Charles i in life may have presented himself in regal aloofness, but it was the image of him on his knees, in prayer, that ensured his iconographic fate. In the famous frontispiece to the collection of prayers and meditations entitled the Eikon basilike, published under his own name yet probably written by the Exeter clergyman John Gauden, the king looks upward to the heavenly corona while the earthly crown rests at his feet and he clutches a crown of thorns – the crown of martyrdom – in his hand, in readiness for the passion awaiting him. The image does not simply evoke King David's entreaties to heaven but, even more boldly, Jesus in the garden of Gethsemane, as it reinforces the text's association of the king's sufferings with Christ's, and the weapons of ‘prayers and tears’ that he will deploy against his persecutors, as he prays in the night, utterly alone, and framed by the palm trees outside. Though the text of the Eikon basilike extends across a range of justificatory meditations and prayers, the engraver, William Marshall, thus chooses to illustrate the moment of grief, holiness and obedience when Charles prays, in direct echo of Luke xxii.42, that ‘Thou givest me leave as a man to pray that this cup may pass from me; but … not my will, but Thine be done.’Footnote 1
Charles's association with the garden was nevertheless a curious choice, for few episodes in the New Testament are more disconcerting than Jesus in Gethsemane – the ‘bedrock of primitive tradition’, according to Vincent Taylor.Footnote 2 As the biblical scholar Raymond Brown has written, Jesus’ anguished address to God to remove the ‘cup of wrath’ from him, or for the passing of ‘the hour’, is not itself new, as it echoes Old Testament, and particularly psalmist, articulations of individuals suffering alone before their creator; thus does Mark xv.34 and Matthew xxvii.46 mirror Psalm xxii.1 (‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’). Nor is the silence in response to Jesus’ prayer original, as it recalls previous traditions of the ‘hiddenness’ of God, while the idea of testing and trial (or peirasmos) can be traced throughout the Old Testament, in the example of Abraham and Isaac, or the book of Job most famously.Footnote 3 But the Son himself – God himself – addressing the Father in such a manner is something else entirely. Apart from the implications in presenting Jesus as such an overwhelmingly human figure, the prayer to the Father for deliverance from the cross, at least in Mark and Matthew, appears to reflect doubt, fear, sorrow and powerlessness about what lay ahead.Footnote 4 Opponents of Christianity, including Porphyry and Julian the Apostate, thus seized on the Gethsemane Jesus in order to deny his divinity or assert that he was a ‘miserable individual’;Footnote 5 more pointed was the learned pagan Celsus, who wrote in the second century, ‘How can one who is divine mourn and lament and pray to escape the fear of death?’ Christians also acknowledged the passage's difficulties, as when Augustine described a ‘Jesus [who in Gethsemane] wished for something other than what the father willed.’Footnote 6 For many exegetes, Jesus’ fear and trembling in this sense did not appear to reflect surrender to the divine will, but resistance to it; while the scene foreshadowed the death, a disparity remained between Christ's garden crisis and the fortitude with which he would later face the cross.
Not all early Christian commentators found Jesus’ agony in the garden to be problematic, however; usually the level of acceptance regarding his sorrow depended upon where one stood on the Christological spectrum. John Chrysostom, for example, approvingly wrote that in the episode ‘Jesus showed his humanity’, though his ‘virtue and self-command’ were also on display ‘to [teach] us even when nature pulls us back, to follow God’.Footnote 7 Later medieval exegetes such as St Bernard or Pseudo-Bonaventure also called for a deep and meditative affiliation with Christ's suffering and therefore his humanity,Footnote 8 not only in his physical pain on the cross but also, more quietly, in his grievous and solitary (if also sweaty and bloody) prayers. Such writers in fact urged believers to follow the path away from physical suffering to what Berndt Hamm, paraphrasing the mystic Henry Suso, once called the ‘wounding of the heart through love, repentance, and willingness to suffer’; in other words, believers were directed not only to identify with the outward, bodily drama of the cross, but to locate their own ‘personal Gethsemanes’ in Jesus’ internal crisis in the garden.Footnote 9
It is somewhat surprising then that recent studies of the passion or martyrdom have tended to overlook Gethsemane;Footnote 10 with the exception of the abandonment on the cross in Mark and John, or perhaps the temptation scene in the desert, Gethsemane, however, constitutes the only moment in the New Testament when Jesus appears to reveal himself completely, when his inner state seems to be most fully and vulnerably exposed. But Jesus’ inwardness could also be interpreted in a variety of ways. In the case of early modern England, for example, divergent hermeneutical perspectives on Gethsemane emerged to reflect the theological, literary and even political developments of the time, reflecting a shift in previous interpretive approaches; as a result, for all the continuity that existed between them, St Bernard's Gethsemane, for example, diverged from that presented by later writers who placed their Jesus in a different psychological framework and invested his interiority with ambiguity, self-division, alienation, fear and doubt, in accordance with a new kind of autonomy that would eventually separate, in the post-Cartesian era, from embodiment altogether.Footnote 11
This article will argue that readings of the Gethsemane scene in early modern England both reflected and generated a more psychologically nuanced approach to Jesus’ interior life than had existed before, and that fed into modern representations of selfhood and subjectivity. Of course, Christian traditions had long emphasised the importance of interiority in spiritual growth, just as the distinction between the believer's ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ life – that is, between his outer expressions of body, speech and action and his interior expressions of ‘mind, heart, and spirit’ – extended back through Hellenistic and Hebraic as well as Pauline writings.Footnote 12 Charles Taylor has famously (if problematically) argued that this distinction, and the concept of the reflexive self as a superior ontological category, are unique constructs of the west, deriving primarily from Augustine and leading, somewhat inexorably, to Descartes's cogito.Footnote 13 As Michael Hanby and others have written, however, Taylor tends to overlook the fact that Augustine was referring to a profoundly theological conception of the self as opening up not to its own introspection but to transcendence beyond that very selfhood. In this sense Gethsemane itself was not about Jesus ruminating on his own suffering inner life, but relating that suffering to a source outside himself – that is, to the Father.Footnote 14
Yet early modern Catholics and Protestants, in different ways, did begin to project onto Jesus an interior and affective life that was to be explored for its own sake, parallel to their own respective and confessionally-driven imperatives to themselves undertake intense and often doubt-ridden self-examinations on the path to godliness or spiritual discernment. Continuities existed with late-medieval spiritual practices and beliefs, but significant shifts also took place within these continuities to drive the idea of Gethsemane toward a more psychologised as well as spiritual kind of ‘inward turn’, or what Susan Karant-Nunn has recently termed the ‘reformation of feeling’.Footnote 15 For Lutherans or Calvinists, for example, the scene resonated with more layered and personal understandings of despair that brought new resonances to Jesus’ interior life, and made it an experience with which humans, in their sin, could identify. Catholics in England, for their part, meditated upon the garden, but as a scene that offered them comfort (and, in the case of the sleeping disciples, warning) on a personal as well as collective level. Perhaps most important, however, was the re-emergent issue of martyrdom, which generated new levels of identification and projection toward Jesus’ own turmoil on the part of religiously-diverse figures such as Thomas More, John Bradford, Hugh Latimer and Robert Southwell, each of whom would face the hour of their own deaths, and frequently with equal amounts of fear.Footnote 16 In this sense, Gethsemane appealed to both sides of the religious divide and bridged confessional differences regarding faith and suffering, sin and redemption, Christ's humanity and divinity; more than the sacrifice on the cross, the drama of Gethsemane proved much more challenging, yet also more important, as writers attempted to understand the nocturnal grief, as well as the psychological and spiritual crisis, of a God in apparent struggle against himself.
I
The idea of a tortured figure facing death alone and in existential crisis against an absent father (or an unseen God) is so familiar to modern sensibilities that it is easy to overlook the fact that the New Testament tends to elide any extensive descriptions of Jesus’ interior life.Footnote 17 Luke, for example, does not portray a Jesus experiencing deep or prolonged inner distress, particularly toward his own fate, even if the text speaks of Jesus’ ‘agony’ during one prayer; as Raymond Brown has argued, agony – agonia in the Greek sense – did not connote extreme pain, but the kind of effort utilised by an athlete about to enter a trying contest (the Lucan passage referencing ‘agony’ might have been a later addition in any case).Footnote 18 In Mark, on the other hand, Jesus first enters the garden ‘greatly distraught and troubled’ (xiv.32), with ‘troubled’ – ademonein – also connoting separation from others. Matthew, however, softens Mark's ‘troubled’ by substituting ‘sorrowful’, with the ‘cup’ itself being an Old Testament image and reference to the passion and the forthcoming sacrificial spilling of blood.Footnote 19 The Gospel of John differs from all three texts, for while it describes Jesus coming with his disciples to a garden, any mention of prayer and sorrow are omitted as it would not correspond with the evangelist's own theological design, which advances the full unity of Jesus with the Father – a Jesus, while human, who is also ‘no longer in the world’ (xvii.11).Footnote 20
The exegete towards whom many later interpreters of the Gethsemane episode turned in navigating this hermeneutical thicket was Jerome and his commentary on Matthew, which addressed pagan denials of Jesus’ divinity based upon the apparent helplessness in the garden. But Jerome made his case by diminishing Jesus’ humanity, including any kind of suffering interior life. Instead, Jerome asserted (with Origen) that Christ only experienced ‘half-passions’ (propassiones), which did not dominate him as they would one wholly human;Footnote 21 thus did Matthew state that Jesus ‘began to be sorrowful and troubled’ (xxvi.38), which for Jerome was not the same as sorrow, since ‘It is one thing to be saddened … and another to begin to be saddened.’Footnote 22 As for the statement that ‘My soul is sorrowful unto death’, (Matthew xxvi.38), Jesus was simply claiming that he would be sorrowful for the sins of the Apostles and of mankind, but only until his own death redeemed them; pursuing the theme of sorrow as expressed outwardly toward collective sinners, rather than inwardly toward the self, Jerome also claimed elsewhere that Jesus’ distress related to the fate of the Jewish people and Jerusalem – and not to any inner trepidation over death.
If Jerome tended to diminish the range of emotions contained within Jesus’ humanity, Pseudo-Bonaventure, writing in the fourteenth century, represented a shift in emphasising the ‘deep anguish’ or the ‘disquieted heart’ experienced in the garden as well as on the cross. Pseudo-Bonaventure referred to Jerome by stating that ‘some wise expounders of Scripture hold that our Lord Jesus prayed to the Father, not so much from the fear of suffering as from pity for His former people’, namely the Jews; yet while Jesus held in him the ‘Will of Divinity’, in his capacity as ‘true Man … He was brought into deep distress’.Footnote 23 This was not necessarily a personal, psychological distress, however, but rather a spiritual sorrow and mental anguish suffered on a heightened and perhaps even super-human level. It also was based, particularly as the passion sequence progressed, on physical suffering – a condition that became evident with contemporary devotions to the Man of Sorrows idea. Ironically, it was Jerome who introduced the term vir dolorum (or as the Wycliffe Bible would translate it, ‘Man of Sorrows’) in the first place, using the image from Isaiah liii.3 to emphasise the manner in which Jesus was despised as a ‘leper’ and suffered calamities for his assuming the weight of mankind's sins.Footnote 24 In the Middle Ages, St Francis would follow this idea by embracing lepers as suffering proxies for Christ, while numerous devotional images appeared under the ‘Man of Sorrows’ title, usually depicting Jesus as somewhere between the crucifixion and the resurrection, looking downward with a dolorous expression upon his burdensome wounds and marks of passion. While certainly not devoid of its own representation of interiority, the image of the Man of Sorrows nevertheless hewed closely to Isaiah's original intention, in which sorrow or ‘aquaint[ance] with grief’ referred to physical woundedness and pain rather than to a singularly mental suffering. The image itself was also part of a larger devotional and meditative passion tradition which emerged in the later Middle Ages in which the cult of wounds encouraged believers not to explore their own interior and affective states in and of themselves, but to understand the depth of Jesus’ sacrifice, and the extent to which (to quote Bernard of Clairvaux), ‘I am the cause of thy sorrows.’Footnote 25 As Gertrud Schiller once wrote, the Man of Sorrows thus conveys new ‘emotional qualities’ such as ‘intimacy, compassion, exaltation, and intercession’, but only in order that ‘the suffering Son of God and the sinful man [may] seek one another in their love’.Footnote 26
Historians have rightly stressed the continuities that existed between these late-medieval beliefs and practices, and those of early modern Catholics and even Protestants; writings that centre upon Gethsemane in particular attest to numerous similarities between old and new, Protestant and Catholic.Footnote 27 Yet one may also run the risk of overlooking the subtle yet very real differences that also took place in the sixteenth century – in this case between the late medieval depiction of Jesus’ ordeal as one that involved the struggle to relate to another, such as the Father, against one which stressed psychological ramifications of that ordeal on its own terms. Jesuits, to take a related example, may have been influenced by Thomas a Kempis's Imitation of Christ, with its emphasis on attaining moral, intellectual and ultimately mystical union with Christ by conducting an inner dialogue in the service of personal piety. Yet they were called not simply to effect a relationship with Christ, which was the primary focus of Kempis's work; instead, they were to understand the motions of the soul or the discernment of spirits, which required them to dwell on their own thoughts, emotions, imaginings, desires and attractions – in other words, their psychological world – to an extent that went beyond previous and purely spiritual imperatives.
Not all early modern readings of Gethsemane followed the ‘inward turn’, however. Jerome's assertion that Jesus only expressed ‘half-passions’ in the garden was reasserted in the early sixteenth century, for example, by the humanist John Colet, who famously engaged with Erasmus on the subject.Footnote 28 For Colet, the truest and therefore ‘most spiritual’ interpretation of Gethsemane meant Jerome's version, in which Jesus did not display any weakness in the garden; instead, Jesus adhered even in the garden to his transcendent divinity, his disquiet only evident insofar as it expressed compassion for the evil of his persecutors or for the fate of his people.Footnote 29 The words, ‘Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me’, while sorrowful, also did not reflect any psychological trepidation, especially since such fear would have rendered Jesus less resolute than the martyrs who followed him ‘joyfully’ to their deaths; instead, the Jesus of Colet displayed majesty and courage, making him a figure that remained firmly elevated above humanity.Footnote 30
Yet if Colet could not accept a Jesus who, in his perfection, submitted to the human condition, or at least its sin-inclining emotions, Erasmus, in his refutation of Colet, insisted that Christ, as both human and divine, experienced qualities belonging to both.Footnote 31 This is traditional enough. Yet for Erasmus, Gethsemane also very much illuminates the psychological dilemmas faced by Christ, even if his fear is taken on voluntarily and is ultimately subservient to his perfect obedience and love. In praying for deliverance from death, Jesus is speaking ‘as a man, for men, to men, and in the words of men, expressing man's fears’; his anguish in the face of death is naturally ‘implanted’, and no different from the urge – or will – he feels in his human capacity toward food in the face of hunger. What Jesus is truly saying to the Father, in Erasmus’ words, is ‘I am conscious within myself of the nature I have taken upon me, a nature that violently dreads a cup so bitter; but thy will, not mine, be done, since whatever is thy will is mine also.’ And in the end, despite his dread, Jesus ‘thirsts’ and is even joyful for death, for the salvation it will bring for mankind – all of which reflects the divine will working in him. Still, Erasmus contributes to a more complex and contradictory portrayal of Jesus’ internal life by emphasising the coexistence of joy and dread within, just as the ‘more obvious were the signs he gave of dread, the clearer was the proof of his truly human nature and the more cogent was the example of obedience he set’.Footnote 32
Erasmus’ perspective on Gethsemane revealed his strongly incarnational view of Christ, as well as his tendency to emphasise the contradiction between the inner nature of Jesus – both godly and human – against the humble exterior.Footnote 33 In the process, Erasmus did not assert a more human (as opposed to divine) Jesus so much as redefine what that human side meant. Both Protestant and Catholic were similar in this regard: though his own Christology was relatively unsystematic, Luther tended, at least in the beginning, to present Jesus as an enthroned, judging, righteous and altogether inhuman figure – in other words, his was the Jesus of John, whom he called ‘the master of all evangelists’.Footnote 34 Yet Luther also came to dwell on the ‘become man’ aspect of Christ, exploring the nature of Jesus’ interior life as one who not only slept and ate but undertook the more ‘sinful’ or weak emotions held by fallen man (more radically, Luther also claimed that it was not simply the human Christ who suffered, but God-in-Christ as well).Footnote 35 Luther placed particular emphasis on a despair that was not simply theological but also more intimately psychological, and one with which he was all too familiar on a personal level.Footnote 36 While despair was both the ultimate symbol of estrangement from God as well as the working of the devil, it was also, for Luther, part of the Christian experience and very much undertaken by Jesus in the garden, so fully did Jesus take on man's sinful condition – even if he did not, of course, need the grace that was necessary for man's salvation. Gethsemane, Luther wrote, ultimately reminds us ‘what a heavy, great load sin is, because it oppressed and afflicted the Son of God himself to such a degree that he was in agony, and his sweat fell as drops of blood’; though it was the sins of others that he took on, it was no less heavy in ‘distress[ing]… God and Lord Jesus Christ to the greatest degree’. Yet Gethsemane also brought comfort, for it showed Christ's struggles, and taught ‘that in all our troubles we should resort to prayer’, and rely upon God who ‘will graciously help [us] by his Holy Spirit’.Footnote 37 Indeed, for Luther, Gethsemane represents the climax of the passion, for there Jesus confronts and ultimately conquers his despair and agony, in a battle that culminates with the redemption that he faces on the cross.
Eric Henrikson has argued that early modern reformist treatments of the passion tended as a whole to favour Gethsemane over the crucifixion, since, among other reasons, the scene ‘privilege[d] spiritual over physical suffering and provide[d] a spiritual model of devotion and self-examination appropriate to reformed culture’.Footnote 38 Such a claim neglects the many instances of Protestants dwelling on the woundedness of Christ on the cross, or of Catholics expending as much writing on the garden as on the death to come.Footnote 39 It also does not account for the new focus on psychology as well as spirituality in the matter of Jesus, which was elaborated upon by subsequent generations of Protestants and Catholics alike. In the case of the English Protestant (and Marian martyr) John Bradford, Jesus’ agony appears to result not from existential crisis nor from the Father's silence but from his personal abandonment as he repeatedly seeks and fails to find comfort in his ‘dearest friends’. ‘Yet again’ he finds them ‘fast asleep; whereupon [he is] enforced to go again to [his] heavenly Father for some sparkle of comfort in these [his] wonderful crosses and agonies, or deadly pangs.’ The burden here – the cause of Jesus’ agony – is thus not the pending death but the failure of the disciples as they sleep, and then flee (‘Peter, even in they sight, forsweareth thee’); in this regard, Bradford's is not simply a reflection on the passion of Christ, but the manner in which believers sin by abandoning him and thereby cause his suffering.Footnote 40
Another approach toward Gethsemane was represented by Bradford's Protestant contemporary (and future fellow martyr) Hugh Latimer, who asserted that Gethsemane was one of the most important moments in the passion sequence for the manner in which it provided instruction and comfort to Christians. In Gethsemane, he asserted in a sermon before Edward vi, was ‘our remedy’, for ‘[h]ere we must have in consideration, all [Christ's] doings and sayings for our learning, for our edification, for our comfort and consolation’.Footnote 41 Latimer took issue with Origen's (and Jerome's) use of ‘coepit’ or ‘began’ – as in ‘began to be sorrowful’ – which for him served to diminish Jesus’ suffering and humanity; instead, Latimer insisted, ‘It was perfect heaviness [that he felt]; it was such a one as was never seen the greater; it was not only the beginning of a sorrow.’ Jesus in fact not only suffered ‘great afflictions’ for ‘the blindness of the Jews’ – as Colet, following Jerome, had stated – but he was ‘heavy in His mind’, ‘greatly vexed with Himself’. Such statements are, once again, very much in line with traditional late-medieval assertions about Jesus in the garden. Yet Latimer diverges from tradition in pushing the mental and spiritual torment to the forefront, often at the expense of the physical. In Gethsemane, Latimer writes, Jesus experienced a ‘pang’ that was ‘greater than any He ever suffered’; indeed, ‘it was a greater torment unto Him, I think a greater pain, than when He was hanged on the cross’. For ‘this was the heaviness and pensiveness of His heart, the agony of the spirit’; and ‘just as the soul is more precious than the body, even so is the pain of the soul more grievous than the pains of the body’. If ‘the horror and ugsomeness of death [was] sorer than death itself’, Latimer concluded, then Gethsemane was ‘the most grievous pain that ever Christ suffered’.
Latimer thus placed Gethsemane, and Jesus’ internal psychological drama, in the forefront of the passion narrative, as it represented the deeper agony of a God who struggled with the sins of mankind and his own inner anguish as he ‘humbled himself with all obedience unto death’.Footnote 42 In this sense Latimer followed Luther in contributing to a new spiritual and psychological reading of the passion account by highlighting Gethsemane as the locus of godly suffering – a suffering that was also characterised by all-too-human ambiguities. Jesus’ fear, for example, was ‘bitter’, since his suffering was taken on for ‘sin which he never did’, making him a ‘debtor for us’. And of course Jesus, for Latimer (and Bradford), remains human as he also experiences ‘bitterness’ when he turns to his disciples, not to enjoin them in prayer – as traditional interpretations held – but to seek comfort, and finds them asleep. Indeed, rather than a figure of divinity whose foreknowledge is assured – or a figure, as in the Middle Ages, who is simply the passive receptacle of abject torment – Jesus is ‘[tossed] from post to pillar’, on the one side to his ‘Father, and was destitute at his hand’, and on the other ‘to his friends, and found no comfort at them’. Forced by the Father to ‘bite upon the bridle awhile’, Jesus thus languishes, for the sins of mankind.Footnote 43
In pushing forward the internal distress of the garden scene, and the idea that a wholly innocent Christ assumed the penalty for man's sin, Latimer accorded with Calvin's substitution theory of atonement, in which the wrath of an angry yet loving God was directed onto the Son, with the Son ‘taking our guilt upon himself’.Footnote 44 The drama in the garden, more than the cross itself, embodied this drama of transference, even if for Calvin Jesus’ despair was in full obedience to God and, as Susan Snyder has written, ‘one that did not lose hope in God’.Footnote 45 Still, as Calvin writes – and as preachers such as Latimer echoed – Jesus experienced anguish in Gethsemane ‘because he [had] before his eyes the dreadful tribunal of God, and the Judge himself armed with inconceivable vengeance; and because our sins, the load of which [was] laid upon him, [pressed] him down with their enormous weight’.Footnote 46
Yet the drama in the garden (and on the cross) is also personal for Calvin, as for Luther, Erasmus and Latimer; for the prospect of death, Calvin writes, causes Jesus to be ‘struck with fear and seized with anguish … amidst the violent shocks of temptation’, seizing his mind ‘with a terror to which he had not been accustomed’.Footnote 47As Debora Shuger has pointed out, the ‘Calvinist passion narratives’ – and one could include Latimer here – once again tend to emphasise the abandonment by the Father of the Son in the garden and on the cross, as when Joseph Hall (in the seventeenth century) speaks of ‘Christ's inward torments … in the sense and apprehension of thy Father's wrath’, which ‘pressed thy soul, as it were, to the nethermost hell’. Such an interpretation, for Shuger, reflects a Protestant displacement of hell from the lower regions to the soul,Footnote 48 just as it teaches Protestants that their internal, psychological sufferings, according to Calvin, were once undertaken by Christ as well.Footnote 49
For later sixteenth-century Calvinist writers such as William Perkins, Gethsemane – and the passion in general – exists not to ‘stirre up compassion’, as ‘Friars and Jesuits in the Church of Rome Catholics towards Christ’ are wont to do’ (in his own estimation, that is). Instead, the sequence should serve as a ‘looking glasse, in which we may clearely beholde the horriblenesse of our sinnes’, as it elicits ‘in our hearts a purpose and a care to reforme our selues, and live in holines and newnes of life’. By entering into Jesus’ sorrows, believers for Perkins were subjectively to meditate upon their own spiritual and psychological condition, for just as ‘Christ's passion was grievous and bitter unto him, so should our sinnes likewise bee grievous and bitter unto us’; otherwise, ‘we shall never reape any sound benefit by the passion of Christ’, nor ‘reform our selves, and live in holiness and newness of life’.Footnote 50
In the Golden chain, Perkins focuses upon the three-fold ‘arraignment’ of Christ, from his apprehension through the accusation and condemnation; in Gethsemane, however – in the apprehension phase – we witness Christ ‘preparing’ himself for the ‘day of death’ that all believers must face, and must follow in fortitude. Jesus does not choose Gethsemane to conceal himself, however, but instead ‘resorts to such a place in which his enemies in all likelihood might easily find him’, thus reflecting the manner in which he ‘yield[s] himselfe to death willingly, and not of constraint’.Footnote 51 Perkins also describes a very introspective Jesus, first in his posture of prayer (‘he praieth not in his Godhead, but according to his manhood’) and in his assuming the ‘infirmities of our nature’, including the sorrow and fear against which he seeks prayerful consolation. He prays to be delivered from death, but it is not fear of bodily death that drives him; instead, he experiences ‘the malediction of the law, even the very heate of the furie and indignation of God [that] was poured forth upon him’. This is not necessarily a description original to Perkins, or to Protestants for that matter. But Perkins, like others, does add a new kind of complexity when he addresses the vexed issue of Jesus’ will, arguing that it was not contrary to his father's; instead – in a somewhat innovative reading – ‘[Christ's] will as he is man and the will of his father in this agonie, were not contrarie, but onely divers, and that without any contradiction or contrarietie’, for ‘a man may will a divers thing from that which God willeth’, as witnessed in Paul's desire to preach in Asia, from which he was ‘hindered in the spirit’. Finally, and perhaps most important, Perkins also expands the psychological nuances of the scene by arguing that Christ's prayer in Gethsemane did not reflect a struggle with the divine decree, but within himself, between the desire ‘of doing his Fathers will’, and as a man, another desire, ‘whereby nature seekes to preserve it selfe’.Footnote 52
An excessive humanising of Jesus – or rather, one that focused solely on his body rather than his internal ruminations – was deemed too ‘Catholic’ and idolatrous for most Protestants.Footnote 53 But Jesus, at least for Puritans such as Perkins (or Latimer for that matter), was also most ‘human’ in Gethsemane, though it is important to note that as a figure without sin, and wholly divine, he also was beyond anything that depraved humanity could reach. Perkins's embrace of the humanity (or a more psychologised humanity) of Jesus in the garden above all served as a model for behaviour and personal reformation – a fact that contradicts statements such as that of A. G. Dickens, that ‘the person of Christ figures very little in [Puritan] literature’.Footnote 54 Even more, the doubt and fear of Jesus in Gethsemane was often a model for Puritans who displayed similar anguish in the process of their self-examination, particularly as such despair was presented as a kind of passion to be undertaken before the reception of grace.Footnote 55 The genre of the spiritual autobiography,Footnote 56 in which Gethsemane-like suffering found its resonance in precise descriptions of psychological and spiritual states, would reach its fullest expression in the seventeenth century, particularly in the work of John Bunyan (who viewed his time in Bedford gaol, with the gallows looming before him, as his own personal Gethsemane).Footnote 57 But the earlier words of Perkins continued to influence the process of spiritual exploration, particularly as faith was to be tested – as in Gethsemane – by ‘doubt, despair, and distrust’,Footnote 58 just as sin was to bring about a reassessment of one's relationship to the Lord. What Barbara Lewalski once wrote of Protestant meditation also applied to the Puritan spiritual autobiography: while neither focused too heavily on sensuous details or practices, the self-examination ‘engage[d] the mind in an effort to penetrate deeply into the motives and motions of the psyche’,Footnote 59 with episodes such as Gethsemane proving especially conducive to the attainment, through mental and spiritual suffering, of godliness.
Jesuits also sought to ‘penetrate … the motions and motives of the psyche’ in order to attain proper spiritual discernment in the workings of God or Satan on the emotions, feelings or soul. In England, Gethsemane had much to say regarding Jesus’ humanity and suffering in relation to Catholics’ own experiences as a beleaguered community, later in the century. Devotional meditations, by Jesuits particularly, enjoyed increasing popularity among the recusant community, with Gaspar Loarte's The godly garden of Gethsemane, first translated in 1579, one of the most prominent works to devote itself in part to the theme of Christ in the garden.Footnote 60 Suffused with Ignatian (and Bernardine) imperatives to meditate upon the passion in highly visualised and subjectively meaningful terms, the Spanish theologian's work on Gethsemane dwelled upon Christ falling prostrate, before he proceeded to ‘sweate droppes of blood, that fell upon the earth’.Footnote 61 The reader is encouraged not simply to feel compassion for Christ's suffering, but to enter into it psychologically and spiritually, to imitate, or ‘follow’, in the ‘words he spake,’ and the ‘workes which he did’.Footnote 62 The manual accorded with the Spiritual exercises’ vision of Jesus in Gethsemane as a man who does not simply sweat blood but ‘suffers convulsions like a dying person’ as his heart ‘[appears] to break’ from a sorrow whose cause is ‘the infinite injury that [man's] sin does to the majesty of His Father’. ‘Given up to all the agitation and bitterness of His heart’, Jesus has ‘recourse to prayer’ and, in his kneeling and prostration, humility – a lesson for all believers who should turn to Jesus both as a ‘victim’ and a ‘model’.Footnote 63 As Loarte wrote in his other treatise, The exercise of a Christian life, the ‘remedie we must flee to, when we hap to be thus afflicted and made heavy’ is a ‘zeale and perseverance in prayer’, in imitation of a Christ who was fully alive to the ‘apprehension he had of his future torments’.Footnote 64
More than the physical scourgings of the cross, Gethsemane also holds out as a model for a community of individuals subject to their own isolation and sorrows. As with his Exercise of a Christian life, Loarte's manual, as well as that of the Spanish Dominican Luis de Granada,Footnote 65 served to guide the faithful – the laity as well as members of the religious orders – in prayer, and to enjoin them to see their own sufferings mirrored in Christ. In this regard, Loarte would inspire Robert Persons to embark on his own guide to the meditative life entitled the First book of the Christian exercise, which would in turn be translated and reconfigured by the Protestant Edmund BunnyFootnote 66 – all of which reflected a Protestant readership no less receptive to passion or imitatio works (including the Gethsemane idea) than Catholics could be. For Catholic readers of Persons and Loarte, however, the personalised pain of Jesus in Gethsemane also lent itself to larger contemporary concerns, as the community of Catholic recusants, church papists, even apostates were warned by leaders to heed the example of the sleeping disciples.Footnote 67 During the reign of Henry, Thomas More, for example, had compared the sleeping Apostles to contemporary bishops who fell silent in the face of heresy as they succumbed to their own spiritual sloth, while under Elizabeth Robert Southwell, in An epistle of comfort and other works, urged his community to hold fast and patiently to the faith. Southwell's poem ‘Christ's sleeping friends’ was particularly insistent in warning that same community, and recusants in particular perhaps, against carelessly falling away in negligence from the miracle before themFootnote 68 – or separating from each other, for that matter, in symbolic sleep. But the message is not simply one of turning away from the faith, or the community of the faithful; for Southwell, Jesus’ prayer allows him to anticipate the suffering to come, and therefore grants him resoluteness as he finally submits his will to the Father's. The problem with sleeping disciples, Southwell seems to say, is therefore not simply their turning away, but their inability to truly anticipate, or at least to properly equip themselves, both psychologically and spiritually, as Jesus has, for the trials set before them.Footnote 69
II
The drama of Jesus in Gethsemane was also perceived as martyrological, even if the Jesus of Mark and Matthew, and in a different sense Luke, diverged radically in his torment from future martyrs who were depicted as facing their deaths stoically, even joyfully. As William Perkins put it in his Golden chain, the difference between Jesus and later Christian martyrs was that ‘he put on the guilt of all our sinnes, [while] they in death are freed from the same; he was left to himself void of comfort, they in the middest of their afflictions feele the unspeakable comfort of the holy Ghost’.Footnote 70 In other words, Jesus was more human, and identifiable on a psychological level, than his own martyrs often were. The agony of Gethsemane nevertheless took on an altogether new and more personal meaning with Protestants under Mary, or Catholics such as Robert Southwell, who found themselves presented with their own moment of lonely prayer, and the prospect either of a literal martyrdom that lay ahead or the daily governmental oppressions that could wear down the faith. And in fact, while martyrologists chose (by the polemical necessity of their genre) to omit any mention of fear in depicting their heroes, many others, including future martyrs, viewed Jesus’ torment not as diminishing the act of martyrdom, but as affirming the place of personal suffering within it.
Martyrologists tended for the most part to focus on the Jesus of Luke – the most ‘martyrological’ of the Gospels, in its depiction of fortitude and patience amidst suffering (to reiterate, John, by contrast, offered a Jesus who had completely ‘overcome the world’ [xvi.33] – an entirely resolute figure without any ambiguity in his will or actions). Such fortitude eludes the kind of inner distress depicted in Mark or Matthew,Footnote 71 but stands as a model of Christian suffering, with a psychologically opaque Jesus in command of himself and at peace with God and the trials to come. Much of the imagery, in Luke and the other texts, also evokes Old Testament models: the cup over which Jesus prays was common in contemporary and older martyrological literature (and, of course, appeared in the Last Supper, with the disciples’ voluntary drinking symbolising their own willingness to accept the martyrdom of Jesus); the Jesus of Luke is also likened to the past martyr prophets of Israel, including the Maccabeans who suffered under Antiochus. Like the Maccabee Eleazor, Jesus is described as ‘flowing with blood (4 Maccabees vi.6) or bathed in ‘noble sweat’ (4 Macc. vii.8); he is presented as embodying victory over temptation – and urging his followers to do the same.Footnote 72
Thomas More's own contribution to Gethsemane rested in his last major Tower work entitled De tristitia Christi, which was composed shortly before his own martyrdom in 1535.Footnote 73 Written (and heavily revised) in Latin – the language of the Church for which he was about to dieFootnote 74 – De tristitia continued where his Dialogue of comfort against tribulation left off, providing a lengthy meditation on the torments in the garden as distinct from the larger passion narrative. Both works, however, emphasise different facets of Christ's humanity, whether it be the late-medieval aspect of the Dialogue of comfort that focuses upon his crucified body, or the internalised fear and other emotions that predominate in Tristitia. What results, in the latter particularly, is not simply an assertion of Christ's humanity in his ‘sadness, sorrow, and grief’, but an application of human psychology to a figure who is ‘true Man’ as well as ‘true God’. Following tradition (and Erasmus), More proceeded to argue that if Christ experienced ‘hunger, thirst and sleep’, then so was the ‘attendant frailty’ of fear a natural part of the ‘frail humanity’ that he chose – and the emphasis is on ‘chose’ – to assume.Footnote 75 Indeed, if Christ was man as well as God, ‘I see no reason for us to be surprised that … he had the ordinary feelings of mankind.’ Such a view, while widely accepted, contradicted the aforementioned interpretation of commentators such as Aquinas and Bonaventure, however, who argued that Christ's sorrow was not ‘human’ but entirely theological, just as passions in general, for Aquinas, ‘were in Christ differently than they are in us’.Footnote 76
Louis Martz once argued that the Tristitia, like the Utopia, contained a ‘voice of the individual self … constantly speaking within the framework, the guise or disguise, of a traditional objective commentary on the gospel’.Footnote 77 The individual self did not only refer to More, however, but to a Jesus whose fear served as the entry point into his interior life. What allowed More to project a distinctly human psychology onto Jesus – and distinguished More's own treatment of Gethsemane from other commentaries – was his placing of Christ's fear specifically within the unfolding drama of martyrdom, thus imbuing it with an altogether more personal treatment in the wake of what he was to face himself. More was himself a unique sort of martyr, not least in his humour and irony – qualities for which martyrs were not normally known. He was also freely and admittedly trepidatious about his pending death, famously writing to his daughter Margaret Roper that ‘I have not been a man of such holy living as I might be bold to offer myself to death, lest God for my presumption might suffer me to fall, and therefore, I put not myself forward, but draw back.’ If it comes to death – if ‘God draws me to it Himself’ – then ‘trust I in His great mercy that He shall not fail to give me grace and strength’.Footnote 78 More thus saw his own mental anguish reflected in Christ's, and in the identification contributed to a more intimate and interiorised portrait of divine suffering than had existed before.
Like Perkins much later, More also wonders, as others did, how Christ could ‘be terrified at the approach of pain’ when ‘His martyrs rushed to their deaths eagerly and joyfully, triumphing over tyrants and torturers’;Footnote 79 indeed, Christ taught his followers not to fear death, though he appeared to display exactly that trepidation. Yet Christ, for More, ‘hardly intended it to mean that they should never under any circumstances recoil from violent death, but rather that they should not, out of fear, flee from a death which will not last, only to run, by denying the faith, into one which will be everlasting’. Courage and ‘prudence’ therefore did not foreclose fear, and those who denied fear by appearing to seek out pain only revealed their own foolishness.Footnote 80 Christ the ‘prudent master’ thus set the example for others, including the Apostles ‘and almost all the illustrious martyrs in the many succeeding centuries’– including Paul – who chose at one time or another to flee from persecution and punishment,Footnote 81 even if in the end, in the ‘final struggle’, they ultimately ‘shed their blood for the faith’.
For More, martyrdom in this sense entails overcoming ‘not only the enemy but also [one's] own fear, which is often harder to conquer than the enemy himself’.Footnote 82 But Jesus also provides comfort, for by expressing sorrow at his pending death, he chose to ‘enhearten’ the less stalwart of his followers who were facing death, and who could look to him rather than the brave martyrs for encouragement in their own hours of death – who could look to him ‘walking ahead of [them] along this fearful road’.Footnote 83 Christ himself ‘becomes weak for the sake of the weak’,Footnote 84 and assumes the greatest humility, while his prayer is a central expression of obedience, even if he ‘was not in need of any such prayer’ when his will was the same as the Father's’.Footnote 85 For More, the anguish of Christ in the garden was also a ‘salutary’ psychological warning to the bolder sorts of martyrs, for ‘it keeps the one from being over-exultant and makes the other be of good hope when his spirit is crestfallen and downcast’.Footnote 86 Fear also, it should be noted – in an important issue for More – was a strong factor in mitigating against the pride and enthusiasm that could render the death not a martyrdom but a suicide.
It should be pointed out that More's actual death constituted a display, in its famous ‘mocks’, of the stoic idea of apatheia, or in Patrick Collinson's words, ‘the mean between foolish temerity and despicable cowardice’ in the face of martyrdom.Footnote 87 Similarly, More also turned to sources other than Gethsemane when it came to his own death, such as the Psalms contained at the back of his prayer book, which he annotated and studied in the Tower. As Eamon Duffy has pointed out, such annotations and accompanying prayer-poems also reinforced the corporate nature of religious culture, ‘in which private intensities [were] nourished by and consciously related to the public practice of religion’.Footnote 88 Still, More's identification remained particularly resonant with the solitary and inwardly suffering Jesus of Gethsemane; an apologia for godly and personally-felt fear, De tristitia even promotes the idea that the distressed martyr is in many ways stronger than those given the gift of undoubting joy in facing their deaths, for God is aware that those joyful martyrs ‘would [otherwise] not be equal to facing fear’, out of their own weakness.Footnote 89 More even reads his own very doubt as a sign of grace – a sign that he was part of (and perhaps at the stronger end of) a larger providential plan in which ‘God proportions the temperaments of His martyrs … in such a way that one rushes forth eagerly to his death, another creeps out hesitantly and fearfully, but for all that bears his death none the less bravely.’Footnote 90
More was a rare martyr in expressing his own disquietude and in identifying so intimately with Jesus in the garden; though they belonged to an age that witnessed increasingly subjective and psychological expressions of religious faith and devotion, martyrologists tended for their part to avoid mentioning anguish on the part of their heroes, though they invariably included scenes of prayer before and during the hour of death. John Foxe, for example, does not apply any Gethsemane-like moments to his martyr-narratives, though gardens frequently provide scenes of suffering – specifically, Bishop Edmund Bonner's garden, where he commits acts of sadistic torture on his victims.Footnote 91 The ‘passion’ of Foxe's protaganists also tends to begin with their apprehension, and the night before their deaths is spent in meditative constancy, as in the case of George Eagles, whose story is presented in direct parallel to Jesus’, though his own Gethsemane – in prison, the night before his final trial and execution – is described as spent ‘in deuout prayer, [as he] would not sleepe, neither would eat or drinke, but bread and water’.Footnote 92 To present individuals such as Eagles as fearful – to even delve into their inner worlds – would have opened them to the charge of being false martyrs, unwilling to die for a faith revealed as counterfeit. In the face of contention only Jesus in Gethsemane, in this sense, could be afforded the ‘luxury’ of fear.
One exception is Foxe's description of the Protestant Robert Glover and his moment of destitution before death; according to reports of the Protestant minister and frequent prison-visitor Augustine Bernher, Foxe writes that two or three days before his death Glover, his ‘hart beyng lumpish and desolate of all spirituall consolation, felt in hymselfe no aptnes nor willingnes, but rather a heavines and dulnesse of spirite, full of much discomfort to beare that bitter crosse of Martyrdome ready now to be layd upon him’. Feeling that God had ‘utterly withdrawne his … fauor from him’, Glover ‘prayed day and night unto the Lord, and yet could receive no motion nor sense of any comfort from him’. Told by Bernher that God ‘in good time’ would come to him, Glover's despair suddenly turned to joy the next day as he laid eyes upon the stake, and was ‘so mightily replenished with Gods holy comfort and heauenly joyes, [that] he cryed out clapping his hands to Austen, & saying in these words, Austen, he is come, he is come’.Footnote 93
This is not quite Gethsemane, but Foxe nevertheless deepens the passion of Glover – and the faith to which he adheres – by incorporating the psychological presence of fear and doubt, as well as estrangement from God, within it. Catholic martyrologies also avoided any overt or extended Gethsemane-like moment in their accounts, though priests were occasionally depicted as enjoining their followers to pray for them in the ‘last agony’.Footnote 94 More notable was John Mush's description of Margaret Clitherow on the night before her own execution, as she requested the company of women to ‘watch her’. She states in the account that she does not fear death – death itself, and not the women, ‘is comfort’; but, she adds – in a reference to Jesus in the Gethsemane of Mark xiv.38 – 'the flesh is frail’. Clitherow then proceeds to pray until dawn, prostrating herself in the manner of Jesus in Matthew and Mark.Footnote 95
Robert Southwell, who would face his own martyrdom in 1595, understood the spiritual challenges faced by English Catholics, and the power of Gethsemane to answer them; as Pierre Janelle, Scott Pilarz, Anne Sweeney and Frank Brownlow have each pointed out, Gethsemane yielded powerful psychological and spiritual meanings for Southwell, in addition to images – ‘fat soile, full spring, sweete olive, grape of blisse’Footnote 96 – that could be brought to vivid life through Ignatian methods of imaginative contemplation which allowed him, as in other poems, to ‘fully penetrate’ the scriptural episode, as well as the depths of his own interiority.Footnote 97 Southwell's Gethsemane poems were also effecting a new kind of subjective transformation, as they connected God and man (or God and Southwell) through the intimate, apostrophic use of ‘you’ and ‘me’; but so did this more personal, contemplative and relational aspect accord with the prayer in Matthew (and Mark) which reconciled the individual to the burdensome will of God.
The strain of grappling with the divine decree is most famously conveyed in Southwell's depiction, in ‘Christ's bloody sweat’, of Jesus’ prayerful and bloody sweat, which echoes the words of Luke xxii.44 (‘In his anguish he prayed even more earnestly, and his sweat fell to the ground like great drops of blood’). Jesus’ sweating blood (or bloody sweat) was, on the one hand, laden with larger spiritual implications, as he shed sweat, or sweat-blood, in anticipation of his larger flesh-torn self-sacrifice. But in other cases Jesus’ emanations – the result in part of ardent prayer – were also perceived by Southwell and others as indicative of internal crisis, of strain embodied and liquefied in the anguished struggle with his foreknowledge of what awaited him. If the original curse of Adam was to toil ‘by the sweat of his brow’, then the sweat of Christ, the second Adam, represented the voluntary acceptance of this burden, as he strained to release man from this curse, and sin.
Interestingly, and given the Jesuit imperative to console, Southwell in his Gethsemane poems omits the appearance – described in Luke and 1 Kings – of an assisting angel who comes to Jesus in comfort. But in Southwell's reading of Luke, in a poem such as ‘Christs sleeping friends’, Jesus’ awareness of God's presence in the garden is enough to serve ‘as a source of strength and patience’, a connection able to withstand ‘the darkest of hours’. Gethsemane in this sense was itself a consolation, in reminding Southwell – as he put it in a prison letter to Robert Cecil – that fear ‘is a thing incident unto Christ himself’.Footnote 98 At the same time, however, Gethsemane could also remind readers of the nature and weight of their own sin too. In ‘Sin's heavy load’, which uses Mark and Luke's image of Jesus falling to the ground in prostration, Southwell injects himself as the cause of Christ's fall (‘O Lord my sin doth over-charge thy breast/The poise thereof doth force thy knees to bow’).Footnote 99 Southwell not only brings in his own sin to the poem, but he also asserts that the prostration is due to sin's ‘huge and heavy’ weight – a weight that all Christians know that they must bear.
Southwell's portrayal of Jesus’ torment does not entail the ‘holy desperation’ that accommodates penitence, nor is it the despairing remorse that Southwell would depict in St Peter's complaint, which is ultimately forgiven by Christ's saving, restorative grace.Footnote 100 But ‘Sin's heavy load’ and other poems nevertheless accord with the literature of tears and sacred grief, albeit with some variation. Religious sorrow, according to Paul in 2 Corinthians, served to orient one's relationship to the divine, as the sorrowful supplicant was ‘both called to and being called by’ God, towards repentance. The Christian soul, for writers such as John Chrysostom and Augustine, must in fact be wounded in sorrow for it to be lifted up to the lord.Footnote 101 But Jesus in Gethsemane does not need to be ‘lifted’, his heart opened to repentance; instead, Jesus’ sorrow is an act of kenosis, or emptying out, as he contemplates not his own fate so much as the weight of human sin that he must bear (Donne would later refer to such sorrow – in the tears Jesus shed at the cross – as bringing on ‘pontifical tears’).Footnote 102 As Brownlow has written, the Jesus in ‘Christ's bloody sweat’ voluntarily enters into this sorrow, much as one would enter into a contemplative or mystical experience, through prayer.Footnote 103 As with other writers examined in this article, many of these assertions reflect continuity with past beliefs. But the sorrow, and the poem itself, also becomes painfully personal, prefiguring Southwell's own martyrdom as he imagines Jesus’ pain as his own (‘May I become like unto Christ, who passed no single moment of His whole life without some sorrow’).Footnote 104 If ‘Christ's sleeping friends’ misses the moment of Christ's prayer, ‘Christ's bloody sweat’ – and Southwell himself – are fully alive to it, and all its attendant dolorousness.Footnote 105
Gethsemane finally allowed Southwell to speak to his community on the nature of martyrdom itself, to use Jesus’ internal sufferings and psychological complexities to inspire English Catholics and remind them of his centrality in their enduring tribulation. Martyrdom was the highest form of imitatio Christi, an exalted and glorious act of sacrifice; as Southwell put it in his Epistle of comfort, ‘What greater preeminence is there in God's church, than to be a martyr? What more dignity, than to die in this case of the Catholic faith?’Footnote 106 This was certainly a bracing message set before a community of believers; at the same time, it should be pointed out that for all of Southwell's fervency – and for all the emphasis on and even preparation for martyrdom that was being instilled at the English Church in Rome – Jesuits were not enjoined to die but to missionise. It was not true, as one historian has put it, that no one displayed a ‘greater eagerness … for the palm and the crown’ than Jesuits; as Scott Pilarz put it, Southwell was hardly ‘rushing toward martyrdom’, or death, even if he understood it as a part of apostolic duty if need be.Footnote 107
Southwell thus sought to elude his ‘lynx-eyed’ captors for as long as possible, in order to continue his ministering and missionary service to a suffering community.Footnote 108 But after imprisonment, and as his own death approached, Southwell appeared to express fear over it, stating in a letter to Cecil that ‘[my] body trembled and tears betrayed grief’ upon considering the ‘painful agonies’ to come.Footnote 109 Though themes of consolation, sorrow and suffering pervaded so many of the subjects that preoccupied Southwell, it was Gethsemane, at this moment, that became most consolatory to him: the cry in the garden – ‘Remove this cup [of suffering] from me’– acknowledged Jesus’ psychological and spiritual anguish, but the bloody sweat of prayer allowed him to endure it. In the end, Southwell finally asked (and perhaps challenged) Cecil to expedite his death – to grant him martyrdom, not for martyrdom's sake, but because his own apostolic mission had been rendered useless by the imposed silence, and the enforced separation that now existed between himself and the community that he served. With the trials, sorrows and consolations of his own imprisonment – his own Gethsemane – passed, Southwell could now embrace the ‘gridiron of Lawrence, the flayer of Bartholomew, the lions of Ignatius, all things in a word which can possibly come’; for now, he wrote, ‘I refuse nothing, I will embrace all, I will endure all – not indeed I, dust and ashes as I am, but Thou, my Lord, in me.’Footnote 110
III
While literary critics reveal their historical shortsightedness in asserting that the early modern period (and particularly Shakespeare) ‘invented’ inwardness or subjectivity, the era nevertheless witnessed characters displaying new psychological imperatives and conflicting or (in the case of Hamlet) even internally divisive temperaments that served in plays as the locus of the new drama.Footnote 111 The Jesus of Gethsemane accorded with this shift; while medieval devotional writers had also encouraged believers to dwell on the internal state of Jesus in the garden, the Catholic and Protestant Reformations brought new and more psychologised emphases on such emotions as despair, or personal edification and reform, or spiritual turmoil and fear in the face of a martyrdom that had assumed renewed predominance across western Europe. Catholics and Protestants were both compelled by the garden scene, and the nature of Jesus’ sorrow, at least as it was presented in Matthew and Mark; this did not, however, mean that Gethsemane was viewed in the same manner across confessional divides. The Gethsemane of a Latimer – himself a future martyr – differed from that of Thomas More, for example, even if both chose to emphasise Jesus’ humanity (and fear); the difference rested, in part, on the particular lessons that Jesus’ struggle could impart, or on the weight that Latimer, as a reformer, placed on the substitution theory of atonement, in which Jesus’ suffering was due to the enormity of man's sin that he had taken on. The psychological conflicts of Jesus in Gethsemane were also conducive to the spiritual exercises of Puritans and Catholics, even if Puritans chose to channel such conflicts through the godly conversion narrative, and Catholics through a sense-based devotional meditation that reinforced their collective identity as a faith under siege.
The seventeenth century would witness an efflorescence of Gethsemane treatments, culminating in such poems as George Herbert's ‘The agonie,’ which has been described as part of a greater contemporary wave of passion poems that ‘engage in a poetics of interior sacrifice, one that relocates the sacrifice from the rituals of liturgy to the labyrinths of psychology’.Footnote 112 Certainly the works of Herbert, or Henry Vaughan (who wrote of Jesus’ ‘flesh, spiritual agony, and sweating of blood’)Footnote 113 had a deeply ‘medieval ancestry’, particularly as they partook of the aforementioned Man of Sorrows image.Footnote 114 Lancelot Andrewes would also recall medieval devotional traditions by invoking the importance of the bloody sweat in Gethsemane, which he labelled the ‘hardest passion to endure’ of the ‘three passions’ suffered by Christ (the others being the passion of Gabbatha – where Jesus received the scourges and thorns – and Golgotha). For Andrewes, the blood shed by Jesus ‘was another manner of blood’, for ‘that was the blood of his Internal Cross’Footnote 115 – blood that was equally given, however, ‘in supplication’, to God.Footnote 116
For all the medieval continuities, however, seventeenth-century authors’ personal identification with the Jesus of Gethsemane, resulted in a different interpretation – or as Debora Shuger has put it, ‘a specific version of Christian selfhood’, and one that was ‘gripped by intense, contradictory emotions and an ineradicable tension between its natural inclinations and religious obligations’.Footnote 117 As this article has argued, this tendency found its roots in the sixteenth century, with writers such as Southwell, who placed a new kind of emotional and martyrological weight on Jesus in the garden. Indeed John Donne only recalled Thomas More by invoking a more ‘personal’ Gethsemane, particularly in the face of what appeared to be his own pending death, from the ‘martyrdom’ of illness. ‘I see [Jesus’] feares, and I feare with him’, Donne wrote of Jesus in Gethsemane, adding that ‘Many of thy blessed Martyrs, have passed out of this life, without any showe of feare; But thy most blessed Sonne himself did not so.’Footnote 118 As with More, Donne believed as a result that fear of death was not a matter of which one should be ashamed (‘The naturall love of our naturall life is not ill’);Footnote 119 nor should the dying feel ashamed of feeling forsaken, for Christ himself had ‘as heavy a feare of Gods forsaking him in the agony of death, as we can have’.Footnote 120
In the centuries that followed, modern theologians, including Søren Kierkegaard, also found the garden episode enormously attractive, not least in what they perceived as its psychological richness as well as the very qualities – Jesus’ fear, trembling, vulnerability – that provoked such interest in the Reformation writers.Footnote 121 With the exception of nineteenth-century theologians such as Friedrich Schleiermacher, who wrote that the account was not literal and that Christ's inner life in Gethsemane was ‘wholly free from everything which we have to conceive as conflict’,Footnote 122 modern commentators perceived it very much as a moment of struggle, whether as an instance of innocent suffering – which particularly resonated in the twentieth century – or as a personal crisis in the life of Jesus, perhaps even a temptation in the manner of his struggle in the wilderness.Footnote 123 Meanwhile, theologians such as Karl Barth articulated their understanding of Christ's humanity through the scene's prism, emphasising Gethsemane as a kind of ‘existential turmoil’ that Jesus and all human beings must face in their lives, as they ultimately come to a stance of obedience.Footnote 124 Assuming a different interpretation, Jürgen Moltmann (radically) looked to the scene in Gethsemane as indicative not of reconciliation between Father and Son but of division, even of transformation in the Trinitarian relationship, as ‘the communicating love of the Father turns into infinite pain over the sacrifice of the Son’, while ‘the responding love of the Son becomes infinite suffering over his repulsion and rejection by the Father’.Footnote 125
Poets as varied as Rudyard Kipling (‘And all the time we halted there/I prayed my cup might pass’) and T. S. Eliot in ‘The Wasteland’ (‘After the torchlight red on sweaty faces/After the frosty silence in the gardens/After the agony in stony places’) also latched onto Gethsemane to express themes of internal anguish and doubt, or of abandonment and betrayal. This was unsuprising, for with the exception of Jesus’ agonising cry on the cross in Mark xv.34, Gethsemane was the scene in which Jesus’ suffering was expressed most starkly, his calling out to the Father so nakedly gone unanswered. Perhaps the poet who most encapsulated these themes of spiritual struggle for modernity, however, was Southwell's Jesuit descendant,Footnote 126 Gerard Manley Hopkins, who early on read an account of Gethsemane by Sister Anne Catherine Emmerich and was brought to tears by the ‘sorrows of a lifetime’ that it provoked in him.Footnote 127 His ‘terrible sonnets’, which dwelled on spiritual abjection and desolation of the mind – a ‘winter world’ as opposed to one of the ‘grandeur of God’ – constantly evoked the agony of Gethsemane not only in their self-portraiture but in describing the act of poetic composition, with the poems written in exertion, ‘in blood’.Footnote 128 ‘Comforter, where, where is your comforting?’, he asks in one sonnet (the angel of Luke being distinctly absent); ‘pitched past pitch of grief’, he receives no answer to his call, just as the end of Gethsemane, for Jesus, does not come with resolution, but with Judas. Yet Gethsemane, for Hopkins as for early modern writers, was as much a part of the Christian experience as the cross and the resurrection, even if it now came with torments that had become internalised to an acute degree. As Hopkins wrote to those who experienced their own personal Gethsemane hours, and those fortunate enough to have not:
