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

Chaper 2 Spenser’s Dark Materials: Representation in the Shadow of Christ

c h a p t e r 2 Spenser’s Dark Materials: Representation in the Shadow of Christ I dolatry haunts the history of poetry. In his treatise on the genealogies of the pagan gods, Boccaccio traces the art of this “fervid and exquisite invention,” poetry, to one of three primal scenes: the deification and worship of nature, the rituals and sacrifices of the Hebrews, or the Babylonian devotions enacted under the rule of Nimrod, who is described as “the founder of idolatry.” While pagan animism deifies the wonders of the natural world, Babylonian idolatry mistakes the useful or the enjoyable for the divine, as in the case of fire. Animism and idolatry fail to grasp the scope of the relationship between the Creator and the created world. Thus it was left to the ancient Hebrews to discover , or to have revealed to them, the true means of communicating with the Creator, in part through sacrifice. For Boccaccio, Moses, in his communion with the Holy Ghost and reception of the scriptures, becomes the model poet. The poet, then, is the conduit between a spiritual message and a fallen world all too inclined to misread it. By this point in the treatise, Boccaccio has set aside primitive pagan animism and has dismissed depraved Babylonian idolatry, saying “of the beast Nimrod I take no account.” Lurking in the shadows of history, however, is a desire to take into account poetry’s fundamental materiality. And while many have approached this materiality as what inheres in textuality itself or in the media of transmission, one still wonders what it is that makes poetry neither merely imagination nor medium nor text. This question becomes especially keen in an early modernity in which the aftermath of the Reformation meant not only the waning presence of the suffering Christ but, moreover, the waning presence of Christ, Word made 76 The Legend of Holiness flesh, to mediate between the spiritual sources of poetry and its physical manifestations. Michel Foucault’s influential The Order of Things famously posits an early modern crisis of representation in which classical systems of knowledge and order, rooted in regimes of resemblance, come to be ruptured at and as the emergence of modernity, a time in which the “profound kinship of language and the world was dissolved” as signs come to refer only to other signs. Not only are “things and words . . . to be separated from one another” but also language and literature lose an “enigmatic, monotonous, stubborn, primitive being” as well as a “peculiar existence and ancient solidity of language as a thing inscribed in the fabric of the world.” While there is value in understanding language , especially poetic language, as endowed with “enigmatic, stubborn , primitive being,” Foucault’s account is not particularly attentive to the ways in which early modern crises of order were embedded in religious conflict. Post-reformation debates about the nature of the Eucharist—was it endowed with physical, divine presence or was it no more than an abstract sign or reminder?—provide a central instance of a truly massive representational crisis rooted in the now troubling flesh of Christ. As Regina Schwartz has argued, “When Reformers gave up the doctrine of transubstantiation (even as they held on to revised forms of the Eucharist), they lost a doctrine that infuses all materiality, spirituality , and signification with the presence of God.” Furthermore, Michael O’Connell describes how early modern Europe witnessed, as a result, a shift away “from visual, sensible, ‘incarnational ’” modes of meaning to “logocentric” modes of meaning as “‘Christ as text’” comes to “replace the sacramental Christ, the visualized Christ.” As a consequence “in much of Europe, attitudes would shift so dramatically that what had before been created by highly developed artistic expression would, a few years later, be destroyed as a religious abomination.” To explore the means by which poetry attains its “ancient solidity as a thing inscribed in the fabric of the world” is to risk the “abomination” of primitive or depraved idolatry, yet in idolatry we find the sensuous particularity that lends poetry its efficacy. It is no accident, then, that Spenser begins The Faerie Queene with the Legend of Holiness. Holiness, with its vested interests in idolatry and iconoclasm, articulates appropriate relationships to matter, to the Spenser’s Dark Materials 77 complex substances of bodies, things, and to the world through which those...