CHAPTER 4 - THE THEOLOGY OF PHYSICAL SUFFERING IN HERBERT

Summary

As we saw in the previous chapter, John Donne examines suffering in a relatively limited number of poems. In the poetry of George Herbert, by contrast, questions of suffering form a structural theme. In Herbert, pain has a wide range of meanings, often contradictory. Indeed, in The Temple the spiritual essence of suffering lies partly in the fact that it signifies in profoundly paradoxical ways. This is underlined, for example, by the fact that God inflicts suffering on Herbert's speakers, but is also uniquely capable of alleviating their pain. The theme of pain serves in part as a way of exploring the relation between Herbert's speakers and God. It offers a vocabulary for investigating possible ways of relating to the divine and, by implication, for reflecting on the nature of spiritual experience in general. This becomes clear, for example, in Herbert's poems on the Passion. The speakers in these poems are deeply troubled by the question of how humans can or should respond to Christ's suffering, and by the difficulty of comprehending the nature of Christ's pain.

In this last respect, Herbert's Passion poetry, like that of Donne, can be said to enact the theological controversies over the meaning of pain discussed in chapter one. Indeed, Herbert's conception of the relation between human and divine suffering remains unstable throughout The Temple.