Reading, Desire, and the Eucharist in Early Modern Religious Poetry [1 ed.] 9781442694927, 9781442642812

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RE AD IN G, D ESIRE, AND THE EUCHARIST IN E AR L Y MODERN RELIGIOUS P OE TR Y

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RYAN NETZLEY

Reading, Desire, and the Eucharist in Early Modern Religious Poetry

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press 2011 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada ISBN 978-1-4426-4281-2

Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-based inks.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Netzley, Ryan, 1972– Reading, desire, and the Eucharist in early modern religious poetry / Ryan Netzley. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4426-4281-2 1. Christian poetry, English – Early modern, 1500–1700 – History and criticism. 2. Christianity and literature – England -- History – 17th century. 3. Lord’s Supper in literature. 4. God in literature. I. Title. PR545.R4N47 2011

821'.409382

C2011-902976-6

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing activities.

Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction: Desiring Sacraments and Reading Real Presence in Seventeenth-Century Religious Poetry 3 1 Take and Taste, Take and Read: Desiring, Reading, and Taking Presence in George Herbert’s The Temple 23 2 Reading Indistinction: Desire, Indistinguishability, and Metonymic Reading in Richard Crashaw’s Religious Lyrics 66 3 Loving Fear: Affirmative Anxiety in John Donne’s Divine Poems 106 4 Desiring What Has Already Happened: Reading Prolepsis and Immanence in John Milton’s Early Poems and Paradise Regained 149 Conclusion: Reading Is Love Notes 207 Bibliography 263 Index

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Acknowledgments

This book owes its most substantive debts to those colleagues who offered their tireless generosity, astute advice, and intellectual support by reading chapters over the past several years. Mary Ellen Lamb, George Boulukos, Thomas P. Anderson, and Rebekah Fowler have read every word of this book and poked and prodded me to be clearer, more ambitious, and, quite frankly, better. Jason Kerr understood the stakes of the project immediately and helped to frame several chapters conceptually. Brooke Conti provided valuable comments at a late stage that made my reading of Donne much more careful and nuanced. Michael Molino and Mary Bogumil read the final manuscript and headed off some last argumentative errors and infelicities. And Yasuko Taoka gamely and enthusiastically helped me grapple with Crashaw’s Latin. The colleagues who encouraged and supported this project over the years, at conferences, in sundry living rooms, and even just at bars, are really too numerous to list, but several deserve mention for their very real assistance in this project’s development: David Ainsworth, Kathy Romack, Bryan Reynolds, Melissa Hull, John Muckelbauer, Marco Abel, Jeff Karnicky, and Elizabeth Mazzolini. At Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, Andrew Youpa, Doug Anderson, Elina Gertsman, Roudy Hildreth, Terri Wilson, Tamara Yakaboski, Holly Hurlburt, David Anthony, and Mark Amos all suffered through oral renditions of this project and conspired to produce a supportive local intellectual community. In addition, I am grateful to the participants in and interlocutors at several conferences, whose questions and comments helped to improve sections of this book: the International Milton Society Conference (2008); the 2007 and 2009 Conference on John Milton at Middle Tennessee State University; the Icon and Iconoclast Conference at the University of Illinois

viii Acknowledgments

at Urbana-Champaign organized by Feisal Mohammed (2008); an MLA panel organized by the John Donne Society and Brooke Conti (2009); and the Association of English Graduate Instructors and Students Conference at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale (2010). Thanks are also due to the members of my spring 2007 seminar on desire and religion, especially Kurtis Hessel, for engaging so ably and thoughtfully with the issues around which this book revolves. Finally, Linda Woodbridge and Laura Knoppers have supported and encouraged this project for years and in ways that I only fully realize now, at its completion. At the University of Toronto Press, Suzanne Rancourt has patiently shepherded this project to completion and dealt kindly with my nagging queries. Thanks are also due to Barb Porter and Judy Williams for making this entire process remarkably smooth, efficient, and manageable. The two anonymous readers provided exceptionally detailed comments: I am grateful not only for their assistance in making this a better book, but also for the level of care and precision that they exhibited in reading the manuscript. To be read that closely, is, I think, every author’s dream. Alison Erazmus suffered, sometimes patiently, through the writing of this entire book, and the desperate celebrations that attended various milestones along its path. It is dedicated to her because she has been a living, breathing reminder of one of this project’s central theses: that love is not work.

RE AD IN G, D ESIRE, AND THE EUCHARIST IN E AR L Y MODERN RELIGIOUS P OE TR Y

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Introduction: Desiring Sacraments and Reading Real Presence in SeventeenthCentury Religious Poetry

How does one desire a God that one does not lack? Seventeenth-century religious verse obsesses over the appropriate approach to an immanent divinity, the affective and conceptual responses to God’s presence specific to religious desire. Once God is present and one is no longer wishing for or awaiting his arrival, there remains much to do. English devotional lyrics, from poets as theologically and poetically distinct as John Milton, Richard Crashaw, John Donne, and George Herbert, explore not just the preparations and predispositions necessary for a proper communion, but also the manner and practice of desiring God: not just what one desires, but the very nature and activity of desire that persists after this arrival. The Lord’s Supper serves as a privileged site for such poetic meditations, in part because of the ceremony’s continued insistence on a Real Presence in the elements within the ostensibly reformed Anglican ceremony, but also because of the event’s intimate ties to controversies surrounding the operation of metaphor, signification, and words in general. When one desires presence in or during the eucharistic ceremony, one is not desiring a god that is absent, but rather one who is immanently, even insistently present. As a result, it seems necessary to abandon psychoanalytic and dialectical understandings of desire that insist that we can only desire that which we lack. Early modern religious verse’s attention to the Lord’s Supper enjoins a reading practice that is equally immanent. In a rite where a sign fully contains and presents what it signifies – the body of Christ is fully and really present in the elements – reading can no longer be a procedure for filling in or supplementing a poem with its absent, transcendent meaning. This poetry does not simply offer a surer, less ambiguous approach to interpretation, a more secure connection between signifiers and signifieds, words and meaning, a connection often

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Reading, Desire, and the Eucharist

signalled in modern critical discourse by the concept of sacramentality: the indeterminacy of meaning is not the problem that the Real Presence poses. In addition, the eucharist does not put us on a chivalric quest to attain an end, whether that aim is salvation, pleasure, or love. Rather, the sacrament insists that God is right here at hand, a gift for the taking, and then challenges communicants, devotees, and readers to respond appropriately to this presence. Getting God is not the problem; taking, desiring, reading, and loving this presence, for its own sake, is the task that these lyrics set for readers. This book then outlines the affirmative, immanent model of desire present in early modern religious poetry and explores the consequences of this devotional desire for how we read seventeenth-century religious verse. The poetic deployments of the Lord’s Supper in the late English Renaissance require a model of devotional desire that takes seriously these lyrics’ insistence on the Real Presence of Christ and, in turn, force us to treat reading practice itself, and not the meanings that we glean from it, as devotion. Reading as an activity cannot lead to devotion, for this would simply be treating presence as a mercenary instrument. Instead, the readerly encounter with the poem itself, the line-by-line reading of it, must constitute devotion. Instead of a eucharist that recovers grace for fallen believers, or one that signifies or seals such a recovery through Christ’s sacrifice, English religious verse more often presents the sacrament of the altar and even desire for it as an immediate affective connection to the divine. Yet sacramental desire is neither a hopeless, but nonetheless satisfying infinite yearning, nor a system of exchange and mutual recognition in which God recognizes our gift as a return of his own gift. As Brian Cummings argues, within a Calvinist predestinarian theology, desiring grace can have no connection to the divine, freely given gift of grace: ‘To allow mankind even a gesture of reciprocity in matching the gift of grace with some motion of answering merit – even if only desired, or foreseen, or preveniently called into being by the act of giving itself – seemed to Calvin to make it untrue.’1 Desire then does not signify a fundamental lack in the devotional subject, but rather is a gift from God that does not allow for reciprocity. Desiring the desire of the other, the classic Hegelian and psychoanalytic formulation, makes constitutive absence and reciprocity the fundamental features of desire. Donne, Herbert, Crashaw, and Milton attempt to wrest devotional desire away from this mechanism, which they all present as essentially extortive, presenting both God and the devotee as coyly withholding. The problem of desire, and love for that matter, in these lyrics is how to produce, engineer, or maintain an affec-

Introduction: Desiring Sacraments and Reading Real Presence 5

tive, non-mercenary attachment to a God who is already present, whose love does not need to be wheedled out of him – in short, a desire without a future project or aim. Whether focusing on reading this verse through the lens of Petrarchism, psychoanalysis, or Reformation history, much modern criticism finds in these poets a desire organized around God’s absence and the attendant struggles for compensation or restoration.2 Yet with a poetry so intensely concerned with a ceremony that revolves around divine presence, what does it cost to treat its depictions of presence as a questing desire for an inaccessible transcendence, as a fantastical, if nonetheless enabling, illusion? I do not doubt that one can treat devotional poetry’s concern with immanence as a symptom of such an abiding lack or absence or a desire for restoration of a lost presence. However, to do so returns desire to a logic of agency and work, the devotional subject struggling to overcome – even if she fails – the distance between herself and God. A model of lack or constitutive absence turns desire for God into a necessary work, instead of a free choice, and thus treats the gift of grace as a matter of recognition and reciprocity. The conceptual apparatus undergirding this model of desire is, of course, Hegel’s: Desire has reserved to itself the pure negating of the object and thereby its unalloyed feeling of self. But that is the reason why this satisfaction is itself only a fleeting one, for it lacks the side of objectivity and permanence. Work, on the other hand, is desire held in check, fleetingness staved off; in other words, work forms and shapes the thing. The negative relation to the object becomes its form and something permanent.3

Drawing on Hegel, Susan Stewart describes poetic creation as precisely this sort of work, a reaction against the oblivion and chaos of a primordial night that results in a compensatory product: ‘in work that is both the transformation of nature and the means of self-transformation and self-overcoming, the slave as maker creates himself in the long path that extends from the night of sense certainty. The slave does not die with the death of his outward form as does the master – the slave leaves the mark of his practices in the world and forms a link with what is universal in human culture.’4 Yet she also acknowledges that the lyric poses a challenge to the time and aims of labour and, by implication, the dialectical logic that undergirds it.5 What if this oscillation between desire and work, pleasure and permanence, both of which revolve around negation, were not the mechanism of devotional love, choice, or freedom?

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Reading, Desire, and the Eucharist

What if religious verse were not a struggle to compensate for an absence or overcome an obstacle? What if devotion and love were not work? Finding lack everywhere, even in those poems where desire is imagined as an immanent connection, means insisting that these poets could not have meant what they actually wrote, that evocations of presence are not what they are.6 Instead of holding onto the conceptualization of desire that requires such symptomological machinations, I propose that readers consider an alternative account of how desire proceeds in early modern devotional poetry, one that does not assume the mercenary extortions necessary in a lack economy or the teleological aims of a devotion conceived as work: the ‘welding of desire to lack is precisely what gives desire collective and personal ends, goals or intentions – instead of desire taken in the real order of its production, which behaves as a molecular phenomenon devoid of any goal or intention.’7 For Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, soldering desire to an absent pleasant aim transforms it into a self-exhausting labour, as opposed to a freely moving drive: ‘Work is a motor cause that meets resistances, operates upon the exterior, is consumed and spent in its effect, and must be renewed from one moment to the next. Free action is also a motor cause, but one that has no resistance to overcome, operates only upon the mobile body itself, is not consumed in its effect, and continues from one moment to the next.’8 Work, then, is the model of pleasure, struggle, and goals; free action is the model of desire and love. These poets tend to present the presuppositions of work itself as the problem for devotional action, precisely because it requires obstacles, exhaustion, and at least temporary obsolescence for desire: if lack does not exist, it will have to be invented. Modern criticism has tended to find in early modern religious verse a march toward or a quest for God that accords with our expectations of drama and accomplishment. This book argues that for Donne, Herbert, Crashaw, and Milton, devotional desire and love, even with all the pain, doubt, and anxiety that they might elicit, are not struggle, but rather a loving attention to an immanent divinity. At the very least, this means that these poems are not struggling to overcome a loss, or restore a wholeness. George Herbert’s ‘Love (III),’ the final poem in ‘The Church’ section of The Temple, perhaps most succinctly encapsulates the conflict between these two models of desire, one insisting narcissistically on an irremediable inadequacy and struggle, the other on the desirable gift already available. The poem stages a deceptively quotidian, if not homey, rendition of a eucharistically inflected meal. Its conceit, of course, revolves

Introduction: Desiring Sacraments and Reading Real Presence 7

around the speaker’s soul visiting an inn only to become timid in the face of the proprietor, Love: Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back, Guiltie of dust and sinne. But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack From my first entrance in, Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning, If I lack’d any thing.9

Love’s initial question, a version of the tavern-keeper’s ‘what d’ya lack?,’ reinforces the familiarity of the scene and presents this question as a comforting invitation, not a mercenary challenge. The question also foregrounds the role of desire – ‘what do you want?’ – in the Lord’s Supper. The soul’s response to Love’s question insists on the fundamental inadequacy of the subject doing the speaking and exhibits an understanding of desire as absence, one with decided Hegelian and Lacanian echoes: A guest, I answer’d, worthy to be here: Love said, you shall be he. I the unkinde, ungratefull? Ah my deare, I cannot look on thee. Love took my hand, and smiling did reply, Who made the eyes but I?

(7–12)

Although the speaker announces a conventional unworthiness to participate in the ceremony, he does so in terms that place inadequacy at the heart of a devotee’s identity: the soul desires that it not be hopelessly riven by lack. Love’s response, though, highlights the problem of conceiving desire in a soteriological system where prevenient grace is necessary for the soul’s transformation even to begin, where God’s gift of grace can have absolutely no reciprocal relationship to human action, experience, and desire. For Cummings, Herbert’s verse wrestles with the difficulty that such predestinarian theology poses for the basic logic of grammar and predication: ‘The endings of the poems in The Temple are instructive because they so often resist any sense that grace has been willed or desired into being.’10 Even the recognition of lack or transcendence mistakenly arrogates to the speaking subject an active role in the soteriological process. And as Stanley Fish notes, asserting humility, or inadequacy, is still asserting.11

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Reading, Desire, and the Eucharist

Yet Love’s reassurance, such as it is, does not endorse the speaker’s self-presentation, but rather rebukes this portrait of abject inadequacy. Herbert’s response to the givenness of grace is not to distance the communicant from God, or to highlight the inescapable paradox of asserted humility. Rather, the soul’s interlocutor chides it for not recognizing its already existing connection to and emanation from Love. Love’s response, ‘you shall be he,’ does not delay a full or worthy identity to an imminent future. Instead, ‘shall be’ interpellates the speaker in the present, positioning him as a guest at this particular moment, and, in turn, suggests that asserting and speaking, affirming what sort of person one is, is much less important than receiving. In fact, asserting or lamenting one’s inadequacy is a self-serving illusion that prevents the devotee from focusing on the activity of receiving love: Truth Lord, but I have marr’d them: let my shame Go where it doth deserve. And know you not, sayes Love, who bore the blame? My deare, then I will serve. You must sit down, sayes Love, and taste my meat: So I did sit and eat.

(13–18)

The speaker, up to the final line, imagines reception as a matter of reciprocal exchange: I must give a gift in return – ‘I will serve’ – so as to show my appreciation, gratitude, or worth. Yet this brand of reactive selfdemonstration seems precisely what Love cautions against throughout the poem. Love directs the speaker to abandon his initial conception of desire as lack and substitutive transaction for one in which desire is an immanent, intimate connection. Whether the soul learns the lesson that Love teaches, that it does not lack the thing it initially claimed to lack, however, remains an open question at poem’s end. The speaker’s concluding choice to eat, instead of just tasting the meat as Love asks, may be an indication that he has learned nothing, or at least retains a presumptuousness that would ultimately cripple devotion.12 The poem then stages the difficulties involved in accepting, using, and desiring God’s presence. An immanent divinity is not simply a welcome recompense for a lost unity: absence continues to have its appeal, even after Love explains that it is an inaccurate representation of the world. And of course, it also offers the allure of two very attractive subject positions: a grieved passive-aggressive faux-martyr who hopes to extort love from God and a diligent, committed servant, worker, and slave whose obsession with

Introduction: Desiring Sacraments and Reading Real Presence 9

struggle cloaks a resentful desire to save himself. The poem then does not seem to have much faith in the ability of right-thinking individuals to choose or desire correctly once they have been shown the light of reason or inspiration: the speaker jumps from abjection to presumption without so much as a hiccup in metre. ‘Love (III)’ does not simply enjoin its speaker, much less its readers, to choose affective presence instead of absence. It also shows that adjusting a reader’s focus away from acquiring God requires a change in disposition, not an addition of knowledge. And in turn, for Herbert, refocusing attention on the manner in which one possesses God entails a refocusing of readers’ attention on the practice, instead of the issue, of reading.13 This reading of Herbert, of course, echoes recent critical work on the validation of passion and emotion in early modern literature. Critical accounts of humoral physiology and emotion in early modern studies, as well as the general affective turn in literary studies, have certainly been salutary in consigning to the dustbin any simple opposition between passion and reason.14 Michael Schoenfeldt’s account of humoral embodiment, for example, insists that humours are not simply the domain of chaos and disorder, but rather serve as a regulatory mechanism that enables individual agency.15 Yet even in this model desire works and is regulated by work: The Renaissance seems to have imagined selves as differentiated not by their desires, which all more or less share, but by their capacity to control these desires. Psychoanalysis and early modern psychology are linked in that both require fastidious attention to the inner promptings of various appetites and urges. But where psychoanalysis tends to locate identity in terms of which objects are desired among the various possibilities, how intensely they are desired, and how these desires have been fashioned by the experiences of early infancy, the Renaissance locates identity in the more or less successful regulation of a series of desires shared by all.16

Schoenfeldt does not imagine desire and passion as a chaotic mass in need of an extraneous formal imprint, but the model of regulation that his account advances still makes desire both work and the object of work. I do not suggest here that there are no sinful desires that require regulation or control in Renaissance literature. Rather, this study questions the value of early modern studies’ pervasive account of desire as an excess in need of measure for a devotion that imagines desire as something more than the circular labour of setting up limits in order to transgress them.

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Reading, Desire, and the Eucharist

If we are to take seriously the positive account of passion and emotion that early modern studies has bequeathed us, it seems pivotal to abandon a notion of desire that conceives of it as a labour to be overcome or a motor for labour. In this respect, modern scholarship has perhaps (I acknowledge the rampant speculation here) too quickly adopted the ethos and paranoias of its mode of production: the impulse to appear busy, like one is doing real work in a university increasingly under suspicion for idleness.17 It has also perhaps too hastily assumed that excess and transgression are engines of political engagement and emancipation. Instead of turning to the altered aims or regulatory mechanisms that govern desire, this study argues for a desire without struggle, quests, or work in early modern religious verse, and for the value of this model of desire in the broader context of Renaissance literature. We misunderstand the transformed desire in devotional lyrics if we imagine it as only oriented toward a necessarily deferred aim or as a uniform practice recalcitrant to fundamental change. As Richard Strier notes, citing Petrarch, knowing or understanding virtue, through metaphor or otherwise, is not enough: one must also love it.18 My claim here is that this love, for virtue or for God, is not simply a well-regulated desire, but a fundamentally different type of desire, one in which we love and care for the immanent without mercenary calculations of reward. Following Aristotle and Strier, if you are the sort of person who needs rules in order to love God, you might be desiring the right thing, but you are not desiring aright. Reading the Eucharist In the case of the eucharist, how one desires is a more dominant concern than what one desires. Desire is not organized around its object, the host, or its aim, communion with or incorporation in the body of the church. Moreover, the eucharist is not just one ritual among others, one more liturgical event represented within verse. Rather, as Stephen Greenblatt, Judith Anderson, and Regina Schwartz have maintained, this ceremony and debates about it are central to literary critical conceptions of metaphor and signs, whether representation is even what poetry does with rituals and events.19 Roman Catholic and Reformed sacramental theologies pose fundamental questions about the process of designation, how exactly a sign indicates or carries meaning. Yet they also explore a communicant’s immediate engagement with a sign or a sacrament. Thus, Zwinglian and Cranmerian memorialism solves the problem of reference by insisting that, in the words of institution, ‘is’

Introduction: Desiring Sacraments and Reading Real Presence 11

means ‘signifies.’20 Signification, though, does not solve the problem of reception and reading or explain the immanent encounter with this designating sign. As a result, Cranmer insists on the commonality of a signifying procedure, maintaining that because it happens every day, surely we understand it: this process amounts to ‘calling a thing that signifieth, by the name of the thing which is signified thereby: which is no rare nor strange thing, but an usual manner and phrase in common speech.’21 Other Roman Catholic and Reformed formulations, as well as those of later English divines, are not so sanguine about the clarity and simplicity of this common procedure. Ultimately, the eucharist and its signs do not just enact a debate about the nature of reference, but also pose the more foundational question of how one receives a sign and even how a sign can be desirable in its own right. The sacrament is pivotal for reading this verse precisely because it serves as a site for examining how one goes about receiving divinity, not just through the senses, but also through words. In the Thomist tradition, even if a communicant desires the ultimate aim of the eucharist, participation in God and the church, the means already contain this end: thus, the telescoping, even instantaneously performative power of ex opere operato extends to the recipient of the grace really present in the elements. Aquinas begins in a manner similar to Cranmer, by describing the sacrament as a metaphor, a means of conveying knowledge to humans through something they already know: bread and wine. But it also turns out that the sign itself has sanctifying power, which is what distinguishes it from a run-of-the mill signifier: Signs are given to men. Now it is characteristic of men that they achieve an awareness of things which they do not know 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.22

As even this classical Catholic formulation of the sacrament indicates, the eucharist has never simply been about the nature of reference or the collapse of signifier into signified, word into thing.23 Rather, Aquinas’s account reveals an insistent concern with the desire that attends this special sort of sign, or what it means to desire such a sign and what its effects are:

12

Reading, Desire, and the Eucharist Of itself this sacrament has grace-giving virtue, nor does anyone have grace before receiving it except from the longing for it, whether his own, as with an adult, or the Church’s, as with babies, as has been stated. Accordingly it is from the effectiveness of its power that even by desiring it a person obtains grace whereby he is spiritually alive. Still it is true that when the sacrament itself is really received grace is increased and the life of the spirit perfected.24

Although Aquinas locates the power of the sacrament in its own virtues, he also insists that the sheer desire for it produces a type of grace, the grace ‘whereby he is spiritually alive.’ This is not ‘really received grace,’ but it remains a type of grace nonetheless. This formulation amounts to the suggestion that the sign itself elicits desire and that this desire itself is a devotional and salvational act. Aquinas, then, prompts the primary critical question that early modern devotional poetry poses: not how signifier and signified relate, but how one desires and receives a sign with its own inherent value. The Calvinist sacrament offers a similarly desirable independent sign, one that is perhaps even more autonomous than the Real Presence effected in a transubstantiated host. In a Reformed context, where the Lord’s Supper is a seal of grace, not its efficient cause, the object of desire is the virtualist host, which does not confer grace, but acts as a full symbol or seal of grace.25 One certainly might still desire the same grace and communion that serve as ostensible aims, but in Protestant accounts, these are causally unmoored from the Lord’s Supper itself. The Institutes insist that sacramental signification, while not conjuring bodily presence, does entail a special fullness for the symbols involved, a fullness that outflanks charges of mere signification: The rule which the pious ought always to observe is, whenever they see the symbols instituted by the Lord, to think and feel surely persuaded that the truth of the thing signified is also present. For why does the Lord put the symbol of his body into your hands, but just to assure you that you truly partake of him? If this is true let us feel as much assured that the visible sign is given us in seal of an invisible gift as that his body itself is given to us. (4.17.10, 564)

Calvin consistently attempts to debunk the accusation of mere signification by implying not only that God connects a signified reality to sacramental signs, but also, like Cranmer, that even quotidian signs legitimately adopt the names of absent things (4.17.21, 574). As with

Introduction: Desiring Sacraments and Reading Real Presence 13

Aquinas, though, his account of the sacrament’s action focuses on the affective disposition within reception at the centre of the ritual event, not just the connection between signs and their designations: we are not just persuaded, but feel surely persuaded. A similar receptionist focus appears in accounts of the sacrament from English divines with wildly divergent confessional commitments. One need only turn to the Elizabethan church’s Thirty-Nine Articles to recognize this preoccupation in English theology: The supper of the Lord is not only a sign of the love that Christians ought to have among themselves one to another; but rather it is a sacrament of our redemption by Christ’s death: insomuch that to such as rightly, worthily, and with faith, receive the same, the bread which we break is a partaking of the body of Christ; and likewise the cup of blessing is a partaking of the blood of Christ . . . The body of Christ is given, taken, and eaten, in the supper, only after an heavenly and spiritual manner. And the mean whereby the body of Christ is received and eaten in the supper is faith.26

In this formulation, the actual, real partaking of the body depends on the manner – rightly, worthily, and faithfully – in which a communicant receives the sacrament, not the ontological status of the objective elements themselves. William Perkins offers a similar account of the importance of reception for any notion of Real Presence: . . . when God gives Christ with his benefits and man for his part receives the same as they are given, there riseth that union which is between every good receiver and Christ himself: which union is not forged, but a real, true and near conjunction, nearer than which none is or can be, because it is made by a solemn giving and receiving that passeth between God and man, as also by the bond of one and the same Spirit. To come then to the point, considering there is a real union, and consequently a real communion between us and Christ as I have proved, there must needs be such a kind of presence wherein Christ is truly and really present to the heart of him that receives the sacrament in faith. And thus far do we consent with the Romish Church touching real presence.27

Perkins’s insistence on a ‘true and near conjunction’ between human and divine presents the sacrament as an immanent affinity and, thus, gives the lie to any characterization of the Reformed sacrament as a bare sign governed by lack or absence. Instead, these formulations introduce

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Reading, Desire, and the Eucharist

affective experience and reception not as the solution to debates about Real Presence, but rather as the site where they play out. But an emphasis on sacramental reception is not confined to revolutionary, or even conforming Puritans. Indeed, conservative and moderate ‘Anglicans’ also adopt and adapt this position. Richard Hooker, in language strikingly similar to Perkins’s, uses reception to translate transubstantiation into a description of what happens to communicants, not bread or wine: . . . to us they [the consecrated elements] are thereby made such instrumentes as mysticallie yeat trulie, invisible yeat reallie worke our communion or fellowship with the person of Jesus Christ as well in that he is man as God, our participation also in the fruit of grace and efficacie of his bodie and blood, whereupon there ensueth a kind of transubstantiation in us, a true change both of soule and bodie.28

Lancelot Andrewes’s notoriously ambiguous doctrinal stance on the eucharist also emphasizes reception.29 He chiastically inverts this sacramental operation as well, insisting that the sacrament also effects a receiving of the communicant into the church: For this is indeed the true receiving, when one is received to the table, to eat and drink, to take his repast there; yea ad accipiendum in Quo acceptus est, to take, and to take into him ‘that body, by the oblation whereof we are all sanctified,’ and that blood ‘in which we have all remission of sins.’ In that ended they, in this let us end. And this accepting we desire of God; and desiring it in an acceptable time, He will hear us.30

The ubiquity of these concerns about proper taking and receiving indicates that receptionism is not the solution to the problem of intractable doctrinal debates about eucharistic presence, but the problem itself. And it is this focus on practices of reception, what it is one does in receiving presence, not just its results or aims, that makes the sacrament a pivotal site for understanding not just meaning and signification, but the activity of reading itself. The basic question of how to desire a full sign or symbol issues in the literary critical problem of how one might desire a sign for its own sake. Both Roman Catholic and Reformed theology emphasize not the broader telos of communion or the overcoming of a lack via goal-oriented work, but rather the receptive activity that one performs on or with this

Introduction: Desiring Sacraments and Reading Real Presence 15

specific sort of sign. These theological accounts insist that readers grapple with a given real presence, of whatever stripe, instead of subsuming it within a purposive logic. Although it is beyond the scope of this project, these poets’ – even Crashaw’s – rejection of a logic of work can be seen as a response to the general Reformation objection to a soteriology of works. For these poets at least, once works become suspicious, the notion of struggle too comes under suspicion as a way to conceive of action. Instead of affirming a faith that would replace works, these lyrics rearticulate activity as a matter of love. They solve the problem of what to do if faith is all that is necessary for salvation by abrogating activity construed as purposive struggle in favour of a free activity motivated by love, without extraneous aims.31 Faith might well happen in rituals, individuals, and even churches, but poetry is the site of love and activity. This poetic rejection of work garners support from the fact that the sacrament is already, in Aquinas and Calvin, a question of immanent desire and not merely a symptom of a primordial – or historical – loss.32 Moreover, even the theological underpinnings of this communion ritual foreground the problem of desiring signs and seals in their own right, not as instrumental causes of some more precious spiritual reality or state. And it is for this reason that poetic attention to the eucharist also entails, if not transforms into, an abiding concern with reading as an activity independent of its potential goals, including interpretation. The sign and one’s encounter with it are more complicated than a matter of reference or commonsensical communication precisely because one also desires the signifier itself, not its ultimate signified or object.33 The concern with reception that informs theological accounts of the eucharist from Aquinas to Andrewes reveals sacramental theology’s recurrent preoccupation not just with metaphor, but with the appropriate dynamics of active reception: how to receive presence in a manner that is active but not presumptuous, dismissive, or mercenary. It is this concern that ultimately turns the sacrament into a pivotal model for devotional reading.34 Even criticism at odds over the confessional allegiances of these poets has consistently registered their concerns with the nature of presence. For example, Barbara Lewalski and Louis Martz both insist on the power of signs to convey and embody a divine immanence.35 Yet a critical focus on whether or not Donne is a Calvinist turns religious desire into a matter of confessional identity and, moreover, conspires to occlude the uniform receptive activities that occur in devotion. In other words, a thesis about the beliefs that one holds ignores the activities that occupy early modern devotional verse, including the activity of ‘holding’ a belief. It

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is not that there are no differences between Catholic and Protestant devotion, of course, but rather that the focus on determining a given poet’s allegiances reduces poetry – and religious ceremonies and events themselves for that matter – to nothing more than superfluous representations of these convictions. In addition, confessional allegiance as an analytical tool turns choice into a selection between competing belief options. As Molly Murray notes, there is something reassuring about such a dichotomous choice, both for early modern converts and modern critics: it reassures us that we know what Protestantism or Catholicism is, that it is marked by an internal homology, not a chaotic set of differences. Murray, though, finds the language of conversion in poetry and polemic to be so strikingly similar that it tends to present indistinguishable processes: only the end result – I’m a Protestant; I’m a Catholic – distinguishes these activities.36 A critical focus on confessional identity, then, treats conversion as a uniform labour differentiated ex post facto and harbours one very loaded assumption about the nature of historical change: that which is new is necessarily a negation, rejection, or refutation of the old or, to put it in explicitly Hegelian terms, the blossom is the refutation of the bud.37 The problem, of course, with this dialectical model is that it defines one’s new confessional identity, as it must, via opposition: the old me has been rejected and lost, but also preserved in a new distinguishing resolution. These poems do not respond to this problem simply by offering a more positive account of what one desires, as if listing the propositions in which one believes escapes this particular identitarian trap: confessional allegiance might be a way to describe one’s preparation for an encounter with the divine, or the convictions that issue from such an encounter, but it remains a decidedly blunt tool for describing or enacting a desirous response to immanent divinity and the acts of conversion and devotion entailed thereby. These poems and, as a consequence, this study, focus less on the devotee’s transformation into a new subject, than they do the evasion, however provisional, of this entire interpellating structure: these lyrics explore the activity of desire and love as such, instead of assuming in advance their goals and origins. A focus on confessional allegiances then buttresses the very concerns with identity that this verse seems at pains to avoid: not because of a broad toleration or rising secularism, but rather because these lyrics do not imagine religion as a matter of belief or conviction, but rather as a manner of living and as a loving action. Of course, labelling Donne or Herbert a Calvinist is only useful if we know what Calvinism means, but

Introduction: Desiring Sacraments and Reading Real Presence 17

more is at stake than the relative finality of such definitions. Rather, at stake is the basic logic of how devotion and love proceed, whether they fit within the structuring poles of subject and object or, instead, treat action and relation as dispositions observable in their own right. In other words, should we even conceive of reading as an action that a subject performs on an object? As Cummings contends, critical discussions of confessional allegiances mistake the level at which devotion plays out in poetry: Most accounts of religious writing are founded on an unacknowledged conceptual separation of the surface of discourse from the beliefs that motivate them. Religion comes first, writing follows after. This goes hand in hand with the attempted identification of a writer’s beliefs in terms of a doctrinal position or party . . . 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.38

Knowing whether a given poem is Catholic or Protestant does not really explain the sort of desire, love, or reading that its words and actions enjoin, precisely because this model of action presupposes that what is really important is what one believes, not what one does. Poems, according to this reading, are representations of belief, not active expressions of devotion. The same degradation holds for the ritual itself: a model of religiosity that centres on belief turns the ceremony itself into an unnecessary representation of the belief and conviction that undergirds it. Somewhat paradoxically, it is the logic of belief and confessional identity that renders Catholic and Protestant positions indistinguishable, precisely because everything then flows from and back to the same source: a subject’s conviction. At one level, this conflict between ends and actions is a reprise of a broader critical debate about the nature of lyric, whether it is characterized by immediacy and presence or a fictionalized speaker and absence. Heather Dubrow traces this conflict to the early modern rhetorical origins of the concept of immediacy: ‘Those roots are, however, somewhat tangled by the verbal and conceptual similarities between the concepts of enargia, which can roughly be translated as a vividness that makes it possible to see in the mind’s eye, and energia, which suggests activity and energy.’39 The poems under consideration in this study, though, tend either to focus on energia or conflate these two lyric phenomena, insisting that the distance between a representation and its object is actually

18

Reading, Desire, and the Eucharist

populated by a positive content and connection: in an inversion of the conventional slogan, representation is always first presentation. In this sense, these poems often act like autonomous relations or activities, capable of existence and analysis without the terms that purportedly bookend them: author and reader, intention and meaning. Poems, in this light, do not reestablish a lost connection or performatively instantiate a new state of affairs. Instead, they exist in a world in which, in Deleuze and Guattari’s parlance, relation is primary, in which it is possible to examine relations independent of the terms that circumscribe them and to escape the cycle of recognition and reciprocity that allows us to treat the distance between subject and object as an empty gulf and the site of a uniform work.40 It is for this reason that reading is not a transaction or an exchange, either imagined as rationalist value optimization or a circular reciprocity: such a transactional account, like that advanced by Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, necessarily destines the thing that one reads to obsolescence.41 It is not just that the subject is troubled or fragmented or constituted performatively, but that if one is focused on terms – whether they be origins, ends, or subjects – one is not focused on the activity of reading and relation, only its purportedly instrumental aims. Or to modify Lee Morrissey’s terms, reading becomes so much a question of ends that there is no need to read.42 A poem then is not a gift that calls for reciprocal response, the circulation of social energy or the potlatch: such reciprocity always secretes the mercenary aim of levelling accounts. Instead, the poem becomes an exercise in reception, what it means to receive and take without immediately treating this reception as a debt to be repaid – i.e., as a future labour. It is in this sense that the devotional poem and the sacrament of the altar share a logic: both act as present gifts whose issue is less important than the attentive disposition entailed in an encounter with them.43 The activity of reading the poem does not produce or unearth a proposition – although interpretation certainly does – but turns readers into attentive and loving actors and receivers, if only for a moment. Of course, there are innumerable ways that a reader might evade this activity, short-circuiting it with a rush to meaning or busy inattention or an insistence that the real or spiritual realm is bigger than language. A poem cannot force people to agree to these propositions or act in an attentive manner. It can, however, show how all of these familiar practices are not really reading: aims and goals might be endlessly useful, but they leave blank and empty the in-between space, the positive distance that reading purportedly bridges.44 This poetry then is a positive, autonomous relation insofar as it refuses to treat

Introduction: Desiring Sacraments and Reading Real Presence 19

this space as a black hole or black box, defined only by its poles. In short, it tries to imagine divine love and desire – God’s love for us and our love for him – as having a positive content, something other than a yearning for the opposite of absence. Religious poetry then attempts to focus readerly attention not on the one who is speaking, but the speaking itself. In this respect, these poems mirror Jonathan Culler’s account of a lyric that resists narrativization in order to focus on an immanent present: . . . it is deadly for poetry to try to compete with narrative – by promoting lyrics as representations of the experience of subjects – on a terrain where narrative has obvious advantages. If narrative is about what happens next, lyric is about what happens now – in the reader’s engagement with each line – and teachers and scholars should celebrate its singularity, its difference from narrative.45

Infuriating as it may be, attending to the present poem, engaging each line, does not issue in a generalized reading strategy, or at least not a strategy organized as a method. ‘Pay attention’ does not really distinguish one critical approach from another: after all, no one enjoins ‘do not pay attention.’ Yet as Blanchot notes, there is a general reading, a general attention that is the great threat to the singular event that is an encounter with a poem: ‘What most threatens reading is this: the reader’s reality, his personality, his immodesty, his stubborn insistence upon remaining himself in the face of what he reads – a man who knows in general how to read.’46 The problem that an individual devotional poem or an immanent sacrament poses is always how to perform an action in such a way that it does not become a general principle, a rule that replaces the act itself. It turns out that evading an abstract reading, resisting the urge to turn reading into a general skill, is much more difficult than we might originally have imagined. Even for a purportedly secular modernity, the eucharist matters as a model for reading a given thing, without reference to its broader aim or purpose, those general goals that shape disparate acts into a methodical procedure.47 I do not maintain that all reading is really religious, or that all literary criticism is fundamentally pious, but rather that the attention to action, presence, and relation that these poems offer is an apt description for what literature does: it disposes us to love something for its own sake without hope of return or reward. Even if this ends up as the pedagogical aim of these poems, it is an aim of a very specific sort: not a telos

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organizing a cascading series of causes, with attendant objectives, but rather an effect or issue structured as a free action or desire, instead of work; not Kant’s purposiveness without purpose, but rather a poem with effects that are not organized according to a principle of developmental stages, first and final causes, or learning objectives. Love, in other words, is not just any old objective, like critical thinking. Learning to receive, to treat love as receptive attention alters a teleological understanding of how pedagogy can proceed, and what it even means to have an aim or purpose. This verse asks us to focus on effects and affects and not aims; it offers a desire and a reading organized around love, not struggle. Loving God, it turns out, is hard precisely because it does not promise the reassuring logic of accomplishment and failure that attends any and all accounts of desire and reading that characterize them as work. Chapter 1 explores how Herbert’s verse uses taste, instead of eating, as a means of meditating on the appropriate means of taking, if not possessing God. In fact, in The Temple, this basic concern with the logic of taking, a taking that does not diminish the taken, characterizes desire as well: pleasure and delight, unlike desire and love, require that the world be organized as a quest and that something be taken away from a divine gift. Herbert’s much ballyhooed plainness then becomes a similar lesson in how to take poetry, the possession without subtraction or extraction that taking and receiving actually entails. The Temple ultimately presents reading, and tasting, as a free activity that does not characterize its freedom as a choice between options, as a selection among possible objects or ends, much less a natural and necessary drive toward incorporation or restoration. Chapter 2 argues that Crashaw’s poetry uses synaesthesia and the indistinguishability of subjects and objects to promote a devotional experience that is not governed by the solidity of substance, but rather by careful attention to the multiple immanent relations between God and devotees. According to a unidirectional epistemological model of metaphor, in which figures employ the familiar in order to transmit the intelligible, sensible impressions are more immediately knowable and thus can convey difficult intellectual concepts. Crashaw’s verse, on the contrary, does not present sense as more intimate or accessible than thought or spirit and, instead, conflates sense, figure, and idea into a metonymic sacramental worldview. In the end, Crashaw’s verse enjoins a reading activity that is openly iconophilic, if not idolatrous, and maintains that it is actually the distinction between signifier and signified, word and thing, that enables a dangerous idolatry.

Introduction: Desiring Sacraments and Reading Real Presence 21

These poets’ conceptions of sacramental experience ultimately shape the model of reading propounded and advanced in their devotional verse. For Donne and Milton, reading is not so much affected by a primary sacramental event as it actually is that primary event. Whereas Herbert and Crashaw embrace the Lord’s Supper as a liturgical ceremony and experience, Donne always considers it first and foremost a reading experience. Chapter 3 then maintains that Donne’s famed rejection of assurance in the Holy Sonnets stands as a primary example not of the inconsolable anxiety that attends desperate devotees, but rather of the value of anxiety itself. His model of sacramental reading practice asks us to read anxiously and desperately, not because we are driven to overcome anxiety, but rather because these are the appropriate devotional responses to the divine. The effect of this reading strategy is a transformation of the basic character of fear: it can no longer be simply opposed to love as a reactive passion. This chapter concludes by arguing that Donne’s focus on grammatical and syntactical operators in the Divine Poems issues in a devotion concerned with the concept of relation itself: what it means to resemble, assimilate, or associate with some other entity. Chapter 4 contends that it is the sacramental immanence – not the apocalyptic imminence – of the end that serves as the primary devotional stimulant in Milton’s poetry. His frequent use of prolepsis asks that we desire what has already happened in the present and embrace a monist devotional universe in which the problem of a deferred or absent consummation never even occurs. Thus, sacramental presence functions in Milton’s verse in a manner similar to its role in Herbert’s: it allows for a conceptual and devotional exploration of an activity that does not have an external or ulterior purpose. Reading, then, can no longer seek to find something new in a poem or add something new to it. Despite the apparent redundancy attached to such a model of reading, this chapter shows how reading nonetheless remains a valuable activity in Milton’s verse insofar as it trains readers, perhaps against their will, to be virtuous. Paradise Regained even goes so far as to maintain that the activity of reading is itself the activity of love. The conclusion meditates on the broader implications of the reading practices outlined and demanded by a poetry that takes Real Presence seriously. It sketches the value, for both literary criticism and pedagogy, of treating poetry as an entity or event without the aim of meaning. The conclusion also contends that there are certain benefits, especially for modern readers, to be derived from a reading practice separated from an interpretive goal and the logic of struggle and work, among them the

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rejection of mercenary consumerist and informatic approaches to literature. For literary criticism, such a model offers the possibility of focusing on the act of reading literature, and not the epistemological truths of other disciplines, as the ground for future critical study. Obviously, Milton, Donne, Herbert, and Crashaw do not maintain that reading is a useless or pointless endeavour. However, their depictions of reading practice do provide a welcome corrective to modern, popular understandings of reading as a means to an end, whether that end be pleasure, understanding, education, distraction, or salvation.

1 Take and Taste, Take and Read: Desiring, Reading, and Taking Presence in George Herbert’s The Temple

Tolle lege, tolle lege. Augustine, Confessions1

Take and eat. Take and taste. Take and read. George Herbert’s verse obsesses over the permutations in this sequence. Yet his are not simply concerns about the proper preparation for communion or the place of reading and sermons in the ceremony or preparation for it. Instead, Herbert is just as much concerned with this activity of ‘taking,’ or picking up, what it would mean to have God really and immanently at hand, but not treat him as a tool, to have God really present, and still desire him. A model of devotional desire in which the subject quests after a receding, ultimately inaccessible God, either infinitely deferred or transcendently absent, certainly cannot do justice to such a present divinity. Rather, one only ‘takes’ or picks up that which is already there. The Temple, then, is an exercise in how to take this immanent divinity, how devotees should respond correctly to a God to whom they already have access. Both reading and desire respond to a present entity, instead of pointing elsewhere to a more important spiritual reality or meaning. When one takes and reads, one is no more insisting that a poem lacks its meaning than sacramental desire assumes that communicants lack Real Presence. The task that these lyrics set is to treat desire and reading themselves as intrinsically valuable devotional practices, instead of mere means to a more important end. In The Temple, reading poetry trains devotees to take things correctly, but is also itself a devotional act of taking. Herbert’s verse ultimately insists that reading poetry actually is devotion, and that all devotion can, and should, model itself on this activity.2

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When ‘Divinitie’ modifies Jesus’ words of institution at the last supper, ‘Take, eat; this is my body,’3 to emphasize taste instead of eating, the poem does so at the expense of doctrinal statements about ‘taking’ as substitution: But he doth bid us take his bloud for wine. Bid what he please; yet I am sure, To take and taste what he doth there designe, Is all that saves, and not obscure.

(21–4)4

The first ‘taking’ here is a metaphorical replacement: act as if it were blood or receive the blood in exchange for wine. What’s initially striking about this line is that the traditional eucharistic sequence, whether conceived as transubstantiation or memorialism, is inverted: Jesus bids the speaker to take blood for wine, not wine for blood. In fact, this substitution almost seems a metaphorical regression, since Jesus’ blood should be the end of the transformation or the entity represented by the sign of wine: the sequence leads us back to the sign itself, wine, that is supposed to lead to the more important phenomenon, blood, spirit, etc. This inversion feeds into the poem’s dismissal of Jesus’ hermeneutic bossiness in the succeeding lines: ‘Bid what he please’ indicates that these metaphorical substitutions and transformations, whether the blood really is wine or signifies wine, are irrelevant for the speaker’s devotional activity. He, instead, rests assured in taking and tasting what Jesus ‘there’ designs. It is the encounter with this immanent thing, ‘there,’ not its meaning or significance that saves. The point here is not to celebrate Herbert’s irenic receptionism, but rather to note how this stanza drives readers and communicants away from thinking of the sacrament in terms of a symbolic meaning or a purposive transformation and toward an immediate engagement with the more complicated acts of ‘taking,’ tasting, and ultimately reading. Yet if communicants are taking what Jesus designs, a sacrament that is ready to hand, how is this not the easiest, even the most automatic of activities? This is always the problem with immanence and immediacy: where is the work, the struggle, the drama necessary for salvation and redemption if God is right there in front of our faces, in our hands and mouths? What is there to say then about devotion and desire if all one needs do is ‘to take and taste’? Herbert’s answer, of course, is that these questions get it all wrong, that it is not easy at all to desire an immanent God for its own sake or to avoid the reactive notions of fear, pain,

Take and Taste, Take and Read: George Herbert

25

reward, and absence that make drama and struggle appear necessary for salvation. Passionate desire is not on a quest for the warm bosom of immanence in which it can rest, a point at which one can be done with desire. Instead, desire and even love are an attentive response to a present divinity that does not seek to achieve an extraneous goal. On the one hand, such an emphasis seems entirely conventional, a rejection of the mercenary approach to God that narcissistically and selfishly seeks its own reward. However, Herbert expands this conventional aversion to mercenary calculation to include all ends and purposes, depicting a devotional desire that must be essentially anti-teleological, whether that telos be conceived as salvation, communion, pleasure, or any other purportedly legitimate aim. In fact, contrary to the assumption that immanence produces inertia, The Temple shows how it is a transcendent or infinitely deferred goal that actually produces devotional stasis and complacency: it is only an immanent God who makes devotion into a loving and desirous action, and not a craven extortion. Herbert’s verse then insists that devotional desire entails something more than an intensified pleasure. Rather, it is an attempt to preserve desire as an experience, action, and event valuable in its own right.5 When it fends off fulfilment or telos, it does not do so in order to prolong the sweet pain of a beloved’s absence, but rather affirms the value of the desirous activity being performed at this moment. In this sense, Herbert’s devotional desire mirrors Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s account of deferral in the Petrarchan tradition. Instead of conceiving desire as an unfortunate task with which one is burdened, they contend that the courtly love tradition is not always and everywhere attempting to have done with desire. Deferral or delay no longer functions as a sign of incapacity, as a signal of desire’s frustration, but rather reveals a desire that actively attempts to fend off these self-annihilating aims: . . . it would be an error to interpret courtly love in terms of a law of lack or an ideal of transcendence. The renunciation of external pleasure, or its delay, its infinite regress, testifies on the contrary to an achieved state in which desire no longer lacks anything but fills itself and constructs its own field of immanence . . . all that counts is for pleasure to be the flow of desire itself, Immanence, instead of a measure that interrupts it or delivers it to the three phantoms, namely, internal lack, higher transcendence, and apparent exteriority. If pleasure is not the norm of desire, it is not by virtue of a lack that is impossible to fill but, on the contrary, by virtue of its positivity . . .6

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My appeal to this portrait of desire does not mean that desire never fails or that the idiom of lack never appears in The Temple, but only that we should not assume in advance that it inevitably fails or lacks and that this lack is constitutive of devotional subjects, the principles that organize both Hegelian and Lacanian accounts of desire and the subject.7 Instead, Herbert’s poetry asks that readers treat it as doing and desiring to do what it is actually doing: if it defers pleasure, it is because pleasure and other such aims are an impediment to an immanent devotion, not because of a constitutive lack that requires such deferral. ‘Love (III)’ presents precisely this pedagogical scene, correcting readers, and the poem’s speaker, who would wallow in these reassuring inadequacies: I the unkinde, ungratefull? Ah my deare, I cannot look on thee. Love took my hand, and smiling did reply, Who made the eyes but I?

(9–12)

Regardless of whether we read this moment as the height of passiveaggressive behaviour on the speaker’s part, trying to extort from Love the very reaffirmation that she receives, what matters most is the aspiration, not the ejaculation, that the speaker emits: ‘Ah.’ The danger of lack is the same as the danger of ends and goals: it serves as a resting place, treating devotion and poetry as nothing more than recumbent testaments to their own inadequacy. The same suspicion of an essential incapacity appears even in The Temple’s presentation of the limits of metaphorical ornament. A desire that does not point to some other end leads to a devotional reading in which signs do not lack their meanings. Yet this alternative model of a plain reading practice does not reduce to an unproblematic or reassuring immanence or given meaning. That is, Herbert’s much ballyhooed denunciations of ornament do not depend upon an ineffable transcendent divinity that is figured forth by language’s failure or on a simply transparent present sign. Thus, when ‘Jordan (II)’ famously rejects curling metaphors, the plainness that results is not equivalent to transparency. The friend whispers: ‘There is in love a sweetnesse readie penn’d: / Copie out onely that, and save expense’ (17–18). If this is how writing works, the reader’s job then appears to be to read the sweetness of love already plainly present in this copy: in fact, the italics emphasize precisely this point by indicating that the speaker is already transcribing, copying out,

Take and Taste, Take and Read: George Herbert

27

another’s discourse. Sweetness, though, is not a meaning or the result of a hermeneutic procedure, however reciprocal, a supplement in excess of what is already there.8 Rather, this sweetness is written within love, not a result or idea or sensation that issues from writing. The concluding stanza of ‘Jordan (I)’ stages precisely this problem when its denunciation of figural ornament issues in a plainness marked not by clarity or transparency, but the sweetness of a rhyme: Shepherds are honest people; let them sing: Riddle who list, for me, and pull for Prime: I envie no mans nightingale or spring; Nor let them punish me with losse of rime, Who plainly say, My God, My King.

(11–15)

The problem with riddles is not that they muddle up or introduce ambiguity into a clear and plain meaning. Rather, those who riddle do not punish the poet’s speaker with loss of rhyme at all, but threaten to treat verse as a vehicle for transmitting a final, independent meaningful payload. After all, ‘My God, My King’ is not a proverbial moral that one trots out, but a phrase welded within the reading of this poem: its meaning is immanent to the poem and is inseparable from the activity of reading it within the rhyme scheme. Ultimately, The Temple shows us how to read such immanent meanings, but also how alluring is the temptation to treat reading as issuing in an end or result, something that one can take away from a poem. It is the task of this chapter to show how Herbert’s verse depicts and enjoins an immanent model of desire and how this desire, in turn, requires of devotees a reading practice in which the sheer activity of reading does not just produce but actually is an affective devotion. Pivotal to understanding the activity of reading that Herbert’s verse requires is The Temple’s depiction of sacramental experience, an experience in which one takes presence, but which does not, for all that, result in a naively self-present, simple, or secure possession.9 Reading, desire, and the eucharist then share this basic concern with the manner of taking a divine presence, of how to take something without succumbing to the impulse to take away. Sacramental Experience In those poems that explicitly treat the subject of the eucharist, Herbert entertains several different conceptions of the function of the

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sacrament – restoration of a lost connection between material and spiritual realms or of a lost intimacy between human and divine; reassurance of God’s concern or grace – only to dismiss these notions, ultimately, because they treat the Lord’s Supper as a reactive, even mercenary event. For Herbert, the notion of Real Presence and the sacramental experience that attends it requires something more than an affirmation of the union of transcendent and immanent aspects of the divine or inner and outer experience. In fact, experience is not a dialectical détente between such opposites, a comforting resting place away from or after tension and contradiction. Real Presence does not serve as a salve for the absence of a transcendent God, but rather serves as a present object of desire: so not a yearning for a missing entity, but a desirous affection for and attention to that which is already present. In The Temple, this brand of attention certainly has a critical edge, demanding that readers adopt an affective experience denuded of ulterior aims, however noble or pious. Yet attention to an immanent object for its own sake is also love for Herbert: not gratitude or thankfulness, but love. Immanence, then, does not mean transparency or rest, but this particular brand of attentive love. As a result, instead of focusing solely on the notion of appropriate preparation for sacramental rituals, Herbert’s verse often explores the very nature of devotional experience, asking not just how to communicate appropriately, but how to communicate at all. In other words, The Temple consistently asks one question about the sacrament: how does the very notion of experience change when it turns to or is imbued with a divine presence? Or rather, how does one take – and then taste, eat, and read – a divine immanence ready to hand?10 The version of ‘The H. Communion’ in The Temple concludes with a portrait of sacramental experience not as an overcoming or dismantling of a dualistic division between flesh and spirit, but rather as an increased ease of movement between these radically sundered realms.11 The final stanza, in fact, describes the Lord’s Supper as a means of returning to an Edenic connection between heaven and earth. The domains remain separate and the ease described is not of rest but of activity, shuttling back and forth between two positions: Thou hast restor’d us to this ease By this thy heav’nly bloud: Which I can go to, when I please, And leave th’ earth to their food.

(37–40)12

Take and Taste, Take and Read: George Herbert

29

Ease of movement, of course, revolves around the maintenance of the very distinctions that the poem, at least initially, promises to abolish. Thus, the opening stanzas describe the sacrament’s efficacy in terms of consumption and digestion: the Lord’s Supper works via ‘nourishment and strength’ (7) and ‘creep’st into my breast’ (8). Despite this initial promise to overcome the division between internal and external spheres, the experience of the ceremony quickly transforms into a reaffirmation of this very aporia. Thus, in the third stanza, soul and flesh are separated by an impassable wall and the eucharist has only external effects on the body: Yet can these not get over to my soul, Leaping the wall that parts Our souls and fleshy hearts; But as th’ outworks, they may controll My rebel-flesh, and carrying thy name, Affright both sinne and shame.

(13–18)

Here, the sacrament produces only a fearful reaction from sin and the devotee’s sinful flesh. In this stanza at least, the wall between flesh and spirit is impenetrable. The succeeding stanza, however, presents a subtle grace as the means of navigating this seemingly impassible gulf: ‘Onely thy grace, which with these elements comes, / Knoweth the ready way’ (19–20). Yet this grace is not a transcendent spirituality, but rather the very sacramental, even bodily, immanence that attends the Real Presence. After all, the sacrament’s grace is explicitly contrasted with the spiritual variety that must wait at the door to the soul: ‘While those to spirits refin’d, at doore attend / Dispatches from their friend’ (23–4). The poem concludes not with a reunion or resolution of heavenly and earthly spheres, but with the establishment of a prelapsarian ease of transport between fundamentally disconnected spheres. What is most important here is that immanence and presence are not a response to or a means of overcoming divisions or restoring a lost wholeness: the divine does not dissolve back into the immanent and transporting connections, however smooth, are still necessary. It is not just that the imperative to transcend such a division maintains and requires the persistence of that very division. Rather, ease still entails an active attention and movement that a model of immanence as givenness and rest would hobble. The version of ‘The H. Communion’ in the Williams manuscript opens with confidence in the soteriological effects of the Lord’s Supper, much

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like the version in The Temple, but complicates these initial sentiments in succeeding stanzas and concludes with a much more ambiguous account of sacramental efficacy and experience. Unlike the 1633 version, this poem offers no promise of restored ease. In response to the first stanza’s question about the nature of divine presence in the elements – ‘how shall I know / Whether in these gifts thou bee so / As thou art evry-where’ (1–3) – the second and fourth stanzas reaffirm the broader redemptive goal of eucharistic reception: ffirst I am sure, whether bread stay Or whether Bread doe fly away Concerneth bread, not mee. But that both thou and all thy traine Bee there, to thy truth, & my gaine, Concerneth mee & Thee. ... Then of this also I am sure That thou didst all those pains endure To’ abolish Sinn, not Wheat. Creatures are good, & have their place; Sinn onely, which did all deface, Thou drivest from his seat.

(7–12)

(19–24)

At one level, the rejection of eucharistic controversy is entirely conventional in these middle stanzas. Instead of endless debates about the exact metaphysical nature of the Real Presence, what really matters is the faithful reception and acceptance of the ceremony’s purpose: abolishing sin, not wheat. The speaker is sure of the salvational aims of eucharistic participation, not the ontological status of the means to that end. Although Herbert here postulates a Lord’s Supper that has transcended doctrinal wrangling about the nature of the Real Presence, the poem does not conclude by reasserting a confident faith in the ultimate end of the ceremony. Rather, the poem turns to the difficulties inherent in any sensory or significative experience of the eucharist. As a result, the broader aims of the Lord’s Supper, whether conceived as incorporation or reception, cannot actually account for the sacramental encounter with divinity: That fflesh is there, mine eyes deny: And what shold flesh but flesh discry, The noblest sence of five?

Take and Taste, Take and Read: George Herbert If glorious bodies pass the sight, Shall they be food & strength & might Even there, where they deceiue?

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(30–5)

Although this stanza presents a traditional description of the limitations of carnal sense, it also hints at the equally difficult jump to signification. The limitations of sense experience might point toward the transcendent reality of ‘glorious bodies,’ but this pointing does not enable any real communication between fleshly and spiritual spheres. That is, and this is the most important moment in this verse, a system of signification that revolves around limitation or lack cannot ultimately effect the communion that the Lord’s Supper hopes to achieve. Instead, Herbert describes a ceremony in which it appears impossible to experience the sacramental reunification of fleshly and spiritual spheres at all. The sign that points elsewhere and the experience that it produces necessarily impede any attempt to restore or reveal a connection between matter and spirit: the designating sign reduces connection to pointing across this aporetic gulf and ignores the insistent experience of the sacrament in the present. Designation, like deferral, implies that the really important aspect of the event is elsewhere, in another place or another, later time. The succeeding stanza makes this painfully apparent: Into my soule this cannot pass; fflesh (though exalted) keeps his grass And cannot turn to soule. Bodyes & Mindes are different Spheres, Nor can they change their bounds & meres, But keep a constant Pole.

(37–42)

This manuscript version of ‘The H. Communion’ then opens with a faithful confidence in the goal of the sacrament, only to conclude that the middle or means to this goal is hopelessly empty, nothing more than designation. Claiming that there is a presence attached to signs does not solve this problem either, as presence still requires a response: this poem shows that presence is not a consoling end for the ritual, but rather the very problem that the ritual stages. Neither goals nor givenness end up accurately describing the operation of the sacrament: both end up promoting rest in a fashion that these two poems find anathema to sacramental experience.

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The Williams manuscript poem abandons a more secure receptionism or signification, both means of asserting a confident experience of the sacrament in the face of doctrinal squabbles about the nature of the Real Presence, in favour of the more nebulous notion of the sacrament as gift. Importantly, this gift is not an affirmation of ineffability or a complete submission to a divine will. Rather, it is a meditation on what it means to take and possess, to receive a gift actively:13 This gift of all gifts is the best, Thy flesh the least that I request. Thou took’st that pledg from mee: Give me not that I had before, Or give mee that, so I have more; My God, give mee all Thee.

(43–8)

As Regina Schwartz argues, the gift of the eucharist is not just a soothing divine grace that would overcome the fundamental division between heaven and earth. Rather, the speaker’s concluding, and potentially impudent, demand for ‘more’ reveals how this particular gift is one of both desire and gratitude: ‘Grateful for what? For desire, for what is given is this desire; hence, to feel desire is to feel gratitude, and when we express gratitude, we also express desire.’14 In the concluding stanza, though, the exact nature of this gift, other than its identification with desire, appears irrelevant. ‘Give me not that I had before, / Or give mee that’ implies that it does not matter whether the speaker receives a new gift that she lacked, or something that she already had, provided that it leads to ‘more.’ The irrelevance of the nature of the eucharistic gift does, however, alter the nature of this ‘more’: it can no longer entail an increase in what one has, because the nature of the thing given is inconsequential. Instead, ‘having more’ in this register describes an increase in the intensity of possession. One does not have more things, but rather one has them, or takes them, more intensely. Thus, having is not a zero sum activity in The Temple. And it is this increased intensity that is the hallmark of sacramental experience for Herbert.15 The effect of rejecting doctrinal controversy in the Williams manuscript version of ‘The H. Communion’ is not the replacement of one epistemological system, eucharistic theology, with a more secure sensory experience or a receptionist understanding of the eucharist, but rather an acknowledgment of the limitations of a sacramental experience imagined as significative or, for that matter, directed toward con-

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ceptual knowledge, of any sort, as its end or goal. Both models rely on a comprehensive grasping that treats possession as without degrees: one either understands or one does not. For Herbert, the abundance or intensification that the speaker seeks has no actual meaningful object as its content or referent. The speaker’s opening confidence in the efficacy of eucharistic participation is born of a teleological conviction, that the end is really what matters. However, as the poem proceeds, it consistently questions the validity of this conviction, demonstrating that a sacramental experience, to be sacramental, really cannot point elsewhere for its meaning and still hope to restore a connection between divine and human. Herbert depicts a eucharist then that enjoins an affective, intensive attachment to an immanent divinity, but does not imagine the ceremony as overcoming a dialectical division between inner and outer, immanent and transcendent realms, or human and divine spheres. In fact, the Williams manuscript version of ‘The H. Communion’ asserts that this understanding of the sacrament must be overcome. It stages, as it proceeds, the limitations of a eucharist conceived as a miraculous spectacle overcoming lack and aporia and ultimately offers instead an attention to this middle relation, the act of receiving and taking, as the focus of sacramental verse and desire. In other words, desire and love are directed here, both for their object and their command and control centre. This middle reception, the receptionism that marks Herbert’s verse, is not a way to subjectify or interiorize the sacrament, but rather a way to refocus attention on a sacramental experience with a positive, non-reactive content. Although the publication sequence for this poem, in the Williams manuscript and the later Bodleian manuscript and print editions, does not necessarily reflect an evolution in Herbert’s views, the progress through the versions of the poem does fortuitously support the notion that experience is a concept just as fraught with difficulty as presence. Thus, the Williams version of ‘The H. Communion,’ which more explicitly affirms a receptionist position, comes first and then the later poem turns away from any self-satisfied version of reception or possession. One starts with the fact of reception and then examines what a truly receptive experience entails; one does not begin with a question of elemental presence and proceed to the final resting place of reception.16 Again, reception and experience are not the solution to the problem of Real Presence, but the problem itself. Despite the decidedly different aims of critics like Robert Whalen, Achsah Guibbory, Richard Strier, and Michael Schoenfeldt, they all share a conception of experience as the means for overcoming division or dia-

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lectical opposition, as the restoration of a lost relationship. Experience, in this respect, is both divided and whole, a recognition of an almost aporetic separation that is simultaneously the means of overcoming said gulf. Given this model, it is unsurprising that they imagine the motivation for experience, sacramental or otherwise, to be a fundamental, even constitutive absence. For Whalen, the desire for the sacrament always stems from anxiety, inner turmoil, and doubt, a set of conflicts motivated by inadequacy or the fear of it.17 Accordingly, Whalen reads ‘Love (III)’ as an instance of the speaker fending off Love’s offer of grace: the guest ‘continues to resist a thoroughly undeserved grace until the sacrament intercedes to silence soteriological anxiety’ (Poetry of Immanence 158). Love, the innkeeper, however, corrects the soul’s wilfully erroneous perception that it is inadequate and thus has reason for anxiety. The soul’s interlocutor in the poem consistently, if gently, rebukes the speaker for his repeated laments about his inadequacy: ‘yet my soul drew back, / Guiltie of dust and sinne’ (1–2); ‘I the unkinde, ungratefull?’ (9); ‘let my shame / Go where it doth deserve’ (13–14). Schoenfeldt describes these laments as an exposure of ‘the self-contempt that masquerades as modesty.’18 Strier characterizes them similarly, as a portrait of the ‘steps by which self-denial becomes self-assertion,’ but also insists that the poem’s movement is an even more fundamental aspect of subjectivity: ‘The moment of reluctance here being described (this drawing back, after all is internal – “my soul drew back”) is presented as an immediate reflex of consciousness upon itself. It dramatizes the brute fact of self-consciousness.’19 Yet by repeatedly exposing the speaker’s reticence and resistance, the poem seems not just to assuage anxiety or provide consolation for this fallen speaker, but rather to disavow it. Nothing will assuage these anxieties because the speaker desires the repeated assertion of and complaint about this lack. Love’s responses – ‘Who made the eyes but I?’ (12); ‘And know you not, sayes Love, who bore the blame?’ (15) – are pedagogical in that they attempt to drive the soul away from its infatuation with its own lack,20 but they are no match for a speaker who has already conceived herself as both hopelessly fragmented and incorrigible. When the soul decides to ‘sit and eat’ (18), it has mistaken Love’s offer of meat as an attempt to fill this lack. ‘You must sit down, sayes Love, and taste my meat’ (17) directs its addressee away from thinking of this repast as filling or consuming: one must sit down and taste. The speaker’s persistent error resides in thinking of Love’s response as commensurate with its own lack-based model of desire, instead of considering it an attempt to push the reader to reconceptualize devotional

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desire itself, treating it as a positive connection to an immanent divinity, instead of a self-satisfied self-hatred. Thus, ‘Love (III)’ does not close with a sacramental experience that would quiet anxiety, much less accept the model of anxiety that the speaker presents. In fact, sitting and eating serve as a mark of the speaker’s presumptuousness and obstinacy, given Reformation debates about the proper reverence required at the communion table. As Strier notes, only the more radical Reformers and puritans actually sat at the communion table (Love Known 78), and Herbert himself expresses serious reservations about sitting and eating in the The Countrey Parson: ‘The Feast indeed requires sitting, because it is a Feast; but man’s unpreparednesse asks kneeling. Hee that comes to the Sacrament, hath the confidence of a Guest, and hee that kneels, confesseth himself an unworthy one, and therefore differs from other Feasters: but hee that sits, or lies, puts up to an Apostle: Contentiousnesse in a feast of Charity is more scandall then any posture.’21 The speaker of ‘Love (III)’ seems to confuse these divergent gestures, opening with a kneeling reverence and closing with a more arrogant or assured sitting: even Love’s adverb, ‘down,’ and its disappearance from the speaker’s final line are important in this respect, as they imply that there is more than one way to ‘sit,’ that the manner of sitting matters in a way that the speaker ultimately ignores. Thus, the reported action in the poem’s last line appears presumptuous and precipitous, a continuation of an earlier error – overconfidence in one’s own self-knowledge. The transition from ‘I am not worthy’ to ‘I am worthy,’ then, is not really a change at all, but rather just a shift in the object of one’s focus, from self-satisfied failure to self-satisfied success.22 This last lyric in ‘The Church’ does not simply task readers with determining whether the speaker is worthy or not, but rather shows us how the very procedure for making such determinations is misguided. A speaker confident in her own lack is still too confident precisely insofar as she ignores the actual gift being offered, focusing instead on the reward it promises. As was the case with ‘Divinitie,’ the distinction between taste and eating in ‘Love (III)’ works to distinguish a sacramental experience conceived as a reactive, consuming response – incorporation, restoration, reunification – and one conceived as immediate and immanent encounter. On the one hand, we are certainly already familiar with a description of taste, or any other sensation, as a marker of the intimate connection between body and soul that must attend an incarnational religiosity.23 In this vein, Whalen reads Herbert’s modification of the Gospel accounts in ‘Divini-

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tie’ – ‘take; eat’ to ‘take and taste’ – as evidence that Herbert requires ‘as physical an apprehension of God’s “designe” as is possible’ (Poetry of Immanence 116).24 According to this logic, Herbert uses ‘taste’ instead of ‘eat’ in order to emphasize the sensory intimacy of the eucharistic experience. Yet why is taste more physical or carnal than eating? It seems just as likely that Herbert hopes to drive his readers away from a consuming eating that is more carnal and more presumptuous than mere tasting.25 ‘Providence’ presents precisely this portrait of incorporation, depicting eating as the activity of beasts: ‘The beasts say, Eat me: but if beasts must teach, / The tongue is yours to eat, but mine to praise’ (21–2). If eating is not a consoling consumption that leads to incorporation of or into the body of God, then the escape from anxiety and inner turmoil cannot be the proper motivation for communion. In ‘Love (III),’ the speaker recognizes eating as a means to overcoming anxiety, but the poem presents this attitude as an obstinate, wilful misunderstanding of an immanent love. The point then is not that eating never comes after tasting, but rather that there is more to taste than a whetting of the appetite, a mere means of driving readers to eat. Rather, Herbert’s verse asks us to attend to taste itself because it serves as the entirety of devotional desire. The Temple, then, is not primarily concerned with how to achieve or acquire assurance, but rather how to desire and intensify the desire for the divine presence that is already there. There is eating in this scenario, but it does not serve as the final cause that governs sacramental or devotional experience. Taste does not reconnect body and soul, so much as it refuses the presupposition that body and soul require or need reconnecting, with all of the impulses to restored ease that such a reunion would imply. So what then is taste? Numerous seventeenth-century religious poets and theologians employ the sensation of taste as a means of emphasizing the intimacy and immediacy, but also the groundlessness of devotees’ relationships to the divine.26 As Debora Shuger notes, Richard Hooker explicitly figures faith as grounded on a taste of God’s love, against the dictates of reason.27 Taste, in Hooker’s sermon on the perpetuity of faith, stands as a figure for the slimness, but nonetheless conviction of ‘the Certainty of Adherence,’ in contradistinction to the ‘Certainty of Evidence’: ‘and therefore even then when the evidence which he hath of the truth is so small that it grieveth him to feel his weakness in assenting thereto, yet is there in him such a sure adherence unto that which he doth but faintly and fearfully believe, that his spirit having once truly tasted the heavenly sweetness thereof, all the world is not able quite and clean to remove him from it.’28 In Hooker’s formulation, taste figures an intimate

Take and Taste, Take and Read: George Herbert

37

and unshakeable apprehension that is nonetheless marked by faintness and potential doubt. Intimacy then does not breed reassuring, irresistible certainty. Contrary to Susan Stewart’s argument, however, this is not because taste signifies a low animality, or that we are led astray by such bestial sensations: ‘Even in the serious and didactically religious poems of George Herbert, the smells and tastes of this world are like will-o’-thewisps that we would be fools to chase.’29 Rather, the fleeting intensity and intimacy of the sensation is precisely the point, not the danger. Herbert’s and Hooker’s accounts of sensation then jar with the epistemological preoccupations of early modern studies, even in the wake of the ‘affective turn.’ As just one example, Bruce R. Smith’s nuanced historical phenomenology still tends to submit sense to an epistemological exchange – a transaction between subject and object – and, in so doing, subordinates the ‘how’ of knowing to a system of hollow substitutions and endless, uniform circulation: ‘With color there is no “thing-in-itself.” Color asks to be thought about, not as an object to be observed or as a text to be read, but as a transaction to be experienced.’30 By focusing on a transaction, which necessarily emphasizes the terms between which an action occurs, even a historically nuanced phenomenology impedes an understanding of what this ‘how’ would actually entail, in what activity actually consists.31 Herbert and Hooker, in contrast, tend to oppose ‘how’ and ‘what’ much more forcefully than Smith’s Renaissance phenomenology allows. Thus, even though it is groundless and faint, the danger for taste is that it always risks turning into the sort of surety – even the structural surety of a transaction between subject and object – that would undermine or make unnecessary divine grace: . . . it cannot be that any man’s heart living should be either so enlightened in the knowledge, or so established in the love of that wherein his salvation standeth, as to be perfect, neither doubting nor shrinking at all. If any such were, what doth let why that man should not be justified by his own inherent righteousness? For righteousness inherent being perfect will justify. And perfect faith is a part of perfect righteousness inherent . . . And then what need we the righteousness of Christ? His garment is superfluous: we may be honourably clothed with our own robes, if it be thus.32

I do not hope to suggest here that Hooker (or Herbert) is a secret, antirational mystic, but rather that the affective force of taste and the more general apprehension – in both senses – that it embodies appear as a positive devotional affect that requires protection from the perfection

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and completion embodied in teleology, a transactional conception of experience, and eating. For Hooker, the sinful imagination of conceptual perfection and certainty evidences a fundamental corruption of the flesh that believers must resist so as to preserve and respect the gift of grace. For Herbert, though, it is the allure of such epistemological processes, not just their completion, and all of the small ways in which they infect devotional life, that must be resisted. Thus, when ‘Conscience’ emphasizes the brevity and immediacy of sacramental taste, it does so in order to show that repentance is not a causal or teleological progress: ‘when ever at his board / I do but taste it, straight it cleanseth me’ (14–15). Instead of the dilatory work of incorporation, renovation, and repentance, the speaker insists that a cleansing change occurs immediately, alongside tasting the eucharist. This poem’s evocation of a sudden transformation asks that readers abandon meditations on process, preparation, and all the provisional goals that attend them and turn to the more pressing devotional question of what one does and desires after one has been cleansed. In this respect, taste, particularly in a poem like ‘Divinitie,’ serves as a central figure for a non-acquisitive, reverential faith, but also acknowledges that this devotional posture is extremely difficulty to maintain precisely because of the human impulse to eating, conceptualization, and instrumentalization. As Whalen notes, ‘perhaps simply to “take and taste” grace without trying to understand how grace is imparted in the sacrament is as difficult, finally, as retaining for the universe an Aristotelian hierarchy while dismissing the models which render it intelligible’ (Poetry of Immanence 117). ‘The Church’ would then end with a demonstration of just how alluring is the temptation to transform the eucharistic moment into a self-possessed, teleological, and transactional experience that one understands, the temptation, in other words, to ‘sit and eat,’ not ‘take and taste.’ If the speaker of ‘Love (III)’ errs, it is not because of an ineradicable lack, but rather because she imagines intimacy or presence as the completion of a quest after which there is nothing to do. Herbert’s verse focuses on taste and tasting because responding to immanence is difficult, because fashioning oneself as a complaining, lacking subject on a quest is easy and reassuring, and of course resentful. A consolation that salves the pain of God’s absence is easy insofar as it simply promises the return of presence; a consolation that acknowledges a persistent divine presence is more difficult insofar as the unveiling or revelation of divine presence does not have any comforting effect. To put it in Petrarchan terms, what does a speaker do once the beloved says ‘yes’?33

Take and Taste, Take and Read: George Herbert

39

Yet taste is not simply a sign that cannot reach its goal, whether that goal is immanent communion or meaning. It does not run up against its transcendent limit, only to be thrown back into a more narrowly construed human domain: this is not an accommodationism. Rather, reading ends up like tasting insofar as signs themselves act as immanent forces or objects with their own value, not as designators or pointers. For example, ‘The Banquet’ opens with an evocation of the limits of sense and language similar to the appeals to transcendence that appear early in ‘The H. Communion’ poems. In the first stanza, the pleasure offered by the eucharist exceeds taste and linguistic representation: Welcome sweet and sacred cheer, Welcome deare; With me, in me, live and dwell: For thy neatnesse passeth sight, Thy delight Passeth tongue to taste and tell.

(1–6)

Given the excessive nature of pleasure, it is unsurprising that it would end up exceeding language and even sense. Yet this poem does not devolve into repeatedly asserting the ineffability of this joy and the attendant weakness of words and taste: delight is only where this poem begins, not where it ends. ‘The Banquet’ closes by enjoining its addressee and its speaker to ‘Strive in this, and love the strife’ (54), not the conclusion or outcome of the strife, in this case pleasure. Late in the poem, taste becomes a sign that actually and immanently connects with divinity, but the asymmetrical nature of this connection thwarts any notion of reciprocity or transaction: Having rais’d me to look up, In a cup Sweetly he doth meet my taste. But I still being low and short, Farre from court, Wine becomes a wing at last.

(37–42)

Here, taste is equivalent to desire, a desire that God has raised in the speaker to begin with: prevenient grace allows the speaker to look up at all, but God’s response is not visual. He responds with a sweet taste in a cup. This stanza does not stage a series of reciprocal exchanges, where

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God responds in kind and desire desires the desire of the Other. The opening stanza’s insistence on a mystery that passeth taste and language has disappeared by this point, but it is not replaced by a hermeneutic reciprocity or a phenomenal transaction. Instead, taste transforms from a failed designating sign into a sign with energy and the ability to effect a connection between devotees and God. The asymmetry here indicates that there is more to this connection, though, than a thin line between two points, whether conceived as subject and God or subject and object. It is the thickness and substance of this relation, how one senses and desires, that occupies Herbert’s verse. This focus on relation as such is in keeping with Hooker’s linguistic theory, which contends that language does not directly designate an extra-temporal experience or concept, but rather eschews representation in favour of a call for liturgical participation: ‘Language appropriately used thus becomes a facilitator of process, an agent of change, an act of persuasion, rather than a means of reassurance or a depictor of reality.’34 In Strier’s terms, Herbert’s verse dissuades devotees from fruitless searches in the natural world and, instead, trains them to seek God where he asks to be sought: ‘The goal, for Herbert, is to contemplate the fluctuations of immediate emotional experience without attempting to “map” this experience in an ontological or cosmological way’ (Love Known 238). Once again, sacramental experience is not a quest, but it still requires attention to one’s own actions and passions, without the reassuring functionalism and lacks that purposiveness or meaning provides. For example, ‘The Agonie’ begins by insisting that philosophers have failed to measure sin and love: ‘But there are two vast, spacious things, / The which to measure it doth more behove: / Yet few there are that sound them; Sinne and Love’ (4–6). Yet instead of treating Love as a cosmic mystery, the poem casts readers back on the very immediate experience that Strier describes: Who knows not Love, let him assay And taste that juice, which on the crosse a pike Did set again abroach, then let him say If ever he did taste the like. Love is that liquor sweet and most divine, Which my God feels as bloud; but I, as wine.

(13–18)

The speaker feels Love as wine, which would not appear to be all that novel, but simultaneously is challenged to recognize its uniqueness:

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‘then let him say / If ever he did taste the like’ (15–16). Whatever mystery exists here does not reside behind the sign or experience of the eucharist, but in the sign. That is, ‘The Agonie’ contends that the sacrament never presents a problem of meaning or telos, but rather one that revolves around the nature of experienced signs. One feels love as wine, just like any other wine, but still recognizes something different in its very nature as a sign. Of course, it is not accidental that this particular, non-designating sign is also love. Herbert’s attempt to organize sacramental experience around an attention to taste and signs as such is part of a broader reorientation of desire, away from what one lacks to what one already has, in this case the sign itself. Desiring Presence At one level, Herbert’s account of taste amounts to the entirely innocuous Lutheran assertion that human activity or experience does not cause grace. Tasting the eucharist does not cause grace. Neither does eating. Yet tasting, strictly speaking, does not cause consumption either: we might label taste a spur or motor, but it is not a cause. Eating as an activity does not follow from taste: taste is the principle of selection among possible solutions to the problem of hunger, or need. Taste, in short, is a mechanism of desire and choice, not cause, effect, and need. Of course, it is possible to eat for pleasure, to transform this choice into a goal. Taste in this scenario becomes a pleasurable end itself, instead of being an attentive sensation or encounter with an object. In other words, when one treats taste as an aim, one is no longer paying attention to the thing in one’s mouth or one’s relation to the thing, but rather the residue of joy that one subtracts from this inattentive interaction. Herbert’s verse casts suspicion on both of these attempts to subordinate taste to a teleological plan, either as a means or an end. As a result, taste is less a figure for the physical and reassuring intimacy of devotion than it is a means of exploring the nature of religious desire itself. In The Temple, the distinction between taste and eating indicates the ways in which religious desire should not presumptuously reach for an end beyond its ken, but should concern itself with the immanent features of connection to the divine. Herbert’s propensity to separate human devotional actions and their purported goals, grace or assurance, is entirely in keeping with a theology that makes salvation and redemption a divine gift, not a deserved accomplishment. Brian Cummings maintains that The Temple is relentless in eliminating any causal connection between devotional actions and

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sentiments and the gift of grace: ‘The poems are full of the expression of subjective fears, desires, hopes, but these signs of the will are cut off from the final action of the drama, a redemption which comes (if it comes) without asking or waiting.’35 John N. Wall finds a similar separation between cause and effect in The Countrey Parson: ‘to “Throw [oneself] down at the throne of grace” is not to abandon effort but to suspend simplistic causal expectations about the link between effort and outcome.’36 One of Cummings’s chief examples, ‘Prayer (I),’ Herbert’s famous sonnet without a verb, closes with a cryptic evocation of understanding that seems to prevent either human will or the poem from grasping its aim: ‘The milkie way, the bird of Paradise, / Church-bels beyond the starres heard, the souls bloud, / The land of spices; something understood’ (12–14). For Cummings, ‘Prayer (I)’ is a poem that ‘stops without ending’ and that, as a result, ‘is a trope for the gift of grace.’37 Devotional desire in this register does not so much yearn for the acquisition of a gift as it does respond to the gift after it is given. The reception of the eucharist certainly has effects, but these effects are not caused or achieved by taste or desire. Instead, a continually desiring taste is what one does or the attitude one presents in response to a grace already present. How then is one desiring an immanent God, when all the aims and rewards of said desire are either unconnected to one’s own actions or already present? And in turn, what sort of devotee results from such an understanding of desire? At the very least, an acquisitive model of the subject, in which it seeks, but always and inevitably fails to acquire its object, whether that object is God, pleasure, or assurance, ceases to have much value as a means of comprehending religious identities. Instead, Herbert’s poetry presents a renovated self capable of affirming dependency precisely insofar as its primary feature is a continuous desiring activity, not consistently and inevitably failed attempts to possess assurance, pleasure, or God. Critical models that imagine the goal of devotion as the recognition and reassertion of God’s omnipotence ultimately require that one assert devotees’ and God’s lack. That is, we lack (or exceed) the power to praise God aright and, thus, God lacks our proper praise. This basic mechanism is characteristic of criticism that otherwise fundamentally disagrees. Thus, Stanley Fish’s reading of ‘The Altar’ posits the impossibility of asserting dependence, the self-consuming and -undermining nature of such an assertion: ‘The final couplet is superfluous in exactly the same way and for the same reason that the efforts of the poet-speaker (and the reader) have been superfluous from the beginning. One cannot ask for what has already been given; nor can one

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do what has already been done.’38 Fish’s argument turns on the irresistible grace of Reformed soteriology, a gift given once and for all that cannot be rejected by its recipient. However, desire in Fish’s account must be a fundamentally mercenary procedure insofar as it ceases once this irresistible, but nonetheless supremely wonderful gift appears. Despite Richard Strier’s disagreement with Fish’s argument, on this point he completely concurs: ‘Fish correctly notes that one “cannot ask for what one has already been given” . . . but one can coherently ask for what one does not feel one has been given’ (Love Known 194). In Strier’s estimation, it is devotees’ blindness to what they’ve already received – God’s grace – that allows for desire. Yet this position seems difficult to square with an affirmation of desire’s dignity, insofar as it requires us to imagine desire always and everywhere as an error. For Fish and Strier, regardless of their broader differences, one can only desire the apparently absent or lacking, a gift not yet given or recognized. Yet a desire that disappears after its goal has been achieved or recognized is precisely the telos that Herbert’s evocation of taste evades. Desire is a response to the gift, not a prelude to it. Thus, Herbert consistently enjoins his readers to desire that which is already there, instead of getting mired in a circuit of reciprocal and endless recognitions.39 Devotional desire then does not have a goal or a lack as its impetus. An immanent passionate connection to the divine drives it instead. ‘Providence,’ in fact, describes humans as the only beings for whom desire is an engine, not a hole: ‘Nothing useth fire, / But Man alone, to show his heav’nly breed: / And onely he hath fuell in desire’ (110–12). We can certainly imagine the endless oscillation between presence and absence that a Lacanian or Hegelian understanding of desire would offer in this register.40 However, The Temple consistently evades a reactive dialectic of self and Other, precisely because such reactivity denies desire any affirmative content. Herbert consistently presents an affirmative love, not fear, anxiety, or a reactive consolation, as the appropriate motive for devotion, which in turn requires that desire have its own positive valence. The Temple’s challenge to the basic dialectic of selfconstitution does not just reside within its consistent troubling of the notion of self-possession, the attempt, in ‘Clasping of hands,’ to ‘make no Thine and Mine!’ (20). In fact, it is Herbert’s consistent focus on the immanent activity of sacramental desire that drives readers away from such a dialectical model. Instead of yearning for a heavenly pleasure that descends to reward or solace the devotee or attempting to restore a connection lost, The Temple frequently presents desire for this lived,

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loving relationship as an already-present activity in need of intensification. When lack does appear in Herbert’s verse, it is not as the absence of desire’s object – the Other or the desire of the Other – but rather as an absence of intensity. Thus, ‘Church-lock and key’ presents desire as requiring divine intervention and amplification: ‘So I do lay the want of my desire, / Not on my sinnes, or coldnesse, but thy will’ (7–8). A lack of intensity is decidedly different from a missing object: the former describes an already existing and persisting affective state; the latter a state of affairs to be overcome. A lacking intensity will never be overcome, precisely because it is not targeted toward a destination, an optimal intensity, that erases or negates intensity. The infinitely deferred transcendent object, however, motivates a desire that either loathes itself and its own processes, wishing for their dissolution down the road, or presents this temporary state as a mercenary means, however pleasurable. ‘The Glimpse,’ for example, opens with a formulation that treats pleasure as absent, ‘Whither away delight?’ (1), and then describes delight as an unsatisfying fleetingness: Thy short abode and stay Feeds not, but addes to the desire of meat. Lime begg’d of old, they say, A neighbour spring to cool his inward heat; Which by the springs accesse grew much more great.

(11–15)

This stanza’s final description of desire as a chemical reaction between lime and water indicates that desire intensifies not because of temporal constraints, the fleeting nature of pleasure, but because of its basic chemistry. The fact that water does not cool the heat of lime shows that an attempt to satiate desire is misguided. We might even note a pun on ‘access’ and ‘excess’ in line 15, which would imply that the spring’s abundance – not its lack – intensifies an inward desire. By the end of the poem, Herbert’s speaker actually wishes for delight’s stay to be short: ‘If I have more to spinne, / The wheel shall go, so that thy stay be short’ (26–7). ‘Stay’ might mean absence, as Hutchinson acknowledges,41 which would make this poem a conventional wish for God’s more enduring presence. However, the lines also read as a wish that delight be short so that desire might intensify. The notion that pleasure actually impedes an amplified desire is not unique to ‘The Glimpse.’ ‘Love (II)’ presents a contest between lesser and true desires that argues for the perpetuation of the latter:

Take and Taste, Take and Read: George Herbert Immortall Heat, O let thy greater flame Attract the lesser to it: let those fires, Which shall consume the world, first make it tame; And kindle in our hearts such true desires, As may consume our lusts, and make thee way. Then shall our hearts pant thee; then shall our brain All her invention on thine Altar lay, And there in hymnes send back thy fire again.

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(1–8)

True desire consumes lust in the same fashion as does Donne’s ‘fiery Zeale . . . which doth in eating heale.’42 But this regulatory purgation of lust, the pleasure of discipline that Foucauldian critics might justly locate here, is not the ultimate end of true desires. Instead, true desires take over the heart and makes it ‘pant thee,’ not because of exhaustion or surfeit but because of increased intensity. And then true desires reciprocally return to the initial ‘Immortall Heat’ via hymns. In Fish’s terms, ‘ “Hymnes” which celebrate God’s fire are the products of what they celebrate.’ In turn, this self-perpetuation indicates the ‘illusoriness of human participation’ and transfers all responsibility for action to God.43 Yet this critical focus on the level of human agency in devotional events and the viability of a perpetual-motion praise machine makes whether humans act or have warrant for acting the primary issue in Herbert’s verse. Instead of adjudicating the legitimacy of a subject’s devotional actions, The Temple seems to present not so much an examination of grounds and ends as a picking up and putting to use of present objects and sensations. Herbert does not ask whether he can act in this or that way, but asks how his action can proceed in a devout manner: a focus more on ‘how’ than on ‘that.’ Thus, it turns out, in ‘Church-lock and key,’ that even sins themselves, the fundamental inadequacies within humans, can become a means to amplify prayer: Yet heare, O God, onely for his blouds sake Which pleads for me: For though sinnes plead too, yet like stones they make His blouds sweet current much more loud to be.

(9–12)

In this poem there is no contrarian tendency, no dialectical pull between lack and satiation. Instead, even that which looks, smells, acts, and tastes like absence ends up acting as an intensifier of desire.

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Richard Rambuss, in what is probably the most thorough recent discussion of the relationships between desire, pleasure, and seventeenthcentury devotion, presents devotional pleasure as precisely such an affirmative phenomenon, a positive content that does not need to detour through a regulatory asceticism or discipline in order to be, in fact, pleasurable: This is not to deny that pleasures can indeed be found along such a via negativa, that sensual ecstasy may also be wrought through disciplining a fervidly abject devotional body or subjectivity. But what I would foreground here is the existence of a powerful vein in seventeenth-century English religious writing that . . . forthrightly advances religious devotion as a practice of pleasure.44

Even in those poems where one might expect a description of the pleasures of constraint, Herbert offers instead an affirmative account of desire. ‘Discipline’ pleads with God repeatedly to ‘Throw away thy rod’ (1, 29) and, in its stead, substitutes love as the engine of order: Then let wrath remove; Love will do the deed: For with love Stonie hearts will bleed.

(17–20)

Love then replaces discipline or becomes the regulatory apparatus that would elicit pleasure. Rambuss’s positive account of pleasure is central to any affirmative model of devotional desire insofar as it insists that religious affect need not be tied to a desire for restraint or prohibition. However, pleasure as a concept also seems to have serious critical limits in Herbert’s corpus, and not just in those poems like the ‘The Churchporch’ that insist on renunciation and regulation. Perhaps most famously, this poem contends that ‘Man is a shop of rules, a well truss’d pack, / Whose every parcell under-writes a law’ (141–2). Pleasure loses its critical foothold insofar as Herbert’s verse asks us to sacrifice it in the name of desire and love, or rather to abandon it as an organizing principle of devotional action. Pleasure, of course, as an end, can be put in the service of moral order, in a tradition of instruction and delight stretching from Jonson and Sidney back to Horace:

Take and Taste, Take and Read: George Herbert Thou, whose sweet youth and early hopes inhance Thy rate and price, and mark thee for a treasure; Hearken unto a Verser, who may chance Ryme thee to good, and make a bait of pleasure. A verse may finde him, who a sermon flies, And turn delight into a sacrifice.

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(1–6)

The final line of this stanza suggests that delight is something more than a mercenary, if nonetheless effective, bait-and-switch tactic and that the transformation that poetry effects is not just one of putting pleasure in the service of virtue. A sacrifice, after all, is synonymous with virtue or a moral goal toward which delight would lead: turning delight into a sacrifice means turning this goal into a means, or collapsing this distinction between means – delight – and end – sacrifice. In addition, transforming delight into sacrifice entails a basic alteration in the relationship between devotion and pleasure: not just using it as is, but transforming it into an offering to God. Whether delight is renounced as a sacrifice or offered up as a sacrifice, in both cases pleasure is the thing abandoned. The concluding lines of ‘The Church-porch’ certainly enjoin readers to acknowledge the fleetingness of pleasure: ‘play the man. / Look not on pleasures as they come, but go’ (457–8). This orientation to passing pleasures, though, amounts to more than renunciation: after all one is still watching them as they go. Rather, ‘The Church-porch’ ends with the abandonment of pleasure or delight as the aim of desire. Turning delight into a sacrifice means rejecting pleasure as the controlling interest in desire and abandoning the arrival of pleasure as a measure of devotional success: instead of anticipating joy’s arrival, one finds joy within desire itself. Herbert’s verse does not then insist that all pleasure be avoided or evaded: after all, some joy will seep through even the most impermeable of ascetic walls. In fact, The Temple sets at least two different models of joy in opposition, suggesting that it is not reason or moderation that tempers excessive sinful pleasure, but rather a different configuration of passion. As Arnold Stein notes, when The Temple seeks to produce a measured order, it turns to affect, maintaining that devotional desire produces its own brand of order, and never simply allows reason or repression to intervene and squelch passion: For a basic description of Herbert’s aim we cannot improve on his announced program: to ‘kindle’ true and ‘consume’ false desires in order to

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Reading, Desire, and the Eucharist ‘make thee way.’ Whatever the merit of the program itself, in his hands it does not minimize the dignity or force of human desire; it does not arrive at its goal easily, by screening or suppressing the false desires while bestowing promotions on the true.45

Yet the ordered contest of affects and pleasures that Stein describes seems perhaps too mild a description for the overwhelming heavenly joy that competes with worldly joy in a poem like ‘The Invitation.’ This poem opposes a reformed model of sacramental joy – the invitation of the title – to a destructive joy that forages beyond limits. Yet the destruction that heavenly joy effects does not appear immediately dissimilar to the destruction wreaked by worldly joy: Come ye hither All, whom joy Doth destroy, While ye graze without your bounds: Here is joy that drowneth quite Your delight, As a floud the lower grounds.

(19–24)

In other words, we are still left with the problem of how one could tell these joys apart, how a true desire kindles in a way different from a worldly one. When the joy offered in the eucharistic meal overwhelms the lower-grade delights of earthly behaviour, this flood is not just pleasure of a greater intensity that supplants, within the same evaluative order, another less powerful carnal pleasure. These are not the same models of joy. In this contest of joys, reformed or heavenly does not just win because its pleasure is more intense, but because it does not expend itself in searching after pleasure: sacramental joy drowns delight, considered as an aim or goal, even the reassuring aim of moderation that Stein presents. Thus, the first stanza offers a sacramental divinity as the lure for worldly gluttons and, in so doing, highlights the waste involved in any questing effort: Come ye hither All, whose taste Is your waste; Save your cost, and mend your fare. God is here prepar’d and drest, And the feast, God, in whom all dainties are.

(1–6)

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Certainly, by the end of the poem, these promises of sacramental efficacy and presence might all look like an extortion racket: ‘For it seems but just and right / In my sight, / Where is All, there All should be’ (34–6). By inviting ‘all,’ the speaker strong-arms God, ‘All,’ into showing up as well. Yet devotional action here, the joy that the speaker asks devotees to embrace, is independent of this broader theological question of whether God is actually present. ‘The Invitation’ does not quite advocate faking it until one makes it, but it does outline a devotional action and desire that proceeds as if God is immanently present. The poem shows that the repeated postulation of God’s transcendent absence and its corollary model of desire as a quest for this absent object of desire is precisely not the way to act devoutly. When ‘The Invitation’ evokes a taste that produces or is waste, it points to the fundamental limitations of a desire conceived as work. For Deleuze and Guattari, when one attaches desire to the aim of pleasure, as the glutton does, desire becomes a self-exhausting labour, as opposed to a freely moving drive: ‘Work is a motor cause that meets resistances, operates upon the exterior, is consumed and spent in its effect, and must be renewed from one moment to the next. Free action is also a motor cause, but one that has no resistance to overcome, operates only upon the mobile body itself, is not consumed in its effect, and continues from one moment to the next.’46 In other words, waste is not the product of a misdirected desire, one that focuses on the wrong goal. Rather, it issues from a misconceived desire, one in which desire is a matter of work, quest, and struggle – the model of pleasure – instead of a free action – the model of love. This distinction in the nature of desire also applies to Deleuze and Guattari’s rereading of the Petrarchan and courtly love traditions. In this light, the lover’s suffering and even masochism are not evidence of a deferral or a failure to achieve his goals, but rather effect an immanent desiring joy that has nothing to do with the goals, struggles, and work of pleasure: ‘There is, in fact, a joy that is immanent to desire as though desire were filled by itself and its contemplations, a joy that implies no lack or impossibility and is not measured by pleasure since it is what distributes intensities of pleasure and prevents them from being suffused by anxiety, shame, and guilt.’47 It is this immanent joy that Herbert offers as the event of devotion, as opposed to an exterior goal that would render this activity mercenary or laborious. For Herbert, these external aims and standards are dangerous precisely because they can so quickly and easily shore up the very self or subject that devotion hopes to transform. Thus, ‘Affliction (I)’ acknowledges the

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prideful danger of taking pleasure in one’s own suffering and the ease with which it turns into a badge of honour or God’s favour: Yet lest perchance I should too happie be In my unhappinesse, Turning my purge to food, thou throwest me Into more sicknesses. Thus doth thy power crosse-bias me, not making Thine own gift good, yet me from my wayes taking.

(49–54)

Although this poem often reads as a lament, we would do well to consider the possibility that being thrown off course, frustrated in one’s attempt to achieve one’s destination, does not appear as a negative event in the broader devotional logic of The Temple. A desirous obedience or submission then ultimately renders the goals of devotional desire inaccessible, whether they be pleasure, pain, or salvation. Yet they are inaccessible because they are disavowed, not because they are infinitely receding. Salvation or pleasure certainly may occur along this devotional path, but only contingently. ‘Affliction (I)’ closes with the acknowledgment that desire is not something transparently available to a believer’s consciousness, not because such knowledge is mysteriously ineffable, but rather because accepting one’s affliction faithfully means not jumping to the broader aims and purposes of one’s own devotion and of God’s plan: ‘Ah my deare God! though I am clean forgot, / Let me not love thee, if I love thee not’ (65–6). The speaker of this concluding couplet begs to love God outside of a system of reciprocal recognition: ‘though I am clean forgot.’ There are passive-aggressive echoes to this phrase, of course, but, as with the final stanza of ‘The Invitation,’ we need not read these lines as a lament designed to extort remembrance from the divine. Rather, they present the love for which the speaker wishes, her own, as decidedly not predicated on God’s reciprocity or recognition. In Deleuze’s terms, the configuration of desire around pleasure offers a paradoxically safe and lacking model of the self, one built on the mutually reinforcing principles of recognition and self-regard: ‘Pleasure is an affection of a person or a subject; it is the only way for persons to “find themselves” in the process of desire that exceeds them; pleasures, even the most artificial, are reterritorializations. But the question is precisely whether it is necessary to find oneself. Courtly love does not love the self, any more than it loves the whole universe in a celestial or religious way.’48 Herbert’s verse does not lock itself into the impossible dialectic of

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asserting humility, but rather attempts to eschew pleasure as an aim insofar as it shores up the very self that one attempts to transform or convert. There are moments in The Temple that tempt us to locate and embrace a self-pitying, resentful subject trying to extort presence from God. Yet reading this same self again, lurking as a self-interested motive behind the poems’ own advocacy for an immanent divinity, mistakes the devotional import of this verse. Even if we know, theologically, that we lack God, devotionally we must act as if, at each moment, he is right there in front of us to be taken, tasted, and desired. Donne’s more reciprocally extortive Holy Sonnet 9, ‘If poysonous Minerals,’ serves as a useful comparison here. In Donne’s sonnet, the speaker concludes with a desire for oblivion in an attempt to excuse his faults: ‘That thou remember them, Some clayme as dett, / I thinke it Mercy if thou wilt forgett’ (Westmoreland, 13–14).49 Herbert’s poem does not allow the devotee, after acknowledging that he has been forgotten, to rest assured in this oblivion, to abandon loving because his love has not been returned, but rather insists that the devotee must continue to desire God. For Herbert, unlike Donne, being forgotten by God is not an excuse for an escape from loving God. Neither, though, is it a motivation or cause for loving God. Recognition or its absence, in short, has got nothing to do with it. After touring through the joys and pains of devotion, the poem concludes by acknowledging that neither of these marks, pleasure or pain, is adequate to indicate or seal God’s love. Yet this final couplet also insists that being forgotten is not a motivating force for desire either: ‘though I am clean forgot’ does not mark a desire that overcomes oblivion or a separation between divine and human, but rather a desire that proceeds independent of all of these other considerations – pleasure, pain, and God’s own recognition. The quotidian scene of ‘Love (III)’ undermines the value of recognition by insisting that all it can accomplish is a reassertion of the distance between God and devotees. All recognition can ever produce is anxious, reactive concern, a repetition of one’s own self-concern, not love. Thus, the speaker begins by retreating from Love’s welcome because he is ‘Guiltie of dust and sinne’ (2) and continues throughout the poem to denigrate himself as ‘unkinde, ungratefull’ (9) and full of a damnable ‘shame’ (13). Love serves as the interlocutor and pedagogue, however, teaching the speaker and his soul that the spectacular displays of absence and inadequacy are fundamentally inaccurate portraits of the relationship between divine and human. That is, the poem acts as a tutorial in the type of desire that should attend devotion, one that stems not from

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a resentful and resented gap between human and divine, or even from the recognition of an immanent divinity. ‘Love (III)’ does not promise a speaker who experiences an epiphanic recognition – God is present not absent, now I know – but rather stages the uselessness of recognition for Love. Frustration and pain do not disappear in Herbert’s verse, but rather the poems imagine their desires for God as something other than the product of these frustrations and inadequacies, for a desire that stems from such motives is a mercenary desire for reward and solace, not one motivated by love. Merely recognizing God as immanent is simply the inverse of this reactive process. The effect of The Temple then, and this is also where Deleuze and Guattari’s account of desire proves useful, is to transmute the motivation for desire and love, not just its objects and aims. In ‘Love (III),’ Love asserts that love is primary, not that it comes later, that it is a product or result. Devotion then is neither a struggle nor a recognition, but rather the attempt to make love, and not sin or the fear thereof, the key motive in one’s religious life. Herbert, of course, recognizes the attraction and allure of a teleological model of devotion: at least in such a scenario, we can treat love as an end to be achieved, something that we struggle to acquire and then recognize as ours. Even if devotees never achieve this aim, as an absent, unreachable goal it remains reassuring: we will know when we have it. The Temple, though, insists not only that we already have these ends, that the divine is right there for the taking, but that our job is to do more than just recognize this immanent divinity. Herbert’s eucharistic poems often insist on precisely the simultaneous availability of means and ends, so as to challenge this fantasy of ultimate possession.50 ‘The Bunch of Grapes’ affirms that one already has access to and possesses not just the sacrament, but also its source. The speaker answers his own question about dispossession, ‘But where’s the cluster? where’s the taste / Of mine inheritance?’ (19–20), with an affirmation that he already possesses the fruit of both the grape and the wine: ‘But can he want the grape, who hath the wine? / I have their fruit and more’ (22–3). The speaker already possesses not only the immanent elements here, but also the purported ends – the fruits – of these elements. In this poem, the Lord’s Supper is not a means to some other end, but rather a present gift valuable in its own right, one in which that other end has been folded back proleptically into the immanent experience of the sacrament: delight, a means, turned into a sacrifice, its aim.51 Herbert, though, does not offer up such a collapse of means and ends merely to reaffirm God’s omnipotence. Contrary to Fish’s argument, the issue is not the relative agencies of God

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or humans: ‘How can we obey the injunction to serve God, if his power and omnipresence join to make service impossible?’52 The issue is devotion, not obedience – or not the fact of obedience, but the manner of obedience. Instead of recognizing that God always is and must be ahead of our actions, Herbert verse asks devotees to abandon these sorts of questions as narcissistic self-reflections and as impediments to devotional action and expression. The final stanza of the Williams manuscript’s ‘The H. Communion,’ as we have already seen, contends that the endless oscillations between humility and assertion, lack and excess are fundamentally irrelevant: ‘Give me not that I had before, / Or give mee that, so I have more; / My God, give mee all Thee’ (46–8). The speaker here is unconcerned with his agency or lack thereof, whether he lacks the gift or already has it: ‘or’ here connotes an equivalence of irrelevant options – give me what I lack, or give me what I already have; it doesn’t matter. Whether one already has this gift, or lacks it, has nothing to do with the devotional response to the gift. The poem’s final stanza then designates a basic conflict between having and taking, the ways in which an obsession with whether one has a gift prevents asking for, responding to, and just plain taking the gift. Herbert’s rejection, or at least suspicion of possession is entirely orthodox, of course, but his verse nonetheless emphasizes the difficulty of actually accepting this orthodoxy, of abandoning our desire for ends that one owns, however fleetingly, once and for all.53 Taking what is right in front of us turns out to be just as difficult, if not more so, than questing after an unattainable, transcendent end. It is not that we are all greedy and acquisitive and should stop wanting to own God. Rather, Herbert’s verse shows how even divestment, saying no to possession, becomes a means of having God. Retooling desire so that it responds to, as opposed merely to recognizing, an immanent divinity entails a rigorous attention to these present sacramental phenomena, what is there for the taking, not a wishy-washy mysticism that would allow us to trail off into vagary: e.g., the contention that God is too ineffable or transcendent to be possessed. In The Temple, that means a devoted and loving attention to the word itself, at the expense of its much more amorphous meaning, which always threatens to reintroduce an end or goal. Just as the problem in sacramental devotion is how to take what is present, so too does the problem of devotional reading revolve around taking what is already plainly there in the verse. That is, The Temple consistently shows us that meaning and its complex variations are easy, but that reading plainness and taking what is right there on the page requires a constant vigilance.

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Reading and Taking Presence Reading is the exercise of taking, receiving, and accepting a gift and then refusing the triumphalist temptation to offer a gift in return. Reading does not have a supplementary goal that would justify or explain this taking. A true gift does not fill a need or a hole in the receiver. The poem as gift is in this sense purposeless: it does not ensure salvation or lead one to faith. And most importantly, it does not prompt reciprocation. Receiving and reading then amount to more than just gratitude, but also entail loving this offer itself. God, after all, does not give the gift for mercenary reasons, to extract gratitude or a return gift, and to treat the offer of grace in this fashion is to misunderstand love, to imagine it as a system of reciprocal recognition, instead of as an affective attention to things, persons, the living. As with the sacrament, the problem of devotional reading revolves around how to take a gift, but without transforming this taking into a self-confident possession. In this light, reading becomes an exercise of love, but a love construed as attention, not giving or selflessness. That is, The Temple advances a model of reading in which devotion is a sincere, loving taking that refuses to fall back into the passive-aggressive oscillations of humility and self-abnegation. There is, of course, a model of gift exchange and loving reciprocity that informs critical accounts of the sacrament. Schwartz describes the immanent gift of the eucharistic sign as a ceaselessly reciprocal giving and taking: ‘If mystical theology invites us to think of praise as a gift that has been made to us and as an offering we return, as a pure expression of desire and as a ceaseless activity, praise can also take the form, in a seeming paradox, of lament. For in the very act of lamenting, one is implicitly celebrating what she already has: someone to hear.’54 In contrast to the presupposition that lack motivates all approaches to presence, presence undergirds and is assumed by even laments about absence. In addition, the iconic presence of the sign is central to even its designations of a transcendent absence: The Eucharist straddles a critical divide between understanding signification as a revelation, as presence, and as lack, as absence. Something is suggested that is more than the sign, and yet it is suggested by the sign. Meaning both participates in the sign (God in the bread and wine) and is wholly other than it (God is not merely bread and wine) . . . This iconicity of language, in contrast to its idolatry, informs the mystery of how language means, how language cannot altogether contain what it nevertheless points

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to, which is beyond itself, and how this is made possible by forces of meaning beyond words.55

This circuit of exchange, although it does account for the relationship between presence and absence in the sacrament, ultimately renders the gift itself a designating sign, subordinate to the larger logic of reciprocity. It seems instead that Herbert’s verse asks us to break this circuit and treat the sacrament as a plainly transparent gift of God’s love. The sacrament and the poem are gifts without strings attached, including designating strings. Yet if reading does not point us elsewhere or perform a circular self-recognition, what does it do? For Herbert, the attention that reading demands entails abandoning an interpretation that would extract meaning or communication from verse and instead treating the verse itself as worthy of love. Ultimately, this means that even designation does not issue in the postulation of an external transcendence, but rather offers readers an immanent divinity that they can actually love, in the poem. This reading practice, then, trains devotees in the manner, but not the goals, of love. Loving attention in this register is not the same thing as affect. Herbert does not ask us to check conceptualization or reason at the door so as to preserve a sensory or affective experience within reading. This is not a fight over whether reason or the hermeneutics of suspicion imperil beauty.56 Thus, when Wall describes reading itself as a participatory and affective experience, he does not celebrate the received sensory experience as somehow superior to interpretation, but rather insists on the active nature of reading as experience: ‘What the poem is “about” in any conventional sense, therefore, is not our experience of it or interpretation of it alone, but another experience which it makes possible, perhaps even necessitates for the faithful reader, so that “true” reading of the poem comes to be in participation in the activity to which it points.’57 Whalen argues for a similar link between sacramental experience and poetry: ‘Not merely self-reflective, verse actually facilitates communion with the presence it celebrates . . . Herbert in effect applies sacramental theology to poetic craft, asserting the latter’s status as a manifestation of the essence by which it is sustained, much as sacramental signs convey that which invests their otherwise mediatory, representational status with transcendent value’ (Poetry of Immanence 161). In both cases, one is already immanently acting within the experience designated proleptically by the poem: the immanence of experience as opposed to the imminence of an anticipated end. Herbert’s reading presents an immanent

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activity, in which even designation enables present readerly participation and in which the anticipated end or meaning is already present. Or in the language of ‘The Invitation’: ‘Taste and fear not: God is here / In this cheer’ (16–17). It is for this reason that mechanisms of lack or absence are so anathema to Herbert’s verse. The plain and the written are not bare, insufficient badges, or pieces in a circuit of exchange, but rather elements of a constituted relation to divinity that deserve attention as such. When language designates it does not point beyond itself and its own inadequacy to a fuller domain, but rather causes this anticipated end to be operative within the designating poem.58 Reading then amounts to engagement with this present end. Such an account of an immanent divinity available within the poem undoubtedly courts the charge of idolatry. In fact, arguments for an unreachable transcendence and language’s weakness gather much of their force from the twin dangers of overconfidence and idolatry: surely I cannot be sure of my own election and surely God cannot really be here in this cheer, for that would substitute sign for signified.59 Thus, Douglas Trevor insists that the written is only tentative evidence for grace, not a gift of grace itself: Certainly God is behind the writing of the verse to the extent that he helps the poet compose the praise and hence identifies the poet as one of his elect; but such election must resist unequivocal verification through the textual traces of writing itself, since that would confer on the reader of the poem a judgment equal to that of the Creator . . . Writing is important principally because it attests to God’s grace, not because of what is written. Lacan, of course, is similarly invested in the indirect apprehension of truth; by fixating the locus of ‘true’ speech outside of the self, he reconjures God as a psychic phenomenon rather than an ontological one . . . The result of such a belief system, as in Herbert, is a radically dependent subject, keenly aware of the incapacity of the self not only to know itself but, more fundamentally, to constitute itself as an individuated being.60

Trevor is not alone in contending that verification must be resisted and that the written is less important than its transcendent meaning. Richard Todd makes a similar point on the basis of Augustine’s conceptualization of signs and their fundamental opacity: ‘The signs are frustrating because they have the effect of suggesting that what characterizes the transcendent realm, of which man may occasionally catch glimpses, is something that cannot be known; yet knowledge must continually strive

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toward it.’61 Herbert’s verse, however, takes issue with the representational assumptions embedded within these concerns about idolatry, advocating a plain verse that does not designate a lacking end or object and, instead, presents an immanent and positive relation to the divine. In fact, The Temple suggests that it is only the understanding of signs as a means oriented toward an end that makes idolatry possible. ‘The Quiddittie’ insists that poetry puts one in God’s presence: ‘But it [a verse] is that which while I use / I am with thee, and most take all’ (11–12). John Tobin’s note claims that this is the ‘most cryptic’ poem in all of The Temple, at least in part because these final few words might be taken either as a coordinate clause, as in ‘Let the Most take all,’ or another action that the subject performs while being with God, as in ‘I am with thee and also take all while I am with thee.’62 Reading these lines is only further complicated by the differences between the 1633 Temple and the Bodleian manuscript. In the Everyman edition of Herbert’s English verse, Ann Pasternak Slater, relying on the capitalization of ‘Most’ in the 1633 edition, glosses this concluding line as a version of ‘winner takes all,’ in which case God would be the winner who gains all things.63 Yet as Tobin’s note also acknowledges, in addition to acting as a subject that does the taking, ‘most’ also serves as an adverb modifying ‘take.’64 As a result, this line is only cryptic if we assume that ‘taking all’ cannot bear modification because it is a simple action of possession. However, this seems precisely the assumption that ‘The Quidditie’ seeks to dethrone. The problem that The Temple poses is not how to preserve meaning or transcendence from idolatrous pillaging, but how to use verse itself and its immanences. A salvational logic of verification and self-recognition assumes that once one takes all, one has all and there is nothing more to be said about it. Now that I have the end for which I strove, I can rest content. Herbert’s verse shows that taking continues, not because God is transcendentally removed from our everyday experience, but because the very activity of taking is not an all or nothing proposition. It shows devotees not just how to take the all that is present, but how to most take it: as with everything in Herbert, manner matters. Of course, The Temple does frequently express suspicion of poetry’s power, but this suspicion is grounded in the weakness of metaphor and its excesses, its attempt to adorn devotion as a commodity for sale: ‘My thoughts began to burnish, sprout, and swell, / Curling with metaphors a plain intention, / Decking the sense, as if it were to sell’ (4–6). The problem with such metaphorical ornament is that the gift that this verse gives does not require attracting customers who would offer an exchange

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in kind. Thus, ‘Jordan (II)’ closes by advocating an act of plagiarism, but one in which, notably, there’s already something to plagiarize, something written, within love: ‘There is in love a sweetnesse readie penn’d: / Copie out onely that, and save expense’ (17–18). Plainness in this context is not a matter of transparent representation, but rather a principle of economy, geared toward paring away excrescences that cloud what is already present, what is already penned within love. Yet this principle changes the nature of this economy. Plainness is not a better vehicle for reaching this destination, the transcendent meaning that the poem lacks, but a presentation of immediacy in opposition to the transaction and transport of metaphor. In short, Herbert’s plainness insists that reading is neither an exchange nor a journey. Even in a poem like ‘A true Hymne,’ which often appears as a centrepiece in arguments for the limitations of poetic language in The Temple, matters are not so simple. The final stanza opens with what appears to be a statement of poetry’s inadequacy and God’s supplementing power: ‘Whereas if th’ heart be moved, / Although the verse be somewhat scant, / God doth supplie the want’ (16–18). Many critics tend to read this last line as an example of God filling in or up the scant verse, tacitly equating ‘want’ and ‘lack.’ However, it seems equally plausible to read ‘want’ as ‘desire’ in this context, in which case God supplies the desire – the heart’s movement – mentioned in the stanza’s opening line. Strier maintains that this poem critiques the ‘mentality that can think only in terms of accomplishment’ and that ‘[t]o be regenerate was to desire to love God perfectly (a want which God supplies) and to have this desire accepted for the deed’ (Love Known 205). This is not then a desire recognizing its impossible fulfilment in another desire: rather, God supplies a desire, the devotional motor, and in so doing also supplies the desire, keeping it alive and running. Yet ‘A true Hymne’ also makes this present desire part of the reading process by staging a line in which there is no scantness that needs God’s intervention. The Bodleian manuscript’s alternate reading of line 17 makes this readily apparent: ‘Although verse be somewhat scant.’65 Hutchinson deviates from his control text, the Bodleian manuscript, at this moment and inserts ‘the,’ averring in his note that this must be ‘a slip, as the metre requires another syllable.’66 As Todd notes, this metrical anomaly might be part of the point, that God supplies the syllable that is lacking, the ‘the,’ in the immediately preceding line, that God is even there to supply the numbers necessary to fill out the metre.67 On the one hand, these variations stage the problem of whether all verse is lacking, or whether it is just individual specimens

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that are scant: the Bodleian reading implies that all verse suffers under this lack, as opposed to the specific poem that is ‘A true Hymne.’ On the other, this poem also shows the basic problem of reading (or taking) plainness: if readers are not supplementing scantness or lack, and if the poem itself does not lack because God has supplied it, no longer does the poem authorize the contention that language is a weak instrument for representing devotional acts. Rather, the devotional problem resides not in language’s power, but in a voracious, acquisitive manner of desire that leads reading astray: He who craves all the minde, And all the soul, and strength, and time, If the words onely ryme, Justly complains, that somewhat is behinde To make his verse, or write a hymne in kinde.

(11–15)

The just complaint that this stanza poses is not that words merely or ornamentally rhyme, but that the spirit or soul does not. Words only rhyming does not mean that they lack substance, as in ‘the words merely ryme.’ Rather, rhyme has been treated as a merely pleasing representational ornament, not a model for the soul and the heart’s movement, as in ‘only the words ryme, and not the soul.’ It is the presupposition that ‘onely’ means ‘merely,’ the presupposition of language’s weak designating power, that this poem takes to task. The speaker’s complaint here also depends on a craving for all of these things, mind, soul, strength, and time, that the poem undermines in the final stanza: instead of craving an all that is absent, the poem insists that verse allows us to ‘take all.’ Only readers with a voraciously craving, poorly attuned desire look behind the verse. Instead, readers should try to attune souls and psalms: ‘The finenesse which a hymne or psalme affords, / Is, when the soul unto the lines accords’ (9–10). In this respect, ‘A true Hymne’ mirrors the pedagogy of ‘Love (III),’ insisting that devotees do not lack what they claim to lack. But it also ties this disavowal of lack to the reading and writing of verse. Thus, the concluding couplet describes ‘most taking all,’ ‘As when th’ heart sayes (sighing to be approved) / O, could I love! and stops: God writeth, Loved’ (19–20). Regardless of whether the divine response means that the speaker already loves or is already loved, its key feature is the fact that it occurs in the past tense: once again, that which appears initially to be lacking turns out to be already present or to have already occurred. Taking entails not filling a hole, but engaging

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with that which is already immanent, including the words of the poem that one is reading. ‘Coloss. 3:3’ and ‘Vanitie (I),’ particularly when read as a sequence, present the attempt to uncover what lies behind a poem, its meaningful treasure, as motivated by an equally misguided desire. ‘Coloss. 3:3’ drives readers to locate an openly hidden diagonal sentence within its lines – ‘My Life Is Hid In Him That Is My Treasure’ – but, in doing so, undermines an interpretive procedure that would unearth such a hidden nugget and then treat it as an independent meaningful payload. By dragging to the surface a purportedly buried meaning, Herbert defuses or, perhaps, mocks the propensity to think of reading as an excavation of a more primordial or fundamental idea, referent, or signified, as well as the tendency to treat meaning as an independently possessible product of a journey or quest.68 The succeeding poem, ‘Vanitie (I),’ condemns a similar obsession with the oscillation between hidden meaning and apparent sense. It opens by explicitly mocking the astronomer and the pearl diver, both of whom seek to penetrate behind the surface of things and fetch an earned reward: The nimble Diver with his side Cuts through the working waves, that he may fetch His dearely-earned pearl, which God did hide On purpose from the ventrous wretch . . .

(8–11)

This poem then closes with a condemnation of such rummaging about in the natural world: ‘Poore man, thou searchest round / To finde out death, but missest life at hand’ (27–8). This condemnation extends as well to hermeneutic rummaging: the accord between a poem and a soul goes missing when one reads for a meaning, construed as hidden behind a text, when one treats reading as the quest for the possessible teleological take-away of a poem. Instead of a hermeneutic practice that would be able to have done with reading once it reached this treasure, Herbert’s verse demands that reading itself, not interpretation itself, be the model for the soul’s devotional activity: attention, taking, and love, not craving, searching, and having. In denying language’s attachment to a referent or signified behind a poem or word, Herbert’s verse does not just offer readers ambiguity, but once again fundamentally troubles an understanding of designation that relies on a categorical distinction between vehicle and tenor, means and end. As with the sacrament and idolatry, poetry then tends to erase

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the distinction between a transcendent object or meaning, and its expression. Heather Asals argues that this tendency is best described as equivocacy, whose great danger is an indistinction that bleeds into idolatry: ‘the delicate balance of Relation rather than conflation.’69 In other words, the basic logic of predication and separable entities must persist; equivocity must not transform into univocity. However, a poem like ‘The Water-course,’ in which the reader is, twice, asked to choose between two different words in order to end lines, challenges precisely this impulse toward separation and distinction: If troubles overtake thee, do not wail: For who can look for lesse, that loveth Life? Strife? ... That so in purenesse thou mayst him adore, Who gives to man, as he sees fit, Salvation. Damnation.

{

{

(4–5)

(9–10)

The first of these choices, between ‘life’ and ‘strife,’ seems to be precisely the sort of conflation that Asals finds dangerous. After all, unlike the choice between salvation and damnation, life and strife describe the same worldly existence. While holding out the possibility of choice for readers, the poem itself conflates the two options, rendering the choice itself meaningless. This poem does not undermine Asals’s argument about the equivocacy in Herbert’s verse, but it does point up the broader consequences for reading equivocacy’s centrality in The Temple : there is a tipping point at which equivocacy overtakes predication, designation, reference, and naming to such an extent that it fundamentally alters their function, or evacuates them as the primary purpose of poetry. Or in Deleuze’s terms, ‘There is therefore an excessive equivocation from the point of view of the voice and in relation to voice: an equivocation which ends equivocity and makes language ripe for something else.’70 The poem’s final choice between ‘salvation’ and ‘damnation’ is certainly not irrelevant and the concepts definitely do not undergo conflation. And indeed, there is certainly something oddly ironic about a poem whose last line invokes God’s predestining soteriological authority, but asks its readers to choose between the words ‘salvation’ and ‘damnation.’ The poem shows that the outcome of this choice, its instantiation in the world, is beyond human agential control, but the choice itself, the disposition that it entails, happens right there in the poem. The

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difficulty is not picking ‘salvation,’ but rather adopting and inhabiting the disposition in which such a humble readerly choice, and not some spectacular conversion drama, could actually amount to a devotional act. The concluding line does not then flog once more the weakness or inadequacy of human agency. Instead, choosing between ‘salvation’ and ‘damnation’ matters insofar as it reveals and actually produces the correct devotional disposition in readers. The point is not to know one’s soteriological status, even if that status is ambiguous or equivocal, but rather to use the poem to choose without reward. The choice required of readers is not one between equivocal or conflated options and, thus, the great danger is not indistinction. Rather, ‘The Water-course’ asks readers to imagine the world as free from a logic of options and ends: choice is not a principle of selection based on where a path leads, but rather the manner in which one affirms or embraces the univocally present. In this sense, the poem drives readers to choose ‘salvation’ for no viable reason whatsoever, but nonetheless as part of one’s desire and love for God: loving God is not the reason or final cause of the choice, because that would entail the endpoint of recognition – someone would see that my choice revealed my love for God. In fact, there is really only one choice that counts as a choice: choosing damnation or not choosing at all would entail imagining the entire lyric as a matter of reward, determined by the very overreaching mercenary calculations that the poem is at pains to evade. It is in this sense that these choices are presented univocally: for the choice to be a choice, and not a feeble extortion, the selection must occur without the aid of calculation. This is the same motif that informs the final lines of ‘The Collar.’ After thirty-four lines of ‘raving’ (33), the speaker inexplicably returns to God as a result of nothing more than an apparent call: ‘Me thoughts I heard one calling, Child! / And I reply’d, My Lord’ (35–6). So in ‘The Water-course,’ it is not that one confuses salvation and damnation, but rather that their presentation in the poem affirms the inconsequentiality of their selection: you do not get anything out of choosing, but one still chooses and must choose. This is the almost imperceptible dispositional change that such a free action produces in its readers: devotional readers who make this choice acknowledge that their actions do not control their ultimate fate in a world radically dependent on God, but that they can alter their internal disposition, almost automatically, by reading.71 The difficult part of conversion is not the end, salvation, but the transformed attitude toward actions, including reading, that would allow salvation to be a thing that one could pick up or take aright, in response to God’s always present offer.

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This altered disposition does not gain God’s favour or recognition, but it entails the experience of a positive, non-mercenary desire for the divine. And in turn, this experience is identical to the practice of reading the poem, line by line and word by word, not the retroactive meaning that one secures through this activity. Meaning then means less the ideational payload or experience that a poem conveys than the immanent activity and engagement with signs that the verse requires. The Temple does not tell or show us that a nonmercenary and a-teleological love is a good thing and we should choose it. Rather, many of these poems, even those we might label as gimmicky, force readers to go through a reading procedure that is itself a devotional act. The choice, such as it is, is between participating in this procedure or not really reading the poems at all.72 As a result of their penchant for preciousness, poems like ‘Jesu’ and ‘Love-joy’ always tempt ironic interpretation: surely, they evince a dubious nostalgia for a time before signification, or some childish pre-rational, pre-modern collapse of sign and signified. When the speaker in ‘Love-joy’ avers that he is ‘never loth / To spend my judgement’ (4–5) before pronouncing that ‘J’ and ‘C’ signify ‘Joy and Charitie’ (7), he appears potentially as a self-righteous buffoon and, according to this reading, the poem satirizes the propensity to imagine words as the magical, mystical repository of meaning or the fetishistic collapse of signifier and signified. Yet the speaker of ‘Lovejoy’ is also obviously correct: ‘J’ and ‘C’ can denote, simultaneously, joy and charity and Jesus Christ. The same basic procedure occurs in ‘Jesu’: the letters of ‘Jesu’ are broken up and ultimately signify ‘I ease you’ (9), which grants the letters of Jesus’ name an almost talismanic power to carry meaning.73 But it is also the case that the basic procedure of alphabetic, phonetic letters authorizes this claim. These two poems show that the most basic procedures of orthography are tantamount to magic: both the most pragmatically modern and the most mystical theory of the sign assume that the sign is a tool, either designating a missing meaning, or encapsulating a present one. In this respect, modern signification and a primitive mystical collapse of word and thing suffer from the same problem: a devotional desire attached to a possessive comprehension of the word or poem, or an inability to ‘take’ aright. Herbert’s verse then asks readers to pay attention to the nature of the tool, but not so as to avoid the appropriation or manipulation of God: i.e., idolatry.74 In The Temple, idolatry is simply the risk that devotional verse must run, in order to be or express a love for God. Avoiding it does not amount to avoiding possession: after all, God is already there for the

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taking in Herbert’s sacrament. Idolatry cannot be forestalled by shoring up the Augustinian distinction between use and enjoyment, between mediate and immediate pleasures, for The Temple undermines this very distinction. Asals proposes precisely this solution: ‘Use means suspended enjoyment, and because of its tremendous capacity to be readily enjoyed rather than used, poetry remains for Herbert a dangerous tool.’75 The Temple, though, is not satisfied with suspending enjoyment, pleasure, and delight because such renunciations preserve the all-or-nothing logic of possession that is the actual devotional problem. As Schwartz maintains, idolatry is a much more virulent weed and threatens even the concept of Being, and perhaps all concepts: ‘the concept of Being has been contaminated by possession . . . The contemporary philosophical version of idolatry includes possessing the concept – idolatrous, in the sense of delimiting, describing, and manipulating the concept.’76 Herbert’s verse does not attempt to avoid possession or taking so much as it rejects the notion that possession is the end of a devotional process: even when one has all, there is still so much more to do. For Herbert, the problem of idolatry is not the problem of taking signs for things, or overreaching in one’s acquisitive desires: the problem of idolatry rests on the presumed finality of taking and owning. As ‘The Quidditie’ emphasizes, appropriative manipulation – taking – is unavoidable in a truly desirous and loving devotion. A devotee cannot withhold herself coyly from a divine gift, but rather must learn to ‘most take all.’ In fact, for Herbert, it appears that the problem is not a presumptuous taking of all – rifling God’s secrets, or trying to possess the unpossessible – but rather an inability to take what is right in front of us. The problem is not that we treat God as present when he is really absent, encapsulating him in fetishes or words or ideas. We are all already taking all at every moment. Instead, Herbert’s verse shows us that idolatry and the actual obstacle to devotion is our desire to treat meaning, or any taking, as a finally owned possession, and to treat reading and love as a stage to which we need no longer return. In the case of these poems that already contain, immediately and immanently, their own meaning, there is, in fact, no ‘take-away.’ Such poems risk turning into idols, certainly, but they also impede, however briefly, the readerly impulse to treat meaning as just another thing that one finally and definitively owns. Reading itself is a devotional activity for Herbert precisely insofar as it is an attention to an object that reveals that one cannot take away, finally, an interpretive payload. It is not that this desire to overcome or be done

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with reading does not exist, of course, but The Temple retards a yearning for meaning that turns reading into work, an overcoming of obstacles in the interest of an aim that ultimately exhausts itself. These poems maintain that one most takes all precisely when one tastes, desires, and reads without treating any of these activities as a struggle, when, instead, one freely takes without presuming, or fearing, that one takes away.

2 Reading Indistinction: Desire, Indistinguishability, and Metonymic Reading in Richard Crashaw’s Religious Lyrics

There is nothing perverse, grotesque, tasteless, or lurid about Richard Crashaw’s verse, despite the plethora of critical comments to the contrary and the curious critical obsession with opening essays by reproducing, if only to reject, precisely this litany of negative epithets. He is simply committed to a sacramental worldview that modern readers reject, or at least find difficult to conceptualize: namely, that transcendent and immanent domains, spiritual and material, signifier and signified are not just connected, but utterly indistinguishable. Yet for Crashaw this is not simply a matter of saying ‘both’ to questions about the relationship between the divine and the worldly, or pointing cryptically and hyperbolically to the radical generosity or even absurd love expressed in the incarnation. Rather, Crashaw’s notion of indistinguishability ultimately errs on the side of an immanent mass of connected sensory impressions, thus his intense interest in synaesthesia and transforming and transformative liquids, which several critics have described as a perverse, or at least striking, obsession.1 Although he acknowledges that disgust motivates some of the critical reactions to Crashaw’s tasteless excesses, Richard Rambuss also maintains that it is the earnestness, not the grotesquerie or irony, of Crashaw’s verse that so exercises critics: ‘Perhaps there is something so discomfiting, even offensive about the sacred that we can now find it palatable only when its invocation comes at least partially diluted, whether by irony, satire, or ambivalence. Crashaw’s devotional expression lacks such qualifiers and, even though it is not literally derived from piss and dung, it may be too much for us to stomach.’2 In other words, it is the sacred itself, immanent in the world and not relegated to a purified, separate, or otherwise demarcated zone, that provokes such squeamishness on the part of modern readers and critics: transgression is not really all that

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disturbing; the earnestly sacred is. Acknowledging this phenomenon, however, does not mean that Crashaw’s conventional sacramentalism is actually transgressive, but rather shows how the logic of transgression, along with the notions of excess and lack that undergird it, does not accurately describe the effects and affects that these lyrics elicit. Instead, Crashaw’s verse offers a world in which devotion does not entail crossing a limit or leaping over an aporetic gulf between devotees and God, but rather attending to a divinity indistinguishably present in immanent sensations. That presence is disturbing enough for devotees, without all the bells and whistles of transgression and hyperbole. To focus on immanent sensations, however, does not entail an attempt to validate immediate sensory, bodily, material, affective experience at the expense of mediated intellectual meaning, and thus does not mesh with recent critical attempts to recover the value of the bodily within reading practice.3 Sense does not liberate us from or transgress order. Instead, Crashaw’s is a verse that ignores or attempts to evade the tried and true distinction between structural order and sensory overload and transgression – including its connection to the distinction between Protestant and Catholic confessional allegiances – in the interests of exploring relation and transformation as such, independent of the end results of these changes. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s account of the baroque, Susan Stewart argues that an immanent poetics eschews representation and enables an attention to the immediate events of devotion or conversion: ‘Crashaw’s work may superficially seem to be imitative of the visual forms of Baroque art, including its many images of flaming and wounded hearts, but it is far more accurate to say that the words are the events or expression.’4 Stewart’s affirmation of immediacy rejects the notion that Crashaw’s verse employs excess or hyperbole to drive devotees toward a transcendent mystical ecstasy or self-dissolution.5 Immanence, which we should recall is inhabited by God, is not a chaotic, ineffable mass that lies behind representational and categorical order. In this sense, it is not the safe harbour after which devotees yearn. As Kimberly Johnson argues, Crashaw’s verse maintains that physical intimacy is readily available in the sacrament and, simultaneously, describes this bodily immanence as disturbing and ‘fretful.’6 In other words, Crashaw rejects the choice between an unmeasured, disordered immediacy that requires transcendent limits and a comforting presence that requires nothing of devotees. The indistinguishability between sense and sensation that motivates Crashaw’s verse, the immanence of one to the other, issues in a devotional affect conceived as groundless, a series of accidents without

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substance or any subtending depth. And it is precisely because of this refusal of a ground that indistinction requires a loving attention. Whether one condemns as indecorous the excess ascribed to Crashaw, or celebrates it as part of a systematic deployment of hyperbole that drives readers to recognize the paradoxical and excessive nature of the incarnation, the universally acknowledged starting point for criticism remains these lyrics’ own obvious excesses.7 Yet why should we accept this designation, particularly in a poetry that insists on the sacramental power of language and, in turn, dissolves the very distinction between signifier and signified on which a notion of moderate, even-keel signification would be based? Asserting that Crashaw’s verse, or any verse for that matter, is marked by ‘excess’ implies the existence of a normative principle of moderation. For criticism of Crashaw, this normative principle is quite specific: his baroque images ultimately ascribe to language a transformative, metamorphic force that threatens to dissolve the distinctions between subject and object, divine and human; since such dissolutions are obviously impossible, then his poetics must be considered excessive.8 It is the task of this chapter to show how this ‘excessive’ poetics does not respond to such a fundamental lack, in language or the human beings who use it. Instead, I will argue that we should take seriously Crashaw’s grand pronouncements for the power of verse because he does not simply make them in the mode of hyperbole, as an attempt to drive us beyond a feeble and limited representational language to the spiritual meaning behind words. The preface to the 1646 and 1648 Steps to the Temple argues that divine poetry is the language of heaven rendered – not approximately represented – on earth: ‘he [Augustine] thought with this, our Poet, that every foot in a high-borne verse, might helpe to measure the soule into that better world: Divine Poetry; I dare hold it, in position against Suarez on the subject, to be the Language of Angels; it is the Quintessence of Phantasie and discourse center’d in Heaven.’9 Although Crashaw is not the author of this preface, it does indicate the way in which his contemporaries in the Little Gidding community imagined the operation of his verse, and perhaps all divine verse. For Gary Kuchar, this preface, and the introductory material for Epigrammata Sacra (1634), offer poetry as an efficacious means of connecting devotees and God: these volumes ‘are packaged in such a way as to encourage readers to see these works as not only supplementing the sacramental life, but also as performing a sacramental function – bringing the reader to God through language.’10 The poetry does more than simply represent a liturgical, ceremonial, or devotional event; it actually participates in and enacts it.

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However, what seems curious about Kuchar’s account of a successful devotional performance is his continued characterization of it as excessive and hyperbolic: ‘The power of fascination/repulsion that Crashaw’s epigrams possess is a function of the way that their rhetorical design reveals the traumatic “excess” – that thing which resists symbolization – that sacrifice enacts in order to contain’ (117). The Lacanian echoes are not accidental here, as Kuchar describes this transition to a sacramental worldview as at least analogous to a ‘transition from a logic of temperance to one of excess, from what Lacan would distinguish as a shift from desire to jouissance’ (114). I simply want to ask on what basis we label this a logic of excess and not temperance, much less how we reach the conclusion that this excess resists symbolic representation. This question seems even more pressing in light of the conclusion to the Steps to the Temple preface. After asserting the power of divine poetry to speak and be the language of heaven, the preface concludes by insisting that there is nothing excessive or distempered or immoderate about Crashaw or his poetics: ‘To the former Qualifications I might adde that which would crowne them all, his rare moderation in diet (almost Lessian temperance) hee never created a Muse out of distempers, nor (with our Canary scribblers) cast any strange mists of surfets before the Intelectuall beames of his mind or memory’ (651–2). The preface may not be the gospel truth, but what seems most striking here is the disjunction between its insistence that Crashaw’s poetry does not stem from surfeit and does not traffic in excess and the almost universal critical rejection (tacit or explicit) of this claim – the absence of any real consideration within Crashavian criticism that the preface might be remotely correct. At its most basic, the preface requires that we consider whether the sacrament is a surprising, novel, sublime paradox that links one to a transcendent divinity, and thus requires an excessive figuration to overcome the mundane uses of language, or rather is an immanent, quotidian phenomenon in its own right. My account of the limitations of transgression as a critical tool revolves in large part around the ways in which excess translates back into lack or absence, and thus cannot do justice to a divinity conceived as immanent and incarnate. Desire for an immanent God seems better served by Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of desire as productive and present, instead of a psychoanalytic model built around a constitutive lack. Their account also shows how excess does not so much overwhelm limitations and produce change as it does fall back onto lack and inadequacy: ‘Lack or excess, it hardly matters. It comes to the same thing to say that the

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sign refers to other signs ad infinitum and that the infinite set of all signs refers to a supreme signifier.’11 The object of desire – God, meaning, or the master signifier – is absent, but it also exceeds the field of possible objects so as to be the pivot or relay that distributes desire among other minor objects.12 In addition, there is no moving beyond, no transgression, that does not reaffirm the aporetic limit or gulf, the absence, over which it has crossed. This endless, homogenous oscillation between overabundance and paucity that Deleuze and Guattari here outline – and ultimately seek to counter – is not a particularly accurate or useful characterization of Crashaw’s sacrament. Michael McCanles’s attempt to link Crashaw’s embarrassing figures to a self-referential poetic technique and a brand of negative theology stands as a representative example of the presumed necessary link between excess and lack in Crashaw criticism: ‘these hyperboles strike the reader as at once exaggerations of finite realities and as “not exaggerated enough” to express the divine.’13 In McCanles’s estimation, Crashaw’s transgressive erotic imagery recoils on itself, highlighting both its hyperbolic status and, for that very reason, its inadequate approximation to the very transcendent divinity it hopelessly approaches: ‘The sexual element defines the upper limits of purely human eroticism, and thereby strains toward expressing a transcendent, divine experience, for the grasping of which sexuality likewise presents itself as clearly inadequate.’14 Yet in such a model, Crashaw’s verse, and religious lyrics in general, always reduce to the same basically reactive operation: pointing beyond themselves to an inaccessible transcendence and reaffirming that even the most excessive of figures is itself lacking. I simply propose that this model renders all language about God equally inadequate and, thus, redundant. In turn, such a model necessarily undermines the very earnest and sincere concept of the devotional lyric that Crashaw propounds. To borrow Jeff Nealon’s phrasing, Crashaw does not tarry with the irony that necessarily attends hyperbole for he knows its issue: an inevitable failure that just as inevitably – and indiscriminately – turns out to be success. As we will see, Crashaw’s poetry does not present as a radical break with quotidian language and, simultaneously, rejects the notion of a universal impotence to all talk about God. Instead of a dialectical sacrament that would point communicants to transcendence, Crashaw’s verse relies on a pleroma that is quotidian and measured, an equilibrium that is, in fact, immanently possible. But more important than arguing for the superiority of an immanent account of desire is the consequence of this question for how we read and talk about Crashaw’s verse. What does it cost us to label his verse excessive or

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hyperbolic? In asking this question, I do not wish simply to charge literary criticism with a hypocritical squeamishness or pious decorousness. Rather, in ascribing excess or hyperbole to Crashaw, we are reduced to asserting that he surely cannot be doing what he seems to be doing, that he cannot possibly be dismantling the spiritual reality or meaning behind poetic figurations. Kuchar’s reading is instructive in this respect, and all the more strikingly so because of his attempt to take seriously Crashaw’s sacramental poetics: Crashaw’s excessive straining of the two aspects of the sacramental vision – the surface, corporeal aspect and the underlying pneumatic, spiritual perspective – runs the risk of diffusing the very union of divine and mundane orders that it inscribes . . . In his defiantly sacramental attempt to show the contiguity between divine presence and human experience in the midst of desacramentalizing forces, Crashaw’s poem comes remarkably close to annulling the spiritual reality beneath and within the corporeal surface. (112–13)

The slippage in this last sentence is important: I would concur that Crashaw tends to annul the spiritual reality beneath the corporeal, but not that within it. Moreover, this disavowal of a subtending spiritual reality does not seem an unfortunate, unintended risk of the poetry, but rather the explicit goal of a decidedly sacramental worldview. One renders the eucharist literally not in order to undermine it, via hyperbole or parody or satire, but rather to do precisely what it appears to do: reject the transcendence of the spiritual as a viable devotional and literary option. It is not that Crashaw’s verse, particularly his Latin poems, does not contain ecstatic ejaculations, revelling, even perversely, in the liquefaction of Jesus’ body. ‘In vulnera Dei pendentis,’ or ‘On the wounds of God hanging (on the cross),’ resembles the wound poems in English, portraying wounds not as penetrable openings located on a body, but as constantly fluctuating sites that are almost overwhelmed by their emissions: O streams of blood from head, side, hands and feet! O what rivers rise from the purple fountain! His foot is not strong enough to walk for our safety (as once it was) but it swims; ah – it swims in its own streams. His hand is held fast; but it gives, though held fast: his good right hand gives holy dews, and it is dissolved into its own gift. O side, o torrent! for what Nile goes forth in greater

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Reading, Desire, and the Eucharist flood where it is carried headlong by the rushing waters? His head drips and drips with thousands and thousands of drops at once: do you see how the cruel shame reddens his cheeks? (1–10) ... Each hair is a slender channel for a tiny rill, a little stream, from this red sea, as it were. O too much alive [are] the waters in those precious streams! Never was he more truly the fountain of life. (13–16)15

In this poem, Christ’s foot is no longer stable, but shifts. Likewise, the good right hand, emblematic of the gift of the eucharist, also dissolves. It is not hard to see how Crashavian criticism has battened on excess as one of the primary features of this verse: in addition to the speaker’s ejaculations, the poem itself maintains that the flood of liquids issuing from Jesus is greater than the Nile’s flood (‘quis enim torrentior exit / Nilus, ubi pronis praecipatatur aquis?’ [7–8]). The comparable English poem, on the other hand, ‘On the wounds of our crucified Lord,’ does not really traffic in these images of an overwhelming deluge. The poem presents the determination of the nature of the wounds, whether they are mouths or eyes, as essentially irrelevant to the salvific liquids that issue from them, but the tears or blood that come from wounds, mouths, or eyes do not overwhelm the speaker or, apparently, the reader. O these wakefull wounds of thine! Are they Mouthes? Or are they eyes? Be they Mouthes, or be they eyne, Each bleeding part some one supplies.

(1–4)

Although the distinctions between wounds, eyes, and mouths might dissolve in this poem, unlike its Latin counterpart, ‘On the wounds of our crucified Lord’ does not describe blood or tears as a solvent: here it is explicitly presented as supplying or nourishing some other part. Wild dissolution is not their effect and the liquefactions for which Crashaw is justly famous do not appear as a hyperbolic figure for mystical comingling.16 ‘In die Passionis Dominicæ,’ or ‘On the day of the Master’s Passion,’ reaffirms this reticence to offer an excessive, mystical dissolution as the primary avenue of devotion or salvation. It offers a sustained meditation on the entirely conventional and orthodox eucharistic implications of Christ’s side wound and, ultimately, opens onto an equally conventional discourse

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about olfactory and other miraculous nourishments.17 What matters for us, however, is the poem’s refusal to embrace the self-dissolution, or even overcoming, precipitated by these joyful odours: Now it goes, and oh with what fragrance does that burning torrent steam! as hence a stinging odor rushes out like heavenly breeze! What rose so fresh flutters though [sic] Falernian glasses? What wines of Massica sparkle with such a star? I did not know; but behold, that is the wine of love: how should I, how should I be equal to such glasses? I am overcome: oh I am almost completely mingled with these aromas: I am not, I am not equal to such glasses. (7–14) Jámque it; & ô quanto calet actus aromate torrens! Acer ut hinc aurâ divite currit odor! Quae rosa per cyathos volitat tam viva Falernos? Massica quae tanto sydere vina tremunt? O ego nescibam; atque ecce est Vinum illud amoris: Unde ego sim tantis, unde ego par cyathis? Vincor: & ô istis totus propè misceor auris: Non ego sum tantis, non ego par cyathis.

(7–14)

Although it considers, for a moment, the possibility of being overcome by the wine of love and its aroma, ‘On the day of the Master’s Passion’ quickly hedges on this ecstasy and rejects any identification of liquefaction and mysticism. When the speaker claims that he is ‘not equal to such glasses’ it is all too easy to read this moment as a conventionally humble announcement of inadequacy. However, the Latin contains two different senses of ‘equal’ that end up emphasizing not so much inadequacy as the complexities of any notion of comparison or relation. ‘Non ego sum tantis, non ego par cyathis’ reads ‘I am not of such size as these great glasses’ and then ‘I am not similar to or like these glasses.’ The line progresses from a difference in degree to a difference in both degree and kind. The speaker asserts, first, with ‘tantis,’ that he does not measure up to these glasses on a broader continuum, that he is not of such size as these glasses. Next, ‘non ego par cyathis’ affirms a difference in degree, but also in kind, that the speaker is not comparable to these salvational liquids or their containers. The point here is not to critique Bowman’s translation, but rather to show that even within this Latin poem so insistently about these onrushing liquids, Crashaw is intimately

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concerned with the nature of measure, comparison, and equivalence. At its most basic, the progress through these two different forms of ‘I am not equal’ encapsulates the central conundrum of how these poems use figuration and what sort of reading practice they enjoin. Instead of a radical, even excessive metaphorical leap across a gulf of difference – Samuel Johnson’s violent yoking18 – the movement from ‘tantis’ to ‘par’ enacts a careful and measured expansion of difference. Grammatically and rhetorically, ‘Non ego sum tantis’ also drives readers to expect a comparison to ‘some great something,’19 to expect a relation, in short, which only reaffirms the line’s initial insistence that the speaker exists on a continuum with these salvific liquids and their glasses. In this first instance, one is not radically incomparable to the glasses, but rather differs from them on an already existing associational or metonymic chain. Even if we were to read ‘non ego par cyathis’ as a much more categorical difference, the line itself shows that incomparability and inadequacy can only be deduced from a comparison that does not rely on metaphorical distinctions of level or domain. Association and relation are primary, and it is incomparability and inadequacy that are derived. As we will see, Crashaw’s verse focuses on this immanent and primary association and the metonymic model of figuration that attends it, not because one cannot reach the conclusion that language is inadequate, but rather because focusing on the limitations of language conflates the ends of an action, devotion or reading, with the action itself. That is, reading is not really reading if it jumps to the end, the conclusion that one already knows. Criticism that ascribes excess to Crashaw tacitly reaffirms the baseline value, and perhaps the poetic value, of a measured decorum that he himself questions in this verse, and ignores the much more nuanced and precise exploration of similarity, sameness, and indistinguishability that the lyrics perform.20 It is not so much that there are no discussions or evocations of excess in Crashaw’s poetry, but rather that uniform critical and theoretical designations of excess and hyperbole are blunt tools in comparison to his own explorations of the nature of measure and equality and his insistence that the end of an act does not exhaust the nature of the act. Crashaw’s poetry uses the sacrament as an engine for producing an immanent indistinguishability between means and ends, worldly and heavenly domains and, in turn, between literal and figurative meanings, signifiers and signifieds.21 However, the critical impulse toward inclusive and expansive explanation, perhaps best labelled ‘both . . . and,’ itself misses the extent to which these poems dissolve distinctions, even the scholarly analytic distinctions that we so often employ. As just one

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example of this phenomenon, Deneen Senasi maintains that Crashaw’s fabled ‘illegibility’ stems from his unsettling of existing categories of spirit and matter, word and body: Seen in this light, Crashaw’s poetics is characterized by an expansive semiotic richness. The body of Christ, the body of the saint, the body of the poem, and the body of the reader collapse into and out of one another, as each is suffused with the Word of God. Within that context, the body of the poem is imagined in Crashaw’s work as a material signscape of convergence and coalescence. The boundaries that constitute it are permeable, plastic ones, as visual and verbal elements alike are employed in a poetics of the Word and of body that transcends the limitations of a single language, a single aesthetic, or a single poem.22

My argument certainly resonates with Senasi’s insistence that Crashaw’s verse does not adhere to the categorical distinctions between spirit and matter that dominate some literary critical accounts of early modern devotional verse (2) and with the assertion that ‘reading itself becomes the ritual through which God’s “real presence” materializes’ (7). But this process, from absence to presence, seems backwards. Crashaw does not begin with a distinction that must be overcome, an inadequacy that must be rectified by the return of presence: it does not need to materialize because it is already there. Rather, presence is the case, and then out of this presence, individuation may well occur, but even this emergent individuation does not amount to a categorical distinction, a gulf between kinds: Crashaw asks us to focus on the continuum of ‘Non ego sum tantis,’ not the potential distinction in ‘non ego par cyathis.’ ‘Both’ is too blunt a tool to describe what Crashaw does in this verse, precisely insofar as it conflates two fundamentally distinct processes: the recombination of divided elements and the individuation of elements already connected. It is, of course, only the latter that Crashaw offers as the site and motor of devotion. Connection, however indefinite, drives devotion, not the future goal of overcoming distance or distinction. As with Herbert, the devotional practice evoked here is one in which one must desire a God already present, a God that one does not lack. These moments where Crashaw drives readers to indistinguishability have consequences for how we conceive the act of devotion in CounterReformation, or at least high church, poetics. But they also alter how we can read hyperbole in English verse. When we label a given figure hyperbole, and sometimes then sacred parody, what reading practice have

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we tacitly adopted? Yet if Crashaw’s verse is so excessive, and consistently so, does it not at some point cease to make sense to call it ‘excessive,’ to imagine it as responding to or deviating from a mean? What is the critical value of postulating a measure for this verse only so that it can so consistently and systematically exceed it? As we will see in this chapter’s final section, the reading and devotional practice that Crashaw enjoins amounts to a radicalization of metonymy, one in which association provides a more substantive, less arbitrary connection than usually supposed in literary critical reading. Significantly, metonymy is the concept that both the Council of Trent and Calvin advance as the appropriate response to the sacrament.23 But first, this study must turn to the sacramental liquids, odour, and senses that provide the primary physical and metonymic means of engendering this model of sacramental desire and reading. Desiring Indistinction The transpositions and gender dialectics that Kuchar, Senasi, and other critics remark certainly appear to dominate some of Crashaw’s more famous poems, ‘The Flaming Heart’ and the English and Latin poems on the wounds, for example. ‘The Flaming Heart’ explicitly enjoins its readers to transpose the genders involved in the traditional iconography of Saint Teresa: Doe then as equall right requires, Since HIS the blushes be, and her’s the fires, Resume and rectify thy rude design; Undresse thy Seraphim into MINE. Redeem this injury of thy art; Give HIM the vail, give her the dart.

(37–42)

By the poem’s end, this transposition also comes to affect the speaker, and perhaps the reader as well, pushing both to what appears to be a substantial conversion of the worldly self effected by reading Saint Teresa’s life: ‘Leave nothing of my SELF in me. / Let me so read thy life, that I / Unto all life of mine may dy’ (106–8). As with ‘On the day of the Master’s Passion,’ whose speaker resists being overwhelmed by the salvific liquids that issue from Jesus, the closing plea of ‘The Flaming Heart’ does not completely dissolve the self in a mystical union with divinity, but rather preserves it emptied of its selfishly possessive tendencies, its propensity to

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think of its life as its own property. Yet in Crashaw’s verse, this evacuation of the self-possessed self is not the ground of an irresolvable contradiction, what Stanley Fish has described in Herbert as a hopeless attempt to assert humility or dependence on God.24 Instead, the poems in Carmen Deo Nostro and Steps to the Temple offer real and possible means of transforming devotees into the type of thing – self, subject, and even ‘being’ may not be the correct terms – that desires God aright.25 This transformation occurs through a consistent emphasis on the indistinguishability, not the compatibility or similarity, of various realms usually imagined as separate but intimately related, at least in our modern critical lexicon: immanence and transcendence, material and spiritual, sense and meaning, signifier and signified. Crashaw’s verse enjoins its readers to move beyond the notion of ‘separate but related’ (or ‘both . . . and’) to desire indistinction as such, not union with the divine, self-annihilation, or any of the other excessive or transgressive ends to which such indistinguishability is usually put. Even in those poems that multiply indistinct orifices all over the body of Christ, the effect is not ultimately one of mystical dissolution, but rather of a measured economically conceived exchange between devotees and Christ. After opening with an inability to distinguish between wounds, eyes, and mouths, ‘On the wounds of our crucified Lord’ concludes by describing the transmogrifying liquids that issue from these orifices as engaged in a repayment of debt: The difference onely this appears, (Nor can the change offend) The debt is paid in Ruby-Teares, Which thou in Pearles did’st lend.

(17–20)

Rambuss notes the potential indecorousness of this final stanza’s evocation of the Magdalene’s purported prostitution: ‘The poem thus recasts the Christian doctrine of the atonement as a form of purchased love, one that none too decorously at once recalls and redeems what was seen to be (according to several traditions) the Magdalene’s former profession’ (504). Yet if we read this moment as an excessively parodic eroticism, a process of remembering that also pushes over into redeeming, we ignore the entirely sober exchange that ends the concluding stanza: the speaker explicitly asserts that the transformation from tears (or semen) to blood cannot offend. And moreover, this blood is not an excessive overwhelming of the speaker’s sins, but rather the measured payment of a debt.

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Jesus’ love is abundant, but it is not excessive. Measure, not a transgressive excess, repays the debt: the debt is repaid, not overwhelmed, abolished, or forgiven. The distinction between excess and abundance is pivotal for determining precisely how Crashaw’s verse imagines the relationship to divinity in this world and through his verse. More specifically, excess implies a transcendent divinity fundamentally absent from the world and devotees, one that requires transgression or immoderation to overcome an aporetic division. Abundance, however, entails an immanent divinity and, moreover, one that is not threatened by the approach of devotees. A communicant’s partitioning of this love does not produce a lack in this fullness. ‘On the miracle of the multiplied loaves’ presents this phenomenon in epigrammatic form: See here an easie Feast that knows no wound, That under Hungers Teeth will needs be sound: A subtle Harvest of unbounded bread, What would ye more? Here food it selfe is fed.

(1–4)

The same theme occurs in Crashaw’s duet with Abraham Cowley, ‘On Hope’: Cowley counsels acquisitiveness and care lest exposure or openness allow it to rot: ‘For joy, like Wine kept close, doth better taste: / If it take ayre before, its spirits waste’ (29–30).26 Crashaw, in contrast, insists that ‘Thy generous wine with age growes strong, not sower; / Nor need wee kill thy fruit to smell thy flower’ (43–4). The principle of decay that dominates Cowley’s stanza does not appear in Crashaw’s. By the end of the poem, Hope appears as an ‘absent presence,’ but it is not exactly clear which term readers should emphasize: Sweet Hope! kind cheat! faire fallacy! by thee Wee are not where, or what wee bee, But what, and where wee would bee: thus art thou Our absent presence, and our future now.

(67–70)

Hope here is a proleptic engine, driving the future back into the present, a phenomenon that we will also witness in Milton’s and Donne’s work. Prolepsis in this register also entails the rejection of goal-oriented accounts of devotional desire: one does not quest after or work toward a missing divinity. Hope, the virtue directed toward the future, in Crashaw’s hands becomes an engine for affirming an already present divinity and

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the power of the desire that responds to it. Thus, we mistake Crashaw’s devotion if we focus exclusively on the absence in this absent presence. More specifically, Crashaw’s engagement with the senses and the sacrament appears to revolve almost exclusively around determining the appropriate devotional response to this divine abundance or presence. The problem for devotees then is not a radical separation from God, as in a Calvinist tradition of total depravity. Unlike Donne’s religious verse, we witness no anguished, internal soul-searching about personal or collective sinfulness. Rather, one’s job is to embrace this effusive gift appropriately, not to mull over one’s abjection endlessly. As with Herbert, we are faced with a poet who asks how one desires a god that is insistently present in the present, and in the poem. Part of Crashaw’s answer to how devotees and readers must desire a present god revolves around the indistinguishability of giver and gift. In the same way that he proliferates orifices all over the Christic body, Crashaw explicitly transforms the Christic body into the salvific liquids it offers. ‘Song upon the Bleeding Crucifix’ is probably the best example of this phenomenon among the English lyrics: III. Thy restlesse feet now cannot goe For us and our eternall good, As they were ever wont. What though? They swimme. Alas, in their own floud. IV. Thy hands to give, thou canst not lift; Yet will thy hand still giving be. It gives but o, it self’s the gift. It gives though bound; though bound ’tis free.

(9–16)

Jesus’ hand, emblematic of the gift of the eucharist, threatens to metamorphose, or even dissolve into the gift, a dissolution that seems, initially at least, contrary to Crashaw’s other depictions of the threat of liquefaction. As we have already seen in the case of ‘On the wounds of our crucified Lord,’ the proliferation of wounds, eyes, and mouths all over the Christic body, all of them issuing saving liquids, does not turn into an excuse for mystical ecstasy: ‘Be they Mouthes, or be they eyne, / Each bleeding part some one supplies’ (3–4). Regardless of the type of orifice these wounds resemble, they bleed and supply ‘some one.’ ‘Song upon

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the Bleeding Crucifix,’ by its conclusion, also backs away from such a mystical dissolution, offering up a flood that saves the speaker, and devotees in general, from an annihilating, excessive deluge: IX. This thy blood’s deluge, a dire chance Dear LORD to thee, to us is found A deluge of Deliverance; A deluge least we should be drown’d.

(33–6)

What is most important about this evocation of a deluge that does not overcome devotees is the poem’s insistence that the dissolving of the self into this type of liquid gift is not itself overwhelming, not in fact a mystical ecstasis but rather an almost measured preservation. Thus, Crashaw’s oft-remarked attention to liquids does not signal a wild dissolution of the devotional self or a simple liberation from the solidity of sinful, or divine, bodies.27 Yet neither is a substantial and whole Jesus simply lurking behind all of these liquid transformations, waiting to reform them into a unity.28 Rambuss argues that the proliferation of orificial entrances and exits all over the body of Christ ends up producing a decidedly different type of body with a much more fraught relationship to a stable holism: ‘What excites adoration here is the notion that Christ’s body is exposed to be all openings and valves; no surface on it is completely sealed. Everywhere open, utterly accessible, this body presents no unbreachable borders of permeability and impermeability.’29 Rambuss’s argument here focuses on, in addition to poems like ‘On the wounds of our crucified Lord,’ those lyrics and epigrams in which Crashaw presents Jesus’ wounds as doors and his body as a cabinet or enclosure. For example, in ‘On our crucified Lord Naked, and bloody,’ Jesus’ body appears as a clothes closet: Th’ have left thee naked Lord, O that they had; This Garment too I would they had deny’d. Thee with thy selfe they have too richly clad, Opening the purple wardrobe of thy side. O never could bee found Garments too good For thee to weare, but these, of thine owne blood.

(1–6)

Likewise, Jesus’ side is a gate in the Latin epigram ‘John 10:7–9. I am the door’: ‘Now you lie open. A heavy spear has thrown back the bolt of your heart. / And the nails as keys unlock you on all sides’ (1–2). The

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everywhere permeable body that Rambuss describes is ultimately not the same thing as a body dissolved and transcended, the conventional solid prison house that must be escaped via liquefaction. Rather, it is a body fundamentally transformed, turned into nothing but orifices. It is not just that ‘no surface on it is completely sealed’ but that it has been transformed into nothing but surface, without a subtending or posterior depth or volume. For Crashaw, this is not really a heavy-handed brief for transubstantiation, in which accidents would persist above and in spite of substantial transformation. Rather, the very distinction that enables such a logic disappears as a result of these lyrics’ transformation of substance into an immanent surface of accidents. As a result, the sacramental liquids that appear in these poems are not simply a metonymic register of Christ’s gift, a part or accident that signifies the whole substance. Rather, in Crashaw’s hands, these liquid accidents, these metonyms, are the substance of Christ’s body. Ultimately, all of these indistinguishabilities – of orifice and secretion, giver and gift, object and experience – require a sacramental desire that does not yearn for any entity behind or beneath appearances, or a future return of such a totality. The flattening of distinctions that Crashaw’s verse performs asks readers to desire accidents or surfaces themselves, instead of the whole object or subject behind these emissions. This attention to synecdochic and metonymic surfaces requires a reading that attends to these associations as such, not the ends or meanings in which they ultimately issue.30 Crashaw’s loose translations and elaborations of the pseudo-Thomist eucharistic hymn ‘Adoro Te’ and Aquinas’s own ‘Lauda Sion Salvatorem’31 echo the indistinguishability topos present in ‘Song upon the Bleeding Crucifix,’ but also peg this thematic, as one would expect, to the question of transubstantiation and Real Presence. In a series of conventional reversals, Jesus is both shepherd and food for his flock, as well as the master on whose authority one takes oaths. The conceit in ‘Lauda Sion Salvatorem’ is that Jesus must swear on himself to care for his flock, just as he fed the same flock with his own body: JESU MASTER, Just and true! Our FOOD, and faithfull SHEPHARD too! O by thy self vouchsafe to keep, As with thy selfe thou feed’st thy SHEEP.

(13.1–4)

Following Senasi’s lead in attending to the typographical features of Crashaw’s printed texts,32 we would do well to note the visual identification

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of ‘FOOD’ and ‘JESU’ effected by capitalization, a visual similarity that only reaffirms the basic statement of these lines: that Jesus feeds his devotees with himself. At one level, it is unsurprising that Crashaw’s verse, and the Latin models on which he loosely bases these translations, would insist that the bread really and substantially is the body of Christ. Yet more important than this reaffirmation of doctrine is the response enjoined for communicants: ‘FOOD’ and ‘JESU’ and ‘SHEPHARD’ are all explicitly and visually equated in this stanza, but the ‘SHEEP’ – aka, us – are also visually linked to these other three capitalized terms. These links do not result in the postulation of a mystical union between devotees and Christ, but rather highlight the measured indistinction and metonymic association that Crashaw ties to sacramental participation. These words and concepts have important theological connections, but the poem itself does not so much reaffirm these with the blunt tool of capitalization as drag to the surface these underlying associations. In other words, associations are not mysteriously subterranean, but insistently present. Moreover, the conflations that this poem effects undermine attempts to separate out the activities of eater and eaten, subject and object, part and whole, all of which contribute to a model of desire incompatible with Hegelian or psychoanalytic subjectivities and their irremediable lacks and a reading practice conceived as oriented toward an extraneous meaning. When ‘Lauda Sion Salvatorem’ turns to the interaction between a consuming communicant and the eucharistic bread-body or the sacramental practice that the verse enjoins, it insists that there is no partitioning of the host, no distinction even in the element itself effected by the participating devotees. The mouth does not fragment or otherwise divide the bread or body: The Receiving Mouth here makes Nor wound nor breach in what he takes. Let one, or one THOUSAND be Here Dividers, single he Beares home no lesse, all they no more, Nor leave they both lesse then before.

(8.1–6)

Once again, Crashaw offers a devotional scenario in which there is only abundance and never lack: each individual communicant takes a portion, a portion that is not really presented as a matter of need or nourishment, and this taking does not leave a hole in the sacramental body that Jesus offers. One might, of course, chalk this holism up to a transcendent

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sacramental body that escapes the worldly senses. Yet, ‘Lauda Sion Salvatorem,’ unlike ‘Adoro Te,’ seems less amenable to any model of sacramental transcendence, even validating ‘names’ themselves as the means of transferring Christ to communicants: Where nature’s lawes no leave will give, Bold FAITH takes heart, and dares to believe. In different species, names not things Himself to me my SAVIOUR brings, As meat in That, as Drink in this; But still in Both one CHRIST he is.

(7.1–6)

The third line of this stanza seems to present ‘names not things’ as apposite to ‘different species,’ in which case the names themselves, the signifiers through which Christ is transmitted, would point elsewhere to the real transcendent thing behind these sensory phenomena. Yet this reading of ‘names not things’ as an appositive description only really obtains if there is a comma after ‘things.’ Without a comma after ‘things,’ readers cannot be certain that ‘names not things’ modifies ‘different species’ and does not, in fact, stand as the means through which Christ brings himself to human beings. Instead of disavowing the importance of the different species by suggesting that the distinction is only nominal, without the comma this line reads as an affirmation of the power of words. ‘In different species’ then refers only to the final line in this sentence, ‘As meat in That, as Drink in this,’ as opposed to the names and things after the first comma. Thus, names are not mere incidental instruments, irrelevant vehicles for a more fundamental referent. What is most important, of course, is that without the comma after ‘things’ my saviour brings himself to me through names, not things. Certainly, one might argue that this stanza exhibits a tendency to end-stop lines and, as a result, we should deduce that there is a compositor’s punctuation error here. I think this argument is dubious, however, particularly when we consider that the succeeding stanza, on the receiving mouth that does not divide the host, includes at least three enjambments, perhaps to reaffirm formally the absence of discontinuity that it advances in its content. Moreover, we cannot establish a conventional distinction between weak names and strong things by looking to the final lines of the stanza: ‘As meat in That, as Drink in this’ only suggests a merely nominal resemblance if we have already assumed that the names themselves do not reach the real thing. Asserting that Jesus comes like meat in this species, and drink in

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the other, designates an instrument of linguistic representation only if we have decided in advance that such resemblances – or indistinguishabilities – are not real but rather conventionally false expressions: that is, we must assume precisely what Crashaw does not – that things are fundamentally distinct and that words produce ambiguity. However this stanza is punctuated, it nonetheless affirms the sameness of things and advances a poetics and metaphysics that is much less sanguine about real distinctions in the world. The version of this poem in Carmen Deo Nostro (1652), which Williams uses as his control text, differs from the poem in Steps to the Temple (1648) on precisely these issues. The earlier text, titled ‘A Hymne on the B. Sacrament,’ prints this stanza as Where Natures Lawes no leave will give Bold Faith takes Heart, and dares Believe. In different-species, Names not Things, Himself to me my Saviour brings. As meat in that, as drink in This; But still in Both, on Christ he is.

(7.1–6, p. 77)33

Here, ‘names not things’ is undoubtedly apposite to ‘in different species.’ However, we also witness another version of the material, visual equation of terms that Senasi notes: here, it is ‘Names,’ not ‘Things,’ that is italicized and visually identified with ‘Saviour’ and ‘Christ.’ This typographical phenomenon probably does not overcome the appositive enforced by the comma in this version of the stanza, but it does show just how reticent this poem is, in any of its versions, to point unproblematically to a transcendent beyond of things.34 In contrast to its Thomist counterpart, ‘Adoro Te. The Hymn of St. Thomas in Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament’ comes much closer to affirming a logic of sacramental transcendence. It certainly expands on the formula present in the original Latin hymn, by describing faith’s transcendence of any sensory proof and by adding the obligation of witness to that of belief: Sweet, consider then, that I Though allow’d nor hand nor eye To reach at thy lov’d Face; nor can Tast thee GOD, or touch thee MAN; Both yet beleive and wittnesse thee My LORD too and my GOD, as lowd as He.

(27–32)

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The Latin poem to which these lines roughly correspond evokes doubting Thomas and the limitations of sensory proof: Unlike doubting Thomas, I do not see the woundings, But still I confess that you are my Lord. Make me believe in you always more strongly, Have stout hope in you and forever adore.35

Although both hymns take as their starting point the limitations of sense, Crashaw’s paraphrase, and even the original hymn itself, do not simply offer a clean transition to the spiritual or transcendent meaning behind these deluded senses. Instead, the very logic of secrecy that would make of the sacrament a means to access transcendence suffers under the ambiguity of who or what exactly is hiding: . . . Because than Though hidd as GOD, wounds writt thee man, Thomas might touch; None but might see At least the suffring side of thee; And that too was thy self which thee did cover, But here ev’n That’s hid too which hides the other.

(21–6)

Under the elements of the eucharist, bread and wine, is hidden the humanity of Christ, which in turn hid the divinity of Christ during the Son’s worldly incarnation. This logic of hiddenness is not Crashaw’s invention, but marks the original hymn as well: ‘On the Cross Jesus’ godhead was totally hidden; / But here the humanity also hides; / I believe in them both, I confess them.’36 Crashaw’s rendering, however, insists that the ‘covering’ is itself also Christ: ‘that too was thy self which thee did cover’ (25). This addition matters, of course, not merely because it complicates the notion of secrecy entailed in the sacrament, but also because it tacitly insists that the covering itself – analogous to the elements and even words themselves – is also worthy of attention. The eucharist does not then simply drive us, even in this Latin poem that is so overtly about the logic of secrecy entailed in the sacrament, beyond the surface experience of the event to its transcendent significance.37 This poem does not promise an ultimate revealing in the future, but rather uses the indistinguishability of hidden and hiding elements to describe an already immanent divinity. Indistinction then becomes a means of avoiding the deferrals and absences that attend any apocalyptic yearning. ‘Adoro Te’ certainly

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concludes with an entirely orthodox promise of seeing face to face, but it also collapses the distinction between ends and means so as to preserve the value of devotional activities in their own right and avoid treating them as mere instruments. Thus, the poem concludes with the wish to see God face to face, to move behind the veil of sacraments and the world more generally: ‘When Glory’s sun faith’s shades shall chase, / And for thy veil give me thy FACE’ (55–6). And Crashaw’s concluding couplet matches the conclusion of ‘Adoro devote’: Jesus, I see you veiled in darkness. When can I have what I strongly desire? When can I gaze on your face that’s now hidden And bask in the glory that comes with this sight?38

However, despite this promise that one day faith and the sacraments will be unnecessary, Crashaw’s translation includes a celebration of the ‘Bread of loves’ that substantially amplifies and alters the Latin hymn and, moreover, seems at odds with the notion that the sacrament is an instrument, like ‘faith’s shades,’ destined for obsolescence. The Latin model reads: You, reminder of the death of our Master, Bread that offers true life to mankind, Offer my soul some life-stuff out of you, Allow it to savor your delicate taste.39 O memoriale mortis domini, Panis vivus, vitam praestans homini: Praesta meæ menti de te vivere Et te illi semper dulce sapere.40

Crashaw’s rendering, however, transforms the bread into a supplementary and superior soul and life, not just the nourishment or ‘life-stuff’ that appears in the Latin hymn. In addition, Crashaw’s pun on ‘gust’ as both taste and vital breath elevates the importance of the bread and ultimately identifies it more closely with the communicant. Importantly, the Latin word translated as ‘taste’ in this passage is ‘sapere,’ to taste of or to understand, but Crashaw inserts ‘gust’ instead – tasting or enjoying. This change does not indicate that Crashaw is anti-intellectual, irrational, or otherwise eschews knowledge in his account of the sacraments

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or devotions more generally. Rather, in Crashaw’s hands, this shift from sapere to gustare allows the bread to be indistinguishable from the communicant by the end of the stanza.41 Instead of presenting, as the pseudo-Thomist hymn does, the bread as an ultimately disposable means on the way to knowledge, ‘gust,’ in a bilingual pun, connotes both the enjoyment that the communicant experiences and the issue of this experience, life. In other words, this stanza proleptically conflates means and end and, thus, preserves the ‘Bread of loves’ as an immanent object of devotional attention and desire: O dear memoriall of that Death Which lives still, and allowes us breath! Rich, Royall food! Bountyfull BREAD! Whose use denyes us to the dead; Whose vitall gust alone can give The same leave both to eat and live; Live ever Bread of loves, and be My life, my soul, my surer selfe to mee.

(37–44)

The concluding couplet of this penultimate stanza pleads for the eternal existence of the very thing, the sacramental bread, that the ultimate stanza treats as destined for extinction. Crashaw’s paraphrase of ‘Adoro devote’ then consistently troubles the original hymn’s focus on the hiddenness of true divinity behind the sacramental elements and, instead, offers a devotional experience that is not primarily about uncovering the secret behind material signs. On the subject of the sacrament, as elsewhere in his verse, he insists on a notion of experience in which there are only accidents, never substances or meaning behind these accidents. We should also remark here the similarity to the final lines of ‘The Flaming Heart’ with which this section began: ‘Leave nothing of my SELF in me. / Let me so read thy life, that I / Unto all life of mine may dy’ (106–8). Instead of the kenosis that this conclusion implies, ‘Adoro Te’ closes by pleading for a replacement for this now divested self: the bread of loves, which is more than just a surer self, but also the speaker’s life and soul. And once again, Crashaw offers us a sacramental scenario that relies on indistinction, treating the communicant not as the consumer of the eucharistic elements, but as potentially identical to them. In addition, ‘Adoro Te’ and its Latin original allow for the possibility that even fallen human senses can access God, really, substantially, and immanently, in the sacrament; they do not always point beyond

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themselves to a broader independent spiritual domain. In fact, hearing appears as the privileged sense in the presence of the sacrament, something we might not expect from a poet customarily figured as attached to the liturgy and ceremony of high-church Anglicanism or Roman Catholicism:42 Down down, proud sense! Discourses dy. Keep close, my soul’s inquiring ey! Nor touch nor tast must look for more But each sitt still in his own Dore. Your ports are all superfluous here, Save That which lets in faith, the eare.

(5–10)

Crashaw is not, of course, secretly Protestant, but the echoes of Reformed polemic and homilies about sermons in this moment reveal the limitations of turning to confessional allegiance as a means of literary critical explication. To put it more pointedly, if we know that Crashaw is a Roman Catholic, we only know something of value if we know what Catholicism is or entails. As Molly Murray argues, the internal divisions within confessional allegiances are precisely what go missing when readers are faced with a dichotomous choice between Catholicism and Protestantism.43 ‘Upon the ensuing Treatises [of Mr. Shelford]’ closes with a similar suspicion of the contentless nature of such a choice: ‘In summe, no longer shall our people hope, / To be a true Protestant, ’s but to hate the Pope’ (67–8). More important than the political impetus behind this claim is its succinct rejection of a dialectical framework for devotion and confessional allegiances: devotion and conversion must be more than saying ‘no,’ no matter how infinitely nuanced or productive is that negation. Thus, we learn little about Crashaw’s notion of devotion by labelling Catholicism the religion of sense and Protestantism the faith of bodily denial. In poems like ‘A Letter from MR. CRASHAW to the Countess of Denbigh, Against Irresolution and Delay in matters of RELIGION,’ Crashaw certainly describes the procedures of conversion and advocates for Catholicism, but he attempts to do so primarily by turning to the positive content of an immediate affective experience. Choosing or adhering to Catholicism or Protestantism is not the sort of true transformation that interests Crashaw in the majority of his poems. Instead, he asks us to imagine faith as an active force to be cherished, not a place of rest or a tool in the service of an ultimate aim, like being a convinced Roman Catholic.

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Moreover, despite broad historical generalizations about the importance of hearing and sermons to Reformed religion, there’s nothing essentially Protestant about such a validation of hearing over sight, touch, and taste, as the pseudo-Thomist hymn itself reveals: I adore you devoutly, O hidden truth, Lurking inside all these outward forms; To you my heart will gladly surrender, For in contemplation of you it fails. Taste, sight, and touch when near you falter; Only the hearing is wholly believed. I believe what the Son of God has uttered: There is nothing truer than the word of truth.44

What is striking about Crashaw’s rendering of these opening lines is the absence of two themes pivotal to the original hymn: hiddenness and the utter failure of the devotee to contemplate or approach divinity. The Latin poem reaffirms a sacrament pointing to transcendence whereas Crashaw’s paraphrase does not think that communicants are doomed to lack. Perhaps the best example of this phenomenon occurs right after the privileging of hearing. The Latin poem expresses dependence on the Son’s enunciations: ‘I believe what the Son of God has uttered’ (7). Crashaw praises a faith that the communicant actually possesses: Faith is my skill. Faith can beleive As fast as love new lawes can give. Faith is my force. Faith strength affords To keep pace with those powrfull words. And words more sure, more sweet, then they Love could not think, truth could not say.

(11–16)

Whereas the portrait of faith in the Latin original entails jumping an unbridgeable gulf, Crashaw here presents faith as a power that a devotee owns, not as an instrument that inevitably fails in the face of transcendence. In addition, this strength allows the speaker to keep up with the powerful words, of institution and sermon, presumably. And in turn, these words themselves are the most sure and sweet: the ambiguity of ‘There is nothing truer than the word of truth’ (8) disappears in favour of an unabashed celebration of these specific words. Yet what are these

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qualities that Crashaw’s poetry claims as its possession? What is the ‘faith’ that belongs to the speaker as both skill and force, but that nonetheless preserves a flat surface of indistinction between substance and accident? In this respect, Crashaw drives us back to the pivotal question of sacramental desire, what exactly it is that communicants want, or even come to own, when they encounter, consume, or possess this divine immanence, conceived as a forceful faith. Crashaw’s portrait of faith as force revolves around the relationship between senses (themselves often presented as indistinguishable), accidents, and substance. Several of these poems come close to synaesthesia, but it is the precise nature of these lyrics’ conflation of senses that matters for our discussion. Modern readers are probably most familiar with abrupt and jarring schizophrenic synaesthesias that reaffirm the distinctions between senses through their very violence. Crashaw’s synaesthesias, however, do not fit this model of excess and transgression, but rather continue to foreground the indistinguishability topos that this chapter has so far described.45 In its account of sweet words not heard with ears and sights not seen with eyes, ‘Ode on a Prayer-book’ offers the sort of ecstatic sensory confusion that would seem to point readers beyond the senses to a transcendent spiritual reality: Doubtlesse some other heart Will gett the start Mean while, and stepping in before Will take possession of that sacred store Of hidden sweets and holy joyes, WORDS which are not heard with EARES (Those tumultuous shops of noise) Effectuall wispers, whose still voice The soul it selfe more feeles then heares; Amorous languishments; luminous trances; SIGHTS which are not seen with eyes . . .

(60–70)

It would take very little effort to transform this synaesthetic moment into a broader indictment of the power of worldly senses: the sights and words that matter transcend these localized organs of reception. In other words, synaesthesia enables or enacts mysticism and Teresan ecstasy; by complicating sense, or undermining its surety, these poetic transformations hope to capture the sort of ecstasy that attends a devotional

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transfiguration. In Louis Martz’s terms, ‘[t]he Baroque tries by multiplication of sensory impressions to exhaust the sensory and to suggest the presence of the spiritual.’46 Yet reading these lines as evidence of sense’s inadequacy or its need to be overcome treats ‘WORDS which are not heard with EARES’ and ‘SIGHTS which are not seen with eyes’ as critiques of corporeal apprehension and ignores the very sensuous nature of the ‘wispers, whose still voice / The soul it selfe more feeles then heares.’ Moreover, Crashaw’s synaesthesias may be breathless, even hyperventilating, but they hardly seem exhausted. Such an interpretation essentially insists that synaesthesia, as a figure, cannot really present what it claims to present, that it absolutely cannot be serious, for if it were the subject would dissolve into a mystical, ecstatic, transcendent union: that is, destabilizing the distinctions between senses or senses and their objects necessarily entails driving readers toward a different subject. However, Crashaw’s verse holds out the very real possibility that this different devotee – we should probably be wary of calling it a subject just yet – does not transcend the current one. Or rather, transcendence and overcoming are not the only way to transform. Thus, synaesthesia, in this poem and others in Crashaw’s oeuvre, does not appear to kick us out of or beyond the sensory, but rather mires or engulfs us more fully within it. Crashaw’s poetry consistently avoids recourse to a transcendent realm in which significance or meaning or salvation would reside. His verse certainly has mystical sympathies, thus its infatuation with Teresa of Avila, but it does not hope to achieve a mystical or ecstatic end via negative theology or a rejection of language’s or the body’s power. Yet if we label this tendency ‘mysticism,’ we should also reevaluate precisely how Crashaw imagines mysticism, or the ecstasies into which these sensory transformations purportedly catapult devotees. Instead of achieving a mystical union via a denigration of the worldly senses and the self that undergirds them, Crashaw’s Teresan and Marian poems use the indistinction between senses, and between senses and their objects, to do precisely what they appear to be doing, namely maintaining that there is no viable distinction between senses and objects, accidents and substance. Feeling as opposed to hearing words is not then a way to indicate that all sense is limited, but rather is a means of asserting that all sense is connected. Or to put it another way, Crashaw’s verse literalizes figures: synaesthesia is not just a way to designate the inadequacy of sense or language, but rather a mechanism for transforming it. Crashaw does not offer us excess sense so that we can become overwhelmed by sense, but rather so that we would finally attend to sense, as opposed to jumping from immanence to

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a transcendent order. We receive an abundant sense to which we should attend, not an excessive sense that prompts us to throw up our hands in exasperation and look elsewhere for meaning, faith, or love. As just one example of this phenomenon, ‘The Weeper’ presents brief, if nonetheless famous moments of synaesthesia, but ultimately produces a synaesthetic effect not by focusing on the senses of cherubs or devotees, but rather by attending to the indistinguishability of various liquids. Early in the poem, Crashaw offers a much-reviled description of a cherubic tear breakfast: Every morn from hence A brisk Cherub somthing sippes Whose sacred influence Addes sweetnes to his sweetest Lippes. Then to his musick. And his song Tasts of this Breakfast all day long.

(V.1–6)

Yet even this stanza has only a mild synaesthetic thrust: after all, ‘sweet’ applies to both taste and sound. Crashaw does not give us a jarring transposition of senses, which would preserve each in its proper domain no matter how briefly and apparently transgressive, but rather a set and series of ultimately indistinguishable liquids that make transposition a fundamentally inoperative concept. The poem then presents a fairly radical notion of mixture that postulates indistinction as its ultimate goal and its initial state: But can these fair Flouds be Freinds with the bosom fires that fill thee! Can so great flames agree Æternall Teares should thus distill thee! O flouds, o fires! O suns o showres! Mixt and made freinds by loue’s sweet powers.

(XVII.1–6)

There’s something disingenuous about this stanza, and not only because its opening interrogatory syntax is capped by an exclamation point.47 What is most curious about these lines is that the poem’s epigraph has already mixed floods and fires, suns and showers: ‘Loe where a WOUNDED HEART with Bleeding EYES conspire. / Is she a FLAMING Fountain, or a Weeping fire?’ The epigraph does not ask whether fire and flood are compatible as a mixture, but interrogates the precise description of this

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mixture. The distinct entities are already mixed in the epigraph and the task of the poem is not to demonstrate this mixture so much as it is to provide readers with a fuller conception or explanation of it. Devotion is a very different thing if one starts with the presupposition of affirmative connection and indistinguishability and imagines the goal of poetry as rendering this indistinguishability correctly, as opposed to imagining it as the overcoming or transcending of limiting corporeal divisions and, in turn, demonstrating that everything is connected and unified within God. Crashaw’s poetic devotions then do not operate according to a logic of revelation: nothing is revealed and nothing concealed. Instead, this verse offers us only the exposition of how sensory accidents are connected and what they essentially are. Crashaw’s work does not proceed from the presupposition that we know, immediately or self-evidently, what sense is.48 Here too, confessional allegiance appears extremely limited as critical tool for analysing Crashaw’s verse: if the very nature of sense is at issue, any account of the relationship between Protestantism and Catholicism built around their different approaches to sacraments, bodies, liturgy, and works must be a second-order phenomenon. Perhaps the best example of Crashaw’s tendency to flatten sense, signifiers, and significance, so that the very notion of a signified – conceived as an absent mental, spiritual, or otherwise transcendent idea – disappears, occurs in the ‘Hymn to the Name of Jesus.’ This hymn presents the name itself as exhibiting its own self-contained sensuous allure, regardless of its broader epistemological or significative function: O fill our senses, And take from us All force of so Prophane a Fallacy To think ought sweet but that which smells of Thee. Fair, flowry Name, In none but Thee And Thy Nectareall Fragrancy, Hourly there meetes An universall SYNOD of All sweets; By whom it is defined Thus That no Perfume For ever shall presume To passe for Odoriferous, But such alone whose sacred pedigree Can prove it Self some kin (sweet name) to Thee. SWEET NAME, in Thy each Syllable A Thousand Blest ARABIAS dwell;

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(170–88)

The preeminent sweetness of the name of Jesus is, of course, a conventional trope. What matters about this passage, given Crashaw’s aforecited penchant for synaesthesia, is the extent to which the poem enacts devotion to a metonym, the name standing in for the whole. Readers receive a name that has no signified or referent subtending it, a name that is the object of devotion and pleasure in its own right. ‘In its own right’ here does not signal, though, a recourse to somatic or sensory experience as the ground of devotional desire or reading. Rather, there simply is no ground for Crashaw’s devotion: only accidents, but never substance, including the substance that would be the body and senses. Of course, the other customary name for attention to the sign in its own right, treating it itself as worthy of devotion, is idolatry. Yet when Crashaw evacuates substance from idols and presents them only as accidents, he goes a long way toward evading the charge that he replaces the Creator with creatures. Ultimately, Crashaw is not particularly worried about the mental attitude that motivates idolatry, the propensity to focus on immanence and immediacy, or things in their own right, and, in fact, enjoins readers to approach his poetry with precisely such a potentially idolatrous mindset. Reading and Being Metonymically The notion that Crashaw, or even Crashaw’s poetry, would ask to be read idolatrously sounds, prima facie, ludicrous, an intellectual perversity far more dubious than any of the Bataillean paeans to excess that this chapter initially challenged. And perhaps ‘idolatry’ is not quite the right term for the brand of immediacy that Crashaw enjoins for his readers. After all, this verse that is so focused on indistinction would seem to undermine the very conceptual categories that make idolatry a recognizable and condemnable activity. As Regina Schwartz notes, there are at least two types of idolatry, the outward idolatry of objects that is so easy to avoid, and the inward idolatry of concepts that is much more difficult to extirpate:49 . . . the concept of Being has been contaminated by possession. After all, one of the meanings of Being that Aristotle offers is ‘property.’ The contemporary philosophical version of idolatry includes possessing the concept

Reading Indistinction: Richard Crashaw 95 – idolatrous, in the sense of delimiting, describing, and manipulating the concept. To own the concept, to possess Being, is to turn a world that is independent and animate into one that is subject to the process of my thought; it is to turn the Other into an object, but not just any object, my object. What, then, is the objection to idolatry if not ultimately an objection to the violence of possession? (28)

For Schwartz, it is only the absence or transcendence of the conceptualized thing that prevents it from being idolatrously appropriated by humans. Thus, transcendence performs a pivotal ethical function, ensuring that at least some aspect of sacramental divinity exceeds the grasping hands of communicants: They too [thinkers like Marion and Levinas] have distinguished between the object of worship – if it is false or misleading, leading to a false life, one devoted to the wrong pursuit, an unworthy cause – and the manner of worship, one that approaches the object in a troubling way. And like them, the many Reformers preoccupied with idolatry sought not only to prevent worship of a false god, but also to preserve the true One from ‘use.’ They feared an instrumentality that sought to control the domain of mystery. What they helped enable, however, was arguably a new instrumentality – not of the Eucharist by the Church, but of the sacred by the state. (29)

One potential consequence of this analysis is that instrumentality cannot be used to fight instrumentality, that it is the very logic of a future or transcendent end that actually enables idolatry: the manipulation and presumptive possession of divinity only begins if one imagines the world as a set of tools to be put in the service of work and aims. Crashaw, however, offers a decidedly different approach to avoiding idolatry. His verse does not exhibit the concern with instrumentality or possession, the obsession with taking and not taking away, that marks Herbert’s. In fact, he seems quite comfortable with use and even a devotional object that does more than simply designate God. ‘Hymn to the Name of Jesus’ associates the name itself with a variety of sensations and appears, in some respects, to function as a traditional synecdoche: Come, lovely NAME! Appeare from forth the Bright Regions of peacefull Light Look from thine own Illustrious Home, Fair KING of NAMES, and come.

(115–18)

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However, as previously noted, the name or word does not just stand in for some fuller whole, in this case a transcendent or even incarnate Jesus that the name signifies, designates, or otherwise shadows forth. In fact, the hymn closes by claiming both that all knees bow to this metonym and that those who refuse will be driven to submit: For sure there is no Knee That knows not THEE. ... They that by Love’s mild Dictate now Will not adore thee, Shall Then with Just Confusion, bow And break before thee.

(226–7, 236–9)

The poem then does not just ask that devotees adore the name, but threatens them with confusion if they do not. In addition, this poem refuses to register, even remotely, the idolatrous potential of bowing to the name. At the most basic level then, if this poem enjoins us to bow to the metonym, to take the sign for the thing signified, how can we do this in our reading practice? The traditional anthropologically inflected account of idolatry proceeds on the assumption that idolatry and fetishism are primitive, evidence of a benighted inability to understand signification. But as the previous question implies, for modern readers – and perhaps early modern ones as well – object idolatry, the idolatry of the thing instead of the concept, is actually quite difficult to perform.50 What would it really look like for a modern or early modern reader to fetishize the word on the page, to treat the word as the thing itself? At the very least, the notions of signifier and signified would seem to disappear from such a reading practice: no idolater, after all, thinks to herself, ‘Hey, now I’m conflating sign and signified illegitimately.’ It would seem that the indistinction that Crashaw advances in his lyrics would require a practice of reading that adamantly refuses to accept signification as the primary operation of words. If words are still signs for Crashaw, the sign has undergone a major overhaul, almost to the point that it is unrecognizable. Thus, the poetry attempts to evacuate substance or the signified, this other domain that would transcend or subtend the linked accidents, sensations, and qualities that make up the verse. John Peter maintains that Crashaw’s verse focuses solely on the figure itself, eschewing a doubled attention to sign and signified:

Reading Indistinction: Richard Crashaw 97 We are obliged to admit that the eyes and tears of the weeper have in the poem the function almost of pretexts, that their connection with the imagery lavished upon them is at best a tenuous one, and that in consequence the effect is to direct us, not to a relation or fusion (which might be profound or revealing), but simply to the imagery per se . . . My point is that it is quite impossible, here, to feel that we are in any real sense still concerned with the tears of the weeper, or even with the poet’s reverence for or joy at them. These drops of ‘balsom’, which in their envy of her teardrops are suffered to grieve for themselves, for their own failure to be her tears rather than what they are, are accorded an attention which altogether distracts us from the essential theme of the poem and it is almost with reluctance that we (and Crashaw) in time return to that theme.51

Here again, we witness Crashaw’s aversion to the logic of ‘both . . . and’: instead of attending to signifier and signified, these lyrics offer only an attention to imagery itself – subtraction and not addition. Peter’s account is also instructive insofar as it hints at Crashaw’s somewhat counterintuitive solution to the problem of idolatry and imagery: he does not exhibit a Romish or crypto-Catholic comfort with icons or attempt to preserve mystery from use and appropriation; rather, these lyrics imply that it is transcendence, not immanence or immediate accessibility, that engineers idols. When Crashaw describes his rejection of Reformation iconoclasm, in ‘Upon the ensuing Treatises [of Mr. Shelford],’ he does so ostensibly in the entirely conventional name of retaining or restoring a balance between faith and works, rejecting as extreme and immoderate the Reformed emphasis on sola fide. Yet this account actually presents the balance it desires as one between words: This shall from hence-forth be the masculine theme Pulpits and pennes shall sweat in; to redeem Vertue to action, that life-feeding flame That keeps Religion warme: not swell a name Of faith, a mountaine word, made up of aire, With those deare spoiles that wont to dresse the fair And fruitfull Charities full breasts (of old) Turning her out to tremble in the cold.

(49–56)

It is not that faith is only a name, treated idolatrously, but rather that it despoils other full and fruitful names, like charity. The problem of

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idolatry presumes precisely what Crashaw seeks to deny: that God is not immanent to all of the dynamic and transformative events and activities that occur in the sacrament and one’s devotional life. For Crashaw, there is then a way to worship God as such and in his own right in a world of signs, but the presumed distinction between signifier and signified will always prevent such an immanent encounter with divinity. The idea here is not simply to create a pantheistic divinity, one that would be everywhere and simultaneously transcendent – the ‘both . . . and’ answer – but also to rearticulate concepts of being, substance, and signs so that they do not enable idolatry or misapprehend divine immanence. Crashaw’s verse attempts nothing less than to drive readers toward a notion of being as sheer dynamic accident, devoid of substance or ground and, in turn, toward the notion that God is really and immediately in signs. We have already read the name of this mechanism in the context of the sacrament and its reception: metonymy. Crashaw’s metonymic God seems initially at least quite different from Donne’s metaphorical one, tied as the latter is to an excessive proliferation of figures: Neither art thou thus a figurative, a Metaphoricall God, in thy word only, but in thy workes too. The stile of thy works, the phrase of thine Actions, is Metaphoricall. The institution of thy whole worship in the old Law was a continuall Allegory; types & figures overspread all; and figures flowed into figures, and powred themselves out into farther figures.52

In this passage from Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, Donne’s metaphorical god participates in the hyperbole that Crashaw, as well as his printer in the reader’s preface, is at pains to reject. Yet even in the case of Donne, these metaphors that flow into metaphors, this deluge of metaphors, ceases to have the solid grounding that distinguishes literal and figurative gods and senses: the repeated italicization of ‘figures’ only highlights this slippage into a world actually transformed into figures. Crashaw’s lyrics, of course, attempt to take this liquefaction of metaphor to its logical conclusion: a world where figures overspread all is one in which there are only accidents, not substance. What looks initially like an abstruse theological question – the nature of being in Crashaw – ultimately provides the rubric for understanding the act of reading in his verse, an activity in which one does not affirm, predicate, or appropriate being as a concept, but rather learns, somewhat paradoxically, through this pullulating mass of figures, synaesthesias, and metamorphoses, how to be still, even passive, in the face of divinity.

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As Heather Asals contends, metonymy plays a pivotal role in Crashaw’s theology, ultimately serving as a means of propounding a participial notion of being. Whether ‘being,’ and the being of God in particular, is a noun or a participle, positions epitomized by Duns Scotus and Francis Suarez, respectively, was a central debate in late medieval and early modern metaphysics. The Council of Trent reaffirmed Aquinas’s position on predication and naming, in which ‘being’ is a posterior denomination based on effects: while the signified of a predicate applied to God has an a priori existence in God, the application of a name to him is a posteriori. Asals contends that Crashaw comes down on the side of Suarez and participial being and in so doing necessarily rejects not just the independent existence of objects and bodies, but also their distinct existences as separable entities: being is not a unique quality that enables an entity to have qualities, but rather a quality just like any other.53 Such a rejection of a substantial being accounts for the frequent appearance of mystical, ecstatic transformations in Crashavian devotions: if being is not a solid substance undergirding things or God, if it is instead an activity that does not assume the existence of a prior actor, then the ontological integrity of entities or selves and the substantial distinctions that guarantee such integrities are no longer possible or, for that matter, necessary. One of Asals’s chief examples of this propensity comes from ‘The Flaming Heart,’ specifically Crashaw’s use of the formula ‘by another’ or ‘per alium’ in the poem’s concluding lines: By all thy dowr of LIGHTS and FIRES; By all the eagle in thee, all the dove; By all thy lives and deaths of love; By thy larg draughts of intellectuall day, And by thy thirsts of love more large then they; By all thy brim-fill’d Bowles of feirce desire By thy last Morning’s draught of liquid fire; By the full kingdome of that finall kisse That seiz’d thy parting Soul, and seal’d thee his; By all the heav’ns thou hast in him (Fair sister of the SERAPHIM!) By all of HIM we have in THEE

(94–105)

Asals reads these moments as an example of a metonymic conflation of ‘creatures-beings-images’ – indistinguishability, in other words – and maintains that it results in all entities appearing as a secondary effect:

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‘And surely, one way of seeing what the poem is about is that it defies the per se existence of everything that it touches, making definition stand as effect’ (43). Although Asals’s argument draws on the Tridentine affirmation of metonymy as the proper way to relate to images of Christ (41), metonymy is not a uniquely Roman Catholic approach to the sacraments: as previously noted, Calvin explicitly advocates metonymy as the proper approach to sacred mysteries.54 Here again, an emphasis on confessional allegiance tends to obscure Crashaw’s interest in the activity of devotion, at the expense of its ends or origins. Moreover, ‘The Preface to the Reader,’ as Kuchar notes, insists, in opposition to Suarez, that direct experience of God is possible through language: ‘I dare hold it, in position against Suarez on the subject, to be the Language of the Angels’ (Williams 650).55 In other words, the preface contends that a metonymic chain that levels beings, actions, and qualities is not inadequate to divine things – an impotent chain of signifiers that cannot reach a goal – but actually connects to them via an affirmative, positive power. Such an affirmative power and the conflations that come with it always risk the idolatry of things. For Asals, though, metonymy serves as an antidote to idolatry, allowing one to focus on the effects of things, instead of the more dangerous focus on things in themselves (41–2).56 That is, despite all of the dismantling of identitarian distinctions that metonymy accomplishes, it still progresses and points toward a ‘total Being’ (45), in effect avoiding the charge of idolatry by insisting on its designation of a transcendent signified or referent behind all of its baroque indistinctions and liquefactions. Yet what does it cost to read Crashaw’s metonymies as undergirded or overlain by a transcendent model of being? At the very least, we are left with a metonymy that transforms seamlessly into metaphor, all these effects ultimately translating us off of a carnal, sensory, even spiritual plane – via the centrifugal force of all these excessive images – to a model of total being. In this scenario, even when one acknowledges the moderation and impulse to measure implicit in Crashaw’s work, baroque images nonetheless drive readers above and beyond this pullulating mass of indistinction toward a transcendent domain. Martz’s reading is a representative example of this critical tendency: he maintains that the proliferating images of baroque art all ultimately radiate upward, demanding that viewers contemplate a separate spiritual sphere. Moreover, ‘without a basic underlying design no work of art can hope to function. In estimating Crashaw’s success, then, we must watch for the line of control.’57 Although Martz’s argument meshes with this

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chapter’s argument for a measured use of figure in Crashaw’s verse, the moderation that Martz describes operates through the very logic of foundation and transcendence that the poetry seems to eschew. The name for this principle of structure and control is reason, but it is not clear that Crashaw opposes affect to reason, presenting sense and passion as if they require an external control. Certainly, Crashaw’s poetry evinces measure and not excess, but the means to this measure are not a subtending structure, but rather a reason and affect that are themselves indistinguishable, baroque, and self-organizing. Thus, Martz maintains that ‘The Flaming Heart’ is successful – ‘barely successful,’ actually – because it is tethered to an actual painting and book, which can then act as controls on the poetic energies unleashed. In this reading, the many ‘by another’ or per alium formulations that close the poem point to an authoritative foundation around which the hymn has revolved: ‘By thy larg draughts of intellectuall day’ (97) restrains the baroque imaginative energy by grounding all these affective flights. However, the per alium gestures at the end of the poem do not assert a foundation on which an oath might be taken, but rather attempt to extort an action from an addressee, based on the addressee’s attributes, including her figurative attributes: ‘By all thy dowr of LIGHTS and FIRES’ (94) functions as an imploration, perhaps extortive, pleading with the addressee that it ‘Leave nothing of my SELF in me’ (106) on the basis of qualities that the other possesses. Yet these qualities are essentially groundless as they are themselves the product of figurative associations: ‘By all the eagle in thee, all the dove’ (95); ‘By all thy brim-fill’d Bowles of feirce desire / By thy last Morning’s draught of liquid fire’ (99–100). Thus, it is not just that the sheer number of these statements multiplies grounds to such an extent that the very notion becomes ludicrous: in that model, we would once again have fallen into an excess that overwhelms order. The problem with such a reading, of course, is that it assumes that all invocations require a foundation on which to swear. It assumes that we know what ‘by’ means, that ‘By all of HIM we have in THEE’ (105) must mean something like ‘on the basis of’ or ‘reliant upon.’ It most surely cannot mean contiguity, as in ‘beside all of HIM we have in THEE; Leave nothing of my SELF in me.’ Yet why can we not read it in this fashion, as a principle of paratactical contiguity and not hypotactic order and authority? This question even applies to Martz’s reading, in which the poem is tethered to a painting and a book by its explicit references: why think this tethering is a grounding and not a mere link? I am less interested in asserting that ‘by’ means only contiguity in this poem than I am in

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highlighting the critical propensity – even in those critics who emphasize Crashaw’s penchant for metonymy and measured effects – to give baroque fecundity or participial being a decorous and secure foundation or end, whether that be total being or transcendence. But Crashaw’s use of metonymy seems more than simply a tactical attempt to avoid idolatry or an instrument for the achievement of transcendence. In fact, if we take the participial notion of being seriously, metonymy becomes an engine for driving devotional readers to live in accordance with a revised ontology, one in which metonymy is not just a way of speaking or thinking, Catholic or not, but a way of being. Such a devotional life means that images and figures actually recoil upon things and ideas themselves and, in turn, alter how readers can conceive of the activity of being. For example, instead of just asserting that love and an affectionate connection to others in the world is a central demand of a devout life, or persuading devotees to act as if everything is connected, this poetry is – not just enacts – affectionate connection. Admittedly, asserting that poetry is connection sounds somewhat mystical, if not ridiculous. Yet despite this risk, the phrase does emphasize the resistance to any model of representation, designation, and even predication that Crashaw’s verse adopts: his poetry neither advocates a performative faking it until one makes it, ‘acting as if’ something is the case so as to conjure it into existence, nor attempts to convince readers to believe in some specific proposition about being or God.58 Instead, Crashaw’s verse advances a devotional system in which there are only accidents without substance, whether that substance is conceived as a whole being behind the welter of sensation or an end toward which all devotion would tend. Reading, paradoxically, in this register, only attends to the nature of things when it stops talking about being, substance, and meaning – all concerns of the predicating, copular ‘is’ – and, instead, turns its attention to words and names – the affirmative ‘is.’ I acknowledge, of course, that a model of reading without predication sounds decidedly odd. What is one reading, other than guttural cries and aphasiac noise, if there is no thing, idea, or proposition being transmitted? The basic problem here, of course, is that it is relatively easy to describe what not to do: do not read for a depth or transcendence beneath, behind, or beyond the signifying or metonymic chain. But if we are not doing that, what then are we doing, as devotional readers? The most critically notorious and frequently reviled lines in Crashaw’s corpus, those tasteless walking baths of ‘The Weeper,’ are probably the best place to answer this question:

Reading Indistinction: Richard Crashaw 103 XIX. And now where’re he strayes, Among the Galilean mountains, Or more unwellcome wayes, He’s follow’d by two faithfull fountains; Two walking baths; two weeping motions; Portable, and compendious oceans.

(19.1–6)

The walking baths and mobile, copious oceans, however tasteless, seem at least conceptualizable. In fact, the succeeding stanza offers a succinct explanation of what they mean: ‘O Thou, thy lord’s fair store!’ (20.1). Yet ‘two weeping motions’ is an entirely different sort of figure, one that is not a mere chiastic inversion of the former: ‘weeping motions’ does not simply invert ‘walking baths.’ The poem’s epigraph is an important counterpoint in this respect, offering a traditional chiasm: ‘Is she a FLAMING Fountain, or a Weeping fire?’ Instead, ‘weeping motions’ provides no substantial repository or vehicle for the weeping: there is neither a receptacle nor a source in these two words – only two activities abutted. Unlike ‘Hymn to the Name of Jesus,’ this poem, at least in this moment, drives readers away from a static name that would ground even an idolatrous devotion or reading. Instead, one must attempt to read, not just a participatory weeping, but weeping motions. And ‘weeping’ does not simply modify ‘motions’ here or describe the activities that a noun undertakes, as in ‘weeping eyes’ or ‘weeping fountains.’ Motions do not weep in the same way that fires, fountains, or eyes do. Rather, ‘weeping’ is not just what the ‘motions’ do but also what they essentially are. In this respect, there is something fundamentally redundant, almost tautological, about this figure: weeping is itself a motion and, moreover, we probably do not need to be informed of this fact. So if readers only receive a redundancy here instead of some new demand or knowledge, if this figure is decidedly purposeless in this respect, we are still left with the basic question of what action – as distinct from what function – it performs on or for readers. This question is not designed to produce a broader, respectable aim to which these poems might be tethered, but rather to get at the activity of reading and the type of action that results from this model of metonymic being. This moment in ‘The Weeper’ is the most succinct version of an accident or action without substance: ‘weeping motions’ do not have a substantial entity behind them performing them. In addition, this short moment in one of Crashaw’s most notorious images reaffirms one of the broader consequences of metonymic being

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and devotion at which we have already hinted: the utter uselessness of predication and naming for devotion. That is, Crashaw’s verse does not actually say anything. Although it is beyond the scope of this study, we might also wonder whether the almost universal critical denigration of this figure – for everything from excess to tastelessness to melodramatic sentimentality – stems more from this basic challenge to predication than it does from any indecorousness on Crashaw’s part: perhaps the rejection of predication is itself fundamentally indecorous. Yet if this verse consistently avoids asserting or even saying anything, or rather liquidates such an affirmation by insisting on a thing’s indistinguishability from all other things, what do Crashaw’s lyrics actually do? The glib, and I think all-too-infuriating, answer is nothing: no predication; no invitation for readerly participation; no performativity. Quite simply, they neither act nor prompt action. Participial being in this respect is not so much an attempt to insert activity into being, but rather to transform activity into a quality so as to present so many metonymic strings where no one name or word can jump off the string and act as a substance. Paradoxically, in Crashaw’s verse, only substances require or promote action, not strings of indistinguishable and indistinguishably connected accidents. Instead of the activity of devotion, all of these indistinguishabilities and the participial being that they produce throw readers into the being of devotion. Instead of an action that might be hijacked by a goal or aim, Crashavian metonymy presents devotion not as something one does, but rather something one is. This distinction is probably best encapsulated in the two different versions of ‘Hymn in the Holy Nativity’ and its famous evocation of ‘love’s architecture.’ In the version in the 1648 Steps to the Temple, Thyrsis describes a world with a unified loving architecture: ‘The Phænix builds the Phænix, nest / Love’s Architecture is all one’ (46–7).59 In Carmen Deo Nostro, however, Thyrsis describes love as self-contained: ‘The Phænix builds the Phænix’nest. / Lov’s architecture is his own’ (46–7). Martz describes these lines as roughly similar: ‘Whichever reading we take, the line provides a summary of Crashaw’s poetical aims.’60 This seems precisely wrong, however, particularly insofar as the later version does not describe an aim at all. The 1648 version, ‘Love’s Architecture is all one,’ postulates a homologous, uniform world and, more importantly, asserts the existence of this unity. The 1652 version, ‘Lov’s architecture is his own,’ is a tautology and doesn’t predicate anything: ‘love’s architecture is an architecture that belongs to love,’ both self-contained and self-organizing.61 What’s important about this aspect of Crashaw’s poetics is that all of these indistinguishabilities and metony-

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mies do not prod or represent or otherwise issue in activity or liberty or liquefaction. Reading in this moment is not an activity either, much less a recognition of some postulated or asserted knowledge or affect. Unlike Herbert’s verse, which promotes a careful type of taking, Crashaw’s verse offers no such pedagogy. Reading does not show, tell, or teach us that it is aimless. Instead, reading simply is aimless: an attention to a string of qualities and their utter indistinguishability. Crashaw gives us only accidents without substance, which in the end looks like the purest of signifying chains. However, the metonymic links between these accidents are not the result of a mere structural juxtaposition, but rather the product of a pullulating and admittedly active sequence of indistinguishabilities.62 If we take seriously the notion that being is a participle, not a noun or a verb, then these accidents networking together are being (or ‘be-ing’), but do not, as with the performative, do so so as to constitute being or a being. Accidents do not drive, then, toward enunciation: they do not have this purposive aim. Rather, they create a new world without substance, but one that affirms these accidents in their own right, not as a critique of foundation or substance. In other words, metonymy is not a critique of metaphor: in Crashaw’s hands, it asserts nothing and thus critiques nothing. Metonymy does not show us that metaphor or transcendence or lack is all wrong, but rather goes about its merry way offering an inactive, even inert being and reading. The fantasy here is not that one has already accomplished or achieved what one desires, but rather that one simply is: for Crashaw, this basic passivity – just like object idolatry – is much more difficult to achieve than modern readers often imagine. If Herbert teaches us how to take presence, Crashaw’s verse drives us just to be present, without all of the learning and action and self-distinction that pedagogy implies. For Crashaw, an excess that would immobilize us, or teach us something, still allows us to be too busily active. All the activity and purported excess is on the side of the verse in Steps to the Temple and Carmen Deo Nostro and, thus, forces readers into a decidedly passive position, one in which they finally can accept divine gifts – all of these metonymic qualities – without rummaging around resentfully in the hope of more and more substantial offerings. In this sense, learning to read indistinction means not fashioning oneself into, but actually just being a passive receptacle for God’s already measured grace.

3 Loving Fear: Affirmative Anxiety in John Donne’s Divine Poems

For religion can only change when the emotions which fill it are changed; and the religion of personal fear remains nearly at the level of the savage. George Eliot, Middlemarch1 The love of God begins in feare, and then Amor est timor consummatus, The feare of God ends in love . . . Conceive no such feare as excludes spiritual joy, conceive no such assurance, as excludes an humble and reverentiall feare. John Donne, Sermon 13, Preached upon Trinity-Sunday2

Devotional anxiety, anxiety in the presence of God, is not tense. This is the fundamental premise of Donne’s poetic devotions. Moreover, our task as readers and devotees is to transform a religious anxiety built on tension – the unpleasant irritation of need or desire, as well as this same irritability construed as pleasurable – into an affect that is commensurate with a generous and attentive love. This change in the emotion that fills religion is not a swapping out of fear for love, a simple substitution, but rather a transmutation of anxiety and fear themselves. Thus, Donne’s verse asks us to abandon the notion that devotion, the promise of salvation, and religion in general are means either of transcending the absence of assurance or of perpetuating such instability in the interests of a broader goal. In other words, affliction is neither a sign nor a pedagogical instrument. In Donne’s Divine Poems, anxiety, and even fear, are not a reaction to an utterly inaccessible fulfilment or an infinitely deferred end, but rather stand as the very devotional dispositions that one should desire. Fear then is not a reaction against an impending

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threat, God’s withdrawal or punishment, for example, and anxiety is not, properly speaking, tension. Donne’s verse transmutes these passions not only so that devotees do not seek to escape them, but also so that they do not consider tension or anxiety itself as a mark of or prelude to pleasure or assurance. This chapter sketches how the Holy Sonnets present an affirmative anxiety, one not bound to the affirmation of tension or release, that responds to sacramental immanence and, in turn, provides an alternative to critical work that presents Donne’s religious verse as motivated by irremediable lack and absence. Of all the poets considered in this study, Donne’s notion of devotional desire has received the most critical commentary from a psychoanalytic perspective, arguably because of its odd combination of a bossy, even impudent speaker in the Holy Sonnets with abjectly masochistic sentiments.3 Although this chapter acknowledges the ways in which Donne’s expressions of anxiety in the Divine Poems often enable critical understandings of desire as lack, it also shows how these lyrics ultimately reject the temptation to treat God as absent and instead affirm an anxiety that does not seek to be assuaged.4 In affirming anxiety, Donne does not optimistically or resentfully tether affliction to reward, treating suffering and the anxiety that attends it as evidence of salvation. In fact, anxiety does not signify at all, as such a function would amount to its overcoming or obsolescence: fear would mean something, and thus be decidedly reassuring. Instead, in Donne’s verse it testifies to the uselessness of ends, or organizing one’s devotional life with an eye toward any sort of telos. Like Herbert and Crashaw, Donne imagines the Lord’s Supper as a means of training devotees to respond to an already existing divine presence. Donne, though, treats the sacrament as a means of transmuting a petty tension or doubt into an affirmative, instead of a defensive, devotional response: sacramental presence becomes a means of altering the basic contours of anxiety about the future or absence into an attentive response to an immanent divinity. Gary Kuchar describes Donne’s transformation of fear, however, as an attempt to perpetuate anxiety, but this time in the interests of ego defence: . . . the tropes that introduce and conclude the sonnet [‘Batter my hart’] do not call for the dissolution of anxiety, but, rather, they both express a desire to feel a more profound form of it . . . The anxiety that the speaker is asking to feel – the sort of fear attendant upon being imprisoned, raped and beaten – is the kind of anxiety Lacan speaks of as a ‘signal affect,’ an

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affect that warns the ego that the boundaries upon which it is grounded are threatened.5

Yet Donne’s verse just as often asks why we should imagine anxiety as an endlessly perpetuated defence mechanism, an attempt to shore up a subject against the encroachments of the very divinity desired. My argument here is that this notion of anxiety as simultaneously defence and lack – reacting against a potential threat, but also intensifying the very absence that threatens the ego – seems incompatible with a set of poems intent on ‘making me new.’ The Holy Sonnets’ famed rejection of assurance, to the point of appearing masochistic, stands as a primary example not of a conservative fear of self-annihilation, but rather of the value of anxiety transmuted. As Paul Cefalu maintains, a filial, godly fear promotes righteousness and drives devotees out of the security of habit and rest: ‘Godly fear should serve as a diffuse emotional state, rather than as a spur to commendable actions.’ Yet even in making this claim for an affirmative model of devotional fear, Cefalu raises the spectre of an anxiety haunted by the possibility of lack: ‘When we express love for what we possess, are we not at the same time revealing our fear of what we might lose?’6 Donne answers this question with a resounding ‘no.’ The Holy Sonnets disavow consolation not because of an inconsolable idiosyncrasy or pyrrhonist scepticism, but rather because assurance is not what devotees should desire, and because anxiety as defence is incompatible with love. Thus, instead of reading Holy Sonnet 17’s evocation of a desire that persists after its achievement – ‘But though I have found thee,’and thou my thirst hast fed, / A holy thirsty dropsy melts mee yett’ (Westmoreland: 7–8)7 – as evidence of desire’s inevitable failure, we should read it as evidence of desire’s desirability in its own right, not as something that necessarily persists despite our, and God’s, best attempts to transcend it. If one still desires even after thirst is fed, it could simply mean that desire is not organized exclusively around, nor is it wholly controlled and exhausted by, its end: desire does not end when drink or pleasure arrives to sate its need. The choice of ‘dropsy’ drives readers to precisely this conclusion, for dropsy is an excess of fluid, not a lack. Desire here is a result of a holy overabundance or plenitude, not congenital dearth.8 Moreover, this sonnet concludes, not with anxiety about the possible absence of God’s love, but rather with supreme confidence in its presence: But why should I begg more Love, when as thou Dost woe my Soule, for hers offring all thine:

Loving Fear: John Donne And dost not only feare least I allow My Love to Saints and Angels, things diuine, But in thy tender jealosy dost doubt Least the World, fleshe, yea Deuill putt thee out.

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(Westmoreland: 9–14)

If there is anxiety here, it is on the part of God, not the speaker. Although one could always chalk this depiction of a jealous, voracious, even excessive divine love up to projection, to do so demands that we assume precisely what the poem seems to deny: that devotees must be anxiously lacking and, moreover, that they could never achieve the desire of the Other that this sonnet claims that they have achieved. This poem, then, closes with a direct affront to the psychoanalytic account of the subject and desire, the notion that the lack in the subject can never be filled and that this failure is fundamentally constitutive of subjectivity. Kuchar’s account of ‘Since She whome I loved’ provides the most succinct version of this Lacanian position: ‘Paradoxically, the poem derives its effect of sincerity and hence its emotional power from such apparent failure.’9 The critical model of an essentially lacking or impossible subject has extensive influence even outside of this explicitly psychoanalytic framework. Despite his decidedly different focus on the self-consuming power of rhetoric in Donne’s verse, Stanley Fish’s critique of an anti-foundationalist signification ultimately issues in the same type of unachievable subject, one who seeks to exist outside of its signs as a masterful authority and a stable, independently existing self: The effort of self-persuasion – which is also at bottom the effort to confirm to himself that he is a self, someone who exceeds the theatrical production of signs and shows – fails in exactly the measure that his rhetorical effort succeeds. The better he is at what he does with words, the less able he is to claim (or believe) that behind the words – o’erstriding the abyss – stands a self-possessed being.10

In short, failure signifies and is the only type of success. Instead of tracing the futile quest for a whole self, Donne’s religious verse actually evades this endless dialectic of affirming (but necessarily undermining) the subject. According to these models, there is no desire that is not anxious about, but also seeking to overcome, its own lack. This chapter simply suggests that the Holy Sonnets and, more generally, the Divine Poems reject this model of desire, anxiety, and the subject searching for

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stability, affirming instead the very real possibility of an immanent, present, this-worldly connection to divinity.11 Certainly, there might be pleasures that issue from these failures: in fact, pleasure may well consist precisely in such failures, or the perverse deviation from a recognized aim. Yet precisely insofar as they rely upon and, thus, reaffirm such a project for devotional desire – the postulation of a goal or a subversion of it – Donne’s verse finds these eruptions of transgressive joy suspicious. Pleasure, conceived as perpetual tension or its release, impedes the sort of positive devotional desire that Donne espouses, a notion of desire and its immanent joys that echoes Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s rejection of extraneous measures for desire: . . . the masochist’s suffering is the price he must pay, not to achieve pleasure, but to untie the pseudobond between desire and pleasure as an extrinsic measure. Pleasure is in no way something that can be attained only by a detour through suffering; it is something that must be delayed as long as possible because it interrupts the continuous process of positive desire. There is, in fact, a joy that is immanent to desire as though desire were filled by itself and its contemplations, a joy that implies no lack or impossibility and is not measured by pleasure since it is what distributes intensities of pleasure and prevents them from being suffused by anxiety, shame, and guilt.12

Deleuze finds in masochism an account of desire unmoored from an exterior aim, including the infinitely deferred aim of egoistic, apocalyptic triumph that Theodor Reik locates in social masochism.13 However, it is not just masochism, but pleasure itself that assures the ultimate triumph of the self: ‘Pleasure is an affection of a person or a subject; it is the only way for persons to “find themselves” in the process of desire that exceeds them . . . But the question is precisely whether it is necessary to find oneself.’14 Pleasure shores up the very subject that Deleuze’s analysis of desire and Donne’s account of devotion seek to unseat. A transgression or decentring of this subject is not quite enough for either of these writers, insofar as it will necessarily reassert the very limit and self that one hopes to evade and relies upon a uniform operation of desire: the object or aims might change, but the basic activity remains constant. In contrast, Deleuze and Donne describe a scenario in which desirous activity itself, the actual practice and not just its aim, can be transformed.

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The same, it turns out, goes for fear. Holy Sonnet 19 closes with the insistence that anxiety and fear produce the devotee’s ‘best dayes,’ but distinguishes this concluding fear from a fear tied to future or present loss: I durst not view heauen yesterday; and to day In prayers, and flattering Speaches I court God: To morrow I quake with true feare of his rod. So my deuout fitts come and go away Like a fantastique Ague: Save that here Those are my best dayes, when I shake with feare.

(Westmoreland: 9–14)

The two fears in these six lines are not of the same type. ‘Quaking with true feare of his rod’ looks toward the future and a threat of punishment: what Cefalu describes as servile fear.15 ‘Shaking with fear,’ on the other hand, does not anticipate a future object or threat. Instead, the rhyme in the concluding couplet emphasizes the present immediacy of this second fear: ‘Save that here / Those are my best dayes, when I shake with feare.’ Neither does ‘shaking with fear’ have a purpose: it is ‘fear,’ not ‘fear of.’ Paradoxically, it is ‘true feare of his rod’ that is devotionally problematic in this poem, precisely because it invites readers to judge fear based on truth-value and purpose. One could only judge a fear false if it projected an absent threat or stemmed from a self-serving delusion: thus, judging fear according to this extraneous rubric indicates that one is still in the realm of servile fear. The poem’s final fear is not bound up in the dialectical oscillation – the constant inconstancy – between anxiety and reassurance, tension and resolution that marks the sonnet’s earlier evocation of fear and futurity. In addition, the difference between quaking and shaking reaffirms this distinction between types of fear: ‘quake’ denotes only a trembling tension, but ‘shake’ has the added meaning of shuffling off – but also fleeing or departing.16 The poem’s first line, then, ‘Oh, to vex me, contraryes meet in one’ (Westmoreland: 1), means that anxiety and assurance are vexing insofar as they appear as contraries, as part of an endless cycle of failed, but productive aims. The poem proposes, however tentatively, a different type of fear, one that would flee or slough off the utterly immobilizing and predictable trap of a dialectical inconstancy, one in which ‘Inconstancy vnnaturally hath begott / A constant habit’ (Westmoreland: 2–3) and in which one fears only loss and the necessary failure to achieve a goal. This sonnet simply

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maintains that a fear of failure that actually turns out to be success is not really fear at all. Even in other divine poems that explicitly reject fear as a motivation for devotion, we witness this same aversion to dialectical oscillation and, just as important, a suspicion of a fear tied to future goals and ends. Thus, although ‘A Litanie’ pleads for deliverance from anxiety, this liberation is a reaction to a very specific use of fear: XV From being anxious, or secure, Dead clods of sadnesse, or light squibs of mirth, From thinking, that great courts immure All, or no happinesse, or that this earth Is only for our prison fram’d, Or that thou’art covetous To them whom thou lov’st, or that they are maim’d From reaching this worlds sweet, who seek thee thus, With all their might, Good Lord deliver us.

(127–35)17

These lines are not just an indictment of extremes in devotion, but of the very oscillation between reassurance and anxiety that we saw in ‘Oh to vex me.’ They also lead to a condemnation of the use of fear as a motivational instrument: XVI From needing danger, to bee good, From owing thee yesterdaies teares to day, From trusting so much to thy blood, That in that hope, wee wound our soule away, From bribing thee with Almes, to’excuse Some sinne more burdenous, From light affecting, in religion, newes, From thinking us all soule, neglecting thus Our mutuall duties, Lord deliver us.

(136–44)

Both ‘A Litanie’ and Holy Sonnet 19 ultimately issue in the contention that an abject paralysis and an overconfident faith are part of the same immobilizing oppositional calculus, a world organized by the disjunctive ‘or.’ It matters little whether one throws up one’s hands in despair or in confident assurance: assurance and despair ultimately issue in the

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same inertia. Despite the apparent differences between ‘A Litanie’ and Holy Sonnet 19, some of which we might well chalk up to genre (one is a meditation, the other a liturgical prayer), both ultimately reject a notion of anxiety that wishes to be assuaged, one that yearns for the fleeting goal of consolation or self-perpetuation. The solution that these poems provide, however, is not moderation, but rather an attempt to evade this structure by rejecting a teleological orientation for fear, whether it is the instrumentality of using fear to promote virtue in ‘A Litanie’ or cowering before the threat of punishment in the sonnet. Even the use of fear as an incitement to or intensifier of pleasure, divine or otherwise, falls under this indictment. Thus, contrary to Ben Saunders’s argument, fear does not act as an instrument of arousal in Donne’s verse.18 It does not block or forbid pleasure and, as a result, heighten it. The value of fear in devotion does not reside in such coquetry, but rather in transforming what we mean by devotional desire. One must avoid the danger of needing danger to be good, not just because it contaminates the desire for the good, but also because it is not the right manner of using fear. In the language of the Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, ‘Is not this that which thou intendest, when thou sayest, The secret of the Lord is with them, that feare him; the secret, the mistery of the right use of feare.’19 Put schematically, there’s nothing mysterious about using fear to inculcate virtue or signify election. The mystery does not reside in the fact that fear is used for the wrong ends, but rather that it is used in the wrong manner, as a means to an end, whether that end is assurance or intensified pleasure. Although it is beyond the scope of this chapter to account for the role of metaphysical poetry in the rise of New Criticism, it is at least worth acknowledging that the model of anxious reading that Donne’s religious verse advances might well contribute to its prominent place in the rise of formalist literary analysis in the first half of the twentieth century. What might well seem most attractive about this model of readerly anxiety is that it affirms the very anxious attention that would mark radically close reading, a close reading even more radical than that of a formalism that postulates unity as the end or being of a poem. Yet more important than the explanation that such a phenomenon offers for Donne’s privileged place in the history of literary criticism is the challenge to the very notion of the subject that it implies. Alongside the demise of anxiety as an absence or fragmentation to be transcended – or to be enjoyed – comes the disavowal of the constitutively lacking subject constructed in and as complaint. Donne’s is a verse that does not just critique, destabilize, or otherwise challenge the subject: it does not produce propositions evalu-

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ating or exposing the contradictions within subjectivity, the delusional nature of autonomy, or the constitutive nature of absence. What makes reading Donne’s lyrics difficult is that they ask us to focus not on propositional claims, but rather the relations – grammatical, syntactical, and otherwise – that make such claims possible: as we saw with Crashaw, devotion is not about predication. This is not to maintain that they evince a thorough scepticism, or that they exhibit the wry reserve of hipster wit. Put simply, reading Donne produces anxiety: not anxiety that might be assuaged if only the poems’ meaning were less ambiguous, not anxiety overcome by faith in the benevolence of a transcendent deity, but an anxiety that can be embraced in its own right, as an affective state to be cherished and cultivated insofar as it amounts to attention to relation as such, in this instance the association between God and human beings treated as an accessible object of contemplation independent of the terms, God and humans, of the relation. At one level, I am insisting here only on a distinction between rhetoric and poetry, and demanding that we treat Donne’s verse as the latter: there is more to Donne’s verse than its meaning, propositions, or persuasiveness. However, it is also the case that a poetry in this mould, one that does not try to persuade readers of something, or console them in some fashion, ends up requiring a very different sort of reading practice. Assent and belief, it would seem, have nothing to do with it. Yet if we are not assenting to or imbibing a proposition to which we might, in a different register, assent, what then are we doing when we read? It is the task of this chapter’s third and final section to explore precisely this question, the impact on reading practice of the disappearance of the anxious subject, yearning for stability and security. In abandoning this chimera, Donne’s verse leads us into a devotional selfhood that would actually take seriously anxiety, and not reduce it to the reactive tensions, painful or pleasurable, that devotees experience in response to a foundationless indeterminacy. For Donne then, most religious anxiety is not nearly anxious enough insofar as it proceeds in an entirely predictable, conservative, and reassuring pattern of inconstant constancy: instability, followed by attempts at reassurance or pleasurable perpetuation, followed by the recognition that the initial instability is constitutive of the very person one is, itself its own type of identificatory pleasure – the dialectic of psychoanalytic subject formation, in short. These lyrics transform this tension into a positive anxiety by forcing readers away from a faith in or anticipation of cataclysmic or dialectical reversals. Donne’s verse then drives readers to focus on seemingly superficial, a-signifying syntactical

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and grammatical elements precisely because the great danger for readers is that they will leap too quickly to the solace of meaning, transcending the anxiety that is the hallmark of devotion. That is, Donne asks not that we applaud the ingenious ways in which he has made dissimilar things similar, but rather that we attend to the immanent order of sameness and relation in his lyrics, to the tissue of relation embedded in grammar and syntax.20 Anxious Sacraments If anxiety or fear is not to be assuaged by Real Presence, then what does the sacramental event actually do? Unlike Crashaw, who acts as if signifier and signified are utterly indistinguishable, Donne agonizes over their connection in the sacrament, anxiously pleading with God to associate signifier and signified, much less word and thing. Andy Mousley argues that Donne’s verse is fundamentally about displacement and, in so doing, describes the religious poetry in a manner very similar to the preceding chapter’s account of Crashaw’s indistinguishabilities: ‘In a verbal universe, where no concept is ever so completely itself that it cannot be likened to, or rewritten as, another concept, the putative identity of concepts and/or substances is repeatedly thrown into question.’ Kuchar offers a similar account of Donne’s repetition of ‘vapor’ in Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, going so far as to contend that such repetition does not just link word and thing, but evacuates the notion of the word in favour of the materiality of things: ‘While the word “vapors” functions as a thing, it does not do so through a sacramental rapprochement of res and verba, but by a kind of dissolving or effacing of verba, which gives way to the sheer materiality of res.’21 These accounts of Donne’s indistinguishabilities, while extremely seductive insofar as they echo my own reading of Crashaw, nonetheless ignore the extent to which Donne does insist and meditate on the problem of sacramental rapprochement in the Devotions. For example, he ultimately pleads for the ability to ‘associate thy Word, with thy Sacrament, thy Seale with thy Patent; and in that Sacrament associate the signe with the thing signified, the Bread with the Body of thy Sonne.’22 Although Donne rejects the doctrine of transubstantiation, the Real Presence, however nebulously defined, is part of his theological repertoire. Why then would he need to plead for an association that God has already effected, let alone an association between the word, one type of full sign, and the sacrament, another type of equally full sign? Donne does not ask for assurance that the sacrament has the power that

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devotees ascribe to it. Nor does he ask for a transformation of bread into body. He asks for what, regardless of one’s confessional allegiance, has already happened: an association between bread and body. In short, Donne renders the least controversial of all statements – the bread is ‘associated’ with body – into a matter worthy of prayer and anxiety. The Devotions also indicate just how pivotal the notion of relation and association, as such, are for Donne’s conception of sacramental and religious desire. Donne’s sermons tend to condemn memorialism and transubstantiation in the same breath, categorizing them both as dissolutions of presence: ‘there are other dissolutions of Jesus, when men will melt him, and powre him out, and mold him up in a wafer Cake, or a peece of bread; there are other annihilations of Jesus when Men will make him, and his Sacraments, to be nothing but bare signes’ (5.135). Instead of Crashaw’s attempt to establish the indistinguishability of signifier and signified, Donne renders uncertain the nature of the basic relationship between word and thing, turning it into a matter worthy of prayer. It is not that Donne advocates a radical scepticism at this moment, but rather that the model of devotion he advances advocates anxiety in the face of the immanently given: in this case, nothing more controversial than an association. Such a focus on a relation as such might well be a response to the Reformed notion of signs. As Judith Anderson notes, a relation without a third or middle term, the relay of the real, is characteristic of the Reformed account of signification: ‘Where in Luther there is a middle term – a presence “real” or physical as well as spiritual and symbolic – in Calvin there is a trope, an exchange or transfer, indeed a sleight of name, and with it there is an assertion of faith. These are the defining alternatives neither of the Middle Ages nor of the Lutheran version [of the sacrament and metaphor].’23 The anxiety required by and indicative of sacramental relation in this moment, not its overcoming or absence, is the entire point of the communion: in Cefalu’s terms, an assured signification, à la Calvin, or a transcended distinction, à la transubstantiation, would allow the sacrament to produce habit and rest.24 In turn, modern criticism that imagines the sacrament as a quest for the assurance of meaning misses the fundamental role of anxiety in the face of immanent, sacramental assurance – not its absence – that characterizes Donne’s understanding of poetry and devotion.25 Donne’s attempt to preserve anxiety through pleas for and a focus on ‘association’ reveals that this notion is more than a nominalist or structuralist juxtaposition of arbitrary elements. Rather, it entails an actually immanent

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connection between words and things that issues in devotional desire. Robert Whalen describes Donne’s sermons in a similar fashion, contending that Donne ‘advances as complementary the potentially contrary imperatives of word and sacrament by conferring eucharistic status on both the “elements” of his sermon and their desired or intended effect on his auditory.’26 The rhetorical expression of an idea is not the opposite of a transubstantiated host or Real Presence, but rather another type of this sacramental phenomenon: for Donne, signification is not the opposite of presence, but rather plugs into the same immanent power. The concluding lines of Holy Sonnet 13, ‘What if this present were the worlds last night?,’ and their famous editorial crux pose precisely this question of how one should relate to signs. The 1633 and 1635 editions of the poem offer what initially appears to be a tenuous connection between sign and signified, built as it is on assumption: ‘To wicked spirits are horrid shapes assign’d, / This beauteous forme assumes a piteous minde’ (1635: 13–14). One possibility here is that it is the speaker doing the assuming and, thus, she fesses up to a perhaps fantastical desire for assurance. Yet such a reading seems to wrench the sense of the line: it is actually the ‘beauteous form’ that does the assuming. We might still want to chalk this claim up to the desperate fantasies of the speaker, but ‘assume’ itself carries two incompatible senses here: the form acts to assume or put on a piteous mind; or the form presupposes such a mind. If the beauteous form ‘assumes,’ as in adopts as a disguise, a piteous mind, the logic of the entire passage is precisely backwards: outward form precedes or controls, as the reference to idolatry would imply, an internal, spiritual state. The alternative reading, that ‘assumes’ means ‘presupposes,’ is much closer to the sense of the manuscript version of this sonnet: . . . but as in myne idolatree I sayd to all my profane Mistressis Bewty of pity, foulnes only is A Signe of rigor; So I say to thee To wicked Sprights are horrid Shapes assignd This bewteous forme assures a pittious mind.

(Westmoreland: 9–14)

Here too, the customary priority of internal over external appears inverted: the speaker’s love for and idolatrous attachment to profane mistresses is a viable model for devotion and one can glean from external appearances Jesus’ interior state. Both ‘assures’ and ‘assumes,’ of course, allow for ironic readings, or rather dismissals of this sonnet’s speaker: he

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is either ridiculously overconfident in the similarity between worldly and heavenly things; or he reveals that the entire conceit is wishful thinking by letting slip the word ‘assumes.’27 However, why must we assume an error or an irony in this closing sequence? Instead of assuming that this quest for assurance fails, the poem may well actually advocate idolatry as preparation for devotion. Jesus’ beauteous form itself may well assure a piteous mind, regardless of whether the form itself encases a similar mind. And a form that puts on a piteous mind actually gives signs the ability to act on internal states. Holy Sonnet 13 matters for a discussion of the sacrament because it explores the basic problem of how to respond to corporeal signs and the nature of their association with an immanent divinity. ‘A Litanie’ offers a similar consideration, one in which the question of idolatry yet again returns to haunt the notion of presence. This poem, however, also insists that neither presence nor absence provides an escape from the perils of salvational anxiety: When want, sent but to tame, doth warre And worke despaire a breach to enter in, When plenty, Gods image, and seale Makes us Idolatrous, And love it, not him, whom it should reveale, When wee are mov’d to seeme religious Only to vent wit, Lord deliver us.

(183–9)

This stanza indicates not only that there is no security to be had in the afflictions sent by a radically distanced deity, but also that sacramental immanence produces its own brand of anxiety. In short, there is only anxiety all the way down. Whalen acknowledges precisely this absence of resolution in the context of ‘The Crosse’ and its own condemnation of empty wit: So when thy braine workes, ere thou utter it, Crosse and correct concupiscence of witt. Be covetous of Crosses, let none fall. Crosse no man else, but crosse thy selfe in all. Then doth the Crosse of Christ worke fruitfully Within our hearts, when wee love harmlessly That Crosses pictures much, and with more care That Crosses children, which our Crosses are.

(57–64)

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For Whalen, the energy of the poem ‘consists precisely in the poet’s willingness not to resolve the difficulties he raises, to display openly not only his inability to reconcile the ideological poles traced by “The Crosse,” but also his failure to contain the potential idolatry he recognizes in his art.’28 Instead of considering the unresolved anxiety that visible, sacramental forms produce as a danger to be overcome, and one that Donne fails to overcome or resolve, I argue that we should instead consider all of these poems as a concerted attempt to preserve anxiety at the expense of surety in the face of signs that carry a modicum of presence. Such a preservation does not necessarily amount to a pious deferral of security or stability, but rather a rearticulation and transformation of the very values that we ascribe to devotion. If Donne’s sacred lyrics, the Holy Sonnets in particular, appear ‘fearful’ or ‘desperate,’ this is only because they are convinced that devotees are not nearly anxious enough, that a desire that wishes either for a continuation of or an end for tension issues, in its very operation, in an utterly predictable and complacent dialectical oscillation. Preserving tension and delaying gratification, both mechanisms that reside on the side of pleasure, mistake Donne’s emphasis on transforming, essentially, the nature and process of religious desire, not just the objects that one desires. Richard Strier’s account of Donne’s anxious incompatibility with Calvinism locates this difficulty at the level of soteriological method, not a personal, desperate worry over whether he is one of the elect: ‘I will argue that the pain and confusion in many of the “Holy Sonnets” is not that of the convinced Calvinist but rather that of a person who would like to be a convinced Calvinist but who is both unable to be so and unable to admit that he is unable to be so.’29 Donne worries over the difficult means of becoming a Calvinist, not the relatively easy end, being or wanting to be a convinced Calvinist.30 Such an attention to method, paradoxically, seems necessary to prevent fear from transforming into precisely the sort of habit and rest that Cefalu describes in his account of servile fear: if devotees fall back only on desperate wails of self-abnegation, they do nothing more than confidently reaffirm the absence of relation with God. Donne has no patience with such a lazy turn and, instead, maintains that habitual, reactive fear is not adequately anxious.31 The trick then, in part, is to transform fear from a reactive and craven passion into a reverential and true devotional affect, a religious disposition that one could desire and even love. Regardless of all the Machiavellian and, later, Hobbesian baggage that fear comes to carry, for Donne at least, it is more than simply a means of enforcing obedience or morality. Yet there

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is also a second piece of this puzzle: maintaining this anxiety in the face of a sacramental immanence or presence that looks for all the world like a licence for consolation, assurance, even joy. Instead of a ready-made goal of union with the divine, or achieving God’s presence, Donne’s verse attempts to train readers in how to respond joyfully and affirmatively to presence. This is not to contend that Donne’s sermons do not offer incorporative accounts of communion, describing the goal of sacramental participation as the constitution of an individual and collective connection to God. The 1626 Christmas Sermon, for example, presents the sacrament as a matter of digestion and concoction that issues in similarity: ‘The end of all digestions, and concoctions is assimilation, that that meate may become our body. The end of all consideration of all the actions of such leading and exemplar men, as Simeon was, is assimilation too; That we may be like that man’ (7.280–1). The nature of this likeness or identity, though, is the pivotal issue for Donne’s account of the sacrament. Even in this passage, we witness Donne complicating the notion of assimilation and dragging it closer to the more nebulous notion of association: assimilation initially seems to signify an actual, bodily transformation, but the parallel example of Simeon introduces the possibility that it means identification or analogy. Thus, if the Devotions advance a notion of association that would, presumably, preserve the distinctions between word and thing, signifier and signified, how does this notion of an assimilation that is also, in part, a matter of resemblance fit with Donne’s broader use of the sacraments? Is ‘assimilation’ Donne’s name for metaphor, whereas ‘association’ names metonymy? Of the Holy Sonnets, ‘Wilt thou love God, as he, thee?’ is probably the best place to answer such a question as it starts with the conventional tropology of eating-as-understanding and closes with an awestruck awareness of similarity. The sonnet opens by figuring the comprehension of difficult theological truths, in this case the doctrine of the incarnation and the indwelling of the spirit in the faithful, as a matter to be digested by the soul: Wilt thou love God, as he, thee? then digest My Soule, this holsome meditation: How God the Spirit by Angels wayted on In heauen; doth make his temple in thy brest.

(Westmoreland: 1–4)

Here, ‘digesting’ the meditation ultimately equals loving God, but such a loving knowledge might not necessarily amount to assimilation. Donne,

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after all, is not Crashaw, and exhibits none of the latter’s penchant for mystical union with the divine. Thus, this sonnet’s closing couplet reaffirms the almost incomprehensible difficulty, even strangeness of the incarnation and the concept of similarity: ‘’Twas much that Man was made like God before, / But that God should be made like Man much more’ (Westmoreland: 13–14). The poem’s first line does not ask readers or the soul to eat or taste this meditation, à la Herbert, but rather to digest it, a purportedly automatic natural process of assimilation that would not require the soul’s or the reader’s assent. Yet the sonnet does not close with the calm security of natural alimentary processes. Rather, the sonnet moves from the security of automatic assimilation and consumption, a subject in control of its knowledge intake, to a fundamental awe before the nature of likeness and association. All the speaker can conclude is that these connections are ‘much,’ not that one has comprehended or is in any way reassured by such similarities or assimilations. The poem concludes by insisting that even after this initial assimilation, one still has to focus on, and be awed by, the nature of association. What is important about these poems is not just that they reject assurance or consolation, but the manner in which they do so. None of the Divine Poems renders the devotional subject indistinguishable from or assimilates it, in mystical or some other fashion, to a divine entity. Even if Donne’s sermons occasionally advance a positive conception of being consumed and assimilated by God, the religious verse attempts to maintain both the anxiety that would attend such a communion and a reverential awe before the very notion of an immanent similarity – not a sublimely transcendent deity. Certainly, if one goes in search of ecumenism, communalism, and commensality in Donne’s verse, they are there to be had. The Divine Poems, however, consistently foreground the ways in which similarity and association are not excuses for comfort, pleasure, or security. Sameness, likeness, and similarity are not the end of anxiety or the end of the communion story, but rather the beginning. The fear and anxiety that serve as components of Donne’s devotion do not then fit within a dialectical structure of selves and others, where difference is the engine of anxious activity and sameness and presence are the mark of rest. Neither does his verse enlist fear and anxiety in the purposive march toward overcoming isolation or training devotees to avoid worldly temptations and pursuits. The devotional point, rather, is to preserve a true fear and even to love this fear. Yet this true fear does not stem from God’s irremediable absence, but rather from a decidedly immanent, insistent presence: true fear focuses on the immediate, not

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the deferred, the present, not an unknown future. In the end, Donne offers us a transformed fear and anxiety, one that, contrary to the Spinozist tradition, is actually compatible with and demands love. How to Love Fear Unlike Crashaw’s verse, which imagines conflation or indistinction as an evasion (but not a resolution) of soteriological anxiety, the proleptic conflations of ‘Upon the Annunciation and Passion falling upon one day. 1608,’ ‘Hymne to God my God, in my sicknesse,’ and ‘A Litanie’ serve as spurs to anxiety in Donne.32 In its very first lines, the 1626 Christmas sermon emphasizes precisely this proleptic aspect of both the incarnation and the eucharist: ‘The whole life of Christ was a continuall Passion; others die Martyrs, but Christ was born a Martyr . . . His birth and his death were but one continuall act, and his Christmas-day and his Good Friday, are but the evening and morning of one and the same day’ (7.279). Pseudo-Martyr performs a similar conflation, but this time of ends and the actions that lead to them, ultimately insisting that the pains and rewards of martyrdom are indistinguishable: ‘So that Christ promises a reward, but not to take away the persecution; but so to mingle and compound them, and make them both of one taste, and indifferency, that wee shall not distinguish, which is the meate and which is the sauce, but nourish our spirituall growth as well with the persecution, as with the reward.’33 Yet Donne’s polemic also insists that what distinguishes true Protestant martyrdom and the ‘misprovoke[d]’ martyrdom of Catholicism is their different attitudes toward purposiveness and reward: ‘Yet there is more Devotion in our Doctrine of good works, then in that of the Romane Church, because wee teach as much necessity of them as they doe, and yet tie no reward to them.’34 For my argument here, what matters in these very different prose texts is the impact of this consistent aversion to ends and goals on Donne’s notions of desire and anxiety. Molly Murray describes this phenomenon in Donne’s prose and verse as evidence of a desire to keep the end result of conversion secret or hidden. Thus, Pseudo-Martyr’s famed refusal to describe the end of Donne’s irresolution, the end of his conversion, draws attention to and emphasizes the mysterious results of conversion by defying readers’ generic expectations of a carefully delineated new man.35 In contrast, the remainder of this chapter maintains that Donne does not so much hide as disavow such ends, that the prose and verse focus, as Murray notes, on the similarity of method because they are only interested in method, not ends. It is the

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task of this section to describe what devotional desire looks like when it does not have an object toward which it tends, a missing goal that it seeks to achieve. In addition, it explores how Donne’s verse transmutes desire and anxiety so as to advance a notion of reverential fear that is not the evil Hobbesian inverse of a Spinozist love. In other words, Donne’s lyrics affirm a love for fear that is neither craven nor hopelessly reactive.36 The immanence that prolepsis enacts, figuratively or otherwise, does not assuage devotional anxieties. But just as importantly, it does not aim to do so. ‘Upon the Annunciation and Passion falling upon one day. 1608’ opens by acknowledging the conflation of first and last things as a result of this calendrical anomaly. Donne then turns not just to a proleptic temporal conflation, but also to one of his favourite images, east and west meeting in a flat map: All this, and all betweene, this day hath showne, Th’Abridgement of Christs story, which makes one (As in plaine Maps, the furthest West is East) Of the’Angels Ave,’ and Consummatum est.

(19–22)

As if we had not gotten the point, not only do west and east, beginning and end, get conflated here, but so too do space and time: the comparison that explains the temporal link between beginning and end is an artificially constructed spatial figure – a flat map of a round world. However, this simile is also important because, strictly speaking, the meeting of east and west does not occur when one views a flat map: the west stops on the left side, the east on the right.37 From a transcendent perspective then, Donne’s image preserves the linear distinction between west and east, beginning and end, even as it affirms precisely its erasure. However, if one is on the terrain, or even is the map, as the more famous version of this image postulates in ‘Hymne to God my God, in my sicknesse,’ then west and east do, in fact, become contiguous, if not indistinguishable: I joy, that in these straits, I see my West; For, though theire currants yeeld returne to none, What shall my West hurt me? As West and East In all flatt Maps (and I am one) are one, So death doth touch the Resurrection.

(11–15)

This image only makes sense if the speaker is immanent to the map or territory invoked and, thus, that which is west in one instance can be east

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in another: a transcendent eye looking down on a Cartesian grid ultimately prevents the simile from making sense. In both of these poems, spatial contiguity is a metaphor for temporal conflation, the collapsing of the future back into the past. This metaphorical sequence then marks a distinction between a future assimilated to the present, which would entail the abolition of distinction, and one associated with it, the very distinction between assimilation, in the sermons, and association, in the Devotions, that we remarked in the preceding section on sacramentality. If prolepsis here is based on contiguity, not identity, then Donne’s use of it is decidedly different from one that would imagine events as already contained in their beginnings.38 Donne’s prolepsis does not so much assure readers that a goal has already been accomplished as enact a disavowal of ends via association: a future treated as already present, or even an objection peremptorily rebutted, retrains a devotee’s focus on the nature of association, the act of desire itself. Of course, if ends have already been achieved, then desire no longer appears as an orientation toward a future fulfilment. Yet prolepsis does not entail the end of desire in Donne’s religious verse. The first poem in La Corona evokes an end already achieved and possessed, proleptically, but one that still nonetheless elicits a desirous thirst: The ends crowne our workes, but thou crown’st our ends, For, at our end begins our endlesse rest, This first last end, now zealously possest, With a strong sober thirst, my soule attends.

(9–12)

The corona form itself, of course, foregrounds a connection between beginnings and ends, a circularity in which goals are included formally in the poem’s beginning. What’s perhaps most important to note at this juncture, however, is the persistence of thirst once the proleptic end is presently possessed. Although this sequence traffics in the customary paradoxical epithets for Mary – the second poem on the Annunciation describes her as ‘Thy Makers maker, and thy Fathers mother’ (12) – it also insists on the perpetually desiring nature that must attend the possession of an immanent end. This apparent contradiction between perpetual, anxious desire and proleptic possession occurs because these conflations of ends and beginnings do not simply amount to a teleological reassurance in which first causes end up being identical to final causes and, thus, guarantee the arrival of an end. Instead, such conflation troubles any neatly goal-oriented notion of desire, any notion, in other words,

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in which it would make sense to describe devotional desire in terms of success or achievement, let alone lack or absence or failure: failure and success share the logic of rewards and purposiveness that Donne’s devotional verse seeks to escape and provide anxiety with a reassuring habit or groove in which to operate.39 In fact, even the accidental pleasures that result along the way, whether considered innocuously perverse or subversive, reaffirm a purposive logic for desire: there is no perverse pleasure, however irrelevant, without the postulation of an aim from which it might deviate.40 As Murray’s account of ‘Satire III’ indicates, Donne does not catalogue deviant or multifarious methods of conversion, for there is only one method.41 He disavows ends precisely so that devotees will focus on this one method, as opposed to utilizing a goal as a means of excusing a lazy inattention to means. As we saw in this chapter’s opening section, the same motif appears in Holy Sonnet 17: ‘But though I have found thee, and thou my thirst hast fed, / A holy thirsty dropsy melts mee yett’ (7–8). One could certainly read this moment as the persistence of a fallen, voracious, acquisitive desire that will never be filled, that even in having and finding God, one still presumes that one lacks God because of this desire for possession. And certainly, the ‘thirsty dropsy’ of Holy Sonnet 17 connotes an excessiveness at odds with La Corona’s ‘sober thirst.’ Yet sinful acquisitiveness is not the only way to conceive of even this feverish thirst that persists: devotional desire must continue even after its aim has been achieved, so that the end itself does not mark the terminus of desire.42 Perhaps the better way to describe this scenario, one in which death, absence, end, and lack do not constrain desire, comes from Regina Schwartz: ‘The notso-dark and not-so-secret truth of Christianity may be that, beyond death, it is really in love with love.’43 Donne’s religious verse consistently exhibits a dissatisfaction with the very notion of an end for desire, in both senses of that phrase: a goal and a terminus. The devotional effect, if not the goal, of this poetic tendency is that ends collapse into the present so as to remove the temptation of fantasizing about an end to and for both fear and love. Ultimately, of course, any discussion of the place of anxiety and fear in Donne’s religious verse must grapple with the Holy Sonnet most notorious for violence, masochism, and pain, the one that prompts so much critical commentary, explication, and, I would argue, anxiety. Interpretation of ‘Batter my hart, three-persond God’ has often proceeded from the imperative to give purpose and meaning to all of the violent annihilations that appear in the sonnet:

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Batter my hart, three-persond God, for you As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend; That I may rise, and stand, orethrow me; and bend Your force to breake, blow, burne, and make me new. I like an vsurp’d towne to’another dew, Labor to’admit you, but Oh to no end, Reason your viceroy in me, me should defend, But is captiv’d and proves weake or vntrew. Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved faine: But ame betroth’d vnto your enemy: Diuorce me, vnty or breake that knott agayne, Take me to you, emprison mee, for I Except you enthrall me neuer shalbe free, Nor euer chast except you rauishe mee. (Westmoreland: 1–14)

It is not as if there have not been numerous convincing critical attempts to provide this sonnet with an orthodox, heterodox, or other sort of religious purpose. In fact, the very activity of literary criticism, devoted as it is to producing or unveiling the meaning of a poem, tends in this direction. Even critics at odds over Donne’s confessional allegiances and whether this sonnet evinces confidence or doubt – I am thinking, of course, of Barbara Lewalski’s Protestant poetics and R.V. Young’s argument for Catholic influences – agree on one fundamental point: that Holy Sonnet 14 has a devotional or theological point. Lewalski contends that the poem’s shocking figure of a rape that renders the devotional speaker ‘chaste’ nonetheless serves a broader meaningful purpose. The sonnet ‘is explicitly about regeneration, “making new” ’: Regeneration, or sanctification, is a process distinct from and yet accompanying justification (the imputing of Christ’s merits to the elect), and involves the renovation of the soul by degrees, so that, progressively but never completely, the corruptions of sin are purged from it and the image of God is restored in it . . . Mere mending will not suffice to [the speaker’s] regeneration: he must be made new by violence.44

The notion of regeneration in this reading depends upon the postulation of a purposive end, however incomplete or inaccessible for the speaker. Young’s reading performs a similar manoeuvre, despite his fundamental disagreement with Lewalski’s conclusions. He too finds that there is a theological point to Holy Sonnet 14, even if it is couched

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initially in terms of uncertainty: ‘Donne’s sonnet resists clear doctrinal resolution just because it is an expression of religious uncertainty on the part of a speaker who is groping for some sense of balance between divine power and his own will and identity.’45 Uncertain groping then is not evidence of the absence of an end, or even its infinite withdrawal. Instead, the sheer possibility of pointlessness reveals that the poem must offer an effective prayer and deny the Calvinist doctrine of irresistible grace: ‘ “Batter my heart” is precisely a prayer for grace that, if the irresistibility of grace be true, is essentially pointless.’46 Young’s implicit conclusion then is that, surely, the poem cannot reduce to an affirmation of the irresistibility of grace, because the poem must have a point. Yet Holy Sonnet 14 does not unfold in so purposive a manner, toward a devotional goal and the resolution of anxiety or uncertainty that such an aim implies. The desirous prayer that characterizes this poem may well move away from a timid, tame knocking and mending – or shake it – but the sonnet itself consistently defies the attempt to pinpoint the objective of this ‘making new.’ The poem then frustrates critical attempts to secure its devotional goal not because it is ambiguous or disturbing or complex, but because it is actively suspicious of a purposively organized devotion.47 ‘Making new’ is not just any old goal. We are all familiar with the dialectical trap of the new, in which we conceive of it as moving forward only in looking backward and distinguishing itself somehow from the non-new. Yet Donne’s notion of the new poses more fundamental questions about the process of renovation, including whether ‘process’ is even an accurate term for this activity: is ‘making new’ a transformation, a movement beyond or across forms, or a conversion, a turning altogether? Does the new connote an opposition to that which already exists, a dialectical differentiation from what has gone before? Or does the poem imply that such a notion of the new is not adequate for conversion at all, that it is still too tethered to a sinful self insofar as it insists on negating this very self? Put schematically, a notion of the new that distinguishes itself dialectically from its predecessors is not all that new: this is the paradox of an Aufhebung or sublation that both preserves and overcomes.48 Lee Edelman describes this phenomenon as the entirely predictable unfolding of a future organized around a logic of reproduction (and thus challenged by queerness): Undermining its [the future’s] claim to be aberrant and unprecedented at once, it transmits, in the requisite aberrant form, as futurity always

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demands – in the form, that is, whose aberrant quality is therefore anything but and whose future repeats its precedents precisely by virtue of being ‘unprecedented’ – the Symbolic chain of discourse, in which, as everyone knows (and this, of course, is precisely what everyone knows), intelligibility must always take place.49

There is nothing new about the future. In this light, ‘making new’ must be a challenge to the programmatic intelligibility, buttressed by reproduction, that Edelman describes. Instead of resigning itself to this endless cycle of contradiction and self-undermining, Donne’s verse imagines another notion of the new, one that entails an evasion of critical attempts to append to it an aim, of any sort, even if that aim is construed broadly as an open futurity. And just as importantly, the poem does so in a fashion that drives us toward an affirmative account of the activity of devotional desire, anxiety, fear, and, ultimately, reading. In Edelman’s terms, this affirmation would be identical to the ‘act of resisting enslavement to the future in the name of having a life.’50 Regardless of the correctness of Lewalski’s or Young’s accounts, they both implicitly tame the eroticized violence of Holy Sonnet 14 when they give it a broader point. This taming seems partly what Richard Rambuss has in mind when he so persuasively dismantles gender-bending interpretations of the poem or, for that matter, any interpretation that would seek to explain away the fact that the opening line evokes ‘a trinitarian gangbang’: ‘an appreciation of this expressive amplitude is what tends to go missing in accounts that sublate the erotic galvanism of devotion to Christ into “mere” metaphor or that dampen the potential here for excess and transgression by making orthodoxy and doctrine the only applicable categories of meaning.’51 Although I am sympathetic to this argument about criticism’s propensity to tame the homoerotic energies of this poem, I would argue that even transgressive, masochistic homoeroticism ends up taming this poem by giving it a point.52 What’s most unnerving about this sonnet is that it offers no pleasure, an obedience divorced from goals, and a desire that does not tend toward any sort of consummation. Thus, it does not unfold in a purposive manner toward a devotional or subversively erotic goal and the dialectical resolution and perpetuation of uncertainty that such an aim implies. The sonnet declares as much in the second quatrain: ‘I like an vsurp’d towne to’another dew / Labor to’admit you, but Oh to no end’ (Westmoreland: 5–6). This last ‘to no end’ indicates not merely the inability of the speaker to admit his divine lover, but also the utter pointlessness of

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this admission. It is customary, of course, to read the succeeding lines as offering an objective for all this labour: Reason your viceroy in me, me should defend, But is captiv’d and proves weake or vntrew. Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved faine: But ame betroth’d vnto your enemy . . .

(Westmoreland: 7–10)

However, these very lines are emblematic of the same sterile dialectical oscillations that we already witnessed in ‘Oh, to vex me’ and ‘A Litanie.’ They also seem to point toward no object in particular. Even being loved in return does not appear as the object: the speaker would readily be loved, but that’s not really the poem’s goal, since being open and ready to be loved by God is not the same thing as desiring God’s love.53 Even the famously shocking paradoxical couplet – ‘Except you enthrall me never shalbe free, / Nor euer chast except you rauishe mee’ (Westmoreland: 13–14) – does not present an end to be achieved so much as a state to be perpetuated: freedom and chastity are not goals, but rather statuses that require continual activity and upkeep, as the poem itself implies. After all, the speaker asks God to ‘Diuorce me, vnty or breake that knott agayne’ (Westmoreland: 11), indicating that this divorce, with all its breaking and burning, is a repetition of a previous act, not a climactic event on the way toward an end.54 Devotional desire is not here the futile spinning of one’s wheels implied by a lack economy. If it produces faithfulness, it is not as the ordered product of a teleological process, but rather as an activity coincident, if not identical to desire itself. If the poem describes the production of chastity and freedom, it imagines them not as goals, but rather as immanent to the very actions of anxiety and desire that the poem sketches. By the end of the sonnet, ‘Oh to no end’ has come to signify the pointlessness of ‘labouring to admit you,’ or rather the pointlessness of viewing devotion as a matter of struggle and work. It is only the pointlessness of the activity that allows for an escape from the logic of labour into a devotion characterized as free activity.55 In Brian Cummings’s terms, Holy Sonnet 14 reveals the involuntary, uncaused, even accidental nature of grace and, further, is marked by ‘a strangely directionless and unmotivated energy of articulation.’56 Yet in arguing that the labour is pointless, the sonnet does not simultaneously argue that the activity should, or could, be stopped: the endlessness of the activity, as well as its pointlessness, is the point of the pun. Rather, this useless, but free activity, in opposition to labour, and the affirmed

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anxiety that still attends it, is precisely devotion for Donne. One is not anxious because one might fail or lose something: one is, quite simply, anxious before an immanent divinity. Psychoanalytically inflected criticism of this poem will certainly find in this line – ‘Oh to no end’ (Westmoreland: 6) – confirmation of the ineradicable lack and inevitable failure at the heart of devotional desire, a desire whose object, like all objects, is infinitely deferred as a result of the fundamental nature of desire.57 According to this reading, the turn at the beginning of the sestet – ‘Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved faine’ (Westmoreland: 9) – is a redundant expression of the fundamental dialectic of desire within the subject: one desires the desire of the Other. In Kuchar’s terms: ‘the very phrase itself is redundant: does loving God not naturally assume the desire to be loved by him?’58 Quite frankly, no: loving God does not assume anything of the sort. It is precisely this brand of natural, but also extortive reciprocity that Donne seeks to evade. ‘Making me new’ means loving and desiring without the broad umbrella of purposiveness that a constitutive lack implies, without the mercenary conniving that attends a desire for the other’s desire. One is not really desiring God if one makes one’s desire contingent on God returning the favour: to treat desire in this fashion assumes, of course, that God is a coquette, that his love is withheld in some fashion. This is the cost of imagining God as merely coterminous with a model of the Other.59 The psychoanalytic model – in which desire would yearn for an infinitely receding, unreachable object and, thus, be trapped in a cycle of endless longing and failure – does not exactly sound like the mechanism for making anything new. Moreover, it is predicated on a denial of divine presence and a fundamental indictment of the very immanent divinity it purportedly desires. Of course, the anxiety, love, and desire that I am sketching in Donne are also endless, but these endlessnesses differs in one important respect: in the logic of lack that Donne evades, even if desire never achieves its aim, it nonetheless has one. In Donne’s devotional scenario love does not come along to exterminate or transcend fear, but rather converts an abject craven fear into a true, reverential and loving fear. Yet this conversion is a turning, not an unfolding process or goal. The issue in this poem is not whether longing persists or achieves its object, but rather whether religious longing can even possess an aim and still count as religious longing. Even a perpetual desire still leaves open the question of the nature of desire. Even if longing is infinite, even if desire is a more appropriate devotional attitude than assurance, that does not necessarily entail the conclusion

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that desire is motivated by lack: rather, desire might be endless and still immanent. The Holy Sonnet that most explicitly addresses an apocalyptic futurity, ‘At the round Earths imagind corners,’ exhibits precisely this model of an infinite desire packed back into an intimate, immanent lifeworld and thus stages a transition away from infinitely deferred longing for a future unity. What is important about this sonnet, however, is not that it valorizes prolepsis or immanence, but that it reveals the presumptuousness and reassuring ease of any dialectical opposition between transcendence and immanence. It opens, cosmically enough, on an eschatological scene: At the round Earths imagind corners blow Your trumpets Angels, and Arise Arise From Death you numberles infinities Of Soules and to your scattered bodyes go

(Westmoreland: 1–4)

Yet after this sweeping, world-historical opening, the speaker returns to a very local scene of individual repentance: But let them sleepe, Lord, and me mourne a space, For if above all these my Sins abound Tis late to aske abundance of thy grace When we are there: Here on this lowly ground Teach me how to repent, for that’s as good As if thou hadst Seald my pardon with thy blood. (Westmoreland: 9–14)

As Helen Wilcox acknowledges, this sonnet ‘does not end as it began, looking to the future in those far-flung “imagin’d corners” of the earth, but in present and local circumstances, “here on this lowly ground,” in the corners of a fearful heart.’60 Yet the quotidian scene with which the poem concludes is not a moment of rest, precisely because it issues in a patently presumptuous and heretical contention that repentance is equal to Christ’s atoning sacrifice. What is important in this moment is not so much the speaker’s error, but that the poem stages the safe inertia that stems from any postulation of an infinite empty distance between immanence and transcendence. ‘As if’ reveals not just the hasty analogies that issue from the dialectic, a purported engine of difference, but also the endlessly reassuring nature of the oppositional differences on which it relies. Repentance is, naturally, incomparable to Jesus’ seal of pardon, but their comparison, like all comparisons in this model, rests on the

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sameness of all oppositions across that infinite gulf of empty distance. The speaker deduces his comparison of repentance and grace from the fact that, for the dialectic at least, all differences are different in the same way. But, he has learned the wrong lesson from the poem’s movement from apocalypse to personal immediacy: the poem reveals that all distances and differences are not of the same order, that the way in which cosmic apocalypse is different from individual devotional works is itself different from the difference between humans and Jesus. Thus, even the insistence on the utter incomparability of grace and repentance is reassuring because it offers us a method of differentiation that is always the same: a contradiction or incompatibility that always takes difference to its ultimate limit. When all difference works in this uniform fashion, all comparisons are legitimate because they all must leap the same aporetic gulf. This sonnet then shows how dialectical difference and sublation do not preserve anxiety, but always end up relaxing it. In this model, the nature of the relation between humans and God or subjects and objects is never really in doubt and, more importantly, is never really an object of attention or concern. It is for this reason that it cannot serve as a viable model for devotional anxiety in Donne’s Divine Poems. The dialectical model that this sonnet challenges is essentially that of psychoanalysis. One always knows what one is doing when one is doing relation: a devotee is either reaffirming the unbridgeable gulf between self and Other, or transgressing and abolishing the distinction, which essentially reaffirms the very distinction or limit overcome. When Kuchar notes, following Žižek, that Petrarchism and the tradition of courtly love leave us with the gnawing and nagging possibility that desire in a poem like this does not fail, but rather perpetuates itself independent of its object, the mechanism of this self-perpetuation is already given: constitutive lack, hyperbole, parody, and transgression. In Kuchar’s reading of ‘Negative love,’ the fundamentally homogenous process of desire persists in the form of the dialectic: ‘By taking the Petrarchan scenario to its logical limit, Donne’s speaker is left in a position where success and failure, absence and presence, all and nothing, bravery and cowardice, lose their distinctiveness and hence their meaning. The effect is a parody of the self-generating monumental subjectivity that Freccero explains is at work in the Rime Sparse.’61 Importantly, parody here challenges the lowest-hanging of fruit: the autonomous subject and its fantasies of selfsufficiency. Yet if all of these dialectical opposites lose their distinctiveness, why think that this is a parody of subjectivation or autonomy and not a parody of the dialectic itself? Donne, though, imagines an anxious

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desire that operates outside of this laborious system of excess, opposition, and overcoming, and that would, as a result, be capable of generating a new, and newly chaste devotee. This is not the tried and true return of a freedom made possible by constraint, but rather a preservation of desire that is valuable in its own right, a free activity that is not a means to some other end – a desire valuable insofar as it might actually produce something new. Transgression and hyperbole, although masquerading as a mechanism of change and the new, always end up reproducing the very subject that conversion seeks to transform or evade. The problem with transgression in this instance is that it confines relation to the straitjacket of excess and hyperbole, to the homogenous difference between a self and Other.62 As one example of this tendency, Ronald Corthell’s reading of ‘Batter my hart,’ which revolves around the fundamentally excessive nature of subject formation, contends that, in contrast to the centrality of the unconscious in Freud and Lacan, Donne’s verse exhibits a flat, but nonetheless hyperbolic model of interpellation: ‘Donne represents a psyche that is all surface, no depth . . . Donne seems to be fully aware that his wish to be beaten is a wish to be loved.’63 Yet the parody that results from this awareness does not change the basic logic of subject formation or desire, but rather demonstrates that the basic relations that govern the constitution of subjects remain constant. Thus, Corthell tamps down ‘utopian’ and liberatory readings of masochism, most notably that of Deleuze, in the service of affirming transgression as the more moderate, respectable, even conservative explanation for what goes on in this poem: ‘This reading is far removed from Deleuze’s grand claims for masochism, but it does point to a potentially disruptive, even transgressive effect of the poem.’64 Initially at least, it is difficult to see how a model of desire like Deleuze’s, in which desire has no tie to programmatic or pleasurable ends, could suffer the charge of utopianism. Yet it is precisely this absence of programmatic aim, subversion or transgression, that energizes Corthell’s critique. For Deleuze, the masochistic features of a poem like Donne’s ‘Batter my hart’ are not a political or religious opposition to the self, a hyperbole or parody of devotion, but rather a revision of the relations that we think we already know: ‘Disavowal should perhaps be understood as the point of departure of an operation that consists neither in negating nor even destroying, but rather in radically contesting the validity of that which is: it suspends belief in and neutralizes the given in such a way that a new horizon opens up beyond the given and in place of it.’65 This is a basic question about the nature of the new, and

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the making of the new: what would it look like to make something new without reacting against the old or the existent and then sublating or suspending the opposition? What would it mean to suspend or turn away from the given as such? Ramie Targoff contends that Donne is ‘horrified’ by a ‘making new’ that threatens the self with annihilation and consistently characterizes any desire for oblivion as absurd.66 To a certain extent, this is absolutely correct, but for the wrong reasons: Donne does not cherish the subject under threat of annihilation, but rather finds destruction and negation to be concepts incompatible with conversion. Moreover, the Divine Poems are interested in the act of conversion, the event itself, not its beginning and ending points.67 Thus, instead of running screaming in response to the possibility of the new, ‘Batter my hart’ attempts to reimagine newness and a conversion not built on negation. Somewhat paradoxically, Holy Sonnet 14 maintains that waiting itself constitutes the new, but waiting conceived in a very specific fashion. In psychoanalysis, transgression reaffirms the limit that it passes: like negation, it bows to the very limit it rejects. Deleuze describes a scenario, though, in which limits are not transgressed or reaffirmed, but ignored somehow. The masochist escapes this system of rewards, pleasure and pain, replacing a desire directed toward ends with one whose primary characteristic is a purposeless waiting. Deleuze claims that the ‘masochist experiences waiting in its pure form,’68 describing desire as something more than the anticipation of deferred pleasure in which pain has only a negative, empty role as the lack of this awaited fulfilment.69 Waiting is pure in this register insofar as it is a relation to which one can attend independent of the terms of the relation: as with the distinction between ‘feare’ and ‘true feare of,’ Deleuze here outlines a distinction between waiting and waiting for. As was the case with the sacrament, the relation or association between entities and activities is the focus, not the issue of this relation.70 Of course, criticism of the psychoanalytic variety will object that we cannot recognize actions of any sort, much less devotional actions, without the intentions and goals that motivate them. Yet this is merely to reassert the dialectical relation between terms that Donne’s verse questions. Actions only need an aim to be recognized as actions if we cannot examine relation as such. As I have been arguing throughout, Donne’s devotional lyrics evoke an independent and purposeless anxiety and fear that drives devotees and readers to examine relation outside of a system of aims and a dialectical opposition of terms. It is the nature of the relation and association that is worthy of devotional attention, not the ‘I’ and ‘thou’ that serve as its poles.

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Even God’s love turns out to be pointless in Donne’s verse. As Susannah Brietz Monta notes, Holy Sonnet 11, ‘Spitt in my face ye Jewes,’ concludes by ascribing to God a strange and strangely pointless love: Oh let me then his strange love still admyre: Kings pardon, but he bore our punishment. And Iacob came clothd in vile harsh attyre But to supplant and with gainfull intent: God cloth’d himselfe in vile Mans flesh, that so He might be weake inough to suffer wo.

(Westmoreland: 9–14)

In Monta’s estimation, the speaker of this sonnet ultimately rejects the human ability to stand in Christ’s stead and suffer martyrdom in emulation of him, the conceit of the opening octave. In its conclusion, the poem presents suffering as fundamentally without aim or goal: ‘Donne’s poem deflates an understanding of suffering as repayment, a deflation which leaves the speaker in wonder before the divine, strange love of one who is willing to suffer with no motivation for gain, certainly no motivation articulated explicitly in this sonnet.’71 Jacob’s ‘gainfull intent’ differentiates him from Christ not because it symbolizes a presumptuous rifling of God’s ways, but rather because the postulation of a plan thwarts devotion and actually degrades God, and us, by tethering him, and us, to ends: it is the calculations themselves, not the mercenariness of the calculations, that pose a problem here. The concluding couplet makes a related point by posing as an explanation of Christ’s plan, but then merely reasserting the repetitive strangeness that Monta notes: God clothed himself in flesh to be weak, which issues not in redemption but simply more weakness – suffering woe. What’s radical about Donne’s theological position in this moment is not just that he rejects the calculation of reward or the attempt to take anxiety or pain as a sign of favour, or displeasure. Rather, it is that he presents anxiety and fear as having value in themselves, not as pedagogical instruments. In turn, devotees are required to love this fear itself, not, as Cefalu maintains, to recognize the ways in which one’s loves are haunted by fear.72 We must love fear for what it is, not for what it means, does, or helps us to recognize. Literary criticism has often tasked itself with putting the desire, anxiety, and masochism of Donne’s Holy Sonnets in the service of some sort of goal, respectable, responsible, transgressive, erotic, blasphemous, parodic, or otherwise. Even if there’s something perverse or absurd about ‘Batter my hart,’ its absurdity nonetheless means something: after all,

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as Young notes, a pointless prayer, one that does not seek to overcome its initial anxiety, or achieve a desired object, or solve its basic problem would be, well, pointless. Yet that is the point: one makes the new ‘Oh to no end.’ That phrase is not a lament of inadequacy or failure, the impossibility of desire or the lack in the subject. ‘Oh’ is not a sigh, or a cry of pain, but an expression of joy: it asks us to imagine an escape from the aims – the purpose-driven life and its narcissistic infatuation with its own labour – that cripple the speaker’s devotion and conversion. It asks us to make the new by turning away, together, from all the cowardly, selfdeluding ways in which we infect it with the old, whether those ways are transgression, dialectic, subversion, critique – or even purpose. Purposelessness, in this register, also changes fundamentally how we can imagine the reading of Donne’s verse. In evoking it at this moment, I do not hope to valorize immediate experience or sensation at the expense of a deferred end or meaning: valorizing the process or the problem instead of the product or solution.73 Rather, these poems drive us toward a discussion of the sheer activity of anxiety or desire without recourse to the crutch of meaning. If, as Judith Herz maintains, Donne’s poems ‘baffle provocatively and usefully any attempt to fix their meanings, directing our attention to the words, their figuration, shape, and patterns, often more than to the ideas,’ it would seem that words and poems can no longer be treated as designating signs, directing us to some other meaning or evoking an illustrative analogy.74 Yet if poems, like desire and anxiety, do not direct us elsewhere, how are they anything more than the most primitive of idols? The answer to this question, of course, revolves around Donne’s rejection of the dialectical opposition between transcendence and immanence, the conceptual ground for any accusation of idolatry, and his insistence that relation is accessible in its own right within poetry, not as a degraded byproduct of the interaction of subjects, objects, and others. Reading Relation My discussion of Donne’s plea for an associational sacrament in this chapter’s first section echoes Eliot’s account of metaphysical poetry as a precursor to and antidote for a ‘dissociation of sensibility’: A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility. When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experiences; the ordinary man’s experience is chaotic, irregular,

.

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fragmentary. The latter falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.75

Instead of arguing for the origins of New Criticism in Reformation debates about the Lord’s Supper (although I am certainly sympathetic to such an argument),76 the final section of this chapter examines how one reads these new wholes or, rather, what one is actually reading when one reads them. That is, it explores the impact of this revised notion of anxiety on the activity of reading. In part, reading practice mirrors the aversion to purposiveness that we have already charted: if the sacrament does not assuage anxiety with assurance, and if desire does not tend toward its consummation, then reading itself would not appear to move toward the purposive goal of meaning. Yet if this model of negation, thwarting the march toward meaning or a stable subject, is all this verse accomplishes, then we are back to the dialectic of failure: over and over again, we realize that poetry cannot accomplish what it seeks to accomplish.77 Instead of this endless spiral, this final section sketches what an affirmatively anxious reading would actually do and what it would actually read, when it is not bound to a hermeneutic experience or aim. Yet how does one delimit an action without an aim? And to what does one attend when one anxiously attempts to attend to immanence? These concluding pages then must ask what it would mean to read not only anxiously, but also pointlessly and freely, without the presupposition that reading entails struggling toward a goal. This discussion of meaninglessness in Donne’s verse may seem wilfully perverse in light of the famous discussion of literal and metaphorical Gods in the Devotions. Expostulation 19 insists that God is both literal and metaphorical, advocating a plain style of transparent signification as well as an elaborate system of figuration and typological allegory. In this world, it would seem that there is meaning at every level of the text and universe: My God, my God, Thou art a direct God, may I not say, a literall God, a God that wouldest bee understood literally, and according to the plaine sense of all that thou saiest? But thou art also (Lord I intend it to thy glory, and let no profane mis-interpreter abuse it to thy diminution), thou art a figurative, a metaphoricall God too; A God in whose words there is such a height of figures, such voyages, such peregrinations to fetch remote and precious

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metaphors, such extensions, such spreadings, such Curtaines of Allegories, such third Heavens of Hyperboles, so harmonious eloquutions, so retired and reserved expressions, so commanding perswasions, so perswading commandements, such sinewes even in thy milke, and such things in thy words as all profane Authors, seem of the seed of the Serpent, that creepes; thou art the dove, that flies. O, what words but thine, can expresse the inexpressible texture and composition of thy word . . . Neither art thou thus a figurative, a Metaphoricall God, in thy word only, but in thy workes too. The stile of thy works, the phrase of thine Actions, is Metaphoricall. The institution of thy whole worship in the old Law, was a continuall Allegory; types & figures overspread all; and figures flowed into figures, and powred themselves out into farther figures. (Devotions, Ex. 19, 99–100)

This long passage deserves full quotation mainly because it performs precisely the sort of hyperventilating spreading of figures that it itself pegs to God. One customary response to this passage, of course, is to read these overflowing figures as hyperbole, as an excess that marks the inadequacy of human language to designate God. Thus, Wilcox maintains that this very passage entails a recognition of the ‘inadequacy of human expression – including Donne’s – to divine language.’78 Wilcox’s phrasing here is important, as is the line from the Devotions on which she bases this claim: ‘O, what words but thine, can expresse the inexpressible texture and composition of thy word’ (Devotions, Ex. 19, 99). Importantly, this sentence evokes the compatibility and adequacy of one language, one set of words, to another. This is not an instance of the plea that we have already witnessed in the case of the sacrament, one for an association of sign and thing signified, or even signifier and sign. Instead, the Devotions insist that the very notion of metaphor, in the case of divine language, is impossible: no words other than God’s can express this ‘texture and composition,’ but this is the texture and composition of a word, not a world. All that would be expressed in this instance is, of course, the ‘texture and composition of thy word’ or the vehicle itself. The impossibility of metaphor here does not rely on an inexpressibility topos. Things do not exceed language’s power to represent them. Rather, this passage denies metaphor insofar as it denies comparison: only God’s words are adequate to God’s words.79 As Lynne Magnusson notes, in this passage, Donne is writing more about the grammatical structure of utterances, ‘sinews even in thy milk,’ than he is advocating a conflation of word and thing, or some sort of nominal immanence: ‘Surprisingly, what the rhetorical schemes of rep-

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etition set on display are not – as in many other poets – the lexical nouns but instead the small words and grammatical particles. Thus, Donne’s rhetoric accents seemingly inconsequential words and grammatical operators. Donne is more a poet of grammar and syntax than he is a poet of diction.’80 Cummings highlights a similar propensity in ‘If poysonous Minerals,’ which erupts into agrammaticality at a pivotal point (line 10) and whose syntax ultimately undermines the drive to assertion. This specific claim, of course, is part of his larger argument that conversion not only comes unexpectedly and without plan, but also has no appropriate syntax. Thus, Cummings describes the sermons as revealing the ‘incapacity of ordinary grammar to express the unfathomable grammar of grace.’81 My argument here is that the grammar of grace is not unfathomable, but is rather immanent to the Divine Poems. In Murray’s terms, the fact that ‘denotative statement’ and predication are not up to the task of presenting conversion calls for ‘other words – or perhaps a different kind of language entirely.’82 It is this different language – not newer, better, more accurate words, but a different use of them – that this final section outlines. When the Devotions evokes ‘The texture and composition of thy word,’ it does not affirm, or deny, the existence, much less the compatibility of two different grammatical and syntactical registers, human and divine, that Cummings distinguishes. Instead, this phrase shifts readerly attention to the relations and contours that make up the word, not a series of possible equivalences for the word. To put it all too succinctly, this passage from the Devotions demands that readers focus on what the association between all these words is. By focusing on grammatical organization – an inexpressible texture and composition – it asks us to treat the order and nature of association as a substantial presence, not an unproblematic issue easily reducible to a structural dialectic of recognized identity and empty difference. Donne’s lyrics demand a reading practice that attends to relation as such, what relation or association itself actually is, instead of to the terms or entities that would be so related. The way to understand sameness, then, is to examine sameness itself, not examples of things that happen to be the same. In this light, an inexpressible texture is not evidence of a transcendently withdrawn divinity that cannot be encapsulated in human language, but rather reveals the fact that grammatical structure does not actually represent at all: it is a series of relations that certainly serves as the scaffolding for representation, but it itself has no interiority or unconscious to reveal. It is this order that Donne’s verse dredges up and, in turn, that challenges how we go about reading.

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Yet what would it mean to read the actual association or relation between words? What would it mean not just to read grammatically, but to read grammar? To put it all too aphoristically, this process revolves around the power of ‘yet.’83 In Donne’s hands, this word acts as a marker of turns and disjunctions, but also insists that these turns are not dialectical, that the association marked by ‘yet’ is not already determined in advance. As previously noted, Holy Sonnet 14 never stages an actual break in an immanent life world, an irruptive event that would change everything: instead, it pleads for divine intervention in the future, a violent eruption that would wrest the speaker from all his other sinful attachments, the habitual inertia in which he finds himself. ‘Yet dearly I love you’ stands in the midst of a sequence of disjunctive turns: Reason your viceroy in me, me should defend, But is captiv’d and proves weake or vntrew. Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved faine: But ame betroth’d vnto your enemy

(Westmoreland: 7–10)

‘But . . . yet . . . but.’ I would do all of these things, but . . . It is easy to imagine these conjunctions as the same, but ‘but’ and ‘yet’ differ in one important respect: ‘yet’ connotes not just a turn or an anticipation, but also a temporal continuity, as in ‘I am yet your dear lover.’ ‘But,’ in a similar context, connotes either humility or an exclusive role: ‘I am but your dear lover.’ At the beginning of such a phrase, it signals disagreement and the claiming of a recognized identity via negation: ‘But I am your dear lover.’ This single conjunction then encapsulates the necessarily paradoxical nature of asserted humility, what Fish finds so aporetic and irreducibly self-contradictory in both Herbert and Donne.84 However, ‘yet’ evades the dialectical distinction between humility and individual assertion, continuity and change, absence and presence. Surrounded by anaphoric ‘but’s, Holy Sonnet 14’s ‘yet’ shows us the staid predictability of a reading practice that would look for breaks, that would seek to find conversion in reaction – all that breaking and burning – instead of associations that already exist – an already and still existing dear love. At its most basic then, ‘yet’ marks a conversion without spectacular, dramatic change, without the predictable aberrance of an intelligible future that Edelman describes.85 This is not to suggest that conversion, from Roman Catholicism to the Church of England, for example, is not a lifechanging event, but rather that it is such an event for different reasons than modern readers and critics assume. Conversion, if it is worth the

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name, amounts to more than a performative utterance – ‘I am saved’ or ‘I am a Catholic’ – or the reproduction of intelligible marks of one’s current confessional allegiance.86 In this sense, Donne’s conversion is not a radical metamorphosis of the devotee, an apostasy from one church and unsettling resituation within another, but a repurposing of that which is: after all, ‘me’ persists in the phrase ‘make me new.’ As such, the fear of annihilation of the self within conversion, which both Targoff and Kuchar remark,87 is no longer operative here: Donne solves the problem of conversion and self-annihilation by conceiving of change outside of the logic of dialectical reversal. And at least one of the elements transmuted here, as I have been arguing all along, is the affect of anxiety. The end of this conversion – ‘I’m a Christian’ – does not govern the activity of conversion and all of the affective tension that it unleashes. What modern criticism desires, a decisive, remarkable break – either the eruption of anxiety or its overcoming – is precisely what Donne’s Divine Poems deny. Even in those poems that do not rely on the distinction between ‘yet’ and ‘but,’ the purposiveness of dialectical opposition and resolution – solving the problem of anxiety, in short – seems under suspicion. A more conventional turn, marked by ‘but,’ occurs in Holy Sonnet 9, ‘If poysonous Minerals.’ Yet even here the sonnet produces a reading experience that does not point toward the solace of deferred decision. It does not just eschew a tendency toward a future resolution, but rather does not tend in any direction at all. After complaining that ‘Why should intent, or reason, borne in me, / Make Sins els equall, in me more hainous?’ (Westmoreland: 5–6), the speaker appears to recognize his error in the sestet: ‘But who am I that dare dispute with thee / O God?’ (Westmoreland: 9–10). However, the rest of the sestet successfully undermines this confidence by, ultimately, showing that even if we understand all the words on the page, we still have no idea what exactly is going on in the verse: . . . O of thyne only worthy blood And my teares make a heauenly Lethean flood And drowne in it, my Sins blacke memoree. That thou remember them, Some clayme as dett, I think it Mercy if thou wilt forgett. (Westmoreland: 10–14)

Strier, of course, reads these lines as the height of fantastically parodic blasphemy: ‘The sense of sin and the fear of God in this poem are so

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profound that being forgotten replaces being forgiven as the alternative to damnation . . . A Calvinist sense of sin has banished merit as the way to salvation, but nothing – or rather, nothingness – has replaced it. Donne finds it difficult to accept being saved as a sinner, and he cannot convincingly imagine being free from sin.’88 I would completely concur with this reading of Holy Sonnet 9, but would simply add: and that is not a failure for Donne’s verse. Yes, there is nothing left over after this banishment of merit, not even the promise that affliction or anxiety signifies reward or an earnest desire for God. But this banishment means that an utterly foundationless anxiety without hope of assurance is the devotional stance remaining: not because one despairs, but because it is quite simply correct and treats God aright. That is, Donne’s devotional anxiety does not worry over having or losing God, but rather over the nature of this having: so not the ground, goal, or reason for relation but rather relation itself. The multiple manuscript and print versions of these concluding lines, especially the multiple spellings of ‘sins,’ as well as the ambiguous grammatical antecedents in the couplet, all conspire to reaffirm an anxious reading that attends to something other than nouns and their referents. Cummings goes so far as to claim that, in this final couplet, the ‘grammatical subject commits suicide in front of us, erasing himself into subordination.’89 Yet if the subject disappears, or even spectacularly self-immolates in this fashion, what then are we left to read in these final lines? Strier answers this question by training our focus on the same issue, pronominal antecedents, and tying them to the question of forgiveness and oblivion. Thus, he insists that ‘them’ must refer to some people, not sins, and that the poem must conclude with a plea for being forgotten in order to maintain the parallelism in the final couplet.90 Modern editions often emend line 12 to reaffirm Strier’s understanding: if it reads ‘drown in it my sin’s black memory,’ then ‘sinners’ seems the much more likely referent of ‘them.’91 However, even with such an emendation, the poem’s designations do not necessarily get any clearer. For example, is this a ‘blacke memoree’ that belongs to sin, possessed by sin – as in ‘sin has a black memory itself and of itself’ or ‘my sinful black memory, as opposed to my untarnished memory’? Or rather is the speaker’s ‘black memorie’ of sin, a memory then that the speaker has of his own sins? Of course, this latter possibility makes more sense if the line reads ‘sins’’ not ‘sin’s.’ Without the apostrophe, however, there remains one other option: ‘my sins-black memory,’ where the compound ‘sins-black’ describes the nature of memory in general. In this case, the speaker would request

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the drowning of memory, which carries the blackness of sin: this would be, potentially, a desire for oblivion.92 All of these questions are more than merely the ravings of an editorially obsessed critic or a blithe and banal attempt to affirm ambiguity, and thus an endless – and endlessly reassuring – hermeneutic quest. Rather, they also show how the poem and its textual history, regardless of intention, drive readers to a focus not on what the poem means, but the syntactical, structural, grammatical, even possessive relations that obtain within it: how one actually possesses something, be they sins or God. Certainly, this is a continuation of Magnusson’s and Cummings’s points, but it also highlights just how much this verse forces the activity of reading into an attention to a-signifying – and not anti-signifying – elements, the relations that produce or are a substructural order independent of all these other questions about signification and figuration. In this instance, for example, how sins are actually possessed, what it means to have them, as well as what it means to be possessed by sin appear as the predominant focus of any reading of the verse. Yet this focus is a function not of an examination of metaphorical or analogical equations or the operation of signification, but rather of a redirection toward the relation and association of words as such. One could ultimately translate this question into a later hermeneutic proposition, certainly, but the answer to the question is not a function of what is said, a communicated payload, or even how it is said, an analysis of style and tone, but rather of the grammatical relations that make this how and what possible. The anxiety that attends reading does not then revolve around the relentless play of success and failure that attends signification: as was the case with desire, reading anxiety entails disavowing or evading this very dialectic. Attention to grammar and syntax in Donne’s verse is not subservient to showing, once more, the limitations of the subject and signification. Rather, it shows that all one has in one’s relationship with God, who obviously cannot be greedily possessed, is this very relation. And it is that relation, an immanent one, itself, not the possibility of its loss, that produces a valuable, cherished – nay – lovable devotional fear and anxiety. In Donne’s devotions, this propensity to drive readers to examine relation as such, an attention to the nature of order in itself, stems not from a fear of its dissolution or because we do not adequately understand it, but rather because it is the closest we will ever get to loving something for its own sake. Yes, that means that only relation – in this case grammatical relation – can be loved, a revelation, at the level of reading, of Schwartz’s acknowledgment of the dirty, self-reflexive secret of Christi-

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anity, that it is in love with love.93 The danger of such a claim resides in its similarity to the baldest of anti-intellectualisms: if poems are not for interpreting, then we should just let them sit, appreciate them, and not sully them with our analytical interventions. Yet such a reading merely reaffirms the very dialectic between immediacy and mediation that the poems are at pains to disavow or evade. When ‘A Litanie’ prays to be delivered from prayer, it is all too easy to chalk this moment up to witty, paradoxical reversal – the mark of metaphysical poetry – or the radical, subversive paradoxes of Christianity – a weakness that is also strength. However, to do so misses one of the more pressing points in this poetic prayer, namely that prayer is not for trusting or doubt: XIV And whil’st this universall Quire, That Church in triumph, this in warfare here, Warm’d with one all-partaking fire Of love, that none be lost, which cost thee deare, Pray ceaslesly,’and thou hearken too, (Since to be gratious Our taske is treble, to pray, beare, and doe) Heare this prayer Lord, O Lord deliver us From trusting in those prayers, though powr’d out thus.

(118–26)

This passage certainly fits with our earlier discussion of Donne’s rejection of assurance in favour of a continued anxiety and even conforms to an entirely orthodox conviction that prayer appeals to, but does not extort love from God. Yet if we are not trusting in prayers, like the poetic one that we happen to be reading, then what are we doing with them? One might categorize this moment as a matter of healthy iconoclasm, a warning against the danger of idolatry within any sacramental or incarnate religiosity. However, such a reading turns this stanza into a contest, whereas it actually insists that the ‘universall Quire,’ including both church triumphant and church militant, is not involved in a battle at all. The succeeding lines, which I have already quoted in the chapter’s opening section, are precisely those that plead for deliverance from a self-loathing anxiety: ‘From being anxious, or secure, . . . Good Lord deliver us’ (127, 135). In fact, this stanza prays for the ability to stop reading signs of salvation, to stop thinking that a covetous or jealous God signifies salvation, or that voracious, zealous devotees are necessarily overweening and out of God’s favour:

Loving Fear: John Donne From thinking, that great courts immure All, or no happinesse, or that this earth Is only for our prison fram’d, Or that thou’art covetous To them whom thou lov’st, or that they are maim’d From reaching this worlds sweet, who seek thee thus, With all their might, Good Lord deliver us.

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(129–35)

‘A Litanie’ prays that its speaker might stop reading the world and human activities as signifying salvation or damnation. Such a result would not assuage devotional anxiety, but it would fundamentally alter its tenor. One does not avoid trusting in prayer because of a tactical calculation about salvation, because it runs the risk of tempting us into idolatry or hubristic faith in our own powers of persuasion. Rather, one avoids trusting in prayer because the very controversy about the power of prayer and human agency drags one into a regime of sceptical, mercenary calculation, a system of anxiety as reticence and doubt in which one withholds oneself as a cherished treasure.94 However orthodox these positions may be, Donne’s verse ultimately adds the relatively novel contention that treating words as signs, and the hermeneutic consequences that follow, is itself part of this dangerous temptation. To put it axiomatically, words and poems are not for believing or doubting, but rather for reading. Donne’s most systematic poetic critique of the dialectical trap of weak signification and negative theology finds expression in the Songs and Sonnets, though, and it is to this moment that this chapter turns in conclusion. ‘Negative love’ reveals the danger of a notion of association that focuses on the terms and not the positive substance of a relation, the activity that happens in between words as well as between devotees and God. The poem pivots, in its first stanza, on the notion that knowing and loving are incompatible activities, rejecting along the way not only the customary outward trifles of beauty, but also the purportedly more noble objects of desire, virtue, and intellect: I Never stoop’d so low, as they Which on an eye, cheeke, lip, can prey, Seldome to them, which soare no higher Then vertue or the minde to’admire, For sense, and understanding may Know, what gives fuell to their fire: My love, though silly, is more brave,

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For may I misse, when ere I crave, If I know yet, what I would have.

(1–9)95

Certainly, there’s a parodic aspect to this poem: the speaker boasts, just like the lovers he dismisses, of the courage of his own affections. More important though, ‘yet’ returns again as a key marker of the shift away from propositional reductions or teleological aims. Despite the overblown praise for his own love, the speaker explains that should he continue to know, ‘yet’ or still, what he wants, then he will miss this object of desire. The final stanza does not so much reverse this position as it shows that, really, there’s no such thing as an error or failure in a model of love built on the inexpressibility topos: If that be simply perfectest Which can by no way be exprest But Negatives, my love is so. To All, which all love, I say no. If any who deciphers best, What we know not, our selves, can know, Let him teach mee that nothing; This As yet my ease, and comfort is, Though I speed not, I cannot misse.

(10–18)

One interpretation of these concluding lines is that the speaker, via the via negativa, insulates himself from error in the hunt for love: a love that has no content or that is nothing prevents the speaker from shooting astray. However, the thrust of this final stanza is broader than such an inward psychodrama.96 Rather, the poem also shows how a model of the limited representational sign, one that only inadequately approximates the thing signified, is always, ultimately, successful: just as, within the psychoanalytic dialectic, failure is actually success, in this instance the failure of language to express its object, simply made manifest by the turn to negative theology, ensures victory for the speaker – ‘I cannot misse.’ Several conclusions issue from this recognition. The speaker here shows us the fundamental problem with claims of language’s inadequacy to love or divinity: if all poetry only reveals its inability to represent transcendence, whether divine or human, then not only is all poetry a repetitive instrument saying the same thing over and over; any poem is also pointing in the right direction, so that even the worst poem succeeds at reaffirming the central thesis – that language is inadequate to its

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ineffable, transcendent, glorious referent (in fact, the worst poem might be better at asserting this thesis than the best one). The consolation that the speaker takes here is that even the most wildly inappropriate, ill- or un-considered lyric or statement is headed in the right direction: under this model, it is impossible to write a bad poem or, for that matter, to be truly sinful. There is no reason to attend to or be anxious about one’s reading or the poem under consideration – or one’s devotional desires – because we all already know where reading and the poem are headed: confirmation of an ineffable divinity and the insistence that the relation between devotees and God is of only one sort – an empty, vacant distance, of no interest in its own right.97 Donne’s religious verse seems to find this position odious not because it challenges the pretensions of a poet, but rather because it lets devotees off the hook, offering them an escape from the anxiety and the anxious, attentive reading that should mark one’s love for God.98 Finally, one important consequence for modern readers is that Donne’s verse here reveals that it is representation and the rock of the real that actually produces a radical subjectivism or relativism, not a language unmoored from reference: when we assume that language is always exceeded by the real or its reference, we, secure as subjects, are free to make any statements about this referent because we ‘cannot misse.’ Alongside whatever these poems actually mean, Donne then advances a notion of reading without representation, an activity that no longer has interpretation or decoding as its aim, so as to preserve anxiety as something more than a temporary obstacle to loving God. For Donne at least, only such a practice can dispose readers toward the loving fear that is our only legitimate mode of attentive relation to the divine. C.S. Lewis’s famous dictum – that once one has finished reading Donne, there’s nothing left to do – encapsulates much of what this chapter has already addressed, and even seems absolutely correct, but for all of the wrong reasons: Paradoxical as it may seem, Donne’s poetry is too simple to satisfy. Its complexity is all on the surface – an intellectual and fully conscious complexity that we soon come to the end of . . . There are puzzles in his work, but we can solve them all if we are clever enough; there is none of the depth and ambiguity of real experience in him . . . When we have once mastered a poem by Donne there is nothing more to do with it.99

Yes, it fails to satisfy precisely insofar as it disavows pleasure as its aim. And yes, its complexity is all on the surface, if we mean by that the order

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and structure of how words and other elements fit together, not the semantic or hermeneutic depth that would beg for profundity, precisely because real experience is not about depth at all, but rather attending to what is right in front of us. And finally yes, there’s nothing more to do with it, not because mastery is impossible, but because this verse insists that reading is doing something, that we as readers are always acting in ways that exceed our knowledge, our plans, and our desires – and that’s a good thing too. Even when we are trying to gain solace and consolation, Donne’s model of anxious reading enacts a devotion without hope, and instead displays a fear converted from a reactive phenomenon into an affective act that one can love as such and that does not seek its own transcendence. Anxious reading for Donne is merely the activity that mirrors and actually is the transformation of a crippling fear into an anxiety that is worthy of preservation and that commands attention, not self-pity. It is in this sense that his religious verse produces and requires of readers devotion to loving – and a loving – fear.

4 Desiring What Has Already Happened: Reading Prolepsis and Immanence in John Milton’s Early Poems and Paradise Regained

How could one ever affirmatively desire a Protestant sacrament, particularly insofar as Reformed religion is often imagined as a reactive, negating force that undermines sacramental presence and replaces it with mere signification?1 Or to put it more pointedly, how could one desire a sign? In Milton’s poetry the attractions of Reformed religion revolve around a desire that immediately and immanently contains, and does not simply prefigure or herald, its own consummation. The sacrament appears not as the material or spiritual manifestation of the body of Christ, but rather as an odd teleological holism, where incipient events unfold according to a prescribed and prefigured order, but also contain, in their very incipience, the final end toward which they move. As a result, the very notion of a purpose or end disappears in Milton’s poetry. In its deployment of sacramentality, Milton’s verse seems bent on providing a rationale for actively desiring Reformed religion, one that does not simply provide a reactive substitute or compensation for what has been lost as a result of the Protestant attack on the Mass, images, and other corporeal devotions, but rather affirms the affective attachment to divinity inherent in a Reformed sacrament. An ultimate purpose does not organize desire, either as a compensation for loss or a promise of future fulfilment. For Milton then, the object of devotional desire is not a spectacular body or imminent reward, but rather the sign that already includes the consummation of an event: i.e., one that has already happened. In a manner similar to Herbert’s and Crashaw’s work, Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained adopt this positive account of sacramental desire as a principle of reading strategy, insisting that in a monist and vitalist universe, words do not lack their meanings. In turn, Milton’s poetry presents the activities of desire and reading as analogous: both practices face an obsolescence brought on

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by their own successful completion, but must nonetheless persist as devotional activities valuable in their own right. In this model, reading and interpretation no longer hope to find something new in a poem or add something new to it, but rather embrace, even love, that which is already there. Instead of issuing in a shocking Platonic recognition of knowledge that we already possess, or leading to a pre-programmed, desirable purpose, reading in the early poems and Paradise Regained is an act of love, an affectionate attention to a present entity in and for itself. Despite the apparent involution, redundancy, and even purposelessness that attends such a model of reading, this chapter shows how reading nonetheless remains a valuable activity in Milton’s verse insofar as it trains readers, perhaps against their will, to be virtuous and loving. As numerous critics have noted, in the Christian Doctrine, Milton certainly comes off as an anti-sacramental poet, arguing vehemently against transubstantiation and a variety of other external forms of worship. Perhaps most famously, he condemns the Roman Catholic Mass as a blasphemous debasement of God, employing the scatological horrors for which Reformation polemic is famous: Finally the Mass brings down Christ’s holy body from its supreme exaltation at the right hand of God. It drags it back to the earth, though it has suffered every pain and hardship already, to a state of humiliation even more wretched and degrading than before: to be broken once more and crushed and ground, even by the fangs of brutes. Then, when it has been driven through all the stomach’s filthy channels, it shoots it out – one shudders even to mention it – into the latrine.2

Polemic moments like this passage, which appears in almost every critical study of Milton and his relationship to the sacraments, certainly contribute to a portrait of Milton as a stodgy, puritanical (read repressive and austere) killjoy, the damper on an otherwise fecund period of sensuous, corporeal devotional poetry and desire. Yet as Richard Rambuss notes, if we focus too intently on the pleasures that stem from discipline, we miss the affirmative joys that stem from a non-reactive devotion.3 Criticism that characterizes the Reformation as exclusively reactive, as a negation of Roman Catholicism, church imagery, or transubstantiation, ignores the ways in which Protestantism, and even Puritanism, seek to heighten desire affirmatively.4 Milton’s verse, and even the Christian Doctrine itself, do more than simply say ‘no’ to external, corporeal ceremonies. Or rather, this ‘no’ does not reduce to a repression of desires or the bodily,

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but instead disavows any brand of sacramental purposiveness: as we witnessed in Donne’s suspicion of the dialectic, all no’s are not of the same type. Milton’s poetry then attempts to transform the Lord’s Supper and sacramental presence into a viable model for devotional desire and reading by insisting on the value of attention to an object for non-mercenary reasons and, simultaneously, on the unnecessary nature of this attention. The eucharist turns out to be useful for Miltonic desire and reading precisely because it not only cautions against mercenary calculations of reward, but also shows how love, when it is presented as necessary or required for salvation, becomes contaminated by telos and self-interest. That is, the Miltonic sacrament teaches readers not only to attend to the present, but also that only unnecessary love counts as love. As Regina Schwartz and John C. Ulreich have noted, in Milton’s verse, from the early religious lyrics to Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, sacramental presence is much more complicated than the simple dualistic dismissal of the corporeal senses sometimes evident in the Christian Doctrine. Schwartz in particular insists that sacramental presence is not so much a theme in seventeenth-century poetry as it is a central feature of wideranging debates about devotion, politics, and the literary.5 Her essay on hunger and the Real Presence in Milton opens with an account of the pervasive importance of the eucharist for a host of political, theological, linguistic, and poetic issues, one probably even more far-reaching than Stephen Greenblatt’s claims for the influence of the Lord’s Supper on literary criticism.6 She also describes the eucharist as having implications beyond a reactive logic of redemption: During the Reformation, discussions about how to understand, and ritually perform, the ingestion of the body of God or the ingestion of a wafer that brought to mind the presence of the body of God, materially, spiritually, or symbolically, reflected assumptions about the entire world. What was at stake in these debates was not only the obvious issue of redemption, but also the relation of matter to spirit, the universal to the particular, the self to the other, language to its referents, and how and where power is vested – the authority of scripture, of the priesthood, of the church, and by extension, civil government. That is, along with religion, one’s ontology, epistemology, poetics, and politics were bound up with his understanding of the Holy Communion. That is why I believe that there are compelling reasons why we should still attend to what may seem at first like arcane controversies that ravaged Europe for several centuries over the status of the bread and the wine in the mass.7

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Much of my study is predicated on a similar commitment to the importance of the Lord’s Supper for understanding religious desire and reading. However, I have also been arguing for the importance of a non-reactive model of desire when it comes to the eucharist, one that Schwartz acknowledges here, however briefly. For Schwartz, the Edenic meal that Raphael shares with Adam and Eve in Book 5 of Paradise Lost is a eucharist without sin and without sacrifice: ‘In his imaginative flight, Milton has depicted a sinless man in the garden, with no need for the redemption signaled by the communion, engaging in communion. And readers are thereby challenged to conceive a wondrous thing: what is a sinless Eucharist? What is the radical Milton radically offering us in his radical communion?’ (Sacramental Poetics 65).8 Ultimately however, even this sinless eucharist points to the fundamental lack at the heart of desire: ‘In Milton’s paradisal sinless Eucharist, the emphasis falls on desire, but not on an achieved redemption or one forever repeatable in ritual’ (Sacramental Poetics 69–70). The earlier version of this sentence in ‘Real Hunger’ is even more explicit in describing desire as a matter of lack: ‘the emphasis falls on desire, and its frustration – on desire, and perhaps on hope, but not on an achieved redemption’ (‘Real Hunger’ 15). I would concur that there is no achieved redemption in this moment, but also maintain that absence is not necessarily the result of or the impetus for the frustration of desire. Instead, the desire that Milton channels here is not for an impossible redemption or presence, but rather for something entirely different: a positively construed divine plan, perhaps even a teleological one, packed back into events and a sacrament, as Schwartz notes, not only focused on ‘the obvious issue of redemption.’ In this respect, Milton’s use of sacramentality is similar to Herbert’s: it allows for a conceptual exploration of devotion as an activity that does not have an external end or ulterior purpose. In this respect, we should recall one of the more important, if infrequently cited, claims from the Christian Doctrine : ‘It follows that sacraments are not absolutely necessary’ (1.28.556).9 A sacrament that is not needed, but rather is desired: this notion seems at least implicitly at the root of Schwartz’s argument that the focus of sacramentality in Milton’s Eden falls on desire. This chapter argues, though, that this focus on desire extends beyond the prelapsarian communion to the present, requiring an alternative notion of sacramental desire as attending to immanence, not transcendence. Such a notion is pivotal for the early religious verse and Paradise Regained insofar as it takes seriously Milton’s monism and reconciles it as a metaphysical position with his practices of faith and devotion.

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Turning from the account of the sacrament in the Christian Doctrine and Paradise Lost, this chapter’s second section contends that Milton’s use of prolepsis in the early poems on the Nativity, Circumcision, and Passion is symptomatic of his broader understanding of a postlapsarian sacrament and presents devotional desire as a productive, immanent connection to divinity, instead of considering it a matter of deferral and lack. By treating future events in the Christian drama as if they have already occurred, these verses not only train readers to desire a present divinity, one who is not remote, absent, or transcendent, but also to eschew interpretation as the primary aim of reading poetry. In the end, prolepsis celebrates a liberty immanent to devotional and reading practice that is only enslaved by a purposive, goal-oriented relationship to the world and God. Instead of a purpose-driven life, Milton asks readers to desire the immanent figure or sign as such and to imagine this desire as affirmative and valuable, not hopelessly self-involved or sterile. In this chapter’s final section, we turn to Paradise Regained’s treatment of similar issues surrounding an immanent model of reading. The brief epic, however, more thoroughly rejects purpose as a principle of readerly and devotional practice than the early religious verse, going so far as to present reading as an unnecessary, superfluous, even redundant activity. The effect of this rejection is not an irreducible ‘double bind of the “Don’t read me” sort,’10 but rather the presentation of an activity, reading, analogous to the operation of the sacraments in Milton’s view: not required or necessary, but nonetheless a desirable figure or sign. This final section shows how the Son rebukes Satan’s temptations not because they ask him to value the wrong ends, but rather because they ask him to perform the process of valuation incorrectly, by imagining actions as organized according to a logic of ends and means. Thus, Paradise Regained carefully and consistently abjures purposes and plans and ultimately presents reading as an activity desirable and valuable for its own sake, not the interpretative achievements it might instrumentally produce. Milton’s poem then drives us to imagine reading itself as a type of freely chosen, unnecessary desire: indeed, Paradise Regained asks us to imagine reading itself as an exercise in and of love. Monist Sacraments in Paradise Lost and the Christian Doctrine So how would a sacrament actually function in a monist universe? How would the sacrament, conceived as a sign, work in a world that does not maintain a categorical distinction between spiritual and material

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spheres? Critics have frequently acknowledged the disparity between Milton’s entirely conventional Protestant rejection of transubstantiation in the Christian Doctrine and his prominent placement of transubstantiation in the prelapsarian meal that Adam and Eve share with Raphael in Book 5 of Paradise Lost.11 The epic voice intrudes at this moment in order to insist that Raphael does actually eat human food and that it nourishes him: . . . So down they sat, And to thir viands fell, nor seemingly The Angel, nor in mist, the common gloss Of Theologians, but with keen dispatch Of real hunger, and concoctive heate To transubstantiate; what redounds, transpires Through Spirits with ease; nor wonder; if by fire Of sooty coal the Empiric Alchimist Can turn, or holds it possible to turn Metals of drossiest Ore to perfet Gold As from the Mine.

(5.433–43)12

The positive evocation of transubstantiation in this passage has led some critics, among them John N. King and Michael Schoenfeldt,13 to find polemic or satiric intent therein, particularly given Milton’s sometimes vituperative rejection of transubstantiation in the theological treatise. Others, like Schwartz and John C. Ulreich, describe a more nuanced account of sacramentality, if not transubstantiation, in the Christian Doctrine, one that focuses primarily on the nature of a sign and a communicant’s or devotee’s engagement with it. Ulreich begins by acknowledging the long critical tradition of reading Milton as an ‘almost doggedly anti-sacramental’ poet and traces this critical tendency to the entirely conventional rejection of the Mass in the Christian Doctrine.14 Milton’s treatise, specifically the chapter entitled ‘Of the External Sealing of the Covenant of Grace,’ first presents the sacrament as a visible symbol or seal of grace: ‘In a sacrament God sets the seal upon his saving grace, or upon Christ’s satisfaction, by means of a visible sign which he has instituted for the sake of us believers’ (1.28.542). In the more polemical context of an assault on the Roman Mass, Milton goes even further, labelling the sacrament a mere symbol of salvation: ‘it is clear that the Papists are wrong when they attribute to the outward sign the power of conferring salvation or grace. They think that this power is

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released whenever the rite itself is performed. But the sacraments cannot impart salvation or grace of themselves. They are merely seals or symbols of salvation and grace for believers’ (1.28.556). Although Ulreich acknowledges the radical distinction between internal belief and external signs that grounds the Reformed critique of transubstantiation – what he dubs ‘Milton’s reductive, Protestant conception’ (36) of the sacrament – he does, nonetheless, argue that the Lord’s Supper performs a valuable function in Milton’s verse, and even in the theological treatise. Drawing on Owen Barfield, Ulreich insists that Milton’s sacrament maintains the possibility of an internal spiritual participation that is still, nonetheless, an experience of signs: ‘And what we are conscious of, primarily, is not the activity of nature without us but the working of our own minds. The sacrament is “a kind of symbol” of that inner activity. The reality in which such symbols participate, and which they render intelligible, is the spirit within man himself’ (48). It is the participation of these symbols in spiritual reality, as opposed to the mere representation of it, that matters most in an account of Milton’s devotion. The symbol does not render the internal experience intelligible by acting as an approximate imitation of an inner state, but rather via an involvement and connection explicitly conceived as active. Like Ulreich’s, Marshall Grossman’s description of the Miltonic sacrament’s literary and devotional value revolves around the special nature of the sacramental sign. His short essay presents the now familiar argument about the distinction between treatise and poem and ultimately argues, like Schwartz and Ulreich, that the sacrament in Paradise Lost does not reduce to a merely memorial signification, along the lines of Zwingli. Instead, the sacrament appears as a sign that truly and fully communicates: Like most Puritans of his day, Milton treats the Sacraments as specific elements in a divine rhetoric. The sacrament is neither identical to the saving grace that may be communicated through it, as the papists would have it, nor is it a siglium nudum or pneumonic [sic] of Christ’s sacrifice, as the memorialists would have it; rather, it is a siglium verbi, a true communicating sign through which the receiver is brought to the benefits of Christ’s sacrifice.15

What, though, does it mean for the sacramental sign to be ‘truly communicating,’ to bring receivers to Christ’s sacrifice, as opposed to merely representing it or its soteriological value? Such a notion appears to give

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to the sacrament a force more substantive than mere persuasive success. But this postulation of the sign’s power also poses basic questions about how one would read it: if we are not agreeing with or submitting to its propositions, how does the affective force of this sign work on readers? All of these critical approaches to Milton’s sacrament in Paradise Lost affirm a value for sacramental experience and the special character and force of the sacramental sign, in contradistinction to the merely significative understanding of the Lord’s Supper that appears in the Christian Doctrine. However, the theological treatise itself, despite its frequent citation and characterization to the contrary, can help us to understand the nature of this activity as well. Although the Christian Doctrine describes sacraments and the Lord’s Supper in particular as mere seals and symbols, it also insists that the sacraments exhibit a type of signification marked by unusual proximity: In the so-called sacrament, as in most matters where the question of analogy arises, it is to be noted that a certain trope or figure of speech was frequently employed. By this I mean that a thing which in any way illustrates or signifies another thing is mentioned not so much for what it really is as for what it illustrates or signifies. Failure to recognize this figure of speech in the sacraments, where the relationship between the symbol and the thing symbolized is very close, has been a widespread source of error, and still is today . . . The biblical writers seem to have employed this figure of speech to denote the close relationship between the symbol and the thing symbolized, and also to show that these spiritual matters were sealed with absolute certainty. (1.28.555)

Grossman’s argument for a truly communicating sign seems buttressed here by Milton’s portrait of the sacrament as a special type of sign with a special type of connection to the thing signified. However, the Christian Doctrine also insists, as we have already noted, that the sacrament is ‘not absolutely necessary’ (1.28.556), that one does not really need the Lord’s Supper to access Christ’s sacrifice at all: ‘Clearly, if the sacrament is nothing but a seal, or rather a sort of symbol, it is not wrong for a man to have just as much trust in God, even without the seal, when it is not convenient for him to receive it properly’ (1.28.557). If the eucharist is an unnecessary sign, fulfils no fundamental soteriological need, and does not even perform a consoling function, then it appears difficult to imagine how devotees could come to desire it at all. These are not merely arcane theological controversies, as Schwartz notes. Rather, such

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a purposeless sacramental sign parallels the unnecessary, purposeless activity of poetry. When Milton labels the sacraments ‘merely seals or symbols of salvation and grace,’ readers of the theological treatise should not, for all that, simply dismiss them as useless externals. The Lord’s Supper might well be unnecessary according to the Christian Doctrine, but it is not, for all that, valueless. Milton’s general definition of a sacrament insists on its status as a visible sign, but also makes it evidence of the communicant’s faith and gratitude. After describing the sacrament as a seal, the theological treatise maintains that reception is itself an action, a type of testimony: ‘At the same time we testify our faith and obedience to God with sincerity and gratitude’ (1.28.542). Sealing grace and the absolutely certain connection between sign and signified that marks Milton’s eucharist certainly echo Calvin’s account of the Lord’s Supper as a full symbol. ‘Mere signification’ seems incompatible with Calvin’s notion of the sacrament, insofar as sacramental signification alters signification itself, at the very least by ensuring, but also by intensifying the presence of, the signified: For unless we would charge God with deceit, we will never presume to say that he holds forth an empty symbol. Therefore, if by the breaking of bread the Lord truly represents the partaking of his body, there ought to be no doubt whatever that he truly exhibits and performs it. The rule which the pious ought always to observe is, whenever they see the symbols instituted by the Lord, to think and feel surely persuaded that the truth of the thing signified is also present.16

Although Milton does not take an identical tack, he never consistently reproduces an understanding of the sacrament as a mere memorial sign and, moreover, only uses the extreme Zwinglian-Cranmerian position in a polemical context.17 Simultaneously, Milton adds to the sacrament not just an injunction to receive this absolutely certain symbol, but also the imperative to ‘testify our faith and obedience with sincerity and gratitude.’ Not to put too fine a point on it, but how does the reception of the eucharist as a sign, even a special type of sign, also amount to a testimony of faith? How is receiving also an expressive activity? Contrary to Achsah Guibbory’s argument for Milton’s continued attachment to external ceremony, I am not attempting to carve out a portrait of Milton as a secret sacramentalist, particularly one with a traditional understanding of and desire for church ceremony.18 Instead, the Christian Doctrine describes the sacrament as an unnecessary receptive activity with valuable effects,

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an event that one does not require for salvation, but that nonetheless promotes a dispositional change in devotees, from mercenary calculation to love. Despite the positive sacramental possibilities that one can extract from the Christian Doctrine, the narrative of the Fall in Paradise Lost describes two fundamental ruptures that seem to undermine any postlapsarian sacramentality: the interiorization of devotional experience and the severing of a monist connection between words and things. Michael’s closing promise to Adam of ‘A paradise within thee, happier farr’ (12.587) stands as the most famous example of an increasingly interiorized devotional and spiritual life. Claude Stulting reads this line as evidence of a fall away from monist unity, in which Milton . . . fails to envision the salvation of human kind as a restoration of its prelapsarian sacramental relation to creation. Nature is divested of any role in the salvific destiny of humankind, which now undergoes two radical shifts: rather than being grounded externally in the materiality of the created order, Adam’s and Eve’s relation to God becomes radically interiorized; and rather than being located in nature, Adam’s and Eve’s relation to God becomes situated in history.19

Stulting is certainly not alone in reading the concluding, postlapsarian books of Paradise Lost as lacking the public restorative force of the sacrament.20 Yet, it is not necessarily the case that this internal paradise is incompatible with sacramental signs. Adam acknowledges that ‘Henceforth I learne, that to obey is best, / And love with fear the onely God, to walk / As in his presence’ (12.561–3). For Stulting, the comparative ‘as’ in Adam’s admission ‘reduces the literalness and sacramental materiality of God’s prelapsarian immanence to a metaphoric immaterial, postlapsarian transcendence . . . in the postlapsarian world God is abstracted from his presence in and through the material creation’ (192). Stulting considers metaphor and simile here as a matter of weak approximation: ‘as’ means ‘like,’ which implies an analogical similarity across a gulf of difference. However, it is precisely this assumption about the work of metaphor that the notion of the sacrament challenges: ‘as’ does not connote the wishful fakery of ‘as if’ and an attempt to paper over God’s absence, but rather performs or is an actual, positive, and substantial relation between the terms of comparison. When Adam bewails the absence of God’s countenance, that he will not be able to show his sons ‘place by place where he voutsaf’d / Presence

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Divine’ (11.317–18), Michael retorts that God is, essentially, everywhere present: Adam, thou know’st Heav’n his, and all the Earth, Not this Rock onely; his Omnipresence fills Land, Sea, and Aire, and every kinde that lives, Fomented by his virtual power and warmd: All th’Earth he gave thee to possess and rule, No despicable gift; surmise not then His presence to these narrow bounds confin’d Of Paradise or Eden . . .

(11.335–42)

Here, the postlapsarian God – in his ‘Omnipresence’ – does not appear abstracted from his own presence at all. In fact, this and similar passages in Book 11 explain the necessity of Stulting’s somewhat odd and perhaps even self-contradictory phrasing: a god ‘abstracted from his presence in and through the material creation’ is still nonetheless immanent to the creation, because this very activity, ‘abstracting,’ proceeds ‘through the material creation.’ However, Stulting is also absolutely correct to note that the succeeding portions of Michael’s introduction describe God as showing himself via signs: Yet doubt not but in Vallie and in plaine God is as here, and will be found alike Present, and of his presence many a signe Still following thee, still compassing thee round With goodness and paternal Love, his Face Express, and of his steps the track Divine.

(11.349–54)

Michael’s phrasing here is important, though. The postlapsarian God is not signified, heralded, or designated by signs because he is actually absent and transcendent. Rather, God is present also outside of Eden, in the same manner as he is in Eden. Once again, ‘as’ plays a pivotal role: ‘God is as here’ means that God is present in the fallen world in the same manner that he is in Eden; the phrase does not mean that it merely appears that God is here. The signs that follow Adam, even dogging his steps, do not point elsewhere, but rather wrap him in an embrace of Love. That point bears repeating: after the Fall, immanent signs – one might even venture to call them ‘sacramental’ – compass Adam ‘With goodness and paternal love.’ Moreover, God’s face, on

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which one purportedly cannot gaze directly, is in these signs not just expressed, but ‘express’ or ‘expressly.’ The distinction matters because a ‘Face / Express’ is one immanently present, not withheld and expressed by some other means. In sum, the connection between sign and signified does not seem contingent or otherwise inadequate in these final books: signs affect Adam directly and actually produce affects in him. And most importantly, they actually surround Adam with love’s presence. Even in the moment of the Fall, where one would expect to see the violent rending of sacramental presence, Paradise Lost offers a much more complicated spectacle. If the Fall means a fall into mere signification, on what basis would the exterior world represent Adam’s or Eve’s interiority after the primal transgressions? It is certainly possible to read the changes in the natural world that proceed from the Fall as simply metaphorizing the altered interiority of these first humans, but the poem itself does not force readers to treat this moment as mere signification, different in kind from other analogical events in Eden. After Adam eats, Earth trembl’d from her entrails, as again In pangs, and Nature gave a second groan, Skie lowr’d and muttering Thunder, som sad drops Wept at compleating of the mortal Sin Original

(9.1000–4)

If we are to read these tremblings as evidence of a radical sundering of heaven and earth, human and divine, and human and the natural world, all of which would indicate a fall into lack-based signification and analogy, the tremors must serve not only as an outward expression of Adam’s and Eve’s transgression, but also as a violent upheaval that seals a lost connection between the divine and the human. The earthquake and other signs in Book 9 must designate a lost monist or sacramental unity, but this designation must be different in kind from the connection between heaven and earth present before the Fall. There is more to this moment than a logical conundrum: how can the tremblings signify the Fall if the connection between humans and the natural world and humans and divinity has been radically sundered? Rather, Paradise Lost seems intent on forcing precisely this difficulty around the issue of present signs. The earth’s sympathetic reaction, a reaction that borders on the pathetic fallacy, to Eve’s transgression makes this painfully apparent. After Eve eats, ‘Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat / Sighing

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through all her Works gave signs of woe, / That all was lost’ (9.782–4). The contention here that all was lost seems to buttress the notion that some radical division or disintegration occurs at this moment, but the very fact that a natural sign marks this moment, that nature gives signs of woe, would seem to undermine the contention that signs themselves become so radically different after the Fall that they can have no immanent force or connection to the world. Even in the moment of its abolition, the essential, immanent connection between humans and the natural world – and humans and God – is reaffirmed by the very natural signs that signify their separation. At one level, such questions about the operation of signs and sacraments in the postlapsarian world repeat the logical and theological difficulties inherent in Milton’s monist universe: how to explain evil in a world where God is omnipresent in its substance? Without a dualist division between spirit and matter, so the argument goes, it becomes impossible to account for the operation of sin in the natural universe. I am less interested in deciding these admittedly interesting ontological and metaphysical questions than in exploring the ways in which presence – monist, immanent, or otherwise – continues to operate after the Fall: not so much a narration of how humans degenerate into sin, but the exact sorts of presence and signs that exist in the postlapsarian world. Even those critics who describe a disjunction between prelapsarian sacramentality in Paradise Lost and a decidedly different postlapsarian anti-sacramentality in the Christian Doctrine hold out the possibility of a specific sort of presence that attaches to Milton’s signs. Thus, Schwartz acknowledges the way in which the Edenic transubstantiating universe that the epic outlines is present, in some fashion, inside or alongside Milton’s language: Paradise is his vision of a redeemed world, this lost world, this way of being in the world. And paradise is not wholly lost as long as he can imagine it and we can imagine it with him. This vision of an original goodness at the beginning of the story, instead of achieved as the goal at the end, makes it perpetually present in language, and hence, not only possible, but in language, actual. (Sacramental Poetics 70)

The collapse of the end of the story back into a present language, or treating the future end as if it has already occurred – prolepsis, in short – is a hallmark of Milton’s poetics. Schwartz here insists on the immanent actuality of Milton’s notion of paradise in the language at hand. Ulreich

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offers a similar acknowledgment in his reading of Raphael’s justification of metaphorical comparisons between heaven and earth in Book 5, going so far as to claim that the epic presents language as ‘the sacramental embodiment of thought’ (55n36). The lines in question are, of course: . . . yet for thy good This is dispenc’t, and what surmounts the reach Of human sense, I shall delineate so, By lik’ning spiritual to corporal forms, As may express them best, though what if Earth Be but the shaddow of Heav’n, and things therein Each to other like, more then on earth is thought?

(5.569–75)

It would require very little heavy lifting to translate this moment into evidence of an accommodationist understanding of metaphorical absence: if the earth is but the shadow of heaven, then surely these earthly images are only inadequate approximations of the heavenly phenomena they represent. In other words, we should translate the parable of the cave onto Milton’s prelapsarian account of metaphor. However, Raphael’s account of how these resemblances work does not simply endorse such a denigration of shadow, but rather insists that the similarity between these two domains exceeds earthly expectations, that Adam and Eve are too quick to establish a radical distinction in kind between corporeal and spiritual realms. Modern readers are probably included in this gentle indictment as well, insofar as we too hastily accede to the notion that heaven is radically separate from earth. Although Raphael’s explanation does acknowledge that some divine phenomena exceed human sense, his description of metaphorical comparison insists that likening spiritual and corporeal forms ‘may express them best’: not best, given the circumstances, but just plain best. Raphael’s promise to compare earth and heaven is not itself a comparative statement, but rather is an absolute one. His qualification does not mean that he will choose and use the specific analogies that are appropriate to the specific heavenly content that he wants to communicate. Rather, ‘As may express them best’ stands as a general claim about the connection between spiritual and corporeal forms, that all spiritual forms may be best expressed through corporeal ones. And once again, ‘as’ operates as a substantive connection, not a mark of mere similarity or analogy. In this respect, we should also acknowledge that this phrase could be read as an independent,

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appositive clause meaning ‘the word “as” may best express them.’ Metaphor, analogy, and signs in general are not, then, the unfortunately necessary means of communication and representation after the Fall, but are instead the ideal object of desire in their own right. This moment in Raphael’s description of metaphor and of the epic poem’s own metaphorics outlines a scenario very similar to the Christian Doctrine’s own pivotal claim about the sacrament: it is not a necessary instrument, but rather a desired expression. There’s no indication that spiritual forms need to be expressed in corporeal form, but that does not then mean that they should not be, or that one must insert an absence to justify or compel expression.21 Equally important to note is that expression in this register does not neatly equate to the external representation of an internal and spiritual truth. Despite his interest in the reading practices that the sacrament engenders, Stephen Honeygosky, drawing on the Christian Doctrine’s account of seals and signs, reduces the sacrament to a subordinate player in what is primarily an internal drama: The revised, Miltonic notion of sacramentality suggests that spiritually, by dint of Christ’s having given his Spirit to all believers, the power of Christ and communion with the divine reality are always immediately and directly there, the sacraments simply standing for that truth. The outward instrument, that is, the preached Word or administered Sacrament, only seals or expresses what, in fact, is already present for the Puritan. The former notion [the classical Thomist account of sacramental efficacy], on the other hand, would always have the believer arrive where the Radical Reformist believes he or she already is.22

Honeygosky’s formulation, though, and other critical accounts like it, can never explain the desirability of a sacrament that ‘only’ or ‘merely’ expresses or stands for the internal, spiritual facts of divine presence or reality. If the divine reality is always already there, then why would we want a sacrament, or a poem, at all? One possible answer is to locate in human beings a fundamental, ineradicable need for religious ritual that can only be satisfied by turning to an expressive sacrament. Guibbory’s anthropologically inflected account of Milton’s religious propensities and verse certainly fits within this rubric. External ceremony emerges as the basic fact and necessity of human existence and those aspects of Milton’s theology that lean toward individualistic anti-ceremonialism appears as an unworkable idealism

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and asceticism, even for Milton himself. Thus, Edenic love appears, even before the Fall, as a compensation for the Fall: I would suggest, then, that Milton’s depiction of Edenic love and worship expresses a longing for both the community and the sense of integration that the ceremonialism of the Church of England claimed to provide . . . Paradise Lost expresses his desire to replace a lost sense of community, as he imagines an Edenic time and state where life and worship were inseparable and integrated, involving body and soul in harmony.23

Guibbory describes Paradise Regained in similar terms, maintaining that individuality is necessarily haunted by a loss: ‘The intimate, spiritual connection between the individual and an invisible God, while clearly seen as a blessing, is offset by a loss of communal or social bonds that surely was painful for a poet who imagined his Adam as, from the first, needing more than the company of God.’24 Following Ramie Targoff, I would argue that the Reformation does not amount to a disintegration of community or wholeness, but rather offers a revised conception of collectivity.25 But more important here is the difference between a sacramentality based on need and one based on desire: contrary to Guibbory’s claim, Adam does not need a companion; rather, he wants one. A lack or loss that one is compelled to supplement or overcome, in the end, makes of the sacrament nothing more than a mercenary compensation for this lack, a natural drive or compulsion no more valuable to God than the hunger of beasts. Instead, Milton’s verse and prose demand that readers, modern and early modern, imagine the sacrament as a desirous attachment to a divinity that is already present: as Honeygosky, Schwartz, and others acknowledge, the divine reality is already there, but the sacrament expresses or seals it. It is the task of the remainder of this chapter to explore two consequences of this account of the sacrament: 1) how must readers imagine desire in Milton’s sacramental scenario where the divine actuality is already present, but the sacrament is merely a seal? 2) if reading is an activity subject to such sacramental redundancy – one in which sacramental signs only stand for a truth that is already immanently and immediately present – and does not actually accomplish any goal, how does one actually go about doing it? What is one doing when one freely chooses to do something that has no goal or reward? Milton’s argument in Paradise Regained, as we will see in this chapter’s final section, is that when one is doing reading itself – as opposed to interpreting or uncovering or producing meaning – one is performing a work of love.

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Desiring the Present If the Lord’s Supper does not cause or communicate grace, but rather seals or expresses a state that has already been accomplished or achieved, then the commonsensical temporal order of desire – want followed by fulfilment – seems unworkable. Instead, when one desires a state of affairs that has already been received, one desires the literalization of prolepsis and perhaps even desires proleptically. In arguing that the Edenic meal in Book 5 of Paradise Lost represents a return of what has already occurred, what has already been given by God, Stulting describes the eucharist in precisely these terms: ‘The meal is created as an offering to God, an expression of thanksgiving, a returning to God of what he has already provided. In short it is a eucharistic meal.’26 Similarly, Jade Fleck describes Milton’s ‘eschatological grammar’ as precisely such a proleptic exercise. In Fleck’s estimation, it is the immanence – not the imminence – of the end that serves as one of the primary devotional stimulants in Milton’s theology: ‘eschatological grammar pushes beginnings back in time and demonstrates that the end is implicit in the beginning of an action, itself a prophetic fulfillment. This grammar has theological and devotional significance, celebrating the ever-present reality of eschatological redemption.’27 Numerous other critics have also noted Milton’s use of prolepsis and other disruptions of linear temporal sense in the early poems and in his later work. David Quint argues that the Nativity Ode contains a radical and odd fantasy of time running backwards to an Edenic Golden Age, a fantasy that is ultimately rejected in the course of the poem. And Marshall Grossman, drawing on Charles Huttar’s work, briefly describes Paradise Regained as revealing a ‘triumphant Christ who proleptically defeats sin and already points toward the exaltation.’28 The 1645 and 1673 editions of the Poems even highlight the importance of temporal disruption for these early religious lyrics by placing ‘On Time’ between ‘The Passion’ and ‘Upon the Circumcision.’ Thus, the notion that Milton’s early poems, and even Paradise Regained, are marked by temporal disruptions and prolepsis is not particularly revolutionary, but the consequences of prolepsis for our understanding of desire and the process of interpretation require more extensive critical attention. Prolepsis in these early lyrics forces us to reimagine devotional desire, what it is we are doing in our affective attachment to divinity when we are reading. Yet we mistake Milton’s use of prolepsis if we imagine it primarily and merely as a disruption of a regular temporal sense. This figure forces us to reimagine the activity of reading, mainly

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because prolepsis is not just one figure among others. Instead, it is the figure that negates its own temporal figurative pointing: treating events in the future as if they have already happened translates, at the level of interpretation, into the somewhat odd notion that the figurative, future meaning – the issue of an interpretive procedure – has already occurred as well. In noting this, I do not hope to reveal a fundamental aporia or point to the self-consuming or -immolating force of prolepsis. Rather, these particular collapses, of future into present, and meaning back into reading, enjoin a model of devotional desire in which one is asked to desire the already present and that which has already happened. Early modern studies is, of course, rife with accounts of the links between poetic and rhetorical figures and desire. Yet these tend to postulate language’s fundamental representational inadequacy, and the perversion that goes along with it, as a central principle of the identification of trope and desire. For example, Madhavi Menon maintains that ‘desire is not only like metaphor, it is also itself always metaphorical.’29 As the focus on metaphor implies, however, such a comparison relies on the essentially catachretic nature of metaphor and, thus, ensures that desire will always fail: ‘This attempt [to represent desire on stage], always made and always failing, is rendered ever more pathetic because desire can only be “represented” by a language that is itself already wanton.’30 Here, desire’s productions end in failure, but, just as importantly, they submit to a logic of accomplishment, a system of judgment in which their representations can be evaluated for effectiveness: ‘always made and always failing.’ Milton’s use of prolepsis, though, seems to court the opposite position: not a language of excessive catachresis and fundamental lack, or even one that achieves, already, what it claims to achieve – God immanently present in the world. Prolepsis, instead, challenges precisely this logic of work and achievement by asking us to receive, not struggle for, an end already available. These temporal shifts do not authorize classing Milton among the many poets who can be lumped in or under the broader Derridean or Hegelian epithet of the ‘always already.’ Neither do I seek, following J.D. Fleming, to peg Milton to the modern philosophical hermeneutic tradition epitomized by Gadamer and Heidegger:31 ‘already’ is not the anticipation of consensus or completeness that characterizes the hermeneutic circle. Rather, I am interested in the type of devotional desire that could attend something that has already happened, for which there is no anticipation of or anxiety about the ultimate outcome, no fore-understanding of its ultimate meaningful destination: so not ‘always already’ – ‘always’

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the mark of a constitutive lack and failure – but just already. In this world, though, where devotees are asked to act as if everything has already happened, what is the work or operation of desire? If these poems ask readers to imagine the future as already present, and not just assured, how then should readers approach the figure, prolepsis, that seems to undermine the futural orientation of poetic figuration? This alternative notion of desire must be able to take seriously Milton’s monism and account for the ways in which the ‘ever-present reality of redemption,’ to borrow Fleck’s phrase, is present in or to language. In this respect, this chapter attempts to carve out a space in opposition to readings of these poems that treat them as failures of linguistic representation or as authorial evasions of the complex work of repentance and humility. As an example of the first type of interpretation, Grossman argues that ‘The Passion’ does not really represent the Passion because ‘Milton never surrenders his conception of the crucifixion as a transforming moment which exists in time but cannot be represented in language.’32 As opposed to reading this poem as a version of the ‘inexpressibility topos,’33 I argue that we should read these proleptic moments as doing something other than pointing to the inevitable limitations of language and fantasies of an immanent link to God.34 Stephen Fallon, although allowing for Milton’s affirmation of the power of poetry in the early religious verse, nonetheless sides with Grossman in arguing that language is actually limited, constrained by the fact of sin. Thus, it turns out that prolepsis and the affirmation of poetry’s power is only a naïve assertion of authorial sinlessness, which Milton ultimately learns to abandon, somewhat, over the course of his poetic career.35 For Fallon then, Milton obscures the present moment of conversion, the hard work of recognizing oneself as sinful, in favour of a future triumph: Nowhere in his works does Milton acknowledge the need for a conversion experience. The idea of a conversion experience is not resituated in terms of the reader; it is simply absent from Milton’s vocabulary. The theological and Puritan poet is in this way, paradoxically, not a religious poet; he lacked the conviction of sin that is both a prerequisite to and a component of conversion.36

For Fallon, the conversion experience involves recognizing a need or failure and humbly submitting to a divine remedy. But even in granting all responsibility for redemption and regeneration to God, conversion in this model is still a matter of struggle, a series of obstacles to be overcome

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and achievements to be recognized, even if that achievement is nothing more than the paradoxical assertion of humility.37 However, the transformations of the self that occur in Milton’s verse do not adhere to a logic of need or of work, and the postulation of absent aims that such concepts necessarily require. Instead, they conform to the model of a free activity described by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in which desire and action do not annihilate themselves in the production of effects and are not governed by a future telos.38 Milton uses prolepsis not to celebrate a sinless self, but rather to offer a much more radical proposition: one does not need a conversion experience at all; one wants conversion. Prolepsis insists that this desire for conversion does not operate according to a logic of labour and goals, precisely because the purported object of desire and struggle is already immediately available. Instead of interpreting prolepsis as a failed wish to overcome or escape the vicissitudes of a fallen history, we should follow Fleming and acknowledge that there is a plenitude to Milton’s poetry that does not hide a secret absence and that his verse advances an insistently present reading practice.39 Fleck also finds in prolepsis a key not just to the propositional meaning behind a text, but the very notion of free choice in Milton’s work: ‘The point of eschatological grammar is the primacy of spiritual experience, and of choice, to any action.’40 Fleck’s argument then explicitly rejects the notion that prolepsis indicates a ‘quietistic withdrawal from the realm of historical action’41 and implicitly aligns arguments about the inevitable failure and limitation of language with precisely this brand of quietism: Milton’s verse implies that lack equals passivity, or a passive acceptance of an inevitable fate, and is thus the enemy of free choice. John Rogers argues that this rejection of passivity is part of Milton’s broader theological rejection of Calvinism and Trinitarianism, but also the passivity entailed in an orthodox model of the Atonement: ‘If the conceit of the angelic borrowing of evaporated tears [in ‘Upon the Circumcision’] strikes us (as surely it must) as forced, or even desperate, the extent of its hubris speaks to the intensity with which Milton resists the decidedly passive agency that orthodoxy requires the Christian to bring to his redemption.’42 At base then, Milton’s early verse stages a distinction between a passive lack and an actively free proleptic presence. And this distinction turns on the basic difference between being subject to God and being devoted to God. The former is a model of inevitable, inescapable, and necessary absence; the latter a model of desire that does not hope to overcome itself, ultimately.

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Milton’s early religious verse depicts devotional desire as an attraction to an ultimate eschatological end, but also embeds that end, from the start, in the present object of consideration. One example of this phenomenon occurs in the Nativity Ode, in a brief passage where the promise of future sacrifice folds back into the infant Jesus. After promising that ‘Truth, and Justice then / Will down return to men’ (XV.141–2), the ode’s speaker arrests the hasty rush to the New Heaven and New Earth: But wisest Fate sayes no, This must not yet be so, The Babe lies yet in smiling Infancy, That on the bitter cross Must redeem our loss.

(XVI.149–53)

Quint reads this moment, particularly ‘But wisest Fate sayes no,’ as the refusal of a naïve, immature fantasy of a return to Eden.43 However, even according to Quint’s reading, this stanza does not so much refuse such a return to original purity as delay it until the Babe grows to maturity: i.e., he reads this poem as a Bildungsroman for both speaker and reader. Such a progression, though, ignores the proleptic grammar in these lines. Certainly, we all understand the temporal telescoping by which the infant Jesus stands in for the crucified Christ, but regardless of how the conventions of reading practice and temporal sense ask us to jump to the very adult event of the Crucifixion, the poem’s grammatical construction makes it so that it is the Babe that dies on the bitter cross: ‘The Babe lies yet in smiling Infancy, / That on the bitter cross.’ Right after deferring the New Jerusalem to the future with ‘This must not yet be so,’ the poem reaffirms the notion that the Babe already contains and is the person that will die on the cross, in effect undermining the very twists and turns of Bildungsroman on which Quint’s reading relies. What’s most important here is not to critique Quint, but rather to acknowledge that the poem does not so much reject as infantile the initial fantasy of Edenic return in favour of a more mature and adult apocalyptic future as it does present a scenario in which both temporal schemes are incorrect: we neither return to an Edenic golden age nor anticipate a future New Jerusalem. Instead, the Babe already contains and is the fulfilment and completion that devotees desire. The poem then asks us to figure out a way to desire this already present fulfilment, and keep on desiring it even as it exists in our presence.

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In addition to presenting the infant Jesus as already containing and being an atoning sacrifice, the Nativity Ode also implies that the apocalypse has already begun. Or to put it another way, salvation, however perfect it might be in the future, is also happening right now: And then at last our bliss Full and perfect is, But now begins.

(XVIII.165–7)

These lines do not argue that our bliss will be full and perfect, but rather that at last it is full and perfect. Obviously, the present tense serves as a poetic device to place readers in this future space, imagining the future as present. Yet, as M.J. Doherty argues, there is also something fundamentally disruptive about this ungrammatical moment: Milton’s ungrammatical mingling of verb tenses, or the rhetorical figure of solescismus . . . has been understood to disrupt rules of sequentiality in order to illustrate the relationship of time to eternity, for instance. Breaking the rules of chronology conveyed by verb tense makes poetic sense in a poem that expresses the inexpressible mystery of the Incarnation, or divine intervention in human history.44

But how exactly does this tense disruption lead us to throw up our hands and dismiss language as fundamentally limited or riven by the paradox of expressing the inexpressible? It seems that converting ‘is’ to ‘will be’ in these lines, translating them into grammatical sense, requires that readers project into the future, actively, what the poem asserts is already the case: ‘then’ already ‘is.’ Making this moment grammatical requires a readerly intervention that imposes and desires lack. In this moment, readers are asked to want the sensible temporal coherence that would nonetheless force us to abandon or disavow what the poem asserts we already have. Unlike Herbert’s ‘Love (III),’ which consistently teaches readers that they are wrong to presuppose lack, the Nativity Ode here seems to tempt readers to make precisely such a presupposition. But whereas Herbert’s poem issues in a cautionary lesson, chiding readers for their inappropriate dispositions, the Nativity Ode offers no such pedagogical payoff, leaving readers to cast about for themselves when it comes to the appropriate program or plan. Thus, the poem presents a fundamental distinction between an interpretive activity that makes the poem conform to sense, or reforms it for sense, and a reading activity

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that preserves the ungrammatical, but nonetheless poetic, figure of prolepsis. The problem is not that a numinous divinity escapes sense and a-grammaticality is the only way to indicate its ineffable transcendence. Rather, making the line make sense costs something: the notion that prolepsis is what it claims to be, the treatment of future events as having already occurred – not just ‘as if’ they had occurred – or the collapsing of the future back into the present.45 Neither is the slant rhyme of ‘bliss’ and ‘is’ irrelevant to this basic question about reading practice.46 Certainly, one way to read this off rhyme is as a repudiation of the power of language to contain or represent completion. According to this logic, the rhyme is incomplete because it is slant and, thus, points toward a transcendent reality that escapes poetry. Although I am sympathetic to this reading of the importance of rhyme in this moment, the off rhyme actually seems to undermine not the possibility of completion, but rather the notion that fulfilment is part of a temporal sequence or experience. If completion or restoration is depicted by a secure rhyme, the implication of such a poetic phenomenon is that fulfilment happens at the end, and then casts a unifying gaze – or pall – back over the preceding sequence. This is the very logic of teleology that Milton attempts to evade. The incongruity between ‘bliss’ and ‘is’ then does not point to language’s limitation, but rather back to the problem of sequence’s limitation, the notion that we should be waiting for fulfilment at the end of time, or the end of a line. The succeeding line, ‘But now begins,’ only further undermines the notion of teleological and deferred fulfilment, breaking the full end stop that one might expect after ‘is’ if one wished to highlight the inadequacy of rhyme or language. In fact, that stop appears in the middle of the succeeding line: ‘But now begins; for from this happy day’ (XVIII.167). ‘But’ here appears to mark a return to grammatical and temporal sense, and the sequential progressive project that the preceding lines disrupted. Yet even this return to a more familiar temporal order disintegrates upon a closer inspection of this ‘now.’ As Doherty insists, the Nativity Ode obsesses over the present of its own composition, which leads us to a somewhat perverse question: how is it possible for our bliss to begin to build today, in 1629, 1645, or 2011, with the Nativity?47 Instead of pointing to a mysteriously transcendent divinity, these lines appear to present the opposite: a God packed back into, to use J. Martin Evans’s terms, the immediate experience of devotion.48 The poem’s effect then is not to point readers toward an ineffable God, but rather to push them to recognize

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that they are looking for the wrong thing if they are looking for the new, or an unfolding temporal sequence that ends in the apocalypse. The proleptic elements of ‘Upon the Circumcision’ are even more pronounced than those in the Nativity Ode. This poem points toward Jesus’ future pain and sacrifice, yet requires its readers to focus their devotional attachments on an infant body that does not just prefigure, but also essentially already contains the entire redemptive scheme. The poem concludes with what appears to be the promise of Christ’s future sacrifice and atonement: ‘but O ere long / Huge pangs and strong / Will pierce more neer his heart’ (26–8). However, as Rogers notes, this conventional typological or teleological understanding hinges on the presupposition that ‘pangs’ are primarily external, and that, in this moment, they signify Christ’s spear wound. Rogers insists, though, that ‘pangs’ are primarily internal and, as a result, the poem complicates, if not undermines, any interpretation that seeks to present this moment as a conventional prefiguration of Christ’s sacrifice: ‘The huge pangs and strong that will be the ultimate marker of the Christian dispensation are not, in this reading, the piercing pains of nail and spear, but the pangs of conscience, the purified inner space which alone can supply the means by which virtue itself is rewarded with salvation, by which virtue itself entitles one to salvation.’49 In addition, ‘Upon the Circumcision’ insists that the circumcision occurs in the present, whereas the kenosis and atonement have already occurred in the past: For we by rightfull doom remediles Were lost in death, till he that dwelt above High thron’d in secret bliss, for us frail dust Emptied his glory, ev’n to nakedness; And that great Cov’nant which we still transgress Intirely satisfi’d, And the full wrath beside Of vengeful Justice bore for our excess, And seals obedience first with wounding smart This day . . .

(17–26, my emphasis)

Such a proleptic sealing of obedience itself prefigures Paradise Regained’s depiction of Jesus’ proleptic redemption of humankind via discipline and obedience. The past tense verbs in ‘Upon the Circumcision’ are important insofar as they consign the narrative portions of the redemptive event, the backstory that focuses on lack, to the past: ‘we were lost,’

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‘he dwelt above,’ ‘he emptied his glory,’ ‘satisfied the covenant,’ and ‘bore Justice’s punishment.’ On the other hand, the operation of sealing obedience occurs today, in the present: of all these past events in the redemptive drama, it is the typological figuration of sacrifice that appears in the present. As we witnessed in the last section, sealing is what sacraments do, for both Calvin and Milton, acting as a present emblem (not just a mere sign) of a very real and immanent promise. The only other present activity is our own: we continue to transgress. Perhaps most importantly, the middle of the poem describes Jesus’ circumcision, the mere figure for his later suffering and atonement, as providing immediate consolation in the present, not just the prefiguration or promise of consolation: ‘He who with all Heav’ns heraldry whileare / Enter’d the world, now bleeds to give us ease’ (10–11, my emphasis). In other words, the poetic or rhetorical figure itself, the circumcision, already provides consolation, now, and is successful in doing so: it does not provide consolation by pointing to a future or signalling a confident assurance.50 How the present poetic figure, as figure, provides consolation or prompts devotion is the central question for literary critical readings of this verse, and for any discussion of the broader activity and practice of reading. ‘Upon the Circumcision’ enacts a scenario in which one desires the immediately present sign itself, not the thing it signifies or heralds. Like the sacrament, this is a sign that does not so much designate a signified, but rather carries its own immanent force.51 Milton’s rejection of external, formal worship has led some critics to insist that he must ultimately reject the efficacy, sacramental or otherwise, of poetic figures, that he must keep them in their decidedly corporeal and carnal place as unfortunately seductive instruments of devotion. In turn, this propensity, alongside Milton’s various affirmations of the superiority and necessity of the paradise within, happier far, has sometimes been translated into the accusation that he decorporealizes devotion. Rambuss makes precisely this argument about Milton’s early poems on the Nativity, Circumcision, and Passion, and Paradise Regained: ‘Milton’s recasting of these events [the Nativity, Circumcision, and Passion] not only drains them of much of their potential for erotic cathexis, he also strikingly decorporealizes them. In Milton’s devotional corpus Christ appears hardly to have a body at all. Coincident with that absence, Milton himself hardly seems like a devotional poet.’52 Instead of taking Rambuss to task for not giving adequate attention to the corporeal elements in Paradise Lost, or trotting out Milton’s monism as a rebuttal, I want to argue that Rambuss is, in several important respects, correct. However, that does not mean

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that Milton simply loathes corporeality or exhibits an anti-sacramental asceticism. Rather, the de-corporealization that Rambuss describes is more accurately presented as a reconfiguration of what devotees are doing when they are desiring. Quint offers an argument similar to Rambuss’s, finding in Milton an impulse toward a ‘noncarnal poetics,’ that also offers a hint as to what this poetics might do other than say ‘no’ to the body: Milton’s period of principled chastity, associated with his years of retirement at Horton, may begin here [with the Nativity Ode], where he is clearly already interested in what we may call a chaste or noncarnal poetics. The rejection of the solar, Apollonian inspiration of the elegy entails a separation of poetic imagination from the appetites of the flesh and a resulting poetry that purifies itself of carnal images – the forms of Nature and the human body. In the Nativity Ode, this purified poetry attempts to reduce itself to the state of pure light and music.53

Quint reads this purified poetry as an example of the naiveté that the poem asks us to transcend: ‘Milton’s poetry is thus turning into the pure music that it describes, the “unexpressive notes” of line 116: a music that lies, in fact, beyond the poet’s abilities to express its nature, a music that expresses or represents nothing but itself.’54 The lines in question, of course, refer to cherubim and seraphim who are ‘Harping in loud and solemn quire, / With unexpressive notes to Heav’ns new-born Heir’ (XI.115–16). Quint hangs much here on the adjective ‘unexpressive,’ equating it, it seems, with a sterile self-involvement. Perhaps more importantly, he treats ‘unexpressive’ as if it means ‘inexpressible’ or ‘ineffable,’ fundamentally incapable of expression.55 There is certainly warrant for this, in the OED and in a host of editorial glosses.56 However, following Catherine Belsey, my argument hinges on the notion that ‘unexpressive’ is not so much a negative epithet as it is a positive description of notes that do not try to point beyond themselves to some future apocalypse or transcendent horizon.57 For Belsey, the unexpressive is the site of a performative promise: ‘A promise, a performative, not the expression of a meaning which is elsewhere, not a sign of harmony, but the unexpressive bond itself, a part of the angelic song, the “Ode” is offered as a redemptive text.’58 The speaker of such unexpressive promises is not represented, but rather constituted in such utterances. Yet even this performative promise still circles around a self and its self-postulation, a mechanism that seems incompatible with an understanding of conversion and salvation that might well ask us to abandon, not construct or

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say the self.59 That is, performativity still drags us back to the question of who is speaking, or for whom something is inexpressible, which seems precisely what ‘unexpressive’ seeks to avoid.60 Identifying ‘unexpressive’ and ‘inexpressible’ runs the risk of explaining away the central choice that Milton here foregrounds: that ‘not expressing a meaning’61 is something that one can choose and desire, not simply the fate to which language is consigned by an iron law of necessary and constitutive lack. Criticism that would class the ‘unexpressive’ as the ‘inexpressible’ assumes, in a manner similar to that of philosophical hermeneutics, that one naturally and essentially desires to express oneself or even to speak and that any failure in this regard is the result of an impediment, not a desire. Carla Mazzio’s account of inarticulateness on the Renaissance stage acknowledges the value of ‘disabled utterance’ or unintelligibility, but makes of these disabilities a means of ‘exposing fictions of coherence’ within dominant narratives.62 Thus, even when such inarticulateness is chosen, it serves a broader coherent master: exposing dominant narratives as a sham. Yet what if ‘unexpressive’ is not a ruse to expose fictional coherences, but rather the appropriate response to an already existing connection between a devotee and God? Mazzio’s praise for inarticulateness relies on its value as an irruption of nonsense that opposes the march toward sense. In making this claim, she adduces Deleuze and Guattari’s contention that literature makes language stammer, but describes this stammering as a nonsensical lapse in coherence that enables thought, as the intervention of nonsense into an otherwise sensible language.63 However, such a momentary failure designed to disrupt coherence is not what Deleuze and Guattari have in mind, but rather the much broader attempt to make language itself stammer: ‘The writer uses words, but by creating a syntax that makes them pass into sensation that makes the standard language stammer, tremble, cry, or even sing.’64 Stammering is not, then, a momentary eruption of an opposition to sense and coherence, much less a congenital aphasia in the face of transcendence. Instead, it creates a real connection to purportedly extra-linguistic elements and, in so doing, offers a much more radical challenge to language itself: that it does not simply designate or refer to ideas or things outside of its own system, but actually connects to these very real sensations, events, objects, and phenomena.65 The presupposition that ‘unexpressive’ connotes a necessary structural failure, that it signals that language only weakly approximates its transcendent signifieds and referents, appears in the other Miltonic example cited by the OED. The OED lists this line from the Nativity Ode,

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as well as citations from Lycidas (‘the unexpressive nuptial Song’ [176]) and As You Like It (‘the fair, the chaste, the unexpressive she’ [3.2.10])66 as examples to confirm the equation of ‘unexpressive’ and ‘inexpressible.’ The description of Rosalind may connote ineffability (although I have reservations about this reading as well), but the full lines from Lycidas only reinforce my contention that ‘unexpressive’ does not mean ‘inexpressible’ or ‘incapable of expressing a meaning’: So Lycidas sunk low, but mounted high, Through the dear might of him that walk’d the waves Where other groves, and other streams along, With Nectar pure his oozy Lock’s he laves, And hears the unexpressive nuptiall Song, In the blest Kingdoms meek of joy and love.

(171–7)

Lycidas here has ‘mounted high’ and reached the ‘blest Kingdoms meek of joy and love,’ and thus would seem to be no longer subject to the same limitations of representation characteristic of a fallen humanity. Moreover, reading ‘unexpressive’ as ‘not expressing a meaning’ has the added benefit of solving the antecedent problem that characterizes ‘inexpressible’: who is incapable of expressing the nuptial song, Lycidas, the inhabitants of heaven, the poem’s speaker, or the poet? ‘Not expressing a meaning’ allows ‘unexpressive’ to designate a quality of the song, as opposed to referring to a mysteriously ambiguous and weak speaker. This moment in Lycidas also reveals how translating ‘unexpressive’ as ‘inexpressible’ effectively reaffirms the primacy of the subject who speaks because of need or compulsion, the very sort of self that the devotional works are at pains to evade or escape. In the Nativity Ode, these unexpressive notes, which might ultimately be an apt description for these early poems themselves, do not designate an ineffable transcendence.67 Neither does Milton invite readers to treat these poems as harbouring a secret located in some more foundational domain, or in an unfolding future. As Fleming notes, a model of interpretation that revolves around secrecy ends up insisting on the obsolescence of the activity of decoding and uncovering. Once the secret is revealed, interpretive practice renders itself useless and joyless: ‘In post-modern thought, the upshot of this paradox is Derrida’s secretive “taste” – for the secret as such, as the not-yet-revealed, as the joy of interpretative promise that must be lost when it is fulfilled.’68 Any joy that we experience in the act of reading, as part of this divine promise,

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must disappear at the moment of revelation. Such a presupposition, of course, requires that we deny any joyful presence in the act of reading itself and treat it as a mere instrument. Yet this is precisely the approach to reading that Milton rejects by insisting on the proleptic presence of future events. Prolepsis in Milton’s poetry serves as a figure for a desire that would not look elsewhere for its aim or fulfilment. Edward Tayler describes this as Milton’s prevailing modus operandi: Milton elects ‘as usual to treat the figure rather than the fulfillment.’69 I would simply add that that is not an error in Milton’s verse or evidence of a megalomaniacal impulse on the part of an author who fancies himself without sin, but rather the entire point of Milton’s poetic devotions. Prolepsis is the figure that embodies precisely this principle: the future completion and fulfilment collapsed back into the original moment, the unexpressive present of the poem and reading. It is for this reason that a notion of desire organized around infinite deferral, imminent fulfilment, and ineradicable absence will always mistake desire in Milton, treating it as unfathomable and bound to ineffability. There are certainly moments in Milton’s prose and verse where he appears to propound, despite his monist inclinations, a fundamental distinction between external form and internal spirit, the noncarnal or anti-corporeal propensities that Quint and Rambuss remark. The turn inward, at the end of Paradise Lost, or in a poem like ‘The Passion,’ would then be evidence of this fundamental privilege. As Fleming argues, however, Milton’s work exhibits a consistent suspicion of the value and desirability, not just the existence, of secretive, private interiorities: ‘I will argue that the dramatic Milton constructs an ideal of exoteric behavior, according to which intentional secrets must be displayed for all to see. The one thing Milton’s dramatic heroes must never attempt is the one thing that most critics assume to be normative: namely, a retreat from outward expression to inward and secret experience’ (67). Thus, we should be wary of describing Milton’s approach to the Passion and Crucifixion as a reaction against the outward form and appearance of the event of Christ’s suffering and, instead, treat these poems as an attempt to render or advocate the appropriate devotional responses to these events: mourning, love, and verse.70 Readers should not assume that displaying the spectacular corporeal suffering of Jesus on the cross is the only way publicly and presently to engage the Passion. Even when ‘The Passion’ offers us a kinetic image of Ezekiel’s assumption into heaven and Christ’s guiltless blood drowning the towers of Salem, Milton closes the stanza with a return to the devotee’s attitude:

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See see the Chariot, and those rushing wheels, That whirled the Prophet up at Chebar flood, My spirit some transporting Cherub feels, To bear me where the Towers of Salem stood, Once glorious Towers, now sunk in guiltles blood; There doth my soul in holy vision sit In pensive trance, and anguish, and ecstatick fit.

(VI.36–42)

The ‘ecstatic fit’ of this moment is accompanied by sitting and contemplation, not bodily rapture.71 The rhyme, however clanging, only accentuates the oddity of this figure: a soul sitting in an ecstatic fit. The poem often reads like so many injunctions to quietism, arguing that the Passion, as opposed to Christ’s ‘godlike acts’ and ‘temptations fierce’ (IV.24), is a subject fit for silent stillness, not corporeal transport: ‘Me softer airs befit, and softer strings / Of Lute, or Viol still, more apt for mournful things’ (IV.27–8); ‘Yet on the softned Quarry would I score / My plaining vers as lively as before’ (VII.46–7). These lines, of course, indicate that ‘The Passion’ is a poem about writing poetry about the Passion. Yet it is also and, I would argue, primarily, a poem about how to read events, particularly the event of the Crucifixion. I have argued elsewhere that Milton collapses events back into poetry in Samson Agonistes, insisting that we should not treat them as if they exist in a separate realm that puts language to shame for not adequately representing them.72 In ‘The Passion,’ something similar occurs: the main spectacular event does not appear for viewers or readers and we are asked not to treat this as a lack. A carnal, corporeal, or even metaphorically imagistic presentation of the Passion does not occur in this poem not because Milton fears the potential of icons to turn into idols, nor because he wants believers to turn inward for their worship and devotion in a fallen world. Rather, the Passion does not appear in the poem because its presentation would evidence a resentful doubt and lack within devotees, a lack of faith in the immanent promise that Christ embodies. So it is not that one could not represent the Crucifixion in any of these poems, that it somehow exceeds language, but rather that one should not desire to. Milton certainly focuses on the immanent figure instead of the imminent, ultimate, or even transcendent fulfilment, as Grossman and Tayler note. He does this, though, out of choice, not necessity – and here we return, finally and however obliquely, to Fleck’s comment about the relationship between prolepsis and choice. Prolepsis in the Nativity Ode and ‘Upon the Circumcision’ is the figure that heralds precisely this choice, the demand that devotional read-

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ers treat Christianity’s consummation, the New Heaven and New Earth, and poetry’s consummation, meaning, as if they have already occurred and already exist within their initial heralding. The devotional desire that results is not one of anxious acquisitive yearning, but rather one that attends to the present proleptic promise, or the end already immediately there in the poem. In Deleuze’s terms, the orientation of desire toward an absent end to be acquired results ultimately in nihilism and a desire that dreams of its own annihilation: To a certain degree, the traditional logic of desire is all wrong from the very outset: from the very first step that the Platonic logic of desire forces us to take, making us choose between production and acquisition. From the moment we place desire on the side of acquisition, we make desire an idealistic (dialectical, nihilistic) conception, which causes us to look upon it as primarily a lack: a lack of an object, a lack of the real object.73

Within this understanding of desire, signs do something more and more primordial than represent the object or aims of desire. In Deleuze’s account, we should imagine signs and the reading of them as a present, immanent force, not bound to the differential structure of signifier and signified: ‘Signs as we have defined them – as habitudes or contractions referring to one another – always belong to the present.’74 Although working within Gadamerian philosophical hermeneutics, a position not immediately compatible with Deleuze’s argument, Fleming offers a similar argument about the importance and difficulty of surface reading. It is difficult to achieve and maintain a surface reading because ‘the attempt to achieve an hermeneutic alignment with the surface – an exoteric hermeneutics – must combat the almost reflexive assumption that interpretation per se entails (esoteric) depth and discovery’ (159). Moreover, the alternative model of depth and transcendence is not really reading at all: ‘To posit, therefore, “a hidden level beneath words,” is not to posit a better way of reading. It is to posit non-reading’ (160). The task that Milton’s work sets then is to consider reading as an activity that would not be defined by either its lacks or its goals, but rather would perform a loving attention to things, signs, and poems in themselves. These poems ask us to treat reading as an engagement with the superficial or the literal and as an activity accessible only on its own terms: it might well result in meanings or aims, but it is neither exhausted nor determined by these teleological orientations. Somewhat counterintuitively, Milton asks us to desire the present figure instead of its fulfilment so as to respect the immanence of the divine,

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avoid mercenary calculations of reward, and actually make free choices. The freedom involved here is certainly not equivalent to a republican political liberty or to any model of autonomy: in fact, it appears to be radically dependent upon books. However, the freedom of devotion that Milton describes is not just one of choosing which confessional allegiance to adopt, but the freedom entailed in the act of religious devotion. The boon of these early poems is that they hint at a freedom internal to devotion that asks readers and devotees to escape the slavishness imposed by both lack and purpose. Both of these seemingly pious phenomena – purpose would seem to give divine order to one’s existence, but actually results in mercenary acts; lack would seem to prevent the devotee from presuming too much about God, but actually results in a quietistic, passive faith or a recourse to mysticism – appear suspicious in the early verse and, thus, we are asked to abjure them in favour of alternative desiring and reading practices. Unsurprisingly, if the desires that attend poetry are no longer tending to an interpretive consummation, but are instead focused solely on the present, we might well have to rethink how readers read, the sheer activity that they perform, which now might appear somewhat pointless. How this brand of desire alters the relationship between reading and meaning, particularly in Paradise Regained, that purportedly most esoteric and secret of poems, to borrow Fleming’s terms, is the subject to which we must now turn. At the very least, it is important to remember the fundamental analogy here between desire and reading: they both must persist as practices in the face of a planned, inevitable obsolescence, an end that threatens to annihilate their validity and even their ultimate usefulness; if desire and reading are only instruments on the way toward joy or meaning, then surely there must be a way, finally, to cut out the middle man. Milton, of course, does not think we should be so hasty and, moreover, rejects the notion that reading and desire are, in fact, dispensable. Instead, Paradise Regained offers the admittedly curious claim that reading itself is a practice of love, an act in which one values an immanent entity for its own, non-instrumental sake. Reading Is Love A claim like this one, that ‘reading is love,’ runs the risk of sounding so obvious as to be banal: sure, one might retort, but what isn’t related to love for a committed believer? Let me be clear: I’m not arguing that reading

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is about love, or that the poem represents reading as love. For Milton, reading is an activity one performs after belief, faith, and conviction: not the only activity and not a necessary activity, but an activity that follows faith. This pointless reading trains devotees to attend to something for its own sake, not what it promises or offers down the road. Paradise Regained does not imagine reading as a quest for some transcendent or otherwise withdrawn object of desire. Neither does it imagine it as a sterile, pleasant self-assurance. The aim is not to achieve God’s love, because one already has it, or to accept an assurance that would provide surety and stability. Instead, reading, and the respect for an immanent presence that it confers, teach devotees what to do other than merely rest assured in their own salvation or faith. Reading is love because it trains us to respond to divine love with an active, attentive desire: so without complacency, but also without a voracious, desperate, ungrateful acquisitiveness. Modern criticism, of course, trains us to ask questions about purpose. What function does this poem perform if the activity that it enjoins – reading – is redundant and unnecessary? Why read at all if there’s no function to reading, if there’s no purpose? Milton, however, is not Rick Warren and, to put it somewhat baldly, these are not the right questions. Here, the point is not to berate mercenary calculation or selfish functionalism yet again, to condemn once more the desire for material things. Rather, the poem challenges the validity of all drives toward purposiveness, asking us to imagine reading as an activity that might well have effects, but not as one that has a function. In his rejection of the temptation of classical learning, the Son notoriously presents reading as an unnecessary, purposeless – if nonetheless intensive – activity.75 Once one has garnered what one needs, from divine inspiration or from books, there seems to be no point to reading: . . . However many books Wise men have said are wearisom; who reads Incessantly, and to his reading brings not A spirit and judgment equal or superior, (And what he brings, what needs he elsewhere seek) Uncertain and unsettl’d still remains, Deep verst in books and shallow in himself, Crude or intoxicate, collecting toys, And trifles for choice matters, worth a spunge; As Children gathering pibles on the shore.

(4.321–30)

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The Son’s parenthetical qualification – ‘(And what he brings, what needs he elsewhere seek)’ – sounds very much like the radically secret and subjective account of reading that Fleming describes and that Lee Morrissey attributes to someone like Abiezer Coppe: ‘With such arguments, reading subjectively – or reading as subjectivity – reaches its endgame: reading is so much a question of the reader that there is no need to read.’76 In addition to dismissing reading as redundant, at best, the Son presents reading as analogous to the operation of the sacraments as outlined in the Christian Doctrine: you don’t need to do it – it performs no function – but you’re still going to do it nonetheless. Yet after condemning promiscuous reading in general, the Son reverses course immediately and affirms the value of reading the Hebrew prophets: Remove their [classical literature’s] swelling Epithetes thick laid As varnish on a Harlots cheek, the rest, Thin sown with aught of profit or delight, Will far be found unworthy to compare With Sion’s songs, to all true tasts excelling, Where God is prais’d aright, and Godlike men, The Holiest of Holies, and his Saints. (4.343–9)

Importantly, the tasteful, even beautiful praise that these lines ascribe to the Hebrew prophets performs no necessary function. Book 4 does offer a political purchase for reading such encomia, but it turns out that even these lessons are unnecessary. Late in the brief epic, the prophets appear as the plainest and easiest way to learn how to rule a kingdom: In them is plainest taught, and easiest learnt, What makes a Nation happy, and keeps it so, What ruins Kingdoms, and lays Cities flat; These only with our Law best form a King.

(4.362–5)

Yet we have already witnessed, at the end of Book 2, that these sorts of public political lessons are unnecessary, as it is an interior reign that actually prepares one for rule and kingship: Yet he who reigns within himself, and rules Passions, Desires, and Fears, is more a King; Which every wise and virtuous man attains: And who attains not, ill aspires to rule . . .

(2.466–9)

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So every wise man has already attained this spirit and judgment equal or superior and thus does not really need to learn political lessons or plans from the Hebrew prophets. There is no purpose at all – not just no public purpose – to reading the Old Testament. And this purposelessness is not simply the result of the Son’s superior knowledge. His language in the repudiation of reading does not arrogate the privilege of divine understanding only to himself. Rather, the Son’s suspicion of reading’s usefulness acts as a general principle: ‘he who receives / Light from above’ (4.288–9) and ‘who reads / Incessantly, and to his reading brings not / A spirit and judgment equal or superior’ (4.322–4) refer to readers and devotees in general, not his own special case. For the godly as well as the Son, reading is unnecessary and does not possess a useful, guiding telos. Thus, Milton’s poem has ultimately driven us to imagine reading itself as a type of freely chosen, but decidedly unnecessary desire. Whatever political programs we hope to glean from it should be abandoned as, quite simply, turning outward for what is really an inward phenomenon. Instead of a means of learning lessons about politics, conceived in the broadest of senses, Paradise Regained asks us to imagine reading itself as the appropriate disposition toward an already achieved divine love and as itself an act of love. A critical paradigm that insists on teleological planning as the motive for action, for God or humans, mistakes the nature of reading and salvation in Paradise Regained. This suspicion of ends is an element of the virtue ethics lodged in both the brief epic and A Mask, an ethics that requires an attention to the source of an action or gift, and the disposition of its receiver, instead of its consequences or tactical benefits. The Son, after all, responds to Satan’s temptation of food with the insistence that he only values gifts based on the moral status of the giver: ‘Thereafter as I like / The giver, answer’d Jesus’ (2.321–2). And in A Mask, the Lady maintains that ‘none / But such as are good men can give good things’ (703–4). This consistent wariness of ends and effects, which marks not just Paradise Regained but the bulk of Milton’s corpus,77 stands as a challenge to Stanley Fish’s argument about the temptation of plot.78 Plot and drama aren’t the problem here: purpose is. Fish’s argument postulates a recognizable end, obedience, for action, whereas the poem itself describes any orientation to an end as itself mistaken. All ends are idolatrous insofar as they establish any goal, not just a prime goal that could replace God. Ultimately, Paradise Regained presents as Satanic not only the notion of recognizable ends, but also the concept of means. In the end, it also maintains that God is not motivated in the same manner

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that we are: not just that his goals are different, but that the very activity of motivation, in essence, is different. Satan’s late temptations – both the temptation of worldly kingdoms and of knowledge – revolve around the insistence that means are determined by ends, that means are necessary for ends. Thus, Satan maintains that means are necessary for the fulfilment of prophecy: ‘prediction still / In all things, and all men, supposes means, / Without means us’d, what it predicts revokes’ (3.354–6). He offers a similar empiricist narrowness when he assumes that the way things happened in the past is the way they must happen in the future: ‘Great acts require great means of enterprise’ (2.412). Even his initial hope for tempting the Son rests on this brand of vulgar empiricism: ‘and the way found prosperous once / Induces best to hope of like success’ (1.104–5). Here, Satan sounds very much like Manoa and Samson, assuming that instruments constrain the divine plan and attempting to bind the Son within a sterile logic of recognition and self-recognition.79 The temptation is not just that the Son will appoint God’s ways, but that he will begin to imagine the world as it is as the way it must be. Recognizing the world as it is and responding accordingly, as Deleuze notes, ultimately impedes thought and the new or, in the brief epic’s idiom, the devotional and readerly conversion that must attend a regained paradise. In addition, it makes of this new paradise an empty, if nonetheless pure form, a hollow object of desire with no positive qualities to recommend it: Recognition is a sign of the celebration of monstrous nuptials, in which thought ‘rediscovers’ the State, rediscovers ‘the Church’ and rediscovers all the current values that it subtly presented in the pure form of an eternally blessed unspecified eternal object . . . For the new – in other words, difference – calls forth forces in thought which are not the forces of recognition, today or tomorrow, but the powers of a completely other model . . . By contrast, how derisory are the voluntary struggles for recognition. Struggles occur only on the basis of a common sense and established values, for the attainment of current values (honours, wealth and power). A strange struggle among consciousnesses for the conquest of the trophy constituted by the Cogitatio natura universalis, the trophy of pure recognition and representation.80

Current values – honour, wealth, and power – are all that Satan has to offer, and even these have value only because of their position within this larger structure: they are unspecified eternal objects without content.

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Yet, of course, the Son has already abandoned these values early in the poem, as well as the procedures of judgment that would attend them. When he first begins to hunger in the wilderness, Jesus acknowledges that his own imagination and past practices do not constrain God’s ways: ‘yet God / Can satisfie that need some other way’ (2.253–4). In addition, the poem consistently forecloses any definitive revelation of the Son’s identity – ‘this is the Son of God’ or ‘I am the Son of God; Tempt not the Lord thy God’ – so as to evade precisely this brand of empty recognition.81 We are not then consigned to ambiguity or a mystical or abjectly fallen lack of recognition. In fact, humans, and even Jesus, recognize things all the time, and that’s the problem. It is not that they recognize or value the wrong things, but rather that recognition is their primary approach to the world. Paradise Regained shows us that this mechanism for evaluating current values – not just the values themselves – hampers salvation, reading, and true conversion. The brief epic reaffirms this utter suspicion of recognition by making Satan the voice of kairos and, thus, the notion that there is a significant, opportune time for performing acts of deliverance. To recognize such opportunities, one must know not only the global plan, but also the best means of fulfilling or completing such a plan. So Satan insists that ‘each act is rightliest done, / Not when it must but when it may be best’ (4.475–6) and that ‘Zeal and Duty are not slow; / But on Occasions forelock watchful wait’ (3.172–3). Unlike Samson Agonistes, Paradise Regained appears to present kairos as a temptation, not just because it is an attempt to read and appoint God’s plan, but also because it imagines God as acting in such a calculating fashion. There is a fundamental division in this God who intends and then acts. As a result, the Son himself rejects kairos and the logic of purposive instrumentality that it entails: All things are best fullfil’d in their due time, And time there is for all things, Truth hath said: If of my raign Prophetic Writ hath told That it shall never end, so when begin The Father in his purpose hath decreed.

(3.182–6)

The Father’s purpose here is decidedly different from a plan that needs steps to achieve its goal: instead of decreeing his purpose, the Father in his purpose has decreed. A purposive end is packed, proleptically, back into the Father’s initial decree, effectively denying a progression toward ends. In fact, this decree is the opposite of kairotic recognition:

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God orders the opportune times with the sheer power of his voice, not a calculation of means and ends. Truth’s opening statement in this passage poses a similar challenge: if time there is for all things, then actions are not defined by the logic of singular opportunity. Here, the problem with kairos is not just presumption, assuming that one knows both the ends and means of God’s inscrutable plan. Rather, it seems that the very notion of a projected end is the problem, as well as the logic of singular means that attends it. The Son rejects kairos not because of its invasive hubris, but rather because it is a mistaken model of how divine action, and ultimately any loving devotional action, occurs. If kairos is a problem for our characterization of God, it also appears as an erroneous characterization of our own abilities and actions. At the end of Book 3, Jesus rejects Satan’s political temptations by emphasizing humanity’s fundamental misrecognition of the divine: ‘no, let them serve / Thir enemies, who serve Idols with God’ (3.431–2). Jesus quickly adds that humans do not have the knowledge necessary to recognize kairotic opportunities for deliverance or salvation: ‘Yet he [God] at length, time to himself best known, / Remembring Abraham by some wond’rous call / May bring them back repentant and sincere . . . To his due time and providence I leave them’ (3.433–5, 440). So if we cannot recognize these really significant moments, what then are we supposed to do in the world? The problem in this register is not just human misrecognition. Kairos itself consigns devotees to the same slavish attachment to purpose that we noted in the context of the early religious verse: in waiting for the opportunities that will arise or be given, one treats God either as an arbitrary tyrant or as the architect of a purposive order. In either case, devotees may be working and struggling in the world, but they are not freely acting in it. And this is really the lure of Satan’s most damning and truly challenging question to the Son, the temptation to treat action as governed by ends, as a functional labour or intervention: ‘What dost thou in this World?’ (4.372). If one imagines action as a loving gesture without reward or purpose, then the Son does all kinds of things. If one imagines action as Satan and Stanley Fish do, then the Son does nothing and, moreover, has no legitimate response to Satan’s challenge.82 When the Son rebukes Satan’s presumption and myopic, unimaginative empiricism, there is ultimately more to it than the customary refusal to appoint God’s ineffable ways. This is not just a pious refusal to rifle through God’s secrets, but rather a challenge to the very teleological order that distinguishes ends and means. First, Jesus scolds Satan for thinking that only his offered means are the way to accomplish the di-

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vine mission: ‘Means there shall be to this, but what the means, / Is not for thee to know, nor me to tell’ (4.152–3). Quite frankly, the poem suggests that the Son is wrong about this, that there shall be means. In claiming not only that Satan is not fit to be convinced, but also that it is not his responsibility to explain the means at all, the Son appears to devolve means onto God. But perhaps this is too hasty, as God’s actions do not fit this model in which process tends toward an end. In fact, the ‘means’ that the Son ascribes to the Father may well be so substantially altered as to be unrecognizable as instruments in a purposive plan. When Satan characterizes God as motivated by the reward of glory (3.111), the Son immediately retorts not just that this isn’t God’s motivation, but rather that God is not motivated in the same way that humans or other beings are. God deserves glory not because he seeks it, but ‘since his word all things produc’d, / Though chiefly not for glory as prime end, / But to shew forth his goodness’ (3.122–4). God is not communicating goodness to humans, hoping that they will understand or recognize it, but simply expressing it: and expression, unlike communication, has no destination. Unlike the Nativity Ode, in which Milton describes ‘unexpressive notes’ so as to avoid telos, Paradise Regained uses expression to counter the presupposition that language is a device for conveying God’s goodness to readers. Yet just as ‘unexpressive’ was a free choice in the early poem, ‘expressing’ is a radically free choice here: God does not need to express his goodness, or to express it in this particular fashion. ‘Showing forth goodness’ might be a reason or first cause for God’s creation of the universe, but it is not a purpose or final cause, an end that we recognize and then give back as praise. As a result, the poem demonstrates that as soon as one begins to imagine expression as a planned communication with an aim, one has mistaken the nature of divine or devotional action.83 The purposeless love that I am trying to limn in this section parallels the Christian Doctrine’s claims for an unnecessary sacrament. Both appear as activities not absolutely necessary for salvation or devotion. Paradise Regained does not justify or explain away the superfluousness of reading by appealing to the knowledge that it would transmit to readers, or to the pleasure that it would provide. Instead, the brief epic explicitly foregrounds the absence and irrelevance of an aim, whether that aim be salvation or interpretation. Superfluous purposelessness is the point or the effect of the poem. In this sense, Paradise Regained appears substantially more radical than the earlier devotional verse: instead of preserving a teleological endpoint by packing it back into an immanent present, the

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brief epic disavows purpose. What we have left then is an activity, reading, very much like the sacraments insofar as it is not required for salvation and, moreover, entails an attention to an immanent presence. Yet this attention, although it is without purpose, is certainly not without effects. We are all accustomed to Christianity’s calls for a more careful evaluation of our worldly desires: instead of the pleasures and perils of this-worldly, materialist pursuits, we should cast our desires toward heavenly things, the truly valuable objects. Paradise Regained and the early religious verse, however, reject precisely such a model of reform by insisting that such a shift in goals is neither revolutionary nor radical insofar as it does not even remotely change how we actually act. These poems’ consistent assault on purposiveness indicates that radical change, at the salvational and political level, entails a fundamental alteration of our most basic understanding of planning and action: not just what we value, but how we value. To put all too fine a point on it, at least one consequence of an immanent, monist deity, particularly one present in the word and sacrament, is a devotional reading evacuated of all these political purposivenesses and programs, not so as to insulate devotion from politics, but so as to insulate politics from purpose.84 The Son, of course, rejects precisely this sort of political calculation when he condemns, of all things, Satan’s role in David’s census (3.409–14). For Quint, this moment stands as a rejection of ‘political arithemetick,’ the rising science of demography and other techniques for rationalizing and rendering more efficient the entire population.85 Quint acknowledges that Jesus does not advance an ‘alternative political program’ and, as a result, characterizes Milton’s politics as lacking: ‘if Milton did not opt for simple quietism, neither did he find a formula for political action that goes beyond individual acts of piety.’86 I would add, though, that the Son’s condemnation of the census is not just a rejection of statist purposes, but a suspicion of all programs and purposes, regardless of their author. After all, the Son begins this rejection of the census with a general condemnation of Satan’s appeal to means: ‘Means I must use thou say’st, prediction else / Will unpredict and fail me of the Throne’ (3.394–5). Paradise Regained does not then simply affirm the identity of the personal and the political, or the importance of internal self-regulation as a step on the way to politics. Rather, the brief epic’s advocacy for inward self-sufficiency forms part of a broader rejection of purposive means. Individual acts of piety are themselves acts of politics precisely insofar as they refuse to offer a presumptuous formula for action.

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Paradise Regained shows us that we have never – moralizing sermons against idolatry to the contrary – paid adequate attention to things themselves. When we are purportedly paying attention to a desire or a poem, we are too often really paying attention to its goal, pleasure or meaning, the point at which we can stop, finally, paying attention. Milton’s brief epic has little patience for such false devotion and, ultimately, shows how idolatry is not so much a fetishization of things, but rather a fetishization of ends. It also insists that this idolatry of ends, and the modern critical demand for purposiveness that mirrors it, amount to a slavish demand for direction. In other words, the persistent desire for a recognizable program of action stands as evidence of our continued wish to be told what to do. It is in this sense that the Son’s bare ‘no’ is a decidedly radical act: he just says ‘no’ to plans, and resists the logorrheic urge to add ‘but.’ Once one has achieved or recognized God’s love, there remains an imperative to act, to do something in response to this love other than idly appreciate it or rest assured in its meaning. In focusing too intently on interpretation, though, a reader always short-circuits this particularly active model of reading: unnecessary, a-teleological, non-mercenary, purposeless. Reading, separate from the epistemological and experiential frames of hermeneutics, attends to a poem not because it must, or because it hopes for some pleasurable reward, but rather for no viable reason whatsoever. It is the paring away of these extraneous aims – a persistent, if not universal ‘no’ – that Paradise Regained enacts. It is also the avenue to simultaneously the simplest and most bizarre of Milton’s monist, vitalist devotional tenets: the act of reading – attending to a thing in its immanence, not out of duty, expectation, or even hope, but out of a passionate, desirous affection – is not just like, but actually is the act of love.

Conclusion: Reading Is Love

To assert that reading is love, let alone to argue for such a claim, runs the risk of evoking the wishiest and washiest mysticisms and sounds dangerously similar to rhapsodies about the power of the lyric. As I have tried to indicate throughout this study, however, I do not think that these poets, or my reading of them, tie verse to a mysterious, or not so mysterious, transcendent realm. In attempting to show how seventeenth-century religious lyrics resist and evade interpretation as an end, this study does not serve as a prelude to an assault on literary criticism, in its New Critical, poststructuralist, or other variants, but rather a plea – one might even call it a manifesto – for the inclusion of the activity of reading as a subject of study in the broader literary critical pantheon. This book began with a conviction similar to Robert Darnton’s: ‘we do not know what reading is when it takes place under our own noses.’1 Such a conviction does not reduce to one more forensic indictment of the hermeneutic claims of early modern literary study, but rather demands that we attend to the sheer activity of reading verse independent of the impulse to translate, interpret, paraphrase, or otherwise metaphorize it.2 If this book has obsessed over the nature of metaphor, textual variations, and even punctuation, this focus has not been solely the result of crypto-formalist tendencies on the part of the author. Instead, I have attempted to show how each of these poets engages with the concept of translation or conveyance, the carrying-over of metaphor, not necessarily so as to critique or hobble it, but so as to attend to an activity that, because of a residue (at least) of sacramental presence, requires reverent attention to words in their own right. As Terry Eagleton so convincingly notes, this phenomenon is not unique to seventeenth-century verse, but rather is an adumbration of a central feature of an entirely orthodox Christian ethics:

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It [ethics] is a question of how to live most richly and enjoyably, relishing one’s powers and capacities purely for their own sake. This self-delighting energy, which is entirely without point or function, stands in no need of justification before some grim-faced tribunal of History, Duty, Geist, Production, Utility, or Teleology . . . The morality Jesus preaches is reckless, extravagant, improvident, over-the-top, a scandal to actuaries and a stumbling block to real estate agents.3

Modern readers – even real estate agents – are certainly accustomed to such a claim for the revolutionary nature of Jesus, but we have been all too willing to assume that revolution can conform, or can be made to conform, to progressive change. We often reduce the revolutionary change that Christianity demands to a shift in the ends on which we focus. We all know these familiar injunctions: instead of the pleasures and perils of this-worldly, materialist pursuits, we should cast our desires toward heavenly things, the truly valuable and desirable objects. Thus, when modern readers talk about revolutionary change, we are often only talking about reform. Yet as Eagleton’s enumeration of all the purposes that must fall by the wayside indicates, revolutionary change entails the fundamental alteration of our most basic understanding of planning and action: again, not just what we value, but how we value. These lyrics reveal that at least one consequence of an immanent deity, particularly one present in the word and sacrament, is a devotional reading and practice evacuated of all these purposivenesses and programs – or, in Deleuze and Guattari’s terms, all this work.4 And in turn, early modern religious verse shows us that we have never, despite a long and storied history of hyperventilating, handwringing condemnations of materialism and idolatry, really attended to things in themselves. If modernity has neutered Christianity’s revolutionary potential, it has done so primarily by rendering it subservient to this reassuringly reformist concept of teleology, according to which we always know exactly what we’re doing: working. Although the preceding chapters have spent considerable space unpacking the religious motives and consequences of this sacramental reading practice, this study really does not attempt to intervene in the current squabble about secular and post-secular epochs, or the fabled turn, or return, to religion in literary study.5 Early modern religious verse does not teach us that all literary criticism is really pious or religious after all or that the denizens of secular reason are all hypocrites and frauds. Instead, I have argued that these poems are not about possessing or achieving God’s affection or desire, but rather about how one responds,

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how one acts after or as one achieves it. Desire then is not a quest, but rather a comportment. In this respect, this study’s focus on religion follows the same pattern as its focus on reading: as opposed to an account of religion’s causes or effects, it examines the activity of devotion in this verse, what it is one actually does when one does religion in lyric – not the object that one wants, the creed that one believes, or the meaning that one desires. Finally, one of the potential conceptual consequences of this book, I hope, has been an argument, however implicit, for forestalling the attempt to turn the study of reading in literary criticism into a primarily empirical matter, one of accounting for readers’ marginalia, journalistic or autobiographical comments on their own reading practices, etc. In arguing for a reading practice grounded in immanence, I hope to recuperate this particular early modern slice of reading practices from reactionary resistances to poststructuralism,6 the new empiricism fostered by the history of the book scholarship, and the self-satisfied vapidity endemic to contemporary scholarship on teaching and learning, in which what one thinks about one’s own reading amounts to the primary, or only, evidence of what is actually happening in the process of reading. As this last bugbear makes clear, this study does have a contemporary pedagogical thrust, one aimed squarely at the way in which the teaching of literature celebrates reading for its own sake, only to abandon this purportedly naïve cheerleading in the interests of pragmatic and political justifications. That said, I acknowledge the great danger of general dicta about reading that Blanchot registers: ‘What most threatens reading is this: the reader’s reality, his personality, his immodesty, his stubborn insistence upon remaining himself in the face of what he reads – a man who knows in general how to read.’7 As a result, this study attends to the singularity or particularity of reading practice, particularly insofar as it charts these poets’ evasions of a homogenous and uniformly predictable activity of subject creation: reading is a specific local act, not a generalizable means. By focusing on the ways in which early modern religious verse disavows an understanding of desire as lack, and the modern subject that comes with it, this study shows how these lyrics reimagine the devotional self, as neither constitutively lacking nor fundamentally a product of the dialectic. It is this detour around the subject, as opposed to a critique of it, that makes Deleuze’s work a pivotal conceptual echo in this book.8 In this conclusion, I would like to leach out, however briefly, some of the consequences of a reading practice conceived as selfcontained, unnecessary, and purposeless for our understanding of love

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and desire, for religious devotion and for modern pedagogical and critical practices. At least one of these last consequences, as we will see, is that our most naively utopian paeans to reading really do not go far enough in celebrating an activity without end. Desire and Love Whereas Blanchot shows us how reading must proceed singularly, and not at the level of an abstract or general praxis, I have tried to show throughout how desire follows a similar model in early modern religious verse. The target, throughout this study, has been a psychoanalytic or dialectical desire constituted in and by lack and its incompatibility with a devotion that construes divinity as both incarnate and immanent. But asserting that desire works immanently is only the premise, not the conclusion of this work. Instead, the chapters included here have attempted to show precisely how this premise of desire unfolds in these four canonical poets. If there is a general conclusion to be gleaned from these analyses, however, it resides in precisely this question of singularity and what it means for the comparison of sexual and religious desires. As Richard Rambuss notes, metaphorization and spiritualization often denude early modern religious verse of its erotic, bodily, and affective charges: ‘These devotional guides and stimulants do not offer up their highly wrought amorous scenarios simply as analogies in the service of evincing, however dimly, some aspect of the otherwise ineffable mysteries of spiritual life. Rather, they bespeak a devotion that is – and not just is like – an erotic experience, an affective shock that seldom registers as “just” spiritual.’9 Here, though, I am interested not in the erotic or bodily nature of religious existence, but in the very specific activity that is religious or devotional desire and, in particular, all of the ways in which this brand of desire is not remotely comparable to sexual or erotic desire. This book does not hope to preserve religious desire from the taint of sex so much as it hopes to know what desire is, as an activity, before making broader comparisons. I would argue that we do not really know what sexual desire is either, that it is not more readily available to us as a form of knowledge, and thus such a discussion of the nature of religious desire might actually help modern readers understand the forces at work within eros. The point is not to beat up on psychoanalysis because it is anachronistic,10 or because it is tied to the messy business of eroticism and the unconscious, but rather to point up the limits of a desire that always already knows where it’s going

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for a religious verse that might find such a repetitive cycle both prideful and worldly. Psychoanalytic approaches to these lyrics mistake all their talk of desire, thinking that it connotes longing and not love. The problem is not that God is so grand or transcendent or remote that pleasure or fulfilment is deferred indefinitely. Rather, this verse consistently shows a desire that does not have satiation as its aim: its object is either immanent, and thus not lacking, or, more often, its object disappears from the entire desiring process. To translate this out of the idiom of psychoanalysis, these religious lyrics depict desire not as a courtly love quest for an absent mistress, however idealized and transcendent: this is not the drama of a romantic comedy, with obstacles to be overcome, a climax and brief denouement. These poems, instead, reveal a loving union already achieved, but one in which desire must still persist. They eschew the adolescent drama of chasing and achieving God’s affection, or any drama for that matter: these lyrics are neither Romeo and Juliet, nor A Midsummer Night’s Dream.11 Instead, they present the much less spectacular, but arguably more interesting phenomenon of desiring and responding to the divine love that one already possesses, or in which one already subsists. Achieving God’s love, after all, is not a quest or a mission: regardless of one’s confessional allegiance, God makes the first move via his offer of grace. The problem, if we want to call it that, is what to do with this freely offered but also horrible love, to use Deleuze’s term for it: For this is what was already horrible – the manner in which Christ loved. This is what would permit a religion of Power to be substituted for the religion of love. In Christ’s love, there was a kind of abstract identification, or worse, an ardor to give without taking anything . . . Found by Mary Magdalene, who wants to give up everything for him, he perceives a small glimmer of triumph in the woman’s eye, an accent of triumph in her voice – and he recognizes himself in it. Now this is the same glimmer, the same accent, of those who take without giving.12

Excessive giving and voraciously acquisitive taking produce the same glimmer of power, at least according to Deleuze and D.H. Lawrence. Deleuze pegs this love to the production of the ego, and thus treats it as something that impedes, hampers, or otherwise impairs the soul: ‘For love is not the individual part, it is not the individual soul, it is rather what makes the individual soul an Ego [Moi]. Now an ego is something to be given or taken, which wants to love or be loved, it is an allegory, an

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image, a Subject, it is not a true relation.’13 Yet this egoic, transactional love, imagined as a type of giving, is not the love we have witnessed in early modern devotional lyrics: love is not tied to the model of transgressive excess and reciprocal recognition and exchange that Deleuze here, I think rightly, finds suspicious. However, this verse does chart a version of this danger, the fear that the devotee will transform into this subject, will enter this system of gift exchange, and fall prey to all of the horrible loves and triumphalist giving that Deleuze anatomizes. The activity presented in these lyrics is precisely the attempt to fend off these dangers, the danger, in sum, of non-relation. These poems show us that the real danger in devotion is not an acquisitive desire without love, but rather a self-satisfied love, either giving or receiving, without desire. Divine love and, I would argue, love in general are difficult not because they are difficult to get, but because their self-referentiality borders on idolatry – one must love something in its own right – and because narratives of their transmission or acquisition always threaten to contaminate their active practice or performance, in effect reducing love to a message, affect, or quality that one receives or gives – it hardly matters which – once and for all. This is not the narcissistic love of Romeo for Rosalind, which always proceeds down the same dialectical path of an other reflected in the self, or vice versa. In devotional verse, love is, instead, an action that refers only to itself, not because it reaffirms or stabilizes, however ineptly, a self-involved subject, but rather because attending to an action in its own right is the only way to avoid precisely this reassertion of the self in a moment designed to evade it. What looks to modern readers like the most narcissistic of involutions appears in this verse as the means of divesting oneself of the subject’s fundamental lacks, paranoia, and voraciousness. The immanence that these poems offer then is neither an overwhelming chaos of stimulation against which we fight and which we try to order, nor a harbour of comforting presence for which we yearn. And it is here that this study connects to broader themes within early modern literary study: instead of thinking of sense, or immanence, or poetry as a creation that compensates for absence, or as a basic givenness, this book shows that immediacy demands a much thicker concept of relation, what is actually going on in this space in between things and terms.14 I maintain that early modern studies and literary criticism in general have tended to treat the content of relation and desire as an empty distance, a vacuum or gulf that must be traversed, whereas this verse presents a full, positive notion of distance and relation, that there is something in be-

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tween other than a measured journey, or an empty difference stretched to its asymptotic limit. In contrast to this prevailing critical tendency, Bruce Smith’s carefully nuanced account of historical phenomenology insists on the importance of how one knows to what one knows, of an attention to immanent action instead of just aims. Here, I have tried to thicken this ‘how,’ to show what happens after the obliteration of the distinction between subject and object that Smith describes.15 In sum, early modern devotional verse offers early modern studies an account of love as attention to a relation or action as such, not a gift, an attention unattenuated by the terms and aims of this relation. Or to put it another way, it offers the possibility of treating verbs as things, not merely as lines on a grid or processes on the way toward their objects. In short, it actually offers a way to write earnestly and sincerely about the very activity of love. Religion If modern criticism has often ignored the challenges to telos and utility presented by early modern religious verse, it is not because literary criticism is fundamentally impious or even secular, but rather because it exhibits the wrong type of piety. As Lori Branch argues, ‘To read is, in some sense, to be religious. It is to situate oneself in the realm of language, which is a realm of uncertainty, of doubt, and of belief.’16 In contrast to Branch’s contention that reading provokes conviction or doubt, it has been the task of this study to show in what sense the activity of reading itself is religious and, just as importantly, the ways in which this activity eschews concern with faith, doubt, and persuasion. To put it somewhat baldly, once we believe, or have faith, or receive grace, or are saved, what do devotees, or readers, do other than wait? This project has described the sorts of desirous and reading activities that these four authors advance in answer to this deceptively simple question. Herbert consistently insists that God’s love is immanent and trains readers away from a goal-oriented model of religious devotion. Crashaw, instead of Herbert’s more explicit lesson, opts for affirming an indistinct universe in which it is impossible to separate means and ends, tenor and vehicle, earthly believer and heavenly object. Donne reconceives anxiety and fear as desirable immanent states without end or hope of consolation, ultimately offering them as the only appropriate response to a divinely offered love. And finally, Milton advances an almost world-weary proleptic collapse of ends and beginnings so as to depict a monist devotional

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universe in which the problem of lacking consummation never even occurs. Despite this variety of responses to an immanent divinity, all of these poets share a concern with depicting or attending to the action, comportment, or disposition that divine love requires or elicits. These poems do not merely represent a devotional drama or situation or status, expressing it or transmitting it to readers as a model or exhortation. Rather, reading – and perhaps also writing (but that is a story for another day) – these lyrics is what one does other than just waiting, sitting on one’s hands, for the parousia. Certainly, many of these poems fall within the encomium tradition, but even if we read these lyrics as praising God, we are left with a similar basic conundrum: how does praise change when it necessarily can have no function?17 In this respect, even praise appears as a pointless goal, not a viable activity. God, after all, does not need this gift and depicting him as desiring such a gift only returns us to the endless dialectic of desiring the other’s desire. With all this talk of immanence and the evasion of the hermeneutic, much of this study has undoubtedly appeared like a shadow assault on the notion of mysterious or transcendent divinity. Yet the actual being of God and its relation to human experience are really beyond the scope of this book and I certainly would not maintain that there is no element of transcendence in these authors’ devotions or even their poetry. In fact, I have a substantial amount of sympathy with Regina Schwartz’s general account of the sacramental sign and the poetry that stems from it: A sacramental poetry is a poetry that signifies more than it says, that creates more than its signs, yet does so, like liturgy, through image, sound, and time, in language that takes the hearer beyond each of those elements . . . A sacramental poetics is not any sign-making, then, for it entails a radical understanding of signifying, one that points beyond the life and presence of the artist, to manifest a new world.18

The preceding pages simply ask why we should continue to call this signifying if it is so radically altered, whether, in fact, such a conceptual manoeuvre tames the transformative potential of the sacrament. If transformative manifestation of this new domain is the ultimate effect of the sacrament, how exactly would we know that we have moved beyond the given elements? My questions here may seem to be pedantic quibbles, a retread of a debate from the mid-1970s about the nature of signification, but at base this minor dispute revolves around the question of whether sacramental poems signify in a heightened or intensified way, or whether

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this amplification of signification ultimately issues in the dissolution of this function. It is a question, then, of what it is that sacramental poems do: signify, be, act, or some combination thereof? This study does not reject the notion that sacraments generally work to link the human world to a transcendent reality, that their primary theological and devotional function is to pack the divine back into the human. I would simply maintain that once this goal has been achieved, sacramental poetry does not need to repeat it, but rather to respond, with love and desire, to this transcendence rendered immanent. Although this book makes some fairly grand claims for poetry, it does not maintain that lyrics replace the eucharist itself as an event or try to double its function. Nor would I maintain that religious devotion itself is exhausted by poetry, that poetry is all there is to do, or that it is the necessary avenue to salvation. Instead, it is a very specific attempt to grapple with an immanent divinity and all the anxiety, love, desire, fascination, and sheer terror that such an immediate presence provokes. It is for this reason, these lyrics’ focus on the activity of devotion in its own right, that this book actually has so little to say about the nature of faith. Faith is where all of these poets begin, and the verse itself is less about confirming or propagating this baseline conviction, regardless of whether we imagine it as intellectual or affective, and more about how this premise fundamentally alters not just what one does, but how one does it. As with Eagleton’s question of revolution, the devotional task is not just to change the aims of one’s action, which is easy enough as a goal, but to change the very nature of action, a much more difficult procedure. We have all read some variation of this claim before, of course – that faith is not just an intellectual, self-consciously willed commitment, that it is a type of being and action in the world that exceeds planning. Yet the radically transformative consequences of such a position often disappear when criticism begins its process of explanation or determination of a poet’s confessional allegiances: once we start explaining where an action began and where it’s going, we are halfway down the garden path to turning it into a mercenary calculation. The problem that early modern religious lyrics pose is how to analyse, explain, or otherwise discuss an action without turning one’s attention from that action itself, without turning, that is, to causes, plans, or ultimate effects. Thus, we end where we began, with Herbert. ‘Affliction (I)’ famously closes with a couplet that seems to imply that one cannot know one’s own motives or affections: ‘Ah my deare God! though I am clean forgot, /

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Let me not love thee, if I love thee not’ (65–6). To make sense of this final line is easy enough: one of these loves refers to an interior state of being, a mysteriously inaccessible core of the speaker where his true sentiments really reside. So either the speaker asks that God forbid his acts of love if he does not really love God sincerely; or the speaker asks that God prevent his internal love if his acts are inappropriate in some fashion, if they do not amount to love. Yet what if these two ‘loves’ refer to one and the same action, not an unconscious or opaque core? If love is an activity in both instances, the line would read, in an unfortunately glib paraphrase, ‘do not let me do what I am not doing.’ The effect here is very much the same as what we have already witnessed in ‘Love (III)’: the notion of a self-possessed and possessive speaker, one structurally identical to the modern subject, opens the poem, only to be dismissed by its end. ‘Love (III)’ begins with a speaker retreating into itself – ‘Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back, / Guiltie of dust and sinne’ (1–2) – only to learn that activity, not endless selfexamination, is required: ‘So I did sit and eat’ (18). ‘Affliction (I)’ begins in similar fashion, with a speaker who will melt away as the poem progresses: When first thou didst entice to thee my heart, I thought the service brave: So many joyes I writ down for my part, Besides what I might have Out of my stock of naturall delights, Augmented with thy gracious benefits.

(1–5)

As is well known, the rest of the poem complains about affliction, sometimes reading it as a sign of favour, only to acknowledge that God frustrates this prideful confidence as well. When the speaker has been ground down to this level of trusting that affliction is a sign of neither salvation nor damnation, he demands that he be automatically useful in some fashion: Now I am here, what thou wilt do with me None of my books will show: I reade, and sigh, and wish I were a tree; For sure then I should grow To fruit or shade: at least some bird would trust Her houshold to me, and I should be just.

(55–60)

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The life of the tree is desirable here not because it escapes affliction, but because it escapes pointlessness. The speaker’s complaint about his books and reading is that they lack a programmed or prophetic end, that they cannot explain or foretell events. But this readerly desire for an exterior aim, as we have seen, is always under suspicion in seventeenthcentury verse: witness the Son’s condemnation of reading in Paradise Regained – ‘(And what he brings, what needs he elsewhere seek)’ (4.325). What seems most important here is that it is the subject’s desire for purposiveness that appears dubious: ‘Affliction (I)’ shows us an absurd wish for purpose in response to the unconsoling purposelessness of reading – even the radically other, an unconscious tree, turns out to have a function. The devotion that these lyrics envision then is without end in both senses: infinite and pointless. Yet this poetry also does not ask readers to marvel at the divine mystery of it all, to sit back in wonder and appreciate the ineffable absurdity of this divine love. This approach would be that of the existential tree, ironically aware of its own inherent pointlessness as well as the absurd propensity of human beings to dragoon it into a functionalist service and use it to make a convoluted anti-intellectual point about the divine order of the universe. Ultimately, if purposiveness is a problem for devotion, it is not just because telos ends up distracting devotees from the immanent divinity right in front of them. Rather, goals, aims, and the plans they describe turn devotion into the feeding of a spiritual need: the tree in ‘Affliction (I)’ is not an emblem of determined, soulless automatism, but of an end imposed unnecessarily and ludicrously from without; it is an emblem of choice, growth, and activity betrayed by plans and purposes, not by an absence of self-conscious will or subjectivity. It is in this very specific sense that we might follow Eagleton and call the devotion of these lyrics revolutionary: they describe, enjoin, and quite simply are a loving activity that evades the iron logic of struggle, subjection, and subjectivation. Even the most ludic accounts of excess and transgression affirm this logic and praise us for our labour of emancipation: we get to work very hard to resist, critique, or even ultimately transcend our chains, but we always still get to be us. A criticism focused on the aims and goals of religion, salvation and assurance, will always mistake the nature of devotion in these lyrics because it can conceive of religiosity only as something that devotees need or believe that they need – to stabilize this self, or save it – not as liberated activity that they desperately and passionately want. In this light, we should probably modify Menken’s bon mot about puritanism: for these poets at least, devotion is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, is turning

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into a subject. There may well be obedient subjects, religious subjects, and even faithful subjects, but this poetry maintains that there is no such thing as a devout or loving one. Pedagogy Despite this study’s insistence that the tactical calculation of objectives is anathema to devotional poetry, I would nonetheless maintain that positive effects issue from an understanding of desire and reading that does not jump to, or even tend toward, a telos or point. If there is a pedagogical lesson to be gleaned from my account of seventeenth-century devotional verse (and yes, I already hear the charges of hypocrisy that the notion of a ‘lesson’ evokes), it is that modern education’s attempt to relate objects of study to the interests, desires, and goals of students does a substantial injustice to the poetry under consideration. Yet there’s really more to this pedagogical question than the imperative to treat faithfully and earnestly the literary object of study, to do it justice and not mangle it to fit one’s own narcissisms (after all, we are all guilty of that, to a degree). Rather, the lesson that this verse teaches is that the problem with modern humanities education is not that students do not understand its purpose, and must then have this purpose explained, or rather sold, to them. Instead, it is that even the notion of the humanities’ uselessness or pointlessness remains much too purposive, linked as all such accounts are to an enlightened, if not Enlightenment, rational aversion to superstitious idolatry. After all, the most truly useless thing is not even the fetish, the object that the outsider recognizes, rationally and progressively, as useless and the insider considers an instrument of power and control. Instead, the most truly useless thing is an instrument whose purpose has been achieved: the fetish, in short, will never be as useless as the Allen wrench.19 When Stanley Fish selectively quotes Derrida’s injunction to ‘Beware of ends’ in matters pedagogical, one might sense an initial echo with some of the broader concerns of this study. Fish paraphrases Derrida’s position as ‘Beware, that is, of doing something for a reward external to its own economy.’20 Also all well and good, but as even a passing acquaintance with Fish’s understanding of teaching indicates, he doesn’t really believe it. Instead, the nature of goals determines the nature of an activity: ‘What’s the nature of the academic enterprise? Once that question has been answered, the scope of its goals can be specified precisely, and it becomes possible to determine who should be given the respon-

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sibility for achieving them.’21 Thus, for all the defence of an inherently involuted and useless humanistic study in Fish’s book, there’s little real respect for a poetry or a pedagogy conceived as divorced from ends. If there’s a pedagogical yield to my study, it revolves around asserting and advocating precisely such a fetishistic idolatry, an attention to the object of study that prevents, however provisionally, its appropriation by any aim or purpose, including student skills and knowledge. Yet even the phrase ‘object of study’ appears misguided in some respects. As Isobel Armstrong contends, a notion of reading that construes its own activity as a practice aimed at an object ends up maintaining a vacant distance between reader and text. For Armstrong, this is the necessary result of the Enlightenment’s distinction between affect and thought: Critique supported by the feeling/thought dichotomy actually rests on an account of the text as outside, something external which has to be grasped – or warded off. Despite the anti-positivist language of so much modern criticism and theory, the text is seen as other: it is object to a Kantian subject who stands over against the world in a position of power. This is distance reading, not close reading.22

Reading has never been close enough precisely because it has been conceived as a dialectical relation between subject and object, a transmission or recognition across an empty, unpopulated distance of non-relation: ‘I am not proposing a paranoid model of reader and text, but I do believe that all reading that is not reading for mastery necessarily gets caught up with, imbricated in, the structure of the text’s processes, and that this is where thought begins.’23 So what then would a close reading look like, one that started with a relation to the text, or by treating the poem as itself a relation, instead of imagining reading as overcoming distance? The close reading that Armstrong describes is not simply a vehicle for one more stale critique of the Enlightenment, but rather exposes the basic danger of treating the poem as an object in need of the supplement of relation, instead of as an already existing relation in its own right. Instead of starting with the faith that a poem will issue in meaning or unity, or that it needs this end in order to exist or act, close reading begins with faith in the poem, the reception of what is already present, and then proceeds to what happens after faith. Obviously, the brand of reading that I have traced in Donne, Herbert, Crashaw, and Milton does not lend itself to a classroom practice in which one asks what a given line means, or invites a plethora of individual,

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individually valid, interpretations. Such an approach remains within the pedagogical domain that Fish describes: the nature of an activity is determined by its aim or goal; activities are governed by their futural or teleological orientations, and analysis of a practice like reading amounts to an examination of the tactical efficiency, construed in the widest possible sense, of said instrument at achieving such an aim. Yet this is precisely to miss the focus of this verse, what it obsesses over to the point of monomania: that we don’t know what desire or reading are, as activities, if we only judge and analyse them based on where they end up. Again, it’s not that process is so much better than product, but that process is always already a part of product. Early modern devotional verse then presents us with, at least initially, a ground-clearing project, pruning away the assumptions that guide, however implicitly, modern literary criticism and its impulse to meaning. The more important positive content of this lesson, however, revolves around the affirmation of reading as a free activity, which should not be construed as advocacy for the notion of an active, as opposed to a passive reading style. If it appears difficult to produce a language appropriate to this activity, that is at least in part the result of the poverty of our understanding of how we might sincerely attend to a thing. It is relatively easy, after all, to attend to the object or the Other, particularly insofar as each already exists in an empty relation to the subject or self. It actually turns out, however, that it’s much more difficult to be a materialist, to attend to things as such, than complaints about deluded idolaters and other legendary rubes, just over the next hill, imply. In fact, even accusations of idolatry assume a simplicity to the concept of relation and possession that this verse denies. Reading, in contrast, entails attending to and receiving this thing, a poem, that wants nothing from us, but is still a type of relation. In short, this verse shows us that transaction and exchange, consumerist, phenomenological, or otherwise, are not the only models of relation or association. Love is the name of this relation and of the comportment we bring to it. Love then is not something one feels or something that one gives, but an attentive act that one performs and the attitudinal bearing that goes along with it. It is not a given, an emotion that we hope to elicit from students as a response to reading a poem. ‘I love it’ is not a response that we are trying to receive on an assessment form. In this respect, we should adapt Blanchot’s dictum about the danger of the reader who knows in general how to read: the great danger for love is precisely this lover, the lover who knows in general how to love. Instead of such a general theory, love is an affective disposition and an action that must be made in sin-

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gular instances in attentive response to specific immanent things. The pedagogy that these lyrics enjoin then is not a return to appreciation, the mystical taste-making in which we would read ‘Affliction (I)’ and sigh wistfully: appreciating the poem is neither reading nor loving it. After all, sighing in appreciation or longing is precisely what this poem mocks. Loving a poem is not an emotional attachment somehow opposed to analysis, or discussion, or explication. In fact, such an emotional attachment is just another way not to pay attention to the poem, but rather to revert to the subject as the ground of meaning or value. Such fulsome emotional responses are still too general to attend earnestly to a thing. It is not just that this poetry does not teach critical thinking or informed citizenship: complaining about this sort of functionalist skills-based learning is low-hanging fruit. Rather, these lyrics do not even issue in a general theory of reading. When we claim, on the contrary, that poetry teaches critical reading, that it’s one object among others that might lead us to this ability, we betray either duplicitous self-preservation or, even worse, a craven self-loathing, a refusal to care, not just about, but for this literary object with which we spend so much time. In the classroom, this means a different set of questions and a much more confrontational stance with other genres and other disciplines. So, no bells and whistles to allure student attention, but rather a tireless, relentless focus on the way that the thing itself, the poem, is interesting – and is the only thing that is interesting. Yet these lyrics also enjoin a different approach to, or even attitude toward explanation: a poem here is a thing valuable, interesting, and explicable only on its own terms, which means that one fairly quickly reaches the limit of the usefulness of comparison, not just to one’s own subjective experience and other disciplines, but also to other genres and poems. Attending to a poem in its own right means refusing to extract from this attention broader lessons or skills that are applicable to other things – novels for instance. Whether a novel can be read with the same love as a poem, whether it demands the same type of attention, is a question beyond the scope of this study.24 However, the pedagogy that issues from these lyrics requires a classroom in which we are willing to abandon a priori assumptions about the compatibility of different genres. It might turn out that reading novels makes us unable to or unfit for love and a class that is not willing to entertain this possibility has leaped too hastily to the reassuring conclusion that all reading and all literature are of the same sort. What this study of early modern verse proposes, in the end, is a pedagogy based on subtraction, narrowness, focus, even fetishism in the clas-

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sical sense: pretending not to know what one actually does know. We all know that literature is embedded in a welter of historical, political, and religious milieus or contexts, to use a decidedly démodé term. But all these contexts and connections breed understanding of a conveniently self-serving sort: a world of confidently interrelated unity and complementary complexity – a world that conveniently mirrors the fantastical self-projection of the university. The problem with this portrait is not its chummy insularity or relativistic refusal to affirm truth claims, but rather that it teaches our students that the blithe affirmation of this unity, beyond things, is what really matters, the affirmation of a general explanatory structure and the skills that go along with it. It asks students to pretend that all these disciplines fit harmoniously together – thus the endless empty mantras about inter- or post-disciplinarity – when, in fact, we all know they are at war. This study has advocated subtraction as a means of resisting the self-satisfied, transcendent survey of the world beneath that characterizes the self-reflective and self-confident notion of complementary understandings presupposed by the university form. This book and, more importantly, the poems examined herein advance an object-centred pedagogy, a focus on – or even devotion to – a thing for its own sake, independent of any purpose, goal, or aim. The product – or ‘through-put’ – of this pedagogy would not be a better worker, more informed citizen, or even the self-reflective understander or synthesizer of knowledge, but rather an idolater, which would at least be one step on the long road to that most elusive of macguffins, a student who actually and earnestly loved or cared about something. What a poem means is all too easy to discover, construct, or demonstrate. What it is, and what one’s own activity is in relation to it, is much more difficult to discern, precisely because it does not map so neatly onto the aforementioned practices of revealing, building, and proving – i.e., the practices of work. The pedagogy that this verse enjoins is one that would attempt to take seriously the dictum that we all assert, but that none of us really ends up acting upon: it is not about you. Such a pedagogical payload, initially at least, appears difficult to sell in a contemporary university obsessed with making disciplinary objects relevant to student lives. Yet if early modern devotional verse teaches us anything, it is not something so banal as that consumerist reading is bad or that we are all a bunch of raging narcissists: one does not need the bazooka of Milton to kill that particular gnat. Rather, it shows us just how slavish and soul-killing is the impulse to purposiveness and the cowed, labouring subject that comes along with it. It also at least begins the process

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of considering religion not as a straitjacket for desire, but as a radically liberating action and event. If there is a pedagogical upshot for this approach to early modern religious lyrics then this would certainly be it: there is more to life than being a subject, with all its passionate desires, noble commitments, and progressive aspirations. In other words, there is more to life than being you. There is reading and there is love.

Notes

Introduction: Desiring Sacraments and Reading Real Presence in Seventeenth-Century Religious Poetry 1 Brian Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002), 321. 2 For criticism of this verse explicitly indebted to Jacques Lacan, see Gary Kuchar, Divine Subjection: The Rhetoric of Sacramental Devotion in Early Modern England, Medieval and Renaissance Literary Studies, gen. ed. Albert C. Labriola (Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 2005), 8, 20; Ben Saunders, Desiring Donne: Poetry, Sexuality, Interpretation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2006), 148, 158, 171; Ronald Corthell, Ideology and Desire in Renaissance Poetry: The Subject of Donne (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1997), esp. 134–66; Douglas Trevor, ‘George Herbert and the Scene of Writing,’ in Historicism, Psychoanalysis, and Early Modern Culture, ed. Carla Mazzio and Douglas Trevor, Culture Work, ed. Marjorie Garber (New York: Routledge, 2000), 230, 252, 246. For a brief translation of the Lacanian model of desire into an early modern literary context, see Jonathan Dollimore, ‘Desire Is Death,’ in Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, ed. Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass, Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture 8, ed. Stephen Orgel (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996), 369–86. For arguments that the Reformation is a loss of presence or community, see Regina Mara Schwartz, Sacramental Poetics at the Dawn of Secularism: When God Left the World, Cultural Memory in the Present, ed. Mieke Bal and Het de Vries (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2008); Achsah Guibbory, Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton: Literature, Religion, and Cultural Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998), 9; R.V. Young, Doctrine and Devotion in Seventeenth-Century Poetry: Studies in Donne, Herbert, Crashaw, and Vaughan, Studies

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in Renaissance Literature 2, gen. ed. John T. Shawcross (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2000); Malcolm Mackenzie Ross, Poetry and Dogma: The Transfiguration of Eucharistic Symbols in Seventeenth Century English Poetry (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1954), vii, 54, 228–9; Louis L. Martz, The Poetry of Meditation: A Study in English Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century, Yale Studies in English 125, gen. ed. Benjamin Christie Nangle (New Haven: Yale UP, 1954), 7–8. For a focus on the Petrarchan inheritance and its influence on Donne’s sacramentalism, see Theresa M. DiPasquale, Literature and Sacrament: The Sacred and the Secular in John Donne, Medieval and Renaissance Literary Studies, gen. ed. Albert C. Labriola (Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1999), 145–72. 3 G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977), 118. For a related formulation of desire as lack in the psychoanalytic tradition, see Jacques Lacan, ‘The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious,’ Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton, 2002), 671–702. For a succinct account of the necessarily self-perpetuating nature of lack, see Elizabeth Grosz, ‘Refiguring Lesbian Desire,’ in Space, Time, and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies (New York: Routledge, 1995), 176: ‘Hegel conceives of desire as a lack, a unique one that, unlike other lacks, can only function if it remains unfilled, a lack, therefore, with a peculiar object all of its own – its object is always another desire. The only object desire can desire is one that will not fill the lack or provide complete satisfaction. To provide desire with its object is to annihilate it. Desire desires to be desired. Thus, for Hegel, the only object that both satisfies desire and perpetuates it is not an object but another desire. The desire of the other is thus the only appropriate object of desire. Psychoanalytic theory is one of the heirs to this tradition.’ 4 Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 4. Stewart also shows how Marx shares with Hegel an insistence that emancipation is a matter of labour: ‘Marx imagines the history of sense impression as a labor of emancipation that would only be finished in a moment of Hegelian fulfillment, a point of replete consciousness, where the senses, free of the contingency of nature and the political economy, were wholly determined and determining in accordance with human ends’ (41). 5 Ibid., 329–30: ‘Why not take seriously one of the most unsophisticated questions we can ask of an artist: “How long did it take you to make that?” What did this question mean, or did it even exist, before the alienation of wage labor? If we imagine the time of making as full of the pleasure, struggle, and absorption of sensual engagement with materials, we can rephrase the question: “How much time did you escape in making that?” or “In creating this form, how long were you able to ignore the social grid of abstract time?” ’

Notes to pages 5–7

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Stewart treats this escape from labour time, however, as a matter of intersubjective slowing down, and thus as a reaction against labour and modern capitalism. Instead of focusing on the resistance to labour time that writing produces, I argue for a non-reactive account of reading verse. I borrow this formulation from Richard Rambuss. See Closet Devotions, Series Q, ed. Michèle Aina Barale, Jonathan Goldberg, Michael Moon, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Durham: Duke UP, 1998), 6: ‘ “in those days they couldn’t have meant that ” – “that” typically being the sexual and, most often, the sexually transgressive.’ Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 342. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 397. For a similar account of free use that explores its links to messianism and love, see Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey, Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics, ed. Werner Hamacher (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005), 26: ‘Use: this is the definition Paul gives to messianic life in the form of the as not. To live messianically means ‘to use’ kl e-sis; conversely, messianic kl e-sis is something to use, not to possess.’ For a related argument about the heteronormative limitations of a desire oriented toward future ends, but from a perspective much more friendly to Lacan, see Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Series Q, ed. Michèle Aina Barale, Jonathan Goldberg, Michael Moon, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Durham: Duke UP, 2004), 106. Edelman describes this resistance to a future always coded as reproductive and heteronormative as an ‘act of resisting enslavement to the future in the name of having a life’ (30). His aversion to reproducing the same old sinful self and his attention to one’s immanent life are instructive for the religious poets under consideration here. For a related description of Western society’s preference for extended stability over rapid, zealous bursts of life, see Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York UP, 2005), 4–5: Halberstam takes as her example drug addicts, but here we might substitute devotees. George Herbert, ‘Love (III),’ in The Works of George Herbert, ed. F.E. Hutchinson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1941), ll. 1–6. All citations of Herbert’s poetry are from this edition. Line numbers will appear in parentheses. Cummings, 323. Stanley Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 156–223.

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12 For the argument that only the most radical Reformers and puritans actually sat at the communion table, see Richard Strier, Love Known: Theology and Experience in George Herbert’s Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 78. For Herbert’s own concerns about the familiarity of sitting at the communion table, see A Priest to the Temple, or, The Countrey Parson, in The Works of George Herbert, 259: ‘Hee that comes to the Sacrament, hath the confidence of a Guest, and hee that kneels, confesseth himself an unworthy one, and therefore differs from other Feasters: but hee that sits, or lies, puts up to an Apostle: Contentiousnesse in a feast of Charity is more scandall then any posture.’ A more extensive discussion of Herbert’s emphasis on taste as a means of sacramental participation occurs in chapter one. 13 For the related argument, culled from phenomenology, that how one knows is part of what one knows, see Bruce R. Smith, The Key of Green: Passion and Perception in Renaissance Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 8. Phenomenology, however, assumes that experience is a transaction between subjects and objects, as Smith acknowledges (16, 24). Such a presupposition still reaffirms the preeminence of the subject and, thus, seems incompatible with a devotional verse suspicious of the sinful self. Gail Kern Paster similarly contends that emotion is transactional and links her own account of an embodied fluid passion to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the body without organs: see Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body: Emotion and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 1–2, 21–2. Here, I would argue that the concept of transaction necessarily emphasizes the positions between which action occurs and, in so doing, reasserts the very dualism that Paster wishes to challenge (5, 244). In addition, Deleuze and Guattari’s emphasis on the primacy of relation – it exists independent of transactions – seems to undermine Paster’s use of the body without organs as a concept of transactional lability. See Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 318: ‘And even when the impulses and circumstances are given, the relation is prior to what it places in relation. Relations between matters of expression express relations of the territory to internal impulses and external circumstances: they have an autonomy within this very expression.’ 14 For the recent scholarly interest in passion and emotion that informs this study’s focus on desire, see Smith, The Key of Green; Paster, Humoring the Body; Katherine A. Craik, Reading Sensations in Early Modern England, Early Modern Literature in History (New York: Palgrave, 2007); Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson, eds., Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,

Notes to pages 9–11

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2004); Michael Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton, Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture, gen. ed. Stephen Orgel (New York: Cambridge UP, 1999). For examples of the turn or return to affect in literary and cultural studies, especially as it impacts the discussion of reading, see Karin Littau, Theories of Reading: Books, Bodies, and Bibliomania (Cambridge: Polity, 2006); Patricia Ticineto Clough and Jean Halley, eds., The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (Durham: Duke UP, 2006); Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke UP, 2003). Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves, 11, 14. Ibid., 17–18. Schoenfeldt focuses on the interior consequences of humoral physiology, instead of the immediate surface effects characteristic of Jonson’s comedy of humours (2). My study contends that immediacy and surface require a much more complicated response from devotees. See also Paster, Humoring the Body, 1–2, 14. For a similar argument about the regulation of passion, in which reading excites emotions but also does the work of regulation, see Craik, Reading Sensations in Early Modern England, 6–7. For an argument exposing the work-fetishism of many critical denigrations of pastoral, see Linda Woodbridge, ‘Country Matters: As You Like It and the Pastoral-Bashing Impulse,’ in Re-Visions of Shakespeare: Essays in Honor of Robert Ornstein, ed. Evelyn Gajowski (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), 189–214. Richard Strier, ‘Against the Rule of Reason: Praise of Passion from Petrarch to Luther to Shakespeare to Herbert,’ in Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion, ed. Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 24. Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 75–109; 136–62; Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Remnants of the Sacred in Early Modern England,’ in Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, ed. Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass, Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture 8, ed. Stephen Orgel (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996), 342; Judith H. Anderson, Translating Investments: Metaphor and the Dynamic of Cultural Change in Tudor-Stuart England (New York: Fordham UP, 2005), 50–1, 42; Schwartz, Sacramental Poetics, 1–17; Young, Doctrine and Devotion. Huldreich Zwingli, Commentary on the True and False Religion, ed. Samuel Macauley Jackson and Clarence Nevin Heller (Durham, NC: Labyrinth Press, 1981), 224.

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21 For Cranmer’s similar account of signification, see Thomas Cranmer, A Defence of the True and Catholic Doctrine of the Sacrament, in The Work of Thomas Cranmer, ed. G.E. Duffield (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1965), bk. 3, ch. 9, p. 145. For Augustine’s account of spiritual eating, which informs Cranmer’s account, see Homilies on the Gospel of John, trans. John Gibb and James Innes, in A Select Library of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, vol. 7, ed. Philip Schaff (Grand Rapids: W.B. Eerdman, 1956), tractate 26, ch. 12, p. 172. 22 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiæ: Latin Text and English Translation, vol. 56, trans. David Bourke (New York: Blackfriars/McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1975), div. 3, ques. 60, p. 9. All references to the Summa Theologiæ are from this edition. References will include division, question, article, and reply numbers, as well as the volume and page number in the Blackfriars/ McGraw-Hill edition. 23 For the argument that new historicist work on the eucharist reveals an impoverished understanding of presence as bare, sensible presence, see Sarah Beckwith, ‘Stephen Greenblatt’s Hamlet and the Forms of Oblivion,’ Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 33 (Spring 2003): 267. 24 Aquinas, Summa Theologiæ, vol. 59, div. 3, ques. 79, p. 7. 25 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, vol. 2, trans. Henry Beveridge (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1979), bk. 4, ch. 17, secs. 10, 21, 39. Subsequent references to the Institutes will appear in parentheses and include book, chapter, section, and page numbers. 26 ‘The Thirty-Nine Articles,’ in Religion and Society in Early Modern England: A Sourcebook, ed. David Cressy and Lori Anne Ferrell (New York: Routledge, 1996), 67. Emphasis added. 27 William Perkins, A Reformed Catholic, in The Works of William Perkins, ed. Ian Breward, Courtenay Library of Reformation Classics 3 (Appleford, UK: Sutton Courtenay Press, 1970), 558. Emphasis added. 28 Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Book 5, The Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker, vol. 2, ed. W. Speed Hill (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1977), 339. 29 For this notorious ambiguity, see Maurice F. Reidy, S.J., Bishop Lancelot Andrewes: Jacobean Court Preacher: A Study in Early Seventeenth-Century Religious Thought (Chicago: Loyola UP, 1955), 137, 146. 30 Lancelot Andrewes, ‘A Sermon Preached before the King’s Majesty at Greenwich,’ Resurrection Sermon 11, in The Works of Lancelot Andrewes, sometime Bishop of Winchester, vol. 3, ed. J.P. Wilson and James Bliss, Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology (Oxford: J.H. Parker, 1841), 343. 31 For a related description of love as an escape from the strictures of predication and purpose, both of which fundamentally limit free devotion, see

Notes to pages 15–16

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Agamben, 128: ‘Love does not allow for copulative predication, it never has a quality or an essence as its object . . . Love has no reason, and this is why, in Paul, it is tightly interwoven with faith.’ For a rejection of the presupposition that the Reformation is a loss of community or presence, see Ramie Targoff, Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 18; Robert Whalen, The Poetry of Immanence: Sacrament in Donne and Herbert (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), xvi. For the argument that poststructuralism replays a Reformation assault on presence, see Young, Doctrine and Devotion, 103–4; Eleanor J. McNees, Eucharistic Poetry: The Search for Presence in the Writings of John Donne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Dylan Thomas, and Geoffrey Hill (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 1992), 35; Catherine Pickstock, After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy, Challenges in Contemporary Theology, ed. Gareth Jones and Lewis Ayres (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1999), 263. For the related argument that the lyric is most socially connected when it is least communicative, see Theodor W. Adorno, ‘On Lyric Poetry and Society,’ in Notes to Literature, vol. 1, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia UP, 1991), 37, 43. For the argument that reading is the primary activity of devotion after the Reformation, see Debora Kuller Shuger, Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance: Religion, Politics, and the Dominant Culture, The New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics 13, gen. ed. Stephen Greenblatt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 37: ‘The act of reading is the experience of divinity’; Georgia B. Christopher, Milton and the Science of the Saints (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1982), 7: ‘With the Reformation, religious experience, to an overwhelming degree, became “literary” experience’; Gerald L. Bruns, Hermeneutics Ancient and Modern (New Haven: Yale UP, 1992), 146–7. See Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1979), 6: in Reformation theology there is an ‘overwhelming emphasis on the written word as the embodiment of divine truth’; Martz, The Poetry of Meditation, 150: ‘Not an Image restored from without by special grace, but an Image that has always been, indestructibly, there: the creative presence of divinity within man; a power, defaced and weakened by sin, but still potential, and once discovered and recovered by self-scrutiny, capable of achieving, through Charity, a high degree of conformity with the will of its Maker.’ Molly Murray, The Poetics of Conversion in Early Modern English Literature: Verse and Change from Donne to Dryden (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009), 24–5.

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37 Hegel, 2. For an argument for an affirmative model of change that nonetheless acknowledges that one cannot simply move beyond the dialectic, see John Muckelbauer, The Future of Invention: Rhetoric, Postmodernism, and the Problem of Change (Albany: SUNY Press, 2008), 10–16, 43–8: ‘For this postmodern challenge, in order to avoid repeating the dangerous ethicopolitical structure of active negation, the very nature of change must be at stake . . . Now, it is extremely important that this affirmative change not be thought of as something that is simply different from dialectical negation – such a gesture would repeat the very problems that it wants to address (“that was the old version of change; this is the new one”). Instead, the key challenge for responding to “the problem of change” is to both articulate and demonstrate an affirmative sense of change that is neither the same as dialectical change nor different from it’ (10, 12). 38 Cummings, 281. 39 Heather Dubrow, The Challenges of Orpheus: Lyric Poetry and Early Modern England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2007), 112. 40 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 318. For the related claim that desire, affect, and green are relations independent of the terms of these relations, see Smith, The Key of Green, 1, 37. 41 Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, ‘ “Studied for Action”: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy,’ Past and Present 129 (1990): 30–78. For an emphasis on the materiality of this transactional model of reading, see Craik, 3. For the argument that Jardine and Grafton’s work, as well as that of Kevin Sharpe and William Sherman, focuses on ‘the “goal-orientated” reading of professional scholars,’ see Heidi Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005), 2–3. 42 Lee Morrissey, The Constitution of Literature: Literacy, Democracy, and Early English Literary Criticism (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2008), 45: ‘With such arguments, reading subjectively – or reading as subjectivity – reaches its endgame: reading is so much a question of the reader that there is no need to read.’ 43 Although my claims about the importance of the singular object of the poem certainly are influenced by book history, as a discipline it tends to assume an unproblematic, empirical relationship between objects and readers. For the argument that history of the book has not done enough to incorporate reception theory, see Kevin Sharpe, Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England (New Haven: Yale UP, 2000), 39. 44 For a description of this in-between relation that does not connect points, see Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 293: ‘A line of becoming is not defined by points that it connects, or by points that compose it; on the

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contrary, it passes between points, it comes up through the middle, it runs perpendicular to the points first perceived, transversally to the localizable relation to distant or contiguous points.’ For the related notion of positive distance, see Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, ed. Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia UP, 1990), 173: ‘The idea of a positive distance as distance (and not as an annulled or overcome distance) appears to us essential, since it permits the measuring of contraries through their finite difference instead of equating difference with a measureless contrariety, and contrariety with an identity which is itself infinite. It is not difference which must “go as far as” contradiction, as Hegel thought in his desire to accommodate the negative; it is the contradiction which must reveal the nature of its difference as it follows the distance corresponding to it.’ 45 Jonathan Culler, ‘Why Lyric?,’ The New Lyric Studies: Theories and Methodologies, PMLA 123 ( January 2008): 202. 46 Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 198. 47 For the argument that modern secularism borrows from sacramentalism, see Schwarz, Sacramental Poetics, 14: ‘My contention is that instead of God leaving the world without a trace, the very sacramental character of religion lent itself copiously to developing the so-called secular forms of culture and that these are often thinly disguised sacramental cultural expressions.’ 1. Take and Taste, Take and Read: Desiring, Reading, and Taking Presence in George Herbert’s The Temple 1 Augustine, Confessions, vol. 1, ed. James J. O’Donnell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), bk. 8, sec. 29, p. 101. For the translation of this children’s refrain as ‘pick up and read,’ see Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991), 152. For accounts of this pivotal moment in the Confessions that emphasize the instantaneity of conversion, as well as the insistent present, unmoored from remembered pasts, that attends the moment of conversion, see Molly Murray, The Poetics of Conversion in Early Modern English Literature: Verse and Change from Donne to Dryden (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009), 9; Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 203–4. 2 For a brief synopsis of arguments about The Temple as a type of practical devotion, see Regina Mara Schwartz, Sacramental Poetics at the Dawn of Secularism: When God Left the World, Cultural Memory in the Present, ed. Mieke Bal and Het de Vries (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2008), 118–19, 173n5. My

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argument here differs from Schwartz’s and that of other critics in focusing on the impact of such an equation of devotion and poetry for poetic reading: what happens to reading when devotion takes poetry as its model? For the argument that the ‘Eucharist is the marrow of Herbert’s sensibility,’ see C.A. Patrides, ‘ “A Crown of Praise”: The Poetry of George Herbert,’ Introduction, The English Poems of George Herbert, ed. Patrides (London: Dent, 1974), 17. Matthew 26:26; Mark 14:22. In the case of Herbert, I have cited the Authorized Version throughout. George Herbert, ‘Divinitie,’ in The Works of George Herbert, ed. F.E. Hutchinson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1941), ll. 21–4. Unless otherwise noted, all citations of Herbert’s poetry are from this edition. Line numbers will appear in parentheses. For accounts of Herbert’s verse that emphasize the centrality of desire for his notion of devotion, see Debora Kuller Shuger, Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance: Religion, Politics, and the Dominant Culture, The New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics 13, gen. ed. Stephen Greenblatt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 99: the ‘hidden, private self is experienced as desire’; Arnold Stein, George Herbert’s Lyrics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1968), 134: ‘Whatever the merit of the program itself, in his hands it does not minimize the dignity or force of human desire; it does not arrive at its goal easily, by screening or suppressing the false desires while bestowing promotions on the true.’ For other accounts of the centrality of emotion to Herbert’s devotion, see Michael Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton, Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture, gen. ed. Stephen Orgel (New York: Cambridge UP, 1999), 113; Richard Strier, Love Known: Theology and Experience in George Herbert’s Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 174. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 156–7. For a related account, from later in the seventeenth century, of the operation of desire and passion that insists on the incompatibility of negation and desire, see Baruch Spinoza, The Ethics, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1982), pt. III, def. 1, p. 142. For a succinct account of the Hegelian and Lacanian models of desire, admittedly from a Deleuzian perspective, see Elizabeth Grosz, ‘A Thousand Tiny Sexes: Feminism and Rhizomatics,’ in Gilles Deleuze and the Theater of Philosophy, ed. Constantin V. Boundas and Dorothea Olkowski (New York: Routledge, 1994), 195: ‘desire is primary and given rather than lack; it is not produced, an effect of frustration or ontological lack, but is primitive and

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primary, not opposed to or postdating reality, but productive of reality. Desire does not take for itself a particular object whose attainment it requires; rather, it aims at nothing in particular above and beyond its own proliferation or self-expansion.’ See also Grosz, ‘Refiguring Lesbian Desire,’ in Space, Time, and Perversion: Essays on the Politics of Bodies (New York: Routledge, 1995), 175–9. 8 For a succinct version of the hermeneutic circle, see Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), 260–2: ‘Hence the task of hermeneutics has always been to establish agreement where it had failed to come about or been disturbed in some way . . . The anticipation of completion that guides all our understanding is, then, always specific in content. Not only is an immanent unity of meaning guiding the reader assumed, but his understanding is likewise guided by the constant transcendent expectations of meaning which proceed from the relation to the truth of what is being said.’ 9 For the related argument that poetry, since Plato, has played out the distinction between having and possessing knowledge, see Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, 112–13. Stewart’s discussion of what it means to love a voice also resonates with my concerns in this chapter. She contends that loving a voice amounts to loving an individuality as such, one not reducible to an aim or subsumable within a larger whole: ‘Yet it is not really the anticipation of reciprocity that fuels my love for your voice. Nor is it simply that the voice is metonymic to the body as a whole. We love voices as we love eyes – as vessels of that presence we call the soul’ (107). 10 For a related assertion about the complexity of sensory experience in Emily Dickinson’s lyrics, see Oren Izenberg, ‘Poems Out of Our Heads,’ The New Lyric Studies: Theories and Methodologies, PMLA 123 ( January 2008): 219: ‘And what constitutes experience – not just of poems, but experience itself – is Dickinson’s great subject here, so much so that she presents mere experience as a more radical possibility than revelation . . . Despite the apparent ease of introspective access to our own experiences, ordinary sense experience is more mysterious than revelation, which at least gives one company in the circle of the elect.’ In a similar vein, this chapter seeks to show that sensory experience, particularly the experience of taste, does not reduce to sheer, transparent self-evidence. For a critique of new historicist attempts to turn eucharistic presence into a bare, self-evident sensation, see Sarah Beckwith, ‘Stephen Greenblatt’s Hamlet and the Forms of Oblivion,’ Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 33 (Spring 2003): 261–80. For the argument that experience is fundamentally tied to conceptual appropriation of the world, in contrast to a presence linked to sense perception, see Hans

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Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2004), 39. 11 For an example of this critical tendency, in which experience explicitly appears as a wholeness that overcomes division and is not fundamentally riven by dialectical oppositions, see Achsah Guibbory, Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton: Literature, Religion, and Cultural Conflict in SeventeenthCentury England (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998), 78: ‘In his [Herbert’s] desire for harmony in a church increasingly “rent” with schism, his poetry focuses on the experience of devotional worship as something that can unite people, rather than on divisive topics of controversy.’ For a related account that emphasizes the sacramental merging of inward and external devotion, see Robert Whalen, The Poetry of Immanence: Sacrament in Donne and Herbert (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 147. 12 This version of ‘The H. Communion’ has a moderately complicated textual history. In the 1633 Temple and the Bodleian manuscript, it appears as a single poem with four six-line stanzas, followed by four four-line stanzas. In the Bodleian version, there also appears to be a space for another title between the two different sets of stanzas: see Herbert, The Bodleian Manuscript of George Herbert’s Poems: A Facsimile of Tanner 307, ed. Amy M. Charles and Mario A. DiCesare (Delmar, NY: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1984), 75; George Herbert, The Temple (Cambridge: Thomas Buck and Roger Daniels, 1633), 43–4. In the Williams manuscript, three of the last four four-line stanzas appear as part of an independent poem titled ‘Prayer’: the final stanza in Williams is different. The Williams manuscript also includes an entirely different poem entitled ‘The H. Communion,’ to which this chapter will turn in succeeding pages. See Herbert, The Williams Manuscript of George Herbert’s Poems: A Facsimile Reproduction, ed. Amy M. Charles (Delmar, NY: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1977), 34. 13 Jason Kerr first suggested that this description of a reception that also entails activity echoes Greek middle voice. I am also indebted to his account of middle voice in relation to Milton’s interpretive practice: Jason Kerr, ‘Scriptural Vehemence and Interpretive Agency,’ unpublished manuscript, 44: ‘Whereas the active-voice mode of thinking insists on a firm distinction between subject and object (or agent and patient), the middle voice allows for subject and object to be mutually involved in each other: the object is not acted upon without requiring some change in the subject as well. Thus, middle-voice agency is not merely instrumental. Even in the apparently simple activity of hammering a nail, for instance, a carpenter is more than the instrument whereby force is transferred through motion from the hammer to the head of the nail in the service of constructing something.’ See also

Notes to pages 32–5

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Herbert Weir Smyth, Greek Grammar, rev. Gordon M. Messing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1984), 390. Schwartz, Sacramental Poetics, 128. For a related argument that describes the eucharist as an intensification of the quotidian experience of eating, see Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves, 100: ‘The aura of wonder that suffuses the Eucharistic feast, Herbert suggests, is an intensified version of the quotidian miracle of digestion . . . Significantly, the intimacy between God and human that was lost because of a dietary transgression – consuming the forbidden fruit – is restored by an act of eating. Just as the grace of the elements enters the innermost chambers of the consuming subject, penetrating the wall separating matter and spirit, so can postlapsarian distance between human and God be spanned. The Eucharist, then, regains for humanity a sociability lost at the Fall.’ Although my argument echoes Schoenfeldt’s in this respect, he contends that this increased intensity tends toward a broader goal: the renewal of sociability between God and humankind. I argue that this goal is where Herbert begins and that The Temple describes the affective responses necessary after this renewal has been achieved. For the history of the Williams manuscript, see Amy M. Charles, ‘Introduction,’ The Williams Manuscript of George Herbert’s Poems, ix–xxxi. Given this study’s contention that the evasion of the concept of the subject is often central to this verse, I do not wish to lean too heavily on this biographical contingency. Whalen, The Poetry of Immanence, 139, 146. Subsequent references to The Poetry of Immanence will appear in parentheses. Michael Schoenfeldt, Prayer and Power: George Herbert and Renaissance Courtship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 218. Strier, Love Known, 74. Subsequent references to Love Known will appear in parentheses. In the context of ‘The Collar,’ Douglas Trevor describes this propensity in Herbert’s verse as ‘lacerating self-regard.’ See Douglas Trevor, ‘George Herbert and the Scene of Writing,’ in Historicism, Psychoanalysis, and Early Modern Culture, ed. Carla Mazzio and Douglas Trevor, Culture Work, ed. Marjorie Garber (New York: Routledge, 2000), 249. A Priest to the Temple, or, The Countrey Parson, in The Works of George Herbert, 259. Henry Vaughan’s ‘Dressing’ seems to read the final lines of ‘Love (III)’ as evidence of irreverence, evincing a suspicion of eating much stronger than Herbert’s subtle denigration. Vaughan’s speaker pleads for the grace necessary to avoid eating the sacrament like a beast and, in so doing, appears to

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take the speaker of Herbert’s ‘Love (III)’ to task for presumption: ‘Some sit to thee, and eat / Thy body as their common meat, / O let not me do so! / Poor dust should lie still low’ (Vaughan, ‘Dressing,’ in The Complete Poems, ed. Alan Rudrum [New York: Penguin, 1976], ll. 37–40). Here, the speaker eschews eating in favour of a more radical humility. One might certainly chalk this critique of ‘Love (III)’ up to Vaughan’s greater aversion to the presumptive familiarity of the radical reformers’ sacrament and a preference for a more decorous high-church distance from the sacramental elements. Regardless, Vaughan exhibits a concern with taste similar to Herbert’s and ultimately places familiar eating under even more explicit suspicion. For another potential critique of the speaker’s closing lines in ‘Love (III),’ see Milton’s attribution of this phrase to Satan three times in the course of forty lines in Paradise Regained: ‘only deign to sit and eat’ (2.336); ‘What doubts the Son of God to sit and eat?’ (2.368); ‘What doubt’st thou Son of God? sit down and eat’ (2.377) ( John Milton, Paradise Regained, in The Riverside Milton, ed. Roy Flannagan [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998]). For the argument that Satan’s ‘sit and eat’ is a perversion of Adam’s invitation to Raphael to ‘sit and taste’ in Book 5 of Paradise Lost (5.369), see Denise Gigante, ‘Milton’s Aesthetics of Eating,’ diacritics 30 (2000): 106. For a related account of taste conceived as immediate intuition and intimacy, see Julia Carolyn Guernsey, The Pulse of Praise: Form as a Second Self in the Poetry of George Herbert (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999), 98–9. For a discussion of the superiority of taste and smell to words within the Augustinian tradition, see Richard Todd, The Opacity of Signs: Acts of Interpretation in George Herbert’s The Temple (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1986), 24–5. In the earlier version of his argument in Renaissance Quarterly, Whalen describes this even more pointedly as a ‘carnal’ apprehension: see Whalen, ‘George Herbert’s Sacramental Puritanism,’ Renaissance Quarterly 54 (Winter 2001): 1286. For a related argument about taste, eating, and the concept of experience in body criticism and studies of humoral physiology, see my ‘ “Take and Taste”: Sacramental Physiology, Eucharistic Experience, and George Herbert’s The Temple,’ in Varieties of Devotion in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ed. Susan Karant-Nunn, Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance 7 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2003), 179–206. For a discussion of the transgressive and erotic valences of ‘simply conventional’ figures and metaphors, see Richard Rambuss, Closet Devotions, Series Q, ed. Michèle Aina Barale, Jonathan Goldberg, Michael Moon, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Durham: Duke UP, 1998), 1–9, 73–101.

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27 Debora Kuller Shuger, Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance, 43. Subsequent references to Habits of Thought will appear in parentheses. 28 Richard Hooker, ‘A Learned and Comfortable Sermon of the Certainty and Perpetuity of Faith in the Elect,’ Sermon I, in The Works of That Learned and Judicious Divine, Mr. Richard Hooker, vol. 3, ed. John Keble, 6th ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1874), 471. 29 Stewart, 32. 30 Bruce R. Smith, The Key of Green: Passion and Perception in Renaissance Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 16. 31 Ibid., 8. For related critical accounts of sensation and passion in the early modern period that emphasize both their ties to the body and the transactional nature of emotion, see Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body: Emotion and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 8, 18–19; Katherine A. Craik, Reading Sensations in Early Modern England, Early Modern Literature in History (New York: Palgrave, 2007), 2–3. 32 Hooker, ‘A Learned and Comfortable Sermon of the Certainty and Perpetuity of Faith in the Elect,’ 471. 33 For the argument that Herbert revises Petrarchan conventions in the service of a divine love in which fulfilment is a legitimate possibility and there is not ‘loss at every turn,’ see John N. Wall, Transformations of the Word: Spenser, Herbert, Vaughan (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988), 231. For a brief discussion of Herbert’s presentation of God as an ‘unresponsive’ Petrarchan mistress, see Todd, 47. Schoenfeldt also describes Herbert’s representation of the eucharist in The Temple as ‘both the pattern and fulfillment of sexual desire.’ See Schoenfeldt, Prayer and Power, 261. 34 Wall, 54–5. Wall’s argument, of course, draws on Sidney’s Defence of Poetry, and maintains that religious poetry should produce ‘praxis, not gnosis’ (65). 35 Brian Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002), 324. 36 Wall, 199. 37 Cummings, 327. 38 Stanley Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 215. 39 For the claim that this dialectical circle of recognition is resentfully sterile, see Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia UP, 1994), 135–6: ‘On the one hand, it is apparent that acts of recognition exist and occupy a large part of our daily life: this is a table, this is an apple, this the piece of wax, Good morning Theaetetus. But who can believe that the destiny of thought is at stake in these acts, and that when we recognise, we are thinking? . . . how derisory are the voluntary struggles

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for recognition. Struggles occur only on the basis of a common sense and established values, for the attainment of current values (honours, wealth and power).’ For the argument that the oscillation between presence and absence is fundamental to the eucharist and its signification, see Schwartz, Sacramental Poetics, 123. F.E. Hutchinson, ed., The Works of George Herbert, 531. John Donne, ‘I ame a litle World,’ in The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne, vol. 7, pt. 1, The Holy Sonnets, ed. Gary A. Stringer (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2005), Westmoreland sequence, l. 14. All references to the Holy Sonnets are to this edition. Line numbers appear in parentheses, as well as the particular sequence cited (Original, Revised, 1635, or Westmoreland). Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts, 193. Rambuss, Closet Devotions, 85. Stein, 134. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 397. Ibid., 155. For Deleuze’s more extensive engagement with masochism, as decidedly distinct from sadism, see Gilles Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty, in Masochism, trans. Jean McNeil (New York: Zone Books, 1989). Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 156. The Original sequence for these lines emphasizes moving away from a mercenary creditor-debtor relationship between God and devotees: ‘That thou remember them no more as debt, / I thinke it mercy, yf thou wilt forgett’ (13–14). For the related argument that lyrics, as a genre, challenge the teleological ends of narrative and offer alternative conceptions of time and order, see Stewart, 243: ‘The practice of numerical form becomes a means of exploring the significance of seriality and chroniclism beyond the teleology of narrative’s ends – just as the deictic situation of poetic speakers enables an imperfect and continuing relation to narrated experiences.’ For an argument that any futural orientation is fundamentally heteronormative, see Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Series Q, ed. Michèle Aina Barale, Jonathan Goldberg, Michael Moon, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Durham: Duke UP, 2004), 11, 106. Although I am suspicious of the Lacanian frame of Edelman’s argument, his claims for the value of the present resonate with my argument about devotional immanence here. Fish, The Living Temple: George Herbert and Catechizing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 160.

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53 For the argument that being as a concept is contaminated with this impulse to possession, see Schwartz, Sacramental Poetics, 28. 54 Ibid., 128. My emphasis. 55 Ibid., 123–4. 56 Even Bruce Smith’s account of phenomenology and the affective turn presents itself as a reaction, in this case against the objectifying forces of ‘structuralism, new historicism, deconstruction, and Lacanian psychoanalytical theory’: see Smith, The Key of Green, 5. Similarly, Gail Kern Paster describes her own brand of phenomenology as a reaction against the formalisms of Saussure and Derrida: see Paster, Humoring the Body, 245. For general accounts of reading that oppose immediate sensation and meaning, see Karin Littau, Theories of Reading: Books, Bodies, and Bibliomania (Cambridge: Polity, 2006); Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence. 57 Wall, 211. 58 For a description of the notion of reverse causality, in which an anticipated future has real effects before its existence, see Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 431: ‘Physics and biology present us with reverse causalities that are without finality but testify nonetheless to an action of the future on the present, or of the present on the past, for example, the convergent wave and the anticipated potential, which imply an inversion of time. More than breaks or zigzags, it is these reverse causalities that shatter evolution . . . it [the State] was already acting before it appeared, as the actual limit these primitive societies warded off, or as the point toward which they converged but could not reach without self-destructing . . . To ward off is also to anticipate . . . But in order to give a positive meaning to the idea of a “presentiment” of what does not yet exist, it is necessary to demonstrate that what does not yet exist is already in action, in a different form than that of its existence.’ 59 For the argument that reading, in the broader Reformation tradition, ultimately becomes an active, valuable devotional experience in its own right, see Georgia B. Christopher, Milton and the Science of the Saints (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1982), 7, 10: ‘With the Reformation, religious experience, to an overwhelming degree, became “literary” experience . . . The works urged are “literary” ones – reading, studying, meditating upon God’s word and then professing, confessing, or testifying about one’s grasp thereof.’ For a related account of the Lutheran hermeneutic impulse, see Gerald L. Bruns, Hermeneutics Ancient and Modern (New Haven: Yale UP, 1992), 146–7. 60 Trevor, 239–40. My emphasis. 61 Todd, 28.

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62 John Tobin, ed., in Herbert, The Complete English Poems, Penguin English Poets, gen. ed. Christopher Ricks (New York: Penguin, 1991), 359. 63 Ann Pasternak Slater, ed., in Herbert, The Complete English Works, Everyman’s Library 204 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 423. John Tobin’s Penguin edition makes the same choice in this respect: see Tobin, ed., 359. The Bodleian manuscript version does not capitalize ‘most.’ See Herbert, The Bodleian Manuscript of George Herbert’s Poems, 103. 64 Tobin, ed., 359. 65 Herbert, The Bodleian Manuscript of George Herbert’s Poems, 255. 66 F.E. Hutchinson, ed., The Works of George Herbert, 168. 67 Todd, 203–4. 68 For the contrary argument, from a Lacanian perspective, that the poem uses anamorphosis to install lack and overcome it, see Eric B. Song, ‘Anamorphosis and the Religious Subject in George Herbert’s “Coloss. 3.3,” ’ SEL 47 (Winter 2007): 116–17: ‘The poem’s anamorphic text does produce a certain hiddenness, but only when the lines are read. Unlike anamorphic paintings, Herbert’s poem offers us a unity of simultaneous apprehension: as long as we are looking and not reading, we are able to grasp at once the poem’s “double motion.” . . . “Coloss. 3.3” is Herbert’s remarkable attempt to reimagine the possibilities of anamorphic art not only to inscribe lack, but also to overcome it.’ In contrast to Song’s argument, in which looking supplants reading, I argue that the logic of struggle and overcoming embedded in the distinction between reading and looking is precisely what the poem challenges. 69 Heather A.R. Asals, Equivocal Predication: George Herbert’s Way to God (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981), 51. 70 Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, ed. Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia UP, 1990), 248. 71 For an account of the incorporeal transformations effected in the sacrament, see Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 80–1. In this case, though, these transformations are effected in the reader. 72 For a related version of this claim, culled from Augustine, in which transformation occurs at the level of use, not substance, see Asals, Equivocal Predication, 75. 73 For the argument that ‘Jesu’ is a signifier generating, automatically and without end, other signifiers, see Jonathan Goldberg, Voice Terminal Echo: Postmodernism and English Renaissance Texts (New York: Methuen, 1986), 117. Goldberg poses several questions about Herbert’s verse that resonate with my argument: ‘And if the voice were toneless? And if no one spoke? And if there were no self “behind” the words? No transcendence beyond the text?’

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(101). However, his model of automation is always a failed recompense for an impossible presence and the endlessness that accrues is an unfortunate repetition foisted upon us by the inability to reach an end. It is not, as I argue, a choice to avoid ends. 74 For the argument that ‘Love-joy’ allows, even forces, a consideration of ‘the nature of signs in themselves,’ see Todd, 17. 75 Asals, Equivocal Predication, 58. For Augustine’s distinction between enjoyment and use, see De Doctrina Christiana, trans. R.P.H. Green (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), bk. 1, ch. 4, sec. 8, p. 15: ‘To enjoy something is to hold fast to it in love for its own sake. To use something is to apply whatever it may be to the purpose of obtaining what you love – if indeed it is something that ought to be loved.’ Augustine begins this book with a discussion of signification that would seem to relegate poetry to a mere instrument, something to be used but not loved. However, he does acknowledge that some things and signs should be loved and enjoyed in themselves as long as they are connected in some manner to God: ‘It is not the case that all things which are to be used are to be loved; but only those which exist in some kind of association with us and are related to God, like a man or angel, or which, being related to us, stand in need of the kindness of God as received through us, like the body’ (bk. 1, ch. 23, sec. 44, p. 31). Yet is there any thing or sign that exceeds this formulation, that would not need the kindness of God? As a result, I would argue, it appears that everything ultimately warrants love for its own sake. 76 Schwartz, Sacramental Poetics, 28. 2. Reading Indistinction: Desire, Indistinguishability, and Metonymic Reading in Richard Crashaw’s Religious Lyrics 1 For one of the most famous and nuanced analyses of Crashaw’s strange liquid transformations, see Robert Martin Adams, ‘Taste and Bad Taste in Metaphysical Poetry: Richard Crashaw and Dylan Thomas,’ Hudson Review 8 (1955): 61–77. Writing of stanzas four and five of ‘The Weeper,’ Adams maintains: ‘The transformation of salt tears to milk is queer; raising the butterfat content to make it cream is odder yet. The delicacy of “sippes” gives us a slight respite; but the domestic word “Breakfast” in congruence with the idea of aftertaste (the whole image being underlain by notions of cudchewing, angelic saliva, and a delicate series of cosmic belches) would seem to be in the worst possible taste. Actually, Crashaw seems to be trying to convey the idea of intimacy in the most intimate terms available to earthly creatures’ (66). For Empson’s use of Crashaw to illustrate the seventh type

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of ambiguity, the uniting of opposites, see William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 3rd ed. (New York: New Directions, 1947), 217–24. Empson also maintains that synaesthesia leads to a type of indistinction: ‘It throws back the reader upon the undifferentiated affective states which are all that such sensations have in common; perhaps recalls him to an infantile state before they had been distinguished from one another’ (13). I would argue that the indistinction that Empson notes ultimately transforms the seventh type of ambiguity, so that in Crashaw’s hands, there are no more opposites to unite. 2 Richard Rambuss, ‘Sacred Subjects and the Aversive Metaphysical Conceit: Crashaw, Serrano, Ofili,’ ELH 71 (2004): 522, 521. Rambuss dubs Crashaw the author ‘who probably has accumulated more detractors than any other early modern poet and certainly some of the most florid critical censure’ (501). Rambuss’s essay provides a thorough survey of hyperventilating critical condemnations of Crashaw’s poetics. For examples of the critical tendency to begin essays on Crashaw with a recitation of these condemnations, see Maureen Sabine, ‘Crashaw and Abjection: Reading the Unthinkable in His Devotional Verse,’ American Imago 63 (2007): 423; Lorraine Roberts, ‘Crashaw’s Epiphany Hymn: Faith Out of Darkness,’ in ‘Bright Shootes of Everlastingnesse’: The Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987), 134: ‘Of all the important English religious poets of the seventeenth-century, Richard Crashaw has generally received the least sympathetic response from readers and critics’; Anthony Low, Love’s Architecture: Devotional Modes in SeventeenthCentury English Poetry (New York: New York UP, 1978), 116: ‘Critics have not treated Crashaw’s poetry kindly. It is commonplace to accuse him of bad taste and extravagance. He is incapable of enforcing a structure on his poems. He pursues images for their own sake. He cannot write strong, simple poetry. He is un-English. He is too passionate or he is too cold and calculating’; Michael McCanles, ‘The Rhetoric of the Sublime in Crashaw’s Poetry,’ in The Rhetoric of Renaissance Poetry from Wyatt to Milton, ed. Thomas O. Sloan and Raymond B. Waddington (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), 189: ‘When confronted with the imagery of “The Weeper,” “The Teare,” “The Divine Epigrams,” as well as stronger poems such as the “Hymn to . . . Sainte Teresa” and “The Flaming Heart,” the usual reaction critics have had to contend with is quite simply embarrassment’; John Peter, ‘Crashaw and “The Weeper,” ’ Scrutiny 19 (1952–3): 258: ‘Crashaw’s extravagances are all but proverbial . . . Again, there has perhaps been some inclination, even among the enlightened, to use him unthinkingly as a whipping-boy, one upon whom dispraise can be so entailed as to allow his fellows to go free.’

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3 For an account of literary reading in general that attempts to recapture the central role of bodily affect in literature, see Karin Littau, Theories of Reading: Books, Bodies, and Bibliomania (Cambridge: Polity, 2006). For the related contention that a focus on meaning degrades the immediacy of presence, see Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2004). 4 Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 185. For Deleuze’s account of baroque indistinction on which Stewart’s argument relies, see Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 11–12, especially his account of the lack of distinction between body and soul: ‘Life is not only everywhere, but souls are everywhere in matter . . . It might be claimed that physical gravity and religious elevation are quite different and do not pertain to the same world. However, these are two vectors that are allotted as such in the distinction of the two levels or floors of a single and same world, or of the single and same house. It is because the body and the soul have no point in being inseparable, for they are not in the least really distinct’ (11). For a contrary account, in which sensation is the mediated product of words, see Bruce R. Smith, The Key of Green: Passion and Perception in Renaissance Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 166. See also Smith, ‘Premodern Sexualities,’ PMLA 115 (May 2000): 319: ‘A fictional text represents things; it is not the things themselves.’ 5 For accounts of the subjective dissolutions that result from an overwhelming, transgressive jouissance, see Cynthia Marshall, The Shattering of the Self: Violence, Subjectivity, and Early Modern Texts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2002), 99– 100; Leo Bersani, ‘Is the Rectum a Grave?,’ in AIDS: Cultural Analysis, Cultural Activism, ed. Douglas Crimp (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 197–222. 6 Kimberly Johnson, ‘Richard Crashaw’s Indigestible Poetics,’ Modern Philology 107 (2009): 34, 50. 7 For the argument that explaining away these negatively construed excesses has become the preferred introductory gambit for most Crashaw criticism, see Eugene R. Cunnar, ‘Crashaw’s “Sancta Maria Dolorum”: Controversy and Coherence,’ in New Perspectives on the Life and Art of Richard Crashaw, ed. John R. Roberts (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1990), 99: ‘It has become almost obligatory to begin an essay on Crashaw by explaining his disparaging treatment at the hands of critics over the years.’ 8 For the contention that reason intervenes in order to tame Crashaw’s ‘baroque extravaganza,’ see Louis L. Martz, From Renaissance to Baroque: Essays on Literature and Art (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991), 209. I maintain that Crashaw does not oppose affect to reason, but advances a baroque

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reason and affect that organize themselves: sense or passion is not an excess in need of external control. The original version of Martz’s essay appears in The Wit of Love (South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969), 111–47. ‘The Preface to the Reader,’ in The Complete Poetry of Richard Crashaw, ed. George Walton Williams, The Stuart Editions (New York: New York UP, 1970), 650. All references to Crashaw’s poetry are from this edition. Stanza and line numbers will appear in parentheses. All translations of the Latin poems, by Phyllis S. Bowman, are also from this edition. Gary Kuchar, Divine Subjection: The Rhetoric of Sacramental Devotion in Early Modern England, Medieval and Renaissance Literary Studies, gen. ed. Albert C. Labriola (Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 2005), 103. Subsequent references to Divine Subjection will appear in parentheses. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnestoa Press, 1987), 115. See also Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, ed. Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia UP, 1990), 228: ‘It is the paradoxical element or object = x, missing always its own equilibrium, at once excess and deficiency, never equal, missing its own resemblance, its own identity, its own origin, its own place, and always displaced in relation to itself.’ For a classic formulation of the link between lack and excess from the psychoanalytic and Hegelian traditions, see Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 53: ‘Is not the paradoxical topology of the movement of capital, the fundamental blockage which resolves and reproduces itself through frenetic activity, excessive power as the very form of appearance of a fundamental impotence – this immediate passage, this coincidence of limit and excess, of lack and surplus – precisely that of the Lacanian objet petit a, of the leftover which embodies the fundamental, constitutive lack?’ For a succinct version of the consequences of such a dialectic that indicates just how problematic it is for the divine promise entailed in the sacrament, see Jeffrey T. Nealon, Alterity Politics: Ethics and Performative Subjectivity (Durham: Duke UP, 1998), 12–13: ‘Those who tarry with the negative, he [Deleuze] suggests, know all too well what they do: they know that totalization will fail, the subject will be frustrated, promises will be inexorably broken. And it is precisely because of this success – because lack surreptitiously returns the horizon of wholeness to the subject – that ethics, like cultural and sexual difference, must be reinscribed outside the realm of loss, lack, or failure.’ For an explanation of this phenomenon, see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark

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Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 73: ‘This common, transcendent, absent something will be called phallus or law, in order to designate “the” signifier that distributes the effects of meaning throughout the chain and introduces the exclusions there . . . the libido as energy of selection and detachment is converted into the phallus as detached object, the latter existing only in the transcendent form of stock and lack.’ 13 McCanles, 192. 14 Ibid., 208. 15 Crashaw’s Latin original reads: O Frontis, lateris, manuúmque pedúmque cruores! O quæ purpureo flumina fonte patent! In nostram (ut quondam) pes non valet ire salutem, Sed natat; in fluviis (ah!) natat ille suis. Fixa manus; dat, fixa: pios bona dextera rores Donat, & in donum solvitur ipsa suum. O latus, ô torrens! quis enim torrentior exit Nilus, ubi pronis præcipitatur aquis? Mille & mille simul cadit & cadit undique guttis Frons: viden’ ut sævus purpuret ora pudor? Spinæ hôc irriguæ florent crudeliter imbre, Inque novas sperant protinus ire rosas. Quisque capillus it exiguo tener alveus amne, Hôc quasi de rubro rivulus oceano. O nimiu`m vivæ pretiosis amnibus undæ ! Fons vitæ nunquam verior ille fuit. 16 There is no hard and fast distinction between the symbolaries of the Latin and English poems: many of the Latin poems display a reticence when it comes to ecstatic excess that mirrors the English verse. For example, the Latin counterpart to this poem, ‘In vulnera pendentis Domini,’ or ‘On the wounds of the Lord hanging (on the cross),’ enacts a similar distribution of mouths and eyes across the entire surface of Jesus’ body. However, the concluding line insists, despite the ambiguity of the deictic reference, that an eye is clearly discernible, that this proliferation of orifices ultimately returns to a recognizable logic of exchange and recompense in which tears are returned or repaid: Sive oculos, sive ora vocem tua vulnera; certe` Undique sunt ora (heu!) undique sunt oculi.

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Ecce ora! ô nimiu`m roseis florentia labris! Ecce oculi! sævis ah madidi lacrymis! Magdala, quae lacrymas solita es, quæ basia sacro Ferre pedi, sacro de pede sume vices. Ora pedi sua sunt, tua quo` tibi basia reddat: Quo` reddat lacrymas scilicet est oculus.

(1–8)

Whether I call your wounds eyes or mouths – surely everywhere are mouths – alas! – everywhere are eyes. Behold! the mouths! o blooming with lips too red! Behold the eyes! ah wet with cruel tears! Magdala, you who were accustomed to bring tears and kisses to the sacred foot, take yours in turn from the sacred foot. The foot has its own mouths, to give your kisses back: This clearly is the eye by which it returns your tears. (1–8) 17 For this debate in the Christian tradition, particularly as it surrounds eucharistic theology, see P.J. Fitzpatrick, In Breaking of Bread: The Eucharist and Ritual (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993), 33. Both Alan of Lille and Peter Cantor adduce smell as a possible alternative means of nourishment, particularly when pressed about the nourishing properties of transubstantiated bread. If the substance of the bread has altered, Alan of Lille argues, any nourishment one receives from the bread must be miraculous. But this fact should not appear odd or strange because, in Fitzpatrick’s paraphrase, ‘do not some peoples live off the smell of apples, and is it not possible to get drunk simply by smelling wine?’ Peter Cantor’s reference to apple-smellers, however, works in the opposite polemical direction, suggesting that physical nourishment provided by transubstantiated bread is in fact not miraculous, because nutritive smell occurs as a natural phenomenon. 18 Samuel Johnson, ‘Cowley,’ Lives of the English Poets, vol. 1, ed. George Birkbeck Hill (New York: Octagon, 1967), par. 56, p. 20. 19 For this formulation, and for help sussing out some of these issues, particularly the temporary grammatical ambiguity of ‘tantis,’ between ablative and dative, I am indebted to my colleague, Yasuko Taoka. All errors here are, of course, my own. 20 For an argument that Crashaw presents the erotic and non-erotic as indistinguishable, see James M. Bromley, ‘Intimacy and the Body in SeventeenthCentury Religious Devotion,’ EMLS 11.1 (May 2005): par. 27.

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21 For the argument that Crashaw reverses the structuralist and poststructuralist understanding of the relationship between signifier and signified, see R.V. Young, Doctrine and Devotion in Seventeenth-Century Poetry: Studies in Donne, Herbert, Crashaw, and Vaughan, Studies in Renaissance Literature 2, gen. ed. John T. Shawcross (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2000), 163: ‘Crashaw’s hymn (virtually all of his poetry) is an invocation of presence. But with this difference, the hymn invokes not the signified behind the signifier, but the signifier itself, the NAME of Jesus. This name does not merely re-present, the Name of Jesus is presence itself – the presence of the Word (or Λόγος). Things do not lie behind this Word, it lies behind them.’ Young’s argument seems another example of maintaining distinction in the face of indistinguishability: here, it’s the distinction between signifier and signified that persists. My argument is that neither the signified nor the signifier sits behind the other as a type of ground. 22 Deneen Senasi, ‘A Matter of Words: Aesthetics of Reading and Embodiment in the Poetry of Richard Crashaw,’ Religion and Literature 36.3 (Autumn 2004): 19. Subsequent references to Senasi will appear in parentheses. For another example of the critical propensity to analyse Crashaw as a poet of ‘both . . . and,’ see Sabine, 425, 429. 23 For the Tridentine affirmation of metonymy, or actually synecdoche, as the proper way to understand eucharistic presence, see the thirteenth session of the Council of Trent in Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, trans. and ed. H.J. Schroeder, OP (St Louis: B. Herder, 1941), 75: ‘For Christ is whole and entire under the form of bread and under any part of that form; likewise the whole Christ is present under the form of wine and under all its parts.’ Of course, this assertion is part of the council’s justification for communion in one kind. See also Josef Neuner, SJ and Heinrich Roos, SJ, eds., The Teaching of the Catholic Church: As Contained in Her Documents, ed. Karl Rahner, SJ, trans. Geoffrey Stevens (Staten Island, NY: Mercier Press, 1967), 288, 293. See also Heather A.R. Asals, ‘Crashaw’s Participles and the “Chiaroscuro” of Ontological Language,’ in Essays on Richard Crashaw, ed. Robert M. Cooper, Elizabethan & Renaissance Studies, ed. James Hogg (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universität Salzburg, 1979), 42. Asals also argues that ‘metonymy is not just a way of speaking: it is a characteristic Catholic way of thinking’ (41). For Calvin’s insistence that one should read metonymically, particularly when it comes to the sacraments and other scriptural mysteries, see John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, vol. 2, trans. Henry Beveridge (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1979), bk. 4, ch. 17, sec. 21, p. 573: ‘I say that the

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expression which is uniformly used in Scripture, when the sacred mysteries are treated of, is metonymical.’ See Stanley Fish, Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 179. For Fish’s discussion of similar issues in relation to Donne’s verse, see ‘Masculine Persuasive Force: Donne and Verbal Power,’ in Soliciting Interpretation: Literary Theory and Seventeenth-Century English Poetry, ed. Elizabeth D. Harvey and Katharine Eisaman Maus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 223–52. In her account of the poems to the Countess of Denbigh, Molly Murray describes Crashaw’s penchant for erasing markers of confessional identity as a mechanism for focusing readers’ attention on the process of transformation itself, a process in which ‘effort and acquiescence’ are indistinguishable. See Molly Murray, The Poetics of Conversion in Early Modern English Literature: Verse and Change from Donne to Dryden (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009), 118–20. Crashaw and Abraham Cowley, ‘On Hope,’ in The Complete Poetry of Richard Crashaw, 71, 665. Williams notes that this poem has a complicated bibliographic history, appearing in the 1646 and 1648 Steps to the Temple as a dialogue and then in the 1652 Carmen Deo Nostro as two separate poems. Cowley also published this poem in 1647 with revisions to his own answering stanzas: these revisions are incorporated in Crashaw’s 1652 volume. For the critical focus on Crashaw’s liquids, see Adams, ‘Taste and Bad Taste in Metaphysical Poetry,’ 66; and my own earlier piece, ‘Oral Devotion: Eucharistic Theology and Richard Crashaw’s Religious Lyrics,’ Texas Studies in Literature and Language 44 (Fall 2002): 245–72. For a psychoanalytic reading that relies on Melanie Klein’s notion of partobjects, see Susannah B. Mintz, ‘The Crashavian Mother,’ SEL 39 (Winter 1999): 111–29. For Klein’s arguments about part-objects, see Melanie Klein, ‘A Study of Envy and Gratitude,’ in The Selected Melanie Klein, ed. Juliet Mitchell (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), 212. I am suspicious of this psychoanalytic reading precisely insofar as it preserves a whole body behind these liquid particulates. For a critique of Klein’s notion of part-objects, see Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 44: ‘she cannot rid herself of the notion that schizoparanoid partial objects are related to a whole, either to an original whole that has existed earlier in a primary phase, or to a whole that will eventually appear in a final depressive stage (the complete Object)’; see also Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 189; Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 361. Richard Rambuss, Closet Devotions, Series Q, ed. Michèle Aina Barale, Jonathan Goldberg, Michael Moon, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Durham: Duke UP, 1998), 30.

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30 For the classic de Manian account of the irreducible conflict between metonymy and metaphor, a conflict that is ultimately the engine of deconstructive literary criticism, see Paul de Man, ‘Semiology and Rhetoric,’ in Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale UP, 1979), 3–19. For our purposes, what matters most in this essay is de Man’s reading of Yeats’s ‘Among School Children’ – particularly the poem’s final line, ‘How can we know the dancer from the dance?’ – in which he insists on the difficulty of literal reading and on the indistinction that issues from it: ‘It is equally possible, however, to read the last line literally rather than figuratively, as asking with some urgency the question we asked earlier within the context of contemporary criticism: not that sign and referent are so exquisitely fitted to each other that all difference between them is at times blotted out but, rather, since the two essentially different elements, sign and meaning, are so intricately intertwined in the imagined “presence” that the poem addresses, how can we possibly make the distinctions that would shelter us from the error of identifying what cannot be identified? The clumsiness of the paraphrase reveals that it is not necessarily the literal reading which is simpler than the figurative one, as was the case in our first example; here, the figural reading, which assumes the question to be rhetorical, is perhaps naïve, whereas the literal reading leads to greater complication of theme and statement’ (11). In Crashaw’s case, as well as that of the other poets in this study, this amounts to the contention that immanence and immediacy are not easier or more consoling than mediation; neither are they more chaotic and in need of control. 31 For the argument that ‘Adoro devote’ is incorrectly attributed to Aquinas, see Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991), 156n437; André Wilmart, Auteurs spirituels et textes dévots du Moyen âge latin, études d’histoire littéraire (Paris: Bloud et Gay, 1932), 361–414. Crashaw, as the title of the paraphrase indicates, believes that Aquinas is the author. 32 For the argument that Crashaw’s use of capitalization emphasizes the materiality of words on the page and foregrounds a link between the verbal and the visual, see Senasi, 8–9, 11. 33 Richard Crashaw, Steps to the Temple, 2nd ed. (London: Humphrey Moseley, 1648). For the later volume, see Richard Crashaw, Carmen Deo Nostro (Paris: Peter Targe, 1652), 72. I have consulted the British Library copies of these two volumes. 34 The final line of this stanza in 1648, ‘But still in Both, on Christ he is,’ seems to be a compositor’s error (‘on’ for ‘one’) that introduces a third person, this ‘he’ that is neither Christ nor the speaker, into the mix. If this is not

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an error, however, this difference might indicate a move away from the emphasis on Christ’s presence in both species to the communicant’s participation via either species: i.e., ‘he’ rests ‘on’ Christ regardless of the species consumed. Thomas Aquinas, ‘Adoro devote, latens veritas,’ in Medieval Song: An Anthology of Hymns and Lyrics, trans. James J. Wilhelm (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1971), ll. 13–16, p. 53. Wilhelm, unlike Wilmart, attributes this hymn to Aquinas. The Latin is ‘Plagas sicut Thomas non intueor / Deum tamen meum te confiteor: / Fac me tibi semper magis credere, / In te spem habere et diligere’ (Williams, ed., The Complete Poetry of Richard Crashaw, p. 174). ‘Adoro devote, latens veritas,’ in Medieval Song, ll. 9–12, p. 53. The Latin is ‘In cruce latebat sola deitas / Ad hic latet simul et humanitas: / Ambo tamen credens atque confitens / Peto quod petivit latro pœnitens’ (Williams, ed., The Complete Poetry of Richard Crashaw, p. 174). For the argument that Crashaw’s use of ‘unmodified demonstrative pronouns’ at the end of this poem is an attempt to mediate and hide Christ’s face, see Johnson, ‘Crashaw’s Indigestible Poetics,’ 46. Here, I argue that these demonstratives are not so much veils as mechanisms for producing indistinction. ‘Adoro devote, latens veritas,’ in Medieval Song, ll. 25–8, p. 53. The Latin is ‘Iesum quem velatum nunc adspicio / Oro: fiat illud quod tam sitio, / Ut te revelata cernens facie / Visu sim beatus tuæ gloriæ’ (Williams, ed., The Complete Poetry of Richard Crashaw, p. 176). ‘Adoro devote, latens veritas,’ in Medieval Song, ll. 17–20, p. 53. Williams, ed., The Complete Poetry of Richard Crashaw, 174. Significantly, the type of taste that is rejected early in the Latin hymn is ‘gustus’: ‘Visus, tatus, gustus in te fallitur / Sed auditu solo tuto creditur.’ For the contrary argument that gustare emphasizes the distinct physicality of the encounter, see Johnson, ‘Crashaw’s Indigestible Poetics,’ 44. In contrast to Johnson’s view, I contend that Crashaw returns to ‘gust’ after the condemnation of ‘gustus’ in the Latin hymn so as to erase the distinction between spiritual and sensual domains on which the sapere-gustare separation is founded. For arguments that tie Crashaw’s poetic sensibilities to liturgy and ritual, see Austin Warren, Richard Crashaw: A Study in Baroque Sensibility (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1957); Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1979), 12: ‘Crashaw writes out of a very different aesthetics emanating from Trent and the continental Counter Reformation, which stresses sensory

Notes to pages 88–96

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stimulation and church ritual (rather than scripture) as means to devotion and to mystical transcendence.’ Murray, 24–7. ‘Adoro devote, latens veritas,’ in Medieval Song, ll. 1–8, p. 52–3. The Latin is ‘Adoro te devote, latens deitas / Quae sub his figuris vere latitas / Tibi se cor meum totum subiicit / Quia te contemplans totum deficit. / Visus, tatus, gustus in te fallitur / Sed auditu solo tuto creditur: / Credo quidquid dixit Dei filius: / Nil hoc verbo veritatis verius’ (Williams, ed., The Complete Poetry of Richard Crashaw, p. 172, 174). For an account of ‘non-semantic sound’ and synaesthesia that helps to explain Crashaw’s indistinguishable senses, see Smith, The Key of Green, 206: ‘The green potential in early modern verse is more radical than that. It dissolves words, not into other words, but into non-semantic sound. It does not just break words down into phonemes that can be recombined with other phonemes in new and interesting ways; it liquefies words. That potential, present in all languages, whatever the time and place in which speakers and listeners find themselves, is positively encouraged by a physiology of knowing, current among speakers of English in the seventeenth century, in which the passions “hear” sensations before reason does.’ Crashaw, I would simply add, does not just liquefy words, but also obliterates the conceptual distinction between passion and reason. Martz, From Renaissance to Baroque, 206. I acknowledge that early modern printers sometimes substituted exclamation points for question marks, either out of error or thrift. That said, even if the first exclamation point is an error, it still highlights the fact that the poem itself does not really question whether fires and floods are compatible. For a similar argument about the mysterious nature of sense in Emily Dickinson’s lyrics, and by extension lyrics as a genre, see Oren Izenberg, ‘Poems Out of Our Heads,’ The New Lyric Studies: Theories and Methodologies, PMLA 123 ( January 2008): 219. Regina Mara Schwartz, Sacramental Poetics at the Dawn of Secularism: When God Left the World, Cultural Memory in the Present, ed. Mieke Bal and Het de Vries (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2008), 26. Subsequent references to Sacramental Poetics will appear in parentheses. Schwartz’s argument draws on Jean-Luc Marion’s work in Idol and Distance: Five Studies, ed. John D. Caputo (New York: Fordham UP, 2001) and God without Being: Hors-Texte, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). For the suggestive claim that the history of Christianity is a history of iconoclasm and that, in turn, idolatrous practices would be much more difficult

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for early modern devotees than we might imagine, see Terry Eagleton, Reason, Faith and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate (New Haven: Yale UP, 2009), 69: ‘Even so, in a choice irony, it [the Enlightenment] inherited its brave campaign against superstition partly from Christianity itself, with its rejection of all false gods and prophets, all idols, fetishes, magical rituals, and powers of darkness, in the name of human flesh and blood.’ Peter, ‘Crashaw and “The Weeper,” ’ 270. My only quibble is that the grief that Peter here describes does not acknowledge a distinction between what the tears are and what they hope to be or signify. For a related reading of Crashaw’s imagery, see Anthony Low, Love’s Architecture, 125. Low argues that Crashaw is all close-ups with no panoramic establishing shot (125), thus rendering any attempt at visualization difficult. ‘The Weeper’ in particular lacks such a scene-setting shot, and thus works on the level of such a minuscule meditative framework that ‘it cannot be called an affective meditation. Rather it is an almost pure affective devotion’ (134). John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, ed. Anthony Raspa (New York: Oxford UP, 1987), Expostulation 19, p. 100. Asals, ‘Crashaw’s Participles and the “Chiaroscuro” of Ontological Language,’ 37–8. Subsequent references to Asals will appear in parentheses. For Aquinas’s understanding of the names of God, see Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, Book 1: God, trans. Anton C. Pegis, FRSC (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975), Book 1, Chapter 28–35, pgs. 135–49. Calvin, Institutes, bk. 4, ch. 17, sec. 21, p. 573. See Kuchar, Divine Subjection, 271n23. For the theological background of Asals’s argument here, see Roberto Bellarmino, An Ample Declaration of the Christian Doctrine, trans. Richard Hadock (Dovvay: Laurence Kellam, 1605), 143: ‘Moreouer you are to know, that many thinges are painted, to make vs vnderstand, not what they are in themselues, but what properties they have, or what effectes they vse to worke’; Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, Book 1: God, book 1, ch. 33–4, pp. 145–8. Martz, From Renaissance to Baroque, 213. For a succinct account of the different ways that contiguity and transcendence challenge representation, see Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan, Theory and History of Literature 30 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 50: ‘If the ultimate instances are inaccessible and cannot be represented, this occurs not as a function of an infinite hierarchy belonging to a negative theology but as a function of a contiguity of desire that causes whatever happens to happen always in the office next door.’

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59 For these lines, I have consulted the 1648 Steps to the Temple and the 1652 Carmen Deo Nostro, mainly because Williams’s edition does not print this variation, opting instead for the shorter 1646 version of the poem, but also because he silently emends some of the typographical oddities in the lines from the later volume. See Crashaw, Steps to the Temple, 2nd ed. (1648), 44; Carmen Deo Nostro (1652), 14; Williams, ed., The Complete Poetry of Richard Crashaw, 70–85. 60 Martz, From Renaissance to Baroque, 215. 61 For a related description of tautology as an attempt to literalize figures, in the context of Andrew Marvell’s work, see Dominic Gavin, ‘ “The Garden” and Marvell’s Literal Figures,’ Cambridge Quarterly 37 (2008): 224–52, esp. 232. 62 For the argument that Crashaw’s model of conversion is autoerotic, selftransforming, and self-multiplying, see Murray, 123–6, 136. Although much of this chapter meshes with Murray’s claim that there is a multiplicity inside the converted self (127) and that the converted subject is marked by selfmultiplication (136), I argue that the self takes a back seat to the metonym in this process of multiplication. 3. Loving Fear: Affirmative Anxiety in John Donne’s Divine Poems 1 George Eliot, Middlemarch (New York: Bantam Books, 1985), 567. 2 John Donne, Sermon 13, The Sermons of John Donne, vol. 3, ed. George Potter and Evelyn Simpson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953–62), 279. 3 For psychoanalytically inflected accounts of Donne’s verse, see Gary Kuchar, ‘Petrarchism and Repentance in Donne’s Holy Sonnets,’ Modern Philology 105 (2008): 535–69; Kuchar, Divine Subjection: The Rhetoric of Sacramental Devotion in Early Modern England, Medieval and Renaissance Literary Studies, gen. ed. Albert C. Labriola (Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 2005), 151–79, 219–39; Ehsan Azari, Lacan and the Destiny of Literature: Desire, Jouissance and the Sinthome in Shakespeare, Donne, Joyce, and Ashbery, Continuum Literary Studies Series (New York: Continuum, 2008), 117–38; Ben Saunders, Desiring Donne: Poetry, Sexuality, Interpretation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2006); Ronald Corthell, Ideology and Desire in Renaissance Poetry: The Subject of Donne (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1997). For the argument that Donne’s verse adapts a Petrarchan model of unconsummated and unquenchable desire, see Theresa M. DiPasquale, Literature and Sacrament: The Sacred and the Secular in John Donne, Medieval and Renaissance Literary Studies, gen. ed. Albert C. Labriola (Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1999), 145–72. 4 For the insistence that the Holy Sonnets in particular are marked by anxiety motivated by the absence of the sacraments in the early seventeenth-century

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English church, see Anthony Low, ‘Absence in Donne’s Holy Sonnets: Between Catholic and Calvinist,’ John Donne Journal 23 (2004): 95–115, esp. 95–6. For the related argument that the Reformation evacuates divine presence from the world, in the form of an immediate significant pain or sacramental devotion, which in turn causes Donne anxiety, see Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen, ‘In Thy Passion Slain: Donne, Herbert, and the Theology of Pain,’ in The Reformation Unsettled: British Literature and the Question of Religious Identity, 1560–1660, ed. Dijkhuizen and Richard Todd (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2008), 77; Achsah Guibbory, ‘Donne’s Religious Poetry and the Trauma of Grace,’ in Early Modern English Poetry: A Critical Companion, ed. Patrick Cheney, Andrew Hadfield, and Garrett A. Sullivan (New York: Oxford UP, 2007), 237: ‘There is something missing – a strong sense of the actual presence of God.’ Kuchar, Divine Subjection, 229–30. Paul Cefalu, Moral Identity in Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004), 130, 132. The devotional anxiety and fear that I describe here has nothing in common with the notion of despair, predicated on an implicit negative evaluation of Calvinism, that characterizes John Stachniewski’s reading of the Holy Sonnets. See Stachniewski, The Persecutory Imagination: English Puritanism and the Literature of Religious Despair (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 267, 277, 281. For a more militant, and erroneous, reiteration of this negative evaluation of Reformation theology, see James Simpson, Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and Its Reformation Opponents (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2007). John Donne, The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne, vol. 7, pt. 1, The Holy Sonnets, ed. Gary A. Stringer (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2005). All references to the Holy Sonnets are to this edition. Line numbers appear in parentheses, as well as the particular sequence cited (Original, Revised, 1635, or Westmoreland). For clarity’s sake, even when referring to manuscript editions of these sonnets, I have preserved the traditional numbering from the 1635 edition. As Ramie Targoff notes, Helen Gardner’s ordering classes these poems into two sequences: one on love; one on judgment. My argument here, contra Gardner, is that love and judgment are ultimately the same thing in these sonnets, effected by the merging of love and fear. See Ramie Targoff, John Donne, Body and Soul (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 109; Helen Gardner, ed., The Divine Poems, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978), xxxvii–lv. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (1989), s.v. ‘dropsy.’ See also Mary A. Papazian, ‘John Donne’s Secular and Sacred Reactions to Loss: From Nothingness to God’s Tender Jealousy,’ in The Sacred and Profane in English Renaissance

Notes to pages 108–10

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Literature, ed. Papazian (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008), 174. Papazian, contrary to my argument here, frames this poem as one necessarily affirming absence and loss. Kuchar, ‘Petrarchism and Repentance,’ 569. See also Saunders, 155: ‘It is only in the failure of reason that we are afforded a glimpse of Divine totality; moreover, it is only in knowing that we don’t know that we come to know ourselves for what we are. In both Donne’s negative theology and Lacanian psychoanalysis, then, the human being is defined by a failure to comprehend: defined, precisely, as the subject not supposed to know.’ Stanley Fish, ‘Masculine Persuasive Force: Donne and Verbal Power,’ in Soliciting Interpretation: Literary Theory and Seventeenth-Century English Poetry, ed. Elizabeth D. Harvey and Katharine Eisaman Maus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 247. For a similar deployment of this impossible subject, which, like Fish’s, does not stem from an overt commitment to psychoanalytic criticism, see Targoff, John Donne, Body and Soul, 22–3: Donne ‘worries that his “I” will no longer be his “I” unless he keeps his spiritual and material parts together . . . His deepest fantasy is also to be fully present in both parts of the self. This fantasy of being fully present is not limited to Donne’s posthumous existence – it pervades his mortal life as well.’ Targoff also maintains, though, that there are ‘salutary effects of anxiety’ (169). For a similar claim about the this-worldly nature of communion for Donne, see Regina Mara Schwartz, Sacramental Poetics at the Dawn of Secularism: When God Left the World, Cultural Memory in the Present, ed. Mieke Bal and Het de Vries (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2008), 89: ‘For John Donne, communion – between body and soul, man and God, and human lovers – is achievable in this world and in this time . . . His goal is to join time and eternity, the physical and the spiritual, the immanent and the transcendent. After all, this is what the Incarnation does, wherein God became man, and what the Eucharist does, wherein man combines with God.’ Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 155. Theodor Reik, Masochism in Modern Man, trans. Margaret H. Beigel and Gertrud M. Kurth (New York: Grove Press, 1957), 311–15. Reik claims that postponing the masochistic aim, even its deferral to an apocalyptic end of history, does not amount to a removal of the aim (320, 339). I argue, however, that such a deferral actually enables the dismissal of an aim for masochism and, in its apocalyptic variant, allows this aim to fall back into the present as a proleptically achieved completion. Deleuze cites Reik approvingly in his longer discussion of masochism, but takes him to task for

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reasserting the symbolic presence of the punishing father: see Gilles Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty. Masochism, trans. Jean McNeil (New York: Zone Books, 1989), 58–9, 74–5, 89. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 156. Deleuze also distinguishes between his own thought and that of Michel Foucault along this desire-pleasure axis. See Gilles Deleuze, ‘Desire and Pleasure,’ trans. Melissa McMahon (http://eng7007.pbworks.com/DesireAndPleasure, 1997), G; a translation of ‘Désir et plaisir,’ Magazine littéraire 325 (October 1994): 59–65. For the counter argument that pleasure is essentially transgressive, and that masochism, contrary to Deleuze’s argument, binds pleasure and desire, see Karmen MacKendrick, Counterpleasures, SUNY Series in Postmodern Culture, ed. Joseph Natoli (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999), 6, 9, 17. Cefalu, 130. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. (1989), s.v. ‘shake, v.’ I.1. Although the OED lists this usage as obsolete by the time of Donne’s writing (the last recorded citation is 1450), the continued use of ‘shake off’ as sloughing off or escaping retains the notion of evasion that I here emphasize. Donne, The Divine Poems, ed. Helen Gardner, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978). All references to Donne’s Divine Poems, other than the Holy Sonnets, are to this edition. Line numbers will appear in parentheses. Saunders, 42–3. Saunders’s argument is based on Thomas Browne’s ‘To the Deceased Author’ in the 1633 edition of Donne’s poems. John Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, ed. Anthony Raspa (New York: Oxford UP, 1987), Expostulation 6, p. 32. For the centrality of these ‘surface’ formal relations to the early modern understanding of grace, see Brian Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002), 281. Andy Mousley, ‘Transubstantiating Love: John Donne and Cultural Criticism,’ in The Poetics of Transubstantiation: From Theology to Metaphor, ed. Douglas Burnham and Enrico Giaccherini, Studies in European Cultural Transition 27, gen. ed. Martin Stannard and Greg Walker (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005), 57; Kuchar, Divine Subjection, 163. Subsequent references to Kuchar appear in parentheses. For a related account of vapour in the Devotions, one that argues for the collapse of metaphor and metonymy in this moment, see Judith Anderson, Translating Investments: Metaphor and the Dynamic of Cultural Change in Tudor-Stuart England (New York: Fordham UP, 2005), 71–6. Donne, Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, Expostulation 7, p. 39. Hereafter cited as Devotions. Subsequent references to this text will appear in parentheses and include page and section number.

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23 Anderson, Translating Investments, 70. 24 Cefalu, 128. 25 For critical work that uses the sacrament as a critique of poststructuralism, see R.V. Young, Doctrine and Devotion in Seventeenth-Century Poetry: Studies in Donne, Herbert, Crashaw, and Vaughan, Studies in Renaissance Literature 2, gen. ed. John T. Shawcross (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2000); Eleanor J. McNees, Eucharistic Poetry: The Search for Presence in the Writings of John Donne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Dylan Thomas, and Geoffrey Hill (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 1992). 26 Robert Whalen, The Poetry of Immanence: Sacrament in Donne and Herbert (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 109. Whalen also maintains that the Divine Poems present a Petrarchan anxiety that seeks solace in transcendence: ‘Both the supporters of and those opposed to Calvinist readings of Donne, however, fail to recognize the degree to which sacramental topoi in the poems register their speakers’ desire to transcend the subjective anxieties they deliberately evince. The Eucharist in La Corona and Holy Sonnets signals escape from the manic-depressive turns of a lover/devotee who variously embraces and resists a radically transcendent deity’ (68–9). 27 For the claim that the sestet’s argument is transparently dubious, see Richard Strier, ‘John Donne Awry and Squint: The “Holy Sonnets,” 1608–1610,’ Modern Philology 86 (1989): 380–1. 28 Whalen, 81. 29 Strier, ‘John Donne Awry and Squint,’ 361. For an example of the misreading of Calvinism as threatening with which Strier takes issue, see Stachniewski, 254–91. 30 For the argument that ‘Satire III’ focuses on the method of conversion and, in so doing, shows how Catholic and Protestant conversion procedures are actually identical, see Molly Murray, The Poetics of Conversion in Early Modern English Literature: Verse and Change from Donne to Dryden (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2009), 91. 31 Cefalu, 128. 32 Whalen, The Poetry of Immanence, 77, 105. 33 John Donne, Pseudo-Martyr, ed. Anthony Raspa (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1993), ch. 1, par. 13, p. 33. 34 Ibid., ch. 3, par. 12, p. 92; ch. 3, par. 4, p. 88. As Targoff notes, this propensity even extends to Donne’s will where he insists on the connection between body and soul in death. See Targoff, John Donne: Body and Soul, 5: ‘Not only does he affirm his belief that God desires equally both parts of the self. He also seems to elide the period of separation – when the body is buried in

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the earth and the soul rests in heaven – by imagining salvation and resurrection as concurrent events, “ymprinte[d] in me nowe.” ’ Murray, 79–82, 104. Here I would disagree with Richard Strier’s contention that Donne is unable to ‘conceive of divine love in terms of a loving relationship.’ I argue that Donne is at least attempting to rearticulate love, fear, and desire so that they might be up to the task of entering into relationship with God. See Strier, ‘John Donne Awry and Squint,’ 380. Helen Wilcox notes this recourse to space to ‘explain an apparent impossibility in time,’ but does not acknowledge the difficulties that the image itself poses. See Helen Wilcox, ‘Devotional Writing,’ in The Cambridge Companion to John Donne, ed. Achsah Guibbory (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006), 156. The succeeding chapter argues that this position is closer to Milton’s use of prolepsis. For the argument that ‘Grace works by prolepsis’ and that ‘ “God is a future God” ’ who disrupts conventional tenses and syntax in Donne’s sermons, especially, but also his poetry, see Cummings, 413–14. See Cefalu, 128–32. For the contrary contention that transgression does harbour some critical purchase, see Michel Foucault, ‘A Preface to Transgression,’ in Religion and Culture, ed. Jeremy R. Carette (New York: Routledge, 1999), 61: ‘Transgression contains nothing negative, but affirms limited being – affirms the limitlessness into which it leaps as it opens this zone to existence for the first time. But correspondingly, this affirmation contains nothing positive: no content can bind it, since, by definition, no limit can possibly restrict it.’ I would simply maintain, following Deleuze, that pleasure does not affirm limitlessness, but rather reaffirms the subject as limit. Murray, 91. For a brief account of the links between the end of desire and death in Renaissance and psychoanalytic thought, see Jonathan Dollimore, ‘Desire Is Death,’ in Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, ed. Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass, Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture 8, ed. Stephen Orgel (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996), 369–86. Schwartz, Sacramental Poetics, 116. Barbara Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1979), 271–2. Young, Doctrine and Devotion, 17. Ibid. Obviously then, this argument rejects Lynette McGrath’s contention that ‘Donne considers frivolous and even dangerous the poem without a moral

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purpose.’ See Lynette McGrath, ‘John Donne’s Apology for Poetry,’ SEL 20 (1980): 87. For the argument that lyric in general undermines the notion of meaning and endings and transforms ‘the end into its opposite, a non-end,’ see Timothy Bahti, Ends of the Lyric: Direction and Consequence in Western Poetry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996), 13. Although I am sympathetic to this account of the lyric, in this instance what matters more are the specific implications for religious desire of verse’s evasion of purposiveness. For the argument that Donne uses endings to undermine or even sully the lines that precede them, see Christopher Ricks, ‘Donne after Love,’ in Literature and the Body: Essays on Populations and Persons, ed. Elaine Scarry, Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1986, no. 12 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1986), 39: ‘The better the best things in his poem, the more Donne is driven to rend it with his ending.’ For the contention that creative metaphor, in Donne in particular, is an agent of such sublation, see Anderson, Translating Investments, 76: ‘It [sublation and metaphor] is thus at once positive, neutral, and negative; gain, preservation, and loss; surplus, continuity, and lack.’ Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Series Q, ed. Michèle Aina Barale, Jonathan Goldberg, Michael Moon, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Durham: Duke UP, 2004), 106. Ibid., 30. Richard Rambuss, Closet Devotions, Series Q, ed. Michèle Aina Barale, Jonathan Goldberg, Michael Moon, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Durham: Duke UP, 1998), 50, 98. It is for this reason that I find unconvincing accounts of subversive pleasures like that of Karmen MacKendrick. See MacKendrick, 4–13. Reik’s account of masochism proceeds in a similar fashion, insisting on the hidden fantasy of a triumphant subject behind every masochist and martyr. See Reik, 314–15, 334–6, 351. For Spinoza’s related notion of being open to being loved or affected by God, see Baruch Spinoza, The Ethics, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1982), pt. IV, prop. 38, p. 177: ‘That which so disposes the human body that it can be affected in more ways, or which renders it capable of affecting external bodies in more ways, is advantageous to man, and proportionately more advantageous as the body is thereby rendered more capable of being affected in more ways and of affecting other bodies in more ways.’ In this respect, we should recall Michel Foucault’s account of Christianity: obedience as the repetition of obedience. See Michel Foucault, ‘Sexuality and Power,’ in Religion and Culture, 124: submission has shattered its

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moorings in teleology ‘because the important thing in Christianity is that one does not obey to reach a certain result . . . In Christianity, the absolute honour is precisely to be obedient. Obedience must lead to a state of obedience. To remain obedient is the fundamental condition for all the other virtues.’ For this distinction, see Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 397: ‘Work is a motor cause that meets resistances, operates upon the exterior, is consumed and spent in its effect, and must be renewed from one moment to the next. Free action is also a motor cause, but one that has no resistance to overcome, operates only upon the mobile body itself, is not consumed in its effect, and continues from one moment to the next.’ Cummings, 397. For accounts of desire that tie it to failure, see Kuchar, ‘Petrarchism and Repentance,’ 569; Saunders, 155. For the argument that several of the secular love lyrics actually present a fulfilled desire, see Achsah Guibbory, ‘Erotic Poetry,’ in The Cambridge Companion to John Donne, ed. Guibbory (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006), 141: ‘Obstacles, absence, or frustration seem built into desire, for we can only long for what we do not, at the moment, possess – whether it is another person or God. Donne is keenly aware of the instability of desire, of the conflict between our longing to dissolve the boundary between self and other and our impulse to withdraw and reassert the self’s separate identity. Yet a few of Donne’s love poems imagine desire as fulfilled and, miraculously, persisting, as if in defiance of natural laws.’ Kuchar, Divine Subjection, 232; see also Azari, 122; Saunders, 82, 169: ‘Over and over, the divine poems and the verse letters proclaim love, and hope for its reciprocation’; ‘It [love] is an aggressively incorporative impulse, exactly parallel to an emotion like hate in this respect.’ Saunders’s account is, of course, influenced by Lacan’s account of a voraciously acquisitive desire. See Jacques Lacan, Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book I. Freud’s Papers on Technique, trans. John Forrester (New York: W.W. Norton, 1988), 276–7: ‘Love, the love of the person who desires to be loved, is essentially an attempt to capture the other in oneself, in oneself as object . . . with hate, it is the same thing.’ For an account of the limitations of the Other as a critical model, see Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, ed. Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia UP, 1990), 301–21. Wilcox, 154. Kuchar, ‘Petrarchism and Repentance,’ 538, 546. Subsequent references to ‘Petrarchism and Repentance’ will appear in parentheses.

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62 For the classic formulation of the equation of lack and excess, see Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 95–9. See also Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 228. 63 Ronald Corthell, Ideology and Desire in Renaissance Poetry: The Subject of Donne (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1997), 162. 64 Ibid., 161. 65 Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty, 31. See also Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 155. 66 Targoff, John Donne, Body and Soul, 121. For an explanation of how reacting against the dialectic ultimately reaffirms the dialectic, see John Muckelbauer, The Future of Invention: Rhetoric, Postmodernism, and the Problem of Change (Albany: SUNY Press, 2008), 10–16, 43–8. 67 For the counter claim that Donne is interested in the secret or concealed ends of conversion, see Murray, 95–6, 104. 68 Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty, 71. 69 For a variation on the contention that masochism defies teleology, see MacKendrick, 59. MacKendrick, however, presents this defiance as dialectical tension and frustration (61–3). My argument centres on the inadequacy of transgression or perversion for an account of Donne’s transmutation of desire. 70 See Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty, 71. For the argument that Deleuze explores relation as such, see Daniel W. Smith, ‘Deleuze and the Production of the New,’ in Deleuze, Guattari, and the Production of the New, ed. Simon O’Sullivan and Stephen Zepke (New York: Continuum, 2008), 156. 71 Susannah Brietz Monta, Martyrdom and Literature in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005), 141. 72 Cefalu, 131–2. 73 For an example of this propensity, see Judith Scherer Herz, ‘Reading and Rereading Donne’s Poetry,’ in The Cambridge Companion to John Donne, ed. Achsah Guibbory (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006), 102, 107. For general accounts of reading that affirm immediate sensation in opposition to meaning, see Karin Littau, Theories of Reading: Books, Bodies, and Bibliomania (Cambridge: Polity, 2006); Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2004). 74 Herz, 106. For a succinct account of Deleuze’s insistence that analogy and resemblance are not the only ways for words and things to connect, see JeanClet Martin, ‘Deleuze’s Philosophy of the Concrete,’ trans. Alex Martin, in A Deleuzian Century?, ed. Ian Buchanan (Durham: Duke UP, 1999), 241–8. 75 T.S. Eliot, ‘The Metaphysical Poets,’ in Selected Essays: New Edition (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1950), 247. The choice of Spinoza in this passage

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might be simply fortuitous, but given this chapter’s focus on an immanent desire, Eliot’s example is, at the least, redolent of the brand of affirmative desire and experience that I am here outlining. For this argument, see Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Remnants of the Sacred in Early Modern England,’ in Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, ed. Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass, Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture 8, ed. Stephen Orgel (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996), 337–45. For a succinct account of how the hermeneutic impulse requires failure, see Jeffrey T. Nealon, ‘Beyond Hermeneutics: Deleuze, Derrida and Contemporary Theory,’ in Between Deleuze and Derrida, ed. Paul Patton and John Protevi (New York: Continuum, 2003), 160: ‘Because every signifier fails adequately to represent its signified (attesting to the absence of the signified, not its presence), then every interpretation always already lacks – it inevitably fails to do justice to the text at hand. Such an assured interpretive failure (and its symmetrically inverse flipside, the postmodern infinity of interpretation) inexorably defines meanings and subjects in terms of what they can’t do: be whole.’ Wilcox, 161. For the argument that, in the presence of faith and prayer, metaphor and metonymy collapse in this moment, see Anderson, Translating Investments, 71–6. Lynne Magnusson, ‘Donne’s Language: The Conditions of Communication,’ in The Cambridge Companion to John Donne, ed. Achsah Guibbory (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006), 192. Cummings, 400–1, 413. For the related argument that Donne uses ‘subsentential units’ – like conjunctions – to render words as material things, see Judith H. Anderson, Words That Matter: Linguistic Perception in Renaissance English (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996), 221–2, 230–1. Murray, 91. For Donne’s use of ‘veruntamen,’ or ‘nevertheless’/‘but yet,’ as an emblem of salvation, see ‘Sermon 13, Preached at White-Hall, the first Friday in Lent, 1622/3,’ The Sermons of John Donne, 4.328: ‘But as all these passions were sanctified in the roote, from which no bitter leafe, no crooked twig could spring, so they were instantly washed with his Veruntamen, a present and a full submitting of all to Gods pleasure, Yet not my will O Father, but thine be done. It will not be safe for any man to come so neare an excesse of passions, as he may finde some good men in the Scriptures to have done.’ For the argument that it is the Latinity of this word that gives it redemptive power, an argument at odds with what follows here, see Anderson, Words That Matter, 195–6.

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84 Fish, ‘Masculine Persuasive Force,’ 245–55; Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 179. 85 Edelman, No Future, 106. One way to imagine this conversion would be as an ‘incorporeal transformation.’ For this notion, see Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 81, 85, 108–9: ‘The incorporeal transformation is recognizable by its instantaneousness, its immediacy, by the simultaneity of the statement expressing the transformation and the effect the transformation produces . . . Eating bread and drinking wine are interminglings of bodies; communing with Christ is also an intermingling of bodies, properly spiritual bodies that are no less “real” for being spiritual. But the transformation of the body of the bread and the wine into the body and blood of Christ is the pure expressed of a statement attributed to the bodies’ (81). 86 For the argument that there’s something unperformable about Holy Sonnet 14, see Cummings, 396: ‘The peremptory imperatives that abound in the Holy Sonnets seem aimed at nobody out of nowhere. It is this unperformability which gives this poetry its sense of religious futility, of wild gesture. The sinner senses a need for grace and makes hopeless cries for transformation; but can only be transformed by a grace which should already have intervened preveniently.’ 87 See Targoff, John Donne: Body and Soul, 121; Kuchar, Divine Subjection, 224–5. 88 Strier, ‘John Donne Awry and Squint,’ 383–4. 89 Cummings, 400. 90 Strier, ‘John Donne Awry and Squint,’ 384. 91 See A.J. Smith, ed., The Complete English Poems (New York: Penguin, 1971), 312; John P. Rumrich and Gregory Chaplin, eds., Seventeenth-Century British Poetry: 1603–1660 (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2006), 71. 92 Here then, I disagree with Targoff’s contention that Donne’s aversion to absolute nothingness means that he is horrified by the destructive aspects of conversion. See Targoff, John Donne, Body and Soul, 131. For a similar claim about Donne’s fear of annihilation, see Stachniewski, 268, 289. For Donne’s contention that even the prisoners of hell cannot wish for annihilation, see Essays in Divinity, ed. Evelyn M. Simpson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), bk. 1, pt. 3, 30–1. 93 Schwartz, Sacramental Poetics, 116. 94 For the argument that Donne employs scepticism and rhetorical controversia as a tool, but is nonetheless suspicious of controversy in subjects devotional, see Thomas O. Sloane, Donne, Milton, and the End of Humanist Rhetoric (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 150, 200–5. In addition, Sloane contends that idolatry can serve as a viable pattern for love (205).

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For the argument that Donne moves the ‘consequences of choice beyond the reach of argument or debate,’ and thus outside of the domain of rhetoric and doubt, see Murray, 72–3. ‘Negative love,’ in The Poems of John Donne, ed. Herbert J.C. Grierson (London: Oxford UP, 1912). Quotations from the Songs and Sonnets are from this edition. Line numbers appear in parentheses. For a Lacanian reading of this poem that presents it as a parody and ‘desublimation’ of Petrarchan conceits, see Kuchar, ‘Petrarchism and Repentance,’ 547–51. For the notion of positive distance, see Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 173: ‘The idea of a positive distance as distance (and not as an annulled or overcome distance) appears to us essential, since it permits the measuring of contraries through their finite difference instead of equating difference with a measureless contrariety, and contrariety with an identity which is itself infinite. It is not difference which must “go as far as” contradiction, as Hegel thought in his desire to accommodate the negative; it is the contradiction which must reveal the nature of its difference as it follows the distance corresponding to it.’ For the argument, indebted to Jean-Luc Nancy, that love entails transcendence and an openness to loss, see MacKendrick, 155–60. In contrast, I have argued throughout that Donne’s verse, ultimately, presents love as attention to a thing, not such a rhapsodic boundary crossing. C.S. Lewis, ‘Donne and Love Poetry in the Seventeenth Century,’ in Seventeenth-Century Studies Presented to Sir Herbert Grierson, ed. John Dover Wilson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938), 80–1.

4. Desiring What Has Already Happened: Reading Prolepsis and Immanence in John Milton’s Early Poems and Paradise Regained 1 This question is a variation on Debora Shuger’s account of modern readers’ befuddlement in the face of Calvinism: ‘It is so easy to find Calvinism morally obnoxious and so hard to understand why an earlier era embraced it.’ See Debora Kuller Shuger, Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance: Religion, Politics, and the Dominant Culture, The New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics 13, gen. ed. Stephen Greenblatt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 177n90. 2 Christian Doctrine, ed. Maurice Kelley, trans. John Carey, in The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, vol. 6, gen. ed. Don M. Wolfe (New Haven: Yale UP, 1973), bk. 1, ch. 28, p. 560. Subsequent reference to the Christian Doctrine will appear in parentheses and include book, chapter, and page numbers.

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3 Richard Rambuss, Closet Devotions, Series Q, ed. Michèle Aina Barale, Jonathan Goldberg, Michael Moon, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Durham: Duke UP, 1998), 85. 4 For the argument that the Reformation offers a revised notion of collectivity, and not just a degeneration of an earlier whole community, see Ramie Targoff, Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 18. 5 Regina Mara Schwartz, Sacramental Poetics at the Dawn of Secularism: When God Left the World, Cultural Memory in the Present, ed. Mieke Bal and Het de Vries (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2008), 8. Subsequent references to Sacramental Poetics will appear in parentheses. 6 Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Remnants of the Sacred in Early Modern England,’ in Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, ed. Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass, Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture 8, ed. Stephen Orgel (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996), 342 7 Regina M. Schwartz, ‘Real Hunger: Milton’s Version of the Eucharist,’ Religion and Literature 31.3 (Autumn 1999): 1. My emphasis. Subsequent references to ‘Real Hunger’ will appear in parentheses. I have preferred this earlier formulation to the more recent account of the eucharist’s importance in Schwartz’s Sacramental Poetics because of its explicit acknowledgment that the sacrament does something in addition to redemption. For the more recent formulation, see Schwartz, Sacramental Poetics, 8–9. 8 For the argument that Paradise Regained is the culmination of Milton’s tendency, evinced also in the early poems, to represent himself as sinless, see Stephen M. Fallon, Milton’s Peculiar Grace: Self-Representation and Authority (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2007), 238. 9 The Latin is ‘Itaque nec absolute necessaria sunt.’ See John Milton, De Doctrina Christiana, compiled and edited by Charles Richard Sumner (Brunsvigae: Fr. Vieweg et filius, 1827), 330. 10 Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Poetry as Experience, trans. Andrea Tarnowski (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1986), 13. 11 Schwartz, Sacramental Poetics, 59–63; John C. Ulreich, Jr, ‘Milton on the Eucharist: Some Second Thoughts about Sacramentalism,’ in Milton and the Middle Ages, ed. John Mulryan (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 1982), 36–7; Marshall Grossman, ‘Milton’s “Transubstantiate”: Interpreting the Sacrament in Paradise Lost,’ Milton Quarterly 16 (May 1982): 42. 12 John Milton, Paradise Lost, in The Riverside Milton, ed. Roy Flannagan (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), 5.433–44. All references to Milton’s poetry are from this edition. Book and line numbers will appear in parentheses.

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13 For the contention that Milton’s use of ‘transubstantiate’ in these lines is satiric, see John N. King, Milton and Religious Controversy: Satire and Polemic in Paradise Lost (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000), 152. For the argument that this moment shows quotidian physiology to be more of a miracle than transubstantiation, see Michael Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton, Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture, gen. ed. Stephen Orgel (New York: Cambridge UP, 1999), 140. The attribution controversy of the early 1990s offered another way to reconcile these disparate treatments of the sacrament: deny that Milton wrote the Christian Doctrine. For recent work that seems to put this controversy to rest, see Gordon Campbell et al., Milton and the Manuscript of De doctrina Christiana (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007). For the original controversy, see William B. Hunter, ‘The Provenance of the Christian Doctrine,’ and Barbara K. Lewalski, John T. Shawcross, and Hunter, ‘Forum: Milton’s Christian Doctrine,’ both in SEL 32 (1992): 129–42, 143–66; Hunter, ‘The Provenance of the Christian Doctrine : Addenda from the Bishop of Salisbury,’ SEL 33 (1993): 191–207; Maurice Kelley, ‘The Provenance of John Milton’s Christian Doctrine : A Reply to William B. Hunter,’ and Christopher Hill, ‘Professor William B. Hunter, Bishop Burgess, and John Milton,’ and Hunter, ‘Animadversions upon the Remonstrants’ Defenses against Burgess and Hunter,’ all in SEL 34 (1994): 153–63, 165–93, 195–203. 14 Ulreich, ‘Milton on the Eucharist,’ 33, 36. Subsequent references to Ulreich will appear in parentheses. 15 Grossman, ‘Milton’s “Transubstantiate,” ’ 44. 16 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, vol. 2, trans. Henry Beveridge (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1979), bk. 4, ch. 17, sec. 10, 564. Subsequent references to Calvin will appear in parentheses and include book, chapter, section, and page numbers. 17 For the memorialist position, see Huldreich Zwingli, Commentary on the True and False Religion, ed. Samuel Macauley Jackson and Clarence Nevin Heller (Durham, NC: Labyrinth Press, 1981), 224: Zwingli contends that, throughout scripture and specifically in the words of consecration, the verb ‘is’ means ‘signifies.’ 18 Achsah Guibbory, Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton: Literature, Religion, and Cultural Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1998), 10: ‘We see in him [Milton] the persistence of desire for ceremony, for a ritual experience that might integrate body and spirit and connect human beings.’

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19 Claude N. Stulting, Jr, ‘ “New Heav’ns, new Earth”: Apocalypse and the Loss of Sacramentality in the Postlapsarian Books of Paradise Lost,’ in Milton and the Ends of Time, ed. Juliet Cummins (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003), 191. Subsequent references to Stulting will appear in parentheses. 20 For another example of the critical emphasis on the dialectical process of interiorization, see Stephen R. Honeygosky, Milton’s House of God: The Invisible and Visible Church (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993), 224: ‘Lacking still is the last step of interiorization of what has been fittingly spiritualized. Even spiritual without must become spiritual within. How does this sanctification occur? Does the reader inhabit the poem or does the poetic Word inhabit the reader? The poetic framework is that which the reader inhabits, but only initially, so that its inner meaning and center, namely Christ and his Spirit, can inhere within the reader and inscribe the internal Scripture in the heart, theoretically now in perfect fulfillment of the Father’s prophetic promise to write one day upon fleshly tablets.’ 21 For the argument that transubstantiation as a concept serves to comment on both the energy and danger of metaphorical language, see Douglas Burnham, ‘The Riddle of Transubstantiation,’ in The Poetics of Transubstantiation: From Theology to Metaphor, ed. Douglas Burnham and Enrico Giaccherini, Studies in European Cultural Transition 27, gen. ed. Martin Stannard and Greg Walker (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005), 1–10. 22 Honeygosky, Milton’s House of God, 204. Subsequent references to Honeygosky will appear in parentheses. 23 Guibbory, Ceremony and Community, 216. 24 Ibid., 227. 25 See Targoff, Common Prayer, 18. 26 Stulting, 188. 27 Jade C. Fleck, ‘A Grammar of Eschatology in Seventeenth-Century Theological Prose and Poetry,’ in Reform and Counterreform: Dialectics of the Word in Western Christianity since Luther, ed. John C. Hawley (New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1994), 72. For another account of the multiplication of endings in Paradise Lost that ultimately issues in a complication of the notion of fulfilment, see Regina M. Schwartz, ‘From Shadowy Types to Shadowy Types: The Unendings of Paradise Lost,’ Milton Studies 24 (1988): 130. 28 David Quint, ‘Expectation and Prematurity in Milton’s Nativity Ode,’ Modern Philology 97 (1999): 206–7; Marshall Grossman, ‘ “In Pensive trance, and anguish, and ecstatic fit”: Milton on the Passion,’ in A Fine Tuning: Studies of the Religious Poetry of Herbert and Milton, ed. Mary A. Maleski (Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1989), 217n2.

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29 Madhavi Menon, Wanton Words: Rhetoric and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 27. The identification of desire and metaphor is curious because Menon cites Lee Edelman’s argument, following Lacan, that desire is a metonymy, but sexuality is this metonymy ‘misrecognized or tropologically misinterpreted as a metaphor.’ See Lee Edelman, Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Culture Theory (New York: Routledge, 1994), 8. 30 Ibid., 31. 31 For Fleming’s link between Milton and Gadamer, see James Dougal Fleming, Milton’s Secrecy and Philosophical Hermeneutics, Literary and Scientific Cultures of Early Modernity, ser. eds. Mary Thomas Crane and Henry Turner (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), 1–29. For Gadamer’s classic formulation of the hermeneutic circle and fore-conception, see Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), 260–2: ‘Hence the task of hermeneutics has always been to establish agreement where it had failed to come about or been disturbed in some way. The history of hermeneutics can offer a confirmation of this if, for example, we think of Augustine, who sought to relate the christian gospel to the old testament, or of early protestantism, which faced the same problem . . . So when we read a text we always follow this complete presupposition of completion, and only when it proves inadequate, ie the text is not intelligible, do we start to doubt the transmitted text and seek to discover in what way it can be remedied . . . The anticipation of completion that guides all our understanding is, then, always specific in content. Not only is an immanent unity of meaning guiding the reader assumed, but his understanding is likewise guided by the constant transcendent expectations of meaning which proceed from the relation to the truth of what is being said.’ 32 Grossman, ‘Milton on the Passion,’ 216. 33 See Michael Schoenfeldt, ‘ “That Spectacle of Too Much Weight”: The Poetics of Sacrifice in Donne, Herbert, and Milton,’ Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 31 (2001): 581: ‘If a poetics of sacrifice emerges from these poems, it is in the realization that Christ’s sacrifice ultimately defeats poetry. As a poetic subject, the sacrifice demands that one perform the inexpressibility topos writ large.’ 34 For the argument that Milton presents an actually unfallen language and humanity in Paradise Lost, see Richard Strier, ‘Milton’s Fetters, or, Why Eden Is Better than Heaven,’ Milton Studies 39 (2000): 169–97. For Strier, the goal is to become the sort of person who no longer needs to deliberate over ethical conundrums: ‘Aristotle’s Ethics helps here; its project is to encourage the development of creatures of a certain kind rather than of perfect rational

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calculators. The goal of the ethical life, for Aristotle, is not to make perfect choices but to become through training, education, and moral experience, the sort of creature who does not have to be constantly making moral choices’ (191). Fallon, 46–7. Ibid., 54. Ibid., 59. For Fish’s related argument on selflessness and assertion in Paradise Regained, see Stanley Fish, How Milton Works (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2001), 345: ‘The Son performs the impossible feat of saying silence and makes himself disappear.’ Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 397. Fleming, x, 26. Whereas Fleming describes this phenomenon as a problem of secrecy, in which once the secret is revealed the thing that hides it, the poem, is no longer useful (18), I describe it as a problem of lack and teleology: not just hidden secrets, but open ends make reading ultimately obsolete. In addition, what Fleming describes as a hermeneutic practice, I would present as a reading practice. Fleck, 72. Ibid. John Rogers, ‘Milton’s Circumcision,’ in Milton and the Grounds of Contention, ed. Mark R. Kelley, Michael Lieb, and John T. Shawcross, Medieval and Renaissance Literary Studies (Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 2003), 208. Rogers’s argument responds to and draws on E.M.W. Tillyard’s claim that Milton presents humans as capable of working out their own salvation. See Tillyard, Milton, rev. ed. (London: Chatto & Windus, 1966), 238: ‘He would like to believe that Man, once created and set in his surroundings, has it in him to work out unaided his own salvation. But such a belief was so utterly incompatible with Christianity that it was out of the question for Milton to admit it – even to himself.’ For the related argument that Milton rejects orthodox concepts of sacrifice and atonement so as to ‘free his characters, his epic, and his God from the tyranny of necessity,’ see Gregory Chaplin, ‘Beyond Sacrifice: Milton and the Atonement,’ PMLA 125 (March 2010): 367. Quint, ‘Expectation and Prematurity in Milton’s Nativity Ode,’ 207–8, 211. M.J. Doherty, ‘Salvation History, Poetic Form, and the Logic of Time in Milton’s Nativity Ode,’ Milton Studies 25 (1989): 25. For a related account of reverse causality, in which an anticipated, or warded off, future has real effects in the present, see Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 431.

254

Notes to pages 171–4

46 I am indebted to a question from John Leonard, at the ‘Iconoclast to Icon’ conference (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 6 November 2008), for suggesting the importance of this off rhyme for my broader argument. 47 As Heather Dubrow notes, even the subtitle of the Nativity Ode in the 1645 Poems, ‘Compos’d 1629,’ contributes to this temporal confusion and collapse. See Dubrow, The Challenges of Orpheus: Lyric Poetry and Early Modern England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2007), 146–7. To make matters even more complicated, this subtitle disappears from the 1673 Poems. 48 J. Martin Evans, ‘A Poem of Absences,’ Milton Quarterly 27 (1993): 33. Despite his essay’s title, Evans claims that the Nativity Ode produces a heightened ‘sense of immediacy by fusing the tenses in the poem in such a way that the events seem to be taking place in a kind of eternal present, both then and now’ and that the poem ‘forces us to respond to the Nativity not vicariously through the experiences of the wise men and the shepherds but directly.’ 49 Rogers, 206. 50 For the argument that rhetoric has restorative power after the Fall, see Menon, 18–19. 51 For the argument that Milton’s recapitulationist understanding of the Atonement justifies a focus on the circumcision, and not the Crucifixion, as the site and moment of redemption, see Rogers, 195–6: ‘But if the poem has a serious claim to our admiration, surely it is because it is so capable of leaving the impression, throughout its first 24 lines, that it is the circumcision and not the Crucifixion that satisfies God’s demand for justice.’ For an account of the sign as an immanent force of a different order from the signifier and signified, see Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia UP, 1994), 77; Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 112. See also Daniel W. Smith, ‘Deleuze’s Theory of Sensation: Overcoming the Kantian Duality,’ in Deleuze: A Critical Reader, ed. Paul Patton (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 30–2. 52 Rambuss, Closet Devotions, 134. 53 Quint, ‘Expectation and Prematurity in Milton’s Nativity Ode,’ 204. 54 Ibid., 206. 55 For a similar argument that ‘unexpressive’ here means ‘that which is itself incapable of expressing anything semantically meaningful,’ see Noam Reisner, ‘The Prophet’s Conundrum: Poetic Soaring in Milton’s “Nativity Ode” and “The Passion,” ’ Philological Quarterly 83 (Fall 2004): 379. 56 See Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., s.v. ‘unexpressive’ and ‘inexpressive’ 1. For editions that gloss ‘unexpressive’ as some variant of ‘inexpressible’ or

Notes to pages 174–5

57 58 59

60

255

‘indescribable,’ see Flannagan, The Riverside Milton, 42; William Kerrigan, John Rumrich, and Stephen Fallon, eds., The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton (New York: Modern Library, 2007), 23; Merrit Y. Hughes, ed., John Milton: Complete Poetry and Major Prose (New York: Macmillan, 1957), 46; John T. Shawcross, ed., The Complete Poetry of John Milton (New York: Anchor, 1971), 67n24; Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg, eds., John Milton: The Major Works, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991), 738. Catherine Belsey, John Milton: Language, Gender, Power, Rereading Literature, gen. ed. Terry Eagleton (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 4. Ibid., 5. Although my discussion of prolepsis and performativity is informed by queer theory, it deviates from this work in rejecting the return of the subject that appears in many discussions of queer desire and time. For the argument that futurity is modelled on the heteronormative reproduction of the same, see Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Series Q, ed. Michèle Aina Barale, Jonathan Goldberg, Michael Moon, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Durham: Duke UP, 2004), 106. I argue that Milton escapes this model by abandoning the Lacanian subject that is the centre of Edelman’s analysis. Under the rubric of positing a queer temporality, Judith Halberstam enacts a similar return to the subject that Milton hopes to transmute. In effect, she turns the question of temporality into a matter of which identities get to control and map ‘reproductive time’ and ‘family time,’ in other words into a matter of space. See Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York: New York UP, 2005), 10, 152–3. For the argument that performativity is not particularly useful for technoscientific discourse because of its attachment to the speaking subject, see Richard Doyle, On Beyond Living: Rhetorical Transformations of the Life Sciences, Writing Science, ed. Timothy Lenoir and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997), 137n17: ‘the persistent invocation of the “I” as the site of the performative – however coherently and brilliantly problematized – renders the performative less useful as a concept for technoscientific discourse, a discourse populated with actants unable to enunciate “I” but that nonetheless seem to exercise force.’ I would argue that a similar reticence about the performative should extend to religious discourse, not because actants cannot enunciate the ‘I,’ but rather because they shouldn’t. In other words, I think we should be similarly wary of the self-centred nature of the performative in a religious poetry that finds the self, often, to be part of the problem.

256

Notes to pages 175–8

61 OED, 2nd ed., s.v. ‘unexpressive’ and ‘inexpressive’ 2. 62 Carla Mazzio, The Inarticulate Renaissance: Language Trouble in an Age of Eloquence (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 2, 17. 63 Ibid., 16. 64 Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia UP, 1994), 176. For the related contention that sense and nonsense are not opposed in the manner that Mazzio describes, see Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, ed. Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia UP, 1990), 35, 68–71. 65 See also Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 98. 66 See William Shakespeare, As You Like It, in The Norton Shakespeare: Based on the Oxford Edition, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1997), 3.2.10, p. 1624; As You Like It, in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), 3.2.10, p. 383. Both of these editions gloss ‘unexpressive’ as ‘inexpressible.’ 67 For the argument that even the ode’s opening line – ‘This is the Month, and this the happy morn’ (I.1) – may refer to the poem itself and, ultimately, collapse the thing represented into its representation, see Dubrow, 147. 68 Fleming, Milton’s Secrecy, 18. Subsequent references to Fleming will appear in parentheses. 69 Edward Tayler, Milton’s Poetry: Its Development in Time (Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1979), 34. See also Grossman, ‘Milton on the Passion,’ 205. 70 See ibid., 212: ‘Unlike the meditative poems of Crashaw and Herbert, which contemplate the intensity of Christ’s suffering so as to appreciate the depth of his gift to man and man’s need of that gift, Milton’s poem dwells on the poet’s choice of a place to stand, a vantage point from which to witness the events at Calvary.’ I tend to agree with Rogers’s explanation of Milton’s aversion to the Passion and Crucifixion as sites that enforce passivity. Here, though, I am more interested in what Milton substitutes for this passivity, the type of activity that his verse enjoins. See Rogers, 208–12. See also Chaplin, 367. 71 In this respect, we should also remember the description of a still, holy passion in ‘Il Penseroso’: ‘Thy rapt soul sitting in thine eyes: / There held in holy passion still, / Forget thyself to Marble, till / With a sad Leaden downward cast, / Thou fix them on the earth as fast’ (40–4). What’s probably most significant here is the fact that passion produces a forgetting of self, not a fragmenting challenge ( jouissance) or a reconsolidation (pleasure).

Notes to pages 178–84

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72 Ryan Netzley, ‘Reading Events: The Value of Reading and the Possibilities of Political Action and Criticism in Samson Agonistes,’ Criticism 48 (Fall 2006): 509–33. 73 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 25. 74 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 77. See also Deleuze and Guattari, AntiOedipus, 39. 75 For the difference between intensive reading in the seventeenth century, which threatens revolution and civil war, and the eighteenth-century’s much less threatening extensive reading, see Lee Morrissey, The Constitution of Literature: Literacy, Democracy, and Early English Literary Criticism (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2008), 8. For the original formulation of the intensive-extensive distinction, see Rolf Engelsing, ‘Die Perioden der Lesergeschichte in der Neuzeit,’ Archiv für geschichte des Buchwesens 10 (1970): 945–1002. See also Leah Price, ‘Reading: The State of the Discipline,’ Book History 7 (2004): 303–20. 76 Morrissey, 45. 77 See The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes, The Complete Prose Works of John Milton, vol. 3, gen. ed. Don M. Wolfe (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1962), 221: ‘the vulgar judge of it according to the event, and the lerned according to the purpose of them that do it.’ I maintain that we have often misread this line, imagining intention as purposiveness and events as simply external spectacles. Instead, events stand as effects or ends, and intention as expression or motive, without regard to aims. 78 Fish, How Milton Works, 379: ‘But any thing or action that is offered as an object of worship is by definition a vehicle of idolatry, and idolatry, like perfection, does not admit of degrees . . . No matter what position an object or action may have in some hierarchy of values, when it is put forward as an alternative to the value of worshipping God, it is of no value at all.’ For the notion of an idolatry of the concept, see Schwartz, Sacramental Poetics, 28. 79 See, for example, Manoa’s deduction that because God has restored Samson’s strength, his eyesight and a renewed divine purpose cannot be far behind: ‘And I perswade me God had not permitted / His strength again to grow up with his hair / Garrison’d round about him like a Camp / Of faithful Souldiery, were not his purpose / To use him further yet in some great service / Not to sit idle with so great a gift / Useless, and thence ridiculous about him. / And since his strength with eye-sight was not lost, / God will restore him eye-sight to his strength’ (1495–1503).

258

Notes to pages 184–8

80 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 136. Deleuze’s more mocking account of recognition might also be of use here: ‘On the one hand, it is apparent that acts of recognition exist and occupy a large part of our daily life: this is a table, this is an apple, this the piece of wax, Good morning Theaetetus. But who can believe that the destiny of thought is at stake in these acts, and that when we recognise, we are thinking?’ (135). 81 For the argument that the Son asserts his own identity at this moment, see Robert L. Entzminger, Divine Word: Milton and the Redemption of Language (Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1985), 116. Barbara Lewalski maintains that the Son’s response on the pinnacle reveals an increased understanding and manifestation of his own role and identity. See Milton’s Brief Epic: The Genre, Meaning, and Art of Paradise Regained (Providence: Brown UP, 1966), 303, 305, 315–17. My argument here is that the poem indicts the processes of revelation and recognition. 82 For a related criticism of Fish’s understanding of action, see David Ainsworth, Milton and the Spiritual Reader: Reading and Religion in SeventeenthCentury England, Studies in Major Literary Authors, ed. William E. Cain (New York: Routledge, 2008), 213n7. For Ainsworth, Fish’s position ‘not only ignores the hidden, silent, but implied internal activity of the poem ( Jesus’ meditations), but equates an active and strenuous hermeneutical struggle with doing nothing. Process is action in this poem, with the product (salvation) deferred.’ In contrast, I maintain that the end is not just deferred, but that the very logic of means and ends, process and product, must be abandoned. 83 For a description of directionless, chaotic creativity as an element of divine grace, in the context of Paradise Lost, see John Rumrich, Milton Unbound: Controversy and Reinterpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996), 141: ‘Chaos represents a principle of indeterminacy and randomness essential to divine power.’ I would simply add that, in Paradise Regained, this purposeless randomness is not just a characteristic of chaotic matter, but of all immanent matter. 84 For an account of a modern queer politics that resists the futural orientation of the political in favour of a present life, see Edelman, No Future, 30: the only act that counts as political is the ‘act of resisting enslavement to the future in the name of having a life.’ For Edelman, all modern politics points toward the future imagined as the space in which a child lives, and thus necessarily degrades a non-reproductive queerness (11). Although I am sympathetic to Edelman’s account of Lacanianism’s complicity with such a heteronormative futurity (85–91, 106), I am less sanguine about his call to enlarge the inhuman (152) as a means of resistance. This move seems to be

Notes to pages 188–92

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an example of changing what we value (the inhuman instead of the human) as opposed to how we value. For a poststructuralist account of the rejection of messianism (within Marxism and Christianity), conceived as a programmatic end, in favour of the messianic, a general formal promise, see Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 75, 89–92, 167–70. 85 David Quint, ‘David’s Census: Milton’s Politics and Paradise Regained,’ in Re-membering Milton: Essays on the Texts and Traditions, ed. Mary Nyquist and Margaret W. Ferguson (New York: Methuen, 1987), 140. 86 Ibid., 130, 138. Conclusion: Reading Is Love 1 Robert Darnton, ‘How to Read a Book,’ New York Review of Books, 6 June 1996, 52. 2 For the related argument that ‘interpretation should be, insofar as possible, an act of love,’ see Ben Saunders, Desiring Donne: Poetry, Sexuality, Interpretation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2006), 243n31. 3 Terry Eagleton, Reason, Faith and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate (New Haven: Yale UP, 2009), 13–14. Eagleton’s book is a succinct, persuasive, and withering dismantling of the journalistic accounts dubbed the ‘new atheism.’ For examples of this trend, see Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York: Twelve, 2007); Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York: Houghton-Mifflin, 2006). 4 Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 342; Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 397. 5 See Ken Jackson and Arthur F. Marotti, ‘The Turn to Religion in Early Modern English Studies,’ Criticism 46 (Winter 2004): 167–90; Stanley Fish, ‘One University under God?,’ Chronicle of Higher Education, 7 January 2005, C1. 6 For the argument that reading, for a variety of reasons, has been treated as conceptually unproblematic, even self-evident and natural by recent conservative critics, see Jeffrey Karnicky, Contemporary Fiction and the Ethics of Modern Culture (New York: Palgrave, 2007), 1–25. For examples of the conservative appropriations of reading that Karnicky critiques, see Harold Bloom, How to Read and Why (New York: Scribner, 2000); Denis Donoghue, The Practice of Reading (New Haven: Yale UP, 1998).

260

Notes to pages 192–5

7 Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982), 198. 8 For an account of the rationale behind Deleuze’s rejection of a subject constituted through lack, see Alain Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, trans. Louise Burchill, Theory Out of Bounds 16, ed. Sandra Buckley, Michael Hardt, Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 81. For a succinct account of how the hermeneutic impulse is similar to that which grounds the constitutively lacking subject, see Jeffrey T. Nealon, ‘Beyond Hermeneutics: Deleuze, Derrida and Contemporary Theory,’ in Between Deleuze and Derrida, ed. Paul Patton and John Protevi (New York: Continuum, 2003), 160. 9 Richard Rambuss, Closet Devotions, Series Q, ed. Michèle Aina Barale, Jonathan Goldberg, Michael Moon, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Durham: Duke UP, 1998), 84. 10 For a compelling rejection of this historicist accusation and defence of the value of psychoanalysis as a tool in Renaissance literary criticism, see Cynthia Marshall, ‘Psychoanalyzing the Prepsychoanalytic Subject,’ PMLA 117 (October 2002): 1207–16: ‘Historicists seek a putatively available real, while psychoanalysis insists on a boundary to what language can contain’ (1209). In rejecting the notion that language is limited in this fashion, I have not hoped to reaffirm the positivist historicism that Marshall here pans. For a related argument for the value of psychoanalysis in early modern literary criticism, see Cynthia Marshall, The Shattering of the Self: Violence, Subjectivity, and Early Modern Texts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2002), 1–55. 11 For the argument that lyric has nothing to do with drama or narrative, and that there is no real-world activity represented within it, see Jonathan Culler, ‘Why Lyric?,’ The New Lyric Studies: Theories and Methodologies, PMLA 123 ( January 2008): 201–2: ‘If narrative is about what happens next, lyric is about what happens now – in the reader’s engagement with each line – and teachers and scholars should celebrate its singularity, its difference from narrative.’ 12 See Gilles Deleuze, ‘Nietzsche and Saint Paul, Lawrence and John of Patmos,’ in Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 50. 13 Ibid., 51. 14 For the argument that all poetic creation is a response to oblivion and that all presents are mediated, see Susan Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 1–3. For an account of the relationship between expressive immediacy and rhetorical mediation in lyric, and its relationship to eucharistic debates, see Heather Dubrow, The

Notes to pages 195–204

15 16 17

18 19

20

21 22 23 24

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Challenges of Orpheus: Lyric Poetry and Early Modern England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2007), 5, 111–12, 120–1. Bruce R. Smith, The Key of Green: Passion and Perception in Renaissance Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 8, 16, 24. Lori Branch, Rituals of Spontaneity: Sentiment and Secularism from Free Prayer to Wordsworth (Waco, TX: Baylor UP, 2006), 225. For the argument that the eucharist implies a thanksgiving not motivated by a gift or object, see Regina Mara Schwartz, Sacramental Poetics at the Dawn of Secularism: When God Left the World, Cultural Memory in the Present, ed. Mieke Bal and Het de Vries (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2008), 117: ‘The Greek eucharistia is generally translated as “thanksgiving,” but in contemporary parlance, thanksgiving has largely come to signify gratitude for a favor, for some thing received, while eucharistia suggests thanks-giving, or praise, without reference to an object.’ Ibid., 7. Concerns about the inutility of lyric poetry continue to preoccupy literary criticism, of course, as the discussion of ‘The New Lyric Studies’ in PMLA indicates. See especially Virginia Jackson, ‘Who Reads Poetry?,’ PMLA 123 ( January 2008): 183; Rei Terada, ‘After the Critique of Lyric,’ PMLA 123 ( January 2008): 196. Stanley Fish, Save the World on Your Own Time (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008), 178. For Derrida on the modern university, especially the full quotation which is much more nuanced than Fish acknowledges, see Jacques Derrida, Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2, trans. Jan Plug et al., Crossing Aesthetics, gen. eds. Werner Hamacher and David E. Wellbery (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2004), 153: ‘Beware of what opens the university to the outside and the bottomless, but also of what, closing it in on itself, would create only an illusion of closure, would make the university available to any sort of interest, or else render it perfectly useless. Beware of ends; but what would a university be without ends?’ Fish, Save the World on Your Own Time, 107. Isobel Armstrong, The Radical Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 87. Ibid., 94. I would like to thank interlocutors, especially Carl Bloom who originally posed the question, at the Association of English Graduate Instructors and Students Conference at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale (2010) for prodding me to think more expansively about the consequences of this concept of reading for literature and literary study in general.

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Bibliography 277 ‘The Thirty-Nine Articles.’ In Religion and Society in Early Modern England: A Sourcebook, ed. David Cressy and Lori Anne Ferrell, 59–73. New York: Routledge, 1996. Tillyard, E.M.W. Milton. Rev. ed. London: Chatto & Windus, 1966. Todd, Richard. The Opacity of Signs: Acts of Interpretation in George Herbert’s The Temple. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1986. Trevor, Douglas. ‘George Herbert and the Scene of Writing.’ In Historicism, Psychoanalysis, and Early Modern Culture, ed. Carla Mazzio and Douglas Trevor, 228–57. Culture Work. Ed. Marjorie Garber. New York: Routledge, 2000. Ulreich, John C., Jr. ‘Milton on the Eucharist: Some Second Thoughts about Sacramentalism.’ In Milton and the Middle Ages, ed. John Mulryan, 32–56. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 1982. van Dijkhuizen, Jan Frans. ‘In Thy Passion Slain: Donne, Herbert, and the Theology of Pain.’ In The Reformation Unsettled: British Literature and the Question of Religious Identity, 1560–1660, ed. van Dijkhuizen and Richard Todd, 59–85. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2008. Vaughan, Henry. The Complete Poems. Ed. Alan Rudrum. New York: Penguin, 1976. Wall, John N. Transformations of the Word: Spenser, Herbert, Vaughan. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988. Warren, Austin. Richard Crashaw: A Study in Baroque Sensibility. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1957. Whalen, Robert. ‘George Herbert’s Sacramental Puritanism.’ Renaissance Quarterly 54 (Winter 2001): 1273–1307. – The Poetry of Immanence: Sacrament in Donne and Herbert. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. Wilmart, André. Auteurs spirituels et textes dévots du Moyen âge latin, études d’histoire littéraire. Paris: Bloud et Gay, 1932. Wilcox, Helen. ‘Devotional writing.’ In The Cambridge Companion to John Donne, ed. Achsah Guibbory, 149–66. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006. Woodbridge, Linda. ‘Country Matters: As You Like It and the Pastoral-Bashing Impulse.’ In Re-Visions of Shakespeare: Essays in Honor of Robert Ornstein, ed. Evelyn Gajowski, 189–214. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004. Young, R.V. Doctrine and Devotion in Seventeenth-Century Poetry: Studies in Donne, Herbert, Crashaw, and Vaughan. Studies in Renaissance Literature 2. Gen. ed. John T. Shawcross. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2000. Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, 1989. Zwingli, Huldreich. Commentary on the True and False Religion. Ed. Samuel Macauley Jackson and Clarence Nevin Heller. Durham, NC: Labyrinth Press, 1981.

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Index

Adams, Robert M., 225n1, 232n27 Adorno, Theodor W., 213n33 affect, 9 – 10, 32 – 3, 36 – 7, 44 – 5, 47 – 8, 54 – 5, 67, 88, 101 – 2, 114, 119, 141, 148, 149 – 50, 165, 193 – 5, 198, 202, 211n14, 214n40, 219n15, 226n1, 227n3, 228 – 8n8, 236n51. See also affective turn; desire: and intensity affective turn, 9 – 10, 37, 223n56. See also affect Agamben, Giorgio, 209n8, 212 – 13n31 Ainsworth, David, 258n82 Alan of Lille, 230n17 Anderson, Judith H., 10, 115, 211n19, 240n21, 243n48, 246n79, 247nn81, 83 Andrewes, Lancelot, 14 – 15 anxiety, 21, 34 – 6, 106 – 48, 166, 196, 198, 237 – 8n4, 238n6, 241n26. See also fear apocalypse, 21, 85, 110, 131 – 2, 169 – 70, 172, 174, 339n13 Aquinas, Thomas, 11 – 13, 15, 81, 84, 99, 163, 233n31, 234n35, 235n44, 235nn53, 56; ‘Adoro devote, latens veritas,’ 85 – 9, 234n35, 235n44

Armstrong, Isobel, 202 Asals, Heather A.R., 61, 64, 99 – 100, 224n72, 231n23 association. See relation assurance, 21, 28, 36 – 8, 106 – 8, 111 – 13, 115 – 18, 120 – 1, 130, 137, 142, 144, 173, 200. See also possession Augustine, Saint, 23, 56, 64, 68, 215n1, 220n23, 224n72, 225n75, 252n31 Badiou, Alain, 260n8 Bahti, Timothy, 243n47 Beckwith, Sarah, 212n23, 217n10 Bellarmino, Roberto, 236n56 Belsey, Catherine, 174 Blanchot, Maurice, 19, 192, 193, 203 Branch, Lori, 196 Brayman Hackel, Heidi, 214n41 Bromley, James M., 230n20 Burnham, Douglas, 251n21 Calvin, John, 4, 12, 15, 76, 100, 116, 157, 173, 231 – 2n23 Calvinism, 4, 12 – 14, 15 – 17, 79, 119, 127, 142, 168, 238n6, 241nn26, 29, 248n1

280

Index

Cantor, Peter, 230n17 Catholicism, 10 – 12, 14 – 17, 67, 88, 93, 97, 100, 122, 126, 140 – 1, 150, 231n23, 241n30 Cefalu, Paul, 108, 111, 116, 119, 135 ceremony, 10, 16 – 17, 21, 28, 30 – 1, 33, 68, 75, 88, 150, 157, 163 – 4, 250n18, 234n42 Chaplin, Gregory, 253n42 Christopher, Georgia B., 213n34, 223n59 communion. See eucharist confessional identity, 15 – 17, 67, 88, 93, 100, 126, 141, 180, 194, 198, 232n25. See also conversion; subjectivity conversion, 16, 62, 88, 122, 125, 127, 133 – 4, 136, 139 – 41, 167 – 8, 215n1, 237n62, 241n30, 245n67, 247nn85, 92. See also confessional identity Corthell, Ronald, 133 Counter-Reformation, 75, 234 – 5n42. See also Trent, Council of Craik, Katherine A., 211n16, 214n41, 221n31 Cranmer, Thomas, 10 – 12, 157 Crashaw, Richard, 15, 20 – 1, 66 – 105, 107, 114 – 16, 121, 122, 149, 196, 202; ‘Adoro Te,’ 81, 83, 84 – 90; Carmen Deo Nostro, 84, 104, 232n26, 233n33, 237n59; Epigrammata Sacra, 68; ‘The Flaming Heart,’ 76, 87, 99 – 101; ‘Hymn in the Holy Nativity,’ 104 – 5; ‘A Hymne on the B. Sacrament,’ 84, 233 – 4n34; ‘Hymn to the Name of Jesus,’ 93 – 4, 95 – 6, 103; ‘In die Passionis Dominicæ [On the day of the Master’s

Passion],’ 72 – 4, 75; ‘In vulnera Dei pendentis [On the wounds of God hanging (on the cross)],’ 71 – 2, 229 – 30n16; ‘John 10:7 – 9. I am the door,’ 80 – 1; ‘Lauda Sion Salvatorem,’ 81 – 4; ‘A Letter from MR. CRASHAW to the Countess of Denbigh,’ 88; ‘Ode on a Prayer-book,’ 90 – 1; ‘On Hope,’ 78 – 9, 232n26; ‘On the miracle of the multiplied loaves,’ 78; ‘On our crucified Lord Naked, and bloody,’ 80 – 1; ‘On the wounds of our crucified Lord,’ 72, 77 – 8, 79; ‘Song upon the Bleeding Crucifix,’ 79 – 80, 81; Steps to the Temple, 68, 84, 104, 232n26, 237n59; Steps to the Temple: ‘The Preface to the Reader,’ 68 – 9, 100; ‘Upon the ensuing Treaties [of Mr Shelford],’ 88, 97 – 8; ‘The Weeper,’ 92 – 3, 102 – 4 Culler, Jonathan, 19, 260n11 Cummings, Brian, 4, 7, 17, 41 – 2, 129, 139, 142, 143, 240n20, 242n38, 247n86 Cunnar, Eugene R., 227n7 Darnton, Robert, 190 Deleuze, Gilles, 6, 18, 25 – 6, 49 – 50, 61, 67, 69 – 70, 110, 133 – 4, 168, 175, 179, 184, 191, 192, 194 – 5, 210n13, 214 – 15n44, 221 – 2n39, 222n47, 223n58, 224n71, 227n4, 228n11, 232n28, 236n58, 239 – 40n13, 240n14, 242n40, 245n74, 247n85, 248n97, 253n45, 258n80, 260n8 de Man, Paul, 233n30

Index 281 Derrida, Jacques, 166, 176, 201, 223n56, 259n84, 261n20 desire: and immanence, 3 – 9, 41 – 53, 66 – 76, 90 – 4, 107, 110, 152 – 3, 158 – 64, 191 – 6, 252n29; and intensity, 9, 24, 32 – 7, 43 – 5, 48 – 9, 214n40; and lack, 3 – 10, 14, 24 – 6, 31 – 2, 34, 38, 40 – 5, 69 – 70, 75, 107 – 9, 125, 130 – 6, 152 – 3, 163 – 4, 170, 179 – 80, 208n3, 216n6, 216 – 17n7, 242n42, 244n57; and purpose, 10, 12, 14 – 20, 41 – 2, 78, 122 – 36, 149 – 53, 163 – 80, 182 – 9, 194 – 6, 203 – 5; and transgression, 9 – 10, 76 – 94, 245n69; versus pleasure, 46 – 51, 106 – 10, 113, 119, 125, 128, 134, 240n14; and work, 5 – 6, 9 – 10, 14 – 15, 18 – 20, 24, 49, 163 – 4, 166 – 8, 179, 186, 191. See also Deleuze, Gilles devotion. See love dialectic, 3 – 6, 16, 43 – 5, 88, 91, 109, 111 – 12, 114, 121, 127 – 32, 134, 137, 139 – 41, 143 – 4, 146, 179, 192 – 3, 195, 197, 202, 214n37, 221n39, 228n11, 245n69, 251n20. See also desire: and lack; subjectivity DiPasquale, Theresa M., 208n2, 237n3 Doherty, M.J., 170, 171 Dollimore, Jonathan, 207n2, 242n42 Donne, John, 15, 16, 21, 45, 51, 78, 79, 98, 106 – 48, 151, 196, 202, 232n24; ‘At the round Earths imagind corners,’ 131 – 2; ‘Batter my hart,’ 125 – 31, 134 – 6, 140 – 1; La Corona, 124 – 5; ‘The Crosse,’ 118 – 19; Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, 98, 113,

115 – 16, 124, 137 – 9; Essays in Divinity, 247n92; ‘Hymne to God my God, in my sicknesse,’ 122 – 4; ‘I ame a litle World,’ 45; ‘If poysonous Minerals,’ 51, 139, 141 – 3, 222n49; ‘A Litanie,’ 112 – 13, 118, 122, 144 – 5; ‘Negative love,’ 132, 145 – 6; ‘Oh, to vex me,’ 111 – 13; Pseudo-Martyr, 122; ‘Satire III,’ 125, 241n30; Sermons, 106, 116 – 17, 120, 122, 246n83; ‘Since She whome I lovd,’ 108 – 9, 125; ‘Spitt in my face ye Jewes,’ 135; ‘Upon the Annunciation and the Passion falling upon one day. 1608,’ 122 – 4; ‘What yf this present,’ 117 – 18; ‘Wilt thou love God,’ 120 – 1 Doyle, Richard, 255n66 Dubrow, Heather, 17, 254n47, 256n67, 260 – 1n14 Eagleton, Terry, 190 – 1, 198, 200, 235 – 6n50 Edelman, Lee, 127 – 8, 140, 209n8, 222n51, 252n29, 255n59, 258 – 9n84 Eliot, George, 106 Eliot, T.S., 136 – 7, 245 – 6n75 Empson, William, 225 – 6n1 emotion. See affect; desire: and intensity Engelsing, Rolf, 257n75 Entzminger, Robert L., 258n81 eucharist: as gift, 32, 42 – 3, 54 – 5, 72 – 3, 151, 165, 261n17; and immanence, nature of, 3 – 4, 52 – 3, 71, 75 – 87, 122, 163 – 4, 149, 151 – 2, 190 – 1, 212n23, 218n10, 222n40; and lack, 4 – 5, 15, 33 – 4, 66 – 7,

282

Index

89 – 90, 152, 215n47, 221n33, 249n7; and reception, 10 – 15, 23 – 4, 27 – 41, 86 – 7, 115 – 22, 187 – 8, 190 – 1, 219n15; and sense, 34 – 42, 84 – 8, 89, 219 – 20n22, 230n17; and signification, 3 – 4, 10 – 15, 54 – 5, 68 – 71, 81 – 4, 98 – 100, 116 – 17, 137 – 8, 149 – 64, 173 – 4, 197 – 8. See also Real Presence Evans, J. Martin, 171, 254n48 excess. See transgression Fallon, Stephen M., 169, 249n8 fear, 21, 106 – 15, 119, 121 – 36, 242n36. See also anxiety; love: and fear fetish. See idolatry Fish, Stanley, 7, 42 – 3, 45, 52 – 3, 77, 109, 140, 183, 186, 201 – 2, 203, 253n37, 257n78, 258n82, 261n20 Fitzpatrick, P.J., 230n17 Fleck, Jade C., 165, 167, 168, 178 Fleming, James Dougal, 166, 168, 176, 177, 179, 180, 182, 253n39 Foucault, Michel, 240n14, 242n40, 243 – 4n54 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 166 – 7, 179, 217n8, 252n31 Gavin, Dominic, 237n61 Gigante, Denise, 220n22 Goldberg, Jonathan, 224 – 5n73 Grafton, Anthony, 18, 214n41 grammar. See reading: and grammar/ syntax Greenblatt, Stephen, 10, 151 Grossman, Marshall, 155 – 6, 165, 167, 178 Grosz, Elizabeth, 208n3, 216 – 17n7

Guattari, Félix. See Deleuze, Gilles Guernsey, Julia Carolyn, 220n23 Guibbory, Achsah, 33, 157, 163 – 4, 218n11, 238n4, 245n73 Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich, 209n8, 255n59 Halberstam, Judith, 209n8, 255n59 Hegel, G.W.F., 4 – 6, 7, 16, 26, 43, 82, 166, 208nn3, 4, 215n44, 216 – 17n7, 228n11, 248n97 Herbert, George, 6 – 9, 16, 20, 21, 23 – 65, 75, 77, 79, 95, 105, 107, 121, 140, 149, 152, 170, 196, 201; ‘Affliction (I),’ 50 – 1, 198 – 201, 204; ‘The Agonie,’ 40 – 1; ‘The Altar,’ 42; ‘The Banquet,’ 39; ‘The Bunch of Grapes,’ 52; ‘Church-lock and key,’ 44, 46; ‘The Churchporch,’ 46 – 7; ‘Clasping of hands,’ 43; ‘The Collar,’ 62; ‘Coloss. 3.3,’ 60; ‘Conscience,’ 38; The Countrey Parson, 35; ‘Discipline,’ 46; ‘Divinitie,’ 24, 35 – 6, 38; ‘The Glimpse,’ 44; ‘The H. Communion,’ 28 – 9, 39, 218n12; ‘The H. Communion’ (Williams ms.), 29 – 33, 53, 218n12; ‘The Invitation,’ 48 – 9, 50, 56; ‘Jesu,’ 63; ‘Jordan (I),’ 27; ‘Jordan (II),’ 26, 57–8; ‘Love (II),’ 44–5; ‘Love (III),’ 6 – 9, 26, 34 – 5, 38, 51 – 2, 59, 170, 199, 219 – 20n22; ‘Love-joy,’ 63; ‘Prayer (I),’ 42; ‘Providence,’ 36, 43; ‘The Quidditie,’ 57, 64 – 5; ‘A true Hymne,’ 58 – 9; ‘Vanitie (I),’ 60; ‘The Water-course,’ 61 – 2 Herz, Judith Scherer, 136 Honeygosky, Stephen R., 163, 164, 251n20

Index 283 homoeroticism. See queer theory; sexuality Hooker, Richard, 14, 36 – 8, 40 hyperbole. See transgression idolatry, 20, 56 – 7, 60 – 1, 63 – 4, 94 – 8, 100, 102, 105, 117 – 19, 136, 144 – 5, 189, 191, 195, 201 – 2, 205, 235 – 6n50, 247n94, 257n78 immanence, 3 – 6, 8, 10, 15, 19, 21, 23 – 9, 33, 35, 39, 41 – 65, 66 – 78, 81, 87, 90, 91, 94, 98, 110, 116 – 17, 123 – 4, 129 – 31, 153 – 64, 178 – 80, 187 – 8, 191 – 2, 193 – 201, 209n8, 233n38. See also desire: and immanence; eucharist: and immanence, nature of immediacy. See immanence ineffability. See inexpressibility topos inexpressibility topos, 70, 74, 138, 139, 146, 167, 170, 174 – 80, 252n33, 245 – 5n56, 256n66 intensity. See affect; desire: and intensity interpretation. See reading: versus interpretation Izenberg, Oren, 217n10, 235n48 Jackson, Virginia, 261n19 Jardine, Lisa, 18, 214n41 Johnson, Kimberly, 67, 234nn37, 41 Johnson, Samuel, 74 kairos, 185 – 6. See also desire: and purpose; prolepsis; recognition Karnicky, Jeffrey, 259n6 Kerr, Jason, 218n13 King, John N., 154, 250n13 Klein, Melanie, 232n28

Kuchar, Gary, 68 – 9, 71, 76, 100, 107 – 9, 115, 130, 132, 141, 239n9, 248n96 labour. See work Lacan, Jacques, 7, 26, 43, 56, 69, 107 – 8, 109, 133, 207n2, 208n3, 216n7, 222n51, 223n56, 224n68, 228n11, 239n9, 244n58, 248n96, 252n29, 255n59, 258 – 9n84 lack. See desire: and lack Lewalski, Barbara K., 15, 126 – 8, 234 – 5n42, 258n81 Lewis, C.S., 147 – 8 Littau, Karin, 211n14, 223n56, 227n3, 245n73 Lord’s Supper. See eucharist love: and fear, 21, 43, 46, 106, 119, 121 – 36, 147 – 8 (see also anxiety); and freedom, 49, 151, 164, 168, 179 – 80, 187 – 9, 200 – 1, 209n8, 212 – 13n31; and immanence, 6, 10, 15, 19, 28, 35, 41, 51 – 2, 194 – 6, 203 – 4, 217n9, 225n75, 248n98; and pedagogy, 19 – 20, 151, 153, 158, 203 – 6; and reading, 8 – 9, 15, 19 – 20, 54 – 5, 63 – 4, 104, 153, 159 – 60, 180 – 9, 190 – 206 (see also reading: practices versus goals) Low, Anthony, 236n51, 237 – 8n4 lyric, nature of, 5, 17 – 20, 190 – 4, 195, 198, 204 – 6, 213n33, 217n10, 222n50, 235n48, 243n47, 260n11, 260 – 1n14, 261n19 MacKendrick, Karmen, 240n14, 243n52, 245n69, 248n98 Magnusson, Lynne, 138 – 9, 143 Marshall, Cynthia, 227n5, 260n10

284

Index

Martin, Jean-Clet, 245n74 Martz, Louis L., 15, 91, 100 – 1, 104, 227 – 8n8 masochism, 49, 107, 110, 125, 128, 133 – 4, 222n47, 239 – 40n13, 240n14, 243n52, 245n69. See also desire: versus pleasure mass. See eucharist Mazzio, Carla, 175, 256n64 McCanles, Michael, 70 McGrath, Lynette, 242 – 3n47 meaning. See reading: versus interpretation memorialism, 10 – 11, 24, 116, 155, 250n17 Menon, Madhavi, 166, 252n29 metaphor, 3, 10, 11, 15, 20, 26, 57 – 8, 70, 74 – 6, 98 – 100, 105, 120, 128, 137 – 8, 143, 158, 162 – 3, 166, 190, 220n26, 233n30, 240n21, 243n48, 246n79, 251n21, 252n29 metonymy, 20, 74 – 6, 81 – 2, 94 – 105, 120, 231n23, 233n30, 237n62, 240n21, 246n79, 252n29. See also reading: and relation, nature of Milton, John, 21, 78, 149 – 89, 196 – 7, 202, 205, 218n13, 220n22, 242n38; The Christian Doctrine, 150 – 8, 161, 163, 182, 187, 250n13; ‘Il Penseroso,’ 256n71; Lycidas, 176; A Mask, 183; Nativity Ode, 153, 165, 169 – 77, 178, 187, 254nn47, 48; Paradise Lost, 149, 151, 152, 154, 155 – 6, 158 – 62, 165, 173, 177, 220n22, 251n27, 252 – 3n34, 258n83; Paradise Regained, 21, 149 – 51, 152, 153, 164, 165, 172, 173, 180 – 9, 200, 220n22, 249n8, 253n37, 258n83; ‘On Time,’ 165; ‘The Passion,’

165, 167, 177 – 8; Samson Agonistes, 178, 184, 185, 257n79; The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, 257n77; ‘Upon the Circumcision,’ 165, 168, 172 – 3, 178 Mintz, Susannah B., 232n28 Monta, Susannah Brietz, 135 Morrissey, Lee, 182, 257n75 Mousley, Andy, 115 Muckelbauer, John, 214n37, 245n66 Murray, Molly, 16, 88, 122 – 3, 125, 139, 215n1, 232n25, 237n62, 241n30, 245n67, 248n94 mysticism, 53, 63, 67, 72 – 3, 76 – 7, 79 – 82, 90 – 2, 99, 102, 121, 180, 190 Nealon, Jeffrey T., 70, 228n11, 246n77, 260n8 New Criticism, 113, 137, 190 Papazian, Mary A., 239 – 40n8 passion. See affect passivity, 98, 104 – 5, 168, 180, 203, 256n70. See also receptionism Paster, Gail Kern, 210n13, 211n16, 221n31, 223n56 Patrides, C.A., 216n2 pedagogy, 8, 11, 17 – 20, 21 – 2, 26, 34, 51, 105, 135, 170, 181, 192 – 3, 201 – 6 performativity, 11, 18, 102, 104 – 5, 140 – 1, 174 – 5, 255nn59, 60 Perkins, William, 13 – 14 Peter, John, 96 – 7, 236n51 phenomenology, 37 – 40, 196, 203, 210n13, 223n56 pleasure. See desire: versus pleasure

Index 285 poetry. See lyric, nature of positive distance, 17 – 19, 131 – 2, 147, 195 – 6, 214 – 15n44, 248n97. See also relation, nature of possession, 23 – 7, 32 – 3, 53, 57 – 60, 64 – 5, 89 – 90, 94 – 5, 124 – 5, 142 – 3, 194 – 5, 217n9, 223n53. See also assurance; idolatry prolepsis, 21, 52, 55, 78, 87, 122 – 5, 131, 149, 152 – 3, 161, 165 – 80, 185 – 6, 196 – 7, 239 – 40n13, 242n38, 255n59 Protestantism. See Reformation psychoanalysis, 3 – 5, 9, 107, 109, 114, 130 – 4, 193 – 4. See also Lacan, Jacques queer theory, 127 – 8, 209n8, 255n59, 258n84 Quint, David, 165, 169, 174, 177, 188 Rambuss, Richard, 46, 66 – 7, 77, 80 – 1, 128, 150, 173 – 4, 177, 193, 220n26, 226n2 reading: and affect, 54 – 5, 67, 101, 105, 148, 156, 168, 202, 211n14, 227n3; and freedom, 61 – 3, 137, 153, 164, 168, 178 – 80, 188 – 9, 200, 203; and grammar/syntax, 21, 114 – 15, 136 – 48, 170 – 1; and possession, 54 – 65, 59, 63 – 5; practices versus goals, 14 – 20, 24, 26 – 7, 53 – 7, 104 – 5, 114 – 15, 137 – 48, 180 – 9, 191 – 2, 196, 200 – 1, 202 – 6, 214n41, 224n68, 253n39, 259n6; and relation, nature of, 3 – 4, 18, 19 – 20, 39 – 41, 61 – 2, 74 – 6, 81, 149 – 51, 192, 202, 223n59; versus interpretation, 21 – 2, 24, 26 – 7,

57 – 61, 63, 96 – 105, 137 – 9, 142 – 5, 147 – 8, 153, 165 – 6, 176 – 80, 190, 202 – 3, 205 – 6, 258n82 Real Presence, 3 – 4, 10 – 15, 21, 23, 28 – 30, 32, 33, 81, 115, 117, 151. See also eucharist receptionism, 10 – 15, 24, 30, 32 – 3, 157, 218n13 recognition, 5, 18, 34, 42 – 3, 50 – 4, 57 – 8, 62, 139 – 40, 184 – 6, 195, 202, 221 – 2n39, 258n80. See also dialectic; subjectivity Reformation, 5, 10 – 17, 35, 43, 67, 88 – 9, 93, 95, 97, 116, 122, 126, 137, 149 – 51, 154 – 5, 163 – 4, 210n12, 213nn32, 34, 220n22, 223n59, 238nn4, 6, 241n30, 249n4, 252n31 Reik, Theodor, 110, 239 – 40n13, 243n52 Reisner, Noam, 254n55 relation, nature of, 17 – 19, 40, 73 – 4, 82, 114 – 15, 116, 124, 131 – 2, 136 – 48, 195 – 6, 202 – 3, 210n13, 214n40, 214 – 15n44. See also positive distance; reading: and relation, nature of religion: and literary criticism, 16 – 17, 137, 151, 191 – 2, 196 – 201 representation. See signs Ricks, Christopher, 243n47 ritual. See ceremony Rogers, John, 168, 172, 253n42, 254n51, 256n70 Roman Catholicism. See Catholicism Rubin, Miri, 233n31 Rumrich, John P., 258n83

286

Index

sacrament. See eucharist; Real Presence Saunders, Ben, 239n9, 240n18, 244n58, 259n2 Scotus, Duns, 99 Schoenfeldt, Michael, 9, 33 – 4, 154, 211n16, 219n15, 221n33 Schwartz, Regina Mara, 10, 32, 54, 64, 94 – 5, 125, 143 – 4, 151 – 2, 154, 155, 156, 161, 164, 197, 215 – 16n2, 222n40, 223n53, 239n11, 249n7, 251n27, 257n78, 261n17 sensation, 36 – 7, 66 – 76, 83 – 94, 208n4, 217 – 18n10, 221n31, 227n4, 227 – 8n8, 234n41, 235nn45, 48. See also synaesthesia; taste sexuality, 252n29 Senasi, Deneen, 75, 76, 81 – 2, 84, 233n32 Shakespeare, William, 176, 194, 195 Sharpe, Kevin, 214nn41, 43 Sherman, William, 214n41 Shuger, Debora Kuller, 36, 213n34, 216n5, 248n1 signification, 3 – 4, 10 – 15, 20, 30 – 1, 39 – 41, 54 – 7, 63, 74, 85, 91, 93 – 4, 96 – 105, 115 – 22, 137 – 8, 142 – 6, 149 – 64, 172, 179, 197 – 8, 212n21, 224n73, 225n75, 229n12, 231n21, 246n77, 254n51. See also reading: and relation, nature of Simpson, James, 238n6 Sloane, Thomas O., 247n94 Smith, Bruce R., 37, 196, 210n13, 223n56, 227n4 Smith, Daniel W., 245n70 Song, Eric B., 224n68 Spinoza, Baruch, 122, 123, 137, 216n6, 243n53, 245 – 6n75

Stachniewski, John, 238n6 Stein, Arnold, 47 – 8 Stewart, Susan, 5, 37, 67, 208n4, 208 – 9n5, 217n9, 222n50, 260n14 Strier, Richard, 10, 33 – 4, 35, 40, 43, 58, 119, 141 – 2, 210n12, 242n36, 252 – 3n34 Stulting, Claude N., Jr, 158, 159, 165 Suarez, Francis, 99, 100, 121 subjectivity, 4 – 9, 15 – 18, 26, 34 – 5, 37 – 8, 40 – 5, 49 – 53, 82, 91, 108 – 10, 113 – 14, 130, 132 – 4, 136, 142 – 3, 168, 176, 182, 192, 195, 199 – 201, 204 – 6, 210n13, 218n13, 228n11, 237n62, 239n10, 242n40, 246n77, 255nn59, 60 subversion. See transgression synaesthesia, 20, 66, 90 – 2, 94, 98, 226n1, 235n45. See also sensation syntax. See reading: and grammar/ syntax Targoff, Ramie, 134, 141, 164, 213n32, 238n7, 239n10, 241 – 2n34, 247n92, 249n4 taste, 20, 35 – 43, 49, 86, 121, 220nn22, 23, 25. See also sensation Tayler, Edward, 177, 178 teaching. See pedagogy teleology. See desire: and purpose Terada, Rei, 261n19 Thirty-Nine Articles, 13 Tillyard, E.M.W., 253n42 Todd, Richard, 56 – 7, 58, 220n23, 221n33, 225n74 transcendence. See immanence transgression, 9 – 10, 66 – 94, 110, 128, 138, 132 – 6, 138, 220n26, 227n5, 240n14, 242n40, 245n69

Index 287 transubstantiation, 12 – 14, 24, 81, 115 – 17, 150, 153, 154 – 5, 230n17, 250n13, 251n21 Trent, Council of, 76, 99, 100, 231n23. See also CounterReformation Trevor, Douglas, 56, 219n20 Ulreich, John C., Jr, 151, 154 – 5, 161 – 2

Wilcox, Helen, 131, 138, 242n37 Woodbridge, Linda, 211n17 work: versus free action, 4 – 6, 8 – 10, 14 – 15, 19 – 20, 24 – 5, 49, 65, 95, 103, 110 – 11, 129, 137, 166 – 8, 184, 186, 191, 200, 211n17, 221 – 2n39, 224n68, 244n55, 258n82. See also Deleuze, Gilles; desire: and work; love: and freedom; reading: and freedom

van Dijkhuizen, Jan Frans, 238n4 Vaughan, Henry, 219 – 20n22 virtualism, 12, 14

Young, R.V., 126 – 7, 128, 136, 231n21

Wall, John N., 42, 55, 221nn33, 34 Whalen, Robert, 33 – 4, 35 – 6, 38, 55, 117, 118, 119, 213n32, 218n11, 220n24

Žižek, Slavoj, 132, 228n11, 245n62 Zwingli, Huldreich, 10, 155, 157, 250n17