I’m working on several issues for which the needed research is beyond my abilities, so I ask your help.
Ever since taking a course with Don Cheney at Yale in the early 60’s (just as his book appeared), then reading Berger’s “Secret Discipline,” Horton’s The Unity of The FQ, Hieatt’s and Fowler’s numerological studies, and countless subsequent commentaries on Spenserian design (including the impressive recent Spenser Studies issue on his Platonism), I’ve brooded on the holistic pattern of Spenser’s epic (a brooding only briefly interrupted by Paul Alpers’ insistence that large structures have no importance in FQ).
A key feature in Spenser’s epic seems to be a movement toward enthronement – imitations of the merkabah throne vision of God in Ezekiel, Isaiah, & Revelation – a feature authoritatively discussed by Jim Nohrnberg (Analogy, 51-54) as a basis for Lucifera’s and Philotime’s travesties and as a basis for the positive adulation of Una, Britomart, Mercilla, and especially Sapience in HHB, which seems to adumbrate the FQ’s conclusion, Gloriana enthroned in glory as a reflection of God’s true glory.
So here are my questions:
First, how well did Spenser know the various elaborate Jewish and Christian commentaries on the merkabah throne vision, especially their interpretations of Isaiah’s and John of Patmos’s six-winged seraph (adding a pair of wings to Ezekiel's four-winged cherub: Isa.6, Rev.4, Eze.10 – Dante apologizes to Ezekiel for preferring six wings, Purgatorio XXIX). In particular, how aware was Spenser of the varied evolution of a six-stage hierarchic pattern that structures contemplative progress toward the vision of God – as developed, e.g., in the Christian-Platonic writings of Richard of St. Victor (De Arca Mystica) and Bonaventure (the Itinerarium)? Is it possible that Spenser was using this mystical scheme in a comprehensive way to order the twelve virtues of The FQ? – i.e., the first six virtues showing a crucial, humbling “downward descent”(or “dilation”) into the multiplicity of the created world, then the final six, if he had lived to publish them, showing an ascent to increasing awareness of God (or of divine sapience) as the basis for human virtue?
Second, does the carefully-structured six-stage pattern of contemplation that springs from the symbolic “six wings” always form an ascent, as in Bonaventure’s Itinerarium? Or did some poets (esp. Dante but also English poets) and theologians (esp. Augustine but also eastern writers) use the pattern as a basis for a carefully-structured descent into the multiplicity of the created world, which seems to be the case in Books 1-6 of The FQ?
I know that Leigh DeNeef (in The American Benedictine Review 25 (1974) 317-34) used Bonaventure’s Itinerarium to explain the structure of HHB. And I know that Dante used the “six wings” at key moments in the Commedia (Satan’s six wings are paralyzed by sin, while the six-winged cherubim in Beatrice’s Edenic “enthronement” explicitly draw on the potent merkabah vision in which the cherub/seraph, along with the griffin and radiant Beatrice, enable Dante’s further ascent). But did Dante use the symbolic six wings as part of a full-scale allegorical narrative patterning -- like Bonaventure’s six rising stages of The Soul’s Journey into God (Itinerarium mentis in Deum) . . . or like Spenser’s six legends that, inverting the hierarchy of three pairs, descend into the world’s problematic, fallen materiality?
I hope this is not too garbled. Deep thanks in advance for any help you can give.
Robin Reid
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