George Herbert, Calvinism, And Reading "Mattens" (Critical Essay‪)‬

In November 1973 Dame Helen Gardner, distinguished editor of Donne and Herbert, wrote me, saying "I think a study of Herbert as a 'Calvinist' would be a 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 the Seventeenth-Century English Lyric (1979), as Stanley Stewart suggests ("A Priest to the 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, the other writers named have paid attention to recent historical insights into the English church, the main leadership of which in most of Herbert's time was Calvinist (Collinson, Fincham, Lake, Tyacke). But objections by Martz ("Donne, Herbert, and the Worm of Controversy," "The Generous Ambiguity of Herbert's Temple"), Stewart ("Priest"), and Young (Doctrine and Devotion in Seventeenth-Century Poetry) to the Protestant interpretations deserve an answer. As Stewart notes ("Priest" 168), there is a 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 the 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, a joint enterprise.