Essay 5—
Impossible Worldliness
"Devout Humanism"
François de Sales is officially a saint from the early seventeenth century, and George Herbert is as close to being one (unofficially) as the Church of England will allow. This is all well and good, but from the point of view of intellectual and cultural history, the problem with the special status of these writers is that their works tend to be read with presuppositions about piety in mind, which is to say that some of their works, especially directly moralistic ones, tend not to be read in any strong sense at all. The aim of the following essay is to read carefully two major texts by these writers (and some bits from John Donne) that have been associated with the movement in early seventeenth-century France and England characterized as "devout humanism." The essay does not mean to uncover anything "hidden" in these texts. Indeed, as I hope the first section of this book has made clear, I have serious doubts about the necessity and desirability of seeking for hidden or "below the surface" meanings. The reading that I intend to do in this essay is precisely a reading of the surface of these texts, an attempt to think hard about what these texts actually say—not about what they might be construed in a general way to mean but what they are truly saying. I want to take these texts as literally as possible at their words, and to hold them fully accountable for these words.
My aim is not debunking but clarity. The class implications of the texts, and of "devout humanism" in general, have been obscured or downplayed by what commentators the texts have had. Christianity is not simply a nose of wax. The difficulties, acknowledged or unacknowl-
edged (or in between), that the authors in question had in reconciling their social perspective with the teaching of the gospels are instructive for the way in which a dimension of radical critique can never be completely extinguished from a version of Christianity that is haunted to any degree by the gospels. Aside from determinedly literal reading, the mode of this essay might be called Ideologiekritik . The essay is certainly informed by the Marxist tradition, but I am happy to say that (as we shall see) some of the "Marxism" in the essay is actually derived from a seventeenth-century text, since the critic of devout humanism on whom I have most strongly relied is Blaise Pascal.
"Devout humanism" needs to be seen in the context of a larger picture. One of the great problems of late medieval and early modern spirituality in Western Europe was the religious status of ordinary Christians, of persons living in "the world," outside of monastic or religious orders. The devotio moderna and the popularization of Rhineland mysticism were responses to this problem—created by the increase in lay wealth and education—as was, in part, the Lollard movement in England.[1] At the beginning of the sixteenth century, Erasmus's exaltation of baptism as the essential Christian "vow" and "the holiest of ceremonies" was a sustained attempt to break down the barrier between the layman and the "religious."[2] Luther's baptismal doctrine of the priesthood of all believers asserted this position more powerfully ("we who have been baptized are all uniformly priests by virtue of that very fact") and provided a theological framework more coherent than Erasmus's for proclaiming the religious value of "worldly" activity.[3] Luther's revolution, according to Weber, was to declare the fulfillment of worldly duties "the highest form which the moral activity of the individual could assume."[4] Luther held, quite spectacularly, that "the common work of
[1] See, for instance, Preserved Smith, The Reformation in Europe (1920; pap. rpt., New York: Collier, 1962), chap. 1; A. G. Dickens, The English Reformation (New York: Schocken, 1964), chaps. 1–2; Albert Hyma, The "Devotio Moderna" or Christian Renaissance (1380—1520) , 2d. ed. (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1965); and Steven Ozment, The Age of Reform, 1250–1550 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), chap. 5.
[2] See The Enchiridion of Erasmus , trans. Raymond Himelick (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963), 40, 116, and passim.
[3] The Babylonian Captivity [Pagan Servitude] of the Church , in Martin Luther: Selections from his Writings , ed. John Dillenberger (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1961), 345; see also pp. 311, 349, and, in the same volume, An Appeal to the Ruling Class , 407–12. Erasmus's Platonism works against a celebration of the ordinary and mundane (see chap. 14, "The Fifth Rule," of the Enchiridion , 101ff.).
[4] Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904–5), trans. Talcott Parsons, foreword by R. H. Tawney (1930; pap. rpt., New York: Scribner's, 1958), 80. Weber sharply distinguishes this position from what he calls "the liberal utilitarian compromise with the world at which the Jesuits arrived" (81).
a serving man or maid is more acceptable [to God] than all the fastings and other works of monks."[5]
The Puritan movement in England and America can be seen as continuing the anti-elitist note of Luther.[6] The Jesuits spearheaded the Roman church's attempt to recapture the laity as "religious." Unlike the Puritans, however, the Jesuits concentrated their efforts almost exclusively on the social elite, and it was out of this emphasis and the anti-ascetic strands within Loyola's teachings that the movement known primarily in France as "devout humanism" took its orientation.[7] Devout humanism might be described as a movement that set out to show Christianity to be fully possible within the bounds of ordinary and recognizable aristocratic life. Its class orientation is essential to it in both its Catholic and its Protestant forms, though this has mostly been obscured by commentators.[8] For the Catholics, "devout humanism" was a way of capturing the part of the laity that mattered, keeping the lay elite from either Protestantism or "libertinage."[9] For the English, it was a way of defusing the democratic and anti-elitist strains in Protestantism (and perhaps in the gospels).
The major text of "devout humanism" is François de Sales's Introduction to the Devout Life (first edition, 1609). Pascal's Provincial Letters , later in the century (first edition, 1656), is the great attack on both
[5] The Babylonian Captivity, in Luther: Selections, Dillenberger, ed., 311.
[6] See Weber, Protestant Ethic , chap. 4; R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926; pap. rpt. New York: Mentor, 1954); and Christopher Hill, "The Industrious Sort of People," Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England (New York: Schocken, 1967), 124–44. The distinctiveness of "Puritan" economic views has been seriously questioned by Charles H. George and Katherine George, The Protestant Mind of the English Reformation, 1570–1640 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961). They argue that the sermon literature of English Protestantism in general in the earlier seventeenth century incorporates "the most outgoing and positive view of work which exists in the Christian tradition" (143).
[7] The phrase seems to have been coined by Henri Bremond in Devout Humanism (1914), trans. K. L. Montgomery, vol. 1 of A Literary History of Religious Thought in France (New York: Macmillan, 1928).
[8] Bremond's presentation of the movement obfuscates its social elitism. The elitism is noted, in somewhat metaphysical form, in Paul Benichou, Morales du grand siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 1948), chap. 3, English translation by Elizabeth Hughes, Man and Ethics (New York: Doubleday, 1971); and is noted very clearly in A. W. S. Baird, Studies in Pascal's Ethics (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975), chaps. 3–4.
[9] For "libertinage," see Antoine Adam, Les Libertins au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Buchet-Chastel, 1964).
the Jesuit and the Salesian movements. George Herbert has been claimed for "devout humanism" in England, as has John Donne.[10] Donne's "A Litanie," together with some of his sermons, and Herbert's "The Church-porch" can plausibly be related to the aims and ideals of St. François's treatise. One of the things that I want to explore, especially in St. François and Herbert, is the peculiar mixture of ingenuousness and disingenuousness that the texts of this movement, from the seventeenth-century to its contemporary equivalents, seem necessarily to involve.[11] François de Sales's book is the most impressive and elaborate of the texts. It comes closest, at moments, to presenting a version of aristocratic behavior that actually seems to partake of fundamental Christian values. Herbert's poem is the crudest of the texts, and perhaps therefore gives us the most revealing picture of the aristocratic mentality (at least in England) in the early seventeenth century. The crudeness of the values of this early poem of Herbert's also perhaps helps explain some of his later revulsion against the attitudes that he there expressed and against some of the aims of "devout humanism."
In the ninth of the Provincial Letters , Pascal's Jesuit interlocutor notes that "men of the world are generally deterred from devotion by the strange ideas they have been led to form of it"; to counter this "strange idea," he especially praises Father Le Moine for drawing a "perfectly charming" picture of devotion in his work entitled Devotion Made Easy .[12] I had initially thought that this was parody. But it is not. The book exists, and as Bremond observes, Le Moine's treatise "does little
[10] For Herbert, see Louis L. Martz, The Poetry of Meditation: A Study of English Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century, rev. ed. (New Haven; Yale University Press, 1962), 249–59. For Donne, see Helen Gardner, ed., John Donne: The Divine Poems , rev. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), xxvi. Neither Martz nor Gardner claim direct influence, though it seems that Martz would like to. Martz's distinctions between Jesuit and Salesian spirituality (Poetry of Meditation, 144–52) are plausible, but Martz overlooks the historical continuity between the two movements.
[11] For some interesting reflections on a nineteenth-century version of a very similar problematic, see Haddon Willmer, "'Holy Worldliness' in Nineteenth-Century England," in Derek Baker, ed., Sanctity and Secularity: The Church and the World (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), 193–211. A twentieth-century American version of the movement can be recognized in Michael Novak's Toward a Theology of the Corporation (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, 1981).
[12] Blaise Pascal, The Provincial Letters , trans. Thomas M'Crie, in Pensées and The Provincial Letters (New York: Random House, Modern Library, 1941), 438; Les Provinciales , ed. with an introduction by Louis Cognet (Paris: Garnier, 1965), 158 (the plural in "strange ideas" is not in the original). Page references will hereafter be included parenthetically in the text, first to the translation, second to the original.
more than paraphrase some chapters of the Introduction à la vie dévote ."[13] Devotion Made Easy—the fundamental premise of François de Sales' book is that "the way to heaven is not as difficult as the world makes it out to be."[14] The aim, as Pascal's Jesuit (following Le Moine) says, is to produce "genteel saints and well-bred devotees [saints polis et . . . devote civilisés ]" (438; 159), Christian versions of the honnêtehomme .[15] The devout life, for St. François, can happily include a remarkable range of normal aristocratic behavior: sports, banquets, parties, and balls (77; 65), as well as hunting and games of skill played for (nonexorbitant) stakes (208; 147). Cleanliness is seen, by virtue of a remarkable use of a passage in Isaiah, as "to a certain extent" (en quelque façon ) next to godliness (192; 226), and St. François "would have devout people, whether men or women, always the best dressed in a group" (193; 227). The premiere courtly virtue, sprezzatura , (the appearance of) unaffectedness, is the key to proper social and Christian behavior: "If beauty is to have good grace, it should be unstudied [negligée ]" (133; 143). The devout are not only to be the best dressed but also "the least pompous and affected." One can maintain the dignity due one's rank "without damage to humility" if this is done negligemment (134; 145). Unaffectedness also extends to the spiritual and emotional realm. One must speak of one's sufferings only "in a natural, true, and sincere way," and not exaggerate them in order to get sympathy (130; 137). This latter case, in which St. Paul becomes the perfect model of a gentleman, shows the way in which this perspective can offer something more than mere accommodation. The critique of affectation becomes a critique of "very subtle and refined ambition and vanity" (130; 137) in this diagnosis of unbecoming ostentation in suffering.
With similar sensitivity to the manipulation of (virtuous) appearances, the aristocratic ethos is at times subject to moral criticism in the Intro -
[13] Bremond, Devout Humanism , 296. Bremond notes that "Port Royal, too prudent to attack the master, gladly delivered the disciple over to the scourge of Pascal."
[14] St. Francis de Sales, Introduction to the Devout Life , trans. John K. Ryan (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Image Books, 1950), 68; Introduction à la vie devote , ed. Dom B. Mackey, vol. 3 of Oeuvres de Saint François de Sales (Annecy: Niérat, 1893), 53. Page references hereafter included parenthetically in the text, first to the translation, second to the original.
[15] For a precise seventeenth-century formulation of the conception of the honnêtehomme , see Chevalier de Méré, "De la vraïe honneteté," Oeuvres Complétes Paris: Fernand Roches, 1930), 3: 69–84, esp. 70: "si quelqu'un me demandoit en quoi consiste l'honnêteté, je dirois que ce n'est autre chose que d'exceller en tout ce qui regarde les agréments and les bienséances de la vie." I am grateful to Philippe Desan for calling my attention to this text.
duction , yet the important point is that the drive toward accommodation keeps the criticism from being sustained. In speaking of the way in which everyone can take and keep his proper rank without damage to humility, St. François notes that his defense of this assertion might seem to pertain "to wisdom rather than [to] humility" (134; 145). He then, however, provides a brilliant critique of the sorts of strategic humility that Castiglione discusses. Castiglione's Federico recommends that the courtier modestly refuse favors and honors that are offered him, but do so "in such a way as to give the donor cause to press them upon him more urgently."[16] St. François speaks of humility as false when "we make a show of flying away and hiding ourselves so that people will run after us and seek us out," when "we pretend to want to be last in the company and to be seated at the foot of the table, but it is with a view toward moving more easily to the upper end" (135–36; 147). True humility is either hidden or, when expressed, sincere. Yet St. François cannot end the discussion at this point. The position that he has been developing is overly rigorous with regard to the ordinary interactions of polite social life. He goes on to add that while the devout person must (perhaps) not play the game himself, "sometimes good manners require us to offer precedence to those who will certainly refuse it," and he insists that "this is neither duplicity nor false humility" (136; 147). The same is true of employing "certain words of honor which do not seem to be strictly true," but which ordinary social decorum requires. It is certainly, says St. François, "not always advisable to say all that is true" (206; 244), and it is neither necessary nor desirable to be a fool for Christ's sake (138; 150). If certain great servants of God have pretended to be fools in order to render themselves more abject in the eyes of the world, "we must admire but not imitate them."
For François de Sales, sociability is the essence of charity. It even covers sins. In discussing games, St. François makes a clear distinction between games of skill and of chance, allowing games of skill and prohibiting those of chance (208–9; 247–48). Yet a few pages later, participation in games
[16] Baldesar Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier , trans. Charles S. Singleton (New York:Doubleday, 1959), 113. In the dialogue, Cesare Gonzaga jokingly provides gospel ratification for Federico's strategic advice in Luke 14:8–10. These strategies, in Renaissance conduct as well as in the books on which the conduct was modeled (though not the Introduction to the Devout Life ), have been penetratingly analyzed, by way of Burke, Bourdieu, and Goffman, in Frank Whigham, Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Theory (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984).
of chance is said to be allowable "when prudence and discretion direct you to be agreeable," since "to be agreeable is part of charity, and makes indifferent things good and dangerous things permissible." Agreeableness even "removes harm from things in some way evil [aucunement mauvaises ]" (212; 253). We are inevitably reminded of Pascal's discussion of the Jesuit relaxations of the conception of "proximate occasions of sins" (457–58; 181–82). St. François's appeal to the image of Ignatius Loyola at genteel card parties hardly removes the discomfort. For St. François, this image is of the same sort as that of St. Catherine of Siena "turning the spit" in her father's kitchen (214; 255). The difference in the nature and social meaning of the activities is irrelevant. François de Sales does not see Christian values as exerting any pressure on the class orientation of his text. Concern for reputation, one of the great aristocratic obsessions, is upheld because "good name is one of the bases of human society [l'un des fondemens de la societé humaine ]" (143; 155). There is no conflict between humility and concern for one's honor. At times, St. François does seem to allow biblical testimony to threaten social norms, as when he speaks of St. Paul and David bearing shame in the service of God. "Nevertheless [J'excepte neanmoins ]," St. François immediately adds, certain reproaches cannot be borne, and certain persons, "on whose reputations the edification of many others depends" need not bear reproaches at all (144; 160). Again, Christ and the biblical exemplars are to be followed, but "with prudence and discretion [mais sagement et discretement ]" (145; 159).
Charity requires sociability, and sociability in turn requires full participation in and skillful management of the forms, fictions, and practices of polite society. Eutrapelia , "which we call pleasant conversation" (196; 231), is redeemed from its Pauline status as a vice and returned to its Aristotelian standing as a virtue.[17] The seemingly dour virtue of mortification is brilliantly adapted to the demands of social life. Building on the Ignatian conception of "indifference" as a form of humility, François de Sales goes further than Ignatius does in exalting "indifference" above renunciation.[18] With regard to food, St. François concedes
[17] For Paul's condemnation of eutrapelia , see Ephesians 5:4, in George Ricker Berry, The Interlinear Greek-English New Testament (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1897), 508; for Aristotle's praise of eutrapeloi , see Nicomachean Ethics , 1128a10, ed. and trans. H. A. Rackham 1968 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, Loeb Classical Library, 1932), 246.
[18] For the conception of "indifference," see Ignatius's discussion of "Three Occasions when a Wise and Good Choice can be Made," in The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, trans. Anthony Mottola (New York: Doubleday, 1964), 85. There is some ambivalence here. In the meditation on "The Three Classes of Men," the indifferent are the highest (p. 78), while in the discussion of "The Three Modes of Humility," the indifferent are second, behind the actively ascetic (82).
that although "always to choose the worst" seems more austere, the truest kind of mortification is to eat without preference whatever is put before you, even if you like it (186; 219). ln this way, we renounce our choice as well as our taste, since the austere-seeming form of mortification involves continuous assertions of will. The proper exercise of mortification, mortification through adaptability and acquiescence, "doesn't show in public, bothers no one, and is well-adapted to social life [est uniquement propre pour la vie civile ]." One can be "mortified," in other words, by continually eating one's favorite food—as long as it is spontaneously served to one. At a moment like this, it is difficult to distinguish ingenuousness from disingenuousness in the text.
The conceptions of humility and mortification are sticking points for "devout humanism," requiring a series of delicate distinctions and adjustments. These adjustments are at times, as we have just seen, brilliantly made by François de Sales. But the gospel condemnations of wealth are particularly unsettling. St. François's way around this is to stress Jesus' praise of "the poor in spirit" (Matthew 5:3) and therefore to distinguish, again more sharply than Ignatius did, between spiritual and material poverty.[19] A whole chapter (3.14) is devoted to the claim that poverty of spirit can be observed in the midst of riches. You can possess riches without being spiritually hurt by them "if you merely keep them in your home and purse, and not in your heart" (162; 185); moreover, "you may take care to increase your wealth and resources" through just means (163–64; 187). For almsgiving, which is recommended, God will repay us "not only in the next world but even in this" (165; 189). One can be "poor in effect" through any experience of inconvenience, as when "our best clothes are in one place and we need them in another" or when (God forbid) "the wines in our cellar ferment and turn sour" (116; 190).
St. François tells us that St. Elizabeth, daughter of the King of Hungary, sometimes for recreation among her ladies "clothed herself like a poor woman, saying . . . 'If I were poor, I would dress in this manner,'" and thereby manifested poverty of spirit (as, presumably, did Marie Antoinette later). The ideal, which François de Sales is sure is fully possible, is to have "the advantages of riches for this world" together with "the merit of poverty" in the world to come (161; 185). It is just
[19] For Ignatius's use of this distinction, see Spiritual Exercises , 77.
this happy harmony that Pascal sought to disrupt. A. W. S. Baird cogently argues that the reason why casuistical arguments legitimizing aristocratic pastimes are singled out so frequently in the Provinciales is not merely because these represent the most vulnerable point in the Jesuit armor but also "for the more basic reason" that, as Baird puts it, "the aristocratic way of life requires more numerous and more serious attenuations than any other" in the standard of Christian conduct.[20]
In the introduction to his study, Bremond mentions that if time and space had allowed he "would fain have shown how among the Anglicans of the first half of the seventeenth century was produced a temper analogous to French devout humanism."[21] Donne's "A Litanie" may well have been one of those works which Bremond would have treated. As I have already noted, Helen Gardner, citing Bremond, links the poem to the movement.[22] In "A Litanie," Donne professes a heroic willingness to endure life for God, stating, "Oh to some / Not to be Martyrs, is a martydome" (lines 89–90). The poem seems to pray for a balanced view of worldly splendor, to be saved "from thinking that great courts immure / All, or no happinesse." The dramatic enjambment, however, betrays the balance. "All" is clearly the greater temptation, and the rest of the stanza is not devoted to finding a mean between two excesses, but to the problem of undervaluing worldly (that is, courtly) delights. The "or" clauses in the stanza become elaborative rather than antithetical as Donne prays to be saved from thinking "that this earth / Is only for our prison fram'd, / Or that thou art covetous / To them whom thou lov'st, or," worst of all, "that they are maim'd / From reaching this worlds sweet, who seek thee thus" (lines 129–34). The God of this poem is emphatically not a "covetous," jealous God. He does not demand absolute honesty—"Good Lord," Donne prays, "teach us when / Wee may not, and we may blinde unjust men" (lines 170–71)—and He does not demand antisocial behavior.[23] A moment very close to St. François de Sales in "A Litanie" is that in which, after stressing "our mutuall duties," Donne prays to be delivered "From indiscreet humilitie," which might scandalize "the world" (lines 149–51). Discretion, not humility, is the
[20] Baird, Studies in Pascal's Ethics, 42.
[21] Bremond, Devout Humanism , xiii.
[22] Donne: The Divine Poems , ed. Gardner, xxvi. I will cite "A Litanie" from this edition.
[23] If Helen Gardner is correct in seeing in the lines on blinding unjust men "a clear reference to the bitter contemporary debate on 'equivocation,'" (Divine Poems, 90), then these lines are a direct link to Jesuit moral casuistry.
commanding virtue. Donne returns to this perspective in some almost consciously disingenuous lines in "The First Anniversarie" in which the external manner of an action is given virtual priority over the motive of the action, since "Wicked is not much worse than indiscreet."[24]
Needless to say, the God of "A Litanie" also does not demand or privilege poverty. Donne insists that Christians are "to both waies [riches and poverty] free" (line 162). This is again close to Ignatian "indifference."[25] Donne sees the gospels as perfectly balanced on the matter of wealth. In direct colloquy with Christ, Donne concedes that "through thy poore birth . . . thou / Glorifiedst Povertie"; the next line, however, begins "And yet." Donne argues that "soone after" His birth, Jesus "riches didst allow, / By accepting Kings gifts" (lines 158–61). As in the stanza on "this worlds sweet," the balanced treatment falls away. Poverty is punitive or dangerous whereas plenty is seen as both "Gods image" and His "seale" (line 185). Moreover, kings are privileged. It is no accident that Jesus specifically accepted "Kings gifts" in the Epiphany. To allow "bold wits" (like the Donne of his own Satires?) to "jeast at Kings excesse" is seen to lead one easily "To'admit the like of majestie divine" (lines 123–24).[26] Arthur Marotti has argued that throughout "A Litanie" Donne "conflates spiritual and monarchical authority," and Marotti remarks that the defense of riches in the poem "looks suspiciously like an apology for the extravagance of James's court."[27]
Although Gardner approvingly associates "A Litanie" with "devout humanism," she nonetheless remains a bit troubled by what she calls its" "rather exaggerated stress" on "the compatibility of the service of God with 'this worlds sweet.'"[28] Gardner offers some plausible biographical reasons why Donne may have fallen into such exaggeration in 1608, but John Carey has shown that Donne's position stays the same in his sermons (after his ordination in 1615).[29] In a characteristic moment, Donne assures his auditors in 1621 that "Salvation it selfe being so often presented to us in the names of Glory, and of Joy, we cannot thinke that
[24] "The First Anniversarie," lines 329–38 (on "proportion") in The Complete Poetry of John Donne, ed. John T. Shawcross (New York: Doubleday, 1967).
[25] See note 18 above.
[26] For the radicalism of the Satires (written in the 1590s), see Essay 6 below. "A Litanie" was probably written in 1608; see Divine Poems , ed. Gardner, 81.
[27] Arthur F. Marotti, John Donne, Coterie Poet (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), 250.
[28] Divine Poems , xxv.
[29] John Carey, John Donne: Life, Mind and Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 113–14.
the way to that glory is a sordid life affected here, an obscure, a beggarly, a negligent abandoning of all wayes of preferment, or riches, or estimation in this World." A "sordid" beggarly life is seen as a life of affectation. "The glory of Heaven," Donne explains, "shines downe in these beames" of preferment, riches, estimation. Like St. François de Sales and Father Le Moine, Donne is concerned lest "men thinke, that the way to the joyes of Heaven, is a joylesse severenesse, a rigid austerity." Receiving is as holy as giving: "as God loves a cheerefull giver, so he loves a cheerefull taker."[30] In another sermon, Donne uses the conception of poverty in spirit just as St. François does. "This poverty," Donne explains, "is humility; it is not beggary," and so the key point emerges: "a rich man may have it" (6:303). Donne then develops the hint in "A Litanie" that poverty is more spiritually dangerous than wealth. Elsewhere Donne explains that the biblical injunction to seek God with a whole heart does not require material renunciation or, indeed, any sort of material adjustment: "To seeke him with a whole heart, is not by honest industry, to seeke nothing else." God, Donne explains, "weares good cloathes, silk, and soft raiment, in his religious servants in Courts, as well as Cammels haire, in John Baptist in the Wildernesse"; God manifests Himself to man "as well in the splendor of Princes in Courts, as in the austerity of John Baptist in the Wildernesse" (9:328). Again, the glory of God shines down in the beams of silk, wealth, and preferment.
If Donne's version of "the devout life" is splendid and that of François de Sales polished, what is striking about Herbert's "The Church-porch" is that it is hard to see it as offering any version of the "devout life." It is not concerned with the love or service of God at all, although it is concerned with Christian behavior (almsgiving, tithing, and church attendance) and with proper behavior in church (not flirting and, especially, not making fun of the preacher, on which topic there are four stanzas).[31] There is no equivalent in "The Church-porch" to Donne's conception of "splendour" or to St. François's sustained attempt to transform sociability into a version of charity. Unlike St. François's Introduction , "The Church-porch" does not attempt either a critique or a transformation of the courtesy-book tradition. It merely places a
[30] The Sermons of John Donne, ed. George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson, 10 vols. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of california Press, 1957), 3:270 (further references cited in text).
[31] Stanzas 72–75. All citations of "The Church-porch" and other writings of Herbert are from The Works of George Herbert , ed. F. E. Hutchinson, rev. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1945). Hereafter cited as "Hutchinson."
distinct version of that tradition, unalloyed, in an overtly Christian framework.[32] The version of the courtesy tradition on which "The Church-porch" draws is that which, to borrow John Lievsay's distinction, addressed the gentiluomo rather than the cortegiano .[33] It is important to take note of Frank Whigham's reminder that both these figures were members of the privileged class of gentry, but the distinction nonetheless remains useful.[34] It helps us see that Herbert's poem is no more concerned with service of a prince than with service of God; its focus is not political but purely social. Like Bacon's Essays , the most popular "courtesy book" in Renaissance England, "The Church-porch" is a collection of "counsels, civil and moral."[35] Bacon makes clear in The Advancement of Learning that "civil" counsels are quite distinct from moral ones; they are entirely pragmatic.[36] Jacob Zeitlin has argued that Bacon goes beyond Machiavelli in his pragmatism, for where Machiavelli allowed the criterion of efficacy only to princes or states, Bacon, as Zeitlin says, "applies it to private persons in their quest for worldly success."[37] Herbert follows Bacon in this. In "The Church-porch," as in Bacon's Essays , "civil" rather than moral counsels are dominant, and since Herbert's perspective is more relentlessly on "private persons" than is Bacon's, it is no surprise that Herbert's poem is especially admiring of and
[32] For a similar perspective on "The Church-porch," see Michael C. Schoenfeldt, Prayer and Power: George Herbert and Renaissance Courtiership (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 5–6. While Schoenfeldt and I share a view of "The Church-porch," we differ in our senses of the relation of the bulk of the lyrics to this poem. For a discussion of these disagreements, and some reflections on their theoretical significance, see the appendix to this chapter, "Impossible Transcendence."
[33] John Lievsay, Stefano Guazzo and the English Renaissance, 1575–1675 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961). For Lievsay's view as requiring some modification to fit the English rather than the Italian sixteenth-century situation, see Daniel Javitch, "Rival Arts of Conduct in Elizabethan England: Guazzo's Civile Conversation and Castiglione's Courtier," Yearbook of Italian Studies 1 (1971): 178–98.
[34] For his dismissal of the relevance of this distinction to Elizabethan and early Jacobean England (and his caveats about both Lievsay's and Javitch's reading of Guazzo), see Whigham, Ambition and Privilege , chap. 3, n. 12 and n. 29 (p. 214).
[35] For the popularity of the Bacon's Essays or Counsels, Civill and Morall , see Whigham, Ambition and privilege , 28, and the table of editions in chap. 1, n. 99 (p. 199).
[36] For "Civil Knowledge" as distinct from moral, see the lengthy discussion in book 2 of The Advancement of learning , in Selected Writings of francis Bacon , ed. with an introduction by Hugh G. Dick (New York: Random House, Modern Library, 1955), 345–77. On the distinction between the civil and the moral counsels in the Essays , see Douglas Bush, English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962), 196–97, and, especially, Jacob Zeitlin, "The Development of Bacon's Essays and Montaigne," Journal of English and Germanic Philology 27 (1928): 496–512.
[37] Zeitlin, "The Development of Bacon's Essays and Montaigne," 502.
concerned with what Bacon called the "small wares and petty points of cunning."[38]
The normal view of "The Church-porch" is that it is both moral and boring. Both of these claims are wrong (I do not, by the way, mean to suggest that if the poem were moral, it would be boring; my point is about the nature of the counsels in the poem, not about the quality of the writing). Attempts to read "The Church-porch" as moral have been notably unsuccessful. This points to a real weakness in much of the "old" historicism. Louis Martz connected Herbert with François de Sales and "l'humanisme dévot ," but the social dimension of the movement is as invisible in Martz's treatment as it is in Bremond's. Martz has little to say about "The Church-porch," and what he does have to say about it is inaccurate in ways that are instructive. Naturally, he sees the poem as purely moral. It falls, he says, into three general divisions, reprehending in turn sins "related to individual conduct" (stanzas 1–34); "sins related to social behavior" (stanzas 35–62); and "sins related to specifically religious duties" (stanzas 63–77).[39] The central section of the poem, however, that on social behavior, is concerned not with sins but with strategies. And this section takes up five-sixths, not merely one-third, of the poem. By the fifth stanza, Herbert is already dealing with the perils of sociability. The opening of this stanza constitutes a striking and (in this poem) typical descent in level of discourse: from the high moral ground of stanzas two through four ("O what were man, might he himself displace") to "Drink not the third glasse." Despite Martz's neat scheme of sins, the high moral ground is virtually abandoned after stanzas two through four of the poem. The scheme of sins that Joseph Summers offers is more nuanced but equally inaccurate. Summers sees the poem as moving through the seven deadly sins, from lechery, "the least important," to "the greatest spiritual sins" of anger, envy, and pride.[40] This is, again, perfectly plausible, but the moral scale that Summers employs is nowhere endorsed or utilized by the poem. The
[38] Bacon, "Of Cunning," in Selected Writings , 63. On Herbert and Bacon, see Joseph H. Summers, George Herbert, His Religion and Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954), 195–97; Hutchinson, xl, n. 1; William A. Sessions, "Bacon, Herbert, and an Image of Chalk," in Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth, eds., "Too Rich to Clothe the Sunne": Essays on George Herbert (Pittsburgh: University of pittsburgh Press, 1980), 165–78; and some suggestive comments throughout Arnold Stein, George Herbert's Lyrics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968), esp. 23 and 120.
[39] The Poetry of Meditation , 291.
[40] Joseph H. Summers, The Heirs of Donne and Jonson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 90.
poem does not consider lust and drunkenness "least important." The attack on these sins is abrupt and passionate; in an earlier version stanza two began "Beware of Lust (startle not)."[41] The stanzas on drunkenness provide the most savage moment in the poem: "He that is drunken may his mother kill."[42] These opening stanzas are, in fact, the high points of the poem's moral counsels. The critiques of anger and envy in the poem are, as we shall see, anything but traditional (or boring). And the poem defends pride.
The trouble with envy, in "The Church-porch," is not that envy is a "spiritual sin" but that it implies self-deprecation. Toward "great persons"—persons, that is, holding positions of power—Herbert recommends using "respective [i.e., respectful] boldnesse," since "That temper gives them theirs, and yet doth take / Nothing from thine " (lines 253–56; emphasis supplied). Envying "great" persons is counterproductive: "thou mak'st thereby / Thy self the worse, and so the distance greater" (lines 259–60). Envy only increases "the distance" that one seeks to lessen. "Be not thine own worm," the next line begins. Canon Hutchinson rightly glosses this as "Do not disparage yourself and your qualities," and he rightly connects this to the advice Herbert gave to his younger brother Henry in a letter, a connection that helps date the original composition of "The Church-porch."[43] Amy Charles has convincingly redated this letter to 1614, making George Herbert a twenty-one-year-old who had just proceeded B.A. when he wrote it.[44] "Be proud," Herbert advised, "not with a foolish vaunting of yourself . . . but by setting a just price on your qualities." "It is the part of a poor spirit," Herbert continues, "to undervalue himself and blush." One would certainly not want to be poor in spirit and to "undervalue himself" and show shame. Aristotle would have agreed.[45] "The Church-porch" shares this view. Its ideal is Aristotelian rather than Pauline, proper pride rather than humility. One should "get substantiall worth" and then boldly show it forth. "Boldnesse guilds finely." "Solid braverie" is the
[41] Hutchinson, 6. This version of stanza 2 is preserved in the "Williams manuscript" (see Hutchinson, lii–lvi).
[42] The passion of these stanzas is evident in this startlingly Neronian example, a completely arbitrary instance of drunken behavior that the young George Herbert would have found especially appalling and perhaps, in some Freudian depth, appealing.
[43] Hutchinson, 480. For the letter, see 365–66.
[44] Amy M. Charles, A Life of George Herbert (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 78, 82–84. Hutchinson had ascribed this letter to 1618.
[45] For Aristotle on proper pride (magnanimity, megalopsychia ) and inappropriate humility, see Nicomachean Ethics , 1123b–1125a, ed. Rackham, 212–27.
ideal (stanza 35), and it is important to read "braverie" here as meaning something like "fine stuff to be displayed."[46] The contrast is not with cowardice but with insubstantial "braverie," with "empty boldnesse." The use of boldness is again the topic (compare Bacon's bemused remarks on the virtually magical effects of boldness in "civil business").[47]
The world of "The Church-porch" is overwhelmingly the world of the beau monde , of what Guazzo called "civil conversation" among the gentry. Summers is on much firmer ground when he recognizes the elitism of the poem, its exclusive concern for the gentry rather than for either "simple parishioners" or universalized catechumens.[48] He correctly identifies the intended reader as "a worldly young man of the contemporary ruling class." The poem sees such persons as especially valuable: "Thou, whose sweet youth and early hopes inhance / Thy rate and price, and mark thee for a treasure " (lines 1–2). There is no irony here. The argument is that "Kneeling ne'er spoil'd silk stocking" (line 407). That silk stockings—a specific class privilege—might hurt devotion is not an issue that ever arises.[49] "Stay not for th' other pin" is the poem's "compromise" position (line 411; emphasis mine), a position very close to that of François de Sales.
The message of the poem to the gentry is, be proud and have ambition. The stanza on envying greatness changes course midway; it ends by commanding envy (since it can serve as a spur to ambition [lines 161–3]). In the most impassioned moment in the poem, Herbert assumes a prophetic stance to rebuke the English gentry for lack of ambition. It is interesting to watch "sloth" in this stanza slip from its traditional standing as a deadly sin to its more relevant standing as a national disgrace; "sloth" seems to be a specification of generalized "sinne" in the first line,
[46] See OED meaning 3: a ("splendour"); c ("an adornment, an embellishment"); and especially d ("a thing of beauty or interest, a thing to exhibit") and e ("a fine thing, a matter to boast or be proud of").
[47] See "Of Boldness," in Bacon, Selected Writings, 32–34.
[48] The Heirs of Donne and Jonson , 89. For the intended audience as "simple parishioners," see, inter alia , Valerie Carnes, "The Unity of George Herbert's Temple," ELH 35 (1968): 512. In The Living Temple: George Herbert and Catechizing (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978), Stanley Fish's insistence on the catechistical character of "The Church-porch" leads him to deny the class bias of the poem (p. 126) and to obfuscate the specific social dimension of many of its precepts. Again a scheme eliminates particular content, though here Fish's scheme, with its apparent historical basis, is closer to Tuve's "tradition" than to the purely abstract scheme of self-consumption. See Essays 1 and 3 above.
[49] On who was entitled to wear silk stockings, see the chart in Whigham, Ambition and Privilege , 164–65.
but turns out to be (as the grammar perhaps more strongly suggests), a different and more serious problem:
O England! full of sinne, but most of sloth;
Spit out thy flegme, and fill thy brest with glorie:
Thy Gentrie bleats, as if thy native cloth
Transfus'd a sheepishnesse into thy storie. (lines 91–94)[50]
The antidote to aristocratic "sheepishnesse" (brought on, it seems, by the economic situation of the country) is education conceived as a spur to ambition.[51] To reconcile Pauline with Aristotelian values, one stanza offers the following advice: "Pitch thy behaviour low, thy projects high; / So shalt thou humble and magnanimous be" (lines 331–32; emphasis mine). It is clear, however, that "Sinke not in spirit" (line 333) is a more important message than "Pitch thy behaviour low." Moreover, "Pitch thy behaviour low, thy projects high" sounds like a formula for hypocrisy, or more precisely, for a purely strategic humility, a humility of "behaviour" familiar, as we have seen, in the courtesy tradition.[52] The next stanza asserts that only "active and stirring spirits" can truly be said to "live" (lines 341–42). "Humblenesse" is associated by both rhyme and argument with "lethargicknesse" (lines 335–36). Glory is the goal.
The stress on glory is one of the poem's strategies: to present its moral counsels as adventurous. "Dare to be true" (line 77); "Dare to" be introspective and to spend some time alone (line 147).[53] The final stanza begins, "In brief, acquit thee bravely; play the man" (line 457). The stanzas on "respective boldnesse" suggest the poem's other and more major strategy: to present morality as prudential. Swearing "gets thee nothing" and can lose you everything (stanza 10); gambling is "a civil gunpowder" (line 203). The prudential focus provides the link between
[50] In line 91 here, "sloth" is either in apposition with "sinne," specifying a particular kind of sin, or in opposition to it (sloth versus sin). Taking the line in isolation, the former is almost certainly the proper (and traditional) reading, but in the stanza as a whole, the second possibility emerges, since the issue of sin disappears and is replaced with that of "sheepishnesse." It is no accident, I think, that being lamblike is strongly derided in this poem.
[51] Herbert apparently did not observe the "zeal for education" with which J. H. Hexter has credited the English aristocracy; see "The Education of the Aristocracy in the Renaissance," Reappraisals in History , pap. rpt. (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), 45–70, esp. 58, n. 1).
[52] See p. 88 above on Castiglione and François de Sales.
[53] On the relative rarity of voluntary solitude in the period, see for instance Anne Ferry, The 'Inward' Language: Sonnets of Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 47–55.
the moral and the civil counsels of the poem. A line like "Who keeps no guard upon himself, is slack" unites the types of counsel (line 139). Summers recognizes the prominence of prudential argument in the poem, rightly sees this prominence as determined by the intended audience, but then goes on to praise this prominence as demonstrating Herbert's knowledge of "the fact that moral persuasion is likely to be most effective when a speaker addresses an audience in its own language."[54] To say this is to ignore the equally pertinent "fact," insisted on by Pascal (among others), that moral teaching can aim to transform the values of its audience rather than merely to rely on them. Pascal denies that it is "part of a rule to bend in conformity to the subject which it was meant to regulate" (376; 78).[55] Despite its opening mention of turning delight "into a sacrifice" (line 6), "The Church-porch" does not aim to transform its audience morally. It is not clear, moreover, that the speaker of the poem, fully identical with the young George Herbert, believes that his audience needs to be morally transformed.[56] There is no indication in the poem that the values of its speaker are different from those of his audience—except, that is, insofar as he wants them to work harder and be more disciplined. The poem is certainly part of "the civilizing process" defined by Norbert Elias, but this is a modernizing process, not a Christianizing one.[57]
Self-interest is the only motive to which "The Church-porch" appeals. The George Herbert of 1614, already on the fast track at Cambridge, does not expect religious considerations to move his peers, and he does not attempt to give such considerations weight. His exhortation to the slothful gentry to educate their children concludes, "And if Gods image move thee not, let thine" (line 102). He is perfectly at case with
[54] The Heirs of Donne and Jonson, 99.
[55] See also the opening of Factum pour les Curés de Paris on those who "au lieu d'accomoder la vie des hommes aux préceptes et les règles de Jésus-Christ, ont enterpris d'accomoder les préceptes at les règles de Jésus-Christ aux intérêts, aux passions et aux plaisirs des hommes," Provinciales, ed. Cognet, 406.
[56] To "assume always that the speaker [of a poem] is someone other than the poet himself" (Lawrence Perrine, Sound and Sense: An Introduction to Poetry , 4th ed, [New York: Harcourt Brace, 1973], 22) seems to me the merest dogma. It also seems to me exactly wrong as a working assumption. I would assume that in general the speaker of the poem is identical with the historical author unless there is some good reason (as there certainly is in some cases) not to make this assumption. I have argued for this view in "John Donne Awry and Squint: The 'Holy Sonnets,' 1608-1610," Modern Philology 86 (1989): 357–84, and I employ the view again in Essay 6 below.
[57] See Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process (1939), trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Pantheon, 1978), 2 vols.
the priority of the second consideration over the first. Whatever weight religious concerns have in the poem is entirely derived from their analogy to earthly ones. In urging his reader (specifically male as well as aristocratic) to "Doe all things like a man, not sneakingly," Herbert instructs him to "Think the king sees thee still; for his King does" (line 122). In this line, the entire fearfulness of God derives from the connection that is asserted between the king's King and ours. "Think the king sees thee still" is the real message. God is merely a surrogate for imagining the king's omnipresence. In picturing conscience (or self-consciousness) as an extension or version of the kingly gaze, which is, in turn, modeled on a vision of God conceived as a king, Herbert is participating in the conflation of inner and outer theatricality, kingly and divine vision, that Jonathan Goldberg has identified in his remarks on the ideology of the royal gaze in this period.[58] A similar attempt to lend God something of the mana and magnetism of the king occurs toward the end of Herbert's poem. In urging church attendance on Sundays, Herbert asserts that "God then deals blessings." This, however, is not presented as a consideration that in itself will carry much weight. To give the point force, Herbert asks: "If a king did so, / Who would not haste, nay give, to see the show?" (lines 389–90). This speaker cannot imagine a person who would not "haste, nay give" to be where a king deals blessings. He has nothing to say to those who take no care for the morrow: "Who say, I care not, those I give for lost; / And to instruct them will not quit the cost" (lines 347–48). Summers assures us that Herbert is here merely acknowledging that those who "say, I care not" would, as Summers rather nervously puts it, "at any rate, be unavailable to prudential argument."[59] This does not, however, account for Herbert's obvious scorn for such "unavailable" persons—"those I give for lost; / And to instruct them will not quit the cost."
As the vision of God dealing blessings suggests, the religion in "The Church-porch" is a matter of straightforward spiritual commercialism. One goes to church and behaves in a Christian manner in order to get something. The conception of perceiving "God's image" in persons as a possible factor in motivating one's behavior toward them recurs in the context of almsgiving—"man is Gods image; but a poore man is / Christs stamp to boot" (lines 379–80)—but the true motive for almsgiv-
[58] See James I and the Politics of Literature (Baltimore: Hopkins University Press, 1983), 147–63, esp. 149.
[59] The Heirs of Donne and Jonson , 90.
ing is prudential: "Think heav'n a better bargain than to give / Onely thy single market-money for it" (lines 374–75). Summers, as an apologist for the poem (surely it cannot be so crude), finds these lines especially troubling. He finds the appeal to self-interest so naked in them that "a reader may misunderstand." Summers hastens to assure us that Herbert "does not mean to imply that he thinks salvation is something we can purchase."[60] But the poem is quite insistent. Why must the critic defend it from itself? Even less in "The Church-porch" than in Introduction to the Devout Life is almsgiving an act of spontaneous charity.[61] Almsgiving is a matter of calculation in the short term—"In Almes regard thy means, and others merit"—and prudence in the long—"Let thy almes go before, and keep heav'ns gate / Open for thee; or both may come too late" (lines 373; 383–84).[62]
Alms open heaven's gate. The reader can hardly misunderstand. It is only the critic who is reluctant. There is no subtlety or irony to be missed. What the poem means is what it says. The accounting mentality is the key to success—in both the spiritual and the material realms. In the spiritual realm, "since we shall be / Most surely judg'd, make thy accounts agree" (lines 455–6); in the worldly realm,
Slight not the smallest losse, whether it be
In love or honour: take account of all;
Shine like the sunne in every corner; see
Whether thy stock of credit swell, or fall. (lines 343–346)
To "Shine like the sunne" does not mean to be sublimely undifferentiating in one's outpourings (as in Matthew 5:45 and various Neoplatonic traditions) but to be, as is always necessary with regard to points of honor, constantly and unremittingly watchful.[63] To "care not" about
[60] The Heirs of Donne and Jonson , 92 (emphasis in original).
[61] For François de Sales on almsgiving in the Introduction , see p. 90 above.
[62] I find it hard to believe that young Herbert seriously intended the advice that one ought to impoverish oneself in giving to a "good poore man" (lines 378–79), but it is interesting that he felt the pressure toward such a gesture of traditional saintliness, however hedged about with considerations of worthiness.
[63] On watchfulness and honor, see Pierre Bourdieu's "The Sentiment of Honour in Kabyle Society," in J. G. Peristiany, ed., Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 208–11. On "outpouring" in Neoplatonic tradition, see Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (1936; rpt., New York: Harper and Row, 1960), 61–66; for the New Testament conception, see Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros , trans. Philip S. Watson (1953; rpt., New York: Harper and Row, 1969), 77–78.
one's "stock" is as inadvisable in the spiritual as in the material realm. "See / Whether thy stock of credit swell, or fall" applies equally well in both realms. This language of stock and accounting might seem more mercantile than aristocratic, but as Derek Hirst has reminded us, we must, with regard to England especially, resist "any simplistic distinction between 'feudal' and 'capitalist,'" since in England the nobility was not barred from engaging in trade and aristocrats were among the kingdom's greatest capitalists.[64]
As Herbert's economic metaphors suggest—"Think heav'n a better bargain"; "make thy accounts agree"—the ideal in social behavior is to get maximal returns from minimal outlays. Two of the three stanzas on friendship in "The Church-porch" are concerned (regarding suretyship) with placing proper limits on what one ought to do for a friend.[65] Prudence and calculation are at the heart of the poem. This is, interestingly, more true of its social than its strictly economic thinking. About wealth and monetary accumulation, the poem is ambivalent. In stanzas 18 and 19, it uses a Stoic critique of wealth in a way similar to that in which Donne and François de Sales make use of the gospels: poverty and wealth are both redefined; contentment becomes true wealth. This would seem to lead to a rejection of material wealth, but Stoic "contentment" produces a state of freedom from need, which allows actual wealth to be treated as abundance rather than excess ("If thy sonne can make ten pound his measure,/Then all thou addest may be call'd his treasure [lines 113–14]). The praise of the quiet mind is divorced from that of the mean estate. The stanzas on thrift and accumulation (26–29) are very nervous about the evils of hoarding. "Surely use alone / Makes money not a
[64] Derek Hirst, Authority and Conflict: England , 1603–1658 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 12.
[65] As in Bacon's Essays , the treatment of friendship in Herbert's poem is both idealistic—"Thy friend put in thy bosome"—and cynical: "the way of friendship's gone" (lines 271–75). On Bacon's essay on friendship, see Essay 2, pp. 33–36 above. In The Merchant of Venice , standing surety for a friend is seen, as in "The Church-porch," as dangerous, though it is (arguably) less warily treated. In discussing the virtue of "humanity" (observing "the common courtesies of life in our dealings with our fellow men") in Christian Doctrine (2.11), Milton warns that "humanity" can be "of a rash and ill-advised kind," and his example of this excess (citing Proverbs 6:1–2) is being "too eager to stand surety for someone"; The Complete Prose Works of John Milton , vol 6, ed. Maurice Kelley (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), 745. Lacey Baldwin Smith has argued for the importance of the biblical "wisdom literature," especially Proverbs and Ecclesiastes, in shaping the Tudor mentality of suspicion; see Treason in Tudor England: Politics and Paranoia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 102–5. A full study of suretyship in the period is strongly to be desired.
contemptible stone" (lines 154–55), so that the "scraping dame" is seen, paradoxically, as "wasteful" (line 173). Here Herbert seems to want to distinguish aristocratic from bourgeois behavior, but early capitalism would certainly have shared this emphasis on the use of money.[66]
With regard to social rather than strictly economic life, hoarding, calculation, and thrift are entirely approved in "The Church-porch." Individual survival and gain are the only concerns. The poem contains no vision of community. "At Court," one of Herbert's Outlandish Proverbs asserts or observes, "every one for himselfe."[67] This seems to be true of social life in general. The Herbert of "The Church-porch" very much shared the view that Smith has argued was normative in the Tudor period: social interactions are fraught with danger.[68] In a scene of drunkenness, one is to remember that "All in a shipwrack shift their severall [i.e. individual] way" (line 44). One must look out for oneself. "Who keeps no guard upon himself, is slack"; "lose not thy self"—these are the watchwords. As Herbert says elsewhere, "Life is a businesse, not good cheer; / Ever in warres."[69] Overmuch laughter is dangerous; there is as great a fear in the poem of laughing as of being an object of laughter. Wit is distrusted as "an unruly engine, wildly striking / Sometimes a friend, sometimes the engineer" (lines 241–42). In recommending solemnity, the image of social life as war is made explicit:
A sad wise valour is the brave complexion,
That leads the van, and swallows up the cities.
[66] Marx notes that "capital becomes capital only through circulation" in Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy , trans. Martin Nicolaus (Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1973), 520. For Foucault, "exchange" is central to the "episteme" of the "Classical age" in early modern Europe; see Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences , trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Random House, 1970), chap. 6, esp. part 3, "Mercantilism".
[67] Number 795, Hutchinson, 347. See also number 874: "So many men in Court and so many strangers." On the authorship and provenance of the Outlandish Proverbs , see Hutchinson, 568–73.
[68] Smith, Treason in Tudor England , chap. 2. Smith probably overstates his case in calling this view of social life "paranoid," but Whigham's picture of court life is similar; see Ambition and Privilege , esp. 137–47. For a judicious review of Smith's book, see Christopher Hill, "Under the Tudor Bed," New York Review of Books 34 (May 7, 1987): 36–38.
[69] "Employment" (II), lines 16–17, Hutchinson, 79. The rest of this stanza, contrasting the vulgarly undiscriminating nature of the sun with the elegant calculation of the stars, which "Watch an advantage to appeare," are also reminiscent of "The Church-porch." On this imagistic context, see n. 63 above. Since "Employment" (II) appears in the "Williams manuscript" (see n. 41 above), there is a chance that it is early.
The gigler is a milk-maid, whom infection
Or a fir'd beacon frighteth from his ditties. (lines 247–50)
Seriousness is manly and leads to total victory; to be a "gigler" is to be weak-minded, cowardly, lower-class, countrified, and effeminate.[70]
The long section on conversation (stanzas 49–54) is particularly revealing. The rhetoric is that of courtesy (being considerate; avoiding boorishness), but the imagery is pure capitalist strategy. In conversation,
Entice all neatly to what they know best,
. . . . . . . .
Steal from his treasure
What to ask further. Doubts well rais'd do lock
The speaker to thee, and preserve thy stock. (lines 295; 299–300)
The piece of advice that begins next stanza combines the military with the capitalist imagery: "If thou be Master-gunner" in a conversation, "spend not all / That thou canst say at once; but husband it." One must never be "lavish" (line 304), and one must never lose control. As another master of civil counsel suggests, "Give every man thine ear, but few thy voice; / Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgment."[71] Above all, always be calm. The stanzas on calmness bear careful examination. In a discussion of autonomy as a mode of social power, Richard Sennett has noted that "keeping calm in the face of someone else's anger is always a way to stay in control of a conflict."[72] Herbert certainly knew this. The first stanza on calmness in "The Church-porch" begins with an other-directed consideration ("fiercenesse makes / Errour a fault, and truth discourtesie") but immediately shifts from "Don't offend others" to "Don't be offended by others": "Why should I feel another mans mistakes / More then his sicknesses or povertie?" (lines 309–10).
These are remarkable lines. They open a window into the world of "The Church-porch." They accept quite casually a world in which persons do not take to heart the sickness or poverty of others. The
[70] I am not certain of the meaning of "infection" in these lines. Could it be the rumor of plague?
[71] The still widespread critical perception of Polonius as a fool and windbag fails to come to terms with the content of his precepts. It also fails to come to terms with their social dimension. Polonius's precepts are a courtier's advice to his son, a very successful courtier's advice. For relevant comparisons, see the texts gathered in Louis B. Wright, Advice to a Son: Precepts of Lord Burghley, Sir Walter Raleigh and Frances Osborne (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1962).
[72] Richard Sennett, Authority (New York: Random House, 1981), 102.
argument of the lines depends on the premise that we do not "feel" these things. To be moved by another's mistakes would be inconsistent. This is truly "the economy of the closed heart," in which the ideal is to be unmoved by any other: "moving others," but oneself "as stone, / Unmoved, cold, and to temptation slow."[73] Herbert's counsel in these lines, however, is so directly contradictory of the social ethic of the gospels that Herbert is constrained to note that "In love I should" (feel other men's "sicknesses or povertie"). He immediately, however, dismisses the relevance of love to the issue ("but anger is not love") and substitutes another criterion—"Nor wisdome neither" (we recall François de Sales's problem with the relation between "wisdom" and humility). "Wisdom," not love, is the guiding ideal. The second stanza on calmness clarifies the nature of this wisdom. It argues entirely in terms of "advantage":
Calmnesse is great advantage: he that lets
Another chafe, may warm him at his fire,
Mark all his wandrings, and enjoy his frets;
As cunning fencers suffer heat to tire.
(lines 313–16)
The angry person is viewed from an immense (emotional) distance. He is a kind of freak, a spectacle, foolishly expending rather than preserving his energy. Fencing was apparently the standard Renaissance model of an activity in which, as Donne says, "Passion layes a man as open as unskilfulnesse."[74] "Lord, what fools," is Herbert's perspective on the angry person. But, as is the case with Puck's exclamation, the context here is not genial. The last line of the quatrain recalls us to the issue of "advantage." Manipulation as well as sardonic enjoyment is at work here. The viewpoint is practical, not aesthetic (if "enjoy his frets" has a musical secondary meaning, the aesthetic and the practical viewpoints merge). Coolness is part of "cunning," and cunning in social relations is the ideal. Passion is a form of unskillfulness.
"Cunning" is always positive in "The Church-porch." The term recurs after two stanzas in which Herbert recommends constant calculation: of gains ("Let thy minde still be bent, still plotting where, / And
[73] Shakespeare, Sonnet 94. On the complex and bitter ironies of this sonnet in praise of coldness, capitalistic ownership, and aristocratic hauteur , see William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (1952; pap. rpt., New York: New Directions, 1960), chap. 3; and Edward Hubler, "The Economy of the Closed Heart," The Sense of Shakespeare's Sonnets (1952; pap. rpt., New York: Hill and Wang, 1962), 95–109.
[74] John Donne, Biathanatos (New York: The Facsimile Text Society 1930), 179.
when, and how the businesse may be done" [lines 337–38], and of losses ("Slight not the smallest losse. . . ." [line 343]). In this context of continual "plotting," carefulness, and scorn for those who "care not," Herbert issues a final precept on social interaction. It is suprisingly democratic, seeming to work against rather than with his audience's prejudices: "Scorn no mans love, though of a mean degree" (line 349 ).[75] The explanation for not exercising one's normal scorn for those "of mean degree" seems to be that love has an extraordinary social viability; it climbs the social scale: "Love is a present for a mightie king." The next lines continue the topic of how one, as a person of some status, is to relate to those "of a mean degree," but the emphasis now shifts from not scorning love to not causing hatred. This is Machiavelli's emphasis (in chapter 17 of The Prince , Machiavelli argues that while it is not crucial for the prince to be loved, it is crucial that he not be hated).[76] The argument becomes straightforwardly prudential: "Much lesse make any one thy enemie. / As gunnes destroy, so may a little sling" (lines 351–52). This, however, is too purely monitory, and it entirely forgets the issue of love from—never for—those of mean degree. The final couplet perfectly integrates the recognition of love into the framework of prudential calculation: "The cunning workman never cloth refuse / The meanest tool, that he may chance to use." Love makes men serviceable.[77] The ideal is the cool, flexible, and socially uninhibited opportunist; excessive snobbery would limit one's potential "tools." These lines have been used to illustrate Herbert's attitude toward the materials of his art, and their very successful use as such is a striking instance of the tendency of formalist criticism to idealize and depoliticize literary works.[78] Craftsmanship here, however, is the vehicle, not the tenor. When we restore the lines to their original and primary social context, we can see them as truly meriting a share in Blake's general comment on Bacon's Essays :
[75] It is semantically and syntactically possible to read "though of a mean degree" as modifying "love" rather than man, but I believe that this reading is contextually unsupported. The rest of the stanza clearly refers to persons "of mean degree."
[76] Machiavelli, The Price: A Bilingual Edition , trans. and ed. Mark Musa (New York: St. Martin's, 1964), 136–43. See p. 94 above for "The Church-porch" following Bacon in extending the scope of Machiavelli's perspective.
[77] George Ryley's gloss is accurate (though interestingly substituting "respect" for love): "Value ye respect of ye meanest. for you know not whom you may have occasion to use." "Mr. Herbert's Temple & Church Militant Explained & Improved . . . by George Ryley: A Critical Edition," ed. John Martin Heissler (Ph.D. diss., 1960), 27.
[78] See, inter alia , Stein, Herbert's Lyrics , 21.
"Good Advice for Satans Kingdom."[79] The cunning social craftsman will make apt use of any human tool. One never knows when a willing peasant will come in handy.
I have already endorsed the view that "The Church-porch" is an early poem of Herbert's. It seems likely that the extreme sensitivity to and revulsion from prudential and self-enhancing considerations that, as I have argued elsewhere, many of the lyrics demonstrate can be related to the prominence of such considerations in this poem and in the life that this poem reflects and manifests.[80] That the young George Herbert was a man on the make both socially and politically is no secret. At the time around 1614 when "The Church-porch" was probably initially composed, and for at least a number of years thereafter, Herbert continued to believe, as he said in a letter of 1619, that worldly and spiritual ambition "may very well be joined."[81] From this perspective, we can perhaps see why, despite the architectural metaphor, there is no easy transition from the porch to "The Church," why, as Stanley Fish has argued, the poem that directly precedes "The Church" makes the transition from porch to main structure a mysterious and very much less than straightforward matter.[82] Herbert can be seen to have transcended the spiritual com-
[79] Blake set this comment on Bacon's title page; The Poetry and Prose of William Blake , ed. David V. Erdman (New York: Doubleday, 1965), 609.
[80] For the argument about Herbert's sensitivity to such considerations in the major lyrics, see Richard Strier, Love Known: Theology, and Experience in George Herbert's Poetry (Chicago: University, of Chicago Press, 1983), esp. chaps. 3 and 4.
[81] The quotation comes from Herbert's letter to his stepfather, Sir John Danvers, in October 1619, in which Herbert defends his vigorous pursuit of the Cambridge Oratorship, a position with many perquisites and "Gaynesses, which will please a young man well" (previous letter), against Danvers's suggestion that the Oratorship "being civil may divert [Herbert] too much from Divinity" (Hutchinson, 369–70). Hutchinson certainly seems justified in calling this reply "too facile" (xxviii). Herbert does manifest some nervousness in adding, after the assertion that the Oratorship "hath no such earthiness in it, but it may very well be joined with Heaven," the afterthought, "or if it had to others , yet to me it should not" (emphasis mine). This exemption of the self from a recognized spiritual danger is hardly reassuring.
[82] See Fish, The Living Temple , 128–31. Although I strongly agree with Fish about the mysteriousness and sense of peril in "Superliminare," I do not agree with Fish's view that the crucial qualifying phrase, "at his peril," refers indiscriminately to all three moral types mentioned in the poem (the profane, the pure, and those who groan "to be so," i.e. pure). The profane, I would argue, are simply forbidden to enter ("come not here"); the address to them is finished in the first line, which ends with a full stop. The other two categories, the "holy, pure, and clear" and those who groan "to be so," are allowed to enter the perilous ground. The poem, in other words, does distinguish between the profane and the others. Fish, as always, wishes to deny distinctions (see Essay 2 above). Yet the poem does indeed insist on the perilousness of entering even for the two groups who are invited. Fish's reading of the grammar is dubious and typically tendentious. His point, however, about the way the poem problematizes the movement from "The Church-porch" to "The Church" is well taken. The presence of "Superliminare" perhaps helps resolve a problem that arises if my view of the relation of "The Church-porch" to the major lyrics is correct: why did Herbert retain "The Church-porch," in somewhat revised form, in The Temple? The more the discontinuity, the better for my view.
mercialism of "The Church-porch" through a thorough apprehension of Reformation theology, which was precisely targeted at such an attitude. The "freedom of a Christian" that Luther proclaimed was precisely freedom from this attitude. "I fear," said Luther at the moment of the Reformation, "that in all [our works] we seek only our profit, thinking that through them our sins are purged away." He warned his readers that good works are not to be done "in order to obtain some benefit, whether temporal or eternal ."[83]
For the claim that Herbert also transcended the disingenuousness with regard to wealth and worldly position that seems intrinsic to "devout humanism," something like documentary evidence can be presented. How much weight one will give to such evidence will depend on one's view on a number of very general matters. Since my general approach allows me to use anything that comes to hand and to consider taking seriously explicit authorial statements (though not to be obliged by these), I have no compunctions. Seeing no good reason not to do so, and good reasons for doing so, I am inclined to give this evidence weight, to take it seriously as evidence.
In writing to his mother "in her sickness" and low spirits in 1622, Herbert classifies "afflictions" as being either of Estate, Body, or Mind. He immediately then dismisses afflictions of Estate with reference to the biblical injunctions against wealth. After doing this, however, he stops to consider the normal devout (and not so devout) humanist response to these injunctions: "But perhaps being above the Common people, our Credit and estimation calls on us to live in a more splendid fashion?"[84] This is the normal justification for ecclesiastical (and princely) splendor.[85] It comes, I think, as a great breath of moral and religious clarity, of true
[83] The Freedom of a Christian , in Luther: Selections , Dillenberger, ed., 79; emphasis added. The depth of Herbert's commitment to and grasp of Reformation theology, especially as Luther formulated and understood it, is the major argument of Strier, Love Known .
[84] Hutchinson, 373.
[85] See, for instance,Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Bks. VI–VIII , ed. P. G. Stanwood (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 7:xix–xxi.
ingenuousness, when Herbert continues, "but, Oh God, how easily is that answered, when we consider that the Blessings in the holy Scripture, are never given to the rich, but to the poor." Unlike Donne, who, as we have seen, often found "the glory of Heaven" shining down in the beams of preferment, and riches, and estimation, Herbert says that he never finds in the gospel, "Blessed be the Rich, or Blessed be the Noble." With regard to wealth and "great place," Herbert became one of those "who say, I care not." In "Submission," he cut through another disingenuous knot when he quietly notes, after echoing the normal claim for the special utility of "place and power" in serving God, "Perhaps great places and thy praise / Do not so well agree."[86]
Appendix: Impossible Transcendence
When "sophistication" or "tough-mindedness" are at issue, there is always a danger that cynicism will be taken for wisdom. We have already encountered this problem in dealing with the nihilism of "self-consumption."[87] The New Historicism too can be seen as encouraging, perhaps relying on, this tendency. Especially in its more Foucaultian or Puttenhamian forms, the New Historicism can be seen as encouraging a rather easy cynicism about motives.[88] Love is never love.[89] From my point of view, this view is another a priori. It would undercut the whole thrust of this book for me to deny the possibility of saintliness. I am as strongly, in other words, against the a priori denial as I am against the a priori assertion of this. Again, as always, I think that one must look. George Herbert, after 1622, seems to me to have effected—by means, as I have already suggested, of a deepening apprehension of Reformation theology—a remarkable transformation in his attitudes.
[86] For a fuller discussion of this poem and its relation to Herbert's life and writings as a whole, see the appendix to this chapter, "Impossible Transcendence."
[87] See Essay 2 above.
[88] George Puttenham's The Arte of English Poesie (1589) sees poetry in terms of rhetoric and rhetoric in terms of courtly strategies. It is a key text for the current understanding of both rhetoric and courtliness in the English Renaissance. Puttenham's treatise is reprinted in G. Gregory Smith, ed., Elizabethan Critical Essays (London: Oxford University Press, 1904), 2:1–193.
[89] For the classic essay reading Elizabethan love poetry as fundamentally having political rather than erotic goals, see Arthur Marotti, "'Love is not Love': Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences and the Social Order," ELH 49 (1982): 396–428.
A new historicist view would deny this. Michael Schoenfeldt has provided such a view. He has given us sex, violence, and politics in The Temple . Schoenfeldt's discovery of sex in a great many of Herbert's lyrics is not especially characteristic of New Historicism, and New Historicism is not, therefore, especially implicated in this practice (which demonstrates, I would argue, the need for contextualization that we have already discussed with regard to Thomas Greene's similar reading of Shakespeare's Sonnets).[90] Schoenfeldt's treatments of torture and of courtliness, on the other hand, are characteristic. The issue of courtliness is especially relevant to New Historicism, since the figure of the courtier, understood as Frank Whigham understands this figure, represents, together with the figure of the conquistador, the fundamental model for human behavior in new historicist studies of the Renaissance.
But first a word on torture. Despite much earlier work on this topic, we owe our intense awareness of this practice in the past (and perhaps the present) to the work of Foucault and the New Historicists.[91] This is certainly a gain, ethically and historically. Yet we must still tread carefully. On the representation of torture in Herbert's poems, Schoenfeldt falls into a systematic confusion of the vehicle with the tenor of metaphors, a confusion that is a constant temptation for New Historicism. Schoenfeldt refuses to acknowledge the metaphorical status of the language of torture in Herbert's poetry. Yet the language of torture exists in the poetry exactly as the language of space does, and Herbert's transformation of spatial into psychological terms has been analyzed at length.[92] Like the language of space, in other words, the language of torture in the poetry is profoundly and systematically psychological. When Herbert speaks of himself in "Affliction" (IV) as "a wonder tortur'd in the space / Betwixt this world and that of grace," he is no more speaking of being physically stretched or shattered than he is speaking of a geographical or cosmological place. Herbert is talking about something that is happening to or within his inner life ("My thoughts are all a case of knives"). I am not at all sure that we get closer
[90] On Greene's reading of Shakespeare's sonnets, see pp. 49–52 above.
[91] The key text here is, of course, Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison , trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Random House, 1979), 3–69, though even here there are problems with Foucault's analysis (see Essay 4, n. 18 above). For earlier scholarship, see the useful bibiliographical essay in Edward Peters, Torture (New York: Blackwell, 1985), 188–99.
[92] See especially Helen Vendler's analysis of "The Temper" (I) in The Poetry of George Herbert (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), 39–41, and Strier, Love Known, 227–38.
to the spiritual experience Herbert is describing by taking it to be physical. Again, we need more than a behavioral context.[93] It is certainly good to be reminded that the rack and the "Scavenger's Daughter" were Elizabethan realities, and it is certainly good to be reminded of the actual tortures to which captured priests like Robert Southwell were subjected, yet when we are told that torture is "an unbearably real metaphor " in Herbert's poetry, something has gone deeply awry.[94] As we saw before in deconstruction, now in the name of "realism" and historicism, the difference between literal and metaphorical has been fudged or lost.[95] What is the role of "unbearably" in Schoenfeldt's assertion, and, more urgently, what is the meaning of "real"? The rhetorical ante has been upped, but has there been any gain in comprehension of the poetry?
To take a particular instance, I cannot see that our understanding of "Confession" is enhanced by seeing the "open breast" in the poem—an extremely positive and abstract image (contrasted with cleverly and intricately constructed closed spaces)—as suggesting "the grisly spectre of the disemboweled traitor" (129).[96] The critic's sensational image leads us away from the poem. It may perhaps lead us to something that we are in fact more interested in, but that is not the point. The grisly specter conjured by the critic does not help us understand what Herbert is saying in this poem about his topic (confession to God). This tendency toward sensationalism can lead to misreadings of tone (as in regard to "Bittersweet," which is read without any sweetness), and it can lead away from rather than toward history. Perhaps the real trick in reading Herbert's poetry of affliction would be to try to understand how this language could be used of nonphysical suffering. Perhaps the model for suffering need not be physical. Perhaps Lear meant it when he said that the tempest in his mind was worse than the physical one. Schoenfeldt is certainly right that we must attend carefully and knowledgeably to the vehicles of the metaphors that Renaissance writers use, but we must also, I would argue, go on to try to think hard about what the metaphors are metaphors of.
As I have already suggested, however, the key issue is not sex or even torture, but strategic, self-seeking courtliness. Of Herbert's keen and constant awareness of this, there can be no doubt. The question is not
[93] See Essay 4 above.
[94] Schoenfeldt, Prayer and Power , 125 (emphasis mine); further page references will appear in the text.
[95] See Essay 3, pp. 45–49 above. The mistakes, however, flow in opposite directions. Where deconstruction metaphorizes the literal, New Historicism tends to literalize the metaphorical.
[96] For a passage where such a context is directly relevant, see pp. 218–19 below.
whether but how Herbert's awareness of manipulative courtliness is present in the lyrics of "The Church." Ultimately, the issue concerns authorial control. On my view, Herbert is fully aware of the compromised, strategic nature of courtly supplication and makes ironic, critical use of this awareness; on Schoenfeldt's view, the compromised and strategic nature of courtly language filters into Herbert's poetry unawares. Schoenfeldt (to his credit) waffles on this a bit, but his fundamental commitment is to see Herbert as not fully in control of the manipulative and aggressive resonances of his language. In a typical formulation, Schoenfeldt speaks of how manipulative tactics continually "invade" the "allegedly submissive utterances" that Herbert directs to the "divine" (127). Language of infiltration and insurgence is crucial to Schoenfeldt's view (and qualifiers like "allegedly" must always appear before terms like "submissive" and "humble"). Schoenfeldt is committed to taking "straight" many self-presentations that I would see as ironic and self-mocking. Herbert knows, on my view, that the joke is on him—and therefore it is not. Self-seeking and manipulation seem to me to be the overt topics of many of the poems. My view relies on a strong sense of Herbert's authorial control, of him writing the language and not the language him. I would not generalize this. Donne's relation to the materials of his religious poems, for instance, seems to me to be quite different.[97] Like so much else, degree of authorial control seems to me an empirically not a theoretically determinable matter. Some authors in some works are quite fully in control of their materials, and some aren't. Herbert, I would argue, in most of the lyrics of "The Church," is.
In terms of Herbert's career, what this means is that Schoenfeldt is committed to a view that minimizes the difference between "The Church-porch" and "The Church," between the Oratorship at Cambridge and the parsonage at Bemerton. With a belief that is implicit in much new historicist practice, Schoenfeldt sometimes relies on images to do the work of argument. He takes as obviously symbolic the fact that Bemerton is "walking distance" to Wilton (37, 99), although no actual data about Herbert at Wilton is supplied (since none, I believe, exists). Schoenfeldt acknowledges the "immense adjustments" that Herbert's move from Cambridge to Bemerton involved, but his sentence acknowledging this is followed by a resounding and crucial "But" ("But I do not want to let emphasis on the conspicuous changes preclude attention to the considerable continuities" [8]). It may be relevant that Herbert's
[97] See Strier, "John Donne Awry and Squint," (n. 56 above).
contemporaries were much more struck by the distance rather than the similarities between Herbert's two lives, but that cannot, obviously, be taken as definitive.[98] The question is not straightforwardly one of fact. Is it possible to settle such a question—or, if that is unrealistic, to establish plausibility? Judgments of tone will be crucial, but such judgments are notoriously difficult and disputable. Such judgments will tend to follow from rather than to determine one's overall view. Theology seems to me to offer a more promising route. If a person truly believed, as Milton puts it (in his most Herbertian poem) that God "doth not need / Either mans work or his own gifts," then it is hard to know how one would seriously attempt to coerce or subtly manipulate Him, especially if one also believed that such attempts were the surest signs of fallen nature. Schoenfeldt waffles on the matter of theology. He seems to want both a strongly Reformation Herbert and a Herbert who seriously attempts to manipulate God. It is not clear that this is coherent.
Perhaps the best way to address this matter is to consider two crucial lyrics. The first, "Submission," is directly relevant, as we have seen, to the matter of Herbert and "devout humanism"; the second, "Love" (III), is central to every critic's sense of Herbert. "Submission" comments directly on the kind of ambition that the young Herbert who sought to "work the heads" to his purpose at Cambridge manifested in his letters to his stepfather, the ambition to combine Divinity with civil dignity.[99] After giving voice to this ambition in the second stanza, Herbert (or his "speaker") rebukes himself in the third stanza, and then asks:
How know I, if thou shouldst me raise,
That I should then raise thee?
Perhaps great places and thy praise
Do not so well agree.
Schoenfeldt places a good deal of weight on "Perhaps." He takes it straight, as expressing dubiety, and he sees "Do not so well agree" as an "exceedingly roundabout" phrase; again there is an "infiltration,"
[98] See especially Charles Cotton's prefatory poem to the 1675 edition of Walton's Lives (Izaak Walton, The Lives of John Donne, Sir Henry Wotton, Richard Hooker, George Herbert, and Robert Sanderson [London: Oxford University), Press, 1927], 11–12); and Barnabas Oley's remark in the preface to his edition of Herbert's Remains (London, 1652), sig. a llv-a 12r, that Herbert was widely censured by "sober men" for not having managed "his brave parts to his best advantage and preferment" through having "lost himself in a humble way."
[99] See n. 81 above.
this time by "the rhythms of reluctance" (90). I would read the sentence beginning "Perhaps" as devastatingly ironic and self-mocking, as extreme understatement. I would see the doubt raised in "How know I" as making the issue of seeking "great places" from which or in which to "raise" God completely moot. The ironic reading, I would argue, is more coherent and, if I may use the word with all due self-consciousness, more natural. The stanza follows directly from the previous one (barely mentioned by Schoenfeldt) in which speaker directly rebuked himself for raising the issue of "place and power" ("when I thus dispute and grieve / I do resume my sight"). The final stanza of the poem, after what I would see as another bit of fully conscious self-mockery ("Wherefore unto my gift I stand"), ends on a diminuendo: "Onely do thou lend me a hand, / Since thou hast both mine eyes." Schoenfeldt sees this ending as grudging ("the least you can do is 'lend me a hand'") and as different in tone but "not structurally different" from the opening "imprecation" of God for making the speaker miss his "designe" ("But that thou art my wisdome, Lord. / And both mine eyes are thine / My minde would be extremely stirr'd / For missing my designe"). I would see the wry, self-mocking petition of the ending as quite different, in every way, from the opening assertion of discontent thinly framed as a hypothetical. I would not take the title of the poem as announcing a psychosocial activity that is impossible to attain, even for a moment, and I would not mock the final gesture, however wittily, as "blind obedience" (91).
The other lyric that I will consider, "Love" (III), is the eye of the hurricane in Herbert studies, the calm and maddeningly sublime center around which all the controversies swirl. Schoenfeldt sees this poem as perfectly revealing the contestatory and competitive aspects of courtesy. I see the poem as (again) alluding to that world but purposely establishing a sharp contrast with it. The first line of the poem reads, "Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back." We have already seen, through François de Sales and Castiglione, that the initial refusal of an invitation was a standard move in the repertoire of strategic courtliness, and Schoenfeldt develops this point at length and with wonderful examples (202–8). He applies the point to the poem gingerly, but his normal language for describing the place of courtliness in the lyrics surfaces: "the political pressures of courtesy invade the socially determined recoil" (204; emphasis mine). But does it make sense to see (or to stipulate) the human character's initial response as socially determined? I would argue that this figure's initial response is not a deferral or a refusal or anything of the sort. I would argue that this response is not, in fact, a verbal act at all, and that it is not even a physical one: "my soul drew back." Schoenfeldt
again allows the vehicle to overwhelm the tenor—even when, as here, the tenor is named. The tiny motion of the soul described is visible only to Love (who is thereby proved, in a wonderful pun, "quick-ey'd" by "observing" it).[100] The human character has not said anything yet. His response is presented as puzzlingly instinctive, not as socially determined or constructed. Herbert explains the phenomenon ontologically: "Guiltie of dust and sinne." "Guiltie of dust " is purposely odd. Moreover, when the human figure does finally say something, at the beginning of the second stanza, what he says is not particularly polite. His response to Love's courteously idiomatic query ("sweetly questioning, / If I lack'd any thing") is, as Arnold Stein has said, "a verbal clench": "A guest, I answer'd, worthy to be here."[101] Love's response to this is even odder. Instead of reassuring the guest that he is indeed "worthy to be here"—the normal polite response—or even, more didactically, reminding the guest that worthiness is not the issue, Love unequivocally predicts (or declares), "You shall be he." This is astonishing. And it is socially unintelligible. We are not in the world of normal social interaction here, much as we feel its presence. We are in a much stranger world, a world where the figure we are encountering is clearly divine and says things that no human host, however gracious, could possibly say, things like "You shall be he" and "Who made the eyes but I?"[102]
Schoenfeldt does not deal with this strangeness. He has to see the poem on a competitive model. For him, the interlocutors "maneuver for political power" (228). He is therefore in a position of having to see the human speaker as paradoxically, through professions of unworthiness, seeking "to avoid a recognition of his own complete unworthiness" and "to hold out the possibility that he could be worthy" (209). Professions of unworthiness cannot be taken at face value. The courtesy books are seen as establishing an unavoidable norm. They are seen as defining the language of humility, not as debasing it. This is not an easy position to maintain in the face of "Love" (III). In treating the final stanza of the poem, Schoenfeldt must skip over the speaker's desire for punishment ("let my shame / Go where it cloth deserve") and focus only on the very attenuated and theoretical "aggressiveness" of "My deare, then I will serve." This final resolution by the human speaker is answered in such an astonishing way that dialogue ends and action supervenes. For Schoenfeldt, the human speaker's final, wordless action can only be seen as
[100] "Quick-ey'd" here means, I take it, both "highly observant" and seeing to "the quick."
[101] Stein, Herbert's Lyrics , 193.
[102] On the theology of "You shall be he," see Love Known , 78–79.
a great social coup. If the poem is about "the astounding difficulty of responding properly even to the most courteous of divine figures" (224), then the human figure must be given credit for performing this difficult feat. This would fit perfectly with the fifteenth-century Italian paintings of the Annunciation that Schoenfeldt sees as analogous to Herbert's poem, since, as Schoenfeldt accepts from Baxandall's analysis, these paintings are based on a theology of the Annunciation that sees Mary as moving from Conturbatio to Meritatio .[103]
Yet Schoenfeldt wants to accept the view that "Love" (III) is about "faith alone," which he rightly characterizes as "the Reformation notion of grace" (218–19). This is where confusion sets in. Schoenfeldt cannot actually accept the Reformation reading of the poem. To do so would undermine his entire framework. He seems to think that he can accept part of the Reformation reading. He can accept the "givenness" of grace, but not its irresistibility. But I am afraid that there is a bit of theological naiveté here. In rejecting the idea that the achievement of "Love" (III) is to give a fully humanly acceptable account of the doctrine of the irresistibility of grace, Schoenfeldt cites nothing in the poem.[104] He appeals to a general fact ("people do turn down invitations") and to a quotation from a section of The Country Parson about dealing with despairing parishioners (214). He seems to think that to grant human beings "the negative power to shun the welcoming arm of God" is a small concession ("at least the negative Power"). But, as Luther, Calvin, John Cotton, and others would have been quick to point out, this makes salvation ultimately depend not on grace but on the act of accepting it, on "responding properly"—that is, on a form of merit.[105] Theology, or at least Reformation theology, turns out not to be so easily assimilated to the world of ordinary social life.
Herbert certainly had intimate knowledge of the social world of his time. "The Church-porch" shows this. We must certainly have the scholarly equivalent of such knowledge if we are to read Herbert's poems
[103] Prayer and Power , 316, n. 91, citing Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982).
[104] Prayer and Power , 214, citing Love Known, 83.
[105] See Love Known , chaps. 3 and 4. It may be worth noting in this context that even Aquinas is uncomfortable with asserting that "to impede or not to impede the reception of divine grace is within the scope of free choice." In book 3, part 2 of the Summa contra Gentiles , he makes this assertion in chapter 159 but then explains in chapter 160 that it applies only "to those persons in whom natural potency is integrally present" (that is, only to the unfallen). Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles , trans. Vernon J. Bourke (New York: Hanover House, 1956), 261.
with full understanding. But we must also have theological awareness. Most importantly, we must not assume that all other discourses are necessarily at the mercy of the aggressive and the prudential. To do this—that is, not to make this assumption—might help with a historical question with which, as we have already seen, New Historicism has vainly struggled: the question of the appeal of Reformation theology.[106] Assuming a continuity has obscured a dialectic. It may well be that part of the reason for the success of Reformation theology—and part of the reason why it so appealed to figures like George Herbert, Fulke Greville, and Philip Sidney—was precisely that this theology provided a critique of and refuge from the world of competitive and self-serving strategizing of which the new historicists have given us so convincing a portrait.[107]
[106] See Essay 4, p. 76 above.
[107] In Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance: Religion, Politics, and the Dominant Culture (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), chap. 3, Debora Kuller Shuger has suggested something like this dialectic. She argues for the cultural significance of the discontinuity between "The Church-porch" and "The Church" (92–93, 104–5). She goes on, however, to see both the lyrics and Reformation theology as only fitfully capable of presenting or imagining a noncompetitive world. She relegates the Reformation critique of self-interest to a footnote on "another strain of Reformation Christianity" that she sees as rather eccentric (116 n. 75). Shuger gives us a dialectic, in other words, and then essentially eliminates one pole of it. At least with regard to earthly experience, she ends up with a continuity rather than a dialectic. Her view of the lyrics turns out to be close to Schoenfeldt's (she quotes with approval one of his descriptions of how the lyrics are "contaminated by" competitiveness [115]). She too (see Essay 4, p. 74 above) sees the Reformation primarily in terms of loss (the sacred being pushed further and further inward, and the inward being hollowed out [118]). Shuger does not give any sense that love and comfort are experienced realities in the lyrics or in Protestant experience. Her remarks on poems that express and thematize comfort are therefore quite misleading (see 113–14, on "The Dawning" and "The Glance"). Shuger does draw a sharp line between the "pneumatic" and the autonomous self in Renaissance persons (98), but this distinction, as Shuger deploys it, does not allow for preheavenly comfort in the "pneumatic" world, nor does it allow for humor, irony, or critical self-assessment, since the "pneumatic" world is, for Shuger, only a world of longing.