The Politics of Grace in Early Modern Literature

By Deni Kasa

This book tells the story of how early modern poets used the theological concept of grace to reimagine their political communities. The Protestant belief that salvation was due to sola gratia, or grace alone, was originally meant to inspire religious reform. But, as Deni Kasa shows, poets of the period used grace to interrogate the most important political problems of their time, from empire and gender to civil war and poetic authority. Kasa examines how four writers—John Milton, Edmund Spenser, Aemilia Lanyer, and Abraham Cowley—used the promise of grace to develop idealized imagined communities, and not always egalitarian ones. Kasa analyzes the uses of grace to make new space for individual and collective agency in the period, but also to validate domination and inequality, with poets and the educated elite inserted as mediators between the gift of grace and the rest of the people.

Offering a literary history of politics in a pre-secular age, Kasa shows that early modern poets mapped salvation onto the most important conflicts of their time in ways missed by literary critics and historians of political thought. Grace, Kasa demonstrates, was an important means of expression and a way to imagine impossible political ideals.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Mar 12, 2024
• ISBN: 9781503638310

Book preview

The Politics of Grace in Early Modern Literature

DENI KASA

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Stanford, California

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

© 2024 by Deni Kasa. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

ISBN 9781503638266 (cloth)

ISBN 9781503638310 (ebook)

Library of Congress Control Number 2023022824

CIP data available upon request.

Cover design: Gabriele Wilson

Cover art: Caravaggio, Conversion on the Way to Damascus (1601). Oil on canvas, 90.5 x 68.8 in. Cerasi Chapel, Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION: The Politics of Grace

1. Equity and Grace in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene

2. Grace, Gender, and Patronage in the Poetry of Aemilia Lanyer

3. The Beauty of Grace in Abraham Cowley’s Davideis

4. Cooperative Grace and Interpretation in Milton’s Paradise Lost

5. Grace and Prophetic Education in Paradise Regained

CONCLUSION: The Poem of Grace

Notes

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book began at the University of Toronto and matured at Tel Aviv University and the University of Oxford. I owe its existence to the guides, friends, and colleagues in each of these institutions who shaped my work and supported me, particularly during the difficult times. I am grateful to Paul Stevens for his compassion, grace, and generosity during the most important years of my intellectual development. I am grateful to Mary Nyquist and David Galbraith, who helped me overcome the timidity of a student and embrace the creative sacrifices involved in writing a book. I am grateful to Noam Reisner, who taught me the true meaning of the golden rule and guided my transition to a new culture, a new professional stage, and a new phase of personal maturity. I am grateful to Sarah Mortimer for the many conversations and ideas that are woven into the fabric of this book, and for her tireless efforts to include me in her community at Oxford even in the darkest days of the pandemic. I am indebted to Tom Dilworth and Stephen Pender, who guided my first steps in literary criticism, and to my first teacher, Daniel Bonk, whose memory lives with me still.

This book also owes its existence to the many friends and colleagues who accompanied me over the past decade. I am especially grateful for the unfailing support of Michael Donnelly, who has advised on every part of this book in each of its many incarnations, and who guided me through my most difficult crises of confidence. I am grateful to Noel Malcolm, whose advice, wisdom, and experience were crucial in helping me to finish the book in its final stages. I am grateful for the warmth, advice, and goodwill of Lynne Magnusson and Laura Lunger Knoppers, who provided extensive feedback on an early version of the manuscript. I am indebted to John Rogers for his invaluable advice on the final chapters and to Leslie Wexler for her care and patience in editing and providing feedback on the final draft. I am grateful to Jonathan Stavsky and Spencer Morrison for their feedback, and for making Tel Aviv feel like home.

I completed much of the final draft during my time at Oxford, and I am indebted to those who sharpened my thinking in that crucial period: Noël Sugimura, William Poole, Lorna Hutchinson, Blair Worden, David Scott, James Hooks, and the larger community of scholars at Oxford’s Centre for Intellectual History, the Faculty of History, and Wolfson College. I am also very grateful for the conversations and warmth I have shared with Alex Beeton, Eli Bernstein, Sophie Aldred, Hannah Dongsung Lee, Dmitri Levitin, and other early career scholars during this period.

Part of the fourth chapter of this book appeared in Milton Quarterly as an article, and I am grateful to Edward Jones and the anonymous reviewers at MQ for their feedback on this publication. Other parts of the book have appeared at conferences and seminars in Budapest, Oxford, Strasbourg, Haifa, Toronto, Beersheva, New Orleans, Bruges, and Berlin. I am indebted to the organizers and to my interlocutors at these events, including David Ainsworth, Alison Chapman, Stephen Fallon, Jason Kerr, Nigel Smith, Miklos Peti, and many others for their incisive questions and feedback. I am indebted to Caroline McKusick and the anonymous reviewers at Stanford University Press for their feedback on the final drafts. I am also indebted to the Azrieli Foundation, which funded my research in Tel Aviv with an international postdoctoral fellowship, and to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for funding this book for multiple fellowships.

I am more grateful than I could express to my parents, Agron and Laura Kasa, who remain the best embodiment of grace in my life. I dedicate this book to them.

INTRODUCTION

The Politics of Grace

IN THE ILIAD, or the Poem of Force, Simone Weil argues that The Iliad revolves around a single concept: force. Force, she explains, is what turns a human being into a thing. Killing is the most extreme example, but most of the essay concerns the kind of force that dehumanizes without killing. Time and time again in The Iliad, defeated warriors clasp the knees of the victor to beg for life. Priam kisses the hands of the man who killed his son. Weil argues that in such moments, the suppliant’s vulnerability is so extreme that he is deprived of the right to show even the most basic signs of life:

If a stranger, completely disabled, disarmed, strengthless, throws himself on the mercy of a warrior, he is not, by this very act, condemned to death; but a moment of impatience on the warrior’s part will suffice to relieve him of his life. In any case, his flesh has lost that very important property which in the laboratory distinguishes living flesh from dead—the galvanic response. If you give a frog’s leg an electric shock, it twitches. If you confront a human being with the touch or sight of something horrible or terrifying, this bundle of muscles, nerves, and flesh likewise twitches. Alone of all living things, the suppliant we have just described neither quivers nor trembles. He has lost the right to do so.¹

The suppliant has lost the right to tremble because he must concentrate his entire self in a single act of submission to force, the principle that transforms human beings into things. Even if the sword does not perform the final cut, this act of submission dehumanizes the suppliant with an exchange: as the suppliant offers his submission, the conqueror pauses to consider, with absolute authority over life and death, if to accept the offer and show mercy. Weil believes that all of the heroes in The Iliad are subjected to force at some point or other in the poem. Force is the only true victor in the poem, the universal, cosmic principle.

This book is devoted to the politics of grace rather than the force Weil explored in her essay. Nevertheless, the Christian idea of grace resembles the situation Weil described in one important way: it involves an extreme disparity between God and the sinner. The key difference is that grace does not imply the same kind of exchange, because sinners receive grace as a free gift. Early Modern Protestants in particular stressed that salvation was not an exchange or an economic bargain. God, they argued, was free to dispense his unmerited grace on some and to punish the rest of humanity on account of the original sin of Adam. He who begs for grace does not earn it by begging; he discovers, rather, that grace has always already been offered to him, and this divine gift was what moved him to penitence in the first place. The redeemed sinner does not feel the anxiety the suppliant feels as he clasps Achilles’s knee because God, in his genuinely absolute power over life and death, has bestowed grace freely and thus humbled human force.

The Politics of Grace in Early Modern Poetry tells the story of how four early modern poets—Edmund Spenser, Aemilia Lanyer, Abraham Cowley, and John Milton—built on this Protestant tradition to envision grace as a form of agency fulfilled in submission to God. Because grace is a gift, the most important battles in their poems are no longer fought between warriors on a battlefield. The warriors who continue to rely on what Spenser calls fleshly force (V.vii.40.9)—such as the monster Geryoneo, who evokes Catholic Spain, or the Roman soldiers in Lanyer’s Passion poem—are not simply defeated but also ridiculed for their inability to understand the eclipse of force by a new dispensation.² The important battles, according to these poets, are now interpretive. Given that God bestows grace unilaterally, all that remains for human beings to do is to interpret how grace will be received, to whom it will be given, and what will be its fruits in those who accept it. Their poetry valorizes those who use grace to interpret the will of God creatively so as to find space for individual and collective agency within their submission to the divine gift.

From a more critical perspective, however, this idea of grace can validate other modes of domination and inequality. Alongside the Protestant theory of salvation, each of these poets understood grace through the humanist theory of education. Humanism helped inspire the Protestant Reformation, but it also bestowed on Spenser, Lanyer, Cowley, and Milton a profound respect for the power and prestige of an elite education.³ This assumption informs how they imagine grace. They argue that while grace is indeed a divine gift that cannot be earned through human means alone, to accept grace fully one must demonstrate the learning, civic virtue, and interpretive liberty celebrated in humanist educational writing. While grace was in theory available regardless of social station, the fruits of grace were clearest in the work of humanist Protestants who had the necessary cultural capital and education to read the Word of God critically, to debate its meaning publicly, and to mold the nation with eloquence. While this argument was not always inherently violent, it did at times allow the castigation and repression of those who did not exhibit this ideal. In Book V of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, for example, the flail of the iron man Talus is as ruthless as anything to be found in Homer, yet the aim of his violence is ostensibly to spread the grace of a Protestant ruler over a rebellious people. Such a justification for violence was rendered acceptable, for Spenser, by assumptions that were both religious and cultural: the rebels were brute-like because they lacked civility as well as grace, while those directing this policy of oppression did so from an elevated moral and cultural position. The overlap between grace and education explains this political approach to grace. It also helps to explain, more broadly, a fact increasingly noted by literary critics and intellectual historians: some of the loudest proponents of liberty and equality in this period were also apologists for colonialism, empire, and repressive government.⁴ By taking this approach to grace, some poets were able to speak about the eclipse of force while idealizing the use of force by well-educated Protestant men.

This book explores poems that unmoored grace from theological precision to explore these imaginative possibilities for political life. The political stakes are clearest in Spenser’s writing on Protestant empire, Lanyer’s idea of sacred poetry, Cowley’s view of civil war, and Milton’s ideal of citizenship. Spenser draws on Protestant legal thinking to argue that the Elizabethan colonization of Ireland, a project in which he was personally implicated, is the political expression of grace. In doing so, he presents the Irish as both uncivilized and religiously backward, thus making grace essential to his arguments for colonial expansion. Lanyer addresses the gendered inequalities of humanism head-on by foregrounding the exclusion of women from education notwithstanding their equal claim to religious grace. Cowley draws attention to the divisiveness of contemporary republicanism, and he develops a vision of sacred poetry in which grace reunites a nation on the brink of civil war under a king. Milton takes a different perspective on republicanism, arguing that sovereignty should belong to an elite of humanist-educated men. These poets pursue very different aims, but they all frame their ideal political communities in the language of grace, which allows them to present political agency as paradoxically fulfilled by a recognition of insufficiency. This paradoxical agency-in-submission is part of the tension they explore between agency and repression in a political community.

Throughout this book, I use the term political heuristically, following the convention of historians of political thought, to describe communities that are larger than a household but more particular than would-be universal constructs such as the Church.⁵ Some examples relevant to this book are a nation, a city, a republic, or an empire. Grace provided a way to challenge the boundaries of these communities because the New Testament promises their imminent dissolution. The Apostle Paul stressed that the fashion of this world passeth away (1. Cor. 7:31), and that the time is short (1 Cor. 7:29) before the arrival of Kingdom of God.⁶ As a result, Protestant theologians saw worldly authority as important but temporary, and thus distinct from questions pertaining to grace and the eternal Kingdom of God.⁷ The poets explored in this book, on the other hand, repurposed the language of salvation to reimagine the boundaries and ambitions of their political communities. Lanyer, for example, writes on the grace of visionary women to challenge women’s exclusion from political life, while Spenser imagines a patriarchal vision of empire in which Protestant magistrates conquer the known world. While their approaches seem on the face of it to be wholly incompatible, Spenser, Lanyer, Cowley, and Milton nevertheless use a shared language to articulate what are ultimately very different political visions. While each poet understands his or her ideal to be unrealistic in practice, they turn to grace in order to imagine new possibilities as well as to reflect on existing inequalities.

Alongside the Protestant language of salvation, these poets also draw on the humanist ideal of poetry as a form of creative making. In Philip Sidney’s contrast between poetry and history, the poet is told to borrow nothing of what is, has been, or shall be; but range, only reined with learned discretion, into the divine consideration of what may be and should be.⁸ In other words, a humanist poet strives to create an ideal pattern for imitation rather than true accuracy or verisimilitude. As Colin Burrow has shown recently, this humanist idea of imitation allowed poets to adapt their material creatively to a rhetorical situation.⁹ Spenser, Lanyer, Cowley, and Milton embody this Sidneian vision by imagining communities that aim to educate their readers, not to represent the political world as it really was. And the reality was often disappointing for these poets. Spenser celebrates the virtues of a Protestant magistrate while conveying his frustration with the indecision of real magistrates in Ireland. Lanyer celebrates female noblewomen who were not likely to offer her any patronage, so her praise for them doubles as a complaint. Cowley, an erstwhile royalist writing in the zenith of Cromwellian power, strikes an elegiac note as he imagines the beauty of grace averting the kind of civil war that had so recently led to regicide in the real world. Milton wrote his epics after power changed hands again during the Restoration, and his idealized communities accordingly criticize the nation’s refusal to embody republican virtue. Combining the language of grace with the humanist ideal, these poets seek to transcend their disappointment and imagine political communities as they may be or should be.

To emphasize the key role of the imagination in these poems, I express the political ideals they describe as imagined communities of grace. In doing so, I do not imply any necessary connection to Benedict Anderson’s imagined communities to describe nationhood.¹⁰ Whereas Anderson’s focus is on print as a medium, my focus falls instead on the poet’s imagination, which turns to grace in order to authorize the effort to mold and educate readers in terms of some imagined ideal. An imagined community of grace weaves Protestant ideas of salvation with the humanist ideal of poetry, and it celebrates the poet’s imagination and transformative eloquence as the means of bringing that ideal to the world.

By bringing education as a crucial third term to the relationship between politics and salvation, this book seeks to build on recent criticism that has emphasized the radical or even violent aspects of grace.¹¹ While radicals in this period often disavowed human learning in favor of divine inspiration, the poets explored in this book embrace learning as the complement to grace.¹² Even when these poets seem to disavow education or critique the worldly wisdom of rivals, they then go on to emphasize their own creativity, poetic skill, and civic virtue in explicitly humanist terms. Milton, for example, insists on the need for a learned response to grace throughout his work, and in a key moment in Paradise Regained, he imagines the messiah as a man with patrician tastes who dismisses the common people as a herd confused, / A miscellaneous rabble, who extol / Things vulgar (3.49–51).¹³ If we contextualize Milton only in terms of radical religion, we risk bypassing the deep-rooted elitism that separates him and other educated poets from what they saw as the vulgar rabble.

In addition to these contextual approaches, I am committed throughout this book to close reading and formal analysis as the means of recovering the paradoxes of grace. The key paradox is the belief that human force is ineffective on its own, because genuine human agency is fulfilled in the believer’s submission to God and the gift of grace. Instead of resolving such paradoxes in detailed argument, the poems explored in this book often represent them as unresolved tensions in poetic form, meter, and thematic patterning.

While the importance of grace in early modern culture invites these different approaches, it also places constraints on this book that are worth acknowledging at the outset. I do not attempt a comprehensive study of all poets who used grace to reimagine their communities because such a project would require many volumes. The poets chosen for this study are interesting to study together because they share overlapping concerns, but other poets could be studied in a parallel way, and I hope this book will invite future research in that direction. Moreover, although I describe common themes that these poets inherit from a shared idiom and religious tradition, I do not argue for a linear, teleological development between chapters. Rather, each chapter explores different ideas of poetry, faith, and politics that were developed in different contexts. While I discuss Milton’s work over two chapters, this added detail is due to the fact that Milton wrote more (and more explicitly) about grace, but these concluding chapters are not intended to provide a teleological resolution to the themes discussed earlier in the book.

The Politics of Grace in Early Modern Poetry thus explores how early modern poetry used grace—as a theological concept, as a cultural topos, and as an encounter provoked by a poem’s form—to imagine political communities. It shows that Spenser, Lanyer, Cowley, and Milton built on a broader Protestant humanist tendency to map the paradoxes of grace onto the promise of a humanist education. This effort challenged the distinction that Protestant doctrine ordinarily maintained between salvation and the kingdoms of this world. Because this distinction was central to Protestant thought, it deserves further elaboration.

The Politics of Grace and the Two Kingdoms

The magisterial Protestant theologians had good reason to fear radical arguments about salvation. Grace enabled believers to transcend their worldly communities, fraught as they were with inequality and social hierarchy, so as to become part of a messianic Kingdom of God. If the boundary between worldly kingdoms and the Kingdom of God were to be erased, it would be difficult to stop the many calls for transformative social change that dogged the Reformation from its earliest days and threatened to delegitimize the likes of Luther and Calvin. In order to explore why poets were interested in the politics of grace, it is first necessary to explain why these major theologians avoided conflating grace with political agency.

The dangers of free grace theology became clear to Protestants soon after Luther began to preach his ideas. During the German Peasants’ rebellion of 1524–25, rebel leaders used Luther’s arguments to challenge the authority of the civil (or temporal) authorities as well as the Catholic church. Some of them, like Thomas Müntzer, claimed that grace had emancipated the saints from all law, both religious and secular. This position, which came to be known as antinomianism, became one of the most reviled interpretations of grace among the magisterial reformers. All Protestants opposed the kind of Catholic legalism that sought to bind consciences, but the antinomians claimed that they were also freed from worldly authority by grace and the Holy Spirit.¹⁴ Luther rejected these arguments because, in his view, the majority of professed Christians in any worldly community are hypocrites, and temporal law is thus necessary to restrain them from abusing the godly. He argued that if anyone attempted to rule the world by the gospel and to abolish all temporal law and sword . . . the wicked under the name of Christian [would] abuse evangelical freedom, carry on their rascality, and insist that they were Christians subject neither to law nor sword, as some are already raving and ranting.¹⁵ This skepticism led Luther to oppose the German peasants, contributing to their defeat.¹⁶ The term antinomian became a term of abuse for later groups, including radicals during the English Civil Wars who attempted to use grace as the grounds of political liberty.¹⁷

On the other hand, the Gospel represents grace as part of the believer’s entry into a new kingdom, the Kingdom of God, so the magisterial reformers needed a sophisticated explanation for how grace could build a new kingdom without overturning the existing political order. The key inspiration was Augustine’s division of the heavenly and earthly cities in City of God: two cities then were created by two kinds of love: the earthly city by a love of self carried even to the point of contempt for God, the heavenly city by a love of God carried even to the point of contempt for self.¹⁸ The force of the ruling authorities was necessary in the earthly city to restrain the rapacious love of self, thus making possible the conditions for life. In the City of God, on the other hand, force was no longer necessary because divine love had a transformative effect on the universal community of saints, leading them toward the voluntary performance of the good. Luther built on this approach to argue that God has ordained two governments: the spiritual, by which the Holy Spirit produces Christians and righteous people under Christ; and the temporal, which restrains the un-Christian and wicked so that—no thanks to them—they are obliged to keep still and to maintain an outward peace.¹⁹ It is true, he adds, that those who have received grace no longer need a magistrate: there is no need for any suit, litigation, court, judge, penalty, law, or sword among Christians, since they do of their own accord much more than all laws and teachings can demand.²⁰ Nevertheless, true Christians are a small minority in the kingdom of this world, so temporal authority is needed in order to constrain the ungodly.²¹ Luther was in fact so committed to defending temporal authority that he argued against resistance to princes who persecuted Protestants.²² It became more common for Lutherans to claim a right of resistance after the 1530 Augsburg confession, but even then, resistance had to come from inferior magistrates—public officers below the ruler—rather than the godly in general.²³ Luther and followers thus saw grace as a source of spiritual regeneration that should not be used to undermine political authority.

Like Luther, Calvin reclaimed this Augustinian separation of the two kingdoms as a means of avoiding radical antinomianism. While Calvinists produced influential theories of resistance in the sixteenth century,²⁴ they did not base the right of resistance on grace. Calvin insists that law and discipline is necessary to constrain the ungodly:

Let us first consider that there is a twofold government in man: one aspect is spiritual, whereby the conscience is instructed in piety and in reverencing God; the second is political, whereby man is educated for the duties of humanity and citizenship that must be maintained among men. These are usually called the spiritual and the temporal jurisdiction. . . . There are in man, so to speak, two worlds, over which different kings and different laws have authority.²⁵

Building on this distinction, Calvin takes direct aim at the radicals of his day: we are not to misapply to the political order the gospel teaching on spiritual freedom, as if Christians were less subject, as concerns outward government, to human laws because their consciences have been set free in God’s sight.²⁶ In an earthly polis, where the ungodly are often the majority, any confusion between spiritual and political freedom would simply lead to license for the wicked majority, and thus ultimately the persecution of the godly by the ungodly: For since the insolence of evil men is so great, their wickedness so stubborn, that it can scarcely be restrained by extremely severe laws, what do we expect them to do if they see that their depravity can go scot-free—when no power can force them to cease from doing evil?²⁷

Later Calvinists followed suit on the need to separate grace from resistance theory.²⁸ Beza’s On the Rights of Magistrates Over Their Subjects and the anonymous Vindiciae, Contra Tyrannos argued that tyrants could be opposed only by inferior magistrates, and not by private citizens.²⁹ Radical proponents of resistance theory, such as John Knox, Christopher Goodman, and John Ponet, did extend the right of resistance to the common people, but even they argued that resistance was legitimate only when the ruler was idolatrous, and not because grace had freed the godly from legal obligation.³⁰ George Buchanan’s argument for tyrannicide in De Jure Regni Apud Scotos similarly avoided authorizing resistance on the basis of grace.³¹ This tradition of arguing against antinomianism means that the Presbyterians of the English Civil Wars had a powerful arsenal of arguments with which to oppose radicals in their context.³² From Calvin and Luther to the Presbyterians, grace was seen by most Protestants as insufficient on its own to legitimize political liberty, driving such arguments to the antinomian fringes of the Reformation.

Historians of political thought have taken these Protestant reformers at their word, concluding that grace is less important for political thought than concepts drawn from political theory, such as the state, sovereignty, or liberty. In his Machiavellian Moment, for instance, John A. Pocock explains Machiavelli’s influence in the period as part of an effort among European thinkers to pull away from transcendent concerns so as to study the prudence needed in a worldly republic.³³ Similarly, in his Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Quentin Skinner privileges secular ideas of liberty, tracing their origins to the political culture of medieval Italian city-states or, in a later version of this argument, to a neo-Roman theory of liberty that revived