Le verbe fait image: Iconoclasmes, écriture figurée et théologie de l'Incarnation chez les poètes métaphysiques. Le cas de George Herbert by Anne-Marie Miller-Blaise (review)

Anne-Marie Miller-Blaise's title - The Word Made Image: Iconoclasms, Figurative Writing and the Theology of Incarnation among the Metaphysical Poets: The Case of George Herbert - describes what she sees as Herbert's task as a poet: to teach readers, through poetry, to see the Incarnation around and within themselves again (1 John 14). (Since this book is currently available only in French, I include numerous English translations of my own throughout this review.) Miller-Blaise situates her analysis of Herbert within two larger sixteenth- and seventeenth-century contexts: first, European baroque preoccupations with the proper nature and function of the visual, particularly religious visual art; and second, forms of English iconoclasm, arguing that Herbert attempts to convert and purify poetry, to give it back its proper high function. The book's project is described on the back cover:

It is a question, against the order of reason and fallen nature, to restore this similarity between man and God that seems to have been lost with the Reformation and the concomitant reformation of the imago mundi. Poetry will have as its task the interior reconstruction by an effective poetry of discordia concors, whose absolute model is the theology of the Incarnation, itself a theology of the image.

The printing of Herbert's poems disseminates within his larger culture a model of "interior reconstruction" that is analogous, surprisingly, to the Orthodox icon; we explore the "extent to which the Herbertian aesthetic is altogether ruled by the logic at work in the Incarnation and which permitted the Word to become Image" (p. 34). Herbert writes poems to help us see newly by imagining ourselves as being seen by God's repairing look.

In the first chapter, "The Image Tested by Speech," we follow a historical inquiry into English iconoclasm, attempting to explain the larger English discourse in which Herbert situates himself and his poetic project. Writers like Crashaw or Southwell, like Herbert, display in their poems a distrust of the idolatrous that is common, Miller-Blaise argues compellingly, to both the Catholic and Protestant Baroque. Herbert's The Temple, by contrast, presents itself as "a text made to be gazed upon" (p. 38); poems evade an idolatrous gaze by teaching us, building and extending a different way of seeing so that readers can imagine themselves as being seen by a loving, redeeming God.

We encounter in this study an intelligent discussion of the political, religious, and aesthetic implications of a tumultuous long period of transformation in English history, exploring English iconoclasm from Henry VIII through the Civil Wars. Under Elizabeth, we witness the beginning of a slippage from "religious image" to the "image of absolutism" (p. 47). Under the Stuarts, the power of the image is transferred even more vigorously from the Church to the Crown. During the Civil Wars, iconoclasm extends even to print, including of course the banned Book of Common Prayer. The chapter explores, in short, the progressive "secularization of the image," which allowed John Donne, for example, to collect devotional paintings and to list them individually in his will. Of particular usefulness in this chapter is Miller-Blaise's tracing of the language and logic of images in "Homily of 1563 Against Idolatry" as printed in the succeeding editions of the Book of Homilies. We follow the a progressive erasing in English translation of the differences between eidolon ("idol") and eikon ("image") in the Greek, particularly in the edition promulgated by James I, which Herbert and Donne would have known well. Herbert responds to the collapse of the image into the idol by reasserting the saving possibilities of the former, when properly understood and experienced.

In the second chapter, "The Crisis of the Image," less historical and more "philosophical," as the...