Herbert and Pleasure

Like most early modern religious verse, The Temple expends a lot of verbal energy expressing various kinds of physical and emotional suffering. “The Sacrifice” is the extended complaint of a god who suffers horribly at the hands of his creatures. It concludes, moreover, with a statement of the uniqueness of his suffering that emerges via the chilling syntax of threat: “Onely let others say, when I am dead, / Never was grief like mine.”¹ The volume has five poems entitled “Affliction”; the speaker of “Affliction (IV)” complains that he is “Broken in pieces all asunder,” and “tortur’d in the space / Betwixt this world and that of grace” (ll. 1-6). The poem “Confession” laments that

        No scrue, no piercer canInto a piece of timber work and winde,    As Gods afflictions into man,    When he a torture hath design’d.

(ll. 7-10)

These tortures, moreover, are aimed with sadistic precision to fall “upon the tendrest parts” (l. 12). The speaker of “Affliction” (II) asks the “Lord of life” to “Kill me not ev’ry day” (ll. 1-2). The speaker of “The Temper” (I) pleads “O rack me not to such a vast extent,” invoking one of the most fearsome instruments of early modern torture (l. 9). The speaker of “Josephs coat” is “wounded,” “tormented,” and “Thrown down” (ll. 1-2). Similarly the speaker of “The Crosse” complains that God “tak[es]” him “up” only “to throw [him] down” (l. 22). “The Watercourse” suggests that “the condition of this world is frail, / Where of all plants afflictions soonest grow” (ll. 2-3). One can make a strong case that affliction is the predominant sensation of the volume, and complaint the corresponding discursive mode.²

Despite this consistent if unsurprising focus on suffering, Herbert’s Temple nevertheless includes a remarkable investment in sensuous and sensual pleasures; that is, in the pleasures of the five senses and, in those senses in a specifically sexual context. In the volume’s opening stanza, the speaker of “The Church-porch” proposes to “make a bait of pleasure,” to use pleasure to lure the reader into the space, and action, of virtue (l. 4). Herbert knows well that poetry, his chosen medium, has its pleasures: “A verse may finde him, who a sermon flies, / And turn delight into a sacrifice” (“The Church-porch,” ll. 5-6). And in one of the volume’s final poems, “The Invitation,” Herbert uses the fact that the Eucharistic feast can be imagined to encapsulate various activities situationally identified as sinful (eating, drinking, loving) in order to suggest that his particularly capacious Christianity is aimed precisely at those who have sought out pleasure in their lives; indeed, Herbert tells them that they are finally about to get exactly what they have always wanted: “Here is joy” (l. 22), the speaker announces (l. 22). In between these gracious invitations to pleasurable experience, the volume articulates a surprising variety of possible pleasures. One of the most remarkable things about The Temple is the astonishingly crucial role that pleasure assumes in the act of devotion. For Herbert, the God who died in extreme pain at the hand of his creatures reveals the full extent of his unearthly mercy in his willingness to license the experience of profound if delimited pleasure on the part of those creatures.

Adam Potkay has recently reminded us of the surprising importance of joy in the Christian Scriptures.³ But because pleasure so frequently serves as a synecdoche for sin in Herbert’s culture, it can prove challenging to imagine a positive account of pleasurable sensation in religious discourse. In such discourse, by contrast, the mere experience of pain, the opposite of pleasure, can seem innately virtuous. Religious pleasure is of course licensed in part by the voluptuous imagery of that anomalous book of the Bible, the Song of Songs. But the most common way of reading that book is to tame its sensuality through allegory rather than to allow its sensuality to function as an endorsement of corporeal pleasure.⁴ Moreover, when Christianity seeks a unifying symbol to represent itself, it is telling that it chooses the crucifix, a...