Spenser's Hymnes & Plato's Liturgical Ethos

I hope all of my readers will accept my apologies for the lack of posts the last few days. I have been busy, tired, and lacking in an overabundance of inspiration, and these three forces conspired to keep me away. I hope this post may atone for my brief absence. Though this sort of post doesn’t typically generate a lot of excitement or discussion, the subject is one that is dear to my heart, and also lies near the heart of my interest in literature. I hope the reason for that will become clear by the end, and that all will enjoy as best they can this little glimpse at what makes Aaron tick.

Before I had ever read a word of Edmund Spenser, I was made aware of his Platonism by Dame Frances Yates’s The Occult Philosophy of the Elizabethan Age. Although Yates’s primary purpose in the chapter on Spenser is to situate him in what she calls the ‘Hermetic-Cabalist’ tradition, she argues that the latter in fact forms the core of the ‘Platonism’ of the Renaissance. Thus she acknowledges of Spenser’s Fowre Hymnes—with which I am concerned here—that they ‘abound in references to Plato and to Platonic philosophy; their cult of heavenly love and beauty is Platonic in conception.’ [1]

I have referred previously (here) to the delightful little edition of the Hymnes by Lilian Winstansley, published by Cambridge in 1907. Winstanley, though she acknowledges the influence of Marsilio Ficino and Giordano Bruno on Spenser, describes these figures merely as ‘Platonists’ and says nothing whatever about Hermes Trismegistus. Aside from a passing reference to the ‘strangely transformed’ Platonism of the Renaissance, which had been ‘intermixed and confused with the mysticism of Philo and Plotinus, and with ideas derived from the Jewish Cabala, and even from Indian and Egyptian sources’, [2], Winstanley’s introduction is wholly concerned with the Hymnes as Platonist artefacts.

But even with this limit in perspective taken account of and allowed for, Winstanley’s Enlightenment approach still leads her into some unhelpful judgements, and there is one in particular that I would like to mention here. She writes:

Again Spenser has no means, at least he does not contrive any means, for representing the rich variety of opinion in Plato; Plato frequently represents in the same dialogue the most widely different opinions but without arbitrating among them; his speakers advance views mutually inconsistent and the author declines to pronounce definitely on any one; hence the best dialogues, though strewn with suggestive ideas, are free from dogma and give the effect of extreme flexibility of mind. This effect Spenser does not attempt to render in his poetry and, even where he follows Plato most closely, it is always with a certain difference. This imitation is nowhere closer than in the Fowre Hymnes where his theories of the nature of love and beauty are, in all essentials, taken from the Phaedrus and Symposium; yet he can only make his explanations consistent by sacrificing a large part of the Platonic dialogues and by buttressing up what remains with conceptions taken from the Italian Platonists; in the process the dramatic life and variety of the originals are inevitably lost; the total result, though in a sense more consistent, is less subtle, less ingenious and less profound. [3]

I think this is, first and foremost, a mistake about genre. Winstanley has paid no attention to it. Confronted with this criticism, I think Spenser would say, as C.S. Lewis has Boethius do in response to those who ask why his Consolatio is not more religious, ‘But did you not read my title?’ [4] Like Milton, Spenser’s first question was not ‘What do I want to say?’ but ‘What kind of poem do I want to make?’ As Lewis goes on to say of this choice:

The things between which choice is to be made already exist in their own right, each with a character of its own well established in the public world and governed by its own laws. If you choose one, you lose the specific beauties and delights of the other: for your aim is not mere excellence, but the excellence proper to the thing chosen—the goodness of a rockery or a celibate being different from that of a tennis court or a husband. [5]

. . . [E]very poem has two parents—its mother being the mass of experience, thought, and the like, inside the poet, and its father the pre-existing Form (epic, tragedy, the novel, or what not) which he meets in the public world. By studying only the mother, criticism becomes one-sided. . . . It would, in my opinion, be the greatest error to suppose that this fertilization of the poet’s internal matter by the pre-existing Form impairs his originality, in any sense in which originality is a high literary excellence. . . . The matter inside the poet wants the Form: in submitting to the Form it becomes really original, really the origin of greatwork. [6]

So, Spenser chose the ‘hymn’, not the philosophical dialogue, and the raison d’être of a hymn is to praise the good, not to ‘represent a rich variety of opinion’, or to reproduce the ‘dramatic life and variety’ of a dialogue. But of even more interest is the fact that Plato himself recognised this, and seems to have preferred, philosophically speaking, the hymn to the dialogue.

I hate to raise the spectre of ‘Radical Orthodoxy’, but I think Catherine Pickstock has called attention to this issue very well, and I shall refer to her views at length. In After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy, she argues that Plato intends the dialogue as a sort of stepping stone from the fragmentation of the self, the irony, the superficiality, and the lack of fixed principles characteristic of the sophistic polis and the mimetic arts (such as Homeric poetry) as practiced and/or interpreted in such a context, to the ‘supremely centred and non-ironic . . . genuine avowal’ of ‘doxological expression’. [7] This is why Socrates insists, in Republic 607a, ‘But you should also know that hymns to the gods and eulogies to good people are the only poetry we can admit into our city.’ [8] Concerning the sophistic polis, Pickstock cites the view of Hans-Georg Gadamer that—

Such a factured ethos cannot securely accommodate those works of art which do not unambiguously depict the true paideia, based upon a positive, substantive construal of principle, since any inculcation of virtue they may contain can readily be perverted. For Gadamer, ‘the contemporary morality and moral education which had established itself upon the basis of the poetic forumlations of the older morality . . . in adhering to aging moral forms, found itself defenceless against arbitrary perversions of those forms brought on by the spirit of sophism’ (‘Plato & the Poets’). [9]

Hymns, that is, liturgical poems, lack this ambiguity. Pickstock writes:

Although these forms engage in a certain amount of mimetic representation, such as the depiction of gods as interlocutors, a key characteristic of a song of praise or hymn is that it does not involve self-division. In an act of doxological expression, the one who gives praise, the object of praise, and all those who share in its expression, are supremely centred and non-ironic, for genuine avowal involves commitment to such a degree that nothing can be held back or veiled. [10]

Pickstock argues that liturgical poetry is the literary expression of a way of life in that it is ‘ontologically constitutive of the person who gives praise’ and in that it is ‘the highest form of language’. [11] But the dialogue is merely a means of leading those affected by the sophistic ethos back to the liturgical ethic. Pickstock writes:

The dialogues represent the dissemination of ‘theology’ in a fragmented society, as intended to lead therapeutically towards the doxological life, not only through their content, but also their structure . . . . [The Platonic dialogue’s] resistance to any foundation reveals it to possess the flexibility of orality, together with its form as a ‘literary’, or theological, rather than straightforwardly doxological, prayer. [12]

It should now be clear how Winstanley has so decidedly missed the point. All of the features she values in the dialogic form—the ‘rich variety of opinion’, the freedom from ‘dogma’ and ‘extreme flexibility of mind’, the ‘dramatic life and variety’—which she terms ‘subtle’, ‘ingenious’, and ‘profound’, are precisely those features which are there merely as therapy for those corrupted by the sophistic ethos. The Christian poet, Spenser, is free of such restrictions and has found his way back to the liturgical ethos. I fear the majority of his scholars have not.

I shall end with the 25th Stanza of ‘An Hymne of Heavenly Love’, preceded by a rhetorical question: could this really be improved in subtlety or profundity by being freed from ‘dogma’ or by introducing a ‘mutually inconsistent’ opinion?

O blessed Well of Love! O Floure of Grace!
O glorious Morning-Starre! O Lampe of Light!
Most lively image of thy Fathers face,
Eternall King of Glorie, Lord of Might,
Meeke Lambe of God, before all worlds behight,
How can we thee requite for all this good?
Or what can prize that thy most precious blood? [13]

[1] Dame Frances Yates, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 113.

[2] Lilian Winstanley, ‘Introduction’, The Fowre Hymnes, by Edmund Spenser, ed. Lilian Winstanley (Cambridge: Cambridge U, 1930), pp. x, xi.

[3] Ibid., pp. xi-xii.

[4] C.S. Lewis, The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval & Renaissance Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge U, 2002), pp. 77-8.

[5] C.S. Lewis, A Preface to Paradise Lost (NY: Oxford U, 1965), p. 2.

[6] Ibid., p. 3.

[7] Catherine Pickstock, After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), p. 39.

[8] Plato, ‘Republic’, tr. G.M.A. Grube, rev. C.D.C. Reeve, Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper, with D.S. Hutchinson (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), p. 1211.

[9] Pickstock, p. 38. I take Gadamer’s views with greater seriousness than most German philosophers precisely because of his emphasis on and defense of tradition in the humanities, a view described at length and applauded in Fr Andrew Louth’s Discerning the Mystery.

[10] Ibid., p. 39.

[11] Ibid., p. 40.

[12] Ibid., p. 43.

[13] Spenser, p. 27.