Conflicts of Devotion

Liturgical Poetics in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England

Daniel R. Gibbons

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780268101374
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Poetry
• Index: Literature

Who will mourn with me? Who will break bread with me? Who is my neighbor? In the wake of the religious reformations of the sixteenth century, such questions called for a new approach to the communal religious rituals and verses that shaped and commemorated many of the brightest and darkest moments of English life. In England, new forms of religious writing emerged out of a deeply fractured spiritual community. Conflicts of Devotion reshapes our understanding of the role that poetry played in the re-formation of English community, and shows us that understanding both the poetics of liturgy and the liturgical character of poetry is essential to comprehending the deep shifts in English spiritual attitudes and practices that occurred during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The liturgical, communitarian perspective of Conflicts of Devotion sheds new light on neglected texts and deepens our understanding of how major writers such as Edmund Spenser, Robert Southwell, and John Donne struggled to write their way out of the spiritual and social crises of the age of the Reformation. It also sheds new light on the roles that poetry may play in negotiating—and even overcoming—religious conflict. Attention to liturgical poetics allows us to see the broad spectrum of ways in which English poets forged new forms of spiritual community out of the very language of theological division. This book will be of great interest to teachers and students of early modern poetry and of the various fields related to Reformation studies: history, politics, and theology.

PART I

Redrawing the Boundaries

CHAPTER 1

Accommodation and Exclusion

Writing Community in the 1559 Book of Common Prayer

Yet because there is no remedy, but that of necessitie there must be some rules: therfore certein rules are here set furth, whiche as they be fewe in nombre: so they be plain and easy to be understanded…. It is more profitable, because here are left out many thynges, whereof some be untrue, some uncertain, some vain and supertsticious: and is ordeyned nothing to be read, but the very pure worde of God, the holy scriptures, or that whiche is evidently grounded upon the same: and that in suche a language and ordre, as is moste easy and plain for the understandyng, bothe of the readers and hearers. It is also more commodious, bothe for the shortnes thereof, and for the plaines of the ordre, and for that the rules be fewe and easy. Furthermore by this ordre, the curates shal nede none other bookes for their publique service, but this boke and the Bible: by the meanes whereof, the people shall not be at so great charge for bookes, as in tyme past they have been.

And where heretofore, there hath been great diversity in saying and singing in churches within this realm, some following Salisbury use, some Hereford use, some the use of Bangor, some of York, and some of Lincoln, now from henceforth all the whole realm shall have but one use.

—Archbishop Thomas Cranmer’s Preface to The Book of Common Prayer, 1549

If we take Cranmer at his word, we see that he understood The Book of Common Prayer as an attempt to produce spiritual unity in a community that had been disordered and divided since long before Henry VIII’s break from Rome. Cranmer’s winsome description of his new liturgical manual portrays the Prayerbook (and by metonymy the whole of the new religious order of Edward VI’s church) as a solution to an old communal problem rather than the imposition of a new ecclesiology. Perhaps these divisions are overstated in Cranmer’s Preface. I know of no evidence that many late medieval Christians were seriously troubled by the liturgical diversity Cranmer describes.¹ Whether or not Cranmer’s representation of the liturgical situation in England is somewhat disingenuous, even a modern reader can feel the attraction of Cranmer’s language of consolidation, simplification, and ease of use. People today may still hold all manner of religious commitments and beliefs, but most tend to value transparency, accessibility, and “user-friendliness.” The subtle force of Cranmer’s rhetoric is not entirely lost on us, even nearly half a millennium later, but of course every affirmation of one idea risks the exclusion of many others. We might share Ethan Shagan’s sense that “moderation could be made to support very different agendas; as a language of control, it was an enormously useful tool for early modern elites to defend and naturalise their various and sometimes contradictory ideological programmes.”² Because the word diversity now carries positive connotations that Cranmer could not have imagined, we are likely to regard his blithe exclusions of “vaine and supersticious” things with more suspicion than he could have anticipated.

Regardless of how persuasive a modern reader may find Cranmer’s justifications of his liturgical reforms, we can see in his prefatory comments a tension between two fundamental rhetorical patterns that framed the basic structure of the English Reformation: accommodation and exclusion. The early reformers could not afford to alienate the vast body of Englishmen who did not yet share their theological convictions and aesthetic tastes, but they also could not afford to tolerate for long the traditional beliefs and practices that, in their view, kept that body of Christians ignorant of the true gospel and yoked in spiritual submission to the false beliefs of the Roman Antichrist. And so began a careful play of accommodations and exclusions, the canny management of which was essential to the remarkable success of the English Reformation during the reign of Elizabeth I.

Both accommodation and exclusion are necessary for the formation of any community—some will be “in” and some will be “out”—but the way in which a community manages the boundaries of its “us” by accommodating and excluding determines its character. The placid air of resolving old communal divisions that we find in Cranmer’s Preface belies the alarming new divisions that had begun to emerge during the decades preceding the Preface’s publication—divisions that the 1549 Book of Common Prayer deepened even as its proponents attempted to produce the liturgical unity Cranmer envisioned. These divisions were neither exclusively political nor exclusively religious, but were the products of the mixed motives of people who, for all of their violent disagreements, would have been united in despising our way of separating religious from political life. In the sixteenth century, politics was (at least in part) a product of theology and personal belief. Separation of church and state in any way other than jurisdictional would have been a repugnant notion to Christians (and pagans) living before the eighteenth century. Although the intermingling of religious and political life was a source of deeply satisfying social unity in times of relative religious stability, in times of religious fragmentation the interdependency of church and state could quickly turn theological arguments into serious threats to the commonweal.³

The array of fine theological distinctions that began to take root in the hearts of English religious and political leaders during this period had intellectual, social, and often all-too-physical effects. While disputes over the Eucharist, predestination, faith and works, and liturgical vestments seem to many twenty-first-century readers like petty squabbles about minor theological details—absurd conflicts like Swift’s egg-cracking debate between the Big-Endians and Little-Endians in Lilliputia—for sixteenth-century English men and women those theological arguments not only were a matter of life and death in this world but carried eternal consequences in the afterlife. Indeed, though most of the disagreements of the Reformation era were generated by competing answers to subtle theological questions, the turmoil that erupted out of those theological disputes during the first half of the sixteenth century was so grave that it threatened to tear England apart at the seams.⁴ This chapter will examine the role of the English vernacular liturgy in the Elizabethan attempt to manage the social impact of those theo-political disputes by means of rhetorical accommodation in the Communion rite and didactic exclusion in the Order for the Burial of the Dead. These two rituals, both of which are deeply concerned with the renewal of spiritual community and the management of its boundaries, not only are fascinating dramatic texts in themselves but also had profound unintended consequences for the English sense of spiritual community and the poets who sought to reshape and sustain spiritual communities in their verse.

AN UNSETTLING BOOK: THE EMERGENCE AND PROMULGATION OF THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER

Although the history of the “Elizabethan Settlement” and its Prayerbook will be familiar to specialists in early modern English religious history, I will digress from the main argument for a few pages to provide a brief review of the process by which the Book of Common Prayer came to inhabit such a central place in English culture. Readers more familiar with this history may proceed directly to the next section of this chapter and pick up the thread of the argument there, while readers less familiar with this history may abide with me to travel over that well-worn historical ground whose topography is necessary background for following the argument of the rest of this chapter and the whole book.

When Elizabeth Tudor acceded to the throne in 1558, intense pressures both abroad and within England made it imperative that a stable transition of power take place and that a stable national identity be re-forged without too much visible internal conflict.⁵ This national identity had to compete with, control, or contain the various unstable religious identities extant among the English in order to secure a relatively unified front against England’s major political rivals, France and Spain. One of Elizabeth’s first projects upon her accession was the uprooting of her half sister Mary’s work to reestablish Roman Catholicism in English law and religious practice.

To accomplish this without provoking rebellion in the more staunchly Catholic north and west of England, Elizabeth’s bishops would need to “settle” the major theological disputes in favor of Elizabeth’s preferred moderately Reformed religious establishment, but in a way that would allow room for a limited spectrum of private practices and theological opinions on matters that did not present a perceptible threat to the regime. The need for this so-called Elizabethan Settlement led the queen and her supporters to secure the passage of legislation establishing Elizabeth’s supremacy over religion in England. Elizabeth’s religious supremacy required, in turn, that the monarch’s agents hold the power to enforce uniform adherence to the authorized theology in the preaching and liturgy of all English parishes. Key to establishing uniformity of teaching and worship at the parish level was the promulgation of a standard liturgical book for all English churches—the sort of unifying Prayerbook that Cranmer had helped to produce for King Edward VI. Indeed, that same Prayerbook, tweaked to fit the queen’s preferences and the pressures of the mid-sixteenth century, turned out to be just what Elizabeth’s church needed.

There is no clear evidence that would allow us to determine exactly who was involved in the process of revision that produced the 1559 Book of Common Prayer, or even to suggest how the revision proceeded. Norman Jones offers a series of possibilities, none of which can be excluded by the meager documentation that does exist: “Perhaps the divines met and decided that fewer changes were necessary than were envisaged…. Or perhaps it was decided that the book needed so little revision that the committee never met (thus explaining why there is no evidence of any meeting). Or perhaps Elizabeth’s conservatism exerted itself in limiting the number of changes she allowed the committee to make. Finally, there is the slight possibility that the committee prepared a revision which met so much opposition in Parliament that it was withdrawn and replaced with the slightly modified 1552 version.”⁶ We may not know precisely how the 1559 revisions of the 1552 Edwardian Prayerbook took place, but it is clear that the editors of the authorized Elizabethan liturgical texts were faced with a difficult rhetorical task nearly identical to that faced by Cranmer when he first set out to perform the audacious work of inventing a reformed Christian liturgy in English. The new liturgy book would need to draw together a geographically and socially diverse audience whose members held widely divergent beliefs about contentious doctrines like the “real presence” of Christ in the Holy Communion and prayer for/to the dead. The 1559 version of the Book of Common Prayer engaged this divided audience by means of both delicate accommodations and trenchant exclusions. Whether or not the Elizabethan editors intended the book as a final articulation of Reformed English Christianity, the 1559 Book of Common Prayer did, in fact, institute most of the theological principles, attitudes, and ways of using language that would later come to be seen as characteristic of the Church of England.

What emerged out of the ecclesiastical and parliamentary negotiations of 1559 was a hybrid text that combined elements of various vernacular liturgical texts and the earlier versions of the Prayerbook on which Thomas Cranmer and a number of other English Reformed divines had been working throughout the previous decade.⁷ Doubtless, the rhetorical texture of this hybrid text is marked by the countervailing forces involved in its composition and compilation. However, there is more to be gained from a close study of the 1559 Book of Common Prayer than a historical lesson in the difficulties of theology by committee. One could fruitfully follow the various threads of theology in the Prayerbook to their historical, textual, and political sources, but I am more interested in the immediate implications of the Prayerbook’s language, especially as the hybrid language of the whole final product became an authorized religious rhetoric in England, a way of writing communal worship that would penetrate the spiritual vocabularies of English poets from Spenser to Crashaw.

Although no full vernacular liturgy was issued during Henry’s reign, there had been much work on early drafts of vernacular and reformed liturgical texts and prayers, many undertaken at the king’s order. Any vernacular liturgical or ritual prayers could, in the context of the early sixteenth century, be seen as theologically loaded, not because they were explicitly forbidden, but because of a general sense among traditionalists that the abandonment of Latin in the liturgy or other religious rituals would inevitably be little more than a step down the slippery slope into Wycliffitism, Lutheranism, or other heresies, which were perceived as inevitably leading to general social and spiritual chaos.⁸ Brian Cummings also speculates that for most Christians in the sixteenth century there may have been a sense that prayers translated out of Latin might no longer be able to produce the spiritual effects they were intended to accomplish (BCP, xxiii).

While reformers advanced the idea that prayers whose language could not be fully understood by the one praying were useless, or even impious, traditionalists maintained the usefulness and beauty of the Latin prayers. This defense sometimes relied on a mystical attitude toward divine ineffability. Edmund Shether (a Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, who was made a preacher at Canterbury by Cranmer himself but was later prosecuted for his resistance to Cranmer’s religious program) articulated an especially pithy version of this argument in his sermon at St. Stephen’s, Canterbury, in May 1543: “Some of you say that men cannot pray in an unknown tongue because they understand not what they say. But I say that no man understandeth what he prayeth, as St. Paul sayeth, nescit homo quomodo orandum sit, sed spiritus hominis docet quomodo orandum sit.”⁹ What could Shether possibly mean when he denies that one can understand even one’s own vernacular prayers? What could one understand better than words proceeding from one’s own heart and mind, spoken in one’s mother tongue? Shether’s claim may at first seem absurd, but its substance becomes clearer when it is placed in the context of a mystical understanding of both the insufficiency of all language and the ineffability of the divine.

We might compare Shether’s argument to Emmanuel Levinas’s more recent articulation of the false thinking and ethical failure produced by confidence in human notions of the divine. While in other places Levinas criticizes what he considers a displacement of true ethics in Catholic ritual and sacrament, in an essay entitled “Loving the Torah More Than God,” Levinas argues for a beneficial sense of the ineffability of the divine not dissimilar to Shether’s:¹⁰

But with what lesser demon or strange magician have you therefore filled your heaven, you who claim that it is empty? … The God who hides His face is not, I believe, a theological abstraction or a poetic image. It is the moment in which the just individual can find no help. No institution will protect him. The consolation of divine presence to be found in infantile religious feeling is equally denied him, and the individual can prevail only through his conscience, which necessarily involves suffering…. This condition reveals a God Who renounces all aids to manifestation, and appeals instead to the full maturity of the responsible man…. It is precisely a word, not incarnate, from God that ensures a living God among us.¹¹

Levinas argues that it is the very sense of God’s concealment or incomprehensibility that makes possible the recognition that he is other than the “infantile” images and notions of God that humans tend to create for themselves. If one is thinking “God,” one is further from true knowledge of God than a person who is confronted with divine obscurity. Levinas presents a spiritual stance similar to Shether’s in its attention to the limitations of human conceptions of the divine. For him, the best way to really encounter God is thus through the Torah, through texts that are other than God but that, by their very obscurity, constantly remind us of the otherness of God.

While reference to Levinas may help us to find a more modern language by which to approach Shether’s advocacy of linguistic alienation with respect to the divine, we must also recognize what is distinctive about the Christian model of linguistic alienation proposed by Shether. Shether’s defense valorizes a model of cooperative interiority that relies upon divine involvement in the individual’s reproduction of or participation in imperfect prayers, prayers whose divine addressee is best apprehended by starting with consciousness of one’s lack of full rational understanding. One has to recognize one’s own failure to understand if one is to rely properly on the work of the Holy Spirit to lift up one’s imperfect prayers.

Shether’s characterization of the ultimate ineffability of the divine and the insufficiency of human language confounds the typical reformist characterization of traditional religious practices as mere form and exterior piety masking spiritual ignorance, emptiness, or impiety. Indeed, one could extend Shether’s defense of Latin prayer to the conclusion that the real impiety lies in vernacular prayers. He does not say this explicitly, but it follows from his argument that vernacular prayer denies the need for grace by overvaluing our own ability to speak of eternal things in language familiar to us.¹²

Shether’s defense of Latin prayer implies a distinctive vision of the worshipping self. The self is most itself when it remains consciously open to divine activity, when it maintains certain absences in itself out of respect for the divinity who is radically other, yet is intimately involved with the worshipper. In this view, we understand God best when we know that we are not understanding and thus remain more open to his unspeakably mysterious work in and through us. We understand ourselves best when we are constantly reminded of our alienation from the sacred, even in our most pious acts. Shether’s mystical defense of his traditionalist affection for church Latin is atypical, but he gives voice to an intuition that many other traditionalists likely experienced but could not or simply did not articulate.

At the other end of the theological spectrum stood those who believed that the obscurity of Latin was not only spiritually counterproductive but also a useful obfuscatory tool for venal clergy who wished to subjugate and deceive their naive congregations. For English reformers (and the whole sola sc...