In the Anteroom of Divinity: The Reformation of the Angels from Colet to Milton 9781442688322

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IN THE ANTEROOM OF DIVINITY: THE REFORMATION OF THE ANGELS FROM COLET TO MILTON

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FEISAL G. MOHAMED

In the Anteroom of Divinity: The Reformation of the Angels from Colet to Milton

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

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© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2008 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada ISBN 978-0-8020-9792-7

Printed on acid-free paper

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Mohamed, Feisal G. (Feisal Gharib), 1974– In the anteroom of divinity : the reformation of the angels from Colet to Milton / Feisal G. Mohamed. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8020-9792-7 1. English literature – Early modern, 1500–1700 – History and criticism. 2. Angels in literature. 3. Angels – History of doctrines. 4. PseudoDionysius, the Areopagite – Influence. 5. Christianity and literature – England – History – 16th century. 6. Christianity and literature – England – History – 17th century. 7. Reformation – England. I. Title. PR411.M64 2008

820.9′38235309031

C2008-906271-X

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Humanities and Social Sciences Federation of Canada, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).

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Contents

Table and Plates ix Acknowledgments xi Abbreviations xiii Introduction

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1 John Colet’s Ecclesiology and Dionysian Thought

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2 Hooker and Spenser on the Celestial Hierarchy: The Decline of a Tradition? 33 3 Donne’s Ideated Angels

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4 Angelic Hierarchy in Milton and His Contemporaries 5 Raphael, the Celestial Physician

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6 Michael of Celestial Armies Prince Epilogue

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Notes 169 Bibliography 211 Index

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Index of Biblical Passages 241

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Table and Plates

Plate 1 John Colet’s Diagram of the Celestial Hierarchy and Its Relationship to the Trinity (by permission of the British Library, Add. MS 63853, f23v; photograph © The British Library) 21 Table 1 The Hierarchies of Pseudo-Dionysius and Saint Bonaventure’s Elaborations upon Them 24 Plate 2 Frontispiece to Thomas Heywood, The Hierarchie of the Blessed Angels, 1635 (by permission of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library of the University of Illinois; photograph by the author) 90 Plate 3 Harmenszoon van rijn Rembrandt, The Archangel Leaving the Family of Tobias, 1637 (by permission of the Musée du Louvre; photograph © Réunion des Musées Nationaux /Art Resource, N.Y.) 138 Plate 4 Hans Memling, Last Judgment, Central Panel, 1467–71 (by permission of the National Museum in Gdan´ sk, Poland; photograph © Ryszard Petrajtis) 158 Plate 5 Jan Provost, The Last Judgment, c. 1525 (Gift of James E. Scripps to the Detroit Institute of Arts; photograph © The Detroit Institute of Arts) 159 Plate 6 William Blake, ‘The Expulsion from Eden,’ from Paradise Lost, 1808 (by permission of The Huntington Art Collections; photograph © The Huntington, San Marino, California) 161

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Acknowledgments

The debts accumulated in writing a first book are deep and numerous. I am grateful first of all to have received first-rate graduate instruction at the Universities of Ottawa and Toronto, both of which offered generous support through their scholarship programs. The final years of my doctoral work were particularly facilitated by support from the Ontario Graduate Scholarship. I also had the good fortune at these institutions to have been taught by two exceptional Miltonists. Nicholas von Maltzahn’s rigour, polymathematical knowledge, and gentlemanly good nature were truly inspiring in my undergraduate introduction to Milton and over two graduate seminars, the last of which produced the paper from which this book was born. Mary Nyquist’s verve for analysis, combination of fresh ideas and traditional scholarship, and generous encouragement made her a more than salutary dissertation supervisor. This project has also been significantly strengthened by the insight of those who have read it in its various stages: Constance Brown Kuriyama, David Galbraith, Elizabeth Harvey, John Reibetanz, Paul Stevens, and Gordon Teskey. I am also indebted to the anonymous readers at the University of Toronto Press, who reviewed the manuscript with care and offered generous guidance. Research travel to England was made possible by support from Texas Tech University’s Arts and Humanities Initiative, and the completion of this book was facilitated greatly by reduced teaching made available through that institution’s Department of English. For these and many more reasons I will be forever thankful to the institution that gave me my first job. The editorial staff of the University of Toronto Press have guided it

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to publication with efficiency and care; I wish to thank in particular Suzanne Rancourt, Barb Porter, and Margaret Burgess. An earlier version of chapter 2 first appeared in the Journal of the History of Ideas 65 ([2004]: 559–82) as ‘Renaissance Thought on the Celestial Hierarchy: The Decline of a Tradition?’ A much earlier version of a portion of chapter 4 first appeared in the Milton Quarterly 36 ([2002]: 240–52) as ‘Paradise Lost and the Inversion of Catholic Angelology.’ I am thankful to the publishers of these journals for their permission to include this material. I am finally most grateful to my wife, Sally, to whom this book is dedicated, who has been unwaveringly supportive over the entire course of my post-secondary education and the uncertainties of a nascent academic career, and has taught me that love all love of other sights controls.

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Abbreviations

B C 1 Cor

CH

CPW DCH

DEH De sac

DPS EH FLE

John Donne. Biathanatos. Ed. Ernest W. Sullivan II. Newark, N.J., 1984. John Colet. Commentary on First Corinthians. Trans. and ed. Bernard O’Kelley and Catherine A.L. Jarrott. Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 21. Binghamton, N.Y., 1985. Pseudo-Dionysius. The Celestial Hierarchy. In The Complete Works. Trans. Colm Luibheid and Paul Rorem. Classics of Western Spirituality. New York, 1987. John Milton. Complete Prose Works of John Milton. 8 vols. in 10. New Haven, Conn., 1953–82. John Colet. On the Celestial Hierarchy. In Two Treatises on the Hierarchies of Dionysius. Ed. J.H. Lupton. London, 1869. John Colet. On the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy. In Two Treatises on the Hierarchies of Dionysius. John Colet. De sacramentis. In John B. Gleason. John Colet. Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1989. 270–333 (Appendix 1). John Donne. Donne’s Prebend Sermons. Ed. Janel M. Mueller. Cambridge, Mass., 1971. Pseudo-Dionysius. The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy. In The Complete Works. Richard Hooker. The Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker. 7 vols. in 8. Gen ed. W. Speed Hill. Binghamton, N.Y., 1977–93.

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Abbreviations

Martin Luther. Luther’s Works. Ed. Jaroslav Pelikan and Helmut T. Lehmann. 55 vols. Philadelphia, 1955–67. Marshall Peter Marshall and Alexandra Walsham, eds. and Walsham Angels in the Early Modern World. Cambridge, 2006. McGrade Arthur Stephen Mcgrade, ed. Richard Hooker and the Construction of Christian Community. Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies. Tempe, Ariz., 1997. ODNB H(enry) C(olin) G(ray) Matthew. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: In Association with the British Academy: From the Earliest Times to the Year 2000. 60 vols. Oxford, 2004. PL John Milton. Paradise Lost. In Complete Poems and Major Prose. Ed. Merritt Y. Hughes. New York, 1957; repr. Indianapolis, Ind., 2003. Sermons John Donne. Sermons of John Donne. Ed. Evelyn M. Simpson and George R. Potter. 10 vols. Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1953–62. SRH W. Speed Hill, ed. Studies in Richard Hooker: Essays Preliminary to an Edition of His Works. Cleveland, Ohio, 1972. Ps-D Pseudo-Dionysius. The Complete Works. Trans. Colm Huibheid and Paul Rorem. Classics of Western Spirituality. New York, 1987. Ps-M John Donne. Pseudo-Martyr. Ed. Anthony Raspa. Montreal and Kingston, 1993. ST Thomas Aquinas. Summa theologiae. Blackfriars Edition. 60 vols. Cambridge, 1964–76. STC 12760 Entry number in A.W. Pollard and G.R. Redgrave, eds. A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, & Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad, 1475–1640. 2nd ed. London, 1976–91. Available at http://eebo.chadwyck.com. Wing E3533 Entry number in Donald Wing, ed. A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and British America and of English Books Printed in Other Countries, 1641–1700. New York, 1945–51. Available at http://eebo.chadwyck.com.

Points of Convergence

IN THE ANTEROOM OF DIVINITY

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Introduction

I understand, he said. You mean the city whose establishment we have described, the city whose home is in the ideal, for I think that it can be found nowhere on earth. Well, said I, perhaps there is a pattern of it laid up in heaven for him who wishes to contemplate it and so beholding to constitute himself its citizen. But it makes no difference whether it exists now or ever will come into being. The politics of this city only will be his and of none other. That seems probable, he said. – Plato, Republic X

Plato’s heavenly city is a strain pervasive in idealization of human society.1 Unlike a fictive utopia, this city exists in the realm of Idea and can be seen through contemplation; such a journey simultaneously justifies the beholder’s status as ‘wise man’ and authorizes him to bear witness to perfect political order. Christian ontology confirms the existence of this celestial society with a realm inhabited by creatures more immediately in God’s presence than we can be in our fallen condition. From Paul’s ascent to the third heaven to Redcrosse’s vision of the New Jerusalem, the Christian tradition, and especially the mystical tradition, has sought vision of the heavenly city and its idealized citizens. It is fitting, then, that this study of angelology take as its focus the influence of a supposed disciple of Paul, an avid Christianizing Platonist, and a seminal figure on the subjects of mysticism and angelology, Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite. By combining the daimones of Plato’s Symposium with the triads of Proclus, and organizing – somewhat arbitrarily – biblical designations of angels into hierarchical

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ranks, Dionysius provides a (provisionally) Christian model of Neoplatonic procession and return. Each triad of angels is associated with an ability to perfect, illumine, or purify, and each order within the triad distinguished along the same lines, yielding nine descending orders: Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, Dominations, Virtues, Powers, Principalities, Archangels, and Angels. The Cherubim, for example, are perfect in nature because of their membership in the first triad and are involved in the illumination of their inferiors (see Table 1). As a rule, the abilities of superior creatures contain those of their inferiors, and knowledge of God moves only downward through the hierarchical ranks.2 This hierarchy generates distance between human knowledge and the profound mystery of divinity, a mystery upon which Dionysius elaborates in his Divine Names and Mystical Theology. By his principle of negative theology we can only describe God by dissimilar similitudes, knowing that ‘as Cause of all and as transcending all, he is rightly nameless and yet has the names of everything that is’ – when Malachi likens God to the sun (4.2), we recognize both that He is the sun, as He is all things, and that He is much more than the sun. The multiplicity of names and concepts associated with God in scripture alerts us to his transcendence of the conceptual. In the contemplative flight of mysticism we do not see God fully – that is impossible – but we do see ‘where he dwells,’ the indescribable, transcendent realm above speech and concept. Such contemplation is thus an ascent into profound unknowing.3 Dionysius’s ninefold hierarchy would prove to be the most commonly evoked model of the heavenly city in the Middle Ages, and his equally influential mysticism would reaffirm Plato’s statement that this ideal is within the grasp of the contemplative soul.4 Also significant is the political insight attending such contemplation – ’the politics of this city only,’ Plato says, ‘will be [the wise man’s] and of none other’ – a tendency codified by the Pseudo-Areopagite in the terrestrial counterpart to the celestial polis, his Ecclesiastical Hierarchy. Just as angels are arranged in heaven according to their capacity to receive divine illumination, so are human beings in the organization of the church. In this world, the topmost triad is occupied by the sacraments, those theurgia, or holy works, by which divine illumination is immediately transmitted; the middle triad is occupied by the clergy, or those who mediate theurgia – bishops, priests, and deacons; and the final triad by laity, or those who receive theurgia – monks, the baptized, and

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catachumens. As is the case in the celestial hierarchy, the divinity of the bishop, or hierarch, is absolutely above that of his inferiors: ‘the divine order of hierarchs is therefore the first of those who behold God. It is the first and also the last, for in it the whole arrangement of the human hierarchy is fulfilled and completed.’5 Because this is a hierarchy of divinity rather than simply of church office, those overreaching their bounds earn Dionysius’s scorn. This is most famously evident in his Eighth Epistle, where he upbraids the monk Demophilus for interfering with a priest’s forgiveness of a penitent, and reminds him that he is required to receive, rather than to provide, priestly instruction.6 For Dionysius, hierarchy is the divine order by which all creatures are arranged according to their proximity to God, and disagreement with one’s superiors is equivalent to attempting to create division within the divine kingdom. This vision of the church would also have seminal influence, with a good deal of medieval thought fitting the twin hierarchies to emerging ecclesiastical concerns. Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the controversies of the thirteenth-century church in which Saints Bonaventure and Thomas Aquinas were embroiled, where mendicant friars sought to justify their perceived encroachment upon the preaching and teaching offices of Paris’s secular clergy. The leading controversialist for the clergy, William of St Amour, presents the friars as Dionysian monks overstepping their bounds. In his reinterpretation of Dionysian mysticism and angelology, Saint Bonaventure, the ‘Seraphic Doctor,’ develops a divine economy emphasizing mystical contemplation and thus privileging the spiritualism of his besieged Franciscan order. His contemporary Saint Thomas Aquinas also engages and reinflects Dionysian thought, developing an ontology that tends to collapse the twin hierarchies as it draws on them, and to justify a more fluid ecclesiasticism where he and his Dominicans could continue teaching and preaching: that humanity is part body and part spirit, Thomas suggests in Aristotelian fashion, indicates the existence of beings that are pure spirit; if angels are pure spirit, they have no need of a body and are thus pure form; because a species must be defined by a single form, each angel must be its own species. With this myriad of celestial species in place, Dionysian hierarchy becomes less a series of rigid ranks than it is a continuum of angelic spiritual capacity – the Dionysian ranks are the mathematical limit toward which angelic ability tends as the number of angelic species approaches infinity. Less defined still in Thomas’s terms are hierarchical distinctions among

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humanity, for all humans comprise a single species with relatively small variation in spiritual capacity.7 The Pseudo-Areopagite’s prodigious influence is predicated in good measure upon his self-styled apostolicity. As narrated in Acts 17, Paul, incensed by the pagan monuments with which he was surrounded in Athens, preached in the famous assembly on Mars’s Hill against an altar inscribed ‘To an Unknown God’ so that he might lead his audience out of ignorant worship. Dionysius and Damaris are the only two named among those so led (Acts 17.34). While Damaris faded into obscurity, Dionysius was destined for much greater things than he could have imagined. Eusebius Pamphili (c. 263–339), following an account given to him by Dionysius of Corinth, describes the Pauline convert as ‘the first to be entrusted with the episcopacy of the diocese at Athens.’8 Because of Dionysius’s apostolic connection and foundational role in the Greek church, the body of writings attributed to him – a corpus complete with letters to Timothy, Polycarp, Titus, and even to John the Apostle, comforting him in his exile on Patmos – received a good deal of attention from the moment of its discovery in the sixth century. The commentary on the Corpus Dionysiacum begun between 537 and 543 by John of Scythopolis (d. c. 548) and continued by Maximus the Confessor (c. 580–662) not only cemented the text’s authority – especially given Maximus’s reputation as a hero of the faith in both the eastern and western churches – but also rendered more orthodox the Platonizing Dionysius’s Christology and cosmology.9 With the translation of the Corpus into Latin, Dionysius’s influence in the western church would truly blossom. Hilduin, Abbot of St Denis near Paris, was first to complete such a translation in 832. Despite the pervasive interest in the Corpus leading to this translation – an interest generated by the applicability of Dionysius’s writings to debates over the role of sacraments and images in worship – Hilduin’s notoriously illegible hand restricted its dissemination.10 Perhaps Hilduin’s greatest contribution to Dionysiana is his popularization of the legend conflating the Areopagite with Saint Denis, the envoy of Pope Clement I who was apostle to the Gauls, first bishop of Paris, and martyr of Montmartre.11 John the Scot Erigena’s superior, and more legible, translation of 852 would become the standard Latin text for three centuries. Erigena’s heterodox overvaluation of Greek philosophy, however, produced some detraction – expressed as an assault on his national origin by the papal librarian Anastasius, who dismissed the Scot as a ‘barbarous man planted at the end of the world.’ 12

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Such minor qualms are all but absent after the twelfth century: John Sarrazin produced a fresh translation and the Corpus became a foundational text in the Victorines’ mystical theology, a prominence reflected in Hugh of St Victor’s (d. 1142) full commentary on Dionysius’s Celestial Hierarchy.13 Robert Grosseteste’s thirteenth-century translation and commentary would be employed by Thomas of York, Roger Marston, Thomas Gallus, and John Wycliffe. Albert Magnus also wrote a full commentary on the Corpus and travelled across Europe delivering a series of lectures on Dionysius. These were transcribed by a young pupil then known to his fellow friars as ‘The Dumb Ox,’ Thomas Aquinas. Such fourteenth-century mystics and ‘forerunners of the Reformation’ as Johann Tauler and Meister Eckhart looked frequently to Dionysius, as did Jean Gerson, who found in the Corpus apostolic support both for his spiritualism and his conciliarist opposition to papal supremacy. Indeed, it is difficult to find a medieval theologian who does not make use of the Corpus Dionysiacum – Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153) is one of these rareties14 – and it is a commonplace among scholars of the Middle Ages that aside from the Pauline Epistles and the works of Boethius no texts were more widely read and written upon than those attributed to Dionysius. The importance of the Pseudo-Areopagite’s thought in this period is frequently likened to that of Augustine and of Aristotle.15 If I dwell on this medieval influence, it is because it is all but ignored in scholarship of England’s early modern period – C.A. Patrides’ now forty-five-year-old claim that English Renaissance views on the celestial hierarchy constitute ‘the decline of a tradition’ has remained widely accepted. Peter Marshall and Alexandra Walsham’s recent and significant collection, Angels in the Early Modern World, similarly treats Dionysian angelology as a sidelight; only Bruce Gordon’s omnibus chapter on ‘The Renaissance Angel’ offers sustained discussion of the Pseudo-Areopagite, and tends to do so primarily with reference to his influence on Christian Platonism.16 Indeed there is a good deal of evidence suggesting that the tradition of the ninefold hierarchy of angels associated with Dionysius suffered serious injury at the hands of Renaissance and Reformation. Subjected to the scrutiny of Renaissance scholarship and in light of the rediscovery of several Neoplatonists, particularly Proclus, it became quite clear that the Corpus Dionysiacum had been written centuries later than its author pretended. In the midfifteenth century, Lorenzo Valla argued that because the Areopagus was a legal, rather than a philosophical, assembly, because none of the

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Greek or Latin fathers make mention of Dionysius, and because the claim in the letter to Polycarp to have witnessed in Heliopolis the solar eclipse at the moment of Christ’s death is a clear fabrication, placement of the Corpus in the first century is dubious.17 These suggestions went largely unnoticed until Desiderius Erasmus, returning from England where William Grocyn had begun murmurs regarding the Areopagitic origin of the Corpus, discovered in Louvain a manuscript of Valla’s commentary on the Book of Acts, published it in 1505, and incorporated its conclusions in his influential annotations to his Greek New Testament (1516).18 The discovery of Dionysius’s pseudonymity, and Erasmus’s suggestion that Dionysian ceremonies could no longer be connected to the apostolic church, would damage permanently the now Pseudo-Areopagite’s influence. In a classic case of complicity between Renaissance humanism and Reformation theology – both Protestant and Catholic, it must be stressed – the sixteenth century turned away from Dionysian thought in general and from The Celestial Hierarchy in particular. The interrogation of apostolic origin begun by prominent Catholic thinkers like Erasmus and Cardinal Cajetan was most convenient to reformers like Martin Luther, Philip Melanchthon, Ulrich Zwingli, and John Calvin, who typically describe the author of the Corpus as ‘Dionysius, whoever he was.’ 19 We must be chary, however, of too open-and-shut a presentation of sixteenth-century Dionysiana. Renaissance humanists were not the first to question the dating of the Corpus: Peter Abelard (c. 1079–1142) fuelled general perception of his heretical tendencies by suggesting that Dionysius may not have been the Pauline convert mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles.20 Much more important, however, is the number of Renaissance scholars for whom the Pseudo-Areopagite is a formative influence. Despite his stance on the authenticity of the Corpus Dionysiacum, Lorenzo Valla describes Dionysius in the peroration to his Encomium Sancti Thomae Aquinatis as playing the flute in a celestial symphony before the throne of God.21 For Nicholas Cusanus, as F. Edward Cranz describes it, ‘Dionysius is the most important Christian theologian, with no runner-up who is even close.’22 Apparently at his suggestion, Ambrogio Traversari, who described the author of the Corpus as ‘Apostoli disciplus,’ produced a fresh translation acceptable to humanist tastes in 1437, which received wide dissemination in the 1498 Theologia vivificans of Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples.23 Lefèvre also saw the Corpus as apostolic in origin and authority, and went so far as to endorse the conflation associated with Hilduin of

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Dionysius and Saint Denis, Pope Clement’s emissary to the Gauls.24 Giovanni Pico della Mirandola saw the Pseudo-Areopagite’s writings as following directly from the teachings of Paul.25 Marsilio Ficino employed Dionysius in his comments on angels in the Theologia Platonica, translated and commented on The Divine Names and The Mystical Theology, and consistently endorsed first-century dating of these works.26 Even those conceding that authorship of the Dionysian texts was an open question might still regard them as part of a divinely inspired church tradition. Thus Sir Thomas More argues in the Confutation of Tyndale that authorship does not impact the value of the Corpus: ‘what great harme and losse were there in the mater,’ he asks, ‘though it somtyme happed the boke of one good holy man to be named the boke of an other.’27 And even Reformers like Martin Luther and John Calvin who dismiss the Corpus out of hand have a much more complex relationship to it than one might expect. While the former would ostensibly turn away from his youthful flirtation with mystical excessus, the affective relationship to scripture persistent in his later work shows some debt to Johann Tauler’s and Jean Gerson’s reinterpretations of Dionysius. While Calvin repudiates the twin hierarchies and their author in his arguments for presbyterian church government, his views on divine majesty are indebted to the tradition of negative theology arising from the Pseudo-Areopagite’s Divine Names. That Dionysius’s role is diminished in the English Renaissance is unquestionable. Thinkers of this period are clearly more reluctant than their medieval predecessors were to present their ecclesiology as earthly reflection of the nine orders of angels. If the univers dionysien, to use René Roques’s phrase, suffered a collapse at the hands of the Reformation and modernity, however, then surely it could not have been accomplished overnight, nor could a period so concerned with sacred sources divorce ’ itself entirely from Dionysian notions of ␫⑀␳␣␳␹␫ ´␣ – a term coined by the Pseudo-Areopagite from the words ‘sacred’ and ‘source.’28 Indeed, examining various responses to Dionysius in the period sheds a good deal of light on the complex nexus of concerns particular to the English Renaissance and Reformation. Despite the Reformist impulse to interrogate the apostolic authority traditionally lent to Dionysius, the English imagination is clearly fired by Continental Platonism with its incorporation of the Pseudo-Areopagite’s Proclean thought, and the English church’s lengthy and animated debate on episcopacy subtly draws on the inescapable terms of the Dionysian tradition.

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Chapter 1 explores these concerns in the last English thinker to mount a full commentary on Dionysius’s twin hierarchies, John Colet. In his examination of the historical context of scripture and his criticism of church corruption, Colet has been described as a founding father of English humanism and as a proto-Reformer, in both of these regards paving the way for the intellectual work of his acquaintances Sir Thomas More and Desiderius Erasmus. This perception has been justly questioned on the grounds that this austere Dean of St Paul’s holds a consistently negative view of the human condition quite at odds with humanism, and does not fully develop a program of exegetical practice that would be available to others. The mystery surrounding Colet’s thought is at least partly attributable to the fact that all of his writings appear only in manuscript and are locked in Latin. These works do reveal that despite his well-documented reading of Ficino’s Epistolae, the chief intellectual debt of Colet’s commentaries is to the works of Saint Bonaventure, lending support to John Gleason’s claims on the Bonaventuran strain in Colet’s thought. Though he was intellectually engaged with those founders of English humanism Grocyn, More, and Erasmus, Colet’s approach to Dionysius shows a spiritualism and an ecclesiology that follows the medieval mystical tradition. This interest in the Seraphic Doctor is sparked by more than the celebrity of his 1482 canonization and his induction as Doctor of the Church in 1488. Bonaventure’s Franciscan simplicity and spiritualism likely found a receptive audience in Colet, who seems to have had a haughty disdain for human frailty with regard to riches and the flesh. Chapter 2 explores the significance of the Dionysian tradition to the English church’s conformism debate of the 1590s, with particular emphasis on Richard Hooker’s Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie and on Edmund Spenser’s Fowre Hymnes. The focus here will be on the conformists’ sense of divine order as they sought to reconcile endorsement of many aspects of Calvinist theology with retention of episcopal church government. A generation before, the Archbishop John Whitgift’s defence of the established church is essentially secular: episcopacy had proven to be an effective form of church government in England, so there is no need to change things just because a few upstarts harbour a jealous resentment of their superiors. The escalating tensions of the late Elizabethan church saw a rise in jure divino arguments for episcopacy especially through the influence of Hadrianus Saravia’s De diversis ministrorum (1590), which claims that the

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office of bishop was first implemented by Christ and the Apostles and is therefore an institution reflecting God’s will for his church. In the most elaborate and lengthy conformist negotiation of Calvinism and conservatism, Richard Hooker would incorporate Saravia’s claims but also argue for a sacralization of several aspects of tradition, including the ceremony of ordination – a ceremony that both Luther and Calvin had strained to divest of sacramental significance. His view of the church as a ‘societie supernaturall’ subtly evinces a Dionysian mystification of holy works in a way particularly apparent in his claims for ‘correspondence’ between celestial and ecclesiastical law. Spenser’s Fowre Hymnes (1596) give poetic expression to this retention of divine mystery in the Dionysian hierarchy. In Heavenly Love, the mystery of the ‘trinall triplicities’ (64) is associated with the mystery of the Incarnation, and separated from the Neoplatonic flight in which the poet-hero engages over the remainder of the hymn sequence.29 Critics have tended to overlook this pattern in favour of exclusive focus on the Hymnes’ Neoplatonism. What distinguishes the Hymnes from The Faerie Queene or the Amoretti is the presence of a straightforward Christian primer in Heavenly Love, alongside which the remaining hymns seem conspicuously heterodox. This allows Spenser significantly to associate Dionysian hierarchy with an orthodoxy impermeable to the intellectual play of Neoplatonism. This tension between orthodoxy and intellectual play will also be explored in the angelology of John Donne’s poetry in chapter 3. Donne’s use of religious language and imagery has been the focus of a good deal of discussion, with critics divided between associating him with Lewalskian Protestant poetics and Martzian poetry of meditation. The persistence of at least an emotive sympathy with Roman Catholic worship and sacramentology has found recent expression in the scholarship of Dennis Flynn and R.V. Young. Taking the example of Donne’s ‘Ideated Angels,’ this chapter finds that while Ideas can claim ontological presence in Donne’s universe, his consistent application of scepticism and irony to human thought undercuts straightforward Platonic legitimacy of this ontological realm – an Idea can have real existence, but that does not make it Truth. The verbal and intellectual play characterizing Donne’s use of Dionysian angelology and mysticism contrasts sharply with his views on the divine truths of scripture and the saving quality of grace, reflecting sola Scriptura and sola gratia values consistent in early poetry and late, in poetry and prose – this

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chapter finds such concern in Aire and Angels, Pseudo-Martyr and the sermons, Satyre III, the Anniversaries, and the Holy Sonnets. The final three chapters turn their attention to John Milton and especially to Paradise Lost. Despite the complexity and significance of Milton’s angels, despite the wide influence these angels have on later poetry, and despite the size and productivity of the Milton industry, Milton’s angelology has received relatively little attention. The only full-length work on the subject is Robert H. West’s 1955 Milton and the Angels. West focuses largely on issues of angelic corporeality, fitting Milton’s ethereal angels into philosophical and theological traditions, and ascertaining parallels with such figures as Michael Psellus and Isaac Ambrose.30 More recently, Stephen M. Fallon has addressed the issue of angelic substance in Paradise Lost, comparing Milton’s monism to the dualism of such philosophers as René Descartes and Henry More.31 Given these treatments, the present study decidedly avoids issues of angelic substance and looks instead to aspects of angelology shedding light on Milton’s construction of godly poetics, politics, and devotion. It is here that West’s work seems most out of date, given our refinement of the relationship between Milton’s poetry and his politics in recent decades. To this end, chapter 4 places Milton’s views on celestial hierarchy in the context of the political and religious tumults of the mid-seventeenth century. To put it in general terms, Puritan configurations of the heavenly city replace mystical excessus with internal illumination. This replacement turns explicitly to the Pseudo-Areopagite in the case of John Everard’s posthumous Some Gospel-Treasures Opened (1653), which defends Dionysius’s Pauline conversion and appends Everard’s English translation of the Mystical Theology. Rapha Harford, Everard’s publisher and biographer, dedicates the tract to Cromwell and his government, urging them to follow the ‘Primitive Christians[’] ... selfdenial and spiritual love.’32 This branch of renewed interest in Dionysius seems not to have enticed Milton; angelologies departing from the Pseudo-Areopagite’s are more directly relevant to Paradise Lost. The Puritan Henry Lawrence, Lord President of Oliver Cromwell’s Council of State and ‘virtuous father’ of Milton’s twentieth sonnet (1), focuses on Hebrews 1.14, the proof text central to Calvin’s thought on angels: ‘Are they not all ministering spirits, sent forth to minister for them who shall be heirs of salvation?’33 From this verse Lawrence concludes that angels serve as guardians to the elect, and that their tireless militarism against

Introduction

13

the evil angels is an example to be followed by the Saints. Sir Henry Vane, the subject of Milton’s seventeenth sonnet, interprets this verse differently. Vane claims that the true Saints will exist after the Apocalypse as an order superior to the angels – the angels are here in the ‘divine service’ of the Saints in that they are at the command of the heirs of salvation. To recall again the political insight attending vision of the heavenly city, the centricity of the Saints in Vane’s divine order underwrites his views on liberty of conscience, a measure that will remove worldly opposition besetting the spiritually elect. In light of Lawrence’s and Vane’s angelology, Milton’s reluctance in Paradise Lost to endorse the nine angelic orders is not only, as has previously been argued, consistent with his reserved speculation on scripture, but is also a pointed critique of the tradition associated with Dionysius. Given the stance in the antiprelatical tracts that ecclesiastical hierarchy is an Antichristian infiltration of the church, one would expect Milton to reject the celestial hierarchy by which episcopal government had traditionally been justified. This rejection displays itself as an implied inversion of the Dionysian ranks in the upright angels of Paradise Lost, and a return to this order among the fallen angels. Chapters 5 and 6 explore more fully the terms of the angels’ ‘divine service’ in Paradise Lost through examination of Raphael and Michael, respectively. Raphael’s conversation with Adam has proven to be a contentious point in criticism, which tends toward one of two reductive conclusions: either seeing his as a ‘fool’s errand’ in its inability to prevent Original Sin or attributing to the angel a catastrophic ‘blunder’ on the point of human sexuality. The present analysis will more fully explore Raphael’s role in light of the tradition surrounding this angel: his role in the Book of Tobit and the Renaissance association with medicine, dialectic, and moral philosophy arising therefrom. These associations make more prominent Adam’s consistent inability fully to realize the role of the spirit in human devotion, an inability pointing to the limits of his natural, rather than spiritual, perfection. Far from making Raphael’s a fool’s errand, Adam’s limited ability to learn from the ‘sociable Spirit’ prompts us to recognize the spiritual awareness made possible by the second Adam, Christ. We see such awareness dramatized in the person of the Bard in the proem to book 7, who, like his counterpart in the Book of Tobit, is the pious beneficiary of the angel’s discursive medicine. Building on the conclusions of this reading, we will explore how the Miltonic bard’s participation in the angelic realm informs his self-por-

14

In the Anteroom of Divinity

trait as spiritually illumined. The visions of the celestial polis to which the Bard gains access in Paradise Lost dramatize spiritual fitness and thus legitimate his claims to terrestrial authority, a gesture that recalls the godly republicanism of Lawrence and especially of Vane. The apocalyptic strain of the sense of election associated with celestial insight is most pertinent to Milton’s construction of the angel Michael, who is associated both in Daniel and in Revelation with the Apocalypse. Comparing the Michael of Lycidas with his counterpart in Paradise Lost, however, reveals significant development in Milton’s apocalyptic thought: where the former presents the angel as protector of a terrestrial elect nation in the spirit of Daniel, the latter more fully emphasizes the war of the Saints against the forces of Antichrist typical of Revelation. This shift mirrors that of Milton’s early and late prose: where the prose of the 1640s evokes a looming apocalypse to urge development of godly institutions of church and state, the prose of 1659–60 evokes Revelation in a way that questions the possibility of godly worldly institutions. Milton’s characterization of Michael in Paradise Lost thus points not only to the importance of eschatology to the poet’s thought, but also to the eschewing of an earlier brand of political and nationalist eschatology. Just as is the case in Dionysius, in Thomas Aquinas, in Bonaventure, in Gerson, in Colet, and in Hooker, constructions of the heavenly city in Milton and his contemporaries thus provide insight into the sense of divine economy informing statements on politics and ecclesiology. To be sure, Reformed angelology is by definition much less developed than its Dionysian counterpart, taking its cues from scripture in determining that God wishes us only to know the scantest of details on the activities of our celestial cousins. To be preoccupied with seeking more is not only soteriologically pointless, but can lead to idolatry. Even among the staunchest of Reformers, however, angels do offer a valuable barometer of views on the form of human society and devotion tending most toward divinity, and the significance of angelology has been overlooked in studies of Milton and his contemporaries, and indeed in studies of the English Renaissance, for far too long. The vision of the heavenly city described by Plato and pervasive in the patristic and medieval eras does persist in early modern thought, and exploring this critical blind spot can provide insight into the religious and political culture of the period.

Recto Running Head

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1 John Colet’s Ecclesiology and Dionysian Thought

John Colet is the last English thinker to write a full commentary on the Pseudo-Areopagite’s twin hierarchies. Despite the doubts of William Grocyn, his friend and mentor, regarding the authenticity of the Corpus Dionysiacum, Colet values the works in the spirit of the Florentine Platonists he clearly admired, and consistently shows sympathy with Ficino’s statement in the Epistolae that ‘Paul and Dionysius [are] the wisest of Christian theologians.’1 Like Ficino and the French humanist Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, he does not challenge the Areopagite’s status as a disciple of Paul and views the Corpus as a direct expression of the teachings of the apostle. His interest in Dionysius has thus been described, not as a vestige of medieval thought, but rather as revealing the new humanist learning he brings to England after his 1496 travel on the Continent, which would inspire and instruct Sir Thomas More and Desiderius Erasmus, and, to quote Fredric Seebohm’s Oxford Reformers, mark an ‘epoch of sharp transition’ between England’s Middle Ages and its Reformation and Renaissance.2 Though Seebohm’s view of Colet has been a resilient one, it is, like most claims for sharp epochal transition, entirely inaccurate. The degree to which Colet can be termed a humanist thinker has been called into question, as has been the extent to which he can be termed a forerunner of the Reformation and a guiding light to More and Erasmus – the latter of whom seems to have endured Colet rather than to have been inspired by him. Thanks to the careful scholarship of Eugene F. Rice, J.B. Trapp, and John B. Gleason, a more accurate portrait of the austere Dean of St Paul’s has emerged, and he now seems, to paraphrase Alexander Pope, as much the last to lay the old aside as he is the first by whom the new was tried.

16

In the Anteroom of Divinity

While this is true, it is also a conflicted position, and if Colet holds interest it is because he occupies a complex interstitial space between traditional epochs. A significant, though somewhat neglected, manuscript revealing such complexity is the British Library’s Royal 1 E.V., part 2, a presentation copy of the canonical Epistles commissioned by Colet in 1505–6, and an intriguing artefact of transition between medieval and Renaissance thought.3 The opening pages provide Jerome’s preface to the Pauline Epistles, and it is Jerome’s Vulgate translation that appears in the main column of the manuscript. At some point in the composition, however, Erasmus asserts his presence – likely because of his return to England in 1505 and the renewed acquaintance with Colet it occasioned.4 Where ample room appears to have been left in the margin initially for a commentary, it is filled instead by Erasmus’s fresh translations. From Galatians onward, the Epistles are typically prefaced by the Vulgate’s brief argument and by a more detailed one by ‘D. Eras. Rotterod.’5 Also noteworthy is the presence of the volume’s patron: the colophon announces that it was commissioned by John Colet, Dean of St Paul’s, exceptional theologian (‘Sacre Theologie professoris eximii’), and son of Henry Colet, ‘senator’ of the most illustrious city of London. It records that in the year of its composition, Philip I of Castile was forced by tempest to land in England, where he was warmly and humanely received by Henry VII. We thus see asserted Colet’s prominent connections in the city and at court, as well as his desire to associate himself with Continental learning and urbanity. The manuscript also constitutes a significant chapter in the much-discussed relationship between Erasmus and Colet. While it is often noted that Erasmus cultivated this friendship partly out of necessity in his early time in England, Colet was also willing to reap its rewards by associating himself in 1506 with the already prodigious reputation of the author of the Adagia and Enchiridion. The commentaries on Dionysius are likewise on the cusp of medieval and Renaissance thought. That Colet is influenced by the latter is evident everywhere in his writings. The edition of the Corpus Dionysiacum from which he works is that of Lefèvre.6 He draws frequently on Pico, quoting the Oratio at length in his commentary on the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy and on Romans, and the Heptaplus at length in his commentary on First Corinthians, which describes the transformation of the human spirit into efficient cause by the Holy Spirit: ‘the cause transforming this carnal man into a spirit and an efficient cause

John Colet’s Ecclesiology and Dionysian Thought

17

is the Spirit of God Himself, who moulds the matter (as it may be called) by His power, so that at length man may become what he is capable of being.’7 The Heptaplus is also, as Colet’s nineteenth-century biographer and translator J.H. Lupton describes it, ‘proximate cause’ both of Colet’s desire to comment on and method in treating the Mosaic account of Creation in his Letters to Radulphus.8 Equally significant is Colet’s debt to Ficino. In a treatise supplemental to his commentary on the Celestial Hierarchy he follows rather closely the qualities attributed to the angels in Ficino’s De raptu Pauli.9 Colet was clearly proud of his brief correspondence with the Florentine philosopher: he copied into his heavily annotated copy of Ficino’s Epistolae their exchange of letters, including a rather awkward draft apparently written during his time on the Continent that sought a meeting with the famous, and aging, master of the Platonic Academy at Careggi – he self-consciously fumbles with his Latin, understandably given his audience, striking out the unfortunate phrase ‘if you live till the year after that.’ 10 Like the Florentines and Dionysius, Colet seems consistently to imagine the universe operating according to a Neoplatonic procession and return, where progress toward God is conceived as a journey toward unity. This is on display in his Commentary on First Corinthians: just as Moses did when delivering God’s Word to the Israelites, Paul accommodates his letter to the limited spiritual capacity of the Corinthians, which, though necessary, is ‘a kind of deterioration from simplicity to multiplicity, from the intelligible state to the sensible’ (C 1 Cor, 111). Opposed to such deterioration is the clarity of vision enjoyed by Paul when he was carried to the third Heaven, or, as Colet describes it, when he ‘was carried into the One’ (C 1 Cor, 99). In the same spirit human progress toward God is described in De sacramentis as a stripping away of multiplicity: ‘There is in man an undivided and single element, which belongs to his nature. If it is obscured and weakened by evil multiplicity it wavers and falters. A man must rid himself entirely of this hampering condition and restore inmost undividedness so as to be once more himself and appear naked, pure, and simple’ (De sac, 317).11 These sentiments follow Dionysius, who follows in turn Plotinus’s Enneads: the attainment of it [the good] is for those who go up to the higher world and strip off what we put on in our descent; (just as for those who go up to the celebrations of the sacred rites there are purifications, and strip-

18

In the Anteroom of Divinity pings off of the clothes they wore before and going up naked) until, passing in the ascent all that is alien to God, one sees with one’s self alone That alone, simple, single, and pure[.]12

Underlying Colet’s Neoplatonism, however, are sentiments quite at odds with his humanist counterparts on the Continent. Where the Florentines celebrate humanity’s unique position in the universe, poised between flesh and spirit and striving toward the good – ‘Man,’ Ficino claims in the Theologia Platonica, ‘is the greatest of all miracles of nature ... man is the miracle of world’ – Colet is less optimistic about this position, excoriating humanity’s all-too-frequent tendency to be mired in carnalilty. The rare flourishes in his prose are often in this vein. Thus his exposition of Romans: ‘Ill has it fared with man, diseased and dying every hour, since his transgression of the divine law; when, forsaken by the grace once abounding, he was driven from that high and healthful dwelling-place, where life is everlasting, to this valley of contagion and pestilence.’ 13 Receiving especially harsh treatment is fornication: ‘just as this sin most belongs to the body, at the same time it is the greatest turning away from the soul, and a dissolving of the body into everlasting death’ (C 1 Cor, 135) – one wonders what Colet would have thought of his seventeenth-century successor in the deanery of St Paul’s, Jack Donne. Humanity faces a choice either to move upward toward God or downward toward corrupt matter, and it is in touch and ‘especially in the carnal act’ that ‘matter rules most strongly’ (C 1 Cor, 133). Ficino’s commentary on the Symposium descibes human sexuality in similar terms, but balances its criticism of carnality against love’s higher motives, the union with beauty and procreation, both of which tend toward the good.14 Even marital sex does not escape the austere Dean’s censure, and in De sacramentis he goes so far as to claim that the marriage instituted by God in Eden is merely an Old Testament shadow of the spiritual marriage obtaining after Christ, where the priest is the bridegroom and those in the process of taking orders are his bride (De sac, 305). The marriage and procreation of Adam and Eve is a shadow of the ‘divine Son’ and His bride the church engaging in spiritual propagation by leading souls into belief in Christ; unlike a ‘propagation of flesh,’ which ‘leads to death,’ this ‘propagation of Justice through Jesus Christ leads to life’ (De sac, 301). This typological interpretation of marriage places the sacramental value of matrimony in outmoded Hebrew law, a view supported with reference to Dionysius: ‘the reason Dionysius

John Colet’s Ecclesiology and Dionysian Thought

19

says nothing about matrimony in the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy is that its sacrament had already come and gone’ (De sac, 303). The commentaries on Dionysius similarly tend to emphasize the figurative elements of the marital relationship in Christ as ‘vir deus’ and the Christian as ‘femina homo.’15 Differing further from the Florentine Platonists is Colet’s thought on the relationship between secular and religious knowledge. He repeatedly and unequivocally states that these two are fundamentally antithetical: ‘The reverencers of the Gentiles’ books cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons ... We must read only those books in which there is the saving taste of Christ; in which Christ is set forth for our feasting. Those in which there is no Christ are the table of demons’ (C 1 Cor, 219). It is here especially that we see a view of learning fundamentally at odds with that of a Ficino. Colet does not aim to produce a Theologia Platonica marrying Platonism and Christianity, but rather sees Paul’s – and, by extension, Dionysius’s – teachings as divinely inspired. Even though in selecting such messengers God has clearly chosen men endowed with secular learning, Colet claims – rather indefensibly, it must be noted – that Paul and Dionysius are careful to separate ‘human reason’ from ‘divine revelation’ (C 1 Cor, 89). It is not that these divine messengers are influenced by Platonism in their teachings, but rather that Platonists, working without revelation from sensibles to the realm of spirit, were able through reason to determine some aspects of the operation of this world; they failed, however, to recognize the true divine economy, thus making them damned writers with demonic writings. Whereas Ficino’s translation and commentary on Dionysius’s Mystical Theology must be placed in the context of his commentaries on Plato, Plotinus, Iamblichus, and Proclus, Colet’s account of the PseudoAreopagite’s twin hierarchies is his only non-biblical commentary. Even so, Colet clearly devotes more attention to the manuscript on Dionysius than he does to his biblical commentaries: the manuscript housed in the British Library (Add. MS 63853) is a fair copy produced in Meghen’s elegant hand, with its various tables carefully ruled and fitted alongside the main text, and a copy of the commentary on the Celestial Hierarchy was produced after Colet’s death to reside in St Paul’s School. Though Thomas Harding famously declared that Colet ‘hath neuer a worde to shew, for he wrote no workes,’ the commentaries on Dionysius clearly are works in the attention given to their presentation.16 This may be attributable either to the perception that this effort more than any other lays claim to an association with Continental learning, or to the

20

In the Anteroom of Divinity

medieval tradition of commenting on Dionysius as a theologian’s rite of passage – a crowning achievement typically following commentary on the Christian Bible and on Lombard’s Sentences. It should thus not be entirely surprising when we see Colet’s account of the twin hierarchies depart significantly from what we might expect from a committed Christian Platonist. The ‘Compendium Platonicae theologiae’ he provides in the marginalia to Ficino’s Epistolae places the Father’s unity, simplicity, and potency over the Son’s purity, clarity, and truth.17 He would seem to pull this influence of the Epistolae into his supplemental treatise on the celestial hierarchy by associating the angelic orders, as Ficino does in De raptu Pauli, with aspects of God as beginning, middle, and end of all: in the first hierarchy, the Seraphim contemplate the End in the End, and the Cherubim the Middle in the End, and the Thrones the Beginning in the End; in the second hierarchy, the Dominations contemplate the End in the Middle, the Virtues the Middle in the Middle, and so on (DCH, 36–7). Unlike Ficino, however, Colet associates these qualities with aspects of the Trinity. The Father’s unity corresponds to the lowest hierarchy and the Holy Spirit’s goodness to the highest, suggesting that he is fitting his hierarchy to principles other than the Neoplatonic ones employed by Pico in the Heptaplus and Ficino in De amore (see Plate 1). In a way that has not been described, this association of each triad with an aspect of the Trinity evokes the angelology of Saint Bonaventure. Indeed Colet’s description of ‘the third and highest Hierarchy [as] ... especially bent upon the third Person’ directly repeats the twenty-first collation of Bonaventure’s Hexaëmeron (38). This parallel recalls Gleason’s placement of Colet’s views on the sacraments ‘unambiguously in the Franciscan school’ rather than the ‘Thomistic-Aristotelian school’ 18 – a tendency evident in the abstract of The Celestial Hierarchy, where Colet overlooks passages of Dionysius especially pertinent to Thomas.19 Despite the fact that Franciscanism in the sixteenth century increasingly looked to Ockham rather than to Bonaventure, Gleason finds Colet responding to the ‘Bonaventure renaissance’ surrounding the Seraphic Doctor’s canonization in 1482, a sympathy suggested by the parallels between the opening paragraph of De sacramentis and Bonaventure’s Breviloquium.20 A look at the intervention of Bonaventuran angelology in the ecclesiastical controversy of its time might shed some light on Colet’s views

21

Plate 1: John Colet’s Diagram of the Celestial Hierarchy and Its Relationship to the Trinity, The British Library, Add. MS 63853, f23v (photograph © The British Library).

John Colet’s Ecclesiology and Dionysian Thought

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In the Anteroom of Divinity

on church reform. Like his Dominican counterpart Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure rises to prominence in the midst of thirteenth-century tumults at the University of Paris. Though the Franciscans had taken on the offices of teaching and preaching since their 1219 arrival in Paris, they, like the Dominicans, maintained primary allegiance to their order rather than to the university. When the mendicant friars began also to take on the role of confessor, to build large churches for their growing congregations, and to allow congregants to be buried in their churchyards – thus depriving the secular clergy of their muchneeded mortuary fees – their presence became rather too much to bear for Paris churchmen. Add to this that the friars often bypassed the jurisdiction of their local bishops by obtaining their licenses to preach and hear confession directly from the pope or one of his legates, and one can see why the secular authorities were eager to curb the influence of these newcomers. The secular clergy began to take decisive action to stem the mendicants’ domination of the university by passing two statutes: the first, which limited the number of chairs held by each order to one, in 1252; and the second, which obliged all masters to swear to observe the statutes of the university, in 1253. When the Franciscan Gerard of Borgo San Donnino wrote an introduction to Joachim’s collected works in which he supported that author’s controversial millenarianism, the seculars were provided with, as John Moorman has put it, ‘a useful stick with which to beat the friars, whom, for quite other reasons, they desired to remove from the university in Paris.’21 Gerard’s Joachimism was particularly irksome in that it suggested that the mendicants would be the recipients of Joachim’s eternal gospel of the Holy Spirit and that they would replace the clergy, thus, as E. Randolph Daniel observes, reinforcing the seculars’ belief ‘that the friars saw themselves as supplanters of the Petrine church and its sacraments.’22 This perception of Franciscan Joachimism was employed to sway Pope Innocent IV from his initial support of the order, prompting him to pass the 1254 bull ‘Etsi animarum,’ which revoked the friars’ clerical privileges. The pope’s fortuitous death three weeks later paved the way for his successor, Alexander IV, who had previously been a protector of the Franciscan order, promptly to repeal his predecessor’s bull and to order that the Franciscans and Dominicans be readmitted into the university. This served only to feed the ire of the Paris seculars, who defied the papal order and attempted to rally the public

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against the friars. So hostile was the climate in Paris that Florence of Hesdin delivered his inaugural lecture as master of the Dominicans under the protection of a royal guard.23 It was in this context that Bonaventure began to make a name for himself. When William of St Amour, the seculars’ most active polemicist, attacked the mendicants in his 1255 Quaestiones disputatae, it was Bonaventure who deftly responded on behalf of the Franciscans. This quickly earned him a position of prominence in the order. After John of Parma was forced to resign as Minister General due to accusations of Joachimism, he nominated Bonaventure as a replacement equipped to lead the friars out of their embattled position. This move backfired somewhat in that Bonaventure sentenced his controversial predecessor to life imprisonment, subsequently reduced to exile in Greccio.24 Such action against John of Parma was not popular within the order, which was divided into two relatively equal camps: those who saw John’s love of poverty and his Joachimism as natural extensions of Franciscan spirituality, and those who sought to imitate the Dominicans’ institutional legitimization through increased clerical activity.25 In order to secure the future of the Franciscans, Bonaventure had not only to justify and to preserve the status of the order as a growing institution, but also to do so in a manner that would not be perceived by its more sensitive members as a deviation from the doctrine of simplicity of its founder, Francis, the Poverello of Assisi. These concerns inform Bonaventure’s adjustments of Dionysian hierarchy. William of St Amour included in his 1256 De periculis ovissimovum temporum a reference to the disruption of hierarchy signified by the new monasticism: Dionysius assigns only to the clergy the task of perfecting others, while the laity, including monks, must be perfected by their clerical superiors.26 Only the former is entrusted with the duty to ‘teach, illuminate, and administer the sacraments,’ while the latter could only ‘obey and learn.’27 Bonaventure would address this objection throughout his thought on celestial and ecclesiastical hierarchy. In Apologia pauperam, his response to Gerard d’Abbeville’s 1269 attack on the mendicants, he justifies deviation from Dionysian hierarchy with the pragmatic claim that the monks of the Areopagite’s day were ‘neither priestly nor literate’ (4: 264). Papal sanction of the friars’ function as preachers and confessors is sufficient proof that they were no longer in this rude state; their new role should be embraced by the clergy, who now have ‘coeveangelists to reap the multitude of the divine harvest’ (4: 261). He also concedes in this tract the Dionysian

Table 1. The Hierarchies of Pseudo-Dionysius and Saint Bonaventure’s Elaborations upon Them

2. Illumined 3. Pure

perfecting illumining purifying perfecting illumining purifying perfecting illumining purifying

1Dionysius is reluctant to 2The ‘sacred person’ has

Celestial

Ecclesiastical

Seraphim Cherubim Thrones Dominations Virtues Powers Principalities Archangels Angels

Eucharist Baptism –1 Hierarch Priest Deacon Monk Sacred person2 Catachumen

describe any of the sacraments as purifying, assuming that the participant must already be pure. been purified, is thus no longer a catachumen, and receives the priest’s illumination.

Bonaventure’s Elaborations on Dionysius in Collationes in Hexaëmeron The Triple Triad and the Trinity (Coll., 21.20) The Triple Triad and the Church Militant (Coll., 22)

1. Father 2. Son 3. Holy Spirit

3Aspects

in Holy Spirit in Son in Himself in Father in Himself in Holy Spirit in Father in Son in Himself

Seraphim Cherubim Thrones Dominations Virtues Powers Principalities Archangels Angels

In terms of Procession3

In terms of Power

In terms of Practice

Fundamental

Perfecting

Contemplative Francis (evelated)4 (Monastic) Friars (speculating) Monks (supplicating) Mixed Pontifical (Clerical) Sacerdotal Ministerial Active Holy leaders (Lay) Holy masters Holy people

Apostles Prophets Patriarchs Promoting Martyrs Confessors Virgins Consummating Prelates Masters Regulars

Illumining Purifying

Pope Bishop Priest Deacon Subdeacon Acolyte Exorcist Reader Porter

of the Trinity and the angelic orders apply to the ecclesiastical orders, i.e., the Patriarchs are associated with the Father Himself and the Thrones. 4This ‘Seraphic’ order associated with Francis belongs to those who ‘attend to God by means of elevation, that is, through ecstacy and rapture’ (Coll., 22.22).

In the Anteroom of Divinity

1. Perfect

24

Dionysius’s Triple Triads

John Colet’s Ecclesiology and Dionysian Thought

25

principle that the state of perfection required of a monk is inferior in kind to that of a bishop, and that the two ‘are in the same relationship as that between a state of becoming and a state of achievement’ (4: 56). Because the prelate is necessarily concerned with the salvation of his flock in a way that the monk is not, ‘we must say unconditionally that the state of prelacy and its perfection are higher, as Dionysius says in his book “On the Hierarchy of the Church”’ (4: 56). The Seraphic Doctor would go one step further, however, in his last and most sophisticated work, the Collationes in Hexaëmeron (c. 1274). Here Dionysius’s emphasis on the processes of purification, illumination, and perfection is downplayed in favour of the hierarchical relationship between knowledge, power, and action (see Table 1). In the twenty-first collation, Bonaventure particularizes the roles of these three virtues in the celestial hierarchy.28 Maintaining the Dionysian pattern of the triple triad, Bonaventure divides the genus associated with knowledge according to three different types: ‘Knowledge is, moreover, threefold, namely elevating knowledge, drawing into the origin; speculative knowledge, receiving illumination from above; and decisive knowledge, holding the domain of judgment. The Seraphim possess the first, the Cherubim the second, and the Thrones the third.’29 In the following collation, Bonaventure applies these celestial virtues to the ecclesiastical hierarchy. If the ecclesiastical hierarchy is considered according to ‘power,’ he claims, then one must place the pope at its head, followed by the bishop, priest, deacon, subdeacon, acolyte, exorcist, reader, and porter – as Douie observes the primacy Bonaventure grants to the pope reflects the friars’ consciousness of ‘the approval given by the Papacy to their way of life.’30 If we hierarchize the church according to practice, on the other hand, we must give the monastic life of contemplation primacy over the clerical life. That the clergy lead a life of both contemplation and action places them in the second of the hierarchical triads: ‘Although in terms of highness the order of prelates is placed at the highest level, yet, from this point of view, it is placed in the middle, since it is mixed. And so, the active order is at the lowest level, the order of prelates at the intermediate, and the contemplative order at the top’ (Works, 5: 348–9). The sequestration of monastic orders allows them to come closest to pure contemplation of God, and thus they most closely resemble the uppermost triad of the celestial hierarchy.31 Bonaventure tops off this hierarchical scheme by describing the order that corresponds to the burning love of

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the divine displayed by the Seraphim. Although he does not find an existing order that can be said to display such ardour, he does identify Francis as Seraphic: ‘The contemplation of the third order is guided upward to God; it was made visible to Saint Francis and for it he was prepared in the end.’32 The aims of this ecclesiastical hierarchy are relatively clear. By privileging contemplation and retirement over activity, Bonaventure no longer has to concede unqualified primacy of episcopacy as he did in the Apologia. His position in the Hexaëmeron allows him to give fullest expression to the spirituality suggested in The Soul’s Journey and The Six Wings of the Seraphim by creating a hierarchical scheme in which mystical contemplation is defined as the highest possible form of creaturely worship. This prioritization of spiritual excessus also allows him to assuage the fears of the faction of his order unsettled by the exile of John of Parma and concerned that the order’s embrace of learning had led it away from the simplicity of its founder: by making Francis the sole inhabitant of the highest of his hierarchical orders, an order characterized by spiritual embrace of the divine, Bonaventure shows the centrality of Franciscan mysticism in his conception of devotion. He also nods to the Joachimism influential in his order by aligning Seraphic ardour with the Holy Spirit. In the twenty-first collation of the Hexaëmeron, Bonaventure complicates the angelic orders’ Dionysian attributes by associating them with the persons of the Trinity. Each of the three triads is associated with a person of the Godhead, the topmost with the Father, the middle with the Son, and the lowermost with the Holy Spirit. Within each triad, the topmost order is associated with the person of the Trinity in the Holy Spirit, and the remaining two with the element of that person in the other aspect of the Trinity – thus the Seraphim are associated with the Father in the Holy Spirit, the Cherubim with the Father in the Son, and the Thrones with the Father himself.33 This association of the angelic orders with aspects of the Trinity is, as Bernard McGinn notes, an elaboration upon Thomas Gallus.34 Bonaventure’s parallels between the Trinity and the celestial orders would appear to be somewhat backwards. Throughout his Trinitarianism, the Father is the wellspring whence other aspects of the Trinity and all of Creation arise.35 It seems somewhat inconsistent, therefore, for the Seraphim to be associated with the Father in the Holy Spirit while their hierarchical inferiors, the Thrones, are associated with the Father Himself. In his translation of the Hexaëmeron, de Vinck clearly feels the need to provide some explanation of the confusion:

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How Bonaventure would explain that the lowest order corresponds to the first Person is anybody’s guess ... Once a mind as systematic as that of Bonaventure is set upon developing his system, the most fluid truth becomes neatly boxed so that it may become the object of intellectual juggling and mathematically absolute deductions.36

The hierarchy, however, serves a very practical purpose: it is a system whereby the progress and aspirations of the Franciscans are presented as a reflection of the divine economy. In her thorough and insightful study of Joachimism in the Middle Ages, Marjorie Reeves states that despite Bonaventure’s early condemnations of Joachimism, he ‘does after all commit himself to the concept of particular manifestations of the Trinity in history and his culminating sequence brings him close to Joachim’s Age of the Holy Ghost.’37 That Francis’s Seraphic ardour is given hierarchical primacy in the Hexaëmeron, and that this ardour is aligned with the summe sanctus of the Holy Spirit, is consistent with the Joachimism of Bonaventure’s final work. By prioritizing the spiritual values that are the foundation of Franciscanism while at the same time withholding the monks’ fulfilment of them, Bonaventure thus upbraids the excesses that were beginning to appear in the rapidly growing order and does so in a Joachimist language that had gained currency among many of its members. In this way his redefinition of Dionysian hierarchy deftly navigates the three major dilemmas with which he was faced at the beginning of his term as minister general: the Joachimism of his fellow Franciscans, the identity crisis in the order resulting from its new roles, and the difficulty of justifying the growing influence of the monks in the face of challenges from secular clergy.38 With the aims and context of Bonaventure’s thought in view, the reasons for Colet’s sympathy will be apparent. In questioning the elision of spiritual and administrative authority in the ecclesiastical hierarchy, there is a strain of resistance in Bonaventure that seeks a return to homely religion founded upon desire for spiritual union with God. In reserving his highest praise for Francis, his is also an aspirational ecclesiology meant to encourage his coreligionists toward piety rather than ambition. The purging of worldly concern that Colet identifies as necessary in the journey toward God can be seen as indebted to medieval mystics just as much as it is to Renaissance Neoplatonists. Indeed, we would seem to have hints in what we know of Colet’s life of his sympathy with this form of religion. When he had been sum-

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moned to meet Henry VIII after preaching during the king’s French campaign to ‘follow Christ rather than the Juliuses or Alexanders,’ Colet chose not to go directly to the king’s palace at Greenwich, but to an adjacent Franciscan convent. Here, by Erasmus’s account, the king met him and sought advice on how a Christian prince might engage in a just war.39 Even if elements of this story are apocryphal, that Erasmus places Colet among Franciscans at this critical moment must say something about the dean’s sympathies. Our second hint also comes from Erasmus’s accounts. Both in his biographical letter on Colet and in his Disputatiuncula, Erasmus describes Colet as resolving a theological debate by entering into a ‘divine madness.’ Is this a gentle jab by the even-tempered scholar at Colet’s tendency to resolve doctrinal issues with mystical inspiration rather than learning? More significant is the precedent that Bonaventure provides for Colet’s unusual association of celestial orders with persons of the Trinity, and the ecclesiological ramifications of this association. Indeed, Colet seems more thoroughly to apply Bonaventure’s hierarchization than the Seraphic Doctor himself had done: where Bonaventure somewhat inconsistently associates only the top rank of the top triad with the Holy Spirit rather than the Father, Colet associates the top triad and the top rank of each triad with the Holy Spirit. In a way consistent with Bonaventure’s Joachimism, and in a way entirely absent in Dionysius’s hierarchies, Colet furthermore anticipates in his commentaries an apocalyptic age of the Holy Spirit: Jews obey the Father’s Power, the ‘Christians under Christ’ the Son’s Wisdom, and the ‘Christians after the Ascension’ the Holy Spirit’s Goodness (DCH, 42).40 His comments on angels evoke at several points the age when humanity will share God’s ‘full and perfect reality ... with the angels’ and when God will be ‘all in all’ (DCH, 9, 14), and his brief treatise introducing his commentary on the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy describes imitation of the angels as the goal of human spirituality: ‘we should rightly imitate the angels, in whose virtue we begin to be spiritual; that being at length perfected we may be spirits’ (DEH, 52). ‘Whilst we are living here, in the hours of morning and forenoon,’ Colet claims, ‘we are journeying towards the mid-day sun, to sup with our Lord’ (DEH, 108). This spiritualist teleology is the standard by which Colet measures the church. We see the austere Dean consistently value simple worship rather than engage in a Lollard or proto-Lutheran interrogation of church tradition. Such views are informed by the values of medieval spiritualism: if he were interested in repristination per se, he would be

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less inclined to subscribe to Bonaventuran adjustments of Dionysian thought. Not only his Joachimist millenarianism, but also his selfstyled asceticism and his homiletic biblical commentaries all point to influence of the spiritualist tradition in general, and of Franciscanism in particular. It is with this influence in mind that we can approach Colet’s thought on the clergy. His views on the office of bishop, that all-important apex of Dionysian ecclesiastical hierarchy, are illuminating. In his commentary on the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, he describes the bishops as holding especial possession of divine mystery; they ‘are brought into open light’ and ‘possess the real meanings of the signs’ (DEH, 59). This Dionysian valuation of the divine illumination of the bishop is entirely consistent with the principles of Colet’s praise of the freshly appointed Cardinal Wolsey as among ‘the order of Seraphin,’ and with the trickledown reform of the church described in his Convocation Sermon: ‘This reformation and restoring of the churches estate muste nedes begynne of you our fathers, and so folowe in us your pristes and in all the clergye. You are our heede, you are an example of living unto us.’41 Where Dionysius impregnates the hierarch’s works with divinity, Colet makes this quality conditional: ‘If he be a lawful bishop, he of himself does nothing, but God in him. But if he do attempt anything of himself, he is then a breeder of poison’ (DEH, 151; emphasis mine). According to these terms, the scriptures are placed on the bishop’s head in the ceremony of ordination not only, as they are for Dionysius, to represent his exclusive knowledge of things divine, but also to admonish him on the correct object of his contemplation: ‘what is the meaning of laying the holy Gospels on the head of the Bishop at his consecration? It is this, that the Bishop should keep in his head and in his heart all things sacred and divine, and should be by far the wisest of all in heavenly things’ (DEH, 125).42 This gentle advisement turns to ire when Colet addresses those bishops who gain their appointments through connections to nobility: such influence-peddling nobles are ‘overthrowers of His Church’ who ‘not in consecrated and holy places, but in chambers and at banquets; appoint Bishops to rule the Church of Christ; and those too (heinous crime!) men ignorant of all that is sacred, skilled in all that is profane’ (DEH, 123). Better to return to the ancient custom of appointment by lot than to allow such a practice, for, after all, chance depends upon the ‘decree of God’ rather than political connection (123).43 As is often the case in human affairs, fortissimo indignation unsuccessfully drowns hypocrisy in piano: as the 1506

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volume of canonical Epistles announces, Colet’s father was one of London’s most prominent men, serving five terms as master of the Mercers and two terms as Lord Mayor and holding the seat for London in Parliament. This made a rise to the deanery of St. Paul’s via several choice preferments the result rather more of conversations in chambers and at banquets than of knowledge of things sacred.44 Colet furthermore describes prelacy as primarily administrative, downplaying significantly the divine illumination of the hierarch so important to the Pseudo-Areopagite: ‘he is not so much superior to the other priests in office and dignity, since he performs no act more exalted than does every priest, as in a kind of administration and authority in quelling disputes’ (DEH, 83–4). This sentiment rhymes well with Bonaventure’s placement in the Hexaëmeron of the bishop and pope at the head of the ecclesiastical hierarchy only with respect to power, while his more cosmically significant hierarchization according to action gives primacy to the monks’ contemplation of the divine. Indeed, Colet seems to echo Bonaventure directly in claiming that the ‘highest’ churchmen are ‘those who are intent upon God with all their affections’ (DEH, 129). While in this chapter he locates these qualities in the bishop, by following Bonaventure’s language he introduces into his commentaries on Dionysius a set of values for measuring the clergy other than ordained hierarchy: a mystical renunciation of worldliness and desire for union with the divine. The clear ecclesiological implication in adopting a Bonaventuran hierarchy predicated upon divine contemplation is an emphasis on the spiritual fitness of the clergy rather than hierarchical distinctions within the clergy. The sacrament on which Colet places most emphasis is not the Eucharist, the apex of Dionysius’s sacramentology, but ordination. This is especially evident in De sacramentis, where he is not hemmed in by the values of Dionysius’s Ecclesiastical Hierarchy: ‘the first and supreme priest is God himself ... This is why orders, the priesthood founded by God in the temple of the universe, is first and most ancient among the sacraments.’45 The reasoning behind the importance of ordination in Colet’s view of the church is made explicit in his Convocation Sermon: ‘for ther is the well of euils, that, the brode gate of holy orders opened, euery man that offereth hym selfe is all where admytted without pullynge backe. Therof spryngeth and cometh out the people that are in the churche both of vnlerned and euyll pristes.’46 By the same logic Colet shows greater flexibility than Dionysius does regarding the promotion of monks to clerical orders.

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Although they are, as Dionysius describes them, the perfected members of the laity, they may ‘make progress’ and ‘be promoted to the rank of ministers’ (DEH, 133). A monk properly fulfilling his obligations to renounce earthly pleasures and contemplate the Almighty is a much more suitable candidate for the austere Dean’s vision of ordination than the well-connected careerist who gains preferment in the salons of noblemen.47 These parallels to Bonaventuran mysticism and polemic complicate the traditional view of influences on Colet, which tends to focus on Augustine and various disciples of Plato.48 They also allow us to reevaluate the brand of church reform with which Colet’s little-known works have been previously associated. The portrait of Colet that Erasmus provides in his letter to Jodocus Jonas aims to show the young scholar that one need not defect to Luther’s side in order to voice discontent with the church. This overemphasis of Colet’s reforming tendencies prompts Tyndale misleadingly to state that the bishop of London ‘wold have made the old deane Colet of paules an heretyke / for translatynge the Pater noster in englyshe,’ a story later included by Foxe in his Actes and Monuments and informing Matthew Parker’s account of the Dean in De antiquitate – though Foxe also reports the testimony of two Lollards that Colet had been among their persecutors.49 Colet the proto-reformer appeared, as Gleason describes it, ‘to be just what Seebohm was looking for’ in his account of the dawn of ‘practical Christian reform’ at Oxford, and Seebohm’s portrait of Colet’s ‘fellowwork’ with Erasmus and More strongly informs Lupton’s biography.50 Although Colet is indeed concerned with the state of the church in his day, his comments on the hierarchies show this concern to be fundamentally conservative in its endorsement of traditional ecclesiastical hierarchy. His vision of reform, as H.C. Porter describes it, hinges upon affirmation of the dignity of the priesthood and the suppression of an unruly laity, a program that harmonizes well with the Areopagite’s sense of divine order.51 This dignity, however, is defined according to terms consistent with Bonaventure’s adjustment of Dionysian hierarchy, with its emphasis on isolation from worldly corruption and contemplation of things divine. Not all church reform, scholars of England’s early modern period can tend to forget, occurs in the Protestant Reformation. In Colet’s reformist tendencies we do not have an anticipation of Protestantism, or even the ‘practical reform’ of the English via media, so much as we have a sympathy with elements of the spiritualist tradition.

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In some ways Colet’s views might be taken to be very influential; he was, after all, Dean of St Paul’s, founder of its school, and master of such students as Thomas Lupset.52 In another, however, they are not. Harding’s famous claim that Colet wrote no works – a rejoinder, it should be noted, to Jewel’s erroneous claim that Colet shared Erasmus’s doubts of the Areopagite’s authenticity – suggests the relative obscurity of the Dean’s writings in the period. Lest we should think that his interest in Dionysius was an anomaly, however, we must also remember the interests reflected by the 1589 catalogue of Corpus Christi College, Oxford; the library, as J.R. Liddell describes it, ‘devoted beyond all others to the revival of humanistic studies’ and used by Vives, Lupset, Jewel, Hooker, Rainolds, Nicholas Udall, and Richard Edwards.53 Here we see three holdings for Dionysius, a Greek text, a Latin text with the scholia of John of Scythopolis and Maximus the Confessor, and the Lefèvre edition, which holdings were donated by John Claymond – from the library he inherited from Grocyn, Richard Fox, the school founder, and Thomas Walshe, respectively. Augustine, by comparison, has two holdings, an edition of his works donated by Claymond and a separate edition of his commentaries on the Psalms from an unknown donor. The holdings in Dionysian mystical theology are also substantial, including Bonaventure, Hugh and Richard of St Victor, Alexander of Hales, and Jean Gerson. Though Colet’s preparation of a full commentary on the twin hierarchies is unique in sixteenth-century England, clearly his interest in Dionysius and other mystics is not.

Recto Running Head

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2 Hooker and Spenser on the Celestial Hierarchy: The Decline of a Tradition?

The Dionysian arrangement of the angels was dismantled on the one hand because its author was increasingly regarded as a ‘counterfait,’ and on the other hand because Protestants upheld the Bible’s supremacy over all the ‘vain babblings of idle men.’ In consequence, those who like Spenser celebrated the ‘trinall triplicities,’ look back upon a great past that had provided a vision hallowed by time and graced by an impressive array of intellects. – C.A. Patrides

It has been some forty years now since C.A. Patrides first argued that English Renaissance views on the celestial hierarchy constitute ‘the decline of a tradition,’ an argument made so convincing by his encyclopaedic articles on the subject that scholars have been content to accept it.1 Indeed several events did conspire to damage the PseudoAreopagite’s reputation in the period. The rediscovery of the works of Proclus suggested that the Corpus Dionysiacum had been written centuries later than its author pretended. Both Catholics and Protestants sought in the period to return the church to its early purity, bringing under scrutiny Dionsyius’s supposed first-century ceremonies and offices. Lorenzo Valla observed that because the Areopagus was a legal, rather than a philosophical, assembly, because none of the Greek or Latin fathers make mention of Dionysius, and because the claim in the letter to Polycarp to have witnessed in Heliopolis the solar eclipse at the moment of Christ’s death is a clear fabrication, placement of the Corpus in the first century should be dubious. These suggestions went largely unnoticed until Desiderius Erasmus, returning from England

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where William Grocyn had begun murmurs regarding the Areopagitic origin of the Corpus, discovered in Louvain a manuscript of Valla’s commentary on the Book of Acts, and incorporated its conclusions in his influential annotations on the New Testament. Reformers like Martin Luther and John Calvin were eager to embrace such doubts on the apostolic dating of the Corpus, both referring to its author as ‘Dionysius, whoever he was.’ Countervailing this interrogation of Dionysius’s apostolicity is the interest he held especially in the period’s engagement with Platonism. To be recalled is Traversari’s 1437 translation, appearing in Jacques Lefèvre’s 1498 edition and employed in Colet’s commentaries. Lefèvre endorsed first-century dating of the Corpus and the traditional conflation of Dionysius with Saint Denis. Even Valla describes Dionysius in his Encomium Sancti Thomae Aquinatis as playing the flute in a celestial symphony before the throne of God. Nicholas Cusanus and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola both endorsed Dionysius’s Pauline instruction and authority. Marsilio Ficino showed especial interest in the PseudoAreopagite: he drew on Dionysius in his comments on angels in the Theologia Platonica, translated and commented on The Divine Names and The Mystical Theology, and consistently endorsed first-century dating of the Corpus Dionysiacum.2 The complexities of Dionysius’s influence in the Renaissance is evinced in two major figures of England’s 1590s, Richard Hooker and Edmund Spenser. If we believe Izaak Walton’s account, in his final earthly scene Hooker told his ‘Confessor’ Saravia that he was ‘meditating the number and nature of Angels, and their blessed obedience and order, without which peace could not be in Heaven; and oh that it might be so on Earth!’3 Though its explicit references to the PseudoAreopagite’s twin hierarchies are relatively few, his Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie presupposes that both celestial and ecclesiastical order emanate from God. His definition of celestial law undergirds a mystification of church hierarchy and common prayer, and is thus fundamental to the notion of the church as a ‘societie supernaturall.’ Spenser tacitly endorses an analogous parallel between celestial and ecclesiastical hierarchy in the Fowre Hymnes by investing the angelic orders with a mystery impregnable to individual speculation. The straightforward affirmation of the Word (via the Incarnation) and tradition (via the Dionysian orders) in An Hymne of Heavenly Love shows by contrast the limits of the mystical flight dramatized in An Hymne of Heavenly Beautie – limits often overlooked in various readings of the hymn

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sequence’s Platonism. As such, the hymns simultaneously sacralize one element of the Dionysian tradition, the celestial hierarchy, while presenting another, mysticism, as heterodox though intellectually appealing. Both Hooker and Spenser thus evoke the ‘trinall triplicities’ in more than a simple tribute; they point to them as an important element of the divine order governing human devotion. Hooker’s Politie is born of the concerns common to conforming ministers in the 1590s, when Whitgift’s rather heavy-handed tactics as Archbishop of Canterbury stoked the growing desire for disciplinarian reform. Within a year of England’s providential victory over the Spanish Armada, the search for Martin Marprelate uncovered correspondence pointing to an underground network of divines with aspirations of instituting presbyterian discipline. ‘Puritans’ were equated with Papists as a threat to the commonwealth, a sentiment explicitly expressed by Lord Keeper Christopher Hatton who, after reviewing the history of Roman aggression against England, warned the 1589 Parliament that Elizabeth ‘as your Prince and dread Sovereign, [does] most straitly charge and command you, upon your allegiance, that ... you do not in this assembly so much as once meddle with any such matters or causes of religion, except it be to bridle all those, whether Papist or Puritans, which are therewithal discontented.’4 Elizabeth’s central control of all things ecclesiastical seemed to disciplinarians an obstacle to the institution of a truly Reformed church government modelled on Calvin’s Geneva. The absolute control in religious matters sought by disciplinarian reformers and separatists seemed to those supporting the Elizabethan compromise to introduce a potentially subversive non-monarchical power within the state, which introduction would render pointless the breach with Rome. Freedom of conscience, the conformists held, was a private matter that should not interfere with the public authority of the English church – though, as Sir Francis Knollys recognized, that authority was increasingly being viewed by ecclesiasts in the late Elizabethan reign as deriving jure divino rather than from the Royal Supremacy, so that conformists duplicated in their own way precisely the subversion of which separatists were accused.5 Hooker shares the view of Puritan and Papist as equally threatening. As he puts it in one of his marginal notes to A Christian Letter, ‘two things there are which troble greatly these later times, one that the Church of Rome cannot, another that Geneva will not erre’ (4: 55.3–6).6

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His response to the ‘speciall illumination of the Holy Ghost’ claimed by the disciplinarians, who are his chief opponents, is, as William P. Haugaard describes it, ‘the appeal to human reason’ that is ‘a principal tool in Hooker’s polemic throughout the Lawes’ (6: 78). The rationalist via media with which Hooker is traditionally associated, however, tends to misrepresent several elements of his work. The first misrepresentation is an overstatement of his concern with Rome. Even the most cursory glance at the preface to the Politie reveals that the real target of his polemic is the growing threat posed by the disciplinarians. Hooker is not so much searching for a middle ground as he is making an argument – and what he believes to be a Reformed argument – for conservatism against an increasingly influential radical fringe. The second misconception is that the Politie is more a work of political philosophy than it is of theology, ecclesiology, or polemic, an error born of the common and all-too-tempting tendency to read only books 1 and 8.7 This secularized view of Hooker’s project overlooks his important sacralization of certain aspects of conformist discipline. Recent scholarship such as that of William J. Bouwsma, Brian Vickers, and Debora K. Shuger has attempted to recover this important element of Hooker’s thought, to establish the spiritualist concerns of his theologia rhetorica – a theology emphasizing scripture’s affective function – and to relate these concerns to the brand of conformism displayed by such figures as Lancelot Andrewes.8 Precisely where rationalism leaves off and spiritualism takes over in Hooker’s anthropology, and consequently in his ecclesiology, however, is still open to question, and it is for insights into these aspects of his thought that his angelology is valuable. The ecclesiology of Hooker’s natural law tends to emphasize the necessity of political stability in church government. Working from first principles and showing how the commonwealth develops from natural law, and how the church is an extension of the commonwealth, Hooker presents the dramatic changes to the English church promoted by disciplinarians as spurious. Calvin, he argues in the Preface, implemented his program of reform in a Geneva devoid of civil and ecclesiastical order; England, on the other hand, already has in place a sovereign, aristocracy, university system, and church government that all tend ably to the polity’s spiritual needs (1: 3.6–7 and 51.14–22). His reasoned progression opposes itself to the ‘illumination’ claimed by radical reformers by which ‘they must professe themselves to be all (even men, women, and children) Prophets’ (1: 17.21–2).9 Such pretensions gen-

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erate a zealotry that threatens public order, a threat given full polemical force by its association with, to use W.D.J. Cargill Thompson’s phrase, ‘the hoary sixteenth-century bogey of Anabaptism.’10 Hooker argues, as Whitgift and Starkey had done before him, that such extremism is unnecessary at best, and that English reformers had approached the tradition rationally, choosing those aspects of devotion suited to the national character, discarding Romish superstition, and avoiding the madcap innovations of some of their Continental counterparts.11 In this view tradition is not the direct expression of the Holy Spirit as it is for Thomas More in the Confutation of Tyndale; it is rather a reference library of interpretations of the Word that is ontologically subordinate to scripture but valuable as an expression of fifteen hundred years of collective reason.12 An exclusive emphasis on Hooker’s rationalist approach to tradition and ecclesiastical government, however, ignores the important tendency in his thought to which Shuger draws our attention: Hooker’s spiritual psychology consistently makes desire rather than reason the epistemic ground. Nevertheless his understanding of selfdeception and ideological hermeneutics problematizes this optimism of self-warranting desire: one can feel very strongly and still be very wrong.13

There is, even amongst what seems like relentless rationalism in book 1, a place for mystical affectus and participatus in Hooker’s ideas of worship. That which is ‘most desirable,’ he argues, is that ‘wherin ther is infinitie of goodness,’ and since ‘no good is infinite but only God,’ our greatest desire is to be ‘unto God united’ (1: 112.7–20). Unlike will, which moves toward that which is rationally deemed to be good, or appetite, which moves toward that which is sensually deemed to be good, desire is a faculty tending instinctively toward God’s infinite goodness, and striving for union with him. In describing this faculty Hooker departs from both Thomist theology and mystical tradition. Thomas Aquinas argues in his Summa theologiae that the imperfect power of intellection available to humanity indicates by necessity the perfection of this quality in the angels. Hooker similarly describes desire for God’s goodness as separating men from beasts and associates it with an intellectual faculty that is perfectly present in the angels.14 Unlike Thomas, however, he unequivocally defers human capacity for intellectual insight to the

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afterlife; although our ‘happiness’ resides in ‘the full possession of that which simply for it selfe is to be desired,’ ‘of such perfection capable we are not in this life’ (1: 112.21–5).15 Unlike Christian Platonists like Pico and mystics like Gerson, Hooker denies the human capacity for mystical ascent.16 Desire forms the gemuete, to use Johann Tauler’s term, of human piety – it motivates the drive for union with infinite goodness – but the fraction of perfection to be enjoyed in this life can be attained only through understanding and will, which terms are exclusively rational in Hooker’s formulation.17 It is only in ‘the world to come’ that we will enjoy fully the Pauline virtues: the ‘intuitive vision of God’ that is the perfect justification of Faith, the ‘actuall fruition’ of our Hope, and the ‘endlesse union’ that will induct us into the mystery of his infinite Charity (1: 118.31–119.13). By making intellectual insight an impossibility in this life, Hooker is able to dismiss his opponents’ claims to ‘speciall illumination.’ This generation of an anthropology opposed to noetic insight opens the door for location of spiritual authority exclusively in the church, going well beyond the arguments of his conformist predecessors. Whitgift had concluded on adiaphora that ‘it is not every man’s part in the church to judge and determine what the circumstance of the times and persons maketh profitable or hurtful (for then should we never be quiet), but theirs only to whom the government of the church is committed.’18 The mounting assault of the disciplinarians in the 1590s would prompt conformists to move away from this secularized, political argument on church government and to establish a more direct link between episcopacy and divine illumination. This mood is exemplified by Hadrianus Saravia, whose jure divino arguments for prelacy maintain that the superiority of bishops over ministers was a condition instituted by Christ’s designation of twelve apostles and seventy disciples.19 Hooker shows the same tendency by extending the mysterious illumination that he denies individuals to a sacralized English discipline. Especially significant for the present discussion is book 4, where he rebuts the charge that the English church is ‘corrupted with Popish orders’ (subtitle to book 4; 1: 271). Rather than appealing to the reasoned political philosophy characteristic of book 1 to mount his argument, he turns rather quickly to a statement of the limits of rationality: The thinges which so long experience of all ages hath confirmed and made profitable, let us not presume to condemne as follies and toyes, because wee sometimes knowe not the cause and reason of them ... The

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sensible things which religion hath hallowed, are resemblances framed according to things spiritually understood, whereunto they serve as a hand to lead and a way to direct. (1: 274.27–275.24; Hooker’s italics)

Here inexplicability does not point to the irrationality that occasioned previous dismissal of disciplinarian thought as anarchical, but rather to mystical purpose. As Peter Lake remarks of the passage immediately preceding this selection, ‘this was little short of a reclamation of the whole realm of symbolic action and ritual practice from popish superstition to that of a necessary, indeed essential, means of communication and edification.’20 Rational, selective engagement of tradition is set aside in favour of an acceptance of that which is justified by long usage, which longevity indicates mysterious purpose. It is a point that Hooker supports in the final sentences of this passage with a quotation from Dionysius’s Ecclesiastical Hierarchy that invests religious ceremony with hidden spiritual value. The passage from the Pseudo-Areopagite furthermore hints, as the sentence in the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy immediately preceding it explicitly states, that ordained clergy are distinct from the ‘common crowd’ in their ability to have insight into the mysteries of which such ceremonies are tokens: ‘we, who have reverently lifted our eyes up to the sources of these rites and have been sacredly initiated in them, we shall recognize the stamps of which these things are impressions and the invisible things of which they are images.’21 It is not surprising, then, that Hooker follows his defence of ritual by interrogating Walter Travers’s divestment of sacramental significance from ordination: Sacraments are those signes and tokens of some generall promised grace, which alwaies really descendeth from god unto the soul that duly receiveth them; other significant tokens are only as sacraments, yet no sacraments: which is not our distinction but theirs. For concerning the Apostles imposition of handes these are their owne wordes Manuum signum hoc et quasi sacramentum usurparunt. They used this signe or as it were sacrament. (1: 276.14–20)

Though the disciplinarians criticize the ceremonialism of the national church, they themselves attribute significance to those sacraments without scriptural foundation. The passage gestures toward elision of sacrament and that which is ‘as sacrament’ – it implies that ‘we’ conformists leave such nice distinctions to ‘them.’ The effect is to query

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the impulse to divest ordination of its divinity; it leaves one wondering over the validity of the category ‘as sacrament, yet no sacrament’ here attributed to Travers, and, by extension, the passage in Calvin’s Institutes on which it draws: ‘For the laying on of hands ... though I have no objection to its being called a sacrament, I do not number [it] among ordinary sacraments.’22 This subtle reclamation of ordination as holy work is no mean point, for, as Luther recognized, the presence of divine mystery in this ceremony was at odds with the ‘liberty’ of a priesthood of believers.23 Indeed, later chapters will point to the sacralized authority of ordained clergy, particularly in justifying the retention of Papist traditions: the disciplinarians’ ‘sentences will not be greatly regarded, when they oppose their Me thinketh unto the orders of the Church of England’ (1: 283.5–6). The judgment of the ‘orders of the Church of England’ is clearly meant to be taken here as superior in kind to the disciplinarians’ ‘Me thinketh’ – and one senses here a particularly barbed reference to Travers, Hooker’s nemesis from Temple Church, who had refused episcopal ordination.24 Although Whitgift saw episcopal superiors as responsible for the ‘government’ of the church, Hooker’s evocation of Dionysius implies ontological hierarchy in ecclesiastical orders. In this view, the mysterious divine illumination held by hierarchs invests their decisions with a direct relationship to divine order that runs counter to the notion of adiaphora. These ideas are also evident in Hooker’s later discussion of ordination in book 5 and in his defence of episcopacy in book 7. In the former he affirms the Dionysian principle that members of holy orders become direct agents of the Holy Spirit: ‘when wee take ordination wee also receive the presence of the holy Ghost partlie to guide direct and strengthen us in all our waies, and partlie to assume unto itself for the more authoritie those actions that apperteine to our place and calling’ (2: 430.3–6).25 It is by virtue of the infusion of the Holy Spirit in ordination that ministers are ‘disposers of Gods misteries’ in all of their holy works (2: 430.20–1). This view of ordination develops the mystification of church orders introduced in book 4. The individual inspiration and scriptural meditation that are the signs of ministry among those sympathetic to Genevan reform are here undercut by making ‘calling’ contingent upon ordination (2: 424.8–425.30). As in the Dionysian tradition, Hooker’s ordained clergymen possess a mysterious and exclusive divine illumination that is expressed in their theurgia, Dionysius’s term for the holy works by which divinity is passed downward through the twin hierarchies.

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Similarly Dionysian is Hooker’s repeated description of bishops as ‘Angells among men’ (3: 146.31, 205.24, 303.24). At several points he gestures toward the Dionysian principle where ‘the whole arrangement of human hierarchy is fulfilled and completed’ in the office of the bishop.26 As in The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, the powers of the bishop Hooker describes contain those of the orders beneath him, a statement of episcopal authority opposite to presbyterianism. Only the bishops reside in locus apostolorum because, like the Apostles, they are direct recipients of Christ’s illumination: ‘Thapostles [sic] peculiar charge was to publish the gospell of Christ unto all nations, and to deliver them his ordinances received by immediate revelation from himself’ (2: 440.7–9), a role filled ‘afterwardes in stead of Apostles [by] Bishopes’ (2: 446.7–8). The fact that ‘the Apostles who began this order of Regiment by Bishops, did it not but by divine instinct’ (3: 169.30–1) indicates that ‘surely the first institution of Bishops was from Heaven, was even of God, the Holy Ghost was the Author of it’ (3: 170.18–20). As W.J. Torrance Kirby observes, Hooker explicitly acknowledges the source of his views on divine order and ecclesiastical hierarchy in the Autograph Notes to the final book of the Politie, where he claims that ‘it is a divine law, says St Dionysius, for the lowest things to be led back to the highest by those that are intermediate. There should then be one in the Church who possesses supreme power, supreme and widest right over all’ (FLE, 3:494.10–13).27 The investment of divine mystery in the ceremony of ordination and the authority of bishops, however, would seem to contradict the anthropology of book 1, where Hooker describes reason as the faculty by which humanity approaches God. That this apparent contradiction is found in book 7 might furthermore be taken as by-product of his growing friendship with Saravia during composition of the later books and not reflective of the unalloyed Hookerean values of books 1 through 4.28 As Nijenhuis shows, Saravia had also argued that ‘by the laying-on of hands as a visible sign they [the apostles] passed on the gift of the Holy Spirit who also guided them infallibly,’ and that ‘the apostles had passed on their “potestas” to the bishops who acted as their successors.’29 Of Hooker’s relationship to such arguments for episcopal authority, Lake claims that ‘all the basic assertions of the jure divino case for bishops were dutifully rehearsed’ in the later books, but seem like an ‘afterthought’ in the early ones, suggesting that ‘Hooker had come only recently to accept’ them.30 Indeed books 1 through 4 consistently attack, in a manner reminiscent of Whitgift, the notion of repristination central to disciplinarian reform, claiming that ‘in tying

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the Church to the orders of the Apostles times, they tye it to a mervelous uncertaine rule’ (1: 278.8–10).31 The early books’ scepticism on returning the church to its ancient purity cannot be confused with a scepticism regarding the principle of a jure divino defence of episcopacy. Hooker’s sacralized view of ordination in book 4 equally demonstrates the divine sanction of prelacy, and does so without expressing the desire to reestablish the apostolic church characteristic of disciplinarian polemic. The only real shift in book 7, then, is that it rehearses the particular kind of jure divino argument that had gained currency via the influence of Saravia. In order fully to counter the view of Hooker as champion of rationalist political theory, however, we must reconcile this affirmation of sacralized episcopacy with the religio-philosophical framework of book 1. There we find in the relationship between the celestial and ecclesiastical hierarchies a foundation upon which Hooker can later rest his mystically illumined English hierarchs. An entire chapter of this book is devoted to ‘The law which Angels doe worke by’ (1: 69.21; title to 1.4), following the chapter on the law of natural agents and preceding that on the law of human conduct, in which he follows Thomas in describing the angels as ‘spirits immaterial and intellectuall’ who have ‘attayned that high perfection of blisse’ from which they ‘are without possibilitie of falling’ (1: 69.25 and 71.23–5).32 A large part of their imitation of God, Hooker emphasizes, displays itself as an interest in humanity’s spiritual fitness: ‘Desire to resemble him in goodnes maketh them unweariable, and even unsatiable in their longing to doe by all meanes all maner good unto all the creatures of God, but especially unto the children of men’ (1: 70.9–12). The laws governing men and angels are, as Kirby notes, ‘distinct expressions of the one and undivided Gubernatio Dei.’ 33 In their ministration the angels thus attempt to raise us to their perfection in the observance of divine law, in the cause of which, as Hooker states in the conclusion to book 1, they especially inform discipline and devotion: Neither are the Angels themselves, so farre severed from us in their kind and manner of working, but that, betweene the law of their heavenly operations and the actions of men in this our state of mortalitie, such correspondence there is, as maketh it expedient to know in some sort the one, for the others more perfect direction ... Yea, so farre hath the Apostle S. Paule proceedeth, as to signifie, that even about the outward orders of the Church which serve but for comlinesse, some regard is to be had of

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Angels, who best like us, when wee are most like unto them in all partes of decent demeanor. (1: 137.13–30)34

The ‘correspondence’ between celestial and ecclesiastical law here described echoes not only in the reference to Pseudo-Dionysius’s Ecclesiastical Hierarchy in book 4, but also in the argument employed in book 5 in defence of Common Prayer: ‘the howse of prayer is a court bewtified with the presence of the cœlestial powers, that there we stand, we pray, we sound forth hymnes unto God, havinge his Angels intermingled as our associates; and that with reference thereunto thapostle doth require so great care to be had of decencie for the angels sake’ (2: 114.12–18). The angels here have a physical presence in the church that requires us to frame our devotion therein in a manner befitting the company of such worthy ‘associates.’ In this way, as Kirby observes, ‘“Common Prayer” is the participation in an action which transcends the ordinary distinction between the earthly-temporal and the celestial-eternal realms.’35 The fundamental premises of Dionysian hierarchy are thus defended: episcopal ecclesiology and traditional liturgy are an extension of angelic ministration and a reflection of heavenly devotion.36 Although we as individuals cannot have claims to this perfection – a point that marks Hooker’s departure from Thomas – the church does gesture toward such claims in that its discipline has been directed by the angels’ mysterious ministration, evidence for which celestial influence is especially apparent in the relative stability of the English prelacy.37 This is a vitally important complement to Hooker’s rationalist defence of the benefits to the commonwealth of stable church government. Rather than demanding logical defence of all matters ecclesiological, he affirms the status of the church as repository of supernatural illumination. This does not necessarily make it a mediating presence fundamental to human soteriology, for, as Kirby and Wayne J. Hankey have shown, Hooker draws in his thought both on the immediate dispensation of grace in Augustinian soteriology and the Dionysian tradition’s principle of mediation in his cosmology, ecclesiology, and political theology.38 While Hooker claims that human beings ‘carrie written in their hearts the universall law of mankind, the law of reason’ (1: 139.1–2), their vitiated reason cannot ascertain supernatural law. For this they must rely on the direction of that ‘societie supernaturall’ the church, in which they are joined not with ‘men

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simplye considered as men,’ but rather – and here Hooker employs a telling hierarchical triad – with ‘God, Angels, and holie men’ (1: 131.6–10). Hooker’s conformist argument thus rests not only on a rational choice of political stability, but also on recognition of the mystical authority of the church in allowing the fallen viator a return to God. The notion in the Politie of the church as ‘societie supernaturall’ has thus been somewhat misrepresented to date. In his seminal article, Cargill Thompson describes the distinction between the church as ‘politic’ and as ‘supernaturall’ as equivalent to that between the visible and invisible church.39 On the contrary, Hooker envisioned a straightforward parallel between visible ‘thinges publiquely done by the Church’ and the invisible ‘bond of spirituall societie.’ Indeed a good deal of conformist argumentation attempts to eliminate the distinction between visible and invisible churches common in Puritan discourse, positing, as Whitgift puts it, ‘no difference betwixt a Christian commonwealth and the Church of Christ.’40 More recently Shuger has shown how the dynamics of this ‘societie supernaturall’ establish the church as a ‘coercive institution’ that ‘disallows the political capacities of the “common multitude,” and restricts active participation in the government of either church or state to the well-born and the wise,’ and thus represses ‘schism, dissidence, heresy, and all other such outbursts of individual dissent and ambition.’41 Shuger’s general principle is true enough, but her repeated emphasis on the social inclusivity of Hooker’s church tends to misrepresent his purpose. The Politie is not a work overly concerned with the ‘simpler sort,’ but it is very much concerned with the learned and increasingly influential disciplinarians. Thus the vertical relationships that Shuger describes can indeed be seen to stem from Hooker’s sacralization of the visible church, but they do not get to the heart of his polemical purpose. Much more important is how these aspects of his thought destabilize disciplinarian authority. By mystifying conformist discipline and by maintaining a sacramental view of ordination that firmly identifies the bishop as the (Dionysian) medium of divine illumination, Hooker leaves his opponents without a leg to stand on. His is an ecclesiology meant to undercut the influence both of the ‘simple’ and the ‘wise’ and to ensure a normalized public worship under the aegis of established hierarchs. Locating such worship in the realm of the ‘supernaturall’ renders it above the reproach of the natural reason available to individuals. This mode of

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justification of church authority consistently underpins the various arguments for conservatism found throughout the Politie – the sacralized view of ordination in book 4, the defence of Common Prayer in book 5, and the defence of episcopacy in book 7 – and is signalled by the ‘correspondence’ between celestial and ecclesiastical law introduced in book 1. Spenser’s Fowre Hymnes have been most often discussed as clearly representative of the poet’s Neoplatonism, with critics jostling with one another in attempts to assert the importance of their favourite Neoplatonist: Jefferson B. Fletcher favours Benivieni, Josephine W. Bennett adds Pico, Sears Jayne points to Ficino, and Jon A. Quitslund recovers Leone Ebreo from Robert Ellrodt’s aspersions.42 The most conspicuous shortcoming of this emphasis on Neoplatonism is its tendency to overlook as irrelevant the relatively straightforward Christian primer that comprises the Hymne of Heavenly Love. In this vein Mary I. Oates describes the sequence as a scala in which Spenser demonstrates that ‘one’s second (or third or fourth!) chances in love may well be better than the first.’43 Ellrodt proposes instead that the Hymnes be viewed as leaves of a diptych, with the Neoplatonism of the earthly hymns set against and superseded by the Christian Platonism of their heavenly counterparts.44 Einar Bjorvand sees ‘the transition from the first to the last pair of hymns’ as ‘a Christian conversion rather than a gradual ascent,’ a view approximated by William C. Johnson.45 This relatively homogeneous ‘conversion,’ however, tends to argue for an appositive relationship between the final two hymns that misrepresents the important differences between them. More nuanced is Enid Welsford’s fortuitous misreading of Ellrodt’s model, in which she describes the Hymnes as two diptychs related to one another as diptych.46 In an exceptional article, Terry Comito explores the dialectical relationship between the two heavenly hymns, but refers only to their Platonism, thus leaving their Christian terms untouched.47 The result is that in the body of criticism on the hymn sequence ‘the issue’ raised, as F.M. Padelford saw it seventy years ago, remains unresolved: ‘Is the Christian element in the last two hymns only coloring, with the basic conceptions unchanged, ... or are these last two hymns basically Christian, with a mere coloring of Neo-Platonism.’48 The oppositional relationship between the two heavenly hymns sheds some light on this issue. Far from constituting a climactic fulfilment of the Christian mystical vision suggested in An Hymne of Heav-

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enly Love, the heterodoxy of An Hymne of Heavenly Beautie worries human capacity for mystical insight in a manner evoking Hooker’s anxiety over the truth-claims of personal spiritualism. Such a parallel between Hooker and Spenser recalls Welsford, who declares it ‘probable’ that ‘Spenser had read [the Politie] before composing the heavenly hymns.’49 While the points of agreement between Spenser’s Dame Sapience and Hooker’s Eternal Laws to which Welsford draws our attention do not fully support such a claim – nor, it should be said, does she entirely intend them to do so – her statement that ‘Hooker helps one to understand the very structure of the poem’ certainly deserves some attention.50 The ambiguous religion of the mystical flight in the final hymn is reminiscent of the scepticism regarding human intellectual capacity found in Hooker’s manipulation of Thomism, where one can feel very strongly and still be very wrong. By casting the lively philosophical play of Heavenly Beautie in such a mould, Spenser is able simultaneously to satisfy the (conformist) politico-religious concerns he shares with his network of aristocratic patrons and give a knowing wink to the Areopagus of poets and thinkers capable of joining him in Neoplatonic flight.51 The promise in the dedication to ‘reforme’ the ‘poyson to ... strong passion’ of the two earthly hymns into a ‘hony to ... honest delight’ has been the source of some debate.52 The earthly hymns have been seen as representing a lofty brand of love that does not require ‘retractation,’ though this tends to downplay the heresies arising from their Neoplatonic playfulness.53 An Hymne in Honour of Love, where the pursuit of earthly beauty is expressed as a desire for connection with Beauty itself, transforms Cupid into the ‘great Parent’ (156). An Hymne in Honour of Beautie, where this Platonism continues and is coupled with the notion of reincarnation, describes romantic love as a ‘celestiall harmonie, / ... To work ech others ioy and true content’ (197–200).54 While such lofty mutuality would separate Spenser from Petrarchism, it does present a problem when set alongside Christian ontology. Whence arises the Christian conversion to which Bjorvand refers, which is certainly achieved in An Hymne of Heavenly Love and its climactic enjoinder to look to Christ’s Passion as evidence of a love superior to any found on Earth: All other loves, with which the world doth blind Weake fancies, and stirre up affections base,

Hooker and Spenser on the Celestial Hierarchy Thou must renounce, and utterly displace, And give thyself unto him full and free, That full and freely gave himselfe to thee.

47

(262–6)55

This injunction comes at the end of a relatively conservative recapitulation of the Bible. Although Spenser incorporates certain non-scriptural elements in this summary, such as the ‘trinall triplicities’ (64) of angels and an account of the war in heaven owing more to tradition than to Revelation 12, these are minor elements in what is essentially and predominantly an account of Original Sin and Redemption. True to the promise of the opening lines, Spenser provides a ‘heavenly Hymne ... / Unto the god of Love, high heavens king’ (6–7). Beginning with the coronation of the Son by the Father and proceeding to angelic creation and fall, to human creation and fall, and finally culminating with the promise of redemption in the life of Christ, our attention is drawn constantly to the ‘Meeke lambe of God’ (173). From start to finish we receive, to use C.S. Lewis’s apt summary, ‘a straight account of the Creation, Fall, and Redemption, such as any child in a Christian family learns before he is twelve.’56 Perhaps this is why critics have found Heavenly Love something of a bore, and tended to overlook it in favour of the mystical pyrotechnics of Heavenly Beautie. Spenser seems to wish us to see this final hymn as picking up where the previous one left off. The closing stanzas of Heavenly Love promise spiritual enlightenment through the embrace of Christ: With al thy hart, with all thy soul and mind, Thou must him love, and his beheasts embrace; ... Then shalt thou feele thy spirit so possest, And ravisht with devouring great desire Of his deare selfe, that shall thy feeble brest Inflame with love, and set thee all on fire With burning zeale ...

(260–71)

Such ‘burning zeale’ is precisely what Heavenly Beautie expresses. To use the separation of faculties common in mystical discourse, if Heavenly Love arises out of the engagement of intellectus with the revealed Word, the opening of Heavenly Beautie indicates the awakening of affectus in order to explore heaven’s mysteries:

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In the Anteroom of Divinity Rapt with the rage of mine own ravisht thought, Through contemplation of those goodly sights, And glorious images in heaven wrought, Whose wondrous beauty breathing sweet delights, Do kindle loue in high conceipted sprights: I faine to tell the things that I behold, But feele my wits to faile, and tongue to fold.

(1–7)

Beginning with the sense of rapture that follows from the embrace of Christ in the previous hymn, this poem quickly calls for direct illumination by the Holy Spirit. It employs, as Bjorvand notes, the fixation on Christ’s Passion of the previous hymn as impetus to spiritual ascent in a manner reminiscent of Bonaventuran mysticism.57 Here rational interpretation of scripture is insufficient, the poet feels his ‘wits to faile’ (7), and he turns instead to a reading of Creation illumined by the ‘sparkling light’ that has been planted in his ‘breast’ (10). The poet-hero then ascends from the Earth and Sea through a universe that is distinctly Ptolemaic and Neoplatonic: ‘th’ Aire,’ the ‘christall wall,’ the ‘house of blessed Gods, which men call Skye,’ the heaven ‘where happy soules haue place,’ the realm of Intelligences ‘which Plato so admyred,’ and the hierarchy of angels (38, 41, 52, 78, 83): Yet farre more faire be those bright Cherubins, Which all with golden wings are overdight, And those eternall burning Seraphins, Which from their faces dart out fierie light; Yet fairer then they both, and much more bright Be th’Angels and Archangels, which attend On Gods owne person, without rest or end.

(92–8)

Here it is the Angels who must veil themselves from ‘His glorious face which glistereth ... so bright’ (118–19), a departure not only from the Dionysian tradition but also from the vision described in Isaiah 6.2: ‘Above [the Lord’s throne] stood the seraphim: each one had six wings; with twain he covered his face, and with twain he covered his feet, and with twain he did fly.’ When we do arrive at God’s throne, we are led through a composite portrait of the Almighty’s virtues: ‘His throne is built upon Eternity,’ ‘His Scepter is the rod of Righteousnesse,’ and ‘His seate is Truth’ (152,

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155, 159). The focus then shifts from God to Dame Sapience: ‘There in his bosome Sapience doth sit, / The soueraine dearling of the Deity’ (183–96). Having reached this heavenly sovereign who is the apex of the poem’s topology, we are shown how she is the source of all beauty. Sapience is the Beauty toward which human art can only gesture – whether it is of ‘that Painter ... / Which pictured Venus with so curious quill’ (211–12), or ‘that sweet Teian Poet which did spend / His plenteous vaine in setting forth her praise’ (219–20), or, finally, that of Spenser himself, ‘the nouice of his [the Teian poet, Anacreon’s] Art’ (225). These associations of Dame Sapience’s beauty with that of Venus recall the earthly hymns where, as Welsford puts it, ‘Ovidian Amor’ is ‘on the throne of the Christian God.’58 The angels themselves spend their time singing the praises and contemplating the mysteries of this beauty above Beauty: Let Angels which her goodly face behold And see at will, her soveraigne praises sing, And those most sacred mysteries unfold, Of that faire love of mightie heavens king.

(232–5)

It is from Dame Sapience, God’s ‘owne Beloved,’ that ‘All ioy, all blisse, all happinesse have place’ (241–3). Unlike the previous hymn where the recognition of the self-sacrifice of the Son leads one to an abandonment of earthly frivolity – ’in no earthly thing thou shalt delight, / Than in his sweet and amiable sight’ (272–3) – here it is the realization that all earthly beauty is a pale reflection of this divine source that so leads us. The prominence and the eternity of Dame Sapience recall especially the qualities of Wisdom described in Proverbs 8: ‘I was set up from everlasting, / from the beginning, / or ever the earth was’ (23). She is simultaneously formed, however, from the very Neoplatonism of the earthly hymns that Spenser has promised in the dedication to ‘amend.’ God functions here as a Neoplatonic One surrounded immediately by ideals: Righteousness, Truth, and Wisdom. Dame Sapience’s central position in the hymn’s ontology approximates Proclus’s placement of ‘knowledge itself’ in On Parmenides, and her union with God rehearses the foremost triad’s occult and immediate connection to the One as outlined in his Platonic Theology.59 Quitslund has drawn parallels between Sapience and Ficino’s construction of the qualities of the

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Angelic Mind and Leone Ebreo’s description of Wisdom as ‘the First Beauty’ in the Dialoghi d’Amore.60 Sapience has been seen as reminiscent of the Virgin Mary, of a medieval Divine Motherhood, of the Hebrew ideal of Wisdom, of Prudentius’s character of the same name in Psychomachia, and of the Holy Ghost.61 Denis Saurat has argued that all aspects of Spenser’s Sapience – that she is in the immediate presence of God, represents Beauty itself, is visible to human perception, and is a mediatrix between God and humanity – may be found in the Kabbalah’s Shekhina.62 In an attempt to reconcile this hymn with Heavenly Love, Ellrodt associates Sapience with the second person of the Trinity, a position that Bjorvand follows in concluding that the two final hymns together offer ‘the triune Deity’ as an ‘affirmative centre,’ as opposed to the ‘negative centre’ of ‘Venus and the beloved’ offered in the earthly hymns.63 That such a plenitude of readings is possible points to the fact that we are getting two very different portraits of heaven in these two ‘reformed’ hymns. While Heavenly Love offers a rather conservative account of the source of Christian piety in the Redemption, Heavenly Beautie begins from the book of nature and delivers a polysemous portrait of divinity. Those readings positing a straightforward connection between Sapience and an aspect of the Trinity tend to impose orthodoxy on the text: we can follow many of Ellrodt’s subtle connections between Sapience and the Son, but must take our leave when we find him saying that ‘the “characters” in the last two hymns are Christian “characters”: God, Christ, the Holy Ghost, the Biblical Sapience.’ 64 If we do concede for a moment that Sapience is meant to represent the Son – and conclude with Ellrodt that the Son in this case can indeed be female and have a sensual, subordinate relationship to the Father – we would nonetheless have to admit that this portrait of the Triune Deity makes no mention of the Incarnation.65 Even if, in other words, we allow the mystical vision described in Heavenly Beautie the greatest proximity possible to the divine economy of Heavenly Love, it still fails to penetrate the central mystery of Christianity – for insight into that, we must turn to the revealed Word as summarized in the third hymn. Though the ostensible impetus for the mystical vision in Heavenly Beautie is the ‘full and free’ giving of oneself to Christ described in Heavenly Love, the climax of that vision leaves us with some doubt as to its reconcilability with the Christian godhead. In this way the final hymn registers a Reformed scepticism of mystical flight most famously seen in Luther, who abandoned his

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early, monastic attempts to ascend to the ranks of the angels and later claimed that he would rather have been among the devils. He ultimately eschews even the scriptural mysticism of a Tauler or Gerson, and denies the existence of an affective relationship to God existing over and above an intellectual relationship to the revealed Word.66 John N. Wall observes in The Faerie Queene a critique of the individualist religion arising from late medievalism in favour of the communal experience promoted by the national church.67 The ambiguous status of private, affective contemplation is similarly displayed in the mystical vision of Heavenly Beautie, which, despite its frequent turn to scripture, does not achieve the affective union with Christ valued in Heavenly Love, but rather climaxes in a witnessing of the formal Beauty sought in the earthly hymns. One element of the final hymn that explicitly recalls the divine economy of Heavenly Love is its mention of angels. Spenser here scales the wings of angels in his mystical ascent in a manner reminiscent of Bonaventuran spirituality, where, as the Seraphic Doctor puts it in The Soul’s Journey into God, ‘the six wings of the Seraph ... symbolize the six steps of illumination that begin from creatures and lead up to God.’68 Instead of an elaboration of the ‘trinall triplicities’ mentioned in the third hymn, however, we see seven celestial orders – Powres, Potentates, Dominations, Cherubins, Seraphins, Angels, and Archangels – and even these are rearranged from the Dionysian scheme so that the Angels and Archangels are elevated above the Seraphim and Cherubim and placed in God’s immediate presence. Although this departure from the Dionysian hierarchy is often noted, its implications have been overlooked.69 In reducing the angelic orders to seven, Spenser evokes not the Dionysian tradition, but rather Proclus’s On Parmenides, where a sevenfold hierarchy of intelligible beings stands below the principles associated with original Being, including, as we have seen, ‘knowledge itself.’70 That the order of these hierarchies deviates from the Dionysian model might suggest, as Bennett puts it, that Spenser is ‘naming the orders of the angels from memory,’ but to give an incorrect number of orders, especially after giving the correct number in Heavenly Love, and to give instead a number that more directly evokes the Neoplatonic categories prevalent in Heavenly Beautie suggests an intentional and purposeful departure from the Pseudo-Areopagite.71 In this sense, taken as a whole Spenser’s hymn sequence functions in a manner both like and unlike what Stanley Fish would call a ‘selfconsuming artifact.’72 It is self-consuming in that it proclaims ‘not only

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its own insufficiency, but the insufficiency of the frame of reference from which it issues, the human frame of reference its hearers inhabit.’73 That it is self-consuming in the sense that it is an object culminating in a supersessive, private vision of truth, however, requires some qualification. While the final hymn would seem in one sense a consummation of the Neoplatonic ascent begun in the earthly hymns and enabled by the infusion of heavenly love – it reaches heights on the scala not seen in the earthly hymns74 – it is also clearly a vision that does not penetrate soteriologically significant elements of doctrine. The mystical ascent in Heavenly Beautie does not leave us with an overriding vision in which the contradictions of the hymn sequence make sense, but rather provides us with an ambiguous vision that does not reveal Christianity’s central truths. For these we must turn to the divine love signified by Christ’s Passion as described in the Bible and reflected in the hierarchy of his true bride, the church. The foregrounded subjectivity of the poet-hero that is suspended in Heavenly Love thus returns in the final hymn in a way that repeats some of the dubious Christology of the earthly hymns.75 Spenser privileges traditional mediation over private inspiration, a contrast to the personal illumination more fully expressed in the seventeenth-century devotional verse that Fish examines. This places the Hymnes in a mode of expression somewhat different from the eclectic blend of philosophical, literary, and religious influences that we would usually expect from Spenser. Unlike the Amoretti or the Mutabilitie Cantos, where Neoplatonism and Christianity are treated more syncretically, the picture here painted of the Fowre Hymnes is more compartmentalized. It must be remembered, however, that such compartmentalization is suggested by the poet himself, who isolates in Heavenly Love a conservative treatment of Christian spirituality alongside which the remaining hymns seem heterodox. The Hymnes are thus, as Quitslund observes, exceptional in the Spenserian corpus for their ‘logical and systematic exposition of doctrines.’76 Those who have seen in them the kind of eclecticism evident elsewhere in Spenser have tended either to overlook or misrepresent the third hymn. Heavenly Love is not simply a prelude to the Platonic ascent of Heavenly Beauty in the same way that Love anticipates Beautie; to claim so is to suggest that Christ is the son of Dame Sapience in the same way as Cupid is of Venus. The slippage between the two heavenly hymns indicates a scepticism regarding human capacity consistent with

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reformed attitudes toward mysticism and with Hooker’s conformist arguments in the Politie. Just as the mystery of the Incarnation is hidden from the vision of Heavenly Beautie, so too is the divine order signified by the angels arrayed in ‘trinall triplicities.’77 We have, as Hooker puts it, a ‘weake apprehension of things not sene [that] endeth with the intuitive vision of God in the world to come’ (1: 119.5–6; my italics). That the Dionysian orders are associated with the Incarnation in a poem outlining essential aspects of a Christian divine economy impenetrable to human reason – or intellect, or affectus, or any synteresis of these capacities – affirms the conformist sentiment that in its hierarchy and ceremony the church is in mysterious harmony with divine order. This opposes Johnson’s view of the vision in Heavenly Beautie: ‘We know from The Faerie Queene, from the Amoretti, and from the Hymnes that “heaven blis,” either in heaven or as reflected here, is achievable. It may be ‘gotten ... with labour and long toyle’ (Amoretti, 69), but it is gotten.’78 On the contrary the view presented in the Hymnes resembles the promise of the New Jerusalem in The Faerie Queene: Redcrosse is granted the vision by Contemplation’s (priestly) mediation and is told that its full satisfaction is attainable only in the afterlife. We are made aware of human inability authoritatively to describe the heavenly city – just as the poet’s wits fail and tongue folds in the opening lines of Heavenly Beautie, the poet tells us that ‘earthly tong / Cannot describe, nor wit of man can tell’ of the New Jerusalem (1.10.55) – and in the echoes between this episode and the encounter with Archimago in the first canto of book 1 we see that Redcrosse is able finally to find his way through the assistance of the divinely enlightened community to which Una leads him.79 The angels in Heavenly Love are, as Comito notes, only ‘provisionally visible,’ and in challenging the limits of this vision the poet-hero of Heavenly Beautie evinces both the thrill and the danger of personal inspiration. Though the mystical vision of Heavenly Beautie achieves heights not seen in the other hymns, in its beginnings in this world it is also the flight of a ‘soare faulcon’ – a year-old hawk that has just molted its feathers – that is just learning to fly (26), and is necessarily limited in its insight on the celestial realm.80 The two heavenly hymns can in this way be seen as consistent with what Anne Lake Prescott describes as the tendency in The Faerie Queene to ‘scrutinize, lament, or even satirize what happens to human holiness in a fallen world,’ with the implicit value of the mediating presence of the church as bringing unity to a potentially disparate community of believers.81

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The difference between Hooker and Spenser, of course, is that Spenser is a poet, and as such we can expect his attempts to express subjectivity while limiting its insights to be rather more conflicted than Hooker’s are. With this conflictedness in mind we can see the Fowre Hymnes structured simultaneously as Neoplatonic scala and as diptych-within-diptych. The poetic vision offered in the final hymn is a consummation of the Neoplatonic ascent that remained frustrated in the two earthly hymns. The oppositional relationship of this poetic consummation to the basic elements of Christianity pictured on the other leaf of the heavenly diptych, however, highlights the instability of its conclusions in a manner suggesting the limits of human insight in the face of scripture and tradition. Both Hooker and Spenser demonstrate this opposition between individual insight and divine order with reference to Dionysian hierarchy. The divorce of divine illumination from the established institutional hierarchy upon which disciplinarian reform hinged is undercut by Hooker’s definition of the church as a ‘societie supernaturall’ and his investment of divine mystery in such functions as ordination and common prayer. Spenser displays similar concerns by showing the realm of the ‘trinall triplicities’ to be impenetrable to human investigation, a gesture that mystifies the Dionysian hierarchy in a way that implicitly affirms its (ecclesiastical) authority. While neither author provides the full description of Dionysian orders found in a John Colet, both present more than what Patrides describes as the ‘emotive’ sympathy with Dionysius typical of the Renaissance.82 These authors’ concept of hierarchy retains Dionysian elements with their ecclesiological significations and polemical applications. The brand of mystification of church authority in which Hooker engages would be subject to fashion: the Jacobean church tends to return to Whitgift’s sense of church government as a matter indifferent, while the bishops’ precarious position in the civil war period would lead them to revive the language of jure divino episcopacy.

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3 Donne’s Ideated Angels

Many of the difficulties, frustrations, and rewards of Donne’s poetry are exemplified in an encounter with Aire and Angels. The poem develops a great deal of artistic and intellectual elegance in its two conceits on celestial messengers only to have supple contemplation of the spiritual and physical dynamics of human love undermined by epigrammatic salinity in its masculinist final lines: ‘Just such disparitie / As is twixt Aire and Angells puritie, / T’wixt womens love, and mens will ever bee.’1 As elsewhere, angels in this poem seem to bring out the best and the worst in Donne. In The Dreame he vaults above Petrarch’s angelification of Laura by presenting a spiritual mutuality that renders his beloved superior to an angel: Yet I thought thee (For thou lovest truth) an Angell, at first sight, But when I saw thou sawest my heart, And knew’st my thoughts, beyond an Angels art, ... I must confesse, it could not chuse but bee Prophane, to thinke thee any thing but thee.

(13–20)

Less inspired is Donne’s use of the quibble on ‘angels’ as heavenly creatures and as stamped coins in the Epithalamion Made at Lincoln’s Inne, again in Elegie XX, yet again in Satyre V, and so often in Elegie XI that with Edmund Gosse ‘we lose all patience with so much self-satisfied ingenuity.’2 In Aire and Angels we are not quite sure which Donne is before us – sincere or cynical, elegantly metaphysical or groan-inspiringly punnical. The poem has yielded responses ranging from Coleridge’s baffle-

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ment – ’the first stanza is able ... the second I do not understand’; to Dame Helen Gardner’s repugnance and resentment of Donne’s prankish pulling of the chair from underneath us; to an ingenious presentday apologism that finds in this poem a portrait of romantic mutuality akin to that of The Extasie, an approach that understands neither lyric.3 If the final lines press an awareness upon us, it is not that Donne is ruining his own poem; it is that he is not writing the poem we might expect. The soul’s yearning for its love object in the first stanza raises anticipation of the rarefied portrait of love in The Good-morrow; this anticipation is compounded by the poem’s first reference to angels, which brings to mind the mystification of spiritual love as above human physicality in The Relique: First, we lov’d well and faithfully, Yet knew not what wee lov’d, nor why, Difference of sex no more wee knew, Than our Guardian Angells doe[.]

(23–6)

Such expectations blind us to the fact that from its very opening Aire and Angels is an entirely different poem, with this difference only most obvious and undeniable in its concluding lines. The first stanza describes the unattainability of purely spiritual love: But since, my soule, whose child love is, Takes limmes of flesh, and else could nothing doe, More subtile than the parent is, Love must not be, but take a body too[.]

(7–10)

This interrogates the Neoplatonic scala central, for example, to Spenser’s earthly hymns, which finds in physical beauty the first step on the ascent to Beauty Itself and thus an impetus to extra-sensual spiritual flight. By presenting the human soul as incapable of a purely ideal love, Donne inverts a Petrarchan blazon of physical attributes leading to an idealization of the love object – an inversion signalled, as several critics have observed, by the poem’s form as two ‘reversed’ sonnets.4 This is just one of the ways in which the ability of humanity to conform to Platonic ideals of love is vexed in this poem. Rather than the ‘eyes, lips, and hands’ of A Valediction Forbidding Mourning (20), we find love here attaching itself to ‘lip, eye, and brow,’ recalling Ficino’s statement in the Commentary on Plato’s Symposium that the beauties

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inspiring love pertain ‘only to the intellect, to seeing, and to hearing.’ By attaching his love to the organs of speech and sight and the seat of the intellect, Donne’s speaker aims to distinguish his feelings from the ‘lust’ Ficino associates with the other senses: ‘taste and touch’ lead to ‘venereal madness’ and ‘to intemperance, and therefore to disharmony. Therefore it likewise seems to lead to ugliness, whereas love leads to beauty ... Therefore the desire for coitus (that is copulation) and love are shown to be not only not the same motions but opposite.’5 Despite the effort in the first stanza to keep sensuality at bay, the relationship with the beloved becomes highly sexualized in the second stanza. The shift in verb tenses between the poem’s two stanzas suggests that the relationship with the beloved has proceeded from romantic pursuit to sexual activity: the present of the first stanza becomes a moment in the past in the opening line of the second stanza, ‘Whilst thus to ballast love, I thought.’ Janel Mueller astutely describes the poem as a sonnet sequence in miniature, with the intervening event of sexual conquest occurring between stanzas and without direct description.6 With Ficino’s opposition of love and lust in mind, the second stanza of Aire and Angels can be seen as reflecting the speaker’s effort to move from the confusion that sexuality generates to a reachievement of harmony. Part of this effort is the implication of pregnancy. As Albert Labriola has observed, references to the beloved as overloaded ship and later as occupied ‘spheare’ could suggest that she has become pregnant.7 If this is the case, the speaker by his procreative act returns in Ficino’s terms from disharmony and loss of selfhood to a state of spiritual agency: though ‘the procreative power is said to be moved in another, because its entire function is confined in the mass of the body,’ it is moved ‘By another certainly, since it is necessarily activated by the soul.’8 This is entirely consistent with the final location in Aire and Angels of men’s love in the realm of pure soul and women’s love as its physical sphere. Drawing on the terms of feminist criticism, Mueller states that in Aire and Angels, ‘the Self, sexually magnetized toward union with an Other, feels its boundaries loosening and thus comes to fear losing either its own sense of identity or the bliss of union. By playing with and playing out verbal formulations of difference ... this speaker strives to regain self-control.’9 We are led to a similar view of the poem through recognition of the threat of disharmony and ugliness posed by sexuality in the Platonic ideal of love as defined by Ficino.

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The strain of ideal love against ‘venereal madness’ is further evinced in the poem’s continual sexual wordplay. The opening lines might refer to the speaker’s promiscuous past: ‘Twice or thrice had I loved thee / Before I knew thy face or name.’ This implied consummation before physically meeting the lover might continue with a bawdy double entendre on ‘nothing’ in the final lines of the opening sestet – ’Still when, to where thou wert, I came, / Some lovely glorious nothing I did see’ – suggesting that not finding his beloved, the lover is enticed by available objects of sexual pursuit. This pun is repeated in ‘nothing doe’ (8). In the second stanza we find that infamous ‘pinnace,’ a word used in the period to refer both to a small ship and to a prostitute: the ship carrying too much ‘ballast’ might also be a sexual object too overwhelming in its display of ‘wares.’10 In a way that has gone unnoticed, the image of the ship might also allude to Olimpia’s abandonment by Bireno, the central event in the tenth canto of Orlando Furioso. Despite Olimpia’s loyalty during his imprisonment, Bireno’s affections turn elsewhere after their reunion – as it appears in Sir John Harington’s remarkable 1591 translation, ‘From flow to eb thus turned was the tide. / His late belov’d Olimpia lothsome grew’ (10.13).11 Bireno takes to ship while Olimpia is asleep, causing her to lament her abandonment upon waking: What meanest thou (thus poore Olimpia spake) So cruelly without me to depart? Bend back thy course and cease such speed to make; Thy vessel of her lading lacks a part. It little is the carkass poore to take Since that it doth alredie beare the hart.

(10.24)

The episode receives especial prominence in the frontispiece to the canto in Harington’s 1591 edition, which vividly portrays its various stages. Bireno makes the accomplished rake’s clean getaway after he has lost interest in his love object; his ship carries Olimpia’s heart but not her body. Aire and Angels, by contrast, laments that ‘loves pinnace is overfraught’ after spiritual love has been made physical, and suggests regret that the speaker ‘thought’ to load it with physical lading. Such roguery persists in the poem’s concluding lines: if we see there the implication of pregnancy, their assertion of the superiority of male love might lie in the freedom conferred by biology to walk away from such a situation unencumbered. And if this is their suggestion, then the

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spirit in which the poem concludes is entirely consistent with that of the poem following it in the Group I manuscripts and the 1633 Poems, Breake of day, where a female speaker pleads that her lover stay with her: Must businesse thee from hence remove? Oh, that’s the worst disease of love, The poore, the foule, the false, love can Admit, but not the busied man.

(13–16)

In the Group III manuscripts, Aire and Angels is followed by Witchcraft by a Picture, which describes a man leaving a tearful lover and showing little regard for her emotional anguish: But now I have drunke thy sweet salt teares, And though thou poure more I’ll depart; My picture vanish’d, vanish feares, That I can be endamag’d by that art[.]

(8–12)

Also suggestive of an association with Aire and Angels is this poem’s evocation of and departure from sonnet convention – it is fourteen lines broken into two seven-line stanzas with a rhyme of ababccc.12 The theme of physical possession in Aire and Angels is also reinforced by the poems with which it is surrounded in manuscripts and early editions. The first stanza, it should be recalled, concludes significantly with a figure describing not just attachment to but infiltration of the beloved: the speaker’s love having found its object will ‘assume [her] body.’ This finds ready parallel in A Feaver, the poem preceding Aire and Angels in the Group I manuscripts and the 1633 Poems, where the speaker wishes to mimic the fever’s fleeting possession of the woman’s body (25–8). Aire and Angels leaves unresolved the human condition of seeking spiritual love while trapped in a physical body: ‘For, nor in nothing, nor in things / Extreme, and scattring bright, can love inhere[.]’ This tension between idealized love and physical excitement also finds expression in Loves Growth, the poem following Aire and Angels in the Group II manuscripts and preceding it in the Group III manuscripts. Here the speaker seeks to find intellectual justification for the growth of his love with the arrival of spring: ‘Me thinkes I lyed all winter, when I swore, / My love was infinite, if spring make’it more’ (5–6). Like Aire and Angels, this poem takes the form of two ‘inverted’ sonnets and struggles with the spiritual and physical

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dynamics of human love, and it describes the ‘elementing’ of the two with sexual double entendre on ‘do’ – ’as all else, being elemented too, / Love sometimes would contemplate, sometimes do’ (13–14). Though the poem concludes with the assertion that the growth of love with the arrival of spring does not impinge upon its pure ideality, it moves in the second stanza from a simile likening degrees of love to the heavenly spheres to a rather less lofty comparison of love and taxes – ’As princes doe in times of action get / New taxes, and remit them not in peace’ – reminding us that the motives of springtime affection are more worldly than cosmic. Similarly, it is as the speaker of Aire and Angels seeks a middle ground between attaching love to spiritual nothingness and to physical passion that we find the poem’s masculinist finish, likening men’s love to an angel occupying the air of women’s love. That we are not fully prepared for this blandly insolent assertion of male superiority must be the point.13 Within the terms of the poem – not only, pace R.V. Young, within the terms of ‘current ideological predilections’14 – the statement falls flat, for we have seen nothing of the speaker that would justify this sense of superiority. The final statement works much like the climactic conceit of the compasses in A Valediction Forbidding Mourning, where sexual language strains against surface assertion of purely spiritual love. We are similarly led in Aire and Angels to be sceptical of the surface self-comparison to an angel in light of the rank physicality that seems an inextricable part of the speaker’s romantic experience. Here, too, surface meaning consistently seeks to distract from a physicality that intrudes itself at every turn. The explicit Thomism of the poem’s second angel figure is especially at odds with the human experience of love that the speaker has described. The image of the angel wearing ‘face and wings / Of aire’ has correctly and universally been identified with Thomas Aquinas’s account of the celestial messengers’ compacting of air in order to make themselves visible to humanity. Though the angels are incorporeal, they can take on a visible shape to accommodate themselves to our understanding: ‘It is true that air does not normally retain shape or colour; but when condensed it can have shape and colour, as in the clouds. The angels, then, assume bodies made of air, but condensed by divine power in an appropriate manner.’15 Phoebe Spinrad finds Protestant counterparts to this statement in the works of King James, Reginald Scot, and Ludwig Lavater.16 Though the reference is orthodox enough, the speaker’s self-comparison to a Thomist angel is quite unjustified. Unlike

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Thomas’s angels, which are pure Form and have no physical being, this speaker is driven, even overtaken entirely, by physical impulse. Also unlike Thomas’s angels, the speaker here arrogates to himself the ‘divine power’ of shaping air – in both the Summa and the Sentences, Thomas makes clear that the angels do not take on airy bodies by their own agency. Despite his claims Donne’s speaker is not at all a pure intelligence accommodating himself by God’s power to the faculties of a lesser creature. He does not take on airy shape to spread divine tidings; he seeks justification for an inability to set aside bestial libido. The poem’s earlier reference to angels raises similar concerns about the speaker’s intellectualization of his tendency to be overcome by sexual desire: ‘So in a voice, so in a shapeless flame, / Angells affect us oft, and worship’d bee.’ Dionysius likens scriptural references to the fiery nature of angels to similar statements made about God, stating that ‘imagery of fire best expresses the way in which the intelligent beings of heaven are like the Deity ... In this way they show how closely these resemble the divine and how much they are, to the extent possible, imitators of God.’17 In his Treatise of Angels, John Salkeld likens the angelic quality of being circumscripti in loco to the influence of a flame, with greater angels exerting more ‘heat’ than their inferiors do. Salkeld also describes how the angels influence humanity: either by ‘outward sensible signes’ or ‘the production of inward phantasmes, representations, intellectual formes or species.’ Following Girolamo Zanchi, he distinguishes between such movement of human intellect and the inner promptings of grace. The angels may ‘move both our understandings and wils’ and excite our ‘passions’ by ‘perswading, speaking, and cooperating inwardly with us,’ but only God ‘doth moue our will as it pleaseth his diuine Majesty to draw it.’18 While the figure in the second stanza of Aire and Angels plays on how angels take on airy shape in order to influence us by outward signs, that of the first stanza plays on their inward influence, suggested by the ‘voice’ by which angels ‘affect us oft.’ Unlike divine grace, which can overtake human will when it pleases, such angelic motions are subject to human misinterpretation. This seems to be the case here, for our speaker is not prompted to love of the divine, but to inappropriate angel ‘worship,’ a tendency universally frowned upon by theologians and famously declared inappropriate in Augustine’s De vera religione – we do not find a statement of Dionysian procession and return, where fiery angelic nature is a reminder of the divine. This is not only, as Spinrad notes, suggestive of angelolatry, but may also have a sexual double meaning typical of the

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poem.19 ‘Worship’ may carry in this instance the sense of sexual attraction that it does in Farewell to Love: ‘the thing which lovers so / Blindly admire, and with such worship wooe; / Being had, enjoying it decayes’ (14–16). Interpreted by this speaker, the promptings of angels produce an effect that one might expect from Succubi, those lascivious spirits still taken seriously in James’s Daemonologie.20 It is important to dwell on Aire and Angels in this way because the ambiguities and critical controversies surrounding this poem are illustrative of the challenges in finding in Donne’s work a stable position on angels. Though R.V. Young points in lucid and informed ways to this poem’s engagement of Neoplatonism and Petrarchism, his assertion that the poem posits ‘a radically Thomist conclusion’ on the dilemma of human love attributes to this poem a greater normative voice than the text allows.21 This is just one instance where Donne evokes traditional angelology in a way suggesting that it belongs more in the realm of idle thought than doctrinal truth. He seems to take for granted Dionysian hierarchy in A Funerall Elegie – ’What is’t to us, alas, if there have beene / An Angell made a Throne, or Cherubim?’ (49–50) – and the apostolic dating of the Corpus Dionysiacum in his sermons.22 Such statements are far too fleeting and infrequent, however, to be said to occupy a substantive place in his thought. Donne’s angels would thus seem to foster one common portrait of him: a consistently inconsistent poet’s poet with little regard for anything in the universe outside of the emotion conveyed in the poem at hand, a view expressed in C.S. Lewis’s apt comment on Donne’s similes: ‘It may be true that Donne cannot court a mistress without bringing in scholastic philosophy, law, chemistry, and cosmography. But he has no interest in these things except as toys and does not care in the least what place they have, if any, in the real universe – if, indeed, there is a real universe outside the present emotion.’23 Given our reading of Aire and Angels, one might be tempted to add angelology to Donne’s intellectual toy chest. My aim here will be to resist this temptation, and to argue instead for a consistent view of divine economy underpinning early and late work, verse and prose. Confusion and contradiction, after all, can play a role in outlining larger certainty, a tendency suggested by full recognition of the role of ideas suggested by one of Donne’s pet terms, ‘ideate.’ David Norbrook has drawn attention to the appearance of the term in the verse letter ‘To Sir Henry Wotton’ (4), and in Donne’s comments on the ‘Idæated’ utopias of Plato and Sir Thomas More.24 That the term is associated with speculation is revealed in Pseudo-Martyr:

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But for this spirituall Monarchie which they have fansied, I thinke, that as some men have imagined, and produced into writing, divers Idaeas, and so sought what a King, a Generall, an Oratour, a Courtier should be, So these men have only Idaeated what a Pope would be. For if he could come to a true and reall exercise of all that power which they attribute to him, I doubt not, but that Angell, which hath so long served in the place of being the particular Assistant in the Conclave, (for, since they affoord a particular Tutelar Angell to everie Colledge and Corporation, And to the race of Flyes and Fleas, and of Ants, since they allowe such an Angell to euery Infidell Kingdome, yea to Antichrist, yea to Hell it selfe, it were verie unequall to denie one to this place,) This Angell, I say, would be glad of the roome, and become a Suiter to the holy Ghost, to name him in the next Conclaue. For he should not onely enlarge his Diocesse, and have all the lower world under him, but hee shall haue those two principall Seraphins which ever attend the Pope, Michael, and Gabriel; (for, that Gabriel is the second, Victorellus produces two very equall witnesses, The Romane Litanie, and Tassoes Hierusalem.) (180.10–27)

This is one of the precious few instances where Donne’s wit shines in this tract’s juristic accumulation of inartificial evidence – as Donne’s nineteenth-century editor, Dr Jessopp, famously remarked, ‘Who but a monomaniac would read Pseudo-Martyr through?’ Donne uses Roman Catholic placement of angels on anthills, in infidel nations, in Hell, and in the papal conclave damningly to elide these spaces. With the understated phrase ‘two very equall witnesses’ he presents the Roman litany and Tasso as equally fictive, and summarily dismisses Victorellus’s authority. Surely Donne would also have recognized the homonymic association between his pet term ‘ideate’ and a favourite term from the elegies, ‘ideot’ (Elegy VII, 1; Elegy X, 26). Taken together, these suggest a progress of human thought that begins in idiocy, turns to speculation, and on occasion ends in truth; those who are most dangerous confuse the middle term for the last, revealing their proximity to the first. It is by the guidance of grace and the Word, the Essays in Divinity tells us, that we arrive at true Ideas and escape the human tendency to generate intellectual chimeras: ‘and let [my soul] now produce Creatures, thoughts, words, and deeds agreeable to thee. And let her not produce them, O God, out of any contemplation, or (I cannot say, Idæa, but) Chimera of my worthinesse ... but meerely out of Nothing; Nothing pre-existent in her selfe, but by power of thy divine will and word.’25 Most significant for

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present purposes is Donne’s use in the above passage from PseudoMartyr of the phrase ‘only Idæated,’ and his citation of elaborate angelology as a particularly conspicuous example of imagined ideas as opposed to authoritative truth. Though he evokes the Platonic signification of ‘Idea,’ Donne dismisses the inherent authority of form over the realm of sense. The tendency to justify authority with reference to angels becomes by his logic a particularly absurd attempt to lend hegemonic significance to mere fiction. This scepticism is quite consistent with Aire and Angels, where we see angelology deployed in a way that aims to intellectualize and mask sexual foibles. Such ‘ideation’ also animates the Anniversaries. Ben Jonson’s oft-cited account of his dialogue with Donne is illuminating in this regard: ‘Dones Anniversarie was profane and full of Blasphemies[;] that he told Mr Donne, if it had been written of ye Virgin Marie it had been something to which he answered that he described the Idea of a Woman and not as she was.’26 The supposed blasphemy of the poem cuts both ways: it is not only an impious elevation of Elizabeth Drury, but also an implicit diminution of the Virgin Mary’s privileged status as exemplar of the Idea of a Woman. In Donne’s ‘symbolic praise,’ to use Barbara Lewalski’s term, it is not Elizabeth Drury or the Virgin Mary that is praiseworthy, but the idea of virtue that, as Donne is fully aware, is not a literal portrait of either of these women whom he never met.27 It must be remembered, too, that this Idea of a Woman is ‘only Ideated’; if it has value, it derives from its relationship to the doctrines of Original Sin and prevenient grace, as shown especially in the description of Elizabeth Drury’s spiritual journey in The Second Anniversary: Who kept, by diligent devotion, Gods Image, in such reparation, Within her heart, that what decay was growen, Was her first Parents fault, and not her owne: Who being solicited to any Act, Still heard God pleading his safe precontract; Who by a faithfull confidence, was here Betrothed to God, and now is married there[.]

(455–62)

The scepticism cast on Mary’s embodiment of ideal female virtue in this poem’s Reformed portrait of devotion coincides with the barbs on Roman Catholicism in The First Anniversary – the gibe at the Roman Eucharist in ‘feed (not banquet) on / The supernaturall food, Religion’

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(187–8), and the satirical comment on Elizabeth’s supernatural power to lend ‘Some nunneries some graines of chastitie’ (424). Angels similarly occupy in Donne’s universe this realm of Idea, and are valued as symbolic representations of proper devotion rather than as literal mediators of divine mystery. Where Hooker is torn between Dionysian mediation and Augustinian immediacy, Donne consistently presents mediation as unnecessary in a vision of devotion that is fundamentally sola Scriptura and sola gratia. This focus on God’s meting out of truth, rather than on hierarchical intercession, also informs his views on the church. Far from being a by-product of the shifting winds of Donne’s fancy, these views are quite remarkably consistent given the multifarious emergent occasions of his career, from the trials of a would-be courtier to those of a divine, and from the Elizabethan to the Jacobean and Caroline churches. In exploring this consistency, we shall examine his thought on angels as revealing his views on the church first in his prose, specifically Pseudo-Martyr and the sermons, and then in his poetry, with especial emphasis on the ecclesiology of Satyre III and Holy Sonnet VIII, and the engagement of Dionysian mysticism in The Second Anniversary and elsewhere. As an expression of Donne’s views on the nature of devotion, PseudoMartyr (1610) should be approached with some caution. It is Donne’s first printed work of real length and an explicit attempt to curry the favour of James I; the position it outlines must be considered in light of this publicity. It is also, however, composed in the same period as a good portion of Donne’s religious verse, and may thus be a text more illuminating to these poems than the sermons, to which critics frequently turn. Despite the public pressures weighing on Pseudo-Martyr, moreover, Donne’s approach to James and to the Oath of Allegiance controversy does show the ecumenical concern prominent elsewhere in his works: he appeals to James not as the doctrinally Calvinist head of the church who held appeal for moderate puritans, but as the monarch who sought through his pacific foreign policy to reunite Christendom as a collection of state churches paying little heed to Rome in temporal matters. In this approach he sets himself apart from such defenders of the Oath as William Barlow, Bishop of Lincoln, whose Answer to a Catholicke English-Man (1609) Donne dismisses in a letter to Goodyere not only as ‘unscholarlike’ but also as divisive in its narrowly partisan handling of the Jesuit Robert Parsons: ‘And for the person[,] ... upon whom he amasses as many opprobries as any other could deserve, he

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pronounceth, that he will account any answer from his adversary slander, except he do (as he hath done) draw whatsoever he saith of him from authors of the same religion, and in print.’28 In the same letter Donne declares his favour for ‘unity in religion’ and his view of Christendom as a single ‘corporation,’ though he recognizes the irreconcilability of the issue at hand: ‘both sides may be in justice and innocence ... for, clearly, our state cannot be safe without the Oath; since they profess that clergymen, though traitors, are no subjects, and that all the rest may be none tomorrow. And, as clearly, the supremacy which the Roman Church pretend were diminished, if it were limited.’29 This balanced spirit in which Donne writes to his fairly unreligious friend Goodyere should not be overemphasized. Pseudo-Martyr is quite clearly a Protestant tract with flourishes in praise of ‘the good health and sound constitution of the Reformed Religion.’30 It separates itself from more vitriolic controversialism, however, in its fundamentally humane approach to the Oath controversy, an approach signalled in the Preface by Donne’s declared purpose of the ‘unity and peace’ of the church, and by his famous conversion narrative: ‘I used no inordinate hast, nor precipitation in binding my conscience to any locall Religion. I had a longer worke to doe then many other men; for I was first to blot out, certaine impressions of the Romane religion’ (12.33, 13.9–12). More subtly, this approach is signalled to the narrow circle of coterie readers familiar with Biathanatos by the clear echoes generated between the opening pages of Pseudo-Martyr and that interrogation of blanket condemnations. The charitable spirit animating Donne’s argument that suicide not always be considered sinful is applied to his consideration of the plight of Recusants. Donne begins by recalling many of the statements of Biathanatos: his qualification of Aristotle’s unequivocal view of self-destruction in the Ethics, his interrogation of ecclesiastical and legal inflexibility on ‘this ordinary disease,’ and his reference to the presence of the human impulse even in the utopian visions of Plato and Sir Thomas More (29–30). For the purposes of Pseudo-Martyr, he does adjust his reference to suicide among natives of the Indies more fully to emphasize Spanish brutality.31 This is more than innocent writerly recycling. It signals Donne’s recognition of the complex loyalties at stake for English Roman Catholics, and his reluctance to trade in high-handed dogmatism. Though fundamentally Reformist, then, Donne’s approach does not dismiss Romish religion out of hand. Instead it drives a wedge between truly ‘Catholic’ religion and the extremist, self-interested

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position of the pope and his Jesuit henchmen – Pseudo-Martyr thus differs in prevailing tone, but not in substantive argument, from the satirical association of the papacy and the Jesuits with Lucifer in Ignatius His Conclave. Donne refers to the pope as Antichrist and the Jesuits as ‘Devils’ while claiming that ‘no point of Catholique faith ... is impugned by us,’ and inviting the Recusants into the fold of the national church: ‘nor is the Church so soure and tetricall, but that she admits with ease and joy, those, which after long straying, not only into that Religion, but into such treasons and disobediences, as that Religion produces, returne to her againe’ (Ps-M, 36.27–37). While it is tempting to see this position as reflective of Donne’s personal experience as a Roman Catholic convert, it must be recalled that several divines in the Jacobean church make claims resembling his in PseudoMartyr: James Ussher provides the same distinction between the Roman and the catholic church, William Bedell the same invitation to Recusants to join the national church, and Joseph Hall the same claim that despite its flaws the Roman church remains a true church.32 Donne also strikes precisely the note that James wished to do during the Oath controversy. As with the puritans in the Hampton Court conference of 1604, James extends during the Oath controversy an olive branch to those moderate Recusants willing to respect the English church and monarchy while heaping scorn upon the sort of radical responsible for the Gunpowder Plot.33 Ameliorating the view of his earlier Paraphrase upon the Revelation of St John, at this juncture James identifies the pope as Antichrist only insofar as he meddles in the temporal affairs of monarchs. His own defence of the Oath, Triplici nodo, triplex cuneus, consistently emphasizes the ‘naturall obedience’ he is owed as temporal monarch and denies any intention to coerce Roman Catholic subjects into Protestant worship.34 In a similar vein, Donne argues that because the English church will still allow Recusants to take the sacraments and hear the Word preached they are not being prevented from practising fundamental elements of Christian faith, making the martyrdom and resistance encouraged by Rome entirely baseless. As opposed to this spurious foreign influence, Donne encourages a nationalist regard for civil order: ‘And if the [pope’s] suspicious and quarrelsome title and claime to this temporall Jurisdiction; ... If your owne just and due preservation, worke nothing upon you, yet have some pitie and compassion towards your Countrey’ (26.28–32). The Oath of Allegiance is, by this logic, an act of civil obedience that has little bearing upon spiritual loyalties. Donne furthermore shows

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over and again the erroneous argumentation of Robert Bellarmine and others who would defend the papacy’s temporal authority. The extent of Donne’s separation of temporal and spiritual authority is also somewhat unlike James’s position. Though he ostensibly argues only for civil obedience, James also adopts in Triplici nodo the status of godly monarch of which he was clearly fond. His use of biblical examples of temporal obedience moves from that paid by the Israelites to Pharaoh to a series of references indicating that the authority of the monarch is second only to God’s, drawn from Tertullian, Justin Martyr, and Saint Ambrose, among others. Though he argues that the Oath of Allegiance should not be equated with the Oath of Supremacy, his calls for temporal obedience are consistently delivered in a language suggesting the monarch’s role as political and spiritual leader.35 Rather than seeing the prince unequivocally as the head of church and state, Donne seems to see the relationship between prince and priest as symbiotic: It is intire man that God hath care of, and not the soule alone; therefore his first worke was the body, and the last worke shall bee the glorification thereof. He hath not delivered us over to a Prince onely, as to a Physitian, and to a Lawyer, to looke to our bodies and estates; and to the Priest onely, as to a Confessor, to looke to, and examine our soules, but the Priest must aswel endevour, that we live vertuously and innocently in this life for society here, as the Prince, by his lawes keepes us in the way to heaven[.] (38.32–39.4)

Though the prince governs the body with regard for the soul, and the role of the body in Creation cannot be discounted, the office of the priest is more fully associated with the higher calling of spiritual care.36 This is not the typical Jacobean argument for the prince as David or Solomon redivivus, but as a legislator who guides subjects on the path to heaven insofar as external governance can. Also significant is the nature of the spiritual authority that Donne locates in the clergy, where we see a strong departure from Hooker’s crypto-Dionysian retention of mystery in ecclesiastical orders and ceremonies. Indeed, the jure divino justification of ecclesiastical hierarchy promulgated by Saravia in the 1590s would in the following decade come under the scrutiny of such Calvinist divines of the national church as Andrew Willet. In his popular encyclopaedia of popish errors, the Synopsis papismi, Willet identifies jure divino with the

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‘princely’ authority that Bellarmine arrogates to the bishops, refers to episcopacy only as an ‘ancient custom,’ and associates English bishops with the reformed divines of Geneva and Germany. His left-leaning Reformist sympathies are revealed in his insistence that bishops preach and live simply, and that the ordination of bishops does not differ from that of ministers.37 The pervasiveness of this abandonment of Saravian principles is indicated in the Hampton Court conference, where Bishop Bancroft seems an isolated voice of the jure divino arguments of the previous decade.38 Donne seems to share Willet’s view in his dismissal of Bellarmine’s ‘Superstitious’ Dionysian argument that the ecclesiastical hierarchy is divinely ordained and hence unalterable (Ps-M, 77.29–30); he also goes further than Willet does in his reluctance to present either regal authority or ecclesiastical hierarchy as immediately instituted by God. Though the power enjoyed by the king and his church is divine in origin, the institutions of monarchy and episcopacy are framed by natural law and human reason: God has ‘enlightened our Nature and Reason, to digest and prepare such a forme, as may bee aptest to ... conserve us in Peace and in Religion: And that since the establishing of the Christian Church, he hath testified abundantly, that Regall Authoritie, by subordination of Bishops is that best and fittest way to those ends’ (131.7–13). Monarchy and episcopacy are not ‘Immediate’ expressions of divine order, but rather ‘Mediate’ conduits of divine power (77.30–1). Though these institutions are alterable, the divinely implanted human desire for peaceful civil society and conservation of religion finds fullest satisfaction when a hereditary king supports an episcopal church. This argument does not entirely remove God’s influence, but it does differ markedly from a Saravian episcopacy immediately instituted by Christ and the apostles. It favours instead the portrait of church and state that had been promoted by Whitgift and later by the moderate puritans prominent in the Jacobean church: that ecclesiastical government is a matter indifferent, and that the English solution effectively promotes civil and spiritual order.39 The sermons sustain this distinction between mediate and immediate divine authority in terrestrial institutions, and especially advance a Reformist emphasis on preaching. Here, too, we can clarify Donne’s position by comparison with Hooker: where Hooker describes the church as a ‘societie supernaturall’ of mysterious and vitally necessary order, Donne locates the supernatural element of church devotion in

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the act of preaching. Where Hooker refers to the regard that must be shown to the church’s angelic guests in his arguments for decorum in church prayer and ceremony, Donne, as he puts it in his poem on the Sidneys’ translation of the Psalms, claims that ‘Angels learne by what the church does here’ (Upon the Translation of the Psalmes, 28). Human devotion need not be ordered in a fashion inoffensive to our hierarchical superiors; these celestial guests stand to benefit just as much as their human counterparts do from the central mystery in Donne’s vision of church worship, the preaching of the Word. He thus sustains Reformist valuation of preaching, but, in his emphasis on orderly sermons within the established church, marginalizes the extemporizing preaching of puritan radicals. As he puts it in a passage of understated eloquence in the second Prebend sermon, the human ‘Idea’ of worship should conform to God’s Idea as revealed in the Word and the traditions of the church: If I pretend to serve God, and he aske me for my Idea, How I meane to serve him, shall I be able to produce none? If he aske me an Idea of my Religion, and my opinions, shall I not be able to say, It is that which thy word, and thy Catholique Church hath imprinted in me? ... But if I come to pray or preach without this kind of Idea, if I come to extemporall prayer, and extemporall preaching, I shall come to an extemporall faith, and extemporall religion; and then I must look for an extemporall Heaven, a Heaven to be made for me; for to that Heaven which belongs to the Catholique Church, I shall never come, except I go by the way of the Catholique Church, by former Idea’s, former examples, former patternes, To beleeve according to ancient beliefes, to pray according to ancient formes, to preach according to former meditations. God does nothing, man does nothing well, without these Idea’s, these retrospects, this recourse to pre-conceptions, pre-deliberations. (DPS, 2.367–88)40

As opposed to human extemporizing, the Word and the church are imprinted with God’s Idea of religion and are thus the only path to his heaven. While ‘private prayer in our Chamber’ still holds value in Donne’s vision of devotion, ‘the greatest power of all is in the publique prayer of the Congregation’ (DPS, 4.411–14). Donne thus draws a distinction between that which is ‘only Ideated’ by humanity and God’s ‘Idea.’ He also points to tradition as a reliable reflection of God’s Idea of devotion, though it must be stressed that his notion of tradition and of catholic faith points not to the medieval

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Roman Catholic Church, but to the basic elements of Christian faith that are the concern of Protestant repristination – the ‘former meditations’ he cites in this sermon are, typically, those of such Fathers as Jerome, Chrysostom, and Augustine. In this spirit he deploys angels in the sermons largely figuratively and in a way that underwrites a sola Scriptura, sola gratia divine economy with emphasis on the special evangelical role of the church. If Donne shares the spirit of one of the Fathers in his angelology, it is not Dionysius’s hierarchical mediation, but John Chrysostom’s use of the celestial creatures for illustration of aspects of human devotion. In his Homilies against the Anomeans Chrysostom draws on the Seraphim’s self-veiling with their wings in Isaiah’s vision of God’s throne as illustration of creaturely inability to endure God’s glory – if these angels ‘cannot endure the bright rays shining and radiating from this throne,’ how can we comprehend God’s infinity?41 Chrysostom furthermore claims that God does not always employ angelic mediators; rather, ‘if you pray constantly and with fervor ... God himself, without any mediator, will illumine your mind.’42 In his Easter sermon of 1622 Donne critiques Dionysian speculation on angelic mediation as he praises Chrysostom’s ‘unspeakable wisdom, and Fatherly care’ (Sermons, 4: 2.567–72, 691). Though he does not directly cite the angelology of the latter, it does fit much more neatly with the Christocentric approach of the sermon, in which Donne reads the apocalyptic Archangel of 1 Thessalonians – ’the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the Archangel’ (1 Thessalonians 4.16) – to be Christ (Sermons, 4: 2.253). This reading also recalls Calvin’s approach to angels, with its scepticism of human speculation and its tendency to argue that several especially significant biblical angels are in fact Christ: the angels of Jacob’s ladder are a ‘symbol of Christ,’ because ‘he alone joins heaven and earth’; scripture refers to the angels appearing to Abraham, Jacob, and Moses as ‘gods’ because ‘Christ was that angel.’43 Calvin, too, shares much of the spirit of Chrysostom’s angelology: he reads the vision of Isaiah 6 as a sign of ‘God’s most glorious and splendid majesty’ and claims, not surprisingly, that God does not require angelic mediation: ‘whenever he pleases, he passes them by, and performs his own work by a single nod.’44 Donne more explicitly shows his agreement with Calvin’s views on angels in his Easter sermon of 1629, which is based on the text ‘Behold, he put no trust in his servants, and his angels he charged with folly’ (Job 4.18). The Jesuit convert to the English church Salkeld brings this

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passage into harmony with Thomist angelology by claiming that it must refer to the angels in their natural understanding, before they received the divine illumination by which they became fixed in their beatitude.45 Donne eschews excuse-making on the angels’ behalf and follows Calvin’s comment that the beings earning this charge are loyal angels, praising the Genevan reformer’s principle that ‘though this seeme to derogate from the honour of Angels, that being confirmed [in grace], they should be subject to weaknesse, yet, sayes he, we must not pervert nor force any place of Scripture, for the honour of the Angels’ (Sermons, 8: 16.152–4, 145–8). While Calvin is singular in his interpretation, his reading is not a newfangled departure from tradition but an adherence to ‘Truth, and all Truth is ancient’ (165). Also showing Reformed emphasis is Donne’s most extended discussion of angels in his sermons, the All Saints’ Day sermon of 1623.46 In the view of church worship here described, Donne dismisses the necessity of angels in divine mediation, is reluctant to grant them a place of honour in the congregation, and reads mention of them in scripture symbolically to affirm Christ’s central role in human soteriology and to endow the preached Word with divine mystery. The passage on which Donne preaches in this sermon certainly invites discussion of the role of angels in the protection of the elect: ‘And I saw another angel ascending from the East, which had the seale of the living God, and he cryed with a loud voyce to the foure angels, to whom power was given to hurt the earth, and the sea, saying, hurt yee not the earth, neither the sea, neither the trees, till we have sealed the servants of our God in their foreheads’ (Revelation 7.2–3). Donne follows the opinion of ‘many Expositors’ in stating that the angel ascending from the East in this text, ‘which doth so much for Gods Saints, is ... our Saviour Christ himselfe’ (Sermons, 10: 1.223–5). Even though the ultimate security for ‘our deliverance and protection’ comes from ‘this Angel ... as this Angel is Christ,’ we also have a ‘more immediate, and more applicable’ source of security, namely ‘the servant of Christ too; This Angel is the Minister of his Word, the Administrer of his Sacraments, the Mediator betweene Christ and Man ... This Angel is indeed, the whole frame, and Hierarchy of the Christian Church’ (257–71). It is significant that Donne treats the hierarchy of the church in toto, rather than dividing its orders according to varying degrees of illumination, and emphasizes as he proceeds ministration of the Word as especially fundamental to Christian faith. In making the association between ministers and the angel of the East who is a stand-in for Christ, Donne also elevates the ministry

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above the influence of angels: ‘The ministery of celestiall Angels is inferiour to the ministery of the Ecclesiasticall; The Gospel (which belongs to us) is truly Euangelium, the good Ministery of the good Angels, the best ministery of the best Angels; for though we compare not with those Angels in nature, we compare with them in office’ (293–8). Not only is the preaching of the gospel in the church better accommodated to human faculties than invisible angelic ministration, as the Word it is more immediately connected to God – it is in an immediate sense evangelium, ‘good tidings,’ and thus more directly divine than those mediating spirits, the angeli or ‘messengers.’ Though no human being, clergy or laity, is elevated to angelic nature, the ‘office’ of preaching is higher than the angels’ invisible ministration. This diminution of the angels’ role is consistent with Reformed emphasis on Paul’s warning against angel worship in Colossians 2.18 and the rebuke of John for falling at the feet of an angel in Revelation 19.10 and 22.8–9.47 In its reading of Revelation, the sermon consistently downplays the role of angels and urges an embrace of the soteriological value of the Word preached in Christ’s church. Donne thus avoids Dionysian notions of celestial and ecclesiastical mediation and shows little regard for angelic ministration more generally. His emphasis on preaching the Word points to sympathies more consistent with the Calvinism of the Jacobean church than with Hooker’s and Saravia’s late Elizabethan conformity, a sympathy also suggested by Donne’s adoption in some regards of Calvin’s interpretations of biblical angels. Unlike his late Elizabethan counterparts, Donne does not present church ceremony and ecclesiastical orders as unalterable and divinely ordained, but focuses instead on an aspect of devotion more agreeable to the principle of sola Scriptura, the preaching of the Word. He is, as Daniel W. Doerksen has described him, an adherent of the Thirty-Nine Articles who is a moderate Calvinist in his conformism.48 It is significant, however, that Donne grants special privilege to preaching within the church and values a learned ministry aware of the purest elements of the tradition as especially equipped to deliver the Word in its true spirit, concerns distinguishing him from the further left wing of reformed thought. Donne’s poems reflect this reliance on grace and the Word. Even though we see the Dionysian traditions of angelology and mysticism frequently evoked, these are consistently rendered as unstable human ideas opposed to immediate expressions of divine will. These traditions are thus, and in a way that we might expect from our reading of

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Aire and Angels, associated with the human tendency to wander in the labyrinths of worldly error, intellectually inviting as they may be, rather than in God’s truth, a theme that runs through a broad range of poems dealing with angels or with mystical flight: The Litanie and Holy Sonnets, the Anniversaries, and the Obsequies to the Lord Harrington. Though Donne draws on the traditions associated with the PseudoAreopagite, he ultimately bids them adieu in a way consistent with Calvin’s repudiation of Platonizing theology: ‘Away, then, with that Platonic philosophy of seeking access to God by means of angels, and courting them with the view of making God more propitious ... – a philosophy which presumptuous and superstitious men attempted at first to introduce into our religion, and which they persist in even to this day.’49 This rejection applies both to Neoplatonist angelology and to mystical formulations like Bonaventure’s in which the ascent to God is mounted on angel wings. Such a stance rhymes well with Donne’s poetic approach to ecclesiology in Satyre III. Here the supposedly rakish Jack Donne of the 1590s provides the kind of informed and subtle-minded defence of the English church that would find fuller expression in his Pseudo-Martyr and sermons. Through the satirical portraits that form the poem’s middle, Donne leads us away from the extremes in religion posed by Rome and Geneva – the errors of his Mirreus and Crants, respectively – and from other erroneous paths to religious truth. Graius’s adherence to the national church arises from an unsearching acceptance of the words of ‘Some Preachers, vile ambitious bauds, and lawes / Still new like fashions’ (55–6), and from an unthinking conformism, ‘hee / Imbraceth her, whom his Godfathers will / Tender to him’ (58–60). Phrygius and Graccus have abandoned real discernment of religious truth; the former dismisses all churches as corrupt – ’Carelesse Phrygius doth abhorre / All, because all cannot be good, as one / Knowing some women whores, dares marry none’ (62–4) – and the latter indifferently ‘loves all as one’: this blindnesse too much light breeds; but unmoved thou Of force must one, and forc’d but one allow; And the right; aske thy father which is shee, Let him aske his; though truth and falshood bee Neare twins, yet truth a little elder is; Be busie to seek her, beleeve me this, Hee’s not of none, nor worst, that seeks the best.

(68–75)

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Richard Strier has argued that there is not much wrong with Graccus’s position, and that the ‘force’ compelling us to ‘aske [our] father’ leaves us in a position much like Graius’s. On the contrary, Graccus takes the trappings of piety to be religious truth – ’As women do in divers countries goe / In divers habits, yet are still one kinde; / So doth, so is Religion’ (66–8) – and, as a result, finds religion where there is in fact none: his ‘blind- / nesse too much light breeds.’ Like Phrygius, he does not discern any difference at all among the various churches and has given over the search for God’s truth that is the soul’s highest calling. The poem dismisses his overemphasis of externals in the flesh/soul distinction underpinning the parallels between religious and romantic attitudes found throughout the satirical portraits: ‘Flesh (it selfes death) and joyes which flesh can taste, / Thou lovest; and thy faire goodly soule, which doth / Give this flesh power to taste joy, thou dost loath’ (40–3). To put it another way, both Phrygius and Graccus are sceptics in a poem with the Stoic moral centre that one would expect from satire.50 Unlike Donne’s other satires, where the reader implicitly shares the moral fitness of the satirist upbraiding the world around him, here the satirist’s raillery thrusts upon us much more urgently the moral choice that each individual must make – the frequency of imperatives in the poem is striking and unprecedented in the satires: ‘Know thy foes’ (33), ‘Seeke true religion’ (43), ‘now doe’ (85), and ‘Keepe the truth which thou hast found’ (89). We are ‘forc’d’ to make a decision on religious truth in this poem, though not by tradition or human law but by the impending Judgment to which the poem intermittently refers (35–9, 94–5). The lines directing us to ask our ‘father’ do not promote Graius’s unthinking traditionalism, but rather encourage us to join the elect nation Moses describes in his hymn in Deuteronomy: ‘ask thy father, and he will shew thee; thy elders, and they will tell thee. When the Most High divided to the nations their inheritance, when he separated the sons of Adam, he set the bounds of the people according to the number of the children of Israel. For the LORD’s portion is his people’ (Deuteronomy 32.7–10). Significantly, though Donne’s allusion to Deuteronomy evokes a discourse of national election, he resists overt English Protestant chauvinism and its conventional association of Rome with Antichrist. In this poem’s eschatology, it is worldliness more broadly that is the Whore of Babylon: The worlds all parts wither away and passe, So the worlds selfe, thy other lov’d foe, is

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(36–9)

This ‘worne strumpet’ is in the background of Mirreus’s turn to Rome, which is a turn not to ‘true religion’ but to ‘her ragges’ (43, 47) – Strier’s claim that Donne here suggests menstrual rags is convincing. The Genevan Crants, however, is a ‘Lecherous humor’ in his contemptuous suspicion of all beauty in devotion, as ‘one that judges / No wenches wholesome, but course country drudges’ (53–4). This attitude, too, deduces religious value by worldly externals rather than heavenly truth. This dismissal of externals also questions temporal law and, by implication, political arguments for Elizabethan conformity: Foole and wretch, wilt thou let thy Soule be tyed To mans lawes, by which she shall not be tryed At the last day? ... That thou mayest rightly obey power, her bounds know; Those past, her nature, and name is chang’d; to be Then humble to her is idolatrie.

(93–5, 100–2)

As he would later do in Pseudo-Martyr, Donne draws a clear distinction between temporal and spiritual authority. Where the focus in his later tract is on the papacy encroaching upon temporal jurisdiction, here he suggests that all temporal rulers must recognize the limits on their power emphasized here with reference to the Apocalypse. If Donne praises the English church it is by indicating the terms by which it is embraced by the right-thinking believer: not out of religious indifference or sheepish obedience to civil and ecclesiastical authority, but at the end of an ardent individual search for God’s truth. As such the national church that seems like the most sensible option at the poem’s end is associated with a fully Protestant religious ethic. Individual seeking, however, is a problematic category in the discourse of ecclesiastical conformism. Hooker, we’ll recall, often describes desire rather than reason as the ground of human devotion, but is careful to subordinate desire to the truth as mediated by orders of the church. In his other explicitly ecclesiological poem, ‘Show me deare Christ,’ Donne similarly expresses desire for union with God only to cast doubt on the human terms in which it is necessarily con-

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ceived. The sestet moves from language of romance, to love triangle between speaker, spouse, and Christ, to the final paradox of the spouse most faithful when most promiscuous: Dwells she with us, or like adventuring knights First travaile we to seeke and then make Love? Betray kind husband thy spouse to our sights, And let myne amorous soule court thy mild Dove, Who is most trew, and pleasing to thee, then When she’is embrac’d and open to most men.

(9–14)

In this irreverent play on the church as Bride of Christ, Donne calls our attention to the insufficiency of a human frame of reference in the discernment of God’s ways – as he does elsewhere in the Holy Sonnets, whether describing the cleansing of sin in Christ’s blood to drowning it in the ‘Lethean flood,’ thus associating Christ’s redemptive power with the pagan underworld (IX, 11); or comparing his desire for God’s love to his previous courtship of ‘profane mistresses’ (XIII, 10); or likening the divine love signified by the Incarnation and Redemption to a man’s repurchase of his stolen goods (XV, 9–12). The final lines of ‘Show me deare Christ,’ to use Donne’s language from Upon the Translation of the Psalmes, ‘thrust into strait corners of poore wit / Thee who art cornerlesse and infinite’ (3–4). They show what is suggested by the poem’s opening line: that discernment of the true church is a revealed truth available neither to reason nor desire. The best we can do in the absence of direct revelation, to recall the language of Satyre III, is to ‘doubt wisely’ (77). As in Hooker’s Reformed anthropology, this view takes the mystical desire for union with God as the foundation of human worship, but with a strong awareness of its limits and its tendency to be misapplied. Reason must be on constant lookout to decipher God’s truth from competing alternatives. Donne’s engagement of Dionysian angelology and mysticism in his poetry tends to reinforce such reliance on grace and the Word, and his scepticism of human ability to obtain vision of the divine. He consistently maintains the emphasis of Satyre III that this life is one of seeking the correct path rather than enjoying it. In the eighth holy sonnet this thoroughgoing deferral of the satisfaction of our union with God is described with reference to the limits of angelic knowledge. The poem opens with the protasis ‘If faithfull soules be alike glorifi’d / As Angels’ (1–2). The apodosis offered in the first quatrain

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claims that added to the ‘full felicitie’ of his father’s soul is the angelic awareness ‘That valiantly I hels wide mouth o’rstride’ (3, 4). The ability of angels and blessed souls to arrive at such awareness, however, is interrogated in the second quatrain, which introduces a contrary protasis: But if our mindes to these soules be descry’d By circumstances, and by signes that be Apparent in us not immediately, How shall my mindes white truth by them be try’d?

(5–8)

This is a loaded question, for it brings the foundational principles of Thomist angelology under suspicion. In his seminal interpretation of Dionysius, Thomas argues in Aristotelian fashion that the perfection of the universe requires the presence of beings who are pure Form and Intellect, and that the angels must therefore possess these qualities. Unlike the human intellect, which ‘draws intelligible truth from the objects of sense,’ Thomas claims that the angelic intellect ‘does not understand intelligible truth discursively but by a simple intuition.’51 By questioning angelic intellection and wondering if the angels must rely on ratiocination – reading circumstances and signs – Donne casts doubt on the angelology he had evoked in Aire and Angels. This is a gesture Donne would also make in his 1623 All-Saints’ Day sermon, where his account of angelic knowledge leaves little difference between us and our celestial cousins: Man and Angels have one thing in common to them both, which is the best thing that naturally either of them hath, that is Reason, understanding, knowledge, discourse, consideration. Angels and men have grace too, that is infinitely better than their Reason; but though Grace be the principall in the nature and dignity thereof, yet it is but accessory to an Angel, or to man; Grace is not in their nature at first, but infused by God, not to make them Angels and Men, but to make them good Angels, and good men. (Sermons, 10.1.145–52)

By attributing to angels a discursive reason equivalent to humanity’s, Donne emphasizes here creaturely dependence on the infinitely superior quality of grace. Rather than an ascending scala of divinity from humanity through the angelic ranks, we have a majestic God dispensing grace to all of his creatures. Like this sermon’s later claim that

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Christ is the angel of Revelation 7.2, this diminution of angelic mediation recalls Calvin’s concern for grace and divine majesty in his views on angels. It should thus be no surprise that ‘If faithfull soules’ closes by directing devotion to God rather than to interceding spirits. The sestet responds to the interrogation of angelic knowledge of the second quatrain by claiming that the possibility of angelic reliance on interpretation of externals forces us to direct prayer to God: They see idolatrous lovers weepe and mourne, And vile blasphemous Conjurers to call On Jesus name, and Pharisaicall Dissemblers feigne devotion. Then turne O pensive soule, to God, for he knowes best Thy true griefe, for he put it in my breast.

(9–14)

This extended treatment of the poem’s second protasis and concluding apodosis generates an emphatic claim that angels are just as susceptible as we are to Graccus’s error, ‘So doth, so is religion’ (Satire III, 68): in their reliance on interpretation of externals, they cannot tell love weeping from repentance, blasphemy from prayer, sham piety from devotion. The poem is ultimately as sceptical of angelic mediation as is the 1622 Easter Sermon. Like Milton’s Uriel, Donne’s angels cannot discern hypocrisy, leaving Donne more piously to turn directly to God – Donne’s placement of ‘Then turne’ at the end of line 12 allows for double emphasis on the ‘pensive soul’ and ‘God,’ the only two entities in the poem of soteriological significance. This stands in contrast to Catholic appeals for the intercession of the Saints or angels or the Virgin. Angels and departed souls are simply not fit to observe and evaluate our spiritual fitness – intriguingly, Donne chooses especially to diminish the significance of his ‘fathers soul,’ rendering paternal scrutiny irrelevant in this poetic undercutting of his family’s religion. If Donne shows a Reformed scepticism of angelic mediation, we might expect him also to be sceptical of Dionysian ecclesiastical hierarchy, and especially of a sacramental view of ordination. We have already seen how Pseudo-Martyr distinguishes between Mediate and Immediate divine institution, recalling Whitgift’s view of the hierarchy of the English church as simple good government and a matter indifferent. In To Mr Tilman after he had taken orders, a poem that invites consideration of ordination as signifying entrance into the divine ar-

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canum, Donne casts the possibility of direct illumination in an interrogative tone and colours it with some of the irony of the opening pun on Tilman’s name: Thou, whose diviner soule hath caus’d thee now To put thy hand unto the holy Plough, ... What bringst thou home with thee? how is thy mind Affected since the vintage? Dost thou finde New thoughts and stirrings in thee?

(1–7)

When Donne does turn to the transformation involved in ordination, he describes it in terms of Christ’s dispensation of mercy – which, of course, is available to all believers – and this comes only briefly before he returns to the interrogative voice: Thou art the same materials, as before, Onely the stampe is changed; but no more. And as new crowned Kings alter the face, But not the monies substance; so hath grace Chang’d onely Gods old Image by Creation, To Christs new stampe, at this thy Coronation; Or, as we paint Angels with wings, because They beare Gods message, and proclaime his lawes, Since thou must doe the like, and so must move, Art thou new feather’d with cœlestiall love?

(13–22)

Ordination in itself does not change human ‘substance.’ We are, furthermore, twice made aware that the parallel between angel and ordained minister is ‘only Ideated.’ Though the reference to angels might recall the twin hierarchies, Donne refers not to their essence but to their representation in human art. He also does not provide here Hooker’s triad of ‘God, Angels, and holie men’ (FLE, 1: 131.6–10), but leaves as mysterious the angelic illumination bestowed in ordination – ’Art thou new feather’d with cœlestiall love?’ – and predicates this possibility of divine favour upon the dissemination of the Word that is the focus of the poem’s image of the ministry. Rather than immediately divinized, ordination in this poem makes one a mediate ‘Embassadour to God and destinie’ (38). There are moments, however, when Donne would seem to evoke the

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Dionysian tradition in less complicated fashion, and especially to call upon Bonaventure’s elaborations upon Dionysian hierarchy. In the twenty-second collation of the Hexaëmeron, Bonaventure presents the ranks of the Church Militant as a direct reflection of ‘the model hierarchy’ of heaven – just ‘as the moon is the daughter of the sun and receives its light from it, likewise the Church Militant [receives hers] from that Jerusalem which is above’52 – organizing them in a triple triad of most to least involved in the spiritual foundations of the faith, as follows: apostles, prophets, patriarchs, martyrs, confessors, virgins, prelates, masters, and regulars.53 Later Franciscan tradition would add to the head of this hierarchy a tenth order for the Virgin Mary. Donne draws on this tradition in The Litanie, a poem that he describes in a 1609 letter to Goodyere as ecumenical in nature: ‘That by which it will deserve best acceptation is, that neither the Roman Church need call it defective, because it abhors not the particular mention of the blessed triumphers in heaven, nor the Reformed can discreetly accuse it of attributing more than a rectified devotion ought to do.’54 True to this sentiment, Donne’s poem devotes a stanza each to the Virgin Mary and to several of Bonaventure’s orders of the Church Militant without worshipping these human figures in a fashion frowned upon in Reformed devotion. Where the Trinity is the ‘milke to faith,’ the Virgin Mary inspires ‘Our zealous thankes’ (29, 43) – the distinction recalls Una’s address to Redcrosse upon his defeat of the dragon, ‘Then God she praysd, and thankt her faithfull knight.’55 While Donne points to Bonaventure’s ranks, he does not consistently adhere to their order: the topmost triad of patriarchs, prophets, and apostles is mentioned in ascending order in stanzas 7 through 9, only for Donne to leap in the following stanzas to the top of the second triad and move in the descending order of martyrs, confessors, and virgins. The angels, furthermore, are evoked as a whole, with no mention whatsoever of their hierarchy, and with emphasis placed on their invisibility to humanity: ‘So let mee study, that mine actions bee / Worthy their sight, though blinde in how they see’ (53–4). The Litanie evokes Bonaventuran hierarchy but casts doubt on the certainty of its ordering of the ‘blessed triumphers in heaven.’ This structural resistance to overconfident human organization of invisibles is reflected in the poem’s consistent lesson on the dangers of human speculation. We must look to the patriarchs without allowing ‘Faith by Reason added, [to] lose her sight’ (63); we cannot use the vision of the prophets to excuse our ‘excesse / In seeking secrets’ (71–2); and we should resist

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the temptation to appropriate the apostles’ words through biblical commentary: ‘O decline / Mee, when my comment would make thy word mine’ (80–1). In the same vein, Donne offers mixed praise to the doctors, who have ‘taught / Both bookes of life to us’ but from whose errors we must pray to be rescued: ‘pray for us there / That what they have misdone / Or mis-said, wee to that may not adhere’ (110–11, 113–15). The poem proceeds from treatment of these orders to a thoroughgoing account of the human frailties from which we should pray to be delivered, whether ‘bribing’ God with alms or being tempted by heresy (140, 196–8), culminating in a final plea to the Son not to allow humanity to be ruined by its sinful ‘affections’ (242): ‘O Lambe of God, which took’st our sinne / Which could not stick to thee, / O let it not returne to us againe’ (248–50). Donne’s evocation of Bonaventure’s Dionysian hierarchization of the Church Militant thus contributes to this poem’s scepticism of human penetration of God’s Truth. We are aware here that Bonaventure’s complex hierarchies are ‘only Ideated,’ that human assertion of divine order is a temptation to be avoided. In The Litanie the blessed triumphers of heaven are not valued within a universe ordered in triple triads; they show individual examples of the bestowing of God’s grace, examples that emphasize the insufficiency of human endeavour without divine assistance. Bonaventuran hierarchy operates similarly in The Second Anniversary, which draws more fully on the mystical tradition. Our attention is drawn to spiritual ascent in Joseph Hall’s Harbinger to the Progresse: just as it evokes the Petrarchan tradition that The Second Anniversary will unravel (36), so it points to the poet’s mystical flight: ‘And thou (Great spirit) which hers follow’d hast / So fast ... let me wonder at thy flight / Which long agone hadst lost the vulgar sight’ (19–20, 23–4). Donne invites consideration of his Progresse of the Soul in mystical terms: Returne not, my Soule, from this extasee, And meditation of what thou shalt bee, To earthly thoughts, till it to thee appeare, With whom thy conversation must be there.

(321–4)

Here the apotheosis of Elizabeth Drury propels her, and the poet-hero following her ascent, ‘Up, up’ through the orders of Bonaventure’s Church Militant. It is significant, however, that despite repeated emphasis on upward movement – ’Up, up my, drowsie soule ... Up to

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those Patriarckes, ... Up to those Prophets ... Up, up’ (339–56) – each mention of the word ‘up’ moves us downward in the Bonaventuran ranks, reversing the topology of mysticism.56 This reversal casts some doubt on the visionary truth of the poethero’s ‘extasie,’ evoking the language of mystical flight imperfectly in order to affirm its larger claim on the inaccessibility of divine illumination until the ‘third birth’ of the afterlife (214). This is coupled with the attunement to prevenient grace that has animated Drury’s virtuous life – ’Who being solicited to any act, / Still heard God pleading his safe precontract’ (459–60) – and the fuller satisfaction of divine favour enjoyed after death: ‘Who by a faithfull confidence, was here / Betroth’d to God, and now is married there’ (461–2). Rather than selfpurification and vision of the Godhead through mystical flight, Donne emphasizes time and again the inherent limits of human vision and the upright individual’s dependence on prevenient grace. Donne similarly critiques mysticism in the Obsequies to the Lord Harington. The opening lines of the poem present Harington as heavenly object of meditative flight: I can studie thee, And, by these meditations refin’d, Can unparallel and enlarge my minde, And so can make by this soft extasie, This place a map of heav’n, my selfe of thee.

(10–14)

Despite its language of heavenly meditation and extasis, the final lines of this passage show that his will not be a mystical flight: rather than ascending into the cloud of unknowing, he will contemplate Harington’s terrestrial path to celestial reward in the hope of duplicating his virtue. The limits placed on this ‘soft extasie’ are sustained throughout the poem, which, like The Second Anniversary, emphasizes earthly removal from direct vision of God: God is the glasse; as thou when thou dost see Him who sees all, seest all concerning thee, So, yet unglorified, I comprehend All, in these mirrors of thy wayes, and end.

(31–4)

The best that this meditation can do is to contemplate the ‘Deeds of good men’ from which can be gleaned hard-won lessons on the ‘selfe,

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the hardest object of the sight’ (39, 30). As in The Second Anniversary, a majestic God removed from human sight is coupled with a Reformist emphasis on the role of prevenient grace in good deeds. Though Harington is joined with the ‘Tutelar Angels’ (228), the fitness of his soul is attributed to the fact that he had from God daily ‘Instructions, such as it could never be / Disordered’ (151–3).57 Taken as a whole, Donne’s approach to contemplative ascent, Neoplatonic and mystical, is both like and unlike Spenser’s in The Fowre Hymnes. Spenser’s heavenly hymns, we’ll recall, are complex in their evocation of mystical ascent, presenting us with a final vision of Dame Sapience that seems heterodox when considered alongside the straightforward narrative of the Fall and the Redemption in Heavenly Love. Included in this narrative is the mediating presence of the Dionysian ‘trinall triplicities’ of angels (64), which in their own way affirm that element of the tradition operative in Hooker’s divinely ordained hierarchy of the English church. Donne’s response to mystical ascent in his epitaphic poetry operates differently. Not only does it resist the Christian Neoplatonism of Spenser’s Heavenly Beautie – Donne significantly passes on this opportunity for intellectual play – it also focuses its attention on a sola gratia relationship between God and the individual. Though the deceased enjoys celestial vision, we can only follow his or her example of earthly virtue – a process that will require rigorous selfinterrogation and a hearkening after the call of grace – in the hope of enjoying fuller union with God after death. The ‘trinall triplicities’ are quite absent and procession and return of the soul is much more thoroughly Reformed in its deferral of celestial bliss to the afterlife. This reading of Donne’s consistent Protestant concern will go against the grain of some current criticism, which tends to cast Donne as a convert malgré lui or as a time-serving conformist divine. R.V. Young has recently revived many of Louis Martz’s claims in challenging Lewalski’s account of Protestant biblical poets: ‘A biblical poetics is practised in Donne’s Holy Sonnets insofar as the spiritual drama of the individual is conceived in biblical terms, and in this regard his poems include features that are common among contemporaneous Catholic poets of the Continent.’ Young laudably reminds us that both sides of the Reformation were concerned with a return to scripture; that many of the humanist scholars on the vanguard of this return were Roman Catholic rather than Protestant; and that critics of English poetry tend to rely on Protestant polemic for their views of Roman Catholic doc-

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trine and devotion, thus neglecting such facts as the Council of Trent’s (1547) unequivocal statement on the necessity of prevenient grace: ‘justification in adults must be received from the prevenient grace of God through Christ Jesus; that is, from his call, by which they are called for no existing merit of their own.’ Donne’s discomfort with Calvinist irresistible grace in the Essayes in Divinity thus aligns him in Young’s view with the ‘scholastic mentality’ fundamentally at odds with doctrinal and ecclesiastical reform.58 It should be noted first of all that Donne does not dismiss the idea of irresistible grace in the Essayes; rather, he casts doubt on controversialists’ overconfident assertion of God’s ways: ‘And yet we may not say, but that God begins many things which we frustrate; and calls when we come not. So that, as yet our understanding hath found no word, which is well proportioned to that which we mean by power of God.’59 In this respect he resembles such divines as Lancelot Andrewes and John Overall. As Peter Lake notes, though Calvinism held hegemonic authority in the Jacobean church, several clergymen queried the nature of election and predestination, and the failure of the Lambeth Articles to become official doctrine particularly ‘exposed the dubious nature of Calvinist claims to represent official orthodoxy.’60 Milton, it should be remembered, also departs from Calvin’s views on irresistible grace; none ever found in him a crypto-Catholic scholastic.61 And though Martz’s Poetry of Meditation considers Protestant devotional verse in light of the art and thought of the CounterReformation, its strength lies in its arguments for formal parallels, rather than doctrinal ones.62 The English devotional lyric of the seventeenth century is inevitably influenced by the art of the Continent. Equally inevitably, it reinscribes that art, transforming it into one reflective of its own cultural milieu. Perhaps it is neither engagements of scripture nor abstruse points of theology that are most illumining in describing a Protestant poetics. What more clearly separates Protestant and Roman Catholic thought and poetry are attitudes toward the tradition, and specifically whether it be seen as subordinate to scripture or as direct expression of divine will. This is the dividing line between Luther and Erasmus, More and Tyndale. My own focus here on one element of the tradition has brought me to conclusions similar to those of Daniel Doerksen and Jeanne Shami, and also of Robert Whalen, who finds in the sacramentology of Donne’s sacred verse a ‘confessional identification with the doctrinally Calvinist mainstream of the English church.’63

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In this light it is extremely significant that Roman Catholic devotional poets present nothing of the complex interrogation of the Dionysian tradition found throughout Donne’s work. Though, as Young observes, Crashaw’s Hymn in the Glorious Epiphanie is ‘a poem deeply involved with the text of Scripture,’ its uncomplicated inclusion of Dionysius is telling of its relationship to tradition.64 Crashaw provides as the moment of Dionysius’s conversion not Paul’s speech to the Areopagus (Acts 17.34) but the eclipse at the moment of Christ’s death, described by the Areopagite in his letter to Polycarp (Ps-D, 268). He thus uses as a figure of this central moment of Christian time one of the most dubious elements of the Dionysian tradition. In a lengthy digression on ‘The right-ey’d Areopagite’ (191), Crashaw furthermore praises as a model of devotion his mysticism and negative theology, which will ‘teach obscure MANKIND a more close way / By the frugall negative light’ (208–9). While Crashaw takes as his impetus the gospel narrative of the Crucifixion, then, his inclusion of Dionysius in this narrative, and his deployment of him as guide to interpretation of the gospel, introduces those elements of the tradition problematized in Donne’s Protestant response to mystical ascent. As in his Saint Theresa poems, Crashaw introduces as mediating presence between God and the believer elements of the tradition that are quite at odds with a Reformed religious ethic. To see in Donne a consistent sympathy with English Calvinism is, finally, not at odds with his ecumenism. Donne was, above all, a civilized individual not prone to narrow-minded partisanship – in this respect, as the likes of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound have famously observed, he is quite superior to Milton. This does not diminish, however, his consistent scepticism of those elements of the tradition on which Reformers had cast a good deal of doubt, including the ‘only Ideated’ angelology of the Pseudo-Areopagite. Donne’s distinction between Mediate and Immediate divine influence clearly does not present the church and its traditions as direct expressions of the Holy Spirit, providing instead a majestic God dispensing instruction through the Word and grace to the individual believer. Before turning our attention to the antiprelatical interrogation of the English church mounted by Milton and his contemporaries, with its pet caricature of the bishops as fat, self-seeking, ignorant lords, it is worthwhile to note just how many learned and humane divines graced the late Elizabethan and early Stuart church – not only Hooker and Donne, but also Joseph Hall, George Herbert, and Lancelot Andrewes.

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4 Angelic Hierarchy in Milton and His Contemporaries

Though the episcopacy debate returns with a vengeance at mid-seventeenth century, jure divino arguments for retention of the bishops tend to avoid even Hooker’s implicit nod to the Dionysian tradition. As was the case to a lesser extent with Whitgift, Archbishop William Laud’s heavy-handed attempts at high-church uniformity only stoked the flames of puritan desire for reform.1 Hooker does remain important throughout the seventeenth century, but defenders of episcopacy in the 1640s tend to rehearse the arguments for jure divino episcopacy associated with Saravia. Thus James Ussher, who revises from manuscript Hooker’s Continuation of These Contentions for inclusion in his Certain Briefe Treatises, and who also prepares books 6 and 8 of Hooker’s Polity for publication, tends to base his arguments for the divine institution of episcopacy on its antiquity. The prominence given to the ‘Primitive Institution of Episcopacie’ on the title page of his Briefe Treatises points to the emphasis pervading the tract. Mention of ordination here refers to the ‘Lawfulness’ of episcopal authority in a Protestant church. This emphasis is duplicated in Milton’s response to this collection, The Reason of Church Government, which gives scripture primacy over antiquity and church law. Similar to Ussher’s position is that of Joseph Hall, Milton’s most formidable opponent in the antiprelatical tracts. Hall repeatedly points to the divine institution of episcopacy signified by Christ’s selection of the Apostles and the Apostles’ installation of bishops: ‘if the foundation were laid by Christ and the wals built up by his Apostles,’ he argues in Episcopacie by Divine Right, ‘the Fabrick can be no lesse than divine.’2 He provides the familiar examples of Paul’s appointment of Timothy in Ephesus and of Titus in Crete as evidence of the apostolic

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roots of prelacy.3 This approach is repeated in his Humble Remonstrance, where he claims that episcopal government ‘fetches its pedigree, even from no lesse, then Apostolicall; (and therefore, in that right, Divine) institution.’4 Where Hall deals with ordination, it is in the same legalistic spirit evident in Ussher. Ordination is the traditional jurisdiction of the bishop, rendering illegitimate any taking of orders that has not received episcopal approval: ‘faine would I see where ever it can be read, that Presbyters, without a Bishop, in a regular course imposed hands for Ordination.’5 Though Hall, like Hooker, points to Calvin’s reluctant acknowledgment of the mystery of laying on of hands, he does not emphasize ordination as a sacrament.6 His concern is in demonstrating that there are ‘severall acts that were appropriated to the Bishops alone, by the universall consent of all times.’7 It is not entirely a surprise, then, that Hall eschews Dionysian angelology in his Invisible World Discovered to Spirituall Eyes, which is, as the title page promises, a ‘feeling meditation’ on the nature of angels and the human soul. While he is curiously unafraid to trade in superstitious anecdote on the intercession of guardian angels in daily life – he tells of an acquaintance who is prompted by angels to find an ‘important evidence’ in his ‘Dove-cote’ – Hall carefully avoids Dionysian angelology, providing a reductio ad absurdum of the tradition of the trinal triplicities: What modest indignation can forbear stamping at the presumtion of those men, who, as if upon Domingo Gonsales his engine, they had been mounted by his Gansaes from the Moon to the Empyreall heaven, and admitted to be the heralds, or masters of ceremonies in that higher world ... For me, I must crave leave to wonder at this boldnesse: and professe my self as far to seek whence this learning should come as how to believe it: I do verily beleeve there are divers orders of celestial spirits: I beleeve they are not to be beleeved that dare to determine them.8

The reference is to the early science-fiction sensation, Francis Godwin’s Man in the Moone: or a Discourse of a Voyage Thither by Domingo Gonsales, The Speedy Messenger (1638). Saint Paul himself, Hall argues, was not granted sufficient vision of heaven to determine precisely the orders of the angels, as shown in the differing hierarchies suggested by Colossians 1.16 and Ephesians 1.21.9 Though he elsewhere concedes that Dionysius may very well be correct as to the number of angels, it is in the spirit of stating that one guess is as good

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as any, and only after he has cast doubt on the enterprise of determining the angels’ number and described the Pseudo-Areopagite as ‘him, who pretends to fetch it from the chosen vessel rapt into Paradise.’10 Even Thomas Heywood’s Hierarchie of the Blessed Angels, which one would expect to be very strongly Dionysian – it is organized into nine books corresponding to the nine orders of angels; it is dedicated to the Catholic queen Henrietta Maria and begins the Epistle to the Reader with a French proverb – has relatively little to say about the PseudoAreopagite’s angelology. Heywood describes the full hierarchy of angels only in book 4, and here they receive less emphasis than a lament that poetry, and especially contemporary English poetry, does not enjoy the reputation it deserves. Though he refers favourably to the negative theology of the Divine Names and lists Dionysius as among ‘the first Holy beginners’ of the faith, Heywood does not give the Pseudo-Areopagite a prominent place in his crabbed accumulation of sources theological and philosophical.11 The work is largely a Lucretian contemplation of natural order beginning in Heaven with demonstration of God’s existence and ending in Hell with the operations of Satan; in this vein, and as its frontispiece suggests, the ninefold hierarchy is taken as a geometric extension of the Trinity (see Plate 2). Dionysius does enjoy a curious revival, however, among radical leftwing sects. John Everard’s posthumous Some Gospel-Treasures Opened appends his English translation of The Mystical Theology, and defends the Pseudo-Areopagite’s conversion by Paul.12 Rapha Harford, Everard’s publisher and biographer, describes in his dedication of the Treasures to Cromwell and his government the need for Dionysius’s brand of religion: ‘Very few answer now to the Primitive Christians, who delighted in self-denial and spiritual love: ... we ascend not, nor set our feet aright on those six steps ascending up to the Throne of Grace, Peace, and Rest.’13 The ‘six steps’ mentioned here evoke the Bonaventuran interpretation of Dionysian mysticism, an interpretation pervasive in Everard’s thought. As Nigel Smith has shown, Dionysian mysticism supports ‘the central point in Everard’s theory of interpretation: that the letter of the Scriptures cannot be understood properly until the reader allows the “mystery” of the spirit to determine the truly divine meaning behind the letters.’ 14 Radical interpretations of divinization draw on the mystical tradition with the difference that, as Smith describes it, ‘the enthusiast claimed to be where the mystic wanted to go.’15 This chapter will focus on less radical positions more directly pertinent to Milton. Although such thought is reluctant to turn to the

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Image Not Available

Plate 2: Frontispiece to Thomas Heywood, The Hierarchie of the Blessed Angels, 1635 (by permission of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library of the University of Illinois; photograph by the author)

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Pseudo-Areopagite, it does frequently define the angels’ role as ministering spirits. Dionysius’s economy of theurgia whereby divine illumination descends through the angels is abandoned, but, as is the case for Calvin, the illuminationist terms attending the relationship between God and the true believer share several concerns with Dionysian angelology and mysticism. Instead of illumination being meted out in ceremony or granted through contemplation, it is located in the mystery of election. Only the true believer receives angelic guidance, just as only the true believer receives the spiritual replenishment offered by the Eucharist. In the Calvinist theorization of this sacrament, the spirit of the (preveniently determined) true believer is mysteriously replenished by the body and blood – a definition locating agency exclusively in the divine rather than the human. In analogous fashion, the arcanum of divine mystery so important in Dionysian thought persists, but access to it is not guarded by angels or hierarchs. This arcanum is instead divorced from creaturely agency and lodged by the Spirit in the heart of the true Saint. Angels are significant in this Reformed model as a body of superior, godly creatures whose ministration, as Hebrews 1.14 has it, is especially bestowed upon ‘them who shall be heirs of salvation.’ Such a view of angelic ministration lends the tradition of angelic guardians a scriptural foundation and an emphasis suiting the period’s radical discourse. Those less sympathetic to the revolution of the Saints tend to adopt a more universal view of angelic protection: the Arminian divine Richard Montagu asserts that every Christian has a guardian angel, and Hall likewise sees such guidance in a broad range of daily events, sympathizing with Jean Gerson’s claim that the angels take especial care in protecting us from the perils of childhood.16 In Paradise Lost, and in the angelological models most pertinent to Milton’s epic, emphasis on Hebrews 1.14 suggests that contact with the angels signals spiritual fitness and thus prophetic legitimacy. Henry Lawrence, the ‘virtuous Father’ of Sonnet 20, employs the authority granted by the Saints’ ‘communion’ with angels to justify the militarism of the Cause and his vision of church reform. In his Retired Mans Meditations, Sir Henry Vane, the subject of Sonnet 17, describes an eccentric celestial hierarchy employed in buttressing his political arguments regarding liberty of conscience. This chapter will explore the non-Dionysian models of Lawrence and Vane and move on to Milton’s rejection of Dionysius in Paradise Lost. In chapter 5 we will see how the association of angelic illumination with election informs the prophetic errand of the Miltonic bard.

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Luther’s and Calvin’s proscriptions on angelological speculation have seminal influence among those on the left wing of Reformation. Both men have rhetorical flourishes roundly dismissing Dionysius. ‘Who told him that there were nine choirs?’ Luther asks in his Lectures on Genesis (1535), ‘Who does not realize that these are nothing but idle and useless human ideas? ... [T]hese are trifles worthy for the papists to learn and admire after assailing the sound doctrine so stubbornly’ (LW, 1: 235). Calvin similarly claims in his Institutes that ‘Dionysius (whoever he may have been) has many shrewd and subtle disquisitions in his Celestial Hierarchy; but on looking at them more closely, every one must see that they are merely idle talk’ (1.14.4). Also without foundation is the tradition of the good and bad guardian angels, which is described as a by-product of the ‘vulgar imagination’ (1.14.7). ‘[B]idding adieu’ to such ‘nugatory wisdom,’ Calvin turns to the ‘simple doctrine of Scripture’ to determine ‘the Lord’s pleasure that we should know concerning the angels,’ from which determination it is clear that he intends us to know rather little (1.14.4). The ‘one point ... we ought to hold for certain,’ Calvin claims, is that angels are ‘ministering spirits (Heb.1.14) whose service God employs for the protection of his people, and by whose means he distributes his favours among men, and also executes other works’ (1.14.9). This emphasis strongly informs the angelology of both Henry Lawrence and Sir Henry Vane, though in quite different ways. Lawrence outlines his views on angels in Our Communion and Warre with Angels (1646), a tract subsequently re-released under two other titles, An History of Angels (1649) and Militia Spiritualis (1652).17 Repeatedly citing Hebrews 1.14, which appears as an epigraph to Militia Spiritualis, Lawrence claims that it is part of the ‘dignity of saints’ to have ‘the Angells to be their ministers’ (18). ‘It is cleare,’ he claims, ‘that the tutelage of the good Angells, belongs onely to the elect’ (19).18 In spite of Calvin’s views, however, Lawrence acknowledges the value of the ‘exceeding antient’ tradition of ‘Angell Guardians,’ presenting terrestrial warfare between iniquity and godliness as a battle between the influence of evil angels and that of good angels. This is an extended application of the tradition of guardian angels to the doctrine of election earlier advanced by, among others, Richard Grenham, Isaac Ambrose, and John Deacon and John Walker.19 A fellow Cromwellian, Nicholas Lockyer, contributes a prefatory epistle to Robert Dingley’s Deputation of Angels, or, The Angel-Guardian, which cites Lawrence briefly and draws the ‘doctrinal conclusion’ from Acts 12.15 – ‘It is his

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[i.e., Peter’s] angel’ – that ‘every Elect person hath his Guardian angel.’20 Vane, on the other hand, interprets the ‘service’ of the angels promised to the elect in opposite terms: it is the angels who are at the charge of the Saints. In his divine order, the Saints will fully enjoy a status superior to that of the angels after Judgment, an eschatological privileging of the elect that strongly informs and qualifies his more widely known arguments on liberty of conscience. Lawrence’s treatise is largely an exegesis of Ephesians 6, describing the spiritual armour with which the Saint is equipped. Before mounting this commentary, however, Lawrence provides an account ‘of the nature of Angells, yet keeping neere the Scripture and not departing from our most assured rule, the word of God’ (6). Despite this promise his comments on angelic nature derive from the Thomist tradition. Like Thomas he employs Aristotle’s deduction that ‘to the perfection of the world it is necessary that there should be three sorts of substances, invisible, visible, and partly invisible and partly visible’ (8). The angels are thus ‘simple formes’ who ‘have not either inward or outward sences’ (13, 30). Humankind’s partial participation in the realm of spirit and imperfect noesis point to the perfection of these qualities in a superior being.21 Though the view of angels as pure spirit is given greatest philosophical detail by Thomas, it had been made doctrine before him by the Lateran Council of 1215 and persists in Luther’s Lectures on Genesis (1535), which refers to angels as ‘mere spirit’ and describes humanity as occupying a ‘middle position’ between brutish physicality and angelic intellection.22 Lawrence departs from this tradition on the more theologically significant points of angelic creation and celestial hierarchy. Thomas follows Augustine’s De Genesi ad litteram in his account of angelic creation and fall, claiming that the Genesis account of the ‘light’ of the first day refers to the creation of the angels, with the separation of darkness from light at the end of the first day signifying the apostate angels’ removal from heaven23 – ‘God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness’ (Gen 1.3–4). Though the angels are created with divinely implanted ‘morning’ knowledge of things ‘as they are in the Word’ – and are thus declared by God all to be ‘good’ in their first moment – they also have an ‘evening’ knowledge of things ‘as they are in their own natures.’ It is the misdirection of the latter that results in the sin of pride: an angel ‘of his own free will pursued a good for himself without regard for the rule of the divine

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will.’24 After this fall, as Augustine puts it, the knowledge of the fallen angels is properly designated as ‘Night because it does not retain the creaturely love signified by the twilight of evening.’25 These Augustinian categories would be interrogated by Reformation exegesis. In his Lectures on Genesis, Luther accuses Augustine of ‘extraordinary trifling’ in his reading of the six days, though he concedes, on the evidence of John 8.44, that it is likely that ‘some proud angels, displeased by the meekness of the Son of God, wanted to place themselves above Him.’26 Despite his great affection for Augustine, Calvin concedes that ‘some runne into an Allegorie’ in interpreting the light of the first day as the creation of the angels, ‘but here very disorderly, for this is to me an undoubted principle, that Moses speaketh here onely of the visible forme of the world.’27 While Lawrence endorses the Augustinian categories of morning and evening knowledge, he does not refer them to the first day of creation, joining in his discomfort with an allegorical reading of Genesis such seventeenth-century exegetes as Alexander Ross, John White, Henry More, and Abraham Wright.28 John Deacon and John Walker depart from Augustine on the angelic creation, but rather unprecedentedly provide the second day as the moment of angelic creation, ‘wherein God created the heauenly firmament, with all the whole host aboue the same.’29 Heywood praises ‘Learned Saint Austin’ for concluding that the angels were made with the empyreal heaven, but simultaneously casts aspersion on those ‘almost irreligious’ authors whose curiosity seeks ‘To penetrate into [God’s] secret Will / Without his Warrant: and conclude, That they / Had with the Light subsistence the first day.’30 Sir Henry Vane, however, declared the angels to be ‘described by the light which God made on the first day,’ a point on which he is in agreement with that Dutch theologian so significant to Milton’s De doctrina, John Wollebius.31 Milton’s position on Augustine’s reading of the first day resembles Luther’s: the categories of morning and evening knowledge seem a likely enough explanation for the rebellion of the refractory angels, but scripture simply does not attach these events to the first of the six days. Indeed, De doctrina finds in this reading occasion to impugn the common gloss of theologians: ‘that [the angels] were created on the first day or any one of the six days is asserted by the general mob of theologians with, as usual, quite unjustifiable confidence ... Certainly many of the Greek Fathers, and some of the Latin, were of opinion that angels, inasmuch as they were spirits, existed long before this material world.’ The rebellion of the apostate angels also ‘took place before even the first

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beginnings of this world’ (CPW, 6: 313). The angels of Paradise Lost seem to have resided in Heaven for some time before their civil embroil: Raphael comments that before the war the angels were ‘wont to meet / So oft in Festivals of joy and love’ (6.93–4). In this Milton seems to agree with the fathers listed by Heywood who held that the angels were ‘fabricated / Long time before’ this world: Jerome, Saint Ambrose, Gregory Nazianzen, Cassian, John the Damascene, Origen, Hilary, and Basil.32 Milton does evoke the categories of morning and evening knowledge, however, in describing angelic rebellion: Satan significantly waits until the first evening after the coronation of the Son to begin plotting with Beelzebub, and both seem to recognize that evening is an especially suitable time to seduce their compeers. ‘Assemble thou /... those Myriads,’ Satan commands, ‘ere yet dim Night / Her shadowy Cloud withdraws’ (5.683–6).33 The substance of Satan’s temptation draws on self-knowledge, the kind of awareness Augustine associates with angelic evening: ‘Will ye submit your necks, and choose to bend / The supple knee? ye will not, if I trust / To know ye right, or if ye know yourselves’ (5.787–9). Satan supports his arguments with claims, in Augustine’s terms, of ‘knowledge of creation in itself’; rather than referring such knowledge back to the ‘praise and love’ of God, he encourages his audience to ‘delight more in themselves than in union with whom they are happy.’34 The similes surrounding the apostate angels that reduce their stature at this moment of rebellion are also suggestive in their relationship to these Augustinian categories: they are transformed from the ‘sons of Morn’ of Isaiah 14.12, to ‘Stars of Night,’ to ‘Stars of Morning, Dew-drops’ (5.716, 745–6) – the last of these obtains some of its parodic effect by evoking the true morning of God’s Word from which they are now cut off. To return to Lawrence’s angelology, we find further departure from Thomas in a refusal to acknowledge the Dionysian orders: the ‘Principalities’ and ‘Powers’ subjected to Christ in Ephesians 1.21 do not reflect ‘particular titles’ (7). Although Lawrence states in Thomist fashion that ‘the reprobate Angells never saw God as the elect did’ (29), he does not grant the same emphasis to the sin of pride in the angelic fall. The difference between the elect and fallen angels, which he draws, as Luther does, from John 8.44, is ‘there was a truth and knowledge which some adhered to and some not’ (28). The fallen angels never arrived at a point where they were granted supernatural knowledge because they did not abide in the truth of natural knowledge (32).

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It is the last of these departures that holds the greatest significance for Lawrence’s anthropology. The supernatural knowledge that distinguishes the elect from the fallen angels also becomes central to human devotion: ‘The same sermon that speakes to the reason onely of one man, speakes to the heart and conscience of another ... Pray therefore for supernaturall light, that will improove all the rest, and all the rest without it, will but helpe to render you inexcusable, and so leave you’ (33). It is as repositories of this supernatural knowledge that angels may be potentially instructive. These celestial guides are not the source of salvation, Lawrence is very careful to point out – Christ is the ‘fountaine’ and the angels ‘but cisternes and channells’ (49) – but we should ‘apply our selves to them, as to the ordinances and ministers of God,’ for in our communion with them we are ‘conversing ... after a spiritual way’ (51). This spiritual communion is especially located in the true church: ‘Its good to be a Church,’ Lawrence argues, because ‘to Churches ... Angells seem to be destined,’ a conclusion drawn from 1 Corinthians 11.10 (25). It is worth recalling that this is precisely the argument, and the scriptural precedent, that Hooker uses to justify common prayer. Church services, Hooker argues, must be fit to the angelic presence in the congregation, and therefore decisions regarding the liturgy are not to be made by just anyone. This argument, we’ll recall, defers human intellection to the afterlife, but metes out limited portions of it in a sacramentalized ceremony of ordination that implicitly affirms Dionysian hierarchy. It is also worth recalling that when Donne refers to this passage, it is to emphasize that the preaching of the Word is a divine mystery illuminating to human and angel alike. Lawrence, by comparison, allows for supernatural knowledge, but limits its possession to the Saints: ‘Its good to be a Saint, that yee may have the tutelage of Angells, This honour have all the saints, and none but they’ (25). This definition divorces ‘supernaturall light’ from an independent valuation of church ceremony, institution, or even preaching, and allows for immediate divine inspiration – the very tendency Hooker derides as opposing a ‘Me thinketh’ to communitarian worship. The good angels, Lawrence argues, used to perform visible miracles, but under the dispensation of Christ perform their ‘great workes ... upon the inward man’ (36).35 Their superior nature gives them control over those human faculties that are only provisionally volitional: they can control ‘such fancies as befall us (as it were) by chance, as in dreames or sicknes,’ and ‘can remoove the impediments of apprehension’ (37).

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This supernatural ‘guidance’ gained secretly by the elect is fundamental to Lawrence’s reading of Ephesians 6, which is largely a call to arms to his fellow Saints. The Saints do not ‘fight for their country, for their possessions, for their wives and children, for their liberties’ – these things too, Lawrence’s rhetoric implies, are at stake – but rather ‘for eternall life, wee fight for God and Christ, whose glory in us lyes at the stake every day, and suffers, or is relieved by our fighting’ (108).36 This militancy is a constant in the Saint’s terrestrial existence: ‘if you give over to soone, and stay not till the victory be gotten, till your enemy be profligated, and abased, hee [i.e., ‘you’] had as good have done nothing ... thinke not to goe to heaven with your armes acrosse, or your head upon your elbow, or with good beginnings, and faint offers, t’is lawfull fighting, t’is hard labour, leads you to glory’ (117). Thus arises Lawrence’s seemingly paradoxical reading of Matthew 5.9 – ‘Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God’ – which argues that as the true children of God, the Saints must gain a spiritual peace that expresses itself in earthly combat; they must gain the ‘peace that will enable ... warre’ (138): it is the fate of some warres, not onely to be the meanes by which peace is gotten, and procur’d, but by which it is nourisht, and maintayn’d, and we know some countryes, which injoy the greatest benefites of peace in the midst of a confirm’d warre ... In a word therefore, we improve best our communion with our friends, the good Angells, whilst we make warre, so as whilst we make warre, we shall have peace. (188–9)

It is with this idea of peaceful war that Lawrence closes his argument. Lawrence’s angelology thus has a strikingly bellicose caste. Indeed the timing of the release of his tracts is telling in this regard. Each title comes at a significant moment of martial victory in the revolutionary period, when the honest party would seem most to be wearing the impregnable armour of the believer. The May 1646 release of Our Communion and Warre comes on the heels of Charles’s surrender to the Scots and may be read not only as an expression of triumph, but as a reminder of the task lying ahead. The 1649 release of An History of Angels, the title page of which refers to Lawrence as ‘a Member of this present Parliament,’ may be read again as touting the success of action against Charles, and as an attempt to steel the resolve of those who had grown reluctant in the project of reformation – in this sense it participates in the same polemical interrogation of Presbyterian ‘levitie

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and shallowness of mind’ as does Milton’s Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (CPW, 3: 193). The 1652 release of Militia Spiritualis would seem to speak to the Dutch War and to anticipate the ‘huge two-handed sway’ (PL, 6.251) with which Cromwell would soon wield the sword of righteousness.37 The ‘peaceful war’ that Lawrence describes in his account of the spiritual communion of Saints and angels thus lends itself readily to an endorsement of the Cromwellian absolutism in which he would play a strong supporting role. Those who would recoil from the warfare necessary to the Cause, in Lawrence’s terms, are forgetting the example of the good angels’ ongoing war against devils, and thus neglecting the duty of the elect to serve under ‘the great Generall of all his people[,] Iesus Christ’ (sig.*2r). Angelology also illumines the thought of a prominent critic of Cromwell’s regime, Sir Henry Vane. Though they had been closely associated in the early days of the revolution, Vane strongly opposed Cromwell’s storming of Parliament, during which, if Edmund Ludlow’s account is to be believed, the two men are supposed to have come into direct confrontation: the General stepped into the midst of the House, where continuing his distracted language, he said, ‘Come, come, I will put an end to your prating’; then walking up and down the House like a madman, and kicking the ground with his feet, he cried out, ‘You are no Parliament, I say you are no Parliament; I will put an end to your sitting; call them in, call them in.’ Whereupon the sergeant attending the Parliament opened the doors and Lieut. Col. Wolsey with two files of musketeers entered the House; which Sir Henry Vane observing from his place, said aloud, ‘This is not honest, yea, it is against morality and common honesty.’ Then Cromwell fell a railing at him, crying out with a loud voice, ‘O, Sir Henry Vane, Sir Henry Vane, the Lord deliver me from Sir Henry Vane.’38

One detects in Cromwell’s response not so much real animosity as the battle-worn general’s sardonic dismissal of a coddled dreamer’s idealism. This disagreement would become rather more serious, however, with Vane’s publication of A Healing Question (1656), which urges the Army to come under the direction of Parliament – a view that prompted Cromwell’s Council to imprison Vane for four months after its release. Though he had absented himself from parliamentary proceedings against the king, here Vane describes the deposition of

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Charles as expression of a ‘naturall right’ of citizens in their ‘just claim to be governed by National Councils and successive Representatives.’39 This right is frustrated by Cromwell’s ‘great interruption ... something rising up that seems rather accommodated to the private and selfish interest of a particular part (in comparison) then truly adequate to the common good’ (2–3). Vane recommends that civil and religious liberty would best be upheld by a standing Council of State that would be selected by ‘the present Ruling Power,’ but only in his capacity as ‘General of the Army,’ a position that would be under the direction of the instituted government (20). In order fully to understand Vane’s political views, however, one must come to terms with the spiritualism informing them, which has frequently been described as elaborate to the point of convolution. In his nineteenth-century biography – which aims to present Vane as an American Founding Father avant la lettre 40 – James K. Hosmer describes religious thought as ‘the weakness of the strong man,’ and cites Peter Hayne’s comment on The Retired Mans Meditations that ‘in the forenoon, under the influence of strong tea, and with an alarm clock to go off at your ear every twenty minutes, you might make something of it. I have been too signally defeated to try again.’41 Vane’s early hagiographer George Sikes seems acutely aware of such complaints in opening his biography with the claim that Sir Henry ‘was partaker of the Divine Nature (2 Pet. 1.4), ’tis past the skill of humane nature to interpret him. His attainments were too big for the tongue of Men and Angels.’42 As David Parnham has recently shown, Vane’s doctrine of the spirit consistently infuses his republican discourse, and provides it with many of the features that distinguish it from such contemporary proposals as James Harrington’s rotating democracy and Richard Baxter’s theocracy.43 It is in Vane’s religious writings that we gain insight into the eschatology underpinning such practical tracts as the Healing Question and Needfull Corrective. Clearly Vane himself saw his political and religious works as intertwined, referring to his Meditations in the postscript to A Healing Question as ‘an Essay ... already made, in a private way to obtain the first thing, that is to say, Conviction; which chiefly is in the hand of the Lord to give’ (sig.D1v). The confusion generated by Vane’s religious writings, furthermore, tends to be extrinsic rather than intrinsic: the question we most often find ourselves asking is not what he means, but how on earth he arrived at such notions. His three religious works, The Retired Mans Meditations (1655), Two Treatises (1661), and A Pilgrimage into the Land of

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Promise (1664), are remarkably systematic and consistent, as are the unpublished sermons and writings recorded by his daughter Margaret and Sikes’s account of his spiritualism.44 What seems to unsettle is that Vane develops rather eccentric doctrine, a tendency that shades toward quackery in a manner difficult to reconcile for the modern reader with his public life as English ambassador to Vienna, governor of Massachusetts, prominent parliamentarian, and the position in which he most excelled, treasurer of the navy. We see in the Meditations how imminence of the millennium informs the activism for liberty of conscience with which Vane is often associated: ‘since the days are hastning fast, wherein there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; neither hid that shall not be made known ... why should the true Believer and righteous man be afraid to present the most inward thought of his heart[?]’ (sig.a2v). We also see significant qualifications on this liberty: in the impending millennium, the defeat of Antichrist will be coupled with the spiritual elect’s exertion of the ‘Civil’ and ‘Military’ authority for which they are uniquely equipped by virtue of their ability to apply it with ‘the most exact subserviencie unto Christ it is capable of’ (382). This rise to civil authority in the thousand-year reign will be coupled with a de-institutionalization of the visible church and the arbitration of conscience by a governing body of Saints. The oppression of the Saints at the hands of the visible church and Antichristian magistrate – which, in the 1655 context of the Meditations, is a charge levelled squarely at Cromwell and his supporters – is, when compared with truly godly rule, a spiritual ‘Midnight’ that anticipates the rise of the elect.45 In the ‘day of their ascension and final exaltation’ they will commence a spiritual rule that Vane identifies with the power of the keys: ‘they have committed unto them, the power of the KEYS, in the full extent and exercise thereof, whereby, all that they binde in earth, shall be bound in heaven, and all that they loose on earth, shall be loosed in heaven ... and all disobedience and opposition thereunto, shall be punished by their Church-Censures, in a way of Excommunication’ (410). This arbitration would seem to contradict the arguments for liberty of conscience prominent in Vane’s political tracts. To look forward to the day when there will exist a ruling body with absolute civil and religious authority would seem to fly in the face of the Healing Question’s assertion that ‘the nature and goodnesse of the cause’ lies in the institution of representative government and the guarantee of religious freedom (4–5). Fuller recognition of Vane’s divine order, however, reveals how he is able simultaneously to justify his arguments for

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liberty of conscience and to anticipate a day when government will rightly hold absolute religious authority. Because of the imminence of their reign, the time had come for the Saints to separate themselves from their spiritual inferiors, namely the ‘nations of the world’ and the ‘fleshly seed.’46 The latter are those who live under divine law in its fleshly dispensation; they remain a de facto Jewry because their view of Redemption never moves beyond Christ’s satisfaction of legal proscription. Unlike the spiritual seed, who are the Bride under the second covenant, they ‘live unto Christ as their Bridegroom and Husband under the first covenant, [Romans 7] ver. 2, 3, and are, as it were his married wife under that dispensation, Isa. 54.1 bearing children, or becoming fruitful unto Christ in this state’ (188).47 Because they are believers only in the law and flesh, theirs is a precarious belief – ‘these are knit unto Christ in a Marriage-band, (though capable of Divorce)’ (331) – and ‘when their faith comes to trial ... they prove waverers and unstable’ (211).48 For this reason they will never be admitted into the New Jerusalem, but ‘only from the top of Mount Pisga, they may have a view and prospect of the true Land of promise ... and may see its Lineaments and proportions, though never be able to enter into the life and power of it’ (211). In this regard they are no better than the best of the heathen, or ‘natural men’ (211). The natural men and fleshly seed receive the ministration of angels: as the angels ‘bear the image and similitude of Christs natural life and perfection,’ so they minister ‘therein unto the birth of Christ in his first appearance, in and under the first covenant’ (150). Vane applies the category of the fleshly seed more specifically to include both the Ranters, those who claim spiritual authority from slavish bibliolatry, and the Familists, those who think themselves on equal footing with the Son: [they] under pretence of spirit and power, do either with those called Ranters, set up the doctrine and inspiration of devils, in opposition to the truth of their witness, that is but in the letter, introducing again the filthiness of the flesh ... or else they do annihilate the creature-being, and assert perfection to consist in a swallowing up thereof into the pure being of God, (even in that glory, wherein he is incommunicable, and saith, I am, and there is none besides me) as the Familist[.] (201)

As Parnham observes, Vane objects both to the hylozoism of the Ranter that ‘brings God down to flesh,’ and to the ‘arrogant ... climb to God’

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evident in the Familist who ‘goes too far in taking his leave of creation.’49 Both of these misinterpret the role of the spirit, the middle status between God and flesh that is the receptacle of the Mediator’s illumination. Vane also includes among the fleshly seed the ‘visible and flourishing Saints of these our dayes,’ a not-so-veiled reference to the growing successes of Cromwell and his followers, and warns these self-assured pretenders that those truly favoured by the Lord will ultimately defeat them (310). Especially earning Vane’s ire is absolutism arising from pretension to spiritual insight. Though they have not embraced the doctrine of the spirit, the fleshly seed feel justified in determining matters of conscience because of their adherence to the letter of the Word. Drawing on the exercise of terrestrial power by the beast in Revelation 13 (15–17), he presents them as ‘Satans instruments’ in that they take the ‘image of God’ in the Word to be a true discovery of divine will. Indeed, any civil magistrate allowing the visible church to exercise absolute authority is Antichristian; the highest function of the visible church is as a training ground for the true Saint, and as such it is a temporary institution that will be outgrown in the progress of the elect’s spiritual maturation.50 Proper magistracy should allow for the transcendence of the visible church by governing only the ‘outward concernes of men’ (387);51 in attempting to enforce the spiritually mature Saints’ conformity to the visible church, the magistrate only prolongs their suffering and performs the work of Antichrist. This vigorous defence of spiritual liberty is the position most often associated with Vane and his followers: it is repeated time and again not only in Vane’s work, but also in that of Henry Stubbe and George Sikes.52 Vane emphasizes this privileged status of the Saints in his vision of celestial hierarchy. As the true bride of Christ, the Saints will be fixed after the Apocalypse in heaven’s highest room, in a position above the angels (73). While those who live in righteousness, the guests of the groom in Vane’s celestial wedding, will also be transported to heaven, they will join the angels in its second rank and enjoy a divinity subordinate to that of the spiritual elect, or true Bride: the Saints, that come thus to be branches of the same perfect heavenly manhood with him [i.e., Christ], are so neverthelesse, in a distinguished state of subordination and inferiority to him, in the capacity of the Bride, the Lambs wife, who by all this their exaltation are neither Godded with God, nor Christed with Christ, but are still in the proper capacity of crea-

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tures, but of the highest and best creatures under Christ their Head, exalted above all Angels or any particular nature whatsoever, and brought thus at last into the enjoyment of the beatifical vision of God, in the face of the blessed Trinity. (422)53

Sikes clarifies this distinction between the Saints and other elect by distinguishing between a single and double portion of divinely planted Spirit: ‘There are two distinct sorts of everlastingly saved men; such as receive the single, and such as receive the double portion of the spirit ... The former are exalted into association with the elect angels ... The latter and more exalted form of Saints, are taken into association with the spiritual manhood of Christs person’ (37). It is in this way that Vane can argue without contradiction both for liberty of conscience in the present and for religious absolutism in the future. The Saints are the bride of Christ in his heavenly role as Mediator: they are ‘one spiritual seed with Christ, as brought forth into the same unity with him which he is in with his Father’ (122). This unique relationship with the Mediator accords the Saints a place in Vane’s divine scala above that of the angels. In Vane’s reading of Hebrews 1.14, then, the angels are at the Saints’ command: ‘The supreme Lords and Rulers then in this kingdom under Christ, are the Saints, or general assembly of the first-born ... unto whom as unto the right heirs of salvation, the elect Angels will be constant ministers and attendants’ (155).54 The difference between Lawrence and Vane on this point is illuminating. In Lawrence’s reading of Hebrews 1.14, angelic ministration revolves around delivery of the gospel and the government of the visible church; the Saints are aided by angels in their war with an Antichrist who ‘opposeth gospell-worhip, gospell-preaching, would mingle some things of worke and merit, with the free doctrine of justification ... so as pure and naked gospell is little knowne, or preached by the ministers and professours of it’ (85). In this model the angels retain their traditional ontological superiority to humanity, and the Saints are those who are directed by them to a pure reception of the revealed Word. In Vane’s terms such an emphasis on the Word and on visible worship would render Lawrence one of the fleshly seed, a bibliolater ontologically inferior to the spiritually enlightened Saint. The distinction rises to the fore in Stubbe’s criticism of Baxter’s Presbyterian theocracy: ‘Is it your desire that Church-Government should be established in this Land? why then, If it be such a Government as is jure Divino, you may set it up by the spiritual Sword, though you have

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no assistance from the civil Magistrate.’55 True jure divino church government is established by a spiritual elect, rather than a military force claiming sainthood. Liberty of conscience must be established, then, so that those holding the ‘spiritual Sword’ can rise to their rightful place of preeminence over the fleshly seed. In both models the angels direct visible government from a position of divine authority, but in Vane’s scheme this direction plays a secondary role: because of their mystical union with Christ as Mediator, Vane’s elect supersede both the invisible ‘Thrones and Dominions’ and their visible terrestrial counterparts.56 Those like Lawrence and his comrades in the Council of State who felt that the Cause would reach its end with the reformation of visible worship are ‘sonnes of Belial, as so many thornes that have laine goading in the sides of Gods suffering Saints’ (387). As we will see in the following chapters, Milton’s employment of angels in Paradise Lost shares the emphasis on election and illumination evident in both of these men. The development of such angelic personalities as Raphael and Michael points to a supernatural guidance consistent with the invocations of ‘holy Light’ (PL, 3.1) and evinces divine privilege. Before exploring these illuminationist aspects of angelology in Paradise Lost, however, it will be worthwhile first to explore the epic’s engagement with the Dionysian tradition. I do not conclude that Prelaty is Antichristian, for what need I? the things themselves conclude it. – Milton, The Reason of Church Government (CPW, 1: 850)

The attack on prelacy in The Reason of Church Government consistently makes the point common in dissenting polemic that episcopal government is a corruption of the simplicity of devotion outlined in scripture. Drawing on reasons that ‘imply themselves’ (CPW, 1: 750), in the phrase made famous by Stanley Fish, Milton aims to establish, as Calvin does in the Institutes, that far from being an extension of divine order, the episcopal hierarchy is attributable to the influence of Antichrist.57 The argument throughout the antiprelatical tracts is that the creation of bishops hierarchically superior to their fellow ministers stems from worldly greed and heathenish ceremony rather than from godly devotion: ‘The soure levin of humane Traditions mixt in one putrifi’d Masse with the poisonous dregs of hypocrisie in the hearts of Prelates that lye basking in the Sunny warmth of Wealth, and Promotion, is the Serpents Egge that will hatch an Antichrist wheresoever’ (CPW, 1: 590).58 Milton

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thus revives the language and spirit of the Elizabethan disciplinarians exemplified by William Fulke in 1580: ‘withall our heart, we abhorre, defie, detest and spit at your stinking greasie antichristian orders.’59 In their historical context, the antiprelatical tracts criticize those moderate Presbyterians who would negotiate a settlement with the bishops and favour instead the root-and-branch extirpation of prelacy slowly making its way into legislation via the influence of Vane and Cromwell. To this end, Milton upsets arguments for episcopacy founded on the early church by questioning the chief patristic precedents employed by Bishops Hall and Ussher – the same precedents that had been employed in the sixteenth-century conformity debate by Hooker, Cranmer, and Saravia. Of Prelatical Episcopacy in particular interrogates the evidence provided by Ignatius of Antioch, Irenaeus, Polycarp, Tertullian, and Clement of Alexandria, and posits in the face of such ‘offals, and sweepings of antiquity’ the ‘perfection of the Gospell,’ which provides evidence only of ‘two Ecclesiasticall Orders, Bishops, and Deacons’ (CPW, 1: 651).60 Against ‘all the heaped names of Angells, and Martyrs, Councells, and Fathers urg’d upon us’ Milton posits ‘the pure, and living precept of Gods word onely’ (CPW, 1: 652). Scripture is plain on the simplicity required of its ministers – Milton draws in the Animadversions on the First Epistle to Timothy (3.3) to establish this claim (CPW, 1: 702) – and the ‘true Apostolick Bishop’ for which scripture provides sanction is one who ‘feeds his Parochiall Flock’ and ‘ha’s his coequall and compresbyteriall Power to ordaine Ministers and Deacons by publique Prayer, and Vote of Christs Congregation in like sort as he himself was ordain’d’ (CPW, 1: 537). In response to the Dionysian view of the hierarch’s angelic office, the Animadversions claims that ‘ ’Tis not Ordination or Jurisdiction that is Angelicall, but the heavenly message of the Gospell, which is the office of all Ministers alike’ (CPW, 1: 713–14). Milton emphasizes this with an entirely de-sacramentalized view of ordination: For wherein, or in what worke is the office of a Prelat excellent above that of a Pastor? In ordination you’l say; but flatly against Scripture, for there we know Timothy receav’d ordination by the hands of the Presbytery [1 Timothy 4.14] ... Every Minister sustains the person of Christ in his highest work of communicating to us the mysteries of our salvation, and hath the power of binding and absolving, how should he need a higher dignity to represent or execute that which is an inferior work in Christ? why should the performance of ordination which is a lower office exalt a

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Prelat, and not the seldome discharge of a higher and more noble office which is preaching & administring much rather depresse him? Verily neither the nature, nor the example of ordination doth any way require an imparity between the ordainer and the ordained. (CPW, 1: 767–8)

In this hierarchy of ministerial offices, the significance of ordination is dismissed as having no soteriological significance to believers; preaching the Word, by contrast, provides insight on the Redemption, thus shedding light on the mystery central to salvation. That Milton and Donne resemble one another in their account of episcopacy as an administrative position and emphasis on the role of preaching shows a somewhat unexpected parallel between the two poets, one a supposed regicide and firebrand of the Puritan cause and the other a supposed apologist for Jacobean political and religious absolutism. What this proximity really reveals is how the moderate puritanism that was relatively mainstream in the early Jacobean church had been transformed by Milton’s coming of age to radical resistance of the Laudian establishment. Milton’s position – more aggressively iconoclastic in its treatment of this sacrament than Calvin’s is – completely undercuts Dionysian ecclesiology in its dismissal of the hierarch’s privileged status in the performance of theurgia. Ordination does not confer divine illumination at all; it is simply a public declaration of office subordinate to the ‘inward calling of God that makes a Minister’ (CPW, 1: 715). Milton here approximates the position of Luther’s Babylonian Captivity that if ordination ‘ever fall to the ground, the papacy and its characters will scarce survive’ (LW, 36: 117).61 It is not surprising, then, when we find an association of Dionysius with idolatry in Prelaticall Episcopacy. Having dismissed Irenaeus as the ‘Patron of Idolatry to the Papist’ for his Mariology (CPW, 1: 642), Milton later refers to Dionysius as providing authority to the Abramites’ opposition to the Iconoclasts’ efforts to ‘put downe Monks, and abolish Images’ (CPW, 1: 649). Just as the Iconoclasts were thwarted in their efforts to institute ‘homely’ religion by such theorizers of image worship as Dionysius and Irenaeus, so are defenders of episcopacy repeating the tactics of self-serving monks in drawing on patristic sources. For Milton’s purposes the tacit acceptance of Dionysius’s patristic dating is of polemical value: his status as one of the ‘ancient Fathers’ remains unchallenged so that his dubious religion becomes symptomatic of the unreliability of patristic theologians and underscores the need for exclusive reliance on scripture. As Lewalski observes, ‘Milton’s strategy is to denigrate all the patristic authorities

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and texts cited by Ussher – Ignatius, Leontius, Polycarp, Eusebius, Photius, Polycrates, Irenaeus, Papias, and others – by showing their insufficiency, inconvenience, and impiety, so as to leave scripture standing alone as the only authority on church government.’62 Given such arguments on the idolatry and greed inherent to prelacy, it would not be amiss to expect the heaven described in Paradise Lost not to sanction the Dionysian celestial hierarchy that traditionally underwrote episcopal privilege. Robert H. West asserts that Milton avoids the issue by using ‘the orders of rank so fluidly that no one has been able to organize his use into a consistent pattern.’ This fluidity allows for a sort of ‘general allusiveness that does not seriously exceed what Protestants would accept nor yet fall wholly short of what Catholics claimed.’63 Many of the Dionysian orders, West claims, are repeatedly evoked without Milton particularizing the attributes of their inhabitants: the Father refers to the ‘Thrones, Princedoms, Powers, Dominions’ (3.320), and again to the ‘Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, Powers’ (5.601), but does not provide detail as to what these categories might mean.64 That there are principalities in Heaven is indicated in the bard’s account of Mammon’s architectural achievements: his hand was known In Heav’n by many a Tow’red structure high, Where Scepter’d Angels held thir residence, And sat as Princes, whom the supreme King Exalted to such power, and gave to rule, Each in his Hierarchy, the Orders bright.

(1.732–7)65

This recalls Church Government, where Milton refers to the angels as ‘distinguisht and quaterniond into their celestiall Princedomes, and Satrapies, according as God himselfe hath writ his imperiall decrees through the great provinces of heav’n’ (CPW, 1: 752). It is worth emphasizing, however, that if Milton retains the names of the traditional angelic orders, it is because he, like Dionysius, is drawing on references to angels found in scripture. His ‘general allusiveness’ here is not a reluctant nod to the Areopagite’s hierarchy – or to Gregory the Great’s or to Isidore of Seville’s, for that matter – it is, rather, an echo of Colossians 1.16 and Ephesians 1.21. Indeed the conciliatory stance toward Catholicism that West describes is difficult to reconcile with Milton’s prose. Patrides more sensibly places Milton’s reluctance to particularize his angelic hierarchy in a distinctly Protes-

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tant context, claiming that the poet ‘did not attempt any classification of the angels’ in a gesture consistent with Calvin’s dismissal of angelological speculation.66 More recently Stephen M. Fallon has added that Milton’s angelology is generally consistent with ‘Puritan Reserve,’ but that ‘inasmuch as the writers of the “Puritan Reserve” are marked by a reticence to say more on the particulars of angel essence and operation than is clear from Scripture, they differ from Milton. The angelology embodied in Paradise Lost is audacious, original, and still unique.’67 It is worthwhile to note that audaciousness and originality are quite absent from the angelology of Paradise Regained, which has no reference to celestial orders and thus leads us to wonder whether the angelic offices of Paradise Lost are a reflection of the epic’s more complex machinery or of Milton’s view of divine order.68 While it is certainly true that we can expect Milton to be sceptical of angelological speculation and particularly of Dionysian hierarchy, and that we must consider the angels’ roles as literary characters in an epic poem, there remains nonetheless significant purpose in the celestial relationships that he does describe. As we have seen in Hooker and in Vane, one need not flesh out the roles of the nine orders to develop a polemically valuable angelology. Milton’s angelic characters in Paradise Lost do show several clear signs of hierarchized roles. The Archangels Uriel, Lucifer, and Michael are consistently described as members of God’s innermost circle of angels – the privileged seven described in Tobit 12.15, Zechariah 4.10, and throughout Revelation.69 Only Michael is referred to as a ‘Prince’ throughout the epic, and Milton clearly sees him as an angel, rather than, as the tradition Vane follows has it, as a standin for Christ.70 In the ranks of the war in Heaven, Gabriel is clearly inferior to this Archangel: ‘Go Michael of Celestial Armies Prince, / And thou in Military prowess next, / Gabriel’ (6.44–6). Gabriel is of sufficient rank, however, to be placed in command of the Cherubim guarding Eden (4.844–65), a relationship consistent with the latter’s construction throughout Paradise Lost as the lowest order of angels. Unlike their angelic superiors, the Cherubim are limited in their knowledge of Creation to that of which they have firsthand experience. This is a departure, of course, from the Thomist model to which Lawrence adheres, where all angels are pure Form and Intellect and gain their knowledge of particulars through their immediate access to ideas. The ‘angelic intellect,’ as Thomas describes it in his Summa theologiae, ‘does not understand intelligible truth discursively but by a simple intuition. The human intellect, on the other hand, draws intel-

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ligible truth from the objects of sense and understands that truth by means of a certain discursus of the intellect’ (46: 39).71 Not all of Milton’s angels possess this quality. In the battle in Heaven, ‘Zophiel, of Cherubim the swiftest wing’ (6.535), returns from a reconnaissance mission to the rebel camp bearing news that is no news at all to his noetic superiors: this day will pour down, If I conjecture aught, no drizzling show’r, But rattling storm of Arrows barb’d with fire. So warn’d he them aware themselves[.]

(6.544–7)

Even after seeing the preparations of the rebel camp, Zophiel’s predictions for the forthcoming day of battle are speculative: he ‘conjectures,’ and, more significantly, his deduction, even when informed by objects of sense, falls short of predicting the rebels’ invention of cannons. Like Zophiel, the Seraph Abdiel attempts to bring news of the activities of the rebel angels to his superiors. After fleeing from the first meeting of the Satanic host, he reports to the Mount of God only to find his arrival anticipated by the heavenly Powers: ‘War he perceiv’d, war in procinct, and found / Already known what he for news had thought / To have reported ...’ (6.19–21). Those ‘friendly Powers’ residing closest to the Mount of God are already aware of the impending rebellion (6.22). And while they deliver Abdiel to the ‘seat supreme’ (6.27), he encounters God as ‘a voice / From midst a Golden Cloud’ (6.27–8). Like the Cherubim guarding Eden, to whom God speaks ‘from his secret Cloud’ (10.32), Abdiel is not capable of enduring God’s glory firsthand – this cloud is never mentioned, by contrast, when the Archangel Michael receives his charge (11.99–133). If, as is claimed in De doctrina Christiana, ‘God reveals himself to the sight of angels ... insofar as they are capable of seeing him,’ it would seem that Paradise Lost emphasizes the inability of the Seraphim and Cherubim directly to endure divine glory. Isaiah’s vision of the Seraphim – where Seraphs were in attendance above the Lord, and ‘each one had six wings: with twain he covered his face, and with twain he covered his feet, and with twain he did fly’ (6.2) – is thus evoked here, but employed in a way altogether different from the Areopagite’s: whereas Dionysius takes it as evidence that these are ‘the first rank of heavenly beings’ who are ‘particularly worthy of communing with God and of sharing in his work’ (CH, 165), Milton uses this biblical account of

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Seraphic self-veiling to suggest that divine glory is not fully revealed to these angels. The limitations of the Cherubim are also operative in Satan’s deception of Uriel. By disguising himself as a ‘stripling Cherub’ (3.636), Satan is able to profess an ignorance of the newly created Earth that can only be remedied by an errand of observation and direction by a superior spirit who acts as ‘Interpreter’ (3.657, 668–76). He is able to employ this ruse because a Cherub does not have the intelligential capacity that would obviate the need for empirical observation of humankind – in the Thomist model the angels’ high intellection ‘makes it unnecessary for them to acquire knowledge by sense experience’ (ST 9: 33). Like a human being, this angel must embark upon, as is described in De doctrina, the necessary ‘course of instruction’ to complement his implicit faith (CPW, 6: 472).72 That Satan’s disguise works, and indeed merits Uriel’s praise, indicates that the Cherubim of Milton’s universe do require sense experience to arrive at a fuller sense of the glory of ‘The great Work-Master’ (3.696). That Uriel is deceived by Satan reveals Milton’s reluctance to confer perfect intelligence upon any creature: ‘neither Man nor Angel can discern / Hypocrisy, the only evil that walks / Invisible, except to God alone’ (3.682–4). As Fallon observes, Milton ‘limits the knowledge of the angels’ here in a manner also consistent with De doctrina: ‘The good angels do not see into all God’s thoughts, as the Papists pretend. They know by revelation only those things which God sees fit to show them, and they know other things by virtue of their very high intelligence’ (CPW, 6: 347–8).73 The ‘very high intelligence’ that Uriel possesses as a member of the most elite rank of angels is thus distinguished from omniscience. The encounter between the Satan Cherub and Uriel ends significantly in a display of hierarchical distance between the two angels: ‘Satan bowing low, / As to superior Spirits is wont in Heav’n, / Where Honour due and reverence none neglects’ (3.736–8).74 The two angels are thus clearly non-Dionysian in that a Cherub is subordinate to an Archangel who is approving his course of self-instruction. In a Dionysian universe, this would be entirely impossible: not only would a Cherub be superior in rank, but his knowledge would absolutely contain that of his Archangelic inferior – this final point is fundamental to his celestial hierarchy, where ‘the higher orders have all the illuminations and powers of those below them and the subordinate have none of those possessed by their superiors’ (CH, 159). Though Milton does not dwell on angelic hierarchy, then, the hier-

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archical relationships that he does describe register a clear departure from the Dionysian model. The placement of Archangels at the top of the angelic hierarchy, and of Cherubim and Seraphim at the bottom of it, inverts the Areopagite’s celestial hierarchy. This is a tendency that goes well beyond ‘Puritan reserve.’ In Order and Disorder, for example, Lucy Hutchinson is considerably more reserved than Milton is with regard to the amount of attention she is willing to devote to the angels, but even in her limited description she shows the stubborn persistence of the Dionysian ranks: These perfect, pure intelligences be, Excel in might and in celerity, Whose sublime natures and whose agile powers Are vastly so superior unto ours Our narrow thoughts cannot to them extend And things so far above us comprehend As in themselves, although in part we know Some scantlings by appearances below And sacred writ, wherein we find there be Distinguished orders in their hierarchy: Archangels, cherubims, and seraphims, Who celebrate their God with holy hymns; Some raised to thrones and principalities, Some power, some dominion exercise; Ten thousand thousand vulgar angels stand All in their ranks, waiting the Lord’s command, Which with prompt inclination of their will And cheerful, swift obedience they fulfill ...

(1.253–70)75

Though the privileged status accorded these creatures operates largely as preamble to an upbraiding of their terrestrial counterparts – ‘Why blush we not at our vain pride, when we / Such condescension in Heaven’s courtier’s see’ (1.279–80) – it is significant that this reduced account of the celestial hierarchy operates in traditional terms. Speculation on angels is discouraged – ‘Our narrow thoughts cannot to them extend’ – but they are here described as Thomist ‘pure intelligences’ defined against human reliance on deduction from the senses: ‘things so far above us comprehend / As in themselves, although in part we know / Some scantlings by appearances below.’ ‘[H]oly writ’ provides evidence of ‘orders in their hierarchy,’ and in these, in a way recalling

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Bonaventure, the Seraphim and Cherubim’s contemplation and praise are elevated above the active life of the ‘vulgar’ ‘Angels,’ with the mixed life of Powers and Dominations placed between in a middle rank. Hutchinson elevates the Archangels to the topmost triad, but also places them there with the traditionally supreme Seraphim and Cherubim, leaving the Dionysian hierarchy relatively intact. Like Henry Lawrence, she forecloses angelological speculation but shows in the process an endorsement of several aspects of traditional, and especially Thomist, angelology. Though Milton, therefore, is much less reserved than Hutchinson, he is simultaneously more aggressive in his rejection of aspects of the tradition that cannot be reconciled with scripture. By promoting the ministerial Archangels to the top of his angelic hierarchy, and demoting the Seraphim and Cherubim to the bottom, Milton creates a heaven where the enactment of divine will is the highest creaturely calling. The contemplative role Dionysius attributes to the Cherubim, and the burning devotion associated with the Seraphim – the qualities so important in Thomas’s and Bonaventure’s monastic reworkings of The Celestial Hierarchy – are subordinated to the Archangels’ execution of Providence. God’s inner circle of Archangels, ‘the sev’n ... nearest to his Throne’ (3.648–9), are praised primarily for their efficacy in carrying out divine decree: they ‘Stand ready at command, and are his Eyes / That run through all the Heav’ns, or down to th’Earth / Bear his swift errands over moist and dry ...’ (3.650–2). This valuation of the angelic ability to serve the divine will is, as Michael Walzer points out, characteristic of puritan angelology, and is in the spirit of the emphasis on Hebrews 1.14 that we have identified in this chapter.76 Hutchinson, Sibbes, Perkins, and, as we have seen, Lawrence and Vane, all show the emphasis on serviceability found in Calvin’s angelology.77 Milton stands apart, however, in his pursuit of this Reformist principle to its conclusions, and in his audacity to reorganize entirely the celestial hierarchy. Indeed, scripture would seem to provide sanction of Milton’s demotion of the Seraphim and Cherubim and elevation of the Archangels: it is only in the Hebrew Bible that angels are referred to as Seraphim and Cherubim, and only in the Christian Bible that we find Archangels. Isaiah, not only a book of the Hebrew Bible but a prophetic book, provides the only biblical appearance of Seraphim, and thus falls short as a proof text establishing these angels’ preeminence. Archangels, the ‘supreme messengers,’ on the other hand, play a more significant role in texts that from Milton’s perspective would have been much more significant. Paul’s First Epistle to the Thessalonians describes them as har-

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bingers of the Second Coming (1 Thessalonians 4.16). Michael, who is heavenly prince of the people of Israel in Daniel (10), and who is leader of the war against Satan and the rebel angels in Revelation (12.7), is referred to as an Archangel in Jude and identified as the angel who buried Moses (Jude 9; cf. Zechariah 3.2). It follows, then, that his is the order closest to God, and that the theologian who, as Luther would have it, is ‘more of a Platonist than a Christian’ (LW, 36: 109) got things backwards in placing the Archangels on the outskirts of Heaven. Michael’s prominence in Paradise Lost also points to the apocalyptic element in Milton’s angelology, the implications of which we will soon examine. We must thus re-evaluate West’s claim that Milton ‘hints that the top two ranks are as Dionysius gives them: “The great Seraphic Lords and Cherubim” (1.794) sit in hell’s council uncontracted while the lesser devils swarm reduced in the outer courts.’78 The detail to which West does not give sufficient attention is that the Seraphim and Cherubim are leaders in Hell. This leadership is not an endorsement of the Dionysian scheme, but is rather an assertion of its backwardness. Only in Hell is it possible for Beelzebub, the ‘Fall’n Cherub’ (1.157), to be the second most prominent angel – he is entirely absent from descriptions of the war in Heaven in books 5 and 6 – and only in Hell does Satan’s disguise as a ‘Plebeian Angel militant / Of lowest order’ suggest that this is the bottommost angelic rank (10.442–3) – later in book 10 the Angels of Heaven are described as ‘mighty’ (650). Only Satan describes Uriel as ‘Brightest Seraph’ (3.667); everywhere else he is referred to as an Archangel. The only place where the Cherubim fill their traditional throne-bearing role is not in God’s presence, but in the conveyance of Satan during the war in Heaven: ‘Th’ Apostate in his Sun-bright Chariot sat / Idol of Majesty Divine, enclos’d / With Flaming Cherubim’ (6.100–2). To this Satanic parody of the ‘Chariot of Paternal Deity’ (6.750) the Cherubim add only lustre, whereas their unfallen counterparts seem to possess qualities making them especially well suited to their divinely appointed task: Itself instinct with Spirit, but convoy’d By four Cherubic shapes, four Faces each Had wondrous, as with Stars thir bodies all And Wings were set with Eyes, with Eyes the Wheels Of Beryl, and careering Fires between ...

(6.752–6)

The emphasis in this description is on the harmonious relationship between the Cherubim and the Chariot that is ‘Itself instinct with

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Spirit.’ This recalls the Chariot of Zeale drawn in An Apology from the same scriptural texts (Ezekiel 1 and Revelation 4), and whose conveyors embody certain spiritual virtues – ‘one visag’d like a Lion to expresse power, high authority and indignation, the other of count’nance like a man to cast derision and scorne upon perverse and fraudulent seducers’ – and which ‘drives over the heads of Scarlet Prelats’ (CPW, 1: 900). Such associations of the fallen angels with traditional angelology thus serve as Milton’s most aggressive animadversions against Dionysian order and affirm his position on ecclesiastical hierarchy: that prelacy is a ‘criminous’ and ‘unholy Hierarchy’ (CPW, 1: 786, 925), that it has ‘trespas’t not onely against the Monarchy of England, but of Heaven also’ (CPW, 1: 589), and that ‘Lucifer ... was the first prelat Angel’ (CPW, 1: 762). In his treatment of the Dionysian ranks Milton might also be responding to Zanchi, who is cited by Heywood, in his claim that the fallen angels maintain a ninefold order that is a corruption of the Dionysian heavenly hierarchy, descending from false gods to tempters.79 Milton, by contrast, finds the Dionysian hierarchy itself a demonic parody of the arrangement of the loyal angels. The hierarchical relationships among Milton’s loyal angels underscore the reliance on gospel in matters of devotion for which the antiprelatical tracts argue – ‘We can want no Creed,’ Milton writes in An Apology, ‘so long as we want not the Scriptures’ (CPW, 1: 943). His departures from the Dionysian tradition in Paradise Lost register the desire not only to limit angelological speculation, but also rigorously to follow the scriptural comments on angels important to reformed exegetes – the prominence of the Archangel Michael, the mention of Seraphim and Cherubim only in the Hebrew Bible, and the emphasis on the angels’ role as messengers. The Antichristian nature of the ecclesiastical hierarchy for which Dionysius provides sanction is affirmed in the prominence of the Seraphim and Cherubim among the fallen angels, a prominence consistent with the claim in the Animadversions that ‘it is God that makes a Bishop, and the Devill that makes him take a prelaticall Bishoprick’ (CPW, 1: 724). Though the celestial hierarchy exists in reduced form in Milton’s epic, it is nonetheless constructed in a way that buttresses arguments against episcopacy. It is developed so that the ‘things themselves’ imply that ecclesiastical hierarchy is not a reflection of its celestial counterpart but is rather symptomatic of Antichrist’s infiltration of the church.

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5 Raphael, the Celestial Physician

‘Let us summon Raphael, celestial physician, that he may set us free by moral philosophy and by dialectic as though by wholesome drugs.’ – Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man*

Milton’s Raphael is unique among his major angelic characters in the ambiguity of his hierarchical status. Although he is usually described in Paradise Lost as a Seraph (5.277 and 7.113), he is also referred to once as ‘The affable Arch-angel’ (7.41). This single reference may represent what West describes as Milton’s tendency to use the term as ‘a title of high command or special mission,’ rather than the designation of an order: ‘Milton names only Satan, Uriel, Raphael, and Michael as Archangels. The three good angels on the list all have special worldly missions – Uriel to be regent of the sun, and the others to convey God’s messages to Adam – but plainly they have a rank in heaven as Archangels aside from these missions.’1 That Raphael is equal to Uriel or Michael is questionable: despite the angel’s claim in the Book of Tobit to be ‘one of the seven who stand ready and enter before the glory of the Lord’ (12.15),2 nowhere in Paradise Lost is he described as a member of God’s innermost circle. It also must be remembered that the ‘special worldly missions’ of the three angels suggest Raphael’s lower rank in Heaven: Uriel directs the motion of the sun; Michael casts Adam and Eve out of Eden and reveals the entire course of human history; Raphael, on the other hand, is a ‘sociable Spirit’ sent by God to have a friendly chat with our Sire: ‘Go therefore, half this day as friend with friend / Converse with Adam’ (5.221, 229–30). The hierarchical distance between Raphael and Michael is furthermore

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observed by Adam upon the latter’s arrival in Eden; he recognizes immediately that Michael is ‘One of the heav’nly Host, and by his Gait / None of the meanest’ and that that he is not ‘sociably mild, / As Raphaël’ (11.230–1, 234–5). In a way not seen among the ‘true’ Archangels, Raphael – like the ‘brightest Seraphim’ of book 3, who ‘with both wings veil their eyes’ (381–2) – must be ‘Veil’d with his gorgeous wings’ in God’s presence (5.250). The epic’s other loyal Seraph, Abdiel, is likewise shielded from God by a ‘Golden Cloud’ (6.28). When Raphael appears before the Throne of God his posture is thus similar to the Seraphim in Isaiah 6.2: ‘each one had six wings; with twain he covered his face, and with twain he covered his feet, and with twain he did fly.’ Dionysius sees this self-veiling as a figure of the secrecy of the ‘holy of holies,’ celestial and ecclesiastical; Bonaventure, the ‘Seraphic Doctor,’ draws on this tradition in using the six wings as a figure of the ladder the ecstatic soul must climb in its journey to God.3 Milton has in mind something much more akin to Calvin’s commentary on Isaiah 6, which states that the Seraphim must veil themselves because they cannot endure divine glory.4 When Raphael appears in his ‘proper shape’ as he alights on the Eastern cliff of Paradise, Milton recalls the earlier description of his ‘gorgeous wings,’ but now presents him with face exposed: A Seraph wing’d; six wings he wore, to shade His lineaments Divine; the pair that clad Each shoulder broad, came mantling o’er his breast With regal Ornament; the middle pair Girt like a Starry Zone his waist, and round Skirted his loins and thighs with downy Gold And colors dipt in Heav’n; the third his feet Shadow’d from either heel with feather’d mail Sky-tinctur’d grain.

(5.277–85)

That this is the angel’s proper shape registers a departure not only from the Thomist deduction that the angels are pure form, but also from the Cambridge Platonist Henry More’s ethereal, spheroid angels.5 Milton also shows us here that Seraphic self-veiling in God’s presence is a temporary necessity, thus departing from Dionysian and Bonaventuran traditions. The Seraph’s ‘special mission’ thus does not indicate an alteration in his celestial rank. This entirely un-Dionysian presentation of special

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calling rather than rigid hierarchy readily parallels Milton’s views on the church, and especially recalls the position of the antiprelatical tracts on ecclesiastical appointment. Paul’s installation of Timothy and Titus had long been a favourite weapon in defences of episcopacy – long before Ussher or Hall, Dionysius drew heavily on it in his Ecclesiastical Hierarchy – and Milton is anxious in Of Prelatical Episcopacy to undercut this perceived apostolicity. To this end, he argues that ‘Timothy, and Titus ... had rather the vicegerency of an Apostleship committed to them, then the ordinary charge of a Bishoprick, as being men of an extraordinary calling’ (CPW, 1: 626). Paul’s request of Timothy says nothing about his permanent installation as bishop, but ‘was only an intreating him to tarry at Ephesus, to do something left him in charge’ (CPW, 1: 631).6 Titus was likewise ‘left in Creet, that he might supply, or proceed to set in order that which Saint Paul in Apostolick manner had begun, for which hee had his particular Commission ... . So that what hee did in Creet, cannot so much be thought the exercise of an ordinary Function, as the direction of an inspired mouth’ (CPW, 1: 711).7 The same principle holds in Milton’s angelology, where divine service is emphasized much more than hierarchical position. Raphael’s mission does not carry promotion in the celestial hierarchy, but instead points to a ‘particular Commission’ deemed necessary by the Father. Indeed, to view this errand as signifying such promotion is to misrepresent significantly Milton’s view of the nature of obedience. Those creatures who are meritorious in Milton’s universe are not ontological careerists seeking new heights on the divine scala – an impulse displayed in Satan and the fallen angels – but devoted souls willing to answer God’s call insofar as they are able. ‘God doth not need / Either man’s work or his own gifts,’ Patience reminds us in Milton’s nineteenth sonnet, ‘who best / Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best’ (9–11). In Paradise Lost the actions of Raphael – or Zophiel, or Abdiel – would not amount to much in the eyes of a taskmaster; it is their devotion to God that earns our esteem. Precisely what Raphael’s commission entails, however, is a source of debate deserving of attention. We must first recognize Raphael’s traditional role as celestial physician, the significance of which has not been fully explored, his resulting association with dialectic, and his operation in Milton’s epic as shadow of that ultimate spiritual physician, Christ.8 In exploring these aspects of the sociable Spirit, I will defend an obvious conclusion that many seek to avoid: Adam is a lacklustre

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pupil. Far from making Raphael’s a fool’s errand, however, Adam’s imperfect learning awakens in the Christian reader a spiritual awareness fundamental to the epic’s theodicy. This awareness is especially dramatized in the case of the bard, who, like his counterpart in the Book of Tobit, shows a spiritual awakening as a result of Raphael’s visit expressed in the hymnic opening to book 7. Several have seen in Raphael an Edenic schoolmaster embodying the principles in Milton’s treatise Of Education, claiming that he holds many of the ideal attributes of a Miltonic teacher but, unlike Michael, has some difficulty in controlling his classroom – Michael Allen argues that both angels are ‘best understood as expressions of the teaching methods which Milton describes in Of Education.’9 This line of criticism often emphasizes the ‘blunder’ of Raphael’s admonishment of Adam at the end of book 8, a pedagogical slip that leaves our Parent untutored in the proper role of physical passion and thus contributes to his fall.10 The obvious shortcoming of this approach to Raphael is that he is really not a schoolmaster at all: he is an angel sent by God to inform Adam’s sense of obedience. If he were in permanent residence in Eden for the purpose of instructing Adam in geometry, or music, or even military exercise, a straightforward relationship to Of Education might hold. That this is not his role must qualify the extent to which we use this tract to shed light on his function in Paradise Lost. Though Raphael speaks to Adam as ‘Friend with friend,’ there is still a significant ontological gap between angel and human, and to see Raphael as an instructor in the mould of Milton’s educational treatise is to misrepresent this relationship. Of Education does shed light, however, on the principles underlying Milton’s sense of moral and spiritual guidance, showing especially the significance of logic. In this treatise the acquisition of logic is the crowning achievement of a pupil’s development. The significance to Milton of Ramist method in particular is evinced in the Artis logicae and has been found in many of his major works, both poetry and prose.11 In the Animadversions, for example, Milton makes frequent assaults on the Remonstrant with reference to the Downame edition of Ramus’s Dialecticks.12 We should expect Raphael in particular to carry a certain dialectical ‘resonance’ – and I use this Greenblattean term to emphasize the ‘active charge’ the apocryphal angel carries for Renaissance artists and

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thinkers.13 From the translation of his name, the ‘medicine’ or ‘healing’ of God, and his knowledge of the pharmaceutical applications of fish scraps in the Book of Tobit, Raphael is traditionally presented as a celestial apothecary. The Rabbinical tradition presents the angel variously as ameliorating the post-operative pain of Abraham’s circumcision, tending to Jacob’s thigh after his wrestling match at Peniel, and giving a medical textbook to Noah after the flood.14 The medieval cult of Raphael, particularly that encouraged by Edmund Lacy in the fifteenth century, venerated especially his role as a healer, and the office for visitation of the sick had priests call on the angel to descend with a cure as he did for Tobias and Sarah.15 Joost van den Vondel draws on this tradition by having Raphael announce that he has come to Lucifer with healing intent: ‘I come with medicine / And balm of mercy from the heart of God.’16 The physician and astrologist John Napier claimed that prophecies granted to him by Raphael allowed him to predict outbreaks of the plague.17 In a similar spirit, Richard Blackmore’s Prince Arthur (1695) has the angel cure the British camp with a ‘Viall full of Od’rous Fumes’ of a plague induced by the demon Asmodai.18 In the Renaissance it is not unusual to associate this medical expertise with the influential Platonic category of the physician, who administers the moral benefits of logical method. Thus arises Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s portrait in the epigraph to this chapter of Raphael as celestial physician administering the ‘wholesome drugs’ of moral philosophy and dialectic. It is no coincidence that the traveller who leads the dialogue in Thomas More’s Utopia is named Raphael, or that Trithemius, in describing a Platonic cycle of ages each governed by a prominent biblical angel, associates the age of Raphael with knowledge, and particularly developments in writing, music, and navigation.19 A generation after Milton, the Sicilian philosopher Tommasso Campailla seems independently to have placed Raphael in Eden for the purpose of leading morally instructive dialogues with Adam.20 The Ramism that Milton clearly found important, moreover, frequently describes its practical, forensic qualities as arising from the medical discourse of such figures as Hippocrates and Galen, underscoring the associations already available between ‘the medicine of God’ and dialectical method.21 Recognizing this association may make more specific Northrop Frye’s observation that Adam and Raphael’s encounter is ‘a Socratic dialogue without irony, a symposium with unfermented wine, a description of an ideal commonwealth ending with the expulsion of

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undesirables, and (for Adam is the king of men) a cyropaedia, or manual of royal discipline.’22 The dialectical framework of the dialogue may also go a long way in explaining why so much of what Raphael says – from the notion of procession and return, to the war in Heaven, to angelic sex – would have been seen by Milton as dubiously, or at least not doctrinally, true. It should strike us as odd, for example, that this angel spends much of his early discourse referring to Plato’s Timaeus and Lucretius’s De rerum natura, or, as Irene Samuel argues, that Raphael seems a ‘strict Neoplatonist’ in the mould of Castiglione’s Cardinal Bembo.23 If, as Lewalski has shown, the dialogue on love between Raphael and Adam is generically indebted to Plato’s Symposium and such Renaissance counterparts as those of Castiglione, Ficino, and Leone Ebreo, we must also recognize that part of the mechanism of Platonic dialogue, the tendency that Stanley Fish has described as ‘self-consuming,’ lies in its ability to engender awareness not through knowledge of the subject matter at hand, but through dialogical exercise itself.24 To say that Raphael’s instruction is ‘about’ procession and return, or the war in Heaven, or angelic sex, is as fundamentally limited as claiming that the Timaeus is ‘about’ creation, or the Phaedrus ‘about’ love. While much of the conversation may revolve around these topics, they are ultimately in Plato’s dialogues only instruments to the larger didactic purpose – the training of young nobles in philosophy for the purpose of instituting an ideal state in the Timaeus, and an object lesson in the operations and virtues of dialectic in the Phaedrus. To use the terminology of Milton’s Artis logicae, despite his status as angel Raphael does not speak in the vein of ‘Divine Testimony,’ a ‘bare attestation’ that ‘does not prove ... why it is so’ – this more accurately describes the speech of the Archangel Michael, who is largely a conduit of what God reveals to him – but instead employs dispositio, the arrangement of arguments, to lead Adam to a heightened awareness of the divine economy and his role therein (CPW, 8: 318–19).25 In this regard he approximates the spiritual physician described in Church Government: it were all one to the benefit of souls, as it would be to the cure of bodies, if all the Physitians in London should get into the several Pulpits of the City, and assembling all the diseased in every parish should begin a learned Lecture of Pleurisies, Palsies, Lethargies, to which perhaps none there present were inclin’d, and so without so much as feeling one puls,

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or giving the least order to any skilfull Apothecary, should dismisse ’em from time to time, some groaning, some languishing, some expiring, with this only charge to look well to themselves, and do as they heare. (CPW, 1: 755–6)

Rather than simply lecturing on matters of obedience, Raphael leads discussion aimed at quickening the spiritual faculty that is Adam’s best defence against temptation. As a more specific working argument on what precisely this awareness entails, we can roughly combine and paraphrase the comments on the ends of learning in Of Education and The Reason of Church Government: Raphael engenders an awareness of the realm of spirit that is just slightly beyond human grasp so that Adam might embrace the highest part of himself and gain the selfesteem that will make him love God, imitate Him, and be like Him.26 This is why Raphael begins by claiming the ontological superiority of spirit to sense. To Adam’s opening statement of his limited knowledge – ‘only this I know, / That one Celestial Father gives to all’ (5.402–3) – Raphael responds that the realm of spirit lies between humanity and God; this is the substance, if the pun may be excused, of his comment on angelic digestion: ... to man in part Spiritual, may of purest Spirits be found No ingrateful food: and food alike those pure Intelligential substances require As doth your Rational; and both contain Within them every lower faculty Of sense[.]

(5.405–11)

Jason P. Rosenblatt is clearly correct in concluding that in this jab at the ‘common gloss / Of Theologians’ (5.435–6) Milton subordinates the apocryphal account in the Book of Tobit (12.19) of Raphael faking consumption of human food to Genesis 18, where Abraham and Sara prepare a meal for their angelic guests. Calvin also avers that the angels of Genesis truly ate, though he suggests that God temporarily gave them physical bodies so that they might do so.27 Heywood’s Hierarchie does quite the opposite with the two biblical passages on angelic eating, evoking them alongside one another but claiming that the angels appearing to Abraham only seemed to eat.28 This statement is also the perfect exordium to Raphael’s lesson. Adam has already

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shown in his counsel of Eve his understanding of ‘Reason’ as the chief faculty ‘in the Soul’ (5.100–3), but the superiority of the ‘Spiritual’ and ‘Intelligential’ to the rational, and his own share of these rarefied qualities, are to this point beyond him. Raphael proceeds to elaborate upon the Neoplatonist – whether that of Pseudo-Dionysius, or Ficino, or Pico, Milton, as Clay Daniel points out, remains noncommital here so that he can later cast suspicion on all of these29 – hierarchy of Reason, Intellect, and Being, and their subordination to the One: there ‘one Almighty is, from whom / All things proceed, and up to him return’ (5.469–70). More ‘spiritous’ beings have a greater noetic power than their inferiors do: ... the Soul Reason receives, and reason is her being, Discursive or Intuitive; discourse Is oftest yours, the latter most is ours, Differing but in degree, of kind the same.

(5.486–90)30

As opposed to the Thomist assertion that angels use only intellection, Milton attributes to them some discursive reason – ‘the latter most is ours.’ This passage thus generates greater proximity between angelic knowledge and its human counterpart; it awakens Adam to the highest part of himself – his small share of intuitive knowledge of God’s love – and also points to the prominence of discursive reasoning in Raphael’s view of human epistemology. The reward of obedience, Raphael states, is promotion on the scala natura that he describes: the transcendence of sense and the transformation to spirit that will allow more immediate enjoyment of divine bounty (5.499–503). God requires ‘voluntary service’ not ‘necessitated’ (5.530–1), a standard applied equally to angels and humans: ‘freely we serve, / Because we freely love, as in our will / To love or not; in this we stand or fall: / And some are fall’n’ (5.538–41).31 In yet another departure from Thomas, Raphael thus stresses, as Milton does in De doctrina Christiana, that the loyal angels are not fixed in their bliss (CPW, 6: 344). Salkeld’s Treatise of Angels, by contrast, claims that ‘neyther the blessed [angels] can come to damnation, nor the damned to felicitie,’ citing not only Thomas but Augustine’s claim in De civitate Dei that the devils never obtained the beatitude ‘quam habere Angelos lucis pia fide credimus: Which we piously believe the good Angels have obtained.’32 Perhaps the most relevant departure from this widespread

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opinion was that of Jacobus Arminius, who argues in his Examination of the Treatise of William Perkins that if ‘the angels obey God freely, I shall say with confidence, that it is possible that the angels should not obey God. If, on the other hand, you affirm that they cannot but obey God, I shall thence boldly infer that they do not obey God freely.’33 This seems very much to be Milton’s position on angelic obedience, both before and after Satan’s rebellion. With the suggestion that some spirits have fallen something very significant happens: Adam does not quite get it. While he claims that he is most motivated by ‘desire to hear’ the ‘full relation’ of the angelic fall, he also professes ‘doubt’ that disobedience can exist in Heaven (5.554–6). He further shows dubious comprehension of Raphael’s message in his pledge never to ‘forget to love / Our maker’ (5.550–1). He should know by now – as we certainly do from observing the apostate angels over the course of the first four books – that disobedience is much more than an act of forgetfulness: it is a conscious misapplication of the will that ignores the undischargeable debt of love owed to God. Although he simultaneously promises obedience to ‘him whose command / Single, is yet so just’ (551–2), this likewise indicates an imperfect awareness of Raphael’s principles. Adam implies an ontological distinction between God and his actions that allows him to evaluate the ‘justice’ of divine decree – he forgets the theological commonplace that unlike created beings, God is pure potency and act. It is precisely this wedge that Satan employs in his seduction of Eve: ‘God therefore cannot hurt ye, and be just; / Not just, not God; not fear’d then, nor obey’d’ (9.700–1). Satan’s logic is fallacious in that the axiomatic truth ‘not just, not God’ means that if God hurts you it is just. To say as Adam does here that the Edenic interdiction seems fair enough is to admit the possibility that God might be unjust and unloving, and does not fully acknowledge Him as the fontanus plenitudo dispensing justice and love. This is the principle fundamental to the procession and return that Raphael has just outlined. It is significant, then, that at this point Raphael pauses, reflects, and shifts his approach (5.561–2). After all the Father has made it excruciatingly clear, as is his wont, that the Seraph’s visit should engender knowledge of the relationship between will and obedience: ... such discourse bring on, As may advise him of his happy state, Happiness in his power left free to will,

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Left to his own free Will, his Will though free, Yet mutable ...

(5.233–7; emphasis mine)

The threefold repetition of the importance of free will in Raphael’s ‘discourse’ leaves little doubt as to its significance; the warning regarding Satan that is often taken to be the primary purpose of the angel’s visit seems, by comparison, like an afterthought. Raphael’s pause points to the good physician’s method, as Socrates tells us in Plato’s Gorgias, of exercising ‘forethought for what is best for the soul’; to do otherwise is simply to lead pleasant conversation in Paradise, a role more properly fitting a rhetorician, or ‘cook’ in Plato’s terms, ‘cultivating pleasure’ rather than pursuing good.34 As James describes the Platonic physician in Basilikon Doron, he ‘must first know what peccant humours his Patient is naturally most subject to before he can begin his cure.’35 Having seen Adam’s imperfect comprehension of the nature of obedience and disobedience, Raphael elaborates on the subject through his narrative of the war in Heaven. To return to the terminology of the Artis logicae, instead of following as he has done thus far the standard logical method of moving from ‘universals’ to ‘singulars,’ he turns to a ‘crypsis of method’ generally reserved for poets and orators, or those facing a resistant audience, that inverts this order through the use of narrative and tends to make more use of ‘digressions from the point and dwelling on a point.’36 Perhaps the best example of Raphael ‘dwelling on a point’ for Adam’s benefit is his account of the exchanges between Abdiel and Satan. To Satan’s statement that angelic ‘freedom’ precludes the introduction of ‘Law and Edict on us’ (5.798), Abdiel replies that the terms of law and liberty are determined by God alone: ‘Shalt thou give Law to God, shalt thou dispute / With him the points of liberty, who made / Thee what thou art’ (5.822–4). Setting aside more universal notions of divine order, Abdiel claims that ‘experience’ has further taught the angels how ‘provident’ God is in exalting their ‘happy state’ (5.826, 828, 829–30). Moving from inartificial to artificial demonstration, he finally argues by concessio that even if it is unjust ‘That equal over equals Monarch Reign’ (5.832), the fact that the Son was decreed King of Heaven by the Father’s Word – ‘Equal to him begotten Son, by whom / As by his Word the mighty Father made / All things, ev’n thee’ (5.835–7) – renders Satan’s argument inapplicable in the present case. When Satan attempts rebuttal in the only way that Abdiel’s speech has left open, by denying God’s creative power, Abdiel sees that the rebel

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angels are beyond help and voices words that Adam would do well to remember in book 9: ‘O alienate from God, O spirit accurst, / Forsak’n of all good; I see thy fall / Determin’d’ (5.877–9). In witnessing Abdiel’s pious resistance, Adam sees that disobedience pursued to its logical foundation denies God’s role as Creator – Abdiel forces the revelation, as Lewalski puts it, of ‘the suppressed terms of Satan’s argument.’37 Before striking the first blow of the war in Heaven, Abdiel attacks Satan’s fallen notion that ‘Our puissance is our own’ (5.864), and shows whence true strength arises: ‘His puissance, trusting in th’ Almighty’s aid, / I mean to try, whose Reason I have tri’d / Unsound and false’ (6.119–21). This remark demonstrates that Abdiel’s arguments in his evening encounter with Satan stemmed from his own reason rather than the ‘Almighty’s aid,’ and provides a vital object lesson in the ability of discursive reason to refute temptation, even when the tempter is a superior spirit.38 His arguments also address the points of ontology on which Adam was confused: in response to the wedge that Satan drives between the Father and his ‘Edict,’ which allows him to divorce the coronation of the Son from divine benevolence, Abdiel reminds his audience that He is the source of Creation and the wellspring of universal law. Once Adam seems to understand the significance of these ideas – seen in his sound resolution to ‘observe / Immutably his sovran will, the end / Of what we are’ (7.78–80) – the point is driven home with the exchange of Creation stories. Raphael adapts this exchange to his purposes, employing his hexaemeron as a review of his lesson. He begins by reiterating his previous statement on humanity’s ultimate promotion to the realm of spirit: ‘by degrees of merit’ humans will ‘open to themselves at length the way’ to Heaven (7.155–60). Before narrating the creation of humankind, Raphael similarly pauses to reinforce the relationship between reason, will, and obedience, and between selfknowledge and self-esteem: man is ‘the Master work, the end / Of all yet done,’ ‘endu’d / With Sanctity of Reason’ so that he might ‘Govern the rest, self-knowing’ and be ‘grateful to acknowledge whence his good / Descends’ (7.505–13). Raphael’s Creation account points to the universal principles that he has been outlining all along: it is by virtue of his Reason that Adam reigns on Earth, and that to know himself and his role in the universe aright is to apply this faculty to adoration of the Creator. With this reiteration of the importance of reason and freely willed devotion, Adam is prepared to provide his own version of Creation,

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the share of the disputatio that is, in essence, his examination on the principles that Raphael has just inculcated.39 To refer again to the Timaeus, Adam, like Timaeus, Critias, and Hermocrates, must now host a ‘feast of discourse’ in return for the one provided him by his instructor, and in the process, of course, show that the efforts of his Socratic interlocutor have not been in vain.40 The effectiveness of Adam’s narrative lies in its ability to demonstrate awareness of the universals Raphael has tried to instill. Indeed, Adam largely provides an account of the stages of his learning.41 Upon his initial awakening he instinctively turns his gaze to Heaven (8.257)42 and surmises that he owes his existence to a Creator – ‘how came I thus, how here? / Not of myself; by some great Maker then, / In goodness and in power preëminent’ (8.277–9). The central episode of Adam’s autobiography is the dialogue with the ‘Presence Divine,’ where he shows proper valuation of the ‘rational delight’ of companionship (8.314, 391). He further shows awareness of divine order by subordinating his creaturely ‘unity defective, which requires / Collateral love’ (425–6) to God’s perfection: ‘Thou in thyself art perfet, and in thee / Is no deficience found; not so is Man’ (415–16). Adam is rewarded for this recognition of his role in the universe by being granted his request: Thus far to try thee, Adam, I was pleas’d, And find thee knowing not of Beasts alone, Which thou hast rightly nam’d, but of thyself, Expressing well the spirit within thee free, My Image, not imparted to the Brute[.] (437–41)

Because he has recognized that reason separates him from the animals, because he has shown proper obedience to God, and because, above all, he has exercised these virtues freely – in this passage ‘the spirit within thee free’ is the image of God; a point made emphatic with the placement of ‘My Image’ – he is successful in this trial and his request is granted.43 So far Adam’s narrative coincides well with Raphael’s lessons. Upon the arrival of Eve, however, ‘rational delight’ seems rather quickly to be forgotten. Adam’s description of his wife is ambiguous in its reference of her virtues to the Creator – ‘Grace was in all her steps, Heav’n in her Eye’ (8.488) – thus verging, to use Milton’s terminology in Eikonoklastes, on rendering her a ‘superstitious Image’(3: 343). His interest in Eve is divorced entirely from proper devotion to God in his

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peroration – I quote the passage at some length here to give full emphasis to the extent of Adam’s departure from Raphael’s instruction, which is often downplayed in critical discussion: For well I understand in the prime end Of Nature her th’ inferior, in the mind And inward Faculties, which most excel, In outward also her resembling less His Image who made both, and less expressing The character of that Dominion giv’n O’er other creatures; yet when I approach Her loveliness, so absolute she seems And in herself complete, so well to know Her own, that what she wills to do or say, Seems wisest, virtuousest, discreetest, best; All higher knowledge in her presence falls Degraded, Wisdom in discourse with her Loses discount’nanc’t, and like folly shows; Authority and Reason on her wait, As one intended first, not after made Occasionally; and to consummate all, Greatness of mind and nobleness thir seat Build in her loveliest, and create an awe About her, as a guard Angelic plac’t.

(8.540–59; emphasis mine)

While some readers have admired Adam’s tender matrimonial affection – what we might call the He’s-just-a-fool-in-love response44 – we should not be surprised that Raphael listens to this ‘with contracted brow’ (8.560). Adam’s passion is expressed in conspicuously dangerous terms: though he recognizes his superior position in the divine order, he cannot help but feel in his ‘Commotion strange’ (8.531) that ‘Wisdom,’ ‘higher knowledge,’ ‘Authority,’ and ‘Reason’ all seem like ‘folly’ when compared to ‘her loveliness.’ With a single, pointed question Raphael exposes Adam’s inordinate focus on externals: ‘what transports thee so, / An outside?’ (8.567–8). In his reading of Raphael’s significance, Clay Daniel has recently remarked that Adam’s failure at this point is that he is too much the Neoplatonist in believing that his passion will lead him heavenward.45 The source for this commonplace is Socrates’ account of Diotima’s lesson in Plato’s Symposium that the inductee of the ‘mysteries of Love’

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begins with devotion to the beauty of one body and proceeds, ‘ever mounting the heavenly ladder,’ until finally arriving at a vision of ‘heavenly beauty itself.’ In this spirit Ficino claims in his Commentary that the lover ‘does not desire this or that body, but he admires, desires, and is amazed by the splendor of the celestial majesty shining through bodies.’46 Milton himself plays with this Platonic principle, as Rumrich points out, in his youthful correspondence with Diodati: ‘I seek for this idea of the beautiful, as if for some glorious image, throughout all the shapes and forms of things (“for many are the shapes of things divine”)’ (CPW, 1: 326).47 Adam’s is not a misguided attempt at Neoplatonic ascent, however, so much as it is a fetishization of things extreme and scattering bright. Rather than being prompted to awareness of things divine, his focus on externals leads to disregard and confusion of internal fitness and abandonment of heavenly aspirations. As George Sikes argues of natural knowledge in The Book of Nature, ‘joy arises’ not only from ‘the having of any thing, and the knowing that we have it,’ but also from knowing ‘him, from whose hand he [man] has received all.’48 Adam’s narration of the ‘sum of earthly bliss’ does not indicate such knowledge. Eve appears, as Satan argues the angels are in book 5, to be ‘in herself complete’; Adam finds himself forgetting her place in Creation and imagines – and here his uxoriousness verges on idolatry in applying a description befitting ‘the Mount of God’ – ‘a guard Angelic’ placed about her.49 Adam’s failure here is underscored by comparison with the sources working in the background of this dialogue. Philo describes the Platonic physician as especially curing the sensual overindulgence that leads to abandonment of reason: the multitude woos desire as a man woos a woman, and makes her his medium in all that he says and does, ... and is wont to pay little heed to the promptings of reason. Very aptly does Moses call him a chief cook; ... As for the difference between cooks and physicians, it is a matter of common knowledge. The physician devotes all his energies solely to preparing what is wholesome, even if it is unpalatable, while the cook deals with the pleasant only and has no thought of what is beneficial.50

Ignoring his rational superiority to Eve, Adam focuses instead on sensual desire (8.522); such cookish pleasure-seeking, no matter how epicurean, puts him directly at odds with the internal fitness to which his celestial physician has devoted his efforts. Even more pertinent to

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this episode is Tobias, Adam’s counterpart in the Book of Tobit, who, after using Raphael’s medicine to remove Asmodeus’s curse, praises the spiritual benefits of marriage: Blessed are you, O God of our ancestors, and blessed is your name in all generations forever. Let the heavens and the whole creation bless you forever. You made Adam, and for him you made his wife Eve as a helper and support ... I now am taking this kinswoman of mine, not because of lust, but with sincerity.

(8.5–7)51

Tobias’s hymnic epithalamium begins and ends with an address to God and pointedly defines the benefit of marriage against lust, a gesture made with reference to its divine institution in Eden. It is for this reason that Chaucer’s Parson points to Tobias as a positive example of avoiding the ‘avowtrie’ that can exist between husband and wife, when ‘they take no reward in hire assemblynge but oonly to hire flesshly delit ... But in swich folk hath the devel power, as seyde the aungel Raphael to Tobie.’52 Adam’s autobiography, by contrast, does not contain an address to God, shows a tendency to indulge in fleshly delight and to forget why Eve was created in the first place, and thus does not infuse the spiritual medicine of Raphael’s discourse. Though Adam is yet to fall, like the unfallen Mammon the ‘downward bent’ of his ‘looks and thoughts’ marks him as not as ‘erected’ as he should be (1.679–81).53 Rather than giving due credit to the true source of his earthly bliss, he closes his spiritual autobiography with an account of the sensual ‘passion’ arising from ‘the charm of Beauty’s powerful glance’ (8.530, 533). That the angel becomes rather more stern with his charge than he has been up to this point should seem justifiable. Eloquent and subtle arguments for the subordination of sense to spirit – both by logical demonstration of universal principles and by narrative – give way to direct command: Accuse not Nature, she hath done her part; Do thou but thine, and be not diffident Of Wisdom, she deserts thee not, if thou Dismiss not her[. ]

(8.561–4)

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Again Raphael emphasizes the relationship between self-knowledge, self-esteem, and obedience, claiming that Adam would do well to remember his place above Eve in the divine order (8.572–3). As Adam recognized before the event, and as Milton claims in The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, in Edenic marriage ‘generation’ is ‘secondary ... in dignity’ to ‘cheerfull conversation’ (CPW, 2: 235).54 Human love in its truest form, according to Raphael, promotes the rational intercourse that allows fuller expression of the love of God: What higher in her society thou find’st Attractive, human, rational, love still; In loving thou dost well, in passion not, Wherein true Love consists not; Love refines The thoughts, and heart enlarges, hath his seat In Reason, and is judicious, is the scale By which to heav’nly Love thou mayst ascend, Not sunk in carnal pleasure, for which cause Among the Beasts no Mate for thee was found.

(8.586–94)

‘Wedded love,’ as we have heard the bard tell us, is ‘Founded in Reason, Loyal, Just, and Pure’ (4.750, 755). Referring again to the Platonic scala, but significantly beginning the ascent heavenward in reason rather than sense, Raphael recommends that Adam find in his relationship with Eve a correspondence with that part of himself that marks him as closer to God than ‘the Beasts,’ so that the Edenic pair might mutually strive for spiritual ascent. Those who would see Raphael’s statement here as an excessively harsh ‘blunder,’ then, tend to ignore how consistent his imperatives are with the rest of his lesson, and also to downplay Adam’s resistance to the instruction offered by his angelic guide. Though the young poet of the first elegy may have chafed at his tutor’s strictness, Milton describes in the Apology the types of religious instruction for which Christ provides an example, including becoming ‘severe’ in order to ‘check’ his disciple’s tendency to be ‘over-confident and jocond’ (CPW, 1: 900). The pedagogical value of severity is repeated in Church Government in Milton’s account of the spiritual ‘cure’ for which a Minister is responsible, the medical language and Platonic reference of which resonate especially with Raphael’s role in Paradise Lost: He ... beginning at the prime causes and roots of the disease sends in those two divine ingredients of most cleansing power to the soul, Admo-

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nition & Reproof, besides which two there is no drug or antidote that can reach to purge the mind, and without which all other experiments are but vain, unlesse by accident. And he that will not let these passe into him, though he be the greatest King, as Plato affirms, must be thought to remaine impure within, and unknowing of those things wherein the purenesse and his knowledge should most appear. (CPW, 1: 846)55

Just as the Stranger in the Sophist states – ‘as the physician considers that the body will receive no benefit from taking food until the internal obstacles have been removed, the purifier of the soul is conscious that his patient will receive no benefit from the application of knowledge until he is refuted, and from refutation learns modesty’56 – Raphael’s reproof of Adam aims to remove the adulation of Eve that is posing an obstacle to right knowledge of divine order. As such it does not express an ‘aristocratic scorn’ of carnality betraying ignorance of the operation of human love57 – carnality, Raphael says, has its place, and that place is the ‘pure’ act of procreation – but instead shows the ‘censure’ that is as a ‘saving med’cin ordaine’d of God’ (CPW, 1: 835), a tendency that we should expect from the celestial physician. It is also worth bearing in mind that the Father provides a precedent for the pedagogical value of sternness in his pronouncement of the ‘rigid interdiction’ (8.333–5), and that Raphael avails himself elsewhere of punchy statement and imperative to make his point clear.58 If Adam is ‘half abash’t’ by Raphael’s response (8.595), he is only half as abashed as he should be, for he is still immodest enough to ask if angels feel something akin to the passion he has described – ’how thir Love / Express they, by looks only, or do they mix / Irradiance, virtual or immediate touch?’ (8.615–17). While Raphael’s reluctant response has prompted much debate on Milton’s angelological heresy, and source-hunting for precedents of angelic sexuality, it is worth bearing in mind that what the angel describes really isn’t ‘sex’ in any recognizable form.59 It is instead a communion of ‘higher’ faculties that leads one upward on ‘the scale / ... to heav’nly Love’ consistent with the model of human love that he has already recommended to Adam: ‘if Spirits embrace, / Total they mix, Union of Pure with Pure / Desiring’ (8.591–2, 626–8). The statement on this angelic embrace is significantly placed in the conditional – the ‘if’ with which Raphael introduces this statement is frequently overlooked – indicating that the point is not whether or not angels actually do embrace, but rather how they would do so.

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Like much of what Raphael says, we cannot take this account of angelic sexuality as a direct and literal representation of truth, but must see it as a lesson on the brand of human self-awareness tending most toward God. Unlike physical passion, the henosis that Raphael describes encourages a correspondence of our highest faculties and in its gesture toward unity looks upward rather than downward on the divine scala, reinforcing our primary love of the Creator – a value reflected in Raphael’s final admonition to ‘Be strong, live happy, and love, but first of all / Him whom to love is to obey’ (8.633–4). We began this discussion by saying that Raphael aims to lead Adam to an awareness of his participation in the realm of spirit, and in so doing to have him embrace the highest part of himself and gain the self-esteem that will make him love God, imitate him, and be like him. We have seen that Adam’s imperfect comprehension of this lesson at the end of book 5 occasions a generic change in Raphael’s discourse meant to demonstrate by example the operation of obedience, namely that it is not simply the observance of divine interdiction, but is rather a natural by-product of zealous love of God. Adam seems to understand this in his embrace of the divine will above all else in book 7 (78–80), but when he comes to describe ‘the sum of earthly bliss,’ the account that should reflect his new awareness of the universe around him, he stumbles significantly when he subordinates the faculties tending most toward God to his physical adulation of Eve. Though Adam professes only to be telling his angelic friend how he ‘feels’ – ‘I to thee disclose / What inward thence I feel, not therefore foil’d / Who meet various objects, from the sense’ (8.607–9) – we soon find out just how misplaced is his confidence in his ability to set aside ‘The Link of Nature’ uniting him to Eve (9.914). Douglas Bush has noted that our doubts are raised at this moment at the level of allusion. Adam’s claim to ‘Approve the best, and follow what I approve’ (8.611) approximates Medea’s famous statement in Ovid’s Metamorphoses: as it appears in the Sandys translation, ‘I see the better, I approve it too: / The worse I follow.’60 This leaves us with the conclusion that despite Raphael’s various approaches to his subject matter – from logical demonstration of universals, to narrative, to direct reproach – Adam remains a recalcitrant interlocutor in that he never arrives at a vision of the divine economy and his role therein that fully acknowledges the superiority of spirit to sense. One wonders if Adam himself is ‘the thick shade’ (8.654) from which Raphael departs in his return to heaven.61

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To say that Adam gains little from his conversation with Raphael is precisely the unsatisfying position that much criticism seeks to avoid. Though the balance sheet most generous to ‘our Sire’ must find his misunderstandings and errors in the Raphael books more grave and numerous than his insights, critics are reluctant to voice this conclusion. On the surface it would seem a conclusion worth avoiding: it suggests that Raphael’s is a ‘fool’s errand’ and, consequently, that one third of Milton’s great epic is a rather pointless exercise. I will argue that this is not necessarily true; rather the benefits to be gained from Raphael’s discourse must lie elsewhere. The task of reading Raphael’s errand as productive is one of divorcing it from its relative ineffectuality in Adam’s particular case and of associating it instead with the larger instructive purpose of Milton’s epic. To approach this another way, we can see that Raphael demonstrates an entire set of principles that Adam never acknowledges at all, and indeed that he cannot recognize at his point in human history, namely the full significance of the Seraph’s portrait of the Triune God as it relates to the Redemption and Apocalypse of which his narrative is a shadow. Though the angel never explicitly states the insufficiency of a purely singular deity, his portrait of the Godhead clearly develops from the Platonic One described in book 5. The coronation of the Son that is the point of departure in his narration of the war in Heaven introduces the Second Person. This is complicated again in book 7, where Raphael’s substantial preamble to his hexaemeron provides a primer in the relationship between Father, Son, and Spirit: the ‘Filial Godhead’ effects the Almighty’s ‘Word’ (7.174–5), ‘The King of Glory in his powerful Word / And Spirit’ creates ‘new Worlds’ (208–9), and finally, just before the Genesis account begins, ‘His brooding wings the Spirit of God outspread, / And vital virtue infus’d’ (235–6). The Platonic methodology of this movement from unity to multiplicity is also evinced in Heywood’s Hierarchie, which begins by describing procession and return from the One – acknowledging Aristotle, Plato, Proclus, and Plotinus – and proceeds to the ‘three in One.’62 And yet we cannot expect Adam to grasp the full significance of the Second Person; we cannot expect him to recognize the Son’s triumph on the third day as prefiguring the Resurrection, or to comprehend the eschatology recurring in Raphael’s discourse that suggests an ‘end’ when God shall ‘be All in All’ (6.731–2).63 Philip J. Gallagher has offered the enticing view that these aspects of Raphael’s discourse

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point to the angel’s errand of preparing Adam for his impending fallenness, and that in doing so he offers prevenient grace that will ‘initiate his postlapsarian regeneration.’64 This approach tends first of all to misrepresent the doctrine of prevenient grace. This grace is necessary to upright action because human will has been corrupted by the Fall. Milton follows this definition in Civil Power, where the ‘faith and charitie’ that were ‘once indeed naturally free’ in the prelapsarian condition exist ‘now only as they are regenerat and wrought on by divine grace’ (CPW, 7: 255). It is also dubious that Milton would have an angel deliver grace, an action reserved to God alone. Given his prelapsarian audience, Raphael is much more likely to be informing ‘naturally free’ devotion than he is to be providing a prevenient grace that is not yet necessary. In order for Gallagher’s argument to stand, furthermore, we must search for evidence of Raphael’s instruction between the moment of the Fall and the arrival of the Son in Eden, which evidence has not been provided. Indeed it is difficult to find even a glimmer of the affable spirit’s influence in the drama of lust, blame, and despair that characterizes this portion of the epic, and when Adam recommends repentance at the end of book 10, it is through contemplation of the grace signified by the Son’s decree: ‘let us seek / Some safer resolution, which methinks / I have in view, calling to mind with heed / Part of our Sentence ...’ (10.1028–31). Having lost the prelapsarian habitual connection to Heaven – in Eden ‘God or Angel Guest / With Man, as with his Friend, familiar us’d / To sit indulgent’ (9.1–3) – postlapsarian soteriology must partly rely on spiritual development and knowledge of the Word, the journey that begins for Adam with the Son’s decree and continues with Michael’s revelations. Adam would do well to learn what Raphael is teaching him, but it is not essential to his natural ‘perfection’ – the Father makes it clear that his continued residence in Eden depends not on the assimilation of these lessons, but rather on application of the capacities with which he was created. Both before and after the fatal transgression, Adam’s dialogue with Raphael does not awaken in him a heightened awareness of the terms of his obedience. That he does not do so highlights the spiritual path incumbent upon the Christian viator. In the awkward conclusion to the dialogue with Raphael, Milton makes two points that are vitally important to his theodicy. He shows us first what we have lost in presenting Adam’s impeccable carnality. Because neither he nor Eve has

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been tainted by Original Sin, his physical passion is not at odds with obedience to God. Adam shows concupiscence without culpability in a way that fallen humanity can never regain. Milton also shows us what we have gained as a result of Adam’s fall. In presenting an Adam who does not look beyond the physical universe and gain genuine insight on the realm of spirit, we see how the Fall has resulted in fuller spiritual dispensation. To put this lesson in Vanist terms, that Adam never fully embraces a doctrine of the spirit shows the limits of the natural man even in his most perfect state. Adam’s apostrophe on Eve’s loveliness, and the physical ‘Link of Nature’ that later prompts him to sin (9.914), fits rather neatly into Sikes’s definition of the earthly man: the thing chiefly beloved obteins dominion over it, and so over the whole man. The will is the ruling power in man, commands all the rest of him. To whom or whatsoever a man’s whole love is given, his whole will is given; and consequently, the whole man ... If earthly things be chiefly loved, he is an earthly man; has an earthly will. If god be his chief beloved, he is a heavenly man, has a heavenly will.65

In a similar vein John Deacon and John Walker declare in their Dialogicall Discourses (1601) that ‘the naturall man ... cannot possibly perceiue the things of the spirit of God ... Neither can he know them at all; for, they are spiritually discerned.’66 Adam is, in a sense, the ultimate natural man: he is not only derived directly from the soil but his name carries an association with the Hebrew ’adamah, or ‘aerable ground.’ We are aware in seeing his earthly qualities that this Adam is only the first one, and, as Paul tells us, that humanity’s spiritual birth must await the arrival of the second Adam: ‘The first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit. Howbeit that was not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural; and afterward that which is spiritual’ (1 Corinthians 15.45–6). Returning to Of Education – and moving beyond our previous paraphrasings into a more specific understanding of its principles – we can see more readily the postlapsarian function of Raphael’s instruction: ‘The end then of learning is to repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that knowledge to love him, to imitate him, to be like him, as we may the neerest by possessing our souls of true vertue, which being united to the heavenly grace of faith makes up the highest perfection’ (CPW, 2: 366–7). ‘For Milton,’ Richard

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J. Durocher observes of this passage, ‘education is for the fallen.’67 To ascertain correctly the significance of Raphael’s proximity to these principles, we must see how they are contingent upon the reparation of Original Sin. That Raphael leads a dialogue encouraging proper knowledge of and faith in God, and that he does so by encouraging proper ‘conning over the visible and inferior creature’ (CPW, 2: 369), indicate that his true pupils are the inhabitants of the fallen world who must rely on such knowledge. Gallagher’s insight that Raphael’s instruction applies itself most readily to postlapsarian consciousness is thus highly significant; that this instruction applies itself to Adam’s postlapsarian consciousness, however, is a conclusion that the text simply does not support. The irony in this Socratic dialogue, to recall Frye’s observation, is that it functions in a manner rather opposite to its ostensible role as cyropaedia: the lack of necessity in prelapsarian knowledge of the divine economy accentuates the natural perfection that is now lost to us, and in the process directs our attention to the more arduous though enduring spiritual perfection made available after the Fall. In thus reading Milton’s Raphael we must recognize the dual role of his counterpart in the Book of Tobit (Tobit 3.17). One of the angel’s functions, as we have seen, is to remedy Sarah’s despair over the curse of Asmodeus that has seven times killed her groom on her wedding night. The angel provides Tobias with a cure for the curse and encourages him to marry Sarah – after which he surprises her family by surviving his first night of marriage, leaving her father in the rather embarrassing situation of scrambling to fill the grave he had prepared for his new son-in-law. This function has been likened to Raphael’s role in Paradise Lost of chasing away Satan so that Adam and Eve’s conjugal bliss may be preserved, a parallel emphasized by Milton in his comparison of Satan to Asmodeus in book 4 (168). Raphael also cures Tobit of the blindness caused by a sparrow’s unhappy aim, an injury that adds to the pious man’s woes of exile. When the film covering his eyes is removed by Raphael’s treatment and the angel finally reveals his identity, Tobit bursts into the most elaborate hymn of the book: Bless the Lord of righteousness, and exalt the King of the ages. In the land of my exile I acknowledge him, and show his power and majesty to a nation of sinners:

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‘Turn back, you sinners, and do what is right before him; perhaps he may look with favor upon you and show you mercy.’ As for me, I exalt my God, and my soul rejoices in the King of heaven. (13.6–7)

After regaining his eyesight, Tobit continues a conspicuously pious life, and on his deathbed reminds his son of God’s word regarding the fate of Israel: the whole land of Israel will be desolate ... And the temple of God in it will be burned to the ground, and it will be desolate for a while. But God will again have mercy on them, and God will bring them back into the land of Israel; and they will rebuild the temple of God ... They will all abandon their idols, which deceitfully have led them into their error. (14. 4–6).

Tobit’s central position in the apocryphal story is captured in Rembrandt’s The Archangel Leaving the Family of Tobias (see Plate 3).68 Here the illumination that is strongest around the angel is also shed on the two recipients of his medicine, Sarah and Tobit. Though Sarah stands to the side and shows some of the astonishment of her husband Tobias, Tobit occupies the centre of the piece, is in stronger light, and has his head bowed reverently. The repository of spiritual enlightenment throughout the Apocryphal book is not Tobias, who is Raphael’s companion for much of the story, but Tobit himself. Significantly when Augustine discusses the story of Tobit, he emphasizes how the holy man’s inner sight is superior to the physical sight of his son: ‘There is another eye; there is an inner eye. For Tobias [sic; Tobit is intended], too, was not without eyes when, blinded in his bodily eyes, he was giving the precepts of life to his son. The one was holding his father’s hand that he might walk on his feet; the other was giving counsel to his son that he might keep the way of justice.’69 If Adam, Eve, and Satan parallel Tobias, Sarah, and Asmodeus, respectively, the clear parallel to Tobit is Milton’s bard, who throughout the epic is the central human exponent of divine illumination.70 As Louis Martz has argued, ‘the bard himself seems ... to be guided by the revelations of the action as he explores the way toward Eden.’71 In this movement toward a spiritual Eden the bard, like Tobit, bemoans his blindness and exile, is the mouthpiece of divine history, laments the state of the church, and holds his piety up as an example to a fallen

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Plate 3: Harmenszoon van rijn Rembrandt, The Archangel Leaving the Family of Tobias, 1637 (by permission of the Musée du Louvre, photograph © Réunion des Musées Nationaux /Art Resource, N.Y.)

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age. The relationship between Raphael’s discourse and the bard’s vision is especially dramatized in the proem to book 7. Having descended to the visible realm – and retaining, of course, the illumination provided by his heavenly guide – the bard is able more confidently to affirm his constancy in the midst of a degenerate world: More safe I Sing with mortal voice, unchang’d To hoarse or mute, though fall’n on evil days, On evil days though fall’n, and evil tongues; In darkness, and with dangers compast round, And solitude; yet not alone, while thou Visit’st my slumbers Nightly, or when Morn Purples the East: still govern thou my Song, Urania, and fit audience find, though few. But drive far off the barbarous dissonance Of Bacchus and his Revellers ...

(7.24–33)

As in Tobit’s hymn, celestial illumination is here juxtaposed against a corrupt, threatening terrestrial environment. While certain dangers attend Urania’s visitation, namely the over-reaching implied in the bard’s allusion to Bellerophon (7.18), it is this communion with the divine that transcends Bacchanalian sensuality and is characteristic of the bard’s prophetic endeavour.72 Unlike Adam, the bard has thus been awakened to the vision suggested in Raphael’s narrative. Lewalski has associated the psalmic tendency of this proem with ‘the historical David, whom God sustained in all adversity.’73 At least as pertinent is the parallel between Milton’s proem and Tobit’s hymn. While the bard’s physical blindness is not cured by the celestial physician, the angel’s narration of heavenly events generates increasing confidence in his internal vision and consequently encourages him in his exile; he is indeed on the path of righteousness and his worldly misfortune comes at the hands of those ‘alienate from God’ (5.877). The physical sight granted by the apocryphal Raphael thus acts as a type of the ‘Celestial Light’ that for the bard shines ‘inward’ (3.51–2), and as the bardic vision applies itself to the visible realm it carries with it the authority of heavenly communion signified by this angelic visitation. With increasing confidence, the bard places himself among the elect and justifies his lament of the ungodliness with which he is surrounded.

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In our reading of Raphael’s influence in Paradise Lost we must recognize several aspects of his errand. Milton’s employment of him is, first of all, consistent with Renaissance perception of this ‘celestial physician’ in its affinity with, as Pico puts it, ‘moral philosophy’ and ‘dialectic.’ Examination of his discourse with reference to dialectical categories reveals, furthermore, the various shifts Raphael employs in his effort to penetrate Adam’s understanding: logical method, narrative – that ‘crypsis’ or reversal of method – and, finally, direct command. Adam’s discourse on creation fails fully to incorporate Raphael’s lessons, an absence especially apparent by comparison with Tobias’s epithalamium. In a manner consistent with the operations of dialectic, however, Adam’s shortcomings contribute to the didactic purpose of this episode by directing our attention to the brand of awareness necessary in our fallen condition. The Book of Tobit allows us to make this claim more specific by suggesting the importance of seeing Milton’s bard as a repository of the divine illumination shed by the ‘sociable Spirit,’ a relationship evinced in the proem to book 7. That Raphael’s visit does not culminate in a divine vision on Adam’s part does not make it a fool’s errand; it rather points to the angel’s role in the larger projects of the epic: informing the spiritual journey on which the Christian reader must embark, and dramatizing the divine illumination that is the recompense of the bard’s piety.

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6 Michael of Celestial Armies Prince

Gabriel might announce the Bible’s most significant events, but Michael has unparalleled importance in the progress of history – he is so significant that Saint Ambrose is reluctant to think of him as an angel at all, stating that ‘Christ was that angel,’ a position echoed by Donne, Wollebius, and Dingley but eschewed by Milton in both Paradise Lost and De doctrina Christiana (CPW, 6: 347).1 Both Daniel and Revelation present this angel, whose name means ‘he who is like God,’ as leading the war against the ungodly as the world rushes toward apocalypse. There is a significant difference, however, between these two portraits of the celestial prince. The first is conceived in earthly terms: Daniel learns of the fate of the princes of Persia, Greece, and Egypt, and how Michael, ‘the great prince which standeth for the children of thy people,’ will deliver Israel and awaken ‘many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth ... some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt’ (12.1–2). While Revelation draws on Daniel’s prophecy, it presents the role of the great prince in more cosmic terms: ‘there was war in heaven: Michael and his angels fought against the dragon; and the dragon fought and his angels, And prevailed not; neither was their place found any more in heaven. And the great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, called the Devil, and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world’ (12.7–9). This vision of Michael is divorced from the shifting powers of terrestrial princes, providing instead broader explanation of the trials caused by Satan’s deceptions. These dynamics of the Archangel’s warfare tend to be blended in literary tradition. In the Christian romances of Ariosto and Tasso, Michael lends aid in battles against the Muslims. In response to

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Charlemagne’s prayer in Orlando Furioso, God sends Michael to play the role of a classical epic’s god; the angel allows Rinaldo’s troops to arrive in Paris speedily and silently – though the battle-day victory, Ariosto points out, is directly attributable to careful planning in the Christians’ ingeniously cruel deployment of combustibles.2 In Gerusalemme liberata, God sends Michael to disperse the demons aiding Soliman and the angel reveals to Godfrey the invisible army of saints besieging the city with him – as it appears in Fairfax’s translation, ‘See, see what legions in thine aid I bring, / For heau’n assists thee, and heau’ns glorious king[.]’3 These moments combine the angel’s role in Daniel and Revelation, drawing especially upon the commonplace association of Islam with Antichrist: he leads God’s chosen in their struggle against earthly princes and is especially involved in the battle against Satan and his followers. The tensions between Michael’s earthly and heavenly battles will assist us in approaching Milton’s presentation of the celestial prince in Paradise Lost. It must be recalled, however, that Milton first evokes the Archangel not in his epic, but in his elegiac search for Lycidas’s remains: Or whether thou to our moist vows denied, Sleep’st by the fable of Bellerus old, Where the great vision of the guarded Mount Looks toward Namancos and Bayona’s hold; Look homeward Angel now, and melt with ruth[.]

(Lycidas, 159–63)

Here the angel is physically placed on the Cornish mountain bearing his name, which carries in turn its association with the fable of Bellerus, the giant of Land’s End, whence arises the Roman name of the mountain, Bellerium. This is a typical example of the poem’s weaving together of classical, native, and biblical traditions – best seen in the unlikely assembly of Hippotades, Camus, and Saint Peter (96–109) – affirming in Milton’s youthful nationalism England’s status as a seat of learning and religion. Michael in this context is primarily the angel of Daniel’s vision: he is given a decidedly English version of the role attributed to him in the Geneva Bible’s gloss of Daniel 10.21, where he is ‘appointed for the defense of the Church vnder Christ, who is the head thereof.’4 His charge is to protect an elect nation against the assaults of irreligious earthly princes, in this case the threat of Spanish Catholicism and the infiltration of papistry into the English

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church through the corruption of the prelates. It is noteworthy that Catholics likewise deployed the celestial prince as defender of their church, as in Clement X’s 1676 decree that those who offered a Michaelmas prayer for the triumph of the Roman church in a Welsh chapel dedicated to the Archangel would receive complete remission for their sins.5 The portrait of Michael in Lycidas contributes to the poem’s sense of national religion defined against the institution of episcopacy. Significantly, Michael’s role here is like the one he plays in the English liturgy. The Common Prayer for ‘Saint Michael and all the Angels’ calls on angelic protection for those participating in the church service: ‘Everlasting God ... Mercifully grant, that they which always do thee service in heaven, may by thy appointment succor and defend us in earth.’ This is not a strictly reformist emphasis on Hebrews 1.14, where the angels protect the Saints, but a more communitarian call for God to allow Michael and his fellow angels to protect those participating in the prayer. George Wither’s hymn ‘For the Day of St Michael, and all the Angels’ picks up on this strain: Yea, we believe they watch and ward, About our Persons, evermore, From evill-Spirits, us to guard: And, we return Thee Thanks, therefore.6

(The lameness of the hymn’s concluding ‘therefore’ reminds us that we are reading Wither.) Though we see Milton retreating from the emotive sympathy with English ceremony at work in the Nativity Ode – which refers to the ‘ninefold harmony’ of angels (131) – it is a gradual retreat: we find in Lycidas religion conceived in national terms and the character of Michael evoked in a way consistent with his role as protector of the English flock. As in Elegy III and On the Death of a Fair Infant Milton refers to angels in a conventional way, with the difference here being that he deploys convention for resistance effect.7 We will soon see how this sense of national religion is also at work in the roughly contemporary antiprelatical tracts. Paradise Lost, by contrast, tends to emphasize Michael’s broader role as protector of the elect provided in Revelation, though it simultaneously suggests that his activity resides primarily in this world in the spirit of Daniel. Our first impression of the Archangel is as combatant against Satan and his crew in the war in Heaven, though, as Stella

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Revard observes, Milton significantly departs from Renaissance portraits of the Archangel by reserving military victory for the Son.8 In the final books of Milton’s epic, we see the spirit of Revelation continue, as Michael unveils a ubiquitous worldly corruption shocking to Adam’s inexperienced eyes. Daniel’s vision resonates in these books in that Michael’s prophecy focuses on the progress of earthly history – we see no mysterious seals broken or trumpets sounded as the world proceeds towards its end. This transition between the Michael of Lycidas and of Paradise Lost evinces a shift in emphasis from national to personal election fundamental to the development of Milton’s sense of biblical history and the end of time. In order to see this development in its full significance, we will compare his early and late ecclesiological prose, the antiprelatical tracts of 1641–42 and the twin tracts of 1659 arguing for de-institutionalization of the church, Civil Power and Hirelings. In these works we see a distinct, though largely unnoticed, shift between an eschatology conceived in nationalist terms and one that dissolves national boundaries in its portrait of the progress of biblical history.9 The latter position provides background to the method of Michael’s history in Paradise Lost, which is concerned more with the piety of isolated individuals than with the rise of an elect nation. In The Reason of Church Government (1641), the first published work on which he provides his full name and ventures into autobiography, Milton announces himself as a youthful, learned, and energetic mouthpiece of the cresting tide of English Reformation. The prelates are obstacles to a godliness here conceived in classical terms as a progressive national virtue: ‘They teach not that to govern well is to train up a Nation in true wisdom and vertue, and that which springs from thence magnanimity, (take heed of that) and that which is our beginning, regeneration, and happiest end, likenes to God’ (CPW, 1: 571).10 Even in the later Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, where Milton is forced to divide the ranks of reformers in attacking the Presbyterian ‘backsliders’ who invoked the Solemn League and Covenant against Parliament’s prosecution of the king, his target is a relatively isolated group of ‘bad men’ who ‘with the falsifi’d names of Loyalty, and Obedience ... colour over thir base compliances’ and defy the ‘Sword of God’ that has removed Charles (CPW, 1: 191, 193).11 A national spirit of godliness and liberty purging spurious forces of enslavement also animates a

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good deal of the Observations on the Articles of Peace and the Defences. This stands in sharp contrast to Milton’s prose of 1659–60, when he returns to print after something of a four-year hiatus. Here he is decidedly less optimistic about English godliness, and devotes a good deal more attention to lamenting ‘the fickl’ness which is attributed to us as we are Ilanders’ and chastising a ‘barbarously ingrateful’ nation running headlong into bondage (CPW, 7: 437, 274).12 The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth in particular takes issue with the national immaturity evident in the desire for a return to monarchy: ‘Shall we never grow old anough to be wise to make seasonable use of gravest authorities, experiences, examples? Is it such an unspeakable joy to serve, such felicitie to wear a yoke?’ (CPW, 7: 448).13 In Church Government the prelates pose an obstacle to national progress in ‘wisdom and vertue’; in The Readie and Easie Way the ‘giddy multitude’ is rather more beyond hope, and is frittering away the liberty for which the sounder part of the nation has nobly fought.14 This difference is underscored by comparison of Milton’s self-affiliations with Jeremiah in Church Government and The Readie and Easie Way.15 The former tract evokes Jeremiah as holding wisdom that makes him an outcast among his nation. Despite the ‘irksomnesse of that truth’ a sense of public responsibility behooves the prophet to enlighten his compatriots (CPW, 1: 803).16 For this reason the divine favour that has been shown Milton in the gift of ‘the diligence, the parts, the language of a man’ must be applied to the ‘cause of God and his Church, ... for which purpose that tongue was given thee which thou hast’ (CPW, 1: 804–5). Like much of the autobiographical material in the prologue of the second book, the reference to Jeremiah emphasizes the disregard for worldly advantage in the Miltonic rhetor’s defence of true religion. In moving from discussion of Jeremiah and John to his own situation, divine illumination is transformed to largely secular conditions of Christian humanist learning: instead of a revelation, Providence has granted Milton the circumstances and ability to allow him to contemplate and speak convincingly on the state of religion – a synthesis of the doctrine of prevenient grace, the leisure attending contemplative life as outlined in the Philebus, and Machiavellian occasione. In The Readie and Easie Way, by contrast, the evocation of Jeremiah registers a much greater resentment of the nation’s inability to walk in the path of God:

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Thus much I should perhaps have said though I were sure I should have spoken only to trees and stones; and had none to cry to, but with the Prophet, O earth, earth, earth! to tell the very soil it self, what her perverse inhabitants are deaf to. Nay though what I have spoke, should happ’n (which Thou suffer not, who didst create mankinde free; nor Thou next, who didst redeem us from being servants of men!) to be the last words of our expiring libertie. But I trust I shall have spoken perswasion to abundance of sensible and ingenuous men: to som perhaps whom God may raise of these stones to become children of reviving liberty. (CPW, 7: 462–3)17

The high probability of a Stuart restoration prompts Milton in this passage from the second edition to remove a reference to the expulsion of Coniah and his seed (CPW, 7: 388). Both editions, however, employ Jeremiah to emphasize the intense isolation of the speaker in his delivery of a divine message, a tendency that has led Laura Lunger Knoppers to describe the tract as a ‘jeremiad, a prophetic lament over the apostasy of a chosen nation.’18 Corns questions the pervasiveness of the ‘jeremiad’ in the tract, but even in his more reserved argument notes Milton’s ‘need for a Jeremiah’s lamentation and angry reproach.’19 Instead of speaking as representative of the national spirit of godliness oppressed by backward institutions, Milton is a lone prophet surrounded by the ‘perverse.’ Though in his Christian teleology Milton anticipates the inevitability of an enduring liberty – in the parenthetical phrase that Barker describes as ‘the very centre of Milton’s thought’ on the subject, the Father and Son will not allow these to be ‘the last words of our expiring libertie’20 – its defence depends either on the enlightened minority seizing control of the nation, or on the birth from the ‘stones’ to which this Jeremiah preaches of a generation willing to ‘become children of reviving liberty.’ A falling away from nationalist optimism is also characteristic of the development of Milton’s chiliasm. The Animadversions provides a call for ‘every true protested Brittaine [i.e., Briton] throughout the 3 Kingdoms’ to leave ‘this Remonstrant and his adherents to their owne designes,’ implying that this is necessary preparation for Judgment: ‘thy Kingdome is now at hand and thou standing at the dore’ (CPW, 1: 704, 707). The most famous evocation of the Apocalypse in the antiprelatical tracts comes in Of Reformation, which concludes with a

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lengthy description anticipating divine justification of adherents to the cause of reformation and ultimate damnation of the prelates: this great and Warlike Nation … may presse on hard to that high and happy emulation to be found the soberest, wisest, and most Christian People at that day when thou the Eternall and shortly-expected King shalt open the Clouds to judge the severall Kingdomes of the World, and distributing Nationall Honours and Rewards to Religious and just Common-wealths, shalt put an end to all Earthly Tyrannies … But they contrary that by the impairing and diminution of the true Faith, the distresses and servitude of their Countrey aspire to high Dignity, Rule and Promotion, here, after a shamefull end in this Life (which God grant them) shall be throwne downe eternally into the darkest and deepest Gulfe of Hell. (CPW, 1: 616–17)

Milton juxtaposes the apotheosis of national heroes of ‘Truth’ and ‘Righteousness’ against the damnation of those self-interested souls who aspire to ‘Dignity, Rule, and Promotion’ in a passage that has recently been described as making ‘clear that Milton believed Christ’s monarchy to be imminent.’21 That this passage expresses Milton’s belief in an impending reign of Christ is dubious. It is, more precisely, a fitting peroration to a tract that argues against the possibility of negotiation with the prelates, and a participation in the apocalyptic rhetoric for which the Long Parliament had a clear relish. In a 1641 sermon before Parliament, William Bridge presents the elimination of episcopacy as a fall of Babylon necessary to the rise of Sion.22 The Long Parliament commissioned English translations of commentaries on Revelation by Joseph Mede, Johann Heinrich Alsted, Thomas Brightman, and John Napier. Milton evokes this rhetoric in lively fashion to urge completion of the sitting saints’ task of extirpating prelacy root and branch. That Milton chooses in the antiprelatical tracts to participate in the Long Parliament’s self-styled sainthood signifies a sharp contrast to his later prose. One way of illuminating this shift is examination of his location of the beginnings of the Reformation and his portrait of the early church, and particularly of Constantine. A survey of his prose works suggests that this is a point illuminating to his rhetorical stance. In Of Reformation, the reawakening of true religion is associated with Wycliffe. It is ‘Wicklefs preaching, at which all the succeding Reformers more effectually lighted their Tapers,’ showing the ‘Precedencie which

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God gave this Iland, to be the first Restorer of buried Truth’ (CPW, 1: 525–6).23 These early sparks of reformation were ‘stifl’d by the Pope and Prelates, for sixe or seven Kings Reignes’ (526) – as is typical in the antiprelatical tracts, Milton does not distinguish here between England’s Catholic and Protestant bishops. The Animadversions likewise describes how God ‘hath yet ever had this Iland under the speciall indulgent eye of his providence; and pittying us the first of all other Nations ... he knockt once and twice and came againe, opening our drousie eye-lids leasurely by that glimmering light which Wicklef, and his followers dispers’t’ (CPW, 1: 704).24 This nationalist pride in Wycliffe as a forerunner of the Reformation connects Milton’s position to Foxean narrativization of reformation and national election.25 Milton departs strongly from this tradition, however, in his portrait of Constantine. For Foxe, the conversion of the emperor consummates the early purity of the church and allows the faithful an existence without persecution; this argument is of course convenient to his praise of Elizabeth’s rescue of reformation from Marian Catholicism, where the Protestant queen figures as a Constantine redivivus. As with the emphasis Foxe places on Wycliffe, this influential approach locates true religion in England rather than on the Continent, drawing on the tradition that Constantine is crowned emperor at York – thus George Herbert’s ‘Church Militant’ refers to the ‘higher victory’ reserved for the English church signified by ‘Constantine’s British line[.]’26 Milton is less eager to praise the monarch as head of the church. He thus describes the corruption of ‘homely and Yeomanly Religion’ and favour of ceremony over ‘inward Sanctity’ as arising with Constantine: ‘through Constantines lavish Superstition they forsook their first love, and set themselvs up two Gods instead, Mammon and their Belly’ (CPW, 1: 576–7).27 Vane’s disciple Henry Stubbe would refer glowingly in his Light Shining out of Darkness (1659) to the opinion of ‘the excellent Mr. J. Milton’ on the subject of Constantine’s corruption of the church.28 This view of the emperor supports Milton’s position that the English clergy had become a royal court of greedy sycophants entirely at odds with a true ministry’s humble piety and disregard for worldly advantage. The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce somewhat alters these views of Wycliffe and Constantine. In this tract it is not the Lollards who are credited with beginning reformation, but Henry VIII, who ‘finding just reason in his conscience to forgoe his brothers wife ... it pleas’d God to make him see all the tyranny of Rome, by discovering this which they

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exercis’d over divorce; and to make him the beginner of a reformation to this whole Kingdom’ (CPW, 2: 347–8). This of course rhymes nicely with Milton’s argument that divorce is a fundamental liberty especially necessary to the spiritual development of the wayfaring Christian. When Wycliffe does appear in this tract, he joins Constantine in a long line of national heroes: ‘Who was it but our English Constantine that baptiz’d the Roman Empire? ... who but Alcuin and Wicklef our Country men open’d the eyes of Europe, the one in arts, the other in Religion. Let not England forget her precedence of teaching nations how to live’ (CPW, 2: 231–2). This is not necessarily a contradiction of Milton’s former position, for Milton’s aim here is to render divorce a matter of private (male) conscience, rather than an affair of either church or state.29 Constantine is thus praised for seeing divorce as a matter indifferent, and for allowing the persistence of the Roman tradition of granting divorce by common consent.30 He is similarly pointed to in the first Defence as providing precedent of a Christian magistrate’s authority to ‘crush’ a tyrannical equal in his handling of Licinius – ’why,’ Milton asks in a question that glosses over Parliament’s reliance on the army and tellingly diminishes monarchical sovereignty, ‘is not the relationship of Parliament to Charles that of Constantine to Licinius? Constantine was put in office by the soldiers; Parliament by law – which made it the equal or indeed the superior of the king’ (CPW, 4: 415). Though Milton does point in a way consistent with the antiprelatical tracts to the destructiveness of the church’s access to ‘huge resources’ and its desire for ‘position and power and civil authority,’ he claims here that this is only the continuation of a loss of ‘early holiness and purity of faith’ that had begun ‘long before Constantine’ (4: 417). Hirelings, on the other hand, avoids these characters significant to the nationalist, Foxean tradition – Henry VIII, Wycliffe, Constantine – and instead locates the beginnings of Protestantism in the Waldensian colony. The praise Milton offers this colony of pious laypersons points to the de-institutionalization of the church favoured in this tract and its companion, Civil Power. Milton’s turn to the Waldensians is often described as illustrating his point on clergy supporting themselves with trades rather than through tithes (7: 306). Equally significant is that Milton’s description of them as ‘the ancient stock of our reformation’ constitutes a turn away from his earlier nationalism: the Waldenses do not have even Constantine’s claim to Englishness. Immediately after showing that ‘those ancientest reformed churches of

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the Waldenses, if they rather continu’d not pure since the apostles, deni’d that tithes were to be given,’ Milton associates the idea of a ‘national church’ with the ‘Jewes’ and points to the universality of the Christian church: ‘the Christian church is universal; not ti’d to nation, dioces or parish, but consisting of many particular churches complete in themselves’ (7: 291–2). Though Milton, it must be stressed, had never endorsed the idea of a national church in his earlier prose, the complete dissociation here of religion and nationhood forms a stark contrast to the sentiments of his prose of the 1640s. Taken with the horror and outrage over the Waldensians’ contemporary persecution in the sonnet Upon the Massacre at Piedmont, this points to Milton’s broadening sense at this point in his career of the struggle between the justified and agents of iniquity – the issue here is no longer simply the elimination of corrupt institutions, but a rather more global worldly assault upon the Saints. This turn away from a nationalist view of the Apocalypse tends to be ignored in discussions of Milton’s prose. Revard is certainly correct to caution in her magisterial article on ‘Milton and Millennium’ against seeing the invocation of Apocalypse in Milton’s prose only as rhetorical flourish with a desired political effect. Deserving fuller attention is the significant development of Milton’s early and late renderings of Christ’s return. Unlike the antiprelatical tracts, The Readie and Easie Way emphasizes the corruption of all worldly institutions rather than the divine calling of Parliament: The Grand Councel being thus firmly constituted to perpetuitie ... ther can be no cause alleag’d why peace, justice, plentifull trade and all prosperitie should not thereupon ensue throughout the whole land; with as much assurance as can be of human things, that they shall so continue (if God favor us, and our wilfull sins provoke him not) even to the coming of our true and rightful and only to be expected King, only worthy as he is our only Saviour, the Messiah, the Christ[.] (CPW, 7: 444–5)

This is a statement much more sceptical than its counterpart in Of Reformation of the ability of human political institutions to lead the nation on the path of godliness – the Messiah does not emerge here to distribute ‘Nationall Honours and Rewards to Religious and just Common-wealths’ (CPW, 1: 616). We see instead an effort to hem the Grand Council into its proper worldly sphere – the arenas of civil peace and justice, of economic trade and prosperity – in order to pre-

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serve the religious freedom that will allow the truly enlightened to live with conscience as their guide. The oligarchic government recommended in this tract does not possess a saintliness to be rewarded upon Christ’s return, but rather holds the potential to be less intrusive than Stuart monarchy, Presbyterian theocracy, or Harringtonean republicanism. Like the change in Milton’s references to Jeremiah from Church Government to the Readie and Easie Way, this removal of a nationalist sense of Apocalyptic destiny indicates a scepticism not only of the nation’s ability to advance in religious virtue but also of the ability of the Parliament to lead the nation to righteousness. This sentiment is also expressed in the arguments on liberty of conscience in Civil Power: where Of Reformation participates in the apocalyptic rhetoric of the Long Parliament, Civil Power strains in its every period to deny Parliament claims to sainthood. The removal of the advance of religion from the realm of national cause, and thus from the hands of Parliament, for which Civil Power argues is further reinforced by the notoriously spare style of the tract.31 Milton explicitly establishes as a rule adherence to scripture in the opening sentences of the tract: ‘What I argue, shall be drawn from the scripture only; and therin from true fundamental principles of the gospel; to all knowing Christians undeniable’ (CPW, 7: 241). Milton does not locate religion exclusively in literal adherence to the written Word; rather he makes it clear that this is the only rule of religion relevant to the magistrate. He affirms at several points that the benefits of scripture arise both from the divinity of the written Word and the extent to which the living Word is preveniently implanted in the interpreter: First, it cannot be denied, being the main foundation of our protestant religion, that we of these ages, having no other divine rule or autoritie from without us warrantable to one another as a common ground but the holy scripture, and no other within us but the illumination of the Holy Spirit so interpreting that Scripture as warrantable only to our selves and to such whose consciences we can so perswade, can have no other ground in matters of religion but only from the scriptures. And these being not possible to be understood without this divine illumination, which no man can know at all times to be in himself, much less to be at any time for certain in any other, it follows cleerly, that no man or body of men in these times can be the infallible judges or determiners in

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matters of religion to any other mens consciences but thir own. (CPW, 7: 242–3)32

In Paradise Lost Michael – who, as we will see, seems closely to have read this tract – similarly claims that the ‘written Records pure’ are ‘not but by the Spirit understood’ (12.513–14). Because ‘no man can know ... at all times’ that he is divinely guided, he cannot – and thus Parliament cannot – impose his will in matters of religion. In resorting to force in matters of conscience the magistrate thus shows a confidence in his divine illumination, or the illumination of religious advisors, that may be entirely misplaced.33 Liberty of conscience is fundamental to Protestant government because it affirms the role of an individual faith contingent upon the dispensation of grace rather than locating godliness in a ‘papist’ imposition of outward forms.34 One of the key aims of Civil Power is thus an affirmation of Parliament’s fallibility in matters religious, or, to employ Vane’s terminology, an argument for government of the ‘outward concernes of men’ (Meditations, 387). It is an argument presupposing that the members of Parliament are, as Sikes would put it, of ‘the legally religious party ... that accuse, prosecute and deliver up Christ and his followers into the hands of sinners among the Gentiles’ (111), and is thus a far cry from the affirmation in the antiprelatical tracts of Parliament as a godly institution – it is the full blossoming of the seed of discontent that had been planted in the ‘Digression on the Long Parliament’ of 1648–9.35 The stylistic features of this tract that so clearly set it apart from Milton’s earlier prose – its repetition and rather rigidly literalist interpretations of the Bible – provide an object lesson in the self-restriction it advocates. The absence of prophetic flourish points to Milton’s larger prophetic purpose: his self-imposed stylistic limits mirror those being urged on Parliament, with the implication that liberty of conscience will remove institutional interference with those more spiritually fit than their political and ecclesiastical superiors. The long passage quoted above twice draws our attention to the temporality of reliance on scripture – ‘we of these ages, having no other divine rule ... but the holy scripture,’ ‘no man or body of men in these times can be the infallible judges or determiners in matters of religion’ – and thus points to a time when scripture will be superseded and when there will exist a body of infallible judges in matters of religion. Milton’s advocacy of religious liberty in Civil Power suggests in a manner reminiscent of Vane that religious freedom will allow for the ascension of

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those truly equipped to be judges of conscience. This is not conceived in terms of a neo-roman advance in national virtue, but rather as the creation of conditions whereby the Saints will no longer suffer worldly opposition and the anticipation of that post-apocalyptic time when humanity, or what remains of it, will have outgrown scripture. The proximity between Civil Power and Hirelings and the views of Vane and his supporters – noted by Lewalski, Austin Woolrych, and, most recently, David Hawkes – is evinced not only by its argument for liberty of conscience but also by the implicit teleology underpinning this argument.36 This shift in the nature of Milton’s apocalyptic language must inform our reading of Michael in Paradise Lost. We initially expect that Milton will adhere closely to the role assigned to the angel in Revelation, that of vanquisher of Satan and the rebel angels in the war in Heaven – we hear in book 2 that the rebel host assents to Mammon’s suggestion that they abandon militarism in favour of home decorating out of the fear that ‘Thunder and the Sword of Michaël / Wrought still within them’ (2.294–5). When we do arrive at the war in Heaven, however, this role is presented as vain hope on the part of Michael, who seeks Satan on the field ‘as hoping here to end / Intestine War in Heav’n’ (6.258–9) and adopts an imperious tone with his adversary: ‘Heav’n casts thee out ... Hence then, and evil go with thee along, / Thy offspring, to the place of evil, Hell’ (6.272–6; emphasis mine). This closely follows Revelation 12, which strongly suggests, though does not unequivocally state, that it is Michael who casts Satan and the rebel angels out of Heaven. It also resembles Valvasone’s Angeleida, where a single blow from the sword of Michael casts Satan into ‘the shadowy deep,’ a victory that finds several counterparts in the visual arts – notably in Luca Giordano’s Fall of the Rebel Angels (1666), where Michael balletically touches his toe to the neck of a Lucifer writhing in his fall out of Heaven.37 In Paradise Lost Satan’s dismissal of Michael’s words as empty vaunting is allowed to stand – ‘Nor think thou with wind / Of airy threats to awe whom yet with deeds / Thou canst not’ (6.282–4) – as we see that this is a fairly equal match. The Archangel’s victory is fleeting; Satan is soon ‘heal’d’ of the humility dealt by Michael’s sword (6.340–4). Though Milton thus does not adopt the view of Wollebius and other theologians that Michael is simply a stand-in for Christ, he simultaneously departs from the artistic tradition of recording the Archangel’s

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triumph. In an aside on the history of warfare, John Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes refers to Satan as inaugurating its evils: The olde serpent, he levyathan, Was the first that ever werre gan, Whan Michael, the hevenly champioun, With his feerys venqwisshyd the dragoun And to helle cast hym downe ful lowe.

Wither’s Michaelmas hymn refers to ‘that great Arch Angel’ who cast ‘the Dragon / ... and his Angels out,’ though his headnote acknowledges that ‘some doe thinke that this Angel is Christ.’38 Stella Revard draws our attention to how the ‘Renaissance Michael’ is consistently the champion glorified in the war in Heaven, as seen in the poems of Antonino Alfano, Fredericus Mollerus, Garparo Murtola, Giovandomenico Peri, Friedrich Taubmann, Erasmo di Valvasone, and Joost van den Vondel. Only in Odoricus Valmarana’s Daemonomachiae is the Son given any prominence in the war in Heaven: it is stated that Michael could not have won the war without the Son.39 Heywood also presents the ‘Arch-Angell’ as Heaven’s champion: ‘a Conflict terrible and great / Began in Heav’n; the Rebell Spirits giue way, / And the victorious Michael wins the day.’ Michael’s triumph is pictured in the frontispiece to book 8 of the Hierarchie, where he is characteristically represented as crushing Satan under foot – an image given various interpretations in paintings by Spinello Aretino, Peter Paul Rubens, Piero della Francesca, Juan Jimenez, Jacobello del Fiore, Dionisio Calvaert, and Raphael.40 Paradise Lost is quite unique in denying Michael his traditional role of casting Satan and the rebel angels into Hell. Also significant in the battle between Michael and Satan in the war in Heaven is that it is pulled into the visible heavens through an extended simile: ... such as, to set forth Great things by small, if Nature’s concord broke, Among the Constellations war were sprung, Two Planets rushing from aspect malign Of fiercest opposition in mid Sky, Should combat, and thir jarring Spheres confound.

(6.310–15)

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Just as the later reference to the Son herding the fallen angels out of heaven like ‘Goats or timorous flock together throng’d’ anticipates Christ’s role as shepherd (6.857), this simile in the encounter between Michael and Satan anticipates their extended warfare in the fallen world: Nature’s concord will break with the human fall, inaugurating a fierce opposition between Michael and Satan that will endure until the world’s end. Milton’s qualification of Michael’s celestial role as suggested in Revelation is thus coupled with the implication of an earthly role consistent with Daniel. As we turn to the final books of Milton’s epic, the picture becomes more complex. Upon his arrival in Eden, we find Michael described in his armour in a way that Milton does not provide in book 6 (11.240–8).41 Though Michael as terrestrial warrior reminds us of Daniel, we do not see the celestial prince protecting an elect nation as he does in Lycidas. His narration of biblical history rather evokes terrestrial elements of the Revelation tradition, and particularly the view of the Apocalypse of Milton’s late prose, in its attention to the worldly trials of the faithful few. We see this emphasis especially in Michael’s account of antediluvian history, where he opens Adam’s eyes to a postlapsarian worldly ‘Corruption’ whose ubiquity is pierced only by the isolated ‘Just Man’ (11.428, 681). Enoch is, as Michael describes him, ‘The only righteous in a World perverse,’ and is removed in a cloud to the realm of celestial reward ‘to walk with God / High in Salvation and the Climes of bliss’ (11.701, 707–8). Noah is similarly found to be ‘The one just Man alive’ (818), occasioning Adam’s rejoicing over a race of offspring not entirely lost: ‘Far less I now lament for one whole World / Of wicked Sons destroy’d, than I rejoice / For one Man found so perfet and so just’ (11.874–6). Michael praises this sentiment, adding an explanation of the First Covenant that reinforces the apocalyptic terms of his narrative: Such grace shall one just Man find in his sight, That he relents, not to blot out mankind, And makes a Cov’nant never to destroy The Earth again ... till fire purge all things new, Both Heav’n and Earth, wherein the just shall dwell.

(11.890–3, 900–1)

These final words of book 11 lend centricity to the ‘one just Man’ in the

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progress of history, and remind us of the ultimate reward awaiting the fit few. This emphasis is – somewhat unexpectedly – sustained as Michael moves to the history of Israel. Here Milton not only resists dwelling on the notion of an elect nation, but also confines such election to a particular period in biblical history. Whereas the refrain in book 11 is praise of the ‘one just Man,’ we hear over and again in book 12 that ‘All Nations shall be blest.’42 This is the promise held forth by the twelve tribes of Abraham that reaches full expression with the arrival of Jesus. Though God calls Abraham to be the forefather of Israel, this is only the first step in a more universal dispensation of divine favour: ‘from him will raise / A mighty Nation, and upon him show’r / His benediction so, that in his Seed / All Nations shall be blest’ (12.123–6). Though Moses is a ‘Saint’ with an extraordinary calling to lead ‘the Race elect / Safe towards Canaan’ (12.200, 214–15), the extended description of the Ark to which God’s Covenant with Israel is shackled reminds us of the differences between the Law and the Gospel: Thus Laws and Rites Establisht, such delight hath God in Men Obedient to his will, that he voutsafes Among them to set up his Tabernacle, The holy One with mortal Men to dwell: By his prescript a Sanctuary is fram’d Of Cedar, overlaid with Gold, therein An Ark, and in the Ark his Testimony, The Records of his Cov’nant, over these A Mercy-seat of Gold between the wings Of two bright Cherubim ...

(12.244–54)

As he does throughout his prose works, Milton emphasizes in this passage the ways in which Israel’s worship is a shadow rendered obsolete by the arrival of Jesus: it is a religion of laws and rites and of a physical, rather than a spiritual, tabernacle; its centrepiece is God’s physical sanctuary (of gold, no less); and it is content with a gaudy earthly counterpart to ‘the Mercy-seat above’ (11.2). This point is emphasized further in Adam and Michael’s exchange at this point. Adam praises the promise of Abraham, ‘in whom all Nations shall be blest’ (12.277), but expresses confusion over God’s favour of a sinful

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people: ‘So many Laws argue so many sins / Among them; how can God with such reside?’ (12.283–4). Michael responds with a primer in the doctrine of Redemption and justification by faith and famously notes humanity’s progress ‘From shadowy Types to Truth’ (12.303); unlike Moses and the Israelite kings, Jesus leads humanity into a true, heavenly Canaan and is a king ‘in whom shall trust / All Nations’ (12.328–9) – though we cannot have missed the point by now, Milton here gives emphatic placement to ‘All Nations.’ Dissolution of the idea of national election is given final emphasis in Adam’s concluding question to Michael, ‘what will betide the few / His faithful[?]’ (12.480–1). It is here especially that we see how Civil Power and Hirelings fit into Milton’s overriding sense of the world’s progress toward apocalypse, for Michael rehearses the major arguments of these tracts: the priesthood of believers is assaulted by those clerical ‘Wolves’ who have sought secular authority and worldly station (12.508), and liberty is a ‘consort’ of the ‘Spirit of Grace’ because no one ‘against Faith and Conscience can be heard / Infallible’ (12.525–30). Rather than offering in the spirit of Daniel’s prophecy hope of the worldly defeat of the opponents of the elect, Michael claims in the spirit of Revelation that worldly iniquity will persist until the Second Coming: ... so shall the World go on, To good malignant, to bad men benign, Under her own weight groaning, till the day Appear of respiration to the just, And vengeance to the wicked[.]

(12.537–41)

Michael’s physical description of the return of the Messiah is also revealing in its suggestion of Milton’s interpretation of the relationship between Daniel and Revelation. We have heard earlier that the Son will ‘come’ from ‘His seat at God’s right hand’ when ‘this world’s dissolution shall be ripe,’ which would suggest that he descends into the world for Judgment (12.457–9). Michael’s later statement on the Apocalypse, however, has the Son ‘in the Clouds from Heav’n to be reveal’d / In glory of the Father, to dissolve / Satan with his perverted World’ (12.545–7). This second image of the Son appearing in the clouds evokes scenes of Judgment common in the visual arts, and especially in Dutch painting. Roland M. Frye provides several examples of Italian representa-

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Plate 4: Hans Memling, Last Judgment, Central Panel, 1467–71 (by permission of the National Museum in Gdan ´ sk, Poland; photograph © Ryszard Petrajtis)

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Plate 5: Jan Provost, The Last Judgment, c. 1525 (Gift of James E. Scripps to the Detroit Institute of Arts; photograph © The Detroit Institute of Arts)

tions of Judgment, which typically lend the Son central and exclusive prominence – the most famous of these is Michelangelo’s in the Sistine Chapel. Hans Memling’s Last Judgment (see Plate 4) provides just one example of the features typical of such Dutch representations as Jan van Eyck’s Crucifixion and Last Judgment Diptych, as well as those of Rogier van der Weyden, Vrancke van der Stockt, and Bernard van Orley.43 Unlike the Sistine Chapel, where the Son looks sternly toward the damned with a threatening raised hand, these paintings depict a separation of duties where the Son judges from Heaven while Michael separates the souls of the saved and the damned on Earth – the two

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realms separated by a rainbow – allowing the Archangel to perform the dirty work while the Son gazes beneficently either upon creation or directly at the viewer, inviting an embrace of promised grace. It is an angel who angrily grapples with the damned in Jan Provost’s Last Judgment (see Plate 5). In Memling’s painting Michael appears in military garb and, as is common, carrying the scales in which the reprobate soul comes up light and is prodded into perdition with the Archangel’s lance. That Milton implies during the war in Heaven Michael’s ongoing battle with Satan in a fallen world; that he presents Michael in Eden in military attire; and that he suggests that the Son will remain in the clouds of Heaven during Judgment all evoke this vision of the Archangel’s role deriving from Daniel’s account of his awakening of souls (Daniel 12:2). This tradition is further suggested in the prominence Milton lends to the image of the Cherubic guard placed at the eastern gate of Eden (Genesis 3.24). After witnessing the progress of the world from the Fall to the Apocalypse, we see Michael’s leading of Adam and Eve out of their earthly Paradise as a mirror image of the Archangel’s leading of the elect into the heavenly Paradise at the end of human history – William Blake saw this with spotless clarity in his watercolour of this scene in Paradise Lost, which elides the Cherubic guard with the four horsemen of the Apocalypse (see Plate 6). In this reworking of Michael’s earthly and heavenly offices, Milton is able simultaneously to draw on traditional images of the Archangel and to adhere to the Reformed impulse not to lend angels too prominent a place in the divine economy. While he seems to question the convenient device of stating that biblical angels that seem too important must be Christ, he is no less Christocentric in that he assigns the defeat of Satan solely to the Son. Michael’s frustrated hope of defeating the adversary places him with the rest of the creatures, learning that only the Godhead can achieve such a victory and that the Son holds the full power of the Father – the Father reserves triumph for the Son so ‘that all may know / In Heav’n and Hell thy Power above compare’ (6.704–5; emphasis mine). The Archangel will struggle against Satan and is associated with biblical history, but Milton is careful to present him as closely following divine command in these roles. This allows him to adhere to a literal reading of scriptural references to Michael as an angel while at the same time diminishing his agency in the world’s progress toward the end of time.

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Plate 6: William Blake, ‘The Expulsion from Eden,’ from Paradise Lost, 1808 (by permission of the Huntington Art Gallery Collections; photograph © The Huntington, San Marino, California)

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Equally significant is how the portrait of Michael in Paradise Lost differs sharply from that of Lycidas, and does so in a way consistent with the shift in argument from early prose to late. Where Milton’s prose of the 1640s emphasizes the rise of an elect nation, buoyed by the sainthood of its Parliament, his prose on the eve of the Restoration is sceptical of national progress and seeks the liberties that will end the worldly trials of those faithful few to be justified on the day of Judgment. In similar fashion, though Milton’s pastoral elegy strongly evokes his role in Daniel as guardian of an elect nation, Michael’s history in Paradise Lost instead reminds us that God’s election of Israel is a fleeting moment in biblical history shackled to the institutions of the Old Law, and that true promise resides in the extension of grace to the faithful few of all nations. This is entirely in keeping with Milton’s turn away from the Foxean spirit of the antiprelatical tracts to the location in Hirelings of true religion in the Waldensian colony. To return to the bard’s Tobitean moment in the proem to book 7, we thus have a sense that Milton’s ‘fit audience though few’ has a significantly different caste in his later works. Though it is a strain that has been traced as far back as his academic Prolusions, Milton tends to narrow and entrench its boundaries as the number of individuals with whom he is disappointed grows steadily larger. The association of political action with spiritual fitness in Eikonoklastes and the first Defence, which presents opponents of monarchical tyranny as a ‘fit few,’ would become more complicated as the rifts among the godly party widened over the course of the Interregnum.44 This finds poetic expression in the bard’s isolated position of election in Paradise Lost. If Milton provides us in the epic invocations with, as James Holly Hanford has put it, ‘the record of his inner life,’ we can see how the increasingly habitual heavenly visitation attending that life generates growing confidence in its divinely granted portion of spirit.45 The imploring of divine illumination in the proems to books 1 and 3 – ‘What in me is dark / Illumine, what is low raise and support ...’ (1.22–3), ‘So much the rather thou Celestial Light / Shine inward ... that I may see and tell / Of things invisible to mortal sight’ (3.51–2, 54–5) – slowly shades into confidence in a more habitual ‘nightly visitation unimplor’d’ (9.22). The early uncertainty with regard to the nature of celestial illumination shades into heightened

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awareness that can be only imperfectly related to the audience – the searching ‘Or’ that drives the description of the ‘holy Light’ in the proem to book 3 becomes a more knowing ‘Nor’ in its counterpart in book 7.46 When we hear of that just man Noah, he sounds rather like someone we know: ‘the only Son of light / In a dark Age, against example good / ... fearless of reproach and scorn’ (11.808–9). The light–dark contrast here recalls the bard inwardly bathed with ‘Celestial Light,’ ‘In darkness, and with dangers compast round’ (3.51, 7.27). To put it another way, the bard’s advertisement of his spiritual election is concurrent with our witnessing through the events of the Fall our postlapsarian dependence on divine grace. We have seen in the proem to book 7 how the Tobit-Bard experiences a spiritual awakening that the Tobias-Adam does not. What we see in the remainder of the epic is a continuation of this trajectory, with Adam corrupting himself with sin and attempting spiritual recovery while the bard narrates with unwavering confidence the course of human history. The familiarity that was once extended to humanity in specie is now limited to an elect group of which the bard is a member, an implication made more explicit in the treatise on prevenient grace that introduces book 11. Also suggested in the final dialogue between the Father and the Son is Milton’s view of the role of the Saints after the Apocalypse: ‘All my redeem’d,’ the Son proposes, ‘may dwell in joy and bliss, / Made one with me as I with thee am one’ (11.43–4). The earthly elect – and it is clear that the Son is making a ‘request for Man’ rather than for men and angels – will be perfectly united with the Mediator. The angels, by contrast, are the ‘Sons of Light’ and are not included in this matrimonial relationship (11.80, 84). This recalls the celestial model of Vane, where the Saints after Judgment reside in Heaven as ‘the Lambs Bride and wife, whilst the Angels are but friends of the Bridegroom’ (Meditations, 73). In the bard’s illuminationist terminology, the very act of generating this dialogue between Michael and Adam carries with it the implication of election. The angels are, after all, ‘ministering spirits, sent forth to minister for them who shall be heirs of salvation,’ a view investing awareness of the terms of their service with divine election. By making Michael a mouthpiece for the views on liberty of conscience expressed in Civil Power Milton is not simply reiterating his views, but is rather

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dramatizing his perception that these views on ‘force’ and righteous dissent are fundamental to divine order, and affirming his own divinely appointed role – like Tobit’s, Jeremiah’s, and Noah’s – in resisting persecution and justifying the ways of God to man. Although he is increasingly cynical about his compatriots’ readiness to walk in God’s path, the prophetic mode of his later work does not point to the abandonment, but rather to the affirmation, of the politico-religious priority of a small group of Saints and the inevitability of their triumph.

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Epilogue

In an illuminating essay, Alexandra Walsham examines reaction to angelic iconography in England’s long Reformation – much in the spirit of Eamon Duffy’s Stripping of the Altars – looking especially at the controversy surrounding Henrietta Maria’s private chapel, Richard Culmer’s removal of images of angels from Canterbury in 1643, and the 1644 parliamentary order banishing these icons from all churches and open places.1 Resistance to these images is often a barometer of the mood of English reform: during the 1681 Exclusion Crisis, Edmund Sherman, a churchwarden of All Hallows, Barking, dismantled and set fire to a gilded carving of Michael the Archangel. Though he would claim that he was merely saving the parish the cost of fuel, he was eliminating what had become viewed as an invitation to idolatry.2 Thus church angels were sacrificed throughout the period when anxiety over England’s imperfect Reformation reached the boiling point. But of course even the left wing of Protestantism – especially the left wing, in fact – adopted more than a negative stance toward angels, as Walsham’s essay and this work both emphasize in looking at interpretations of Hebrews 1.14. This strain of angelology confirms God’s special concern for his Saints, a personal religion potentially opposed to the communitarian views of worship favoured by the state church. Angels could march in stride with those advocating godly resistance to established order in a way quite opposite in spirit to much of the Dionysian tradition. Unlike the canon of saints, angels thus survive – they must do given their presence in the Bible – but are reimagined in a way consistent with altered views of human devotion. In an English context this holds

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even for those not especially on the fringes of Reformation: the Leicestershire rector Benjamin Camfield seeks in his Theological Discourse of Angels (1678) to defend the traditional, Thomist view that angels are pure form against the physician John Webster’s dismissal of this position as witchcraft. In the same treatise, however, he dismisses the Celestial Hierarchy as being without scriptural foundation, and lists Dionysius’s nine ranks alongside Maimonedes’s ten as equally speculative views of celestial order.3 The anteroom of divinity is recast according to perceptions of the Godhead and of the means by which humanity approaches it, and it is the fundamental change in the relationship between the divine and human that interrogates the long influence of the Pseudo-Areopagite’s twin hierarchies, perhaps more than scholarly rejection of their authenticity. In charting developments in angelology, one is consistently aware of their close correspondence to anthropology – the flip side of Harold Bloom’s observation that we are all fallen angels is that the loyal angels are the beings we wish we were.4 However the rise of individualism in the West is conceived – as a product of humanism, of Protestantism, of modernity’s moveable capital, all of these explanations have strengths and limitations – it is an attitude fundamentally at odds with a Dionysian universe, where the path to the divine lies only through mediating celestial and ecclesiatical hierarchies. Perhaps this is why it is difficult to find a thinker, Protestant or Catholic, taking the twin hierarchies entirely seriously in the eighteenth century and beyond, even though attribution of the Corpus Dionysiacum is not universally dismissed until well into the nineteenth century. As Gary Kuchar has recently observed, the critique of sacramentology in the period coincides with a more fragmented inward turn of meditation.5 In similar spirit the private influence of angelic guides challenges a Dionysian economy of theurgia, replacing a procession and return mediated by ceremonies and institutions with the justification of the individual. In making such claims one must be chary of the oversimplification of medieval thought to which scholars of the early modern period are prone – a tendency that this study has sought to avoid. Medieval thinkers also meditated, of course. But there is a difference between the mystical flight of a Bonaventure, which ascends heavenward on angels’ wings and confirms hierarchical order along the way, and the internal illumination of a Milton, granted directly by a Godhead that may or may not deploy ministering spirits and which turns to

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extended contemplation of individual angels such as Raphael and Michael. Bonaventure’s sense of divine order does, however, carry a resistance strain in making simple devotion the measure of church institutions, an element with which Colet would sympathize – his approach to Dionysius through Bonaventure carries none of the hermetic heterodoxy that Michael J.B. Allen finds in Ficino’s thought.6 Hooker and Spenser betray in their own way anxieties over the supplanting of communal order by individual insight, and in the process resist both medieval and early modern modes of private meditation. Though Donne gives a good deal of space to such meditation, and does so in a way evoking traditional sacramantology, Mariology, and angelology, he simultaneously treats these as elements of human thought subject to a destabilizing scepticism unseen in his treatment of grace and the Word. The ostensible privacy of Milton’s prophetic illumination, then, can be understood as akin to Vane’s and Lawrence’s celestial speculation – Vane, it must be remembered, offers a ‘retired man’s meditations,’ Lawrence, though President of the Council of State, dedicates his theological works to his mother – in that it makes scrutable the author’s awareness of divine order, which in turn justifies public thought. To recall the categories suggested in Republic IX, through vision of the heavenly city the contemplator becomes participant in an ideal politics; seeing is not just believing in this case, but also possessing – or at least shareholding – with the assumption of privilege that possession entails. Though one of the key patristic theorizers of the celestial arcanum no longer holds sway in the thought of Lawrence, Vane, and Milton, the meting out of divine illumination, and the worldly order most conducive to divine will, do remain pervasive concerns. Aside from the ubiquity in the period of Christian Platonism, of rethinking sacramentology, and of questions of divine majesty – the most explicit extensions of Dionysian thought – there is a consistent concern with a hierarchization of spiritual fitness, with the view that an assault on God’s favourites is an assault on divine order, sharing concerns, even if implicitly, with the Pseudo-Areopagite.

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Notes

Introduction 1 Plato, Republic, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato: Including the Letters, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, Bollingen Series 71 (New York, 1961), 819 [592a–b]. 2 See Pseudo-Dionysius, The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibheid and Paul Rorem, Classics of Western Spirituality (New York, 1987), 159–73. In describing the angelic hierarchy, Dionysius has in mind the daimones, described in Hesiod and Plato’s Symposium (202e–203a) as intermediaries between gods and man and developed by Plutarch and Apuleius (see Andrew Louth, Denys the Areopagite, Outstanding Christian Thinkers [Wilton, Conn., 1989], 34–5). Philo Judaeus had already elided the daimones with scriptural angels, and Neoplatonists such as Plotinus, Iamblichus, and Proclus had developed hierarchized models of procession and return to the One. In his model Iamblichus describes how knowledge descends from the One to a ‘perfect’ intellectual order, the gods, which is superior to ‘illuminated’ demons, who are superior to a ‘pure’ order, the heroes; see Iamblichus of Chalcis, De mysteriis Aegyptorium, ed. Stephen Ronan (Hastings, 1989), 30–2 [1.7–8]. Proclus is the source of the triple triad; see his Platonic Theology, trans. Thomas Taylor, Great Works of Philosophy (Kew Gardens, N.Y., 1985), 1: 179 [3.13]. Dionysius significantly departs from Neoplatonic ontology by incorporating Being, Life, and Intellect into the One in his description of God – if God is to be creator, he must have a hand in Being and Life, thus dissolving the unbridgeable distance between the One and existence fundamental to Neoplatonism; see Stephen Gersh, From Iamblichus to Eriugena: An Investigation of the Prehistory and Evolution of the Pseudo-Dionysian

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Notes to pages 4–6 Tradition, Studien zur Problemgeschichte der Antiken und Mittelalterlichen Philosophie 8 (Leiden, 1978), 154. Ibid., 56–7, 137–3. It is worth noting that Dionysius’s was not the only model of angelic hierarchy of the Middle Ages. Cyril of Jerusalem (c. 315–c. 386) suggests a similar order: ‘Angels, Archangels, Virtues, Dominations, Principalities, Powers, Thrones, ... the Cherubim with many faces ... [and] the Seraphim, whom Esias in the Holy Spirit saw standing around the throne of God’; see his Catechetical Lectures, trans. Edwin H. Gifford, vol. 7 of A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church (New York, 1894), 154. More significantly, Gregory the Great reverses placement of Principalities and Virtues in the Homilia and offers quite a different arrangement of the middle five ranks in his Morals on the Book of Job – providing Angels, Archangels, Thrones, Dominations, Virtues, Princedoms, Powers, Cherubim, and Seraphim – a pattern to which his contemporary Isidore of Seville also adhered; see his Morals on the Book of Job (Oxford, 1847), 3: 549; and C.A. Patrides, ‘“Quaterniond into their celestiall Princedomes”: The Orders of the Angels,’ in Premises and Motifs in Renaissance Thought and Literature (Princeton, N.J., 1982), 13. This is not generally perceived in medieval thought to be a major issue: Gregory praises Dionysius in one of his writings as ‘venerabilis Pater’; he and Dionysius vary only in the middle orders, on which both are vague; and the hierarchy in the Homilia is quite close to Dionysius’s, suggesting, as Paul Rorem has argued, that Gregory likely encountered Dionysius’s work during his time in Constantinople, and that although his Greek was too limited for him to have read the Corpus firsthand, he may have received ‘a secondhand account or summary, perhaps given to him orally’ (PseudoDionysius: A Commentary on the Texts and an Introduction to Their Influence [Oxford, 1993], 76). Dante Alighieri follows the Dionysian orders and provides a telling response to the ‘dispute’ between Gregory and the Pseudo-Areopagite: ‘Gregory afterward differed from [Dionysius], where- / fore, as soon as he opened his eyes in this / heaven, he smiled at himself’ (Paradiso, trans. Charles S. Singleton, 2 vols., Bollingen Series 80 [Princeton, N.J., 1975], 28.127–35). Dante also, however, adheres to Gregory’s Morals on the Book of Job in describing the angels in the Convivio; see Dante, Convivio, trans. William Walrond Jackson (Oxford, 1909), 85–6 [2.6]. Ibid., 236. Ibid., 272. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, Blackfriars Edition, 60 vols. (Cam-

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bridge, 1964–76), 9: 23, 33, 237; references to this edition are hereafter indicated by ST. See also Thomas Aquinas, Against Those who Attack the Religious Profession [Contra impugnantes Dei cultum et religionem], an Apology for the Religious Orders, ed. John Procter (London, 1902), 129. For interpretation of Thomas’s thought on hierarchy, see Étienne Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas, trans. L.K. Shook (New York, 1988), 162, 166; Fran O’Rourke, Pseudo-Dionysius and the Metaphysics of Aquinas, Studien und Texte zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters 32 (Leiden, 1992), 266; Yves Congar, ‘Orientations de Bonaventure et surtout to Thomas D’Aquin dans leur vision de l’Église et celle de l’état,’ Thomas d’Aquin: Sa vision de théologie et de l’Église (London, 1984), 5.693; and Umberto Eco, The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, trans. Hugh Bredin (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), 47. Eusebius Pamphili, Ecclesiastical History, trans. Roy J. Deferrari (New York, 1953), 1: 144, 257. See Paul Rorem and John C. Lamoreaux, John of Scythopolis and the Dionysian Corpus, Oxford Early Christian Studies, ed. Gillian Clark and Andrew Louth (Oxford, 1998), 11 and 21–2; Gervais Dumeige, ‘Influence du Pseudo-Denys en Occident. Origine de l’influence dionysienne,’ Dictionnaire de spiritualité ascétique et mystique, doctrine et histoire, vol.3 (Paris, 1932), 318–19; and Jaroslav Pelikan, Introduction to The Complete Works, by Pseudo-Dionysius, 16. The distinction between John of Scythopolis’s and Maximus the Confessor’s commentaries has been discernible only quite recently: in the 1980s Beate Regina Schula discovered a manuscript thought to contain only the scholia of John of Scythopolis (Rorem and Lamoreaux, 1–3, 36–8). In what follows I am concerned primarily with Dionysius’s Western influence; for an account of his Eastern influence, see ‘Influence du Pseudo-Denys en Orient,’ in Dictionnaire de spiritualité, 3: 286–318. See David Luscombe, ‘The Reception of the Writings of Denis the Pseudo-Areopagite into England,’ in Tradition and Change: Essays in Honour of Marjorie Chibnall, ed. Diana Greenway, Christopher Holdsworth, and Jane Sayers (Cambridge, 1985), 116–18. In his Post beatum ac salutiferam, or Passion of Saint Denys, Hilduin promises an account of the ‘passio sanctissimi Dionysii qui ... a sancto Paulo apostolo Athenesium ordinatus archiepiscopus, apostolica vero auctoritate beati Clementis papae, totius Galliae constitutus apostolus ... ’ J.P. Migne, ed., Patrologiae cursus completus, series latina (Paris, 1844–65), 106.23d; available at http://pld.chadwyck.com. Scholars have now refuted the claim that Hilduin was the originator of this legend; see Luscombe, 118, and H.

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Notes to pages 6–7 Moretus-Plantin, ‘Les Passions de Saint Denys,’ in Mélanges offerts au R.P. Ferdinand Cavallera (Toulouse, 1948), 215–30. ‘ille vir barbarus, ille qui in finibus mundus positus’ (my trans.); see Luscombe, 121–3. On Erigena’s debt to Dionysius, see Dumeige, ‘Influence du Pseudo-Denys,’ 321; Jean Pépin, La tradition de l’allegorie: De Philon d’Alexandrie à Dante, Études Augustiniennes (Paris, 1988), esp. 199–219 and 247–50. Hugh of St Victor, Commentarium in hierarchium coelestem, in Migne, Patrologia latina, 175.1038. On Dionysius’s twelfth-century influence, see Rorem, Pseudo-Dionysius: A Commentary, 31 and 217; Dumeige, ‘Influence du Pseudo-Denys,’ 327; and Bernard McGinn, The Growth of Mysticism: From Gregory the Great Through the Twelfth Century, vol. 2 of The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism (New York, 1994), 363–418. See Rorem, A Commentary, 66. See Karlfried Froehlich, Introduction to The Complete Works, by PseudoDionysius, 33; James Walsh, ed., The Pursuit of Wisdom and Other Works by the Author of the Cloud of Unknowing (New York, 1988), 51; and Chenoine R. Aubert, ‘L’Influence de Denys en Occident au Moyen Age,’ Dictionnaire d’histoire et de géographie ecclésiastiques, vol. 14 (Paris, 1960), 295. Bruce Gordon, ‘The Renaissance Angel,’ in Angels in the Early Modern World, ed. Peter Marshall and Alexandra Walsham (Cambridge, 2006), esp. 43–4, 48, 51, and 54. See Lorenzo Valla, Collatio Novi Testamenti, ed. Alessandro Perosa (Firenze, 1970), 167–8 [comment on Acts 17.22–3]. For Dionysius’s claim to have seen the eclipse at the moment of Christ’s death, see Letter 7, in Complete Works, 268. See also Charles L. Stinger, Humanism and the Church Fathers (Albany, N.Y., 1977), 161–2; and Karlfried Froehlich, Introduction to Pseudo-Dionysius, The Complete Works, 38. Lorenzo Valla, Laurentii Vallensin viri tam graecae quam latinae peritissimi in latinam Novi Testamenti (Paris, 1505); Desiderius Erasmus, Erasmus’ Annotations of the New Testament, ed. Anne Reeve and M.A. Screech, 2 vols., Studies in the History of Christian Thought 42 (Leiden, 1990), 2: 312–13 [Acts 17]. On Grocyn, see also John Foxe, Actes and Monuments, 8 vols. (London, 1843–49), 4: 248; and J.B. Trapp, ‘John Colet and the hierarchies of the Pseudo-Dionysius,’ in Religion and Humanism, Studies in Church History 17, ed. Keith Robbins (Oxford, 1981), 139. See, for example, Martin Luther, Luther’s Works, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan and Helmut T. Lehmann, 55 vols. (Philadelphia, 1955–67), 36: 109; references to this edition are hereafter indicated by the abbreviation LW. See also Jean Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Ford Lewis Battles,

Notes to pages 7–9

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The Library of Christian Classics 20 (London, 1960), 1: 164 [1.14.4]; on Zwingli and Melanchthon, see Froehlich, 40. See Patrides, ‘Quaterniond,’ 5. Patrides also notes Bishop Hypatius’s interrogation of Dionysian authenticity in the sixth century and Patriarch Photius’s in the ninth century. Lorenzo Valla, Encomium sancti Thomae Aquinatis, ed. J. Vahlen, Opera omnia, 2 vols. (Torino, 1962), 2: 351–2. See Hanna H. Gray, ‘Valla’s Encomium of St Thomas Aquinas and the Humanist Conception of Christian Antiquity,’ in Essays in History and Literature Presented by Fellows of the Newberry Library to Stanley Pargellis, ed. Heinz Bluhm (Chicago, 1965), 40. F. Edward Cranz, Nicholas of Cusa and the Renaissance, ed. Thomas M. Izbicki (Brookfield, Vermont, 2000), 137. Bruce Gordon notes, however, that ‘Cusa’s devotion to Dionysius in words was not entirely consistent with the direction of his own thought’; see his ‘Renaissance Angel,’ in Marshall and Walsham, 44. Ambrogio Traversari, Oratio II, qtd. in Stinger, Humanism and the Church Fathers, 161; the Traversari translation is available in Dionysiaca, ed. P. Chevallier, 2 vols. (Paris, 1937–49); Theologia vivificans is available through the Gallica project of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (http://gallica.bnf.fr). See Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, The Prefatory Epistles of Lefèvre d’Étaples and Related Texts, ed. Eugene F. Rice, Jr (New York, 1971), esp. 65 and 66n1; see also Eugene F. Rice, Jr, ‘Humanism in France,’ in Renaissance Humanism: Foundations, Forms, and Legacy, ed. Albert Rabil, Jr, 3 vols. (Philadelphia, 1988), 2: 110–11 and 114. Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Heptaplus, trans. Douglas Carmichael, On the Dignity of Man, On Being and the One, Heptaplus (New York, 1965), 70 [1st proem]. On Pico’s view of Dionysius, and comparison to Ficino’s view on the same, see Charles Trinkaus, ‘Cosmos and Man: Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico on the Structure of the Universe and the Freedom of Man,’ in Renaissance Transformations of Late Medieval Thought [first appearing in Vivens Homo (Florence, 1994)], Variorum Collected Studies Series (Aldershot, 1999), 10.336–7; and In Our Image and Likeness, 2 vols. (1970; Notre Dame, Indiana, 1995), 507–12. Bruce Gordon is incorrect in stating that Ficino translated ‘the works of Dionysius, most notably the Celestial Hiaerarchy’ (‘Renaissance Angel,’ Marshall and Walsham, 48). For Ficino’s discussion of angels, see Platonic Theology [Theologia Platonica], trans. Michael J.B. Allen, ed. James Hankins, 3 vols., The I Tatti Renaissance Library (Cambridge, Mass., 2001–3), 1: 77 [1.5.12]; Ficino’s translation and commentary on The Divine

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Notes to pages 9–16 Names and The Mystical Theology available in Dionysii Areopagitae translatio una cum suis argumentis, Opera omnia [repr. 1576 Basel edn.], introd. Paul Oskar Kristeller (Torino, 1962), 2: 1013–1128. On this translation, see Stinger, 161. For Ficino’s endorsement of early dating of Dionysius, see Platonic Theology 1: 77 [1.5.14], and The Letters of Marsilio Ficino (London, 1981), 3: 19 [Letter 13] and 3: 45 [Letter 19]. Thomas More, The Complete Works of St Thomas More, ed. Louis A. Schuster et al. (New Haven, Conn., 1973), 8: 712; see also 706–7, 727–8, and 679–80. René Roques, Univers dionysien (1954; Latour-Maubourg, 1983); Louth, Denys the Areopagite, 38. Unless otherwise indicated, references to Spenser’s short poems are to The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, ed. William A. Oram et al. (New Haven, 1989). See Robert H. West, Milton and the Angels (Athens, Georgia, 1955), esp. 123–43. See Stephen M. Fallon, Milton among the Philosophers: Poetry and Materialism in Seventeenth-Century England (Ithaca, N.Y., 1991), 137–67; see most recently Joad Raymond, ‘“With the Tongues of Angels”: Angelic Conversations in Paradise Lost and Seventeenth-Century England,’ in Marshall and Walsham, 256–81. John Everard, Some Gospel-Treasures Opened (Wing E3533; London, 1653), sig. A5r. For discussion of Everard’s use of Pseudo-Dionysius see Nigel Smith, Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion, 1640–1660 (Oxford, 1989), 115, 126–8, and 141. Unless otherwise indicated, references to Milton’s poetry are to John Milton: Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (New York, 1957); references to the Bible are to the King James/Authorized Version.

1 John Colet’s Ecclesiology and Dionysian Thought 1 In Sears Jayne, John Colet and Marsilio Ficino (Oxford, 1963), 7, 141. Colet underlines the phrase that follows in the Epistolae: Paul and Dionysius ‘say that things invisible, which belong to God, are known through those things which have been done and which are seen in the world.’ 2 Fredric Seebohm, The Oxford Reformers (1867; New York, 1929), 2. 3 Gleason’s full-length study of Colet does not make mention of British Library Royal 1 E.V., pt. 2, and Trapp’s ODNB entry notes it only cursorily. Pt. 1 of this manuscript, completed in 1509, contains the Gospels of Luke and John and is housed in the Cambridge University Library

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(Dd.vii.3); pt. 2, completed in 1506, contains the canonical Epistles. Daniel T. Lochman discusses the frontispieces to these manuscripts, supposed on thin evidence to be portraits of Colet, in ‘Divus Dionysius: Authority, Self, and Society in John Colet’s Reading of the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy,’ Journal of the History of Ideas 68 (2007): 1–3. I am indebted to Dr Andrea Clarke of the British Library for alerting me to Royal 1 E.V. See John B. Gleason, John Colet (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1989), 116. Arguments by Erasmus appear before Galatians (f.136v), Ephesians (f.155r), Philippians (f.174r), Colossians (f.188r), 1 Thessalonians (f.201r), 2 Thessalonians (f.213v), 1 Timothy (f.220r–v), 2 Timothy (f.235v), Titus (f.246r–v), Philemon (f.252v), Hebrews (f.256r–v), James (f.297v), 1 Peter (f.311r–v), 2 Peter (f.326v), 1 John (f.336v), and Jude (f.354v). See J.B. Trapp, Erasmus, Colet, and More: The Early Tudor Humanists and Their Books, The Panizzi Lectures, 1990 (London, 1991), 131; and ‘John Colet and the Hierarchies of the Pseudo-Dionysius,’ 139. John Colet, Commentary on First Corinthians, trans. and ed. Bernard O’Kelley and Catherine A.L. Jarrott, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 21 (Binghamton, N.Y., 1985), 259, see also p. 17 and 329n7. Further references to this edition are indicated in parentheses by the abbreviation C 1 Cor. Colet’s use of the Oratio is noted by J.B. Trapp in his entry on Colet in the ODNB. Colet, Letters to Radulphus on the Mosaic Account of Creation, together with Other Treatises, trans. J.H. Lupton (1876; Ridgewood, N.J., 1966), xxiii, 10–11. Lupton notes this parallel in his edition of Colet’s Two Treatises on the Hierarchies of Dionysius (London, 1869) 36n1. This edition is hereafter cited parenthetically as DCH (On the Celestial Hierarchy) and DEH (On the Ecclesiastical Hierarchy), with cross-references to especially pertinent passages of its source manuscript, now British Library Add. MS 63853, provided in notes. Jayne provides the passages from Colet and Ficino side by side for ready comparison in John Colet and Marsilio Ficino (Oxford, 1963), 147. Gleason, John Colet, 48. References to De sacramentis are to the facing-page translation in Appendix 1 of Gleason’s John Colet, 270–333, and are indicated in parentheses by the abbreviation De sac. Plotinus, Enneads, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), 1.6.7; cf. Dionysius, Complete Works, 208, 247. John Colet, An Exposition of Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, ed. J.H. Lupton (1873; repr. Ridgewood, N.J., 1965), 130. See Jayne, Colet and

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Notes to pages 18–25 Ficino, 57; and Gordon, ‘The Renaissance Angel,’ in Marshall and Walsham, 51. See Marsilio Ficino, Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love, trans. Sears Jayne (Dallas, 1985), 40–1, 49. For diagrammatic representation of this relationship, see British Library Add. MS. 63853, f.140v. Thomas Harding, A Reioindre to M. Jewels Replie (STC 12760; Antwerp, 1566), 44v. Ibid., 105. For a fuller summary of Colet’s thought on the twin hierarchies, see Lochman, 18–29. Gleason, 199; see also p. 196, where Gleason discusses Colet’s ‘deep hostility to Thomas.’ Colet specifically overlooks the ambiguity surrounding the hierarchical position of the Seraph in Isaiah and the number of angels suggested in scripture. See Two Treatises, 34; Lupton notes these absences (34n2) but does not relate them to Thomist angelology. Gleason, John Colet, 202–3. John Moorman, A History of the Franciscan Order (Oxford, 1968), 130. Joachim’s trinitarianism had already been declared anathema in the second canon of the 1215 Lateran Council. For the full text of Council, see H.J. Schroeder, ed., Disciplinary Decrees of the General Councils: Text, Translation and Commentary (St Louis, 1937), 236–96; this text available at Paul Halsall, ed., Medieval Sourcebook, Fordham University (1996; http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/lateran4.html). E. Randolph Daniel, ‘St Bonaventure: Defender of Franciscan Eschatology,’ in S. Bonaventura, 1274–1974, ed. Jacques Guy Bougerol et al. (Rome, 1973), 4: 799. Douie, ‘St Bonaventura’s Part in the Conflict Between Seculars and Mendicants at Paris,’ S. Bonaventura, 1274–1974, 2: 588–9. See Moorman, History of the Franciscan Order, 145–6; and Bernard McGinn, The Flowering of Mysticism, vol. 3 of The Presence of God (New York, 1998), 72–4. See Douie, ‘St Bonaventura’s Part,’ 585; and Moorman, History of the Franciscan Order, 146. Douie, ‘St Bonaventura’s Part,’ 591. Ibid., 591. Bonaventure, Collationes in Hexaëmeron, ed. R.P. Ferdinand Delorme, OFM (Florence, 1934), 4.2.27 (21.27): ‘triplex est genus vitae in caelo, a quo exemplatur triplex vitae in terra, scilicet genus vitae actuosae, quae respondet operationi, genus vitae otiosae, quae respondet scientiae,

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genus vitae ex utraquae permixtae, quae potestati respondet ... Inter haec tria scientia respondet supremae hierarchiae, actio infimae, ordo sive potestas respondet mediae [the sort of life in heaven is threefold, in accordance with which is displayed a threefold sort of life on earth, namely an active sort of life, which corresponds to work, a leisurely sort of life, which corresponds to knowledge, and a sort of life mixed in both of these, which corresponds to power ... Among those three knowledge corresponds to the supreme hierarchy, action to the lowest; the rank with power corresponds to the middle.]’ De Vinck provides a full translation of the Hexaëmeron as it is found in the Quaracchi edition of the Opera omnia (vol. 5 of his Works of Bonaventure: Cardinal, Seraphic Doctor, and Saint [Patterson, N.J., 1966]). I have chosen here to quote and translate directly from the more conservative Delorme edition. Compare, for example, each edition’s version of the highly significant 22.22: the Quaracchi edition would seem to have included some material copied from the Legenda maior where the Delorme does not. Bonaventure, Hexaëmeron, 4.2.28 (21.28), translation mine: ‘Scientia autem triplex est, scilicet scientia sursumactiva ruducens in originem, scientia speculativa suscipiens desuper illuminationem, scientia sententiativa tenens iudicii districtionem. Harum prima est in Seraphim, secunda in Cherubim, tertia in Thronis.’ Douie, ‘St Bonaventura’s Part,’ 612. See Bonaventure, Hexaëmeron, 4.3.20–1 (22.20–1); and David Keck, Angels and Angelology in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1998), 147. Bonaventure, Hexaëmeron, 4.3.22 (22.22): ‘Tertius ordo contemplantium est eorum, qui sursumaguntur in Deum: de quo videtur fuisse sanctus Franciscus, qui in fine apparuit.’ See McGinn, Flowering, 99. See Hexaëmeron, 4.2.13 (21.13); and Étienne Gilson, La Philosophie de Saint Bonaventure (Nogent-le-Retrou, 1924), 255–6. McGinn, Flowering, 98. See Cousins, ‘The Two Poles,’ 157–9. Bonaventure, Works, trans. de Vinck, 5: 349n†. Marjorie Reeves, Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages: A Study in Joachimism (Oxford, 1969), 180; see also Reeves’s Joachim of Fiore and the Prophetic Future (New York, 1977), 36–8; and Delno C. West and Sandra ZimdarsSwartz, Joachim of Fiore: A Study in Spiritual Perception and History (Bloomington, 1983), 104. ‘Three dilemmas,’ adapted from Douie, ‘St Bonaventura’s Part,’ 585. Gleason, John Colet, 257–9. The table appears in British Library Add. MS 63853, f.24r.

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Notes to pages 29–31

41 Qtd. in Ibid., 245; Samuel Knight, The Life of Dr John Colet, Dean of St Paul’s (Oxford, 1823), 259. Knight provides full Latin and English texts of the Convocation Sermon as an appendix. See also Trapp, ‘John Colet and the Hierarchies,’ 133. 42 Cf. the same chapter in Pseudo-Dionysius, Ecclesiastical Hierarchy, in Complete Works, 242: ‘only the hierarch carries on his head – in a holy manner – the sacred scriptures. Since the perfecting power and understanding of all the clergy were given to the hierarchs, men of God, by that divine goodness which is the source of every consecration, it is only proper that there should be placed on the heads of the hierarchs the scriptures which God himself handed down and which reveal to us all we can know of God.’ 43 See also the reference to Matthias on p. 125; cf. Pseudo-Dionysius, Complete Works, 241. 44 See Gleason, John Colet, 22–5, 32; and J.B. Trapp’s entry on Colet in the ODNB. 45 John Colet, De sacramentis, 276. References to De sacramentis are to the full Latin and English text given as Appendix 1 in Gleason, John Colet, 270–333. 46 Knight, Life of Colet, 259. 47 This is not to say that Colet was not critical of monastic opulence; see the Convocation Sermon (Lupton, A Life, 301): ‘Let be rehersed also to my lordes these monkes, chanons, and religious men, the lawes that commaunde them to go the straite way that leadeth vnto heuen, leauyng the brode way of the worlde.’ On the Dean’s famous austerity, see H.C. Porter, ‘The Gloomy Dean and the Law: John Colet, 1466–1519,’ in Essays in Modern Church History, in Memory of Norman Sykes, ed. G.V. Bennett and J.D. Walsh (London, 1966), 18–20; and Eugene F. Rice, ‘John Colet and the Annihilation of the Natural,’ Harvard Theological Review 45 (1952): 141, 151. 48 For expressions of this view, see Ernest William Hunt, Dean Colet and His Theology (London, 1956), 103; and Leland Miles, John Colet and the Platonic Tradition (La Salle, Ill., 1961), 167–9. 49 William Tyndale, An answere unto Sir Thomas Mores dialoge (STC 24437; Antwerp, 1531), fol. civv. See John Foxe, Actes and Monuments, 8 vols. (London, 1843–49), 4: 247; Matthew Parker, De antiquitate Britannicae (STC 19292; London, 1572), 359; and Trapp’s ODNB entry on Colet. 50 Gleason, John Colet, 4; see also chap. 10, esp. pp. 236–42. On the Protestant Colet, see Trapp, ‘John Colet and the Hierarchies,’ 130; and Porter, ‘The Gloomy Dean,’ 23.

Notes to pages 31–5

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51 Porter, ‘The Gloomy Dean,’ 18; in a related vein, Rice notes in ‘John Colet and the Annihilation’ that Colet denies the existence of ‘a natural social order outside of the order of grace’ (149). 52 On the foundation of St Paul’s School, see Gleason, in John Colet, 217–34. 53 J.R. Liddell, ‘The Library of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in the Sixteenth Century,’ The Library, 4th ser. 18 (1937–38): 385–6. 2 Hooker and Spenser on the Celestial Hierarchy 1 The epigraph is from C.A. Patrides, ‘“Quaterniond into their celestiall Princedomes”: The Orders of the Angels,’ in Premises and Motifs in Renaissance Thought and Literature (Princeton, N.J., 1982), 30. ‘Quaterniond’ is essentially a consolidation of Patrides’ previous articles: ‘Renaissance Thought on the Celestial Hierarchy: The Decline of a Tradition,’ Journal of the History of Ideas 20 (1959): 155–66; and ‘Renaissance Views on the “Vnconfused Orders Angellick,”’ Journal of the History of Ideas 23 (1962): 265–7. 2 For a more detailed account of the history of Dionysian influence in the Western church, see the Introduction. 3 Izaak Walton, The Lives of John Donne, Sir Henry Wotton, Richard Hooker, George Herbert and Robert Sanderson, introd. George Saintsbury (1927; London, 1962), 224–5; qtd. in W.J. Torrance Kirby, ‘Grace and Hierarchy: Richard Hooker’s Two Platonisms,’ in Richard Hooker and the English Reformation, ed. Kirby, Studies in Early Modern Religious Reforms 2 (Dordrecht, 2003), 25; this essay is reprinted as chap. 3 of Kirby’s Richard Hooker, Reformer and Platonist (Aldershot, 2005). Kirby briefly draws a parallel between Hooker and Spenser’s Fowre Hymnes in ‘Angels Descending and Ascending,’ in Richard Hooker and the English Reformation, 114–15; this essay is reprinted as chap. 7 of Richard Hooker, Reformer and Platonist, where the passage appears on pp. 100–1. 4 Qtd. in J.E. Neale, Elizabeth I and her Parliaments (London, 1957), 2: 199. Relevant accounts of this period are Peter Lake, Anglicans and Puritans? (London, 1988) and Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (Cambridge, 1982); Horton Davies, Worship and Theology in England, vol. 1: From Cranmer to Hooker (Princeton, N.J., 1970), esp. chaps. 2, 5, and 12; Philip B. Secor, Richard Hooker: Prophet of Anglicanism (Toronto, 1999), chap. 14; William P. Haugaard, Introduction to the Preface, The Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker [hereafter FLE] (Binghamton, N.Y., 1977–93), esp. 6: 22–37; Peter Lake with Michael Questier, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat (New Haven, Conn., 2002), 505–55; and W.D. James

180

5 6

7 8

9

10 11

Notes to pages 35–7 Cargill Thompson’s masterful articles, ‘Anthony Marten and the Elizabethan Debate on Episcopacy,’ in Essays in Modern Church History, ed. G.V. Bennett and J.D. Walsh (London, 1966), 44–75, ‘The Philosopher of the “Politic Society”: Richard Hooker as Political Thinker,’ Studies in Richard Hooker: Essays Preliminary to an Edition of His Works [hereafter SRH], ed. W. Speed Hill (Cleveland, Ohio, 1972), 3–76, and ‘Sir Francis Knollys’ Campaign Against the jure divino Theory of Episcopacy,’ in The Dissenting Tradition, ed. C. Robert Cole and Michael E. Moody (Athens, Ohio, 1975), 39–77. See Cargill Thompson, ‘Sir Francis Knollys,’ esp. 45–50. Parenthetical references to FLE are given by volume, page, and line number for primary material, volume and page for introductions and commentary. See Cargill Thompson, ‘Politic Society,’ 13. The term ‘theologia rhetorica,’ ‘which saw the gospel as a persuasive appeal to the heart,’ is developed by Bouwsma from Charles Trinkaus. See William J. Bouwsma, ‘Hooker in the Context of European Cultural History,’ in Richard Hooker and the Construction of Christian Community [hereafter McGrade], ed. Arthur Stephen McGrade (Tempe, Ariz., 1997), 46–7; Brian Vickers, ‘Public and Private Rhetoric in Hooker’s Lawes,’ McGrade, esp. 145; and Debora K. Shuger, Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance: Religion, Politics, and the Dominant Culture (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1990; repr. Toronto, 1997), esp. 41–3 and 90. See also Lee W. Gibbs’s face-en-face comparison of book 6 with Andrewes’s sermon ‘Of the Power of Absolution,’ ‘Richard Hooker and Lancelot Andrewes on Priestly Absolution,’ McGrade, esp. 265–73. See also 1: 15.13–19 for Hooker’s disparagement of ‘the Cause,’ and 1: 18.32–19.22, where Hooker underscores the irrationality of the disciplinarian cause by describing its appeal to ‘them whose judgements are commonlie weakest by reason of their sex.’ Cargill Thompson, ‘Politic Society,’ 15; see FLE, 1: 43.24–6. See John Whitgift, The Works of John Whitgift, ed. John Ayre (Cambridge, 1851), 2: 2: ‘we must, I think, have no more to do with this argument: “The pope invented them; ergo they are not to be used”; but this must be the question, “whether they have any use or profit in those things or ends wherein or whereunto they are now used”’; and Starkey, A Dialogue Between Pole and Lupset, ed. T.F. Mayer, Camden Fourth Series 37 (London, 1989), 82–94. On Hooker’s relationship to Whitgift and other Elizabethan conformists, see Cargill Thompson, ‘Politic Society,’ 5, 13–22, and 53.

Notes to pages 37–8

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12 See More, Complete Works, 8: 332.35–333.12. Cf. FLE, 1: 123.3–15, 1: 285.21–5 and 1: 339.18–340.8. See also Neelands, ‘Hooker on Scripture, Reason, and “Tradition,”’ in McGrade, 87 and 89–92; Egil Grislis, ‘The Assurance of Faith According to Richard Hooker,’ in McGrade, 249; and Nigel Atkinson, Richard Hooker and the Authority of Scripture, Tradition and Reason (Carlisle, 1997), 46–60. For the same position in Saravia, see Wilhelm Nijenhuis, Adrianus Saravia (c. 1532–1613): Dutch Calvinist, First Reformed Defender of the English Episcopal Church Order on the Basis of the Jus devinum, Studies in the History of Christian Thought 21 (Leiden, 1980), 174–5. 13 Shuger, Habits of Thought, 44; see FLE, 2: 3.28–4.1, and 46.7–48.9. 14 See FLE, 1: 84.25–85.4. See ST, trans. Kenelm Foster (Cambridge, 1968), 9: 33 [1.51.1]; and Étienne Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas [Le Thomisme], trans. L.K. Shook (New York, 1988), 16–62. Thomas’s influence on Hooker is most discussed with reference to notions of nature and law: see Gibbs, FLE, 6: 97; Neelands, 78–80 and 85; Arthur P. Monahan, ‘Richard Hooker: Counter-Reformation Political Thinker,’ McGrade, 208–09; and Cargill Thompson, ‘Politic Society,’ 11, 21–2, 51. The classic studies of this aspect of Hooker’s thought are A.P. d’Entrèves, The Medieval Contribution to Political Thought, 117–42; and Peter Munz, The Place of Hooker in the History of Thought (London, 1952), esp. 49–67 and 175–93. W.J. Torrance Kirby has shown the indebtedness of Hooker’s notion of natural law to such reformers as Martin Luther, Heinrich Bullinger, and John Calvin in The Theology of Richard Hooker in the Context of the Magisterial Reformation, Studies in Reformed Theology and History n.s. 5 (Princeton, N.J., 2000), esp. 5–22. 15 See also 1: 114.19–25; and Kirby, Theology of Richard Hooker, 39. 16 See Neelands, 84; for the opposite view, see Bouwsma, 50. 17 See FLE, 1:113.9–10 and 18–20. Tauler defines the term gemuete as follows: ‘In this gemuete one should renew himself by constantly drawing himself back into the ground, and turning with an active love and disposition directly to God without any mediation. The gemuete certainly has the power to do this,’ qtd. in Stephen E. Ozment, Homo Spiritualis: A Comparative Study of the Anthropology of Johannes Tauler, Jean Gerson and Martin Luther (1509–16) in the Context of Their Theological Thought, Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought 6 (Leiden, 1969), 24. 18 Whitgift, 2: 3. In ‘Sir Francis Knollys,’ Cargill Thompson notes Whitgift’s fleeting mention of the superiority of bishops as ‘God’s institution’ (Whitgift, Works, 2: 378), but argues that ‘in general Whitgift based his main arguments against the presbyterians on the claim that no set form of church government was prescribed in scripture’ (44).

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Notes to pages 38–44

19 On this transition over Elizabeth’s reign, see Cargill Thompson, ‘Anthony Marten,’ 46–60. 20 Lake, Anglicans and Puritans? 165. 21 Pseudo-Dionysius, Complete Works, 204. 22 Calvin, Institutes, 2: 1296 [4.14.20]. 23 See Martin Luther, The Babylonian Captivity, LW, 36: 119: ‘if this sacrament and this fiction ever fall to the ground, the papacy and its “characters” will scarcely survive. Then our joyous liberty will be restored to us; we shall realize that we are equal by every right.’ 24 See W. Speed Hill, ‘The Evolution of Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity,’ SRH, 120–2 and 125–7; and Secor, 201–2. 25 On Hooker’s elevation of ordination to ‘near sacrament,’ see Robert F. Faulkner, Richard Hooker and the Politics of Christian England (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1981), 35, 122, and 134. 26 Pseudo-Dionysius, Complete Works, 236. 27 W.J. Torrance Kirby, Richard Hooker, Reformer and Platonist, 31. 28 See Secor, 294: ‘Saravia may have helped him refine Book VII so that it became the most polished of the final three.’ 29 Nijenhuis, 237 and 238; see also 224–6 and 237–9. 30 Lake, Anglicans and Puritans? 221. 31 See Whitgift, 1: 414 and 2: 182–3. 32 For Thomas’s definitions of angelic immateriality, see ST, 9: 15–23 [1.50.1–4]; for his arguments on angelic fixation in beatitude, see ST, 9: 233 [1.62.5]. 33 Kirby, Theology of Richard Hooker, 35. 34 For evidence of the apostles connecting spiritual society to the angels, Hooker cites 1 Peter 1.12, Ephesians 3.10, and 1 Timothy 5.21; on the comeliness of church worship with reference to the angels, he cites Paul’s description of the covering of women’s heads in 1 Corinthians 11.10. 35 Kirby, Reformer and Platonist, 101. 36 Pseudo-Dionysius, Complete Works, 147. 37 See FLE, 3: 147.16–23 [7.1.4]. 38 Kirby, Reformer and Platonist, 36; Wayne J. Hankey, ‘Augustinian Immediacy and Dionysian Mediation in John Colet, Edmund Spenser, Richard Hooker and the Cardinal de Bérulle,’ in Augustinus in der Neuzeit: Colloque de la Herzog August Bibliothek de Wolfenbøut, 14–17 octobre 1996 (Paris, 1998), 149–50. 39 See Cargill Thompson, ‘Politic Society,’ 54–5. Lake tends to deal with the church only as ‘politic society,’ 217–18, as does d’Entrèves, 137–8. 40 Whitgift, 3: 313, see also 1: 382–4; and W. David Neelands, ‘Richard

Notes to pages 44–6

41 42

43

44 45

46 47 48 49 50

51

52

183

Hooker on the Identity of the Visible and Invisible Church,’ in Richard Hooker and the English Reformation, esp. 99 and 110. Shuger, ‘Societie Supernaturall,’ 318 and 319. See Jefferson B. Fletcher, ‘A Study in Renaissance Mysticism: Spenser’s Fowre Hymnes,’ PMLA 26 (1911): esp. 467–75; Josephine W. Bennett, ‘The Theme of Spenser’s Fowre Hymnes,’ Studies in Philology 28 (1931): 18–19 and 47; Sears Jayne, ‘Ficino and the Platonism of the English Renaissance,’ Comparative Literature 4 (1952): esp. 217; and Jonathan Quitslund, ‘Spenser’s Image of Sapience,’ Studies in the Renaissance 16 (1969): 206–9. Quitslund also discusses Ebreo with reference to the Garden of Adonis in Spenser’s Supreme Fiction: Platonic Natural Philosophy and the ‘Faerie Queene’ (Toronto, 2001), esp. 237. Mary I. Oates, ‘Fowre Hymnes: Spenser’s Retractions of Paradise,’ Spenser Studies 4 (1983): 146. Fletcher also describes the sequence as scala, ‘Study in Renaissance Mysticism,’ 462. Robert Ellrodt, Neoplatonism in the Poetry of Spenser (1960; repr. Folcroft, Penn., 1975), 117. F.M. Padelford, ‘Spenser’s Defence of Poetry: Some Structural Aspects of the Fowre Hymnes,’ in Fair Forms: Essays in English Literature from Spenser to Jane Austen, ed. Maren-Sofie Røstvig (Cambridge, 1975), 14. See William C. Johnson, ‘Spenser’s “Greener” Hymnes and Amoretti: “Retraction” and “Reform,”’ English Studies 73 (1992): 434. Enid Welsford, Spenser: Fowre Hymnes and Epithalamion (Oxford, 1967), 48. See Terry Comito, ‘A Dialectic of Images in Spenser’s Fowre Hymnes,’ Studies in Philology 74 (1977): 301–21. F.M. Padelford, ‘Spenser’s Fowre Hymnes: A Resurvey,’ Studies in Philology 29 (1932): 207. Welsford, Fowre Hymnes and Epithalamion, 57. Ibid., 58. This comment is made only of the Hymne of Heavenly Beautie, but I believe it has implications for the overriding organization of the Fowre Hymnes. I use here the categories of audience proposed by Richard Helgerson in Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago, 1992), 14–15. See also Jon A. Quitslund, ‘Spenser and the Patronesses of the Fowre Hymnes: “Ornaments of All True Love and Beautie,”’ in Silent But for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works, ed. Margaret P. Hannay (Kent, Ohio, 1985), 192. Dedication to Ladies Cumberland and Warwick, 690. All references to the Fowre Hymnes are to The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, 681–752.

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Notes to pages 46–50

53 See Welsford, Fowre Hymnes and Epithalamion, 37; Johnson, ‘Spenser’s “Greener” Hymnes,’ 431; and Patrick Cheney, Spenser’s Famous Flight: A Renaissance Idea of a Literary Career (Toronto, 1993), 196–7. 54 For a recent discussion of Spenser’s employment of Platonic reincarnation, see Carol A. Kaske, ‘Neoplatonism in Spenser Once More,’ Religion & Literature 32.2 (Summer 2000): esp. 160–2. 55 On the direct parallels between the development of Cupid in Love and the Son in Heavenly Love, see Einar Bjorvand, ‘Spenser’s Defence of Poetry: Some Structural Aspects of the Fowre Hymnes,’ in Fair Forms: Essays in English Literature from Spenser to Jane Austen, ed. Maren-Sofie Røstvig (Cambridge, 1975), esp. 17–19. 56 C.S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (Oxford, 1954), 376. See also Quitslund, ‘Sapience,’ 189. Some have read Heavenly Love as predominantly mystical: see Padelford, ‘Resurvey,’ 218; and A. Leigh DeNeef, ‘Spenserian Meditation: The Hymne of Heavenly Beautie,’ American Benedictine Review 25 (1974): 320. 57 Bjorvand, ‘Spenser’s Defence,’ 34–5; see also 38. For a more detailed account of ‘Bonaventuran Method’ in this hymn, see DeNeef, ‘Spenserian Meditation,’ esp. 322–34. 58 Welsford, Fowre Hymnes and Epithalamion, 42. 59 Proclus, Proclus’ Commentary on Plato’s ‘Parmenides,’ trans. Glenn R. Morrow and John M. Dillon (Princeton, N.J., 1987), 589 [50–1k]; The Platonic Theology, trans. Thomas Taylor, Great Works of Philosophy (Kew Gardens, N.Y., 1985), 1: 179 [3.13]. 60 Quitslund, ‘Spenser’s Image of Sapience,’ 186 and 200; see also Jayne, ‘Ficino and the Platonism,’ 217. 61 Fletcher argues for Mary and the Holy Ghost, in ‘Study in Renaissance Mysticism,’ 458 and 460; Linda R. Galyon argues for Divine Motherhood in ‘Sapience in Spenser’s “Hymne of Heavenly Bevtie,”’ FourteenthCentury English Mystics Newsletter 3.3 (September 1977): 9–12; Charles C. Osgood argues for the Book of Wisdom in ‘Spenser’s Sapience,’ Studies in Philology 14 (1917): 169, and for Prudentius in The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition, ed. E. Greenlaw et al. (Baltimore, 1943), 7: 561. For a summary of these positions see Ellrodt, Neoplatonism, 164–5; see also E. Ruth Harvey’s entry on Sapience in The Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. A.C. Hamilton (Toronto, 1990). 62 Denis Saurat, ‘La “Sapience” de Spenser et la “Schekina” de la Cabale,’ Revue de littérature comparée 6 (1926): 6, 9. 63 Bjorvand, 45; see Ellrodt, 117 and 164–70. Osgood also draws parallels to the Son in ‘Spenser’s Sapience’ 174. Quitslund argues against this in ‘Sapience,’ esp. 198.

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64 Ellrodt, Neoplatonism, 155. 65 On Sapience and the Father as ‘lovers,’ see Quitslund, ‘Sapience,’ 206. 66 See Martin Brecht, Martin Luther, trans. James L. Schaaf, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1985), 1: 96, 137; Heinrich Boehmer, Luther and the Reformation in Light of Modern Research, trans. E.S.G. Potter (London, 1930), 67; Boehmer, Road to Reformation, trans. John W. Doberstein and Theodore G. Tappert (Philadelphia, 1946), 92, 148–9; George Yule, ‘Medieval Piety, Humanism and the Theology of Luther,’ Religion and Humanism, Studies in Church History 17, esp. 175–8; Stephen E. Ozment, Homo spiritualis: A Comparative Study of the Anthropology of Johannes Tauler, Jean Gerson, and Martin Luther (1509–16) in the Context of Their Theological Thought, Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought 6 (Leiden, 1969), 117, and 214–15; and Heiko A. Oberman, ‘Simul gemitus et raptus: Luther and Mysticism,’ The Reformation in Medieval Perspective, ed. Stephen E. Ozment (Chicago, 1971), 220. 67 John N. Wall, Transformations of the Word: Spenser, Herbert, Vaughan (Athens, Ga., 1988), 120; see also Wall’s entry on the Church of England in The Spenser Encyclopedia. 68 Saint Bonaventure, Bonaventure: The Soul’s Journey into God, The Tree of Life, The Life of St Francis, ed. Ewert Cousins (New York, 1978), 55. 69 See Padelford, ‘Resurvey,’ 223; the Yale Editors’ notes to Heavenly Love, 64, and Heavenly Beautie, 85–98; and Comito, ‘A Dialectic of Images,’ 320. 70 Proclus, On ‘Parmenides,’ 588–9 [48–51k]. 71 Bennett, ‘Theme of Spenser’s Fowre Hymnes,’ 41. 72 Quitslund also applies this term, but only to the earthly hymns in ‘Spenser and the Patronesses,’ 200. 73 Stanley E. Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of SeventeenthCentury Literature (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1972), 42. 74 See Padelford, ‘Resurvey,’ 209; and Bennett, 23–4. For a summary of the scala according to Castiglione, see Ellrodt, Neoplatonism, 29–30; according to Benivieni, see Fletcher, ‘Study in Renaissance Mysticism,’ 470–3. 75 On the shift of focus away from the speaker’s subjectivity in Heavenly Love, see Comito, ‘A Dialectic of Images,’ 305–6; and Welsford, Fowre Hymnes and Epithalamion, 51, 61–2. 76 Quitslund, Supreme Fiction, 92. 77 For the opposite view of Spenser’s departure from Dionysian order, see Hankey, ‘Augustinian Immediacy,’ 148. 78 Johnson, ‘Spenser’s “Greener” Hymnes,’ 437–8; author’s italics. For the opposite view, see Welsford, Fowre Hymnes and Epithalamion, 56. 79 I follow here Wall’s interpretation of Faerie Queene, I.x in Transformations of the Word, 83–127.

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Notes to pages 53–9

80 On this image, see Cheney, 219. 81 Anne Lake Prescott, ‘Complicating the Allegory: Spenser and Religion in Recent Scholarship,’ Renaissance and Reformation n.s. 25.4 (Fall 2001): 14; on Spenser’s concern with Christian community and commonwealth, see Wall, 83–4. 82 Patrides, Premises and Motifs, xi. 3 Donne’s Ideated Angels 1 All references to Donne’s poetry are to The Complete English Poems, ed. C. A. Patrides (London, 1985). 2 See Epithalamion Made at Lincolnes Inne, 15–16; Elegy XX, 10–12; Satire V, 58–59; Elegy XI passim; Edmund Gosse, The Life and Letters of John Donne (1899; Gloucester, Mass., 1959), 1: 77. The verve of Gosse’s work notwithstanding, the most authoritative biography is R.C. Bald’s John Donne: A Life (Oxford, 1970). 3 For Coleridge, see John Donne: The Critical Heritage, ed. A.J. Smith (London, 1975), 270; Helen Gardner, The Business of Criticism (Oxford, 1959), 62, 63, 68–9. A broad range of current responses are collected in the indispensable Interpreting ‘Aire and Angels,’ ed. Achsah Guibbory, John Donne Journal 9 (1990): 1–112. 4 See Peter De Sa Wiggins, ‘Aire and Angels: Incarnations of Love,’ ELR: English Literary Renaissance 12 (1982): 87–101; and R.V. Young, ‘Angels in Aire and Angels,’ Interpreting ‘Aire and Angels,’ 6. 5 Marsilio Ficino, Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love, 2nd ed., trans. Sears Jayne (Dallas, 1985), 41. 6 Janel Mueller, ‘The Play of Difference in Donne’s Aire and Angels,’ in Interpreting ‘Aire and Angels,’ 89. 7 Albert C. Labriola, ‘“This Dialogue of One”: Rational Argument and Affective Discourse in Donne’s Aire and Angels,’ in Interpreting ‘Aire and Angels,’ 80–1. 8 Ficino, Commentary, 49. 9 Mueller, ‘The Play of Difference,’ in Interpreting ‘Aire and Angels,’ 85. 10 This was first noted by Murray Prosky in ‘Donne’s Aire and Angels,’ Explicator 27 (1968): item 27. 11 Sir John Harington, trans., Ludovico Ariosto’s ‘Orlando Furioso,’ ed. Robert McNulty (1591; Oxford, 1972). 12 For a list and discussion of the place of Aire and Angels relative to other poems in manuscript and early editions, see John T. Shawcross, ‘Donne’s Aire and Angels: Text and Context,’ in Interpreting ‘Aire and Angels,’ 33–41.

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13 Application of the phrase ‘blandly insolent’ to these lines is F.R. Leavis’s, in Revaluation: Tradition and Development in English Poetry (London, 1936), 12. 14 R.V. Young, ‘Angels in Aire and Angels,’ in Interpreting ‘Aire and Angels,’ 11. 15 Thomas Aquinas, ST, 9: 37 [1a.51.2]. 16 Pheobe S. Spinrad, ‘Aire and Angels and Questionable Shapes,’ in Interpreting ‘Aire and Angels,’ 20. 17 Pseudo-Dionysius, The Complete Works, 183–4. 18 John Salkeld, A Treatise of Angels (STC 21621; London, 1613), 63–5, 110– 11. 19 See Augustine, De vera religione, Corpus christianorum, series latina 32 (Turnholt, 1962), 28 [Migne, 134]; Phoebe S. Spinrad, ‘Aire and Angels and Questionable Shapes,’ in Interpreting ‘Aire and Angels,’ 19. 20 See James VI and I, Daemonologie, in Minor Prose Works, ed. James Craigie (Edinburgh, 1982), 46. 21 R.V. Young, ‘Angels in Aire and Angels,’ in Interpreting ‘Aire and Angels,’ 8. 22 See Donne’s statement that Dionysius’s nine orders precede Gregory I in The Sermons of John Donne, ed. Evelyn M. Simpson and George R. Potter, 10 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1953–62), 8: 3.390–2; further reference to this edition are indicated in parentheses by Sermons. References to Donne’s Prebend Sermons are to John Donne, Donne’s Prebend Sermons, ed. Janel M. Mueller (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), indicated in parentheses by the abbreviation DPS. 23 C.S. Lewis, ‘Dante’s Similes,’ Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature, ed. Walter Hooper (1966; Cambridge, 1998), 72; for more current expression of this view, see Annabel Patterson, ‘All Donne,’ in Soliciting Interpretation: Literary Theory and Seventeenth-Century English Poetry, ed. Elizabeth D. Harvey and Katherine Eisamann Maus (Chicago, 1990), 42. 24 David Norbrook, ‘The Monarchy of Wit and the Republic of Letters: Donne’s Politics,’ in Soliciting Interpretation, 10. For the application of ‘ideated’ to Plato and More, see Donne, Biathanatos, ed. Ernest W. Sullivan II (Newark, N.J., 1984), 62; and Pseudo-Martyr, ed. Anthony Raspa (Montreal and Kingston, 1993), 30.27; further references to these editions are indicated in parentheses by the abbreviations B and Ps-M, respectively. 25 Essayes in Divinity, ed. Evelyn M. Simpson (1952; Oxford, 1967), 37. 26 Ben Jonson, ‘Ben Jonson’s Conversations with William Drummond of Hawthornden,’ in Ben Jonson, ed. C.H. Herford and Percy Simpson, (Oxford, 1925), 1: 133.43–8.

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27 See Barbara Lewalski, Donne’s Anniversaries and the Poetry of Praise: The Creation of a Symbolic Mode (Princeton, N.J., 1973); Raymond-Jean Frontain, ‘Donne’s Protestant Paradiso: The Johannine Vision of the Second Anniversary,’ in John Donne and the Protestant Reformation, ed. Mary A. Papazian (Detroit, 2003), esp. 123; and Gary Kuchar, Divine Subjection: The Rhetoric of Sacramental Devotion in Early Modern England (Pittsburgh, 2005), 6–19. See also Louis L. Martz’s discussion of meditations on the Virgin as Ideal Woman in The Poetry of Meditation, rev. ed. (New Haven, 1962), 223–48. 28 Gosse, 1: 222. 29 Gosse, 1: 223, 221–2. 30 Preface, par. 18 (italics original); see also pp. 135–9. 31 Cf. Donne, Biathanatos, 52 on Spanish Indies, 62–3 on More and Plato, 72–4 on ecclesiastical and civil law, and 86 on Aristotle. 32 See Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640, Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History (Cambridge, 1995), 140–2. 33 See Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake, ‘The Ecclesiastical Policy of King James I,’ Journal of British Studies 24 (1985): 171 et passim. 34 James VI and I, Triplici nodo, triplex cuneus, in The Workes (1616), Anglistica and Americana 85 (New York, 1971), 249. 35 Ibid., 255. On the religious culture surrounding James and his affection for divine right, see Johann P. Sommerville, ‘James I and the Divine Right of Kings: English Politics and Continental Theory,’ in The Mental World of the Jacobean Court, ed. Linda Levy Peck (Cambridge, 1991), esp. 59–61; and James Doelman, King James I and the Religious Culture of England, Studies in Renaissance Literature 4 (Cambridge, 2000), 20–38 et passim. 36 See also Ps-M, 173–4, 190–1. 37 Andrew Willet, Synopsis papismi, that is, A General View of Papistrie (STC 25700a.3; London, 1634), 272–4, 277, 279; this tract was first published in 1592 and reprinted in 1594, 1600, 1613, and 1634. 38 See Fincham and Lake, 173–4. 39 On Whitgift and Saravia, see pp. 38, 40–2, above. 40 John Donne, Donne’s Prebend Sermons, ed. Janel M. Mueller (Cambridge, Mass., 1971), 2.367–83. As indicated in n. 22, above, further references to Donne’s Prebend sermons are to this edition, indicated in parentheses by the abbreviation DPS; references to all other sermons are to the tenvolume Sermons of John Donne, ed. George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1953–62), indicated in parentheses by Sermons.

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41 John Chrysostom, Homilias de incomprensibili contra Anomeos, in Opera omnia quae exstanti, vol. 1, ed. D. Bernard de Montfaucon (Paris, 1839), 465c (my trans.). 42 Chrysostom, 469d (my trans.). 43 On Jacob’s ladder, see John Calvin, Calvin: Commentaries, trans. Joseph Haroutunian, Library of Christian Classics 23 (London, 1958), 147; on Abraham, Jacob, and Moses, see Institutes, 1: 145 [1.14.5]. 44 Institutes, 1: 148–9 [1.14.10–11]. 45 Salkeld, A Treatise of Angels, 219. 46 I follow here Potter and Simpson’s tentative dating of this sermon. 47 For Reformed views on these biblical passages, see Alexandra Walsham, ‘Angels and Idols,’ in Marshall and Walsham, 137–8, though Walsham also points out that the 787 Council of Nicea ‘established the crucial distinction between the latria due to the Lord and the dulia owed to the lesser members of the celestial hierarchy’ (139). 48 Daniel W. Doerksen, ‘Polemist or Pastor? Donne and Moderate Calvinist Conformity,’ in John Donne and the Protestant Reformation, esp. 15, 17, and 23. See also Doerksen’s ‘Discerning God’s Voice, God’s Hand: Scripturalist Moderation in Donne’s Devotions,’ in Centered on the Word: Literature, Scripture, and the Tudor-Stuart Middle Way, ed. Doerksen and Christopher Hodgkins (Newark, N.J., 2004), 164–6; and his Conforming to the Word: Herbert, Donne, and the English Church before Laud (Lewisburg, 1997), 20–3, 30–1, and 108–9. Jeanne Shami similarly finds in Donne’s sermons ‘a program of reinterpreting Calvin to support his own generous interpretations of the Thirty-Nine Articles’; see her John Donne and Conformity in Crisis in the Late Jacobean Pulpit, Studies in Renaissance Literature 13 (Cambridge, 2003), 279; see also Jeffrey Johnson, The Theology of John Donne, Studies in Renaissance Literature 1 (Cambridge, 1999), 13–14. 49 Institutes, 1: 150 [1.14.12]. 50 On the nature of Donne’s satire in light of classical poets and Elizabethan contemporaries, see Lawrence Manley, Literature and Culture in Early Modern London (Cambridge, 1995), esp. 384 and 396–402. 51 Thomas Aquinas, ST, 46: 39 [II.II., 180, 6]. Donne also evokes this tradition in his Obsequies to the Lord Harrington, which describes the rapidity of angelic thought (81–100). Even here, however, the angels are described as ‘amassing several formes of things’ and are likened to the ‘perfect reader [who] doth not dwell, / On every syllable’ and yet will ‘distinctly see / And lay together every A and B’ (89, 93–6); this presents their knowledge as especially acute empiricism, rather than as intellection.

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52 Bonaventure, Hexaëmeron, in Works, 5: 341 [22.2]; translator’s square brackets. 53 See Bonaventure, Hexaëmeron, in Works, 5: 342–5 [22.3–10]. 54 Gosse, Life and Letters, 1: 196. 55 Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Qveene, ed. A.C. Hamilton (Harlow, U.K., 2001), I.xii.55. 56 In his Poetry of Meditation, Martz also concludes that while the Progresse ‘uses both mystical structure and mystical imagery ... this does not mean that Donne’s Progresse is, properly speaking, a mystical poem’ (248). 57 It seems that Donne allows himself more fully to explore contemplative flight only in a poem of more secularist caste, such as the verse letter To the Countesse of Huntingdon. Here he describes a Neoplatonic ascent predicated upon the purity of the contemplative soul: the soul must strip itself of bodily impurity before it is worthy of loving the countess, who figures as a One from whom all proceeds and returns: ‘But soule we finde too earthly to ascend, /’Till slow accesse hath made it wholly pure, / Able immortall clearnesse to endure’ (104–6). This approach to the countess recalls the stripping of the body in the soul’s ascent described by Plotinus: ‘those who go up to the higher world ... strip off what we put on in our descent; ... until, passing in the ascent all that is alien to God, one sees with one’s self alone That alone, simple, single and pure, from which all depends and to which all look and are and live and think’ (Enneads, Loeb Classical Library, 1: 253 [1.6.7]). As the Cambridge Platonist Henry More would describe it, this stripping of the body is necessary because ‘sense cannot arrive at th’inwardnesse / Of things, nor penetrate the crusty fence / Of constipated matter’; the ‘Souls excellence’ resides in its ability to turn from ‘shadows sensible’ to ‘higher pitch’; Philosophical Poems (Wing M2670; Cambridge, 1647), 1.28 and 1.12. 58 R.V. Young, Doctrine and Devotion in Seventeenth-Century Poetry, Studies in Renaissance Literature 2 (Cambridge, 2000), 185, 6, and 11–12. In Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton, N.J., 1979), Lewalski describes the two elements that ‘especially characterize Protestant meditation’ as ‘a focus upon the Bible, the Word, as guiding the interpretation of the subject and providing meditative models; and a particular kind of application to the self, analogous to the “application” so prominent in Protestant sermons of the period’ (148). 59 Essayes in Divinity, 81. 60 Peter Lake, ‘Calvinism and the English Church, 1570–1635,’ Past and Present 114 (1987): 48; on Andrewes and Overall, see Dewey D. Wallace,

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62

63

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Jr, Puritans and Predestination: Grace in English Protestant Theology, 1525–1695, Studies in Religion (Chapel Hill, 1982), 76. See Paradise Lost, 3.183–202, where the Father defines the reprobate as deaf to the call of grace; and De doctrina Christiana, in Complete Prose, 6: 186. One of the poets central to Martz’s claims is thus William Alabaster; see The Sonnets of William Alabaster, ed. G.M. Story and Helen Gardner (Oxford, 1959). Robert Whalen, The Poetry of Immanence: Sacrament in Donne and Herbert (Toronto, 2002), 61; see also the works by Doerksen and Shami cited in n. 48 of this chapter. Young, Doctrine and Devotion, 202.

4 Angelic Hierarchy in Milton and His Contemporaries 1 On the rise of Laud and the outbreak of civil war, see Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism c. 1590–1640 (1987; Oxford, 1990), esp. 181–244; and Aspects of English Protestantism c. 1530–1700 (Manchester, 2001), esp. 160–75 and 203–21. The classic historical studies of the revolutionary period are David Underdown, Pride’s Purge: Politics in the Puritan Revolution (Oxford, 1971); and Austin Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate (Oxford, 1982). 2 Joseph Hall, Episcopacie by Divine Right (STC 12661; London, 1640), 1.30. 3 See Hall, Episcopacie, 2.26–34. 4 Joseph Hall, An Humble Remonstrance to the High Covrt of Parliament (Wing H386B; London, 1640), 19–29; see also his Defence of the Humble Remonstrance (Wing H378; London, 1641), 36. 5 Hall, Episcopacie, 2.95. 6 For this comment on Calvin, see Hall, Episcopacie, 1.31. 7 Hall, Episcopacie, 2.90. 8 Hall, The Invisible World Discovered to Spirituall Eyes (1651; 3rd printing, Wing H387; London, 1659), 43 and 45–8. 9 Colossians 1.16 provides ‘thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers’ and Ephesians 1.21 ‘principality, and power, and might, and dominion.’ 10 Hall, Invisible World, 16, see also 17–18. 11 Thomas Heywood, The Hierarchie of the Blessed Angels (1634; facs. repr. New York, 1973), 78, 97, and 300.

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12 John Everard, Some Gospel Treasures Opened (Wing E3533; London, 1653); the title page promises ‘the Mystical Divinity of Dionysius the Areopagite, spoken of Acts 17.34 with Collections out of other Divine Authors, translated by Dr Everard, never before printed in English.’ 13 Ibid., sig.A5r. 14 See Smith, Perfection Proclaimed, 115; see also 39, 126–8, and 141. 15 Ibid., 17. 16 Hall, Invisible World, 21–2, 38–9; on Montagu, see Peter Marshall, ‘Angels around the Deathbed,’ in Marshall and Walsham, 97; on the Reformed view that angels especially guard the elect, see ‘Migration of Angels,’ in Marshall and Walsham, 15, 16, and 20. 17 The three tracts are identical, including the common running title, ‘Of our Communion And Warre with Angells,’ and the list of errata, suggesting a single print run. Parenthetical page references to Our Communion and Warre are equally applicable to the other two titles under which the tract is released. This recourse was also taken in Lawrence’s tracts on baptism: his Some Considerations (1649) is released under the title A Plea for the Vse of Gospell Ordinances (1651), the latter of which advertises itself as a response to William Dell. 18 For Lawrence’s further references to Hebrews 1.14, see Militia Spiritualis, 18, 24, and 81. See also p. 20: ‘every elect hath his proper and peculiar Angell deputed as his keeper and companion.’ Lawrence further discusses the tradition surrounding guardian angels on pp. 20–1. 19 John Deacon and John Walker, Dialogicall Discourses (STC 6439; London, 1601), 58; Peter Marshall and Alexandra Walsham, ‘Migrations of Angels,’ in Marshall and Walsham, 15–16; and Alexandra Walsham, ‘Angels and Idols in England’s Long Reformation,’ in Marshall and Walsham, 136. 20 Robert Dingley, The Deputation of Angels, or, The Angell-Guardian (Wing D1496; London, 1654 [Thomason date November 7, 1653]), 33; Dingley cites Lawrence on p. 17. 21 See Thomas Aquinas, ST, 9: 33 [1.51.1]; see also Dingley, The Deputation, 16–17. 22 See ‘Twelfth Ecumenical Council: Lateran IV, 1215,’ in Disciplinary Decrees of the General Councils: Text, Translation, and Commentary, ed. H.J. Schroeder (St Louis, 1937), Canon 1; this text is available in the Internet Medieval Sourcebook, ed. Paul Halsall, Fordham University (1996; http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/lateran4.html); Martin Luther, LW, 1: 86, 112. 23 Thomas Aquinas, ST, 9: 163; cf. Augustine of Hippo, De Genesi ad litteram [The Literal Meaning of Genesis], trans. John Hammond Taylor, SJ (New

Notes to pages 94–5

24 25 26

27 28

29 30 31

32 33

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York, 1982), 1: 129–38 [4.22–31]; and De civitate Dei [The City of God], 11.7: ‘The word “light” here means the Holy City which consists of the holy angels and the blessed spirits.’ Augustine is responding to such allegorical readings of the first day’s light as those of Philo and Origen, who saw it as representative of the spiritual illumination with which God impregns the universe. ST, 9: 163, 165, 251. Augustine, De Genesi, 1: 132, and De civitate Dei, 11.7. Luther, LW, 1: 112; for a fuller discussion of the Lectures on Genesis, and of Luther’s angelology more broadly, see Philip M. Soergel, ‘Luther on the Angels,’ in Marshall and Walsham, esp. 77–8. My italics; John Calvin, Commentarius in Genesin, trans. Thomas Tymme (STC 4393; London, 1620), 29. See Lawrence, Militia Spiritualis, 7: ‘Moses doth not particularly describe their creation, accommodating himselfe to the rudenesse, and ignorance of that time, in which he writ, and therefore particularizes onely in visible things ... If you aske what day they were created? in all likelyhood the first day with the supreame heaven, in respect to the similitude of their nature’; and Alexander Ross, An Exposition of the Fourteene First Chapters of Genesis (STC 21324; London, 1626), 4; John White, A Commentary upon the Three First Chapters of the First Book of Moses Called Genesis (Wing W1775; London, 1656), 5 and 22; Henry More, Conjectura Cabbalistica (Wing M2647; London, 1653), 197; and Abraham Wright, A Practical Commentary or Exposition upon the Pentateuch (Wing W3688; London, 1662). Deacon and Walker, Dialogicall Discourses, 22. Heywood, Hierarchie, 334. See Johannes Wollebius, Compendium Theologiae Christianae, in Reformed Dogmatics, ed. John W. Beardslee III, Library of Protestant Thought (Oxford, 1965), 54–5 [1.5.1]; and Sir Henry Vane, The Retired Mans Meditations, or the Mysterie and Power of Godliness (Wing V75; London, 1655), 42. Further references to Vane’s Meditations are in parentheses; because this is Vane’s most lengthy and developed religious work – and because his later tracts tend to recapitulate it – primary reference will be made to this work with supporting references to later tracts provided in notes. Heywood, Hierarchie, 334. See also Beelzebub’s address to the assembled angels: ‘the most High commanding, now ere Night / Now ere dim Night had disencumber’d Heav’n’ (my italics; 5.698–9), and the reference to the fallen angels retreating into Heaven’s first darkness – as opposed to its previous twi-

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39 40

41

42

Notes to pages 95–9 light – after the first day of battle: ‘Satan with his rebellious disappear’d, / Far in the dark dislodg’d, and void of rest’ (6.414–15). Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram, 1: 132. See also pp. 43, 45. See also p. 169. A timeline of these events is illumined by Gordon Campbell, A Milton Chronology (New York, 1997). Qtd. in James K. Hosmer, The Life of Young Sir Henry Vane (Boston, 1889), 409. Hosmer also cites the account of Leicester, who seems to have editorialized the episode to a much greater extent than Ludlow did: ‘[Cromwell’s] exclamation to Vane stands in Leicester’s Journal altogether different from Ludlow’s report. “At the going out the General said to young Sir Henry Vane, calling him by his name, that he might have prevented this extraordinary course, but he was a Juggler, and has not so much as common honesty”’ (411). For recent biography, see Violet A. Rowe, Sir Henry Vane the Younger: A Study in Political and Administrative History (London, 1970); and the more popular J.H. Adamson and H.F. Folland, Sir Henry Vane: His Life and Times (Boston, 1973). Sir Henry Vane, A Healing Question propounded (Wing V68; London, 1656), 2. Further references to this text are in parentheses. Hosmer claims that Vane ‘became in his political ideas thoroughly American, living and dying in the premature effort to bring about in England government of the People, by the People, and for the People’ (ix), describes the years 1648–53 as ‘American England’ (xxv), states that ‘only after a hundred years and under American conditions could [Vane’s] ideas become practical’ (415), and deals at length with Vane’s efforts in establishing a ‘Written Constitution’ (433–47; Hosmer’s capitalization). It is in this spirit that Hosmer dismisses Vane’s spiritualist discourse and develops a portrait of a split personality: ‘Few men of the English race have possessed to any greater degree the faculty of plain speech, or greater power in practical life. With it all, however, he was, after a strange fashion, a dreamer, devoted, when he could find leisure for it, to rhapsody and abstruse discussion, unintelligible to men of his time, and the despair of those of the present day who seek to follow him’ (49). Hosmer, 433 and 499. See also J. Max Patrick, ‘The Idea of Liberty in the Theological Writings of Sir Henry Vane the Younger,’ in The Dissenting Tradition: Essays for Leland H. Carlson, ed. C. Robert Cole and Michael E. Moody (Athens, Ohio, 1975), 101. George Sikes, The Life and Death of Sir Henry Vane Kt (Wing S3780; [London,] 1662), 3. Further references to this work are in parentheses.

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43 See David Parnham, Sir Henry Vane, Theologian (London, 1997), 43–50. 44 Margaret Vane’s manuscript volume of some of her father’s sermons and writings, ‘began July 1677,’ is available as Forster 606 in the National Art Library (Pressmark 48 D. 41), and begins with ‘the last sermon My Dearest Father preached at his own house (on the Sabbath Day) Just before he was sent to the Tower. Out of the 45 chapter of Jeremiah.’ Full contents of the volume are provided on the final page (386). 45 See the account of how ‘the earthly Jerusalem or worldly Christian Church shall be besieged and taken’ on p. 413. In making this argument Vane provides an especially large number of scriptural precedents on the nature of the Apocalypse: 1 Corinthians 3.22–3, Matthew 25.6, Daniel 12.1 and 7, Zechariah 14. 1–2, Revelation 11.2 and 8, 2 Thessalonians 2.3, 1 Timothy 4.1–2, 2 Timothy 3.1, and Hebrews 12. 46 For a summary of the distinctions between these groups, see p. 141. 47 See chap. 16 (188–211) for the fullest account of the fleshly seed. See also A Pilgrimage into the land of promise, By the light of the vision of Jacobs ladder and faith (Wing V73; London, 1664), 8 and 72. For further distinctions between the fleshly and spiritual seeds, see Sikes, Life, 12–13, 23, 60, and 68. 48 See also Vane, Meditations, 129: ‘even as the worldly Church and fleshly seed of Professors among the Christian Gentiles shall be dealt with, when the Jews are grafted in again upon a Scriptural account, and shall be made known to be the fulness of Gentiles.’ 49 Parnham, Sir Henry Vane, 89. 50 See Vane, Meditations, 153–4, 229, and 307–8: ‘Through this powerful operation of faith, the youth of flesh and blood in the Saint is weakened, and grey heirs [sic] now begin to appear here and there upon him in this his captivity to the obedience of faith, which state is very honourable, and is the qualification that renders the Saints true Elders in the Church of God ... how despicable soever this frame of spirit be in the eyes of the worldly Church and of the youthful visible Churches of Saints, flourishing with their fair shewes in the flesh.’ 51 See also Vane, Meditations, 384–91. 52 See Vane, A Healing Question, 5–7. Henry Stubbe responds to Baxter’s criticism of Vane in A Vindication of that Prudent and Honourable Knight, Sir Henry Vane (Wing S6068; London, 1659): ‘if he be for such a Liberty, without exception or restraint, why should you quarrel with him ... more than with Luther, Austin, and other Fathers! Admit their opinion (that are for an universall Liberty) be a mistake, yet it is far lesse dangerous then theirs, that would have few or none tolerated, but such as concurre with

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54 55 56 57

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59

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Notes to pages 103–5 them in every thing; as if they had monopolized to themselves a spirit of infallibility’ (12–13). Despite such professions of universal liberty, Stubbe excludes ‘Papists, Prelatical, and Presbyterial persons’ from his Vanist senate in A Letter to an Officer (Wing S6054; London, 1659), 61. Sikes frequently describes and endorses Vane’s position on liberty of conscience in his Life, stating that the Devil ‘assumes and challenges to himself, the Authority of the highest Spirit of Truth, boasting himself as the infallible Teacher and Guide in matters of Faith and divine Worship, in all things pertaining to the good and salvation of Souls’ (14); see also pp. 46, 49–50, 110, and 129. Vane repeats that the Saints are not ‘Christed’ on p. 123. This, as Parnham shows in Sir Henry Vane, is an important difference between Vane and the Antinomians with whom his detractors associated him (87–8). For further discussion of Antinomian divinization, see Smith, Perfection Proclaimed, 14–15 et passim. For further expression of Vane’s position, see A Pilgrimage, 42 and 62; and Sikes, Life: Here we have a distinct expression of the heavenly orders. 1. An Innumerable company of Angels, and spirits of just Men imperfect. 2. The general Assembly of the first-born, that have the double portion of the Spirit. 3. Jesus the Mediator of the New Covenant. 4. God the Judge of all. (39) See also Vane, A Pilgrimage, 87–8. Vane describes the angelic role in the Apocalypse in Meditations, 415. Stubbe, A Vindication, 20. See Meditations, 126, 130, and especially 384–5. See Stanley Fish, ‘Reasons That Imply Themselves: Imagery, Argument, and the Reader in Milton’s Reason of Church Government,’ in SeventeenthCentury Imagery, ed. Earl Miner (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1971), 83–102. For Calvin’s position on hierarchy, see Institutes, 2: 1071–2 [4.4.4]. The passage in Of Reformation continues, ‘If the splendor of Gold and Silver begin to Lord it once againe in the Church of England, wee shall see Antichrist shortly wallow heere, though his cheife Kennell be at Rome’ (CPW, 1: 590). See also CPW, 1: 536, 556–7, 629, 665, 765, 771, 782, 793, and 952–3. William Fulke, A Retentive to Stay Good Christians (STC 11449; London, 1580), 69. Henry Stubbe cites this passage among other references to Fulke in A Light Shining out of Darkness (Wing S6057; London, 1659), 8. For further patristic references in Of Prelatical Episcopacy, see CPW, 1:

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69 70 71

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638–9 on Ignatius, 639–44 on Irenaeus and Polycarp, 644–6 on Tertullian, and 647–8 on Clement. See also CPW, 1: 568, 868, 903, 912, 943. See Luther, LW, 36: 18. Lewalski, Life, 130. West, Milton and the Angels, 134 and 136. Satan also refers to ‘Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues, Powers’ in 10.460. See also 7.192, where Raphael refers to the angels singing in their ‘Hierarchies.’ Patrides, ‘Renaissance Thought,’ 163. Fallon, Milton among the Philosophers, 158. In Paradise Regained, Milton typically refers to the angels en masse (see 1.168–72), though significantly a single ‘choir’ sings at the moment of Jesus’ birth and multiple ‘choirs’ celebrate his victory over Satan (1.243 and 4.593). See Revelation 1.4, 4.5, and 5.6, and Paradise Lost, 3.648–9, 5.658–60, and 6.44. On Michael, see chap. 6, below. Harold Bloom provides a summary of Thomas’s position in Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection (New York, 1996), 55: ‘the great Thomistic insight is that angels have perfect knowledge of their own spirituality and so of their own freedom. We stumble about, knowing nothing but facts, while angels are great Platonists, as it were, and know the Ideas directly, yet also know all the facts.’ In light of the complex issues of authorship surrounding De doctrina Christiana, I refer to it as a text illustrating theological categories with which Milton was certainly familiar and which he almost certainly endorsed. For the terms of this debate, see William B. Hunter, Visitation Unimplor’d: Milton and the Authorship of ‘De doctrina Christiana’ (Pittsburgh, 1998); ‘Responses,’ Milton Quarterly 33 (1999): 31–7; and ‘De doctrina Christiana: Nunc Quo Vadis?’ Milton Quarterly 34 (2000): 97–101; Christopher Hill, ‘Professor William B. Hunter, Bishop Burgess, and John Milton,’ SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 34 (1994): 166–93; Lewalski, ‘Milton and De doctrina Christiana: Evidences of Authorship,’ Milton Studies 36 (1998): 203–28; and Janel Mueller, ‘Milton on Heresy,’ in Milton and Heresy, ed. Stephen B. Dobranski and John P. Rumrich (Cambridge, 1998), 21–38. Fallon, Milton among the Philosophers, 217. These lines make dubious Carrol B. Cox’s claim that the Uriel–Satan episode is an illustration of ‘the abstract individual existing prior to and

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Notes to pages 111–16 autonomously of concrete social relations.’ The episode suggests instead that Milton’s Heaven does have concrete social relations that are to be respected. See his ‘Citizen Angels: Civil Society and the Abstract Individual in Paradise Lost,’ Milton Studies 23 (1987): 167. Barbara Lewalski more accurately cites this episode as an example of a dialogue between a hierarchical superior, Uriel, and an inferior, the Cherub Satan pretends to be, in ‘Paradise Lost’ and the Rhetoric of Literary Forms (Princeton, 1985), 151–2. Lucy Hutchinson, Order and Disorder, ed. David Norbrook (Oxford, 2001). Parenthetical references are to this text. See Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints (New York, 1968), 163. See pp. 92–104, above. The angels thus seem to follow the valuation of good works found in De doctrina: ‘what chiefly constitutes the true worship of God is eagerness to do good works ... Good works are those which we do when the spirit of God works within us, through true faith, to God’s glory’ (CPW, 6: 638). West, Milton and the Angels, 134. See Heywood, Hierarchie, 411 and 436–7; see also Benjamin Camfield, A Theological Discourse of Angels, and Their Ministries (Wing C388; London, 1678), 45. In descending order, Heywood describes the ninefold hierarchy of fallen angels is as follows: 1) false gods; 2) distasters of sanctity and truth; 3) vessels of wrath; 4) those who convince humans to sin and punish them; 5) deceivers; 6) Potestates who raise thunder and lightning; 7) the Furies, who give rise to war and strife; 8) ‘Explorers that accuse’ (Heywood offers little more detail than this); and 9) tempters who ambush souls. Curiously, Beelzebub is master of the first order and Satan is chief of the fifth.

5 Raphael, the Celestial Physician * The epigraph is from Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man, in The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, ed. Ernst Cassirer et al. (Chicago, 1961), 237 [par. 20]. 1 West, Milton and the Angels, 133. 2 Quotations of the Book of Tobit are from the NRSV. 3 Pseudo-Dionysius, Complete Works, 195–200; see also Thomas L. Campbell, The Ecclesiastical Hierarchy (Washington, D.C., 1955), 115n24. Bonaventure, The Soul’s Journey into God, 55; and The Six Wings of the Seraphim (3: 139). 4 Calvin, Commentaries, 123. See also De doctrina, where Milton claims that

Notes to pages 116–18

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God ‘reveals himself to the sight of the angels and saints (insofar as they are capable of seeing him)’ (CPW, 6: 312). Henry More, The Immortality of the Soul (Wing M2663; London, 1659), 381–2 [3.5.6]; see also Fallon, Milton among the Philosophers, 146. Hughes’s note that ‘Raphael’s proper shape Milton takes to be that of the seraphs in Isaiah vi, 2’ thus stands in need of some correction. Milton clearly departs here from the tradition that presents the Seraphim as constantly veiled with their first set of wings. The relevant text is 1 Timothy 1.3–4. The relevant texts here are 2 Corinthians 8.23 and especially Titus 1.5: ‘For this cause left I thee in Crete, that thou shouldest set in order the things that are wanting, and ordain elders in every city, as I had appointed thee.’ This would seem to come very close indeed to the institution of episcopacy. For one example of reference to Christ as spiritual physician, see Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John, trans. John W. Rettig, The Fathers of the Church 79 (Washington, D.C., 1988), 108 and 115–17. Michael Allen, ‘Divine Instruction: Of Education and the Pedagogy of Raphael, Michael, and the Father,’ Milton Quarterly 26 (1992): 114; see also Margaret Olofson Thickstun, ‘Raphael and the Challenge of Evangelical Education,’ Milton Quarterly 35 (2001): 245–57. The modern originator of this view is Murray W. Bundy in ‘Milton’s View of Education in Paradise Lost,’ Journal of English and German Philology 21 (1922): 127–52. The term ‘blunder’ is used by Thomas A. Copeland in ‘Raphael, the Angelic Virtue,’ Milton Quarterly 24 (1990): 124. His view captures the sentiment of many critics. See, for example, Allen, ‘Divine Instruction,’ 116; Lewalski, Rhetoric, 216; Anna K. Nardo, ‘The Education of Milton’s Good Angels,’ Arenas of Conflict: Milton and the Unfettered Mind, ed. Kristin Pruitt McColgan and Charles W. Durham (Selinsgrove, 1997), 204. Ramus’s influence is also evident in the Accedence Commenc’t Grammar. See Walter J. Ong, ‘Introduction to Artis logicae,’ CPW, 8: 197–202. Ong suggests the importance of logical method in the Prolusions, Animadversions, De doctrina Christiana, Church Government, and Milton’s poetry. The general influence of dialectic in Milton’s thought is also evident in Areopagitica and Of Reformation; see Michael Lieb, The Dialectics of Creation: Patterns of Birth and Regeneration in ‘Paradise Lost’ (Amherst, 1970), 4–11. See also Fish, ‘Reasons’; and Christopher Grose, ‘Milton on Ramist Similitude,’ in Seventeenth-Century Imagery, 103–16. See CPW, 1: 672, 694, and 709–10.

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13 Stephen J. Greenblatt, Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (New York, 1990), 163. 14 See Gustav Davidson’s entry on Raphael in A Dictionary of Angels: Including the Fallen Angels (New York, 1967). Rashi comments that Raphael is the angel responsible for Lot’s rescue since ‘healing and rescue form a mission of the same kind’; qtd. in Jason P. Rosenblatt, ‘Celestial Entertainment in Eden: Book V of Paradise Lost,’ Harvard Theological Review 62 (1969): 417. John P. Rumrich finds in the translation of Raphael’s name the suggestion of a tribute to Milton’s most intimate Platonic friend, the physician Charles Diodati; see his ‘Erotic Milton,’ Texas Studies in Literature and Language 41 (1999): 135. 15 Peter Marshall and Alexandra Walsham, ‘Migrations of Angels in the Early Modern World,’ in Marshall and Walsham, 11; Keck, Angels and Angelology, 170–1. On visitation of the sick, see Peter Marshall, ‘Angels around the Deathbed,’ in Marshall and Walsham, 85; Marshall notes that the reference to Tobias and Sarah is present in the 1549 Order for the Visitation of the Sick but dropped in the 1552 edition (92). 16 Joost van den Vondel, Lucifer, in The Celestial Cycle, trans. and ed. Watson Kirkconnell (1952; New York, 1967), 402. 17 Marshall and Walsham, ‘Migrations of Angels,’ in Marshall and Walsham, 32. 18 Richard Blackmore, Prince Arthur (1695; facs. repr. Menston, 1971), bk. 6 (p. 183). 19 Trithemius, ‘Of the Heavenly Intelligencies Governing the Orbes of God’ [De septem secundeis], in The World’s Catastrophe, or Europe’s Many Mutations Untill, 1666, trans. W. Lilly (Wing L2252; London, 1647), 43; see also Bruce Gordon, ‘The Renaissance Angel,’ in Marshall and Walsham, 59. 20 This parallel was first noted by J. Douglas Bruce in The Nation 97 (1913): 32–3, but has not received much attention. 21 See Walter J. Ong, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Discourse (New York, 1974), 226. On Ramus’s focus on the practical use of his method, see James Veazie Skalnik, Ramus and Reform: University and Church at the End of the Renaissance, Sixteenth Century Essays & Studies 60 (Kirksville, Missouri, 2002), 47–51. In a more general vein, Mark A. Wollaeger suggests that a ‘Hellenistic strain’ in ‘the rationalism of Raphael’s conversations with Adam and Eve is characteristic of apocryphal texts’; see his ‘Apocryphal Narration: Milton, Raphael, and the Book of Tobit,’ Milton Studies 21 (1985): 137. 22 Northrop Frye, The Return of Eden: Five Essays on Milton’s Epics (Toronto, 1965), 12; repr. in Northrop Frye on Milton and Blake, ed. Angela Esterham-

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mer, vol. 16 of The Collected Works of Northrop Frye (Toronto, 2005), 42. Thickstun similarly argues that ‘Raphael’s teaching strategy is [partly] ... modelled on Socratic symposia and on Christian catechetical tradition’; Allen, ‘Divine Instruction,’ comments on the Socratic nature of the Father’s dialogue with Adam (115); in a related but more emotive vein, Bundy describes the emphasis on ‘right feeling’ in both Raphael’s and Adam’s instruction as evidence of ‘the conception of no narrow Puritan; it is the conception of one rightly called the last of the great Elizabethan humanists’ (152). On parallels to Lucretius, see Lewalski, Rhetoric, 40–2; and Irene Samuel, Plato and Milton (Ithaca, N.Y., 1947), 163–5. See also Clay Daniel, ‘Milton’s Neo-Platonic Angel?’ SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 44.1 (Winter 2004): 173–4. See Lewalski, Rhetoric, 214–15; and Stanley E. Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts, 12–14. For Milton’s chapter on method, see CPW, 8: 390–6. Lewalski analogously associates the difference between Raphael’s and Michael’s instruction with reference to John Smith’s ‘Of Prophesie’ (Rhetoric, 27, 39, and 50); Wollaeger, ‘Apocryphal Narration,’ refers to De doctrina Christiana to claim that Raphael’s status as apocryphal angel distances him from the Word of God (137–8). The relevant passages are CPW, 2: 366–9 and 1: 842, respectively. For one interpretation of their relevance, see Copeland, ‘Raphael,’ 124. See Joad Raymond, ‘“With the Tongues of Angels”: Angelic Conversations in Paradise Lost and Seventeenth-Century England,’ in Marshall and Walsham, 266. Jason P. Rosenblatt, ‘Celestial Entertainment in Eden: Book V of Paradise Lost,’ Harvard Theological Review 62 (1969): 414–15; Heywood, Hierarchie, 200. See also James H. Sims, The Bible in Milton’s Epics (Gainsville, 1962), 202–4 and 210; Wollaeger, ‘Apocryphal Narration,’ 144; and Lewalski, Rhetoric, 207. See Daniel, ‘Milton’s Neo-Platonic Angel?’ 174–5. The ‘most’ of line 489 registers a departure from the Thomist principle that angelic immateriality precludes any dependence at all on discursive reason, and is consistent with Milton’s general depiction of angelic ethereality. Raphael thus tends here, as Milton says the church should do in Church Government, to ‘those inner parts and affections of the mind where the seat of reason is’ so that he might lead Adam to a free obedience of God (CPW, 1: 747). Salkeld, Treatise of Angels, 349 and 194–5; the relevant passage in Augus-

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Notes to pages 123–7 tine is De civitate Dei, 11.13 [Migne, 328–9]. Thomas’s position is a response to Peter Lombard’s claim in the Sentences that the angels merit bliss while in a state of perfection; to this the Summa theologiae responds that ‘you cannot merit what you already have, just as you cannot be at an end and still be moving towards it’ (ST, 9: 229). Qtd. in West, Milton and the Angels, 163–4. Plato, Gorgias, Collected Dialogues, 284 [501a-b]. James I, BA⌺I⌳IKON ⌬⍀PON [Basilikon Doron], in The Workes (1616), Anglistica and Americana Reprints 85 (New York, 1971), 159; Donne also draws on the distinction between cook and physician in his third Prebend Sermon (DPS, 3.529–33). CPW, 8: 395, and Walter J. Ong’s introduction to the Artis logicae, 8: 178; see also Milton’s comment on method in the Animadversions, CPW, 1: 709–10. Lewalski provides a thorough treatment of the shift from ‘philosophical poem’ to ‘prototypical epic,’ but does not account for the motivation and purpose of this shift; see Rhetoric, 39–44. Lewalski, Rhetoric, 158, see also Life, 467 and 477; and Lieb, 100–2. On the categories of morning and evening angelic knowledge, see p. 93–5, above. As Lewalski observes in Rhetoric, ‘the dialogues with Raphael serve not so much to provide Adam and Eve with knowledge absolutely necessary to their lives, as to exercise them in the right way of meeting intellectual and moral challenges and difficulties’ (210). Plato, Timaeus, in Collected Dialogues, 1155 [20b]. Lewalski similarly describes Adam’s invention of ‘spiritual autobiography,’ Rhetoric, 211–14. This initial, instinctive movement toward Heaven is noted by Lieb, 64–5. Adam’s deduction of a Creator is consistent with man’s natural capacities as described by George Sikes in The Book of Nature (Wing S6322B; London, 1667), 8: ‘From this general view and comparison of himself with all inferiour creatures, may man argue and certainly conclude, that there is some invisible lord over him, who gave to all inferiour things what they have; and to himself, what he has.’ See also Allen’s discussion of the Father’s Socratic dialogue with Adam, ‘Divine Instruction,’ 115 and 118–19. In a generally wonderful reading of Raphael’s dialogue with Adam, Lewalski, for example, tends to downplay the danger of Adam’s passion: ‘The angel’s success in teaching through dialogue and literary invention is confirmed after this discourse, as Adam declares himself freed from perplexing thoughts and ready to take the lead himself in speaking of

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“things at hand / Useful” – his own history and his feelings of passion for Eve’ (Rhetoric, 154). In ‘Raphael,’ Copeland notes that Adam’s ‘wisest, virtuousest, discreetest, best’ are almost blasphemous in their echo of the Son’s description of the Father as ‘First, Highest, Holiest, Best’ (6.724), and that Raphael is ‘frustrated throughout his visit by his student’s slowness to comprehend,’ but nonetheless objects to the severity of the angel’s response (125). On the need ‘to testify always to [God’s] centrality’ in expressions of love, see Stanley Fish, How Milton Works (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), 50–4. See Daniel, ‘Milton’s Neo-Platonic Angel?’ 179–80, 182. Plato, Symposium, in Collected Dialogues, 561–3 [210–11]; Ficino, Commentary on Plato’s Symposium, 52. See Rumrich, ‘Erotic Milton,’ 133–4; the Yale editors note that Milton’s parenthetical statement is used by Euripides at the end of several plays. Sikes, Nature, 30. There is, of course, an angelic guard in Eden, but Adam suggests here that he sees it as serving Eve rather than as serving God. Philo, ‘On Jospeh,’ in Philo, Loeb Classical Library (1935; Cambridge, Mass., 1950), 6: 173 [60–1]. Janna Thacher Farris argues that the picture of Edenic marriage in bk. 4 is consistent with that suggested by Tobias’s prayer. The more compelling parallel to Tobit, I think, must be after Raphael has administered his instruction. Farris argues that Milton presents in Eden a more enduring, less hierarchized relationship between human and angel than is possible in the postlapsarian apocryphal story. This seems something of a misrepresentation: it must be remembered that Tobias and Raphael are travelling companions for weeks, and that during this time Tobias is under the impression that the angel is a distant family member. See Janna Thacher Farris, ‘Angelic Visitations: Raphael’s Roles in the Book of Tobit and Paradise Lost,’ Arenas of Conflict, 184. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, 3rd ed. (Boston, 1987), X (I) 904–6. Fish finds a parallel to Mammon in Adam’s inquiry into Astronomy; see How Milton Works, 77. As Mary Nyquist observes, ‘the divorce tracts never tire of insisting [that] the true doctrine of marriage relates only to the satisfaction of that which the wanting soul needfully seeks’; see Nyquist, ‘The Genesis of Gendered Subjectivity in the Divorce Tracts and in Paradise Lost,’ Re-Membering Milton, ed. Nyquist and Margaret W. Ferguson (New York, 1988), 117. For Milton’s emphasis on the pedagogical value of severity, see also the

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Notes to pages 131–5 Apology, CPW, 1: 874–5, and Animadversions, CPW, 1: 716. The tendency to see Raphael as an excessively harsh instructor would seem to have more to do with the pedagogical mores of our own day than it does with Milton’s various statements on spiritual guidance. Sophist, Collected Dialogues, 973 [230c–d]. That Milton is referring in Church Government to this passage was first argued by Ronald B. Levinson, ‘Milton and Plato,’ Modern Language Notes 46 (1931): 87. I find this more convincing than Herbert Agar’s claim that Milton here refers to Gorgias, 524–5, the argument favoured by the Yale editors; see Agar, Milton and Plato (Princeton, N.J., 1929), 61. This term for Raphael’s approach is Copeland’s in ‘Raphael,’ 125. See, for example, Raphael’s comments on obedience (5.520–3), his explicit warning after narrating the war in Heaven (6.908–12), and his final comments on astronomy (8.167–88). On possible sources for Milton’s presentation of angelic sexuality, see West, Milton and the Angels, 169–73. Douglas Bush, ‘Paradise Lost’ in Our Time (1945; New York, 1948), 107; George Sandys, Ovid’s Metamorphosis Englished, Mythologized, and Represented in Figures [1632], ed. Karl K. Hulley and Stanley T. Vandersall (Lincoln, Nebr., 1970), 306. For this reference I am indebted to John Leonard’s ‘Douglas Bush in His Time and Ours,’ in Milton and Canadian Historicisms, ed. Feisal G. Mohamed and Mary Nyquist (forthcoming). Though this is not entirely serious, that Adam is the ‘shade’ might suggest his impending mortality. See OED ‘shade,’ sb. 5.b: ‘something that has only a fleeting existence ... c 1580 Sidney Ps. xxxix.iv They are but shades, not true things where we live.’ Heywood, Hierarchie, 60–1 and 68. See also 7.157–61. Philip J. Gallagher, Milton, the Bible, and Misogyny, ed. Eugene R. Cunnar and Gail L. Mortimer (Columbia, Mo., 1990), 148; see also 144 and 149. Hideyuki Shitaka and Margaret Olofson Thickstun have endorsed this view, the former stating that the ‘full significance’ of Raphael’s instruction ‘will become evident once man has experienced the miseries attendant on the fatal transgression’; see ‘“Them thus employed beheld / With pity heaven’s high king”: God’s dispatch of Raphael in Paradise Lost, Book 5.219–47,’ Milton Quarterly 24 (1990): 130–1. Olofson Thickstun similarly claims that it is by virtue of Raphael’s ‘prevenient ministry’ that the human pair ‘recognize their sinfulness, accept responsibility for their disobedience, and actively reach out for God’s free gift’; see ‘Raphael and the Challenge of Evangelical Education,’ Milton Quarterly 35 (2001): 255. Sikes, Nature, 47–8.

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66 Deacon and Walker, Dialogicall Discourses, 16; the statement is based on 1 Corinthians 2.14. 67 Richard J. DuRocher, Milton among the Romans (Pittsburgh, 2001), 8. 68 On Rembrandt’s fascination with Tobit, see Julius S. Held, Rembrandt Studies, 2nd ed. (Princeton, N.J., 1991), 118–43. 69 Augustine, Tractates on John, 46–7 [13.3.3]. 70 Wollaeger, ‘Apocryphal Narration,’ 146–8, argues for the most part that Milton’s role is parallel to Raphael’s but I find the parallels to Tobit much more compelling; he deals with these in the final paragraphs of his article (152–3). 71 Louis L. Martz, The Paradise Within: Studies in Vaughan, Traherne, and Milton (New Haven, 1964), 109. 72 On the Restoration context of Milton’s dismissal of ‘Bacchus and his Revellers,’ see Laura Lunger Knoppers, Historicizing Milton: Spectacle, Power, and Poetry in Restoration England (Athens, Ga., 1994), 87–91. 73 Lewalski, Rhetoric, 35. 6 Michael of Celestial Armies Prince 1 See Wollebius, Compendium theologiae christianae, 62; Dingley, The Deputation of Angels, 95; and Ambrosius Mediolanensis, in Migne, Patrologia latina, 17: 959. John Napier associates Michael with the Holy Spirit in his Plaine Discoverie of the Whole Revelation of Saint Iohn (STC 18355; London, 1594). The last two of these are cited in Stella Purce Revard, The War in Heaven: ‘Paradise Lost’ and the Tradition of Satan’s Rebellion (Ithaca, N.Y., 1980), 110nn5–6. 2 John Harington, trans., Ludovico Ariosto’s ‘Orlando Furioso,’ ed. R. McNulty (Oxford, 1972), 14.65–7 and 95–6. 3 Edward Fairfax, Godfrey of Bulloigne: A Critical Edition of Edward Fairfax’s Translation of Tasso’s ‘Gerusalemme liberata,’ ed. Kathleen M. Lea and T.M. Gang (Oxford, 1981), 9.58 and 18.92. 4 The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition, introd. Lloyd E. Berry (Madison, Wisc., 1969). 5 ‘Migrations of Angels,’ in Marshall and Walsham, 25 6 George Wither, Hymn 56, Haleluiah: or, Britans Second Remembrancer (1641), Part I, Spenser Society 26 (1879; New York, 1967), 332. 7 In characterizing the Nativity Ode in this way, I follow Thomas N. Corns, ‘On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity, Upon the Circumcision and The Passion,’ in A Companion to Milton, ed. Corns (2001; Oxford, 2003), esp. 231. See Elegy III, 59–60, and Fair Infant, 57–63. 8 Stella Purce Revard, War in Heaven, 235–6; and ‘The Renaissance Michael

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Notes to pages 144–6 and the Son of God,’ in Milton and the Art of Sacred Song, ed. J. Max Patrick and Roger H. Sundell (Madison, Wisc., 1979), 121 et passim. For fuller articulation of this tendency in Milton’s thought, see my ‘Liberty Before and After Liberalism: Milton’s Shifting Politics and the Current Crisis in Liberal Theory,’ in ‘Milton’s America / America’s Milton,’ ed. Paul Stevens, University of Toronto Quarterly (forthcoming). See also CPW, 1: 627, 662. On Milton’s self-construction in the antiprelatical tracts, see Lewalski, Life, 121–3 and 153. On the climate surrounding the publication of The Tenure, see Martin Dzelzainis’s introduction to John Milton, Political Writings, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge, 1991), ix–xix. For Milton’s rhetorical position in this tract, see Thomas N. Corns, Uncloistered Virtue: English Political Literature, 1640–1660 (Oxford, 1992), 194–200. References to the seventh volume of the CPW are to the revised edition. See also CPW, 7: 427. Unless otherwise indicated, references to The Readie and Easie Way are to the second edition. See CPW, 7: 421–2, 428, and 446. Reuben Sanchez, Jr discusses these two self-presentations as Jeremiah in relation to the biblical figure’s historical situation and development, concluding that ‘In 1642 Milton does seem to believe that Englishmen may after all heed his words. That optimism characterizes Milton’s work near the beginning of the Revolution, an optimism significantly tempered by events between 1642 and 1660. In the final part of his career, Jeremiah witnesses the destruction of his nation by Nabuchadnezzar [sic], who functions as Yahweh’s chosen instrument to punish the unfaithful (chaps. xxix; xxii, 25–35). For the mature prophet-teacher, without an audience for his lamentation, Milton must respond to the failure of the nation’s public covenant, a failure symbolized by the people “chusing them a captain back for Egypt”’; see his Persona and Decorum in Milton’s Prose (Madison, Wisc., 1997), 75. Milton is here interpreting Jeremiah 15.10: ‘Woe is me, my mother, that you ever bore me, a man of strife and contention to the whole land!’ (NRSV). See Corns, Uncloistered Virtue (30–7), on the ‘distinct self-image’ of ‘youth, integrity, and creativity’ in this tract. Lewalski’s comment in Life that this reference to Jeremiah reflects Milton’s self-construction as ‘a prophet called to testify and teach’ is, I think, somewhat overstated (149). In this instance Milton carefully differentiates his divine gifts from those of the prophets he evokes. Milton’s ‘O earth, earth, earth!’ refers to Jeremiah 22.29. Laura Lunger Knoppers, ‘Milton’s The Readie and Easie Way and the

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English Jeremiad,’ in Politics, Poetics, and Hermeneutics in Milton’s Prose, ed. David Loewenstein and James Grantham Turner (Cambridge, 1990), 213. Corns, Uncloistered Virtue, 292; for Corns’s discussion of Knoppers’s argument, see pp. 284–5. Arthur E. Barker, Milton and the Puritan Dilemma (Toronto, 1942), 289. Sarah Hutton, ‘Mede, Milton, and More: Christ’s College Millenarians,’ in Milton and the Ends of Time, ed. Juliet Cummins (Cambridge, 2003), 29; for similar claims, see Lewalski, Life, 145; and Janel Mueller, ‘Embodying Glory: The Apocalyptic Strain in Milton’s Of Reformation,’ in Politics, Poetics, and Hermeneutics, 10. See Revard, ‘Milton and Millenarianism: From the Nativity Ode to Paradise Regained,’ in Milton and the Ends of Time, 47. See also CPW, 1: 615–16, 704–5, and 941. See also CPW, 1: 734. On Milton’s participation in a Foxean tradition of national election in the antiprelatical tracts, see Michael Fixler, Milton and the Kingdoms of God (Evanston, Ill., 1964), 38, 66–8, and 213. George Herbert, The Church Militant, in The Complete English Poems, ed. John Tobin (London, 1991), 90–3. See also CPW, 1: 541, 554, 557, 700–1, 726. Henry Stubbe, Light Shining out of Darkness, 174; on the following page, Stubbe provides the versified dismissal of Constantine found in Of Reformation. See CPW, 2: 343: ‘another act of papal encroachment it was, to pluck the power & arbitrement of divorce from the master of family, into whose hands God & the law of all Nations had put it.’ See CPW, 2: 238 and n. 16. On the spare style of Civil Power, see Corns, Uncloistered Virtue, 270; Lewalski, Life, 382; Barker, Puritan Dilemma, 218; and James Egan, ‘Public Truth and Personal Witness in Milton’s Last Tracts,’ ELH: English Literary History 40 (1973): 237–9. See also CPW, 7: 244, 245–6, 277–8, and 456. See CPW, 7: 244–5: ‘Seeing then that in matters of religion, as hath been prov’d, none can judge or determin here on earth, no not church-governors themselves against the consciences of other beleevers, my inference is, or rather not mine but our Saviours own, that in those matters they neither can command nor use constraint; lest they run rashly on a pernicious consequence, forewarnd in that parable Mat. 13 from the 26 to the 31 verse: least while ye gather up the tares, ye root up also the wheat with them.’

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34 See CPW, 7: 243: ‘If then we count it so ignorant and irreligious in the papist to think himself discharged in Gods account, beleeving only as the church beleevs, how much greater condemnation will it be to the protestant his condemner, to think himself justified, beleeving only as the state beleevs?’ 35 On the 1648–49 dating of the first four books of the History, including the ‘Digression,’ see Nicholas von Maltzahn, Milton’s ‘History of Britain’: Republican Historiography in the English Revolution (Oxford, 1991), 22–48. 36 See Woolrych’s introduction to the revised seventh volume of CPW, 104–6; David Hawkes notes the proximity of Hirelings to Henry Stubbe in ‘The Concept of the “Hireling” in Milton’s Theology,’ Milton Studies 43 (2004): 76–9. See also Lewalski, Life, 362, 367, for discussion of how Milton’s separation of church and state distances him from Harringtonean republicanism. 37 Erasmo di Valvasone, L’Angeleida, 2.121–4; a translation of this passage is available in Kirkconnell’s Celestial Cycle, 82–3. 38 John Lydgate, The Siege of Thebes, ed. Robert R. Edwards, TEAMS Middle English Texts Series (Kalamazoo, 2001), lines 4663–7. Wither, Hymn 56, Halelviah, pt. 1, verse 1. Lydgate’s use of the term ‘levyathan’ recalls, of course, Milton’s extended simile on Satan in Paradise Lost, 1.201–10; both poets are drawing on Job 41, Isaiah 27.1, and Gregory the Great. 39 Revard, ‘Renaissance Michael,’ 121; Revard cites Odoricus Valmarana, Daemonomachiae: Sive, de Bello Intelligentiarum Super Divini Verbi. Incarnoatione, Libri 25 (n.p., 1623), bk. 1, p. 27; Antonino Alfano, La battaglia celeste tra Michele e Lucifero (Palermo, 1578); Fredericus Mollerus, De creatione et angelorum lapsu carmen (Leyden, 1596); Garparo Murtola, Della creatione del mondo (Venice, 1608); Giovandomenico Peri, La guerra angelica (MS Florence, Biblioteca Nazionale); Friedrich Taubmann, Bellum angelicum, in Epulum musaeum (Leipzig, 1597); Erasmo de Valvasone, Angeleida (Venice, 1590); and Joost van den Vondel, Lucifer [Amsterdam, 1654], in The Celestial Cycle, trans. Watson Kirkconnell (Toronto, 1952). 40 Heywood, Hierarchie, pp. 340, 494. Relevant works by the artists here mentioned are provided in Roland Mushat Frye, Milton’s Imagery and the Visual Arts: Iconographic Tradition in the Epic Poems (Princeton, N.J., 1978), plates 4, 8, 17, 18, 20, 22, 25, 69, and 70. R.M. Frye notes that, more than literary representation, visual representation is impelled to present Michael as victorious: ‘the artist has only a one-shot opportunity to capture his subject, a single exposure in which to express its form and suggest its meaning. To show Michael and Lucifer in dubious battle, hand to hand as apparently equal antagonists, might appear to suggest

Notes to pages 155–65

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44 45 46

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something which the central Judeo-Christian tradition has persistently denied, that is, the essential equality of the forces of good and evil’ (51). Milton is not alone in presenting Michael as narrating significant historical events in Eden. In the Northumbrian Cursor Mundi, Simeon’s sons descend into Hell with Christ to hear how Michael has taught Seth of the Redemption and led Adam into Heaven; see Cursor Mundi (The Course of the World), Part 3, ed. Richard Morris, Early English Texts Society 62 (London, 1876), lines 17939–58 and 18377–82. This draws on the angel’s role in the apocryphal book of the Christian Bible, the Gospel of Nicodemus; see Gospel of Nicodemus [Acta Pilati], ed. H.C. Kim, Toronto Medieval Latin Texts 2 (Toronto, 1973), 27.1. I owe these references to the search capabilities of Chadwyck-Healey’s Literature Online (http://lion.chadwyck.com). See 11.681, 818, 876, 890; 12. 126, 277, 450. See R.M. Frye, Milton and the Visual Arts, plates 60 (Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel), 100 (Fra Angelico’s Last Judgment), and 105 (Giambattista Fontana’s Last Judgment). A notable exception to such Italian representations is Nardo di Cione and Andrea Orcagna, Last Judgment, ca. 1350 (Frye, plate 115). For the Dutch paintings here mentioned, see Maurice B. McNamee, SJ, Vested Angels: Eucharistic Allusions in Early Netherlandish Paintings, Liturgia condenda 6 (Tilburg, Netherlands, 1998), figures 85, 86, 97, and 109 For Eikonoklastes, see CPW, 3: 339–40; for the first Defence, CPW, 4: 359. James Holly Hanford, John Milton, Englishman (New York, 1949), 182. Compare the declaratives of Paradise Lost, 7.5–7 – ’for thou / Nor of the Muses nine, nor on the top / Of old Olympus dwell’st, but Heav’nly born’ – to the interrogatives of 3.1–8: Hail holy Light, offspring of Heav’n first-born, Or of th’ Eternal Coeternal beam May I express thee unblam’d? since God is Light, And never but in unapproached Light Dwelt from Eternity, dwelt then in thee, Bright effluence of bright essence increate. Or hear’st thou rather pure Ethereal stream, Whose Fountain who shall tell?

Epilogue 1 Alexandra Walsham, ‘Angels and Idols in England’s Long Reformation,’ in Marshall and Walsham, 157–9. Despite Protestant association of

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2 3 4 5 6

Notes to pages 165–7 angelolatry with Catholicism, Walsham rightly points out that Nicea in 787 distinguished between ‘the latria due to the Lord and the dulia owed to lesser members of the celestial hierarchy and their visual similitudes’ (139). Walsham, 163–4. Camfield, A Theological Discourse, 44–6; John Webster, The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft (Wing W1230; London, 1677). Bloom, Fallen Angels, 27. Kuchar, Divine Subjection, esp. 6, 8, and 17. Michael J.B. Allen, ‘At Variance,’ passim; see also Arnold, ‘John Colet,’ 185–7 and 190–2.

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Recto Running Head

229

Index

Abelard, Peter, 8 Abraham, 71, 119, 121, 156 adiaphora (matters indifferent), 38, 40, 69, 149 Alabaster, William, 191n62 Albert Magnus, 7 Alcuin, 149 Alexander of Hales, 32 Alfano, Antonino, 154 Allen, Michael, 118 Allen, Michael J.B., 167 Alsted, Johann Heinrich, 147 Ambrose, Isaac, 12, 68, 92 Ambrose, Saint, 95, 141 Anabaptism, 37 Anastasius, 6 Andrewes, Lancelot, 36, 85, 86, 180n8 Angeleida. See Valvasone angels, 14, 17, 42–3, 44, 48, 53, 55–6, 65, 71, 74, 103–4, 108, 111–12, 143, 169n2; biblical as Christ, 71, 72–3, 108, 141, 153–4, 160; creation, 47, 93–4, 192–3n23, 193n28; fallen, 47, 92, 93–5, 96, 114, 193–4n33, 198n79; guardian, 56, 88, 91, 92–3; hierarchy, 4, 20, 13, 110–11, 170n4;

influence on humanity, 91, 96, 103; imitation of, 28; knowledge of, 71, 77–9, 108–9, 122, 189n51, 197n71, 198–9n4, 201n30; obedience of, 122–3, 182n32, 201–2n32; service of, 13, 198n77; sexuality of, 62, 120; substance of, 5, 12, 60–1, 93, 116, 182n32, 201n30; worship of (angelolatry), 14, 61–2, 73, 165, 189n47, 209–10n1 Antichrist, 100, 104, 142; pope and Roman Church as, 67, 75–6, 196n58 Apocalypse. See eschatology Apuleius, 169n2 Aquinas, Thomas. See Thomas Aquinas Archangels, 4, 48, 51, 71, 108, 109–10, 111, 112–13, 114, 115, 116, 120, 137 Aretino, Spinello, 154 Ariosto, Ludovico, 58, 141–2 Aristotle, 5, 66, 78, 93, 133 Arminius, Jacobus, 123 Articles of Religion. See ThirtyNine Articles Asmodeus, 119, 136, 137

230

Index

Augustine of Hippo, Saint, 31, 32, 43, 61, 65, 71, 122, 137; angelic creation and fall, views on, 93–5, 192–3n23, 195–6n52 Bancroft, Richard, 69 Barlow, William, 65 Basil, 95 Baxter, Richard, 99, 103–4, 195–6n52 Beauty (Platonic category), 46, 49, 51, 56, 57 Bedell, William, 67 Being (ontological category), 51, 169n2 Bellarmine, Robert, 68, 69 Bellerophon, 139 Benivieni, Girolamo, 45 Bennett, Josephine W., 45, 51 Bernard of Clairvaux, 7 Bjorvand, Einar, 45, 46, 48 Blackmore, Richard, 119 Blake, William, 160 Bloom, Harold, 166, 197n71 Bonaventure, Saint, 5–6, 10, 20–7, 32, 48, 51, 74, 81, 82, 89, 112, 116, 166; Apologia pauperam, 23, 26; adjustments of Dionysian hierarchies, 23–7, 30, 31, 81, 82–3, 112, 176–7n28; and Paris controversy, 23–7; Breviloquium, 20; Collationes in Hexaëmeron, 20, 25, 26, 27, 30, 81; Six Wings of the Seraphim, 26; Soul’s Journey into God, 26, 51 Bouwsma, William J., 36 Bridge, William, 147 Brightman, Thomas, 147 Bullinger, Heinrich, 181n14 Bush, Douglas, 132 Cajetan, Cardinal, 8

Calvaert, Dionisio, 154 Calvin, John, 8, 9, 10–11, 34, 35, 36, 40, 65, 71, 72, 74, 85, 88, 91, 92, 94, 104, 106, 108, 112, 116, 121, 181n14, 189n48 Camfield, Benjamin, 166 Campailla, Tomasso, 119 Cargill Thompson, W.D.J., 37, 44 Cassian, 95 Castiglione, Baldassare, 120 Charles I, King, 97, 99, 144, 149 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 129 Cherubim, 4, 20, 25, 48, 51, 62, 108–10, 111, 112, 113, 114, 198n74 Christian Platonism, 3, 7, 20, 38, 45, 84, 167 Chrysostom, Saint John, 71 church, 25, 28–31, 71, 76–7, 81, 96; Caroline, 65; Elizabethan, 10, 35–7, 38, 40, 43–4, 65; Jacobean, 65, 67, 69, 73, 85, 106; medieval, 5, 20–3; repristination, 28, 41–2, 71; tradition, 9, 34, 37, 73, 85–6; visible and invisible, 44, 100, 195n50 civil wars, English, 98 Claymond, John, 32 Clement of Alexandria, 105 Clement X, Pope, 143 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 55–6 Colet, Henry (father of John), 16, 30 Colet, John, 15–32, 34, 54, 167, 176n19; commentaries on Pseudo-Dionysius, 10, 15, 20, 28, 29, 30–1, 34, 54; Commentary on First Corinthians, 17, 19; ‘Compendium Platonicae theologiae,’ 20; Continental travel, 15, 17; Convocation Sermon, 29, 30; De sacramentis, 17, 18–19, 20, 30;

Index ecclesiology, 10, 28–30, 31; Erasmus and, 16; exposition of Romans, 18; founder of St Paul’s school, 32; historical exegesis, 10; influenced by Bonaventure, 10, 20, 30–1; influenced by Ficino, 15, 17; influenced by Pico, 16–17; Joachimism, 28–9; Letters to Radulphus, 17; manuscripts, 16, 174–5n3; no humanist, 10, 15, 18; on bishops, 29, 30; on monks, 30–1; on secular and religious knowledge, 19; on sexuality and marriage, 18–19 Comito, Terry, 45, 53, 185n75 conformism, 10, 35, 38, 39, 44, 53, 73, 74, 76, 84 Coniah, 146 Constantine, 147–9 Corns, Thomas N., 146 Cranmer, Thomas, 105 Cranz, F. Edward, 8 Crashaw, Richard, 86 Cromwell, Oliver, 12, 89, 98, 99, 100, 105, 194n38 Culmer, Richard, 165 Cusanus, Nicholas, 8, 34, 173n22 Cyril of Jerusalem, 170n4 d’Abbeville, Gerard, 23 Daemonomachiae. See Valmarana Damaris (of Acts 17), 6 Daniel, Clay, 122, 127 Daniel, E. Randolph, 22 Dante Alighieri, 170n4 David, 68 Deacon, John, and John Walker, 92, 94, 135 Denis, Saint, 6, 9, 34 Descartes, René, 12

231

diamones, 3, 169n2 dialectic, 117, 120, 140. See also Ramus, Peter Dingley, Robert, 92, 141 Diodati, Charles, 128, 200n14 Dionysius of Corinth, 6 Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite, 3–4, 19, 20, 32, 34, 40, 41, 51, 61, 62, 65, 68, 71, 74, 77, 78, 81, 87, 89, 91, 92, 96, 104, 106, 116, 122, 165–6, 169–70n2; authenticity of, 6, 7–9, 15, 32, 33–4, 62, 89, 106, 166, 173n20; Celestial Hierarchy and angelology, 4, 11, 26, 28, 33, 54, 73, 77, 80, 86, 88–9, 91, 92, 107, 108, 109, 110–11, 112, 113, 114, 116, 166, 170n4, 185n77, 187n22; Divine Names, 4, 9, 89; Ecclesiastical Hierarchy and ecclesiology, 4, 16, 19, 25, 28, 29, 30, 39, 41, 43, 54, 79, 80, 114, 116, 117; epistles, 5, 6, 8, 33, 86; Mystical Theology, 4; mysticism of, 4, 11, 65, 73–4, 77, 86, 89, 91; negative theology of, 4, 9, 86; on bishops (hierarchs), 25, 30, 40, 41, 44, 105, 106, 178n42; on monks, 23–5; on sacraments, 18; translations of, 6–7, 8–9, 12, 89, 173–4n26 disciplinarian reform, 35, 36, 38, 39, 40, 41, 44, 54, 105 Doerksen, Daniel W., 73, 85 Dominican order, 5, 22; and Paris controversy, 22–3 Donne, John, 11, 18, 55–86, 96, 106, 141, 167, 190n57; Calvinism of, 73, 85; ecclesiastical hierarchy, views on, 69, 72; ecumenism, 66, 86; ‘Idea’ and ‘ideate,’ use of, 62–3, 64, 70; masculinism, 55, 58,

232

Index

59, 60; preaching Word, emphasis on, 69–70, 72–3, 96; Protestantism of, 84; sexual wordplay, 58, 60, 62; sonnet convention and, 55, 56–7, 59; spiritual and physical love in, 59, 60; temporal and spiritual authority, views on, 68, 76; Thirty-Nine Articles and, 73; tradition, views on, 70 – poems: Aire and Angels, 55–62, 64, 74, 78; Anniversaries, 64–5, 74, 82–4; Breake of day, 59; Dreame, 55; Elegie XI, 55; Elegie XX, 55; Epithalamion Made at Lincoln’s Inne, 55; Extasie, 56; Farewell to Love, 62; Feaver, 59; Funerall Elegie, 62; Good-morrow, 56; Holy Sonnets, 65, 74, 76–7, 77–9; Litanie, 74, 81–2; Loves Growth, 59; manuscripts and early editions of, 59, 186n12; Obsequies to the Lord Harrington, 74, 83–4, 189n51; Relique, 56; Satyre III, 65, 74–6, 77; Satyre V, 55; ‘Showe me deare Christ,’ 76–7; To Mr Tilman, 79–80; Upon the Translation of the Psalmes, 70, 77; Valediction Forbidding Mourning, 56, 60; verse letters, 62; Witchcraft by a Picture, 59 – prose: angels in, 71–3, 79, 187n22; Biathanatos, 66; Essayes in Divinity, 63, 85; Ignatius His Conclave, 67; Pseudo-Martyr, 62–3, 64, 65–9, 74, 76; sermons, 65, 70, 71–3, 74, 78–9, 189n48 Downame, George, 118 Drury, Elizabeth, 64–5 Duffy, Eamon, 165 Durocher, Richard J., 135–6 Dutch War (1652–4), 98

Ebreo, Leone, 45, 50, 120 Eckhart, Meister, 7 Edwards, Richard, 32 election, 85, 92, 93, 97. See also Saints Eliot, T.S., 86 Elizabeth I, Queen, 35, 148 Ellrodt, Robert, 45 Enoch, 155 episcopacy, controversy over, 9, 10, 35, 54, 69, 87–8, 104, 105, 114, 143, 144, 147–8; jure divino arguments for, 10–11, 35, 38, 41–3, 54, 68–9, 87; root and branch elimination of, 105, 147 Erasmus, Desiderius, 8, 10, 15, 16, 33–4, 85, 175n5; Colet and, 16, 28, 31; Greek New Testament, 8 Erigena, John the Scot, 6 eschatology, 14, 75, 76, 93, 99, 100, 102, 113, 133, 144, 146, 147, 150–1, 153, 155, 157, 160, 162, 163 Eucharist, 30, 64, 91 Eusebius Pamphili, 6, 107 Everard, John, 12, 89 Exclusion Crisis, 165 Fallon, Stephen M., 12, 108, 110 Familists, 101–2 Ficino, Marsilio, 9, 17, 19, 20, 34, 45, 49–50, 56–7, 120, 122, 167; Commentary on Plato’s Symposium, 18, 56–7, 128; De raptu Pauli, 17, 20; Epistolae, 10, 15, 17, 20; on authenticity of Pseudo-Dionysius, 34, 173–4n26; on celestial hierarchy, 20; Theologia Platonica, 18, 34; translations of Pseudo-Dionysius, 9, 19, 34, 173–4n26 Fiore, Jacobello del, 154

Index Fish, Stanley, 51–2, 104, 120 Fletcher, Jefferson B., 45 Florence of Hesdin, 23 Flynn, Dennis, 11 Form (Platonic category), 61, 78, 108 Fox, Richard, 32 Foxe, John, 31, 148, 162 Francesca, Piero della, 154 Franciscan order, 22–3, 81; and Joachimism, 22, 23, 27; and Paris controversy, 22; papal support of, 22, 23, 25 Francis of Assisi, Saint, 23, 26, 27 Frye, Northrop, 119–20, 136 Frye, Roland M., 157–8, 208–9n40 Fulke, William, 105 Gabriel (angel), 63, 141 Galen, 119 Gallagher, Philip J., 133–4, 136 Gardner, Helen, 56 Gerard of Borgo San Donnino, 22 Gerson, Jean, 9, 32, 38, 51, 91 Gerusalemme liberata. See Tasso Giordano, Luca, 153 Gleason, John B., 10, 15, 20, 31 Gregory the Great, 107, 170n4, 187n22, 208n38 Godwin, Francis, 88 Goodyere, Henry, 65, 81 Gordon, Bruce, 7, 173n26 grace, 61, 64, 83, 84, 134, 163 Greenblatt, Stephen, 118 Grenham, Richard, 92 Grocyn, William, 10, 15, 32, 33–4 Grosseteste, Robert, 7 guardian angels. See angels, guardian Gunpowder Plot, 67

233

Hall, Joseph, 67, 82, 86, 87–9, 91, 105, 117 Hampton Court Conference, 67, 69 Hanford, James Holly, 162 Hankey, Wayne J., 43, 185n77 Harding, Thomas, 19, 32 Harford, Rapha, 12, 89 Harington, Sir John, 58 Harrington, James, 99, 151 Hatton, Christopher, 35 Haugaard, William P., 36 Hawkes, David, 153 Hayne, Peter, 99 Henrietta Maria, Queen, 89, 165 Henry VII, King, 16 Henry VIII, King, 28, 148–9 Herbert, George, 86, 148 Hesiod, 169n2 Heywood, Thomas, 89, 94, 95, 114, 121, 133, 154, 198n79 Hilary, 95 Hilduin, 6, 8–9 Hippocrates, 119 Hooker, Richard, 10–11, 32, 34–45, 46, 53, 54, 65, 68, 69, 73, 76, 77, 84, 86, 87, 88, 96, 105, 108, 167; anthropology opposed to personal illumination, 37–8, 41, 46, 76, 77, 96; conformism, 35–6, 39, 53, 105; Continuation of These Contentions, 87; defence of common prayer, 43, 54, 96; on angels, 42–3; on church hierarchy and office of bishop, 34, 40–2, 43, 44, 80; on jure divino episcopacy, 41–2; on ordination, 41–2, 44–5, 54, 88, 96, 182n25; on reason, 36, 37, 41, 42, 76, 181n14; on tradition, 37, 38–9; opposition to disciplinarian reform, 35–6, 40, 41, 44, 180n9;

234

Index

opposition to Rome, 36; references to Pseudo-Dionysius, 39, 41, 43; ‘societie supernaturall,’ 11, 34, 43–4, 54, 69, 182n34 – Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie, 34; Autograph Notes, 41; book 1, 36, 38, 41, 42, 45; book 4, 38–9, 40, 41–2, 43, 45; book 5, 40, 43, 45; book 6, 87, 180n8; book 7, 40, 41, 42, 45; book 8, 36, 87; Preface, 36–7 Hosmer, James K., 99, 194n38, 194n40 Hugh of St Victor, 7 Hutchinson, Lucy, 111–12 Hypatius, Bishop, 173n20 Iamblichus, 19, 169n2 Iconoclasts, 106 Idea (ontological category), 3, 11, 63, 64–5, 70, 197n71 Ignatius of Antioch, 105, 107 Incarnation, 50, 53, 77 Innocent IV, Pope, 22 intellection, 37–8, 42, 46, 47–8, 53, 61, 78, 93, 96, 108–9, 110, 122. See also angels, knowledge of Irenaeus, 105, 106, 107 Isidore of Seville, 107, 170n4 Israel, 141, 156, 162 Jacob, 71, 119 James I, King, 60, 62, 65, 67, 68, 124 Jayne, Sears, 45 Jeremiah, 145, 146, 164, 206n15 Jerome, Saint, 16, 71, 95 Jessopp, Augustus, 63 Jesuits, 67 Jesus, 156–7. See also Son, the Jewel, John, 32

Jimenez, Juan, 154 Joachim of Fiore, 22, 26–7, 28, 176n21 John of Patmos, 145 John of Parma, 23, 26 John of Scythopolis, 6, 32, 171n9 John the Damascene, 95 Johnson, William C., 45, 53 Jonson, Ben, 64 Judgment. See eschatology jure divino. See episcopacy, jure divino arguments for Justin Martyr, 68 Kabbalah, 50 Kirby, W.J. Torrance, 41, 42, 43, 181n14 Knollys, Sir Francis, 35 Knoppers, Laura Lunger, 146 Kuchar, Gary, 166 Labriola, Albert, 57 Lacy, Edmund, 119 Lake, Peter, 39, 85 Lambeth Articles, 85 Lateran Council (1215), 93, 176n21 Laud, William, 87, 106 Lavater, Ludwig, 60 Lawrence, Henry, 12, 14, 91, 92–8, 103, 104, 112, 167, 192n17; angels, views on, 92–4, 95–8, 108, 112, 193n28 Lefèvre d’Étaples, Jacques, 8–9, 15, 16, 32, 34 Leontius, 107 Lewalski, Barbara, 11, 64, 84, 106–7, 120, 139, 153, 190n58, 202n39, 202–3n44 Lewis, C.S., 47, 62 liberty of conscience, 35, 91, 93, 99,

Index 101, 102–3, 104, 152, 153, 195–6n52 Liddell, J.R., 32 Lockyer, Nicholas, 92 Lollards, 28, 31, 148. See also Wycliffe, John Lombard, Peter, 20 Long Parliament, 147 Lucifer, 67, 119, 153, 208–9n40 Lucretius, 89, 120 Ludlow, Edmund, 98 Lupset, Thomas, 32 Lupton, J.H., 17 Luther, Martin, 8, 9, 28, 31, 34, 40, 50–1, 85, 92, 93, 94, 106, 113, 181n14, 182n23, 195–6n52 Lydgate, John, 154 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 145 Magnus, Albert. See Albert Magnus Maimonedes, 166 Marprelate, Martin, 35 Marshall, Peter, and Alexandra Walsham, 7. See also Walsham, Alexandra Martz, Louis L., 11, 84, 85 Mary, Virgin, 50, 64, 79, 81, 106, 167 Maximus the Confessor, 6, 32, 171n9 McGinn, Bernard, 26 Mede, Joseph, 147 Melanchthon, Philip, 8 Memling, Hans, 159, 160 Michael (angel), 63, 113, 141–64, 165, 208–9n40, 209n41. See also Milton, Paradise Lost, Michael Michelangelo, 159 Milton, John, 12–14, 85, 86, 87, 94–5, 104–64, 166–7 – Paradise Lost, 12, 91, 104, 107–64,

235

201n30; Abdiel, character in, 109, 116, 117, 124–5; Adam, character in, 13, 115, 117–18, 121–32, 133, 134–5, 137, 139, 140, 155, 156–7, 160, 163, 200n21, 200–1n22, 201n31, 202n39, 202–3n44; angelic creation and fall in, 94–5, 193–4n33; angelic sexuality in, 120, 131; Archangels in, 108, 110–11, 112, 113, 115, 116; bard, 13–14, 118, 137–40, 162–4; Beelzebub, character in, 95, 113; celestial hierarchy in, 107–14, 115–17, 197–8n74; Cherubim in, 108–10, 111, 112, 113, 114; Creation narratives in, 125–7; Eve, character in, 115, 123, 126–8, 130, 131, 134–5, 137, 160, 200n21, 202n39; Gabriel, character in, 108; God the Father, character in, 123–4, 131, 133, 134; Lucifer, character in, 108; Mammon, character in, 107, 129, 153; Michael, character in, 13, 104, 108, 109, 113, 114, 115, 116, 118, 120, 134, 152, 153–62, 167; obedience in, 118, 122–4, 125, 130; Raphael, character in, 13, 95, 104, 115–40, 167, 200n21, 200–1n22, 201nn25, 31, 202n39, 202–3n44, 203n51, 204nn55, 64; Satan, character in, 95, 110, 113, 115, 123, 124–5, 136, 153, 155, 160, 197n64; Seraphim in, 109, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116; Son, the, character in, 133, 134, 160; Uriel, character in, 79, 108, 110, 113, 115, 198n74; war in Heaven, 113, 125, 133, 153, 160; Zophiel, character in, 109, 117 – prose: 13, 14; Animadversions, 105,

236

Index

114, 118, 146, 148; Apology against a Pamphlet, 114, 130; Artis logicae, 118, 120, 124; Civil Power, 134, 149, 151–3, 157, 163–4; De doctrina Christiana, 94–5, 109, 110, 122, 141, 197n72, 198n77, 198–9n4, 201n25; Defences, 145, 149, 162; Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, 130, 148–9; Eikonoklastes, 126, 162; Hirelings, 149–50, 153, 157, 162; Observations on the Articles of Peace, 145; Of Education, 118, 121, 135; Of Prelatical Episcopacy, 105, 106, 117; Of Reformation, 146–8, 150, 151; Prolusions, 162; Readie and Easie Way, 145–6, 150–1; Reason of Church Government, 87, 104, 107, 120–1, 130–1, 144–5, 151, 201n31; Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 97–8, 144 – shorter poems: Elegy 1, 130; Elegy 3, 143; Lycidas, 14, 142–3, 144, 155, 162; On the Death of a Fair Infant, 143; On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity, 143; Paradise Regained, 108, 197n68; Sonnet 17, 13, 91; Sonnet 19, 117; Sonnet 20, 12, 91; Upon the Massacre at Piedmont, 150 Mollerus, Fredericus, 154 Montagu, Richard, 91 Moorman, John, 22 More, Henry, 12, 94, 116, 190n57 More, Sir Thomas, 9, 10, 15, 37, 62, 66, 85, 119 Moses, 71, 75, 94, 128, 156, 157 Mueller, Janel, 57 Murtola, Garparo, 154 mysticism, 4, 9, 26, 27, 32, 37–8, 45–6, 47–8, 50–1, 52–3, 65, 74, 77, 82–4, 89, 166, 190n57

Napier, John, 119, 147 Nazianzen, Gregory, 95 Neoplatonism, 4, 11, 17, 20, 35, 45, 46, 48, 49–50, 51, 52, 56, 62, 74, 84, 122, 123, 127–8, 133, 169n2, 190n57 Nicea, Council of (787), 189n47, 209–10n1 Nijenhuis, Willem, 41 Noah, 119, 155, 163, 164 Nyquist, Mary, xi, 203n54 Oates, Mary I., 45 Oath of Allegiance (Jacobean), 65–6, 67–8 Oath of Supremacy, 68 ordination, 11, 29, 40–1, 54, 69, 79–80, 87–8, 96, 105–6, 182nn23, 25 Origen, 95, 192–3n23 Original Sin, 47, 64, 135, 136 Orlando Furioso. See Ariosto Overall, John, 85 Ovid, 132 Padelford, F.M., 45 Papias, 107 Parker, Matthew, 31 Parliament, 30, 35, 97, 98, 144, 147, 149, 150, 151–3, 162, 165 Parnham, David, 99, 101–2 Parsons, Robert, 65 Patrides, C.A., 7, 33, 54, 107–8 Paul, Saint, 3, 16, 17, 19, 87, 88, 117, 135 Perkins, William, 112 Peri, Giovandomenico, 154 Petrarch, 46, 55, 56, 62, 82 Philip I of Castile, 16 Philo, 128, 169n2, 192–3n23

Index Photius, 107, 173n20 physician, 115, 117, 119, 120–1, 124, 128, 140 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni, 9, 16–17, 20, 34, 38, 45, 115, 119, 122, 140 Plato, 3, 4, 14, 19, 35, 56, 57, 62, 66, 119, 130–1, 133, 184n54; Gorgias, 124; Phaedrus, 120; Philebus, 145; Republic, 3, 167; Sophist, 131; Symposium, 3, 120, 127–8, 169n2; Timaeus, 120, 126 Plotinus, 17–18, 19, 133, 169n2 Plutarch, 169n2 Polycarp, 105, 107 Polycrates, 107 Porter, H.C., 31 Pound, Ezra, 86 predestination, 85 Presbyterians, 97, 103, 105, 144, 151, 195–6n52 Prescott, Anne Lake, 53 Proclus, 3, 7, 9, 19, 33, 49, 51, 133, 169n2 Provost, Jan, 160 Prudentius, 50 Psellus, Michael, 12 Pseudo-Dionysius. See Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite puritans, 35, 44, 65, 67, 69, 87, 106, 108, 111, 112 Quitslund, Jon A., 45, 49–50, 52 Rainolds, John, 32 Ramus, Peter, 118, 119. See also dialectic Ranters, 101 Raphael (angel), 115, 117, 118–19. See also Milton, Paradise Lost, Raphael

237

Raphael of Urbino, 154 Recusants, 66, 67 Redemption, 47, 77, 101, 106, 133, 157 Reeves, Marjorie, 27 Rembrandt, Harmenszoon van rijn, 137, 138 repristination. See church, repristination Restoration, the, 162 Revard, Stella P., 143–4, 150, 154 Rice, Eugene F., 15 Roman Catholicism, 8, 11, 35, 38–9, 63, 66–7, 71, 79, 81, 84, 85–6, 107, 110, 142–3, 148, 152, 195–6n52, 196n58, 208n34, 209–10n1 Roques, René, 9 Rosenblatt, Jason P., 121 Ross, Alexander, 94 Royal Supremacy, 35 Rubens, Peter Paul, 154 Rumrich, John P., 128, 200n14 sacraments, 4, 11, 18, 20, 22, 23, 30–1, 39, 67, 85, 167. See also Eucharist; ordination Saints (puritan), 91, 92, 93, 96, 97, 98, 100–1, 102, 103, 104, 163, 165, 195n50. See also election Salkeld, John, 61, 71–2, 122 Samuel, Irene, 120 Sandys, George, 132 Sara (character in Genesis), 121 Sarah (character in Tobit), 119, 136, 137, 200n15 Saravia, Hadrianus, 10–11, 34, 38, 41–2, 68–9, 73, 87, 105, 182n28 Sarrazin, John, 7 Satan (biblical character), 141, 153, 154, 160, 198n79

238

Index

Saurat, Denis, 50 Scot, Reginald, 60 Seebohm, Fredric, 15, 31 Seraphim, 4, 20, 24, 25, 26, 29, 48, 51, 63, 71, 109, 111, 112, 113, 114, 176n19 Shami, Jeanne, 85, 189n48 Sherman, Edmund, 165 Shuger, Debora K., 36, 44 Sibbes, Richard, 112 Sikes, George, 99, 100, 102, 103, 128, 135, 152, 196n53, 202n42 Smith, Nigel, 89 sola gratia, 11, 65, 71, 84 sola Scriptura, 11, 65, 71, 73 Solemn League and Covenant, 144 Solomon, 68 Son, the, 18, 20, 26, 28, 47, 49, 50, 82, 94, 95, 101, 124, 125, 133, 134, 144, 146, 154, 155, 157–60, 163, 184n55 Spanish Armada, victory over, 35 Spenser, Edmund, 10–11, 34–5, 45–54, 84, 167; Amoretti, 11, 52, 53; Faerie Queene, 3, 11, 51, 52, 53, 81 – Fowre Hymnes, 11, 34–5, 45–54, 56, 84; Beauty, 46, 49; celestial hierarchy in, 35, 46, 51, 53, 84, 185n77; Christian Platonism, 45; conformism, 46; Dame Sapience, 46, 49–51, 52, 84; godhead, 50–1; Hymne in Honour of Beautie, 46, 52; Hymne in Honour of Love, 46, 52; Hymne of Heavenly Beautie, 34–5, 46, 47–53, 84; Hymne of Heavenly Love, 34, 45–6, 46–7, 50, 51, 52, 53, 84, 185n75; mysticism, 34–5, 45–6, 50–1, 52–3, 84; Neoplatonism, 35, 45, 46, 48, 49–50, 51, 52 Spinrad, Phoebe, 60, 61–2 St Amour, William of, 5, 23

St Victor, Hugh of, 32 St Victor, Richard of, 32 Starkey, Thomas, 37 Stoicism, 75 Strier, Richard, 75, 76 Stubbe, Henry, 102, 103, 148, 195–6n52 Succubi, 62 Tasso, Torquato, 63, 141–2 Taubmann, Friedrich, 154 Tauler, Johann, 7, 9, 38, 51, 181n17 Temple Church, 40 Tertullian, 68, 105 theurgia (holy works), 4, 40, 91, 106, 166 things indifferent. See adiaphora Thirty-Nine Articles, 73, 189n48 Thomas Aquinas, Saint, 5–6, 7, 20, 37, 46, 60–1, 62; angelology of, 60–1, 72, 78, 93, 95, 108–9, 110, 111, 112, 116, 122, 166, 182n32, 197n71, 201n30, 201–2n32 Thomas Gallus, 7 Thomas of York, 7 Timothy, 87, 117. See also Index of Biblical Passages Titus, 87, 117. See also Index of Biblical Passages Tobias, 119, 129, 136, 137, 140, 163, 200n15, 203n51 Tobit (biblical character), 136–7, 139, 162, 163, 164 tradition, 85–6 Trapp, J.B., 15 Travers, Walter, 39–40 Traversari, Ambrogio, 8, 34 Trent, Council of (1547), 85 Trinity, 20, 26, 28, 50, 81, 89, 103, 133 triple triad, 4, 24, 169–70n2. See also

Index Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite, Celestial Hierarchy Trithemius, Johannes, 119 Tyndale, William, 31, 85 Udall, Nicholas, 32 Ussher, James, 67, 87, 105, 107, 117 Valla, Lorenzo, 7–8, 33–4 Valmarana, Odoricus, 154 Valvasone, Erasmo di, 153, 154 van den Vondel, Joost, 119, 154 van der Stockt, Vrancke, 159 van der Weyden, Rogier, 159 van Eyck, Jan, 159 van Orley, 159 Vane, Margaret (daughter of Sir Henry the younger), 100, 195n44 Vane, Sir Henry the younger, 13, 14, 91, 92, 93, 98–104, 105, 108, 112, 135, 152–3, 163, 167, 194nn38, 40; celestial order, views on, 94, 102–4, 108, 112, 163, 196n53; Healing Question, 98–9, 100; liberty of conscience, views on, 93, 100–3, 195–6n52; Needfull Corrective, 99; Pilgrimage into the Land of Promise, 99–100; Retired Mans Meditations, 91, 99–103, 193n31; spiritualism, 99–103, 135; Two Treatises, 99; unpublished writings, 100 Vickers, Brian, 36 Victorellus, 63 Victorines, 7, 32

239

Vives, Juan Luis, 32 Waldensians, 149–50, 162 Walker, John. See Deacon, John, and John Walker Wall, John N., 51 Walsham, Alexandra, 165, 189n47. See also Marshall, Peter, and Alexandra Walsham Walshe, Thomas, 32 Walton, Izaak, 34 Walzer, Michael, 112 war in Heaven, 154. See also Milton, Paradise Lost, war in Heaven; Index of Biblical Passages Webster, John, 166 Welsford, Enid, 45, 46, 49 West, Robert H., 12, 107, 113, 115 Whalen, Robert, 85 White, John, 94 Whitgift, John, 10, 35, 37, 38, 40, 41, 44, 54, 69, 87, 180n11, 181n18 Whore of Babylon, 75–6 Willet, Andrew, 68–9 Wither, George, 143, 154 Wollebius, John, 94, 141, 153 Wolsey, Cardinal, 29 Woolrych, Austin, 153 Wright, Abraham, 94 Wycliffe, John, 7, 147–8, 149 Young, R.V., 11, 62, 84–5 Zanchi, Girolamo, 61, 114 Zwingli, Ulrich, 8

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Index

241

Index of Biblical Passages

Genesis 1.3–4, 93 Genesis 3.24, 160 Genesis 18, 121 Deuteronomy 32.7–10, 75 Job 4.18, 71 Job 41, 208n38 Proverbs 8.23, 49 Isaiah, 112, 176n19 Isaiah 6.2, 48, 71, 109, 116, 199n5 Isaiah 14.12, 95 Isaiah 27.1, 208n38 Isaiah 54.1, 101 Jeremiah 15.10, 206n16 Ezekiel 1, 114 Daniel, 14, 141–2, 143–4, 155, 157, 162 Daniel 10, 113 Daniel 10.21, 142 Daniel 12.1–2, 141, 195n45 Daniel 12.2, 160 Daniel 12.7, 195n45 Zechariah 3.2, 113 Zechariah 4.10, 108 Zechariah 14.1–2, 195n45 Malachi 4.2, 4 Tobit, 13, 118, 119, 140, 203n51 Tobit 3.17, 136 Tobit 8.5–7, 129

Tobit 12.15, 108, 115 Tobit 12.19, 121 Tobit 13.6–7, 136–7 Tobit 14.4–6, 137 Matthew 5.9, 97 Matthew 13.26–31, 207n33 Matthew 25.6, 195n45 John 8.44, 94, 95 Acts 12.15, 92–3 Acts 17.34, 6, 86, 192n12 Romans, 16 Romans 7.2–3, 101 1 Corinthians, 16, 17 1 Corinthians 3.22–3, 195n45 1 Corinthians 11.10, 96, 182n34 1 Corinthians 15.45–6, 135 2 Corinthians 8.23, 199n7 Galatians, 16, 175n5 Ephesians, 175n5 Ephesians 1.21, 88, 95, 107, 191n9 Ephesians 3.10, 182n34 Ephesians 6, 93, 97 Philippians, 175n5 Colossians, 175n5 Colossians 1.16, 88, 107, 191n9 Colossians 2.18, 73

242

Index of Biblical Passages

1 Thessalonians, 175n5 1 Thessalonians 4.16, 71, 112–13 2 Thessalonians 2.3, 195n45 1 Timothy, 175n5 1 Timothy 1.3–4, 199n6 1 Timothy 3.3, 105 1 Timothy 4.1–2, 195n45 1 Timothy 4.14, 105 1 Timothy 5.21, 182n34 2 Timothy, 175n5 2 Timothy 3.1, 195n45 Titus, 175n5 Titus 1.5, 199n7 Philemon, 175n5 Hebrews, 175n5 Hebrews 1.14, 12, 91, 92, 103, 112, 143, 165, 192n18 Hebrews 12, 195n45 James, 175n5

1 Peter, 175n5 1 Peter 1.12, 182n34 2 Peter, 175n5 2 Peter 1.4, 99 1 John, 175n5 Jude, 175n5 Jude 9, 113 Revelation, 14, 108, 141–2, 143–4, 155, 157 Revelation 4, 114 Revelation 7.2–3, 72, 79 Revelation 11.2, 195n45 Revelation 11.8, 195n45 Revelation 12, 47, 153 Revelation 12.7, 113 Revelation 12.7–9, 141 Revelation 13.15–17, 102 Revelation 19.10, 73 Revelation 22.8–9, 73