Encounters with God in Medieval and Early Modern English Poetry.

Quinn, William A.

Encounters with God in Medieval and Early Modern English Poetry. By Charlotte Clutterbuck. Hampshire, England & Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2005. ISBN 0-7546-5270-X. Pp. viii + 226. $89.85.

I highly recommend Charlotte Clutterbuck's Encounters with God. Clutterbuck is herself a poet as well as a literary scholar; for what it's worth, she is also Catholic and Australian. Her critical voice has both a convincing straightforwardness and a personal investment in religious poetry. She reads each text not for its psychological or socio-political or gendered subtexts; rather, she responds to each poem on its own terms as a sincere confession of the religious experience itself. In her "Introduction," Clutterbuck professes her own belief that much medieval and early modern poetry can thus "achieve a transcendence that allows it to speak with almost unabated force to the modern reader" (4); this is a pious hope to be carefully nurtured.

Clutterbuck's book can be read either as a survey that "chronicles the movement of serious public, religious poetry away from encounter with God" (203) proceeding from Middle English poetry through William Langland and John Donne to John Milton, or as four stand-alone studies. Throughout, Clutterbuck employs traditional linguistic and stylistic analyses to explicate each author's discourse with the divine. Her sensitivity to tensions between lexis (what is said) and syntax (how it is said) is particularly acute. The terminology of her formal analysis is very conventional (e.g., verbal tenses, indicative vs. interrogative vs. subjunctive moods, 2nd vs. 3rd person pronominal references, etc.). Her determination of what comprises the rhetoric of a lyric-encounter, distinguishing "praise-poems" from "plea poems" is likewise very clear and straightforward though flexible enough to include excerpts (e.g., invocations) from predominantly dramatic and narrative works.

In her first chapter, "Speaking across the Gap: The Language of Encounter with the Divine," Clutterbuck defines the contexts within which she analyzes "public" religious poetry. Clutterbuck's readings draw heavily on Theodore Jenning's Beyond Theism: A Grammar of God-Language (Oxford UP, 1985), and Paul Ricoeur's History and Truth (Northwestern UP, 1965), The Symbolism of Evil (Beacon, 1969), and Time and Narrative (U of Chicago P, 1984). Her interpretive frame for distinguishing among various lyric encounters with God is especially dependent on Ricoeur's designation of five levels of anguish. But Clutterbuck's specific applications of this interpretive model often call for particularly insightful reservations and qualifications. In subsequent chapters, when Clutterbuck must analyze the mechanics of each discourse with the divine, she often reveals illuminating connections between otherwise seemingly trivial grammatical details and transcendent meaning.

Clutterbuck's second chapter, "Redemption and Response in the Anonymous Middle Ages," celebrates the profoundly optimistic emphasis on "God's mercy, Christ's victory over the Devil, and the importance of human response" that one finds in the Middle English crucifixion lyrics and comparable lyric moments in the Corpus Christi cycles. In this chapter, Clutterbuck introduces Gustaf Aulen's identification of three distinct theories of atonement, which she also recurrently uses to interpret the theological premises of each lyric persona. The "heroic (or classic) theory" celebrates Christ as rescuing victor over the devil; the "satisfaction theory" (credited to Anselm's Cur Deus Homo?) stresses Christ the sinless victim offered as ransom to the Father's justice; Peter Abelard's "exemplarist theory" sees the love made manifest by Christ's selflessness as winning man's redemptive love in return (31-32). In this chapter, Clutterbuck also first employs her recurrent strategy of designating some rhetorical role for the lyric "I." The first-person voice of the crucifixion lyrics (the poet's "T" that must be enacted by the reader as reciter of each prayer) is designated the "Mediator" who speaks primarily in the indicative and to whom Christ on the cross "is usually alive and speaking" (37). Some of Clutterbuck's simplest observations seem at once either obvious or provocative. For example, she observes that "The tendency to subject God to time seems a tendency in narrative texts" (51)--presumably, of course, in the narratives of the Bible itself.

Along with all other modern critics, Clutterbuck seems to have been predestined to address the controversy regarding the Protestant vs. Catholic readings of William Langland. In her third chapter, "Finding the Balance in the C-revision of Piers Plowman: Faith-Grace-Mercy versus Hope-Works-Justice," Clutterbuck considers how Langland's "Will" voices his lyric discourse primarily in the interrogative. Clutterbuck focuses on the salvific value of work as Will's key inquiry motivating a more balanced thesis in the C-revision. This may now seem a rather established thesis to many Langland scholars; see too Clutterbuck's own "Hope and Good Works: Leaute in the C-text of Piers Plowman," Review of English Studies 28 (1977): 129-40. But her analysis of the poem seriatim in this book fine-tunes Langland's implicit argument in contrast to alternative theological perspectives; "The Creviser's view ... does not follow the Anselmian insistence on God's justice but the heroic-exemplarist view that stresses both God's loving mercy and the need for humans to ... embrace the leel works" (68).

Chapter four, "Donne's Seeker and the Anguish of Desire;' attributes "the diverse ways in which critics have interpreted some of Donne's poems" (114) to the post-medieval anxieties of his lyric persona, the Seeker. Dismissing the conventional statement of the controversy regarding Donne's Calvinist vs. Catholic beliefs, Clutterbuck explores Donne's doubts: "The apostate Donne did not feel the same assurance that he had access to the 'truth' about God" (113). The poet's subversive formal features often reveal an "undercurrent of psychic anguish" (114) rather than simply a debate about doctrine. "Unlike Langland, Donne does not represent sin as something the sinner does ... Rather ... as ... something that he cannot escape" (128). Clutterbuck considers in detail Donne's appropriation of religious diction for erotic poems, "Satyre III, the Holy Sonnets" "Goodfriday, 1613. Riding Westward," and finally the "Hymnes" as a progress of the Seeker's will toward consent. Even in the relatively simple and more assured "Hymnes" however, "a note of uncertainty remains" (144).

Chapter five, "Alienation from God in Paradise Lost," maps the fall of lyric confidence in speaking publicly and directly to God during the early modern era. Clutterbuck confronts directly Milton's dilemma as a Christian sinner and an epic poet. Milton's approach is "radically different in two main aspects" from that of all other religious lyric poems considered in Clutterbuck's study because Milton as an epic rather than lyric poet "does not write himself into the action of his poem" and because "Milton makes God the Father a character" (149) subject to time and space. The formal demands of his genre invite presumptuous idolatry. As an initial example, she contrasts Milton's seemingly arrogant, declared intent "to justify the ways of God to men" with his description of Adam's attempt to justify his own sin (Book X 13743). Milton's implicit (albeit very much later) recognition of such a "fallen use of the word" (151) complements Brian Cummings's reading of Milton's epic statement of theme in terms of Luther's reading of Rom. 1:17 in The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace (Oxford UP, 2002). Clutterbuck attempts to save Milton from a negative portrayal of God in a very medieval fashion: she analyzes Milton's internal conflict as a debate between quasi-allegorical projections of his poetic soul, the presumptuous epic "Poet" (who dominates the narrative voice) vs. the humble and eventually triumphant "Believer" (to whom Clutterbuck attributes a lyric function). These voices are "not distinct characters but rather distinct roles or aspects ... The Poet is a projection of Milton's ambitious self, the ego that he has come to see as sinful. The quieter voice of the Believer is, I believe, closer to Milton's own mature voice" (154). The poetically subversive but theologically redemptive voice of this Believer is heard best in Milton's invocations of Books I, III, VII, and IX as a corrective to the Poet's very problematic characterization of God the Father in Book III. Perhaps Clutterbuck's most tenuous but well intentioned critical argument is her attempt to save Books XI and XII from the widespread opinion that they are poetic failures because they "dramatize both Milton's doubts about Portraying the Passion at all, and the distance between the Poet and God" (193).

Clutterbuck's "Conclusion" ruminates on her perception of a steady decline from medieval optimism toward modern disillusionment--i.e., each Christian lyric poet's loss of an older "sense of security"(202), which followed the loss of ecclesiastical unity. And here she is most moving and most vulnerable.

This book is probably going to have to endure far harsher reviews than this one. There are a very few and apparent (and, as such, easily correctable) typographical errors that now seem the inevitable glitches of a computer-generated text. At times, Clutterbuck's challenge to alternative (sometimes magisterial) readings may sound a bit dismissive as, for example, when she rejects Rosemary Woolf's attribution of the satisfaction theory to early medieval lyric in The English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages (Oxford UP, 1968) or Brian Cummings's less hopeful assessment of the tone of Donne's Sonnet IX because he "misses several aspects of the poem" (126). Perhaps, scholars who specialize in each poet or period that Clutterbuck considers will find much that is derivative and much that is neglected in her individual chapters. Perhaps she could have incorporated a richer bibliography of critical theory to include more studies of direct address, apostrophe, the psalms themselves, popular hymns, and melic verse in general. But perhaps Clutterbuck could not have done any of the above and kept Encounters with God as such an intriguing and entertaining communion of mutually complementary essays.

William A. Quinn

University of Arkansas