Notes on the Faerie Queene, Book 2

Here is the allegory of Temperance. It follows the standard medieval warrior pilgrimage. Sumpter has done a fine job of modernizing the spelling while retaining the exalted style. However, there are a few flaws with Sumpter's approach (I am not criticizing his work. It is literally one of a kind and preciously needed). Sumpter ignores (or doesn't notice) Spenser's Neo-Platonism. Without understanding Spenser's commitment to Neo-Platonism, parts of the story are incoherent. Here are some themes that will guide the reader.



Neo-Platonic Themes

Reason masters passions: “Yet with strong reason mastered passions frail” (VI.40). But this isn’t standard Neo-Platonism of the monkish sort. Passions aren’t bad. They just need to be guided by reason.

*Mediating Spirits. Neo-Platonism of its various forms sees a chain of being connecting all of reality. The material is suspended by the spiritual. Transcendence, therefore, can be found in the lowest link of the chain. Along this chain are mediating spirits (powers, angels, fairies).

*Because of his Neo-Platonism, Spenser sees a greater role for angels than we do today (VIII:1-2). Angels actively engage and empower man and thwart the enemy.

*It seems that Spenser identifies “Temperance” as a “god” (IX.1). Granted, he isn’t using god in the crude polytheistic sense. Rather, temperance seems to be a “power” or even “Archetype.” True, this could be merely poetic license, but given Spenser’s Neo-Platonism, it fits neatly.

*In the Bower of Bliss the heroes (Guyon and Palmer) come across a “false Genius.” If we accept that these characters (Genius et al) are Archetypes, we can then add the standard (neo)Platonic insight that the Archetypes and Forms have causal power. But we have a problem. The “Genius” here is a false Genius, as Spenser clearly argues (XII.47). So clearly this Genius isn’t the real genius, but a shadow one.

EXCURSUS: ALMA'S CASTLE

Alma's Castle in Book X illustrates how thoroughly committed to Neo-Platonism (and how familiar with the occult) Spenser was.  Sumpter isn't aware of these connections.

Sumpter misses the implication that Memory has hermetic overtones (Yates 2014).  Memory mediates a society’s passing down of Absolute Spirit (Magee 87).
Speculative Philosophy holds up a mirror (speculum) to the Idea itself: it allows the Idea to comprehend itself (88).  In fact, following the Kabbalist tradition, the “mirror” allows one to behold the deeper essence of Spirit (120).

This brings us back to the Hermetic Art of Memory.  “Imagination” is to evoke from memory the Perennial Philosophy.  In other words, to echo Jung, it draws out from within the unconscious.

This is rather speculative.  Is this what Spenser really had in mind? I think so.  Dame Frances Yates argues that Spenser “inherited much more than Neo-Platonism” (Yates 2001, 112). Spenser describes the man (representing memory) as “of infinite remembrance” (IX.52). Man is finite, not infinite--unless man himself was drawing upon a universal subsconcious.  I suggest this is what Spenser had in mind.  (Interestingly, Yates comments specifically on this very Canto; 114).

Yates further argues that the structure Spenser gives suggests that Man is a Microcosm of the universe.   In Canto 22 we read of a “circle” and a “triangle” with a “quadrate” (cube) in between.  The four-sided cube represents the four elements of the world, which is proportioned equally by “seven and nine.”  Seven is the number of the planets and nine is the angelic hierarchy.  If the cube is between seven and nine, then it is an eight, or an octave.  This could also represent the Temple of Solomon.


Conclusion:

Spenser’s work is literally the standard by which all other poetry is compared. Even though (or perhaps because of!) he is a Neo-Platonist, Spenser floods the senses (and the soul) with beauty and creates in the reader a desire not only for the good, but for the Beautiful, for the Heroic--indeed, for the Temperate.

This isn’t accidental. If what we have said about Forms/Archetypes’ having causal power, then then we can expect “pullings” upon our soul when reading Spenser.


Spenser’s most memorable creation is the Bower of Bliss (as Lewis said, no prude can read Spenser). Guyon’s actions represent a neat twist in Neo-Platonism. The most temperate action is to go into a frenzy and destroy the Bower. This isn’t what we expect from a Neo-Platonist. Spenser doesn’t negate the passions--he calls them into Reasons’s service, but all the while they remain very, very passional. Spenser may have just squared the circle: he may have just redeemed Neo-Platonism.  Guyon isn't an Anchorite who tries to transcend the realm of passions.

What about Sumpter’s annotations? They are a mixed bag. When Sumpter is explaining ethics, theology, or literary symbolism, his annotations are amazing. When he tries to be funny they are worse than awful. Remember the Ron Swanson style of humor? If you have to try hard to be funny, you aren’t. Hilarity should flow from your very being. You shouldn’t have to strain to be funny. I say that because some of the wannabe funny footnotes seriously distract from the story.

Rightly Ordered Loves

This is a summary of Joan Lockwood O'Donovan's essay "Christian Platonism and Non-Proprietary Community."



Thesis: The possession of rights is always proprietorship.  In the Western tradition all natural rights originate in property right.

Pope John XXII proposed that from the moment of creation all mankind was collectively endowed with full lordship in the sense of ownership over earthly goods.

Patristic Foundations of Non-Proprietary Community

Augustine distinguished between two rights on which earthly goods are based: divine right, in which all things belong to the righteous, and human right--which is in the jusridiction of the kings of the earth (Ep. 93, NPNF (1) I:400.).

Eventually, this would be seen that in a just commonwealth, "the highest and truest common good, namely, God, is loved by all, and men love each other in Him without dissimulation" (Ep. 137.5.17).  Therefore, bonum commune is above all a sharing in rightly ordered loving--an activity that is entirely common in the sense of inclusive and participatory because entirely spiritual (JO, 80).

"By contrast, Augustine conceived of the disordered love of the soul as the privatization of good, in that it entails the soul's turning away from the universal common good to its private good, that is, to itself as privately possessed."

"In the body politic, disordered love is the destruction of community, of the bonum commune, because it involves radical loss of the shared spiritual possession of being, meaning, and value."

• regulated interaction of private spheres of degenerate freedom.

Franciscan Poverty: The Theology of Evangelical Non-Possession

In the later middle ages the distinction between common property and common non-proprietary possession never surfaced.

• Bonaventure moved the debate forward.  By drawing upon the Christian neo-Platonic tradition, he was able to posit the Trinity/Word as font and finis of thought and spirituality. 
• Christ's life revealed "Evangelical Perfection."
• This meant that Bonaventure's order saw the claiming of spiritual goods for oneself and against one another.  It disrupts the human response to divine love (84).
• Renouncing the property right means the wayfarer is not a self-possessor, but is possessed by Christ, receiving from Him all the good that he is, has, and does (85).  

Wyclif's Ecclesiological Revolution

Fitzralph (Wyclif's intellectual predecessor) argued that God's "gift of lordship to Adam is a communication or sharing of himself and his lordship rather than an alienating transfer of lordship, which would diminish God--a communicating and communicable possession and use of things according to rational necessity" (89).

• "Wyclif's core Augustinian insight is that just lordship over earthly goods involves rightly ordered love toward them, which in turn depends on the true knowledge of them available only in Christ"
• Evangelical dominion, therefore, is the just communal possession and use of earthly goods that shadows God's own dominion by conserving the being of non-human creatures...

Conclusion

"We are not our own but Christ's" (1 Cor. 6.19).  "As we are possessed by Christ and receive ourselves from him, the central act of our willing is one of conforming to his will" (92). 

• When we encounter other goods, we first possess them in their essential being, through knowledge illumined by the love of Christ, before answering the demand or claim that they present" (93).
• We are "claims," not "rights-possessors." 
• By conforming to Christ, we respond and recognize that the Other is.  We fulfill the demands of Justice, but not the demands of one another (this solves Hegel's problem.  We introduce the Other as loved).  

Righteous human lordship is communal chiefly because it is spiritual (this is where Reconstructionism in its libertarianism is so horribly wrong).

• Righteous "human community is a sharing in or communication of spiritual goods before physical goods."
• "Only the fellowship of the Holy Spirit entered into through the divine-human communication of Christ crucified and resurrected makes possible an inclusive communion in the use of physical goods.  No meum or teum. 
• Common possession means that no one acts as if any good belongs to him/her in any excluding or even particularizing sense (94).

Notes on Bulgakov, Part 1

From Bride of the Lamb.  I'll polish it in my review.

Bulgakov says he rejects pantheism and monism.  He makes several incisive criticisms against cosmic dualisms (the two creating entities annul one another).

Creation Out of Nothing

What do we mean by the word “nothing?”  Are we reifying “nothing?”  Bulgakov says there is “no extra-divine ground of creation” (Bulgakov 6).   We must distinguish two different types of “nothing:”

1. pre-creaturely nothing, ontological zero. The negation of all being
2. Ontic, creaturely nothing, me on. It is a mode of creaturely being.  

More on nothing (116ff)

• nothing is no-thing, not just something.
• Its existence can only be posited by extreme abstraction.  
• All creation has a non-creaturely, creaturely character.  
• The positive force of its being is the creaturely Sophia, which is the image of the divine Sophia (117).

Aquinas

Aquinas has a difficulty with calling creation “good.”  Rather, it is imperfect.  It is only one type of many possible worlds.  There is a non-correspondence between ideas and things, as the former is always larger than the latter.  The divine ideas are suspended in mid-air.  They aren’t entirely accidents, because God doesn’t have accidents, but to the degree that they actualize creation, they can’t be fully God, either.  

Creatio and God as Cause

Motion cannot be explained on the basis of the motion itself (???).  

“The strength of the causal series lies in its continuity” (35) and if a gap were introduced, it would fail.  And there is a gap between God and creation.  Both causality and mover belong to the world of unitary being.  “It is not possible to transcend the world.”  

But the Christian faith does not need any of this.  It has the doctrine of creation, which is personal and presupposes a personal God (37).  

Divine Sophia is the en-hypostatic life of the Trinity.  

• It is the Divine World.
• Not a hypostasis, but a hypostasizedness

Creation of the World

• a self-positing of God (46).
• But the world is not a piece of God.
• Rather, Divine Sophia has a creaturely Sophianic mode of existence in which the world exists.
• Divine Sophia exists in a dual mode
• eternal (proper mode)
• creaturely
• contains multiplicity
• relative nothingness
• There can be no divine principle of existence which exists in the “nothing” (ouk on).  
• “Nothing” is a modus of reality.  It cannot exist by itself and for itself.

Divine Prototypes

• These are the plan of creation (55).
• The problem Patristics faced with this was how to relate these prototypes, which were divine, to creation.  Bulgakov suggests Sophia is the relation.
• Ideas are the “seeds” of being.
• Creation

Temporality of Creation

What do we mean when we say that the world is created “in time?”  How do eternity and temporality interact without the former subsuming the latter?  Is the latter merely an illusion?

• Temporality is not yet time; time is the mode of its existence (70).
• Time is the abstract measure of temporality, but it is not the unique measure.
• With respect to creation, we must not speak of the beginning of time (which is contradictory), but of the emergence of temporality.
• Time is a relation within becoming.

Therefore, we say that creation is beginningless, but not eternal.    It can’t have a beginning in time since time, too, is created.  Therefore, we say that creation and time emerge from temporality.

The World Soul and its Hypostases

world soul: the creaturely Sophia (79).  It is here that Bulgakov’s project shines in all its brilliance but also threatens to come undone.  He admits that the existence of the world-soul marks a “loss of clarity” and one wonders if he is reverting back to Aristotle’s chain of being.  But it is a lively chain, for he assures us: “There is no place for dead matter in the world.”

• We are speaking of the world soul, not the world spirit.  The difference between soul and spirit is that the soul is not hypostatic, whereas the Spirit is.  
• The soul corresponds to the spirit’s nature.  It is the spirit’s hypostatizedness.
• This is not Neo-Platonism, for he does not see the World Soul as a hypostasis.  
• The World-Soul is a connected, multi-organic unity
• It is the world’s inner entelechy which unifies.
• Therefore, there is an “inner life principle” in the world.  If this were not so, then why would we enjoin creation to praise God if creation is merely dead matter?
• It is the actualization of creaturely being (197).  The world-soul actualizes creation’s instincts for power.
• In its proper being it is divided into heaven and earth

Angels

Angels are how God usually relates nature (199).  They are the bearers of the sophicanic prototypes of creation and the earth’s reality.  Creation arises through the elemental forces of the world soul but its formation presupposes angelic activity and participation (Rev. 7:1, 14:18; 16:5; and fight battles).

Angels are the sophicanic heaven of the world, the creaturely bridge between Divine Sophia and Creaturely sophia, metaxu.  Angels contain the assurance that creation is a ladder of life.

Main Point

The connection of God and the world is grounded in Sophianicity.  “The divine Sophia is one, though she has two forms of being” (223).  Bulgakov argues that the Western insistence on speaking of God as First Cause and creation as Second Cause has the effect of subsuming the latter under the former.  Rather, God is not the cause of the world but the Creator.

• In the creation of the world God repeats or doubles his own Being.  This is the Divine Sophia positing the Creaturely Sophia’s mode of existence (222).
• It is the self-repetition of the Divine Sophia.

Bulgakov thinks he solves the main aporia--that of divine and human freedom--in placing this interaction within the realm of creaturely Sophia (231).

The Church

Holds to a highly qualified apostolic succession (280-282).

The Eucharist

• He suggests that Ignatius’s stringent appeal to the bishop suggests that his position is new and far from indisputable (284).
• The initial emphasis was not on the Bishop, but on the koinonia.

History and Knowledge

• mankind finds its unity in Adam and is the gnoseological subject, The Universal-I.  It is realized in the particular cognitive acts of individuals.  This is what Hegel was getting at when he said knowledge is social.  If knowledge is atomized, it can’t be transmitted.
• If there is a transcendental subject, then there is a transcendental object.  This is the world in its integral unity, creaturely Sophia.

Expanding Being in History

We know from revelation that spiritual hierarchies participate together with man in the world.  “They act within the limits of the world.”  

Criticisms

What does Bulgakov mean by alluding to an “ontological hierarchy” in creation (53)? Elsewhere, he rightly rejects the Aristotelian chain of being.  I think he means something along the lines that creation is not a nominalistic bundle of atoms (a string of pearls without the string).  

Essence-Energies Rebutted

An alternative reading of the so-called Western doctrine of God is the essence/energies distinction made famous by Gregory Palamas.  It posits that we cannot know God in his simple essence, but we can know him by his energies (or operations).  Hints of this doctrine are found in the Cappadocians and Maximos (though I deny they are saying exactly the same thing as Gregory).  The doctrine has an initial appeal.   Admittedly in our prayer lives, we do not pray to “essence itself,” but to the persons of the Trinity.   It also appears that we do know God by his actions towards us, and not by transcending to the essence.  So this means the distinction is correct, right?  If this is the only alternative to the Thomistic doctrine of absolute divine simplicity (e.g., person = relation =essence; person = essence!), then how can we avoid not assenting to it?

Some form of the doctrine might in fact be correct, but even when I was gung-ho for anchoretism, a number of questions kept coming up.

1. Is it true that the Thomistic model of divine simplicity is the only choice for Western doctrines of God?  I simply deny this to be the case.  I think it is disputed that even Augustine held to a form of this.
2. While it’s true that we know God by his actions toward us, can the “energies” model really account for all biblical data?   Even Orthodox theologians note this difficulty.   Vladimir Moss, in rebuttal to Fr John Romanides writes, “Do the Scriptures speak of our having an energetic relationship with God or a personal relationship with God?”
3. It is true that God relates to us by our actions, but as Gunton notes (Act & Being), when Scripture uses these concepts it does so around terms like providence, Incarnation, and covenant.  When the fathers use these terms they usually mean the peri ton theon (things around the godhead) or the divine logoi (think eternal forms).

Technical critiques of the doctrine:

Orthodox philosopher David Bradshaw writes, ““Somehow by energeia Gregory and Basil would appear to understand both that which God is, and that which God performs. … Basil and Gregory in their turn revise Plotinus by rejecting the distinction of hypostasis between Intellect and the One.  For them the relevant distinction is rather that between God as he exists within himself and is known only to himself, and God as he manifests himself to others.  The former is the divine ousia, the latter the divine energies.  It is important to note that both are God, but differently conceived:  God as unknowable and as knowable, as wholly beyond us and as within our reach.”

In other words, God’s energies are ad extra, outside the Godhead.  They relate to creation.   This raises a troubling point, as Olivianus has noted, “if there were no creation would God’s nature be the same? On the Eastern view, no. On said view, in order for God to have the nature he does he must create. Thus creation is a necessity of nature.”  Remember, in some sense the “energies” are part of who God is--but they only relate to God's works ad extra.  All Christian traditions believe that God’s essence is stable and unchanging.  God would be God regardless of creation.  However, God’s energies only relate to creation (God’s manifesting himself to others).  So here we have a disjunction between God ad intra and God ad extra.  The only way out of his is to posit a necessary creation, which few traditional theologians are willing to do.

Addendum: Vladimir Moss’s extended critique:

Moss is one of the outlaw theologians of the Orthodox Church.  He is a Western convert to a catacomb branch of the Russian Orthodox Church.  (When the Moscow Patriarchate surrendered to the Bolsheviks, a number of Orthodox believers rightly resisted and went underground, forming denominations–I know they hate that word–like ROCOR and ROCA.  Most of these denominations have since rejoined the MP.  Moss’s has not).   Moss’s theological project is odd, but in many ways it is quite helpful.   He does not have rose-colored Tsarist-Holy Serbia glasses.  He honestly points out problems in current Orthodox theology, historiography, and practice.  His comments on topics like substitutionary atonement, theosis, and original sin are very helpful, surprisingly.

Fr John Romanides in some ways resurrected the theological project of Gregory Palamas. In his works one will note a strong antipathy towards anything Western:  substitution, original sin, AUGUSTINE, etc.  While Romanides has a clear manner of writing, it appears that he often overshoots his target.  While he makes many good points, his method precludes a number of valuable insights in Christian theology.  Moss realizes this and responds accordingly.  In its starkest form, the essence-energies distinction, most starkly represented by Romanides, adopts the Dionysian hyper-ousia (God is beyond being) of which we cannot know, but he reveals himself in his energies, which we can know.  The following are Moss’s glosses:

Romanides:  “ The relationship between God and man is not a personal relationship and it is also not a subject-object relationship. So when we speak about a personal relationship between God and man, we are making a mistake. That kind of relationship between God and human beings does not exist…The relations between God and man are not like the relations between fellow human beings. Why? Because we are not on the same level or in the same business with God.”

Moss: But God came down to our level in the Incarnation (this is precisely the same point Gunton makes against Dionysius).  What reason could Romanides have for denying that God is a Person(s) and that our relationship with Him is personal? The present writer can only speculate here, but the answer may lie in Romanides’ obsession with the distinction between the Essence and the Energies of God, according to which God is unknowable in His Essence, but knowable in His Essence. Now this is a valid and very important distinction, but Romanides abuses it as often as he uses it correctly. It would be an abuse, for example, to say that since God can only be known through His Energies, our relationship with Him can only be “energetic”, not personal. For Who is known through His Energies? Is it not the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit – that is, the Persons of the Holy Trinity? So our relationship with God is both “energetic” and personal: we know the Persons of God through His Energies. For, as St. Paul says, God has “shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God [His Energies] in the face of Jesus Christ [His Person]” (II Corinthians 4.6).

Romanides:  “No similarity whatsoever exists between the uncreated and the created, or between God and creation. This also means that no analogy, correlation, or comparison can be made between them. This implies that we cannot use created things as a means for knowing the uncreated God or His energy.”

Moss: But this immediately raises the objection: if there is no similarity whatsoever between God and His creation, why, when He created man, did He create Him in His “image and likeness”? And again: is not this likeness between God and man precisely the basis which makes possible the union between God and man, and man’s deification?

Me:  This touches on the analogia entis, which most Protestants reject in its Romanist form.  I had never realized Moss’s point before. I offer a hearty amen.

Addendum: