초록 열기/닫기 버튼
This paper aims to study the concept of nature and its function in the poetic vision of The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser. As a Christian humanist, Spenser integrates the Neo-Platonist view of “Ideas” and the Christian moral teleology into a wider and more comprehensive vision of nature, actively and creatively participating in divine moral perfection. Spenser views nature in this epic as an active moral agent, a manifestation of divine providence, that works to achieve God’s teleology. In the world of the Arthurian romance, nature or the pastoral sphere, if fallen and tainted, ultimately functions to illuminate God’s order in this mundane world and simultaneously to give humans life, moral encouragement and physical power against evil. In Spenser’s fairyland of the divine moral order, nature is not a passive and inanimate material entity, but a creative moral force that shows pity and sympathy for man and also encourages man with his defective reason to aspire back to the light of God.
