The Elizabethan World Picture

E.M.W. Tillyard, E.M.W. Tillyard

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351304306
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Littérature
• Categoria: Critique littéraire médiévale et du début des temps modernes

This illuminating account of ideas of world order prevalent in the Elizabethan Age and later is an indispensable companion for readers of the great writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Shakespeare and the Elizabethan dramatists, Donne and Milton, among many others. The basic medieval idea of an ordered Chain of Being is studied by Tillyard in the process of its various transformations by the dynamic spirit of the Renaissance. Among his topics are: Angels; the Stars and Fortune; the Analogy between Macrocosm and Microcosm; the Four Elements; the Four Humors; Sympathies; Correspondences; and the Cosmic Dance ideas and symbols that inspirited the imaginations not only of the Elizabethans, but also of the Renaissance as such.

This idea of cosmic order was one of the genuine ruling ideas of the Elizabethan Age, and perhaps the most characteristic. Such ideas, like our everyday manners, are the least disputed and the least paraded in the creative literature of the time. The province of this book is some of the notions about the world and man that were quite frequently taken for granted by the ordinary educated Elizabethan; the commonplaces too familiar for the poets to make detailed use of, except in explicitly educational passages, but essential as basic assumptions and invaluable at moments of high passion.

The objective of The Elizabethan World Picture is to extract and explain the most ordinary beliefs about the constitution of the world as pictured in the Elizabethan Age and through this exposition to help the ordinary reader to understand and to enjoy the great writers of the age. In attempting this, Tillyard has brought together a number of pieces of elementary lore. This classic text is a convenient factual aid to extant interpretations of some of Spenser, Donne, or Milton.

Five

The Links in the Chain

(i) Angels and Ether

It will be convenient to describe the Elizabethan scheme 01 creation from top to bottom. But first we must shed any notion that even in the Middle Ages the chain or ladder of creation was single and consistent. Some portions of it plainly could not be fitted into a single unit: for instance the four elements. These, as inanimate, should ideally be lower than the lowest animate creation. It might have been expected that fire, the highest of the elements, should link with the vital spark of a worm or an oyster. But the operations of the elements did not cease with the lowest living thing: nor were the higher living things compounded of the lower, but all were compounded of the four elements direct. So the elements could not be links in a simple chain: they had to be a supplementary chain multifariously connected with the main one. Now just as the elements, themselves inanimate, touched the chain at higher or at least middle as well as at low places, so the perfected parts of inanimate nature were arranged in a hierarchy that removed its heights far above the lower specimens of the animate class. In other words the upper reaches of the physical universe were connected not with plants or beasts (though they might act on them) but with the very angels, with whom they will have to be considered.

In spite of Copernicus and a wide knowledge of his theories through popular handbooks, the ordinary educated Elizabethan thought of the universe as geocentric. He was as apt as a modern to meditate on its immensity and he thought of God as domiciled beyond the bounds of the fixed stars in the coelum empyraeum (Milton’s empyrean) attended by the hosts of the angels. The name of this heaven signifies fire and hence, fire being the best of the elements and heavenly fire being better than the elemental, the highest perfection. It also signifies light and the notion of God as light. Milton’s first description of heaven cannot be far from the Elizabethan conception:

Now had the Almighty Father from above,

From the pure Empyrean where he sits

High Thron’d above all highth, bent down his eye,

His own works and their works at once to view:

About him all the Sanctities of Heaven

Stood thick as Starrs, and from his sight receiv’d

Beatitude past utterance.

What if anything there was between the coelum empyraeum and the created universe was not settled, but on one notion there was an intermediate space containing lesser heavens. To what use it was put I will return when I speak in detail of the angels. Opinion varied on the precise constitution of the created universe. The number of spheres that composed it could be nine ten or eleven; but no one doubted that round a central earth revolved with differing motions spheres of diameters ever increasing from the moon’s through the other planets to that of the fixed stars, and that there was a sphere called the primum mobile outside that of the fixed stars, which dictated the motions proper to all the rest. Within this universe there was a sharp division between everything beneath the sphere of the moon and all the rest of the universe. (The adjective sublunary contains a lot of meaning.) It was the difference between mutability and constancy. Though the four elements were the material for the whole universe, they were differently mixed in these two regions: below the moon ill, above it perfectly. Hence the heavens were eternal, the sublunary regions subject to decay: on the medieval principle that, in Donne’s words, whatever dies was not mixed equally. Another difference was that, while below the moon the air was thick and dirty, above, it was pure, and known as the ether. In the words of an encyclopaedist printed by Caxton:

This air shineth night and day of resplendour perpetual and is so clear and shining that if a man were abiding in that part he should see all, one thing and another and all that is, fro one end to the other, all so lightly or more as a man should do here beneath upon the earth the only length of a foot or less.

And there was an alternative theory which made the ether a fifth element and the substance of all creation from the moon upward. As was only natural, the farther the distance from the earth and the nearer to heaven, the purer and more brilliant was the atmosphere. Contrariwise the earth itself was gross and heavy and the more so towards its own centre. Far from being dignified and tending to an insolent anthropocentricity, the earth in the Ptolemaic system was the cesspool of the universe, the repository of its grossest dregs. As a Frenchman of the time of Francis I expressed it, the earth

is so depraved and broken in all kind of vices and abominations that it seemeth to be a place that hath received all the filthiness and purgings of all other worlds and ages.

Nor did the Ptolemaic system make for any sense of smallness or confinement. It was just as possible in Elizabethan days as later to be terrified by the vast spaces. Caxton’s encyclopaedist must have taken away the breath of the vulgar quite as effectively as any modern lecturer on the marvels of the heavens; and he uses the same method. This is how he puts the immense distance of the stars from the earth:

If the first man that God formed ever, which was Adam, had gone fro the first day that he was made and created twentyfive miles every day, yet should he not have comen thither, but should yet have the space of seven hundred and thirteen year to go at the time when this volume was performed by the very author. Or if there were a great stone which should fall fro thence unto the earth it should be an hundred year ere it came to the ground.

It has been necessary to describe the physical universe down to the very earth because the angels (as a species though not individually) could inhabit or visit its whole range. As in so many other matters, the Elizabethans kept the main medieval beliefs about the angels but omitted or confused many of the details. First they were convinced that there were angels and would have agreed with Sir Thomas Browne that it is a riddle

how so many learned heads should so far forget their metaphysics and destroy the ladder and scale of creatures as to question the existence of spirits.

Further they were quite clear that angels are intermediate between God and man; that their nature is purely intellectual; that they possess free will like man, but that it never conflicts with God’s will; that they can apprehend God immediately and not by figure or symbol; that they are arranged in orders; that they are God’s messengers; and that they act as guardians of men. All this the Elizabethans held in common with the Middle Ages. But just as the reformers abolished much of the church ceremony, so the Elizabethans ignored many attributes of the angelic hierarchies.

As before, Sebonde gives an admirable general account of the conventional medieval notion of the orders of the angels:

We must believe that the angels are there in marvellous and inconceivable numbers, because the honour of a king consists in the great crowd of his vassals, while his disgrace or shame consists in their paucity. Thousands of thousands wait on the divine majesty and tenfold hundreds of millions join in his worship. Further, if in material nature there are numberless kinds of stones herbs trees fishes birds four-footed beasts and above these an infinitude of men, it must be said likewise that there are many kinds of angels. But remember that one must not conceive of their multitude as confused; on the contrary, among these spirits a lovely order is exquisitely maintained.

Sebonde goes on to speak of the various orders on earth and adds:

If then there is maintained such an order among low and earthly things, the force of reason makes it necessary that among these most noble spirits there should be a marshalling unique, artistic, and beyond measure blessed. Further, beyond doubt, they are divided into three hierarchies or sacred principalities, in each of which there are high, middle, and low.

The most influential account of the angels had been that of the man traditionally called Dionysius the Areopagite, a Christian Neo-Platonist of the fifth century A.D., in his work On the Heavenly Hierarchy; and it is widely known because Aquinas and Dante accepted it. Dionysius taught that the angels are arranged in a definitive order according to their natural capacity to receive the undivided divine essence. Knowing themselves and being without sin, they are utterly content with the full measure of what they can assimilate, and will not envy those above them. Those of inferior capacity will receive divine knowledge through the medium of their superiors. There are three main orders of angels. The highest is contemplative and consists of Seraphs, Cherubs, and Thrones. Thus the highest link in the chain of being would be the chief Seraph. The second order is more active but rather potentially than in deed: their psychological state is rather of an attitude than of an action. They are divided into Dominations, Virtues, and Powers. More active still is the third order, divided into Principalities, Archangels, and Angels. It is this lowest rank, the Angels, who form the medium between the whole angelic hierarchy and man. They go on God’s errands. To the medieval mind the nine orders mattered a great deal, first because the triple divisions echoed the Trinity, second because they corresponded to the ninefold division of the material heavens, accepted in the main in medieval times. From heaven in descending order the spheres were those of primum mobile, the fixed stars, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars, the Sun, Venus, Mercury, and the Moon; and the nine hierarchies of angels were thought each to regulate one of these spheres in the order given above, the seraphs regulating the primum mobile and so on. Dionysius also sees a correspondence between the angelic hierarchy in heaven and the ecclesiastical hierarchy on earth.

The Dionysian order was not unknown through the Elizabethan age. But it had lost its authority, and was sometimes ignored and sometimes altered. It is worth here asking the question (which I have not seen asked before) whether the best known of all Elizabethan references to an order of angels may not be an accurate rendering of part of the Dionysian plan. In the Merchant of Venice Lorenzo says to Jessica:

There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st

But in his motion like an angel sings,

Still quiring to the young-eyed Cherubins.

These lines are usually explained by the Platonic doctrine of the music of the spheres. But in Plato each sphere made its own note; there was no question of all the stars singing. Shakespeare imagines all the stars in the sphere of the fixed bodies singing to the Cherubim. Now in the Dionysian scheme it is the Cherubim who have charge of the fixed stars. Was it a mere accident that Shakespeare wrote Cherubin rather than Seraphin (euphony apart), or did he know the tradition?

For a knowledge of medieval doctrine but a free adaptation of it one can go to Milton. He has his various hierarchies but lays down no precise order and diverges from Dionysius by exalting the Archangels to the supreme place, above the Seraphim and Cherubim. Donne is familiar with many of the medieval details and in using them assumes a like familiarity in his audience. His Air and Angels has as its main point the doctrine that the angels are of a brightness insufferable to human sight and that when they appear to men they assume a body from the ether:

For nor in nothing nor in things

Extreme and scatt’ring bright can love inhere;

Then as an angel face and wings

Of air, not pure as it, yet pure doth wear,

So thy love may be my love’s sphere.

The angel lore here is precise and abundant. The comparison is between love and an angel finding embodiment. An angel takes his body neither from nothing nor from the fiery element of the empyrean. He is himself purely spiritual and for embodiment chooses something grosser than himself, yet not unworthy of his own purity. This is the ether, the pure air surrounding the heavenly spheres.

Once more Hooker probably gives the average beliefs of the well-educated Elizabethan. Angels, according to him, are

spirits immaterial and intellectual, the glorious inhabitants of those sacred palaces, where nothing but light and blessed immortality, no shadow of matter for tears discontentments griefs and uncomfortable passions to work upon, but all joy tranquillity and peace even for ever and ever doth dwell: as in number and order they are huge mighty and royal armies, so likewise in perfection of obedience unto that law which the Highest, whom they adore love and imitate, hath imposed upon them. . . . God, which moveth mere natural agents as an efficient only, doth otherwise move intellectual creatures and especially his holy angels: for beholding the face of God, in admiration of so great excellency, they all adore him; and being rapt with the love of his beauty they cleave inseparably for ever unto him. Desire to resemble him in goodness maketh them unweariable and even unsatiable in their longing to do by all means all manner good unto all the creatures of God, but especially unto the children of men: in the countenance of whose nature, looking downward, they behold themselves beneath themselves; even as upward in God, beneath whom themselves are, they see that character which is nowhere but in themselves and us resembled.

Hooker does not wish to arouse scholastic controversy and keeps to what were for his age essentials: the nature of angelic intelligence, their place in the scale of being, and their function as guardians of men.

The notion of the Guardian Angel was univers...