Jesse Sharpe PhD thesis - Research@StAndrews:FullText ...

Herbert Discussing the Word 131
this to be the case as well. While The Temple could point to the various incarnations of the
historical temple in Jerusalem (and possibly even the Tabernacle), this is too limited of a
reading to incorporate all of the meanings that Herbert presents his readers with in his
book of poems. Likewise, The Church could be based on seventeenth-century British
churches, but once again, this is too narrow of a reading to incorporate all that the reader is
presented with in The Church. A better way to view the architecture of the book is to view
the terms in their various, mutable forms. The Temple then is not a literal building, but a
place of worship, and because of the immense human and incarnational/Christological
themes of the book, it is also the Temple that is the body, the ‘Temple of the holy Ghost’. 13
Likewise, The Church is a physical church, and the bride of Christ, and the body of the
believer. The book operates as a movement in (‘Church Porch’ to Church) and out
(Church to ‘Church Militant’), just as the title allows for the physically external location of
communion with the divine in an actual Temple, and as an internal location of communion
with the body acting as the place of communion. This view of the architecture allows for a
fluidity that incorporates the various functions that Herbert places on the Temple and
Church without losing the significance that the words ‘temple’ and ‘church’ add to our
understanding of the work. In light of this view of Herbert’s work as architect of his
poetry, without denying assertions such as Stanley Fish’s that The Temple functions as a
catechism 14 or relating the work to the Old Testament Temple or seventeenth-century
English churches, I will be discussing the architecture of the book in relation to the
dichotomy of Law and Gospel of the Old and New Testaments as well as the dichotomy
contained in the human/divine conversation that Herbert carries out in much of The
Church.
13 1 Corinthians 6.19, William Aldis Wright (ed,), The Authorized Version of the English Bible, 1611, 5 vols.,
(Cambridge, 1909), all quotations from the Bible are from this edition.
14 Stanley Fish, The Living Temple (London, 1978).