"Sweetnesse readie penn'd": Herbert's Theology of Beauty

While trying to identify Herbert's poetry with particular religious positions, critics have long been divided between those who emphasize Anglo-Catholic influences on The Temple and those who argue in favor of the poet's Calvinism. Those who suggest the poet's affinities with a contemporary Calvinist theological position classify his work as belonging to the category of Protestant poetics, with a prevailing reliance on Scripture and a positive aesthetics of simplicity.¹ The purpose of my discussion is not to defend the idea of a typically Laudian understanding of the Church in The Temple and to deny the importance of Calvinist doctrine in Herbert's conception of theology, but rather to show that his knowledge of patristics prior to the Reformation is the grounds for an implicit theology of beauty in his poetical work.² While not a theologian, Herbert is a learned, Christian poet – or, more exactly, he is all three of these: a scholar of classical letters and divinity, an individual Christian, and a poet. His work combines knowledge, faith, and aesthetics. Herbert does not found his aesthetics of simplicity on a rejection of Church tradition, which we often associate with the Reformation. Rather than choosing one particular doctrinal standpoint, he is writing within the thought handed down to him through his scholarship in Christian orthodoxy. Interestingly, he gives his poetry the same function as the Church Fathers gave to sensuous beauty, and especially to images. Writing in an age when images were condemned by a majority in England, the poet adapts the particular locus of beauty to his times and religious context, making the visual and the verbal intersect.

An analysis of "The Pearl," one of Herbert's poems which addresses most explicitly the question of the status of knowledge with regard to Christian faith, will help to exhibit what is in fact only a seeming dismissal of knowledge as a means for salvation in The Temple. Indeed, the traces of Herbert's knowledge of Saint Augustine are numerous. This very knowledge, as I will later show, helps to shape the poet's understanding of the way in which the Incarnation becomes a model for a new poetics. Looking at the legacy of Augustine paradoxically illuminates how the experience of beauty becomes a didactic tool that takes the place of human knowledge. Finally, extending the investigation of Herbert's knowledge of theology to the Greek tradition, I would like to suggest that the beauty of Herbert's poetry can be likened to that of icons as defined by the Fathers of the Byzantine Church. Not only does the verbal become visual in The Temple, but the poems' function can be better accounted for in light of the Greek Fathers' distinction between theology, that is the doctrine of the Trinity, and economy, that is the reaching down of God towards humanity through the Incarnation. Icons were understood as pictorial objects that make God present to the material world, following the example of Christ, who was the embodiment of God. Herbert, I believe, fed off his knowledge of patristics to create poems that worked not so much as doctrine but rather as aesthetic objects extending the process of salvation beyond the Incarnation.

The Apparent Dismissal of Knowledge

On reading "The Pearl," one can hardly avoid being struck by the mysterious image of the "silk twist" (l. 38) in the last stanza.³ Looking at the first stanzas of the poem, one notices the use of other terms that pertain to thread or rope. Herbert uses the image of spinning in the first stanza to describe the way in which man devises "laws and policie" (l. 5), thanks to his own knowledge and reason. Later, he describes the way in which the "true-love-knot" (l. 16) ties one to the world through honor. He also speaks of the "sweet strains" (l. 21) of music, itself a metonymy for sensual pleasures. All of these, then, are products of man's fabrication, creation, weaving. But, in the end, man is saved by a "silk twist" that is not his own. One is tempted...