Closet Devotions RICHARD RAMBUSS CLOSET DEVOTIONS Edited by Michele Aina Barale, Jonathan Goldberg, Michael Moon, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2020 with funding from Duke University Libraries https://archive.org/details/closetdevotions01 ramb Closet Devotions RICHARD RAMBUSS Duke University Press Durham and London 1998 © 1998 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ® Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan Typeset in Sabon by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book. Virtue hath some perverseness. —John Donne, ‘‘To the Countess Contents Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xi Note on Texts xiii Introduction Sacked Eroticisms I I Christs Ganymede II Devotion and Desire 73 3 The Prayer Closet 103 Notes 137 Works Cited 175 Index 187 Illustrations i. Michelangelo, Risen Christ 4 z. Circle of Giovanni Bellini, Christ Carrying the Cross 15 3. Ecce Homo 22 4. Andres Serrano, Piss Christ 23 5. Engraving: Justus Lipsius, De Cruce 24 6. Engraving: Justus Lipsius, De Cruce 25 7. Engraving: Richard Crashaw, Carmen Deo Nostro 29 8. Andres Serrano, Crucifixion 33 9. Michelangelo, Ganymede 55 10. Perugino, Madonna and Child 62 11. “Every 10th Jesus is a Queer!” 68 12. Marsden Elartley, Christ Held by Half-Naked Men 69 13. Otto van Veen, Amoris divim emblemata 100 14. Title page: Edward Wettenhall, Enter into thy Closet 118 AciCNOWLEDC M ENTS What was to become this book began with a generously open invitation from Jonathan Goldberg to contribute something to a volume of essays he was editing on sexuality and Renaissance literature and culture; for pro¬ viding the initial impetus, for his indispensable reading of the book’s final draft, and for so much more, to him go my most affectionate thanks. I am also grateful to those who provided such stimulating forums for me to try out and refine my thinking on this subject before committing it to print. Thanks to Colleen Lamos and Helena Michie for hosting me at Rice University; to David Lee Miller for asking me to deliver one of the Hudson Strode lectures at the University of Alabama; to Mary Bly for the invitation to speak at “The Sacred Body in Law and Literature” sympo¬ sium at Yale; to Jean Howard and Nicholas Radel for thinking to include me in the Shakespeare Association of America seminar they organized on feminism and queer theory; to the organizers of “Queer October” for having me back to Johns Hopkins; to the graduate students in medieval and Renaissance studies at Duke University who asked me to address the “Varieties of Desire” conference; to Jeffrey Masten for inviting me to present my work at the Center for Literary and Cultural Studies at Har¬ vard; and to Valerie Traub, Stephen Campbell, and Pat Simons for bringing me to the University of Michigan as a participant in their “Rhetorics and Rituals of (Un)Veiling” conference. It is with pleasure and devotion that I acknowledge my happy reli¬ ance upon a group of colleagues and friends, exchanges with whom have been so important to me over the past few years. For their assistance, encouragement, and engagement with my work I want to thank David Baker, Leonard Barkan, Cathy Caruth, Paul Elledge, Will Fisher, Geoffrey Harpham, Jeffrey Masten, Michael Moon, Supriya Nair, Patricia Parker, Gail Paster, Stephen Orgel, Joseph Roach, Michael Schoenfeldt, Debora Shuger, Alan Sinfield, Peter Stallybrass, Maaja Stewart, Ramie Targoff, Teresa Toulouse, Valerie Traub, and Joseph Wittreich. Larry Simmons and Josie Dixon presented me with Christ icons they knew I would like, and I have reproduced those images here. Thanks also to Richard Morrison, Acknowledgments Ken Wissoker, Paula Dragosh, and Amy Ruth Buchanan at Duke Univer¬ sity Press for the care and enthusiasm with which they have overseen the making of this book. I am especially indebted to John Guillory, who, over coffee one summer afternoon in Dupont Circle, helped me to see what this book was really about. Janice Carlisle read through several versions of the manuscript and improved it each time; she instantiates for me the meaning of colleague and of friend. * * * My research was generously supported by a fellowship from the Fol- ger Shakespeare Library, as well as by grants from Tulane University and Emory University. Portions of chapter i of this book first appeared in different forms as “Pleasure and Devotion: The Body of Jesus in Seventeenth-Century Reli¬ gious Lyric,” in Queering the Renaissance, ed. Jonathan Goldberg (Dur¬ ham: Duke University Press, 1994); “Christ’s Ganymede,” Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 7 (1995): 77-96; and “Homodevotion,” in Cruising the Performative: Interventions into the Representation of Ethnicity, Nationality, and Sexuality, ed. Sue-Ellen Case, Philip Brett, and Susan Leigh Foster (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995). . Xll . Note on Texts I have used the following editions: John Donne, The Oxford Authors, ed. John Carey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); The Sermons of John Donne, ed. George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson, 10 vols. (Berke¬ ley: University of California Press, 1953-62); George Herbert and Henry Vaughan, The Oxford Authors, ed. Louis L. Martz (Oxford: Oxford Uni¬ versity Press, 1986); The Complete Poetry of Richard Crashaw, The Stuart Editions, ed. George Walton Williams (New York: New York University Press, 1972); Thomas Traherne: Selected Poems and Prose, ed. Alan Brad¬ ford (London: Penguin, 1991); and John Milton, The Oxford Authors, ed. Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991). All citations of the Bible are according to the 1611 Autho¬ rized Version. In a few instances I have modernized some aspects of the seventeenth-century texts I cite. Introduction Sacked Ekoticisms The underlying affinity between sanctity and transgression has never ceased to be felt. Even in the eyes of believers, the libertine is nearer to the saint than the man without desire. — Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality This is a book about devotion: devotion, specifically, as a form of desire. Much, though not all, of this study turns on a re¬ reading of English devotional literature, both verse and prose, from the early to the mid-seventeenth century, a span that traditionally has been esteemed as marking the apex of religious writing in the language. My concern with this literature does not derive simply from its cultural prestige, however. I am also drawn to it as a litera¬ ture of heightened affect, produced as such, especially among those poets grouped together under the name of “the metaphysicals,” as a daringly experimental expressive project. That is, I am interested in the manner by which religious (and other ecstatic) texts represent and stimulate affect, particularly in its most amplified registers. One means by which this pro¬ cess transpires in devotional writing involves its reliance upon structuring analogies to erotic expression and experience. “If [Christ] come not yet into thee, stirre up thy spirituall concupiscence,” prompts Francis Rous in a devotional manual titled The Mysticall Marriage, or Experimentall Dis¬ coveries of the heavenly Marriage between a Soule and her Savior (1631). “Therewith,” Rous continues, “let thy soul lust mightily for him.” 1 Who can engage the literature of Christian devotion and not be struck by how often it speaks of religious affect in terms of—even as—sex? Of course, to address God amorously as “My Lord, my Love,” as George Herbert does (“The Search,” line 2), or to look forward to the coming nup¬ tials of Christ and his Church, or to blazon the physical beauty of Jesus in the throes of what is evocatively termed his Passion: all this was then and, to a certain extent, remains now a devotional commonplace. But what does that mean? Too often interpretation desists at the point of such a de¬ termination, as if the status of being conventional would make a discursive Closet Devotions construct or a sentiment any less thick with significance. I will be arguing that, on the contrary, the very conventionality of such expressions marks them as all the more meaningfully impacted. Hence the project of Closet Devotions is to read through—indeed, to read into—the conventions and conceits of what I call, after Bataille, sacred eroticism . 1 My aim in doing so is to press beyond the impasse represented by the designation “simply con¬ ventional” and thereby to unsettle some of the usual pieties that continue to govern discussions of the interface between religion and eroticism, as well as between the soul and the body, the spiritual and the material. Having invoked the question of the body’s place in the sphere of reli¬ gious devotion, I want to situate this book in relation to the seminal work that has been done on this topic over the past decade and a half. Through the endeavors of distinguished cultural historians such as Leo Steinberg, Caroline Walker Bynum, Peter Brown, and others, the body has begun to be restored to its place at the very core of pre- and early modern religious expression. 3 Closet Devotions looks to extend the scholarship that has been undertaken in these earlier periods to the seventeenth century and beyond. In doing so, I will be examining representations of the devout body, along with the body of Jesus and its various spectacularized figurations in ex¬ tremis, in the canonical poetry of the period (particularly the verse of John Donne, George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, Henry Vaughan, and Thomas Traherne); in prose texts such as sermons, devotional manuals, prayer books, spiritual diaries, personal testimonies, and prophecy; and finally in some of the substantial religious materials produced over the course of the seventeenth century by women writers (including Aemilia Lanyer, Anne Wentworth, Elizabeth Singer, and Sarah Davy, among others). These texts afford us a plethora of affectively charged sites for tracing the complex overlappings and relays between religious devotion and erotic desire, as well as between the interiorized operations of the spirit and the material conditions of the body. Articulating a devotion that is profoundly attuned to the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation, of God becoming flesh —be¬ coming a man—these religious works exhibit surprisingly little inclination to efface the corporeal. Rather, they proffer a spirituality that paradoxi¬ cally bespeaks embodiment, doing so in ways that often enhance or extend the expressive possibilities of bodies and desires. Following the work of Bynum and Steinberg, I will thus be arguing that Christianity’s relation to the body cannot adequately be accounted for only in terms of an ascetic repudiation of the flesh—a task that, as Sacred Eroticisms Bynum’s studies of medieval female penitential practices illustrate, can itself be nothing short of corporeally spectacular. Like Bynum, then, I am interested in how religion has made use of the body and the passions in sig¬ nifying, even amplifying, devotion. I am also interested, however, in how the erotic conversely—perversely? —uses the religious to enhance its own affects. Moreover, in view of the writings of Georges Bataille and Michel Foucault, as well as recent studies in the history of sexuality, I want to probe some of the terms under which the body and the bodily have been thus far recovered to devotion’s expressive repertories. As I will lay out in more substantive detail in what follows, I am especially troubled by the ways in which the pioneering and still prevailing scholarship on devo¬ tion has too readily circumscribed both the libidinal and the transgressive potentialities of the sacred body, whether it be the body of Jesus or a saint or an individual Christian devotee. In Leo Steinberg’s bold study, The Sexu¬ ality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion, an astonishing assemblage of images that compromise modern decorum in their nearly exhibitionist presentation of a sexed and naked Christ, this circumscrip¬ tion takes the form of a hermeneutically delimiting theologism. For Stein¬ berg carefully hedges with reference to dogma only the field of available meanings of and responses to representations of Jesus’ arrestingly exposed body —as though, for instance, Michelangelo’s nude, impressively muscled Risen Christ (fig. i) would then (or now) stimulate reflection, as Steinberg implies, only upon the doctrine of the Resurrection. 4 In Bynum’s work on female mystics and saints, these interpretively straitening impulses disclose themselves in her propensity to see the devotional body as operating chiefly in the most orthodox formats. One thus finds Bynum reading nearly every somatic expression of female piety, no matter how apparently outlandish or perverse it is to modern (or, for that matter, premodern) sensibilities, through a normalizing semiotics of marriage, impregnation, lactation, or food preparation: a set of terms that keeps the female body, even in its most ecstatic states, quite properly domesticated. “Women’s symbols [of spiritual life],” Bynum thereby concludes in Holy Feast and Holy Fast, “did not reverse social fact, they enhanced it” (279). Bynum further notes that in spiritual expression women, in contrast to men, tend “to elaborate as symbols aspects of life closer to ordinary experience,” which she then par¬ enthetically delineates for us as “eating, suffering, lactating” (293). Following Bataille’s ecstatic theorems on the complementarity of the sacred and illicit, 5 my interests abide more with excess, transgression, and Figure i. Jesus as an icon of male beauty. Michelangelo, Risen Christ, c. 1514-20. S. Maria sopra Minerva, Rome, Italy. Courtesy of Alinari/Art Resource, New York. Sacred Eroticisms the heterodoxies of gender and eroticism that can be embraced and in¬ habited through the mechanisms of devotion. The religious poetry of the metaphysicals, with its colliding decorums of spirituality and carnality, sanctity and profanity, provides a compelling site, we shall see, for this kind of foray through devotion’s intensities and expressive perversities. But these effects can also be glimpsed here by returning for a moment to the enticement from Francis Rous’s Mysticall Marriage with which we began: “If [Christ] come not yet into thee, stirre up thy spirituall con¬ cupiscence, and therewith let thy soul lust mightily for him.” Note that what Rous proffers is not simply an invitation to love Christ; rather, it is a provocation to concupiscence —a “spirituall concupiscence,” but concu¬ piscence nonetheless. Rous’s text aims to incite something more galvanic than any anodyne sentiment of devotional fealty. To do so, he invokes a form of sexual appetite—lust—that is no other than a sin, the very trans- gressivity of this carnal desire serving as the expressive mechanism by which religious affect is to be stimulated and enhanced. Nothing heats the passions, it has been said, like the taboo. In considering sacred eroticism as eroticism, as a form of sexual ex¬ pression, I do not mean to imply that some essential form of the erotic exists prior to its specific and changing cultural or historical instantia¬ tions. Nor that the sexual necessarily underwrites every desire or every semiotics of the body. That said, we nonetheless need to ask how it is that the sexual seems to appear so prominently in the devotional writing of this period. Was it, moreover, recognized as such —as sexual—then? What did it mean for these seventeenth-century Christians to envision and to speak of themselves as being ravished by God or lusting after Christ? Obviously it is not satisfactory to pass off suc h voi cings of desire and passion as merely metaphorical, especially if that desi gnation performs the function of enervating these expressions, of dulling their affective or transgressive ch arge. Another question —one no less legitimate to my thinking—is also what we, centuries later, may want to make of, how we may experience, this historical inheritance of sexualized devotion, with its erotic Christ— “a naked man, utterly desirable,” as the title character in the 1995 film Priest (directed by Antonia Bird) finds himself, to his own dismay, view¬ ing Jesus. At once a historicist and an unrepentant presentist, I look here to theorize devotional desire and to map the expressive forms it has both taken and may take in relation to bodies, affects, and eroticisms, the homo¬ erotic no less than the heteroerotic. Closet Devotions does so principally from the vantage of the “prayer closet” of private religious devotion, a Closet Devotions perhaps unusual site for such a query, but a culturally central and abiding one nonetheless. As we see from Priest, as well as the tellingly overwrought public con¬ troversy attendant upon Disney’s release of the film, the excitations and agitations of sacred eroticism are by no means relics belonging to a past, more baroque culture of religious enthusiasm now placidly dissipated. Hence throughout this study I have been mindful to pose early modern religious artifacts in relation to more recent representations and usages of devotional desire, ranging from Tony Kushner’s critically lauded and com¬ mercially successful Angels in America plays to queer agitprop; from pho¬ tographer Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ (a metaphysical conceit of the sort that one feels could almost have been propounded by Donne in one of his characteristic feats of audacious juxtaposition, or concocted by Crashaw in accordance with his liquefacient poetics) to contemporary pornogra¬ phy, understood in this context specifically as a discourse of the hyper- visualized body and its operations. By means of such reframings across history and across cultural status—the early modern with the contempo¬ rary, the high with the low, the devout with the parodic—my aim here is not only to try to think outside some of the protocols governing current historicizing work on devotion and desire (“in those days they couldn’t have meant that” — “that” typically being the sexual and, most often, the sexually transgressive). More important, by imbricating a reading of the canonical religious literature of the Renaissance with a variously fetched ensemble of contemporary cultural texts, I look to stage a historical salvo in Christianity’s own terms —in Christianity’s own canonic perversities— against its mobilization on behalf of a censoriously normalizing social and cultural vision, whether that ministration comes in the rigidly uncompro¬ mising guise of traditional orthodoxies and fundamentalisms or through the mainstreaming religiosocial tactics of the New Christian Right. Chris¬ tianity, of course, exists as no singular theology, philosophical concep¬ tion, or social structure. Yet, however it is constructed, Christianity’s own myths, institutions, and cultural expressions offer too many transit points to the ecstatic, the excessive, the transgressive, the erotic to be allowed to serve tenably in such a censorious capacity, to be cast as a force field for the proscription of desire and its ever-wanton vagaries. Religion and Christianity in particular rate among our culture’s most venerated institutions. No doubt, then, there are those who will find the central concern of this book—the interrelations between devotion and eroticism in its several forms and registers—to be itself perverse. As what Sacred Eroticisms follows will show, however, those looking to deny any affiliation between these modes of desire are the ones outside the scope of tradition. * * * I listen to the message’s transport, not the message. — Roland Barthes, Sade/Fourier/Loyola The first and longest chapter of this study, “Christ’s Ganymede,” treats the aspect of devotion and desire that has come to be the most phobi- cally resisted and repudiated: the possibility that devotion to Christ might be invested as a site of erotic expressions, interests, and energies that are homoerotic . 6 To render a fuller treatment of Christian devotion and homoeroticism than this important topic has yet received, I afford a spe¬ cial place of prominence here to male devotional desire amorously attuned to a male Christ . 7 My other reason for highlighting male religious authors is that the seventeenth-century literary canon remains predominantly — though no longer exclusively—male, and I want to make my arguments concerning the constitutive excesses and transgressions of the sacred prin¬ cipally at a site where they might bear the greatest cultural capital. The book’s second chapter, “Devotion and Desire,” looks to provide an account of sacred eroticism(s) that neither reduces religious desire into more or less sublimated sexual longing nor anesthetizes devotion’s libidi- nal pulse. In doing so, this chapter replays many of the concerns of the preceding one, but both more expansively and more theoretically: more theoretically, inasmuch as I endeavor to provide a more phenomenological account of the tropes and terms of sacred eroticism, one that shies away from bounding their expressive force under the restraints of the “merely” metaphorical; more expansively, in that this part of the book opens more fully onto devotion’s ecstatic trafficking across a wide purview of affec¬ tively imbued social positions (lover, bride, bridegroom, friend, ephebe, household intimate, servant, mother, father, child, pupil, and so forth) in its highly transitive, even volatile configurations of the bonds between Christ and Christian. While not leaving behind chapter one’s structuring concern with homoeroticized religious expression, I look in this por¬ tion of the book to give more play to devotion’s polytropic erotics —an erotics, we shall see, that is seldom constrained to a strictly dichotomous schematization of heterosexuality/homosexuality. The final chapter of the book, “The Prayer Closet,” delivers a material Closet Devotions location for the devotional affects treated in the first two chapters. Here the relations between religious practice and the self’s sense of itself— devotion’s subjectivity effects, as it were—can be more fully elaborated. How are religious devotion and the various expressive forms it takes to be mapped onto the procedures of subjectivity, of how the self regards and acts upon itself? When does devotional desire work to undermine, rather than consolidate, the structures of selfhood? How does a developing, chiefly (but not exclusively) Protestant culture of private, personal devo¬ tion—“closet devotion” as it comes to be called in the period—function in terms of what Foucault has named technologies of the self, by which he means those techniques that “permit individuals to affect, by their own means, a certain number of operations on their own bodies, their own souls, their own thoughts, their own conduct, and this in a manner so as to transform themselves, modify themselves, and to attain a certain state of perfection, happiness, purity, supernatural power”: in short, the work of the self upon the self? 8 In keeping with my emphasis throughout this study on Christianity’s relation to the body, I frame these subjectifying concerns in materialist, and not simply spiritual or psychological, terms. More par¬ ticularly, I am interested in how seventeenth-century devotional literature establishes the prayer closet both as a metafigurally incorporated condi¬ tion of inwardness within the individual Christian and, at the same time, as a materialized place —a special room—within the Christian household, one whose architecture and even furnishing we find thoroughly detailed in the devotional manuals of the time. Along with its function as an interiorizing apparatus, the prayer closet is increasingly designated in this literature as the private space in which the body—its gestures, motions, and voice—can be more fully brought to bear upon the performance of devotion. Correlative to the enhanced role accorded to the body in closet devotion, the prayer closet is also posited as a kind of vortex for the intensification of religious affect. “Godliness,” Thomas Brooks thus contends in The Privy Key of Heaven, or Twenty Argu¬ ments for Closet-Prayer (1665), “never rises to a higher pitch than when men keep closest to their closets.” 9 Materialized as such, as a special room in the house, the prayer closet is not only a privileged devotional place, but also a place of privilege, of economic and social prerogative. Accord¬ ingly, the literature of closet devotion—an emergent seventeenth-century religious subgenre, I suggest—is rather exclusively addressed to those who have both the means and the leisure for what another seventeenth-century divine calls “Closet-work.” I stress this point here, at the outset of this Sacred Eroticisms study, as a check on any notion that religious devotion, even when it reaches its most ecstatic parameters, can utterly transume the contours of the social. Nonetheless, as much as religious devotion —even the sacred itself—is a social practice, its relation to the normal order of things is seldom strictly circumscribed to the orthodox. Rather, like desire and its vicissitudes, devotion can also take its pangs and its pleasures elsewhere. This book looks to that elsewhere. I Christ's Ganymede The King of the gods once loved a Trojan boy named Ganymede. — Ovid, Metamorphoses Both highly lauded within its own West Hollywood indus¬ try and seized during a St. Valentine’s Day police raid on a Chicago adult theater, the gay porn videotape More of a Man opens, as these things go, with its leading man Vito on his knees. 1 Before him is a naked male form. Vito, still kneeling, hoarsely to the same: “You name it, I’ll do it.” The setting for this alluring scene of solicitation happens to be an empty chapel, and the unclothed male form Vito so addresses is an effigy of Jesus on the cross, dangling from the rosary beads bound up in his clasped hands —the video thereby offering Christ’s as the first of the uncovered male bodies to be exhibited across its erotic field of vision. Commencing a sexual narrative in church, against a backdrop of votive candles and church bells, is in this case more than simply a gay male recasting of the devotional chic of Madonna’s “Like a Prayer” music video, the “sacrilegious” sensation of the year before. 2 Nor, more important, is this staging, however scandalous it might appear to some, proffered as a profanation. Indeed, More of a Man's allotment of a representation of Christ in his “Passion” its own place within gay por¬ nography’s carnival of desired and desiring male bodies is a provocation arguably more than a little overdetermined by Christianity’s own contra¬ dictory, closeted libidinalities. For here is an institution whose culturally venerable assessment of same-sex desire is (perhaps now more than ever) predominantly censori¬ ous, yet one which has also sought to stimulate devotion by the display made of a male body iconicized in extremis —a nearly naked man offered up to our gazes (“Ecce homo”) for worship, desire, and various kinds of identification. What, then, is to be said of the place of Christ in the affective schemes of Christian devotion? In Epistemology of the Closet Eve Kosof- sky Sedgwick remarks that while “Christianity may be near-ubiquitous in Closet Devotions modern European culture as a figure of phobic prohibition, ... it makes a strange figure for that indeed.” “Catholicism in particular,” she continues, is famous for giving countless gay and proto-gay children the shock of the possibility of adults who don’t marry, of men in dresses, of passionate the¬ atre, of introspective investment, of lives filled with what could, ideally without diminution, be called the work of the fetish. . . . And presiding over all are the images of Jesus. These have, indeed, a unique position in modern culture as images of the unclothed or unclothable male body, often in extremis and/or ecstasy, prescriptively meant to be gazed at and adored. The scandal of such a figure within a homophobic economy of the male gaze doesn’t seem to abate: efforts to disembody this body, for instance by attenuating, Europeanizing, or feminizing it, only entangle it the more com- promisingly among various modern figurations of the homosexual . 3 More of a Man offers graphic —hard-core pornographic —testimonial to this usually scrupulously closeted “entanglement,” climactically emblema¬ tized by the video’s final shot: a bedside freeze-frame of Vito’s rosary be¬ side a spent condom. Narrativized as the coming-out story of this deeply conflicted, aggressively virile, Italian, Catholic construction worker, the video undertakes a reconciliation of Vito’s devotion to Christ, his corre¬ spondingly fervent (though he feels illicit) sexual desire for the male body, and his emphatically maintained identity as a “man’s man.” Thus Vito’s opening solicitation (“You name it, I’ll do it”) is embedded in an anx¬ ious supplication that Christ rid him of what he terms “all these crazy thoughts . . . okay, okay, these impure thoughts.” But from this point on, coming as though it were the divine answer to his prayer (if hardly the one he expects), Vito is guided through a series of escalating homosexual en¬ counters. In the tape’s next scene he thus heads from the “prayer closet” of the empty chapel to another kind of closet, one that’s a more familiar set piece of gay porn: the water closet, or the public restroom. There he reciprocally penetrates and is penetrated by another man, sexual acts that are athletically performed through an orifice in the water closet door, the slang term for which is, incidentally, a “glory hole” —a naming that itself accords the scene something of a sacred nimbus. To this encounter, like all those that follow, Vito carries with him the rosary beads of the open¬ ing scene: a token, I take it, of Christ’s sanctioning accompaniment. The conclusion of the tape finds Vito now “out” enough to ride shirtless atop a float in a gay pride parade. Then he heads right inside the float itself. . 12 . Christ’s Ganymede Accompanying him is Duffy, a comparably butch L.A. Dodgers fan, but also, as it happens, a dedicated AIDS activist. Vito and Duffy’s coupling inside the gay pride float not only brings off their tape-long flirtation as the climactic sexual (and romantic) “number” of the pornographic narrative; this scene also consummates, as Mandy Merck suggests in her provocative discussion of More of a Man, a redemptive conjoining of religion, sex, and political activism. 4 Salvation is thus wrought for the symbolically, as well as ethnically, named Vito, but not at all in the terms of his original prayer, terms that would have maintained a phobic opposition between his reli¬ gious devotion and his homosexuality, as well as between his virility and his desire for men. Redemption, the answer to prayer, instead arrives in the form of a coming out of the closet into pleasure and devotion. Apropos of Sedgwick’s intimations, as well as the homodevotional allurements of More of a Man, this chapter traces some of the circuits of male desire, vectored to and through Christ’s body, that continue to mag¬ netize the Christian prayer closet with a homoerotic penumbra. In doing so, however, I want now to turn back from the contemporary televisual medium of video pornography to another, in this case early modern, tech¬ nology for processing (and producing) identity, desire, and affect. The representational mode I have in mind here is the seventeenth-century devo¬ tional lyric poem, an expressive achievement, I noted in the introduction, widely regarded as a high point of religious writing in English. Here we find voicings of devotion to Jesus that (in the reverse of Sedgwick’s formula¬ tion) seldom look “to disembody this body.” Here, particularly in the verse of those male poets loosely grouped together as “the metaphysicals,” we find figurations of devotion, desire, and redemption that are indeed hardly less corporeally spectacularized than those that comprise the conversion- minded porn with which I began. And here, in the prayer closet of private devotion, we find John Donne, George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, and Thomas Traherne, among other religious writers of the period, more or less self-consciously reassigning in same-sex configurations (male God, male devotee) the erotic postures and blandishing conceits of the Renaissance love lyric. All this in the endeavor, as more than one of these authors frames it, of “courting” a profoundly desirable Christ, a beautiful Lord and Savior: Thou art my loveliness, my life, my light, Beauty alone to me: Thy bloody death and undeserved, makes thee Pure red and white. • H • Closet Devotions In this stanza from Herbert’s poem “Dullness” (lines 9-12), Christ’s Pas¬ sion is aestheticized and made amorous in terms of the conventional white- and-red color scheme of the erotic blazon. Jesus’ wounded body likewise blooms white and red in one of Crashaw’s several epigrams on the wound¬ ing of the Circumcision as a highly chromatic prefigurement of the Cruci¬ fixion: “Ah cruel knife! which first commanded such fair lilies / to change into such cruel roses” (“In circumcisionem,” lines 1-2). From the religious application of such amorous conceits issues a mode of devotional expres¬ sion that turns on a deeply affective, often unblushingly erotic, desire for Jesus and his body—“This beauteous form,” as one of Donne’s Holy Son¬ nets envisions it (“What if this present were the world’s last night?”), “This sweeter body,” as a Crashaw hymn adoringly echoes (“Office of the Holy Cross,” “Compline”). 5 “For beauty hee hath no match among men,” the English divine Samuel Rutherford likewise asseverates in Christ Dying and Drawing Sinners to Himself (1647). “Christ hath a most goodly face,” continues Rutherford: an estimation of physical beauty and desir¬ ability that is reflected in any number of Renaissance portraits of Jesus, such as the markedly handsome Christ Carrying the Cross (Circle of Gio¬ vanni Bellini) (fig. z ). 6 Christ’s physical attributes are also the subject of Leo Steinberg’s The Sexuality of Christ. Steinberg’s bold expose of the denuded and phalli- cally endowed images of Christ that abound in Renaissance visual art graphically illustrates the extent to which Christianity is an incarnational religion, one that can turn ostentatious in its desire to render the Savior as fully human and, what is more, as expressly, as functionally male. The poets with whom I am concerned here similarly show themselves to be deeply attuned —sometimes rapturously, sometimes bathetically—to what it means that the Word became flesh, that Jesus (in Pope Leo the Great’s canonic formulation) was “born true God in the entire and perfect nature of true man, complete in his own properties, complete in ours that he was (as the Council of Chalcedon declares) “of one substance with the Father as regards his Godhead, ... of one substance with us as regards his man¬ hood; like us in all respects, apart from sin.” 7 Or again, as an anonymous 1614 English sermon on “The Mysterie of Christs Nativitie” insists: “Un¬ doubtedly he was a true man, and had a true, naturall, and not a celestiall and phantasticall body.” 8 Seventeenth-century religious verse is densely nuanced psychologically, yet arguably many of its most profound subjectivity effects are incited, in accordance with the incarnational theology I have here been calling to the • 14 • Christ’s Ganymede Figure z. “Christ hath a most goodly face.” Circle of Giovanni Bellini, Christ Carrying the Cross, c. 1505-1510. Courtesy of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston. fore, by this poetry’s reflection upon Christ’s body in its extreme vulnera¬ bility as a body, as a truly human form, not a “phantasticall” one. Hence, the excruciating psychic and physical contortions of Donne’s “Good Fri¬ day, 1613. Riding Westward.” Here the poet pathically envisages the image of Christ crucified as “That spectacle of too much weight for me” (line 16), • 15 • Closet Devotions and he literally turns his back upon the Passion to ride away in the oppo¬ site direction. Despite Donne’s renunciatory efforts, however, the poem remains an unnerving confrontation with just such a shattering sight: Could I behold those hands which span the poles, And tune all spheres at once, pierced with those holes? Could I behold that endless height which is Zenith to us, and to’our antipodes, Humbled below us? or that blood which is The seat of all our souls, if not of his, Made dirt of dust, or that flesh which was worn By God, for his apparel, ragged, and torn? (lines 21-28) Consider also the eerie internalized monologue Herbert assigns to the physically brutalized Christ in “The Sacrifice,” as his sacred body under¬ goes, step by step, the ritual desecration of crucifixion, all of which leaves the Savior wondering, in the poem’s echoing, nearly hysterical refrain, “Was ever grief like mine?”: Shame tears my soul, my body many a wound: Sharp nails pierce this, but sharper that confound; Reproaches, which are free, while I am bound. Was ever grief like mine? (lines 217-20) Coincident with their devotion to Christ’s spectacularly exposed and traumatically violated physical body, these poets rarely show much incli¬ nation utterly to transume their own. Rather, as Donne (citing the church father Tertullian) puts it so encompassingly in a 1623 Easter sermon, “All that the soul does, it does in, and with, and by the body.” 9 Donne’s writing, like so much seventeenth-century devotional expression, espouses a devo¬ tion that is cathected onto the corporeal: a spirituality that, paradoxically, keeps returning us to the physical body and its operations, even —or all the more so—in any pietistic endeavor to discipline or rein them in. Caroline Walker Bynum makes a similar case in Holy Feast and Holy Fast concern¬ ing the hyperbolic penitential practices of late medieval female saints and mystics. The prodigious fasts and unnerving eating habits of these ex¬ traordinary women, their deliberate courting of physical illness, even their sallies into self-mutilation —all this, Bynum argues compellingly, is less a . 16 . Christ’s Ganymede simple abnegation of the body than an ecstatic, devotional manipulation of the conditions of corporeality. Such feats should thus be seen, she writes, “more as elaborate changes rung upon possibilities provided by fleshiness than as flights from physicality” (6), as “the experiencing of body more than the controlling of it” (245). For these devotees, even denigrated flesh can be made to instantiate the faith of the soul it encases, the body being redemptively reappropriated as an implement of heightened devotional expressivity rather than repudiated as always no more than a gross weight or hindrance to it. To be sure, the forms of piety we find in the religious cultures of early modern England tend to be quite different from the medi¬ eval Catholic extravaganzas that light up Bynum’s account. Nonetheless, I will be arguing throughout this book that numerous seventeenth-century Protestant devotional authors—those within the Church of England as well as those without—continue to employ the body and its metaphors as means to stimulate and to enhance devotional expression. 10 Like Donne, these poets and divines activate the corporeal as an expressive mechanism of devotion, one that is coenesthetic of “all that the soul does.” Following Bynum, then, I suggest that these religious texts offer an early modern discourse of the body and its passions no less than they provide a discourse of the soul. Yet I want also to reconsider and to interrogate some of the terms under which the bodily has been thus far recovered into view in prevailing accounts (including those of Bynum and Steinberg) of pre- and early modern Christianity. For, despite the talk here of foreground¬ ing and extending corporeal meanings and operations within the sphere of devotion, this scholarship displays a recurring impulse to rein in or curtail the more manifold libidinalities of the very “fleshiness” (to use Bynum’s term) it has itself insisted upon. Moreover, this policing of the flesh tends, we shall see, to be enforced most stridently (if often only implicitly) over questions of religion and the erotic, particularly the homoerotic. The metaphysicals, with their characteristic mise-en-scene of the spiri¬ tual bordering the carnal, the sacred abutting the profane, supply what are perhaps the most provocative grounds for interrogating the orthodoxies of current scholarship on devotion, desire, and the body; indeed, the vola¬ tile heterodoxies of these poets make such reconsideration a requisite. Achieving their effects with a rhetoric of the extreme and often deliber¬ ately courting the perverse, Donne, Herbert, Crashaw, and their fellows have accrued from their own time down into ours more charges of excess, indecorousness, and queerness than one finds imputed to any other early • 17 • Closet Devotions modern literary practice. In fact, the ascription of gross impropriety and a hyperbolism bordering on unnaturalness are among the formative features of Samuel Johnson’s construction (following Dryden) of a metaphysical “school” of poetry: Their thoughts are often new but seldom natural; they are not obvious, but neither are they just; and the reader, far from wondering that he missed them, wonders more frequently by what perverseness of industry they were ever found.... The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons and allusions; their learning instructs and their subtlety surprises, but the reader commonly thinks his improvement dearly bought, and though he sometimes admires, is seldom pleased.... Their wish was only to say what they hoped had been never said before. . . . What they wanted however of the sublime they en¬ deavored to supply by hyperbole. “Their amplification,” he concludes with displeasure, “had no limits.” 11 Following Johnson (though leaving behind his censure), I am interested in what could be termed the experimental habitus of the metaphysicals: their desire, as he puts it, “to say what they hoped had been never said before.” I am also interested in metaphysical transgressivity and the preva¬ lence in these poets of exclamations of devotional affect so intensified that they encroach upon the taboo. This inclination to press the terms of the sacred to their limit—to an interface with the profane—is powerfully ex¬ emplified in Donne’s Holy Sonnet “Batter my heart, three-personed God,” one of the most anthologized religious poems from the period and one that will be a touchstone text for my discussion as well. In this astonishing sonnet, Donne’s extreme agitations for spiritual satisfaction from his God take shape as a divine abduction and rape fantasy—one that is framed, as I will consider later, in metaphoric terms that cut back and forth across gender positions and forms of eroticism. At this point in the discussion, I want simply to suggest that the hyperbole, the downright violence of religious desire in a text like Donne’s “Batter my heart,” if not wholly recoverable, may perhaps best be appreciated by us now, not in terms of the canons of Bynum’s social orthodoxies or Steinberg’s theologism, but rather in something more like what I have been here offering as my own perverse metaphysical conceit in the juxtaposition of metaphysical religious devotion and contemporary pornography. However disparate in cultural status and representational history these forms may be, both are . 18 . Christ’s Ganymede strikingly exhibitionist in their drive to bring into view the body and its most extreme performances and paroxysms, whether of pleasure or devo¬ tion—and often both at once. To put it another way: like pornography, metaphysical poetry is great in its excesses. In keeping then with the metaphysicals’ propensity for the hyperbolic and the transgressive, I will consider how discourses of the sacred can serve to authorize the ecstatic, the excessive, and the illicit. More particu¬ larly, I am interested in devotional modes and expressions that expand — and at times even violate—cultural orthodoxies, especially but not only those having to do with the body, gender, eroticism, and homoeroticism. A number of such prospects, as we have already begun to examine, be¬ come activated around the figure of Jesus and his body’s privileged status within a Christian libidinal scheme that both abjects and stimulates same- sex possibilities. Moreover, we will find Christ’s body—which is the body of God, but also the body made to bear all the corporeal functions, in¬ firmities, and sins of humankind —sited at the breach between sacrosanct cultural boundaries. Christ’s body, in other words, is one that by its very nature keeps exceeding, keeps transgressing the bounds of the licit, doing so in ways that touch upon the profane, the defiled—even, I am going to suggest, the sodomitical in its diffuse early modern shape as the cultural category of ultimate stigmatization. ECCE HOMO: CHRIST AND THE ORIFICIAL BODY Ye sonnes of Salem, see Gods glorious Sonne, Enrob’d with Wounds, and Blood, all goarie-gay! —John Davies, The Holy Roode ... to hang upon him that hangs upon the Crosse, there bath in his teares, there suck at his woundes... — Donne, Death’s Duel It is precisely as the bearer of conflicted cultural encodings that Christ’s violated body is so intently held in view in seventeenth-century devotional poetry. “See, see, ah see,” John Davies repeatedly solicits in his lengthy, • 19 • Closet Devotions sensationalized Crucifixion poem The Holy Roode (1609). 12 Subtitled a “Speaking-picture,” this thirty-page lyric presents Christ’s Passion as a hypertrophy of the visual: But, O my Soule! to stirre, in thee devotion, Upon this ground of Griefe thine Eie still fixe: See here the King of Heav’ns Earthly promotion, Crown’d with sharp Thornes, and made a Crucifixe. Such Sight a squemish stomacke overturnes O see my Soule, ah cast thy carefull Eie Upon this Miracle-surmounting Wonder! The Body of thy God is wrencht awry, And . .. Is . . . made crooked that was ever streight. See how the sweat fals from his bloodlesse Browes Now, Eie of Sp’rite behold this spectacle . .. And see if you can any place espie About that Body, free from Wounds, or Bloes... Looke on this Crosse .. . (12-19) And so forth, stanza upon stanza. Like Donne’s “Good Friday, 1613” and Herbert’s “The Sacrifice,” Davies’s Holy Roode directs us to fix our gaze in particular upon the profanation of Jesus’ body: Behold his Body, that nere Filth could touch, Is now defil’d with Blood, and festred Sores, Both which (thou seest) that Body all begores! (18) Begored and putrescent, Christ’s body is here marked as defiled in¬ asmuch as it is an opened and porous body, a site (to adapt the terms of anthropologist Mary Douglas) where corporeal (and, metonymically, societal) boundaries have been breached, where what belongs inside the body has spilled out onto its surface, thus polluting it. 13 In John Hayward’s . 20 . Christ’s Ganymede book of devotions called The Sanctuarie of a troubled soule (1604), “golden streames” issue from Christ’s body and mix with this overflow of blood, tears, and gore, thereby spectacularizing the Crucifixion as the scene of utter hydraulic release (fig. 3). 14 The seventeenth-century New England poet Edward Taylor elaborates a similar devotional conceit: God’s onely Son doth hug Humanity, Into his very person. By which Union His Humane Veans its golden gutters ly. And rather than my Soule should dy by thirst, These Golden Pipes, to give me drink, did burst. 15 One doesn’t need to travel very far, conceit-wise, to get from Taylor’s “golden gutters,” Hayward’s “golden streames,” and the liquescent Cru¬ cifixion woodcut to the consanguineous religious iconography of the con¬ temporary photographer Andres Serrano, particularly his immensely con¬ troversial Piss Christ (fig. 4), an image whose complex of meanings lies in Serrano’s own evocatively metaphysical juxtaposition of the sacred and the profane, of Christ and the stuff of the “golden gutters.” Jesse Helms and the other Christian fundamentalists who denounced Piss Christ as blasphemous were right, I think, to recognize this photograph as a “shock¬ ing act.” 16 Indeed, nothing would be further from my aim here than to drain off this image’s shock value —or any of the value of shock value. Yet the insouciance, the perversion, of Serrano’s representation of Christ must also be contextualized in terms of Christianity’s own (orthodox) perversities. Piss Christ fully implicates Christ—just as the doctrine of the Incarnation necessarily does—within the human, within the processes of the body. “Inter faeces et urinam nascimur,” Augustine unflinchingly as¬ serted: we are born between shit and piss. And if this is humankind’s reality, it must also be so for the Son of Man. As Serrano’s shocking, and shockingly beautiful, photograph of a crucifix adrift in a refulgent red- gold color field of (defiling? purifying?) bodily fluid so powerfully recalls for us, the effect of the utter immersion of God within the conditions of corporeality turns out to be at once disconcertingly abasing as well as transformatively etherealizing—both for Christ and for the human body and its products. No less than Serrano’s Piss Christ, the Renaissance devo¬ tional texts we have been considering understand this divinely mandated double-valencing, whereby the body of Jesus is rendered at once resplen¬ dent and “a meere Offence!” as Davies’s poem likewise proclaims (18). The sheer profanity of the Crucifixion is also registered in Herbert’s . 21 . j-ifciwf imir i\>l» t#irU f*Mt *ur ^^uiv ^ l}ci*c i! \yu ftp* irruulxi^c^ic btttgijcnlipaf- Aj>vtAc (Vtc aiW- flOC4^j|W CM Oi itmhi frofcki* »ll£ U*t- fc-ct^Ve YV l '-' : W!kfl ®in4iwJ ^a*’tt«ie iotfjm ttAka* cKn^ct*^ ^5t* tn* mu* ml Figure 3. Christ ejaculating blood. Woodcut, Ecce Homo, unknown origin, c. 1450. By permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library. Christ’s Ganymede Figure 4. Serrano’s metaphysical conceit. Andres Serrano, Piss Christ, 1987. Courtesy of Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. poem “The Cross,” which ambivalently deems Christ’s Passion a “strange and uncouth thing” (line 1). This uncouthness is more graphically depicted in De Cruce . . . Ad sacram profanamque (1606), a Latin treatise by the Dutch philosopher Justus Lipsius on the iconography of the cross, as well as the history and uses of crucifixion as a form of capital punishment. Like Donne’s own poem called “The Cross” (which advances a kind of Prot¬ estant defense of the cross as a devotional emblem), Lipsius’s folio-length discursus and its accompanying engravings honor and further spectacu- larize the cross by finding its form everywhere inscribed throughout the domains of the natural, the historical, and the mythic (fig. 5). 17 The image of the cross, as the title of Lipsius’s study indicates, signifies no less within the purview of the profane, however, than it does in the sacred. Just how profane, how uncouth, is imaged in an arresting plate that depicts a cru¬ ciform image of execution by impalement (fig. 6). Here the unfortunate offender’s leg is raised and bent akimbo to show explicitly that the tre¬ mendous spike whose point issues from his opened mouth entered his body through his rectum. In its collocation of cruciforms, Lipsius’s De ■ 13 ■ Closet Devotions Figure 5. Nature’s cruciforms. Engraving from Justus Lipsius, De Cruce, 1606. Courtesy of the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C. Cruce thus renders the central device of Christianity and the implement of Christ’s Passion as the ultimate form of bodily denigration and offense, crucifixion here pictorially evoking a double sodomitical violation of the body—a penetration that is at once per oram and per anum. At the same time and in much the same terms, the cross and the per¬ forated, profaned male body it presents remain available to the devout as a powerful erotic icon. “What is this strange and uncouth thing? / To make me sigh, and seek, and faint, and die,” Herbert continues in “The Cross,” responding to Christ’s Passion in terms of the lexicon and the ges¬ tural system of the conventional Petrarchan lover (lines 1-2). As in “Dull¬ ness,” the poem I cited earlier, in which Herbert addresses Jesus as “my loveliness,” devotion operates here within the scope of a Christian tra- . 24 . Christ’s Ganymede Figure 6. Crucifixion as sodomy. Engraving from Justus Lipsius, De Cruce, 1606. Cour¬ tesy of the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C. dition that finds Jesus’ exposed and macerated body to be paradoxically both a sight of horror, shame, and defilement and a vision of astonishing, even erotic beauty —a devotional convention that is, I would maintain, no less perverse for being a convention. Davies’s Holy Roode likewise offers Christ in his Passion as “The Paragon of Beautie”; “Can any Thing that hath but feeling sense / Be so obdurate,” the poem asks, “As not to melt away, in Passion hot, / To see these Passions?” (io-n). 18 In the context of early modern devotional figurations such as these, Serrano’s Piss Christ—a monumentally scaled, Cibachrome image that is nothing if not gorgeous — appears ever less the mere affront to Christianity many have taken it to be. Indeed, Serrano, who credits Renaissance art as a principal compositional ■ 2-5 • Closet Devotions source of inspiration for his painterly images, himself contends that “the best place for Piss Christ is in a church.” 19 si- si- Judging from sheer lyric output, however, no English poet was more en¬ raptured by the image of God enfleshed, uncovered, and rendered corpo¬ really vulnerable than was Richard Crashaw. In both English and Latin, Crashaw wrote and rewrote numerous epigrams, lyrics, hymns, and litur¬ gical church offices that rhapsodically hold in view Christ’s body and its often astonishing somatic effects and possibilities. What is more, along with the dozens of poems he plies on the Crucifixion, Crashaw was no less lyrically prolix when it came to such other markedly corporeal events and displays in the life of Christ as the complicated technicalities of his virgin conception, development in utero (“The mighty Son whom neither you [Nature] nor she [can] contain wholly / (believe it) is cramped by the fragile tissues / . . . / The quick organs swell with divine movement / (no more holy air moves the heavenly poles)” [“Deus sub utero virginis,” lines 3-4, 7-8), and easy parturition; his circumcision in the Temple (“these first fruits of my growing death” [“Our Lord in his Circumcision to his Father,” line 1]); the elaborate physical tortures he underwent on the road to Calvary; the preparation of his body for burial; and, finally, the post- Resurrection presentation of his still visible and manipulable wounds. The fulcrum of interest in these poems, indeed the trigger for their devotional profusions, is not merely the exhibition made of Christ’s body, but the spectacularization of it as a body that is penetrable and penetrated: “But o thy side! thy deepe dig’d side,” Crashaw thus rhapsodizes in “On the bleeding wounds of our crucified Lord” (line 13), a subject he returns to again and again throughout his several volumes of verse. What is more, Crashaw composes a number of sacred epigrams lyricizing the various implements—the priest’s circumcising blade, Doubting Thomas’s probing fingers, the whips, the thorns, nails, and lance used at Calvary—that had been employed at one time or another to open or to enter Jesus’ body: “And now th’art set wide ope, The Speare’s sad Art, / Lo! hath unlockt thee at the very Heart” (“I am the Doore,” lines 1-2). 20 Even the Roman proctor’s dismissal of Christ to his fate at the hands of the Jews is refig¬ ured by Crashaw, through his collocation of crimes against the body, as a form of bodily penetration: “Is murther no sin? or a sin so cheape, / That . 26 . Christ’s Ganymede thou need’st heape / A Rape upon’t?” he thus wonders in an epigram “To Pontius washing his blood-stained hands” (lines 1-3). 21 Among those instruments that can penetrate and enter Christ’s body is the poet’s own tool, the pen. “Are nailes blunt pens of superficial! smart?” Crashaw asks in his “Office of the Holy Crosse” (“Sixth Houre”). In “Adoro Te. The Hymn of St. Thomas in Adoration of the Blessed Sacra¬ ment,” Christ is told that “Though hidd as god, wounds writt thee man” (line 22). In his extended version of the Marian hymn “Sancta Maria Do- lorum,” Crashaw accords the Passion a more highly wrought textuality, presenting it as the scene of reduplicating inscriptions involving both Jesus and the Blessed Virgin Mary, as “son and mother / Discourse alternate wounds to one another” (stanza 3). Here Christ’s “Nailes write swords in her, which soon her heart / Payes back, with more then their own smart”—a “costly intercourse / Of deaths, and worse, / Divided loves.” These reciprocating penetrations pen what Crashaw terms “This book of loves” (stanza 6), an amorous text into which he looks to be corporeally inscribed himself. In these terms, Crashaw’s “Sancta Maria Dolorum” un¬ folds as a triangulated scene of mystic writing/wooing/wounding, with the poet hoping that by placing himself “in loves way” his “brest may catch the kisse of some kind dart, / Though as at second hand, from either heart” (stanza 7). The Hymn’s conclusion shows him courting the Blessed Virgin, circuiting through her his desire for Christ, with whom the poet wants textually to “mix wounds” and thus share in the Passion: Rich Queen, lend some releife; At least an almes of greif To’a heart who by sad right of sin Could prove the whole summe (too sure) due to him. By all those stings Of love, sweet bitter things. Which these torn hands transcrib’d on thy true heart O teach mine too the art To study him so, till we mix Wounds; and become one crucifix. (stanza 10) This “art” of penetrative transcription is evident in yet another epigram titled “On the still surviving markes of our Saviours wounds.” There the text that “Naile, or Thorne, or Speare have writ in Thee” remains “Still ■ 2.7 • Closet Devotions legible” because the poet’s pen, his means of access to Christ’s body, “did spell / Every red letter / A wound of thine” (lines 2-8) in its very activity of writing the poem. It appears, then, that for Crashaw’s verse to represent—or, as he puts it, render “legible”—the body of Jesus is to remark its wounds, its points of penetration, its openings: Now you lie open. A heavy spear has thrown back the bolt of your heart. And the nails as keys unlock you on all sides. (“Joh. 10. Ego sum ostium.”) In this epigram, Christ’s violated body is once again figured as an opened cabinet or chamber. The architectural metaphor receives further elabora¬ tion in “On our crucified Lord Naked, and bloody,” a poem that presents what is undoubtedly one of the period’s strangest devotional conceits. In it Crashaw directs us to envision Christ’s body as a “purple wardrobe,” a kind of royal clothes closet, one that has been thrown open for the re¬ moval of a viscid robe of blood. This garment, Crashaw declares, is a lamentable covering for a body he says he would prefer to envision as re¬ maining wholly naked: Th’ have left thee naked Lord, O that they had; This Garment too I would they had deny’d. Thee with thy selfe they have too richly clad, Opening the purple wardrobe of thy side. O never could bee found Garments too good For thee to weare, but these, of thine own blood. As George Walton Williams has cataloged, Crashaw recurrently tropes on bodies and various body parts as cabinets and closets, as secret spaces to be penetrated and infused with devotion. 22 In the “Hymn to the Name of Jesus,” he thus first corporealizes, gives a body to, that name—“the wealthy Brest / Of This unbounded name”— and then he implores the now incarnate divine nomination to “Unlock” in itself “thy Cabinet of day” (lines n-12, 127). Similarly, Crashaw adorns the verse “Letter to the Countess of Denbigh” with an emblem depicting the heart as a locked chamber (fig. 7). In the intensely erotic poem that follows, Christ is en¬ treated to take aim at “The self-shutt cabinet of an unsearcht soul,” “And ’mongst thy shafts of soveraign light / Choose out that sure decisive dart / Which has the Key of this close heart” (lines 36, 32-34). 23 Interestingly, in this instance Christ is figured, not as a penetrated body, but as the pene- . 28 . Christ’s Ganymede NON VI. *Tis not the worse of force but frill 7 ofindthe m.i) tn'o 'van's mill. ' 7 Is lone alone can hearts unlock.. ’Wbokntmestht Word, he needs not k«