For many people in the room, this was not the first time we had been exposed to Milton. As we went through introductions roughly two months earlier, nearly every person around the circle mentioned previously reading parts of Paradise Lost in a British literature survey course, and that they chose this class—a three-hundred level seminar dedicated solely to the study of John Milton’s works—to really dive in. The outline of the course started with some of Milton’s earliest poems, “L’Allegro,” “Il Penseroso,” and “Lycidas,” moved through some political writing to get to Milton’s “Masque at Ludlow Castle,” wrestled with the heresies of the divorce tracts and the arguments of “Areopagitica,” then rounded out with Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes. As I reflect back to that handful of students who shuffled in and out of our basement classroom every Tuesday and Thursday, even though we came from different backgrounds, different parts of the country, with different reasons for being English majors, we ultimately were all the same. Signing up for a Milton course, we all had something to prove. Something that needed to be answered. And something that needed to be challenged. I didn’t know at the beginning of the semester that that something would be my faith.

  Before taking this particular Milton seminar, the connective tendons between my study of literature and my faith had never really been tested. The irony of this statement surfaces within the broader context of my undergraduate university. As a private, religious institution, the expectation for faith-based learning seemed to ooze out of the walls. Prayers were the conventional way to begin every class, weekly devotionals gathered students into the basketball arena every Tuesday at eleven o’clock, and each student who graduated from the institution had the equivalent of a religious studies minor. For some, the institution represented a religious haven, where students could gain the knowledge of the world without being in the world. The campus’s stone-cold sober reputation, the strict honor code and curfew, and required ecclesiastical endorsement framed academic pursuits and clearly delineated the university culture from other institutions around the state.

  When I enrolled at this institution as an eighteen-year-old freshman, all of the specifics mentioned above knitted together to create my home away from home. As a small-town farm girl who had, for the most part, been sheltered and protected from the outside world by the isolated nature of my high-desert mountain valley, the comprehensive limitations of this institution appealed to me. I grew up in a community that shared the same faith structure that I did. Choosing this institution would largely keep those same structures in place. Same standards. Same beliefs. Same God. As you would probably expect, the more ubiquitous the religious structures were, the more transparent they became. By the time I enrolled in my Milton class, the unique faith-based environment had drifted into the background—a consistent, yet uninteresting part of my undergraduate education. For me, this religious backdrop unexpectedly came into focus when the shared Christian faith became the justification for not engaging with Milton’s text.

   After struggling through excerpts of the divorce tracts, our time in Milton’s Eden was anticipated to be a step into paradise. However, as we ascended out of Hell, hailing the holy light of Milton’s illustrious muse, the turn toward heaven left the students in the classroom tense. In book three of Paradise Lost, Milton introduces his readers to their first interaction with God. And in book three, Milton’s God is far from the patient, loving, compassionate God that my faith tradition had taught me to anticipate. It was bad enough that books one and two had students debating in support of Milton’s Satan, but when the conversation turned towards critiquing the actions of Milton’s God, I saw a handful of my classmates, one by one, close their books, fold their arms, and refuse to keep talking. At that point, literature and religion had gone too far. Milton had gone too far, and my fellow students refused to contribute to any kind of conversation that would make God, even Milton’s God, look bad.

  As I reflect back on that moment, I am able to pinpoint the earliest urges that would eventually lead me to graduate school. Of the pivotal moments during my undergraduate education, this one, perhaps more than any other, laid the foundation for my future scholarship. As I watched my fellow classmates draw the line between their literary studies and their faith, I felt drawn to do the opposite—to lean into the complexities of literature and the complexities of faith, hoping and believing that both will be illuminated. Admittedly, that first interaction with Milton’s God took me by surprise, but that surprise quickly transformed into inquiry, excitement, and a desire to know more. The alternative portrayal of God emboldened me to turn towards my faith tradition with a renewed sense of purpose to better know the God I professed to love. Now as a PhD candidate in the Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance Studies at the University of Alabama, I have come to know for myself that I don’t study literature in spite of my Christian faith, but rather, because of it.

  By nature of my training, much of my theoretical framework for engaging with literature originated from lyric studies in general. Intrigued by the non-semantic elements of poetics, my literary research tends to be more interested in how a text communicates, rather than what it communicates. A central element in the development of my methodological approach is John T. Hamilton’s Philology of the Flesh. In his book, Hamilton articulates two differing modes of literary engagement, one being a philology of the body, and the other being a philology of the flesh. Respectively, a philology of the body is primarily interested in the sense of the work— “the delivery of meaning,” while a philology of the flesh is interested in “the fleshy qualities of the word— its physical properties, its appearance and sound, but also its coloring, the way it visually and audibly rhymes with other words within and across particular languages, in brief, how a textual component communicates.”¹ Hamilton’s distinction between body and flesh maps onto the distinctions between hermeneutics and poetics. Within a hermeneutic perspective, “reading entails incorporating every word into a body of sense, into a mediating container, one that is capable of delivering the represented content with minimal delays, compromises, or damages. To tarry with the flesh of the text itself would jeopardize the word’s transparency and thus threaten the delivery of meaning.”² In response to this threatened loss, the general practice within hermeneutics reduces, removes, or looks through the fleshy elements of a text for the sake of uncovering the internal meaning. “In the philology of the flesh,” however, “meaning is not merely a detachable kernel of sense embodied within the book’s binding— like a soul awaiting liberation from its somatic prison—but rather a nondetachable presence incarnate in the very word.”³ Hamilton’s philology of the flesh turns away from the sense of meaning and instead focuses on the materiality of the flesh—seeking to understand the conventions, techniques, structures, and forms that make meaning possible.

  In my work, I have deliberately turned towards the poetics of Christology in order to enrich Hamilton’s philology of the flesh. Near the end of “Death’s Duel,” the last sermon delivered by John Donne a few months before he died, the early modern preacher concludes:

“There now hangs that sacred Body upon the Crosse, rebaptized in his own tears and sweat, and embalmed in his own blood alive…There wee live you in that blessed dependency, to hang upon him that hangs upon the Crosse, there bath in his tears, there suck at his woundes, and lye down in peace in his grave, till her vouchsafe you a resurrection, and an ascension into that Kingdom, which he hath purchas’d for you, with the inestimable price of his incorruptible blood.”⁴

That “blessed dependency” Donne imparts to his listeners simultaneously sits at the center of my understanding of a Christian poetics. Donne’s vivid depiction of Christ hanging on the cross focuses the attention of his listeners on the materiality of Christ’s body. Hanging, bathing, sucking, and lying down in connection to Christ’s “sacred Body” emphasizes the fleshiness of Christ’s mortality.

  In another early modern depiction of the Passion, Aemilia Lanyer imparts:

“There may you see him as a God in glory,
And as a man in miserable case;
There may you reade his true and perfect storie,
His bleeding body there you may embrace,
And kiss his dying cheeks with tears of sorrow,
With joyful grief, you may intreat for grace;
  And all your prayers, and you almes-deeds
  May bring to stop his cruell wounds that bleeds. (LL. 1329-1336)⁵

The perfect story captured in Lanyer’s verse emphasizes Christ as both “a God in glory, /And as a man in miserable case.” The uniqueness of Christ, the living reality of the Word made flesh, is the essential element that allows the glory of God to be read, to be perceived by the senses. Christ’s dual nature sets the parameters for my understanding of literature. In terms of hermeneutics and poetics, the perceivable materiality of Christ maps onto the non-semantic poetics that mold, shape, and form literature experiences. In The Arte of English Poesie, George Puttenham reverently extends the logic of poesis “by way of resemblance” to God, aligning the art of poesie with the Augustinian tradition that frames God as the supreme artist.⁶ Within this metaphor, Christ is poetry: divine content in human form.

  By using a theological framework anchored in the materiality of Christ to scaffold my scholarship, my interactions with literature take on a particular sensitivity in regard to literary materiality and formal poetics. At the largest scale of interventions this theological approach to literature directly challenges a hermeneutics that prioritizes content over form. As the default mode of literary engagement, hermeneutic readings tend to look past or through literary forms for the sake of uncovering the sense or meaning locked away in the text’s content. Because literary criticism is, in part, a result of generations of intense biblical exegesis, the focus on hermeneutical meaning is perceived to be the most important site of literary inquiry.⁷ Poetics, the study of how a text works rather than what a text means, is often implicitly framed as a binary in opposition to hermeneutics. Framed within arguments of poststructuralist thinkers, the “[d]ichotomous thinking [between hermeneutics and poetics] necessarily hierarchizes and ranks the two polarized terms so that one becomes the privileged term and the other its suppressed, subordinated, negative counterpart.”⁸ ⁠The problem that emerges from this hierarchical framework results in literary forms consistently being reduced or subordinated in service of the content. Form becomes “an external or superficial mold into which content is poured” or a visual representation of “the inner truth of the text, expressed in its organic shape.”⁹ ⁠In both of the previously mentioned constructions, a text’s poetics are always limited by the hierarchical power of its hermeneutics.

  Using the materiality of Christ as a foundation, my conception of Christian poetics shares a certain affinity with the Christian dogma of the Incarnation. While the ubiquitous influence of hermeneutics would have us to assume that incarnational poetics points toward poems about the incarnation, my use of the term is more interested in the way the incarnation works, rather than the meaning of the incarnate Christ. When framed in this way, the poetics of the incarnation re-examines traditional hierarchical views of the relationship between God and humankind. Accentuated by the fallen nature of humans, the sacred rule of God gets reinforced throughout Christian theology, emphasizing that God is always superior to humans.¹⁰ However, by embodying the title of Theanthropos, the incarnate Christ challenges the vertical hierarchical structure separating God and humans and replaces it with a horizontal, hypostatic union of both natures within his own personhood. To say this another way, the poetics of the incarnate Christ flattens the binaries often asserted between human and Divine, elevating the former to be united with the latter. Rather than a theology and a hermeneutic which asserts that ultimate meaning is found beyond material particularity—such as we find in the human—an incarnational poetics locates meaning within those very spaces—the fleshy materiality of a text’s form. Within this framework the poetics of the incarnation elevates literary forms as an essential and worthwhile point of literary investigation.

  At its core, this form of Christian poetics calls for an adjusted mode of inquiry that responds to poetic form with the same level of attentiveness that is often imparted to poetic content. Throughout my work, I describe this reading practice as allowing content and form, or hermeneutics and poetics, to dwell hypostatically within the interpretive horizon. This description, also sharing theological connections to the Incarnation, implies a type of reading that affords form and content to manifest simultaneously and distinctly. Within a hypostatic union, content and form equally inform and/or reform each other, sometimes supporting, challenging, upholding, or even thwarting the sentiment of the other. Rather than mining devotional poetry for theological resources to be refined and repackaged according to the current confessional market, Christian poetics embodies an approach that attends to the ethical treatment of both form and content. This ethical treatment takes the form of serious considerations of the poem’s content as well as the local and global structures, patterns, and shapes that organize each poem, refusing to disregard the sonic, rhythmic, and spatial elements that make up the material form of a poem. The methodological stakes of this adjustment ripple to affect the way we view and care for the objects of our literary inquiries, the students in our classrooms, and the resources in our material world.

  From a wider perspective, Christian poetics pulls literary criticism away from the isolated and disembodied work-of-the-mind and towards an embodied experience anchored in ethical humanities. When materiality matters, literary criticism not only takes up for careful consideration the literary bodies we are examining, but also our own physical bodies. Like the words of the Eucharist made flesh by partaking of the wafer, the implications of this study take on significance within the embodied act of social advocacy. In extending the critical premise of Christian poetics to our contemporary moment, the importance of materiality and poetics challenges hierarchical structures of power used to justify the erasure of the many different people who do not fit into the cis-gendered, heteronormative, white male form. The methodological stakes of this argument reverberate to affect the way we view and care for the objects of our literary inquiries, the students in our classrooms, and the resources in our material world. In other words, the study of literature becomes the practice of Christian charity. A Christian poetics approach claims that the unique forms that make up literature matter. Extending that premise to our current social crises, I submit that lasting change cannot occur until all materiality matters as well.

  It’s been more than seven years since that Milton course. Though I can’t speak for those who refused to engage in that discussion, I know that my life, my scholarship, my faith has been strengthened because of it. The study of religion and literature opens the door of faith—a space where questions of the soul, desires of the heart, and the limits of the mind are exposed to the mysteries and beauties of divinity. These experiences only come to those who choose them, even if the choice may feel contrary to our faith traditions. If there is anything I have learned from Milton, it’s that faith, much like knowledge, “thrives by exercise…Truthe is compared in scripture to a streaming fountain; if her waters flow not in a perpetual progression they sicken into a muddy pool of conformity and tradition.”¹¹ ⁠For me, the study of literature and religion is a part of that fountain of truth, a truth that is informed by and anchored in Christian poetics.

The title of this essay is drawn from the quote, “that which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is contrary”; see John Milton “Areopagitica,” Milton’s Selected Poetry and Prose, edited by Jason P. Rosenblatt, (New York and London, W.W. Norton & Company, 2011), 350.

¹ John T. Hamilton, Philology of the Flesh (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 6.
² Hamilton, Philology of the Flesh, 6. Emphasis in original.
³ Hamilton, Philology of the Flesh, 7. Emphasis in original.
⁴ John Donne, “Deaths Duell, or, A Consolation to the Soule, against the dying Life, and living Death of the Body,” The Collected Sermons of John Donne, (Provo: Brigham Young University Digital Collections, 2004), 20.
⁵ Aemilia Lanyer, The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer: Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, edited by Susanne Woods (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 108.
⁶ George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, (London: Printed by Richard Field, 1589), C1r.
⁷ Speaking on the development of literary criticism, Brian Cummings notes, “The scientia interpretandi embodied within grammar happily inherited classical models from Cicero or Quintilian but was developed at its most sophisticated level in the exposition of the meanings of the Bible. This fed back in turn into elementary practice in relation to secular authors. Literary theory was motivated powerfully by the need to uncover moral and spiritual levels of meaning within scriptural narrative and poetry.” See, Brian Cummings, Grammar and Grace (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 21.
⁸ Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 3.
⁹ Ellen Rooney. “Form and Contentment.” Modern Language Quarterly: A Journal of Literary History 61, no. 1 (March 3, 2000): 37.
¹⁰Hierarchy comes from the Greek “heirs,” meaning “sacred” and “arche” meaning “rule.” See, “hierarch, adj. and n.". OED Online. March 2023. Oxford University Press. https://www-oed-com.libdata.lib.ua.edu/view/Entry/86784? (accessed March 31, 2023).
¹¹John Milton, “Areopagitica,” 365.