The Word Within: Predicating the Presence of God in George Herbert's The Temple

Abstract

The Word Within: Predicating the Presence of God in George Herbert's The Temple by John Savoie Leave writing Plays, and chuse for thy command Some peacefull Province in Acrostick Land. There thou maist wings display and Altars raise And torture one poor word Ten thousand ways. John Dryden, "Mac Flecknoe"1 Dryden is not entirely mistaken in the above judgment. Shadwell has proven a minor poet, and acrostic is, in general, a fairly minor device even in the hands of a major poet. Dryden errs only in his insinuation against Herbert, all but named in the advice to "wings display and Altars raise," who achieved something serious and substantial in his only real acrostic, "Coloss. 3.3." Two variations help distinguish Herbert's poem. Whereas in most acrostics the first letters, the "tips of the verse," descend to spell out a name, title, key word or perhaps phrase, in "Coloss. 3.3" whole words descend to form a complete thought, a profound mystery of the Christian faith. Moreover, the linking words slant progressively deeper into the line so that the scriptural paraphrase would be buried and lost if not for the italics and capitals to call attention to what is hidden: Coloss. 3.3 Our life is hid with Christ in God. My words & thoughts do both expresse this notion, That Life hath with the sun a double motion. The first Is straight and our diurnali friend, The other Hid and doth obliquely bend. One life is wrapt In flesh, and tends to earth: The other winds towards Him, whose happie birth Taught me to live here so, That still one eye Should aim and shoot at that which Is on high: Quitting with daily labour all My pleasure, To gain at harvest an eternali Treasure.1 56John Savoie The acrostic says, "My Life Is Hid In Him That Is My Treasure" but what the acrostic does, we might articulate as "Scripture Is The Treasure Hidden In My Poem." In a poem pervaded by doubleness, the message of hiding and the message hidden parallel and complement each other. And yet analogy (Herbert : Christ :: Scripture : Poem is the best we can do) cannot quite coordinate the terms, because in the shift from persons to texts the predication between the human and divine is not repeated but rather reversed: Herbert -------------------------» Christ hid Poem <------------------------- Scripture What reverses the arrows and confounds the analogy is the changing meaning of "hid." In one sense Herbert's life is hid or secured in Christ. In the second sense Scripture is hidden or obscured in Herbert's poetry. In such cold discriminating light, the common term of "hid" shrinks to a mere verbal trick, the kind of "torturing" of "one poor word" to which Dryden might object. But Herbert viewed neither his God, self, Scripture, poetry, nor language itself in such light, and I invoke once again the Herbertian logic by which the two meanings of "hid" may unite in "one word" to create a larger "sense most true." "How neatly do we give one only name" to this single verb that governs these terms, we might hear Herbert whisper.3 If each meaning implies the other, then a comparable relationship does hold between the two persons and their two texts. In a paradox of mutual containing, a simultaneous securing and obscuring, each line of force points in both directions. The complexity of the relationship still exceeds conventional analogy, but as the diagram absorbs the analogic impulse, the terms fall into balance and the implicit lines of vertical relationship become visible as well. Through permutations of person (Christ/Herbert), text (Scripture/poem), and meaning (securing/obscuring), the two basic statements of "Coloss. 3.3" yield altogether a dozen corollaries variously declared, demonstrated, or implied throughout The Temple: The Presence of God in The Temple57 Christ «--------------------------» Herbert Scripture «--------------------------* Tempi This essay turns those permutations and moves among those corollaries to explore the fundamental relationships by which God himself becomes present in Herbert's poetry. If, as in "Coloss. 3.3," Scripture lives within Herbert's poetry, and if, as in "The Sacrifice," Christ lives in Scripture, then Christ lives — God dwells — in Herbert's The Temple as the Word within the word within the word.4 Hidden Treasure Before we turn to the whole of The Temple, "Coloss. 3.3" warrants further examination as an instructive "microcosm" of Herbert's scriptural poetics.5 At a glance, the biblical place seems to govern the poem, first in the title of citation, then in the epigraph of virtually direct quotation. By the third manifestation of the verse in the acrostic, however, it is Herbert who has taken control of the biblical place. "For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God" has become "My Life Is Hid In Him That Is My Treasure," a transformation more subtle and complex than the need to make the line scan. Indeed, the plain prose of the Authorized Version is already a prime example of the "poetry" for which that translation has been so widely praised and long esteemed. The anonymous translator has rendered the verse in fairly skillful iambic hexameter resonant with slant rhyme ("dead"/"God" further abetted by "hid") between the "caesura" and "end-line" measured by comma and period respectively . Prosody neither requires nor motivates Herbert's changes; it is the tool at his disposal. More importantly, through deletion, inflection, and addition, Herbert appropriates Paul's dictum to the Colossians in particular, and the Church as a whole, into a highly personal statement of poetic as much as religious conviction. Both the epigraph and acrostic delete the first clause of the biblical verse, "For ye are dead." Recent critics tend to emphasize Herbert's "sighes and groans," but a singular focus can easily overlook how often Herbert turns away from — or plays upon — elements of gloom and morbidity. In the single largest example of 58John Savoie such revisionism, "The Church" closes with a sequence of poems playing off the topos of the four "Last Things": Death, Judgment, Heaven, Hell. Herbert drops Hell and splits Doom from Judgment to retain a quorum of four. To these he adds Love (in this case "Love" [III]), borrowed from another sequence of lingering things, the Pauline triad of faith, hope, and charity. Thus Love, the greatest of the things that abide, outlasts the last things to sound the closing note of "The Church."6 On a smaller scale in "Coloss. 3.3" Herbert similarly chooses to emphasize the affirmation of life while death is dropped, though not denied. Within the poem itself, death is still implicit in the weight of flesh tending toward earth. More overtly, the suppressed yet pervading paradox of life-in-death surfaces in the following poem, "Vanitie" (I), which concludes with the opposing paradox of the godless man who "finde[s] out death, but misses life at hand."7 Still further away, it has been suggested that "for ye are dead" is one of the deep texts underlying the five rhymes on "dead" in "Aaron."8 For Herbert, Scripture can be neither created nor destroyed, though it may undergo changes of place and form. "With Christ in God" has also disappeared from the acrostic, but this revision is better understood as an inflection, a slightly different expression of the same basic content. The epigraph does include the phrase which the acrostic then reduces to "In Him." The pronoun collapses the distinction between God and Christ, a conflation consistent with both Herbert's disregard for theological quibbling and his high Christology. For Herbert, Christ is God, and it is through the second person of the trinity that he most often develops his relationship with the Divine. At the same time, the substitution serves the economy of the verse, saving a foot from the acrostic and two lines from the poem which, within the strict limits of the form, can then be spent more profitably elsewhere. The second inflection also turns on pronouns, this time at the human level. Paul's epistolary prose understandably employs the second person plural, "Your life is hid" (Greek ?µ??). The epigraph recasts this possessive in the first person plural, "Our life," which the acrostic appropriates still more strongly in the singular My Life. Intriguingly, in variation from Paul, Herbert recovers the individual intimacy of an older text lurking behind the epistle: the psalmist trusting in God for security, "hide me under the shadow of thy wing" (17:8).9 As Scripture does itself, the main body of Herbert's poem vacillates between these singular and plural perspectives: "my," The Presence of God in The Temple59 "our," "me," "my" (11. 1, 3, 7, 9). The predominance of the singular has prompted Chana Bloch to speculate that the plural strain "may be a remnant of an earlier stage of the poem," but the suggestion of careless or incomplete revision proves unnecessary. Throughout The Temple, Herbert is concerned with both his individual soul and the collective Church, often simultaneously. One narrow consistency notwithstanding, Bloch proves her larger point. Whereas Stanley Fish would have the poem end in "self-abnegation," a "dismissfal]" of both the personal pronoun and the self for which it stands, Bloch counters, Herbert does not "lose himself" in God's words but, quite the contrary, finds the meaning of those words — and the hidden meaning of his life as well — when he rephrases them as a first person statement. Nor is there anything remotely prideful about such an action: it is, indeed, a model for man's proper response to Scripture.10 Fish infers a wholesale rejection of self along with "my pleasure," but the poem's ending affirms the same self, though chastened, with which the poem began and rewards the progression from "your" to "our" to "my." The speaker's high aim and daily labor yield "My Treasure." With comparable effort at the level of composition, Herbert's deletions and inflections have labored to admit "Treasure" into the scriptural paraphrase. Somewhat surprisingly, this resonant closing note does not belong to the cited verse. In the crudest terms of loss and gain, "Treasure" has replaced the element of death native to Colossians 3:3. We have seen how this "death" disperses into other poems within The Temple. Conversely, Scripture being neither created nor destroyed, "Treasure" emerges from several biblical places to complete both poem and paraphrase. The scriptural provenance of the imported term absolves Herbert from biblical injunctions against and contemporary anxieties over tampering with God's word. Moreover, through this movement among several biblical places, Herbert can be at once both original and obedient to the established word of God that "is all." Even when his verse is the most pointedly scriptural, as in the acrostic, Herbert's authorship, his defining sense of self, is most fully exercised. We may assume that Herbert is one of those poets that led 60John Savoie Eliot to conclude "that not only the best but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously."11 Herbert's own advice for the profitable reading of Scripture entails "the consideration of any text with the coherence thereof, touching what goes before, and what follows after."12 The principle points to Col. 2:3 as the immediate source for this "Treasure." Precisely one chapter or "leaf" before Herbert's title verse, Paul prays that the Colossians would come to know Christ deeply "in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge." Applied to literature, this universal claim yields the particular rule that all poetry, in as much as it is true, is hidden or secured in Christ. This is one of the corollaries I have set out to uncover and examine in The Temple, and yet I do not wish to press this point just yet from "Coloss. 3.3," which the collusion of biblical places so gently intimates. Before we race to such broad conclusions in Herbert, it is important to note that this wisdom and knowledge hidden in Christ is but one — the closest but not necessarily the strongest — of several scriptural antecedents for the "Treasure" in "Coloss. 3.3." In the New Testament, "treasure" (??sa????) is predominantly a synoptic term (fifteen of eighteen occurrences), largely Matthean (nine of those fifteen, while the other six all have analogues in Matthew). Among these usages, the parable of hidden treasure in Matthew 13 proves an especially intriguing antecedent to Herbert's usage. Late in a chapter replete with parables, precise glosses, and perplexing theory, Jesus tells one more brief story: Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto treasure hid in a field; the which when a man hath found, he hideth, and for joy thereof goeth and selleth all that he hath, and buyeth that field. (Matthew 13:44) This parable goes unglossed in Scripture, as it must,13 but the common reading — first posited by early Church Fathers, reiterated in the Reformation, widely known in seventeenth-century England — is that "the treasure hid in Scripture is Christ."14 Through this reading the parable enters Herbert's poem and converges with the title verse. Its influence can be felt in ways both slight and central. The agrarian setting of the parable, along with a]l of Matthew 13, helps account for the poem's harvest field, an image Herbert employs The Presence of God in The Temple61 rather abstractly as if conceding its second-handedness. Though more distant, superficially, than the "treasure" of Col. 2:3, Matthew's usage makes a better fit to Herbert's poem. Whereas Paul has treasures of wisdom and knowledge hidden in Christ, in the parable (rightly understood ) Christ himself is the treasure, just as he is in "Coloss. 3.3." At the same time Herbert's "Treasure" also implies Scripture. The poem never makes this equation explicit, but the meaning presses upon the word from all sides. Words have always been the real treasure of poets; so Beowulf spoke from his "word-hoard," even as the poet unlocked his own.15 In sixteenth-century England, a valued collection of words was already known as a thesaurus, a metaphor that has since become so common, if not dead, that the modern reader seldom pauses to recognize the same valorization in his Roget.16 For the Christian poet, the words of Scripture would hold a still higher value. Not surprisingly, Scripture itself posits the metaphor. Just after the parable of hidden treasure in Matthew 13, Jesus concludes his parabolic discourse by comparing the well-trained scribe (in ??aµµate?? µa??tß?? Matthew seems to coyly sign his own name) to a "householder which bringeth forth out of his treasure things new and old" (13:52). For Matthew writing in the first century, these treasures new and old correspond to the written law and Jesus' oral teaching, a pairing that would evolve into the Old and New Testaments for later readers. Protestants who placed renewed importance on the study of Scripture gave renewed prominence to this metaphor, including the title page of the Geneva Bible, which describes its content as the "incomparable treasure of the Holy Scriptures." Like so many of his contemporaries, Herbert himself turned to this metaphor for the Scriptures he cherished. For his Country Parson, like Matthew's scribe, "the chief and top of his knowledge consists in the book of books, the storehouse and magazene of life and comfort, the holy Scriptures." (Thesaurus was regularly translated as "treasure," "treasury" or "storehouse.") Through diligent study and meditation, the Parson "enters into the secrets of God treasured in the holy Scripture" (pp. 228-29). In "Coloss. 3.3" which reads in short, "My words . . . eternali Treasure," the merely poetic sense of verbal treasures folds into the sacred, Christian, and specifically scriptural sense of thesaurus. So far I have argued broadly for an implicit sense of Scripture in the treasure of "Coloss. 3.3." The argument can be made deeply as well by probing once more the parable of hidden treasure. The 62John Savoie seemingly gratuitous rehiding of that treasure has always puzzled its exegetes. John Dominic Crossan convincingly traces this rehiding to a legal question raised by the folktale behind the parable, but origin does not explain function as the parable is transposed from its literal to figurative meaning.17 In the context created by the gathered volume of Scripture, this second hiding recalls a more certain subtext, this from proverbs, which entails both a finding and rehiding of treasure: My son, if thou wilt receive my words, and hide my commandments with thee; so that thou incline thine ear unto wisdom, and apply thy heart to understanding ; yea, if thou criest after knowledge, and liftest up thy voice for understanding; if thou seekest her as silver, and searchest for her as for hid treasures; then shalt thou understand the fear of the Lord, and find the knowledge of God. (Proverbs 2:1-5) Here the treasure — hidden, sought, rehidden — is explicitly verbal. If Solomon's proverb lies behind Matthew's parable, as modern scholars largely concur, then a profound change has quietly taken place in the shift in significance of this treasure from word to person.18 The parable, though, does not specify and therefore limit the meaning of its treasure so that, in the usual Matthean ratio, it may add new meaning without necessarily negating the old. In a muted intimation of the Johannine logos, both word and person manifest "the knowledge of God." For Herbert, paradoxically, the proverbial characterization of God's word as treasure enters his poem through the very parable that led him to identify this treasure as Christ. Under its encompassing title, "The H. Scriptures ?" sets forth a principle of Herbert's scriptural reading: Oh that I knew how all thy lights combine, And the configuration of their glorie! Seeing not onely how each verse doth shine, But all the constellations of the storie. This verse marks that, and both do make a motion Unto a third, that ten leaves off doth lie. (11. 1-6) In its constellation of proverbial, parabolic, and Pauline texts, "Coloss. 3.3" exemplifies the practice of such reading. In their The Presence of God in The Temple63 different emphases these biblical passages draw the lines that Herbert's poem retraces or assumes. Matthew's parable of hidden treasure establishes the vertical dimension (recall the second diagram above) between person and text. The proverb moves both vertically between text and person and horizontally between the divine and the human, in effect extending the diagonal across the quadrangle. In Colossians not only are "you" hid in Christ but, reversing the relationship, it is equally "rich" that Christ is hid in you (1:26-27). Like the proverb, Paul draws the diagonal as well, the divine word in the human heart: "Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly in all wisdom" (3:16). The logic of theology, or at least the intuition of poetry, would seem to require the presence of a fourth term, a human word that rests in Christ, or just as true, a human word in which God dwells and speaks. What Scripture implies, The Temple realizes. Let us turn then from constellations of Scripture to the configurations of light and space in Herbert's own poetry. The Body of the Book Bound by the shaped poems of "The Altar" and "Easter-wings," the opening sequence of "The Church" frames the first and most prominent of Herbert's many constellations, though precisely what those points of light delineate depends, of course, on the gazer's participation. Among these poems "The Sacrifice" shines as the cynosure. It is by far the longest poem inside "The Church," longer, in fact, than the ten surrounding poems combined. Relishing not only ambiguity but "vindictive terrors" and the "paradox of a vengeful God of love," William Empson brought Herbert's poem into the anguished twentieth century and praised it for a "magnificence he never excelled."19 Rosemond Tuve shared this estimation even as she challenged Empson's reading in an eighty-page rebuttal that placed the poem in a long tradition of verbal and visual representations of the passion.20 Auden was not trying to be eccentric in his judgment that "The Sacrifice" was "Herbert's greatest poem."21 More recently, however, particularly as critical interest has shifted from the paradoxes of Herbert's religion to the paradoxes of his poetic, many of the major studies of Herbert over the last thirty years — including those of Fish (1972, 1978), Vendler (1975), Harman (1982), Strier (1983), Schoenfeldt (1991), and Toliver (1993) — have relegated "The Sacrifice" to a supporting role, a "see-also" title that itself receives 64John Savoie little or no analysis.22 Against this trend toward demotion, I contend that it remains the crucial poem (the "crux" in more ways than one) of the opening sequence and The Temple as a whole. Rightly understood , "The Sacrifice" proves as important to studies of Herbert's poetic as it is to intimations of the mystery of Christ on the cross. "The Sacrifice" effectively serves Herbert's larger poetic project, and has a far greater importance than many contemporary critcs acknowledge. Admittedly, it is perhaps not as accessible as many of the other poems because it differs so greatly in both quantity and style. Most notably, only in "The Sacrifice" is Christ the sole speaker. Hardly meek or retiring, this solitary voice impresses his identity on every stanza. Sometimes slipping into the third-person reference of royalty or divinity (and he claims both), more often the speaker asserts himself through first-person pronouns, "I," "me," "my," and above all "mine," the self-rhyme which rounds all 63 stanzas and ultimately the poem itself. What narrative there is proceeds through him. He suffers the violent paradoxes that pervade the poem and yet enfolds them, quite literally, within his enormous ego. As Tuve observed years ago, this "is not the Christ we know in Luke's or Matthew's straightforward narrative." But as Bloch has since shown, neither is this merely the medieval "Christ of the liturgy of Holy Week."23 In his self-assertions, he is closest to the Christ of the gospel of John, the self-predicating eyu apt who unabashedly claims, "I am the Way and Truth" (1. 38, cf. John 14:6). And as the Johannine Christ he extends further claim as the Christ of the Scriptures as a whole, their implicit subject now speaking in his own voice, their unifying intelligence made manifest. The Johannine Christ threw out the challenge, "Search the Scriptures . . . they are they which testify of me" (5:39). In "The Sacrifice" Herbert has accepted and executed that challenge. Christ speaks in otherpoems, and Herbert makes innumerable biblical allusions throughout The Temple, but nowhere is his presence so strong, or the Scripture so dense, as it is in "The Sacrifice." Scripture figures prominently from the very opening of the "The Sacrifice," but let us skip ahead to a relatively obscure stanza that clarifies an underlying principle of the poem. In the timeless present tense, the speaker tells of his being passed among the "ruler[s]" (priests, Pilate, Herod) while being accused of false teaching, a charge that recalls Jesus' many skirmishes with the religious authorities in the gospels: The Presence of God in The Temple65 Then from one ruler to another bound They lead me; urging that it was not sound What I taught: comments would the text confound. Was ever grief like mine? (U. 53-56) If Jesus is said to confound the text, the established pattern of irony implies that in reality he does just the opposite. But what is the opposite of "confound"? Expound, explicate, elucidate? Apply, extend, refine? Or complete, realize, fulfill? While the indirection of irony allows all these possibilities at once, this last verb suggests the biblical passage in which Jesus clarifies, "Do not think that I came to destroy the Law or the Prophets. I did not come to destroy but to fulfill" (Matthew 5:17). At this point in Matthew, still early in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus functions as a teacher discoursing upon a text. But at this point in the poem, fourteen stanzas into the passion, Jesus does not so much handle the text as embody it. Old Testament prophecy, passion narrative, and New Testament theology all meet in him. His voice arises from their synthesis. For this reason "The Sacrifice" is Herbert's biblically densest poem. Mark Bingham counts in it over ninety allusions to the Old Testament spanning dozens of books. Aside from the continuous reference to the passion narratives in the four gospels, Bingham observes in the poem more than a hundred quotations, allusions, and echoes of the rest of the New Testament including Acts, the epistles, and Revelation.24 The first words of the poem initiate this textual engagement. The italics of "Oh all ye, who pass by" draw attention to its Old Testament provenance, in this case Lamentations 1:12. At the very least the speaker presents himself as the typological fulfillment of Scriptural prophecy. He is by turns the grapes and rock, the Paschal Lamb and Temple, the new Moses and the second Adam. Such typologies have been the stock in trade of Christian exegetes from the very beginning as the original authors of the New Testament sought for correspondences between familiar text (in this case, what we now call the Old Testament) and startling person. The post-biblical writer such as Herbert lacks that original opportunity but he enjoys a broader scope, now with two rich and varied volumes before him, the New as well as the Old. For Herbert, at this next level of integration, Christ is an established (if not entirely known) entity, and through him the poet undertakes a detailed and thorough integration of texts 66John Savoie upon texts, something that Matthew, John, and Paul enable but could not themselves have done. Herbert's Christ is the integration of the shadowy figure of Old Testament prophecy, the rabbi of the Sermon on the Mount, the LAm of John, and of course the central subject of the passion narratives. Consider how several strands of Scripture join in a single stanza: And a seditious murderer he was: But I the Prince of Peace; peace that doth passe All understanding, more then heav'n doth glasse: Was ever grief like mine? (11. 117-20) The first line refers to Barabbas and situates the stanza in the passion narrative (Luke 23:19, cf. John 18:40) and its intrinsic irony of innocence suffering while the guilty goes one free. The speaker then takes hold of the messianic prophecy from Isaiah 9:6. What had been given in the third person, "his name shall be . . . the Prince of Peace," is now realized in the first, "I the Prince of Peace." Pausing on this last word, the speaker goes on to define his peace in terms of the famous Pauline blessing, "And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus" (Philippians 4:7). As Bloch observes, "the repetition of 'peace' on both sides of the caesura rivets the two verses together."25 The voice of this Christ conjoins prophecy and epistle with gospel narrative. He speaks from the black letters of the Bible as well as the red. Herbert fills out the third line with yet another biblical allusion, the Pauline glass of mediated encounter with God that heaven will render obsolete (I Corinthians 13:12). The stanza hardly needs this half-line, but it shows the poem working in what is essentially its default mode. The stanza closes with the insistent refrain condensed from the same passage in Lamentations that provided the poem's opening address, "Was ever grief like mine?" Every four lines the speaker reasserts his unique identity over his possession. In as much as this grief belongs to Christ, so do the myriad texts which convey the grief and often something more. The prevailing irony — that God's love in the Son has been misunderstood and wretchedly rewarded — proves to have its undertow as well. As this stanza shows, beneath the dominant grief, these integrating texts can also suggest hope, triumph, and salvation. The Presence of God in The Temple67 In varying degrees of density and complexity, nearly every stanza gathers and integrates multiple biblical places. Not surprisingly, the crisis of the poem takes place in perhaps the densest and most complex intersection of scriptural texts. In the fifty-third stanza the speaker cries from the cross: But, O my God, my God\ why leav'st thou me, The son, in whom thou dost delight to be? My God, my God -----Never was grief like mine. (11. 213-16) The first three lines have been culled from Scripture with minimal redaction for continuity, meter, and rhyme. Again the italics draw attention to the scriptural provenance of the cry which can be found in Matthew (27:46) and Mark (15:34) but originates from Psalm 22. The second line is another famous locus of biblical intertextuality. Adapted to the voice of the speaker, the words recall the Father's acknowledgment of the Son at his baptism (Matthew 3:17, Mark 1:11) and transfiguration (Matthew 17:5). The words originate, though, from one of the Songs of the Suffering Servant (Isaiah 42), which Matthew quotes at length elsewhere (Mt 12:18-21). The second line grammatically joins the first through the apposition of the delightful "son" to the forsaken "me." In both lines the persons are the same, Father and Son, and yet the predication is completely contrary. With hardly an original word of his own, through the juxtaposition and fusion of scriptural texts, Herbert has sharpened the irony to a higher order. The human tragedy of sinful man's mistreatment of its savior has given way to a divine and more terrifying tragedy (thus Empson's fascination), the Father's abandonment of the Son he loves. The stanza's third line renews the anguished cry, but this time breaks o