Made Flesh. Kimberly Johnson
into the fray of doctrinal dispute; it resists focusing its claims on whether, say, Donne is more a Roman churchman or some stripe of “Protestant,” however variously defined—more a secret papist with an enduring fondness for his ancestral Catholicism, or a restive apostate from his family faith, or rather a full-throated participant in some “Calvinist mainstream.”8 Instead, Made Flesh addresses the phenomenal and epistemological overlaps between textuality and sacramental worship to demonstrate that in the period following the religious Reformation of the sixteenth century, the lyric poem becomes a primary cultural site for investigating the capacity of language to manifest presence. In poems that employ the presentational, and representational, strategies of Communion, seventeenth-century writers assert the status of poems as artifacts with corporeal as well as symbolic resonances, such that the poems themselves embody the shifting and precarious relationship between materiality and signification—which, not incidentally, is precisely the issue that produces conflicting accounts of the operation of the Eucharist.
The Eucharist is distinct among sacraments for a number of reasons, including that it is celebrated across the wide field of Reformation-era Christian churches, though some denominations prefer to call the ritual by other names, including Holy Communion, the Lord’s Supper, and the Sacrament of the Altar.9 Where Catholic doctrine identifies seven sacraments, the sacramental theologies that developed out of the Reformation reduced that number substantially. The Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion (1563), which codified the creed of the English church under Elizabeth, rejected the Roman sacraments of confirmation, penance, the taking of orders, marriage, and unction as “corrupte” because they did not have “any visible signe, or ceremonie, ordeyned of God.”10 But even to Reformed theologians who break to a greater or lesser degree with the view articulated by Thomas Aquinas that “Nam in sacramento Eucharistae id quod est res et sacramentum est in ipsa materia” [In the sacrament of the Eucharist what we call the “thing and sign” is in the very matter],11 the material valences of the rite—its activity of making the invisible visible through the concrete and objective reality of the physical world—are crucial to its special status. In manifesting the incomprehensibility and imperceptibility of the divine as corporeally present and perceptible, the Eucharist reenacts the mystery of Christ’s Incarnation. But that reenactment, as it occurs in the performance of the rite, is self-consciously symbolic, accomplished through the operation of signs. That is, beyond considerations of doctrine and the evolving parameters of observance, this sacrament explicitly engages incarnational concerns from the remove of a symbol that advertises itself as such. In effect, the Eucharist is a sacrament that stages its correspondence to the Incarnation, regardless of the nature of that correspondence, as a set of figures.
It is not at all surprising, then, that literary texts should have been affected by the eucharistic debates of the sixteenth century, given that the ceremony at the ritual center of Christian observance across the confessional spectrum is unavoidably bound up with interpretive practices. The perplexed hermeneutics of sacramental worship extend beyond the representational status of the eucharistic elements to the very narrative of the ritual’s institution. Indeed, no sentence has provoked more, or more anxious, readerly commentary in the history of Christian theology than the one Jesus is reported to have uttered at the Last Supper, which insisted upon a radical new relationship between spirituality, reading, and corporeal experience: This is my body. Theological disagreements over the nature and operation of the sacrament rest on fundamental questions about interpretation, and the long history of doctrinal conflict about the operation of the Eucharist dramatizes the consequences of Christ’s own verbal ambiguity. Are we to understand that the verb is (Greek ἐστιν) denotes true identity between This and my body? Or is Jesus speaking metaphorically, playing on the association of bread with nourishing staple food (as in Matthew 6.11: “Giue vs this day our daily bread”)12 or, in the festive context of the Last Supper, making use of the operative symbolism of the Passover matzoh as the bread of both affliction and deliverance? Or does the significance of the rite inhere in some combination of these referentialities? That the words of institution lend themselves to a range of figurative and nonfigurative readings is compounded by inconsistencies across different biblical accounts of the Last Supper, as when the version reported in Matthew 26.26, where Christ merely instructs his disciples, “Take, eate, this is my body,” is expanded in Luke’s report: “This is my body which is giuen for you, this doe in remembrance of me.”13 Seemingly from the moment of this ritual’s institution, interpreters have disagreed about the precise meaning of Jesus’s words, and that history of controversy and division regarding the nature of sacramental worship has ensured that the Eucharist is experienced primarily as a ritual engagement with signs.14
The earliest commentaries on the sacrament indicate the harrowing stakes by which the rite foregrounds the interpretation of signs. When Paul writes to the early Christian community at Corinth in an effort to promote unity of practice and belief among their nascent sect, he relates Jesus’s actions at the Last Supper, reminding his audience of the injunction to repeat the ceremony: “And when he had giuen thanks, he brake it, and sayd, Take, eate, this is my body, which is broken for you: this doe in remembrance of mee. After the same manner also hee tooke the cup when he had supped, saying, This cup is the new Testament in my blood: this do ye, as oft as ye drinke it, in remembrance of me.” Paul’s phrasing at the end of this passage, which seems to frame the sacrament as a memorialist ritual, the symbol of a new covenant, would make him a favorite among reformers. But just a few lines later, Paul warns that “hee that eateth and drinketh vnworthily, eateth and drinketh damnation to himselfe, not discerning the Lords body.”15 Classifying as unworthy unto damnation the partaker who participates in the sacrament “not discerning the Lord’s body,” Paul’s caution communicates the tremendous pressure that the sacrament put on both the signifying capacities of the sacramental elements and the interpretive faculties of the worshipper. For Paul is not advocating a literal and sensibly perceptual encounter between the communicant and Christ’s body but rather a hermeneutic action that locates real and efficacious significance in the substance of the ritual.
As Paul’s commentary indicates, one of the challenges facing even the earliest Christian communities with regard to the eucharistic meal involved that ritual’s mediation between meaning and materiality. As Christianity evolved, theologians remained alive to the ways in which the Eucharist elides referentiality and immanence, pointing toward divine principles even as it instantiates divine presence. Beginning in the ante-Nicene era, exegetes register this simultaneity of signification and immanence in commentaries on the Eucharist, as when Origen links the corporeal presence of Christ in the ritual meal with the principle of Christ’s providing spiritual nourishment to the worshipper through the nexus of the word: “Carnibus enim et sanguine verbi sui tanquam mundo cibo ac poto, potat et reficit omne hominum genus” [Surely by the flesh and blood of his word as clean food and drink, he refreshes and provides drink to the whole race of men].16 When Ignatius of Antioch, writing in the second century, speaks of “πίστει ὅ ἐστιν σὰϱζ τοῦ Kυϱίου, ϰαί ἐν ἀγάπῃ, ὅ ἐστιν αἵμα Ἰησοῦ Χϱιστοῦ” [faith, which is the flesh of the Lord, and charity, which is the blood of Jesus Christ] and advocates “πϱοσφυγὼν τῷ εὐαγγελίῳ ὡς σαϱϰὶ ᾿Iησοῦ” [taking refuge in the Gospel as the flesh of Jesus], he imagines the body of Christ as a metaphor for Christian doctrine itself, permeating all of Christian worship through the effectual mechanism of sacramental participation.17 A century later, Tertullian describes the rite in terms that collapse interpretation into the bodily encounter of ritual eating: “Itaque sermonem constituens vivificatorem, quia spiritus et vita sermo, eundem etiam carnem suam dixit, quia et sermo caro erat factus, proinde in causam vitae appetendus, et devorandus auditu, et ruminandus intellectu, et fide digerendus” [Establishing his word as vivifying, because his word is spirit and life, Christ also spoke of his flesh in the same way, because the Word became flesh; accordingly, to obtain life, we ought to crave him, and to devour him with our hearing, and to ruminate on him with our understanding, and to digest him by faith].18 And in the early third century, Clement of Alexandria offers a vivid sense of the Eucarist as a kind of immanent sign, a figure that makes use of the capacity of the flesh