of the progress of grace obscure the fact that grace finally manages, in Herbert’s explanation, to link body and soul as “Dispatches”—as a message that arrives in expressly written form. As with the communication contained within a packet of letters, grace inheres in the message of the text, a message inseparable from and dependent for its transmission on the material artifact of the page. For Herbert, sacramental efficacy is achieved by the simultaneity of material and spiritual, a correspondence whose ideal, in “The H. Communion,” takes the form of a piece of writing.
In putting a sacramental focus here on writing, on the efficacy of the word, my aim is not to revisit the position held by critics like Daniel Doerksen and Gene Veith, claiming for Herbert a conforming Calvinist piety centered on the word, and on the way that the authority of Christ as the Word made Flesh gets refracted into the words of scripture and of preaching.10 Herbert’s term “Dispatches” rather collapses the distinction between sign and signified promoted in the Institutes, where Calvin affirms Augustine’s definition of the sacrament as “rei sacrae visibile signum” [a visible sign of a sacred thing]:11
Sacramenta igitur exercitia sunt quae certiorem verbi Dei fidem nobis faciunt: et quia carnales sumus, sub rebus carnalibus exhibentur: ut ita pro tarditatis nostrae captu nos erudiant, et perinde ac pueros paedagogi manu ducant. Hac ratione Augustinus sacramentum verbum visibile nuncupat: quod Dei promissiones velut in tabula depictas repraesentet, et sub aspectum graphice atque είϰονιϰώς expressas statuat.
[Sacraments, therefore, are exercises that make more secure our faith in the word of God: and because we are fleshly, they are exhibited under fleshly things: so that they may instruct us in our sluggish capacities, and lead us by the hand like the young students of a schoolmaster. For this reason Augustine calls a sacrament a visible word: because it represents the promises of God just as if they were depicted in a picture, and places beneath our gazes an icon, a verisimilitude masterfully expressed.]12
Calvin writes that those who participate in the Eucharist must maintain an understanding of the ontological distinction between the sacramental signs and the spiritual realities they represent. The visible word of the sacrament stands as an accommodation to, and a marker of, the human region of unlikeness from divine things. This formulation, which can be traced from Calvin back through Augustine to Aristotle, imagines the sacrament as an outward seal or sign for the invisible, internal, and finally immaterial operation of grace.13 But Herbert’s engagement with the issue of sacramental representation in the published version of “The H. Communion” is not consistent with the ontological binary that Calvin promotes. Rather, Herbert focuses on “Leaping the wall” between fleshly and spiritual, using the word itself as an instrument for producing indistinguishability between ontological realms. Herbert, after all, is the country parson who praised the Lord of the Altar as “not only the feast, but the way to it.”14 That phrase begins to suggest Herbert’s peculiar willingness to collapse sacramental and representational means into ends—that is, to preserve the significance of the sign in itself, in addition to honoring the significance of the principle to which the sign refers.
For Herbert, Communion presents a model for this kind of ontological indistinguishability, offering a text whose spiritual valences endure even as its objectively perceptible substance refuses to be (to use Charles Bernstein’s useful terms) “sublimated / away.”15 As “The H. Communion” makes clear, the sacrament is for Herbert both spiritually and materially significant, and it is striking that his model for eucharistic reception in that poem is figured through the written communiqué of “Dispatches.” In Herbert’s formulation of the sacrament, Christ graces both the end and the means, the feast and the way to it, in direct echo of the Incarnation’s simultaneous valorization of the divine Word and the flesh in which it was made present to man; this principle of holy and meaningful presence effected by the hypostatic union of sign and signified ramifies into Herbert’s perception of texts.16 Over the course of The Temple, Herbert consistently and explicitly evokes the function of Christ as Logos in a way that foregrounds the textuality of that designation, as when in “Sepulchre” he imagines the crucified Christ as an inscription:
And as of old the Law by heav’nly art
Was writ in stone; so thou, which also art
The letter of the word, find’st no fit heart
To hold thee. (16–19)
The comparison to the material ground of the engraved Decalogue gestures toward Christ’s allegorical associations with rock,17 and also calls up an uneasy awareness of the engraving of Christ’s flesh by the spears and nails during the crucifixion (a concept that Christian readings of Isaiah 49.16, “Behold, I haue grauen thee vpon the palmes of my hands: thy walles are continually before mee,” made familiar).18 The meaning of the “letter” here follows from its having been inscribed in the flesh, and Christ’s flesh signifies spiritually because it has been marked materially. Christ is both transparent gospel text and harrowingly, transformatively, unsublimable object.
The consistency with which Herbert foregrounds the sign as a site of substantiality and consequence is a key feature of his poetics. In Herbert’s work, this emphasis arises in part out of his extravagant formal experimentation, a set of antiabsorptive strategies that, to return again to the terms of Bernstein’s analysis, lends to the poetic text a “thickness” that continues to “obtrude impermeably into the world.”19 Herbert’s work is, I argue, radically invested in promoting its own surface, asserting the sign as such as an object rather than treating the text as a transparent conduit to content. Herbert’s incarnationalist poetics bespeak a fundamental faith in the meaningfulness of the material in general and of the material valences of text in particular. When, in “The H. Scriptures I,” Herbert says of the Bible that “heav’n lies flat in thee” (14), he affirms that the physical dimensions of the page parameter heaven itself, and he reacts accordingly with a desire to “Suck ev’ry letter” (2) of that page. Herbert’s attention to the topography of text, with all its surface contour and formal architecture, is at bottom a confirmation of the text’s objecthood. In this project, Herbert shows himself to be in sympathy with the textual experiments at Little Gidding, the religious community established by Herbert’s acquaintance Nicholas Ferrar. The Ferrar household pursued a rigorous devotional life that included communal worship and biblical study; part of this practice involved the construction of Gospel concordances or “harmonies,” in which passages from the four gospels were cut and glued into new arrangements in order to harmonize their narratives. “One of these books,” reports Ferrar’s brother John, “was sent to Mr. Herbert which, he said, he prized most highly as a rich jewel.”20 The book arts projects of Little Gidding, with their endlessly mobile word packets in a variety of fonts, emphasize the physical manipulability of text as well as its hefty substantiality, and argue implicitly that content is contingent on the material. Their emphasis on the physical artifact as an instrument that expresses holy worship claims for words and phrases a meaningfulness that inheres in their very objecthood.
Throughout The Temple, Herbert performs a poetics that likewise claims for language a meaningful objecthood, a poetics in which the material of text tenaciously obtrudes into the transparency of semantic projection. The antiabsorptive qualities of Herbert’s verse are evident, to be sure, in the extraordinary formal innovation that characterizes The Temple, where among other experiments, as Joseph Summers has noted, “Herbert used twenty-nine different patterns with the simple a b a b rhyme scheme.”21 Such formal ingenuity should not be regarded as mere ornamentation or even a reinforcement of the “real meaning” of the poem as expressed in its content. Rather, an emphasis on form, on surface, as opaque in Herbert’s poetry demands that we confront form qua form, that we register the presence of the poem as a material artifact. I mean to echo and refine Whalen’s point when I say that to recognize Herbert’s stake in the relationship between the objecthood of poems and the incarnational poetics of the sacrament is to go to
