6/30/2023 0 Comments Ipaste georgewherbert![]() ![]() What caused Herbert’s pain? His poems were not dated, and it is difficult to know how they fit into his biography. In it he extols “sweet abstinence” and reminds his flock: “The Scriptures bid us fast the church says now.” But his poetry is replete with the Lenten themes of sin, repentance, humility, submission, discipline, denial, along with confession, gratitude, and his frequent recourse to sighs and groans: “I sent a sigh to seek thee out / deep drawn in pain.” Only one of his poems is titled “Lent,” and it is more pedantic than most of his work. Four years later he died on a Friday during the week before Lent began, amidst the weeping of Jane and the three nieces who lived with them in the parsonage at Bemerton. His marriage to the clever, good-looking Jane Danvers (a bona roba, she was called) took place during the Lent of 1629. He was born in Elizabethan Wales during Lent 1593. George Herbert’s life was framed by the season of Lent. But as Rowan Williams has observed, in one respect he does push the spiritual theology of Calvinism to its full Augustinian extent: “Faith is the glorifying of God as God, not the glorifying of God as provider of attractive spiritual experience salvation rests not on how we feel or what we understand but only on the radical willingness to go on standing in the presence of God’s judgment and mercy.” Amidst all the anxieties of the troubled conscience, one posture alone remains possible: “Only my soul hangs on thy promises-with face and hands clinging unto thy breast-clinging and crying, crying without cease / thou art my rock, thou art my rest.” (This is from his remarkable poem “Perseverance,” which remained unpublished until the nineteenth century.) Such a prayer has no truck with the easy-going piety of “God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world” it is an antidote to every form of rustic Pelagianism, whether in Herbert’s rural England or in postmodern urban America. ![]() One cannot simply call Herbert a Calvinist tout court. ![]() Today we sing Herbert’s words in the beautiful hymn, “Let all the world and every corner sing, my God and King!” Yet Herbert could also write “God hath made the stars the foil to set off virtues / griefs to set off sinning / yet in this wretched world we toil / as if grief were not foul, nor virtue winning.” After all, Herbert did write five poems titled “Affliction.” But he also stood amazed at the all-powerful majesty of God. There is much in his work that celebrates the goodness of God, the wonder of creation, and the comfort given to believing Christians in the liturgy and life of the church. George Herbert stands at the confluence of Renaissance poetry and Reformation theology. and among these typical spirits, beacons of a quiet hope, no figure stands out more brightly or more memorably than that of George Herbert.Īs Eliot notes, this is a false picture both of Herbert and his poetry, and also of the church in which he served in the troubled days of early Stuart England. For these contented spirits, happily removed from the stress and din of contending creeds and clashing dogmas, the message of the Gospel tells of divine approval for work well done. This image of Herbert and his place in the history of English spirituality prevailed in a 1907 collection of his poems which the editor introduced in this way: Here, as the cattle wind homeward in the evening light, the benign, white-haired parson stands at his gate to greet the cowherd, and the village chimes call the laborers to evensong. Eliot)-not to say the quintessential Anglican perched midway between the rigors of Geneva and the extravagance of Rome. Izaak Walton’s hagiographical account of Herbert’s life, published in 1670, helped to shape the iconic image of him as “the poet of a placid and comfortable easy piety” (T. ![]() The poems, he said, contained “a picture of the many spiritual conflicts that have passed betwixt God and my soul.” Later that year they were published in Cambridge as The Temple, and they have never been out of print since then. From his deathbed he entrusted them to his friend Nicholas Ferrar, granting him permission to either destroy or preserve them. Like his famous contemporary and friend John Donne and his nineteenth-century American echo Emily Dickinson, Herbert did not publish his poems during his lifetime. The Anglican pastor and poet George Herbert died of tuberculosis on March 1, 1633, just one month shy of his fortieth birthday. ![]()
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