The Politics of The Temple: "The British Church" and "The Familie"

The Politics of The Temple: The British Church" and "The Familie" by Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth The persistent image of Herbert as a sweet-tempered, otherworldly contemplative has obscured an important dimension of The Temple. Herbert's participation in the religious disputes of the seventeenth century has largely been ignored. Even Leah Marcus, whose Childhood and Cultural Despair brilliantly documents Herbert's conservative response to the social and political currents of his day, presents him as something of a recluse, self-exiled from "the troubling realities of Puritan and Anglican controversy."1 Admittedly, Herbert is a more restrained controversialist than many seventeenth-century disputants and more tolerant than most. Moreover, the calm surfaces of his mature poems and his characteristically oblique rhetoric of allusion conceal the degree to which such poems as "Divinitie," "The British Church," "Church-rents and schismes," "Conscience," and "The Familie" participate in the religious controversies they decry. Nevertheless, for all Herbert's apparent self-absorption and mild latitudinarianism, he engages in sectarian controversy, consistently rebuking Puritan attacks on the Established Church. Although Herbert is no full-blown Laudian, he defends the Church's authority and deplores its fragmentation by Puritan "wranglers." No one has denied Herbert's marked preference for the Established Church in matters of liturgy and government. After all, The Country Parson endorses such high-church rituals as censing the sanctuary, kneeling at communion, crossing at baptism, and observing traditional festivities, while Musae Responsoriae refutes Puritan objections to these and various other Anglican practices. Recently, however, it has been argued that such a preference is a minor matter of little or no real consequence to understanding the poetry and that since Herbert is doctrinally a Calvinist, he is therefore not "a Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth normative 'Anglican' in the sense of non- or anti-'Puritan.' "2 This argument, advanced by Richard Strier in what he describes as "A Polemical Note," is weak on several grounds. Its assumption of a necessary correlation between Calvinism and Puritanism is historically untenable, and its reading of "The British Church" as condemning Rome but not Geneva is an extraordinary example of special pleading. Moreover, by minimizing Herbert's interest in ritual and church government in orderto stress more obviously doctrinal issues, the polemical note obfuscates rather than clarifies Herbert's religio-political stance, forquestions of liturgyand ecclesiastical rule possessed in the seventeenth century political and theological significance that both subsumed and transcended purely doctrinal disputes. In the first place, the term Calvinist is exceedingly imprecise , as slippery as Augustinianism or even Puritanism. Nearly every religious thinker of the English Renaissance felt the influence of Calvin to some degree, and the Established Church — though purposely vague on those questions such as election, predestination, and the nature and extent of grace that divided continental Protestants, including Geneva itself —may fairly be described as Calvinist in its dominant theology. As Charles H. and Katherine George note in The Protestant Mind of the English Reformation, 1570-1640, "the nature of the division between an Anglican and a 'puritan' party within the Church of England was . . . not doctrinal but almost entirely ecclesiastical or institutional."3 It therefore simply is not the case that to hold Calvinist doctrinal beliefs is necessarily to favor Puritanism, if by Puritan one refers to the large and diverse group ofseventeenth-century Englishmen who opposed the ceremonies and government of the Established Church. In fact, many of the most vociferous anti-Puritans in the seventeenth century were also Calvinists, in the sense that they clung to some Calvinist doctrines. Herbert's poetic disciple Henry Vaughan, for example, is doctrinally the most Calvinist of the major seventeenth-century religious poets, yet he is nevertheless bitterly anti-Puritan. Writing in the late 1640s and early 1650s, after the Puritan triumph, Vaughan frequently bewails the Parliamentarian transformation of his beloved Church. Herbert's unexceptionable Calvinism, the exact nature and extent of which continues to be the focus of scholarly inquiry, hardly qualifies him as a closet Puritan. THE POLITICS OF THE TEMPLE Strier's reading of "The British Church" as virulently antiRome but only mildly critical of Geneva seriously underestimates the crucial importance Herbert attached to liturgy...