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

Postscript 245
Protestantism to Roman Catholicism, but more than this both poets emphasise the body in
their poetry. For Donne the emphasis is on his and his lovers’ bodies, while Crashaw
emphasises the body of Jesus. Both Aemilia Lanyer and Robert Herrick place great
importance on the social applications available through the belief that God lived on this
earth as a human, and so Lanyer can use this to redeem women from subjection and
Herrick can redeem the festival as a celebration of physical existence. But it is in the
devotional poetry of George Herbert that one finds all of these elements of the Incarnation
celebrated. Herbert writes of the flesh of humanity and the flesh of God, recognises that
God existing as a human redeems all people and gives them equal access to the Divine,
and he realises that this gives humanity the right to celebrate. He knows that the end of the
Incarnation for God and humanity is a heavenly feast in which all are welcome and all will
be fed with God.
The Incarnation is a rigidly held doctrine of Christianity that allows for diverse
personal application while still maintaining religious orthodoxy. It is a destabilising force
that does not allow for the preference of the soul over the body or the material over the
immaterial or one person over another; furthermore, it does not solely belong to Roman
Catholicism, the Church of England, or the Puritans; rather, it is the property of all. The
problem of the Incarnation for seventeenth-century Britain was that as it tried to define its
ecclesiastical identity it was left with a central tenet of faith that favoured no denomination
and could not be used to order society conclusively, and so it was only the accidental
aspects of Christianity that Britain could use to create its distinct church.