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Loy is doomed to frustration. This is, paradoxically, because he believes that he can remove her clothes (those being the external paraphernalia that are part and parcel of the true institutional Church or Churches that she, as the community of the redeemed, inhabits) or – and this is simply tradition as such: ‘Primo, secundo, tertio is a good play; and the old saying is, the third pays for all.’ On fainting as a recurrent motif in The Faerie Queene, see Green, ‘Swooning in the Faerie Queene’. Green observes its typically restorative character (126). 53 Cf. Book of
’s metaphor for ‘the Church’, the Church that is so described is not (thanks to the confusion of the heavenly and earthly citizenries in this life) necessarily identifiable with the institution known as such on earth. While the latter is, according to Augustine, a figure of the indiscernible community of the redeemed, and while it should harbour and foster true Christians, the degree of contiguity between it and the City of God is variable.10 Indeed, Augustine’s system implies that it would be possible for the membership of the earthly (i.e., institutional) Church to be
(Chapter 7). In brief: the dwarf ’s eventual support of Una represents the broadly visible ‘services’ through which the visible institutional Church (or churches) may support, and even (allegorically) embody the functions of the invisible Church.48 These adiaphora include the forms and material ‘ornaments’ of worship, which 47 Lancelot Andrewes, Sermons of the Nativity and of Repentance and Fasting: Ninety-Six Sermons, 2 vols (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1861), I, 283 (italics mine). Andrewes’s text was Eph. 1:10, and in the peroration excerpted here he quotes
purpose is to contaminate and to confuse. As Hypocrisie (which is what he is called at I.i.Arg.3) he must inevitably insinuate himself into the company of his opposite number. Although Una is unable to see through Archimago, his malevolence towards her is always evident to the reader, thanks to the ‘God’s-eye view’ that Spenser’s allegory at this point projects. Spenser thus exposes the mixed nature of the institutional Church, even while he is establishing the sharpest possible distinction between its two components – the truly redeemed and the hypocrites
, who was represented by some Reformers as the devil’s whore. The contextualizing evidence is surveyed by Hamilton (Faerie Qveene, ed. Hamilton et al.) in his commentary on I.vii.16–17. 19 Institvtion, trans. Norton, 3.24.9 (405). 20 While the preaching of the Word is (together with the administration of the sacraments) a token of the true institutional Church, Arthur’s identification with its preaching function is not inconsistent with his status as one of the redeemed, since it is to the Church that is properly performing these essential functions that the