The Rhetoric of Supplication: Prayer Theory in Seventeenth-Century England

The Rhetoric of Supplication: Prayer Theory in Seventeenth-Century EnglandAuthor(s): Cynthia GarrettSource: Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 46, No. 2 (Summer, 1993), pp. 328-357Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Renaissance Society of AmericaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3039064 .

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The Rhetoric of Supplication: Prayer Theory in Seventeenth-Century England

by CYNTHIA GARRETT

ALTHOUGH MANUALS OFFERING detailed instructions in private prayer are both a distinctive and highly popular form of post-

Reformation English literature, relatively little critical attention has been paid to these texts, either by literary critics or historians of religion. Surveys of English devotional literature, such as Helen White's Tudor Books of Private Devotion and English Devotional Lit- erature 1600-1640 and C.J. Stranks's Anglican Devotion, describe the more prominent of these prayer manuals, but no critical study of this large body of literature yet exists. The reasons for this critical neglect are several. As Sam D. Gill's essay on prayer in the recently published Encyclopedia of Religion suggests, the study of prayer itself is still "undeveloped and naive" (2.489). Those religiously inclined perhaps consider prayer beyond criticism, while students of intellectual and religious history may consider it somehow beneath criticism. But a more specific reason for the critical neglect of English prayer guides lies in their marginal position among current aca- demic disciplines. Because they provide popular instruction rather than doctrine, they have escaped the notice of students of theology; because they rarely treat sectarian issues, they have proved of little interest to historians of religion; and because they have been regarded as lacking the literary character and tradition of other Re- naissance prose forms, such as the meditation or sermon, they have also been largely neglected by literary critics.I

My aim in the current essay is to remedy this neglect by provid- ing a critical interdisciplinary study of the more prominent English prayer guides, particularly those written during the period from I600 to 1660 when interest in private prayer was at its height. Com- bining the methods ofhistoricism and phenomenology of religion

'Davies discusses some of the English prayer guides and collections, though his emphasis is on disputes over liturgical prayer. Among literary critics Kelly examines some of the English prayer books, suggesting their importance for Renaissance drama, while McGuire considers the influence of the structure of prayer on the structure of religious lyrics. More recently, Schoenfeldt reads Herbert's lyrics in the context not only of Re- naissance courtesy literature but also of several devotional manuals of the period.

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THE RHETORIC OF SUPPLICATION

with the close attention to rhetorical features of writing more char- acteristic of literary criticism, I argue that the seventeenth-century English prayer manuals reveal a complex theory of prayer which acknowledges, at times even embraces, the contingent and imper- fect nature of communication with the divine. Private devotion may have been noncontroversial in the sense that it provoked relatively little sectarian debate, as Helen White observes,2 yet precisely what private prayer is, how it should best be performed, and how the pray-er is to determine God's response to prayer remain persistent problems for the English writers of prayer treatises. The prayer manuals everywhere betray an intense ambivalence over God's nature, human emotional experience, and the possibility of true communication between human and divine beings, an ambivalence which has wide implications for the study of post- Reformation English views of God, language and the self.

1. The Art of Prayer

The Reformation, with its insistence on the unmediated relation- ship between the individual and God, created a demand for collections of prayers in the vernacular and gave new impetus to arguments over the purpose of prayer, particularly private prayer. While the subject of public prayer generated a greater degree of con- troversy between Protestants and Catholics, Anglicans and Puri- tans, than private prayer, the subject of private prayer stimulated a larger, and largely unprecedented, body of treatises and instruction manuals designed for the use of the layman. 3 Judging from the number of editions of these treatises and how-to books, it would appear that the public was eager to learn where, when, and how to pray. Robert Hill's Pathway to Prayer, for instance, went through at least eight editions between I606 and 1638, and John Preston's The Saints Daily Exercise saw nine editions during the five years

2White, I930, I 2. 30n the popularity of devotional literature in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century

England, see White, I930, and I95I; and Bennett, I965, 132-40, and 1970, 92f. On the wide popular appeal and influence of prayer specifically, see Kelly and McGuire.

White discusses medieval Catholic sources for English Protestant prayer collections and devotional guides. She cites no examples of English manuals of instruction for prayer before I530, however, and sees "the prayer book especially designed for the devout layman" as a distinctly sixteenth-century development in religious literature (195I, I49).

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RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY

from I629-I634.4 By 1639, when George Downame published his

Godly and Learned Treatise of Prayer, his brotherJohn felt obliged to defend the appearance of yet another book on prayer by explaining that although "much already hath been excellently spoken and written upon this subject, yet let no man think it superfluous to have more published of this argument, seeing that can never be too much taught which is never sufficiently learned and loved" (A3). For the English devotional writers, Anglican or Puritan, prayer represents the single most important form of private devotion, requiring not only practice but preparation, study, and instruction. 5

At the same time, they recognized that personal communication with God presents enormous practical and theoretical difficulties, difficulties which they sought to overcome in their treatises and manuals.

Within the Church of England in the early seventeenth century, arguments raged over the kinds of prayers appropriate for use in public worship and for collection in prayer books, but there was little argument over the need for private prayer and for instruction in such prayer. As Protestants, both Puritans and Anglicans accepted the necessity of private prayer for all Christians, not only the clergy and learned.6 In Reformation theology direct individual

4Edition numbers are from A Short Title Catalogue. There may, of course, have been further editions, copies of which have not survived.

SSee Pettit on the Puritan notion of preparing the heart for grace and the introspec- tion this entails. While Pettit's focus is on American Puritanism, his first chapter discusses the "English preparationists." On seventeenth-century meditational practices, see Martz's examination of the influence of continental, Catholic meditation in seventeenth-century England.

Protestant prayer guides, while acknowledging the value of meditation, generally do not describe or recommend the highly-structured meditational practices developed in continental and Recusant devotional literature, but advise instead a more general reflection, usually on God's mercies and one's own sins, as preparation for prayer. Such meditation, however, plays a decidedly secondary role to prayer in these texts. Preston, for instance, argues that we should not postpone prayer for meditation in order to make ourselves more fit for prayer, but should pray for the desire to pray (34-35).

6Although the terms Puritan and Anglican have been criticized as imprecise and, in the case of the latter term, even anachronistic when applied to the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century English church, I use them because no more effective sub- stitute exists to express the broad theological and ecclesiastical division of the period. My study of the English prayer treatises, however, tends to confirm that the two po- sitions are neither as firmly fixed nor as clearly distinct as historians once assumed. Among critics who have debated the appropriateness of one or both of these terms, see New on their usefulness ( -4), George on the invalidity of the term Puritan in particular, and Wallace for an attempt to preserve the terms while acknowledging their limitations (vii-xiii).

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communication with God becomes imperative, and the view WilliamJames and later psychologists and phenomenologists of re-

ligion espouse, that private prayer is the "core of religion," necessarily follows.7 Prior to the Reformation relatively little emphasis had been placed on private prayer outside the monastery or con- vent. This is not to suggest, of course, that Protestant theology in- vents private prayer. What it does do is democratize it, insisting on the need for each individual to confront God alone.

In defining prayer, the English writers of prayer treatises insist that it is real, however unequal, communication with the divine. Prayer is defined throughout these texts as conversation or speech with God, and Puritan and Anglican alike emphasize the familiarity and directness of this communication. John Preston's comparison of prayer with human conversation in The Saints Daily Exercise reflects the common Puritan conception of prayer as talk with God,8 but the High Church Lancelot Andrewes also emphasizes the im- mediacy of communication with God through prayer, remarking in Institutiones Piae that in prayer "wee talke with him (as it were) face to face" and "speake to him, for what we stand in neede of" (4). While Andrewes here emphasizes our communication with God in prayer, other prayer guides, including Goodwin's The Re- turne of Prayers, provide instructions for identifying and interpret- ing God's response to our petitions. Prayer is not monologue but dialogue, the English devotionalists insist, and to ignore God's response to prayer both offends God and prevents us from receiving and acknowledging his blessings.

But despite this protestation that God hears and responds to prayers, Goodwin and the other prayer guide writers often reveal in him a willful deafness to man's cries. Goodwin's instructions on how to determine if God has heard a prayer presume that there are prayers God either cannot or will not hear, prayers that for some reason go amiss. Indeed, the whole body of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century instruction manuals for prayer rests on this

7See James, Lecture 19, and Heiler, passim, on the essential rather than historical centrality of private prayer. While I agree that private prayer is essential in the sense that it exists in most periods and cultures, even those with highly institutionalized religions, I would argue that historically it has played relatively little role in the lives of many peoples, indeed of many religions. The widespread attention to private devotion in post-Reformation Europe thus represents something of an anomaly in the history of the Christian church.

8Preston, 14.

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assumption. Despite claims of God's infinite goodness and accessibility, the God portrayed in these prayer manuals often appears, at best, difficult to reach and, at worst, inclined to reject any communication which, for reasons not readily ascertainable, displeases him. Preston refers to the necessity to "wrastle with the Lord" even when he is "most backward" to grant a request ( 18); Andrewes and Johann Gerhard refer to prayer in the Old Testament fashion as a means of appeasing God's wrath.9 Despite the prayer manualists' theoretical acceptance of God as unmovable, omniscient, and omnipotent, their instructions for prayer inevitably focus on ways of both appeasing and persuading him. 10 Though they ostensibly reject the "magic formula" view of prayer, the view that prayer's effectiveness depends only on saying certain words in a certain order, they provide more complex formulae of their own to make sure private prayer reaches and favorably impresses God. Because prayer is so difficult, and the consequences of failed prayer so great, they suggest, we cannot rely on instinct, intuition, or even the Holy Spirit to guide us in prayer. We must learn the art of prayer from God's Word, from sermons, and, of course, from instruction manuals.

Yet the Christian conception of God, with its conflicting scriptural and theological definitions, makes private prayer extremely problematic. A central tenet of the classical rhetoric that formed so great a part of Renaissance English learning is that a writer or speaker must tailor his speech to his audience and aim. Although recent critics of seventeenth-century literature have tended to see the period's Protestant devotional writers as rejecting classical rhetoric, particularly ideas of decorum, the influence of rhetorical treatises on these prayer manuals seems undeniable." While the English

9Andrewes, AS; Gerhard, I42. Prayer as a means of placating an angry God appears more prominently in sixteenth-century prayer manuals. See Becon, I28; Day, 9.

"°On the largely persuasive aim of private prayer, see McGuire, 65. McGuire fails to note, however, that the prayer guides' advice on how to persuade God is frequently accompanied by claims that God cannot be persuaded.

"Fish argues that Donne, Herbert, and Milton, among others, employ a heuristic method that is specifically anti-rational, anti-aesthetic, and anti-rhetorical (I-4 and passim). Strier views Herbert as following an anti-rhetorical, anti-rational Lutheran theology which categorically rejects art and decorum in favor of emotion and sincerity (Chapter 2, "The Attack On Reason," and I74-79, I83-88). Both critics perhaps too easily accept modification of traditional rhetorical strategies and declarations of sincerity as indications of the absolute abandonment of rhetoric and reason. On the other

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prayer manualists certainly alter traditional rhetorical arts, their en- tire project is predicated on the assumptions that speech, even and

perhaps especially to God, requires instruction; that only certain kinds of attitudes, speech, or gesture are suitable to prayer; and that those who pray should suit their speech to their divine audience. But how does one speak to an audience as difficult to characterize as the Christian God? The rhetorical problem of how to address God reflects the epistemological problem of how we know God, how we determine what he is like, a problem of particular moment to those compelled to address him personally and directly.

Although ideas about the nature of worship changed enormously with the Reformation, the Protestant conception of God did not change as rapidly or as radically. Protestant theology inherits from the medieval church a conception of God that attempts to reconcile Jehovah with Christ and the idea of a personal God with the Neo- platonic concept of an abstract, unchangeable spirit. The doctrinal formulation of the Trinity officially resolved these conflicting ideas of God for the Catholic church, and-surprisingly, given its scant scriptural foundation-Protestant theology largely embraced and even reinforced this doctrine.12 In early seventeenth-century En- gland, with the exception of some few proto-Unitarians, Anglicans and Puritans alike followed Luther and Calvin in accepting the Trinity. But seventeenth-century English prayer manuals show that it is one thing to accept the mystery of the Trinity as doctrine and another to put the doctrine into practice by addressing this multi-personed God directly in private prayer.

The question of exactly whom one addresses in prayer appears explicitly in a number of Protestant prayer manuals, usually in order to dispute the Catholic practice of praying to saints. The En- glish instruction manuals insist that prayer be directed only to the one, triune God; that prayer to God as both one and three might be problematic is rarely acknowledged. Robert Hill, for instance, claims that the invocation "Our Father" in the Lord's Prayer refers synecdochically to the whole Trinity: since the Trinity is one, the

hand, Schoenfeldt has recently challenged this anti-rhetorical view of Herbert, claiming that as both a preacher and a poet he engages in a political discourse which is "inherently duplicitous and deeply rhetorical" (2).

"'Pelikan, I57-58, 32I-3I.

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invocation of any one person automatically entails invocation of the other two. I3 George Downame argues similarly that prayers can le- gitimately be directed to a single person of the Trinity because in naming one person the pray-er automatically acknowledges the others. 4 But despite this insistence on the essential and unproblematic unity of God's nature, the instructions for private prayer these and other manuals offer reveal the problems inherent in praying to, if not conceiving of, a compound God.

One conceptual problem both the prayer manualist and pray-er face is the apparent contradiction between an angry and a loving God. This conflict manifests itself both between two images of God contained in the first person of the Trinity--God as king or judge and God as father- and between the first and second persons of the Trinity, with God as judge, or even prosecutor, and Christ as re- deemer and advocate. Reformation theology exacerbates this division by emphasizing God's wrath, and so the Old Testament concept ofJehovah and his law, while at the same time promoting the doctrine of salvation through Christ alone, not through obedience to the law. Luther replaces the concrete, institutionalized methods of atonement the Roman Catholic church had sanctioned, including penitential prayers, alms-giving, and indulgences, with the single hope of allaying God's wrath through individual faith in Christ. I Protestant theology thus radically narrows the characters in the human spiritual drama, eliminating the roles played by saint and pope, diminishing the role played by priest and church, and leaving the individual Christian to face an often angry God solely through the mediation of Christ. One result of this revision of the salvation economy is the greater distinction made between an angry and merciful God, between God the Father and God the Son, at least in terms of human relations with the divine. Protestant theology may insist on the essential unity of God, but this God often appears sharply divided in communication with his creatures.i6

'3Hill, 4-5. '4Downame, 66. 'SCalvin, however, criticized the Roman Catholic belief in the salvational power

of confession and good works at least partly because he saw it as placing too great a burden on sinful man, who would have to confess his sins and perform good works constantly to obtain any hope of being saved. See, for instance, 3.4.17 and 4.10.2.

'6The relation between the essential Trinity and what theologians call the economic Trinity-the Trinity as manifested in human history through creation, redemption and

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This divided God appears very prominently in English prayer guides. Their writers seem torn between two images of the Trin- ity's first person, often following claims that God can be ap- proached familiarly as Father with warnings that God must be rev- erenced and feared as Judge and King. Horton Davies suggests that Catholic and High Anglican devotionalists favor a language of prayer which emphasizes the kingly majesty of God, while Puritans portray God less formally as the Father. I7 While this general obser- vation may hold true for the style of prayer treatises, Anglican manuals are certainly as adamant as their Puritan counterparts that God should be addressed as Father, and Puritans are as likely as Anglicans to emphasize his majesty and divine justice.

The Lord's Prayer serves as the central model for addressing God as Father, and the prayer instruction manuals are unanimous in their belief that by permitting us to address him in this fashion, God grants us familiar access and paternal indulgence. Andrewes, for instance, notes that in the Lord's Prayer God asks us to address him as "A Father, not a Judge. / One, being a name of goodnesse. Comfortable. / The other, of Power. Terrible" (32). Yet he qual- ifies this by saying that God may be an "angry Father" (33) and, further on, urges that we be "respective of his awfull Majestie, and make our petitions to him, in feare and trembling, in all humilitie and reverence" (3 8). We see a similar contradiction in Preston's advice on how to address God. He, too, emphasizes God as Father, explaining that like a father God would have us ask for what we want, even when we know he intends to give it to us. 8 But Preston finally declares that this boldness in addressing God derives not from our direct relation to the Father but from our relation to Christ. Referring to Leviticus 5:1 I, which speaks of the need for the priest to render sacrifices on behalf of the people, Preston says that "it is not any excellency in the person, nor any fervencie in the

salvation-remains problematic for Christian theology. Nineteenth-century theolo- gian Schleiermacher recognized in traditional theology a "separation between God's being and God's act" which, he believed, resulted in the subordination of the idea of God's action in the world to the idea of his essential being (Williams, I4). In the English prayer manuals this conflict manifests itself in the tendency to define God in essence as an impersonal, omnipotent, omniscient Absolute Good while portraying him as quite personal, and possessed of limited power and knowledge, in his complex emotional relations with man.

'7Davies, 13 I. i8Preston, Ii.

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prayer, nor any pureness, or holiness that is found in him, nothing that comes from man, that causeth his prayer to be acceptable, but it is the priest" (142). For the Puritan Preston, of course, that priest is not a clergyman but the mediator Christ. By ourselves we do not merit God the Father's attention; we can address God as Father, approach him familiarly as his child, only if we do so in or through Christ. It is our brotherhood with Christ, not our filial relation to God, that permits us familiar, and familial, access to him.

This traditional notion of Christ as mediator serves as one means of reconciling the two images of God and bridging the gap between humanity in its spiritual poverty and God the King andJudge in his fearsome majesty. English instruction manuals often use this method of reconciliation, insisting that all prayer be made in Christ's name. Because he is fully human, they explain, Christ understands us in a way that his Father cannot, and because he is fully divine he can communicate with God in a way we, unaided, cannot. In his Christian Prayers and Holy Meditations, one of the most popular sixteenth-century prayer collections, Henry Bull remarks that in addressing Christ we make our plea to someone who has experi- enced suffering and temptation and is therefore able to understand and sympathize with us. 9 George Downame carries the point further by arguing that in order for our prayers to reach God we must address them not only to all three persons of the Trinity but also to Christ in both his natures.20

But the problem of how one should address the multi-personed Christian God is compounded by yet another conception of the divine, the Neoplatonic view of God as an unchangeable, omniscient, omnipotent spirit, which seems to contradict the personalJehovah / Father / Christ image of God altogether. In Catholic theology this view of God is incorporated to a certain extent in all three figures of the Trinity, but at the same time, in its purest and most Platonic form, it seems to stand removed from them, from any kind of being or action in the physical and human world of change and limitation. For some English devotionalists such a philosophical idea of God remains remote; they seem to tacitly recognize that, as phenomenologists of religion have observed, we can speak only to a personal

I'Bull, xxviii. 2ODowname, 66-67.

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God.21 But for most seventeenth-century apologists for private prayer the philosophical view of God remains compelling, even though they have difficulty reconciling it with their instructions for prayer. As Perry Miller remarks of the American Puritans in particular, "though Puritans might forget its implications, to Puritan- ism itself the idea was fundamental that God, the force, the power, the life of the universe, must remain to men hidden, unknowable, and unpredictable" (io). God as an unknowable force seems equally strong in Anglican prayer manuals such as Andrewes's Institutiones Piae and Featley's Ancilla Pietatis, and they too find it difficult to accept the implications of this concept, especially as regards private prayer. For if we accept God's difference from us as absolute, then prayer as a meaningful form of personal communication with the divine becomes impossible.

Though in their apologies for prayer the authors of prayer treatises may be able to explain away the apparent conflict between a personal and impersonal God, usually by appeal to the traditional theory of accommodation-God appears to us as personal, as susceptible to emotion, in deference to the weakness of our understanding-in their instructions on how to pray they cannot so easily rid themselves of the problem or explain how, knowing that God cannot really be moved, we can still sincerely and fervently attempt to move him. What we see in many of these instruction manuals (as in many seventeenth-century lyrics addressed to God) is a struggle between competing desires-one for a God who is wholly other, free of emotion and infinitely superior to our strug- gles, and another for a God who, being human himself, hears and understands our cries.

The how-to portions of seventeenth-century prayer manuals inevitably emphasize a personal God, a God who feels and responds to emotion. Despite their admission that God cannot be persuaded, these books provide detailed instructions on how to persuade him. And what they universally see as the most effective means of mov- ing God is the emotional appeal. The traditional purposes of the classical rhetoric taught in Renaissance England-to teach, please,

"2Van der Leeuw makes this point, commenting that the view that "nature itself is divine and requires no gods ... by no means yields any satisfaction to the poet's cry f6r a god 'to which one can pray,'... since the divine Power in Nature, too, hears not" (I75).

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and move-are here radically revised. We may not be able to teach God or better him in intellectual or moral argument, nor can we expect to please him in the conventional sense of amusing or surprising him, but though philosophical and theological arguments for God's impassibilitas may suggest otherwise, scriptural example encourages us to believe that God responds favorably to persistent emotional appeals.

2. Fervency in Prayer

In his rejection of a stoical attitude toward the passions, Calvin points to Christ's sorrow over his own and others' troubles as a paradigm of the kind of emotional intensity personal relations with God require.22 Extreme emotions are providential, he suggests, because they impel man toward God. For this reason, while claiming that the godly man should feel assurance that God's grace extends to him, Calvin adds a strong qualification:

By "assurance" I do not understand to mean that which soothes our mind with sweet and perfect repose, releasing it from every anxiety. For to repose so peacefully is the part of those who, when all affairs are flowing to their liking, are touched by no care, burn with no desire, toss with no fear. But for the saints the occasion that best stimulates them to call upon God is when, distressed by their own need, they are troubled by the greatest un- rest, and are almost driven out of their senses, until faith opportunely comes to their relief. (3.20.11)

Calvin makes an intense, emotional involvement with God, for- merly expected only of saints in the Roman Catholic sense, a requirement for "saints" in the broader sense of the elect or redeemed. The godly person, far from living in tranquil assurance of God's favor, constantly vacillates between the extremes of doubt and faith, fear and hope.23 Clearly, for Calvin and many later Protestants, including the seventeenth-century English devotional writers, freedom from intense emotions is only possible after death. In this life one's relations with God should be charged with emotion, as the most compelling biblical figures show.

The major requirement in prayer, therefore, becomes fervency, virtually all the prayer manuals pointing to its necessity in order for

22Calvin, 3.8.9. 23Bouwsma discusses at length Calvin's ambivalence over emotion in his recent bi-

ography. See particularly ch. 2, "Calvin's Anxiety," and ch. 8, "Being."

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a prayer to reach or move God. Though Puritans are commonly considered the more enthusiastic and zealous in their devotion to God, manuals written by Anglicans are as likely to invoke the need for fervency in prayer. Daniel Featley, for instance, claims that devotion "consisteth rather in the fervour of the affections, then light of the thought, or blaze and lustre of speech" (2). Andrewes similarly insists that "it is not a chill and cold Perseverance, or expec- tation, that will serve our turnes, to prevaile with God, but a fervent Spirit to pursue the same. . . . it is the affection, and zealous desires of the devout, mixed with sighes, teares, and grones, not to be uttered, which moove, and prevaile with him" (17-18). No Puritan could more forcefully express what both Anglican and Puritan accept, despite philosophical declarations of God's unchangeability: that God responds to fervency and that fervency shows itself not in frequency of prayer alone, but in the expression of powerful emotion. Indeed, the best pray-ers are those who carry fervency to the point of importunity, arguing with God as David and Job did. John Preston defines fervency by referring to such biblical prece- dents, noting that it is "usually expressed in the Scriptures by such metaphors as these, crying to the Lord, wrestling with the Lord, striving with him, and giving him no rest" (I 17). We see the same attitude in one of Donne's sermons which defends the kind of vi- olent prayer he often uses in his poetry. "Prayer hath the nature of violence," he claims, and "the nature of Impudency; Wee threaten God in Prayer" (27). The figure of the pray-er as a persistent and importunate child, which appears so prominently in Donne's and Herbert's religious lyrics, appears frequently in these texts as illus- tration of the fervency required in prayer.24

Unlike some classical rhetorical treatises, English prayer manuals do not advise the reader how to feign an emotion he does not feel. The assumption throughout is that Christians do or should feel intense emotion in their relations with God and that this emotion serves as the main impetus for prayer. Goodwin suggests that God inspires us to pray "with a quickning heat and inlargement of affections" (3 I). If this emotional arousal is divinely and not satan- ically inspired, it can be regarded as a sure call to prayer. But Good- win and the other prayer manualists also recognize that divine inspiration to pray is not always forthcoming and that we may not

24See Andrewes, 33; Goodwin, 80; Hill, "Epistle" n. pag.; and Preston, II.

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by nature be inclined to prayer, and so they offer methods for arousing the affections and thus the desire to pray. One method frequently recommended in the prayer treatises is praying for the inspiration to pray, and many of the collections include petitions ask- ing God to stir the heart to prayer. Samuel Hieron, for instance, begins his collection A Helpe Unto Devotion with "A Prayer to bee prepared and enabled to pray" (I). Meditation on our sins should also rouse us to prayer since, as Hieron explains, "fervency of affection" springs "from the apprehension of our own vilenesse" (Advertisement, n. pag). Henry Vaughan's Mount of Olives con- tains "Admonitions for Evening Prayer" which instructs the reader to "withdraw from all outward occupations, to prepare for the inward and divine." To further this end Vaughan provides a meditation on man's wickedness and God's brightness "to invite thy soul from thy worldly imployments to his proper vocation" (40- 45). The aim of preparatory prayer and meditation is to arouse the feelings of fear and longing necessary to personally approach God. While a calm, well-ordered heart may be the ultimate aim of prayer, as Preston suggests when he claims that our hearts require prayer to "bring them backe againe into order" ( 8), the act of prayer itself appears to require emotional disorder, and when such disorder does not arise spontaneously, it must be incited.

Calvin identifies the appropriate attitude to bring to prayer when he explains that though "cast down and overcome by true humility, we should be nonetheless encouraged to pray by as sure hope that our prayer will be answered" (3.20. I I). This combination of humility and hope becomes the standard attitude prescribed in English treatises on prayer. Henry Bull's preface to his sixteenth-century prayer collection draws directly from Calvin, claiming that "as re- pentance and faith are knit as companions together (albeit the one driveth us down with fear, and the other lifteth us up with com- fort), so in prayer they must needs meet together" (xix). Similarly, seventeenth-century devotionalist Robert Hill interprets the phrase "Thine is the Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory" in the Lord's Prayer as indicating that in prayer we should "ever debase ourselves and ascribe all glorie to this King of Kings" while at the same time we must "bee ever perswaded of the power of God, that hee can helpe us, and the promise of God that hee will helpe us" (I I ).

Ambivalence thus seems integral to private prayer. The readers of these manuals learn that not only must they pray to a complex,

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multi-personed God, a God who is both angry and loving, con-

demning and forgiving, personal and impersonal, but they must themselves experience and express a similar emotional complexity. However, neither Calvin nor the English devotionalists are entirely comfortable with this ambivalence; although they insist that the pray-er must hold and express contradictory emotions, they also attempt to resolve the contradiction. Calvin's answer to the problem is to identify different sources for humility and hope. The two feelings are not contradictory, he claims, because our humility derives from knowledge of our lowliness, our hope from knowledge of God's graciousness. Thus, "expressions seemingly discordant beautifully agree" because "God raises those who lie prostrate" (3.20. I4). The English devotionalists show a similar desire to ex-

plain away the conflict by suggesting that in prayer the emotions of humility and confidence or love and fear do not occur simulta- neously but at different times and arise from different causes. Bull early offers this explanation, remarking that affliction leads to petition while joy leads to songs of praise and thanksgiving (xxx). Others suggest that prayer requires a delicate emotional balancing, Downame, for instance, writing that "we must not be so humbled in regard of our unworthinesse in our selves, but that notwithstand- ing we are to trust in Gods mercy accepting of us in Christ" (IIo). In this view, humility and confidence, fear and hope, must be mixed in careful proportions.

But the difficulty of actually achieving such a mixture or balance of conflicting emotions can be seen in religious lyrics such as Her- bert's "Temper (I and 2)" and in the many spiritual autobiogra- phies of the period. Bunyan's Grace Abounding provides a particularly dramatic example of the constant alternation of fear and hope that humanity experiences in its relations with God, as Bunyan de- scribes himself repeatedly torn between despair over God's rejection of him and hope that he will be redeemed through Christ. In practice the contrary emotions inspired by a contrary God seem to alternate in rapid succession, rather than settling into balance or proportion. Calvin's explanation of what he means by "assurance"- distress relieved by faith, which must then give way again to distress-suggests this alternation of emotions. If there is stability or balance here, it is both precarious and temporary.

Despite declarations of the value of doubt, fear, and self-loathing in this earthly life, Protestant thought often betrays a strong desire

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for freedom from such emotions. The glory of a life wracked by emotional extremes necessarily diminishes by comparison to the te-

leological vision of a tranquil afterlife. Though the prayer guides glorify intense emotions in the individual's relations with God, suggesting that even painful emotions are necessary and valuable, they also portray prayer as a way of purging these emotions and achieving a temporary respite from them. That prayer is a kind of therapy bringing the heart "backe againe into order" (Preston, I8) implies an emotional catharsis similar to that which Aristotle as- cribes to tragedy, a catharsis based on a psychology which regards the emotions as dangerous if not controlled by the understanding or reason. Critics of the seventeenth-century English religious lyric such as Barbara Lewalski and Richard Strier are certainly right to call attention to Protestant belief in the providential nature of human emotion, but they err by ignoring the lingering distrust of emotion that accompanies this belief.25 Neither the Protestant prayer manuals nor the Calvinist and Lutheran texts they draw so freely on present a single-minded, unproblematic celebration of human emotion. Rather they seem torn between the desire to val- orize and the desire to condemn intense emotion, just as they are torn between a view of God as susceptible to human feelings and a view of God as changeless and therefore immune to them. This ambivalence toward emotion shows itself clearly in Calvin, who may insist that the godly person should burn with desire and toss in fear but also claims that "all human desires are evil . . not in that they are natural, but because they are inordinate . .. because nothing pure or sincere can come forth from a corrupt and polluted nature" (3.3. 2).

The view of emotion presented in Calvin, Luther, and the Prot- estant prayer manuals is thus profoundly dualistic, distinguishing between natural passions and spiritual or regenerate ones. Follow- ing Augustine, Protestant theology sees human passions as a prod- uct of the Fall but capable of spiritual transformation. As Augustine explains, "Among us Christians, in accordance with the Holy Scriptures and their sound doctrine, the citizens of the holy City of God feel fear and desire, pain and gladness, while they live in God's

2SOn the central role of emotion in the "Protestant paradigm of salvation," see Le- walski, 20-27. On the Calvinist and Lutheran rejection of apathia or stoicism for emotional experience, see Bouwsma, 40-45 and 133-35, and Strier, I74-79.

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fashion during the pilgrimage of their present existence, and because their love is right, all these feelings of theirs are right" (City, 307). Powerful love of God purifies the natural affections, making what is otherwise corrupt godly. The English Puritans, in particular, advocate this dualistic view, distinguishing sharply between natural affections and affections which are "sanctified, purged and rectified by grace" (Dent, 12). Goodwin, for instance, identifies a "double importunity" in prayer: one produced by "an inordinate desire to a thing" and another "joyned with a subjection to God's will" (41-42). Preston distinguishes effectual from ineffectual prayer according to whether it is inspired by unregenerate or regenerate emotions, by "our owne spirits" or by "God's owne Spirit" (3). The emotions that prompt us to turn to God are holy and providential; the emotions that prompt us to turn away from God to the world are base and even satanic. But how we might determine when fear, love, or anger is righteous and when base, when divine emotion calls us to prayer or when we are prompted only by a base desire for personal gain, is not always clear. Goodwin suggests that although Satan too may prompt the longing to pray, God has instituted a control system insuring that such promptings will appeal only to the conscience, not the heart, and often at times when prayer is "unseasonable" (32), an explanation which seems designed to relieve some of the burden a dualistic view of the affections imposes on humanity.

Within this dualism lies a further dualism in the privileging of the positive emotions of hope and love over the negative emotions of fear and sorrow, seen clearly in Augustine's statement that the Christian's love makes other emotions right. The English prayer manuals portray humankind as moved to prayer primarily through hardship and distress, but the necessity for this providential spur to emotion is laid to our fallen nature. Were we not corrupt and sinful, were our hearts not indifferent or (in a biblical image used often in the prayer manuals) stony to all but base passions, then we would have little need for petitionary prayer but, like the angels, would sing constant hymns of praise. Donne suggests this view in a letter when he remarks "I had rather it [devotion] were bestowed upon thanksgiving than petition, upon praise than prayer; not that God is indeared by that, or wearied by this; all is one in the receiver, but not in the sender: and thanks doth both offices, for nothing doth so innocently provoke new grace as gratitude" (3I). Although

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Donne claims praise and petition are all one to God, his last phrase suggests otherwise. Praise seems more welcome to God since it is more likely to move him to respond favorably to the presumably unspoken petition. Donne clearly sees praise as the highest form of

prayer both because God himself looks more favorably on it and because we profit more from it.

Donne's use of the word "innocently" here, especially in con- junction with his claim that praise serves human ends more effectively than petition, raises a further problem in private prayer-the problem of sincerity. The idea that the supplicant, aware that God

prefers praise, can still "innocently" employ it to secure God's favor, may seem to us highly ironic and perhaps even hypocritical. Like many of the prayer guide writers, Donne here seems to offer advice on how to manipulate God most effectively, suggesting that praise works best. Elsewhere in his comments on prayer, on its "violence" and "impudence," Donne seems to agree with the more commonly-held view that emotional appeals for God's favor are more likely to succeed in bending God to the pray-er's will. Both views may seem to the moder reader manipulative and calculated, and therefore at odds with the sincerity Protestant theology seems to prize.

Luther emphatically rejected the Catholic idea that prayer recited in Latin can be effectual even when it is not understood, and he in- sisted on prayer in the vernacular so that the pray-er can both understand andfeel the prayer. "What is it elles but to tempte God, when the mouthe babbleth and the hart is scatered elles were?" Luther asks in a 1548 English compilation of his writings (Di). Calvin argued similarly that God hates insincere prayer, prayer which is not given the pray-er's whole heart and mind.26 English prayer manuals embrace this view, regarding emotional appeals to God as effective not so much because they move God to like emotion but because they demonstrate to God the intensity of the prayer's feelings and thus validate their sincerity. Bull's definition of prayer typifies the importance the English devotionalists place on sincerity in prayer. "Seeing therefore the chief duty of prayer consisteth in the heart," he writes, "we must with our whole heart pour out our prayers unto God, the searcher of hearts, and with a sincere, unfeigned, and ardent affection and opening of our heart before

26Calvin, 3.20.6.

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God (for that is true prayer), call upon him, or else we shall not find him" (xv). Because sincerity in prayer is so important, the prayer instruction manuals urge the reader to work to achieve it. Robert Hill notes that though a "perfection of sincerity" in prayer may be impossible, yet "I must strive with Paul for this perfection, and pray unto God that I may come to this perfection" (31). We must not only be sincere in prayer but, just as we must pray and meditate to experience the emotion prayer requires, so we must pray for the sincerity it requires.

The idea that sincerity requires work, that one must learn to be sincere, may seem curious, given the post-Romantic tendency to see sincerity as essentially natural and spontaneous, and therefore at odds with rhetoric, art, and perhaps even language itself. A. D. Nuttall reflects this view in his claim that the didacticism and cal- culation of George Herbert's lyrics addressed to God make them duplicitous.27 But the English Protestant prayer manuals make clear that though they indeed made a cult of sincerity, they did not, indeed could not, altogether reject rhetoric or reason. For although Protestant theologians and English devotionalists frequently define prayer as the heart's cry to God, and often emphasize the familiarity personal prayer allows, they also provide instructions for when, where, and how to utter these heartfelt cries and insist that prayer should show thought as much as it shows emotion.

3. The Form and Substance of Prayer

The tension created in the English prayer manuals between a definition of prayer as cry and instructions on how to manufacture this cry reflects conflicting images of God and conflicting ideas about the purpose of prayer. The prayer manualists constantly wrestle with competing views of prayer, at times accepting that it consists entirely in internal communication with an understanding, indwelling God, at others arguing that some manifestation in word, gesture, or other sign is needed to demonstrate sincerity and devotion to an external, perhaps even hostile, divinity.

Definitions of prayer in Protestant prayer guides often suggest that prayer is, at core, internal and nonverbal. "Real" prayer appears in them as a kind of Platonic form which words and gestures only remotely signify and may even obscure. The prayer manuals

27Nuttall, 57.

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see the human heart as the locus of prayer and often insist that whether God spiritually descends to us in prayer or we spiritually ascend to God, no physical movement or manifestation outside the heart is required. Downame expresses this common Protestant belief in the essentially internal nature of prayer when he declares that "prayer is not the outward speech chiefly or onely but the inward of the soul" (3). When the prayer manualists refer to an outward manifestation of this inner prayer, it is often in terms of the "sighes, teares and grones" of the heart. They frequently cite Paul's claim in Romans 8:26 that in prayer "the spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered." The intense emotion which provokes prayer is here seen as issuing in inarticulate sounds, if it issues in sound at all.

Along with ambivalence toward emotion itself, the English prayer guides thus betray ambivalence over outward displays of emotion, insisting that they are valuable only if they are sincere. But how does one know if fervency and devotion are sincere or feigned? God may know-though even this often appears doubtful in the prayer manuals-but can those who pray truly gauge their own sincerity? The danger always exists that emotional display may distort real feeling or even produce false feeling. Suspicion of emotional display is common in Renaissance literature, religious and secular. Shakespeare, indeed, seems obsessed with the problem: one thinks of Hamlet's insistence that an outward show of sorrow is suspect because it can easily be feigned or staged and of Mal- colm's remark on Macbeth's grief over Duncan's death, "To show an unfelt sorrow is an office/Which the false man does easy" (2.3.138-39). That emotion can be falsely shown makes all shows of emotion equivocal. The English prayer manuals show a similar suspicion of emotional demonstrations in prayer, even as they advocate them. They seem to want to retain expression of emotion as a sign of fervency, yet they fear the sign may be an empty one. Their insistence on absolute sincerity in prayer represents a desire to somehow guarantee that the emotion and reverence the pray-er displays in gestures, words, even cries, will not be hypocritical.

Protestant criticism of Roman Catholic religious ceremony as hypocritical leads to a general suspicion of other kinds of symbolic demonstration. While the Puritans were, of course, more compre- hensive in their objections to Catholic liturgy and rituals, both Anglicans and Puritans condemned public and private religious

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practices that they felt substituted outward form for inner faith and conviction. Andrewes's objection to "cold faint and drowzie

prayers" condemns prayer which is all form and no substance. What is important is the fervency of the prayer, not the words or forms it employs. The efficacy of prayer, according to the English devotional guides, depends on the spiritual state of the pray-er at the moment of praying, not on the way he expresses himself. Thomas Goodwin claims men are wrong "tojudg of the weaknesse of their prayers by their expressions, and gifts in performing them" because all God attends to in prayer is "the faith, the sincerity, the obedience, the desires exprest in it" (79). Andrewes's and Good- win's comments reflect the widely-held Protestant view that real prayer does not consist in the words or gestures the pray-er uses and, in fact, can exist quite apart from them. Prayer may employ words or gestures, but it need not. As Gerhard explains, "There is not alwayes need of clamour; because God heareth even the sighs of our hearts, seeing that he dwelleth in the hearts of the godly. There is not alwayes need of words; because he is present even with the thoughts. Oftentimes one sigh moved by the holy Ghost, and offered to God in the spirit, is more acceptable to God then long repetitions of prayers, where the tongue prayeth, and the heart is plainly dumbe" (I44-45). Words and gestures here seem entirely incidental to true prayer, which consists in the immediate, even involuntary, communication of the heart with God.

Definition of prayer as the cry or sigh of the heart to God reaf- firms God's absolute power by implying that prayer comes solely from him, that we can take little or no responsibility even for the impulse to pray. Most of the prayer manuals make precisely this claim, adopting the Calvinist and Lutheran view that humankind is so weak, sinful, and hard-hearted that without God's grace we would never engage in prayer. Goodwin goes so far as to claim that God not only inspires us to pray but also composes the prayer himself. Comparing the genesis of prayer with the genesis of the world, Goodwin explains that God "sayes, Let there be a prayer, and there is a prayer, that is, he powres upon a man a spirit of grace and supplication, a praying disposition, he puts in motives, suggests arguments and pleas to God" (3 I). Goodwin is anxious that the supplicant receive no credit even for the form prayer takes. The individuality of private prayer, necessary as evidence of the Prot- estant's personal faith in God, becomes threatening to God's

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omnipotence when it seems to issue in an individual language and

style calling attention to a self distinct from God. But this view of divine control and human powerlessness in

prayer not only conflicts with the instructions for rousing the heart to pray that the prayer manuals provide but, like the arguments against a free human will on which it is based, ultimately seems to make meaningless the functions of prayer as service to God and an

expression of human desire for and dependence on the divine. For this reason, even arch-Calvinists such as Goodwin and Preston cannot consistently embrace a view of prayer as entirely inspired and involuntary. Indeed, Preston suggests that though we must be fervent and importunate in prayer, we also must be more than usually self-aware and deliberate. When one prays fervently, Preston claims, "all within him is opened and explicate, and exposed to the view of the Lord" (8), an openness which occurs not because God exercises special powers to perceive us when we pray, but because in prayer we actively and willingly abandon the attempt to hide the self from God. The frequent admonitions in Protestant prayer manuals to concentrate and attend to prayer, even in reciting set prayers, indicate that private devotions must be deliberate and self- conscious. Prayer, Robert Hill states, should be made "in intention without wandering" (Preface, n. pag.). Those who pray must con- sciously open themselves up to and intentionally address God.

The modern assumption that true prayer is spontaneous and immediate communication with God may have taken root with the Reformation, with the rejection of Latin liturgy and rote prayers performed as penances, but the definition of prayer in seventeenth- century England was by no means as fixed and narrow as that accepted or assumed by twentieth-century religious writers and critics of religious verse. The dominant modern view of prayer, well- expressed in Friedrich Heiler's study Prayer, tends to define the highest prayer as absolutely spontaneous, its purity compromised by reflection, deliberation, even by language itself. 28 But even those

28For Heiler real prayer is essentially spontaneous; thus liturgical and literary prayer, while valuable as models and aids to devotion, are not real prayer. The spontaneity and artlessness of ancient and original prayer, he claims, represent the only true prayer: "The language of prayer is wholly free, informal, unpremeditated, impromptu. He who prays does not borrow his words from others, they come naturally to him, he speaks from his heart, in his own impulsive words, corresponding entirely to the mo- mentary situation and the particular circumstances" (9).

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seventeenth-century English Puritans who insist most adamantly on the value of extemporaneous prayer do not view private prayer as extemporaneous in the absolute sense that post-Romantic religious writers have. Though both Puritans and Anglicans frequently define prayer as a heartfelt cry to God, few would accept Heiler's assumption that the more deliberation and thought we exercise over prayer, the further it moves from authenticity.

Despite their valorization of interior prayer and their suspicion of outward show, the English prayer guides are reluctant to resign the use of set prayers from Scripture or popular contemporary collections and the careful composition of one's own devotions in favor of a strictly spontaneous, internal invocation to God. While they unequivocally state that prayer is not outward form alone, and often insist that it can exist without form, they do not reject the use of language and gesture in prayer and indeed offer advice for the most appropriate kinds to use. Puritan and Anglican may disagree on the use of liturgical prayer in public worship, but both generally accept the view that private prayer can be either extempore or pre- meditated, conceived or set (in the terms they often use) and that these very different kinds of prayer are valuable and even necessary.29

One reason few prayer guides advocate the exclusive use of internal or spontaneous prayer is the fear that such prayer may not properly honor God. A spontaneous cry to God may effectively express the pray-er's emotion and aid confession, but even to Puritan writers on prayer it seems inappropriate as service to God. The

29Although Puritans and Anglicans disagreed on the use of liturgical prayers in public worship-Puritans generally arguing for the use of extemporary or scripturally inspired pastoral prayer while Anglicans defended use of the liturgy of The Book of Com- mon Prayer-both generally admitted the use of set and extemporaneous prayer in private devotion. Even that highest of Anglicans Bishop Cosin acknowledged that although the Christian should rely primarily on set prayers in both private and public devotion, "all kind of ejaculatory or sudden, devoute, and holy Praiers are not to be condemned" (Preface,n. pag.). Similarly, apart from a few radical separatist groups and, later in the seventeenth-century, the Quakers, few Puritans condemned the use of written or set prayers in private devotion. This is not to suggest that the English Church of the period displays perfect harmony over the use of set and spontaneous private prayer, but such disagreement as exists, even between the representatives of extreme views within each faction, centers on the relative, rather than exclusive, merits of each.

See Davies, I87-200oo, on Puritan and Anglican disputes over the use of liturgical prayer in public worship.

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Protestant believes that God permits familiarity, even importunity in prayer, but also that, as Melanchthon declared, "God wants to be acknowledged; that is with glory and honor to his divine name" (301). Fearing "carelesnesse in seeking to God" (Preston 54), the prayer manualists frequently admonish the reader not to pray "rashly" or "at adventure." Andrewes, for instance, though he defines prayer as familiar converse with God, still insists on the need for decorum, advising that we should "not pray so familiarly, as if we were speaking to our equals: for the higher and more eminent the person is, whom we petition; the more reverend, and submisse, ought our behavior to be to him" (I 5). Such insistence on decorum may not be surprising in a High Anglican such as Andrewes, but prayer manualists with Puritan leanings also believe that prayer, however familiar and importunate, should at the same time show "unfained reverence" for God (Hill, I9) and this reverence is best manifested in the care one takes over prayer. Downame, for instance, argues that "a good desire, vow or promise made in prayer upon former deliberation is more accepted of God, and is like to be more constant, and may likewise be uttered with better fervency of affection and begged with more assurance of faith then that which is rashly uttered upon a sudden" (138). Though God will accept prayer "rashly offered upon a sudden," Downame implies, he prefers prayer demonstrating not only sincerity but thought. For Downame, indeed, the two do not appear to be at odds; the most thoughtful prayer may be also the most passionate and sincere.

Another reason some prayer treatises refuse to advocate the exclusive use of spontaneous prayer is the belief that set and premed- itated prayer may be less likely than original devotions to obscure or misrepresent the intense emotion central to prayer. Robert Hill, for instance, arguing that the two kinds of prayer draw on different faculties, suggests that reading another's prayer arouses the emotions more than composing one's own: "When it [prayer] is endited, then is the faculty of conceiving or invention exercised, and where it is repeated or read that facultie resteth, but other faculties with the affections may be exercised, if not more than when the invention is working" (1 33-34). "Endited" or "conceived" prayer indeed may be more full of self than set prayer; we may become so enamored of our own voice, our own invention, even our own emotion, that we cease to focus on God. Donne criticizes "sudden and unpremeditate prayer" because it may result from base passions

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and express a false, earthly self instead of the true, spiritual self: "Passions and affections sometimes, sometimes bodily infirmities, and sometimes a vain desire of being eloquent in prayer, aliens me, withdraws me from my self, and then that prayer is not my prayer" (I 5). The use of set prayer averts these dangers, becoming a kind of via negativa that permits the pray-er to abandon anxiety over forms and methods of praying and directly experience emotional involvement with God.

But in this view, set or even written prayer in a sense ceases to be prayer and becomes a prompt to the mystical experience that constitutes real communication with the divine, returning us to the view that real prayer is internal and any expression involved in prayer is incidental. Some prayer manualists explicitly state that reading or reciting set prayer is an intermediate form of prayer best suited to neophyte devotionalists. Robert Hill, John Preston,and Daniel Featley all advise or admit the use of set prayer in private devotion, but suggest that it is valuable only as an aid for the young or unlearned. 30 Although Preston argues that set prayer is necessary, he ultimately does not seem to regard it as either truly private or truly prayer since he claims that "the end of a set forme of prayer is to be a help for the private" (83). This argument resembles Re- naissance defenses of poetry which suggest that poetry's educa- tional value lies in its greater accessibility than history or philoso- phy to weak intellects. Although set prayer may be valuable, for most English devotionalists it remains inferior to original prayer because it represents another instance of accommodation to human weakness. Were we stronger mentally and spiritually, we would be able to communicate with God without fixed forms and perhaps without words or gestures at all.

An omniscient God theoretically should not require outward demonstration of the pray-er's sincerity and devotion, should not need words or gestures, since he can read human hearts. But the prayer guides cannot escape the conviction, borne out by Scripture, that God requires some external expression of devotion. Good- win's claim that God does not judge prayer by the pray-er's "expressions" but by "the faith, the sincerity, the obedience, the desires exprest in it" leaves intact the assumption that human devotion must somehow be outwardly expressed and that God

3°Preston, 83; Hill, I28-37; Featley, A7-A8v.

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judges us by that expression. It seems impossible to keep in constant view the belief that God has direct knowledge of our most

fleeting thoughts and feelings. The prayer manuals may accede to this view, but they nevertheless show concern over how those who

pray appear to God, as if the divine vantage point were no more far-seeing than our own. God is frequently portrayed as entirely external to humanity, judging us as we judge each other, on the basis of our actions and words rather than on the basis of our internal

spiritual disposition. Andrewes offers this view of an entirely external God when he discusses the need to demonstrate fervency in

prayer. Such demonstration is necessary, he argues, "For how doe, or can we thinke, that God will give us that, for which wee pray, when by our behaviour and gesture, our faint and weake sollicita- tion, we seeme to him, that either we doe not want, what we pray for, or, that he will upon every sleight and cold motion, be perswaded to give us, what wee desire?" (I9). And though Preston finally insists that only Christ's sacrifice makes prayer acceptable to God, he nevertheless presents the "right method" (5) for prayer, a method which requires that Christians prove their devotion through fervent and importunate supplication of God. God is the ultimate judge of both the pray-er and the prayer, and the prayer manualists portray God as requiring some demonstration of faith and devotion in order to make his judgment. Preston makes this clear in his definition of prayer as "an expression of the mind to the Lord; sometimes by words, sometimes without words, but yet there must be an expression, and some opening of the will to him" (2). Prayer may at times be nonverbal, but it must always be expression.

4. Divine Language and Human Language

James 5:I6, a passage frequently cited by the prayer guides, states that "The effectual fervent prayer of the righteous man availeth much." The circularity of this statement, suggesting that prayer is effectual if it is effectual, calls attention to another problem for those addressing God: how do we determine if or when prayer achieves its aim? God, presumably, is the only infallible judge of the efficacy of prayer, and he renders his judgment, according to the prayer manuals, by accepting or rejecting prayer. But how are we to know if our prayers have reached God? The question of how to obtain God's response to petitions is a persistent problem in discussions

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of prayer, even the most zealous advocate of prayer acknowledging that frequently there seems to be no response at all. The seventeenth-century English devotionalists explain the apparent lack of response to prayer as the pray-er's fault either because the prayer was bad (in which case God's silence is really a response signalling rejection of the prayer) or because the pray-er lacks sufficient

knowledge of how to discern God's answer. To discover whether our prayers have been accepted or rejected we need only learn how to read God's response to prayer, a skill Preston and Goodwin, among other prayer guide writers, propose to teach us.

The need to learn to read God underscores the difficulty involved in private prayer. Although God responds to prayer, the prayer manuals make it clear that he does not respond in a way immediately intelligible to the supplicant. Fallen humanity cannot expect the kind of direct, verbal response God granted Adam in paradise, and the individual praying alone cannot rely on a priest to explain God's response. Those who pray privately, therefore, must learn to read God's signs as they manifest themselves in the external world, in Scripture, and through the petitioners' state of mind or heart.

Both Preston and Goodwin direct those who pray to pay particular attention to occurrences in the world around them for, as Goodwin explains, even small things may be "magna indicia," God's "tokens" or "signs" in response to prayer (50). God responds in unpredictable ways, Goodwin suggests, and so we must constantly compare what we see around us to what we have asked of God in order to find possible correspondences. Preston, too, emphasizes the unpredictable nature of many of God's responses to prayer: God often "doth our businesse by such meanes, that we least dreame of" (58). We may believe God has not responded, Pres- ton suggests, when in reality we have missed God's message because his manner, means, and time of answering were not what we expected. The Bible, too, may provide God's answers to our prayers, both authors maintain, so we must scour not only the world but also the Word in search of the answers to our petitions.

But in addition to speaking through the world and the Word, God also speaks to supplicants through their own emotions. Good- win notes that Christians may read God's response to prayer "especially out of the impressions in their own hearts" (Epistle, n. pag.). Petitioners must therefore pay close attention to their emotional state before, during, and after prayer. While the tendency

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toward self-analysis so evident in Protestant literature may derive in part, as Pettit and other critics have remarked, from the Puritan belief that the inner life provides signs of grace or election, it may also owe a great deal to this more general belief that God speaks to us through our changing emotions.

That this divine language is difficult to interpret becomes apparent in Goodwin's elaborate qualification of each method he presents for decoding God's signs. A mind "calmed and satisfied" by prayer and a "strong sense of Gods favour, and presence" may be good signs that God hears a petition but they do not necessarily mean that God will grant the petitioner's request (34-36). If "God stirres up in the heart a particular faith in a business" one can feel certain that God has inspired the prayer, but again this feeling is not a sure sign that his request will be answered (3 8). In short, we can never be sure where, when, or how God responds, and so must be vigilant for clues, both in our hearts and in the world around us. Despite Good- win's and Preston's conviction that we can and must listen to God's return to our prayers, their instructions for reading God reveal how difficult it is to understand God's language. And despite the claim that God responds to every prayer, or at least to all genuine prayer, the rhetoric of the prayer guide often reveals little faith in God's ability or willingness to listen to human speech.

Preston's claim that God "knowes not the meaning" of prayers "of our owne spirits" (3) indicates that the language barrier between divinity and humanity is two-sided. It is not just we who have difficulty reading God; God also has difficulty reading us. Though Preston modifies his statement by adding that God "doth not accept" such prayers, the implication remains the same: the gap between God and human is enormous and communication between them is therefore enormously difficult. Much of the time, we speak to God in a language of natural desire which God cannot or will not understand, while God, when he condescends to speak to us at all, communicates through cryptic external signs or equally cryptic emotional states, the significance of which can never be fixed or sure.

Though Protestant theology claims that Christ alone bridges this gap, that the divine Word provides the one language both God and creature understand, the English prayer manuals betray the human desire to bridge the gap personally, to speak not only to or through God the Son but directly to God the Father. To this end they at-

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tempt to provide a language appropriate to communication with God. Just as they distinguish between spiritual and natural emotion, they also distinguish between spiritual and natural expression. Their focus on how we should pray, on the appropriate attitude, tone, gestures, and words to use, shows their concern to identify a language of prayer in some way distinct from other kinds of language or expression. The English prayer guides may reject Catholic recitation of the Pater Noster accompanied by ritualized gestures, but they are anxious to identify other words and gestures that will genuinely express the pray-er's love of and desire for God. Dow- name suggests that God has established a language of prayer when he claims that "where he [the Lord] requireth the inward worship of the soul in prayer, as honoremfacti, the honour of the deed, there also he requireth the outward of the body when it may be conve- niently exercised, as honorem signi, the honour of the signe" (I 17). While strict Puritans might not agree with this defense of gesture in prayer if it entails "popish" crossing or genuflection, they ac- knowledge that prayer necessarily entails expression, and they, too, are concerned to identify a language that, unlike the empty expression of Catholic ritual, will truly communicate with God.

But a difficulty presented by this dualistic view of language or expression is that both spiritual and natural language seem to rely on the same forms. Whether the prayer guides are speaking of mental, oral, or written prayer, they cannot escape referring to words and signs. Downame claims that prayer is not "the outward speech chiefly or onely" but he acknowledges that it is "the speech or communication of the soul with God" (3-4); Hill explains that although we need not use the exact words of the Lord's Prayer, we must find "other words" to express what is in our hearts (3). In all the prayer treatises prayer is referred to as "talk" or "speech" with God. De- spite their suspicion of "speech only" and of"vain repetitions," the prayer manualists hold fast to words, to the sign, as the only possible means of expressing ourselves to God. Though they may wistfully admire the entirely mental or spiritual communication of angels and mystics, they cling to human language. For what they are concerned with in these texts is not salvation and the perfect communication with God salvation may offer, but methods for communicating with God here and now.

"For the world of the primitive and of antiquity, and above all the religious world, knows nothing whatever of'empty words,' of

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'words, words'; it never says: 'more than enough words have been exchanged, now let me see deeds'; and the yearning no longer to have to 'rummage among words' is wholly foreign to it."31 The seventeenth-century English prayer guides do know something of empty words and are anxious to keep them from prayer. But they also recognize that words and other signs are the only means we have to communicate with God immediately and personally. By at- tempting to resolve the problems involved in personal communication with God, seventeenth-century prayer theory exposes difficulties inherent in all language and communication. At the same time, it offers a vision of the possible power of language to tran- scend human limitations and approach the divine. For if prayer is effectual, as the English devotionalists claim; if, despite its limitations, our language can bridge the enormous gap between human and divine, then there must somehow be power in this language, a power perhaps instituted by God, but certainly exercised by humankind. UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE

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Documents

The Rhetoric of Supplication: Prayer Theory in Seventeenth-Century England