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Prayer and the Sacred Image: Milton, Jeremy Taylor, andthe Eikon Basilike

David Gay

As Elizabeth Skerpan-Wheeler has observed, in both its “inception and recep-tion,” the Eikon Basilike was “a collaborative project” with many “hands shapingthe book and giving it its final form” (123-24). Chapter 16 is particularly revealingof collaborative work, as the voice of King Charles commends recent defendersof the Prayer Book: “As for the matter contained in the Book, sober and learnedmen have sufficiently vindicated it against the cavils and exceptions of those, whothought it a part of piety to make what profane objections they could against it”(131). One of these “sober and learned” vindicators was certainly Jeremy Taylor.Taylor published his Discourse Concerning Prayer Ex tempore in 1646 in response toParliament’s replacement of the Book of Common Prayer with the Directory of PublicWorship in 1645. An Apology for Authorized and Set Forms of Liturgie against the Pretenceof the Spirit, published in 1649, expands on the Discourse with, among otheradditions, a dedication to the King and a preface lamenting his imprisonment andimpending martyrdom.1

According to James Clifford, a printer who worked on the first edition, Taylor“accidentally” entered the shop of the Royalist publisher Richard Royston and sawthe proofs of the Eikon Basilike under the title, “The Royal Plea.” Alarmed that soobvious a title “would betray the Book,” Taylor wrote to the King to urge a changein title, suggesting that the Greek title Eikon Basilike would not draw the attention ofanti-royalists, and would also, as a tribute, evoke James I’s Basilikon Doron.2 Theroyalist writer Richard Hollingworth collected Clifford’s testimony in order toattribute the Eikon Basilike solely to Charles I. We can be certain that Charles com-mended Taylor’s Discourse Concerning Prayer Ex tempore, thus encouraging its expan-sion into the Apology for Authorized and Set Forms of Liturgie. In his prefatory letter tothe King, Taylor observes that, in the two years “since your Most Sacred Majestywas pleased graciously to looke upon” the Discourse, its leaves “are growne into aTract, and have an ambition (like the Gourd of Jonas) to dwell in the eye of theSunne from whence they received life and increment” (“To His Most SacredMajesty” sig. A3r). While Taylor’s overall contribution to the collaborative patternof the Eikon Basilike is difficult to quantify, Taylor’s defenses of liturgy held theKing’s attention and influenced the ways in which the Eikon Basilike champions setforms of prayer.

By identifying Taylor’s Apology as a central subtext in chapter 16 of the EikonBasilike, we can read Milton’s Eikonoklastes in relation to both the Eikon and theApology. Milton had attacked the imposition of set forms of prayer as early as 1641 inAnimadversions:“there is a large difference in the repetition of some patheticall ejacu-lation rays’d out of the suddain earnestnesse and vigour of the inflam’d soul, (such aswas that of Christ in the Garden) from the continual rehearsal of our dayly orisons”

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(CPW 1: 682).3 Ministers who impose set forms on others practice a “supercilioustyranny impropriating the Spirit of God to themselves” (CPW 1: 682). My purposeis not simply to account for the politics that separated Milton from Taylor, Charles I,and the makers of the Eikon Basilike. The image of the King as Christ suffering inGethsemane, and the vindication of this image by Taylor and others, impelledMilton to refine his idea of inspiration in prayer in a manner that would affect bothhis polemical purpose in 1649 and the later representation of prayer in his majorpoems.

1. Perceiving the Sacred:The Dialectics of Iconoclasm

The Eikon Basilike is subtitled:“the Pourtraicture of His Sacred Majestie in hisSolitudes and Sufferings.” Thus, the King’s person is extraordinary as it allows forthe perception of the sacred by others. The portrait of the King, in turn, occasionsthe perception of the “sacred” in a book. The focal point for this perception isWilliam Marshall’s emblematic frontispiece representing the King at prayer, with itsclear evocation of the passion of Christ (27). As the King holds a crown of thorns inhis right hand, his own eyes are fixed in a reciprocal gaze linking a ray of heavenlylight from behind bearing the words “clarior e tenebris,” and the upward-looking,heaven-directed light of the King’s gaze, bearing the words “caela specto.” The“Explanation of the Embleme” paraphrases these Latin phrases in verse:“So triumphI, And shine more bright / In sad Affliction’s Darksom night” (clarior e tenebris), and“That heav’nlie Crown already mine / I view with eies of Faith divine” (caela specto).The reader observing this emblem will experience two related aspects of the sacred.The visual representation of Charles as a Christ-like figure conveys the sacred as theincarnation of Christ. The convergence of verbal messages conveys the sacred as thereception and expression of the divine will in the appearance of light. The text thatfollows sustains the reader’s relationship to the image of sacred majesty in its use ofthe persona of Charles I: each chapter conveys the verbal portraiture of the King’sinnermost thoughts and convictions, attaining to a unique threshold of sanctity inthe prayers that conclude each chapter. A seventeenth-century reader who acceptsthe premise of sacred majesty would find the Eikon Basilike a uniquely intimate andinward experience of the sacred in prayer. This description of the potential encoun-ter between readers and the image and voice of King Charles in the Eikon Basilikeraises the larger question of how those readers would perceive the sacred in a mate-rial text, and how that perception is affirmed or contested byTaylor and Milton, twowriters situated on either side of the king’s book.

Achsah Guibbory describes the distinct temporalities in Anglican and Puritanpositions: Eikonoklastes “articulates the conflict between the ‘Puritan,’ reforming ide-ology, which insists on disruption and discontinuity in history, and the ‘Anglican’ideology, which values continuity and constructs history as a continuous, seamlesswhole in which the present gains its value from its connection with the past” (284).These two temporalities apply to Milton and Taylor. For Milton, reformationrequires the disruption of the capacity of the Eikon Basilike to replicate a compla-cently royalist readership; for Taylor, in contrast, continuity sustains and animates theuniversal and trans-historical communion of the Body of Christ. Following the

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traumatic disruption effected by the regicide and the abolition of monarchy, theEikon Basilike proved to be a powerful corrective to an act of literal and figurativeiconoclasm in its representation of the sacred image of the King.

In Eikonoklastes, Milton is not simply performing the destruction of a sacredimage before an audience of readers. By focusing on the reader’s inward experienceof the sacred, Milton is creating conditions for the reader to reimagine the sacred.Milton’s iconoclasm is paradoxically both destructive and creative, as several criticshave observed. Creative iconoclasm is vital to a society of readers. For SharonAchinstein, Milton’s revolutionary reader can “resist propaganda by relying uponinner judgment” (162-63). For David Ainsworth, Milton’s spiritual reader is a dis-cerning subject able to question images “instead of uncritically accepting them”(35). Eikonoklastes encourages readers to respond to the Eikon Basilike “by breaking itapart, as Milton does, and separating the divine wheat from the worldly chaff” (58).Ernest Gilman develops the paradox of iconoclasm in the dialectic of idol andimage, outer and inner person, and, in the case of the Eikon Basilike, disease andhealth. If idolatry is a disease that can “contaminate the inner man” and “grip thebody politic,” then “iconoclasm becomes the necessary instrument of public health”(154). Erin Henriksen observes a paradoxical tension of “corrective breaking” inEikonoklastes: Milton “shatters the image set up by the King’s book, breaking it pre-cisely in those places that threaten to ensnare its audience in idolatry. It goes furtheras well, to make from the broken pieces a new work, an image that corrects the mis-taken beliefs of the original” (47-48). Emphasizing the theatrical self-fashioning ofCharles I in the Eikon Basilike, David Loewenstein argues that destructive icono-clasm also creates “a new orientation towards the past” (63). Loewenstein makessignificant observations on the role of prayer in the Eikon Basilike. Charles’s“Penitential Meditations,” which echo the penitential Psalms, strengthen his con-nection to “the biblical line of kingship represented by David and Christ” (54). Hecites Charles’s inclination to “‘hold to primitive and uniform Antiquity [rather] thanto comply with divided novelty’” (Eikon Basilike 145; cited in Loewenstein 54).These affirmations of antiquity and continuity draw from Taylor, who sees theresources of authentic prayer in “primitive and ancient formes of Church service,which are composed according to those so excellent Patterns” (54), and who arguesthat “a publick Forme of Lyturgie was the great instrument of Communion in thePrimitive Church” (69). Loewenstein recognizes a larger tension between the seem-ingly irenic position of Charles as he prefers prayer to conflict in his sufferings, andthe intensely polemical Milton who detains his textual and ideological adversary inthe revolutionary sphere of history.

Informed by these articulations of the paradox of iconoclasm, I want to intro-duce a new dialectical relationship found in recent phenomenological studies ofprayer. In “Prayer as Kenosis,” James Mensch considers two human capacities thatfunction in prayer: kenosis functions as a mode of receptivity; incarnation functionsas a mode of empathy. Kenosis and incarnation are, of course, key terms in theChristian understanding of God taking human form. By adapting these terms tothe phenomenology of prayer, Mensch calls our attention to how we experience thesacred, and thereby provides a model for how readers might encounter the sacred inthe Eikon Basilike, a text that represents the image of sacred majesty as the incarnateChrist, and that invites empathy with the King’s suffering.

Mensch identifies a basic paradox in the perception of the sacred: phenomenol-ogy, he observes,“is the study of appearing” while the “sacred seems to signify what

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cannot appear” (64).4 In Exodus 33.20, for example, God tells Moses, “Thou canstnot see my face: for there shall no man see me, and live.” As Mensch observes, prohi-bitions “against seeing God face-to-face imply that were God to appear as he is,he would burst the bounds of the world. His appearance would be deadly in itsoverwhelming splendor” (65).

Milton is attentive to this problem in Paradise Lost. The poetics of accommoda-tion, which he articulates in De Doctrina Christiana, offers a solution. God in Scrip-ture “is always described or outlined not as he really is but in such a way as willmake him conceivable to us. Nevertheless, we ought to form just such a mentalimage of him as he, in bringing himself within the limits of our understanding,wishes us to form” (CPW 6: 133-34). Accommodation is, however, only part ofMilton’s solution. Milton grounds his approach to the sacred in prayerful invocationsbecause prayer, as Mensch suggests, is “the attempt to provide a space where thesacred can appear” (64).

Hail, holy Light, offspring of Heav’n first-born,Or of the Eternal Coeternal beamMay I express thee unblam’d? since God is light,And never but in unapproached lightDwelt from eternity, dwelt then in theeBright effluence of bright essence increate.

(3.1-6)

Here, Milton distinguishes uncreated light, or the radiance of the Father, from thecreated light that emanates from the moment of creation. Secure in this distinction,the epic narrator invites the Spirit to shine inwardly in the psychic space whereextemporaneous prayer is formed. The invocations in Paradise Lost are prayers forinspiration, and work by opening a space for the Spirit which can, in turn, empowerboth voice and image in the perception of the sacred, as Milton seeks to “see and tell/ Of things invisible to mortal sight” (3.54-55).

Book 3 explores not only the unapproachable splendor of the Father but alsothe recognizable humanity of the Son as he narrates his own incarnation.5 Kenosis,literally a self-emptying, is integral to the Incarnation of Christ, who “being in theform of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: But made himself of noreputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likenessof men” (Philippians 2.6-7). Read as a prayer, the invocation to Book 3 shows theepic narrator preparing to describe the Incarnation in a posture of analogous recep-tivity that makes room for the sacred to appear. For religious non-conformists afterthe Restoration, the rejection of set forms of prayer was both iconoclastic and self-emptying, since all human inventions and devices must be set aside to validate thevoice of the Spirit. Milton was able to lift this kind of kenosis to a mythic level: Mil-ton’s prayerful invocations become a mode of receptivity to the Spirit that extends,not through a tradition of apostolic succession as Taylor might aver, but from theoriginal moment of creation in Genesis 1. Mensch suggests that the Bible providestwo figures to illustrate kenosis as receptivity: “The first is the ‘empty waste’ thatexisted before creation. The second is the creative breath, the ruah or ‘Spirit of God’that hovers over it” (67). Milton constructs this analogy in each of his invocations,which invite the Spirit to create within the “vast Abyss” (1.21) and the “void andformless infinite” (3.12).

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Incarnation is a mode of empathy, which is “a feeling (a suffering or undergoing)of the world in and through another person” (Mensch 68). The sufferings of otherscome into being in our consciousness, as “empathy involves both a self-emptyingand an assumption of the other—a letting him or her come to be in our person”(69). The Son’s offer to redeem the human race epitomizes empathy:“I for his sakewill leave / Thy bosom, and this glory next to thee / Freely put off, and for himlastly die” (3.238-40). While only the Son can enact this form of ultimate empathy,the mind of the epic narrator remains the receptive space in which the event is per-ceived and experienced for the reader.

Milton was just as concerned with the ways in which false images and idolsfind entry into a reader’s conscience. In Paradise Lost, for example, Satan feigns idola-try of both Eve and the Tree of Knowledge in order to gain entrance into herconscience. The Eikon Basilike also enters the mind of the reader as an image of thesacred monarch perceiving and receiving holy light while in a condition of prayerfulsuffering that invites empathy.6 For Milton, however, this image of the sacred is aspecious conflation of monarchy and divinity that suborns the role of the Spirit. Toachieve clarity in the relation of empathy and receptivity in his political prose andhis major poems, Milton had first to address what he found to be false claims to thedivine image, giving Eikonoklastes a pivotal role in his development. The Eikon Basi-like affects an analogy of receptivity and empathy comparable to that which Miltonconstructs in Book 3 of Paradise Lost, with the image of the King receiving the inspi-ration of holy light and the voice of the King in his prayers occupying the receptivespace of the reader’s conscience. It is within these competing and irreconcilableclaims to authentic sanctity that Milton’s Eikonoklastes, Taylor’s Apology, and theEikon Basilike polemically converge. For Taylor, the Book of Common Prayer withits set forms of liturgy provides a textual space for the potential reception of thesacred expressed in public prayer; the Eikon Basilike presents an analogy for thispublic expression based on the image of sacred majesty as an affirmation of theKing’s genuine individual, corporate, and national sanctity. For Milton, the image tobe broken is not the King’s person but the King’s book: the Eikon Basilike and theBook of Common Prayer preclude genuine receptivity by foreclosing on the spacefor prayer that each individual should create. The Eikon Basilike is therefore an idolthat assimilates the sanctity of Christ and King David in the image of “sacredmajesty.”

2. Discerning the Sacred: Prayer and the Image ofTruth

Chapter 16 of the Eikon Basilike,“Upon the Ordinance against the Common-Prayer-Book,” responds at length to Parliament’s abolition of the Book of CommonPrayer in January 1645 (130). The chapter rehearses the arguments of some of themore eloquent defenders of the Prayer Book, and laments its replacement by thelegal but not universally popular Directory of Public Worship. Proponents of the PrayerBook saw in its liturgical practices the reflection of a God of constancy more thanvariety: it provides a space for the transmission of a Spirit that inspired the firstapostles, and a means for the consolidation of a Christian society convened by orderand decency in worship. Opponents of the Prayer Book prefer the potential variety

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of extemporaneous prayer, which, for Milton, implies the exercise of individualpoetic gifts, the emancipation of the Spirit in worship and the continuing reforma-tion of a godly nation. The voice of King Charles, mediated by those who con-structed the Eikon Basilike, speaks for the Prayer Book:“Nor is God more a God ofvariety, than of constancy; Nor are Constant Forms of Prayers more likely to flat, andhinder the Spirit of prayer, and devotion, than unpremeditated and confused varietyto distract, and lose it” (132). This sentence is at best a simple abstract of Taylor’sextensive argument. For example, extemporaneous prayer depends “upon irregularvariety for which no antecedent rule can make particular provision”:

it is not to be expected, the publike constitution, and prescribedformes, which are regular, orderly, and determin’d, can make provi-sion for particulars, for chances, and for infinite varieties. . . . Thus, ifpublike formes of Prayer be describ’d whose matter is pious and holy,whose designe is of universall extent, and provisionary for all publike,probable, fear’d, or foreseen events, whose frame and composure isprudent, and by authority competent and high, and whose use andexercise is instrumentall to peace and publike charity, and all thesehallowed by intention, and care of doing glory to God, and advan-tages to Religion, express’d in observation of all such rules, and pre-cedents as are most likely to teach us best, and guide us surest, such asare Scriptures, Apostolicall Tradition, Primitive practise, and prece-dents of Saints, and holy Persons, the publike can doe no more, all theduty is performed, and all the care is taken.

(Apology 35-36)

Taylor has no objection to extemporaneous prayer in private devotion; the Apologyvindicates set forms of liturgy against the “Pretence” of the Spirit in public worship.In Taylor’s usage, pretence conveys the sense of a fallible claim to divine inspirationand authority. While Milton writes “in answer” (with answer in large capital letterson his title page) to the Eikon Basilike, Taylor writes in answer to the Directoryin the Apology.7 Both writers speak in their own voices through reason and lucidargument, fulfilling from opposed perspectives the dynamic tension of truth anderror idealized in Areopagitica. In chapter 16 of the Eikon Basilike, however, Taylor’svoice and argument are subsumed briefly into a persona affecting divine authority,leaving the contest of reason intimidated by the premise of sacred majesty. In fact,Taylor dedicates the Apology to the sacred image in a prefatory letter to the Kingthat reinforces the “portraiture” of Charles I as a Christ-like martyr:

I present your MAJESTY with a humble persecuted truth, of thesame constitution with that condition whereby you are become mostDeare to God, as having upon you the characterisme of the Sonnesof God, bearing in your Sacred Person the markes of the Lord Jesus,who is your Elder Brother, the King of Sufferings, and the Prince ofthe Catholique Church. But I consider that Kings, and their GreatCouncels, and Rulers Ecclesiasticall have a speciall obligation forthe defence of Liturgies, because they having the greatest Offices,have the greatest needs of auxiliaries from Heaven, which are best

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procured by the publike Spirit, the Spirit of Government and Supplica-tion. And since the first, the best, and most Solemne Liturgies and Setformes of Prayer were made by the best and greatest Princes, byMoses, by David, and the Sonne of David;Your MAJESTY may bepleased to observe such a proportion of circumstances in my layingthis [Apology for Liturgy] at Your feet, that possibly I may the easierobtaine a pardon for my great boldnesse; which if I shall hope for, inall other contingencies I shall represent my selfe a person indifferentwhether I live or die, so I may by either, serve God, and GodsChurch, and GodsVicegerent.

(“To His Most Sacred Majesty” sigs. A3v-A4r)

In this passage, Taylor emphasizes the typology and authority of biblical “princes.”The similitude of Christ and King Charles in his sufferings becomes, however, ametaphor for the Book of Common Prayer, the “humble persecuted truth” that isthe subject of Taylor’s Apology. The same trope of the book as suffering martyrappears in chapter 16 of the Eikon Basilike, as the Prayer Book is crucified by thosewho abolished it:

Hence our public Liturgy, or Forms of constant Prayers must be (notamended, in what upon free and public advice might seem to sobermen inconvenient for matter or manner, to which I should easilyconsent but) wholly cashiered, and abolished, and after many popularcontempts offered to the Book, and those that used it according totheir Consciences, and the Laws in force, it must be crucified by anOrdinance.

(131)

The ordinance is the Act of Parliament abolishing the Book of Common Prayer in1645. In 1644, Milton deploys the trope of the book as a suffering body inAreopagitica to attack Parliament’s licensing Ordinance of 1643. Areopagitica comparescensorship to murder and persecution:

We should be wary therefore what persecution we raise against theliving labours of publick men, how we spill that season’d life of manpreserv’d and stor’d up in Books; since we see a kinde of homicidemay be thus committed, sometimes a martyrdome, and if it extend tothe whole impression, a kinde of massacre, whereof the executionends not in the slaying of an elementall life, but strikes at that ethere-all and fift essence, the breath of reason it selfe, slaies an immortalityrather then a life.

(CPW 2: 493)

As “good almost kill a Man as kill a good Book” is a central premise in Areopagitica(CPW 2: 492). For Milton, the Eikon Basilike is not a good book, making it theadversary in an open encounter between truth and error. Milton separates truthfrom error in the Eikon Basilike by discerning the text’s misappropriation of thesacred. In response to the emblematic frontispiece depicting a Christ-like Charleskneeling in prayer, for example, Milton, in Eikonoklastes, traces the image to secular,“pagan” entertainments of Stuart court culture: “But quaint Emblems and devices

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begg’d from the old Pageantry of some Twelf-nights entertainment at Whitehall, willdoe but ill to make him Saint or martyr” (CPW 3: 343). In a telling attack onCharles’s prayers, Milton accuses Charles of stealing his prayers from secular or“heathen” sources such as Sidney’s Arcadia:

In praying therefore, and in the outward work of Devotion, this Kingwee see hath not at all exceeded the worst of Kings before him.But herein the worst of Kings, professing Christianism, have by farrexceeded him. They, for ought we know, have still pray’d thir own, orat least borrow’d from fitt Authors. But this King, not content withthat which, although in a thing holy, is no holy theft, to attributeto his own making other men’s whole Prayers, hath, as it wereunhallow’d, and unchrist’nd the very duty of prayer it self, by bor-rowing to a Christian use Prayers offer’d to a heathen God. Whowould have imagin’d so little feare in him of the true all-seeingDeitie, so little reverence of the Holy Ghost, whose office is to dictateand present our Christian Prayers.

(CPW 3: 362)

Accusations of begging, borrowing, purloining and plagiarizing from court masquesand secular texts effectively empty the royal image of sincerity and legitimacy, ren-dering the King’s prayers, in Taylor’s word, a “pretence.” For Milton, the same Spiritthat inspires extemporaneous prayer also guides the reader in the discernment andrecognition of false images, feigned piety, and idolatrous books. References to pen-etrating sight and recognition, implicitly attacking the vectors of light in the Mar-shall frontispiece, support the reader’s discernment of the emptiness of the King’simage, distinguishing its implicitly false divinity from the “true all-seeing Deitie.”Viewed with discerning, critical reason, the Eikon Basilike appears to Milton as afalse incarnation of the sacred which seeks not only to parody its origins in Stuartcourt culture, but also to consume and deplete the resources of empathy and recep-tivity of a national reading public.

3. Authenticating the Sacred: Prayer and Inspiration

Taylor is a compelling proponent of set forms of prayer. For Taylor, kenoticreceptivity consists in the active reception of liturgical forms and traditions thatenergize the collaboration of human effort and divine inspiration. For Milton, setforms are compromised expressions of a mundane political agenda; authentic prayer,as he notes in his Apology Against a Pamphlet, consists of “those free and unimpos’dexpressions which from a sincere heart unbidden come into outward gesture”(CPW 1: 951). Taylor’s concept of proper receptivity gives a satirical edge to hisattack on the Directory of PublicWorship:

The Directory takes away that Forme of Prayer which by the authorityand consent of all the obliging power of the Kingdome, hath beenused and enjoyned ever since the Reformation. But this was done by

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men of differing spirits and of disagreeing interests; Some of themconsented to it that they might take away all set forms of prayer, andgive way to every man’s spirit; the other, that they might take awaythis Forme, and give way and countenance to their owne. The First isan Enemy to all deliberation, the second, to all authority.

(“To His Most Sacred Majesty” sig. B2r)

Taylor uses the phrases “take away” and “give way” four times to describe thereplacement of the prayer book. The “differing spirits” that produced the Directorycannot claim to have produced an ideal space for extemporaneous prayer, since it isalso a product of political compromise. The general directions, as opposed to setforms, contained in the Directory manifest in an ironic kenosis, since taking away andgiving way produce vacancy rather than receptivity.

For Taylor, proponents of extemporaneous prayer unknowingly presume toequate their utterances with Scripture. Such prayers, he suggests, “would prove asgood Canonicall Scripture as any is in Saint Paul’s Epistles; the impudence of whichpretension is sufficient to prove the extreme vanity of the challenge” (“To His MostSacred Majesty” sig. D3r). Taylor challenges his opponents to edify the church bywriting rather than speaking:“I demand then, Whether cannot this man, when it isonce come into his head, hold his tongue, and write downe what he hath con-ceived? If his first conceptions were of God, and Gods Spirit then they are so still,even when they are written. Or is the Spirit departed from him, upon the sight of aPen and Inkhorne?” (“To His Most Sacred Majesty” sig. D3r). For Taylor, extempo-raneous prayer may do more to limit the movement of the Spirit than set forms.

Claims to inspiration inviteTaylor’s skepticism:“No man can assure me that thewords of his ex tempore prayer are the words of the holy Spirit” (Apology 31). Theinspired nature of the Psalms, in contrast, brings unanimous assent:

But if we will take David’s Psalter, or the other Hymnes of holyScripture, or any of the Prayers which are respersed over the Bible, weare sure enough that they are the words of Gods spirit, mediately orimmediately, by way of infusion or extasie, by vision, or at least byordinary assistance. And now then, what greater confidence can anyman have for the excellency of his prayers, and the probability of theirbeing accepted, then when he prayes his Psalter, or the Lords Prayer,or any other office which he finds consigned in Scripture?

(Apology 32)

In 1649, this passage takes on new significance. Charles’s prayers in the Eikon Basilikeecho or incorporate passages from the Psalms. Milton attacks the psalmic style ofCharles’s prayers by disconnecting the King’s inner self from his outward appear-ance:“He borrows Davids Psalmes. . . . Had he borrow’d Davids heart, it had beenmuch the holier theft” (CPW 3: 547). The potential to conceal rather than revealthe inner self is central to the attack on scripted prayer.

A concept of the eucharist informs Taylor’s incarnational view of prayer.Taylor sees the Directory as anti-eucharistic in its fragmentation of the corporatebody of the church. Its directions promote social disintegration:“I will not say intohow many Churches, but into how many innumerable atomes, and minutes ofChurches those Christians must needes be scattered, who alter their Formes accord-

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ing to the number of persons, and the number of their meetings, every companyhaving a new Forme of Prayer at every convention” (Apology 69). Formal prayerprovides an integrative eucharistic function as the Spirit works to complete human“industry.”

It is one of the Priviledges of the Gospel, and the benefit of Christ’sascension, that the Holy Ghost is given unto the Church, and isbecome to us the fountain of gifts and graces. But these gifts andgraces are improvements and helps of our naturall faculties, of our artand industry, not extraordinary, miraculous, and immediate infusionsof habits and gifts.

(Apology 8)

Taylor invokes the parable of the talents to affirm the collaboration of nature, art,and grace:“something must be done on our part, we must improve the talents, andswell the bank; for if either we lay them up in a napkin, or spend them, suppresse theSpirit, or extinguish it, we shall dearly account for it” (Apology 13). The helps of theSpirit, therefore,“are not inspirations of the habit, or infusions of a perfect gift, but asubliming of what God gave us in the stock of nature and art to make it in a suffi-cient order to an end supernaturall and divine” (Apology 13).

Art therefore represents the cooperation of human effort with the workings ofthe Spirit. Romans 8.26, the locus of attacks on scripted prayer, states that “theSpirit helpeth our infirmities: for we know not what we should pray for as weought.” Here, Taylor cites the Greek original of the text to make his own case,although he presents it in Latin: “it is in the Greek, collaborantum adjuvat. It is aningeminate expression of our labours. And that supposes us to have faculties capableof improvement, and an obligation to labour” (Apology 14). Prayer as an “ingeminateexpression,” with this adjective derived from “Gemini” or twinning, is thus relationaland cooperative rather than independent.

Taylor’s allusion to the parable of the talents in this passage can remind us ofthe parable’s central place in Milton’s autobiographical reflections and his sense ofvocation. The Reason of Church-Government, for example, includes Milton’s visionof art completed “by devout prayer to that eternall Spirit who can enrich with allutterance and knowledge,“ to which “must be added industrious and select reading,steddy observation, insight into all seemly and generous arts and affaires” (CPW 1:820-21). Here, Milton’s vision of the Spirit’s collaboration with artistic productionmight seem compatible with Taylor’s. Not so in the Eikon Basilike, however, wherethe inclusion of a prayer from Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, perhaps justifiable as anexample of what Taylor calls “ingeminate expression,” is denounced by Milton asplagiarism or misrepresentation (Skerpan-Wheeler 129-30).

For Milton, the larger purpose that makes the Eikon Basilike a form of falseIncarnation is its affectation of the sacred. He would find Taylor’s dedication of hisbook to the King to be complicit in this purpose, as it affirms a Christ-like King“having upon you the characterisme of the Sonnes of God, bearing in your SacredPerson the markes of the Lord Jesus, who is your Elder Brother, the King of Suffer-ings, and the Prince of the Catholique Church” (“To His Most Sacred Majesty” sigs.A3v-A4r). Taylor’s dedication, as an a priori premise instilled in readers, reverses theprogression from kenosis to Incarnation in (for Milton) authentic prayer, therebycompromising the concept of Incarnation in its potential for political idolatry. By

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predicating spontaneous prayer on kenosis, in contrast, Milton argues that as God“left our affections to be guided by his sanctifying spirit, so did he likewise ourwords to be put into us without our premeditation; not onely those cautious wordsto be us’d before Gentiles and Tyrants, but much more those filial words, of whichwe have so frequent use in our access with freedom of speech to the Throne ofGrace” (CPW 3: 506). Where Taylor presents this notion of kenosis as pretentious,Milton suggests that set forms amount to presumption, since “to lay aside for otheroutward dictates of men, were to injure him and his perfect Gift, who is the spirit,and the giver of our abilitie to pray” (CPW 3: 506). Evoking Romans 8.26 in oppo-sition to Taylor’s reading, Milton describes the dwelling of the Spirit in the kenoticconscience of the individual, and the subsequent Incarnation or embodiment of aminimal religious community:

Though we know not what to pray as we ought, yet he with sighsunutterable by any words, much less by a stinted Liturgie, dwelling inus makes intercession for us, according to the mind and will of God,both in privat, and in the performance of all Ecclesiastical duties. Forit is his promise also, that where two or three gather’d in his nameshall agree to ask him any thing, it shall be granted; for he is there inthe midst of them.

(CPW 3: 507)

In opposition to Taylor’s eucharistic conception of common prayer, Miltonemphasizes King Charles’s prayers, which conclude the chapters of the Eikon Basi-like, as confining expressions. He does this by deploying three images in succession,with each image portraying the confinement of the Spirit in scripted prayer. Thefirst presents stinted prayer as a “Pinfold” of set words:

They who use no set formes of prayer, have words from thir affections;while others are to seek affections fit and proportionable to a certaindoss of prepar’d words; which as they are not rigorously forbidd toany mans privat infirmity, so to imprison and confine by force, into aPinfold of sett words, those two most unimprisonable things, ourPrayers and that Divine Spirit of utterance that moves them.

(CPW 3: 505)

“Pinfold” means a “pen or pound for cattle.” As Merritt Hughes suggests, this wordechoes the Attendant Spirit in A Maske, who sees men “with low-thoughted care /Confin’d and pester’d in this pin-fold here” (5-7; CPW 3: 505n8). The Lady in AMaske is a prayerful figure who voices a higher, inexpressible language of the Spiritbeyond the carnal confinement of A Maske.

The second presents mythological giants as enemies of heaven. The confine-ment of the Spirit, Milton argues, “is a tyranny that would have longer hands thenthose Giants who threatn’d bondage to Heav’n” (CPW 3: 505). The image returnsin Paradise Lost to compare the rebel angels to the “Earth-born” Titans who ”warr’don Jove” (1.198).8 The third presents manna as a demonic type of eucharist, since theconfinement of the Spirit produces a corrupt rather than consecrated element:

But suppose [set forms of prayer are] savory words and unmix’d,suppose them Manna it self, yet if they shall be hoarded up and

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enjoynd us, while God every morning raines down new expressionsinto our hearts, in stead of being fit to use, they will be found likereserv’d Manna, rather to breed wormes and stink.

(CPW 3: 505)

Taylor, in fact, addresses manna as a metaphor deployed in support of extemporane-ous prayer:

When the formes are dayly changed, it is more probable that everyMan shall find something proportionable to his fancy, which is thegreat instrument of Devotion, then to suppose that any one forme,should be like Manna fitted to every tast; and therefore in prayers, as theaffections must be naturall, sweet, and proper, so also should the wordsexpressing the affections, issue forth by way of naturall emanation.

(Apology 34)

Manna, though divine, is monotonous to the restive Israelites; likewise, oppo-nents of set forms compare manna to prescribed uniformity: they “long for variety,and then they cry out that Manna will not nourish them, but prefer the onions ofEgypt before the food of Angels” (Apology 41). Milton responds with imagery: hedescribes the bread as corrupt rather than spiritual, and he overcomes Taylor’s criti-cal distinction between private and public devotion by using plural forms—Godinspires “our hearts.”9 For Milton, the distinction between idolatry and devotionsupersedes that between private and public prayer. His primary motivation is toattack what Lana Cable calls the “idolatry of words” in the Eikon Basilike (163).

In conclusion, Taylor and Milton base their concepts of inspiration andauthenticity in prayer on their radically different views of scripted liturgy and setforms. Taylor’s dedication of his argument to the King’s image demands Milton’screative iconoclasm to awaken and energize the discerning reader. Milton, unlikeTaylor, is a poet, and so we can recognize within this complex polemical exchangeon prayer among these three texts—Taylor’s Apology, the Eikon Basilike, and Milton’sEikonoklastes—the development of the poetics of prayer that emerge in Milton’smajor poems. Although Taylor is not a poet, he argues persuasively and eloquentlyfor the common heritage and lineage of poetry and liturgy, reminding us that the“first civilizing of people used to be by Poetry, and their Divinity was conveyed bySongs and Verses” (Apology 59). He would continue to exercise his gifts in thewriting of prayers and devotions. Milton, while acknowledging that his own art andcreativity can be enriched by the inspiration of the Spirit, consistently rejects theconfinement of the Spirit in set forms of prayer, which he sees as coterminous withthe idolatrous appropriation of the sacred by earthly monarchy. In 1649, iconoclasmbecame Milton’s precondition for the reception of the Spirit.

University of Alberta

Notes

1 In the interests of clarity, citations in this essay to Taylor’s prefatory epistle, “To His Most SacredMajesty” will refer to the signatures governing its four pages while citations to Taylor’s Apology will beto page numbers.

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2 See Hollingworth 14. Hollingworth secured Clifford’s testimony and included it as an affidavit inorder to maintain Charles as sole author against claims that John Gauden was the real author. See alsoMadan who notes that Taylor, though living in Wales, is thought to have been in London in 1648 (3:131). Taylor knew Royston, who published Taylor’s and Sir Christopher Hatton’s Psalter of David in1646 (ODNB Richard Royston).3 Adam and Eve’s morning “Orisons” echo this passage, but their prayers model spontaneous expres-sion in “various style” (Paradise Lost 5.145-46).4 The “sacred” can mean a state of devotion or consecration, as in “being kept apart or reserved for thedivinity” (Mensch 64). Milton speaks of his “love of sacred Song” (Paradise Lost 3.29). The “sacred”majesty of Charles I describes his special relationship to the divine. Mensch also speaks of the sacred asthe “killing splendor of God,” or the impossibility of “seeing God face-to-face” (65). Milton combinesthe devotional and ineffable concepts of the sacred in Book 3 of Paradise Lost, while rejecting the idola-trous appropriation of the sacred by earthly monarchs.5 The Son justifies Milton’s representation of the sacred: he is a means of approaching the Father (John14.9: “he who hath seen me hath seen the Father”) and is an intercessor who makes the prayers offallen humanity acceptable to the Father:“the glad Son / Presenting, thus to intercede began” (ParadiseLost 11.20-21).6 As Sharon Achinstein suggests, prayer “held a special meaning for a Protestant: it was the direct andabove all sincere communication between humans and God, and it represented the voice of conscience”(163).7 Taylor received advancement in the Church from Bishops Laud and Juxon in the 1630s. During theCivil War, he joined the royal court at Oxford where he was appointed a chaplain to the King. By1646, he joined the household of the Earl of Carbery in Golden Grove in Wales, where he wrote histreatise on toleration, The Liberty of Prophesying (1647; ODBN). Given his connection to Bishop Juxon,who attended the King during his trial and execution, and his revision of the Discourse as the Apology, itis likely thatTaylor was an influence on chapter 16 of the Eikon Basilike.8 Hughes cites the birth of Typhoeus in Hesiod’s Theogony 826-32:

The hands and arms of him are mighty,and have work in them,and the feet of the powerful godwere tireless, and up from his shouldersthere grew a hundred snake heads,those of a dreaded dragon,and the heads licked with dark tongues.

(216n197)

Hughes notes Renaissance allegories of Typhoeus as “ambition that assails even heaven itself.”9 Milton also cites Matt. 18.19-20,“where two or three gather’d together in his name shall agree to askhim anything, it shall be granted” (CPW 3: 507).

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Ainsworth, David. Milton and the Spiritual Reader: Reading and Religion in Seventeenth-Century England.NewYork: Routledge, 2008.

Cable, Lana. Carnal Rhetoric: Milton’s Iconoclasm and the Poetics of Desire. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1995.

Directory for the Publique Worship of God Throughout the Three Kingdoms of England, Scotland, and IrelandTogether with and Ordinance of Parliament for the Taking Away of the Book of Common-Prayer: Orderedby the Lords and Commons Assembled in Parliament. London, 1644.

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Eikon Basilike, with selections from Eikonoklastes. Ed. Jim Daems and Holly Faith Nelson. Peterborough:Broadview, 2006.

Gilman, Ernest B. Iconoclasm and Poetry in the English Reformation. Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 1986.

Guibbory, Achsah. “Charles’s Prayers, Idolatrous Images, and True Creation in Milton’s Eikonoklastes.”On Poetry and Politics: New Essays on Milton and HisWorld. Ed. P. G. Stanwood. Binghamton, NY:Medieval and RenaissanceTexts and Studies, 1995. 283-94.

Henriksen, Erin. Milton and the Reformation Aesthetics of the Passion. Studies in the History of ChristianTra-ditions. Boston, MA: Brill, 2010.

Hesiod. Theogony. Trans. Richmond Lattimore. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1959.

Hollingworth, Richard. Dr. Hollingworth’s Defence of K. Charles the Firsts Holy and Divine Book, CalledEikon Basilike. London, 1692.

Loewenstein, David. Milton and the Drama of History: HistoricalVision, Iconoclasm, and the Literary Imagina-tion. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990.

Madan, Francis F. A New Bibliography of the Eikon Basilike. Oxford Bibliographic Society Publications,Vol. 3. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1950.

Mensch, James. “Prayer as Kenosis.” The Phenomenology of Prayer. Ed. Bruce Benson and NormanWirzna. NewYork: Fordham UP, 1995. 63-74.

Milton, John. Complete Poems and Major Prose. Ed. Merritt Y. Hughes. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill,1984.

———. Complete Prose Works of John Milton. Gen. ed. Don Wolfe. 8 vols. in 10. New Haven, CT: YaleUP, 1953-82.

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison. 60 vols. Oxford:Oxford UP, 2004.

Skerpan-Wheeler, Elizabeth. “Eikon Basilike and the Rhetoric of Self-Representation.” The RoyalImage: Representations of Charles I. Ed. Thomas Corns. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. 122-140.

Taylor, Jeremy. An Apology for Authorized and Set Forms of Liturgie against the Pretence of the Spirit. London,1649.

———. Discourse Concerning Prayer Ex tempore, Or, By pretence of the Spirit. In Justification of Authorizedand Set-formes of Lyturgie. London, 1646.

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