Christianity & Literature

This Introduction to a special issue on “The Sacramental Text Reconsidered” provides a brief genealogy of the practice of describing texts, performances, and poetics as sacramental, eucharistic, and incarnational. It also offers a critique and clarification of such reading practices by differentiating between the real divine presence theologically understood to dwell in a proper sacrament and the “disincarnation” enacted by sacramentally laden literary texts and performances. Drawing on the writings of Emmanuel Levinas, Rowan Williams, and St. Paul, I demonstrate the disincarnate as a poetic of ritual and oblation in an extended reading of Herbert’s poetry.

Both Pearl and the Prioress’s Prologue and Tale attend to sacraments: the Eucharist (in both texts) and baptism (in Pearl). What the texts say about sacraments is quite orthodox; indeed, one might argue that these texts are orthodox in ways that mark them as distinctly anti-heretical, particularly given the harsh treatment of Jews in the Prioress’s Tale. However, what the texts do in presenting this orthodoxy is more daring, recalling significant religious debates of the period and resonating with overlapping aspects of the emergent Lollard movement and contemporary Continental female mysticism, especially that of St. Birgitta of Sweden.

The critical fields of early modern English literature and religion define the term “sacrament” as a range of linguistic, didactic, and metaphorical moves. However, studies of sacramental rhetoric in Shakespeare and others fail to tie linguistic sacramental features to relevant, Reformed, historical notions of personal, answerable sin. This essay responds by considering how Shakespeare reflects on sin, confession, and literary expression through his Henry VI plays. Shakespeare employs the form of the book to stage his characters’ confessional struggles, offering rich articulations of literature’s interactions with sin and the sacramental practices syncopating the lives of readers.

This essay argues that in Hamlet, Shakespeare extends the conventional logic of Senecan revenge—the revenger’s quest to redress crimes against kin through a course of retributive blood justice—to the matter of Old Hamlet’s unsacramental death, which leaves him without the last rites of communion, penance, and unction. Shakespeare scripts revenge in such a way that these denied sacraments feature symbolically in Hamlet’s revenge on Claudius. This unique form of retributive justice and the soteriological anxieties it produces are made more poignant in a play set in Catholic Denmark and performed in Reformation England.

This essay excavates a subterranean medieval presence in Dickens that squares the uncanny presence-in-absence of the Middle Ages in the nineteenth-century mind with the absent-present sacramental logic that animated the medieval mind. Medievalism properly understood, then, is an exercise more subtle and pervasive than a modern artist’s biased appropriation of a particular medieval topos: I contend that medievalism as a practice is sacramental. I argue that Dickens’s mobilization of medieval sacramentality reveals his participation in a radical form of medievalism concerned with activating and inhabiting traditional symbolic categories, and his interest in making these categories live again according to the very conceptual formulas in which they were originally imagined.

By tracing the often hidden presence of the Roman Catholic sacraments throughout Hemingway’s first novel, a pattern of action in priority to words emerges. Jake likes the silent, “dim” Spanish churches; so too Hemingway likes his newfound religion—one whose theology affirms that the nearest approach to God comes not by way of propositional language or spiritual meditation, but by the eating of His body in the Eucharist. This bypassing of referentiality in favor of direct and physical union puts Hemingway’s nascent “Iceberg theory” in prescient conversation with Derrida’s monumental critique of signs as vehicles of presence.

In this article I suggest that attending to the water imagery in Marilynne Robinson’s novel Housekeeping can reveal a sophisticated account of the sacraments, one that anticipates by several years important developments in recent Christian theology. I also argue that the novel seems thus to suggest something crucial about the nature of literary representation itself, about writing’s relationship to the reality of love. Briefly put, in Housekeeping Marilynne Robinson not only proposes a novel sacramental theology and anticipates its development in other thinkers, she also suggests a sort of sacramentality inherent to the very act of literary writing.

This essay maintains that an incarnational aesthetic often privileges the concrete over the abstract, transcends the dichotomy between the secular and the sacred, and offers a glimpse into the intersection of time and eternity, as evidenced in the works of Kathleen Norris, Madeleine L’Engle, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and Jorie Graham, though such themes are given particular resonance in the non-linear narrative technique of Graham Greene’s novel The End of the Affair. Greene seeks to represent the simultaneity of past, present, and future in the cyclical technique of his novel, which offers the unreliable narrator a redemptive entrance into God’s wheeling story of eternal love. The revelation of Christ’s Incarnation and a revaluation of corporeal presence stand at the heart of this novel, underscoring how human intimacy is a window into divine intimacy.

Emily Dickinson, as the enigmatic anti-Madonna of American verse, presides over a Eucharistic micro-drama by suggesting that Words-as-spoken are a sacramental Food. Her repeated tokens of Crumb and Berry are the ritual components of Bread and Wine compressed into nubs, exiles from a collective Loaf and Vine. Dickinson never “took” the public rite of Communion, but performs her own private counter-version via her poems, where “famishing” is used as a progressive verb and “Starvation” is treated as an honorific state. Dickinson’s speaker nibbles at a non-communal crouton in several poems, favoring the nub of a crumb to the risen, levitated Loaf.

As an Afterword to the Special Issue on “The Sacramental Text Reconsidered,” this essay consolidates approaches to sacramentality in literary studies in four dimensions, and these dimensions are symptomatic of the wider sub-field and the larger context of literary studies at present. Those four ways are: the sacrament as a historical trajectory; the sacrament as concept, and also the vehicle of conceptual amnesia; the sacrament as language; the sacrament as literature.