Authority, Church, and Society in George Herbert: Return to the Middle Way.

As Hayden White has reminded us, works of scholarship can have arguments structured like plots, quite as clearly articulated as those of genre fiction. Some by their narrative predictability reassure us of an underlying order; others shock or surprise or delight us with the unexpected. What links these books by Flesch and Hodgkins is their authors' common interest in George Herbert, their attention to authority in its various forms and guises, and their obsession with loss. Otherwise, Flesch and Hodgkins pursue their agendas in quite different directions, producing readings, and thus poets, with dramatically different interests and concerns. Hodgkins' Herbert is of interest because of Hodgkins' reassurances and the grounds he offers for making them; Flesch's Herbert becomes interesting when reassurance gives way to loss, to surprise, to questioning.

Hodgkins' Herbert is always nostalgic for a mythical Elizabethan religious settlement lost to the rigors of Laud's absolutism. Flesch's Herbert looks beyond rather than backward, and thus Flesch finds that the "real anguish and power of Herbert's poetry" (11) resides in the evocation not of consolation but of "loss that does not imply its own recuperation" (5). For both writers, therefore, Herbert is a poet of loss, although for Hodgkins what is lost is a function of historic development, present in the Elizabethan past, although missing or threatened in the Jacobean present. For Flesch, Herbert's sense of loss is a function of language itself, reflecting or articulating a universal experience of abandonment - although the specific terms in which that abandonment gets voiced may be linked to what Flesch sees as a transition from a gift economy to an exchange economy and thus may to a degree reflect a specific cultural transition.

Hodgkins' Herbert is in the tradition of Lewalski and Strier, as opposed to the tradition of Fish and Harman. That is to say, there are no surprises here; the experience of reading Herbert leads us to safe ground, secure within such formulations as "Calvinist anti-absolutist lower-church Episcopalian (Old Conformist)" (11). Hodgkins believes that there once was a clearly defined and broadly supported Elizabethan Settlement of Religion that in Herbert's day was fragmenting, and that Herbert grieved its loss. Herbert's poetry thus becomes an exercise in what Hodgkins calls "regenerative nostalgia," seeking "to refound the faltering Elizabethan church in the small spaces of the heart and of the rural congregation" (214).

Hodgkins explores these issues through a weaving together of quotations from The Country Parson and selected poems from The Temple, seeking to reconcile what he terms the inner emphasis of the poems and the community emphasis of Herbert's manual for rural ministry. Nevertheless, when given the choice he always finds Herbert possessed by an "internalizing impulse . . . toward building the altar and temple in the heart" (164). Although Hodgkins generally rejects Walton's interpretation of Herbert as an anti-Puritan High Churchman, nevertheless he does seem to find in Herbert's poetry Walton's own nostalgia for pre-Civil War Anglicanism and Walton's view of Herbert as an exemplar of that version of English Christianity.

Hodgkins' view of Herbert as a follower of the Tudor humanists (189) is a reading of Herbert with which I certainly agree. Hodgkins' argument about Herbert's place in the spectrum of seventeenth-century belief is based on the valid point that many readers of Herbert try to force him into religious dichotomies derived more from the nineteenth than from the seventeenth century. But Hodgkins' position seems just as much an after-the-fact rationalization. The reign of Elizabeth was no golden age of religious harmony, as John Jewell and Richard Hooker would be happy to remind us. The Elizabethan Settlement was far more a set of limits on competing religious alliances than it was a broad agreement on essentials. Elizabeth tolerated a diversity of theologies, liturgical practices, and religious allegiances so long as individuals or parties did not cross over into active political opposition or challenge the conduct of worship in her chapel. Laud got into trouble for trying to enforce the letter of the Elizabethan Settlement, not for trying to change it.

While Hodgkins does not surprise us with his conclusions about Herbert, he often puzzles and confuses his reader with loose definition and argumentation. Terms like "Protestant," "Puritan," "Catholic," "Arminian," and "Laudian" have a way of meaning one thing in one place and something a bit different in another place, so that Herbert can be aligned first with Perkins (97) and then with Laud (107) in the space of only a few pages. One might not think the issue of precise alignment so important here but for the fact that Hodgkins makes it central to every encounter with Herbert. To enlist Herbert in Calvin's theological camp, Hodgkins defines Calvinism so broadly that one has trouble imagining how not to be included. If ultimately I find Hodgkins' work unsatisfying, it has much to do with the sense that strong claims are being made and words like "exact" and "precise" are frequently being used, yet the scaffolding for such claims seems often vague, overgeneral, unhistorical, and thus insecure.

Flesch's encounter with Herbert takes Herbert's Protestantism for granted in unproblematic ways that are troubling after Hodgkins has sought to smooth them over in such troubling fashion. Yet Flesch's sense of Herbert's Protestantism starts in a place that raises interesting questions, the desire characteristic of all reformed traditions to have the Bible generally available, in a language "understanded of the people," and unmediated by traditional interpretive authority. Thus the gift of language comes at the price of authority that once might have secured the meaning of that language. This leads Flesch to explore language and meaning, the sense of self formed in and through language, the way a loss of external authority for meaning can lead to skepticism, the consequences of skepticism for one's sense of self in light of the experience of solitude and mortality, and the issue of whether there is anything outside of language.

Flesch's vocabulary for this inquiry comes out of Wittgenstein and Blanchot; in application to Herbert, it pays dividends because it enables Flesch to attend to moments in Herbert that all too often get passed over in a rush to interpretation. Flesch notes moments in Herbert when a kind of religious skepticism is voiced only to be answered by a faith that "those whose despair is genuine enough, whose sense of abandonment is powerful enough, will be comforted," yet points beyond skepticism to moments when "there is a sense of another kind of solitude, of loss that does not imply its own recuperation" (5). This "comfortless loss" Flesch finds not so much in Herbert's human as in his divine speakers, leading to the realization that skepticism of true community can be overcome through inclusion in community when it is understood as a "community of loss."

This is to me a fascinating reading of the cross in Herbert, linking Christ to his church through his (and its) experience of loss, or as Flesch puts it, Christ comes to stand "not for a limitless capacity to provide but for an endless exclusion from a provident pastoral abundance" (80). In Flesch's argument this leads to an exploration of the complex dynamics of generosity, the way the bestowing of a gift carries a price (the price of reciprocal obligation), the implications gifting has for our senses of public and private space and meaning, the way the inequalities of power and authority revealed in a moment of generosity also point to the limits of that authority. Flesch's approach opens up a fascinating discussion of how what he terms a "deeper contingency or experience of loss or solitude or mortality" (6), leading to "a sense of the ghostly generosity of language" leaves "when generality fails" (84).

Flesch's discussion of Herbert forms the groundwork for further exploration of these issues in Shakespeare and Milton. Shakespeare's characters he finds (with special regard for the situation of King Lear) caught in the economy of giving and receiving where they "experience, and describe the experience of, an exhaustion of the generosity of being that they imagined they had embodied" (7). At this moment, Flesch notices, their language of loss becomes "simultaneously generous and impotent, and its spectral generosity exceeds all bounds as it attempts the impossible compensation for its own impotent spectrality" (8). Giving special attention to the sonnets, to Richard II, to the Henry IV plays, to Antony and Cleopatra, and to King Lear, Flesch traces the perspective of the benefactor in the economy of generosity, especially as this figure experiences an inevitable decline in his ability to give and thus to control the language of self-fashioning, both his own and that of his beneficiaries.

Flesch sees in Milton this Shakespearean sense of the irreconcilability between the language of poetry and the language of power. Flesch reads Milton initially in romantic terms, appreciating the poetic power of Satan's speeches yet finding Satan even more enamored of tyrannical power than the God against whom he rebels. Flesch contrasts Satan's sense of generosity with Adam and Eve's, noting the different conceptions of poetry to which each must lead. Yet Flesch's argument about Milton leads us back to his argument about Herbert. For Flesch, the Fall is finally redeemed through the experience Adam and Eve can have only after the Fall of "the poetry of exclusion and of mortality," incorporating them in the "negative community of mortality, a community to which the Son also consents to belong" (9).

What I find intriguing about Flesch's work is not so much the novelty of its story, which turns out not to be so unfamiliar a story after all, but the way in which the conceptual frame for the story is carefully worked out and thoroughly articulated. Also valuable is the effectiveness of this frame in keeping disparate elements - the personal and social, the cultural and the economic, the languages of self, power, poetry, and culture - in play so that familiar poems reveal new dimensions, new moods, new stances, new emphases. Although theoretical concerns are often at play here, they work to the enrichment and illumination of the literary texts, making them new in ways that carry the conviction of authenticity. One finds here "fresh woods, and pastures new" where one might have expected eroded landscapes overrun by kudzu - an experience for which this reader is grateful.

JOHN N. WALL North Carolina State University