Divine Subjection: The Rhetoric of sacramental Devotion in Early Modern England

Conclusion: Sacramental Rhetoric in the Time of the "Wan Ghost": Excess, Subjection and Spectrality

CONCLUSION Sacramental Rhetoric in the Time of the “Wan Ghost” EXCESS, SUBJECTION AND SPECTRALITY “She, she, is dead; she’s dead: when thou know’st this, Thou know’st how wan a ghost this our world is.” — Donne, An Anatomy of the World In his last will or Ultimum Testamentum, the Laudian bishop John Cosin proudly declares that “I am most addicted to the symbols , synods and confessions of the Church of England, or rather the Catholic Church.”1 This unqualified assertion of a compulsive attachment to the Laudian church bespeaks the self-consciously hyperbolic character of much seventeenth century English sacramentalism ; it discloses, in characteristically unabashed terms, the extent to which the act of attaching oneself to and participating in a sacramental community entails an intense dimension of enjoyment — a form of pleasure that is excessive enough to inspire “addiction.” If Cosin’s resorting to the language of addiction in order to accommodate the affectively charged, apparently compulsive, nature of his religious desire seems strangely hyperbolic to modern ears, it appears even more odd when read in relation to Thomas 219 220 Divine Subjection Cranmer’s diagnosis of religious dispute in the 1549 Book of Common Prayer. Addressing the theological and more precisely liturgical crisis emerging in Tudor England, Cranmer complains that the minds of men in his time are so diverse that “some think it a great matter of conscience to depart from a piece of the least of their ceremonies, they be so addicted to their old customs; and again on the other wise, some be so new-fangled, they would innovate all things.”2 While in Cranmer’s context the language of addiction serves to pathologize excessive forms of attachment to “old customs,” in Cosin’s Laudian context such excessiveness is used to signal an eagerly devout assumption of ceremonial worship as practiced in the Stuart church. Whatever personal propensity Cosin’s compulsive attachment to sacrament is signaling, it reveals the welldocumented Laudian emphasis on — and perhaps addiction to — order, whose liturgical, ecclesiastical and political extensions are metaphysically grounded in the continuity between sacrament and receiver.3 Writing in a context where the nature, indeed the very existence of, such continuity gets called into question, Cosin hyperbolizes his feeling for sacramental continuity and the order that extends outward from it. As we have seen, such hyperbole is a characteristic strategy of the way that early modern sacramental writers cope with the desacralizing pressures of the age. By describing his feeling of attachment to the church’s ceremonies as self-consciously immoderate, Cosin discloses the extent to which the relation between temperance and excess, between order and disorder, is dialectical rather than static in the context of sacramental thought. As we have seen throughout this book, there is a constant tension between states of fullness and emptiness, between continuity and difference within the rhetorical production of the sacramental. By speaking of his feeling for Laudian sacraments as an addiction, Cosin gestures at the way in which sacramentality is inherently excessive, involving within itself a movement of transgression that is both constitutive of and dangerous to the production of the sacred. Speaking in the context of early Christian experience, Georges Bataille addresses the transgressive nature of sacramental continuity when he asserts that the Christian God is a highly organised and individual entity springing from the most destructive of feelings, that of continuity. Continuity is reached when boundaries are crossed. But the most constant characteristic of the impulse [of] transgression is to make order out of what is essentially chaos. By introducing transcendence into an organised world, transgression becomes a principle of an organised disorder.4 Sacramental rhetoric works insofar as it transgresses a limit in order to assert continuity between things that are experienced as separate . In this way, the impulse to intemperance in the name of order is an integral, if counterintuitive, part of how sacramental subjectivities are constituted. The transgression of limits constitutes not something logically inimical to Christian sacramentality, but rather constitutes a specific, if always dangerous, moment in the production of the sacred. The sacramental impulse arises from, as Bataille argues and as the previous analyses have demonstrated, the desire to break apart discreteness, to cross a border in the name of continuity: Faced with a precarious discontinuity of the personality, the human spirit reacts in two ways which in Christianity coalesce. The first responds to the desire to find...