The Johannine Renaissance in Early Modern English Literature and Theology. Paul Cefalu. Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. viii+352.

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Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewThe Johannine Renaissance in Early Modern English Literature and Theology. Paul Cefalu. Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. viii+352.Constance M. FureyConstance M. FureyUniversity of Indiana, Bloomington Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreOn the cover of Paul Cefalu’s remarkable book The Johannine Renaissance in Early Modern English Literature and Theology, there is a detail from Hans Holbein’s painting Noli me tangere (1524–26), depicting the moment when a weeping Mary Magdalene encounters Jesus outside the tomb that no longer houses his body. “Touch me not,” Jesus says to his devoted follower, in a story Cefalu reminds us appears only in the Gospel of John. Cefalu’s comparative analysis of Holbein’s painting deftly illustrates his book’s broadest claim: the Fourth Gospel and the First Letter of John shaped crucial theological debates as well as much of the religious poetry in early modern England. The influence of these Johannine writings has not gone unnoticed, but Cefalu is the first to make a comprehensive claim for John’s literary and theological significance. In this respect, The Johannine Renaissance should be read as a worthy successor to Barbara Kiefer Lewalski’s Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth Century Religious Lyric (1979). Uninhibited by Lewalski’s belief that Protestantism can and should be cleanly differentiated from Catholicism, and informed by more recent work on materiality and signification as well as theology, Cefalu’s book is nevertheless akin to Lewalski’s in the scale of its intervention. All subsequent work on Renaissance religious poetry must confront the challenge The Johannine Renaissance poses to the assumption that Paul was the Reformation’s most important biblical theologian, that justification and atonement were this period’s most consequential theological questions, or that seventeenth century Christological devotion was informed first and foremost by the Synoptic Gospels’ accounts of Jesus’s human life and salvific death.In Holbein’s painting, Mary and Christ are both standing. Mary reaches out with her hand and Jesus leans back slightly, holding up his hands as if to ward her off. The two are depicted looking intently at one another. A thin cirrus cloud in the background illumines the space between them, welcoming the viewer familiar with the story to recall and consider the words that they exchanged. The viewer’s puzzlement is Mary’s—why should she not touch him?—and as she listens, trying to comprehend what Christ is telling her, the figure of Mary Magdalene represents what Cefalu explains are Johannine theology’s key characteristics. Revelation is an interactive process. Attentive disciples are in the ironic position of misunderstanding what is clearly revealed. Christ is a confident savior who interacts with his followers as a Socratic teacher, prodding them to comprehend what he has revealed. By including the angels in the tomb and the biblical writers Peter and John in the background, Holbein gestures toward a Johannine concern with pneumatology and what Cefalu helpfully describes as exegetical devotion. Instead of emphasizing the physicality of Mary Magdalene’s attempt to confirm the living presence of her lord, as his near contemporaries Correggio and Titian did in their own versions of the scene, Holbein shifts attention from hands to head, from the visual to the aural, and from the body of Christ to Christ the incarnate Word. This painting is thoroughly Johannine, then, insofar as it conveys that Christ’s teachings are more important than his physical presence, and that the fulfillment of revelation is a comforting experience of divine indwelling and fellowship.Cefalu details the relevance of all this to Renaissance theology and literature in six thematic chapters. After an extensive introduction, explaining how Paul’s long shadow has led scholars to overlook or underestimate the importance of John, the main chapters in Cefalu’s book convincingly demonstrate that Johannine writings influenced debates about sacramentalism, the Holy Spirit, love, grace, and revelation. Each chapter demonstrates how new interpretations of a specific debate might issue in new readings of familiar poems. Chapter 1 describes the relevance of the bread- of-life discourse in John 6 to the sacramental poems of George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Richard Crashaw, and Edward Taylor. Chapter 2 demonstrates how John’s story of the encounter between Mary Magdalene and Christ at the tomb inspired numerous literary texts—including meditations by Robert Southwell, Gervase Markahm, Thomas Walkington, and Nicholas Breton and later Magdalene poems by Crashaw and Vaughan as well as Anna Trapnel—to recapitulate the dramatic style as well as the theological content of the Johannine writings. The third chapter surveys numerous Reformed accounts of the role of the Holy Spirit in order to contextualize the chapter’s concluding contrast, between John Donne’s assurance that the Holy Spirit comforts and guides believers and John Milton’s more ambivalent account of the Paraclete’s role. Chapter 4 argues for the unique nature of John’s ontological and metaphysical conception of agape as debated in early modern treatises before turning to a comparative reading of poems about divine love, by Herbert, Vaughan, Thomas Traherne, and Taylor.Cefalu’s fifth and longest chapter, more political and sociological than the others, explores the way radical dissenters, antinomians, and enthusiasts appropriated the style as well as the content of Johannine discourses in their embrace of sectarianism, dualism, and free grace. Concluding sections explain the relevance of all this to Crashaw’s poetic accounts of ecstatic union with Christ and Vaughan’s repudiation of millenarian fire. Chapter 6, on discipleship misunderstanding and irony, offers close readings of poems by the two writers Cefalu identifies as the “most Johannine poets of the early modern period” (41): George Herbert and Henry Vaughan. Here Cefalu’s ability to combine biblical knowledge with literary analysis is on full display, as attention to Johannine stylistics and themes yields intriguing insights into poems including “The Bag,” “The Agonie,” and, especially, “Love Unknown” and Vaughan’s “The Night.”The book concludes with an afterword on Johannine enchantment, and it is here that we encounter the clearest account of what I believe is the book’s most important contribution to the study of religion and literature. By emphasizing divine indwelling, fellowship, and a Christological mysticism, Cefalu explains, Johannine theology provided a comforting alternative to a materialist ontology of Real Presence. Cefalu hereby updates and nuances the traditional claim that the Reformation era spiritualized Christian devotion. On this point, Cefalu’s contribution would have been enhanced by more sustained engagement with recent books such as Kimberly Johnson’s Made Flesh: Sacrament and Poetics in Post Reformation England (2014), for example, or Sophie Read’s Eucharist and the Poetic Imagination in Early Modern England (2013)—books that offer alternative accounts of how Renaissance poetry reimagined the relationship between materiality and spirituality.In a discussion of a version of Herbert’s poem “The H. Communion,” for instance, Cefalu concludes that “Herbert is less interested in the substance of Christ’s presence during the Eucharist than he is in the fundamentally Johannine conceptions of the profitless nature of the flesh, Christ as bread of life, and the importance of the Ascension to an understanding of the Communion” (64). Several lines in the poem straightforwardly support Cefalu’s reading: “whether bread stay / Or whether Bread doe fly away / Concerneth bread, not mee,” Herbert writes, proclaiming himself concerned instead with “But that both thou and all thy traine / Bee there, to thy truth, & my gaine, / Concerneth mee & Thee” (lines 7–12). Cefalu helpfully contextualizes Herbert’s concerns with references to several contemporary interpretations of John 6 by Zwingli and others. And yet, although Cefalu mentions Kimberly Johnson’s work in the introduction and here quotes her claim that Herbert is indeed interested in “the manner how” Christ’s body and blood might be offered in bread and wine (63), he omits a discussion of the middle stanzas of Herbert’s poems, stanzas crucial to Johnson’s argument. More consequentially, insofar as I mention this omission as an example of how the Johannine Renaissance presents itself as a broad rather than targeted intervention, Cefalu fails to engage Johnson’s central claim, that Herbert’s poems themselves perform a mingling of materiality and spirituality. By offering spiritual messages in black ink, Johnson points out, and providing “Dispatches” of spiritual grace in the form of lines and stanzas on a material page, Herbert’s poems are “Leaping the wall that parts / Our souls and fleshly hearts” (“The H. Communion,” lines 14–15). This alternative vision of materiality is not one Cefalu considers in arguing for Johannine theology’s insistence on spiritualized presence.Cefalu, who has demonstrated his interest in ambitious claims and provocative uses of theory to illuminate Renaissance sources in other books and collections, including, most recently, Tragic Cognition in Shakespeare’s Othello: Beyond the Neural Sublime (2015), and “Thinking with God: Cognitive Theory, Religion, and Literature” (2014), a special issue of Religion and Literature, coedited with Julia Reinhard Lupton. In the Johannine Renaissance he makes the understandable and perhaps even necessary choice to privilege primary over secondary sources and contextualization over theorization. The result is a remarkable book, and what it does not do is only worth mentioning because ongoing debates about Renaissance devotion, not to mention broader discussions of materiality and spirituality, could benefit from Cefalu’s sophisticated account of a theology that equates revelation with interaction and insists that spirituality is necessarily and essentially interactive. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 116, Number 4May 2019 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/702196HistoryPublished online March 01, 2019 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.