Читать книгу Made Flesh - Kimberly Johnson - Страница 7

Introduction

Eucharistic Poetics: The Word Made Flesh

This is a book about how poems work, and about how the interpretive demands of sacramental worship inform the production of poetic texts.

If it seems impolite for a book to declare its intentions so brashly in its first gesture, such insolence has nevertheless been made necessary by the publication of several critical texts that set out to investigate what they term the poetics of the post-Reformation period, particularly in conjunction with a consideration of eucharistic theology. In what has become a minor fad in Renaissance literary criticism, a number of studies advertise themselves as engaged in an examination of the relationship between the sacramental theologies of the early modern period and the representational strategies of poetic texts; but too often these critical examinations seem to lose track of, or fundamentally to misunderstand, the terms in which they frame their projects. While a number of well-meaning critics have trafficked in phrases like “eucharistic poetics,” “sacramental poetics,” and “the poetics of immanence,” and have acknowledged, either explicitly or implicitly, the interpretive overlap between sacramental worship and the processes of signification, their attention remains focused not on poetics—that is, not on the way poems work as literary artifacts—but rather on whatever opinions concerning sacramental theology Renaissance literature seems to offer. The present study, by contrast, concerns itself primarily with poetics, with the ways in which poems communicate information beyond denotation and in addition to the referential content of words rather than with whatever thematic commentary poems may offer on the subject of the Eucharist. I am most urgently interested, in other words, in how poems say as opposed to what poems say. For it is in their concern with the success and failure of language to provide interpretive experiences that these poetic texts reveal and respond to the challenges of eucharistic worship. The Eucharist is after all a ritual fundamentally involved with the mechanisms of representation, and the question of how exactly Christ is presented in the bread and wine is one of the animating debates of the Reformation. This book demonstrates the ways in which the sacramental conjunction of text and materiality, word and flesh, in the ritual of Communion registers simultaneously as a theological concern and as a nexus for anxieties about how language—particularly poetic language, with its valences of embodiment—works.

In advancing these claims, I do not seek to rehearse the arguments made by Malcolm Ross in his stealthily enduring 1954 study Poetry and Dogma. That book takes a dim, not to say curmudgeonly, view of post-Reformation poetry (as well as post-Reformation dogma), lamenting that what Ross identifies as Protestantism’s “outright abandonment of Eucharistic sacramentalism” constitutes nothing less than the “declension of symbol into metaphor,” with disastrous aesthetic effects.¹ Ross’s thesis suggests that such a shift—or, in his oft-repeated term, a “deterioration”—is at once the inevitable consequence of Reformed eucharistic theologies, which Ross argues make a “drastic separation of the sign from the thing signified” (51), and the ineluctable cause of poetic decline over the course of the seventeenth century. Leaving aside the tendentiousness of Ross’s approach to his subject, his argument is puzzling in its apparent indifference to the ways in which the work of John Donne, George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, Edward Taylor, and other devotional poets of the period explicitly engage—in the thematic content of their poems, to be sure, but also in their poetic strategies—issues of signification, sacrament, worship, and the ontological value of the material world and of the flesh, concerns whose purported decline in seventeenth-century poetry most vexes Ross. Indeed, the flowering of English poetry in the seventeenth century, which this study will argue stands in response to the challenges, tensions, and potentialities of sacramental worship, eventuates not, as Ross seems to think, in the thin broth of poetic godlessness but in the establishment of an aesthetic that underwrites the composition of poems even to the present day, an aesthetic that relies upon the capacities of poetry to express and to embody, in which the word is continually made flesh.

Until fairly recently, Ross’s book was virtually the only critical study devoted to poetic treatments of the Eucharist in Renaissance poetry. But the last several years have seen the publication of a number of studies that acknowledge the proximity of sacramental worship and literary encounter in the early modern period. Investigations such as Regina Schwartz’s Sacramental Poetics at the Dawn of Secularism; Robert Whalen’s The Poetry of Immanence: Sacrament in Donne and Herbert; Eleanor McNees’s Eucharistic Poetry; and Theresa M. DiPasquale’s Literature and Sacrament: The Sacred and the Secular in John Donne have contributed to an increasing critical awareness that the interpretive strategies inherent in a sacrament that relies on the presentation of one modality of objects (the material artifacts of bread and wine) which refers to another (the substance, either corporeal or spiritual, of Christ) necessarily ramify into a cultural approach to literature.² Still, a full assessment of the ways in which eucharistic worship informs literary production in that crucial period of doctrinal reformulation has been preempted in part by an overwhelming critical focus on determining a precise confessional identity for the poets under investigation, a schematic approach whose obvious attractions of definition and certainty do not provide for what Molly Murray has described as “the more fluid and provisional reality” of Christian experience in the early modern period.³ Despite this urge among modern readers to fix early modern poets within coherent and defined doctrinal positions, early modern poets do not always cooperate. While many critics tend to be reductively content to let Crashaw stand as uncomplicatedly, even simplemindedly, committed to an identifiably Catholic ceremonialist sacramentalism, or to view Taylor as so strong and unanxious a champion of nonconforming Calvinism that he exiled himself to the American wilderness to administer both his faith and its Suppers, such confessional stability has eluded scholarly treatments of the two major devotional poets of the theologically jumbled Stuart church, Donne and Herbert—which elusiveness explains in part why the question of confessional identity has so dominated Donne and Herbert studies.

Much critical energy has been devoted to trawling through the literary output of post-Reformation religious writers generally, and of Donne and Herbert especially, in order to determine whether the true theological allegiance of each author lies most properly with Catholicism, Anglo-Catholicism, crypto-Catholicism, high or low Anglicanism, via media Anglicanism, Protestantism, Calvinism, Puritanism, or some combination thereof. And while there is certainly more than a little slippage among these designations, owing in part to the hodge-podge nature of English church doctrine during the period and in part to inconsistencies of usage, it has occasionally seemed as if twentieth- and twenty-first-century critics were bent on perpetuating the confessional quarrels of Reformation and post-Reformation divines in their claims about early modern poets, imagining Renaissance views on the Eucharist as merely dichotomous (pitting the literalism of transubstantiation against bare memorialism) and reinscribing those binaries in their treatment of poetic texts. The modern debate is framed on the one hand by the intellectual heirs of Louis Martz, whose influential view of seventeenth-century religious poets located their greatest aesthetic sympathies with the practices of Catholic worship and meditation, and on the other hand by the school of “Protestant poetics,” whose view, seminally articulated by Barbara Lewalski, is that the work of those same devotional writers accomplishes a distinct departure from continental Catholicism in both style and substance.⁴ Not surprisingly, the Eucharist has come to serve for modern critics, as it did for early modern divines, as a kind of litmus test for confessional allegiance, as when Richard Strier’s Love Known: Theology and Experience in George Herbert’s Poetry considers a passage from Herbert’s poem “Love Unknown.” Of his problematically hard heart, the speaker reports,

I bathed it often, even with holy blood,

Which at a board, while many drank bare wine,

A friend did steal into my cup for good,

Even taken inwardly, and most divine

To supple hardness.⁵

Strier writes that in these lines “Herbert goes out of his way to present a strongly receptionist view of the Eucharist,” which understands sacramental transformation as occurring through the exercise of the communicant’s faith rather than by means of priestly consecration, and he concludes that “the central point” of these lines is to declare Herbert’s Reformed conception of “the religious life as entirely a matter of ‘the heart.’ ”⁶ For Strier, in other words, the poem’s narration of its eucharistic encounter indicates Herbert’s decided rejection of the Catholic doctrine of works in favor of a brand of Protestantism inspired by Luther and Calvin in which man is justified by faith alone. The events of Herbert’s poem provide, in Strier’s reading, a key into the poet’s larger theological affinities, and disclose something about how Herbert defined his doctrinal position within the religious turmoil of the Stuart church.

But Strier’s effort to establish Herbert’s theology through the evidence in “Love Unknown” does not allow for the poem’s own complication of that theology, for even as the poem’s drama argues against the efficacy of labor—or, to use the theological terminology that Strier invokes, of “works”—in the pursuit of grace, its language foregrounds the labor of its own telling. The speaker’s tale, as he introduces it to an unidentified interlocutor in the poem’s first line, “is long and sad,” and the telling of it hard, for as the speaker importunes his audience, “in my faintings I presume your love / Will more complie then help” (2–3). Here, the term “faintings” collapses the speaker’s narrative of past afflictions into his present relation of that narrative, marking the tale itself as an effort, an exhaustion. This sense is reaffirmed throughout the poem, as the speaker interrupts his narrative with parenthetical expressions of its difficulty: “(I sigh to say)” (8), “(I sigh to tell)” (24), “(I sigh to speak)” (50), the tale and indeed the very regularity of the poem’s iambic pentameter disrupted by these short, gasping lines. Strier claims that the poem expresses “Herbert’s rejection of works,” and he seeks to extract from the poem’s apparent conviction about “the pointlessness of effort” a stable eucharistic theology for the poet: “Herbert does not want to present taking communion as either a good work in itself or a way of cooperating with God in suppling the heart,” Strier concludes, arguing that “Herbert’s insistence on the action of a friend in stealing the ‘holy bloud’ into the speaker’s cup eliminates all suggestion of cooperation” in a thoroughly Reformed sacrament.⁷ However, the ostentatious labor of the poetic utterance here works precisely in cooperation with the interlocutor’s response to achieve the poem’s redemptive lesson, which is offered in the poem’s concluding lines as an interpretation of the speaker’s recounted afflictions: the heart’s having endured being “washt and wrung” (17) is reframed in the interlocutor’s reading as a sign of baptismal renewal, the heart’s time in the “scalding pan” (35) served but to soften it, the bed of “thorns” (52) works in this new perspective to “quicken what was dull” (65), each and every challenge revalued by the speaker’s auditor as a gracious gift of God to make the soul “new, tender, quick” (70). That is to say, as the unnamed, unknown “Deare Friend” (1) explicates the narrative’s spiritually fraught picaresque, so difficult to be told, what that interpretation produces is an apprehension of grace: the work of utterance is a crucial activity toward apprehension, and this regenerate understanding of the self is produced in cooperation with the divine perspective of the unnamed friend.

I have focused on this poem and this critic not to posit a theological counter to Strier’s Calvinist reading of Herbert—not, that is, to claim “Love Unknown” for the theology of works set—but rather to indicate how such a doctrinally definitive approach may prevent even acute readers from appreciating how adaptable, porous, and sometimes inconsistent Christian worship was in the post-Reformation period, for both communities of worship and individuals alike. Studies that ground textual analysis within historical context have done much to illuminate the complexity of belief in the period, and have helped demolish any notion that post-Reformation doctrine, institutional or otherwise, was consistent. And yet the persistent assumption that a poem declares any given writer’s creed or that it presents a stable articulation of a doctrinal position threatens to reduce poetic utterance to a transparent referential instrument, a straightforward and aesthetically naïve expression of the spiritual life of the poet. But as we shall see, poetic utterance itself works ever against the referential impulse, emphasizing the surface of its discourse in a way that both invites and occludes a referential encounter. And in this quality, holding invitation and interruption in tension one with another, poetic utterance corresponds to nothing so much as the sacramental event of the Lord’s Supper.

My concern here is to chart the ways in which poetic texts of this period explore the expressive capacities of their own discursive surfaces, a practice that transcends doctrinal divides and defies nice theological categories. This study is far less interested in jumping into the fray of doctrinal dispute; it resists focusing its claims on whether, say, Donne is more a Roman churchman or some stripe of “Protestant,” however variously defined—more a secret papist with an enduring fondness for his ancestral Catholicism, or a restive apostate from his family faith, or rather a full-throated participant in some “Calvinist mainstream.”⁸ Instead, Made Flesh addresses the phenomenal and epistemological overlaps between textuality and sacramental worship to demonstrate that in the period following the religious Reformation of the sixteenth century, the lyric poem becomes a primary cultural site for investigating the capacity of language to manifest presence. In poems that employ the presentational, and representational, strategies of Communion, seventeenth-century writers assert the status of poems as artifacts with corporeal as well as symbolic resonances, such that the poems themselves embody the shifting and precarious relationship between materiality and signification—which, not incidentally, is precisely the issue that produces conflicting accounts of the operation of the Eucharist.

The Eucharist is distinct among sacraments for a number of reasons, including that it is celebrated across the wide field of Reformation-era Christian churches, though some denominations prefer to call the ritual by other names, including Holy Communion, the Lord’s Supper, and the Sacrament of the Altar.⁹ Where Catholic doctrine identifies seven sacraments, the sacramental theologies that developed out of the Reformation reduced that number substantially. The Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion (1563), which codified the creed of the English church under Elizabeth, rejected the Roman sacraments of confirmation, penance, the taking of orders, marriage, and unction as “corrupte” because they did not have “any visible signe, or ceremonie, ordeyned of God.”¹⁰ But even to Reformed theologians who break to a greater or lesser degree with the view articulated by Thomas Aquinas that “Nam in sacramento Eucharistae id quod est res et sacramentum est in ipsa materia” [In the sacrament of the Eucharist what we call the “thing and sign” is in the very matter],¹¹ the material valences of the rite—its activity of making the invisible visible through the concrete and objective reality of the physical world—are crucial to its special status. In manifesting the incomprehensibility and imperceptibility of the divine as corporeally present and perceptible, the Eucharist reenacts the mystery of Christ’s Incarnation. But that reenactment, as it occurs in the performance of the rite, is self-consciously symbolic, accomplished through the operation of signs. That is, beyond considerations of doctrine and the evolving parameters of observance, this sacrament explicitly engages incarnational concerns from the remove of a symbol that advertises itself as such. In effect, the Eucharist is a sacrament that stages its correspondence to the Incarnation, regardless of the nature of that correspondence, as a set of figures.

It is not at all surprising, then, that literary texts should have been affected by the eucharistic debates of the sixteenth century, given that the ceremony at the ritual center of Christian observance across the confessional spectrum is unavoidably bound up with interpretive practices. The perplexed hermeneutics of sacramental worship extend beyond the representational status of the eucharistic elements to the very narrative of the ritual’s institution. Indeed, no sentence has provoked more, or more anxious, readerly commentary in the history of Christian theology than the one Jesus is reported to have uttered at the Last Supper, which insisted upon a radical new relationship between spirituality, reading, and corporeal experience: This is my body. Theological disagreements over the nature and operation of the sacrament rest on fundamental questions about interpretation, and the long history of doctrinal conflict about the operation of the Eucharist dramatizes the consequences of Christ’s own verbal ambiguity. Are we to understand that the verb is (Greek ἐστιν) denotes true identity between This and my body? Or is Jesus speaking metaphorically, playing on the association of bread with nourishing staple food (as in Matthew 6.11: “Giue vs this day our daily bread”)¹² or, in the festive context of the Last Supper, making use of the operative symbolism of the Passover matzoh as the bread of both affliction and deliverance? Or does the significance of the rite inhere in some combination of these referentialities? That the words of institution lend themselves to a range of figurative and nonfigurative readings is compounded by inconsistencies across different biblical accounts of the Last Supper, as when the version reported in Matthew 26.26, where Christ merely instructs his disciples, “Take, eate, this is my body,” is expanded in Luke’s report: “This is my body which is giuen for you, this doe in remembrance of me.”¹³ Seemingly from the moment of this ritual’s institution, interpreters have disagreed about the precise meaning of Jesus’s words, and that history of controversy and division regarding the nature of sacramental worship has ensured that the Eucharist is experienced primarily as a ritual engagement with signs.¹⁴

The earliest commentaries on the sacrament indicate the harrowing stakes by which the rite foregrounds the interpretation of signs. When Paul writes to the early Christian community at Corinth in an effort to promote unity of practice and belief among their nascent sect, he relates Jesus’s actions at the Last Supper, reminding his audience of the injunction to repeat the ceremony: “And when he had giuen thanks, he brake it, and sayd, Take, eate, this is my body, which is broken for you: this doe in remembrance of mee. After the same manner also hee tooke the cup when he had supped, saying, This cup is the new Testament in my blood: this do ye, as oft as ye drinke it, in remembrance of me.” Paul’s phrasing at the end of this passage, which seems to frame the sacrament as a memorialist ritual, the symbol of a new covenant, would make him a favorite among reformers. But just a few lines later, Paul warns that “hee that eateth and drinketh vnworthily, eateth and drinketh damnation to himselfe, not discerning the Lords body.”¹⁵ Classifying as unworthy unto damnation the partaker who participates in the sacrament “not discerning the Lord’s body,” Paul’s caution communicates the tremendous pressure that the sacrament put on both the signifying capacities of the sacramental elements and the interpretive faculties of the worshipper. For Paul is not advocating a literal and sensibly perceptual encounter between the communicant and Christ’s body but rather a hermeneutic action that locates real and efficacious significance in the substance of the ritual.

As Paul’s commentary indicates, one of the challenges facing even the earliest Christian communities with regard to the eucharistic meal involved that ritual’s mediation between meaning and materiality. As Christianity evolved, theologians remained alive to the ways in which the Eucharist elides referentiality and immanence, pointing toward divine principles even as it instantiates divine presence. Beginning in the ante-Nicene era, exegetes register this simultaneity of signification and immanence in commentaries on the Eucharist, as when Origen links the corporeal presence of Christ in the ritual meal with the principle of Christ’s providing spiritual nourishment to the worshipper through the nexus of the word: “Carnibus enim et sanguine verbi sui tanquam mundo cibo ac poto, potat et reficit omne hominum genus” [Surely by the flesh and blood of his word as clean food and drink, he refreshes and provides drink to the whole race of men].¹⁶ When Ignatius of Antioch, writing in the second century, speaks of “πίστει ὅ ἐστιν σὰϱζ τοῦ Kυϱίου, ϰαί ἐν ἀγάπῃ, ὅ ἐστιν αἵμα Ἰησοῦ Χϱιστοῦ” [faith, which is the flesh of the Lord, and charity, which is the blood of Jesus Christ] and advocates “πϱοσφυγὼν τῷ εὐαγγελίῳ ὡς σαϱϰὶ ᾿Iησοῦ” [taking refuge in the Gospel as the flesh of Jesus], he imagines the body of Christ as a metaphor for Christian doctrine itself, permeating all of Christian worship through the effectual mechanism of sacramental participation.¹⁷ A century later, Tertullian describes the rite in terms that collapse interpretation into the bodily encounter of ritual eating: “Itaque sermonem constituens vivificatorem, quia spiritus et vita sermo, eundem etiam carnem suam dixit, quia et sermo caro erat factus, proinde in causam vitae appetendus, et devorandus auditu, et ruminandus intellectu, et fide digerendus” [Establishing his word as vivifying, because his word is spirit and life, Christ also spoke of his flesh in the same way, because the Word became flesh; accordingly, to obtain life, we ought to crave him, and to devour him with our hearing, and to ruminate on him with our understanding, and to digest him by faith].¹⁸ And in the early third century, Clement of Alexandria offers a vivid sense of the Eucarist as a kind of immanent sign, a figure that makes use of the capacity of the flesh itself to serve as a site of representation: “σἀϱϰα ἡμῖν τὸ Πνεῦμα τὸ ἅγιον ἀλληγοϱεῖ· ϰαὶ γὰϱ ὑπ' αὑτοῦ δεδημιοὺϱγηται ἡ σἀϱξ· Aἷμα ἡμῖν τὸν Λόγον αἰνίττεται· ϰαὶ γὰϱ ώς αἷμα πλούσιον ὁ Λόγος ἑπιϰέχυται τῷ βίω” [The Spirit uses flesh as an allegory for us; for by him was the flesh created. Blood signifies through a veil the Word for us, for as rich blood the Word has been poured forth into our life].¹⁹ Clement’s use of “σάϱϰα,” whose carnal connotations are akin to “meat,” to describe the embodiment of spiritual ideas, locates in corporeal flesh the function of representing divine interventions into the world. In a later passage from the same treatise, Clement returns to the same terminology to elaborate on the ways in which the particular enfleshed signs of the sacrament manifest not only the body of Christ, but the abstract meaning of sacramental worship:

Διττὸν δὲ τὸ αἷμα τοῦ Κυϱίου· τὸ μὲν γὰϱ ἐστιν αὐτοῦ σαϱϰιϰόν, ᾧ τῆς ϕθοϱᾶς λελυτϱώμεθα, τὸ δὲ πνευματιϰὸν, τοῦτ' ἔστιν ᾧ ϰεχϱίσμεθα. Kαί τοῦτ' ἔστι πιεῖν τὸ αἷμα τοῦ Ἰησοῦ, τῆς ϰυϱιαϰῆς μεταλαβεῖν ἀφθαϱσίας· ἰσχὺς δὲ τοῦ λόγου τὸ πνεῦμα, ὡς αἷμα σαϱϰός. Ἁναλόγως τοίνυν ϰίϱναται ὁ μὲν οἶνος τῷ ὕδατι, τῷ δὲ ἀνθϱώπῳ τὸ πνεῦμα, ϰαὶ τὸ μὲν εἰς πίστιν εὐωχεῖ, τὸ ϰϱᾶμα, τὸ δὲ εἰς ἀφθαϱσίαν ὁδηγεῖ, τὸ πνεῦμα, ἡ δὲ ἀμφοῖν αὖθις ϰϱᾶσις ποτοῦ τε ϰαὶ λόγου εὐχαϱιστία ϰἐϰληται, χὰϱις ἐπαινουμἐνη ϰαὶ ϰαλή, ἧς οἱ ϰατὰ πίστιν μεταλαμβὰνοντες ἀγιάζονται ϰαὶ σῶμα ϰαὶ ψυχήν, τὸ θεῖον ϰϱᾶμα τὸν ἄνθϱωπον τοῦ πατϱιϰοῦ βουλήματος πνεύματι ϰαὶ λόγῳ συγϰιϱνάντος μυστιϰῶς· ϰαὶ γὰϱ ὡς ἀληθῶς μὲν τὸ πνεῦμα ᾠϰείωται τῇ ὑπ' αὑτοῦ ϕεϱομένῃ ψυχῇ, ἡ δὲ σὰϱξ τῷ λόγῳ, δι' ἣν ὁ λόγος γἐγονεν σὰϱξ.

[The blood of the Lord is double in nature. In one sense it is fleshly, that by which we have been redeemed from destruction. In another sense it is spiritual, that by which we have been anointed. To drink the blood of Jesus is to share in the Lord’s immortality; and the force of the Word is the Spirit, as the blood of the flesh. Thus as wine is mixed with water, just so is the Spirit mixed with man; the one, the mixture, quenches us to faith, and the other, the spirit, leads us to immortality; the mingling of both—of the drink and the Word—is called the Eucharist … and those who partake of it with faith are sanctified in both body and soul…. For truly the Spirit cleaves to the soul that is moved by it, and the flesh to the Word, for which purpose the Word became flesh.]²⁰

Clement’s reading exemplifies the interdependence of figuration and corporeality in the sacrament. He identifies the different senses by which the Eucharist manifests the divine as physical and spiritual, and argues that the partaker experiences a transformation in both body and soul. That is to say, Clement, like other early thinkers about the Eucharist, views the sacrament as both a fleshly and a referential event, signifying both in the drink and the word.

Though these early Christian writers tend to display a notable, almost programmatic, reserve regarding the operation of the Eucharist, preferring mystery to speculation on the precise mode of sacramental physics, their commentary consistently recognizes the special significative status of the eucharistic elements. The ritual has ever been understood as a ceremony deeply invested in representation, and historical divisions in eucharistic theology arise precisely over questions of signification—that is, of how a sign manifests meaning. And while the variety of opinion on the manner and mode of signification in the sacrament dispels any illusion that Christianity enjoyed, even long before the Reformation, a monolithic and uncomplicated understanding of the rite, much of the diversity of opinion from the early medieval church through the era of Reformation can be traced to the competing influences of Ambrose of Milan and Augustine of Hippo.²¹ In his fourth-century treatise on the Eucharist, De sacramentis, Ambrose emphasizes the identity of sign and signified as the sacrament’s primary event: “Ergo, tibi ut respondeam, non erat corpus Christi ante consecrationem, sed post consecrationem dico tibi quia iam corpus est Christi. Ipse dixit et factum est, ipse mandauit et creatum est” [Thus, so that I answer you, there was no body of Christ before the consecration, but after the consecration I say to you that there is now the body of Christ. He himself said it and it is done; he himself commanded and it is established].²²

Ambrose commits his understanding of the Eucharist to a kind of hermeneutic certainty, in which the sign is secured to its signified: the ritual elements are substantially identical to the body of Christ, the words of institution are identical to their accomplishment. But writing as a rough contemporary to Ambrose, Augustine proposes a formulation of the ritual that allows for a degree of referentiality, the sign indicating its signified as a figure or metaphor, as when he recalls that the Last Supper was a festive event “in quo corporis et sanguinis sui figuram discipluis commendavit et tradidit” [in which he delivered and entrusted to his disciples the figure of his body and blood].²³ In his De Doctrina Christiana, Augustine elaborates on his use of the term “figuram” to describe the sacramental event:

Si praeceptiva locution est aut flagitium aut facinus vetans, aut utilitatem aut beneficentiam jubens, non est figurate. Si autem flagitium aut facinus videtur jubere, aut utilitatem aut beneficentiam vetare, figurate est. Nisi manducaveritis, inquit, carnem filii hominis, et sanguine biberitis, non habebitis vitam in vobis (Joan. VI, 54). Facinus vel flagitium videtur jubere: figura est ergo, praecipiens passione dominicae communicandum, et suaviter atque utiliter recondendum in memoria quod pro nobis caro ejus crucifixa et vulnerata sit. [If a commandment prohibits that which is shameful or villainous, or orders what is useful or beneficial, it is not figurative. But if it seems to order what is shameful or villanous, or to prohibit what is useful or beneficial, it is figurative. Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, scripture says, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you (John 6.54). This seems to order what is villainous or shameful: it is a figure, therefore, commanding communion in the passion of the Lord, and that there is to be a sweet and useful recollection in the memory that for us his flesh was crucified and wounded.]²⁴

Here, Augustine foregrounds the referential qualities of the sacramental rite, designed to activate in the worshipper an awareness of sacrifice and mercy. And yet this figure is distinct from other kinds of signs because of the ways in which it commands “communicandum”—both communication and communion together—a representational and experiential sharing in Christ’s passion that is unavailable in other signs. Indeed, Augustine argues, “Diximus enim, fraters, hoc Dominum commendasse in manducatione carnis suae et potatione sanguinis sui, ut in illo maneamus, et ipse in nobis” [We have said, brothers, that the Lord commended to us the chewing of his body and the drinking of his blood, so that we might remain in him, and he in us].²⁵

Despite his affirmation of a materially efficacious sacrament containing the corporeal presence of Christ, Augustine’s discomfited reflection that the conversion of the elements of bread and wine to Christ’s body seems shameful helped, a millennium later, to fuel Reformation attacks on what was canonized during the thirteenth century as the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. According to this doctrine, whose articulation is as much indebted to Ambrose as to Aristotle, the substance or essence of the elements undergoes a change while the bread and wine remain present to the senses as accidents or forms. As Thomas Aquinas explicates it, in the Summa Theologiae’s meticulous and definitive codification of transubstantiation, Christ “per veritatem corporis et sanguinis sui nos sibi conjungit in hoc sacramento” [joins us to himself in this sacrament in the reality of his flesh and blood]. Aquinas distinguishes the Eucharist as a special category of signs, differing even from other sacraments in that “in aliis sacramentis non est ipse Christus realiter, sicut in hoc sacramento” [In the other sacraments we have not got Christ himself really, as we have in this sacrament]. He makes clear that he is not speaking about Christ’s being represented in the elements in some figural fashion: “Per quod non intelligimus quod Christus sit ibi solum sicut in signo, licet sacramentum sit in genere signe: sed intelligimus corpus Christi hic esse, sicut dictum est, secundum proprium modum huic sacramento” [In saying this we do not mean that Christ is only symbolically there, although it is true that every sacrament is a sign, but we understand that Christ’s body is there, as we have said, in a way that is proper to this sacrament]. And yet, Aquinas explains, the sacramental presence of Christ in the eucharistic elements relies on the operation of a figure, the bread and wine serving as a means by which Christ can be comprehended. Aquinas defines sacramental signs as serving a particular significative function, one that communicates a sacred term to human perception:

Signa dantur hominibus, quorum est per nota ad ignota pervenire. Et ideo proprie dicitur sacramentum quod est signum alicuius rei sacrae ad homines pertinentis, ut scilicet proprie dicatur sacramentum, secundum quod nunc de sacramentis loquimur, quod est signum rei sacrae inquantum est sanctificans homines.

[Signs are given to men. Now it is characteristic of men that they achieve an awareness of things which they do not known through things which they do know. Hence the term “sacrament” is properly applied to that which is a sign of some sacred reality pertaining to men; or—to define the special sense in which the term “sacrament” is being used in our present discussion of the sacraments—it is applied to that which is a sign of a sacred reality inasmuch as it has the property of sanctifying men.]

As Aquinas stipulates, the sacramental sign does not present its signified to the senses, but like any other sign, it requires interpretation: “Dicendum quod duplex est oculus scilicet corporalis, proprie dictus et intellectualis, qui per similitudinem dicitur. A nullo autem oculo corporali corpus Christi potest videri prout est in hoc sacramento … sed solo intellectu, qui dicitur oculus spiritualis” [There are two kinds of eyes, the eye of the body, properly so called, and the eye of the intelligence, called so by analogy. The body of Christ, as it is under this sacrament, cannot be seen by any bodily eye…. It is only open to the intellect, which may be called a spiritual eye]. For Aquinas, Christ’s body, which is substantially present albeit patently not perceptible by means of the senses, is apprehended by means of a “similitudinem” or figure. Aquinas locates the effective power of the sacrament in the virtue of christic presence even as he delineates the ways in which the communicant engages interpretively with the sacramental elements. This is to say that in the Thomist formulation, the sign is understood simultaneously as a figure or similitude and as an object whose value is inherent by virtue of its identity with the substance of Christ’s body. Even as this formulation invites an interpretive encounter with the eucharistic elements, which indicate figurally the principles of spiritual nourishment, charity, mercy, and sacrifice, as well as the abiding presence of Christ during what Aquinas calls the “peregrinatione,” or pilgrimage, of life,²⁶ it also asserts that the sign has essential and efficacious meaning in and of itself because it has become sacramentally identical to the body of Christ.

Throughout the centuries of Christianity leading up to the Reformation, the Sacrament of the Altar is treated as an event in which corporeal experience is not extricable from hermeneutic activity, the perceptible sign not disseverable from its holy signified. Early exegetical writings on the Eucharist display a remarkable willingness to allow the materialist and figural valences of the ritual to maintain themselves in fruitful tension with one another. Indeed, the doctrine of transubstantiation is, as Thomas makes clear, entirely dependent upon a set of analogical associations: the body of Christ is unavailable to the bodily eye, but it is made present by means of a symbolic figure; likewise, the more figural perspective on the sacrament’s effects, described so influentially by Augustine, is secured by the good bishop’s insistence on the substantial reality of the divine body figured forth in bread and wine. And while it is plainly inaccurate to consider sixteenth-century Protestantism as a cohesive organization united in doctrine and creed, or to imagine, as Ross seems to do, that the sacramental program of the Reformation was to create irremediable lines of division between body and spirit, yet it is not too much to observe that as currents of receptionism and memorialism were introduced ever more fervently into the theological conversation over the course of the sixteenth century, it became increasingly possible to conceive of a sacramental system in which the referential meaning of signs may be divorced from the signs themselves. Where in the Lateran Council’s doctrinal canonization of transubstantiation the elements of the sacrament are transformed in essence into the body of Christ, sixteenth-century challenges to that formulation called into question the manner of association between corporeality and the spirit, and interrogated the material reality of Christ’s presence in the sacramental signs. In working through shifting conceptions of the significative status of the physical world, Reformation debates about the sacrament—the defining controversy of the Reformation itself—focus precisely on the relationship between signs and signifieds, presence and representation, materiality and tropology. To put it another way, the history of eucharistic theology in the sixteenth century is a history of theories about the operations of signification and figuration.

The shared investments of sacramental theology and language are confronted directly by Swiss reformer Huldreich Zwingli, whose paradigm-shifting assertions about the nature of the Eucharist are based explicitly in the figural qualities of linguistic representation. Zwingli and his followers contend that the sacrament functions as a trope, as “sacrae rei, hoc est factae gratuae signum. Credo esse invisibilis gratiae, quae scilicit dei munere facta & data est, visibilem figuram sive formam, hoc est visibile exemplum, quod tamen fere analogiam quandam rei per spiritum” [a sign of a sacred thing, i.e., of grace that has been given. I believe that it is a visible figure or form of the invisible grace, provided and bestowed by God’s bounty; i.e., a visible example which presents an analogy to something done by the Spirit].²⁷ He elaborates:

Ex his enim fit manifestissimum quod veteres semper symbolice locuti cum corporis Christi in coena esui tantum tribuerunt, puta, non quod sacramentalis manducatio mundare animum posset, sed fides in deum per Iesum Christum, quae spiritualis est manducatio, cuius externa ista symbolum est & adumbratio. Et quemadmodum panis corpus sustinet, vinum vegetat, et exhilarat, sic animum firmat & certum facit de misericordia dei, quod filium suum nobis dedit.

[It becomes very evident that the ancients always spoke figuratively when they attributed so much to the eating of the body of Christ in the Supper meaning, not that sacramental eating could cleanse the soul but faith in God through Jesus Christ, which is spiritual eating, whereof this external eating is but symbol and show. And as bread sustains the body and wine enlivens and exhilarates, thus it strengthens the soul and assures it of God’s mercy that he has given us his son.]²⁸

For Zwingli, the communicant, while considering the sacramental elements, is provoked to reflect on the divine principles of cleansing and sustenance to which the signs refer, an association that even in its evacuation of divine presence endows the signs of bread and wine with special value. As Zwingli explains elsewhere,

Res arduas significant. Ascendit autem euiusq; signi pretium cum aestimatione rei cuius est signum. Ut si res sit magna, pretiosa, et amplifica, iam signum eius rei eo maius reputetur…. Sic panis & vinum amicitiae illus quo deus humano generi per filium suum reconciliatus est, symbola sunt, quae non aestimamus pro materiae oretuim sed iuxta significatae rei magnitudinem.

[They signify sublime things. Now the value of every sign increases with the worth of the thing of which it is the sign, so that if the thing be great, precious, and sublime, its sign is, therefore, accounted the greater…. So the bread and wine are the symbols of that friendship by which God has been reconciled to the human race through his Son, and we value them not according to the price of the material but according to the greatness of the thing signified.]²⁹

By amplifying the concept of referentiality in the Eucharist, Zwingli paradoxically foregrounds the sign qua sign—that is to say, in correlating the objective value of the sign to the thing it signifies, Zwingli also recognizes that a sign itself has an objective value. Indeed, the intrinsic value of the sign as a material object provides the means by which we comprehend the signified:

Visus cum panem videt ac calicem … Christum enim velut ante oculos conspicit, quem mens eius inflammata pulchritudine deperit. Tactus panem in manus sumit, qui iam nÕ panis sed Christus est significatione. Gustus Olfacts’q; & ipsi huc advocantur, ut odorent quam suavis sit dominus, quam’q; beatus sit qui in illo fidit.

[When the sight sees the bread and cup … it sees Christ, as it were, before the eyes, as the heart, kindled by His beauty, languishes for Him. The touch takes the bread into its hands—the bread which is no longer bread but Christ by representation. The taste and smell are brought in to scent the sweetness of the Lord and the happiness of his that trusteth in Him.]³⁰

Though those opposed to Zwingli’s sacramental theology dismiss his ritual symbolary as “bare tokens,”³¹ Zwingli’s explication of the tropes of the Eucharist postulates the sign as crucial because it is the material object of encounter, because it must be confronted as the apprehensible term of a hermeneutic act distinct from but assistive to its content. His formulation, shifting from one model of interpretive event to another, from sensorily imperceptible corporeal change to figurative memorialism, asserts the matter of the bread and wine as objects for meaningful sensory engagement, an approach that recognizes the sign itself—in and beyond its referential function—as a legitimate site of sacramental participation.³²

Zwingli’s contentions turn the attention of Reformation theologians upon the question of the precise manner in which a sign interacts with its content, and upon the phenomenon of signification generally; in one way or another, each of the developing strains of sacramental theology over the course of the sixteenth century responds to the Zwinglian perspective, and thereby engages in a debate about the significative qualities of materiality. A generation after Zwingli’s period of greatest productivity, John Calvin situated his own view of the sacrament against what he considered the errors of both Zurich and Rome, warning, “ne aut in extenuandis signis nimii, a suis mysteriis ea divellere, quibus quodammodo annexa sunt: aut in iisdem extollendis immedici, mysteria interim etiam ipsa nonnihil obscurare videamur” [neither let us be seen diminishing the signs overmuch by wresting them from the mysteries to which they are in some fashion connected; nor extolling them immoderately so as to obscure in some way the mysteries themselves]. As he defines his position against these perceived misformulations of the sacrament, Calvin reveals that his primary anxiety concerns, again, the status of the sacramental elements as signs. The Lord’s Supper, Calvin argues, offers a tangible symbol or seal of grace, which “rem illic signatam effert et exhibet” [offers and exhibits the reality there signified]. It is against the specter of Zwingli’s argument that Calvin commits himself most explicitly when he takes up the question of referentiality and metaphor, parsing out the immanent meaningfulness of the eucharistic signs in and of themselves. It is worth quoting Calvin’s rather lengthy articulation of the relationship between the “symbolum” of bread and the “res,” or real thing, it symbolizes:

Nec est, quod obiiciat quispiam figuratam esse loquutionem, qua signatae rei nomen signo deferatur. Fateor sane, fractionem panis symbolum esse, non rem ipsam. Verum hoc posito, a symboli tamen exhibitione rem ipsam exhiberi, rite colligemus …. Itaque si per fractionem panis Dominus corporis sui participationem vere repraesentat, minime dubium esse debet, quin vere praestet atque exhibeat. Atque omnino istaec piis tenenda regula est, ut quoties symbola vident a Domino instituta, illic rei signatae veritatem adesse certo cogitent ac sibi persuadeant. Quorsum enim corporis sui symbolum tibi Dominus in manum porrigat, nisi ut de vera eius participatione te certiorem faciat? Quodsi verum est, praeberi nobis signum visibile ad obsignandam invisibilis rei donationem, accepto corporis symbolo, non minus corpus etiam ipsum nobis dari certo confidamus.

[Nobody can object that this is a figurative expression by which the name of the thing signified is given to the sign. Indeed, I acknowledge the breaking of bread to be a symbol, not the thing itself. But having posted this, we nevertheless infer that by the showing of the symbol the thing itself is also shown…. Therefore, if through the breaking of bread the Lord represents the participation of his body, there ought not to be the slightest doubt that he truly presents and shows himself therein. And the pious ought by all means to hold to this rule, that whenever they see symbols appointed by the Lord, they should think and be persuaded that the truth of the thing signified is certainly present there. Why should the Lord put in your hand the symbol of his body, except to make certain his true participation in it? But if it is true, that to us a visible sign is offered to seal the gift of a thing invisible, when the symbol of the body has been received, let us trust with just such a certainty that the body itself is also given to us.]³³

As Calvin takes care to distinguish the “figuratum” of Zwingli’s referential sacrament from the “symbolum” of a sacrament in which God is actually present, he lays out a ritual in which signs become mysteriously and efficaciously substantial. In asserting elsewhere that “the inward substance of the sacrament is annexed to the visible signs,” Calvin argues for a material encounter with the signs themselves because the reality they signify inheres in them.³⁴ Where Zwingli argues that the sign demands to be addressed as a distinct and assistive reality, Calvin insists that the “symbolum” manifests the fullness of the “res.” This recognition leads Calvin into an argument that has aesthetic implications: “Hac ratione Augustinus sacramentum verbum visibile nuncupat: quod Dei promissiones velut in tabula depictas repraesentet, et sub aspectum graphice atque είϰονιϰώς expressas statuat” [For this reason Augustine calls a sacrament a visible word: because it represents the promises of God just as if they were depicted in a picture, and places beneath our gazes an icon, a verisimilitude masterfully expressed].³⁵ Calvin’s comparison registers the proximity between the symbolic action of the sacrament and the symbolic action of art, a similarity that does not differentiate the literary from the pictorial. Indeed, by understanding both eucharistic and verbal signs as kinds of icon, Calvin foregrounds their physical valences, offering a conception of signs that maintains their visual presence, their perceptible materiality. From this perspective, the sacramental elements are experienced as aesthetic objects of devotion, appealing to the spiritual precisely because they are material.

It is this legacy to which the English divines of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries are heir. As the Elizabethan church formulates its developing position out of wildly divergent confessional affinities, its theologians are at pains to justify a persistent sense that the eucharistic signs matter, in both senses of that term—that the bread and wine are both significant and significantly material. Mid-century reformer Nicholas Ridley, who rejects a doctrine of Real Presence, also rejects a view of the sacramental elements as “common baken bread … a bare sign, or a figure, to represent Christ, none otherwise than the ivy-bush doth represent the wine in a tavern; or as a vile person gorgeously apparelled may represent a king or a prince in a play”; rather, he asserts, Christ is effectually present in the bread in “the propertie of hys substance.”³⁶ Edwin Sandys, who would become Archbishop of York under Elizabeth, calls the sacrament “a figure effectual,”³⁷ and the Thirty-Nine Articles adopt similar language, describing sacraments as “effectual signs” even as they insist that “The body of Christ is given, taken, and eaten, in the supper, only after an heavenly and spiritual manner.”³⁸ Richard Hooker’s moderate synthesis of an ecclesiastical standard promotes a clear receptionism, but continues to dwell upon the importance of the sacramental elements for spiritual participation: “The breade and Cup are his body and bloud because they are causes instrumentall vpon the receipt whereof the participation of his body and bloude ensueth. For that which produceth any certaine effect is not vainely nor improperly said to be that very effect wherunto it tendeth. Euery cause is in the effect which groweth from it.” The bread and wine are here “instrumentall,” each conceivable as a cause distinct from but effectually bound to the end it produces: “to us they are thereby made such instrumentes as misticallie yet truely, inuisibliy yet really worke our communion or fellowship with the person of Iesus Christ.” And even as Hooker states clearly that the body and blood of Christ are “onely in the very hart and soule of him which receiueth them,” the statement immediately following this receptionist declaration emphasizes that the elements are remarkable for the significatory work they do: “As for the Sacraments they really exhibit … that grace which with them or by them it pleaseth God to bestow.”³⁹ That Hooker commends the capacity of the sacramental elements to “really exhibit” reveals the peculiar materiality of their instrumental force: it is precisely because the bread and wine are material, apprehensible objects that they can serve a sacramental function, manifesting the divine through their corporeality. Indeed, Lancelot Andrewes explicitly identifies the eucharistic elements as embodying “a kind of hypostatical union of the sign and the thing signified,” and extends this association further, determining that the signifying properties of sacramental elements make them akin to Christ in his incarnation: “even as in the Eucharist neither part is evacuate or turned into the other, but abide each still in his former nature and substance … each nature remaineth still full and whole in his own kind. And backwards; as the two natures in Christ, so the signum and signatum in the Sacrament, e converso.”⁴⁰

Andrewes’s sermon makes clear that these questions of how signs mean reflect ultimately on the spiritual status of the material. The perceptible objects of bread and wine in eucharistic worship guarantee the immanence of the divine in the physical world, but in the perceptual absence of their holy signified, the sacramental elements and one’s encounter with them become the nexus of spiritual engagement. The sign becomes, in eucharistic worship, the principle of presence, and thus the object not only of interpretation but, as we have seen, of anxiety, obsession, and desire. Ryan Netzley has persuasively argued that the sacrament posits not the problem of divine absence but the problem of immanent desire. His 2011 study Reading, Desire, and the Eucharist in Early Modern Religious Poetry investigates the challenge of approaching the sacrament with the appropriate recognition of the fullness of presence, a stance made necessary given that “even the theological underpinnings of this communion ritual foreground the problem of desiring signs and seals in their own right.” Netzley uses the model of desire offered by the Eucharist—that is, desiring a sign for its own sake—to explore its effects on reading, and argues that the poetry of the early seventeenth century is invested in treating the activities of both desiring and reading themselves as “intrinsically valuable devotional practices.”⁴¹ In its adroit claim that eucharistic theology influences reading practices, Netzley’s argument delineates the ways in which receptionism transfers readily from the sacramental to the textual. His work invites the logically prior question of how Reformation eucharistic theology influences representational practices by reconceiving the sign as intrinsically valuable. For as religious reformers emphasize the capacity of signs as such to be meaningful, or perhaps meaning-full, they outline the parameters of a plenitudinous symbology that redounds to the literary. The Reformation drives, and is driven by, an unprecedentedly vigorous and systemic public discussion about signification, one that takes as its central focus of interrogation the vexed relationship between being and meaning. The model of devotion that emerges out of sixteenth century theology is, finally, textual.

In the wake of such a sustained controversy in which sublimity, materiality, and signification itself are fused together, it should come as no surprise that the questions at the heart of these disputes should ramify into poetry. Lyric poetry in general and the devotional lyric in particular are dedicated to the principle of evoking presence, and it is inevitable that such an enterprise would respond to such explicit and enduring pressures on the mode and manner of signification in this ritual of presence. For post-Reformation writers, the Eucharist stands not only as the central sacrament of Christian worship and the fiercest flashpoint of Reformation dispute, but also as the sacrament whose efficacy is understood to be contingent on questions of signification and the matter (again, in both senses of that term) of words. Nor is it adequate to suggest that the poetic effects of this controversy are confessionally limited—to claim, for example, that post-Reformation poetry exhibits a distinctly Protestant poetics in its word-centered pieties, or that it clings bravely to an imperiled Catholic system of valorized materiality. It is more accurate to say that post-Reformation poetry is self-consciously engaged with its own capacities—and failures—to manifest presence, and thus registers vividly the ways in which signification informs and is informed by eucharistic controversy. Indeed, when we consider Schwartz’s passing remark that “While theologians argued about the status of signs in the Eucharist … the mysteries of the Eucharist gave Reformation poets little difficulty,” that assertion becomes increasingly puzzling.⁴² For, as we have seen, the status of signs is inextricable from the central mystery of the Eucharist, and in displaying an obsessive concern with that mystery in its very poetics, the seventeenth-century lyric announces its difficult theological inheritance. Particularly in the devotional lyric of the English seventeenth century, poets confront directly and explicitly the presence-making capacities of the tangible sign, and probe the relationship between the unsublimable materiality of the text and its potential as an instrument of referentiality.

As a genre, poetry is distinguished by the ways in which it generally emphasizes the communicative properties of its nondenotative features to produce a self-aware and objective textuality, a self-affirming textual objecthood.⁴³ That is to say, poetry is a formal practice fundamentally invested in the substantiality of its own medium, not only as a mechanism for generating referentiality, narration, mimesis, and other discursive acts but for its own sake. Indeed, the dynamic interaction of referentiality and materiality underwrites poetic utterance, as on the one hand the designative function suggests the transparency of the word, while on the other hand the formal conspicuities of poetic language intrude into that designative function, asserting the word as a sonic, rhythmic, and spatial object. As Mutlu Konuk Blasing writes, “The incommensurability of the semiotic/formal and the semantic/symbolic systems is perceivable as an immediate experience in poetic language, for they work at each other’s expense. A poem, far from being a text where sound and sense, form and meaning, are indissolubly one, is a text where we witness the distinct operations of the two systems. We cannot do both at once, and poetic language will not allow us to ignore either system.”⁴⁴ As poetry elaborates its devices into the sensorium, it destabilizes the referential function of words, an interplay that trains hermeneutic attention on the linguistic surface, thwarting interpretive transparency. Formal patterns of recurrence rely on corporeally available qualities of language: schemes using rhyme and alliteration, assonance and consonance, and the alternating and variable stress patterns of meter contribute to the semantic meaning of a poem, but they do not themselves constitute semantic meaning. Likewise, the positioning of words on a page, including but not limited to the line breaks that interrupt the horizontal progress of language and activate perceptions of the spatiality of text, intrudes into the accumulation of semiotic information. These features interpose a textual substantiality that resists being “read through” to some stable and defined “real meaning” or content. Similarly, figurative language emphasizes the estrangement or incommensurability of the terms which it links, irrupting as difference into the conciliatory urges of meaning-making.⁴⁵ In Blasing’s terms, these poetic processes work to “foreground the mechanism of the code” because they present to the apprehension language per se, as an artifact of encounter.⁴⁶ It would not be inappropriate here to reframe this theoretics in the language of Reformation theology: such features work to emphasize the sign as effectual, and meaning-full, objects as such—that is, objects in which significance inheres.

Though the field of his primary study is some centuries removed from early modern England, Charles Bernstein’s analysis of the extent to which poetry foregrounds its own presence on the page is particularly relevant to the poetics that develops out of the Reformation and is influenced by that era’s renegotiations of the capacities of the sign to manifest immanence. (Again, it is precisely to my point to note that Bernstein’s diction sounds a strong echo to the theological treatises of the sixteenth century.) The mark on the page, argues Bernstein,

is the visible sign of writing.

But reading, insofar as it consumes &

absorbs the mark, erases it—the words disappear

(the transparency effect) & are replaced by

that which they depict, their “meaning” … Antiabsorptive

writing recuperates the mark by making it opaque,

that is, by maintaining its visibility

& undermining its meaning, where “meaning” is

understood in the narrower, utilitarian sense

of a restricted economy.⁴⁷

As what Bernstein calls “antiabsorptive” writing foregrounds the nondenotative qualities of its language, it impedes “the transparency effect,” in which meaning is conceived as somehow standing behind the words, waiting to be claimed. Antiabsorptive writing must be negotiated not merely as a set of referential signs but as an object, which status confers presence rather than implying absence (e.g., the absence, among other things, of the signified):

The visibility of words

as a precondition of reading

necessitates that words obtrude impermeably into

the world…. The thickness

of words ensures that whatever

of their physicality is erased, or engulfed, in

the process of semantic projection,

a residue

tenaciously in-

heres that will not be sublimated

away.⁴⁸

Moreover, as Bernstein goes on to suggest, as poetic utterance both invites an encounter with semantic absorption and frustrates that encounter by dint of its opaque objecthood, the intersection of those registers of textual experience “is precisely / flesh,”—or, more precisely, it is “the flesh of the word”:

The tenacity of

writing’s thickness, like the body’s

flesh, is

ineradicable….

The thickness of writing between

the reader & the poem is constitutive for the poem

of its visibility & for the reader

of the outer limit of his or her absorption

in the poem; it is not an obstacle

between them, it is their means

of communication.⁴⁹

Those features that prevent readerly absorption into a poem, that prevent the poetic text from yielding transparently to “meaning,” do not prevent the matter of the poem, as Bernstein observes here; they constitute the matter of the poem.

In the lyric mode, this general poetic investment in presencing capacities of language extends to the manifestation of the lyric subject or “I,” the speaker who functions in the poem as the principle of aesthetic presence. That is, in the lyric poem, the speaker serves as an embodiment of the concern with making present to the senses that which is phenomenally absent. Susan Stewart connects the speaker’s position with the significative operation of language explicitly. The central concern of the lyric, she argues, is “to make visible, tangible, and audible the figures of persons” as a strategy against what she identifies as the central crisis of the lyric: “the fading of the referent.” In this light, those poetic devices of prosody, form, sound, and so forth become strategies of recuperation as well as presence, lineamenting an otherwise perceptually absent speaker in perceptible structures. Stewart calls these elements “The poet’s recompense” because the sense impressions they produce ensure that the poetic encounter is an essentially material one; this material encounter is not limited to the matter of the book with its pages and ink (though these qualities certainly shape a literary encounter) but extends to include these strategies by which the signs of language are concrete and perceptible manifestations of the imperceptible.⁵⁰ On this point, Stewart’s argument is indebted to Allen Grossman’s Summa Lyrica, whose foundational claim is that “Poetry is language in which the eidetic function is prior to all other functions. Indeed, the meaning of most claims for poetic language (that it is ‘divine,’ ‘primordial,’ etc.) is that poetic language, by contrast to other kinds of language, has no other function than the eidetic function.”⁵¹ As Grossman articulates it, all the tools of poetic language serve to manifest presence, the presence of the poem itself, and of the speaker whose presence is co-terminous with the poem’s. Working to this end, the nonreferential components of poetic speech—again, rhyme, meter, structure, figure, and so forth—become epiphanic instruments in that they constitute and reveal the poem, making it present to the reader.

The lyric’s fundamental concern with what Grossman calls “the presence of presence” produces a state of affairs in which the assertively nonreferential mechanisms of poetic devices define the text’s substantial form. The principle of presence in the lyric thus is delineated within the energetic exchange between the semantic impulse toward the signified and the irrepressible materiality of the sign. The similarities between the priorities of the lyric poem and the notion of a Real Presence in the sacrament are clear. For the Eucharist too is primarily concerned with “the presence of presence,” and with the capacities of material figures to present presence, as it were, in recompense for the promised but ultimately imperceptible reality of Christ’s physical body.⁵² Indeed, following Grossman and Stewart, it might be said that this sacrament is a ritual in which the eidetic function is prior to all other functions. The eucharistic event, at its most basic level, involves the worshipper’s encounter with material signs for the substance of the body of Christ. The body of the communicant becomes an apparatus by which Christ’s body can be both affirmed and meaningfully manifest, a site wherein presence matters. Again, this relational corporeality is reflected in the lyric, in which the structural investments of poetic language mandate a particularly bodily mode of engagement with the text on the part of the reader. Since presence is effected in the poem by means of sensorily apprehensible structures, the reader’s body is enlisted as a device for registering that presence. In lyric poetry, as in the Eucharist, corporeality is an intrinsic component of the system of representation. It is, as Bernstein says, “their means / of communication.”

Reformation-era sparring over the operation of the Eucharist offers, as we have seen, a range of opinions regarding the status of signs and, by implication, the role of the material in sacramental worship. But as reformers diverge from the Lateran dogma of the Eucharist, it is precisely the mode by which “the presence of presence” is achieved that becomes destabilized. By calling into question the manner of sacramental presence, the eucharistic debates of the early modern period disclose the ontological disjunction between sacramental signs and their divine referents. And while sixteenth-century exegetes were not unaware of what we would now call the semiotic consequences of their controversy (even this chapter’s cursory survey of Reformation writings on the Eucharist reads like a veritable primer in semiotics!), it is in the poetry of the post-Reformation period that these consequences are most fully registered. For in their fixation on the perceptual absence of Christ’s body and on the mechanisms by which that absence is redressed, and in their reimagining of the Eucharist’s underlying assumptions regarding the capacity of signs to manifest corporeal presence, reformers interrogate the very phenomena that animate lyric poetry.

Lyric poetry in early modern England begins to exhibit a suite of characteristics that can only be understood as a direct response to Reformation controversies over the Eucharist. And while the effects of this reaction can be felt in sacred and secular poetry alike, they are most pointedly evident in the devotional lyric, which not coincidentally emerges in English poetry in an extraordinary efflorescence during the early seventeenth century. Certainly, a number of factors contributed to the development of such a strong tradition of devotional poetry, including the availability of the Bible as both a generic sourcebook and a common storehouse of phrases and stories, and the humanist revitalization of the idea that the poet is a kind of inspired prophet, uniquely qualified to address divine things.⁵³ Such cultural conditions doubtless go some way toward explaining the predominance of devotional writing in the period, but they do not account for the startling development, in the seventeenth-century English lyric, of poetic strategies that simultaneously assert the linguistic sign as an intractable and unsublimable object and the central role of the body as a communicative and a perceptual instrument.⁵⁴ The persistence of this trend over the course of the seventeenth century and across confessional divides argues against attributing this development to a broadly defined tradition of Protestant poetics; neither can we align it with some generalized nostalgia for the theological certainties of pre-Reformation religion. Rather, the Reformation’s long dispute about the mechanics of sacramental worship catalyzes a poetics that foregrounds the ritual’s inherent tensions between material surface and imperceptible substance, between sign and signified, between flesh and spirit, a poetics remarkably attuned to the complicated interdependence of the body and the word.

The phenomenon I wish to address here is, again, not some preponderance of talk about the body in seventeenth-century poetry, nor am I interested in locating in the early modern lyric tradition a set of theological treatises with line breaks. Indeed, if theological argument is the goal, poetry offers a circumlocuting and inefficient means to such an end. Instead, I wish to demonstrate that the seventeenth century witnesses the development in English poetry of particular poetic strategies that directly respond to the hermeneutic challenges of sacramental worship and replicate its conflicts. Though I will naturally attend to the arguments of poems, this study’s primary concern involves poetics as opposed to thematic content; for, as Brian Cummings observes, “It is at the surface of discourse that the nexus of grammar and grace is found. It is here that the anxieties and tensions of early modern religion are revealed.”⁵⁵ The poetry of the period, especially when it addresses devotional concerns, deploys a set of structural and representational tactics that emphasize the objecthood of language, both as material artifact on the page and as representational surface. Seventeenth-century poetry displays a marked unwillingness to allow the word to become a mere transparent conduit to some imperceptible referent, rather asserting the priority of the sign and problematizing its relationship to any signified. The poetry of Donne, Herbert, and other writers of the period exhibits a strange fixation on the physicalizing potentialities of its own language, calling attention to the lineaments of structure, prosody, and sound even as it probes the capacity of language to function symbolically. The effect of these strategies in concert is to arrest readerly absorption—that is, to prevent the dissolution of the sign into the signified, the word into content. The antiabsorptive turn in the post-Reformation lyric asserts the significance of the material in the representational ground, and so conserves in the material a mechanism for presence. To put it another way, by maintaining readerly awareness of the substantiality of words, the post-Reformation lyric provides an event in which reading becomes an encounter with fully present signs.

The substantiality of poetic elements, already crucial to the presencing project of the lyric, are in post-Reformation poetry enlisted into a program of corporealized signification urgently connected to the theological developments of the sixteenth century. By exploring the poetic effects of the materiality of the word, both ontologically and receptionally, the poetics that develops during the early seventeenth century negotiates the same difficulties that animated sacramental reforms. Like the Eucharist itself, such a poetics explores its own capacity to actualize presence, for in the same way that the sacrament is ultimately concerned with reenacting or recalling Christ’s Incarnation by manifesting divinity in the material world, seventeenth-century poetry implements a poetics radically invested in plumbing the representational reach of the Word made flesh. And just as Reformation debates about the operation of the Eucharist seek to resolve the ways in which presence inheres in the representational scheme of the sacrament, the devotional poetry of the seventeenth century proclaims its investment in the incarnational capacity of language to realize presence. The seventeenth-century lyric witnesses the development of a set of poetic strategies provocatively resistant to spiritualized readings—that is, readings that would displace the object for its meaning, the sign for the signified. The eucharistic poetics of the seventeenth century react to the rhetorical implications of sacramental discourse in which the presence of the Word becomes extricable from the presentational capacities of the word.

Made Flesh charts the ways in which seventeenth-century poetic practice negotiates the strange triangulation of body, word, and meaning in the Sacrament of the Altar and effectively reproduces the interpretive challenges of sacramental worship. In the materially invested poetics of the post-Reformation period in England, presence is asserted as a perceptual phenomenon, and the axis of presence is relocated from the signified to the sign itself. In accomplishing such a shift, this poetics ensures the interpretive persistence, the significance, of the material in the face of the precarious sacramentality of the phenomenal world. The material becomes thus a recourse against the perceptual inapprehensibility of sacramental presence, and holds out the promise of holy immanence in the world, of the very kind established by the Incarnation itself. Indeed, it might be tempting to label this poetics as incarnational rather than as eucharistic were it not for the pervasive concern with the activity of representation in both poems and sacrament—a correspondence amplified when the poems address explicitly the manner of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist and the mode of its operation. Though that theological commentary may be inconsistent from poem to poem, and though the poetics of a poem often complicates, subverts, or belies its theological assertions, devotional poetry’s thematic awareness of the theological and representational issues in play in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper makes it a lively platform for observing eucharistic poetics at work. These texts provide a richly self-aware sample of peculiar poetic strategies designed to disrupt the transparent action of interpretation and to make of reading a bodily event, one that finally sustains the material as a site of immanent presence.

This study limits the primary field of its survey to the devotional poetry of the seventeenth century, though, as my concluding chapter will demonstrate, the poetic developments I trace here ramify into the broader poetic landscape and inform the production of poetry for centuries to come. Chapters 1 and 2 of this book explore one mode of poetic response to the problem of absent presence, in which the communicative properties of poetic structure are marshaled as a means of securing the lyric event to its textual substantiality. As a sensorily apprehensible set of signs that lineament presence, the poetic text has an a priori investment in the ways in which form itself communicates, and in how structure offers a kind of significance that precedes semantics. It is natural that the expressivities of form should become a center of gravity for eucharistic poetics. Exploiting poetic form as a communicative end in itself—that is, as an objective textual feature whose meaning is self-contained rather than referential—the seventeenth-century lyric makes increasing use of the architectural objecthood of the poetic text and, in so doing, relocates significance from the strictly abstract and perceptually unavailable sphere of the signified to the sign.

Chapter 1 of this book examines the aggressively corporeal innovations of George Herbert’s The Temple, a collection of poems characterized by extravagant formal invention, in which the manifestly constructed objecthood of signs secures the material ontology of the incarnate Word. Herbert’s verse constantly asserts its own poetic surfaces, emphasizing the sonic and graphic qualities of language so forcefully that the reader becomes radically aware of the experience of encountering signs. This treatment reflects an approach to eucharistic worship, sometimes articulated in Herbert’s own pastoral writings, in which the physical aspects of sacramental participation serve to recall and celebrate the Incarnation. Herbert’s poetic texts register the incarnational potential of the sign in both language and in sacrament, and I explore the ways in which his assertions of objecthood make of poetry a ritual of material immanence against the absence of the divine.

The signifying properties of form and their implications for the material experience of sacramental worship remain my focus in Chapter 2, which investigates the interventions of poetic structure into eucharistic theology in the poetry of Edward Taylor. Taylor, writing a generation after Herbert and (like so many others) in the shadow of The Temple, redirects his anxiety about the absence of God into a suspicion about his own qualification to participate in sacramental worship. In Taylor’s nonconforming Calvinist view, the Lord’s Supper is a nuptial banquet, effecting a marriage between the soul and God, but even as he in his ministerial position advocates that every worshipper who approaches this “Wedden Feast” should inspect himself to ensure that he is properly regenerate, Taylor necessarily confronts the difficulty of determining regeneracy. For Taylor, the absence of an apprehensible sign from God that the soul is regenerate, which is itself a symptom of God’s ultimate inapprehensibility, redounds to the absence of stable signs for the self’s righteousness. The perceptual lacuna at the heart of Taylor’s sacramental concerns is simultaneously God’s and the soul’s, each eluding the certainty of the senses. Without the assurance of sense-data, Taylor turns to poetic form, using it as a sensorily legible proxy, a kind of body for the intangible soul. In Taylor’s long lyric cycle of Preparatory Meditations, the poetic text comes to embody his own process of regeneracy, demonstrating structurally the poem’s ever-repeating desire to purge sin and prove ready for Christ’s grace. That Taylor models this cyclical project of purgation and desire after the menstrual cycle concords with his view of the “Wedden Feast,” in which the soul must become the Bride of Christ, a gendered construct that again flouts the evidence of the senses. Taylor’s poetic body offers an alternative physicality in which the gendered valences of sacramental worship can be satisfied even as it offers a knowable embodiment of the unknowable soul.

My initial focus on structure and form as instruments for producing an antiabsorptive textual materiality gives way in the latter chapters of this book to an investigation of what happens when such an approach gets absorbed into the system of symbolic signification. Structural innovation produces one kind of hermeneutic arrest; another occurs when symbol itself responds to this same urge toward objecthood. Certainly poetic form and structure are fundamentally invested in the relationship between linguistic surfaces and semantic meanings, and the status of the text as an object in its own right in addition to a referential instrument aligns it interpretively with the eucharistic elements. But this scheme has implications, too, for the symbolic use of language, particularly when symbol is employed to represent the divine. If the Eucharist, that holiest of symbolaries, resists interpretive access and denies absorption through transparent symbols to the heart of their sacred meanings, how might a poetics informed by such a system negotiate the competing demands of the referentiality and the discursive surface of symbol? In the second movement of this book, I concentrate on two poets whose work explores precisely this question. Chapter 3 reveals that while John Donne shares with Taylor an enthusiasm for biblical metaphor, and like Taylor freely appropriates figurative conventions that have been normalized into the general religious lexicon, his treatment of those conventions is complicated by his stake not in the achievement of its primary symbol (as is Taylor’s hope) but in the persistence of unsublimated corporeality such that the referential function of that symbol is obstructed. In other words, Donne’s physicalized embroideries of traditional symbols render them no longer functional as symbols, no longer conducive to revealing the meanings with which they are conventionally associated. For Donne, the particularizing of the sign renders it more opaque, more substantial, and as a consequence more durable than the ephemeral signified. Donne’s recourse to common scriptural tropes upends whatever currency they possess through their familiarity; in Donne’s hands, such theological conventions as the Bride of Christ and the glorious resurrection of the flesh become shockingly unfamiliar precisely because they endure as ends in themselves rather than as transparent symbols referring to abstract spiritual principles. In his refusal to allow tropes to transluce into meaning, Donne locates spiritual significance not in the disembodied and abstract sphere but in the body itself.

I finally examine the work of Richard Crashaw, whose rococo aesthetic tendencies have relegated him to the periphery of critical interest in seventeenth-century literature. Indeed, most critics seem not to know what to do with Crashaw: his work is seen variously as grotesque or as hopelessly primitive because of what is perceived as its indecorous integration of discomfitingly physical language into the devotional depiction of sacred scenes. But Crashaw’s dissonant style is not, I argue, evidence of his poetic immaturity so much as it is a canny replication of the interpretive problems, as Crashaw himself articulates them, of eucharistic worship. Foremost among these problems, as a number of Crashaw’s poems allow, is that the senses are simultaneously activated and defied by the ritual of the Eucharist, a contradiction that prompts in Crashaw a real ambivalence about both the role of the body in sacramental worship and the integrity of sacramental representation. For Crashaw, the material remains vexingly, maddeningly present in a rite that argues against its relevance, and this presence gets recorded in Crashaw’s devotional verse as an obstruction to locating divinity in the Eucharist. Moreover, Crashaw sees clearly how the contradictory demands of the rite impinge upon the system of representation itself. The signature excesses of Crashaw’s style bring to bear an insurmountably corporeal poetics that expels the reader from the symbolic system of the sacrament. And where Donne compromises the sacramental symbolary at the level of the trope, Crashaw undermines the symbolic function of the word itself, foregrounding disjunctions in the representational project of the Eucharist in order to disclose its limited referential capacities.

Form and structure, trope and symbol: in the seventeenth-century lyric each of these materials of poetic techne are subjected to the pressure of a developing aesthetic imperative that would privilege the imperceptible abstract over the perceptible object. This innovation, borne ultimately out of the profound anxiety about reading and the status of the corporeal that attended the semantic revisions of the Reformation, makes of poetry an event that promotes the meaningfulness of the sensual world and argues for the fitness of that world for realizing presence objectively. Though the restoration of meaning to the corporeal transforms the poem into a process in which the sign and signified are estranged, post-Reformation poetics accomplishes what the Eucharist itself, by any confessional definition, cannot: it transforms—we may say transubstantiates—absence into perceptual presence. At issue here are the incarnational possibilities of representation and the capacities of the Word to take fleshly expression, which are the fundamental concerns of eucharistic worship.

More alive than any of his contemporaries to the fleshliness of the poem on the page, Herbert recognizes the sacramental quality of poetic form, and he invests his ingenious art with a sometimes playful self-awareness about its own status as an artifact, as a thing made to be present to a reader. Before continuing in later chapters to trace out subtler manifestations of antiabsorptive poetics, this study begins by addressing Herbert’s conspicuous application of a sacramental representational scheme to the poetic medium. And though I begin with what some readers have dismissed as Herbert’s ingenuous curiosities,⁵⁶ I aim in the end to demonstrate that the impulses that animate Herbert’s ostentatious technique permeate all aspects of poetic craft in the seventeenth-century lyric—and continue to be felt long past the moment of the seventeenth century. For my conviction is that these strategies remain influential far beyond the period of heightened religious fervor that produced them, and my hope is that Made Flesh will suggest the persistence of post-Reformation poetic innovations into the later literary tradition. In short, my slightly immoderate ambition is to suggest that the stable of unsublimable, self-asserting flourishes of technique that we have come, in our enlightened postmodernity, to think of as poetics was effectively developed four hundred years ago by devotional poets.