In Book I of his epic poem The Faerie Queen, Edmund Spenser means to allegorize the Christian individual's quest for holiness and, at the same time, give a commentary on the religious debate of his particular cultural moment. Spenser lived in post-reformation England, where Protestantism (particularly Anglicanism) had replaced Catholicism as the national religion. Furious with the disloyal Catholic propagandists that hindered English solidarity, Spenser uses the The Faerie Queen to relate his vision of a magnificent English empire reminiscent of the Arthurian days of old. This empire includes a unique national religion with the monarch (in the case of the poem, the Faerie Queen) as a religious and political protector, par excellence . Spenser's critique of Catholicism includes but is not limited to criticism of: the superficiality of Catholic faith as works without God's grace and the shortsighted and uncharitable nature of the Catholic monastic life. His understanding of Christian holiness, as the Redcrosse Knight represents it in Book I, is a heroic quest. In Spenser's estimation, true holiness is a knight-like state of mind, and this holiness is earned by way of unwearied struggle versus the forces of enemies like false Truth, Despair, and Pride.
St. Ignatius Loyola was a devout Catholic that delivered Spiritual Exercises to the Catholic public. These exercises developed into a unique kind of Catholic monastic life (the life of the Jesuits). Ignatius crafted these Spiritual Exercises in a spirit of soldierly piety much like that of Spenser's conception of holiness. Consequently, the attitudes of the Ignatian exercitant concerning consolation, desolation, and the nature of holiness are very similar to the Anglican vision of holiness allegorized in The Faerie Queen. Furthermore, this likeness of attitude gives rise to numerous concrete theological similarities that one would not expect to find between a Catholic ascetic and The Faerie Queen, a critique of Catholic asceticism.
