Sacramental Poetics At the Dawn of Secularism: When God Left the World by Regina Mara Schwartz (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 169 contribution to this field of inquiry. The student of the literature of the German Baroque will find here reason to question the trite assumption that occasional poetry has little interest for one teaching the literary canon. Scholars of the epicedia and epitaphia written in Latin and Classical Greek by German humanists and academics-here may be mentioned the thirteen Latin funeral poems of Eobanus Hessus written between 1508 and 1531 (admirably discussed in Ingeborg GraBer's Die Epicedien-Dichtung des He/ius Eobanus Hessus, 1994) and Johannes Posselius the Elder's Epitaphia clarorum et piorum aliquot hominum of 1565-will find in Linton's book valuable insights into and points of comparison with the vernacular Lutheran tradition of lamentation. Diane Louise Johnson Western Washington University Sacramental Poetics At the Dawn of Secularism: When God Left the World. By Regina Mara Schwartz. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008. Cloth (ISBN 0804756678), $60; paper (ISBN 0804758338), $19.95. Regina Schwartz's brilliant and thought-provoking contribution to the "Cultural Memory in the Present" series from Stanford University Press begins with a note of lament. Telling the story of her unwillingness to take communion when offered the opportunity to do so during a private Mass at the chapel of Ignatius of Loyola, Schwartz offers the following analysis of what she confesses to be a long-standing reluctance to participate: "On that day I knew that I could not take communion because the world was not yet redeemed" (xiii). For Schwartz, the pervasiveness of injustice and suffering in the world is such that Christ cannot be deemed to be fully present, and it is from this starting point that the book examines the consequences of the Reformers' break with the doctrine of the Real Presence. We are encouraged to appreciate how much was risked when the Reformers pursued a more limited notion of the Eucharist: "a redeemed world, eternal life, justice, participation in a communion constituted by consent rather than by rule, and by even more-love" (26). But we should not think that Sacramental Poetics at the Dawn ofSecularism: When God Left the World is about "nostalgia for the 'old faith' of a more sacramental Christianity, even for Catholicism" (140). Schwartz is much more interested in understanding the "ever-departing" (140) loss of the gods that secularism brings forth than she is in seeking a return to a pre-Modern era. Her argument is that understanding this loss brings hope: remembering what is no more, we recall the value of such things and desire them anew. Whether or not such hope is an adequate replacement for the presence of Christ is debatable, as Schwartz's preface acknowledges, but there is no question that remembrance does, at the very least, alert us to the consequences of theological dispute, in literature and culture. 170 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE Following two conceptual chapters on the cultural and theological implications of the loss of the Real Presence, the substance of the book consists of close readings of work by four Early Modern writers: William Shakespeare, John Milton, John Donne, and George Herbert. I do not want to make too much of the distinction between conceptual analysis and close reading, however, for one of this book's great strengths is the seamless way in which Schwartz moves between textual insight, cultural analysis, theological reflection, and theoretical understanding. From start to finish, the discussion speaks intelligently of multiple worlds (the worlds we inhabit, physically and mentally; the present world; and the world of the Reformation) and moves fluently and imaginatively between them. There is a methodological richness here which, when taken alongside the book's beautiful and considered prose, results in one of the most engaging works that I have read for some time. Not only is the book attentive to the doctrine of the Eucharist; it is a book that impresses upon us why theological intricacies matter and how they connect with other issues that we might be more familiar with. Aware of the dynamic potential of all forms of representation, chapter 3, for example, observes how the Reformers' "very insistence that in the Mass, the sacrifice was only represented, and not repeated ... brought the Mass closer...