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COPYRIGHT 2006 Rice University
But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering,
gentleness, goodness, faith, [m]eekness, temperance: against such there is no law. --Galatians 5:22-3 (1)
Joy becomes an anxious concern during the Protestant Reformation in both Germany and, my focus here, England. English Protestant writing of the early modern era vividly evokes both joy and, conversely, the threat of joylessness in Christian life. Yet the importance of joy to Christianity and particularly Protestant Christianity, although recognized by theologians, has gone largely unnoticed by literary and cultural historians of Reformation England, and the specter of joylessness has, to my knowledge, elicited no scholarly comment at all. (2) My aims in this essay are, first, to demonstrate that joy and joylessness were of peculiar interest to early Protestant theology and the literature it influenced and, second, to offer an explanation of why this was so.
I argue that within the Protestant "pluriverse" of souls each striving for God and struggling against Satan or fallen human nature, joy serves as a countervailing, centripetal force, a sign and surety of adhesion to God and neighbor. For the individual soul seeking signs of its salvation, joy, no less than "good works," is a proof or "earnest" of its sanctification by the Holy Spirit. Joy is one of the first three "fruits of the Spirit" in Galatians 5:22 (love and peace are the others). Christian joy is joy in or inspired by the Holy Spirit (Rom. 14:17, 1 Thess. 1:6). In John's Gospel, Jesus promises his community of believers, the "friends," "that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full" (15:11). Thus, for scriptural commentators who held the Word to be, in Martin Luther's phrase, "'the true treasure of the Church,'" joy came to be adduced as an index of the Spirit's presence in personal life as well as in interpersonal life within a universal or national church. (3) Yet even as joy rose to prominence as a free gift of God 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 literature 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 Mediterranean 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 (at least in historically Protestant countries) as a milestone in the history of human freedom, may of course be viewed as precisely the opposite of that: a historical episode of spiritual fear and trembling, a renewed sense of bondage to sin and indebtedness to the Lord, and the resuscitation of the Church militant. (5) We might list among the ills that arose during the early Reformation a host of superstitious beliefs comparatively unimportant during the Middle Ages: 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 of the 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 history of the term "joy." Protestant writers appeal to joy with novel urgency, even at times with anxiety. Joy features prominently in Protestant and especially Protestant-evangelical hymns, songs, 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 partial 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 of the 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 suggest the broader differences in joy theology between the Roman and Reformed churches. St. Thomas Aquinas, one of the few pre-sixteenth-century theologians to write a major commentary on Galatians, is, in keeping with his philosophy of the passions, the only one to comment significantly on love, joy, and peace as fruits of the 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). Of the 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 and 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, (excepting the Holy Bible) before all the books that ever I have seen, as most fit for a wounded Conscience." (9) A good part of the salve lies in Luther's comments on Galatians 5:22. He construes "love" as a self-abasement toward one's neighbor (not, as in Aquinas, an orientation toward the abstract "good"). Such love is entirely enabled and sustained by Christ and the Spirit. (10) Joy, accordingly, "means joyful thoughts about Christ, wholesome exhortations, happy songs, praise, and thanksgiving." (11) Luther describes joy as nothing less than a central Christian duty: God is repelled by sorrow of spirit; He hates sorrowful teaching and sorrowful thoughts and words, and He takes 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 of the 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. Luther himself did much to institutionalize rejoicing (along with supplicating) 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 of the Law for righteousness to everyone who has faith." (14) Thus joy, which we are required to have, is that which we cannot have by our own efforts but only in conjunction with faith, itself a gift of the Spirit and of God's grace.
In Paul's original Greek, grace (charis) is etymologically connected to, and sometimes not clearly distinguished from, joy (chara). (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 of the spirit are called fruites thereof hence it followes, that there are no true vertues, and good affections, without the...
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