TRUTH AND DISMEMBERMENT IN THE RENAISSANCE

"When my love swears that she is made of Truth,
I do believe her, though I know she lies."
Shakespeare's Sonnet 138.1-2

Cynthia Bruner Bryson
December 1991

Contents

Chapter 1

In the history of Western thought, a profound search for the understanding of Truth has prevailed from the time of Plato and Aristotle to the present. The theologian/philosopher Mortimer Adler states that "this understanding [of Truth] rests upon a single supposition; namely, that there exists, quite independent of the human mind, a reality which the human mind thinks about and tries to know" (116). Before Truth can be found, there must be some underlying unity which can be universally defined. For Adler, "the definition of truth is the agreement of thought with reality" (21); and reality exists independent of the mind, and reality is what it is regardless of how we think about it. The confusion in the search for Truth stems from the tangibility that Douglas Bush identifies when he writes that "man sees the universe through his own eyes and this leads to an anthropomorphic view of that universe" (Preface 35). According to Renaissance and contemporary thought, our search for Truth is motivated by the desire to perceive the various parts of reality without personal interpretation and to incorporate these fractions into a whole rather than divide Truth into a multiplicity of sections.

Saying that there is one whole of truth does not, according to Adler, "preclude the parts from being different from one another in a variety of ways--with respect to the objects with which they are concerned, with respect to the methods by which inquiry is conducted, and with respect to the sources or bases of truth being sought" (123). No matter how diverse may be the objects, methods, and sources involved in the different parts of Truth, they all remain, nevertheless, parts of one whole and as such must congruously fit together. We must assume that Truth is in principle attainable, even if we cannot in fact attain it ourselves; otherwise the search for Truth would be futile. But the availability of each found part of Truth will promote some reasoning "to the soul which is always yearning to reach after what is whole and complete, both human and divine" (Plato 283). The search itself promotes intellectual thought and produces its own rewards.

Difficulty with "fragmented" Truth arrives when one small fraction of Truth is discovered and exonerated above the Truth in its entirety, such as the division of Christianity into thousands of partitioned Protestant denominations. Each faction has built its creed upon a single portion of Truth rather than striving to know Truth in its wholeness. Adler is correct in saying that the pursuit "does not call for the suspension of the false opinions that others may still hold. It does not call for any social or political action enforcing unanimity in the adoption of the truth. It does not call for witch hunts, McCarthy tactics, or the burning of heretics. It calls only for continued discussion between individuals" (3). The pursuit demands that each person search for and perceive the various parts of reality based on the evidence or weight of reason which dictates the integrity of that found part as a fraction of the whole. Since the truth of faiths or religious beliefs is beyond proof by any empirical or rational means, the parts of truth that are most amendable to proof are the truths of mathematics, of empirical science, and of historical research.

In the Renaissance, the obsession with understanding all forms and concepts relating to Truth was not limited to philosophy and literature but spilled into astronomy, geometry, chemistry, and medicine. According to Marc Bensimon, "if the fascination with anatomical dissection which in fact developed during this period must be called accidental," it can be considered one method of seeing beneath the flesh to the parts below the surface (252); anatomical dissections served life by revealing an integrated connectiveness of all parts to the whole. From More to Milton, Renaissance writers used the dismembered body as an allegory for divided Truth. Studying truth from a multiplicity of sources, these writers believed that they either understood the complexities of Truth or that they were capable of pointing men in the right direction toward a search which would produce an intelligent, educated society. For these authors, the concrete physical body became an allegorical vessel for abstract Truth. Physical, concrete Truth became a means of preparing the mind for more abstract, philosophical Truth. S.L. Bethell refers to this idea when he remarks that, before the Locke-Newton universe came to be accepted, "reason... included faith, intuition, feeling, as well as the more strictly rational processes. Beauty, goodness, love, were a part of truth. ...The mind itself had suffered fragmentation; its means of deepest experience and understanding had been discarded" (57, 63-64). After science broadened man's understanding, moral truth became subject to and totally separated from reason.

However, as the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century writers were making themselves available to the new discoveries in the various sciences and finding a way to incorporate these discoveries into poetic concepts, they were also looking back to the classical myths and tales which could be used as allusions to support either their philosophical views or to demonstrate moral and ethical didactic principles. One of the most common Medieval and Renaissance allusions, when attempting to promote reasoning or in offering a moral allegory, is to Orpheus as a Christ-figure. Orpheus journeys to Hell to win back his dead wife; Pluto is swayed by the musician's song and releases Eurydice under the condition that Orpheus not look back. Fearing that she has slipped, Orpheus violates the condition, and his wife is lost. Unable to love another woman, Orpheus turns to young boys, and this infuriates the Maenads, who tear him limb from limb. "Even after his death," Baker writes, "Orpheus continues to sing. Although his head is severed from his body, then drowned and floated in a river, and finally buried, the hero's head and his oracular lyre are not silenced" (18). Virgil's Orpheus, a victim of tragic "furor," offends against the inflexible divine order and is torn apart by the Maenads; whereas Ovid's Orpheus is presented as the redemption of the world full of misfortune, a blossoming of new life out of loss and death and an affirmation of the ultimate harmony that may result from tragedy.

The advantage of the Orphic myth to the Renaissance writers is two-fold: Orpheus represents a redeeming, sacrificial, Christ-like hero and he also represents a unity of opposing faiths. The union is described by Baker: "In combining the ecstatic element of Dionysus with the civilizing power of Apollo, Orpheus defines the essence and power of poetry.... The art of Orpheus is both emotive and intellectual; it is sensual and frenetic as well as philosophic and peaceful" (17). He never disassociates himself from either god and emerges as the Greek hero who fuses contrary religious rites.

Orpheus is identified with his partly Christianized deeds in the underworld and with the Christian Good Shepherd in the catacombs. Medieval writers went so far as to claim his songs were written in praise of the one true God. Boccaccio suggests that "to strengthen the authority of these songs, [he] enclosed the high mysteries of things divine in a covering of words, with the intention that the adorable majesty of such things should not become object of too common knowledge, and thus fall into contempt" (Boccaccio 44). Pico "supposed that Orpheus had concealed in [his hymns] a religious revelation which he wished to be understood only by a small sect of initiates: 'In the manner of the ancient theologians, Orpheus interwove the mysteries of his doctrines with the texture of fables and covered them with a poetic veil, in order that anyone reading his hymns would think them to contain nothing but the sheerest tales and trifles' (ed. Garin, De hominis dignitate, p.162)... In praising the wisdom of such religious disguises, Pico claimed that the pagan tradition had a virtue in common with the Bible: there were Hebrew mysteries as well as Pagan" (Wind 18). With the resolution of the Orphic myth and Christianity, Orpheus became a credible allusion for Christian Renaissance writers.

John Milton, who frequently uses ancient, mythic allusions, prominently used the horror of dismemberment in his tracts and saw the dismemberment of Truth as a "kind of homicide" and "martyrdom, and if it exceeds to the whole impression, a kind of massacre,... a slaying of an elemental life..." (Areopagitica 720). This homicide is reminiscent of both Orpheus and the dismemberment of the Gibean concubine in Judges XIX:22-30, perhaps the bloodiest example of dismemberment in the Bible. The Sons of Belial beat on the door of a hospitable man and demand that his male guest be given to them for their sexual pleasure. Instead of his foreign visitor, the host offers his daughter and concubine to the men, both of whom are refused. Sensing that the confrontation is about to become violent and that the men are going to assault his guest, the host gives them his "Matron to avoid worse rape" (Paradise Lost I.505). After a night of the grossest atrocities, the woman was left for dead on her master's doorstep. The sexually-abused woman, who had been given to the worthless men as a means of averting their homosexual perversions, was killed, dissected, and distributed among the twelve tribes as a sign and warning to the people of Judah for their sins and corruptions of God's Truth. Similar to the Biblical warning, Plato describes Truth as being "left bereft of kindred, and other persons unworthy of her burst in and insult her and fasten reproaches upon her, such as you say her defamers reproach her with--that some of those who court her are quite worthless and most are unworthy of condign punishment" (293). The Gibean woman became the physical dismemberment of Truth and a warning against apostasy. Truth was abused, murdered and cut apart, limb by limb.

Osiris, a mythic father to Orpheus, also suffered the fate of dismemberment. And like Orpheus, the Pentheus myth has the hero torn to bits by the same Maenads because he tried to prevent them from celebrating their orgies. (They later played ball with the scraps of his body.) In addition to the myths of the Gibean concubine, Orpheus, and Pentheus, other examples of dismemberment available to the Renaissance writers from classical literature include Actaeon, who was torn apart by hounds after gazing on Diana while she bathed; Jezebel, who was trampled to death by horses, then had her dismembered corpse consumed by hounds (II Kings IX:33-37); Gamelon's punishment by horses for treachery in Chanson de Roland; Laura presented as a collection of disassociated parts in Petrarch's Rime sparse; and others. Northrup Frye writes that "what is technically known as sparagmos or the tearing apart of the sacrificial body, an image found in the myths of Osiris, Orpheus, and Pentheus [is part of] a long series of sinister dealings with flesh and blood from the story of Thyestes to Shylock's bond" (148). Torture and mutilation have been long recognized as symbolic teaching devices.

In contrast with the private symbolism of so much modern writing, a Renaissance poet anywhere in Europe could assume that his readers shared a common knowledge and for the most part a common outlook, and he could draw freely upon traditionally and internationally understood motifs and allusions. Bush writes that "mythology becomes a kind of evocative shorthand" (PM&CT 20). The name "Pan" immediately conjures up the idea of pastoral imagery; "Orpheus" suggests divine harmony or jealous destruction of beauty by those less educated; even "Venus" brings to mind the abstract concept of physical "beauty." One mythological allegory could typify concepts which would take a thousand words to explain. But this method of exegesis did not begin in the Renaissance. Douglas Bush explains that it "had been practiced in Greece before Plato, was later applied to both the Bible and classics, notably the Aeneid and even the more doubtful poetry of Ovid, and it was given a popular restatement for the Renaissance by Boccaccio" (Preface 18). A concrete mythic character or example could be used to illustrate allegorically an abstract idea, much as the physical, human body could be used to demonstrate the abstract notion of Truth.

Samuel Levin states that "the staple of allegory is personification. By definition personification is a metaphoric, hence mixed, mode--something nonhuman is endowed with human characteristics. This 'endowment' results from the transfer of semantic features from a predicate normally associated with humans to a noun (typically functioning as subject) that designates something nonhuman" (24). The Renaissance depiction of Truth in the form of a human body fits well with Levin's definition of an allegory. T.E. Hulme says in the Speculations that only by metaphor and allegory "can poetry be made not a language of counters but a visual concrete language, a compromise for a language of intuition which 'would hand over sensations bodily'; that figurative language endeavors to arrest you, 'to make you continuously see the physical thing, to prevent you gliding through an abstract process'" (qtd. in Tuve 102). Allegory is the literary method appropriate to a recognition theory of knowledge: its fictions make us think about what we already know; they seek to awaken and charge with motive force a knowledge that remains latent, passive, or merely implicit in the reader.

In Renaissance literature, Truth is frequently, though not exclusively, represented allegorically in the shape of a woman's body. On the surface, this personification might be considered a curious phenomenon because of the traditional position of women within this society. Sixteenth-century commentators consistently praised a few English women for their learning and virtue but continued to demand that they be paragons within their homes, not part of a man's intellectual circle. As representatives of beauty, truth, and grace, women were placed on pedestals, according to Beilin, which were too high to be descended, "thus initiating the habits of isolating them as exceptional women and insisting that women's intellectual attainments consort with their feminine goodness" (xvi). Maclean's survey of sixteenth-century medical texts on women indicates how thoroughly the writings were inbred with "the metaphorical association of woman with mother earth, nutrition, fruitfulness and the fluctuation of the moon, which is deeply embedded in the substratum of ancient medical thought" (qtd. in Miller 249). Placing women at the very heart of Christianity, Renaissance writers "envision woman's proper place, which if lower than man's in the hierarchies of the world, is often higher in the beauties of the spirit" (Beilin xv), which could explain why the ancients gave the Graces feminine characteristics.

Considering the variety of sources from which Renaissance writers could draw their exempla, it is not surprising that their depictions of women as allegorical vehicles are mixed. Linda Woodbridge writes that "the classical and the Judeo-Christian traditions both contain favorable views on the equality of women: the classical tradition offered Plato's remarks on the equality of women; the Judaic had its Deborahs, Sarahs, and Esthers; the medieval Christian traditions contributed to Mariolatry, with its probable influence on the adulation of woman in the literature of courtly love" (15). Beauty, truth, compassion, and love are all allegorically female. "The real shock," contends Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, a German humanist scholar of international reputation, "is that, given woman's superiority, Christ as God would surely have descended to earth in female form had it not been necessary to exhibit humility, since the sin he had come to expiate was pride: 'He toke vpon hym manhode, as the more humble and lower kynde, and not womankynde, the more hygher and noble'" (qtd. in Woodbridge 41). Woodbridge laughingly adds, "one can imagine clergymen fainting in their studies upon reading such a passage" (41). Robert Vaughan, in his A Dialogue defensyue for women, agaynst malycyous detractours, has his falcon concede that no human being is perfect but insists that women are "more godly than men." Vaughan sees detraction of women as an affront to God.

But Elaine Beilin acknowledges that Renaissance writers invariably return to the first woman to "point out that Eve listened to Satan and thus initiated all of humankind's future woe. Since then, women have followed their guilty foremother by being disobedient, talkative, lascivious shrews. Implied in this attack is that women should be the opposite--obedient, silent, and chaste--and indeed, these are precisely the virtues that women's defenders claim. Also acknowledging Eve's fault, they nevertheless propose that the second Eve, the Virgin Mary, is the source of all redemption" (xix). So whether the female body is, representing virtue and truth, as Eve and corrupted by the world, as redeeming as Mary, or as dedicated as Psyche, the female body remains a vessel of Truth; and dismembering this body is the allegorical division of Truth.

Milton's representation of divided Truth in Areopagitica, used as a censure against the licensors, is perhaps the best allegorical representation of Truth in the shape of the dismembered body. Truth is presented in a "whole" form, torn apart by evil men, and lost until men either search for her or Christ returns to reunite the pieces. Although the primary usage of Renaissance dismemberment involves a woman who represents Truth, this depiction is not always congruent with the imagery of tearing the body from limb to limb. In the same way that Orpheus was dismembered for reasons either of jealousy or divine punishment and the Gibean concubine was sectioned into twelve pieces to be dispersed among the twelve tribes of Israel, Renaissance writers use dismemberment as a warning against spiritual and more often political apostasy. Truth can be divided as an allegorical lesson which either calls attention to the insurrections already existent or as a preventative model. Nonetheless, the Renaissance writers had some sort of principled thought behind their portrayals of dismemberment.

Chapter 2

The use of the dismembered and/or catalogued body occurs quite frequently during the Renaissance in both prose and poetry. Only a limited example of primary texts will be mentioned in this paper; however, the variety and scope of the examples should convince the readers that these sixteenth- and seventeenth-century authors intentionally use the fragmented body as an allegorical surrogate for divided Truth.

One of the most poetic representations of the female body as Truth is found in Francis Bacon's "Of Truth" from his Essays (1625). He writes:

But howsoever these things are thus in men's depraved judgments and affections, yet truth, which only doth judge itself, teacheth that the inquiry of truth, which is the love-making or wooing of it, the knowledge of truth, which is the presence of it, and the belief of truth, which is the enjoying of it, is the sovereign good of human nature. (Bacon, Essays 1673)

Truth as a woman is courted and pursued by a lover of Truth. The idea of making love to Truth is similar to the Biblical thought that two bodies become one flesh in the act of intercourse. The pursuit for Truth unites the seeker with the mistress Truth. Truth's partnership is the guarantee of the "good life." Frye writes that "in sexual symbolism, of course, it is still easy to employ the 'one flesh' metaphor of two bodies made into the same body by love. Donne's 'The Ecstacy' is one of the many poems developed around on this image, and Shakespeare's 'The Phoenix and Turtle' makes great play with the outrage done to the 'reason' by such identity. Themes of loyalty, hero-worship, faithful followers, and the like also employ the same metaphor" (143). Bush states that "we might not have expected the prophet of the new science to write a book of allegorical myths," but this rendition exalts Bacon to the plateau of a human lover of divine philosophy (PM&CT 11).

Quite different from Bacon's lofty philosophical and spiritual representations of Truth, Thomas Carew's highly erotic poem entitled "The Rapture" not only depicts the female body as Truth but calls attention to man's desire to accost and ravish Truth in much the same way that the male protagonist rapes and seeks to overpower a physical woman: "By greedy men, that seek to enclose the common/ And within private arms impale free woman..." (19-20). Instead of courting and making love to Truth as Bacon suggests, Carew argues that a woman is part of humanity which is weaker than man and subject to manipulation; in forcibly trying to control or "impale" a woman, such a man has already admitted his own inability to regulate, to understand, and to incorporate the basic levels of Truth in his own life; the desire to change Truth and the assertion of personal will against Truth in the form of a woman points directly toward a man's inability to deal with his own circumstances and a disinterest in the verity and completeness of Truth.

The lack of man's control over Fate, Fortune, and circumstances is also a recurring theme in many of Shakespeare's plays. When he describes the painting of the Fall of Troy contemplated by Lucrece (lines 1266-1442) in his "Rape of Lucrece," Shakespeare praises the beautiful cunning of the artist who made it in terms of his synecdochic technique:

The rape of Troy by Paris is meant to foreshadow the ravishing of the chaste Lucrece, a violation demonstrative of something else. Javitch states that "the rape of Lucrece is that part that leads the reader to the imagined whole, namely the killing of kings and the founding of republics" (82). Although the actual rape of Lucrece by Tarquin is not literally discussed, the rape is displayed more elaborately in the figurative parallel act of Lucrece's thrusting the dagger into her own body. Leonard Tennenhouse writes that "this display effectively translates penetration into dismemberment. It is Lucrece's mutilated body to which the poem draws our eyes.... Here--in the rape of Lucrece--the female body displays such violation in terms that suggest it is the [political] body imaged forth as, for example, in the Ditchley portrait" (109). Several modern scholars, such as Frank Kermode and Leonard Tennenhouse, believe that Shakespeare equates rape with dismemberment or the horror of castration. By calling Lucrece a "late sack'd island," Shakespeare makes an obvious alliance between the woman and England; if Lucrece represents the body politic, then her mutilation and rape, as the painting she studies suggests, can be considered a figurative warning against both regicide and the accosting of Truth. Lucrece is Truth and innocence; she is a "splendid example of pagan domestic virtue, a woman whose actions might well be countenanced by Christian ladies [possessing an] inner light" (Allen, I/M 59). Many critics contend that Shakespeare read the ancient story of Lucrece in a Christian context and that the story needed to be glossed in terms of Christian possibilities for a Christian nation. Lucrece, fabled for chastity, is further alluded to in The Taming of the Shrew (II.i.298), Titus Andronicus (IV.i.91), Cymbeline (II.ii.12-14), the anonymous Lust's Dominion (III.ii.5-6), and Westward Ho (IV.ii.154). Her body represented Truth and purity, and once it was violated, Renaissance authors took the opportunity to advocate a system of morals in a hopeful attempt to return the reader (and nation) to a pursuit of absolute Truth.

The pure and chaste Lavinia in Titus Andronicus witnesses the murder of her husband before being raped and mutilated by the sons of her father's enemy. Shakespeare's tale of dismemberment closely follows Ovid's Philomel being raped by her brother-in-law (Metamorphosis VI.424-676). But Shakespeare also includes the removal of her hands, along with her tongue, to prevent Lavinia from writing the names of her assailants. Tennenhouse believes that Shakespeare "brings her on stage after the rape mainly to call attention to her mutilated condition" (106). After Titus' sons, Lavinia's brothers, are falsely accused of the murder of her husband, Titus is deceived into believing that his sons will be released if he severs his own hand and sends it to the king. Rather than his sons'release, Titus receives their heads and his own hand. Lavinia's attackers are discovered and killed by Titus, and their ground bodies are served in a meat pie to their evil mother. Truth is ravished and mutilated in Shakespeare's play, but rape is not as criminal in the play as amputation. Lavinia's mutilated body "appears as synecdoche and emblem of the disorder of things" (Tennenhouse 107). Truth and the body politic are represented in her dismembered body, and the violation calls attention to the fighting between opposing forces in Rome and/or to the division between political and theological forces in Elizabeth's England. Shakespeare's impetus is to preserve the unity of Truth and the body politic, not the dismembering of it by rival factions.

Believing Iachimo's lies indicting Imogen of infidelity in Shakespeare's drama Cymbeline, Posthumus pronounces, "O, that I had her here, to tear her limb-meal!" (II.iv.150) Pisanio is told in a letter from Posthumus to kill Imogen, but he objects and implies that she is the feminine representation of Truth: "No. She's punished for her truth" (III.ii.7). Imogen accepts her rejection by Posthumus and declares, "I must be ripped. To pieces with me!" (III.iv.53) The villain Cloten is beheaded, and Imogen finds the body, mistaking it for her Posthumus, and cries, "O Posthumus! Alas/ Where is thy head?" (IV.ii.321-22) Once again Shakespeare uses dismemberment to call attention to the unjust division of Truth as well as it being used as a punishment for violators of societal norms. A pure maiden is threatened because of her virtue. Imogen is identified as Truth (line III.ii.7), but unlike Lavinia, she is spared the sectioning of her body (although she offers it freely, confirming her rectitude). Instead of the emblem of truth and virtue being dismembered, the villain receives the just punishment meant to remind and warn the reader/audience against apostasy and lies.

Adhereing to the advice of Aristotle, Shakespeare offered plays which included dismemberment and were meant to both delight and instruct. Allen reminds us that "there is absolutely no reason to believe that Shakespeare had any of Spenser's liking for overt allegory, but it is quite probable that he could allude to matters that had intrinsic allegorical value for his readers" (I/M 75). And as Kenneth Muir remarks, "any literature that tells the truth, that exposes illusion, that reminds us that deeds have consequences, has, whether designed or not, a didactic effect on its readers and in its audience" (23). Shakespeare's audience left the theater with a warning that dismemberment was a possibility if moral codes were broken.

Continuing the allegorical depiction of a woman as Truth, Shakespeare combines both the idea of feminine virtue and the threat of dismemberment in his gender-altered women. Portia is his standard of both ideal womanhood and Truth; while Shylock represents an enemy of goodness. His demand of a pound of flesh is met by Portia's rectitude in disguise. Like Milton's "wicked race of deceivers" and Carew's "rapist," Shylock wants to maim and murder what he does not understand or believes is a threat to his own personal beliefs. Knowing that she cannot address the court in her virtuous, feminine state, Portia must rely on a form of transvestism, or dressing in an outward garment to misidentify the body beneath it, in order to save Antonio from dismemberment. She must alter her gender to disguise Truth and virtue so that she can relate to injustice and corruption within the Venetian society. Though Truth is not visible, it still remains applicable in her judgments and wisdom.

Similar to hiding the Truth that is represented in a woman's body is the need to expunge the Truth by eliminating femininity when there arises a desire to act outside of virtue and Truth. This eradication of matronly virtue can be demonstrated by Lady Macbeth's comments of "Unsex me here" and "Oh, God, that I had been born a man!" (I.v.48) She cannot, as a depiction of Truth, remain a woman, contemplate, and carry out the murder of Duncan. She must become a man mentally if she cannot physically. Instead of the transvestism of Portia, Lady Macbeth seeks to "turn her milk to gall" and corrupt the internal femininity. Tennenhouse argues that "confusing gender distinction... pollutes the body politic" (132). Truth and political order become aberrated and veiled, leading to regicide and the corruption of absolutes. Whereas Portia's femininity and Truth are covered but remain intact, Lady Macbeth eliminates feminine Truth and replaces it with "murd'ring ministers" of evil.

Analogously Linda Woodbridge believes that "Lear's imagery consistently makes monsters of Goneril and Regan: they cannot be women, for women aren't like that" (215). Goneril's husband, Albany, sees her as a dervish: "Howe'er thou art a fiend,/ A woman's shape doth shield thee" (IV.ii.66-67). And Regan recognizes her restrictions as a vessel for Truth when she cries, "O God, that I had bin but made a man." Truth would not reject father and king; Truth would want to preserve the body politic; but these sisters cannot remain feminine Truth and must fragment and separate it from them before they can commit acts against it. Throughout Shakespeare's plays, there remains a necessity for women to become "unsexed" fiends before they can separate themselves from their roles as allegorical Truth.

In writing about Spenser's Faerie Queene, Miller states that Spenser's "art fantasizes its own perfection in terms of access to a spiritual body replete with truth" (71). Miller goes on to imply that Spenser structures his poetics in a strange path of being which is "ultimately lost to itself and indefinitely in quest of the mysterious divine body without which it can neither be nor become anything" (14). Similar to the definition of Reality and Being, Truth simply is; "for the truth of being and the truth of knowing are one" (Bacon, Advancement of Learning 53). Like the truth of the heavenly hymns, Una emerges into representation through a differential repetition that sets her apart from herself; this new representation makes her dependent on what she is not--dividing Truth against itself to assert its self-resemblance in a phrase that echoes, as it opposed, Duessa's counter-epiphany (I.iii). Yet Miller says that "Spenser cannot represent Una except in divided form. Initially she is set apart by a veil, recognizable in that she is hidden. But even when she stands revealed in canto 12, Spenser's language can express Una's integrity only as a mediated relation, 'self-resemblance'" (81). In the ideological formations that underwrite Spenser's symbolism, these values are associated with the body natural, which in turn is generally female. Canto 9 of Book I identifies "Glorianna to be a synecdoche for the ideal unity of the poem she appears in..." (Miller 130):

At the same time, the poem appropriates the aesthetic qualities of the human body, converting them into a 'natural' sign of virtue and so reflects into a sign of 'healthy' politics. Miller writes that "Spenser stresses from the beginning that while his chronicle may list monarchs," similar to Shakespeare's painting in The Rape of Lucrece, "it is really a history of the monarchy and reinforces the point at each of the interregna, which are characterized implicitly as sundering of the bodily wholeness" (202):

Spenser's allegory is the biological collective, which acts like a totalitarian state when it commandeers the female organism. Recalling Carew's "impalement," the male appears as implicitly threatening because he is the agent through which the species commandeers the female body: "Even when she is willing, or provocative, it is unquestionably the male who takes the female--she is taken" (Miller 216). In The Faerie Queene the female body stands not only for simple Truth at the mercy of worthless men, but she also represents the country and England's vulnerability to violation by a corrupt society.

In Spenser's "The Barriers," Truth and Opinion--a division of the state of knowing according to its degree of certainty common in Plato as knowledge and opinion (Republic V.476-478)--hold a discussion on marriage, and an angel declares that "Eternal Unity behind her [i.e.Truth] shines,/That fire and water, earth and air combines." Under the name of Unity the true nature of love and Truth is indicated. Unity is advocated above the sectioning of pre-Socratic opposites as an endeavor toward attaining happiness.

In Spenser's poem "A Hymne in Honovr Of Beavtie" the feminine body again represents Truth and nature and is depicted in fragments:

Truth is evaluated by degrees, by parts, rather than collectively. An onlooker is forced to "assume" the value of the whole based on his opinion of the parts. Spenser also restates the Renaissance concept that outward beauty reflects a beautiful soul within the body. But once again, this value judgment is based on only seeing a limited part of Truth instead of unity. The over-valuation of one single part ceases the search for the wholeness of Truth, or as Bacon writes, "whatever [a] mind seizes and dwells upon with particular satisfaction is to be held in suspicion" (Novum Organum 56).

In Samuel Daniel's debate on the use and value of learning and the arts, the title character in Musophilus begins his speech by declaring that Truth and "Virtue... stand fast" (62) but ends his part of the discussion with an admonition: "Be not, oh, be not accessory found/ Unto HER death, that must give life to you" (237-38). His warning against dividing the Truth and reifying it in a corrupt fashion becomes a caution against self-destruction. Daniel writes:

It seems to be more natural for Truth to be united and for man to adhere to Truth by changing his own way of thinking, but Daniel recognizes that most men would rather divide the Truth and utilize the parts to prove what they already believe. And once Truth has been divided or "neglected with barbarous means" (235), it becomes weakened to the point of death. If Truth dies, society dies; analogously, if Truth is fragmented and corrupted, society becomes fragmented and corrupted.

Ignoring Daniel's plea for holistic understanding, Robert Herrick disembodies Julia in Hesperides, peels off her flesh, fragments the body, scatters the parts, and fixates each part. Moira Baker notes that "this fetishing of the body and eroticizing of the individual part are Herrick's most characteristic modes of inscribing the female body" (19). He produces poems upon Julia's "voice, hair, hair filled with dew, breasts, nipples, and sweat. Her body lies scattered about, and her segmented body is the stuff out of which the poet shapes his poetic garden..." (M. Baker 19). Using language, he fragments and reshapes, or more accurately deforms, her body which, in fact, denies her Truth and power. Cataloguing and reifying are analogous to "changing Truth" to suit one's own belief system. Truth becomes subject to personal interpretation and discernment, although not so violently as with Carew's "empalement" of Truth.

But Herrick is but one of many Renaissance writers who use "cataloguing" to divide and conquer Truth. Bensimon points out the problem by noting that "in the Blasons du corps feminine, a part of the body of a lady is isolated.... These aesthetic constructions express distance and alienation rather than intimate possession" (250). Sidney's Astrophel and Stella, Ralegh's "Nymph," Greville's Caelica, and Herrick's Hesperides "offer a diverse sampling of Renaissance verse, and serve to illustrate a range of rhetorical stratagems for (dis)embodying female power and thus attempting to master it, textually, at least, if not sexually" (M. Baker 7). The advantage of cataloguing body parts through fragmentation and reification is that the author becomes a divine creator, a god-like man. By creating a new version of Truth in accordance with his personal beliefs and a new woman to replace the mother of sin (Eve), the writer produces his own Paradise, an Edenic masterpiece with a perfected, manipulated feminine Truth. There is, perhaps, even a surrender to Satan's temptation in the first Garden: "You shall be as gods." This recreation of womanhood and Truth elevates the author to the position of the divine creator and supreme judge. The Renaissance emphasis on self-mastery and control appears to be redirected by the cataloguers to include mastery and control over abstract philosophy and women in general. Though not the only ones to use cataloguing (recall Shakespeare's list of body parts in "The Rape of Lucrece"), these four seem to use reification more than the other major writers.

Sidney writes in Sonnet 91 of his Astrophel and Stella:

Whether or not this passage is an accurate description of Stella's physical body is less important than recognizing that Sidney is actually divesting her of her body's autonomy as he dismembers it. In the first song of Astrophel, Sidney writes a tribute to his beloved, devoting a separate stanza to each adored body part: eyes, lips, feet, breast, hand, hair, and voice. His eye becomes "full master of the object" when it gazes upon the vision of Stella. Moira Baker notices that "after rhapsodizing over a specific part in each stanza, the poet/speaker rounds off the piece by repeating the first stanza.... Scrutinized by the gaze of the male lover who objectifies her body and makes of its fragments a poem, the woman remains the silent and passive Other, merely a collection of parts without human subjectivity" (M. Baker 10). Astrophel's understanding is not purifying but becomes "a clarification and commitment to his own fallen nature" (Kalstone 21). Sidney's stylized fragmentation is a means of justifying his own short-comings and of maneuvering and controlling the depicted person, and reification creates a new woman, perhaps quite different from the original. Her scattered and reunited parts reflect back to Sidney as a creator of both his perfect woman and his personal perception of Truth. Language becomes a tool for manipulating Truth.

Strephon, in Sidney's The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, recognizes the traditional use of dismembering a woman's body as he complains: "For she whose parts maintained a perfect music.../ Hath cast me, wretch, into eternal evening" (61, 65). Sidney condemns the outward parts as being a source of Strephon's despair, quite unlike Spenser's perfect external parts suggesting a perfect internal soul. Without being Truth, she is nonetheless fragmented. Of course an opposite position could be maintained: Sidney may be arguing that she IS Truth, but because he is unable to understand and have power over the autonomous Truth, she must be divided so that she can be manipulated.

While he may have been somewhat critical of women in Arcadia, Sidney continues the dismemberment motif in The Defence of Poetry and uses the female body as a vessel of Truth. Similar to Milton's call for a multiplicity of sources from which Truth might be gleaned, Sidney writes:

Sidney sees himself and his writings as a source of Truth. It is his intention to offer the feminine Truth to the reading public, even if poetry only makes that Truth presentable in fragments. It is not his business to reunite Truth, but to make it available.

Sidney's lifelong friend, Fulke Greville, also fragments and reifies the female body. In Caelica, a woman's body is at once a garden of paradise and the cause of the male speaker's banishment from Eden:

As if a commentary on Caelica, his "Chorus Sacerdotum" clearly points to the struggle caused by the male speaker's banishment from Eden and the depiction of the woman's body as a symbol of Paradise: "What meaneth nature by these diverse laws?/ Passion and reason, self-division cause" (5-6). Because the speaker cannot understand and justify the totality of Truth based on his limited view of reality, he believes that passion and reason must necessarily be opposites and incongruent with autonomous Truth. His lack of understanding precipitates mental division; and when a person cannot comprehend a holistic contentment with Truth or the nature of his own mental faculties, it becomes easier to deny the existence of that totality. Although Greville partakes of Paradise, "of every flower I had a part...," he is suspicious of a woman's body and fragments Truth to make it congruous with his perception of reality.

Corresponding to Sidney, Greville, and Herrick, Sir Walter Ralegh also makes use of cataloguing fragmented body parts in an effort either to remold or to condemn femininity. In his poem, "The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd," Ralegh lists the outward garments of a woman to indicate the futility of outward appearances:

Yet the text could also be demonstrating that the individual entities comprising the entire woman can easily be corrupted while in a singular state, and thus there is less threat from the forgotten, holistic depiction. Or Ralegh could be suggesting, not the corruptibility of Truth or the conscious destruction of Truth, but a "withering" and "rotting" of man's own propriety. Ralegh appears to be adhering to the basic convention of "divide to conquer" anything not immediately understood or controllable. Bush writes that "one special and popular convention was the catalogue of the beauties of the female body.... While Ovidian narratives and anatomical catalogues were outlets for neopaganism, Renaissance poets could be quite sincere and serious in using similar technique to depict sensual temptation as the insidious foe of man's integrity and the heroic life" (Preface 35). For Ralegh passion and ignorance of Truth could both be eliminated by simply destroying the motivator--Truth in the form of an autonomous, feminine body.

In "Nature, That Washed Her Hands in Milk" he divides the woman not only by her body parts but also between the imagined, preferred woman and the reality of her attractiveness. Ralegh recognizes that the parts, examined individually, create the allure, but the examination of the whole woman, representing nature rather than pure Truth, is a more honest and less desirable activity. He writes:

The appeal for Ralegh of the fragments and the rejection of the whole is consistent with Plato's Truth's being insulted and rejected (293), and it also compatible with modern denominationalism. Rather than examine Truth in its entirety, it is easier and sadly more desirable to seek out the one part or limb of Truth which most appeals to what a person already believes and is "most glorious to look on" (Milton 741). Ralegh clearly acknowledges that divided Truth is more attractive and easier to destroy; and by segmenting Truth, it is less difficult to dispense with rival thought and opinions.

Ralegh writes in his "Meditations on History" that "whosoever, in writing modern history, shall follow truth too near the heels, it may happily strike out his teeth. There is no mistress or guide that hath led her followers and servants into greater miseries. He that goes after her too far, loseth her sight, and loseth himself; and he that walks after her at a middle distance, I know not whether I should call a kind of course temper or baseness" (542). His admonition is for one not to look too closely for a united understanding of Truth. It is perhaps the fear of having to change one's personal beliefs after the discovery of new fragments of Truth which hinders the desirability and pursuit for a holistic Truth. Partitioned Truth is weaker and less a threat, and, for Ralegh, it is more engaging and alluring, and less likely to "strike out his teeth" (542).

Truth comes to the speaker in Thomas Sackville's introduction to his The Mirror for Magistrates in the form of a feminine goddess: "a goddess sent by godly providence,/ In earthly shape thus showed herself to me,/ To wait and rue this world's uncertainty" (171-73). The goddess becomes revelatory Truth and exposes the speaker to the problems with the world in its current state (Dread, Misery, Revenge, etc.). She is so sorrowful as she approaches the man that she shrieks, falls down, and tears herself to pieces, symbolizing the already corrupted Truth. But Sackville is also guilty of fragmenting his vision of revelatory Truth before she dismembers herself through cataloguing. Instead of listing her "eyne," "hands," "hair," "face," and "cheeks" as parts of an ideal woman which much be examined separately, he calls attention to the corruption and impurity already found in each part of the feminine Truth caused by the woe she experiences as a result of man's feculence and voluntary subjection to cruel Fortune. Although Sackville is still fragmenting and reifying Truth, he does not elevate it to some deformed, re-created level but points out that Truth has already been maimed by baser men.

Although it is most typically the female body which represents Truth and is dismembered, the threat of fragmentation is not limited to the bodies of women. Christopher Marlowe often uses dismemberment or the threat of dismemberment in his dramas. Paul Sellin calls attention to the climax in the fifth act of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and justifies Faustus' being dismembered by the demons: "grace is, as one would naturally expect, withheld in spite of the convincing intensity of Faustus' pleas, and there are almost no grounds for the denial to make it dramatically acceptable to the audience in terms of either the play or common charity" (183). The scholars return to Dr. Faustus' house the morning after his contract with Mephistopheles is executed:

A struggle exists between critics who want to explicate this drama based on Biblical tenets: did Faustus' repentance cost him his life, or is he more like the Gibean concubine, an example of the punishment heaven requires for pride (harmatia) and sin? If Faustus' repentance was complete, then his dismemberment could be considered a dismemberment of Truth perpetrated by evil demons; but if his petition to God is just another "death bed confession" in hopes of expiating himself from a life which reveled in sin, then, as Sellin suggests, "Faustus seems to have been raised up by the just but inscrutable judgment of God to show forth his glory in [Faustus'] condemnation" (180). However, the spiritual state of Faustus is of little consequence; the fact remains that he IS dismembered and "torn asunder." Placating his redress, Bush justifies the dismemberment as a warning by saying, "Faustus, we remember, is deluded as well as damned" (PM&CT 19). His death should be associated more with Jezebel than with the Gibean woman. When the people go to bury Jezebel's remains, like Dr. Faustus' scholars, they only find her scattered, disassociated limbs - her hands, her feet and her skull.

But modern scholars have suggested that Marlowe was an atheist and would not have written a play meant to reflect Christian theology. Critic George Buckley writes that "Marlowe... had a full share of the Renaissance exuberance of spirit and love of action and was abreast of the thought of his time, but he was also a university man and familiar with the classics. All the currents of thought that made for religious unbelief seem to have combined in him to produce one of the best examples of what is well called Renaissance paganism" (129). Faustus' changed heart was not enough to save him from the demons, but the change may have been enough to call attention to philosophical Truth, though perhaps not Christian absolutism. Kenneth Muir writes that "even though we may disagree with Marlowe's opinions, ... we need not doubt that he had a didactic purpose" (32). If a moral lesson is to be determined, it could be that men who violate societal standards must be punished to maintain the purity of the body politic. Sickness and disease must be amputated to insure the physical health of Truth.

In The Jew of Malta, Marlowe again paints a scene reminiscent of Jezebel's dismemberment and death (see II Kings IX:30-37). Believing that Barabas is dead, Ferneze immediately brings to mind the disposal of the evil Jezebel, who was thrown over the walls of Jezreel and torn apart by dogs as a punishment for her sin, when he says: "For the Jew's body throw o'er the walls,/ To be prey for the vultures and wild beasts" (V.61-62). Of course, this command does not describe the way the Jew actually dies, but Marlowe wants the imagery of Jezebel's death and the reasons behind it, her rejection of the divine ordinances and the holy prophets of God, to be clearly identified with the Jew of Malta. The command to "throw o'er the walls" was a warning against allowing an infection or a disease to remain in the body politic and a foreshadowing of the justified purging to come.

After the mock play in which Balthazar and Lorenzo are actually killed to avenge the murder of his son in Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, Hieronimo bites out his own to tongue to avoid confession when being overtaken by courtiers:

Since Hieronimo can only confess in writing, he asks for a knife to sharpen the pen but instead he kills the king's brother and himself, bringing the number of deaths in the play to eight. His self-inflicted mutilation is similar to Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus: both fathers become "avenging angels" and must sacrifice part of their own bodies in an effort either to redeem their children or to preserve themselves from an unjust political system. Although neither man's hands are free from blood, each temporarily becomes a vessel for Truth and divine retribution.

The anonymously written comedy Swetnam the Woman-hater Arraigned by Women is directed against Joseph Swetnam, the author of The Arraignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward and Unconstant Women, and presents a mock trial of the author, captured and imprisoned by a society ruled by women. Lorenzo, the king's missing son, disguises himself as an Amazon named Atlanta and lures Misogynos, the alias of Swetnam, into the arraignment, condemnation, and eventual pardon. The character Swash tells Swetnam before his capture:

Because his reputation has preceded him, Swetnam adopts the new identity of Misogynos. Woodbridge writes that "at the trial, he finds the women as aggressive as ever: after one of his speeches, the Queen cries, 'Stop the Detractors mouth: Away with him'; the other women shout, 'Teare him in pieces' (III.iii.248-49).... Aurelia believes him unworthy of proper assassination" (313):

Swetnam is NOT a representative of Truth, and he is also NOT dismembered by the women. Because he is eventually pardoned, the women display a sense of justice and Truth which the anonymous author wants to display as contrary to the man depicted in the play. The female body is still characterized as a allegory for Truth, justice, and mercy because the women do NOT "teare his limmes in pieces."

Another excellent example of a masculine body's being representative of Truth and virtue can be found in Ben Jonson's Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue. Hercules, representing "Virtue," is laid at the feet of the pygmies:

This giving "every tract of earth a piece" is reminiscent of the dispersement of the twelve pieces of the Gibean concubine to the tribes of Israel. Once again, the dismemberment is meant to be a method of warning someone else against violating the laws and authority of those in charge (although the pygmies are in no way demonstrative of a divine nature and are eventually defeated). But their threat to tear apart Hercules is supposed to be viewed as a conscious attack against Truth and virtue. The pygmies actually want to dismember Truth; analogous to Orpheus' Maenads, they want to violate what they cannot understand.

Jonson identifies the soul as a "she" in "Scientia, " an essay in Timber; or Discoveries. He is very concerned with the idea that a man can be easily swayed by misinformation:

Knowledge is the action of the soul, and is perfect without the senses, as having the seeds of all science and virtue in itself; but not without the service of the senses; by those organs the soul works: she is a perpetual agent prompt and subtle: but often flexible, and erring, entangling herself like a silkworm, but her reason is a weapon with two edges, and cuts through. In her indignation oft-times new scents put by her, and she takes errors into her by the same conduits she doth truths (30).

Jonson alludes to the scripture in Hebrews IV:12, which says:
"The word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing as far as the division of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, and able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart."

Through reason and understanding of absolute Truth (God's Word), the feminine soul can avoid errancy. This passage is quite similar to Milton's issue with division in Areopagitica. The problem is not with the division of Truth itself but is possibly in HOW Truth is divided and by WHOM. Milton says that the nation must have a "quick, ingenious and piercing spirit," able to rightly divide the Truth (Areopagitica 742 and see II Timothy II:15). Instead of malicious destruction of all Truth while weeding out errancy, the separation, if handled rightly, would promote some reasoning. Jonson suggests that in the body of Truth, there is the potential of recognizing and separating fragmented Truth from error, but this careful division can only be accomplished through a constant search and application of divine absolutes.

In Volpone Jonson uses the traditional female body as a candidate for dismemberment when he has Celia's husband Corvino say to her about her adventures with Volpone:

Under the impression that Truth has already been violated, Corvino wants to make her dismembered body a concrete symbol that represents errant, abstract Truth. A curious thought here is that Corvino wants to first dissect her body then read his explication. Justification for division is only necessary when a person recognizes for himself prior to the actual division that it is going to be questioned and possibly condemned.

Corvino's desire to publicly dismember his wife as an act of punishment is consistent with Renaissance judicial acts of punishment. Binding a criminal's limbs to four horses and sending them in opposite directions, commonly referred to as being "drawn and quartered," was a routine form of execution. And equally traditional was the beheading of a criminal or enemy of the court. John Foxe, in his Acts and Monuments, calls special attention to the beheading of Lady Jane Grey, a woman whose Christianity and virtue were maintained to the very end. She became the emblem of a body politic gone mad with power and fear.

Thomas Hobbes also uses the dismembered body as an allegory for Truth and the body politic in much the same manner as Spenser uses it in The Faerie Queene. In Hobbes' Introduction to Leviathan, he writes,

For seeing that life is but a motion of limbs, the beginning whereof is in some principle part within, why may we not say that all automatas (engines that move themselves by springs and wheels as doth a watch) have an artificial life? For what is the heart but a spring; and the nerves but so many strings; and the joints but so many wheels, giving motion to the whole body such was intended by the artificer?... [The body politic is that] in which the sovereign is an artificial soul, as giving life and motion to the whole body; the magistrates and other officers of judicature and execution, artificial joints; reward and punishment (by which, fastened to the seat of the sovereignty, every joint and member is moved to perform his duty) are the nerves, that do the same in the body natural (1701-2).

The physical body becomes a representative of the political body; and when that body is performing to its ideal capacity, it represents Truth--God's Truth--with the king or queen as the emissary of God on earth. When the body is a united whole, there is health and happiness; but when there is division, there is sickness and despair.

John Lilburne continues this imagery of the body depicting both Truth and the body politic in his The Picture of the Council of State. The advice to the leader is that "if you don't dismember them, they will dismember you":

"'Sir, let me tell you that which is true, if you do not break them, they will break you, yea, and bring all the guilt of the blood and treasure shed and spent in this kingdom upon your head and shoulders; and frustrate and make void all that work that with so many years' industry, toil and pains you have done, and so render you to all rational men in the world as the most contemptiblest generation of silly, low-spirited men in the earth, to be broken and routed by such a despicable contemptible generation of men as they are, and therefore, sir, I tell you again, you are necessitated to break them'" (1741).

Lilburne separates the common man from the court; whereas the pastorals have associated shepherds with mythic gods and superhumans such as Orpheus, this tract repudiates the worth of men outside of the court. The body politic is at war with its own emblems of Truth. Rather than be educated by such vessels of Truth, the advice this leader receives is that he must destroy them.

In his intercepted letter to a priest in Spain (1626), Gabriel Brown discusses the reception of Lord Buckingham by the members of the house of Commons and writes that they

"doe now picke a thousand quarrells at him, striving all they can to trample him under foote, yea more, if it were in their power, to teare him peace meal, & eat him raw with salt whom soe little a while since they did so immeasurable extoll" (From Robert P. Shepherd's dissertation, "Royal Favorites in the Political Discourse of Tudor and Stuart England" {Claremont Graduate School, 1985}, p. 45; quoted from the transcription of State Papers, Domestic {London, Public Record Office} 16/27/36).

The idea of dismemberment was so routine that the concept even appeared in casual letter-writing such as this. Verbally Brown saw Buckingham dissected and scattered to the four winds; to Brown, Buckingham represented Truth, and he saw it being fragmented, dispersed and cannibalistically devoured by unworthy members of the body politic.

The Renaissance writers often called upon the dismemberment of Truth to point out the discrepancies between groups of society. Adhering to the assumption that Truth and virtue are generally depicted in a female body, the Renaissance writer Aemilia Lanyer, a part of the minority group of women authors, becomes especially excited when she writes in her Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum:

... they would refer to such points of folly, to be practised by evil disposed men, who forgetting that they were born of women, nourished of women, and that if it were not by the means of women, they would be quite extinguished out of the world, and a final end of them all, do like vipers deface the wombs wherein they were bred, only to give way and utterance to their want of discretion and goodness (1046).

Using this allegory of Truth, men consciously reject the very vessels of Truth and intentionally deface it; the womb of Truth becomes their tomb. Men forget that they were born of women, raised by women, and owe their very existence to women who symbolize Truth. In Gondarino's How a Man May Choose a Good Wife From a Bad, the author describes the heroine's brutal beating at the hands of her husband (IV.iii). Truth becomes debased in men's eyes, something which must be dissected and mutilated to be understood and controlled instead of something to be desired and pursued.

This dispersal and rejection of feminine Truth is consistent with Neoplatonic thinking. In Plato's Timaeus the world is depicted as "immortal, perfect, masculine" contrary to the falling away, represented by the "imperfect, mortall, foeminine" body which is re-membered by the dialect. Plato's cosmic anima comes to Spenser as the Neoplatonic World Soul, which may be feminine -- like 'Venus selfe' in Colin Clovts come home again, a nominally feminine goddess who 'doth solely couples seeme' (line 801). "But the World's Soul," writes Miller, "corresponds by resemblance to a nominally masculine supratemporal deity in whose being all dualities, including that of gender, are resolved" (259). Miller implies that there is no excuse for rejecting Truth because of its femininity; an androgynous god supercedes societal segregation. Whether the soul or Truth is masculine or feminine should be of no consequence to a seeker of absolute Truth.

But Sir Thomas Hoby, in his translated version of Castilogne's The Courtier, Norris in his "Seraphick Love" (stz.4), and Andrew Marvell in his "Dialogue Between the Body and the Soule" only saw the soul as feminine and depicted in the physical manifestations of a woman's body. John Friedman states that "according to some late antique authors influenced in one way or another by Platonic thought, the soul was merely on loan to the body on earth, and during its corporeal existence yearned to return to the stars where, after the death of the body, it would go to rejoin the One" (80). The feminine body was a receptacle for absolute truth made manifest in the soul. It is only natural that a feminine body would allegorically house the feminine soul.

Of course Andrew Marvell does condescend to the listing and cataloguing of body parts. While he would like to exalt himself above the traditional allegorical representations, the woman in "Damon the Mower" is still fragmented into a deformed unity of sections. He lists her fair eyes (5), second skin (16), icy breast (32), the harmless snake (male - 35), my feet (47), his elbow (73),and his own ankle (78). The author deforms himself as he segments the woman into a multiplicity of parts; there seems to be a suggestion that in dividing himself, he can better understand the fragments of divided Truth.

John Donne conveys his idea that a woman's nature is not only an allegory for Truth but that it is also representative of the universal soul. Harrison writes, "this idea of the death of the world in the death of a woman is explained at length" in Donne's "An Anatomy of the World" (165):

The Virtues are all represented in Latin by feminine nouns and portrayed as female figures, so it not surprising that Donne would call attention to the femininity or that he would immediately make an allusion to Eve as the mother of sin and to the Virgin Mary as the mother of salvation. In claiming that the world's Truth is feminine, Donne points to a philosophical fragmentation quite different on the surface from dismemberment yet consistent with Renaissance moral discourse. When the world was a healthy body, all the parts were held together in a magnetic unity which fastened "sundered parts in one"; but as disease and corruption weakened and destroyed the vulnerable body, the unity of the body could not be maintained. Speculating that the weakened body was actually dismembered by men dividing Truth, his analogy to a "crippled" world is quite appropriate. Obviously neither the world nor Truth is dead, but Donne wants to warn men against violating both through negligent fractioning. If the world has lost her magnetic force and can no longer hold her parts as one, then it becomes man's obligation to search for and reunite the fragments of Truth for her.

Donne amplifies the role of the feminine body representing the dying world and Truth in his Of the Progress of the Soul: The Second Anniversary, but there is a more hopeful conclusion. He sees the opportunity for searching men to find the parts of Truth:

Donne projects a possible reification of Truth if it is sought, contemplated, and argued. Men have to become seekers of all the parts and shapes of Truth, even down to the fingernails and hairs. And although he recognizes that some of the parts (limbs) may appear to be "putrid" (273), a united Truth would be living, vital, and purified. But the search must precede the reunion of the fragments, and for Donne, like Milton, the search is in the examination of all knowledge and the dispelling of illusion. Man is to turn away from the variegated beauties of the visible, corrupted world to the Truth which created it.

The search for Truth is perhaps of more importance to Milton, to other Renaissance writers, and to this study than simply identifying her representations. Henry Vaughan writes in "The World" that enemies of Truth seem to be successfully dividing it: "And poor, despised Truth sat counting by [recording]/ Their victory" (lines 44-45). Personified Truth is rejected and fragmented by "her defamers" (Plato 293). But, still, she is sitting and waiting to be found and embraced by worthy men. Each man is obligated to examine all kinds of knowledge and find the scattered fragments for himself. In Religio Medici Thomas Browne states that

Where we desire to be informed, 'tis good to contest with men above ourselves; but to confirm and establish our opinions, 'tis better to argue with judgments below our own, that the frequent spoils and victories over their reason may settle in ourselves an esteem and confirmed opinion of our own. Every man is not a proper champion for truth, nor to take up the gauntlet in the cause of verity (334).

Every man has the potential to pursue Truth, yet not every man has the desire nor ability to understand Truth when he discovers it. This sort of understanding can only come through contemplation, "musing, searching, revolving new notions and ideas" (Milton Areopagitica 743).

Of course advocating the search for Truth above the custom of being intellectually, spiritually, and philosophically satisfied with the already found fragments can also bring hostility to readers of the Renaissance writers. Bacon's stimulus to "further inquiry" sacrifices his "perfect satisfaction" in coherent literary experience; Bunyan believes the search will make a "traveller" out of the reader; and many of Milton's readers "are alienated and discomforted when he insists that each of us measure himself against an unyielding standard of righteousness and illumination" (Fish 371). Browne doesn't promote self-examination and criticism but believes the reader should strive for his own contentment based on his unconditional acceptance of the Truth (faith) as it is made manifest (Religio Medici 343).

To understand divine Truth, a person must prepare himself for the search, and this preparation begins with meditation upon the available parts of Truth. Some of those fragments are contained within our own physical members, the evidence of some sort of higher, creative power. George Herbert contemplates the Truth in a physical manifestation and seems to suggest that through separation and purification, reification will occur with the new creation being a purer form of Truth than the original. Not only does Herbert divide the physical body in his poem "The Altar," he actually segments the heart into a multiplicity of parts:

By cutting the heart of human body into pieces, each piece can be purged of errancy and reunited into a holy, wholeness "fit for the master's use."

Herbert may be considering the allegories of bodily dismemberment in Ephesians IV:16, Romans XII:4-5, and I Corinthians XII. The Apostle Paul suggests that the cement holding the body together is not the repentant tears as in Herbert's poem but actually the blood of Christ "from whom the whole body, being fitted and held together by that which every joint supplies according to the proper working of each individual part, causes the growth of the body for the building up of itself in love" (Eph.IV:16). Frye explains that "the metaphor that we are all members of one body has organized most political theory from Plato to our own day. Milton's 'A Commonwealth' ought to be but one huge Christian personage, one mighty growth, and stature of an honest man and belongs to the Christianized version of this metaphor" (142). The church on earth becomes the universal body of Christ, each member being a physical member of Christ and held together by his blood. Since Christ claimed he was the Truth, the implication then exists that the universal church contains the Truth as the physical manifestation of the body of Christ. Equally curious is the allegorical comparison of each member of the church acting a separate body part:

For just as we have many members in one body and all the members do not have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually members of one another (Romans XII:4-5).

Each of us contains one part of the Truth, and if that one part is segmented and exalted above the others, strife exists and Truth is corrupted (the effect being that of dividing Truth and scattering it to the four winds). Saint Paul says that "there should be no division in the body" (II Corinthians XII:25). To prevent this voluntary dismemberment, Christ instituted the Lord's Supper as a tangible reminder of the need to maintain Truth in its unity. The bread is broken and dispersed, but His body is reunited in the form of the corporate church. The wine, symbolic of His blood, again becomes Herbert's "cement" that joins the universal church into one, living body representing Truth.

Ephesians IV suggests that Christ is the head of the spiritual body, the corporate church; and Saint Paul writes that believers have the mind of Christ. Each part or limb of the body has a direct understanding of Christ, who represents pure Truth and pure reasoning. According to Plato, there is nothing higher in man. Reason and science precipitate Truth; because they provide answers to what is highest in God, divine reason and hypothetical science are conversant only with ideas, that is, with the antecedent and pure truth of things. Hoopes writes that "man's duty is to escape the mere shows of life and to rise to a contemplation of that truth by means of intellectual effort and moral discipline. Knowledge of absolute truth, therefore, is in some way God's peculiar gift to man, and comprises the most genuine token of his own image" (Hoopes 176). When God said in Genesis, "Let us create [mankind] in our own image" (Genesis II), He was not necessarily speaking about the physical similarity of Himself with mankind, but He was distinguishing the intellect of mankind as similar to his own. Renaissance writers were well-grounded in the Scriptures and utilized them with current thought. For them the benefit of Locke-Newton thinking combined with Christianity should be considered as a means toward gathering the disassociated parts of Truth and recombining them through meditation, reasoning, and disciplined living as a method of understanding the united, absolute Truth. Bacon adds, "assuredly the search... hath brought to light a great number of good and fruitful inventions, as well for the disclosing of nature as for the use of man's life... [For Truth] exempted from the liberty of examination" cannot be discovered or reunited (Advancement 54).

By displaying Truth as unnecessarily fragmented and in need of reification, the Renaissance writers use the allegorical dismemberment as a plea to promote the search for her fragments. Although presented in a multiplicity of methods, the reccurring admonition is for Bacon's "liberty of examination" and Milton's "freedom of choice." The implication is that educated men would pursue Truth in her entirety and seek to end voluntary segmentation. Anything less than a unified vision of Truth creates a dissatisfied cognizance for the educated man.

Chapter 3

The elite group of "thinkers" within the Renaissance was the Cambridge Platonists, intellectuals who considered the understanding of Truth available from a multiplicity of sources. As guardians of the faith, so to speak, they represented the aristocracy of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century thinking. Incorporating the teachings of Plato with traditional Christianity to appease the masses, their writings served to reflect the thoughts of the educated gentry. Hoopes notes that if the majority of the Cambridge group either conjected or proclaimed that it was impossible to reason rightly without God's guarantee, then the logical assumption of correct reason must be God himself: "the conviction that reason and morality, truth and goodness, are founded in the absolute Truth of the divine nature had... been eloquently asserted by the Greek, Stoic, and Christian moralists alike and re-articulated by Hooker, Spenser, and others" (181). Combining Platonism, Christianity, the Cabala, and some fetishes of the occult, their version of Mystical Platonism met most of the philosophical needs of the day; obscurity was blended with the familiar. Edgar Wind believes that Mystical Platonism "allowed for so many levels of understanding; the principle of 'the whole in the part' permitted so many kinds of foreshadowings and foreshortenings that the speculative phases of the argument could remain hidden in the clouds, and yet be accurately 'mirrored' in a practical adage" (97).

Once the Classics began to be read more as literature than simply text books for Latin and Greek scholars, the secular Humanists soon discovered that there was a worthy system of morals in Seneca and Plutarch and saw no reason why this alternative, pagan system could not be made supplementary to the Christian. Like the Greek writers who molded the ancient stories into tales of their own that taught philosophical and religious concepts under the guise of dramatic entertainment, the Renaissance writers revered the ancients and blended their mythology and pagan philosophy with Christian theory to produce moralized literature. Since the Cambridge Platonists and most educated men of this period were taught classical Latin, it can be assumed that they absorbed the mythology used as texts. Most of these students also discovered that there was much to be learned from the ancients which could be applied to both Christian and secular activities. Bush reminds us that at its height, the aged mythology offered an "universal reverence felt for the ancients as a superior race and for the moral wisdom, of almost Christian elevation... Allegorical interpretation had already come to the rescue of religion and morality" (Bush PM&CT 1-2).

For the Renaissance writers, the chief medieval compilation of allegorized mythology was that of Boccaccio. Along with and after Boccaccio came new dictionaries of mythology which dealt in moral and cosmological rather than religious interpretations. Bush writes that "allegorical interpretation--which did not at all preclude aesthetic enjoyment-- was one large and lasting way of reconciling pagan myth with Christianity; it was in full accord with traditional reverence for ancient wisdom" (PM&CT 4). Comparative religion was also finding a stronghold in the Renaissance. Authors and philosophers began to speculate and claim that pagan myths were acceptable as having universal validity because they were in fact simply distorted versions of Biblical truth. Theophilus Gale, a Nonconformist (1667), implied that Hebrew is the mother of all languages, and the Hebrew theology established by Moses is the inspiration of all impressive human thought. He believed that everything the gentiles knew was owed to Jewish innovation: astronomy was invented by Abraham, arithmetic and geometry were discovered by Moses, navigation was first practiced by Noah, and architecture was understood and utilized by Solomon. Allen notes that "having demonstrated that all mythologies are misreadings of Jewish history, Gale devotes the remainder of his bulky book to proving that all ethnic poetry, theology, philosophy, and ritualistic religion were cast in Hebrew moulds but are now very much misshapen" (Allen, MM 75). In Thomas More's An Explanation of the Grand Mystery of Godliness, Pythagoras, Plato, and his disciples are generally excused from pagan culpability because More can recognize in their works a foundation already established in the pentateuch of Moses. Allen writes that "Breganio lists the non-Christians to whom God condescended to make revelations, and traces the dissemination of the 'perfect theology' as it flowed from Adam to Moses to the Greeks. Plato, who lived after the time of David and learned from both Moses and the Prophets, quotes the Old Testament (Breganio got this from Eusebius) fourteen times" (Allen, MM 32-33).

The use of allegory served to end the clash between the otherworldly and humanistic points of view. Both St. Augustine and Boccaccio sought to reconcile pagan moral concepts with Christian moral principles by suggesting that Truth was allegorically hidden in myth. Even the Song of Solomon came under fire as an erotic poem not suitable to acceptance in the canon until the Jewish leaders proclaimed it to be an allegorical reading of God's love for the children of Israel; later Christian figures accepted the allegorical reading as Christ's love for the church. Saint Augustine also went on to suggest that if a text is literally profane, it may be read figuratively and endowed with Christian, instructive principles. Thomas Aquinas had written an extensively-studied text in the thirteenth century which was both an apology for the allegories and hidden truths of the Bible and a touchstone for allegorical and didactic writers succeeding him. He recognized the extended metaphors as more than simple teaching tools and considered them to be the keys to the mysteries of the Christian faith: "It is befitting [for] Holy Writ to put forward divine and spiritual truths under the likeness of material things. For God provides for everything according to the capacity of its nature. Now it is natural to man to attain to intellectual truths through sensible things, because all our knowledge originates from sense. Hence in Holy Writ spiritual truths are fittingly taught under the metaphors of [sensible] material things" (Summa Theologica, Pt.1, Q.1, Art.9, Response and Reply to Obj.1). Presenting the abstract in a concrete form makes it much easier to understand; presenting Truth in the form of a human body gives it a tangibleness which suggests that it may one day be reunited. Symbolic and allegorical interpretation hides a multitude of sins and allow for a much wider base in the search for Truth.

The early humanists hunted eagerly for manuscripts and brought to light so many neglected and forgotten works of ancient literature. They understood that Truth could be gleaned from a variety of sources and that none of these sources could be haphazardly discarded because of censorship or ignorant bias. John Milton wrote that Truth could be understood through "arguing, much study [and] many opinions; for opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making" (Areopagitica 743). A revival in Plato and Aristotle also promoted a revival in the Sophists and rhetoric. Craig acknowledges that "the Elizabethans very much wished to dispute successfully, and it is the parts of the ancient art and science of oratory which, like fragments of truth in the fable of Osiris, they gather as best they can" (172). Rhetoric became the tool for educating the public in philosophical versions of moral discipline. He adds that "by the time [Robert Greene] and John Lyly began to write, it had become a fashion in England, as it had everywhere in Europe earlier, to combine moral discourses with other literary forms" (121). And even Dryden writes in his Essay of Dramatic Posey that "moral truth is the mistress of the poets as much as of the philosopher" (I.211).

Much can be learned from the poetical truth that resides in works of the imagination. Meaning or significance is not dependent on the logical truth of what is being said or thought. Aristotle maintained in his Poetics that the two operations performed by poetry (in the broad sense of the word) are to give delight and instruction, insights and understanding that result from the inquiry into possibilities and probabilities. Adler enhances Aristotle's definition by explaining that "... he says that poetical truth consists in a narrative about what could have possibly happened and even might probably happen, but never did actually happen... he says that poetical truth is more like philosophical or scientific truth than it is like historical truth, because the stories told in poetical narration have a generality not to be found in the historic narration of singular past events" (Adler 55). The ancients and their stories become guides, not commanders and absolutes.

Throughout the sixteenth-century men of learning, science and philosophy as well as literature, engaged themselves in reshaping, amplifying, explaining, and rendering available older learning. The essential difference between medieval and Renaissance treatments of mythology is that "The Middle Ages, with what one scholar calls their 'encyclopaedic grasp of the Inverse,' found a significant place for mythology, as for all else, in their scheme of things. They assume a reality in the old myths, and essential truth variously reflected, but truth and reality nevertheless. The Renaissance, with its advance in classical scholarship, knew more and more about mythology, but took it less seriously. With the increase of knowledge the conviction of reality declines, at least in artistic use, and the old myths tend to become mere playthings, material of applied ornament and superficial decoration" (Osgood xxiii). The classics supplied forms, interpretations, and ultimately materials--materials, however, which had often been mediaevalized, sometimes debased, before they were used. The importance of the myths was not in their credibility but in their underlying moral truth, their availability to be used for instruction, and their catalytic capability to promote the pursuit of Truth.

Besides pagan myth, Christianity was of equal importance to the Cambridge philosophers. The concept of the Old Testament God as a masculine, aggressive and vindictive deity and the New Testament God (Christ) as a feminine, passive, loving divine being originated in the Renaissance as perhaps a way of explaining the androgynous nature of God. Nonetheless it promoted a dual personality for the creative maker. George Halifax, a British statesman and author, wrote that "even God Almighty is divided between his two great attributes, his mercy and his justice" (op. cit., p.97). In the last sentence the word 'divided' would have profoundly offended the Renaissance Neoplatonists, who saw the Old Testament God and New Testament God as merely expressions of the united God's various temperaments; each expression is but one part of the whole. Thomas Browne writes that we should "distinguish even his judgments into mercies" (Religio Medici 342). Wind believes that "it is man's limitation to conceive of [justice and mercy] as 'divided'" (220). In Plato justice is the same thing as temperance, an inward state of the soul and the condition of any virtue (see Republic IV.443). John Smith, a Renaissance Neoplatonist, believed that "knowledge unattended with humility [would] never lead to knowledge of absolute truth. Truth is nothing if divorced from virtue, and therefore a man will achieve the clearest vision that reason can afford only by dedicating himself to the good life" (Hoopes 179). Man falls short of his own perfection (he is created in the image of God) and is unable to rise to the idea of God as long as he does not recognize his own self-imposed limitations, the need to divide parts of Truth into the opposites. Rather than alternate between justice and mercy or reason and Truth, these abstracts must be viewed as a compromise of both sides at once. Empedocles said that "only in God is there no discord because in him there is no union of diverse elements, but his unity is implied, without any composition. And since in the constitution of created things it is necessary that the union overcomes the strife (otherwise the thing would perish because its elements would fall apart) -- for this reason it is said by the poets that Venus loves Mars, because Beauty, which we call Venus, cannot subsist without the contrariety" (qtd. in Pico, "On the general nature of Beauty," Commento II, vi. ed. Garin, pp 495). The opposites need each other for balance, and both parts are integral to the whole to understand the unity of religion or philosophy.

The systemization of theology in the Middle Ages was replaced in the Renaissance with an idea of a personal encounter with God, encouraged by the printing of the King James version of the Bible in 1611. The various Old Testament dismemberment myths, combined with the New Testament allegorical teachings (one Lord, one faith, one body, etc.), became a virtual garden of metaphoric fruit. The New Testament in particular offered a continuous theme of divided autonomy. But the idea of an eternal Incarnation of Truth was maintained in both literary allegory and Holy Communion. The correspondence between the earthly and heavenly could be seen as "physically manifested in the natural world and in the forms and symbols of daily life" (Madsen 86). "The reenactment of the last supper in the Eucharist" symbolized the physical incarnation of Christ who claimed to be "the Truth" (H. Levin 19 and St. John XIV:6). Many medieval and Renaissance poets, in particular, make a concerted effort to reconcile religious conventions (such as the incarnation in the Lord's Supper) with the ancient literature they so admire. To do so, they are forced either to ascribe philosophies resembling Christian assumptions to ancient mythic heroes or to discredit those pagan figures who resist allegorization. Thus, many early poets distort the ancient characterizations of Pan and Orpheus and alter them to conform with recognized Christian figures, saints, demons, pilgrims, or God himself. Thus it is not surprising to find Orpheus-Christos exemplars in Medieval literature which suggests a sacrificial hero similar to the incarnated Christ remembered in the Eucharist.

The sixth century Consolation of Boethius is considered to be the primary source of the Orpheus legend in the Middle Ages. Boethius combines elements from both Ovid and Virgil and also offers a Christian interpretation of the mythic material. In his widely-read text, Boethius has Philosophia note that "synecdoche represents the whole body of Truth, grasped only piecemeal (as she explains) by contending schools that have torn fragments from her gown" (Miller 94). The allegory of the divided physical body as a symbol for the dismemberment of Truth was becoming firmly established in the Renaissance canon.

Perhaps the most influential allegorical text is the anonymous Ovide Moralise written in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century which presents Ovid's work in couplets with elaborate allegorical appendices. (The book devotes 34 pages to the tale of Orpheus alone.) This Christianized text also attracted British readership and thus formed part of the English understanding of Orpheus mythology. Arthur Golding's Metamorphosis (1567) was the first complete English translation of Ovid, making the Latin author available to a much wider audience. In his lengthy prefaces in verse, he expounded the moral lesson for young and old to be found in Ovid's tales (see Baker 24-25 and Bush PM&CT 10-11).

Also widely read and debated in the Renaissance was the Cabala. Attributed to Dionysius the Areopagite, an Athenian disciple of St. Paul, is the transcription of the oral laws given to Moses on Mt. Sinai, which included naming Orpheus, Musaeus, and Linus as the earliest theological poets to the Gentiles. Wind notes that "without so remarkably universal a breach of etiquette, it might have been difficult for the Renaissance to revive the Orphic, Mosaic, and Pauline secrets" (20). With the availability of the ancient classics, the Cabala, and the Holy Scriptures, the classical revival of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was a great example of the logical and inevitable interest in the discovery of hidden Truth as a unit rather than disassociated parts. It might also be good to remind ourselves at this point of the importance of printing. The printing press obviously hastened the circulation of all kinds of knowledge and spread the influence of the recently rediscovered vessels of Truth.

But ancient literature was read less by the masses than were the contemporary works produced in the Renaissance. From the courtiers to the common man, the transduced philosophy and thought came via the poets and dramatists. And even these well-read authors had a tendency to incorporate personal ideas with classical allusion, especially when it came to concepts of Truth. The pursuit of Truth became less defined and more open to opinion; and the search itself was almost as important as actually finding the scattered bits and pieces. Bacon wrote in his Novum Organum (1620) that "truth is to be sought for not in the felicity of any age, which is an unstable thing, but in the light of nature and experience, which is eternal" (56).

The three authors who use the allegory of the dismembered body as Truth most are Milton, Shakespeare and Spenser. But perhaps the best example of the Renaissance dismemberment of Truth comes from John Milton's Areopagitica:

"Truth indeed came into the world with her divine Master, and was a perfect shape most glorious to look on; but when he ascended,... a wicked race of deceivers... took the virgin Truth, hewd her into a thousand pieces, and scattered them to the four winds... The sad friends of Truth... went up and down gathering up limb by limb still as they could find them. We have not found them all, Lords and Commons, nor ever shall doe, till her Masters second coming" (Areopagitica 742).

Milton's use of dismemberment is an indictment against the Roman Catholic Church; its popes, bishops and Carolinian censors are the "deceivers." But dismembered Truth can also be viewed as Milton's anxiety about the violation and disfigurement of the poet and sacred texts. Milton is appealing for the opportunity to search for a united Truth by first finding the parts through contemplation and examination of all available materials. Plato wrote that "if [Truth] is not sown and grown and nourished in proper surrounding it will grow to everything opposite, unless a god comes to the help" (290). The "proper surroundings" for Milton would be an environment which promoted free thinking and contemplation. Without intellectual man's searching for the parts and reassembling them, Truth would remain "scattered to the four winds."

Milton is perhaps the most expert at "borrowing" ideas and allusions from other available sources. Allen notes that "unlike Spenser, Drayton, or Jonson, whose mythical figures move like men and women through allegorical episodes, Milton, writing variations on a mythical literal, can only use his non-Christian allusions as rephrasings. The gods... can do little more than stand outside what is literal and real. Orpheus and Hercules, famous as pagan types of Christ, are openly welcomed by their proper names in Milton's circle of metaphors" (Allen, MM 294). As Milton compares his dead friend Edward King to Orpheus on the pastoral Lycidas, he makes a direct allusion to the Greek myth:

Friendship represents beauty to Milton, which explains why he elevated King to the level of the Orpheus-Christ figure in his tribute poem. Noted by Harrison, "in Milton beauty is an idea to be known in the soul by him who seeks for it among the beautiful objects of the world of sense; its pursuit is an intellectual quest of a philosophic mind" (41). Milton admits Platonic influence on his thinking as he writes in defense of his own life, "Thus, from the laureate fraternity of poets, riper years and the ceaseless round of study and reading led me to the shady spaces of philosophy; but chiefly to the divine volumes of Plato" ("An Apology for Smectymnus," Prose Works I.225). Having been influenced by Plato, the Classical myths and the Bible, it is not surprising that Milton uses the dismembered body as an allegory for divided Truth. The pursuit to unify Truth reflects Milton's own problems with finding Truth in a multiplicity of oft-times incongruent places. From Plato he learns the idealistic, from the Bible he gleaned the moralistic, but from life he garnered the realistic: most men did NOT want to know Truth in her holistic entirety.

Milton's Areopagitica is directed primarily against the censorship and licencing of the Jacobean and Carolinian reigns, yet its purport easily spills over into the twentieth-century. Today's denominationalism has not only divided Truth into a multiplicity of fragmented creeds, but it has dismembered the corporate church and divided Christ himself. Whether it be the Catholic Church banning the Scriptures in the 14th century from the hands of the masses or the current charismatics who base their beliefs on "feeling" rather than "knowing," groups of people have intentionally severed themselves from the consolidated Truth. But the Renaissance writers saw Truth as being available in more places than just the Scriptures. In the theology of the current century, each denomination has one "limb" (part) of the Truth and denies its existence outside the boundaries of organized Christianity, but without a unity and fellowship of believers found in the universal body of Christ which is living and cemented (Herbert's word) by his blood and the search for Truth WHEREVER it may be found, the Truth will remain splintered, each group having only one portion of the Truth and never knowing her in her entirety.

The irony of striving for a homogeneity is that the diversity of Truth seems to promote a search for Truth, thus making the dismemberment a catalyst and companion for acquiring wisdom. If Truth is divided rightly, as was the Gibean woman, detachment can point the way toward a more perfect re-memberment. The availability of conflicting materials and opinions is necessary for the emergence of Truth and virtue. If, as Bacon suggested, mankind's greatest gift from God is the ability to reason, then we must believe like Milton that God also "gave him freedom of choice, for reason is but choosing" (Areopagitica 733). Choice implies that it is possible to make a reasonably informed decision and that the Truth does exist within man's reach. People who want to dictate the possible sources to be considered and contemplated in the search for Truth are not removing error but actually removing reasoning.

If the dismemberment of the Gibean matron was both a warning against apostasy and the opportunity for redemption by means of recognizing and identifying Truth, then the image of Orpheus being torn to bits because of his violation of societal norms becomes an example of divine justice. But warnings, like knowledge, are meaningless without understanding. Truth is the understanding of all things -- the spirit and heart of the desire to know. She lives and breathes within the rational man who seeks knowledge and information with a passion to discern: "Truth is," Socrates says, "seeing and contemplating things which are well ordered and unchangeable,... all things in concord and regulated by reason; we surely [must] imitate these things and make ourselves like to them" (Plato 298). St. Paul said men without understanding are "always learning and never able to come to the recognition of the Truth" (II Timothy III:7). Whether this truth is of the nature of a Platonic ideal or is Jesus Christ himself, she is the all-encompassing understanding of the inter-relatedness of knowledge and thought. When the understanding dies (or is murdered) because of recreative artistry, or censorship, or complacency, it is dissevered and scattered, and only through dedicated thought, opinion, and speech can it be reassembled. Since "a clearer perception of real being (Truth) and the world of mind (Reason) is given by a knowledge of dialectic (logical questioning and argumentation)" (Plato 311), there must be a complete range of thought for the "full assurance of understanding, resulting in true knowledge" (Colossians II:2). Men will not ordinarily choose evil; since the "idea or principle of the goodness provides Truth and understanding and gives the power of knowing to the knower, only by free choice can men choose goodness, and all options have to be available" (Plato 308). Before a man can abide by St. Paul's admonition to "Prove all things, hold fast to that which is True" (I Thessalonians V:21), he must first have access to "all kind of knowledge whether good or evil" (Areopagitica 727).

Francis Bacon, a writer probably read by Milton, writes that "this quality of knowledge must fall under popular contempt" (191). Even with the knowledge available, the masses do not want to hear it. Milton writes in Areopagitica that

it is their own pride and ignorance which causes the disturbing;... they are the troublers, they are the dividers of unity, who neglect and permit not others to unite those dissevered pieces, which are yet wanting to the body of Truth. To be still searching what we know not by what we know, still closing up truth to truth as we find it (for all her body is homogeneal and proportional), this is the golden rule in theology as well as in arithmetic (742).

Under a guise of cold, dispassionate "reason," men consciously reject learning or gathering all the pieces of Truth. They are afraid that they might accidentally pick up something harmful; but God has given man the gift of reason to be his own chooser (733). A seeker should eventually be able to discern between a limb from the body of Truth or a limb from a tree (even though the "knowledge of good and evil" was actually contained in the fruit of the "tree" in Eden). He should, as Browne writes, "protect her from the power of vice, and maintain the cause of injured truth" (Religio Medici 345).

The allegory of Truth's dismemberment in Milton's Areopagitica is followed by a vision of unity in which Christ "shall bring together every joyant and member [of Truth], and shall mould them into an imortall feature of loveliness and perfection" (742). Christ becomes the sculptor to reshape and reassemble the body politic and men's intellectual disarray. One has to wonder how different this reassembling by Christ is from cataloguing and reshaping by misogamists wanting to reform imperfect women? Or is there any difference? Is Christ's fragmenting and reification of the body any different from the cataloguing of the Renaissance writers? The assumption must be that mankind's depiction of the body as Truth begins with a deformed perception of Truth. Christ would perform a dissection and severance which would disassociate the error from the body and reify Truth in its purest, uncorrupted state. Adler agrees with this possible reunion and says that "such unification... will not preclude the persistence until the end of time of philosophical or religious pluralism as long as men are engaged in the pursuit of the whole truth that while attainable in principle, is not likely ever to be fully attained" (128). Milton is probably correct in asserting that Truth cannot be realized in its entirety until it is rejoined by Truth himself.

The meaning of this last age, according to Madsen, will "be fully revealed when Christ's mystical body has grown to its full stature and the righteous have entered into a state of 'perfect glorification'" (113). This restoration and reassembling of Truth, opinions and virtues would produce a nation resembling Christ's victorious and glorious return. As St. Paul said, "When the perfect comes [again], the fragments will be done away" (I Corinthians XIII:9).

The uniqueness of the later part of the twentieth-century is our repetition of the periods of enlightenment. Though we are living nearly four hundred years after the Renaissance writers, Truth is in the forefront of man's thinking and endeavors. Galileo may have determined that the earth revolves around the sun, but he would be pleased to learn that our entire solar system is also revolving. Medicine is no longer limited to fixing what is wrong, but we now have vaccines to prevent illness. And Truth is being contemplated at an all-time high: whether it be the fundamentalists looking to prove the "inerrency" of Truth in the holy scriptures, or the New Age believers seeking Truth in the teachings of the ancients and spiritual guides, or intellectuals examining Truth in the writings of the Greek philosophers, or the Buddhists tracing Truth in the teachings of a very wise man, Truth is being sought; and it is being sought in a multiplicity of places. As the Truth is evaluated and reassembled by intelligent men, she becomes united; but in each of the aforementioned areas, Truth remains limited and imprisoned by seekers who have only one limb. The search must be extended to include ALL of Truth, or she will continue to be scattered to the four winds.

Our time period has cultivated a group of thinkers; nothing seems unreasonable or impossible to us. If we do not understand something, it is simply because we do not have all of the necessary information needed to make a reasonable judgment. Hardin Craig notes that "the spirit of our age makes us want the truth and gives fact significance to us, to such a degree that we are seeing more and more clearly what it was that Elizabethan writers said and perhaps are learning to care more for their meanings than for other meanings attached to their works by persons who have read into them thoughts that the Elizabethans never uttered or feelings which they could never have entertained" (211). These writers were twentieth-century men trapped in Renaissance bodies; because of the political restrictions of their day, they were unable to examine fully Truth from a multiplicity of angles, yet we presumptuously interpret their writings based on our more complete understanding of natural, scientific, and philosophical tenets. The Renaissance writers understood that they did NOT fully comprehend the complexities of Truth, but they could determine that Truth was as of yet undisclosed and needed to be sought to be reunited. The image of a physical embodiment of Truth was not revolutionary, but it made the concept of a holistic Truth seem a possibility; and it also pointed out that it is MAN who divides Truth, not God or Nature. The constancy of Truth is a promise that one day man will be able to know Truth in her entirety.

John Donne, one of Milton's contemporaries and the Dean of St. Paul's, published his famous Easter Sermon (Sermon XXIII in his Folio of 1640) and revealed the official position of both the Anglican Church and state. Completely contrary to Milton's position in Areopagitica, he wrote, "We are forbidden private conventicles, private spirits, and private opinions" ("Sermon XXIII" 82). The formal attitude of the day admonished that people accept ONLY what they were told to believe in church. A personal pursuit for Truth was squelched in an attempt to control and regulate the thought and actions of the people. But this perspective can create only zombies and followers; and it is exactly this form of mind control to which Milton objects in his tract. If the church, or any other organization, has only a limited understanding of Truth, how will men be able to find Truth in her entirety? Donne's sermon is based upon the scripture in I Corinthians, "now I know in part, but then...." Milton, other Renaissance writers, and scholars today realize that the "then" should not be limited by the "now." Donne was content with Truth as it was revealed in his age, but Milton recognized the limitations and complacency generated by satisfaction with only fragments of divine understanding: "The light which we have gained, was given us, not to be ever staring on, but by it to discover onward things more remote from our knowledge" (Areopagitica 742). Without the unhindered search, Truth will remain in her "parts" and only reassembled by divine intervention; without "all opinions, yea errors, known, read, and collated," man will not move "toward the speedy attainment of what is truest" (727); and without the pursuit, "that which is perfect" may never return.

Notes

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Acknowledgements

I would like to recognize and thank Dr. William A. Sullivan for being my Thesis Director, friend, and supporter through not only my thesis but also my time spent at Winthrop College. I am also appreciative of the time, consideration, and insight given to this paper by Dr. Debra Boyd and Dr. Gordon N. Ross, my other two readers. And lastly, I want to credit my family with the patience and strength needed to allow me to return to school. Thank you, all.

Cynthia B. Bryson