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
