The Pain of Reformation: Spenser, Vulnerability, and the Ethics of Masculinity

Conclusion

Conclusion And thou most dreaded impe of highest Ioue, Faire Venus sonne, that with thy cruell dart At that good knight so cunningly didst roue, That glorious fire it kindled in his hart, Lay now thy deadly Heben bow apart, And with thy mother mylde come to mine ayde: Come both, and with you bring triumphant Mart, In loues and gentle iollities arraid, After his murdrous spoyles and bloudie rage allayd. (1.proem.3) T he Faerie Queene opens with an act of disarmament. Although the poem confirms its affiliation with the heroic by trumpeting “Fierce warres and faithfull loues,” it also lays claim to the power of love to disarm the fury of Mars and set aside that fundamental aggression at the heart of epic violence, even when such violence might be dedicated to apparently virtuous purposes. In so doing The Faerie Queene comes to redefine masculinity as an ethical project accessible through the intimate aesthetics of the vulnerable body and through bonds of shared vulnerability that oppose forms of structural violence. With that proem Spenser launches himself into a massive endeavor, one that would outlive him. Although the proem announces a project of disarmament that clearly resonates with mythographic tradition and contemporary political allegory, it may be, at first, difficult to detect this project. That difficulty stems from the complexity of Spenser’s poem; from the representation of violence that is, at times, glorified and gratuitous; and from the tendency to construe vulnerability as mere privation. 226 Conclusion As I have suggested, the consequences of the Reformation complicate but also enable the task of apprehending vulnerability as an ethical project, a project of transforming the very idea of virtuous work and of the forms of masculinity on which notions of virtue rest. On the one hand, much post-Reformation theology and practice obscured experiences of vulnerability central to a deeply embodied religion with a central focus on the devotional act of witnessing and contemplating the suffering of others, beginning with Christ and extending outward. On the other hand, because the far-reaching consequences of the Reformation were distributed not solely in the sphere of religion—in battles over icons, idols, sacraments, and rites—it became possible that an ethics rooted in vulnerability could appear widely and obliquely in a range of meaning-making systems, from the sanctioned purposes of poetry and poetics to the intimate urgencies of desire, sex, and sexuality. Like Spenser, Lucretius invokes a Venus capable of disarming Mars and bringing peace to the land. Yet Lucretius also identifies her as “Aeneadum genetrix” or “mother of Aeneas and his race.” As such, it would seem that this Venus would be the mother of empire. But Lucretius describes the mother of life itself: “nurturing Venus, who beneath the smooth-moving heavenly signs fill with yourself the sea full-laden with ships, the earth that bears the crops, since through you every kind of living thing is conceived and rising up looks on the light of the sun.” Venus calms the rough seas, charms the wild beasts, and drives “love into the breasts of all creatures” causing them “greedily to beget their generations after their kind.” In De rerum natura, all life is Venus’s empire , and she disseminates the impulse to love as a means of increasing life. Her power to soothe Mars and bring peace saves lives by stopping conflict, but her original function is generation itself. To disarm, to experience vulnerability is merely to return to this original life-giving state. It is fitting that Spenser’s project culminates in the central canto of the Legend of Chastity, as the bleeding tree of Reformation trauma becomes a locus of a transformative aesthetics and ethics of vulnerability . Out of the absence of the iconic presence of Christ blossoms Adonis in the midst of a garden that unites generation and mortality. Even Venus and Diana find concord in this garden. The invocation of Venus by Lucretius indicates that Spenser’s quite singular attempt to explore vulnerability had precedent, while the at- Conclusion 227 tention Rubens paid to Venus, Mars, and Adonis also indicates that he inherited and struggled with similar mythic constructs in an attempt to explore the possibility that war might be allayed by love. Lucretius lived through shockingly violent times. The forty-four years of his life were punctuated with civil war, public riots...