Sin (II)

In “Mattens” Herbert says that despite the many blessings provided by God (as celebrated in stanzas 1–3), man chooses—or has, as an empirical creature, no other choice—to study not the invisible creator but his more immediately knowable, because visible, creations. Having said that, Herbert goes on to ask that God himself be made as visible as his creation—“May both the work and workman show”—and that the visible be further rendered into something tangible—“Then by a sunbeam I will climb to thee”—an unlikely event and one that, given the earlier stanzas of the poem, Herbert already knows to be inappropriate to wish for. Where, after all, is faith?

Equally unseeable, says the next poem, is sin, which Herbert would also have be made visible, until reaching the conclusion that “devils are our sins in perspective.” Even as devils offer a perspective by which to understand sin, so does the poem on sin offer a perspective on the subject matter of “Mattens,” namely, God's blessings. This is why sin is necessary and—to return to the original discussion—it is an explanation for the existence of affliction in our lives: how better, Herbert would ask, to understand salvation (by which we are to be released from affliction) than by affliction itself, affliction being a modified version of salvation's opposite, damnation? And again, sin provides the perspective by which to know, via our own affliction, the greater affliction of Christ (“like stones [sins] make / His blood's sweet current much more loud to be,” Herbert says in “Churchlock and Key,” 11–12).

Thus, the rationale. But reasoning notwithstanding, there remain for Herbert two difficulties with affliction. One is that affliction is ultimately inadequate when it comes to knowing Christ's affliction in its entirety. For not least of the distinctions between Christ and natural humanity is that it is via sin that persons are subject to affliction (beginning with Original Sin); Christ suffers in a state of sinlessness. As Herbert puts it, “I am behind,” by which I take him to mean that human beings, in their efforts to imitate Christ, are at an insurmountable disadvantage from the start; all of those efforts, therefore, will necessarily fall short.

The second problem with affliction is less sophisticated but no less true: namely, affliction doesn't feel good.

In “The Windows” Herbert describes humanity as “a brittle crazy glass” (2)—by “crazy,” meaning cracked, flawed. We are also told, however, in “Repentance,” that “Fractures well cured make us more strong” (36). In light of what Herbert says about affliction, sin, and their places in our lives, it seems reasonable to understand by this glass metaphor that sins—and the afflictions we suffer as a consequence of sin—can be ultimately good for us. If we are bettered by sin—made “more strong”—can't there be made an argument for indulging in sin, the more thoroughly to know the blessings of God? How can it be that we are made better by the very sins that we are instructed to rail against? Is it true that we are so bettered, or is this the only recourse, when it comes to thinking about the matter—given that, for the Herbertian Christian, sin is as inevitable as our yielding to it, as is our consequent suffering for having yielded? Not the least aspect of Herbert that wins for him my allegiance and trust—and makes him a distinctly earnest poet among his contemporaries whose work too often can seem mere flourish—is his silence in the wake of these questions.

How often it is that Herbert's poems will on one level argue—and persuasively—against the very arguments they no less persuasively put forward on a more immediate level. The poem “Justice (I)” can be seen, in terms of its form and rhyme, as a balance or set of scales, in which the weights are God and humanity: