but I would argue that he is absolutely wrong in his reasoning. For “The Agonie” takes pains
not to imagine “spiritual experience” as an event directly channeled into the worshipper’s apprehension with epistemological immediacy. Mountains and seas can be understood through the apprehension of the senses, but as Herbert’s poem presents it, the problem with spiritual knowledge is that it must come through the mediation of terms whose objecthood is ultimately more stable, more apprehensible, than the abstractions to which they refer. In the case of “The Agonie,” the spiritual meaning of Christ becomes available to our apprehension insofar as he is textualized: Christ is manifested here not just
in or
through the eucharistic elements but as a text that by the act of signifying maintains its own presence.
