George Herbert's Consuming Subject

Michael C. Schoenfeldt George Herbert's Consuming Subject He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, dwelleth in me, and I in him. — John 6:56 (AV) Obsession with food is the best proof that we have of the existence of the soul. — Charles Simic1 Perhaps because of the intensely inward trajectory of The Temple, a trajectory marked by the progression from the social maxims of "The Church-porch" into the internal architecture of "The Church," critics of George Herbert have focused on the spiritual and theological components of his poetry at the expense of its engagements with the material world. This focus has prevented our giving to such a palpable subject as food the degree of attention it merits. For the subject of food consumed Herbert, providing him with a primal occasion for exploring the very inwardness that subsequent criticism has so valued. As it progresses from the external liturgies of sacred and secular consumption to the internal labyrinths of digestion, food traces for Herbert the inner contours of the devotional subject. The speaker of Herbert's "Pearl," as if addressing a tendency in himself and others to sublimate material to spiritual concerns, declares that "My stuffe is flesh, not brasse; my senses live."2 Throughout his comparativelylimitedcorpus, Herbert devotes at least as much attention to the food that nourishes and tempts his flesh as to the theology that engages his mind. In the process, he reveals a series of profound if unexpected linkages between the digestive operations that sustain somatic existence and the theology that maps eternal life. As we will see, the Treatise of Temperance and 106Michael C. Schoenfeldt Sobrietie that Herbert translated shares with the poetic Temple of devotion he constructed a concern with the ways in which the inner selfis defined by the substances that enter and exit the physical body. So different from our own post-Cartesian selves, which are produced by separating body from spirit and biology from morality, Herbert's devotional self is constituted by the corporeal substance it attempts to discipline. He discovers individuality, inwardness, and authenticity not by acceding to appetite but rather by carefully controlling it. A portal between matter and spirit, inner and outer, self and other, health and sickness, food generated acute ambivalence in Herbert and in his culture. Absolutely necessary to the survival of the mortal subject, food is also the occasion of great risk to that subject. Eating conjoins the extremes of mortal experience, from the brutal exigencies of animal hunger to the baroque elegance of table manners. Eating, moreover, figures prominently in the two central moments of Judeo-Christian history: the consumption of the forbidden fruit in the Fall, and participation in the communion meal that commemorates Christ's sacrifice. An occasion of purification and of pollution, eating demands that one confront daily the permeable boundary separating inner space from the outside world. Each bite presumes a negotiation between the inner demands of the selfand the recalcitrant graces of the outer world. Each bite, furthermore, reminds the mortal subject of the violence that is necessary to sustain life. For the subject to live, an external object must be killed, rent, cooked, consumed, and digested until it becomes the very substance of the eater. This violence is only intensified in a carnivorous culture such as the Renaissance, where one's status is linked to how high on the food chain one eats. What is not digested, moreover, must be evacuated, and immediately rendered repulsive, again demanding a confrontation with the thin and permeable line separating self and other, pleasure and disgust. Life itself becomes, as seventeenth-century physiology would have it, a delicate but often interrupted balance between assimilation and evacuation. The process by which slaughtered bodies sustain life involves a correlation of matter and spirit at least as mysterious as the transubstantiation that was so contested in Herbert's day. An apt place to begin our analysis of the centrality of food to the production of interiority for Herbert is "The H. Communion," a poem that transforms the controversy over the physical presence of God in the communion meal into the occasion for exploring the Herbert's Consuming Subject107 relationship between the body...