Fragrance, "Marie Magdalene," and Herbert's The Temple

Fragrance, "Marie Magdalene,' and Herbert's The Temple by Garret Keizer As a poet George Herbert actively sought to please God. It is a mistake to view his gallantry as a trope borrowed from the poets of romantic love, or as a convenient symbol for his own subjective development. One must remember that in Herbert's view the love poets themselves had purloined the language of adoration; their praises were "Dust blown by wit" ("Love" [II], I. 10),' diverted from the living God to the "guilded emptinesse" ("Dotage," I. 3) of earthly pleasures. When Herbert addresses God he is not anthropomorphizing a cosmic principle, or projecting his "true self" — he faces a lover more real to him than all others: "Mothers are kinde, because thou art, / . . . Their infants, them; and they suck thee / More free" ("Longing," II. 14-18). A reader of The Temple must also recognize that any mystical inclination of its author, or of its author's religion, does not represent the refinement of a crude anthropomorphism . Christian mysticism grows from the centrality of a down-to-earth deity, a Jesus more human than Yahweh. "For he became man that we might become divine."2 Thus Herbert's love affair with God is no less substantial than the flesh the Word became, and their courtship is often expressed in lncarnational terms: "Almightie God doth grieve, he puts on sense" ("Grieve not the Holy Spirit," I. 16). To say that Herbert actively sought to please God is also to say that in his own theology God is not impersonal, the individual is not illusory, and the acts of worship are neither superficial nor futile. The purpose of this article is to discuss these implications in Herbert's poetry: first, in terms of what shall be called "fragrance" after the imagery through which biblical writers, and Herbert, expressed mutuality in thedivinehuman relationship, and especially man's ability to please his maker. Second, the poem "Marie Magdalene" will be examined 29 Garret Keizer as embodying the fragrance theme. The interpretation of that poem will in turn be applied to others — particularly as regards the treatment of the possibility of Christian action and the nature of Christian identity in Herbert's work — with a view toward challenging the studies of those critics who have ignored or denied Herbert's capacity for "fragrance." "It were a silly conceit" preached Lancelot Andrewes, "to imagine of God as if He . . .'did hungerorthirstforourglory.' What is He the better for it? Only nothing we have but that, and so either that or nothing; for nothing but that can He receive from us."3 In his poem "Miserie" Herbert admits to God that "our clay hearts, ev'n when we crouch / To sing thy praises, make them lesse divine" (II. 39-40). But like Andrewes he adds: "Yet either this, / Or none, thy portion is" (II. 41-42). Several of Herbert's critics, among whom Stanley Fish is the most notable, have taken considerable pains to demonstrate the negligibility of that portion — and have done so to the extent that the either/or between "nothing" and the glory Herbert strives to give to God disappears entirely.4 The glory itself becomes nothing, rendered by a nothing who can do no better than to recognize his utter nothingness before the supposed "God of the living" (Mark 12:27). It is true that the God of The Temple needs nothing from Herbert, and there is nothing Herbert can give without needing God's grace. Yet those who stress this dimension of the divine-human encounter at the expense of every other have missed a good portion of the contents of The Temple. There is another condition to Herbert's relationship with God which allows meaningful interaction to take place between God and man. Herbert's awareness of this condition was derived from the Scriptures where it appears in terms of a recurring theme that might be identified as"frarance ." For the earliest articulation of this theme we must go to the beginning of the Old Testament, in Genesis. After the waters of the deluge receded, Noah departed from the ark and offered a sacrifice to God. We read that "the...