Herbert's House of Pleasure?: Ejaculations Sacred and Profane

Herbert's House of Pleasure? Ejaculations Sacred and Profane by Elizabeth Clarke The starting-point for this essay was an acrimonious correspondence on the Milton List (an Internet mailing-listknown for its sharp exchanges) in the spring of 1996, under the general heading "Herbert's House of Pleasure." Half the correspondents had always assumed a sexual connotation to Herbert's Ejaculations, along the lines of Jonathan Goldberg's suggestion that "the title-page of The Temple is a site of masturbation."1 The other half professed itself scandalized by the suggestion. Along with the mutual recrimination there was great citing of the OED to establish the preeminence of the sexual use of the term: 1578 as the first quoted use of "ejaculate" with this connotation predates by nearly fifty years the first citation of the spiritual use in 1624. To many post-Freudian critics, this evidence was clearly persuasive. In this paper, however, I will outline a discursive context for the choice of subtitle to The Temple which is rather more complex. In 1633 when The Temple appeared with its subtitle Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations the word was innovative as a title for any kind of writing. The English term in its religious sense was part of an Augustinian discourse associated with Puritan teaching on prayer. Elnathan Parr in his 1618 treatise Abba Father had felt the need to define "the Prayers called Eiaculations": they are not necessarily verbal, but a "sudden lifting up of the heart to God, from manifold occasions occuring every day."2 In 1619 Francis Rous assumed knowledge of this type of prayer when he advised the use of "short eiaculations" if answer to prayer were delayed, a suggestion he repeated sixteen years later in TheMisticallMarriage? Thomas Gokins' "Meditation on the Lord's Prayer" of 1624 suggested that ejaculatory prayer is particularly valued by God: "he taketh recreation / In one ejaculation.4 All these authors are drawing on Augustine's use of the word jaculatas, "darted," to describe the prayer style of the desert fathers when they had no time to use formal set prayers: very brief, very sudden.5 As Augustine conceived it, the intensity of mental effort, the expression of love kindled in the heart, is what is important in 56Elizabeth Clarke ejaculatory prayer: too many words can defuse the emotion, and blunt the force of the prayer, which is seen as a weapon. The power of an ejaculation is in the spiritual "motion" which gives rise to it, as Thomas Gokins makes clear, situating his praise of ejaculatory prayer within a bleak Calvinist view of the total depravity of man: But we have nothing good: no, not a motion; Nor one poor drop of grace but from thine ocean. And all our store is but meere poverty Except thine all sufficient grace supply; But so supplied, thou takest recreation In one good thought, or one eiaculation. All the Calvinist dichotomies are on display here. Heavenly plenitude is opposed to earthly aporia. God is good, we are very very bad. In this analysis, the only hope is to eliminate the earthly and the "carnal," so that the Christian becomes entirely spiritual, heavenlyminded . Just as "good works" cannot signify within the Calvinist scheme unless they are prompted by God, and carried out through the agency of his Spirit, so the copia of human rhetoric has no power: God hears only the ejaculation, inspired by the motion of his own grace. Minimizing verbal utterance, the "ejaculation" is the distillation of rhetoric into the purest form of words: "Brief spiritual, sublime ejaculation" as Robert Aylett put it in 1654.6 In the sacred/carnal dichotomy expressed by the spiritual and sexual meanings of ejaculation resides the difficulty for modern scholars. How can terminology which is archetypally "carnal" be used with integrity for a discourse the whole point of which is to eliminate the flesh? On one level, of course, it could be seen as a brilliant, if daring strategy. To hijack the term so completely as to define it in terms of its opposite is to silence a particular discourse of male sexuality. The ability of the reader to interpret "ejaculation" as an entirely spiritual entity...