Binding the Ghost: Theology, Mystery, and the Transcendence of Literature by Ed Simon

Author:Ed Simon [Simon, Ed]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LIT000000 Literary Criticism / General, Religion, General, Christian Theology, Literary Criticism, REL013000 Religion / Christianity / Literature & The Arts, Christianity, REL067000 Religion / Christian Theology / General, Literature & the Arts
ISBN: 9781506478777
Google: vwxYEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Augsburg
Published: 2022-04-19T20:43:56+00:00

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Neo-Donatists in Eden

Edmund Spenser knew how to turn a phrase. His poetic vision, exemplified by his epic The Faerie Queene, remains in some ways unsurpassed. Though it is a dense, maximalist, incomplete poem of seven books and thousands upon thousands of lines, a complex religious allegory with a massive cast of characters, Spenser could deftly craft quivering lines of exquisite, whispered beauty, as he wrote in 1956’s “Prothalamion”: “Calm was the day, and through the trembling air / Sweet-breathing Zephyrus did softly play— / A gentle spirit, that lightly did delay / Hot Titan’s beams, which then did glister fair.” One might assume that Spenser’s observation in The Faerie Queene that the “noblest mind the best contentment has” is true of its author, for as he celebrates his own genius in “Prothalamion,” his is a verse that commands, “Sweete Themmes runne softly, till I end my Song.”

Spenser’s poetry is influential and important, and as is always more crucial, Spenser’s poetry is sublime and sweet. He is able to march into an iambic rhythm like a poetic general, able to allude to the honey-scented winds of Zephyr or the clear waters of Parnassus, but for all of the immaculate lines he strung together, there is also his 1596 pamphlet, A View of the Present State of Ireland. In that piece, he argued that that colonized nation was a “diseased portion of the State, it must first be cured and reformed,” which he recommended accomplishing through the scorched-earth eradication of Irish culture and people, the elimination of Gaelic, and the forced conversion of the natives. To argue that such a proposal is anything other than a form of ethnic cleansing would be revisionism, an attempt to ameliorate Spenser’s guilt. Spenser’s relationship to genocidal policy was more than just theoretical. He was present at Smerwick in 1580, where a surrendering garrison of Irish, Italian, and Spanish soldiers were massacred, and for his role, Spenser was gifted plantations at both Munster and Kilcolman by the British government. Spenser engaged authoritarian logic, the same type of logic since deployed from Wounded Knee to Wannsee in the language of Manifest Destiny and Lebensraum. He conceived of an Ireland where “in a shorte space there were none almost left, and a most populous and plentyfull countrye suddenly lefte voyde of man or beast.” Despite his greatness as a poet, there must be a serious accounting of how we approach a man like Spenser and thus a poem like The Faerie Queene. As scholars, as teachers, as students, and most importantly, as readers, there must be a moral reckoning on how we reconcile the reality of the poet to the reality of the poem.

Spenser is not the only writer with a darkened biography, especially in his own era. Consider Spenser’s fellow veteran in the Irish campaigns of the Nine Years’ War, the ever-romanticized Sir Walter Raleigh. The celebrated explorer, in addition to being a privateer, was also a poet of tremendous talent, whom the undersung modern critic Yvor

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