George Herbert's approach to God: The faith and spirituality of a country priest

Theology Today, Jul 2003 by Witt, William G

ABSTRACT

This article examines the way practices and doctrines formed the spirituality of the sixteenth-century Anglican priest George Herbert, as reflected in his poetry (The Temple) and prose (The Country Parson). The practices of virtuous living, Sunday worship, public and private prayer, hearing and proclaiming the Word, and partaking of sacraments combine to shape virtuous Christian character. The doctrines of God, creation, sin, Christ, and grace, as well as the problem of affliction, combined to form Herbert's faith.

The spirituality of George Herbert, the seventeenth-century poet and priest, has been associated with classical Anglicanism. It pursues the via media (which is supposed to be both catholic and evangelical). It celebrates creation viewed in continuity with redemption. It focuses on the incarnation as the prime example of the positive value of creation. Its theology is experienced in word and sacrament (in the public worship of the daily office and liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer).

Such a summary of Herbert's spirituality is not mistaken, but it encourages us too easily to imagine him as a happy anticipation of the current sacramental and liturgical "experientialism" that passes for spirituality in much contemporary Anglicanism. This sanctions Herbert's poetry as a forerunner of the primacy of religious ."experience" only to the extent that it ignores the actual content of Herbert's writings. At the same time, there is nothing particularly Anglican about the appeal to the primacy of "experience." Designated "experiential-expressivism" by George Lindbeck, variations pervade contemporary spirituality.1 The primary characteristic of experiential-expressivism is the separation and priority of "religious experience" over linguistic interpretation. "Religious experience" is viewed as prethematic, prelinguistic, and (generally speaking) culturally universal. Religious symbols, practices, narratives, and doctrines are viewed as consequent attempts to articulate this prior experience linguistically. Hermeneutically, the contemporary goal is to peel away layers of interpretive enculturation to retrieve and reappropriate the original experience.

Despite its pervasive influence, I find the experientialist model unhelpful, because it offers a misleading and inaccurate account of the relationship between theology and spirituality. It is inconsistent with the self-understanding and actual practices of most Christians in history who have prayed and worshiped. It imposes a paradigm on Christian spirituality that does not fit well with the actual historical texts and studies of Christian spiritual writers.

In place of the "experientialist" paradigm, I find a "cultural-linguistic" (Lindbeck) or "religious contextual" (McGinn)^sup 2^ approach to spirituality to be more faithful to the actual relationship among theology, religious beliefs and practices, and "spirituality" (which term I prefer to the expression "religious experience"). Rather than religious practices and beliefs expressing prior unthematic religious experiences, the opposite is the case. There simply are no experiences that are not made possible by languages, narratives, and traditions. All experiences (not just religious experiences) are epistemologically mediated in complex ways. Particular religious traditions, with their accompanying narratives, rituals, and practices, form religious experience and make it possible; religious experiences are, accordingly, specific to particular cultural contexts. Buddhists have Buddhist religious experiences; Jews have Jewish religious experiences; Christians have Christian religious experiences.

I think George Herbert's spirituality is better understood in such a contextualist paradigm. He does indeed have much to teach us about a thoughtful, self-critical spirituality that does, after all, value creation, incarnation, sacraments, liturgy, and the catholic and evangelical traditions of the church; but, at the same time, Herbert's spirituality provides a corrective to the dominant paradigm of contemporary spirituality. In this discussion, I examine George Herbert's approach to God as expressed in his short work, The Country Parson, and his collection of religious poetry, The Temple, tracing the relationships among Herbert's religious practices, his theology, and his spirituality.3

PRACTICES

The Virtues

George Herbert's life as a "country parson" for the less than three years that he lived at Bemerton, a village near Salisbury (26 April 1630-1 March 1633), has caused him to be considered an "exemplar" of the Anglican pastor. As a priest, Herbert seems to have transferred his disillusioned idealistic hopes of reforming England through political service to reform-ing it through the Body of Christ, the church. (Herbert spent a period serving in Parliament and for several years sought unsuccessfully to serve with the crown. His brief service as a parish priest was cut short by his death from tuberculosis.)

The themes of Herbert's small treatise, The Country Parson, and his collection of poems, The Temple, seem to reflect the experiences of a rural priest in the Church of England; nonetheless, it has been speculated that he wrote most of these works before his ordination and only edited them and added some poems afterwards. Herbert's method in both works is catechetical and didactic.