Torture and the Art of Holy Dying

[For this post I am indebted to Olivia Weisser who, in response to my post on The Sufferings of the Martyrs and the Transgressive Female Gaze, very kindly sent me an extract from her dissertation, Gender and Illness in Early Modern England (John Hopkins, 2010), which she is currently working up for publication with Yale University Press in 2015 as Ill Composed: Sickness, Gender, and Belief in Early Modern England. I would like to take this opportunity of thanking her, as well as expressing my appreciation of the insights her work has given me.]

John Donne’s poem illustrates the ideal early modern death as a peaceful process, in which the sick person passed almost imperceptibly from life to death, without “tear-floods” or “sigh-tempests”. This attitude towards death underlies the entire early modern attitude towards illness. As Olivia Weisser puts it:

Pious patients struggled to withstand pain without displaying fear or despair. Complaints were admissible, but only if they exuded patience and hope.

Weisser points out that the bottom line was the belief that God “was the ultimate source of all afflictions”, and cites Jeremy Taylor’s The Rule and Exercises of Holy Dying (1651) as a typical example of early modern attitudes:

…he that is afraid of pain is afraid of his own nature; and if his fear be violent, it is a sign his Patience is none at all; and an impatient person is not ready dressed for Heaven. (P. 124; online text here.)

At first sight, all this calm patience in the face of suffering would seem to be a far cry from what we may suppose to be the experience of and response to torture, but Weisser establishes a close discursive link between patient forbearance in the face of secular suffering – particularly illness and the pains of childbirth – and the sufferings of the martyrs, in which torture played a frequent part:

…torture became a lasting model of suffering well into the 1600s. John Foxe’s sensational account of the persecution of Protestant martyrs under the Catholic Mary Tudor, a book popularly known as the Book of Martyrs, was integral to developing and popularizing this discourse.

Alice Thornton, for example, says of her fifth pregnancy, in 1657:

I was upon the racke in bearing my childe with such exquisitt torment as if each lime weare divided from other, for the space of two houers. (The Autobiography of Mrs. Alice Thornton of East Newton, Co. York, 1875, p. 95.)

Weisser – drawing on Sharon Howard’s ‘Imagining the Pain and Peril of Seventeenth-Century Childbirth: Travail and Deliverance in the Making of an Early Modern World’ (Social History of Medicine, 16:3, 2003, pp. 367-82) – comments:

Comparing her pain to torture highlighted the intensity of her suffering, as well as the spiritual significance of her deliverance from danger. Thornton’s pain, like that of a martyr, was harsh and harrowing, and surviving such an ordeal conveyed God’s profound grace and mercy. Part of the metaphor’s power also lay in the overlapping imagery of a body split on the rack and a body torn apart in childbirth. The discourse of martyrdom gave deep and positive meaning to the spiritual, as well as physical, experience of suffering.

Furthermore:

Martyrdom offered scripts for expressing the torments of pain, as well as models of heroic endurance.This is the second way patients employed the discourse of martyrdom: in imitation of martyrs themselves.

The Stoicism of the early modern martyrs, Weisser argues, derives from the late medieval conception of pain as having its origin “in the soul while the body served merely as a vehicle for its expression”:

Just as Protestant sufferers viewed illness as an impediment to overcome in order to pray and meditate, Foxe’s martyrs exhibited a remarkable ability to transcend the corporeal.

Taylor writes elsewhere in Holy Dying about the “supervening necessity” of suffering:

Nothing is intolerable that is necessary … tie the man down to it and he endures it. Now God hath bound this sicknesse upon thee by the condition of Nature … it is also bound upon thee by speciall providence, and with a designe to try thee, and with purposes to reward and crown thee. These cords thou canst not break; and therefore lie thee down gently, and suffer the hand of God to do what he please, that at least thou mayest swallow an advantage, which the care and severe mercies of God forces down thy throat.
Remember that all men have passed this way, the bravest, the wisest, & the best men, have bin subject to sicknes & sad diseases … and under so great, and so universal precedents, so common fate of men, he that will not suffer his portion, deserves to be something else than a man, but nothing that is better. (Pp. 94-5; online text here.)

I have written in another post about how this Stoical view of suffering was so deeply ingrained in the seventeenth-century mindset that any challenge to it was perceived as potentially seditious, and I’ve also posted in praise of Melissa Sanchez, whose Erotic Subjects: The Sexuality of Politics in Early Modern English Literature (OUP, 2011) explores the political ramifications of a kind of institutionalized culture of suffering, in which ‘Agony and abjection’ are given positive meanings as ‘signs of a power that reconfigures traditional definitions of heroism and masculinity’, and ‘Subjects know that they are being abused, but they tolerate affliction because they enjoy the moral authority it gives them’ (pp. 17 and 240). Rejoicing to suffer for Christ and enjoying the moral authority of being an afflicted subject are essentially the same thing; as Pomfret puts it, in the context of the Rye House Plot of 1683:

That man only is Christianly patient, that … is chearful in it; does not only quietly and serenely suffer wrong, but rejoyces in it. This [is] the true Martyrs patience. (Thomas Pomfret, Passive Obedience, Stated and Asserted, London, 1683, p. 8.)

Weisser, however, is primarily interested in what this culture of suffering meant at an individual, rather than a political level.

Calm composure and pious speech in life’s final moments were key signifiers of salvation. Attempts to die in this ideal way were epitomized by sufferers who experienced agonizing pain in the throes of death but remained insensible to the torments.

“These individuals,” she stresses, “were not ascetics or martyrs, but ordinary individuals”, able to overcome their pain by “concentrat[ing] on the afterlife”. Nor, crucially, were they in a state of unconsciousness or insensibility:

The model death in early modern England entailed stoic endurance of pain and a lucid mind. Witnesses at the deathbed reassured absent friends and family that the dying experienced an awakened state in their final moments.

This insistence that the dying person be both conscious of their agonies and patiently accepting of them is at the core of the early modern “art of suffering”, which is the title of Ann Thompson’s book on Puritan attitudes to suffering in the seventeenth century, and which I have written a few comments on here. Thompson focuses on only a narrow range of writers, and analyzes the way in which their approach to the subject of suffering and death was deconstructed by the advance of “anti-providential thought” during the seventeenth century. She notes that, by the later part of the century, Puritan treatises on suffering deal rather with pain management than with the concept of spiritual growth or development through suffering, What Weisser and Sanchez and, I think, my own work demonstrate is that the decline of faith in God’s providence – and a concomitant rejection of the concept of the inevitability, necessity and utility of suffering – can be observed across across a much wider spectrum of writings, opening the way, philosophically, to widespread acceptance of the pleasure principle – the Epicurean idea that it is both natural and right to avoid suffering – as an approach to life, and leading to a society sanitized of suffering by antibiotics, distanced from it by television cameras, toying with it as a means to achieving short-term objectives in sports and sadomasochistic role play, but largely incapable even of imagining the role it played in the lives of people like John Donne or Jeremy Taylor.

FOLLOW-UP: Reblogging Daniel Goldberg’s comments on my comments on Olivia Weisser’s forthcoming book!

Professor Goldberg, On the Modern Rise of Hedonism: Changing Views Towards Pleasure, Pain & Suffering, writes:

John Yamamoto-Wilson, an early modern historian who has published a recent book on pain and suffering in 17th c. England, has a fascinating blog post examining some of Olivia Weisser’s forthcoming work on pain, suffering, and gender in early modern England (go Wes!).

(Historians of pain are eagerly awaiting Dr. Weisser’s forthcoming book!)

I am interested in Dr. Yamamoto-Wilson’s conclusion, but I do want to first note the posture in which I approach this subject.

Namely, I’m a modernist through-and-through. My expertise is deep but narrow, focused primarily on pain in its 19th and early 20th c. contexts. However, my primary methodology for thinking about pain is through the history of ideas, and specifically focuses on changing ideas about objectivity from the early modern to the modern world. I take very seriously the obligation to think about history dialectically, which means that if I want to responsibly discuss changing views about pain in the modern era in the West, I had better get a sufficient understanding of some of the attitudes, practices, and beliefs about pain that precede the modern changes.

So I read widely and voraciously on early modern pain, and there have been a number of outstanding works on the subject in the past 5-6 years (see, to name but a few, Lisa Smith’s work, Hannah Newton’s terrific book The Sick Child, this excellent 2011 anthology, and Sam Sandassie’s fascinating blog).

Nevertheless, I am absolutely an interloper in the period. But given my emphasis on changing ideas about pain, I’m not entirely ignorant of the scholarship and the substantive complexities regarding pain and suffering in early modern contexts. As they say, I know enough to be dangerous.

Dr. Yamamoto-Wilson discusses some excerpts from Dr. Weisser’s work alongside some rich primary sources, and concludes as follows:

What Weisser and Sanchez and, I think, my own work demonstrate is that the decline of faith in God’s providence – and a concomitant rejection of the concept of the inevitability, necessity and utility of suffering – can be observed across across a much wider spectrum of writings, opening the way, philosophically, to widespread acceptance of the pleasure principle – the Epicurean idea that it is both natural and right to avoid suffering – as an approach to life, and leading to a society sanitized of suffering by antibiotics, distanced from it by television cameras, toying with it as a means to achieving short-term objectives in sports and sadomasochistic role play, but largely incapable even of imagining the role it played in the lives of people like John Donne or Jeremy Taylor.

I am of course in no position to disagree intelligently with Dr. Yamamoto-Wilson’s assessment of attitudes towards pain and suffering in early modern contexts. But given that he concludes by addressing changes in such attitudes to the modern era, I have some thoughts to share.

First, the idea that Western society has become less stoic, less capable of withstanding pain and suffering and the goods it can bring, is itself an ancient trope. Indeed, the tension between Epicureanism and Stoicism at least in part revolved around this concern. Marcus Aurelius had a great deal to say about pain, noting that it was neither everlasting nor intolerable and does not touch the soul (although he explicitly denies that pain is either good or evil).

This is not to suggest that Dr. Yamamoto-Wilson is mistaken in arguing that the modern world became more Epicurean than Stoic, that pain became less tolerable, but rather that where the historical narrative is ancient and powerful, we should proceed carefully and look closely to see if developments are more complex than that for which an overarching and dominant meta-narrative typically allows.

Second, presuming for the moment that Dr. Yamamoto-Wilson is largely correct in charting the broad changes in attitudes towards pain and suffering from early modern to modern, I think we should be extremely careful to avoid the hoary and increasingly dubious belief that relief of pain and suffering was not a priority in the medieval and early modern worlds, especially for healers. As I noted previously, we have some sophisticated scholarship from medievalists and early modernists that undermines this long-held belief. These historians have gathered significant evidence showing that lay people, theologians, and healers in medieval and early modern contexts were extremely concerned with practical relief of pain and suffering, even at the same time that endurance of such pain and suffering was thought to be a gift (of grace?) and an opportunity for redemption.

There is obviously a tension between the co-existing emphasis on the goodness and utility of pain and suffering and the focus on its alleviation, but that kind of ambivalence is itself emblematic of the phenomenon of pain. As Emily Dickinson notes, pain has an element of blank. It defies categories and descriptions, and generates a variety of paradoxes (I teach a class on the paradoxes of pain. Seriously!).

Third, and again presuming that Dr. Yamamoto-Wilson’s assessment is correct in the broad strokes, we should be extremely careful in our interpretation of the modern end of the comparison (and as a modernist, I speak with a bit more confidence here). That is, we late moderns may well be vastly more Epicurean than our more Stoic early modern predecessors. But it does not follow that the notion of enduring pain and suffering, nor the redemptive potential of such pain and suffering, is either uncommon or enervated. This, like most features of the meaning of pain and suffering, likely varies significantly among different societies in the West, but especially in the U.S., known for its reliogisity, we have a deal of evidence suggesting the typicality and power of beliefs in the significance of enduring pain and its redemptive potential, as well as the moral value of suffering in silence.

As ever, I come back to the tension between the aphorism that the past is a foreign country and the likelihood that we may nevertheless speak related languages of pain and suffering.

Thoughts?

UPDATE: Do check out Dr. Yamamoto-Wilson’s fantastic response in the comments!!

Here is my “fantastic response”!

Thank you for these thoughtful comments. Societies, cultures, creeds and philosophies come and go, but pain is a constant and – however much others may sympathize or empathize – we experience it alone. We all experience it, but we only experience our own. We don’t even know for sure what it is like for our nearest and dearest, never mind for people long dead.

Having said that, we can gain some insights from the way people talk about their pain, the terms in which they discuss it. My Irish grandmother would never grumble about her rheumatism but chirpily announce that the little people were “playing her up”. In her sadness she sometimes felt Saint Jude (she always prayed to him as the patron saint of lost causes) was standing behind her, laying a comforting hand on her shoulder. These things tell me something about how she perceived her pain, both physical and mental.

I agree absolutely that we cannot sustain, overall, the thesis that “relief of pain and suffering was not a priority in the medieval and early modern worlds”. Succour for the sick was one of the main forms of charity, and charity was central to a moral person’s sense of duty. At the same time, there are certain areas in which we unquestionably feel the past is a foreign country, as when Dr. Weisser tells us that “Physicians opposed to anesthesia in the 1800s argued that the ability to feel pain was essential to life and, conversely, dulling pain was tantamount to death.” The value placed on dying patiently while fully conscious runs counter to our own values. “It was a mercy in the end,” we often hear. “She died in her sleep.” Or the two-edged sword when a loved one is dying under anaesthetics after surgery. “Can he hear me?” we fretfully ask the nurses, as we whisper words of comfort, hoping that he can. “Keep stroking his hand,” they say. “That’ll comfort him.” But ask them if he can feel the wounds made by the scalpel, ask them if he knows his lifeblood is seeping away and, “No, he can’t feel a thing,” they’ll tell us. “He’s beyond all that.”

Even though Dr. Weisser and I share an interest in the seventeenth century, I have not made a special study of early modern attitudes towards illness and the pain arising from it. The picture Dr. Weisser is painting certainly highlights differences between early modern attitudes and the present time. I would imagine, though, that there were those who hoped to cease upon the midnight with no pain, whatever the social paradigm of a “good” death dictated. What interested me was the paradigms, the ways in which writers on such topics as the art of holy dying framed conceptions and expectations about death and suffering. Pain may be beyond words, but words and ideas can sustain people in their pain – or, conversely, exacerbate things.

It’s interesting that you make the association between religion and “the typicality and power of beliefs in the significance of enduring pain and its redemptive potential, as well as the moral value of suffering in silence,” especially in the United States, where the values of the early modern puritans are more widely preserved than in my native Britain. Modern society also has access to a much broader range of religious and ideological frameworks – from psychotherapy to Buddhism – in its processing of pain and suffering. No doubt these also play a part.

I always feel I’m on slightly shaky ground when I step outside the seventeenth century, and I’m a lot less sure about the dispersal of Stoic and Epicurean ideas at the present time than I am when I pore over the seventeenth-century literature on the subject! When I speak of modern times, I speak not as an expert, but merely as one who is living in them. It’s also something of a constraint that in a blog post one is pretty much obliged to paint one’s picture with broad stokes, with all the pitfalls that generalizations generate. So it is with some misgivings that I venture to suggest that, today, the emphasis is primarily on issues of pain management whereas, until about the middle of the seventeenth century, it would have been divided between managing one’s pain on the one hand and seeing pain as an opportunity for growth, development and acceptance of the divine will on the other.