The Resurrection of the Body and the Life of the Flesh in Henry Vaughan’s Religious Verse

Abstract

I ask how Henry Vaughan’s distinctive understanding of resurrection determines how he uses poetic language to represent biological and corporeal life. Vaughan holds a theory of resurrection that is distinctive in two ways: (1) it rejects body/soul dualism, seeing resurrection exclusively as a matter of the body living again, and (2) it sees resurrection as something that will happen in the future but also as something that is happening already now, and in that sense it is a theory of immanent resurrection. Vaughan’s theory of immanent materialist resurrection leads to a search in the here and now for the signs or seeds of an alien life that is already now moving in the direction of resurrection. Whereas we (in our modern biological frame of reference) think of the material body as the thing that “causes” the death of the socially conditioned person by becoming diseased or old, Vaughan’s apocalyptic perspective is the reverse: for him, it is the socially conditioned self that will necessarily die and the only thing that could possibly survive this apocalyptic end is precisely the “raw” body, the flesh that is left over after death and that he sees as the substrate of resurrection.

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