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

Postscript 244
POSTSCRIPT
The paradox of Jesus Christ being fully God and fully human is the centre of the
Incarnation and Christianity. As history has shown, to emphasise the divine nature of Jesus
(so that he is a spiritual being who only appears to be human), or to emphasise the human
nature of Jesus (so that he is a wise man rather than divine), is easier than accepting this
paradox, yet Christianity embraced this difficult doctrine. Moreover, not only have they
accepted the paradox of the Incarnation, as the discussion of the creeds, theotokos, and the
‘communication of attributes’ demonstrates, there has been no attempt to lessen the shock
of a doctrine that promotes God in the flesh. This then gives believers a God who has
experienced birth, being nursed, hunger, exhaustion, suffering, and death, and rather than
being shocked and embarrassed by the divine humanity of Jesus, John Donne, Aemilia
Lanyer, George Herbert, Robert Herrick, and Richard Crashaw relish and delight in the
flesh of God. It is God as human that they find to be the great liberator, whether for Donne
and the assurance of physical resurrection, Lanyer and the promise of an equal society,
Herbert and the ability to approach God conversationally, Herrick and the redemption of
the festival, or Crashaw and the over-abundant outpouring of God’s inner-being, all have
found the Incarnation to be a doctrine of life.
In the writing of this dissertation I have chosen to arrange the chapters as
chronologically as possible, but in this I also found a symmetry appropriately resulting in
the central chapter of this work being the one on George Herbert, the poet who best
embodies the poetic acceptance of all aspects of the Incarnation. John Donne and Richard
Crashaw are the beginning and the end of my discussion, which creates a bookending as
Donne converted from Roman Catholicism to Protestantism and Crashaw converted from