LoveKnown:TheologyandExperienceinGeorgeHerbert's Poetry(review)
Barbara K. LewalskiGeorge Herbert Journal, Volume 8, Number 2, Spring 1985, pp. 45-48 (Review)
Published by George Herbert Journal
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1353/ghj.1985.0013
Foradditionalinformationaboutthisarticle
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/432997/summary
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Reviews
Richard Strier, Love Known: Theology and Experience in George Herbert's Poetry. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1983. xxii + 277 pp. $22.
by Barbara K. LewalskiRichard Strier's splendid book engages the central and still highly controversial issue of Herbert's theology and its significance for his poetry, adding to the debate not more heat but a good deal of light. He does so by drawing the careful theological distinctions which good intellectual history makes possible, and by offering discriminating and persuasive readings of many Herbert poems, readings which are primarily thematic but also sensitive and attentive to poetic language. Strier's book demonstrates that the central tenets of the Reformation, particularly as experienced and articulated by Luther, constitute the thematic core of Herbert's poetry, explaining the development (and resolving the apparent cruxes) of poem after poem.
This book reinforces and extends current revisionist readings of Herbert in Protestant Reformation terms. Strier sets himself in the general tradition of Joseph Summers, William Halewood, and myself on this issue, but makes his own strong case against the Walton-Martz-Tuve view of an AngloCatholic Herbert, primarily influenced by medieval and CounterReformation sources. His case rests upon the centrality of the Reformation doctrine of sola gratia (or sola fides) to Herbert's poetry. Without claiming that Herbert was a Lutheran or even that he was directly influenced by Luther, Strier argues with great cogency Herbert's affinity to Luther in the intensity with which he focused upon agape, God's spontaneous and "unmotivated" love for man. The fact that most of the poems chosen for analysis are not from the W manuscript successfully challenges the view that Herbert's later poems moved closer to an "Anglo-Catholic" position.
In his first five chapters, Strier draws out the doctrinal corollaries of the sola gratia position, and illustrates their interpretative significance in very many poems. The denial that man can in any way merit salvation is shown to be at the core of "Sighs and Grones," "Judgement," "Miserie," "Giddinesse," and especially "Ungratefulnesse," among others. Thenotion that sin and concupiscence are located primarily in the intellect rather than the senses and that, accordingly, human reason and ingenuity continually mislead us in spiritual matters is the thematic center of "Confession," "Sinnes round," "Jordan" (II), "Vanitie" (I), and "TheAgonie." The rejection of Puritan covenant theology as an unwarranted bargaining with God is seen as the burden of "The Pearl," "Obedience," "Artillerie," and "Assurance." Finally, the Lutheran sense of assurance as the concomitant of conversion and justification as that which alone can dispel anxiety over sin and bring joy in a relationship to Christ is shown to be dramatized powerfully in "Conscience," "Justice" (II), "Aaron," and "The Glance," among others.
The final chapters demonstrate Herbert's focus on experience and emotion. Strier reinforces the argument of those who find individual spiritual experience rather than the life of the corporate church at the center of Herbert's poetry, in keeping with the primary Reformation emphasis on the work of the Spirit in the heart. "The Church-floore" with its unexpected shift in the final lines from church architecture to the sinful heart is a case in point, as are other poems ostensibly about architecture or liturgical symbols but actually about the Christian life: "The Windows," "The Altar," "The Bunch of Grapes," "Love unknown," "Providence." Strier is especially interesting on the matter of emotion and feeling in Herbert —the privileging of complaints, groans, insistent pleas, despondency, as a sincere expression of the heart's truth in poems like "Longing," "Deniall," and "Sighs and Grones." But he also exposes Herbert's complex view of the difficulties in interpreting personal experience, the need to correct distressing episodes of spiritual dryness or apparent abandonment by God by continued attention to the larger pattern of enduring relationship with him. The final chapter offers subtle readings of several poems which dramatize that issue brilliantly "The Collar," "The Search," and especially "The Flower."
BOOK REVIEWS
Strier sees much merit in, but also takes some issue with, two other revisionist approaches to Herbert. Against Helen Vendler's reading of Herbert in human and experiential rather than doctrinal terms, he argues that the theology of Herbert's poems is inseparable from their human content, precisely because Herbert's Pauline theology itself privileges emotional experience. And the poetic strategy Vendler reads as "reinvention," arising from attention to human psychological complexity, Strier reads in seventeenth-century terms as rhetorical "correctio" grounded upon deepening theological understanding. Against Stanley Fish's view of Herbert as a species of mystical pantheist and total determinist, forced again and again to admit that God is and does everything, Strier insists that Herbert's is a theological (not an ontological) position, grounded upon the central Reformation doctrine that humans are unable to act in any way pertaining to salvation, and in the spiritual (though not the human) realm must depend entirely upon grace. He is led by that distinction, and by the specific thematic contexts which are established in the poems, to contest Fish's claim that many Herbert poems (like "Sepulchre") are ambiguous and unresolved. The same factors lead him to contest Fish's reading of "The Holdfast" and "Love" (III), among others, as exercises in humiliation, recognizing them instead as joyful celebrations of the power of grace.
He takes some issue as well with my emphasis on Herbert's biblical poetics, arguing that in poems like "Jordan" (II), "Sion," "The Forerunners," and "A true Hymne" Herbert discounts and devalues art in favor of the spontaneous, sincere, and untransformed expression of emotion. His claim here is that Herbert's emphasis on inwardness and sincere emotion (groans rather than art) links him to radicals like William Dell "who truly wanted to 'walk naked' from a liturgical point of view and to rely solely on the vitality of the Holy Spirit 'lodged' in the heart" (p. 217). Others must judge between us on this point, but I believe Strier here forces a dichotomy which Herbert himself did not recognize.
What Strier leaves out of account, I believe, is an element which is properly part of his story, the Reformation emphasis on praise, on the loving duty of the Christian (and in a special sense the Christian poet) to offer praise and thanksgiving to
God. In Reformation terms, that is all the Christian can render back in gratitude for the grace freely given him. In recognition of that responsibility Luther himself composed psalmic hymns for congregational song; and Christian poets from Du Bartas to Milton to Edward Taylor worried about how to use their poetic gifts properly in God's praise. The issue does not arise for radicals like Dell who regard the forms of art and liturgy as prideful human barriers to the Spirit's illumination. But all that we know about Herbert's care for the beauty and decency of Christian worship (and the quite obvious care he took in constructing his own artful poems) indicates that he did not share that view.
Herbert sounds the theme of praise in the first poem of "The Church," as he prays that praises sounded by his altar/heart may make up for any lapses in his conscious vocal praise: "That, if I chance to hold my peace, / These stones to praise thee may not cease." In "Easter" he claims that in the best case true praise arises from the conjunction of the risen heart, thepoetic voice resounding in harmony with Christ's cross, and the Spirit's "art" making up all defects. The concern with praise continues throughout "The Church" because in that collection of lyrics Herbert explores and seeks to come to a right understanding of all his roles as redeemed Christian, as priest, as Christian poet.
Strier is quite right to emphasize that for Herbert the heart's sincerity, the truth of its devotion, is the one thing needful: if the priest is not an eloquent preacher, or if the poet in times of misery cannot finish his poem or in age loses his "lovely enchanted language" he does not thereby lose anything necessary or essential in his relationship to God. But the priest will nonetheless concern himself constantly with how best to serve his congregation's needs (as The Country Parson and "The Windows" make clear). And the Christian poet will continually strive to create from his intimate spiritual experience the best poetic praises of God he can produce. At times of despondency these praises may take the form of psalmic groans; but at other times they may rise with "utmost art" to hymnic celebration.
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