'Add Faith Vnto Your Force': The Meaning Of Una's Advice in The Faerie Queene I.i.19.3

Abstract

WHEN, at the threshold of Error’s cave, Red Cross dismounts, Una urges caution: ‘your stroke / Sir knight with-hold, till further tryall made’ (i.12.5–6).1 Having rejected this advice (at 12.7–9), Red Cross is nearly vanquished when Error defends herself against his attack by wrapping her monstrous tail about him (18.1–7). As he struggles in vain to free himself, Una cries out: … Now now Sir knight, shew what ye bee, Add faith vnto your force, and be not faint: Strangle her, els she sure will strangle thee. (19.1–4) There are, however, two difficulties attendant upon this interpretation. First, while the Thirty-Nine Articles (among numerous other documents of the Reformation) affirm that ‘we are justified by faith only’ (italics mine), Una in I.19.3 seems to conceive of faith as a supplement to ‘force’ (meaning, perhaps, ‘virtue’).3 It is perhaps with this difficulty in mind that A. C. Hamilton cites 2 Pet. 1: 5 (‘joyne moreover vertue with your faith’).4 Una’s injunction, Hamilton thereby suggests, is in fact consistent with the New Testament teaching beloved of Protestants. But the priorities implied by Una’s advice are quite the reverse of those of 2 Pet. 1. Peter addresses his Epistle to those already in possession of ‘precious faith’ (2 Pet.1: 1).5 Only once he has elaborated on the benefits of grace (in verses 2–4) does he goes on to address both ‘virtue’ and the virtues: ‘And besides this, giving all diligence, add to your faith virtue; and to virtue knowledge; And to knowledge temperance; and to temperance patience; and to patience godliness [etc.]’ (2 Pet. 1: 5–6). According to Peter, then, faith is the condition and foundation of virtue. As Darryl Gless has rightly remarked, any implication that ‘human beings can somehow … choose to add faith’ is inconsistent with the Protestant definition of faith ‘as an unmerited and uninvited gift of grace.’6