Michael Schoenfeldt
It is tempting, particularly for those of us who engage in academic study of the products of the religious imagination in earlier cultures, to underestimate or ignore the role of the senses in religion. The cerebral nuances of theology seem so more congenial to our analytical machinery, and our disciplinary expertise, than the wispy, ephemeral stuff of sensation. This volume shows the great virtue of resisting that temptation. The scholars gathered here demonstrate the myriad ways that religious experience involves not just the brain, but the hands and heart and nostrils and eyes and ears and mouth of the worshipper. Indeed, once one starts paying attention to sensuous phenomena, images and experiences of touch and smell and sight and taste leap from the pages devoted to religious discourse. Religion, these scholars demonstrate, is not an escape from the material world, but a deliberate intensification of lived experience, particularly experience achieved through the senses. Some of our suspicion about the role of the senses in Christianity may derive from St Paul; not only did he define faith as ‘the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen’ (Hebrews 11:1 AV), but he asserts that ‘eye hath not seen nor ear heard… the things which God prepared for them that love him. But God hath revealed them unto us by his Spirit’ (1 Corinthians 2.9-10 AV). As the essays in this collection make clear, however, religion requires the senses, even to begin to conceive the unseen. And it is through the senses that the mysteries of Christianity begin to enter into the heart of the believer. In its most vital and compelling incarnations, religion engages the raw, wild, primal matter of our entire beings; it addresses body, mind, and soul at once. When religion ignores the sumptuous, unruly stuff of the senses, furthermore, devotion can desiccate. A religion whose practices neglect or demean the senses can succumb to arid intellectualizing or vapid moralizing, and in the process, render itself largely dormant to the common worshiper.
Historically, however, the senses have been perceived as spiritually hazardous, since even devout sensuous experience can drift easily into distracting sensuality. Perversely, Christianity has been much more at ease with sensations related to pain and suffering than with those associated with joy and pleasure. At the core of Christian worship is the crucifix, a conspicuous instrument of torture and death. In much traditional Christian thinking about the senses, only pain and its related sensations carry any ethical legitimacy, probably because they link humans to the unearthly suffering of their savior; pleasure, by contrast, is seen as an engine of the devil, continually tempting humans to ungodly sensual indulgence.1 One of the many pleasant surprises in this collection that there is remarkably little attention paid to suffering, but perhaps that is because suffering is such a conventional and unsurprising subject for Christianity.
The rampant suspicion about the senses that suffuses so much Christian commentary, moreover, is an implicit acknowledgement of their immense power, for good or ill. As the inevitable gateway between inner experience and the outer world, the senses provide a potentially slippery avenue for either sinful extravagance or devout adoration. By the same token, they are closely tied to the dynamic emotions that can be stirred and manipulated through them. By means of the senses, devotion shifts from abstract concept to urgent sensation. The senses provide physiological access to the otherwise inaccessible quandaries of religion.
Deliberately juxtaposing essays by medievalists and early modernists, this volume challenges the persistent idea that the Middle Ages denied the senses while the Renaissance celebrated them.2 It is refreshing to see the continuum between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance explored with such scrutiny, and the changes and continuities recorded with such nuance and rigour. By demonstrating sensuous engagement on the part of a wide range of writers and practices, the volume also confronts the prevalent perception that certain denominations are far more involved than others in matters relating to the senses. The essays presented here implicitly dispute the widely accepted claim that ‘Protestant meditation did not stimulate the senses’.3 While it may have worked differently, and at times emphasised different senses from Catholic practices, Protestant meditation and devotion did not fail to engage the senses. Indeed, a leading Puritan preacher, Stephen Egerton, published a book entitled The Boring of the Eare (1623), depicting in detail the processes by which one must ready oneself in order to hear a sermon properly. While the title inadvertently advertises the effect many Puritan sermons must have had on their hearers, it also indicates the critical importance of an active sense of hearing to allow divine messages to penetrate to the core of the believer. To ‘heare then’, Egerton argues, ‘is to attend with the eare, to receiue with the heart’; the biggest impediment to proper hearing is ‘carnall Securitie, Impenitence, Worldliness, Uncleannesse of life, etc., which things altogether draw men away from hearing, or else make them heare with a deaf eare, or a dead heart’.4 Hearing well is for Egerton a profoundly ethical action.
In a poem called ‘The Invitation’, the Conformist George Herbert (a poet invoked frequently in this collection) cleverly exploits the fact that the Eucharistic feast entails the primal activities of eating and drinking. This meal, Herbert suggests, can be imagined as the epitome of epicurean sensuous experience, fulfilling rather than repudiating terrestrial appetite. Herbert tells those who have sought pleasure in their lives that this feast will finally give them exactly what they have always wanted. The poem extends a gracious invitation to those whose ‘taste / Is your waste’, those ‘whom wine / Doth define’ and those ‘whose love / Is your dove’.5 ‘Here is joy’, the speaker announces (l. 22), suggesting that the carnal satisfactions of the Eucharistic meal in fact embody various sensuous indulgences frequently rendered as sinful.6 The Puritan John Milton is so fully invested in the religious centrality of the senses and the appetites that his Paradise Lost emphasises that angels possess ‘every lower faculty / Of sense, whereby they hear, see, smell, touch, taste’.7 As we see, his angels even eat earthly food with relish. Both Conformists and Puritans regularly address the importance of the senses in the effort to exhort an audience to their religious persuasion.
This admirably interdisciplinary volume does a splendid job of addressing what John Arnold, in the opening essay, terms ‘the inherent complexities and tensions within the senses’. The essays reveal fascinating accounts of unanticipated but fruitful intersections of sense and spirit. The essay by Richard Newhauser analyses the anxious processes by which Peraldus imagined that the volatile senses could be properly steered toward heaven. The essays by Erin Lambert and Emilie Murphy, on the other hand, provide engaging analyses of the rich soundscapes produced by choirs and churchbells – sounds that must have suffused everyday religious experience. C. M. Woolgar’s essay asks a fascinating question – by what sensuous processes might something be made holy? – while Joe Moshenska and Abigail Shinn both offer absorbing accounts of the critical role of the senses in the conscientious act of religious conversion. Several essays attest to something that is frequently forgotten: the subtle ways in which language is itself a profoundly sensory phenomenon, invariably entering consciousness through the eyes and ears and even touch. Robin Macdonald’s essay reminds us that the very material on which something is written affects both the way it is composed, and the way it is read. Subha Mukherji explores how these complex interactions of matter, spirit, and sense translate to some luminous and troubling moments on the Elizabethan stage, while Bronwyn Wallace offers an edgy analysis of Robert Southwell’s interpretation of Mary Magdalen’s inevitably frustrated longing to touch the resurrected Jesus. In the final essay, Elizabeth Swann investigates the surprising phenomena of works that imagine God’s sensory experience. Together, these essays develop a powerful case for the critical importance of the senses to any study of religion.
Almost every essay in this wonderful collection emphasises the Janus-faced nature of the senses – the crucial role they can play in devotional attention, and the myriad ways in which they can distract from the divine subject. It is telling that when we think of the proper bodily disposition for prayer, we imagine closed eyes, and hands touching each other, as if to seal off our sensory engagements with the outside world as much as possible from the powerful but distracting senses of sight and touch. But other senses are more difficult to shut down; we have no flaps to cover our ears and keep out distracting sounds. In a sermon, John Donne (another writer who makes several appearances in this collection) describes with some exasperation how easily the senses can distract the devout worshipper from appropriate attention to the divine:
I throw my selfe downe in my Chamber, and I call in, and invite God, and his Angels thither, and when they are there, I neglect God and his Angels, for the noise of a Flie, for the ratling of a Coach, for the whining of a doore; I talke on, in the same posture of praying,; Eyes lifted up; knees bowed downe; as though I prayed to God; and, if God, or his Angels should aske me, when I thought last of God in that prayer, I cannot tell: Sometimes I finde that I had forgot what I was about, but when I began to forget it, I cannot tell. A memory of yesterdays pleasures, a feare of to morrows dangers, a straw under my knee, a noise in mine eare, a light in mine eye, an any thing, a nothing, a fancy, a Chimera in my braine, troubles me in my prayer.8
As Donne knew all too well, the senses could be a hindrance to devotion, allowing irrelevant aural, tactile, and visual phenomena to invade a consciousness that aspires to be turned exclusively to God.
But Donne, a popular and immensely talented preacher, also knew that properly concentrated senses were an essential element of true religious experience. In a sermon on the Annunciation, that joyous but perplexing moment when the Word truly was made flesh and dwelt among us, Donne offers a stunning description of the pleasurable sensations one can receive from the well-chosen words of another:
a man may upon the hearing of something that strikes him, that affects him, feel this springing, this exultation, this melting, and colliquation of the inwardest bowels of his soule; a new affection, a new passion, beyond the joy ordinarily conceived upon earthly happinesses.9
The Incarnation occasions Donne’s fulsome praise of the deeply sensuous experience of being moved to joy, in the innermost core of our being, by another’s words. For Donne, this involves an exhilaration that is at once profoundly intellectual and deeply visceral. And it starts with the thoroughly sensuous act of hearing.
One can begin to make sense of religion, then, by exploring the myriad ways in which the senses are oriented toward sacred subjects. The senses were unavoidable, even indispensable, thresholds linking the external world to the inner recesses of the individual. In various religious texts, materials, and practices, we can see that the senses, when properly engaged, were imagined to offer a conduit to spiritual matters. A full history of religious experience would be incomprehensible without careful and rigorous attention to the role of the senses. The essays in this collection allow us to explore the rich and complex relationship between earlier sensory worlds and our own. While the senses have probably not changed that much over the centuries, what they apprehend, and how they construe sensation, certainly has.
When Bottom wakes from his dream in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, as Mukherji’s essay suggests, he amusingly bungles the quotation from Paul in 1 Corinthians 2.9 in fascinating ways: ‘The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was’.10 His unintentionally nullified synesthesia about the ‘vision’ he has just had, which was ‘past the wit of man’, gently mocks Paul’s suggestion that faith is infinitely superior to the senses in religious devotion. Yet even the Pauline letters can when necessary argue that the sacred is not so much a renunciation of this world as an intensification of its sensations and experiences. When Paul wants to describe the invariably partial nature of human apprehension of the sacred, he writes: ‘For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face’ (1 Corinthians 13.12 AV). And in the letter to the Hebrews, the author (probably not Paul) remarks: ‘For the word of God is quick, and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart’ (Hebrews 4:12 AV). Like Donne’s account of piercing eloquence, this riveting passage describes no ‘common sense’, but rather the vivid, visceral experience of a fully engaged worshiper responding to religion’s ability to percolate through the senses into the innermost recesses of the body. In such moments, the ineffable material of religion is rendered palpable and dynamic, wrenching humans out of the everyday and into a realm of intensified sensation that may be as close as we can get in this life to something approaching the sacred.
Notes
1 For exemplary accounts of the importance of the sensation of suffering in early modern Christianity, see, for example Jan Frans Van Dijkhuizen, Pain and Compassion in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (London: D. S. Brewer, 2012); the essays collected in The Sense of Suffering: Constructions of Physical Pain in Early Modern Culture, ed. Van Dijkhuizen and Karl Van Enenkel (Leiden: Brill, 2009); and Mitchell B. Merback, The Thief, the Cross, and the Wheel: Pain and the Spectacle of Punishment Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
2 This seductive historical fiction continues to surface in some otherwise essential works, such as Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (New York: W.W. Norton, 2011), and Richard Strier’s The Unrepentant Renaissance: From Petrarch to Shakespeare to Milton (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2012).
3 Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979) 150.
4 Stephen Egerton, The Boring of the Eare (1623), A4.
5 George Herbert, ‘The Invitation’, in Helen Wilcox, ed., The English Poems of George Herbert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 624–25.
6 See my essay, ‘Herbert and Pleasure’, George Herbert Journal, 38 (2014/2015): 145–57.
7 John Milton, Paradise Lost, in Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg, eds., The Major Works, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 5.410-11.
8 John Donne, The Sermons, ed. George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson, 10 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953–62), 7: 264–65.
9 Donne, Sermons, 4: 159.
10 William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Arden Shakespeare, ed. Sukanta Chaudhuri (London: Bloomsbury Arden Shakespeare, 2017) 4.1, 205–9.