Spenser, Donne, and the Theology of Joy

Author(s): Adam Potkay

Source: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 , Winter, 2006, Vol. 46, No. 1, The
English Renaissance (Winter, 2006), pp. 43-66
Published by: Rice University

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/3844562

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SEL 46,1 (Winter 2006): 43~66 43
ISSN 0039-3657

Spenser, Donn
the Theology
ADAM POTKAY

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering

gentleness, goodness, faith, [mjeekness, temperance: agains
such there is no law.
?Galatians 5:22-3l

Joy becomes an anxious concern during the Prot

ormation in both Germany and, my focus here, En
Protestant writing ofthe early modern era vividly ev
and, conversely, the threat of joylessness in Christ
the importance of joy to Christianity and particular
Christianity, although recognized by theologians, ha
unnoticed by literary and cultural historians of Refo
land, and the specter of joylessness has, to my know
no scholarly comment at all.2 My aims in this essay
demonstrate that joy and joylessness were of peculi
to early Protestant theology and the literature it inf
second, to offer an explanation of why this was so.
I argue that within the Protestant "pluriverse" o
striving for God and struggling against Satan or fa
nature, joy serves as a countervailing, centripetal for
surety of adhesion to God and neighbor. For the in
seeking signs of its salvation, joy, no less than "goo
a proof or "earnest" of its sanctification by the Holy
one ofthe first three "fruits ofthe Spirit" in Galatia
and peace are the others). Christian joy is joy in or

Adam Potkay, professor of English at the College of William

is author of The Fate ofEloquence in the Age ofHume and The
Happiness: Samuel Johnson and David Hume. This essay is par
book, "The Story of Joy from the Bible to Late Romanticism."

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44 Spenser, Donne, and Joy

the Holy Spirit (Rom. 14:17, 1

sus promises his community of
joy might remain in you, and t
Thus, for scriptural commenta
Martin Luther's phrase, "'the t
came to be adduced as an index
life as well as in interpersonal
church.3 Yet even as joy rose t
that assured God's presence, it was also addressed, somewhat
paradoxically, as an obligation or duty, particularly in its active
form of rejoicing.
Conversely, joylessness came to be seen as a sign of the
Spirit's absence from the life of the individual believer and from
the corporate Church, a corollary of a lack of love for God and
neighbor. Indeed, what distinguishes the Protestant discourse
of joy from medieval or Continental Catholic theology and litera?
ture is not only its emphasis on joy and rejoicing but also, and
more strikingly, its anxiety over joylessness. Thus, for example,
Edmund Spenser's Christian knight Redcrosse battles?but does
not conclusively defeat?an antagonist named Sans-Joy ("without
joy"), a character without significant analogue in the Mediterra?
nean epic and romance traditions upon which Spenser drew.4 In
order to illustrate the Protestant dynamic of joy and joylessness,
I briefly examine selected works of German and English theology
before turning to a more detailed examination of two milestones
of English literary and church history, the first book of Spenser's
The Faerie Queene and John Donne's collected Sermons.

JOY AND JOYLESSNESS IN EARLY PROTESTANT THEOLOGY

The northern European Reformation, often viewed

in historically Protestant countries) as a milestone in t
of human freedom, may of course be viewed as precis
posite of that: a historical episode of spiritual fear and
a renewed sense of bondage to sin and indebtedness t
and the resuscitation ofthe Church militant.5 We migh
the ills that arose during the early Reformation a host of
tious beliefs comparatively unimportant during the M
Satan's daily presence as a formidable foe; the threat of lesser
demons, witches, and warlocks (along with the public burning of
witches); and, with the rejection ofthe doctrine of Purgatory, the
fear of hellfire as the sole alternative to sanctification.
Nevertheless?perhaps as a counterweight to its darker
side?the Protestant Reformation was a watershed in the cultural

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 Adam Potkay 45

history ofthe term

urgency, even at t
Protestant and es
sermons, discourses, and testimonies from Luther and Johann
Sebastian Bach to the contemporary American gospel group,
Mighty Clouds of Joy.
Why this special emphasis on the invocation of joy? The
primary reason, I suggest, lies in Protestantism's break (a par?
tial break in some churches, a complete one in others) with the
sacramental theology of medieval and Catholic Christianity.
Protestant churches and congregations have, to varying degrees,
supplemented or supplanted the medieval and Catholic mysticism
of sacrament and ritual with a mysticism of the Holy Spirit, and
the first three "fruits ofthe spirit" are, as Paul tells us, "love, joy
[chara], [and] peace."
It is worth pausing over Paul's Letter to the Galatians and
its commentary tradition: the differences between several major
commentaries, one late medieval and three Protestant, may sug?
gest the broader differences in joy theology between the Roman
and Reformed churches. St. Thomas Aquinas, one ofthe few pre-
sixteenth-century theologians to write a major commentary on
Galatians, is, in keeping with his philosophy ofthe passions, the
only one to comment significantly on love, joy, and peace as fruits
ofthe Spirit.6 These fruits are, Aquinas argues in a eudaimonistic
vein, the virtues that perfect us inwardly (love, joy, peace) and
outwardly (goodness, patience, chastity, and so on). Ofthe inward
virtues Aquinas writes philosophically, even psychologically. Love
is "the inclination to good"; joy "proceeds from the presence of
the thing loved"; peace comes when "the lover . . . adequately
possesses the object loved."7 Aquinas's analysis contains no overt
theology. Although his vehicle of human love assumes a tenor of
love divine, it does so in terms drawn ultimately from Plato and
Aristotle, not from Paul, or at least not Paul as we have been
taught to read him by Protestant theology.
The contrast is striking between Aquinas's commentary an
that of Luther. Luther's 1535 Galatians commentary was his
most influential work in English, translated in 1575 and printed
seven more times through 1644.8 John Bunyan praised it highly:
"I do prefer this book of Mr. Luther upon the Galathians, (except-
ing the Holy Bible) before all the books that ever I have seen, as
most fit for a wounded Conscience."9 A good part ofthe salve lies
in Luther's comments on Galatians 5:22. He construes "love" as
a self-abasement toward one's neighbor (not, as in Aquin

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46 Spenser, Donne, and Joy

orientation toward the abstrac

abled and sustained by Christ a
"means joyful thoughts about
happy songs, praise, and thank
as nothing less than a central

God is repelled by sorrow of

teaching and sorrowful thoug
pleasure in happiness. For He came to refresh us, not
to sadden us. Hence the prophets, apostles, and Christ
himself always urge, indeed command, that we rejoice and
exult. Zech. 9:9: "Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout
aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem! Lo, your King comes to
you." And often in the Psalms (32:11): "Be glad in the
Lord." Paul says (Phil. 4:4): "Rejoice in the Lord always."
And Christ says (Luke 10:20): "Rejoice that your names
are written in heaven." When this is a joy of the Spirit,
not ofthe flesh, the heart rejoices inwardly through faith
in Christ, because it knows for a certainty that He is our
Savior and High Priest; and outwardly it demonstrates
this joy in its words and actions.12

Luther presents "joy of the Spirit" as both a subjective attitude

("the heart rejoices inwardly") and as a set of outward practices
("words and actions," "wholesome exhortations, happy songs")
that are dependent upon a proper inner state but that are also,
paradoxically, enjoined upon all who would attain that state. Lu?
ther himself did much to institutionalize rejoicing (along with sup-
plicating) in his translations of Psalms, his hymnody in general,
and his emphasis on congregational singing in the vernacular.13
According to Luther, we are categorically urged or commanded
to rejoice: rejoicing seems to partake of the law that Christians
must follow. Of course, Luther's larger point in his exposition on
Paul is that the law is precisely what fallen humans cannot follow
and that it is not one's own works or merits that save but rather,
and wholly, faith that one is saved through Christ's sacrifice. On
Galatians 5:23?"against such [as have the fruits of the Spirit]
there is no law"?Luther comments, "So a Christian fulfills the
law inwardly by faith?for Christ is the consummation ofthe La
for righteousness to everyone who has faith."14 Thus joy, wh
we are required to have, is that which we cannot have by our o
efforts but only in conjunction with faith, itself a gift ofthe Spiri
and of God's grace.

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 Adam Potkay 47

In Paul's original
nected to, and sometimes not clearly distinguished from, joy
(chard).15 Theologically, joy is a grace, that is, a gift. It at once is
and responds to something given to us unearned. This connection,
implicit in Luther, is explicit in William Perkins's Puritan-inflected
commentary on Galatians, posthumously published in 1604: "In
that the workes ofthe spirit are called fruites thereof hence it fol-
lowes, that there are no true vertues, and good affections, without
the grace of regeneration."16 The fruit of love is "the love of God . . .
an holy affection, whereby wee love God in Christ for himselfe" or
17
"our neighbour . . . for the Lord, and for no other by-respect
The fruit of joy, Perkins continues, "is twofold":

[J]oy of glory after this life, and the ioy of grace in this
life: and it stands in three things. The first is, to reioyce
in the true acknowledgement of God, that he is our God,
and reconciled to us in Christ. The second is, to reioyce
in the worke of our regeneration. The third is, to reioyce
in the hope of eternall glory.
This joy of grace hath a double fruite. First, it moder-
ates all our sorrowes, which makes us reioyce in the mid-
dest of our afflictions, 1 Thess. 5.16. Secondly, it causeth
men to reioyce at the good of their neighbors, Romanes
12.15.18

In Perkins's account, joy is the index that the individual has

received "the grace of regeneration"; only the new creature can
rejoice in God and in neighbor and do so regardless of whatever
temporal afflictions beset her.19
Professedly building on Perkins, Thomas Hooker (1586-1647)
wrote a long discourse specifically on Galatians 5:22, titled
Spirituall Love and Joy. Hooker calls true love and joy "the seed
and spawn of faith."20 As the seed that grows into faith, they are
bestowed upon the individual entirely by God in His calling or
"vocation" to the soul, but as faith's "spawn" they emerge from the
individual's active engagement, enabled by "the power of grace,"
with "the Word." This engagement is essential to the individual's
"sanctification."21 Within this dialectic of joy's take-and-give with
God or the Holy Spirit is found "the point of Doctrine, and that
is this . . . The Spirit of the Father kindles in the soule of a sin-
ner, truely humbled and inlightned, love and joy, to entertaine
and rejoice in the riches of his mercy, so as beseemes the worth
ofit."22

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48 Spenser, Donne, and Joy

Agreeing on the desideratum

as well that true spiritual joy
know there is wilde love and jo
wilde Thyme and other herbes
and garden joy, of Gods owne p
Christians, real Christian love
"from all the fained love and jo
wretches pretend to have to Je
still more severely, "wee are m
the world be for the most part
the flesh. And it is our commo
away with griefe, as Cain did,
our brother."25 Perkins and Ho
pessimism about human nature, an Augustinian (anti-Pelagian)
stance Luther summarized in a sentence: 'The world is indeed a
sick thing; it is the kind of fur on which neither hide nor
any good."26 For Luther even the saints on earth are at onc
teous (spiritually, through Christ's imputed righteousness
yet sinners (in the flesh), simul iustus etpeccator.27 We per
take joy in "the flesh," understood either as the body or, as
tended to understand it, the whole person, body and soul.2
corporeality was most apt to come under fire, as in these
ofthe moderate Puritan divine Richard Baxter (1615-91): "How
base an Idol is the Flesh? . . . Is it so great a madness to serve an
Idol of silver, or gold, or stone, or wood? What better is it to serve
an Idol of flesh and blood? A paunch of gutts? Thats full of filth
and excrements within, and the skin it self, the cleanest part, is
ashamed to be uncovered?"29
Joy takes on a dual importance in Protestant discourse a
demeanor, both as a presence and as an absence: the ideal joy
of grace and the actuality of joylessness or merely carnal joy.
Spiritual joy, so intensely desirable in Protestant theology, an?
nounces its elusiveness through the very insistence with which
it is invoked. Exhortations (or commands) to rejoice in the right
way are also admissions that such rejoicing is scarce. Invoking
joy may even be viewed as a form of magic, of naming something
in order to have authority over it or summon it into being.
Luther recognized the lack of joy as a spiritual problem in
his own life. He commented on Isaiah 55:12 ("For ye shall go out
with joy"): "We can mark our lack of faith by our joy; for our joy
must necessarily be as great as our faith."30 And in a Christmas
sermon of 1543, he offered this personal reflection: "I am intensely
displeased with myself and detest myself because I know that all

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 Adam Potkay 49

that Scripture says about Christ is true and that there can be
nothing greater, nothing more important, nothing more pleas?
ant, nothing more joyful. It should fill me with supreme joy . . .
yet the malice of my flesh prevents it, and the law of sin has so
thoroughly taken me captive that I cannot fill all my members, all
my bones, and my innermost being with this blessing of Christ
as I surely would like to do."31
Luther's anxieties over faith and final judgment are well
known. Indeed, Luther is arguably the author who turned the
German word angst toward its modern existential sense of per-
vasive gloom and oppressive, future-oriented worry.32 Spiritual
joy is, for Luther, a proposed antidote to angst; yet its elusiveness
is, finally, a new source of anxiety. Joylessness became a new
site of dubious battle with the flesh and the devil or a new demon
against which the wayfaring Christian must contend.

THE THREAT OF JOYLESSNESS:

SPENSER AND DONNE ON THE ENGLISH CHURCH

The specter of joylessness looms in The Faerie Que

96), written roughly forty years after Edward VI and
made Protestantism the official policy ofthe Church
A generation after Spenser, John Donne addressed jo
as an explicit problem in his Sermons, the polished an
mously published versions of sermons he delivered fr
of England pulpits between his ordination in 1615 an
in 1631. (He became the Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral in 1621.) In
his homiletic mode Donne sought to turn the tide of joylessness
by presenting joy as biblically enjoined; as presumptive evidence
ofthe individual's anxiously sought favor with God; and, finally,
as crucial to the corporate life of the church in England. Con-
necting Spenser's epic romance and Donne's sermons is a shared
perception ofthe threat of joylessness to the life ofthe universal
church and the church in England or, in protonationalist terms,
of England.
Book I of Spenser's The Faerie Queene is subtitled 'The Legend
ofthe Knight ofthe Red Crosse or [an allegory] of Holinesse."33 The
book allegorizes both the making of a saint and the history of the
Christian Church. On one level, the Red Cross Knight, or simply
"Redcrosse," represents the beginning Christian who gradually
conforms to the example of Christ and recognizes himself as a
saint (Saint George, to be exact). His proper place is with the
lady Una?who represents the "true church," i.e., the primitive

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50 Spenser, Donne, and Joy

Christian and the Protestant re

place is with Duessa?i.e., the unreformed medieval church and
the sixteenth-century church of Rome. On another level, Red-
crosse also represents the "spirit of holiness" in history. Working
through Spenser's ecclesiastical allegory, John J. O'Connor sees
Una as "the visible Church" and Redcrosse as the spirit of holi?
ness, together comprising "the one true Church."34
My particular interest in book 1 of The Faerie Queene lies in
the significance of three of the book's antagonists, the brothers
Sans-Foy ("Faithless"), Sans-Loy ("Lawless"), and Sans-Joy ("Joy-
less"), nephews ofthe personified power of Night. Redcrosse, as
soon as he separates from Una, is set upon by the pagan knight
Sans-Foy, whom he kills without much ado; he is then seduced
by Sans-Foy's duplicitous consort, Duessa (1.2). Led by Duessa
to the "house of Pride," Redcrosse?rejecting the "joyaunce vaine"
(1.4.37.8) of its more outrageous displays (e.g., a pageant ofthe
seven deadly sins with Satan holding up the rear)?meets and
is challenged to battle by Sans-Foy's younger brother, Sans-Joy
(1.4). Redcrosse prevails in their tournament, but Sans-Joy is
saved from the death stroke by Duessa's magic (she obscures his
prostrate body beneath "a darkesome clowd"), and saved from
death when Duessa and Night bring him to the underworld to
be healed by the physician Aesculapius (1.5.13.6). In the mean?
while, Una, searching for Redcrosse in the wilderness, is seized by
Sans-Loy (1.4). In canto 6, shocked by the sudden appearance of
satyrs, Sans-Loy releases Una, who then meets and converts the
half-satyr/half-man hero of the woods, Satyrane: "Thenceforth
he kept her goodly company, / And learnd her discipline of faith
and verity" (1.6.31.8-9). As the canto ends, Satyrane engages
in doubtful battle with Sans-Loy while Una flees the forest. The
battle's outcome is left undecided.
Sans-Foy, Sans-Loy, and Sans-Joy have names that mark
them as symbolic figures, but what precisely they symbolize within
Spenser's allegorical plot is not obvious. Of the three brothers,
Sans-Foy's significance appears most readily: the embodiment of
atheism, he springs from Redcrosse's deluded desertion of Una.35
He "cared not for God or man a point" (1.2.12.9), embodying the
lack of the Spirit's first fruit, love of God and neighbor. The ease
with which Redcrosse slays this particular crystallization of his
own apostasy suggests that the threat of atheism was not for
Spenser a serious one for either the individual Christian or the
spirit of the Church. Sans-Foy's younger brothers Sans-Loy and
Sans-Joy pose greater problems, however, to the protagonists of

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 Adam Potkay 51

The Faerie Queene, and, by extension, to Spenser and his six?

teenth-century Protestant audience and, finally, to our own efforts
at interpreting Spenser's filigreed romance.
We may begin with the obvious but often overlooked detail that
neither Sans-Loy nor Sans-Joy is decisively defeated in Spenser's
poem. Thus both presumably appeared to Spenser as representing
real, ongoing threats to the individual Christian and the Church.
But what precisely do they represent?
The key to understanding Sans-Loy lies in seeing him in rela?
tion to the book's other characters and particularly Sir Satyrane,
with whom he engages in battle as the canto ends. Satryane is
a hearty hero, famous in the civilized realms of fairyland for chi?
valric adventure but also given to bloody hunting in the forest
(1.6.20-30). His dual identity stems from his mixed parentage,
being fathered by a lusty forest satyr on "a Lady myld," "Thyamis,"
whose name?despite her apparent gentleness?derives from the
Greek thumos, a Homeric concept word that can mean life force,
mind, spirit, courage, or anger (1.6.21.3).36 Although superficially
civilized by his ladylike mother, his encounter with Una teaches
Satyrane true "faith and verity" (1.6.31.9). In order to help Una on
the path to reuniting with Redcrosse, Satyrane leads her out from
the obscurity ofthe woods back onto the open plain (1.6.32-3).
Here on the plain Satyrane finds Sans-Loy: their combat com-
mences, but is left unfinished (1.6.40-7). That Satyrane?the
fledgling Christian emerging from the forest primeval?should
battle with "lawlessness" makes perfect sense on a psychological
and moral level. On an ecclesiastic level, one might see Satyrane
as the Church of England, having ushered the lost body of the
true church out of hiding but now left to battle?as it was bat-
tling in Spenser's day and would for decades thereafter?with the
"lawless" aspects of Puritanism and Dissent. Theologically, that
lawlessness was known as antinomianism, the doctrine that the
gospel of grace had superceded religious and moral law. Luther
associated it with licentiousness in his criticisms of Johann Ag
ricola and the Anabaptists, many of whom settled in England i
the sixteenth century. For the Church of England, however, the
greater threat of lawlessness lay in schismatic Puritans, most
notably Robert Browne in the 1580s, and the beginnings of Con
gregationalism. (Whatever Spenser's religious beliefs may have
been, he was writing The Faerie Queene for Elizabeth, the head
ofthe Church of England.37)
Sans-Joy, analogously, represents something that Redcrosse,
either as the individual Christian or as the spirit of the true

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52 Spenser, Donne, and Joy

church, must fight against ye

Sans-Joy appears directly after
vaine" ofthe House of Pride, sp
deadly sins led by its queen, L
admiration and shouts of joy b
of people" (1.4.36.5). As reasona
back on characters such as "Lucifera" and "Sathan," Redcrosse's
doing so immediately occasions the appearance of Sans-Joy, a
figure who in certain ways resembles Redcrosse, beginning with
the red of his sign:

Whereas an errant knight in armes ycled,

And heathnish shield, wherein with letters red
Was writt Sans ioy, they new arriued find:
Enflam'd with fury and fiers hardyhed [hardihood, over-
boldness],
He seemd in hart to harbour thoughts unkind,
And nourish bloody vengeaunce in his bitter mind.
(1.4.38.4-9)

In the same way that Sans-Loy embodies a psychological aspect

of Satyrane, so Sans-Joy bursts out, as it were, from Redcrosse's
head, the personification of his repressed tendencies toward fury
and violent retaliation. Such tendencies are glimpsed in his re?
action to the House of Pride but are fully on display in the early
cantos of book 1: when Redcrosse first erroneously perceives
Una to be unchaste, "halfe enraged at her shameless guise, /
He thought haue slaine her in his fierce despight" (1.1.50.2-3);
when he is fooled again, he "would haue slaine them [the illusory
Una and her lover] in his furious ire," but is physically restrained
(1.2.5.8).
The joylessness that Redcrosse must struggle against, and
that Sans-Joy embodies, seems fairly broad in its parameters.
Manifesting itself after Redcrosse's rejection of Pride's pageant, it
seems initially to connote an immoderate rejection of all earthly
or fleshly joys. And yet, paradoxically, Sans-Joy later feasts and
flirts among Lucifera, Duessa, Gluttony, Sloth, and a company
that may include Redcrosse, too, "in ioy and iollity" (1.4.43.5).
Indulging in the pleasures of "bowre and hall"?the same plea?
sures we find later in The Faerie Queene in the "Castle Joyeous"
of book 3, canto 1?Sans-Joy comes to embody the absence of
spiritual rather than sensual joy (1.4.43.6). In sum, Sans-Joy
seems designed to represent both the loss of worldly joy in pas-

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 Adam Potkay 53

sionate fury and

forms of joylessn
as the warfaring C
Joy is something
of book 1. To reca
the soule ofa sinn
Redcrosse become
saga, in his betrot
Redcrosse, when n
"too solemne sad"
Spenser's imagina
ology of doubt" c
(1.9) but spread th
the possibility of
assurance in one's
cern for the futu
moment, both in
expected, and in U
not. Responding t
"sadness" in the b
a tristitia Christi
manic-depressiven
bodied in Sans-Joy. "For Spenser," Trevor claims, "sadness?not
joy?is the exact opposite of melancholy," particularly the furious
melancholy of Sans-Joy.39
Although Trevor sheds light on Spenser's romance, it should
be noted that the poem's narrator criticizes Redcrosse from the
outset as "too solemn sad" (my emphasis). Excessive sadness, like
melancholy dull or fervid, may also constitute the opposite of joy.
Much of Redcrosses's adventure involves missed opportunities for
joy, in which the holy ones around him rejoice, but he cannot or
does not join in. Thus, when Una reunites with Redcrosse, just
set free from the dungeon of Orgolio (pride, presumption)

to him she ran

With hasty ioy: to see him made her glad,
And sad to view his visage pale and wan.
(1.8.42.1-3)

Her limited sadness passes with her assurance to him that "good
growes of euils priese [testing, proving]" (1.8.43.6). Redcrosse
responds, however, to neither her wisdom nor her joy: "The
chearelesse man, whom sorow did dismay, / Had no delight to

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54 Spenser, Donne, and Joy

treaten of his griefe" (1.8.43.7-

ought to have quickened to Un
ness appears a spiritual malaise. It precipitates his subsequent
encounter with the allegorical figure of Despair, whose doctrine of
eternal justice and call to suicide for past sins (and to avoid new
ones) Redcrosse is all too ready to hear. Redcrosse's very dress
and name symbolize a single-minded focus on God's justice and
Christ's atoning sacrifice: "on his brest a bloodie Crosse he bore, /
The deare remembrance of his dying Lord" (1.1.2.1-2). Redcrosse's
cross leaves no room for the Christian comforts that Luther sym-
bolized in his own Seal by placing the cross, "which mortifies and
which should also cause pain," within a heart "in the middle of a
white rose, to show that faith gives joy, comfort, and peace . . . it
places the believer in to a white, joyous rose, for this faith does
not give peace and joy like the world gives."40 Branded solely with
a bloody cross?its red the same hue as Sans-Joy's name, writ
upon his "heathenish shield"?Redcrosse proves susceptible to
a gloomy emphasis on depravity and reprobation that exceeds
the restrained nods to Calvinist doctrine found in the Church of
England's Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion (1563). Article 17
Predestination and Election," affirms "Predestination to [eternal]
Life," but implicitly warns against John Calvin's corresponding
emphasis on predestination to hell, "a most dangerous downfall"
whereby the Devil tempts men to despair.41 Redcrosse is saved
from despair by Una, who takes him to recover at the House of
Holiness?which is, for all but Redcrosse, a house of rejoicing.42
It is only at the very end of book 1 that Redcrosse?afforded
some "pragmatic assurance" of election by having slain the wicked
dragon;43 knowing that his once and future name, George, frees
him from entire identification with a bloody cross; and betrothed
to Una, who now appears, her "sad wimple throwne away," in
dazzling white (1.12.22.3)?attains a joy that stands out for its
previous absence in his character:

Her ioyous presence and sweet company

In full content he there did long enjoy,
Ne wicked enuy, ne vile gealosy
His deare delights were hable to annoy:
Yet swimming in that sea of blisfull ioy,
He nought forgott, how he whilome had sworne,
In case he could that monstrous beast destroy,
Unto his Faery Queene back to retourne:
The which he shortly did, and Una left to mourne.
(1.12.41.1-9)

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 Adam Potkay 55

Redcrosse is still in the Faerie Queene's service; thus, his su?

preme joy passes within this stanza into Una's mourning at his
necessary departure. Such is Spenser's final word on joy in the
world. As Redcrosse came to understand in his vision ofthe New
Jerusalem, "great joy"?the fullness and permanence of joy?
longs only with saints and angels at the end of history (1.10
1.10.56.4).
In the meanwhile, joylessness remains a problem. Just as
the visible form of the church is subject to violation by Puritan
lawlessness, so is the spirit of the true church threatened by
joylessness. Redcrosse does defeat Sans-Joy in canto 5, but the
victory appears hollow and temporary. The end of canto 5 implies
that the wounded Sans-Joy, once healed by Aesculapius in the
underworld, will resurface once again.44 Spenser depicts joyless?
ness as an abiding problem for the church. That it is temporarily
held at bay seems more a courtly compliment to Elizabeth's reign
than a tenet of his faith.

In 1625, from the pulpit at St. Paul's Cathedral, John Donne

explicitly addressed joylessness as a problem for the individua
and for the corporate church or, more specifically, for the Eng
individual and the Anglican Church:

I would always raise your hearts, and dilate your

hearts, to a holy Joy, to a joy in the Holy Ghost. There may
be a just feare, that men doe not grieve enough for their
sinnes; but there may bee a just jealousie, and suspition
too, that they may fall into inordinate griefe, and diffidence
of Gods mercy; And God hath reserved us to such times,
as being the later times, give us even the dregs and lees
of misery to drinke. For, God hath not onely let loose into
the world a new spirituall disease; which is, an equality,
and an indifferency, which religion our children, or our
servants, or our companions professe . . . but God hath
accompanied, and complicated almost all our bodily dis?
eases of these times, with an extraordinary sadnesse, a
predominant melancholy, a faintnesse of heart, a chear-
lesnesse, a joylessnesse of spirit, and therefore I returne
often to this endeavor of raising your hearts, dilating your
hearts with a holy Joy, Joy in the holy Ghost, for Under
the shadow of his wings, you may, you should, refoyce
[Psalm 63:7].45

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56 Spenser, Donne, and Joy

Donne's sermon is breathtakin

joylessness and its bravura app
winds here between seeing Jacobean joylessness as an effect
of a Calvinist "diffidence of Gods mercy"; as a part of God's es-
chatological plan (these are "the later times"?i.e., the end isn't
far off); and as the psychosomatic corollary ofthe new spiritual
disease of religious carelessness. England and its church have,
in Spenser's terms, been attacked by Sans-Joy and Sans-Loy.
Donne responds by prescribing a regimen of spiritual joy. He does
so here in a rhetorical performance that derives its incantatory
force?to analyze only Donne's last sentence?from gradatio as
"sadness" and "melancholy" mount to "joylessnesse of spirit";
amplification and epistrophe, in "raising your hearts, dilating
your hearts"; the chiasmic effect of his refrain, "a holy Joy, Joy
in the holy Ghost"; and, finally, within the metaphorical shadow
of God's wings, the correctio of "you may, you should, rejoyce"
verbally enacting the transformation of possibility into obligation.
Donne's eloquence serves the "holy stirring of religious affections"
he saw as the function of pulpit oratory (8:95); but the ultimate
religious affection, the end to which instrumental fear and mel?
ancholy lead, is joy.46
Donne devotes five full sermons, and parts of several others,
to the duty and prospect of joy.47 In doing so, he brings to frui-
tion a seed found in Archbishop Cranmer's Book ofHomilies (first
edition published in 1547), a foundational text ofthe reformed
English church. In its sixteenth sermon, to be delivered annu?
ally on Whitsunday (Pentecost), Cranmer invokes joy as being
among the "fruits of the Holy Ghost" (Galatians 5) and praises
the Apostles' "joy and gladness," their "patience and joyfulness
of heart in temptation and affliction."48 Other Church of England
men of the earlier seventeenth century?for example, George
Herbert in 'The Bunch of Grapes" (1633) and Henry Vaughan in
"Joy" (1650)?elaborated on Cranmer's theme; yet none do so with
the sustained intensity of Donne in his sermons.
Why was Donne the preacher so invested in "holy Joy"? One
reason may be biographical: as John Carey argues, Donne, fear-
ing damnation as a Catholic apostate, had tremendous anxiety to
allay; thus, he may have sought the Lutheran antidote of spiritual
joy in his own spiritual life.49 A second, more public reason for
Donne's emphasis on joy might have been the growing self-per-
ception and Continental reputation of Englishmen as melancholic
and even suicidal (before his ordination, Donne himself penned a
defense of suicide, Biathanatos [published 1644])?not the type of

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 Adam Potkay 57

characteristics upo
maritime empire.
save the English f
them, more parti
relation to man.
Theologically Donne found in joy the hinge between works
grace, what we ought to do and what God does for us. For Don
joy is a Christian duty?"you may, you should, rejoyce"?and,
sitting somewhat uneasily with that injunction, it is also "the
earnest ofthe Spirit" (3:340), "[t]he best evidence that a Man is
at peace, and in favour with God" (10:215). One must have joy
in order to be saved and yet joy is what proves that one is saved.
Albeit illogically, Donne here offers a pas de deux between God
and man that attempts to reconcile free will and election, having
it both ways in good Anglican fashion.
Donne's clearest formulation of this theology of joy comes in a
late sermon on 1 Thessalonians 5:16, "Rejoyce Evermore." Donne
first insists that this text, which he treats as a central Christian
tenet, "does more [than] imply a promise to us, for it laies a pre-
cept upon us: It is not, Gaudebitis, you shall Rejoyce, by way of
Comfort, but it is, Gaudete, Rejoyce, see that you doe Rejoyce, by
way of Commandement" (10:213-4). Moreover, there are sanctions
against noncompliance with the commandment to rejoice: "Man
passes not from the miseries of this life, to the joyes of Heaven,
but by joy in this life too; for he that feeles no joy here, shall finde
none hereafter." One is obliged to "Rejoyce alwaies . . . in your
prosperitie . . . inyour adversitie too" (10:214). Donne informs us
that by doing so we will find consummate joy in heaven, a joy he
describes in terms drawn from Matthew ("Eritor into thy Masters
Joy") and John ("your joy shall befull . . . in heaven" [10:227];
"Heaven . . . is Satietas gaudiorurrv, fulnesse of Joy" [10:228]). The
beatific vision itself consists, primarily, in joy: "the first thing that
the seeing of God shall produce in us, is Joy" (10:228), a joy for
which joy on earth is "preparatory, and inchoative" (10:214). Of
course, the proposition that earthly joy is the admission ticket to
heaven entails another proposition: joylessness paves the way to
hell. As Donne puts it in another sermon, "Howling is the noyse
of hell, singing the voyce of heaven; Sadnesse the damp of Hell,
Rejoycing the serenity of Heaven" (7:70).
Yet joy may not be possible for everyone. Donne, after elabo-
rating at some length on joy as a moral and religious obligation,
pulls back from his emphasis on what we should freely do and
treats rejoicing as something that God enables us to do: 'The

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 58 Spenser, Donne, and Joy

best evidence that a Man is at peace, and in favour with God,

is, that he can rejoyce" (10:215). From this, it does not follow
that God bestows favor on all?the ability to rejoice and with it,
since Donne has linked the two, the potential for salvation. The
issues that Donne here skirts?free will's relation to prevenient
grace or to predestination, Calvinism versus Arminianism?loom
large in Protestant theological controversy. That he wraps them
so elegantly within a mollifying discourse of joy abounds to his
oratorical credit and reveals his Anglican commitment to allowing
for some latitude of opinion in matters of doctrinal dispute.50
The flexibility Donne demonstrates in his theology of joy car?
ries over into his ecclesiology as well. Like Spenser (and the Gospel
of John) Donne claims that real joy abides only in the true church
or body of believers?Donne even invokes the "the Catholique [i.e.,
universal] Church" and its "unanime consent"?yet Donne speaks
not of the "one true Church" but of "a true Church," broaching
the grammatical possibility of a plurality of true churches (pre?
sumably including the continental Protestant churches) whose
confederacy would form "the Catholique Church" (3:87). (Indeed,
one wonders if Spenser could have intended the same ambiguity
in his use of the Italian Una?"one" or "a"?for a character who
represents some version of church and truth.) Who, inde
a true Christian? Donne universalizes only in terms of i
and "a true Church":

joy, true joy is truly, properly, onely belonging to a

Christian; because this joy is the Testimony of a good
conscience, that wee have received God, so as God hath
manifested himself in Christ, and worshipt God, so God
hath ordained, in a true Church. There are many tesserae
externae, outward badges and marks, by which others
may judge, and pronounce mee to bee a true Christian;
But the tessera interna, the inward badge and marke, by
which I know this my selfe, is joy.
(3:339)

Donne's contention that inner joy and not external affiliation mark
the true Christian?along with his minimal requirement that the
true Christian worships God in "a true Church"?would seem to
allow for an enlightened religious pluralism.
Donne's pluralism, however, is finally palliative rather than
radical, a rhetorical means of softening divisions within the
Church of England rather than those between the church and

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 Adam Potkay 59

outsiders. Recall t
Donne singled out as a special disease the indifference to in-
terdenominational differences or of thinking of all religions as
equal.51 For all the latitude implied by Donne's expression "a
true Church," it nevertheless conjures the oppositional figure of
some false church?and that, of course, is the "Roman Church."
'The Pope is Antichrist" and his doctrine, "the doctrine of Devil
Tridentine Catholicism is "Heresie" its attitude toward the Eu-
charist, "Idolatry" (3:124, 132). The Roman Church is Babylon,
and worse than Babylon: "Babylon is Confusion, disorder, but at
Rome all sinnes are committed in order, by the book" (10:171).
Such stuff was homiletic boilerplate, especially after the Gunpow?
der Plot of 1605, yet Donne adds to it not only the biographical
resonance of his own renounced Catholicism but also an ethi?
cal possibility for church building: "Let us therefore ma
of those enemies, and of their aery insolences, and their
confidences, as thereby to be the firmer in our selves" (3
The negative strategy of John's gospel of joy could not b
any more clearly than this, and indeed, nodding to the op
of John, Donne proceeds to emphasize that what sets the true
church in England apart from the false is "we make the Word the
onely rule of our faith" (3:129). One problem with Donne's as with
Johannine ethics is that its stance of embattled group separatism
generates further, intragroup separatism as indeed it did apace
in Jacobean England. Donne looked askance at Presbyterian
and Congregationalist "secession" from the church (the effect of
"distempered men"), but did not dignify these denominations with
the appellation of "church" (10:174). Nonetheless, churches they
were, and claimants to being true churches. Donne records their
complaint without an effective rejoinder: "Many of these extempo-
rall men have gone away from us, and vainly said, that they have
as good cause to separate from us [the Church of England], as we
from Rome. But can they call our Church, a Babylon; Confusion,
disorder?" (10:174).
They could and they did, challenging Donne's vision of the
unified church in England as well as the joy he prescribed as
its consolidating force. In literary history one might think of the
examples of the Congregationalist Bunyan and the Presbyterian
Daniel Defoe. In their Dissenting Calvinist Protestantism we find
writ large both anxiousness for assurance and the separatism of
the elect. Calvin, by making the doctrine of double predestination
(election/reprobation) central to his theology, invited, as John N.
Wall writes, "a concern for finding inner assurance of election and

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 60 Spenser, Donne, and Joy

for distinguishing the company

body of humanity."52 These "c
take the Calvinist traditions fa
worship and the promotion of
dational texts for the Church o
and the Book of Common Pray
Accordingly, Donne's emphasis on corporate rejoicing, or
rejoicing as a public ritual, gives way in Dissenter narratives to
the private discovery of inward joy through hardships and or?
deals, chiefly inner ones. The psychomachia of Spenser's romance
mode is translated into a daedal field of inner and ordinary life.
Generically, the confession becomes a new form of romance; the
synthesis of old romance and new emerges with the modern novel.
And in this new space of storytelling, joy becomes a climax and a
marvel. It marks, in Isaac Watts's account, "the extraordinary wit?
ness ofthe Holy Spirit," by which an individual's heart is "raised to
holy raptures, to heavenly joy and assurance," realizing Peter 1:8,
"believing, ye rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory."54

NOTES

1 KJV. Subsequent biblical references will be to this version and

thetically noted in the text by book, chapter, and verse number.
2 "Joy" receives a more or less extensive entry in the major En
German dictionaries of theology and/or the Bible published in the past
forty years. See especially Erich Beyreuther and Gunter Finkenrath, "Joy,
Rejoice," in The New International Dictionary of New Testament Theology,
ed. Colin Brown, 3 vols. (Grand Rapids MI: Zondervan, 1976), 2:352-61;
Peter Beyerhaus, "Joy," in Bakets Dictionary of Christian Ethics, ed. Carl F.
H. Henry (Grand Rapids MI: Baker Books, 1973), pp. 356-7; Werner Lauer,
"Joy," in Concise Dictionary of Christian Ethics, ed. Bernhard Stoeckle (New
York: Seabury Press, 1979), pp. 144-6; John Painter, "Joy," in Dictionary
of Jesus and the Gospels, ed. Joel B. Green and Scot McKnight (Downers
Grove IL and Leicester UK: InterVarsity Press, 1992), pp. 394-6; and T. A.
Dearborn, "Joy," in New Dictionary of Christian Ethics and Pastoral Theology,
ed. David John Atkinson et al. (Downers Grove IL: InterVarsity Press, 1995),
p. 512. Also see the monographs by Jiirgen Moltmann, Theology and Joy,
trans. Reinhard Ulrich (London: SCM, 1973) and William G. Morrice, Joy in
the New Testament (Grand Rapids MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1984).
3 Martin Luther, qtd. in Jaroslav Pelikan, "Reformation of Church and
Dogma," vol. 4 of his The Christian Tradition: A History ofthe Development
of Doctrine, 5 vols. (Chicago and London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1984), p.
128.

4 Significantly, there is a structural parallel to the Sans-Joy episode in

Ariosto's Orlando Furioso (first published in Italian in 1516), but Ariosto's
scene concerns rage as the dark side of honor, not joylessness as the dark

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 Adam Potkay 61

side of the Christian s

parallel: "the quarrel b
resembles . . . [an] episode in canto xxx of the Furioso in which Ruggiero
battles Mandricardo over the right to carry a shield . . . Mandricardo and
Sans Joy are depicted in both episodes as shadows of the protagonists, in?
habitants of the night worlds of Redcrosse and Ruggiero" (in "Spenser's Use
of Ariosto: Imitation and Allusion in Book I ofthe Faerie Queene," RenQ 44,
2 [Summer 1991]: 257-79, 269).
5 The Enlightenment philosopher and historian David Hume (1711-76)
addressed the Reformation in these terms in volume 1 of the first edition of
his The History of England, from the Invasion ofJulius Caesar to the Revoluti
ofl688, ed. William B. Todd, 6 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1983), 1:
xvi. For an elegant critique of the myth that the Protestant Reformation wa
structurally necessary to historical progress, see also Herbert Butterfield, Th
Whig Interpretation of History (1931; rprt. New York: Norton, 1965).
6 Commentaries by Origen, Jerome, and Abelard are digested in th
thirteenth-century Glossa Ordinaria, the standard biblical gloss through
the sixteenth century. Its gloss on Galatians 5:22 includes a paragraph on
charitas as necessarily being a love of the good. Gaudium receives only a
brief definition, "Puritas conscientiae," which seems to link it back to the
beatitudes: "Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God" (Matt.
5:8); cf. 1 Tim. 1:5, which enjoins "charity out of a pure heart, and of a good
conscience" (BibliaLatina cum Glossa Ordinaria, Editio Princeps Adolph Rusch
of Strasbourg, 1480/81, intro. Karlfried Froehlich and Margaret Gibson, 4
vols. [facsimile rprt. n.p.: Brepols, 1992]).
7 Thomas Aquinas, "Lecture 6," in Commentary on Saint Paul's Epistle to
the Galatians, trans. Fabian R. Larcher (Albany: Magi Books, 1966), chap.
5, pp. 176-83, 179, 180.
8 A Commentarie ofM. Doctor Martin Luther upon the Epistle ofS. Paul
to the Galathians, First Collected and Gathered Word by Word out of His
Preaching, and Now out of Latine Faithfully Translated into English for the
Unlearned. Wherein Is Set Forth Most Excellently the Glorious Riches ofGods
Grace and Power of the Gospell, with the Difference betwene the Lawe and
the Gospell, and Strength of Faith Declared: to the Joyfull Comfort and Con-
firmation ofAll True Christian Beleevers, Especially Such as Inwardly Being
Afflicted and Greeved in Conscience, Doe Hungre and Thirstfor Justification
in Christ Jesu. For Whose Cause Most Chiefely This Booke Is Translated and
Printed, and Dedicated to the Same (London: Thomas Vautroullier, 1575); STC
16965. The text was reprinted in 1577 and 1580; a second, revised edition
appeared in 1588; further imprints are from 1602, 1616, 1635, and 1644.
The next reprint appears in 1760. No other work of Luther's had more than
three English printings through 1620. On the sustained influence of Luther's
Galatian commentary on doctrines of justification, sanctification, and assur?
ance, see J. Wayne Baker, "Sola Fide, Sola Gratia: The Battle for Luther in
Seventeenth-Century England," SCJ 16, 1 (Spring 1985): 115-33.
9 John Bunyan, Grace Abounding to the ChiefofSinners, ed. Roger Shar-
rock (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), p. 41.
10 Luther writes that by listing love as the first fruit of the Spirit, Paul
exhorts Christians "that above all they should love one another, through love
outdo one another in showing honor (Rom. 12:10), and each regard the other

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 62 Spenser, Donne, and Joy

as more excellent than himself?all t

and the Holy Spirit, and on account
divine gifts which Christians have"
5-6," trans. Pelikan, ed. Pelikan and Walter A. Hansen, in vol. 27 of Luther's
Works, ed. Pelikan and Helmut T. Lehmann, 55 vols. [St. Louis: Concordia
Publishing House; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1955-86, 1964], pp. 1-149,
93). Subsequent references to this work will be to this edition and will be
identified in the notes as "Lectures" followed by page number. Subsequent
references to Luthefs Works will be identified in the notes as Works.
11 Luther, "Lectures," p. 93.
12 Ibid.
13 Five of Luther's own hymns contain "joy" (freude) and "rejoice," m
prominently in "Dear Christians, Let us now Rejoice" ("Nunfreut euch li
Christen"), in "Liturgy and Hymns," ed. Ulrich S. Leupold and Lehmann,
53 of Works (1965), pp. 217-20. See also Luther's hymns "Would That the L
Would Grant Us Grace [The 67th Psalm], 1523," in Works, 53:232-4, 234; "In
Peace and Joy I Now Depart [The Nunc Dimittis], 1524," in Works, 53:247-8;
"Now Let Us Pray to the Holy Ghost, 1524," in Works, 53:263-4, 264; and
"From Heaven on High I Come to You, 1534/35," in Works, 53:289-91, 290.
Johann Sebastian Bach set Luther's text on "heartfelt joy and delight" (her-
zenfreud und wonne) in Can tata no. 4; Bach's Can tata no. 147, written for
the Feast of the Visitation?the chorale stanzas of which are accompanied
by the orchestral piece popularized as "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring"?con?
cludes in triumphant chorus, "Jesus bleibet meine Freude." On Luther and
John Calvin's influence on English metrical psalmody, see Hannibal Hamlin,
Psalm Culture and Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ. Press, 2004), pp. 1-2, 22-4.
14 Luther, "Lectures," p. 96.
15 As Beyreuther and Finkenrath trace in their erudite entry on "joy,"
"charis (grace) . . . has not always been clearly distinguished in meaning
from chara" (p. 356).
16 William Perkins, A Commentary on Galatians, ed. Gerald T. Sheppard
(New York: Pilgrim Press, 1989), p. 391. Perkins (1558-1602) was a prominent
theologian ofthe Reformed Church; his Commentary was published after the
author's death by Ralph Cudworth (d. 1624), father of Ralph Cudworth the
Cambridge Neoplatonist.
17 Perkins, p. 392.
18 Ibid.
19 Perkins, p. 391. On the necessity of temporal affliction to spiritual joy,
compare Luther's commentary on John 16:24, "ask, and ye shall receive,
that your joy may be full": "there must be bitterness in this life to such an
extent that anxiety and sadness will impel them to pray and to cry out, in
order that comfort may taste better to them and they may become all the
more desirous of joy"; "But [perfect joy] will not take place until the life to
come . . . In faith we have only a droplet of this joy; this is the beginning or
foretaste which includes the comfort that Christ has redeemed us and that
through Him we have entered God's kingdom" (in "Sermons on the Go
of St. John, Chapters 14-16," ed. Pelikan and Daniel E. Poellot, vol. 24 of
Works [1961], pp. 398-401, 400).

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 Adam Potkay 63

20 Thomas Hooker's Sp
his treatise The Soules
on Esay 57.15. The Pre
ing into Christ, on Ma
Young, 1637), pp. 155-266, 156.
21 Hooker, pp. 157-8.
22 Hooker, p. 158.
23 Ibid.
24 Hooker, p. 161.
25 Perkins, p. 393.
26 Luther, qtd. in Vernon J. Bourke, Joy in Augustine's Ethics: The Saint
Augustine Lecture 1978, Saint Augustine and the Augustinian Tradition
(Villanova PA: Villanova Univ. Press, 1979), p. 19. Bourke offers a statistical
summary by Luchesius Smits of Augustine's role as the progenitor of Prot?
estant pessimism, particularly with regard to Calvin: Calvin's Institutes of
Christian Religion has by one count 1,051 references to the seventeen works
that Augustine wrote against Pelagius, many of which emphasize fallen
mankind's tendency to wallow in evil (pp. 18-9). Bourke's larger argument,
however, is that the "expressions of discouragement that sometimes appear
in the anti-Pelagian works" are not characteristic of Augustine's thinking as
a whole (p. 18).
27 Baker, p. 118.
28 The consequences of Luther's equation of "flesh" with the whole person,
including his reason, are set out by Richard Strier, "Against the Rule of Rea?
son: Praise of Passion from Petrarch to Luther to Shakespeare to Herbert," in
Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion,
ed. Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson (Philadelphia:
Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), pp. 23-42, 29-31.
29 Richard Baxter, A Christian Directory: or, a Summ of Practical Theologie,
and Cases of Conscience. Directing Christians, How to Use Their Knowledge
and Faith; How to Improve All Helps and Means, and to Perform All Duties;
How to Overcome Temptations, and to Escape or Mortifie Every Sin. In Four
Parts, I. Christian Ethicks (or Private Duties.) II. Christian Oeconomicks (or
Family Duties.) III. Christian Ecclesiasticks (or Church Duties.) IV. Christian
Politicks (or Duties to our Rulers and Neighbours.) (London: Robert White for
Nevill Simmons, 1673), p. 268.
30 Luther, "Joy," in What Luther Says: An Anthology, comp. Ewald M.
Plass, 3 vols. (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing, 1959), 2:688-93, 692.
31 Luther, "Joy," 2:693.
32 Anna Wierzbicka argues this in Emotions across Languages and Cul?
tures: Diversity and Universals (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999),
pp. 139-67.
33 Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton, Hiroshi
Yamashita, and Toshiyuki Suzuki (London: Longman, 2001), p. 29. Subse?
quent references to The Faerie Queene will be to this edition and will be cited
parenthetically in the text by book, canto, stanza, and line number(s).
34 'Thus, after . . . [Una] and Redcross are separated, Una?because she
is the visible church?must disappear from the sight of people by entering a
wilderness. There she remains during the centuries when Redcross is serving
as traveling companion to Duessa [the Roman Catholic Church]. When Una

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 64 Spenser, Donne, and Joy

emerges from the wilderness, she r

peared . . . [in the] sixteenth centur
and Spenser's Historical Allegory,"
35 In his entry on "Sansfoy, Sansjoy
"The theological allegory might be i
frute of the Spirit is love, joye, pea
from the state of infidelity or faith
separation from Una in ii 6, through
of despair or joylessness" (in The Sp
[Toronto and Buffalo: Univ. of Toro
625-6, 625).
36 Robert Kellogg, Oliver Steele, and Hamilton concur in deriving "Thya-
mis" from thumos, glossing the Greek as "passion." See Hamilton's emenda-
tion to 1.6.21.4 on p. 86 of his edition of The Faerie Queene. For Kellogg and
Steele's annotation, see their edition, Books I and II of the Faerie Queene,
The Mutability Cantos, and Selections from The Minor Poetry, ed. Kellogg and
Steele (New York: Odyssey, 1965), p. 144.
37 Recent work on the slipperiness of Spenser's religious views, and the
instability of early Reformation theology more generally, is reviewed by Anne
Lake Prescott, "Complicating the Allegory: Spenser and Religion in Recent
Scholarship," Ren&R, n. s. 25, 4 (Fall 2001): 9-23.
38 Harold Skulsky, "Spenser's Despair Episode and the Theology of
Doubt," MP 78, 3 (February 1981): 227-42.
39 Douglas Trevor, "Sadness in The Faerie Queene," in Reading the Early
Modern Passions, pp. 240-52, 245. In his reading of Sans-Joy as "the kind of
furor that can be understood via Galenic terms" (p. 248), Trevor draws upon
John R. Maier's "Sansjoy and the Furor Melancholicus," MLS 5, 1 (Spring
1975): 78-87.
40 Luther wrote on the meaning of his Seal (also known as the Luther
Rose) in a letter to Lazarus Spengler, 8 July 1530, qtd. in Dietrich Korsch's
"Luther's Seal as an Elementary Interpretation of His Theology," trans. Amy
Marga, in Harvesting Martin Luther's Reflections on Theology, Ethics, and th
Church, ed. Timothy J. Wengert, Lutheran Quarterly Books (Grand Rapids
MI and Cambridge MA: William B. Eerdmans, 2004), pp. 56-77, 57.
41 Article 17 (1562, 1604) reads: "As the godly Consideration of Predesti?
nation, and our Election in Christ is full of sweet, pleasant, and unspeakable
comfort to Godly persons . . . so for curious, and carnal persons, lacking the
Spirit of Christ, to have continually before their eyes the sentence of Gods
Predestination is a most dangerous downfall, whereby the Devil doth thrust
them into desperation, or into wretchedness of most unclean living, no less
perilous than desperation" (The Faith, Doctrine and Religion, Professed and
Proteced in the Realm of England and Dominions ofthe Same: Expressed in
Thirty nine articles [Cambridge, 1681], p. 74).
42 The matron of the house, Dame Caelia (Heavenly), seeing Una "with
ioy unwonted inly sweld" (1.10.8.8); her daughter, Charissa (Charity), is sur-
rounded by babes "that ioyd her to behold" (1.10.31.2).
43 Skulsky, pp. 241-2, 242.
44 Hamilton thinks otherwise in his note to book 1, canto 5, stanza 44:
'The further fortunes of Sansjoy need not be told: none return from hell

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 Adam Potkay 65

'without heauenly grac

refers comes in a passage in which exceptions are clearly admitted, "But
dreadfull Furies . . . / And damned sprights" (1.5.31.8-9), and we have be?
fore us the examples of Night and Duessa returning to earth after escorting
Sans-Joy to the underworld.
45 John Donne, "Number 1: The Second ofMy Prebend Sermons upon
My Five Psalmes. Preached at S. Pauls, January 29, 1625," in vol. 7 of The
Sermons ofJohn Donne, ed. George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson, 10
vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1953-62, 1954),
pp. 51-71, 68-9. Subsequent references to Donne's sermons will be to this
edition and will appear parenthetically in the text by volume and page num?
ber. Subsequent references to The Sermons ofJohn Donne will be identified
in the notes as Sermons.
46 On the rhetorical structure of this sermon?Donne's Second Prebend
sermon?as a whole, see Terry G. Sherwood, "Reason in Donne's Sermons,"
ELH 39, 3 (September 1972): 353-74, 371-4.
47 Donne's five full sermons on joy are "Number 2, Preached at White-hall,
the 30 Aprill 1620. Psal. 144.15 Being the First Psalme for the Day. Blessed
Are the People That Be So; Yea Blessed Are the People, Whose God Is the
Lord," in Sermons, 3:73-90; "Number 16: Preached at Lincolns Inne. Colos.
1.24. Who Now Rejoyce in My Sufferings for You, and Fili up That Which Is
Behind of the Afflictions of Christ in My Flesh, for His Bodies Sake Which Is
the Church," in Sermons, 3:332-47; "Number 14: Preached at S. Pauls. Psal.
90.14. O Satisfie Us Early with Thy Mercy, That We May Rejoyce and Be Glad
All Our Dayes," in Sermons, 5:268-95; "Number 1," in Sermons, 7:51-71 (see
note 45 above); and "Number 10: A Sermon Preached in Saint Dunstans. 1
Thessalonians 5.16. REJOYCE EVERMORE," in Sermons, 10:213-28. Sub?
sequent references to these sermons will appear parenthetically in the t
by volume and page number.
48 Thomas Cranmer, Sermons, or Homilies, Appointed to be Read in
Churches in the Time of Queen Elizabeth, of Famous Memory. In Two Parts
(New York: T. and J. Swords, 1815), pp. 390-1.
49 John Carey, John Donne: Life, Mind, and Art (New York: Oxford Univ.
Press, 1981), pp. 15-36.
50 In a recent collection of essays, John Donne and the Protestant Ref?
ormation: New Perspectives (ed. Mary Arshagouni Papazian [Detroit: Wayne
State Univ. Press, 2003]), Daniel W. Doerksen and Jeanne Shami argue that
Donne, although tending toward moderate Calvinism rather than Arminian-
ism, accommodates both positions in his irenic, consenus-building sermons.
See Doerksen's "Polemist or Pastor? Donne and Moderate Calvinist Confor?
mity" (pp. 12-34) and Shami's "'Speaking Openly and Speaking First':
Donne, the Synod of Dort, and the Early Stuart Church" (pp. 35-65). See
also Joshua Scodel, "John Donne and the Religious Politics ofthe Mean," in
John Donne's Religious Imagination: Essays in Honor ofJohn T Shawcross, ed.
Raymond Jean Frontain and Frances M. Malpezzi (Conway AR: UCA Press,
1995), pp. 45-80 and Achsah Guibbory, who in opposition to mainstream
opinion, argues that Laudian Arminianism shaped Donne's sermons from
1624 on. Guibbory nonetheless concedes Donne's "cautious, balanced rheto?
ric," his "gestures of inclusion and deferences to Calvin" ("Donne's Religion:

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 66 Spenser, Donne, and Joy

Montagu, Arminianism, and Donne's Sermons, 1624-1630," in ELR 31,3

[Autumn 2001]: 412-39, 427).
51 Donne expands on this complaint of religious "indifferency" in 10:161-
2, where he complains of Catholics converting to the Church of England for
temporal advantage and not out of true belief in its ordinances and sacra-
ments. Autobiographically, Donne may be veiling self-examination, if not
self-criticism, here. His own conversion opened to him avenues of civil and
ecclesiastical advancement; yet as P. M. Oliver notes: "few Renaissance Prot-
estants can have had quite as distinguished a Catholic patrimony as Donne,
and few can have had so much pressure on them from family and friends to
resist the lure of Protestantism" (in Donne's Religious Writing: A Discourse of
Feigned Devotion [London and New York: Longman, 1997], p. 263). Glancing
at Donne's anti-Roman invective, Oliver eoncludes, "the possibility that he
had left a church which was doctrinally sounder than the one he had joined
was a perpetual stimulus to him to denigrate his old church and demonstrate
the soundness of his new one" (p. 263). See also Arthur F. Marotti, "John
Donne's Conflicted Anti-Catholicism," JEGP 101, 3 (July 2002): 358-79.
52 John N. Wall, "Church of England," in The Spenser Encyclopedia, pp.
153-60, 156.
53 Ibid.

54 Isaac Watts, Evangelical Discourses on Several Subjects, to Which Is

Added, an Essay on the Powers and Contests of Flesh and Spirit (1747), in
The Works of Isaac Watts, Containing Besides His Sermons and Essays on
Miscellaneous Subjects Several Additional Pieces, ed. George Burder, 6 vols.
(London: J. Barfield, 1810-11), 1:711.

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