Abstract
This chapter reviews various ideas of religious conversion throughout Judeo-Christian history. It first distinguishes two broad lines of development: the body as ‘prison house’ and the body as ‘temple,’ and concludes that it is the latter view that dominated Christian thought, meaning that any religious conversion, including the conversion from death to eternal life, necessarily included body as well as soul (a distinction not analogous to flesh versus spirit). The chapter continues by making a further distinction, this time between how sixteenth-century Catholics and sixteenth-century Protestants viewed bodily conversion. Catholics developed medieval Bernardine traditions that viewed conversion as a matter of bodily purification, and this approach was not acceptable to Renaissance Protestants who did not believe that bodily purification was a valuable aim.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
For a discussion of various forms of conversion to Christianity and Islam, see Marc David Baer, “History of Religious Conversion,” in Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion, eds. Lewis R. Rambo and Charles E. Farhadian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 25–47.
- 2.
A.D. Nock , Conversion: the Old and the New in Religion From Alexander the Great to Augustine of Hippo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933; rpt. 1952), 7.
- 3.
Christoph Barth, “Notes on ‘Return’ in the Old Testament,” Ecumenical Review 19.3 (1967), 310.
- 4.
J.W. Heikkinen , “Notes on ‘Epistrepho’ and ‘Metanoeo’,” Ecumenical Review 19.3 (1967), 313.
- 5.
Following the establishment of the ‘conversatio morum’ in Chapter 58 of the Rule of Saint Benedict of Nursia (c. 530) and the relatively rapid transformation of that phrase into ‘conversio morum’ by the eighth century, the term ‘conversion,’ in the context of those already baptized as Christians, came specifically to mean a conversion to the monastic life. For the movement from “conversatio” to “conversio” see Thomas Merton (drawing on the pioneering work of Philibert Schmitz), The Life of the Vows: Initiation into the Monastic Tradition 6, ed. Patrick F. O’Connell (Trappist KY: Cistercian Publications, 2012), 278–81. For the sense of conversion, used in the Middle Ages, as the entrance into a specifically monastic lifestyle, See Karl F. Morrison , Understanding Conversion (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1992), 14.
- 6.
Calvin, for instance, strongly defended infant baptism; one of his arguments involved the possibility that the infant was spiritually transformed: “I would not rashly affirm that they are endowed with the same faith as we experience in ourselves, or have entirely the same knowledge of faith – this I prefer to leave undetermined.” Calvin asked, “why may the Lord not shine with a tiny spark at the present time on those whom he will illumine in the future with the full splendor of his light … ?” Institutes, 4.16.19, 1342.
- 7.
For the notion of the ‘I-then’ and the ‘I-now’ in spiritual autobiography, see, for instance, Eugene Vance , who discusses the “self” versus the “self as author” in “Augustine’s Confessions and the Grammar of Selfhood,” Genre 6 (1973), 5. Other examples include Joan Webber who uses the terms “I-in-process” and “interpreter” to distinguish past from present selves, and Norman Friedman who discusses the “I as protagonist” in contrast to the “I as witness.” Joan Webber , The Eloquent ‘I’: Style and Self in Seventeenth-Century Prose (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968), 29; Norman Friedman, “Point of View in Fiction: The Development of a Critical Concept,” in Approaches to the Novel: Materials for a Poetics, ed. Robert Scholes (San Francisco: Chandler Publishing, 1961), 130–2. In their study of autobiography (Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001]), Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson suggest this model of narrative identity needs to be made more complex (58–9) although they too utilize it when discussing the conversion narrative: “this narrative mode is structured around a radical transformation from a faulty ‘before’ self to an enlightened ‘after’ self,” 192. The “I-then” versus “I-now” model remains a powerful one; as Johanna Lindblandh points out in a reference to Suzette A. Henke’s 2000 book Shattered Selves: Trauma and Testimony in Women’s Life-Writing, “An important aspect of the therapeutic work consists in trying to make the witness overcome the experience of a break in time that the trauma has caused in his or her consciousness, by letting the ‘I now’ become rejoined with ‘I then’ in a coherent story.” Johanna Lindbladh, “The Problem of Narration and Reconciliation in Svetlana Aleksievich’s Testimony Voices From Chernobyl,” in The Poetics of Memory in Post-Totalitarian Narration (CFE conference Paper Series No. 3), ed. Johanna Lindbladh (Lund, Sweden: Lund University Centre for European Studies, 2008), 47.
- 8.
Augustine, Confessions, trans. R.S. Pine-Coffin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), 164 (8.5; emphasis in original).
- 9.
D. Bruce Hindmarsh , The Evangelical Conversion Narrative: Spiritual Autobiography in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 25–7. For Luther’s “tower experience” (turmerlebnis) conversion, see Luther, “Preface to the Complete Edition of Luther’s Latin Writings,” in Luther’s Works, 34:336–7. For Calvin’s autobiographical fragment (part of his preface to the Commentary on the Book of Psalms, a text, incidentally, translated into English by the poet Arthur Golding in 1571), see John Calvin , Commentary on the Book of Psalms, trans. James Anderson (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845), xxxv–xlix. Beza’s conversion account appears in the preface to the 1560 Confessio Christianae Fidei, qtd. in Irena Backus , “Reformed Orthodoxy and Patristic Tradition,” A Companion to Reformed Orthodoxy, ed. Herman Selderhuis (Leiden: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2013), 104.
- 10.
D. Bruce Hindmarsh , The Evangelical Conversion Narrative, 26–7. Hindmarsh also cites Judith Pollmann’s concurring viewpoint about the lack of sixteenth-century conversion narratives in Europe, 26. See Judith Pollmann, “A Different Road to God: the Protestant Experience of Conversion in the Sixteenth Century,” Conversion to Modernities: the Globalization of Christianity, ed. Peter Van der Veer (New York and London: Routledge, 1996), 47–64.
- 11.
Michael C. Questier , Conversion, Politics, and Religion in England, 1580–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Eamon Duffy , The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c. 1400–1580 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992), 593.
- 12.
Ethan H. Shagan , Popular Politics and the English Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 3.
- 13.
Shagan, Popular Politics, 6.
- 14.
Molly Murray , The Poetics of Conversion in Early Modern English Literature: Verse and Change from Donne to Dryden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 33. As Murray says, during this period in England :
on both sides, writers most frequently ground their arguments for conversion on principles that are precisely opposed to the idea of change: each claims his church’s superior stability, unanimity, antiquity, and universality. First-person narratives of conversion, meanwhile, generally follow a neat structure of before-and-after, in which the inadequacy of one church is juxtaposed with the persuasiveness of the other. In seeking to contrast their current convictions with their former errors , authors of such accounts generally do not represent the indecision, ambivalence, terror, and doubt that might have accompanied any shift from one system of belief, and one community of believers, to another (27–8).
As Richard Sheldon, a famous early seventeenth-century English convert to Protestantism, remarked in his Motives, “pardon mee Christian Reader for this disclosing the secrets of my soul.” Richard Sheldon , The Motives of Richard Sheldon, Pr. For his iust, voluntary, and free renouncing of Communion with the Bishop of Rome, Paul the 5. and his Church (London: 1612), preface p. 5 (pages of preface not numbered). Hindmarsh cites a similar ‘reluctance’ to discuss the details of conversion on the part of an Anabaptist, Menno Simons (1496–1561), The Evangelical Conversion Narrative, 28.
- 15.
Richard Strier, Love Known: Theology and Experience in George Herbert’s Poetry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
- 16.
Adrian Streete, Protestantism and Drama in Early Modern England , 10.
- 17.
Christopher Tilmouth, Passion’s Triumph Over Reason: A History of the Moral Imagination from Spenser to Rochester (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 34.
- 18.
Martin Luther, “Commentary on 1 Corinthians 7” (1523), trans. Edward Sittler , in Luther’s Works, American Edition, eds. Jaroslav Pelikan , Helmut T. Lehmann , Christopher Boyd Brown, et al. 79 vols. to date (St. Louis, MO: Concordia Press; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1955–), 28:35.
- 19.
Adrian Streete, Protestantism and Drama, 11.
- 20.
In addition to Hindmarsh’s study, see Patricia Caldwell, The Puritan Conversion Narrative: The Beginnings of American Expression (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983) and Kathleen Lynch , Protestant Autobiography in the Seventeenth-Century Anglophone World. As Molly Murray’s work emphasizes, Catholics too wrote autobiographies in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England .
- 21.
Hindmarsh, The Evangelical Conversion Narrative, 20–1.
- 22.
Hindmarsh cites the William Perkins text, Cases of Conscience (1606) as an example that provides the basic template for this “spiritual geography of the soul,” The Evangelical Conversion Narrative, 37–8.
- 23.
Questier, Conversion, Politics, and Religion, 2.
- 24.
Murray, The Poetics of Conversion, 25.
- 25.
As Murray summarizes, “Donne implies that the best kind of Christian is not a Catholic or a Protestant, but a convert,” The Poetics of Conversion, 101.
- 26.
Duffy , Stripping of the Altars, stresses the continual tensions and violence between the two faiths in England ; Peter Marshall argues that, even when describing the earliest years of the English Reformation, Protestants should not be considered as “slightly heterodox Catholics.” “Evangelical Conversion in the Reign of Henry VIII,” in The Beginnings of English Protestantism, ed. Peter Marshall and Alec Ryrie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 28.
- 27.
For examples, see Marshall , “Evangelical Conversion,” 26. For an example from Germany, see Katharina Schütz Zell (1498–1562), Church Mother: The Writings of a Protestant Reformer in Sixteenth-Century Germany, ed. and trans. Elsie McKee (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 127.
- 28.
William Alabaster says in his “Conversion” that the spirit of the men he admired were “guided by a spirit very different from that of our protestants.” It was, for Alabaster , “[the fastings of the Apostles … and of those who were the first to profess the faith of Christ, together with their whip]pings, sorrowes, groanes, teares, [punishment] of [the body, kneelings and similar severe] and [voluntary mortification of their flesh]” that were most impressive, and (as Alabaster emphasizes throughout) least compatible with Protestant approaches to religious practice. William Alabaster , “Conversion” in Unpublished Works by William Alabaster, ed. Dana Sutton . Salzburg Studies in English Literature, Elizabethan and Renaissance Studies 126 (Salzburg: University of Salzburg, 1997), 107. The bracketed words were provided, as Sutton explains (xxx), from a Latin translation of the text, probably made by Alabaster’s superior at the English College in Rome, Robert Persons, soon after Alabaster’s completion of his English text.
- 29.
Plato , “Phaedo,” trans. G.M.A. Grube , in Plato, Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper & D. S. Hutchinson (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997), 56; 65a. It should be noted that, in later works (the “Phaedrus,” the “Republic ,” and the “Timaeus ”), Plato proposed an alternative, tripartite, conception of the soul—formed of appetite, thumos (ambition), and intellect or reason. Yet in the “Republic ” also, the body is presented as a hindrance to the development of the mature soul. The philosopher’s proper “desires flow towards learning and everything of that sort … the pleasures of the soul itself by itself.” Such a person should “abandon those pleasures that come through the body – if indeed he is a true philosopher and not merely a counterfeit one.” Plato, “Republic ,” trans. G.M.A. Grube , rev. C.D.C. Reeve , in Plato, Complete Works , ed . John M. Cooper & D. S. Hutchinson (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997), 1109; 485d.
- 30.
The philosopher’s soul, “which is pure when it leaves the body and drags nothing bodily with it … makes its way to the invisible, which is like itself, the divine and immortal and wise.” In contrast, “if the soul is polluted and impure when it leaves the body, having always been associated with it and served it” that soul will not be “freed and purified.” Instead it will, Socrates avers, remain partially committed to the body and “wander around graves and monuments,” attracted by its lingering, debased longing for physical things. Plato, “Phaedo,” in Plato, Complete Works, 71; 80e–81d.
- 31.
Qtd. in Jason David BeDuhn , Augustine’s Manichaean Dilemma, vol. 2: Making a “Catholic” Self, 388–401 C.E. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 432–3. For an account of the changes in Augustine’s thinking on the value of the body in relation to human spirituality, see David G. Hunter , “Augustine on the Body,” in A Companion to Augustine, eds. Mark Vessey and Shelley Reid (Chichester, Oxford, UK; Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell 2012), 353–64; Hunter argues “the year 410 marked a turning point in Augustine’s reflections on the relation of body and soul,” 356.
- 32.
Jerome, “Letter 22,” in Letters and Select Works, trans. W.H. Fremantle , G. Lewis , and W. G. Martley , in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series. Eds. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace . 14 vols. (New York: Christian Literature Company, 1893), 6:24–5.
- 33.
Susan C. Karant-Nunn , “The Mitigated Fall of Humankind: Martin Luther’s Reconciliation with the Body.” Past and Present 234 supplement 12 (2017), 52.
- 34.
Marsilio Ficino , “Phaedo,” in Gardens of Philosophy: Ficino on Plato, trans. Arthur Farndell (London: Shepheard-Walwyn, 2006), 131.
- 35.
Desiderius Erasmus, A Book Called in Latin ‘Enchiridion Militis Christiani’ and in English ‘The Manual of the Christian Knight’ (London: 1533; rpt. London: Methuen, 1905), 183 (chapter 13). Christopher Tilmouth, in Passion’s Triumph Over Reason, discusses Erasmus’s debts to the Phaedo and also quotes from the Tusculan Disputations (c. 45 BC) of Cicero (106–43 BC), which similarly imagines the body as a “prison-house from which the immortal soul must free itself” if it is to be converted to God, 18.
- 36.
Caroline Walker Bynum, Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity 200–1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). For instance, in “twelfth-century discussion … the emphasis [in resurrection] is on an identity guaranteed by material and formal continuity, not on an opportunity for growth, escape, or rebirth,” 8.
- 37.
“Lateran Council IV 1215,” in Sources of Catholic Dogma, ed. Heinrich Denzinger, trans. Roy Deferrari , 30th edition (St. Louis: Herder, 1957, rpt. Fitzwilliam, NH: Loreto Publications, 2002), 169. Malcolm Barber, like other scholars of Catharism , writes that for Cathars, “there never had been resurrection of the flesh.” Malcolm Barber , The Cathars, 2nd edition (Harlow, England: Pearson Education, 2013), 113. Of course, the precise nature of the resurrected body posed a continual problem. Bynum credits Augustine for establishing “the background to the doctrine of the dowries of the glorified body developed in the high Middle Ages.” These qualities included “weightlessness, beauty, impassiblity, and incorruption.” By the late thirteenth century, these had developed into “the doctrine of the four dowries (impassablity, subtlety or penetrability, agility, and clarity or beauty).” Bynum, Resurrection of the Body, 100, 132. The Council of Trent also addressed this issue. See “Article XI: The Resurrection of the Body,” trans. J. Donovan , in The Catechism of the Council of Trent (1566) (Baltimore: Lucas Brothers, 1829), 85–92.
- 38.
As Ezekiel 11:20 puts it, those who have been given hearts of flesh “may walk in my statutes, and keep mine ordinances … and they shall be my people, and I will be their God.”
- 39.
As Margaret R. Miles puts it, for Paul, “flesh and spirit” are “both located in the soul.” “Theology, Anthropology and the Human Body in Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion ,” Harvard Theological Review 74.3 (1981): 311. Gordon D. Fee argues that Saint Paul uses the terms ‘flesh’ and ‘spirit’ (sarx and pnuema) to indicate a contrast between eras: “the present evil age” of flesh is contrasted to the spiritual, “eschatological age that has dawned with the coming of Christ,” Paul, the Spirit, and the People of God (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1996), 129.
- 40.
Augustine, The City of God Against the Pagans (c. 422), trans. Philip Levine. 7 vols. (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1966; rpt. 2002), 4:281–3 (Book 14, Chapter 5). The Latin is: “Nam qui velut summum bonum laudat animae naturam et tamquam malum naturam carnis accusat, profecto et animam carnaliter adpetit et carnem carnaliter fugit.” Interestingly, Michel de Montaigne cites this passage at the close of his essay, “On Experience,” trans . Donald M. Frame, in The Complete Essays of Montaigne (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1958), 855.
- 41.
For example, Augustine, The City of God 4:269 (Book 14, Chapter 3).
- 42.
Augustine, The City of God 4:213 (Book 13, Chapter 20).
- 43.
Tertullian, “On the Flesh of Christ,” trans. Peter Holmes , in Anti-Nicene Fathers: The Writings of the Fathers Down to A.D. 325, eds. Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson , rev. A. Cleveland Coxe. 10 vols. American Reprint of the Edinburgh Edition (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1956–1957), 3:535 (Chapter 16).
- 44.
Bernard of Clairvaux, “On Loving God,” in On Loving God and Selections from Sermons, ed. Hugh Martin (London: SCM Press, 1959), 50–1. For two additional strong examples of this intense longing for the spiritual body in Bonaventure (1221–1274) and Richard of Middleton (c.1249–c.1302), see Carolyn Walker Bynum, “Material Continuity, Personal Survival and the Resurrection of the Body: A Scholastic Discussion in its Medieval and Modern Contexts,” in Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1992), 257.
- 45.
Thomas Aquinas , “On the Union of Body and Soul,” in Summa Theologica. 3 vols. Trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1947 [1911–1925]), 1:381 (First part; Q76. A7. R3). Caroline Walker Bynum notes that this reading of Aquinas’s influential theory of the soul being the sole form of the body (what she calls ‘Aristotelean hypomorphism’) as signaling a “victory over [Platonic] dualism” is not the only reading. She cites a tradition of scholarship that argues “what Aquinas’s teaching actually threatens is body” by denying the “plurality of forms” doctrine which gave the human body more scope as its own particular form (forma corporeitatis) among others. Caroline Walker Bynum, “Material Continuity,” 255–7, 402.
- 46.
Qtd. in Thomas Aquinas, Selected Philosophical Writings, trans. Timothy McDermott (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 192.
- 47.
Calvin, Institutes , 3.25.7, 999. Margaret R. Miles discusses this passage in “Theology, Anthropology, and the Human Body,” 319.
- 48.
For the ‘similitudo corpora ’ concept in Augustine, see Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 98.
- 49.
Jane Hwang Degenhardt , “Catholic Martyrdom in Dekker and Massinger’s The Virgin Martir and the Early Modern Threat of ‘Turning Turk,’” ELH (English Literary History) 73 (2006), 83–117.
- 50.
Degenhardt, “Catholic Martyrdom,” 96.
- 51.
Degenhardt, “Catholic Martyrdom,” 99.
- 52.
Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, 234–5.
- 53.
Qtd. and discussed by Sarah Beckwith, Christ’s Body: Identity, Culture and Society in Late Medieval Writings (London: Routledge, 1993), 54.
- 54.
Qtd. in Thomas H. Bestul, Texts of the Passion: Latin Devotional Literature and Medieval Society (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 39.
- 55.
Robert Southwell, “Saint Peters Complaint” (c. 1595), in The Poems of Robert Southwell, S.J., ed. James H. McDonald and Nancy Pollard Brown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 75–100.
- 56.
John Preston, Sins Overthrow: or a Godly and Learned Treatise of Mortification (London: J. Beale, 1633), 27–8. For additional examples of early modern English Protestant writers objecting to practices of bodily self-mortification, which they associated with Catholics, see John R. Yamamoto-Wilson , Pain, Pleasure and Perversity: Discourses of Suffering in Seventeenth-Century England (Farnham, Surrey, GBR; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013), 89–93.
- 57.
Alison Shell , Catholicism, Controversy, and the English Literary Imagination, 1558–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 56–104. Shell argues that while “English Calvinist piety did not tend to encourage passion narratives,” both Southwell’s popularity and imitations of “Saint Peters Complaint” by Protestants shows “how lamentation could be a genre equally acceptable to Catholic and to Protestant,” 64, 80. Joseph R. Teller, “Why Crashaw was not Catholic: The Passion and Popular Protestant Devotion,” English Literary Renaissance 43.2 (2013), 242.
- 58.
Teller, “Why Crashaw was not Catholic,” 266.
- 59.
As Louis L. Martz puts it, “it was the doctrine of the ‘real presence’ that made possible that delicate sense of ‘presence’ which characterizes Catholic meditation on the life of Christ.” The Poetry of Meditation (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1954), 164.
- 60.
Teller, “Why Crashaw was not Catholic,” 246, 255, 244.
- 61.
Martin Luther, “A Meditation on Christ’s Passion 1519,” trans. Martin H. Bertram , in Luther’s Works, American Edition, eds. Jaroslav Pelikan , Helmut T. Lehmann , Christopher Boyd Brown, et al. 79 vols. to date (St. Louis, MO: Concordia Press; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1955–),42:7. The sermon shows a distaste for prolonged meditation on the Passion, about which Luther writes: “Only God knows whether that is invented for the purpose of sleeping or of waking,” 8. For the argument that Luther (and Protestants in general) opposed “affective piety” in relation to the Passion as well as other topics, see Susan C. Karant-Nunn who cites comments by both the Lutheran Martin Chemnitz (1522–1586) and the Calvinist Johann Philipp Mylaeus (dates unknown) that condemn the tendency of Catholics to stress the lamentable parts of the Passion. Reformation of Feeling: Shaping the Religious Emotions in Early Modern Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 93, 125.
- 62.
Luther, A Meditation on Christ’s Passion , in Luther’s Works, 42:8–9.
- 63.
Luther, “Lectures on Galatians 1535; Chapters 1–4,” in Luther’s Works, 26:70.
- 64.
Rachel Fulton writes that the idea of Christ as judge was the dominant tone of meditation “at the turn of the millennium” before the writings of Anselm , John of Fécamp (d. 1078), and later, Bernard. In the earlier era, “Carolingian and Anglo-Saxon collections of private prayers” established a “great distance between Christ and the sinner,” focusing more on one’s sins than on Christ’s suffering and more on Christ’s compassion for the sinner than on the compassion of the sinner for Christ. Fulton argues that these valances are dramatically changed, first by Anselm and later by Bernard. From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800–1200 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 150–3. See also Thomas Bestul, Texts of the Passion, 151. Sarah McNamer argues for another shift in the tenor of Passion narratives (specifically lyrics) starting “in the late fourteenth century” wherein “first-person scripts all but disappear,” and are increasingly replaced by the voice of Christ, “wronged and reproachful.” This voice moreover addresses himself to a reader who is “Christ’s unkynde beloved – one who ignores, disdains, or violently rejects his appeals for an eroticized pity,” Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 183, 178. Such an approach, harshly reminding sinners that Christ died for their sins, still seems considerably removed from Luther’s position that it was the penitent who drove the nails into Christ’s flesh. David V. N. Bagchi nicely references one early reaction to Luther’s statements of his agonized life in the monastery, that such a man must have been possessed by the devil. Bagchi , Luther’s Earliest Opponents, 38.
- 65.
Debora Kuller Shuger, “The Death of Christ,” in The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice, and Subjectivity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 98.
- 66.
Martin Luther, “The Freedom of a Christian 1520,” trans. W.A. Lambert , rev. Harold J. Grimm , in Luther’s Works, American Edition, eds. Jaroslav Pelikan , Helmut T. Lehmann , Christopher Boyd Brown, et al. 79 vols. to date (St. Louis, MO: Concordia Press; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1955–), 31:345.
- 67.
John Milton , “Of Reformation” (1641), in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, gen. ed. Don M. Wolfe . 8 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953–1982). 1:521–2.
- 68.
Milton , “Of Reformation,” 519. Calvin says, similarly, that in unfallen Adam, “there was no part of man, not even the body itself, in which some sparks did not glow.” Institutes , 1.15.3, 188.
- 69.
Calvin’s commentary on John 6:51, qtd. in David K. Winecoff , “Calvin’s Doctrine of Mortification,” Presbyterian 13.2 (1987), 86.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Gleckman, J. (2019). Conversion in Protestant and Catholic Thought in the Reformation. In: Shakespeare and Protestant Poetics. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9599-5_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9599-5_7
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore
Print ISBN: 978-981-32-9598-8
Online ISBN: 978-981-32-9599-5
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)