George Herbert's allegorical poem 'The Quip' features the archetypal temptations of Beauty, Money, and Glory. Intriguingly, he lists a 4th one too: 'Wit-and-Conversation'. It says a lot about the 17th century that the desire for wit is ranked alongside the other great temptations

At first I found this totally eccentric. The idols of sex, wealth, glory I can easily understand - but who would sell their soul for witty conversation? Then I remembered Twitter.

Pretty much every day on Twitter you can see people selling their souls for the sake of wit. I would have assumed the motive is “glory” (e.g. becoming renowned and admired for my vicious hot takes). But maybe Herbert is right and it’s a different standalone temptation

When you think of the classic Christian critique of rhetoric (e.g. Augustine) it’s not only about resisting the allure of glory. It’s also about the inherent seductiveness that comes with a skilful mastery of language.

Augustine concedes the pragmatic usefulness of rhetoric, but only after stressing its dangers. The power to influence through words can easily tend toward deceit. Language is for truth. If you’re good at ‘wit’ then it’s not going to be easy to make truth your first priority

Is ‘wit-and-conversation’ a standalone temptation, and not just a means to Glory? Maybe. On Twitter there seem to be examples of people who actively sacrifice glory, wealth, etc for the sake of saying something incredibly witty or striking or infamous. That’s pretty remarkable

Here’s Herbert’s poem - check it out https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44372/the-quip

Random comment: Herbert’s picture of Glory “puffing by / In silks that whistled, who but he” anticipates Bunyan’s characters in The Pilgrim’s Progress. In Bunyan you have to go on an arduous journey to defeat temptation: but in Herbert you just lie there in triumphant passivity

These temptations all conspire “to meet together where I lay”—it’s the temptations that are on a journey, not the Christian. In Herbert, the Christian’s arduous task is learning how to wait. (Compare Tertullian who said that every sin comes from impatience, a failure to wait.)