In recent years, scholars interested in the intersections of theology, confessional identity, and literature in early modern England have studied representational strategies and devotional practices of Catholics and Protestants alike, exploring the interchanges and distinctions between writers of theologically opposed confessions. In Milton studies, critics such as Michael Schoenfeldt and Gregory Chaplin have argued that despite Milton's wide-ranging engagement with Christian theology, he consciously turned away from representing Christ's passion, either because he thought meditating on the event too Catholic, or because the passion was simply marginal to Milton's theories of the atonement. Erin Henriksen's Milton and the Reformation Aesthetics of the Passion responds to these claims, arguing that although Milton never writes explicitly about the passion, he employs a poetics of “fragmentation, omission and iconoclasm” (199) to create an “alternative passion” (1) characterized by absence, substitution, deferral, displacement, and removal (40). Henriksen draws on new historicist assumptions about the migration of religious ritual into art (theories forwarded, for example, by Regina Schwartz, Richard McCoy, and Elizabeth Mazzola) and Derridian-influenced theories of presence and absence in order to argue that Milton's poetry turns away from “the suffering, dead, and buried Christ so typical of the late medieval passion” (200), creating instead “a living, standing, teaching Jesus” (199–200) typical of both the early Church and early modern Protestantism.
Henriksen rightly emphasizes Milton's preoccupation with Christ as victor, with the Son as the righteous and obedient image of the Father. She also poses important questions about the intersection of theology and aesthetics in Milton's work and helpfully positions Milton's poetry within a broader history of Christian art. Unfortunately, the book's underdeveloped readings, its reliance on secondary materials rather than on fresh assessments of primary texts, and its generalizations about Catholic and Protestant poetics tend to undermine its arguments. Perhaps most problematically, Henriksen defines “passion” so broadly that it lacks cohesion. While the word itself denotes “suffering” and traditionally signifies the gospel events from the Garden of Gethsemane through Christ's burial, Henriksen claims that Milton's “alternative passion” includes, variously, Christ's incarnation, his pre-incarnational existence, his obedience to the Father, his temptations in the desert, his righteousness, and the atonement.
After a brief introduction, Henriksen in chapter 1 discusses strategies for depicting Jesus in Christian art. Henriksen claims that the early Church did not depict the passion, but instead grappled with the problems of representing Christ's dual natures. Henriksen argues that medieval devotion to the passion is an aberration in Christian art, and Milton's appropriation of early Church practices subsequently produces a “counter-cultural” passion (34).
In chapter 2, Henriksen argues that iconoclasm “acted as a creative force, shaping English poetry and the Christian theory of representation” (35), and that English Protestantism “placed a value on broken images . . . and the reformation of earlier Christian art forms” (38). She turns to Eikonoklastes, claiming that Milton's attack on Charles I's Christ-like portrait in Eikon Basilike illustrates Milton's rejection of the Christus Patiens tradition. Similarly, in chapter 3, Henriksen theorizes a post-Reformation passion that turns away from the Christus Patiens in favor of “an absolutely reformed passion concerned not with Jesus' death but with his incarnation” (51). She then offers several disappointingly undeveloped readings of John Donne, George Herbert, and Francis Quarles, claiming that none of these poets engage the passion directly—even in poems that ostensibly represent Christ's suffering.
In chapter 4, Henriksen interprets Milton's incomplete “The Passion” not as a failure (as critics have long argued), but as an “early statement of Milton's full poetics of the passion” (82). Reading the lyric as an intentional fragment, Henriksen claims that it “echoes the as-yet-incomplete passion and atonement,” and that the passion's absence from the poem conveys Milton's belief in the deferred nature of the atonement (97). In chapter 5, Henriksen argues that Milton further revises the passion by rewriting Protestant elegy in “Lycidas,” turning the lyric into a Protestant passion that replaces “the medieval cult of death” with the resurrection (99).
In chapter 6, Henriksen posits that Paradise Lost represents the passion through a poetics of omission and supplement, and that the epic “establishes the crucifixion . . . as an obstacle to correct perception of the divine” and replaces the crucifixion with the incarnation (130). In chapter 7, the author reads Christ's temptations in the desert in Paradise Regain'd as another substitute for the passion, one that encourages readers to “unlearn” associations of the passion with suffering and instead to see the passion as a celebration of Christ's Sonship (152).
In chapter 8, Henriksen argues that Samson Agonistes (in Protestant fashion) “replaces the crucifixion” with a “set of events that recall Jesus' meditations in Gethsemane” (175). Samson embodies the elements of the passion Milton rejects: the veneration of Christ's dead body, the call for revenge against God's enemies, and a vision of the passion as merely a historical event. Finally, a short epilogue summarizes Milton's “theology of brokenness” (196).
Sadly, the monograph suffers from significant conceptual and methodological weaknesses. While scholars have shown that rigid distinctions between early modern Catholic and Protestant poetics are largely untenable in light of fresh analysis of primary texts, Henriksen's book shows little awareness of this research (for example, work by Alison Shell, Molly Murray, Susannah Monta, Arthur Marotti, R. V. Young, and Robert Miola, to name a few), relying instead on misleading distinctions between Protestant and Catholic poetics that sometimes approach caricature (her insistence that “meditative, devotional” writing is uniquely Protestant is a glaring example [52]). In addition to her unhelpfully broad use of “passion” to signify almost any aspect of Christ's existence, Henriksen's basic assertion that the absence of the passion in Milton's poetry is evidence of the passion's centrality seems under-theorized and, ultimately, unconvincing.
The book also relies on forced and unsupported readings of primary texts. Reading “On the Morning of Christ's Nativity,” Henriksen claims that in the lines “Our great redemption from above [Christ] did bring / . . . That he our deadly forfeit should release” (ll. 4, 6), “the crucifixion is evoked without being shown” (74). Interpreting Samson Agonistes, she claims that Samson's lament that his agony transcends his “heart, head, breast, and reins” (l. 609) “seem[s] to resemble closely [the wounds] of Christ on the cross in their location” (184). She asserts that Samson is a revised passion play, when in fact Milton links his “brief epic” to Aristotelian theory and the classical dramas of Greek and Roman antiquity, mentioning the twelfth-century Christus patiens—which is not a passion play—only to justify Christian use of classical drama. Most crucially, Henriksen's case for a Protestant passion poetics is built on occasional factual error. When using early modern passion narratives of Gervaise Markham and John Bullokar to describe Protestant aversion to the crucifixion (the crucifixion is indeed absent from both texts), Henriksen does not consider that Markham's introduction explains that this is only the first of two parts of his narrative; nor does she seem to know that John Bullokar was a life-long recusant Catholic whose son was executed at Tyburn in 1642 as a Franciscan priest.
Milton and the Reformation Aesthetics of the Passion poses potentially fruitful questions regarding the interplay of literature, theology, and Christian art history. Unfortunately, the book's forced readings and its broad generalizations will frustrate and disappoint the careful reader.
