The work of modernist poet and visual artist David Jones provides a retrospective vantage of the central claims of Liturgy, Ritual, and Secularization in Nineteenth-Century British Literature. Jones saw the nineteenth century as a moment of breakage with the past. This rupture, according to Jones, threatens the work of the artist by depleting the sacramental meaning of reality – that is, the ability of concrete things to signify unseen spiritual depths. In both a dramatic biographical encounter with the Mass during his time on the front lines of World War I and in his subsequent art and poetry, Jones turns to liturgical forms to confront the breakage that began in the nineteenth century. Viewed from Jones’s perspective, the Romantic and Victorian interest in liturgy takes on new significance for the overarching genealogy of modernity and secularization. These liturgical fascinations intervene in – and resist – the long story of modernity’s separation of the material and spiritual, the natural and supernatural.

I argue in Chapter 3 that the canon law precept of the marriage debt, which was formulated particularly by Augustine, Gratian, and Thomas Aquinas in the course of establishing marriage as a sacrament, indicates a mode by which power is exercised on and through the bodies and the wills of married parties. It is a mode by which individuals are enjoined to a voluntary subservience. The power that the loathly lady figure wields over the penitent knight in The Wife of Bath’s Tale leaves its subject formally free but freely compliant, aiming at the production of internal conditions rather than external constraints. The same dynamic shapes the plots of other medieval texts featuring the marriage debt, from Chaucer’s The Merchant’s Tale to the tales told on Days 2 and 8 of Boccaccio’s Decameron, all of which I consider as illustrative analogues. These texts identify marriage, and marital sex in particular, as a key site where debt makes subjects, where political power is enacted in and through the free wills of human beings.

This chapter shows how the Laudians conceived the history of the church as a succession of sacrifices and altars stretching from Adam or Abel through the actual sacrifices of the Jews, under first natural, and then Mosaic law, and then through the spiritual sacrifices offered up by and in Christian churches. Where there were sacrifices there also altars and priests, and so the history of the church was conceived as a succession of consecrated persons and spaces, centred on altars, and then on episcopal chairs, stretching from the apostles to the present. The chapter shows the Laudians attempting to trace the presence in the primitive church, and then in the church of England, of the basic triad of priest, sacrifice and altar. They encountered some issues in so doing in the post-reformation church of England and the chapter shows some of their critics, most notably Bishop Williams, pointing that out and the Laudians responding with difficulty to those criticisms.

Thomas Hoccleve has long been identified both as an autobiographical poet and as a poet who hoped that his writings would speak on his behalf to prospective readers and patrons. This chapter builds upon these insights by suggesting that Hoccleve felt certain literary materials could exercise a quasi-religious or even quasi-legal force, or “vertu,” in the social world. I argue that Hoccleve’s faith in this idea was motivated by his familiarity with two other late-medieval discourses in which certain words were believed to possess a direct and unmediated kind of power: the language of Lancastrian bureaucracy, which Hoccleve knew firsthand from his work at the Privy Seal, and the language of the church, and in particular sacramental language. I suggest that, in the Series, Hoccleve attempts to write a kind of poetry that will exercise an analogous kind of “vertu” upon his audience. By composing a book that will speak directly to the “prees” on his behalf, he hopes to circumvent the skepticism with which his own words have been received by his readers and patrons in the wake of his “wilde infirmitee”—even if he doubts that, in the end, the Series will do exactly what he wishes.

Dante’s Comedy is a work of theology, done by way of a fictional journey through Hell and Purgatory to Paradise. Did Dante really make that journey? Of course he did. The journey is made by way of the fictional narrative describing it, and this way of enacting a truth by way of its description shares something with the sacramental act that makes to be so that which it signifies, or perhaps better, in the sort of way that the interpretation of Scripture is part of the efficacy of the scriptural word. Dante needed poetry to record that journey, and the poetry was how he traveled. In this way his poetry is a lived interpretation of a Christian journey, and the journey recorded is the journey made.

In the titles and subtitles of David Jasper’s ‘sacred trilogy’ the word ‘sacrament’ appears only in his third book, but Jasper adopts the language of sacrament throughout to designate the way that transcendent reality becomes wholly immanent and gives rise to silence. Sacrament is thus no longer understood to be a manifestation of the divine through a material thing but as the silence of what Jasper names as “Total Presence”, instantiated in both the textual body of the world and in human bodies that make a journey into the desert place. This sacramental phenomenon comes to a focus in the text of poetry, novels, the visual arts and music. This chapter reflects on the extent to which this refiguring of sacrament might enable us to re-think the boundary between the ‘sacred’ and the ‘secular’ which seems to persist in our late-modern age. It does so by developing five themes in relation to sacrament: the death of God and universality; the sacred; inside/outside of the text; participating in Christ; and community.

The second chapter distills three distinct understandings of belonging through corporal union. All are based on the biblical principle of “one flesh,” according to which corporal unification of individuals transforms them into a single entity. Two of the approaches developed during the early centuries of the ecclesial tradition, while the third appeared toward the end of the first millennium of the Common Era in Karaite circles. The ecclesial approaches understand the performance of belonging in physical terms as a fixed and irreversible unification, whereas the Karaite approach conceives it in spiritual terms as an elastic phenomenon of shared selfness. Each of the discussed readings of the biblical principle exhibits a different comprehension of the meaning of corporal union and its legal implications.

The Second Vatican Council’s vision for the liturgy was rooted in a deep appreciation for the intimate relationship between a people’s culture and that people’s fruitful participation in the liturgical life of the Church. By examining the conciliar documents’ treatment of the liturgy and tracing the history of post-conciliar liturgical reform, this chapter argues that cultural diversity in the liturgy is necessary for the liturgy to serve the life of the church.

John Calvin, like all Protestant reformers of the 1520s and 1530s, was born into a Roman Catholic society and baptized as an infant, according to Catholic practice. When Calvin began to work with Guillaume Farel to lead the Reformation in Geneva, they were interacting with a community of individuals who had all received Catholic baptisms, whether at a baptismal font by an ordained priest, or in the birthing room by a midwife. Those late medieval rites of baptism reflected a number of theological concerns and assumptions, including the teachings that the sacrament of baptism was essential to salvation and that infants who died without baptism would be consigned to limbo. At the same time, traditional baptismal practices also embodied a series of social and familial priorities, including the importance of godparents in building and solidifying social networks and the desire to honor those godparents in the name of a child. As a result, Calvin’s understanding of baptism challenged core beliefs and social traditions with which both he and his Genevan followers (both enthusiastic and reluctant) had been raised, complicating the implementation of his ideas and shaping the development of his teachings across the mid-sixteenth century and well beyond Geneva.

This chapter return to the soteriological arc with a discussion of sacramental imagery and aspirations of redemption and transcendence. Beginning with the Gaudete Epilogue poems and moving on River and Under the North Star, it looks at the rise in sacramental and specifically eucharistic imagery in Hughes’s poetry, arguing that the naturalization of sacramental activity in these poems authenticates human religious concerns. Sympathies between Hughes’s work and that of the American Transcendentalist, hinted at here there so far in the book, are discussed explicitly. Also making significant reference to Eliot, this chapter discusses the question of time in Hughes’s poetry, where, especially in River, it appears as something to be resisted and potentially escaped or transcended. The chapter culminates in a close reading of the poems “That Morning” and “The River.” We watch as Hughes overcomes anxieties about the destructive nature of time by cleaving ever closer to an explicitly Christian metaphysic.