual arrival may also be read as one of the poem’s deliberate didactic incentives. Redcrosse still has a long way to go as do the readers of his story in fashioning their lives in accordance with their hero’s godly steps. The hero’s earthly quest, however, is left incomplete, announcing a repetitive pattern to occur throughout Books II–VI including the Cantos of Mutabilitie, all of which end in dialectical in/conclusion. This form of Spenserian dialectics, I will argue, reaches full fruition in the last few stanzas of the fragmentary Cantos of Mutabilitie. While they put some kind of an end to the earthly peregrinations of a restless epic poem that gestures toward eternal rest in “that Sabaoths sight” (VII, viii, 2.9), the fragmentary Cantos at the same time point to a continuation of the militia christiana. Approaching such a syncretic text as Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene inevitably leads to some methodological caveats. It is far beyond the aim of this chapter to enquire into each and every byway that the poet seems to open to his readers lest we find ourselves at the doors of Despair. Although I am inclined to agree with Andrew D. Weiner, who opined that every detail in the Spenserian canon is likely to evoke a very particular response with the reader, I think that a fruitful reductionism is in order.17 That is to say that, in

16

Nievergelt, Allegorical Quests, 4.

17

Weiner, “Pattern as Structure,” 34.

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the pages to follow, Spenser’s reliance on Aristotelian ethics, Neoplatonic thought, Greek epic, the Georgic tradition, and to some degree even his debt to the Arthurian framework of his post-medieval romance as well as his undeniable poetic tribute to the monarch need to be relegated to the periphery. Proceeding thus will allow me to isolate what is more pertinent to aspects of the last pilgrimage as an early modern trope depicting the transition between this world and that which is to come. Such a deliberately selective reading derives authority from its own historicity: as Darryl J. Gless advances, Spenser’s readers were very much trained in performing “processes of selection and extrapolation” as their schoolmasters taught them “deliberate strategies . . . to seek Christian meanings in the pagan classics.”18 On another note, it bears emphasis that Spenser’s literary debt to his potential precursors is notoriously difficult to unravel. Most of The Faerie Queene is, to borrow David Lee Miller’s words, “reminiscent of almost every major work and genre in the history of European literature without really resembling any of them.”19 Therefore, unnecessary digressions into source studies will be avoided in the present chapter unless these are immediately relevant to works that are closely associated with the trope of the last pilgrimage. Elucidating Spenser’s didactic use of the last pilgrimage in negotiation of medieval and Protestant spirituality also requires some initial byways in order to isolate its relevance later on. After a few theoretical remarks, I will turn to how the poet depicts earthly wanderings as purposeless, unproductive, and invariably leading to sin and death. This will both help the uninitiated reader to become familiar with some of the most central episodes of Book I that are presented in summary as well as allow the well-read expert to follow the argument more easily. It will become clear how the earthly

18

Darryl J. Gless, Interpretation and Theology in Spenser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 8.

19

David Lee Miller, “The Faerie Queene (1590),” in A Critical Companion to Spenser Studies, ed. Bart van Es (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 144. The plethora of potential sources in Spenser studies has led one eminent critic to complain that “the last thing Spenserians want is another ‘source’ for The Faerie Queene”; see Anne Lake Prescott, “Spenser’s Chivalric Restoration: from Bateman’s Travayled Pylgrime to the Redcrosse Knight,” Studies in Philology 86, no. 2 (1989): 166. For a comprehensive overview of potential sources for Spenser’s pilgrimage narrative, see Cullen, Infernal Triad, 4–21.

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wanderings of Cantos 1–9 are personified in Redcrosse as archetypal homo erro necessitating the hero’s spiritual cleansing in the House of Holinesse. A detailed discussion of this episode will reveal this House and the vision of the last pilgrimage to be the sine qua non for Redcrosse’s more focused and elect state of spiritual itinerancy as a homo viator. Although this new spiritual role does not preclude error, I will maintain that it is inspired by the vision of his last pilgrimage that informs most of the knight’s deeds in the cantos and books to come.

METAPHOR, ALLEGORY, AND ANAGOGY IN FAERIELAND In his Letter to Raleigh, Spenser calls the first installment of his opus magnum a “continued Allegory, or darke conceit” (l. 4), which invites some theoretical reflections on the poet’s mode. While the theory of metaphor that was the guiding critical principle in the previous chapter will in no way be abandoned, allegory as one of the The Faerie Queene’s authorially authorized modes reveals similarly valuable insights for the present chapter. For just as metaphors like the one of the last pilgrimage have a hermeneutic potential to linguistically transcend earthly realms, “allegory consists in giving an imagined body to the immaterial,” as C. S. Lewis put it.20 This close relation to metaphor becomes even more pertinent as early modern rhetoricians consistently construed allegory as “a Metaphore vsed throughout a whole sentence, or Oration,” “none other thing, then a contynued Metaphor,” or “a long and perpetuall Metaphore.”21 In light of the transcendental potential of

20

C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love: a Study in Medieval Tradition (London: Oxford University Press, 1936; reprint, 1953), 322.

21

George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, 1589, eds. Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936; reprint, 1970), 187; Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique, fol. 93r; Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence . . . , 1st ed. (London: H. Jackson, 1577), D1r. This early modern conception is not congruent with modern theories of allegory and

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metaphors, it is thus hardly surprising that a similar, perhaps even more holistic potential can be attributed to early modern forms of allegory. This is confirmed in Verena O. Lobsien’s study on the aesthetics of the afterlife, in which she advances that the theological hermeneutics of early modern England imagined “the allegorical mode to provide access to higher things, to open up what lies ahead, and to render the invisible visible.”22 Through this early modern proximity of allegory and metaphor, The Faerie Queene is figuratively well equipped with the potential of negotiating the poet’s transcendental repertoire when approaching the afterlife via the metaphor of the last pilgrimage. To delve further into the specifically allegorical property of the poem, it is instructive to turn to both modern as well as early modern theory. George Puttenham, one of Spenser’s contemporaries, conceives of allegory in the traditional Aristotelian way as an instance in which “we speake one thing and thinke another, and that our words and our meanings meete not.”23 This can be related to Lobsien’s modern observation that allegory functions as a mechanism to create text (“speake”) and provide sense (“thinke”) at the same time. According to her, it is this twofold nature of allegory, explicitly comprising both text and sense, that enables us to recognize in a stereoscopic view the correspondences and differences of a multidimensional world.24 Puttenham, however, criticizes allegory as deceptive in that it is a “Courtly metaphor, respectively: from a modern perspective, the former is usually believed to be predicated on “an intrinsic relationship between the signifier and the signified” whereas the latter denotes “a trope in which one thing is referred to in terms of another in a way semantically inappropriate”; see Wendell V. Harris, Dictionary of Concepts in Literary Criticism and Theory (New York: Greenwood Press, 1992), 3, 222. 22

Verena O. Lobsien, Jenseitsästhetik: Literarische Räume letzter Dinge (Berlin: Berlin University Press, 2012), 83 (my translation).

23

Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, 186. For Aristotle, see Jon Whitman, Allegory: the Dynamics of an Ancient and Medieval Technique (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 264.

24

Lobsien, Jenseitsästhetik, 80–81. In this context, Lobsien speaks of a “Texterzeugungs- und Sinnstiftungsmaschine,” a mechanism generating both text and sense.

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figure . . . , the chief ringleader and captaine of all other figures” that only seems to offer a “vertue of so great efficacie as it is supposed no man can pleasantly vtter and perswade without it.”25 In his Letter to Raleigh, Spenser expects that “To some . . . this Methode will seeme displeasaunt,” but he voices preference for allegory over “all things accounted by their shows” since mere visuality is “not delightfull and pleasing to commune sense” (ll. 21–25). In this manner, Spenser’s allegorical poem forestalls Puttenham’s criticism by subscribing to the popular Ciceronian triad of teaching, delighting, and persuading.26 Not only will Spenser’s readers be taught to become gentlemen “in vertuous and gentle discipline” but his somewhat controversial allegorical mode is also designed to delight and persuade them. Dwelling a little more on the first and last part of this triad, I will demonstrate how Spenser’s poem aims to educate its readers by first misguiding them in the unmistakably multidimensional world of Faerieland to induce them later to follow the right path. At the end of this path, allegory is complemented with anagogy. Adopting the medieval doctrine of the fourfold sense of scripture, Walter R. Davis presents a method of appreciating “the polysemous or multireferential nature” of Book I through a literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical lens.27 Encapsulated mnemonically in the late thirteenth century distich—“Littera 25

Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, 186.

26

Mentioned frequently throughout Cicero’s work on rhetoric, the triad docere, delectare, movere (or flectere) is most succinctly invoked in a passage from De Optimo Genere Oratorum: “Optimus est enim orator qui dicendo animos audientium et docet et delectat et permovet. Docere debitum est, delectare honorarium, permovere necessarium.” (“The supreme orator, then, is the one whose speech instructs, delights and moves the minds of his audience. The orator is in duty bound to instruct; giving pleasure is a free gift to the audience, to move them is indispensable.”) See Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Optimo Genere Oratorum, 46 B.C., trans. H. M. Hubbell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1949; reprint, 1976), I, 3 (pp. 356–57); Brian Vickers, In Defence of Rhetoric (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988; reprint, 1990), 74. For an early modern commentary on this triad, see Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique, fol. 1v–2v.

27

Walter R. Davis, “Arthur, Partial Exegesis, and the Reader,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 18, no. 4 (1977): 554.

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gesta docet, quid credas allegoria / Moralis quid agas, quid speres anagogia”—the four senses were invoked in medieval scholastics to elucidate “literally” the events that happened, “allegorically” what should be believed, “morally” what should be done, and “anagogically” what can hence be hoped for.28 Deriving from Greek ἀνάγω (“to lead up from a lower place to a higher”), this last sense crystallizes the prophetical and hence eschatological import of biblical pericopes and thus becomes particularly relevant in any discussions of the life to come.29 Since Redcrosse’s journey is far from being fulfilled at the end of Book I, I disagree with Davis’s contention that such anagogy is successfully effected in Canto 12 as a “fulfilling prophecy.” However, as the following will show, I would subscribe to an anagogical reading of Canto 10 in which the allegorical Mercy/Contemplation episode leads to a vision of Redcrosse’s last pilgrimage. Through such allegoresis, the hero of Book I and its readers foresee a heavenly reality that literally leads him upward just as implied by the etymology of anagogy itself.30 As such, allegory and anagogy become very close and are connected through the moral sense: just as the allegorical sense provides the context for what is to be believed, the moral sense instructs what is to be done so as to tread, in an anagogical sense, the path to the afterlife.

28

Günter Stemberger et al., “Schriftauslegung,” in Theologische Realenzyklopädie, ed. Horst Balz, et al., 36 vols. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1999), 30:479.

29

For the present purposes, I am grossly simplifying; for a more nuanced account of the medieval four levels of scripture, see Mindele Anne Treip, Allegorical Poetics & the Epic: the Renaissance Tradition to “Paradise Lost” (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 1994), 12–14. The fourfold sense of scripture was still prevalent after the Reformation, but “the Protestant sense of the desperate condition of fallen men dictated a shift in emphasis from quid agas to God’s activity in us,” as Lewalski points out in her Protestant Poetics, 131. William Tyndale and William Perkins, however, famously argued that there is only one sense of scripture and that is the literal one, the other three being mere applications of the literal sense; see William Tyndale, The obedience of a Christen man . . . (Antwerp: Johannes Hoochstraten, 1528; reprint, Scolar Press, 1970), fol. 129r–130v; William Perkins, Prophetica . . . , 2nd ed. (Cambridge: John Legate, 1592), 25; William Brown Patterson, William Perkins and the Making of a Protestant England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 124.

30

On allegoresis enabling anagogy, see Stemberger et al.,“Schriftauslegung,” 479.

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WANDERING IN FAERIELAND: DEFINING THE LAST PILGRIMAGE EX NEGATIVO Faerieland abounds in opportunities to get lost, for its many byways represent a spiritual topography in which the poet juxtaposes tortuous earthly wanderings with the straight and narrow path to eternity (cf. Matt. 7:14). Once Redcrosse’s armor is described, the poet mentions just in passing the actual purpose of his knight’s quest: we learn that the “Glorious Queene of Faery lond” (I, i, 3.3) sent the knight “To proue his puissance in battell braue / . . . / Vpon his foe, a Dragon horrible and stearne” (I, i, 3.7–9). Only much later (I, vii, 43–46) is the reader told that Redcrosse’s defeating the dragon also involves rescuing Adam and Eve, the parents of his immaculate companion Una. Having mentioned Redcrosse and Una’s actual goal only cursorily, the poet, throughout Cantos 1–9, is definitely more concerned with all the distractions that interfere with the accomplishment of their objective. To take shelter from an impending tempest, the two, followed by Una’s dwarf, enter a small wood. The many “pathes and alleies wide, / With footing worne, and leading inward farr” (I, i, 7.7–8) make this grove seem like a convenient refuge. But once the storm has passed, “They cannot finde that path, which first was shown” as there were “So many pathes, so many turnings seene, / That which of them to take, in diuerse doubt they been” (I, i, 10.4–9). This brief episode already serves as an indicator of the program of (dis-)orientation to be established in the cantos to come. In their utter disorientation within this “wandering wood” (I, i, 13.6), the trio ends up taking the path “that beaten seemd most bare” (I, i, 11.3), which leads them straight to “Errours den” (I, i, 13.6). The obvious allegorical message here is that losing track of the right path and conveniently choosing the most apparent one inevitably leads to Error. There may, however, be an opportunity to find one’s way back to the right path, as the episode will show, if one identifies and defeats evil, even if only temporarily. As regards the Ciceronian triad, readers are thus not only taught to avoid paths that lead to Error, but they will also find delight in the defeat of evil and are consequently persuaded to follow the only right path on their spiritual journeys that will at one point become their last pilgrimage to eternity. By invoking this ontological metaphor of the Christian journey or pilgrimage, Spenser participates in a long spiritual tradition that can be traced

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back to the Patristic writings of early Christian theologians and their immediate debts to Scripture, in particular to the Pentateuch, the Pauline epistles, and the Letter to Hebrews (see previous chapter and the Introduction).31 In his oft-quoted article “From Homo Erro to Homo Viator,” Paul Grimley Kuntz demonstrates that Books I–IX of Augustine’s autobiographical Confessions are a precise account of how wrong turns epitomize man’s spiritual journey through life, and Kuntz rightly infers that they serve as “an inventory of all possible kinds of error.”32 Only after his conversion and baptism (Books VIII & IX) does Augustine become a homo viator, a man on the right path, which allows him to sing to God like a pilgrim on his way to the New Jerusalem.33 In a similar Augustinian mode, The Faerie Queene presents 31

Dyas, Pilgrimage in Medieval English Literature, 27–36. It is generally safe to assume that Spenser possessed copies of and knew Augustine’s major work well; see Andrew Hadfield, Edmund Spenser: a Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 228. Moreover, the wide dissemination of Augustine’s work in post-Reformation Europe, amounting to about five hundred editions by the end of the sixteenth century, is again reaffirmed in Arnoud S. Q. Visser, Reading Augustine in the Reformation: the Flexibility of Intellectual Authority in Europe, 1500–1620 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 5.

32

Paul Grimley Kuntz, “Augustine: from Homo Erro to Homo Viator,” in Itinerarium: the Idea of Journey; a collection of papers given at the Fifteenth International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, Michigan, May 1980, ed. Leonard J. Bowman (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 1983), 44.

33

The intensity of Augustine’s prayer merits a longer quote: “and may I enter into my chamber, and sing there a love-song unto thee, mourning with groans that cannot be expressed, and remembering Jerusalem my mother; and thyself that ruleth over it, the Enlightener, the Father, the Guardian, the Husband, the chaste and strong Delight, the solid Joy of it, and all good things that be unspeakable; yea, all at once, because the only sovereign and true Good of it.” See Augustine, Confessions, c. 397–400 A.D., trans. William Watts in 1631, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1912; reprint, 1970–77), bk. 12, ch. 16, (p. 2:323). For ease of reference, I avoid quoting from the original edition and use one that modernized the spelling of Watts’s translation. The Latin original is even more telling: “et intrem in cubile meum et cantem tibi amatoria, gemens

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Redcrosse as a lowly knight-errant to later identify him as a righteous pilgrim, a homo viator, even a proleptic Protestant saint.34 Such superior homines viatores enter a quest for a “supreme self,” as Nievergelt contends, which “we can never quite be but can only approach asymptotically, until the eschatological reunion with the divine is finally effected in the City of God towards which we all travel.”35 This almost-but-never-quite-there pattern will be shown to be both spiritually and didactically significant in Book I, in which Redcrosse, the personified virtue of holiness, envisions but does not actually embark on his last pilgrimage within the parameters of Spenser’s epic. This transformation from a homo erro to a homo viator of sorts is already encapsulated and foreshadowed in the episode in which Redcrosse defeats Error. As Redcrosse enters Error’s den, the knight is able to discern Error thanks to his “glistering armor” that “made / A litle glooming light, much like a shade, / By which he saw the vgly monster plaine” (I, i, 14.4–6). In this fallen world of Faerieland, it is precisely the knight’s traditionally charged armor that qua its association with righteousness, salvation, and spirituality (cf. Eph. 6:14–17) illuminates, albeit dimly, Error’s den and thereby sheds light on its heliophobic denizen (I, i, 16.7–9). In having the light shine only dimly, Spenser probably alludes to the fact that this is still the very beginning of Redcrosse’s wanderings and that the putting on of the full “armour inenarrabilis gemitus in peregrinatione mea et recordans Hierusalem extento in eam sursum corde, Hierusalem patriam meam, Hierusalem matrem meam,…” (my emphasis). On the centrality of this Augustinian view of human life, that “we are all peregrini, souls on peregrinatio,” see Robert J. O’Connell, Soundings in St. Augustine’s Imagination (New York: Fordham University Press, 1994), 69–94, particularly 72. 34

In this regard, Florence Sandler rightly observes that Redcrosse is “more errant than many” of his medieval precursors, which registers an even more significant contrast to his later identification as England’s patron saint; see Florence Sandler, “The Faerie Queene: an Elizabethan Apocalypse,” in The Apocalypse in English Renaissance Thought and Literature: Patterns, Antecedents and Repercussions, ed. C. A. Patrides and Joseph A. Wittreich (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 150.

35

Nievergelt, Allegorical Quests, 12

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of light” (as in Rom. 13:12) is yet to come.36 Seeing “the vgly monster plaine,” Redcrosse is confronted with a creature that is “Halfe like a serpent horribly displaide, / But th’other halfe did womans shape retaine” (I, i, 14.6– 8). Error here is depicted as a breeding chimera that marries both the snake as a symbol for the devil with the figure of the woman as the one who first fell prey to the former’s temptation in the Garden of Eden (cf. Gen. 3:1–6). The “thousand yong ones . . . / Sucking vpon her poisonous dugs” (I, i, 15.5– 6) point to the fact that the sinful union embodied in Error procreates autogamously. The allegory, generating both text and sense (as Lobsien has it above), could not be clearer: the most beaten path among many other tortuous ones leads to a monstrosity that epitomizes sinfulness as perilously selfpreserving and infinitely epidemic. When Redcrosse first starts fighting the monster, he fails spectacularly and effectively assumes the role of a homo erro as he succumbs to Error’s force, “That hand or foot to stir he stroue in vaine” (I, i, 18.8). Significantly, it takes Una to remind the knight to “Add faith vnto your force, and be not faint: / Strangle her, els she sure will strangle thee” (I, i, 19.4–5).37 Indeed, whether through faith or force or both, Redcrosse starts strangling the monster, who then regurgitates the oft-quoted “great lumps of flesh” and “vomit full of books and papers” (I, i, 20.3–6). A few stanzas later, Error finally loses her head as Redcrosse attacks the monster with a second blow of “more then manly force” (I, i, 24.6).38 After Una approaches the knight and names 36

The dim light also stands in contrast to Arthur’s brightly shining armor at I, viii,

37

Richard Mallette, in my opinion, rightly argues that Redcrosse merely “yields

19–21 and II, xi, 17.1–2. obedience, not to the ‘faith’ offered in Una’s first line of advice, which is cryptic in any event but instead to the merely physical imperatives of the second half of her advice (‘strangle her’)”; see Mallette, Spenser and the Discourses of Reformation England, 30. I would, however, add that it is Una’s mentioning of faith that adds a decisive element to Redcrosse’s force which would otherwise remain brutish and not spiritually informed; put differently, even if it is only with a tad of faith, Error can be defeated. 38

That Error’s offspring drink of their dying mother’s blood has often and plausibly been read as a parody of the Eucharist. It does, however, also point to the fact that Error cannot be defeated that easily in a fallen world and that little

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him worthy of his armor, they eventually find their way out of the wandering wood. The end of this early episode gestures toward the true nature of what it could mean to become a homo viator: to leave your homo erro behind in the wandering wood with all its byways and to keep to the one straight path that leads away from Error.39 However, the epic narrator’s comment that the two “Ne euer would to any byway bend” (I, i, 28.4) is, of course, deeply ironic as similar paths to error and sinfulness repeat themselves in the episodes that follow: neither Una’s nor Redcrosse’s paths have been fully straightened yet. In the episodes to come, readers are repeatedly confronted with wanderings and slow movements that thwart spiritual travelers’ adherence to the right path. Later described as an incredibly disoriented wanderer and over the course of Book I characterized as “the arch image-maker, the fabricator of dreams, also the arch-magus or primal magician,”40 the villainous Archimago steps across the plain while “All the way he prayed . . . / And often knockt his brest, as one that did repent” (I, i, 29.8–9).41 Here, he is first presented as an “arch-imager” of his own self and seems to be a devout hermit, but “Bidding his beades all day” to say “an Aue-Mary after and before” (I, i, 30.7 and 35.9) and the telling of “Saintes and Popes” (I, i, 35.8) already alert Spenser’s Protestant readers to the potential threat of this wanderer’s old faith. Such stereotypes are confirmed even more explicitly in Canto 6, in which the magician’s wanderings are more distinctly associated with his evidently Errors still find nourishment in their dead mother even if this means that they have to resort to matriphagy. 39

Almost all of the episodes described in this chapter could be read using the fourfold sense of Scripture. In the Error episode, this would mean that the story tells us that Redcrosse fights a monster by name of Error (literal), that erroneousness procreates ad infinitum even when defeated (allegorical), that one should fight and escape such vice to stay on the right path (moral), and, finally, that adhering to the right path lifts one up to eternity (anagogical).

40

Douglas Brooks-Davies, “Archimago,” in The Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. A. C. Hamilton, et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 53.

41

In his gloss, Hamilton suggests rightly that this is a reference to the penitent publican in Luke 18:13.

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Catholic emblems. Separated from Redcrosse, Una encounters together with Satyrane “A weary wight forwandring by the way” (I, vi, 34.3, my emphasis), who later becomes known as Archimago,42 and the description of his futile movements merges aptly with his characterization as a pilgrim who is headed for Santiago de Compostela rather than a celestial destination: A silly man, in simple weeds forworne, And soild with dust of the long dried way; His sandales were with toilsome trauell torne, And face all tand with scorching sunny ray, As he had traueild many a sommers day, Through boyling sands of Arabie and Ynde; And in his hand a Iacobs staffe, to stay His weary limbs vpon: and eke behind, His scrip did hang, in which his needments he did bind.

(I, vi, 35)

Later referred to as “the Pilgrim” (I, vi, 38.1) and much later as “that false Pilgrim” (I, vi, 48.1), Archimago here embodies the stereotypical futility of place pilgrimages that were inveighed against as unmeritorious in Protestant England.43 While his “Iacobs staffe” points to his supposed destination in 42

The rare verb to forwander is defined by the OED as “To weary oneself with wandering; to wander far and wide” and only occurs a second time in The Faerie Queene to describe Scudamore’s “forwandred steed” (III, xi, 20.6).

43

Apart from the passages quoted in the Introduction, see also the third part of the “Homilie Against the Perill of Idolatrie, and Superfluous Decking of Churches,” which is very clear on what Protestants were to think of place pilgrimages: “Yea, and furthermore the madnesse of all men professing the religion of Christe, nowe by the space of a sorte of hundred yeares, and yet euen in our tyme in so great light of the Gospell verye manye running on heapes by sea and lande, to the great losse of their tyme, expence and waste of their goodes, destitution of their wyues, children, and families, and daunger of their own bodies and liues, to Compostile, Rome, Hierusalem, and other farre countries, to visite dumbe and dead stockes and stones, doth sufficiently proue the pronesse of mans corrupt nature to the seeking of idolles once set vp, and the worshipping of them.” See John Jewel, ed., The Second Tome of Homilees, . . . (London:

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Western Spain, his torn sandals and his excessively tanned face suggest that he must have taken many wrong turns to end up in the extremely distant “sands of Arabie and Ynde.” Literally erring about at the other end of the world, this false pilgrim has gone far beyond the periphery of Western Christendom, and his east-bound journey, away from Compostela, testifies to his many erroneous turns. In this manner, Archimago’s movements are satirized as place pilgrimages leading perilously away into the wilderness of a distant heathen territory. Accordingly, the arch-image-maker’s staff and scrip do not metaphorically encapsulate Protestant doctrine as in Raleigh’s poem, but here they serve as “images that distract us from the straight and narrow way” and deter us from following “the inward, scripturally guided path to salvation,” as Anne Lake Prescott comments.44 By suggesting that such movements lead people unnecessarily astray and that such physical journeys are therefore utterly purposeless, Spenser clears the ground for later explorations of what it means to conceive of pilgrimage as an inward journey, one that leads the spiritual pilgrim to the New Jerusalem rather than to the Arabian Peninsula or to the Indian subcontinent. Spenser’s The Faerie Queene would, however, be too straightforward if purposeless wanderings were only restricted to characters who epitomize moral turpitude. As explained above, Redcrosse and Una also find themselves both at Error’s den because they have chosen the wrong, most beaten path in the wandering wood. Their lack of orientation is intensified once the two are separated from one another in Canto 2 through Archimago’s low cunning. Both now travel/travail individually and are much more susceptible to being led off course. While Duessa is probably already escorting the unsuspecting Redcrosse to the House of Pride, Una is portrayed as a

Richard Jugge and John Cawood, 1571), 134. The attribution of authorship for the homilies printed in this second volume is even more problematic than for the first one, but the Victorian editor John Griffiths assumed that the sermon on “Idolatrie” was written by Bishop John Jewel under whose auspices all the other sermons were collected; see Ashley Null, “Official Tudor Homilies,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon, ed. Hugh Adlington, Peter McCullough, and Emma Rhatigan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 360. 44

Prescott, “Spenser’s Chivalric Restoration,” 166; Tiffany, Love’s Pilgrimage, 44.

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Forsaken, wofull, solitarie mayd Far from all peoples preace, as in exile, In wildernesse and wastfull deserts strayd, To seeke her knight; . . . . . . She of nought affrayd, Through woods and wastnes wide him daily sought (I, iii, 3.2–8, my emphasis)

Although Una is utterly determined to find her knight, she is clearly “as in exile,” a state that implies, in Nievergelt’s words, “exclusion, wandering and sometimes aimlessness.”45 This sense of exile is even reinforced when, in search of Redcrosse, Una is portrayed almost like “the false Pilgrim” above as wandering from “one to other Ynd” (I, vi, 2.7) as the epic narrator’s pun on end or East/West Indies implies. Since Una is personified as Truth throughout the poem,46 one is tempted to view her submission to earthly wanderings as just another counter-intuitive element typical of Spenser’s vexed syncretism. However, Spenser is not the only one who posits that the elect do not remain unaffected by sin and death: Calvin explains in his Institutes that even the electe . . . are scattered abroad and stray in the common desert, and differ nothinge from other, sauing that they be defended by the singular mercie of God, from fallinge into the extreeme hedlong downefall of deathe.47

In this light, the foot-sore Una, as one who sprang “from heuenly race” (I, x, 8.7), is just as susceptible to the dangers waiting on her own path as is

45

Nievergelt, Allegorical Quests, 24. Though Nievergelt does not discuss the terms of exile and pilgrimage in connection with this passage, his definition of the former corresponds congruently with Spenser’s description of Una as an exile: “pilgrimage,” Nievergelt writes in comparison to exile, “is always directed towards a clearly apprehended destination, often imagined as a return to one’s homeland.”

46 47

See, for instance, the “Arguments” to Cantos 2 and 3. Calvin, Institution of Christian Religion, bk. 3, ch. 24, sec. 10; Gless, Interpretation and Theology in Spenser, 146.

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everyone else. As a result, “her innocent feet” (I, x, 9.2) are also exhausted when she enters the House of Holinesse. Just as in Calvin, who calls on “the singular mercie of God,” we are told that, in the House where Una rests her “tyred limbes” (I, x, 11.1), God’s “Mercy, well knowne ouer all” (I, x, 34.4) is allegorically effected and may possibly provide for Una a spiritual pedi-cure.48 In a similar fashion, the Redcrosse Knight roams around Faerieland. His wanderings first lead him into the hands of his interim companion Fidessa (actually the duplicitous Duessa in disguise), who, as she “is wearie of the toilsom way” herself (I, iv, 3.8), guides her new victim to the House of Pride. The “broad high way” (I, iv, 2.8) that leads to this “goodly building, brauely garnished” (I, iv, 2.6) of course corresponds to the well-used path to Error’s den (I, i, 11.3).49 As implied by the beaten path to Error, this broad way takes “Great troupes of people” to this sensual palace, “But few returned” (I, iv, 3.1–3). The spectacle of Lucifera and her pageant of the Seven Deadly Sins as well as Redcrosse’s admiration for this place (I, iv, 15.6–7) have received exhaustive critical attention,50 which makes another extensive commentary unnecessary; one detail, however, needs to be fleshed out. In the House of Pride, movement and progress do not rank very high. Lucifera, “Queene” of the House of Pride, is depicted on a progressiveseeming “coche” (I, iv, 17.1), which is “drawne of six vnequall beasts” (I, iv, 18.1) each identified as the deadly sins of Idlenesse, Gluttony, Lechery, 48

On the tradition of (sacred) footprints in early modern England and Ireland, see Alexandra Walsham, “Footprints and Faith: Religion and the Landscape in Early Modern Britain and Ireland,” in God’s Bounty? The Churches and the Natural World, ed. Peter Clarke and Tony Claydon (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2010), 169–83.

49

The imagery of the broad way is not limited to Book I: on his way to the Cave of Mammon, for instance, Sir Guyon passes “a beaten broad high way” and faces “internall Payne” and “tumultuous Strife” (II, vii, 21.3–7), and a “broad gate” leads to “a sturdie villein” called Disdayne (II, vii, 40).

50

See, for instance, Chew, The Pilgrimage of Life, 93–113; Cullen, Infernal Triad, 40–47; John M. Crosset and Donald V. Stump, “Spenser’s Inferno: the Order of the Seven Deadly Sins at the Palace of Pride,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 14 (1984): 203–18.

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Auarice, Enuy, and Wrath. Undoubtedly, Spenser “is careful to set Pride apart as the ruler of all the others,” as John M. Crosset and Donald V. Stump observe.51 Strikingly, however, Pride does not dictate the rhythm of her hauling entourage: this leading role befalls “sluggish Idlenesse,” who “all the rest did guyde” (I, iv, 18.5–6). Thus, in his order of harnessing, Spenser seems to be particularly anxious to express how one is led astray if pulled by Idlenesse. The poet, moreover, tells us that Idlenesse has only “little redd” in the monkish breviary that he holds in one hand, “For of deuotion he had little care” (I, iv, 19.2–3). This distinct lack of devotion is probably also the reason why he can hardly “vphold his heauie hedd, / To looken, whether it were night or day” (I, iv, 19.5–6). Such a representation of Idlenesse’s heavy and bent head may even be a reference to Martin Luther’s well-known formula of the “homo incurvatus in se,” signifying a complete and utter state of sinfulness with man curved in on himself, unable to look forward or upward.52 Idleness, in other words, constitutes a major impediment to anything heavenward bound. It thus comes as no surprise that Idlenesse’s way cannot be anything but “very euill ledd”: he is the one that “had guiding of the way, / That knew not, whether right he went, or else astray” (I, iv, 19.7–9). Clearly, Spenser alerts his readers here that the deadly sins (including Pride) are first and foremost drawn by Idlenesse, a beast that causes his followers to wander wherever his sluggish disorientation takes them. The sluggishness of this unholy procession is even further underscored as we learn that Sathan sits on a beam on top of the wagon and is equipped “with a smarting whip in hand, / With which he forward lasht the laesy teme” (I, iv, 36.2–3). Consequently, if one is guided by Idlenesse, disorientation and slothfulness follow suit which even invites the devil to crack his whip on the slowly moving pageant. The message here clearly is that one needs to keep to the narrow path that merges ultimately into the last pilgrimage lest antithetic Idlenesse and the other vices of his slothful train prevail. But this is a lesson Redcrosse still has to learn.

51

Crosset and Stump, “Spenser’s Inferno,” 204.

52

For a detailed account of Luther’s idea of the homo curvatus in se as a definition of sinfulness, see Matt Jenson, The Gravity of Sin: Augustine, Luther and Barth on ‘homo incurvatus in se’ (London: T&T Clark, 2006), particularly 72–92.

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The dwarf, embodying Reason that invariably lags slightly behind, 53 brings Redcrosse back to his senses and “made ensample of their mournfull sight” (I, v, 52.2); the knight’s arduous escape, however, shows how difficult it is to leave behind the paths of sinfulness. No longer able to abide the wretchedness in the House of Pride, the Knight of Holinesse absconds from this sinful palace through a backdoor. Moving away, he stumbles across the dead sinners who were unable to break loose from the human depravity compounded in Lucifera’s palace: Scarse could he footing find in that fowle way, For many corses, like a Lay-stall Of murdred men which therein strowed lay, Without remorse, or decent funeral: Which al through that great Princesse pride did fall And came to shamefull end. And them besyde Forth ryding vnderneath the castell wall, A Donghill of dead carcases he spyde, The dreadfull spectacle of that sad house of Pryde.

(I, v, 53)

This stanza not only discloses the fatal consequences of any involvement at this place of sinfulness, but it also points to the challenges of retreating from it. The fact that Redcrosse can hardly find footing on his way from Lucifera’s palace points to a vexed spiritual condition: not only is he so tainted with sin that he can no longer find the right path, but all the sinfulness around him makes matters even worse. To escape this place, Redcrosse eventually has no choice but to place his wandering foot on Lucifera’s decaying victims: this slow form of progress indicates that the sinfulness of the dead even deters the living from tearing loose from their sinful yoke. Because of their sinful end, the individuals that comprise the miry mass are not eligible for “remorse or decent funeral” (I, v, 53.4), and the “Donghill of dead carcases” (I, v, 53.8) emerging from the bottom of the castle signifies that there are many more infected wanderers to come. In addition, Spenser’s refusal to unfold any plan of redemption for Lucifera’s victims, on the one hand, underlines the gravity and deadly consequences of sin and supports a Protestant 53

Cullen, Infernal Triad, 30.

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doctrine in which not everyone is entitled to belong to the elect.54 On the other hand, it gives the poet an opportunity to prototype a Slough of Despond narrative consisting of the ever growing, miry massa damnata and a prospectively righteous pilgrim who, although with great difficulty, finds footing in it.55 Despite the knight’s successful escape from the House of Pride, his sojourn at this place of sinfulness has had a decisive effect on his spiritual armor: weary and resting “foreby a fountaine syde,” he has been “Disarmed all of yron-coted Plate” (I, vii, 2.7–8). As Hamilton’s note informs us, this may be inspired by Ariosto’s Ruggiero or Tasso’s Rinaldo relinquishing parts of their armor.56 It may also point, I suggest, to one of Spenser’s potential medieval source texts, namely, The Pilgrimage of Human Life (1331/1355) by Guillaume de Deguileville. In this French allegory, the pilgrim, “eager to go to the city of Jerusalem,” exchanges the “burdensome” armor originally provided by Lady Grace in favor of a pilgrim’s scrip and staff while the armor is carried for the pilgrim by Grace’s maidservant Memory (just like Spenser’s dwarfish Reason below).57 Irrespective of Spenser’s actual source, a disarmed miles christianus is symptomatic of a spiritual state to which Calvin alerts his congregation: “there is none of vs all that armeth himselfe as he should doo,” he preaches and admonishes that if “wee hang vp our armour 54 55

See, for instance, Calvin, Institution of Christian Religion, bk. 3, ch. 21. In Bunyan’s allegory, Christian struggles to find footing in the miry Slough of Despond until Help assists and tells him that “there are by the direction of the Law-giver, certain good and substantiall Steps, placed even through the midst of this Slough; but at such time as this place doth much spue out its filth, as it doth against change of weather, these steps are hardly seen; or if they be, Men through the dizziness of their heads, steps besides; and then they are bemired to purpose, notwithstanding the steps be there; but the ground is good when they are once got in at the Gate”; see Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, 17.

56

Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, 1532, ed. Robert McNulty, trans. John Harington in 1591 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), vi, 24; Torquato Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered, 1581, trans. Edward Fairfax in 1600 (New York: Capricorn Books, 1963), xiv, 59.

57

Guillaume de Deguileville, The Pilgrimage of Human Life, 1331/1355, trans. Eugene Clasby (New York: Garland, 1992), 3, 58–66 (ll. 30–40, ll. 4341–4950).

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vppon the wall,” it is not “any maruell if wee bee taken vnwares.” The fight against evil, Calvin contends, can only be won if one is to climb back into God’s armor again: “therefore if wee desyre too walke in the fear of our God: wee must bee armed, that wee may bee ready too battell, for our enemye wyll neuer let vs rest.”58 At this point in his Legend, the Knight of Holinesse is doing the exact opposite: laying down his armor, cooling off his “sweatie forehead in the breathing wynd,” and listening to how the birds “Doe chaunt sweet musick, to delight his mynd” (I, vii, 3.1–5), he becomes an easy target for all the hidden dangers in Faerieland. This is confirmed as soon as Redcrosse starts drinking of a fountain whose pagan history of inducing faintness and dullness provides yet another portentous sign (I, vii, 5). When imbibing some of the deceptive “streame, as cleare as christall glas,” the knight’s “manly forces gan to fayle, / And mightie strong was turned to feeble frayle” (I, vii, 6.3–5). Since Redcrosse is no longer able to walk well either spiritually or physically, it does not take much for the approaching giant Orgoglio to seize the helpless, armor-deprived knight. “Disarmd, disgraste, and inwardly dismayde” (I, vii, 11.6), he soon finds himself in his opponent’s dungeon. In this episode, two elements distance the knight from the right path. On the one hand, Redcrosse’s drinking from the pagan stream can be read as a metonymy for the considerable spiritual deceleration on what is meant to be a swift race to the New Jerusalem: the fountain as an epitome of pagan idleness hampers the knight’s spiritual progress. On the other hand, laying off his spiritually charged armor makes him more vulnerable to the evil assaults here personified in the proud and disdainful Orgoglio. To reiterate Calvin’s phrase, it is indeed “no marvel” that the unprotected knight loses the fight against the giant. All is not lost, however: after the fight, belated Reason, aptly personified as a dwarf, collects what is left behind of the knight’s “mightie Armour” (I, vii, 19.5), thus protecting and preserving its soteriological signifiers. Although the Redcrosse Knight is soon freed from Orgoglio’s dungeon—notably to a great extent thanks to Arthur’s arrival in valiant armor— the hero of Book I does not reach the nadir of his lengthy homo erro wanderings until he enters Despair’s cave. At Sir Terwin’s behest, Redcrosse (still probably not terribly well-armed) embarks on his next adventure

58

Calvin, The Sermons of M. Iohn Caluin . . . Ephesians, fol. 324r–324v.

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against “A man of hell, that calls himselfe Despayre” (I, ix, 28.4). The harbingers could not be any less foreboding: Terwin tells at great length of Despair’s manipulative and life-depriving rhetoric, and the way to his cave abounds in ominous signs of ghastly owls and fruitless trees (I, ix, 28–34). Nevertheless, Redcrosse, boastfully unaware of his vulnerability, is determined to confront this “cursed man, low sitting on the ground” (I, xi 35.2). The following episode of Despair’s lengthy but cunning rhetorical skill has often been identified as homiletic parlance parodying New Testament commonplaces and Pauline doctrine in particular. Among others, Patrick Cullen links Despair’s line “Is not his [God’s] lawe, Let euery sinner die” (I, ix, 47.5) to Romans 6:23, “For the wages of sinne is death,” and shows how Despair deliberately omits the rest of the verse, “the gifte of God is eternal life through Iesus Christ our Lord.”59 Similarly, Richard Mallette observes that Despair “suppresses half the text” in “his warping of Scripture,” and that he only embraces one of two functions attributed to sermons by early modern theorists: while completely withholding the “forgiveness of sins,” he belabors the necessity of repentance in light of “the depravity of human nature.”60 Thus, Despair proves not only a skillful rhetorician but in doing so also a heavy censor of Protestant doctrine. Further leading his reductio ad absurdum, Despair argues for a meritorious hastening of Redcrosse’s own last pilgrimage. Well aware of man’s itinerant state on earth, Despair opines that it is honorable to have expedited the decease of his most recent victim, now lying “All wallowd in his own yet luke-warme blood” (I, ix, 36.6). Despair’s argument for those whose feet are stuck runs thus: Who trauailes by the wearie wandring way, To come vnto his wished home in haste, And meets a flood, that doth his passage stay,

59

Cullen, Infernal Triad, 60. For a further account of Despair’s biblical echoes, see Ann E. Imbrie, “‘Playing Legerdemaine with the Scripture’: Parodic Sermons in The Faerie Queene,” English Literary Renaissance 17, no. 2 (1987): 146–50. Similar patterns are observed in Daniel W. Doerksen, “‘All the Good is God’s’: Predestination in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Book I,” Christianity & Literature 32, no. 3 (1983): 14.

60

Mallette, Spenser and the Discourses of Reformation England, 38–39.

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Is not great grace to helpe him ouer past, Or free his feet, that in the myre sticke fast?

(I, ix, 39.1–5)

In other words, since man on his “wearie wandring way” is a stranger and pilgrim with “no continuing citie,” it would be an act of grace to help him across to the other side where he no longer needs to “seke one [city] to come” (Heb. 11:13 and 13:14). The lifeless wight next to Despair serves as his quasi-testimony for such a spiritually ill-advised undertaking: He there does now enioy eternall rest And happy ease, which thou doest want and craue, And further from it daily wanderest

(I, ix, 40.1–3)

Deliberately expunging any advice against suicide from his “homily,”61 Despair continues his argument by reminding Redcrosse of his heavily meandering ways and tells him that it is too late to return to the right path anyway: For he, that once hath missed the right way, The further he doth goe, the further he doth stray. Then doe no further goe, no further stray, But here ly down, and to thy rest betake, Th’ill to preuent, that life ensewen may.

(I, ix, 43.8–44.3)

To prevent Redcrosse from further spiritual disorientation, the only possibility—according to Despair—is to take a suicidal shortcut to leave behind “Feare, sicknesse, age, losse, labour, sorrow, strife” (I, ix, 44.6). Obviously, Despair cleverly withholds that the Augustinian tradition would require the knight to become a homo viator first and that such shortcuts to the afterlife 61

Apart from the sixth commandment in Exod. 20:13 and Judas hanging himself in Mt. 27:3–6, the Bible remains rather silent on the issue of suicide, a lacuna which possibly fostered the proliferation and popularity of literature condemning suicide as heinous throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth century; see Michael MacDonald and Terence R. Murphy, Sleepless Souls: Suicide in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 31–41.

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would in any case run contrary to the pilgrimage-through-life metaphor. Convinced that “Death is the end of woes” (I, ix, 47.9), the hero of Book I is saved by Una just in time before he can stab himself in his hopeless contemptus mundi frenzy. In an act of condensed theological acumen, she delivers to him a stanza-long sermon that Mallette classifies as a doctrinal, redargutive, admonitory, corrective, and consolatory homily,62 which identifies her as Redcrosse’s trailblazer to the House of Holinesse and thus to the vision of his last pilgrimage. All of the episodes just discussed testify to the poem’s strong aversion to misguided movement and the existential consequences of wrong-headed wanderings. In the wandering wood, the poet makes clear that taking the wrong, most well-beaten path inevitably leads to Error but that defeating Error can also reveal a new and straight(er) one. Such straightness is conspicuously absent from the characterization of Archimago as a chief wanderer: not only do his rosary beads and his tales of popes suggest that the magicianclad-as-hermit circumvents and therefore errs about Protestant doctrine, but the marks of his incredibly lengthy pilgrimage to the periphery of the known world also signal that his wanderings are futile, misguided, and hence reprehensible. Moreover, Una’s (almost) solitary divagation shows that, in a fallen world, even Truth herself sometimes strays off despite the fact that we would expect her to keep to the straight and narrow. Additionally, the above has shown that the righteous path lies far away from the House of Pride, whose broad way attracts the spiritually weak in throngs to succumb to Lucifera and her pageant’s indolence and slothfulness. As Redcrosse’s narrow escape indicates, overcoming vice involves plodding through the unpleasant mire made up of the lifeless who took the wrong path. This hostility against all sorts of wanderings is again epitomized when Duessa is stripped of her garments and when her “feete most monstrous were in sight”: here, deformed feet may not only signal diabolical presence63 but, on an allegorical level, also suggest that it must indeed be hard to walk righteously on the straight and narrow path with one foot “like an Eagles claw” and “The other like a 62

Mallette, Spenser and the Discourses of Reformation England, 41.

63

Luther Link, The Devil: a Mask without a Face (London: Reaktion Books, 1995), 44–48, 68, 72–73; Darren Oldrige, The Devil in Tudor and Stuart England, 2nd ed. (Stroud: History Press, 2010), 82.

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beares vneauen paw” (I, viii, 48.5–8). Unsurprisingly, Duessa is soon seen to “wander waies vnknowne” (I, viii, 49.9). What is even worse than slow and misguided wandering, however, is no progress at all which is personified in Despair. Self-absorbed by his warped contemptus mundi doctrine, he is one of the few in Faerieland who is “low sitting on the ground” and not moving at all (I, ix, 35.2).64 Such a metaphorical eschewing of movement, I would argue, leads to Despair’s own suicide, a death he incited many of his victims to inflict on themselves and one that precludes Christian blessing. The purpose of this extensive and extremely negative portrayal of aberrance is to quite a degree a didactic one. On a very basic level, a Legend of Holinesse needs to discriminate unmistakably the unholy from the holy in order to partially meet Spenser’s “generall end” of The Faerie Queene “to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline” (Letter to Raleigh, ll. 7–8). To achieve this, the six extant Books of The Faerie Queene each provide one virtue and one knight that personifies it: “Holinesse” and Redcrosse, “Temperaunce” and Sir Guyon, “Chastity” and Britomart, etc.65 As Louis A. Montrose has famously advanced, This process of fashioning is at once the book’s subject and its object: by the rhetorically effective fashioning of artificial persons, the poet may arouse in his readers a process of emulation; the fashioning of the text and in the text may induce a refashioning in and of its audience.66

It is from this perspective that Spenser’s didactic program needs to be considered. The first virtue pertains exclusively to fashioning the gentleman’s

64

These dangers of not moving at all are nicely anticipated at the beginning of Canto 7, where Redcrosse himself is resting foolishly and extremely vulnerable to all sorts of evil.

65

It is not possible, however, to fully reconcile Aristotle’s “twelue private morall vertues” (l. 19) that Spenser mentions with the philosopher’s Nichomachean Ethics; see Ronald A. Horton, “Virtue,” in The Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. A. C. Hamilton, et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 720.

66

Louis A. Montrose, “The Elizabethan Subject and the Spenserian Text,” in Literary Theory/Renaissance Texts, ed. Patricia A. Parker and David Quint (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 318.

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spirituality, which, as I have shown above, includes to a considerable extent a preoccupation with deviations from Holinesse. By extension, as other “young knights reading The Faerie Queene” stray from the right path, they can “learn from Redcrosse’s example,” as Theresa M. DiPasquale rightly comments.67 Or put differently, Spenser’s proto-gentlemanly readers have to learn to discern which vices belong to the “broad way” that leads to the House of Pride and which virtuous behavior ensures that they remain on the right path. Similar to Erasmus’s Enchiridion Militis Christiani (translated ambiguously as a Dagger/Manual of the Christian Warrior), Spenser thus presents Holinesse as something that can be learned and that is, in Florence Sandler’s words, “not simply imputed.”68 The virtue of Holinesse cannot just be received, but as Maureen Quilligan advances, “the reader’s participation in the fiction must be active and self-conscious, and it will ultimately take the form of gradual self-discovery.”69 As demonstrated in the above, the first nine cantos already point Spenser’s readers ex negativo to such a self-discovery of Holinesse by teaching them how to avoid the many ways and byways that lead to the House of Pride or to Despair’s cave and to similar places and states of sinfulness. Canto 10 will now present the House of Holinesse as the only place where Spenser’s Redcrosse and his readers are not only taught by positive example but where they find delight and persuasion: here, the virtue of Book I can be sought and found.

67

Theresa M. DiPasquale, “Anti-Court Satire, Religious Polemic, and the Many Faces of Antichrist: an Intertextual Reading of Donne’s ‘Satyre 4’ and Spenser’s Faerie Queene,” Studies in Philology 112, no. 2 (2015): 273.

68

Desiderius Erasmus, Enchiridion Militis Christiani: an English Version, 1504, ed. Anne M. O’Donnell, trans. William Tyndale in 1534 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981); Sandler, “The Faerie Queene: an Elizabethan Apocalypse,” 153.

69

Maureen Quilligan, The Language of Allegory: Defining the Genre (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), 226.

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THE HOUSE OF HOLINESSE AS A SPRINGBOARD TO ETERNITY? Episodes like Archimago’s false devotion (I, i, 29–35), his soteriologically undesirable place pilgrimage (I, vi, 34–48), and the extremely negative depiction of Idlenesse and his monkish signifiers (I, iv, 19) confront Spenser’s readers directly with remnants of the “old faith” that are inimical to progress on the right path to the New Jerusalem. Redcrosse and Una often succeed more or less in escaping them, which may well be due to the fact that both already participate among the elect, albeit with varying degrees of awareness: Redcrosse will soon be identified as England’s patron saint, and Una is sprung “from heuenly race” (I, x, 8.7). Although they figure among the elect, the couple is not exempt from sinful wanderings but is still protected by God’s grace as expressed in Calvin above. Despite this Protestant gesture, the poem is still very much infused with references to times past. Spenser’s deliberate use of archaic language has received ample critical commentary as have his many debts to earlier romance and pilgrimage narratives.70 However, much of what is dialectically negotiated along Spenser’s lines of old and new faith should not only be conceived of as a critique of medieval spirituality, but can also be read in light of England’s very slowly and contingently developing Protestant ideology.71 Patrick Collinson famously paints a picture of Elizabethan England as “a Protestant nation containing deep tension and potential confusion within an outward shell of consensus” in which

70

See, for instance, Dorothy Stephens, “Spenser’s Language(s): Linguistic Theory and Poetic Diction,” in The Oxford Handbook of Edmund Spenser, ed. Richard A. McCabe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), particularly 371– 72; Andrew King, “Spenser, Chaucer, and Medieval Romance,” in The Oxford Handbook of Edmund Spenser, ed. Richard A. McCabe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), particularly 561–67; Cullen, Infernal Triad, 3–21.

71

Gless, Interpretation and Theology in Spenser, 10; Christopher Haigh, “Introduction,” in The English Reformation Revised, ed. Christopher Haigh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 6–7; John Guy, Tudor England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 294–95.

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“the principles of Protestantism” did not subvert the old medieval order but “provided a fresh rationale and foundation.”72 This understanding of a dynamic early Church of England is to be found in a number of literary studies on Spenser, which acknowledge that the theological landscape of Elizabethan England was not necessarily predicated on the rock solid doctrine postulated in the Thirty-Nine Articles or the Homilies. Gless and Mallette, for example, each show how, in the second half of the sixteenth century, the Protestant camp was not only invested with doctrinal heterodoxy and theological pluralism, but that such heterodox thought was often also accompanied by “subterranean Catholicism.”73 These and similar tensions surface throughout Book I of The Faerie Queene, in which the framework of a “Legend” recalls medieval hagiographical writings74 while the Knight of Holinesse evokes the image of the miles christianus that was used both before and after the Reformation. Despite being deeply rooted in what is artificially referred to as “the Middle Ages” today, the figure of the Redcrosse Knight, nonetheless, epitomizes the role of a periodical and doctrinal Grenzgänger fashioned along the lines of a new Protestant ideology.75

72

Patrick Collinson, “The Elizabethan Church and the New Religion,” in The Reign of Elizabeth I, ed. Christopher Haigh (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1985), 176, 180.

73

Gless, Interpretation and Theology in Spenser, 10–16; Mallette, Spenser and the Discourses of Reformation England, 9. The parameters of this chapter do not allow for a detailed consideration of how thoroughly Protestant doctrine was infused into believers’ spiritual lives, but Collinson points us to cases around the turn of the seventeenth century that show, for instance, how the doctrine of justification by faith seems to have fallen on deaf ears: “Asked ‘whether it were possible for a man to live so uprightlie that by well doeing he might winne heaven’, there was hardly a man who failed to answer in the affirmative: ‘that a man might be saved by his owne weldoing, and that he trusted he did so live that by God’s grace hee shoulde obtaine everlasting life, by serving of God and good prayers etc.’” See Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants: the Church in the English Society, 1559–1625 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 202.

74

Chapman, Patrons and Patron Saints, 22–33.

75

Nievergelt, Allegorical Quests, 4, 167–70.

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It would be beyond the scope of this chapter on Spenser’s conception of the last pilgrimage to eternity to provide a full account of these pre- and postReformation negotiations in The Faerie Queene; nevertheless, it is crucial to acknowledge the House of Holinesse in Canto 10 as a pivotal episode in which these doctrinal tensions coalesce around Redcrosse’s vision of his very own journey to the New Jerusalem. Most of the spiritual workings that are carried out in this holy place hark back in one way or another to medieval piety, but in almost all cases a very Protestant twist is added. Furthermore, particular weight is attached to this antepenultimate canto in that this part of the poem attracted much more detailed annotations in one of the extant copies of The Faerie Queene. This late sixteenth-century reader, by the name of John Dixon, even glosses the “auncient house not far away” (I, x, 3.1) somewhat prematurely as the New Jerusalem, thereby underscoring its protoeschatological import.76 While the House of Holinesse does indeed figure as an indispensable part of Redcrosse’s conversion narrative, the New Jerusalem will only be revealed as an enticing vision after he has been spiritually restored. At the end of Canto 9, Redcrosse’s spiritual destitution could not be any worse after his attempted suicide (I, x, 2.2–6), but there is hope for “that sowle-diseased knight” (I, x, 24.1). Unlike the false Duessa, Una takes him to the House of Holinesse, governed by Caelia and her allegorical entourage, who are “Renowmd throughout the world for sacred lore, / And pure vnspotted life” (I, x, 3.2–3). As Tiffany notes, the unwavering proximity of this House “bears out the earlier cantos’ representations of travel itself as erroneous wandering from home” and shows that “salvation is not a place to be journeyed to, but a spiritual condition that is always at hand.”77 Put differently, looking for salvation in “Arabie and Ynde” is not purposeful, but Canto 10 teaches and, in all likelihood, persuades Spenser’s readers to

76

John Dixon, The First Commentary on “The Faerie Queene”, ed. Graham Hough (Folcroft: Folcroft Library Editions, 1978), 6. Of course, this reflects only the perception of one individual in 1597, but, as King points out, Dixon’s “notes are quite valuable for the sense that they provide of how at least one Protestant contemporary understood Spenser’s work,” see his Spenser’s Poetry and the Reformation Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 72.

77

Tiffany, Love’s Pilgrimage, 58.

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achieve salvation through a process of scrutinous internal cleansing to identify their spiritual journey to heaven. At first, Una and Redcrosse find the House locked “For feare of many foes,” but when they knock at the door, Humiltá opens swiftly to let them pass through the “straight and narrow . . . way” (I, x, 5.3–9). Their knocking stands for a deliberate choice of a “goodly thing,” which is “hardest to begin” (I, x, 6.1), but their endeavor is further assisted by Zele, who walks them across the “spatious court” (I x, 6.2). The obvious references to the Sermon on the Mount hardly need any commentary: the two seek the House and find it, they knock at its door and are given entry, and they will soon be given what they ask for (Matt. 7:7–8). Furthermore, this is not the broad way that leads to the idle pageant of sin as in the House of Pride. Instead, the constraints of the straight and narrow way open up to a spaciousness “Both plaine, and pleasaunt to be walked in” (I, x, 6.3). This plainness throws into sharp relief the visual extravagance in the House of Pride. What may have seemed delightful at the House of Pride is now fully reworked at the House of Holinesse: here, the poet describes walking (rather than glamorous appeal) as “pleasaunt,” thereby fully embracing the second part of the Ciceronian triad. By describing walking as pleasant, Spenser for once does not return to the almost overplayed pun on travel/travail but seems to announce the end of life’s pilgrimage to those who “Enter in at the streicte gate . . . that leadeth vnto life” (Matt. 7:13–14). In the few stanzas that follow, Caelia and her attendants do not take any interest in things visual but prefer entertaining their guests in godly discourse (I, x, 10–17), which clearly echoes the common Protestant accusation that “Popery is a Religion for the eye; Ours for the Ear.”78 In this manner, the House of Holiness accords not only with

78

Ralph Brownrig, Twenty Five Sermons by the Right Reverend Father in God, Ralph Brownrig, late Lord Bishop of Exeter, ed. William Martyn (London: Thomas Roycroft, 1664), 117; Tiffany, Love’s Pilgrimage, 58. In these early stanzas, Caelia is depicted as counting her beads all night (I, x, 3.8) and as being “busy at her beades” (I, x, 8.3), which has understandably troubled critics of this passage. The use of rosaries in what is supposed to be a place of inward learning and not of outward signs of devotion is indeed contradictory. However, as Christopher Haigh reminds us, such components of Catholic worship were still

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delectare as the second part of the Ciceronian triad but, most importantly, also with docere and movere: in this holy place, Spenser’s readers will not only be entertained but also taught and persuaded. Redcrosse’s godly instruction includes, among other things, Caelia’s rueful observation about her House’s supreme status and its rarely used visitation hours: So few there bee, That chose the narrow path, or seeke the right: All keepe the broad high way, and take delight With many rather for to goe astray, And be partakers of their euill plight, Then with a few to walke the rightest way

(I, x, 10.3–8)

This is also why she thinks it a “Straunge thing” (I, x, 10.1) to welcome an errant knight to her place, but the spiritual operations that follow will even put epitomized errancy on the path of righteousness.79 While the great majority of people indulge in a culture of visuality at the House of Pride that leads to death and eternal damnation, Caelia’s superlative, “walke the rightest way,” announces that the House of Holinesse serves as a prerequisite to funneling the wanderings of those who arrive there into what will ultimately become their last pilgrimage to eternity. At the beginning, Redcrosse’s perception needs to be restored to discern good from evil. Previously described episodes already show how much of the development of the legend hinges on various misperceptions that lead to the main character’s wanderings. Such contingencies of postlapsarian perception are well encapsulated in the celebrated lines of the wise and virtuous Arthur:

kept at Protestant churches. Caelia’s incessant use of them may thus just underscore her exemplary piety and Spenser’s playfulness with its signifiers. See Haigh, “The Continuity of Catholicism,” 179–80. 79

As King rightly argues, Caelia’s surprise also “calls attention to an uneasy fusion of quest romance with saint’s life. That moment reflects the way in which the cult of St George survived the iconoclastic attack on that hero’s unique status as patron of both England and its monarchy”; see his “Spenser’s Religion,” 209.

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Full hard it is (quoth he) to read aright The course of heauenly cause, or vnderstand The secret meaning of th’eternall might, That rules mens waies, and rules the thoughts of liuing wight.

(I, ix, 6.6–9)

When entering Despair’s cave shortly afterwards, Redcrosse fails to heed the many signs and words of warning. What may fill us with an instinctive feeling of revulsion, is “full hard” for the knight to read correctly. As implied by the Despair episode, it is precisely Redcrosse’s inability “to read aright,” his uncritical application of Despair’s perverted sermon, which leads him to the verge of self-inflicted death. By contrast, Una’s reading powers, observes Mallette, include the “original Old English meaning of ‘to advise’ or ‘to explain,’” and are thus much more proficient, although not flawless either; Redcrosse, on the other hand, is “spiritually illiterate” and “hard of hearing.”80 In terms of counseling her knight, however, even Una’s resources seem to be exhausted, which necessitates more comprehensive spiritual instruction at the House of Holinesse to help the knight to find the right path. Una approaches the first theological virtue Fidelia (Faith) and requests “To haue her knight into her schoolehous plaste, / That of her heauenly learning he might taste” (I, x, 18.4–5). Here, again, the Ciceronian triad is at work: not only are Fidelia’s words expected to teach and persuade, but as implied by “taste,” they may eventually prove delightful. The “sacred Booke” that Fidelia uses for her tutee is by no means the Bible, which would be accessible to everyone through spiritually informed reading, but it is probably a reference to the more arcane book in Revelation 5:1, “That none could reade, except she did them teach” (I, x, 19.1–2).81 Fidelia’s preaching again marks

80

Mallette, Spenser and the Discourses of Reformation England, 25. On the many early modern meanings of reading and their occurrence in The Faerie Queene, see Anne Ferry, The Art of Naming (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 9–48.

81

As Hamilton’s note informs us. Naturally, the Bible is not self-evident either, but Protestants were generally encouraged to turn to the Holy Spirit for divine guidance in their reading of Scripture; see, for instance, Calvin, Institution of Christian Religion, bk. 1, chap. 7, sec. 4. The line “That none could read, except

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a distinct contrast to the clamorous spectacle at the lofty House of Pride and points to the Protestant ideal of not erecting tall buildings, but of having “hearts and minds literally ‘edified’ by the preaching of the Gospel.”82 Redcrosse’s spiritual weakness and the excellence of Fidelia’s preaching could not lie more distantly apart: she teaches the knight out of “heauenly documents” That weaker witt of man could neuer reach, Of God, of grace, of iustice, of free will, That wonder was to heare her goodly speech (I, x, 19.4–7, my emphases)

It is significant to note here that Spenser seems anxious to demonstrate that Fidelia’s instruction affects man inwardly by her raising “againe to life the hart, that she did thrill” (l. 9). Throughout these lines, however, Redcrosse appears to be so hopeless a case that mere writing of her “heauenly learning” in his heart as in Jeremiah 31:33 seems ineffective; his corrupt insides need to undergo Fidelia’s penetrating homily as implied by the fairly common Protestant metaphor of God’s word piercing man’s heart. As Mallette argues convincingly, hearing the Word preached was seen as an essential ingredient for curtailing one’s errant wanderings on earth. In around 1540, Richard Taverner, for instance, writes that God’s “worde, which beyng preached vnto vs reproueth vs of our wanderyng and strayeng abroade.”83 Further, Mallette also directs our attention to “The Inuectiue agaynst Swearyng” in which Thomas Becon warns at great length about the dangers of wandering errantly that await those without a preacher: For as shepe, whan they be without a shepeharde, wander they cannot tell wither, hang on euery bushe, are rent wyth euery brier, and in daunger to be deuoured of the

she did them teach” (I, x, 19.1–2) rules out the Holy Spirit as chief interpreter and the Bible as the subject being taught. 82

Collinson, “The Elizabethan Church and the New Religion,” 172.

83

Richard Taverner, Postils on the Epistles and Gospels, 1540, ed. Edward Cardwell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1841), 375; Mallette, Spenser and the Discourses of Reformation England, 36.

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rauening wolfe at all tymes, euen so lykewyse, those people that are without a Preacher and tether of gods word, run astray without order, heare the voice of euery straunger, fal into all kynde of vicious abhomination, are rent and torne with wycked spirites, and ready at euery houre to be swalowed vp of Sathan our olde aduersary, which slepeth not, but watcheth diligently, and walketh about like a rorying Lyon sekyng whom he may deuoure.84

Such a scenario is reminiscent of almost every episode in Faerieland in which Redcrosse cannot rely on Una’s counselling. Despair, in particular, with his crooked sermon qualifies as the “voice of euery straunger” and therefore as one of Satan’s ravening delegates whose suicidal grip Redcrosse only barely escapes. It is all the more important then to have a divinely informed minister and theological virtue like Fidelia, who through her preaching starts to put an end to the knight’s earthly wanderings. For a moment, one fears that the knight “Greeud with remembrance of his wicked wayes” falls back to a desire “to end his wretched dayes,” but fortunately the second theological virtue Speranza (Hope) provides her firm anchor lest Redcrosse “forget all, that Fidelia told” (I, x, 21.6–22.5).85 The metaphor of Redcrosse’s heart being pierced by Fidelia’s sermon strongly suggests that reading and learning to read are processes that affect even the most inward parts of the body and that this constitutes an important element on Redcrosse’s way to becoming a true pilgrim en route to the New Jerusalem. Indeed, in the early modern period, reading was conceived of as a much more comprehensive process than one may be aware of today. As Elizabeth Spiller advances, reading was closely tied to the body: it involved not just the eyes and the ventricles of the brain, but the blood, vital spirits, and humors of the body. The act of reading could change what you thought; it could also change who you were, physically as well as emotionally.86

84

Thomas Becon, The worckes of Thomas Becon . . . (London: John Day, 1564), fol. 217r.

85 86

On the significance of the anchor, see Chew, The Pilgrimage of Life, 129–30. Elizabeth Spiller, Reading and the History of Race in the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 2. As Adrian Johns explains, one way in which reading was theorized in the early modern period was that readers

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By turning to Galenic theory and to a chapter of Juan Luis Vives’s Education of a Christian Woman (1524), Spiller demonstrates how specific literary works were believed to have a positive or negative influence on the balance of the four bodily humors.87 In its well-known aim of “fashion[ing] a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline,” The Faerie Queene and in particular the episode of Redcrosse’s spiritual restoration claims a highly efficacious status for its readers and registers, at least implicitly, a positive impact on their humoral balance. Probably as a proto-eschatological privilege of the future saint, Redcrosse receives snippets of supreme Scripture, not of the Bible (as explained above), through which “the previously inarticulate and illiterate knight eagerly learns to comprehend fundamental theological truths,” as John N. King has it.88 Such an initial turn from theological ignorance to, at least, a certain openness to Christian doctrine not only marks the beginning of Redcrosse’s pilgrimage of spiritual progress but also renders him a potential model for readers of The Faerie Queene to follow. As the heart-penetrating metaphor implies, the acquisition of these theological truths is nothing superficial. Indeed, the whole process is reminiscent of, probably even informed by, Calvin’s understanding of scriptural reading practices: holy readyng of Scriptures, wylt thou or not, it shall so lyuely moue thy affections, it shall so pearce thy hearte, it shall so settle within thy bones, that in comparison of the efficacie of this feeling, all that force of Rhetoricians and Philosophers shall in maner vanyshe awaie.89

were thought to see “letters on a page through eyes that resembled the device known as the camera obscura, which conveyed images, through the body’s animal spirits, onto the brain’s sensus communis. There imaginative and perceptual images combined, and animal spirits mingled and departed to drive the body’s responses to both.” See Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 442. 87

Spiller, Reading and the History of Race in the Renaissance, 23–25.

88

King, Spenser’s Poetry and the Reformation Tradition, 63.

89

Calvin, Institution of Christian Religion, bk. 1, ch. 8, sec. 1 (my emphases).

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At the heart of Calvin’s contention lies the assertion of the Bible’s supreme status as changing the believer’s affections, penetrating his heart, and permeating his entire body. Consequently, if one is to take this passage literally, then Calvin seems to imply that Scriptural reading is so efficacious that it easily surpasses Cicero’s docere, delectare, and movere as a “force of Rhetoricians and Philosophers.” The fact that Redcrosse is instructed with a sacred book that is even more holy than the Bible (“That none coulde reade, except she [Fidelia] did them teach” (I, x, 19.2)) and that not even this is sufficient to fully restore the knight is very much suggestive of the knight’s incredibly low spiritual state and of the urgent need for Fidelia’s homiletic cure. However, to amend further his low spiritual state, the knight has to undergo even more incisive treatments. These bodily purifications become mainly allegorized in the House of Penaunce, a sub-division of sorts within the House of Holinesse. Even after Patience tries to cure the knight with “salues and med’cines, which had passing prief, / And there to added wordes of wondrous might” (I, x, 24.5–6), we learn that the cause and root of all his ill, Inward corruption, and infected sin, Not purg’d nor healed, behind remained still. And festring sore did ranckle yet within, Close creeping twixt the marow and the skin.

(I, x, 25.1–5)

Thus, despite previous instruction in all matters godly, Redcrosse’s body is still heavily infested with sin, which may well be read as a critical commentary on Protestantism’s word-centeredness and on the efficacy of the word alone (sola scriptura). For even the word-centered Calvin argues that listening to, understanding, and embracing the Word of God is not possible “vnlesse we beginne at the inward affection of the heart.”90 Redcrosse’s treatment seems to be very much in line with Calvin’s contention: outward or 90

Calvin, Institution of Christian Religion, bk. 3, chap. 3, sec. 16. For a debate on the different sacramental representations in this episode, see the essays collected by Margaret Christian in Reformation 6 (2002). A conciliatory reading of Patience and others inspired by The Book of Common Prayer can be found in

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regularized attempts of mitigating Redcrosse’s inward corruption through daily fasting and prayer are only another hopeless drop in a huge bucket of sin (I, x, 26.1–5). The kind of treatment that changes the knight’s inward affection needs to be administered inside the feeble knight as allegorized in Spenser’s Amendment, who plucks out his rotting and excessive flesh “with pincers fyrie whott, / That soone in him was lefte no one corrupted iott” (I, x, 26.8–9). This, however, does not seem to suffice to overcome the (almost) indestructible nature of sin, for even as Mother Error dies, her sinful offspring prevail and render further operations like the following imperative: And bitter Penaunce with an yron whip, Was wont him once to disple euery day: And sharpe Remorse his hart did prick and nip, That drops of blood thence like a well did play; And sad Repentance vsed to embay, His blamefull body in salt water sore, The filthy blottes of sin to wash away. So in short space they did to health restore That man that would not liue, but erst lay at deathes dore.

(I, x, 27)

These “allegorical operations” are described as excruciatingly painful, but as the knight becomes aware of their efficacy, he himself starts to “rend his flesh” and to eat “his owne synewes” (I, x, 28.3).91 The episode in the House of Penance has been read by some critics as a “collision of Protestant Passion narrative and martyr discourse” and its insistence on purgative pain has been considered reminiscent of pre-

Sarah Van der Laan’s article “Songs of Experience: Confessions, Penitence, and the Value of Error in Tasso and Spenser,” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 130, no. 2 (2015): 265. 91

I borrow the term “allegorical operations” from Joseph Campana, who rightly contends that these “aim at rendering the dark matter of the body transparent and obedient”; see his The Pain of Reformation: Spenser, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Masculinity (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 69.

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Reformation belief that is irreconcilable with Protestant reform.92 As Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen points out, this part of Redcrosse’s purification may even stress “the spiritual usefulness of physical pain,” which runs “against the grain of much early modern Reformed discourse.”93 However, this somewhat exaggerated assessment by van Dijkhuizen does not appreciate the Protestant agenda accentuated in Spenser’s purgative operations. To illustrate this, it proves helpful to turn to the anonymous medieval mystery play Everyman (c. 1501–10), one of Spenser’s potential source texts for the House of Holiness.94 God sends Dethe to Everyman and bids him, shewe hym [Everyman], in My name, A pylgrymage he must on hym take Whyche he in no wyse may escape, And that he brynge with hym a sure rekenynge Without delay or ony taryenge.

(ll. 67–71)95

Dethe soon approaches Everyman to inform him about his earthly end, and Everyman has to learn that none of his earthly companions are entitled to accompany him on his last pilgrimage. Similar to Redcrosse, Everyman, by

92

Campana, The Pain of Reformation, 69; Joseph Burns Collins, Christian Mysticism in the Elizabethian Age with its Background in Mystical Methodology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1940), 194–200. On Calvinist passion narratives, also see Debora K. Shuger, The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice, and Subjectivity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 7.

93

Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen, Pain and Compassion in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2012), 176.

94

I am indebted to Thomas Willard for this insight. For more details on Everyman, see Willard’s “Images of Mortality in Early English Drama,” 416–18. The similarities between Spenser’s House of Holinesse and the Hous of Salvacyon in Everyman were already noticed by H. J. Todd in 1805, see The Works of Edmund Spenser: a Variorum Edition, eds. Edwin Greenlaw, et al., 11 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1932–1949; reprint, 1961), 1:283.

95

The Somonynge of Everyman, c. 1501–10, in Medieval Drama: an Anthology, ed. Greg Walker (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 279–97. Subsequent quotations are indicated with line numbers in parentheses.

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help of Knowledge, enters the “hous of salvacyon,” where Confession affords him “a precyous jewell . . . / Called penaunce” (ll. 557–58). In his act of penance, however, Everyman takes a much more active role in that he scourges himself in “the name of the Holy Trynyte”: Take this, body, for the synne of the flesshe! Also thou delytest to go gay and fresshe, And in the way of dampnacyon thou dyd me brynge; Therefore suffre now strokes of punysshynge. Now of penaunce I wyll wade the water clere, To save me from Purgatory, that sharpe fyre.

(ll. 611–18)

This flagellation-cum-purification primarily inflicted as punishment as well as Everyman’s receiving of the last rites, among other things, are presented as pivotal linchpins of his last pilgrimage before he comes to stand before God’s throne of judgment. Despite the apparent similarities with Spenser’s House of Holinesse, this late medieval episode from Everyman registers a distinct contrast to Redcrosse’s more Protestant process of purification. Everyman’s extremely active part in punishing his sinful body implies that Good Dedes, who afterwards prepares for him “eternall glory” (l. 631), figures as a reward for man’s own purgative volition. In comparison, Redcrosse’s unmistakable passivity in the House of Holinesse and his largely being healed by others has often been read as the Protestant poet’s insistence on the outward imposition of grace.96 As van Dijkhuizen notes, the experience of pain as “theologically and spiritually meaningful and efficacious, and potentially even something to be actively sought” was vigorously debated by religious writers of preCartesian Europe.97 Among the many models of (dis-)continuities between pain and potential salvation that van Dijkhuizen presents, the one by Calvin is particularly helpful to shed some light on Spenser’s House of Holinesse and Everyman’s Hous of Salvacyon.98 In Calvin’s Institutes, suffering can be one way in which God marks his elect flock and may well be a sign that they 96

Tiffany, Love’s Pilgrimage, 56–59.

97

van Dijkhuizen, Pain and Compassion, 25.

98

van Dijkhuizen, Pain and Compassion, 56–61.

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are worthy of inheriting his kingdom.99 On the other hand, Calvin also takes a clear stance against self-inflicted punishments as they obscure “that, whiche ought to haue ben of much greater importance [i.e., God’s grace]” and as they are “somewhat more rigorous than ecclesiasticall mildenesse maye beare.”100 Thus, Everyman’s self-scourging would definitely not find approval with Calvin; by contrast, Redcrosse’s purgation is almost exclusively not self-inflicted and may in fact be another early marker of his elect state as England’s patron saint.101 In this light, Redcrosse’s “ruefull shriekes and gronings” (I, x, 28.5) become meaningful, not as a sign of meritorious purgation, but as indispensable pre-stages to the vision of his last pilgrimage. First, there is a recurring emphasis on the fact that these are not punishments for Redcrosse’s ill-led wanderings but, in a sense, divinely ordained treatments to rid the knight of his sinfulness, thereby underlining the sinner’s own inadequacy as a scourger of sin. Second, if one considers the passages from the Institutes, it becomes clear that the purpose of these sufferings is to mark out the Redcrosse Knight as one of the elect or even more precisely as the Knight of Holinesse and future St. George. His cleansing, moreover, takes place in an overtly allegorical mode which, according to Lobsien (above), infuses the text with sense and a certain message: if Redcrosse were not cleansed of his sinful flesh, the doctrinal instruction by the third theological virtue, Charissa, who “Gan him instruct in euerie good behest, / Of loue, and righteousness, and well to donne” (I, x, 33.3–9), would fall on deaf ears. The allegorical operations thus lead to the knight’s “cured conscience” (I, x, 29.3), which renders him eligible to hear and arguably better comprehend Charissa’s words as “she teacheth him the ready path” (I, x, 33.9) that will in an anagogical sense reveal to him his last pilgrimage. Critics have variously referred to Spenser’s House of Holinesse as “an alchemical lab,” “a correctional institution,” or as imposing a “therapeutic regimen,” descriptions which all point to a process of re-making or renewing 99

Calvin, Institution of Christian Religion, bk. 3, chap. 18, sec. 7.

100 Calvin, Institution of Christian Religion, bk. 3, chap. 3, sec. 16. 101 His elect state is already invoked when Una, after rescuing him from the hands of Despair, asks, “Why shouldst thou then despeire, that chosen art?” (I, ix, 53.4, my emphasis).

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something of lesser worth.102 The episodes in “that sad house of Penaunce” (I, x, 32.8) suggest that sin is so deeply rooted in the flesh that the only active part in one’s spiritual restoration is to submit oneself to the operations of Amendment, Penaunce, Remorse, and Repentance. These operations are soteriologically indispensable and point to what the actual meaning of fashioning suggests: in the words of Richard Waswo and Wayne Erickson “to ‘fashion’ (facere) is to do what a blacksmith does with iron” that is “to mold, build, or fabricate something out of received raw materials, whether these be history, literary tradition, human beings, or everyday life.”103 Only once these operations have been completed and the knight’s conscience cured can Mercy (at Charissa’s behest) guide the knight with his still “weaker wandring steps” (I, x, 34.1) to “an holy Hospitall” (I, x, 36.1) through a narrow way, Scattred with bushy thornes, and ragged breares Which still before him she remou’d away, That nothing might his ready passage stay

(I, x, 35.2–5)

The knight is apparently still not able to take his steps on the straight and narrow alone, but once the two are welcomed by the “seuen Bead-men” (I, x, 36.3), Mercy begins to instruct him again “with great industree” (I, x, 45.5).104 Redcrosse acquires this new wisdom very quickly, and we are told

102 Galena Hashhozheva, “The Christian Defense Against Classical Skepticism in Spenser’s Legend of Holiness,” English Literary Renaissance 44, no. 2 (2014): 215; Prescott, “Spenser’s Chivalric Restoration,” 187; King, Spenser’s Poetry and the Reformation Tradition, 64. 103 Richard Waswo, Language and Meaning in the Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 231; Wayne Erickson, “Spenser’s Letter to Ralegh and the Literary Politics of The Faerie Queene’s 1590 Publication,” Spenser Studies 10 (1992): 157. 104 I deliberately omit a detailed discussion of the Seven Bead-Men as they are of limited interest to Redcrosse’s apprehension of his last pilgrimage. Their use of beads and their almsgiving, however, can be read as another way in which Spenser’s pre-Reformation heritage is embedded in his poem.

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that “His mortall life he learned had to frame / In holy righteousnesse, without rebuke or blame” (I, x, 45.8–9). Here, Redcrosse is made righteous through Mercy’s verbal instruction. In this sense, both the stanzas about Redcrosse’s bodily purification as well as the ones that tell of his theological instruction ultimately refer to the aim of fashioning the raw matter of errancy into holiness as the virtue and end of Book I.105 Through Redcrosse’s story, Spenser’s readers now have an example that teaches them that the purgation of sin is indispensable if one wants to receive godly instruction effectively and that this is a prerequisite for (passively) fashioning one’s mortal life into a righteous one.106 In other words, for Spenser’s contemporary readers, Redcrosse’s development in this spiritual institution allegorically reproduces the traditional Saul-to-Paul narrative as the chief-of-sinners is envisioned to become a Protestant saint. What now separates the knight from the vision of his last pilgrimage to the New Jerusalem is the steep ascent to the Mount of Contemplation. Redcrosse’s legs are still “fraile” and “nigh weary” (I, x, 47.8), but he advances with the help of Mercy. Before they reach the top, they are somewhat reluctantly received by “that godly aged Sire” (I, x, 48.1) called Contemplation. Blinded by his many visiones Dei, feeding only on “spirituall repast, / And pyn’d his flesh, to keep his body low and chast” (I, x, 48.8–9), this hermit has been entrusted by Fidelia with showing to Redcrosse the way, That neuer yet was seene of Faries sonne, That neuer leads the traueiler astray, 105 This is well reflected in Spiller’s observation about The Faerie Queene being “a kind of early modern critical handbook for the ways in which what might be described as Spenser’s imagined (if not actual) readers ‘made’ their lives”; see her Science, Reading, and Renaissance Literature: the Art of Making Knowledge, 1580–1670 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 62. 106 Such a scenario in which sin has to be removed for the pilgrim to become righteous is reminiscent of Catholic spirituality. However, the removal of these sins by allegorical personae together with Redcrosse’s striking passivity in this process can again be read as one of Spenser’s ways of negotiating the “old” and “new” faith.

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But after labors long, and sad delay, Brings them to ioyous rest and endlesse blis.

(I, x, 52.2–6)

Leaving Mercy behind, the two reach the top of the Mount of Contemplation, which the poet likens to Sinai, Parnassus, and Olivet.107 This threefold reference to biblical and mythological mountains has attracted some considerable critical commentary: the mountain’s similarity to Sinai is probably the most pertinent reference to the metaphor of the last pilgrimage as this is whence God “wil teache vs his waies, and we wil walke in his paths” (Isa. 2:3). This task is fulfilled by Contemplation, who here grants access to higher things and thereby fully unveils the transcendental potential that is released as we move from allegory to anagogy. First, Contemplation shows to Redcrosse “a litle path, that was both steepe and long, / Which to a goodly Citty led his vew” (I, x, 55.2–3). The knight is totally overwhelmed as he, like Jacob in his dream (Gen. 28:10–12), beholds the many angels trafficking companionably to and fro the city “Wherein eternall peace and hapinesse doth dwell” (I, x, 55.9).108 As Redcrosse grows more curious about this glorious city, Contemplation tells him that this is The new Hierusalem, that God has built For those to dwell in, that are chosen his, His chosen people purg’d from sinful guilt, With pretious blood, which cruelly was spilt On cursed tree, of that vnspotted lam, That for the sinnes of al the world was kilt.

(I, x, 57.2–7)

107 Such heavenly visions from a high mountain are a commonplace in romancepilgrimage literature; see Robert L. Reid, “House of Holiness,” in The Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. A. C. Hamilton, et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), 374. For a critical commentary on these mountains, see Åke Bergvall, “Between Eusebius and Augustine: Una and the Cult of Elizabeth,” English Literary Renaissance 27, no. 1 (1997): 29–30. 108 Tiffany’s statement that this is “the high mount from which he sees Cleopolis” is inaccurate as I, x, 58–61 clearly shows that Redcrosse sees the New Jerusalem which only makes him think of Cleopolis as its earthly counterpart; see her Love’s Pilgrimage, 58.

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The christological reference to God’s sacrifice again suggests that Redcrosse’s earlier suffering in the House of Penaunce did not earn him his already pre-ordained state of election but that his salvation is the sole merit of the one who died on that “cursed tree.” As Redcrosse foresees his last pilgrimage to eternity, his perspective on earthly things changes fundamentally. So far, the knight has only seen the place of earthly glory as his quest commenced from “That great Cleopolis . . . / In which that fairest Fary Queene doth dwell” (I, x, 58.2–3). The name suggests that this is the city of fame,109 but the hero becomes aware of its “earthly frame” (I, x, 59.2). Through his vision, he learns that the New Jerusalem “does far surpas” (I, x, 58.8) all the earthly glory and brightness for which he admires Cleopolis, the beginning and end of his earthly quest. The preceding cantos have shown that this quest for the Faerie Queene led him, in Augustine’s words, “to travel through ways unpassable, round about beset with . . . fugitive spirits, forsakers of their God lying in ambush.”110 What Contemplation now reveals to Redcrosse is something at the diametrical opposite of his tortuous wanderings in Gloriana’s service: Then seek this path, that I to thee presage, Which after all to heauen shall thee send; Then peaceably thy painefull pilgrimage To yonder same Hierusalem doe bend, Where is for thee ordained a blessed end: For thou emongst those Saints, whom thou doest see, Shalt be a Saint and thine owne nations frend And Patrone: thou Saint George shalt called bee, Saint George of mery England, the signe of victoree.

(I, x, 61)

Purged of his sinfulness, the Redcrosse Knight finally learns of his appointed destination and of his actual identity as St. George and thus becomes a prospective homo viator. In other words, he has been taught, delighted, and persuaded by the vision on the Mount of Contemplation: ideally, readers would follow suit.

109 Deriving from κλέος, usually translated as “fame, glory, (good) tidings.” 110 Augustine, Confessions, bk. 7, ch. 21 (p. 1:399).

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REDCROSSE’S VISION OF HIS LAST PILGRIMAGE AND ITS EFFECTS ON EARTHLY LIFE Having seen the bliss that awaits him after his last pilgrimage, the Redcrosse Knight immediately wants to wriggle out of his earthly commitment to Gloriana: O let me not (quoth he) then turne againe Backe to the world, whose ioyes so fruitlesse are, But let me heare for aie in peace remaine, Or straight way on that last long voiage fare, That nothing may my present hope empare.

(I, x, 63.1–5)

Someone like Despair, keen to hasten the knight’s last pilgrimage, would —with reprehensible contrivances—confidently fulfill Redcrosse’s request to quit his earthly life. Contemplation, however, reminds Redcrosse of his worldly quest for the Fairy Queen, which leads to the knight’s insight that he has to “walke this way in Pilgrims poore estate” (I, x, 64.4) and expedite his earthly journey so as to soon reach eternity. In this light, the hero’s continuing earthly journey is indeed “profane rather than sacred,” as Tiffany suggests,111 but its impetus is a deeply spiritual one. The knight’s outright contempt for the world (contemptus mundi), which would have been detrimental before his rejuvenation in the House of Holinesse, now encourages him to quicken his spiritual journey on earth so that he may eventually embark on the last pilgrimage he has just envisioned. While his vision is presented to Redcrosse as an individual pilgrim, this pivotal episode also makes a strong case about a collective path to salvation. When Contemplation inquires from Mercy why they have come to “that tedious hight” (I, x, 49.9), Mercy asks rhetorically, What end (quoth she) should cause vs take such paine, But that same end, which euery liuing wight Should make his marke, high heauen to attaine? (I, x, 50.1–3, my emphases)

111 Tiffany, Love’s Pilgrimage, 60.

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These lines invoking “euery liuing wight” are again suggestive of the didactic program of fashioning holiness in the readers of Book I. By going through all the self-examining, purgative, and contemplative steps that have led to the vision of his last pilgrimage, Redcrosse becomes a model for other errant readers to follow. This didacticism is even reinforced as we further disentangle Spenser’s allegory: learning from Mercy that Fidelia (faith) has entrusted the key to such visions of the holy city to Contemplation (I, x, 50.4– 9), the poem’s tutees also come to understand that it is faith alone that gives access to visions of the divine through contemplation. In this context, at least two of the four senses of scripture are at work: allegoria adumbrating what is to be believed and anagogia opening up hopeful expectations. The collective aspect of Redcrosse’s vision is further underscored when he—much like the arriving pilgrim in Herbert’s “Love (III)”—questions his worthiness for what he has just seen and remembers that other men who “haue it [heaven] attained, were in like cace / As wretched men, and liued in like paine” (I, x, 62.3–4). Thus, the Knight of Holinesse is not the first to tread toward the New Jerusalem in righteousness and not the last as the story of his spiritual success in a way urges Spenser’s readers to follow the knight’s vision to eternity. Returning to Redcrosse as a representation of a miles christianus, we come to realize that his armor as defined in Ephesians 6:14–17 has been quite thoroughly restored during his sojourn in the House of Holinesse: it is “glistring” again and filled with light from heaven (I, xi, 4.8). Fidelia’s and Charissa’s instruction has undoubtedly girded the knight’s loins with truth (v. 14) and provided him with “the sworde of ye Spirit, which is the word of God ” (v. 17, my emphasis). The breastplate of righteousness (v. 14) has also undergone spiritual repair as Mercy has taught the knight how to frame his “mortall life” by “holy righteousnesse” (I, x, 45, 8–9). As mentioned above, the fact that faith through contemplation enables Redcrosse to foresee the last pilgrimage to his blissful end implies that—qua allegoria—the helmet of salvation (v. 17) is back in place and that “the shield of faith” is intact (v. 16, my emphasis). Finally, as reflected in “deeds of armes must I at last be faine” (I, x, 62.5), Redcrosse’s feet are “shod with the preparation for the Gospel of peace” (v. 15), which underscores again the metaphorically spiritual import rather than the literally earthly necessity of the knight’s armor. Foolishly laid down by Redcrosse earlier in the text (I, vii, 2–3), these signifiers have had their metaphorical potential reinstated through the knight’s

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restoration in the House of Holinesse. In meticulously describing the restoration of these signifiers, The Faerie Queene, and in particular Canto 10 of Book I, claims to serve as another enchiridion for a life in spiritual warfare. The restoration of Redcrosse’s armor and its signifiers also indicates that his wanderings are not as erroneous as they used to be. Whereas the beginning of Canto 1 presented Redcrosse as a callow knight naïvely unaware of his participation in spiritual warfare, he steps out of the House of Holinesse as a true pilgrim and miles christianus. Now, he is ready to be confronted with the earthly struggles of heavenward bound homines viatores to “striue [his] excellent selfe to excel” (I, xi, 2.7). The restoration of his armor and its heavenly light foreshadow the divine providence in which the knight-elect now participates.112 Without doubt, the ensuing fight against the dragon is tough and the knight’s elect state does not preclude (spiritual) vulnerability: his shield (of faith) is not exempt from penetration (I, xi, 38.5–6), and the dragon’s “scorching flame” burns his armor so badly and boils everything within “That he could not endure so cruell cace, / But thought his armes to leaue, and helmet to vnlace” (I, x, 26.8–9). In contrast to Canto 7, however, the knight now remains steadfast and does not relinquish his armor. The knight’s brave but cruel fight shows that all is not well but that he is safeguarded by the “eternall God that chaunce did guide” (I, xi, 45.6).113 Unlike the pagan fountain that induced idleness in Canto 7, the well of life and the tree of life fortuitously signal divine providence: renowned for “great vertues, and for med’cine good” (I, xi, 29.5) and for that “trickling streame of Balme” (I, xi, 48.2), respectively, these two sources of divine good figure in a way as miniature Houses of Holiness to restore the knight in battle. As they strengthen and revitalize the armored knight in his three-day fight against evil, they also provide an efficacious gesture that extends to Spenser’s earthly readers in their spiritual battles. For Redcrosse is not the only one participating in God’s providence: arguably, Spenser’s readers are also

112 For a more comprehensive reading of this episode and its spiritual import, see Gless, Interpretation and Theology in Spenser, 63–71. 113 In this regard, the Legend participates very much in a Protestant pilgrimage narrative which “takes its rise from . . . an act of trust, which is represented time and again in the decision to relinquish security and stability and to venture into the unknown against, as it seems, common sense”; see Keeble, “Constructing the Protestant Life,” 251.

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to be “All healed of . . . hurts and woundes” (I, xi, 52.2) on their way to holiness. Despite these signs of reassurance, Redcrosse’s deliverance is deferred, which reaffirms the poem’s didactic intent. As Daniel W. Doerksen reminds us, Redcrosse’s vision of the New Jerusalem and his temporary earthly occupation parallel the Old Testament figure Jacob and the apostolic tradition of the New Testament. Doerksen argues that, like Jacob after his vision of the ladder to heaven (Gen. 28:10–19), Redcrosse “must return to the human level, and with St. Paul (Phil. 1:20–25) he must accept the responsibilities of the earthly life while longing for the heavenly one he has glimpsed.”114 Indeed, the knight’s mandate could not be more explicitly earthly. As the etymology of Greek γῆ (“earth”) and ἔργον (“work”) implies, Redcrosse as Ge-orgos and St. George “rises up as a worker of and in matter.”115 Following Redcrosse’s example, Spenser’s readers are in Augustine’s words “like travellers away from our Lord” and are invited to “use this world . . . to derive eternal and spiritual value from corporeal and temporal things.”116 Undoubtedly these “earthly thinges” are “darke . . . compard to things diuine,” as the poet-narrator insists (I, x, 67.9), but their darkness proves quite purposeful. Redcrosse’s fight against the dragon allegorically provides a series of practical trials for his perseverance in faith. These tests not only provide the Redcrosse Knight with occasional opportunities for rejuvenation in fluvio aquae vitae and a ligno vitae, but they also signal to the poem’s tutees that defeating evil in the form of the dragon is an indispensable step on a Christian trajectory of liberating Una’s parents Adam and Eve, the manacled parents of Truth.117 Just as the vision of his very own last pilgrimage to the New Jerusalem has revealed to Redcrosse his spiritual destination, the poem’s didactics insists that the readers, who through the narrator also “see the hauen nigh

114 Doerksen, “Predestination in Spenser’s Faerie Queene,” 17. 115 Campana, The Pain of Reformation, 77. 116 Augustine, On Christian Teaching, 397/462 A.D., edited and translated by R. P H. Green (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997; reprint, 2008), bk. 1, sec. 9 (p. 10). 117 As my discussion of John Milton’s Areopagitica will show in Chapter 3, reestablishing Truth divine is always associated with eschatological implications and expectations as this is an endeavor that is considered incomplete before the end of time.

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at hand” (I, xii, 1.1), have something to which they can look forward. In this way, Spenser’s readers are incentivized to follow Redcrosse’s moral example of holiness as they, like him, live in the present world and can expect the promise of deliverance to be fulfilled beyond the poem’s earthly ambit. Although earthliness is a principal ingredient for Spenser’s epic poem, there are subtle allusions to the end of time and to eternal rest in Canto 12. When the “king of Eden” (I, xii, 26.1) and his wife are set free from the dragon, the former thanks Redcrosse and says, But since now safe ye seised haue the shore, And well arriued are, (high God be blest) Let vs deuize of ease and euerlasting rest.

(I, xii, 17.7–9, my emphasis)

Undoubtedly, this points to the eschatological resolution for which Redcrosse and his pilgrim-followers are yearning, but just speaking (“deuize of”) is not enough for this new world to be effected. As Redcrosse’s example shows, the time is not ripe for such after-worldly conclusions: in spite of his prospective marriage to Una, he recalls his earthly obligation to the Faerie Queene and will only return to Una to inherit Adam’s kingdom after six more years in Gloriana’s service (I, xi, 19–20). The knight appears again in minor roles in Books II and III, needs to be saved by the female knight Britomart (III, i, 21–22), and even takes off his armor again when entering the Castle Ioyeous (III, i, 42.6). When Malecasta, the lady of this castle, makes nocturnal advances to the chaste Britomart assuming that her mail will reveal a man, Redcrosse walks in on them only wearing half of his armor (III, i, 63.2– 3). Hardly a compulsory step on a saint’s itinerary to the New Jerusalem, this episode (among others) shows again that in a fallen world even a homo viator is still confronted with peripatetic wanderings and falls prey to them. Or to borrow Nievergelt’s words, The eschatology invoked by Book 1, then, is merely apparent, since it does not provide a ‘conclusive’ solution to the problems of history, and functions rather as a proleptic visionary sketch that prepares us for a return to the realm of action in Fairyland, the subject of all subsequent books.118

118 Nievergelt, Allegorical Quests, 178.

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Thus, even if the putative reunion of Redcrosse and Una points to “the apocalyptic marriage which will inaugurate the restoration of Eden,” as M. H. Abrams suggests,119 the lack of any such closure is very characteristic of Spenser’s epic poem telling tales of this world, not of the one to come. The virtue of holiness seems to be nigh at hand, but the poetic voice that ends Book I still speaks of a “long voiage” (I, xii, 42.8).

THE CANTOS OF MUTABILITIE AS AN AMBIGUOUS ACCESS TO RESTFUL ETERNITY The adventures and virtues presented in Books II–VI distance themselves more and more from the step-by-step approach to eternity that is programmatically put forward in the Legend of Holinesse.120 Just like Book I, the following Books make a strong case about the incompleteness of moral achievement: in none of them is the actual quest for the respective virtue concluded satisfactorily.121 As the poem develops further, the skepticism grows as to whether a world fashioned along the twelve moral virtues that are promoted on the frontispiece and in the “Letter to Raleigh” is a realistic scenario. At the beginning of Book V, for instance, the poet laments, Me seemes the world is runne quite out of square, From the first point of his appointed sourse, And being once amisse growes daily wourse and wourse. (V, Proem, 1.7–9, my emphasis)

119 M. H. Abrams, “Apocalypse: Theme and Variations,” in The Apocalypse in English Renaissance Thought and Literature: Patterns, Antecedents and Repercussions, ed. C. A. Patrides and Joseph A. Wittreich (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 354. 120 Robert L. Reid, “Spenser’s Mutability Song: Conclusion or Transition?,” in Celebrating Mutabilitie: Essays on Edmund Spenser’s Mutabilitie Cantos, ed. Jane Grogan (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010), 77. 121 Richard A. McCabe, The Pillars of Eternity: Time and Providence in “The Faerie Queene” (Blackrock: Irish Academic Press, 1989), 212–13.

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While the square may be seen as an “emblem of justice,” as Hamilton recommends in his gloss, I would argue that a world that is “out of square” also becomes significantly less congruent with the New Jerusalem, notably shaped in Revelation 21:16 as a perfect square. Such progressive deterioration subverts Spenser’s confidence in the moral virtues, which is later expressed chiasmically in For that which all men then [in ancient times] did vertue call, Is now cald vice; and that which vice was hight, Is now hight vertue, and so vs’d of all

(V, Proem, 4.1–3)

This kind of moral subversion seems to be an appropriate introduction to Book V, which is known for its gruesome episodes that often seem to endorse political violence rather than the virtue of justice it advertises. Like the Legend of Holiness, the Legend of Justice does not conclude Book V by effectually establishing its titular virtue in Irena’s territory, as Artegall, the Knight of Justice, has to depart prematurely to attend Gloriana’s court (V, xii, 43). This sense of inconclusion and unpredictability sets the stage for what is left of Spenser’s Book VII and the “pittious worke of MVTABILITIE” that is “woxen daily worse” (VII, vi, 6.6–7). In 1609, ten years after the poet’s death, the “Two Cantos of MVTABILITIE” were added to the first folio edition of Spenser’s half-finished epic poem. The title was probably given by the printer, Matthew Lownes, who on the first page assumes this fragment “to be parcell of some following Booke of the FAERIE QVEENE, VNDER THE LEGEND OF Constancie.”122 Evidence as to why this part was not printed before, say, more immediately after the celebrated poet’s death in 1599, remains inconclusive.123 Although the two cantos are very different, critics almost unanimously agree that they constitute part of The Faerie Queene in one way or another; and albeit fragmentary, the Mutabilitie Cantos are again highly relevant for the present study in that they can be read as referring to mutable earthly wanderings and their eventual obliteration in the afterlife, as I will show in the following.

122 Hadfield, Life, 370. 123 J. B. Lethbridge, “Spenser’s Last Days: Ireland, Career, Mutability, Allegory,” in Edmund Spenser: New and Renewed Directions, ed. J. B. Lethbridge (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2006), 311–13.

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In what is left of Book VII, no epigrammatic hero of Constancie is featured; instead, the two cantos revolve around Cynthia, Jove, Nature, and Mutabilitie. Antithetical to the titular virtue of Book VII, Mutabilitie epitomizes “the euer-whirling wheele / Of Change, the which all mortall things doth sway” (VII, vi, 1.1–2). Ubiquitous and invariably influential, Mutabilitie challenges the goddess of the moon, Cynthia, who has been entrusted by Jove to govern the universe that he once conquered.124 Arguing almost endlessly over who really governs the world, Jove and Mutabilitie decide to bring their case to Nature, “Still moouing, yet vnmoued from her sted” (VII, vii, 13.3), to act as their arbiter on Arlo Hill. After listening patiently to both parties, Nature pronounces the following verdict: I well consider all that ye haue sayd, And find that all things stedfastnes doe hate And changed be: yet being rightly wayd They are not changed from their first estate; But by their change their being doe dilate: And turning to themselues at length againe, Doe worke their owne perfection so by fate: Then ouer them Change doth not rule and raigne; But they raigne ouer change, and doe their states maintaine. (VII, vii, 58, my emphases)

While these lines are fairly atomistic in tone, they also take us back to the Christian trajectory of Book I and the right path to holiness. In a fallen world, all things that are “rightly wayd” are identical to their first, prelapsarian (e)state (ll. 3–4). Through change, these things can even widen their earthly potential (l. 5) and strive by fate for perfection (l. 7) just as homines viatores do in view of eternity. Thus, if “rightly wayd,” these things are not subjected to change but powerful enough to hold sway over change and to uphold the state of perfection as inspired by the divine creator. Since this subjection of change is considered a natural process, Mutabilitie herself is ruled by Nature,

124 The name Cynthia, as in many other contexts, is a likely reference to Queen Elizabeth I; see John N. King, “Queen Elizabeth I: Representations of the Virgin Queen,” Renaissance Quarterly 43, no. 1 (1990): 30–74.

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who rules in Jove’s favor and provides the quarreling parties with an eschatological outlook: “time shall come that all shall changed bee, / And from thenceforth, none no more change shall see” (VII, vii, 59.3–4). In other words, as the peripatetic wanderings of earthly change are completed, the influence of Mutabilitie will wane and disappear and ring in a time of constancy. Her ruling and prophecy given, Nature confirms Jove “in his imperiall see” and disappears “wither no man wist” (VII, vii, 59.7–9). A time bereft of change is again invoked in the very last stanza of Canto 8, the fragmentary “Canto, vnperfite.” Here, the poetical speaker returns even more strikingly to the pilgrimage-to-eternity pattern in that he juxtaposes the constant change of Mutabilitie with eternal, divine rest: Then gin I think on that which Nature sayd, Of that same time when no more Change shall be, But stedfast rest of all things firmely stayd Vpon the pillours of Eternity, That is contrary to Mutabilitie: For, all that moueth, doth in Change delight: But thence-forth all shall rest eternally With Him that is the God of Sabbaoth hight: O that great Sabbaoth God, graunt me that Sabaoths sight.

(VII, viii, 2)

These final lines evidently refer to an eschatological future and may thus implicitly point to what Redcrosse/St. George and his righteous followers would see after they have concluded their last pilgrimage to the New Jerusalem. However, these lines are, in Kenneth Gross’s words, “only a gesture, and we must take seriously Spenser’s refusal to fill out a vision of a new heaven and new earth according to the lineaments of Scripture.”125 Nevertheless, what assumes prominence as the final stanza of Spenser’s incomplete epic takes the reader back to Book I and to “the Augustinian metaphor, central to medieval culture, of Christian man as a pilgrim seeking his heavenly home while journeying through the world’s tribulations,” as Thomas H.

125 Kenneth Gross, Spenserian Poetics: Idolatry, Iconoclasm, and Magic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 237.

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Cain remarks.126 In acknowledgment of both Gross’s and Cain’s views, I offer, on the one hand, a reading of this last stanza as providing restful closure to an incomplete epic poem through its recurrence to the well-established pilgrimage topos of Book I. At the same time, however, I argue that the poet offers an ambiguous end by denying such closure with an eventual gesture toward a journey and a battle that still lie ahead. Almost any critical reading of the Mutabilitie Cantos involves the old chestnut of whether they, in fact, constitute an authorially intentioned end in which its fragmentary state “bears witness to . . . the incompleteness of all our projects in this world” or whether the epic was to be continued in a part of the poem that is now lost.127 Unless new evidence is uncovered, we will probably never know whether Spenser actually strived at or even succeeded in fully completing his epic as J. B. Lethbridge suggests.128 Albeit conjectural, Lethbridge’s assumption about the final, fragmentary state of the Mutabilitie Cantos is plausible: The reason behind the present form of the Cantos would . . . be, that realizing he would not live to complete or recomplete his great poem, Spenser tried to rescue what he could of what he had, including the published Books, by writing (compiling) at least a special type of conclusion in the little time he possibly realised was left to him. That explains why they appear to interpretation to be both an independent poem and a fitting conclusion to the unfinished torso we have of The Faerie Queene.129

This view values the epic’s end as both conclusive and inconclusive without letting it appear indecisive. The last stanza then testifies to the longing of the poetical speaker as he sings of the “stedfast rest” among “the pillours of Eternity” far beyond Mutabilitie’s remit. Though the final lines of The Faerie Queene seem to achieve closure, the variant spellings of “Sabbaoth God” and “Sabaoth’s sight” are indicative of 126 Thomas H. Cain, Praise in “The Faerie Queene” (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1978), 184. 127 Gordon Teskey, “Two Cantos of Mutabilitie (1609),” in The Oxford Handbook of Edmund Spenser, ed. Richard A. McCabe (Oxford: Oxford Unversity Press, 2010), 336. 128 Lethbridge, “Spenser’s Last Days,” 309–10. 129 Lethbridge, “Spenser’s Last Days,” 332.

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a more ambiguous ending. The eighteenth-century Faerie Queene editor John Upton already noticed the discrepancy between the two variants “Sabbaoth” and “Sabaoth.”130 While the first derives from the verb ‫שׁבַת‬ ָ (shabath) and denotes “to cease” or “to rest,” the second goes back to ‫( ְצבָאוֹת‬tsvaoth) and refers to “hosts” or “armies” as used in the appellative phrase “the Lord of Sabaoth” (Rom. 9:29).131 Understandably, Upton was puzzled at the co-occurrence of phrases like “rest” and “armies” and suggested that the two variants had been confused in the printing process and should therefore be inverted. This assertion is supported by the later listing of “Sabaoth” in the Oxford English Dictionary with its literal Hebrew meaning of army/host (n. 1) and its second entry, “Confused with sabbath” (n. 2), the latter of which provides the last lines from Spenser’s epic as a prime example of such a confusion. Modern editorial practice has retained the spelling of the first folio edition of The Faerie Queene (1609) as “God of Sabbaoth,” “Sabbaoth God,” and “Sabaoths sight,” but a close look at the first folio editions of Spenser’s Works (1611–1617), both published by Matthew Lownes, reveals an interesting detail. Francis R. Johnson observes that when Lownes’s press began reprinting the second part of The Faerie Queene for the Works, there must have been a leftover stack of leaves from the 1609 printing which made it into some (but not all) of the folio editions of Spenser’s Works that were published between 1611 and 1617.132 As a result, some of the extant folio editions of the Works contain leaves from 1609, while others feature ones

130 The Works of Edmund Spenser: a Variorum Edition, 6:315. 131 It can be assumed that Spenser knew some Biblical Hebrew and was probably aware of these differences; see Hadfield, Life, 29, 32. 132 Francis R. Johnson, A Critical Bibliography of the Works of Edmund Spenser Printed Before 1700 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1933; reprint, London: Dawsons of Pall Mall, 1966), 37. Johnson lists a few features that clearly distinguish the leaves from the later printing of the Works from the 1609 printing of The Faerie Queene: “(a) In the running-titles, the spelling is consistently ‘Faerie’ throughout; (b) the running-titles are set in slightly smaller type, the difference being especially noticeable in the case of the canto numbers; (c) only the first 3 leaves of each gathering are signed.”

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that were newly printed between 1612 and 1613.133 Interestingly, in these later reprints, the spelling of “Sab(b)aoth” was regularized to “Sabaoth” throughout the last stanza. Apparently, the variant spelling was perceived as an irregularity and was changed by the compositors, who must have been very keen to have Spenser’s Works “carefully corrected,” as advertised on the title page.134 In so doing, however, they may have flattened the rich texture inherent in the two variants. While it is not completely implausible that “Sabbaoth” and “Sabaoth” were confused in the printing process of a busy early modern publishing house and were harmonized once the “mistake” was noticed, I propose that the two spellings may well be deliberately authorial. The “God of Sabbaoth” as a God of rest makes perfect sense in view of a deity that rests on the seventh day of the creation myth and that commands his people to refrain from work and to observe that day as holy (Gen. 2:2–3, Exod. 20:9–10). Moreover, A. C. Hamilton points to the somewhat inaccurate etymology of the personal name Elizabeth135 signifying, according to the rough contemporary William Camden, “Peace of the Lord, or quiet rest of the Lord.” This leads to Hamilton’s argument that Spenser’s “final prayer as an exile in warravaged Ireland is for sight of the Queen and the rest which she signifies.”136

133 These differences become clearly apparent when comparing the extant copies of Spenser’s Works in the University of London’s Senate House Library with leaves from 1609 (STC-23083.3) and from 1613 (STC-23083.7). 134 This confirms Mark Bland’s assertion about early modern texts that “the idea that the act of writing can only lead to a single version is an obvious fallacy, and one that will lead to false conclusions in the analysis of variants”; see his A Guide to Early Printed Books and Manuscripts (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2010), 154. 135 Etymologically, the name Elizabeth derives from the Hebrew ‫שׁבַע‬ ֶ ‫( ֱאלִי‬Elishéba) and means “God is my oath.” According to Patrick Hanks and Flavia Hodges, “the final element seems to have been altered by association with Hebrew shabbāt sabbath”; see their A Dictionary of First Names (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990; reprint, 1991), 100. 136 A. C. Hamilton, “Our New Poet: Spenser, ‘Well of English Undefyld’,” in Essential Articles for the Study of Edmund Spenser, ed. A. C. Hamilton (Hamden,

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Beyond this rather worldly significance, “Sabbaoth” can also be read eschatologically as a reference to the seventh day of the “cosmic week,” which Augustine describes at the end of Of the Citie of God as “our Sabbath, whose end shall not be the euening, but the LORDS day, as the eight eternall day, which is sanctified and made holy.”137 As a day with no end, “the eight eternall day” undoubtedly points to an ideal far beyond earthly space and time. In view of these three implications of “Sabbaoth,” this variant can be said to offer a rich set of meaning not only denoting weekly rest on the seventh day, but, in a more holistic sense, also peace and eternal restfulness. If the two variants are to be retained as in 1609, then the poetical speaker asks for “that Sabaoth’s sight,” a vision of heavenly hosts, to be granted to him. At first, this might indeed be perplexing, as it was to Upton, but the implications are reminiscent of such eschatological battles as are described in Revelation 7:12, where the Archangel Michael together with a host of angels fights against the devil in the form of a dragon. At this point in the epic poem, at the somewhat premature end of a text that began with Redcrosse as a deconstructed version of a miles christianus to be turned into a fairly righteous victor against the dragon, this final outlook to a heavenly host fighting against evil provides a well-chosen counterpoint. All the struggles that put the heroes of Books I–VI to trial eventually reach their grand eschatological finale in the battle of God’s legions against evil. If the orthographical pun on Sabbaoth/Sabaoth is deliberate (and, with Spenser, it is hard to believe that it is not), the poet cleverly ends his incomplete epic with two variants that resonate both with a perspective of the militia christiana culminating in an eventual apocalyptic battle and a preview of ultimate eschatological rest. Predicated on the shortcomings of orthography, the two variants show that a fallen world lets change even occur in the spelling of a single word as rest and battle coalesce around an apocalyptic scenario that meaningfully negotiates the mutable tensions of this-worldly life. From this perspective, the poet’s invocation to the “great Sabbaoth God” asking him to show “that Sabaoths sight” does not call for any compositorial corrections but dovetails perfectly with what such an eschatological battle would herald: eternal rest.

CT: Archon Books, 1972), 496; William Camden, Remaines of a Greater Worke . . . (London: Simon Waterson, 1605), 79. 137 Augustine, Of the Citie of God, XXII, xxx, 5 (p. 859, Dddd4r).

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*** The tension that is evoked by Redcrosse’s concrete vision of his last pilgrimage to the New Jerusalem and the poet’s more lugubrious longing for such at the end of his incomplete epic poem prompts me to return to Dürer’s Knight, Death, and the Devil. Similar to Spenser’s The Faerie Queene offering an incentivizing taste of the New Jerusalem to its readers in Book I, Dürer’s engraving affords some reassuring stability in the city that towers high above everything else. The knight in the 1513 engraving bears some resemblance to the late sixteenth-century poet, who is well known for his auto-referentiality: both are on a journey that is yet to be completed but that has given them a sense of achievement already.138 Dürer’s knight has just passed death and the devil and effectively shuns their sinful sway by riding toward the light on the left. We do not know what he has to expect, nor does the knight himself as the blinding brightness of the light suggests. Likewise, the poet has completed six books replete with tales of moral virtue and vice and has just passed on to his readership another two cantos on Mutabilitie. Whatever the reason for not completing Book VII, let alone the rest of The Faerie Queene, the Mutabilitie Cantos mark “not quite an ending, not quite a continuation,” as Gordon Teskey rightly points out.139 Paradoxically, they mark both an ending, in that they invoke eternal rest, and a continuation, in that this divine rest has not been consummated yet. Like Dürer’s knight, the poet—perhaps dolefully and exhaustedly—looks forward to a promising brightness of which the particulars remain to be unveiled. Redcrosse’s vision of the last pilgrimage to the New Jerusalem that the poet so delightfully sketches for his readers in Book I may now prove enlightening as the “pillours of Eternity” (VII, viii, 2.4) prefigure the eschatological stability on which the divine city is founded.140 For the poet, his readers, and for Dürer’s knight, reaching the divine city—free from earthly divagation and mutability—eventually means that they have to leave behind the things on earth and embark “streight way on that last long voyage.”

138 As McCabe asserts, Spenser “was constantly auto-referential but seldom autobiographical”; see “Edmund Spenser,” in The Cambridge Companion to English Poets, ed. Claude Rawson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 53. 139 Teskey, “Two Cantos of Mutabilitie (1609),” 336. 140 Reid, “Spenser’s Mutability Song,” 78.

Chapter 3: “a death like sleep, A gentle wafting to immortal Life” Pilgrimages to eternity in John Milton’s Areopagitica, Paradise Lost, and Paradise Regain’d

“NEW ENLIGHTN’D STEPS”: AREOPAGITICA AND THE COLLECTIVE PILGRIMAGE TO TRUTH DIVINE He that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true warfaring Christian. I cannot praise a fugitive and cloister’d vertue, unexercis’d & unbreath’d, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortall garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat . . . that which purifies us is triall, and triall is by what is contrary. John Milton’s Areopagitica (1644)1

These lines taken from John Milton’s Areopagitica nicely encapsulate the pilgrimage-to-eternity motif that I have thus far been exploring in the poetry 1

John Milton, Areopagitica, 1644, in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Ernest Sirluck, 8 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 2:514–15. All subsequent quotations from Areopagitica are taken from this edition and will henceforth be indicated with page numbers in parentheses.

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of John Donne, Sir Walter Raleigh, George Herbert, and Edmund Spenser.2 By projecting the ideal of a spiritual warrior—“the true warfaring Christian”—who faces all kinds of purifying trials, Milton offers his definition of a spiritually guided Everyman, whose relentless efforts lead to his purification and eventually earn him the everlasting prize, the “immortal garland” in heaven. As many scholars have observed, “the true wayfaring Christian” had been hand-corrected to “the true warfaring Christian” in presentation copies of the first edition of Areopagitica.3 Retained in print ever since, this latter orthographical variant may even be authorial as Ernest Sirluck suggests.4 The correction from “wayfaring” to “warfaring” is particularly pertinent with regard to the previous chapter in that it again reflects the close connection between the militia christiana—that is, the spiritual warfare against all sorts of vice—and the metaphor of the pilgrimage through life that culminates in eternity.5 As a spiritual warrior or pilgrim, the idealized warfaring or wayfaring Christian figures as an unremitting spiritual athlete, which precludes,

2

It is uncertain whether or not Milton knew Donne’s and Raleigh’s poetry, but we can be sure that he knew Herbert’s work and that he greatly admired Spenser; see, for example, Richard Strier, “Milton Against Humility,” in Religion and Culture in Renaissance England, ed. Claire McEachern and Debora Shuger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 262; William B. Hunter, “Milton and Spenser,” in A Milton Encyclopedia, ed. William B. Hunter, et al., 9 vols. (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1980), 8:34–36.

3

Apart from Ernest Sirluck’s note on “warfaring,” see, for example, David Ainsworth, “‘Thou art sufficient to judge aright’: Spiritual Reading in Areopagitica,” in Their Maker’s Image: New Essays on John Milton, ed. Mary C. Fenton and Louis Schwartz (Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 2011), 149.

4

In his note on this orthographical change, Sirluck observes that “the inserted r’s all have a similar form, resembling Milton’s r’s. It has been contended that the changes were made by Milton himself, but this cannot be proved . . . . It can scarcely be doubted, however, that the change has Milton’s authority, and was made, if not by himself, by the printer or bookseller after the error was discovered.”

5

The proximity of the two has been noted in Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg, eds., The Oxford Authors: John Milton (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

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in Milton’s words, “a fugitive and cloister’d vertue, unexercis’d & unbreath’d.” Ultimately, contends Milton, such unabated spiritual effort and exercise lead to an “immortall garland” through purifying trial. This process is very much reminiscent of Spenser’s Redcrosse Knight, who is first far from virtue (arguably not even a “cloister’d” one) and whose trials put him through a process of purification and open to him the way to eternity but “not without dust and heat,” as Milton would say. Surprisingly, in his note to these lines from Areopagitica, Sirluck states that “the image of Christian pilgrimage, frequently found elsewhere, never occurs in Milton,” an observation that the following chapter will attempt to refute. Although the poet rarely uses the words “pilgrim” or “pilgrimage” for a life-long spiritual journey, the present chapter will show that the holistic pilgrimage motif of spiritual efforts to be concluded in a world to come is so deeply ingrained in Milton’s thought and poetry that explicit reference to it seems dispensable. This becomes clearly apparent in Areopagitica, which serves as a particularly good example to show how a pilgrimage of intellectual exercise and trial ultimately carries eschatological implications. A tract generally known as a response to the Parliament’s Licensing Order of 1643, Areopagitica advocates a free printing press to promote universal accessibility to all sorts of knowledge.6 As a result of this parliamentary ordinance, many publications were subjected (once again) to the scrutiny of a licensor granting or denying permission for the book or pamphlet in question to be published.7 1991), 826; Neil H. Keeble, “Milton and Puritanism,” in A Companion to Milton, ed. Thomas N. Corns (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 137–38; Campana, The Pain of Reformation, 1–2. 6

The said ordinance was issued to ensure that no “Book, Pamphlet, paper . . . shall from henceforth be printed, bound, stitched or put to sale . . . unless the same be first approved of and licensed . . . and entred in the Register Book of the Company of Stationers”; see “June 1643: an Ordinance for the Regulating of Printing,” in Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642–1660, ed. C. H. Firth and R. S. Rait (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1911), 184–86 [last accessed on January 3, 2018: http://www.british-history.ac.uk/no-series/actsordinances-interregnum/pp184-186].

7

However, a high number of publications made it into print without passing a licensor, with Milton’s divorce tracts and his Areopagitica being only two prime

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Not only was this practice irreconcilable with Milton’s understanding of freedom, but it was also incompatible with his idea of knowledge, which is heavily informed by his concept of Truth. Milton’s understanding of absolute Truth lies at the heart of Areopagitica and is much more than just something that is not false: as “a streaming fountain” (543), Truth epitomizes perfection per se and is “strong next to the Almighty” (562–63). This Truth, the pamphleteer writes, “indeed came once into the world with her divine Master [Jesus Christ], and was a perfect shape most glorious to look on” (549) but has been corrupted ever since Jesus and his immediate followers disappeared. Furthermore, it is not surprising that, along Milton’s Protestant lines, the corrupted version of truth has assumed its most perverted form in the Catholic Church and particularly in the Inquisition. In order for truth divine to be recovered, mankind has to collect it arduously “limb by limb . . . to unite those dissever’d peeces which are yet wanting to the body of Truth” (549–51). Censorship, Milton holds, runs contrary to this hermeneutic endeavor since divine truth is not confined to Scripture but is scattered beyond biblical realms in all sorts of texts, even in “the drossiest volume” (521). Accordingly, the practice of licensing “hinders and retards the importation of our richest Merchandize, Truth” (548), and it impedes the progress of “them that continue seeking, that . . . do our obsequies to the torn body of our martyr’d Saint” (549–50). This “body of Truth,” however, cannot be fully reassembled “till her Masters second coming” (549). Until the grand eschatological finale of unifying Truth through the hand of God takes place, “the activity of finding truth is figured as winning a battle, a race, or an athletic combat,” as one critic describes it.8 This athletic phase is one of trial, and “triall,” as indicated above, “is by what is contrary.” Milton’s call for examples; see Blair Hoxby, “Areopagitica and Liberty,” in The Oxford Handbook of Milton, ed. Nicholas McDowell and Nigel Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 221. In 1644, a mere 20 percent of books and pamphlets were licensed as is estimated in Donald F. McKenzie, “The London Book Trade in 1644,” in Bibliographia: Lectures 1975–1988 by the Recipients of the Marc Fitch Prize for Bibliography, ed. John Horden (Oxford: Leopard’s Head Press, 1992), 137. 8

Sharon Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 35.

“a death like sleep, / A gentle wafting to immortal Life” | 141

contrariness makes trials through bad books necessary; hence, their publication may not be censored by a low-paid “Presse-corrector” (530), for “if it come to prohibiting, there is not ought [i.e., aught] more likely to be prohibited then truth it self” (565). Or, in David Ainsworth’s words, “Licensing cancels the race before it can even start.”9 This laborious teleological race “to unite those dissever’d peeces which are yet wanting to the body of Truth” (550–51) is closely related to the present study’s main interest in pilgrimages to eternity, which is why the eschatological implications of such a race merit further scrutiny. In what is now known as his “Prolusion 3,” Milton, in his last academic year at Cambridge (1628–29), already admonishes his audience, “let not your mind rest content to be bounded and cabined by the limits which compass the earth, but let it wander beyond the confines of the world, and at the last attain the summit of all human wisdom.”10 This race-like endeavor assumes an even more theological and/or epistemological touch in Areopagitica, where Milton speaks of a divine “light which we have gain’d” and which we have received “not to be ever staring on, but by it to discover onward things more remote from our knowledge” (550). As Sharon Achinstein shows in her influential Milton and the Revolutionary Reader, being tried “by what is contrary” leads to a high level of readerly fitness or to a “fit reader,” one who tries books and is tried by them on his race to eternity.11 What Ainsworth calls a “hermeneutic struggle”12 does not only apply to good and bad books but also to “our faith and knowledge,” as Milton writes, both of which thriving “by exercise, as well as our limbs and complexion” (543). Grace Tiffany refers to this internalized process as an “intellectual pilgrimage,” and Neil H. Keeble sees it as a Puritan conception of life, “habitually imaging its moral responsibilities 9

Ainsworth, “Spiritual Reading in Areopagitica,” 149.

10

John Milton, “Prolusion 3,” c. 1628–29, in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe and Kathryn A. McEuen, trans. Phyllis B. Tillyard, 8 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953), 1:247 (my emphasis); Barbara K. Lewalski, The Life of John Milton: a Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 33.

11

Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader, particularly 65–66. Also see

12

Ainsworth, “Spiritual Reading in Areopagitica,” 148.

her chapter “Milton and the Fit Reader” on Paradise Lost.

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and spiritual demands in terms of struggle and effort.”13 Whether this is a purely Puritan understanding of Christian life is doubtful, however, as the Pauline metaphor of “the prise of the hie calling of God” (Phil. 3:14) that is arduously sought but not yet attained was also used by divines on the periphery or beyond the Puritan spectrum.14 Irrespective of whether or not Milton expresses Puritan sentiment here, the metaphor of the race toward God’s prize is undoubtedly echoed in such phrases as “that immortall garland is to be run for.” Hence, in sum, Milton’s notion of an intellectual pilgrimage toward God consists of fallen men struggling to reassemble a divine union of Truth—or, to borrow again from Ainsworth, “This particular HumptyDumpty of Truth can only be put back together again by God. Truth, in short, belongs to God and comes along with him.”15 With its otherworldly thrust, this intellectual pilgrimage or “hermeneutic workout” invites negotiations of individual and collective eschatology.16 On an individual level, Milton writes that God “raises to his own work men of 13

Tiffany, Love’s Pilgrimage, 152–53; Keeble, “Milton and Puritanism,” 137.

14

To answer this question, one would first have to define “Puritanism” and then show that the race/prize metaphor is almost exclusively used by members of said group, neither of which is the aim of the present chapter. In Chapter 1, I comment upon the metaphor of the race to be completed in Holy Sonnet No. 6 by John Donne, hardly a Puritan divine. Moreover, Lancelot Andrewes, also not a known member of the Puritan camp, invokes this metaphor of perseverance in his sermons; see, for instance, his “Sermon Preached before Queene Elizabeth, at Hampton Court,” 1594, in Lancelot Andrewes, Selected Sermons and Lectures, ed. Peter McCullough (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005; reprint, 2011), 117.

15

David Ainsworth, Milton and the Spiritual Reader: Reading and Religion in Seventeenth-Century England (New York: Routledge, 2008), 28. Also see, Ainsworth, “Spiritual Reading in Areopagitica,” 153. Here, Ainsworth connects Milton’s “every joynt and member” to the popular Pauline metaphor of the church as one body of Christ comprising many parts (cf. 1 Cor. 12:12–31 and Rom. 12:3–8). I find it difficult to reconcile the incomplete spiritual race with the metaphor of the church as body of Christ as the former is to be eschatologically effected while the latter speaks of a this-worldly ecclesiological ideal.

16

For the terminology of individual and collective eschatology, see Ch. 1, note 4.

“a death like sleep, / A gentle wafting to immortal Life” | 143

rare abilities” (566) who will work toward the restoration of Truth. While Areopagitica is already working toward this aim in that it advocates the legal parameters for such a restoration through the abolition of censorship, the hermeneutical project itself is more concretely addressed and partly carried out in De Doctrina Christiana. This heterodox theological treatise, possibly written by Milton,17 serves as a perfect example of an attempt to reassemble divine Truth as it aspires “to place at [the reader’s] fingertips things which are read in dispersal in the holy books” and to bring “them together for convenience into a single body.”18 On this basis, the author of De Doctrina Christiana may ipso facto be the John Milton from Areopagitica working on an individual level as a man of rare ability “to gain furder and goe on, some new enlightn’d steps in the discovery of truth” (566, my emphasis). At the same time, however, going on an intellectual pilgrimage to trace “enlighten’d steps” is not a solipsistic endeavor: Milton, in Areopagitica, envisions an enlightened, freely-choosing people “casting off the old and wrincl’d skin of corruption to outlive these pangs and wax young again, entring the glorious waies of Truth and prosperous vertue destin’d to become great and honourable in these latter ages” (557). It is here that the collective intellectual exercise becomes apocalyptic and otherworldly: “God is decreeing to begin some new and great period in his Church” (553), resulting in England as “a noble and puissant Nation rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks” (558). In this fashion, collecting the scattered bits and

17

Milton is a probable candidate for the authorship of De Doctrina Christiana, passed down to us through a manuscript discovered in 1823, but the poet’s authorship has been repeatedly called into question. For a view on each of the two camps, see Gordon Campbell et al., Milton and the Manuscript of “De Doctrina Christiana” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 155–61; William B. Hunter, “The Provenance of the Christian Doctrine,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 32, no. 1 (1992): 129–42.

18

John Milton, The Complete Works of John Milton: De Doctrina Christiana, edited and translated by John K. Hale and J. Donald Cullington, 11 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 8:19 (my emphasis). Subsequent quotations from De Doctrina Christiana are taken from this edition with page numbers indicated parenthetically.

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pieces of Truth becomes a collective effort or pilgrimage out of which England will emerge as God’s favored and chosen nation.19 As mentioned previously, however, the restoration of divine truth is a process that is not completed “till her Masters second coming” (549) and thus incomplete until the collective intellectual pilgrimage is concluded eschatologically, not by the godly wayfarers themselves but by God. As this brief consideration of Milton’s Areopagitica shows, the idea of a step-wise, pilgrimage-like approach representing a spiritual effort that culminates beyond the realms of the fallen world is not foreign to Milton. Pace Sirluck, the third and final chapter of the present study will be concerned with the continuance of the pilgrimage-to-eternity pattern that, similar to its prefiguration in Areopagitica, can be shown to prevail in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regain’d. Compared to the pilgrimage patterns discussed in the poetry by Donne, Raleigh, Herbert, and Spenser in the previous two chapters, Milton’s two epics present such eschatological approximations slightly differently. In Milton, the motif of a journey to eternity not only negotiates the tensions between life and death, but, I will argue, its use extends to serving as a convenient metaphor to cope with the political constraints imposed on the dissenting factions by the post-Restoration authorities of the 1660s. As a consequence, the following complicates the concept of the last pilgrimage to eternity as a teleological project of individual spirituality and eschatology. Instead of “simply” conceptualizing death and the transition to the afterlife as a last pilgrimage, Milton’s two epics will be shown to work with similar metaphorical mechanisms in a dialectical fashion to relate both to means of spiritual interiorization in the present as well as to eschatological expectations of the life everlasting. Before approaching this Miltonic dialectics, I will show how Paradise Lost is intimately concerned with patterns of different kinds of pilgrimages that we have already encountered in the previous two chapters. I will, therefore, first maintain that Paradise Lost offers a clear distinction between journeys that originate from the erroneous wanderings in hell and are directed 19

C. A. Patrides, “‘Something like Prophetick strain’: Apocalyptic Configurations in Milton,” in The Apocalypse in English Renaissance Thought and Literature: Patterns, Antecedents and Repercussions, ed. C. A. Patrides and Joseph A. Wittreich (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 225.

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toward an earthly destination—place pilgrimages—and life-spanning ones that generate spiritual momentum and point to an eschatological future—life pilgrimages.20 As already demonstrated in my reading of Areopagitica, Milton is deeply concerned with the holistic conceit of a collective intellectual pilgrimage to reassemble a Truth divine once lost, an endeavor not to be concluded until the dawn of the eschaton. It will become clear that such an intellectual project as put forward in Areopagtica is radically different to Satan’s place-bound journey from hell to Eden in Paradise Lost, which I will read as a pseudo-pilgrimage to earth that culminates in the devastating consequence of the Fall. With the Fall, death is brought into the world, and its gruesome prospects trouble Adam deeply. This utter fear of death is addressed in Michael’s instruction, which, I will show, renders death palatable to Adam as he learns that he will not end in the dust of the earth but that he is destined to direct his steps-in-exile toward the heavenly country that has been prepared for him in futurity. Adam learns that, through Christ’s sacrifice, death will no longer be fearsome but will only be “a death like sleep, / A gentle wafting to immortal Life” (XII, 434–35).21 However, Adam is also made to understand that before he and everyone else can embark on their final journeys, earthly life will present its spiritual and political challenges. These, I will then contend, can be tackled with an internalized pilgrimage to Milton’s this-worldly “paradise within” that affords Adam and the generations to follow with a temporary spiritual resort until the strains and plights of the present are finally obliterated at the end of time. These present-day challenges are addressed again in Paradise Regain’d. In a close reading of the final episode, in which Satan challenges Jesus to cast himself from the pinnacle of the Temple in Jerusalem, I will show how the wandering pilgrims’ steps, which originated with the first parents, metaphorically come to a stop as the Son of God does not fall but stands resolutely “unmov’d,” thus epitomizing divine stasis. I will argue that, in this final

20

This crucial distinction is borrowed from Dyas and is explained in further detail in the Introduction, pp. 10–11. The assertion that Dyas’s dichotomy is inflected in Paradise Lost is anticipated in Tiffany, Love’s Pilgrimage, 136–43.

21

All quotations from Paradise Lost are henceforth indicated parenthetically and are taken from John Milton, Paradise Lost, 1674, 2nd edition, ed. Barbara K. Lewalski (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007).

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episode of Milton’s brief epic, the many references to wings not only resonate with the “gentle wafting” in Paradise Lost but they also anticipate the Son’s flight to an angelic banquet, richly laid with apocalyptical signifiers of the Kingdom of Glory. Just as in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and in Paradise Lost, however, this kingdom cannot be attained yet, neither by Jesus nor by those who follow his spiritual example. Until the end of time, God’s Kingdom of Grace—theorized in De Doctrina Christiana—provides believers with a “paradise within” and thus with spiritual anchors in times of trial and tribulation. These are overcome temporarily and paradigmatically in the Son’s final gesture of divine stasis that exemplifies steadfastness in crises of faith or politics or both. Eventually, the end of Milton’s brief epic unfurls a contextually rich metaphor that does not point to heaven directly but to a safe haven in tempestuous times as the Son “Home to his Mothers house private return’d” (IV, 639).22 I will read Mary’s private house as potentially referring to a clandestine conventicle in which spiritual knowledge is generated. Thus, Jesus’s return to an epistemologically pertinent institution provides a model of coming to terms with this-worldly tensions and presents a harbor in which the collective pilgrimage for Truth, as advanced in Areopagitica, may be continued until the Son’s Second Coming. An analysis of Milton’s use of the pilgrimage-to-eternity pattern necessitates some preliminary reflections on his conception of the end of time and particularly on his millenarianism and mortalism to show how these two are related to a last journey to the afterlife. In this context, it is important to bear in mind that the seventeenth century knew different nuances of millenarianism—the belief that part of the apocalypse consists in Satan being bound for a thousand years during which Christ is to reign with or through his saints and after which Satan would, for a short period, be set free again to be eventually defeated by God (Rev. 20). Some early modern divines, such as Arthur Dent, argued that Christ’s thousand-year reign had stretched from his immediate preaching to the reign of Pope Gregory VII (d. 1085).23 In contrast, 22

All quotations from Paradise Regain’d are henceforth indicated parenthetically and are taken from John Milton, Paradise Regain’d, 1671, in The Complete Works of John Milton, ed. Laura Lunger Knoppers, 11 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 2:3–64.

23

Arthur Dent, The Rvine of Rome . . . (London: T. Creede, 1603), 271.

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others, such as Joseph Mede and Milton as the potential author of De Doctrina Christiana, held that the millennium would be a future event during which “Christ himself would rule on earth with the resurrected martyrs for a thousand years, at the end of which the last days of the world and the Last Judgment would follow,” as Stella P. Revard writes.24 This latter view, which Milton also expresses in tracts such as Of Reformation and Animadversions,25 was more often than not politicized, the thought of an imminent millennium inspiring revolutionary sentiments. More specifically, the political conflicts and the civil war in the fervent 1640s and 1650s were seen by many dissenters as a sign of the second coming of Jesus Christ. Indeed, following the trial and execution of Charles I in 1649, “many people believed that these were the upheavals prophesied in Scripture to herald the world’s transformation or end” and to some Oliver Cromwell even became a Messianic figure.26 Numerous references to the millennium can be identified in Milton’s work as Revard shows: for although the poet’s millenarian hopes may have been dimmed by the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 (as many have argued),27 he does not desist from using “covert references to the millennium” 24

Stella P. Revard, “Milton and Millenarianism: from the Nativity Ode to Paradise Regained,” in Milton and the Ends of Time, ed. Juliet Cummins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 44, 46.

25

John Milton, Of Reformation, 1641, in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe and William Alfred, 8 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953), 1:616; John Milton, Animadversions, 1641, in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe, Rudolf Kirk, and William P. Baker, 8 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953), 1:706–07.

26

David Loewenstein, Representing Revolution in Milton and his Contemporaries: Religion, Politics, and Polemics in Radical Puritanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 8; Paul J. Korshin, “Queuing and Waiting: the Apocalypse in England, 1660–1750,” in The Apocalypse in English Renaissance Thought and Literature: Patterns, Antecedents and Repercussions, ed. C. A. Patrides and Joseph A. Wittreich (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 250.

27

See, for instance, William B. Hunter, “The Millenial Moment: Milton vs. ‘Milton’,” in Milton and the Ends of Time, ed. Juliet Cummins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 99.

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ranging from the chained Satan in Paradise Lost to the eventual kingship of Christ in Paradise Regain’d.28 While these millenarian events are not necessarily part of an individual final journey to eternity in the way that Chapters 1 and 2 have treated the last pilgrimage as an early modern trope, they do most definitely constitute apocalyptical linchpins on a collective path to salvation. According to Milton’s mortalism, or more precisely his thnetopsychism,29 the impending millennium, expected by Milton (and others) to be very imminent in the 1640s and 1650s, would have led to a collective ushering of the quick and the dead into heaven. In De Doctrina Christiana, Milton as its potential author writes that the Bible contains “about any intermediate state, not even a word!” (447) and that “Before the resurrection . . . , there is not even any living-place in heaven for the saints,” as implied by John 11:25 and 14:2–3 (445). Without any kind of interim state, Milton’s mortalism precludes an immediate journey to eternity following an individual’s death, for the soul in one way or another sleeps and is only imagined to be taken to eternity after the general resurrection and the last judgment. A similar contention is reiterated in Milton’s reading of 1 Thessalonians 4:16– 17, “those who died in Christ will rise again first; then we the living, who are left, shall be caught up together with them into the clouds, to meet the Lord, into the air, and so we shall be forever with the Lord ” (451). In brief, God’s prize that Paul is yearning for in Philippians 3:14 is, according to Milton, not “to be obtained immediately after death,” but “when it is to be given to all the others, presumably not before the glorious coming of Christ” (447). Interestingly, however, such a mortalist doctrine does not surface explicitly in either of the two epics as my discussion of the pilgrimage-to-eternity pattern in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regain’d will show. Likewise, in De

28

Revard, “Milton and Millenarianism,” 58, 62–63.

29

According to Campbell and Corns, the heterodox doctrine of mortalism “came in three variants: thnetopsychism (the soul dies with the body but is resurrected at the Last Judgement), psychopannychism (the soul sleeps from the moment of death and is awakened at the Last Judgement), and annihilationism (the soul dies with the body and permanently ceases to exist)”; see Gordon Campbell and Thomas N. Corns, “De Doctrina Christiana: an England That Might Have Been,” in The Oxford Handbook of Milton, ed. Nicholas McDowell and Nigel Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 433.

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Doctrina Christiana man’s itinerant state on earth and his prospective journey to eternity are in no way compromised by Milton’s mortalist stance: “Our citizenship,” he writes, “is indeed in the heavens, not where we are now already dwelling, but in the place from which we are expecting a savior to lead us away to it” (447). And in a later passage, Milton states similarly following 2 Corinthians 5:8 that “we are confident and prefer to travel away from the body [peregrinari ex corpore] and to be at home with the Lord ” (461). In viewing death as a peregrination away from the body, Milton, despite his insistence on a mortalist doctrine, aligns himself with those poets who conceive of death and the approaching eschaton as a final pilgrimage to eternity. In what follows, I will show that this claim not only holds true for Areopagitica and De Doctrina Christiana but that the poetics of Paradise Lost and Paradise Regain’d are also clearly informed by the idea of a pilgrimage to the afterlife.

“WANDRING THIS DARKSOME DESART”: SATAN’S PILGRIMAGE TO GOD’S LIGHT AND THE FALL OF ADAM AND EVE IN PARADISE LOST From its very beginning, Paradise Lost opens a wide dogmatic gap between death as divine punishment and the assertion of God’s providence, thereby establishing a theological tension that the poem will ultimately seek to bridge through its pilgrimage negotiations. Invoking the Holy Spirit as instructor and enlightener, the poet famously desires to hear his “Heav’nly Muse” sing “Of Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit / Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal tast / Brought Death into the World” to receive the inspiration to “assert Eternal Providence, / And justifie the ways of God to men” (I, 1–26, my emphasis). The aim of this oft-quoted opening is at least twofold: On the one hand, it accounts for death as divine retribution imposed by a just God on his creature who has crossed the line of the divine statutes, thereby laying the first stone of original sin.30 On the other hand, and for the present purposes

30

Clay Daniel, Death in Milton’s Poetry (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1994), 17.

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by far more important, line 25 points to the fact that there is a way out of this earthly misery as divine providence is asserted. Wedged between these two poles is the question of theodicy together with the “admission that many people felt that God’s ways needed justifying,” as Leopold Damrosch maintains.31 Thus, from the outset, the poet seeks to bridge or even close this gap between divine retribution and asserted providence by pursuing “Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhime” (I, 16). Following the developments in Pandaemonioum, the second invocation—this time to “Light”—expresses the poet’s lament that he himself is “From the chearful wayes of men / Cut off,” that he is bereft of wisdom, and in need of “Celestial light” so that he “may see and tell / Of things invisible to mortal sight” (III, 46–55). These repeated requests for divine illumination and inspiration testify to the poet’s admission of his own fallen nature and imply that his own ways are in occasional need of rectification even if they aim to justify God’s ways to men and thus to point to the eternity that has been providentially asserted. Because of the epic poet’s human shortcomings, Milton’s heavenly muse ultimately “must guide us to a conquest of death that takes place beyond this world, not in it,” as Damrosch puts it.32 This immodest endeavor entails transcendence of “mortal sight,” especially because parts of the poem take recourse to the familiar eschatological pilgrimage pattern in an attempt to map man’s ways to eternity and thus to palliate the pangs of death, as I will argue below. To identify ways in which the poet approaches the afterlife step-by-step, I will demonstrate in the following how Milton first presents hell as a place of restlessness out of which Satan emerges as a primeval, restless place pilgrim. In his attempt to reach the celestial light, this wrong-headed wanderer instead conquers earth, where he will inflict his own restlessness upon Eve, and thus sows the seed of the Fall. The resulting plight of Adam and Eve presents the ideal scenario for Milton to unfold the promise of divine providence in that he has Michael reveal to Adam their providential prospects. Although Sin and Death have entered the fallen world, as Michael explains, they will be defeated by the Son of God’s sacrifice on the cross, which will transform death into “a death like sleep, / A gentle wafting to immortal Life”

31

Leopold Damrosch, God’s Plot & Man’s Stories: Studies in the Fictional Imagination from Milton to Fielding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 4.

32

Damrosch, God’s Plot & Man’s Stories, 80.

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(XII, 434–35). With this promise on the soteriological horizon, the first parents with “Providence thir guide” embark “with wandring steps and slow” not on a Satanic place pilgrimage, but on a primeval pilgrimage through life to choose eventually “Thir place of rest” (XII, 647–48). Before identifying this “place of rest,” Milton, like Spenser, is first concerned with presenting to his readers different modes of wandering and disorientation that lead away from God. Books I and II of Paradise Lost, in particular, characterize hell as a place of restlessness, a state that the lapsed angels desperately long to relinquish. Described as an “unhappy Mansion” (I, 268) or an “ill Mansion” (II, 462), hell is full of “Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace / And rest can never dwell” (I, 65–66, my emphasis). When Satan instructs Beelzebub to gather and to rest at “yon dreary Plain, forlorn and wilde,” he immediately seems to doubt that “any rest can harbour there” (I, 180–85). Naturally, the verb “harbour,” as one critic points out, “strengthens the suggestion of the quest for security and calm by making the [fallen] angels mariners seeking a haven from a stormy ocean.”33 However, given their irrevocable state of exile, any quest for rest is utterly futile. This futility is later confirmed in Book II when the “Stygian Counsel” is “dissolv’d” (306) and “the ranged powers / Disband, and wandring, each his several way / Pursues” (522–24) with the effect that—after roughly a hundred lines of wandering—they have “found / No rest” (617–18). Characterized as disoriented and purposeless wanderers, the wandering devils are diametrically opposed to divine rest and have so far basically achieved nothing, apart from providing the reader with a perfect example of how not to frame one’s spiritual steps toward heaven. Very much reminiscent of Spenser’s conception of purposelessness, aimlessness, and wrongfulness, “wandring” is defined with a Miltonic twist on choosing “as inclination or sad choice” that “Leads him perplex, where he may likeliest find / Truce to his restless thoughts” (II, 524–26). Earlier twentieth-century critics such as G. Wilson Knight and Isabel G. MacCaffrey already found this depiction of Milton’s devils to reveal an uncomfortably human pattern: they comment that “The Satanic party are mankind in its

33

Isabel G. MacCaffrey, “Paradise Lost” as “Myth” (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), 186.

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fruitless struggles” and that “The fallen angels, like fallen men, are wanderers in a maze, searching in vain for an end.”34 Furthermore, this sense of wandering as toilsome and errant is not only reinforced through the poet’s depiction of Satan, who is not “erect” like the first parents (IV, 288) and needs his large spear “to support [his] uneasie steps” (I, 295), but also through Abdiel’s later words directed at the Archfiend, “still thou errst, nor end wilt find / Of erring, from the path of truth remote” (VI, 172–72). Far away from the right path, Satan’s wandering steps in hell are described as “uneasie,” which reflects his and his fallen peers’ errant and restless state. It will become clear in my discussion of Paradise Regain’d that this prelapsarian uneasiness will be transposed to Satanic ease as implied by the “easie steps” (I, 120) that the Archfiend takes in the postlapsarian wilderness of Milton’s brief epic. For the time being, however, the negative simile, “not like those steps / On Heavens Azure” (I, 351–52, my emphasis), indicates that Satan and his peers still share an awareness of how pleasant and easy heavenly walking used to be, a spiritual state from which they have been excluded. In its stead, sinful restlessness now persists. It is therefore only to be expected that the fallen angels’ council in Book II precisely revolves around the question of what to do in this dismal state of disorientation. Moloch pusillanimously observes that “The way seems difficult and steep to scale / With upright wing against a higher foe” (II, 71–72), and Mammon resignedly sighs that an “Eternity so spent in worship paid / To whom we hate” must be rather “wearisome” (II, 247–49). Hearing of Earth and “Of some new Race call’d Man” (II, 348), Beelzebub, however, does not abandon the idea that they “may chance / Re-enter Heav’n; or else in some milde Zone / Dwell not unvisited of Heav’ns fair Light / secure” (II, 396–99). His call for a volunteer to do preliminary explorations anticipates the earthly pilgrimage on which Satan soon agrees to embark himself: who shall tempt with wandring feet The dark unbottom’d infinite Abyss And through the palpable obscure find out His uncouth way, or spread his aerie flight

34

G. Wilson Knight, Chariot of Wrath: the Message of John Milton to Democracy at War (London: Faber and Faber, 1942), 137; MacCaffrey, “Paradise Lost” as “Myth”, 183.

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Upborn with indefatigable wings Over the vast abrupt, ere he arrive The happy Ile

(II, 404–10)

In these lines, geographical terms like “infinite Abyss,” “the vast abrupt,” or “The happy Ile” indicate that this pilgrimage of sorts will be of an earthly rather than a spiritual nature, a claim to be further corroborated below. Moreover, the indecisive references to “wandring feet” and “indefatigable wings” show that this is indeed an “uncouth way,” for Beelzebub seems to have no clue which mode of transportation the questing candidate would have to employ.35 Despite this “uncouth way,” Satan bravely embarks on his long and tortuous journey, which has often been identified by critics as a “pseudopilgrimage,” a “geographical pilgrimage,” or even a romance quest, all of which invite an allegorical reading I adopt in the following.36 While I concur with Tiffany’s observation that “To express sin’s results [Milton] employs images of physical travel,” her assertion that the poet “portrays travel not as Godward pilgrimage but as fruitless action that bodies forth sinfulness” needs to be reconsidered in light of the design of the poem.37 Yes, the aimless roamings of Satan and his peers in Hell do, indeed, underline their sinful state and bespeak their moral confusion and waywardness. However, the 35

Later in Book II, the epic narrator specifies that Satan’s modes of transportation are indeed manifold as he travels Ore bog or steep, through strait, rough, dense, or rare, With head, hands, wings, or feet pursues his way, And swims or sinks, or wades, or creeps, or flyes.

36

(ll. 948–50)

MacCaffrey, “Paradise Lost” as “Myth”, particularly 184, 188–91, 195, 202– 03; Louis L. Martz, Poet of Exile: a Study of Milton’s Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 192; Lewalski, Life, 464; Tiffany, Love’s Pilgrimage, particularly 136–39; Beatrice Groves, “Pilgrimage in Paradise Lost,” Milton Studies 53 (2012): 129. Naturally, Satan’s journey also has its epic predecessors in Homer, Dante, and Tasso; see David Quint, Inside “Paradise Lost”: Reading the Designs of Milton’s Epic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 71– 72.

37

Tiffany, Love’s Pilgrimage, 136.

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Archfiend’s lament—“long is the way / And hard, that out of Hell leads up to light” (II, 432–33)—not only echoes the Sybil’s warning to Aeneas before he ventures into the underworld,38 but it also bespeaks a Satanic proclivity for being drawn toward the celestial light. The aim of the present chapter is not to offer yet another attempt at penetrating the notoriously complex concept of light and darkness in Paradise Lost, but I consider it reasonable to read Satan’s complaint as a deeply spiritual one that resonates with Jesus’s dictum in John 8:12, “I am the light of ye worlde: he that followeth me, shal not walke in darkenes, but shal haue the light of life.” This would allow for a reading in which Satan embarks initially on a pilgrimage toward God’s light and only coincidentally toward God’s newly created world as the prime recipient of his divine rays. In addition, although his travels are eventually bound to inflict sin, they do not prove fruitless as Tiffany holds but are literally quite fruitful as Satan will successfully bring about the Fall by cajoling Eve into eating of the fruit of the forbidden tree. As uncomfortable as this may seem, we must take seriously Milton’s portrayal of Satan’s pilgrimage as one toward God’s light and as one that will bear fruit. Once Satan has passed the gates of hell guarded by Sin and Death, he is faced with Chaos, Night, Rumor, Chance, Tumult, Confusion, and Discord, and reiterates his spiritual desire to enter the orbits of God’s light: by constraint Wandring this darksome Desart, as my way Lies through your spacious Empire up to light, Alone, and without guide, half lost, I seek What readiest path leads where your gloomie bounds Confine with Heav’n

38

(II, 972–77)

Virgil, Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid, Appendix Vergiliana, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, rev. ed., 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1935; reprint, 1965), 1:514–15.

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Appropriately erroneously, Chaos tells Satan, “you have not farr” (II, 1007), but, in fact, “he with difficulty and labour hard / Mov’d on” (II, 1021–22).39 This “spacious Empire” that Satan has to cross using the “readiest path” allows for an allegorical reading in which the spaciousness stands for the spiritual separation of the satanic and the divine, a radical polarity that Satan is close to overcoming when he, in Book III, is seen “Coasting the wall of Heav’n” (71). However, in describing Satan’s movements, Milton demonstrates his morphological acumen: Satan only “alighted walks” (III, 422, my emphasis). Here, “alighted” does not only mean “descend[ed], fall[en], or land[ed]” (OED, v.1, II), but it may well constitute an oblique pun on “To shed light on” (OED, v.2, 1). Thus, the prefix in “alighted” implies that God’s light reaches Satan but does not penetrate him, which would arguably be the prerequisite for enlightened walking on a spiritually informed pilgrimage. Although Satan manages to overcome the “spacious Empire,” he does not take the “enlighten’d steps” idealized in Areopagitica but instead figures as the shunned “cloister’d vertue” impervious to divine illumination. What may well be read as a parody of the pilgrimage-to-eternity topos with Satan as its protagonist emerging from the massa damnata almost culminates in a visio coelestis that is akin to the one of the Redcrosse Knight. In the previous chapter, I commented upon Spenser’s depiction of the New Jerusalem “that earthly tong / Cannot describe, nor wit of man can tell” (FQ I, x, 55.5–6) and mentioned how Redcrosse sees that “The blessed Angels to and fro descend / From highest heuen, in gladsome companee” (FQ I, x,

39

The image of Satan being “like a weather-beaten Vessel” that “holds / Gladly the Port” (II, 1043–44) is reminiscent of Thomas Campion’s popular hymn and the image of a pilgrim’s longing for Heaven: Never weather-beaten Saile more willing bent to shore, Never tyred Pilgrims limbs affected slumber more, Then my weary spright now longs to flye out of my troubled brest. O come quickly, sweetest Lord, and take my soule to rest.

See Thomas Campion, The Works of Thomas Campion: Complete Songs, Masques, and Treatises with a Selection of Latin Verse, ed. Walter R. Davis (London: Faber and Faber, 1969), 70–71. This sixteenth-century, perhaps early seventeenth-century, hymn enjoyed popularity well into the 1700s. For this insight, I am indebted to Marco Amherd.

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56.2–3). This traditional image of Jacob’s Ladder (cf. Gen. 28:12) is again replicated in Satan’s vision of Heaven and merits a longer excerpt: And long he wanderd, till at last a gleame Of dawning light turned thither-ward in haste His travell’d steps; farr distant he descries Ascending by degrees magnificent Up to the wall of Heaven a Structure high, At top whereof, but farr more rich appeerd The work as of a Kingly Palace Gate With Frontispiece of Diamond and Gold Imbellisht, thick with sparkling orient Gemmes The Portal shon, inimitable on Earth By Model, or by shading Pencil drawn. The Stairs were such as whereon Jacob saw Angels ascending and descending, bands Of Guardians bright, when he from Esau fled To Padan-Aram in the field of Luz, Dreaming by night under the open Skie, And waking cri’d, This is the Gate of Heav’n.

(III, 499–515)

This is how close the Archfiend gets to Heaven! As mentioned previously, the poet aspires to sing “Of things invisible to mortal sight” (III, 55), but his mere description of Heaven’s portal—“inimitable on Earth”—has to suffice for the time being: Satan is not eligible to see more on his pilgrimage to the celestial light. The fallen readers and the poet of Paradise Lost, on the other hand, are privy to the conversations held behind that gate in the first half of Book III. Drawing a line that Satan cannot cross, Milton exploits and expands the epic simile of Jacob’s Ladder by adding that “The Stairs were then let down, whether to dare / The Fiend by easie ascent, or aggravate / His sad exclusion from the dores of Bliss” (III, 523–25). Standing on the “lower stair / That scal’d by steps of Gold to Heav’n Gate” (III, 540–41), the Adversary looks with envy on everything that God has created for his new race and, allured by all the Edenic splendor, directs his course to the “passage down to th’ Earth, a passage wide” (III, 528) rather than up to the celestial light. This decision marks a pivotal moment on Satan’s journey as it is suggestive of his preference for earthly matters over heavenly ones. When he was

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talking to Chaos and Night earlier, he first said that he was seeking the “readiest path” that “leads where your gloomie bounds / Confine with Heav’n” (II, 976–77). On the lowest step of the stairs to Heaven, Satan’s pilgrimage could still have been considered one leading closer up to God’s light. Now, however, he is considering the alternative of “som other place” (II, 977) elsewhere referred to as “a place of bliss / In the Pourlieues of Heav’n” (II, 832– 33) and seems to be reminded of his initial intention to “drive as we were driven, / The punie habitants” (II, 366–67). It is here that Satan’s earthly pilgrimage takes full form: rather than ascending further toward the heavenly light and “the dores of Bliss,” from which he is excluded anyway, Satan is now pursuing things on earth. Through his envy at God’s recent creation for man, Satan definitely abandons his quest for God’s light and thus becomes an earth-bound pilgrim: the plural of “happy Iles” (III, 567) already suggests that the initial quest for “a happy Ile” (II, 410) has been multiplied. This multiplication of his earthly goals arguably leads to Satan’s utter disorientation in the Miltonic cosmos. Though he has seen Earth from afar at III, 525–43, Satan is somehow stuck on the outermost orb and does not know which way to take. To ask Uriel “In which of all these shining Orbes hath Man / His fixed seat” (III, 668–69), Satan first has to conceal the signs of his long journey: no longer are his steps feeble, for “to every Limb / Sutable grace diffus’d, so well he feignd” (III, 638–39). His pretentious camouflage proves quite successful as his mode of spatial errancy is now transferred to Uriel’s perception, who mistakes the fiend for a fellow angel, directs him to “Adams abode,” and tells him, “Thy way thou canst not miss, me mine requires,” (III, 734–35). Thus inflicting his own errancy on one of God’s jejune sentries, the Archfiend eventually succeeds in his endeavor to approach Earth. The Garden of Eden, however, initially presents itself inaccessible to Satan “As with a rural mound the champain head / Of a steep wilderness, whose hairie sides / With thicket overgrown, grottesque and wilde, / Access deni’d” (IV, 134–37). To Satan “th’ ascent of that steep savage Hill” at first proves rather difficult as “the undergrowth / Of shrubs and tangling bushes had perplext / All path of Man or Beast that past that way” (IV, 172–77).40 40

For a more comprehensive treatment of hills in pilgrimage narratives, see Westerweel, Patterns and Patterning, 146–62.

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Achinstein comments that, here, “‘perplex’ is both a physical and a mental condition, one involving the difficulties of finding one’s way in a confusing field of signs” and one “associated with a difficult journey.”41 Readers of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene may, moreover, be inclined to spiritualize Achinstein’s reading. It is not only a “mental condition” that is at stake here but a deeply spiritual one: clearly, Satan lacks Mercy, who leads the Redcrosse Knight by a narrow way, Scattred with bushy thornes, and ragged breares, Which still before him she remou’d away That nothing in his ready passage stay

(I, x, 35.2–5)

Satan is not afforded such spiritual aid, nor does he require one. The poem makes this clear rather uncomfortably as, all of a sudden, Satan “At one slight bound high over leap’d all bound / Of Hill or highest Wall, and sheer within / Lights on his feet” (IV, 181–83). Hence, the walls of Paradise become disconcertingly easy to breach.42 Having finally arrived at the goal of his earth-bound journey, Satan is presented or, rather, presents himself as though he were a place pilgrim who has just arrived at a physical pilgrimage site, eager to look into all the different shrines: But first with narrow search I must walk round This Garden, and no corner leave unspi’d; A chance but chance may lead where I may meet Some wandring Spirit of Heav’n, by Fountain side, Or in thick shade retir’d, from him to draw What further would be learnt.

(IV, 528–33)

As Jonathan Sumption and Stefan Schröder note, pilgrims to Jerusalem and Rome were often received by members of religious orders or lay local guides 41 42

Achinstein, Milton and the Revolutionary Reader, 213. Rebecca M. Rush, “Satan’s Mural Breaches: Transgression and Self-Violation in Paradise Lost,” Milton Studies 54 (2013): 106, 117.

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who assisted visitors in arranging their pious visits to the different shrines and imparted to them the spiritual significance of certain sites.43 In brief, local guides were a necessity to ensure pilgrims knew where to pray and where to pay.44 When Milton visited Rome in the late 1630s, he may still have witnessed similar practices himself and could have been thinking of and taking a stance against them when composing these lines. This contention is further bolstered by Milton’s depiction of the Paradise of Fools, in which “Pilgrims roam that stray’d so farr to seek / In Golgatha him dead, who lives in Heav’n” (III, 476–77). Here, the poet explicitly inveighs against those who are, in his view, led purposelessly to venerate Mount Calvary as one of the most important pilgrimage sites in Jerusalem instead of looking toward heaven to worship Christ.45 Although Satan hopes to “meet / Some wandring Spirit of Heav’n” (IV, 531) to show him around, he is not entitled to any form of guidance in Paradise and has to find the way to his shrine(s) himself, “Through wood, through waste, o’re hill, o’re dale” (IV, 538). He seems to have arrived at his shrine when he finds Eve in her sleep and starts to instill in her dreams “Vaine hopes, vaine aimes, inordinate desires” (IV, 808), vices 43

Jonathan Sumption, Pilgrimage: an Image of Mediaeval Religion (London: Faber and Faber, 1975), 260–61; Stefan Schröder, Zwischen Christentum und Islam: Kulturelle Grenzen in den spätmittelalterlichen Pilgerberichten des Felix Fabri (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2009), 137. My thanks to Florence A. Zufferey, who pointed this out to me. Similar practices were maintained at English pilgrimage sites before the Reformation; see Ben Nilson, Cathedral Shrines of Medieval England (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1998), 128–34.

44

On the economic aspects of the practice, see Adrian R. Bell and Richard S. Dale, “The Medieval Pilgrimage Business,” Enterprise and Society 12, no. 3 (2011): 609, 612.

45

Dorothea R. French, “Journeys to the Center of the Earth: Medieval Pilgrimages to Mount Calvary,” in Journeys Toward God: Pilgrimage and Crusade, ed. Barbara N. Sargent-Baur (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications of Western Michigan University, 1992), 45–81, particularly 65–67. In addition, it is not unlikely that Milton may have been thinking of a “guide” for Satan like Chaucer’s Pardoner, who can be read as a “parodic relic custodian”; see Robyn Malo, “The Pardoner’s Relics (and Why They Matter the Most),” The Chaucer Review 43, no. 1 (2008): 84.

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of which place pilgrims were often accused by Protestant divines.46 If it were not for Ithuriel, Zephon, Gabriel, and Uriel, the keepers of Eden, who chase Satan away, the evil intentions of his place-bound journey would probably have borne fruit already. In Book IX, Satan reaches the goal of his earthly pilgrimage as his temptations eventually prove successful when Eve succumbs to his wiles and thus initiates her own state of “wandring.”47 Seeing that their “labour grows” (IX, 208), Eve proposes that they divide their work in the garden, whereupon Adam replies, “These paths & Bowers doubt not but our joynt hands / Will keep from Wilderness with ease” (IX, 244–45). On one level, this leads to the disturbing assumption that the wilderness from without the walls of Eden could take over the prelapsarian plain within unless this is prevented in a connubial effort by the first parents. On another level, Adam’s lines need to be read in relation to Raphael’s warning that a “malicious Foe / Envying our happiness, and of his own / Despairing, seeks to work us woe and shame / By sly assault” (IX, 253–56). As long as they are together, as long as their hands are joint, Adam can be the one “Who guards her, or with her the worst endures” (IX, 269) even if this involves protecting Eve from Satan’s assaults and from a wilderness of sin that would follow suit. When Adam agrees to let Eve work on her own, the two are separated and thus share only little difference with the disbanding and wandering devils in Pandaemonium, who “each his several way / Pursues” (II, 524). When Satan finds Eve, he learns of God’s prohibition to eat of the Tree of Knowledge and immediately seizes his chance to have Eve challenge the divine statutes. As Neil Forsyth argues convincingly, Satan, has got Eve to question that text, to divide its meanings, to interpret or read it, to be her own judge or critic. Satan, as it were, has just shown himself to be the first literary critic, and Eve has quickly learned to be one, too.48

46

These common accusations are elucidated in the Introduction, pp. 13–14.

47

This has already been observed in Mary Christopher Pecheux, “Abraham, Adam, and the Theme of Exile in Paradise Lost,” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 80, no. 4 (1965): 366; Tiffany, Love’s Pilgrimage, 142; Groves, “Pilgrimage in Paradise Lost,” 144.

48

Neil Forsyth, The Satanic Epic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 223.

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In her attempted deconstruction of the divine law, however, Eve herself becomes a wanderer between her own whys and wherefores, which occupy almost 40 lines (IX, 745–79). Her thoughts are indeed restless and thus indicative of incipient errancy that dovetails nicely into Milton’s earlier definition of wandering “as inclination or sad choice” that “Leads him perplex, where he may likeliest find / Truce to his restless thoughts” (II, 524–26). To reach a “Truce” between her conflicting thoughts, Eve makes a “sad choice,” eats of the fruit, and encourages Adam to follow her wandering example. That this form of primeval aberrance is not part of Eve’s prelapsarian nature becomes clear when Adam later speaks of her “strange / Desire of wandring” (IX, 1135–36, my emphasis). Wandering is not the type of activity that befalls those who keep the paths of Eden clean of the weeds of the wilderness, yet Eve’s express “will / Of wandring” (IX, 1145–46) suggests a free choice. Here, the dose of “wandring” injected by the chief-wanderer Satan as the root of sinfulness is named for the first time after the Fall and announces the nadir of the couple’s spiritual state and the deleterious consequences for their future access to heaven. Edenic tranquility has now been replaced with wandering restlessness: “Thir inward State of Mind, calm Region once / And full of Peace, now tost and turbulent” (IX, 1125–26). In its calm and prelapsarian state, the “passage down to th’ Earth” was “a passage wide, / Wider by farr then that of after-times / Over Mount Sion” (III, 528–30). Moreover, “Gods Eternal house” used to be directly accessible through “A broad and ample rode, whose dust is Gold / And pavement Starrs” (VII, 576–77). In both cases, access to Heaven seems to be a matter of ease. As a consequence of the Fall, this ease is transposed to or even seized by Satan and his peers who are now able to pass freely through the open gates of Hell up to the fallen Earth on the broad way which has been paved by Sin and Death (X, 304– 474). It is hardly necessary to emphasize that this is the “broad waye that leadeth to destruction” (Matt. 7:13); accordingly, the fallen angels use this wide passage “with ease” (X, 394) to “enter now into full bliss” (X, 503), thus conquering Eden at its etymological root.49 Sin and Death not only pave the broad way to Earth, but they also infiltrate God’s most recent creation themselves; the two are to “dwell and Reign in bliss” (X, 399) and make the world “unimmortal” (X, 611), the double 49

‫( עֵדֶ ן‬Éden) is usually translated as “delight,” “bliss,” or “pleasure.”

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negation of Milton’s neologism reflecting “our inability to imagine immortality except by contrast with mortality.”50 Although Eve “knew not eating Death” (IX, 792), the phrasing suggests that death is not just in the world but that it has been physically incorporated to constitute the fallen state of humanity.51 Satan and Sin’s offspring, initially haunting Adam and Eve (and possibly also the reader) from Books I to X as an uncertainty and shapeless form, is now transformed from “Death into death,” as Lara Dodds explains.52 In Satan’s words, man is now “To Sin and Death a prey” (X, 490), and the prospect of Death’s “eternal Famin” (X, 597) troubles Adam greatly: Death be not one stroak, as I suppos’d, Bereaving sense, but endless miserie From this day onward, which I feel begun Both in me, and without me, and so last To perpetuitie

(X, 809–13)

At this point, the pangs of Sin and Death have become so profound that the first parents long for death themselves, and as implied by “Let us seek Death” (X, 1001), Eve even contemplates suicide. As I will show below, however, their view of death changes radically once Adam is taught by Michael that bodily death will terminate their wandering misery and usher in a time of bliss that ensues as they conclude their pilgrimage through life.

50

Damrosch, God’s Plot & Man’s Stories, 96.

51

Tzachi Zamir, “Death, Life, and Agency in Paradise Lost,” Milton Studies 56 (2015): 209.

52

Lara Dodds, “Death and the ‘Paradice within’ in Paradise Lost and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake,” Milton Studies 56 (2015): 123–24.

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“TO CHOOSE / THIR PLACE OF REST . . . WITH WANDRING STEPS AND SLOW”: PILGRIMAGE NEGOTIATIONS IN PARADISE LOST TO PALLIATE THE PANGS OF DEATH To understand the manifold implications of death in Milton’s thought, it is timely to return briefly to De Doctrina Christiana, in which death is theorized in a fourfold taxonomy. The first death pertains to the physical mors corporalis (440–63), the second to the state of fallen human existence corrupted with guilt and sinfulness (430–31), the third to a mors spiritualis in which sin casts a pall over right reason (432–33), and the fourth to a mors aeterna for those who are exempt from God’s grace and face eternal damnation (888–89). Tzachi Zamir rightly observes that Adam and Eve are only partly submitted to death as original punishment for eating of the Tree: “they are . . . dead in the second and third sense, but not in the first or the fourth.”53 Adam seems to be partly aware of this, too, as he tells Eve of God’s “favor, grace, and mercie” (X, 1096), yet he still believes that they will “end / In dust, our final rest and native home” (X, 1084–85). From Adam’s current perspective, death is leading to dust, and similar to Spenser’s Redcrosse, Adam only sees death and its spiritually destructive force. Any access to Heaven as described in prelapsarian times now seems unattainable. However, since Adam and Eve are in no way subject to a mors aeterna and not yet to a mors corporalis, they still live in a very physical sense and will learn that their spiritual pathway—through their bodily death—ultimately leads them out of their earthly misery. I will argue in the following that it is through Michael’s visual and narrative instruction in Books XI and XII that Adam will learn that his “native home” is not the dust of which he is made but that he is actually headed toward a heavenly destination echoed in the final lines of the poem. Nonetheless, he is not exempt from beholding what the opening lines of the epic already prepared for, namely how his “mortal tast / Brought Death into the World” (I, 2–3). Although Michael came to Adam to “Redeem thee quite from Deaths rapacious claime” (XI, 258), Adam is so appalled when he learns of the story of Cain and Abel (XI, 466–69), of the “painful passages” of death (XI, 528), and of the “many shapes / Of Death” (XI, 467–68) that 53

Zamir, “Death, Life, and Agency in Paradise Lost,” 205.

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will prevail (XI, 466–95) that he wishes he had “Liv’d ignorant of future” (XI, 764). Eve’s perspective is in no way different as she assumes that they will have to “wander down / Into a lower World, to this obscure / And wilde” (XI, 282–84), but it is Michael’s objective in the two final Books to mitigate these prospects, a process that comes to full fruition at the end of the poem. As Adam and Eve take their steps out of Eden, their tears are wiped and the poet makes clear that their departure is not a completely disoriented one into the wilderness. With “Providence thir guid,” they will know where to direct their wandering steps “to choose / Thir place of rest” (XII, 646–47), thus the reassuring climax of Milton’s epic. Russell M. Hillier, moreover, convincingly argues that the act of wiping away their tears already points to an eschatological future where such a gesture, echoing Isaiah 25:8 and Revelation 21:4, carries apocalyptical undertones and suggests an eventual return of the faithful to their heavenly home.54 Such a prospect has already been revealed to Adam, and he takes great delight in hearing of a future time when the faithful will be rewarded and received into bliss, Whether in Heav’n or Earth, for then the Earth Shall all be Paradise, far happier place Then this of Eden, and far happier daies.

(XII, 462–65)

As will become clear in the following, the end of Paradise Lost is in other words only the beginning of a providential pilgrimage through life that sees Adam and Eve embark on their spiritual steps that eventually culminate in eternity.55 Most of the visions and narratives in Books XI and XII are dedicated to Adam’s understanding of such a pilgrimage through life and to revealing to

54

Russell M. Hillier, “‘So Shall the World Goe On’: a Providentialist Reading of Books Eleven and Twelve of Paradise Lost,” English Studies 92, no. 6 (2011): 629.

55

In this assertion, I have been anticipated by MacCaffrey, “Paradise Lost” as “Myth”, 205–06; Pecheux, “Abraham, Adam, and the Theme of Exile in Paradise Lost,” 371; Donald R. Howard, Writers and Pilgrims: Medieval Pilgrimage Narratives and Their Posterity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 105; Groves, “Pilgrimage in Paradise Lost,” 138–46.

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him where it leads. Even before the Fall, Adam was only entitled to a “knowledge within bounds” (VII, 120), and he was advised by Raphael, Dream not of other Worlds, what Creatures there Live, in what state, condition or degree, Contented that thus farr hath been reveal’d Not of Earth only but of highest Heav’n.

(VIII, 175–78)

After the Fall, Adam in a way will have to dream of other worlds since the one that he will inhabit is corrupted, and the only way out of this predicament is—he will learn—to focus on what lies ahead in a world to come. For although God commands Michael to “drive out the sinful Pair, / From hallowd ground” (XI, 105–06), he also asks the Archangel to “reveale / To Adam what shall come in future dayes” (XI, 113–14) lest the couple despair. In this context, Louis L. Martz rightly holds that, in comparison to other roughly contemporary expulsion narratives, Milton’s Michael comes to save Adam and Eve rather than to expel them.56 Moreover, with regard to spiritual reading practices, Ainsworth observes that Adam’s prelapsarian knowledge was indeed limited already, but that it was comprehensive enough to render him a “fit reader” in interpreting the signs around him with remarkable aplomb (e.g., Eve’s dream in Book V). After the Fall, on the other hand, his interpretative skills during his instruction prove so poor that he invariably requires Michael’s help to trace God’s “footstep” (XI, 329).57 Hence, Michael assumes a pivotal role not only in affording all the nuts and bolts of fallen life but also in disclosing to Adam where his spiritual pilgrimage will take him and the fallen generations to come. Michael’s role as Adam’s guide is not coincidental and is comparable to pilgrimage narratives that were treated in previous chapters. In view of Adam’s subsequent pilgrimage to eternity, it is not very surprising that the Archangel Michael is Adam’s “safe Guide” (XI, 371) as he is traditionally known not only as a pilgrim’s companion en route to holy shrines but also as a long-held transcendental safeguard “to conduct the soul to the other

56

Martz, Poet of Exile, 186.

57

Ainsworth, Milton and the Spiritual Reader, 99–104.

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world,” as Westerweel elucidates.58 In this capacity, Michael is like that “one good Angell, which a friend had ti’d / Close to my side” (ll. 16–18) in George Herbert’s poem “The Pilgrimage.” In Milton, this Herbertian pun on the “Angell” also referring to “An old English gold coin . . . having as its device the archangel Michael standing upon” (OED, n. 6) becomes fully literalized: here, Michael is indeed very close to Adam’s side, and his message is designed to stay with Adam once the messenger takes his leave. Moreover, Michael also fits well into the ars moriendi tradition. Showing Adam how “shalt thou lead / Safest thy life, and best prepar’d endure / Thy mortal passage when it comes” (XI, 364–66), Michael’s divine mandate includes a discourse on the art of dying. This is very much reminiscent of Philemon’s pastoral ministry extended toward the dying Epaphroditus in Thomas Becon’s The Sicke Mans Salue, which we encountered in Chapter 1. Finally, Michael also shares some similarities with Spenser’s Contemplation as both take their tutees to a high hill to present them with their eschatological vision/narrative to initiate a process of spiritual interiorization and amelioration that accompanies them to eternity.59 To lead Adam to this understanding, Michael complements his visual accounts of the Old Testament with the narratives from the New Testament, dwelling in particular on the importance of the Son of God, who will eventually prevail over Sin and Death. Michael tells Adam of the coming of “Joshua whom the Gentiles Jesus call” (XII, 310) and does not, as Revard once advanced, teach “Adam to deal with his mortal woe only with Jobean patience and long suffering.”60 On the contrary, the Archangel assumes (somewhat prematurely) the role of a deathbed counselor alleviating the prospects of death by taking recourse to a solid christology that hinges on the 58

For the traditional associations with Michael, see Westerweel, Patterns and Patterning, 200.

59

The Archangel Michael is often associated with high hills and mounts, the most prominent example probably being Mont-Saint-Michel in Normandy or the Saint-Michel-d’Aiguilhe chapel close to Le-Puy-en-Velay in Auvergne; see David Hugh Farmer, The Oxford Dictionary of Saints, 5th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 368.

60

Stella P. Revard, “Vision and Revision: a Study of Paradise Lost 11 and Paradise Regained,” Papers on Language and Literature 10, no. 4 (1974): 355.

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pilgrimage-to-eternity pattern in that it envisions the Son of God to “bring back / Through the worlds wilderness long wanderd man / Safe to eternal Paradise of rest” (XII, 312–14). The Archangel points his student to the fundamental belief that Christ’s sacrifice on the cross and his resurrection will bruise the head of Satan, crush his strength Defeating Sin and Death, his two maine armes, And fix farr deeper in his head thir stings Then temporal death shall bruise the Victors heel, Or theirs whom he redeems, a death like sleep, A gentle wafting to immortal Life.

(XII, 430–35)61

The wafting motion to eternity recalls an earlier image in which Satan espies Jacob’s Ladder from afar and sees it hovering above a jaspideous sea where those “Who after came from Earth, sayling arriv’d, / Wafted by Angels, or flew o’re the Lake / Rapt in a Chariot drawn by fiery Steeds” (III, 520–22, my emphasis). These lines are exemplary for one of those instances in which Milton intersperses his prelapsarian narrative with a reference to the fallen world, more precisely to those who have embarked on their last journey like the beggar Lazarus, who is “caryed by Angels into Abrahams bosome” (Luke 16:22), or like Elijah, who “went up” in “a charet [sic] of fyre” drawn by “horses of fyre” (2 Kings 2:11). As Lewalski suggests in her edition, the Sea of Jasper may be echoing “a sea of glasse like vnto cristal” (Rev. 4:6), but, far more importantly, the metaphor suggests that this highly un-sailable space will eventually become sailable through its “liquid Pearle[s]” (III, 519). It is tempting to think of the Son of God as the one who renders this

61

Apart from the reading presented in the following, the sleep-simile in line 434 would also allow for a reading in which the period between death and resurrection becomes congruent with Milton’s mortalism. However, more specific traces of his thnetopsychism as articulated in De Doctrina Christiana (as delineated above) cannot be identified in this passage as it does not specify whether the general resurrection entails any quickening of dead souls or whether those souls had just been asleep (psychopannychism). Only Milton’s line “Wak’t in the renovation of the just” (XI, 65) carries mortalist undertones but does not allow for a more detailed specification.

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utterly impassible passage easily traversable through his death and resurrection, thus depriving death of its sting and finality. The prospects of death are not only palliated through Christ’s sacrifice on the cross, for the poem goes even further. In God’s instructive speech, Michael is asked to deliver to Adam that death is not a dead end but a new beginning: I provided Death; so Death becomes His [man’s] final remedie, and after Life Tri’d in sharp tribulation, and refin’d By Faith and faithful works, to second Life, Wak’t in the renovation of the just, Resignes him up with Heav’n and Earth renewd.

(XI, 61–66)

In this light, Death is no longer a retributive verdict of a judging God. Indeed, Adam learns that “to the faithful Death the Gate of Life” (XII, 571). The striking absence of the copula (“is”) may even suggest that Adam’s knowledge of God’s redemptive plan is now so profound that any inflection of the verb “to be” has become redundant. Through Michael’s instruction, Adam acquires “the summe / Of wisdom” (XII, 575–76): what has been shown to him is only a matter of “this transient World, the Race of time” and “beyond is all abyss, / Eternitie, whose end no eye can reach” (XII, 554–56). Adam, here, shows himself content to “have my fill / Of knowledge, what this Vessel can containe; / Beyond which was my folly to aspire” (XII, 558– 60, my emphasis). Strikingly, there resides a certain irony in the fact that the Miltonic bard cannot resist this folly himself as he strives to sing “Of things invisible to mortal sight” (III, 55). The knowledge to which Adam is entitled, however, will prove more than helpful when he takes his “wandring steps”: Henceforth I learne, that to obey is best, And love with feare the onely God, to walk As in his presence, ever to observe His providence, and on him sole depend

(XII, 561–64)

In Adam’s departure and in his seeing promises “a farre of,” Barbara Lewalski and Mary C. Pecheux identify the pilgrimage pattern delineated in Hebrews 11: in particular, they note parallels between Adam and Abraham,

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both of whom are summoned to leave a home country to go on a journey whose end they will not live to see with mortal sight.62 Learning of Abraham, who is tried and called out by God “Not knowing to what Land, yet firm believes,” Adam has in him an anachronistic prototype who is “Not wandring poor, but trusting all his wealth / With God, who call’d him, in a land unknown” (XII, 127–34). Likewise, Adam will not be “wandring poor” like the cursed devils in Pandaemonium. In choosing to follow Abraham’s example, he will prove a faithful traveler, arguably one of those “men of rare abilities” from Areopagitica, who—en route—derive spiritual benefit from their eschatological aspirations. The prospect of “New heav’ns, new earth, ages of endless date” (XII, 549) as Adam and Eve’s spiritual goal defines the teleological axis of their prototypical pilgrimage through life, but Michael’s instruction also contains, in a dialectical sense, a more immediate, presentist concern. For the final books of Paradise Lost not only point to eternity but they also offer a way of coping with the politics of the present to address a time in which republicans like Milton may have felt that their God was more remote than before the Restoration. As Ainsworth notes, The tragedy of Milton’s own times, in his perception at least, parallels the tragedy of his account of the Fall, suggesting that the emotional ride Adam takes on his journey to a serene hope may match the course of Milton’s emotions preceding and following the Restoration.63

In other words, as the impending millennium, highly anticipated during the Interregnum, is relegated to a more distant point in time, the present pilgrimage through the Restoration wilderness becomes a long journey through

62

Barbara K. Lewalski, “Structure and the Symbolism of Vision in Michael’s Prophecy, Paradise Lost, Books XI–XII,” Philological Quarterly 42, no. 1 (1963): 29, 32; Pecheux, “Abraham, Adam, and the Theme of Exile in Paradise Lost,” 365, 370–71.

63

Ainsworth, Milton and the Spiritual Reader, 111.

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“Life / Tri’d in sharp tribulation” (XI, 62–63).64 Despite the Fall and in view of the present challenges, the first few lines of Book XI suggest encouragingly that Adam and Eve’s ties to God have not been completely severed: through filial intercession, their repentant prayers still reach the Father’s throne (14–21), and the Son pleads on their behalf to mitigate death as the punishment for man’s disobedience (40–41). Similar gestures are to repeat themselves and underscore Mary Ann Radzinowicz’s claim that “The last books of Paradise Lost are Adam’s and everyman’s books,” and thus address Milton’s readership arguably in a more personal and direct way than did the previous ones.65 Accordingly, although the millenarian hopes that were attached to the “paradisiacal” Cromwellian republic were shattered into pieces after the Restoration,66 the final two books of Paradise Lost now present ways of spiritual interiorization in which Milton’s this-worldly resort of a “paradise within” features prominently. This “paradise within,” however, is not a future promise only to be fulfilled upon the dawn of the eschaton, but

64

Ken Simpson, “The Apocalypse in Paradise Regained,” in Milton and the Ends of Time, ed. Juliet Cummins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 204.

65

Mary Ann Radzinowicz, “‘Man as a Probationer of Immortality’: Paradise Lost XI–XII,” in Approaches to “Paradise Lost”: the York Tercentenary Lectures, ed. C. A. Patrides (London: Arnold, 1968), 31.

66

It has to be noted here that Milton himself grew increasingly disillusioned with Cromwell toward the end of the Interregnum; see Nigel Smith, “Paradise Lost from Civil War to Restoration,” in The Cambridge Companion to Writing of the English Revolution, ed. Neil H. Keeble (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 262–63. Similar arguments on Milton abandoning his millenarian hopes have been advanced in Revard, “Milton and Millenarianism,” 42, 57; Hunter, “The Millenial Moment,” 99; John T. Shawcross, “Confusion: the Apocalypse, the Millenium,” in Milton and the Ends of Time, ed. Juliet Cummins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 116; Simpson, “The Apocalypse in Paradise Regained,” 206–07.

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it figures as a “realized eschatology” that informs the dialectics of the metaphorical pilgrimage in the here and now: man is on his way to eternity, but, at the same time, he is already partaking in it spiritually.67 The mechanism of this internalized “paradise within” is explicated toward the end of the epic. Asked by Adam, “what will betide the few / His faithful, left among th’ unfaithful herd,” Michael, on the one hand, answers that God will send “His Spirit within them . . . / To guide them in all truth” (XII, 480–90, my emphasis). This is arguably the same Spirit that illuminates the blind poet in his writing of Paradise Lost and directs his way, as Martz suggests, “with the eyes of the mind” as the spiritually seeing bard himself “makes his pilgrimage to paradise.”68 God’s Spirit within will, moreover, equip the faithful “With spiritual Armour, able to resist / Satans assaults” (XII, 491–92), thus assisting them actively in the pilgrimage-related spiritual warfare upon which I commented in the previous chapter. On the other hand, Michael later advises his student only to add Deeds to thy knowledge answerable, add Faith, Add vertue, Patience, Temperance, add Love, By name to come call’d Charitie, the soul Of all the rest, then wilt thou not be loath To leave this Paradise, but shalt possess A paradise within thee, happier farr.

(XII, 581–87, my emphasis)

These lines show, in Radzinowicz’s words, that “Milton does not imagine that God’s plan works out successively only or eventually, but rather that it

67

Keeble, The Literary Culture of Nonconformity, 204. Keeble has introduced the modern term of “realized eschatology” to seventeenth-century literary criticism as “the doctrine that the kingdom of God belongs not to the future nor to the world but is founded within each believer who possesses, in Milton’s phrase, ‘a paradise within’.” For the classic treatment of “realized eschatology,” see Charles H. Dodd, The Parables of the Kingdom (London: Nisbet, 1935; reprint, 1936), 34–80, particularly 50–51.

68

Martz, Poet of Exile, 194.

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works in the two dimensions of successive time and the immediate present.”69 Instead of completely abandoning their hope in the Kingdom of God in view of the recent Restoration of the monarchy, “the few / His faithful, left among th’ unfaithful herd” are encouraged by the dialectics of the “paradise within” to internalize spiritually its signifiers faith, virtue, patience, temperance, love, and charity (as delineated in 1 Peter 1:5–7). This process of spiritual interiorization can be accentuated even more clearly in light of the pilgrimage-to-eternity pattern. Lewalski raises concerns about a reading of the poem that advocates radical internal quietism in lieu of revolutionary fervor. She advances that the poem “is a more daring political gesture than we often realize,” especially since we may assume that Milton probably decided on the subject of his epic “as he was losing faith that the English people might become the nation of prophets he had imagined in Areopagitica.”70 Spiritual interiorization, however, need not imply quietism nor is it irreconcilable with any sort of political program. The two are fruitfully combined as Milton shifts his millenarian eschatology to a realized eschatology that envisions man on his present journey through the wilderness, equipped with the spiritually internalized “paradise within thee, happier farr” (XII, 587). On this journey, man is to encounter not only “a prowling Wolfe” (IV, 183) in the form of Satan but, as implied by Acts 20:29, also “grievous Wolves” which will have multiplied and “shall succeed for teachers” (XII, 508), one of many lines which have almost unanimously been read as political commentary.71 The spiritual challenges on this pilgrimage correspond to the wilderness that is invoked in the final lines of the poem, which both Martz and Damrosch read as an allusion to Psalm 107: “They wandred in the wildernes, in a solitary way: they found no citie to dwell in. . . . Then they cryed vnto the Lord in their trouble: and he deliuered them out of their

69

Radzinowicz, “‘Man as a Probationer of Immortality’,” 33.

70

Barbara K. Lewalski, “Paradise Lost and Milton’s Politics,” Milton Studies 38 (2000): 141; Lewalski, Life, 444.

71

David Loewenstein, Milton and the Drama of History: Historical Vision, Iconoclasm, and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 116; John N. King, Milton and Religious Controversy: Satire and Polemic in “Paradise Lost” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 184.

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distresses” (KJV, v. 4–6).72 Indeed, with its insistence on “providence thir guide” (XII, 647), the poem prophesies that, despite “thir solitarie way” (XII, 649), the faithful wayfarers are not left alone on their spiritual journey but can rely on the “Spirit within” and the “paradise within” until the pilgrimage to eternity is completed. Thus, on the one hand, the end of Paradise Lost reveals the “thorny path of human history,” as Hillier puts it,73 but, on the other hand, it provides a blueprint for the right path from a post-Restoration wilderness to the “place of rest” (XII, 647). To elaborate on these faithful steps in the wilderness, it is now timely to move on to Paradise Regain’d, in which, I argue, the Son of God features as an exemplary spiritual wayfarer blazing both the trails to the presentist “paradise within” and eventually to the afterlife, which is fully effected at the end of time.

“YET ONLY STOOD’ST / UNSHAKEN”: STEADFASTNESS AS THE PATH TO THE KINGDOMS OF GRACE AND OF GLORY IN THE WILDERNESS OF PARADISE REGAIN’D Paradise Lost and Paradise Regain’d are related in various ways and are also associated with one another in their negotiations of a wilderness that is to be obliterated not only in the afterlife but, to some degree, also in the immediate present. It is a critical commonplace that Milton’s two epics are not only seen to be connected through their antithetical titles but also through their mutual use of blank verse, their poetic re-enactment of Christian history, the topoi of temptation and dis/obedience, and the two characters Satan and the Son.74 While in Paradise Lost the poet sings “Of Mans First Disobedience” (I, 1), he complements the soteriological timeline of Christianity in Paradise Regain’d by telling of

72

Martz, Poet of Exile, 188; Damrosch, God’s Plot & Man’s Stories, 119.

73

Hillier, “A Providentialist Reading,” 629.

74

William Kerrigan, John Rumrich, and Stephen M. Fallon, “Introduction to Paradise Regained,” in The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton, ed. William Kerrigan, John Rumrich, and Stephen M. Fallon (New York: Modern Library, 2007), 632.

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one mans firm obedience fully tri’d Through all temptation, and the Tempter foil’d In all his wiles, defeated and repuls’t, And Eden rais’d in the wast Wilderness.

(I, 4–7)

As implied by “First Disobedience” and “firm obedience,” the two epics alliterate antithetically, contrasting fallen humanity with a sense of stability that will be pursued in the following as one of the major characteristics of Milton’s Son to be bequeathed to the poem’s readers. Milton’s brief epic, based on the temptation pericope in Luke 4:1–13, will present Jesus as “glorious Eremite,” literally one of the desert,75 which he will subdue as “his Victorious field” (I, 8–10). As second Adam, Jesus yields to the wandering steps that the generations following Adam and Eve have inherited from the first parents’ fall and thus becomes—vere Deus, vere homo—a divine wanderer himself.76 Earning, in God’s words, “Salvation for the Sons of men” (I, 167), he can be shown to go beyond the fallen steps in the wilderness on which the first parents originally embarked. Following other critics, I will argue that Jesus’s victory over the wanderings in the wilderness is iconically expressed in a culminating gesture of nonmovement, of stasis, of triumph over evil as Satan experiences his second fall from the pinnacle of the Temple in Jerusalem. As the Son of God is on an epistemological quest himself, his rigorous dismantling of Satan’s wiles renders him, in the words of Areopagitica, one who “can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better” and thus one who is a “true warfaring Christian” (514–15). However, rather than entering into what Regina M. Schwartz bewails as “the tired controversies over the person of Christ,”77 the following reading of Paradise Regain’d seeks to identify the Son as a spiritual model for those who seek to transcend the plights of their

75

The word heremite with all its variants derives from Greek ἐρηµία, “a solitude, desert, wilderness,” and ἐρηµίτης, “of the desert.”

76

For the doctrine of the double nature of Christ as vere homo, “true man,” and vere Deus, “true God,” deriving from the Council of Chalcedon, see Wilfried Härle, Dogmatik, 4th ed. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2012), 348–49.

77

Regina M. Schwartz, “Redemption and Paradise Regained,” Milton Studies 42 (2002): 45.

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earthly pilgrimage not only in view of an eschaton to come but also of a presentist “Eden rais’d in the wast Wilderness.” As I will show, the Son’s steadfastness, his being ultimately ushered to an angelic banquet, and his eventual return to “his Mothers house” (IV, 639) render him a model pilgrim to follow on one’s way to eternity but also on one’s way to the “paradise within” in the here and now. The fallen world into which Adam and Eve descend at the end of Paradise Lost is reflected paradigmatically in the wilderness that sets the stage for Paradise Regain’d; as mentioned above, this space is characterized by a sense of satanic ease, yet its limits are already clearly demarcated by the liminality of the Jordan river. Confined to hell in prelapsarian times, Satan’s steps were still “uneasie” in Paradise Lost (I, 295), but now we witness how “he directs / His easie steps” (I, 119–20, my emphasis) to the bank of the Jordan to find Jesus.78 On one level, the Jordan can here be identified geographically as the river entering the Red Sea and as the location of Jesus’s baptism (e.g., Matt. 3:13). On a more figurative level, however, this river is noteworthy for its liminal significance as “Jordan, the true limit Eastward” (PL XII, 145). As implied by Genesis 2:8 (and PL V, 142–43; XI, 118–19), the East is generally associated with the seat of Paradise, and the sun rising in the East was often seen as a symbol for the resurrection and the heavenly Jerusalem.79 What adds to the traditional liminality of this river is the fact that, in Old Testament accounts, the Jordan is crossed by the Israelites to reach the Promised Land (cf. Num. 33:51 and Josh. 3:17). By extension, reaching the river’s other side becomes a last pilgrimage of sorts—that is, a metaphor for death and the translation to the afterlife which has memorably 78

Hillier observes rightly that “Across Paradise Lost the word ‘ease’ and its cognates are Satanic terms that connote sloth, luxury, irresponsibility, negligence, apathy, and moral slackness”; see his Milton’s Messiah: the Son of God in the Works of John Milton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 225–26.

79

This is also why many medieval and later churches were planned and erected heliometrically. The eastward orientation of church buildings, especially of cathedrals, is a common feature of Romanesque and Gothic architecture (with occasional exceptions); see, for example, Klaus Gamber, Zum Herrn hin! Fragen um Kirchenbau und Gebet nach Osten (Regensburg: Friedrich Pustet, 1987), 46–47.

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been popularized in Bunyan’s Mr. Standfast’s (and other’s) crossing the said river.80 Thus, from the very beginning, the poem invites negotiations of liminality that will deepen even more once the right path out of the wilderness is at stake. However, it is important to note here that, whereas Satan knows “Where he might likeliest find this new-declar’d, / This man of men” (I, 121– 22), he is only headed for the bank of the transcendentally charged river but seems unable to cross it to reach the other side further East. Like the upper rungs of Jacob’s Ladder and the gate of heaven in Paradise Lost, whatever is metaphorically prepared on the other side of the Jordan is arguably reserved exclusively for Christian wayfarers on their way to eternity and is, thus, out of bounds for Satan. Despite these restrictions, Satan is no longer an exiled and disoriented stranger in the foreign land of Eden, but his ease of movement suggests that he holds sway over his wilderness, which may well parallel the political climate of post-Restoration England. Read as a metonymy and as the epitome of man’s exiled state, this wilderness has Satan as its temporary, though soon to be dethroned, ruler, exerting “his power / Not yet expir’d” (IV, 394–95, my emphasis). Critics like Laura Lunger Knoppers, David Loewenstein, Neil H. Keeble, and Ken Simpson have all argued that the wilderness with its roots in Paradise Lost and now exploited as the topos of a dried-out wasteland in Paradise Regain’d reflects the times of severe non-conformist persecution in the 1660s to which Milton and other political and religious dissenters were subjected.81 In what follows, I will subscribe to such a political reading of Paradise Regain’d and accept the view that the wilderness temptations provide a hermeneutic yardstick for Milton’s readers to identify political trials (in both senses of the word). These, I argue, will allow them

80

Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, 243. Although the crossing of the Jordan River as a metaphor for death may have gained currency through Bunyan’s celebrated allegory, it had been used in ars moriendi manuals before. See, for example, Christopher Sutton, Disce Mori: Learne to Die . . . (London: John Wolfe, 1601), 109.

81

Laura Lunger Knoppers, Historicizing Milton: Spectacle, Power, and Poetry in Restoration England (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1994), 38–39; Loewenstein, Representing Revolution, particularly 242–48; Neil H. Keeble, The Restoration: England in the 1660s (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), 136; Simpson, “The Apocalypse in Paradise Regained,” 204.

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to follow the right and inward path to the “paradise within” and ultimately to salvation. Finding this right path means that one has to rely on the Holy Spirit as an indispensable guide into the wilderness and later also within it and out of it. We first encounter Jesus when he One day forth walk’d alone, the Spirit leading; And his deep thoughts, the better to converse With solitude, till far from track of men, Thought following thought, and step by step led on, He entred now the bordering Desert wild

(I, 189–93)

While both reader and narrator are aware that the Holy Spirit is leading him and that God intends “To exercise him in the Wilderness” (I, 156), Jesus himself only feels that “by some strong motion I am led / Into this Wilderness, to what intent / I learn not yet” (I, 290–92).82 In his human nature, the Son of God is, like the prelapsarian Adam, only privy to a “knowledge within bounds,” and a substantial part of the hermeneutic exercise in the wilderness will consist in painting a full(er) picture of the purpose of God’s trial and, thus, in completing a journey of self-understanding.83 For the time being, however, the epistemologically questing hero is “with dark shades and rocks environ’d round” (I, 194) amidst A pathless Desert, dusk with horrid shades, The way he came not having mark’d, return Was difficult, by human steps untrod

82

(I, 296–98)

Neil H. Keeble, “Wilderness Exercises: Adversity, Temptation, and Trial in Paradise Regained,” Milton Studies 42 (2002): 87.

83

Barbara K. Lewalski, Milton’s Brief Epic: the Genre, Meaning, and Art of “Paradise Regained” (Providence, RI: Brown University Press, 1966), 316–17; John Rogers, “Paradise Regained and the Memory of Paradise Lost,” in The Oxford Handbook of Milton, ed. Nicholas McDowell and Nigel Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 593.

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The absence of paths and the evident untroddenness not only point to the threats of this uncanny space but also to the lack of precedence in successfully overcoming this wilderness. Both the potential threats—hunger, death, drought (I, 323–25)—and Jesus’s isolated state do not go unnoticed by Satan, who remarks that the Son is “far from path or road of men, who pass / In Troop or Caravan” (I, 321–22). Signs that would be disconcerting and foreboding to anyone who is not led by the Holy Spirit are only met with Jesus’s terse response, “Who brought me hither / Will bring me hence, no other Guide I seek” (I, 335–36). Being led by God’s Spirit has significant didactic implications. Introducing his model of a “reader within,” Ainsworth writes that Jesus’s path “may appear twisted to fallen humanity’s distorted vision” but that it is straightened through his spiritual learning and reading practices that the Old Adam had yet to hone with Michael’s help. Ainsworth, furthermore, argues convincingly that these practices allow not only for the dismantling of Satan’s wiles but also for the Son’s ministry “to try, and teach the erring Soul / Not wilfully mis-doing, but unware / Misled” (I, 224–26) through a spiritual hermeneutics of self-identification and self-scrutiny that the readers of Paradise Regain’d are invited to emulate.84 Such a hermeneutic process is arguably not complete before the end of time, but a soul that has been tried and taught in all matters spiritual and that is therefore no longer erring will naturally fare well on the pilgrimage to eternity. Accordingly, the trials that Jesus and his emulators face entail an eschatological impetus. As already invoked in the headpiece to this chapter, Areopagitica defines trial as “by what is contrary” and spurns “a fugitive and cloister’d vertue, unexercis’d & unbreath’d, that never sallies out and sees her adversary” (515). As Joseph Mansky observes, Milton’s Jesus does precisely the opposite in that he “‘sallies out and sees’ the Adversary.”85 Consequently, it is not far-fetched to add here that, in facing “what is contrary” the Son and whoever follows his spiritual example do nothing less than participate in the Pauline race “where that immortall garland is to be run for” (515, my emphasis) to transcend the wilderness of the present. In Paradise

84

Ainsworth, Milton and the Spiritual Reader, 149–52.

85

Joseph Mansky, “Does Relation Stand? Textual and Social Relations in Paradise Regain’d,” Milton Studies 56 (2015): 58.

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Lost, such a scenario is even more concretely delineated by God envisioning his exiled people’s reconciliation to Heaven: till by degrees of merit rais’d They open to themselves at length the way Up hither, under long obedience tri’d, And Earth be chang’d to Heav’n, & Heav’n to Earth, One Kingdom, Joy and Union without end.

(VII, 157–61, my emphasis)

In this way, trial “under long obedience” becomes an inextricable constituent of the race to eternity and enables the exiled to “open to themselves at length the way / Up hither.” In Jesus’s prototypical case, such trial is taken one step further in that it involves physical death: “my way must lie / Through many a hard assay even to the death, / E’re I the promis’d Kingdom can attain” (I, 263–65). Viewing his own death on the cross as “Redemption for mankind, whose sins / Full weight must be transferr’d upon my head” (I, 266– 67), Jesus here clearly points to his ultimate trial leading to the resurrection and thus the salvation of mankind. Placed outside the textual remit of Paradise Regain’d,86 the death and resurrection of Jesus as vere Deus grants salvation to mankind on the one hand, but, on the other hand, his death as vere homo and his reaching “the promis’d Kingdom” signal to his saintly followers that death—mors corporalis—will eventually become “the Gate of Life” (XII, 571) as Adam already learns in Paradise Lost. In Paradise Regain’d, the Son’s victory over death is anticipated in his successful resistance to the trials in the wilderness. Although Milton stretches the three temptations in Luke 4:1–13 to nine temptations in total, he follows the evangelist in his order: Jesus is tempted by Satan to turn stones into bread, then offered to rule over all the kingdoms of the earth, and eventually challenged to cast himself down from the pinnacle of the Temple in

86

William B. Hunter, “The Obedience of Christ in Paradise Regained,” in Calm of Mind: Tercentenary Essays on “Paradise Regained” and “Samson Agonistes” in Honor of John S. Diekhoff, ed. Joseph A. Wittreich (Cleveland: The Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1971), 68; Daniel, Death in Milton’s Poetry, 49–50.

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Jerusalem.87 Milton’s adoption of the Lucan order suggests a climactic preference for the pinnacle temptation over the final one in Matthew 4:8–10, where the kingdom temptation is placed last. The following reading will focus mainly on Milton’s rendering of the final temptation on the pinnacle since most of the other temptations in Paradise Regain’d have received ample critical commentary88 and since I believe that this final trial unfolds a Miltonic dialectics pointing not only to a way of coping with present predicaments but also to their resolution in an eschatological future. I will argue that the pinnacle temptation and the lines that follow ultimately buttress Milton’s idea of a spiritual pilgrimage directed at attaining both the Kingdom of Glory revealed at the end of time as well as the presentist Kingdom of Grace. These two kingdoms are delineated multiple times in the dogmatic terms of De Doctrina Christiana (506–07, 650–51, 882–83) but are most succinctly theorized in Chapter 33, “On Complete Glorification”: For it is agreed that from [the time of] his first coming, the kingdom of grace, on the one hand, which is also called the kingdom of the heavens, had both been proclaimed by John the baptist and had begun; the kingdom of glory, on the other hand, [will begin] only with his second coming. (882–83)

While the Kingdom of Glory essentially refers to the eschaton at the end of time, the Kingdom of Grace denotes what I previously referred to as a “realized eschatology,” effected in the invisible church that Lewalski rightly assumes to encompass “the whole community of the saved rather than any particular sect or national church.”89 In times of severe nonconformist oppression, the Kingdom of Grace may not only be invisibly enshrined in the Christian church, but it may also not be perceived at all. In the following, it will become apparent how Milton denies such presentist imperceptibility by affording his readers a plethora of interiorizing metaphors for the “paradise within” in the Kingdom of Grace that are more often than not predicated on references to the futurist Kingdom of Glory. A clear apprehension of both, the following will show, relies on steadfastness in faith, on “firm obedience,” as epitomized in the Son’s unflinching resistance. 87

Stephen B. Dobranski, The Cambridge Introduction to Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 183–86.

88

For the classic treatment of these, see Lewalski, Milton’s Brief Epic, 193–321.

89

Lewalski, Milton’s Brief Epic, 408.

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Before Satan takes Jesus to the pinnacle of the Temple in Jerusalem, the Son’s steadfastness and victory are prefigured in his perseverance in the storm and in his unwavering endurance of troubled sleep in Book IV. Already here, the Son’s unshakability registers a distinct contrast with the “wandring steps” that the first parents take out of Eden. In a climactic description, the wilderness is here epitomized as bearing the brunt of a ferocious storm in which the tallest Pines, Though rooted deep as high, and sturdiest Oaks Bow’d their Stiff necks, loaden with stormy blasts, Or torn up sheer: ill wast thou shrouded then, O patient Son of God, yet only stoodst Unshaken

(IV, 416–21)

The storm in the wilderness is here depicted as uprooting structures that are commonly conceived as well-anchored and immovable, and any extension of this setting to the politics of the 1660s would probably prove fruitful. Rather than identifying whose stiff necks are bent in the wake of the Restoration, I am interested in the unshakenness of the Son as the only entity in this passage that is left untouched as he withstands the “Infernal Ghosts, and Hellish Furies” and is sitting “unappall’d in calm and sinless peace” (IV, 422–25). It is precisely this sensation that will be replicated in the pinnacle temptation. After this juxtaposition of the Son’s complete unshakability with the highly destructive wilderness, the morning is announced as the sun “Came forth with Pilgrim steps in amice gray” (IV, 427). In Lewalski’s words, this metaphor reasserts “the victory present and to come of the Son/Sun of God over the Prince of Darkness.”90 Moreover, it can be reasonably assumed that the Son/Sun rises in the East, the seat of paradise on the other bank of the Jordan, which is likely to be seen as a symbol for the resurrection and the heavenly Jerusalem as I have shown above. Suggesting a temporary and permanent victory over evil and anticipating new life in the heavenly city, the Son/Sun pun, I would argue, also points to a more immediate, contemplative journey. This contention is strengthened by the potential allusion of the color

90

Lewalski, Milton’s Brief Epic, 312.

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“amice gray” to the vestments of a religious order (OED, n. 2.1) while the Son/Sun’s “Pilgrim steps” could well indicate its members’ interior journeys. Invoking both an ultimate victory over Satan, as Lewalski suggests, as well as a temporary one through an inward pilgrimage, these lines both anticipate the eternal Kingdom of Glory and exemplify the interiorized “Pilgrim’s steps” to the temporary Kingdom of Grace realized in the here and now. Having withstood Satan’s temptations so far, Jesus is eventually taken to “the highest Pinacle” of the Temple in Jerusalem (IV, 546–50), where his tempter expects him to struggle both physically and metaphorically.91 While it may be utterly disturbing that the Son of God is lifted up and born “through the Air sublime” by Satan (IV, 542), the gesture fits very well into Miltonic poetry, which generally characterizes movement as something demonic that may even be imparted to others.92 Lewalski, furthermore, draws our attention to where Jesus is actually placed in Milton’s brief epic: “Most of the exegetes understood that Christ was placed upon a narrow ledge of the Temple where he would be able to stand . . . , but Milton’s Satan places Christ on the topmost spire.”93 Somewhat reminiscent of the suicidal rhetoric of Spenser’s Despair, Satan then proposes, Cast thy self down; safely if Son of God: For it is written, He will give command Concerning thee to his Angels, in thir hands They shall up lift thee, lest at any time Thou chance to dash thy foot against a stone.

(IV, 554–59)

Just like Despair, Satan can be identified as a censor of Scripture: quoting from Psalm 91:11–12, he deliberately omits the phrase “to kepe thee in all thy waies,” which may indicate that the way the Adversary’s proposes is not the one reserved for the godly.94 Moreover, the introductory gloss to Psalm 91 in the Geneva translation explains that he who trusts in God’s ways (rather

91

John T. Shawcross, “A Metaphoric Approach to Reading Milton,” Ball State University Forum 8, no. 3 (1967): 17–18.

92

Tiffany, Love’s Pilgrimage, 136–41.

93

Lewalski, Milton’s Brief Epic, 306–07 (my emphasis).

94

Simpson, “The Apocalypse in Paradise Regained,” 204.

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than Satan’s), committing “him self wholly to [God’s] protection in all tentations,” will be rewarded with “immortal glorie.” In withholding this information, Satan shows himself literally a one-sided negotiator of the limits of life and death similar to his hovering around but not crossing the Jordan. Satan, here, only offers what would potentially lead to death and perdition: Jesus’s jumping down from the pinnacle of the temple would arguably not send out God’s angels, but would put the Creator himself in the position of the one being tried. The Son’s Old Testament knowledge dictates that this is against God’s statutes (e.g., Deut. 6:16): “also it is written, / Tempt not the Lord thy God, he said and stood” (IV, 560–61). What has already been introduced in the Son’s unshakenness after the storm has now been fully accomplished: Jesus stands, and “Satan smitten with amazement fell” (IV, 562). Both Knoppers and Loewenstein provide an exhaustive list of all of the Son’s previous responses to Satan’s temptations: Jesus reacts “sternly” (I, 406), “with unalter’d brow” (I, 493), “unmov’d” (III, 386; IV, 109), or “unshaken” (IV, 421). All of these, Knoppers maintains, bespeak a constancy that “reaches its apex (literally and dramatically) . . . in the temptation of the Tower, when the Son stuns Satan by the untheatrical action of standing still.”95 It has moreover been argued that, at this point, Jesus is only affected by the satanic temptations in his human nature as he is, according to the early Christian doctrine of kenosis, emptied of all godhead.96 As all his divine nature is renounced, Jesus is put through trial as vere homo and is, in the words of God in Paradise Lost, “Sufficient to have stood, though free to fall” (III, 99). In this context, Jesus’s human nature and thus his own free will figure prominently and relate him directly to those potential readers who Milton envisions as saintly followers, freely-choosing but likely to suffer from political and spiritual distress. Hence, Jesus’s static 95

Knoppers, Historicizing Milton, 38–39; Loewenstein, Representing Revolution, 260.

96

The concept of kenosis derives from the Greek verb κενόω, “to empty out”; see Mansky, “Does Relation Stand?,” 56, 69; Wesley Hill, Paul and the Trinity: Persons, Relations, and the Pauline Letters (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2015), 89–90. For a detailed discussion of the concept of kenosis in Milton, see Michael Lieb, “Milton and the Kenotic Christology: Its Literary Bearing,” English Literary History 37, no. 3 (1970): 342–60.

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posture of “firm obedience” to God’s statutes becomes emblematic of Restoration dissenters—possibly Quakers, as Loewenstein suggests—maintaining steadfastness under the persecutions of the new monarchical regime.97 Apart from this political dimension, Jesus’s unflinching gesture also bears pilgrimage-related implications. In the grander scheme of soteriological history, Jesus’s stasis serves as an iconic juxtaposition to the wanderings of Adam and Eve and the following generations in exile. It envisions man as no longer wandering errantly in the desert but as taking a resolute stance against the devil and as prevailing over evil. In striking such a dramatic pose, the Son of God represents a prophecy of a time when no one will be bent under the wiles of the devil but will stand again like the first parents “in far nobler shape erect and tall” (PL IV, 288). In other words, the Old Adam’s prelapsarian state corresponds congruently to the New Adam’s model of spiritual steadfastness in sharp contrast to any form of postlapsarian wandering that occurred in between. Thus, the Son’s immobility is ultimately suggestive of an eschatological reality that would follow once the many tortuous pilgrimages through the sinful wilderness are obliterated and once the journey to eternity is completed. As mentioned above, Milton deliberately deviates from the narrative in Luke 4:9 as he, rather than on “a pinacle of the Temple” (my emphasis), lets Satan put the Son on the highest possible point, for “highest is best” (IV, 553). Satan’s positioning his rival on the topmost point of what is commonly understood to be one of the holiest sites in Judaism, Islam, and Christianity invites further reflections to unfurl this gesture’s textual importance in Paradise Regain’d. The word pinnacle, used in all English Bible translations current in Milton’s day, is a rendering of the Greek πτερύγιον denoting either a small wing or a turret of a building. It seems reasonable to assume that a polyglot like Milton was aware of the Greek original including its various implications. Accordingly, Satan—probably ignorant of Greek—can be read

97

Loewenstein, Representing Revolution, 260–62. Loewenstein shows how “Radical religious discourse, particularly Quaker writing, often envisioned the inward-looking saint enduring great opposition and trials and yet remaining, almost in superhuman fashion, firm and unmoved – in the manner indeed of Milton’s own unflinching Jesus.”

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as literally putting the Son on a fairly solid architectural wing that tops Milton’s version of the Holy of Holies. Being made of stone, this topmost wing in Paradise Regain’d adds an important element to the imagery of a rocksolid immobility that Loewenstein reads as the epitome of dissenters’ ideal steadfastness.98 At the same time, however, Milton’s image becomes much more complex in that a wing made of stone paradoxically gestures toward a flight that is enabled through immobility. At such an existentially vital point in the poem, the paradoxical image of enabling immobility recalls the un-sailable sea of jasper in Paradise Lost, where those “Who after came from Earth, sayling arriv’d, / Wafted by Angels” (III, 520–21). Milton here seems to be conscious of the fruitful paradox and is exploiting it to the fullest. Although referring to an architectural part of the building here, the word πτερύγιον bears divine and/or angelic connotations that resonate with the angels’ wafting motion and with death being rendered a “gentle wafting to immortal Life” (PL XII, 435). This lexical proximity is furthermore strengthened by the cognate πτέρυγας, used in the Septuagint translation of Psalm 91:4, “He wil couer thee vnder his wings,” another verse omitted by Satan in his final temptation.99 Hence, Milton’s deviation from Luke—his preference for the topmost pinnacle—must be taken seriously together with the rich implications of wings illustrating, one is tempted to reason, that spiritual steadfastness eventually leads to such wafting motions like the one over or across the sea of jasper in Paradise Lost. The importance of wings is again reinforced in the textual image of the so-called Mercy-Seat that is essentially constructed when Satan puts Jesus on the highest pinnacle. The First Temple of Jerusalem is commonly believed to have contained the Ark of the Covenant, a wooden construction that 98 99

Loewenstein, Representing Revolution, 261–62. Incidentally, πτέρυξ (“wing,” “winged creature,” “flight,” etc.) seems to be the common word used for angelic wings in the Septuagint, also, for instance, for the ἓξ πτέρυγες denoting the six wings of the seraphim in Isaiah 6:2. It has been argued that Milton was fairly familiar with the Septuagint and that some of his Psalm translations are informed by this Greek version of the Old Testament rather than the Hebrew Bible; see John K. Hale, Milton’s Languages: the Impact of Multilingualism on Style (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 7.

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the wandering Israelites carried over the Jordan into the Promised Land and that disappeared after the temple’s first destruction in 587 BC.100 The Ark was topped with the Mercy-Seat commissioned by God to have one cherub at each end that “shal stretch their wings [πτέρυγας!] on hie” (Exod. 25:20, see Fig. 4).101 Hillier shows how pervasive this Ark-Mercy-Seat device was in early modern and particularly in Puritan culture and argues plausibly that, on the pinnacle of the temple, Milton’s Son becomes “the realization of the symbolic relationship between the Mercy-Seat and the Ark.”102 Figure 4: The Ark of the Covenant

The Geneva Bible (1560), Exodus 25. Reprinted with kind permission of the University of Wisconsin Press.

100 See Joshua 3:14–17 and Yehoshua M. Grintz, “Ark of the Covenant,” in Encyclopaedia Judaica, ed. Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik, 22 vols. (Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2007), 2:467–68; John M. Lundquist, The Temple of Jerusalem: Past, Present, and Future (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2008), 2–3, 30–34, 41, 119. 101 The construction of the Ark-Mercy-Seat device has also found entry into Paradise Lost, see XII, 249–60. 102 Hillier, Milton’s Messiah, 221.

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As the embodiment of God’s mercy, Milton’s Jesus—like the winged cherubim in Exodus 25 or God in Psalm 91, both hardly foreign to the Protestant imagination—now metaphorically covers and protects the place that used to house the divine commandments and that has been associated with them ever since. Ignorant of winged representations of God’s mercy, of biblical Greek, and hence of where he has just put Jesus, Satan ironically creates this compelling icon showing himself once again to be a “cloister’d vertue” unable to qualify as a fit reader either of Scripture or of his own haphazard constructions by which he himself is at least temporarily defeated.103 The lines that follow Jesus’s iconic stasis on the Temple of Jerusalem provide even more overt and covert references to wings, all of which may well signify eschatological terms. As mentioned above, the Son’s unshakenness captures a prophetic moment in which the tortuous wanderings of God’s people are seen as obliterated through spiritual steadfastness. Introduced previously as solidly architectural, embracing and all-encompassing, as well as mercifully propitiating, wings now even spread to their eschatological capacity as the Son is taken “From his uneasie station” by “Angels on full sail of wing . . . / Who on their plumy Vans receiv’d him soft” (IV, 582–84). Now that Satan has fallen, the solidness of the architectural wing of the temple is replaced by the softness and agility of the angels’ “plumy Vans,” which underscores the suggestion that hermeneutic strain has been given the place of divine repose. It is here that Milton definitely departs from the Luke pericope as the angels carry the Son As on a floating couch through the blithe Air, Then in a flowry valley set him down On a green bank, and set before him spred A table of Celestial Food, Divine, Ambrosial, Fruits fetcht from the tree of life, And from the fount of life Ambrosial drink, That soon refresh’d him wearied, and repair’d, What hunger, if aught hunger had impair’d,

103 This testifies to Stanley Fish’s observation that Jesus’s adversary is not entitled to spiritual reading and that “his seeing is radically incomplete and will always remain so no matter how much interpretive works he does”; see his article “Milton and Interpretation,” Milton Studies 56 (2015): 12–13.

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Or thirst, and as he fed, Angelic Quires Sung Heavenly Anthems of his victory Over temptation, and the Tempter proud.

(IV, 585–95)

These lines not only lead to the angels’ later assertion that, “by vanquishing Temptation,” Jesus has “regain’d lost Paradise” (IV, 607–08), but they also include everyone who is in “human form, / Wandring the Wilderness” (IV, 600–01). As explained earlier, Milton’s Son continues the archetypical steps of the first life pilgrims Adam and Eve and is led through the wilderness temptations by the Holy Spirit. His ultimate pose of divine stasis exemplifies his resistance and thus ushers in a band of angels receiving him “on a floating couch” (IV, 585) as a prefiguration of the promise of rest and repose that is soon to be articulated. Briefly returning to my argument that George Herbert’s “The Pilgrimage” ends with a similar heavenly banquet, it bears emphasis that Herbert’s rather passive pilgrim is just taken there as his life is concluded. With Milton things are radically different. As a teacher of both spiritual and political lessons and in his “role of oppositional educator,”104 Milton’s instruction consists in showing how any Christian wayfarer’s steadfastness in any sort of wilderness faced with whatever kind of temptation is rewarded with a restful banquet. This “table of Celestial Food, Divine” potentially includes an allusion to the divine shepherd’s table in Psalm 23 and would thus be prepared even “in the sight of mine aduersary” (v. 5). Jesus’s victory over his Adversary stands not only for the obliteration of man’s plightful earthly pilgrimage but, on another level, also for how Christ defeats death in the resurrection and for how new life is revealed in the Kingdom of Glory. In Paradise Lost, the Son declares to the Father that he is willing to “lastly dye” for man, and expects God to “let Death wreck all his rage” on him:

104 Samuel Smith, “The Son’s Bounded Solitude in Paradise Regained,” in Their Maker’s Image: New Essays on John Milton, ed. Mary C. Fenton and Louis Schwartz (Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 2011), 161; Barbara K. Lewalski, “‘To try and teach the erring Soul’: Milton’s Last Seven Years,” in Milton and the Terms of Liberty, ed. Graham Parry and Joad Raymond (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2002), 175.

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Under his gloomie power I shall not long Lie vanquisht, thou hast givn me to possess Life in my self for ever, by thee I live, Though now to Death I yield, and am his due All that of me can die, . . . But I shall rise Victorious, and subdue My vanquisher, spoild of his vanted spoile; Death his deaths wound shall then receive, and stoop Inglorious, of his mortall sting disarm’d. . . . I ruin all my Foes, Death last, and with his Carcass glut the Grave: Then with the multitude of my redeemd Shall enter Heaven long absent, and returne, Father, to see thy face

(III, 240–62)

Such a definitive, “grave-glutting” victory over death does not seem nigh at hand at the end of Paradise Regin’d, but its symbolic traces are there. When Jesus is carried to the banquet, he is given “Ambrosial drink” from the “fount of life” and fruits are “fetcht from tree of life” (IV, 589–90): the former is an unmistakable reference to John 4:14 and the internalized “well of water, springing vp into euerlasting life,” while the latter is systematized in De Doctrina Christiana as “a symbol, or even a kind of nutriment of eternal life” (360–61).105 In Revard’s words, the end of Milton’s shorter epic depicts how Jesus “symbolically defeats death as he will actually defeat death in his resurrection” and “shows how man may regain the highest fruit of his unfallen nature: the immortal fruit of everlasting life.”106 Despite these eschatological allusions, Milton (like Spenser in The Faerie Queene) does not unfold a full scenario of eternity and prefers to return to earthly matters. In their concluding lines, the quiring angels voice awareness that Satan and his offspring, Death, have not been completely defeated yet:

105 John M. Steadman, “The ‘Tree of Life’ Symbolism in Paradise Regain’d,” The Review of English Studies 11, no. 44 (1960): 385–86. 106 Revard, “Vision and Revision,” 356.

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But thou, Infernal Serpent, shalt not long Rule in the Clouds; like an Autumnal Star Or Lighting thou shalt fall from Heav’n trod down Under his [Jesus’s] feet: for proof, e’re this thou feel’st Thy wound, yet not thy last and deadliest wound By this repulse receiv’d

(IV, 618–23)

In Book III, Satan is already aware that “all hope is lost / Of my reception into grace” and that “worst is my Port, / My harbour and my ultimate repose” (204–05, 209–10). Yet, at the same time, accelerating the worldly timeline and defeating Satan once and for all does not seem to be one of the Son’s top priorities. Time is not so much of an issue: “who best / Can suffer, best can do; best reign, who first / Well hath obey’d” (III, 194–96). Here, the wellknown dictum about the kingdom of heaven in Matthew 19:30, “manie that are first, shalbe last, and the last shalbe first,” has undergone a revolutionary twist: the trials to come refine those tried, and those tried are the ones who will reign eventually. Thus, even though the Kingdom of Glory is asserted at various times in Paradise Regain’d, it remains a future expectation: death has not been completely defeated, and the Son’s Second Coming is yet to come. Consequently, the Son does not yet return to “Heaven long absent,” but “hee unobserve’d / Home to his Mothers house private return’d” (IV, 638– 39), a metaphor which may well epitomize an inward journey to a figurative place of spiritual education and edification in the Kingdom of Grace. Unlike the Father’s heavenly home, of which we learn some particulars in Paradise Lost, the phrase “his Mothers house” is more obscure. To unravel it, critics like Dayton Haskin and Joseph Mansky turn to Book II of Paradise Regain’d, in which the Virgin Mary says that her “heart hath been a storehouse long of things / And sayings laid up, portending strange events” (103–04), thus construing Mary’s house as a private institution for spiritual reading in the wilderness.107 Indeed, Haskin adduces textual evidence from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century rhetoricians and logicians ranging from Thomas Wilson to Henry Jessey that the word “store-house” was used “as 107 Dayton Haskin, Milton’s Burden of Interpretation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 136–37; Mansky, “Does Relation Stand?,” 62–65.

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the standard image in rhetorical treatises for the container in which the topics, or places, were kept.”108 The contention that Mary and her immediate surroundings provide a potential space for such topical collation is furthermore supported by the fact that she is the one who (unlike the Holy Spirit) explicitly nurtures the Son’s thoughts by imparting to him the biblical texts about his annunciation, nativity, and future reign (I, 230–58).109 Additionally, Gary D. Hamilton extends the metaphor of Mary’s private house in political terms to an illegal conventicle, “often referred to by contemporaries as ‘private houses’” and criminalized under the two Conventicle Acts of 1664 and 1670.110 As such, Mary’s house figures as a kind of refuge, a metaphor for the “politics of inwardness,” as Hamilton calls it, not only for Jesus of Nazareth, who can be considered a dissenter in his own time,111 but also for those tried under the restored regime, including Milton himself. This metaphor of Jesus’s pilgrimage out of the wilderness to his mother’s home bears further implications that bring us back to the hermeneutics of Areopagitica. In Book I, Jesus already announces that God “sends his Spirit of Truth henceforth to dwell / In pious Hearts, an inward Oracle / To all truth requisite for men to know” (462–64). Assembled in clandestine conventicles, perhaps even symbolically coming “forth with Pilgrims steps in amice gray” (IV, 427), pious hearts are thus invested with the spiritual and hence internal capacity to discern Truth, just as envisioned in Milton’s tract against licensing and censorship.112 Transposed from the times of revolutionary fervor to a time hostile to republican sentiment, private houses like Mary’s may serve as the locale where the shattered bits of “our richest Merchandize, Truth” (548) are reassembled piece by piece. One may thus conjecture that, as a private house, a store-house, or indeed an illegal conventicle, Mary’s home provides a space for spiritual exercise and progress in the restoration of Truth 108 Haskin, Milton’s Burden of Interpretation, 136–37. 109 Haskin, Milton’s Burden of Interpretation, 132. 110 Gary D. Hamilton, “Paradise Regained and the Private Houses,” in Of Poetry and Politcs: New Essays on Milton and His World, ed. Paul G. Stanwood (Binghamton: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1995), 240–41. 111 Gerd Theißen, Jesus als historische Gestalt: Beiträge zur Jesusforschung (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2003), 133–93. 112 Mansky, “Does Relation Stand?,” 64.

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akin to the one advocated in Areopagitica. In this sense, the house not only figures, in MacCaffrey’s words, as “an ancient and natural enough emblem for the goal, resting-place, or harbor sought by the traveler,”113 but, in a dialectic sense, also as a port in a storm where the spiritual quest for God’s truth in this world is continued in the quietness and restfulness of the Kingdom of Grace. Tried by Satan, who is “compos’d of lyes” (PR I, 407), or purified “by what is contrary” (Areopagitica, 515), Jesus thus serves as the prodigious example of a wayfarer/warfarer who does not ensconce himself in his father’s divine lap, but who finds his “paradise within” as he directs his intellectual pilgrimage for Truth to the confines of his mother’s home. It is arguably here that Eden is “rais’d in the wast Wilderness” (PR I, 7) and that “A paradise within thee, happier farr” (PL XII, 587) may be found. The end of Paradise Regain’d seems to imply that conventicles like Mary’s house provide places for God to raise, in the words of Areopagitica, “to his own work men of rare abilities . . . to gain furder and goe on, some new enlightn’d steps in the discovery of truth” (566). As mentioned above, these “new enlightn’d steps” are not completed until Jesus’s Second Coming, when “he shall bring together every joynt and member, and shall mould them into an immortall feature of loveliness and perfection” (549). Thus, Paradise Regain’d ends on a hopeful outlook that, even in the wilderness of the Restoration, the Kingdom of Grace affords a place where God’s truth can be reunited in a collective intellectual pilgrimage, a process of progress that is to be completed and perfected once the Kingdom of Glory is realized at the end of time. *** In this chapter, I attempted to delineate some of the most salient eschatological implications in Areopagitica, Paradise Lost, and Paradise Regain’d that are inextricably connected to the pilgrimage-to-eternity motif. Even though an immediate, post-mortem journey to the afterlife is, to some extent, precluded by Milton’s mortalism, this chapter has provided ample evidence that Milton, in both poetry and prose, relies on the popular pilgrimage conceit, which he most typically envisions collectively. This could be shown, for instance, in the poet’s clear distinction between place-bound travels toward an

113 MacCaffrey, “Paradise Lost” as “Myth”, 203.

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earthly destination and more holistic, spiritual journeys to heaven. While Satan’s lengthy travels—his place pilgrimage to earth—represent the sinful nature of the former, the “wandring steps” taken by Adam and Eve at the end of Paradise Lost stand for a spiritual mindset that is to guide them to eternity. More concretely, as the first parents receive encouragement from Michael to view their arduous pilgrimage out of Eden as a spiritual journey, they seek, like Abraham and Sarah in Genesis and in the Letter to the Hebrews, a heavenly country or, on a more presentist level, “A paradise within thee, happier farr” (XII, 587). Attaining this “paradise within” is a spiritual matter, I argued, which is prototyped in Jesus’s pilgrim steps in the wilderness of Paradise Regain’d and in his successful resistance against Satan’s hermeneutic and existential trials, by which the Archfiend temporarily defeats himself. Finally, by using Milton’s distinction between the Kingdom of Grace and the Kingdom of Glory, systematized in De Doctrina Christiana, I demonstrated how Areopagitica, Paradise Lost, and Paradise Regain’d devise steps to a presentist interiorization of the paradise that has been lost, to its reinstatement as a “paradise within” in Mary’s house, and eventually to the life everlasting. Returning to Mary’s house, hence, becomes a metaphor for dealing successfully with the predicaments of the present on the collective pilgrimage for God’s Truth that culminates in its restoration in eternity.

Conclusion: John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress Recurring topoi on the pilgrimage to eternity

Having considered the ways in which John Donne, Sir Walter Raleigh, George Herbert, Edmund Spenser, and John Milton devise metaphorical steps to the afterlife, it is now timely to turn to John Bunyan’s well-known bestseller The Pilgrim’s Progress for a prodigious example of how a similar endeavor is accomplished in prose. In his prefatory verses, “The Author’s Apology for His BOOK,” Bunyan explains how he was “writing of the Way / And Race of Saints,” probably an allusion to his The Heavenly Footman,1 when he “Fell suddenly into an Allegory / About their Journey, and the way to Glory” (ll. 7–10). The literary fruit which this sudden allegorical digression bore is generally known to be The Pilgrim’s Progress, in which these “Saints” must be read as pious Everymen, personified in Bunyan’s Christian, who is drawn by his desire for “a better Countrey, that is, an Heavenly” (41). In echoing Hebrews 11:14–16, Bunyan’s text presents a full-fledged prose allegory for what Dyas has termed man’s “life pilgrimage”: Everyman’s initial departure and the many difficult steps on his spiritual journey are outlined in an allegorical frame and culminate eventually in the final, liminal stage which I have dubbed the “last pilgrimage.”2 Although this transition from earthly to eternal life only takes place at the very end of Bunyan’s Part I, many of the ontological topoi that are at stake on the liminal 1

Richard L. Greaves, Glimpses of Glory: John Bunyan and English Dissent (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 211.

2

For the definition of Dyas’s terminology, see pp. 10–11.

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journeys explored in the previous chapters recur in Christian’s adventures on his way to the Celestial City. In the following, some of these most seminal topoi, discussed comprehensively in the poetical pilgrimages above, will be revisited and consolidated to appreciate where Bunyan’s masterpiece is informed by them and to show where the prose allegorist departs from a deeprooted tradition. Before turning to these recurring topoi, however, it is first necessary to address some theoretical issues of figurative language that are raised in Bunyan’s verse Apology since they underscore the controversial nature of allegories and metaphors in Bunyan’s time and exemplify how contentious his project to allegorize the pathway to heaven, including its final stretch, was. As stated in previous chapters, this study is predicated on the theoretical premise that both metaphor and allegory have the potential to provide the (spiritual) reader with an apprehension of what I have interchangeably referred to as the sacred, the divine, or the ineffable—heaven, eternity, or the eschaton. The theoretical stance of Bunyan’s introductory Apology goes in a very similar direction and must therefore not go unmentioned here: it does not merely revolve around metaphorical language and its expression of the immaterial, but—much more importantly—it advances, what Barbara A. Johnson calls, “a strenuous defense” of such language and of its legitimate use to convey a reality of the divine.3 Contradicting his unspecified objector, who criticizes the book as “dark,” “feigned,” and wanting “solidness,” Bunyan writes: Solidity, indeed becomes the Pen Of him that writeth things Divine to men: But must I needs want solidness, because By Metaphors I speak; was not Gods Laws, His Gospel-laws, in older time held forth By Types, Shadows and Metaphors?

3

(ll. 107–10)

Barbara A. Johnson, “Falling Into Allegory: the ‘Apology’ to The Pilgrim’s Progress and Bunyan’s Scriptural Methodology,” in Bunyan In Our Time, ed. Robert G. Collmer (Kent, OH: The Kent State University Press, 1989), 115.

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As already implied by the shortened epigraph from Hosea 12:10, “I have used Similitudes,”4 his allegory, Bunyan postulates, is authorized by nothing other than the Bible itself (i.e., the solid Word of God) and its use of figurative language. Furthermore, as Johnson rightly states, “the word ‘solidity’ clearly refers to the content of his work and implies that its vision will be substantial and meaningful.”5 However, such an endeavor of substantiating the immaterial by use of figurative language was far from uncontroversial, for the use of metaphors and allegories was attacked by some for its alleged artificiality and its departure from the literal “plain style.” Thus, when Bunyan defends transcending the literal “By Types, Shadows and Metaphors” in his Apology, he offers to his objectors a biblical justification for his attempt to go beyond the limits of earthly language to paint in words what is advertised on the title page: “The Pilgrim’s Progress FROM THIS WORLD, TO That which is to come.” This justification needs to be seen in the broader context of the fierce theological debate over how ornate language ought to be. As I explained in Chapter 2, early modern rhetoricians typically theorized allegory as “none other thing, then a contynued Metaphor” or “a long and perpetuall Metaphore.”6 And indeed, Bunyan’s narrative proper comprises nothing more than a dense series of spiritual metaphors arranged in an allegorical narrative that reaches its apex in the pilgrims’ ultimate journey to the Celestial City through the River of Death. Such an allegorical setting, however, was prone to attract considerable criticism. Writing in the 1580s, George Puttenham already voiced skepticism over allegory not only because of its excessive use but also because of its allegedly deceptive nature inherent in the “duplicitie of meaning or dissimulation vnder couert and dark intendments.”7 Over the 4

The full verse reads “I haue also spoken by the Prophetes, & I haue multiplied visiõs, & vsed similitudes by the ministerie of the Prophetes” (Hosea 12:10). The liberty that Bunyan takes in reducing this verse to “I have used Similitudes” even reinforces the allegorist’s argument that he is writing with scriptural authority.

5

Johnson, “Falling Into Allegory,” 122–23.

6

Wilson, The Arte of Rhetorique, fol. 93r; Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence, D1r.

7

Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, 154, 186.

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years, such skepticism led to fierce debates over the ornateness of language, a controversy in which the dividing lines become increasingly blurred the more the seventeenth century progresses. For, as Roger Pooley shows, “the terms of the argument between Puritans and Laudians in the 1630s (plainness versus ostentation) are almost exactly reversed in the 1660s and 1670s, when it is the new Anglicans who emphasise plainness against what they see as Puritan or Nonconformist excess.”8 Bunyan’s Apology must thus be read in view of this general skepticism toward figurative language, which (in his time) mainly found supporters among royalists and Church of England conformists who, in Davies’s words, considered “metaphors and similitudes . . . not only to be anachronistic but uncivil, barbarous, and seditious.”9 In this light, it is hardly surprising that Bunyan anticipates criticism from an unnamed objector who argues that metaphors would “make us blind” and that they lack the solidness of literal— or “plain”—language (ll. 101–06). The identity of this objector probably remains deliberately unspecified, for it could have ranged from people as diverse as Sir Roger L’Estrange, Samuel Parker, or Thomas Hobbes, all of whom figured among conformist supporters of the so-called “plain style.”10 L’Estrange, Royalist pamphleteer and censor, condemns allegorical language because of its high potential to conceal subversive activity; for Thomas Hobbes, in contrast, “the use of Metaphors, Tropes, and other Rhetoricall figures, in stead of words proper” is in no way conducive to progress in reason and science and is hence “not to be admitted”; Parker’s vociferous assault against figurative language ultimately rests on the premise that such language exchanges “the substance of true Goodness for meer Metaphors and Allegories,” that it hence distorts religious truth, and that its use therefore even ought to be proscribed by “an Act of Parliament to abridge Preachers the use of fulsom and luscious Metaphors” as “an effectual Cure

8

Roger Pooley, “Language and Loyalty: Plain Style at the Restoration,” Literature and History 6, no. 1 (1980): 4.

9

In the following, I rely heavily on Michael Davies, Graceful Reading: Theology and Narrative in the Works of John Bunyan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 201–14, here 202; Johnson, “Falling Into Allegory,” 134–36.

10

Davies, Graceful Reading, 202–05.

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of all our present Distempers.”11 These critical voices are implicit in Bunyan’s unspecified objector and may, as suggested by Johnson, even testify to “a distrust on Bunyan’s own part” (“I did not think / To shew to all the World my Pen and Ink / In such a mode,” ll. 19–21) and indicate “an anticipation of [this distrust] in his audience.”12 As implied by L’Estrange’s, Hobbes’s, and Parker’s attacks on metaphor, “the debate over plainness,” Keeble maintains, “resolves itself into a debate over what constituted ‘sense’, what ‘senselessness’,” and ultimately gestures toward an ontologically and spiritually relevant debate about “the nature of truth” per se.13 For Bunyan, on the other hand, this nature of “Truth” can be expressed in no other way than in a metaphorical one, a contention that the allegorist shares with other nonconformists.14 Three years prior to the publication of The Pilgrim’s Progress, Robert Ferguson already advanced similar views in a book chapter entitled “The Import & Use of Scripture-Metaphors,” in which he argues that “God by his unfolding himself and his Mind to us in several kinds of Metaphorical Terms, hath not only allowed, but sanctified our Use of the like.”15 In the same vein, Bunyan asks rhetorically in his Apology if the Bible itself would not speak in “Types, Shadows and Metaphors” 11

Christopher Hill, A Turbulent, Seditious, and Factious People: John Bunyan and His Church, 1628–1688 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988; reprint, 1989), 201; Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan; or, the Matter, Forme & Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill, 1651, ed. Noel Malcolm, 3 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 2:70; Samuel Parker, A Discourse of Ecclesiastical Politie . . . (London: John Martyn, 1670), 76; Davies, Graceful Reading, 202–03, 205, 210–11.

12

Johnson, “Falling Into Allegory,” 118.

13

Keeble, The Literary Culture of Nonconformity, 247.

14

Because of the “centrality of metaphors and similitudes in Bunyan’s theological stance,” Davies concludes, the tinker from Bedford is distinguishable “as a Nonconformist in both religious and, necessarily, political terms, implying a rejection not only of the prevailing religion of civility, morality, and latitude but, potentially, of the social and political structures and precepts that endorse such religion”; see his Graceful Reading, 202.

15

Robert Ferguson, The Interest of Reason in Religion . . . (London: Dorman Newman, 1675), 367; Johnson, “Falling Into Allegory,” 134–35.

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(l. 112) and holds that, therefore, anyone who assaults such figures would “be found to assault / The highest Wisdom” (ll. 114–15). Even “grave Paul,” Bunyan writes, no where doth forbid The use of Parables; in which lay hid That Gold, those Pearls, and precious stones that were Worth digging for.

(ll. 155–58)

In other words, Bunyan puts himself into a line of early modern poets whom “the Bible affords,” in Lewalski’s words, “a literary model which he can imitate in such literary matters as genre, language, and symbolism, confident that in this model at least the difficult problems of art and truth are perfectly resolved.”16 Hence, without being unbiblical, Bunyan can boldly state, “My dark and cloudy words they do but hold / The Truth, as Cabinets inclose the Gold ” (ll. 127–28), for his method is scripturally authorized and can thus be anything but specious. The gold, the pearls, and the precious stones all figure—again—as metaphors for the Truth that cannot be communicated but through figurative language. Unlike fables that have truth “wrapped in a beautiful lie,” as Johnson has it, Bunyan’s narrative, like the Bible, uses parables as “similitudes that encapsulate truth.”17 In this regard, “metaphorical language has an obviously privileged place” as it communicates, according to Davies, “the reality of things unseen, of things beyond sense” by making use of “the ontological and existential value of the parable as a kind of story which encapsulates and conveys ‘Truth’ above all else.”18 In this manner, Bunyan’s prose allegory—here justified in verse!—ultimately serves no other purpose than to penetrate the realm of the divine in a daring attempt at apprehending God’s truth. Unlike most poets treated in the above, Bunyan reflects explicitly and extensively on his allegorical mode in his Apology. The only exception in this regard is Edmund Spenser, who, as I showed in Chapter 2, anticipates similar criticism as Bunyan: “To some,” the poet writes to Raleigh, “this Methode will seeme displeasaunt,” but, as I maintained above, he voices

16

Lewalski, Protestant Poetics, 6–7.

17

Johnson, “Falling Into Allegory,” 124.

18

Davies, Graceful Reading, 193, 206, 208.

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preference for allegory over “all things accounted by their shows” since mere visuality is “not delightfull and pleasing to commune sense” (ll. 21–25). In his Letter, however, he does not go as far as Bunyan in suggesting openly that his allegorical mode would offer access to a new divine reality, even though I have argued that this is precisely what happens in an anagogical sense at the end of Canto 10 in Book I. In communicating the metaphorical potential of his allegory, Bunyan is much less tentative, for in his line of thought allegory conveys “not moral issues but ontologically determined actualities, communicating in earthly terms something of the most unfathomable eschatological aspects of Christian faith—the kingdom of heaven, states of salvation and damnation,” as Davies holds.19 Defending his metaphorical stance, Bunyan acknowledges not only its spiritual import but also its transcendental nature, predating by 300 years Ricœur’s and Weder’s theoretical contention that a hermeneutic potential inheres in religious metaphors. As shown in Chapter 1, both Ricœur and Weder hold that such metaphors contribute to a semantically powerful hermeneutics that allows for a transcendent subject to be combined with an immanent predicate, which generates new spiritual meaning that balances the insurmountable difference between the worldly and the divine. And yet again, Bunyan seems to be more daring not only than Spenser but also than Weder and Ricœur as the use of his metaphors does not suggest a more instructive or a more pleasurable way of self-amelioration (as in Spenser) or the genesis of new spiritual meaning (as in Weder and Ricœur). Much rather, the Gold that is enclosed in Bunyan’s cabinets ushers in a heavenly actuality, “delivering divine reality to men” through a metaphorical mode that “communicates and advances ‘Truth’” by affording “a distinct ‘substance’,” as Johnson and Davies advance.20 Expressing the substance of this Truth with words proper, however, is impossible, which is probably why Bunyan resolves this conundrum appropriately with yet another metaphor: “My dark and cloudy words they do but hold / The Truth, as Cabinets inclose the Gold ” (ll. 127–28). These cabinets of truth are in no way inaccessible, for Bunyan invites his readers to open them through deliberate acts of allegoresis. As will become clear below, many of the allegorical episodes stand—like most of Red-

19

Davies, Graceful Reading, 194 (my emphasis).

20

Johnson, “Falling Into Allegory,” 123; Davies, Graceful Reading, 209.

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crosse’s adventures—for myriads of inner conflicts whose resolutions provide at least a glimpse of Truth divine. These inner conflicts are, as C. S. Lewis already observed (in a different context), almost always inextricably tied to metaphor: We cannot speak, perhaps we can hardly think, of an ‘inner conflict’ without a metaphor; and every metaphor is an allegory in little. And as the conflict becomes more and more important, it is inevitable that these metaphors should expand and coalesce, and finally turn into the fully-fledged allegorical poem.21

In this manner, Bunyan’s chain of ontological metaphors eventually turns into this “contynued Metaphor” that early modern rhetoricians referred to as allegory and that—qua its existential setting—becomes an allegory for life. In Bunyan, places like the Slough of Despond or the conversations between the Worldly-Wiseman, Ignorance, and many others bespeak such inner conflicts, such “allegories in little,” which pilgrims may encounter on their long way to eternity.22 These mini-allegories prove futile, however, unless they are unfolded by the reader himself. Such an invitation to dig for the gold that is enshrined in the many metaphors is explicitly extended in Bunyan’s verse Conclusion to Part I of The Pilgrim’s Progress: Put by the Curtains, look within my Vail; Turn up my Metaphors and do not fail: There, if thou seekest them, such things to find, As will be helpful to an honest mind.

(ll. 13–16)

According to Berta Haferkamp, Bunyan here expresses his desire “to teach and cleanse our senses so that they can accept the divine truth directly and

21

Lewis, Allegory of Love, 60–61.

22

In this regard, Roger Sharrock goes even further and argues famously that “each major crisis of the pilgrimage reflects some stage in Bunyan’s spiritual struggles as he describes them in his autobiography [Grace Abounding]”; see his John Bunyan (London: Hutchinson’s University Library, 1954), 75.

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see through the allegorical veil what is real and what is superior.”23 Thus, removing the figurative veil will reveal “the substance of my matter” (l. 12), which essentially is the “safe Arrival at the Desired Countrey” advertised on the title page. Hence, while Bunyan’s Apology powerfully defends his use of figurative language as nothing other than good old scriptural practice to convey divine Truth, his epilogue to Part I unequivocally invites his readers to turn his allegories inside out to discover the golden Truth inside the cabinet. In other words, the wager of his allegory is to substantiate literally and in material terms the belief in “the Desired Countrey” through the use of figurative language to reveal to his readers the necessary steps on their last pilgrimage. Arriving safely, however, is only possible if one takes seriously and masters successfully the allegorical trials that wait along the way. The lines to follow aim to do precisely what Bunyan invites us to do in his verse Apology and Conclusion, namely to remove the metaphorical veil from Christian’s allegorical trials in an attempt to unlock the spiritual treasures inside the cabinets. On this literary quest, I have to limit myself to some of the most pertinent episodes that will at the same time allow me to revisit and to contextualize some of the most seminal and familiar topoi of metaphorical pilgrimages that we already encountered in the previous chapters. One of the most central conceits that is closely related to, if not synonymous with, this study’s pilgrimage motif is the metaphor of life as a race to eternity as we encountered it in Donne’s, Spenser’s, and Milton’s poetry.24 23

Berta Haferkamp, Bunyan als Künstler: Stilkritische Studien zu seinem Hauptwerk “The Pilgrim’s Progress” (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1963), 76 (my translation). Moreover, Davies argues persuasively that these lines can be read as a reference to the veil that Christ removes “of the old Covenant of the Law,” which Bunyan already uses “in his depiction of the pilgrims’ experience of Beulah, in which the ‘Instrument’ of grace allows them . . . to see the glory of the Celestial City—that is, to see that which cannot be seen otherwise”; see Davies, Graceful Reading, 198.

24

While it is difficult to say whether Bunyan was familiar with any of the poetry by Donne, Raleigh, Herbert, Spenser, or Milton, the almost ubiquitous presence of the race to eternity in eschatological pilgrimage narratives bespeaks a high prevalence of the trope in early modern culture that indubitably informed Bunyan’s and many others’ thinking; see Michael Davies, “Bunyan, John,” in The

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This central metaphor of the race and the everlasting prize has its origin mainly in the Pauline letters of the New Testament, particularly so in the one to the Philippians, in which the apostle writes that he forgets “that which is behinde” to “followe hard toward the marke, for the prise of the hie calling of God in Christ Iesus” (3:13–14). In Donne’s sonnet, as we have seen, the speaker is on his “pilgrimages last mile,” on the last inch of his race, which is “Idly, yet quickly runne” (l. 2–3). On this final part of his earthly race and pilgrimage, the dying pilgrim envisions fearfully how his body and soul are separated. This disunion of the earthly self, or at least the prospect of it, troubles the poetical speaker deeply; in a similar way, some of Donne’s sermons, I have shown, address the intense anxiety over this ontological separation at the end of the race. The sermons I considered, however, do not necessarily paint a fearful picture of this separation, but they attempt to open a door to eternity through which the earthly self will be reconstituted once the race through life has been completed. Likewise, I argued that the last line of Donne’s sonnet ends on a new heavenly identity, a new set of heavenly semantics that is masterfully encapsulated in the newly fashioned “I” which leaves “the world, the flesh, the devill” at the end of the ruminating speaker’s pilgrimage or race to eternity. Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, on the other hand, mostly refers to the race to eternity ex negativo. As I was able to show in Chapter 2, most of the movements in Cantos 1–9 of Book I run contrary to the race to eternity motif: Redcrosse’s own errant wanderings, the sluggish pageant in the House of Pride, and Archimago’s errant place pilgrimage between both ends of the world are all indicators that progress in Faerieland is a rare privilege reserved for the elect. After nine Cantos of countless anti-races, the race to eternity eventually seems to be invoked after Redcrosse has had his vision of the New Jerusalem enticing him to turn his travels into a race, or a swifter pilgrimage, that would allow him to make his way “streight way on that last long voiage” (I, x, 63.4, my emphasis). However, in a world that is so infested with sin that it is “out of square,” as the poet writes, the race to eternity becomes

Encyclopedia of English Renaissance Literature, ed. Garrett A. Sullivan, et al., 3 vols. (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 1:129–30; Brainerd P. Stranahan, “Bunyan and the Epistle to the Hebrews: His Source for the Idea of Pilgrimage in The Pilgrim’s Progress,” Studies in Philology 79, no. 3 (1982): 279.

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increasingly difficult to run. Consequently, Spenser’s Cantos of Mutabilitie remain ambiguously obscure as to the successful completion of this race. Again a different matter is the race invoked in Milton’s Areopagitica. In an elaborate conceit, Milton envisions—with revolutionary fervor—fit readers as hunters and gatherers who race to collect the bits and pieces of divine truth that are scattered in all sorts of books and pamphlets. Censorship, thus Milton’s argument, impedes these “new enlightn’d steps in the discovery of truth” and would cancel the eschatological race for “that immortall garland.” By participating in this race, or in this collective eschatological pilgrimage, for Truth divine, the spiritual athletes/pilgrims pursue an epistemological quest that remains incomplete until Christ’s Second coming. Through their efforts, however, they already gain a sense of the divine in their “paradise within” in the Kingdom of Grace. The metaphor of Mary’s house at the end of Paradise Regain’d, I maintained, may thus figure not only as a “pit stop” of sorts but possibly as a conventicle in which the epistemological race for God’s truth is run through spiritual exercise and progress in anticipation of the eschatological finishing line and of the Kingdom of Glory. In light of these different metaphorical races to eternity, it can be said that this trope is of central concern to the pilgrimage metaphor in Donne’s, Spenser’s, and Milton’s poetry, but its implications may range from a new pronominal integrity, to eschatological skepticism, and ultimately to the eternal reunification of a divine truth once lost. Given this wide range of uses of the race-to-eternity motif, it is not very surprising that it also found entry into The Pilgrim’s Progress. Already employed extensively in Bunyan’s The Heavenly Footman,25 the Pauline race to the heavenly prize in eternity also features prominently in the Apology to sketch Christian’s and other pilgrims’ godly lives: This Book it chaulketh out before thine eyes The man that seeks the everlasting Prize: It shews you whence he comes, whither he goes, What he leaves undone; also what he does:

25

John Bunyan, The Heavenly Foot-Man, 1698, in The Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan, ed. Graham Midgley, 13 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 5:148–49, 154–55, 157, 161, 165–66.

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It also shews you how he runs, and runs Till he unto the Gate of Glory comes.

(ll. 197–202)

Though frequently invoked in the Pauline letters (e.g., 1 Cor. 9:24–27, Phil. 3:12–14, 2 Tim. 4:7–8, and Heb. 12:1), the metaphor of the race is not accompanied with a detailed account in the New Testament. This gap is filled by Bunyan’s allegory, in which the metaphorical particularities of such a race and of the prize that awaits the spiritual athletes are clearly accentuated. What it means to run this race to eternity is already made explicit at the beginning of Christian’s pilgrimage: in view of all the wrath that will come over the City of Destruction, Christian “put his fingers in his Ears, and ran on crying, Life, Life, Eternal Life” (12). Here, Christian commences his race to eternal life resolutely and with a deliberate act of heedlessness toward his family’s dissuading voices. To emphasize this point, the marginal gloss points the scripturally versed reader to Jesus’s words in Luke 14:26, “If anie man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, & wife, & children, and brethren, and sisters; yea, and his owne life also, he can not be my disciple.” Thus, one of the first important messages here is that, by running away from his own family, Bunyan’s Everyman subscribes to such a race of discipleship leading away from “the wrath to come” toward a life in eternity irrespective of the personal sacrifices this may require.26 And yet, while the Pauline metaphor of the race bespeaks spiritual progress from destruction to glory, it does not come without a seemingly paradoxical inference about movement and steadfastness. “The Crown is before you,” says the Evangelist to the journeying Christian, and it is an incorruptible one; so run that you may obtain it . . . . let the Kingdom be always before you, and believe stedfastly concerning things that are invisible” (69, my emphasis)

In other words, metaphorical progress on the race to eternity leads to spiritual non-movement, that is to a solid and unwavering belief in what is not yet to be seen. Racing toward eternity and leaving everything behind that would interfere with this aim, Christian is encouraged to embrace an exemplary

26

In Part II of The Pilgrim’s Progress, Christian’s abandoned wife and children follow his example and embark on their heavenly journey themselves.

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spiritual steadfastness “concerning things that are invisible.” Hence, with regard to Bunyan’s stance on spiritual metaphor, we can say that the race-toeternity motif figures, in a way, as a cabinet of gold inside of which are stored the deeper theological implications of the race, namely that progress on one’s way to eternity ultimately leads to steadfastness in faith. We will see below that this spiritual “solidity” (as Bunyan calls it in his Apology) becomes crucial when the pilgrims embark on their last pilgrimage through the River of Death. Apart from the race-to-eternity motif, another commonly shared characteristic of many last pilgrimage narratives is that the spiritual wayfarers are afforded companions and/or guides that accompany them on their journey to eternity in one way or the other. For example, as I pointed out in Chapter 3, Milton provides his Adam with Michael, who helps him envision his providential pilgrimage to eternity. In the two final books of Paradise Lost, both Michael’s visual and narrative prophecies are instrumental not only in rendering the lapsed couple primeval pilgrims on their way to eternal life, but also in conveying to them a sense of equanimity that guides them through their final passage, in which death becomes “A gentle wafting to immortal Life.” Moreover, George Herbert’s unnamed protagonist in “The Pilgrimage” is metaphorically accompanied by Michael on his last journey as implied by the gold coin, the Angel, which a friend had “ti’d / Close to my side.” Although Milton and Herbert both turn to the archangel Michael at an existentially pivotal point in their poems, their companion angels differ in significant ways: while the former merely points Adam and Eve to their ordained end and acts as a somewhat premature ars moriendi counselor, the latter by no means leaves the pilgrim but embodies a long-standing tradition in which “the archangel depicted on the coin called ‘angel’ was to accompany and conduct the soul to the other world.”27 Thus, Milton’s Michael assumes the role of an angelic educator, comforter, and counsellor, while the minted Michael on Herbert’s metaphorical coin presumably will not be untied from the pilgrim’s gown until he reaches his final destination. Furthermore, Spenser’s Redcrosse, as we could see, is provided not only with one guide, but with a whole array of different tutors varying in trustworthiness and influence. All of them are in one way or another responsible for leading the Knight of Holinesse through his transition from homo erro to

27

Westerweel, Patterns and Patterning, 200.

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homo viator. Although Una provides Redcrosse with guidance invariably in good faith, she is at her wits’ end by the end of Canto 9 and has a more incisive regiment of spiritual guides (Celia, Fidelia, Mercy, Contemplation, etc.) put the almost hopeless Redcrosse back on the straight and narrow. On the other hand, Spenser’s dwarf can be said to be the least reliable of guides in Redcrosse’s entourage in that he embodies the voice of reason that always lags behind. After they have already spent a considerable amount of time at the House of Pride, it suddenly dawns on dwarfish Reason that this place may not be spiritually beneficial to Redcrosse, and they decide to escape. In addition, when the Knight of Holinesse foolishly takes off his spiritual armor, the dwarf, rather than interfering immediately, belatedly collects the signifiers of the abandoned armor (the shield of faith, the breastplate of righteousness, etc.). Because of his companion’s late interference, however, Redcrosse is now acutely vulnerable to all sorts of spiritual threats which eventually culminate in his destitute spiritual condition in the Cave of Despair that marks the nadir of his spiritual pilgrimage. All in all, it becomes apparent that the co-travelers of the poetical pilgrimage narratives that were analyzed in the previous chapters may well range from faithful guides ensuring a smooth transition to the afterlife to those whose belatedness is the only thing upon which their protégés can rely. The fact that co-travelers’ trustworthiness varies in degrees is also mirrored in Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, in which even the most faithful of companions prove less reliable than the Word of God. While Obstinate and Pliable, the first two companions, and later Ignorance and Talkative prove anything but helpful, Christian repeatedly receives guidance on the right path by the Bible which he holds in his hands and by the Evangelist, his shining guide. Companions like Faithful and later Hopeful may be fellows in good faith, but, as the episode at Vanity Fair shows, such amity may be limited. Arrested, incarcerated, and tortured for allegedly causing civil disobedience in Vanity, Christian and Faithful are put to trial and the latter is sentenced to death, inter alia, for heresy. Looking behind the allegorical veil, we come to understand here that this episode does not only fiercely inveigh against religious repression at worldly places like Vanity, but also that Faithful’s sudden martyrdom and premature death puts a limit and an unexpected end to faithful companionship as such. The only permanently reliable guide throughout the first part of The Pilgrim’s Progress is the Word of God

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enshrined and treasured between the two covers of Christian’s Bible. Without God’s Word being a lamp unto his feet (cf. Ps. 119:105, indicated in the marginal gloss on p. 12), Christian would be lost and would probably not even have left the City of Destruction in the first place. At the beginning of his journey, in particular, it is his Bible that not only leads to him being “greatly distressed in his mind” in view of all the wrath to come, but also teaches him that there is “an Inheritance, incorruptible, undefiled, and that fadeth not away” and that “it is laid up in Heaven, and fast there, to be bestowed at the time appointed, on them that diligently seek it” (12–13). Driven by this prospect, Christian is already provided with a taste of the afterlife by his most trustworthy companion, the book in his hand. Thus, unless afforded by the Bible itself, companionship on the pilgrimage to eternity may have its limits. And yet such a journey is rarely a solipsistic endeavor: in many of the texts discussed, characters like the Evangelist, Una, Mercy, Contemplation, Michael, Hopeful, and Faithful appear as spiritual guides along the difficult way that lies ahead and provide partial but often invaluable support with visions, assistance, and comfort in view of the passage—through death—to the life everlasting. Despite these companions, the difficulty of the way to eternity furnishes another frequent pilgrimage topos, often mirrored in the pun on travel/travail and traveler/travailer, which Bunyan is not coy in using either. In his Apology, he writes that This Book will make a Travailer of thee, If by its Counsel thou wilt ruled be; It will direct thee to the Holy Land, If thou wilt its Directions understand.

(ll. 207–10)

As Davies reasons, “the implication here seems to be that if one is at least seeking the kingdom of heaven one need not fear its coming, in which case the reader is being asked to seek and recognize a justifiable spiritual hope and dread before the narrative proper has even begun.”28 Indeed, walking “through the wilderness of this world” (The Pilgrim’s Progress, 11) as an act of travailing may well be seen as dreadful, but, combined with the promise of metaphorical advancement, the toilsome journey also implies spiritual

28

Davies, Graceful Reading, 183.

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hope in the life to come. Understood as a spiritual pilgrim’s guide to eternity, Bunyan’s allegory ultimately offers its readers metaphorical directions on how to overcome the travails of this world and how to reach their ultimate destination through their spiritual travels and progress as smoothly and easily as possible. It goes without saying, however, that until Christian and Hopeful pass through the River of Death as their final ontological obstacle, a seminal passage upon which I will elaborate below, they themselves still have to travel and travail through the dangers of the fallen world en route. In the light of the poetical pilgrimages to eternity discussed in the previous chapters, Christian’s self-description of being a “Travailer” (25) and his “laborious going” (17) out of the wilderness toward the Celestial City immediately recalls the difficulties faced by Redcrosse in Book I of The Faerie Queene and by the unnamed protagonist in Herbert’s poem “The Pilgrimage.” In the latter, the first few words “I travell’d on” invoke both a flashback to and outlook on the speaker’s past and future travels/travails, which are devastatingly deceptive and disappointing. Although the general tone of the poem is bleak, depressing, and unpleasant, the pilgrim’s relentless efforts to reach “the hill, where lay / My expectation” (ll. 1–2) render his bitter disappointment moot and eventually allow him to conclude with his peculiarly rich observation that “After so foul a journey death is fair, / And but a chair” (ll. 35–36). In a word, traveling trumps travailing. In The Faerie Queene, on the other hand, traveling and travailing can be considered synonymous as implied by the epic heroes’ attempts to embrace the various Spenserian virtues in a constant struggle on journeys that ultimately bear very little fruit. As Richard A. McCabe explains succinctly, George leaves Una at the close of book one abandoning ‘rest’ for six further years of active life; after the defeat of Acrasia Guyon and the Palmer hasten to catch the tide of events which hurries them back to the turbulent world of book three; having ‘long in drede/Awayted . . . Britomarts returne’ Scudamour deserts his station in despair thereby deferring his own happiness; the marriage of Florimell and Marinell is postponed until book five where the celebrations surrounding it end in some disarray; Artegall’s reformation of Irena’s homeland proves abortive although he has sacrificed immediate union with Britomart to attempt it; the Blatant Beast escapes from the world of romance narrative into the world of Eliza’s court.29

29

McCabe, Pillars of Eternity, 212–13.

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A pessimistic reading of McCabe’s observation would derive from the conclusion that the struggles of Spenser’s heroes are ultimately in vain, but to a sixteenth-century reader it would probably have been evident that these virtues will, in any case, be fully effected beyond the remit of the fallen world. This, as I argued in Chapter 2, becomes particularly clear at the end of Canto 10 of Book I, where Spenser seems to suggest that, although his Everyman figure is aware of the pleasant implications of godly walking after his sojourn in the House of Holinesse, he still has to “walke this way in Pilgrims poore estate” (I, x, 64.4). This “poore estate” stands for all the future travails which will only be obliterated once Redcrosse embarks on the last pilgrimage that was shown to him on the Mount of Contemplation. In brief, traveling/ travailing will remain toilsome for Redcrosse and all the other Spenserian heroes until they reach that “spacious court” that is “pleasaunt to be walked in” (I, x, 6.2–3, my emphasis). Closely related to this notion of easy walking are the recurring topoi of rest and ease that are promised to pilgrims on their restless and toilsome ways to eternity and that Bunyan frequently invokes throughout Part I of The Pilgrim’s Progress. For example, Christian, who from the very beginning carries a burden on his back, is relieved of this heavy weight as soon as he beholds the cross. “He [Christ] hath given me rest, by his sorrow; and life, by his death,” realizes Christian, and the narrative voice adds that “it was very surprising to [Christian], that the sight of the Cross should thus ease him of his burden” (32). The burdened traveler here is relieved through a visio crucis that not only renders his journey less toilsome but that also foreshadows rest with Christ in eternity. This eschatological notion of ease and rest as afforded to spiritual travelers by God is reinforced at the House Beautiful: after climbing the Hill Difficulty, Christian reaches this palace, which “was built by the Lord of the Hill, for the relief and security of Pilgrims” (39). Having considered Spenser’s The Faerie Queene at length, we cannot help being reminded of the House of Holinesse here and of how the weary Una and the dejected Redcrosse are offered rest and recuperation from the travails of their rather parodic militia christiana. After long discourse with Prudence, Piety, and Charity at the House Beautiful, Christian is “laid in a large upper Chamber, whose window opened towards the Sun rising” (43). The fact that there is only one window in the room not only indicates that there is only one way to eternity, but the sun rising in the east through that one and only win-

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dow must be read as the traditional symbol for eternal rest in the New Jerusalem, an eschatological topos pointing to the seat of paradise in Genesis and in Milton’s Paradise Lost and Paradise Regain’d, as I argued in Chapter 3. Christian’s taking a rest with such heavenly prospects may well be read as an instance of realized eschatology in which the traveler already participates in the restfulness that has been promised to him. This notion of rest, however, is complicated by Bunyan’s insistence that too much rest can also be spiritually disadvantageous, a lesson which Christian learns prior to reaching the House Beautiful. On his way up the Hill Difficulty, Bunyan’s Everyman takes rest in “a pleasant Arbour, made by the Lord of the Hill, for the refreshment of weary Travailers” (36), which is glossed marginally as an “Award of grace.” As weary as Christian is, he indulges in the restfulness offered by the arbor for too long, soon falls asleep, and foolishly leaves behind the scroll that the Evangelist has given him. The sardonic marginal voice tersely comments, “He that sleeps is a loser” (36), and Christian, too, becomes aware of his error, chastising himself for using “that rest for ease to my flesh,” when it was actually prepared “for the relief of the spirits of Pilgrims” (37, my emphasis). Accepting Bunyan’s invitation to turn his metaphors inside out, we do not require much hermeneutical skill to unveil the obvious point here: God provides grace en route, but this generous divine offer must not be seen as an excuse to abandon one’s spiritual progress completely and to relinquish one’s adherence to God’s statutes. In other words, rest comes in different hues: spiritual recuperation in prayer and worship is perfectly acceptable and desirable on the pilgrimage to eternity, but mere bodily indulgence and hence indifference to divine precepts, thought fallaciously to originate in God’s prevenient grace, are considered utterly deplorable. Before falling prey to such antinomian sentiment, and better late than never, Christian reaches the House Beautiful, where he is again given a foretaste of eternal rest, as I showed above. All of these implications of ease and rest in their different nuances are, of course, only metaphorical prefigurations of what cannot possibly be expressed in worldly terms, that is the ease and rest in which pilgrims will partake eventually in the life everlasting. At the end of their earthly pilgrimage, we will see below, Christian and Hopeful ascend to the New Jerusalem that “stood upon a mighty hill,” but the narrator makes clear that the hill’s (all-)mightiness is anything but daunting, for “the Pilgrims went up that hill with ease” (122).

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Viewing this transition from death to the afterlife as one of ease is a major spiritual challenge that has surfaced again and again in this study. One of the main arguments of the previous chapters was that the idea of the last pilgrimage serves as a means to palliate the fear of death. In The Pilgrim’s Progress, this fear assumes an even more explicit role. As a marginal gloss explains, there is a “good use of fear” that, according to Hopeful, “tends much to Mens good, and to make them right, at their beginning to go on Pilgrimage.” Christian, who has diligently been reading in his Bible on his pilgrimage, immediately identifies this “good use of fear” as the one defined in Psalm 111:10, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom” (115). Among the many translations of “fear” from the Hebrew Bible, the word ‫( י ִ ְראָה‬yirah) in Psalm 111:10 denotes a reverent sense of fear, quite unlike the trembling notion of fear as in ‫( ח ֲָרדָ ה‬charadah) in Proverbs 29:25 or the more dreadful meaning of fear as in ‫( ַפּחַד‬pachad) in Psalm 36:2.30 Christian and Hopeful thus accentuate in their doctrinal discourse a central tenet of early modern theology, namely that fear in general, and fear of death in particular, is relative if viewed through the prism of the last pilgrimage. “To go back is nothing but death,” says Christian earlier, but “to go forward is fear of death, and life everlasting beyond it” (36). In other words, for Christian, going back would inevitably mean succumbing to death and destruction. This fear of death, however, is such a strong force of progress on his pilgrimage to eternity that it entails fundamental necessity: he fears death and therefore needs to embark on his pilgrimage. This Bunyanesque understanding takes a slightly different angle on how the fear of death is negotiated through the pilgrimage metaphor. As could be seen in Chapters 1 and 3, the unnamed poetical speaker in Donne’s poem and Milton’s Adam are ridden with a profound fear of death that is far from any reverence for the divine. The former shakes at seeing the face of God and hopes to leave “the world, the flesh, the devill” in a purified and imputed union of body and soul to be realized on the last pilgrimage to eternity. Milton’s first man, in contrast, is horrified at seeing the many shapes of death that he let into the postlapsarian world and is only appeased once he learns that he will reverentially walk on his pilgrimage out of the earthly misery,

30

For illustrative purposes, only a selection of the different Hebrew meanings of “fear” in the Old Testament is provided; Robert Young’s Analytical Concordance to the Holy Bible lists fifteen different Hebrew words for “fear.”

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loving “with feare the onely God” (XII, 562, my emphasis). Thus, Adam’s trembling fear will be replaced with a reverent one in view of his providential journey, his redeemer’s sacrifice, and his eventual heavenly destination. For both Milton’s Adam and Bunyan’s Christian, however, the victory over death and the perspective of a blissful afterlife remain only hopeful expectations along their journeys: “there I hope to see him alive, that did hang dead on the Cross; and there I hope to be rid of all those things, that to this day are in me, an anoiance to me; there they say there is no death, and there I shall dwell with such Company as I like best,” says Christian, and Milton’s Adam would probably nod in agreement (42). This common christological resolution notwithstanding, Bunyan’s stance on pilgrimage and the fear of death is even more accentuated. While, for Milton and Donne, the pilgrimage metaphor serves as a linguistic and pastoral device to render death more palatable, Bunyan’s theology seems suggestive of an even stronger causality between the two: because of his fear of death, Christian embarks on his pilgrimage. In this sense, the fear of death as invoked by Bunyan seems almost identical with the “good use of fear” in that it, too, “tends much to Mens good, and to make them right, at their beginning to go on Pilgrimage.” Put differently, Milton and Donne use the pilgrimage metaphor to palliate the fear of death and to convey a sense of the eschaton, in Bunyan, by contrast, it is the fear of death itself that motivates Everymen like Hopeful and Christian to embark on their pilgrimage in high expectation of what is to come. Once Christian and Hopeful have passed the Inchanted Ground, they reach the Country of Beulah, which “was upon the Borders of Heaven” (119); what now separates the two pilgrims from their ultimate destination is a bridgeless river that allegorizes their last trial of faith. As the marginal voice states unequivocally, this river is “Death” and the episode to follow will show that “Death is not welcome to nature though by it we pass out of this world into glory” (120). The two angels that accompany Christian and Hopeful to the River of Death inform their protégés of its relative depth: “You shall find it deeper or shallower, as you believe in the King of the place” (120). As Hopeful’s allegorical name suggests, he is literally full of hope and can walk on the bottom of the river with his very feet without drowning (121). Christian, by contrast, begins to sink as his faith undergoes an acute crisis resulting paradigmatically in “the conflict at the hour of death,” as the marginal voice comments. Facing “great darkness and horror,” losing his senses, and forgetting about “those sweet refreshments that he had

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met with in the way of his Pilgrimage,” Christian is ridden with “troublesome thoughts of the sins that he had committed” and is horrified at the “apparitions of Hogoblins and Evil Spirits.” This inner conflict at the hour of death during which the dying are reminded of their earthly sins is very much reminiscent of the late fifteenth-century depiction of an ars moriendi deathbed struggle and of the diabolical struggle in Donne’s The Second Anniversarie, upon which I commented in Chapter 1. As could be seen, Donne encourages the dying to pass on their troubling sins to “Satans Sergeants” that block the way to a heaven-ward departure and advises the dying person to “trust th’immaculate blood to wash thy score” (ll. 102–06). In a similar fashion, Christian now has to become worthy of his name and trust in his redeemer in order to make it to the other side of the river, but this is an ontological transition he cannot undergo without help from his co-traveler. Hopeful’s help mainly consists in reverting his companion’s spiritual doubts and weaknesses into a steadfastness that will allow him to find footing in the river and to pass to the other side: Hopeful therefore here had much adoe to keep his Brothers head above water, yea sometimes he would be quite gone down, and then ere a while he would rise up again half dead. (121)

Only when Hopeful reminds Christian of Christ—“Be of good chear, Jesus Christ maketh thee whole”—does his redeemer become the focus of his spiritual efforts again: And with that, Christian brake out with a loud voice, Oh I see him again! and he tells me, When thou passest through the waters, I will be with thee, and through the Rivers, they shall not overflow thee. (121)

Here, the River of Death allegorizes the ultimate trial of faith, a trial that follows a simple—probably too simplistic—spiritual pattern: if your faith in Christ is strong enough, you will make it to the other side; if you struggle, Hope can provide support; and if worse comes to worst, you succumb to the strong currents of death. As the average Everyman, Christian is neither strong enough to pass through the river himself nor too weak to be caught by its current, but by heeding Hopeful’s advice, he finds fresh hope again and recalls the purpose of his journey. Christian’s dependence on his companion in an existentially most pivotal moment is indicative of clear parallels to a

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rich tradition of spiritual pilgrims who, in one way or another, had their plight reverted to a focus on the prospective bliss in the New Jerusalem. As we saw in Chapter 1, for example, Thomas Becon’s Philemon expounds to the dying Epaphroditus his itinerant status as pilgrim on earth and the prospective bliss in Heaven. In this instance, Becon’s ars moriendi deathbed counselor does nothing other than instill a sense of hope into his counselee similar to the one that Contemplation imparts to Redcrosse, Michael to Adam, and Hopeful to Christian. Accordingly, hope raised by (allegorical) companions can be considered an indispensable ingredient in that final passage to the afterlife. As soon as Christian’s faith in Christ is reignited, death is defeated and ease reestablished. Christian presently finds “ground to stand upon,” which now reflects the spiritual condition that accompanies him to his final destination (122). The River of Death is now “but shallow” and the two pilgrims have no difficulty in crossing it. Through this their ultimate trial, the narrator explains, they “had left their Mortal Garments behind them in the River: for though they went in with them, they came out without them,” hence their “agility and speed” with which they are now able to ascend to the city that “stood upon a mighty hill . . . with ease.” This transition clearly corresponds to previous episodes in which progress was anything but easy for Christian: for instance, if it had not been for Help rescuing him from the Slough of Despond, Christian would have drowned in this mire into which “the scum and filth that attends conviction for sin, continually run” (16). Back at the Slough, Help pointed out to Christian that there would have been “certain good and substantiall Steps,” glossed marginally as “The Promises of forgiveness and acceptance to life by faith in Christ,” that would have led him out of his desperate situation (17). Christian, however, does not find footing on God’s promises of forgiveness and faith in Christ and has to rely on Help, who “gave him his hand, and he drew him out, and set him upon sound ground” (16). This is different in the River of Death: although Christian would also not have survived this trial if it were not for Hopeful’s help, his spiritual progress has been so substantial that his own faith now leads him to Christ. Through his faith in Christ, he finds solid ground even in Death, which is what carries him successfully to the other side. In other words, with the “Mortal Garments” that the pilgrims leave in the River of Death, they also leave behind all their doubts and weaknesses that would—again—call for someone like Help to come to their aid. Thus shorn of all their earthly

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burdens, the two pious pilgrims are now able to expedite their journey heavenward, with ease. As they go up to the city, Christian and Hopeful converse with two angels who expound to them what they will find behind the gate of heaven. They shall no longer see “sorrow, sickness, affliction, and death, for the former things are passed away,” but they will align themselves in the lines of the prophets. Since the two pilgrims are “men that have loved [the] Lord, when they were in the World,” the Last Judgment that will be passed on them seems a mere formality, for they are envisioned to sit swiftly next to the divine judge to “pass Sentence upon all the workers of Iniquity” (123). This not only bespeaks their elect state, but the fact that the Last Judgment follows immediately after death also suggests that the end of time is either very imminent for Bunyan or that temporal categories have been abolished all together. In any event, Christian and Hopeful can already be completely confident that their arduous pilgrimage was not in vain, and that they can now “reap what [they] have sown” (122). At the end of their conversation with the two angels, Christian and Hopeful finally reach the gates of heaven, and “as they entered, they were transfigured” (124). The narrator’s exclamation, “Oh! by what tongue or pen can their glorious joy be expressed” already suggests that further narrative specification of this transfiguration would necessitate transcendence of earthly language itself, which is probably why he limits himself to the pithy description that the two pilgrims “had Raiment put on that shone like Gold” (124). After their inexpressible transfiguration, the arriving pilgrims not only listen to the heavenly hymn but they also chime in “with a loud voice” in the eternal praises of the Almighty. Similar to Spenser’s Redcrosse Knight, readers of Bunyan’s allegory are now only given a fleeting glimpse of what is to come: Now just as the Gates were opened to let in the men, I looked in after them; and behold, the City shone like the Sun, the Streets also were paved with Gold, and in them walked many men with Crowns on their heads, Palms in their hands, and golden Harps to sing praises withall. (124)

And then, “they shut up the Gates: which when I had seen, I wished my self among them” (124–25). The narrator’s unfulfilled desire to participate in this glory puts him back on the reader’s level: neither the worldly narrator nor the earthly reader are entitled to see more, let alone to partake in the heavenly bliss. However, with these last pages of The Pilgrim’s Progress, other

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“strangers and pilgremes on the earth” now have a full-fledged allegorical model of what to expect when that final passage comes: no more earthly burdens and a heavenly transfiguration to which earthly language can do no justice. *** In 1675, John Bunyan’s contemporary Robert Ferguson wrote that “Metaphors are not used to impregnate our Minds with gawdy Phantasms, but to adjust the Mysteries of Religion to the weakness of our Capacities.”31 Indeed, the metaphors employed in Bunyan’s allegory testify to all sorts of human weaknesses, but they also serve as a figurative means to address these spiritual shortcomings on “The Pilgrim’s Progress FROM THIS WORLD, TO That which is to come.” As this short discussion of some of the most frequent topoi of pilgrimages to eternity has shown, Bunyan’s prose allegory must be read as a logical continuation of such journeys that, more often than not, refers back to its potential verse precursors that I considered more closely in Chapters 1–3. Even if Bunyan did not know all of these, the recurrence of motifs like the race to eternity, the pilgrimage metaphor alleviating the fear of death, companionship on the (last) journey, etc. suggests a strong prevalence of these ideas in early modern spirituality. In this respect, Bunyan’s work may be said to contribute to—if not to perfect—that “rich assortment of models whose sources may be unknown but which have been gradually selected out by the faithful as being especially adequate to their experience,” as Soskice reasons. “This accumulation of favoured models,” she writes furthermore, is “embellished by the glosses of generations” and therefore “gives the context for Christian reflection and provides the matrix for the descriptive vocabulary which Christians continue to employ in attempts to describe their experience.”32 Derided and criticized by proponents of the “plain style,” this contextualized Christian vocabulary is in many instances metaphorical, which may provide an apt framework for all sorts of spiritual experiences, ranging from the beginning of a believer’s journey to the very end and ultimately to eternity. Returning to Bunyan’s Apology and the contention that his “Similitudes” provide solidity akin to “the Pen / Of him that writeth things

31

Ferguson, The Interest of Reason in Religion, 343.

32

Soskice, Metaphor and Religious Language, 153.

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Divine to men” (107–08), it is important to note that the tinker from Bedford could not have developed and enriched his similitudes if there had not been any precursors. As Roger Sharrock rightly states, the archetypal figures of the pilgrim, the burden, the monsters, the road with its sloughs and by-paths, the guides true and false, the gentle hospitality at the places of resort, and the final bourne of the heavenly city across the river, all these call up similar profound, though not easily definable, responses, in readers belonging to widely separated cultural traditions.33

In these final pages, I have attempted to trace some of these experiential topoi that recur when tracing the idea of the last pilgrimage from its early setting in the ars moriendi literature to its fully developed allegorical form in John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. It goes without saying, however, that this model of depicting the final passage from this life to the afterlife was and will be used in other cultural traditions as well, which may well provide fertile ground for future enquiries with different approaches.

33

Sharrock, John Bunyan, 155.

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