Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 9 Number 3, December 2008
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Schwartz, Regina Mara. Sacramental poetics at the dawn of secularism: when God left the world. (Cultural memory in the present). Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008. xv, 187 p. ISBN 978-0-8047-5833-8 (softcover)
Reviewed by
University of California, Santa Barbara
This book discusses how the Renaissance and the Reformation changed the way that Europeans viewed themselves and their conceptions of God, once the mystery and sacredness of the Eucharistic doctrine was questioned and indeed ridiculed by science and reason. Transubstantiation (the moment that the bread and wine of the Eucharistic becomes God) was something that infused all of daily life with the presence of God. How did people respond to this loss? The author attempts to show that this sense of loss was more of a displacement, that other cultural forms such as the arts became sacramental; indeed, the author goes to great lengths to show how “signs” or “sign making” in the arts pointed to transcendence and mystery, an almost sacramental poetics, as the title of the book indicates.
The author has published a book previous to this, titled The curse of Cain: the violent legacy of monotheism, which is a prequel to this volume. In that book, she explores the cultural and social legacies of ancient religion in modern life, especially Near Eastern conceptions in Western thought, and how this legacy is often used to justify violence. This book takes off from the previous publication, by showing the sacred and creative legacies of ancient religion in modern life. There are three major sections in this book, with two chapters each. Section I, Poesia mystica, provides the background and underlying thesis for the discussion. The two chapters, Sacramental Poetics, and Mystical and Political Bodies, discuss the deconstruction of religion and especially the Eucharist ceremony at the dawn of secularism. Section II, Justitia mystica, examines the issue of justice through the eyes of two writers, Shakespeare and Milton. Section III, Amor mysticus, examines the issue of love through the writings of Donne and Herbert. A short afterword ties the topic together.
It is interesting to see how the author provides such a rich analysis of the various texts, in order to support her thesis and show how mysticism has permeated modern interpretation and theory. The detail that Schwartz takes to dissect the writings of Shakespeare, Milton, Donne, and Herbert is impressive, and this volume adds substantial research to the overall literature on this topic.