George Herbert Journal

“approach, and taste / The churches mysticall repast”

(“Superliminare,” ll. 3–4)¹

In a strangely quotidian way, the main body of George Herbert’s Temple, titled “The Church,” both begins and ends with a table. These are not necessarily the same table, but the first thing we see in “The Church” is a table and the last thing that happens in “The Church” happens at a table. Herbert treats these tables in a way characteristic of his work, that is, he captures the feel of a table – what a body does with a table, what bodies do around a table. Herbert’s tables, even when they turn out not to be tables, are first fully tables in the bodily sense. We feel it in our bones. What does one do with a table? One approaches, one sits down, one sees, tastes, eats.

When we are thinking about the structure of “The Church,” we are necessarily in some way thinking about the space of “The Church,” and so at least two points seem immediately relevant. One is that tables mark a beginning and an ending here, and the other is that tables mark space not in terms of boundaries but in terms of gathering points. The two observations contradict each other, it would seem: for the more obvious way to mark a beginning and an ending – if one is using an architectural metaphor – would be to bound space with a wall (which Herbert also does, in part). Tables mark centers of attention and activity; people gather around them to sit together, to break bread. To begin and end with tables, then, is already a particularly open way to mark space.

But what do I mean, “The Church” starts with a table? It rather starts with an altar, which isn’t really the same thing. Let me admit the complication up front. In fact, the altar isn’t even an altar. Rather it is an altar-shaped heart. That said, it isn’t a heart without being an altar, and an altar is a particular kind of table: this altar, like every table, is a raised structure built to hold something, and what it might hold becomes the first real crux of “The Church.”² [End Page 45]

Of course, to call “The Altar” a table is to wander into the trench warfare of doctrinal debate: I would like to adopt a posture of naïveté on this: what I’m saying is that the table marks the spot. Whether the table is high or low, stone or wood, altar-wise or table-wise we do not know because Herbert doesn’t tell us. In fact, if the table of “The Altar” is hard to define, the table of “Love” is probably more so, in that the poem never mentions it, never mind describes it. These tables are themselves indefinite markers of the space of encounter between God and humanity, places in a finite world in which the infinite has come to dwell. Notably, these space markers have not been invented by humans, but have been revealed: God commanded Moses to build an altar in Exodus 20:25, one untouched by “workmans tool” (“The Altar,” l. 4); and Jesus Christ gathered his disciples around a table for the Last Supper. Herbert places his art, then, not within invented but revealed space. The significance of this is that, as Reformed theologian Thomas F. Torrance has pointed out, the finite creature cannot (logically) make room for the infinite Creator; rather, the Creator must make room for Himself (miraculously) within finite space, space itself being a creature.³ Herbert’s choice of places for the beginning and end of “The Church,” then, appears highly deliberate, and deliberately roomy, as it were. These are spaces not made but invoked and approached by Herbert, in which God acts, and more particularly, in which God hosts humanity, and more curiously, humanity God (in the Incarnate Son). Herbert did not separately choose a setting or structure in which some action would happen, but rather, the space, the action, and the divine Actor are all mutually...