Falstaff and the Psychomachia

Abstract

ROM its very beginning Christianity formulated the moral issues of this life in terms of the soul's destiny in the life beyond. Almost as early, the result probably of the influence of aim Oriental dualism, which had already been absorbed by Judaic culture, these moral issues assumed the shape of a conflict between opposites of vice and virtue: For the flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh: and these are contrary the one to the other.' By what must be regarded as a natural accommodation of method to subject, the language of personification became the means to render this intangible struggle explicit and its unseen soldiery vivid. Entities that are not material, or qualities without independent life apart from the thing they qualify, create a problem in communication which is solved by dressing them in the metaphor of a sensible image. The immaterial realities of the spiritual world, and of the Holy War between unseen forces within the human soul, needed to be expressed thus concretely to the senses if the homiletic and proselytizing efforts of militant Christianity were to be served. We have not very far to look therefore to discover, at the very fountainhead of Christian faith, a statement of the real history of man and his significant warfare couched in the language of personification. St. Paul, writing to the Ephesians, provided for later Christianity a model of the literary method that the great theme demanded: