Abstract
This chapter focuses on the topic of ‘assurance,’ a frequently held Protestant belief, visible as early as Luther, that it was possible to attain such a high degree of faith in God’s love as to qualify for complete, unshakeable confidence. While such confidence was judged to be an unhealthy presumption by Catholics (and many Protestants), it was nonetheless widely adopted by late sixteenth-century English Protestants, especially of a ‘Puritan’ bent. In Macbeth and Twelfth Night, Shakespeare displays this quest for attaining assurance in both tragic and comic contexts; he suggests this component of extreme Protestantism does not produce beneficial results. Indeed, in Twelfth Night, the contrast between Malvolio, believing he has attained true assurance, and Sebastian, convinced he is a reprobate, suggests that the latter state is preferable to the former.
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Notes
- 1.
For a thorough study of assurance as a theological concept in sixteenth-century Europe, see Susan E. Schreiner, Are You Alone Wise? The Search for Certainty in the Modern Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Chapters 2 and 4 outline the Protestant and Catholic positions on this topic. Schreiner’s study throughout stresses the tremendous importance that the Reformers placed on certainty, both in terms of assurance of one’s salvation and assurance that one’s religious principles and Biblical interpretations were the only viable ones. In terms of assurance of salvation , see also Kendall , Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649. For a discussion focusing on Calvin, see A. N. S. Lane, “Calvin’s Doctrine of Assurance.” Vox Evangelica 11 (1979), 32–54. For a summary of the concept of assurance in relation to the Lambeth Articles in England, see Brian Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 287–96. Gary Kuchar also discusses assurance in one’s salvation in English theology and literature in George Herbert and the Mystery of the Word: Poetry and Scripture in Seventeenth-Century England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), chapters three and four.
- 2.
Keith D. Stanglin cites, for instance, Augustine and Gregory, on this point. Arminius on the Assurance of Salvation: The Context, Roots, and Shape of the Leiden Debate, 1603–1609 (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2007), 154–6.
- 3.
“Council of Trent-1545–1563: Session 6,” in Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. Tanner , 2:674. As Leif Dixon puts it, before the Reformation , “for centuries, the vast majority of Christendom’s inhabitants had lived quite contentedly with the reality that one could never be certain of salvation in this life.” Practical Predestinarians in England, 48.
- 4.
Qtd. in White, Predestination, Policy and Polemic, 43.
- 5.
Calvin, Institutes, 3.2.17, 562. See also Stanglin, Arminius on the Assurance of Salvation, 163.
- 6.
“Formula of Concord,” 518.
- 7.
Stanglin, Arminius on the Assurance of Salvation, 162.
- 8.
Martin Luther, “Lectures on Galatians 1535; Chapters 1–4,” trans. Jaroslav Pelikan, in Luther’s Works, American Edition, eds. Jaroslav Pelikan, Helmut T. Lehmann , Christopher Boyd Brown, et al. 79 vols. to date (St. Louis, MO: Concordia Press; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1955–), 26:377.
- 9.
Luther, “Lectures on Galatians 1535; Chapters 1–4,” in Luther’s Works, 26:377–8. Susan E. Schreiner has argued that Luther’s belief in the possibility of assurance was intensified as a result of the criticisms of the Catholic theologian, Tommaso de Vio Cajetan , who had insisted, in his “Augsburg Treatises” of 1518, that no one can ever be certain of having divine grace. Are You Alone Wise?, 55–7. Schreiner also cites Luther’s comment, in his Lectures on Genesis (Chapter 26), “for there is no difference at all between one who doubts and one who is damned,” 75. See Martin Luther, “Lectures on Genesis, Chapters 26–30,” trans. George V. Schick and Paul D. Pahl (rev. by the editors), in Luther’s Works, American Edition, eds. Jaroslav Pelikan , Helmut T. Lehmann , Christopher Boyd Brown, et al. 79 vols. to date (St. Louis, MO: Concordia Press; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1955–), 5:48. For a different perspective, see Jay T. Collier’s recent Debating Perseverance: The Augustinian Heritage in Post-Reformation England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). Collier argues that a belief in the ‘perseverance of the saints’ is specifically Calvinist and not Lutheran (page 11 and passim). He refers to the “Saxon Visitation Articles of 1592” which state, as part of the “False and Erroneous Doctrine of the Calvinists” that “the elect … cannot lose faith … or be condemned even though they commit great sins and crimes of every kind.” The “Saxon Visitation Articles of 1592,” in Sources and Contexts of The Book of Concord, eds. Robert Kolb and James A. Nestingen (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001), 260. Yet these Articles also note that “whoever perseveres in this covenant [of baptism] and confidence [sic] unto the end is not lost but has eternal life,” 258. The “Formula of Concord” says similarly, “We have a glorious comfort in this salutary teaching, that we know how we have been chosen for eternal life … and that no one can tear us out of his hand … For he has assured us that he has graciously chosen us not only with mere words.” “Formula of Concord ,” 518.
- 10.
Schreiner , Are You Alone Wise?. Schreiner quotes Luther: “If everything were sound [in the Papacy], still this monster of uncertainty … is worse than all the other monsters,” 59.
- 11.
John Calvin, “Acts of the Council of Trent with The Antidote,” trans. Henry Beveridge, in John Calvin: Works and Correspondence, Tracts and Treatises in Defense of the Reformed Faith. 3 vols. (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1844–1851); 3:137. Charlottesville, VA: InteLex Past Masters Series, Electronic Edition, 2002.
- 12.
Calvin, Institutes, 3.13.3, 765.
- 13.
William Perkins, “A Discourse of Conscience” (also called “A Treatise of Conscience”), in The Workes of … William Perkins. 3 vols. (London, 1626–1631), 1:541.
- 14.
“The Lambeth Articles, 1595,” 400.
- 15.
Stanglin, Arminius on the Assurance of Salvation, 152. Similarly, Brian Cummings argues that, for Protestants, “confident assurance of salvation was made essential to the doctrine of predestination.” The Literary Culture of the Reformation, 290. Remarks such as those by Ursinus (“in this life not onely we may, but we ought also to be assured, and certaine of euerlasting life: otherwise we shall neuer haue it”) support this view; Zacharias Ursinus , The Sum of Christian Religion , trans. Henry Parrie (London: 1617), 639. But see Peter White’s interpretation of the 1595 Barrett/Baro controversy at Cambridge. White argues that, when Barrett preached against assurance (in the same 29 April 1595 sermon in which, as we have seen, he opposed double predestination), Barrett’s position was supported by many Protestants, including Archbishop Whitgift and the two chaplains, Adrian Saravia (1532–1613) and Lancelot Andrewes (1555–1626), whom Whitgift called upon for advice. White , Predestination, Policy, and Polemic, 101–4. Also, H. C. Porter, Reformation and Reaction in Tudor Cambridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), 366–71. For the opposing view that Whitgift was strongly antagonistic to Barrett, see Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists, 31–2.
- 16.
R.T. Kendall , Calvin and English Calvinism to 1649, 26. See also Lane, “Calvin’s Doctrine of Assurance,” 34–6.
- 17.
Edmund Sears Morgan, Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea (New York: New York University Press, 1963), 38.
- 18.
“Michael P. Winship, “Weak Christians, Backsliders, and Carnal Gospelers: Assurance of Salvation and the Pastoral Origins of Puritan Practical Divinity in the 1580s,” Church History 70.3 (2001), 462.
- 19.
“The Canons of the Synod of Dort, 1619,” 459. The “Westminster Confession of Faith, 1647” provides an extensive discussion of the necessity for Protestants to obtain “infallible assurance,” despite the challenges one faces in doing so, 500. I would argue the term ‘Puritan’ refers to those with this habit of grueling, scrupulous self-examination—the sort that, in the seventeenth century, produced diaries and other accounts of spiritual gains and failures. Puritans also insisted that other Christians follow Puritan practices in order to be legitimately stewards of God’s word. See Karl Gunther, Reformation Unbound: Protestant Visions of Reform in England, 1525–1590 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), especially Chapter 3, 97–130. Gunther’s chapter title calls Puritan ideology “Anti-Nicodemism as a way of life.”
- 20.
J. Sears McGee, in The Godly Man in Stuart England: Anglicans, Puritans, and the Two Tables, 1620–1670 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1976), 59.
- 21.
William Perkins, “A Graine of Musterd-Seede,” in The Workes of … William Perkins. 3 vols. (London, 1626–1631), 1:637.
- 22.
William Perkins, “The Foundation of Christian Religion, Gathered into Six Principles,” in The Workes of … William Perkins. 3 vols. (London, 1626–1631), 1:5. Perkins’s varied comments on the nature of whether assurance is easy or difficult to attain have led Debora Kuller Shuger to conclude that “English Calvinism … is hopelessly contradictory on the matter.” Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance: Religion, Politics, and the Dominant Culture (Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 7.
- 23.
For this distinction, which he attributes to the “Reformed churches,” between “carnalis securitas” and “spiritualis securitas” see Stanglin, Arminius on the Assurance of Salvation, 173.
- 24.
Perkins, “A Golden Chaine,” in Workes , 1:78 (chapter 36).
- 25.
Perkins, “A Golden Chaine,” in Workes , 1:106 (chapter 53).
- 26.
The question of whether Malvolio is a ‘Puritan,’ the usual conclusion Shakespeare scholars have drawn about the character’s behavior, has recently been made more complex by Kristen Poole who argues that Malvolio is only one kind of Puritan (in being puritanical) but not the only kind. Poole argues, for instance, that Falstaff , who uses puritanical pronouncements as a way to conceal his lust and gluttony, is a truer representation than Malvolio of a “stage puritan.” Radical Religion From Shakespeare to Milton: Figures of Noncomformity in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 37. The fascinating issue brought up by Poole’s methodology, namely ‘what defines a given group?’ is nicely explored by Peter Lake who writes: “’puritan’ came to be internalized and appropriated by the godly themselves, and the deployment of the term as an insult integrated into their own complex, intensely dialectical, account of their own identity as the ‘godly’ and of their relation as such with a hostile and ungodly world.” Peter Lake, “Anti-Puritanism: The Structure of a Prejudice,” in Religious Politics in Post-Reformation England, eds. Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2006), 86. For a short summary of some Puritanical traits of Malvolio , see Phebe Jensen, Religion and Revelry in Shakespeare’s Festive World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 165–7. For a careful warning not to see signs of Puritanism in Malvolio where none exist, see Brian Walsh who notes, for instance, that Malvolio does not object to the revelry of Toby Belch , Andrew Aguecheek, and Feste “on religious grounds” and that “objecting to loud disorderly singing in the middle of the night in a house of mourning” does not make one a Puritan, Unsettled Toleration, 97, 101.
- 27.
Qtd. in Nicholas Tyacke, Aspects of English Protestantism c. 1530–1700 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 263.
- 28.
Sean Benson, “‘Perverse Fantasies’?: Rehabilitating Malvolio’s Reading,” Papers on Language and Literature 45.3 (2009), 276.
- 29.
Lorena Henry , “Guiding the Heavenly Causes: Faithfulness, Fate, and Prophecy in The Faerie Queene,” in Centered on the Word: Literature, Scripture, and the Tudor-Stuart Middle Way, eds. Daniel W. Doerksen and Christopher Hodgkins (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), 71.
- 30.
Andrew D. Weiner, “Fierce Warres and Faithfull Loues”: Pattern as Structure in Book I of The Faerie Queene.” Huntington Library Quarterly 37.1 (Nov. 1973), 40.
- 31.
David Bevington writes that Malvolio “tortures the text to make it yield a suitable meaning, much in the style of Puritan theologizing,” “Introduction,” Twelfth Night, eds. David Bevington and David Scott Kasten (New York: Bantam Books: 2005), xv.
- 32.
Sven Grosse, “Salvation and the Certitude of Faith: Luther on Assurance.” Pro Ecclesia: A Journal of Catholic and Evangelical Theology 20.1 (2011), 71.
- 33.
See Donna Hamilton’s chapter, “Twelfth Night: The Errors of Exorcism,” in Shakespeare and the Politics of Protestant England (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1992), 86–110.
- 34.
It should be noted that Sebastian’s approach to his fate suggests double predestination thinking, an assurance of reprobation rather than only of damnation. Sebastian does not speak of any particular sins he has committed to merit his dark fate, and he apparently does not consider it inappropriate even to despair of God’s mercy; as Protestants often stressed, God is the potter who can do what He wants with His clay. Sebastian’s attitude might embody William Perkins’s admonition (in his work, “Cases of Conscience”) to those who might consider themselves to be reprobates : “say with holy Job, Lord, though thou kill me, yet will I trust in thee.” Qtd. in Dixon , Practical Predestinarians in England, 101. Of course, the “trust” that Perkins encouraged was pastorally intended, a reminder that God does eventually bless his elect; nonetheless, such “trust” also includes the possibility that God may have his reasons for deciding one is a reprobate and those reasons too must be accepted (as Sophocles’s Oedipus the King accepts them) in order to give proper glory to God.
- 35.
For a discussion of Psalm 22 (and Psalm 68.15) in relation to Antony’s line in Antony and Cleopatra: “O that I were/Upon the hill of Basan, to outroar/The horned herd!” (3.13.131–3), see Hannibal Hamlin, The Bible in Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 222.
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Gleckman, J. (2019). Double Predestination and Assurance in Shakespeare: Macbeth and Twelfth Night . In: Shakespeare and Protestant Poetics. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9599-5_6
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