[In the following review, Mollenkott provides an overview of Fish's critical argument in The Living Temple and discusses paradoxical and controversial aspects of his assertions.]

If Surprised by Sin set off among certain Miltonists the reaction of Fish-baiting, and Self-Consuming Artifacts widened the scope of that reaction, The Living Temple: George Herbert and Catechizing will probably draw even more seventeenth-century critics into the current of swimming against the Fish. The reasons are not difficult to discern: Stanley Fish writes with clarity and strength, and with a certain absoluteness of tone that is bound to stir up controversy. The serenely confident subtitle of his article in the George Herbert Journal (Fall, 1977) is a case in point: “The Mystery of The Temple Finally Explained.” Furthermore, Fish is never trivial. He confronts central issues head-on, forcing his readers to evaluate their own positions against his calmly worded certainties.

The Living Temple begins with an overview of Herbert criticism in which such people as Williamson, Wedgwood, Grierson, White, and Martz are ranged on the side of Herbert as the resolute craftsman of achieved ease, security, and quiet orderliness, while people such as Tuve, Stein, Freer, and Vendler are ranged with a Herbert who is restless and unstable, whose poetry is full of vacillations and reinventions. Rather than contributing to one or the other of these polarities, Fish insists that the dialectic itself should be the object of interpretation. Accordingly, Fish dedicates The Living Temple to explaining how it is that a poet and his poetry can be restless and secure at the same time. Because this approach has the appearance of subsuming all other critical approaches into its own, Fish can expect irritation from many angles.

The mystery of The Temple is resolved, Fish argues, by perceiving that the poet performs the function of a catechist who, by well-ordered questions, leads the uncertain reader toward an otherwise elusive knowledge. Thus from one perspective, “the reader’s uneven career is foreseen and overseen by an omniscient poet-catechist; but from another (of which we get occasional glimpses) the poet himself is the pupil of a higher teacher who overlooks his fumblings with the same benevolent and supervisory intention.” According to the first perspective, the orderliness of Herbert’s poetry is explained by attributing to the poet the conscious aesthetic strategy of driving the reader toward a more profound religious understanding. But from the second perspective, the strategy is one for which the poet cannot finally claim responsibility. Because the dynamics of the relationship between the poet and God are “unavailable to rational analysis,” explanation dissolves into mystery.

Fish graphically depicts the tremendous paradox of the divine-human relationship which is Herbert’s subject-matter. “There are any number of formulas that will allow us to talk about Herbert’s poetry,” he concedes; “but each of them is a rewriting of the contradiction that exists at its heart, the contradiction between the injunction to do work—to catechize, to raise altars, to rear temples, to write poems—and the realization, everywhere insisted upon, that the work has already been done.” In other words, although the members of the Church Militant must strive to raise themselves into a holy building (a living temple), that building already stands in the perfect body of the Master-builder who is ultimately responsible for their strivings.

“God doth not need / Either man’s work or his own gifts”—and yet God does give the gifts, and, what’s more, expects them to be used in his service. Fish’s interpretation of “Love III” will, I think, illustrate his handling of this basic Christian paradox and simultaneously clarify what has been a source of confusion for some of Fish’s—and Herbert’s—readers. Fish sees “Love III” as in many ways a reprise of “Superliminare”: the communicant responds to an invitation but shrinks back because his self-examinations have left him near despair. When he questions his own merit, the question is simply set aside: “You shall be he.” Gradually the speaker is left with nothing to call his own (“Who made the eyes but I?”) and is driven toward unconditional surrender. When finally he sits and eats, his “silence has been forced … and gratitude is what he has been all along reluctant to give.”

At first glance, such a reading leaves Fish open to charges of failing to understand that in the service of Christ Herbert found perfect freedom. But Fish fully comprehends that fact. Although the speaker in “Love III” loses the contest in which he never had a chance, and with it “loses his independent will,” Fish recognizes that loss to be “the goal of the Christian life.” But as Fish sees it, in “Love III” Herbert “chooses to emphasize the price we pay for it, the price of knowing that it has been paid for by another.” Whereas other critics have tended to stress the “comfortable benevolence” of “Love III,” Fish stresses the high cost of discipleship: “What shrinks or has shrunk is the speaker’s self. He has been killed with kindness.”

Perhaps, had Fish described the shrinking of the ego-nature rather than of the selfhood of the speaker, his meaning might have been clearer. Fish admits that “in a way” Helen Vendler is right to see a shrinkage of the distance between God and the soul in “Love III.” After all, death to the ego-nature is simultaneously ingestion of the Christ-nature (“So I did sit and eat”). The process of “Love III” is the process described by St. Paul in Galatians 2:20: “I am crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me” (italics mine). Fish’s interpretation of “Love III” so powerfully depicts the pangs of the Old Nature that many readers may fail to notice Fish’s understated awareness that the dying to the localized ego is after all only a dying into a larger life. As he did in Self-Consuming Artifacts, Fish stresses the humiliating rather than the exalting implications of the poet’s absorption into the divine nature. The problem is one of emphasis only, certainly not of awareness.

Fish ends The Living Temple with a valuable discussion of hermeneutical principles, contending that “One can only read what one has already read.” We are first persuaded to a way of seeing, he explains, and only afterwards do we find evidence in accordance with that way of seeing. People whose preconceptions or ways of seeing differ from our own simply will not see our facts as facts. “This is not to oppose persuasion to demonstration,” Fish concludes, “but to assert that the second can occur only if the first has already occurred, and that if the first has in fact occurred the second has occurred already.”

There can be little doubt that the vast majority of people (indeed, all of us most of the time) read only what we have already read. But how shall we explain the fact (rare, but real) that sometimes people independently experience major modifications in their field of perception, facing up to evidence that jars against their former and current preconceptions and gradually submitting themselves to that evidence? Such persons are finally persuaded not by other people’s marshaled evidence, but by evidence they independently confront over a period of time, facts which cause cognitive dissonance in them yet which they are too honest to dismiss out of hand.

Furthermore, when Fish began to illustrate his assumptions about literature by describing The Temple as a strategy, and in order to undergird his reading of The Temple turned to a study of the Reformation catechism, he was able to find something in reality-out-there to corroborate the admittedly interested direction of his thinking. Presumably, he tried to be accurate about the context, tone, and spirit of what he quoted from the catechisms. If that is true, then proving or demonstrating is not quite as subjective as Fish seems to imply; here again there is paradox. Although “objective evidence” is of necessity subjectively perceived, yet for a careful scholar that evidence will provide a very genuine check-and-balance.

Stanley Fish is a critic who deals in some of literature’s Big Questions. Because of the vastness of the concerns he raises, inevitably he becomes embroiled in paradox; and sometimes he fails to juggle those paradoxical realities with an even hand. Nevertheless, he writes brilliantly in The Living Temple, and no one who cares about Herbert’s poetry can afford to circumvent this approach to it.