Christ in the Winepress (GH #27)

On Thursday of this Easter Christians around the world remembered the Lord’s Supper and Jesus’ vigil in the Garden of Gethsemene, and on Good Friday we recalled the day of Christ’s crucifixion. I cannot think of a better George Herbert poem to accompany these two days than “The Agony,” which develops the theme of Christ's sacrifice through the metaphor of the winepress.

“The Agony” begins, however, not with Jesus’ Passion, but with scientific exploration:

Philosophers have measured mountains,

Fathomed the depths of seas, of states, and kings;

Walked with a staff to heav’n, 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,—Sin and Love. (1-6)

The speaker of the poem opens with the challenge of measuring geographical locations and political entities, and then switches to the more difficult task of measuring two abstract ideas: Sin and Love.

As a scientific observer and experimenter in the poem, Herbert remains distant from the object of his observation, which is the agony of Christ, until the final two lines of the poem, where the scientific experiment becomes a personal and spiritual experience for the speaker. In the second stanza, the poet as observer describes the agony of Christ:

            Who would know Sin, let him repair

Unto Mount Olivet; there shall he see

A man so wrung with pains, that all his hair,

            His skin, his garments bloody be.

Sin is that press and vice, which forceth pain

To hunt his cruel food through ev’ry vein. (7-12)

Herbert’s references to wringing, bloody garments, pressing, and forcing would have evoked in his readers the familiar winepress image from the Old Testament and Revelation. One of the most extensive passages focusing on the winepress image comes from Isaiah 63, which features a dialogue between Isaiah the prophet and a mysterious man wearing a robe sprinkled with wine/blood:

 

[Isaiah:]  Who is this . . . that is glorious in his apparel, traveling in the greatness of his strength? 

[Man:]  I who speak in righteousness, mighty to save.

[Is:]  Why art thou red in thine apparel, and thy garments like him who treadeth in the winefat?

[Man:]  I have trodden the winepress alone. . . ; for I will tread them in mine anger, . . . and their blood shall be sprinkled upon my garments, and I will stain all my rainment. (63:1-3)

In 1623 (during George Herbert’s university years) popular preacher Lancelot Andrewes gave an Easter sermon on this Isaiah 63 passage and discussed the winepress imagery at length. The man with the blood-stained garments is Christ, says Andrewes, and the Scripture passage is a prophecy of two winepresses: the Winepress of Redemption and the Winepress of Vengeance (220).*

Lancelot Andrewes states, "A double wine-presse . . . we find; Christ was in both. . . . In the former, He was himselfe troden and pressed: He was the grapes and clusters himselfe. In this later heere, He that was troden before, gets up again, and doth heere tread upon, and tread downe . . . upon some others. The Presse he was troden in, was his Crosse and Passion" (230-31). The second press is Christ's triumph over his enemies, which Andrewes says occurred during the Resurrection and will also occur in the execution of God's divine wrath in the end times.

Focusing on this first pressing mentioned by Andrewes in his sermon, that of the Passion of Christ, Herbert's poem "The Agony" uses the winepress image to refer to the weight of sin pressing Christ during the Passion. On Mount Olivet, the place of Jesus' prayer to God and betrayal by Judas, Jesus was tormented by the cup of suffering he knew he would have to taste on the cross. "Wrung with pains" (9), he sweat drops of blood. Andrewes calls this agony of Jesus' the first strain of his pressing.

Christ being pressed in the winepress of "The Agony's" second stanza produces the wine of stanza three, which states,

            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 liquor sweet and most divine,

Which my God feels as blood; but I, as wine. (13-18)

The act of the winepress is compared to the Passion of Christ, and Christ's body is transformed by Herbert into a wine barrel, “set . . . abroach” or punctured (15). The cup of suffering, which is the curse of Adam's sin that Jesus would take upon himself, turns into the cup of blessing and salvation after he has been pressed on the cross, and the new cup is offered to all who will partake of it. Love in “The Agony” becomes a liquid substance, felt by God as blood and by the speaker as wine through the symbolic nature of Holy Communion.

As Henry Vaughan, an admirer of Herbert's poetry, states in his own poem “The Passion,” Christ as the vine was "prest / To be my feast!" (19-20). Let us drink deeply of His divine love as we remember His sacrifice this Easter.

* Andrewes, Lancelot. Sermons. Ed. G. M. Story. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1967.

Bridging the Gap Between Neighbors

In my British novel class this semester, I have been teaching Elizabeth Gaskell’s North & South (from the mid-Victorian era). Some folks know this novel through the same way I originally become acquainted with it: as the 2004 BBC mini-series. While I love the mini-series, it makes several alterations to the characters and their interactions.

One such difference comes in the proposal scene, when John Thornton, a no-nonsense businessman, reveals his powerful feelings for Margaret Hale, the newcomer to town. Margaret is an Anglican Christian, whose strong faith throughout the novel ministers to her family and friends in times of loss and grief. Yet, she struggles throughout, as Thornton does, with a strong self-will—and, in the first half of the novel, a prejudice against Mr. Thornton. This prejudice, along with the unexpected strength of Thornton’s professed feelings and an overwhelming embarrassment, prompts Margaret to respond to Thornton’s proposal harshly. She doesn’t just reject his proposal of marriage, she rejects him as a person: 

Thornton: “I know you despise me; allow me to say, it is because you do not understand me.”

Margaret: “I do not care to understand.”

Hadrian's Wall, England

While Thornton, himself no great understander of Margaret, at least tries to bridge the gap between them by offering to open himself to her, Margaret shuts down this opportunity. She does not care to understand him. This barrier remains between them for much of the rest of the novel. How unfortunate that Margaret, otherwise in many parts of the novel an example of Christian faith, hope, and love, should be such a poor example when it comes to her interactions with this particular neighbor.

I am reminded of a passage from the end of what is often considered C.S. Lewis’s greatest speech or sermon, “The Weight of Glory”: “You have never talked to a mere mortal,” states Lewis.

“Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit. . . . This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind . . . which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously—no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. . . . Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your Christian neighbour, he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also Christ . . . is truly hidden.”

Rather than approaching her “neighbor,” Mr. Thornton, who, at great risk, has laid his feelings bare before her, as if he were a “holy object” with an immortal soul, Margaret has approached him with superiority and presumption. She is sorry for her harshness afterward, but the damage to that neighbor has been done. It takes Margaret’s humbling “fall” and Thornton’s charity in protecting her from its consequences before their relationship begins to be repaired.