Tilmouth, Christopher. Passion’s Triumph Over Reason: A History of the Moral Imagination from Spenser to Rochester. Oxford and New York:Oxford University Press, 2010. vii + 432 pp. ISBN: 978-0199593040. £30.00 paperback.

Christopher Tilmouth argues that at the end of the sixteenth-century, the English rationalist model of self-governance was in crisis. Authors of both philosophical treatises and literary works believed that reason had to control, if not completely eradicate, the passions. Tilmouth contends that works like The Faerie Queene, Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Bussy D’Ambois, and Troilus and Cressida found reason wanting, leaving only two alternatives: a spiritual recuperation of the passions under reason’s aegis or reason’s subordination to the passions. Writers like Herbert, Crashaw, and Milton explored the former; Hobbes, Carew, and the Earl of Rochester the latter. The book’s two sections thus explore the period’s experiments with self-control and self-indulgence respectively. Part I shows how poets and playwrights interrogated and precipitated the collapse of the rationalist model of self-control before a new set of poets recuperated the passions with the help of ideas from Augustine and Aristotle. Part II examines Thomas Hobbes’s enormous influence on the late seventeenth-century’s model of self-indulgence. Arguing that reason should be in the service of the passions, rather than vice versa, Hobbes provided the philosophical foundation for a generation of libertines. But self-indulgence soon cloyed, and in his final chapter, Tilmouth demonstrates how the Earl of Rochester explored and responded to libertinism’s limits by proposing passionate generosity.

Tilmouth’s book features thorough and often insightful analysis, particularly in its second half. However, Spenserians who come to the book for its chapter on The Faerie Queene should be warned that Tilmouth uses the poem primarily as a foil. Describing it as “the confluence between Calvinism and humanist ethics,” Tilmouth argues that Spenser’s text embodies the period’s faith in reason even as it exposes the period-wide feeling that reason could never completely quell the passions (36). This is not a proto-modern Spenser. Rather, “Spenser’s world is the world that many of [Tilmouth’s] later authors became determined to reject” (74). Tilmouth then proceeds to make Spenser the face of the rational philosophy that passion conquers. So, we read that “Hamlet plays upon the desire precisely not to be rational, but rather, to be something never dreamt of in Spenser’s philosophy” (113), “Troilus is important . . . because it brings together . . . terms and values which again prove resistant to the morality celebrated by Spenser or Erasmus” (156), and, of course, “Hobbes seems to overturn the model of human psychology accepted by Erasmus, Spenser, and their kind” (236). Spenser and his poem occupy an important structural place in the book, but Tilmouth’s thesis almost necessarily means the book’s most probing analysis happens in later chapters.

Rather than overtly committing to or even engaging any contemporary theory of affect, Tilmouth finds images within the period’s philosophical and literary texts and begins his analysis there. By privileging images or models over philosophical propositions, Tilmouth shows he wants to maintain a “dialectical” relationship between literature and philosophy (11). He stresses that Spenser and others were not simply encoding philosophical statements into their work. They were responding and altering the assumptions, often distilled into images or metaphors, that served as the basis for Thomas Rogers’s or Erasmus’s moral treatises. Tilmouth calls these assumptions “prerational assumptions,” imaginative constructions that were used by both literature and philosophy (9). For example, Spenser’s dominant image is psychomachia, a battle for the soul between reason and passion.

Tilmouth opens each of the book’s sections with philosophical propositions about reason and passion before moving to literature. Positively, this structure encourages scholars to find their explanations for reason’s struggle with passion not in anachronistic texts but in the theoretical works of the period. However, Tilmouth makes clear that his book is not a genealogy; very few of his chosen texts openly allude to or acknowledge the other texts in his book. Thus, Tilmouth does not analyze Book II of The Faerie Queene because Shakespeare, Chapman, Herbert, Crashaw, or Milton openly refer to the Bower of Bliss. Rather, Tilmouth chooses Spenser as a representative for the baseline rationalist position, someone who imagines the struggle between reason and passion as psychomachia and illustrates the growing skepticism that reason can ever truly conquer passion. Negatively, then, Tilmouth’s decision to begin each section with philosophy before turning to literature works against his claim that literary texts were as important as any philosophical text in passion’s defeat of reason. If the models that Spenser and his cohorts used were imaginative as much as they were propositional—that is, based on images not just maxims—the philosophical foundations for the positions are less important than the “prerational” models writers like Spenser used. Starting with the propositions implies that Spenser was working through these classical models and, consequently, a uni-directional path from philosophy to literature.

The spokesmen for rationalism are classical heavy-hitters: Socrates, Cicero, and Aristotle. While they are each committed to subordinating passion to reason, their differences are illustrative of the variety of models early modern authors had for subjugating bodily appetites. Plato, through Socrates, contended that man’s mind has two parts: rational and emotional. We fight our passions because the passions and the bodily appetites they encourage deceive us into forsaking virtue. Socrates sees no end to this fight. Cicero too sees the passions as enemies, capricious impulses that attempt to undercut the thoroughly supported logic of a person’s reason. Unlike Socrates, however, Cicero firmly believes that reason can win its battle with emotion. Given enough time, a person’s cultivated stoicism will eradicate the passions. Aristotle occupies a middle-ground. Like Socrates, Aristotle believes the passions can never be eliminated. Like Cicero, he believes a person can rationally control the passions. The answer, Aristotle argues, is to cultivate passions that assist the quest for virtue. A person’s most important non-rational faculty is his appetites. With the proper education, passions can drive humanity to rational goals.

Of the early modern thinkers continuing this classical tradition, Erasmus and Calvin are the most important. Erasmus associates the mind with reason and the body with passion, imagining the passions as perpetual “intruders within the gates” (20). Following St. Paul, Erasmus claims that the passions are another identity that lives within the spiritually regenerated man, so the godly man never completely eradicates the passions. Erasmus was thus the voice of a Christianized Socratic form of self-governance. In Tilmouth’s narrative, Calvin is the Christian thinker who offers hope to those disillusioned by humanity’s inability to conquer the passions. While men can never conquer reason autonomously, Calvin insisted they could overcome with the help of God’s grace.

These two thinkers in particular inform Spenser’s investigation of the emotions in TheFaerie Queene. The poem, Tilmouth contends, wants to explore the emotions that inspire human conduct, both good and bad. While the poem has moments where it appears that emotions are at least “equivocal,” we must conclude from the poem as a whole that the passions are negative and lead Spenser’s characters to sin (48). Spenser thinks man is ultimately corrupt, and his poem’s various coursers give a good example of men trying with all their Ciceronian might to rein in their passions. While it may be possible to cultivate the passions into virtues temporarily, these attempts ultimately fail. The horses end up running away from their masters. Even potentially redeemable passions like pity and anger—praised for their ability to stir an agent to action—turn out to do more harm than good. The flesh, in general, is the problem. It imposes a limit on men. While it does offer agents some kind of rational autonomy, it means they are never free to habituate positive virtues. The dominant images of The Faerie Queene, constant internal battles that are then subsequently externalized, demonstrate—at least to Tilmouth—that Spenser was both a rationalist and a humanist. The war is a necessary one, though not a winnable one without God’s grace.

Tilmouth focuses primarily on Book II and its orienting virtue of temperance, the virtue of controlling extreme passions. His most intriguing argument is that Spenser’s temperance is actually Aristotelian continence. That is, Spenser erases the difference between continence and temperance, and this flattening reflects his sense that, without God’s grace, the passions cannot be conquered. Spenser does agree with Aristotle that repeated incontinence eventually becomes intemperance. Thus, Acrasia, the personification of akrasia or incontinence, is merely a means by which characters become intemperate. Spenser does not retain Aristotle’s positive spin on the passions. Tilmouth asserts that Guyon is only temperate once in the entire book—when he’s inside the Cave of Mammon—and, tellingly, that temperance is short-lived. His other victories are better read as continence, for his self-control is never instinctive. Yet Spenser retains his faith in reason. Influenced by “Calvinism” Spenser sees grace as the necessary supplement to rational self-governance. This is what Arthur represents. Having thoroughly mortified his flesh, it is Arthur who is the book’s real temperate hero, though only an ideal. While Spenser may question man’s ability to conquer passion, he thinks the fight is a necessary one. Consequently, Tilmouth gives us a conservative Spenser, whose poem “never questions” the images or assumptions he gets about reason and the passion from Erasmus and Calvin (73).

In his chapter on Hobbes, Tilmouth painstakingly separates what Hobbes wrote from “Hobbism,” the caricatured version of Hobbes’s philosophy that informed libertine authors. He does the same thing for the Socratic, Ciceronian, and Aristotelian models explained in the book’s first chapter, showing how early modern writers like Erasmus and Rodgers gave a popular version of these thinkers’ propositions. The problem is that we have no analogous tradition of “Spenserism,” a lowest-common-denominator version of The Faerie Queene’s moral philosophy to juxtapose with the poem itself. For Tilmouth’s purposes, the poem must represent the model that the rest of the book’s models reject. Problematically, then, Tilmouth performs the very flattening process on Spenser that he later explicates in his study of the libertines.

Jonathan Sircy is an Assistant Professor at Charleston Southern University. He has written on adaptations of Shakespeare and Milton. He is currently working on a book about spiritual kinship in Post-Reformation England.