Integrite Spring 2013

Ashley Anthony 27 Within my heart I made Closets; and in them many a chest; And like a master in my trade, In those chests, boxes; in each box, a till: Yet grief knows all, and enters when he will. (lines 1-5) Despite Herbert’s best attempt to barricade his heart, grief still infiltrates Herbert’s formation whenever it wants. Herbert later qualifies this grief: “No screw, no piercer can / Into a piece of timber work and wind / As God’s affliction into man” (lines 7-9). Despite man’s unwillingness to confess or feel repentance, God inserts what Calvin described as “dissatisfaction with and a hatred of sin and a love of righteousness, proceeding from the fear of God” which ultimately leads to confession and repentance (265). The recognition of sin, and the consequent grief in light of and abhorrence of sin, is within God’s ability, not man’s ability.

Herbert illustrates this with man’s construction of barriers to resist repentance and the invasion of guilt or conviction. Herbert, with his sinful nature, resists God, which echoes Calvin’s idea of the leading of man into repentance, as opposed to man choosing to recognize his sin on his own. In “Man,” Herbert continues the conceit of the heart as a structure being worked upon in an attempt to promote man as a residence for God: “My God, I heard this day / That none doth build a stately habitation / But he that means to dwell therein” (lines 1-3). Herbert recognizes God as Creator of man, suggesting that God created man so that he could inhabit man, alluding to man as the temple of God (1 Cor. 3:16). The idea of God as an architect is presented by Calvin in reference to the roles of God and nature: At this day, however, the earth sustains on her bosom many monster minds—minds which are not afraid to employ the seed of Deity deposited in human nature as a means of suppressing the name of God.... He will not say that chance has made him differ from the brutes that perish; but, substituting nature as the architect of the universe, he suppresses the name of God. (Edgar & Olphint 49) Calvin believed that seeing nature as a deity or as the creator of itself was blasphemy, and this included the idea that man believed he was not created by God. Ultimately, God is the creator, or architect, of the universe, and further, God is the creator and architect of man’s heart. Within his poetry, Herbert struggled between his attempts to improve the structure of his own heart and his allowing God to work on his heart. However, in his realization that God was sovereign in the process of regeneration, Herbert stopped his own attempts at creating a worthy temple for God to reside in and allowed God to change him.

Although Herbert suggests that it is possible for the believer to be the temple of God, he is not suggesting that God literally becomes a piece of the believer. In Love Known, Richard Strier remarks on Calvin’s response to those who believed that God is literally a part of the believer: “Calvin saw these