George Herbert, Calvinism, and Reading “Mattens”

Abstract

In November 1973 Dame Helen Gardner, distinguished editor of Donne and Herbert, wrote me, saying think study of Herbert as 'Calvinist' would be very valuable thing to do (letter to author). Since then literary critics including Barbara Lewalski, Richard Strier, Gene Veith, Christopher Hodgkins, Elizabeth Clarke, Ron Cooley, Cristina Malcolmson, and I have been claiming that George Herbert is significantly Calvinist. Far from reflecting credulity about Lewalski's Protestant Poetics and Seventeenth-Century English Lyric (1979), as Stanley Stewart suggests (A Priest to Geneva Temple 167), such interpretations in fact follow up fruitful suggestions made as early as Joseph Summers' ground-breaking book in 1954. While Rosemond Tuve, Louis Martz (The Poetry of Meditation), and R. V. Young have effectively related elements in Herbert to continental medieval and Roman Catholic backgrounds, other writers named have paid attention to recent historical insights into English church, main leadership of which in most of Herbert's time was Calvinist (Collinson, Fincham, Lake, Tyacke). But objections by Martz (Donne, Herbert, and Worm of Controversy, The Generous Ambiguity of Herbert's Temple), Stewart (Priest), and Young (Doctrine and Devotion in Seventeenth-Century Poetry) to Protestant interpretations deserve an answer. As Stewart notes (Priest 168), there is tendency for critics to pay most attention to those poems or writings in Herbert they find most appealing, or about which they feel equipped to write. That approach should be supplemented and corrected by considering case made for other views. It is no accident that Herbert has attracted good critics with many different approaches, because, as I argue elsewhere (Doerksen, Generous' Ambiguity Revisited), this poet was deliberately reaching out to people of different viewpoints within and outside his church. Herbert scholarship is, and should be, joint enterprise. Critics who use term should explain what they mean by it. William J. Bouwsma in Encyclopaedia Britannica Online says Calvinism is the theology advanced by John Calvin ... and its development by his [Also,] doctrines and practices derived from works of Calvin and his followers.... Historian Anthony Milton, in an important book on Church of from 1600-1640, defines English Calvinism as a general sympathy with continental Reformed tradition in all its purely doctrinal aspects, and sense of identification with West European Calvinist Churches and their fortunes (8). This definition silently acknowledges that other writers, such as Bucer and Bullinger, and of course English ones, were influential in movement. Milton also recognizes that Calvinism, like other aspects of Early Modern Church of England, comprised range of views, and changed as it developed. Milton's definition of Calvinism includes Herbert, who had an enduring in success of international Protestantism (Malcolmson 21)--an interest not shared by Laudians. (1) More specifically, English Calvinism had doctrinal core of Protestant theology, emphasizing God's grace. Although Calvinism was not tied exclusively to writings of Calvin, in those writings were widely circulated and had enormous significance. According to Pettegree, tally of revised Short Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, 1475-1640 indicates that English editions of Calvin's works easily outstripped all other continental writers, and dwarfed production of native English theologians (281). Pettegree reports that Leedham-Green's substantial survey of books recorded in Cambridge wills, carefully analyzed, confirms the preeminent position of Calvin as dominant theological influence in Elizabethan England (280). Also, he cites Francis Higman's bibliographical studies showing that was far and away biggest market for Calvin's work in translation. …

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