Love Known: Theology and Experience in George Herbert's Poetry (review)

Reviews Richard Strier, Love Known: Theology and Experience in George Herbert's Poetry. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1983. xxii + 277 pp. $22. by Barbara K. Lewalski Richard Strier's splendid book engages the central and still highly controversial issue of Herbert's theology and its significance for his poetry, adding to the debate not more heat but a good deal of light. He does so by drawing the careful theological distinctions which good intellectual history makes possible, and by offering discriminating and persuasive readings of many Herbert poems, readings which are primarily thematic but also sensitive and attentive to poetic language. Strier's book demonstrates that the central tenets of the Reformation, particularly as experienced and articulated by Luther, constitute the thematic core of Herbert's poetry, explaining the development (and resolving the apparent cruxes) of poem after poem. This book reinforces and extends current revisionist readings of Herbert in Protestant Reformation terms. Strier sets himself in the general tradition of Joseph Summers, William Halewood, and myself on this issue, but makes his own strong case against the Walton-Martz-Tuve view of an AngloCatholic Herbert, primarily influenced by medieval and CounterReformation sources. His case rests upon the centrality of the Reformation doctrine of sola gratia (or sola fides) to Herbert's poetry. Without claiming that Herbert was a Lutheran or even that he was directly influenced by Luther, Strier argues with great cogency Herbert's affinity to Luther in the intensity with which he focused upon agape, God's spontaneous and "unmotivated " love for man. The fact that most of the poems chosen for analysis are not from the W manuscript successfully challenges the view that Herbert's later poems moved closer to an "Anglo-Catholic" position. 45 Barbara K. Lewalski In his first five chapters, Strier draws out the doctrinal corollaries of the sola gratia position, and illustrates their interpretative significance in very many poems. The denial that man can in any way merit salvation is shown to be at the core of "Sighs and Grones," "Judgement," "Miserie," "Giddinesse," and especially "Ungratefulnesse," among others. The notion that sin and concupiscence are located primarily in the intellect rather than the senses and that, accordingly, human reason and ingenuity continually mislead us in spiritual matters is the thematic center of "Confession," "Sinnes round," "Jordan" (II), "Vanitie" (I), and "The Agonie." The rejection of Puritan covenant theology as an unwarranted bargaining with God is seen as the burden of "The Pearl," "Obedience," "Artillerie," and "Assurance." Finally, the Lutheran sense of assurance as the concomitant of conversion and justification — as that which alone can dispel anxiety over sin and bring joy in a relationship to Christ — is shown to be dramatized powerfully in "Conscience," "Justice" (II), "Aaron," and "The Glance," among others. The final chapters demonstrate Herbert's focus on experience and emotion. Strier reinforces the argument of those who find individual spiritual experience rather than the life of the corporate church at the center of Herbert's poetry, in keeping with the primary Reformation emphasis on the work of the Spirit in the heart. "The Church-floore" with its unexpected shift in the final lines from church architecture to the sinful heart is a case in point, as are other poems ostensibly about architecture or liturgical symbols but actually about the Christian life: "The Windows," "The Altar," "The Bunch of Grapes," "Love unknown," "Providence." Strier is especially interesting on the matter of emotion and feeling in Herbert —the privileging of complaints, groans, insistent pleas, despondency , as a sincere expression of the heart's truth — in poems like "Longing," "Deniall," and "Sighs and Grones." But he also exposes Herbert's complex view of the difficulties in interpreting personal experience, the need to correct distressing episodes of spiritual dryness or apparent abandonment by God by continued attention to the larger pattern of enduring relationship with him. The final chapter offers subtle readings of several poems which dramatize that issue brilliantly — "The Collar," "The Search," and especially "The Flower." 46 BOOK REVIEWS Strier sees much merit in, but also takes some issue with, two other revisionist approaches to Herbert. Against Helen Vendler's reading of Herbert in human and experiential rather...