The Transformation of Sin: Studies in Donne, Herbert, Vaughan and Traherne by Patrick Grant (review)

Edgar, the historical king of that name, who turned England toward the Tudor glory. Finally, Rosalie Colie's second essay opens up a vast area of questionable scholarship as it explores, mainly through Lawrence Stone's Crisis of the Aristocracy, '558-,64', how Shakespeare's tragedy reflects the decline of the Elizabethan 'deference society.' Despite many a penetrating observation, Miss Celie unfortunately gives in to a tendency (all too noticeable elsewhere in the collection also) to get involved in issues at best incidental to the facets of the Lear prism. The result is that the play regularly disappears in the sociological bath water, so that in the end one is driven, in an irrational paradoxy that Miss Colie would surely have appreciated, to put the insistent question of Lady Bracknell: 'Prism! Where is that baby?' (s. WARHAFT) Patrick Grant, The Transformation of Sin: Studies in Donne, Herbert, Vaughan and Traherne.University of Massachusetts Press, xiii, 240, $11..00 'Guilt Culture' and 'enlightenment: or a seventeenth-century collision between the two, is the shared experience of Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, and Traherne, accounting more adequately for their air de famille than the putative kinship of metaphysical style or Anglican religion. Such is the proposition of this book, and although the terms appear oversize at first view, the argument in fact moves most easily at the level of greatest generalization. 'Guilt culture' is a borrowing from E.R. Dodds' celebrated account of Greek religion, The Greeks and the Irrational, which distinguishes 'shame' and 'guilt' stages in the historical development of religious consciousness, guilt arriving as 'conviction of sin' becomes internalized and men cease to take the measure of their spiritual and moral well-being from the external facts of reputation and social approval. St Augustine's adaptation of guilt culture to the uses of Christian theology dominates the Christian centuries until challenged by Renaissance and modern 'enlightenment' - Augustine's old Pelagian enemy proclaiming rationalism, ethical self-sufficiency, and the perfectibility of man. Of the four poets, Donne and Herbert are, comparatively, more drawn to the guilt culture and less to enlightenment, Vaughan and Traherne more to enlightenment and less to guilt culture. There is a striking clarity in such a scheme, and it offers the excitement of placing four familiar poets at the centre of a watershed crisis in the history of human consciousness. Seeing history in such giant blocks and sweeping simplicities inevitably involves sacrifices of attention to particular events and persons, however. A major sacrifice of Grant's is Thomas Aquinas, whose influence in (at least) moderating the force of medieval Augustinianism is wholly ignored. On the other hand, Grant gives close attention to the Franciscans as 'defenders and promulgators of the true Augustine' and the direct conduits of Augustinian influence to English poets. There are immense problems with this, of course, the chief being that the poets were very much men of the Protestant Reformation , habitual users of its vocabulary and firm in its convictions. Grant recognizes, as of course he must, that the Reformation was itself an 'Augustinian revival' (although his picture of a steadily vital and dominant medieval Augustinianism makes it hard to understand what Augustinianism in the Reformation was reviving from). He chooses, none the less, to attribute all of the poets' Augustinian preoccupations to Franciscan influences and concludes, on that basis, that Donne and Herbert are 'basically medieval.' Impediments are everywhere, which Grant scrupulously acknowledges, but forges on unimpeded. In Herbert's poems, he remarks an unmedieval 'fascination with the first person pronoun' and a 'connection between self-regard and sin' - unmedieval, but unmistakeably Augustinian and clear enough evidence, one might suppose, to a reader not already committed to other notions, that Herbert's Augustinianism comes from Reformation sources. Grant duly notes 'Herbert's prepossession with the Protestant doctrine of justification and election in the poems of The Temple,' but has so bound himself to a view of Herbert as medieval and Franciscan that this evidence of Herbert's thorough Protestantism appears to him 'curious and interesting' - by a standard, I'm afraid, that would make the beliefs of virtually every Englishman of the time curious and interesting. Valdes and Bernardino Ochino were principal figures of...