Darryl Gless suggests locating "the all-important divine call before the beginning of RCK's quest, or at the moment when Arthur rescues him from Orgoglio's prison, or at the end of canto ix when he seems consciously to accept the doctrine of predestined election" (Interpretation & Theology in Sp. 145). Gless’s reference to "Readers who accept the knight's armor as prima facie evidence of his prior election and calling" (55) recalls Padelford’s comment on the tall clownish young man who, "when clad in the armor of a Christian man, 'seemed the goodliest man in al that company,' so recreated was he by the grace of God." When does RC receive his call?Abandoning Una (& thus his faith, however "immature or untried") assumes an earlier call.

 

Jim Broaddus’ questioning the precise timing of the “call” seems important, and Darryl Gless’s nice list of options recalls other repetitious features of the moral/religious allegory (why do allegorical figures of “pride” reappear so persistently, yet in such intriguingly varied forms?). The question of when the clownish hero was “called” might be connected with the Reformation’s much-debated question of when to be “baptized” (before, or during, the conscious quest)… & the even more intensely and anxiously debated question of whether (and when) one can be assured of being “saved.” Wasn’t it G.K. Chesterton who replied to a puritan questioner, “Yes sir. I have been saved, I am being saved, and I shall be saved.” So perhaps the answer is all of the above, with the hotline always vulnerable to being again shut down, or again renewed. Even at the very end of the Legend of Holiness it seems RCK is, once again, answering a calling to renew the quest that, as David Miller argues, is always challenged and incompletely answered.

Yet, having said that, it seems that Spenser’s series of moments (and types) of divine call (as listed by Gless) are not simply repetitious but form a carefully-structured sequence which DOES offer a rough simulacrum of completeness.  The defeat of Orgoglio, Despair, and the Dragon offer a holistic pattern that matches the three stages of the house of Holiness. Thus it seems that the structured pattern of types of calling, answering stages of spiritual need in the life-quest, is important.

            Robin Reid