Conforming to the Word: Herbert, Donne, and the English Church before Laud by Daniel W. Doerksen

Abstract

REVIEWS Daniel W. Doerksen. Conforming to the Word: Herbert, Donne, and the English Church before Laud. Lewisburg: Bucknell Uni­ versity Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1997. 181. $33.50 (U.S.) cloth. This very readable book is the result ofmuch thoughtful study and reflection. Professor Doerksen describes it as principally “a work of historical scholarship” (9), his aim being to locate John Donne and George Herbert (and selected contemporaries) within the political and ecclesiastical context of the pre-civil war seventeenth century, especially during the reign ofJames I. Doerksen’s wish above all is to remind us of the Calvinist pre­ disposition ofthe Jacobean church and to demonstrate the gen­ erous comprehensiveness that included such irenic and moder­ ate figures as the “representative” Herbert and Donne. The “anti-Calvinists,” however, were to wreck this peaceful accom­ modation, with William Laud, archbishop of Canterbury after 1633, the unsympathetic agent (with Charles i) of destruction. Doerksen displays an older Church of England, with its roots in the moderate Elizabethan Settlement, in opposition to the narrow and hectoring conformity enjoined by Laud and his followers. The book iscarefully organized through a sequence of eleven short chapters that seem like independent essays. There is a survey of the Jacobean church, with its “moderate confor­ mity”; a depiction of Laudian reform; a particularly informa­ tive chapter on preaching at St. Martin-in-the-Fields during the “pre-Laudian English middle way”; a survey of Herbert’s life and institutional connections; an exposition of predestination, and of the doctrine of the church or ecclesiology; and a fasci­ nating consideration of Richard Sibbes (1577-1635), preacher at Gray’s Inn (1617-35), author of the popular Bruised Reed and Smoking Flax (1630), a moderate conforming puritan with whom Herbert had much in common. The theme that unites these chapters is “conformity”—sus­ taining, scriptural, and preaching-centred, on the one hand, and provoking, non-scriptural,and liturgically-centred, on the other. Doerksen uncovers what he believes has for too long been con­ cealed in studies of the period. We must recognize, he writes, “that there was a non-Laudian conformist option in the church 207 ESC 25, 1999 of Herbert’s time, that the majority of conformist bishops and other leading clergy of the Jacobean years ... were Calvinist in theology and moderate in their attitude toward liturgical vari­ ations” (70). While Herbert loved conformity, he did not, like the Laudians, let outward form dominate his experience. In his conclusion, Doerksen asks rhetorically why some readers of his book might wonder why he is so eager to distinguish Her­ bert—and to a lesser extent, Donne—from Laudianism. But why, Doerksen answers, should anyone have wished to identify Herbert with the Laudians? Having reached this final question, which has resided im­ plicitly throughout the book, most readers should know the obvious and easy response. Doerksen has, in my view, convinc­ ingly presented his case for a moderate kind of “conforming” churchmanship in the early years of the seventeenth century, a kind of conformity typically expressed by Herbert and many ofhis immediate contemporaries. Perhaps Doerksen’s apparent need, however, to set one kind of “good” and generous confor­ mity against another kind that is “bad” and rigid leads to some overly broad and sweeping generalizations. Doerksen must be well aware of the tangled and overlapping views of this period, and the difficulty offinding one’s way through such a thicket of conflicting doctrines and attitudes. But the brief discussion of Richard Hooker, for example, is lightly sketched, mostly for the sake of dismissing him along with Lancelot Andrewes, whom Doerksen sees as proto-Laudian. He writes that “Hooker and Andrewes were good people and good writers who accomplished much but, from Herbert’s point of view, became sidetracked from the most important matters into controversy over things that were ultimately secondary, even to them” (100). What Herbert may have thought about thesefigures issurely a matter of some speculation; but he is not likely to have con­ signed them or their monumentally important works so casually as Doerksen does to intellectual irrelevance. Richard Hooker and the Construction of Christian Community (1997), with im­ portant essays by Bouwsma, Neelands, Collinson, and...