From the Altar to the Lord’s Table: Relocating George Herbert in Early Seventeenth-Century Religious Controversy
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This study explores the ways in which George Herbert’s “The Altar” and “Love (III)” respond to contemporary religious debates over the altar, communion, and sacramental conformity. By offering a richer context for the poems, I suggest a more nuanced way of reading Herbert’s poems in history. “The Altar” and “Love (III),” poems that open and close Herbert’s collection The Church, carry with them a thematic significance and have long been discussed in terms of genre, devotional practice, and/ or biblical exegesis. The poems’ theological and historiographical valences, however, have been largely eclipsed in traditional or older criticism. When located along the axis of the altar controversy, “The Altar” and “Love (III)” appear unambiguously related to continued disputes over the placement of the communion table, namely, the Laudian resanctification of the altar in the 1620-30s. While historically and theologically informed critics tend to couch Herbert’s poems within contemporary polemical literature on the altar controversy and the growing tension between Calvinism and Laudianism, I direct critical attention to a broader and more fundamental question the controversy addresses, that is, the semantic ambiguity and complex cultural practice of the altar in the early modern England. The narrative move from “The Altar” to “Love (III),” from an altar to a communion table, from a sacrificial and yet self-absorbed verbal artifact to a silent sacramental consumption of the Word, suggests the complexity of Herbert’s response to the altar controversy that goes far beyond issues of confessional identity, doctrinal stance, and political affiliation.
Abstract
This study explores the ways in which George Herbert’s “The Altar” and “Love (III)” respond to contemporary religious debates over the altar, communion, and sacramental conformity. By offering a richer context for the poems, I suggest a more nuanced way of reading Herbert’s poems in history. “The Altar” and “Love (III),” poems that open and close Herbert’s collection The Church, carry with them a thematic significance and have long been discussed in terms of genre, devotional practice, and/ or biblical exegesis. The poems’ theological and historiographical valences, however, have been largely eclipsed in traditional or older criticism. When located along the axis of the altar controversy, “The Altar” and “Love (III)” appear unambiguously related to continued disputes over the placement of the communion table, namely, the Laudian resanctification of the altar in the 1620-30s. While historically and theologically informed critics tend to couch Herbert’s poems within contemporary polemical literature on the altar controversy and the growing tension between Calvinism and Laudianism, I direct critical attention to a broader and more fundamental question the controversy addresses, that is, the semantic ambiguity and complex cultural practice of the altar in the early modern England. The narrative move from “The Altar” to “Love (III),” from an altar to a communion table, from a sacrificial and yet self-absorbed verbal artifact to a silent sacramental consumption of the Word, suggests the complexity of Herbert’s response to the altar controversy that goes far beyond issues of confessional identity, doctrinal stance, and political affiliation.
참고문헌 (27)
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