George Herbert's sacramental puritanism (*).

The relationship in the early Stuart church between doctrine and discipline -- between formal theological belief and outward matters including church governance, polity and ceremonial practice -- is important for our understanding of George Herbert's devotional lyrics. Eucharistic theories which entertained notions of "real presence" tended to support a sacerdotal style of divinity in which priest, ceremony and outward conformity were key features. Belief in the centrality of inward spiritual life, on the other hand, was reinforced by a theology in which the external elements are less effectual instruments than mere signs of a strictly invisible grace. This paper elucidates a sacramental poetics through which Herbert sought to reconcile the ideologically contrary imperatives of public ceremony and private religious devotion. The two are brought together successfully in The Temple, but this success consists largely in the drama resulting from the conflict the poems trace. Unmistakably inward in focus, Herbert' s devotional enthusiasm is cultivated nonetheless through a fully sacramental and sacerdotal apparatus.

George Herbert (1593-1633) has been identified as among the earliest of divines "to proclaim the new Anglo-centric orthodoxy" o the English church (Milton, 528). Whereas for earlier conformists the Church of England was a champion of true religion against anti-Christian Rome, the later Jacobean and Caroline ecclesiastical establishment sought to extricate itself from the confessional struggles of European Protestantism. This middle road, it is crucial to note, was based not on the ideal moderation it eventually came to signify in later historiography, but rather on a complex mixture of nationalism, the need to establish a greater sense of contiguity with tradition, and the growing inclination to jettison an earlier Protestant identity. Distinct from foreign Calvinism, the English middle way in the 1 620s and 1630s yielded increasingly to an emphasis on sacrament and ceremony to support the inclusivist policies of a state institution. Though most mainstream bishops and ministers sought to combine the ceremonia l and doctrinal elements of English Christianity, long-standing conflict over the church's confessional identity intensified and threatened seriously to erode relations among the establishment clergy. With its strained fusion of Reform doctrine and Roman Catholic ecclesiology, the English via media was compromised whenever sacrament and ceremony on the one hand conflicted on the other with a religious practice more devotional, scriptural and homiletic in orientation. (1)

An elaboration of C. A. Patrides's observation that the Eucharist is "the marrow of Herbert's sensibility" (Herbert, 1988, 17), this paper elucidates a sacramental poetics through which the poet sought to reconcile the potentially contrary imperatives of public ceremony and private religious devotion. There is in The Temple a marked ambivalence toward the relationship between these modes of piety, particularly as they converge on Herbert's treatment of sacrament. The two are brought together successfully, but this success consists precisely in the drama resulting from the ideological conflict the poems trace. Unmistakably inward in focus, Herbert's devotional enthusiasm is cultivated nonetheless through a fully sacramental apparatus. Similarly, while in certain respects exemplary of what Peter Lake has described as "avant-garde conformity" -- the aggressive promotion of a predominantly sacerdortal and ceremonial vision of the church (1991, 113-14) -- Herbert's verse also typifies the "internal religious exper ience" Anthony Milton identifies as a distinctive feature of both moderate and more radical Puritan divinity (12).

Critical proponents of a coherent Stuart via media discern in Herbert a balance of Protestant doctrine and reverence for traditional ceremonial forms. In recent scholarship, however, the middle road rends often to veer in a decidedly Genevan direction. In Love Known, a sophisticated development of the Protestant poetics first advanced by William Halewood and Barbara Lewalski, Richard Strier avers that eucharistic terminology in The Temple is for the most part metaphorical (47). (2) Gene Veith, similarly, while allowing external forms "to have been closest to Herbert's experience," emphasizes the poet's discussion of the sacraments "in the more guarded terms of Reformed, Calvinist theology" (218; see also Clarke, 13). Christopher Hodgkins is more emphatic in identifying Herbert's via media as "very nearly Calvinist. Very, very nearly" (20). Hodgkins, like Veith, rightly points out the significant role sacrament and ceremony played in Reform theology and ecclesiology, and his analysis of The Temple persuasively challenges Louis Martz's influential view of Herbert as exemplary Anglo-Catholic. In his discussion of the church's and Herbert's indebtedness to Reform theology for their sacramental views, Hodgkins thus compares key passages from the Institutes of the Christian Religion, the Elizabethan Articles, and selected lines from several Temple lyrics (24-31). Perhaps the foremost champion of a Calvinist Herbert, Daniel Doerksen concurs with Hodgkins by seeing in the Jacobean and early Caroline church a middle road that runs directly through Geneva -- between not Rome and Calvin's Swiss church, but rather Rome and the more radical separatists or "those considered heterodox in theology" (21). But this only restates rather than answers the question of the church's confessional identity: considered by whom? Indeed, what is the standard by which anyone in the pre-Civil War religious establishment is to be identified as heterodox, particularly with respect to sacraments and their role in the spiritual life of the church? Doerksen tells us that the eucharistic element in Herbert's poetry is "overrated" by those who neglect to notice that even the most sacramental of the lyrics are about the speaker's heart (97). His observation that Herbert's religion (and Donne's) is "personal and biblical rather than institutional" (139), however, is based on a false dichotomy, as though the focus on inwardness and scri pture were not compatible with the contemporary religious hegemony. Indeed, Doerksen's study itself characterizes the conformist mainstream of the early Stuart church as predominantly and therefore institutionally Calvinist.

R. V. Young is the most recent and a very formidable critic of the Protestant poetics that has predominated in Herbert studies during the past several decades. His observation that such work "fails to do justice to either Catholic or Protestant, forcing both parties into narrow ideological categories," is long overdue. Particularly relevant to the present study is Young's recognition of the relevance of sacrament for meditational practices. "[T]he most intimate and withdrawn of private devotions," he writes, "involves the urge to escape the self' so that "solitude is only the means to a profounder communion" (88-89). Young does not consider, however, the extent to which the relationship between sacrament and devotional solitude could be one of conflict rather than cooperation, a conflict rooted in the confessional struggles of the English church. Critical of the "new-historicist inclination [to] try to explain devotional and doctrinal motifs in The Temple in terms of the socio-political imperatives of Jacobea n and Caroline culture," he is concerned that "unless the poetry is, at some point, considered in its own right as poetry, then there is, finally, no point in studying it at all" (122). The detailed close readings provided here should allay such concern. But Young's insistence that Herbert "was not bound to any of the particular party platforms current in his day" (122) too hastily dismisses the considerable body of Church of England historiography produced in recent years and its relevance for our understanding of the period's literature. Herbert's doctrinal elusiveness, I suggest, is itself a political strategy -- irenic in intent and pastoral in motivation, to be sure -- but deeply aware of the controversies it navigates. Reading The Temple in light of church politics is neither "reductive" nor does it "threaten" Herbert's "poetic vitality" (122-23). On the contrary, that very vitality is evident in his subtle and often dazzling engagement with the socio-religious turbulence of the period. Herbert's heaven ly verse in this respect is firmly on the ground, however exalting our definition of poetry "as poetry."

The relationship between doctrine and discipline -- between, that is, formal theological belief and outward matters including church governance, polity, and ceremonial practice (3) -- is important for our understanding of Herbert's sacramental poetics. Simply put, theories of eucharistic presence emphasizing its material aspects tended to support a sacerdotal style of divinity in which priest, ceremony and outward conformity are key features. Belief in the centrality of inward spiritual life, on the other hand, was reinforced by a theology in which the external elements are less effectual instruments than mere signs of a strictly invisible grace. These binarisms, of course, are problematic, but like all such polarities they are useful if understood as framing the ideological continuum traversed by early Stuart divines in their struggles over the church's confessional identity. Such labels, then, are less precise confessional categories than ideological tendencies, so that while there certainly were divines wh ose theological itineraries suggest a stable middle road embracing both Puritan and ceremonialist inclinations, such "Anglo-Catholics" or Puritan moderates or Calvinist conformists were not immune to the controversies that occupied their more openly polemical contemporaries. This critical flexibility is necessary in considering Herbert, who clearly valued both external and internal dimensions of religious piety. Achsah Guibbory demonstrates such sensitivity in suggesting that when Herbert's lyrics are personal and introspective they tend to "spiritualise the church festivals and ceremonies... in a way that deemphasises the material, ceremonial, and outward aspects of worship" (55). Another way of looking at this, however, is to see sacrament and ceremony as penetrating the inner devotional realm and claiming its otherwise insular space as contiguous with the trappings that are its institutional surface. In Elizabeth Clarke's attractive formulation, Herbert's poems externalize "the inward spiritual holiness wh ich is the essence of Reformed piety" (115-16). Internal and external components of religious experience converge in The Temple on eucharistic topoi, devotional and ceremonial pieties vying for the identity of Christian grace and the location of its authority, just as competing sacramental theories focus on the manner in which the eucharistic elements communicate their holy referents. A style of divinity emphasizing religious experience as integral with ceremonial forms and ritual tends toward more sensualist eucharistic formulae. Obversely, the extent to which the Eucharist was thought to contain or otherwise effectually to communicate grace is an index of its sacerdotal status and role in promoting the church's social and confessional cohesion. The Pauline admonition to examine oneself when receiving the Eucharist was important for early Stuart divines of all stripes, whether moderate Puritan, conforming Calvinist, or avant-gardeb ceremonialist. But just as Jesus's words of institution were the site of exeg etical conflict, so were the relative emphases placed on private devotion and ceremony potentially divisive. Sacramental topoi in The Temple manifest these competing claims to the identity and character of religious experience. (4)

The controversy over sacraments and other ceremonial forms that was to flare again during the Laudian archbishopric long had been a feature of the English church's struggle to establish a definitive confessional identity. Indeed, sixteenth-century views of the role and nature of sacraments were, at best, ambiguous. In the 1549 Prayer Book -- Thomas Cranmer's supreme contribution to Edwardine reform, particularly as regards the Eucharist -- the elevation of the Host at the sacring bell, the pax and holy bread were all removed from the official Church of England liturgy. Now absent from the calendar were most of the traditional feast days, and eliminated also were the very popular and widespread Jesus Masses (Duffy, 465). And yet as tenacious a traditionalist as the Bishop of Winchester, Stephen Gardiner, could find in the Prayer Book the teaching of the Mass to which he was accustomed, despite the obvious abrogation in its pages of essential features of English religious tradition (Ibid., 470). But if the Edwa rdine Prayer Book was largely an adaptation of the Roman Missal, that of 1552 constitutes dramatic Protestant revision, evident especially in the notorious Black Rubric, hastily added in response to the influential presbyterian John Knox and his disdain for popish ceremonies. It is perhaps one of the chief reasons the staunchly Roman Catholic Mary Tudor repealed the book upon her accession in 1553, for in addition to refusing the notion that kneeling in anyway implies adoration, the Black Rubric was boldly Calvinist in its denial of "any real and essential presence there being of Christ's natural flesh and blood.

For as concerning the sacramental bread and wine, they remain still in their very natural substances ... And as concerning the natural body and blood of Our Saviour Christ, they are in heaven and not here" (Cressy and Ferrell, 48). To the elimination of the elevation of the Host in the 1549 version, the new book added the removal of the prayer of consecration at Communion and eliminated as well the signing of the cross over the elements and the stone altar, the latter to be replaced by a simple table in the body of the church (Duffy, 474). Under Mary, of course, the religious centrality of sacrament and ceremony was restored. Though advocating a balance of scriptural and ceremonial emphases, Cardinal Reginald Pole stressed that "the observatyon of ceremonyes, for obedyence sake, wyll gyve more light than all the readynge of Scrypture can doe." Though "the thynge that gyveth us the veraye light, ys none of them both," neither ceremonies nor scripture, yet "they are most apte to receyve light, that are more obe yent to follow ceremonyes, than to reade" (Ibid., 531). Marian primers did go some way to restore the pre-Reformation character totally absent from the Edwardine primer of 1553. Indeed, later editions include a didactic treatise on the Mass that explicates and defends that crucial doctrine of Roman Catholic piety, the Real Presence and Sacrifice. However, elaborate affective prayers on the Virgin Mary, the saints and the Blessed Sacrament, staples of the conservative books, were now almost entirely absent (Ibid., 540-42).

When the Book of Common Prayer was restored under Elizabeth in 1559, the controversial Black Rubric was removed, never to reappear. The final version is a hybrid of the relatively conservative Edwardine book of 1549 and the more radically Protestant version of 1552. It allows communicants to "eat of the flesh of thy dear Son Jesus Christ, and to drink his blood, that our sinful bodies may be made clean by his body, and our souls washed through his most precious blood." That both "body and soul" are fed is repeated in the minister's prayer of thanksgiving, but the added phrase insisting that all is done "in thy heart by faith, with thanksgiving" (Cressy and Ferrell, 47) severely attenuates any suggestion of a physiological reception. In 1559 the Act of Uniformity made adherence to the ceremonies of the Church of England legally binding. But the ambiguities already apparent in the wording of the Prayer Book took on even greater significance with the closing words of the Act:

if there shall happen any contempt or irreverence to be used in the ceremonies or rites of the church by the misusing of the orders appointed in [the Prayer Book], the queen's majesty may, by the like advice of the said commissioners or metropolitan, ordain and publish such further ceremonies or rites as may be most for the advancement of God's glory, the edifying of his church, and the due reverence of Christ's holy mysteries and sacraments.

(Cressy and Ferrell, 59)

If "contempt" and "irreverence" target anti-sacramental disdain, the same phrase might be said to refer to an excessive or popish regard (as opposed to the "due reverence" of the passage's final clause) and thereby offer consolation to those churchmen hopeful of further reform.

Neither were the Thirty Nine Articles (1571), doctrinal counterpart to the liturgy, without ambiguity. According to Article 28, the sacrament is not only a sign"; the reception of the bread and wine, rather, is a "partaking" of the body and blood of Christ for those "such as rightly, worthily, and with faith, receive the same." "Transubstantiation" is "repugnant to the plain words of scripture, overthroweth the nature of a sacrament, and hath given occasion to many superstitions." Nevertheless, the "body of Christ is given, taken, and eaten," though again, "only after an heavenly and spiritual manner," while "the mean whereby the body of Christ is received and eaten in the supper is faith" (Cressy and Ferrell, 67). This careful balance affirming the physical act while subordinating it to spiritual mystery recalls Calvin's own reluctance to stress externals anymore than is absolutely necessary. Article 29, moreover, recalls Calvin's characterization of the wicked (pace Augustine) as he who "presses with the te eth" rather than "eats with the heart" (4.14.15). The Article states that those "void of a lively faith, although they do carnally and visibly press with their teeth (as St. Augustine saith) the sacrament of the body and blood of Christ, yet in no wise are they partakers of Christ: but rather, to their condemnation, do eat and drink the sign or sacrament of so great a thing" (Cressy and Ferrell, 67). That the Articles' most sensual language is applied to the wicked is perhaps a deliberate irony, but there is also the suggestion that the faithless, because they receive only in a carnal manner, do not attain to the edification of either soul or body, whereas for those who receive "worthily" and by "faith" the sacrament is of both spiritual and bodily benefit, what Article 25 describes as "a wholesome effect or operation" (Cressy and Ferrell, 66).

Despite echoes of Reform theology, however, both liturgical and doctrinal ambiguities contributed to continuing dissatisfaction among those for whom the Elizabethan settlement was decidedly less than sufficient. Conrad Russell points out that the Prayer Book and Settlement were constructed prior to the naming of bishops who thus bitterly complained of not being consulted. Formation of the Articles, however, because doctrinal in focus, had to wait until the first Protestant convocation in 1562-1563. The church's discipline and doctrine "came out of different minds, and therefore represented ideals of the church which were at least potentially divergent" (87). Those divines eager for further reform set their sights not only on the Prayer Book, however, but on the Articles as well. The "View of Popish Abuses" appended to the Puritan Admonition to the Parliament, itself following hot on the heels of the Articles in 1572, recognized both there and in the liturgy remnants of such popish practices as idolatrous knee ling and "breadengod" worship. This latter is described further as a "half communion, which is yet appointed like to the commemoration of the mass" (Cressy and Ferrell, 84). That such outrage was provoked by sacramental passages in the Articles is evidence against Christopher Hodgkins's claim that they are unambiguously Calvinist and that Rome, from a doctrinal perspective, "is off the map -- dismissed with the kind of stinging language [Cardinal] Newman was to find so intractable" (27). If Elizabethan Catholics smarted under the language of the Articles, their enemies apparently thought papists had no small cause for celebration.

Though the intense debates over doctrinal Calvinism which plagued the final decades of the Elizabethan era abated somewhat with the Stuart succession, Reform theology was to have lasting impact on the church and especially on its handling of ceremonies. That Calvinism was thought by some to threaten the integrity of sacramental ministry is evident during the decade prior to the publication of Herbert's poems. Supporting the Arminian John Buckeridge's dispute with Thomas Morton over the doctrinal legitimacy of the largely Calvinist Dortrecht articles of 1618, Dean Frances White of Carlisle asked whether predestinarians in Holy Communion could "say to all communicants whatsoever, 'The Body of Our Lord which was given for thee,' as we are bound to say? Let the opinion of the Dortists be admitted, and the tenth person in the Church shall not have been redeemed" (Tyacke, 1995, 65). According to then Archbishop James Ussher, Samuel Ward had complained that some of the English delegates to the Synod of Dort were acc used of being "half Remonstrants for extending the oblation made to the father to all and for holding sundry effects thereof offered serio and some really communicated to the reprobate" (Lake, 1987, 59). As Peter Lake has demonstrated, it is highly instructive to compare Ward's comments here with the irenic advice offered some ten years later to friend and fellow Dort delegate John Davenant. Ward advises Davenant to refrain from asserting that grace is conferred by Baptism, fearing "this time when the Arminians cleave so close one to another" (Ibid., 66). Once indignant at the accusation that he was a "half Remonstrant" for opposing the Calvinist doctrine of limited atonement, Ward now finds it necessary to protect his other half, so to speak. This caution against adding fuel to the fire is indicative of the subtlety of theological opinion among establishment divines during the decade following the 1618 Synod. Ward's advice was offered in 1629, the advent of Charles's personal rule -- a period that would see a long-standing moderate, episcopalian and Calvinist unity yield to an Arminian/Puritan schism, each faction radicalizing the other. It was some sixteen years earlier, however, that the ex-chaplain and imminent Roman convert Benjamin Carier advised James I that Calvinist predestination renders the sacraments meaningless and thus undermines episcopacy (Tyacke, 1987, 5-6). White's and Ward's remarks only reinforce what Carier so presciently realized -- that doctrinal issues are of profound significance for the sacramental life of the church, the relationship between doctrine and ceremony crucial to the struggle over it's confessional identity.

Essentially an alternative to the second-generation Calvinism of Theodore Beza, the views of Jacobus Arminius are distinct from Calvin's own in one important way. While he shared Calvin's conviction that Christ died for all even if not everyone is saved in the end, Arminius maintained a much greater degree of human autonomy. (5) Whereas the Remonstrant controversy on the continent was concerned almost exclusively with doctrine, English Arminianism included an emphasis on sacramental ministry as the external mark of its distinctive character. Not having experienced the same degree of ecclesiastical reform as its continental Protestant counterparts, the English religious establishment had retained not only episcopacy but also a liturgy which, in its inception at least, retained the spirit if not the letter of its Roman Catholic model. In rejecting the arbitrary grace of a predestinarian decree impervious to human will, English Arminians advanced the universalist doctrine of a grace freely offered in the sacrame nts and available to anyone who chose to receive them. Lake has located the origins of this English Arminianism in Richard Hooker, who was among the first of Protestants to emphasize the importance of ritual and ceremony as integral aspects of Christian communal experience rather than as matters to be regarded with indifference or, worse yet, merely tolerated (1988, 155-57). Hooker's "vision of the sacrament really offering Christ's body and blood to all who received it in good faith" (Lake, 1987, 42), moreover, dispensed with the tendency to distinguish between the godly and ungodly as suggested by a style of divinity more explicitly predestinarian in emphasis. But as Lake also points out, Hooker nowhere in the Polity explicitly attacks Calvinist thought, even if the doctrinal implications of his episcopalian and ceremonialist biases conflicted with Reform orthodoxy (Ibid.). Indeed, Lake might have observed in Hooker a more positive rather than merely tacit endorsement of such theology. If the eucharistic el ements, for example, are not to be taken merely "for bare resemblances or memorials of things absent, neither for naked signs and testimonies assuring us of grace received before, but (as they are indeed and in verity) for means effectual," it is also true that "all receive not the grace of God which receive the sacraments of his grace (2:236).This conflict between the visible and invisible communication of grace is not exclusive to Hooker, of course, but it does become for him an issue connected with his erastian tendencies: "It must be confessed that of Christ, working as a Creator, and a Governor of the world by providence, all are partakers; not all partakers of that grace whereby he inhabiteth whom he saveth" (2:232). If Calvinism was, in Patrick Collinson's phrase, "the theological cement" of the early Stuart church (1982, 82), some careful nuancing was required to reconcile its predestinarian and sacramental elements. (6)

The confessional broils of the English Reformation thus derived from a complex ecclesiastical history of which a crucial feature was debate over sacramental theories and practices, a debate comprised of two distinct though related issues: the material extent of divinity in the eucharistic species, and the role of religious subjectivity in the communication of grace. Though presumably the frail in faith might have doubted divine presence in the Eucharist as equally as the internal presence of the spirit, the availability of an external means of grace -- whatever the individual vicissitudes of mood and psychological make-up -- would have been reinforced by a doctrine which insisted not only on the efficacy of those means, but on the divine character of the instruments themselves. The reasons why Reformation religieux were so deeply divided over whether sacrament was more an internal than external matter is beyond the scope of this paper. A simple answer is that the notions sola fidei and sola scriptura displace d the ceremonial from its previously central position in Christian worship. Anxiety about the carnal dimension of the rite, however, was as much a feature of pre-scholastic and medieval theologies as of polemical battles in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. (7) Indeed, it is a problem that troubled not only the church fathers but at least one gospel writer for whom Jesus's disciples, shocked at his insisting that unless they eat of his flesh and drink of his blood they have no life, are perplexed yet again at the caveat that only the spirit gives life while the flesh profits nothing (Jn. 6.53-66). With scriptural authority so deeply vexing, it is not surprising that exegetes and other ecclesiastes subsequently struggled as fiercely as they did.

MODUS

Herbert was among those English divines whose reluctance to identify explicitly the modus of sacramental presence - an irenic agnosticism C. W. Dugmore has identified as the "mysterium tremendum" approach to the Eucharist (61 n. 3) - did not prevent them from revering the material aspects of the ritual. These churchmen made some effort to distinguish, as did Hooker before them, between simply corporeal and more mystical understandings of presence. But if they were wary of the scholastic accretions attached to the Tridentine doctrine of transubstantiation, particularly the Aristotelian categories of substance and accident, English divines in the 1620s began to entertain similar if alternative interpretations. (8) The Concilii Tridentini Acta (7.187) determined that in the Eucharist is a "unique changing of the whole substance of bread into the body and of the whole substance of wine into the blood, while the species of bread and wine nonetheless remain, which change the Catholic Church very suitably calls tran substantiation" (Schillebeeckx, 38). According to Dugmore, the Thomist doctrine actually denied presence in loco, allowing the body and blood a reality only per modum substantiae (26-27). (9) While it is not surprising that many saw in the Tridentine formula a too carnal and therefore idolatrous rendering, schooled divines would have recognized that the subtleties of the doctrine did not make such an interpretation necessary. This may help to explain why such clergy as Richard Mon tagu, Richard Neile, John Cosin, and William Laud advanced a sacramental vision of the ministry bordering on popery," while maintaining, if sometimes disingenuously, a hostile stance toward the Roman church in general. (10) It is safe to speculate that one of the causes why avant-garde and Laudian divines were accused of popery by their opponents is the spectre of transubstantiation raised by this emphasis on ceremony and the sacramental dimension of the ministry. Such fears were not entirely unwarranted. Cosin, for example, endorse d the Jesuit Maldonatus's moderate views on eucharistic sacrifice and went so far as to advocate a rapprochement with Rome on the issue of real presence. Cosin's contemporary, William Forbes, denied the heretical status of transubstantiation and consubstantiation. Perhaps most disturbing about such "popish" flirtations were the implicit suggestion that the Tridentine canons on the Eucharist or even the Roman Missal itself could be interpreted in a manner harmonious with English doctrine, and that Roman divines such as Maldonatus or Sancta Clara were willing to offer such interpretations. Cosin, Forbes and others may have identified transubstantiation with simplified, vulgar interpretations of Roman doctrine common among both moderate and nonconforming Puritans, or they simply may have recognized the futility of encouraging tolerance for a formula whose complexity precluded popular access, in which case their occasional anti-Roman outbursts were less doctrinal in motivation than politically expedient. In any e vent, it is clear these divines sought not only to promote sacraments as essential means of grace, but on occasion appeared to advance sacramental formulae indistinguishable from that of their supposed Roman foes, and thus inadvertently exacerbated fears of crypto-popery. (11)

Like other establishment divines, Herbert more often than not sought to avoid controversy while maintaining both a sacerdotal and sacramental vision of the church. Richard Hooker provided Herbert and others with a model of behavior suitable for approaching Holy Communion: what moveth us to argue of the manner how life should come by bread, our duty being here but to take what is offered, and most assuredly to rest persuaded of this, that can we but eat we are safe?... Let it therefore be sufficient for me presenting my selfe at the Lords table to know what there I receive from him, without searching or inquiring of the maner how Christ performeth his promise.

(2:330)

Herbert essentially agrees, even if his approach to such mystery is far from Hooker's measured rationality. The Country Parson,

being to administer the Sacraments, is at a stand with himself, how or what behaviour to assume for so holy things. Especially at Communion times he is in a great confusion, as being not only to receive God, but to break, and administer him. Neither finds he any issue in this, but to throw himself down at the throne of grace, saying, Lord, thou knowest what thou didst, when thou apointedst it to be done thus; therefore doe thou fulfill what thou didst appoint; for thou art not only the feast, but the way to it. (12)

Poetic endorsement of this mysterium tremendum approach is apparent in "Divinitie," where theological curiosity is as presumptuous as the new philosophy's obsession with astronomical inquiry. Among the objects cut and carved "with the edge of wit" (line 7) is the Eucharist, which, Herbert implies, should be regarded as a simple matter and exempt from controversy:

But he doth bid us take his bloud for wine.

Bid what he please; yet I am sure,

To take and taste what he doth there designe,

Is all that saves, and not obscure.

(21-24)

It may be, however, that the sacrament is not the least of "Gordian knots" (line 20) after all. The first line of this stanza certainly does obscure, grammatically allowing both the innocuous analogy "blood as wine" and the literal substitution "blood in place of wine," the equivocation exacerbated in the third line by "what," which invites the gloss "whatever." (13) The obscurity does not so much evade doctrinal commitment as deliberately avoid controversy and what can only amount to an absurd probing of that which finally is mysterious. "Yet," however, suggests no little reluctance to rest content with the mysterious words of institution. It is as if Herbert either understands the scripture to be saying one thing and proceeds to assert another, or, more likely, is frustrated by an obscurity inherent in the institution itself and, though allowing the ambiguity in his own assessment, has in mind a certain preference nonetheless. It may be recalled that whereas Christ says "take and at," Herbert writes "rake a nd taste," which, while not alone conclusive proof, does suggest the need for as carnal an apprehension of God's "designe" as is possible.

Sensory vividness is evident in an earlier stanza, where the proximity of "broacht" species to pierced side nevertheless is accompanied by a warning against excessive curiosity:

Could not that Wisdome, which first broacht the wine,

Have thicken'd it with definitions?

And jagg'd his seamlesse coat, had that been fine,

With curious questions and divisions?

(9-12)

"Wisdome" indeed eventually did thicken the wine offered his disciples -- but with blood, nor definitions -- which only advances further the notion that the cup received in remembrance is somehow that which it signifies. It would appear on this account that the overly curious "edge of wit" does not pertain to any particular doctrinal formula; the poem condemns scholastic rationalism for applying precise formulae to what must remain a mystery, and thus for mocking that for which Herbert would retain the utmost dignity and reverence.

In the final stanza we find that "Faith needs no staffe of flesh, but stoutly can / To heav'n alone both go, and leade" (lines 27-28). Only faith, which, like "Divinities transcendent skie" is beyond material limitation, can provide the impetus truly to "take and taste," to believe that in so doing one receives that which is "all that saves" (24). Rather than advance theological formulae which render sacramental efficacy rationally palatable, Herbert advocates believing in the means of grace regardless. By instructing the "foolish man" to burn his "Epicycles" and "Break all thy spheres" (25-26) he figuratively attacks Ptolemaic apologists desperate to defend their waning cosmology with sophisticated and ultimately misguided models. Trans- and consubstantiation, Calvinist virtualism -- these are as inadequate as their scholastic predecessors in addressing the mystery behind Jesus's words of institution. To persist in such scrutiny is tantamount to crucifying him anew, this time with "curious questions and divi sions."

But perhaps simply to "take and taste" grace without trying to understand how grace is imparted in the sacrament is as difficult, finally, as retaining for the universe an Aristotelian hierarchy while dismissing the models which render it intelligible. Ignoring his own advice, Herbert left a record of "curious questions" about the Eucharist by way of two very different versions of "The H. Communion." In B and the editio princeps of 1633, (14) he avoids explicit mention of the various doctrinal formulae evident in the earlier Williams MS. He begins by rejecting the notion that God might be conveyed "in" such ceremonial trappings as "rich furniture ... fine aray" and "wedge of gold" (lines 1-4). It is important to note, however, that even if many of his contemporaries would have recognized these as the trappings of the Roman Mass, Herbert does not dismiss the use of such external finery per se. (15) His objection, rather, pertains specifically to the idea that externals might themselves effectually conjure or s omehow contain their divine referents. For if they did, the sacrament's primarily internal and noncorporeal application would be compromised: "thou should'st without me still have been, / Leaving within me sinne" (5-6). But if the first stanza leads one to expect a moderate regard for the elements of bread and wine, the second describes a sacramental efficacy every bit as carnal as the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation:

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.

(7-12)

This essentially physiological description, while seeking to avoid the problem of determining how or at which point in the process the species become involved in conveying the sacrificial body and blood, nevertheless suggests their instrumental and not merely representational status. Sacramental controversy resides in the silence between the first and second stanzas, between awkwardness over the precise role of ceremonial trappings and scrutiny of a mysterious process. Herbert deftly avoids such controversy by focusing on the elements internal operation, maintaining their carnality while accommodating a Reform emphasis on individuals' souls as the collective and primary site of sacramental presence.

The separation of "souls and fleshy hearts" (line 15) in the following stanzas nevertheless continues to suggest the need for a physical explanation of sacramental grace. God's "small quantities" cannot overcome the wall which restrains mere "rebel-flesh" (17). Indeed, the "souls most subtile rooms" are penetrable only by "grace," which, however, "with these elements comes," and which, having entered the soul, sends "Dispatches" to the sentinels or "spirits refin'd" (19-24) guarding the way. They in turn distribute medicinal sacramental benefits throughout the body. The process, figuratively, is a military coup: external finery accompanies but does not directly communicate grace, which, nevertheless, is somehow connected with the elements, but only after they are ingested. The masticated and divinely invigorated species then "spread their forces into every part"; but it is grace, the commander-in-chief, that breaches the stronghold and secures both the soul's terrain and a hitherto "rebel-flesh."

It may be that what I have described as bordering on a Roman Catholic sacramental position is but the poetic description of what in fact is not a physical process after all. This would be in keeping with Calvin's point that God uses material means to communicate a more rarefied grace. The idea that presence is conveyed "with" or alongside, rather than "in" the elements is thoroughly consistent with Reform theology. The sacrament, rather than an accident veiling an inward substance or, as for Luther, a consubstantial manifestation of the hypostatic union, is instead an Augustinian seal ratifying a sacramental reality solely in the heart or soul of the communicant. It is, writes Calvin, "an outward sign by which the Lord seals on our consciences the promises of his good will toward us" (4.14.1). The material elements are important insofar as they are the means by which God chooses to indicate or point toward his gifts, thus mitigating our inability to comprehend spiritual truths without material aids: our "smal l capacity" and the "dullest minds" (4.17.1) are led by "a sort of analogy" from physical to spiritual things (4.17.3). It is a Satanic error, however, to believe "that Christ's body, enclosed in the bread, is transmitted by the mouth of the body into the stomach" (4.17.15). (16) Young insists that "with these elements comes excludes a Calvinist reading. But the poem does not say that either God or grace is, as in Young's gloss, "present in the eucharistic species" (138). Young cites Calvin's view that sacraments "do not bestow any grace of themselves, but announce and tell us" that grace has been conferred (Calvin, 4.14.17; Young, 138). The key phrase here is "not... of themselves" -- not, that is, ex opere operato. "With" in Herbert's poem upholds rather than excludes Calvin's "announce and tell." Nevertheless, the poem's physiological terminology would appear to invite Calvin's condemnation in suggesting that heaven's king might go a progress through the guts of a beggarly sinner -- that the elements indee d are changed at the moment of ingestion. Just as the idea of the individual soul as site of a cosmic struggle would not have seemed odd to the early modern Christian, so did Herbert regard the personal drama of redemption as a very real rather than merely figurative battle -- the arena corporeal, the conflict immanent. Whatever the extent of that war's reality, the forensic and equivocal "Not," "But," "Yet," and "Onely" introducing each stanza are symptomatic less of a clear and stable via media than the irenic disposition of the Country Parson, who would that he were content to know that God is "not only the feast, but the way to it." (17)

The B version of "H. Communion" is sensitive to ecclesiastical controversy over the importance of ceremony and discipline relative to preaching and doctrine. (18) This becomes even more evident when it is compared with the earlier version of the Williams MS, where Herbert's theological sympathies are more clearly discernible. (9) The first stanza suggests two competing theories which recall early Reformation controversy. Roman trans- and Lutheran consubstantiation offer a choice between the notion that the bread's substance is wholly transformed and a doctrine of ubiquity wherein God's substantial presence does not exclude that of the bread. The choice, in hindsight, is of little importance, for in the following stanza Herbert dismisses the issue of the bread's status. What really matters is that his "gratious Lord" (line 1) and "all thy traine" (10) are present in the rite: how this comes about, suggests Herbert, is not nearly as important as simply recognizing that it does. In the third stanza, however, thi s adiaphoric stance yields to a more specifically Calvinist position: divine presence is asserted, but is confined to the communicant's soul; it is indicated, but not embodied, by the species of bread and wine. Explicit here, it is this doctrine that silently connects the first and second stanzas of the later version of the poem; and yet there "nourishment and strength" suggest a physiological grace.

The first stanza's suggestion that Luther was as mistaken as his Roman foes when it comes to sacramental theology is reiterated at the center of the poem where "Impanation" (line 25), the Lutheran view of sacramental presence based on the hypostatic union of the Incarnation, is explicitly rejected. Rather than bread becoming God, according to Luther, the divine substance becomes united with that of bread, just as the Word becomes flesh at its human birth (38:306-07). That God's nature takes on man's is, for this poem, doctrinally sound; but the notion that nature is united with mere bread is simply intolerable. Herbert here is willing to allow a significant role for the species, but he is wary, as was Calvin, of compromising the divine nature. Rather, it is "My flesh, & fleshly villany" that "made thee dead" (lines 2930). If there is a sacrificial element in Holy Communion it is in God's gracious identification with the communicant's "rebel-flesh," the later poem's version of "fleshly villany." And yet this n ew focus on the Incarnation abandons entirely the poem's earlier ecumenism by doubting whether the elements are at all involved in the flesh they supposedly declare: "That fflesh is there, mine eyes deny: / And what should flesh but flesh discry, / The noblest sence of five?" (31-32). The species point to rather than embody a process that occurs on a strictly spiritual level. As with the later poem, the W "H. Communion" registers a gap between flesh and soul, though here the absence of any physiological explanation only exacerbates the absence of Calvin's radically transcendent God:

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)

Yet in the final stanza the "gift of all gifts," unlike flesh, can indeed "pass." This gift, of course, is none other than grace, explicitly identified in the later poem where, by dispatching sacramental and physiological "spirits refin'd," it overcomes "the wall that parts I Our souls and fleshy hearts."

In the earlier "H. Communion," then, Herbert allows little if any inter-penetration of flesh and soul, maintaining instead a vision of sacramental grace as predominantly non-corporeal. The later B poem, conversely, is irenic in tone, accommodating a more integrated, amorphous relationship among body, soul, grace, and the material means of grace. Michael C. Schoenfeldt, in his examination of the eating trope in the poem, gets it right when he remarks that "the entry of God into his mortal subject...delineates the border between matter and spirit that it proceeds benevolently to transgress" (98). These poems, as Robert Ellrodt has suggested, thus frame a linear development in Herbert's sacramental thought (1960, 324-41). The time between their respective compositions parallels a period in Stuart church history, from the 1618 Synod of Dort to the advent of the Laudian archbishopric, in which sacrament and ceremony became increasingly central to the character of mainstream English divinity. Herbert's fondness for ceremony, then, may have coincided with the impatience of some for what they perceived to be an immoderate emphasis on preaching, doctrine and more private enthusiasms. Whether the change is a reflection of his spiritual development or a response to political realities is difficult to determine; such things, of course, are impossible to separate. For while there is no doubt that Herbert shared with other establishment divines a concern that the Eucharist somehow communicate divine presence, the modus of communication as variously expressed in the poetry suggests he would have been far from embracing wholeheartedly the Laudian ceremonial programme first implemented in 1633, the year of his death. Whatever his theological itinerary, the two versions of "H. Communion" document the array of sacramental theories available to Herbert's contemporaries and indicate that the English via media was less a harmonization of competing ecclesiastical and doctrinal ideologies than a way lacking both clarity and certainty.

If wary of an overly carnal or potentially idolatrous attitude toward sacraments, Herbert does not appear to have had much sympathy for those who regarded the elements merely as commemorative signs. In "Love Unknown" he implies that the "many" who "drunk bare wine" suffer considerable disadvantage relative to the speaker for whom "A friend did steal into my cup for good" (lines 42-43). (20) Herbert is far from reluctant to indulge a sensual vision of sacramental grace. And yet what is most striking is the passage's (albeit soft) predestinarian tone, Herbert allowing, as did Calvin, that the godly might worship alongside the wicked. The logic of coupling his own considerable commitment to the sacramental dimension of Christian worship with predestinarian doctrine resulted for Calvin in the caveat that the Eucharist "is turned into a deadly poison for all those whose faith it does not nourish and strengthen, and whom it does not arouse to thanksgiving and to love" (4.17.40). (21) That the sacrament may or may n ot nourish and arouse depends not simply on whether one is faithful, thankful, and loving; rather, one is faithful, thankful, and loving to the extent one is in fact nourished and aroused. Herbert's subtle manoeuvre in "Love Unknown" similarly maintains both a carnal emphasis and the broad-based vision of church membership sacraments support, while at the same time allowing for the possibility that some who drink and eat are not among the spiritually regenerated. (22) It would appear that predestinarian Calvinism for the speaker of "Love Unknown" is compatible with an avant-garde fondness for ceremony. The passage is thus an exception to Peter Lake's alignment of sacramental enthusiasm with anti-Calvinism (1987, 74-75). Herbert does not seem to have shared the concern of those who, like Benjamin Carier, worried that predestination compromises the sacramental dimension of Christian ministry and the social cohesion it supports.

In "The Water-course," more famously, Herbert allows that God

gives to man, as he sees fit,{Salvation. Damnation. (10)

In this uncharacteristically controversial lyric Herbert is perhaps deliberately playful, never clarifying the pronoun's correspondent -- God or man? R. V. Young calls Herbert's position here Thomist, one that sustains both free will and predestination (35). But if this is meant to distance Herbert from Calvin, it does not suffice, for surely Calvin maintained that his position retains human free will, at least with respect to sin, insisting, for example, that the reprobate are "justly charged against the malice and depravity of their hearts," even though "given over" thereto (3.24.14). Whatever the logical contradictions involved in such assertions, Calvin was as concerned as Aquinas and the church fathers both to make sin a strictly human responsibility and grace an unmerited gift. Differences --- and they are significant -- arise only in working out the technical details involved in reconciling such claims with free will. A more general difference is the extent to which Calvin was willing logically to go i n support of these cornerstone truths. By raising the issue of predestination so explicitly in "The Water-course," Herbert thus reveals his affinity with Calvin's own willingness to force consideration of the issue even while demurring from stating clearly his own place within the English Calvinist tradition. As David Como has argued, the "hegemonic force of the predestinarian consensus among English Calvinists "was strongest when it was tacit, assumed and unquestioned" (66). His reluctance to divulge anything like a firm doctrinal position, however, did not prevent Herbert from expressing his confidence in God's mercy, for it is the overwhelming presence of sacramental grace, joined to the communicant's willingness to receive it, that permeates both poem and title: "turn the pipe and waters course / To serve thy sinnes, and furnish thee with store / Of sov'raigne tears, springing from true remorse" (lines 6-8).

Whatever the extent of his Calvinism and views on the controversial issue of limited atonement, Herbert maintains a concern for the material integrity of sacramental grace. Eucharistic topoi for him indicated not only necessary and effectual means, but also, the conceptual and psychological framework within which to think the application of grace to the human heart. "The Agonie," for example, renders the Atonement personal, intimate, and visceral, Christ's sacrifice and the benefits it affords communicated via the sacrament: "Sinne is that presse and vice, which forceth pain / To hunt his cruell food through ev'ry vein" and "Love is that liquor sweet and most divine, / Which my God feels as bloud; but I, as wine" (lines 11-12, 17-18). The juxtaposition of these two couplets is startling. The Christ who in Pauline terms becomes sin (1 Pet. 2.24; 2 Cor. 5.21) is filled here with sin's poison, which displaces the divine blood that in turn becomes that of the communicant, who, presumably, was filled hitherto with the sin now coursing through his saviour's veins. The final line may suggest a moderate sacramental position; indeed, Hutchinson called it "an inversion of the doctrine of transubstantiation" (Herbert, 1941, 488). But "feels" is at best ambiguous, allowing that the speaker's phenomenal experience of wine may intimate what in fact is a bloody affair, the two levels, appearance and veiled reality, evoking the Aristotelian categories of substance and accident implicit in the Tridentine canons on the Eucharist. Herbert, however, stops short of identifying explicitly the modus whereby sacramental grace is actualized. R. V. Young's assertion that in "The Agonie" Christ "is in some way present under the form of" the elements thus seems to me unwarranted, for nowhere in the poem is Herbert this specific. He indeed may "not have been happy" (Young, 121) with the 1552 BOCP, particularly the presence-denying Black Rubric; but the 1559 and subsequent versions of the Prayer Book no more provided Herbert with a rationale for specifying the mode of sacramental presence than the poem allows Young's reading. And yet the communicant's experience of wine rather than blood may be seen as compatible with transubstantiation after all, his senses apprehending as wine (accident) what is actually blood (substance). By this "liquor sweet" the benefits obtained by Christ's surrogate sufferings under the winepress of just wrath are transferred -- or transfused -- minus the sufferings themselves. Recourse "Unto Mount Olivet" for the speaker is purely imaginative, even if excruciating: "A man so wrung with pains, that all his hair, / His skinne, his garments bloudie be" (lines 9-10) suggests a meditative sharing in Christ's sufferings, but poetic artifice renders sweet that which for another was truly agonizing, just as the accidental species of a Roman sacrament veil even as they embody their substantial counterpart.

Less ambiguous is "The Invitation." Whereas Jesus said simply "drink" and "this is my blood," Herbert here introduces a rather provocative modification: "drink this, / Which before ye drink is bloud" (lines 11-12, my emphasis). It is possible that Herbert means only to distinguish between what is taken in the sacrament and what flowed at Golgotha; but it is at least as likely that he addresses the issue so carefully avoided in the 1633 "H. Communion," namely, the question of the spatial and temporal occurrence of body and blood -- of when and where, exactly, the "friend" of "Love Unknown" steals into the speaker's cup. Whereas the blank space between the first and second stanzas of the later "H. Communion" allow him to avoid dealing too specifically with the manner of sacramental presence, here Herbert appears to advocate a change in the species prior to ingestion, thus going considerably beyond the moderate or Calvinist position which allows only a spiritual presence among the souls of the elect.

SACRAMENTUM SACERDOTALIS

Undoubtedly a keen proponent of the church's sacramental policies and practices, Herbert nonetheless cautioned against too enthusiastic a regard for ceremonial trappings. At issue is conflict between, on the one hand, the sacerdotal vision of a church whose collective good consists in public, ceremonial conformity under episcopal discipline, and, on the other, a Puritan enthusiasm which locates true religious piety in the private and rarefied communion of God and individual. Controversy over the material extent and modus of divine presence in the Eucharist, then, is of no little consequence for the perceived role of institutional media in the dissemination of God's gifts. The Temple, however, is powerful evidence that these ideological poles were far from mutually exclusive, for Herbert's celebration of ceremonial forms not only complements but indeed is an integral feature of the devotional subjectivity he cultivates.

In "The Priesthood" Herbert stands in awe of the priestly office, especially the administering of sacraments. His profound respect for ritual is anticipated by subtle comparison of the Eucharist with the potter's art, which fits earth by "fire and trade... for the boards of those / Who make the bravest shows" (lines 16-18). In the next stanza we find that the inferior art is but earth delighting in earth, "both feeder, dish, and meat" having one beginning and one finall summe" (21-22), and in the following stanza the sacramental pun on "boards" is confirmed:

But th' holy men of God such vessels are,

As serve him up, who all the world commands:

When God vouchsafeth to become our fare,

Their hands convey him, who conveys their hands.

O what pure things, most pure must those things be,

Who bring my God to me!

(25-30)

Perplexity results finally in a hyperbolic display of submission, the poet and aspiring priest recognizing his status as "lowly matter," the master potter's clay thrown "at his [God's] feet" (35-36). Such prostration, however, represents more than admiration of and fear for the sacramental office. The Ark of the Covenant he hesitates to grasp, no doubt mindful of Uzzah's fate (2 Sam. 6.6), is typologically the sacrament, the vessel of the new covenant (Heb. 9.4), which here seems to "shake / Through th' old sinnes and new doctrines of our land" (32-33). It is difficult to determine precisely what is meant by "new doctrines." The poem's title and reverent tone suggest Herbert's target is Puritan disregard for holy things. For R. V. Young, "new doctrines ... can only be an attack upon Puritanism" (115). Indeed, it may be that Herbert was responding to excessive fear of the church's increasingly sacramental orientation. On the other hand, Uzzah's presumptuous approach to the presence housed in the Ark suggests H erbert may just as likely condemn a too familiar, curious and thus potentially idolatrous regard for sacraments, a charge often laid against the scholastic dissection of the Eucharist associated with the Roman Catholic tradition. The latitude allowed by "new doctrines" is perhaps deliberately ambiguous, referring to any and all attitudes which threaten an ideal balance of pious restraint and due reverence.

Sacerdotal and sacramental imperatives become mutually reinforcing toward the poem's close, where, following the penultimate stanza's "I throw me at his feet" (line 36), Herbert imagines himself an empty vessel not unlike the eucharistic species, presented and now humbly awaiting divine invigoration: "There will I lie, until my Maker seek / For some mean stuffe whereon to show his skill: / Then is my time" (37-39). Quiet anticipation of miraculous transformation, whether of bread and wine or ministerial office, allows Herbert to indulge a celebration of his vocation, tempered by humility and short of endorsing the iure divino episcopacy advocated by the more zealous of his avant-garde peers. (23) Though considerably enamoured of the special privileges such office affords, and relishing the idea of his own hands being such "pure things" as "bring my God to me," Herbert is self-effacing sufficiently as to recognize the importance of sober and due submission, "Lest good come short of ill / In praising might" (40 -41).

Ceremonial caution and priestly reverence yield to a more relaxed wonder and awe in "The Invitation," where poetic structure mirrors the paradox of the Word become flesh, made explicit, as we have seen, by the poem's claim that the sacramental wine is blood "before ye drink" (line 12). Here Herbert's dual vocation as priest and poet is most apparent, for "The Invitation" is not only about Holy Communion: the poem's subtle conflation of profane and sacred experiences reflects the incarnational scandal even as it exemplifies Herbert's metaphysical wit. The humble Parson extends generous welcome and mild admonition to those approaching the Lord's table, compared to which all previous meals have failed to satisfy vain appetites: "taste" is "waste" (1-2) and wine is "drunk amisse" (10) if not of "the feast, / God, in whom all dainties are" (5-6). And yet the most exquisite of human experiences is surpassed only by a joy which nevertheless resembles that which it putatively transcends:

Come ye hither All, whose love Is your dove,

And exalts you to the skie:

Here is love, which having breath Ev'n in death,

After death can never die.

(25-30)

The balanced antithesis of Herbert's stanza lends formal support to the comparison. Secular love is neither dull nor sublunary. Nor does the love embodied in the Eucharist escape the death implicitly associated with sexual fulfilment, the familiar petite mort (more typical of Donne or Crashaw, unusual in Herbert) suggesting eucharistic sacrifice. Indeed, the paradox that lovers' orgasm signals the obsolescence of their efforts is analogous to the theological commonplace of the final line. This mirroring in the stanza's second half of qualities associated with the love celebrated by the first is reciprocated, "dove" evoking the Holy Spirit which descended both on Jesus to inaugurate his ministry, and on the Virgin Mary at his miraculous conception. (24) This in turn suggests for "breath" an association with the risen Christ's gift of the third member of the Trinity breathed on the apostles just prior to the Ascension (Jn. 20.22). In hindsight, then, the "All" of this penultimate stanza anticipates the identifi cation of "All" and "All" in the final line, extends the invitation, "Come ye hither," to God, and thus advances the interpenetration of love and Love.

The hierarchical order evoked by a vertical structural arrangement (the fifth stanza's "All," "dove" and "skie" followed by "breath" and "death") is dissolved from within when we discover that both the exalting terms and those concerned with more earthly matters are performing double duty. Similarly complementary or imbricate pairs inform other stanzas: profane "fare" and heavenly "feast" in the first (lines 3, 5), "pain" and "cheer" in the third (13, 17), and, above all, "wine" and "bloud" in the second (7, 12). Both thematically and formally, then, the poem is incarnational in its treatment of sacramental ritual, the careful arrangement of antitheses and their instability reflecting the paradox that the Eucharist embodies. Finally, as if to render explicit the poem's thematic design, Herbert offers the theological assertion already discussed -- "drink this, / Which before ye drink is bloud" -- which appeals to while going beyond messianic authority, thus abandoning irenic caution for a decidedly corporeal v ision of sacramental presence. Poetic ingenuity is a prominent feature of "The Invitation." But Herbert is sure to include amid the dazzle a plain, and not obscure, statement of that which is the source of all the fuss. Perhaps in no other Temple poem is the Renaissance notion of poet as quasi-divine maker more evident: priestly and poetic authorities combine to assert the Word become flesh offered to all who would receive it.

DEVOTIO SACRAMENTALIS

Herbert's respect for ceremony and ritual is not confined to the institutional context they support and perpetuate; sacramental attitudes, rather, are comprehensive of a faith whose quotidian realities persist beyond religious ritual and observance. This is most evident in "Sunday," which recognizes an integral relationship between the Sabbath and other less celebrated days of the week. Sacraments ate a key feature of Sunday's worship, here a divine signature or seal conferring on the day a promissory status:

O Day most calm, most bright,

The fruit of this, the next worlds bud,

Th'indorsement of supreme delight,

Writ by a friend, and with his bloud.

(1-4)

The fruit of the vine is the seed of graces yet to come, a taste of the marriage supper of the Lamb to be celebrated at the end of history -- as in "Love (III)," which also happens to be the final poem in The Temple. Such fruit is the harvest rest crowning man's toil, Sundays the "face" and "brow" which knock "at heaven" while "The worky-daies are the back-part" (lines 9-11). Human labour finds purpose here in relation to the ceremonial rest that is the Sabbath which parts the "ranks and orders" of the "fruitfull beds and borders / In Gods rich garden" (26-28). The wine consumed in the Eucharist, while anticipating essential joys, also addresses the effects of Adam's curse, man's share in the sufferings which the second Adam experiences in full. St. Augustine's assertion that the church is united with the sacrificial mystery on the altar in the Eucharist (Sermon 272, cited in Chauvet, 291-92) is relevant for a garden whose fruit is both delineated by human labour and a source of ease "for those/Who want herbs for their wound" (lines 41-42). The cyclical aspect of such ritual is no Blakean same dull round: seen as part of a succession "Thredded together on times string" (30), each Sunday performs an eschatological function, is

a day of mirth:

And where the week-dayes trail on ground,

Thy flight is higher, as thy birth.

O let me take thee at the bound,

Leaping with thee from sev'n to sev'n,

Till that we both, being toss'd from earth,

Flie hand in hand to heav'n!

(57-63)

As the eucharistic species combine the fruit of human and divine labours in a healing balm and rest for the weary pilgrim, so is the back-breaking toil of "worky-daies" joined with the Sabbath to form a devotional pilgrimage almost giddy with its own momentum.

It is this combination of reverence for things divine and homely sympathy for the human condition in Herbert's poetry that allows official observances to reverberate beyond the church's sacred walls. A careful balance of respect and light-hearted familiarity or "domestic simplicity" (H. Davies, 287) integrates stylized ritual with the rhythms of Christian existence. Herbert's awareness of the incarnational paradox proclaimed in the Eucharist, its insistence on the Word become flesh, is the institutional basis for recognizing sacramental significance in daily human life and labour.

The contiguity of ritual and quotidian in "Sunday" is typical of The Temple as a whole. Like the speakers of Donne's divine poems, Herbert's devout finds in the institutional media of sacrament and ceremony relief from the oppressive guilt and sense of personal depravity which haunt the isolated devotional psyche. Herbert's crushing realizations of spiritual inadequacy, however, are often accompanied by a measured confidence rarely seen in Holy Sonnets. In "Conscience," for example, the relationship between devotional and sacramental pieties and its significance for penitential despair is particularly evident in the alternating voices of confident judge and guilty supplicant, where the violence of the Crucifixion is directed against the sorrow-dogging "pratler" (line 1) and his "chatting fears" (5). The speaker's only recourse is to go to

My Saviours bloud: when ever at his board

I do but taste it, straight it cleanseth me,

And leaves thee not a word;

No, not a tooth or nail to scratch,

And at my actions carp or catch.

(14-18)

Notable here is the association of "word" with the accusing Conscience while the silencing of this "pratler" is explicitly a matter of sacramental grace. This sacrament versus word/Conscience opposition is clarified and the tables turned when in the final stanza the cleansing "bloudie crosse" becomes the speaker's "sword," a weapon of "Some wood and nails to make a staff or bill / For those that trouble me" (21-24). Internal reflection and sacramental relief conflict violently within the devotional psyche itself. The speaker would escape Conscience's psychological tortures, finding in sacramental blood and the cross it stains the instruments of his liberation into an external mythos. (25) Herbert's poem appropriates the symbols of Christian ritual paradoxically to eradicate the accuser Conscience from whatever might then remain of the speaker's divided self. This sacramentalization of the religious psyche culminates in a devotional version of man-as-microcosm, where inward agony melts into the surrounding hea vens: "My thoughts must work, but like a noiseless sphere" (8). It is perhaps strange that the target of eucharistic grace also happens to be a vital component of the Christian psyche, the censor who convicts of sin. Certain sweet dishes presumably are sour, certain fair looks foul. Yet Herbert apparently is concerned more with combating Conscience than those fleshly desires which threaten devotional integrity. It is as though music howls at all only because Conscience chides and clouds the ear, which otherwise might hear the "Harmonious peace" (9) of "noiselesse" thoughts and the Pythagorean song they whisper.

In "Love Unknown," Herbert sustains simultaneous recognition of both the penitent's moral depravity and the depth of God's love. His is a devotional psyche reluctantly assuaged by the assurances of sacramental grace. At the first attempt to appease his Lord the speaker's heart is "seis'd" and placed in a font

wherein did fall

A stream of bloud, which issu'd from the side

Of a great rock: I well remember all,

And have good cause: there it was dipt and dy'd,

And washt, and wrung: the very wringing yet

Enforceth tears.

(13-18)

Herbert expands the traditional typology connecting the rock which fed the Israelites with Christ, Baptism and a spiritual food and drink (Ex. 17.6; 1 Cor. 10.1-4) to include more explicitly the blood of the Atonement. The qualification "yet," moreover, implies the heart's need of continual sacramental renewal and thus anticipates the eucharistic heart of the poem. At each painful discovery of the insufficiency of his sacrifices, the speaker acknowledges his friend's disappointments -- "Your heart was foul... hard...dull" (lines 18, 37, 56) -- and follows each with a brief confession. The second of these celebrates a remedy that also exemplifies the caution characteristic of Jacobean and Caroline divines' approach to sacramental

doctrine:

I found a callous matter

Began to spread and to expatiate there:

But with a richer drug then scalding water

I bath'd it often, ev'n with holy bloud,

Which at a board, while many drunk bare wine,

A friend did steal into my cup for good,

Ev'n taken inwardly, and most divine

To supple hardnesses.

(38-45)

As we have seen, Herbert clearly regards as disadvantaged those whose views lean toward a merely commemorative ritual, "bare wine" evoking a disenchanted, ineffective means of grace. He is careful, however, to attenuate this assertion of carnal presence with "Ev'n taken inwardly," thus connecting any substantial transformation of the elements with the act of ingestion. This combination of effectual species and an emphasis on reception rather than the externals of ritual marks the threshold between the worlds of matter and spirit Herbert would fuse. He knows that sin is primarily a spiritual ailment and requires a penetrating, spiritual cure. But his is an undeniably material and somatic characterization of sin: "hardnesses" in need of "suppl[ing]," or, in Agonie," a "presse and vice, which forceth pain / To hunt his cruell food through ev'ry vein" (lines 11-12), both suggesting an overwhelmingly physiological need. Whereas for Calvin the material means are but God's concession to the fleshly limitations of hi s creatures, Herbert is much more reluctant to divest spiritual experience of its sublunary component.

The first and third confessions of "Love Unknown," in which the speaker comprehends his failure to merit salvation, are compensated by divine reassurance. Preoccupied with his many faults, the penitent "still askt pardon, and was not deni'd" (line 21), for his sins, as it turns out, are by another paid, I Who took the debt upon him" (60-61). It is in between, following the second confession (38-39), that the sacramental grace cited above intervenes to assuage his anxieties. Just as Herbert's poetic and prayerful offerings are a sacrifice acceptable only when recognized as divinely initiated and sustained, so Christ's presence among the "rich furniture and fine array" of ceremony imbues what is otherwise meaningless ritual with true sacramental significance. Carnal indulgence is softened both by the homely image of Christ as a mischievous friend stealing his way into the cup, and by an emphasis on communal use - "Ev'n taken inwardly." This latter allows the potentially controversial problem of modus to be avoi ded, even if the evocative imagery and diction - "bath'd," "bloud," "drunk," "supple" - complicate such doctrinal evasion. On the one hand, Herbert is reluctant to allow his transcendent Lord to be subjected to the material limitations of carnal being; yet he also maintains the scandal of the Word become flesh, the need for a Christ actually present among both the means and "suppling" effects of God's gift. If some divines worried that overly carnal notions of sacramental presence compromise divine autonomy and transcendence, Herbert insists that such presence is but the divinely instituted and necessary expression of the Incarnation, a Will paradoxically stripped of power and subjected to history, a body and death.

But does Herbert finally rest secure in a primarily sacramental grace? "Love Unknown" is a psychological dramatization, gesturing only momentarily toward the soteriological efficacy of sacraments and the escape they provide from inner turmoil and doubt. The poem in this respect exemplifies a devotional tendency in Herbert which Achsah Guibbory has described as focusing "on the individual believer rather than the corporate religious community" (45). (26) The external remedy may provide a means of grace independent of psychological disposition, but as significant as it may be, the Eucharist nevertheless is overwhelmed, "Ev'n taken inwardly" -- swallowed, as it were, by the speaker's ever vigilant Conscience. Even the communion with his crucified saviour which the ritual allows is compromised by an anxiety apparently impervious to sacramental persuasion, for immediately following the eucharistic encounter, the still unconvinced penitent hesitates:

But when I thought to sleep out all these faults

(I sigh to speak)

I found that some had stuff'd the bed with thoughts,

I would say thorns.

(49-52)

More than a meditatio Christi, the metaphor transfers the crown of thorns to the speaker's psyche and allows his ephemeral tortures the dignified status of messianic sacrifice. Though the focus here is inward, it forms part of what Elizabeth Clarke calls a process of "mortification-vivification" wherein Herbert's self-abnegation is a priestly sharing in the far superior priesthood of Christ. The inward focus, then, is paradoxically an effort to eliminate the self so that it might be more fully realized as integral with the greater body to which it belongs. Just as resurrection follows death, so does self-affirmation follow self-denial, a resurrection of self Clarke perceptively associates with the externals of ceremonial worship (193-94). If Herbert's sacramental vision suggests Roman sensualism and a fondness for ritual, however, these serve primarily to ceremonialize otherwise inward deliberations. And yet this fusion of inside and outside may not have the desired effect, for while ceremony provides escape from existential isolation, it may be that Herbert's distinctive self permeates rather than becomes lost in its institutional context. There is perhaps no rest for one who knows that even his prayers are inseparable from ritual, reverberating as they do between ceremonial and devotional, institutional and private spheres: "Though my lips went, my heart did stay behinde" (line 59). The crucial question is whether or not he can accept finally that his friend's suppling "holy bloud" will indeed render the heart "new, tender, quick" (70).

The liminal frontier between ceremony and devotion, the site of a psychological drama animated and reified by sacrament, is important for our understanding of Herbert's verse and its ostensibly inward focus. Inwardness in Herbert does not result in the desacramentalization of Christian worship identified long ago by Malcolm Ross as a central (and regrettable) feature of seventeenth-century religious poetry. (27) Eucharist and ritual, rather, are inseparable from the The Temple's interiority the latter an extension of its public, ceremonial context. The result is nothing less than a sacramental Puritanism, the integration of institutional and private aspects of religious experience, as in "Sinne (I)," where God's "fine nets and strategems to catch us in" include not only "laws," "Pulpits and Sundayes," but also "sorrow dogging sinne" and "anguish of all sizes" (lines 3-7); together, these are "Without, our shame; within, our consciences; / Angels and grace, eternall hopes and fears"b (11-12). Woven into the fa bric of his devotional experience, sacramental topoi for Herbert alleviate a self-absorbed psychomachia. The external means of grace provide a healing balm for "sorrow dogging sinne," sacraments penetrating the private psyche and materializing the otherwise ephemeral processes of Christian salvation. Herbert's sacramental Puritanism thus exemplifies what Ramie Targoff has described as "the direct correspondence between outward behavior and inward thought" in early modern subjectivity (50-51).

In addition to addressing the theological controversies of his era, sacrament in The Temple advances the Christian paradox of the Incarnation as central to Herbert's interrogation of the relationship between spiritual and material aspects of religious experience. The integration of internal and external modes is essential to both sacramental worship and devotional versification, for the Christian mythos attending ceremonial forms encompasses also the communicant's private reflections, whether at "board," prayer, or quill and "little book." (28) Herbert's poetry addresses matters of concern to the members of a faith community even as it portrays one individual working out his salvation in fear and trembling. Central to this integration of communal context and private devotional space, sacramental topoi establish the individual penitent's role in a larger scheme, both his or her performative ritual duty and status with respect to the register or book of life to which all hopeful souls aspire. The sober yet ener getic creativity discernible in Herbert's verse is a result of his efforts to find in sacrament the mediation of a grace whose reality the most sincere and constant of devotional psyches is unable otherwise to sustain. It is only through continual return to its institutional and carnal status as sacrament that Herbert can think the Word become flesh and the supreme gift it declares.

(*.) Versions of this paper were presented at the 1999 Sixteenth-Century Studies Conference in St. Louis and at the 2000 International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers at Renaissance Quarterly for their thoughtful suggestions. For a computer-assisted statistical analysis of sacramental and devotional topoi in The Temple see Whalen.

(1.) Milton, 527-28, 470-75; J. Davies, 18-45; Lake, 1991, 113-33.

(2.) Halewood maintains a rigid opposition between sacramental formalism and the inter-nalised spirituality symptomatic of Puritan doctrine and practice (65-73). According to Lewalski, the void left by this suspicion of sacramental divinity is filled by a word-centred piety that urges the sermon as a preparation for meditation (155-56). In keeping with current historiography the term "Reform" here refers to Calvinist theology (Milton, 8 and n. 14; see also J. Davies, 298).

(3.) For a recent and concise overview of these issues see Lake and Questier, ix-xx.

(4.) Even Martz, the influential champion of Anglo-Catholic poetics, recognized that although meditative practices had always had a strong psychological component, it was "the inward surge of Puritanism," combined with older techniques, that produced the distinctive religious devotion of the seventeenth century (9). It is "the weapon of mental communion" in Herbert "which makes the sacraments flow from Christ's side" (299). Martz even went so far as to suggest for one continental meditative a "Catholic Puritanism," but insists it was "free of predestination" (127-28).

(5.) For a nuanced discussion of English Arminianism see Kendall, 141-50. See also Lake, 1987, 39-40.

(6.) Collinson and others (Milton, 395-407, Sommerville, 208) agree that while there often was vehement disagreement over matters of church government and the externals of ceremonial worship, doctrinal Calvinism provided, for a time, a confessional identity of sorts. Tyacke finds that "Puritan" as a derogatory label did not become associated specifically with doctrinal Calvinism and predesrinarian thought until the 1620s when the rise of Arminianism eventually rendered heterodox what hitherto had been the Reform core of English religious orthodoxy. Prior to this time, conformist and non-conformist alike shared a doctrinally Calvinist heritage, so that the majority of conformist divines, whether inclining to a sacrament-centred ministry or one which emphasized preaching and a private lay piety, may be called "Calvinist episcopalians" (1995, 68). Lake observes that while an anti-Calvinist element had always existed, the question is one of "Calvinist hegemony." Distaste for Reform orthodoxy did not prevent parti cipation in Jacobean ecclesiastical life, nor, for that matter, opportunity for preferment. The relative silence of such individuals, however, is "evidence of the extent to which Calvinism had established itself in control of the crucial cultural media of the day" (1987, 34).

(7.) See Rubin, 17-34.

(8.) In addition to Dugmore see H. Davies, 288-91.

(9.) St. Thomas was influenced by his understanding of the Aristotelian philosophy of matter in which it is held that bodies consist of matter and form, form being an extension of matter governing its particular appearance. The substance or essence of a body inheres in both aspects or principles -- both its matter and form. For Aquinas, it was possible that the matter or substance of Christ's body be present under the form of bread even while still in heaven. The conversion of the bread, then, is not a formal or accidental but rather substantial one only. The body of Christ, moreover, is present not as a "body in place," but in a "special way that is proper to this sacrament [sed quodum speciali modo, qui est proprius huic sacramento]" (3:75.1). It is present not locally, as an extended body is, but rather as "purely and simply substance" (3:76.5). Just as the substance of bread is never present as an extended body, neither is the substance of the body of Christ. The doctrine of transubstantiation thus develo ped the idea that while the substance of the elements is wholly changed, the accidents or the elements' appearance remains, a view which was to persist through to and beyond later Tridentine reform.

(10.) Milton cites a speech given before the 1629 Parliament in which Neile goes so far as to dismiss not only the Church of Rome, but also the Mass and transubstantiation (86). It is important to emphasize however, that such vehemence among Laudians may have been less a statement of confessional loyalty than the expedient deflection of charges of Roman sympathy (84-91).

(11.) Ibid., 202-05, 63-72.

(12.) Herbert, 1941, 259. Unless otherwise indicated, Herbert citations are from this edition; 1633, B, and W refer to, respectively, the first edition printed by Thomas Buck at Cambridge, Buck's MS source transcribed by the Ferrars at Little Gidding (the Bodleian Library's Tanner 307) and supposedly based on Herbert's "little book" (now lost), and the earlier MS Jones 28.169 now in the Williams library. For a discussion of the dating of this latter and its autograph status see Charles, 78-87.

(13.) Strier insists that eucharistic readings of "Divinite" are erroneous insofar as they neglect the non-conducive order of the words "bloud" and "wine" (47).

(14.) I do not include as part of "The H. Communion" what in B and 1633 apparently is the poem's second half and what in the earlier W is the separate poem, "Prayer (II)." For an account of possible editorial error see Huntley, 65-76. Allowing the two-part version authority, Clarke discerns a dual motion of outward form toward inward spirituality and the subsequent movement of the grace-inspired soul toward heaven (161). This outward-inward motion is apparent, it seems to me, in the poem's "first half" alone.

(15.) Russell notes that whereas the Prayer Book and Act of Uniformity both called for "common bread," the Queen's Injunction stipulated wafers (Herbert's "wedge of gold"?). "Everyone who took communion," writes Russell, in effect "had to disobey one of these requirements" (86).

(16.) To maintain significance for the elements as set apart from ordinary wine and bread while avoiding earthly contamination of the resurrected Christ, Calvin settled on what sometimes is referred to as virtualism, his singular contribution to sacramental theology. Christ's flesh, though "separated from us by such great distance," nevertheless "penetrates to us, so that it becomes our food"; the Spirit "truly unites things separated in space." Though the breaking of bread is a "symbol" and not "the thing itself," nevertheless, "by the showing of the symbol the thing itself is also shown" (4.17.10). Elsewhere Calvin writes, "Christ is nor visibly present, and is not beheld with our eyes, as the symbols are which excite our remembrance by representing him. In short, in order that he may be present to us, he does not change his place, but communicates to us from heaven the virtue of his flesh as though it were present" (Corpus Reformatorum, 49.489, cited in McDonnell, 231). For Calvin, Augustine and "seal" see McDonnell, 286.

(17.) Ellrodt avers that Herbert's sacramental doctrine as expressed in the later "H. Communion" was "truly original" because it advanced simultaneously "two realities, sensible and spiritual, at once distinct and conjoined" (2000, 210-11). Whereas for Calvin the physical aspect of the Eucharist was only metaphorically parallel to an essentially spiritual operation, for Herbert the communication of grace included a very real physical dimension. But this two-fold sacramentality nonetheless is clearly hierarchical: "Onely thy grace" (line 19), writes Herbert, can open "the souls most subtile rooms" (22). Neither is Herbert's more-than-merely-metaphorical parallel between matter and spirit without precedent in English Protestantism. Ridley, for example, held that "even as the mortal body is nourished by that visible bread, so is the internal soul fed with the heavenly food of Christ's body" (274), while Hooker could write that in receiving the sacrament "we are dyed red both within and without, our hunger is sat isfied and our thirst for ever quenched" (2:331). Anderson persuasively demonstrates that the early English reformers, anxious to maintain a real if non-corporeal presence in the sacrament, devised formulae in which sacramental signs derive substantive power from their referents without actually embodying them. If ostensibly metaphorical and symbolic, such understandings of sacramental presence were neither simply nor merely so (27-47).

(18.) Milton describes Laudian reform as "the desire to transform English Protestants perception of the relative importance of discipline vis-a-vis doctrine, and of sacraments vis-a-vis preaching" (447).

(19.) That the W version was finally excluded from The Temple may be evidence of Herbert's increasingly irenic attitude (Summers, 24; McGill, 21-22; Stewart, 54).

(20.) This may be an indictment of the view of the Swiss reformer Huldreich Zwingli, who sharply distinguished between Christ's two natures and insisted, as Calvin later would, that the ascended Christ is the divine Christ to which alone the sacrament refers. To "feed on Christ's body," he writes, is simply "to believe in him" (198).

(21.) Collinson (1989, 31) notes a similar position in Hooker (2:236), a position compatible with the Polity's tendency to condemn Puritan efforts to distinguish between the godly and ungodly in the visible church (see, for example, 2:342-43).

(22.) The poem recalls Donne's playful treatment of the sacramental-predestinarian connection in "Loves diet" where the mistress's tears and favours, her "drink" and "meate," must for some be "counterfeit," for "eyes which rowle towards all, weepe not, but swear" (lines 17-18).

(23.) Though episcopacy by divine right was initially advanced by the more rigidly Calvinist conformists as a way of asserting their autonomy against the crown's own jure divino claims, Puritan reservation increased proportional to the doctrine's association with the sacerdotal policies and practices of the more avant-garde divines (Milton, 454-56).

(24.) This latter is a traditional feature of medieval and Renaissance iconography. See, for example, Timoteo Viti's Annunciation, where the infant Christ descends on a dove over the praying Virgin (D'Ancona, 38 and fig. 21).

(25.) Frye defined mythos variously as imitation of a "generic and recurrent action or ritual" and of "the total conceivable action of an omnipotent god or human society" (366-67).

(26.) Shuger, similarly, argues that the "confessional intimacy of the divine-human encounter in Herbert fulfils the need for a relationship not available in society" (104).

(27.) In an early study of sacramental literature, Ross finds that eucharistic imagery in Herbert is but "Catholic rhetoric" as opposed to true "Catholic dogma," the former mere ornamental veneer, the latter absent altogether (179-80).

(28.) According to Walton, "little book" was Herbert's name for the volume of poems sent from his death-bed to Nicholas Ferrar (286). The editors of the B facsimile also use the phrase to describe the no longer extant MS likely received by Ferrar at Little Gidding (Herbert, 1984, xii). Amy Charles reminds us, however, that Walton knew Herbert's poems only as published and that "any of the seventeenth-century editions was, indeed, a little book" (182 n12).

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