A Fine Tuning: Studies of the Religious Poetry of Herbert and Milton (review)

Reviews Mary A. Maleski, ed., A Fine Tuning: Studies of the Religious Poetry of Herbert and Milton. Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1989. Vol. 64. xiv + 320 pp. 6 illus. $25.00. by Mary Ann Radzinowicz If it can ever be said that a festschrift is greater than the sum of its parts, overarched by the synthesizing genius of the scholar it honors, that cannot be said of A Fine Tuning, a festschrift that insists on the particularity of its individual contributions. Some readers might well blame Joseph H. Summers for being thus presented with a congeries. Heasks of the literature of the past "what does it say? how does it work?" (p. 17) and listens for the answers. He distributes his interests as widely as between Herbert and Milton, prompting the binocularity of this record of the Sixth Annual Le Moyne Forum on Religion and Literature: "Theology and the Poetry of Seventeenth-Century England." His Christian humanism, described in Russell Peck's opening tribute as accommodating Baptists, medieval mystics, and Quakers, is of the roomy kind that sponsors diversity while urging commitment. Finally, he himself consistently prefers justice to an author over fidelity to a literary theory, a preference that allows of imitation and of contradiction. No wonder, then, his festschrift offers equably an Augustinian reading of Herbert's "The Pulley" (Chauncey Wood), an antinomian reading of Canticles that associates Milton with the Ranters (Noam Flinker), a rabbinic examination of Adam's dream and the hieroglyphic of the rib (Fanny Peczenik), and a secular historicist examination of Herbert's religious "Dedication " (Michael Schoenfeldt). Or that his own commitment to the aesthetic or the literary in literature reinforces, if it does not 80BOOK REVIEWS account for, the will to look at such diverse formal phenomena as "generic multiplicity" (Barbara Lewalski), "divine similitude" (Alinda Sumers), "musical configurations" (Diane McColley), and "decorum of character" (Christopher Grose) within a single cover. In the "Introduction: Theological Approaches to Seventeenth -Century Poetry" to A Fine Tuning, Mary A. Maleski seeks a diapason within the dispersion by placing the two keynote speakers of the conference, Louis Martz and Barbara Lewalski, antiphonally, the tenor singing Catholic meditation, the soprano singing Protestant biblical poetics, and all the remaining voices in a compendious chorus. The unity is very superficial, although three essays in the Herbert half of the collection exhibit it. Louis Martz's essay, praising Herbert's "attractive generosity" of faith (p. 54), measures the doctrinal distance Herbert traverses between the (Calvinistic) early manuscript version of The Temple and the (sacramental) final version of 1633. He argues that Herbert "[undergoes] considerable development and change in his religious outlook from his early years at Cambridge, prime center of Calvinism, up through his late ordination in the Church dominated at that time (1 630) by the Arminian Bishop Laud." As though following Martz's lead, Sidney Gottlieb's essay, "The Two Endings of George Herbert's The Church,' " examines the reordering and revision of the manuscript poems in "The Church" before they were incorporated in the published version of The Temple, stressing the "substantial change of heart and mind" (p. 65) he sees revealed. Chauncey Wood underplays Calvinism as an insight into Herbert, looking at confession in "An Augustinian Reading of George Herbert's The Pulley," " a reading of the poem in the light of Augustine's exploration of the theme "our hearts are restless" in last of the essays in the Herbert half of the book. The other Herbert essays, however, strike out in three very different directions, all not only strong in themselves but suggestive of very distinctive books in progress. Schoenfeldt observes that Herbert approaches God as a contemporary might a patron. Alert to the blend of the secular and the religious in the very word "Lord," he cracks the punning code of "The Dedication" to The Temple. Hester works with another sort of divine pun in examining Herbert's bending the shape of his life and of his poetry by analogous acts of malleability and BOOK REVIEWS81 re-formation i? "Altering the Text of the Self: The Shapes of the Altar." McColley coins the word "hierophon" on the model of "hieroglyph" to...