From 'Damps' to 'Day': Cultivating the Senses in Henry Vaughan's Silex Scintillans

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From ‘Damps’ to ‘Day’

Cultivating the Senses in Henry Vaughan’s Silex Scintillans

Elijne van der Starre MA-Thesis Semester 2 – 2018/2019

MA Literary Studies: English Literature and Culture Leiden University

First reader: Dr. J.F. van Dijkhuizen Second reader: Dr. K.A. Murchison

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3 Teach both mine eyes and feet to move

Within those bounds set by thy love; Grant I may soft and lowly be, And mind those things I cannot see;

Henry Vaughan, “The Ass”

But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man,

the things which God hath prepared for them that love him. 1 Corinthians 2:9 (AKJV)

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Introduction

This thesis examines the role of sense perception in Silex Scintillans, a volume of religious poetry by the early modern English poet Henry Vaughan (1621-1695). By studying this particular work, it aims to contribute to a scholarly understanding of the role which sensory experience played in the religious culture of the Reformation. At heart, it presents an argument similar to Jacob Baum’s in Reformation of the Senses: The Paradox of Religious Belief and Practice in Germany. Baum’s point is that, on the one hand, the Reformation brought with it an intense debate about the role of the senses and the extent to which they could be trusted as gateways to the Divine. On the other hand, he shows that this debate already existed in the Middle Ages and continued from late medieval to Reformed sensory piety. From this point of view, any portrayal of the Reformation as a break with medieval sensory culture should be dismissed as one-sided.

Zooming in on late Reformation England, this thesis takes the poetry of Vaughan as a case study in which the dynamic of continuity and change surrounding the debate about sensory experience can be seen prominently at work. It does so by drawing attention to the poet’s ambivalent attitude to the senses. Indeed, given that Protestantism was the professed religion of the Word and thus invited scepticism towards a sensory experience of faith, early modern Protestant clerics and poets like Vaughan felt the need to thoroughly rethink the role of the senses. Yet, at the same time, they realised that the senses functioned as the primary means to communicate with God. In other words, they found themselves in a double bind; although human sensory capacities were fallen, it proved difficult to devise alternative methods of experiencing the Divine. In their response to this problem, Vaughan and his contemporaries voice – via the medium of poetry as a site of theological exploration – a desire to transcend their corporeality but simultaneously acknowledge that this is only possible

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8 through sense perception, limited and fallen though it may be. Even though it is the Word of God they wish to fathom, they attempt to do so in decidedly sensory, embodied terms. Crucially, the kind of imagery adopted – metaphors of sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch for spiritual experience – bears witness to this struggle to come to terms with a deeply paradoxical religious reality.

In order to highlight the relevance of the discussion about the role of the senses, the first chapter of this thesis elaborates on the concept of sensing in cultural and poetic terms. It explains why sensing is a culture-specific human activity and why metaphor is an important figure of speech to employ in this regard. The second chapter analyses the religious contexts of Vaughan’s poems by turning to the differences and similarities between late medieval and Reformed notions of sensory experience. Next, the third chapter of this thesis outlines the early modern poetic contexts of Vaughan’s works to show his indebtedness to earlier and contemporary poets: John Donne, George Herbert and Robert Herrick. Like Vaughan, these three writers all display a similar preoccupation with the senses and their ambivalent nature as both fallible and instrumental. Moreover, in their poems, no decisive reformation of the senses occurs. The forth chapter then turns to Silex Scintillans to analyse Vaughan’s

evaluation of the senses on the devotional level. It argues that Vaughan’s efforts to delineate the role of the senses are centred around a question of sensory cultivation, of which God is to be in charge. Most importantly, his poetic requests for spiritual renewal illustrate the

conflicted early modern approach to sense perception, as they are cast in terms of physical sensation, even when they plead for a complete disavowal of sensory experience. This is the fascinating paradox of which this thesis attempts to make sense.

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1. Methodological Framework

Before the cultural-historical and poetic contexts of Vaughan’s poetry are discussed, it is important to outline the broader concept of sensing as embedded in culture and employed in poetry. The first section of this chapter elaborates on the idea – as advanced by Peter Burke in What is Cultural History? – that sensing is a deeply cultural practice and the meaning of any given sensory experience therefore differs from place to place and time to time. The second section expounds on the consequences of this notion for the poetic efforts made by the early modern religious writers under discussion in this thesis, and it specifically draws attention to the use of metaphor as a means to come to terms with the shifting cultural perspectives on the topic of sensory piety.

1.1 Culture and the senses

Naturally, since the employment of the senses to understand the world outside the body constitutes a basic human activity, it is a phenomenon of all ages. Still, it has only recently gained momentum as a topic of historical interest and as an autonomous field of study. In his monograph on cultural history and all its facets, Peter Burke points out that the existing tradition of writing academically about the senses dates back to twentieth-century studies about the five senses as separate units, although later works attempt to provide a more all-round discussion (112). Generally, sensory experience can be considered a cultural construct because varying degrees of value are attached to it by those perceiving, depending on their circumstances and associations. An example of such variation Burke finds in the work of the French historian Alain Corbin, who studied the cultural relevance and the meaning of sense perception, for instance of sound. Coining the phrases ‘soundscape’ and ‘the culture of the senses’, Corbin highlighted the intertwining of sense perception and culture by turning to the sound of village bells, which were much more tolerated in the era in which they still

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10 symbolised “piety or parochialism” (Burke 113). Over time, this association faded and the village people instead responded with agitation to the harsh sound of the bells. This example demonstrates that the meaning of any given sensory experience is shaped by its cultural contexts in terms of contemporary and local conventions and practices. Finally, Burke argues that – in order to chart the history of the senses from a cultural perspective – it is important to study the all the senses together rather than simply focussing on sight, for instance, to do justice to the interwovenness of the experiences of sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch (114).

An earlier scholar whose work indeed provides an all-round study of the senses and exemplifies the growing interest in the cultural dependency of the sensory experience is Robert Jütte. In A History of the Senses, he traces the development of a number of existing ideas about the senses from antiquity to cyberspace, opening with the observation that “[w]ith the growth of interest in the body that is such a striking feature of the everyday culture of the present, the five senses are back in fashion” (1). A fundamental premise of his research, Jütte notes, is that “there can be no such thing as a natural history of the senses, only a social history of sense perception” (9), because sensing cannot be done in a culturally neutral way. What this social or – in a broader sense – cultural history of sense perception then offers is an account, not of the perception of people in diverse eras, but of the “sensory value systems of past and present cultures” based on which meaning was and is assigned to perception (13). In fact, Jütte is not simply concerned with the individual instances of sensing but also with the specific hierarchy in which the senses are placed by any given cultural community. Even this hierarchy can be seen to reflect “mental outlines” (14) of the social hierarchies that are in effect among the members of a community. In this hierarchy, sight is commonly given the first place, but the reasons for this valuation differ significantly. Aristotle and Plato, for example, preferred sight because of its cognitive value, whereas St. Augustine emphasized its universality (65). In the Middle Ages, these estimations of the five senses and their functions

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11 also formed the basis for the educational system and church teachings, which shows their cultural situatedness (66).

In both the medieval and early modern era, Jütte continues, there were clear “religious interests” behind the judgements about sensing and sense perception (80), as will become more evident in the next chapter of this thesis. Also, the link between sensing and education continued to be prominent during the Enlightenment, especially because of Rousseau’s core theories about sensory education focused on reform (159). From this period onwards, attention has consistently been given to the impact of the senses and their cultural value. During the Industrial Revolution, technological innovations improved sensory experience significantly, but they also gave rise to the debate about sensory corruption and deception. In the twentieth century, a new emphasis is placed on the senses for their employability in sexual terms, hence the concept of the erogenous zones (246). In the culinary world, the connection between the sense of taste and its culture-specific associations also manifests itself; whereas new international flavours are initially shunned due to their foreignness, they are gradually welcomed on the grounds of their uniqueness and cultural authenticity (262). This suggests that taste does not only differ from one geographical area to another but is also changeable. Scholars like Jütte and Burke, among others, underscore the importance of the study of this kind of development of the human sensory experience over time and place, because it culturally constructed and cannot therefore be detached from its contexts.

1.2 The senses in poetry

As mentioned, the meaning of the sensory experience is considered to be heavily dependent on its cultural contexts, including the various associations and conventions that a cultural community has adopted. In poetry, representations of the senses – with the accompanying cultural assumptions – are often employed and bear “significance in the construction of the social world” (Jütte 72). Indeed, poetry as a medium has the ability to display and construct a

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12 reality in various ways by means of metaphor or allegory. In the poems discussed in this thesis, images of the senses and sense organs are used by the poets because they carry a cultural significance in the contexts of early modern English Protestantism. Crucially, a poem’s mentioning of eyes, ears, noses, mouths and hands is not simply an attempt to describe sensory perception. It is a way to frame a reality that cannot itself be grasped into something “visible, tangible, and audible” (Stewart 2) in order to come to terms with it. What will become clear is that poets like Vaughan adopt the language of sensory experience – sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch – to participate imaginatively in contemporary debates about the relevance of these concepts on the level of religious devotion. The cultural climate of early modern Protestant England, as will also be discussed in the next chapter, harboured a deep ambivalence towards the senses because of their crucial yet conflicted role in the process of spiritual advancement (Jütte 157). In this light, sensing proves to be an activity coloured by cultural – religious, to be more precise – assumptions. Indeed, various kinds of sensory input could direct the soul of the believer towards various spiritual states, but certainty could never be attained. This major problem is what the early modern poets respond to poetically.

In fact, it is not just poetry on itself but metaphor in particular that functions as a way to come to grips with the religious ambivalence that existed. Despite their questions about sensory piety and devotion that remained unanswered, the poets here discussed nevertheless opt for sensory imagery to shape their poetic efforts. They can be seen to include images of eyes and ears to describe their individual sense impressions, but they also use these image on a metaphorical level to describe the workings of the Divine in a material world. Often the lines between these two modes are blurred, which indicates that the literal and the figurative – the textual and the contextual – are not to be approached as binary opposites but, instead, as possibly coexisting realities. In the process of reconciling the realms of the body and the soul, as happens in the works of Vaughan and other early modern poets, metaphor fulfils the

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13 designated task of rendering sensory piety comprehensible and workable in embodied,

sensory terms. In other words, metaphor functions as the vehicle that conveys a sense of the struggle to make the corporeal and the spiritual compatible in the devotional life, and it does so through concrete sensory images that are embedded in cultural-historical contexts.

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2. Cultural-Historical Contexts:

Making Sense of the Senses in Early Modern England

If anything, the early modern era has come to be known as one of disarray and conflict, on the political as well as the religious level. During the enveloping Wars of the Three Kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland, the chief battles did not only take place on the fields; indeed, they were also fought vigorously in the inner courts of government – between monarchy and Parliament. Simultaneously, alongside the political confrontations, the key issue of authority was also heavily debated within the walls of the religious institution of the Church of

England. In fact, the clashes existing in both realms between freedom and constraint, autonomy and submission, were intertwined to such an extent that it was impossible to separate one’s political allegiance from one’s religious conviction. Being a royalist by the mid-seventeenth century implied at least some degree of association with highly ceremonial conformism and episcopacy, as much as parliamentarians were perceived as nonconformists in favour of Presbyterianism.

Indeed, as Ulinka Rublack explains, questions of religious adherence were strongly “bound up with questions of power, contestation, and group building” rather than simply a matter of the individual conscience (The Oxford Handbook 6). In the case of England, the succession of variously-oriented monarchs also gave rise to a range of different ecclesiastical structures: from Roman Catholicism before Henry VIII’s disagreement with the pope, to the establishment of a Protestant Church of England, back to Catholicism under Mary and on to the Elizabethan Settlement. Next, although the subsequent Stuart kings seemed to settle with the Protestant church, both James I and Charles I were more or less explicitly sympathetic with Catholicism or, in Charles I’s case, Arminianism. Especially Charles I’s marriage to the French Catholic princess Henrietta Maria in 1625 and his appointment of William Laud – also an alleged Arminian and one who believed that the Church had to be restored to “the political

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15 role and social standing of which the Reformation had deprived [it]” (Worden 23) – as the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633 roused suspicion among nonconformist Protestants.

Importantly, there had already been tensions between conformist and nonconformist members of the Church for decades, yet these greatly intensified during the reign of Charles I,

particularly due to his interference in church matters in England and Scotland. In fact, his adopted religious policy – including the imposition of a new Prayer Book on the Scottish Church in 1637 – resulted in open combat, first and foremost during the Bishops’ Wars of 1639-1640: a sequence of major conflicts initiating the Wars of the Three Kingdoms.

Just as the Scottish church leaders refused to yield to the foreign king’s demands, English nonconformists also contested what they considered Charles’ papist inclinations by destroying statues and other ceremonial or ritual objects in many churches all over the country during the 1640s. Effectively, these confrontations produced “something of a culture war” (The Norton Anthology 1359) between the rival religious strands both within as well as outside the mainstream Church. One of the main loci of conflict was sensory piety or, more generally, the role assigned to the senses in the life of the believer and the manner in which this sensory dimension of devotion was to take shape. Like religious adherence, this issue was also profoundly political, given that one’s political allegiance often dominated the choice of denomination – and vice versa – and thus also the doctrinal stances informing one’s spiritual daily life. Since the English Reformation had radically changed the ecclesiastical landscape and multiplied the number of denominational strands, personal piety was also significantly revisited and reinvented. In order to understand the complex status of the senses in early modern England – as well as Vaughan’s own lived experience – the following sections discuss the nature of late medieval religious piety as well as Reformed piety to indicate the shift that took place in terms of the presumed efficacy of the material in the approach to the spiritual, specifically on the level of the senses and their correct employment in daily life.

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16 2.1 Late medieval sensation

In the later Middle Ages, one crucial focus of devotional life was on sensation: the ability to come into closer proximity to the Divine by means of looking at or tasting the actual presence of God. As Matthew Milner explains, sensory experience was an integral part of church life, for “the sight of images and liturgies, especially the elevation of the consecrated host at mass, was communion with the divine and salubrious” (The Senses 3). In fact, this desire for bodily participation is also registered by Caroline Walker Bynum as she highlights the late medieval “sense of [the] body as the locus of yearning for God” (The Resurrection of the Body 330). Through bodily experience the sacred could be accessed, especially in the case of the Eucharist, in which God could be seen as well as ingested. Besides the sacraments, images and relics in reliquaries also played an important part in devotion, because they were considered to be not so much “conjuring up or gesturing toward the unseen as manifesting power in the matter of the object” (Bynum, Christian Materiality 28). This kind of ‘holy matter’ – as Bynum refers to it – “invited touch and taste as well as sight” (CM 105), urging devotees to immerse themselves completely and heighten their spiritual understanding via sense perception. In other words, the five senses functioned as the “gateways between the external body and the internal soul” (Woolgar 11), which enabled the devout to not only experience God’s presence but also respond to it with the aid of material objects such as relics. In addition, the senses were also used as metaphors in the kind of emotional language employed to express doctrinal notions, especially in late medieval mysticism, which served as an invitation to readers to “participate in a direct perception of God on the level of corporeal sensation” (McGinn 196).

Given that the five senses were “central to both cognition and higher truths” (Woolgar 23), they were often placed in rank according to different principles. Sight was generally considered the most significant one, given the fact that it was associated with light and inward

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17 vision. It even had its own field of study in the medieval societies of Europe, first as optics and the study of reflection, and later as perspective, which indicates that vision was assigned an important role in the acquisition of knowledge about the world (Milner, TS 26). Sight was also considered “ideal for introspection and spirituality” (Milner, TS 28). In contrast, the absence of sight, or blindness, was linked to a lack of insight and ignorance. Hence the perceived relevance of the visual elements of the church service, such as altars, crucifixes, statues and paintings, by means of which believers could participate on the spiritual level. The painted images in particular were important for the sake of “impelling viewers to experience greater tactility as they penetrated to deeper soteriological significance” (Bynum, CM 24).

Next to sight came hearing, and this sensory capacity was crucial for the mystic Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153), who stated that the first contact with God comes through hearing, both the literal hearing of the Word via the ears and the hearing of the heart (McGinn 192). Following the order of the senses top down, hearing was succeeded by smell, after which came taste and touch, yet these were sometimes rearranged, for instance when the importance of taste had to be stressed for the purpose of the Eucharist. Another mystic with outspoken ideas about the role of the senses was William of Saint-Thierry (1085-1148). He posited a connection between “the immediate, concrete and transformative nature of sense perception and the higher, supra-rational transformation that occurs when the soul comes to ‘know’ God” (McGinn 194). In his view, then, the senses could be employed to establish a link between body and soul and unite the two, so that a clear distinction no longer exists, which is also what the female mystic Hadewijch of Antwerp (1200-1248) believed. Her spiritual approach was characterised by a reliance on the “single sensorium” that incorporated both “external acts of sensation (looking, hearing, smelling, tasting and touching) and interior perceptions” (McGinn 196). By blurring the distinctions between corporeal and spiritual sensation, sensing could lead to unobstructed communication between heaven and earth.

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18 What is important to note concerning the efficacy of sensory engagement in

establishing a connection with the Divine is that it really had a “significance in the

progression of the soul to its salvation” (Woolgar 24). Given that late medieval Christians perceived the universe as “labile and revelatory” (Bynum, “The Sacrality of Things” 17), they were convinced of the fact that materiality mattered and could advance one’s spiritual state to higher levels. Via the eyes, ears, noses, mouths and hands, one could “discover good and conduct oneself well” (Woolgar 17) according to what God demanded. Good use of the senses therefore enhanced the chances of successful acquiring divine goodwill and thus opening the road to salvation. This is not to say that no scepticism towards the senses and their abilities existed in late medieval times at all. Indeed, as Bynum explains, the material and sensory aspects of devotion were regarded as “both radical threat and radical opportunity in the later Middle Ages” (CM 20), which is why scholastics and ecclesiastical authorities attempted to both “restrict and unleash the power of matter” (CM 31). Clerics were duly aware of the dangers of careless dependence on the senses, hence their frequent “attempts to spurn or deny them, or to limit their influence” (Woolgar 17). On the other side, sensory piety focused on the material also constituted the only means to access God. Thus, a “paradox lies at the heart of late medieval Christianity” (CM 34) that, as will become clear, continued to exist in early modern religious culture. Nevertheless, the senses still were the indispensable fundament of devotional life and, ultimately, the goal of this life was to work towards the “integrated notion of the […] self that saw the outer and inner aspects of sensation – feeling, desiring, perceiving and knowing – as part of a continuum” (McGinn 209).

2.2 Reformed sensory governance

During the period of the Reformation, first on the Continent and then also in England, European Christians were confronted with the reality that Christianity actually “contained radically different truth claims” about a plethora of doctrinal issues that were “constantly

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19 reconstructed and questioned” (Rublack, TOH 3). Not only did this religious movement foreground the differences between but also among Catholics and Protestants, which meant that neither can be considered a homogenous entity. What can be stated is that, in England, the main opposition existed between the conformist Protestants, part of the mainstream Church of England, and nonconformists Protestants, who referred to themselves as the

‘godly’. The first group of believers wished to maintain “the Catholic structure [of the church, its outer appearance and clerical hierarchies] even as it absorbed Calvinist theology” (Worden 8), whereas the second pleaded for a more thorough reform to eliminate what they saw as the irrelevant and distracting sensational elements in the church and the episcopal system of hierarchy. As mentioned before, the controversy about whether or not, and to which extent, material culture should be incorporated into church worship as well as personal piety gave rise to major confrontations, especially surrounding the debate about the role of the senses.

Given the Puritan emphasis on the preaching and hearing of the Word of God – derived from the Pauline notion that “faith cometh by hearing” (AKJV, Romans 10:17) – the discussions about the senses were often largely focused on audition, often “at the expense of vision as well as other sensory modes” (Gavrilyuk and Coakley 9). Indeed, Puritans

considered the Bible “the first guide to all experience, worldly and spiritual” (Worden 9). This nonetheless did not mean that the five senses and physical perception did not have a place in Protestant worship. On the contrary, William Wainwright notes, Puritans employed quite a number of devotional practices involving the senses as well as sensory metaphors to describe spiritual sensation (230). In fact, there was a strong sense of mental continuity with the late medieval affective tradition that manifested itself mainly in the beliefs held by English Protestants. For instance, many were convinced of the occurrence of miracles and the

fulfilling of prophecies, as well as the existence of demons and spirits (Rublack, Reformation Europe 183). Even those nonconformists who “decapitated statues to show that their power

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20 was dead clearly suspected that it was not” and thus subscribed to the power of sense

perception as well (Bynum, CM 123). Overall, then, Reformed culture accommodated bodily as much as spiritual affect, which implied that “faith was not just believed to be a matter of a reasoning spirit; the body and senses were part of the experience” (Rublack, RE 184).

Besides the aforementioned belief in spirits and demons, there is another important reason for the sustained attention given to the senses in Protestant conviction, and this is highlighted by Alec Ryrie in Being Protestant in Reformation Britain. A common first impression of the Calvinist doctrine is that it urged believers to strictly discipline themselves on the bodily level to avoid distraction and seduction by worldly vanities and delights

(Worden 10). However, this channelling of emotions and sensory input was not promoted for the sake of limitation or suppression but because Protestants “knew [the senses] mattered” (Ryrie 17) and “the point was to direct and to heighten them” (Ryrie 19). Indeed, they were much more afraid of a lack of feeling than of emotional excess, for the worst-case scenario of the devout early modern Protestant was deadness of heart (Ryrie 20). Even the fiercest pain was to be preferred over a physical and spiritual numbness, for that could indicate that one was not part of God’s elect. As the third and fourth chapter of this thesis make clear, this struggle to feel and perceive constitutes an important theme in early modern devotional

poetry, as poets “bewail their own coldness and deadness” in the face of God’s self-sacrificing love and compassion (Ryrie 22).

Alongside their acknowledgement of the necessity of sense perception, early modern Protestants – both conformists and nonconformists – also realised the importance of

employing the senses correctly, of exerting control or governance over them. In this light, the clergyman Richard Baxter (1615-1691) serves as a good example as he meditated “using the sensory images of the scripture to visualize […] divine things while at the same time

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21 that was hotly debated. For Puritans, that which obstructed the spreading of the Word and thus the promoting of salvation had to be eliminated, in particular the “sensual delights which distract or destroy the soul”, which is why Puritans preferred to have as little ceremony in the church as possible (Worden 10). On the other side of the spectrum, the mainstream church believed in the value of the incorporation of the senses by means of the “comely observation of the sacraments in set forms of prayer and worship” (Worden 12). Indeed, to conformists the church’s ceremonialism appealed to all the human capacities by means of which God could and would connect with believers. Over the whole, both sides of the argument agreed on the Reformed doctrine that one could ultimately be saved by grace alone and not through human agency – be it good works or sensory devotion. This, however, did not solve the problem as it only expanded the debate about the exact role of the senses, which after all were “the means by which God made Himself known: without eyes and ears believers were literally deaf and blind when it came to revelation” (Milner, TS 192).

God Himself endowed the human body with the ability to see, hear, smell, taste and touch the material world that He created for them to discover His glory. It was therefore not at all beneficial to cut oneself off from sensory input completely, nor was it even practically possible to do so in daily life. The problem was, however, that due to the Fall the human senses could no longer be trusted to give a truthful account of reality. Due to this distrust of the senses, the Protestant effort to make sense of the senses involved both a disentanglement of body and spirit as well as an activation of the senses to create a living faith. One view resulting from this ambivalence was that “sensible impieties were best undone by sensible pieties” (Milner, TS 221). In other words, given that the medieval employment of the senses was perceived as the “counterfeiting of true religion”, Reformed churches removed the holy bread, oil, and water and introduced the Book of Common Prayer (Milner, TS 250). One of the most debated practices in this regard was the Eucharist, which in medieval culture

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22 “allowed congregants to see with their bodily eyes if not the miraculous transformation itself then at least the species in which this miracle occurred” (Casper 52). Conversely, in the Protestant tradition the focus was shifted, away from the materiality of the bread and wine as the actual body and blood, to the spiritual significance of these as tokens of Christ’s sacrifice.

As mentioned before, Protestant theology denied the neutrality of the five senses and characterised them as “unruly horses” that need mastering by “well-ordered reason” – the senses were to be captivated, to be reined in (Milner, “To Captivate” 307). If believers did not take great care of what they engaged in materially, they would lose themselves in worldliness, as the English Puritan clergyman Richard Greenham (1535-1594) highlighted in his work containing godly instructions of all sorts, here on the topic of sight in particular:

yet such is our corruption, that if there stand an euill thing before vs, we must needs looke on it. Therefore wee had neede make a couenant with our eyes, that is the surest way. We will end this with that good counsel: Gouerne thy selfe, take heede, and be safe: but yet more safe, if thou doest not fasten thine eye vpon the tree of life. (672)

Greenham’s emphasis on the governing of the eyes is rooted in the Reformed belief that the senses form the windows through which idolatrous, false religion could enter the hearts and minds of believers. At the same time, however, believers could still come to know God’s majesty through the natural world, which was created to inspire awe and wonder.

A similar tension existed on the level of hearing, Rublack points out, for there was an ongoing debate about “how the Word was supposed to affect its hearer” and whether or not there were “particular powers attached to the biblical Word” (RE 188). Given the corrupted nature of the senses, it would be dangerous to rely solely on audition in order to fully understand faith. On the other hand, if simple listening to the Word did not have any effect, preaching would become more or less redundant. In addition, early modern English

Protestants attached significant value to singing – which was believed to “open the heart physically and intellectually and to protect it from hardening” – and pious speaking or reading

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23 aloud, which “stood in contrast to the silence of those who already had a hardened heart” (Rublack, RE 191). Similarly, the effect of touch was acknowledged despite the necessity of sensory control. Pastors, for instance, would place their hand on a believer’s head as a sign of blessing after confession, which suggests that a direct link between the physical and the spiritual could be established (Rublack, RE 185-186). Altogether this attitude supports the idea that Protestants, even the orthodox, lived their faith not only mentally but also physically.

Still, as has become evident, the kind of sensory piety promoted by Reformed

Protestants was not identical to the late medieval tradition. Despite their similarly ambivalent attitude towards the senses, early modern believers were not in favour of a single sensorium or a complete blurring of the distinctions between the corporeal and the spiritual. Crucially, allowing unrestrained sensory engagement with the material world would lead to excess instead of the moderated “part of the rhetoric of faith” that sensory experience was supposed to constitute and that was to move “individuals to the aspirations of the Gospel” (Milner, TS 340). Understandably, this balance was difficult to achieve and maintain, for it required a regulation of sensory input from all the five senses in order to nurture and direct rather than suppress them (Ryrie 20). Eventually, this kind of struggle could only be resolved by “effort and redoubled effort” (Ryrie 24), often in the shape of player and contemplation. Yet, the danger of corruption still existed and was acknowledged by both conformist as well as nonconformist Protestants.

In poetry as much as in theological works, writers such as Vaughan negotiate the spiritual consequences of employing the senses for devotional purposes. Importantly, the early modern poets acknowledge the problem on the level of sensory engagement – of necessity and disavowal – that Ryrie registers, and they attempt to resolve this poetically, as the next chapter about the poetry of John Donne, George Herbert and Robert Herrick shows.

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3. Poetic Contexts:

Religion and the Senses in Devotional Verse

As has become manifest in the previous chapter, the role of the senses in devotional life was hotly debated in early modern England, not in the least in the poetry produced by seventeenth-century Protestant poets. Given the fact that it could function as a space for questions and negotiations, this poetry allowed the early modern devout to voice a number of contemporary concerns about the nature of the spiritual experience that was to accompany faith. As personal piety – which was strongly associated with monastic life before – became a prominent aspect of the Reformed devotional sphere, it also became an important topic in religious verse (Young 82). Indeed, when the number of sacraments within the Church was reduced and the focus was placed on divine grace as the only way to salvation, the question of how to deal with the corporeal dimension of devotion and worship gained in urgency. Therefore, poets like John Donne (1572-1631), George Herbert (1593-1633) and Robert Herrick (1591-1674) found themselves facing the task of assigning a new suitable position to sensory piety. With the supposedly waning power of the sacraments to “make grace present in the world”, their works reveal the religious tensions arising from this perceived loss of sensation (Young 83).

Regarding the content of the works of Donne, Herbert and Herrick, it is important to note that a “conformity of interests” with late medieval believers can be observed when it comes to the involvement of sense perception in the daily religious life (Young 85). This is manifested in the fact that, despite the predominantly Protestant character of their poems, all three poets hold the senses in high esteem for the fact that they are divinely created and instrumental in revealing the Almighty and His works on earth. With the creation of the mankind, God bestowed the capacities of sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch on humans, who could thus come into contact with Him. This is also why early modern Protestants valued the senses so much; they were “a form of revelation” (Ryrie 40). Moreover, as has been

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25 discussed, believers were duly aware of the implications of this conviction, namely that if they were not attentive to sensory input, they would render themselves “wilfully deaf to the voice of God” (Ryrie 41). This awareness of the origin and purpose of the five senses can also be registered in the devotional poetry of Donne, Herbert and Herrick, yet it exists alongside the realisation that the senses are no longer what they once were. As a result of the Fall, the human eyes, ears, noses, mouths and hands are affected by sin and thus corrupted, which makes sense perception extremely unreliable as a source of knowledge about God.

Crucially, however, having established the corruption of the senses, the early modern poets do not for a moment consider disregarding them altogether. Instead, they emphasize the necessity of sense perception in the Protestant struggle against the deadness or dullness of the human heart. Indeed, a continuous “sense of crisis” within the self is created to maintain an alertness to the health of the spiritual state, for which the senses are indicative (Ryrie 417). As a lack of perception or feeling is dangerous, the devotional lyric elaborated on in this chapter voices the desire to activate the senses, to revive them. Nonetheless, it also responds to the question of sensory governance, to which the three poets have various answers. The following three sections discuss these answers given by Donne, Herbert and Herrick respectively, to shed light on their poetic approach to the role of sense perception in the spiritual life.

3.1 John Donne – crossing the senses

The first clergyman-poet whose works are studied in greater detail is John Donne, a convert from Roman Catholicism to mainstream English Protestantism. In his poetry, he displays an unmistakable preoccupation with sensing and sensory worship. To begin with, he foregrounds time and again how God is present in the material world and how this world serves as a reminder of the saving love of Christ, as in “The Cross”:

Look down, thou spiest out crosses in small things; Look up, thou see’st birds raised on crossed wings; All the globe’s frame, and spheres, is nothing else

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26 But the meridians crossing parallels.

Material crosses then good physic be,

But yet spiritual have chief dignity. (ll. 25-26)

In this poem, it is the physical eyes of the speaker that ought to perceive the shape of the cross in the details of creation, and be thus reminded of the existence and the character of the

Almighty. Besides corporeal sight, Donne also presents another, spiritual dimension to seeing in “Nativity”, the third part of “La Corona”: “See’st thou, my soul, with thy faith’s eyes, how He / Which fills all place, yet none holds Him, doth lie?” (ll. 37-38). As mentioned in first chapter of this thesis, this distinction between physical and spiritual sight is commonly made by Christian writers and simultaneously applied to hearing, smell, taste and touch. Unlike late medieval belief systems, Donne’s speaker does not see these two dimensions as blurred and merged into a single sensorium. Rather, the ambiguity that exists within his poem surrounding the meaning of the sensory images originates from the ardent wish to understand the spiritual workings of faith in decidedly visible, embodied terms.

In Donne’s Holy Sonnets (1633), the divine creation of the senses and their role as agents revealing the signs of God’s glory on earth are asserted from the onset, yet so is their corruption by sin. In “Holy Sonnet I”, the speaker experiences a physical sense of decay that affects his visual perception: “I dare not move my dim eyes any way” (l. 5). Due to the pervasiveness of sin, the speaker’s eyesight has been reduced, causing an additional loss of confidence in the process. Ramie Targoff argues that the speaker’s condition in this poem is characterised by helplessness, because of his “fear of abandonment by God” (111). As a result, he is unable to make an accurate judgement of his surroundings, for it is only by God’s guidance that he can navigate his way to heaven: “Only Thou art above, and when towards Thee / By Thy leave I can look, I rise again” (ll. 9-10). Donne’s speaker here admits the corruption of his sight and commits himself to God’s care, but he also asserts the power of seeing. Indeed, these lines are a reference to the story of the Israelites in the desert, who were

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27 urged by Moses to look up to the fiery serpent on the pole so that “every one that is bitten, when he looketh upon it, shall live” (AKJV, Numbers 21:8). In other words, for Donne sight is an important way to connect with the spiritual world, albeit enabled solely by God Himself.

Since Donne assigns such value to sensory devotion, it is not surprising to find his speakers in despair whenever there appears to be no sensory sign of God at all. As Alec Ryrie has pointed out, this lack of feeling or tangibility was considered dangerous, because it could be an omen of the damnation awaiting the believer (21). In fact, Donne realises the risks of this insensibility, for he asks Christ – in “Resurrection”, the sixth part of “La Corona” – to pour him a drop of His blood in order to be freed “from being starved, hard, or foul” (l. 74). The speakers of the Holy Sonnets – collectively making a “concerted attempt to preserve anxiety” and thus escape insensitivity (Netzley 119) – also waste no time lingering in cold-heartedness and call upon God for a revelation of Himself in the shape of sensory affect. In “Holy Sonnet III”, for example, the speaker longs to experience emotions: “O might those sighs and tears return again / Into my breast and eyes” (ll. 1-2). As such, the preferred – and healthy – spiritual state, the speaker implies, is characterised by emotional vibrancy. When this is lacking, Donne’s speakers desperately attempt to avoid numbness by taking rather rigorous steps, demanding to experience physical anguish for the sake of spiritual revival. In the case of “Holy Sonnet XI”, the speaker even desires to imitate Christ’s Passion or to “become Christ” (Van Dijkhuizen 106): “Spit in my face, you Jews, and pierce my side, / Buffet and scoff, scourge and crucify me” (ll. 1-2). Importantly, he does subscribe to the Reformed belief that this sensational imitatio Christi – identification with Christ through suffering – cannot ultimately procure salvation: “But by my death cannot be satisfied / My sins” (ll. 5-6). These lines in particular underscore what Young refers to as Donne’s “sense of inadequacy” regarding his sensory capacities (179).

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28 be spiritually born again, as he explains in “Holy Sonnet XIV”: “Batter my heart […] for You / As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend; / That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend / Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new” (ll. 1-4). Again, the ability to rise is requested from God and to be brought about by a physically experienced assault, during which the speaker does not just see divine glimpses, hear knocking or smell the breeze. Instead, he desires to experience a “direct bodily sensation” (Van Dijkhuizen 109) that involves divine fire, breaking and cracking, and the fierce blows of God’s Spirit. The burning in particular occurs more often related to the senses, for instance in “Holy Sonnet V”, where it serves as a cleansing mechanism along with a divine flood: “Pour new seas in mine eyes, that so I might / Drown my world with my weeping earnestly, / Or wash it, if it must be drowned no more; / But, O, it must be burnt. Alas, the fire / Of lust and envy burnt it

heretofore” (ll. 7-11). Altogether the senses, by nature characterised by sinfulness, cannot produce a reliable version of reality, nor a direct connection with God, if He Himself does not first intervene and reactivate them.

In the light of this condition of being ultimately a “broken artifact” (Targoff 120), Donne presents successful human governance of the senses as highly problematic. In “Holy Sonnet XIV”, the speaker describes himself as an “[u]surped town” (l. 5), with his rational capacity – that which was supposed to control the unruly senses according to Matthew Milner – taken captive by sin. His solution, then, to this problem is not a Puritan elimination of every possible sensory impiety or distraction, but a restraining or barring of the full reach of the senses, which is phrased thus in “The Cross”:

And cross thy senses, else, both they and thou Must perish soon and to destruction bow. For if the eye seek good objects, and will take No cross from bad, we cannot ‘scape a snake. So with harsh, hard, sour, stinking, cross the rest, Make them indifferent; call nothing best.

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29 And move; to th’ others th’ objects must come home. (ll. 43-50)

The crossing the speaker refers to here denotes a thwarting or opposing of the senses, so that they no longer have carte blanche to roam and explore, for this leads to destruction. Instead, they are to be countered and neutralised by negative sensory input – defective visual objects, harsh sounds, hard surfaces and smelly odours – in order to make them indifferent or non-evaluative: not responsive to temptation either way. Interestingly, in advocating such a method, Donne both offers a way of relating to the Divine, namely through the senses, and he simultaneously “censures [that way] for its unreliability” (Van Dijkhuizen), indicating that he finds himself in a deeply conflicted relationship with his own physicality. This conflict is part and parcel of Donne’s poetic attempt to make sense of the Divine through the senses.

3.2 George Herbert – a sense of transparency

Like John Donne, George Herbert took holy orders in the mainstream Church of England in the early seventeenth century, and his poetry collection – The Temple (1633) – is structured along the lines of church architecture and interior design whilst also discussing a number of important contemporary church practices in which the senses were involved. As for the origin and purpose of the senses, Herbert, too, is keen to stress the divinely created nature of human sensory capacities. In “Matins”, for instance, he clearly connects sense perception to the revelation of God’s majesty: “Teach me thy love to know; / That this new light, which now I see, / May both the work and workman show: / Then by a sunbeam I will climb to thee” (ll. 17-20). Indeed, Herbert’s speaker, like Donne’s, underscores the instrumentality of the senses in the process of coming into contact and building a relationship with the Almighty. In fact, it is not just on the level of sight that Herbert promotes this view, but also – and arguably primarily – on the level of taste. In “Superliminare”, the speaker explicitly invites the reader to “approach, and taste / The church’s mystical repast” (ll. 3-4), which suggests that spiritual life can greatly benefit from a physical or sensory involvement in public and private worship.

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30 Moreover, Herbert does not simply advance the idea that the aspect of tangibility enriches devotional life; he actually offers the possibility of gaining a deeper understanding of the nature of the Almighty and His unconditional, self-sacrificial commitment to humankind via the senses, as his speaker explains with reference to the Eucharist in “The Agony”:

Who knows not Love, let him assay And taste that juice, which on the cross a pike Did set again abroach; then let him say

If ever he did taste the like.

Love is that liquor sweet and most divine,

Which my God feels as blood; but I, as wine. (ll. 13-18)

The word “sweet” here is a crucial component of Herbert’s poetic vocabulary, for it is “the functional aesthetic organizing Herbert’s thought along the private and public vectors of devotion” (Hill 239). In Herbert’s view, God’s goodness towards humankind should be received expressly in terms of delight and pleasure, both physical – via the sacrament – as well as spiritual. Indeed, delight as such carries affective power in The Temple, as the volume negotiates “the knotty matter of decorum in worship” (Hill 238). Effectively, Herbert posits that it is precisely physical, sensory delight that draws the believer’s soul to God. God’s sweetness should not be rationalized or “deferred to Heaven”; rather, it should be “taken in and consumed” (Hill 242). In the poem above, the liquor is ‘sweet’ because “it is the most, perhaps only, fitting way to give life or earthly shape to the extravagance of sacrificial divine love” (Hill 252). This divine sweetness has a transformative power that Vaughan later picks up on in his poems, as he adopts Herbert’s idea that “the sweet goodness of God gives […] pleasure and that to taste and be changed by it are one and the same” (Hill 242).

In Herbert’s poetry, the opportunity of relating to Christ by “experiencing [His] unrepeatable pain in a sensuous, physical manner” (Van Dijkhuizen 137) is presented as not just optional. In “Divinity”, his speaker points out that Christ Himself urges devotees to “take his blood for wine” (l. 21) because “[t]o take and taste what he doth there design, / Is all that

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31 saves, and not obscure” (ll. 23-24), as was presumably argued by anti-ceremonialists. Here Young registers the typically conformist attitude that what matters is the belief in the efficacy of the Eucharist “without worrying about how it might be accomplished” (117). Indeed, Herbert assigns great value to a sensory experience of the presence of Christ, despite his awareness of the corrupted nature of the senses due to the Fall. In “Love (3)” in particular, the fallibility of sensory judgement is underlined, for the speaker responds to Love’s invitation with reservation: “I the unkind, ungrateful? Ah my dear, / I cannot look on thee” (ll. 9-10). The reason for the speaker’s refusal to cast his eyes on Love is rooted in the recognition that his sight is not pure – in “Self-Condemnation” the eye is described as “that busy wanderer” (l. 5) – and will therefore not do justice to Love’s redemptive beauty. As a response, Love makes clear that He is the Creator of the speaker’s eyes and therefore has the sole right to direct them, for the intimacy between Love and the speaker “is about their bodies as well as their words” (Gilman Richey 119). Subsequently, however, the speaker again emphasizes his corruption: “Who made the eyes but I? / Truth Lord, but I have marred them” (ll. 12-13).

Notably, this emphasis on the dangers attached to and the consequences of corrupted sight surfaces not infrequently throughout The Temple. In “Perirrhanterium”, for instance, the speaker poses a rhetorical question that seems to be intended to make the reader painfully aware of his hypocrisy: “How dare those eyes upon a Bible look, / Much less towards God, whose lust is all their book?” (ll. 11-12). Given the ease with which the sinful believer is inclined to yield to visual impieties, Herbert considers it necessary to bring such double-mindedness to light. This happens in “The Sacrifice”, where Christ voices the premise that “humans are unresponsive to [His] pain” (Van Dijkhuizen 131): “O, all ye, who pass by, whose eyes and mind / To worldly things are sharp, but to me blind; / To me, who took eyes that I might you find: / Was ever grief like mine?” (ll. 1-4). Especially in the light of Christ’s suffering, this sensory ambivalence and the human inclination to cover it would deserve

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32 divine punishment, which causes Herbert’s speaker in “Sighs and Groans” to appeal to God for mercy: “O do not blind me! / I have deserved that an Egyptian night / Should thicken all my powers; because my lust / Hath still sewed fig-leaves to exclude thy light” (ll. 13-16). Conversely, however, Christ’s response to the speaker’s despair over his corrupted senses does not involve any kind of judgement. Instead, He dedicates Himself entirely to releasing the speaker from his sensory limitations and drawing him into Eucharistic union, as in “Love (3)”: “You must sit down, says Love, and taste my meat: / So I did sit and eat” (ll. 17-18).

Crucially, as in Donne’s poetry, the effort to establish a human-divine connection via the senses is initiated and achieved by Christ Himself. If it was not for His active role in rousing the speaker of “Sunday” and reviving his sense perception, he “had straight forward gone / To endless death” (ll. 15-16) because of his hard-heartedness and insensitivity. In fact, Herbert’s speaker displays his familiarity with this phenomenon in “The Altar”: “A Heart alone / Is such a stone, / As nothing but / Thy pow’r doth cut” (ll. 5-8). Other poems also address this spiritual issue using different kinds of imagery. The speaker of “Grace” declares:

My stock lies dead, and no increase Doth my dull husbandry improve: O let thy graces without cease

Drop from above! (ll. 1-4). […]

Sin is still hammering my heart Unto a hardness, void of love: Let suppling grace, to cross his art,

Drop from above. (ll. 17-20).

Since this spiritual state of being – unable to sense the divine presence and thus running the risk of damnation – is evidently undesirable for one as sensitive to the “drying up of the channels of grace” as Herbert (Young 107), his speakers continually pray for God’s

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33 languish thus, drooping and dull, / As if I were all earth? / O give me quickness, that I may with mirth / Praise thee brimfull!” (ll. 1-4). The term ‘quickness’ here denotes a sense of vivacity or sensory alertness to one’s surroundings, which is what seems to be absent in the life of Herbert’s devout. Yet, whenever the senses are activated, as is the case for the speaker of “The Banquet”, the Almighty alone is credited: “Having raised me to look up, / In a cup / Sweetly he doth meet my taste” (ll. 37-39). Once again, the stress placed on the uncorrupted employment of the senses testifies to the importance Herbert attaches to sensory devotion.

Concerning the ‘governing’ or ‘captivating’ of the senses, as Milner terms it (“To Captivate” 307), Herbert’s speaker expressly dismisses the strict Puritan approach of removing as many visual, aural and other sensory distractions as possible in “Conscience”:

Peace prattler, do not lour:

Not a fair look, but thou dost call it foul: Not a sweet dish, but thou dost call it sour: Music to thee doth howl.

By listening to thy chatting fears

I have both lost mine eyes and ears. (ll. 1-6)

Evidently, Herbert does not see the point of depriving the senses of all potentially damaging influences altogether, particularly because of their role in confirming the presence of God, even though the speaker of “The Banquet” realises that His “neatness passeth sight, / [His] delight / Passeth tongue to taste or tell” (ll. 4-6). Eventually, Herbert admits, sense perception will fail to provide an accurate impression of how all-encompassing God really is, but this is precisely why one is to keep an eye on the sensory input received. In “Perirrhanterium”, a double governance is advocated; the believer is to “[c]orrect [his] passions’ spite” (l. 263) by means of his own scrutinising introspection and through the eyes of others: “Thy friend put in thy bosom: wear his eyes / Still in thy heart, that he may see what’s there” (ll. 271-272). Thus he can be held accountable both privately and publicly.

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34 the topic of sense management is that faith is a matter of going beyond sensory perception, albeit that this notion is conveyed by sensory imagery. In other words, a sense of transparency is to be established that allows believers to sense both the physical and the spiritual realities at the same time. Thus, rather than sticking to the outward, perceptible signs of the Divine, the speaker of “Colossians 3:3” wants to be taught to “live here so, [that] still one eye / Should aim and shoot at that which [is] on high” (ll. 6-8). Indeed, it is to be noted that, although Herbert acknowledges the value of sensory perception in devotional life, he also emphasizes that it is even better to be able to face God directly and his speakers often yearn to do so, for example in “Home”: “My God, what is this world to me? / This world of woe? Hence all ye clouds, away, / Away; I must get up and see” (ll. 32-34).

Given that it is impossible to sense the material world without the liability to sin, Herbert’s speaker focuses on discovering God through or beyond his sensory experience, because – as he states in “The Elixir” – he has a choice: “A man that looks on glass, / On it may stay his eye; / Or if he pleaseth, through it pass, / And then the heav’n espy” (ll. 9-12). Concretely, this means that everything he sees, hears, smells, tastes or touches ought not just to leave an impression on the earthly level but also, first and foremost, to “point toward the transcendent reality” (Netzley 31) of heaven and the everlasting life. The speaker of “Man’s Medley” phrases it thus: “Not, that he may not here / Taste of the cheer, / But as birds drink, and straight lift up their head, / So must he sip and think / Of better drink / He may attain to, after he is dead” (ll. 19-24). Employment of the senses on earth thus becomes a means to prepare for the direct confrontation with God, for, as Alec Ryrie notes, “[t]o be always gazing on God was to be in Heaven”, yet “[m]aintaining that gaze was […] a constant struggle” (417). It is precisely this struggle that Herbert’s poems give literary shape.

3.3 Robert Herrick – the senses purged

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35 senses in the spiritual life is the London-born poet and cleric Robert Herrick. Much like Herbert, Herrick was attracted to religious ceremonialism and voices a kind of “nostalgia for a ceremonial pre-war church” (Loewenstein and Morrill 691). As a supporter of the Cavaliers, Herrick dedicated his collection of poetry titled Hesperides (1648) and the accompanying sacred poems, Noble Numbers, to Charles. In fact, his poems convey this royalist conviction allied with a Laudian sensibility that dismisses Calvinist sobriety and replaces it with an emphasis on the sacraments and sensory piety (Loewenstein and Morrill 692). In his Noble Numbers in particular, sense perception proves to be an integral part of devotional life, both private and public, as for instance in “103. To God”: “With golden censers, and with incense, here / Before Thy virgin-altar I appear, / To pay Thee that I owe, since what I see / In, or without, all belongs to Thee” (ll. 1-4). These lines register the centrality of senses to the overall spiritual experience, here focused on smell and sight, by referring to their purpose to reveal the omnipresence and glory of God, as is the case for Donne and Herbert. Crucially, Herrick’s favouring of sensory affect is not limited to these two senses, for he also explicitly subscribes to the importance of hearing, albeit on itself not sufficient in soteriological terms. In “36. Earrings”, his speaker explains why the Egyptians wore jewels in their ears: “But for to teach us, all the grace is there, / When we obey, by acting what we hear” (ll. 1-3).

Similarly, the impact of communion is concisely voiced in “155. The Eucharist”: “sin is the wound; / The salve for this i’ th’ Eucharist is found” (ll. 1-2). Again, participation in the Eucharistic union with Christ as such does not lead to salvation, but it does contribute to the establishment of a deeper understanding of the intensity of Christ’s Passion and the dismissal of the image of God as an “unknowable and unreachable deity” (Landrum 246). This is also foregrounded in “266. His Saviour’s Words Going to the Cross”, where the speaker presents the Eucharistic wine as “[l]ess for to taste than for to show / What bitter cups had been your due, / Had He not drank them up for you” (ll. 13-15). Thus, the ability to sense – regardless of

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36 whether that is via the mouth or eyes – enhances the devotee’s experience of the Divine as well as the process of humbling oneself and surrendering one’s autonomy. It is precisely this surrender of human agency in affairs of salvation that is advocated in “267. His Anthem to Christ on the Cross”, which displays an “almost casual intimacy with God” (Landrum 246): “But I will sip a little wine; / Which done, Lord, say: The rest is Mine” (ll. 12-13).

Importantly, the reason for this move on the part of Herrick’s speaker is not just the realisation of his own inability to bridge the gap between heaven and earth. More specifically, Herrick displays a keen awareness of the corruption of his bodily faculties, including his senses. One of sin’s consequences is the inherent fallibility of his perception, which is why divine intervention was necessary according to the speaker of “222. Christ’s Incarnation”: “Christ took our nature on Him, not that He / ‘Bove all things loved it for the purity: / No, but He dress’d Him with our human trim, / Because our flesh stood most in need of Him” (ll. 1-4). Since the Fall, mankind is characterised by a sinful nature, which significantly impairs the senses and their accuracy in such an overt manner that the speaker of “755. The Eye” in Herrick’s Hesperides has to conclude that “[a] wanton and lascivious eye / Betrays the heart’s adultery” (ll. 1-2). Knowing that God is aware of mankind’s fallen status and He alone can solve the problem, the speaker of “29. His Ejaculation to God” declares: “heal me with Thy look or touch; / But if Thou wilt not deign so much, / Because I’m odious in Thy sight, / Speak but the word, and cure me quite” (ll. 7-10). By requesting God’s life-changing healing touch, this poem underscores both the limits of bodily capacities as well as the necessity of their employment for the sake of redemption.

Indeed, the activation and subsequent employment of the senses is also linked to the problem of cold-heartedness in Herrick’s poetry. In the two lines that comprise “250. Hardening of Hearts”, the speaker summarises the course of events thus: “God’s said our hearts to harden then, / Whenas His grace not supples men” (ll. 1-2). In order to avoid this

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37 hardening, Herrick stresses the importance of sensing the divine presence and experiencing this spiritual suppling in a sensory manner. In this regard, Herrick follows in the footsteps of Donne and Herbert, as he yearns for a tangible interference that is similarly aggressive and almost self-annihilating, all for the sake of breaking the hold of sin, as in “48: To God”:

Make, make me Thine, my gracious God, Or with Thy staff, or with Thy rod;

And be the blow, too, what it will, Lord, I will kiss it, though it kill: Beat me, bruise me, rack me, rend me, Yet, in torments, I’ll commend Thee; Examine me with fire, and prove me To the full, yet I will love Thee; Nor shall Thou give so deep a wound But I as patient will be found. (ll. 1-10)

Whereas these lines speak of an assault on the speaker by God in echo of Donne’s “Holy Sonnet XIV”, the tendency of “265. Another to His Saviour” is towards a kind of sensational imitatio Christi reminiscent of the attitude of Peter in the Gospels, who preferred to die for Christ rather than to deny Him. Here, instead of passively awaiting God’s response, Herrick’s speaker offers to share in Christ’s pain in response to the sight of Him on the cross: “And, if I see Thee posted there, / To be all-flayed with whipping-cheer, / I’ll take my share; or else, my God, / Thy stripes I’ll kiss, or burn the rod” (ll. 7-10). Importantly, this attitude in favour of an active physical identification with Christ initiated by the Christian is compatible with and a continuation of late medieval piety. Yet, the degree of initiative on the soteriological level taken by Herrick here exceeds that of Donne and Herbert, despite their shared support of the “sacrament-centered service” of the mainstream Church of England (Landrum 247).

Moreover, Herrick’s speaker frequently presents himself as desperate to establish a more intimate human-divine relationship to gain a perspective on God’s reality, as in “106. On Heaven”: “Permit mine eyes to see / Part, or the whole of Thee, / O happy place!” (ll. 1-3).

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38 In addition to obtaining sight, he also longs for an audible sign from heaven, for instance in “77. To His Sweet Saviour”, to which he can and will respond: “Let me Thy voice betimes i’ th’ morning hear: / Call, and I’ll come; say Thou the when, and where” (ll. 11-12). This longing sheds light on a deeper concern of Herrick, namely what he saw as the “desecration of the Established Church” by those who wanted to rid the Church of ceremony (Summers 51). As Herrick was overtly supportive of Laudian ceremonialism, he responds to this opposition by resorting to affective methods. This is the case in “129. To Christ”, where Christ’s wound is a source of healing: “My mouth I’ll lay unto Thy wound / Bleeding, that no blood touch the ground: / For, rather than one drop shall fall / To waste, my JESU, I’ll take all” (ll. 5-8). These lines bear witness to Herrick’s profound dedication to the sensory aspect of the devotional life that has to be activated to benefit the spiritual state of the believer.

Furthermore, Herrick shared with Donne and Herbert a felt need to govern or bridle the senses so as to avoid losing himself in worldly, material pursuits. Echoing Herbert, his poetry aims to keep sense perception transparent and focused on the advancement of the spiritual life – albeit in sensory terms – rather than on a temporal existence on earth, as “25. To God” voices: “There [i.e. in heaven] give me day; but here my dreadful night: / My sackcloth here; but there my stole of white” (ll. 7-8). Still, while being here on earth,

Herrick’s speaker aims to strive against sin in every possible way, always fixing his gaze on the cross of Christ, “[n]ot to adore that, but to worship [Him]” (l. 10), as the lines of “115. His Wish to God” state. In concrete terms, to Herrick this means being dedicated in his Bible reading and prayers but also minding his employment of sensory capacities. Indeed, before participating in worship – and, more broadly, before engaging with the material world out there – the senses are to be prepared for every kind of confrontation. In “65. The Parasceve, or Preparation”, the speaker expounds on the ceremony surrounding the Eucharist, characterised as a “love-feast” (l. 1), for which the table is filled with bread and wine and everything is

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39 made ready. Before communion takes place, a parasceve or a day of preparation or of the body and soul – “a Christian appropriation of the Jewish custom of preparation for the Sabbath” (Parry 10) – is due: “ere we receive, / Fit, fit it is we have our parasceve. / Who to that sweet bread unprepar’d doth come, / Better be starv’d, than but to taste one crumb” (ll. 7-10). These lines reveal that Herrick’s ritualism is accompanied by a “concern with [sensory] purity” (Parry 10).

As a consequence of this “attentiveness to sacrifice and to the purity of those who offer sacrifice” (Parry 11), the kind of preparation promoted by Herrick’s speakers is not just a simple reflection on one’s state of being or a general mindfulness of one’s fallibility. Instead, the sentiment Herrick verbalises is the fact that, in devotional life, one is to cleanse oneself, preferably at the start of the day, as runs the advice of “320. Matins; Or, Morning Prayer” in Hesperides:

When with the virgin morning thou dost rise, Crossing thyself, come thus to sacrifice; First wash thy heart in innocence, then bring

Pure hands, pure habits, pure, pure everything. (ll. 1-4)

Thus, Herrick’s effort to govern himself is centred around the purification of the soul but also of the body and its sensory capacities, or – in the words of “98. Another New-Year’s Gift: Or, Song for the Circumcision” – those meaning to interact with the Divine are to “purge and circumcise / [their] hearts, and hands, lips, ears, and eyes” (ll. 8-9). This procedure strongly resonates with both Old and New Testament imagery. In the Old Testament, Jewish law required male new-borns to be circumcised, which becomes redundant and is replaced by baptism in the New Testament, but the image of circumcision remains in a spiritual sense as Paul urges Christians to commit to God and have the heart circumcised by His Spirit.

In other words, the effort required to govern the senses is demanded both by the devotee himself and by God, suggesting that “[h]uman agency too can stimulate God’s