Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1991. British and American Philologycal Studies (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 20)

Katona Gábor: Twentieth Century Critical Bias Concerning the Choice of a Dominating Philosophical Influence in idney's Defence

105 spiritual level. In Sidney's system of defence, ideas are self-supporting metaphors reflecting the infinite and unattainable beauty of God, and the "skill of the artificer" stands in his capacity to "figure them forth". In the Arcadia a debate takes place between Pyrocles and Musidorus concerning the dubious ethical status of love. Musidor us has not fallen in love yet, so he disapproves of his friend's passionate longing for the beautiful Philoclea. His scornful attitude resembles Bruno's view in The Heroic Frenzies, a work he dedicated to Sidney: "Most illustrious knight, it is indeed a base, ugly, and contaminated wit that is constantly occupied and curiously obsessed with the beauty of a female body."^ Bruno thinks that women should be loved for their virtue only, since "everything in the universe has its own weight, number order, and measure."^ ^ The love of women, however, can be so excessive in men that it can easily take the form of madness. Musidorus charges his friend with falling into the same excess; but his words also contain Sidney's unflattering parody of the false rhetoric we find in Gosson and the Puritans: "And let us see what power is the author of all these troubles: forsooth love, love, a passion, and the basest and fruitlessest of all passions."-^ Musidorus's views on love display the pitfalls and shortcomings of gnostic thinking as well as the contradictions is Bruno's rigid classification of passions. The very fact that Musidorus calls love a "bastard" emotion reveals his confusion of "amor humánus" with "amor ferinus". This false identification of the two loves is not completely alien to Bruno. Then Musidorus propounds something similar to Bruno's doctrine of transsubstantiation: "... for indeed the true love hath that excellent nature in it, that it doth transform the very essence of the lover into the thing loved, uniting, and as it were, incorporating it with a secret and inward working. And wherein do these kinds of love imitate the excellent, for as the love of heaven makes one heavenly, the love of virtue virtuous, so doth the love of the world doth make one wordly: and this effeminate love of a woman doth

... womanize a man ..."^ Musidorus made his friend angry with his lengthy and tedious speech: it is a sign of a failure on his part to convince Pyrocles. Thus, Pyrocles is fully justified in his selfdefence: "I am not yet come to that degree of wisdom to think light of the sex of whom I have my life, since if I be anything

... 1 was, to come to it, born of a woman and nursed of a woman". Women are capable of virtue and virtue "is to be loved" in them.