Gena Hashhozheva

Galena Hashhozheva wrote an article titled “The Christian Defense Against Classical Skepticism in Spenser’s Legend of Holiness.” She opens this article with a relatively brief introduction relating Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene to the main conflict: the controversy of the relationship of knowledge and faith between clashing religious standpoints and how the fallibility of physiological and psychological states threatens knowledge. The religious view under scrutiny is Skepticism, “the pagan philosophy of disbelief and epistemic non-commitment,” and Hashhozheva explains how Spenser detests this ideology throughout his epic (Hashhozheva 197). Within a few pages of the article, it becomes clear that Spenser is fully against Skepticism,

In order to execute holy deeds, first Redcrosse must possess “an intellectual substratum that comprises faith, trust, certainty, and epistemic commitment” (Hashhozheva 195). However, his naïveté and lack of worldly experience destines him for doubt and uncertainty, and straying from those intellectual virtues makes him vulnerable to Skepticism. Overtime, as he loses his virtues to the numerous manifestations of Skepticism, he spirals into misery. Throughout the rest of the article, Hashhozheva follows Redcrosse along his journey and begins to apply the theory of Skepticism to the knight and those whom he

This is where Redcrosse’s Skepticism begins, when he ignores the warning and loosens his connection with the truth, or Una. A Skeptic stops seeking the truth once it has proven itself too elusive, or impossible to obtain, and he contents himself “with the defeat of error—the nearest, yet negative, equivalent to the quest for truth permissible” (Hashhozheva 200). They see error as abhorrent although it is the very sustenance for their vocation, and they seek error. In addition to their paradoxical relationship to error, Hashhozheva also mentions Skeptics’ fascination with dreams, particularly the lunacy-wreaking false perceptions and illusions: these dreams “expand the realm of epistemological unreliability . . . until waking reality begins to bear an indistinguishable likeness to falsehood”