Equivocal Predication: George Herbert’s Way to God by Heather A. R. Asals

Abstract

this book is astonishingly cheerful as well as positive, and vividly conveys a sense of the courage and resilience that women showed in daily life. NOTES 1 A. Eccles, “The Early Use of English for Midwiferies,” Neuphilologische Mittei­ lungen, 78 (1977), 3832 The hyrth of mankynde (London, 1545), “A prologue to the women readers,” see Eccles, p. 381. 3 “The Midwives’ Books,” Medical Life, 42 (1935), 169. e. Margaret fulton / Mount Saint Vincent University Heather A. R. Asals, Equivocal Predication: George Herbert’s Way to God (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981). xii, 145. $25.00 Heather Asals describes Equivocal Predication as a “technical study of the dynamics of Herbert’s religious language” (p. x i); she also claims Renais­ sance logic “demands that we drop many of our everyday assumptions about meaning and that we develop a new way of finding meaning” (p. 111). Whether Renaissance logic makes such demands could be debated, but cer­ tainly Asals’s book does: for example, the expression in the title, taken from Aristotle, employed by Aquinas among others, and interpreted here as a seventeenth-century alternative to Thomistic analogy. While Sidney said that the poet “nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth,” this book assures us that essentially Herbert tells the truth by making punning affirmations about God. Although she hails “logic” as a new and significant way to understand Herbert, Asals broadens and strengthens her treatment of the poetry con­ siderably by resorting to such matters as metonymy and synecdoche, more traditionally regarded as in the domain of rhetoric. Her first chapter focuses on writing — not the imaginative process we usually associate with the term when speaking of poets, but the physical act of handwriting, with which she claims Herbert was obsessed (p. 19). She implies, without evidence that I can recognize as such, that the Puritans viewed handwriting as evil. (Or is she equivocating, or speaking metonymically ? Poets can say one thing and mean another, but should critics?) For Herbert and the Anglicans, however, the scribal act symbolizes the cere­ monial law and somehow becomes a sacrament. Language broken eucharistically (and literally in word-play) becomes the way to heaven for Herbert, and presumably for his readers. Much of Asals’s best work in this book is to be found in the second chapter, on the “Sacramental Voice,” which recalls 98 her excellent article in ELH (1969), and in the fourth, on “wisdom” litera­ ture, which makes interesting use of seventeenth-century scripture commen­ taries. (I shall touch on the third and fifth chapters later.) In Asals’s inter­ pretation, the Herbert of “The Church” is not so much the human being or the believer as the poet, and more specifically the poet as a rather philo­ sophical priest; accordingly, the poetry is treated as liturgy with continual ontological significance. In her preface Asals rightly singles out Joseph Summers’s study as the “basic book” on Herbert, and then tells us she considers her own as in “many ways. . . a sequel to that book: a more advanced reading of Her­ bert’s religion and art” (p. xi). Because she claims so much, because in fact the book is said to have established “a new critical milieu” (p. i) for the interpretation of Herbert and other poets, it cannot be ignored. But because of the book’s difficulty (I found it time-consuming far out of proportion to its length), some readers may choose to accept its conclusions (if they like them) or reject them (if they don’t) without much probing into, say, the medieval or seventeenth-century writers cited. A somewhat detailed review, then, seems warranted. Asals is forthright in objecting to what some other writers have said about Herbert, and her book itself invites forthright com­ ments. In spite of some merits and much potential, this book must be regarded as flawed on a number of counts. As I shall try to show, there are elements of confusion in its presentation of Puritanism and “Anglicanism” as related to Herbert, as well as in its treatment of Augustine and of theol­ ogy in general. (The fact that many of these confusions are shared by others in our time extenuates but...