Medievalish 3.12
Worshipping the Sun/Son
Dear friend,
From the earliest days of the church, Jesus has been associated with light, with the Sun. Gospel writer John tells us that the people sitting in darkness have seen a great light, in one of the most glorious passages of scripture. I am the Light of the World, Christ tells us in John 8:12. The prophet Malachi foretells of the Sun of Righteousness, who rises “with healing in his wings” (Malachi 4:2). The Lord God is both Sun and shield (Psalm 84:11). Soon, if not already, we will sing the great, ancient Advent hymn, O Come, O Come Emmanuel, where we beg the Dayspring, great Dawn to come and put the dark shadows of death to flight.
Today, I share with you Richard Crashaw’s wonderful Hymn of the Epiphanie, where a long, extended conceit reflects upon Christ the Sun.1 Yes, I know, we are only in Advent! But the next Medievalish won’t come out until after Epiphany and one must share beautiful things slightly early sometimes.
I sometimes rely on the “ish” part of this newsletter to move into early modern art and writing. I adore the metaphysical poets—that group of seventeenth-century English poets who used surprising imagery to convey sometimes heavily theological, at other times erotic (and sometimes, both at once) content. Crashaw is sometimes overlooked in favor of the heavy hitters like John Donne or George Herbert. I’m a huge fan of both those esteemed gentlemen, but it’s fun to remember the poets and poems off the beaten path.
Richard Crashaw was born in London around 1612 or 1613. He was the son of a well-known Anglican cleric with strong Puritan tendencies, William Crashaw. The elder Crashaw wrote many pamphlets, which I like to think of as the early modern equivalents of podcasts (you should do a pamphlet about that, man!). These were mostly tirades concerning Roman Catholicism—against, as he put it, in an catchy albeit bigoted phrase, “besotted jesuitries.” Equally, though, father Crashaw had a magnificent theological library, one of the best of his age, that included many writers of the Middle Ages, like St. Catherine of Siena and St. Bernard of Clairvaux. He was known for his translation work as well.
Richard Crashaw, our poet, was orphaned as a young teenager and sent to school, where he followed in his father’s footsteps by becoming a cleric in the Anglican Church. In school, he began writing his mystically-inflected poetry. He was very influenced by George Herbert, and, surprisingly for an Englishman of his age, St. Teresa of Avila. He had high church sympathies, and in the English Civil War, he fled to the Continent to avoid arrest. He converted to Roman Catholicism at some point, and eventually landed in the Papal States. He died not long after at the shrine at Loreto in 1649.
Crashaw’s poetry is gentle and elaborate, like the Baroque art of his day. I like him best bite-sized. I tend to be a bit overwhelmed by that baroque, ornate quality when I read his poems in full, but I like to take pieces and digest them slowly. Take, for instance, one of Crashaw’s Latin epigrams on Jesus turning water into wine. He wrote it in Latin, but then he supposedly translated it himself: “The conscious water saw its God and blushed.” Isn’t that just lovely?
Today I want to share a segment of his Hymn of the Epiphanie. Crashaw builds and plays on sunrise and east for quite some time, creating a beautiful, dense conceit on Christ as center day, eternal year, point and circle in one.
Of course, this would have been very appropriate given that the Magi were often thought of as astronomers or astrologers (pre-empiricism, there wasn’t too much difference). Magi is the word that the gospel of Matthew uses for the three wise men, and it comes from the ancient word for Zoroastrian priests, who were known to study the stars and the movement of the heavenly bodies. It is also where our modern “magic” and “magician” come from.
Spend time chewing on this rather dense exchange between a chorus (Cho.) and the three Magi from the East (1, 2, 3).
( Cho. ) To THEE , thou DAY of night! thou east of west! Lo we at last have found the way. To thee, the world's great universal east. The Generall and indifferent DAY . (1.) All-circling point. All centring sphear. The world's one, round, Æternall year. (2.) Whose full and all-unwrinkled face Nor sinks nor swells with time or place; (3.) But every where and every while Is One Consistent solid smile; (1.) Not vext and tost (2.) 'Twixt spring and frost, (3.) Nor by alternate shredds of light Sordidly shifting hands with shades and night. ( Cho. ) O little all! in thy embrace The world lyes warm, and likes his place. Nor does his full Globe fail to be Kist on Both his cheeks by Thee. Time is too narrow for thy YEAR Nor makes the whole WORLD thy half-sphear.
Crashaw first tries to capture the Incarnation with a series of paradoxes from the chorus, addressed to God: East of West, Day of Night. Christ is the universal East, the always-dawn. The wise men are from the East. He is also, then, the forever destination, that which the heart has unknowingly sought forever. They come from East, they find truest East.
Crashaw then makes a deeply traditional comparison that medievals, ancients, and the early modern used to capture the paradox of God: the circle or sphere. Never-ending, without beginning, eternal. John Donne had said earlier that “the most convenient hieroglyph of God is a circle” and Crashaw agrees. But Crashaw draws out this roundness into the roundness of the globe as well. Rather than the sun, which can only rise and set in one part of the world at once, this Son shines everywhere, into all darkened places. He does not “sordidly shift hands” with day and night, nor is he “vext” and tost” or vexed and tossed, between winter and summer. Instead, he is “One Consistent solid smile,” beaming alike with warmth and bright rays wherever you go, wherever you hide, wherever you look. Time and place are under his dominion.
It is when we turn to the last phrase of the chorus that I truly fall in love with the conceit. We seem to have lost sight of God’s littleness in the Incarnation—the Son in his coming is larger, more powerful, more far-reaching than the sun itself. But the chorus reminds us, again, of the flabbergasting paradox at the heart of Incarnation. The phrase “O little all!” gets me every time. But then Crashaw turns us upside down again as we meet Jesus as a Mother even as a baby, mimicking my favorite medieval mystical writers. Christ is the little all. But in his coming, it is the world, instead, that becomes a baby lying in his arms, receiving kisses, being comforted. The perfect sphere of eternality cradles the limited, time-bound sphere of the globe. Christ, mother and sun in his fullness, brings light and warmth to the whole earth, kisses on both cheeks, uninhibited by the sphere and the tilt of its axis and whirl of its revolutions. Cosmic and intimate, all at once.
Time is too narrow for thee, O God, and yet you give yourself to it. Come, thou Dayspring!
What I’ve been up to this month:
I wrote an essay on Sister Penelope Lawson, pen pal of C.S. Lewis and midcentury translator of medieval monastic texts, for Plough. She is a personal hero of mine. Read it here.
I turned in the revisions for book two! Stay tuned, folks. I’m super excited to share this one with you.
The Old Books with Grace podcast continues onward, in the 2024 Advent series. Yesterday’s new episode features words from Sojourner Truth, courageous advocate for women’s suffrage, former enslaved woman, powerful witness to the love of God. Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What I’ve been reading this month:
Nonfiction: Evelyn Underhill. What joy.
Fiction: My yearly Advent reading, Pride and Prejudice. It’s one of my favorite things I do all year.
Medieval/Medieval-adjacent: Bernard of Clairvaux’s Advent & Christmas sermons, as translated by Sister Penelope Lawson.
Article: Loved this article from Matthew Milliner over at Church Life Journal on “Depth Mariology.”
A Prayer from the Past
This month’s prayer is from Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894), Scottish wanderer and novelist of Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Stevenson was raised in a strict Scottish Calvinist household, became an atheist in his early twenties, and returned to Christianity in his later years, leaving behind prayers published posthumously after his death. I found this one in Prayers Ancient & Modern edited by Mary W. Tileston (Grosset & Dunlap, 1927).
We beseech Thee, Lord, to behold us with favor, folk of many families and nations gathered together in the peace of this roof, weak men and women subsisting in the covert of Thy patience. Be patient still; suffer us yet a while longer—with our broken purposes of good, with our idle endeavors against evil, suffer us a little while longer to endure and (if it may be) help us to do better. Bless to us our extraordinary mercies; if the day comes when these must be taken, brace us to play the man under affliction. Be with our friends; be with ourselves. Go with each of us to rest; if any awake, temper to them the dark hours of watching; and when the day returns, return to us, our sun and comforter, and call us up with morning faces and with morning hearts—eager to labor—eager to be happy, if happiness shall be our portion—and, if the day be marked for sorrow, strong to endure it—Amen.
Peace for your December,
Grace
P.S. Medievalish is free, and I’d be delighted if you shared it with a friend!
Pun INTENDED. Also, recall that in poetry, a “conceit” is not an arrogance, but a long comparison between two disparate objects in somewhat complicated logic, like an extensive, elaborate metaphor.
Beautiful, thank you! “O little All” brings to mind Julian’s hazelnut, with its delicacy and surprising proportions.
I have just finished leading a presentation about John Donne. One of my participants mentioned a book by Katherine Rundell called Super-Infinite: Transformations of John Donne. I have ordered a copy. You can hear the author talking about her book on YouTube. She is passionate, beautiful and sexy. Rather like John Donne! Thank you for sharing Crashaw, and his beautiful poetry. I hadn't heard of him before, but now I want to read more of his work. Romeo says that Juliette is like the sun rising in the East. One could think of what Donne would have made of that!