behove:
Yet few there are that sound them; Sinne and Love. (1–6)
Though philosophers can “measure” geologies and geographies, the histories of nation and rule, sin and love resist this kind of empirical investigation. Vast and spacious in a way that physical things seem not to be, they exceed the senses. As Herbert’s poem continues, it offers alternative means for understanding such spiritual matters:
Who would know Sinne, let him repair
Unto mount Olivet; there shall he see
A man so wrung with pains, that all his hair,
His skinne, his garments, bloody be.
Sinne is that presse and Vice, which forceth pain
To hunt his cruell food through ev’ry vein. (7–12)
In order to understand sin, the poem instructs, we must “see” Jesus in Gethsemane, and Herbert’s verse provides us with details from the scriptural record to compose a scene: Jesus’s bloody garments, skin, and even hair so particularized as to conjure up the vision to our imaginations.44 It is thus remarkable that the stanza begins by displacing these details out of the physical: the bloody skin and hair with all their physical vividness are explicitly identified as standing not for themselves but for something else—for “Sinne.” Christ’s corporeal particularities are offered here as a sign, whose presence in the poem delineates an abstraction too vast to be measured.
In the third and final stanza, the poem’s eucharistic interests are made explicit, even as its language continues to redefine the visceral as significative:
Who knows not Love, let him assay,
And taste that juice, which on the crosse a pike
Did set again abroach; then let him say
If ever he did taste the like.
Love is that liquour sweet and most divine,
Which my God feels as bloud; but I, as wine. (13–18)
Here, Christ’s body is veiled, as it were, behind the rich language of religious emblem so thoroughly charted by Rosemond Tuve decades ago.45 Christ’s body, breached by a sword, spills forth the blood represented in eucharistic wine. And though Tuve finds Herbert’s imagery perfectly “conventional,”46 consistent with a long iconographic tradition, his handling of the vectors of referentiality is provocative both in the context of “The Agonie” and in consideration of the commitment to signs as such that pervades The Temple. For Herbert’s poem does not make it easy to keep the figurative and literal registers separate. By inviting us to “taste that juice set abroach by the spear,” he renders identical the figure and the ground—the blood that flows from the spear wound and the metaphoric juice by which it is represented to the eucharistic worshipper. Christ is in these lines the signified—as the body represented eucharistically in the wine. But Christ also serves here as the sign—the body whose “taste” prompts the figural leap into “juice” and “liquour.” Yet after all, even these sign/signified complexes collapse into the sign position because the poem argues that they represent something else: the principle of Love. The body of Christ in agony, whether it is seen primarily as the emblematic subject or the emblematic object, is finally the word/Word that means love—just as in the previous stanza, it means sin. Helen Vendler has noted that though the qualities of sin and love stand in opposition to one another, the emblematic descriptions featured in stanzas two and three of “The Agonie” are “identical,” both depicting “Christ shedding blood under torture.”47 Thus the suffering body of Christ signifies in multiple registers, meaning two distinct, even opposite, ideas. The poem encourages us to stop on the surface of signification, on the Word which is Christ the Logos, and to register it as an artifact whose referential transparency is prevented by its referential slippage. In “The Agonie,” the meaning of the Word becomes a pun of the same order that Herbert explored in “The Sonne.” Once again, Christ’s body is offered as a sign whose signified remains unfixed, a sign that therefore persists untransparently, antiabsorptively, in the poem’s system of signification.
In Love Known, Richard Strier asserts that the “knowledge” advocated by these stanzas is “entirely a matter of immediate experience, not of conceptual formulation.” Strier goes on to claim that what he calls “the essential terms of religion” gain priority over the sciences in Herbert’s hierarchy of knowledges because they are known by immediate experience. “For Herbert,” Strier declares, “it is science that is abstract and religion that is concrete and empirical. The ‘knowledge’ described in stanza 3 is entirely a matter of immediate experience, not of conceptual formulation.” Strier identifies the depictions of sin and love in “The Agonie” as exemplary of the spiritual knowledge that comes by immediate experience. “Sin and love,” he claims, “cannot be fathomed in the way that seas can.”48 Strier is absolutely correct in this last pronouncement, but I would argue that he is absolutely wrong in his reasoning. For “The Agonie” takes pains not to imagine “spiritual experience” as an event directly channeled into the worshipper’s apprehension with epistemological immediacy. Mountains and seas can be understood through the apprehension of the senses, but as Herbert’s poem presents it, the problem with spiritual knowledge is that it must come through the mediation of terms whose objecthood is ultimately more stable, more apprehensible, than the abstractions to which they refer. In the case of “The Agonie,” the spiritual meaning of Christ becomes available to our apprehension insofar as he is textualized: Christ is manifested here not just in or through the eucharistic elements but as a text that by the act of signifying maintains its own presence.
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