What has always interested me in the Spenser/Aquinas/Aristotle
connection is the play with the differences between temperance and
continence; play focused on issues of agency and bad faith, and
especially noticeable in the deployment of the negative values, as in
the categoreal distinction between sins (i.e. vices) of weakness and
sins of malice. It's the distinction underlying that now famous move,
the disclaimer of responsibility. Think of the sad quavery defensive
little computer voice that says, when your machine screws up, "it'sŠ
notŠ my Šfault." She's pleading incontinence, but if she's
deliberately putting you or herself on, she's being intemperate.
(Probably useful to remind today's students that incontinence
designates a defect of soul and not merely one of senility.)
In the rhetorical register these issues can invade uses of the
figure Puttenham calls "metanoia or the Penitent" (pentimento in
painting), though I prefer E.K.'s term, epanorthosis, because its
etymological implications link it to the act of straightening oneself
out, or up, and regaining one's rectitude; in other words, the act of
self-correction that's been so interestingly foregrounded in Carol
Kaske's work. In Books 1 and 2, epanorthosis is the means by which
the narrative and its male protagonists displace what they find
intemperate or effeminizing in themselves to the alterity of the
female. It's thus the founding trope of the virtues of Holiness and
Temperance.
Incidentally: there are helpful footnotes in volume 43 of the
bilingual Blackfriars edition of Summa Theologiae edited and
translated by members of the English Dominican Province (New York:
McGraw-Hill, 1964. Volume 43 contains the questions on temperance and
shame (2a-2æ, 141-44), translated, edited, and annotated by Thomas
Gilby, the general editor, who was one of the very best commentators
in that era. Aquinas's stuff on verecundia or shamefastness is really
a gas, and Gilby's notes help make it so.
>Also on Spenser and Aquinas, see the four articles by Gerald Morgan cited
>in the revised Faerie Queene: RES for 1981, MLR for 1986, RES for 1986, and
>an article in the collection ed Ni Cuilleanain, NOBLE AND JOYOUS HISTORIES.
> Bert
>
>
>At 01:23 PM 2001-11-07 -0500, you wrote:
> >Dear Christine,
> >For Aquinas as part of the mix that
> >led from Aristotle to FQ, besides the old standard Viola Blackburn Hulbert
> >diss. excerpted in the Variorum and sources cited there, see Father Maurice
> >B. MacNamee, Honor and the Epic Hero: A Studyof the Shifting Concept
> >ofMagnanimity in Philosophy and Epic Poetry NY Holt Rinehart and Winston,
> >1960 and Michael F. Moloney, "Sp. Aquinas, and St Thomas's Virtue of
> >Magnificence" JEGP 52 (1953) on how far it is virtuous for a Christian to
> >pursue fame. I think the conversation between Palmer and RCK in II.i.32-33
> >perfectly exemplifies AQuinas's 2 motives: to glorify God as helper and to
> >set an example to neighbors.
>
>A.C.Hamilton
>[log in to unmask]
>Cappon Professor Emeritus
>Queen's University, Canada
>Phone & Fax: 613- 544-6759
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