Spenser, Donne, and the theology of joy

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

Joy takes on a dual importance in Protestant discourse and demeanor, both as a presence and as an absence: the ideal joy of grace and the actuality of joylessness or merely carnal joy. Spiritual joy, so intensely desirable in Protestant theology, announces its elusiveness through the very insistence with which it is invoked. Exhortations (or commands) to rejoice in the right way are also admissions that such rejoicing is scarce. Invoking joy may even be viewed as a form of magic, of naming something in order to have authority over it or summon it into being.

Luther recognized the lack of joy as a spiritual problem in his own life. He commented on Isaiah 55:12 ("For ye shall go out with joy"): "We can mark our lack of faith by our joy; for our joy must necessarily be as great as our faith." (30) And in a Christmas sermon of 1543, he offered this personal reflection: "I am intensely displeased with myself and detest myself because I know that all that Scripture says about Christ is true and that there can be nothing greater, nothing more important, nothing more pleasant, nothing more joyful. It should fill me with supreme joy ... yet the malice of my flesh prevents it, and the law of sin has so thoroughly taken me captive that I cannot fill all my members, all my bones, and my innermost being with this blessing of Christ as I surely would like to do." (31)

Luther's anxieties over faith and final judgment are well known. Indeed, Luther is arguably the author who turned the German word angst toward its modern existential sense of pervasive gloom and oppressive, future-oriented worry. (32) Spiritual joy is, for Luther, a proposed antidote to angst; yet its elusiveness is, finally, a new source of anxiety. Joylessness became a new site of dubious battle with the flesh and the devil or a new demon against which the wayfaring Christian must contend.

THE THREAT OF JOYLESSNESS: SPENSER AND DONNE ON THE ENGLISH CHURCH

The specter of joylessness looms in The Faerie Queene (1590-96), written roughly forty years after Edward VI and his advisors made Protestantism the official policy of the Church of England. A generation after Spenser, John Donne addressed joylessness as an explicit problem in his Sermons, the polished and posthumously published versions of sermons he delivered from Church of England pulpits between his ordination in 1615 and his death in 1631. (He became the Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral in 1621.) In his homiletic mode Donne sought to turn the tide of joylessness by presenting joy as biblically enjoined; as presumptive evidence of the individual's anxiously sought favor with God; and, finally, as crucial to the corporate life of the church in England. Connecting Spenser's epic romance and Donne's sermons is a shared perception of the threat of joylessness to the life of the universal church and the church in England or, in protonationalist terms, of England.

Book I of Spenser's The Faerie Queene is subtitled "The Legend of the Knight of the Red Crosse or [an allegory] of Holinesse." (33) The book allegorizes both the making of a saint and the history of the Christian Church. On one level, the Red Cross Knight, or simply "Redcrosse," represents the beginning Christian who gradually conforms to the example of Christ and recognizes himself as a saint (Saint George, to be exact). His proper place is with the lady Una--who represents the "true church," i.e., the primitive Christian and the Protestant reformed Church--and his improper place is with Duessa--i.e., the unreformed medieval church and the sixteenth-century church of Rome. On another level, Redcrosse also represents the "spirit of holiness" in history. Working through Spenser's ecclesiastical allegory, John J. O'Connor sees Una as "the visible Church" and Redcrosse as the spirit of holiness, together comprising "the one true Church." (34)