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

TWO. The Gendering of God and the Advent of the Subject in the Poetry of Richard Crashaw

TWO The Gendering of God and the Advent of the Subject in the Poetry of Richard Crashaw “Christianity wants to destroy, shatter, stun, intoxicate: there is only one thing it does not want: measure.” — Nietzsche While Robert Southwell turned to visions of devotionally ideal women in order to affect a change in the poetic and religious life of Elizabethan England, Richard Crashaw embraced a female-centered sacramental vision that not only venerated devotionally strong women but also adapted medieval traditions of feminizing God.1 Writing at a point in time when many within the English church were hostile to female religious authority, Crashaw represented the incarnate Christ and, more provocatively, the transcendental power informing all creation in conventionally maternal and feminine terms. This gendering of God has integral implications for the form of sacramental subjectivity that Crashaw imagines , particularly insofar as it is presented through a rhetoric of excess that challenges, even as it participates within, the devotional 93 94 Divine Subjection protocols of the Laudian and Catholic communities in which he lived and wrote. Indeed, no poet of radical Protestant background gave expression to the sacramental worldview that characterized the more High Church elements of the Laudian establishment (1633–1640) with greater ardor than Richard Crashaw. Writing at a moment in English history when liturgical practices were the focus of bitter controversy and debates over the nature of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist formed a key axis point between competing theological views, Crashaw embraced a ceremonially centered via affirmitiva with enough outward pomp — not to mention Mariolatry — to inspire charges of religious abuse in 1644.2 Charges of “religious innovation” were leveled at Crashaw and his close friend — and fellow High Churchman — Joseph Beaumont by parliamentary agents working for the committee established in 1640 to consider “Abuses in matters of Religion and Civil Government.”3 In Crashaw’s case, these charges focused on his having delivered a sermon on the Annunciation in which he was said to have “turned himselfe to the picture of the Virgin Mary and to have used these words Hanc adoramus, colamus hanc.”4 Coupled with the veneration of Mary in his poetry, these charges make clear that Crashaw was in general sympathy with the views on Marian devotion expressed by Mark Frank, treasurer of Pembroke Hall. Shortly after his ordination in 1641, Frank preached a sermon on the Annunciation in which he says that he would not have chosen this particular theme, but that I see it is time to do it, when our Lord is wounded through our Lady’s sides; both our Lord and the Mother of our Lord, most vilely spoken of by a new generation of wicked men, who, because the Romanists make little less of her than goddess, they make not so much of her as a good woman: because they bless her too much, these unbless her quite.5 As Maureen Sabine and others have noted, Anthony Stafford offers a similarly defiant attitude regarding Marian devotion in his 1635 work, The Femall Glory, which was published with the imprimatur of Archbishop Laud. Mockingly dismissing the Reformist idea that he should suffer anxiety over Marian devotion, Stafford goes so far as to describe his desire for Mary in the form of sacred parody. By doing so, he unsettles the stability of his earlier claim that he would not make Mary his idol through “overworship”: Nay the Saints and Angels are Not safe in Heaven, till she be faire, And rich as they, nor will this doe Untill she be my Idoll too: With this sacriledge I dispence, No fright is in my Conscience.6 Crashaw’s expulsion from Peterhouse College in Cambridge, along with the knowledge of his father’s anti-Marian sentiments — expressed in such anxiously masculinist works as The Jesuites gospel — disclose the extent to which he had firsthand experience of the hostility that Frank, Stafford and other Laudians describe as symptomatic of the attitudes Calvinist reformers showed toward Marian devotion and other female-oriented modes of worship. And like Stafford and Frank’s reactions to the desacralizing nature of radical Calvinist reforms, Crashaw’s poetry possesses intense rhetorical and doctrinal self-consciousness, which is expressed through a poetically and historically peculiar form of sacramental hyperbole. Given the focus of the allegations against Crashaw, it is not surprising that the anticeremonial rhetoric employed in the charges betrays a common misogynist association of...