Spenser, Milton, and the Redemption of the Epic Hero

By Christopher Bond

This book studies the interplay of theology and poetics in the three great epics of early-modern England: the Faerie Queene, Paradise Lost, and Paradise Regained. Bond examines the relationship between the poems’ primary heroes, Arthur and the Son, who are godlike, virtuous, and powerful, and the secondary heroes, Redcrosse and Adam, who are human, fallible, and weak. He looks back at the development of this pattern of dual heroism in classical, Medieval, and Italian Renaissance literature, investigates the ways in which Spenser and Milton adapted the model, and demonstrates how the Jesus of Paradise Regained can be seen as the culmination of this tradition. Challenging the opposition between “Calvinist,” “allegorical” Spenser and “Arminian,” “dramatic” Milton, this book offers a new account of their doctrinal and literary affinities within the European epic tradition. Arguing that Spenser influenced Milton in fundamental ways, Bond establishes a firmer structural and thematic link between the two authors, and shows how they transformed a strongly antifeminist genre by the addition of a crucial, although at times ambivalent, heroine. He also proposes solutions to some of the most difficult and controversial theological cruxes posed by these poems, in particular Spenser’s attitude to free will and Milton’s to the Trinity. By providing a deeper understanding of the religious agendas of these epics, this book encourages a rapprochement between scholarly approaches that are too narrowly concerned with either theology or poetics.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Delaware Press
• Release date: Apr 29, 2011
• ISBN: 9781644531310

Book preview

Introduction

This book is a study of a structural pattern in epic poetry, which I call dual heroism. The essence of the pattern—which has not, so far as I am aware, attracted the attention of scholars—is this. Some poems have two heroes: a primary hero, who is godlike, perfect in ethical virtue and paramount in physical power; and a secondary hero, who is human, fallible and weak. The secondary hero is hampered by his own failings—his rashness, ignorance and amorousness—and eventually falls into a state of profound sin. The job of the primary hero then is to intervene and save the secondary hero from the consequences of his own folly. After this moment of crisis, the secondary hero can continue his progress toward his epic goal, while the primary hero fades into the background. The primary hero tends to be detached and static; the secondary is mutable, and his career the plot of the epic. The primary hero’s relatively fleeting appearances in the poem provide us with the ideal example of virtue to which we should aspire. Our more sustained engagement with the secondary hero provides us with the human interest which the perfect, primary hero lacks, as well as with a more attainable example of error and redemption.

This pattern of dual heroism is found, in a relatively simple form, in a variety of narrative poems and, implicitly, in certain Renaissance theories of epic. It was a powerful didactic tool for poets across several eras and from several nations. It also serves as a means for the modern reader better to gauge and understand the differences in literary technique employed by poets of contrasting cultural and religious backgrounds. Its most sophisticated use is in the three great religious poems of early-modern England: Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene and John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. The primary hero of book 1 of The Faerie Queene is Arthur, and the secondary the Redcrosse Knight; in Paradise Lost, respectively the Son of God, and Adam. In Paradise Regained, Milton combines elements of the two kinds of hero in the single figure of Jesus, the human who is also God, the perfect hero who still must learn and grow.

In the hands of Spenser and, following Spenser, Milton, the pattern became more complicated, and therefore more interesting. These two Protestant poets were alarmed at the distance between the godlike perfection of the primary hero, who stood for divine grace, and the all-too-human degeneracy of the secondary. They were more acutely aware than their pagan or Catholic precursors of the gulf between what a Christian should be, as represented by Arthur and by the Son, and what a Christian was, as represented by Redcrosse and Adam. The salvific interventions of the primary heroes of Spenser and Milton are therefore still a crucial beginning to the redemption of the secondary hero, but they also have the immediate effect of plunging their secondary heroes into despair. In their encounters with Arthur and the Son, Redcrosse and Adam are confronted with their own deficiencies, and neither poet evinces much confidence in the ability of his fallen protagonist to save himself unaided. The process of salvation for the two English writers is more complex and protracted, and it entails considerable refinement and sophistication of the dual-hero model.

This development is twofold. First, a female character, Una or Eve, is introduced. Her role is to help the secondary hero to recover from his despair and to find his path to salvation. Both of these heroines stand for the Protestant church, and both go some considerable way to redeeming the inherent misogyny of an epic tradition in which a woman—archetypally Virgil’s Dido—tended to hinder rather than to help the hero. The second major innovation is in the character of the primary hero. Arthur and the Son remain extraordinary in power and virtue. But because Spenser and Milton want to show how their readers themselves might become better Christians, the primary hero cannot remain a wholly static exemplar. Instead he must evolve in order to model for the secondary hero, and hence for the reader, the process of self-realization that is at the core of these poems. At the same time, however, this primary hero still must model perfection. The difficult—perhaps impossible—task of Spenser and Milton was to show development and growth in a supposedly flawless hero, and an examination of their often unsuccessful attempts to achieve this allows what I hope are fresh insights into their literary techniques.

This investigation of dual heroism yields a number of important conclusions. First, it demonstrates a fundamental way in which Spenser influenced Milton, both as an epic poet and a religious writer. The strength of this influence has been doubted by some scholars and considered only in the vaguest terms by many more. But this book establishes a firmer structural and thematic link between two authors whom critics often have struggled to connect. Secondly, a reading of the narrative poetry of Spenser and Milton side-by-side corrects the view that the allegorical Spenser is hopelessly old-fashioned in comparison with the realistic Milton. Thirdly, the examination of the ways in which the two English poets adapted the basic pattern of dual heroism allows us to explore how and why a narratological device develops over time. In particular, this study reveals both how a strongly anti-feminist genre was transformed by the addition of a crucial—although at times ambivalent—heroine, and how a peculiarly Protestant concern with dialogue and self-realization altered the very nature of epic heroism and narrative structure. Finally, this book proposes solutions to some of the most difficult and controversial theological cruxes posed by these poems, and in particular Spenser’s attitude to free will and Milton’s to the Trinity. Too little scholarship on these questions has been devoted to treating The Faerie Queene, Paradise Lost, and Paradise Regained as poems. But by re-emphasizing the status of these works as literary narratives, I hope both to further understanding of their religious agendas and, more broadly, to encourage a rapprochement between scholarly approaches that are too narrowly concerned either with theology or with poetics.

The first chapter—The Two Heroes of Epic—begins by addressing the general issue of epics with more than one hero. It goes on to examine the work of three writers whose narrative poems certainly anticipate and probably inspire the pattern of the dual heroes employed by Spenser and Milton, thereby offering fresh ways of reading Lucan’s De Bello Civili, Torquato Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata, and William Langland’s Vision of Piers Plowman. It concludes with a consideration of how the dual-hero model corresponds to the two functions traditionally attributed to heroic poetry in the Renaissance: to teach and to entertain. The second chapter—The Transformation of Epic Heroism in the Italian Renaissance—complements this study of poetic origins by setting out the theoretical basis of the dual-hero pattern in the prolific and sophisticated critical writings of sixteenth-century Italy. It first examines the basis for Renaissance theories of heroism and characterization in interpretations (and misinterpretations) of Aristotle and Horace, before considering the ensuing controversy between the theorists of epic who believed that only a wholly perfect hero would do and those who preferred a humbler, flawed exemplar. In these debates over Tasso’s Liberata and Dante’s Commedia, we discover the basic foundations of the development of epic characterization in Early Modern England.

The third chapter—The Legend of Holiness and the Fall of Man—is a sustained comparison of book 1 of The Faerie Queene and books 9 and 10 of Paradise Lost. It opens with the vexed question of Spenser’s influence on Milton and suggests that it is in the area of characterization that the most fruitful work remains to be done on this issue. It then describes in turn how each of the main characters in the Legend of Holiness has his or her Miltonic counterpart and thus shows the particular ways in which these two Protestant poets refined and adapted the basic model of the dual heroes provided by earlier writers. The fourth chapter—The Salvation of Adam and the Redcrosse Knight—extends and deepens this comparison to focus on four specific areas in which the literary and theological affinities between Spenser and Milton are at their closest: the rescue of the secondary hero from error; the role of the heroines, Una and Eve, in this salvation and their cooperation with the primary heroes; the emphasis on the centrality of rational conversation to redemption; and the importance of free will to man’s salvation. It concludes by relating these points of comparison to the broader issue of the balance between religious and poetic imperatives in The Faerie Queene and in Paradise Lost.

The fifth chapter—Spenser’s Arthur: The Education of a Christian Prince—considers the ways in which the ambiguous but essential hero of The Faerie Queene provides a model for Milton’s portrayals of Christ. It initially considers the question of whether the enthusiasm of Renaissance theorists for a flawless hero was borne out by literary practice before examining first the extent to which Spenser’s primary hero unifies his disparate epic, and secondly how the young prince may be understood as Spenser’s portrait of an immature ruler with much to learn. It concludes that, like the Son in Paradise Lost and Jesus in Paradise Regained, Arthur is at once perfect and evolving—an exemplar whose virtue is paramount but whose ignorance of his own role and identity provides scope for development and change. The sixth chapter—The Evolving Perfection of Milton’s Christ—begins by considering the literary problems Milton faced in turning God into an epic character. It then turns to the first of Milton’s divine heroes and argues that by a more careful analysis of the Son’s status as a literary character we may bring some clarity to the often confused efforts of Miltonists to explicate the poet’s Christology. It goes on to offer a new reading of the Jesus of Paradise Regained, who combines elements of the primary and secondary heroes to become the ultimate figure of evolving perfection. This reading demonstrates how, by showing his Jesus surpass each of the primary and secondary heroes of this study, Milton establishes a new brand of exemplary, self-realizing heroism. Finally, the Epilogue—"The Two Heroes of Wordsworth’s Prelude"—suggests how William Wordsworth learnt from the interiorized heroism of Milton’s Jesus for his own epic of teaching, learning, and spiritual growth.

This book thus has a slightly unusual trajectory. It begins in first-century Rome, with a poem from which the gods are banished, and goes on to investigate ideas about epic heroism in seicento literary criticism. But it ends by considering Edmund Spenser’s alleged Calvinism and John Milton’s alleged Arianism. Some readers may wonder whether a book about poetic form can or should also be a book about religious dogma. But scholars have been too reluctant to relate questions of literary technique to questions of theological didacticism. I therefore make no apology for this route, although I should offer some explanation.

As I began this project, I was firmly told by a distinguished scholar of early modern literature that I might work on comparative epic, or on Protestant poetry, but not on both. I ignored this advice primarily because of a desire to show that a better appreciation of how narrative poems work as imaginative fictions can shed much-needed light on how the same poems work as statements of religious belief. In order to discover what The Faerie Queene has to say about free will and salvation, and what Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained have to say about the nature of the Godhead, we have first to pay closer attention to the stories they tell, the characters they present, and the thoughts and emotions they are designed to inspire in the reader. Thus I begin with Lucan and the Italian theorists better to understand Redcrosse, Una, and Arthur, and Adam, Eve, and the Son of God.

At the center of this study, as at the center of these poems, is the principle of didactic exemplarity. Spenser and Milton, in common with almost every other epic poet of the Renaissance, wanted to educate their readers. More specifically, they wanted to make their readers into better Christians: that is, men and women who understood and enacted the essential precepts of Christianity—love, obedience, Holinesse,—and who thought more or less as the poet did on matters such as predestination and Christology. Spenser and Milton, again in common with their poetic precursors, believed that the best way to educate a reader in moral and religious doctrine was to show him or her a character engaged in an action that illustrated the good consequences of following that doctrine and the bad consequences of ignoring it. It was a matter of literary common sense that the more engaging a character and the more entertaining the action, the stronger the reader’s interest and the more effective the teaching. In short, to get one’s theology across, one had first to come up with a good story with convincing heroes. Such a statement of epic modus operandi may seem reductive, but it is never wrong and must form the basis for any complete reading of these poems.

chapter one

The Two Heroes of Epic

Naming the Poem

In the preface to his 1758 edition of The Faerie Queene, John Upton makes a suggestive observation on the relation between the name of an epic and its heroic structure: "Again, ‘tis observable that Homer’s poem, though he sings the anger of Achilles, is not called the Achilleid, but the Iliad; because the action was at Troy. So Spenser does not call his poem by the name of his chief hero; but because his chief hero sought for the Fairy Queen in Fairy Land, and therein performed his various adventures, therefore he entitles his poem The Fairy Queen" (Var. 1:322). It would be inappropriate, Upton contends, to name a poem after a principal character who appears in the story only periodically. A collective name, the name of a place, is more suitable for an epic with more than one hero. Upton’s claim that The Faerie Queene abides by this rule seems a little strained, since Gloriana does appear in the poem, after a fashion, in Arthur’s dream and in the figure of Belphoebe. But his point still holds that Spenser did not mean to write a straightforward Arthuriad.

Upton’s remark might prompt us to categorize other narrative poems by their titles. The Iliad and The Faerie Queene focus on a number of different heroes, and so are named after no particular one of them. Instead each takes its title from a location or from a person who, as Upton points out, is essentially synonymous with a location. The Odyssey, the Aeneid, and Beowulf are more concerned with the career of an individual character and are named accordingly. The title of Apollonius Rhodius’ Argonautica reminds us, in contrast, that the leader of the expedition, Jason, is anything but a strong, resourceful, and individualistic mariner in the manner of Odysseus, and that the enterprise of the men who sailed in the eponymous boat is a collective one. The two epics of Statius provide a convenient example of this distinction. The Thebaid narrates the exploits of seven heroes, and so is named, like the Iliad, after the city they besiege. The Achilleid, on the other hand, sets out to describe the career of the hero of the Iliad before he reaches Troy. Historical epics also tend to fall into the first category: Lucan’s De Bello Civili with its three contrasting heroes, Pompey, Caesar, and Cato; and Silius’ Punica, which similarly tells the story of lengthy and complex war in which no single commander is preeminent throughout.

Two other epics of the Renaissance conform to this pattern in which poems with multiple heroes tend to be named after a place or an event.1 Torquato Tasso first called his poem Il Goffredo, but the title under which it was published—La Gerusalemme liberata—describes the spiritual end, rather than the military means, of the First Crusade and also stresses its essentially collective nature. As it was received by later poets such as Spenser and John Milton, Tasso’s epic thus privileges neither Goffredo nor Rinaldo. While Goffredo is plainly in charge of the campaign, Rinaldo is just as plainly essential to its success, and provides moreover the principal focus of the poem’s emotional drama. In the same way, and in probable imitation of the Liberata, Milton avoids writing an Adamiad (or Adam unparadiz’d), a Christiad, or even a Sataniad by naming his poem after a place. The lost paradise of Eden, like the conquest of Jerusalem, represents a spiritual condition and a decisive religious event in which all three of his major characters play their necessary parts.

These three major Renaissance poems—the Liberata, The Faerie Queene, and Paradise Lost—share the important feature that Upton identified in the Iliad: they have more than one hero. More specifically, these three poems have two principal heroes. Tasso gives to Goffredo and Rinaldo more space and more significance than he does to Tancredi or to any other crusaders (or Muslims). Although several of Spenser’s knights (Arthur aside) appear in more than one book, the fundamental structure of his poem rests on the particular adventure of each one of six heroes and on the assistance Arthur lends to each hero in the appropriate book. For Milton true heroism is found in the Son and in Adam, since the virtù of Satan, while initially impressive, is always parodic and ultimately utterly degraded. In Paradise Lost these two characters conform to the pattern of the dual heroes that we see in Tasso and Spenser.2 Goffredo, Arthur, and the Son are in some way superior—in rank, age, power, wisdom, or moral virtue—to the hero with whom each shares center-stage. But the inferior heroes—Rinaldo; Spenser’s lesser knights, especially Redcrosse; and Adam—all attract far more of the reader’s sympathy and interest. Their adventures are narrated in greater detail, and hence we see more of their human weaknesses.3

My general concern will be with the way in which Spenser and Milton develop these two heroic types—the primary and secondary heroes—and with the crucial interactions between these heroes that focus much of the ethical instruction of their didactic religious poems. These interactions reveal a great deal about the theological schemes that these poets espouse and about the way in which they believe that poetic narrative could best teach theology to their readers. Thomas Greene has analyzed the relationship between the primary, deliberative hero (such as Agamemnon or Goffredo) and the secondary, executive hero (such as Achilles or Rinaldo), and has suggested, too, that Milton’s God and Adam may fit into the same pattern.4 Greene’s paradigm serves as a useful analogy to my own, since it suggests how the secondary hero may learn from the example of the primary hero. But the present study, in contrast to Greene’s work, focuses principally on the actions of the more removed heroes and on the contemplative nature of the more involved heroes: on the direct interventions in the plot by Arthur and the Son that mark the turning-points of The Faerie Queene and Paradise Lost, and on the moral and psychological development of Redcrosse and Adam that provide the reader with lively and instructive examples of human error.

Lucan: Cato and Pompey

In order to clarify this analysis, we must first look more closely at the structure and characterization of an earlier work, overlooked by Greene, in which positive heroism is divided between two contrasting characters: Lucan’s unfinished historical epic, the De Bello Civili, composed in Nero’s Rome. In its use of historical record and its omission of divine machinery, this poem is eccentric to the epic tradition. Nevertheless it is important to discuss it here since the figures of Cato and Pompey embody many of the most important distinguishing features of the primary and the secondary hero.

For many readers of Lucan, of course, it is Caesar, rather than his republican opponents, who is the most compelling character in the poem. But while his brand of heroism is never so heavily ironized by his creator as that of his ultimate descendent, Milton’s Satan, his motives are still so selfish and destructive, and his methods so cruel, that he remains basically an anti-hero. Readers are correct to find some grudging admiration in Lucan’s description of Caesar’s single-minded energy, but we can find nothing heroic in his bloodthirsty love of battle for its own sake.5 Conversely, Cato and Pompey, although each may occasionally be presented in a skeptical light, are always essentially more noble in their motives, and far more admirable in their conduct of the war, than is their opponent. So while the De Bello Civili might well be considered, like Paradise Lost, as an epic with three principal heroes, two of those characters are clearly aligned on the side to which the poet is clearly more sympathetic.6 It is this fundamentally virtuous type of heroism, rather than the superficially attractive but ultimately wicked anti-heroism of Caesar and Satan, that is my concern.

If Lucan’s Caesar operates at the pole of demonic evil, then his Cato seems to represent the opposite extreme as an example of divine Stoic virtue. His introduction to the reader implies an equivalence to the gods themselves. Each of Caesar and Pompey, we are told, had the support of great authority; the winning side pleased the gods, the losers’ Cato (BC 1.127–28).7 Thereafter he is particularly associated with words indicative of divinity: sanctus and sacrus (BC 2.284–85, 9.255, 9.555). In book 9 he pointedly refuses to consult the oracle at Siwa, rejecting its superstitious advice in favor of his own divine wisdom and courage. In dismissing the follower who urges him to fill your heart with the sacred words and ask what is virtue? Cato, filled with the god whom he bore in his secret thoughts, poured out his heart with words worthy of oracles (BC 9.561–65).8 The extraordinary heroism displayed by Cato in his leadership of the march through the Libyan desert prompts the narrator again to elevate him from the human level to the divine: Behold the true father of the fatherland, a man most worthy, Rome, of your altars; . . . if you Romans ever stand upright, your necks freed, you will make Cato a god (BC 9.601–04).9

Perhaps the most striking instance of Lucan’s identification of Cato with a unique and godlike brand of heroism comes in the course of his conversation with Brutus in book 2—a conference which Frederick M. Ahl tellingly compares to a divine council in a conventional epic.10 In accepting the younger man’s request that he join the fight against Caesar, Cato delivers an extraordinary speech in which he demands to be allowed to sacrifice his own life in order to redeem his people from their sins: O would that this head could be exposed to every punishment, condemned by the gods of heaven and hell! . . . May I become a human shield, pierced by every spear, and catching every blow of the whole war! May this blood ransom the nations, and may whatever debt the Romans have incurred by their behavior be repaid by my death (BC 2.306–07, 310–13). Like the Son of the Christian God, Cato’s magnanimous assumption of guilt shows his desire to represent and to take on the burden of an entire people. Part of the role of this quasi-divine hero is to die willingly for the sake of his inferiors.11

Cato’s ability to live up to these high words establishes his excellence as a practical as well as a spiritual leader. Our first sight of him shows a contemplative, magnanimous, and selfless commander, who sits sleepless and worried, turning over in his mind the future of the commonwealth and the fall of Rome, fearless for himself, but fearful for all (BC 2.239–41).12 Our most extended encounter with Cato, in the narrative of his North African expedition in book 9, confirms his excellence in both ethical and military terms. Magnanimous toward his captured enemies, Cato did not take out his anger on the inhabitants of a city: the only punishment suffered by the vanquished was to have been conquered by Cato (BC 9.298–99).13 He displays still more conspicuous generosity to his own men, by publicly refusing to drink the single draught of water available to the army despite his own tormenting thirst and then, after the discovery of a more plentiful supply, by waiting to take his share until even the camp followers have drunk (BC 9.500–510, 591–93). Cato’s excellence does not exist in isolation; rather, it has a powerful effect on the conduct of the men around him. His inspirational dynamism is similar to Caesar’s, in that the virtue of Cato would not bear to stand still, and by his speech to the army he inflamed their trembling hearts with virtue and a love of toil (BC 9.371, 406–07).14 But Cato’s is the more altruistic cause, and he thus elevates his followers closer to his own exalted standard of heroism and imbues them with his single-minded Stoic