Sacramental Poetics at the Dawn of Secularism When God Left the World [Hardcover]

Sacramental Poetics at the Dawn of Secularismasks what happened when the world was shaken by challenges to the sacred order as people had known it, an order that regulated both their actions and beliefs. When Reformers gave up the doctrine of transubstantiation (even as they held onto revised forms of the Eucharist), they lost a doctrine that infuses all materiality, spirituality, and signification with the presence of God. That presence guaranteed the cleansing of human fault, the establishment of justice, the success of communication, the possibility of union with God and another, and love. These longings were not lost but displaced, Schwartz argues, onto other cultural forms in a movement from ritual to the arts, from the sacrament to the sacramental. Investigating the relationship of the arts to the sacred, Schwartz returns to the primary meaning of sacramental as sign making, noting that because the sign always points beyond itself, it participates in transcendence, and this evocation of transcendence, of mystery, is the work of a sacramental poetics. Many others have studied this movement from ritual to the arts, from the sacrament to the sacramental, but rarely with the literary sensitivity shown here. This book explores the movement from a world of sacraments to the sacramental, in which the impulses once met by sacred ritual are displaced onto wider cultural forms, a poetics that becomes the province of mystery. This important study is as much a manifesto as a literary and cultural study on the transubstantiation of transubstantiation in the face of the secular imperative that haunts us. It not only provides a rich analysis of individual texts, it also shows a way to establish a new communion and a new community. Unfailingly readable, clear and precise,Sacramental Poeticsis one of the most important studies of our critical moment, allowing us to move beyond readings of early modern ritual and theatre as merely the emptied-out formsló™