Jesse Sharpe PhD thesis - Research@StAndrews:FullText ...

‘Looke Downe to Heaven’ 210
doctrine of the Incarnation, 11 and while the work done in this area has been of high merit,
there has been less attention given to the discussion of how the body of Jesus is presented
to the reader, and the expectation of how the reader will then react to this presentation.
While some work has discussed the body of Christ in Crashaw’s poetry, such as in Richard
Rambuss’s Closet Devotions, the emphasis has largely been on the sexual and erotic
imagery used in Crashaw’s descriptions. This is certainly a valid area for study, but I hope
to show that this obsession with the body of Christ both includes and moves beyond the
erotic, and that the eroticism is also a part of the anxiety that comes from trying to
physically interact with a physical Saviour who no longer bodily exists for the believer to
touch and taste.
The anxiety of Crashaw’s devotional verse is twofold: there is the anxiety of the
reader and the anxiety of the poet. The two anxieties serve different, but equally useful,
roles in trying to approach God through the poetry of Richard Crashaw. The anxiety of the
reader is the anxiety of being invited to touch and taste the body of Jesus. This anxiety
appears to be as old as the Passion story itself with the example of Thomas’s demand to
touch the body of the resurrected Jesus and then recoiling when being presented with the
opportunity to do just this. 12
The continuing discomfort with the Incarnation and the
divine made low while still divine – all God and all man – can be found in a more modern
example. In the modernist work Miss Lonelyhearts, by Nathanael West, there is a
character named Shrike who often mockingly uses theological jargon to comment on
society, yet his mocking rants are oddly similar to the sincerity found in Crashaw’s verse.
In one scene the character of Miss Lonelyhearts is being mocked for his belief in
Christianity by Shrike, while Shrike is also attempting to seduce his mistress. The rant
reads:
11 Jeffrey Johnson, ‘“Til We Mix Wounds”: Liturgical Paradox and Crashaw’s Classicism’, in Helen Wilcox,
et al (ed.), Sacred and Profane (Amsterdam, 1996), pp. 251-258.
12 John 20.26-8.