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The authors of the first fully English liturgy in 1549 sought to negotiate and stabilize a set of profound conflicts that lay at the heart of the English Reformation and early modern English culture. They endeavored--on a matrix defined by evangelical theology, national uniformity under royal control, and the vernacular--to reconcile the competing claims of Protestant individualism and the centralizing early modern state. Central to this effort was the remaking of the Eucharist into a newly representational event in which the identity and authority of nation and individual are mutually and reciprocally constituting--an explicitly interpretive mode of redefining the relationships of human and divine, church and state, subject and nation.
The Book of Common Prayer contains two seemingly contradictory discourses, each of which was fundamental to the larger discursive situation of the English Reformation. (1) The Prayer Book is unmistakably prescriptive of sociopolitical order and hierarchy. Liturgical form itself is an order-based discursive mode, restricting improvisation and randomness by imposing set formulae of religious expression on those under its aegis. The legislative coercion of uniform Prayer Book use in the various Acts of Uniformity further amplified this function, as it sought to control the dangers of religious diversity by imposing a single, state-appointed form of worship on the entire nation. Furthermore, the Prayer Book's discourses of order asserted both an autonomous identity for England in a multinational Europe and a fairly rigid sociopolitical matrix within the realm; both the royal supremacy and the maintenance of the episcopal hierarchy attest to the continuing importance of vertical structures of authority in the Church of England. Individual engagement in Prayer Book worship, compulsory though it was, constituted a tacit acknowledgment of the legitimacy of the multiple orders it construed and of the necessity and propriety of the individual's subordinate position within them. In short, the Prayer Book established hierarchical order as the natural and authentic context for individual identity and conduct.
The hierarchical nature of this discursive order is counterpoised in the Prayer Book by its more radical theological discourse of Protestant individuality. In it, the Supreme Head coexists with personal competency, and the religious vernacular functions simultaneously as a mode of unified national identity and a means of unmediated private grace. In the Eucharist, the theological move away from transubstantiation was accompanied by a shift in sacramental emphasis from elements to participants, from institutional objectivity to individual subjectivity. Fundamental to this shift--and additionally significant for its connections to evangelical vernacularism--was a reconception of the Eucharistic elements as signs, representations, texts, whose saving grace was conveyed and internalized through acts of self-conscious interpretation. Receiving the Reformed sacrament (as it would clearly be by 1552) was the ceremonial counterpart to the study of scripture; in both cases, divine grace and truth were made available in textual form, as systems of referential signs, and their internalization was an essentially interpretive act with both individual and communal consequences.
The Prayer Book thus attempted to navigate the profound cultural crisis of the Reformation by enfranchising the Reformed subject and establishing a permanent dialectic in which the authority and identity of nation and individual were mutually constituting. This negotiation took place on the ground of representation and interpretation, a mode that, as the contact point of divine grace, became simultaneously epistemological and soteriological; central to both of these potentialities are the beliefs that sign and referent are not copresent and that meaning and identity are thus created and mediated through representations and their interpretation. It is in this tenuous textual and hermeneutic balance that the Prayer Book (as a textual paradigm of the English Reformation) sought to synthetically reconcile the contradictions of a system that upheld both a politics of centralized vertical authority and a theology of dispersed individual competence.
But the Book of Common Prayer proved tragically unable to fully contain the conflicting energies it sought to synthesize. In the latter half of the sixteenth century, the individualizing logic of reform contributed to the continuing growth of an aggressively evangelical strain of Protestantism, which, even in Elizabeth's reign, came to see the Prayer Book as an empty, popish form that impeded authentic religious expression and supported monarchical and prelatical tyranny. The reactionary rise of Laudianism in the seventeenth century founded itself in the set form and ceremonial of the Prayer Book and its implied corollaries of royal and ecclesiastical hierarchy. These two poles, defined substantially and not at all coincidentally around liturgical issues, developed into the parties whose growing conflict eventually resulted in civil war and the beheading of a king. The Prayer Book was originally an attempt to textually mediate the powerful oppositions within one revolution in the sixteenth century; this resolution proved insufficiently flexible to prevent another revolution in the seventeenth.
The latter revolution was a defining event for two of the most influential English voices of the seventeenth century. John Milton and Thomas Hobbes were, to a great extent, both heirs of the English Reformation and its textual establishment in the Prayer Book. Both took it as a matter of course that England should be free of Roman authority, and both decisively rejected not only the political but also the hermeneutic claims of Catholic theology. Yet from this common ground, Milton and Hobbes came to vastly different liturgical and sociopolitical conclusions, equally extreme, respectively, in radicalism and royalism. In this essay, I will briefly consider these two figures and some of the theological, hermeneutic, and sociopolitical implications of their thought; at the same time, I will suggest that, profoundly different as they may be, both men define their ideas around a distinctly Reformed faith in representation. If the differences between Milton and Hobbes are instructive consequences of the spectacular rupture of the Anglican synthesis in the 1640s, the sometimes-surprising common ground they share--and the reciprocal ambivalences in what makes each distinctive--may also have much to teach us about the nature, depth, and historical significance of this particular epistemological system. Perhaps the Prayer Book solution was ultimately more capacious than it seemed.
In a 1997 essay, Ramie Targoff intelligently challenges the critical "assumption that the private and public self are entirely discrete and separable agents" (2) and argues that both the Elizabethan antitheatricalists and the liturgical church founded themselves upon common assumptions of the performative efficacy of external conduct on internal belief. In so doing, she provocatively rethinks the relations of representation, public practice, and "personal and private subjectivity." (3) Though I think Targoff misconstrues the Reformation in several important respects, (4) her argument is a useful reminder of the contestedness of the boundaries between personal conviction and public performance. Both Milton and Hobbes recognize the potential for slippage between the two, though they appraise this potential differently. Each man's ideal subject brings him to different conclusions regarding the ideal form of polity, as well as the hierarchy of values and the role of representation and interpretation within it; in each case, as in the Prayer Book, the constitution of subject and polity are complex, reciprocal processes. But the differences between Milton and Hobbes form a link that recapitulates and extends their common Reformed assumptions; in all their radical opposedness, these two seventeenth-century figures exemplify both the divergent possibilities inherent in the Prayer Book synthesis of the preceding century and its cautious but deep faith in the salvific potential of signs to delineate, govern, and transform our relationships to God and to our fellow citizens.
From his earliest prose, Milton took a radically antiliturgical stance. In tracts composed in 1641, he flatly denounces the liturgy as "evill," its authors as "halting and time-serving Prelates." (5) He devotes an entire chapter of Eikonoklastes (1649) to the Prayer Book and its royalist backing; not only does he find the Prayer Book itself "superstitious, offensive, and indeed, though Englisht, yet still the Mass-Book," but he also categorically rejects the possibility that "any true Christian [can] find a reason why Liturgie should be at all admitted." (6) Milton's arguments against liturgy typify the extreme Protestant position: liturgy is a popish relic, unapproved in primitive use, which restricts authentic worship and encourages meaningless conformity by forcibly prescribing repetitive set forms. The false division these forms reward is, as he argues in De Doctrina Christiana (1660), actually antireligious: "Also opposed to true religion is hypocritical worship, where the external forms are duly observed, but without any internal or spiritual involvement. This is extremely offensive to God." (7)
The radical individualism (and the ideal of a unified religious self) implicit in Milton's far-left politico-religious beliefs, in short, seems to have taken precedence over the claims of the ecclesiastical hierarchy and its common liturgy: contact with the divine, through both word and worship, is to be a highly inward, extemporaneous, and interpretive pursuit that principally determines one's religious conduct. And there is in Milton, I will argue, a fundamental stress on the power of signs to delineate the human relationship to God. But along with this emphasis is a resulting (and...
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