Mirrors of Celestial Grace: Patristic Theology in Spenser's Allegory.

Book One of The Faerie Queene is an allegory of Christ's triumph over Satan: Passion, Harrowing of Hell, Resurrection. Baptized in healing water from the Well of Life, chrismated with Balm from the Tree of Life, the true Saint George acts out the drama of a paschal liturgy in which the believer, in "putting on Christ" (Galatians 3:27), is literally deified. Red Crosse's betrothal to Una is a figure of the Easter Eucharist, anticipating the mystical union of Christ with His Church. At the other "end" of the poem as we have it (i.e. in the Cantos of Mutabilitie) - linked to the climactic action of Book One as the Feast of the Transfiguration was linked to Easter in a certain ancient exegesis - is the most beautified face of Nature, a figure of cosmic deification-in-Christ. The allegory of holiness as theosis in Book One is completed in Book Two by an allegory of temperance as ascesis, specifically as encrateia or hard-won mastery of the passions. Guyon's ravaging of the Bower of Bliss typifies the means to that virtue, Belphoebe's perpetual virginity its end. If the respective roles of divine grace and human labor in the resulting scheme of salvation seem oddly balanced, that is because the poet of The Faerie Queene, reading Romans 5:12 with Erasmus rather than Milton, rejects the doctrine of Original Sin. Mankind inherits mortal passions from Adam, not primal guilt. Arthur's fight with Maleger at the end of Book Two is a figure of Christ's conquering the passions in His Passion, death in His Death, not of an atonement in the juridical sense. The highest Christian ideal is Godlike impassibility. Books Three, Four and Six test a contrary ideal of fallen but chaste affection (i.e. marriage) and find it wanting. Britomart's holiness is more admired than her nubility, the innocent pleasures of the Garden of Adonis are an inaccessible fiction, the only unqualified praise is for Chrysogone's sexless childbearing. The ascetical and mystical theology of the epic precludes the celebration of fallen eros that makes the A moretti and Epithalamion.

While elements of this account may be recognizable to some readers of Spenser's poem, as a whole it will be strange to most. Its strangeness, and its unity, derive from a theological source which Harold L. Weatherby invites us to consider a possible source for Spenser too, namely the writings of the Greek Church Fathers from Clement of Alexandria (2nd cent.) to John of Damascus (8th cent.), together with "orthodox" liturgies of the same period. The author's invitation (9) is so graciously phrased, his expository manner so courteous, the fruits of his researches so various and provocative, only an unchivalrous critic would decline to go along for the ride. Describing himself as "slightly 'before' [A. C.] Hamilton" (13) in his concern with moral and theological ideas rather than images, Weatherby insists that "the poetry itself must . . . be the measure" (194) and asks us to evaluate his hypothesis in terms of its yield for a reading of the poem. Evading that critical challenge, a brief review can only draw attention to two issues of literary-historical method.

The first issue concerns the "patristic" material Spenser is likely to have drawn upon in his poem. Reluctant to assume or demonstrate the poet's dependence on specific texts of the Fathers - there is no index of patristic references to accompany those for Scripture and the FQ - Weatherby offers circumstantial evidence (the holdings of the library of Pembroke College, Cambridge; his association with Lancelot Andrewes) for his access to the literature in general. These arguments are fragile as they stand; only consider the well documented reading habits of Gabriel Harvey, who appears to have taken virtually no interest in the Fathers. Little is made of the more readily accessible, mediated forms in which patristic exegesis circulated in the sixteenth century, such as Erasmus's Paraphrases on the Gospels. (The author might usefully have referred to J.W. Binns's Intellectual Culture in Elizabethan and Jacobean) [Leeds: Francis Cairns, 1990], especially Chs. 6, 13, 17, which supply important disciplinary contexts.

The second issue centers around the question of how, given that the category itself is of later invention, the discernment of "patristic theology" or competing "patristic theologies" can plausibly be attributed to a writer like Spenser. Though disclaiming "any consistent effort to distinguish among schools or periods" (12), Weatherby deliberately sets a "pre-Augustinian" or primitive eastern canon - surprisingly (or not?) almost excluding Origen - against the tradition of the "later Latin" Fathers, in order to argue for Spenser's solidarity with the former. In effect he fashions a new "Greek orthodox" poet. This is surely too partial a construction, reflecting both an oversimplified view of the separation of the early churches and an under-historicized model of an Elizabethan poet's theological options.

If the subtitle to Mirrors of Celestial Grace raises such methodological problems, it is no part of the author's purpose to solve them. "To impose a new content" on the allegory of The Faerie Queene as, in this account, Spenser did on the medieval figure of Nature, should indeed "qualif[y] for praise as a genuinely original act of historical and theological - and, of course, poetic - imagination" (94). Harold L. Weatherby has written a truly original, challenging, and profoundly thoughtful book. In what sense his imagined harmony qualifies as "Spenserian" is for each reader to decide.

MARK VESSEY University of British Columbia