Affective Spirituality
From the thirteenth century, images of Christ’s Passion
become increasingly common in Western art and literature. The Cistercian Saint
Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153) and Saint Francis of Assisi (1182-1286) both
emphasised the humanity of Christ and his physical sufferings. Images of the
Passion which called attention to Christ’s pain were intended to inspire a
certain kind of devotion: one of pathos, compassion and identification with the
suffering Lord – the relation of empathy. We find the idea in the
mid-fourteenth century Life of Christ by the Carthusian monk, Ludolph of Saxony
(died 1378):
I know not for sure
... how it is that you are sweeter in the heart of one who loves you in the
form of flesh than as the word ... It is sweeter to view you as dying before
the Jews on the tree, than as holding sway over the angels in Heaven, to see
you as a man bearing every aspect of human nature to the end, than as God manifesting
divine nature, to see you as the dying Redeemer than as the invisible Creator.
A key text behind much later medieval and Renaissance
religious art is the Man of Sorrows, as described in a passage from the Old
Testament prophet Isaiah and commonly help to refer to Christ:
He is despised and
rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it
were our faces from him; he was despised and we esteemed him not. Surely he
hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken,
smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he
was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and
with his stripes we are healed (ISAIAH 53:3-5).
Affective spirituality is key to the poetry of George
Herbert (1593-1633), who depicts spiritual dilemmas and their resolution
through a properly directed devotion, or imaginative vision. On his deathbed,
Herbert is said to have handed the manuscripts of the poems that make up The Temple to a friend, to be entrusted
to Nicholas Ferrar, founder of a community committed to the practice of
spiritual discipline at Little Gidding:
I know not for sure
... how it is that you are sweeter in the heart of one who loves you in the
form of flesh than as the word ... It is sweeter to view you as dying before
the Jews on the tree, than as holding sway over the angels in Heaven, to see
you as a man bearing every aspect of human nature to the end, than as God
manifesting divine nature, to see you as the dying Redeemer than as the
invisible Creator.
The poems are records of spiritual struggles, then, with the
hope that in contemplating them the reader will attain some measure of healing.
There is a constant tension in Herbert between the placid surface rhythms and
pellucid imagery, and a psychic turbulence underneath. In part, the turbulence
reflects Herbert’s own life, moving from the pursuit of worldly glory at Oxford
to the humbler vocation of a parish priest. The poetry also seems to embody
certain tensions within Anglicanism. Let us see how some of this works in the
poem ‘The Agonie’.
Philosophers have measur'd mountains,
Fathom'd the depths of seas, of states, and kings,
Walk'd with a staff to heaven, and traced fountains
But there are two vast, spacious things,
The which to measure it doth more behove:
Yet few there are that sound them; Sinne and Love.
Unto Mount Olivet; there shall he see
A man, so wrung with pains, that all his hair,
His skinne, his garments, bloudie be.
Sin is that presse and vice, which forceth pain
To hunt his cruel food through ev'ry vein.
Who knows not Love, let him assay,
And taste that juice, which on the cross a pike
Did set again abroach; then let him say
If ever he did taste the like.
Love is that liquour sweet and most divine,
Which my God feels as blood; but I, as wine.
And taste that juice, which on the cross a pike
Did set again abroach; then let him say
If ever he did taste the like.
Love is that liquour sweet and most divine,
Which my God feels as blood; but I, as wine.
(ed. F E Hutchinson, Oxford, 1941).
The title itself draws our attention to the theme of
struggle. But what agony, or whose, is referred to here? The word comes from Greek agon, and originally meant a struggle for victory in the games.
Then it came to mean any struggle, such as a mental struggle. In English in
Herbert’s time, Agonie had as its
main senses: (1) anguish of mind, sore trouble or distress, (2) the mental struggle of Christ in the
Garden of Gethsemane (3) the pangs of death and (4) extreme bodily suffering.
It seems to me that all of these senses are to some degree available here: in
the second stanza, we see Christ’s agony from Mount Olivet (which overlooks Gethsemane;
sense 2). His bloody garments and the reference to the Passion and the spear
which caused the wound in his side take us to senses (3) and (4). Perhaps the whole
poem might be an enactment of sense (1), the internal agon or struggle by which we turn away from worldly learning to
inner knowledge of Sin and Love.
First we see how the Philosophers. These are natural philosophers,
meaning, in Herbert’s world, those who seek knowledge of the material world. We
see their work has much to do with quantifying: they measure, fathom and sound
the heights and depths of the earth, and the stars. But how would you ‘fathom
the depths ... of states, and kings’? This suggests to me the treatises of the
time on the ordering of the state, and the exercise of kingship (More’s Utopia
or James I’s Basilikon Doron, for example). The piling up in the second line – ‘of
seas, of states, of kings’ – gently underlines the excitement of the activity.
The phrase ‘Walk’d with a staffe to heav’n’ is a wonderful example of Herbert’s
simple style, or sermo humilis,
carrying a freight of meaning. The first image that comes to mind – and the
poem is entirely an adventure of the mind – is that of someone walking magically
with a staff to heaven, perhaps suggesting the fantasy, or vanity, of the
Philosopher. But a ‘staffe’ in Herbert’s time was also a measuring instrument,
giving us a picture of a scientific calculation of astronomical distances: ‘walk’d
with a staff’ is a paced-out, measured, quantified journey. A staff was also
the tool of a magus, and instrument of divination (we rememebr Prospero, ‘I’ll
break my staff’), and I wonder if a hint of the occult art is being hinted at
here. I wonder even if ‘staffe’ is foreshadowing the ‘pike’ of line 14 – man’s
vain pursuit of learning injures Christ? – but that may be making the word do
too much work, and it is perhaps against the general sense of the poem: Herbert
is not saying that all this measurement is wicked, only that it overlooks the
inner, spiritual work of attaining insight into ‘Sinne and Love’. These ideas
are ‘vast, spacious’ because they cannot be measured like the other things in the
stanza.
Philosophers get the grand verbs Fathom’d, measur’d. The seeker
after spiritual knowledge gets the much simpler ‘let him repair’ and ‘let him
assay’, ordinary actions appropriate to the humble spiritual state. Yet the
desire could not be greater: ‘who would know Sinne’. And how can Sinne and Love
be known? Not with human knowledge, not with the sounding staff or the
measuring stick, but through devotion. This is Herbert emphasising the
importance of personal, inward devotion over the outer spiritual life of
ceremony.
The seeker repairs – in his mind’s eye – to Mount Olivet,
where he sees Jesus Agony in the Garden, as he contemplates His coming Passion.
It is as though we are contemplating Christ contemplating, for his hair and
garments come to be bloody – as they would not have been in Gethsemane before
the arrest. The spiritual agony has transformed into the physical agony of the
crucifixion. There is another image here, that of the winepress, introduced in
line 11: ‘Sinne is that presse and vice’. A ‘vice’ is another kind of press, a
screw-press, used to crush the juice out of grapes and apples, ‘To hunt his
cruell food’. Winepress imagery is much less easy for most of us to decipher
than more familiar Passion images, and it is worth pausing to trace its
history. The key Old Testament text is Isaiah:
Who is this that cometh from Edom, with dyed garments from
Bozrah? This that is glorious in his apparel, travelling in the greatness of
his strength? I that speak in righteousness, mighty to save.
Wherefore art thou red in thine apparel, and thy garments like
him that treadeth in the winefat? [ie wine vat]
I have trodden the winepress alone; and of the people there
was none with me: for I will tread them in mine anger, and trample them in my
fury; and their blood shall be sprinkled upon my garments, and I will stain all
my raiment. (Isaiah 63:3)
Like the Man of Sorrows, the treader of the grapes was
identified with Christ. The Old Testament righteous anger of verse 3 laid
aside, this is interpreted as an image of sacrifice. This was how Lancelot Andrewes understood it in his Sermons (1628):
This
was the paine of the Presse (so the prophet called it, Torcular:) wherewith as
if he had been in the wine-presse, all his garments were stained and goared
with blood.
The mystical imagery of
the winepress explains this extraordinary image by Hieronymus Wierix (c.1553-1619; print in the British Museum).
This engraving of c.1600 is contemporary with Herbert and
was widely circulated in Catholic europe. In the background on the left are the
Patriarchs and Judges of the Old Testament. They are planting the vines. The
coming of Christ is the harvest, when the grapes are picked and placed in the
vat. Christ is in the vat, being crushed by the press (or ‘vice’, note the
screw device) of the Cross. God the Father and the Holy Spirit (the dove) are
actually pushing down on the Cross to
effect the sacrifice. The inscription at the bottom is Isaiah 63:3, given
above. Christ’s blood fills a chalice held by two angels (stanza 3 of the
poem). In the bottom right corner, the Virgin contemplates Christ’s fate, her
heart pierced by a sword. On the left at the bottom, sinners are praying in
preparation for receiving the Eucharist. They could represent the reader in
Herbert’s poem, seeking knowledge of Sin and Love. (The text at the bottom is the third verse of Isaiah quoted above.)
We can now see how ‘Sinne is that presse and vice’, the sins
of man, figured in the Cross, which becomes the winepress which is torturing
the Saviour. Our contemplation of his agony is exactly our knowledge of Sin: it
is emotional and imaginative knowledge before it is intellectual. But from
theis Sin comes Love. Herbert links the winepress witht he image of Christ’s
side being pierced with the brilliant choice of ‘abroach’, meaning to open by
piercing, just as a wine barrel would be broached. From this wound pours the
juice, the liquor of Christ’s blood. Again, some imagery helps us to imagine
this in something like a contemporary way. There are a number of striking
depictions of the blood from the wound becoming the wine of the eucharist. Here is The Blood of the Redeemer (c.1460-5, National Gallery, London) by Giovanni Bellini (c.1430/40-1516):
The meaning of the Mass is spelled out even more explicitly in the story of The Mass of st Gregory, a popular subject for devotional images. Having prayed for a sign, Pope Gregory is granted a vision of Christ, whose blood flows, as in the painting above, directly into the chalice:
Thus we end with the Eucharist: Christ’s blood becoming
wine. The exact meaning of the Eucharist was, of course, absolutely central to
the Reformation and successive religious wars. Does Herbert define it here? The
word ‘feels’ in the last line is a stroke of genius. On a protestant reading it
could be taken to mean, ‘God experiences it as blood in his body, but I, in my
body, feel it as wine: it is the imagination which links the two’. But there is
room, I think, for the notion of the Real Presence. ‘Feels’ is at once concrete
and vivid – it gets inside the sensation of drinking – yet at the same time
generous in its scope for literal and figurative interpretation. The
conncluding ‘but I, as wine’ steals in ‘I’ at the very last minute. The
impersonal seeker ‘who would know’ has become identified with speaker and
reader, and through Christ’s agony, the agony of spiritual blindness has been,
for the moment, resolved.
