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
