To fully comprehend the difference between the Lady’s and Comus’s conception of meaning and interpretation, we need to lay out more explicitly the connections between proper ends of objects and the moral status of an agent. However, before turning to this task, I would like to bring in for comparison a blunter version of the
27 John Donne, in his Paradoxes and Problems xii, seems to create a similar tension between both ideas of
meaning by making a virtue of temporary virginity as long as it is relinquished in a timely and appropriate manner: “For surely nothing is more unprofitable in the commonwealth of Nature, than they that dy old maids, because they refuse to be used to that end for which they were only made” (The Complete Poetry and
Selected Prose of John Donne, ed. Charles M. Coffin (New York: Random House, 2001), 304). The meaning of
one condition, virginity, is deduced from its future end, rather than from its current state. Thus, virginity can be both either a virtue or a vice based on whether Nature’s intention is correctly interpreted.
position stated by the Lady as found in the sermons of John Preston.28 Preston, a
reluctant convert to the study of Divinity, enjoyed a surprising career after gaining the favor of King James in 1615 during a public disputation on whether dogs can reason.29 In
1621, he became chaplain to Prince Charles and, in 1622, he was appointed to the pulpit at Lincoln’s Inn after John Donne became Dean of St. Paul’s.30 Preston enjoyed the
Court’s favor through most of the 1620s and lost his privileged position only after the Duke of Buckingham turned against him. In his sermon, “The Doctrine of Selfe-deniall,” Preston praises what Comus would have labeled “lean and sallow Abstinence.” 31 The
sermon urges self-denial as a remedy against what Preston calls “idolatry of the flesh,” that is, the worshiping of creation instead of the Creator.32 Keeping this kind of idolatry
28 I choose John Preston to stand in comparison with Milton because of his wide influence and acceptance
both at court and in the “Puritan party.” For a discussion of the problematic term “Puritan” and of the interpenetration of Puritans at court, see Lake, Peter, “Defining Puritanism—Again?” in ed. F. J. Bremer,
Puritanism: Transatlantic Perspectives on a Seventeenth-Century Anglo-American Faith (Boston: Northeastern UP,
1993), 3-29.
29 All biographical details on Preston are from Christopher Hill, Puritanism and Revolution: The English
Revolution of the 17th Century (London: Secker and Warburg, 1958), 239-74. For a more detailed life of John Preston, see Irvonwy Morgan, Prince Charles’s Puritan Chaplain (London: Allen and Unwin, 1957).
30 Christopher Hill gives an impressive roll call of Puritan notables who probably listened to Preston’s
sermons at Lincoln’s Inn, including William Prynne (Puritanism and Revolution, 240).
31 Published in 1633 as part of a collection of sermons, Fovre Godly and Learned Treatises. All quotes are from
Preston’s sermons are from: John Preston, Fovre Godly and Learned Treatises (London, 1633). Early English Books Online. Union Theological Seminary Library (New York, N. Y.). 17 January 2010.
http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.882003&res_id=xri:eebo&rft_id=xri:eebo:citation:9985025 9.
32 Milton may have a similar idea in mind when he has both the Lady and Comus defend their answer to the
question of how to correctly praise the “All-giver.” While Comus claims that “if all the world/ Should in a pet of temperance” give up all luxury, “Th’ All-giver would be unthanked, would be unpraised” (720-3), the Lady replies that if all “Had but a moderate and beseeming share/ […] then the Giver would be better thanked/ His praise due paid” (769-76).
at bay requires constant denial of the desires of the flesh: “[c]onsider what your morning thoughts are, consider that the flesh is lusting and running; thinke therefore every morning how to crosse it the day following, you must dayly deny your selves.” Not surprisingly, the preacher imagines an interlocutor protesting that “this is a hard saying, who can beare it?” Preston insists that happiness cannot be found in what has been created, but only in the Creator.
This is a theme to which he returns frequently. For instance, in “A Remedy Against Covetousnesse,” he urges those who claim that they rejoice in the goods of creation as blessings from God to carefully examine their motives: “If yee thinke this with your selves, wee have Wives, Children, Friends and Riches, ‘tis true we have them, but yet they shall not continue with us an houre or minute longer than God will: If ye thinke so in good earnest, then yee rejoice in them as blessings.” For Preston, the truly godly may be thankful for the bounty of providence, but they must not put their trust in its gifts. He urges his listener to remember to:
looke on them onely as the Vehiculaes or Conduit pipes, to convay comfort. The aire yeelds light as an Instrument, though it hath no light of its owne: the water may heat, but not of its selfe, but by that heate which is infused into it by the fire: So if a man drinke a Potion in beere, the beere of itselfe doth not worke but the Potion worketh by the beere: So it is with all outward blessings, they of
themselves can yield you no comfort at all, but if they yeeld you any, it is by reason of that comfort which God puts into them.33
Comfort and hope cannot be found in creation, but only in the Creator. Thus, “Wives, Children, Friends and Riches” can only be counted as blessings as long as we keep vividly before our eyes the giver of those gifts; none but such as are good can enjoy good things. The distinction between loving creation for its own sake and loving it for the sake of the Creator is not of course new to Preston. But in reading the passage above, one has to ask whether one “conduit pipe” would work as well as another. Are all material conditions and personal relations truly equivalent to the godly? More precisely, is loving creation for the sake of the Creator fundamentally independent of the particularity of the gifts of providence even when those gifts are “Wives” and “Children”? In “The Doctrine of Selfe-deniall” and “A Remedy Against Covetousnesse,” not only are riches and physical pleasures suspect, but so are all human relationships, including the most
intimate. Reading the sermons, one is left with the bewildering sense that the best course of action for an individual might be to create as few attachments and supports as
possible. Friends, who sustain us in our attempts at virtue today, may turn out to be luring us into idolatry tomorrow.
To better understand what other form could be given to the idea of loving creation for the Creator, I would like to compare Preston’s sermons with Augustine’s
Confessions.34 In Book IV, Augustine utters his famous cry of self-doubt and opacity, “I
had become to myself a vast problem,” while narrating his grief over the death of an unnamed childhood friend. 35 This death is a moment of tremendous pain and loneliness
in the Confessions: “all that I had shared with him was without him transformed into a cruel torment. My eyes looked for him everywhere, and he was not there.”36 It is the
passing of time that dulls Augustine’s grief: “[t]ime is not inert. It does not roll on through our senses without affecting us. […] by its coming and going it implanted in me new hopes.”37 But these hopes too are transient; they cannot be a solid foundation for
permanent joy since they also die: “Things rise and set: in their emerging they begin as it were to be, and grow to perfection; having reached perfection, they grow old and die.”38
The successive passing away of all that is created leads those who love only creation to constantly feel longing and suffering. Transient things “rend the soul with pestilential desires; for the soul loves to be in them and take its repose among the objects of its love. But in these things there is no point of rest: they lack permanence.”39 In a striking simile,
Augustine likens the constant passing away of creatures to the formation and
34 For a discussion of the influence of Augustine’s Confessions on Puritan diaries of the sixteenth- and
seventeenth-centuries, see Margo Todd, “Puritan Self-Fashioning” in Puritanism: Transatlantic Perspectives on
a Seventeenth-Century Anglo-American Faith, 57-87.
35 Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 57. 36 Ibid., 57.
37 Ibid., 60. 38 Ibid., 61. 39 Ibid., 62.
understanding of speech: “That is the way our speech is constructed by sounds which are insignificant. What we say would not be complete if one word did not cease to exist when it has sounded its constituent parts, so that it can be succeeded by another.”40 In a
drawn-out lament for the suffering caused by loving only what is created and thus impermanent, Augustine creates a parallel between the successive passing away of all the frail objects we love and the creation of meaning through consecutive sounds. The image presents completeness as achieved by understanding how to transcend the frailty of temporality by correctly fitting each sound, each life, in a fabric of meaning. For though each creature, taken separately, is just like a short sound, yet all of creation seen in its succession becomes meaningful as speech. It is speech that makes order out of the instants of Augustine’s life through the constant calling and praising of God that permeates the Confessions; the text itself becomes an example of how to read creation.
At this moment, Augustine attempts to show how to love creation without resting his hopes on it. This kind of love can only be known through the incarnation:
He who for us is life itself descended here and endured our death and slew it by the abundance of his life. In a thunderous voice he called us to him, at that secret place where he came forth to us. […] He did not delay, but ran crying out loud by his words, deeds, death, life, descent, and ascent—calling us to return to him. And he was gone from our sight that we should ‘return to our heart’ (Isa. 46:8) and find him there. He went away and behold, here he is.41
40 Ibid., 62.
In this passage, the incarnation itself is presented with a syntax that mimics the quick passing away of instants of time and bits of language.42 The life of Christ then becomes a
pattern for human life not only as an example to be followed, each life to be lived as imitatio Christi, but also as the interpretive key to life.43 As Jennifer Herdt points out, the
rhetorical strategy of the Confessions is to teach through a series of examples:
“Augustine’s Confessions is not a static record of his own experience but a cascade of exemplary conversions serving as the occasion for other conversions, which can in turn serve as exemplary. These exemplars can serve as such inasmuch as they point back beyond themselves to scripture and ultimately to Jesus as the original exemplar.”44 This
is not to say that, for Augustine, justification can be achieved without divine grace. Rather, it is through examples, and most importantly the example of Christ, that the individual can move from conversion to growth in the virtues: “Augustine’s language
42 The original Latin, if anything, is even more emphatically fast-paced with its quick succession of dentals:
“et descendit huc ipsa vita nostra, et tulit mortem nostram, et occidit eam de abundantia vitae suae: et tonuit clamans, ut redeamus hinc ad eum in illud secretum unde processit ad nos […]. non enim tardavit, sed cucurrit; clamans dictis, factis, morte, vita, descensu, ascensu; clamans ut redeamus ad eum. et discessit ab oculis, ut redeamus ad cor, et inveniamus eum. abscessit enim, et ecce hic est” (Augustine, Confessions, ed. James J. O’Donnell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 1:40)
43 It is then not surprising that the Confessions end with a discussion of hermeneutics and allegory. The
whole narration of the Confessions can be viewed as an attempt at interpreting Augustine’s life in terms of Christ’s.
44 Jennifer A. Herdt, Putting on Virtue: The Legacy of the Splendid Vices (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
leaves ample room for gradual process and transformation, for spiritual exercise that habituate one slowly in Christian virtue.”45
It is as part of this interpretive effort that the distinction between loving a
creature for its own sake and loving it for the sake of the Creator can be understood. For Augustine, to love creation for its own sake is to rely on transient things as if they were permanent: “The reason why that grief had penetrated me so easily and deeply was that I had poured out my soul on to the sand by loving a person sure to die as if he would never die.”46 To love them for the sake of the Creator is to correctly interpret them and to
understand their true end as well as our own. If we compare this view of creation with Preston’s, the difference becomes clear. In the “The Doctrine of Selfe-deniall,” imitatio Christi becomes renunciation: “learne to know CHRIST aright, that will make you deny your selves.”47 There is no concern for others, but rather a relentless returning to the self
as what needs to be controlled, while the rest of creation is seen as a potential trap to lure the individual into idolatry. The focus is on the sinfulness of the flesh: “The flesh is to the Soule, as a disease is to the body; If ye give one that is sicke of a Dropsie, drinke; or one sicke of a Feaver, Wine; you will please the humour well, but ye kill the man; so it
45 Ibid., 70.
46 Augustine, Confessions, 60.
is here.”48While the language of sinfulness and of the works of the flesh is from Paul—
Preston quotes Rom. 7.20, “It is no longer I that doe it; but sinne that dwels in mee”— nowhere in the sermon can we find a mitigating understanding of corruption of the flesh as a punishment for original sin rather than the source of sin itself.49 Preston’s sermons
relentlessly ask us to view “the flesh,” a category that seems to include our attachments to friends and family, only as a possible source of sin. In Preston’s account, one must be ready to relinquish all human relationships, even those that have hitherto helped in the development of the virtues. Indeed, the very support we might receive from others is a potential source of sin. The fundamental position advocated in his sermons is that we must strip away anything external that might stand in the way of relying on God. Anything else risks breaking the first commandment.50 With such a focus on self-control
and renunciation, Preston’s discussion of the duty to follow the example of Christ is given only five lines, where the reader is reminded of His “love, which he shewed in his
48 Preston, Fovre Godly and Learned Treatises, 190.
49 This second view is the one found in Chapter 3 of Book XIV of The City of God: “For the corruption of the
body, which weighs down the soul, is not the cause of the first sin, but its punishment. And it was not the corruptible flesh that made the soul sinful: it was the sinful soul that made the flesh corruptible”
(Augustine, The City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson (New York: Penguin, 2003), 551).
50 A clear example of this is found in “A Remedy Against Covetousness,” Preston’s sermon on the text of
Col. 3.5: “to seeke helpe and comfort from any creature and not from God alone, is vaine and sinfull: It must needs bee so, because it is Idolatry” (Preston, Fovre Godly and Learned Treatises, 27).
readinesse both to give and forgive.”51 Charity—exemplified by Christ’s love—is
reduced to self-denial and moderation.
While Preston’s sermons give voice to concerns about the misuses of natural bounty that parallel those voiced by the Lady, her rejection of “lewdly-pampered Luxury” (770) moves beyond Preston’s fear of idolatry of the flesh. Although Comus accuses her of listening to “those budge doctors of the Stoic fur” (707), the Lady does not express a slavish obedience to temperance for its own sake or for fear of idolatry. In her speech, temperance becomes part of a form of justice (giving to others what is due to them) and piety (the proper worship due to God). It is through temperance, rather than gluttony, that natural bounty can be properly distributed. Nature
Means her provisions only to the good That live according to her sober law, And holy dictate of spare Temperance: If every just man that now pines with want Had but a moderate and beseeming share Of that which lewdly-pampered Luxury Now heaps upon some few with vast excess, Nature’s full blessings would be well dispensed In unsuperfluous even proportion. (765-73)
The material gifts of Nature are meant for those who are good and follow “her sober law.” This vision of “moderate and beseeming share” is meant to bring into relief the suffering hidden by Comus’s praise of unending consumption. Want and deprivation
are unimaginable in the world described by the enchanter. There, “odors, fruits, and flocks” are put forth by Nature “to please and sate the curious taste” (712-4). Creation offers itself freely and commands that “millions of spinning worms […] weave the smooth-haired silk/ To deck her sons” (715-7).52 It is in reply to this attempt to deceive
with “false rules pranked in reason’s garb” (759) that the Lady feels compelled to speak. As we have seen, her answer bypasses the seductive carpe diem poem which concludes Comus’s speech and becomes instead a vehement defense of what Nature means by her gifts. The Lady seems to have no concern for her own safety, but rather she is angered by his insult to “most innocent Nature,/ As if she would her children should be riotous/ With her abundance” (762-4; emphasis mine). Just as Comus creates a parallel between consumption and free enjoyment of beauty and sexuality, so does the Lady repel his sexual advances by refuting his rationalization of luxurious waste. In Preston, we have seen a reduction of imitatio Christi to self-denial with little focus on the role of charity or justice. A Maske does not go so far, but Milton does imply that “spare Temperance” could reform the misuse of creation, “Nature’s full blessings would be well dispensed”
52 In God Speed the Plow, Andrew McRae points to Thomas Moffett’s use of the image of the hardworking
silkworm in The Silkewormes, and their Flies (1599) to justify the production of a luxury item, silk, by
transforming its producer, the silkworm, into an example of honest industry (Andrew McRae, God Speed the