George Herbert: His Religion and Art

Abstract

Reviews Joseph H. Summers, George Herbert: His Religion and Art. Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval & Renaissance Textsand Studies, rpt. 1981. 247 pp. cloth $13.95. paper $5.95. by Louis L. Martz It is good to see Summers' book back in print, and at a price amazingly low for a book so well produced: only about six dollars for the paperback version. I hope that a great many students and teachers will buy it, for it stands as a valuable, indeed essential supplement or corrective for the various approaches to Herbert that have recently been offered by a later generation of readers: Stanley Fish's "self-consuming artifacts." Helen Vendler's "reinvented poem," or Barbara Lewalski's strictly Calvinist poetic. Summers' book represents a happy juncture of traditional scholarship and the old "new" criticism which was just rising to the peak of its power as this book appeared in 1954. Summers was one of the first to see that the "new" analytic criticism, searching for organic verbal unity in the poem, was no threat to scholarship, despite the outcries from an older generation (rather like the outcries now against the new critical theorists!). Summers' temperate, modest way of proceeding moves with utmost clarity to recognize the full complexity of Herbert's "religion and art" as inseparably one. His third chapter, "Religion," offers a warning that readers nowadays may well heed, when he says, "The religious differences in Herbert's lifetime . . . were much more complicated than the modern labels indicate." One can, he notes, "construct an abstract picture of the 'true-blue Puritan' and the 'Anglo-Catholic' — both members of the Church of England." And it is true that individuals may be found in Herbert's era "who conformed to these patterns." But, he adds, "they were far fewer than most of the discussions of the period's churchly affairs lead the modern reader to believe." "Those who sought the much79 Louis L. Martz praised via media between the two extremes found that it was no marked highway but a vaguely defined area; the paths which conscientious searchers for the truth found through it were rarely identical." Amid all the "debates and fretting jealousies" that Herbert deplored, some areas of agreement could be found: in "the devotional life and everyday activity" (pp. 49-54). It is in the devotional life of Herbert's poetry that apparent or latent contradictions in theology may be reconciled. There is no doubt, as Summers points out, that Herbert, like most clerics of the Church of England, adhered to certain aspects of Calvinism: his poem "The Water-course" shows him accepting the doctrine of double predestination. Such a stern doctrine, rigorously held, ought logically to lead to an opposition to the Book of Common Prayer, to destruction of stained glass windows, and to a denial of any efficacy in the sacraments. And yet, as Summers well says: "TheTemple shows that Herbert believed as strongly in predestination and the doctrine of the Covenant of Grace as he believed in the significance and beauty of the ritual" (p. 58). How could this be? The significance of the ritual, the ultimate source of its beauty, lies in its function of celebration and thanksgiving for the divine presence that Herbert, Donne, Hooker, and many others felt as still working with or within the "instrumental" sacraments of communion and baptism. If these are mere "tokens" the function of the ritual evaporates: even a priesthood is no longer needed. How that presence works Herbert does not say: he regards all such arguments as futile. But he knows that there is an efficacy that occurs in the very taking of the sacrament, as he tells us in his poem "The H. Communion" (for a detailed account of this issue see my forthcoming review of Barbara Lewalski's Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric in Modern Philology). All this is surprising, illogical, but undeniable, as the dozens and dozens of eucharistie allusions show throughout The Temple. The religious sensibility of the early seventeenth century could contain multitudes: Herbert could hold predestination and a version of the real presence within his belief at the same moment. We perhaps cannot see how this was possible...