Corruption in Renaissance Literature

It is no doubt naive to refer to a unitary 'Renaissance world view' of human nature. (Though when I was researching Renaissance ideas the sheer energy some academics devoted to attacking Tillyard for his useful handbook came as a surprise.) The emphasis today is on studying the diversity of beliefs in the period - beliefs which were themselves shifting and not static, moving within and across different communities. In exploring anything along the lines of an 'Elizabethan World Picture' there is also the danger of identifying the official, authorised view with the inwardly felt convictions of a diverse people. Nonetheless, one notion that we find permeating much medieval and early modern culture, while varying in tone and pitch, is the fallen state of man. This more or less coherent belief - diversely construed and variously expressed -  is the subject of the brief note below. It is at the very least a useful contrast to some of the sunnier pictures of Christian humanism in circulation.

Renaissance writings frequently refer to moral corruption. Often, this is viewed as the defining characteristic of all human beings: to err is human; to be mortal is to be fallible and degenerate. The villains of tragedy are there not to reassure us that evil resides in only a few special cases, but to remind us that we are all naturally biased towards evil. Our essential moral character is flawed, and self-discipline is needed to resist the temptation to sin. In the medieval and Renaissance scheme of things, the barrel of mankind contains nothing but bad apples. The moral life is founded on an admission of our corrupt nature, and directed towards the search for improvement and redemption. We are not born good and then descend into wickedness. Rather we are inherently wicked, and only achieve good through conscious effort. Through this effort, man may realise some of his potential for nobility and dignity: God endowed humans with these qualities, but mankind generally smothers them with sin and error. The Faerie Queene, in which knights fight to uphold virtues, is one example of this philosophy in literary action.

Culturally, this conception of human nature is rooted in Christian doctrine. Catholics and Protestants did not disagree over man’s sinfulness, but over the instruments of salvation. In the Christian account, Adam - who stands for all mankind - was made in the image of God and enjoyed the highest state of human nobility, including the right use of reason and will. But when he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge in the Garden of Eden, he fell from grace with God, and brought the human state into moral darkness. This story gives narrative sense to the notion that weakness and disobedience are intrinsic to man’s nature.  We do not need to do anything to become bad, for we are bad already: this is the fact of original sin. The fault lies solely in man: God designed us perfectly, but we have spoiled the design. Man wrongly exercises his reason, which is divine in origin, and thus he mistakes the nature of things. We apply our will to the wrong ends.

Thus a chasm separates God, who is absolutely good, from man, who is depraved. The spiritual life is an attempt to cross this chasm, and in literary writings we frequently find an opposition drawn between mortal corruption and heavenly perfection. This division between mortal and immortal, depraved and perfect, also occurs within man himself, who is divine in origin and potential, but frequently bestial in his actions and desires. The soul looks to heaven, while the flesh drags us to the earth and earthly corruption. In Hamlet’s words, man crawls between earth and heaven. Medieval and Renaissance writings typically express the desire to go back to the prelapsarian state (before the Fall) to recover man’s original pristine condition.  Recognition of error is built into Christian discipline, in the form of confession and penitence. It is also integrated into the Church year, particularly in the season of Lent when all Christians were (and are) required to reflect contritely on their sins. 

Though he is biased towards what is bad, man can still recognise goodness through the soul, which is divine in origin. But the soul is imprisoned in the body, and confronted by the three enemies of man:  the world, the flesh and the devil. These temptations are not merely abstract notions. The devil is actively at work among men, thwarting their struggle to lead a good life. To take another example from Hamlet, when Hamlet addresses his father’s ghost, ‘Be thou a spirit of hell or goblin damned’, he appeals to a general belief that such diabolical agents were real beings, intent on taking the understanding prisoner and leading the will astray. The dark hours before daylight in which this encounter takes place suggest the darkness and confusion of the human state.

Beyond explicitly Christian doctrines, we find the assumption that man is innately corrupt expressed in other aspects of Renaissance culture. The geocentric universe might in one view give the earth an exaggerated importance as the centre of all things. Yet it also means that the earth is at the lowest point of the universe. It is the dregs at the bottom of the bottle, a sedimentary layer where all the muck of the cosmos has gathered.  From it, we can only look out on the heavens, from which we are excluded. In the sublunary space below the moon, the air is corrupted by vapours: spirits from hell can work here, but not angels, whose element is the ether above. Just as man is separated from God, so is the sublunary part of the universe divided from the harmony of the spheres. Weighed down by his sensual life, man is deaf to their music:

            Sit, Jessica. Look how the floor of heaven

            Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold:

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

            But in his motion like an angel sings,

            Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubims, -

            Such harmony is in immortal souls;

            But whilst this muddy vesture of decay

            Doth grossly close it in, we cannot hear it.

            (The Merchant of Venice, 5.1, 58-65)

The human soul, though immortal, is stifled by the ‘muddy vesture’ of the body. It is further imprisoned by the earthly world which man has rendered corrupt by the wrong use of his will. And so the soul’s tendency is to gaze longingly at the perfection from which it has been expelled. In the Renaissance period, this idea also had a close parallel in the philosophy of Plato, which depicts man living in a state of ignorance and illusion, but motivated by his better instincts to search for the Good and the Beautiful.

Since Renaissance writing works so much through analogy, we see the notion of corruption extend well beyond individual human agents. To continue with our main textual illustration, Hamlet depicts original sin (the murder of a brother, a figure of Cain murdering Abel in Genesis) spreading like a virus within the enclosed body of the court: madness, incest, mistrust, spying, lying, betrayal, despair and further murder are all results of this corruption progressively destroying the human community. The court and the state are organisms like the body: ‘There’s something rotten in the state of Denmark’. Other works aim similarly at an anatomy of human depravity. An example is Sir Walter Raleigh’s poem, ‘The Soul’s Errand’ (‘Go, soul, the body’s guest’). Here the soul is sent to ‘give the lie’ to all examples of alleged worldly greatness and achievement, from the Court to Arts and Faith. The message is that they are all illusory, all rotted by vice:

            Go, tell the Court – it glows

               And shines like rotten wood;

            Go, tell the Church – it shows

               What’s good, and doth no good.

The poetic language of the period is correspondingly full of terms like those we have seen in our examples: rotten, gross, muddy, rank, foul, pestilential, sick, decayed, wasting, stale. Images of physical and bodily decay are outward signs of spiritual corruption. Hamlet complains of his morally sullied ‘solid flesh’, and declares that ‘The world’s an unweeded garden that grows to seed. / Things rank and gross in sense possess it merely’ (merely here means ‘completely’).  This vocabulary is answered by an equally rich set of images describing heavenly beauty, harmony and perfection.

The Medieval and Renaissance concern with general corruption can pose a challenge to the modern reader. We may find it all depressing and pessimistic. Indeed, some Renaissance works themselves explore this idea: those who develop a morbid obsession with sin, like Timon of Athens, do little good in the world, and spiral downward into melancholy and madness. There is a frequently stated suspicion about the advisability of the purely contemplative life. Yet the assumption that humans are fallible is in itself not viewed as a morbid fancy, but as self-evident truth, which must be accepted as a prelude to good action. 

We may still find empathising with this view difficult, since we have been exposed to different doctrines. The eighteenth-century enlightenment promoted the opposite idea that man is naturally good. This belief is still powerful today, and helps explain why in popular parlance violent criminals are referred to as monsters and animals: to be human is to be essentially good, and so those who do evil cannot be fully human. Films about serial killers advance the idea that evil is something only a few de-humanised beings do, reassuring the rest of us that wickedness is something out there, not in here. Subsequently, the Romantic movement redefined the inner life as a process of fulfilment through the realisation of creative energy, rather than a process of spiritual struggle.  

The older view of corruption is not, then, necessarily pessimistic, any more than it is pessimistic for us to accept we have some physical illness. An awareness of moral illness, of natural fallibility, is also an encouragement to improve. (Whereas, we might say, the premise that we are essentially good provides little incentive to attain goodness: we cannot aspire to what we already have.) From the bottom of the ladder, we naturally look up. Sidney argues in An Apologie for Poetry that works of the imagination can help to direct our attention upwards in this way:

Sith our erected wit, maketh us know what perfection is, and yet our infected will, keepeth us from reaching unto it.

Wit and will are in a psychomachia (a struggle between different parts of the mind) similar to that between Reason and Passion. Wit lifts us towards higher truth, ‘infected will’ pulls us back down again. This internal conflict is something we can find in numerous texts: Macbeth’s will draws him towards terrible acts in the mistaken quest for power; while at the same time with his wit, or imaginative faculty, he can see with intense clarity that he is damned. As part divine, part animal, man has a dual nature. As a son of Adam, he is corrupt, but as God’s creation, he can use his free will to strive for perfection. Many theological disputes centred around the extent of man’s corruption, and texts of the time explore it in numerous ways. In writing like Sidney’s, an awareness of moral corruption leads inevitably to an intense imagining of what is good and true and beautiful: only the infected person actively desires to be healthy.  Thus we find in so much Renaissance poetry expressions of wonderment and love of some higher perfection. The flower struggles through the soil towards the heavens. It is from the shadows that we best discern the light.

An older book with interesting things to say on such matters is C S Lewis, The Discarded Image (Cambridge UP, 1964),  in particular ‘The Human Soul’, 152-169.