Fictions of Conversion

Jews, Christians, and Cultures of Change in Early Modern England

Jeffrey S. Shoulson

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780812244823
  9780812244823
• eBook ISBN:
  9780812208191
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The fraught history of England's Long Reformation is a convoluted if familiar story: in the space of twenty-five years, England changed religious identity three times. In 1534 England broke from the papacy with the Act of Supremacy that made Henry VIII head of the church; nineteen years later the act was overturned by his daughter Mary, only to be reinstated at the ascension of her half-sister Elizabeth. Buffeted by political and confessional cross-currents, the English discovered that conversion was by no means a finite, discrete process. In Fictions of Conversion, Jeffrey S. Shoulson argues that the vagaries of religious conversion were more readily negotiated when they were projected onto an alien identity—one of which the potential for transformation offered both promise and peril but which could be kept distinct from the emerging identity of Englishness: the Jew.Early modern Englishmen and -women would have recognized an uncannily familiar religious chameleon in the figure of the Jewish converso, whose economic, social, and political circumstances required religious conversion, conformity, or counterfeiting. Shoulson explores this distinctly English interest in the Jews who had been exiled from their midst nearly three hundred years earlier, contending that while Jews held out the tantalizing possibility of redemption through conversion, the trajectory of falling in and out of divine favor could be seen to anticipate the more recent trajectory of England's uncertain path of reformation. In translations such as the King James Bible and Chapman's Homer, dramas by Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Jonson, and poetry by Donne, Vaughan, and Milton, conversion appears as a cypher for and catalyst of other transformations—translation, alchemy, and the suspect religious enthusiasm of the convert—that preoccupy early modern English cultures of change.

Chapter 1

“The Jews Perverted and the Gentiles Converted”: Confessions and Conversos

The Wolfe is made a Sheepe euen then, when gaping, hee is at poynt to enter into the Fold. The Physitian of his soule (praysed be the power of his grace) heales him in the midst of his madnesse; and restores him in the very extremity of his Disease. No height of sinne can forbid the force of grace. Alwayes, the more the weight of sinne, the greater the worke of saluation. True Conuersion, is neuer too late: though late conuersion, proues scarcely true.

—John Gaule, Practique Theories (1630)

The Christian discourse of conversion begins with Paul, whose turn from Pharisaic persecutor of Jesus and his followers to apostle to the Gentiles (especially as it is described in Acts 9) marks a dramatic, miraculous transformation. The question of Paul’s conversion, however, has become a hotly contested one in recent years, part of a more extensive interrogation of the so-called parting of ways, the division (one of many, in fact) within the post-Temple Mediterranean Jewish community that ultimately produced the two distinct religions we now call Judaism and Christianity. Though I do not intend to describe this lively and important scholarly controversy in any detail, it is worth observing that this very pressing contemporary question is also at the heart of the writings about conversion in early modernity. Nearly every Christian writer who speaks about the calling of the Jews or about the conversion of an individual Jew also conjures this primal scene of separation, the initiating division that must be healed through conversion. Perhaps the most vivid instance of this correlation appears in the work of the English millenarian Joseph Mede, whose “Mystery of S. Paul’s Conversion: or, The Type of the Calling of the Jews” sets out, in table form, ten aspects of Paul’s conversion that are prophesied to find direct parallels in the imminent conversion of the Jews.¹ Paul’s writings—and particularly his conversion on the road to Damascus—mark the transformation of Jew to Christian for early modern readers far more so than do the events narrated in the gospels. In modern scholarship, Paul’s writings are also foundational, but their meanings for the question of conversion are far less clear. A. D. Nock’s seminal work on conversion, “the old and the new,” as his subtitle insists, renders Paul’s turn to Jesus as “a complete change of face . . . the first conversion to Christianity of which we have knowledge.”² Alan Segal breaks down the influence of Paul’s conversion into stages, moving from Paul’s ecstatic, visionary experience as described in his letters, to Luke’s characterization in Acts of Paul’s experience as typical of all Gentile conversions, to the later attempts, first in pastoral epistles like 1 Timothy and then in early post-biblical Christian writings, to make Paul in an explicit paradigm for the conversion experience.³ More recently, Paula Fredriksen has argued for the “mandatory retirement” of the term “conversion” when speaking about Paul, who never thought of himself as anything but a Jew, even when he was preaching Christ’s salvation to the Gentiles.⁴ In many ways, this contemporary scholarly controversy captures the very tensions built into the early modern fictions of conversion under analysis in this book. Nock’s characterization of Paul’s conversion combines the language of continuity with radical change, as he describes Paul’s “inner need to discover an interpretation and reconciliation of the old and the new in his religious life.”⁵ I take Nock’s evocative phrase as a helpful expression of my provisional, working definition of conversion; the various formulations of conversion I shall be discussing participate in the rhetorical coordination of the impulse to reconcile old and new. Continuity and rupture figure side by side in the work of conversion; the language of change serves as a site of intense ambivalence. This chapter begins with an account of early Christian writings on conversion that will serve, in turn, as the context for a discussion of the particularly problematic discourse of conversion within the period of the English Reformation. The chapter concludes by making explicit the implicit ties these Reformation fictions of conversion had to the intensely anxious and ambivalent representations of Jewish conversion and marranism.

As we saw in Donne’s sermon, some early modern readers looked to Paul’s experience on the road to Damascus as an account of the extremities conversion could traverse, “from extreame to extreame, without any middle opinion.” In his sermon on “Sauls cruelty. Pauls Conuersion,” the Anglican clergyman John Gaule (1603/4–1687) gave vivid expression to these extremes:

Saul is now on his iourney; the best iourney that euer hee tooke; the worst that euer hee vndertooke. It was wickedly purposed, happily disposed; ill attempted, well atchieued. Now is he neere to Damascus, neere to Euill puporsed; but (oh the Wisedome and Goodnesse of Diuine Prouidence!) nearer to Grace offered. The Wolfe is made a Sheepe euen then, when gaping, hee is at poynt to enter into the Fold. The Physitian of his soule (praysed be the power of his grace) heales him in the midst of his madnesse; and restores him in the very extremity of his Disease. No height of sinne can forbid the force of grace. Alwayes, the more the weight of sinne, the greater the worke of saluation. True Conuersion, is neuer too late: though late conuersion, proues scarcely true.⁶

Stressing the miraculous nature of Paul’s conversion, Gaule concludes his observation with a pair of comments that display the apprehension many of his contemporaries would have felt about their own salvation. When true conversion occurs, it is always, by definition, on time; one can never be certain, however, of the authenticity of one’s conversion, especially when it comes “late.” In fact, so extreme, abrupt, and violent was Paul’s conversion that readers found it very difficult to regard it as a model to be emulated. In a sermon on Paul’s conversion that Donne preached four years prior to his 1628/29 sermon, he remarked that while the “Ecclesiastical Story abounds with examples of occasionall Convertits, and upon strange occasions . . . yet the Church celebrates no Conversion, but this. . . . Here was a true Transubstantiation, and a new Sacrament.”⁷ Paul’s conversion was exceptional, not exemplary. As David Cressy has shown, the feast commemorating Paul’s conversion had even been omitted from the official Elizabethan church calendar.⁸ Donne’s sermons on the event marked a departure from the established tradition at St. Paul’s Cathedral. Indeed, the very exceptionality, the miraculous quality of Paul’s conversion may also help to explain why, more often than not, its invocation as a paradigm (as in Mede’s table) was linked to the miraculous calling of the Jews.

The timeliness of conversion was related to another feature of writings about conversion, especially within the context of the early Reformation. While Augustine, who, after Paul, served as the other key early model of Christian conversion, included images of creation and renewal in his representations of the religious transformation he underwent, newness was a rather fraught matter for many of the early reformers.⁹ Emerging from within the same cultural climate that gave rise to the humanistic return ad fontes, to the sources, proponents of the Reformation were wary of novelty; hence, arguments for reform were typically framed in terms of a return to the original expression of faith and practice of apostolic Christianity. Since innovation was deemed the wrong way to present the teachings of Protestantism, the notion of conversion as rupture, break, or even new creation posed a challenge for reformers who, as Judith Pollman has suggested, “presented [their] program to believers as one of learning old truths and of unlearning bad habits, not as one of changing personality.”¹⁰ Reformers had good reason to be wary of any suggestions of novelty. In defending his own conversion to Catholicism, Benjamin Carier described his process of studying the English church’s break with Rome:

I was sorie to heare of change and of a new Religion, seeing, me thought, in reason if true religion were Eternall, then new religion could not be true. But yet I hoped that the religion of England was not a chance or new religion, but a restitution of the olde, and that the change was in the Church of Rome, which in processe of time might, perhaps, grow to be superstitious and Idolatrous; and therefore that England had done well to leaue the Church of Rome, and to reforme it selfe, and for this purpose, I did at my leasure and best oportunitie, as I came to more iudgement read ouer the Chronicles of England, and obserued all the alterations of religion that I could find therein: but when I found there that the present religion of England was a plain change, and change vpon change, and that there was no cause of the change at all of the first but only that King HENRY the eight was desirous to change his old Bed-fello.¹¹

Donne’s Satire may have offered an affirming view of change; yet Carier’s history lesson teaches a very different, more uneasy, understanding of change, one implicitly associated with human capriciousness and excess, particularly exemplified by sexual immorality (in this case, Henry’s desire for a new wife and new heir).

Despite efforts by some modern historians to locate a precise moment, a turning point, in the life of Luther or Calvin that marked their respective breaks from the Catholic church and their conversions to “Protestantism,” given the potential suspicions aroused by claims of novelty, it should not be surprising to us that the writings of these reformers are noteworthy for the absence of any such pivotal event or rupture. Luther’s so-called tower experience, the revelatory moment he describes in his writings when he came to understand the centrality of faith to salvation, only looks like a conversion experience in retrospect for the reader who expects to find it somewhere—anywhere—in Luther’s self-representations. In his Lectures on Romans, for example, Luther is far more intent upon representing conversion as an ongoing struggle rather than as a decisive, fixed event. A person may be converted in baptism only once, according to Luther, but he may be converted again and again in penitence. “If, therefore, we are always repenting,” Luther notes, “we are always sinners, and precisely thereby we are righteous and being made righteous; we are partly sinners and partly righteous, i.e., nothing but penitents.”¹² He is strongly critical of the view that a Christian’s salvation can be secured permanently and with assurance during his lifetime. As Marilyn Harran has noted, Luther regarded change itself as a constant; and as such, conversion could never be a one-time-only affair.¹³

The influence of humanism’s return to classical sources on Luther and his followers can be seen in an understanding of conversion along the philosophical lines first elaborated as early as The Republic, where Plato speaks of education as a “reorientation of a mind from a kind of twilight to true daylight.”¹⁴ Plato’s idea of a philosophical peristrophe, turning, could also be found at the heart of one of the earliest Christian conversion accounts, predating Augustine’s Confessions by more than 200 years, Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho. In recovering these earlier classical influences, Luther and his humanist followers were also departing from an understanding of conversion that had come to dominate Christian writings since at least Bernard of Clairvaux, that of religious intensification by means of a commitment to monastic life.¹⁵ For reformers like Luther, conversion was far more about an ongoing reorientation. Rather than locating their turns in instantaneous moments of epiphanic inspiration like Paul’s Damascene experience, reformers were more likely to be drawn to, and model themselves after, the philosophically conditioned, incrementally achieved conversion of Augustine, who, after much self- conscious, intellectual, searching, picked up a book, read, and was changed.¹⁶

A similar understanding of conversion as incremental, recursive, and incomplete can be found in the writings of Calvin. Stressing the impossibility of any conversion without God’s initiating role, Calvin notes, “with such bondage of sinne therefore as Will is deteined, it cannot once moove it selfe to goodnesse, much lesse applie itselfe. For such mooving is the beginning of turning to God, which in Scriptures is wholy imputed to the grace of God.”¹⁷ As he suggests in his account of his own religious development, however, Calvin does not regard this imputation of grace as instantaneous and definitive. In fact, Heiko Oberman has convincingly shown that Calvin’s famous use of the word subito in his commentary on the Psalms, which has lead some of his readers to perceive his conversion as sudden, is better understood as unexpected (in the sense of unmerited): “for Calvin the primary connotation of conversion is not salvation but vocation, a call to service. This conversion comes subito, i.e., praeter spem, against all expectations, exactly because it could hardly have come to someone less suited to public office.”¹⁸ Calvin’s Institutes speaks of the restorative work of conversion as happening “not in one moment or one day, or one yeare, but by continuall, yea sometimes slowe proceedings . . . this war hath no end but in death.”¹⁹ Given the enormous influence Calvin’s writing exercised on English Protestantism throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it is hardly surprising to find English writings on conversion replete with accounts of its ongoing, incomplete, impermanent nature. For example, the “morphology of conversion” that took shape within the writings of the influential Cambridge theologian and Puritan writer William Perkins (1558–1602) delineated a series of incremental steps—noteworthy for their non-linear, often retrogressive advance—through which one could hope and expect to proceed on the way toward salvation.²⁰ 2 Peter 1.10, a favorite verse for Perkins and his readers, called upon the faithful to “give diligence to make your calling and election sure: for if ye do these things, ye shall never fall.” A supernatural supplanting of the mortal will by the granting of grace, conversion was not something to be achieved through human agency or action. And yet, according to Perkins, one could experience one’s predestined salvation through the repeated scrutinizing of one’s claim of faith and how that faith manifested itself in particular works.²¹ Perkins is clear, however, that “saving faith” is distinguished by the persistence and return of doubt. As Charles Cohen astutely observes, “A person believes in Christ when he or she stops believing in oneself. The paradox of laboring for preparation is that to receive faith, one must fail to get it, and that in having failed, one succeeds.”²² The Puritan conversion experience takes place repeatedly and is defined by the elusive, endlessly receding nature of any assurances. When conversion seems to have concluded is, precisely, when it has failed. This awareness of conversion’s ongoing quality was, understandably, occasion for anxiety and concern. Gaule, for example, speaks of “Conuersion inchoate,” even as he insists that “Conuersion is none, if not compleat.”²³ Conversion could hardly be considered “compleat” in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English theological discourse.

Between Churches: Ecclesiastical Change

Historians presume (often implicitly) two different kinds of religious conversion in early modern English writing, which appear to describe two different kinds of experience, and which lend themselves to different kinds of language and representational strategies. On the one hand, conversion can refer to the achievement—or perhaps better, the reception—of salvation, an experience that occurs often without any specific or explicit change in denominational identity. Following Michael Questier’s study of early modern English conversion, we might broadly refer to this kind of change as “evangelical” conversion.²⁴ Evangelical conversion dominated Puritan writings from the late sixteenth century and all through the seventeenth century. Thanks in large part ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. “The Jews Perverted and the Gentiles Converted”: Confessions and Conversos
• Chapter 2. “Thy People Shall Be My People”: Typology, Gender, and Biblical Converts
• Chapter 3. “The Meaning, Not the Name I Call”: Converting the Bible and Homer
• Chapter 4. Alchemies of Conversion: Shakespeare, Jonson, Vaughan, and the Science of Jewish Transmutation
• Chapter 5. Conversion and Enthusiasm: Radical Religion and the Poetics of Paradise Regained
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgments