Title: Michael Martin. Literature and the Encounter with God in Post-Reformation England. Farnham
Abstract: Michael Martin. Literature and the Encounter with God in Post-Reformation England. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2014. Viii + 221pp. + 4 illus. $109.95. Review by LISSA BEAUCHAMP DESROCHES, ST. THOMAS UNIVERSITY. Michael Martin's book, Literature and the Encounter with God in Post-Reformation England, is a readable and critically engaged consideration of the complexities of feeling everyday people during a period in which critics more commonly point to the newly emerging fields of science and politics over religion. Indeed, Martin's methodology introduces the importance of relinquishing a critical condescension toward conviction in order to consider it on its own terms. Using the phenomenology of Heidegger as a basis his approach, Martin delivers a straightforward and comprehensive picture of an interesting variety of sources that trace a developing chronology of individual connections to the divine over the course of the period. John Dee, John Donne, Sir Kenelm Digby, Henry and Thomas Vaughn, and Jane Lead provide the source material a critical engagement of feeling from perspectives that range across the considerations of science and religion, centre and margin, and gender and class. Beginning with Dr. Dee, Martin addresses the period's odd co-mingling of mysticism and technology. Referring to de Certeau's Mystic Fable, Martin defines mysticism as what arises in the tension between experience and the attempt to render the revelation or insight garnered through experience into the common coinage of words without trivializing or cheapening the mysterion by means of the (21). In defining mysticism this way, he recovers Dee's status as a kind of cultural interpreter: his explorations of the technological means of communication with the divine combine the rigours of what emerges as a scientific method on in the period with the devotional desire divine contact so familiar in Donne, Herbert, and Crashaw. The intensity of Dee's mysticism, however, results in a kind of wilful blindness which Martin identifies as a fundamental tragedy: Dee was ... enthralled by his misperceived mystical object. He seems to have remained so, as he was still occupied with researches in scrying twenty years later (46). Yet despite these problems, Martin's analysis brings out the surprising fitness of Dee's technological approach to the desired divine encounter: the attempt to rationalize the means of experience is his way of dignifying the translation of his visions, to render them in fully ecstatic detail. Following in chronological order, John Donne's mysticism seems an unusual way to continue the discussion; in contrast to Dee, was extraordinarily sensitive to the ways he might hide his own motivations from (50). Martin begins with this seeming dissimilarity, pointing out how is not a systematic theologian, but a poet and a preacher. His thought is not theologically dogmatic, but is inclined toward the intuitive (47). Despite the acknowledged influences of Augustinian and Pauline conversions in Donne's work, Martin focusses on Donne's religious aesthetic [which] is grounded in humility (48) and the acceptance of ultimate divine union as deferred until physical death. Such an apocalyptic vision has as much to do with the visions of John of Patmos, though Martin does not address the role of Revelation in Donne's work, perhaps because Donne is himself skeptical of mystical visions that attract sensational kinds of attention, and distract the faithful from being patient and humble. The essential paradox of Donne's experience is that If there is to be an ecstasy, Donne, there must also be a thorn in the flesh (70). Martin's excellent analysis of Donne's final sermon is illuminating, as he shows how Donne employs himself as an emblem of a living dead man (80), a rhetorically readable illustration of divine/human union deferred: for Donne the Vision of God recedes into the horizon, ever deferred, while simultaneously enfolding him in the mystery of God's presence (84). …
Publication Year: 2015
Publication Date: 2015-03-22
Language: en
Type: article
Access and Citation
AI Researcher Chatbot
Get quick answers to your questions about the article from our AI researcher chatbot