In this compelling examination of early-modern devotional writing and its theological contexts, Paul Cefalu delivers a convincing reassessment of the Johannine influence which pervades the artistic and literary cultures of the period. Aligning the works of devotional writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with crucial extracts from the Fourth Gospel and First Epistle of John, and drawing on a wide corpus of biblical commentary from Augustine to Cranmer, Cefalu's work manages to be weighty, not overwhelming. The material is complex, but the concept is simple and fresh: that the Johannine influence upon Renaissance literary discourse has been strangely neglected in recent criticism, and that when examined with care it may even be said to be of more consequence than the more commonly cited influence of Paul. Cefalu's reading of these Johannine preoccupations in Renaissance poetry is genuinely revisionary and breaks much new ground.
The book's engaging introduction deftly outlines a distinctive Johannine style and matter. For Cefalu, Johannine theology offers a high christology in which Christ's divinity, eternity and intimate nearness to God are pre-eminent. Christ is ‘uniquely empowered to reveal God as his Word incarnate’ (p. 4), and John's purpose is to retain this full sense of Christ's divinity in his depiction of the incarnation, passion and resurrection. Cefalu constructs a catalogue of typical Johannine effects, including an account of the atonement and passion as revelatory rather than soteriological in the Pauline-Protestant sense.
The divinity of Christ is used as the central conceit around which Cefalu reveals parallels and proxies in the Johannine gospel and the writings of, primarily, Henry Vaughan, John Donne, Richard Crashaw, and George Herbert. These poets, via the exegetical commentaries of Aquinas, Erasmus, Calvin, Luther and others, returned to the Fourth Gospel as an inspirational for christological and sacramental devotion. Moreover, the ‘open-endedness’ (p. 316) and ambiguity of John's theology and his narratology enables complex artistic responses, and resists reductive or narrowly polemical interpretations.
Cefalu's method is intertextual. He conducts close readings of devotional poetry and prose commentaries which show the unmistakable influence of John, especially through their investment in key episodes found only in the Johannine texts: the bread of life passage, the death of Lazarus, the piercing of Christ's side, and the meeting between the resurrected Christ and Mary Magdalene. The first chapter focuses on communion and on Christ as bread of life. Here, Herbert's two poems titled ‘The H. Communion’ loom large for Cefalu, who calls them Herbert's ‘most Johannine’ work. He demonstrates ably how ‘The H. Communion’ (Williams manuscript) explicitly resists polemic around Christ's real presence, focusing instead on the relationship between Christ and the devotee, and on the spiritual understanding which is symbolised and dramatised in the sacrament of eating.
The second chapter focuses closely on Mary Magdalene, the misplaced sensuality and emotion of her conversation with Christ at the tomb, and the Johannine pedagogy by which sacred presence is privileged over physical touch. The material is diverse and well chosen, including Hans Holbein's artwork Noli Me Tangere (1524) and the poetry and experiential prose of Anna Trapnel alongside the male poets. The third chapter explores the Spirit as comforter; the fourth looks at John's notion of divine love as expressed by Herbert, Vaughan and Thomas Traherne. Chapter 5 takes a different tack to discuss the appropriation of John by radical enthusiasts and antinomian writers.
The final chapter, on irony and discipleship misunderstanding, is for me the most intriguing, and weaves together in interesting ways many of the threads which run through the book as a whole. Cefalu shows how John's characteristic depiction of Christ's ironic and accommodative pedagogy embeds itself in the narrative structure and tone of Renaissance devotional poetry. Cefalu relates ‘discipleship failure’ both to the christological thrust of John's text and more minutely to the literary-rhetorical matters of plot construction, dramatic irony, punning, metaphor and double entendre. Close readings of Herbert's ‘The Bag’, ‘The Bunch of Grapes’ and ‘Love Unknown’ again allow the reader to see not just thematic allusion to John, but the richness of Herbert's Johannine ‘orientation’: his engagement with the theology of the Fourth Gospel and his repeated replication of the dramatic ironic effects of John's revelatory style.
Why, Cefalu asks continually, is John's demonstrable influence in these texts so absent in modern scholarship? Despite the work of scholars such as Paul C. H. Lim in noting the centrality of the Fourth Gospel within early modern religio-political discourse, a more expansive account of the Johannine influence in wider literary and iconographical contexts has not been essayed until now. Barbara Lewalski's important Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (1979) shifted sacramental arguments into the realm of literary criticism, and dealt especially with the ways in which the ‘spiritual drama’ of Christian conviction played out in the poetic and literary imaginations. But Cefalu is keen to shift the balance of such an account, observing that for many of the poets in Kewalski's canon, it is Johannine and not Pauline preoccupations which loom large. In so doing, he creates an exceptional work which cannot be ignored by scholars of either early modern devotional poetry or religious politics.
