Abstract

Within a body of criticism that has, in general, stressed Herbert's poetic evocation of the divine, this study stands apart. While I acknowledge his moments of immanence, I read them as part of an overall dialectic of affirmation and negation designed to mourn God's absence from human experience, even as it celebrates His partial presence. The Temple, I propose, is better read as an enactment of the via negativa. Its poetry engages the central paradox of negative theology, namely, how to speak of a transcendent creator who remains, by definition, unspeakable. Like all such texts, it reflexively traces the limits of language and marks, in the end, the unknowability or darkness of God. ;Although I suggest the possible impact of Dionysius and the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing, my aim is not to offer an influence theory of the usual sort. On the contrary, as I demonstrate, the twentieth-century preoccupation with defining Herbert's precise textual referents and doctrinal positions is yet another way critics have missed his challenge to epistemological certainty. For this reason, my work draws support from the handful of Herbert readers, including Empson, more comfortable with ambiguity. In addition, I find the insights of more recent negative thinkers, such as de Man, Iser and Derrida, surprisingly illuminating