5
Abigail Shinn
The conversion narrative, a text which recounts a process of confessional change or spiritual awakening, is recognised as being one of the most dynamic literary forms associated with early modern religious culture. Growing out of the turmoil of the post-Reformation English church as well as the emergence of divergent Protestant sects in the Civil War period, the early modern conversion narrative is often equated with spiritual autobiography, although the parameters of autobiography in this period are by no means uncontested.1 The work of Kathleen Lynch, Bruce Hindmarsh, Patricia Caldwell, and Michael Questier has done much to illuminate our understanding of the form’s prevalence and complexity, and the genre is frequently allied to the Protestant literary tradition and the religious writings of John Bunyan.2
Variously read as ‘an act of self-interpretation’ or the result of combined political and religious motivations, conversion narratives are often composed by men and women to offer proof of a change in confession or spiritual awakening.3 Crucially, they are also designed to provoke further change on the part of the reader; converts frequently attest to their hopes that their individual story will inspire others to join their faith. Many of these texts consequently rely upon patterns of religious experience, typified by a movement from despair to comfort, that are replicated within religious communities in order to form a pathway to conversion that can be followed by future members of a congregation.4 They are produced by both Protestant and Catholic believers and can be found in print and manuscript. The result of a rhetorically literate culture, conversion narratives also rely upon a number of commonplace figures and tropes in order to add substance to what is, in effect, an invisible and unquantifiable spiritual change.5 One of the most prevalent of these commonplaces is the use of the senses and sensory experience as a locus for spiritual transformation. The senses are repeatedly invoked by converts as liminal conduits between the earthly and the divine, but this is also accompanied by the use of sensory metaphors which succeed in producing a similar effect while ostensibly bypassing the body.
Scholars have come to recognise that early modern religious experience is overwhelmingly mediated by sensory discourses and practices, and that despite the Protestant emphasis upon language and the whitewashing of churches after the Reformation, often framed as a shift from the eyes to the ears, religion continued to be a full synaesthetic experience for believers.6 Richard Brathwaite argues in his Essaies vpon the Fiue Senses (1620) that the senses are the conduits through which the Devil reached the believer: ‘the fiue Sences…be those fiue gates, by which the world doth besiege vs, the Deuill doth tempt vs, and the flesh ensnare vs’.7 Similarly, converts often describe moments of demonic or divine intercession that are enacted via the senses. The senses are simultaneously identified as instrumental agents in an ongoing dialogue with supernatural forces, and reactive conduits which provoke movement on the part of the believer. The sensate language of the body thereby provides a powerful system of comparison which can concretise and reify that which is invisible to others, a phenomenon allied to the doctrine of accommodation (the notion that God adapts divine truths in order to make them accessible to the limited comprehension of fallen humanity).8
In this chapter, I explore how the senses and sensory metaphor are harnessed by both Protestant and Catholic converts in order to ally their spiritual change to corporeal systems of exchange and metamorphosis. While we might expect Protestant converts to be more likely to employ the distancing effects of metaphor in order to avoid charges of sensuality, Catholic converts also utilise metaphor. Furthermore, Protestants are not always averse to the sensory when describing their conversion experiences. Central to the use of sensory language as a bridge between the divine and the bodily, however, is the capacity of such language to erase any distinction between the literal and the figural.9 This is a phenomenon that Nigel Smith identifies as a crucial component of the prophetic tenor of radical Protestant conversion narratives, but the conflation of the literal and figurative at the level of sensation is present in a discursive range of conversion texts from different faiths and sects.10 The indistinct boundaries of corporeal and metaphorical sensing thus allow the convert to harness both the symbolic and physiological power of sensation, even when wielding a rhetorical trope.
Examining both Catholic and Protestant narratives, as well as more diverse sources for attitudes to conversion, including rhetoric manuals and religious treatises, I will demonstrate that despite the early modern period’s adversarial culture of conversion, the senses act as an important cross-confessional trope for writers across a range of literary modes. The texts that form the basis of my study span the length of the seventeenth century (one of the richest periods for the circulation of conversion narratives, particularly in print) in order to determine the persistent and pervasive role played by the senses in shaping a language of conversion during this period.11 I will begin by exploring the relationship between the soul and sensation, and then move on to a number of examples of converts who cite the senses as transformative loci for their experiences. This will necessitate an examination of the distinction between the corporeal senses, and the inner spiritual senses, which were often used to search the believer for the truth of their salvation. Finally, I will consider the role played by sensory metaphor in shaping and elucidating the process of conversion. Such is the cliché of the believer who has ‘seen the light’ or ‘heard the voice of God’ that the role of sensory language in conversion texts has frequently been overlooked. My aim in this essay is to argue that sensory language in fact occupies a complex position at the edge of literal and figurative bodies and plays a central role in the fashioning of the new convert into a believable and persuasive entity.
The soul and sensation
The immortal soul was the cornerstone of Christian theology and its effect upon the mortal concerns of the flesh prior to death was a preoccupation of religious, medical, and literary writing.12 Michael Schoenfeldt has persuasively argued that for early moderns ‘bodily condition, subjective state, and psychological character are…fully imbricated’ and that a sense of self can only be understood in relation to the body.13 Schoenfeldt also notes that Galenic medicine maintained that the behaviour of the soul depended on the temperature of the body, so that ‘the purportedly immaterial subject is constituted as a profoundly material substance’.14 The soul, like the body, could therefore be affected by changes in environment and diet. As William Vaughan claims in his Directions for Health (1600), ‘there is a great concord betwixt the bodies qualities and the soules affections’, a link explored by the nonconformist minister Richard Baxter in his posthumously published Reliquiae Baxterianae (1696) when he equates copious sweating with the purging of sin.15 An individual could also be described as being soul-sick, as is the case with the sixteenth-century Spaniard and Protestant backslider Francis Spira. Falling ill after he renounces his Protestantism, he is sent to Padua and examined by eminent physicians who can find nothing wrong with him. Spira ascribes his illness to his apostasy claiming ‘neither potions, plaisters, nor drugs …can helpe a fainting soul cast downe with sense of sinne, and the wrath of God’.16 Such a reading of Spira’s sickness was possible because people believed that the soul could only be perceived through the workings of the body, as Helkiah Crooke notes in the Microcosmographia (1615):
[…] the knowledge of the soule cannot be made manifest but onely by her operations, which also seeing she doth not performe without the helpe of corporall organs, there is a necessity imposed, that wee also vnderstand the exact composition of the body.17
It is essential for people to understand the body if they wish to understand the soul, although, following the Fall, this knowledge can only be limited in scope.18 Consequently, when the convert gestures, weeps, sweats, and senses, the condition of their body can be directly related to the state of their soul.
Both influenced by the environment and assessed via the constitution of the body, the soul also operated as an instrument of consumption comparable to the mouth and digestive system. In A Christian Love-Letter (1606), a Protestant named John Swynnerton recounts his frustration that the object of his affection has been converted to Catholicism by a ‘little booke’, using language which connects reading to the ingestion of Popish poison which fails to sate the hunger of the consumer:19
[…] to haue your soule (after such sort) to be fed, or rather feasted and not fed, or rather filled, and not feasted: but to speak more properly, neither fed, nor feasted, nor filled, but flatly poisoned with such Italian drugs, with such superstitious and Antichristian confections, as in the said booke. 20
Swynnerton’s focus on the soul being ‘neither fed, nor feasted, nor filled’ but poisoned, indicates that the consumption of Catholic writing is an empty gesture which gives only the appearance of nourishment. In this case, the site of literary ingestion is the soul rather than the stomach, indicating the extent to which the soul was understood to function in ways comparable to bodily systems.
The soul also played a fundamental role in shaping theories of sensation in the early modern period. This was because the seat of sensation was commonly located in the soul, although writers often disagreed about precisely where the soul itself was situated. Aristotle argues that the soul resides in the heart and when summarising the opinions of his predecessors in the De Anima he states that beings that have a soul can be distinguished from those that do not by their capacity for sense perception and their ability to instigate movement.21 Sensation was thereby intrinsically connected to the presence of the soul. Furthermore, Aristotle argues that movement on the part of the soul often derives from sensory processes: ‘the most obvious way in which one might say that the soul is moved …would be by the objects of perception’.22 The soul was therefore reactive to sensory systems. Crooke, following Galen, argues that ‘the Brain is the common instrument of Sensation or the organ of all the senses’ and that ‘it [the brain] is the instrument by which the Sensatiue Soule perceiueth all sensible qualities, yea distinguisheth and iudgeth of them’.23 The Galenic model locates the soul in the brain and thus connects sensation to this organ, rather than the heart. Whether centred on the heart or the brain, however, the resulting connection between body and soul in a heuristic economy presided over by the perceptive faculties influences the way that the sensate or ‘feeling’ soul is articulated by converts. If the state of the body can affect the state of the soul and vice versa, then converts’ analogies between the two are not simply metaphorical; rather they reflect a genuine sense of interchange.
The Church of England clergyman and lexicographer Robert Cawdray in his Treasvrie or Storehovse of Similes (1600), a rhetoric manual which is structured as a commonplace book, articulates the belief that the soul itself feels in much the same way as the flesh in an entry under the title Feeling of Faith:
And altogether like as the disposition of the body followeth the qualitie and temperature of the ayre, Elements and exercises, to which wee giue our selues: Euen so according to the places where we liue, and the nourishment that wee there take, is the estate of our soules and consciences. But bee it that water is sometime hote, and sometime colde, and that it chaunge his qualities, sometimes one way, sometimes an other, yet it is alwaies water; Euen so the man that is elect, after his regeneration, is alwayes faithfull, howsoeuer in that he is the child of Adam, he bee sometimes enclined to euill, and that his Faith be not alwayes accompanied with the like zeale and affection. For oftentimes it commeth to passe, that we feele Iesus Christ to stirre and mooue himselfe in vs, and by and by after, wee haue no manner of Feeling at all: But therefore hee ceaseth not to dwell in vs, no more then our soules doo dwell in our bodies when we sleepe, although in sleeping, wee neither Feele them, nor any of their operations.24
Cawdray argues that election does not guarantee that the convert will be impervious to temptation. Much as the body alters along with the temperature and quality of its environment, the soul is subject to reverberations in its complexion once the first zeal and enthusiasm which accompanies conversion has passed. Cawdray emphasises, however, that despite the potential for the soul to incline towards evil, the groundwork of election remains constant, albeit fluid: ‘it is alwaies water’. The sensate soul will sometimes fail to feel the movement of Christ, but this is not a sign that the believer has been abandoned, only that the initial tempest has passed. Cawdray compares this process to the quietude of the soul in sleep when ‘wee neither Feele them, nor any of their operations’. In this way, the soul was frequently described by converts as ‘feeling’ in a similar way to the body and feeling most acutely at the moment of conversion. As the former Catholic priest and Protestant convert Richard Sheldon notes in his Motives (1612): ‘I sensibly feele (in such sort as the soule can feele) my vnderstanding and soule, as it were a new inlightned, illustrated, conforted, and encouraged by a new change and translation out of the shadow of darknesse, into the Kingdome of Gods beloued sonne Iesus’.25 Following his conversion Sheldon feels that his soul now basks in the light of divinity, an incidence of the commonplace of conversion or revelation being figured as a movement from darkness to light which links the metaphor to the ‘felt’ experience of the soul. This is qualified, however, by Sheldon’s observation that he sensibly feels ‘in such sort as the soule can feele’, implying that the feeling soul is by no means easy to observe and that its sensations do not directly correspond to embodied sensation.
The soul’s ability to feel is also linked to its preparation prior to conversion, particularly in Protestant texts interested in the workings of humiliation. As the Scottish minister Arthur Morton notes in The Touch-Stone of Conversion (1647), in response to the question ‘What be the marks that go before faith?’, ‘the Lord…works in them that…ground-work of humiliation in the soule, and consequently a very sensible change, a work indeed painfull, & not joyous for the present’.26 A ‘sensible change’ accompanied by pain (albeit only in the present), stands for Morton as a sign, a ‘mark’, for a coming conversion: the soul must sense the ‘work’ of God before it can begin the long road to salvation.
Sensing conversion
The soul is thus understood as a locus for sensory perception and fully implicated in the workings and environment of the body. When the convert’s spiritual complexion changed it is felt in the soul as an – often-painful – sensate experience. The feeling soul therefore provides the background to conversion texts which articulate instances of powerful revelatory experience which occur at the threshold to the body – the senses.
Tobie Matthew, the son of the archbishop of York who converted to Catholicism while travelling in Italy in 1605, describes an Augustinian moment of auditory influence in his autobiography:
Every day there passed once, and sometimes oftener, under my window, near a certain hour, a procession of little boys, singing the litanies of our B. Lady And I know not by what chance, or rather Providence of Almighty God, the tune of that sweet verse, Sancta Maria, Ora pro nobis, came so often in at mine ears, and contented me so much that at length my tongue took it up; not indeed as a prayer (such was my misfortune at that time; for it is a misery to have been, at any time, other than our B. Lady’s most humble servant) but as a song, whose ditty fell not unpleasingly to that air, and so when I found myself alone, my usual entertainment would be to sing Sancta Maria, Ora pro nobis, in the tune of those babes and suckling’s, who showed forth her praise. These would ordinarily fall out to be the last words before my sleep, and the first after it and though I pronounced them, at that time, but like a parrot, yet those words made me grow into some few thoughts; and I considered now and then what hurt there might be, in desiring the Mother of God to pray for us; and at least I was enured thereby to pronounce them, not long after, as I now do.27
Matthew’s parrot-like repetition of a phrase from the litany of the blessed virgin – albeit as song rather than prayer – precipitates his conversion experience. The cumulative effect of hearing it sung every day by ‘little boys’ while he was in Naples ensures that he cannot get the prayer out of his head and eventually his ‘tongue took it up’. He proceeds to sing Sancta Maria, Ora pro nobis – ‘Holy Mother pray for us’ – before going to sleep and upon awakening, his ritual both reminiscent of Compline, the final church service for Catholics at the end of the day, and the Angelus prayer’s traditional recitation at morning, midday and the end of the day (the Angelus, like the litany of the blessed virgin, includes the phrase Sancta Maria, Ora pro nobis but with the inclusion of ‘mother of God’: ‘Sancta Maria, Mater Dei, ora pro nobis’). This has a clear antecedent in Augustine’s conversion in the garden in Milan, as recounted in his Confessions, where he hears disembodied voices, either of ‘a boy or a girl’, reciting the phrase ‘pick up and read’ (tolle lege, tolle lege), which he interprets as a ‘divine command…to open the book [the Bible] and read the first chapter I might find’.28 For Matthew, divine intercession comes through the ear in a similar manner to Augustine, but this providential act of hearing leads to the daily verbal repetition of a prayer which initially parodies Catholic practice before affecting a fundamental spiritual change. Matthew’s experience thereby charts a trajectory from hearing to singing, from the passive reception of the senses to an active participation in Catholic liturgy, which creates rather than simply expresses a change in faith. This is an instance of the unconscious reception of the divine via the senses that reverses the typical framing of Catholicism as the religion of the eye and Protestantism as the religion of the ear.
The view that the ear was a conduit for God’s grace was a commonly held belief, as articulated by the clergyman Stephen Egerton in his treatise The Boring of the Eare (1623): ‘to hear…is to attend with the eare, to receiue with the heart, to conuert in the life and conuersation, else our sinfull soules can neuer be healed’.29 For Egerton, the ear is the link to the heart and thereby the primary site for conversion in life and conversation. The figuration of the ear as a conduit to the soul or the heart, Jennifer Rae McDermott argues, both responded to and appropriated ‘medical language of permeability, fluidity, and invasion’, particularly following the discovery of the Eustachian tube, the thin corridor connecting the ear and the throat.30 This discovery provides an interesting medical parallel with Matthew’s shift from hearing the litany to singing it to himself, as the Eustachian tube allows liquids and other soluble substances to be conveyed into the interior of the body via firstly the ear and then secondly the throat. Matthew’s auditory revelation thereby references both the commonplace that grace can enter the soul via the senses and the anatomical understanding of the ear as a permeable orifice which connects the outside world to the depths of the body’s interior.
In A further Account of the progreß of the Gospel Amongst the Indians In New England (1660), the Protestant missionary John Eliot’s description of the conversion of the native Algonquian-speaking peoples repeatedly uses the word ‘heard’ and ‘hearing’ in order to highlight how the reading aloud of scripture precipitates religious change.31 In the narrative of a convert called Anthony, Anthony routinely uses the phrase ‘I heard’ before recounting an episode from the Bible or quoting scripture.32 The implication is that at this point in his conversion he could not read English and was therefore reliant upon Eliot and his fellow missionaries for his auditory exposure to the word of God. Anthony’s narrative, like those of the other Algonquins in the collection, is framed as an oral confession made in front of the missionary church elders. Early on he states that ‘I hope Christ hath taught mee his Word; Oh let him (my Lord!) help mee to speak it’.33 Like Matthew, Anthony therefore moves from the auditory consumption of God’s grace to vocalising his newly converted state, a transition which is potentially also marked by his increasing ability to both understand and speak English. This is an instance of cross-confessional parity between Catholic and Protestant narratives at the level of sensation, even if what the two converts hear falls along confessional lines: Matthew’s change of heart is prompted by hearing a Catholic litany, while Anthony is inspired by hearing scripture spoken aloud. This is also evidence of two narratives related to spaces outside of England harnessing the senses as a powerful conversionary force. The permeability of the senses ensures that the possibility of metamorphosis is always present within the structures of the human body regardless of geography, religion, or race.
The senses’ position at the threshold to the soul ensured that converts were acutely aware of the power of sense perception to alter their spiritual makeup. They also had an important role to play in judicial systems of proof, as signs or marks of proof were understood, in the words of the schoolmaster Richard Sherry, to be those occurrences which ‘come vnder the sences of men’.34 The importance of the organs of sense perception for religious feeling was, however, a source of contention for early moderns, with some arguing that reliance upon the senses for proof of the divine was tantamount to a failure to trust in God. The writer Thomas Browne in his Religio Medici (1643) argues that the proof offered by the senses undercuts the ‘greater blessing’ offered by blind faith:
I desire to exercise my faith in the difficultest point, for to credit ordinary and visible objects is not faith, but perswasion. Some believe the better for seeing Christ his Sepulchre, and when they have seene the Red Sea, doubt not of the miracle. Now contrarily I blesse my selfe, and am thankefull that I lived not in the dayes of miracles, that I never saw Christ nor his Disciples; I would not have beene one of those Israelites that passed the Red Sea, nor one of Christs Patients, on whom he wrought his wonders; then had my faith been thrust upon me, nor should I enjoy that greater blessing pronounced to all that believe & saw not. ’Tis an easie and necessary beliefe to credit what our eye and sense hath examined […]35
Browne reads the information gathered by the embodied senses as a persuasive force, but argues that faith itself should be blind: ‘to credit ordinary and visible objects is not faith, but perswasion’. He goes so far as to argue that he is glad that he does not live in the time of Jesus as to do so would lessen ‘that greater blessing pronounced to all that believe & saw not’.
In contrast to the physical organs of sense perception, which could overwhelm or distract the believer from the dictates of true faith, the spiritual or inner senses were often afforded greater weight in religious discourse. Augustine in Book X of the Confessions outlines the role of the spiritual or inner senses and pledges to ‘rise above’ the physical sense perceptions shared with ‘the horse and mule’.36 When asking what it is that he loves about God, Augustine outlines two fields of sensory awareness, one exterior and one interior:
[…] when I love you, what do I love? It is not physical beauty nor temporal glory nor the brightness of light dear to earthly eyes, nor the sweet melodies of all kinds of songs, nor the gentle odour of flowers or ointments and perfumes, nor manna or honey, nor limbs welcoming the embraces of the flesh; it is not these I love when I love my God. Yet there is a light I love, and a food, and a kind of embrace of my inner man, where my soul is floodlit by light which space cannot contain, where there is sound that time cannot seize, where there is a perfume which no breeze disperses, where there is a taste for food no amounting of eating can lessen, and where there is a bond of union that no satiety can part. That is what I love when I love my God.37
It is not the wonders of earthly sense perception which inspire Augustine’s love, but rather the senses of the ‘inner man’. For Augustine, the interior senses are inexhaustible counterparts to the limited physical senses; they have no boundaries and will never be sated. The inner senses, which inspire the love of the believer by providing proof of God’s glory, have the potential to be harnessed by men and women when searching themselves for the signs of sin and faith. There is consequently a distinction to be made between relying upon the physical senses for proof of the presence of God (a tendency that Browne warns against) and harnessing the inner senses as a heuristic aid when trying to ascertain one’s status as a believer (a method recommended by a number of early modern authors).
It was this latter understanding of the spiritual senses that inspired the personal reflection advocated in conversion texts such as The Sound Beleever. Or, a Treatise of Evangelicall Conversion (1645) by the Massachusetts minister Thomas Shepard. Shepard aligns proof of faith with the capacity of the spiritual senses to perceive the marks of sin, figured here as marks or tokens of plague:
I shall hereafter prove that there can be no faith without sense of sinne and misery, and now there can be no sense of sinne without a precedent sight or conviction of sin; no man can feele sin, unlesse he first see it; what the ey sees not, the heart rues not…As a man that hath the plague not knowing the disease, he hopes to live; but when he sees the spots and tokens of death, upon his wrist, now he cryes out, because convinced that the plague of the Lord is upon him; so when men see some one or more speciall sins break out, now they are convinced of their lamentable condition.38
Sight has to precede a ‘sense of sin’ as sin cannot be ‘felt’ unless it is first seen by the eye of the believer. In this instance, the metaphor of disease or plague produces a powerful justification for the power of sight as a spiritual sense and it is the spiritual senses that provide the catalyst for fundamental change: an internal recognition of the boils and pustules left by sin guarantees metamorphosis. This sentiment is echoed in Morton’s Touch-Stone of Conversion (1647) when he argues that ‘it behoves every man to use all deligence to make his calling and election sure, to get clear evidence of his interest in and union with the Lord Jesus Christ’.39 Morton goes on to make a clear distinction between the clumsiness of the ‘naturall eye’ versus the probing subtlety of the ‘inner eye’ in this process of evidence gathering:
Concerning thy sinfulnesse and corruptions: try if thou doest see and perceive them, if thou be convinced of them, and they be discovered unto thee; and not onely those grosser ones which a naturall eye may perceive; but try if thou seest thy inward, spirituall, subtile, and most secret corruptions, as thy hypocrisie, infidelitie, spirituall idolatrie, a whoring of thy heart, &c. for then mayest thou comfort thy self, that the Lord hath performed that his promise, in some measure toward thee.40
If the penitent sinner recognises their inner corruptions in this fashion and is ‘earnest with the Lord’, then ‘according to his promise, he would circumcise thy heart, and cause thee to love him with the whole heart’.41 A successful application of sensate probing to the incorporeal soul will lead to the oldest mark or token of conversion – circumcision – although in this instance as an interiorised proof realised through the inner senses rather than a bodily process.
Sensory perception is therefore not only a point of entry to both the body and the soul, but also the means by which the convert can garner proof of their religious condition. The spiritual senses which are employed to search the interior of the convert are simultaneously connected to and detached from the bodily organs of sense perception. Their use by converts highlights how the invisible processes of religious change are frequently understood via corporeal systems, but also how central the language of sensation (both physical and spiritual) is to the early modern culture of conversion more generally.
Sensory metaphor
As well as the physical and spiritual senses acting as transformative entry points and tools for religious self-examination, there is a long tradition of using sensory language in religious meditative practice. This is emphasised in Brathwaite’s Essaies vpon the Fiue Senses when Brathwaite directs the senses towards the body of Christ:
[…] I haue tyed my selfe to my spouse in all my Sences; being He, that ministers refreshment to all my Sences. If I eye any thing, it shall be my Sauiours crosse; if I heare any thing, it shall be my Sauiours praise; if I touch any thing, it shall be my Sauiours wounds; if I taste any thing, it shall be my Sauiours comforts; if I smell any thing, it shall be my Sauiours oyntments.42
Brathwaite seems to here be ruminating on the spiritual senses, but he does not identify them as such, instead conflating the physical and the inner senses in order to argue that the five forms of sensory perception should be trained solely upon Christ. This indeterminacy is achieved because of the variety of senses harnessed in the excerpt. While it is plausible that Brathwaite can ‘eye’ Christ on the cross (in the form of a crucifix or painting) and ‘heare’ his praise using his physical senses, he would have to use the spiritual senses in order to touch Christ’s wounds, smell his ointment or taste his ‘comforts’. Brathwaite’s overlaying of embodied sense and spiritual sense privileges the senses as a conduit to God, particularly when focusing upon the crucified body of Christ as a meditative object. This elision of the distinction between the literal and the figural, between the embodied and the imagined at the level of sensation, allies the Christian with the bodily hermeneutics of doubting Thomas as he probes Christ’s wounds. This urge to ‘touch’, ‘taste’, ‘eye’ ‘heare’, and ‘smell’ the absent body of the saviour is founded upon a desire to tangibly witness his suffering and sacrifice. This form of spiritual sense is not directed primarily at self-reflection or self-discovery, however, but rather moves outwards to both manifest and explore an embodied Christ.43 For Brathwaite, the senses operate simultaneously on a bodily and spiritual plane, thereby providing a focus for spiritual animation and meditation.
The potential for the physical and spiritual senses to overlap in this manner is also reflected in the difficulty associated with distinguishing the spiritual senses from sensory metaphor. Spiritual perception is often differentiated from sensory metaphor via an emphasis on the closely analogous relationship between physical and spiritual sensation. In contrast, sensory metaphor does not rely upon a close relationship to the corporeal sensorium.44 This difference, however, does not preclude the possibility of the spiritual senses merging with metaphor as any binary opposition between felt experience and literary construct has the potential to collapse in the same manner that Brathwaite merges the spiritual and physical senses for meditative ends. This ensures that the distinction between physical, spiritual, and metaphorical sensing is often indeterminate rather than absolute. This indeterminacy allows converts to wield sensory metaphor as a rhetorical form which nonetheless remains connected to both corporeal perception and spiritual sensation.
Sensory metaphor ostensibly bypasses the body while providing an evocative means of reifying an invisible alteration in religious sensibility. This can take various forms in conversion narratives but frequently a change in the senses is directly connected to spiritual metamorphosis. For example, believers might describe their conversion as a change in taste or appetite – from gluttony or excess to a more discerning palate. This was the case for John Forent, a former Carmelite friar who converted to Protestantism, whose story is recounted in The Voluntarie Conversion (1604):
I will now swallow no more of those bitter-sweete baites, which haue so long time abused my taste, as now appeareth by this contrarie heauenly sauour. I desire in the company of the Children of God, to feede on liuing bread in the house of the Lord. The Onions, Leekes and Garlike of AEgypt, haue seemed most odious and stinking to me, since I tasted the celestiall Manna, which the heauens haue rained downe vpon vs.45
Forent’s claim to have fed on spiritual food in the form of Manna plays on the punning potential of heavenly ‘sauour’ and heavenly saviour, a Eucharistic image of perpetual nourishment which will ensure that the convert, like the Israelites during the flight out of Egypt, never goes hungry, and also, one imagines, have sweeter smelling breath. Heavenly feeding, Forent envisages, will bring him into a community of the saved who reside in the ‘house of the Lord’. This also reinforces the trope of Eucharistic sustenance, but situates the consumption of ‘living bread’ within the context of Protestant congregation and community. No longer abusing his taste with the bitterness of onions, leeks, and garlic, Forent charts his movement from Catholicism to Protestantism along the same path as the Israelites fleeing Egypt, but realises this change through a shift in palate.
The senses could also be used to emphasise the convert’s position within an unbroken line of believers, mirroring the role of sensory experience in the chain of consecration applied to sacred objects such as relics and the host by Catholics. For example, the multiple convert William Alabaster, following his initial conversion to Catholicism, uses the sense of touch to place himself in a consecutive line of converts including St Augustine and St Paul:
[…] that excellent and famed Doctour …Saint Augustine, what syghes and sorrowes, what afflictions of mynde what aboundance of teares what vehemency of prayer he gave hym, which the Saint hymselfe describeth most excellently in his bookes of Confessions. And the lyke our Saviour bestowed (or rather much more) upon St Augustines Master, the greatest persecutor then, but afterwards, Doctor, Apostle and Martir, St Paul when he opened his eyes from Judaisme to Christiansme… wherof I thanke the same God our saviour I had my parte also after when yt pleased his Devine Maiestie to touch me with the same finger of mercy that he had donn to them.46
Alabaster maps his own response to conversion, in the form of copious weeping, onto the experiences of two of the most famous converts in the Christian tradition, and claims that this is evidence of how he too has been ‘touched’ by the ‘finger’ of God. In drawing a link firstly between himself and St Augustine, and then further back in time to the Biblical figure of St Paul, Alabaster imagines his tears as a form of religious inheritance. This is an inheritance which is achieved via God’s touch, ensuring that the sensory metaphor conveys an image of proximity and tactility which validates Alabaster’s claim that he is part of an illustrious lineage of converts. As touch was one of the senses most commonly associated with the Catholic reverence for sacred objects, particularly those connected with saints, Alabaster’s use of the metaphor also places him squarely within the Catholic sensorium.47
The inactive or smothered senses also operates as a metaphor for tepid religious feeling. As the French Protestant convert and former Capuchin John Colleij states in a collection of narratives published in 1601:
[…] those who hitherto haue beene wrapped vp in the palpable darknesse of errour and ignorance, and luld a sleepe vnder the shadow of the wings of that strumpet, hauing ben drunke with the wine of her idolatry, may now awake out of that profound sleepe, and slumber of death, to taste how little soeuer it be of the sauourous fruite of life, and drinke onely a glasse of the delicious waters of the fountaines of immortalitie, which streame from the house of God, into the assembly of the elect […]48
Colleij’s description of error as a ‘palpable darknesse’ paradoxically locates blindness in a tangible absence of light, thereby linking the loss of one sense with the heightening of another. The synesthetic combination of sightlessness with touch imagines the unbeliever suffocating in the smothering shadows of their ignorance, before awakening to the sensory delight of election. For Colleij, it is an awakening of the sense of taste in particular which ends the slumber of error, as ‘sauourous fruite’ and ‘delicious waters’, which represent the fountain of life and immortality, are starkly contrasted with the drunken sensory deprivation of idolatry.
Similarly, in Zacheus Converted (1631), the Protestant writer John Wilson argues that the reading of scripture will awaken those who slumber in darkness, precipitating a forceful, and bodily, intercession by God:
Many grow slugglish, drowsie, and luke-warme: Now the words of the wise and their writings, are like goads and nailes fastened to the spirits of men, which might quicken them up unto their duties, & their lines being spirituall and sparkling, might set their hearts a burning within them, with a holy zeale for God and his Glory…Some hee draggeth as by the haire of the head painfully; others he leades as by the hand gently.49
Varying degrees of sensory awareness precipitate this vivid image of the power of God’s intercession on the behalf of the convert – a violent jerking out of complacency or a gentle shepherding onto the right path. The Word can act like nails hammered into the soul and the sluggish and drowsy of spirit can expect to be hauled physically into the realm of the elect. The implication is that those whose slumber is shallow require less stimulation to precipitate action.
Conclusion
The instruments of sense perception provide a conduit through which heavenly or demonic forces can affect the constitution of the believer’s soul. Converts also understand that their physical senses have a counterpart in the spiritual senses which can be used to search their inner self for proof of their election. The thresholds to the body and soul, however, can also be harnessed as powerful metaphors which help to substantiate any change in the convert’s spiritual condition. The importance of the senses and sensory language for converts and their witnesses, both Protestant and Catholic, therefore lies in the way sensate experience brings the divine into the purview of corporeal sensation: the sensing convert looks to the transformative margins of the body in order to add fleshly weight to the intangible. The prevalence of sensory language in these texts also attests to the burden of proof carried by Christian converts who, without recourse to the physical mark of circumcision, have few means by which to proclaim their changed status. While the body is doubtless a locus for anxieties about humankind’s sinful nature, its thresholds nonetheless prove invaluable for converts who wish to provide evidence for a metamorphosis which is both unseen and silent.
Notes
1 Kathleen Lynch and Brooke Conti, in particular, have sought to critique spiritual autobiography as a coherent genre. Lynch looks to ‘reanimate the aspects of language that constitute social action’ by placing Protestant autobiography in the Anglophone world within the context of networks of congregation, community, the print trade, and an emerging scientific empiricism. Conti identifies texts concerned primarily with religious controversy as an important site for autobiographical reflection. Kathleen Lynch, Protestant Autobiography in the Seventeenth-Century Anglophone World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 12–26; Brooke Conti, Confessions of Faith in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 2–17.
2 Lynch, Protestant Autobiography; D. Bruce Hindmarsh, The Evangelical Conversion Narrative: Spiritual Autobiography in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Patricia Caldwell, The Puritan Conversion Narrative: The Beginnings of American Expression (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, first ed. 1983); Michael Questier, Conversion, Politics and Religion in England, 1580–1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Hindmarsh argues that Bunyan’s Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666) and the Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) ‘helped to establish the form of the conversion narrative’, The Evangelical Conversion Narrative, 51. Molly Murray’s work has also highlighted how the early modern culture of conversion influenced poetic style, The Poetics of Conversion in Early Modern English Literature: Verse and Change from Donne to Dryden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
3 Hindmarsh, The Evangelical Conversion Narrative, 6; Questier, Conversion, Politics and Religion in England, 3.
4 Conversion texts which follow a particular narrative pathway in this manner tend to belong to radical Protestant sects and are associated with congregation building. See for example, Vavasor Powell, Sprituall Experiences, of Sundry Beleevers (London, 1653) and John Rogers, Ohel or Beth-shemesh: A Tabernacle for the Sun (London, 1653).
5 The work of Brian Vickers has emphasised the importance of figures and tropes for the expressive power of rhetoric, In Defence of Rhetoric, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), 294–339.
6 Matthew Milner, The Senses and the English Reformation (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 6. On the medieval senses and the cultural framing of perception, see C. M. Woolgar, The Senses in Late Medieval England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006).
7 Richard Brathwaite, Essaies vpon the Fiue Senses, with a pithie one vpon Detraction. Continued With Sundry Christian Resolues, full of passion and deuotion, purposely composed for the zealously-disposed, 2nd ed. (London, 1620), E1r.
8 Joad Raymond points out that ‘accommodation means that language is neither figurative nor literal’, Milton’s Angels: The Early Modern Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 177.
9 As Joe Moshenska argues, Protestant writers frequently elided any distinction between the literal and figural when harnessing the senses as this allowed English reformers to retain a role for the senses in devotional practice while distancing themselves from the carnality of popery. See Moshenska ‘“A Sensible Touching, Feeling and Groping”: Metaphor and Sensory Experience in the English Reformation’, in Passions and Subjectivity in Early Modern Culture, ed. Brian Cummings and Freya Sierhuis (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 183–199 (at 184).
10 Nigel Smith, Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion 1640–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 24.
11 Hindmarsh dates the rise of the Evangelical conversion narrative to the mid seventeenth-century, The Evangelical Conversion Narrative, 2.
12 The writer who represents the apogee of this preoccupation is John Donne. See Ramie Targoff, John Donne: Body and Soul (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2008).
13 Michael C. Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 1.
14 Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves, 10. Fernando Vidal notes that the dualism resulting from the distinction made between the organic soul, which was connected to the flesh, and the intellective soul, which was immortal, meant that any discussion of psychology in the sixteenth-century, what he terms a ‘project in the making’, looked to the body, The Sciences of the Soul: The Early Modern Origins of Psychology, trans. Saskia Brown (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 25.
15 William Vaughan, Naturall and Artificial Directions for Health (London, 1600), E2v. Richard Baxter, Reliquiae Baxterianae: or Mr Richard Baxter’s Narrative of the Most Memorable Passages of his Life and Times, ed. Matthew Sylvester (London, 1696), C2r.
16 Nathaniel Bacon, A Relation of the Fearefvll Estate of Francis Spira, in the yeare, 1548 (London, 1638), B9v. Spira’s sickness led to him becoming a curiosity and ‘multitudes of all sorts’ (B10r) came to see him and marvel at the physical manifestation of his despair. For a compelling examination of conversion as a cure for the diseased soul and its relationship to both embodied rhetoric and the experience of imagined sensation, see Helen Smith, ‘Metaphor, Conversion and Cure in Early Modern England’, Renaissance Quarterly 67 (2014): 473–502. An example of a convert who figures their conversion as a cure is the Catholic convert Benjamin Carier who suffered ongoing illness which led to him visiting Spa where ‘I found myselfe rather worse then better…therefore I resolved that it was hightime for me to setle my thoughts vpon another world […]’, A Carrier to a King (St. Omer, 1635), A4v. On Carier’s illness and the ‘providential’ role played by ill health for converts in general, see Questier, ‘Crypto-Catholicism, Anti-Calvinism and Conversion at the Jacobean Court: The Enigma of Benjamin Carier’, 57–64. Similarly, the puritan convert Rose Thurgood describes her sin as a ‘foul disease’ and a ‘wound’; this is followed immediately by an account of her ‘sister Farnam[s]’ ‘Fever’ and sickness, so that sin and bodily illness are conflated. She also distinguishes between the ‘stone in the heart’ that is her sin and ‘the stone in the kidneyes’, an act of differentiation which frames the metaphor in bodily terms, ‘A Lecture of Repentance’, Scripture Women: Rose Thurgood, ‘A Lecture of Repentance’ & Cicely Johnson, ‘Fanatical Reveries’, ed. Naomi Baker (Nottingham: Trent Editions, 2005), 1–27 (at 11–12).
17 Helkiah Crooke, Microcosmographia: A Description of the body of man (London, 1615), Iii6r.
18 After the Reformation, the Fall was central to Protestant theology and the soul was identified as a spiritual organ which encompassed both the potential and the danger of human knowledge. Consequently, Protestant congregations were warned to be skeptical about knowledge of the soul garnered through religious experience. Nonetheless, moments of revelation thought to signal the condition of the soul became a central part of the process of testimony advocated by the churches in the New England colony, Sarah Rivett, The Science of the Soul in Colonial New England (Williamsburg, VA: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 3–4.
19 John Swynnerton, A Christian Love-Letter: Sent particularly to K. T. a Gentlewoman mis-styled a Catholicke, but generallie intended to all of the Romish Religion, to labour their conuersion to the true faith of Christ Iesvs (London, 1606), B1r. The little book is later identified as ‘A quarten of reasons of catholicke Religion, with as many briefe reasons of refusall, collected and composed by T. Hill’, B3v.
20 Swynnerton, A Christian Love-Letter, B1r
21 Aristotle, De anima (On the Soul), trans. Hugh Lawson-Tancred (London: Penguin, 1986), 132.
22 Aristotle, De anima, trans. Lawson-Tancred, 140.
23 Crooke, Microcosmographia, Ggg4 v.
24 Robert Cawdray, A Treasvrie or Storehovse of Similes: Both pleasaunt, delightfull, and profitable, for all estates of men in generall. Newly collected into Heads and Common places (London, 1600), Nn3v-Nn4r.
25 Richard Sheldon, The Motives of Richard Sheldon Pr. for his iust, voluntary, and free renouncing of Communion with the Bishop of Rome, Paul the 5 and his Church (London, 1612), *4v.
26 Arthur Morton, The Touch-Stone of Conversion. Or, Marks of true Faith. Wherein The Impenitent Sinner is rowsed. The True Beleever discovered. And The Doubting Saint resolved. By that Excellent Man of God now in Heaven, Mr Arthur Morton Scotch Man (London, 1647), B4v-B5r.
27 Tobie Matthew, A True Historical Relation of the Conversion of Sir Tobie Matthew to the Holy Catholic Faith; with the Antecedents and Consequences Thereof, ed. Arnold H. Mathew (London: Burns & Oates, 1904), 14.
28 Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 152–53. Matthew’s conversion story was originally directed to Dame Mary Gage, a Benedictine nun from the prominent recusant family. It remained in manuscript until 1795 with Matthew exhorting his readers to keep ‘it wholly to yourself’ (1). In his autobiography, Matthew repeatedly invokes Augustine as a model and he was the first translator of Augustine’s Confessions into English, see Lynch, Protestant Autobiography, 31.
29 Stephen Egerton, The Boring of the Eare Contayning a plaine and profitable Discourse by way of Dialogue… (London, 1623), A4r.
30 Jennifer Rae McDermott, ‘“The Melodie of Heaven”: Sermonizing the Open Ear In Early Modern England’, in Religion and the Senses in Early Modern Europe, ed. Weistse de Boer and Christine Göttler (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 177–98 (at 180). For a useful discussion of how the ear was thought to communicate to the soul and the primacy of hearing above the other senses, see Bruce R. Smith, The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-Factor (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 103–106.
31 John Eliot, A further Account of the progreß of the Gospel Amongst the Indians In New England: Being a Relation of the Confessions made by several Indians…in order to their admission into Church-fellowship (London, 1660), C4r.
32 Eliot, A further Account of the progreß…, C4v.
33 Eliot, A further Account of the progreß…, C1r.
34 Richard Sherry, A treatise of Schemes & Tropes (London, 1550), E7v.
35 Thomas Browne, A true and full coppy of that which was most imperfectly and Surreptitiously printed before under the name of Religio Medici (London, 1643), B3r-B3v.
36 Augustine, Confessions, trans. Chadwick, 185.
37 Augustine, Confessions, trans. Chadwick, 183.
38 Thomas Shepard, The Sound Beleever. Or, a Treatise of Evangelicall Conversion. Discovering the work of Christs Spirit, in reconciling of a sinner to God (London, 1645), B4r- B5v.
39 Morton, The Touch-Stone of Conversion, A4v-A5r.
40 Morton, The Touch-Stone of Conversion, B8v- B9r.
41 Morton, The Touch-Stone of Conversion, I2v.
42 Brathwaite, Essaies vpon the Fiue Senses, E4r-E4v.
43 On Christ’s body as a space in which social identity was negotiated in the medieval period see Sarah Beckwith, Christ’s Body: Identity, Culture and Society in Late Medieval Writings (London: Routledge, 1993), 22–44.
44 Paul L. Gavrilyuk and Sarah Coakley, ‘Introduction’, in The Spiritual Senses: Perceiving God in Western Christianity, ed. Gavrilyuk and Coakley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 1–19 (at 6).
45 Anon, The Volvntarie Conversion, and Severall Recantations, of foure great learned men, professed Fryers in sundry Monasteries of Fraunce, From the Errovrs of Idolatrie and Poperie, to the true religion established in the Reformed Church (London, 1604), C3r.
46 William Alabaster, Unpublished Works by William Alabaster 1568–1640, ed. Dana F. Sutton (Salzburg: Salzburg University, 1997), 114–15.
47 See Woolgar, The Senses in Late Medieval England, 42.
48 Anon, Eight learned personages lately conuerted (in the Realme of France) from papistrie, to the Churches reformed: hauing aduisedly and holily set downe the reasons that moued them thereunto, trans. by W. B (London, 1601), K3r.
49 John Wilson, Zacheus Converted: Or the Rich Publicans Repentance Restitution. In which the Mysteries of the Doctrine of Conversion, are sweetly laid open and applyed for the establishing of the weakest (London, 1631), A7v-A10v.