The Literary Achievement of the Early Modern Sermon a DISSERTATI

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THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA

Understanding and Presence: The Literary Achievement of the Early Modern Sermon

A DISSERTATION

Submitted to the Faculty of the

Department of English

School of Arts and Sciences

Of the Catholic University of America

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

For the Degree

Doctor of Philosophy

Emily Alianello

Washington, D.C.

2019

Understanding and Presence: The Literary Achievement of the Early Modern Sermon By Emily Alianello, Ph.D. Director: Tobias Gregory, Ph.D.

In both their preached and printed forms, sermons were one of the dominant genres of the early modern period. While studies of early modern sermons tend to emphasize conflict by centering sermons’ occasional content, this dissertation approaches them primarily as literary texts. It explores how the sermons of Lancelot Andrewes, John Donne, Richard Sibbes and Henry King sought to move their auditories toward faith and in doing so worked to build a community. While Andrewes, Donne, Sibbes and King differed in style, theology and temperament, all four belonged to the “conforming center” of the Jacobean and Caroline English church. These four preachers offer a window into efforts within the conforming church to emphasize shared ground and, in the face of narrowing definitions of conformity on the one hand and of the true church on the other, to create a wider space within the national English church. In treating these sermons seriously as literary texts, this study offers close readings of selected individual sermons from each preacher. These readings join a growing number of studies of religious writing during this period that seek to examine how faith prompted literary efforts to bind rather than divide. These sermons, in language that rendered the abstractions of faith experiential, sought to evoke the presence of things not seen. This study argues that, in the sermons of these four preachers, the nature of that experience also shaped communal identity. The sense of the communal created by these sermons is one that explicitly seeks unity despite conflict through the creation of shared experience, rather than enforcing unity by drawing tighter boundaries. As such, these efforts represent attempts to articulate a unified experience of faith in the face of the increasing fragmentation of the church in England. This study traces, in Andrewes’ sacramental language, Donne’s performative recognition of experience, Sibbes’s loving mysticism, and King’s genre- blurring, the ways some preachers of the conforming center sought to draw their auditories toward a participation in the sermon that was also participation in the community of faith. In distinctive ways, each preacher seeks to make apprehensible and immediate the remote things of faith.

This dissertation by Emily Alianello fulfills the dissertation requirement for the doctoral degree in English approved by Tobias Gregory, Ph.D., as Director, and by Michael Mack, Ph.D., and Daniel Gibbons, Ph.D., as Readers.

______Tobias Gregory, Ph.D., Director

______Michael Mack, Ph.D., Reader

______Daniel Gibbons, Ph.D., Reader

For Livvie. I hope that one day you will read this and know what you can do.

iii

Table of Contents 1. Introduction...... 1 I. The Story of the Sermon ...... 7 II. Literary Sermons of the Conforming Center ...... 18 III. This Study ...... 32 IV. Summary of Argument ...... 36 2. Of the Preaching of the Word ...... 39 I. “Keyes to the kingdom of heaven” ...... 41 II. Pulpits: Preaching Venues and Sermon Forms ...... 56 III. “A Paper-Life”: Sermons and Print...... 62 IV. Artes Praedicandi ...... 69 3. Hunger: Sacramental Participation in the Sermons of Lancelot Andrewes ...... 88 I. “A Folly to Fall to Comparisons:” Andrewes’ Pastoral Theology ...... 91 II. Vivid Structure: Style and Participation ...... 107 III. Word Feasts: Christmas, Easter, Whitsunday ...... 117 4. “Every particular soule”: The Individual in Community in the Sermons of John Donne ...... 135 I. “Consolation without Controversie” ...... 140 II. The House of God ...... 156 III. “Open to most men” ...... 169 5. “Sweet Singer of Israel:” Comfort and the Preacher in the Sermons of Richard Sibbes...... 176 I. Comfortable Passages ...... 181 II. “The Soule on Rocke” ...... 191 II. “He will give being to every word” ...... 206 III. “A communicative, diffusive goodnesse” ...... 216 6. “The Seal of Amen”: Prayer and Community in Henry King’s Exposition Upon the Lord’s Prayer . 225 I. King and The Exposition Upon the Lord’s Prayer ...... 228 II. “Something Understood”: What is Prayer? ...... 233 III. Liturgical Prayer and the Creation of Community ...... 244 IV. Participation in Divine Power ...... 257 V. Dual Persuasion: Petition and Exhortation Together ...... 261 Coda: King in 1664 ...... 269

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

As my debts are many, I shall attempt to begin at the beginning, although I fear omitting at least some who should be thanked. Deborah and Mark Alianello gave me a childhood of books and never quashed a single eccentric interest. They have been a source of unfailing support even in these last long days of my “little essay.” Many years ago, Dr. Marian Sanders and Dr. David Noe pushed me to work harder than I had before and in doing so opened up the world of the academy to me. Dr. Steven Hake is responsible for the core of my undergraduate education. His genuine love for the works we read and for his students still bears fruit. Although we have passed by like the lantern out- of-doors, his prayers and his ethic of delight have followed me and so many others. Dr. Michael Mack’s classes, both those I took and those I observed, have shaped my teaching and my writing. Dr. Daniel Gibbons’ book, Conflicts of Devotion, clarified some of the aims of this project, and his incisive criticism has spurred me to re-think and re-write for the better. I am grateful to both of them for their presence on this committee and in my graduate education. Dr. Tobias Gregory has been an unfailingly patient, kind and wise director. His encouraging comments on a long ago class paper provided the genesis of this project. For your longsuffering and your guidance, thank you. Jennifer Clement kindly gave an afternoon in the fall of 2016 to an unknown Ph.D. student struggling with Richard Sibbes. Her friendly encouragement at the time is matched by the catalytic role in my project played by her scholarship. Kelly Franklin first sent me the link to BYU’s database of John Donne’s sermons. Writing Center sessions with Kevin Rulo got two chapters off the ground. Dana Robinson, Colleen Noletta, Myla Spencer, Jill Fitzgerald, Tereza Belyna and Joan Shifflett worked alongside me, encouraged me and offered key suggestions. With her devoted friendship, Xiaofang Huang pulled me from the slough of despond more than once. The evenings and Saturdays staff at the Library of Congress granted me the space and material to finish. Shaun Cross provides proof to me of the lively vitality of this genre even today. Finally, there are two without whom this project would have fallen to the wayside, the unfinished musings of a Lancelot Andrewes fangirl. With clarity of thought and a willingness to skewer my syntactical absurdities, Ashley Trim has been my reader and my friend from before the beginning. I am not thine, but thee. For Joey, there is so much to say, none of it adequate. Yet here you are, tenaciously viewing me as a scholar, offering your life, loving me and Livvie in triumph and despair and all the moments in between. Our little room is my everywhere.

Chapter 1 Introduction

It is Easter Day, 1610. At Whitehall, James I, along with some of the most powerful men in

England, listens to one of his favorite preachers, Lancelot Andrewes, Bishop of Ely. If someone on the grounds stops to think of the ghosts of Henry VIII and Cardinal Wolsey, surely no one imagines that Charles, still a boy and not yet heir to the throne, will be executed there less than four decades later. As the light that April morning spills onto the Thames, the fasting of Lent disappears.

Everyone present has felt this rhythm every spring of their lives. At churches all around them in

Westminster and the city of London, other preachers enter pulpits to give sermons before the celebration of the Book of Common Prayer’s Holy Communion. It is the same throughout the island.

Andrewes speaks with compassionate pastoral intimacy of a central claim of Christian faith, the bodily resurrection: "If these eyes of Job's have dropped many a tear, it is reason the tears be wiped from them, not from another pair of new-made eyes."1

Andrewes’ sermon that Easter morning showcases the power and position of the genre within the complex religious culture of early Stuart London. While most people’s daily lives were infused with the rhythms and language of the Book of Common Prayer, the words of the church reached beyond the liturgy in the sermons heard on Sunday mornings and afternoons, in parish churches, great cathedrals and market squares. Sermons were part of the longstanding practice of

1 Lancelot Andrewes XCVI. Sermons by the Right Honorable and Reverend Father in God, Lancelot Andrewes, Late Lord Bishop of Winchester. Published by His Majesties Specially Command, edited by William Laud, John Buckeridge. (London: George Miller for Richard Badger, 1629), 263. Throughout this study, I have to a large extent retained original spelling, capitalization, punctuation, and italics when quoting from early modern texts. I have, however, eliminated the long s, and changed v to u, i to j, and uu to w where appropriate.

Christian worship in England and could, as in Andrewes’ sermon, rehearse the continuity of belief.

Yet sermons were also powerful tools for innovation and change, offering the possibility of binding together the fragile consensus of the national church or destroying it. At no other time in English history did the sermon play such a powerful role in the English conversation. In their amplification of the vernacular Scriptures, sermons offered theological foundations and behavioral norms. These sermons, preached by the famous and the forgotten, sought to enact and shape a religious and social community.

Beginning in the 1990s and accelerating with the essay collections The English Sermon Revised

(2000) and The Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon (2011), the early modern sermon emerged as a field of study in its own right.2 Using the work of revisionist and post-revisionist scholars of the

English Reformation to dismantle the old binaries of Anglican and Puritan and to complicate their replacements, scholars such as Mary Morrissey, Jeanne Shami and Peter McCullough have read sermons in context, informed by this more nuanced understanding of the period.3 Such efforts foreground the rhetoric of conflict and power and the period's many political and theological clashes, from the mysteries of the divine will in salvation to the place of ceremonies in worship. Yet sermons do more than take positions on contested issues. Preachers desired to move their auditory’s

2Lori Anne Ferrell and Peter E. McCullough, The English Sermon Revised: Religion, Literature and History 1600-1750, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). Peter E. McCullough, Hugh Adlington, and Emma Rhatigan, The Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

3 See especially: Peter McCullough, Sermons at Court: Politics and Religion in Elizabethan and Jacobean Preaching (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Mary Morrissey, Politics and the Paul's Cross Sermons, 1558-1642 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); and Jeanne Shami, John Donne and Conformity in Crisis in the Late Jacobean Pulpit (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2003).

3 souls with their sermons. The preached sermon sought seismic internal change along with the ordering of a just and holy society.

To those ends, the sermons of Lancelot Andrewes, John Donne, Richard Sibbes, and Henry

King demonstrate pastoral dedication and rhetorical dexterity. This study explores how the language of their sermons makes the abstractions of faith experiential, how rhetoric conjures the presence of things not seen, and how the nature of that experience may shape communal identity. I have circumscribed my study in two ways. First, taking as a premise that sermons can be read as literary texts, I will prioritize close readings of selected individual sermons. While my work draws on history and theology, it remains literary in focus: how does a sermon, as Donne says, make absent and remote things present to those who hear them?4 This study explores how these preachers brought their auditories to participate in the communal construction of faith. For these sermons which established theological priorities also created a shared experience of the movement toward belief.5

Second, this study focuses on an articulation of community within the conforming center of the English church. “Community” is a flexible word. By it we can mean a self-selecting grouping of like-minded people. The importance of community, in this sense of bonds of accountability and support, is stressed by many religious sects, including seventeenth-century dissenters. A community can also refer to geographical connections, such as the immediate community of a specific town or parish or the more abstract sense of a national community. In both cases, community signifies a

4 John Donne, Easter, 1622, Sermon 2, Sermons, ed. George Reuben Potter and Evelyn Mary Spearing Simpson, Vol 4 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953), 87.

5 It is important to acknowledge that our claims about the sermons early modern Englishmen heard are at best a glimpse through a glass darkly. When we do have listening notes that correspond to a surviving printed sermon, these notes reveal significant gaps that seem to indicate that what was preached and was printed do not match exactly. This problem will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter Two.

4 bond of shared experience and identity. In the case of the English church in the period after the

Elizabethan settlement, geography and ideology combined in the strange hybrid of the Protestant

English church which accepted the importance of individual conscience, but also retained the episcopal parish structure of the pre-reformation period.

For the people living in England in the century after the Henrician Reformation, religious identity became wedded to a newly conceived national identity. To be a Christian meant to be part of a church; to be part of the English church involved a blending of religious conviction and political and social necessity. For conforming members of the English church, communal bonds meant something other than they did for dissenters drawn by a shared theology. To what degree could it be assumed that your neighbor was also part of the spiritual community in which you might find salvation? During this period, individuals within the church participated in the negotiation of just what a Christian church in England meant. Geography, ideology, and conscience all played a role in shaping this most earthly and spiritual institution. Amid epistemic and cultural shifts that would redefine the idea of both church and nation, people throughout the island participated to some degree in the rhythms of a faith that shaped their lives and the lives of almost everyone around them. In the immediate wake of Edwardian reform, the shape of this national church was created by force. By the late sixteenth century, however, most of that church had spent their entire lives within such an understanding of community.

As time went on, there were those who took the claims of the rightness of the established church as more than a political convenience. Adherence to the requirements of the English church

5 was for clergy perhaps most simply encapsulated in Whitgift’s three articles.6 Conformity was irrevocably fused to political expediency, and conforming and conformist are themselves fraught terms.7

Yet there was an attitude of conformity which went beyond merely formal assent. Perhaps pragmatic in its origin, in addition to accepting the idea that the truth could best be found in the Church of

England, it was also a real theological and ethical commitment to unity and inclusion. The four preachers in this study, and others like them, invested in a unified church by acknowledging the difficulty of attaining perfection.

The preachers in this study would articulate the overlap between the visible and the true church in different ways, both in theory and practice. Still in conformity there could be a theological commitment to unity and ecclesiastical peace that required widening the acceptable boundaries of the church beyond places where each might determine them on their own, in order to make this idea of a single church work for as many people as possible. Donne, Andrewes, Sibbes and King, as well as many others, took principled steps to write and speak in a space somewhat removed from the conflicts of the era. In inhabiting this center, they sought to build bonds which could hold together the mixed sense of spiritual community formed by nationally and theologically created identities. In concentrating attention on these efforts, my study is also an effort to join a growing number of

6 For a thorough discussion of the complications of the definition of conformity during Whitgift’s tenure and beyond see Kenneth Fincham, “Clerical Conformity from Whitgift to Laud” in Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, c. 1560-1660, ed. Peter Lake and Michael Questier (Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2000), especially 130-131.

7 See for example the discussion in Shami, Conformity in Crisis, 17-18 and Guibbory, Ceremony and Community from Herbert to Milton: Literature, Religion and Cultural Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge University Press, 1998), 6- 7.

6 studies of religious writing during this period which seek to examine how faith prompted literary efforts to bridge divides, to participate, in Gregory Kneidel’s term, in a “struggling universalism.”8

While the sermons of Andrewes, Donne, Sibbes, and King display a variety of styles and theological positions, each, in some vital way, is involved in creating that community through a participatory movement of faith, represented in the sermon and apprehended by the auditory.

Representing the two generations before the war, these preachers were conformists who invested intellectual effort and religious principle into the established English church. In the literary dimensions of these sermons, there is something of the open alterity touched on by Ken Jackson and Arthur Marotti who find in Shakespeare a tendency to “systematically strip away the layers of religion until nothing is left—nothing except the desire for something more or better.” 9 These sermons manifest an analogous yearning, but one in which religious language and convention is heaped upon this desire instead of stripped away from it. Amid the expectations placed upon the sermon within the realities of the social, political, and religious world of early modern England, there is an attempt to articulate something much more elusive, a response to the substance of things unseen.

8 Gregory Kneidel, Rethinking the Turn to Religion in Early Modern English Literature: The Poetics of all Believers (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 19.

9 Ken Jackson and Arthur Marotti, “Introduction” Shakespeare and religion: early modern and postmodern perspectives (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame, 2011), 9.

I. The Story of the Sermon

Early modern sermons, once quiet wallflowers in the bustling literary dance of the period, now find themselves quite engaged. As a sub-field in the study of early modern religious literature, the sermon’s relatively recent success calls for a brief history of the scholarship involved. Because few preachers prepared and read complete sermons, we lack exact records of what was preached.10

Any account must therefore start with the role of seventeenth-century editors in reconstructing printed sermons.11 Collected works were often published posthumously, often claiming the involvement of the original author. 12 Motivations for publication ranged from profit, as in the case of John Donne Jr, to ideological appropriation, as in the case of Laud and Buckeridge’s 1629 edition of Lancelot Andrewes’ XCVI Sermons.13

10 James Rigney “Sermons into Print” in The Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 198-213. Morrissey, Politics and Paul’s Cross Sermons, 43-44. Arnold Hunt, The Art of Hearing: English Preachers and their Audiences, 1590-1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 131.

11 Mary Morrissey, "Sermon-Notes and Seventeenth-Century Manuscript Communities." Huntington Library Quarterly: Studies in English and American History and Literature 80, no. 2 (2017): 293

12 To take two examples not covered in detail in this study, John Preston’s sermons were all published after his death in 1628. While William Perkins’ popular Foundation of Christian Religion was first published in 1590 and Prophetica, his Latin treatise on preaching, in 1594, none of his sermons themselves were published until after his death in 1602. See Clement “He being dead, yet speaketh.” Christy Desmet, "William Perkins (1558-1602)." In British Rhetoricians and Logicians, 1500-1660: Second Series, edited by Edward A. Malone. Vol. 281, 215-228. Detroit: Gale, 2003, http://link.galegroup.com.proxycu.wrlc.org/apps/doc/OQXKAD677513912/DLBC?u=wash31575&sid=DLBC&xid =a058fee3. Accessed February 24, 2018.

13 Robert Krueger, "The Publication of John Donne's Sermons." The Review of English Studies 15, no. 58 (1964): 151-160. Peter McCullough. "Making Dead Men Speak: Laudianism, Print, and the Works of Lancelot Andrewes 1626- 1642." The Historical Journal 41, no. 2 (1998): 401-424.

Many such editorial decisions are now impossible to trace, as we rarely have access to the manuscripts from which the original editors worked.14 Yet our present scholarship is shaped by this calculated preservation or loss of information. For instance, Laud and Buckeridge emphasize occasion and auditory by grouping Andrewes’ sermons by season or holiday and including the date as well as the location.15 This decision has shaped the interpretive priorities of the field as a whole.16

By contrast, John Sedgewick published the collection Evangelicall Sacrifices in 1640, five years after

Richard Sibbes’ death.17 It contains four funeral sermons, all stripped of any identifying information about the dead.18 It is unlikely they were delivered this way; most funeral sermons of the period included some biographical material.19 Perhaps Sedgewick's goal was to preserve Sibbes’ admonitions on how to prepare for a godly death, while severing ties to individuals who, by 1640, were inconvenient connections for those claiming Sibbes’ mantle.

14 Green emphasizes the importance of manuscripts for fully understanding the early modern sermon. Ian Green, Continuity and Change in Protestant Preaching in Early Modern England. Friends of Dr. Williams's Library; 60th Lecture (London: Dr. Williams's Trust, 2009), 19-21.

15 See Lancelot Andrewes, XCVI. Sermons by the Right Honorable and Reverend Father in God, Lancelot Andrewes, Late Lord Bishop of Winchester. Published by His Majesties Specially Command, ed. William Laud and John Buckeridge (London: George Miller for Richard Badger, 1629).

16 See, for example, the important work of Peter McCullough, ranging from "Lancelot Andrewes and Language." Anglican Theological Review 74, (1992): 304-316, to a forthcoming biography on Andrewes to be published by Oxford University Press.

17 Richard Sibbes, Evangelicall sacrifices. In xix. sermons (London : T[homas] B[adger and Elizabeth Purslowe] for N. Bourne, at the Royall Exchange, and R. Harford, at the guilt Bible in Queenes-head Alley in Pater-noster-Row, 1640). While the first title page claims Sibbes’ involvement, the scattered nature of the work, including contradictory subsidiary title pages and pagination that restarts in the middle of the volume, indicated that Sedgewick’s project was, at the very least, a joining together of previous efforts.

18 See “The Hidden Life,” “The Redemption of Bodies” and “Balaams Wish” in Evangellical Sacrifices, Aa2r – Gg5v.

19 Eric Josef Carlson, "English Funeral Sermons as Sources: The Example of Female Piety in Pre-1640 Sermons," Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies 32, no. 4 (2000): 569-572.

Nineteenth-century editors used the seventeenth-century editions to publish more widely available and standardized modern editions. While they used different editorial principles than do modern scholarly editors,20 their texts are often admirably complete.21 These nineteenth-century editors were often clergymen themselves, with confessional ties to the authors they edited. For example, the same J.H. Parker who published Andrewes’ sermons also published Laud’s in The

Library of Anglo-Catholic Theology.22 Similarly, Grosart’s edition of the complete works of Richard

Sibbes and a twelve volume set of the works of Thomas Goodwin were published in Nichol’s Series of

Standard Divines.23

For most of the twentieth century these confessional affinities continued whenever extended attention was paid to the sermons as sermons. Even Eliot’s response to the sermons of Lancelot

Andrewes belongs to this category. Beyond this, sermons were treated as mere evidence for historical and theological claims. In literary studies, they also retained a secondary status, quoted

20 See for example the modernization of orthography and punctuation undertaken by J.H. Parker in his five volume Ninety-six Sermons. “Editorial Note” in Lancelot Andrewes : Selected Sermons and Lectures, ed. Peter E. McCullough (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

21 As an example of this thoroughness, Grossart’s edition of The Complete Works of Richard Sibbes begins with a plea for the only two volumes of Sibbes’ work that he has been unable to locate: “Having now in my library the whole of the works of Sibbes, with the exception of two small volumes, I beg to note them here, in the hope that thereby I may secure them.” See also Mark Dever, Richard Sibbes’ biographer, who notes that Grossart has been “almost entirely accurate.” Richard Sibbes: Puritanism and Calvinism in Late Elizabethan and Early Stuart England, (Macon, Ga: Mercer University Press, 2000), 7-8.

22 William Laud, The Works of the most Reverend Father in God, William Laud, D.D., Sometime Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, ed. William Scott and James Bliss, Vol. v. 51-57, (Oxford: J.H. Parker, 1847).

23 Thomas Goodwin, Robert Halley, and John C. Miller. The Works of Thomas Goodwin (Edinburgh: J. Nichol, 1861).

10 selectively to function as glosses for poetry or other more widely recognized literary genres.24 Finally, sermons were used to study developments in prose style, an narrow approach which distorts our sense of the power and literary significance of sermons in their early modern context.25

Three representative volumes exemplify this older twentieth century approach to sermons as literature.26 Fraser Mitchell’s 1938 monograph, English Pulpit Oratory from Andrewes to Tillotson, is largely a descriptive survey of stylistic markers, unevenly applied. His attempts at systematic classification are undermined by his reliance on anachronistic categories such as "Anglican" while simultaneously grouping “metaphysical preachers” like Donne and Playfere together. It is the latter whose style he regards as a “corruption of clerical taste,” preferring plain preaching that emerged at the end of the century, typified in Tillotson.27 J.W. Blench’s 1964 volume, Preaching in England in the

Late Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries, covers an earlier period and offers a descriptive survey of form with some subjective judgements appended. In its taxonomy of prose style, Blench’s effort relies on generalized categories and does not capture the full complexities of the sermon during the time

24 A more sophisticated version of this tendency is still apparent in work like Clarissa Chenovick’s "A Balsome for both the Hemispheres: Tears as Medicine in Herbert's Temple and Seventeenth-Century Preaching." Elh 84, no. 3 (Fall, 2017): 559-590.

25 Criticism of this approach to sermons can be found in Mary Morrissey’s "Interdisciplinarity and the Study of Early Modern Sermons." The Historical Journal 42, no. 4 (12/01, 1999): 1120-1121. And Martin Schaich, ‘Something more than mere clearness’: The representational art of the seventeenth-century English sermon (Order No. 3071134), 2002. Available from ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global. (276207076). Retrieved from http://proxycu.wrlc.org/login?url=https://search-proquest- com.proxycu.wrlc.org/docview/276207076?accountid=9940, 67-69.

26 Fraser Mitchell, English Pulpit Oratory, from Andrewes to Tillotson: A Study of its Literary Aspects (New York: Russell & Russell, 1962). J.W. Blench, Preaching in England in the Late Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries; a Study of English Sermons 1450-c. 1600 (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1964). Horton Davies, Like Angels from a Cloud : The English Metaphysical Preachers, 1588-1645 (San Marino: Huntington Library, 1986). Morrissey ably surveys the limitations of their approach, “Interdisciplinarity,” 1120-21.

27 Mitchell, 5.

11 before the English Civil War. Still his work is perhaps the most useful of the three. Finally, Horton

Davies’ 1986 Like Angels from a Cloud: a study of the English metaphysical preachers attempts a survey of a certain kind of preaching, using the loose category "metaphysical." For Davies, the theological commitments of the preachers involved are less important than their affinity for wit and complex imagery. He identifies the “plain… style of the Puritans” as “the direct opposite of the metaphysical style,”28 but includes chapters on Metaphysical Arminians and Metaphysical Calvinists.29 In all three volumes, the effort to read sermons seriously as literary texts is undermined by treating the sermons of each individual preacher as an undifferentiated whole from which to pluck quotations.

Scholarship on the sermon has coincided with the historicist trend in early modern studies in general, which, as can be seen from the short survey above, was needed to counter the misreadings offered by “ahistoricism” or a generalized, imprecise historicism.30 In sorting out what might be happening in any given sermon, the work of historians has been an invaluable aid, as Mary Morrissey acknowledges in her seminal 1999 essay “Interdisciplinarity.”31 The current state of the field relies on an understanding of the period that has been readjusted to challenge the triumphant “Whig-ish” story of liberal Protestant success during the English Reformation.32 This Revision (with a capital R)

28 Davies, 47

29 Davies, 133, 189.

30 Jane Gallop, "The Historicization of Literary Studies and the Fate of Close Reading" in The Limits of Literary Historicism, edited by Allen Dunn and Thomas Haddox (Univ. of Tennessee Press, 2012), 3.

31 Morrissey also points out that historians lose something by considering sermons to be historical records in the same way that a parish record or legal register might be. "Interdisciplinarity," 1112.

32 Key efforts to overturn this narrative include Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c.1400-c.1580, (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992) and Christopher Haigh, English Reformations: Religion, Politics, and Society Under the Tudors (New York; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).

12 is further complicated as historians such as Patrick Collinson, Peter Lake, and others sought to clarify the length and completeness of the English Reformation, the degree to which there was ever a stable consensus within the English church after the Elizabethan settlement, and at whose feet the blame for the Civil War might be cast.33 Sermons proved to be key pieces of evidence in this endeavor.34 It was therefore only natural that they should begin to attract attention as an area of study in their own right.

Edited by Peter McCullough and Lori Anne Ferrell, a collection of essays called The English

Sermon Revised was published in 2000.35 This volume took note of the ground prepared by recent efforts, such as McCullough’s Sermons at Court, and forecast a new, interdisciplinary era of studying sermons. The sermon would be “properly considered – as theatrical, as fundamentally occasional, as

33 Important, but non-exhaustive examples in these efforts include many of the works of Patrick Collinson, but especially The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (Univ of California Press, 1967); The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society, 1559-1625 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982). Archbishop Grindal, 1519-1583: The Struggle for a Reformed Church (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979); Kenneth Fincham, Prelate as Pastor: The Episcopate Of James I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). In conversation with Collinson’s characterization of the Puritan movement see Peter Lake, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), and his Anglicans and Puritans?: Presbyterianism and English conformist thought from Whitgift to Hooker (Allen & Unwin Australia, 1988) and with Michael Questier, The Anti-Christ's lewd hat: Protestants, papists and players in post-Reformation England (Yale University Press, 2002). Following Lake, see also Calvin Lane, The Laudians and the Elizabethan Church: History, Conformity and Religious Identity in Post-Reformation England (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2013). Also in conversation with Collinson’s views about the primary responsibility for the Civil War, see Kevin Sharpe The Personal Rule of Charles I (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed : The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600- 1640 (Cambridge University Press, 1995); and Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: the rise of English Arminianism c. 1590-1640 (Oxford University Press, 1987). Finally, see essays by Kenneth Fincham, Peter Lake, and Nicholas Tyacke in the volume: Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, c. 1560-1660, ed. Peter Lake and Michael Questier (Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2000).

34 See especially Lake’s essay on Andrewes and Buckeridge "Lancelot Andrews, John Buckeridge, and Avant- Garde Conformity at the Court of James I" in The Mental World of the Jacobean Court, ed. Linda Levy Peck, 113-133 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) and McCullough and Ferrell’s estimation of its use of sermons, “Introduction,” The English Sermon Revised, 15-16.

35 The title reprises that of a collection of essays edited by Christopher Haigh, The English Reformation Revised, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

13 literary art inextricably engaged in the public sphere.”36 Furthermore, it would be studied as its own genre and not simply to understand the cultural context of poetry and drama.37 McCullough and

Ferrell’s editorial concerns broadened the field beyond the sermons of John Donne, providing scholarly impetus for critical editions of sermons, discarding the practice of printing anthologized excerpts, and insisting on the importance of historical context for any vivified engagement with the sermon as a literary genre.38

By the turn of the twenty-first century, published work focused on sermon culture at the courts of James I and Charles I, important public venues such as Paul’s Cross, and the notion of sermons in performance. Sermons were used to trace political and ecclesiastical conflicts leading up to the Civil War, from James I's attempts to enforce conformity to the “Caroline religious imagination.”39 Significant attention continued to be paid to the sermons of John Donne, as something to be studied in their own right and not just a means of accessing his religious poetry.40

Peter McCullough’s 2005 Selected Sermons and Lectures of Lancelot Andrewes offered the first scholarly edition of the works of the preacher who, second to John Donne, draws the most attention.

By the end of the decade, momentum grew, as work on individual preachers and pulpits accompanied field-defining surveys of preaching in general, especially the historian Arnold Hunt’s

36 McCullough and Ferrell, “Introduction,” English Sermon Revised, 2.

37 Ibid., 5.

38 Ibid., 6-9.

39 Reid Barbour, Literature and Religious Culture in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 10.

40 Shami, Conformity in Crisis. Brent Nelson, Holy Ambition: Rhetoric, Courtship, and Devotion in the Sermons of John Donne (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2005).

2010 monograph The Art of Hearing.41 In 2011, the Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon was published, a central repository for tools to study sermons as records of a context-bound performance as was now generally expected.42 In 2014, the first of a planned sixteen-volume set of

The Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne was published, with a new one following each year.43

In the time between 2000 and the present, the early modern sermon has received an increasing amount of critical attention, both from historians and from literary scholars. New critical editions, as well as electronic resources such as Early English Books Online, offer the tools to study the sermon as one of the most important genres in the early modern period. Critical consensus among literary scholars has emphasized that sermons should be studied as contextualized texts, shaped by the religious, social, and political circumstances of the particular auditories to which they were delivered.44

41 Hunt, The Art of Hearing.

42 The handbook offers short informative chapters on topics such as “The Preacher and Profane Learning” and “Official Tudor Homilies” as well as a single sample close reading of a sermon, “Preaching and Context: John Donne’s Sermon at the Funerals of Sir William Cokayne,” demonstrating the contextualized approach of critical consensus. The Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

43 The following volumes of The Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne have been published so far: Vol 1, Sermons Preached at the Jacobean Courts, 1615-1619. Edited by Peter McCollough. Published 2015; Vol 3, Sermons Preached at the Court of Charles I. Edited by David Colclough. Published 2014; Vol 5, Sermons Preached at Lincoln’s Inn, 1620-1623. Edited by Katrin Ettenhuber, Published 2016; Vol 12: Sermons Preached at St Paul's Cathedral Edited by Mary Ann Lund. Published 2017.

44 As Lori Ann Ferrell writes, “contextualization is the opening up of texts to their historical meaning.” Ferrell, Government by Polemic, 17-18. The means of determining this context ranges from the immediate, such as noting significant events close to the date of delivery, to the reputation and connections of the preacher, to any expectations of the pulpit. Work contributing to this contextualization includes studying the sermon as performance. See Ceri Sullivan, "The Art of Listening in the Seventeenth Century." Modern Philology 104, no. 1 (08/01, 2006): 34-71. Sonia Suman. “A Most Notable Spectacle”: Early Modern Easter Spital Sermons” in Spoken Word and Social Practice: Orality in Europe (1400- 1700), ed. Thomas Cohen and Lesley K. Twomey (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2015). See also earlier work by Brian Crockett The Play of Paradox: Stage and Sermon in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995).

For much of the past two decades, that contextualization has tended to prioritize polemical contexts, whether political or theological.45 (It seems worth noting that the majority of scholarship is on the sermons of Donne and Andrewes.46 Nearly all the published sermons from both of these preachers come to us in posthumous collections preserving contextual information that allows this sort of critical emphasis.) Court sermons and sermons preached on the anniversary of the

Gunpowder plot have been important examples of this focus.47 Recent work, however, opens up that paradigm more, foregrounding the affections, non-political theology and gender.48 Jennifer

Clement has recently argued that our understanding of proper contextualization needs to expand beyond occasion, and Lori Anne Ferrell has noted a need to widen the circle of preachers we study.49

45 See for example, seminal works by McCullough, Ferrell, Shami; Debora Shuger, "Absolutist Theology: The Sermons of John Donne" in The English Sermon Revised and Morrissey’s more recent Politics and the Paul’s Cross Sermons. See also David Colclough, "Silent Witness: The Politics of Allusion in John Donne's Sermon in Isaiah 32: 8." Review of English Studies 63, no. 261 (09, 2012): 572-587. Anne James, Poets, Players, and Preachers: Remembering the Gunpowder Plot in Seventeenth-Century England University of Toronto Press, 2016. Chelsea Rice McKelvey, "The 'Glorie, might, & Maiestie' of Early Modern Sermons." Literature & Theology 28, no. 1 (2014).

46 For instance, Verweij notes that Donne’s sermon in defense of James I’s Directions to Preachers in 1622 is the single sermon to receive the most critical attention to date, "Sermon Notes from John Donne in the Manuscripts of Francis Russell, Fourth Earl of Bedford." English Literary Renaissance 46, no. 2 (2016): 301. This sermon epitomizes the critical preoccupations of much of the field of early modern sermon studies; it is on a controversial matter that can only be understood through immediate, occasional context. Donne offers such a subtle handling of the matter that his “real” position is definitely up for debate. And it has a meta-focus on the role of preaching in public life, especially in questioning the decision of the monarch, and thus is also concerned with the nature of ecclesiastical conformity.

47 See James, 187ff.

48 See, for example, Jennifer Clement, "The Art of Feeling in Seventeenth-Century English Sermons." English Studies 98, no. 7 (2017): 675-688. and "Dearly Beloved: Love, Rhetoric and the Seventeenth-Century English Sermon." English Studies: A Journal of English Language and Literature 97, no. 7-8 (11/20, 2016): 725-745. Emily King, "Affect Contagion in John Donne's Deaths Duell." SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 56, no. 1 (2016): 111-130. Joseph Ashmore. "Faith in Lancelot Andrewes's Preaching." Seventeenth Century 32, no. 2 (2017): 121-138. Femke Molekamp, "Seventeenth-Century Funeral Sermons and Exemplary Female Devotion: Gendered Spaces and Histories." Renaissance and Reformation 35, no. 1 (2012): 43.

49 Clement, "He being Dead, Yet Speaketh: The Preacher's Voice in Early seventeenth‐century Posthumous Sermon Collections." Renaissance Studies. Lori Anne Ferrell, “Sermons” in The Elizabethan top ten: defining print popularity in Early Modern England (Routledge, 2016), 193-202., 194.

To return briefly to the ideal sermon study forecast in The English Sermon Revised, we can see that all three categories—sermons as theatrical, occasional, and literary—have been pursued at length, but that it is time for readjustment. The prioritization of occasion must flex to account for the variety of sermons and the printed state in which they come to us. Similarly, criticism based in sermon performance must move beyond the analogue of the theatre. Finally, as this study argues, we must deepen our treatment of sermons as “literary art.”

Much of the growth within this subfield has been driven by the historicism trending in early modern studies in general. It now seems obvious, as Morrissey claims, that sermons can best be encountered “accurately and fruitfully” in interdisciplinary study.50 Thus, the primary critical emphasis has been on the study of a properly contextualized sermon, rooted in a precise historical event, i.e. a performance on a specific day in a specific space. In her introduction to Volume 5 of The

Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne, Katrin Ettenhuber emphasizes “the formative role played by the place of preaching, conceived of here as multiple and interconnected spheres of political, religious, legal, and social influence.”51 Inasmuch as the new Donne volumes represent the state-of- the-art for the field, Ettenhuber’s approach—notably with political coming before religious—can be taken as indicative of larger trends. In these interdisciplinary efforts, it is perhaps literature which has ceded more ground to history52 Whereas the historian Ian Green laments deficient historical

50 Morrissey, 1112.

51 Katrin Ettenhuber, “Introduction” in Sermons Preached at Lincoln’s Inn, Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne, vol. 5 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), xv.

52 Jane Gallop weighs the field as a whole, complaining, “We have become amateur, or rather wannabe, cultural historians” “Historicization,” 5. Her skepticism at the attempts of literary scholars to be “cultural historians” is shared by actual historians such as Patrick Collinson, who in a retrospective essay about his career says “My quarrel with the so-

17 knowledge of the state of early modern preaching, 53 the gap in the literary study of the sermons is, conversely, the failure to seriously analyze single sermons, selected for their quality and granted sustained attention like the texts of other literary genres.

Even David Colclough, the editor of the initial volume of the OESJD, wonders, “The pendulum may have swung too far in turning from formal analysis: the most rewarding and revealing interpretations of the sermons have been careful to balance detailed consideration of their contexts with alertness to their formal strategies.”54 For all the valiant and interesting scholarship that has been produced in the last thirty years, the question of how to best approach the sermon as a literary genre has yet to be satisfactorily answered. What is missing has something to do with what Blair

Worden calls the “treatment of things eternal” and something to do with taking sermons seriously as literary texts. 55 The former is echoed by ongoing attempts across the field of early modern studies to grant religious writing, as Timothy Rosendale proposes, “the seriousness of its claims to be about

called New Historicists was, and insofar as they have not mended their ways, still is, that their method is not really historical at all.” “Introduction” in From Cranmer to Sancroft (London: Hambeldon Contiuum, 2006), x.

53 Green, Continuity and Change, 11.

54 Colclough, Introduction to Oxford Editions of the Sermons of John Donne, Volume III: Sermons Preached at the Court of Charles I (Oxford, England: Oxford UP, 2013), xxv-xxvi. His own work, for example, “The Politics of Allusion,” shows how this might be attempted and also the way in which the ultimate concern is still the political context.

55 In a review of Colclough's volume, Blair Worden pushes back against the optimistic framing of this interdisciplinary approach, arguing that, in practice, it is barely interdisciplinary. Further, he wonders if the “treatment of things eternal” is also sacrificed when a formal analysis is set aside. Worden, Blair. "Things the King Liked to Hear." Review of Sermons of John Donne Vol. III: Sermons Preached at the Court of Charles I, edited by David Colclough and Complete Works of John Milton Vol. VI: Vernacular Regicide and Republican Writings, edited by N. H. Keeble and Nicholas McDowell. London Review of Books 36 no. 12 (2014): 31-34, https://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n12/blair-worden/things-the- king-liked-to-hear.

18 what it claims to be about.” 56 The latter, in its resistance to the totalizing force of historicism, is also part of a broader battle. These missing pieces, I contend, are related.

II. Literary Sermons of the Conforming Center

Brian Cummings theorizes that religious writing “reaches out beyond itself… to escape the physical laws of gravity which appear to consume all other forms of writing.”57 To examine this outward reach requires both of the missing modes of analysis I identified above. Religion and literature have parallel ways of being, in this reaching beyond. While religious thought in the early modern period included the political in a significant sense, there was also a recognition of a divide between the temporal and the eternal, between the demands of man and the demands of God.

Given the complexities of accurate contextualization, it can become tempting for historicized literary criticism to consider preachers, especially ones in prominent pulpits, as primarily eloquent ecclesiastical politicians. This study engages in ongoing efforts to revise the strain of historicism in

56 When Ken Jackson and Arthur Marotti published “The Turn to Religion in Early Modern Studies” in 2004 (Criticism 46, no. 1 (2004): 167-190.), they were noting the strangeness of the historicist attention to religion and the tendency among scholars to reduce the “alterity” of religion by redefining religious texts as really being about other things. They point out Debora Shuger’s work as, at the time, a notable exception (179). Brian Cummings’ Grammar and Grace and Timothy Rosendale’s Liturgy and Literature articulate well the scholarly potential to this adjustment Jackson and Marotti suggest. Rosendale writes, “While religious experience includes social, political, material, behavioral, ideological, philosophical, psychological, and theological dimensions, it is not finally reducible to any one (or combination) of them; my argument attempts to respect the internal coherence of religious belief (that is, the seriousness of its claims to be about what it claims to be about), while also attending closely to its deep and complex implication in these cultural spheres.” Brian Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002., 5-6, 12-14. Timothy Rosendale, Liturgy and Literature in the Making of Protestant England. Cambridge, England: Cambridge UP, 2007, 11-12.

57 Cummings, Grammar and Grace, 11.

19 literary studies that sees religion as political ideology and power as everything.58 More importantly, however, it seeks to refine the attempts to study the literary nature of sermons.

Despite their other cultural dimensions, the literary nature of a poem or a play is apparent to twenty-first century readers. The literary nature of sermon is less so. It is a premise of this study that sermons, especially the best of them, are themselves worth concerted critical attention as literature in the language they use, the full range of effects produced, and the quality of their expression. While scholars at times assert this literary existence, they do not give a clear sense of what it would mean to approach sermons as literature besides noting the eloquence or adeptness of the language.59

In a dissertation written in 2002, Martin Schaich identifies this absence and attempts to articulate a standard for examining the artistry of the sermon. While I find the details of his proposal lacking, the problem he diagnoses is indeed significant and has yet to be fully addressed. Schaich argues that the theological, cultural, and political are secondary to what a preacher accomplishes as an artist. He writes,

In their description of what the sermon is and does, most of these studies rely upon a rhetorical model which asserts the importance of audience, occasion, and purpose in determining the form that the sermon takes and the goals it fulfills. Exploring the ability of a specifically rhetorical text to flatter or criticize political or ecclesiastical leaders, to communicate precise theological tenets, or even to conform to a leading party’s stylistic conventions emphasizes utilitarian goals and practical effects rather than art.60

58 Cummings, Grammar and Grace, 12-14.

59 Schaich uses the example of when Peter McCullough argues that sermons were a “literary form” under James in Sermons at Court, 101.

60 Schaich, 60.

Thus, Schaich rejects, as I have, the consensus that contextualized readings access the essence of a sermon.61 In asserting the literary status of the sermon, Schaich claims that they cannot be evaluated by the same standards as poetry or drama.62 We must, he argues, find a way to understand the particular thing that a sermon is doing in order to understand the particular way that it exists as art.

Schaich ultimately claims that a sermon exists as literary text because of “a representational, and thus artistic, orientation toward its prompt text.”63 By this he means that in amplifying, indeed recreating, the scriptural text on which the sermon is based, the preacher engages in an artistic use of language. The relative paucity of criticism on the relationship between individual sermons and their texts buttresses his claim that this is an overlooked dimension of the sermon.64 Yet in pursuing his thesis about its representational nature, Schaich excludes the rhetorical functions of the sermon from its core status as a literary text, writing, “the sermon has often compromised its representational identity by including language which carries out rhetorical or philosophical purposes.”65 In his own analysis of individual sermons, he brackets out language that works to

61 Others do as well. See, for example, Nelson, Holy Ambition, 2. Victor Houliston "The Violence of the Knowledge of God: John Donne and the Ordinance of Preaching." Religion & Literature (2013): 34.

62 Reading sermons the way we read other literary prose, he says, is “derivative.” Schaich, 4.

63 Ibid., 64.

64 An exception which pays detailed attention to the reforming of the Scriptural text as a central part of the sermon: Alison Knight’s "The" very, very Words":(Mis) Quoting Scripture in Lancelot Andrewes's and John Donne's Sermons on Job 19: 23–27." Studies in Philology 111, no. 3 (2014): 442-469.

65 Schaich, 119-120.

21 persuade.66 Schaich’s short readings fall short of doing justice to their sermons.67 Ignoring the persuasive function of a sermon overlooks as much as do the political readings Schaich decries.

It is worthwhile to pursue Schaich’s proposal to approach sermons as their own kind of literary text, not as propagandistic or ornate prose, evaluated with methods borrowed from other genres. Nevertheless, it is disingenuous to dismiss their preachers’ religious purposes as distracting compromises from the core artistic value of the sermon. What is represented in a sermon is the

Scriptural text, but not merely the Scriptural text. A sermon is also, as Matthew Smith phrases it, "a kind of effigy of the activity of faith.”68 Ultimately, the literary achievement of the sermon takes place as the preacher makes present the experience of faith. For this reason, any literary approach to the sermon must also be rhetorical, alert to the sermon’s status as religious writing. Such recognition does not compromise our examination of the sermon as a literary text. The art of the sermon is found in the tools it uses to create the presence of faith in its auditors (and readers), bringing them to participate in the work of the sermon.

Like all works of literature, sermons employ the resources of language thickly, from the arrangement of material to syntax to the individual words themselves. This study will engage primarily in close readings of individual sermons as whole texts.69 At times the density of language in

66 For example, Schaich’s reading of a 1660 sermon by Richard Baxter on 172-173.

67 Schaich’s only extended literary analysis is actually of the art of the sermon in Pilgrim’s Progress. Schaich, Chapter 4, 183-246.

68 Matthew Smith, "God's Idioms: Sermon Belief in Donne's London." English Literary Renaissance 46, no. 1 (2016): 127.

69 Ferrell considers this a faulty historical practice as well, “to disengage phrases or ideas from their original moorings and redeploy them in new configurations to illustrate a point too often creates a false support for a historical argument. These fragments have a context within the larger text, and they often cannot be properly understood outside it.” Government by Polemic, 18.

22 a sermon resembles the compressed power of poetry, yet it would be a mistake to focus our literary analysis only on short passages.70 To excerpt these powerful passages is to limit our understanding of their full power. The most valuable sermon criticism proceeds by means of attentive focus on details and the way those details create the whole.

More overtly perhaps than any other genre of the period, the sermon seeks to do something to people. This goal can be understood through the framework of the Christian grand style, which

Debora Shuger surveys in her book Sacred Rhetoric, tracing its development from its classical origins during the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance.71 The object of the Christian grand style is to connect the audience with “things of greatest value,” that is, with matters concerning the salvation of the human soul.72 This is accomplished by “stirring the will to desire what the mind already approves.”73

From the toolbox of rhetoric, then, we may select this helpful implement: attention to purpose. A study of purpose will be multi-faceted: a study of purposes. A literary reading of a sermon,

70 While Lori Anne Ferrell argues forcefully against “disengag[ing] phrases or ideas from their original moorings and redeploy[ing] them in new configurations,” many critics follow this advice not to get a sense of sermons as whole and individual texts, but to avoid misreadings of doctrinal or political positions that can come through deploying sentences of sermons in a way that strikes me as very analogous to the proof-texting of the period, Government by Polemic, 18, 8-9.

71 Debora Shuger, argues that this concept offers a means to understand the goals of Renaissance sacred prose. Sacred Rhetoric: The Christian Grand Style in the English Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1988) 252. Without responding directly to Shuger’s argument, Morrissey complicates this view by insisting that preaching was not considered rhetoric exactly by the English church in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century. Although it borrowed from rhetoric, the presence of the Spirit in the equation is what made its practice fundamental different from classical theories, rather than, as Shuger argues, difference in the place of emotion and the will in classical and Christian anthropologies. Mary Morrissey, "Scripture, Style and Persuasion in Seventeenth-Century English Theories of Preaching." The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 53, no. 04 (2002). 689, 694. I think that these views are not mutually exclusive.

72 Shuger cites Augustine, “radically altering the concept of value” to show how broadly things of “greatest value” could be applied. Sacred Rhetoric, 44.

73 Ibid., 46.

23 then, seeks to notice the way the language of a sermon creates a participatory experience of faith— that is, an experience of the presence of the divine among gathered human beings torn by church and world alike. This study argues that a significant part of what the best sermons set out to accomplish is to make present the divine on earth within a community. To that end, I am interested in what might be called the more “characteristic” sermon of the period, one in which the preacher’s commitments to the spiritual life of his auditors and to extra-temporal subjects are centered.74

According to Richard Bernard, the author of one of the seventeenth-century artes praedicandi, instructional sermon-giving manuals, a successful preacher should “informe the ignorant, confirme such as have understanding, reclaime the vitious, encourage the vertuous, convince the erroneous, strengthen the weake, recover againe the backslider, resolve those that doubt, feede with milke and strong meat continually.”75 Each of Bernard’s verbs represents a facet of redemption. There is, in effect, no one whose soul is not in need of hearing a sermon, from the hardest sinner to the most faithful saint.

The individual sermons presented in this study date between 1609 and 1635. For nearly a decade, Andrewes, Donne, Sibbes and King all preached on a regular basis in London, from King’s first public sermon in 1617 until the death of Andrewes in 1626. The ideal of a community of faith and the practicalities of the community of faith in the English church are related in fraught ways during this period. The century between 1530 and 1630 saw great pressure applied to the

74 Morrissey, “Preface”, Politics and the Paul’s Cross Sermons, xi. While it is undeniably true that the sermon often has political and polemical dimensions, one might gather from the state of the secondary scholarship that these dimensions represent the essential significance of the sermon as a genre, an assumption that has more to say about the concerns of twentieth and twenty-first century scholars than it does about the concerns of seventeenth-century preachers.

75 Bernard, The Faithfull Shepheard: Or the Shepheards Faithfulness (London: Printed by Arnold Hanfield, 1607), 11.

24 relationship between individuals within their immediate and national community, including in the negotiated creation of the national church. This problem extended beyond questions of identity to the quotidian rhythms of life. Its pressure arguably birthed an entire population tuned to the significance of spiritual questions and the pursuit of truth.76

Before continuing, it is necessary to pause in order to attempt a “notorious” 77 task: some definition of the labels which are required for clarity, but which also fail to capture the full range of positions and affinities within the English church between 1559 and 1642.78 Categories blur because, after all, even the primary division between Catholic and Protestant is marked by similarity as well as difference. Binary classification breaks down, as there are too many distinctions in both doctrine and practice to allow for neat divisions or even for two poles and a middle way.79 Furthermore, many of the terms we use began as pejorative terms bestowed by ideological opponents or, conversely, appeared because confessional heirs read their own identity backward into the period.

76 “It is often suggested that the frequent shifts and turns of government religious policy in the sixteenth century must have confused and disoriented people, leaving them with little clear sense of whether they were supposed to be Protestants, Catholics, or some other type of Christian. Yet I think the possibility that it had precisely the opposite result needs to be investigated seriously—that the orders to remove or restore altars, images, and books had a profoundly catechizing effect, encouraging people to think about their meanings more intensely than they had done before. And as communities divided, the presence of "others"—heretics or papists—invariably sharpened in a dialectical way a self-awareness of religious belonging.” Peter Marshall, "(Re)Defining the English Reformation." Journal of British Studies 48, no. 3 (2009): 585.

77 Lake and Questier, xi-xii.

78 Useful overviews of the problem can be found in Anthony Milton Catholic and Reformed, 7-9. Lake and Questier, “Introduction” Conformity and Orthodoxy, xi-xii. As a useful model within a literary rather than historical work, see Daniel Gibbons, Conflicts of Devotion: Liturgical Poetics in Sixteenth-and Seventeenth-Century England (University of Notre Dame Press, 2017), 22-25.

79 See Lake and Questier’s useful analysis of the drawbacks of such efforts, xviii-xix. Also Hunt, The Art of Hearing, 42.

“As soon as one begins naming, one finds oneself enmeshed in the very controversies one is trying to describe,” writes Daniel Gibbons, who adopts wide terms that reference tendencies on a spectrum, reformist and traditionalist, as well as more narrow ones like puritan or papist when they fit his purposes.80 It is this approach that seems most suited to the purposes of this study. My goal is not to challenge the generally accepted (or hotly debated) classifications of Andrewes, Donne, Sibbes or

King, but rather to describe some tendencies among conforming members of clergy during the first three and a half decades of the seventeenth century. However imperfect these terms, they attempt to point to distinctions in the English church which cannot be qualified away.

These labels do not designate clearly defined camps and alliances, but more often speak to a cluster of overlapping concerns with considerable internal diversity. It is also important to remember that this range of positions was dynamic. Even seemingly static elements such as the use of the 1559

BCP signify different things at different points. First, I will use “Reformed” to indicate the doctrine and practices of the Protestant English church after the Henrician break with Rome, especially in affinity with the Reformed church on the continent. At times these will be synonymous with

Calvinism. I will reserve “Calvinist,” however, to refer to a narrower set of theological allegiances, which can be traced to Calvin, Beza and the church in Geneva. Often this refers to the soteriological concerns that so dominated the period and indeed our own understanding of Calvinism, but this is not exclusively true. As the conforming center of the English church is the subject of this study, I will also simplify a range of positions and use “Catholic” to refer those whose allegiance was still primarily to the Roman Catholic church.

80 Gibbons, Conflicts of Devotion, 23-24.

While “Anglican” has been for a while accepted as anachronistic, “Arminian” cannot be easily substituted as a replacement because a resistance to or acceptance of reformed doctrines of soteriology does not function as a dependable marker of allegiance during the period.81 While the growth of Arminian thought is certainly part of the changing doctrinal landscape in the 1620s and

1630s, it is one among many. Using “Laudian” to represent a greater range of concerns than just

Arminian resistance to Calvinist thought alleviates this, and I will use it at times, as Laud’s influence is significant and real. Still “Laudian” works less well beyond the 1630s and is almost useless before the mid-1620s; it makes little sense to call Hooker or Andrewes “Laudian,” although they shared many of Laud’s assumptions and goals. In those earlier cases, it makes the most sense to use

“ceremonialist” or “traditionalist,” depending on need, to refer to those within the conforming church who promoted pre-Reformation traditions and a style of observance within the English church which emphasized participatory ceremonies, including a sacramentalism that embraces real presence.

What to call Puritans is a topic of even more difficulty. In a treatise published in 1604,

Samuel Hieron complains, “The common saying is, that there are none usually so bad as these

Puritanes.”82 He then criticizes those who label as Puritans men who value preaching. The accusers,

81 See Richard Greaves’ discussion of this problem in “The Puritan-Nonconformist Tradition in England, 1560-1700: Historiographical Reflections,” Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies, Vol. 17, No. 4 (Winter, 1985), 455-456. Anthony Milton argues that there is no readily apparent term to cover non-puritans, Catholic and Reformed, 8-9. He also identifies the same sort of problems for “Arminian” as tend to go with “Puritan” during the period, 52.

82 Samuel Hieron, The Preachers Plea: Or, A Treatise in forme of a plain Dialogue, making known the worth and necessary use of Preaching: shewing also how a man may profit by it, both for the informing of his judgement, and the reforming of his life (London: Printed for Simon Waterson, 1604), 64.

Hieron grumbles, do “not [know] truly what a Puritane is.”83 Ambiguity and pejorative connotations still accompany the use of Puritan. And yet one finds oneself in need of a simple term to refer to those who, whether conforming or not, felt that the English church should be more completely

Reformed in theology and ecclesiology and whose shared desires for those ends placed them in some degree of affinity with each other, distinct in expression from the rest of the English church.84

Since the pejorative origin of the term “Puritan” lingers in its twenty-first-century usage, the controversial entanglement Gibbons speaks of leads scholars toward the putatively neutral option of describing this tendency in terms of temperature. Thus, the scholarly literature abounds with “hot” and “hotter Protestants.”85 While this connotes affinity rather than a defined sect and emotive desire, it leans too heavily on the latter. (It also showcases an unfortunate tendency of scholars to assume that they need pay little attention to the connotations of words outside their own field.) These problems can be avoided by using the term “godly,” an adaption of a self-reference. The loose alliance and the desire for reform are both connoted by this term, but it has the disadvantage of assenting to a narrative that defines the godly as more spiritually serious than their contemporary counterparts. To complement “ceremonialist” or “traditionalist,” it could be possible to use

“reformist” or “reform-minded.” However, because “Reformed” is habitually used to talk about

Protestant and, more specifically, Calvinist theology in a sense that relates to a broader section of the

English church, using this term can introduce confusion, especially during the early Stuart church

83 Heiron, The Preachers Plea, 64.

84 The issue is not simply changing the church from the original outlines of the Elizabethan settlement; both Andrewes and Laud sought to change the church.

85 See Collinson, who quotes from a sixteenth century pamphlet, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (Univ of California Press, 1967), 26-27.

28 when many churchmen, men who did not share in the Puritan urgency for further reform of the church, were Calvinist.86 Thus, out of a range of imperfect options, I think it best to stick with

“Puritan” and to clarify individual relationship to the established church with “non-conformist

Puritan” or “conforming Puritan” when necessary.87 The long debate about the term has at least ensured it is used self-consciously.

While all this clarification of terminology is necessary to communicate clearly about distinctions of both dogma and praxis, such a multiplicity of terms overshadows the shared assumptions and practices of a people who were all still part of the church in England, a collective identity. This identity had to be invested into on its own in order to survive during a time of aggressive change.88 The accepted doctrine and practice of the English church was subject to the ebb and flow of the sincere beliefs of the powerful, to political expediency, to the demands of international relations, and to threat perceptions.89 Nevertheless, the idea of a conforming center does hold descriptive value and is a necessary premise for our attempts to understand how exactly the participants in this center sought to bind in a time of fracture.

86 For the original claim about this “Calvinist Consensus” see Nicholas Tyacke, Anti-Calvinists: the rise of English Arminianism, who argues, “It is not an exaggeration to say that by the end of the sixteenth century the Church of England was largely Calvinist in doctrine,” 3. Arguing that “unifying, hegemonic force of the predestinarian consensus was strongest when it was tacit, assumed and unquestioned,” David Como modifies Tyacke’s thesis in “Puritans, Predestination and the Construction of Orthodoxy in Early Seventeenth-Century England” in Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, 66.

87 For a fuller discussion of the complications involved in defining “Puritan,” see the discussion of Richard Sibbes as both conformist and Puritan in Chapter 5 of this study.

88 Judith Maltby, Prayer Book and People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England. Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History. 1998: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Ramie Targoff, Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2001. Rosendale, Liturgy and Literature in the Making of Protestant England.

89 See Collinson’s elegant essay about Cranmer: “Cranmer and the Truth” in From Cranmer to Sancroft, 1-24.

Between the 1534 Act of Supremacy and Elizabeth I’s 1559 Act of Uniformity, matters of both individual conscience and public practice underwent violent upheaval. 90 The Elizabethan settlement had much to accomplish in arresting the destruction of authority and community. Almost no one was completely happy with the result. Still, however complicated for both people and church, helping to drive the Elizabethan settlement forward was what Christopher Marsh calls “an aspiration to communal peace.”91 The legitimacy and even morality of dispute in Protestant England is its own battle ground, from the “Homily Against Contention” until Laud’s aggressive course for unity.92 Yet for all the polemical uses of a desire for peace, we can find throughout this period the evidences of a desperate need for community.

I have chosen to focus my examination of sermons and the problem of community on the period between the accession of James I, representing the maturation of the generation raised within the Elizabethan settlement, and the mid-1630s, just before the full scale dissolution leading to the

Civil War. While dissent certainly existed during this period, both from underground Catholics and from varying points within a rapidly expanding array of Protestant sects, on a practical and legal level, the English church functioned still as a whole.

90 Patrick Collinson encapsulates the rapidity and vehemence of these changes: “On sleepless nights, if there were any, Cranmer may have remembered that he had consented to the death of a man who believed only what he himself now believed.” From Cranmer to Sancroft, 6.

91 Christopher Marsh, Popular Religion in Sixteenth-Century England: Holding their Peace. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998. 25.

92 “But among all kinds of contention, none is more hurtful than is contention in matters of religion.” “The Homily Against Contention and Brawling,” The First Book of Homilies in The Books of Homilies: A Critical Edition, edited by Richard Bray, (Cambridge: James Clarke & Co, 2015), Location 3177, Kindle. In a 1621 sermon before Charles on the text “Pray for the peace of Jerusalem” Laud offers this ambiguous statement: “This Rogate pacem, pray for peace, must bee in the heart, even when the sword is in the hand.” William Laud, A Sermon Preached Before His Majesty, On Tuesday the nineteenth of June, at Wansted, Anno Dom. 1621 (London: Imprinted by F.K. for Matthew Lownes, dwelling in Pauls Church-yard, at the signe of the Bishops head, 1621), 14.

While Ferrell’s Government by Polemic presents the conformist, nominally peaceful center, imposed from the top by James as oppressive,93 Ian Green argues, “An alternative reading of the great majority of court sermons suggests that preachers focused on the doctrinal and moral messages in their chosen texts, treating the monarch and courtiers as sinners like other men and women, in need of Christ’s love.”94 Outside of a court setting, Herbert’s recommendation that the preacher choose “texts of Devotion, not Controversie, moving and ravishing texts, whereof the

Scriptures are full” is not merely the quixotic notion of a someone who was more poet than preacher.95 In 1623, Jerome Phillips warns, “Gods fisher-men, if there be disturbance and contentions amongst them, they thereby so alienate the minds of men, that they can win none.”96 In seeking devotional subjects, early modern preachers were following precedent which had long found the sermon to be ill-suited to doctrinal disputes.97 While there is no shortage of aggressively political sermons, there is also no shortage of those which have spiritual agendas at the forefront.98 As Peter

93 She emphasizes, “texts play active roles, not supporting ones." Ferrell, Government By Polemic, 17.

94 Ian Green, Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press, 2000), 201-202.

95 George Herbert, A Priest to the Temple, or, The Countrey Parson His Characters and Rule of Holy Life (London: Printed by T. Maxey for T. Garthwait, at the little North door of St Paul’s,1652), 24.

96 Jerome Phillips, The Fisher-Man. A Sermon preached at a Synode held at Southwell in Nottinghamshire (London: Printed for W.I. for Robert Bird, and be sold in Ivie Lane. 1623), 21.

97 Leith Spencer, English Preaching in the Late Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 46.

98 Green’s 2000 landmark study of best sellers and steady sellers during the early modern period, Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England, finds that most works that went to more five editions were not the scathing polemics significant to historians, but rather “less controversial works of an instructive, encouraging, or devotional nature.” (vii) This is true not only of popular books of basic religious instruction, like Dent’s Plain Mans Pathway, but of the published sermons that made it into this category as well. For example, none of Lancelot Andrewes’ Gunpowder Plot or Gowrie Plot sermons achieved this status, and neither did the semi-polemical publication of his collected sermons by Laud and Buckridge. However, his 1604 Good Friday sermon, as completely spiritually minded as the pious Andrewes was capable of, does make it. The most popular collections of sermons in print were Arthur Dent’s sermons

Lake writes, “the false choice of either a rigidly defined, party-based conflict or opposition, or a conflict-free consensus, has to be refused.”99

It is partly because of the very proliferation of fissures that I want to study purposefully non- polemical sermons at the center of this turbulence. For these tensions do not lead to utter disintegration, to Fish’s Self-Consuming Artifacts.100 Rather the preachers at the conforming center of the English Church in the early seventeenth century and the auditories to whom they were so sensitive went on trying to live a life of faith in the midst of this division. If an attempt to enact a community in the presence of these divisions exists, it is worth seeing how it is done. The primary strategies of these sort of preachers include (1) emphasizing the central elements of doctrine, while temporarily skirting or mitigating charged points of doctrine associated with them, (2) emphasizing a connection with the inhabitants of scripture and with the Patristics, and (3) creating shared experiences within this new and old thing which was the Church in England.

From childhood, the preachers in this study had existed as part of a grand experiment which tried to retain a coherent visible national church. Within the bounds of conformity, there was diversity of temperament, doctrine (especially regarding adiaphora) and even ecclesiology. The Book of

Common Prayer is often acknowledged to be central literary monument to the effort to preserve this unity.101 Other critics have recognized the presence of what Gregory Kneidel calls a “struggling

on repentance, a large collection by Henry Smith, and a collection by Samuel Smith on the Day of Jubilee. See Green, Print and Protestantism, Appendix 1.

99 Peter Lake, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 280.

100 See Stanley Fish on Donne, Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (Berkeley: University of Calif. Press, 1973), 70-77.

101 See Rosendale, Liturgy and Literature, 35; Gibbons, Conflicts of Devotion, 3.

32 universalism” in the more obviously literary genres of the period.102 This study seeks to parallel such efforts in the genre of the sermon. If major religious poets in the early modern period exhibit sincere, artistically complex attempts to work out a place for communal bonds within a heritage of division, how much more so should we expect to see these efforts in the sermon as it occupies a central role in the articulation and experience of the community of faith within the English church.103

These strained, contradictory attempts to create a verbal space for a broad community of the true Christian faith in England can seem, in retrospect, doomed. The story of the English church in the seventeenth century is after all a story of the failure of community. Yet part of the rhetorical tension of the sermon is that while God gives the gift of faith in response to the word, the sermon as genre is predicated on a practical anti-determinism. The preacher must hope on some level that his sermons can change human hearts and souls.

III. This Study

The preachers chosen for this study represent the rich variety of doctrine and homiletic technique that existed within the conforming center of the church in England. Yet this

102 Kneidel, Rethinking the Turn to Religion, 19. Kneidel examines the attempts of Spenser, Samuel Daniel, Donne, Herbert, and Milton to “conceptualize an enduring, collective, public ethic of all believers, 3. Daniel Gibbons’ “liturgical poetics” approaches the poetry of Spenser, Southwell, Donne, Herbert, and Crashaw in a similar vein. Gibbons argues, “a genuine desire for spiritual communion was at the heart of the poetic participation in the reformation of English religious life,” Conflicts of Devotion, 3. I find a similar animating desire in a certain subset of English preachers.

103 The fundamentally communal nature of a unified auditory for a sermon was a means of meeting this “renewed need for communitas” as Brian Crockett, writing on the aural nature of the sermon, points out. ""Holy Cozenage" and the Renaissance Cult of the Ear," The Sixteenth Century Journal 24, no. 1 (04/01, 1993): 65. Crockett limits this desire for community to “religious writers with Arminian leanings” and “the metaphysical preacher,” however, I think a case can be that this is case throughout the center of the English church, regardless of style or theological loyalties, 53 & 55.

33 representative variety of doctrine, ecclesiology, and homiletics is not sufficient on its own. The large number of sermons printed (let alone delivered) during the period ensures a wide range of quality.

To discuss, in the best of these, the quality of the expression, brings us beyond questions of rhetorical effectiveness into the realm of a distinctive literary prose genre, which seeks to represent faith in language and so to spur recognition and participation on the part of the sermon’s auditors.

Lancelot Andrewes and Richard Sibbes represent two versions of the conforming outlier. 104

Andrewes is called an “avant-garde conformist” to account for his holding to positions aligned with the definition of conformity under the height of Laud’s influence.105 Andrewes’ prose style is so distinctive that it has only imitators, not fellow practitioners, among the other preachers of the period. The plain lines of Richard Sibbes’ sermons stand in stark contrast, although Andrewes is

Sibbes’ elder by only twenty-two years and they shared similar educations. Sibbes’ conformity, even into the 1630s, is evident, yet those who classify him as Puritan observe real affinity with the most splinter-prone non-conformists. Despite their divergent styles and theology, both had contemporary reputations as men of irenic dispositions and as excellent preachers. 106

104 Carlson claims that voices against sermons were rarely heard outside of court settings. Eric Josef Carlson. "The Boring of the Ear: Shaping the Pastoral Vision of Preaching in England, 1540-1640." Preachers and People in the Reformations and Early Modern Period (2001): 287. The division between Reformed preaching and the Laudian project of de-emphasizing preaching in favor of the sacraments, ceremonies, and common prayer overlooks the earlier decades when most people lived somewhere in the middle.

105 Originating with Peter Lake, the term reveals his importance as a precedent appropriated by Laud and Buckeridge, but it also captures his very real ceremonialist and sacramentalist tendencies, "Lancelot Andrews, John Buckeridge, and Avant-Garde Conformity at the Court of James I." in The Mental World of the Jacobean Court, ed Linda Levy Peck (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991), 113-133.

106 One is struck by the continued devotional use of their works. In addition, both came to their positions from humble beginnings by means of considerable academic talent. Neither Andrewes nor Sibbes ever married; both pursued full intellectual and pastoral careers, the former serving as Master of Pembroke Hall, the latter as Master of Katherine Hall.

Although John Donne had a reputation as an important preacher, neither Donne nor Henry

King is much remembered for significant theological contributions or likely to be read today as a clergyman rather than a poet. They differ in their compliance with the hierarchical order of the

English church and the Stuart order generally. Donne questions, resists, problematizes, but assents.

King leans in, in hope and tragedy, to the promises of a transformed Christian community under the hierarchies of the Stuart system.

What all four have in common is an irenic approach to the problem of the community of faith in the English church. Their work is also among the surviving early seventeenth-century sermons worth approaching as literary texts, a literary achievement in their communal performance of participatory faith. Viewed in tandem, their efforts evidence recognizable differences in form, style and ends. Nevertheless, in each, faith is made present through the formal properties of the sermon, through the performance of shared experience, through fusion with liturgical worship, and through the mediating role of the preacher. This study examines the various strategies by which these sermons achieved a representation of a communal faith.

Chapter Two looks at the sermon’s spiritual importance, public role, political dimensions, and communal contexts, including a rhetoric of preaching drawn from the most significant English artes praedicandi. While highlighting some of the particular challenges the study of the genre presents, this chapter provides an important contextual basis for the close readings of the individual sermons that follow. Each one briefly situates its preacher within the world of the English church, in associations, dogma and praxis. Using case studies featuring close readings of a small number of sermons, each chapter then makes an argument about the particular homiletic art of its preacher.

Chapter Three presents Lancelot Andrewes, whose court sermons are at the center of any discussion of the literary value of the sermon during the period. Andrewes infuses the participatory nature of the sacramental into the language and structure of his sermons. For Andrewes, the ceremonies of the church and the sermons he creates for those ceremonies join his auditory to the divine and to each other.

Chapter Four examines John Donne, the popular Dean of St. Paul’s and the center of much of the critical effort surrounding the early modern sermon over the past thirty years. Potently individualistic and determinedly pastoral, Donne's sermons provide a refuge from the doubts of controversy in pastoral inclusion, rather than logical precision. In recognition of shared alienation and doubt, Donne seeks to prepare his auditors to participate in a shared acceptance of hope as well, finding their self-knowledge completed not as individuals, but in community.

Chapter Five explores the work of Richard Sibbes, who was one of the most popular preachers of the 1620s and 1630s and who remains understudied. Sibbes’ sermons push into the paradox that emphasis of his preaching was on the individual alone and yet came in the necessarily communal setting of the preached word of God. Sibbes still strives for community, but his mystic interiority allows for his sermons to reach a community of individuals more akin to readers than to auditors.

Chapter Six presents the poet Henry King, Bishop of Chichester. Younger by a generation than Donne and Sibbes, he is the only one of the four to survive the Interregnum. In his sermon series on the Lord's Prayer, King employs the transformative possibility of common prayer. King weaves that prayer into the fabric of his sermon, so that his auditors both listen and pray along with

36 him. In fusing prayer and sermon, he attempts to uphold the good of the ideal Stuart order as well as to bridge its deficiencies.

IV. Summary of Argument

Although their sermons share some of the broad generic markers of the period, the accommodations made by Andrewes, Donne, Sibbes, and King in order to inhabit their places in the

English church vary; their precise reasons for making them vary too. We can speak meaningfully of the differences between Andrewes’ syntax and Sibbes’ and even of the differences between King’s antebellum confidence and Donne’s persistent ambiguities. Theological camps end up as complicated as stylistic ones. Nevertheless, for each preacher, a shared pastoral concern pushed them toward the shifting ground of the conforming center. Their sermons create a space for the community imagined in the wake of the English Reformation and spoken through the Book of

Common Prayer to be constantly renewed in a continuously morphing ecclesiastical landscape.

Sermons embed the voice of an individual within the communal experience of the church.

The sermon is the intellectual product of a single person; it is clear from both sermon notes and recorded reactions to them that the identity of the preacher as an individual was a key part of how a sermon was understood to exist. Theories about the importance of the preached word—that is, a spoken interpretation of a portion of the scriptures—presume an individual voice as they prioritize the efficacious intimacy of the human voice. And yet, preachers from Andrewes to Sibbes (and beyond) speak most conventionally in a first person plural. Most people expected to work out their individual experience of faith inside a church. While the question of which church was the church lingered, the collective matrix for these individual decisions was not in doubt. If, as the most fervent

37 advocates of preaching believed, the preached Word of God delivered in sermons was the ordinary means to faith and thus salvation,107 salvation could only be accessed in community.

Thus, for those committed to the established English church, the sermon during this period was an important corollary of the codified collective religious experience presented in the rubrics of the Book of Common Prayer. A preached sermon offered a powerful means to enact community, in no small part because of the potential that they could (and did) do just the opposite.108 When, however, they gave voice to a community experience of faith, they fulfilled a flexible role alongside the more static enforcements of conformity such as mandated participation in Communion and the liturgical uniformity of the Book of Common Prayer. In their sermons, a significant and varied sector of preaching English clergy during the seventeenth century pursued a kind of understanding and presence that bound individuals together.

This study examines how Andrewes, Donne, Sibbes and King sought in their sermons to maintain the balance between inclusive and exclusive articulations of community. Not all seventeenth-century preachers seem to have cared about the dangers of exclusionary boundary policing, to be sure. But some did. While undoubtedly, “the fervent language of consensus used to scapegoat and denounce” is part of the ecclesiastical landscape, this study contends that it is not the whole story.109 When fluctuations in authority had temporal consequences up to and including imprisonment and execution and when a generally accepted premise of the times was that the

107 See the discussion in Chapter 2 for a fuller sense of this debate.

108 Mary Morrissey argues that it is when sermons were less controlled and more unpredictable that they had their greatest audience appeal and greatest power. Politics and the Paul’s Cross Sermons, 222.

109 McCullough and Ferrell, “Introduction,” The English Sermon Revised, 14.

38 spiritual consequences were even greater than those bodily ones, we may assume that weight placed on the language of a sermon was heavy indeed. Inasmuch as spiritual intentions can be judged by public words from a distance of four hundred years, these preachers appear to have really believed the essential central claims of English Christianity—the historical reality of the Christ story, the redemptive possibility of belief, and the salvific role of the Church—and to have believed that there was value in locating these claims within a national church. The rhetorical struggle of these sermons is to straddle that line, to define a community without becoming swept up in polemical rhetoric. To bring people within a community in a time of such instability requires an achievement of language that extends beyond a conciliatory avoidance of polemic.

Lancelot Andrewes, John Donne, Henry King and Richard Sibbes each aimed to draw their auditories, and their readers, towards participation in this community. Offering familiar ideas in new words, these men were engaged in a larger effort within the religious conversation of post-

Reformation England to create the forms and language of a universal community, struggling though it was. In Andrewes' vivid sacramental language, Donne’s performative nets for souls, Sibbes’ submerged mystical art, and King’s transformative genre-blurring, we find the literary and rhetorical means by which each of these preachers brought their auditors to participate in the language which opened the Word of God and brought the presence of faith. Each of them seek to engage their individual auditors in a spiritual act which makes mentally present, and thus apprehensible and real, the remote things of faith.

Chapter 2

Of the Preaching of the Word

The sermon was ubiquitous in early seventeenth-century England, proceeding from pulpits in rural parish churches, in the markets of midsize provincial towns, and in the courts of James I and

Charles I. Sermons could be offered to a small gathering in a parish church or before huge crowds from outdoor pulpits such as Paul’s Cross in London. Sermons also circulated in manuscript and in print, published by royal command and by pirates. Their printed forms ranged from penny chapbooks to expensive folios, and they could be published as single sermons, in collections or, redacted of material that marked them as individual sermons, merged together into long treatises.1 It is difficult to determine exact numbers, but aside from the liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer, the sermon was the literary genre most often encountered both by ordinary people and by those at the highest levels of court and society.2 Sermons in the period cover a broader range of subjects than one might suppose.3 There are scolding harangues against drunkenness and fornication.4 Fiery catalogues of sin also feature the oppression of the poor by the very rich, including denunciations of

1 James Ford, "Preaching in the Reformed Tradition." Preachers and People in the Reformations and Early Modern Period (2001): 78-79. Ian Green, Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 210-214.

2 In the case of public sermons like those at Paul’s Cross, this broad auditory is true of individual sermons as well. Mary Morrissey, Politics and the Paul’s Cross Sermons, 1558-1642 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 24.

3 “The more one stands back and takes a broader view of the printed sermons in our sample, the more one is struck by the growing diversity of content, structure, style and presentation.” Ian Green, Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 195. Green notes elsewhere that there is no single norm for preaching during the early modern period. “Continuity and Change in Protestant Preaching in Early Modern England” (60th lecture, Friends of Dr. Williams's Library; London: Dr. Williams's Trust, 2009), 31.

4 Robert Harris, The Drunkards Cup (London: Printed by the assignes of Thomas Man, 1630).

40 luxury clothing, houses, and feasting.5 There are also subtle explorations of memory and conscience.6

Politically charged remembrances of the Gunpowder plot come from the same pulpit as tender mediations on death and dying.7 These sermons are funny and moving, tedious and beautiful, pedantic and quick-witted. They were also popular enough that recreational sermon-going not only had a name, “sermon-gadding,” it was in some ways practiced by the king himself.8

This chapter seeks to survey the genre of the sermon as it existed in England during the early seventeenth century in order to highlight those elements of sermons which will guide the readings that follow. In an age attuned to religious thought, the sermon was “an event unlike any other oration.”9 The sermon was form-bound but surprisingly flexible, making use of print, but still primarily realized in oral form. The theological consensus of the English church prioritized sermons

- the preaching ministry of which was by 1600 sufficiently well equipped, especially in London, to supply pulpits accordingly. The importance granted to sermons was extended by some to claim “that except there be preaching men cannot be saved.”10 A means of understanding truth and

5 See, for example, Robert Johnson, Dives and Lazarus: or rather, Divelish Dives (London: Printed by A.M. for Phil. Byrch, 1620).

6 Richard Sibbes. The Saints Safetie in Evill Times. Shewing the nearenesse of God to such as owne his cause, stand for his truth, and walke closely with him in Well-doing (London: Printed by M.F. for R. Dawlman at the Brazen Serpent in Pauls Churchyard, 1634).

7 Lancelot Andrewes, “A Sermon Preached before the King’s Majestie, at White-Hall, on the V. of November. A.D. MDCVI.” In Lancelot Andrewes: Selected Sermons and Lectures (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 146-161.

8 Arnold Hunt, The Art of Hearing: English Preachers and their Audiences, 1590-1640 (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 192-198.

9 Mary Morrissey, "Scripture, Style and Persuasion in Seventeenth-Century English Theories of Preaching." The Journal of Ecclesiastical History 53, no. 04 (2002), 687.

10 Samuel Heiron, The Preachers Plea: or, A Treatise in forme of a plain Dialogue, making known the worth and necessary use of Preaching: shewing also how a man may profit by it, both for the informing of his judgement, and the reforming of his life (London: Printed for Simon Waterson, 1604.), 86.

41 encountering the presence of faith, sermons were not merely utilitarian instruments of persuasion, tools of public life, or explications of Scripture, but something including and beyond all three.

This chapter will examine the complex relationship between sermons and print, arguing for a critical approach which acknowledges the printed version of the sermon as the text of study rather than regarding it as simply an imprecise record of an ephemeral occasion. Finally, this chapter examines the expectations under which sermons were preached and printed, including through

English artes praedicandi, the sermon manuals that describe the theories of composition, learning, and the nature of preaching. In our literary study of printed sermons, these expectations can be seen in sermons’ retention of their original preached form, complicated relationship with classical rhetoric, flexible use of form, and intertextual relationship with Scripture.

I. “Keyes to the kingdom of heaven”11

What shape did this “chameleon genre” take in the landscape of early modern England?12

Historians and literary critics alike assert the important role preaching played in the religious culture of the period.13 Yet from Latimer to Laud, the precise nature of this role was up for debate. Church and crown authorities, preachers, and the people who listened to them weighed competing claims:

11 Richard Hooker, Book V, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, vol. II, The Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker, ed William Speed Hill (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977), 86.

12 “The sermon is a chameleon genre.” Helen Wilcox, 1611: Authority, Gender and the Word in Early Modern England (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2013), 113.

13 Hunt, Art of Hearing, 9, 19- 25. Paul Seaver, The Puritan Lectureships: The Politics of Religious Dissent (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1970), 15-22. Susan Wabuda, Preaching during the English Reformation, Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 12-13. Wilcox, 1611, 113.

42 was the preached word the ordinary means by which faith came to the people14 or was it one part of a service that ought to center the sacramental and liturgical, part of Laud’s “beauty of holiness.”15

While those who desire more reforms tended to make the strongest claims about the centrality of preaching, resistance to such claims tended to come from the ceremonialist groups within the established church. It would be an oversimplification, however, to characterize the debate as

Laudian liturgy versus Puritan preaching. Archbishop Grindal, for instance, was not exactly Puritan;

George Herbert’s country priest, attentive to duties beyond the sermon, was not exactly Laudian.

Moreover, reasons for opposing sermon-centric worship or for championing sermons sprang from a variety of sources and created allies in complex ways.

Sixteenth-century English reformers were eager to advance preaching in England. Pre-

Reformation sermons were seen as useful but largely optional for both clergy and laypeople.16 The

Edwardian Book of Homilies, including in its revised Elizabethan form, was a precursor to a trained preaching ministry. In crafting his evangelistic homilies, Cranmer was influenced by continental humanists like Erasmus and Melanchthon.17 During the initial period of the Reformation, works like

14 “Hereein ordinarily God will shew his power to save all that shall be saved.” Richard Bernard, The Faithfull Shepheard: Or the Shepheards Faithfulness (London: Printed by Arnold Hanfield, 1607), 1.

15 Laud says, revealing his own priorities, “a greater reverence, no doubt, is due to the Body than to the Word of our Lord.” The Works of the most Reverend Father in God, William Laud, D.D., Sometime Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, ed. William Scott and James Bliss, Vol 6, (Oxford: J.H. Parker, 1847), 57.

16 Eric Josef Carlson, "The Boring of the Ear: Shaping the Pastoral Vision of Preaching in England, 1540- 1640." in Preachers and People in the Reformations and Early Modern Period, ed. Larissa Taylor (Boston: Brill, 2001): 252-253.

17 Ashley Null, "Official Tudor Homilies," in The Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon (Oxford University Press, 2011), 353.

Erasmus’ Ecclesiastes, which argues “the good priest should also be a good preacher,”18 intersected with the priorities of the developing Protestant church to elevate preaching.

Although they would not live to see the firmly established, fashionable preaching ministry of the Jacobean church, reformers like Hugh Latimer provided its doctrinal and institutional basis.

Latimer’s passion for preaching is reflected in his famous “Sermon on the Plowers:”

The preaching of the word of God unto the people is called meat. Scripture calleth it meat; not strawberries, that come but once a year, and tarry not long, but are soon gone: but it is meat, it is no dainties. The people must have meat that must be familiar and continual, and daily given unto them to feed upon. Many make a strawberry of it, ministering it but once a year; but such do not the office of good prelates.19

Latimer’s distinction between preaching as necessary meat and strawberry-sermons—that is, preaching as a rare ornament or luxury, removed from the ordinary practice of the church—is an illustrative moment.20 Latimer’s sermon, a product of the transitions of the Edwardian church, was preached in 1549.21 Change happened slowly. Edwardian expectations were first simply that a sermon should be preached at least four times a year.22 Even the 1547 Book of Homilies was only

18 Wabuda, Preaching, 64.

19 Hugh Latimer, “Sermon on the Plowers,” in Selected Sermons of Hugh Latimer, Folger Documents of Tudor and Stuart Civilization, ed Allan G Chester (Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia, 1968), 32.

20 See Wabuda on Latimer’s high view of preaching as an instrument of salvation. Preaching, 13, 87-89.

21 Peter McCullough finds Latimer only an innovator in the degree of emphasis he puts on the sermon, noting that court sermons were in vogue at various points in the late Middle Ages as well. Sermons at Court: Politics and Religion in Elizabethan and Jacobean Preaching, Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 51.

22 Christopher Marsh, Popular Religion in Sixteenth-Century England: Holding their Peace (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998), 32.

44 infrequently adopted by rural parishes.23 Nevertheless, the banned sacring bell could be permitted before the newly significant sermon.24 Preaching to the people was an essential part of the effort to protestantize the country, and even outside of London, preaching increasingly found its way into churches and market squares.25 Bishop Jewel, whose Apology of the Church Of England sarcastically condemns Roman Catholic bishops for their neglect of preaching and thus, in his mind, the Gospel, represents the Elizabethan re-engagement of this effort.26 Thus, as the exiled English reformers gathered themselves together at the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign, one of their priorities was to train, monitor and deploy ministers who could also be preachers.27 Paul Seaver estimates that by

1600 over 100 sermons were preached in London during the course of a single week.28

The favored proof text for those claiming the most elevated view of sermons was Romans

10:13-14: “For whosoever shal call upon the Name of the Lord, shalbe saved. But how shal thei call on him, in whome they have not beleved? and how shal they beleve in him, of whome they have not

23 Ronald Hutton, "The Local Impact of the Tudor Reformations," in The English Reformation Revised (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 124.

24 Marsh, Popular Religion, 34.

25 Patrick Collinson, Godly People: Essays on English Protestantism and Puritanism (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1983), 467-98.

26 John Jewel, Apology of the Church of England, edited by John Booty, Folger Edition, (University Press of Virginia, 1974), 90. Michael Pasquarello. "John Jewel: Preaching Prelate." Anglican and Episcopal History 69, no. 3 (2000), especially 282, 289-290. See also Kenneth Fincham for an account of how individual bishops, in this case, Thomas Cooper, bishop of Lincoln, undertook the work of training the clergy under their authority, “Clerical Conformity from Whitgift to Laud,” in Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, c. 1560-1660, ed. Peter Lake and Michael Questier (Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2000), 134-135.

27 “A learned clergy was created here and there, and the pastoral ministry acquired a professionalized upper tier.” Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants, The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society, 1559-1625 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 131. See Pasquerello’s examination of Jewel’s part in continuing Latimer’s legacy, "John Jewel: Preaching Prelate." 276-294.

28 Seaver, The Puritan Lectureships, 125.

45 heard? and how shal they heare without a preacher?”29 This text was cited again and again to show the necessity of preaching.30 While vernacular translations of Scripture were a building block of the

Protestant Reformation, many reformers held that it was the preached Word that brought salvation to the people.31 Verse 17 of the same chapter is also frequently cited: “Then faith is by hearing, & hearing by the worde of God.”32 This phrasing supported the reformed emphasis on hearing over seeing, which also conveniently elided with a distrust of Roman Catholic reliance on images.33

Through preaching, the Word of God is made present in the world. It is this presence that can bring faith, repentance, and salvation itself.34

29 Romans 10:13-14. The Geneva Bible: A Facsimile of the 1560 Edition (Peabody, Massachusetts: Hendrickson Publishers, 2007).

30 See for example, Richard Bernard, who directly quotes the whole verse, The Faithfull Shepheard, 2. Or else in allusion, like Samuel Hieron: “To make this manifest, I demaund, whether we beleeve the Scripture? That without faith it is impossible to please God: and whether any other meanes be sanctified by God to beget Faith, besides the hearing of a Preacher? That, I am sure, is ordained to that end: as for any other mainly deputed thereto (without this) I am sure there is no such evidence in all Gods book.” The Dignitie of Preaching: In a Sermon Upon 1 Thessal. 5. 10, (London: Printed by Felix Kyngston for William Welby. 1615), 7). “An Admonition to the Parliament” in Donald Joseph McGinn, The Admonition Controversy (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1949), 176. “An Order Made by the House of Commons for the Establishing of Preaching Lecturers through the Kingdome of England and Wales,” (London: Printed by B. Alsop dwelling in Grubstreet, 1641), A3r. On this passage see also Carlson, “The Boring of the Ear,” 270-271, and Hunt, Art of Hearing, 22.

31 “Preaching could be described as virtually essential for salvation.” Carlson, “The Boring of the Ear,” 269. “Many early modern Protestants were adamant that only the Word preached—not the Word read—could suffice for salvation.” Hunt, Art of Hearing, 25. See also James Ford, "Preaching in the Reformed Tradition," 66; and Wabuda, Preaching, 66.

32 Romans 10:17. Geneva Bible.

33 Carlson, “The Boring of the Ear,” 280-81. Bryan Crockett, ""Holy Cozenage" and the Renaissance Cult of the Ear." The Sixteenth Century Journal 24, no. 1 (04/01, 1993): 65.

34 One effect is that this sensitivity was not limited to those in theological professions. Crockett paints the phenomena this way: “The Protestant reverence for the spoken word, combined with the Reformation's rejection of visual allure and the humanists' revival of classical rhetoric, paved the way for a cult of the ear, an enhanced receptivity to the nuances of oral performance.” “Holy Cozenage,” 51.

While the popularity of sermons in the religious life of seventeenth-century London especially is indicative of the importance of preaching to the religious culture of the period, divisions within the church over its centrality continued. To understand the range of opinions on preaching, it is helpful to look at some of the flashpoints of the controversy. For the most part, both ceremonialist and reformist camps affirmed the central role of both preaching and the sacraments to the true church. Article 19 of the Thirty-Nine Articles defines the true church as “a congregation of faythfull men, in the which the pure worde of God is preached, and the Sacrementes be duely ministered, according to Christes ordinaunce in all those thynges that of necessitie are requisite to the same.”35 Even the most ardent defender of preaching would not deny the sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist. Preaching was honored even by those who wished it to occupy a less central place in the practices of the English church.

Yet conformity to the Church of England was more closely tied to the standardization of the

Book of Common Prayer and the Book of Homilies. Despite calling preaching a necessary part of the true church, the Thirty-Nine Articles requires only reading from the second Book of Homilies rather than the establishment of a preaching minister in each parish.36 In contrast, the late sixteenth-century separatist liturgy printed by Robert Waldegrave organizes the entire service around the sermon:

“Every weeke once the congregation, which may conveniently, assemble to heare some place of the

35 “Articles whereupon it was agreed by the Archbishoppes and Bishoppes of both provinces and the whole cleargie, in the Convocation holden at Londen in the yere of our Lorde GOD, 1562, according to the computation of the Churche of Englande, for the avoiding of the diversities of opinions, and for the stablishyng of consent touch true religion” [London: 1562], B3r.

36 Article 35 in “Articles,” C3r.

Scriptures orderly expounded.”37 Preaching is also open to “such men, as are allowed thereunto by the Eldership, to speake as God shall move their hearts.,”38 whereas Article 23 of the Thirty-Nine

Articles limits preaching to those who are “lawfully called and sent to execute the same.”39 Despite consistent efforts throughout the period to more completely establish a preaching ministry and a sermon-centered Church of England, both the church and the crown sought to control the power of preaching by limiting who could preach and, at times, the subjects of the sermons themselves.40

Given the religious turmoil that preceded Elizabeth’s Act of Uniformity, the crown’s motivations for wishing to control authoritative, public orations are evident. The clash between

Elizabeth I and those who desired to advance preaching’s role in the English church is perhaps most famously evident in the showdown between Elizabeth and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Edmund

Grindal. Elizabeth displayed a personal preference for more “scenic” worship over sermon-centered

37 A booke of the forme of common prayers, administration of the Sacraments: &c. agreeable to Gods Worde, and the vse of the reformed Churches, (London: Printed by Robert Walde-graue, 1585), B3r.

38 Ibid.

39 Article 23 in “Articles,” B4r.

40 For example, shortly after taking the throne, in 1558 Elizabeth issued a proclamation restricting preaching to those with a license and enumerating permissible subjects of sermons in order to secure “the quiet governaunce of all maner her subjects” and “the better conciliation and accord.” Elizabeth I, “The Quenes Maiestie vnderstanding that there be certainepersons, hauing in times past the office of ministery in the churche, which nowe do purpose to vse their former office in preaching and ministery ...” (Imprynted at London : By [John Day for?] Rychard Iugge, printer to the Quenes Maiestie, [1558].

Likewise, Articles 34-52 in the Canons of 1604 set limits on preaching (yet also require it of certain ministers). Constitutio[ns] and canons ecclesiasticall (Imprinted at London: by Robert Barker, printer to the Kings most excellent Maiestie, anno 1604), H1v-L1r.

James’ 1622 Directions Concerning Preachers restricted preachers from certain subjects, including “the deepe points of Predestination, Election, Reprobation,” A2v. James I, “The Kings Maiesties letter to the Lords Grace of Canterbury, touching preaching, and preachers.” [London: s.n. 1622].

48 piety.41 She was also worried about diversity and subversion.42 In 1576, the queen requested

Archbishop Grindal’s aid in suppressing the “prophesyings,” that is, public lectures reputedly intended to train preachers, which were becoming more popular and making her nervous.43 Grindal defied her, sending a letter which defended a sermon-centric ministry and the prophesyings as a means to obtain it.44

His letter to the queen articulates a position shared by reform-minded clergy throughout the period: “Public and continual preaching of God’s word is the ordinary mean and instrument of the salvation of mankind.”45 For Grindal, because sermons are a necessary means of grace, championing preaching is required. For reasons which may have had as much to do with the implications of

Grindal’s defiance as preaching itself, Elizabeth was not convinced and deprived Grindal of much of his authority as Archbishop. Her aggressive response, and her preference for pre-written homilies,46 offer a partial explanation for why Grindal’s view of preaching was never completely accepted; there was an inherent potential for, as the preface to The First Book of Homilies puts it, “diversity of preaching” to be a destabilizing force within the closely held uniformity of the Elizabethan

41 McCullough, Sermons at Court, 3.

42 Seaver, Puritan Lectureships, 21.

43 Collinson, Archbishop Grindal, 1519-1583: The Struggle for a Reformed Church (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 237 ff.

44 This letter followed a large scale effort to prove the prophesyings and preaching in general to be “a necessary institution.” Ibid., 238.

45 Edmund Grindal, “Archbishop Grindal’s Letter to the Queen” in Religion and Society in Early Modern England, edited by David Cressy and Lori Anne Ferrell, 2nd ed., (New York: Routledge, 2005), 109.

46 Collinson, Archbishop Grindal, 241.

49 settlement.47 Yet the desire for preaching and preaching ministers remained strong through the

Jacobean period, and prophesyings morphed into combination lectures for training preachers that were allowed to continue.48 The role sermons played in the recurring crisis of authority throughout the period can be seen more than sixty years later, in September 1641, as both Grindal’s spiritual urgency and defiance are reflected in a parliamentary order that lectures be established in order to extend the preaching ministry since “it is the very way to bring People into the state of salvation; it is the way to save their soules.”49

Grindal was succeeded as Archbishop of Canterbury by John Whitgift. In Whitgift’s published debate with Thomas Cartwright, known as the Admonition Controversy, the arguments concerning the centrality and necessity of preaching are played out at greater length, reflecting the ecclesiological implications of the question as well as the political ones. 50 Cartwright and Whitgift’s larger debate was over the exact nature of the true church and, thus, the shape of established church.

In Cartwright’s view, additional reforms were still needed, including a greater emphasis on a preaching ministry. Like Grindal, Cartwright argues that “the ordinary ways whereby God regenerateth his children is by the Word of God which is preached.”51 Cartwright’s ideals for the church center preaching in the service and prioritize training a preaching ministry. Sermons are more

47 “Preface,” The First Book of Homilies in The Books of Homilies: A Critical Edition, edited by Richard Bray, (Cambridge: James Clarke & Co, 2015), Location 433, Kindle.

48 Collinson, Archbiship Grindal, 291-292.

49 “An order made by the House of Commons,” (1641), A3r.

50 See Peter Lake, Anglicans and Puritans?: Presbyterianism and English conformist thought from Whitgift to Hooker (Allen & Unwin Australia, 1988), 13-70.

51 Thomas Cartwright, Replye to an Answere in Donald Joseph McGinn, The Admonition Controversy (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1949), 180.

50 vital than homilies or other instruction and “are expressly commanded of the Lord, are such as are necessary for all churches and which no one can want.”52 Whitgift pushes back, not so much against sermons themselves as against the exclusiveness of Cartwright’s claims. While sermons are indeed an instrument to bring people to faith, the church has also been supplied with other means, such as the public reading of Scripture. Significantly, Whitgift finds no distinction actually made in Scripture between the Word preached and the Scriptures read aloud.53 Furthermore, the good sermons do is done better when they are restricted rather than common: “He doth not always feed the best nor take the greatest pains which preacheth most often, but he that preacheth most learnedly, most pithily, most orderly, most discreetly, most to edifying.”54 What Whitgift’s ideal of preaching implies is that preaching cannot be considered an unalloyed good; his concern is to argue that salvation comes through the church in more complicated ways than Cartwright’s single-minded elevation of preaching claims.

The position of those who, like Whitgift, did not reject the sermon altogether, but sought to keep it from dominating was eloquently, though less publicly, articulated by Richard Hooker.55

Hooker’s engagement with the ordinance of preaching in Book V Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity refutes the idea that salvific grace comes ordinarily through the Word of God preached, “that is to

52 Cartwright, Second Replie, in The Admonition Controversy, 173.

53 John Whitgift, Defense of the Aunswere, in The Admonition Controversy, 180.

54 Whitgift, Answere to a certen Libell in The Admonition Controversy, 175.

55 Hunt traces the continuity of the debate Hooker engages in from the public controversy between Whitgift and Cartwright, The Art of Hearing, 32-39.

51 saie explaned by livelie voice and applied to the peoples use as the speaker in his wisdom thinketh meete.”56

Hooker’s position is less against sermons than against prioritizing sermons over other ways of transmitting “the word of life” to the people.57 When he does speak of sermons themselves, it is in glowing terms: “as keyes to the kingdom of heaven, as winges to the soule, as spurres to the good affections of man, unto the sound and healthie as foode, as phisicke unto diseased minds.”58 Hooker values sermons as tools but views preaching, that is, proclaiming the word of God, as broader than just sermons. Just as Whitgift argues that faith may come by hearing, but hearing does not necessarily require a sermon,59 Hooker broadens the definition of preaching to include Scripture read aloud in church or privately.60

Outside of the official church structure, ministers, both conformist and non-conformists, used sermons, treatises and dialogues to defend preaching. They aimed to convince the people as well as the church authorities. In 1604, Samuel Hieron, a popular preacher from Devon, published a dialogue in defense of preaching called The Preachers Plea.61 He echoes the language Grindal and

Cartwright use: “that except there be preaching men cannot be saved: not that God is tied to the voice of man, that without it he cannot save: but because the Scripture hath revealed to us, that these things are linked together with an indissoluble knot, praying, faith, hearing, preaching,

56 Hooker, Lawes, Folger Works, vol II, 83.

57 Hooker, Lawes, Folger Works, vol II, 84.

58 Ibid., 87.

59 Whitgift, Defense of the Aunswere in The Admonition Controversy, 176.

60 Hooker, Lawes, Folger Works, Vol II, 67, 98-99.

61 His sermons appear as among the bestselling in the period. See Ian Green’s appendix to Print and Protestantism.

52 sending.”62 In 1621, Robert Johnson published “The Way to Glory,” a sermon which had been preached in St. Paul’s. Johnson’s epistle to readers—in which he quotes Hieron as an authority— makes clear that his sermon was preached in order to argue that preaching ministers should be financially supported.63 As a subtitle and repeatedly through the sermon itself, Johnson repeats this same aggressive claim we find in Latimer, Grindal, Cartwright and Hieron: “the preaching of the

Gospell, is the ordinary meanes, which God hath appointed to us to salvation.”64 By implication, support of preaching is support of the Gospel itself.

As might be expected, the urgency with which preachers like Hieron and Johnson approach questions of necessity of preaching is reflected by the authors of English artes praedicandi, preaching manuals, which we will examine in more detail later in this chapter. Richard Bernard, in The Faithfull

Shepheard, argues for the necessity of preaching (and thus the value of his work):

It [preaching] is therefore verie necessary, and those which should preach the same. For this cause, by the holy spirit the Ministers of the Gospel are called Light, Salt, Saviours, Seers, Chariots of Israel, & Horsemen thereof, Pastours, Planters, Waterers, Builders, and Stewards, Watchmen, Soldiers, Nurses, and such like; comparing them to such things, and callings, as most common, and also needfull to necessarie uses: that the necessity of them heereby may be considered of, both for the Church and Common-wealth.65

62 Samuel Hieron, The Preachers Plea: Or, A Treatise in forme of a plain Dialogue, making known the worth and necessary use of Preaching: shewing also how a man may profit by it, both for the informing of his judgement, and the reforming of his life (London: Printed for Simon Waterson, 1604), 86.

63 Robert Johnson, “The Way to Glory: or The Preaching of the Gospell is the ordinary meanes of our Salvation,” (London: Printed by Nicholas Okes, and are to be sold by John Prper, 1621), A4r. That Johnson was at least attempting to make this sermon part of a higher level conversation is implied by his dedicatory letter to George Abbot, then Archbishop of Canterbury, in which he claims that both “Papists and Schismatickes” oppose him, A2v.

64 Johnson, “The Way to Glory,” including, 4, 21, 24.

65 Bernard, The Faithfull Shepheard, 2.

Like Johnson, Bernard’s defense of preaching is also an argument for preachers and for a shape to the church in England that would support training and employing preachers. Thirty years after

Grindal’s explosive encounter with Elizabeth, Bernard is still careful to counter perceptions of preaching as destabilizing. His mountain of metaphors indicates the way the office of preaching could seem to fulfill so many of the duties of a churchman. Ultimately, however, care in the crafting of sermons was so important because of, as John Wilkins warns at the end of his Ecclesiastes, “the solemne dignity of those sacred mysteries with which we are intrusted, the weighty businesse of saving soules.”66

It is natural that those who preached would consider their work worth doing. Henry Smith, one of the most popular preachers in late sixteenth-century London,67 declares, “Therefore, he which loveth his soule, had not neede to despise Prophecying , for if he despise Prophecying, then verily hee famisheth his owne soule, and is guiltie of her death.”68 Yet being a preacher, even a good one, was no guarantee of holding to a sermon-centric approach to worship. As we will see in Chapter 3,

Lancelot Andrewes, a favorite preacher of the sermon-centric James, irenic yet firm, argues that sermons must be second to prayer, by which he means both public prayer and sacramental elements of worship.69 And sermons were used across all segments of the church, including by those who are

66 Wilkins, Ecclesiastes, or A Discourse concerning the Gift of Preaching as it fals under the rules of Art (London: Printed by M.F. for Samuel Gellibrand, 1646), 74.

67 See both Green, Print and Protestantism, 196, and Lori Anne Ferrell, "Sermons," in The Elizabethan Top Ten: Defining Print Popularity in Early Modern England, edited by Emma Smith and Andy Kesson, (Routledge, 2016), 194.

68 Henry Smith, A fruitfull sermon Upon part of the 5. Chapter of the first Epistle of Saint Paul to the Thessalonians, (London: Printed for Nicholas Ling, 1591), A7r.

69 McCullough argues that Andrewes’ “anti-sermon” sermons are specifically directed against what Andrewes saw as the neglect of liturgical elements of the service in the practice of the court. Sermons at Court, 155-163.

54 seen as anti-sermon, like Hooker, Whitgift, and Laud.70 Whitgift even claims to be a more accomplished preacher than his opponents: “If it were lawful for me to boast of myself, I might justly say, and prove it, that I have preached as many sermons as the most of you.”71 Preaching as vital, even if not supreme among the functions of the church, was a claim that many were prepared to accept.72 In the 1620s, Henry King, hardly a radical Puritan, declared that a famine of “hearing His

Word” was more dangerous than the literal sort.73

George Herbert, whose sermons do not survive but whose work of practical advice to ministers does, may offer insight to how sermons were received and treated by those writing and hearing them in the midst of these debates. The picture of ministry formed by the paratexts of printed sermons, to say nothing of polemic like Samuel Hieron’s, is one in which sermon-giving is the primary function of the minister.74 In A Priest to the Temple, Herbert says surprisingly little about preaching. The majority of the book focuses on how the country parson should order his life and interact with his parishioners.75 He speaks in terms of flock and pastor, rather than preacher.

70 For examples see, Richard Hooker, A Learned and Comfortable Sermon of the certainie and perpetuitie of faith in the Elect, especially of the Prophet Habbakkuks faith (Oxford: Printed by Joseph Barnes, 1612); William Laud, A Sermon Preached Before His Majestie, On Wednesday the fift of July, At White-Hall (London: Printed for Richard Badger, 1626); John Whitgift, A Godlie Sermon preched before the Queenes Majestie at Grenewiche the 26 of March last past (London: Henry Bynneman for Humfrey Toy, 1574). See Carlson on Laud on sermons, “The Boring of the Ear,” 291.

71 Whitgift, Defense of the Aunswere, in The Admonition Controversy, 176.

72 See Carlson on the balance sought by Jacobean “anti-sermon” voices, “The Boring of the Ear,” 286-287.

73 Henry King, The Sermons of Henry King (1592-1669), Bishop of Chichester, ed. Mary Hobbs (Rutherford: Scolar Press, 1992), 179.

74 See Hunt, Art of Hearing, 19-20.

75 Herbert includes such details as whom to invite to dinner and what to hang on the walls of the rectory, A Priest to the Temple, or, The Countrey Parson His Character, and Rule of Holy Life. (London: Printed by T. Maxey for T. Garthwait, at the little North door or St Paul’s. 1652), 50 & 42.

Nevertheless, Herbert’s ideal country parson “often tells them, that Sermons are dangerous things, that none goes out of Church as he came in, but either better, or worse.”76 Even surrounded by diverse elements of pastoral care, Herbert presents sermons as powerful, privileged speech. In calling sermons “dangerous things,” Herbert echoes the political concerns of both monarchs and bishops during the period who sought to control the disruptive potential of the sermon; his use of the word, however, is directed toward the spiritual impact of the sermon. Herbert accepts the premise, common to the period, that a sermon could direct the power of the Scriptures so that, in hearing, people were changed.

In contrast to Herbert’s piety, the letters of John Chamberlain offer, as they do for so many things, a sense of how these ideas about sermons may have been reflected in the sermon reception of a more ordinary member of the English church. Chamberlain’s gossipy reactions often evaluate the preacher’s success in a non-spiritual sense, for instance repeating the rumor that Buckeridge was thought to have plagiarized Andrewes,77 hazarding that Henry King’s poor first showing at Paul’s

Cross only happened because his father was the Bishop of London,78 or speculating that Gervase

Babington’s significant glances during the delivery of his sermon raised the queen’s suspicions.79 He never mentions being particularly convicted or comforted by a sermon, but he does commend

76 Ibid., 23.

77 John Chamberlain, The Letters of John Chamberlain, ed. Norman Egbert McClure, vol. 1 (Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 1939). 84.

78 Ibid., vol I, 114.

79 Ibid., vol I, 92.

Andrewes’ 1609 Christmas sermon to both Dudley Carelton and Ralph Winwood with enthusiasm.80

Amid the noise of London, sermons, both heard and read, are worth attending to, a reaction certainly less urgent than many a preacher would have wished but nonetheless one that reveals the authoritative role sermons occupied in English conversation.

II. Pulpits: Preaching Venues and Sermon Forms

The task of placing the sermons in this study within this larger conversation requires developing a fuller picture of the variety and types of sermons during the period, both printed and preached. The variety of preaching venues alone indicates the flexible role preached sermons played in public and private life. Sermons often took place at other times than Sunday mornings and in other places than a church.81 In churches with a resident preaching minister, the sermon was a central element of the Sunday morning liturgy. The afternoon was reserved for catechizing, often by means of stand-alone lecture, delivered outside of a liturgical frame. These more instructional lectures were still considered sermons.82 In the pulpits of churches, sermons reached a wide variety of people; for example, at Holy Trinity Church in Cambridge the auditory was composed of both university fellows and illiterate laborers.83

80 Ibid., vol I, 292, 295.

81 Rhatigan, “Preaching Venues,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 92.

82 McCullough, “Introduction” in Lancelot Andrewes: Selected Sermons and Lectures (Oxford University Press, 2005), xviii.

83 Sibbes’ popularity at Holy Trinity Church in Cambridge is a good example of this sort of mixed audience. Mark Dever, Richard Sibbes: Puritanism and Calvinism in Late Elizabethan and Early Stuart England. (Macon, Ga: Mercer University Press, 2000), 39.

Ian Green makes a distinction between “occasional and routine” sermons.84 It is occasional sermons which are more likely to survive and which shape much of our current study of the genre.

In addition to churches, institutional chapels, and cathedrals, sermons were preached in open-air public spaces, just as they had been during the late middle ages.85 Paul’s Cross, located in the courtyard of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London and “the largest event venue” in England during this time, was the most important of these spaces.86 Paul’s Cross sermons were a prominent part of sermon culture.87 Sermons preached there could draw crowds as large as five thousand people.88

Preachers were usually important, and public officials, like the Lord Mayor of London, would be in attendance, close to the pulpit.89 For most of the period of this study, sermons were preached at

Paul’s Cross every Sunday, as well as on special occasions.90 It was a space for both thanksgiving, as

84 Green, “Continuity and Change,” 28.

85 Leith Spencer, English Preaching in the Late Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 71.

86 Ferrell, "Sermons," 199.

87 See Millar MacLure, The Paul's Cross Sermons, 1534-1642 (Toronto University Press: 1958) and Morrissey, Politics and the Paul's Cross Sermons.

88 Included in the efforts to reconstruct the experience of hearing sermons in seventeenth-century London is an extensive collaborative effort to recreate the listening space in and around St. Paul’s. The Virtual Paul’s Cross Project works to recreate the space outside of St. Paul’s in its use as a preaching venue. The project includes artistic renderings of spatial reconstructions, but most significantly it also includes recreations of the auditory experience of hearing John Donne’s 1622 Gunpowder Plot sermon. The website, hosted by NC State University, offers the present day auditor a chance to listen to the sermon (voiced by an actor) from various positions around the courtyard. John Wall, et al., Virtual Paul’s Cross Project, North Carolina State University, accessed July 19, 2018, https://vpcp.chass.ncsu.edu. See in particular, “Size of the Crowd,” Occasion, Virtual Paul’s Cross Project, accessed July 19, 2018, https://vpcp.chass.ncsu.edu/size-of-the-crowd.

89 Hunt, Art of Hearing, 323. Morrissey, Paul’s Cross, 16-20.

90 Hunt, Art of Hearing, 321.

58 in the sermon John King gave in 1619 after James I recovered from an illness,91 and alarm, as in the warnings of the Paul’s Cross jeremiads.92 The location and the prestige of the pulpit contributed to its function as “an organ of authorities,” but even so it was host to diverse voices.93 The constraint on preachers at Paul’s Cross exercised by the crown and church was both imprecise and usually post-hoc.94

A significant function of the Paul’s Cross pulpit came during the annual Easter Week sermon cycle. During Easter Week, a sermon would be preached at Paul’s Cross on Good Friday.95

On Easter Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday a sermon would be preached at the St. Mary’s “Spital” pulpit, on the grounds of what was once St. Mary’s Hospital, just outside the walls of the city. These sermons were traditionally pleas of charity, commissioned by the Lord Mayor and the aldermen of

91 John King, A Sermon of publicke thanksgiving for the happie recoverie of his MAJESTIE from his late dangerous sicknesse. (London: Printed for Thomas Adams, 1619). King compares James first to Christ in the triumphant entry, but then to Hezekiah. He observes that the king will die and so will everyone else. The force of the sermon is less to raise James’ position and more to warn the gathered crowd to prepare for the day of their death: “He is sure of nothing but his grave…. Yes, A Grave for his bodie, A Grave for his vanities, A Grave for his riches, A Grave for his hopes: all is buried with him. He that shall say, I have houses, and lands, and vineyards, and fields, and gardens, deveiveth himselfe, and the truth is not in him; he hath nothing certaine but his grave.” (30). King ends by attributing Hezekiah’s illness to the presence of sin and warns his auditors to take heed as sins have public as well as private consequences (54). Rhetorically, these warnings apply to the king as well as to the people in the courtyard of St. Paul’s.

92 Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 281 ff. More from Morrissey, Politics and Paul’s Cross, 150-151, 183.

93 Walsham, Providence, 293.

94 See Morrissey, Politics and Paul’s Cross, especially 68-101. Print could be and was censored, but such efforts were never completely effective. S. Mutchow Towers concludes that print censorship or authorization of religious texts was present, but not stringently enforced, with a shift in this enforcement (and the content of what was prohibited from coming to press) coming in the mid-1630s as Laudianism was on the ascendency. Control of Religious Printing in Early Stuart England (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2003), 277.

95 For a description of this process see Morrissey, "Ornament and Repetition: Biblical Interpretation in Early Modern English Preaching." The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in Early Modern England, C.1530-1700 (Oxford University Press, 2015): 304.

London. 96 Finally, on Low Sunday, the Sunday following Easter, a rehearsal sermon, in which the preacher summarized the previous four sermons and added his own material, would be preached again at Paul’s Cross. Since Spital sermons were two hours long in an open air pulpit and lacked even the helpful acoustics of the St. Paul’s courtyard,97 preaching one was considered an honor and a challenge. Likewise, the rehearsal sermon required a certain feat of memory and rhetorical dexterity.

This sermon series was among the most important sermon events of the year.98 Although they were still religious events, the Easter week sermons are examples of the public civic role sermons could play. They focused on the life of the city and the nation as a whole, often directed to the public officials in attendance as representative heads.99

Also central to any understanding of the sermon as a public instrument are the sermons preached at court.100 While the power of these pulpits made them important, they were not public in the sense that the open-air pulpits were. Although more limited in size, the auditory for these sermons was still prestigious, even if it did not always include the monarch or the members of the

96 Sonia Suman argues that, because the acoustics in this space were much poorer than at Paul’s Cross and because civic officials attended the Spital sermons with a great deal of pageantry, spectacle rather than content was fundamental to how they worked on a civic level. Sonia Suman, ""A most Notable Spectacle”: Early Modern Easter Spital Sermons." In Spoken Word and Social Practice: Orality in Europe (1400-1700), ed. Thomas Cohen and Lesley K. Twomey (Boston: Brill, 2015), 228.

97 Suman, “A Most Notable Spectacle,” 236.

98 Morrissey, Paul’s Cross, 21.

99 Hunt, Art of Hearing, 325-326.

100 Other significant public venues during this period include university sermons and sermons preached before Parliament. Rhatigan, “Preaching Venues,” 110-112.

60 royal family.101 Sermons had undeniable political uses in the court of all three monarchs covered in this study—Elizabeth I, James I and VI, and Charles I—and by those who opposed them. James, especially, elevated sermons and used them as a tool for dissemination of policy.102 Many court sermons reinforced the church’s dependence on the monarchy. For instance, Laud, as a court chaplain, begins a sermon on praying for the nation with the equation, “For if the State come to suffer ‘tis madnesse to thinke the Church can be free… Because if any violence threaten the

Kingdome with Wast, it must needs at once threaten the Church with both Prophanation and

Persecution.”103 Yet, preachers and their sermons also challenged the crown’s authority. Elizabeth occasionally interrupted preachers she felt had stepped too far over the line.104 Preachers like William

Loe purposefully and vigorously criticized crown policy, at known risk to their careers.105 Other preachers, like Andrewes and Donne, critiqued more circumspectly. As at Paul’s Cross, the voices of the court pulpits are remarkably diverse.106

101 For a thorough exploration of the physical surroundings and typical auditories for court preaching, see McCullough, “The Architectural Settings of Elizabethan and Jacobean Court Preaching” in Sermons at Court, 11-50.

102 McCullough, Sermons at Court, 138. Ferrell, Government by Polemic: James I, the King's Preachers, and the Rhetorics of Conformity, 1603-1625 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 10.

103 William Laud, A Sermon Preached Before His Majestie, On Wednesday the fift of July, At White-Hall (London: Printed for Richard Badger, 1626), 3.

104 McCullough, Sermons at Court, 69.

105 See Chelsea Rice McKelvey’s account of Loe’s Norwich sermon in "The 'Glorie, might, & Maiestie' of Early Modern Sermons." Literature & Theology 28, no. 1 (2014).

106 McCullough, Sermons at Court, 5.

Another important category of publicly oriented sermons is the Gunpowder Plot Day remembrance sermons, which were preached in court, at Paul’s Cross, and around the nation. 107 The sermons of this new national “holy day,” instituted by James after the foiled plot in 1605, engaged in crafting a national identity. Gunpowder Plot sermons tended to have two themes: obedience and gratitude.108 What national role they played—and whether or not this took the form of Stuart propaganda—shifted over time. The Gunpowder Plot sermons were used originally to shore up support for the Stuart monarchy under both James and Charles. Yet we find Gunpowder Plot sermons from a wide variety of preachers.109 What’s more, the celebrations continued during the

Interregnum even when traditional Christian celebrations like Christmas were suppressed.110

Practically, preached sermons were a useful tool for the broad dissemination of information from news to the extra-spiritual agendas of ministers, the hierarchy of the English church, and its monarch. Despite their engagement in the public sphere,111 most sermons pursued politics for largely religious reasons. It is worth returning to Ian Green’s caution that the sermons we currently

107 Other significant public venues during this period include university sermons and sermons preached before Parliament. Rhatigan, “Preaching Venues,” 112.

108 Anne James, Poets, Players, and Preachers: Remembering the Gunpowder Plot in Seventeenth-Century England (University of Toronto Press, 2016), 191.

109 This includes all four of the preachers in this study, although King’s do not survive.

110 David Cressy, Bonfires and Bells : National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). 146, 154.

111 See, for example, Mark Larson on the sermons of William Gouge. "The Holy War Trajectory among the Reformed: From Zurich to England." Reformation and Renaissance Review 8, no. 1 (2008).

62 study are an elite subset of the genre as actually preached.112 Yet even this selection can be better understood within a broader whole focused on religious ends.

Regardless of location or interaction with the political or public sphere, the very nature of the sermon as delivered to a gathered assembly is fundamental to the genre. This communal element as well as the spiritual importance of the sermon is, as we shall see, both retained and challenged by the transition to print.

III. “A Paper-Life”: Sermons and Print113

H.S. Bennet estimates that about two thousand individual sermons made their way into print during the first four decades of the seventeenth century.114 Ian Green’s more recent survey of religious print culture estimates that between 1558 and 1640 at least three thousand individual or collected publications of sermons were printed.115 The reasons for the leap into print were varied.

Sometimes a pirated copy was printed without the permission of the preacher.116 Sometimes a single

112 Green notes that this focus on sermons from a small circle of elite preachers in prominent pulpits leads to scholars viewing “the sermon as a weapon of public confrontation.” “Continuity and Change,” 9.

113 “The Epistle Dedicatorie” in Lancelot Andrewes, XCVI. Sermons by the Right Honorable and Reverend Father in God, Lancelot Andrewes, Late Lord Bishop of Winchester. Published by His Majesties Specially Command, ed. William Laud and John Buckeridge (London: George Miller for Richard Badger, 1629), A2r.

114 H.S. Bennett, English Books and Readers III: 1603-1640 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 108.

115 Green, Print and Protestantism, 194.

116 Ambrose Wood includes an apology to Samuel Ward in the paratext to the unauthorized publication of Ward’s sermon “A Coal from the Altar”: ““your sermon which I copied partly form your mouth, and partly from your notes, I have adventured into the light… I was loth to smoother such fire in my breast; but to vent it, to enflame others. If you shall blame me, I knowe others will thanke mee.” “To my Reverend Friend, Mr. Samuel Ward” in A Coal From the Altar, to Kindle the Holy Fire of Zeale, 2nd ed (London: Printed by H.L. for Joyce Macham, widow; and are to beesould in Pauls-church-yard, at the signe of the Bul-head, 1616), A3r.

63 sermon was printed at royal command.117 Sometimes, as is the case with Donne and Andrewes, a collection of sermons drawn from the preacher’s extensive personal notes was posthumously published by others. At other times, the circulation of pirated copies of a sermon, derived from the shorthand notes of an original auditor, pushed a nervous preacher into publishing an authoritative version.118 The content of some popular sermons was repurposed into more of a devotional treatise, as is the case with Sibbes’ The Bruised Reede and the Smoaking Flax. In these, many of the generic markers of a sermon are stripped away, leaving them in a state less easily contextualized as a specific performative event.119

It is from this printed repository, imperfect though it may be at capturing the exact experience of early modern sermon going, that we locate the texts for our studies. Most likely to be preserved were the sermons of preachers at court, or at important pulpits in large cities and university towns, such as Paul’s Cross in London or Holy Trinity Church in Cambridge. As mentioned, Herbert’s sermons to St Andrew’s Church do not survive. This is likely the result not only of choice on Herbert’s part, but also because of a lack of pressure from other sources—kings or pirates—to publish. It is safe to assume that the sample of sermons we have available to us is not representative.120

117 This is the case with most of Andrewes’ sermons which were printed during his lifetime. Hunt, The Art of Hearing, 136-137.

118 Green, Print and Protestantism, 197.

119 The same thing has probably happened to many of the surviving English sermons, most of which are actually preserved in Latin, from the late Middle Ages. Spencer, English Preaching, 33 ff, 55.

120 Green, Print and Protestantism, 208. This is perhaps another reason to content ourselves with a reading that does take historical recreation as its first priority.

A more significant challenge faced in the study of the early modern sermon comes from the very fact that preachers did not prepare a complete text before delivery or memorize their sermons verbatim.121 What was actually preached was something between a memorized delivery and a highly prepared extemporaneous exposition.122 Authorities such as Calvin and Zwingli as well as the authors of the English artes praedicandi held that this left room for the movement of the Holy Spirit in response to the needs of the moment.123 It is, therefore, unlikely that a printed sermon exactly mirrors what was heard when it was originally delivered.124

Reading a sermon was understood to be a different experience than hearing one, including in the expectation that the printed texts differed from the words that were delivered in the original sermon. For example, Thomas Playfere includes an editorial note at the beginning of The Pathway to perfection explaining the notational method by which quotations which had been directly used in the sermon were distinguished from ones which had been added later to fill in paraphrased material.125

Nicholas Colt, in an Epistle Dedicatory in 1617, recounts being urged by people who met him in the

121 Andrewes is unusual in the degree of precision he afforded his language in preparation compared to the general practice. Hunt, The Art of Hearing, 132.

122 There seems to have been at least some expectation of holding the minister to this ideal of a delivered sermon (compared to one that was read, including one read from the Book of Homilies) which came from the people and not just the clergy. See Hunt for a discussion of the preacher Thomas Lydiat, in Alkerton, Oxfordshire, and his parishioners’ expectations, The Art of Hearing, 270-275.

123 Ford, “Preaching in the Reformed Tradition,” 77.

124 In between the original preached sermon and early modern published texts we find the remnants of apparently thriving manuscript culture related to the circulation of sermons. Morrissey divides preserved sermons into four categories: pulpit notes, full-text manuscript copies, "manuscript sermon-books," and printed sermons. Morrissey, “Sermon-Notes,” 297-300.

125 Thomas Playfere, “To the Reader” The Pathway to perfection. A Sermon preached at Saint Maryes Spittle in London on Wednesday in Easter Weeke, 1593 (London: Printed by James Roberts for Andrew Wise, dwelling in Paules Church-yard, at the signe of the Angel. 1597), A4r.

65 street to print his sermon, going home and reassembling it from notes—a process that apparently caused him to “put on hard for God and his people”—and finally publishing “this little Frame and

Impression of the publike” sermon.126

Many had significant concerns about the spiritual efficacy of printed sermons. In the epistle

“To the Benevolent Reader” at the beginning of a sermon on preaching, John Traske claims that

“public & powerfull preaching” prepares readers to read; in other words, without hearing sermons, the reader will be spiritually unable to profit from reading a sermon about the importance of preaching.127 Traske and others were also concerned that a reader removed from the immediacy and power of a delivered sermon would be more critical than receptive. Thus, the “Preacher’s Friend” expresses discomfort with the “Censorious Reader” in the paratext for William Barlow’s original

Gunpowder Plot sermon.128

Justifications for moving sermons into print were often given in the paratextual material, such as letters to the reader from either editors or the preacher himself.129 Clement and Hunt argue that the ultimate position many seem to take is that while spoken sermons could be more powerful, printed sermons were able to endure, their diminished effectiveness outweighed by longevity.130 Ian

Green argues that while the increased acceptance of print is clear, the accommodation of print

126 Nicholas Colt, The Seale of the Churches safetie; or A Sermon preached at Norwich, the fift of November, 1616, (London: Printed by W. Stansby, 1617), A5v.

127 John Traske, “To the Benevolent Reader” in The Power of Preaching, or the Powerful Effects of the Word Preached, and rightly applyed as it was delivered in one or moe Sermons (London: Printed by T.S. for Nathaniel Butter, 1623), A2r.

128 William Barlow, The Sermon Preached at Paules Crosse, the tenth day of November, being the next Sunday after the Discoverie of this late Horrible Treason (London: Printed for Mathew Lawe, 1606), A3v.

129 Lund, “Sermon Paratexts,” 149-151.

130 Clement, “Art of Feeling,” 682. Hunt, Art of Hearing, 130.

66 seemed to focus on the sermons’ usefulness in matters not pertaining to regeneration.131 Molekamp’s work on the funeral sermons of pious women and their use in print as guides to devotional life is one example of these sorts of applications.132 Despite these worries, the attraction of print triumphed for the sermons which survive, including those which defend the absolute necessity of the preached sermon.133

The difference between preached and printed sermons creates a methodological problem for the twenty-first century scholar. We are unable to access sermons in their preached forms and can only guess, based on comments such as the ones above, what types of changes may have been made.134 This means that, for any given sermon, no completely accurate reconstruction is possible.

Furthermore, early modern preachers and auditories clearly considered the liveliness of the preacher’s voice to be a key feature of the genre, an essential part of the authority that led some to make such strong claims about the sermon as an instrument of salvation.

Despite these concerns, many who study sermons have proceeded by using the printed sermon while accepting the impossibility of accessing the preached sermon. Mary Morrissey

131 Green, “Continuity and Change,” 6.

132 Femke Molekamp, "Seventeenth-Century Funeral Sermons and Exemplary Female Devotion: Gendered Spaces and Histories." Renaissance and Reformation 35, no. 1 (2012), 46.

133 Examples touched on in this chapter include Smith’s A Fruitfull Sermon, Hieron’s The Dignitie of Preaching, and Traske’s The Power of Preaching.

134 Instances where we have both a manuscript record and a subsequent print version reveal that some of these changes are to those very contextually determined political statements towards which much critical effort is directed. See Hunt’s example of the changes made to John Donne’s 1622 Gunpowder Plot sermon, Art of Hearing, 293. Hunt argues, “It suggests that we need to exercise considerable caution in reading politically controversial passages from the sermon- as-text back into the sermon-as-event,” 294. See also Hunt’s section in The Art of Hearing, “Revising the Sermon,” 147- 163.

67 provides an extended argument for this practice in her book on the Paul’s Cross sermons.135 She argues that the best justification for doing so is that early modern readers and producers of printer sermons considered them to be “different versions of the same oration.”136 She argues that the paratextual accounts of changes made to sermons as they were prepared for print are, in fact, an indication that the printed sermon is “a record of the sermon preached.”137 Because the exposition of the scriptural text and the arguments that made up the doctrine and application was considered the essential core of the sermon, the printed sermon was seen as an accurate, if not exact, record of the original preached version by its early modern readers. Thus, Morrissey argues, her treatment of printed texts as accurate records of the preached sermon as an occasional event is legitimate.138

Necessity itself offers a compelling reason to accept Morrissey’s explanation of the practice she and others like her follow. In the literary pursuit of this study, however, there is perhaps reason to step back from this necessity. Morrissey theorizes that preachers may have polished and elevated the style of their sermons—especially in key, closing exhortations—as they prepared them for print in order to make up for what was lost in the intonation and expression of the live voice.139 Likewise,

Hunt finds instances where a preacher’s revised, printed version of a sermon had more prominent

135 See Morrissey, Politics and Paul’s Cross, 35-67.

136 Ibid., 35.

137 Ibid., 48.

138 Ibid., 67.

139 Morrissey, 58.

68 references to the situation of the sermon-as-event. He argues that these traces exist to “recreate the experience of participating in a ‘live’ event.”140

As noted before, while early modern preachers themselves claimed that the printed sermon was a weakened version of the preached sermon, they nevertheless saw fit to print it. Jennifer

Clement argues that there is room for consideration of printed sermons as more than simply the faulty record of the purest version of the sermon.141 While the emphasis of the past two decades has been on learning to read the sermon as a deeply occasional genre,142 Clement points out that studying sermons as “printed artifacts” opens important questions of context that go beyond original delivery, including questions of why they were printed and for which purposes.143

Thus, a study that aims to investigate closely the language of these hortatory moments must acknowledge that the literary study of early modern sermons is a study of printed sermons. Retained markers of their aural delivery provide some of the authority of the original delivery and collective auditory, yet these markers also extend the boundaries of the sermon’s collective reach. The language of the sermon, especially if heightened for print, becomes then a representation of the movement of faith in the original sermon. Reading sermons as specific events, tied to a date and auditory, has produced fruitful study. Recognizing that printed sermons are not a transcription of the preached sermon—yet nevertheless retain important ties to that performative event—allows us

140 Hunt, Art of Hearing, 160.

141 Compare Clement’s argument in “He Being Dead” with Hunt’s theory that print record cannot recover something essential about the sermon, The Art of Hearing, 8-9.

142 Lund finds that printed paratexts show that early modern preachers also saw their sermons as occasional. Lund, “Sermon Paratexts,” 148.

143 Clement, “He Being Dead,” 2-3.

69 to place them within their own context. Building on Clement’s adjustment to the current assumptions of the field, I contend that, far from a concession to limitation, such acknowledgement in fact opens a new door in our study.

IV. Artes Praedicandi

In our study of the literary dimensions of printed sermons, we are enabled by an awareness of the genre’s (disputed) spiritual authority and the complications of translating the experience of hearing a sermon to the printed page. The theory of preaching as it was articulated in the period, the ars praedicandi, offers a cohesive view of several additional elements of the genre. As we have seen, sermons varied widely in style, approach, and subject matter. Nevertheless, there are elements of common ground that early modern homiletic teaching tools can help us understand. These teachings were expounded in a number of instructional texts, the artes praedicandi, or sermon manuals. Their subject matter ranges from reading recommendations to instruction in demonstrating sincere passion to fundamental questions about the nature of preaching (such as the role of the preacher and the relationship between Scripture and earthly learning). From them we find a helpful orientation to significant features of the genre as we will encounter it in the next four chapters: the relationship between preaching and rhetoric, sermon form, and intertextuality.

Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century artes praedicandi, whether from continental humanists, prominent reformers like Melanchthon, or humble English compilers like Richard Bernard, have

70 their precedents in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century preaching manuals.144 In the story of ars praedicandi, there is perhaps no text more seminal than Erasmus’ Ecclesiastes. With twelve editions between 1535 and 1555, Ecclesiastes is recommended by Reformed preaching manuals from Perkins to Wilkins.145 Endorsing preaching as an important task for clergy, Erasmus defends passionate preaching which, borrowing from classical models of oratory, extends the foundational homiletics of

Augustine’s De Doctrina Christiana.146

Ecclesiastes addresses both the life of the preacher and the technical application of rhetorical skill, considering both necessary for effective preaching. In Book I, Erasmus articulates this as a distinction between “good faith” and “good judgement.”147 Like Augustine, Erasmus connects love and knowledge in the task of the preacher who must demonstrate love and himself be moved by love. He must also bring his auditors to apprehend faith through love.148 In preaching, “minds must be turned” through the preacher’s life and words as well as the work of the Holy Spirit.149

144 Peter Mack, A History of Renaissance Rhetoric, 1380-1620, Paperback ed. (Oxford University Press, 2011), 258. Debora Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric: The Christian Grand Style in the English Renaissance. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 55-59.

145 Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric, 63.

146 Mack, History of Renaissance Rhetoric, 98-102.

147 “The word of the gospel requires not only good faith but also good judgement in its steward… Good faith is shown by teaching the people only what the Lord has instructed, by everywhere considering sincerely his glory and the good of his holy flock; the role of judgement is to distinguish according to the circumstances of time, place, and person what is to be applied to whom, at what time, and with what discrimination.” Erasmus, Ecclesiastes (Book I), Edited by Frederick McGuiness, Translated by Michael J. Heath and James L.P. Butrica, Spiritualia and Pastoralia: Exomologesis and Ecclessiastes, Collected Works of Erasmus, Vol 67, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), 278.

148 Erasmus, “The most important thing for persuasion, then, is to love what you are urging; the heart itself supplies ardour of speech to the lover, and it brings the greatest force to effective teaching is display within yourself whatever you are teaching to others.” Erasmus, Ecclesiastes (Book I), vol 67, 299.

149 Ibid., 380.

Throughout Ecclesiastes, Erasmus seeks to orient his theories of preaching around “the simplicity of

Christ’s teaching and example.”150 Consequently, preaching is not for engaging in controversy, but for bringing salvation, moving the congregation to a moral life and building community through concord.151

Next to Erasmus in influence, the work of Melanchthon, especially De modo et arte concionandi, provides the theoretical basis for a specifically Protestant theory of preaching, one which prioritizes simplicity and passion.152 Melanchthon’s own theories of preaching were incomplete, but were developed by other Lutherans, including Niels Hemmingsen and Andreas Hyperius, who created more systematic preaching texts.153 Hemmingsen was translated into English and published as The

Preacher in 1574.154 Andreas Hyperius’ De Formandis concionibus sacris was translated into English as The

Practis of Preaching in 1577.155 In his “Epistle to the Reader,” John Horsfall, Hemmingsen’s translator, claims that this work was needed in English as an “arte out of the whiche the true and faithfull

Ministers of Christe, may learne playnely, and orderly, to breake and distribute the worde of God

150 Frederick McGuiness, “Introductory Note” to Erasmus’ Ecclesiastes, Vol 67, 237.

151 Erasmus considered the public nature of the sermon, delivered to an assembled gathering, to be essential to understanding the preacher’s task. McGuiness, “Introductory Note,” 121-122.

152 Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric, 67-69.

153 Ibid., 69.

154 Niels Hemmingsen, The preacher, or Methode of preachinge, vvrytten in Latine by Nich[olas] Hemminge, and translated into Englishe by I.H. Very necessarye for all those that by the true preaching of the Worde of God, labour to pull down the Synagoge of Sathair, and to buyide vp the Temple of God., trans. John Horsfall (London: By Thomas Marsh, Anno. 1574).

155 Andreas Hyperius. The Practis of preaching, otherwise called the Pathway to the Pulpit: Conteyning an excellent Method how to frame Divine Sermons, & to interpret the holy Scriptures according to the capacitie of the vulgar people, trans. John Ludham. (London: Thomas East, 1577).

72 unto the people.”156 Both works begin with principles for interpreting Scripture, continue through classification of sermon types and arrangement of material, and end with delivery.157

It is not until the 1590s that there is a significant English contribution to the ars praedicandi. It comes from the Puritan William Perkins, one of the best-selling theological writers of the period.158

While his most popular works were treatises of practical theology, his preaching was considered exemplary and influential.159 His sermons were well attended during his long Cambridge career and were published posthumously. His influential sermon manual, first published in Latin in 1592 as

Prophetica (later published in English as The Arte of Prophecying) has been called “the purest example of the Protestant version of the passionate plain style”160 and “a literary manifesto.”161 It also had something of an international reach, being twice published in Dutch.162 In Perkins we find the doctrine-and-use method of arrangement which would become known as the “English method.”163

156 John Horsfall, “Epistle to the Reader” The preacher, A4r.

157 Hemmingsen’s order is types of sermons, then arrangement, while Hyperius’s more developed consideration of arrangement, based on the model of the classical oration, comes first.

158 Ian Green’s sample of best sellers and steady sellers includes sixteen titles by Perkins; his catechism The Foundation of Christian Religion went into 34 editions between 1590 and 1723. See Appendix 1, Print and Protestantism.

159 Interestingly Chappell lists him as an example of elaborate sermons. The Preachers, or the Art and Method of Preaching: Shewing the most ample Directions and Rules for Invention, Method, Expression, and Books whereby a Minister may be furnished with such helps as may make him a Useful Laborer in the Lords Vineyard (London: Printed for Edw. Farnham, and are to be sold at his shop in Popes-head Palace neer Corn-hill, 1656), K9r. Peter Auski notes that he was influential across ideological spectrum during the post-Restoration period, Christian Plain Style: The Evolution of a Spiritual Ideal. (Montreal: MQUP, 1995), 289-290.

160 Shuger Sacred Rhetoric, 71.

161 W.B. Patterson, William Perkins and the Making of Protestant England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 133.

162 Mack, 273.

163 Green, “Continuity and Change,” 96. Morrissey, Politics and Paul’s Cross, 59.

The field of English sermon manuals contains other significant voices, as well. Richard

Bernard’s The Faithfull Shepherd was originally published in English in 1607, a notable exception among sermon manuals perhaps indicating his desire to make his aids available to less well educated clergy.164 Bernard is more open to the idea of “godly eloquence” than Perkins.165 He represents a strain of preaching not fully conformable to plain ideals.166 His work is both charming and practical.167

William Chappell’s The Preacher was not published in English until 1656, but it is likely that his instructions on preaching circulated in Latin manuscript within university circles before his death in 1649.168 Chappell’s manual is highly Ramist and methodical; it is filled with branching diagrams throughout. Usefully for our study, however, it contains a substantial list of recommended examples, ranging from Sibbes and Preston to Hooker and Andrewes.169 In his life, Chappell, who infamously

164 Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric, 96.

165 Bernard, The Faithfull Shepheard, 87.

166 Auski, Christian Plain Style, 285.

167 For instance, Bernard offers a number of suggestions, some in my personal experience quite useful, for classroom management while teaching the catechism: “Staie somewhat for an answer, but not too long: if one know not, aske another; if any but stammer at it, helpe him, and encourage him by commending his willingnesse. . . . Note the variety of wittes, and as they be, so deale with them; take a word or a piece of an answer from one, when you may expect much from another: teach with cheerefull countenance, familiarly, and lovingly.” The Faithfull Shepheard, 9.

168 "William Chappell (10 December 1582-14 May 1649)." In British Rhetoricians and Logicians, 1500-1660: First Series, edited by Edward A. Malone. Vol. 236, 91-98. Detroit: Gale, 2001, Accessed Feb 2018. http://link.galegroup.com.proxycu.wrlc.org/apps/doc/UDGFRP780010656/DLBC?u=wash31575&sid=DLBC&xid= 0fbca5c5.

169 “A Nomenclator of sundry Tracts, Sermons, and Commentaries, as may in some measure tend to make a skillful Laborer in the Lords Vineyard” Chappell, The Preachers, K5r.

74 clashed with Milton at Cambridge, also blurred lines between preaching camps; his life habits and preaching methods appear Puritan, but he was preferred by Laud and became Bishop of Cork.170

Finally, just after the period directly under consideration in this study, John Wilkins published his Ecclesiastes in 1646. Shuger writes that this influential work created a conduit for the

“ideal of warm, simple, logical preaching” from its pre-war Puritan form to late seventeenth-century practice within the Restoration church.171 After the Restoration, his manual was used both within and without the established church.172 His prose ideals also translated to secular contexts; Wilkins himself was a founding member of the Royal Society.173

There is in all the artes praedicandi a tension between what Arnold Hunt calls “charisma and routine.”174 Preaching was, especially in the understanding of Reformed churchmen like Perkins,

Bernard, Chappell and Wilkins, the very conduit by which God worked his will, bringing people to salvation. It contained within it the power of God’s breath. Yet there was a practical need for preachers to be trained and a demonstrable difference between good preaching and bad. Gregory

Kneidel distinguishes three main conceptual problems the artes praedicandi sought to work out, each one with practical ramifications. These are, first, the relationship between preaching and the

Scriptures; second, the definition of the preacher, including his distinction from mere orators on the one hand and from God, for whom he was understood to speak, on the other. Finally, the artes

170 Auski, Christian Plain Style, 294.

171 Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric, 98.

172 Auski, Christian Plain Style, 289.

173 Ibid.

174 Hunt, The Art of Hearing, 402.

75 praedicandi explored how the preacher might determine and address the needs of the Church and his individual auditors.175

For the purposes of this study, the instruction given in the artes praedicandi illuminates how preachers used secular rhetoric, Scripture and schemes of arrangement. Following Erasmus, early modern artes praedicandi appropriated the tools of secular orators. 176 Although they differed on the degree to which these tools were permissible or how much of the art of preaching they comprised, all of them allowed for the necessity of some method, art, or science in the preacher’s handling of his sermons. Whether proceeding with Perkins’ skepticism or Bernard’s more accepting appropriation, preachers understood their role to be similar enough to an orator to use some of the same tools, but fundamentally different enough that these tools required significant modification.

Bernard provides his readers with a list of topics for invention curated for use in Scriptural exegesis and, along with those, tropes and figures that might prove especially applicable.177

The wedding of rhetoric and homiletics is visible in both sermon manuals and sermons. For instance, Bernard suggests crafting the exhortation in conclusions: “heere in this place comes in the use of Rhetoricke, and to set abroach all the engins of that Arte and grace in speaking.”178 Many of the best preachers of the period practiced what Bernard describes.179 The perorations of sermons are

175 Gregory Kneidel, "Ars Praedicandi: Theories and Practice," in The Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon (Oxford University Press, 2011), 9.

176 For a full exploration of this, see Chapter 2 of Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric.

177 Bernard, The Faithfull Shepherd, 21, 67.

178 Ibid., 66.

179 Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric, 31.

76 often where the language reaches toward the sublime. At times this involves “the engine” of figures or perfectly balanced periods. At others, however, the sheer power of what the preacher is reaching for elevates, even when delivered in the simplest language.180

While Shuger argues that preaching is actually Sacred Rhetoric, Mary Morrissey asserts that it

“was not considered a branch (or genus) of rhetoric” but merely used rhetoric as a tool in a separate endeavor. Sermons and those who preached them were diverse enough that both are probably true.181 For instance, Wilkins says preaching is “a distinct Art of it self,”182 but later refers to the preacher as “a divine Orator.”183 Perkins calls the ars praedicandi a “sacred science.”184 With these terms, the writers of the artes predicandi are gesturing toward the slippery nature of preaching. It makes use of the conventions and tools of rhetoric, using knowledge, method and art, seeking something that is like persuasion. Yet in its focus on opening scripture and in its understanding of divine agency as the core of any successful preaching, we find significant distinctions. In the end, the goal is to move the auditory toward salvation, through the assent of both the intellect and the

180 Ibid., 241.

181 Shuger, 253 and Morrissey, “Scripture, Style, and Persuasion,” 694.

182 Wilkins, Ecclesiastes, 2.

183 Wilkins, Ecclesiastes, 5.

184 Perkins, “To the Faithful Ministers of the Gospel” in The Arte of Prophecying, A4r.

77 affections.185 Still preachers are often at pains to distinguish between when their auditors merely absorb information, even approvingly, and when they are changed.186

Any change is largely or completely (depending on the theological views of the preacher) a work of the divine. This renders a preacher’s straightforward pursuit of persuasion problematic. The preacher could be haunted by the question of whether his eloquence could muddy or actually block the genuine working of the divine in the souls of his auditory. Shuger argues that Augustine, faced with this same tension, finds “oratory that moves the emotions and loves of the soul, becomes a powerful instrument of redemption.”187 While early modern preachers may assert that it was God only who could give faith or move the will, even the most fervently reformed employ the sort of passionate language, which in reaching to express the things of salvation, is exactly designed to call forth the deepest love and affection within the human soul.188 As Jennifer Clement argues, “early modern sermons engage the passions not to repudiate or repress them, but to understand and redirect them towards God and towards salvation.”189

185 Not the wide range of affections involved. Bernard, for instance, mentions love, desire, hope, joy, shame, sorrow, and fear. The Faithfull Shepherd, 66 ff. This is the base of the study of John Donne’s sermons undertaken by Brent Nelson. Holy Ambition: Rhetoric, Courtship, and Devotion in the Sermons of John Donne (Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2005).

186 Thus a sermon, as Morrissey notes, may employ the tools of classical rhetoric, but in the end conceives of a different model of persuasion, “Scripture, Style, and Persuasion,” 689.

187 Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric, 48.

188 Shuger’s survey in Sacred Rhetoric finds a widespread “emphasis on the visual, dramatic, and figurative as the verbal equivalents of emotion.” 245.

189 Jennifer Clement, "Dearly Beloved: Love, Rhetoric and the Seventeenth-Century English Sermon." English Studies: A Journal of English Language and Literature 97, no. 7-8 (11/20, 2016), 727.

The relationship between preaching and the human art of speaking well, i.e. rhetoric, is further entangled by questions of what exactly the preacher does and the weight of his office.

Bernard makes this distinction: “Preaching should not be a labour of the lippes, or talke of toong from a light imagination: but a serious mediation of the heart in grounded knowledge by much study and illumination of the spirit.”190 While Bernard’s “much study” credits instruction, he also emphasizes spiritual inspiration. Most preachers during the period did not see a sermon as a product of their labor alone.191 When Donne places preaching among the ways “God comes to us” he says, “in his Ordinance of Preaching, God delivers himselfe to us.”192 Among the three agents, preacher, auditory, and God, God is the most active.

Nonetheless, practically, the human agent must compose the text. It was to assist in just such an endeavor that works ranging from Erasmus’ Ecclesiastes to the English artes praedicandi were written. The preacher’s heart is prompted both by God and “much study.” The greatest part of this study is the exhaustive knowledge of scriptural texts. The preacher’s library, however, should reflect other elements of his efforts, including training in logic, rhetoric, economics, law, and biblical languages. An educated clergy was much desired, yet the preacher should deploy this learning judiciously. So Perkins’ requires “the hiding of humane wisedome, and the demonstration (or shewing) of the spirit.”193 Wilkins argues that “to stuffe a Sermon with citations of Authors, and the

190 Bernard, The Faitthfull Shepherd, 11-12.

191 Morrissey, “Scripture, Style, and Persuasion,” 687.

192 John Donne, Sermons, ed. George Reuben Potter and Evelyn Mary Spearing Simpson, Vol 9, no. 4 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953), 18-19.

193 Perkins, The Arte of Prophecying, 132.

79 witty sayings of others, is to make a feast of vinegar and pepper, which may be very delightfull being used moderately as sauces, but must needs be very improper and offensive to be fed upon as diet.”194

Wilkins’ culinary metaphor implies that the meat or substance of the sermon is its presentation of Scripture. In this he is not alone. All four of the English manuals under consideration begin by establishing the connection between preaching and Scripture. Perkins writes,

“The perfect and equall object of Preaching is the Word of God.”195 Chappell says, “The Method of

Preaching is a discourse upon a Text of Scripture.”196 Bernard calls himself a “Preacher of Gods

Word” on the title page. Wilkins calls “the gift of preaching… an expertnesse and facility in the right handling and dividing the word of Truth.”197 All four devote significant space to instruction on the appropriate interpretation of Scripture. The manuals of Perkins, Chappell, Bernard, and Wilkins all agree that the central task of good preaching is interpreting Scripture well. The skills they recommended essentially equip the preacher to do a close reading of the text, bound by checks imposed from other passages, remaining sensitive (as much as possible, culturally and linguistically) to historical situation.198

194 John Wilkins, Ecclesiastes, 13.

195 Perkins, Arte of Prophecying, 4.

196 Chappell, The Preacher, 1.

197 Wilkins, Ecclesiastes, 3.

198 The older multi-level (historical, moral, allegorical, analogical) method of interpretation was rejected, at least in theory, for a more straightforward reading. James Thomas Ford, "Preaching in the Reformed Tradition." Preachers and People in the Reformations and Early Modern Period (2001): 69. In practice, even steadfastly reformed preachers could find sufficient layers of meaning in a text to push their interpretations toward what might be called allegorical.

Due to this emphasis, sermons in this period were intertextual. In addition to the Scriptural prompt text, the body of the sermon was almost always woven through with additional quotations, paraphrases, and allusions.199 Both manuscripts and printed sermons often took care to trace these references.200 In fact, the sermon’s oral status is complicated because in some essential way, sermons are extended close readings of literary texts.201 In this dependency on Scripture for both the shape and the language of their own work, seventeenth-century preachers are part of a homiletic tradition that reaches back to Augustine, who devotes most of De Doctrina Christiana to the proper interpretation of Scripture, for “the heart of the preacher must beat with the heart of Scripture.”202

Because of this, Morrissey argues that the early modern sermon was fundamentally “an act of biblical interpretation” and that the persuasive ends are accidental rather than central.203 This may, however, be an overstatement. While sermons are not simply persuasive rhetoric, as we have seen, many contemporaries did heavily emphasize the role of preaching in moving souls to salvation. For when a sermon is viewed as a means of grace, the tool through which God brings people to

199 Zepper recommends that all literate auditors bring their Bibles with them to church in order to follow along closely, The Art or Skilwell and Fruitfulie to Heare, 50-51.

200 Mary Ann Lund, "Early Modern Sermon Paratexts and the Religious Politics of Reading," in Material Readings of Early Modern Culture: Texts and Social Practices, 1580-173, ed. James Daybell and Peter Hinds, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010),.151. Mary Morrissey, "Sermon-Notes and Seventeenth-Century Manuscript Communities." Huntington Library Quarterly: Studies in English and American History and Literature 80, no. 2 (2017): 299. Jennifer Clement argues textual aids like the inclusion of marginal references and tables of the referenced scriptural texts enhance the intertextuality of the printed sermon. "He being Dead, Yet Speaketh: The Preacher's Voice in Early seventeenth‐century Posthumous Sermon Collections." Renaissance Studies (December 2017), 13.

201 Adam Fox and D.R. Wolf, The Spoken Word: Oral Culture in Britain, 1500-1850 (New York: Manchester University Press, 2003), 12. Morrissey, “Ornament and Repetition”, 303.

202 Peter Sanlon, Augustine's Theology of Preaching, (Lanham: Fortress Press, 2014), 67.

203 Morrissey, “Scripture, Style, and Persuasion,” 693.

81 repentance, then the response of the auditors is its final cause. Nevertheless, understanding sermons as a means to a response must be held in tension with understanding sermons as a means to opening and interpreting Scripture.

Among the practical concerns of the English artes praedicandi were strategies for the arrangement of the material generated by these two facets of the sermon. In the broadest sense, there were two major demands from the preacher for any given situation: first, to explicate the

Scriptural text and, second, to apply this text to the particular congregation before him. Each of the

English sermon manuals devotes some space to the problems of arrangement generated by this two- fold purpose, offering schemes with varying degrees of flexibility. In practice, however, we can see that while almost all sermons began with a short text (usually a verse or two) and used that text to support their sermon in some way, few rigidly adhere to structural advice.204

In structure, the early modern sermon was an adaptation of several strands of sacred rhetoric developed throughout the medieval period. As regular hearing of sermons increased throughout

England during the fifteenth and early sixteenth century, pre-Reformation preaching developed two basic arrangements. The first was essentially a continuation of the form in use for centuries, a linear development of a theme, either on the text for the liturgical reading associated with the day, a topical exploration of a moral principle, or an event from the life of a saint or group of saints. 205 The

204 In an article in which he sets out his case for approaching the study of sermons via discourse analysis, Mark Garner thoroughly demonstrates how the sermons of Robert Rollock at times adhere to conventional homiletic teaching on structure and at times veer away from it or include passages beyond those named in such manuals. "Preaching as a Communicative Event: A Discourse Analysis of Sermons by Robert Rollock (1555-1599)." Reformation & Renaissance Review 9, no. 1 (2007): 53-54.

205 J.W. Blench, Preaching in England in the Late Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries; a Study of English Sermons 1450-c. 1600, (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1964), 72ff. Spencer, English Preaching, 24.

82 second, more innovative, was essentially an adaptation of the form of a classical oration. Early reformers adopted the former, the simpler of the two arrangements, but prioritized the use of

Scripture as a basis for the sermon.206

Erasmus’ influential Ecclesiastes, especially, led to the waning popularity of the thematic as opposed to the exegetical sermon.207 Thus, we find exegetical, but fairly linear sermons in the mid- sixteenth century. 208 Between Latimer and Hieron, the Reformed sermon coalesced into a familiar, yet flexible pattern: doctrine-and-use.209 These sermons began with a text, which was then interpreted to arrive at a “doctrine” or doctrines, followed by the “use” of those doctrines. Division of the text could function as a method of arrangement, helpful to the auditor in taking notes as well as to the preacher as he invented his material.210 While the doctrine-and-use method of arrangement is associated with Puritan preaching, these conventions are almost uniformly visible, although deployed in many different ways, in the sermons of the period.

For Puritans like Perkins, who were committed to the ideal of plain preaching, there is a purity in the simplicity and strength of the doctrine-and-use method. For Perkins, the four necessary parts of a sermon are:

1. To read the Text distinctly out of the Canonicall Scriptures.

206 Blench, Preaching in England, 87. Ford finds the preaching of the reformed tradition breaks off from others most specifically with Zwingli’s introduction of expositional preaching from a specific, short text, “Preaching in the Reformed Tradition,” 65.

207 Wabuda, Preaching, 68-70.

208 In surveying the sermons of Hugh Latimer, Blench notes most “suffer from looseness of structure and are encumbered with digressions.” Blench’s verbs reflect a preference for sermons with tighter structure, but in both a literary and utilitarian sense Latimer’s sermons can be seen as more than successful. Blench, Preaching in England, 92.

209 Ford, “Preaching in the Reformed Tradition,” 72-73.

210 Morrissey, “Sermon-Notes,” 295-296.

2. To give the sense and understanding of it being read by the Scripture it selfe. 3. To collect a few and profitable points of doctrine out of the natural sense. 4. To applie (if he have the gift) the doctrines rightly collected to the life and manners of men, in a simple and plaine speech.211

These four points line up with the practice of most preachers of the period. Significantly, however, this concluding table is given the following title: “THE ORDER AND SUMME | of the sacred and only method | of Preaching.”212

Most sermons of the period followed Perkins’ general pattern. Some sermons, however, preserved the simpler, pre-Reformation form of developing a single theme, albeit nearly always tied to a short Scriptural text.213 Very occasionally a thematic sermon might still be preached, but because preaching was, at this point, so closely connected to the opening of Scripture, sermons are overwhelmingly tied to a specific text, which could be made quite elastic in its connection to what the preacher wished to say.214

When Bernard recommends cloaking the “doctrine” and “use” in favor of “in speaking knit them altogether in a continued speech after the manner of an oration,” he is describing the general

211 Perkins, The Arte of Prophecying, 148.

212 Ibid., 148.

213 Blench, Preaching in England, 100.

214 Richard James’ 1630 Sermon, “A History of Lent-Fast,” is an example of one of these thematic sermons. James presented a survey of the practice of the early church and the origins and practice of Lent. He begins by anticipating and deflecting criticism for his lack of a text, “You must not deeme it a tricke and affectation of noveltie, if I now prefere no Text unto my Sermon” (E1r). This sermon is published under the title page, A Sermon delivered in Oxford. Concerning the Apostles Preaching and Ours, (London: Printed by William Stanssy for Nathaniel Butter. 1630). James’ very detailed, historically based sermon seems in line with his life calling as he was a polyglot, an antiquarian, and the first librarian of the Cotton Library. Tom Beaumont James. "James, Richard (bap. 1591, d. 1638), antiquary." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 28 Feb. 2018. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-14617.

84 practice of most sermons during the early seventeenth century.215 More often than not, especially in more elaborate court or city sermons, the doctrine and use schema was complicated into an arrangement patterned after a classical argument.216 Hyperius, following Erasmus, offers an adaptation of the form of a classical oration. An exordium followed the text, then a division of the text into parts, followed by an extensive argument. This argument was organized as much by the divisions of the text as by divisions of doctrine and application. Like a classical oration, the sermon would often incorporate refutations of objections to either the doctrine in question or its use. The sermon would conclude with a peroration that combined a summary of the teaching with an emotionally heightened exhortation. The final paragraph often blended into the prayer that would follow the sermon.

At times the primary division between doctrine and use does not hold and the two mingle together very closely, the parts nearly indistinguishable. At other times a more elaborate scheme of arrangement is visible, including the divisions Bernard makes of text, scope, doctrine, use, application, objection, prevention of the objection, and loving exhortation.217 His arrangement

215 Bernard, The Faithfull Shepherd, 79-80.

216 “By the end of the seventeenth century, flexible versions of four basic sermon structures—the homily, the thematic sermon, the classical oration, and the doctrine-use scheme—had been theorized for the use of English preachers. Kneidel, “Ars Praedicandi,” 17. “The ‘plaine, easy way of Doctrine and use’, should be seen, therefore, as a simplified version of the same method of composition used by Donne, Andrewes, and other regulars at court and Paul’s Cross.” Morrissey, Pauls Cross, 59.

217 In practice Bernard’s Faithfull Shepherd offers something more like an arrangement in seventeen parts: (a) an opening prayer, (b) the text with an option preface “to stirre up the auditorie to attention” (15), (c) a basic explanation and contextualization of the text, including what he calls the scope, which is “the principall intendment of the Holy Ghost” (20), (d) the division, (e) an explanation of any major difficulties in interpretation, (f) a propositional list of doctrines implied by the text, (g) proof of the doctrines, (h) an exhortation “to the imbracing of this doctrine” (59), (i) the use, (j) a refutation of any errors, (k) a proof for points of instruction, (l) a stirring up of the affections before the application, (m) the application, “a nearer bringing of use” (70), (n) a prevention of objections to the application, (o) the “knitting up” of the conclusion (79), and (p) the closing prayer.

85 distinguishes between a general use, practical implications of the text, and a more affectionate application of the text to the auditory at hand. For Bernard, application is the personal side of use, which is the “sharp-edge of the sword” and should be made in the second person.218 Perkins divides the application into “Mentall or Practicall,” which re-blurs the distinction between doctrine and use, in much the same way that Melanchthon collapses preaching that teaches into that which moves to action. When belief is made central to the Christian life, to understand doctrine is itself a kind of action. Furthermore, the proper knowledge of a truth includes realizing its affective power.219 Thus, even in the arrangement of material, we find unresolved questions about the heart of how a sermon does what it does.

Finally, the artes praedicandi survey the practical pastoral homiletics which spring from an intimate knowledge of the spiritual and temporal states of those to whom a sermon was preached.

“He that will profit a people, must skillfully discerne his auditorie.”220 As we have seen in the scholarly movement towards reading sermons as deeply contextual texts, this discernment of the auditory must be a fundamental part of the analysis of any sermon, both for twenty-first century scholars and seventeenth-century preachers sitting down to write them.221 The nature of the genre

218 Ibid., 71.

219 Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric, 68.

220 Bernard, The Faithfull Shepherd, 8.

221 An interesting test of this is possible in the sermon corpus of preachers whose published sermons include those before multiple auditories. For example, although recognizably from the same preacher, Lancelot Andrewes’ strategies in his sermons at court vary widely from those employed in his Spital sermon.

86 itself demands this; in some ways the preacher must always be subject to his congregation in service in a way that a poet or playwright is not.222

The corollary of this highly sensitive rhetorical knowledge is an awareness of the human limitations of those in attendance. The weakness or indifference of the people is a theme of preaching handbooks as well as a voiced concern of preachers speaking before widely varied auditories.223 Yet despite their best efforts, preachers faced the knowledge that much of what they said would not be remembered or would be remembered incorrectly. Ford writes, “a certain communicative impasse existed between the preacher’s intent and the popular reception.”224 The sermons of the period evidence an optimistic belief that fairly complex arguments will be understood and received. Nevertheless, we can also see the accommodation of the limits of human attention and memory during aural reception of a long argument. Thus, sermons are marked by repetition of the text especially, by the formation of easily perceptible structural markers, and by the deployment of pithy and memorable phrases summarizing the main points.225

As examined in the literary readings of printed sermons which comprise this study, the essential generic characteristics of the early modern sermon are its spiritual importance; retention of the authoritative, collective context of the preached sermon; complicated relationship to persuasion

222 “With particularizing of his speech now to the younger sort, then to the elder, now to the poor, and now to the rich. This is for you, and This is for you.” Herbert, A Priest to the Temple, 22. Crockett, “Holy Cozenage,” 49.

223 See, for instance, Laura Feitzinger Brown’s summary of Robert Wilkinson’s concerns in his sermon on the importance of hearing. "Brawling in Church: Noise and the Rhetoric of Lay Behavior in Early Modern England." Sixteenth Century Journal: Journal of Early Modern Studies 34, no. 4 (Winter, 2003): 963.

224 Ford, “Preaching in the Reformed Tradition,” 83.

225 Garner points out the importance of these discourse markers in the oral delivery of sermons, “Preaching as a Communicative Event,” 57. Zepper interlaces his advice to hearers with asides to preachers to include these sort of aids, “The Art or Skil Well and Fruitfullie to Heare,” 89.

87 and use of classical rhetoric; necessary intertextual relationship with scripture; and the flexible deployment of formal structures, most prominently doctrine and use. Within these boundaries, the sermon fills a vast literary landscape. Generalizations regarding style, use of sources other than

Scripture, subject matter, and degrees of investment in contemporary events and controversies are often the sort of generalizations that exist only to be qualified. Among the work that remains to be done in the study of the early modern English sermon is that which advances our understanding of the literary strategies and power of the best of the sermons, especially those which construct the community of the English church. For many of the period’s greatest literary minds, the church was their vocation, and they worked out their calling in their sermons. In A Priest to the Temple, George

Herbert says of the ideal country clergyman: “the pulpit is his joy and his throne.”226 In the four chapters that follow, we will read some of these literary sermons.

226 Herbert, A Priest to the Temple, 21.

Chapter 3 Hunger: Sacramental Participation in the Sermons of Lancelot Andrewes

A solitary, studious man, Lancelot Andrewes is a paradoxical figure: pious and ecstatic, a favored preacher and advisor of an extravagant and distemperate king. He advocated unity in the church while holding idiosyncratic positions on many of the fraught religious questions of day. He advocated peace while providing much of the theological framework for Laud’s disastrous course of ecclesiastical policy. His writing was subject to fierce interpretive battles even before his death, and since then has been excerpted and arranged by many different editors, who have tended to frame

Andrewes’ eloquence in line with their own preoccupations.

Andrewes’ prose style has the density of poetry. His homiletic approach is driven by an assurance of the significance of language, especially the language of Scripture. Andrewes finds that words are worth mining, as he extends their meanings with connections built through etymology and sound patterns. His syntax also carries something of the strain of poetry. It is knotty; he flexes his sentences, stripping them of verbs or piling up dependent clauses. At times, his taut phrases splinter as he circles back to build on a point. While he often relies on antithesis, chiasmus and paradox, his powerful sentences often cannot clearly stand alone, since most paragraphs are woven together tightly and phrases take on layered significance in context. Despite his rhetorical training and tendency to fill his sermons with Latin, Greek, and even Hebrew, his learning does not trap his prose in the ornamental conventions of the Elizabethan period. A passage from one of Andrewes’ sermons is almost instantly recognizable when viewed beside other late sixteenth and early seventeenth-century prose samples.1 As the best prose stylists do, he allows the distinctive features

1 Laud mimics Andrewes’ style to some degree, but does not achieve his density or vigor.

89 of his style, especially the repetition of short phrases, the generation of ideas through additive syntax, and formal schemes such as parallelism, antithesis, and paradox to shape his thoughts as well as his words. Ornate, difficult, and zoetic, Andrewes’ prose style, as exemplified in his sermons, is one of the treasures of the period. Described at the time as “witty,” his sermons were lauded by some, most prominently James I, and disparaged by others.2

As critical interest in sermons has increased, Andrewes’ star has risen, attracting attention beyond Anglican circles, where he has long been venerated. Recent scholarship has contributed to our understanding of Andrewes’ place in English ecclesiastical history, the political implications of his position at court, his theological thought, and his use of language.3 Such critical efforts present valuable inroads to understanding and appreciating one of the great masters of the English language.4

2 For instance, Herbert is generally assumed to be criticizing Andrewes when he says, “Crumbling a text into small parts, as, the Person speaking, or spoken to, the subject, and the object, and the like, hath neither in it sweetnesse, nor gravity, nor variety, since the words apart are not Scripture, but a dictionary.” George Herbert, A Priest to the Temple, or, The Countrey Parson His Character, and Rule of Holy Life (London: Printed by T. Maxey for T. Garthwait, at the little North door or St Paul’s. 1652), 27. On witty versus spiritual preaching see John Knott, The Sword of the Spirit: Puritan Responses to the Bible (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 42-44.

3 Even though limited, Peter McCullough’s Selected Sermons and Lectures represents a significant scholarly step forward and opens doors for future scholarship. McCullough is also working on a biography. There is yet no comprehensive scholarly edition of his works, and the most complete biography available, Welsby’s Lancelot Andrewes, is somewhat parochial in nature. Lancelot Andrewes, Lancelot Andrewes : Selected Sermons and Lectures, ed. Peter McCullough (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). Paul A. Welsby, Lancelot Andrewes, 1555-1626 (London: S.P.C.K., 1958).

4 In addition to McCullough’s extensive work on Andrewes, for work that combines appreciation and understanding see especially Ashmore, Read, Reisner, Shuger, and Wesley. Joseph Ashmore. "Faith in Lancelot Andrewes's Preaching." Seventeenth Century 32, no. 2 (2017): 121-138. Sophie Read, "Lancelot Andrewes's Sacramental Wordplay." Cambridge Quarterly 36, no. 1 (2007): 11-31. Noam Reisner, "Textual Sacraments: Capturing the Numinous in the Sermons of Lancelot Andrewes." Renaissance Studies: Journal of the Society for Renaissance Studies 21, no. 5 (11, 2007). Debora Shuger, Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance: Religion, Politics, and the Dominant Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), especially 17-68.

Among the many paradoxes uncovered in the study of Andrewes’ work is his discomfort with the very passion for sermon-going that made the early seventeenth century so fruitful for the genre. James I’s patronage of the sermon, carried with him from Scotland to England, made it the most significant literary form of the Jacobean court.5 Yet Andrewes’ ‘avant-garde’ (or traditionalist) opinions about appropriate forms of worship put him at odds with the Reformed emphasis on the preached Word as the primary means of grace.6 Recent scholarship on Andrewes often describes his position as paradoxically anti-sermon. It is true that Andrewes’ vision of the church is one in which the sacramental is elevated; it is, however, equally true that Andrewes’ sermons place enormous value on the power of “prophesying” (i.e. preaching) to transform the will and affections. However much Andrewes desired an appropriately sacramental English Church, he nonetheless presents both the Word and preaching as irreplaceable vehicles of grace.

Andrewes’ practical theology is best understood by rejecting opposition between sermon and prayer, that is, the ordinances of worship which were not sermons, especially the sacraments.7 His sermons are best understood as vessels for a communal experience, complementing the active, ceremonial worship he is known for championing. Andrewes’ approach is most holistically realized in contexts where the auditory participates physically in the sacrament of the Eucharist. Andrewes’

5 Peter McCullough, Sermons at Court: Politics and Religion in Elizabethan and Jacobean Preaching (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 101.

6 Lori Anne Ferrell finds James’ preference for Andrewes, represented in the number of his court sermons which James ordered into printed, to indicate that however idiosyncratic his voice, he was still representative of the state of the Jacobean church. Government by Polemic: James I, the King's Preachers, and the Rhetorics of Conformity, 1603-1625 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 170-171.

7 Peter Lake, “The Laudian Style: Order, Uniformity and the Pursuit of the Beauty of Holiness” in The Early Stuart Church, 1603–1642, ed. Kenneth Fincham (London: Palgrave, 1993), 170.

91 pre-Eucharistic sermons, those delivered on the feast days of Christmas, Easter, and Whitsunday, create the religious context for the distinctive homiletics that draw his auditors to partake in the sermon itself.8

I. “A Folly to Fall to Comparisons:”9 Andrewes’ Pastoral Theology

While controversy, the pressures of politics, and an awareness of his own historical situation are present, they are not Andrewes’ primary emphasis. This chapter will first consider Andrewes’ work as a whole—irenic, sacramental, communitarian—and then examine the linguistic markers of such a reading in three individual sermons. My approach centers Andrewes’ positive soteriology, a vision of a communal restoration of humanity. Andrewes emphasizes his auditory’s place within a

Christianity that involves not only redemption from sin but the eventual glorification of all believers in “perfect, compleat, absolute fulnesse.”10 The picture of the church on earth that Andrewes presents, including in his characteristic positions on the sacraments and the liturgy, is oriented toward anticipating this end. It is in his articulation of this that we find his finest writing.

Nicholas Lossky’s Lancelot Andrewes, the Preacher prioritizes this positive theology.11 Lossky argues that Andrewes’ theology is significant because it “enabl[ed] a whole era to grasp the genuine

8 McCullough, Selected Sermons and Lectures, xxi.

9 “It were a folly to fall to comparisons, Committere inter se, to set them at oddes together, these two waies: as the fond fashion now adaies is, whether is better, Prayer or Preaching: The Word, or the Sacraments.” Easter, 1620. Selected Sermons and Lectures, 242.

10 Selected Sermons and Lectures, 177.

11 Lossky’s book, originally published in French, approaches Andrewes’ theology from a primarily spiritual rather than historical or literary perspective, although it is scholarly and not devotional in nature. Nicolas Lossky, Lancelot Andrewes the Preacher (1555-1626): The Origins of the Mystical Theology of the Church of England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).

92 essence of the Christian message.”12 Lossky’s account of Andrewes’ theology lists the following distinctive concerns: the Incarnation, historically sanctioned Christology, the Holy Spirit as a giver of grace, the Holy Spirit as a distinct, divine person, sacramentalism, and anti-individualism.13 In contrast, most critical debates about Andrewes’ theology focus on the more politically tinged ones of his possible Arminianism (and definite anti-Calvinism), the ceremonies surrounding the sacraments, his support of the monarchy and episcopacy, and his purported anti-sermonism.14 Since

Andrewes—conservative, liberal, avant-garde, idiosyncratic conformist—inhabits a complicated space within the political-theological world of Jacobean England there are many intricacies to tracing his position. 15

Such critical efforts are influenced by the efforts of various parties in the seventeenth century to claim Andrewes’ legacy for their own.16 In the late twentieth century, historians such as

Peter Lake and Nicholas Tyacke focused on the elements of distinction between the various factions

12 Lossky, 6. Although whether this collective grasping happened, given the history of the period, is up for debate.

13 Ibid., 327 ff.

14 See, for example, Nicholas Tyacke, "Lancelot Andrewes and the Myth of Anglicanism" in Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, c. 1560-1660, ed. Peter Lake and Michael Questier (Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2000), 5-33. Peter Lake, "Lancelot Andrewes, John Buckeridge, and Avant-Garde Conformity at the Court of James I" in The Mental World of the Jacobean Court, ed. Linda Levy Peck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 113-133. Interestingly, however, in Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church Lake looks at the broadened concerns of Puritans at this time. Moreover, he argues, “Although the issue of church polity and the conduct of public polemic may dominate the printed works of Thomas Cartwright or Walter Travers, there is no reason to suppose that such issues and activities also dominated their lives in the church as pastors and preachers” (285). Similar expansion can be made for Andrewes. The most visible points of conflict are not always the most important things. Peter Lake. Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).

15 See the examination of Hooker and Andrewes’ theology in Shuger, Habits of Thought, 22-24.

16 See, for example, McCullough, "Making Dead Men Speak: Laudianism, Print, and the Works of Lancelot Andrewes 1626-1642." The Historical Journal 41, no. 2 (1998): 401-424.

93 in the Elizabethan-Jacobean church. Often, the externally located elements of battle—the place of the sermon in the service, for example, or the orientation of the communion table—are not only easier to trace, but also reliable indicators of broader positions. To pinpoint Andrewes’ location within this milieu requires a nuanced accounting of his public teaching (and, to a lesser extent, insofar as evidence is available, his private practice) on these matters. Given Andrewes’ status as a sometimes lonely forerunner, who was later the polemicized champion of the via media, paradoxically at the center and on the outskirts of the Jacobean project, such treatment is not only understandable, but necessary.17 Certainly Andrewes himself was interested in these questions, famously considering

“the beauty of holiness, a reverent, ceremonious, and uniform public worship of God” to be no small matter.18

Yet as an entry point into a full engagement with the sermons themselves, this controversy- inflected characterization of Andrewes’ theology is insufficient. In viewing the imprint of his presence on the court over nearly a half century, we may also consider the way in which he operated as a church leader who was often at odds with his ecclesiastical context. Although Andrewes shares many theological positions with Laud, it is notable that his leadership was far less aggressive. We should bear this difference in mind when reading passages like the following from the 1609 Easter sermon: “For, we under-value it [peace], at too low a rate, when (that, which cost so deere) for every trifling ceremonie, we are ready to lose it.”19 Such sentiments may be interpreted as an underhanded

17 A position nicely reflected by Lake’s choice of the label “Avant-Garde Conformity.” See also Fincham and Lake’s discussion about the level of theological agreement and tolerance within the Jacobean Church. “The Ecclesiastical Policy of King James I” Journal of British Studies Vol. 24, No. 2, (Apr., 1985): 195-207.

18 Lake, “Avant-Garde Conformity,” 128.

19 Ibid., 418.

94 attempt to silence disagreement, but given Andrewes’ status within the church in 1609, it is reasonable to hear a genuine plea for an irenic ecclesiology.

Andrewes’ eschewal of controversy is not the ironically heavy-handed enforcement of moderation that Ferrell considers so central to James I’s ecclesiastical policy, but an active pursuit of peace and unity.20 Scholarship on Andrewes’ life is often influenced by the parochial nature of his most significant admirers, from Buckeridge to Eliot. Consequently, there is a tendency to allow moral judgment to spread from evaluation of the man to evaluation of his work. When Canon

Welsby, his biographer, judges him a “morally weak” man21 he minimizes the achievement of his sermons.22 Welsby faults Andrewes for being too concerned with politics—in the invective of the

Gunpowder and Gowrie Plot sermons—and too willing to defer to power—by holding his tongue in front of James. Lake hypothesizes that Andrewes did not present a more coherent and sustained defense of his position during his lifetime because he was in the minority and could not risk upsetting James I. Lake’s judgement is less harsh than Welsby’s, but he too finds Andrewes lacking.23

20 Ferrell, Government by Polemic, 4.

21 Welsby, 228.

22 For instance, Welsby evaluates the quality of the man alongside the quality of his sermons: “The sermons reveal a man possessed of a depth of insight and devotion and with the ability to move the hearts of his auditors. They convey the personality of one who would seem to have had first-hand experience of the mysteries of the faith he talked of and who was concerned that understanding of the Christian doctrines should never be separated from the leading of the Christian life. Here is manifest a character which is grave, learned, dignified, possessed of a certain sense of humour and of a humility before great mysteries…. The truth of these things is not to be gainsaid. But it is questionable whether it can be regarded as quite the whole truth, for Andrewes was Court Preacher, not only at Christmas, Easter, or Whitsun. Year by year he entered the pulpit on the anniversary of Gunpowder Plot and the Gowrie Conspiracy, and the words uttered on those occasions reveal a severity, a harshness, a polemic, a lack of charity and understanding, which, though characteristic of the age, assort oddly with the temper of his other sermons. Yet the same mind produced both. There is even in his sermons the kind of duality which can be noted in almost every aspect of his life and work.” Welsby, 264.

23 Welsby, 228. “Andrewes, it might be said, was a man chronically devoid of both political sense and gumption, unwilling to take the necessary risks to fight for what he believed in.” Lake, “Avant-Garde Conformity,” 132.

Yet what if Andrewes did not lack courage, but prioritized something other than his own will? For

Andrewes pursuing unity, order, and peace at times meant compromise on policies that would have, on their face, resulted in a more unified church.24 As his defense of Archbishop Abbot—a man whose policies, life and churchmanship were antithetical to his own—indicates, Andrewes’ refusal to engage in a vehement and disruptive fight for his desires may not be the weakness it is sometimes interpreted as being.

While Andrewes’ sermons reflect his active participation in affairs of state, they also demonstrate his role as a spiritual influence on the king. A good example of this tension can be found in the 1604 Good Friday sermon. The first of two surviving Good Friday sermons Andrewes preached before King James I, it was offered near the end of the first year of James’ reign.

Andrewes uses the exordium to establish the terms in which the argument of the sermon should be approached. He reminds the king that his affairs are less important than the crucifixion, “Be they never so great, your occasions; they are not, they cannot be so great as this: How urgent soever, this is more, and more to be intended. The regard of this, is worthy the staying of a journey. It is worth the considering of those, that have never so great affaires in hand.”25 For Andrewes, spiritual outcomes matter more than kingdoms, a premise that informs his critiques of James’ paradoxically enthusiastic and fruitless attitudes toward sermons: “Men may drowsily heare it, and coldly affect it; But

24 Unity is partly an ideal because “for being so togither, we are nearer our Peace.” Lancelot Andrewes, XCVI. Sermons by the Right Honorable and Reverend Father in God, Lancelot Andrewes, Late Lord Bishop of Winchester. Published by His Majesties Specially Command, ed. William Laud and John Buckeridge (London: George Miller for Richard Badger, 1629), 417. (Subsequent references to this edition will be to XCVI.)

25 XCVI, 352.

Principalities and Powers stand abashed at it.”26 The first clause is an indictment of both practice, hearing without attention, and result, failing to be moved. Yet after the ‘but,’ Andrewes asserts that real power exists outside of the temporal realm, manifest by the power of the crucifixion. If James and his court are not moved, they are missing something essential. Though the critique is oblique—

Andrewes does not, for instance, state outright that the devotional practices of the monarch sitting in front of him are at fault—they nevertheless indicate a priority of allegiances and purposes.27

Neither primarily self-preservation nor simply expert Stuart propaganda, Andrewes’ navigation of church and state forms the framework for an irenic, communitarian and participatory body of sermons. His 1609 Easter sermon on John 20:19 illustrates Andrewes’ concerns.28 He argues that Christ’s words in this text reveal the peace he brings to those who are simultaneously undeserving and needy, a condition shared by his auditory. Christ’s gift of peace and reconciliation for the disciples extends outward: “Pax vobis, is as much, as Pacem habete in vobis, Be at peace among your selves.’”29 Because Christ offers people peace, they can in turn behave in peaceful ways.

Andrewes claims that this passage is a call to imitate Christ in the bringing of peace. Meditating on its significance within the Christian life,30 he argues for peace within the English church and

26 Ibid., 357.

27 An extended exploration of Andrewes’ particular engagement with the demands of obedience to God and monarch can be found in Neil Barkley Johnston’s dissertation, Pulpit Rhetoric and the Conscience: The Gunpowder Plot Sermons of Lancelot Andrewes. Unpublished dissertation, 2011. ProQuest.

28 “The same day then, at night, which was the first day of the week, and when the doores were shutt, where the Disciples were assembled for feare of the Jews, came JESUS and stood in the middest, and said to them, Peace be unto you.” XCVI, 414.

29 XCVI, 415.

30 Indeed, we find here some justification for the Anglican infatuation with Andrewes as spokesperson: “And the way, to peace is the mid-way; neither to the right hand, too much; nor, to the left hand, too little. In a word; all analogie, symmetrie, harmonie, in the world, goeth by it.” XCVI, 421.

“through the Christian world.”31 Yet Andrewes also acknowledges that peace is not the de facto state of things. Rather, because contention defines human existence, peace must be actively sought. The final vision of the sermon links the historical manifestation of peace (fleeting as it is) and the final consummation of salvific peace.32

My approach to Andrewes’ sermons prioritizes this irenicism. Lossky finds in Andrewes’ sermons a positive articulation of the theology of the English Church, broader than simple anti-

Calvinism and ceremonialism.33 In conceiving of Andrewes as occupied with defining a middle way between Rome and Geneva, we constrain his spiritual (and, I might add, artistic) vision to one of negation, unable to transcend the politics of its historical circumstances.34

Debora Shuger sees the structure of faith in Andrewes as one of deferment, ever elusive and signified in large part by the awareness of its absence.35 While this sort of longing is no doubt present for Andrewes, there is a center, a resolution. This center is the hope of glorification which

“the eye, by all it can see; the eare, by all it can heare; the heart, by all it can conceive, cannot patterne

31 Ibid., 422.

32 Ibid., 419.

33 Lossky, 326.

34 “There is then no flight from present historical reality in Lancelot Andrewes’ attitude, either into some kind of hankering after the past, or into an eschatologism of a millenarian type. If he is little involved in the religious quarrels of his own time, it is not from flight into another time, but because in his theological vision most of these problems are seen to be bypassed by the rediscovery of a theological language that will not let itself be shut up in the more or less rationalizing impasses of the conflict between Reform and Counter-Reform. It is a matter in fact of a language that refuses to submit the mystery to the necessities of the categories of human understanding. It is, on the contrary, reason that, going to its very limits, seeks to make itself adequate to contemplation of the mystery.” Lossky, 350.

35 Shuger, Habits of Thought, 86. This description fits Donne’s sermons more neatly than it does those of Andrewes.

98 it, or set the like by it.”36 In nearly every sermon Andrewes returns to this hope, and in many of the finest, it is the consummation of the sermon’s rhetorical motion.

For Andrewes salvation is more than pardon from an afterlife in hell. Rather as the mercy of

God transforms enemies into family through adoptions, redemption offers a new life.37 He often pauses to clarify that the Christians he is addressing are not simply pardoned enemies of a technically satisfied judge, but are so fully reconciled to God that they are part of his household.

While judicial salvation is individual, a verdict on the state of a single soul, adoption into the family of God is inherently communal.

The eventual consummation of this adoption is complete harmonious union with the Trinity and with other Christians. So in speaking of the benefits won by Christ’s sacrifice in the 1604 Good

Friday sermon, Andrewes says, “Not to the same estate, but to one nothing like it: (that is) One far better, than the estate, our sinnes berefit us. For they deprived us of Paradise, a place on earth: but by the purchase of his blood, we are entitled to a farre higher, even the Kingdome of Heaven.”38 Andrewes’ phrase “the Kingdome of Heaven” signifies more than the idea of escaping earth to the happier afterlife possibility. Rather, it is a comprehensive transformation in status made possible by a relationship change as well as a legal one.

The full meaning of redemption was a source of wonder to Andrewes: “We made the Sonnes of God, as Hee the Sonne of man; We made partakers of his Divine, as He of our humane nature…For who

36 XCVI, 361.

37 Using the Pauline term “joynt Heires” with Christ, Andrewes emphasizes the concept of adoption. See Selected Sermons and Lectures, 174. Romans 8:17.

38 XCIV, 361.

99 ever heard of a condemened man, Adopted afterward; or that thought it not enough and enough, if Hee did but scape, with his life?”39 These ideas of reconciliation, adoption, and full restoration in the union of eternity orient Andrewes’ theology and provide the rhetorical center of his sermons. In practice, his sacramental inclinations manifest this focus in its most heightened form. The sacraments are physical means of experiencing that heavenly restoration on earth, tasting the grace that adopts as well as pardons. Particularly when his sermons prepare his auditors for sacramental participation, they give a rhetorical taste of the sacrament that is analogous to the physical encounter with ultimate spiritual reality experienced by drinking the wine and eating the bread.

While Doerksen may consign Andrewes to being a mere ‘custodian of order’, there is an unavoidable pastoral bent in how his theology is applied.40 Indeed, McCullough argues that is a vast oversimplification to read Andrewes as not concerned with the pastoral.41 Although Andrewes is an intellectual preacher who writes largely for an elite auditory, his persuasive purposes are emotional and spiritual. Lossky argues that Andrewes’ theology is not an intellectual exercise: “For Andrewes, not only are spirituality and theology not opposed, but the one could not be conceived of without the other.”42 Seen this way, Andrewes engages in what could be called ‘affective theology’ where the

39 Selected Sermons and Lectures, 174. See also, for example, his St. Giles, Cripplegate sermon on Isaiah 6: “If malefactors can obtain their pardon at the hands of temporall Judges, it is all they can look for; but they never come to any preferment: But God doth not only give us veniam but gratiam; as he doth pardon our sinnes, so also he becomes loving and kind to us.” Ibid., 144.

40 Daniel Doerksen, "Preaching Pastor Versus Custodian of Order: Donne, Andrewes, and the Jacobean Church." Philological Quarterly 73, no. 4 (Fall, 1994): 417-429.

41 Peter McCullough, “Donne and Andrewes,” John Donne Journal: Studies in the Age of Donne 22, (2003): 176.

42 McCullough, “Donne and Andrewes,” 31.

100 doctrinal truths are articulated in order to accomplish spiritual goals.43 Andrewes invests emotion in both the explication and application of doctrine. While Puritans like Baxter found “no life” in

Andrewes’ sermons, his emotional investment is apparent, as we shall see.44

In the sermons, the presence of the fullness of salvation is to kindle hope, which Andrewes speaks of as a gate to the “Kingdome of Heaven.” 45 Significantly, Andrewes’ kingdom is a vision for the church as a whole.46 As we have seen, the generic demands of the sermon emphasize the collective nature of this vision. While preaching manuals of the period emphasize the diverse spiritual states present for any one sermon, the preacher most frequently addresses the people as a whole. For

Andrewes, then, who discouraged attempts to tear the sermon from this context, including only reluctantly allowing a few of his own sermons to be published, the path of sanctification toward this glorified existence of joy and rest is lived in communion with the church both present and historical, the “second resurrection” always within view.47 Furthermore, the future consummation of this salvation is profoundly communal, a breaking down of all barriers. 48

43 Lossky finds Andrewes’ positions on Christology, Pneumatology and the Trinity to all be “essentially oriented toward the salvation of man,” 335.

44 Knott, The Sword of the Spirit, 44.

45 Selected Sermons and Lectures, 133.

46 For example, “He is not gone quite away, He is but gone before us : He is but the antecent; we, as the consequent, to be inferred after. . . . So He Himselfe, Vado; not Vado alone, but Vado parare locum vobis, I go to prepare a place, wherein to receive you, when the number of you and your brethren shalbe full.” XCVI, 412.

47 XCVI, 413.

48 Thus, in urging his auditors to the sacrament, Andrewes says, “of which blessing and happinesse he vouchsafe to make us all partarkers.” XCVI, 413.

101

My reading of Andrewes’ sermons hinges on the connection between his pastoral presentation of this communal vision of hope and the relationship between sermons, their ecclesiastical context and the language used to articulate this.49 Andrewes urges his auditors not to neglect the Sacraments in sermons which are themselves participatory. They work jointly with liturgy, prayer, the sacraments, and the other collective expressions of faith in the church.

Sacraments use the physical to create a bridge to spiritual reality otherwise perceivable only through the media of faith and language. Sacraments bind together signified and signifier, making ceremonies do what language also does. In the elevated view of these ceremonies possessed by

Andrewes and others like him, God miraculously grants that the experience of grace is strongest in the combination of the abstractions of faith with the physical elements.

In his sermons, we can see the degree to which Andrewes is convinced of the necessity of this physical, communal experience. His preaching emphasizes this, especially on the Eucharistic feast days of Christmas, Easter, and Whit-Sunday. What Andrewes wants his auditors to gain from listening to his sermon is something more akin to the taste of food than to knowledge of facts delivered in a lecture. Equating preaching with the Word and prayer with the sacraments, he concludes his 1620 Easter sermon this way: “Yet have we offered to God our service in both, and committed the successe of both to Him. He will see they shall have successe, and in His good time

(as shalbe expedient for us) vouchsafe every one of us as Hee did Marie Magdalen in the Text, to know

Him and the vertue of His Resurrection; and make us partakers of both, by both the meanes before

49 Andrewes is well within mainstream Reformed tradition when he says, “as surely as we corporally doe taste the bread and wine, so sure it is, that we spiritually feed on the body and blood of Christ, which is communicated unto us by these elements.” He is, however, more controversial when he implies, in this same sermon, that the elements impart grace regardless of the faith of the participant, though it is best if they are taken in faith. Selected Sermons and Lectures, 144.

102 remembered, by His blessed Word, by His holy mysteries; the means to raise our soules heere, the pledges of the raising up of our bodies hereafter.”50 Lossky argues, “There seems to be, with

Andrewes, a sort of continuity of grace between the Sacrament par excellence and the other means of transmitting and of acquiring it, such as preaching of the word, and prayer.”51 This continuity is enacted in sermons which pull their auditors toward participation even in the hearing. If sermons are not quite the same spiritual food that is collectively enjoyed by the Church in a pre-figuration of the feasting of heaven, then they at least can bring grace by creating a communal hunger for that food. Sermons should not, Andrewes thought, eliminate other forms of worship or devalue the sacramental. Nevertheless, he envisioned them working in a profoundly sacramental way, causing the members of the church to participate in the mysteries of faith.

The role Andrewes creates for the sermon in the church is partly derived from his ideas about language. As Peter McCullough notes, the Word’s incarnation is at the center of Andrewes’ style.52 A divine gift, language is imperfect, but nevertheless ordered in the way it is given to humanity. The seeming accidents of language reveal something about the deep truths of the world for Andrewes. Noam Reisner’s “The Numinous in the Sermons of Lancelot Andrewes” builds on

McCullough’s characterization of Andrewes’ sacramental approach to language itself as sacramental.53 Reisner argues that Andrewes’ prose seeks to “transcend traditional semantic and

50 Selected Sermons and Lectures, 242.

51 Lossky, 286.

52 Peter McCullough, “Lancelot Andrewes and Language,” Anglican Theological Review 74, (1992): 304-316. He is joined in this view by others, including Noam Reisner and Sophie Read.

53 McCullough, Selected Sermons and Lectures, xxxvi.

103 semiotic barriers in the process of capturing and conveying the numinous character of the religious mystery at hand.”54 Andrewes’ employment of figurative language creates a sacramental dimension to his attempts to speak the unspeakable. The pieces of truth accessed through figures, especially synecdoche, unite to become an incarnate means of accessing truth.55 By making words themselves symbolic objects, Andrewes’ ‘text-crumbling’ becomes a sacramental vehicle.56

Andrewes himself makes this connection between the act of preaching and the sacraments.

His 1597 Good Friday sermon shows preaching and the Eucharist working in parallel ways: “When by the office of preaching, JESUS CHRIST is lively described in our sight, and (as the Apostle speakest) is visibly crucified among us: when in the memoriall of the holy Sacrament His death is shewed forth until He come.”57 He further develops this connection between the body of Christ and the Word by quoting

Bernard who pictures the body of Christ as a book, and his wounds letters.58 The mediation of preaching creates, after the body of Christ and the words of Scripture, a third text. Effectual hearing becomes the initial means of participating in the sacrament. But effectual hearing only is so,

Andrewes claims in the 1618 Whitsunday sermon, when it results in invocation.

54 Noam Reisner, "Textual Sacraments: Capturing the Numinous in the Sermons of Lancelot Andrewes." Renaissance Studies: Journal of the Society for Renaissance Studies 21, no. 5 (11, 2007): 668.

55 Reisner, 670-671.

56 Ibid., 673. Reisner’s reading of Andrewes’ sacramental language posits that the sermons create a meeting place for the union of God and man, like the sacraments themselves. Reisner argues that Andrewes himself is the means by which man and God are brought together, 678. While my assertions about the sacramental nature of the sermons are analogous to Reisner’s main argument, he focuses his attention on the way this sacramental approach to language allows Andrewes to strive toward the ineffable.

57 Selected Sermons and Lectures, 123.

58 Ibid., 132.

104

Thus, Andrewes draws his 1605 Good Friday sermon to a close by examining the end of

“looking unto JESUS.”59 He asks, “Having seene all these, what is the end and use of this Sight?”60 He answers, “to move us, or to make us move: to work in our feet, to work in them a motion: not any slow, but a swift motion, the motion of running; to runne the race that is sett before us.”61 This race is the life of faith. Just as, in the ideal, when a sermon is heard, the emotions move the will to a total assent in faith, so faith must work itself out in prayer, sacramental worship, and a virtuous life.62

This blending of the work of faith and the possession of grace is part of the fabric of these sermons. Andrewes’ prayers in the published text of the sermon, as for example, the concluding prayer of the first Gunpowder Plot sermon, meld Word, sermon, and invocation. 63 Likewise, in

“The Pattern of Catechistical Doctrine,” Andrewes devotes a significant portion of his discussion of the first commandment to prayer as an appropriate response to the words: “I am the Lord thy

59 XCVI, 365.

60 Ibid., 380.

61 XCVI, 380.

62 See also “The Pattern of Catechistical Doctrine”: “So then, if the candle of light be in our soules, that is, if we inwardly worship God, we must set it upon a candlestick: our inward religion must appear in our outward worship.” Selected Sermons and Lectures, 22.

63 Compare the conclusion of the sermon with Psalms 118: 1-4 and Psalm 136: 4, 12, 23, 24. “To end then. This Day, which the Lord hath thus made so marvailously; so mervailously and mercifully; let us rejoice in the Maker, for the making of it, by His doing on it that deed, that is somervailous in our eyes, in all eyes; returning to the beginning of the Psalme and saying with the Prophet: O give thankes to the Lord for he is gracious &c. Lett Israël, lett the house of Aaron, yea lett all that feare the Lord, confesse that His mercie endureth for ever.

Who onely doth great wonders. Who remembred us when we were in danger, And hath delivered us from our enemies, with a mighty hand and stretched out arme. And, as for them hath turned their devise upon their owne head. And hath made this day, to us, a day of joy and gladnesse. To this God of Gods, the Lord of heaven, glorious in holinesse, fearefull in powere, doing wonders, be, &c.” Selected Sermons and Lectures, 161. Also see, for example, the conclusion to the 1620 Whitsunday sermon, XCVI, 744.

105

God.”64 In this, preaching is called a kind of prayer. “What is preaching: predicare, but to declare to all the world, his benefits of creation, redemption by Christ, and other benefits we have by him, in publishing whereof we praise and honour God, and therefore the conclusion all sermons is with a

Doxology.”65 Viewed in this light, a sermon resembles responsive liturgical prayers. When the voice of the preacher “declares to all the world” God’s praise, the sermon’s auditors join in the worship, too. The formal measure of their response is in the service that surrounds the sermon, and, on the appropriate days, the Sacrament that follows.

Andrewes and the other preachers covered in this study were attempting to speak through their sermons—that is, with individual voices in a communal genre—to the confluence of burgeoning individualism and the heritage of Christian community. Practically, they lead as voices expressing both individualized religious experience and the need for a collective experience which shaped the community’s life, promulgating norms and steadying a disrupted society. The seventeenth-century sermon must speak to its auditory and to individual auditors. When the preacher’s words engage the auditor’s emotions, it is an inevitably interior process. Yet the internalization of theology must be lived in a collective context. Most notably, for Andrewes, this engagement happens through prayer and the Eucharist.

Andrewes was not alone in recognizing the potential for acts of sacramental worship to bring together multiple individualized theological experiences. Timothy Rosendale’s examination of the place of the Eucharist in the Book of Common Prayer argues for just such a paradoxical

64 Exodus 20:2. Selected Sermon and Lectures, 277.

65 Ibid., 19.

106 understanding of Holy Communion, especially as presented in the 1559 BCP. Rosendale argues that while the individual and individual negotiations of belief have a heightened position within the

Elizabethan (and Jacobean) Church, the form of the liturgy encircles this individual response with community.66 By intentionally allowing for multiple interpretations of the words of the service, this phrasing makes possible shared participation; in other words, intentional ambiguity unites.67

Adopted when Andrewes was just five years old, “The Ordre for the Administracion of the

Lordes Supper or Holy Communion” in the 1559 BCP was the context through which he and the other members of the Church in England approached the sacrament. The conjunction in its very name is notable. The prescribed words—“take and eat this” and “drink this”—allow for a wide range of interpretations by virtue of leaving the antecedent of “this” unspecified.68 Thus, Rosendale argues, “meaning is individually inscribed” but the elements are taken jointly, as a congregation. 69

The members of the community engage in the same act; interpretive possibilities and beliefs overlap.

Andrewes’ linguistic approach shares the BCP’s comfort with silence and with conjunction. In other words, Andrewes is happy to leave some things untouched and to extend parallel interpretations, allowing for possibility in ambiguity. The existence of both the church and of its communal nature

66 Timothy Rosendale, Liturgy and Literature in the Making of Protestant England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 94 f.

67 Ibid., 89.

68 Rosendale, Liturgy and Literature, 101.

69 Ibid., 102. In contrast to Rosendale’s understanding of the ambiguities of the communion liturgy, Gibbons argues that this “conditional reading” is less plausible than a “‘mystical reading’ (a way of interpreting that allows the unresolved semantic excess of the formula to stand as it is in a state that exceeds human logical faculties but points to some mystical meaning).” Daniel Gibbons, Conflicts of Devotion: Liturgical Poetics in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth- Century England, University of Notre Dame Press, 2017, 52-54.

107 was, for most seventeenth-century Englishmen, never up for debate. The context for individual faith was inevitably collective.

II. Vivid Structure: Style and Participation

I will now look more closely at how Andrewes creates these participatory sermons.

Andrewes engages his auditory through what Peter McCullough calls “verbal ecstasy.”70 This ecstasy is created by twin characteristic points of style. First is the complex structure created by the minute division of the source text and the subsequent reification of key words throughout the sermon.

Second is the intensity and visual expressiveness of Andrewes’ prose, what rhetoricians call energeia and enargeia.71 Together these tropes create a sermon which attempts to compel participation in the hearing of the sermon and hunger for the experience of grace through the sacraments.

From the sermons themselves, we get a sense of the sort of mental activity Andrewes associates with effectual hearing.72 He uses verbal icons to relay doctrinal truths so that they are both more affective and effective.73 In his famously anti-Calvinist sermon on Lot’s wife, the pillared woman becomes the embodiment of the warning clearly implied by the text. Making ‘remember’ and the corresponding Latin ‘memento’74 the verbal center of this sermon, Andrewes also offers an

70 Selected Sermons and Lectures, xxxvii.

71 John Wesley considers Andrewes’ enargeia to be “an implicit conflation of oratory and drama” making the sermon a “performance text.” "Acting and Actio in the Sermons of Lancelot Andrewes." Renaissance Studies: Journal of the Society for Renaissance Studies 23, no. 5 (11, 2009): 687. Inasmuch, however, as the matter is the movements of faith, the auditors as well are made performers by means of Andrewes’ language.

72 McCullough says, “much of the intensity of Andrewes’ sermons (both in style and content) come from his straining of every nerve to make hearing his sermons more than a pasttime.” Selected Sermons and Lectures, xxii.

73 “The Christianized Aristotelianism of Renaissance psychology views the interconnected functions of imagination and emotion as necessary for making the excellent object apprehensible and desirable” Sacred Rhetoric, 248

74 Also, ‘remembrance’ and ‘recognosce.’

108 apparent aside that links the key concept in this sermon to his homiletic philosophy: “In which office of preaching, we are imployed as much about Recognosce, as about cognosce; as much in calling to their mindes the things they know and have forgott, as in teaching them the things they know not, or never learnt.”75 The preacher’s task is to engage with the full persons of his auditors (or as

Andrewes might say, the brain, heart, and reins), bringing to life what already exists in them.76

In other words, characteristic elements of Andrewes’ style compel his auditors to partake of his sermon in a communal act of worship as preparation for engaging with the Church in liturgical worship. As I have argued above, Andrewes’ sermons are concerned with doctrine, but this doctrine is knowledge as praxis. Doctrinal explication aims to move the affections into right alignment with truth. The desired end is always a kindling of belief, whether experienced as hope, sobriety, fear, sorrow, or wonder. Inasmuch as faith is the essential Christian act, the preaching of doctrine to provoke belief (an assent of the emotion and will as well as the intellect) is the primary application of any sermon. Andrewes offers his sermons to his auditors to consume by participating in the argument as it is constructed, so that they may arrive at the call to the table in a state of belief. My reading of his sermons presents the sacrament as fused to the sermon, or the sermon to the sacrament, part of the same act of worship.

Two elements of Andrewes’ characteristic prose help explain how Andrewes brings his auditors to inhabit the argument of the sermon. The first, formal structure, covers Andrewes’

75 Selected Sermons and Lectures, 111.

76Guite argues that the central role of memory for Andrewes is derived from Augustine. Scripture is a shared, cyclical history we should remember together. A. M. Guite, "The Art of Memory and the Art of Salvation: The Centrality of Memory in the Sermons of John Donne and Lancelot Andrewes," Seventeenth Century 4, no. 1 (/Spring, 1989), 2-6.

109 multiplicity of divisions and his reification of key words, usually taken from the Scriptural text. In the second, the intensity of his language, which rhetoricians classify broadly as energeia. In Andrewes’ case this is created through the frisson of the ordinary and the extraordinary colliding: his introduction, through colloquial asides, of elements of ordinary life for the telling of extraordinary stories, the infusion of conversational diction within a highly formalized discussion of theological matter, and vivid visual description—enargeia—within abstract and intellectualized discourse. They are all means by which Andrewes brings his auditors to do what Eliot insists only a few will be fit to do: “It is only when we have saturated ourselves in his prose, followed the movement of his thought, that we find his examination of words terminating in the ecstasy of assent.”77

The first structural element, the plethora of divisions and subdivisions that Andrewes uses in nearly every sermon, is one of his most recognizable stylistic features. While formal division is a rhetorical feature of the era, Andrewes carries it to unusual lengths. He takes verses apart phrase by phrase, word by word, and sometimes even syllable by syllable; he likewise finds divisions within divisions. For example, in the sermon preached on Christmas day in 1624, he divides the text into three primary subjects. The first has three sub-points, the second five, the third two more.78 For Ash

Wednesday of 1624, there are five primary divisions. The fourth is further divided into three sets of three.79 The importance of these divisions to Andrewes’ delivery can be seen through

77 T.S. Eliot, “Lancelot Andrewes," in Selected Essays, 1917-1932 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc., 1932), 295.

78 XCVI, 159-169.

79 This sermon was prepared, but never apparently preached, probably due to Andrewes’ failing health. Ibid., 249-259.

110 announcements of the divisions within in the text of the sermon itself, but also through the careful numbering of points in the margins of the texts as they were published.80

Debora Shuger and Stanley Fish both offer intriguing ways of thinking about this baroque tendency of Andrewes. Shuger’s Habits of Thought argues that Andrewes’ structural practice reveals his mystical habits of thought, which are conjunctive rather than exclusive.81 For Andrewes, in any given sermon, “exegesis… is not a matter of finding the meaning but the fullness of meaning.”82

Fish sees a similar collapse of distinctions through the sheer number of categories that

Andrewes creates. In “Structuralist Homiletics” Fish gives a characteristic reading of the 1620 Easter sermon on the account from John 20 of Mary Magdalene at the tomb. Andrewes provides a ready example for Fish’s assertions about the freeness of meaning, which is everywhere and also nowhere in particular.83 In Andrewes, he argues, the magnitude of the number of the structural divisions do not, as might be assumed, provide the auditor with signposts. Instead they overwhelm.84 Meaning exists outside of them, however, because, in faith, Andrewes and his auditors find meaning everywhere.85 One does not need to carry Fish’s observations to the extent that he does; his

80 These marginal notations can be seen in the seventeenth-century edition of XCVI Sermons as well as in McCollough’s edition, although they are dropped in the nineteenth century publication of the sermons.

81 Shuger, Habits of Thought, 52-53. In this chapter, Shuger compares the thought of Richard Hooker and Lancelot Andrewes in order to demonstrate the fault lines within “the picture of homogenous Anglican rationalism,” 46.

82 Ibid., 53.

83 Stanley Fish, "Structuralist Homiletics," Modern Language Notes 91, no. 6 (12, 1976): 1216.

84 Ibid., 1214.

85 Fish, “Structuralist Homiletics,” 1219.

111 argument is almost a parody of what he is claiming for Andrewes’ argument.86 Yet the core of the claim—that meaning is found in all of the categories opened by Andrewes’ divisions, and that this meaning overflows the division—is sound. Both Shuger’s argument, that Andrewes’ thought is primarily conjunctive in nature, and Fish’s claim, that Andrewes’ divisions often serve to highlight the ubiquitous essence of what is being described rather than to create limits, anticipate my argument that Andrewes uses the structural signposts for affective purposes. Furthermore, I see

Andrewes’ structural multiplicity driven by his desire to propel his audience toward faith through transforming the rehearsal of doctrinal truths into persuasion. The structural vessel for his exhaustive exploration of the biblical source text guides the reader into an encounter both mystical and intellectual.

By setting up complex structures, which create and then collapse categories, Andrewes transforms rational arguments into affective evidence. The pieces of a logical puzzle are composed in such a way that the auditor must assemble them mentally, following along with Andrewes’ thorough explanations, but eventually surrendering control, assenting as the evidence mounts. Part of this provisional assent and subsequent surrender is due to the aural nature of the sermon; the ability to reserve judgment or to refer back to previous points is minimized, each must be considered and accepted in turn.87 The agreement of the individual is subsumed in the communal

86 Reisner is somewhat close to Fish when he argues, “the purpose of Andrewes’ division is not to produce logical clarity, but to deconstruct the pretences of rational logic in order to introduce the auditory into a supra-syntactical devotional plateau that is profoundly apophatic and therefore in a sense ‘sacramental.’ “Textual Sacraments,” 671.

87 Early modern populations were in general much better listeners than we are, habitually following long orations and cultivating techniques for memory. Further, as Brian Crockett notes, “The Protestant reverence for the spoken word, combined with the Reformation's rejection of visual allure and the humanists' revival of classical rhetoric, paved the way for a cult of the ear, an enhanced receptivity to the nuances of oral performance.” “‘Holy Cozenage’ and the Renaissance Cult of the Ear." The Sixteenth Century Journal 24, no. 1 (04/01, 1993): 51.

112 future. More than an easily parodied stylistic habit, the structural intensity of Andrewes’ sermons is entwined with the central elements of his theological vision.

The second element of this first category, the reification of words into meditative objects through repetition and iterative variation, is not strictly part of the structure of the sermon. Often, however, a word from the text becomes the thematic core of the sermon and also structures the divisions themselves. This stylistic feature is also aural, as sound similarities create patterns of recognition, making the affective center of the sermon more memorable.88 Furthermore, Andrewes often uses these reified key words to create an extended metaphor which the force of the sermon pushes to the boundaries of language. By taking a word and turning it over and over, Andrewes squeezes out all the drops of meaning (often in multiple languages).

To demonstrate, let us look at the way Andrewes uses respice—look—in the sermon from

1607. On Good Friday, Andrewes chose the text, “And they shall looke upon Me, whom they have pierced.”89 His initial division is into two: “1 The sight it selfe, that is, the thing to be seene: 2 and the sight of it; that is, the act of seeing or looking.”90 Changing his emphasis from the object of sight to the act of seeing, he divides this verb into seven sub-points, transforming the indicative to the

88 A related stylistic tendency is Andrewes’ habit of alliteration, crossing between English and Latin, as in the 1594 sermon on Lot’s wife: “Remember the danger and damage: It is no lesse matter, we are about, then perdet animam. Which if we doe, we frustrate and forfeit all the fruit of our former well continued course; all we have done, is vaine. Yes, all that Christ hath done for us is in vaine; whose paines and sufferings we ought specially to tender, knowing that Supra omnen laborem labor irritus, No labour to lost labour; and Christ then hath lost His labour for us.” Selected Sermons and Lectures, 119.

89 Selected Sermons and Lectures, 122. The text is from Zacharias 12:10.

90 Ibid., 123.

113 imperative, and pairs respice with seven other verbs: transfigere, tranfige, dilige, crede, spera, recipe, and retribue.91 As he usually does, he offers the English translation, “Look and…”

Respice & Spera. Looke upon him, and his heart opened, and from that gate of hope promise thy selfe, and looke for all manner of things that good are. Which our expectation is reduced to these two: 1 The deliverance from the evill of our present miserie; 2 and the restoring to the good of our primitive felicitie. By the death of this undefiled Lambe, as by the yearely Passeover, looke for, and hope for a passage out of Egypt; which spiritually is our redemption from the servitude of the power of darknesse. And, as by the death of the Sacrifice, we looke to be freed from whatsoever evill: So, by the death of the High Priest, looke we for and hope for restitution of all that is good; even, to our forfeited estate in the land of Promise, which is Heaven it selfe, where is all joy happinesse for evermore. Respice & Spera, Looke, and Looke for: by the Lambe that is pierced, to be freed from all miseries; by the High Priest that is pierced, fruition of all felicity.92

These two words, as they appear in both Latin and English, provide more than structural markers.93

They are repeated like a litany. Throughout the sermon the repetitive action of looking is woven in with each new point: in this passage with hoping and with the echo of the crucifixion in ‘pierced.’

Looking at the cross is a metaphor for what is accomplished during the sermon, as the auditory is asked to concentrate on the act of the crucifixion and its significance. Visualization is a common means to extended meditation, but Andrewes pushes the word “look” to its metaphorical limits. He wants the looking to be an inevitable part of the other actions of faith, such as hoping and believing.

He also wants the hearing of the sermon and the meditation it provokes to be only a shade away

91 Ibid., 131-135.

92 The lengthy quote is needed to illustrate this technique in full. Selected Sermons and Lectures, 133-134.

93 Both McCullough and Reisner have drawn attention to the way Andrewes uses repeated key words, especially in Latin, as “word-objects” McCullough, "Lancelot Andrewes's Transforming Passions," Huntington Library Quarterly: Studies in English and American History and Literature 71, no. 4 (2008): 578. Reisner, 675.

114 from physical sight. Language is the tool to create the concrete proximity to the necessities of the faith in the way that the sacraments, in Andrewes’ view, really bring spiritual grace to the partaker.

The second category encompasses deviations from the elevated, formal language that

Andrewes usually employs within the highly structured framework of the sermons. These shifts rely on the contrast between the subject matter and vivid details of the ordinary or colloquial conversation. These moments create entry points for the auditor into the language of the sermon, collapsing the distance between Andrewes’ theological explication of remote arguments or events and present reality. Often this takes the form of infusing summaries of biblical stories with small, ostensibly unnecessary details that map to ordinary seventeenth-century life, creating an energy that passes over the distance in time and culture.94

These memorable moments bring Andrewes’ auditors into the story he tells. For example,

Andrewes describes the decisive moment of weakness for Lot’s wife: “The Sunne rose so cleer and it was so goodly a morning, she repented, she came away. Reckoning her Sonnes in Law more wise in staying still, than Lot and herselfe, in so unwisely departing. Which is the sin of unbelief.”95 When

Andrewes adds this unexpected, extra-biblical detail about the seemingly harmless distraction of a lovely morning, the audience is no longer removed by centuries from a historical event. Instead, they are drawn to inhabit the historical story by identifying it with their own experience, perhaps that very morning. Similarly, in words whose potential Eliot deployed in “Journey of the Magi,” Andrewes

94 The narrative connections between the world of Andrewes’ auditors and the Scriptural stories he is recounting, was briefly noted as a creation of “concrete presence” by T.S. Eliot in his essay “For Lancelot Andrewes.” It is this feature that he picks up on when he quotes the 1622 Christmas sermon in his poem “The Gift of the Magi.” Eliot attributes this to Andrewes’ efforts to be memorable, although he does not explore the significance in any depth. Eliot, 297.

95 Selected Sermons and Lectures, 113.

115 speaks on Christmas of the journey of the wise men, “a cold coming they had of it. . . just, the worst time of yeare, to take a journey; and specially a long journey.”96 In this way, the spiritual reality, which is ultimately not only more important, but more real than the historical story, is made present in the moment of hearing.

These details reflect that a persuasive preacher must connect with his audience though their experiences. In a 1596 sermon on the rich man and Lazarus, Andrewes acknowledges that the text’s descriptions of the pain of hell are limited, but “flesh and bloud conceiveth but what it feeleth, and must be spoken to, as it may understand.”97 So it is that Scripture speaks of a burning tongue or hand to convey the larger, spiritual suffering of the rich man. Andrewes borrows this technique, using limited earthy terms to make spiritual realities more comprehensible for his auditors.

In addition to vivid detail, Andrewes also shifts his tone from the formal voice of the preacher and inhabits the voices of other speakers. Often, this occurs abruptly; one can imagine

Andrewes pausing, changing the tone of his voice. Such moments offer a chance for reflection, humanizing through imagined drama the abstractions of the argument. In the 1608 Easter sermon,

Andrewes becomes his audience, giving them a voice within the argument of the sermon, often with a sarcastic inflection that allows—and answers—doubt. The sermon’s subject is the faith of the women who, intending to anoint the dead body, go to Christ’s tomb in the account of the resurrection given in the gospel of Mark. Andrewes makes his audience interrogators of the women and the rationality of their actions:

96 XCVI, 145.

97 XCVI, 313.

116

Tell them the Partie is dead they goe to: it skills not, their love is not dead; that will goe on. Tell them He is embalmed already, they may save their cost; it is not enough for them, except they doe it too, they will doe it neverthelesse for all that. Tell them they may take time then, and doe it; nay, unless it be done the first day, howre, and minute, it contents them not. Tell them there is a stone, more than they remember, and more than they can remove; no matter, they will trie their strength, and lift at it.98

Here Andrewes answers any skepticism over whether such an intense response is necessary. His auditors are now characters in this story; it is up to the women at the tomb to persuade them of the value of participation in the process of worship, even if the participation seems superfluous.

With these stylistic considerations and their implications for the participatory nature of

Andrewes’ sermons in mind, I will examine a representative sermon from each of the great feast days: Christmas, Easter, and Whitsunday. In terms of theological substance, the historical and spiritual events these days celebrate are at the heart of the Christian faith. They are also the three days of the year on which participation in the sacrament of communion was prescribed for all members of the church, although it may have only been enforced on Easter. 99 Here we can see the working out of each of the elements I have outlined above, both formal structure and an enargeia to create the imaginative habitation of that structure.

98 Ibid., 407.

99 It is possible that Andrewes directed for Communion to be served more frequently when he was in charge of the London parish of St. Giles, but in his court sermons he directs the auditory to the table only at Christmas, Easter, and Whitsunday. Arnold Hunt estimates that most people only received communion at Easter, although it was officially to be taken three times a year, Hunt, “The Lord’s Supper in Early Modern England,” Past & Present, No. 161 (Nov., 1998), 41. Hunt cites the parish of Shillington which added Michelmas (September 29) to the three instances above, although attendance was considerably higher at Easter, 45. This seems to be in line with the custom in Zwingli’s Zurich of serving the Lord’s Supper quarterly, at Christmas, Easter, Pentecost, and once in the autumn. Zwingli’s schedule, if not the theology of the sacrament itself, was also adopted in Geneva. Amy Nelson Burnett, “Social History of Communion and the Reformation of the Eucharist,” Past & Present, No. 211 (May 2011), 113-114.

117

III. Word Feasts: Christmas, Easter, Whitsunday

On Christmas Day, 1609, Andrewes preached before King James I at Whitehall. The text was from Galatians 4:4-5: “When the fulnesse of time was come, God sent his Sonne, made of a woman, made under the Law. That, He might redeeme, them that were under the Law, that wee might receive the Adoption of sonnes.”100 Bound together with the 1610 Christmas sermon, it was among the few sermons printed during Andrewes’ lifetime, and it is this sermon that James famously

“says that he will lay yt still under his pillow.”101

The sermon’s formal structure is intricately laced together, building slowly to completion. It proceeds through repetition, like a sestina. The refrain is “the fulness of time,” a phrase which must have resonated with Andrewes since he also references it in other sermons on the Nativity. In this sermon, however, explored in that Andrewesque fashion, every sense of the word fulness is probed for possible meaning. The metaphor is primarily one of a vessel and liquid, although Andrewes extends the semantic range in places. The sermon’s structure, as the argument progresses, literalizes the metaphor, as the many distinctions of the division are poured on top of each other. The audience enters into the expectation of the structure, feeling both lack and subsequent completeness as the salvific arc of the Incarnation is assembled. As the emotional force becomes too much for the structure to hold, the response of the audience is drawn outward into the celebration of the

100 Lancelot Andrewes, “A Sermon Preached before the King’s Majestie at Whitehall, on Christmas Day.” Christmas 1609. Selected Sermons and Lectures, 162-177.

101 John Chamberlain in a letter to Sir Ralph Winwood, The Letters of John Chamberlain, Ed. Norman Egbert McClure, vol I (Philadelphia: The American philosophical society, 1939), 292.

118

Eucharist, which Andrewes characteristically associates with Thanksgiving. Yet, what Andrewes ultimately envisions is the realization of the promise of the Eucharistic celebration.

And then it will be perfect, compleat, absolute fulnesse indeed, when we shall all be filled with the fulnesse of him that filleth all in all. For, so shall all be when nothing shall be wanting in any: for God shall be all, in all. Not as heere He is, something, and but something in every one; but then omnia in omnibus. And then the measure shall be so full, as it cannot enter into us, we cannot hold it: we must enter into it; Intra in gaudium Domini tui.102

The community of the auditors is caught up in we which is all. His final version of the fullness of time extends far beyond a historical or remembered Christmas morning; it is the ultimate joining of the divine and the human in eternity, what Andrewes calls “the joy of your Lord.”

The first sense of ‘fulness of time’ that Andrewes employs is an almost tautological statement of the appropriateness of this text (and by extension) this sermon for this particular day.103

Andrewes often turns to the conventional statement of the fitness of the text for the occasion in the first section of the exordium in order to assert a profound connection between the day and the text, marking the intersection of Word and the life of faith in the Church year.104 Moving into the division, Andrewes descends immediately into his customary plenitude. (He gives an aside of justification, “There be Texts, the right way to consider them, is to take them in pieces…. And this is

102 Selected Sermons and Lectures, 177.

103 “If, when the fulnesse of time commeth, God sent his Sonne: then, When God sent his Sonne, is the fulness of time come. And as this day, God sent his sonne. This day therfore, (so oft as by the revolution of the yeere it commeth about) is to us a yeerly representation of the fulnesse of time…. For we allow for every month a day, (Looke how many months so many dayes) to this Feast; as if it were, and we so thought it to be, the full recapitulation of the whole year.” Selected Sermons and Lectures, 162.

104 He pushes this claim even further in this particular sermon by attempting to redeem the name ‘Christmas’ from the Catholic connotations of ‘mass’ by connecting the etymology of –mas to the Latin missa: “So that Christi missa is the sending of Christ.” Selected Sermons and Lectures, 163.

119 of that kind.”105 One wonders if Andrewes ever encountered a text that wasn’t ‘of that kind.’) He divides first into two: “1. Of the fulnesse of time. 2. And of that, wherewith it is filled.”106 These two are then divided into four and seven, respectively.

This is no mere over-proliferation of a helpful rhetorical marker run amok. (If you are keeping count, there are now eleven sub-points.) Andrewes uses these markers to ensure the meaningfulness of the simultaneous distinction and bonding of each of the parts. The sum of this is

‘fulnesse’ in a way that mere assertion could never be. For instance, after briefly anticipating the content of each of his eleven sub-points, he returns to the basic two-fold division, “All which, we may reduce to a double fulnesse. Gods, as much as Hee can send. Ours, as much as we can desire.”107

Andrewes uses the connotations of a full measure to create the tension of a force at a climax.

It is in moving through the seven steps of the second part, the filling up, that the progression of the sermon becomes clear. Andrewes moves forward in increments, warning after each that this is not it, our measure is not yet full. For example, in moving between “His Sonne” and

“Made” he says, “This is full, one would thinke: Yet, the Manner of his sending him, is fuller still.”108

The final fullness of this redemption comprises the characteristic totality of Andrewes’ salvific vision: “But is this all? No, He leaves us not heere; but to make the measure compleat, yea, even to flowe over, He gives us not over, when he had rid us out of this wretched estate, till He have brought

105 Ibid.

106 Ibid., 162.

107 Ibid., 163.

108 In order to easily identify the structure, I have used the marginal glosses to refer to each of Andrewes’ points. Selected Sermons and Lectures, 168.

120 us to an estate, as good, as He himselfe is in…. the highest and furthest step of all. For further then it, He cannot goe.”109

To get to this point—the redemption and glorification of mankind—Andrewes calls upon the whole of his soteriology. The result is neither complexity for the sake of complexity nor a display of erudition that confuses and bars the auditor. Rather, it is a complexity that instructs, each step of the argument is constructed in order to create a final clarity in service of the core representation of faith in the sermon.110

Interestingly, it is at moments of structural tension in this sermon that we find Andrewes’ juxtaposition of a vividly assumed colloquial voice with the formality of the logical progression of the argument. For instance, Andrewes creates a dialogue, speaking as both a personification of justice and a confident, heroic Christ: “It stood thus, between Him and us, in this point of Redemption.

Heere are certaine malefactors, under the Lawe, to suffer, to be executed. What say you to them? Why, I will become under the Lawes, suffer that they should, take upon me their execution, upon condition, they may be quit.”111 With the deceptively casual “Why, I will…” especially, the audience must imagine a bargain being driven. This conversation occurs during the discussion of Andrewes’ sixth point, redemption from the sentence of the law. Because his most significant point, which he says takes his sermon on fullness to “full Sea,” is yet to come,112 it is important that his auditors join into the sermon at this moment, so that their attention will be present for the seventh point.

109 Selected Sermons and Lectures, 173-174.

110 Andrewes’ habit of translating Latin, Greek and Hebrew quotations can be attributed to the same impulse.

111 Selected Sermons and Lectures, 173.

112 Selected Sermons and Lectures, 175.

121

Each step, for Andrewes, is an essential part of the puzzle although it will eventually be subsumed in the whole. He is emphatic in marking the distinctiveness of each of the seven points.

For example, in speaking of the fourth point, which is, according to the marginal note, “made of the woman” he says, “I take cleerly to be one.”113 This is paired with the fifth point, “made under the

Law.”114 The two are made distinct (“both very requisite”)115 in order to explore the claims of the

Incarnation, but eventually they collapse together. Likewise in the same sermon, Andrewes divides the twelve days of Christmas into two halves of six days each to represent these two elements. Yet the celebration, as his auditors know, is one.

He fills the verbal vessel he has created by drawing these first five points, once carefully held apart, together through repetition, in short, parallel phrases:

And so now, the sent is full: and fully sent, because, made: and fully made, because made once and twise over: fully made ours, because fully united to us: Made of a woman as wel as we. Made under the Lawe as deepe as we. Both ex muliere, and sub lege. So of our nature (of a woman,) that of our conditions also (of a woman,) that of our condition also (under the lawe:) So, fully united to us in nature, and condition both.116

A persistent repetition of ‘full’ and ‘fully’ mixes with the accumulation of all the distinct syntactical elements of this single Scriptural sentence. Verbally, the auditors are being filled with the fullness of what is meant theologically. But Andrewes is not yet done, of course. He is coming close to the high climax of the sermon and moves into it in the next sentence: “And so we are come, to the full measure

113 Ibid., 168.

114 Ibid., 169.

115 Ibid., 171.

116 Ibid.

122 of His sending. And, that we are come to the full, ye shall plainely see, by the overflowing.”117 The conceit of a fullness that was as full as it could be is now reconceived. When his divisions collapse into the phrase ‘the full measure of His sending,” Andrewes moves into the overflowing benevolence of the redemptive mission with a hint of something more. This concept cannot be contained in the abstract noun ‘fullness.’ It takes form as an adverb, ‘fully,’ and an adjective, ‘full.’ Finally, the adjective becomes a noun, ‘the full.’ The full is the existence to which Andrewes and his auditors will enter at the end of earthly life and begin to enter now as they participate collectively in worship, from the filling of this sermon to the eating of the sacrament. The full is overflowing.

Finally, as he hinted in the beginning of sermon, Andrewes connects ‘fulnesse’ outward, erasing syntactical distinctions, “so from us, and on our parts, it may be plenitudo temporis, or tempus plenitudinis, the fulnes of time or time of fulnes, choose you whether.”118 As he often does, he makes etymology a part of his argument. Fullness is naturally extended in “a joyfull time”119 and

“thankfulnes.”120 Thankfulness or gratitude is an emotional response to the history and future

Andrewes exposits, but it is also an action: the thankful offer thanksgiving. Andrewes’ auditors are set to proceed from the sermon to “the Holy Eucharist, which is by interpretation, Thanksgiving it

117 Ibid., 171.

118 Selected Sermons and Lectures, 175.

119 Ibid.

120 Ibid., 176.

123 selfe.”121 Andrewes briefly draws back from the ecstasy of the completion of his points to declare that the status he has been describing is “not fully consummate without it.”122

The finely wrought concluding paragraph leaves the earthly feast day behind, gesturing toward eternity. However important ceremonial observances are, they are all simply conduits for the reality toward which Andrewes now directs his listeners. His final paragraph no longer reasons with or woos his audience, but is rather a Trinitarian prayer of confidence that “this” (the antecedent of which is all of the above eternal consummation of Christian doctrine) will be accomplished.

The 1609 Christmas sermon exemplifies Andrewes’ use of overwhelming (and overwhelmed) structural divisions to move his sermon toward an ultimate conclusion of unity, in this case, the fullness of redemption. The cumulative pressure of this formal structure creates an opportunity for the sermon’s auditors to participate on an affective level in the progression of its doctrinal argument. This participation is itself an act of faith. In assenting to the hope of fullness promised in this sermon, the auditory must enter a mystical kind of anticipation like what is required to encounter the divine in bread and wine.

Christmas sermons provide an opportunity to mingle the sacramental feast with the holiday celebrations surrounding the day. Andrewes’ functional ambiguity blurs the feast of the communion table and the feast of the twelve days of Christmas. Nevertheless, Easter, also the occasion of compelled assent to the public community of faith, is traditionally considered the high holy day of the Christian year. For Andrewes, the required participation in the sacrament could have grace-

121 Ibid.

122 Ibid., 177.

124 giving substance on its own, but was far better if approached in faith. His sermons seem to say: real hearing of the Word can kindle real faith, making participation in the earthly church a means of grace that leads to participation in the fullness of the glorified Christian community.

Andrewes’ 1610 Easter Day sermon, preached at Whitehall before James, offers a meta- textual look at the way preaching transfers the written Word to the ‘bosomes’ of Andrewes’ auditors.

Partaking in the preached Word creates the active hope that is the necessary corollary of saving faith.

The text for the sermon is from Job 29:

Ver. 23. Oh that my words were now written! Oh that they were written even in a booke! 24. And graven with an iron penne, in leade, or in stone for ever! 25. For I am sure, that my Redeemer liveth, and He shall stand the last on the earth (or, and I shall rise againe in the last day from the earth.) 26. And though, after my skinne wormes destroy this body: I shall see God in my flesh. 27. Whom I my selfe shall see, and mine eyes shall behold, and none other for me, though my reines are comsumed within me. (Or, and this hope is layed up in my bosome.)123

Job’s wish, to see his words of faith written in order to be communicated to others, is literally granted in the transmission of these words. They function in miniature for the whole of the

Scripture; the declaration of faith that Job makes comes close (with the proper explication) to “a full

Creed.”124 Andrewes approaches with twin goals: imparted knowledge and hope. Knowledge of doctrine, while necessary, is not sufficient: “Graven, that it may be knowne: knowne, that it may be our hope…. Graving in stone will doe no good, without laying it up in the bosome.”125 Thus, Andrewes closes this sermon warning that intellectual knowledge alone is fruitless. Claiming that knowledge must be supplemented by hope, he introduces the brain and the heart as possible lodging places, urging,

123 XCVI, 423.

124 Ibid., 428.

125 Ibid., 424.

125 appropriately enough, that hope be stored up in the heart. Rather than offering the binary of knowledge for the brain and hope for the heart, Andrewes claims that both hope and knowledge

(the ingredients of faith) should reside in the bosom.126 By bosom, Andrewes means the physical, psychological and spiritual interior space which holds both the heart and the reins. In specifying both heart and reins, Andrewes is following the Hebrew tendency to double near synonyms in order to indicate fullness of meaning when he says that it is best to have “knowledge in the heart, and hope in the reines.” In the metaphorical ambiguity of reins he is able to push the joint intellectual and emotional response deeper than the original binary allowed. This response, joined with the sacramental celebration that follows, is the proper end of preaching the Word.

Andrewes’ presentation of this text on the power of the Word demonstrates his efforts to make both knowledge of the faith and the active hope it inspires to ‘lodge’ in his auditors’

126 The extended discussion is worth quoting in full: “Now, the place is much, where we lay it: Every thing is best kept in his proper place. Job faith, he bestowed it in his bosome, and would have us doe the like. Of that place, he made choise: of none without us, behind us. That we might ever carrie it about us, ever have it before us, and in our fight; ever at hand: not to seek, but readie and easie to be hand, when we call for it: and these, for the continuall use we are to have of it, in all the dismayes and discomforts of our life. Beside, there it will be safely; that, being the surest place, as being within the fold of our armes, where our strength lyeth, and when, hardest to take it from us. And there it will best cherished, in the warmth, and vitall heate of the bosome. There, the nurse carrieth her childe: and the wife is called the wife of the bosome: And what is dearer to us then these two? But, above all, there it will be next the heart (for the bosome is but the cofer of the heart) and there Job would have it. As well, for that, that place is the best place, and so best for the best hope: as that, there is in this hope, a speciall cordiall vertue against the fainting of the heart: as (indeed) it is cor cordis, the very heart of the heart, and whereby the heart it selfe is more heartned. Job found it so: So did Saint Paul, when he grew out of heart. Put his hand in his bosome, tooke out this Hope, lookes upon it, presently faith: propter quod non deficimus. And when Timothee was in the like deliquium, he applies to him: (What man! Memento, Remember CHRIST is risen, and we shall rise and see GOD; an amends for all, we can suffer:) as a speciall receipt against all cardiaque passions.

But, in choosing this place; Job’s minde was specially, to except to the braine, where (commonly men lodge it, and are mistaken: it is not the right place. Scio, there (if you will;) in the braine; It is the place of memorie: But spero, in the heart, the place of affection (namely feare:) and till the heart be the lesse fearefull, and the more cheerefull for it; it is not where it should be; not layed in the right place. Nay, not Scientia cerebri; knowledge is best neither, not in the braine: Scientia Sinus, and corde creditur; best, when it hath his rest there. When knowledge in the heart, and hope in the reines; and He that searcheth heart and reines, may there finde them. Err not then in laying it up in the head, or any where, but whither Job carried it, and where he layed it, in the bosome.” XCVI, 432.

126

‘bosoms.’127 First, he defamiliarizes the scriptural text, transforming it into a curiosity on “an old stone digged up in the land of Hus… the Characters of it yet legible.”128 He then narrates Job’s desires: “He mends his wish: he would not have them to be barely written, but registered in a booke, enrolled upon record, as publike instruments, mens deeds, judiciall proceeding; or (as the verie word gives it) Acts of

Parliament, or whatsoever is most authenticall.”129 Thus, within a few lines, Andrewes diminishes the original distance. These words, which actually exist in many forms and in many languages, are now more like an Act of Parliament than an ancient artifact, promulgated and authorized.

Time is similarly blurred as Andrewes’ narration of Job’s declaration of faith moves between tenses. “In his case, he saw Him; brought to the dust: and thence he seeth Him rising againe: and so now, it is Easter day with Job.”130 Andrewes uses the past tense to describe events (Christ’s death and resurrection) which from the reference point of Job’s life were historically yet to be, but which the confidence of Job’s faith perceives as having happened and then happening in front of him. Finally, he exploits the functional ambiguity of ‘now.’ The reality of Easter morning exists at three separate points in time: for Job, at the historical point of the resurrection, and at Whitehall on Easter morning in 1610. In faith, all three are the present.131

127 See Joseph Ashmore, "Faith in Lancelot Andrewes's Preaching." Seventeenth Century 32, no. 2 (2017), 130-132, for a discussion of the relationship between faith, knowledge, and Scriptural interpretation in this sermon.

128 XCVI, 424.

129 Ibid., 425.

130 Ibid., 428.

131 Andrewes does this move elsewhere as well. See Christmas 1613, XCVI, 62-71.

127

Likewise, Andrewes conjoins these temporal shifts with a conversational rhythm to make his auditors take part in both realizing their need for a redeemer and the relief of knowing there is one.

Sinned he [Job] had and by committing of sinne was become Servus peccati. Sold be himselfe, and made subject to sinne; and sold by GOD, and made subject to corruption: from both which he needed a Redeemer. Whither servant, or captive, one or both, it falleth out well, both states are redeemable; neither past redemption…. GOD is willing (saith Elihu) to receive a reconciliation, to admitt of a Redeemer: if we can get us one, to lay downe the price, there is hope, we may be restored, to see GOD againe. A Redeemer will doe it. Why then, Scio quod, he knowes of one. Good tydings, to all that need to know, there is one, presently in being.132

He begins in the third person, past tense, objectively describing why Job needs a redeemer. After raising the question of whether one can be found, an ambiguous use of the first person plural is introduced, “if we can get us one.” It is not clear whether this applies to just Job and Elihu.

Andrewes then deploys ‘scio’ – the reified Latin peg for his theme of knowledge. With this the ‘good tydings’ become generalized and spiritual reality is shared: “There is one, presently in being.”

Andrewes uses similar techniques of immediacy in order to make his audience partake of the hope which follows from Job’s knowledge of a redeemer. As before, he elides the times of Job and

Christ with Easter morning 1610: “This, a day of hope.”133 He also plunders the worries of his particular audience to show why such hope is needed: “For, even Kings, in all their royaltie, sometimes have before them the handwriting on the wall: Numeravit, he hath numbered thy daies; and even then, they rest on this hope, and read this inscription not unwillingly.”134 For Andrewes’ auditors at Whitehall, a king with numbered days is a shared problem. The consequences of these fears, as, for instance,

132 XCVI, 427.

133 Ibid., 431.

134 XCVI, 431.

128 when the unexpected hand of death would find Prince Henry and change the succession a few years later, applied to everyone. Andrewes presses beyond these temporal repercussions: “No feare, to the feare of death: what shall become of us, after our short time heere, which makes us never quiet, but in the valley of Achor, all our life long: The resurrection opens us a gate of hope.”135 Knowledge and hope are the two pillars around which Andrewes builds the sermon. As we have seen, the two collapse into faith; the correct thing to believe and the correct response to believing it cannot be separated.

Both belief and response reside in the bosom.

The Word imparts knowledge, which when it works on both an intellectual and emotional level, creates hope. Active hope added to knowledge is faith, which is to be lived out collectively in the taking of the Eucharist. The Sacrament of Holy Communion, which should be entered into in faith and also gives faith, is, in Andrewes’ vision for his church, lived theology, which nevertheless begins in his sermon, a collective context for moving to collective action. In partaking in it, his auditors participate in the vision of “our rising out of the old dustie conversation, to newness of life.”136

Perhaps the least familiar of these three Christian feast days to twenty-first century audiences, Whitsunday, the Christian celebration of the giving of the Holy Spirit to the church at

Pentecost, was for Andrewes as significant as Christmas and Easter. If Christmas celebrated the promise of redemption fulfilled in the gift of the Incarnation, and Easter celebrated the power of the

Resurrection in the defeat of sin and death, Whitsunday memorialized the means by which salvation was proclaimed to the world, that is, the Church, and, in the Holy Spirit, the power given to the

135 Ibid., 431.

136 Ibid., 433.

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Church to make its work possible. In its association with the Holy Spirit, especially, Whitsunday can lead to either the intellectual or mystical sides of Christianity. In the 1618 Whitsunday sermon at court, perhaps most quoted for its attacks on “sermon-centered piety,” Andrewes is both.137 Yet he is also practical and pastoral. Intersecting with many of the critical conversations about Andrewes, it is also an exemplar of Andrewes’ preaching, as the language facilitates apprehension and and then participation, infusing metaphor into action.

The sermon’s text is a small section of the story of Pentecost in Acts 2. In these verses, the apostle Peter quotes the Old Testament book of Joel. Andrewes takes the occasion of the story of a sermon, preached by Peter on the day celebrated as the beginning of the church, to use these words for the base text for his own sermon. In this way, Andrewes typifies the intertextual claims of the genre and connects the representation of the English church sitting in front of him with the purest beginning moment of the historical church, making a claim to continuity and legitimacy that still preoccupied the Jacobean church, even if it had less urgency than for the original Reformers.

The theme of the sermon is “the Spirit’s powring.”138 The main division is into two: first, the nature of this pouring and, second, the end of the pouring, salvation. The mystical and ecclesiastical are made supportive to the promise of “salvabitur” or “[he] shall be saved.” In salvabitur and effundum,

Andrewes finds the Latin words he will squeeze for full meaning, but the main verbal refrain of the

137 McCullough calls this sermon “a sermon against sermons,” which is indicative of the primary interpretive paradigm in which this sermon is often approached, proof for Andrewes’ crusade against sermons in the Jacobean court and the larger culture of the English church. Yet to merely call what Andrewes does here with preaching and invocation “metadramatic genius” in the service of making polemical points against unrestrained preaching is to miss the very real weight Andrewes does give to sermons even as he qualifies them. “Notes” in Selected Sermons and Lectures, 434.

138 Throughout the sermon, Andrewes occasionally spells pouring “powring” which may suggest an easier pun between pour and power than is evident to our twenty-first century ears. Selected Sermons and Lectures, 208.

130 sermon is pouring, a conceit he eventually joins with the pouring of the cup for the Eucharist. On this Whitsunday, partaking in the sacrament allows the auditory to pour out thankfulness for the giving of the Spirit.139 Doing so returns to them a pouring out of grace toward salvation.

As might be expected, Andrewes’ division of his text is multiple. He divides the sermon into two, and each of those two into four. There is a distinction between the structure of the first division, which accounts for a bit more than half of the sermon, and the shorter second part. The first, which is focused on the nature of this great pouring out of the Spirit, is highly structured. Each of the four sub-points are divided further. The first, on the thing poured, makes doctrinal claims about the Spirit of God and is divided into four points, with the last one divided into two.140 The second point offers four further sub-points on the qualities of the act (“Effundam”): (1) that the spirit is liquid as well as fire, (2) that pouring is sign of plenty, (3) that it is voluntary, and (4) that it is controlled, happening at the Pourer’s discretion.141 The third sub-division, the “Party Pouring,” is broken into two as Andrewes makes distinct statements on the Trinity and on the two natures of

Christ.142 The fourth sub-division allows for three further sub-sub-points, with the third broken into two, in which Andrewes notes that the act of an anointing ritual signals the presence of authority and hierarchy, while also affirming the essential egalitarianism in its universality.143 In the second and

139 Andrewes here and elsewhere uses etymology to connect the Eucharist with eukharistia or thanksgiving.

140 Selected Sermons and Lectures, 209-210.

141 Ibid., 210-212.

142 Ibid., 212.

143 Selected Sermons and Lectures, 212-215.

131 fourth divisions, in particular, we see the paradoxes that are helped along by Andrewes’ conjunctive thought. The outpouring of the Holy Spirit, a mystical event, is liberal, hierarchical, and orderly.

Andrewes retains tight structural control throughout the first half of the sermon. His division of his material into clear groupings of points and sub-points and sub-sub-points is indicated by explicit signals in the text, through deliberate syntactical structuring, and in the marginal notations. While the metaphor extended is the Spirit of God pouring out, like water or wine or fire, the text is tightly controlled. The semantic fullness of the expression in these verses is deliberately catalogued, each portion of the meaning kept within its own boundaries.

As the sermon progresses to its second half, the rigidness of the structure is relaxed. The second half is divided into discussion of the four ends of “this powring”: it brings prophecy, invocation, the remembrance of the end of the world, and salvation.144 Yet the final end, “the salvation of mankind,” is Andrewes’ top priority. In transitioning to the second section, he offers a short introduction to the rest of the sermon prioritizing salvation. He reverses the direction of the metaphorical transfer of energy, the Spirit is poured and flows down and thus transforms the flesh it touches so that “the Spirit lift up the flesh thither to heaven, whence it came.”145 The other three points are rendered subordinate, the third actually more of a means than an end itself. The numerical divisions are eased; each of the points are considered in sections which blend into each other.

144 By prophecy Andrewes means preaching. Although he takes time to provide an explanation for why prophecy referred to something more like preaching the truth or warning others rather than foretelling the future, the term would have been in common use. Andrewes includes sacramental worship in the broad category of human response to the divine referred to by “invocation.” Selected Sermons and Lectures, 216.

145 Ibid., 215.

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In a subtle contrast to the first half of the sermon, there is no careful layering of additional divisions. Instead, Andrewes repeats the Latin and English words of the text, especially verses 18 and 21, to form a connective web that makes distinctions, yes, but ultimately draws preaching (in theory and in the literal act of re-preaching Peter’s sermon), prayer, and the sacramental cup together to point toward salvation. In the final four paragraphs, Andrewes uses the harvested semantic value he has been accumulating from his exegesis of the text to weave together a dense, pastoral plea that his auditors soberly approach the table, full of faith and looking for salvation. For instance, invocaverit repeats and spreads to invocation, invocate, voice. Effundum is effusion, pouring, drowning.

The repetition of key words is matched with a repetition of sound in alliteration, “when if we had the whole word to give, we would give it for these foure syllables, salvabitur, shalbe saved.”146

Most of the attention on this sermon focuses on Andrewes’ explanations of the proper places of preaching and prayer in the worship of the church. He restricts preaching to appropriate

“prophets” and subordinates it to invocation. More precisely, he says that preaching cannot be an end in itself; it exists to bring the hearer to the point of calling on the Lord in faith. Moreover, preaching is a limited duty, a grace that comes to ordinary Christians, and even to preachers, from outside themselves. Prayer is a response and is open to whosever will. Yet in the context of the whole sermon, these claims lead not to a formally revised position on the sermon-centric nature of the worship at the court of James I, but rather to a call to the table, to “call on his Name with the Cup of

Salvation taken in our hands.”147

146 Selected Sermons and Lectures, 223.

147 Ibid.

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By emphasizing the response of prayer over the passivity of sermon-going, the “whosoever”

Andrewes finds so significant in its pairing with invocaverit in the final verse emphasizes the inclusiveness of the response.148 A sermon that ends in a passionate, inclusive call to the table is one that promotes its own premise. If the auditory participates in responding to a sermon that addresses them this way, they become a part of the community who is spoken to under such terms. Even while actively subordinating the sermon to invocational elements of worship, Andrewes uses the flexible form of language and metaphor to do with the word what he says the pouring out of the cup of salvation does with the blessing of salvation.

Lancelot Andrewes’ greatest sermons articulate core elements of the developing theology of the Church of England, creating, in this articulation, the context for a participatory response from his auditory. This homiletic approach is explicitly articulated in Andrewes’ protests against ineffectual sermon-going as well as in his treatment of the necessary role of preaching in the church.

It is also reflected, however, in the characteristically Andrewesque aspects of his style, such as a plentitude of structural division, reification of significant words, and shifts from abstract formal diction to powerful enargeia, all of which use language in such a way that to assent to the argument of the sermon is to partake experientially. When, on the feast days of Christmas, Easter, and

Whitsunday, he bends language to push the boundaries of the metaphors of the text so that they are met in the physical reality of the communion table, his rhetoric blends sermon into sacrament. Just as participation in the sacraments provides a fully realized metaphor for acts of grace, so Andrewes’ sermons create the means of engaging the emotions and wills of his auditors in the movements of

148 Andrewes draws short of universalism at several points during the sermon and concludes with the necessity of faith in invocation. In his framing, prayer will not actually happen without faith.

134 faith so that they may taste an animating experience of belief. Such communal engagement figures the unity of the future glorified church, in which they “with one mouth, and one mind, glorifie

God.”149

149 XCVI, 422.

Chapter 4 “Every particular soule”: The Individual in Community in the Sermons of John Donne

To finde a languishing wretch in a sordid corner, not onely in a penurious fortune, but in an oppressed conscience, His eyes under a diverse suffocation, smothered with smoake, and smothered with teares, His eares estranged from all salutations, and visits, and all sounds, but his owne sighes, and the stormes and thunders and earthquakes of his owne despaire, To enable this man to open his eyes, and see that Christ Jesus stands before him, and says, Behold and see, if ever there were any sorrow, like my sorrow, and my sorrow is overcome, why is not thine? To open this mans eares, and make him heare that voice that sayes, I was dead, and am alive, and behold, I live for evermore, Amen; and so mayest thou; To bow downe those Heavens, and bring them into his sad Chamber, To set Christ Jesus before him, to out-sigh him, out-weepe him, out-bleed him, out-dye him… to enrich this poore soule, to comfort this sad soule so, as that he shall believe, and by believing finde all Christ to be his…

John Donne, April 15, 1628. Preached to the King at White-Hall.1

“Rhetorique will make absent and remote things present to your understanding,” says John

Donne as he discusses the limitations and power of human reach in his 1622 Easter sermon.2 For

Donne, in his role as a minister of the gospel, preaching is more than practical oratory. Its stakes are high. By making abstract, spiritual things present to the “languishing wretch” before him, the preacher offers the possibility of belief and, through belief, salvation itself. Preaching about hope and the community of faith is itself a means of accomplishing the hopeful office of that very

1 John Donne, Sermon 8, Sermons Preached at the Court of Charles I. The Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne, Vol. 3, ed. David Colclough (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 132.

(Subsequent references to this volume in this chapter will be given as Sermon 8, OESJD, vol 3, 132.)

2 “Rhetorique will make absent and remote things present to your understanding.” John Donne, Easter, 1622, Sermon 2, Sermons, ed. George Reuben Potter and Evelyn Mary Spearing Simpson, Vol 4 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953), 87.

(Subsequent references to the Potter and Simpson edition will be given P&S, Vol. 4, No. 2, 87.)

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136 community, as it could be found in the seventeenth-century English church. Donne preaches as though, sitting within his congregation, were those who were spiritually paralyzed by despair, doubt, and sorrow. Donne’s homiletic approach centers a method by which, as the preacher tells of the hope of salvation, individual auditors recognize their participation in sin and despair and respond to an open offer of redemption, imitating the progress of the preacher’s performance. In other words, when a sermon makes the auditor present for the offer of salvation, it becomes a means of bringing individuals from despair, through doubt, into the community of belief that exists within the church.

In his sermons Donne repeatedly asserts the importance of preaching for, in short, “the

Cure of Souls.”3 From the concern given to his personal fulfillment of the office of preaching to his legendary desire to die in the pulpit, it is evident that Donne fulfilled his employment with full moral and intellectual seriousness.4 Donne’s sermons are the mature creations of one of the finest literary minds ever to write in English. They explore human discomfort with our limitations in language which reaches for something beyond this state. For his early modern auditors, Donne’s vivid rhetoric probed the innermost part of the soul, attempting to arrest her despair and join her to all those others who have hoped.

In his office of preacher, Donne writes with different purposes than in his poetry. His idiosyncratic wrestling with the individual’s subjective experience and epistemic struggle is transformed by his faith in the fundamentals of Christianity and their particular expression in the

3 P&S Vol 8, no 6, 164. See also, for example, particularly P&S Vol. 6, no. 10, on the conversion of Paul, 205- 222; and P&S Vol 4, no. 14, on Acts 2:36, 345-379.

4 See, for example, “Who but my selfe can conceive the sweetnesse of that salutation, when the Spirit of God says to me in a morning, Go forth to day and preach, and preach consolation, preach peace, preach mercy.” Sermon 3, OESJD, vol 3, 50.

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English church. Donne’s sermons create a multi-faceted enactment of the thinking individual in an unstable religious world. Donne attempts to alleviate the isolation of the individual, not by obliterating subjective experience or questions, but by contextualizing them within the community of the church. As he offered in a sermon preached at Paul’s Cross in November 1629: “There are certaine and constant means ordained by Christ, for our reconciliation to God in him, in all cases, in which a Christian soule can bee distressed, that such a treasure there is deposited by him, in the

Church.”5 Through close readings of two sermons—one an attack on divisiveness and a defense of inclusive soteriology, the other a deeply personal meditation on death and redemption—I will outline the ways in which Donne’s presence-creating rhetoric attempts an offer of relief for the doubting individual.

The first sermon takes John 14:2 as its text: “In my Fathers House are many Mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you.”6 Preached in April 1626 at Whitehall, the sermon is both infused with doctrinal controversy and bold in its statements against the controversial. It exemplifies some of the characteristic ways in which Donne’s preaching sidesteps the deep spiritual anxiety produced by theological dispute in general and especially by solitary wrestling with hardline predestinarian teaching.

The second, preached at Whitehall on his customary first Friday of Lent, is Donne’s final sermon, the frequently anthologized Deaths Dvell, which he described as his “owne funeral Sermon.”7

5 P&S, vol 9, no 4, 127.

6 Sermon 3, OESJD, vol 3, 39.

7 Sermon 14, OESJD, vol 3, 229.

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Even within the urgency of this meditation on death and Christ’s death in particular, Donne creates a refuge for the troubled soul in the collective experience of the church.

Both sermons involve consolation, and both were delivered before Charles I amid the increasing theological tensions of the late 1620s and early 1630s. Both participate in the monarchy’s effort to use court preaching to support the unity of the English church. In such a charged atmosphere, what is unsaid can become as important as what is said. Not to comment at all on the raging (and public) debates is itself a comment. Donne chooses to engage, but cautiously (Jeanne

Shami would say, “with discretion” 8) and, ultimately, to extend mercy. Donne presupposes that his court auditory, a group alive to all of the state repercussions of theology, might also truly have troubled consciences. Intellect, learning, power, wealth—Donne assumes these are no insulation against lying awake at night wondering if you are damned.

Given this context, these pastoral purposes demonstrate the spiritual focus of even Donne’s court rhetoric. In another court sermon, delivered in February of 1625, he says that the text itself, and subsequently his explication of his text, is meant to prompt a “raising” and a “sinking” of the emotions. He compares this motion to the casting and collecting of fishing nets, used to “draw in your soules.”9 Donne engages with the weaknesses and temptations of this specific auditory. His pastoral goals are relevant to his court auditors not despite their status, but rather because of it. The ambitious one is pastor to the ambitious.

8 Jeanne Shami returns to this concept in her description of Donne’s sermons, but first identifies it in “Donne on Discretion,” ELH, Vol. 47, No. 1 (Spring, 1980), 48-66.

9 Sermon 2. OESJD, vol 3, 22.

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Both sermons seem to contradict their consolatory goals. In endings which are not what we expect, first triumphant and then qualified, we find an extension and complication of this overt strategy of consolation. For the sake of consolation and hope, the affective performance of individual faith within these sermons provides an imperfect solution through recognition of self within community: an acceptance of conformity within this faulty version of the English church.

In these two sermons before Charles, we see the tensions that pull on the preaching of one of England’s best poets and preachers. In the religious literature of Stuart England, theological tranquility could be a tool for state power, to quell spiritual questioning was to secure the crown’s authority. Yet, as I have argued, the stability of the temporal community—enabled by what may be either pragmatic negotiation or pusillanimous capitulation—can also be seen as a tool to achieve spiritual goals. Viewed this way, a stable English church is able to call the largest and broadest community toward salvation.

It is this later impulse, seen here in Donne’s attempts to stabilize doubt and dissent that best makes sense of the way apparently contradictory allegiances exist in his work. In an age when questions of who is saved and how caused monarchies to rise and fall, Donne’s pastoral concern even at court shows the degree to which political maneuvering both appropriated power from the spiritual and, even when church and state were intertwined most heavily, ultimately fell short of reaching toward the eternal. Conscious of the power of his role as a preacher, Donne pushes against the fragmentation of community in England by religio-political forces for the sake of extra-temporal allegiances and goals. Although Donne tends to destabilize any realizations of the promise of a unified, glorified kingdom of believers with the imperfections of earthly existence, he ultimately uses these sermons to enact the pull of community into hope.

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I. ‘Consolation without Controversie’

“In my Fathers House are many Mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you.” Preached to the King in my Ordinary wayting at White-Hall, 18. Aprill, 1626.10

About this verse, Donne begins, are many controversies, including over the translation itself.

We must reject those translations which imply that we cannot trust the promises of Scripture.

Instead, reason leads us to accept the interpretation of “our own Church” and this translation of the text.11 The two clauses of this text form the division, although they are handled in reverse order.

“If it were not so, I would have told you.” Donne says this conditional gives us an important principle for interpreting Scripture, which we must regard both as true and sufficient. He presents two ways to err. The first belongs to the Church of Rome, which holds that even if Scripture “speak nothing but truth, yet it does not speake all the truth.”12 Underestimating the sufficiency of Scripture opens the Church to contention and wrangling. Donne summarizes some doctrinal controversies

(the role of the sacraments for salvation, doctrines about the Millennium, whether the dead see God before the last Judgment) to raise the question of what happens when the authorities differ or when the Roman Church affirms “new doctrines.”13 Donne condemns the Council of Trent for binding

10 Sermon 3, OESJD, vol 3, 39-56.

11 Ibid., 39.

12 Sermon 3, OESJD, vol 3, 41.

13 Ibid., 43.

141 consciences, especially for consolidating authority in “the breast and bosome of one man” rather than “upon every deske in a study.”14

The second error is committed by an unnamed threat, those who “doe not believe All persons to be intended in the Scriptures, who seem to be concerned therein.”15 Donne protests that he does not want to engage in controversy over “curiosities” but that he speaks here “onely to deliver God from all aspersions and to defend particular consciences from being scandalized with dangerous phrases.”16 He cites, in abbreviated form, the decision of the Synod of Dort and argues that the English church is in step with these claims about Scripture’s sincerity of intention. This first clause—“If it were not so, I would have told you”—establishes a “general Rule of Doctrines.”17

Donne then proceeds to the “particular” doctrine of Heaven drawn from the first clause.18

The second part of the sermon is divided into two: first, an examination of whether the phrase “many mansions” justifies “disparity and degrees of glory… in heaven” and, second, an exposition of the “right use… of the right sense” of these words, namely consolation.19 Donne does not deny that there must be some degrees of glory in heaven, and presents a survey of agreement in

Christian thought on the question. Yet, taking this doctrine of degrees as far as the Catholic tradition

14 Whether Donne really adheres to an ideal of solitary study for all individuals is another question. Sermon 3, OESJD, vol 3, 44.

15 Here Donne is echoing Arminian criticism of Calvinist qualifications of passages which seem to offer more universal opportunity for salvation. Ibid., 45.

16 Ibid., 46.

17 Sermon 3, OESJD, vol 3, 46.

18 Ibid.

19 Ibid.

142 does—especially in establishing intercessory saints—“destroy[s] Devotion so farre, as to divert it upon a wrong object.”20 Donne dismisses the elevation of saints as unhelpful, irrational. “In this

Divinity, Virgill is their Pope.”21 He ultimately presents the problem as an unnecessary narrowing

“extend[ing] Problematicall Divinity to Dogmaticall.”22

Furthermore, that error is dangerous because the purpose of this particular text is consolation, and “matters of consolation [should be] without controversie.”23 If we focus on what was never controversial, we will find our consolation. The best and most fulfilling moments in the mission of preaching, Donne says, are when the message is consolation. No matter the depths of our circumstances, we can only be separated from this consolation if we depend on false comforts either of distraction or of self-salvation. “Christ comforts then, he disputes not, that is not his way;

He ministers true comfort, he flatters not, that is not his way.”24 The right use of the words of the

Scriptural text must not be merely consolation, but trustworthy consolation.

Donne offers a final division of the text in order to amplify the consolation that it offers:

“Be comforted then, sayes Christ to them, for This, which is a House… My Fathers House… of

Mansions... of many Mansions… This house shall be yours, though I depart from you.”25 This house has a physical manifestation on earth in the houses of prayer that make up the Church. It is Christ’s

20 Sermon 3, OESJD, vol 3, 47.

21 Ibid., 49.

22 Ibid.

23 Ibid., 50.

24 Sermon 3, OESJD, vol 3, 53.

25 Ibid., 55.

143 to promise us, since we are co-heirs with him. Mansions remain, and in this remaining, eternity— without day, night or time—is signified.

Donne moves toward his conclusion with a detour into another controversy—“Reall presence” in the sacrament26—and then ends with an injunction against ambition and jealousy. In the many there is consolation because Christ’s salvation is both multiple and particular; he prepares a place for each soul in particular, though many around them are also being saved. Donne’s final sentence is a negation; do not trouble yourself about others for that is not how “Consolation and

Devotion” and “Rest and Quietnesse” are found.27

This sermon embodies the contradictions that feed the controversy over Donne’s precise theological position within the English church. It was preached, the original heading tells us, “to the

King, in my Ordinary wayting at White-hall,” that is, as part of Donne’s duties as court chaplain to

Charles during the month of April. Given the charged context of its delivery, that is, before a courtly auditory during a time of escalating conflict between Puritans and the emerging Arminians, Donne does not directly confront the controversy the sermon is talking about. The sermon is simultaneously strikingly polemical about combating division and a ready example of Donne’s irenic, pastoral tendencies. Donne engages in controversy in order to set aside controversies, which he sees as standing in the way of salvation. As a means of extending salvation to as many souls as possible, he preaches a communal consolation. It is in a collective context that the individual auditor to most readily comes to depend on the hope that is offered.

26 Ibid.

27 Ibid.

144

Donne enacts the consolation he preaches by leading his auditors through debate and into a promised rest, setting aside the “problematicall” rather than resolving it.28 In doing so, he speaks to the doubting auditor’s experience of struggle, both affirming the individual and locating that individual’s identity within community. In the many mansions of this text, Donne finds reasons for both humility and assurance.

The exordium foreshadows Donne’s rhetorical project in this sermon. It begins by detailing the controversies involved in both translating and punctuating the text in question. Yet, by the end of the paragraph, Donne returns to the reading of the text given in the Authorized Version, the translation “which our own Church exhibits to us.”29 Likewise, in the sermon as a whole, Donne’s message undergoes the very change in attention to which he urges his auditory to submit, eschewing doctrinal controversy for transformative existence in the church under mercy-centered preaching, awaiting the cessation of doubt and conflict in heaven.

At the end of the exordium, Donne offers a brief statement of the theological center for this sermon, and for much of his teaching on assurance: “in that notion, the Plurality, the Multiplicity, lies the consolation.”30 He stresses that his goal is to redirect his auditors to “the right use of the true, and natural, the native and genuine, the direct, and literall, and uncontrovertible sense of the words.”31 In short, in order to progress beyond its initial foray into controversy, while avoiding the

28 Sermon 3, OESJD, vol 3, 49.

29 Ibid., 29.

30 Ibid., 40.

31 Sermon 3, OESJD, vol 3, 40. Perhaps Donne doth protest too much here. Scripture, as the Reformers found out, does not easily have such a sense.

145 tangle of tensions that form its immediate context, this sermon must do the very thing that Donne promises will bring his auditors “Rest and Quietnesse.”32

In Part I, Donne seeks to create criteria for applied dogma that will allow him to dodge doctrinal debates and to avoid the (well-founded) objection that claims to theological stability are arguable at best for the English church.33 Donne wants to present a version of church history that allows him to find a non-controversial, essential core of doctrine, all that must be known to hold on to faith and to pass through life with hope. Of course, Donne’s definition of orthodox is tilted toward the understanding of Christianity that existed in London in the 1620s. Yet, from his place within the Stuart church, he is reaching for a fairly broad minimal orthodoxy.

Donne argues that two opposing camps miss the assurance Christ offers in this verse: those who force the wondering soul to look to sources other than Scripture to learn what is necessary for salvation and those who make that soul wonder which expressions of comfort in Scripture apply to her. By claiming that both Catholics and more radical Calvinists introduce unnecessary qualifiers into an individual’s realization of grace, Donne makes the pre-Anglican English via media not just a political tool, but a pastoral one. Donne’s Calvinism differs from those he is defining himself against not so much in the content of the beliefs themselves, but in how such things are discussed, especially pastorally. It is an irenic, almost utilitarian argument: “to establish a disconsolate soule, there is always Divinity enough, that was never drawne into a Controversie.”34 Avoidance of the

32 Ibid., 55.

33 References to the division of the text are based on the marginal notes, retained in the OESJD from the original publication of the sermon.

34 Sermon 3, OESJD, vol 3, 50.

146 more explosive doctrinal controversies was official crown policy, and Donne was recruited to preach in support of the 1622 “Directions Concerning Preachers.” Nevertheless, for Donne, the choice to emphasize the non-controversial was also a pastoral act. This avoidance could be a prudent course of policy for a national church, but it could also be the way to draw the greatest number of people within that nation into the stream of redemption. In the version of church history presented in this sermon, stability, simplicity, the dependable markers of faith: all can be found in the English church.

Yet the first half of the sermon is not an irenic presentation of the fundamentals of the faith.

The exordium, Part I, and the first section of Part II raise many more questions than they answer.

Donne asserts that controversy is harmful, yet over half of the sermon is nothing but contention, occasionally as aggressive as any other seventeenth-century polemic. He charges his Protestant opponents with making God guilty of “fraudes pias”—a term usually used against Catholic foes35— and he deliberately misreads the conclusions of the involvement of the English Church in the Synod of Dort. 36 The first sentence of the sermon posits “occasion of Controversies of all kinds” within this one verse.37 While Donne details some historical theological controversies, the contemporary

35 Ibid., 40.

36 Achsah Guibbory discusses the intricacies of this reference and its potential subversive power in siding with Montagu and the Arminians. "Donne's Religion: Montagu, Arminianism and Donne's Sermons, 1624–1630." English Literary Renaissance 31, no. 3 (2001), especially 427.

Peter McCollough also sees this passage as an example of Donne’s using the appearance of irenicism as a strategy. "Donne as Preacher at Court: Precarious 'Inthronization'," in John Donne’s Professional Lives, ed. David Colclough (Cambridge, England: Brewer, 2003), 196.

Jeanne Shami, however, provides a reading of the same sermon that sees Donne more neutral, or at least Laudian and reckless. “John Donne and the Synod of Dort,” in John Donne and the Protestant Reformation: New Perspectives, ed. Mary Arshagouni Papazian (Detroit, MI: Wayne State UP, 2003), 314-334.

37 Sermon 3, OESJD, vol 3, 39.

147 polemical content of the sermon is two-fold. In addition to the familiar enemy of Rome, Donne also snipes at aggressively predestinarian teaching, especially the related doctrine of limited atonement, which, at the beginning of Charles’ reign, was a battle being waged in pulpit, pamphlet, and courtroom.38 By pairing these two enemies, he accuses factions of the English Church of the same fault as the post-Tridentine Roman Church, that is, of restricting salvation in such a way that what seems to be offered by Scripture is not actually available. 39 He claims to wish “contentious men would leave wrangling,”40 while using phrases like, “I dispute not, but… I argue not, but…,” in order to continue his own wrangling.41

This strategy is hardly calculated to induce peaceful contemplation of the essentials of

Christian faith. Rather the effect, through the first half of the sermon, is to destabilize. If his auditory did not arrive at this service disposed to start arguing about theology, by midway through this sermon they would be. Despite claiming that wrangling is detrimental to the peace that best serves Christian devotion, in this sermon Donne weighs in on a fray so explosive that it was literally being tried in court.

38 The latter accusation was a step into a minefield. This sermon was delivered in front of some of the very political figures who were currently trying Montagu in Parliament for the Arminian teaching in his writings, including A New Gagg for an Old Goose. Statements on controversial points of soteriology would inevitably be taken as a statement on these proceedings.

39 As was generally expected, Donne openly criticizes the Roman Catholic Church (although there is perhaps less venom in his attacks than can be found in others, and he seems, with a few exceptions, less interested in scoring points in a witty takedown and more with freeing the consciences of those listening to his preaching). He attacks the Council of Trent repeatedly, as well as specific orders and sects. Carrithers and Hardy observe a similar strategy in other of Donne’s sermons. "'Not upon a Lecture, but upon a Sermon': Devotional Dynamics of the Donnean Fisher of Men." In John Donne and the Protestant Reformation, ed Mary Arshagouni Papazian (Detroit, MI: Wayne State UP, 2003), 335-359.

40 Sermon 3, OESJD, vol 3, 43.

41 Ibid., 45.

148

Such destabilization is a rhetorical tool, readied as Donne considers the promise of “my

Father’s House.” Yet the arguments of the first section of the sermon are not for show alone.

Donne is indeed arguing for the more inclusive soteriology necessary for his vision of the community of the Church, and it is significant that he is most sensitive to those theological errors that seem to him likely to prevent people from reaching toward salvation. Nevertheless, the intellectual wrangling of the first part of the sermon raises the ghosts that haunted England since

Henry VIII’s break with Rome. This theological turmoil has personal psychological repercussions as well. Donne wants to defeat these anxieties with the consolation of the scriptural text. In structuring the sermon this way, Donne does not just recommend avoiding controversy. Rather, his sermon also does what it preaches, showing fraught theological questions set aside for the sake of faith.

The hinge to this sermon is not in the transition from Part I to Part II, for the first section of Part II deals with the controversial issue of prayers to saints. Rather, it occurs when Donne lays aside the debates for Consolatio. Here, Donne engages in a sustained first-person demonstration of how all necessary comfort can be found in the elements of Christian faith that were never under debate. 42 These essential claims carry the comforting weight of sixteen hundred years of Christian teaching. In other words, they bring with them the assurance of community. By performing his own progress in grasping these reassurances, Donne provides his auditors with a model in their present journeys.

While his sermons have different purposes and contexts than his poetry, the anxious spiritual wrestling of the Holy Sonnets is recognizable in the moments when Donne the preacher

42 Sermon 3, OESJD, vol 3, 50. This is followed by a first person account of how to get to this uncontroversial peace. My discussion of “Death’s Duell” will address Donne’s particular use of the first person.

149 identifies with the doubting souls in his auditory. In moving beyond the paralysis of doubt and controversy, what he recommends is not exactly that his auditors should not trouble themselves with tricky questions. Rather, the solution is a kind of alchemy, a redemption of questions through reconstitution. The resolution comes not by having better answers, not by winning debates, but by redirecting the question toward the central elements of faith.43 This is also key to Donne’s pastoral method. He does not mean to refute all political enemies and theological opponents, or to engage in debate until all the right positions win out. He means to comfort the questioners and direct them toward God.

Opening the curtain for a while, Donne speaks directly of himself as a preacher: “Who but my selfe can conceive the sweetnesse of that salutation, when the Spirit of God says to me in a morning, Go forth to day and preach…”44 Here Donne expounds on his homiletic purposes. This passage is often read as proof of Donne’s elevation of the role of the preacher. Intriguingly, within the spectrum of possible messages of the preacher, he elevates consolation. In front of king and court, Donne claims that his purpose is not to expose sin or to right the policies of the nation, but rather to “preach consolation, preach peace, preach mercy.”45

43 See also, for a similar example, another sermon preached before Charles in February 1625. Donne exhorts the doubting soul, “Thou must not presse heauily to thine owne damnation euery such Sentence, Stipendium peccati Mors est That the reward of sinne is death; Nor the Impossible est, That it is impossible for him that falls after Grace to bee renewd; That which must try thee is the whole Booke, the tenor and prupose, the Scope and intention of GOD in his Scriptures.” Even the syntax contributes to this consolation through redirection; the individual agency has been reduced in the act of this doctrinal wrestling. In the first instance the auditor is the subject and is enjoined not to “presse heauily” the words of problematic proof texts. The Scriptural text is acted on by the fearful doubter. In the second instance, it is Scripture that “tr[ies] thee.” The auditor is now the subject and will be judged by the whole “Booke.” Condemnatory proof-texts are not defeated by being engaged, they are defeated by being diluted, with the emphasis turned elsewhere. Sermon 2, OESJD, vol 3, 32.

44 Sermon 3, OESJD, vol 3, 50.

45 Ibid.

150

The community of faith plays a significant role in Donne’s exposition of the delight of mercy-centered preaching. For Donne, as for many other preachers in the early modern period,

God’s transformative mercy is communicated propositionally through Scripture, but it is also enacted in biblical narratives. Although the stories in the Bible are considered as literal historical events, the passage of time collapses. His auditors find themselves in a community with people who lived long before: “we shall have a full satisfaction, in that wherein S. Philip placed all satisfaction,

Ostende nobis patrem, Lord, shew us thy Father, and it is enough.”46 What happened for Philip can happen,

Donne assures them, for you. Within the essential elements of the Christian faith can be found the community that sustains rather than alienates.47 This community is also the best means, in Donne’s formulation, to salvific belief.

Donne views himself as a conduit of grace, one who must present to the best of his ability a universal call to salvation, truly on offer to everyone. To do this, Donne blurs the line between the saved and the damned, the elect and the reprobate, the godly and the truly hopeless. In doing so, he ultimately creates a recognition of shared experience.

That if God lead me into a Congregation, as into his Arke, where there are but eight soules, but a few disposed to a sense of his mercies, and all the rest (as in the Arke) ignobler creatures, and of brutall natures and affections, That if I finde a licentious Goat, a supplanting Fox, an usurious Wolfe, an ambitious Lion, yet to that creature, to every creature

46 Donne clarifies that the saints do not give us comfort because they accomplish something for us, but because we are on the same journey. “We are not joint purchasers of Heaven with the Saints, but we are co-heires with Christ Jesus. We have no a place there, because they have done more than enough for themselves, but because he hath done enough for them and us too.” Sermon 3, OESJD, vol 3, 53.

47 Donne’s inclusive soteriology is shared ground with the Arminians. I think his desire to find the community of the Church may proceed from the same root Guibbory identifies (in this sermon and others): “Together Arminianism and ceremonialism sought to reconstruct a corporate community to cope with the fragmenting implications of the Reformation.” “Donne’s Religion,” 414. Nevertheless, Donne’s Calvinism is apparent in other instances to a degree that precludes holistically labeling him an Arminian, and although you can find defenses of ceremonialism in his preaching, it is by no means a major concern.

151

I should preach the Gospel of peace and consolation, and offer these creatures a Metamorphosis, a transformation, a new Creation in Christ Jesus, and thereby make my Goat, and my Fox, and my Wolfe, and my Lion, to become Semen Dei, The seed of God, and Filium Dei, the child of God, and Participem Divinæ Naturæ, Partaker of the Divine Nature it selfe.48

As this passage begins, individual auditors may feel themselves to be either one of the eight

“disposed to a sense of his mercies” or outside of that select number. If they are not one of the select congregation, then they must be other, the many as opposed to the few. This remainder, this greater number, are “ignobler creatures” and seemingly hopeless. In this odd retelling of the story of

Noah’s ark, those who are unaware of God’s mercy are so different from Noah’s family that they are inhuman. Yet it is exactly for these people that the message of mercy exists. With his subtle possessive pronoun, the goat, fox, wolf and lion belong to Donne, the preacher of consolation, and they will also belong to God. The animals have been rescued on purpose and transformed into

God’s children.

As he moves to his exegesis of the house with many mansions, Donne again emphasizes the communal nature of this consolation. The stabilizing comfort of the church—in practical experience an institution often neither stable nor comforting—comes from its destiny of unity. The mansions, plural, are a house, singular. Here on earth the house of God is a house of prayer, which is manifest in houses of prayer, that is, church buildings where the church gathers. All of this, however, is just a shadow of the house of God in heaven which is both “His standing house, his house of glory” and a

48 Sermon 3, OESJD, vol 3, 51.

152

“house… by him made ours, [in which] there are Mansions.”49 The “plurality” consoles because it exists within a single house.

For Donne, peace, happiness, harmony, and glory are all experienced in a state of unity with the divine and with each other. Thus, Donne describes the house of many mansions as a place

“where all our soules shall be intirely knit together, as if all were but one soule, and God so intirely knit to every souls, as if there were as many Gods as soules.”50 While the latter half of this description sounds nearly polytheistic, Donne is giving hyperbolic expression to an expansive inclusiveness which does not negate the individual or individual experiences. In Donne’s paradoxical simile, the harmony of the unity of Christians is likened to the unity of God, and God’s unity with each of them simultaneously is likened to many Gods. The church that will be unified with God is a whole in a way that is difficult for individual humans, trapped inside their own individual perception, to imagine. The house of many mansions will be inhabited in a way that joins the individual and collective experience.

Following this ode to the unity of heaven, Donne seems to reach the peak of consolation.

Amplifying Christ’s words, Donne defines the house of many mansions further, in a rapid series of negations that build to the promise “This house shall be yours, though I depart from you.”51 It is “a

House, and not a Ship… My Fathers House, not a strangers… a dwelling, not a sojourning.”52

Donne’s description incorporates into one long sentence so many facets of comfort: stability,

49 Sermon 3, OESJD, vol 3, 54.

50 Ibid.

51 Sermon 3, OESJD, vol 3, 55.

52 Ibid.

153 belonging, permanency, community. The sentence concludes with a promise of possession. Yet, the final clause in this long sentence is not the authoritative “This house shall be yours,” but rather

“though I depart from you.” The emphatic position is given to the absence rather than the comfort.

This sentence represents a key shift in the sermon. Donne moves on in this paragraph to raise a fresh controversy, the presence of Christ on earth in the sacraments. He does not wade into arguments, and does not even clearly set out his own position. Rather, once again warning against

“wrangling and disputing,” he pushes his auditors to secure Christ’s presence by being “sure, that thou be really present with him, by an ascending faith.”53

Donne finishes the sermon by leaving behind the metaphor of the house of mansions. He warns against fearing the earthly consequences of the deaths of the powerful, doubting God’s will and timing. Donne seems to have taken the controversies he enjoins his auditory to leave aside and to have replaced them with less explicitly theological interpersonal strife. His concluding sentence is as much a warning against ambition and murmuring on earth as it is an expression of consoling assurance.

Earlier we saw this sermon do what it urges its auditory to do. Yet in the end, Donne seems to undercut his purposes. After building to a beautiful expression of resurrected hope, Donne charges back into doctrinal controversy. He ends with chiding and negation rather than affirmation.

Nevertheless, there is, within this unsettling diminishment, a tension that invites further reflection.

Donne creates, in the peroration, a paradigm of relationship to other Christians that lessens the singularity of the individual, while still affirming his or her importance.

53 Ibid.

154

For as Christ Jesus would have come down from heaven, to have dyed for thee, though there had been no soule to have saved but thine; So is he gone up to heaven, to prepare a place for thee, though all the soules in this world were to be saved as well as thine. Trouble not thy selfe with dignity, and priority, and precedency in Heaven, for Consolation and Devotion consist not in that, and thou wilt be the lesse troubled with dignity, and priority, and precedency in this world, for Rest and Quietnesse consist not in that.54

Donne’s conclusion recognizes that element of the human condition by which we experience life: our interior, subjective consciousness. Donne directs his auditors toward a less limited reality.

Donne’s final sentence pairs “Consolation and Devotion.” He presents consolation, not merely as a mercy of God, but as a means to kindling the faith that leads to salvation and to a devoted Christian life here on earth.

The paradox of a house made of many mansions parallels that of a church congregation listening to a sermon. The identities of individual Christians are located in the stability and context of the church. Donne urges his auditors toward a more devotionally efficacious experience by demonstrating the quieting effects that the unified fundamental elements of “Divinity” provides.

The essence of the Christian faith is reassuring not only because others believe it too, but also because the ultimate trajectory of Christian experience is away from division and toward complete unity.

In this paradigm, the individual is not erased, and personal experience, including struggle, is not denied. Rather contention is replaced with hope. Caught by the net of this sermon, Donne’s auditory is brought through controversies toward unity. This unity is imperfectly realized and is beset with contradiction. For instance, Donne consoles by saying that the salvation of “all the soules

54 Sermon 3, OESJD, vol 3, 55.

155 in this world” does not exclude any one individual.55 The consolation he offers is reformulated in the litotes of his concluding paragraph as it gently “forbid[s] thee not… to desire to be dissolved.”56

In the tensions that beset these final few paragraphs it is possible to see an ambitious plan overrun by the preacher’s own doubts and inability to resolve either theological strife or the struggle of ambition amid the fear of death. It is also possible to see a performance of a pattern, in which

Donne invites recognition of an imperfect self, offering a model which proceeds toward salvation in the context of the church. Yet for the recognition to be most effective, it must draw back from a more polished crescendo of comfort.

In the April 1626 sermon on consolation, we see how Donne crafts a sermon in which both the explicit context and the implicit movement of the sermon sets out to ameliorate individual anxiety within the community of the church. The individual may wrestle with difficult theology in any number of ways; indeed, this is inevitable given the destabilization of religious authority. In the midst of growing divisiveness within the English Church, Donne finds establishing the inclusiveness of the offer of salvation pastorally necessary. But beyond this, he wants to limit striving for precarious answers on contentious questions. When those questions are set aside, something more satisfying can take their place. The essential core of Christianity, for Donne, is theology which offers comfort. This comfort is necessarily communitarian, built on shared experience of doubt and hope.

The imperfection of this attempt situates this promise within the imperfections of the current church, offering to any individual auditor a recognition of possibility within an unresolved practice which nevertheless attempts to keep moving forward.

55 Sermon 3, OESJD, vol 3, 55.

56 Ibid.

156

II. The House of God

Deaths Duel “And unto God the (LORD) belong the issues of death. i.e. From death.”57

As he begins his final sermon, Donne’s architectural metaphor in the exordium shows the three simultaneous readings of the text. We are delivered from death, in death, and through death; these understandings are the foundation, buttresses and contignations of this building: “He that is our God is the God of salvation.”58 These three—à morte, in morte, per mortem—are paired with liberatio, deliverance being the end result of “issues of death,” and they provide the main divisions of the sermon. Donne sets out his claims in brief: God rescues the Christian from ultimate death, provides a comforting deliverance at the moment of death, and has accomplished all this through

Christ’s own death.

In Part 1, Donne deals with the claim that the Christian does not need to fear the ultimate issue of death. To establish this, he considers the fore-shadowings of death which “in all our periods and transitions in this life, are so many passages from death to death.”59 The reminders of death are everywhere, as “we celebrate our owne funeralls with our cryes, euen at our birth.”60 Donne finds the pervasiveness of death manifest in both our sins and our grief. In all of this, “with God the Lord

57 Sermon 14, OESJD, vol 3, 229-246.

58 Psalm 68:20.

59 Sermon 14, OESJD, vol 3, 232.

60 Ibid., 233-234.

157 are the issues of death, and… I cannot doubt of a deliverance.”61 From this apparent confidence, Donne swerves to meditate on bodily decay in the grave. He imagines this equalizing process, even to the

“dispersion of dust,” before emphasizes that God delivers even from this death.62

In Part II Donne considers liberatio in morte, deliverance in the moment of death. Far from offering a manual on how to die well, Donne rebuts the common assumption that the manner of a person’s death reveals the state of their soul: “God doth not say, liue well here, and thou shalt dye well, that is, an easie, a quiet death; But liue well here, and thou shalt liue well for euer.”63 God’s deliverance of the soul in the hour of death is promised no matter the particular end.

Part III is, in the original metaphor, the joints that tie the whole building together. We are delivered from death through the death of Christ. In this section, Donne transitions to a passion sermon, in which the “use” of the “doctrine” is meditation and conformity to the death of Christ.

Donne confronts paradoxes: Christ died freely and of necessity; we should mediate daily and yet not familiarly.

Donne provides a devotional rule by which the auditor may begin to conform “thy selfe to him.”64 The events of Christ’s last day are used to direct the conscience: “Hast thou been content to come to this Inquistion, this examination, this agitation, this cribration, this pursuit of thy conscience, to sift it, to follow it from the sinnes of thy youth to thy present sinnes, from the sinnes of thy bed, to the

61 Sermon 14, OESJD, vol 3, 239.

62 Ibid.

63 Ibid., 241.

64 Ibid., 244.

158 sinnes of thy boorde, & from the substance to the circumstance of thy sinnes? That’s time spent like thy

Saviours.”65

Donne’s stream of questions subsides in a vivid picture of the death of Christ and his issue at the moment of death:

And then that Sonne of God, who was neuer from vs, and yet had now come a new way unto vs in assuming our nature, deliuers that soule (which was neuer out of his Fathers hands) by a new way, a voluntary emission of it into his Fathers hands; For though to this God our Lord, belong’d these issues of death, so that considered in his own contract; he must necessarily dye, et at no breach or battery, which they had made vpon his sacred Body, issued his soule, but emisit, hee gaue vp the Ghost, and as God breathed a soule into the first Adam, so this second Adam breathed his soule into God, into the hands of God.66

The peroration combines Donne’s voice with the divine to offer the terms of this liberatio a morte, in morte, per mortem. In following Christ through the end, his end, Christians too give their souls to the

God they belong to, dying with hope of rescue in a position of “blessed dependency.”67 In this final paragraph, Donne moves from retelling Christ’s death to an image of the Christian meditating on

Christ’s death to his characteristic conclusion, part prayer, part doxology: “till hee vouchsafe you a resurrection and an ascension into that kingdome which hee hath purchased for you with the inestimable price of his incorruptible blood.”68

Death’s Duel concerns itself with the psychological and spiritual nuances of each individual auditor. Here in his last sermon, the claims I made about consolation and community for Donne’s

18 April 1626 sermon seem to be irrelevant. And yet, in part because of its reputation for

65 Sermon 14, OESJD, vol 3, 245.

66 Ibid., 246.

67 Ibid.

68 Ibid., 246.

159 demonstrating Donne’s stylistic strengths and their intersection with his forceful personality, this sermon allows a counter-intuitive demonstration of my argument. Although Donne addresses the individual directly, though he urges a contemplation that seems to be interior and solitary and though he rarely mentions a collective experience, even here Donne’s pastoral purposes remain rooted within the church.

The traditional, non-authorial title of Donne’s final sermon, Death’s Duel, is likely derived from and contributes to Donne’s ministerial reputation as a preacher obsessed with death. It is also, as David Colclough points out, less apt than the subtitle: “A Consolation to the Soule, against the dying Life, and liuing Death of the Body.”69 In this sermon, Donne attempts inter-related tasks: performing his own preparation for death and preparing his auditors for death.

Donne modifies the forms of his presence as the preacher in order to fulfill his varied purposes. Ultimately, as he does in the 1626 sermon, Donne finds ways to stabilize the individual

Christian in the community of the church, even when confronting the isolation of death. In this sermon, whether using the first person singular, the first person plural, or speaking in the second person, Donne performs multiple roles. In the first person singular he speaks in three different personas: an exemplary individual experiencing the transformation the sermon is meant to inspire; a pastoral leader, instructing while also formally identifying himself as a member of the instructed body; and finally the authoritative voice of the divine speaking through a human minister.70

69 Sermon 14, OESJD, vol 3, 230.

70 Margaret Fetzer discusses Donne’s varied uses of the first person plural in her consideration of Donne’s preaching as a re-enactment of salvation. "Donne's Sermons as Re-Enactments of the Word." Connotations: A Journal for Critical Debate 17, no. 1 (07, 2007): 1-13.

160

As we have seen, a sermon delivered is part of a communal act of worship.71 Like any piece of persuasive rhetoric, it works on individuals. Yet, these individuals make up a collective auditory, which also has a metaphysical identity as the communion of the saints. The response of any individual exists within this context, and when that response is the one Donne desires to provoke, it is a movement of individual faith toward a communal destiny: the unity of the church universal with the divine in the afterlife.72

As is Donne’s habit, this sermon is an extended meditation on complementary (rather than competing) ways in which the words of his Scriptural text “belong the issues of death” can be taken.

Using the metaphor of a building, i.e., a house of faith, he examines the ways in which God’s presence can be seen as humanity encounters death.73 The exordium is academic and impersonal, but in Part I the sermon’s dominant tone, emotionally heightened and intensely personal, becomes apparent. Donne compares the womb to the grave, and dwells on the specter of death even in birth:

“wee haue a winding sheete in our Mothers wombe, which growes with vs from our conception.”74

71 As opposed to its secondary, published form.

72 Of course, there are times when any preacher is not moving directly toward this end or even arguably directly against it, as the bitter polemical divisions which are a critical commonplace of the study of early modern Christianity no doubt attest, but it is worth considering the role of intended purpose in an analysis of the rhetoric of the sermon itself.

73 I would argue that although this structural reading of this sermon is illuminating, and the repetition of the three-fold structure is perhaps particularly intricate, it is certainly not astoundingly structured for Donne’s sermons, and especially for that auditory. If we recall that a few years prior, the same auditory was used to Lancelot Andrewes plentitude of divisions, and that the division was an expected part of almost every early modern sermon, and that printing the parts of the division in the margin was also commonplace, it is hard to argue that the structure of this sermon is unique. Jonquil Bevan argues that the sermon has a seven paragraph structure to correspond to the seven days of the week in addition to the more obvious tri-part structure. "Hebdomada Mortium: The Structure of Donne's Last Sermon." Review of English Studies: A Quarterly Journal of English Literature and the English Language 45, no. 178 (05, 1994): 185-203.

74 Sermon 14, OESJD, vol 3, 233.

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Yet this morbid discussion is framed in hope; the introductory sentence to this first part reads with argumentative certainty: “First, then, we consider this exitus mortis, to bee liberatio à morte, that with

God the Lord are the issues of death, and therefore in all our death, and deadly calamities of this life, wee may iustly hope of good issue from.”75 He concludes the section by passing in a single sentence from the dissolution of decomposed dust spread to the wind to “a life that shall last as long as the

Lord of life himselfe.”76 In the passages of this sermon that are often excerpted to demonstrate

Donne’s fascination with death, he offers an empathetic catalogue of the sorrows of death and life, which throw into relief the depths of its hopes as well. He asks, for instance, “how much worse a death then death, is this life, which so good men would so often change for death?”77

Around this braid of sorrow, mortality, and hope, Donne signals different relationships with his auditors. Most of the sermon is either in a descriptive third person, or in the conventional first person plural so common to sermons for its facility in signifying the authoritative voice for a minister who is also part of the community of the instructed. Characteristically, however, Donne deviates into either the first person singular or a direct address at significant times.78

His first extended use of the first-person singular, which comes in the section labeled Exitus a mortibus mundi.,79 is essentially performative, involving his auditors in his experience rather than

75 Ibid., 232.

76 Ibid., 239.

77 Sermon 14, OESJD, vol 3, 235.

78 The first person plural is the usual form of Andrewes, Sibbes and King as well.

79 For a detailed argument on why the marginal notations for Deaths Dvell should be considered authorial, see Bevan, “The Structure of Donne’s Last Sermon,” 188ff.

162 expressing the experience of John Donne, individual Christian. He first quotes and then paraphrases

Biblical figures—Job, Elijah, Jonah, Paul, David—who wish for death or wish not to have been born. He then personalizes these as types of experiences—e.g., “If my case bee as Saint Paules case”—in a long period that builds through nine clauses to a great “yet.”80 The climax, still in first person, consists of exemplary statements of confidence, through positive comparison with others in the faith: “after a Iob, and a Ioseph, and a Daniel, I cannot doubt of a deliuerence.”81 The auditor is meant to participate in the statement in the way that the reader of a lyric poem participates in the creation of that experience. Donne identifies with the sorrows of the biblical figures in a pattern that moves from desolation toward consolation.82

While a greater ratio of singular first person pronouns to the standard first person plural may seem to indicate a greater emphasis on individualism, Donne’s use of first person singular is almost always in this performative vein and reveals the salutary way community can function in Donne’s sermons. For example, when Donne says, “When therefore I finde these markes and liue so; I may safely comfort my selfe in a holy certitude and a modest infalliblity of my adoption,” he is not speaking of his adoption, but rather modeling how that assurance may be found.83 Individual auditors learn how to move from despair to consolation by watching Donne on the same journey, who is, in turn,

80 Sermon 14, OESJD, vol 3, 235.

81 Ibid.

82 Donne explicitly urged his auditors to do this in a 1624 sermon at St. Paul’s: “Postdate the whole Bible, and whatsoever thou hearest spoken of such, as thou art, before, believe all that to be spoken but now, and spoken to thee.” P&S, Vol VI, No. 10, 220.

83 Sermon 14, OESJD, vol 3, 237. Consider another example from the July 1, 1627 funeral sermon for Lady Danvers: “Yet I shall finde, that such a family, such a society, such a communion there is, and that I am of the Quorum, that can say, Come what scornes can come, come what terrours can come, In Christo Omnia possumus,” P&S, Vol. VIII, No. 2, 72.

163 following the models of Scripture. Part of the authority to guide the lives of those in the sermon’s auditory comes from the accumulation of the experiences of Christian believers throughout time.

Donne’s exemplary voice affirms the reality of despair and anxiety, while showing a path forward, first through recognition and then through imitation.

The conclusion of the second part also works this way: “a gate into heauen I shall haue, for from the Lord is the cause of my life and with God the Lord are the issues of death.”84 It is worth noting that here, as in the example above, Donne provides a pattern for his auditors to mimic by weaving his own words with the words of Scripture. In the counter-intuitive vision of this sermon, life is a prison, and death is the key to real life. Even though it is strikingly personal in tone, this passage provides a template for universal contemplation.85 It is easy to see this first person recitation of promise, “a gate into heauen I shall haue,” as Donne’s own preparation for death. Yet the categories he considers are broad enough that any auditor can follow along with them. In vivid metaphors of hacking and burning, the fear of death is transmuted into a violent deliverance. The overall effect is more longing than morbidity.

This passage contrasts with Donne’s opening to the second part of the sermon when he lectures them against judging the state of a person’s soul by the manner of death.86 There he uses

84 “But whether the gate of my prison be opened with an oyld key (by a gentle and preparing sicknes) or the gate bee hewen downe by a violent death, or the gate be burnt downe by a raging and frantique feauer, a gate into heauen I shall haue, for from the Lord is the cause of my life, and with God the Lord are the issues of death. And further wee cary not this second acceptation of the words, as this issue of death is, liberatio in morte, Gods care that the soule be safe, what agonies soeuer the body suffers in the houre of death.” Sermon 14, OESJD, vol 3, 241.

85 Ramie Targoff’s discussion of the un-liturgical mode of Donne’s religious poetry, including a Litany, is a useful means of contrasting the shifts in Donne’s voice between his sermons and his religious poetry. Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2001), 92-94.

86 For a discussion of the tensions between this part of the sermon and Donne’s depictions of a good death in other works, see Arnold Stein, "Handling Death: John Donne in Public Meditation." Elh 48, no. 3 (Fall, 1981): 496-515.

164 the first person plural to identify not with the act of judgment, but rather with the complexity of humanity that prevents these sorts of judgments.87 Although Donne is the most removed from his congregation at this point in the sermon, he still employs a convention which places the preacher in the same category as his congregation.

In this sermon, Donne usually uses the second person with the imperative to urge his auditory more explicitly toward contemplation and meditation, which seem solitary activities.

Nevertheless, at the height of marveling that God (in Christ) died voluntarily and yet was constrained by necessity in the form of the rescue he provided, Donne pleads: “answere you with

Dauid, accipiam Calicem, I will take the Cup of saluation, take it, that Cup is saluation, his passion, if not into your present imitation, yet into your present contemplation. And behold how that Lord that was God, yet could dye, would dye, must dye, for your saluation.”88 Taking the cup of salvation recalls partaking of the wine of the sacrament of Holy Communion.89 Thus, even this contemplation begins in the collective context of Church worship. This liturgical context is also apparent about twenty lines further in the paragraph when Donne references “vs that speake dayly of the death of Christ, (he was crucified, dead and buried).” The daily “speaking” is the recitation of the Creed, which forms part of the order of service for morning and evening prayer in the Book of Common Prayer.90

87 Sermon 14, OESJD, vol 3, 240.

88 Sermon 14, OESJD, vol 3, 243. Here we also see an explicit instance of the mimetic use of the first person. The auditory is meant to speak the words “I will take the Cup of saluation” with David and with Donne as part of their contemplation of the passion and as a participatory means of accessing its redemption.

89 An echo of this language is found in the words of the service of Holy Communion in the The Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662. Oxford World's Classics, ed. Brian Cummings. Paperback ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 136-137.

90 Ibid., 110.

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As Donne moves into the peroration, he switches to the familiar thou when he urges contemplation as part of the preparation to take the sacrament elements of the Lord’s Supper, as is appropriate for a Lenten sermon. This preparation involves the meditative remembrance of Christ’s last night, framed as a series of evaluating whether they are conformed to Christ’s passion. Here,

Donne separates himself, functioning as a corrective agent. As such, this authoritative questioning also functions as the voice of the Church, by which the preacher as an individual also questions himself just as the auditor as an individual joins in the I of performative declarations of hope earlier in the sermon.

The complexity of Donne’s rhetorical position vis-a-vis his auditory is nowhere more apparent than in the puzzling, idiosyncratic “wee” of the final sentence:

There wee leaue you in that blessed dependancy, to hang vpon the Crosse, there bath in his teares, there suck at his woundes, and lye downe in peace in his graue, till hee vouchsafe you a resurrection, and an ascension into that Kingdome, which hee hath purchased for you, with the inestimable price of his incorruptible blood.91

This sentence juxtaposed images of bathing, nursing, and sleeping with the gruesome imagery of the crucifixion; it is precisely these sorts of violent yokings that the old classifications of Donne as a metaphysical preacher were trying to describe. Yet the introductory phrase “there wee leave you” has its own sort of shock. This is not the conventional sermon we. Who is leaving whom in this place?

Donne’s ambiguous use of the first person plural, melds together the I of the preacher’s voice with an echo of the divine voice in the wee of the Church. By changing again to you rather than thou,

Donne is able to speak to the congregation both as individuals and as a body. Donne abstracts his voice as preacher to merge it with the voice of the divine as it comes to individual Christians in the

91 Sermon 14, OESJD, vol 3, 246.

166 collective context of hearing a sermon. Even within the individualized preparation for death, the church is the means and the context for apprehending assurance.

Finally, we must look at the last line itself: the familiarity of which belies its complexity in this conclusion. In eighteen of his surviving sermons, Donne closes with some version of this sentence.92 The earliest sermon ending with the phrase “the inestimable price of his incorruptible blood” is in 1617, and he employs it in a variety of contexts, from Whitehall to Paul’s Cross, and at both funerals and weddings. Thus, we can surmise that this was a routine or at least often revisited strategy for closing his sermons. The first part of the sentence varies, but syntactically it is usually either a blessing, promising the consummation of redemption, or, as in this case, an enjoinder to wait in expectation for this promise.93 Almost always, as here, the realization of redemption is labeled as a kingdom, a resurrection experience in which the redeemed are part of a new community.

In this version, Donne retains his separation from his auditory that is so strikingly evident in his use of “wee leave you.” With only one other exception, when Donne closes a sermon with this line, he speaks of a kingdom purchased “for us.”94 Here he says “for you.” This distance is perhaps an indication of his having accepted his death and, thus, his entry to a realized rather than promised kingdom.95

92 In addition to “Death’s Duell” these sermons are Potter & Simpson, vol. 1, no 5; vol. 2, no. 18; vol. 3, nos. 2, 9, 10, 11; vol. 4, no. 10; vol. 6, no 7; vol. 7, nos. 10 & 15; vol. 8, nos. 2, 3, 6, 7, 8; vol. 9, no. 4; and vol. 10, nos. 10 & 11.

93 In this it fits the generic expectation of closing with a prayer or kind of doxology, which seamlessly flows, in some cases mid-sentence, from a more didactic or hortatory mode.

94 In a sermon from February of 1620/21, Donne also uses “for you.” Potter & Simpson, vol. 3, no 9, 224.

95 Targoff reads the “wee” of this passage as Donne identifying with Christ because he has already “arrived triumphant on the other side of the grave.” John Donne, Body and Soul (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 180.

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In his final peroration, Donne returns to a closing he had tried and found useful. The part of the sentence that seems to have most suited him is “the inestimable price of his incorruptible blood,” as he repeats it without variation. In its rehearsal of a relatively straightforward, central

Christian claim, the sentence is familiar. Yet Donne does not take his language directly from either

Scripture or the BCP. The pairing of sound and strength in the two adjectives is a Donnean mixture of reaching toward the ineffable and eternal. Donne takes perfectly orthodox concepts and even language and intensifies them, creating his own liturgical pattern.

In her essay on “Deaths Duell,” Emily King argues that, by spending most of the sermon discussing death with such gruesome detail, Donne “diffuses an unarticulated anxiety” through his auditory without ever resolving it to align with the consolation the sermon promises.96 King gives a sharper point than most to what is, nevertheless, a pressing question presented by this text. What does this sermon actually do to its auditory? How does it move from being eaten by worms to real consolation? The conclusion gestures toward consolation, certainly. But the violence of the imagery and the discomfiting nature of the metaphors of contemplation in the peroration seem to qualify rather than secure that consolation.

In its uncomfortable pseudo-resolution, this sermon, like the 1626 one examined earlier, reminds the reader of the experience of reading Donne’s sonnets. Donne does not conclude with the individual auditor hanging in dependency, contemplating the wounds of the crucifixion. In his concluding clauses, he leaves behind the overt individualism in order to enter into a liturgical moment, albeit, one that he himself created. It is possible to see this doxological conclusion as a

96 Emily King, "Affect Contagion in John Donne's Deaths Duell." SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 56, no. 1 (2016): 119.

168 retreat to convention, a shunning of the “anxiety” the sermon raises about death, in a way an abandonment of language. In turning to a liturgical expression of conventional faith, Donne redirects his auditors beyond the sermon into the house of God, an ending prefigured in Donne’s elaborate architectural structure. In gesturing toward the comfort of the church without fully articulating it, Donne leaves the restless, doubting individual with a path, an uncomfortable entry into an imperfect paradigm, by which the church imperfectly expresses in language the hope of redemption and the assumption of the individual into a perfect kingdom.

In looking at this sermon, famous for displaying the voice of Donne the idiosyncratic metaphysical preacher, we find subtle but inextricable traces of Donne’s desire to stabilize the experience of the individual in both the authority and the community of the church. When the sermon is heard properly, the individuals in the auditory join together in following Donne as he follows the instructions of Scripture. Even personal meditation in preparation for death takes place within the collective context of communal worship. God’s deliverance of Christians from, in, and through death creates the foundation, buttresses, and contignations of a house of faith which the individual auditor inhabits with others. Finally, when Donne elides the voice of the preacher with the voice of God, he relies on a version of the Reformed paradigm that gives Scripture the greatest potency when it is encountered as the preached Word, heard together with others. Donne uses the preacher’s authority to deploy the words of Scripture in declarations of mercy, leaving the individual

Christian in the power of Christ, in an expectation of mercy that assuages the pain and fear of individual struggle.

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III. ‘Open to most men’97

Treated at various times as mere glosses for Donne’s poetry, the sermons are now studied in their own right, having benefited from the increased attention given to the early modern sermon over the past two decades. These efforts, in turn, have been directed more and more by a consideration of fully contextualized sermons, rather than being read as a homogenous whole.98

Building on the work of revisionist historians, literary scholars have waded into the complex religious world of Jacobean and Carolinian England, attempting to discern Donne’s exact position on the fraught doctrinal questions of the day. 99 As with theology, so with politics, scholars debate

97 See Daniel Gibbons for a reading of “Show me Dear Christ” as a “statement of an ecclesiological preference for unity over purity of doctrine” as well as an explanation of the capacity for “mystical reading,” one “less in what it says than it what it allows its audiences to do.” Conflicts of Devotion: Liturgical Poetics in Sixteenth-and Seventeenth-Century England (University of Notre Dame Press, 2017), 160-162.

98 In particular, Jeanne Shami’s extensive work is notable for her authoritative dismissal of many kinds of bad readings of Donne’s sermons, ones which attempt to connect with certain political or theological camps on the basis of decontextualized quotations drawn in isolation from the whole body of his work. Her arguments against tendencies to “an ahistorical and essentially unscholarly approach to the evidence of the sermons” are most succinctly put in “The Absolutist Politics of Quotation” in John Donne’s Religious Imagination: Essays in Honor of John T Shawcross, ed. Raymond- Jean Frontain and Frances M. Malpezzi (Conway, AR: UCA Press, 1995), 382, 385-391.

99 For a non-exhaustive list of twenty-first century attempts to do so, see: David Colclough, “Upstairs, Downstairs: Doctrine and Decorum in Two Sermons by John Donne." Huntington Library Quarterly: Studies in English and American History and Literature 73, no. 2 (2010): 163-191 and "Silent Witness: The Politics of Allusion in John Donne's Sermon in Isaiah 32: 8." Review of English Studies 63, no. 261 (09, 2012): 572-587; Annette Deschner, "Reforming Baptism: John Donne and Continental Irenicism," in John Donne and the Protestant Reformation: New Perspectives, ed. Mary Arshagouni Papazian,. (Detroit, MI: Wayne State UP, 2003), 293-313; Daniel Doerksen, "Polemist Or Pastor? Donne and Moderate Calvinist Conformity," in John Donne and the Protestant Reformation, 12-34; Achsah Guibbory, “Donne's Religion: Montagu, Arminianism and Donne's Sermons, 1624–1630." English Literary Renaissance 31, no. 3 (2001): 412-439; Marla Hoffman Lunderberg, "John Donne's Strategies for Discreet Preaching." SEL: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 44, no. 1 (Winter, 2004): 97-119; Catherine Gimelli Martin, "Experimental Predestination in Donne's Holy Sonnets: Self-Ministry and the Early Seventeenth-Century Via Media," Studies in Philology (2013): 350-381; Arthur Marotti, "John Donne's Conflicted Anti-Catholicism." Journal of English and Germanic Philology 101, no. 3 (07, 2002): 358-379; Peter McCullough, “Donne as Preacher at Court”; Jeanne Shami, “Synod of Dort”, Conformity in Crisis, "Labels, Controversy, and the Language of Inclusion in Donne's Sermons." in John Donne’s Professional Lives, 135-157, “’Trying to Walk on Logs in Water’: John Donne, Religion, and the Critical Tradition” Renaissance and Reformation, Vol 35, No. 4 (2001): 81-99. "Squint-Eyed, Left-Handed, Half-Deaf: Imperfect Senses and John Donne's Interpretive Middle Way," in Centered on the Word: Literature, Scripture, and the Tudor-Stuart Middle Way, ed. Daniel W. Doerksen and Christopher Hodgkins (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2004), 173-192; and Debora Shuger, “Donne’s Absolutism,” in The Oxford Handbook of John Donne, ed. Dennis Flynn, M. Thomas Hester, and Jeanne Shami, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

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Donne’s independence from or loyalty to the Stuarts, weighing sincerity and sycophancy in his guarded words.

Yet the aesthetic and rhetorical dimensions of Donne’s sermons need not be subordinated to their historical context and indeed cannot. Recent years have produced beautiful and sensitive close readings of individual sermons.100 But even these are often oriented toward the political world in which Donne lived, giving priority to issues of controversy and power.101 Yet however politics may influence a sermon or a sermon may speak to politics, Donne’s sermons are not merely or even primarily political rhetoric. They are worth studying as an expression of the faith of both preachers and auditors, members of the elusively defined but substantial conforming center of the English church in the first few decades of the seventeenth century. As these sermons mix public and private, the power of language and the authority of office, and particular faith and universal human experience, we require the tools of literary study.

I will leave to others a precise characterization of the historical person of John Donne: conforming, radical, Arminian, conventional Calvinist, court lackey, principled dissenter, proto-

100 Notably among them is “The Politics of Allusion” by David Colclough, the editor of the recently published first released volume of the new Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne (OESJD). Colclough proposes in the introduction to this edition. “There is, though, a danger that the pendulum may have sung too far in turning from formal analysis: the most rewarding and revealing interpretations of the sermons have been careful to balance detailed consideration of their contexts with alertness to their formal strategies.”” (xxv-xxvi) This strategy can be seen in "Silent Witness: The Politics of Allusion in John Donne's Sermon in Isaiah 32: 8." Review of English Studies 63, no. 261 (09, 2012): 572-587. See also Peter McCollough’s "Preaching and Context: John Donne's Sermon at the Funerals of Sir William Cokayne" in The Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 213–67; Maria Salenius, "True Purification: Donne's Art of Rhetoric in Two Candlemas Sermons" in John Donne and the Protestant Reformation: New Perspectives; 313-334; and Carrithers and Hardy’s “Not Upon a Lecture.”

101 For example, Colclough’s close reading on Donne’s sermon on Isaiah 32 analyzes Donne’s rhetorical strategy in order to find that Donne employs a strategy of “bridging what some perceived as a gulf between the theological positions of his two royal masters, he asserts essentially Arminian theology in the language of high Jacobean Calvinism.” “The Politics of Allusion,” 584. As an example of recent exceptions to this more political emphasis, see Byron Nelson "John Donne's Pulpit Voice." Prose Studies: History, Theory, Criticism 34, no. 1 (04, 2012): 50-58.

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Anglican, and Puritan sympathizer. Mapping theological allegiances while drawing distinctions between points on the spectrum from Laudian to Miltonic is an endless task, and one that at a certain point becomes detrimental to the goal of increasing the reader’s understanding of Donne’s sermons. I find most persuasive those readings which posit a conscious position neither Laudian nor

Puritan, purposefully broad in its doctrinal and temperamental spirit of inclusion.102 Such a reading allows space for even a politically tinged theology to be sincerely held. The thought of John Donne and others who inhabit the intellectual space of the conforming center of the English church is complex and worthy of study.

Within this space, Donne emphasizes the pastoral. He urges those on the edge of despair to turn toward Christ and redemption, promising that salvation is offered.103 Inasmuch as this emphasis allies him with those who opposed the more aggressive versions of Calvinist predestinarian teaching,

Donne takes sides. In many other ways, however, he seeks to downplay contention, embracing a version of the church that is primarily concerned with salvation and the shared essentials of

Christian faith. Donne’s inclusive articulation of his soteriology dovetails with his experiential emphasis on the community of the Church as incubator and hedge of faith. These two sermons, preached before Charles I in a tense, highly politicized context, demonstrate that even when Donne

102 Scholars who place Donne in some category of moderate for the sake of moving forward in argument include Jeffery Johnson in his The Theology of John Donne “Critical discussions such as these [attempting to place Donne as Catholic, Anglican or Calvinist] ignore that Donne himself eschews such sectarian labeling because of the divisive wrangling it represents and, more importantly, often overlooks the theology emphasis Donne perceives between the Church, as the body of Christ, and its liturgical expression within the world, common prayer.” The Theology of John Donne. Cambridge, England: Brewer, 1999, 39. See also Carrithers and Hardy, “Not Upon a Lecture”; Colclough, “Introduction” to OESJD, 2014; Salenius, “True Purification”; Shami, Conformity in Crisis; Gibbons, Conflicts of Devotion.

103 “Though it be impossible to us, by any meanes imparted to us, or to our dispensing and stewardship, yet shall any thing be impossible to God? God forbid; for even from this death, and this depth, there is a Resurrection.” Easter 1626, Potter and Simpson vol 7, no 3, 112.

172 engages in political and theological controversies, his primary purpose is always pastoral. He enters the fight in order to leave room for consolation. Thus, even in his most public, political contexts for assuming the office of a minister, i.e. in his capacity as official court chaplain, Donne offers pastoral comfort to his auditors by locating a salve to stricken consciences in the communal experience of the church. Rifts in Donne’s struggles for cohesion can be seen in both his sermons and his personal devotional poetry – an inevitable result, perhaps, of offering deep comfort through a community torn by upheaval and fraught with questions that that could be literally deadly.

Taken purely as a logical argument, Donne’s method of consolation is lacking. In answer, for instance, to questions of assurance of salvation, many of the nuances of Donne’s reply could be paraphrased as just don’t worry about it.104 The conclusions of his sermons can likewise lose their way, failing to deliver a satisfying closure. The final sentence of the 1626 sermon above is such an example. While the stated promise of the sermon, and indeed most of its actual effort, is consolation, Donne’s final clause criticizes the wrangling for place that is the proverbial problem of court culture. In some ways, this rhetorical habit resembles Donne’s syntactical tendency to build verbal castles from long, multi-clausal sentences which build dependent clause on dependent clause and then undercut or slip away from the seeming center of the sentence once they arrive at the main

104 Consider, for example, in his closing sermon, the passage regarding assurance of adoption quoted above. In the extended passage, Donne warns obliquely against applying reason to know the hidden will of God, that is election, instead encouraging his readers to have confidence in the congruence of the “word of God” and the “execution of the decree.” What he means by this is to consider whether signs of Christian life exist in your life and then to assume that those mean the promises of Scripture apply to your situation. It sounds straightforward until one remembers that determining the existence of those signs was a matter of great anxiety for many, including Donne himself, if the Holy Sonnets are taken as confessional poetry. The subtext to this passage is: this is how to keep from worrying whether you are truly elect or not. The answer lacks some degree of satisfaction, since in a way, it is only “just don’t.” Sermon 14, OESJD, vol 3, 237. You’re absolutely right—but were there any better answers available?

173 clause.105 It may be that Donne’s famously complex mind was unable to achieve something as unified as pastoral, dogmatic exhortation. The deconstruction of his own best rhetorical opportunities may be intentional. Or it may be that Donne’s sermons simply attempt more than they can achieve.

Perhaps the argumentative inadequacy itself embodies what is so interesting in the difficulties represented by Donne’s pastoral endeavor. Whether or not his sermons were able to actually soothe the troubled minds of individual auditors, the attempt and the means of attempting it are provoking in themselves. Within the Calvinistic context of the early seventeenth-century English church, there is no available logical answer to the emotional dilemma of predestination and reprobation. So Donne offers instead a comfort of situation. Hear, in this sermon, that you are not the only one to fear and despair. Freedom begins when you place yourself within the church to hear the words of Scripture with others, to pray with them, to worship with them, to partake in the sacrament of Communion with them. Here, in this multiplicity within the unity of the Church, assurance and faith are bred.

105 An example of this is the sentence used to as an epigram for this chapter: “To finde a languishing wretch in a sordid corner, not onely in a penurious fortune, but in an oppressed conscience, His eyes under a diverse suffocation, smothered with smoake, and smothered with teares, His eares estranged from all salutations, and visits, and all sounds, but his owne sighes, and the stormes and thunders and earthquakes of his owne despaire, To enable this man to open his eyes, and see that Christ Jesus stands before him, and says, Behold and see, if ever there were any sorrow, like my sorrow, and my sorrow is overcome, why is not thine? To open this mans eares, and make him heare that voice that sayes, I was dead, and am alive, and behold, I live for evermore, Amen; and so mayest thou; To bow downe those Heavens, and bring them into his sad Chamber, To set Christ Jesus before him, to out-sigh him out-weepe him, out-bleed him, out-dye him… to enrich this poore soule, to comfort this sad soule so, as that he shall believe, and by believing finde all Christ to be his, this is that Liberality which we speake of now, in dispensing whereof, The liberall man deviseth liberall things, and by liberall things shall stand.” Although the string of infinitive subject phrases eloquently imagines the most miserable of sinners and present reasons for that “wretch” to hope, the main clause diverts to the praise of the preacher’s liberality, rather than the liberality of the salvation he is preaching. Sermon 8, OESJD, vol 3, 132.

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Donne accomplishes this communitarian emphasis in part by addressing his congregation as individual Christians. The spiritual life combines rational thought and what Donne would call the passions. Donne’s methods pull the doubts and struggles of the soul out of the echo chamber of self-evaluation and into a conversation. 106 When Donne’s sermons address the soul who is near to despair, they present the concept of inhabiting such a soul as a shared human experience. If you feel this way, you need not despair, Donne tells his auditors. I will voice for you the way this despair wraps itself around your mind. And as you hear these words, you can come to see that you are not the only one. If you are not alone, there is hope; there is mercy for all of us.

Donne is inviting individual auditors to realize their true selves in community. Emotions can be recognized, contextualized, and understood when they are articulated in language and when they are seen in others.107 In sermons this communal apprehension is assisted by the authority of the preacher and, in a reformed understanding, by the vitality of the preached word of God. In Donne’s sermons, this articulation is multi-faceted. Paradoxically, his auditory apprehends redemption (and the promised unity it entails) during an articulation of fragmentation. Donne performs this

106 Brian Cummings’ essay “Donne’s Passions: Emotions, Agency and Language” argues that Donne’s work reveals a concept of the self as “communicable, rather than self-obsessed.” Cummings argues that, for Donne, the subjective self is understood through the act of communication with someone who understands. While his essay looks primarily at Donne’s letters and poetry, I think this is a helpful insight for the distinction I am trying to make about Donne’s treatment of the individual in community in the sermons. "Donne's Passions: Emotion, Agency and Language." In Passions and Subjectivity, ed. Brian Cummings and Freya Sierhuis (Farnham, England: Ashgate, 2013), 56.

For an examination of the way Donne responds to the emotions of fear and hope, see Daniel Derrin’s study of Donne’s engagement of his auditor’s passions. "Engaging the Passions in John Donne's Sermons." English Studies: A Journal of English Language and Literature 93, no. 4 (06, 2012): 452-468.

107 This is the experiential, pastoral side of Donne’s teaching. Jeffery Johnson finds his more technically theological thought often also sounds themes of the church and community: “From within the liturgical pattern of common prayer, the invisible grace of God is made visible in the Word and Sacraments, and thus, the divine/human relationship, severed because of original and habitual sin, is restored. The Church is for Donne the nexus for that reconciliation, which achieves its spiritual significance by means of physical participation.” The Theology of John Donne (Cambridge, England: Brewer, 1999), 146.

175 subjective emotional experience, using the first person, not as an expression of his personal self, but in a voice that is both singular and universal. His auditory is meant to hear, recognize and inhabit this language. As Donne’s voice moves from despair to hope, the auditory finds room to imitate this progression. In both his theological priorities and his inclusive articulation of the individual experience of faith, the emphasis is on a shared final destiny. The end of the story is redemption and unity with the divine.

Chapter 5

“Sweet Singer of Israel:” Comfort and the Preacher in the Sermons of Richard Sibbes

I saw as if they were set on the Sunny side of some high Mountain, there refreshing themselves with the pleasant beams of the Sun, while I was shivering and shrinking in the cold, afflicted with frost, snow, and dark clouds; methought also betwixt me and them I saw a wall that did compass about this mountain; now thorow this wall, my Soul did greatly desire to pass, concluding that if I could, I would even goe into the very midst of them, and there also comfort myself with the heat of their Sun.

About this wall I thought myself to goe again and again, still prying as I went, to see if I could find some way or passage, by which I might enter therein, but none could I find for some time: at the last I saw as it were a narrow gap, like a little door-way in the wall, thorow which I attempted to pass: but the passage being very straight, and narrow, I made many offers to get in, but all in vain, even untill I was well nigh quite beat out by striving to get in; at last with great striving, me thought I at first did get in my head, & after that by a side-ling striving, my shoulders, and my whole body; then I was exceeding glad, went and sat down in the midst of them, and so was comforted with the light and heat of their Sun.

John Bunyan, Grace Abounding1

The title page of Richard Sibbes’ Two Sermons Upon the First Words of Christs Last Sermon bestows on the Master of Katherine Hall2 an additional appellation: “the sweet singer of Israel.”3

1 John Bunyan, Grace Abounding with Other Spiritual Autobiographies, Oxford World’s Classics paperback ed (Oxford University Press, 2008), 18-19.

2 Unlike our other preachers, Sibbes was not a court preacher. He spent much of his career in Cambridge, from his first training at St. John’s to his eventual role as Master of Katherine Hall, a position held from 1625 until his death. From 1618 until his death, Sibbes was also a preacher at Gray’s Inn; his time seems to have been divided between London and Cambridge. Despite his pre-existing duties at Gray’s Inn, his appointment as Master of Katherine Hall was undertaken seriously, as Mark Dever notes when discussing the improvements that occurred after his tenure began, Richard Sibbes: Puritanism and Calvinism in Late Elizabethan and Early Stuart England (Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 2000), 83. He seems to have moved more comfortably in academic and ministerial circles than city ones. Sibbes’ simultaneous positions as preacher at Gray’s Inn, Master of Katherine Hall and Vicar of Holy Trinity Church attest to his industriousness and ability, along with the respect his peers accorded him.

3Richard Sibbes, Tvvo sermons vpon the first words of Christs last sermon Iohn XIIII. I. Being also the last sermons of Richard Sibbs D.D. Preached to the honourable society of Grayes Inne, Iune the 21. and 28. 1635. Who the next Lords day follwing, dyed, and rested from all his labours. 2nd Edition. London: Thomas Harper, for Lawrence Chapman, 1636. I will be quoting throughout from the second edition, as it contains the prayer before the sermon, which was included in subsequent editions. The reference to David comes from 2 Samuel 23:1.

176

177

Latent in this phrase are many of the identifying features of Sibbes as a preacher. In likening Sibbes’ work to the psalms of King David, the printer, Thomas Harper,4 taps into the popular approval of a preacher who drew such large crowds to Holy Trinity Church in Cambridge that funds were raised to make room for more people.5 His sermons, which showcase the aesthetic potential of the Puritan plain style, are “sweet” because time and time again, Sibbes’ theme is the love of God. He woos his auditory.

Yet in this laudatory epitaph, we also see the tensions and paradoxes of Sibbes’ work.

Although he had considerable academic talent and was a preacher at Grey’s Inn, Sibbes’ preaching is directed toward a wider audience than that of the court preachers and is marked by simplicity.

Sibbes’ craft in shaping his words is hidden, sublimated in the way it must be by someone who strained at his outmost to write something that could lead people into faith, while holding that only

God had the power to give someone faith. Such a mixed account of causality creates a paradox inherent to many kinds of religious literature, yet there is driving emphasis in reformed thought on the irrelevance, indeed worthlessness, of any human action when viewed in light of God’s sovereignty. This emphasis pushes Sibbes toward the rhetorical dance of one crafting that which must not appear to be art, an achievement recognized in the aesthetic dimensions of “sweet” and by

4 Or whomever made the editorial decision concerning the cover page, possibly Thomas Goodwin, who appears on the Latin editorial page following the main title page.

5 When Sibbes first began preaching in Cambridge, townspeople took up a subscription to build a balcony for Holy Trinity Church so that more people would be able to hear him. Mark Dever, Richard Sibbes: Puritanism and Calvinism in Late Elizabethan and Early Stuart England. Macon, Georgia: Mercer University Press, 2000, 39. Grosart notes that many of those who subscribed signed their names with Xs, indicating Sibbes’ popularity among the illiterate, common people of Cambridge (xxxvi). It is also worth noting that his popular appeal extended to his time at Gray’s Inn, where he drew a large enough audience to again require additional space (Dever 75). Alexander Balloch Grosart, “Memoir” in The Complete Works of Richard Sibbes, D.D. Vol 1. Edinburgh: James Nichol, 1862.

178

John Sedgewick who, in dedicating Sibbes’ posthumous Evangelicall Sacrifices, writes, “his art was to hide his art.”6

The possessive preposition is no less important; this sweet singer is “of Israel.” Sibbes’ words are oriented toward a community, and they are for the people of God. The claim that Sibbes was "of Israel"—an identification often made in Christian thought—is a metaphorical claim to community no less ambiguous than it is traditional. Sibbes’ Puritan theology situates him among those who would consider the community of the godly—those elected to be God's people, to truly repent and believe—to be small, smaller than the visible English church certainly. Some of those, as the history of the century reveals, found this a division that called for an external distinction between the two. The community of the elect was an exclusive one. Yet, Sibbes, right up to his death in 1635, positioned himself firmly within the conforming center of the Church of England, finding as much common ground as possible. Sibbes prioritized the central adherence to the Gospel which made the established English church, in his mind, “a true Church of Christ.”7

The outward form of the national church, which sought to bridge theological divides, was an ecclesiastical commitment Sibbes supported not just in policy and position, but also in the irenic nature of most of his sermons. Except for conventional nods at anti-Catholicism, Sibbes eschews polemic.8 For the most part, Sibbes chooses not to explicitly attack those parts of the English church

6 Sibbes, Evangelicall Sacrifices, In xix. sermons. (London: T[homas] B[adger and Elizabeth Purslowe] for N. Bourne, at the Royall Exchange, and R. Harford, at the guilt Bible in Queenes-head Alley in Pater-noster-Row, 1640), A3r.

7 “Consolatory Letter to An Afflicted Conscience” in Grosart, “Memoir,” cxv.

8 The intensity of Sibbes’ anti-Catholic polemic can best be judged in his Gunpowder Plot sermons. For example, in “The Beasts Dominion over Earthly Kings,” Sibbes makes conventional connections between the church in Rome and the beast in Revelation 17:7, including emphasizing the trope of Catholic deceit, “The Devilll is a Lyer and a Murtherer from the beginning, the father of lies; so likewise the Pope is a Lyar, all Popery is nothing but lies,” Evangelicall

179 he opposes, working within it both in his ecclesiastical career and in his rhetoric.9 From the accessibility of his language to his irenic positioning, his impulse seems to have been toward a larger community, rather than a smaller one. Yet his sermons present the Christian life as intensely individualized and interior.

Finally, the very presence of a title page highlights the relationship between Sibbes’ work and the printed distribution of sermons. It borrows the authority of the preacher before his auditory at a moment in time—Sibbes before Grey’s Inn just before he died—while tapping into the widened circle of influence granted by the printed page. The popularity of sermon-going during the reign of

James followed the heavy emphasis by reformed theologians of the late sixteenth century on the preached word of God, received when heard by an auditory.10 A printed sermon is a disruption of this fundamental link in the efficacious distribution of the word of God. Yet Sibbes, for all his

Puritanism, seems comfortable with eliding this distinction. When printed, the reach of his sermons extended beyond Grey’s Inn or Holy Trinity Church; the community he reached was perhaps theologically more constrained, but geographically and numerically wider. In cooperating with this

Sacrifices, 1:11 (B6r). Yet in all three of the Gunpowder Plot sermons published in Evangelicall Sacrifices, Sibbes moves from denouncing Rome to emphasizing the heart of the individual Christian, whose truest enemy is himself, by the climax of the sermon.

9 Jennifer Clements, in examining Sibbes’ choice of the word “beloved” as a form of direct address over “bretheren,” makes the point that “beloved is more inclusive than “brethren.”” This is consistent with Sibbes’ affective minimization of exclusivity implied by some aspects of his theology. Clement, Jennifer. "Dearly Beloved: Love, Rhetoric and the Seventeenth-Century English Sermon." English Studies: A Journal of English Language and Literature 97, no. 7-8 (11/20, 2016), 736.

10 Hunt, Arnold. The Art of Hearing: English Preachers and their Audiences, 1590-1640. Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, 54-59.

180 publication, he situates himself to be one of those who are ‘helpers of the joy of Gods people.’11

Print is the logical corollary of Sibbes’ plain language.

A close reading of these two sermons on faith, the final sermons Sibbes preached, pushes us to questions at the heart of Sibbes' work: what is the role of the Preacher in the interior faith journey of another? How does the possibility of communication, of persuasion, inhabit the communal space between the divinely identified few of the godly? 12 Sibbes’ sermons help us to examine the paradoxical role of rhetoric in creating faith within the context of the Reformed sermon. Rhetoric gives us a tool to bridge these two apparent contradictions: first, the necessity and impossibility of persuasion in the work of faith; second, Sibbes' investment in the established church by means of sermons on the interior lives of Christians. Rather than through the creation of an ethical framework or through participatory action, this community is best understood through the shared inner harmony of converted souls waiting in faith. It is in this paradigm that the sermon as a necessarily communal text can be perceived. Sibbes directs his words primarily to individuals; that so many of

11 Sibbes, “To the Christian Reader” in The Soules Conflict with it self, and victory over it self by Faith. A Treatise of inward disquietments of distressed spirits, with comfortable remedies to establish them. London: Printed by M.F. for R. Dawlman at the Brzen Serpent in Pauls-Churchyard. 1635, B2v.

12 Debora Shuger’s Sacred Rhetoric describes this effect as to be moved rather than to be persuaded (Debora Shuger, Sacred Rhetoric: The Christian Grand Style in the English Renaisance, Princeton University Press, 1988, 120). Yet I think the persuasion can include the way the emotions and will can be moved while allowing room to also include the rest of the rhetorical work going on in Sibbes’ sermons. I use persuasion here to mean something like words which successfully argue with the intellect and move the emotions and the will, interacting in some unknowable way with the spiritual responses of the soul. I’ve simplified this complex goal into the term persuasion, in no small part because it is a word that Sibbes himself uses as well, for example, in explaining his purposes in publishing The Bruised Reede and the Smoaking Flax, “the Holy Ghost effectually perswadeth by a divine kind of rhetoricke,” (unpaginated) and in his claim in Two Sermons that Christ “perswades to confidence” (5). Sibbes, The Bruised Reede and Smoaking Flax. Some Sermons contracted out of the 12 of Matth. 20. At the desire, and for the good of weaker Christians. London: Printed for R. Dawlman, dwelling at the signe of the Brazen Serpent in Pauls Churchyard, 1630.

181 his sermons were revised and published as treatises for the devotional reader, sitting alone, rather than the auditor, sitting in a congregation, speaks to this. Nevertheless, he preaches to individuals still in community, one joined, he asserts again and again, by the same love shown by its wooing savior. Christ’s example is one of “admirable love and care” and “we should imitate our blessed

Saviour.”13 In following Christ, Christians are given strength to love each other “for the love of God must set all on work.”14 Sibbes’ performance as the "sweet singer of Israel" provokes the apprehension of faith he says comes only from God, bringing his auditory to grasp the remote and divine—the unseen things of faith—as present. The applied vision of the conformity he assents to is worked out through his role as the comforting preacher.

I. Comfortable Passages

The two sermons published as “TVVO | SERMONS | VPON THE FIRST | words of

Christs last Sermon | IOHN XIIII I. | Being also the last Sermons of R I C H A R D S I B B S

D.D.” differ from the majority of Sibbes’ published sermons for several reasons. Unlike The Bruised

Reede’s vague “some sermons,” the title page gives dates and location for the sermons, June 21 and

28, 1635 at Gray’s Inn.15 They contain traces of their liturgical context within the published text, most clearly in the prayer that takes the place of a dedicatory epistle.16 Originally published in 1636,

13 Sibbes, “The first Sermon,” Two Sermons, 3-4. 14 “King David’s Epitaph,” Beames of Divine Light, 2:185.

15 Sibbes died on July 5, 1635.

16 Two Sermons, A2v. This prayer is not included in the first edition, but is included in the second, which was also published in 1636 and seems to indicate a strong demand.

182 shortly after Sibbes’ 1635 death, they merit their own volume on account of their status as his final sermons.17 The long title seizes on the parallels between Sibbes’ sermons and the context of Christ’s words, delivered on the night before his death in John’s narrative of the Passion. The title page bears the quotation from 2 Samuel which functions as an epitaph for Sibbes and his work: “These are the last words of the sweet singer of Israel.” A Latin dedication page bestows “mellittissimi” as an honorific title, i.e. the most honeyed, merging the biblical reference with a rhetorical one.

Despite the differences related to their contextual presentation in print, these sermons, in subject, style, and tone, are characteristic of Sibbes’ work as a whole, including his most popular published works. In their focus on Christ’s love and with their pastoral object being the comfort of a dejected soul, they offer in a truncated form what Sibbes provides in The Bruised Reede and the

Smoaking Flax, The Soule’s Conflict with Itself, and Bowels Opened. These three longer works are all taken from multiple sermons, evidently preached in a series, but published in treatise form. The Bruised

Reede was not only a bestseller in the seventeenth century, but made Sibbes’ reputation for centuries and is even now offered devotionally in paperback form.18 The Soule’s Conflict with Itself, containing an authorial note from Sibbes dated July 1, 1635, four days before his death, covers in extensive detail the sort of internal turmoil of conscience that places a soul in need of comfort.19 Bowels Opened,

17 I quote from the second edition throughout.

18 Kari Konkola notes that the degree of Sibbes’ success means that during his peak popularity in 1638-1639 it is probably that the new editions of The Bruised Reede were being printed in runs of two to three thousand. The Bruised Reede is what drives much of Grosart’s praise and seems to be responsible for much of Sibbes’ nineteenth century reputation among the heirs of the non-conformists. There are at least six paperback editions available on Amazon.com as of November 21, 2018, including one offered “In Today’s English.”

19 Richard Sibbes, “To the Christian Reader,” The Soules Conflict with it self, and victory over it self by Faith. A Treatise of inward disquietments of distressed spirits, with comfortable remedies to establish them, A3r-B2v.

183 published posthumously, is from a series of sermons on the Song of Solomon and went into three editions between Sibbes’ death and the war. A significant contribution to Sibbes’ affective reputation, it uses the motif of Christ as lover to explore faith and repentance in relational terms.20

The paratexts to Two Sermons, the prayer and the title pages, bear marks of Sibbes’ relationship with print culture. The prayer contains indications of being written for delivery in the congregational setting, referring to the gathered believers and to the sermon event that is about to take place. Sibbes would have delivered a prayer such as this from the same position behind the pulpit where he preached the sermon. In print, the prayer appears in much smaller text, set off from the rest of the text with a decorative border. The title pages formalize and condense Sibbes’ position, titles, and relationship to his congregation and patrons.21 Their very weight comes from the particular moment and space in which they were actually preached. Sibbes’ admirers clearly found it significant that his last sermons were on the words of Christ the night before he died.22 The

20 Richard Sibbes, Bovvels opened, or, A discovery of the neere and deere love, union and communion betwixt Christ and the Church, and consequently betwixt Him and every beleeving soule Delivered in divers sermons on the fourth fifth and sixt chapters of the Canticles. By that reverend and faithfull minister of the Word, Doctor Sibs, late preacher unto the honourable societie of Grayes Inne, and Master of Katharine Hall in Cambridge. Being in part finished by his owne pen in his life time, and the rest of them perused and corrected by those whom he intrusted with the publishing of his works. London: Printed by G[eorge] M[iller] for George Edwards in the Old Baily in Greene-Arbour at the signe of the Angell, MDCXXXIX. [1639] Dever comments on Sibbes’ understanding of the natural fit of the “sensual language” in this poem for this homiletic task, 143. Clements’s examination of Sibbes’ usage of “beloved” relies heavily on this work, 740-741.

21 The Latin editorial title page claims Sibbes’ relationship with Robert Rich, the Earl of Warwick and his family: “HONORATISSIMIO Dominio, | DOMINO Roberto COMITI Warvvicensi, | HAS | MELLITISSIMI THEOLOGI | Richardi Sibbs, S. THEOL. DOCTRIS | (Quem | Percharum habuit, cuiusque concio- | nantis auditor erat assiduous, una | cum nobilissima | Familia).” See Dever on the evidence, based in part on Sibbes’ position at Gray’s Inn, for a strong relationship between Sibbes, Warwick, and Warwick’s son, also Robert, 62-63.

22 Even the “sweet singer” quotation comes from a passage describing David’s last words in 2 Samuel 32.

184 authenticity of the original delivery no doubt contributed to their success in publication, with two more editions following in 1637 and 1638.

These two sermons showcase the intersection of faith, love, and rhetoric in the working homiletics of Richard Sibbes. Eloquent examples of the strength of Sibbes’ opus as a leading Puritan practitioner of affective preaching, they feature beautiful individual passages. In places, the tensions inherent to Sibbes’ ecclesiological commitment to the established church and his deeply individual approach to Christianity show themselves. More significantly, however, in these, his last sermons, we can see the picture of preaching that he wished to leave to his auditors, whom he acknowledges are made of “flesh not steele.” 23 Sibbes styles Christ’s words in the text of this sermon as a

“comfortable” passage, and it is clear that he sees himself as also a “comfortable” preacher.24 It is his ideal not only of his own preaching, but of preaching as a means of grace in the world, to the

English church as a whole.

The two sermons together take as their text the opening words of John 14: “Let not your heart be troubled: ye beleeve in God, beleeve also in me.”25 The “sweet singer of Israel” employs seemingly simple language to exhort the other members of the community of the godly in and to the faith which he claims only God can give. Gentle, yet zealous, spare, yet mystical, these sermons embody the paradoxes that distinguish his ecclesiological career and homiletic craft. They assume the hearer to be doubting and troubled and have as their end a peaceful, rightly ordered soul. The

23 “The first Sermon,” 6.

24 Ibid., 2.

25 “The first Sermon,” 1. “The second Sermon,” 36.

185 preacher comforts, drawing his flock toward union with Christ in the realization of faith, an interior glorification only possible through the activation of the word preached in the church.

While many of Sibbes’ sermons have colorful titles, these two are called only “The first

Sermon” and “The second Sermon,” perhaps reflecting a lack of authorial revision given his death only a week following the delivery of the second sermon.26 Essentially one work, the emphasis of the first is on the command to not be troubled; the second on foundational faith in God the Father and in Christ himself. Throughout both, Sibbes argues that faith is the key to the untroubled heart.

“The first Sermon” begins by situating Christ’s words as especially authoritative given his approaching death. Christ’s loving intent in these words—“of all words that come from loving men to those they love, such are most remarkable as be spoken when they be ready to dye”—is the theme of the exordium.27 A savior, Sibbes suggests, who speaks like this before he dies is consistent with the one who would come to save at such great lengths.

After the division of the text into “a disswasion from over-much trouble” and “direction to beleeve in God, and Christ,” Sibbes then moves into his discussion of the first command.28 Christ sees, he claims, the good in the weakness of the disciples’ distress at this moment. Their fear was intertwined with their love for and dependence on him. While he is their comfort, his physical

26 For example, “The Knot of Prayer Unloosed,” “A Glimpse of Glory,” “A Matchless Mercy,” all in The Saints Cordials, or “Violence Victorious” and “The Church’s Echo” in Beams of Divine Light. Grosart, “Bibliography” Vol 7. 564- 565. It is possible of course, that these titles were created by an editor and not Sibbes himself since The Saints Cordials was unauthorized and Beams of Divine Light was posthumous. However, Sibbes seems to have chosen The Bruised Reede and the Smoaking Flax, a title taken from Scripture but very vivid in itself.

27 “The first Sermon,” 2.

28 Ibid., 4.

186 presence is not necessary and, in fact, his presence through the Holy Spirit after the ascension will be more to their good. Although the disciples are blind to this, Christ’s words here will be their help.

Sibbes observes that even “the best Christians” are troubled more than they should be and gives examples of troubled characters in Scripture, followed by reasons God allows trouble: it shows us our weakness so that we will see Christ, prevents spiritual pride, and makes us merciful to others.29 A troubled spirit is inordinate, however, when “it hinders us in duties to God, or to others.”30 To be paralyzed either through sorrow or fear is sinful. Affections are good, but only when properly ordered. Their role is to move us to act as we should, not to prevent action. Thus, an overly troubled soul gives a place to Satan.

Sibbes categorizes the ways in which being “over-much troubled” is problematic for the

Christian.31 Yielding to excessive affections of fear or sorrow weakens the capacity of the spirit and the mind,32 dishonors God by demonstrating a proud refusal to believe,33 wrongs others, and harms the reputation of religion.34 Answering the objection that religion actually “makes men sad,” Sibbes admits that it does but says it is only so that it may cheer them rightly. 35 For, he argues, it is first

29 Ibid., 8.

30 Ibid., 10.

31 Ibid.

32 “The first Sermon,” 13.

33 Ibid., 14.

34 Ibid., 15.

35 “But you will say, Religion breeds a great deale of trouble, and pensivenesse. It is indeed the speech of the shallow people of the world, Religion makes men sad.” “The first Sermon,” 15.

187 necessary to know “that all is not well” in order to be rescued and cheered.36 He follows this by cautioning that being overly miserable about your own sin is a failure of belief.

Sibbes then argues that Christ cures sorrow by forbidding it, because in giving that command he gives the grace to accompany it. Practically, Sibbes says, troubled Christians are comforted through community, the common graces of the physical world, and the Sacraments, but, ultimately it is the heart that must receive comfort because that is where the trouble lies. Here Sibbes runs headlong into one of the fraught paradoxes of sola fide of the Reformation: “that we may receive comfort, let us labour for a spirit of faith.”37

There are concrete steps through which the Christian can labor for faith. First, find the cause of the trouble, especially unrepented sin. Then confess that sin to God and consider the promises that answer to that situation, promises drawn from Scripture. Memorizing these and meditating on them should combine with striving to keep a clear conscience from sins of omission and commission. Finally, Sibbes recommends that his auditors consider the full import of the incarnation and crucifixion and the work of the Trinity in helping the Christian to realize that comfort.

It is this last injunction that provides the climax of the sermon. Faith in Christ banishes troubles and brings comfort, unites us to Christ and empties us of ourselves, and is the foundation of both the logical realizations and the healthy praxis that together lead us to comfort. In the peroration, Sibbes returns to love. “Faith sets the Soule on a Rocke, above the reach of waves, upon

36 Ibid., 16.

37 Ibid., 28.

188 the love of God in Christ. And therefore set the grace of Faith on worke, keepe it on the wing, preserve it on exercise, and faith exercised will be able to comfort the most dejected soule in the world, and to raise it above all the troubles that can be imagined, or befall us.”38

The structure of “The Second Sermon” transposes the order of the first one, beginning by completing the second part of the initial division of the text, focusing on the words “Yee beleeve in

God, beleeve also in me.”39 First, it briefly reprises much of contextual work of the first exordium.

As before, Sibbes mines the basic tenets of Christian doctrine, presenting the love that brought

Christ to earth as the same relational impulse that creates this last sermon. He uses the person of

Christ as the object of faith to tie together the parts of this command—the injunction against a troubled heart and the command to believe.

As he did in the first sermon, Sibbes seeks to articulate the balance between appropriate and inappropriate grief, but focuses this sermon on the work of God in reaching the troubled heart.

Christ, the object of the faith that prevents melancholy is not just a mantra or metaphysical claim, but a person. Moreover, the words of the text itself are also active, part of the work of the Holy

Spirit in persuading the heart to faith. This faith has creedal content; it is belief in all three

Trinitarian persons and belief that the Christian soul is supported by the power that holds the world together. It is also, however, faith in the sense of relational trust.

In asking how it is that faith salves the troubled soul, Sibbes argues that it unites us with heaven. More practically, he expounds on the dynamic nature of faith, which must be constantly

38 “The first Sermon,” 35-36.

39 “The second Sermon,” 40.

189 renewed. He emphasizes again the basic premise of faith in Christ as the only way to transcend trouble, and then abruptly transitions to another finely balanced point. Some who should be troubled are not, and some who should not be troubled are. In order to distinguish between the two, he points out three conditions that justly trouble the soul. First, God’s anger, which is answered because the blood of Christ makes peace between us and God. Second, the soul is dismayed by itself. In this case, peace comes from having the upper hand over corruption within our souls even if it is not completely eliminated. Third, we are distraught by the condition of the world. These troubles, Sibbes argues, cannot truly harm or worry us when we know we are reconciled to God.

Comfort, he says, “stickes here” for knowing our status, nothing else can actually trouble us.40

As in the first sermon, Sibbes encourages his auditors to know scripture and the heart of its promises. Furthermore, they should remember that it is the object of faith and not the quality of the faith that saves. So even weak faith joins the Christian to God. Ignoring the faith that is present is pride. The Christian must learn to listen to the truth—that is, faith—over fear, humors, and Satan, letting the evidence of “any worke of grace” strengthen and comfort.41

As Sibbes concludes, he presents all trouble to the soul as essentially the same; it is fundamentally a lack of appropriate belief. Sibbes closes by navigating through some of the familiar paradoxes of reformed teaching; faith is entirely God’s work, only faith will save the Christian, and yet one must strive for faith, exercise it, and actively fight against doubt. The Christian is in between the light of heaven and the darkness of the world. However fearful that darkness is, we should not

40 “The second Sermon,” 50.

41 Ibid., 55.

190 be afraid because it is already overcome. To live by faith is to live looking toward the eternal.

Meditation on the grounds of comfort will keep producing comfort. The peroration is crafted as both an encouragement to do this and a proactive aid, moving the auditor to apprehend the grounds of faith not only intellectually, but also with the affections. “Warm the heart with these, and see if any petty thing can cast thee down.”42

In the conclusion of each sermon, Sibbes offers a kind of mystical vision of salvific grace. In this and in their focus on a “comfortable” presentation of assurance, i.e., the apprehension of faith for a peaceful, rightly ordered soul, these sermons are vehicles to examine the forces at play in

Sibbes’ work that reveal to us his vision of the preacher’s words as a communal force of love. Just as

Christ concerns himself with reaching toward his doubting disciples in order to provide not only salvation but also peace and comfort, so Sibbes makes it his mission to preach the Word by focusing on these words of love, presented to his auditors in “gratious colours” without which “we shall sinke.”43 In making present the gracious colors of the rescue, the preacher imitates the savior in an act of salvific grace.44

42 “The second Sermon,” 65.

43 “The first Sermon,” 23.

44 "When the preacher speaks of God’s love, he does so through the promptings of the Holy Spirit, speaking through—and as—God as much as he speaks through and of his own feelings." Clement, 737. Clements’ article emphasizes the performative role of the preacher in these acts of love, rather than attempting to judge sincerity. See also Auski, 104.

191

II. “The Soule on Rocke”45

In addition to their “comfortable” words, both of these sermons demonstrate the “radical interiority”46 that is characteristic of Sibbes’ version of Christianity. At first reading, this focus in

Sibbes’ work seems to make other people, that is, community, irrelevant. Much of Sibbes’ instruction in these sermons relates to searching the conscience in what seems to be exhaustive detail. The heart, he says, may be expected to be somewhat troubled, but it should never become too troubled. Sibbes’ rhetorical questions ask things such as: “But how shall we know that our hearts are more troubled than they should be?”47 Sibbes follows this question with several paragraphs in which he lays out criteria for making this distinction, carefully balancing between well-regulated affections and “exorbitant and irregular” ones.48 In some ways the detail seems practical, but if undertaken must have necessitated exhausting introspection.

For Sibbes, this introspection is necessary because the real proving ground of the soul’s condition is personal and interior. Thus, when Sibbes elaborates on the oft-cited verse from 2 Peter

“let us labour to make our calling and election sure,” he repeatedly directs his auditors inward: “that is, in our selves, and in our owne apprehension… to make sure in our own breasts, that sinne may be pardoned in our owne consciences, that all may be reconciled in our owne hearts, that what is done in heaven, may be

45 “The First sermon,” 35.

46 “Sibbes radically interiorized Christianity.” Dever, 157.

47 “The first Sermon,” 10.

48 Ibid., 11.

192 done in our hearts also, being cleared to our owne assurance.”49 While Sibbes emphasizes the reformed prioritization of the sovereignty of God, the de facto working out of that sovereignty is in the personal experience of assurance within the heart of the individual Christian. There is no call toward any specific set of outward behaviors, but rather everything hinges on a subjective perception of assurance. The sins that most concern Sibbes are pride and security.50

This interior orientation can also be seen in the prayer that contains, one could argue, the essence of Sibbes’ goals. Most of what he asks for “furthering of us in the way of salvation” is internal in nature.51 Sibbes asks for “true insight into our owne estates” and for the “worke of thy holy Spirit opening our understandings, clearing our judgements, kindling our affections.”52 Almost as an aside, he leaves a final goal more in keeping with instruction: “we may learne thy holy will, and then labour to frame our lives thereafter.”53 What most of the prayer requests, however, is that the sermon be a divine tool for revealing the interior self of each auditor and moving them toward the full realization of faith. It is this inward assurance—the confidence of conscience—that joins with supernatural reality of the heavenly and creates stability for the Christian in the face of trouble.

When Sibbes speaks of sin, it is almost always in terms of the relationship between the

Christian and God. What counts as sin does not need to be detailed; in fact, nearly any action or

49 “The second Sermon,” 52-53; 2 Peter 1:10. Emphasis mine.

50 See for example, “The first Sermon,” 9.

51 “The Authors Prayer before his Sermon.” Two Sermons, A2v.

52 Ibid.

53 Ibid.

193 non-action can be a sin, depending on the intent and the degree of faith. For instance, he portrays disbelief and discouragement as a contradiction of one’s status as “an heire of heaven, and a childe of God.”54 Specific sins are rarely mentioned; when speaking of sins that are outwardly visible,

Sibbes is categorical rather than pointed, as in “a swearer, a profane liver, a malitious person.”55

There is no overt discussion of contemporary events or controversies, either ecclesiological or political.

Beyond their prioritization of the inner state of the soul, the interior focus of these sermons extends to a nearly complete absence of other people, even those who have been made no longer the other, in the peace of union. The heaven the Christian in Sibbes’ sermons is headed toward is one in which “we shall have no need of being comforted, for there our peace shall be to have no enemies at all.”56 In Sibbes’ presentation, the absence of enemies is more a metaphorical absence of sin and doubt than an absence of people to whom one is not reconciled. The unity described is primarily that between the Christian and Christ.57

The irrelevance of others also seems to hold true on earth. In speaking of how the chaotic world may trouble the soul, Sibbes claims that “the soule can be at peace in that respect” by knowing that she has been saved and is right with God.58 Sibbes may mean that if God has saved your soul, he will also deal graciously with a troubled world. The effect, however, is not so much a

54 “The second sermon,” 57.

55 Ibid., 44.

56 “The second Sermon,” 46.

57 Ibid., 42.

58 Ibid., 46.

194 promise of eventual peace in the world, but of the individual’s ultimate emotional invulnerability and isolation from the effects of temporal—familial, sectarian, or national—concerns.

The earthly peace Sibbes discusses is one between the soul and God, the soul and itself, and the soul and its contentment with troubled outside circumstance. All of these categories of reconciliation are internal. “The Soule on a Rocke, above the reach of the waves,” in the peroration to the first sermon, is singular.59 This striking picture of comfort is of a disembodied soul set alone above a tempest. The only other humans mentioned in this passage are Pharaoh and Ahab, standing in for those enemies who must be ignored in order to comprehend the true state of the soul.

In the peroration of the second sermon, Sibbes paints a picture of how the Christian who knows he is Christ’s responds to all the things that may cause distress. Ultimately, nothing can shake him, “for his witnesse is in heaven, and in his owne conscience. And God in heaven, and his conscience within, do acquit him.”60 In this version of the Christian life, any kind of trouble has, at its heart, the damning presence of the Christian’s own sin. Relief comes from assurance that you have been forgiven and, thus, may turn untroubled from doubts and conflicts.

In reading Two Sermons, the practical advice for dealing with this inner turmoil resembles an early modern self-help manual. Recast in the theological terms of the conformist Puritan, Sibbes is essentially offering a plan for fighting spiritual melancholy. It is a pastoral approach that acknowledges real mental hurdles, even if much of his advice seems more to shift the locus of the question of assurance than to answer it. He recommends that his auditors find the specific cause of

59 “The first Sermon,” 35.

60 “The second Sermon,” 64.

195 their distress, speak it aloud, and find short passages from Scripture that challenge the negative thinking, memorizing them and keeping them ready to deploy when overwhelmed by difficult thoughts. For example, he recommends the promise of Hebrews 13—“I wil not faile thee, nor forsake thee”—and the confidence of Psalm 23—“Though I walke in the valley of the shadow of death, yet will I feare no ill, for thou art with me.” 61 Sibbes claims these promises “well digested” will guard against all troubles “from Satan, and hell” and, tellingly, “our own hearts.”62 The battle being fought is, at its most essential core, one of unbelief. To believe that God will not fail you is to have evidence that he will not. All problems can be overcome when the soul is properly aligned to

God in faith because no problem is more significant than a heart unreconciled to God.

While Sibbes speaks in the conventional first person plural of most sermons of the period, his preaching nearly always seems directed at the individual conscience, for the purpose of strengthening individual faith as in the case of these meditations. This focus on the condition of the soul accepts the primacy of the inner life, as he declares in the aptly titled “The Hidden Life”: “God will have it so, that this life shall bee now hid, that we may live by the promises, though wee have no feeling at all; that we may perswade our selves in the greatest desertions and extremities, yet I have a hidden Life in Christ, though I have little influence, and manifestations of it in mee: yet I have a glorious life in my head.”63 The troubles named here, the “desertions and extremities,” are as much troubles of the soul as of any outward opposition. The Christian may be troubled by having little

61 “The first Sermon,” 24 and 25.

62 Ibid., 25.

63 Sibbes, “The Hidden Life,” in Evangelicall Sacrifices, 2:6 (A24v).

196 outward manifestation of faith, yet comfort should come by realizing that “in my head” there is “a glorious life.”

Sin is a specter in Sibbes’ sermons, but most often, as in Two Sermons, it is spoken of in vague terms. So in “The Successful Seeker,” Sibbes speaks of seeking God with a pure heart and hands.

(His major theme, as the title suggests, is the necessity of seeking God at all times.) He comes no closer to calling out specific impurity than to say, “Thou has foule hands; thou art a briber, a corrupter; thou hast an impure heart, thou art a filthy creature, thou hast lived in such and such sins, cleane thy hands, and thy heart.”64 Besides bribery, Sibbes is content to allow his auditors to fill in

“such and such sins.” His real concern, the real sin, is the failure to seek God’s face.

Given such a focus on these interior realities, it is easy to find in Sibbes’ opus the seeds of a myopic individualism. When combined with the reformed tendency to see the godly as a group chosen by God through unknowable decree, rather than actively formed through participation in the outward worship of a church, the focus on assurance can amplify the interiority of discussing the individual’s unity with Christ, rather than the church’s unity with Christ.

The ultimate unification of the individual’s soul with the divine is by no means a doctrinal innovation. Yet, in Sibbes’ version, a subordinate category of unification, that of the individual

Christian with the collective Church, barely appears. As Paul Cefalu argues in his discussion of

Sibbes’ moral theology, “Sibbes’s Christological love ethic seems to displace the centrality of horizontal love, including outward service, to the experience of regeneration.”65 Cefalu is concerned

64 Sibbes, “The Successful Seeker,” in Evangelicall Sacrifices, 1:183 (M7r).

65 Paul Cefalu, Moral Identity in Early Modern English Literature. Cambridge, England: Cambridge UP, 2004, 114.

197 with the motivation (or lack thereof) Sibbes’ auditors might have to pursue moral action given the theological priorities Sibbes pursues. Indeed, Sibbes’ emphasis on the all-consuming relationship between Christ and Christian tends to minimize the category of the union of the church. Yet, as we shall see, the communion of the saints never entirely disappears from Sibbes’ affective theology.

Yet for Sibbes, even when most concerned with the emotional perfection of assurance, the interiority of the Christian experience is not solipsism. Sibbes argues that faith actually “carrieth the soule out of it selfe.”66 He suggests that while the earthly reality of the journey of faith is full of self- examination, the souls in his auditory that do turn in on themselves are spiritually deficient. While this outward turn may not provide the basis for a robust moral theology or civic vision, there is in

Sibbes’ ecclesiology and his practice as a preacher an animating principle of love.

Given the “radical interiority” demonstrable in these sermons, and indeed, Sibbes’ work as a whole, his place in the increasing fragmentation of Protestantism seems clear. Yet Sibbes delivered these two sermons in 1635 as a prominent conforming minister. It is worth a moment to examine his career and ecclesiology in more detail.

Sibbes is in some ways easily classified as Puritan and in other ways not.67 He shares theological commitments with conformists such as the older William Perkins and with non- conformists such as William Ames.68 Randall Pederson attempts to capture the essence of English

66 Ibid.

67 As I outlined in the introduction to this study, the question of what to call Puritans is fraught. Who to classify as Puritan is also complicated. Randall Pederson’s project is to problematize and offer a new way of coming around to a kind of complex working definition in Unity in Diversity: English Puritans and the Puritan Reformation, 1603-1689, Leiden, The Netherlands: Koninklijke Brill, 2014.

68 Dever, 18. Of course there are differences between even these similar figures. The majority of Frost’s dissertation on Sibbes pivots on the distinctions between the nomist, supralapsarian Perkins and the anti-nomist,

198

Puritanism as a blend of fervor and doctrinal commitments, “a style that weaved dogma and praxis.”69

In most of these elements, Sibbes’ Puritanism is easily recognizable. He favors Scripture over other sources of authority, deploys plain style preaching, and emphasizes conversion experiences.70 Less relevant is a concern for precise Sabbatarianism or other details of worship, although these elements are at times present in Sibbes’ work.71 On the prickly issue of predestination, usually considered a marker of Puritanism, Sibbes is often silent, in contrast to Perkins’ infamous Golden Chain.72 While

Dever attributes this silence to a pastoral concern which minimized an “unpacific doctrine” despite his full acceptance of the doctrine, Frost disagrees and argues that this silence stemmed from Sibbes’

“belief in an affectionate God.”73 We may try to define Sibbes as Reformed in theology, and moderately Puritan in praxis and ecclesiology.

In Sibbes’ understanding of the sovereignty of God in the gift of faith, the godly receive their standing within the community of the elect through identity rather than participation in the forms of the established English church. The elect are so before they ever walk through a church

infralapsarian Sibbes and their understandings of grace. A helpful chart is provided on page 19. Frost, R. N. (1996). Richard Sibbes' Theology of Grace and the Division of English Reformed Theology.

69 Randall Pederson, Unity in Diversity, 317.

70 Brauer, “Types of Puritan Piety,“ 42; Pederson, 32.

71 Kuchar says Sibbes’ work displays “the most lyrical, social, and nondogmatic aspects of reformed piety.” 95.

72 William Perkins. A golden chaine, or The description of theologie containing the order of the causes of saluation and damnation, according to Gods woord. A view of the order wherof, is to be seene in the table annexed. Written in Latine by William Perkins, and translated by an other. Hereunto is adioyned the order which M. Theodore Beza vsed in comforting troubled consciences, At London: Printed by Edward Alde, and are to be sold by Edward White, at the little north doore of S. Paules Church at the signe of the Gunne, 1592.

73 Dever, 109. Frost, 65.

199 door or take communion under the words of the BCP. This is especially true because one’s inclusion in this community is discernable largely through interior self-examination rather than any particular position in the visible world of the church. The identity-driven community of the godly is formed by a different kind of participation, participation in a conversion experience, marked by faith.74 The nature of faith, as Sibbes and Calvinists like him understood it, must be separate in essence from works. As a result, outward appearance and actions can provide no true window on its presence. So while the Puritan reputation for emphasizing strict behavioral codes derives from attempts to pinpoint who is and who is not among the godly, such codes do not actually solve the problem of personal assurance.75 Divines like Sibbes, who were open to mystery, sought to address these doubts, which were driven in part by the individualized nature of conversion experiences.76 The interior focus of many of his sermons follows from Sibbes’ theological commitments at large.

74 Dever approaches this point to arrive at an almost contradictory emphasis: “It seems that Sibbes adopted the rhetoric of an establishment revolutionary; that is, someone who affirmed the established ecclesiology of the Elizabethan church and yet who increasingly emphasized the more voluntary nature of much continental Reformed ecclesiology— aspects obviously compatible in Sibbes’s earlier days in Cambridge. As apparent opposition to what Sibbes understood as the preaching of the gospel increased, he became ever more explicit about the voluntary aspects of the church. Godly preaching, as the means of the Spirit’s activity, rather than historical organizational continuity was the heart of Sibbes’s vision of the church.” 92-93.

75 It is this problem that leads, Bremer argues, to the necessity of articulating faith in community, 631.

76 Brauer writes, “Puritans demanded a personal, existential religious experience of conversion which became the basis for their zeal and drive.” Jerald C. Brauer, “Types of Puritan Piety,” Church History 56 (1987), 42.

200

Insofar as Puritan is understood to mean an “opposition party” to the established church, 77

Sibbes is less that sort of Puritan.78 The combination of being identifiably Puritan and not having a

London-based preaching career caused Sibbes to be misidentified for many years as a persecuted non-conformist, driven out of his Cambridge positions by the increasingly aggressive Laudians.79

Mark Dever, the author of the only published scholarly monograph on Sibbes, argues instead that it is more accurate to picture of Sibbes as a “conformist to his dying day, who yet never ceased striving for the gradual reformation of the church.”80 In Dever’s estimation, Sibbes’ conformity is evidenced by his own official submission to the Three Articles, by his urging others to “render [themselves] to the sacred communion of this truly Evangelicall Church of England,”81 and by his conscientious avoidance of polemic and controversy in the majority of his published writings.82

77 Pederson, 24.

78 It is worthwhile to note that Sibbes did engage, through signing a letter in support of Calvinist clergy in the Palatinate and through his participation in the Feoffees for Impropriations, in some political efforts to support the influence of those he agreed with in the church, in direct conflict with Laud. See Dever, 80-83.

79 See Knight, British Prose Writers Entry, pg 288.

80 Dever, 6.

81 Sibbes, “A Consolatory Letter To an afflicted Conscience” Reproduced in Grosart, vol 1:cxvi. The Complete Works of Richard Sibbes, D.D. Nichol's Series of Standard Divines. Puritan Period; Variation: Nichol's Series of Standard Divines.; Puritan Period. Edinburgh: J. Nichol, 1862-1864

82 Dever 6, 29, 72, 85, 90. Unlike A.B. Grosart, Sibbes’ nineteenth-century biographer and the editor of the only complete modern edition of Sibbes’ sermons, Dever sees Sibbes’ conformity as “Reformed and conscientious.” Grosart’s hagiographic tone wavers when discussing Sibbes’ conformity, especially in view of Sibbes’ arguments in favor of conformity in his “Letter to an Afflicted Conscience” Vol 1:cxvi-cxvii.

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Pederson groups Sibbes among the mystic Puritans, which is helpful in understanding the particular kind of Puritan Sibbes was among his more notorious fellows.83 Gary Kuchar writes that, when Sibbes walks a line of moderation between dissenters and Laudians, he is critiquing “the overconfidence animating both puritan dissent and Laudian extremism.”84 This overconfidence is best answered with humility in the face of mystery.85

In reading Sibbes at length, it is easy to agree with Dever when he classifies Sibbes as “a hesitater, and a questioner, but not a dissenter.”86 Sibbes was both markedly Puritan and also a faithful conforming minister of the Church of England. His willingness to conform was part of his contemporary reputation, as can be seen in his appointment as Master of Katherine Hall in 1626, a time when Cambridge was becoming a more fraught place for a man with Sibbes’ theological commitments.87 Beyond a formal position of conformity, Sibbes also maintained personal friendships with a range of clerics.88 He is restrained and irenic where many in the period would not be. Within a period of increasing fragmentation, Sibbes is, yes, gentle and cautious, but still intensely

83 Pederson, 73. Pederson divides Puritans into four overlapping strains: precisianist, mystical, antinomian, and neonomian, 67. Dever calls Sibbes “affectionate,” in the seventeenth century sense of the term, rather than mystic, 135- 137. Frost again disagrees with Dever’s rejection of “mystic” and calls his theology “moderate mysticism,” 32-34. I think that to talk about Sibbes as “affectionate” is certainly an accurate term, but that Sibbes’ visions of the life to come veer beyond emotionally intense in their language into something that is more easily described as mystical. I use mystic and mystical to try to capture this rather than to engage in any precise classification.

84 Kuchar, Gary. George Herbert and the Mystery of the Word : Poetry and Scripture in Seventeenth-Century England. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, 97.

85 Kuchar, 94.

86 Dever, 47.

87 Ibid., 32-33, 83.

88 Ibid., 59.

202 principled. His commitments are first to the message of salvific faith he called the Gospel. His irenic conduct and rhetoric follow as a means by which that message might most be promoted, in England and throughout the world.89

In the details of his ecclesiastical career and in his preaching we find a Puritan of a very different sort than those who would overthrow monarch and archbishop less than a decade after his death. Sibbes creates no grand civic projects and seems to acknowledge external circumstances only in passing. In these sermons, which he must have had some sense might be his last, there is no call to arms against the rapidly shifting expectations of the Laudian hierarchy or plea for the soul of the

English church. There is only the paradoxically polemical commitment to avoiding polemic. For

Sibbes, preaching the Gospel was central. In his choice to do this to the exclusion of other concerns, as in these final sermons, he put himself at odds with both non-conformists and Laudians.

In his biography of Sibbes, Grosart reproduces a letter Sibbes wrote to an anonymous

“afflicted conscience,” presumed to be the non-conformist Thomas Goodwin. In the letter, Sibbes attempts to persuade the recipient to repent and return to the established English church. He equates leaving the established church with forsaking “the assemblies of the Saints,” labeling it an act of “excommunicating [him] self.”90 Sibbes attributes to the established church the benefits of fellowship with “the mysticall body, the Church.”91 In leaving the church, the recipient has opened

89 See Trueman, “Puritanism as Ecumenical Theology,” on the internationalism of English Puritans as well as Affleck, B., JR. (1969). The Theology Of Richard Sibbes, 1577-1635 (Order No. 6918621), 363-364.

90 “Consolatory Letter to An Afflicted Conscience” in Grosart, “Memoir,” cxv.

91 Ibid., Cxv.

203 himself to suffering, in part because he is separated from those who could comfort and pray for him, and in part because the suffering is God’s disciplinary tool to return him to the fold.

Anticipating the reply that the English church is not the “true Church” and so dissociation with them is actually to “adhere to the true Church,” Sibbes responds by arguing that the established church is indeed the true church, where the communion of saints is to be found.92 He lists “sound preaching of the Gospell, right dispensation of the Sacraments, Prayer religiously performed, and evill persons justly punished” 93 as the necessary marks of a true church and argues that all of them are to be found still in “this truly Evangelicall church of England.”94 Furthermore, the charges of corruption of ceremonies and wicked people within the church are insufficient to revoke this. In cutting off comparisons to more fully Reformed churches on the continent, Sibbes accuses them of being deficient in preaching.95 Even here, Sibbes’ concern is for the individual soul: “it is no better than soule-murder for a man to cast himself out of the Church, either for reall or imaginall corruptions.”96 In this brief letter, we can find a concise accounting for Sibbes’ commitment to conformity. It is ultimately an argument that the benefits of unified fellowship are for the good of the individual soul and the spread of the Gospel.

In this letter, Sibbes also posits that the communion of saints only exists within the established church, as opposed to any gathering of believers. In his sermons, this term reappears

92 “Consolatory Letter,” in Grosart, “Memoir,” cxv.

93 Ibid., cxv.

94 Ibid., cxvi. Emphasis in the original text.

95 Ibid.

96 Ibid.

204 with some regularity, not usually as part of any explicit argument for conformity, but as one of the available helps to the struggling Christian.97 It is often listed alongside the preaching of the Word and the administration of the sacraments, two of the other essential characteristics of the “true

Church” and ones Sibbes places inside the established church, although all three were a part of nonconformist practice. For example, in “The Successful Seeker,” as mentioned above, Sibbes’ theme is the necessity of actively seeking God’s face. Though much of Sibbes’ discussion is focused on the interior spiritual comfort received from God’s presence, he does take time to locate the “chief presence” of God in the “Ordinances, that is, in the unfolding of the word, in the administration of the Sacraments, in the communion of the Saints.”98 Likewise, in “The Hidden Life,” Sibbes declares that the “quickening” inward spirit is most effectually given by means of “the Word, and

Sacraments, the Communion of Saints, and all sanctified meanes.”99

To return to Two Sermons, in presenting Christ as a profoundly relational, loving deity, Sibbes creates the basis for his only overt characterization of the community of those in relationship with that Christ.

What admirable love and care, and pitie is in this mercifull high Priest of ours, that should so thinke of comforting his disciples, as to forget himselfe, and his owne approaching death; It is the nature of love so to do, and we should imitate our blessed Saviour in it: you see how hee laboureth to strengthen them, especially towards his end, he knew they would then need it most, and therfore he endeveavoureth by all means to strengthen them both by counsel, as here by the Passeover, and by a newly instituted Sacrament.100

97 For more extensive discussions along these lines, see Chapter XIV of The Souls Conflict, 222 ff. and “The Church’s Visitation” in The Saint’s Cordials.

98 “The Successful Seeker,” 1:173 (M2r).

99 “The Hidden Life,” 2:15 (Bbr).

100 “The first Sermon,” 3-4.

205

A love that is directed toward the good of others who are weaker and marked by self-forgetfulness is held up here as a standard to be imitated by Christians. The pronoun “it” in “imitate our blessed

Savior in it” is key. Sibbes does not just say that the Christian should imitate the Savior in love.

Rather, the antecedent of “it” is this whole act of encouraging, faith-strengthening love. Christ is both enabler and example, and this example includes enabling other people. Sibbes’ retiring rhetorical persona is here subtly paralleled with Christ’s parting words to the disciples.

We also see that Sibbes holds up the necessarily communal observation of the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper as a part of this comfort, implying that however individually directed these words are, they are meant to be received in community with others.101 Sibbes goes on to contrast this sacramental eating and drinking with an image of a selfish, solitary kind of consumption: “when we plodde and pore so much upon our discontentments, and drink up our spirits, and eate up our hearts, it disables the soule.”102 Self-absorption is a kind of self-consumption. The intense self- inspection Sibbes recommends can have a dark side. The disabled soul, in this instance, is marked largely by its being unfit to love others. In its proper form, self-knowledge helps us to be “merciful to others.”103 Thus, Sibbes condemns being so internally distraught as to be unable to render any aid.104

101 Affleck writes, ““Though Sibbes often discussion salvation in personal terms, he always means to construe saving faith within the limits of Christian community.” 335.

102 “The first Sermon,” 15.

103 Ibid., 10.

104 Ibid., 15.

206

Thus, amid the focus on the inner life that is the theme of these sermons, we do see Sibbes affirming or assuming traditional Christian teachings about the communal life of the Church. While

Cefalu’s observations about the priority of the redemptive relationship with Christ reflect the overwhelming focus of Sibbes’ work, his sermons do not completely ignore the duties and pleasures of horizontal love nor can they be said to entirely “marginal[ize] pastoral concerns.”105 Along with the comfort of fellow Christians, the most revealing of these teachings is the importance of communicative love with Christ as a model. Sibbes’ references to an understanding of the Christian life as a life lived within community reveal the framework inside which he positions his sermons, acts of love toward fellow pilgrims. Sibbes shapes sermons into gardens in which to plant and nourish even the smallest fragments of faith.

Both sermons begin by drawing parallels between Christ just before his death and the actions of godly men just before their deaths. Sibbes presents Christ’s love toward his disciples in this extremity as proof of his goodness and magnificence, but he also holds it up as a model. The logic of the initial framing of these sermons is clear: love, the best love, draws you outward. The spirit of the sermon in Sibbes’ version of the genre is fundamentally grounded in love. In the paratexts of these sermons and others, we can see that the community which surrounded Sibbes at the end of his career viewed his role as a Preacher along similar lines.

II. “He will give being to every word”106

Sibbes’ rhetorical performances as a preacher are the vehicle for saving faith. While ultimately this rectitude of the soul comes only from God and stands removed from human volition,

105 Cefalu, 114. 106 Sibbes, “The Unprosperous Builder,” in Evangelicall Sacrifices, 1:133 (I6r).

207 the soul-searching required to be in a right state with God fills many sermons. By examining Sibbes’ use of language, we can see something of how the role of the preacher participates in making present the things of faith. This function of rhetoric is closely tied to the work of faith itself. In urging his auditors to attend to sermons, which “beat downe al these spirituall wals,” Sibbes says,

“To quicken our faith the more, let us have those blessed times in the eye of our soule; let us see them as present: It is the nature of faith to apprehend things to come as present: let us see heaven, and earth on fire; see Christ comming to judgement; let us see all the wals downe.”107 It is sermons which can chiefly provide “those blessed times.” A personal love for a personal divine also reaches toward the people with whom Sibbes pleads. This love motivates eloquence in the creation of faith, though cloaked in simple prose and bracketed by careful even, perhaps, painful (in the seventeenth century sense of the word) exposition.

To characterize Sibbes’ sermons as being written in what can be called the “plain style” is to place him within the broad story of the prose of the century. He rejects the complicated syntax and detailed, vivid metaphors of Andrewes and Donne, but not art or passion. In his prose, we can see a version of what Debora Shuger calls the Christian grand style.108 Shuger’s Sacred Rhetoric aims to uncover the premises and intellectual heritage of a style that “even according to its practitioners… was not supposed to exist.”109 She points to Augustine’s De Doctrina Christiana as the intellectual

107 Sibbes, “The Ruine of Mysticall Jericho,” in Evangelicall Sacrifices, 1:96-97 (G3v-G4r).

108 Shuger’s project is carried on in a more limited way through what Peter Auski traces in his project on Christian plain style. Since Auski limits himself to that part of the Christian grand style that can be called plain, he is able to look in more particular detail at the homiletics of English Reformation, including Sibbes. See, in particular, 276-294.

109 Shuger, 3.

208 foundation for the powerful simplicity of the Christian grand style. In separating the grand style from its limitations in subject matter, Augustine elevates the ordinary into the realm of the divine.110

Furthermore, his emphasis on the necessity of love for right understanding provides the ethical basis for allowing affect to be a legitimate part of discourse which seeks to reveal truth.111 As Shuger follows these developments from Augustine to the seventeenth century, she examines the characterizations of overt displays of wordsmithing and learning made in various preaching manuals.

In William Perkins’ Art of Prophecying, she finds the emphasis is on “the spiritual and psychological sources of passionate oratory at the expense of the artistic.”112 Sibbes is less restrictive than Perkins, but ends up, in his direct comments, somewhere near the older man’s positions. Both of them, however, are Puritan versions of Plato, practicing with some skill what is rejected in theory.113

Thus, to discuss Sibbes’ style here is to discuss a philosophical and theological fusion of feeling and truth, passion and simplicity. He is close to Bacon’s philosophically driven directness of language, although Sibbes might be more successful in achieving it.114 He resembles at times the power of Bunyan in Pilgrim’s Progress and suffers, lacking a narrative, from some of the same faults as

Bunyan in Grace Abounding. At their best, his sentences unfold on themselves, mapping the

110 Ibid., 44.

111 “By distinguishing reason from volition, argument from pathos, Augustine resolves the epistemological status of the grand style. It does not circumvent rationality but enables it, stirring the will to desire what the mind already approves.” Shuger, 46.

112 Ibid., 70.

113 Shuger, in fact, calls this apparent contradiction in Puritan rhetoric a “red herring.” She says that their concerns were more about accessibility than on “the relative merits of the genus tenue and the genus grande.” 94.

114 Grosart and Kuchar both note that Bacon and Sibbes overlapped at Gray’s Inn. Grosart claims mutual influence. Grosart, xlii. Kuchar, 94.

209 emotional movement of the sentence into the syntactical flow. For example, consider one of Sibbes’ many admonitions to look inward in “The First Sermon:” “But search the heart ingenuously, and truly to the bottome of it, and see if there be not some Achan in the Camp, some sinne in the heart

(for sinne is like winde when it gets into the veins, it will have vent, and a troublesome one: and so will sinne, if it gets into the soule) it is that indeede which causeth all trouble.” Sibbes begins by doubling the intensity by which the heart should be searched, making “ingenuously” and “truly” parallel, and then extends his description of the search with the metaphor of an “Achan in the

Camp.”115 He again creates parallel phrases through the repetition of “some” as he explains his metaphor. The movement of the sentence is carried forward through another parenthetical illustration of air exploding in the veins by means of the repetition of “sinne.” Having drawn his auditors through the sentence by the lengthening of the parallel phrases, the repeated words, and the alliteration of s and v, Sibbes halts his sentence with the flattened “causeth all trouble.” There is no extension after the plosive t of “trouble,” which ends the searching in the sentence.

Any discussion of Christian style must consider the question of accessibility. In homiletics, especially, achievement comes through provoking spiritual change rather than admiration or even emotion. Affective preachers like Sibbes understood truth to be most clearly communicated in simple language, albeit simple language that reverberates with passion.116 Thus, even Sibbes' descriptive language is usually lean, although its Anglo-Saxon force has its own kind of enargia.

Although at times quite colorful, these passages avoid anything like Donne’s long and complicated

115 “The First Sermon,” 21.

116 Auski examines Sibbes’ understanding of the power of truth clearly communicated in his presentation of the plain style in Reformed preaching, 279.

210 conceits or Andrewes’ vividly realized biblical scenes. Sibbes claims that to “affect writing in a high strain” will place him in danger of failing to achieve his goals.117

Sibbes' style is emotional and mystical, but not deliberately irrational.118 What he offers has enough reason in it to be something more than simply emotional coercion. In describing how persuasion works, he says, “we are reasonable and understanding creatures, and God works on us answerably to our principles. He stayes our spirits by reasons stronger then the grievance.”119 In this rhetorical paradigm, spirits, which are emotional and extra-rational, are comforted by logical reasoning. Emotion is a thing to be managed, rather than an end in itself.120 In practice, however,

Sibbes often speaks in a way that contradicts the limits of logical principles, presenting reasons that are really only reasons through the view of arational faith. These reasons must be perceived emotionally and spiritually. Sibbes replaces disordered emotion not with the mastery of reason but with more consuming emotions which are realized by an immediacy which presents the objects of hope as near.121 As he writes in “Violence Victorious,” a sermon which engages deeply with a variety

117 “To the Christian Reader” The Bruised Reede, A12r.

118 See Frost, 36-37. Sibbes says, “a man without affections is like the dead sea, that moves not at all,” “The first Sermon,” 11.

119 “The first Sermon,” 4.

120 “They must be regulated, and ordered, they must be raised up, and laid downe, at the command of a spiritual understanding.” “The first Sermon,” 11.

121 Auski, referencing Sibbes, speaks of “the force of feeling” in the power of the affective plain style, 279. Clement writes, “early modern sermons engage the passions not to repudiate or repress them, but to understand and redirect them towards God and towards salvation,” 727.

211 of emotions and their helpful place in spiritual struggle, “Religion takes not away the earnestnesse of the affections, it doth direct them to better things, it changeth them in regard to the object.”122

Much of the above is true of many preachers with Sibbes’ theological leanings. Yet having described these stylistic generalities, we are still left with the beauty of his prose. His seventeenth- century reputation, from the growing crowds who attended his ministry to the appellation “sweet singer of Israel,” seems to show that his sermons were regarded as both effective and aesthetically successful in some way. There is little in the way of overt ornament. Yet there is grace—less clever and condensed than Herbert in his poetry—capable of taking simple metaphors and extending them in a way that offers new depth to standard images, breath as life, rocks as anchors of safety.

In form and style, Two Sermons offers prose typical of Sibbes’ work, plain language about abstract things. In these two sermons, as was his wont, Sibbes hangs back from the hypotyposis of the more colorful preachers of the period, but still achieves a kind of vivid energy from ordinary, concrete metaphors.123 As with the simile of sin as air in vein, Sibbes is often able to accomplish this within a single sentence. For example, toward the beginning of “The first Sermon” he begins to the answer the question of how one can know whether the troubled soul needs to be addressed. It is, he says, when the soul is “like an Instrument out of tune, made fit for nothing, or like a limbe out of

122 Sibbes, “Violence Victorious” Beames of Divine Light, 1:249 (R6r).

123 Dever claims, “Sibbes’s own sermons are replete with scores of striking illustrations, so much so that one could almost reconstruct life in Stuart England from Sibbes’s sermons alone.” (141) While this is rhetorically an overstatement, it does speak to Sibbes’ tendency to use the ordinary and concrete in his figurative language. This is true both of extended metaphors and convserastion asides, such as this comparison between God’s graciousness and man’s: “Contrary to the fashion of the corrupt poysonfull nature of man: if they have but one thing (in all a mans life) to hit him in the teeth with, he shall be sure to hear of it oft enough.” “King David’s Epitaph” in Beames of Divine Light, Breaking forth from severall places of holy Scripture, as they were learnedly opened, In XXI Sermons. London: Printed by G.M. for N. Bourne, at the Royal Exchange and R. Harford, at the guilt Bible in Queens-head Alley in Pater Noster-Row, 1639, 168.

212 joynt, that moves, not only uncomelily, but painfully, & becomes unfit for action: when we finde this in our trouble, we may know it is not as it should be.”124 In the first comparison, there is the idea of thwarted purpose, but it is with the “limbe out of joynt” that Sibbes conveys a more precise idea of the problem with the troubled soul. While the instrument is unable to fulfill its purpose, the limb first “moves”—an attempt at continuing in its role—but does so awkwardly. So much is perhaps external, but Sibbes adds the pain, connecting it to the gradual disintegration of action and the breakdown in purpose for the injured limb and the wounded soul.

It is with language like this that Sibbes most fully embodies the insight of practitioners of the

Christian grand style that tough, ordinary metaphors have a place in accessing the sacred. By investing common visual metaphors—light and dark, clouds and the sun, waves and rocks—with gravity and spiritual purpose, Sibbes pushes them to the edge of metaphor as signifiers of spiritual truths which must move his auditors at the deepest level. In order for the preacher to fill the role of the comforting savior, faith must be made present through this artless language. Sibbes relies on the strength of simple, Anglo-Saxon words, infused with the language of Scripture and the passion of inner struggle.

Finally, to understand the full relationship between Sibbes’ sermons, rhetoric and community, it is helpful to consider his relationship with print. His most popular published work was The Bruised Reede and Smoaking Flax, which went into seven separate editions during the seventeenth century—five during his lifetime—and was published with an introductory note by

Sibbes himself, not an editor. Unlike Donne and Andrewes, whose most popular collections of

124 “The First Sermon,” 10. Additional notable examples in “The First Sermon” are fishing in “troubled water” (11), a cloud (13), blood and cleansing (27), and, of course, rocks and water (34-36).

213 sermons were first published posthumously, The Bruised Reede was originally published in 1630, five years before Sibbes died and with his own editorial involvement.125

The title page tells us that The Bruised Reede was taken from “some sermons,” but it reads as a single, continuous work.126 The 1630 edition printed by R. Dawlman is 347 pages long and, although the table of contents breaks it into three parts, each with a doctrine and several uses, the text itself contains only slight spatial divisions.127 In its basic form, then, it is closer to a devotional treatise than to a single sermon, certainly very different than a single sermon individually preached. The marginal notes only rarely make reference to occasion, such as remarking that a passage on the

Lord’s Supper was preached at the administration of the sacrament.128 Yet, the original status of this teaching as sermon generates some of its authority. It is as a preacher and a pastor that Sibbes’ reputation was made.

Many of Sibbes’ posthumous publications were published with closer generic adherence to the sermon as preached, as for example in the collection of sermons and sermon compilations called

Evangelicall Sacrifices. Yet most of the contextual markers that place the sermon as a specific event— and an event, moreover, that is embedded within the liturgical context of a church service—have

125 A long collection of twenty-nine individual sermons, The Saints Cordials, was originally published in 1629, but apparently without Sibbes’ involvement. (One of the sermons published in the first edition is actually by Thomas Hooker. Grosart, vol7:563.) The Saints Cordialls; delivered in sundry Sermons upon special Occasions, in the citie of London, and elsewhere. London: Printed for Robert Dawlman dwelling at the Brazen-Serpent in Pauls Church-yard. (The main title page has no date, but the title pages for individual sermons say 1629.)

126 The same is true of The Soul’s Conflict with Itself, which was published at Sibbes’ direction and with his editorial assistance just before his death in 1635.

127 The Bruised Reede, 208.

128 Ibid., 145. This sort of remark gives some sense that the original sermons were preached in the context of a church service and that they were part of connected series.

214 vanished.129 Even funeral sermons, like “The Hidden Life” and “Redemption of Bodies,” are published with no reference whatsoever to the dead. Instead, they offer general comfort and general instruction that may be drawn at the occasion of a funeral, any funeral. The absence of anchors to specific places, times, and people is part of what makes Sibbes so appealing. In the printed form, it is easy to find him communicating universal truths to an audience beyond the lawyers of Gray’s Inn and the students and townspeople of Cambridge. The form of the sermons published with Sibbes’ involvement suggests that universality over occasion was a significant part of his purpose for his printed sermons and, perhaps, for his preached sermons as well.

It is useful here perhaps to compare Sibbes again to William Perkins, his elder by twenty years and an established intellectual leader when Sibbes first came to Cambridge. Like Sibbes he made the choice to continue to conform to the established church despite reservations and like

Sibbes he was also a preacher. Yet most of his published works are treatises rather than sermons, including the Art of Prophecying, his treatise on preaching. After his death, a few works are published purporting to be taken from sermons, but in form more like a treatise. For example, the long title of

A Cloud of Faithfull Witnesses, published five years after Perkins’ death, declares it to be a

“commentarie” yet “preached in Cambridge.”130 Although Perkins was known by his contemporaries

129 One remainder in Evangelical Sacrifices is the inclusion of three Gunpowder Plot sermons. The irregular habits of the time can be seen in wholesale inclusion of individual sermons and collections of sermons with separate title pages, all published under a new title page, with an (inaccurate) table of contents, dedicatory epistle, and epistle to the reader. The pagination sometimes continues through volumes and sometimes does not (It runs from 1 to 317, begins again at 1 with The Hidden Life and continues on to the end of the volume, although it breaks from 254 to 155 and then begins counting again.)

130 William Perkins. A cloud of faithfull witnesses, leading to the heauenly Canaan, or, A commentarie vpon the 11 chapter to the Hebrewes preached in Cambridge by that godly, and iudicious divine, M. William Perkins ; long expected and desired, and therefore published at the request of his executours, by Will. Crashawe and Tho. Pierson, preachers of Gods Word, who heard him preach it, and wrote it from his mouth. , At London : Printed by Humfrey Lownes, for Leo. Greene, 1607. In form, little remains of the

215 for being a preacher, his published record during his lifetime is distanced from his role as a preacher of the heard Word of God. Perkins’ sermons could be published after his death without fear of tainting his character with the desire for fame, and because, as his executers put it, “that shining light is quenched.”131 The original good—the word of God preached aloud—is no longer available.132 In contrast, Sibbes published sermons directly and openly during his lifetime.

In the introductory epistle to The Bruised Reede, Sibbes first offers a conventional defense for publishing his sermons: unnamed others were circulating inferior versions without his authorization.

He then remarks, however, that his subject, communicating the comfort of Christ’s love to those inclined to despair, was important, and he has had some new thoughts on the issue since he first preached his sermons. Eventually, he offers his core justification. In publishing this collection of sermons, Sibbes does what is absolutely essential and entirely useless, for “men may speake comfort, but it is Christs Spirit that can onely comfort.”133 Yet although it is the Holy Ghost who “effectively perswadeth by a divine kinde of rhetoricke,” this happens by means of “friendly entercourse, as

structure of individual sermons, which at 592 pages must have been a long series of sermons. Instead the work is divided into eighteen sections of unequal length, each devoted to a character mentioned in Hebrews 11.

131 William Crashaw and Thomas Pierson “The Epistle Dedicatory” in A cloud of faithfull witnesses, A3v.

132 In a case that appears to be somewhere in the middle, Sibbes, along with John Davenport, published some of the sermons of John Preston, after his early death in 1628. In the letter “To the Reader,” Sibbes and Davenport claim that Preston desired the publication of these sermons on his deathbed. They also appear to see some generic shifts between the spoken and printed sermon, lamenting that Preston’s absent editorial presence, “Things livened by the expression of the speaker, sometimes take well, which after, upon a mature review, seem eyther superfluous, or flat” (unpaginated 2). This sort of statement, of course, is also a claim to the authenticity of the printed text. Richard Sibbes and John Davenport, “To the Reader” The nevv covenant, or the saints portion A treatise vnfolding the all-sufficiencie of God, and mans uprightnes, and the covenant of grace. delivered in fourteene sermons vpon Gen. 17. 1. 2. Wherevnto are adioyned foure sermons vpon Eccles. 9.1. 2. 11. 12. By the late faithfull and worthie minister of Iesus Christ Iohn Preston. Dr. in Divinitie, chaplaine in ordinary to his Maiestie, maister of Emmanuel Colledge in Cambridge, and sometimes preacher of Lincolnes Inne

133 “To the Christian Reader” Bruised Reede, A7r-A7v.

216 intreaty, and perswasion, and discovery of his love in Christ.”134 Printing sermons, and even freeing them from the context where they were originally spoken aloud, is not only permissible, but necessary. Because the persuasion of the Holy Spirit comes through the words of man and in the service of this good persuasion, a wider rather than narrower distribution is desirable. The spirit of the sermon in Sibbes’ version of the genre is fundamentally grounded in love, and love draws you outward. By printing decontextualized sermons, the shape of the community changes from an auditory—collective, existing together in a moment of time–to a community of individuals, joined by the presence of a faith summoned by rhetoric.

III. “A communicative, diffusive goodnesse”135

In the form they come to us, Sibbes often seems removed from his audience, writing or speaking to a generic, disembodied soul rather than to particular people or even to a particular congregation.136 Yet, while his initial auditory and later reading audience might seem to come to his words primarily as individuals, it is only within the context of Christian community that Sibbes’ role as preacher exists, realizing the human role which it also denies. Christ “perswades to confidence”137 through reasonable discourse presented by loving men. In this role, Sibbes embodies the participatory ideal of preaching that Augustine defends in De Doctrina Christiana: “There would be no

134 “To the Christian Reader” Bruised Reede, A7v.

135 “The Successful Seeker,” 1:142.

136 This impersonal nature could, no doubt, be a product of the form in which they come to us rather than a testament to their original nature.

137 “The first sermon”, 5.

217 way for love, which ties people together in the bonds of unity, to make souls overflow and as it were intermingle with each other, if human beings learned nothing from other humans.”138 Preaching is used by God, Augustine argues, because it is an exercise in a love which binds people together. It is this same vision we see manifest in Sibbes’ “comfortable” words “from loving men to those they love” at the end of his preaching career.139

It is in the work of persuasion Sibbes sets out to accomplish that we most clearly see the form of his enactment of community and the preacher’s particular place within that community.

While he calls his auditors to “labor for faith,” his sermons create for them the tools of that labor.140

Sibbes ends “The Second Sermon” by encouraging his auditors to meditate on “these comforts,” that is, the teachings about faith that have been the subject of his sermon.141 It is these truths, he asserts, that through understanding change the heart. True spiritual comfort is obtained by perceiving as present a reality which is unknowable through the information in our immediate surroundings.

Sibbes uses the first person to speak in the persona of Christ at his death: “For howsoever in love to you, and mankind, I tooke mans nature on me, and am abased; yet in my greatest abasement, remember this, that I am God.”142 This technique confers power by a mimesis of divine authority in

138 Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana, trans. R. P. H. Green, Oxford Early Christian Texts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 7-9.

139 “The first sermon,” 2.

140 Ibid., 28.

141 “The second Sermon,” 65.

142 “The first Sermon,” 29.

218 the voice of the man standing behind the pulpit. As they echo “I am,” these are bold words to speak, even if the assumption of this voice is conventional. By dramatizing the position of Christ the comforter, Sibbes speaks the cure that he claims faith offers. In speaking, he as the preacher is creating that cure in the way that Christ provided comfort by speaking it. Sibbes’ comfort differs from the quoted text in borrowing rather than assuming its authority. While Christ speaks with a simple imperative—“let not your heart be troubled”—and Sibbes’ attempt at comfort is more complicated, both, Sibbes seems to claim, persuade.143

In John Donne’s 1622 Easter Sermon, he says, “Rhetoric makes absent and remote things present to our understanding.”144 Donne’s comment is frank about the role of rhetoric in accessing the sacred. Sibbes, who is only less visibly rhetorical than Donne, is less direct. In the second sermon, we find Sibbes expressing a parallel thought to Donne’s phrase, claiming that faith makes these distant things present. “Faith,” Sibbes begins by saying, “stirreth up such grace, as do comfort the soule, as hope in all good things promised.” He goes on, however, to claim that faith does not just stir up comforting feelings, but it “is the grace that apprehends the joyes.”145 The work of faith and the work of rhetoric are alike here. Sibbes continues: “faith makes things present to the soule.”146 In Sibbes’ sermon the very act of narrating what it is that faith does creates its presence.

143 “The first Sermon,” 5.

144 John Donne, Sermons, Potter & Simpson, vol. 4, no. 2. Shuger claims Donne speaks disparagingly of rhetoric, but here and elsewhere he is more neutral, if not positive, Sacred Rhetoric, 192.

145 “The first Sermon,” 33

146 “The first Sermon,” 34. In “Redemption of Bodies,” Sibbes expands Paul’s command that Christians should “comfort yourselves one another with these words” about the resurrection of bodies and the life after death discussed in 1 Thessalonians 4. Sibbes tells his auditors to “talke one to another often of this… how it shall be with us world without

219

The language used to articulate faith can, as it were, summon faith into being. Sibbes tells his auditors that “all heavenly comfort… must come to us from Christs presence.”147 What his sermons aim to create, through parallels between the preacher and Christ and through metaphor, is presence.148

Sibbes’ words in these two sermons seek to do this elusive thing. He creates arguments, at times even calling out objections and providing specific refutations, that weave together logos and pathos in order to persuade the auditor that Christ’s redemptive crucifixion delivers comfort.149

What seems at first a sober goal, to “passe an estimations of things as they are,”150 eventually involves a knowledge “above nature.”151 Sibbes’ finest paragraphs contain prose which is capable of a certain transcendence or mystical vision, and they speak into existence the mystery of faith through verbal creation. Doing so is an act of communication—whether in sermons heard or read—during

end hereafter, we should conferre, and speake, and oft meditate and think of these things.” He goes on to say “faith makes the estate to come present.” Evangelicall Sacrifices, 2:65-66 (Ee2r-Ee3v).

147 “The first Sermon,” 7.

148 The parallels between the preacher and Christ can be seen not just in the ethos of the preacher as Sibbes presents himself within the text, but also in the reaction of his contemporaries. A memorial poem by Francis Quarles is included in the prefatory material to The Soul’s Conflict with Itself. It appears to have been written immediately following Sibbes’ death, as it was included in the early editions published in 1635. Quarles talks about his inability to praise or summarize Sibbes’ words, in tones strikingly similar to the way Sibbes and Herbert talk about Scripture, as in his concluding couplet: “Foole that I was ! to think my Lines could give / Life to that worke, by which they hope to live.” The Soule’s Conflict with Itself, B4r.

149 These are important enough rhetorical conventions for even Sibbes’ sermons that Sibbes’ editors note both objection and answer in the margins. The references for Scriptural allusions are also given, but other than that there is almost no marginalia.

150 “The first Sermon,” 3.

151 “The second Sermon,” 40.

220 which Sibbes, by the love of the preacher in the place of Christ, joins together members of a circumscribed religious community.

In considering how faith and rhetoric achieve the ends of comfort for Sibbes’ auditors in these two sermons, it is helpful to consider the distinction Sibbes makes between “rationall” and

“reall” comforts.152 Rational comforts are “fetched from grounds” and real comforts appear in “the presence of anything which comforts.”153 He offers the example of the sight of a friend as a real comfort. By this we can infer that he means those things which his auditors access through experience, something that works immediately and viscerally. Sibbes’ goal in these sermons is to take doctrinal principles and somehow transfer them from rational comforts to real ones. The miracle of faith is realized when the spiritual—justification from all-encompassing sin—and the distant— lasting bliss in heaven—become as easily apprehensible as the sight of a friend is to a suffering person.

Sibbes creates the reality of the truest comfort by application of Christ’s words as a physical thing.

As the griefe sinks and soakes to the root of the heart: so doe Christs comforts, like true cordials indeed, that goe as deepe as the grievance. If the griefe goes to the heart, the comfort must go as deepe. Now God the Father of Spirits, and the Holy Ghost the Comforter, knows and searches our spirits; they know al the corners of the heart, they can banish feare, and sorrow, out of every cranny; and bring light, heat, and influence into every part of the soule. And therefore Christ saith, Let not your hearts be troubled.154

152 “The first Sermon,” 19.

153 Ibid.

154 John Bunyan, Grace Abounding, 20.

221

In this passage, which comes in the first sermon just as Sibbes pivots into discussing the practical ways to achieve comfort, his metaphor figures the heart—itself a metaphor for the inward, emotional person—as a physical object, one which has complex spatial dimensions. Sibbes brings the whole Trinity to bear in the physical displacement of sorrow from the heart. Yet, significantly, the linchpin of the whole exchange is simply Christ saying, “Let not your hearts be troubled.”

Words, Sibbes presumes, can have actual presence. Yet Christ’s words are distant. So, although they are the healing cordial, they require this sermon to soak into the heart of Sibbes’ auditors. In using the metaphors of liquid, light, and heat, Sibbes creates a vehicle for understanding language as able to penetrate, bend, and be absorbed, translating the authority and efficacy of the divine will into the auditor’s mental, emotional and spiritual reality.

It is perhaps helpful to turn here to the passage from John Bunyan’s Grace Abounding which forms the epigraph to this chapter. While the nonconformist Bunyan published his spiritual autobiography in 1666, it parallels the recursive struggle for which so many of Sibbes’ sermons purported to offer a remedy. The introspective cycles of despair and hope that Bunyan experiences appear in A Bruised Reede, The Soul’s Conflict with Itself, and in these final two sermons. During the period this passage recounts, Bunyan was trapped by a conviction that he had no faith. His despair over his unbelief rendered him unable to believe. In a dream-vision, he figures an attraction to faith through an image of believers “refreshing themselves with the pleasant beams of the Sun” while he, the doubter, is left on the other side of the rocks, cold and alone.155 The sun, Bunyan helpfully elucidates in the next paragraph, is not just God; it is “the comfortable shining of his mercifull

155 Bunyan, 18.

222 face.”156 Over the course of Bunyan’s dream, he manages to pull himself through a gap in the rocks, the narrow door of salvation, by means of solitary struggle. In the end, he sits “in their midst” and is

“comforted with the light and heat of their sun.”157

Bunyan’s own explanation of this short dream is that saving grace is only available to “those that were in down-right earnest,” yet it is striking to observe both the presence and the absence of others in his presentation of how faith is achieved.158 The sunlight calls him to the struggle, but only because he sees it shining pleasantly on others whom he is unable to join. The happy ones bathing in the light do not speak to him or help him. The demands of salvation are undergone alone. Yet the presence of others is still vital to the interior change undergone. Furthermore, the reward of salvation is not just to be refreshed by the merciful face of God, but to be in the midst of the church.

Although Sibbes’ does not speak of the communion of the saints as frequently as he does of the individual soul in the struggle for faith, he does return to the concept as one of the comforts available in moments of turmoil, one practical manifestation of his ecclesiology, as I have argued above. In the undated sermon “The Hidden Life,” Sibbes describes the gathering of the saints in glory in terms that parallel aspects of Bunyan’s dream-vision of the group atop the mountain.

When so many Saints shall be gathered together they shall be farre more glorious then the Sunne in his Majestie; and this glory is reserved till all be gathered together. God said of the creatures severally they were good, but when hee looked on them together, they were exceeding good: so the severall soules of Christians are glorious: but at the day of Judgement when all shall be gathered together, there shall be an exceeding glory. . . . O! that the hearts of Christians were exercised with them. Could wee be dead either for grace or comfort, if

156 Ibid., 19.

157 Ibid.

158 Ibid.

223

wee did oft thinke of this with application? Let us oft warm our selves with these things: let us bring our selves to the light, let us think of the blessed times to come: could we be unfruitfull?159

The theme of “The Hidden Life” is one common to Sibbes, fighting for faith on an inner battlefield.

This passage, on the brilliance of the glory of the saints gathered together at the end of all things, comes within a larger section in which Sibbes speaks of the promised glory of the resurrected soul and body when fully unified with Christ. Sibbes speaks of the glory of the Christian in heaven first as fullness. He then turns to the timing of this glorification; he chooses “when all the Elect shall be gathered together.”160 His metaphor changes from fullness to the lights of heaven, the stars and the sun. As he often does, Sibbes leans into a particular connotation of a theologically pregnant word, in this case to the connotation of brightness in glorification. The individual Christian blends in brightness with the others and the result is “an exceeding glory.”

It is this glory that Sibbes uses to pivot from description to exhortation. As we saw him do in the conclusion to “The Second Sermon,” Sibbes turns from ecstatic expression of the realization of faith to urge his auditors to meditate on this vision in order to spur on their faith. The brightness of the gathered saints in heaven can, he pleads, enliven a dead heart. Just as in the sermons on John

14, when this sermon makes present the realization of faith, it can create faith, providing light and warming the soul that waits for glorification. While Bunyan’s sun-bathed saints do not overtly interact with him in his solitary struggle, their presence displays the warm light of the comforting savior. Their communion with Christ and each other goads him through the narrow gap, although it

159 “The first Sermon,” 24-25.

160 Ibid., 23.

224 is only after the struggle is over that there is any realization of this magnetic force. The beauty of the communion of the saints, when it appears in Sibbes’ sermons, seems to work in a similar way. By making the realization of faith present in his words, Sibbes the preacher creates a means by which the community within the church acts as a force on the individual who is struggling to work out his salvation. Since spiritual reality is so interior, even the joys of gathering as a church appear most potently as light seen from a distance, a force which pulls toward the perfection of heaven.

When Sibbes meditates on the promises of Scripture and when he puts into words the mystical vision of realized faith, he enters into the role of the preacher as a loving conduit for grace to the community of the godly. While love is primarily and ontologically about God, it is also “a very busie grace.”161 In persuading his auditors that these truth claims are so, in moving their souls to accept these truths, Sibbes comforts by means of claiming an existential basis for comfort. For in articulating the final promised reality as if it were fully possessed, his language creates a presence for the hope that he says animates the Christian when all around him sinks. It is in talking of faith that it is made to exist.

Conversation requires another, requires a community, by its very nature. It is easy to assume that the interior life of the Christian is necessarily individualistic and only things pertaining to exterior actions are communal in nature. Yet there may be real community that links the most private and interior parts of ourselves. By singing sweetly this song, Sibbes’ rhetoric makes faith present to his fellow Christians.

161 “King David’s Epitaph,” Beames of Divine Light, 2:185.

Chapter 6

“The Seal of Amen”: Prayer and Community in Henry King’s Exposition Upon the Lord’s Prayer

A generation younger than Donne and Sibbes, Henry King’s genre-blurring moderate sermons on the Lord’s Prayer fuse prayer and sermon, showcasing a version of early Stuart conformity at its best. His long ecclesiastical career (1616-1669) begins at the height of the Jacobean church, spans the bitterness of the Interregnum, and ends with King struggling amid the dissolution of the Restoration church. Conformist in politics and theology, King accepts the claim that the hierarchal system of church and state, king and bishops, reflects and contains the authority of the divine. Yet though his conformity is less complicated than our other preachers, King’s work is not mere Stuart propaganda. His sermons are strongest as they acknowledge the failures of the Stuart order while seeking to transcend the emotional pressures and suffering of finite humanity within earthly systems of power and authority. As his sermons enact the hope that divine power can transform the community of the Christian church in England, King blurs the boundaries between sermon and prayer increasingly demarcated in the conformity of the Caroline church.

As church and crown under James I and then Charles I continued Elizabeth’s at times uneasy settlement, establishment proxies, including preachers, articulated an imperfect (ultimately unsustainable) worldview intertwining religious and secular authority. Proliferating religious disagreement elided heresy and treason; the crisis of authority was complicated by the monarch’s authority over the church and the church’s influence on the monarch. Much has been written about

225

226 the Stuart projection of power through the institution of the church.1 This ideology shaped the conforming center of the English church, in which conformity itself was framed as a virtue and order one of the highest divine values. As we saw in Chapter 2, preservation of order was among the most important ecclesiastical goals for Elizabeth and James, especially; national identity was an explicit element of the religious fabric. It was possible for sincere members of the English church to accept those claims about the virtues of stability on both a political and a theological level.

Yet the secular and ecclesiastical hierarchies work perfectly only in theory and, even at their best, are bounded by death. Complicating the primacy of the Stuart monarch, the authority that undergirded this nationalized Christianity was articulated in the language of a faith that in turn derived part of its authority from transcending political and national boundaries.2 Conforming

1 For a non-exhaustive sample, see Patrick Collinson, Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society, 1559- 1625. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), especially 1-38. Kenneth Fincham, Prelate as Pastor: The Episcopate of James I (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), especially on James I’s concept of Christian kingship, 36-53. Christopher Hill, “The Problem of Authority” in The Collected Essays of Christopher Hill: Religion and Politics in Seventeenth-Century England (Amherst, Mass: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1986), 37-48. Leo Frank Solt, Church and State in Early Modern England, 1509-1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), especially 130-196. Deborah Shuger, Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance: Religion, Politics, and the Dominant Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). Essays by Fincham, Lake, and White engage usefully in The Early Stuart Church, ed Kenneth Fincham (London: Palgrave, 1993). On the language of political theology used in sermons, see Glenn Burgess, The Politics of the Ancient Constitution (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992), 130-138. For more extended consideration of this relationship as evidenced in sermons, see Lori Anne Ferrell, Government by Polemic: James I, the King's Preachers, and the Rhetorics of Conformity, 1603-1625 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998); Peter McCullough, Sermons at Court: Politics and Religion in Elizabethan and Jacobean Preaching (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Mary Morrissey, Politics and the Paul's Cross Sermons, 1558-1642 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), especially 130-159. More recently see Kevin Sharpe, Image Wars: Promoting Kings and Commonwealths in England, 1603-1660 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), on James I and Charles I, especially 9-57 and 190-266.

2 Jean-Louis Quantin argues, “The seventeenth-century Church of England claimed to be the most faithful to antiquity, and to the beliefs and practices of the primitive Christians, of all the Christian Churches in the word.” The Church of England and Christian Antiquity: The Construction of a Confessional Identity in the 17th Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 13. This claim legitimized the English Church, asserting even a superior status to reformed churches in other nations, but it also qualified the purely national character of the church. Traces of this reality can be seen in the wide range of quotation and allusion in King’s sermons, from Augustine and Tertullian to Calvin. English theologians and preachers are mostly referenced as opponents to be refuted.

227 divines of the early seventeenth century had to navigate these complexities. Their often obsequious loyalty to the monarch is balanced and at times undercut by an allegiance to a faith which, however bent to the political realities of the age, could not be completely divorced from its extra-temporal and anti-national essence.

Henry King’s eleven-sermon series An Exposition Upon the Lord’s Prayer (1628) offers a sustained meditation on the text of the Lord’s Prayer taken from Matthew 6. By elevating this most ancient and common of Christian prayers, King attempts to stabilize the political, theological, and social order of Stuart England in an extra-historical hope of transformation. Adherence to standards of Christian behavior that would ease or enable the functioning of the temporal system is possible only within the context of a persistent attempt to transcend that system, subordinating even the authority of Church and Crown to time and to God. King’s project appropriates the liturgical form of the Lord’s Prayer, blending the acts of preaching and praying, to present a vision of community for the English church, both on earth and in its salvific hope.

Near the close of the final sermon, King states, “It hath beene my Office, thorowout this whole Tract upon Christ’s Prayer, onely to Chafe the Wax, to informe and mollifie, and prepare your

Meditations by kindling a Religious zeale in you. My part is done and now I must expect somewhat from you.”3 His sermons prepare the wax by inflaming the affections, but his auditors must

3 Henry King, “XI: For Thine is the Kingdom”, The Sermons of Henry King (1592-1669), Bishop of Chichester, ed. Mary Hobbs, (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1992), 216.

(Subsequent references to the Lord’s Prayer sermons will use the roman numeral only.)

228 complete the process, must stamp the seal by saying “Amen.”4 This congregational utterance stands in for the participation King desires from his auditors both in hearing the sermon and in praying this prayer. It is a formal assent, but nevertheless an efficacious one.

I. King and The Exposition Upon the Lord’s Prayer

Born in 1592, King was ordained in 1616, moving immediately into a degree of prominence, due to his being the son of John King, the Bishop of London.5 His first public sermon was famously disparaged by John Chamberlain.6 He was chaplain to both James I and Charles I. Even within the shifting definitions of conformity during the 1620s and 1630s, he was moderate: episcopal, royalist, ceremonialist, but not Laudian.7 In March 1640, he preached an explicitly political sermon at St

Paul’s on Charles’ inauguration anniversary, which was, in effect, a plea to save both the form of the established church and the monarch himself.8 He was consecrated Bishop of Chichester in 1642, a

4 XI, 219.

5 John King was a friend of John Donne’s and the younger King became intimate with Donne as well, eventually becoming the executor of Donne’s will. See Mary Hobbs, “Introduction,” The Sermons of Henry King (1592- 1669), 48-50. Hobbs argues that this close association has influenced later readers to judge King’s sermons as weaker echoes of Donne’s.

6 John Chamberlain, The Letters of John Chamberlain, ed. Norman Egbert McClure, vol. 2 (Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 1939), 114. See, for example, the anecdote’s appearance in Kate Armstrong’s “Sermons in Performance” in English Sermon Revised: Religion, Literature, and History 1600-1799, ed. Lori Anne Ferrell and Peter McCullough (Manchester, England: Manchester UP, 2000), 121, and Ronald Berman’s, Henry King & the Seventeenth Century (London: Chatto & Windus, 1964), 13.

7 It is Hobbs’ thesis that King was an “adventurer in a middle-way” and that he can be found to be moderate about both his Calvinism, rejecting at least supralapsarian claims of double predestination, and what Hobbs calls Arminianism, but which is more than just a soteriological claim. This latter position might be also understood through King’s moderate ceremonialism and strong royalist loyalties that stop short of the aggressiveness of the Laudians, see especially “Introduction,” 31, 33-35, 39; Sharpe, Image Wars, 249.

8 See discussion of this sermon in Sharpe, Image Wars, 188-189. Sharpe identifies King as a bishop although he would not be consecrated as Bishop of Chichester until nearly two years later. Morrissey also discusses the sermon,

229 moment of imperfect timing that serves as a statement of this loyalty.9 He survived the Interregnum, though not without personal and material losses. After being sequestered in March 1643, King lived in retirement for much of the 1640s.10 King remained a devoted adherent to the theology and ecclesiology of the exiled Church of England, committed to continuing an episcopal ministry, even participating in plotting with Brian Duppa to join Charles II in exile and secretly consecrate new bishops through the requisite laying on of hands in order to ensure the apostolic succession.11

King spent the last nine years of his life restored to his full role as Bishop of Chichester; his sermons and poetry from this period of his life are often marked by dissatisfaction and, at times, apoplectic anger. 12 There is a notable change in the tone of his sermons. Unlike Milton’s acerbic polemic, political (and personal) wrath did not improve the quality of King’s literary expression, though even in these later sermons we see his strengths.13

King’s literary reputation rests mostly on his poetry, especially his striking elegy for his young wife Anne, who died in 1625. Like many others who fall somewhere in the amorphous

noting its tendency to preach “at” rather than “to” the auditory. Politics and the Paul’s Cross Sermons, 156. Hobbs thinks that King was chosen for this particular sermon precisely because he was not Laudian, “Introduction,” 21 & “1640,” 219-222.

9 Hobbs, 22.

10 Ibid., 23.

11 Ibid., 24.

12 While the post-1642 sermons evidence his strong ideological attachment to Charles I and the early Stuart church, much of his ill adjustment to first the Commonwealth and then Charles II’s reign may be, as Roger Clark posits, more the problems of being an old man in any age and less irrevocable attachment to a singular ideology. Roger G Clark. "Henry King and the Rise of Modern Prose Style." The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 74, no. 2 (04/01, 1975): 179.

13 Hobbs, “Introduction,” 30 f.

230 category once called metaphysical, his critical fortunes were revitalized by the interest of Eliot and the New Critics in the early twentieth century. The study of his sermons is often directed by stylistic comparison with the poetry. In Fraser Mitchell’s 1932 tome English Pulpit Oratory and Horton

Davies’ 1986 survey of early modern “metaphysical” sermons, both critics compare his style unfavorably with more well-known preachers such as Donne. 14

Mary Hobbs’ 1992 edition of King’s sermons pre-dates most of the recent bloom of sermon scholarship. Nevertheless, work on King is much less extensive than on our other preachers. The extant scholarship on King evaluates his sermons as markers of King’s political and theological commitments, as encapsulations of the Stuart worldview, and as useful (or perhaps not so useful) markers by which to trace developments in prose style throughout the seventeenth century.15

14 Hobbs notes that Mitchell seems to base his opinion entirely on two very early sermons, ignoring entirely the beautiful work in The Exposition Upon the Lord’s Prayer, which I trust this study will prove, is both full of moments of eloquence and a worthy example of the way sermons (and sermon series) could work as a whole, Hobbs, “Introduction,” 41.

15 In the only critical monograph devoted to our intrepid hero, Henry King and the Seventeenth Century, Ronald Berman presents a version of Henry King that is of a typological figure, shifting his style as the collective mood of the century changed, but always proceeding from the ideological premises of the early seventeenth century. He is at pains to establish King as part of the Jacobean mainstream and describes Christ Church, where King was at Oxford, as a “hotbed of complacency.” (10) This monograph pre-dates the complicating scholarship of historians such as Lake, Fincham, and Tyache in its categories of Puritan and Anglicans. It places King solidly in the camp of Andrewes and Laud. While the former was certainly an influential presence, King was, as Mary Hobbs points out, not a member of Laud’s inner circle.15 Berman also oversimplifies King’s (and Donne’s) thoughts on election, equating all teaching about predestination too easily with both the most deterministic Calvinism and the most radical of Puritans (41). Identifying King’s loyalties as lying within the Stuart orthodoxy that so intricately combined political and ecclesiastical order, Berman styles him as absolutist about being relativistic, as he affirms the authority of the monarch and the church in part as a way to maneuver around the extreme demands of the Puritans: “In Donne we see Puritanism guilty of a breach of that caritas which should sustain the individual: in Henry King we shall see it as guilty of destroying the Christian community by rebellion against the manifest will of God” (43). Berman’s account also gives prominent place to King’s pre-occupation with order, returned often to the telling sentence from a 1640 sermon: “There is nothing so much sets out the Universe as Order” (52). Berman’s chapter on King’s sermons reads for style through an ideological lens. It is also here that he explores his signature contentions about the way in which King’s style develops throughout the seventeenth century, reflecting shifts in expression that were rooted in the changes in the philosophical landscape, while ultimately never accepting the epistemological premises to the new “plain” style (68 ff). (Roger Clark’s study of Henry King’s sermon, however, complicates the ease with which these stylistic changes can be pinned to the overarching changes of the century.) Furthermore, reading style in this way is mostly made possible by cherry-picking sections of the sermons, for in even his early sermons there are segments of lucid explanatory prose, of both rationality and enthusiastic meditations.

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As in my chapters on Andrewes and Donne, I offer a study of Henry King’s sermons that, while contextualized by a consideration of historical moment and ideological agendas, primarily engages with the way his language achieves purposes artistic and pastoral. While the ideological commitments Berman, Hobbs, and others outline in King’s sermons are present in all his sermons, they comprise only some of the elements at play in the Exposition Upon the Lord’s Prayer. Although devotion to order (and the ecclesiastical and political schemes implied by devotion to the established order in England in 1625) is a major preoccupation, it is not the only important concern. The Lord’s

Prayer sermons are not a neat, theologically infused apologia for state power. King preaches on personal pain and national lament, on the mystical future and the practical present, in the civic sphere of London and far beyond it.

First published in 1628, with a second edition following in 1634, the sermons of The

Exposition Upon the Lord’s Prayer were probably preached over the span of several years, likely disrupted by both personal and national tragedy: the death of James I and of King’s wife, Anne, in

1625, as well as the plague year of 1626.16 Although the published volume is dedicated to Charles, the first sermons were preached while James was still king.

When Berman does admit this complexity, he attributes it to the fact that King’s style never becomes “totally coherent” (71). It seems ridiculous to assert that a coherent style is to be determined by our attempts at stylistic taxonomy, asserted from a vantage point several centuries removed and inflected though the lens of arbitrary periodization. Style is determined by the needs of the task at hand in that portion of the sermon and reading sermons more holistically would help to elucidate this.

16 Hobbs, 19.

232

Over the course of eleven individual sermons, King painstakingly exposits each of the phrases of the Lord’s Prayer. King begins with an introductory sermon, placing the prayer within its immediate Scriptural context and offering a justification of his project. This is followed by ten sermons on the prayer itself. In the published sermons, they are numbered as follows:

II. Our Father Which Art in Heaven III. Hallowed be Thy Name IV. Thy Kingdom Come V. Thy Will be Done in Earth as it is in Heaven VI. Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread VII. And Forgive Us Our Debts VIII. As We Forgive Our Debtors17 IX. And Lead Us Not into Temptation X. But Deliver Us from Evil XI. For Thine is the Kingdom, etc.

King’s project is a tour de force of close reading. He justifies his attention to each phrase by noting the density of meaning in Scripture and in this prayer in particular: “Now if every word in Scripture hath its weight, much more every word in this Prayer, which is the Epitome of all Scripture, and as the Spirit extracted out of the whole Booke of God.”18 The intensity of his close reading fits not only with the mystical elevation of Scripture by Christians as a special, divinely inspired text, worthy of mining for the deepest possible meaning, but also within the Reformed emphasis on preaching the Word. Scripture has meaning which is to be shown to the Church, in painstaking detail when

17 King uses the “debts… debtors” translation of Matthew 6:12 of the Authorized Version. The 1559 Book of Common Prayer uses “trespasses… theim that trespasse against us.” The Book of Common Prayer: The Texts of 1549, 1559, and 1662, ed by Brian Cummings, paperback ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 104.

18 King, “VII: And Forgive Us Our Debts,” 185.

233 necessary, through careful explication. However, in making a prayer “the epitome of all Scripture,”

King is choosing an interpretative stance.

This chapter argues that King’s sermons on the Lord’s Prayer present a holistic vision of the

Christian community, grounded in a liturgical treatment of this prayer as a transformative act. King’s goal is to move his auditors to participate in this prayer and so to be changed. He wishes for his auditors to be led in a liturgical act, one in which they engage, with understanding, in the transformational worship of the church.19

In arguing for this understanding of the Exposition Upon the Lord’s Prayer, I will examine

King’s definition of prayer, the relationship between liturgical prayers and community, the paradoxical way in which King presents the Church’s participation in divine power through prayer, and the rhetorical presence of a dual audience—human and divine—revealed by the integration of prayers within the text of the sermons.

II. “Something Understood”: What is Prayer?20

Throughout these sermons, King constructs a vision of Christian life grounded in the nature of the Lord’s Prayer and of prayer itself. The Lord’s Prayer, found in the gospels of Matthew and

Luke, is one of the earliest known elements of Christian liturgy; its status as a fundamental text has

19 “In a church where for the most part, I hope we doe, or should understand one another; where as neere as wee can, wee follow the Psalmist’s rule, To praise God with understanding…” XI, 216.

20 See line 14 of “Prayer (I)” in George Herbert, The Complete English Poems, ed by John Tobin (New York: Penguin Books, 2004), 45-46.

234 remained constant throughout church history. Upon this brief text, King builds a complex vision of

Christian life and community. Prioritizing this prayer allows King to position his exhortation, as he so often does, on a theological middle ground that embraces the paradox of real human action and complete acceptance of God’s sovereignty. It also allows King to use sermons as means to prayer, but blended in such a way that any opposition between the two is diffused.

Prayer, says King, places humanity in the paradoxical position of acting volitionally yet relying completely on divine providence to empower those actions: “‘Tis his grace that we Pray, and again, ‘tis his grace which answers our Prayers: like a cloud doth this Grace still hang over our heads, but the dew thereof drops not downe upon us unlesse first resolved by the breath of our Praiers. Let therefore our Prayers ascend up unto him, that so his Grace may descend on us.”21 All the actionable power, including the will to pray at all, is really God’s, but the need for prayer requires real human action in “the breath of our Praiers.”22 King explicitly dismisses theological perspectives that discourage people from praying. It is wrong, he says, to teach that God’s rule is so sovereign that prayer is unnecessary or pointless.23 Also dangerous, however, is the elevation of the human capacity for good that would cause prayer to be neglected.24

21 King, “I: An Exposition Upon the Lord’s Prayer,” 138.

22 “Hee by the working of his Grace inspires us with a Duty and holy Zeale to ascribe this Praise.” XI, 215.

23 I, 138.

24 Ibid., 138, 142.

235

To find the animating theology of prayer in King’s middle way, we must pay close attention to his definition of prayer.25 For King, prayer is a transformative utterance of petition, offered by an inferior (dependent humanity) to a superior (a powerful benevolent deity). The mode of this petition is formal, communal, potent, and necessarily undergirded by faith.

Michael Joseph Brown, writing about the Lord’s Prayer, notes that prayer is “an expression of theological convictions, whether they be formal or popular.”26 King quotes Aquinas: “Prayer is the interpreter of our desire.”27 The terms on which the divine is approached reveal ideas about the nature of the deity, about the nature of the petition, and about the relationship between the petitioned and petitioner. Crucially undergirding King’s understanding of the relationship between this inferior humanity and the superior deity is an assumption that the divine is inclined toward the human in mercy.

King’s choice of synonyms for prayer, as he creates the structural markers for the series, offers a useful entry point into his concept of the word. When he divides the Exposition into its individual sermons using the phrases of the Lord’s Prayer, King speaks of prayer as petition. This foundational choice is explained in King’s first sermon in the series: “We come not to present God with a

25 Definitions of prayer differ from the technical and linguistic to sectarian and devotional. Brown, for instance, defines it “as a ritualized practice, dialogic in nature, with another who is conceived as present, a being represented after a human fashion, whom the orant believes can be influenced in analogy to the established model of human social relations.” 596-597. I will examine King’s functional definition through both these modes. Michael Joseph Brown, ""Panem Nostrum": The Problem of Petition and the Lord's Prayer." The Journal of Religion 80, no. 4 (2000): 595-614.

26 Brown, 602.

27 King, “III: Hallowed be Thy Name,” 152.

236

Narration, but a Petition, and not to discourse with him, but to pray to him.”28 While twenty-first century notions of prayer often frame it as a dialogue or an expression of intimacy, King contradicts the seventeenth-century version of such notions. He recommends that we ought not to use prayer to communicate our interior life or what we are thinking, as God already knows all of our thoughts.29

Prayer is also, significantly, the expression of an inferior to a superior. The most common metaphorical registers King works in when describing prayer are those of power hierarchies: financial patrons, the law, civil government, and nobility.30 The power dynamics King presents are benign, but nevertheless hierarchical.31 In addition to petition he employs verbs such as ask, intreat, invocate, beseech, and request to describe the action of prayer.32 The Christian who prays is dependent; this is a fundamental fact of the human condition as King understands it. In fact, the earthly hierarchies he deploys as metaphors flatten into an equality before God. The great gulf is between human and divine.33

King’s attention to the burden of separation from the divine is sober and nuanced. In many of the most powerful passages of these sermons, we see traces of the author of “The Exequy” as he

28 I, 141

29 Ibid.

30 Ibid., 137-138.

31 Diana Henderson argues this point while exploring the ways in which King’s patriarchalism leave him room to mourn his wife in the way that he does. "King and no King: "the Exequy" as an Antebellum Poem." George Herbert Journal 22, no. 1 and 2 (Fall 1998/Spring 1999, 1998): 57-75.

32 I, 139. King, “II: Our Father Which Art in Heaven,” 144, 146.

33 II, 149.

237 offers a deeply inhabited articulation of the grief of the human condition. The seventh sermon,

“Forgive us our debts,” and King’s penultimate sermon on “But deliver us from Evill” are most full of these sort of passages.34 He expects his auditors to be able to enter readily into this sort of emotional response to the world.

The form of the Lord’s Prayer used in The Book of Common Prayer offers a liturgical pattern for this sort of identification. It leaves off the line beginning “for thine is the kingdom,” which is included only in Matthew. In the prayer book, any time the Lord’s Prayer is not prayed either by the priest alone or by the entire congregation together, the people close the prayer by answering the minister with “But delyver us from evyll. Amen.”35 Rather than simply saying Amen, the people most frequently participate in this prayer by asking to be delivered from evil. In these instances, the prayer is often offered amid a series of responses that emphasize mercy and delivery. For example, the order for the visitation of the sick is as follows:

Lorde have mercy upon us. Christe have mercy upon us. Lorde have mercy upon us.

34 Compare the sensibility of the following lines from “The Exequy” with a passage from the “But deliver us from Evill” sermon. “I give thee [the earth] all / My short liv’d right and Interest / In Hir, whome living I lov’d best: / With a most free and bounteous grief, / I give thee what I could not keep” (64-68) and “Think not much of my delay; / I am already on the way, / And follow Thee with all the speed / Desire can make, or Sorrowes breed” (91-94). “The Exequy” in The Poems of Henry King. Edited by Margaret Crum. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965. 68-72. “There can be no such exquisite torment as to prolong an unwilling life. I doe not onely include in this speech those whom Misery hath tired out, and so made weary of living… My speech reaches to all, and in this Generall Appeale I make Common Understanding the Judge, and on that ground pronounce that there is none who indifferently weighs the troubles of Life when it is calmest, and our quiet in Death.” X, 204. A capacity for articulating grief seems to be natural to King’s disposition. He wrote a number of elegies in addition to the one for his wife and offers in the middle of a political rant this line: “Nothing is so Natural as to Lament the dead.,” “Commeration of Charles I, King and Martyr,” 267.

35 This is the case in the Litany as well as the orders of service for marriage, baptism, burial, the churching of women, and within a commination against sinners.

238

¶ Our father whiche art in heaven. &c. And leade us not into temptacion. Aunswere. But deliver us from evel. Amen. ¶ Minister. O Lorde save thy servant.36

This frame subordinates the remaining lines to the tenor of the responsive answers in this portion of the liturgy, all of which emphasize asking for aid in a desperate situation. King finds this emphasis appropriate, “when there are so many Quues given us, we cannot but be expert in the repetition.”37

He argues that because “there is nothing so natural to Man as to call for helpe, because there is not in the World a creature exposed to so much want and danger as hee,” it is good that the Christian congregation in the church of England has “tongues… perfect in the language of this Petition.”38

This helplessness, often articulated in the prayers of The Book of Common Prayer through calls for mercy, is for King indicative of the entirety of human experience. It is most evident in the presence of death in the world, but also through the inevitable griefs encountered along the way:

“We first grow familiar with our Evills when wee take acquaintance with Life, Whose whole Voyage is so clogg’d with variety of encumbrance, that ‘tis an affliction but to carry our Contemplations thorow, or travel it with our thoughts.”39 The passage of life is marked by human impotence. King reminds his readers that all of their apparent earthly powers—wealth, strength, beauty—are at best

36 BCP, 1559, 164.

37 King, “X: But Deliver Us From Evil,” 204.

38 Ibid., 204.

39 X, 204.

239 temporary possessions: “The Breath we draw, is that ours? Is it not suckt & borrowed from the next

Aire?” All attempts to alleviate or transcend this condition must fail, as failure is the only real possession humanity has, “There is not so naked, so penurious a thing as Man. Naked was he borne, and naked shall hee returne, devested of all but his sinnes. Wee have no peculiar but this, nothing that we can call Ours, but only our Faults.”40 If man is helpless and dependent, however, God is both potent and willing to rescue. As Henderson suggests in her discussion of the expansive articulation of grief in “The Exequy,” it is possible that King’s very comfort with his role within the social structures of early Stuart England allows him to create an honest articulation of human loss, albeit in a space circumscribed by theologically specific language.41

After petition, King sees prayer as a bridge between the human and divine spheres. In the first and last sermons, he styles the spanning of this gap as a letter: “‘Tis both the letter and the bearer too.”42 In metaphorical variety that recalls Herbert’s “Prayer,” the Exposition also pictures

40 “There is not so naked, so penurious a thing as Man. Naked was he borne, and naked shall hee returne, devested of all but his sinnes. Wee have no peculiar but this, nothing that we can call our Ours, but only our Faults. Except that lucklesse patrimony, I know not what we can lay claime to, either that is without us, or in us, Bona Fortunae—Wealth— acknowledgeth no Soveraigne Fortune, wee are not Masters of it. And though it abide with us as an Hireling, perhaps till the end of our daies, then it surely takes leave—often before that, becoming any one’s save his whose it last was. Nothing of all wee had goes along with us but our Winding sheet; for other things wee have gathered, the Psalme says wee know not who shall enjoy them—sure wee are, wee shall not. And for that forme which makes so many enamoured of themselves, can any call it Theirs?—When all the Pargets Art hath invented are not able to Coat it against the violence of Time and Weather, nor by all their fillings to repaire those decayes and breaches which sicknesse hath wrought upon it? The Breath we draw, is that ours? Is it not suckt &borrowed from the next Aire? Our best part, the Soule, is it many more than a Loane, deposited for some yeares with the Body, after whose expiration it reverts to him that gave it? And lastly for our Body, is it any thing else but a Lumpe of walking clay, a little Earth, inanimated; the certaine restitution whereof wee owe unto the Dust from whence it was taken?” VII, 190-191.

41 Henderson, 61.

42 XI, 210.

240 prayer as a key, weapons, a scaling ladder, and an engine of battery.43 What these metaphors all have in common is that they are a means of eliminating separation by crossing or destroying boundaries.

In this vein, King also speaks of prayer as a sacrifice, with the rising smoke and perfume of incense.44

Incense figures the longing these petitions represent. Prayer orients humanity toward the ineffable, looking toward what is not yet bridged.

Wee are permitted to looke at the distance whereat Seamen discover Land, and our hopes are as remote from us as they from Harbour, which they onely beginn to ken, and no more. Or as Moses from the top of Abarim survaied the Land of Promise and tooke possession of the Soile with his eyes, so from this Mount of Grace are wee permitted to descry that higher Mount of Glory, whose top reaches the highest Heavens; To taste it in the promise of the Gospell, and take possession of it Oculo fidei, with the Eye of our Faith, till ourselves being seated in it, the Eyes of our Body shall hereafter see all that we now believe…. But here our eye dazzles, dimme and unable to behold any more; the Consequence of that blisse is unutterable, the Measure of it not to bee taken by so weake a Perspective as the Eye.45

For King, this state of humble, limited longing for the infinite is consistent with the posture of humanity as we pray. Prayer is an act that takes place not in complete union, as in the Kingdom of

Glory described above, but in the long wait before that union is attained. In this understanding of prayer as an integral part the wait for redemption, King engages in the Pauline struggle of “already

43 I, 139.

44 II, 139.

45 King, “IV: Thy Kingdom Come,” 165.

241 and not yet” which Gregory Kneidel finds to be such a significant part of the literary efforts of the seventeenth century which press toward unified community.46

The vital necessity of prayer comes from the desperate and uncertain nature of the human condition. And so King urges his auditors toward prayer: “To close all, Pray, and I say againe, Pray.

Let thy uprising and thy down-lying, thy going in, thy comming out, be hallowed by Prayer.”47 This exhortation seems to urge constant and individualized prayer. Yet King is writing not simply on prayer generally, but on this prayer, the Lord’s Prayer. It models the ideal for prayer, but it also offers something in its status sui generis.

In the 1559 Book of Common Prayer, which King would have heard from childhood, the Lord’s

Prayer is present not only in the daily rituals of matins and evensong, but also in the rites that marked the significant moments of English lives, from baptism to burial.48 The entirety of the Lord’s

Prayer first appears in the offices for morning prayers. Afterwards, the rubric indicates that it is to be said with “Our Father which. &c.”49 This shorthand testifies to the Catholic heritage of the paternoster, and to its ubiquity. The Book of Common Prayer lists the following knowledge as the

46 Gregory Kniedel, Rethinking the Turn to Religion in Early Modern English Literature: The Poetics of all Believers, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 14.

47 I, 142.

48 The role of the rites of burial in the BCP in shaping ideas of community in Early Modern England is explored by Daniel Gibbons, Conflicts of Devotion: Liturgical Poetics in Sixteenth-and Seventeenth-Century England (University of Notre Dame Press, 2017), 57-71. On Shakespeare, naming, and identity in the rite of baptism, see Daniel Swift, Shakespeare’s Common Prayers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 221-246.

49 BCP, 1559, 110, 111, 120, etc.

242 minimum for confirmation: “None herafter shalbe confyrmed but suche as can saie in their mother tongue the articles of the faith, the Lordes praier, and the .x. Commaundementes.”50

The use of Lord’s Prayer in The Book of Common Prayer contrasts with its pre-Reformation use, in which the paternoster was meant to be said privately by the members of the congregation while the priest was otherwise occupied.51 In The Book of Common Prayer, it was both part of the official voice of the minister, as at the beginning of morning and evening prayer, and also a moment of universal participation: “Then the Minister, Clarkes, and people, shall saye the Lordes praier in Englyshe, with a loud voice.”52

The very continuity of the Lord’s Prayer—its dual authority as part of the perceived practice of the primitive church and the enduring practice of the universal church—is part of a prerogative which was a polemical claim of the English church in which King was a whole-hearted participant.

The use of this prayer signals a claim to legitimacy through participation in the historical practice of the faith. But King is no less concerned with the comprehensive vision of the words themselves.

In adopting this scheme, King is careful to place himself within Christian tradition. “You see the large capacity of this Prayer, how that it comprehends the subject of all other prayers; and not them only, but even all Christian discipline, as Tertullian writes: for which cause he stiles it

Breviarium totius Evangelii, the Abridgement of the whole Gospell, Such plentifull Rivers streame from

50 Ibid., 150.

51 Rami Targoff, Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2001), 22.

52 BCP, 1559, 110.

243 this Seven-headed Fountaine.” 53 In these sermons, King maps the rivers that stream from the fountain. His subjects range from lessons in knowing and accepting the will of God to warnings against bitterness and anger, and from defenses of the monarchy to assertions of the equality of all people. He engages in academic theology (though not with particular originality) and in practical pastoral guidance, and somewhere between the two he offers subtly wrought meditations on subjects of hope and of pain.

King signals the importance of his vision when he exhorts his auditors to be imitators of

Christ through this prayer.

Nor was this barely given in charge, but exemplified by the Author, Christ himselfe. Hee that in his Gospell taught us to make Prayers and Supplications did himselfe pray also; and that not only a few times, nor in few places. For what place was there wherein this High Priest found not an Oratory to pray? The Mount, the Garden, the Crosse: so that I may truely say of Him, His whole life was nothing else but a long Prayer.”54

This passage is significant for understanding how King conceives of prayer. He uses a rhetorical sleight of hand to elide his statements; Christ prayed many times; thus, Christ prayed continually.

The verb becomes a definitional noun; his life was not just a life of prayer, but a prayer itself. It would be easy to equate a statement such as “life is a prayer” with the idea of prayer as an almost subconscious communion with the divine that, though latent in the more mystical strains of

Christianity, is much more common to our own century. Yet King is at pains to set up this particular prayer—including, notably, its formal liturgical nature—as the model. In temperament, practice and

53 II, 145.

54 I, 137.

244 doctrine, he is invariably on the side of order and the established church. He directs his auditors toward Christ as a model, emphasizing his constant prayer, and urging his auditors to pray in a like manner. In this, King emphasizes the potential of prayer to shape the orientation and content of a life. Prayer is, in fact, a means to conversation, in its seventeenth-century usage, not just an exchange of words but a life lived in relation to others.55 If, like Christ, King’s auditors live lives that are prayers, they not only create a linguistic bridge over the gap between the human and divine, the ultimate transcendence of which they look toward in hope, but they also are transformed now.

Moreover, it is a transformation that happens within and for a community.

III. Liturgical Prayer and the Creation of Community

In his introductory sermon to the series, King takes considerable pains to defend the Lord’s

Prayer as both model—an “excellent patterne”—and an ideal prayer in itself.56 In doing so, he contrasts its “set forme” with longer, extemporaneous prayers, which he calls “sudden unsettled fits of praying.”57 Here King partakes in the debate about the role of liturgy and of set and extemporaneous prayers specifically. Although King does not insist that the exact words of the

Lord’s Prayer are the only permitted prayer and admits that there may be use for “extemporal

55 “The action of living or having one's being in a place or among persons. Also fig. of one's spiritual being.” "conversation, n.". OED Online. March 2014. Oxford University Press.

56 I, 140.

57 I, 140.

245

Prayers, when need or occasion shall require,” he begins the series by placing this prayer within a clearly liturgical paradigm. 58

As presented in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, the Lord’s Prayer is both an actual prayer and a lesson in how to pray. Its earliest use was both as an element of communal worship and as an outline of suggestions for what and how to pray.59 In the early modern English church, however, the

Lord’s Prayer became a locus for a larger debate over which kinds of prayers were appropriate for the public worship of the church and for Christians in private devotions.60 Puritan non-conformists tended to view the Lord’s Prayer as an example for extemporaneous prayers. They were apt to be against set prayers in general, considering them mechanical routine devoid of devotional value. In this they follow some of the continental reformers, especially Calvin. While Calvin’s discussion of prayer in the Institutes allows the Lord’s Prayer to be both a guide for how to pray and also “words

[put] into our lips,”61 he regards “cold” set prayers with suspicion.62 “The first rule of right prayer,” argues Calvin, is the right attitude of “heart and mind,” and our prayers do not succeed “unless they proceed from deep feeling.”63 Following this lead, English non-conformists removed acts of public

58 Ibid.

59 Gordon Bahr cites the Patristics to argue that the Lord’s Prayer was considered a guideline to the necessary elements of an ideal prayer. Reasoning from the plural form in the Gospels, he also quotes Cyprian (“Our prayer is public and common”) to argue that it formed part of congregational services. "The use of the Lord's Prayer in the Primitive Church." Journal of Biblical Literature 84, no. 2 (Jun 1965), 155, 156.

60 Kenneth Stevenson offers a good summary of this debate. “Richard Hooker and the Lord’s Prayer: a Chapter in Reformation Controversy.” Scottish Journal of Theology 57, no. 1 (February 2004): 40-41.

61 John Calvin. Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge, Vol II (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1966), 182.

62 Calvin, 150.

63 Calvin, 148, 180.

246 prayer from the homogenous authority of the Book of Common Prayer, freeing the sincere expression of the preacher. In the separatist Waldegrave replacement liturgy, for instance, most of the prayers are examples to be followed rather than exact forms. 64

Richard Hooker’s defense in the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity of the practice of liturgical or common prayer—and indeed of its superior devotional efficacy—is, according to both Targoff and

Stevenson, significant in the progression of the arguments over the nature of public worship.65 It offers a defense of liturgy, including prayer. Hooker argues that public prayer is more effective than private because of the holy solemnity of the church space, the combined good it does and because

“the alacritie and fervor of others serveth as a present spurre.”66 Thus, the hearts of weak individuals are inflamed and strengthened by public worship. Hooker cites the Lord’s Prayer itself to argue that the set forms of common prayer are a gift and “prevent this phancie of extemporal and voluntarie prayers.”67 Three decades later, King assumes Hooker’s arguments and, in The Exposition Upon the

Lord’s Prayer, treats the value of common prayer as established. While King dismisses the proponents of free, extemporaneous prayers, this sermon series is not primarily a defense of his position within

64 For instance, in the instructions for the visitation of the sick, the liturgy reads, “It is hard to prescribe al rules appertaining thereunto, we referre it to the discretion of the godly and prudent Minister.”A booke of the forme of common prayers, administration of the Sacraments: &c. agreeable to Gods Worde, and the vse of the reformed Churches, (London: Printed by Robert Walde-graue, 1585), E4r. Targoff quotes from the instruction for the prayer before the sermon, “The Minister useth this confession, or like in effect,” 45.

65 Targoff, 28. Stevenson, 49. Indeed, Hooker argues that those who view set forms of prayer as “superstitious” have been tricked by “the best stratagem that Satan hath,” Book V, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, vol. II, The Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker, ed William Speed Hill (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977), 119.

66 Hooker, Book V, Vol II Folger Edition, 112-113.

67 Ibid., 119.

247 this controversy. He is largely concerned with the devotional-rhetorical application of this theological position.

King argues that the Lord’s Prayer is divinely infused with a perfection that elevates all liturgical prayer, while also functioning liturgically itself. As Ramie Targoff argues, the conforming center of the English church did not see a set liturgy as merely politically convenient; these practices were also informed by “the belief that external practices might not only reflect but also potentially transform the internal self.”68 For conformists of King’s bent, liturgical prayer has devotional significance that goes beyond, but also includes, social cohesion. As voices blend in the “Our

Father,” King argues that Christ “shew[s] himselfes the Reconciler of Man and Man, shutting up all opposition of Mine and Thine in this one word, as the common Peacemaker: Noster, Our Father.”69

King and others allied with Hooker saw no necessity to prove sincerity through tortured, individualized extemporaneous prayers. In fact, they cautioned, rather than being devotionally superior, such prayers may cause spiritual harm if what is prayed for is inappropriate or harmful.70

The words given by Christ direct the Christian to pray for what ought to be prayed for, and open the soul to being transformed in accordance with those prayers. The wisdom and grace imparted through the power of this specific language cannot be replaced by even the sincerest self-generated utterance. Both the Lord’s Prayer and other liturgical prayers contain a power that “could penetrate the inner self, shape personal voice, and inscribe the printed words on the page upon the innermost

68 Targoff, 3.

69 II, 149.

70 In fact, this was not just a concern for Hooker and others who prioritized the ceremonial aspects of worship. Calvin also cautioned against the dangers of undirected prayer. Calvin, 1198.

248 parts of the spirit.”71 As can be seen in King’s depreciation of prayers of “narrative,” individual participation in this powerful prayer matters more than individual expression. In this understanding of the Christan life in community, each soul, through the act of prayer, journeys together past separation and into unity, out of alienation and to salvation.

Nevertheless, King is quick to affirm that there is no power in saying the words of the prayer if the utterance is not animated by faith.72 While Hooker and King privilege public worship over private, both emphasize the necessity of the interior reality of faith in any set prayer or worship.

They do not suggest that empty formal prayers are still effective; their contention is rather that formal prayers need not be empty. Targoff argues that the theology of the conforming English church in fact presented a comprehension of prayer in which “the individual’s personal experience of the liturgical utterance is heightened rather than diminished by the collective performance.”73 For

Andrewes argues collective prayer, prompted by preaching, brings souls closer to salvation than preaching alone. In part, prayer trumps because it is not mere “hearing.”74 Similarly, in King’s presentation, liturgical prayer is powerful because it is participatory. The individual worships within the collective whole of the church. Liturgy is thus by its nature communal experience and expression. Especially in the sermons on “Our Father Which Art in Heaven” and “Give Us This

71 Targoff, 13.

72 II, 148.

73 Targoff, 54.

74 “Then can it not be, but a great grief, to a Christian heart to see many, this day, give Christ’s peace the hearing, and, there is all; heare it, and then turne their backs on it; every man go his way, and forsake his peace: insteed of seeking it, shunn it; and, of pursuing, turne away from it. Lancelot Andrewes, XCVI. Sermons by the Right Honorable and Reverend Father in God, Lancelot Andrewes, Late Lord Bishop of Winchester. Published by His Majesties Specially Command, ed. William Laud, John Buckeridge (London: George Miller for Richard Badger, 1629), 422. See also the 1620 Easter Sermon in Lancelot Andrewes: Selected Sermons and Lectures, ed Peter E. McCullough (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 123.

249

Day Our Daily Bread,” King emphasizes the significance of the plural pronoun, which presuppose collective participation, in the received text of the Lord’s Prayer.

Lancelot Andrewes also wrote an exposition of the Lord’s Prayer as part of his private devotions, eventually published as Institutiones Piae. Andrewes’ exposition covers much of the same ground as King’s more explicitly public version. But where Andrewes concludes his with an extended paraphrase in the form of a prayer, moving beyond direct liturgical participation to imitation of the model, King’s paraphrase is, in essence, offered through the life of the one who prays.75 The sanctifying grace of this collective worship produces external changes, the evidence of spiritual metamorphosis. It also creates a kingdom of believers whose conversation—the lives they live—is hallowed. King argues that God’s presence bestows power on each participant:

So that in this short Prayer, as in a little Orbe, the Sonne of righteousnesse moves. From hence doth ever Starre, every faithfull servant and Confessor of Christ (for they are incarnate Starres), borrow a ray of light, to illuminate and sanctifie the body of his meditations—The Church in her Liturgie, and the Preacher both enjoyn’d to use it.76 This prayer, with Christians using both the words and the form, is actually inhabited by divine presence. The transformation of the human petitioner is dependent, like prayer itself, on two facets existing in tension: divine power and human participation.

According to King, human efforts are impotent unless animated by this divine power:

“When he bids us Pray, he doth but fit us with a capacity to receive what he desires to give.”77 Yet

75 In this we can see an example of how rigid structures by which to sort individual figures into theological camps doesn’t always work. Andrewes is, if anything, more ceremonialist and traditionalist than King, but he uses the prayer as a model, while King emphasizes the text itself.

76 II, 145.

77 I, 137.

250 human participation in the transformation is still necessary. The specific words of the prayer give this participation shape. In the sermon on “For Thine is the Kingdome,” King asserts, “And yet in this wee imply a Dedication, a Devoting of ourselves to Him; For the ascribing of Dominion and

Power to him imports the obedience and subjection and service which we owe Him.”78 Thus, this model for prayer is actually a model for life, to be lived under the authority and by the power of the divine will. The petitioner’s life is brought into accordance with the implied standards of behavior presented in the prayer, but the request itself is for the grace to live in such a way:

The Commandements are His Will. We doe not presume so much on our owne strength or perswade our selves wee can fulfill them, as the Rhemists doe, but retire to God from whom they came for his assistance—such is the humble voice of our Letany: Incline thou, O Lord, our hearts to keep these Lawes. Againe, ‘tis his Command and Will that We believe in the Name of the Jesus Christ (Joh. 3:23). Therefore we cry to him in the Gospell, Domine aduage fidem: That Hee would helpe our unbeleefe, and confirme his faith in us.79 The combination of these two elements creates, for King, the transformative power of prayer. The will of the individual must be engaged; the heart must turn to the keeping of the law. Through divine intervention, the seeming hopelessness of the human condition is realigned toward the hope of salvation. The seed for the vision of the Christian community that King offers in this series is expectation of grace; the ideal society is available to a Church which prays and is transformed by this set of divinely sanctioned petitions. “Wee expected to be Changed,” King offers.80

78 XI, 215.

79 King, “V: Thy Will be Done in Earth,” 171.

80 Ibid., 173.

251

King’s exhortations are not only to pray, but also to behave in a certain way as implied—by the content of the petitions of the prayer. Much of the behavior he is concerned with is less interior than we might find in Donne or Sibbes. King focuses on community-oriented behaviors, preaching vigorously against behaviors such as hoarding of wealth (especially through the aggregation of estates) and status-seeking behavior like great feasts which result in over-eating and waste.81 He also characterizes London as a city deeply in need of prayer due to its tolerance for fornication, oppression of the poor, and fraud.82 Failures to be charitable, King warns, are “not Morall Vices but

Capitall Crimes.”83

King remains a champion of the traditional social order as it appeared in its Jacobean incarnation.84 By temperament, King seems disinclined to strive against the social order in any aggressive way, warning against sermons which dared to critique the state.85 In the 1620s, he is confident that the existing order (patriarchal, monarchial, episcopal) is a social and moral good.

Individuals may fail in their roles within the system, but the system should be preserved nonetheless.

Thus, he opens Sermon VII, on forgiveness, by extending the equation of debts and sin. Rather than

81 King, “VI: Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread,” 181.

82 V, 171.

83 King, “VIII: As We Forgive Our Debtors,” 193.

84 Consider for example that he begins Sermon IV with an aside which implies that all those who do not rejoice in the safe delivery home of Charles from Spain—that is, for the good of the state under this particular regime—should be barred from the kingdom of God. IV, 161.

85 See for example, when he enters into the subject of kingdoms, God’s and England, by chiding unnamed preachers who “pretend a deeper reach than men of ordinary compasse to speak no language but State.” King accuses these pretentious preachers of breaking out of their proper role and thus disrupting the ordained order, “From the pulpit they sound worst of all, that being a place not priviledged for censure, but erected as an Oratory wherein to pray for Kings and Kingdomes.” IV, 159.

252 immediately urging his auditors to forgive each other, he digresses into an apology for a hierarchical society. He takes up the metaphor of finance provided by the translation, but expands it beyond mere monetary debts or even sin. Rather he elides debts with all the ties that connect us to each other as humans. In his discussion he is concerned with both the debts we collect from others and the payment of our own debts, a system which, in his construction, creates the social order. There are obligations due from authorities to those under them and from the lesser to the greater. Such debts are familial, social, economic and civil. They can be relational on both a personal and national level. And they are reciprocal. Wives owe a debt of proscribed behavior to their husbands, and vice versa. Despite this reciprocity, King focuses more on the obligation of the lesser, including the assertion that a superior’s neglect of responsibility does not free you from your obligation. So King argues, “The violating of the Conditions on one part doth not make the other void. An ill Master, or an hard father, or a worse Husband, do not disoblige Servant, or Childe, or Wife, from those respects which God’s Commands hath cast upon them as Debts. When equality of desert or correspondence in those parties failes, our Obedience unto God, under whose sentence wee must stand or fall, should supply their defect.” 86 In speaking especially of the failures of husbands toward their wives, King admits that a cruel husband is, in the biblical understanding, hating “his owne flesh,” yet if a wife were to use this as reason for divorce it would be likely to “discompose and disorder the frame of Wedlocke so much, as that it could never be peeced together againe.”87

Tellingly, King makes no mention here of the continued obligations of masters, fathers or husbands

86 VIII, 192.

87 Ibid.

253 should their servants, children, or wives fail in their duties. It is the inferiors who, paradoxically, have the power to blow the whole system up.

This detour ends in a call to forgiveness and reconciliation. King acknowledges injustice, but he sees it as the result of individual (rather than systemic) failure. He also characterizes forgiveness as healing the wounds and caring for a body. Thus, for all his denigration of rebellion and ambition,

King insists on the moral imperative for charity: “The Gospell carries these sins of Omission higher, making them not lesse than perpetrated facts. By that Rule and in that Language, all Defect in

Charity is Cruelty; Not to give is as much as to take away; Not to succor the distressed is in effect all one as to spoyle them. If I feed not the hungry, I starve them; if I releeve not, I destroy.”88 The singular pronoun serves to make the conditional statements unescapable for the individual wealthy auditor. Furthermore, by shifting the grounds of the charge from a duty of charity to a prohibition of cruelty, King emphasizes the interconnectedness of the community to which he is preaching. In championing traditional social hierarchies, he has little patience for wealth or power that is either accumulated through exploitation or used to oppress. Some of his harshest words in the entire series are reserved not for rebels to the social order but for the inhumane custom of debtor’s prisons.89

For King, the body of the Church and the body politic are closely related. The social order of

England is preserved, in King’s eyes, as much by the moral action of the powerful (that is, charity and justice for the poor), as by the dutiful obedience of the common people. In extending St. Paul’s metaphor of the body of the church to individual body parts—hands, feet, etc—with given

88 Ibid., 193.

89 VIII, 194.

254 functions and roles, King compares the rich man to the stomach: “Now as the stomacke receives the meat not to retaine it still there, but to disperse it into all the parts of the body, which must bee fed by that nourishment; so have Rich men their wealth, not to hoord up, but to disperse amongst the needy.”90 This Christian communal duty has inevitable social and political consequences. If we return to the formative “Our Father” at the beginning of the prayer, King argues for a paradigm in which Christian identity is understood through mutual obligation: “He that thinks himselfe borne only for himselfe contracts and straightens the freedome of his being. The most noble and Christian resolution, therefore, is for a man to study his brother’s good as well as his owne.”91 Thus, in the sermon on “Thy Will Be Done,” which King calls the climax of the prayer,92 he urges his auditors to pray that God would “alter.. our crooked inclinations” so that they may be “sanctified both in Soule and Body [to] abstaine from fornication, from oppression, and fraud.”93 The sanctification requested has social implications between individuals and, ultimately, the community as a whole. By finding the call toward this sort of civic action within the transformative utterance of prayer, for the everyday

90 King, VI, 182. See also I Corinthians 12:21-21: “For as the body is one, and hath many members, and all the members of that one body, being many, are one body: so also is Christ. For by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body, whether we be Jews or Gentiles, whether we be bond or free; and have been all made to drink into one Spirit. For the body is not one member, but many. If the foot shall say, Because I am not the hand, I am not of the body; is it therefore not of the body? And if the ear shall say, Because I am not the eye, I am not of the body; is it therefore not of the body? If the whole body were an eye, where were the hearing? If the whole were hearing, where were the smelling? But now hath God set the members every one of them in the body, as it hath pleased him. And if they were all one member, where were the body? But now are they many members, yet but one body. And the eye cannot say unto the hand, I have no need of thee: nor again the head to the feet, I have no need of you.” Authorized Version.

91 II, 149.

92 V, 166.

93 In this passage, King criticizes the City of London for prostitution, fraud, and the abuse of power. V, 171, 172.

255 ordering of community King appeals to the same faith that reaches toward the divine from the disordered pain of humanity.

Perhaps the strongest expressions of this communal imperative come when King explicates the plural pronouns our and us in Sermons II and VI. In Sermon II, he asserts the importance of

“our Father” over “my father” in language that appropriates commercial terms to critique the concept of property: “These two little Monosyllables, Mine and Thine, they are the great Monopolists that spanne the wide world, that, like Abraham and Lot, divide the land betwixt them yet cannot agree, but are ever wrangling and quarrelling about their shares.”94 Thus, he argues, we pray instead to “Our Father.” King finds this phrase so significant because every time individual Christians pray thus, articulating the common status of all people regardless of rank or wealth, they learn again charity and humility. King also finds, within this plural that makes up the community of the church, the great equality that is visible in viewing the separation between the human and the divine.

The devotional efficacy of common prayer promotes changes that are beneficial for the entire Christian community. So also in Sermon VI, King emphasizes that we pray for “our daily bread.” According to King, this use of the plural pronoun implies an interdependence: bread is needed not only for a few, but for all. “Our bread” is both a request for material needs and a charitable requirement for those who have material possessions. King warns those who desire to live in moral isolation from those around them: “It must be Panis datus, Bread given to us from God, not

Panis arreptus, extorted and wrung from the throats of others. For God will not blesse that kinde of

94 II, 148-149.

256 men which vulture-like lives by rapine and preying on their brethren.”95 Asking God even for the most basic of human provision—daily bread—reveals the dependent status of all of humanity, including the wealthy and powerful. For King, all that we have is a gift, “panus datus,” which makes any autonomy in terms of decisions about its distribution impossible. Thus, in praying to ask for

“our daily bread,” the Christian community is also asking to be transformed into the sort of community that feeds all parts of the body. God gives and so those who have must give. While it is easy to see the failure of such an ideal in the realities of early seventeenth-century English society, it is nonetheless the vision that is wielded by King in the Exposition.

Furthermore, King insists that the recipients of grace become open to grace only when they recognize their own need. The Lord’s Prayer facilitates this recognition when the petitioners speak words of dependence in asking for what they think they already possess. The behavioral expectations derived from the Lord’s Prayer are often concerned not with the transformation of an individual Christian or with sorting out the individual’s conscience, but rather with the web of symbiotic behavior that is human life in community. This is, finally, a community oriented toward salvation. The concluding sermon fashions a role for the doxology that is analogous to King’s goal in the series as a whole. King argues that the purpose of the doxology is “to establish them in a confident belief.”96 Both an assertion of and a submission to power, the very act of praying “for thine is the kingdome, and the power, and the glory, for ever” fosters “confident belief.” The tenets of belief already exist within the community of faith, independent of any individual’s participation,

95 VI, 181.

96 XI, 211.

257 yet accessible to each. Ultimately, the content of this belief is less about specific moral principles and much more about the metaphysical triumph of life over sin and death. In King’s presentation of the final phrase of the prayer, sin stands less for transgressive behaviors in particular and more for the sum of human failure in general, the separation of the human from the divine.

IV. Participation in Divine Power

Although the doxology is not always included in the Lord’s Prayer, and, in fact, is not used in the Book of Common Prayer, King decides to make it the subject of an entire sermon, giving it the same weight as the petitions.97 The arc of this series as a whole requires a final affirmation of God’s power. Combined with the “amen” that closes the prayer, it offers an opportunity for King to present the paradox of divine and human action in prayer in miniature. King uses it to buttress two important points of his over-arching argument: the dependent state of humanity and the necessity, for the sake of kindling both hope and faith, of including “a flash of Mercy.”98

Like the genre as a whole, King’s sermons in the Exposition upon the Lord’s Prayer address his congregation as a synecdoche for the Church universal. Without the participation of each individual auditor, the sermon cannot achieve its purpose. The response of the corporate whole requires the response of each individual. Perhaps more than any other genre, sermons demand a participatory response as part of their rhetorical fabric. King is unsatisfied with a sermon as the act of a single

97 Andrewes in “The Lords Prayer Analyzed” in Institutiones Piae omits the doxology entirely. Institutiones piae or directions to pray also a short exposition of the Lords Prayer the Creed the 10 Com[m]andements Seauen Penitentiall Psalmes and Seauen Psalms of thanksgiuing, ed. Henry Isaacson, (London: Printed by Felix Kingston for Henry Seile, 1630).

98 XI, 211.

258 agent, the preacher. Rather, the congregation must be active participants in the sermon, as they are in liturgical prayer.99

The members of the sermon’s auditory cannot be passive recipients of the sermon’s message. In this final sermon, King styles this participation as the amen of the prayer. 100 In addition to assent or agreement, amen is also a command—fiat or, as it is paraphrased in the question on the

Lord’s Prayer in the “Catechisme” in The Book of Common Prayer, “So be it.”101 King extends the original metaphor of prayer as a letter by making the amen a kind of seal, granting authority to the words within the letter and to the petition of the prayer. In describing a similarly paradoxical element of Christian theology, Calvin uses the metaphor of a seal to discuss the way in which the sacraments work.102 They are a sign of the power that animates the act of redemption they represent, but they are also something more, a necessary guarantee of that power.

99 Timothy Rosendale explores the connection between the vernacular liturgy, individual participation and the creation of a community of faith. “The Prayerbook’s vernacularism is thus fundamentally linked to the Reformation’s theological insistence on the participation and comprehension of individual subjects.” ""Fiery Tounges:" Language, Liturgy, and the Paradox of the English Reformation." Renaissance Quarterly 54, no. 4 (Winter 2001, 2001): 1160. See also his Liturgy and Literature in the Making of Protestant England, (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

100 In a way, this gesture supports Targoff’s broader arguments about the role of prayer in the Book of Common Prayer: “At its very core, the petitions of the Common Prayer Book represents Cranmer’s attempt to expand the role of the congregation from one of intoning passive if comprehending amens to one of active participation.” Targoff, 28. In Lake’s arguement that corporate, public prayer was “close to the centre of the Laudian vision of the beauty of holiness,” we can see the way in which order and beauty merge to create a particular kind of participation. Peter Lake, “The Laudian Style: Order, Uniformity and the Pursuit of the Beauty of Holiness” in The Early Stuart Church, 1603-1642, ed. Kenneth Fincham, (London: Palgrave, 1993), 169. But for King, there is something significant invested in the sermon as a means to this prayer which cannot be overlooked. The sermon is necessary to create the proper participation in the prayer.

101 XI, 217. BCP, 154.

102 Judith Maltby, Prayer Book and People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 5.

259

King alludes to Old Testament models of public worship to complete the connection between saying “amen” at the end of the prayer and the auditory’s holistic act of prayer: “In

Deuteronomie no lesse than Twelve times the Command is iterated, Let all the People say Amen.”103

Interestingly, the moments of communal agreement referenced here are not to assent to doctrine or petition but to standards for behavior. King expects that for his auditory, like the one in

Deuteronomy, the community of faith is largely synonymous with the community in which they live.104 In King’s example, then, the amen is an assent to a paradigm for how those in the congregation are to live within the community of faith.

The stakes for both King’s congregation and the one in Deuteronomy—salvation or cursing—go beyond the pragmatic details of a system of social behavior. They are eternal and spiritual. The amen King desires to elicit from his audience is not only a recognition of the gravity of failure. Because prayer is transformative, the amen of his final sermon is one of hope. Yet he warns,

“Prayers are not Crown’d with their Effects unless God himselfe also say Amen.”105 The hope the sermon aims for is predicated on divine power, and divine agency infuses the participation King wishes to urge. The peroration of this sermon, in effect the peroration of the entire series, emphasizes the continuity of word, understanding, grace and transformation.

Let us therefore address our selves to Him, not only in our Prayers but for the successe of those Prayers, beseeching Him who at first pronounced a Fiat over the Worke of his

103 XI, 216.

104 Though King acknowledges that there are people who live in England and are not truly part of this community, such as “atheists” and “reprobates,” he finds little point in creating a separation for them, even finding no great tension in their participation in the worship of the Church, including this prayer, since when they pray they speak with “the language of the Church” and not their individual voices. II, 148.

105 XI, 218.

260

Creation to repeat that Fiat over us, in accomplishing the Worke of our Redemption. Dic verbum tantum: Lord, onely say the word, and thy servants shall live. By the Power of thy Word thou didst set up a light in Darkenesse. Thou saidst, Let there bee light, and it was made. Gracious God, for thy mercie’s sake, exercise that Act of Power upon us. When we shall be benighted in our Graves and shut up within the Region of Darkeness, O Thou that art the True Light, suffer us not for ever to sleepe in Death, but grant that in Thy Kingdome, and in Thy Presence, wee may have the fruition of a New Light. That wee may see Light in Thy Light, and enjoy that Light by enjoying Thee who art that Light. That from thy Militant Church, wee may bee translated into thy Triumphant; That of Christians here, we may bee made Saints there; and finally exchange the State of Grace for a Crowne of Glory in Thy Kingdome, which shall know no End. Amen.106 In this peroration, King’s sermon functions on multiple levels. It is still a sermon: urging intellectual assent and an emotional response, seeking to engage the will in the performance of faith. Yet in

King’s melding of these two modes of devotional discourse, these sermons have also become the very thing they are talking about.

Significantly, King closes this sermon (and thus the entire series) with an actual prayer, as can be seen by the presence of rhetorical markers of the syntax of prayer. King quotes from the

Gospel of Matthew a phrase from the story of the centurion who asks for his servant to be healed:

“Dic verbum tantum.”107 He switches from the first person plural to a direct address, and appropriates the quoted prayer, transforming it into English. His diction maintains a tension between the intimate and the elevated. There are multiple second person pronominal references, as well as “Gracious

God” and the vocative “O Thou.” He also concludes with the amen that can technically elide with an independent wish of “so be it,” but which, as a conclusion, primarily creates, through association,

106 XI, 218.

107 Matthew 8:8.

261 the speech act of prayer. And yet, King has not left the sermon behind. Rather he blends petition and exhortation, foregrounding the dual audience of the entire paragraph.

V. Dual Persuasion: Petition and Exhortation Together

Throughout the Exposition Upon the Lord’s Prayer, King mixes petition with exhortation. This is most easily seen in the perorations of the sermons.108 At times, as in the passage quoted above, multiple markers of prayer are present: the vocative, the second person, a conclusion of amen.

Sometimes, however, only a few of these signs appear. For example, while the peroration of Sermon

X concludes with an “Amen,”109 it is not explicitly framed as a prayer. Rather, the paragraph begins as an ordinary declarative sentence—“The successelesse Petition of Dives will shew that the Soules condemned to the Pit of Sulphur are so farre from release, that they cannot make their approaches to the first degree of comfort.”— gradually rising to an emotional invocation. Thus, the final sentence both instructs and yearns: “Prayer and Penitence are unable to remove the fits of the Last Criticall fire when they are upon us; but if they be seasonably and timely applied, they doe not only Bale us from

Judgement by Delivering and Guarding us from Evill, but like Starres fix us in that glorious Firmament where is the fruition of All Deliverance, Salvation, and Peace, and Joy for evermore.” This optative mood recalls the petitional mode of prayer, while being, in its paraphrasable content, an exhortation to pray. Indeed, the elevation of King’s language into a meditative, doxological contemplation of a

108 King is not unusual in ending with prayer, of course. But this technique gains special potency within the context of the particular elements King has set up in this sermons series.

109 X, 210, as are all of the quotations in this paragraph.

262 superlative state is a property of prayer. Concluding with an “Amen” subordinates the wish to the very paradigm of paradoxical agency that King has been preaching all along.110

Similar to the optative expression of Sermon X, the Trinitarian blessing in the peroration of

Sermon IX, “Lead Us not into Temptation” follows this pattern. King crafts desires as blessings, respectively, of “the Spirit of Comfort,” “our Leader Christ Jesus,” and “the God of Hoasts.” Each is framed as an assumption of a request already granted: first, for help during moments of temptation, second, for confidence in having already “overcome the world,” and, third, for a final victory over “our Last Enemies, Hell and Death.” King weaves the teaching and the blessing together with prayer by closing again with an “Amen.”111 In doing so, he creates an enacted version of his exhortation to lived hope.

The infusion of invocational rhetoric into the sermon also occurs more subtly. King assumes a posture of prayer by quoting the prayers of Scripture, partly as an inherited gesture of petition,112 as when he concludes Sermon VII: “The Intercession of whose Bloud daily solicites our pardon, and

110 The conclusion to Sermon VI also follows this optative pattern. “Such Bread which, when we have once tasted, will leave no more hunger to succeed it; and such a Morrow which shall have no new Day apparent to inherit that Light which died the Evening before. For this Life’s Hodie, which wee call To Day, shall be turn’d into a Quotidie, Every Day, in the next; but without difference, or vicissitude, or alteration. That Every Day shall be but One entire Day, produced and lengthned into a Semper, a blest Eternity, whose duration shall bee like our Joyes, both as unutterable, as endlesse. Amen.” 184.

111 IX, 203.

112 The mingling of quotation and explication is similar here in Sermon XI where King both declares that Glory belongs to God and models ceding power to him: “King David (who had better right to take, than they to give), to the shame of Sycophants, modestly releases all his Claime or Title to Glory, conferring it wholly upon God: Non nobis Domine, non nobis, sed Nomini tuo da Gloriam: Not unto us, Lord, not unto us, but to thy Name give the Glory. For Heaven is the Sphere of glory, and God is the King of Glory, and Glory is the Perogative of his Kingdome, which as it doth Convenire soli, so Semper—it is Only His, so Everlastingly His. For thine is the Kingdome, the Power, and the Glory, For ever.” King, “XI: And Lead Us Not Into Temptation,” 214.

263 seales unto our Conscience the Forgiveness of these Sinnes we here sue for, Forgive us our sinnes.”113

This is a paraphrase rather than a direct quotation, as King has shifted (and limited) the metaphorical

‘debts’ into the more theologically direct ‘sins.’ Syntactically, the sentence moves from description—Christ’s intercession asks for pardon on behalf of the Church—to example—it is forgiveness for the same sins we are about to ask forgiveness for—to participation in the example— simultaneously quoting and praying, “Forgive us our sinnes.”

The liminal rhetorical context of the perorations creates a natural occasion for King to combine petition and exhortation. However, King also shifts between these two rhetorical modes elsewhere. These additional prayers are marked in many of the same ways as the ones found in the perorations of the sermons, although King is less likely to include an “Amen.” Often he switches back into exhortation in the very next sentence.

Suffer us not to be seduced by either of those Spirits—the one is a Spirit of Aire, the other of Fire—But let thy calme, peacefull Spirit so compose our Faith, so settle our Religion, that thus established it may rest sure upon its owne Base and Center, the Word of Truth, not to be shaken by these, or disordered by any the like Temptations. For To depart from Faith by Apostasie, nay to bee brought into any degree of Revolt, either by recoiling against the Truth, or by any unsteadinesse, any hesitation to stagger in it, is to be Lead into Temptation.114

It is unclear at first whether the initial imperative “Suffer us not to be seduced” is directed toward

God or as a warning to believers. The second person possessive pronoun for “calme, peacefull

Sprit” clarifies this, however, and the whole of the first sentence is understood as a prayer. Yet it is

113 VII, 191.

114 X, 202.

264 meant to inform the listening humans and the next sentence leaves the motion of prayer behind altogether, instead explicating the original text. The tightness of this movement, its un-self- consciousness, reveals the twin pillars of prayer as transformative and dependent speech act.

The moments when King chooses to break into prayer, so to speak, are often those of homiletic intensity regarding human action. In these cases, the prayer drives home the seriousness of some moral action. For example, after railing against the illogical cruelty of debtor’s prison, King pauses to pray, “For such men as these, Father forgive them, or at the least reduce their cauteriz’d dead consciences to this sense of their owne misery: that without a speedy repentence shall reprive them, they are lost, and that they never must taste droppe of thy mercy, unlesse they shew that mercy unto others which they expect from thee.”115 One can imagine this prayer delivered in fire-and-brimstone tones as an attempt to pierce consciences King clearly considers all but dead.

It may be objected that such a mix of petition and exhortation is insincere worship, put on in order to gain authority by scolding the auditory while appearing to address God. If King’s overall framework of prayer is taken seriously, however, there will be no contradiction between striving and praying, and we should expect instruction and prayer to blend together. In the paradox of prayer that King presents, public request is not showmanship because the act of asking transforms the one presenting the petition. A prayer for the ability to act is also instructional, establishing behavioral expectation.

115 VIII, 194.

265

Furthermore, the shift to prayer releases some of the emotional tension latent in King’s survey of the condition of his world as it stands. Even when offered only in form, as in the request for mercy for “such men as these,” King is painting a picture of communal life in which this hollow usage echoes a genuine petition for transformational mercy, easing the functioning of an imperfect society. This recourse to prayer mitigates the failures of the order that King desires to valorize, especially when that failure comes in the form of powerful forces engaging in immoral action.

This attempt to transcend social conflict by sublimating it to divine transformation can be seen in those times when prayer happens subtly behind exhortation as well. This second mix of petition and exhortation is epitomized in the construction “let us.” The use of the inclusive plural imperative is often followed by a verb of petition or prayer: “Let us beseech the great Physitian that hee would revive our sicke Soules.”116 What follows in indirect statement is, of course, the prayer. It is both an expression of desire and an instruction in the necessity of such a desire.

In a similar way, King plays on the “today” latent in the prayer for “daily bread.” The request—which he conventionally interprets as both physical and spiritual bread, as do, for example,

Calvin, Hooker, and Andrewes—has an immediacy that is constantly renewed, in the same way that people are hungry every new morning.

Let us to Day, and in a continued course of Prayer all the Dayes of our life, beseech Him to heare ours: That He would vouchsafe to speake unto every one of us in that gracious language wherein he bespake his Deare Sonne, Hodie genui te—This day have I begotten you

116 VI, 180.

266

anew, this Day have I accepted of you for my children, and settled on you the Inheritance of my Kingdome, which shall never be revoked or reversed.117

The quotidian is renewed and renewed until it becomes eternity. King’s vision of the eternal is profoundly communal in nature. His use of the first person plural in “let us” which shifts to a jointly possessed singular noun, “our life.” In the next sentence, the communal is individualized as the

Father is petitioned to speak to “every one of us” the words spoken to Christ, but singular and plural blend together without distinction as the paragraph goes on. The quoted Latin pronoun “te” is singular, which would seem to guide our reading of the ambiguous English “you.” But the extrapolated voice of God “accept[s] of you for my children,” again plural. At this point, however, the unity engendered is not just among the members of the church but between those members and the second person of the Trinity as well. King’s sermon on “Give us this day our daily bread” is about praying for earthly and spiritual sustenance and how meeting of those needs happens on earth. Finally, King anticipates the ultimate meeting of daily need in an irrevocable inheritance, transcending the recurring limits of time-bound earthly kingdoms and the kings that govern them.

Toward the conclusion of Sermon V “Thy Will be Done on Earth as It is in Heaven,” King explicates the title phrase as follows: “Making the full meaning of our Petition this, That our

Conversation may bee in Heaven, and wee our selves may so live out our Pilgrimage on Earth, that wee be not excluded from the joys and fruition of Christ’s glorious Kingdome in Heaven. This is the

Period, the resting place of all our Hopes, and of our Faith; it is the end of our Prayers, it shall also

117 Ibid., 183.

267 be mine.”118 By punning on teleological end and concluded end, King subordinates earthly living to the heavenly goal, blending together sermon and prayer, and offering hope.

If we look again at the prayer in the peroration of the final sermon, we find the presence of each of three key elements: the Church as a community of individuals, dependence and participation paradoxically mingled, and an ultimate emphasis on mercy over judgment. The ghosts of specific moral commands, while present, have been subordinated to a more general desire for “the Worke of our Redemption.”119 Furthermore, as with the other instances of generic blending, both prayer and sermon work together toward the same goal, to move the will of the auditors toward hope. The effect of such a prayer is not just to anticipate the presence of the divine, but to create it here in the language of the sermon. The soaring rhetoric in this final prayer looks toward the realization of the divine power which not only gives light in darkness but also gives the hope of light.

This blend of sermon and prayer reflects the centrality of King’s dual audience. He attempts to persuade his auditors to engage in the sermon and the life of prayer it advocates. At the same time, through the sermons’ prayers, he exemplifies dependence on the divine power to which he directs the prayer. The Exposition Upon the Lord’s Prayer offers a functional definition of prayer as petition, offered in faith, by dependent humanity to a sovereign, benevolent deity. King’s understanding of the Lord’s Prayer as an ideal form, infused with divine presence, informs his emphasis on its communal, liturgical nature. By participating in this prayer, the Christian community is transformed, but it is a transformation that has a corporate focus, as King’s emphasis

118 V, 175.

119 XI, 218.

268 on social behavior indicates. Taken together, these elements compose a vision of the Christian community constructed around the framework of the received language of the Lord’s Prayer.

Just as prayer offers transformation through participation, so, in a similar way, sermons work to create desire, which is increased by participation in the argument the sermon is making,

“shew[ing] that your hearts went along with me in this holy exercise.”120 As in prayer, without the participation of the Christian, the public action of a sermon is devotionally ineffective. Yet as in prayer, the effectiveness of the sermon depends on both the preacher and the auditory finally acknowledging that if anything is accomplished it will be God’s doing.

King’s emphasis on the order and significance of the petitions of the Lord’s Prayer and many of his observations about these phrases are by no means novel. They appear in Calvin, Hooker and Andrewes’ explications of the prayer as well. What is significant about King’s treatment is the window it provides into the functional soul of the conforming center at the end of the 1620s. King finds the stability of liturgy not merely a politically convenient artifact, but also an efficacious transformational devotional practice, one that is oriented toward the life of the Christian in community, both in right living here on earth and in ultimate union with each other and the divine in the afterlife.

120 Ibid., 216.

Coda: King in 1664

In January 1664, Henry King, now the septuagenarian Bishop of Chichester, preached at

Whitehall on the anniversary of the execution of Charles I. His text, from 2 Chronicles, spoke of

Charles I by analogy with King Josiah: “And all Judah and Jerusalem mourned for Josiah. And

Jeremiah lamented for Josiah, and all the Singing-men and the Singing-women spake of Josiah in their Lamentations to this Day, and made them an Ordinance in Israel; and behold they are written in the Lamentations.”1

While the Scriptural text emphasizes the united mourning for Josiah, King’s opening salvo moves immediately from mourning to anger. He claims his text is “hung about with Blacks,”2 but his grief does not begin, as we might expect, with any praise of the monarch. Instead King gives vent to an anger undiminished by the sixteen years since Charles I’s beheading: “This is a Day of Trouble, of

Rebuke, and Blasphemy.”3 The offense is irrecoverable; the stain of Charles’ blood indelibly marking

England.4 King’s ire is directed specifically at preachers: “Those who, by their Office, were to Preach

Peace, became the Trumpets of Rebellion.”5

1 2 Chronicles 35: 24, 25. Henry King, “Commemoration of Charles I, King and Martyr” in Hobbs, 263-275.

2 “Commemoration,” 263

3 Ibid.

4 Later, he claims that the nation will need to weep for nine hundred years, three times the length of time Adam and Eve wept for Abel. “Commemoration,” 269.

5 Ibid., 263.

269

270

King denounces rebellious preachers generally and then names names.6 In these accusations he is more pointed than in any of his antebellum polemic. King declares “Sparring Blows were made in the Pulpit,” tracing the causes of the whole conflict, including the sin of regicide, to sermons.7 In beginning his sermon this way, King mourns a community, the ideological assumptions that supported it, and the place of the sermon as a tool to build community rather than to destroy it. 8

After the division of his text, King expounds on the bitter irony of the “all” who mourned

Josiah. King contrasts the corporate mourning due a monarch with the prohibitions placed on “any shew of sorrow” for Charles, an affront which indicates the severity of the nation’s fracture.9 While styling his sermon as part of the mourning due to England’s Josiah, King does not claim that his sermon or any other post-Restoration efforts are a remedy for the original lack. The absence of this claim is perhaps an indication that King finds no repair available.

When King does praise Charles I, it is in glowing terms, as equal to the best of the biblical kings.10 In fact, he stops just short of comparing him to Christ in the quality of his suffering. In contrast, his retrospective evaluation of early Stuart society is sharp: “I bid the Sons and Daughters of Our Jerusalem weep, not so much for Him, as for your selves and for your Children: Who All, more or

6 Specifically Wat Tyler, Jack Straw, John Knox, “Smictymnus,” [sic], [John] Archer, and Lemuel Tuke. “Commemoration,” 265.

7 “Commemoration,” 265.

8 King deliberately bars from any hope of redemption any of the women who were active in the war or in deposing Charles. It seems that in these actions they betrayed both their place as subjects and as women, the two together plunging them into insurmountable shame. “Commemoration,” 274.

9 Ibid., 267.

10 Yet while he lauds his piety, his temperance, his chastity, his skill in writing and his intellectual ability, he never actually mentions his leadership or his ability to command, both of which seem significant lapses in Charles’ success as a king. “Commemoration,” 270-271.

271 less, were instrumental in the Tragedy of this Day.”11 If there was any “all” to be found in the

England of the 1640s, it is only in an inclusive guilt. 12 But, more significantly, King seems to have reconsidered the functionality of the early Stuart order. King’s hopeful vision in the Exposition on the

Lord’s Prayer has been battered and reformed. While his early work figures Stuart society working as a body, here he finds the system complicit in its own ruin.13

As in his earlier sermons, King ends this one with prayer. But rather than weaving prayer through the fabric of the entire sermon, he turns to it perfunctorily. In the final few paragraphs he seems to remember that England once again has a king and directs his auditory to pray for “the

Happy Light sprang from the Loins of our Late Buried Sun.”14 King elides instruction with prayer in a series of indirect clauses which follow “we have therefore Just Cause to Pray that….”15 In this, his exhortation to pray is colder and more indirect than when signaled by phrases such as “let us pray.”16

Rather than expressing hope for the transformation of the community as a whole, a restrained King appears rather to be instructing Charles II to follow his father’s example, seemingly without much confidence “that as He happily Inherits His Kingdoms, so He may Inherit His Vertues, too.”17

11 Ibid., 273.

12 In this we can see a continuation of the same tendency that would blame an escaping wife rather than a negligent or cruel husband for ruining the institution of marriage. See the discussion earlier in this chapter on Sermon VII of The Exposition on the Lord’s Prayer, “And Forgive Us Our Debts.”

13 “In one kind or other all were Contributors unto it.” “Commemoration,” 273.

14 Ibid., 275.

15 Ibid.

16 See, for example, the conclusion of Sermon XI “For thine is the Kingdome,” 218.

17 “Commemoration,” 275.

272

The occasion of this sermon differs in significant ways from the context ofAn Exposition

Upon the Lord’s Prayer. Even so, King seems to have undergone a significant change in perspective between the mid-1620s and the early years of the Restoration. Where before merging modes of religious discourse in King’s Lord’s Prayer sermons indicates a confidence that sermons could play a role in a community that was constantly striving to be transformed in hope, in the

“Commemoration,” King looks with horror on the destructive role preachers have played. In blaming them for war and regicide, he acknowledges the power of the pulpit, but now finds its potential for harm horrifying. This corrosion seems to have infected King’s own hermeneutic approach. Instead of offering words to bind and build, merging the cohesion of liturgical corporate prayer with the flexible power of the sermon, King blames or remains silent, eschewing his earlier rhetoric of redemptive possibility.

Previously King’s allegiance to the Stuart monarchs and the national church was buoyed by hope in a redemption already and not yet realized. By bringing his auditors to participate in his sermon, he was also urging participation in a community of faith. In this sermon, his vision narrows.

The hope of the “struggling universalism” reflected in the sermons examined in this study is diminished; the reality of the English church, even in its restored state, is one of failed community.

The story of King’s sermons suggests that if sermons are not actively engaged in language that pulls the auditory into this hope, the fears of establishment figures from Cramner to Laud might be realized. After all, the inherent tensions that accompany this practice in which individual ministers become the creative conduit for the Word of God—tensions of grace and participation, of continuity and reform—are entangled in a final paradox: the genre capable of making present a communal faith also carried within it the capacity for division.

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Colt, Nicholas. The Seale of the Churches safetie; or A Sermon preached at Norwich, the fift of November, 1616. London: Printed by W. Stansby, 1617. EEBO.

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———. Sermons Preached at the Court of Charles I. The Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne. David Colclough, ed. Vol. 3. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

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Herbert, George. A Priest to the Temple, or, The Countrey Parson His Character, and Rule of Holy Life. London: Printed by T. Maxey for T. Garthwait, at the little North door or St Paul’s. 1652. EEBO.

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———. The Dignitie of Preaching: In a Sermon Upon 1 Thessal. 5. 10. London: Printed by Felix Kyngston for William Welby. 1615. EEBO.

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———. The Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker. Edited by William Speed Hill. Vol 11. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977.

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