It is not our aim to refine or complete the system of rules for the use of our words in unheard of ways.

Herbert criticism began with Nicholas Ferrar's suggestion that perhaps it was presumptuous to expect patronage of The Temple from "any mortall man" (Herbert 3). Ferrar's focus on George Herbert's character and motives ("the condition and disposition of the Person") initiated the hagiographic tradition, which was to dominate seventeenth and eighteenth century commentary. Since then, the knowledge industry, with its exponential increase of information and misinformation, has changed but not extinguished critical interest in Herbert. We no longer remember Herbert as a saint on the calendar of the Christian year. This is surely progress or decline of some kind. And yet the computer age may only have focused, not answered, questions that we ponder today about the Herbert whom Ferrar knew better than we. What did he believe? Did he say what he believed? Did he believe what he said? Did he know what he said? Could he know what he said? Stanley Fish reminds us that Herbert was not a postmodern. But the questions that we pose about Herbert do not suffer from the same historical limitation. And the answers that we propose seem sometimes more post-postmodern than modem or postmodern.

We can trace the demise of hagiographic Herbert criticism to at least as early as 1853, when a decisive interest in the Herbert critic emerged in Coleridgean hyperbole. With a proto-postmodern flourish, Coleridge extended the hagiographic picture of Herbert's texts to include the critic. By arguing that, since Herbert was "a poet sui generis," the "merits" of his poetry were imperceptible to anyone lacking "sympathy with the mind and character of the man" (Coleridge 2:379). So over a century ago Coleridge shifted the emphasis from Herbert to his critics: "To appreciate this volume, it is not enough that the reader possesses a cultivated judgment, a classical taste, or even poetic sensibility, unless he be likewise a Christian, and both a zealous and an orthodox, both a devout and a devotional, Christian." We see here a demand much like that made by advocates of ethnic and gender criticism today. It is not enough to know the intellectual and generic features of a work, or even to know its tradition and to view its unique features within that tradition with judgment and taste. The critic must be a certain kind of person, a "Christian," and more than that, a particular kind of "Christian": zealous and orthodox, devout and devotional.

And yet not even this severe limitation will do the trick. For such sympathies in a critic could still permit too wide a range of possibilities. Coleridge wants a serious thinning of the field:

But even this will not suffice. He [that is, the proper Herbert critic] must be an affectionate and dutiful child of the Church, and from habit, conviction, and a constitutional predisposition to ceremoniousness, in piety as in manners, find her forms and ordinances aids of religion, not sources of formality; for religion is the element in which he lives, and the region in which he moves.

We might add (for here Coleridge echoes Paul's speech to the Areopagus) "and has his being." For Coleridge perceives in Herbert, not "the Romish foppiness and even the Papistic usurpations" that others do, "but . . . more correctly and more charitably . . . the Patristic leaven" (2:378) of non-idolatrous devotion. He reads Herbert as leaning toward both Canterbury and Rome. Hence, ceremony is the key to understanding Herbert. Coleridge is not always comfortable with Herbert in this regard; he thinks a line ("Holy Macerius and great Anthony") from The Church Militant overrates the early Fathers, and he registers his objection in remarks on "Judgement": "I should not have expected from Herbert so open an avowal of Romanism in the article of merit" (2:381). This inclination to read Herbert with a Roman inflection is nowhere more evident than when Coleridge engages the representation of the Eucharist in "Divinity": "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" (135). Coleridge writes:

'But he doth bid us take his blood for wine.' Nay, the contrary, 'take wine to be blood, and the blood of a man who died 1800 years ago. This is the faith which even the Church of England demands; for Consubstantiation only adds a mystery to that of Transubstantiation, which it implies.

Perhaps the "it" here refers to "Consubstantiation," but it might, alternatively--or also--refer to the line that Coleridge means to gloss. Either way, Coleridge indicates that "faith"--the faith of "even the Church of England"--buttresses the ceremonial observance of the mystery which is only deepened by the theory of "Consubstantiation," which depends for its impact, as does Herbert's poem, upon an understanding of "Transubstantiation."

As I suggested at the start, in our own time much Herbert criticism exhibits a renewed interest in what Coleridge called the "constitutional predisposition" of the critic. Many critics assume that, by some mechanism ("materialist" or whatever) what critics are before they become Herbert critics determines what they say about Herbert. Although in 1853 the editor explains away the locution that bothers Coleridge (2:38 1n), the High-Church view of Herbert advanced by Coleridge would take hold almost a century later in the "Metaphysical Revival," when T. S. Eliot and other so-called New Critics attempted something like a recuperation of values believed lost or attenuated during the Neo-classical and Romantic periods. At the same time, critics unsympathetic with T S. Eliot's magisterial outlook on literary tradition claimed that he and others like him unapologetically fawned on the esoteric High-Church values of the Metaphysicals, creating a coterie poetry to fit their coterie values. But, perhaps in reaction against those values, some practitioners of the current generation of Herbert critics look back to Coleridge, but for a different reason. Arguing that one's ethnic or religious being enables, defines, and so delimits the range and, implicitly, the validity of a critic's perspective, these critics insist that ideology (like noses, in that everybody has one) functions in such a way that Anglicans like T. S. Eliot and Dame Helen Gardner understand and appreciate a text written by an Anglican in a certain way; their groupings of texts, accompanied by prescribed attitudes (the canon) reflect no more than the sociologically determined biases of upper-crustian, Oxbridgean, High-Church Tories.

The situation now is that Herbert critics disagree, and sometimes their disagreements are substantive, touching the foundations of the discipline-what we know and how we talk about what we know. Even historicists, who share many basic assumptions, exhibit irreconcilable differences, differences which Gene Veith colorfully describes as a recurrence of "the religious wars of the seventeenth-century" ("Wars" 19). Veith confesses that, although himself a combatant, he nevertheless finds the critical descendants of the Roundheads and the Cavaliers "utterly convincing in illuminating Herbert's poetry" (18). (I worry about how long we can sustain a war if belligerents remain so agreeable.) Of course, Veith's tone is commendable. I admire, too, Sir Thomas Browne's famous remark on toleration for its recognition that, as a practice, tolerance serves the interests of personal growth: "I COULD never divide my selfe from any man upon the difference of an opinion, or be angry with his judgement for not agreeing with mee in that, from which perhaps within a few days I should dissent myselfe" (Browne 1:15). But, with the best will in the world, does investigation of the critical record show that there are, as Veith claims, truly no "necessarily incompatible" assertions separating Herbert critics, even historically-oriented Herbert critics? Probably, responses to this question will vary, and so provide evidence in support of my thesis that Herbert critics generate incompatible assertions. I suggest that, as long as there are differences between critics, there must be confusion, for, as Wittgenstein observes, "Philosophy simply puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything." Explanation and deduction allow for the confusing sense that something has escaped us. Wittgenstein writes: "If one tried to advance theses in philosophy, it would never be possible to debate them, because everyone would agree to them" (Philosophical Investigations 126, 128). But experience tells us that Herbert critics often disagree.

What did Herbert believe? We might first ask, what did he say? Or did he believe what he said? Or did he and others like him in the seventeenth century express themselves in such and such a way? Or is Herbert's usage so extraordinary as to make it, in the language of the time, unintelligible? What will serve as a criterion of judgment here? (Yes, he did. No, he didn't. The evidence [. . .] suggests [. . .], or, on the basis of the evidence [. . .] we infer [. . .].) In response, some critics function much as lexicographers (see Stewart, "Dictionary" 36-57). Rosemond Tuve places Herbert's poetry in the context of liturgical uses; Louis Martz elucidates Herbert's practice in the context of contemporary meditative writings. Historical critics assert the relevance of a range of linguistic possibilities in Herbert's time: in Anglo-Catholic theology (Asals), in Protestant prose and poetry (Lewalski, Strier), in catechisms (Fish), in the Bible (Bloch), in Cambridge divines (Sherwood), and many others.[1]

Although at times these historical critics appear to be at loggerheads, they share important areas of agreement. For instance, historicists alike assume that correction is possible, because a valid criterion of accuracy enables critics to distinguish between descriptions in need and those not in need of correction (they might designate this standard in different ways: "propriety," "probability," or "in accordance with the evidence," but the purpose is the same). So the question arises, can we know what Herbert said? Can we know his emphasis among the myriad of historically certified possibilities? We might say that we can look at what Herbert said in the context of how such expressions were customarily used. If the question, "can we know?" means are we able to look and see without recourse to preternatural means, then we have Herbert's text. And we have the descriptions of Tuve, Martz, Lewalski, Strier, Sherwood, and other historical critics, just as we have the OED--as guides to places where Herbert's expressions might fit within the range of demonstrable uses in 1633. Historicists deal with the demonstrable. We might expand on the Wittgenstein quotation: "Philosophy simply puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything.--Since everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain. For what is hidden, for example, is of no interest to us" (PI 126). We could say that historical critics bring materials to our attention that we had not thought about, or not thought ahout from the demonstrated viewpoint. Their implicit imperative--that we focus on the cited evidence because it is relevant--arrests our attention, and perhaps understanding occurs (something akin to the moment before, after consultation, we close the OED with the sense that we have found what we were looking for). So are we to infer, then, that the accompanying explanations ("there is nothing to explain") provide the occasion for what Gene Veith calls a war?

Let us narrow our investigation. "The work of the philosopher," Wittgenstein observes, consists in assembling reminders for a particular purpose" (PI 127). Much has been written and said about Herbert's Calvinism, and indeed there are shadings of the terms "Calvinism," "Protestantism," and "Puritanism" that allow for something approaching their interchangeable use. This might be a harmless linguistic "fact" of usage (specialized language, jargon) within the confines of a "community of interpreters" (Fish, "Affective Stylistics"), but we can imagine that even within such a community mistakes might occur (for another perspective, see Currie). Consider, for instance, the concept of "critical problems," which has its analogue in that of "philosophical problems." These, Wittgenstein suggests, "arise when language goes on holiday" (PI 38). Wittgenstein does not imply that it is a priori dangerous for language to remain idle, but, less drastically, that taking non-functional for functional uses within a language can lead to misunderstanding. If we say "Calvinist" or "Protestant" over and over while looking at specific Herbert texts, we might imagine that one or both terms correspond to something transcending the ordinary use of ordinary words:

This (that is, naming--"Calvinist," "Protestant," "Catholic") is connected with the conception of naming as, so to speak, an occult process. Naming appears as a queer connexion of a word with an object.--And you really get such a queer connexion when the philosopher tries to bring out the relation between name and thing by staring at an object in front of him and repeating a name or even the word "this" innumerable times.

As an anodyne to this affliction, suppose we think that neither these terms nor their repetition nor contemplation of their orthographic forms bears any necessary relation to anything beyond particular uses within a particular grammar and lexicon. (Here, we might recall Willard Quine's clarification of the linguist's task [Quine, chapter 3].) Then, to the question "Is Herbert a Calvinist?" we might respond: "Well, since we can parse the Herbert and Calvin canons into numerous parts, we might not be able to answer helpfully without knowing which parts to talk about with respect to whatever aspect of appositeness might be thought to justify either an affirmative or negative response." But suppose our interlocutor presses with, "I mean, can you think of Herbert texts which either do or do not lend credence to the assertion that Herbert believed, with Calvin, in "predestination"? In this context, the answer might be that "The Water-course" comes to mind. Here, the speaker urges an auditory subject to the human condition of suffering not to complain, for to love "life" is the same as to love "strife":

But rather turn the pipe and waters course
To serve thy sinnes, and furnish thee with store
Of sov'raigne tears, springing from true remorse:
That so in purehesse thou mayst him adore,

Salvation.

Who gives to man, as he sees fit, {

Damnation.

Gene Veith argues that this poem echoes the attitudes and even the imagery of Calvin's Institutes (Spirituality 91), and Richard Strier perceives in the same lines an apposite Augustinian caprice (85). This view seems right, for, as elsewhere in his verse (in "The Flower," for instance), Herbert here imagines God's power as the source of "Salvation" and "Damnation" (which is not to say that God's judgment of what is "fit" is void of propriety with respect to human conduct).

And yet, commenting on the same poem, Louis Martz convincingly argues against "a strictly Calvinist" (65) reading of Herbert. While not denying that certain Herbert poems are "capable of Calvinist interrpretation," Martz discriminates between the tone and doctrine of such poems as "The Water-course," "Redemption," "The Priesthood," and "Perseverance," showing how consistently Herbert resists the strictures of Calvinist theology as laid out by Archbishop Whirgift in the controversial Lambeth Articles. In resisting the "powerful tendency" to read Herbert "as a strictly Calvinist poet" (65), Martz emphasizes the many "eucharistic allusions" in the final version of The Temple as well as the "mood of assurance that dominates the last twelve or fifteen poems in the final version" (70). Herbert affords a place for "conscience" in man's salvation (76); he inclines "toward a middle way" and so is neither Calvinist nor anti-Calvinist.

But does Herbert never separate from Calvin in matters of doctrine and discipline? Suppose the interlocutor points out that there was opposition within the British Church to zealously-held opinions of Calvin--such as those concerning festivals and fasting, in general, and the observance of Lent? Can we not legitimately describe that opposition as anti-Calvinist? Our interlocutor says, "I thought we had agreed not to address such questions, but only to consider parts of the canon relevant to the particular text or topic." Quite so. More narrowly, then, and in accord with our critical protocol, on the matter of Lenten observances, Calvin wrote:

But I do not want to waste many words in a matter so obvious. I say only this, that both in fasts and in all other parts of discipline the papists have nothing right, nothing sincere, nothing well-ordered and arranged, to give them occasion to boast, as if anything remained among them deserving praise.

Calvin was annoyed by the implicit assumption that, by enduring forty days of dietary duress, supposed Christians practiced "an imitation of Christ" (Harmonie 1:126), a claim that Calvin considered a "madde boldnesse spite at God," in that it misconstrued the sense of Scripture:

I woulde to God that they had only plaide like apes with these follies. But it was a wicked and a detestable scorning of Christ, in that they attempted in theyr fained fasting to frame them selves after his doing. It is a most vile supersitition that they perswade themselves that it is a worke meritorious, and to be some part of godlinesse in worship.

Calvin insisted that Christ's forty-day sojourn in the wilderness had nothing to do with temperance, nothing in fact to do with physical regimen. His fast was a sign and seal of "authoritie," not of self-control. It appears, then, that these texts distance Calvin from the practice of fasting during Lent, and, indeed, from the observance of Lent itself.

In Elizabethan and Jacobean England, the issue of Lent was controversial at least partly because Anglican apologists--Hooker, for instance--did not wish to separate themselves too sharply from the position laid out by Calvin (Cressy chap.3). And yet, while conceding that the scriptural basis of the practice was not impressive, Hooker tactfully supported traditional activities of Lent.[2] Thus, Hooker's more or less centrist posture in matters of doctrine and liturgical decency includes a mild disclaimer on fasting and Lent. But what were Herbert's views? Were they like Hooker' s, or did they shade toward Calvin's, or were they somewhere between Hooker's and Laud's?[3] We might point out that Herbert included a poem entitled "Lent" in The Temple (86-87), and this in the appropriate sequence of the Christian calendar. Moreover, he does so in an almost polemical manner--atypical of Herbert: "Welcome deare feast of Lent: who loves not thee,/ He loves not Temperance, or Authoritie." Calvin argued that too often men would miss one meal only to gorge at another, thus using the Lenten season to heighten self-indulgence. The worshipper of "Lent" addresses this objection. For him, "sweet abstinence" is made sweeter in part because it is enjoined by the Church: "The Scriptures bid us fast; the Church sayes, now." That is, the Church imposes a particular temporal order upon a general biblical duty. Then, as if to meet the Calvinist charge that Lenten exercises were replete with scandal, Herbert writes:

The humble soul compos'd of love and fear
Begins at home, and layes the burden there,
When doctrines disagree.
He sayes, in things which use hath justly got,
I am a scandall to the Church, and not
The Church is so to me.

It could be said that here the issue is not doctrine but motive. Where Scripture and the Church have spoken, "passion" is an improper response: "who loves not thee (that is, Lent),/ He loves not Temperance, or Authoritie." Although Herbert tactfully steps around the specific doctrinal issue ("doctrines disagree"), he is quite explicit in suggesting that "love and fear" of both Scripture and Church enjoin the "true Christian" to adhere to the Christian calendar. Fasting is good; fasting during Lent is doubly so: "True Christians should be glad of an occasion/To use their temperance, seeking no evasion."

Again, for Calvin, who was incensed by the analogy of the seasonal observance and Christ's forty days in the wilderness, Christ's fast was singular, and its protracted length was a sign of that singularity. How, then, would Calvin have responded to these lines from Herbert's poem?

It's true, we cannot reach Christs forti'th day;
Yet to go part of that religious way,
Is better then to rest:
We cannot reach our Saviours puritie;
Yet we are bid, Be holy ev'n as he.
In both let's do our best.

Calvin held that one season was no holier than another; nor was it conceivable that humankind could ever sustain a forty-day fast. Rather, the imposition of seasonal demands provided an extended occasion for hypocrisy and self-indulgence. In contrast, for Herbert, the Church calendar was no occasion of scandal, but rather it was the individual (false) Christian who fell short: "Neither ought other mens abuse of Lent/ Spoil the good use; lest by that argument/We forfeit all our Creed."

In a sense, "Lent" is atypically argumentative in that, unlike the speakers of, say, "The Collar" and "The Crosse," the speaker here ponders, not recalcitrant aspects of his own soul, but troublesome ideas disturbing the calm of "Authoritie" within the Church. Even the devotional colloquy at the end of the poem repudiates the Calvinist charge that Lenten observances incline to insincerity:

Yet Lord instruct us to improve our fast
By starving sinne and taking such repast
As may our faults controll:
That ev'ry man may revell at his doore,
Not in his parlour; banquetting the poore,
And among those his soul.

The observance, then, is only the outward sign of a hoped-for inward grace, namely, the transformation of man's sinful nature into something closer than it would otherwise be to "an imitation of Christ." The "true Christian" prays that Lenten practices will yield both inner and outer results--yes, spiritual development ("faults controll"), but also "good works" ("banquetting the poore")--an aim of Lent of no interest to Calvin at all.

Of course, the interlocutor could point out that Herbert's "Lent" is only a fictional part of a poetic sequence and not necessarily an expression of Herbert's true opinions in the matter. But how do we distinguish between an author's true and untrue opinions? Are the opinions on the subject reflected in A Priest to the Temple and in Herbert's private correspondence likewise "untrue"? ("No." Are we then to assume that the old barrier between fiction and non-fiction has been resurrected, with the latter as the privileged domain of truth, as if no one had ever exaggerated or even fabricated in epistolary or hortatory prose?) In The Country Parson Herbert claims that "fasting dayes containe a treble obligation" (242), and he urges the priest to maintain the discipline even while under the stress of a journey (251). Similarly, in a letter to Sir John Danvers (written during Lent of 1617), Herbert states:

Now this Lent I am forbid utterly to eat any Fish, so that I am fain to dyer in my Chamber at mine own cost; for in our publick Halls, you know, is nothing but Fish and Whit-meats: Out of Lent also, twice a Week, on Fridayes and Saturdayes, I must do so, which yet sometimes I fast.

Herbert's texts, then, seem to contrast with both Calvin's and Hooker's on the question of fasting and Lent. Calvin feared the ill effects of "superstition." Herbert stresses divisiveness as more dangerous to the country parish and appears to have followed a strict Lenten regimen himself. For him, it was in the "Schoole of Religion" (240) of the home that the "secret of governing" was manifest and the observance of "fasting dayes" (242) was only one sign among many of the Parson's self-discipline and charity.

So then Herbert, author of Calvinist "The Water-course," was in fact no Calvinist? In certain instances ("The Water-course" is one), "Calvinist" might be just the word we want to describe features we have in mind of a particular Herbert text. Likewise, when talking about "Lent," the term "anti-Calvinist" might be, especially given the poem's polemical edge, just the one we are looking for. But, our interlocutor protests, the two poems are in the same sequence. Wouldn't such a critical protocol lead to contradiction within the literary system? Well, does our critical system entail expression in a logical (or "constructed" language? What is the purpose--what, in the Wittgensteinian sense, is the proposed "work"--of our system? "The work of the philosopher consists," Wittgenstein writes, "in assembling reminders for a particular purpose" (PI 127). One purpose might be to focus our attention on neither "The Water-course" nor "Lent," but on the relation between naming and interpretation.

In linguistics, the concept of "idiolect" designates the phenomenon of individual differences among speakers of a dialect within a language (Hill 13, 57-61; Langacker 49-50). In fact, individuals may exhibit mannerisms and inflections which are idiosycratic, evident in spectographic analysis--not only peculiarities of diction which arise from social setting, but even variations in expression affected by myriads of possible differences in body shapes, sinus sizes, and so on. We might say that the concept has its analogue in the reading experience, for unless a limiting device is encoded in our system of decision-making, it will produce n number of "readings." I.A. Richards addressed this feature of critical discussion when he referred to one function of his project with students as "a piece of field-work in comparative ideology" (Richards 6). (He was not talking only about what he called "mnemonic irrelevances"--those "misleading effects of the reader's being reminded of some personal scene or adventure, erratic associations, the interference of emotional reverberations from a past which may have nothing to do with the poem" (Richards 5). The question is: How do we determine which associations from whose past reverberate appropriately in accounts of Herbert's poetry? One critic, characterizing her perspective as "materialist" (Harman 34), inquires: "What does writing make visible to me in the work that I am reading?" It seems to me that this is precisely the question Richards' students were invited to answer, although they were not burdened by knowledge of the texts' authors or biographies or intellectual and social backgrounds. Oddly, even as theory takes a predominate role in critical discourse today, the prior question of grounds for determining the propriety of responses still requires an answer. Whatever is made visible to me in my reading of a piece of writing is "the work" in particular (the subtitle of Barbara Harman's book is Representations of the Self in George Herbert's Poetry). Similarly, Debora Shuger claims that, when we read Herbert, "we bring to bear our own categories, formed by our own language, culture, experiences, onto the printed surface of the text and read back our selves to ourselves" (Shuger 264).

Often poststructuralists construe past utterances (let us say Herbert's texts) in spatial terms. The assumption is that no criteria exist for discriminating "interiority" from "exteriority," or "signifiers" from "signifieds." Although Harman makes no reference to Derrida in her book on Herbert, I have the impression here and elsewhere in poststructuralist Herbert criticism of a prevailing influence of historical deconstruction: "It is thus the idea of the sign that must be deconstructed through a meditation upon writing which would merge, as it must, with the undoing (sollicitation) of onto-theology, faithfully repeating it in its totality and making it insecure in its most assured evidences" (Derrida 73). Security and insecurity have to do with states of mind in relation to the aggregate of texts and their relation to each other ("readings" and "readers"): "The security with which the commentary considers the self-identity of the text, the confidence with which it carves out its contour, goes hand in hand with the tranquil assurance that leaps over the text toward its presumed content, in the direction of the pure" (159). This rhetorical aim perhaps explains why Harman and Shuger find difficulty in disentangling the past (that is, the archeological evidence on which inferences about the past might be effectively grounded) from what we say about it, for in order to do so they must make an unmakable distinction between signifier and signified, exterior and interior, past and present--that is, between Herbert's "self" and that of the reader. Thus, it is not only Herbert's poems that collapse, but the author's imagined self collapses, too, into the more accessible self of the critic.

The proposition that, when reading a text written by someone else, one encounters oneself suggests that a reader discovers the same self in every text. Why is it, then, that, "finding myself" in my reading, I so often encounter attitudes and beliefs that seem to me so unfamiliar? Wittgenstein appears to argue otherwise and more convincingly that "One can mistrust one's own senses, but not one's own belief" (PI 190e). One could of course reply that perhaps one's true self contains an unknown but very large number of beliefs and attitudes of which one is not aware. But even if this were so, one's encounter with a particular self among the n number of possible selves would still depend on an interpretation (or "reading" or "response" or "analysis"--many synonyms are in current use). And so questions--differences--could arise. For instance, what does this view imply about criteria for correcting error or misunderstanding of the text? Would the remedy of correction be the same as in the case when I misspeak, saying one thing but meaning another? That is, can someone else correct me? I say such and such concerning Herbert's Temple--that its imagery and diction resemble expressions found in the marginalia of the Little Gidding "Harmonies" (see my Herbert chap. 3)--and you reply, "No, you mean so and so"--that it resembles typical rhetorical flourishes in William Perkins' very popular Cases of Conscience." In criticism, misunderstanding is the country-cousin of correction. Ben Jonson writes in "To the Reader": "Pray thee, take care, that tak'st my booke in hand,/ To reade it well; that is, to understand." But how, if I encounter myself in Jonson's text, is misunderstanding possible? Whom does Jonson enjoin to understand? I encounter the same myself whether I read Jonson or Herbert or Nietzsche or de Sade or C. S. Lewis. This is strange. I say to myself, "I agree" or "I disagree with"--or "I am appalled by--myself."

Is this proposition--that we find ourselves in various texts--a fair account of our reading experience? If so, how do we learn the opinions of others? Or are all opinions innate, like the instinct of the snake to strike out even as it emerges from its shell? Can the problem be the formulation of the sentence--which was, after all, accompanied by this odd sensation? Again, Wittgenstein observes: "Misunderstandings concerning the use of words, [may be] caused, among other things, by certain analogies between the forms of expression in different regions of the language.--Some of them can be removed by substituting one form of expression for another; this may be called an 'analysis' of our forms of expression, for the process is something like one of taking a thing apart" (PI 90). Our investigation must be into the propriety of the analogy introduced by critical vocabulary. We analyze our critical formulae as a first step toward clarification, and if, during that process, it appears that the formulae do not help to clarify the question at hand, we may if we wish set the formulae aside, and try a different tack.

We might observe, for instance, that notably missing from these discussions of the interiority/exteriority conundrum is attention to the spatial figure itself. Supposedly, we cannot tell whether we are inside or outside of ourselves. As we investigate this use of spatial metaphor, let us imagine that you cannot tell whether you are inside or outside of my house. It is your first visit after a long absence, and your confusion can probably be explained by the architectural designs which I have commissioned in the interim to make the house look larger by focusing attention on the landscaping of the garden. The boundary between house and garden, once a solid wall but now a single, large pane of glass, has been attenuated for a purpose. You say, "I am unsure in my judgment of the boundary between interior and exterior," and this makes perfect sense.

But now suppose I say that I cannot tell whether l am inside or outside of a rectangle within which you have asked me to stand, and, further, that you answer that you can't tell either. So which way do I move to follow your instruction? We know that the rectangle of the batter's box in baseball can become blurred and, for all practical purposes, even disappear during play. Is our incapacity to distinguish interiority from exteriority in criticism like this? Does it matter? (Is the baseball game over when the line delineating the batter's box is rendered indistinct?) The point may be in criticism that we have reached an impasse. What to do? We could say that, without further instruction on its employment, the spatial figure appears to be unhelpful in elucidating the aspect of the Herbert text in question, for instance, that of distinguishing a modern from a Caroline and Jacobean usage. We are unsure where Herbert's exterior ends and our interior begins, and the more we ponder the interiority/ exteriority "problem" the more daunting it becomes. We could say that sometimes a spatial metaphor might be just what is needed to clarify a point, but this doesn't seem to be one of them. When a figure befuddles or beclouds the matter at hand, we are free--and it might be prudent and helpful--to dispense with it.

In literary theory, interpretation precedes essence. We can say that the parts of a work cohere or do not cohere, but we cannot do so without giving an account of the thematic interests lending to or detracting from the work's continuity. And, as we have seen, the explication of parts of so complex a work as The Temple belongs to the ebb and flow of language and the history of thought. Coleridge argued that only a certain kind of Christian was competent to understand Herbert, and yet our present institutions permit--cynics might say even require--secular interpretations, which exist side by side with non-secular ones, like wares at a bazaar. They bear directly upon such questions as the structural integrity of The Temple as well as--and this seems to me more interesting--the moral and intellectual integrity of the author. Depending on one's ideological perspective, poems develop and come to a close or fail to do so. For example, claiming that her interest in "discursivity" and "textuality" represents a "materialist" viewpoint (34), Barbara Harman says of "The Flower":

. . . in "The Flower" experience is always in the process of changing, and descriptions of it are always in the process of becoming obsolete. This speaker is a misreader by necessity--someone who can only say amiss because, as a creature, he has no access to that total and unchanging vision represented by God's word in stanza three and by Paradise in stanza seven. In "The Flower" creatures are in the business of being and saying amiss, and the recognition of that fact makes saying amiss the only real way of saying aright. (168-69)

From this viewpoint, God's "wonders" are only another instance of misprision. Similarly, understanding of the limitations of "pride" toward which the poem appears to move is also an illusion or "saying amiss."

Since Harman claims to be talking, not about Herbert, but about the convergence of a particular text with her "materialist view," attention shifts from Herbert's poem to the critic's candor. Her critical assertions either are or are not a true account of that convergence, and, reliable or not, she is the only witness. It would be uncivil if, after scrutinizing a Rorschach inkblot, the viewer says, "This is what I see," and the auditor answers, "Oh, no you don't." Polygraph tests may be, in the current situation, unreliable, but we can imagine technological advances which would assure us if readers tendered authentic reactions to texts. And with the help of the computer we can envision an exponential increase in our capacity to log in, collate, and codify "views" of Herbert texts--materialist, Feminist, Freudian, Marxist, historicist, semiologist, structuralist, poststructuralist, deconstructionist, and so on, each with n number of permutations to reflect individual differences. How, we might ask, are we to correct any one of them? Given our democratic institutions, is it desirable--or even consonant with law and public policy--to single out particular critical utterances for praise or blame?

This question involves not only our understanding of the sense and tone of Herbert's poem, but also our appreciation of its structure. For the "materialist" in question, "The Flower" proceeds--or fails to proceed--to an unstable non-assurance regarding the meaning of the experience. The critic perceives a species of deep irony in the poem instead. In contrast, Richard Strier says of the same poem: "It is Herbert's greatest triumph of placing immediate experience without undermining it with irony" (Strier 244). Where one finds uncertainty, tentativeness, undoing, and collapse, others (Strier; Bloch 197; Vendler 53) find "homiletical neatness" and a "law and order" ending in the text. (Vendlet finds the ending of the poem a "fault;" Chana Bloch does not. On the content and tone of the conclusion they agree.) The question is not which of the two perspectives is correct, but how we are to decide the matter of correctness. Are the two perspectives equally relevant to Herbert's poem? Are they equally valid? Although they seem to contradict each other, can we accept them both? Can we teach uninformed students that both "represent" Herbert's text? Suppose we imagine a thoroughly latitudinarian response here, with an emphatic "yes" to all four questions. Can we not then ask what method of measurement was employed to distinguish equivalence from inequivalence in "relevance" and "validity"? How did we decide upon the acceptability of contradictory statements? And, without moving into the contemporary sociology of interpretations, how do we teach students that the ending of Herbert's text conjoins "homiletic neatness" with "collapsing" instability? In the current situation, do we think of the "neo-Christian" and "materialist" views as equally appropriate to our understanding of the coherence or incoherence that Herbert and his contemporary audience would have perceived in such a poem?

Did--could--Herbert know what he said? Modem thought permits, but does not compel, us to say that Herbert's poetry expresses ideas and attitudes of which Herbert and his audience were not aware. It is even possible that the meanings involved might have had no means of expression in the language of the time. Some critics say that such meanings and attitudes were "'unconscious." It is even possible that our reading of The Temple retains and reflects vestiges of these unconscious meanings, attitudes, and impulses. For instance, critics speak of our uneasiness with sexuality and eroticism in Herbert's poems. Setting aside my skepticism regarding what counts, in an age of Madonna and "rap" doggerel, as evidence of such unease, I want to address Michael Schoenfeldt's assertion that the figure of "spirit" in "My God, where is that ancient heat" represents "a common Renaissance euphemism for 'penis'" (Schoenfeldt 274). My concern is that, when objects or ideas or figures or inspirations "rise" or are otherwise "erected," Schoenfeldt infers sexual interest. He draws support for this practice from other critics, one of whom perceives "onanistic" meanings in Herbert's verses, which perception prompts Schoenfeldt to point out that his predecessor could have included (but didn't) among his Herbertian examples the "remarkably onanistic" (277) "Sinnes round," the . . . ophidian form" of which "completes the closed circuit of shame and desire" (243). Now the critic further buttresses his masturbatory thesis by suggesting that Herbert may be "deploying an unstated visual pun on 'pen' and 'penis'" (278).[4] Surely the investigator would be remiss who did not ask how one perceives unstated puns, whether verbal, visual, or olfactory. Are they like unstated musical motifs, which, since they are in neither the score nor the performance, harmonize perfectly with any melody? Be that as it may, any pun between "pen" and "penis" would have been difficult even to unstate in Herbert's time, in that (if we can believe the OED) the latter word did not enter the language until about 1693. The critic-as-depth-psychologist could argue, of course, that the non-appearance of the word in Herbert's poem--indeed, in the Herbert canon--amounts to its first undocumented use in the English language. And he could point out that Herbert was a fine Latinist, and so could have known the word in its original language.

The problem with this method, I think, is knowing when to quit. Supporting evidence is everywhere available, while contrary data are impossible to find. So how do we determine when an inference is justified? Schoenfeldt quotes Helen Vendlet on the subject: "We cannot miss the tentative sexuality of his 'budding' and 'shooting up' and later 'swelling'" (279). While it may reassure some critics that Vendler finds Herbert's texts so transparent ("We cannot miss"), what about the others? What if we do "miss" this "obvious" meaning? Was it there to miss? Schoenfeldt buries a possibly relevant perspective on this question in a footnote: "Vendler seems cautiously attracted by a 'Psychoanalytic interpretation' which might see this poem as a masochistic acquiescence in castration; to accept castration is to be reconciled with the father by no longer possessing a rival masculine member" (299n). Now, suppose I perceive an explanation here. How do I know if it is helpful? How do we teach the propriety of such linguistic moves to our students? All "risings" are not the same. All tumescence is not male. Waves swell, as do bosoms, breezes, and abrasions. Does a term used once in such and such a way imply poetic creation? Given our loose conceptualization of metaphoric expression, we cannot deny that it could. And, then, will they--the waves, bosoms, abrasions--suggest priapic erection? Our interlocutor responds that our logic requires an affirmative, if wary, response. Are we entitled, then, in our new taxonomy of synonyms to say that (since A = B, B must also = A) images of onanism are metaphoric expressions of ocean waves, women's bosoms, country breezes, and black eyes? Well, in our lexicon, tumescence (A) is associated with genitalia (B) and both are figures of creative activity (c). But does it now also follow that as a poet writes, invariably, images of A and/or of B are before his mind?

I have questions, too, about the "resistance theory," which holds that critics (Bloch and Lull, for instance)[5] resist the drift of their own insights into the erotic aspect of "Love (III)," a poem to which Schoenfeldt directs much of his attention. According to this genetic approach, we can explain what is left out of other critics' analyses (namely, what is present in our own). Bloch and Lull do not agree with Schoenfeldt because they are uncomfortable with the sexual content of the poem. But this procedure presupposes: A) that a method of measuring the sexual content of the poem is available (Bloch and Lull accord some but not enough); B) that critics impart the sexual content of a poem on the basis of their measurable comfort or discomfort (because of their discomfort, Bloch and Lull don't accord enough [286-87]); and C) that there is a corollary between comfort and correctness of interpretation. But isn't it possible for one to be comfortably mistaken, or uncomfortably well-informed?

The intellectual twin of depth psychology is depth rhetoric, which holds that, beneath the surface of verbal utterance lies a depth of meaning imperceivable to the naive reader, but penetrable to practitioners of the rhetorical school of criticism. Thus, Herbert's writing exhibits a superficial meaning, which rhetorical analysis reveals as misdirecting less sophisticated readers who focus on the merely verbal, surface expression. I take as exemplary of this method the most celebrated practitioner of the reader-response school. Stanley Fish's view of "Herbert's Hypocrisy,"[6] affirms that, on the surface, Herbert pretends to be--performs as if he were--as traditional critics have perceived him, "a model of sincere piety." But Fish's rhetorical analysis, with its emphasis on "artifice and theatricality" in A Priest to the Temple, shows him to be quite another, to be, in effect, the opposite of sincere: "to be all surface, superficial, without depth, thin, to be continually composed, confected, constructed, to feign, to be continually theatrical, to be always playing a role." In this flight from anything that is his own, we "see that there is something sinister in the parson's program." Why so? Because "The Parson's Eye" borders on the omniscient. Because the parson aims at a totality of social intelligence and sanction. Because he knows all, punishes all, and forgives all. At issue are such passages as this from A Priest to the Temple:

The Countrey Parson upon the afternoons in the week-days, takes occasion sometimes to visite in person, now one quarter of his Parish, now another. For there he shall find his flock most naturally as they are, wallowing in the midst of their affairs; whereas on Sundays it is easie for them to compose themselves to order, which they put on as the holy-day cloathes, and come to Church in frame, but commonly the next day put off both. (247)

Here, Herbert admonishes the priest to make his parish visits unannounced, so that he will see parishioners as they are rather than as they only seem to be on Sundays and holidays. Since parishioners have no way of knowing when he will appear, the priest finds them as they usually are, not "well drest," but "wallowing in the midst of their affairs." The locution "wallowing" conveys a negative feeling about the rural folk: "the poorest Cottage" might "mell never so lothsomly." Just as he schedules his visits randomly, the priest also rebukes misconduct at unforeseen intervals, in some cases waiting until departure "to reprove" less sophisticated members of the congregation "plainly."

We could infer from this section that the wise priest must learn to fit his visits to the needs of particular families. He must, as we might say, be sensitive. He must not treat those "sensible of finesse" as he would those "of higher quality." Preparation is the key here, as it is in the more formal demands of public preaching and prayer. The priest exerts himself to achieve the proper, benign effects. But this viewpoint entails a charitable characterization of the priest's motives and functions in the world. To the contrary, Fish argues that beneath the surface of the parson's charitable offices lurks a "sinister" undercurrent of pernicious motives. Fish prosecutes his argument by analyzing the quotation above--and certain passages from "The Parson's Eye"--in the context of Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison: "it is impossible not to think Foucauldian thoughts and to see Herbert's idealized pastor as the engineer and operator of a system of surveillance and control that answers perfectly to the account in Discipline and Punish of Bentham's Panopticon." One relevant passage reads:

All that is needed, then, is to place a supervisor in a central tower and to shut up in each cell a madman, a patient, a condemned man, a worker or a schoolboy. By the effect of backlighting, one can observe from the tower, standing out precisely against the light, the small captive shadows in the cells of the periphery. They are like so many cages, so many small theatres, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible. The panoptic mechanism arranges spatial unities that make it possible to see constantly and to recognize immediately. In short, it reverses the principle of the dungeon; or rather of its three functions--to enclose, to deprive of light and to hide--it preserves only the first and eliminates the other two. Full lighting and the eye of a supervisor capture better than darkness, which ultimately protected. Visibility is a trap.

The inference is that Herbert's priest is a jailer. His function defines his motives. Using his vision as a means of imposing his presence even when he is absent, he controls parishioners, spies on them, punishes them. Parishioners cannot know when he will arrive to visit because, notwithstanding his pretended Christian charity, he designs his itinerary in order to produce embarrassment and anxiety. In other words, Herbert's priest is a phony, an actor, and he admits as much when he describes his conduct in the pulpit: "When he preacheth, he procures attention by all possible art, both by eamestnesse of speech, it being naturall to men to think, that where is much eamestness, there is somewhat worth hearing; and by a diligent, and busy cast of his eye on his auditors, with letting them know, that he observes who marks, and who not; and with particularizing of his speech now to the younger sort, then to the elder, now to the poor, and now to the rich" (232-33). Just as when he prays the priest raises his hands and eyes in a certain manner, so when he preaches he strives to communicate with his audience--to arouse a response. In this way Herbert implies, whether he was aware of it or not, that the priest is like an actor, pretending to be "holy" in order to achieve the reverent reaction of his parishioners. He lifts his hands and raises his eyes and intones his words in such and such a way. It is a performance; therefore, it is hypocritical. Beneath the priest's daily ministrations, we perceive his misgivings about and contempt for the rural folk. They must be acted upon because, left to their own devices, they would fall back to "wallow" in economic and spiritual disarray.

There are, I think, notable inconveniences in the employment of Foucault's remarks with explanatory intent. First, Foucault imagines the prisoners--that is, the prisoners, madmen, patients, capital offenders, workers, and schoolboys--as actors individuated by the system. His is a Wordsworthian metaphor: "Visibility is a trap." "Shades of the prison-house begin to close/Upon the growing Boy." But why is this? In Foucault, because society imposes the functions of the prison in the architectonics of its institutions. But if this is so, then it must follow that prisons reflect the structure of society, or that, in effect, the concept of "prison" is a mistake (hence, the slippage in Foucault's formulation from prisoner to worker to schoolboy).[7] According to Foucault, to gaze upon is to control the action of the actors on the miniature stages of hypothical individualities.

It is not my purpose here to quarrel with Romanticism in any of its manifold expressions. I will even allow that it might be interesting to ponder the comparison between the priest in Herbert's Country Parson and the jailers in Foucault's/Bentham's Panopticon. I could even admit that my Wittgensteinian presentiments constrain me to allow that there could be contexts in which the juxtaposition of these texts might coax a recalcitrant learner to a better understanding of Herbert's text. But, if so, what would that understanding consist of, and how would it be brought about? Well, not necessarily by the reader's recognition of the similarity between Foucault's jailer and Herbert's priest. (Wittgenstein: "What I am looking for is the grammatical difference" [PI 185e].) For Fish/Foucault, "visibility is a trap." Society in the shapes of jailers (prisoners), doctors (patients), supervisors (workers), and teachers (schoolboys) imposes its hegemonic demands upon all, whether its oppressors are present or absent. Alas, everybody is doomed to be observed even when not observed, so clever are the devices of the oppressors, who gaze on gazees with the "sinister" intent of entrapment.

One might question Fish's reading of Country Parson by pointing out that nobody in Herbert's time seems to have given it much thought, or by objecting, as David Cressy has, to the use of Michel Foucault by Renaissance historians and literary critics (Cressy, "Foucault"). (If critics depend on dubious sources, how much confidence can we invest in their applications?) But I doubt that this strategy will discourage practitioners of such analogical thinking, because such critiques, although valuable, suffer the disadvantages of a reasoned empiricism, namely, that they do not address the underlying, figurative conception on which analogy depends, namely, that of "depth analysis." For depth analysts will simply reply that Herbert and his contemporaries were only interested in or only prepared to grasp surface significance.

The target must be the picture of depth in depth analysis itself, for depth analysis depends on the explanatory relevance of the figure of depth. Just when did this depth meaning (say, of Herbert's "sinister" motive) come into existence? Or was it always there, like a musical piece scored for violin and harpsicord, but for centuries performed only as a violin solo. Lacking the analogue of the musical score, how do we determine what accompaniment to offer? That is, since the accompaniment is to the words written by Herbert and interpreted by his contemporaries without the accompaniment, how do we determine which notes to strike in our rendition? Some critics say, "Well, it is a new rendition in which both the score and the performance are newly-invented." But this sentence provides us with no more than an appropriate instance of one grammatical use of the locution "new." What is the status of the theoretical assertion that this novelty is relevant to the piece composed prior to 16337 Can we not imagine a reinscription of Monteverdi's Vespers of 1610 in which dissonance replaces harmony, and the twelve-tone scale takes the place of that familiar to Monteverdi and his audience? Suppose we imagine performing the Vespers of 1610 with the usual score in front of us, and with all of the historically correct instruments played by properly prepared musicians, but with this proviso: when the conductor's baton descends with the audience expecting the concert to begin with a loud sound of brass, no musicians play, and, although they peer intently at the Monteverdi score and look to the conductor in appropriate ways, they continue not playing for some minutes. Have they, then, performed 4'33" regarded by some as John Cage's finest composition (Lanham 71)?

Again, did Herbert believe what he said? Could he believe what he said? When Stanley Fish says that Herbert is a hypocrite, he implies that he perceives Herbert's true motives, which, in turn, conflict with his purported ones. Herbert is insincere. But what is the criterion of sincerity here? Doesn't the figure of depth permit proponents of an even deeper depth analysis to assert that there lies beneath Herbert's comparatively shallow hypocrisy a deeper affirmation of compassion and sincerity? That is, given the figure of depth permissible in depth analysis, who can claim to have plumbed the Marianas Trench--that rhetorical depth beyond which no further depth can be imagined? Is the problem, then, the intractable impropriety of the figure of depth itself?. In The Blue and Brown Books, we read:

Now there is no doubt that, having the visual image of a string of beads being pulled out of a box through a hole in the lid, we should be inclined to say: "These beads must all have been together in the box before". But it is easy to see that this is making a hypothesis. I should have had the same image if the beads had gradually come into existence in the hole of the lid. We easily overlook the distinction between stating a conscious mental event, and making a hypothesis about what one might call the mechanism of the mind. (BBB 40)

Wittgenstein is talking about the ease with which the mind moves from familiar experience to theorize about experience in general. We imagine that our way of reading or our way of expressing human problems is the only way. We have been taught to think that motives underlie expressions, and yet the figure of "underlying" implies a dichotomy, which, on analysis, we might not wish to defend. Wittgenstein suggests that it wouldn't--that it doesn't--matter what is inside the box from which the beads are being pulled. (If it helps, we can imagine that the box cannot be opened.) Perhaps the depths of poetry's origin are like that. We might even infer that the notion of critical problems are like that, too--neither deep nor shallow, but just present in the here and now of discussion.

So what about sincerity? Is an actor's performance intrinsically insincere, or can there be sincere and insincere performances, say, of the role or function of a country parson? Wittgenstein writes: "We say 'The expression in his voice was genuine'. If it was spurious we think as it were of another one behind it.--This is the face he shews the world, inwardly he has another one.--But this does not mean that when his expression is genuine he has two the same" (PI 606). Again, it is the spatial figure that misleads. There is another priest behind the mask of the benign visitor, another meaning behind the priest's utterance or gesture in the pulpit. (This actor is performing the part of Lear as if he were Volpone; this priest, under the guise of returning the parishioner to his vocation is actually trying to make him a permanent ward of the parish.) The priest "acts" in order to sustain the "aristocratic" power structure (Wolberg 177).[8]

The inconvenience of such assertions is that, in searching out depth meanings, it finds "sinister" motives alien to those laid out in Herbert's instructions. The purpose of the parson's unexpected visits is to provide the priest with appropriate occasions for the discharge of one of his holy offices: moral instruction. The function of his charity is not--I repeat not (because, in this context, it is an important qualifier)--to increase or extend the parishioner's dependence upon the priest, but, on the contrary, to make that dependence a step toward independence:

When he riseth in the morning, he bethinketh himselfe what good deeds he can do that day, and presently doth them; counting that day lost, wherein he hath not exercised his Charity. He first considers his own Parish, and takes care, that there be not a begger, or idle person in his Parish, but that all bee in a competent way of gettng their living.

This he effects either by bounty, or perswasion, or by authority, making use of that excellent statute, which bindes all Parishes to maintaine their own. . . . But he gives no set pension to any; for this in time will lose the name and effect of Charity with the poor people, though not with God: for then they will reckon upon it, as on a debt; and if it be taken away, though justly, they will murmur, and repine as much, as he that is disseized of his own inheritance. (244)

The point here ought not to be lost even on post-postmodems. When one takes the charity of neighbors as if it were only the repayment of something owed ("a debt"), the act of giving, of caring, loses the name of charity, and the dependent becomes an "idle person" rather than one mindful of obtaining "a competent way of getting (a) living." As for the priest's motive in giving money to the poor, this service is like the other offices of the Church: the Word in the world. It is like a sermon. Indeed, Herbert says it is a sermon: "So that his charity is in effect a Sermon" (245). But the Word is not meant to bind the workman to the priest, as child to father, in an unchanging dependence. Contrary to this self-righteous, self-aggrandizement, Herbert envisages a process based in economic anxiety. The parish church enacts no dole, no pension. Charity aims to eliminate dependence by encouraging poor parishioners "to take more pains in their vocation, as not knowing when they shal be relieved" (245). Idleness is the opposite of such constructive efforts, and Herbert implies a causal link between the pension--the expectation of an unearned benefit that "they will reckon upon it, as on a debt" (244)--and the sin of sloth.

My point is that only an uncharitable reading of "The Parson's Charity" will lead to an account that fails to recognize the function of the priestly office as Herbert represents it. What is the service to accomplish? That is the question addressed in the chapters to the novice rural priest. The way to avoid encouraging the sin of acedia (see Wenzel for an analysis of this misunderstood and underappreciated sin) is to remind the idle that someone else must work hard to provide them and their families with bed and board. The desiderata are that the idle learn "to praise God more," of course, but, more to the point, "to live more religiously," and the latter entails that they "take more paines in their vocation, as not knowing when they shal be relieved; which otherwise they would reckon upon, and turn to idlenesse" (245). The priest offers no set pension because such a dole too easily insinuates itself in the receiver as one's due. Then, if removed the idle complain rather than return to work, in which case the priest himself would be partly to blame, having encouraged the sin of acedia, not to mention that of ingratitude (a species of presumption, or pride).

Without denying the possibility that the metaphor of depth in language might have useful applications in certain instances, we can say, now, that nothing could be clearer than Herbert's surface meaning. Moreover, it is only the assertion that there is another, deeper, "sinister" meaning--that Herbert is an actor, and what is more an "insincere" actor--that enables one to impute pernicious motives to Herbert's instructions. But we are not obliged to think that this depth picture of language works in every case. If we are tempted to believe we have encountered a critical problem, we should be wary. We should remain willing to adjust our metaphor to the given situation. Why assume that Herbert enunciated instructions of which he was not aware? Wittgenstein writes:

The problems arising through a misinterpretation of our forms of language have the character of depth. They are deep disquietudes; their roots are as deep in us as the forms of our language and their significance is as great as the importance of our language.--Let us ask ourselves: why do we feel a grammatical joke to be deep? (And this is what the depth of philosophy is.) (Pl 111)

Here, Wittgenstein insinuates, not the "end of philosophy," but the beginning of an investigation into those moments in discussion when metaphors mislead, or, as we might say in critical theory, when our metaphors derive from a different "form of life" than do the locutions which they purport to describe.

Ultramodernism recoils at closure. For post-postmodems every thematic development strives toward something transcending a Wagnerian motif: the end is not yet. They seem to perceive in these fictive designs with pronounced closure a trace of the ancient, discredited teleology. God is dead, so why shouldn't finality be vanquished too? Herbert's poems do not end, but rather collapse or disappear, or in one of a number of ways deny all that they seem to affirm, namely, all evidences of temporal order leading from Genesis to Revelation, beginning to end. In the place of the Word they inscribe "writing," which simply "is," because it must "be" or nobody will get tenure. Within the surface structure of Herbert's The Temple is its simultaneous dissolution, this accompanied by the now familiar anti-teleology of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and their intellectual descendants. Are we, then, proposing a retrograde motion, as if time could or should be turned back? Or are we suggesting that beneath the surface rhetoric of deconstruction we perceive a hidden rhetorical thrust toward subversion of its purported aim to complete the undermining of the western metaphysical tradition? The answer might depend upon how seriously we take particular expressions of rhetorical theory. Is it always the case that at some level of depth arguments, narratives, and systems revert to incoherence and self-abnegation? Or could it be that rhetorical theories themselves represent prior belief systems? Does Herbert's espoused belief only hide his sexual embarrassment? Or his guilt? Or his resentment? Or--perhaps more to the point--his atheism? Well, does the materialist's certainty of doubt merely hide the profoundest depth of yearning for and embrace of belief?. Does the ancient teleology triumph in every spasm of materialist indignation toward the serenity of those typical Herbertian closures?

Since Herbert criticism is an ongoing fact of life, in at least one sense, "closure" of the critical questions we have engaged would not seem imminent. And yet how do we explain--or need we explain--the widening interest in George Herbert, so long regarded by so many as an Anglican saint? Is that interest only the necessary condition for a debasement of his supposed character and beliefs? Our interlocutor might, in a moment of candor, say, "I don't know. Doesn't our critical system proscribe categorical responses?" Perhaps so. But a process may follow protocol without establishing systematic procedures. We can surely distinguish between categorical and evaluative statements. (We need not approve of statements we regard as abusive or destructive or wrongheaded.)

When he had fallen too ill to read himself, Wittgenstein asked a friend to read Frazer's Golden Bough to him. His remarks are, I think, relevant to Herbert criticism -- and to the larger theoretical question today of the boundary between criticism and philosophy.[9] Wittgenstein was, to put it mildly, annoyed not so much by any specific fact or interpretation generated by Frazer, but rather by Frazer's attitude toward the subject of his study, namely, the beliefs of the people whom he regarded as savages. These remarks serve as a fitting close--or opening or collapse or disappearance, as you wish--of this investigation:

Frazer's account of the magical and religious notions of men is unsatisfactory: it makes these notions appear as mistakes.

Was Augustine mistaken, then, when he called on God on every page of the Confessions?

Well--one might say--if he was not mistaken, then the Buddhist holyman, or some other, whose religion expresses quite different notions, surely was. But none of them was making a mistake except where he was putting forward a theory.

Exasperated, Wittgenstein exclaims: "What a narrowness of spiritual life we find in Frazer!" I would add that Frazer was not alone in his incapacity to "understand a different way of life from the English one of his time!" Times change, and Frazer's England no longer exists. But the incapacity of critics to understand religious language--an apposite "narrowness of spiritual life"--persists, and we can find its traces today where Coleridge looked for it long ago: in Herbert criticism.

1) Rosemond Tuve, A Reading of George Herbert (London: Faber and Faber, 1952): Louis L. Martz, The Poetry of Meditation: A Study in English Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale UP, 1954); Heather A. R. Asals, Equivocal Predication: George Herbert's Way of God (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1981); Barbara Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1979); Stanley Fish, The Living Temple: George Herbert and Catechizing (Berkeley: U of Calif. P, 1978); Bloch, Spelling the Word; Terry C. Sherwood, Herbert's Prayerful Art (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1989). This list is by no means comprehensive, but only suggestive of the range of historical commentary.

2) It seems clear that Hooker addresses the motive behind the practice: "For so we are to interpret the meaning of those wordes wherein the restitution of the primitive Church discipline is greatly wished for touching the manner of publique penance in time of Lent." Both extremes overstate the case by pretending that the Bible either authorizes or proscribes the practice.

"They have long pretended that the whole Scripture is plaine for them. If now the Communion booke make for them too (I well thinke the one doth as much as the other) it may be hoped that being found such a weiwiiler unto their cause, they will more favor it then they have done. Having therefore hitherto spoken both of festivall dales and so much of solemne fasts as may reasonable serve to show the ground thereof in the law of nature, the practise partly oppointed and partly allowed of God in the Jewish Church, the like continued in the Church of Christ, together with the sinister oppositions either of Heretiques, erroniously abusing the same, or of others thereat quarelling without cause, wee will onely collect the chiefest points as well of resemblance as of difference between them, and so end." (Lawes 5:211-12, 212, respectively).

• 3) Laud and Laudlans sought to return the nation to the traditional ecclesiastical calendar. Cressy points out: "The king's Book of Sports, promulgated but only lethargically promoted by James I, was reissued by Charles I in 1633 as part of a national programme. Archbishop Laud ordered its distribution to every parish" (Bonfires 35).
• 4) Schoenfeldt is talking about imagery, not diction, as the word "pen" does not appear in the text of the sonnet in question. In a possible indication of the beginnings of a critique of the assumptions behind the critical formulation itself, Schoenfeldt omits the term "visual" from his assertion about the unstated pun in Prayer and Power (243).
• 5) Recently, Chana Bloch informed me that she and her husband, Ariel, will soon publish a new translation of the Song of Songs. This translation in modem verse, to be published with an introduction by Robert Alter (Random House, promised for 1994), represents the lovemaking of a young, unmarried couple, and may be considered a challenge to the resistance theory, or, perhaps, further evidence of the lengths to which people will go to cover up their true motives.
• 6) I am grateful to Professor Fish for providing me with a copy of this paper.
• 7) The incoherence of this argument appears when we consider Foucault's tone. His disapproval of prisons is hard to miss. Or, to put the thought another way, he "otherizes" the empowered "otherizers," which is okay, I suppose. But his implied advocacy of utopian liberation from all "system" must, by his own analysis (unless he seeks to offer himself as an exception to the metaphysical rule he has established), be no more than yet another expression of an inescapable prison system of gazer and gazee: We have met the Commissar, and he is us. Lest it be thought that I am registering disapproval here, I would add (sincerely) that, when it does no harm, the game of "visibility is a trap" ("Paranoia"?) might be considered harmless.
• 8) Wolberg's theme is similar to Fish's, in that she argues for a self-interested function in the priestly office as Herbert would direct it: "Herbert's goal is to win his people 'to praise God more.' And in 'making a hook of his Charity,' Herbert retains the aristocratic purpose of liberality which is causing 'them to still depend on him.' His 'double aime' is similiar to that of all liberal gentlemen, that is, to give, both for the good of the people and the good of one's own position" (177).
• 9) My co-authors Bemd Magnus, Jean-Pierre Mileur, and I have explored this matter at length in Nietzsche's Case: Philosophy as/and Literature (New York: Routledge, 1993).

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By Stanley Stewart

Stanley Stewart is professor of English at the University of California-Riverside. He has authored several books and numerous essays of criticism on seventeenth-century poetry and poets, as well as works of fiction. Among his various academic honors are a senior fellowship from the John Simon Guggnheim Memorial Foundation, an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship and the Distinguished Teaching Award at Riverside.