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Woe to him who seeks to pour oil upon the waters when God has brewed
them into a gale! --Moby-Dick
The New Arcadia begins with shipwreck. Sir Philip Sidney's narrator, in one of the Renaissance's most famous literary descriptions, portrays "a sight full of piteous strangeness: a ship, or rather the carcase of the ship, or rather some few bones of the carcase hulling there, part broken, part burned, part drowned--death having used more than one dart to that destruction." (1) Amid the wreckage float mutilated corpses and a "great store of very rich things" (p. 66). This scene, when juxtaposed with the text's other shipwrecks, reveals a fictional structure through which Sidney explores the relative merits of reason and faith in understanding human experience. (2) As one might expect from an incomplete text, the New Arcadia does not yield any simple conclusions, but its elaboration of the ancient topos of shipwreck shows Sidney's understanding of reason and faith to be neither as Neo-Platonic nor as Calvinist as some critics have assumed. In three scenes of shipwreck, Sidney treats faith as superior to reason but sees the two as interactive, a position which allows him to qualify the Reformation's attack on this-worldly values with his hopes for human intellect.
Investigating this topic brings one face to face with the unsettled status of humanist reason and Protestant faith in Sidney studies. Where critics once held that Sidney--"that rare thing, the aristocrat in whom the aristocratic ideal is really embodied," as C. S. Lewis called him--embodied Renaissance humanism, recent work has emphasized Sidney's eclectic nature. (3) The question has become not whether Sidney was a humanist, but which strain--civic, Neo-Platonic, Erasmian, Stoic, Ciceronian, hybrid--best fits him. Critical opinion has shifted from John Danby's confident description of Sidney's "conjunction of the Christian and the Nichomachean ethic" to studies that emphasize "contradiction and irresolution." (4) Recent studies have made it clear that the tradition of describing Sidney as a "Platonist Protestant" does not do justice to his intellectual range and critical rigor. (5) Arthur F. Kinney, who makes Sidney a centerpiece in his study of "humanist poetics," calls him "a man of contradictions" who not only embraced humanism but also produced "a considered reexamination of the precepts and practices advocated by Tudor humanists." (6) Richard Helgerson further claims that the Arcadia represents a retreat from humanist principles, even though Sidney's first readers denied this. (7) Wesley Trimpi has pointed out that Sidney's Defence of Poesy, often called Neo-Platonic, appears animated by a rejection of Neo-Platonic analysis of poetry in favor of a Ciceronian/Aristotelian approach. (8) At every turn, Sidney's attacks on intellectual folly counterbalance his hopes for human reason; every "erected wit" has its "infected will."
Research on Sidney's Protestantism has advanced an alternate focus for his career, but Sidney's religion appears no less contradictory than his humanism. (9) Politically, Sidney was part of the faction of the earl of Leicester and Francis Walsingham, who advocated an alliance with Dutch Protestants and sympathized with Calvinist doctrine. (10) The notion that Elizabethan theology contained a "Calvinist consensus" regarding grace and election, however, has been challenged by revisionist historiography since the 1980s. (11) Although the Book of Common Prayer took a semi-Calvinist position on the Eucharist, and godly preachers such as William Perkins and Arthur Dent were popular both on the pulpit and in print, the English Reformation appears ideologically very mixed in recent scholarship. (12) When considering the four strains of English Protestantism that Penry Williams sees as influential during the late Tudor period--reformers such as Edmund Grindal, anti-Presbyterians such as John Whitgift, proto-Arminians such as Lancelot Andrewes, and advocates of reason and natural law such as Richard Hooker--it has been standard practice to link Sidney to the reformers. (13) (The poetic tribute to Grindal in Spenser's Shepheardes Calendar, a text dedicated to Sidney, emphasizes the point.) In the New Arcadia, however, Sidney appears less hostile to human reason than many reformers. Sidney's fictional defense of reason never becomes as explicit (or anti-Puritan) as Hooker's, but he strains against the orthodox reformed position. (14) Sidney had no doubts about the superiority of faith to reason, but he refused to discount reason entirely.
Absolute Providential control was a tenet of Protestantism from which Sidney never wavered. Sidney's shipwrecks provide a fictional counterpoint to the project of his friend, the Huguenot theologian Philippe de Mornay, in the treatise De La Verite de la religion chrestienne (1581): making divine Providence appear reasonable to human minds. (15) For Mornay,
Prouidece [sic] is nothing els but a wise guyding of things to their end, and that euery reasonable mynd that woorketh, beginneth his worke for some end, and that God (as I haue said afore) the workemaister of all things, hath (or to say more truely) is the souereine mynd, equall to his owne power: doth it not follow that God in creating the worlde, did purpose an end? (16)
The crucial term, for Mornay and Sidney as Protestants, and for Sidney as a writer of romance, is "end." A purposed end imagines God as a Supreme Author, maneuvering the history of humankind according to His elaborate plotline. The end of the story redeems its beginnings. For Sidney's fictional characters, this problem becomes literal, as repeated shipwrecks make their "ends" seem likely to be death by drowning.
The tautology at the heart of Mornay's definition of Providence opens the door for Sidney's literary experiment. Mornay's God, "the workemaister of all things," controls events in the world, but His "end" is irrevocably aloof from human experience. God is "the souereine mynd, equall to his owne power," but He is only "reasonable" in His own terms. Human reason cannot grasp the divine mentality. In a pre-Christian fiction, however, Sidney is released from religious orthodoxy into an arena of intellectual freedom. His pagan surrogates rely on human mental ingenuity without the saving crutch of faith. The New Arcadia, by combining a pagan setting with disembodied determinist control, creates a haven for reasoned speculation into theological truisms.
Sidney's concern with the status of reason in a fallen world, as Ake Bergvall has noted, has made him "a focal point for a broader investigation of the interaction between humanism and reformation." (17) Observing that a hard line between human reason and divine power was defended by Desiderius Erasmus as well as Martin Luther and Jean Calvin, Bergvall suggests that Sidney demonstrates the compatibility of humanism and Protestantism. (18) By exploring the shipwrecks in the New Arcadia, I hope to complicate Bergvall's valuable observations. I believe that his notion of "compatibility" goes too far; the relationship Sidney explores is more fraught and combative. In fact, Bergvall's reading of the Arcadia--that it "warn[s] against the dangers accompanying the trespass over" the boundary between the "two Kingdoms" (19)--fails to recognize how shipwreck problematizes that very boundary.
Even the most...
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