Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewGeorge Herbert and the Mystery of the Word: Poetry and Scripture in Seventeenth-Century England. Gary Kuchar. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Pp. xv+288.David MarnoDavid MarnoUniversity of California, Berkeley Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreHaving published his third book on the subject, Gary Kuchar should be considered one of the most prolific scholars currently working on seventeenth-century English devotional poetry. His new book, George Herbert and the Mystery of the Word, marks an interesting departure from his earlier work. Divine Subjection (2005) relied on literary theory and psychoanalysis to articulate an account of “the sacramental self”; The Poetry of Religious Sorrow (2008) looked at religious melancholy as a discourse. In both, Kuchar surveyed a broad range of authors from Robert Southwell and John Donne to Richard Crashaw and Aemilia Lanyer. In this monograph, in contrast, Kuchar concentrates on a single author, George Herbert; and the previous books’ theoretically inflected approaches have given room to a predominantly historical one.At first sight, this should make Kuchar’s latest book fit in well with the mainstream of Herbert scholarship of the past half century, which, from Rosamond Tuve’s A Reading of George Herbert (1952) and Richard Strier’s Love Known (1983) to Michael Schoenfeldt’s Prayer and Power (1991) and Ramie Targoff’s Common Prayer (2001), has been dominated by historicist approaches. Tuve’s work challenged formalist readings of Herbert by suggesting that features of The Temple that the New Critics and Empson appreciated as Herbert’s inventions were in fact traditional devotional images and techniques. Strier’s book placed Herbert’s poetry in its more immediate Reformation contexts to show how Herbert responded to the intricacies of Lutheran and Calvinist theology. And while the goal of both Tuve’s and Strier’s work was to produce more historically accurate readings of Herbert’s poems, Schoenfeldt and Targoff showed how the poems themselves could shed light on their historical contexts.If these four books can be taken as representative of the various old and new historicisms that have shaped Herbert scholarship, Kuchar’s book offers something quite different, an approach that might be described as “transhistoricist.” To be sure, Kuchar provides fine close readings of Herbert’s poems, and he attends carefully to their immediate religious and cultural contexts; but the primary goal of the book is to claim Herbert’s work for the significantly broader tradition of what Kuchar calls “the mystery of the Word.”It is worth dwelling for a moment on this phrase: What does Kuchar mean by it? There was a time when Herbert’s lyrics, like much of English religious verse, were described as “mystical,” and based on the book’s title one might be forgiven to assume that Kuchar’s goal is to reclaim Herbert for mysticism. But there is no attempt in the book to associate The Temple with the poetry of St. John of the Cross or Teresa of Avila, and although terms such as negative theology make occasional appearances in the argument, Kuchar’s main interest lies elsewhere. Instead of mystical theology or heterodox devotional practices, the subject of the book is a particular but mainstream hermeneutic and exegetical tradition. Mystery is central to this tradition, argues Kuchar, in the sense of a question or secret that invites the participation of readers rather than their attempts to resolve or disclose it. That there is such a tradition is itself part of Kuchar’s argument, though perhaps less fully articulated than it could be; but the main goal of the book is to demonstrate that Herbert used the resources of lyric poetry to revitalize the tradition of hermeneutic mystery in the particular context of the early Stuart church in seventeenth-century England.This, I take it, is what Kuchar means when in the introductory chapter he describes the first of the argument’s two prongs as an attempt to place Herbert’s poetry “in a transhistorical exegetical tradition running from the Christian bible through Augustine up to present-day theological hermeneutics in which scriptural revelation is thought to consist of a mode of revelation-in-concealment and concealment-in-revelation.” The second prong, he continues, is that “in stressing the mysterious and evolving nature of biblical revelation, Herbert participated in a broader cultural project of resisting more dogmatic approaches to religious life in seventeenth-century England” (3). In other words, Kuchar doesn’t just want to illustrate philosophical parallels between Herbert’s poems and the transhistorical hermeneutic tradition of mystery; he also seeks to show that in crafting a poetics of participatory hermeneutics, Herbert was responding to the pressing concerns of religious life in the early Stuart church, joining forces with those who similarly advocated a revival of mystery, and critiquing those who have contributed to its eclipse.This is why although the book is framed by Kuchar’s broader transhistorical claims, the chapters tend to focus on the more immediate post-Reformation contexts of Herbert’s poetry. In the first four chapters, Kuchar reads Herbert’s poems in the context of the early Stuart church’s departure from the doctrinal controversies of the earlier Reformation, relying especially on Richard Hooker, Lancelot Andrewes, and Richard Sibbes. Chapters 5 to 7 turn to the question of how Herbert’s poems themselves offered critiques of various early modern discourses of certainty, especially in the work of the Spanish itinerant reformer Juan de Valdés, Herbert’s brother Lord Cherbury, and Francis Bacon. Then, in the last and most surprising chapter Kuchar places Herbert’s poetry in the context of early modern physics and metaphysics of hearing and listening to argue that the poems rely on a hermeneutics of “hearkening.” While these individual chapters focus on texts and figures more or less contemporaneous with Herbert, other names that signal the transhistorical ambitions of the argument appear across all of the chapters. Thus, one encounters frequent references not only to Augustine and the Church Fathers but to those modern thinkers whom Kuchar considers the heirs of the hermeneutic tradition he wants to uncover, as in his claim that Herbert “belongs to the modernity of Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Gadamer, not that of Derrida, Foucault, and de Man” (229).I single out this sentence in part because it highlights the transhistorical ambitions of Kuchar’s argument, and in part because it is somewhat representative of its less successful aspects. One of Kuchar’s main modi operandi is to stress dichotomies, both of concepts and thinkers. Nothing wrong with that; new and well-crafted dichotomies can possess a unique potential to open up new paths of investigation. The problem with Kuchar’s is that they are often all too familiar dichotomies, at times precisely of the kind that more recent work in both history and religious studies have been interrogating. Thus, practice in Kuchar’s argument is consistently against theory, devotion is contrasted with theology, faith with knowledge, religion with instrumental reason, mystery with certainty, and so on; a pattern that is repeated in the case of authors, where Augustine, Hooker, Andrewes, Herbert, and Gadamer fall on one side, with Perkins, Juan de Valdés, Lord Cherbury, and to some extent Francis Bacon on the other. Nor does Kuchar ever come off as an intellectual historian aspiring to produce a purely descriptive account; rather, by the middle of the book one feels that Herbert’s poetry participates in a millennium-long resistance operation against the various forces that range from Puritanism to deism and experimentalism all seeking to suppress an allegedly consistent Augustinian hermeneutics of mystery. Here, too, the problem isn’t simply the Manichean character of the account or that Kuchar clearly takes a side; it’s that we never get an explicit account of the author’s own perspective on the story he tells.Even so, Kuchar’s careful reading of the poems in the dual context of the Christian hermeneutics of mystery and its reappearance in the early Stuart church yields plenty of helpful results. Since the book is primarily about Herbert, let me close with an early but important insight that Kuchar offers and that resolves a long-standing tension between two dominant ways of responding to the poems of The Temple. On the one hand, Herbert is usually included with the metaphysical wits of the seventeenth century, on account of the obvious intellectual complexity of the poems. On the other, however, one of the commonplaces of Herbert scholarship at least since Barbara Lewalski’s Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (1979) is that Herbert belongs to a line of Protestant poets who developed a “plain” devotional poetry reflecting Reformation concerns with the literal sense of biblical passages. Kuchar’s claim that Herbert’s turns to poetry is motivated by a desire to revive a hermeneutics of mystery suggests that both of these responses are correct and in fact complement each other. The best of Herbert’s poems, and we might surmise based on Kuchar’s argument that this is the result of a deliberate and careful design, make it easy for readers to enter the mysteries of Christianity—and then they make it difficult for them to leave. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 116, Number 3February 2019 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/700658HistoryPublished online October 11, 2018 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.