Made Flesh. Kimberly Johnson
will … what these elements are in themselues it skilleth not, it is enough that to me which take them they are the body & bloud of Christ.”2 Though Hooker’s call for a shift from disputation over “the maner how” to affirmation that the sacrament does in truth perform Christ’s promise to offer his body and blood seems to provide a reasoned response to controversy, it is nevertheless a bit disingenuous because the question of whether the elements “are the body & bloud of Christ” is deeply entwined with the manner in which that mystery occurs. And while Herbert seems never to have explicitly entered into the theological debates surrounding “the maner how” that flourished as suspicions of crypto-popery ran rampant during the 1620s and beyond, he does not scruple to wrestle with “the maner how” in a number of poems that consider the Eucharist directly. On the contrary, Herbert’s concern with the relationship between the material species of bread and wine and the spiritual operation of Holy Communion is evident throughout The Temple as well as in his other writings, both poetry and prose. For Herbert, the sacrament asserts itself in both spiritual and material registers, and their very inextricability both repeats the incarnational model of the Word made flesh and influences the representational strategies of Herbert’s poetic practice.
Herbert’s literary canon would seem to offer a rich field for investigating the ways in which the Eucharist informed and inspired seventeenth-century devotional poetry. The sacrament provides the imaginative center for his lyric collection, governing its organization as well as its subject matter. Whether we consider his stable of images, with its reliance on familiar sacramental topoi like grapes, winepresses, vines, veins, and so forth, or regard The Temple’s overarching narrative of sacramental preparation culminating in the feast of “Love (III),” or examine the poems that explicitly dramatize participation in Communion, C. A. Patrides’s conclusion that “The Eucharist is the marrow of Herbert’s sensibility” feels entirely justified.3 Perhaps the most obvious place to begin a study of Herbert’s engagement with eucharistic theology is the pair of poems each given the title “The H. Communion,” in which Herbert addresses directly the ritual and its operation. In the version of “The H. Communion” that Herbert did not include in The Temple, the poet begins with a survey of theological claims about the mode of christic presence in the sacramental elements:
O gratious Lord how shall I know
Whether in these gifts thou bee so
As thou art evry-where;
Or rather so, as thou alone
Tak’st all ye Lodging, leaving none
ffor thy poore creature there.4
In its first stanza, the poem presents two competing versions of eucharistic operation: Lutheran ubiquitarianism, which holds that Christ is substantially present in all things and by extension also in the bread and wine, and Roman transubstantiation, in which Christ’s substance replaces that of the bread. But after considering these options, the poem adopts a tone of gentle mockery: “ffirst I am sure, whether bread stay / Or whether Bread doe fly away / Concerneth bread not mee” (7–9). Here, Herbert waves off the controversial question of the mode of Christ’s presence, and the poem would seem to continue as if it pursued a poetic version of Hooker’s counsel, letting disputations rest in the face of mystery: “But yt both thou and all thy traine / Bee there, to thy truth, & my gaine / Concerneth mee & Thee” (10–12). The only matter worth addressing, suggests Herbert as if channeling Hooker, is not “the maner how” but that “Christ performeth his promise.”
But Herbert’s confidence about that performance seems to waver in the middle stanzas of the poem:
That fflesh is there, mine eyes deny:
And what shold flesh but flesh discry,
The noblest sence of five.
If glorious bodies pass the sight
Shall they be food & strength, & might
Euen there, where they deceiue? (31–36)
Herbert here identifies explicitly the fundamental interpretive problem of a ritual that proposes to make the divine present to man by means of a set of physical signs: “mine eyes deny.” Herbert’s inability to descry Christ’s presence in the species of Communion leads him to question both the efficacy of the sacramental elements and the credibility of Christ, whose most glorious body remains most imperceptible in the sacrament that represents it. Michael C. Schoenfeldt reads this uncomfortable questioning as Herbert’s discovery of “the wall that divides matter and spirit,” and sees Herbert pursuing the consequences of that discovery into the assertions of his next stanza:5
Into my soule this cannot pass;
fflesh (though exalted) keeps his grass
And cannot turn to soule.
Bodyes & Minds are different Spheres,
Nor can they change their bounds & meres,
But keep a constant Pole. (37–42)
Despite the poem’s professions of its own uninterest in “the maner how” Christ might be present in the sacramental elements, it spends twelve lines worrying about precisely that question: how can Christ be present to the soul in the Lord’s Supper, especially in light of the fact that he is completely absent to the senses? Herbert’s insistence that “Bodyes and Minds are different Spheres” may address the problem of Christ’s sensory imperceptibility, but it also forecloses the possibility that God might be transmitted to the incorporeal soul by means of this corporeal ritual.
Herbert returns to the relationship between these “different Spheres” in his later poem also called “The H. Communion,” which was included in The Temple. This poem opens by rejecting the idea that God employs material finery to communicate himself to man. “Not in rich furniture, or fine aray, / Nor in a wedge of gold” (1–2), Herbert insists, and although the imagery he refuses seems to invoke the ceremonial richness of the Mass, the poem’s objection to such stuff has less to do with its confessional extravagance than with the fact that its materiality remains unassimilable: “For so thou should’st without me still have been” (5). The phrase “without me,” in its conflation of physical separation and lack of possession, is attuned to the difficulty of apprehending God (in both physical and non-physical senses of that verb) through a material medium. Though Schoenfeldt concludes that “The H. Communion” resolves this difficulty by defining divine presence not as if it might be located in any external trappings but as an internal, spiritualized process, the poem nevertheless exhibits a continued preoccupation with the relationship between physical signs and their immaterial referents:
But by the way of nourishment and strength
Thou creep’st into my breast;
Making thy way my rest,
And thy small quantities my length;
Which spread their forces into every part,
Meeting sinnes force and art.
Yet can these not get over to my soul,
Leaping the wall that parts
Our souls and fleshly hearts;
But as th’ outworks, they may control
My rebel-flesh, and carrying thy name,
Affright both sinne and shame. (7–18)
After the poem’s opening repudiation of luxurious trappings as a conduit for Christ, the second stanza prefers a view of sacramental contact in which the divine presence creeps in by “nourishment and strength,” which Schoenfeldt glosses as “the medium of food.”6 Herbert’s echo of Cranmer’s sacramental formulation rings loudly enough here: Holy Communion, explains Cranmer, is a “visyble sacrament of spirituall nourishment in bread and wyne.” Still, as Cranmer, and later Hooker, must acknowledge, a conception that the spirit is nourished by means of the sacramental elements makes this process of spiritual sustenance discomfitingly inextricable from the processes of the body. Cranmer goes on in