P. G. Stanwood, Critical Directions in the Study of Early Modern Sermons

P. G. Stanwood, Critical Directions in the Study of Early Modern Sermons, in Fault Lines and Controversies in the Study of Seventeenth-Century English Literature, Eds. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth, University of Missouri Press, Columbia and London, 2002.

…sermons… affected almost everyone, providing religious inspiration, theological analysis, political commentary, and—certainly not least—a great measure of entertainment. (140)

The excitement of hearing a good sermon had special force in James’s reign, for that theologically minded king would not miss the chance to hear one of his favorite preachers. He commonly took his preachers hunting with hum, and would hear a sermon at eight in the morning, before eating and then seting off on the hunt. (140)

Sermons were popular among all classes of people, not merely those at court, and the sermon was the preeminent literary genre in earlier seventeenth-century England—certainly not the drama, and surely not poetry, whether lyric or epic. Preachers might be heard anywhere in the country, without charge or inconvenience, though the best or most ambitious of them hoped for an audience in London, and a few preachers, who were thought interesting or challenging enough, were chosen to preach at court or else at such popular and prestigious locations as St. Paul’s, or outside the cathedral, at Paul’s Cross. (140)

Mitchell, who published his English Pulpit Oratory… Not surprisingly, the increased interest in Donne’s work, marked by Herbert J. C. Grierson’s edition of the poetry in 1912 and his anthology of the “metaphysical poets” ten years later, which elicited T. S. Eliot’s famous review (and his promotion of those poets who wrote before “a dissociation of sensibility set in”), inspired Mitchell to study the sermons not only of Donne but also of his age. His book is a model of its kind: a thoughtful historical study based upon the enormous task of reading many hundreds of sermons produced by numerous preachers… (141)

According to Mitchell, theological attitudes became steadily less rigid across the decades, and with the merging or softening of views came an important change from the witty style of Andrewes to the pain style of the late Restoration, from complexity of exposition and variety of theological beliefs in the early years of the century toward “Propriety, Perspicuity, Elegance, and Cadence” by its end [Mitchell, English Pulpit Oratory, 395] … Nevertheless, religious and political views were not necessarily less complex in this changed world, nor may “style” have been so simply defined across a spectrum leading from “witty” to “plain.” (142)

…Thomas Sprat in his account of the Royal Society—whose members had adopted “a close, naked, natural way of speaking; positive expressions; clear senses; a native easiness: bringing all things as near the Mathematical plainness, as they can.” (142)

Irene Simon notes of South’s determination to clarify pulpit oratory that “fustian bombast, high-flown metaphors, scraps of Greek and Latin, and such ‘insignificant trifles’ are to be banished from pulpit oratory, as are indeed all ‘affected schemes or airy fancies,’ tropes and fine conceits, ‘numerous and well-turned periods,’ jests and witticisms, language borrowed from plays and romances, or starched similitudes.” Yet, South often proceeded to write in the fashion he condemned. Simon, the most recent and best critic of South and his contemporaries Isaac Barrow and John Tillotson, provides an extended commentary and careful edition of them in her Three Restoration Divines, a substantial though insufficiently known contribution to the study of sermon literature. However, like Mitchell, she is particularly concerned to demonstrate through homiletic literature the development of “the plain style,” although these preachers possessed a kind of rhetorical richness that had much in common with their predecessors of previous generation. (143)

Early homiletic studies, while useful in calling attention to the range and variety of sermons, and the rather obvious fact that they respond to and illustrate changing, or at least different, prose styles, are too restrictive, for they tend toward anthologizing… (143)

Sprat, History of the Royal Society, ed. Jackson I. Cope and Harold Whitmore Jones (1667; St. Louis: Washington University Press, 1958), 113

South, “The Scribe Instructed,” in Three Restoration Divines: Barrow, South, Tillotson, Selected Sermons, ed. Irene Simon, Bibliotheque de la Faculte de Philosophie et Lettres de l’Universitie de Liege, fasc. 213 (Paris: Societe d’Editions “Les Belles Lettres,” 1976), 2.1.246 (vol. 1, from which I also quote, appeared in 1967 as fasc. 181); Simon Three Restoration Divines, 1:153.

The traditional view of the developed of the sermon style is stated in Richard Foster Jones, “The Attack on Pulpit Eloquence in the Restoration: An Episode in the Development of the Neo-Classical Standard for Prose,” in The Seventeenth Century: Studies in the History of English Thought and Literature from Bacon to Pope (Stanford: Stanford Univ Press, 1951), 111-142, which originally appeared in the Journal of English and Germanic Philology 31 (1932); and in Wilbur Samuel Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500-1700 (Princeton Univ Press, 1956) esp. 110-115.

…the tendentious Like Angels form a Cloud: The English Metaphysical Preachers, 1588-1645, a long and rambling book by Horton Davies that attempts to describe a supposed literary movement, but the label is inappropriate, and the sermon illustrations too brief and unsatisfactorily connected. Perhaps Miller MacLure’s Paul’s Cross Sermons, 1534-1642 was most successful in setting the course that has preoccupied many recent scholars of the early modern sermon, for he focused on the political and social issues that this important group of sermons revealed about their times. / Current criticism of sermon literature is especially concerned with the relationship of the preacher to his audience or to his patron. Debora Shuger applies a kind of new historicism to the career of Hooker, Andrewes, and Donne. On Donne, for example, she discusses his “politicization of the divine image [that] leads to a spirituality based on awe and subjection… The sermons insist on the analogy between God and king and furthermore locate the point of contact in power.” [Shuger, Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance: Religion, Politics, and the Dominant Culture (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ of Cal Press, 1990), 168-169. Shuger’s chap. 5, “Absolutist Theology,” on Donne’s sermons, is reprinted in Ferrell and McCullough, English Sermon Revised, 115-36.] There is much in her sensitive study that encourages us to inquire more deeply into the culture from which these sermons emerge, and which they may have wished to address, but her formulations are emerge, and which they may have wished to address, but her formulations are often too confining. (144)

In a similar though much larger way, P. J. Klemp reports in an important article his careful study of a scribal copy of Lancelot Andrewes’s Easter Sermon of 1620, in Trinity College, Cambridge (MS B. 14. 22) [See Klemp, “ ‘Betwixt the Hammer and the Anvill’ : Lancelot Andrewes’s Revision Techniques in the Manuscript of His 1620 Easter Sermon,” Publications of the Bibliographical Society of America 89:2 (1995): 149-82.] … At last, then, with such discoveries and studies as these, we are beginning to learn much more about the practical details of sermon composition and revision, and its relationship to the spoken as well as to the printed text. (145)

However, the most searching study of sermons of the period from the standpoint of audience and context is Peter McCullough’s Sermons at Court. He has patiently read or examined more than a thousand sermons (1,257 are conveniently summarized and calendared on a computer disk that accompanies his book), and he has been able to show how two monarchs—Elizabeth and James I—respond to certain preachers, and has even described the physical and architectural circumstances in which they listened to them. McCullough demonstrates that the attendance of the monarch at sermons offered an opportunity for royal display, Elizabeth particularly delighting in the opportunity for an opulent procession. … The royal gallery was thus high above the facing sets of stalls below, where the household officers and courtiers sat. the preacher spoke from a pulpit, probably movable and also at a height from which he could speak directly to the monarch—the monarch on occasion addressing the preacher with praise or disapproval. This arrangement of royal closet over the chapel was thus a declaration of hierarchy, … (145-146)

An expansion of McCullough’s interest might appropriately include more consideration of rhetorical motives or “strategies,” more about how various theological concerns were addressed, and more concern for the aesthetic value of many of these sermons, which were certainly meant to impress and sway their audiences through all available oratorical means. Indeed, the sermon must be more fully understood for the kind of discourse to which it originally belonged, for sermons were meant first to be heard, then published and read. Many sermons were great performances; they provided a kind of theatre, and Andrewes and Donne—by no means to ignore them—to study with at least the same care such remarkable figures as Richard Hooker, Henry King, William Laud, John Cosin, Henry Hammond, Jeremy Taylor, Mark Frank, Robert Frank, and Isaac Barrow. Let us include even John Tillotson in this company, for he believed that he was following and improving on his predecessors. (146)

The study of rhetorical tradition needs to be further explored, particularly in the “witty” sermons of the earlier part of the century, which affected the next generations, some of whose names appear in the roll just called. I have elsewhere discussed Donne’s borrowings from patristic sources, especially Tertullian, whereas others have demonstrated his deep indebtedness to Augustine, and Janel Mueller has given detailed commentary on his five Prebend Sermons—Potter and Simpson having provided almost no annotation in their complete, supposedly chronological edition of the sermons. [See my “Donne’s Art of Preaching and the Reconstruction of Tertullina,” John Donne Journal 15 (1996): 153-69. An especially useful discussion of Donne’s general response to Augustine is Mark Vessey, “John Donne (1572-1631) in the Company of Augustine: Patristic Culture and Literary Profession in the English Renaissance,” Revue des Etudes Augustiniennes 39(1993): 173-201; and Vessey, “Consulting the Fathers: Investion and Mediation in Donne’s Sermon on Psalm 51:7 (‘Purge Me with Hyssope’),” John Donne Journal 11 (1992): 99-110.] Nonetheless, having identified Donne’s influences and indebtedness, have we learned enough about the construction and method of his sermons? How did his sermons become, at their best, coherent entities? Here is a new challenge for rhetorical analysis analysis, posed by Carol V. Kaske, who employs a hermeneutic approach to The Faerie Queene, a method which may be profitably applied, she suggests, to the study of early modern sermons. [ See Kaske, Spenser and Biblical Poetics (Ithica: Cornell University Press, 1999 (especially 27, 54-56). (147)

Kaske holds that Spenser’s inconsistencies and contradictions were deliberate, carefully planned, properly adapted, and determined through his own reading of certain medieval and Renaissance rhetorical manuals available to him. … Not only did Spenser make use of the Bible as portrayed by these distinctions, but he also wrote with a concordance of his own poem in mind and expected readers to compile one, too. The marks of distinctions are threefold: concordantial composition, variation of images, and analysis of a natural object. These terms, which help to describe the structure and fundamental coherence of The Faerie Queene, are equally useful in realizing the method of many sermon writers of the same period—and of years to come. (147)

Andrewes ranges over many biblical instances of stones, buildings, angels, and heads. … This passage seems to reflect the use of a concordance, or of a mind that could organize like one. The image of “stone” is also notably varied; it does not stay still. And Andrewes sees the fundamental stoniness of stone by analyzing its natural constitution even while he recognizes its metaphorical meaning. Stone retains its essential value so that it may portray the Resurrection: concordantially, variously, analytically. (148)

This is no mere tugging at a metaphor of simply playing with words. Like Spenser, his fellow contemporary at Pembroke College, Cambridge, Andrewes learned to have an eye for the rhetorical parts of a much greater whole, and Donne, as we shall learn, continued the same tradition. We may, indeed, be close to recognizing the means whereby such a writer as Richard Hooker might develop so complex yet so unified a work as the Ecclesiastical Polity, a prospective study that I should wish to defer for another time. (149)

With difficulty can one do little more than suggest through such examples the rhetorical integrity of this whole sermon, and its management of distinctions. Andrewes’s sermons have unfortunately been known for too long principally from the excerpts, which have occasioned sometimes particular and detailed analysis. Instead, the sermons need to be celebrated more for the ingenuity and generosity of their entire structure. / Donne’s sermons seem in general more direct, less elusive, easier to describe, and simpler to analyze. Nevertheless, most of his best effects, like Andrewes’s, require not only our careful attention to the details of language but also our capacity for perceiving the management of the entire text. (150)

Herein lies one direction that further study of these early modern sermons should try to pursue, a study that most obviously might be applied to the densely conceived work of Andrewes and to his copiously witty successors. (152)

For the more familiar sermons of Andrewes and Donne we do possess a number of studies that seek to locate their thoughts, but few seriously contemplate the great riches of their rhetorical strength and density. Jeffrey Johnson’s Theology of John Donne clarifies Donne’s underlying Trinitarianism and sacramentalism, but makes no broader claim. The best of recent work on the sermons of Andrewes is the eloquent and sympathetic study by Nicholas Lossky, who wishes to separate out the great theological concerns of Andrewes’s preaching and to show how they were ordered and developed. However, his work, like Johnson’s, treats not so much of rhetorical and homiletic issues as of theological themes. Even though Lossky claims to be writing only about the theology of Andrewes situated within the broad historical setting of his church, he does, nevertheless, tell us much about the structure and rhetorical invention of the sermons. His is a study that brings together the worlds, often divided and distinguished, of theology, rhetoric, history, and politics—an admirable method that deserves emulation and enlargement. [See Mitchell, English Pulpit Oratory, 91-92, and esp. “Preaching as a Branch of Rhetoric,” 93-130; Johnson, Theology of John Donne, Studies in Renaissance Literature 1 (Woodbridge, England: D. S. Brewer, 1999); and Lossky, Lancelot Andrewes: The Preacher (1555-1626), trans. Andrew Louth (Oxford: Claredon Press, 1991), originally published as Lancelot Andrewes le predicatuer (1555-1626) aux sources de la theologie mystique de l’Eglise d’Angeleterre (Paris: Les Editions du Cerf, 1986). An important thematic study of Donne’s sermons, which emphasizes his imagery of light, is Maria Salenius, The Dean and His God: John Donne’s Concept of the Divine (Helsinki: Societe Neophilologique, 1998). (154)

Brian Crockett, The Play of Paradox; Stage and Sermon in Renaissance England

Bryan Crockett, The Play of Paradox; Stage and Sermon in Renaissance England. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1995.

It would be a mistake to assume, for example, that playwrights responded to King James’s 1606 act outlawing theatrical references to controversial religious topics by suddenly becoming “secular”; the term is an anachronism for most of the period’s discourse. [See Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), p. 45, and Jonathan Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religious Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1984), p. 25] (2)

Since the Renaissance stage play and the Reformation sermon perform the same work—helping audiences adjust to and control the peculiar ambiguities of the early modern period—the two modes can be evaluated in the same terms. (3)

If the medieval cruciform churches were designed to encourage contemplation of and participation in an action (the atoning, sacrificial martyrdom, re-enacted at every mass), the centrally planned churches [circle churches] were designed to foster contemplation of perfection, to lift the worshipper out of the conflicted world of history and into a state of serene transcendence. As Rudolph Wittkower has said, in the architectural move from the medieval cross to the Renaissance circle, “Christ as the essence of perfection superseded Him who had suffered on the Cross for humanity; the Pantocrator replaced the Man of Sorrows” (30). / [Martin] Bucer and the Platonists are alike in rejecting the theatre, the spectacle, of enacted sacrifice. They agree that there is something suspect in all that seems “theatrical” about the Catholic mass—the visual display, the mediating role of the priest, the performance of a sacrifice, the processions, the elevation of the Host, the very shape of the building. But Bucer’s design would accommodate theater of another sort. His round church would be an auditorium, an arena where the air would be filled with sound. The theatrical activity of the mass would be replaced not by the Platonists’ serene transcendence but by the action of the word. In this sense it was closer to Shakespeare’s “wooden O” than to the centrally planned Italian churches. (4-5)

Rather than beholding a profusion of visually alluring icons and then taking part in a communal act of sacrifice, all of which could be denounced as “theatrical”, the worshipper in Bucer’s church would watch and listen as the preacher performed. Paradoxically, then, the Reformation insistence on the centrality of the spoken word reintroduced an element of theatre into the liturgy… (6)

The modulations of sound through the course of an auditory performance—whether a sermon or a symphony—immerse the audience in a sequential experience: one that works through time to present change, conflict, resolution. … These habits of aural synthesis conceive of a world in flux: a dynamic, dramatic, threatening world compared with the relatively static world a visually-centered synthesis constructs. (6)

There is little doubt that Reformation preaching styles influenced dramatists, just as there is little doubt that Renaissance stage plays influence preachers. The substantial audience overlap between the two modes meant that preachers could assume a high degree of receptivity to oral performance, as the playwrights could assume their audiences’ tendency to cast their experiences in religious terms [Martha Tuck Rozett, The Doctrine of Election and the Emergence of Elizabethan Tragedy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1984), pp. 15-25. J W Blench remarked more than thirty years ago that the influence of preaching on the dramatists of sixteenth-century England “is more pervasive and powerful than has been generally recognized,” Preaching in England in the Late Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (Oxford: Basil Blackweel, 1964), p. 349.]. Henry Smith, dubbed by Thomas Nashe the “silver-tongued” preacher of Elizabethan England, demonstrates the ease with which the language of the pulpit could mix with that of the stage: / How many years of pleasure thou hast taken, so many years of pain: how many drams of delight, so many pounds of dolor: when iniquity hath played her part, vengeance leaps upon the stage: the comedy is short but the tragedy is longer. [“Silver tongu’d Smith, whose well tun’d style hath made thy death the general tears of the Muses, quaintly couldst thou devise heavenly ditties to Apollo’s lute, and teach stately verse to trip it as smoothly as if Ovid and thou had but one soul,” Thomas Nashe, Pierce Penilesse his Supplication to the Divell, 1:137-245 in Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. R. B. McKerrow, 5 vol. (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1910), pp. 192-93; Henry Smith, The Trumpet of the Soule, Sounding to Judgement (London, 1592), sig. A8v-BIr.] (7)

…some of the leading English reformers, including John Foxe, were also playwrights. These preacher/playwrights objected not so much to the theater as institution as to the theatricality of Roman Catholism. Foxe, for example, refers to the typical medieval pope as a “remarkable actor,” / that wholly theatrical contriver, [who] descended into the orchestra for the purpose of dancing his drama. While the other actors were driven off the stage little by little, he wished to keep the stage alone and to keep up all of the roles of everyone. / Yet Fox himself wrote the plays Titus et Gesippus (1544) and Christus Triumphans (1556). Politically influential English who were both Puritan third and fourth earls of Pembroke, Cromwell’s chaplain Peter Sterry, and Milton. … Nor was Calvin himself antitheatrical; he allowed the production of a play in Geneva, and in his Institutes he repeatedly refers to the world as a glorious theater in which angels behold human actions. … we are heir to the style of preaching that emerged in the eighteenth century, a style that valued analytics over theatrics. [G. N. Clark remarks that Restoration sermons differed from those of the Renaissance, which were considered divinely inspired and therefore authoritative in a way that later ones were not, and which were rhetorically more innovative and effective than later ones. As such, Clark claims, late Tudor and early Stuart sermons compose a significant branch of literature, The Later Stuarts: 1660-1714 (Oxford: Claredon Press, 1949) pp. 347-48]. (7-8)

In a mid-century preaching manual that John Ludham translated into English in 1577, the Marburg theologian Andreas Hyperius says, / They that teach no otherwise in the temple than professors are accustomed in the schools, it cannot be that they should be the authors of any great spiritual fruits, and very few or none are seen to be induced with such sermons to repentance and amendment of life. [Andreas Hyperius, The Practise of preaching, otherwise Called the Pathway to the Pulpet, trans. John Ludham (London, 1577), p. 41r.] / In a remark to his congregation, John Donne is more concise: “We are not upon a lecture but a sermon.” [Quoted in Gale H. Carrithers, Jr., Donne at Sermons: A Christian Existential World (Albany: SUNY Press, 1972), p. 3] (8)

[Stephen] Gosson makes a clear distinction between the minister in his ordinary human capacity and in his divinely inspired role in the pulpit, calling it the devil’s work to confuse the two offices. [Stephen Gosson, sig. E7r. The Trumpet of Warre. A Sermon preached at Paules Crosse the seventh of Maie 1598 (London, 1598)] In his manual for preachers The Art of Prophecying, the popular theologian William Perkins also distinguishes two offices, both proper to the prophet: “And every Prophet is partly the voice of God, to wit, in preaching: and partly the voice of the people, in the act of praying.” [William Perkins, The Art of Prophecying, in The Workes of that Famous and Worthie Minister of Christ, in the University of Cambridge, M. William Perkins, 3 vols. (London, 1609), 2:731] (9)

Hyperius… Practice of Preaching. (11)

Perkins: …If any man think that by this means barbarism should be brought into the pulpits, he must understand that the Minister may, yea and must privately use at his liberty the arts, philosophy, and variety or reading, whilst he is in framing his sermon: but he ought in public to conceal all these from the people. (759) / The paradox is that while the impulse behind concealing eloquence is to avoid deceptive ostentation, the deliberate concealment amounts to an artful, dramatic deception. (12)

In the twentieth century such instructions might appear disingenuous—the combination of moral earnestness and deliberate deception impossible to maintain… (12)

In The Country Parson Herbert advises preachers to compose themselves properly in order to make their performances effective: / When [the country parson] preacheth, he procures attention by all possible art, both by earnestness of speech, it being natural to men to think, that where is much earnestness, there is somewhat worth hearing; and by a diligent, and busy cast of his eye on his auditors, with letting them know, that he observes who marks, and who not. [George Herbert, The Country Parson, The Temple, ed. John N. Wall, Jr. (New York: Paulist Press, 1981), p. 62] (12)

The number of complaints about over-done gestures indicates that preachers frequently got carried away with gestures indicates that preachers frequently got carried away with their theatrics. Hyperius says, “By reason of their undiscreet and unseemly gesture, some are made the common talking stock and public pastime of the people” (177v). (13)

Hamlet also pleads with the players not to allow any ad-libbing: “and let those that play your clowns speak no more than is set down for them…” (3.2.38-40). As Hieron points out, the same objection is often raised against preachers. … In Hieron’s exchange Nymphas, the ignorant character, voices a common objection to the practice of delivering sermons extemporaneously rather than reading from a carefully prepared text: … Preacher’s Plea, 102… In Epaphras’s view “sound preachers” should not only be allowed but should be encouraged to speak extemporaneously, to move from merely reading a prepared text to using the text as only a set of notes for a live performance (117). … more powerful, more piercing, more majestical, more awaking to the conscience” than mere reading (123). … Even a theologian like Richard Hooker, who is troubled by the onetime “speech event” of the extemporaneous sermon, is unsatisfied with sermons that are merely read. In Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Hooker objects on the one hand to those who insist that original sermons are the only means of salvation. … [Richard Hooker, The Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker, 6 vols. ed. W. Speed Hill (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977-93), 5.21.2] …On the other hand, it is not the preacher’s animated style of delivery that bothers Hooker; he notes universal recognition of the lively sermon’s rhetorical effectiveness. It was difficult for the preacher who merely read his sermons from the official Book of Homilies to match the performative force of the preacher who composed a sermon for the occasion. (14-15)

Just as Tudor/Stuart plays were subject to censorship, Elizabeth and James attempted to exercise control over the pulpits. In 1559 Elizabeth revised and reissued the first Book of Homilies (1547), of which Cranmer had been one of the principal authors, and in 1563 she issued an expanded version. A few preachers were licensed to compose their own sermons, but the vast majority were required to read their from the Homilies. As Elizabeth attempted to control the well-attended sermons at Paul’s Cross in London, she tried to use the Homilies to control the parish clergy throughout England [See Ronald B Bond’s introduction to Certain Sermons or Homilies (1547) and a Homily against Disobedience and Rebellion (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), p.9]. It is noteworthy that the one sermon added to the Second Book of Homilies during Elizabeth’s reign was the 1570 Homily against Disobedience and Wilful Rebellion. James similarly attempted to keep wayward clergy in check with both the Homilies and his own Instructions regarding Preaching (1622) [Horton Davies, Like Angels from a Cloud: The English Metaphysical Preachers, 1588-1645 (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1986), p. 175]. The magistrates’ relentless efforts to control the preaching clergy, as well as the numbers of preachers brought before the ecclesiastical courts (where playwrights also made occasional appearances), testify to the rhetorical power of the pulpit. (15)

Their very profession as role players carries the threat of instability, the threat of Proteus. Writing in 1630, the theologian and poet Richard James makes a similar argument about preachers. (16)

Elizabeth …instructed the Archbishop of Canterbury, Edmund Grindal, both to reduce the number of licensed preachers and to suppress the prophesyings. Grindal refused. In 1576 he wrote a letter to the Queen, arguing that reading from the official Homilies was a poor substitute for pulpit performance: / The godly preacher… can apply his speech according to the diversity of times, places, and hearers, which cannot be done in homilies: exhortations, reprehensions, and persuasions, are uttered with more affection, to the moving of the hearers, in sermons than in homilies. Besides, homilies were devised by the godly bishops in your brother’s time, only to supply necessity, for want of preachers; and are by the stature not to be preferred, but to give place to sermons, whensoever they may be had. (Grindal, 382) / Other passages in the letter attest to the extent of Grindal’s willingness to play the prophet. He not only says, “I cannot marvel enough how this strange opinion should once enter into your mind, that it should good for the church to have few preachers”; he goes on to say, “Remember, Madam, that you are a mortal creature” (378, 389). The letter effectively ended Grindal’s career. (16-17)

Despite the risk involved in preaching one’s own sermons rather than simply reading from the Book of Homilies, the number of original sermons increased dramatically during the last half of the sixteenth century. Martha Tuck Rozett reports that the number of regular parish clergy who preached rose from 27 percent in 1561 to 88 percent in 1601 to 113 during the 1580s (Rozett, 19-20). (17)

…the rector at Stratford-upon-Avon—the man who may well have preached before the young Shakespeare—was described as “learned, zealous and godly, and fit for the ministry; a happy age if our Church were fraught with many such” [Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), pp. 280-81.]. (17)

On the other hand is John Donne, who employs irony of a different sort. In 1622 Donne was called on to defend at Paul’s Cross both the King’s attempt to regulate preaching and, as John Chamberlain reported at the time, to defend the King’s “constancy in the true reformed religion, which the people (as should seem) began to suspect.” [John Chamberlain, The Letters of John Chamberlain, 2 vols., ed. Norman Egbert McClure (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1939), 2:451.] In a tactic reminiscent of Marc Antony’s funeral oration in Julius Caesar, Donne let it be known through the manner of his delivery that he himself had doubts. (18)

If, as Steven Mullaney, Louis Montrose, and others have argued, Shakespeare’s theatre performs a vital social function in helping the audience adjust to and control the ambiguities arising out of the epistemological crisis of early modern England, the same can be said of the Reformation sermon. [Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago: Univ of Ch Press, 1988), and Louis A. Montrose, “The Purpose of Playing: Reflections on a Shakespearean Anthropology” Helios 7 (1980): 51-74, p. 64. …As Davies says of the late sixteenth century, “this was a period of great turbulence and transition in England: from Catholicism to Protestantism; from an international to a national Church; from the Petrine pope to the paper pope of the Bible; from a geocentric to a heliocentric universe, in which the heavens had grown very far off; from a position where religion had once been a widely accepted tradition, and was now a matter of acute controversy,” Like Angels from a Cloud, p. 123.] (32)

‘To an articulate part of [the religious] elite [the theatre] appeared religiously atavistic, dangerously so, and able to appeal to sensibilities that should properly have atrophied in the reform of religion. The popularity of the London theaters testifies to the survival of those sensibilities, even as the reform was successful in eliminating them from worship. Theater was not worship, but as a cultural institution, its roots lay deep in the centuries in which it had performed a religious function. Its status was ambiguous in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries—not religious in the same sense it had been, and yet, in terms by the which the culture defined it, not secular either.’ [Michael O’Connell, “The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm, Anti-Theatricalism, and the Image of the Elizabethan Theatre,” ELH 52 (1985): 279-310, p. 307.] / O’Connel is quite right that the theatre as aesthetic and secular is a post-Renaissance phenomenon, and he argues compellingly that some of the theatrically of Roman Catholicism was displaced onto the Renaissance stage. What is missing from O’Connell’s analysis, though, is an account of the ways in which the Protestant movement itself incorporated and transformed Roman Catholic ritual. As I have suggested, the preachers of Reformation England took on an authoritative role as mediators of sacred mystery—the role that the priests of the old order had performed not as much by celebrating the sacrificial mass and administering the other sacraments. (33)

The Reformation sermon, like the Renaissance play, is not merely a static reflection of ideology, nor is it merely a manipulative didactic device. While both modes of course have ideological import and didactic elements, the ritualistic dimension of both goes beyond the reflection and inculcation of established dogma. (33)

Both principles can be found in Shakespeare. While most of his plays tend toward irenic rhetoric (think of the way, say, King Lear or The Winter’s Tale resist any sort of ideologically definitive response), a play like Henry V is a notorious for its divisive effect on audiences; commentators on the play are divided into two well-defined camps. It seems that Henry is either an ideal monarch or a ruthless hypocrite, and it is nearly impossible to reconcile these two views in a single vision. / On the theological side, a good example of the split between irenic and polemic rhetoric is the exchange between Erasmus and Luther on free will. … Luther’s divisive style found a reader in the early sixteenth century than did Erasmus’s conciliatory approach. This preference for polemics is reflected not only in the period’s theology but also in its drama. In fact the stage and the pulpit are mutually influential forces both in nurturing a receptivity polemic discourse and in providing performative resolutions to deep-seated ambiguities of early modern culture. If Shaksepeare’s Henry V and Luther’s De servo arbitrio dare the individual to choose between the two opposing camps, the dare is an endemic cultural principle. (36)

As I argued in the introductory chapter, Renaissance sermons and plays are closely related, especially in their facility for providing performative resolutions to paradox. The readiness on the part of both preachers and playwrights to address paradoxical issues is particularly acute in late sixteenth-century England in part because the age is simultaneously informed by two impulses: the insistence on maintaining the tension of Christian paradox and the slackening of that tension by reducing Christian paradox to one of its constituent contraries. The failure of attempts to reconcile these two opposing impulses eventually signals the abandonment of the world: the secular self-assertion characteristic of the modern age. (37)

…the open-air sermons at Paul’s Cross, where the most famous preachers in England were invited to perform before audience of as many as six thousand. [William Laud, The Works of the Most Reverend Father in God, William Laud, D. D…, 9 vols (Oxford: Parker, 1847-1860), 7:47] As the sermons at Paul’s Cross typically lasted for two hours, twice the usual length of Elizabethan sermons, the preacher had to do everything in his power to hold the attention of an audience that tended to be unruly—so much so that the royally appointed authors of the 1552 Reformatio Legum Ecclesiasticarum were obliged to include the following proviso not just for the Paul’s Cross sermons but also for ordinary church services: / If there are any people of such rudeness that, while the preachers is still speaking from a pulpit, they wish to raise an outcry, or interrupt him or rail at him in some manner, they are to be separated from the Church and separated from communion with it until they openly acknowledge the crime and have returned to their sense. In the same way, whoever either by aimlessly walking about, or by inopportunely chattering, or by walking out of the sacred assemblage in such a way that contempt of the sermon or of the preacher can be detected or who knowingly and willingly turns the people’s attention away from the sermon in any way whatsoever or disturbs them, will pay the merited penalties for this kind of wicked frivolity. [The Reformation of the Ecclesiastical Laws of England, 1552, ed. And trans. James C. Spalding, Vol. XIX, Sixteenth Century Essays and Studied (Kirksville, Mo.: Sixteenth Century Journal, 1992), p. 90. See also Millar MacLure, The Paul’s Cross Sermons (Univ. of Toronto Press, 1958), pp. 3-17, and Rozett, pp. 41-42. ] / Francis Marbury also complains of this “wicked frivolity” : / And it were to be wished that some even of those which resort to Paul’s Cross and will not come at their own church, and when they are here delude the law with walking and talking, were better ordered. [Francis Marbury, A Sermon Preached at Paules Cross the 13. of June, 1602 (London, 1602), sig. E3r.] / The audiences at sermons, it seems, were sometimes as disruptive as the crowds at the playhouses. (39)

The Paul’s Cross sermons served a function simultaneously religious and theatrical: expounding Christian doctrine and practice by engaging the audience in an individual’s dramatic predicament. (39)

…pervasive tendency in the late Tudor/ early Stuart period to use the Paul’s Cross stage to launch verbal attacks. Thus, Rozett notes, even when the focus was not on an act of public penance, the sermons served the polemic, dramatic function of denouncing an enemy—an “other”—albeit an enemy absent from the stage (41). And frequently even the enemies got a chance to defend themselves; since preachers of virtually every theological persuasion were invited by the ecclesiastical authorities (who were themselves a varied group) to speak at Paul’s Cross, a good many of the sermons were counterattacks on previous ones. As MacLure says of the long series of accusations, replies, and confutations, “No summary of arguments, no collection of excerpts, can convey the insistence, the overwhelmingly tedious energy of these tirades from the Paul’s Cross pulpit” (65). (40)

…explain their popularity. In an age that confronts a new epistemology, a whole new human orientation in the world, one should expect a ready appetite for polemic performances; the need for order, for ideological definition, is insistent in a time of epistemic change. (40)

The danger of preaching persisted into the early decade of the seventeenth century. A 1633 letter from Archbishop William Laud to Richard Sterne illustrates the degree of official control (including a reduction of the allotted time for the sermon) that had come to seem necessary: / You shall understand that you are appointed to preach at St. Paul’s Cross on Sunday, the seventeenth day of November next ensuing, by discreet performance whereof you shall do good service to God, the King’s Majesty, and the Church. These are therefore to require and charge you, not to fail of your day appointed, and to send notice of your acceptance in writing…, to bring a copy of your sermon with you, and not to exceed an hour and a half in both sermon and prayer… And hereof fail not, as you will answer to the contrary at your peril. [William Laud, The Works of the Most Reverend Father in God, William Laud, D. D… 9 vols. (Oxford: Parker, 1847-1860), 7:47] / Despite Laud’s efforts at control, ten years later zealous reformers physically dismantled the Paul’s Cross pulpit. In the year before the demolition, and for similar reasons, the theatres had been closed. (41)

…a theologian enormously influential in Elizabethan Englad: Theodore Beza, Calvin’s successor at Geneva. Beza defends the doctrine of predestination against what he calls a “slander of the papists”—that is, the slanderous accusation that Calvinists make the following claim: “God in the bare and alone determination of his will hath created the greatest part of the world to perdition.” According to Beza, the accusation is slanderous not because it claims that God predestinated most souls to damnation—an idea Beza readily accepts—but because it uses the phrases “bare and alone determination” rather than “just and alone and determination” (10) … Beza is making a distinction that can have meant little to most theologians, let alone ordinary believers, and yet he is using the distinction to judge between true and false believers, … (47)

Thomas Playfere’s 1595 sermon The Meane in Mourning brought his audience to tears. So moving was the performance that two pirated editions of the sermon appeared before Playfere could issue a carefully edited version. Among the most popular of the “metaphysical” preachers of Shakespeare’s day (at which time their style was called “witty” or, interestingly, “spiritual”), Playfere shows a particular fondness for verbal pyrotechnics, especially for rhetorical figures that frustrate the categories of rational thought. [See Knott, The Sword of the Spirit, p. 42] The paradox is among his favorites. In expounding on Luke 23:28, for example, Playfere confronts his audience with a dizzying set of paradoxes: / Weep not too much saith [Christ], for my death, which is the death of death. Not too much for my death, which is the death of the devil. Not too little for your own life, which is the life of the devil. Not too much for my death, which is my life. Not too little for your own life, which is your death. Not too much for my death, which is the life of man. Not too little for your own life, which is the death of Christ. (67) (p. 51).

Interestingly, Andreas Hyperious defends both simplicity and the use of rhetorical conceits. … The defenders of metaphysical preaching as well as the detractors use the language of trickery and seduction—of cozenage, enticements, and allurement. The question seems to be not whether cozenage takes place, but whether there can be such a thing as “holy cozenage.” [Jasper Mayne, prefatory ecomiastic poem to William Cartwright, Comedies, Tragi-Comedies, with other Peoms (London, 1651] (51)

If the question was not resolved in the sixteenth century, neither has it been settled in the twentieth. On the one hand are almost wholly sympathetic studies of metaphysical preaching such as Horton Davies’s Like Angels from a Cloud; on the other hand are judgments like the one in W. Fraser Mitchell’s English Pulpit Oratory: / [It is] the verdict of contemporaries and posterity alike, that the components of “metaphysical” preaching were not such as were in themselves intrinsically valuable, that the use of which they wre put by the “witty” preachers was not consonant with the great ends of Christian oratory, and, that both the material and methods employed rendered impossible the cultivation of a prose style suited either to delivery in the pulpit or to give to religious discourses in their printed form the dignity of literature. On two counts, therefore, both for what it was, and for what it could not become, “witty” preaching stands condemned. [Mitchell, English Pulpit Oratory, p. 194] / Alexander Whyte echoes Mitchell’s sentiment, commenting that he is “bewildered and confused” by Lancelot Andrewes’ metaphysical sermons: “What a pity it is…that anything of Andrewes’s has been preserved besides his Devotions.” [Lancelot Andrewes, Lancelot Andrewes and His Private Deovtions: A Bigography, a Transcript, and an Intrepretation, ed. Alexander Whyte, 2nd ed. (London: Oliphant Anderson and Ferrier, 1896), pp. 16, 19] / Some of Andrews’s contemporaries register a similar uneasiness about extravagant pulpit performance. Samuel Hieron, for example, warms of eloquence that functions merely as “a mist before a man’s speeches, to cause him to be the more hardly understood.” [Samuel Hieron, The Preachers Plea, pp. 195-196] (52)

As Gifford recognized, the strangeness of the style is calculated to bring the hearer into a state of “wonderful.” Gifford sees this condition as mere bafflement, a stultifying dead end. Clearly the metaphysical preachers themselves see it as a desideratum. Why? … Stephen Gosson points out that the unprecedented exposure to the simple message of the gospel during the Elizabethan period paradoxically made the people deaf to it. There may be more than mere nostalgia in Gosson’s 1598 sermon The Trumpet of Warre: … [Gosson, The Trumpet of Warre, sig. E6r] (52)

The metaphysical preachers, then, could have neen doing what poets always do: finding fresh ways to combine words to reinvigorate language that has become deadened from overuse. (53)

It would seem that an aversion for one mode implies an aversion for the other, that the denigration of metaphysical preaching is perhaps one component in the antitheatrical prejudice that Jonas Barish sees operating widely in Western culture. (53)

As one of the most prolific of the preachers, Ralph Brownrig, says, “Property is a religion for the eye; ours for the ear.” [Ralph Brownrig, fifth Transfiguration sermon, Sixty Five Sermons by the Right Reverend Father in God, Ralph Brownrig, Late Bishop of Exceter, (London, 1674), p.83] … Even those Protestants who do not wholly impugn the power of sight tend to subordinate the eye to the ear. John Donne, for example, says, / … [Sermons, 6:10.459-68. Cf. Donne’s statement, “The organ that God hath given the natural man is the eye; he sees God in the creature. The organ that God hath given the Christian is the ear; he hears God in the Word” (2:3:114)] (53)

Or, to put an even finer point on Diehl’s argument, one might say that the Protestants object either to images and ceremonies divorced from words or to images and ceremonies accompanied by misinterpreted words. … Christ’s “this is my body” … Becon’s objection is not only to the Catholic priest’s misunderstanding of the word but also to the popular belief that the mere sight of the elevated Host is salvific: (54)

…bearing in mind the qualification that Protestants do not wholly impugn the power of sight, accept the argument that in the sixteenth century a Protestant “logolatry” supplants the idolatry of which the reformers accuse Catholicism. (55)

O’Connell is quite right, then, that early Protestantism tended towards logocentricity, but it shold be remembered that there was still considerable reisistance in sixteenth-century England to a merely textual understanding of the faith. To be sure, print culture was playing its part in ushering in a new epistemology, but Elizabethan England was also the great age of the performance: it is arguable that along with the song and the stage play, the sermon reached the height of its rhetorical effectiveness toward the end of the sixteenth century. An index of the power of the sermon in Renaissance England is the complaint of John Howson, no mean preacher himself, that the houses of prayer, the oratoria, have become auditoria. Royalist Henry Hammond expresses a similar uneasiness, explicitly relating the liturgy to the theater… If Protestants writing a century earlier spent their efforts attacking Roman Catholicism’s idolatrous cult of the eye, Hammond is worried about a similarly dangerous cult of the ear. …the late sixteenth century’s enhanced receptivity to the nuances of oral performance is in part indebted to the Protestant reverence for the spoke word, combined with the Reformation’s rejection of visual allure and the humanists’ revival of classical rhetoric. … [56] the work’s generally irenic tone, which may account for its poor sales in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. [The first four books were published in 1594 and the fifth in 1597—all to meager sales. The sixth, seventh, and eighth books were not published until 1648, 1662, and 1651 respectively. See H. C. Porter, ed., Puritanism in Tudor England (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1971, p. 244] (57)

Arthur Pollard, English Sermons

Arthur Pollard, English Sermons, Published for The British Council and the National Book League by Longmans, Green, & Co. London, 1963.

Others less eminent but of more recent date, men like Sir Edmund Gosse and the historian of preaching, Dargan, have made claims perhaps more temperate but none the less diminished. … If Donne’s manner may be compared to a mountain stream of massive force and impressive volume, and Andrewes’s to a river erratic in course and pace but always interesting to behold and yielding unexpected beauties, the waters of Taylor’s oratory may be said to flow broad, smooth and assured through rich pastures. Sometimes indeed one feels that there is more polish in the expression than there is power in the arguments. Stylistically, the polish is occasionally to bright. His faults are the defects of his virtues. The richness overflows into uncontrolled exuberance, the images and references luxuriate in flamboyant disorder. At its best, however, Taylor’s resonant Ciceronian prose sends forth its deep harmonies; the mind is engaged by a succession of, at times, incredibly apt references to men and events, and the imagination is stimulated by an abundance of fertile imagery. / Pearsall Smith has referred to Taylor’s elaborate periods as examples of ‘that long-breathed eloquence, that great Atlantic roll of English prose’. They display a double mastery, in Taylor’s firm manipulation of complex syntactical arrangements and in his demonstration of strong and fluent rhythms. (17)

His reading, as Coleridge remarked, ‘had been oceanic’ [Notes on English Divines, (1853), Vol. I, p. 209). Sometimes he gives us a whole list of instances… at others a single reference suffices to impress a lesson… These references often by little details remind us of Taylor’s rich fancy, but this quality is more magnificently demonstrated by his imager. … Images proliferate, often adding nothing to the meaning, yet exquisitely beautiful in themselves. This, his ‘one gift, and only one, of the highest quality’ (Pearsall Smith), led Coleridge to assert Taylor’s near rivalry with Shakespeare. (18)

Trevor A. Owen, Lancelot Andrewes

Trevor A. Owen, Lancelot Andrewes, Twayne Publishers, Boston, 1981.

Although Hooker and Andrewew were in complete harmony in the principles which they proclaimed, their prose styles were markedly different; and Eliot’s reference to their “prose style” (not styles) is puzzling in its implied implication. Hooker’s typical prose unit is the long, frequently periodic, Ciceronian sentence, while Andrewes favors the brief paragraph composed of short sentences and phrases. Andrewes’s prose is, in fact, much closer to that of Donne’s whose sermons Eliot contrasts somewhat unfavorably with Andrewes’s. (139)

How many of Andrewes’s and Donne’s sermons Eliot had actually read when he wrote this essay is uncertain. His references to Andrewes’s sermons are limited to the Nativity group, and it is quite possible that his reading from both preachers was mostly confined to the two editions of selected sermons which he mentions. [Andrewes: Seventeen Sermons on the Nativity (London: Griffith, Farran, Okeden and Welsh, n.d.0; and John Donne: Sermons, Selected Passages, ed. Logan Pearsall Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1919).] (140)

Eliot says nothing at all about Donne’s prose, presenting instead only vague generalities about the quality of his religious experience. Something about Donne’s sermons is “incommunicable” (a word Eliot borrows from Logan Pearsall Smith); about him “there hangs the shadow of the impure motive,” his “experience was not perfectly controlled,” and “he lacked spiritual discipline.” (140)

Eliot’s lack of emphasis on prose style is understandable, since the essential difference between Andrewes’s and Donne’s sermons lies not so much in their prose styles as in their homiletic methods. And it is on this subject that Eliot makes his most valuable distinction. He declares that “Andrewes’s emotion is purely contemplative… wholly evoked by the object of contemplation” and that Donne, in contrast, is “a personality…constantly finding an object which shall be adequate to his feelings.” (140)

Although Lancelot Andrewes was Stella Praedicantium in his own age, his star has never shown so brightly in succeeding generations. One of the first to express enthusiasm for Andrewes’s preaching was the Elizabethan writer Thomas Nashe, who relates in his Have With You to Saffron Walden (1596) how his friend John Lyle had recommended Andrewes to him, probably when Andrewes was vicar of Saint Giles: “By Doctor Androwes his own desert and Master Lillies immoderate commending him, by little and little I was drawne on to bee an Auditor of his: since when, whensoever I heard him, I thought it was but hard and scant allowance that was giv’n him, in comparison of the incomparable gifts that were in him.” [The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. Ronald B. McKerrow (Oxford, 1904, rpt. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958), III, 107] Early in Andrewes’s career, then, there were some who gave him “hard and scant allowance.” / At the court of King James, where Andrewes won his greatest fame… in Andrewes’s age his distinctive style of preaching soon found followers in such preachers as William Laud, Ralph Brownrig, John Hacket, John Cosin, and Mark Frank. (145)

By the end of the century, Andrewes and his school were already regarded as old-fashioned. John Aubrey declares of Andrewes that “had had not that smooth way of Oratory, as now.” [pg. 7 Brief Lives, ed. Oliver Lawson Dick (London: Secker and Warburg, 1949)] John Evelyn, in an entry in his diary for July 15, 1683, reports that he had heard an old man preach “much after Bp. Andrews’s method, full of logical divisions, in short and broken periods, and Latin sentences, now quite out of fashion, in the pulpit, which is grown into a far more profitably way of plain and practical discourses.” [Cited by Charles Smyth in The Art of Preaching (London: SPCK, 1940,) p. 122] This newer style of preaching is exemplified by the sermons of Robert South and John Tillotson, the most popular preachers of the Restoration. (145)

Anne Davidson Ferry, Religious Prose of 17th Century England

Anne Davidson Ferry, Ed., Religious Prose of 17th Century England, Alfred A Knopf, New York, 1967.

Religion was interesting to everyone in England in the seventeenth century; the writer who concerned himself with theological doctrine or forms of devotion or ecclesiastical organization could be sure of engaging the attention of a vast and varied audience. (Introduction, 4)

This energetic interest in religious doctrine, religious institutions, or religious experience is expressed in every work included in this volume. It is reflected, for example, in assumptions about the reader which, to secular modern minds, are sometimes disconcerting. The audiences for these works were assumed to be thoroughly familiar with Scripture, to have a solid knowledge of orthodox Christian doctrine, to be capable of following a theological argument, and to be faithful believers (whatever their behavior might be). These assumptions were made about them, not as learned specialists or a pious elite, but as ordinary men, Protestants, Englishmen, members of a Christian society. These assumptions were shared by all the writers represented in this volume (except Augustine Barker to whom only Roman Catholics were true believers), a few of whom assumed additional, more special kinds of knowledge. Donne, for example, preaching before the lawyers of Lincoln’s Inn with whom he had once studied or Lancelot Andrewes, preaching to the King at Whitehall, played upon a knowledge of Latin and logic which only special congregations could be expected to appreciate; not George Herbert’s parishioners at Bemerton or Bunyan’s at Bedford. Taylor, in the selection printed here, used only one Greek word but made numerous allusions to ancient literature and history. Browne seemed to assume in his readers (and surely he intended his work to be read, despite conventional protests against publicity in its preface) some familiarity with all sorts of esoteric learning. (4-5)

To write this in this 1630’s was to take sides in a bitter argument over religious toleration, an issue which actively entered the lives of most seventeenth-century English (virtually all the writers in this volume were imprisoned, ejected from their livings, or persecuted in some way by their religious opponents). / Seventeenth-century writers expressed passionate conviction, and in a variety of tones of voice—not always solemn but often scornful, sarcastic, furious, playful, ironic, sophisticated, sweet—sometimes in accents which to the modern reader less secure in his attitude towards religion seem indecorous, even irreverent. In controversy or in preaching or in prayer they were remarkably free to speak in the accents of individual human beings who themselves felt the pressure of what they wrote. Within a single paragraph, then, we often hear tones of exalted reverence mingling with the expression of what Milton in Animadversions called “those two most rationall faculties of humane intellect anger and laughter.” (5-6)

The interest rates to be charged by money-lenders was a religious question; the tenure of kinds and magistrates was argued on theological grounds; the theatres of London were the subject of pious attack; the defeat of the Armada was attributed (by Browne among others) to direct heavenly intervention, and the imprisonment of George Fox was thought to have infected his enemies with the plague. The areas of experience which we distinguish as “secular” were interpreted in religious terms, and conversely, religious concerns penetrated, became, finance, politics, philosophy, science. The existence of bishops involved economic interest (as the Presbyterians liked to point out); willingness to take the Holy Communion according to the rites of the Anglican Church was for a time the test for eligibility to hold public office; the existence of God was a premise of all systems of knowledge (perhaps excepting the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, which was therefore almost universally abhorred and attacked); Genesis was a chief source of geological fact. (6)

Browne’s experimental knowledge of anatomy did not challenge the axioms of his religion, but by a piece of faulty logic was made to support them. The existence of the soul was unquestioned truth; the absence of any experimental evidence for its existence simply proved its immateriality. (7-8)

Or, to take another illustration, Thomas Traherne, in the following passage from paragraph 8 of “The Third Century” of his Meditations, was attempting to define the nature of man in the light of his own experience, but his own experience was characteristically interpreted in Biblical images… For Traherne was here fighting against the traditional interpretation of man’s nature, set forth in this volume most elaborately in Donne’s Second Sermon on Psal. 38.4. Traherne was attempting to refute the orthodox view that “Adams punishment is pardoned in no man, in this world” because we are all born into this world “under the weight of Originall sinne.” By arguing that his own recollections of childhood contradicted this view of human nature, he seems in a sense to have rejected religious assumptions which did not survive the test of experience, and therefore to make experience itself the highest authority for truth. Yet even that immediate experience itself was seen in Biblical images… (8)

Browne’s whimsy sounds quite different from Donne’s wit, Taylor’s melancholy from the meditative sweetness of Traherne, the earnestness of Baxter from the urgency of Bunyan, George Herbert’s gravity from Whichote’s. (9)

Although none of these writers was yet living in 1533-4, when Henry VIII made the Church of England finally independent of the Pope, Lancelot Andrewes was born during the return to the Roman Church under Mary Tudor (1553-1558) while many others, themselves born during the reign of Elizabeth (1558-1603), must have had a mixed religious training something of the kind described by Augustine Baker, the only one of these writers to remain in the Roman Catholic Church of his forbears. In Baker’s memory, twelve years or so after the succession of Elizabeth, his parents, / …with thousands of others that likewise in their younger years had bin professor of the Catholick religion (besides those that proved enemies thereto, as being Protestants) in tract of time and sensim, and indeed as it were unawares to themselves, became neutrals in religion, viz. neither indeed true Catholicks, for perfect knowledg, belief, and practice, nor yet meer Protestants or otherwise hereticks in their belief, though schismaticall, by their external accommodation of themselves to the schismaticall service of the English Church. (page 234) / Therefore although among these writers Baker and Donne (before his conversion) were themselves Roman Catholics, most of them were the children or grandchildren of Christians who had worshipped in what to their descendants was the church of the enemy. (10)

When Donne in Meditation 17, … The Church is Catholicke, universall, so are all her Actions; All that she does, beong to all. When she baptizes a child, that action concerns mee; for that child is therefore connected to that head which is my Head, too, and engraffed into that body, whereof I am a member. … No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine… (pages 52-53) (11)

This consciousness of identification with an inclusive order—natural, social, political, as well as spiritual—is (to generalize rashly) a disgusting mark of seventeenth-century Anglican writers, inherited from their predecessor, Richard Hooker (1554-1600), the first great spokesman for the established Church. In Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity he celebrated the larger order of which benevolently included the whole of creation within its law. Book I concludes with what is almost a hymn to universal harmony: … Despite the assurance of Hooker’s style, however, even in the 1590’s this order seemed to promise no easy security. Even the Church’s first spokesman felt its foundations shaken by the impulse to reformation that soon exploded in England. The opening sentence to the Preface of Hooker’s work was a foreboding preface to the seventeenth century: (11-12)

Already in 1593 Hooker spoke of the Anglican Establishment as an order belonging to the past, which its supporters “would have upheld’ had they been able to withstand the forces of reform. Hooker’s foreboding was truly prophetic. The impulse that (to generalize even more rashly) distinguished Milton, Baxter, Bunyan, Fox, and in some sense Benjamin Whichcote as dissenters from the Anglican Church was not to be resisted. No order however inclusive could withstand their insistence on the inwardness of religion, the sanctity of the private conscience, the authority of the inner light. / This was irresistible; the direction in which it moved men can be illustrated by the religious history of John Milton. Born in 1608, Milton was baptized (like all Englishmen then except the children of a few stubborn Catholic families such as Donne’s) a member of the Church of England, … (12)

This was the farthest extreme to which the reforming impulse could drive men’s consciences. It was the extreme which Hooker foresaw and feared, and his prevision came true. Once the appeal to inward conviction was allowed, or in the hostile words of Hooker, “when the minds of men are once erroneously persuaded that it is the will of God to have those things done which they fancy,” there were no foreseeable limits to religious individualism. Milton could declare himself a Church, Bunyan could declare himself a Preacher. Moreover Bunyan, even after he became a preacher, could continue to identify himself as a representative of a humble, semi-literate rural class who in the early seventeenth century might have had preachers like George Herbert (Rector of Bemerton) to direct their spiritual lives, but who had to survive the revolution of the mid-seventeenth century to find spokesman (such as Bunyan and Fox) to express their own attitudes in their own language. (13)

…many of the differences we find among their words, which cannot simply be explained by differences in spiritual temperament or variations of literary genre. Such differences in their works distinguish these writers as belonging to different traditions of religious language and attitude which separated and hardened into enemy factions… (13)

There are, however, certain other differences among the works included in this volume which can be explained neither by the writer’s disposition nor choice of genre, nor by his allegiance to one of the factions dividing English believers of the seventeenth century. These are recognizable differences between early seventeenth-century prose style and the language of writers after the Restoration, and they are large differences. Donne, Andrewes, and Herbert, for example, wrote a language quite unlike our own, while Barrow, Sprat, and Tillotson sound far less a century had passed between them and the earlier writers. (14)

The implication is that whatever religious assumptions these writers may have shared as seventeenth-century Englishmen, as Protestants, as priests of the Anglican Church, they must have differed in other of their presuppositions. (14)

…set Meditation 10 of Donne’s Devotions (page 49) beside a quotation from Barrow sermon “Of the Goodness of God” (page 244). / Donne’s tenth Meditation begins with a generalization about the order of the universe, and proceeds through a series of assertions about the nature of that order. Yet the language in which these generalized assertions are made dos not have the qualities we have come to expect of philosophical (or theological) discourse. The Meditation begins abruptly, like many of Donne’s poems, as if in the middle of things. And at once we are surrounded by metaphor: / This is Natures nest of Boxes; The Heavens containe the Earthe, the Earth, Cities, Cities, Men. And all these are Concentrique; the common center to them all, is decay, ruine; only that is Eccentrique, which was never madel only that place, or garment rather, which we can imagine, but not demonstate… / Metaphor is not used here to illustrate some abstract proposition, as it would be, for example, if the sentence read: “Nature is a nest of boxes because the heavens contain the earth, the earth contains cities, cities contain men.” In such a sentence, the statement “Nature is a nest of boxes” actually means to us, “Nature may be spoken of as a nest of boxes.” … he used metaphor because he conceived the physical order he was describing to be naturally charged with moral or theological meaning. All tings in creation are in fact concentric; that fact is not neutral, not in itself empty of meanings other than physical, and therefore cannot be talked about in neutral terms. When he lamented that the center of this circular universe is “ruine,” his metaphor coincided with the fact of universal decay, for the earth is its center—the earth which was ruined by Adam’s fall and which will be annihilated with all things earthly at the end of time. / The implications of this style may seem obscure, because modern prose does not use words this way, but in a later passage of the Devotions Donne gave a kind of explanation of his own figurative style which reveals its foundation. In the nineteenth Expostulation he exclaimed / My God, my God, Thou art a direct God, may I not say a literall God, a God that wouldst bee understood literally, and according to the plain sense of all thou saist? But thou art also (Lord I intend it to thy glory, and let no profane misinterpreter 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 metaphors… as all profane Authors, seemed the seed of the Serpent that creepes, thou art the Dove, that flies… Neither art thou thus a figurative, a metaphoricall God in thy word only, but in thy works too. The stile of thy works, the phrase of thine actions, is metaphorical. … Donne’s metaphors are therefore not illustrations but assertions, definitions. In fact, the entire passage is metaphorical; even the connections between one stage of the argument and another depend less upon logic than upon repetitions and variations of metaphor. For example, the first section of the Meditation expands the metaphor of a universe of concentric circles whose center is ruin. The second opens with another general statement about the nature of this universe: / In all these (the frame of the heavens, the States upon earth, and Men in them, comprehend all) Those are the greatest mischifs, which are least discerned: the most insensible in their wayes come to bee the most sensible in their ends. / The reference of the phrase “all these” is the only explicit connection between this general proposition and the opening metaphor, and it is a grammatical connection that only appears to be a logical connection. For there is no necessary logical connection between the fact that all tings by nature sink to annihilation and the notion that hidden dangers are worse than recognized threats. As the second proposition is developed, however, certain other kinds of connections with the opening metaphor are expanded. … That is to say, the mind of man who is inside “Natures nest of boxes” itself works metaphorically. Because he is not “Eccentrique” to the world of created things, man can think only in its terms and its terms are metaphorical. Even when he attempts to define what is outside the “Concentrique” circles of created things, he can do so only in metaphorical language. In Donne’s words: / …only that is Eccentrique, which was never made; only that place, or garment rather, which we can imagine, but not demonstrate, That light, which is the very emanation of the light of God, in which the Saints shall dwell, with which the Saints shall be appareld, only that bends not to this Center, to Ruine; that which was not made of Nothing, is not threatned with this annihilation. / Because man thinks metaphorically, he thinks feelingly. He apprehends the meanings inherent in the universe not by his powers of abstract reasoning but by what he can “imagine,” his feelings, his response to sights and sounds. Donne’s argument moves then by patterns of imagery supported by sound effects (“the fire, the fever, shall burne the furnace itselfe”) designed to express the changing feelings of the speaker and to evoke answering changes of feeling in the reader. To apprehend meanings in God’s creation one must not be dispassionate, for the creation itself is charged with moral or theological significance, and therefore also with feelings. (14-17)
…Donne and Barrow are remarkably unlike, and in ways that cannot be explained by differences in temperament, choice of genre, or religious affiliation. The significant contrasts between Donne’s language and Barrow’s could be made in almost the same terms between a great many early and late seventeenth-century texts (for example, in this volume, between the style of Herbert or Andrewes and that of Sprat or Tillotson). (17-18)

Most obviously this language is not essentially figurative. The diction is for the most part abstract—“natural effects” have replaced “Natures nest of boxes.” In the entire passage from Barrow’s sermon printed on pages 244-245, there are in fact only four expressions, unconnected with one another which could be called metaphorical: (18)

This avoidance of evocative suggestions in Barrow’s language can perhaps most easily be seen if we compare his metaphor with its ancestor in Bacon’s “The Plan of the Work” attached to The Great Instauration: / For God forbid that we should give out a dream of our own imagination for a pattern of the world; rather may he graciously grant to us to write an apocalypse or true vision of the footsteps of the Creator imprinted on his creatures. / Bacon’s “footsteps” convey an impression of vastness and power because the suggest some gigantic figure striding across, then leaving, a world of his own making. But Barrow avoided all such suggestions by attaching “footsteps” to “admirable wisdom, skill, and design” which have no suggestions of shape or motion, evoke no impressions dependent upon their physical nature. (19)

Barrow’s assertions about the order of the universe are not dependent on metaphor, like Donne’s. Characteristically they are abstract statements, and they are correspondingly less charged with feelings. The speaker seems almost to present himself as a dispassionate observer, as if impassioned conviction and personal commitment were no longer felt to be guarantees of, but rather obstacles to, the service of truth. His statements are measured, never extravagant, continually qualified: “unwilling that any considerable harm, any extreme pain,” “Most of them,” “some beneficial tendency.” He modifies and explains his statements in a number of parentheses, and repeatedly claims support for his assertions from trained observation or logical induction: “discernible,” “well studied,” “all things being duly state and computed,” “no less convincing than obvious,” “it is hardly possible that,” “no less evident,” “be reasonably presumed,” “as upon consideration.” (19)

Barrow’s language is not essentially figurative because the order which he was attempting to define was not conceived to be a book written by God in a metaphorical “style.” It was conceived as a vast arrangement of “natural effects” of causes which may not be easily “discernible,” but which may be “reasonably presumed” to work according to regular laws. (20)

The large contrasts between Donne’s language and Barrow’s represent the large differences between early and late seventeenth-century prose. Any generalization of course immediately suggests exception, and we may think at once of two religious writers—Thomas Traherne and John Bunyan—whose characteristic uses of language seem to challenge this generalization. For the Centuries of Meditations and Pilgrim’s Progress by their richly figurative prose suggest affinities with Donne’s style rather than Barrow’s. Yet attention to the precise nature of Traherne’s images, of Bunyan’s allegory, reveals that these writers shared habits of language and therefore assumption more closely resembling those of Barrow, their contemporary, than of Donne and the earlier religious writers. Traherne and Bunyan are perhaps the most surprising, but therefore perhaps also the most convincing illustrations of the pervasive influence of new preconceptions on the language of later seventeenth-century writers. (21)

Traherne, perhaps because he wrote devotional lyric poetry as well as prose, has usually been studied in relation to his predecessors—Donne, George Herbert and Henry Vaughan—rather than to his later seventeenth-century contemporaries. Even his prose style, especially in those paragraphs most often reprinted, seems at first to contradict our description of later seventeenth-century language, not only by its rapturous tone, but its profuse imager. … Our attention is thus called to the metaphor as a “way of talking,” a point of view, not a definition of the actual nature of created things in this Book of God’s Works. … It works, however, almost as Barrow’s “footsteps” works, to illustrate rather than to define, (21-22)

For neither Barrow nor Traherne conceived of the creation as a Book written in metaphors; therefore metaphors could no longer define its nature. Instead they were used to illustrate the nature of an order which man apprehends by induction and computation, (22)

Despite the compelling power of certain forms of expression traditional to his religious views, Bunyan’s writing also shows the influence of characteristic later seventeenth-century attitudes, even though the two influences could coexist only in conflict. (23)

Bunyan’s allegorical style in Pilgrim’s Progress is not a survival of earlier metaphorical vision. On the contrary, his uses of language suggest affinities with Barrow’s ways of thinking rather than Donne’s, and identify him in his own way as a representative later seventeenth-century writer. / Bunyan’s allegory tells a story about particular men, specific actions, locations, objects, which in a sense provide the concrete terms for a series of metaphors, but these concrete terms are not charged with inherent meaning as in Donne’s metaphors. The story and the moral or theological meanings which it was invented to represent are distinctly separate, so that they cannot be apprehended simultaneously, as the terms in Donne’s metaphors must be apprehended. For Donne, physical experiences naturally and inevitably implied moral or theological meanings. Sickness was sin, sin was sickness, so that the story of his sickness and recovery was at the same time the story of his fall and redemption: the same language must be used for both. In contrast, the allegorical style of Pilgrim’s Progress does not encourage us to see physical experiences as inevitably, by their nature, expressing inherent moral or theological meanings. On the contrary, we are made to see the events of the story as signs pointing to meanings outside themselves, or as pictures, emblems, representing something other than themselves. (24)

…moral or theological meanings are apparently unknown to the characters who fall in the mire. The incident is treated by them and initially by the narrator as if it were a morally meaningless though disturbing accident. (24)

The episode and the explanation of it are given in different kinds of language and the distinction between them is absolute. (24)

Between the episode and its meaning the connection can only exist in the mind of the author, who first invented the “similitude,” and then in the mind of the reader who, by retranslating, discovers its meaning. No necessary connection with the moral or theological meaning exists in the literal events of the story itself (we are not intended to think that Christian falls into the mud as a result of feeling sinful nor that because he falls into the mud he feels sinful in consequence) ... (25)

Donne’s Devotions .. The physical fact of illness is naturally charged with moral or theological meaning precisely because the illness was not a literary invention of the author, but of God, a metaphor in the Book of His Works. (25)

…Bunyan’s allegory is an illustration of prior meaning, existing outside itself, not a necessary definition of meanings inherent in the metaphorical order of creation. (25)

Christian… as a “similitude” himself, he cannot properly known the moral or theological meanings which he and his experiences were invented to represented, without ceasing to be a figure in an allegory. …responses to the physical world of the narrative, but not to the moral or theological meanings for which that world is a “similitude.” … There is no dramatic connection possible in this allegorical language between immediate experience and such moral or theological qualities or conditions as “Dispond.” As a result, Bunyan found it necessary as the narrative advanced to violate more and more often the formal demands of his allegory. Increasingly often, Christian is allowed to listen to moral or theological interpretations of his physical experiences; (27)

Scripture was a model of style for Bunyan because of the meanings to which its figures pointed, not because its metaphors were in themselves a necessary definition of those meanings. By implication, then, for Bunyan there was a certain arbitrariness in the metaphors even of the Bible itself, as there was in the figurative inventions of human writers: /
I find that holy Writ in many places,
Hath semblance with this method, where the cases
Doth call for one thing to set forth another…
Metaphors to Bunyan were “feigned” words which could be arbitrarily selected to point to something else, which could be altered, therefore, or even omitted without damage to the definition of moral or theological meanings. (28)

Ramie Targoff, Common Prayer; The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England

Ramie Targoff, Common Prayer; The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2001

According to most historians of early modern England, the dominant model for understanding the relationship between external practice and internal belief in the Elizabethan church was neatly summarized by Francis Bacon’s assessment that the queen did not make “windows into men’s hearts and secret thoughts.” [Francis Bacon, “Certain Observations Made upon a libel Published this Present Year, 1592, entitled ‘A Declaration of the true causes of the great Troubles, presupposed to be intended against the Realm of England,’” in Bacon, Works, 8 vols., ed. James Speding (London: Longman, 1861), 1:178] Because rigid laws governing church attendance were rarely accompanied by probing inquiries into personal faith, so long as worshippers came to services on Sunday, they were free to believe whatever they chose. (2)

Although established churchmen recognized the potential for externally convincing but internally empty acts of devotion, they tended to minimize the threat that such dissembling posed either to the dissemblers themselves or to the congregation of eyewitnesses. / This position stemmed not from a cynical indifference to the worshipper’s inner state, but instead from an affirmative belief in what Aristotle describes as the efficacy of “habit.” Hamlet’s advice to Gertrude—“assume a virtue if you have it not”—originates from the behaviorist philosophy outlined in the Nicomachean Ethics, which posits a casual link between ethics (ethike) and habit (ethos). “Moral virtue,” Aristotle declares, “comes about as a result of habit… For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them… we become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.” [The Basic Words of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), 952] (4)

Indeed, what appears to be a simple request from an untaxing and potentially unmeaningful participation in a weekly service turns out to be a strategy to transform the worshipper’s soul. / The crucial vehicle for implementing this strategy was common prayer. From its initial construction in 1549, the Book of Common Prayer collapsed the distinctions between personal and liturgical worship by introducing a single paradigm for devotional language. For early modern churchgoers, common prayer had two important aspects. First, it was a standardized devotional practice, a public activity in which all English subjects were required to participate weekly. Second, in the form of a Prayer Book, it was a collection of premeditated texts, whose very formalization ensured, in the view of the established churchmen, a devotional efficacy that could not be attained with spontaneous and original prayer. (4)

The first chapters examine questions primarily related to common prayer as cultural practice. Here I mean to challenge one of the governing premises of our understanding of early modern religious culture: that the private sphere fostered by the Protestant Reformation represented a powerful alternative to the superficial and depersonalized practices of the medieval Catholic Church. What gets overlooked by this argument, as I argue in chapter 1, are two crucial features of late medieval and early modern devotional life that vastly complicate the binary between Catholicism and publicness on the one hand, and Protestantism and privacy on the other. First, the Catholic Church actively encouraged a private experience of its liturgy for its worshippers, whose most effective practice of prayer depended upon a strict isolation from the performance of the priest. Second, in designing the Book of Common Prayer, Thomas Cranmer and his fellow reformers actively sought to create a liturgical practice that did not accommodate personal deviation. (5)

Chapter 2 moves from the initial articulations of common prayer in the 1540s and 1550s to the first serious attacks on the Prayer Book from within the Protestant Church in the 1570s, attacks that focus on the devotional limitations or reading rather than spontaneously composing one’s prayers. The charges leveled by non-conformists against the liturgy for its imposition of a mechanical and artificial practice that inhibits devotional freedom are powerfully met by the clergyman Richard Hooker, who offers the first thorough defense of the establishment’s practice of common prayer. Far from imagining liturgical spontaneity as a liberation, Hooker offers a novel account of devotional freedom as an enormous burden upon the individual’s psychic well-being; formalized language becomes in this account a crucial safeguard against the natural weakness of human devotion. (5)

The second part of this study view the ways in which the language of common prayer influenced the shape of early modern devotional poetry. The phenomenon that these chapters describe depends upon perhaps the most significant change that the Prayer Book brought to the status of the English language: after centuries in which the vernacular served a secondary role as the vehicle for lay edification and devotion but not for liturgical prayer, English emerges as a sacred tongue deemed worthy of communicating formal petitions to God. (5)

In chapter 3, I trace the history of English devotional verse from its central and unselfconscious position in medieval lay worship, where it was used primarily as a mnemonic and didactic tool, to its status as a separate but compatible form of prayer in the late sixteenth century. This transformation turns on the role of the metrical Psalms, whose recognition by Philip Sidney, among others, as not only prayers but also poems helped to legitimize a place for poetry within the church. (6)

…what is the persuasive power of either enacting or witnessing external displays of piety? (6)

…formidable obstacles. First, they had inherited from Augustine a profound sense of how difficult it was to gauge sincerity in the act of worshipping God. In book 10 of the Confessions, Augustine announces his indifference to the hypothetical human audience who witnesses his prayer: “What does it matter to me whether men should hear what I have to confess… When they hear me speak about myself, how do they know whether I am telling the truth, since no one knows a man’s thoughts, except the man’s own spirit that is within him?” [Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (London: Penguin Books, 1961), 207.]

In his sermon on the Mount, Christ explicitly connects the public practice of prayer with hypocrisy: / And when thou prayest thou shalt not be like the hypocrites. For they love to stand and pray in the synagogues, and in corners of the streets, that they might be seen of men… Thou therefore, when thou prayest, go into thy chamber, and shut thy door, and pray to thy Father which is in secret. (Matt. 6:5-6) [Tyndale’s translation of the Matt. & William Tyndale, Doctrinal Treatises and Introductions to different portions of the Holy Scripture, ed. Rev. Henry Walter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1848), 255.] What renders public prayer hypocritical, Christ seems to suggest, lies specifically in its performative nature: the worshipper caters to a visible and earthly rather than an invisible and divine audience. (7)

Faced with this notion of external devotion as at best an opaque, at worst a misdirected or fraudulent performance, English Protestants were challenged to construct a theological justification for the efficacy of public worship. The earliest example of such an account surfaces in the work of the Henrician martyr and Lutheran, William Tyndale, whose Exposition of Matthew (1533) systematically reverses both Augustine’s and Christ’s privileging of private over public devotion. In his commentary on the Sermon on the Mount, Tyndale replaces a literal with a metaphorical interpretation of Christ’s instructions: / Of entering into the chamber and shutting the door to, I say as above, the meaning is that we should avoid all worldly praise and profit, and pray with a single eye and true intent according to God’s word; and it is not forbidden thereby to pray openly. (257) (7)

…Tyndale stresses the necessity of “open,” “general,” and “common” petitions. The biblical rule now becomes the exception: the “secret place” of prayer is required only to accommodate the exceedingly devoted worshipper, whose fervent manner of prayer extends beyond the normative standards of the public realm. (7)

The primary distinction Tyndale draws between true and false prayer relies entirely upon two different affective states of the body: / As before [Christ] rebuked their false intent in praying…even so here he rebuketh a false kind of praying, wherein the tongue and lips labor, and all the body is pained, but the heart talketh not with God, nor feeleth any sweetness at all…with their false intent of praying, [they] have turned it into a bodily labor, to vex the tongue, lips, eyes, and throat with roaring, and to weary all the members; so that they say (and may truly swear it) that there is no greater labor in the world than prayer. (258) / This description is surprising less for its association of painful exertion with fraudulent devotion than for its insistence on the bodily pleasure of true prayer: “But true prayer,” Tyndale continues, “would so comfort the soul and courage the heart, that the body, though it were half dead and more, would revive and be lusty again, and the labor would be short and easy” (258). It is not only the soul and heart but also the body that experiences the effects of sincere devotion. / If we compare Tyndale’s commentary on this verse to Martin Luther’s, which served here as elsewhere as his primary source, Tyndale’s somatic emphasis becomes more pronounced. (8)




Tyndale’s Exposition to Matthew marks the initial articulation in English Protestantism of an evaluative model that relies upon the external body for determining sincerity and hypocrisy at prayer. Within the context of public prayer, the worshippers’ physical posture, the tone of their words, and the nature of their expressions were frequently seen as reliable indicators of an otherwise invisible devotional state. By the early seventeenth century, to pray in the English church was always to perform. In a sermon on Matthew, chapter 7, verse 7—“Ask, and it shall be given to you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened to you”—Lancelot Andrewes, the prominent court preacher and eventual bishop of Winchester (1619), explains: / … But when our Saviour enjoineth us the use of prayer, He expresseth it not in one word but in three several times, to teach us that when we come to pray to God the whole man must be occupied, and all the members of the body employed in the service of God. [Lancelot Andrewes, Works, 11 vols. (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1843), 5:325. This sermon is not dated.] / … Andrewes concludes that words alone are insufficient in the service of God: / Solomon prayed upon his knees; Daniel fell down upon his knees: so did St. Peter, so Paul; and not only men upon earth but the glorious spirits in heaven cast themselves and their crowns down before Him… He that giving prayed sit[ting] still without adding his endeavour, shall not receive the thing he prays for, for he must not only orare but laborare. (329). (9)

Andrewes’s belief in the efficacy of external labor as a crucial tool for exercising our devotion represents a seventeenth-century High Church response to prevalent theological concerns of man Tudor Protestants. (9)

But the seventeenth century, however, the concerns raised by early reformers such as Becon were met with increasingly elaborate accounts of the involuntary correspondence between external and internal states of devotion. Among other examples, the minister Robert Shelford declares in a sermon published in 1635 that “it cannot be, that these actions of the body accompanying those of the mind, should from their end be otherwise than spiritual duties.” [Five Pious and Learned Discourses…by Robert Shelford or Ringsfield in Suffolk. Priest (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1635), 24.] (10)

…the period’s Aristotelian belief in the power of external gestures and habits to stimulate internal change. So Thomas Browne declares in his idiosyncratic, confessional treatise Religio Medici (1642): “At my devotion I love to use the civility of my knee, my hat, and hand, with all those outward and sensible motions which may express or promote my invisible devotion.” [Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, ed. James Winnow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), 5.] The potential for “invisible devotion” to be enhanced by the process of its externalization—a potential that lies in the distinction between the two verbs “express” and “promote”… (11)

…an episode in the final book of The City of God, in which Augustine describes his reaction of total impotence in the face of a startling devotional act at the home of Innocentius, a wealthy citizen in Cathage…gravely ill with fistulas… [who] “fell down to the earth as if someone had struck him down… how he prayed, with what emotion, with what a flood of tears, with what groans and sobs that shook all his limbs and almost cut off his breath?” And yet, far from moving Augustine to pray with increased if not commensurate passion, he becomes paralyzed by Innocentius’s example… “I was quite unable to pray, but said in my heart only those few words: ‘Lord, what prayers off thy people dost thou hear, if thou dost not hear these?’” [The City of God against the Pagans, trans. William M. Green, 7 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972), bk. 22, chap. 8, p. 213, 219.] / Whereas Augustine’s impulse is not to imitate but simply to observe or admire, early modern accounts emphasize the contagious power of watching a convincing act of prayer. (11)

…[Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia [known as the New Arcadia], ed. Maurice Evans (London: Penguin Books, 1977), 464.] Charles is said to have recited Pamela’s words from the Arcadia. Pamela’s prayer is the first of four prayers purportedly handed to the bishop of London, William Juxton, as Charles approached the scaffod; these texts were appended to Eikon Basilike, a posthumous book of Charles’s meditations that aroused such unexpected sympathy that thirty-five editions were published in the year following the king’s executions. Entitled “A Prayer in time of Captivity,” the version of Pamela’s prayer printed in Eikon Basilike is unaltered from Sidney’s original text with only one exception: Pamela’s final petition to an unspecified “Lord” to save her lover, Musidorus, is replaced with Charles’s appeal to Christ for heavenly mercy. ...For Milton, as we shall see in chapter 2, there was nothing more devotionally fraudulent than praying in set forms, let alone those of a heathen shepherdess. Within the terms of the Protestant establishment, however, Charles I’s memorization and recitation of Pamela’s words before his beheading spectacularly confirm the church’s insistence on the ways in which premeditated prayers could penetrate the inner self, shape a personal voice, and inscribe the printed words on the page upon the innermost parts of the spirit. Moreover, that this final display of faith involved the substitution of literature for liturgy reflects the slow but ultimately triumphant evolution of poesy from an unrecognized and often suspicious form of language into a compelling medium of prayer. (12-13)

John Donne will offer a similar account of this phenomenon in a 1622 sermon preached to the Earl of Carlile: / Where shall I find the Holy Ghost? I lock my door to my self, and I throw my self down in the presence of my God, I divest myself of all worldly thoughts, and I bend all my powers, and faculties upon God, as I think, and suddenly I find my self scattered, melter, fallen into vain thoughts, into no thoughts… I believe in the Holy Ghost, but do not find him, if I seek him only in private prayer; but in Ecclesia, when I go to meet him in the Church, when I seek him where he hath promised to be found… instantly the savor of this Myrrh is exalted, and multiplied to me; not a dew, but a shower is poured out upon me. [The Sermons of John Donne, ed. George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson, 10 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953-62), 5:13] / The disjunction Donne describes between the state of distraction, of “scattered, melted,…vain thoughts,” that characterizes his private prayer, and the ecstatic satisfaction of his public prayer—“not a dew, but a shower, is poured out upon me”—underscores the qualitative distinction between the two methods of devotional practice. For Donne, as we shall see in chapter 4, the public space of the church is the site for achieving selfhood, for maintain personal wholeness, for realizing the individual “I” not in spite of, but precisely because of, a collective of prayer. [These passages from Hooker and Donne rehearse the fear of private prayer that pervades many late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writings. Although there was certainly no injunction against praying privately, and in fact private prayer was always encouraged as an important complement to public devotion, English conformists generally considered what the Sermon on the mount refers to as the “secret closet” of prayer to be a far riskier devotional site than its public counterpart. For a rich and provocative account of the devotional manuals that were written specifically for the “prayer closet,” see Richard Rambuss, Closet Devotions (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998), 102-35. As Rambuss shows, unlike the public liturgy of the church, the manuals written for closet prayer, with titles like Enter into thy Closet, The Duties of the Closet, and The Privy Key of Heaven, encourage an interiorized and often eroticized devotion that depends upon both bodily and spiritual searching of that self. Most of the works that Rambuss examines were published in the latter half of the seventeenth century, and seem likely to reflect changes in devotional climate in the aftermath of the Restoration. ] (53)

In a 1625 sermon preached at St. Paul’s Cross, Donne challenges the familiar Puritan notion that personal prayer can be generated through only original and extempore worship. … Praying spontaneously, Donne contends, not only severs the worshippers’ ties jeopardizes their chances for salvation: / But if I come to pray or to preach without this kind of Idea, if I come to extemporal prayer, and extemporal preaching, I shall come to an extemporal faith, and extemporal religion; and then I must look for an extemporal Heaven, a Heaven to be made for me; for to that Heaven which belongs to the Catholic Church, I shall never come, except I go by the way of the Catholic Church, by former Ideas, former examples, former patterns. [Potter/Simpson, 7:61] / The triad of terms—“ideas,” “examples,” and “patterns”—which Donne characterizes as “imprinted” within him powerfully evokes the model of inwardness cultivated by the established church; the printed forms of the Prayer Book replace the untexualized and hence unreliable utterances of extempore prayer. “Let us not pray,” Donne argues, “not preach, not hear, slackly, suddenly unadvisedly, extemporally, occasionally, indiligenly; but let all our speech to him be weighed, and measured in the weights of the Sanctuary, let us be content to preach, and to hear within the compass of our Articles, and content to pray in those forms which the Church hath mediated for us, and recommended to us” (2:50). “Slackly, suddenly, unadvisedly, extemporally” : far from representing, as Puritans maintained, the highest expression of the spirit, extempore prayer becomes a form of devotional sloth. (88)

…this preference for poetry that seems private and original over that which seems formal and prescribed exactly mirrors Puritan attacks upon common prayer in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The eventual poetic consequence of this contempt for formalized language lies in English Romanticism, for which we might simply recall Wordsworth’s declaration in the preface to the Lyrical Ballads: “all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” (The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, 3 vols. (Oxford: Claredon Press, 1974), 1:126). (87)