SILENT, PERFORMATIVE WORDS: THE LANGUAGE OF GOD IN VALDESSO AND GEORGE HERBERT

Abstract

The Renaissance rediscovery of classical rhetoric coincided with a Reformation emphasis on the effectiveness of the written word for salvation. It is not surprising, therefore, to find in the writings of sixteenth-century scholars, both theologians and literary theorists, a concern with the power and status of language that is almost an obsession. In Lutheran Germany this conflation of Reformation theology and Renaissance rhetoric led to a joyful affirmation of the power of language in the work of its most famous rhetorician, Melanchthon. His ideas, widely circulated throughout Reformed Europe, included the view that classical Latin as practised by Cicero was a divinely-authenticated language in which to describe the God given world.1 This supposition of a sacral relationship of words to things had the useful side effect that one could identify heretics by the language they used to describe their dangerous doctrines: Melanchthon confidently condemns Anabaptists on the strength of their strange choice of metaphor.2 Towards the end of the sixteenth century in England, however, Protestant divines were expressing a more sober view of the potentialities of human language. Although Sir Philip Sidney could postulate a poet's view of the capacity of poetic utterance to express a reality that was pre-Fall,3 most theologians were all too aware of the fallen-ness of human language. The relationship between words and things had been disrupted for ever, and human language now showed a tendency to be inaccurate to the point of deception. John Hoskins' correlation of word, mental image and thing in his Directions for Speech and Style of 1599 does not anticipate any debasement of the currency of words: