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

Introduction 32
nature, allows writers to use the everyday physical world as a means to understand and
approach God. He writes that there is
the distinction between a downward or deductive approach to incarnation and an
upward or inductive approach. The former approach celebrates God’s initiative in
the incarnation, emphasizing his desire to share our grief and suffering, to become
involved in the reality of human existence, to reveal his nature to humankind by
becoming human himself. The inductive approach, on the other hand, suggests that
incarnational theology leads our understanding upwards from the familiar, the
human, to the divine, so that understanding and loving God (whom we cannot see)
must begin by understanding and loving our fellow human beings (whom we can
see, and who show in tangible form something of God’s nature). Thus the spiritual
world is a more accessible mirror which reflects and symbolizes spiritual reality. 40
The ability then to use the plain and easily accessible daily routines of the writers as ways
to access God is because of the Incarnation.
In this dissertation I will be primarily discussing how the Incarnation – that ‘the
Word was made flesh’ – is used by five seventeenth-century devotional poets to try to
understand, justify, or navigate the world in which they lived. The Incarnation offers the
stability of knowing that God has partaken in the normal, physical existence of a human
being, and yet it remains problematic because it gives the physical existence great weight
and importance. If God became human, lived as a human, died as a human, was
resurrected as a human, and returned to heaven in human form, then the actions, emotions,
and thoughts of humans become the things of the Divine. And as God was revealed to
40 J. Mark Halstead, ‘John Donne and the Theology of Incarnation’, in Liam Gearson (ed.), English
Literature, Theology and the Curriculum (London, 1999), p. 156.