Divine Rhetoric: Essays on the Sermons of Laurence Sterne (review)

Laurence Sterne's oeuvre is small, and a significant proportion of it is found in his forty-five sermons, a genre foreign to most literary critics. Following the publication of Melvyn New's monumental Florida Edition of the sermons (1996), there has been a steady trickle of studies. W.B. Gerard's introduction offers a graceful history of the sermons' critical reception, establishing the well-known terrain to be covered in this collection. Together, the essays collected in Divine Rhetoric restate many of the questions surrounding the sermons—primarily the complementary issues of plagiarism (Sterne borrowed frequently from other sermonists) and orthodoxy (his reputation as a bawdy novelist always precedes the reading of the sermons). If there is an editorial bias here, it is against theoretical, non-contextual readings, leaning instead towards the school of New, which insists upon a thorough grounding in Anglican theology before Sterne's sermons can be properly read.

The four essays collected under the heading "Theological Contexts" provide such a grounding and also carry a polemical argument about the importance of this context for Sterne studies. As New has insisted (for more than forty years now, but especially in the introduction to his edition of the sermons), Sterne was an unexceptional Anglican preacher. Christopher J. Fauske, by attending to key passages of the Thirty-Nine Articles, and Martha Bowden, by examining William Rose's 1762 anthology of sermons (which included three by Sterne), follow New by explaining that Sterne was fully consistent with the mainstream in his theology and preaching practice: like every other Anglican minister of his day, Sterne insisted that theological mysteries remain unexplained while emphasizing practical ethical questions. Both Fauske and Bowden argue that modern critics who approach the sermons by way of Tristram Shandy misread these mainstream characteristics as evidence of flouting religion and writing merely "moral essays." Jack Lynch's contribution similarly calls for a more historically accurate understanding of genres. The danger in this insistence on Sterne's ordinariness is that it begs the question of the value of reading Sterne's sermons at all. The ironic—perhaps Shandean—manifestation of this danger in Gerard's collection is that the reader finds himself a full third of the way into the book without having encountered a single sustained engagement with any of Sterne's actual sermons.

In the fourth essay, we hear from New himself, who offers advice on attending to the liturgical occasion of each sermon as an essential interpretative context. This results in the conclusion that "most Anglican preachers probably differ as much from themselves on different occasions as from one another when they preach on the same occasion" (102). Reading Sterne's sermons in isolation (and drawing conclusions about their Shandean uniqueness) is, therefore, "an essentially flawed pursuit" (102). If this is not sufficiently discouraging, the reader is admonished in a footnote: "At a very minimum, before we make any critical observations about Sterne's sermons or his publishing of them, it behooves us to read the combined ten volumes of Foster and Seed [two eighteenth-century sermon writers]" (115). If the editor of the present book had applied this rule to his own contributors, I suspect it might have been a very slender volume indeed.

Of the three essays included as studies of "Sources and Influences," James Gow's (the first to offer sustained close attention to Sterne's sermons) is the most successful. In answer to the "New school," he makes a convincing argument, based on the use of source material, that the sermons are legible as uniquely Sterne's: they characteristically simplify, personalize, and moderate their sources. By demonstrating Sterne's extremely creative use of his sources (especially in the volumes he himself published), Gow provides a way of approaching the sermons as pieces of writing composed by an individual about whose characteristics one might venture to make an informed critical judgment.

Also in this section, Geoff...