"All things unto our flesh are kind": Corporality and Ecology in The Temple

Introduction

                Man is all symmetrie,Full of proportions, one limbe to another,        And all to all the world besides:        Each part may call the furthest, brother:For head with foot hath private amitie,                And both with moons and tides.

… … … .

                More servants wait on Man,Then he'l take notice of: in ev'ry path        He treads down that which doth befriend him,        When sicknesse makes him pale and wan.O mightie love! Man is one world, and hath                Another to attend him (ll. 13-18, 43-48).¹

Ecology is the study of the relationships existing between organisms and their environments. George Herbert, as demonstrated by the stanzas of his poem "Man" quoted above, is similarly interested in the innate connections between the human body, the divine, and other creatures in several poems throughout The Temple. According to the analogical worldview of the Renaissance, entities exist in a chain of governorship extending from minerals to heavenly bodies and beyond, which emerges in the work's understanding of the human body as penetrable to forces and beings outside itself – "one world" with "another to attend him." "Man" partakes of this tradition of early modern ecology in its emphasis upon the benevolence of the entanglement – the "amitie" – between the human body and its environment. Barry Commoner's four laws of ecology, particularly the first and the fourth, are reflected in The Temple's ecology:

1. 1. Everything is connected to everything else.

2. 2. Everything must go somewhere.

3. 3. Nature knows best.

4. 4. There is no such thing as a free lunch.²

The human body is a unity of internal and external correspondences with and lives in a world populated by foodstuffs suited to its humors, produced by and subsisting in a Chain of Being. The image of the self that arises in The Temple is an ecological one insofar as it betrays a profound interest in the body, the essential nature of which is shared with the rest of creation, and the human being as the axis between heaven and earth.³ Man himself, according to the poem's first stanza, is a "stately habitation," a composite of the best qualities of all of creation, and God is invoked to "dwell therein."

Though "Man" has been noted for its "outrageous anthropocentrism," its positive evaluation of the body and the body's traffic with its environments, both celestial and mundane, are striking from an ecocritical standpoint.⁴ Ecocriticism, as defined in the field's seminal anthology The Ecocriticism Reader, is "Simply put … the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment," starting from the premise that "human culture is connected to the physical world, affecting and affected by it."⁵ In other words, a driving question of ecocriticism might be: how does literature inform, reflect, and construct our cultural attitudes towards the environment? "Man" and other of Herbert's poems delighting in the economy at work between man, nature, and God might expose the ambivalence of an age which saw nature as exclusively created for human benefit. It might also, as I intend to show, have positive implications for the body and its occult ties to the natural world.

Nonetheless, Herbert's corpus and the work of the Metaphysical poets more generally have generally fallen out of the purview of ecocritical scholarship save for a handful of works from the last two decades.⁶ A view towards how Herbert envisions the body, its relationships, and its duties to other creatures may prove the missing link between the fields of literary ecology and the religious poetry of the seventeenth century. Mary Floyd-Wilson and Garrett A. Sullivan note that "in early modern thinking, transactions between body and environment usually imply a conception of subjectivity or social identity."⁷ Though the construction of social identity in Herbert is outside of the scope of this paper, I argue that the conception of subjectivity in The Temple can productively be expressed as ecological – a corporeal self invested in its entanglements with other bodies, and thus, to its creator.⁸

Corporeality and Sacrament in...