By Jeremy Taylor
228 pages. Sublunary Editions. $18.
There is an incident, recorded in Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, that is most famous for being the subject of Max Beerbohm’s essay “A Clergyman.” Johnson, Boswell, and some other acquaintances are having one of their many literary chats; the discussion moves to the subject of sermons by some of the eminent ecclesiastics of their time. The sermonizers they name include Atterbury, Tillotson, South, Seed, Jortin, Sherlock, Smallridge, Clarke, Ogden, and Dodd (and here is where the clergyman of Beerbohm's title speaks up: "Were not Dodd's sermons addressed to the passions?" he asks – which is followed by Johnson’s immortal reply: "They were nothing, Sir, be they addressed to what they may.").
“Who were they, these worthies?” Beerbohm asks, reflecting on this list of sermon writers. Boswell only gives us their last names, indicating that a reader of his time would have had at least a passing familiarity with them. And yet today (and in Beerbohm’s time), all have been completely forgotten; I doubt that even a dedicated scholar of 18th century English literature has read more than a few of them.
In one respect, such is the nature of literary history: a hundred years from now, only the tiniest percentage of today’s authors will still be read.1 But for sermon writers in particular our present age has little respect. With few exceptions, if sermons appear in book form at all, they appear from specialty religious publishers. Glance through the articles of any of the leading book review publications (even the religious ones!) and it is doubtful you will see a single book of sermons come up, even in a random sample of 1000 reviews.
In this context, I was surprised when I read a new edition of the sermons of the 17th century cleric Jeremy Taylor. Some of my surprise had to do with the fact that this book came not from a religious publisher, or even one known for conservative or traditional tastes, but from Sublunary Editions, a Seattle-based small press dedicated to the work of avant-garde writers, in particular authors such as Djuna Barnes, Boris Pilnyak, and Mario de Andrade. How could a Protestant preacher from Cromwell’s England possibly fit into their catalog?
But in fact this was not the source of my greatest surprise: I had heard of Jeremy Taylor. I knew he was considered one of the great masters of English prose, as someone who pushed the baroque style in English literature to its heights. He had been praised by William Gass, and was well known among those souls who have dedicated themselves to the beauty of the English sentence. One of these very souls had shared with me the beginning of his famous “bubble” sermon (not included in this Sublunary collection).2
Taylor’s reputation, then, is upheld by literary types, and not necessarily ones with any strong religious bent. He is known for his artistry with prose, not his command of the nuances of Christian theology; better compared to Thomas Browne or Walter Pater, rather than Thomas Cranmer or Richard Hooker.
When I read these four sermons by Taylor, however, what surprised me the most was that the prose was very good, though not as good as Johnson or Hazlitt at their best – but the argument for Christian values was among the strongest I have ever read!
But first some more about Taylor's prose. Like many English authors of his era, his literary foundations lay in the study of Greek and Latin. For some, a classical learning allows them to write thick, complex prose, with subordinate clauses buried deep in knotty sentences. The reader passes their eyes over these sentences two or three times to figure out how each word relates to one another. This is not the way of Taylor: his prose flows. One image leads to the next, and idea is connected to idea with almost no friction. Subject, verb, and object are happily wedded to one another, and live in very close proximity. His sentences are long, but they are not stressed by unwieldy contortions. And his vocabulary, read by a speaker of 21st century English, does not strike us as particularly latinate – indeed, it is those rough, Anglo-Saxon words (“big,” “hard,” “die”) that provide his sermons with such heft. All these features may naturally be the effect of these works being sermons, intended to be spoken to a large public audience,3 but all the same the vigor of his prose is astonishing.
Taylor wove Greek and Latin sayings into his sermons, and provided his own English translations for each one. His translations are not always literally accurate, but they display some of Taylor’s greatest feats of language. Tacitus’s neat little adage Tristitiam simulamus contumaciae propiores Taylor gives as “We seem sad and troubled, but it is doggedness and murmur.” Phillip Dupesovski, who helped put together this volume, translates it as “We simulate Sadness, come closer to Doggedness.” Dupesovski’s translation is very good, but Taylor’s is better, with that final “murmur” suggesting so much.
But what prompted Taylor to quote that bit of Latin? He did so to clarify the nature of the heart – that is, the heart as the will and spirit of human beings that make them more than animals but less than God. And so, Taylor instructs us, when we “seem sad and troubled,” it is not an aimless melancholy we are experiencing, but a hardened heart set upon “Mischief.” Our heart may murmur, but its core is fixed upon a dogged will. “God seems to be at a losse, as if he knew not what to do to us. Warre undoes us and makes us violent: Peace undoes us and makes us wanton. Prosperity makes us Proud, Adversity renders us Impatient,” says Taylor of the fickleness of the heart.
Is it accurate to the laws of Christian religion to say “God seems to be at a losse”? Probably not, though the “seems to be” rather than the “is” likely makes it acceptable in the spirit of poetic argumentation for the layperson. But it is poetic argumentation for the layperson, rather than any scrutiny of Biblical works or dialogue in a theological debate, where all of Taylor’s genius lies.
And what is the message that Taylor hopes laypeople will hear? In these sermons, Taylor’s stress falls above all upon human sin, not just the vilest sins, but our everyday acts of self-destruction – what he calls the “arts of impiety.” Taylor’s perspective, as the quote above about the hardness of the heart indicates, is that humans are prone to self-perfidy and folly, and can in any situation lead themselves into wretchedness.
Taylor rarely sermonizes in the negative sense of the word. He does not condescend to his audience, does not act as a messenger of God set above common mortals; at the same time, he does not perform that move so common to 21st century preachers, of deprecating himself, admitting that even he sins sometimes. He can get a bit stuffy (especially when addressing the proper conduct of women), but usually he is speaking candidly to his audience, almost as if one-on-one.
The biggest reason Taylor doesn’t come off as a preachy scold is probably the fact that he does not focus on sins of the flesh. He is not the sort of Christain who says that worldly, gaudy temptations can be overcome with a stern mind and parsimonious temper. For Taylor, sin is not an inappropriate sensory pleasure, but something woven into the fabric of human nature. Again, note the significance of his focus on the heart as the nexus of impiety.
In fact, Taylor did not think there was anything inherently wrong with the body as such, just the role it played in our earthly existence. In one of his most important theological statements, he says, “[A]s the operations of the soule by reason of its dependence on the body are animall, naturall, and material: so in the resurrection, the body shall be spiritual by reason of the preeminence, influence, and prime operation of the soul.” That is, upon resurrection, the body is not cast away, but merely made dependent on the soul. This idea of Taylor’s seems to me to be at the crux of his argument for Christianity, and I find it to be a very compelling conception of human nature in the shadow of the eternal. And finally, the fact in our mortal lives our soul is dependent upon our body does not however justify any sin: “It is but a weak and unlearned proposition to say, That the soul can doe nothing of it self, nothing without the phantasmes and provisions of the body.”
Taylor had read Montaigne’s essays. He does not have the self-reflective spirit of Montaigne, but his sharp observations of the contradictory, complex nature of human behavior, along with his ability to sustain a coherent narrative without shackling to a pre-determined form, seem to be clearly derived from Montaigne.
Perhaps one could say that Taylor is to English religious argument what Burke is to English political argument – beautiful in rhetoric, even if it is not always true to the most scholarly standards. But for me, the immaterial, ineffable nature of religion will always make it more amenable to an artistic, literary interpretation rather than one based on cold logic and strict rules. In Dante’s Inferno, the Gates to Hell are unlocked; Jeremy Taylor sermons explain why we humans remain inside.
“It is a very solemn thought indeed that no more than a hundred-and-fifty years hence the novelists of our time, with all their moral and political and sociological outlook and influence, will perhaps shine as indistinctly as do those old preachers, with all their elegance, now,” writes Beerbohm. Beerbohm then goes on to imagine a similar literary discussion in his day, with these novelists being mentioned: Wells, Ward, Caine, Galsworthy, Corelli, Sinclair, Glyn.
For the reader a hundred and fifty years hence, I give you some last names from my era: Groff, Whitehead, Cohen, Powers, Moshfegh, Taylor, Robinson.
“A man is a bubble, (said the Greek proverb,) which Lucian represents with advantages and its proper circumstances, to this purpose; saying, that all the world is a storm, and men rise up in their several generations, like bubbles descending a Jove pluvio, from God and the dew of heaven, from a tear and drop of rain, from nature and Providence; and some of these instantly sink into the deluge of their first parent, and are hidden in a sheet of water, having had no other business in the world, but to be born, that they might be able to die: others float up and down two or three turns, and suddenly disappear, and give their place to others: and they that live longest upon the face of the waters are in perpetual motion, restless and uneasy; and, being crushed with a great drop of a cloud, sink into flatness and a froth; the change not being great, it being hardly possible it should be more a nothing that it was before. So is every man: he is born in vanity and sin; he comes into the world like morning mushrooms, soon thrusting up their heads into the air, and conversing with their kindred of the same production, and as soon they turn into dust and forgetfulness - some of them without any other interest in the affairs of the world, but that they made their parents a little glad and very sorrowful: others ride longer in the storm; it may be until seven years of vanity be expired, and then peradventure the sun shines hot upon their heads, and they fall into the shades below, into the cover of death and darkness of the grave to hide them.” Read the rest here.
Though not every writer who is called upon to speak in public modifies their prose for the situation. Anyone who has been to an academic conference knows of a scholar who reads one of their journal articles verbatim as a “talk.” One wishes that every PhD was required to take to heart Harrison Ford’s advice to George Lucas after reading the pre-production draft of the script for Star Wars: “You can write this shit, but you can’t say it.”