Made Flesh. Kimberly Johnson
smell hym at our nose, taste hym with our mouthes, grope hym with oure handes, and perceaue him with al our senses. For as the word of god preached putteth Christe into our eares, so lykewise these elementes of water, breade and wyne, ioyned to Goddes woorde, doo after a sacramentall maner, put Christe into our eies, mouthes, handes, and all our senses.”7 What Cranmer describes is a sacrament of dual significance, body and spirit alike invigorated by the encounter with the elements of bread and wine. He advocates that the communicant fuse the spiritual to the sensual, which Herbert’s poem accomplishes in the slippage of its language between corporeal and noncorporeal registers. Just as in Herbert’s phrase “nourishment and strength,” the terminology of the poem’s second stanza activates physical and spiritual associations as it charts the progress of the sacramental experience: Christ “creep’st into my breast,” the poem reflects, suggesting both the abstracted seat of emotions and the vault of the body that encases those emotions. And when divine power manages to fill the speaker’s “length” and to “spread … forces into every part,” the physical suggestiveness of both “length” and “part” is supplemented by the way that this divine occupation develops at the stanza’s end, for what it meets is not bodily substance but “sinnes force and art,” a figurative army whose spiritual encampment cannot be pinpointed in fleshly coordinates. As Cranmer yokes the mouth, hands, and eyes to the spiritual apprehension of Christ in his rhapsody on sacramental contact, Herbert joins the physiological to the spiritual, such that the two modes of sacramental experience cannot be distinguished from one another.
In his attentive study The Poetry of Immanence, Robert Whalen steps away from the confessional squabbling of much twentieth-century criticism on Herbert in order to recognize (appropriately irenically) the poet’s synthesis of sensual ceremonialism and internal spirituality; accordingly, Whalen acknowledges Herbert’s investment in a Eucharist that maintains both spiritual and material significance. For Herbert, writes Whalen, it was important “to realize in the sacramental sign an effectual, objective communication of grace and not merely the outward symbol of a process with which it has no material connection.” Though Whalen glances at the resemblance between the dual signification of Herbert’s Eucharist and the Incarnation’s mysterious joining of divine spirit to carnal flesh, Word to body, he seems not to appreciate the implications of that conjunction for Herbert’s view of language generally, and of poetry in particular. Whalen rightly declares that “it is through the insistent fleshly status of the eucharistic species that the paradox of the Word become flesh is stubbornly proclaimed,” but he does not mark the ways in which his own insight bears upon Herbert’s poetics.8 For both Communion and the Incarnation provide for Herbert a literary model in which the divine Logos gains significance by its material expression, a model that Herbert imitates in his own poetic texts. Whalen acknowledges that the material aspects of eucharistic presence “go to the very heart of [Herbert’s] sacramental poetic,”9 and his close readings are specific and sensitive to Herbert’s eucharistic preoccupations, but he does not pursue his insights to discuss the way that Herbert’s verse makes use of representational strategies that emphasize his poems as material artifacts—that is, the way they repeat the incarnational model of Communion. Or, to put this problem in the terms with which this book began, Whalen is admirably exhaustive in cataloguing what Herbert’s poems say about the Eucharist but gives scant attention to how they say it.
The distinction I am making between even a careful review of the content of poems and an assessment of their poetic function is particularly germane to a reading of Herbert. I argue that Herbert’s sense of the affinity between text and sacrament is recorded in the very representational architecture of The Temple. Herbert himself provides in the later version of “The H. Communion” a virtual pronouncement of the way that texts, like sacraments, can operate with an incarnational, instrumental force born simultaneously of the substance of their signifieds and the accidents of their material expression. What usually gets overlooked in critical treatments of the climactic stanza of “The H. Communion” is that “Leaping the wall” is accomplished neither by the material substance of the bread and wine nor by the force of spiritual nourishment. Instead, Herbert concludes,
Onely thy grace, which with these elements comes,
Knoweth the ready way,
And hath the privie key,
Op’ning the souls most subtile roomes;
While those to spirits refin’d, at doore attend
Dispatches from their friend. (19–24)
Disputations about whether Herbert privileges in these lines a Catholic or a Reformed view 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