16 EURAMERICA what virtues they embody. Duessa reproaches Redcrosse for “leauing her in place vnmeet” (I, vii, 3), but she does not really go on to give a lesson about chivalric loyalty. Spenser here is not questioning the humanist practice of “providing some kind of detemporalized paradigm . . . , be it rule, moral, exemplar, picture— to which we can contract and compare the flux of experience” (Dolven, 2007: 53); on the contrary, he is showing how perverse it is not to see beyond human experience in history and find the atemporal truth embedded in it. In “Letter to Raleigh,” Spenser himself says his lesson “shoulde be most plausible and pleasing” (2007: 715), suggesting that pleasing the readers means presenting a plausible story, a story that brings out a logical conclusion, not just showing fanciful incidents.23 Gregory the Great also readily rebukes pastors who delight without providing lessons, who try to secure “the love of laity more than . . . the Truth” (590/2007: 74). Gregory knows well that “good spiritual directors desire to please others” because “it is certainly difficult for a preacher who is not loved, regardless of how well he speaks, to be heard,” but he insists that pastors can incline the students to love them only when they “use affection for themselves as a sort of road to introduce the hearts of their audience for the love of the Creator” (76). Here the danger of using pleasure as a tool in pastoral care lies not just in whether the pleasure is used to bring out the lesson, but also in the fact that pleasure can lead the students to both truth and idolatry. The pastor figures in the House of Holiness try to avoid this kind of danger, so they seldom please. They do not teach like humanists such as Erasmus and Vives, who “moved explicit 23 Sidney holds a similar opinion about what kind of pleasure poets should use to teach and to move. He makes a distinction between delight and laughter, arguing that “for delight we scarcely do but in things that have a conveniency to ourselves or to the general nature,” whereas “laughter almost ever cometh of things most disproportioned to ourselves and nature” (1966: 68). He here points out that the legitimate kind of pleasure is a kind of intellectual pleasure derived from the readers’ recognition of some natural law or truth in the story.
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