George Herbert Journal

Herbert, Vaughan, and PubRc Concerne In Private Modes by Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth Neither the George Herbert of The Temple nor his selfavowed disciple, the Henry Vaughan of Silex Scintillons, is a public poet in the ordinary sense of the term. The collection of each is subtitled "Sacred Poemsand Private Ejaculations,"and both concentrate on abiding themes: the manifestations of God and His will in the lives and actions of human beings and the quest for personal salvation. In total, neither collection is polemical. But the idemtifcation of God's will and its accomplishment on earth were very much public, even political issues in seventeenth-century England, and neither poet chose to retire from the world or to evade the particulars of the religious and political climate of his time. Scattered throughout both The Temple and the two parts of Sllex Scintillons are several poems that address public issues, notableamongthem works that directly treat the visible church. The modes of these poems are private — lyrical expressions of personal joy, alarm, sorrow, reflection, and prayer — but theyare set within Biblical and historical contexts that transcend the private convictions and personal desires of their authors. Herbert and Vaughan are distinctive poets;and inaddition to many personal differences between them, the differing external conditions under which they lived were crucial in shaping their public poetry. Although not altogether satisfied with the church of his day, George Herbert discovered in the Established Church the immanence of God. He creates public poetry by recognizing and lamenting the dangers that threaten the visible church, both from within and from without, and by placing the temporal and localized institution within a broad context of Judeo-Christian history that prophesied the apocalyptic destruction of God's enemies and the establishment of a New Jerusalem. Writing some two decades later, Vaughan reacted to the immediate issues posed by the Parliamentarian transformation of the Established Church — the unseating of her bishops, the proscription of her prayerbook, the desanctification of her buildings, the Summers and Pebworth abolishment of her forms — concerning himself with how to survive emotionally and spiritually in a time when "our beautiful gates are shut up, and the Comforter that should relieve our souls is gone far from us." ' In discovering the displaced Christ in the temple of nature —the enclosed garden of the allegorized Song of Songs — Vaughan translates his private quest for Christ and His spouse the Church into public poetry. The popular image of Herbert, based on Walton's biography of him and on the sweet tempered surfaces of his mature poems, might suggest that he was too tolerant to have engaged in sectarian controversy. Indeed, in A Priest to the Temple, he advises the parson to be "voyd of all contentiousnesse " while using "all possible diligence" in reducing those in his congregation who hold "strange Doctrins" to "the common Faith." 2 Nevertheless, Herbert was deeply concerned about doctrinal questions and about the effect of doctrinal division on the Established Church, 3 one of whose offices was to interpret "the obscurity in some points" of doctrine (Hutchinson, p. 263). The sweet reasonableness and calm assurance of such poems as "Divinitie" and "The British Church" — and the painful lamentation of "Church-rents and schismes" — have concealed the degree to which these poems participate in the religious controversies they decry. "Divinitie," for instance, seems at first glance a witty confutation of obscurantist speculators, an assertion of the superiority of faith to reason. Yet the poem goes beyond merely ridiculing the absurdity of theological quibbling to suggest that "the edge of wit" (I. 7) threatens to tear Christ's "seamlessecoat" (1. 1 1 ). the symbol "of loveand hence of unity in the Church." * In contrast to the "curious questions and divisions" (1. 12) raised by theological disputants, Christ's doctrine is "cleare as heav'n, from whence it came" (1. 14): "Loire God, end love your neighbour. Watch end pray. / Do as ye would be dono unto" (II. 17-18). The apparent simplicity of Christ's conflation of the whole message of the law and the prophets (Matt. 22:34-40; cf. Matt. 7:1 2) stands in opposition to the elaborate complexities and fine...