Herbert’s pepper corn: Responsibility and reciprocity in The Temple

In common with medieval piety and the theology of Richard Baxter, George Herbert’s lyrics express a responsive amor Dei or desire for God, required of humans if faith is to be maintained. In Herbert’s poetry his lyrical voices often become aware that they are recipients of God’s grace, but their discovery of, response to, and participation in the reception of that grace is no less paramount. Herbert’s poetry marks and celebrates this divine-human exchange. The article examines the nature of such human responsibility throughout Herbert’s poetry, and especially in the lyrics that make up The Temple: in Herbert’s attitude to Scripture and in the practice of confession; in the motif of the answered call; in patterns of symbolic actions of clasping hands and climbing; in the altered state effected by faith; and, finally, in the eschatological encounters dramatized across the final sequence of poems in The Church.