Abstract
The book concludes by showing how Henry Vaughan’s biblical poetics exemplifies Kuchar’s claim that the emphasis on mystery in seventeenth-century English Protestantism helps explain why the religious lyric flourished in the age of Donne rather than the age of Wyatt. It also summarizes the book’s overall argument with reference to St. Augustine’s theory of prayer. Differentiating Augustine’s view of prayer’s relation to the origin of faith from the two extremes exemplified by Calvin and Pascal, the conclusion reemphasizes how Herbert balanced the importance of the habits of faith with the unpredictable aspects of spiritual motions. Concomitantly, Kuchar shows how Herbert’s views of tradition and eucharistic prayer bear a close resemblance to John Buckeridge’s funeral sermon for Lancelot Andrewes. Viewed in this context, it becomes clear that there is no contradiction in seeing Herbert's poetics as rooted in both Augustine's theory of prayer and the Bishop of Hippo's broader eucharistic vision.
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Notes
- 1.
I allude here to Anne Lammott’s disarmingly simple typology of prayer in Help, Thanks, Wow: Three Essential Prayers (New York: Penguin, 2012).
- 2.
Saint Augustine, Soliloquies, trans. Gerard Watson (Warminster: Aris and Phillips, 1990), 30–31.
- 3.
Cited in John Booty, Three Anglican Divines On Prayer: Jewel, Andrewes, Hooker (Society of St. John the Evangelist: Cambridge, MA, 1977), 35.
- 4.
Cited in Lubac, History and Spirit: The Understanding of Scripture According to Origen trans. Anne Englund Nash (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2007), 89.
- 5.
Cited in Bouyer, Christian Mystery, 279.
- 6.
Thomas Cooper, The Wonderful Mystery of Spiritual Growth (London: 1622), B1.
- 7.
See Saint Augustine, Letters Volume 2, trans. Sister Wilfrid Parsons (Washington D.C. Catholic University of America Press, 1966), 399 and Clarke, Theory and Theology.
- 8.
Kristine A. Wolberg, ‘All Possible Art’, 133. For a related view of the medieval religious lyric see Judson Boyce Allen, “Grammar, Poetic Form, and the Lyric Ego: A Medieval A Priori” in Vernacular Poetics in the Middle Ages. ed. Lois Ebin (Western Michigan University Press: Kalamazoo, 1984), 227–248.
- 9.
Paul Cefalu, Moral Identity in Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004), chapter 5.
- 10.
C.S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 491.
- 11.
See Calvin Institutes 3.20.1.146 and Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. A.J. Krailsheimer (New York: Penguin, 1995), 125.
- 12.
Saint Augustine, Confessions trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998), 3.
- 13.
Augustine, On the Trinity, 15.2.168.
- 14.
Read, Poetry and the Eucharist, 126.
- 15.
Cummings, Book of Common Prayer, 138.
- 16.
Whalen, Poetry of Immanence, 112.
- 17.
See Ibid. My emphasis.
- 18.
Rust, Body in Mystery, 37.
- 19.
For Andrewes’ preferring of the 1549 BCP, see Davies, Caroline Captivity 61, and Cummings, Book of Common Prayer, 769.
- 20.
David Aers and Sarah Beckwith, “The Eucharist,” in Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History eds. Brian Cummings and James Simpson (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010), 153–165, 154.
- 21.
Fincham and Lake, “Ecclesiastical Policy of King James I,” 182–183.
- 22.
Ibid., 182–183.
- 23.
The more hostile attitude toward Rome expressed in “The Church Militant” may reflect a subsequent breakdown in the conditions for such an attitude later in James’ reign among many conformists. Though even there, Herbert sustains a view of the church as evolving over time in unexpected ways.
- 24.
See Egil Grislis, “The Hermeneutical Problem in Richard Hooker” in Studies in Richard Hooker ed. W. Speed Hill, 159–206, 179.
- 25.
Hooker, Laws 1:153-13-25 cited in N. Voak, “Richard Hooker and the Principle of Sola Scriptura” Journal of Theological Studies 59 (2008), 96–139, 131.
- 26.
Browne, The Major Works, 105 and 63.
- 27.
For a discussion of scriptural conceptions of beauty as process, see Gerard von Rad Old Testament Theology vol. 1. The Theology of Israel’s Historical Traditions, trans. D.M.G. Stalker (Harper and Row: New York, 1962), 367–369.
- 28.
See Works of Saint Augustine, 44.244–245. For a discussion of Augustine’s theory of mimetic inversion, see Karl F. Morrison, The Mimetic Tradition of Reform in The West (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1982), 95.
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Kuchar, G. (2017). Conclusion. In: George Herbert and the Mystery of the Word. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-44045-3_9
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