Spenser, Donne, and the theology of joy

Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Wntr, 2006 by Adam Potkay

  But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering,
  gentleness, goodness, faith, [m]eekness, temperance: against such
  there is no law.
  --Galatians 5:22-3 (1)

Joy becomes an anxious concern during the Protestant Reformation in both Germany and, my focus here, England. English Protestant writing of the early modern era vividly evokes both joy and, conversely, the threat of joylessness in Christian life. Yet the importance of joy to Christianity and particularly Protestant Christianity, although recognized by theologians, has gone largely unnoticed by literary and cultural historians of Reformation England, and the specter of joylessness has, to my knowledge, elicited no scholarly comment at all. (2) My aims in this essay are, first, to demonstrate that joy and joylessness were of peculiar interest to early Protestant theology and the literature it influenced and, second, to offer an explanation of why this was so.

I argue that within the Protestant "pluriverse" of souls each striving for God and struggling against Satan or fallen human nature, joy serves as a countervailing, centripetal force, a sign and surety of adhesion to God and neighbor. For the individual soul seeking signs of its salvation, joy, no less than "good works," is a proof or "earnest" of its sanctification by the Holy Spirit. Joy is one of the first three "fruits of the Spirit" in Galatians 5:22 (love and peace are the others). Christian joy is joy in or inspired by the Holy Spirit (Rom. 14:17, 1 Thess. 1:6). In John's Gospel, Jesus promises his community of believers, the "friends," "that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full" (15:11). Thus, for scriptural commentators who held the Word to be, in Martin Luther's phrase, "'the true treasure of the Church,'" joy came to be adduced as an index of the Spirit's presence in personal life as well as in interpersonal life within a universal or national church. (3) Yet even as joy rose to prominence as a free gift of God that assured God's presence, it was also addressed, somewhat paradoxically, as an obligation or duty, particularly in its active form of rejoicing.

Conversely, joylessness came to be seen as a sign of the Spirit's absence from the life of the individual believer and from the corporate Church, a corollary of a lack of love for God and neighbor. Indeed, what distinguishes the Protestant discourse of joy from medieval or Continental Catholic theology and literature is not only its emphasis on joy and rejoicing but also, and more strikingly, its anxiety over joylessness. Thus, for example, Edmund Spenser's Christian knight Redcrosse battles--but does not conclusively defeat--an antagonist named Sans-Joy ("without joy"), a character without significant analogue in the Mediterranean epic and romance traditions upon which Spenser drew. (4) In order to illustrate the Protestant dynamic of joy and joylessness, I briefly examine selected works of German and English theology before turning to a more detailed examination of two milestones of English literary and church history, the first book of Spenser's The Faerie Queene and John Donne's collected Sermons.

JOY AND JOYLESSNESS IN EARLY PROTESTANT THEOLOGY

The northern European Reformation, often viewed (at least in historically Protestant countries) as a milestone in the history of human freedom, may of course be viewed as precisely the opposite of that: a historical episode of spiritual fear and trembling, a renewed sense of bondage to sin and indebtedness to the Lord, and the resuscitation of the Church militant. (5) We might list among the ills that arose during the early Reformation a host of superstitious beliefs comparatively unimportant during the Middle Ages: Satan's daily presence as a formidable foe; the threat of lesser demons, witches, and warlocks (along with the public burning of witches); and, with the rejection of the doctrine of Purgatory, the fear of hellfire as the sole alternative to sanctification.

Nevertheless--perhaps as a counterweight to its darker side--the Protestant Reformation was a watershed in the cultural history of the term "joy." Protestant writers appeal to joy with novel urgency, even at times with anxiety. Joy features prominently in Protestant and especially Protestant-evangelical hymns, songs, sermons, discourses, and testimonies from Luther and Johann Sebastian Bach to the contemporary American gospel group, Mighty Clouds of Joy.

Why this special emphasis on the invocation of joy? The primary reason, I suggest, lies in Protestantism's break (a partial break in some churches, a complete one in others) with the sacramental theology of medieval and Catholic Christianity. Protestant churches and congregations have, to varying degrees, supplemented or supplanted the medieval and Catholic mysticism of sacrament and ritual with a mysticism of the Holy Spirit, and the first three "fruits of the spirit" are, as Paul tells us, "love, joy [chara], [and] peace."

It is worth pausing over Paul's Letter to the Galatians and its commentary tradition: the differences between several major commentaries, one late medieval and three Protestant, may suggest the broader differences in joy theology between the Roman and Reformed churches. St. Thomas Aquinas, one of the few pre-sixteenth-century theologians to write a major commentary on Galatians, is, in keeping with his philosophy of the passions, the only one to comment significantly on love, joy, and peace as fruits of the Spirit. (6) These fruits are, Aquinas argues in a eudaimonistic vein, the virtues that perfect us inwardly (love, joy, peace) and outwardly (goodness, patience, chastity, and so on). Of the inward virtues Aquinas writes philosophically, even psychologically. Love is "the inclination to good"; joy "proceeds from the presence of the thing loved"; peace comes when "the lover ... adequately possesses the object loved." (7) Aquinas's analysis contains no overt theology. Although his vehicle of human love assumes a tenor of love divine, it does so in terms drawn ultimately from Plato and Aristotle, not from Paul, or at least not Paul as we have been taught to read him by Protestant theology.