Made Flesh. Kimberly Johnson
this association further, determining that the signifying properties of sacramental elements make them akin to Christ in his incarnation: “even as in the Eucharist neither part is evacuate or turned into the other, but abide each still in his former nature and substance … each nature remaineth still full and whole in his own kind. And backwards; as the two natures in Christ, so the signum and signatum in the Sacrament, e converso.”40
Andrewes’s sermon makes clear that these questions of how signs mean reflect ultimately on the spiritual status of the material. The perceptible objects of bread and wine in eucharistic worship guarantee the immanence of the divine in the physical world, but in the perceptual absence of their holy signified, the sacramental elements and one’s encounter with them become the nexus of spiritual engagement. The sign becomes, in eucharistic worship, the principle of presence, and thus the object not only of interpretation but, as we have seen, of anxiety, obsession, and desire. Ryan Netzley has persuasively argued that the sacrament posits not the problem of divine absence but the problem of immanent desire. His 2011 study Reading, Desire, and the Eucharist in Early Modern Religious Poetry investigates the challenge of approaching the sacrament with the appropriate recognition of the fullness of presence, a stance made necessary given that “even the theological underpinnings of this communion ritual foreground the problem of desiring signs and seals in their own right.” Netzley uses the model of desire offered by the Eucharist—that is, desiring a sign for its own sake—to explore its effects on reading, and argues that the poetry of the early seventeenth century is invested in treating the activities of both desiring and reading themselves as “intrinsically valuable devotional practices.”41 In its adroit claim that eucharistic theology influences reading practices, Netzley’s argument delineates the ways in which receptionism transfers readily from the sacramental to the textual. His work invites the logically prior question of how Reformation eucharistic theology influences representational practices by reconceiving the sign as intrinsically valuable. For as religious reformers emphasize the capacity of signs as such to be meaningful, or perhaps meaning-full, they outline the parameters of a plenitudinous symbology that redounds to the literary. The Reformation drives, and is driven by, an unprecedentedly vigorous and systemic public discussion about signification, one that takes as its central focus of interrogation the vexed relationship between being and meaning. The model of devotion that emerges out of sixteenth century theology is, finally, textual.
In the wake of such a sustained controversy in which sublimity, materiality, and signification itself are fused together, it should come as no surprise that the questions at the heart of these disputes should ramify into poetry. Lyric poetry in general and the devotional lyric in particular are dedicated to the principle of evoking presence, and it is inevitable that such an enterprise would respond to such explicit and enduring pressures on the mode and manner of signification in this ritual of presence. For post-Reformation writers, the Eucharist stands not only as the central sacrament of Christian worship and the fiercest flashpoint of Reformation dispute, but also as the sacrament whose efficacy is understood to be contingent on questions of signification and the matter (again, in both senses of that term) of words. Nor is it adequate to suggest that the poetic effects of this controversy are confessionally limited—to claim, for example, that post-Reformation poetry exhibits a distinctly Protestant poetics in its word-centered pieties, or that it clings bravely to an imperiled Catholic system of valorized materiality. It is more accurate to say that post-Reformation poetry is self-consciously engaged with its own capacities—and failures—to manifest presence, and thus registers vividly the ways in which signification informs and is informed by eucharistic controversy. Indeed, when we consider Schwartz’s passing remark that “While theologians argued about the status of signs in the Eucharist … the mysteries of the Eucharist gave Reformation poets little difficulty,” that assertion becomes increasingly puzzling.42 For, as we have seen, the status of signs is inextricable from the central mystery of the Eucharist, and in displaying an obsessive concern with that mystery in its very poetics, the seventeenth-century lyric announces its difficult theological inheritance. Particularly in the devotional lyric of the English seventeenth century, poets confront directly and explicitly the presence-making capacities of the tangible sign, and probe the relationship between the unsublimable materiality of the text and its potential as an instrument of referentiality.
As a genre, poetry is distinguished by the ways in which it generally emphasizes the communicative properties of its nondenotative features to produce a self-aware and objective textuality, a self-affirming textual objecthood.43 That is to say, poetry is a formal practice fundamentally invested in the substantiality of its own medium, not only as a mechanism for generating referentiality, narration, mimesis, and other discursive acts but for its own sake. Indeed, the dynamic interaction of referentiality and materiality underwrites poetic utterance, as on the one hand the designative function suggests the transparency of the word, while on the other hand the formal conspicuities of poetic language intrude into that designative function, asserting the word as a sonic, rhythmic, and spatial object. As Mutlu Konuk Blasing writes, “The incommensurability of the semiotic/formal and the semantic/symbolic systems is perceivable as an immediate experience in poetic language, for they work at each other’s expense. A poem, far from being a text where sound and sense, form and meaning, are indissolubly one, is a text where we witness the distinct operations of the two systems. We cannot do both at once, and poetic language will not allow us to ignore either system.”44 As poetry elaborates its devices into the sensorium, it destabilizes the referential function of words, an interplay that trains hermeneutic attention on the linguistic surface, thwarting interpretive transparency. Formal patterns of recurrence rely on corporeally available qualities of language: schemes using rhyme and alliteration, assonance and consonance, and the alternating and variable stress patterns of meter contribute to the semantic meaning of a poem, but they do not themselves constitute semantic meaning. Likewise, the positioning of words on a page, including but not limited to the line breaks that interrupt the horizontal progress of language and activate perceptions of the spatiality of text, intrudes into the accumulation of semiotic information. These features interpose a textual substantiality that resists being “read through” to some stable and defined “real meaning” or content. Similarly, figurative language emphasizes the estrangement or incommensurability of the terms which it links, irrupting as difference into the conciliatory urges of meaning-making.45 In Blasing’s terms, these poetic processes work to “foreground the mechanism of the code” because they present to the apprehension language per se, as an artifact of encounter.46 It would not be inappropriate here to reframe this theoretics in the language of Reformation theology: such features work to emphasize the sign as effectual, and meaning-full, objects as such—that is, objects in which significance inheres.
Though the field of his primary study is some centuries removed from early modern England, Charles Bernstein’s analysis of the extent to which poetry foregrounds its own presence on the page is particularly relevant to the poetics that develops out of the Reformation and is influenced by that era’s renegotiations of the capacities of the sign to manifest immanence. (Again, it is precisely to my point to note that Bernstein’s diction sounds a strong echo to the theological treatises of the sixteenth century.) The mark on the page, argues Bernstein,
is the visible sign of writing.
But reading, insofar as it consumes &
absorbs the mark, erases it—the words disappear
(the transparency effect) & are replaced by
that which they depict, their “meaning” … Antiabsorptive
writing recuperates the mark by making it opaque,
that is, by maintaining its visibility
& undermining its meaning, where “meaning” is
understood in the narrower, utilitarian sense
of a restricted economy.47
As what Bernstein calls “antiabsorptive” writing foregrounds the nondenotative qualities of its language, it impedes “the transparency effect,” in which meaning is conceived as somehow standing behind the words, waiting to be claimed. Antiabsorptive writing must be negotiated not merely as a