The Knowledge of God
Pulter’s poem ends with a promise that after the Final Judgment and Resurrection, “we shall know (without which all is none) / The eternal essence, even as we are known” (ll. 58–59). But what did it mean to “know” the eternal essence, or God, in the seventeenth century? Robert Herrick’s terse couplet, the entirety of his poem “What God Is,” succinctly summarizes one position on this question:
- God is above the sphere of our esteem,
- And is the best known, not defining Him.
Herrick has other poems in which he dwells on the impossibility of ever knowing God, as in his poem “To Find God”:
- Weigh me the fire; or canst thou find
- A way to measure out the wind;
- Distinguish all those floods that are
- Mix’d in that watery theatre;
- And taste thou them as saltless there
- As in their channel first they were.
- Tell me the people that do keep
- Within the kingdoms of the deep;
- Or fetch me back that cloud again,
- Beshiver’d into seeds of rain;
- Tell me the motes, dust, sands, and spears
- Of corn, when summer shakes his ears;
- Show me that world of stars, and whence
- They noiseless spill their influence:
- This if thou canst, then show me Him
- That rides the glorious cherubim.
Margaret Cavendish, a poet writing at roughly the same time as Pulter, also frequently takes the position that it is best not to ask after questions that can’t be answered, including cosmological questions (as in her poem “Of Stars”) as well as theological questions (as in her poem “Great God from Thee All Infinites Do Flow,” which ends, “But since none knows the great Creator, must / Man seek no more, but in his greatness trust.”).
- We find that i’th’East Indies stars there be,
- Which we in our horizon ne’er did see;
- Yet we do take great pains in glasses clear
- To see what stars do in the sky appear.
- But yet the more we search, the less we know,
- Because we find our work doth endless grow.
- For who knows, but those stars we see by night
- Are suns which to some other worlds give light?
- But could our outward senses pace the sky,
- As well as can imaginations high,
- If we were there, we might as little know
- As those which stay, and never up do go.
- Then let no man in fruitless pains life spend:
- The most we know is, Nature death will send.
- Great God, from Thee all infinites do flow,
- And by Thy power from thence effects do grow.
- Thou order’st all degrees of matter; just
- As ’tis Thy will and pleasure, move it must.
- And by Thy knowledge order’st all for th’best,
- And in Thy knowledge doth Thy wisdom rest,
- And wisdom cannot order things amiss,
- For where disorder, there no wisdom is.
- Besides, great God, Thy will is just—for why?
- Thy will still on Thy wisdom doth rely.
- O pardon Lord for what I now here speak
- Upon a guess; my knowledge is but weak.
- But Thou hast made such creatures as mankind,
- And gav’st them something which we call a mind;
- Always in motion, it ne’er quiet lies
- Until the figure of his body dies.
- His sev’ral thoughts, which sev’ral motions are,
- Do raise up love, hope, joys, and doubts and fear.
- As love doth raise up hope, so fear doth doubt,
- Which makes him seek to find the great God out.
- Self-love doth make him seek to find if he
- Came from, or shall last to, eternity.
- But motion, being slow, makes knowledge weak,
- And then his thoughts ’gainst ignorance do beat,
- As fluid waters ’gainst hard rocks do flow,
- Break their soft streams, and so they backward go:
- Just so do thoughts, and then they backward slide
- Unto the place where first they did abide,
- And there in gentle murmurs do complain
- That all their care and labor is in vain.
- But since none knows the great Creator, must
- Man seek no more, but in his greatness trust.
- FINIS.
While Cavendish frequently concludes that the limits of the human mind forever prohibit us from accessing truly divine knowledge, Neo-Platonic poets like Thomas Traherne imagine their mind as transcending the body. Traherne’s poem “The Consummation,” much like Pulter’s “Perfection of Patience and Knowledge,” moves from what we can know in this realm to what we will know “in a glorious day” (l. 41; the Final Judgment?), though unlike Pulter’s poem, “The Consummation” begins not with images of the resurrection but with the transcendence of the mind.
- The Thoughts of Men appear
- Freely to mov within a Sphere
- Of endless Reach; and run,
- Tho in the Soul, beyond the Sun.
- The Ground on w[hi]ch they acted be
- Is unobserv’d Infinity.
- Traversing throu the Sky,
- Tho here, beyond it far they fly:
- Abiding in the Mind
- An endless Liberty they find:
- Thou-out all Spaces can extend,
- Nor ever meet or know an End.
- They, in their native Sphere,
- At boundless Distances appear:
- Eternity can measure;
- Its no Beginning see with Pleasure.
- Thus in the Mind an endless Space
- Doth nat’rally display its face.
- Wherin becaus we no
- Object distinctly find or know;
- We sundry Things invent,
- That may our Fancy giv content;
- See Points of Space beyond the Sky,
- And in those Points see Creatures ly.
- Spy Fishes in the Seas,
- Conceit them swimming there with Eas;
- The Dolphins & the Whales,
- Their very Finns, their very Scales,
- As there within the briny Deep
- Their Tails the flowing Waters sweep.
- Can see the very Skies,
- As if the same were in our Eys;
- The Sun, tho in the Night,
- As if it mov’d within our Sight;
- One Space beyond another still
- Discovered; think while ye will.
- Which, tho we don’t descry,
- (Much like by night an useless Ey,
- Not shaded with a Lid,
- But in a darksom Dungeon hid)
- At last shall in a glorious Day
- Be made its Objects to display
- And then shall Ages be
- Within its wide Eternity;
- All Kingdoms stand,
- Howe’r remote, yet nigh at hand;
- The Skies, & what beyond them ly,
- Exposed unto ev’ry Ey.
- Nor shall we then invent
- Nor alter Things; but with content
- All in their places see,
- As doth the Glorious Deity;
- Within the Scope of whose Great Mind,
- We all in their tru Nature find.
I will end this curation with another Cavendish poem, her “Motion of Thoughts,” which will help shine new light on Pulter’s “Perfection of Patience and Knowledge.” While Traherne’s poem replaces bodily resurrection with transcendence, Cavendish’s poem focuses our attention not just on divine knowledge, but also on the status of the body, or soul, who is capable of “knowing” anything at the Final Judgment. If Pulter’s poem has an explicit reference to 1 Corinthians 13:12, Cavendish’s gloss on the biblical verse is more implicit; Cavendish is also perversely physicalist when she says that even though St. Paul promises that we will see God with our eyes, the bodies that resurrect may be so radically different that this may be only a figure of speech (ll. 57–62). If Pulter’s poem gestures to a fantasy of knowledge, Cavendish’s ends by bringing her readers crashing back to earth: “all the wise and learnèd cannot tell / What’s done in Heaven, or how we there shall dwell” (ll. 67–68).
- Musing one time alone, mine eyes being fixed
- Upon the ground, my sight with gravel mixed,
- My feet did walk without direction’s guide;
- My thoughts did travel far and wander wide.
- At last they chanced upon a hill to climb,
- And being there, saw things that were divine.
- First, what they saw: a glorious light did blaze,
- Whose splendor made it painful for the gaze.
- No separations nor shadows by stops made,
- No darkness did obstruct this light with shade.
- This light had no dimension, nor no bound,
- No limits, but it filled all places round.
- Always in motion ’twas, yet fixed did prove,
- Like to the twinkling stars, which never move.
- This motion working, running several ways,
- Seemed as if contradictions it would raise,
- For with itself it seemed not to agree,
- Like to a skein of thread, if’t knotted be.
- For some did go straight in an even line,
- But some again did cross, and some did twine.
- Yet at the last, all several motions run
- Into the first Prime Motion, which begun.
- In various forms and shapes did life run through,
- Which was eternal, but the shapes were new;
- No sooner made, but quickly passed away,
- Yet while they were, they did desire to stay.
- But motion to one form can ne’er constant be,
- For life, which motion is, joys in variety.
- For the First Motion everything can make,
- But cannot add unto itself, nor take.
- Indeed no other matter could it frame:
- Itself was all, and in itself the same.
- Perceiving now this fixèd point of light,
- I spied a union: Knowledge, Power, and Might,
- Wisdom, Truth, Justice, Providence, all one,
- No attribute was by itself alone.
- Not like to several lines drawn to one point,
- For what doth meet may be again disjoint.
- But this same point, from whence all lines did flow,
- Nought can diminish it, or make it grow.
- ’Tis its own center and circumference round,
- Yet neither has a limit nor a bound.
- A fixed eternity, and so will last:
- All present is, nothing to come or past.
- A fixed perfection; nothing can add more;
- All things is it, and itself doth adore.
- My thoughts then wondering at what they did see,
- Found at the last themselves the same to be,
- Yet were so small a branch, as they could not
- Know whence they sprung, nor how they were begot.
- Some say, all that we know of Heaven above
- Is that we joy, and that we love.
- But who can tell that? For all we know,
- Those passions we call joy and love below
- May by excess such other passions grow;
- None in the world is capable to know.
- Just like our bodies, although they shall rise,
- And as St. Paul says, see God with our eyes,
- Yet may we in the change such difference find,
- Both in our bodies, and also in mind,
- As if we never had been of mankind,
- And that these eyes we see with now were blind.
- Say we can measure all the planets high,
- And number all the stars be in the sky,
- And we can circle all the world about,
- And can find all th’effects of nature out:
- Yet all the wise and learnèd cannot tell
- What’s done in Heaven, or how we there shall dwell.