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  • George Herbert’s Divine Comedy: Humor in The Temple
  • Michael C. Schoenfeldt (bio)

One of the signal if unexpected pleasures of George Herbert’s poetry is its frequent recourse to affable laughter at human foibles. We tend to assume that the ascetic orientation of religion is by definition opposed to terrestrial pleasure. And Herbert in particular seems to exemplify the sober earnestness that marks a particular stereotype of Anglican worship.1 In The Temple, though, Herbert intends to reorient a range of secular pleasures toward heaven, declaring that God is at once their source and goal. Terrestrial pleasure is not negated, but it is revealed to be only a scanty appetizer for the deeply sensual joys of heaven. These joys, I want to argue, extend not only to the more carnal pleasures of food and sex – pleasures whose uneasy presence in Herbert I have tried to document elsewhere – but also to the deeply social amusements of humor.2 Herbert feels that laughter, like all pleasures, is morally and socially hazardous, and so must be carefully circumscribed, and deployed with the greatest delicacy and decorum. Attention to the myriad uses of humor throughout Herbert’s corpus discloses the anxious if indulgent opulence of a religious imagination which presumes that the “quick returns of courtesie and wit” might provide a worthy medium for the devout worship of God.3

Despite the unrelenting solemnity with which Western culture tends to drape religious devotion, Herbert was far from the first to explore potential links between religion and humor. St. Paul incisively delineated the divergent standards of wisdom that demarcate the differences between terrestrial and celestial perspectives:

For the preaching of the Crosse is to them that perish, foolishnesse: but unto us which are saved, it is the power of God. For it is written, I will destroy the wisedome of the wise, and wil bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent. (I Corinthians 1:18–19; AV) [End Page 45]

Building on a passage from Isaiah (29:14; “for the wisedome of their wise men shall perish, and the understanding of their prudent men shall be hid”), Paul tells the community at Corinth that Christianity entails a complete inversion of terrestrial hierarchies of power and knowledge:

Hath not God made foolish the wisedome of this world? … [When] the world by wisedome knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishnesse of preaching, to save them that beleeve … The foolishnesse of God is wiser then men: and the weaknesse of God is stronger then men … God hath chosen the foolish things of the world, to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weake things of the world, to confound the things which are mighty … that no flesh should glory in his presence.

(I Corinthians 1:20–30)

Paul here argues that those pursuits that the world mocks are in fact the occasion of a higher wisdom. “The wisdome of this world,” he argues, “is foolishness with God” (1 Corinthians 3:19). He deliberately aligns the Christian subversion of earthly values with the comic inversion of terrestrial hierarchies in his invocation of a decidedly theatrical metaphor: “For wee are made a spectacle unto the world, and to Angels, and to men. We are fooles for Christs sake, but ye are wise in Christ” (I Corinthians 4:9–10).

This Pauline concept of holy folly is developed at length by Erasmus in the latter sections of his enormously popular work, the Encomium Moriae, or Praise of Folly. Jesus, notes Erasmus’s figure of Folly,

was made something of a fool himself in order to help the folly of mankind, when he assumed the nature of man and was seen in man’s form. Nor did he wish [sinners] to be redeemed in any other way save by the folly of the cross and through his simple, ignorant apostles, to whom he unfailingly preached folly. He taught them to shun wisdom, and made his appeal through the example of children, lilies, mustard-seed and humble sparrows, all foolish, senseless things.4

Erasmus wryly suggests that Jesus’ deliberate metaphoric simplicity and parabolic method entailed an active participation in the comic mode. [End Page 46] He argues, moreover...

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