Made Flesh: Sacrament and Poetics in Post-Reformation England

Chapter 4. Richard Crashaw’s Indigestible Poetics

C h a p t e r 4 Richard Crashaw’s Indigestible Poetics Suppose he had been Tabled at thy Teates. Thy hunger feeles not what he eates: Hee’l have his Teat e’re long (a bloody one) The Mother than must suck the Son. —Richard Crashaw, ‘‘Luke 11. Blessed be the paps which Thou hast sucked’’ In his editorial headnote to Crashaw’s epigram on Luke 11, George Walton Williams notes mildly that ‘‘This little poem has provoked extravagant comment.’’1 Williams then goes on to catalogue examples of what he views as a troubling critical focus on the poem’s physicalized terminology, including Robert Adams’s infamous opinion that the epigram imparts ‘‘a nasty twist to the spiritual-carnal relation’’ and William Empson’s remark that it encompasses ‘‘a wide variety of sexual perversions.’’2 Williams springs to Crashaw’s supposed defense, insisting that the poem’s shocking imagery merely represents a spiritual principle and is therefore not really shocking at all. ‘‘The bloody teat is the spear-wound in Christ’s side, imaged here as near the breast,’’ he instructs, and points out that ‘‘The image of the nourishing breast of God is a devotional metaphor found in the Scriptures’’ and elsewhere in the exegetical tradition.3 Williams’s headnote goes some way toward explaining by example the ‘‘extravagant comment’’ surrounding this poem, positing as it does a divide between interpretations that trouble themselves about the poem’s rebarbative physical details on the one hand and interpretations that seek to dissolve those physical details into metaphysical precepts on the other. 120 Chapter 4 The problem with each of these approaches—a problem to which Empson ’s commentary on the poem is attuned—is that they binarize the interpretive possibilities of a text whose argument turns precisely on collapsing binaries, on bringing into proximity terms that would seem to be in opposition to one another. As R. V. Young notes, reinforcing Empson’s response to the poem, ‘‘Crashaw was certainly not unaware of the overtones of sexual perversion, incest, and cannibalism that might be evoked in this epigram by modern critics.’’ Indeed, continues Young, these elements are far from accidental, for ‘‘it is evident that Crashaw is attempting to impart some sense of the truly shocking implications of Holy Communion. But it is truly shocking only for a man with a belief not merely in a vague ‘real presence,’ but in the actuality of Christ’s Body and Blood under the outward forms of the sacrament.’’4 Young’s argument recognizes that the carnal elements of Crashaw’s epigram exist simultaneously with its spiritual concerns, that they even work to illuminate those spiritual concerns. Yet Young takes the ‘‘shocking implications’’ he observes to reaffirm a doctrinally orthodox reading of the poem, identifying the epigram’s shock value as a reflection of the physics of a thoroughly unreformed Eucharist, in which the body of Christ actually enters into the body of the communicant. I would like to suggest that Crashaw’s epigram communicates the problematics of the Eucharist not only by acknowledging the indecorous ‘‘overtones of sexual perversion, incest, and cannibalism’’ intimated by sacramental contact with the body of Christ but also in the hermeneutic challenge it thrusts before its reader. For Crashaw, I propose, the most shocking aspect of the Eucharist is not precipitated by the possibility of physical intimacy between the worshipper and the body of Christ; like many of his contemporaries —including, as we have seen, George Herbert, Edward Taylor, and John Donne—not to mention the centuries of exegetical commentary that preceded them, Crashaw seems to proceed from the premise that the achievement of intimacy with the divine is rather the point of the sacrament.5 Rather than whatever carnal implications may follow from the presence of the body of Christ in the Eucharist, what seems to exercise Crashaw most strenuously is the bald imperceptibility of Christ’s body in the consecrated elements. In acknowledging the necessity of faith to recognize the substantial presence of Christ’s flesh beneath the accidents of bread and wine, Crashaw does not depart from the explanation of transubstantiation that had served as Catholic institutional orthodoxy since the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 and was later explicated so clearly by Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologiae. But Richard Crashaw’s Indigestible Poetics 121 Crashaw sounds the tension between sensory and spiritual modes of perception with...