A Sign of Contradiction
Your enemy may tell you the truth about yourself, perhaps with invidious exaggerations, and harden you in your commitment to falsehood. A half-hearted or a weakling friend may let you tell falsehoods about yourself, and not oppose you, but even encourage you in them, so that you end up filling your heart with a false cheerfulness even as you walk toward your reckoning. It takes the true friend to let you speak, and to say, with a gentle but firm voice, that you haven’t got things right. Such a friend may act as that voice we wish very much would be quiet, namely, the voice of conscience, which is not our voice but, to use Milton’s happy term, God’s umpire within us. That is what we have in George Herbert’s dialogue poem, “Love Unknown.”
“Dear Friend,” says the speaker, feeling sorry for himself, “sit down, the tale is long and sad.” He proceeds to tell the friend of three acts of what he takes as ingratitude, lovelessness, and even cruelty on the part of his landlord—clearly, the Lord God himself. “To him I brought a dish of fruit one day,” he says, “And in the middle placed my heart.” But rather than stroking him on the head for the gift, the lord looked to one of his servants, one closer to him than the friend is to the speaker, or the speaker to himself. This mysterious servant, perhaps the Spirit, passes on the fruit and seizes the “heart alone, / And threw it in a font, wherein did fall / A stream of blood” issuing from the side of a rock.
Herbert expects his readers to think of the blood set abroach by the lance in Christ’s side, as the fulfillment of the water sprung from the rock when Moses struck it with his staff, to refresh the children of Israel on their journey through the desert. The action, though, is not calm or comfortable. For the servant dipped the heart in the blood, dyed it, washed it, and wrung it hard: “The very wringing yet / Enforceth tears.”
THIS ARTICLE ONLY AVAILABLE TO SUBSCRIBERS.
FOR QUICK ACCESS:
Anthony Esolen is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Thales College and the author of over 30 books, including Real Music: A Guide to the Timeless Hymns of the Church (Tan, with a CD), Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture (Regnery), and The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord (Ignatius). He has also translated Dante’s Divine Comedy (Random House) and, with his wife Debra, publishes the web magazine Word and Song (anthonyesolen.substack.com). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
Get six issues (one year) of Touchstone PLUS full online access including pdf downloads for only $39.95. That's only $3.34 per month!
Get a one-year full-access subscription to the Touchstone online archives for only $19.95. That's only $1.66 per month!
bulk subscriptions
Order Touchstone subscriptions in bulk and save $10 per sub! Each subscription includes 6 issues of Touchstone plus full online access to touchstonemag.com—including archives, videos, and pdf downloads of recent issues for only $29.95 each! Great for churches or study groups.
Transactions will be processed on a secure server.
more from the online archives
19.6—July/August 2006
The Three-Fold Cord of Imagination, Reason & Will in C. S. Lewis by Michael Ward
31.6—November/December 2018
on the Church's Response to the Anti-marriage Tide by Diane Woerner
calling all readers
Please Donate
"There are magazines worth reading but few worth saving . . . Touchstone is just such a magazine."
—Alice von Hildebrand
"Here we do not concede one square millimeter of territory to falsehood, folly, contemporary sentimentality, or fashion. We speak the truth, and let God be our judge. . . . Touchstone is the one committedly Christian conservative journal."
—Anthony Esolen, Touchstone senior editor
