Equivocal Predication: George Herbert's Way to God 9781442656383

Table of contents :
Acknowledgments
Contents
Preface
Introduction: Holy Equivocation
1. The Chirograph: Liturgy and Ontology
2. The Sacramental Voice: Distance Related
3. Augustinianism: The Use and Enjoyment of Poetry
4. Wisdom: The Seam and the Wine
5. One-Both and the Face of Anglicanism
Afterword
Notes
A Bibliography of Exegetical and Doctrinal Materials
Index

Citation preview

TA University, Toronto. Equivocation replaced Thomistic analogy as a means of predicating God in the minds of many seventeenth-century divines. In this study, Professor Asals analyses George Herbert's use of language as a method of devotion in his major cycle poem, The Temple. Tracing the logical notion of equivocation (here the extensive use of puns and pun-like verbal devices) as predication through other influences on his poetry, she argues that the very basis of Herbert's work lies in its responsibility in predicating God as One and Love. Asals explains that, for Herbert, the act of writing a poem - the actual handwriting-was a sacramental and ceremonial act of worship recreating Christ's death on the cross: ink becomes blood. The sign on the printed page points sacramentally to the blood it signifies. Thus, the domain of Herbert's poetry reaches from earth to heaven and from heaven to earth. Continuing with an examination of Herbert's language, including aspects of phonology, morphology, and syntax, Asals reveals its two-fold significance in expression and meaning. Through a detailed reading of the entire corpus, she investigates the profound influence of Augustinianism and Wisdom literature on the way poetry works and explores the meaning of gesture and its importance to Herbert's Anglicanism - his belief in the importance of ceremony. In the final chapter, on the topos of Magdalene, its relationship to Herbert's mother, and his mother's importance to his writing, Asals argues that Anglicanism as a way to God (and God as a way to himself) is at the very core of Herbert's poetics. This book establishes a new critical milieu in which Herbert may be interpreted and sheds new light on the poetry of other writers of the period.

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HEATHER A.R. ASALS

Equivocal Predication George Herbert's Way to God

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

University of Toronto Press 1981 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 0-8020-5 536-2

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Asals, Heather A.R. (Heather Anne Ross), 1940Equivocal predication Bibliography: p. Includes index. ISBN 0-8020-5 5 36-2 i. Herbert, George, 1593-1633 — Criticism and interpretation. 2. Herbert, George, 1593-1633 — Religion and ethics. 3. Christianity in literature. I. Title. PR3508.A82 821'.3 081-094129-5

This book is published with the assistance of a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to the University of Toronto Press.

In memory of Elizabeth Anne and Benjamin Stuart a25 Arnold Stein discusses not 'wit' but 'plainness' in Herbert and, although I find his remarks about the importance of 'brevity,' for instance, most germane, I find it hard to accept

8 Equivocal Predication his concept of Herbert's plainness as can art by which he may tell the truth to himself and God.'26 Although Coburn Freer offers an interesting observation about Herbert's language when he mentions the discrepancy in Herbert's poetry between the way a poem behaves and the way Herbert says it behaves, I find a statement such as 'One way of rejecting earthly joys is to write an ugly poem'27 totally inadmissible. Mark Taylor's notion of Herbert's Augustinianism providing 'a model of his own spiritual ascendency' is much closer to the truth. But I do not agree with him that 'Herbert is always aware that words are only signs,' and I object to the notion that 'Herbert was consciously anti-metaphysical in his views of poetic style and was a devotee of Puritan plainness.'28 In certain ways it would be fair to say that what I formulate here is but an extension of Stanley Fish's germinal 1972 essay on Herbert in Self-Consuming Artifacts. I am totally convinced of the validity of the following insights, which Fish captures in that essay: that in Herbert's poetry 'words tend to lose their referential fixity,'29 that 'To stop saying amiss is not only to stop distinguishing "this" from "that," but to stop distinguishing oneself from God,'3° and that 'Herbert avoids saying amiss in the context of a perspective he would have us transcend. ' 31 As I continue, I will speak more directly to the question he raises there, 'If insight into God's omnipresence is violated by the very act of predication ("this or that is"), how does a poet who is committed to that insight practise his craft?' But I should also mention that I am very impressed indeed by a few incidental remarks made by Helen Vendler in a book about which I, generally speaking, have grave reservations. She speaks very much in tune with what I consider to be the central chord of Herbert's poetry when she discusses Herbert's 'pruning' of language in 'Paradise' ('Each pruning, as Herbert's hieroglyph shows, engenders a new word'),32 and she very rightly considers the 'false etymologies' in Herbert's Echo poem ('Heaven') to be central to his poetic method - 'We should like to think that such natural opposites and obverses and parallels had a "natural" linguistic relation' (they should have, she concludes).33 As I see it, what has been best said about Herbert's idea of language to date is very much in line with what has been remarked on as his concern with the Many and the One. In 1936 Helen White spoke quite precisely of Herbert's poetic imagination: 'However it may lift its head towards the One, its roots are in the Many'34 - 'a reintegrated world of order came home to their destinies in the One Love. '3 5 In an interesting reading of 'Providence,' Virginia Mollenkott pursues that theme by claiming that the central motif of 'Providence' is 'that of the One in the Many and the Many in the One. '3